Employers have the right to monitor their workers' online private messages, according to a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). It comes after a Romanian man was fired for sending personal messages while at work.

The Strasbourg court sided on Tuesday with the employer of a Romanian engineer who was dismissed from his job after using Yahoo Messenger to communicate with his fiancée and brother while at work.

Dismissing the employee's claim that his company had violated his right to privacy by monitoring his messages, the judge said that it was "not unreasonable that an employer would want to verify that employees were completing their professional tasks during working hours."

By now we've all heard what happened in Cologne, Germany, on New Year's Eve. A group of 1000 refugees allegedly caused mayhem in the city's main square, drinking heavily, launching firecrackers into the crowd, robbing people, and sexually assaulting over 100 women. According to Cologne police, over 200 cases of sexual assault have been registered. A climate of fear is the result, along with a backlash against authorities, from local police to Germany's leadership. It's "sexual terrorism" at its worst, proof that Germany's experiment in multiculturalism, and their open-arms policy to refugees from the Middle East and North Africa, have been utter failures. The coverage and reactions are unequivocal.

But is this narrative justified? Hardly. We don't even have a clear idea of exactly what happened in Cologne that night. The fact that all media outlets are in agreement - in a country where the media is controlled by the CIA - indicates the 'operational' and contrived nature of the coverage, and perhaps even the event itself.

So far, available video from the scene shows a large crowd of young people (mostly men) on the square, some obviously drinking, and several of them launching firecrackers into the sky and some into the crowd. Basically, a large group, or several smaller groups, of teens and twenty-somethings acting like teens and twenty-somethings do in most of the Western world: irresponsibly and "just having a bit of fun". What the videos don't show, but what certainly also occurred, was a series of sexual assaults on women in the area by an unknown number of these young men. Victims report being forced through groups of young men - of Middle Eastern or North African appearance - where they were repeatedly groped at, some robbed, and at least one or two reportedly raped.

A proposal to audit the Federal Reserve failed to pass in the US Senate. The bill, proposed by Kentucky Republican Rand Paul, was opposed by the Democrats, the White House, and the business lobby. The procedural motion on the bill required 60 votes to pass, but managed to get only 53. "Both Republicans and Democrats agree that it is absurd we do not know where hundreds of billions worth of our money is going," Paul said ahead of the vote, according to The Hill.

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, an Independent currently vying for the Democratic presidential nomination, voted in favor of Paul's proposal. "Requiring the Government Accountability Office to conduct a full and independent audit of the Fed each and every year, would be an important step towards making the Federal Reserve a more democratic institution that is responsive to the needs of ordinary Americans rather than the billionaires on Wall Street," Sanders said in a statement following the vote.

Paul's initiative ran into fierce opposition from the Federal Reserve, the White House, the Democratic party and the US Chamber of Commerce. The bill would have required a Government Accountability Office (GAO) audit of the Federal Reserve - a private entity entrusted with managing the US monetary policy - and potentially expose the secret interest rate deliberations of the Federal Open Market Committee, according to Bloomberg.

The White House has called Paul's proposal 'dangerous.' "What that bill is about is about Congress supplanting its judgment as to what monetary policy should be," said Jason Furman, chairman of Obama's Council of Economic Advisers. "Congress shouldn't be telling the Fed what to do with monetary policy."

The United Nations has been grappling with so many sexual abuse allegations involving its peacekeepers that Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon recently called them "a cancer in our system."

Now, officials have learned about what appears to be a fresh scandal. Investigators discovered this month that at least four UN peacekeepers in the Central African Republic allegedly paid young girls as little as 50 cents in exchange for sex.

The case is the latest to plague the UN mission in the Central African Republic, whose employees have been accused of 22 other incidents of alleged sexual abuse or sexual exploitation in the past 14 months. The most recent accusations come in the wake of Ban's efforts to implement a "zero tolerance" policy for such offenses.

12-year-old Ciara Meyer was shot and killed by a police officer this Monday morning as her family was being evicted from their home. According to police, her father, 57-year-old Donald B. Meyer, pointed a gun at Pennsylvania State Constable Clarke Steele during the eviction. The police say that Steele shot at Meyer when he had the gun pulled on him, and grazed the man's arm. However, the bullet went on to fatally strike young Ciara Meyer after it went through her father.

Donald Meyer was taken to the hospital but was also charged with aggravated assault, simple assault, terroristic threats, and reckless endangerment.

