Up to 500 people gathered in a St. Petersburg street where a statue of the demon Mephistopheles had been smashed earlier in the week under suspicious circumstances, to object to what they believe is the willful destruction of the city's cultural heritage.

"This is our city! This is our building!" chanted the demonstrators, who were encircled by police cars, with multiple cameras looking on.

The bas relief of the smirking demon was built as an adornment for a modernist guest house completed in 1914, and had become a city landmark. On Wednesday, a group of workmen, who refused to identify themselves, drove up to the sculpture, knocked it down, smashed it to pieces, and carted the fragments off to a dump. The statue cannot be restored.

A criminal investigation has been opened, but in the meantime, St. Petersburg is awash with theories about the vandals' motivation.

The bas relief was located directly opposite an Orthodox church that is currently under construction, and is scheduled to open next year.

Initially, Denis Gorchin, ostensibly a former leader of a conservative group calling itself the Cossacks of St. Petersburg, took responsibility for the destruction of the"Satan-worshipping" monument in a letter to the media. But Irbis, an umbrella union for Russian Cossacks, said they had never heard of Gorchin or his organization, and promised to "find and arrest the provocateur."

A pilot has been killed after losing control of a small plane in Austria, the latest in a string of fatal incidents that have plagued airshows this summer.

The 50-year-old pilot was attempting to complete a loop in front of an audience of 500 people at the Friesach-Hirt air show in Carinthia in Austria when he crashed, according police spokesman Markus Dexl, who spoke with the Austria Press Agency. The pilot died from his injuries before he could be taken to the hospital.

No one else was hurt in the incident, but the remainder of the flying festival was abandoned.

This is the sixth fatal incident at airshows this month. The most serious occurred during the Shoreham air show in the UK, where a vintage Hawker Hunter plane crashed into a busy road following a failed maneuver, killing 11 people. There have also been fatalities in Germany, Russia and the US.

In April this year the Toronto Symphony Orchestra (TSO) cancelled a concert by Ukrainian-American classical pianist Valentina Lisitsa at the Roy Thomson Hall because she spoke out against Kiev's 'anti-terror operations' in eastern Ukraine. The TSO told Valentina's agent: "the Toronto Symphony Orchestra received some messages from ticket buyers and others expressing concern over pianist Valentina Lisitsa's public political statements." The TSO quickly found a substitute and paid Lisitsa's fees.

Needless to say, her 'political views', which according to the TSO are "public incitement of hatred", are in fact valid concerns about military actions against civilian targets, actions that have been strongly supported by the US and Canadian governments since the West's installment of the current regime, which includes radicals with links to nazism, and the thousands of innocent lives lost as a result. In a plea on Facebook, posted on April 6th, Lisitsa wrote:

...I took to Twitter in order to get the other side of the story heard, the one you never see in the mainstream media - the plight of my people, the good and bad things that were happening in Ukraine. I translated news stories from Ukrainian language websites, I translated eyewitness accounts of atrocities.... I became really good in unmasking fakes published by Western media in order to make one side of the civil war look whiter and softer than Easter bunny, and another - as sub-humans, not worthy of mercy, the "collateral damage".

To give you just one example: one of my feats was to confront French fashion magazine Elle, who published a glowing cover story about women in Ukrainian army. After the research I have shown to the magazine in my Twitter posts that the "cover girl" they have chosen to show was in fact a horrible person, open Neo-Nazi, racist, anti-Semite who boasted of murdering civilians for fun! The magazine issued a written public apology.

I was very proud! But with time my activities attracted a lot of vicious haters. I was a particularly important "target" because of being Ukrainian, thus - a traitor. I thought I knew hate - my playing on YouTube certainly "attracted" a fair share of hate mail. But I was mistaken. Death threats, wishes for my family to die, calling me "paid Kremlin wh*re"...the list goes on and on. My haters didn't stop there. Trying, in their own words, to teach me a lesson, they have now attempted to silence me as a musician. ...

In this world, 'freedom of speech' is granted only to those who say the 'right' things. Oftentimes, those who speak the truth are attacked, in one way or another, or have their words twisted in order to show them in a bad light. Now Lisitsa is under fire again because Dutch airline KLM is removing her music from its in-flight entertainment program.

Moscow has helped free a Ukrainian citizen who had long been kept prisoner by illegal armed groups in Afghanistan, the Russian Foreign Ministry said Saturday, adding that the man is ready to be transferred to Ukrainian authorities.

The operation which resulted in the release of Dmitry Bely was successful due to the joint efforts of Russian and Afghan authorities, the ministry said in a statement.

"We are glad that our efforts helped save the life of the Ukrainian citizen and restore his freedom," Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a statement.

Dmitry is now safe, and Russian authorities are ready to transfer him to Ukrainian officials in Afghanistan "at any convenient time," according to the ministry.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mariana Betsa said they had no information about Bely's release.

"Bely's wife, indeed, informed us that her husband had vanished while on the Afghan territory, and we took every step in cooperation with relevant Ukrainian authorities and the Afghan side to look for him," she told RIA Novosti.

RT's Ruptly agency has released footage of Bely meeting Russian Ambassador to Afghanistan Alexander Mantytskiy to thank the Russian authorities for their help in rescuing him.

