A 20-year-old Kazakh citizen and a college friend of Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Dias Kadyrbayev, accused by the US authorities of hindering the investigation into the 2013 bombing, has agreed to plead guilty to a number of charges, The Boston Globe reported.

According to Kadyrbayev's lawyer Robert Stahl, the young man is expected to issue a statement in US District Court in Boston later on Thursday. The attorney also confirmed that Kadyrbayev had agreed to plead guilty, but refused, however, to provide further details on the issue before the hearing.

The move might allow for a more lenient sentence for the defendant.

Kadyrbayev is charged with obstruction of justice and conspiracy to obstruct justice for allegedly removing Tsarnaev's laptop computer and a backpack, filled with fireworks from his college dorm room and trying to dispose of them after learning that Tsarnaev was a suspect in the bombing. Kadyrbayev is scheduled to go on trial on September 8. He faces up to 25 years in prison and possible deportation if found guilty.

Justice ignores unarmed woman's slaying by police

Attorney General Eric Holder is in Ferguson, Missouri, ostensibly to investigate the shooting of an unarmed African-American by a white police officer.

What he is not investigating is the shooting of an unarmed African-American woman by his own federal officers, in his own jurisdiction, the District of Columbia.

And that has the family of the late Miriam Carey so outraged, they announced Wednesday they plan to double the amount of money in their lawsuit against the federal government to $150 million.

While the attorney general looks for the possibility of bad intentions and a wrongful death by an officer in the Midwest, Carey family attorney Eric Sanders believes he need look no further than under his nose in Washington, D.C., where an innocent, unarmed, suburban mother was gunned down in a barrage of bullets by Holder's officers, all because, he said, one off-duty U.S. Secret Service officer "wanted to make that b - -h pay."

WARNING: The following video and screenshots (visible at the original source) contain extremely violent images of the carnage resulting from Kiev's so-called anti-terrorist operation in eastern Ukraine.
America's 'news' media do not let the victims of Ukraine's civil war - the people who are dying and being driven out from the southeastern regions of that country by the new Ukrainian Government - speak, and tell their story. Scenes will therefore be posted below from an admittedly overlong amateur video from southeastern Ukraine, in which they have been allowed to tell their story. This is being done here since U.S. 'news' media apparently don't consider it something that you would want to know, and since you should be allowed to judge for yourself whether it is or not, and to judge why it's not being reported on the 'news' sources that our 'democracy' offers to 'inform' America's public about public affairs. It is also being done because these still photos from the documentary summarize this over-long documentary's important narrative. You are welcomed to click onto the link above to see the entire 82-minute documentary.

First, there will here be an introductory paragraph summary of the relevant background (not discussed in the documentary), if you want to know that: In February 2014, our State Department and CIA used 'false flag,' or engineered-so-as-to-be-misinterpreted, violence by our country's paid Ukrainian agents, in order to exploit the 'Maidan' demonstrations in Kiev, the desire of Ukrainians for a less-corrupt government than existed in Ukraine, and than has existed in Ukraine ever since the fall of communism there. Our Government, the Obama Administration, paid masked gunmen there to dress as if they were from the State Security Force of the corrupt Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and to shoot at and murder not just policemen but anti-Yanukovych or 'democracy' demonstrators. (However, Yanukovych had, in fact, himself been democratically elected in 2010, and still was the democratically elected President.) (NOTE: The complete key phone-transcript whose audio is briefly heard excerpted there is printed here.) And our gunmen also threatened some members of the Ukrainian Parliament at gunpoint, and engineered their approval of an emergency replacement of Yanukovych's government by one that was appointed by Obama's agent, Victoria Nuland, and that was headed by Nuland's friend "Yats," Arseniy Yatsenyuk. This new government was filled with people who stated their desire to exterminate the people in Ukraine's southeast, the people who had voted overwhelmingly for Yanukovych - to just get rid of them. Doing that would make Obama's regime in Ukraine become permanent. Then, Ukraine held a 'democratic' election in which voters everywhere but in the southeast voted, and essentially the same coup-installed people remained in power. The billionaire oligarch Petro Poroshenko was elected as the President of 'Ukraine'; and Victoria Nuland's chosen leader, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, continued on as the new country's Prime Minister. Yatsenyuk fired the previous Defense Minister and replaced him with Mikhail Koval, who on June 11th announced a program of ethnic cleansing in the southeast. This was actually a direct extension from the program that had already started with the extermination on May 2nd of hundreds of supporters of the previous government, who were trapped inside the Trade Unions Building in Odessa and burned alive there. This massacre was masterminded by people who were installed by the Obama Administration. That massacre started Ukraine's civil war, by demonstrating to people throughout the southeast, that the newly Obama-installed Ukrainian Government wanted to kill them. It was now official policy throughout the southeastern portion of Ukraine, to kill the Obama-installed regime's opponents. All of the residents there were being officially labelled by the Obama government as 'terrorists,' and their elimination was declared to be a patriotic necessity for Ukraine. However, this amateur documentary from Ukraine's southeast - the video from which the scenes below are taken - presents the resulting civil war not from the Obama Government's side, but from their regime's victims' side, which is hardly heard at all in the West.

The father of "affluenza" teen Ethan Couch was arrested Tuesday for impersonating a police officer.

Officers were called just before 1:30 a.m. July 28 to a disturbance in North Richland Hills, Texas, where they found Fred Couch at the scene claiming that he was a reserve Lakeside police officer.

After police finished investigating, they spoke again to Fred Couch, who repeated his claim that he was a reserve officer and told them he'd left his "police stuff" in his car.