An unidentified neighbor told local reporters that Ciara was a "Very kind, sweet kid."

"Here's a little girl that doesn't even have a chance to grow up and live her life, and all because of this senseless act. It's horrible, absolutely heartbreaking," the neighbor said.

Handcuffed to a wall inside a cell with no windows, Deanda Wilson was forced to urinate on himself after a police sergeant allegedly held a knife to his throat during an interrogation at Homan Square. Falsely charged with the manufacture and distribution of heroin, Wilson and his co-defendants were imprisoned for 15 months before a judge found them not guilty.

As the Cook County Commissioner and a state representative both call for a federal investigation into the CIA-style black site known as Homan Square, Chicago police union officials are fighting to incinerate decades of police misconduct records. Although the city, an investigative journalist, and a University of Chicago law school professor have battled in court to preserve the misconduct records, police unions argue that red-flagged officers should not be judged by their marred past.

While Cook County Commissioner Richard Boykin and the Board of Commissioners prepare to address a resolution on Wednesday calling on the DOJ to expand its investigation into Homan Square, leaders of the Chicago NAACP and state Rep. La Shawn Ford are working to prevent the Chicago Police Department from destroying any police misconduct files older than five years.

A new book detailing the role wealthy families have played in shaping conservative US politics has found that the father of multi-billionaires and political donors David and Charles Koch built an oil refinery in Nazi Germany, aiding the German war effort.

Jane Mayer's "Dark Money" details how, in 1934, Fred Koch, in partnership with William Rhodes Davis, an American businessman who has previously been called a "Nazi Agent of Influence", drew up engineering plans for a large oil refinery near Hamburg, Germany and oversaw its construction.

Adolf Hitler gave the refinery his personal blessing and it went on to play a vital role in the Third Reich's war effort. It was the third largest refinery under Nazi control and supplied fuel to their warplanes.

"On 57 monitors that cover the walls of the center, operators zoomed and panned an array of roughly 200 police cameras perched across the city. They could dial up 800 more feeds from the city's schools and traffic cameras, and they soon hope to add 400 more streams from cameras worn on officers' bodies and from thousands from local businesses that have surveillance systems."

Though the intricate surveillance apparatus described above seems straight from a dystopic novel, it is actually the Washington Post's recent description of the the visual data collection system employed by a local California police department. The police department in Fresno, California, has taken extreme measures to combat high rates of crime in the city.

As the Post reports, Fresno's Real Time Crime Center, buried deep in the police station's headquarters, has developed as a response to what many police call increasing threats. The system, according to police officials, can "provide critical information that can help uncover terrorists or thwart mass shootings, ensure the safety of officers and the public, find suspects, and crack open cases" — a feature they say is increasingly important in the wake of events like the November terror attack in Paris and the San Bernardino shooting last month.

The Royal Bank of Scotland has recommended its clients prepare for a "cataclysmic year," as major stock markets could drop by a fifth and Brent oil could hit $16 a barrel.

"Sell everything except high quality bonds. This is about return of capital, not return on capital. In a crowded hall, exit doors are small," said the bank's credit team in a note sent to clients, quoted by the Telegraph.

According to RBS analysts, the markets are showing the same stress alerts as seen before the 2008 crisis.

Andrew Roberts, the bank's credit chief, says that "China has set off a major correction and it is going to snowball." China "has very high debt levels (as a percentage of GDP) given they are still emerging" and crucially they have accumulated this debt incredibly fast, he said.

Armed men occupying Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon are tearing down part of a fence erected by the government to keep ranchers out of federally owned property.

The escalation comes 10 days into the standoff at the fowl sanctuary south of Burns, Oregon. Ammon and Ryan Bundy, who head the group occupying the refuge, announced they would be tearing down the portion of the fence and replacing it with a gate, to allow local ranchers access to pastures.

The Bundy brothers also said they would not end the occupation until Dwight and Steven Hammond, the two ranchers recently imprisoned by the government, are set free. The Hammonds were prosecuted by the government under a terrorism statute, over fires set on their property that damaged 140 acres of federally owned land. Government prosecutors insisted on a five-year mandatory minimum sentence.

Following a peaceful protest in Burns on January 2, the Bundys and their fellow militia members seized the empty building at Malheur. The group has been camped at the refuge ever since, calling for the government to abide by its own rules and stop the heavy-handed treatment of the ranchers. Their father, Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, successfully faced down federal agents in 2014 in a dispute over grazing fees and land use.