Russian courts could get the green light to seize foreign assets on Russian territory under a draft law intended as a response to Western sanctions over the Ukraine crisis.

The draft, which was submitted to parliament on Wednesday by a pro-Kremlin deputy, would also allow state compensation for an individual whose property is seized in foreign jurisdictions.

Italian authorities this week seized property worth about 30 million euros ($40 million) belonging to companies controlled by Arkady Rotenberg, an ally of President Vladimir Putin targeted by the U.S. and European Union sanctions.

The draft law, published on a parliamentary database, would allow for compensation for Russian citizens who suffer because of an "unlawful court act" in a foreign jurisdiction and clear the way to foreign state assets in Russia being seized, even if they are subject to international immunity.

People queue up to cross from Ukraine to Russia at the Uspenka border post, held by pro-Russian separatists, on September 26, 2014.

Ukraine's president may have ordered the closure of his nation's border with Russia but, when asked about it, the rebel commander of this crossing point just smiles and points to the snaking queue of cars traversing the international line.

"As you can see, it is very much open," the border post commander at Uspenka who identifies himself by his nickname "Arshi" says.

Uspenka is just a speck on the map in eastern Ukraine, but hundreds of vehicles had motored there Friday to travel along a country road from the rebel-held Donetsk region to Russia, and in the other direction.

In the view of all those interviewed there by AFP, that border post -- and even the border itself -- were bound to disappear soon.

"Oh, the border is supposed to be closed, is it? I wasn't aware," Archi comments archly.

"What Kiev says or decides is of no interest to me. This is no longer Ukraine here. Soon, when we are united with Russia, we won't even have this outpost here, or it'll be hardly anything at all, just a little checkpoint."

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko announced the temporary closure of the 2,000-kilometre (1,200-mile) border Thursday in a bid to halt the flow of weapons from Ukraine's former Soviet master to pro-Russian separatists.

But by the time of the signing of the ceasefire for eastern Ukraine, on September 20, the rebels already controlled a 260-kilometre stretch of the border.

Workers laid off by an American auto parts company in Argentina have burnt US flags during a protest march on Washington's embassy in the country's capital, Buenos Aires.

The Wednesday evening protest rally was triggered by job losses at a manufacturing plant run by US auto parts maker Lear as the Argentine automotive industry reels from an ailing economy.

Hundreds of Argentinean workers, many of them laid off by the American company, rallied in front of the US embassy to demand their jobs back.

The angry protesters set fire to US flags and chanted slogans against the owners of Lear as armed police officers blocked off any access to the grounds of the heavily guarded embassy.

The North American multinational auto parts company has recently dismissed over 300 of its workers.

The Pennsylvania attorney general's office is blaming a woman for getting raped by an inmate while at work at a state prison, saying she should have locked the door to her office. The prisoner has a history of rape, including of a woman at another jail.

The 24-year-old state prison clerk is suing over her rape at a central Pennsylvania prison. The defendants include the state Department of Corrections and three employees. The woman worked at the Rockview prison near Bellefonte in 2013 when she was attacked by inmate Omar Best, a criminal with three prior convictions for sex-related crimes. Best had been transferred to Rockview after committing a felony assault on a female prison worker at a different facility.

"Despite this knowledge, defendants... still allowed Omar Best to have unsupervised access to the offices of female employees," the attorney general's office wrote in the response to the woman's suit.

The PA Attorney General blames woman for her own rape http://t.co/DlaLIp2xqapic.twitter.com/HdxTcD3eml
- ThinkProgress (@thinkprogress) September 25, 2014

In mid-July 2013, just a month after the plaintiff began working at the Bellefonte facility, she told her superiors that inmates were coming into the hallways that led to her office, and that she was uncomfortable with Best, who sometimes emptied the trash in that area of the building. She was especially distressed by Best entering her office, ThinkProgress reported. She was told that Best would no longer be allowed in her office, according to the Washington Examiner.

Best raped the woman on July 25, 2013. First, he entered her office, pretending to empty the trash can. He grabbed her from behind, strangled her until she was unconscious, then raped her. The ordeal lasted 27 minutes before closed-circuit television showed the inmate leaving the room ‒ the victim's own office ‒ of his own accord. Prison staff later found the woman on the office floor, still unconscious.

At least twenty-three people were killed by officers from various United States police departments in the past week. That means about three people died in the custody or at the hands of police every day from September 18-24.

The frequency in which police use force, especially lethal force, would seem to deserve quite a bit of attention, however, it is rarely highlighted by news media. For the most part, it goes ignored.

Only when there was a crisis in Ferguson after a white police officer killed an unarmed black teenager did media examine how often people are killed by police in the US.

The "Killed by Police" Facebook page keeps track of deaths as they occur and, from May 1, 2013, to August 24, 1,450 people have been killed. When calculated, about three people were killed each day.

The following incidents were noted by the page over the past week:

In a wonderful 45-minute interview with John Ward of Anglo-Far East bullion dealers, fund manager, author, and geopolitical strategist James G. Rickards explains the methods, objectives, and perpetrators of gold market manipulation.

The methods, Rickards says, include strategic dumping of official gold reserves, which isn't done much anymore; dumping paper gold on the futures markets to panic weak-handed and skittish longs, especially hedge funds, which is "child's play"; and gold leasing by central banks to investment banks that leverage the gold supply by a factor of 10, effectively devaluing gold, since most gold investors don't realize that there is no metal behind their claims, just the market-manipulating power of the central banks and their investment bank agents.

