Nearly 700 passengers and staff have been evacuated from Crimea's primary airport in Simferopol after an anonymous phone call claiming an explosive device has been planted. The airport is the region's only air link to mainland Russia.

Simferopol law enforcement said 670 people had been evacuated from the airport, which has been checked for explosives by bomb technicians, RIA Novosti reports.

Airport director, Evgeny Plaksin, told TASS allegations of a bomb in terminal B turned out to be false. A suspicious, unattended item was in fact construction waste.

"The airport is operating normally," Plaksin said.

The alarm about a possible explosive device in the airport came at about 11am. Passengers and staff were evacuated from Terminal B, while Terminal A and the arrivals hall continued to function nominally.

Something remarkable is taking place in Russia, and it's quite different from what we might expect. Rather than feel humiliated and depressed Russia is undergoing what I would call a kind of renaissance, a rebirth as a nation. This despite or in fact because the West, led by the so-called neo-conservatives in Washington, is trying everything including war on her doorstep in Ukraine, to collapse the Russian economy, humiliate Putin and paint Russians generally as bad. In the process, Russia is discovering positive attributes about her culture, her people, her land that had long been forgotten or suppressed.

My first of many visits to Russia was more than twenty years ago, in May, 1994. I was invited by a Moscow economics think-tank to deliver critical remarks about the IMF. My impressions then were of a once-great people who were being humiliated to the last ounce of their life energy. Mafia gangsters sped along the wide boulevards of Moscow in sparkling new Mercedes 600 limousines with dark windows and without license plates. Lawlessness was the order of the day, from the US-backed Yeltsin Kremlin to the streets. "Harvard boys" like Jeffrey Sachs or Sweden's Anders Aaslund or George Soros were swarming over the city figuring new ways to rape and pillage Russia under the logo "shock therapy" and "market-oriented reform" another word for "give us your crown jewels."

Disgusting, repugnant, vile, hateful, despicable. These are just a few words that can be used to describe the actions of several of Baton Rouge's finest.

The Baton Rouge police department has launched an internal investigation into the actions of officers who allegedly rode on and helped decorate a float that mocked a woman for being raped as a child; by her father.

The theme of the float was of the Baton Rouge reality show, Sons of Guns. It focused on the daughter of the former television star, Will Hayden. Hayden is currently facing sexual assault charges in East Baton Rouge and Livingston Parishes, after being accused of sexually assaulting his own daughter along with two other victims.

The float was "decorated" with a large photo of Stephanie Ford, the sexual assault victim, with the caption underneath her photo stating, "A face only a daddy could love." Other sayings on the float consisted of things like, "Krewe of Sleazania," "Red Jack It" and "Kiss Me Daddy."

A manager at the Roudebush Veteran Affairs Medical Center in Indianapolis appears to mock the mental health problems of returning combat veterans in an email to her employees.

The email obtained by The Indianapolis Star contains photographs of a toy Christmas elf posing as a patient in what appears to be the hospital's transitional clinic for returning veterans. In one photograph, the elf pleads for Xanax. In another, he hangs himself with an electrical cord.

The woman who sent the email is Robin Paul, a licensed social worker who manages the hospital's Seamless Transition Integrated Care Clinic. The clinic provides returning veterans with transition assistance, including mental health and readjustment services.

Our media should stop indulging in gratuitous nonstop coverage of violent events and should not intensively publicize mass murders and mass killings.

It has been more than 13 years since 9/11, and some things that have become routine weren't so in those blissfully ignorant days before that trauma, when the biggest news stories focused more on cheating politicians and shark attacks. With yet another fear-mongering alert that Al-Shabaab (the latest variation on a theme) is somehow targeting every mall in the entire North American continent, our media and other public institutions have kept the war on terror going. Fueled by a changing, Internet-driven culture and shifting profits, the media and political pundits are going for the quick sell; clickbait for people stuck in a post-recession reverie. But they wouldn't be feeding us if we weren't biting. Why are we such easy prey for this kind of ongoing hysteria? What is it about constant premonitions of doom that continue to thrill and excite us as mass media consumers in America?

Post-traumatic stress disorder manifests in some individuals who experience a life-threatening trauma, but it can also show similar signs in a larger culture that has undergone mass trauma as well, such as war or genocide. One might argue that 9/11, despite relatively few casualties compared with major wars, was still a major psychological trauma for America, which had never experienced a civilian domestic attack by an outside threat in its history. And the attack was definitely dramatic in its symbolism: The tallest buildings in Manhattan destroyed, key government buildings in our nation's capital hit or nearly hit, comfortable office workers on a routine day brutally killed. The everyday, safe banality of American life seemed to be over.