It is horrific that people are drowning and suffocating to reach safety. These stories should be a reminder that migrants are not just statistics

They're not people: nobody would tolerate hearing about the drowning of human beings over and over again. At best they are bleak but intangible statistics, the object of a bit of tutting before mundane everyday life takes over. For others, they are an unwanted and uninvited swarm that Fortress Europe must keep out: full of undeserving would-be leeches who have no place in the west. In the hierarchy of death, anyone labelled "migrant" must take their place somewhere near the bottom. It is a dehumanised word: for all too many people, it is somewhere down with "petty criminal", and who mourns petty criminals?

As the news of up to 200 dead refugees, drowned off the coast of Libya, filters fleetingly into news coverage, the only guarantee is that more will drown. And with news of more than 70 refugees found dead in a truck in Austria - to try to imagine their last living moments triggers a horrible feeling in the pit of the stomach - we know that more bodies will be found in more trucks. Those of us who want more sympathetic treatment of people fleeing desperate situations have failed to win over public opinion, and the cost of that is death.

Recently, a man named Joseph Hutcheson parked his car in front of the main lobby of the Dallas County Jail, and stumbled asking for help from deputies.

He had just left a hospital, even though doctors had advised him not to, and it seems that whatever he was being kept there for was indeed still an issue. Realizing that he should not have left, Hutcheson, 48, pulled over to the first building he could find where he apparently thought help could be administered. Instead of helping him, however, a newly-released video shows Dallas County Sheriff's deputies tackling him to the ground.

It was only minutes after deputies piled on the injured, disoriented and incoherent Hutcheson, that he was dead at the scene.

Minutes later, Hutcheson was dead.

Local WFAA reports that in the video it is clear Hutcheson is "not well."

The video documents him "limping around" right before a deputy grabs him and slams him to the ground.

Still Hutcheson is calm, perhaps still a bit sedated from medication. His hands remain by his sides.

"My brother needed help," James Hutcheson, said in an interview with WFAA. "You treat some people like they have a medical emergency, not everybody like a criminal. I can tell you that he wasn't going to hurt anybody."

When a wing section of a Boeing 777 washed up on the Indian Ocean island of La Réunion last month, the Malaysian government quickly ascribed the part to missing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370. But an ongoing investigation has failed to verify this claim, and the story just keeps getting weirder.

Shortly after the flaperon washed up, Boeing engineers confirmed that the wing segment belongs to a 777. And MH370, which went missing in March of 2014, is the only 777 unaccounted for. So case closed, right?

Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak figured it was, and on August 5th, he released a statement announcing as much to the world. But minutes later, French investigator Serge Mackowiak countered the prime minister's remarks, saying that more tests were needed to conclusively determine the wing segment's origin. Those test results were supposed to come within a day. Then it became a few days. Now it's been several weeks.

What's the hangup? According to New York Magazine, the ID plate that should have been attached to the inboard edge of the flaperon is missing. This plate, affixed to all 777 flaperons, ought to contain a serial number linking the part to MH370. Its absence has not only stymied the verification process, it's resulted in other aspects of the wing segment coming under (perhaps excessive) scrutiny.

The Republican presidential candidate leading every poll, Donald Trump, recently unveiled his plan to forcibly deport all 11 million human beings residing in the U.S. without proper documentation, roughly half of whom have children born in the U.S. (and who are thus American citizens). As George Will noted last week, "Trump's roundup would be about 94 times larger than the wartime internment of 117,000 persons of Japanese descent." It would require a massive expansion of the most tyrannical police state powers far beyond their already immense post-9/11 explosion. And that's to say nothing of the incomparably ugly sentiments that Trump's advocacy of this plan, far before its implementation, is predictably unleashing.

Jorge Ramos, the influential anchor of Univision and an American immigrant from Mexico, has been denouncing Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric. Yesterday at a Trump press conference in Iowa, Ramos stood and questioned Trump on his immigration views. Trump at first ignored him, then scolded him for speaking without being called on and repeatedly ordered him to "sit down," then told him: "Go back to Univision." When Ramos refused to sit down and shut up as ordered, a Trump bodyguard physically removed him from the room. After the press conference concluded, Ramos returned and again questioned Trump about immigration, with the two mostly talking over each other as Ramos asked Trump about the fundamental flaws in his policy. Afterward, Ramos said: "This is personal. ... He's talking about our parents, our friends, our kids and our babies."

Looking for water to flush his toilet, Tino Lozano pointed a garden hose at some buckets in the bare dirt of his yard. It's his daily ritual now in a community built by refugees from Oklahoma's Dust Bowl. But only a trickle came out; then a drip, then nothing more.

"There it goes," said Lozano, a 40-year-old disabled vet, masking his desperation with a smile. "That's how we do it in Okieville now."

Millions of Californians are being inconvenienced in this fourth year of drought, urged to flush toilets less often, take shorter showers and let lawns turn brown. But it's dramatically worse in places like Okieville, where wells have gone dry for many of the 100 modest homes that share cracked streets without sidewalks or streetlights in California's Central Valley.

An 80-year-old Venezuelan woman died, possibly from trampling, in a scrum outside a state supermarket selling subsidized goods, the opposition and media said on Friday.

The melee at the store in Sabaneta, the birthplace of former Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez, was the latest such incident in the South American nation where economic hardship and food shortages are creating long queues and scuffles.

The opposition Democratic Unity coalition said Maria Aguirre died and another 75 people were injured - including five security officials - in chaotic scenes when National Guard troops sought to control a 5,000-strong crowd with teargas.

"Due to the shortage of food ... the desperation is enormous," local opposition politician Andres Camejo said, according to the coalition's website. It published a photo of an elderly woman's body lying inert on a concrete floor.