"He kept putting his hands in his pocket, and that has a tendency to make officers nervous they don't know what your intensions are," said Keith Bauman, of North Richland Hills police.

He flashed a wallet containing what appeared to be a police badge and identification card, and police allowed Couch to leave.

Like many other news websites, Common Dreams has been plagued by inflammatory anti-Semitic comments following its stories. But on Common Dreams these posts have been so frequent and intense they have driven away donors from a nonprofit dependent on reader generosity.

A Common Dreams investigation has discovered that more than a thousand of these damaging comments over the past two years were written with a deceptive purpose by a Jewish Harvard graduate in his thirties who was irritated by the website's discussion of issues involving Israel.

His intricate campaign, which he has admitted to Common Dreams, included posting comments by a screen name, "JewishProgressive," whose purpose was to draw attention to and denounce the anti-Semitic comments that he had written under many other screen names.

The deception was many-layered. At one point he had one of his characters charge that the anti-Semitic comments and the criticism of the anti-Semitic comments must be written by "internet trolls who have been known to impersonate anti-Semites in order to then double-back and accuse others of supporting anti-Semitism"--exactly what he was doing. (Trolls are posters who foment discord.)

The impersonation, this character wrote, must be part of an "elaborate Hasbara setup," referring to an Israeli international public-relations campaign. When Common Dreams finally confronted the man behind the deceptive posting, he denied that he himself was involved with Hasbara.

The Islamic State militant group has executed 700 members of a tribe it has been battling in eastern Syria during the past two weeks, the majority of them civilians, a human rights monitoring group and activists said on Saturday.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which has tracked violence on all sides of the three-year-old conflict, said reliable sources reported beheadings were used to execute many of the al-Sheitaat tribe, which is from Deir al-Zor province.

The conflict between Islamic State and the al-Sheitaat tribe, who number about 70,000, flared after the militants took over two oil fields in July.

109,631,000 Americans lived in households that received benefits from one or more federally funded "means-tested programs" - also known as welfare - as of the fourth quarter of 2012, according to data released Tuesday by the Census Bureau.

The Census Bureau has not yet reported how many were on welfare in 2013 or the first two quarters of 2014.

But the 109,631,000 living in households taking federal welfare benefits as of the end of 2012, according to the Census Bureau, equaled 35.4 percent of all 309,467,000 people living in the United States at that time.

When those receiving benefits from non-means-tested federal programs - such as Social Security, Medicare, unemployment and veterans benefits - were added to those taking welfare benefits, it turned out that 153,323,000 people were getting federal benefits of some type at the end of 2012.

Subtract the 3,297,000 who were receiving veterans' benefits from the total, and that leaves 150,026,000 people receiving non-veterans' benefits.

The New York Police Department reached a $125,000 settlement with a man who says he was arrested and strip-searched for photographing officers performing a stop-and-frisk operation in 2012.

Dick George was sitting in his car in Flatbush on June 14, 2012, when he spotted three African-American youths getting searched by police employing the NYPD's controversial stop-and-frisk policy. The 45 year old pulled out his cell phone and began taking pictures, the New York Daily News reported.

After the youths were let go, George advised them to note the cops' badge numbers next time. The cops overheard his remark and violently pulled George out of his car, court papers stated.

"Now we're going to give you what you deserve for meddling in our business and when we finish with you, you can sue the city for $5 million and get rich, we don't care," Lt. Dennis Ferber told him,according to the suit filed in Brooklyn Federal Court.

The officers arrested George and charged him with disorderly conduct. He was in police custody for a total of 45 minutes, but he said he suffered a torn meniscus of his knee while being handcuffed.

The increased militarization of local US police forces is an alarming trend in America that contributed to rising tensions in Ferguson, Missouri, according to Cheryl Chumley, author and news writer for The Washington Times.

"Police are supposed to be tasked with serving and protecting the American public - not treating the streets of America as if they're military war zones," Chumley told RIA Novosti on Monday. Chumley, author of Police State USA: How Orwell's Nightmare is Becoming Our Reality, noted that "the trend in America is alarming." Chumley said, "Police in Ferguson came out with a level 10 response, when a level four, maybe five would have sufficed. By that I mean police rolled out the full-body armor, militarized gear and armored vehicles - equipped with what appeared to be a 50 cal[iber gun] mounted on top - prematurely, and in so doing, ratcheted tensions and quite possibly turmoil in the streets of Ferguson."

Protests have continued in Ferguson for a week following the shooting of an unarmed African-American teenager by police on August 9. When protests erupted, Ferguson police responded by deploying heavily into the neighborhoods where they were centered. A state of emergency was declared on Saturday by Governor Jay Nixon and included a curfew imposed on the city from midnight until 5 am. When protesters refused to disperse and obey the curfew over the weekend, police responded with tear gas, rubber bullets and other crowd control measures. On Monday morning, Governor Nixon announced the deployment of the National Guard to Ferguson.

The St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department has released mobile phone footage that seems to be at odds with parts of its story surrounding the officer-involved shooting of Kajieme Powell in the weeks after Michael Brown's death.
According to St. Louis Public Radio, the police released the video Wednesday evening as part of an effort to be more transparent when it comes to violent incidents involving law enforcement. In addition to the cell phone footage, the department also released security camera footage of the alleged robbery, as well as the two 911 calls made to police.

Police were first called to the scene - less than four miles away from the spot Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old, was killed - when a local store owner reported the 25-year-old Powell for stealing drinks and snacks. A separate woman, meanwhile, also reported Powell for allegedly having a knife in his pocket and acting strangely.