An anchor for News 12 The Bronx in New York sparked controversy this week after the station mistakenly broadcast him ranting about people who use government assistance.

During what he probably thought was a commercial break on Wednesday morning's broadcast, veteran anchor Matt Pieper advised reporter Amy Yensi that she had two minutes before a segment about the need for school crossing guards in certain areas.

A Pittsburgh couple filed a federal civil rights suit accusing police of mistreating them while their son died, WPXI-TV reported on Thursday.

The suit accuses an officer of unlawfully using his Taser against Rev. Earl Baldwin Jr. on June 24, 2012. Baldwin said that at the time, he was in the emergency room of UPMC Mercy Hospital attempting to pray for his stepson, 23-year-old Mileek Grissom. Grissom was shot and killed that day while reportedly trying to break up a fight.

"I needed to tell him his family was going to be OK," Baldwin told WPXI this week. "I was going to do everything I could to make sure they were OK."

Footage of the incident shows police restraining a visibly upset Baldwin for a few seconds before another officer pulls out his Taser and uses it on him. Grissom's mother, Tori Baldwin, was stopped by authorities and not allowed to enter the hospital.

Police have not commented on the lawsuit, but hospital officials have said that Earl Baldwin was interfering with attempts to revive Grissom.

"Clearly this was a stressful situation and a tragic loss for this family," the hospital said in a statement. "However, the allegations about the circumstances are inaccurate."

But Baldwin argues that police slid Grissom's hospital bed away before restraining him.

"Watch the video," his attorney, Joel Sassone, was quoted as saying. "Not only was the child not being treated, the child was dead."

US whistleblower Edward Snowden was among five winners of the Swedish human rights award, announced in Stockholm on Wednesday.

The decision to the honor former National Security Agency contractor might have cost the 2014 Right Livelihood Awards' jury the ability to announce the winners from Swedish Foreign Office pressroom, a usual place for such statements since 1995, Foundation director Ole von Uexkull told AP.

Snowden, who has lived in Russia for over a year, shares his award with Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of the Guardian newspaper, which was first to break the NSA leaks.

"The 2014 Right Livelihood Honorary Award goes to Edward Snowden for his courage and skill in revealing the unprecedented extent of state surveillance violating basic democratic processes and constitutional rights," the Stockholm-based foundation said in a statement.

The annual prize is awarded "to honour and support those offering practical and exemplary answers to the most urgent challenges facing us today", and by them the foundation understands "courageous and effective work for human rights, freedom of the press, civil liberties and combatting climate change".

Although the whistleblower would not receive the customary 500,000 kronor ($70,000) prize money, the foundation said it would "fund legal support for him".
In a statement, Rusbridger said he was "delighted" to share the award with Snowden because he thinks "he was a whistleblower who took considerable risks with his own personal freedom in order to tell society about things that people needed to know."

Pakistani human rights lawyer Asma Jahanger, Sri Lankan rights activist Basil Fernando and US environmentalist Bill McKibbben were the other three prize winners. They will receive their awards at a formal ceremony in the Swedish parliament on December 1.

We loved America. I remember, we did. When we were teens, growing up in the early 90s; most of my friends the same age did not even question their attitude toward Western civilization. It was great, how could it be otherwise?

Unlike our grandfathers and even fathers, we did not think of the USSR falling apart - the "greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the XX century" - as a disaster. For us it was the beginning of a long journey. Finally, we would break out beyond the Soviet shell into the big world - limitless and cool. Finally, we would quench our sensory deprivation. We are born, maybe not in the right place, but certainly at the right time - or so we thought. It's hard to believe now, but even the Orthodox Church coming out from under communist supervision was for us the same thing as the triumph of Western liberal values. The celebration of the 1000th anniversary of the Baptism of Russia and the first concert of the Scorpions in Moscow with their "Winds of Change" - was, for us, all part of the same thing.

The war in Iraq and even the breakup of Yugoslavia mostly escaped our attention, somehow. And it was not just that we were young and carefree. I, for one, was already trained in the Komsomolskaya Pravda, in the International Department. I was monitoring the English Reuters feed that was full of Izetbegovic, Karadzic and Mladic, but somehow did not take all these events seriously. It was somewhere far away, and not in our area. And, of course, the war in the Balkans did not fit within any kind of anti-Western storyline for me. Croats killed Serbs, Bosnians killed Serbs, the Serbs killed both of those - why blame America?

In 1990 we voted for "Yabloko" democrats, went to the White House barricades on the side of democratic forces, watched the newborn CHANNEL and listened to the echo of Moscow radio. Our first journalistic articles always mentioned the "civilized world" and we firmly believed that it was really civilized. By the mid-1990s, the first Euro-skeptics started to appear in our ranks, but they were more in the category of devil's advocates. I myself shared a dorm room with Pete the communist and Arseniy the monarchist. My friends from other rooms would see me off each evening with words of regret: "Bye, go back to your madhouse."

The first serious blow to our pro-Western orientation in life was Kosovo. It was a shock; our rose-colored glasses were shattered into pieces. The bombing of Belgrade was, for my generation, what the 9/11 attacks were for Americans. Worldviews turned 180 degrees together with the plane of the then Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov, who was over the Atlantic Ocean on the way from Ireland to the United States when he learned of the beginning of the American aggression - and gave the command to return to Russia.