Even if most people did not develop severe clinical PTSD like the first responders or the people truly exposed to danger at the scene, our country underwent a psychological reckoning afterward, one we perhaps still haven't fully processed in a healthy, self-aware fashion. Complicating matters has been the concomitant rise of social media culture and technology in the last decade, leading to an interesting mélange of influences and coping mechanisms.

The young woman sitting in a Parisian cafe could be meeting a friend for lunch. Her figure-hugging purple top sets off her dark hair and intelligent eyes, and her hands are heavy with rings.

Every so often she glances out of the window, but she is not checking whether her friend has arrived: She is nervously hoping the police officer assigned to keep her safe is not too far away.

Anna Erelle is living in terror, having crossed ISIS, also known as Islamic State. She has received death threats and abuse online and a video of her is circulating accompanied by Arabic text that reads: "Brothers around the world, if you see her, kill her."

On her smartphone, Erelle has a CCTV picture of three British girls — Shamima Begum, 15, Kadiza Sultana, 16, and Amira Abase, 15 — as they passed through Gatwick airport a fortnight ago in flowing scarves and skinny jeans, en route to join ISIS in Syria.

"Look at them, they're perfect," she said, pointing a manicured fingernail at the screen. "They seem happy and relaxed. They look just as if they are off to spend a fortnight on the beach in Turkey. Three girls in black would attract attention. Like this, why would anyone notice them?

"It's the same instruction I was given when I was travelling to Syria. Ditch the niqab, look like a regular girl. Be nice to your family, they won't suspect. Leave nothing behind, not a note or a text message, don't try to explain or they will come after you. Be there one day and the next, disappear."

Witnesses say that they saw a murder happen right before their eyes when a Florida SWAT team gunned down an unarmed Deltona man over a tiny amount of marijuana.

They say that the SWAT raid looked more like a police-executed "murder" (their words) than anything that could be construed as "enforcing the law."

But Volusia County sheriff's deputies are defending the dawn SWAT raid where they shot and killed 26-year-old Derek Cruice, 26, even though he was unarmed and non-violent. Cruice became the 10th person to be executed by law enforcement officials in the so-called "War on Drugs" this year.

"They were met with resistance," Sheriff Ben Johnson said to local My News 13.

Johnson told local WFTV that the raid was part of an "ongoing narcotic investigation." Cruice allegedly "advanced on a member of the SWAT Team who was entering the residence," but friends and family explain that there wasn't a violent bone in Cruice's body, suggesting instead that he was going towards the front of his home when he heard the noise and was shot for this alone.

The shooter has now been identified as 10-year veteran Todd Raible, who police say "opened fire one time, shooting the suspect in the face while just inside the doorway of the home."

A Scottish school has come under fire for issuing primary school kids homework featuring questions about global terrorist organizations. Children were asked to describe the various tactics of Al-Qaeda, the IRA and Hamas.

Children, some as young as seven at New Stevenston Primary in Motherwell, North Lanarkshire, were handed worksheets with a cartoon of an exploding bomb.

One of the exercises required pupils to consider why "Palestinians feel that they have the RIGHT to use terrorism against the Israelis." The students were encouraged to give two examples of why, and to describe two of the methods used.

Copies of the worksheets were later posted online, provoking complaints from parents and campaigners.

Another question - presented in a multiple-choice format - involved identifying the two most prominent terror groups in Northern Ireland. Pupils were asked to explain the aims of Loyalists and Republicans.

The instances of torture of Palestinian prisoners by Israeli services soared sharply in the second half of 2014, after the killings of three Jewish teenagers in June, says data from military courts and anti-torture bodies, collected by Haaretz.

All in all, 51 cases of torture were reported in the second half of last year, according to an attorney representing those accused of security offences. The data was obtained by Haaretz from military courts, and the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel.

"In years past there were a few rare cases. But something has changed," the attorney said.

Twenty-three Palestinians sent a number of complaints of torture they had suffered in 2014 by Shin Bet, Israel's internal security service. Each of the plaintiffs said they experienced several methods of torture.

Moscow's Basmanny district court has arrested five people in connection with the murder of Boris Nemtsov, a prominent opposition figure, who was gunned down last week. Two judges are reviewing the charges against the five people brought before the court by the prosecutors on Sunday.

Two of them are Zaur Dadaev and Anzor Gubashev, who were identified as key suspects in the killing of Nemtsov after their detention on Saturday. The prosecutors asked the court to arrest the duo by April 28, the current deadline for the investigation, saying that otherwise they may flee or interfere with the investigation.

According to the judge, who ordered Dadaev's arrest as requested by the prosecution, he confessed his involvement to the police. The accused didn't comment on this during the court session. Gubashev pleaded not guilty to the crimes he is charged with.

The other individuals, who may have had a hand in the crime, are Gubashev's brother Shagit and two identified as Ramzat Bakhaev and Tamerlan Eskerkhanov. The request for their arrest has been reviewed separately by another judge.