Tuesday, this week, marked 13 years since the start of the Afghan War, when on October 7, 2001 the US and its NATO allies launched Operation Enduring Freedom against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban movement in Afghanistan.

The war has already become America's longest-running campaign in history. When combined with the war in Iraq, the military campaign has cost taxpayers between $4 trillion and $6 trillion, according to research published last year by a Harvard researcher.

According to the website iCasualties, the US military has suffered 2,349 military fatalities, including 2,144 "in and around Afghanistan".

However, American political writer, peace activist and co-director of the New York-based International Action Center Sara Flounders said in interview with Radio VR that the Americans are largely unaware of all this, because the figures are not revealed to the general public.

Students at the Complutense University of Madrid kicked out several radical Ukrainians who stormed into a lecture, trying to provoke a fight. Posters reading, 'Ukraine besieged by fascism will not happen,' appeared in campus halls after the incident.

The university faculty of political sciences and sociology is currently hosting an exhibition titled, "Humanitarian crisis in southeastern Ukraine and its consequences for Europe," which features photographs from Odessa, and the Donetsk and Lugansk regions. The display is part of a series of lectures and roundtables on the situation in Ukraine.

While students were gathering for one of the discussions, on the subject of the May 2 Odessa massacre, that left nearly 50 anti-government activists dead, several radicals carrying Ukrainian flags and banners of some of the country's nationalist parties stormed into the hall, not letting professors begin the lecture.

The skirmish was filmed and posted on YouTube.


According to Spanish newspaper La Republica, the protest was carried out by a group of supporters of the neo-Nazi Svoboda (Freedom) party. Chanting the name of Stepan Bandera, leader of Ukrainian nationalist movement during World War 2, the protesters threatened and assaulted several students who had gathered to remember the victims of the events in Odessa.

"At first professors asked them to leave the room, but they wouldn't do so, saying they would not let the lecture begin. Students were outraged by that and started shouting 'Fascists, get out of here!' Almost half the faculty got involved," one of the exhibition's organizers, Sergey Markhel, told RIA Novosti news agency.

After the fight's instigators were kicked off of the campus, students put up posters against fascism in Ukraine.

Leaving the university premises, still waving Ukrainian flags, the offenders were seen by a van with the registration of the Diplomatic Corps of the Ukrainian Embassy in Madrid, La Republica reported.

The event was attended by a representative of the Ukrainian Embassy, the embassy confirmed to RIA Novosti.

The Ukrainian Ambassador to Spain has later met with the university rector, expressing his "deep concern" and asking him to cancel Ukraine-related conferences, which he claimed were being "used by Russian propaganda agents to give false information," El Pais reported.

The conference on the Ukrainian crisis is scheduled to run at the Complutense University until October 23.

US police killed 77 people throughout the country in September, according to a compendium of local press reports compiled by volunteers on Wikipedia. Over the past week, police have killed at least 14 more people, while judges and prosecutors continued to protect the perpetrators of police violence.

Detroit judge throws out manslaughter charge against officer who killed 7-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones

Wayne County Circuit Court Judge Cynthia Gray Hathaway tossed out a felony manslaughter charge on Friday against a police officer who shot a 7-year-old girl during a raid in 2010.

Jones was killed as police were executing a "no-knock" search warrant for a homicide suspect in the two-apartment home. The police - members of the heavily armed Special Response Team - threw a flash grenade through an unopened window around 12:45 a.m. before charging in with guns drawn.

Jones' killer, Joseph Weekley, claimed he was pointing his gun at Stanley-Jones when it accidentally went off, killing her. Hathaway claimed it was not evident that the police officer had been acting with willful negligence. "The entire trial has been about the carelessness of the defendant based on his skills ... Nowhere did I hear anything about a willful negligence," she said.

RT ads were rejected for outdoor displays in London because of their "political overtones." Though posters had to be redacted, the original images could still be seen on them, with the help of a special mobile app.

The censored posters, part of RT's international "Second Opinion" ad campaign, were supposed to feature ex-US President George W. Bush and the former UK prime minister Tony Blair, but will instead show an empty space with a word "redacted" over it.

SEE MORE at secondopinion.rt.com

London outdoor advertising companies have refused to allow the original images to appear on the city's telephone booths and underground stations, citing the Communications Act 2003, which prohibits political advertising.

"RT's slogan is 'Question More' and our advertising campaign has been calling exactly for that - to ask yourself a question of how would events develop, if the world media reported on different points of view, "said RT's editor-in-chief, Margarita Simonyan, reacting to the refusal to place the company's advertising posters in London. "It's sad that some people do not want these issues to be raised at all."

A ship carrying radioactive materials is drifting in North Sea after a fire broke out in one of its engines and as a result a nearby oil platform has been evacuated, BBC news.

The ship, named the Parida, was carrying highly radioactive concrete waste from Scrabster to Antwerp when a large fire broke out in one of her funnels. The ship lost power and is now drifting towards the Beatrice oil platform, reports the Scottish Daily record.

As a precautionary measure, 52 people have been evacuated from the oil platform by the RAF and the Coast Gaurd. 15 people are still on board the ship.

One of the UK's most prestigious universities has installed cages over warm air vents, as a way to ward off the city's homeless sleeping on them.

The cages, which have been placed around the universities campus, completely cover the area surrounding the warm air vents near the college buildings.

Students say they are "disgusted"by the cages, saying that the move shows a lack of love and compassion for the less fortunate.

@cardiffuni how can this be acceptable in this day age. Despicable. I am ashamed. http://t.co/98pdm42uJ8
- Katharina Riekemann (@KatRiekemann) October 8, 2014

"A cold, ugly barred cage had been fixed to one of vents" Cardiff student Lewis Hopkins wrote on his blog.

"I had noticed the winter before that these vents bellowed a comforting pocket of warm air, which from time to time was occupied by the homeless. They never caused any trouble, never littered nor gathered in groups. They were just content with finding a warm place to sleep at night"

A well-known Israeli settler rabbi recently called for Israel to "cleanse" the territories it occupies of all Palestinians, according to the news website The Times of Israel.

During a visit to Israeli settlers on 30 September in the occupied West Bank, Rabbi Dov Lior said that Israel "must strive to cleanse the entire country" of Palestinians, ostensibly referring to present-day Israel, the occupied West Bank and the besieged Gaza Strip.

Lior, who is the chief rabbi for Israeli settlers in the West Bank city of Hebron and in theKiryat Arba settlement, was speaking at an event at Givat Oz Vgaon, an "outpost" colony recently established in the Etzion bloc of settlements in the central West Bank.

From the time it occupied the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) in 1967, Israel has recognized 125 Jewish-only settlements that today harbor a population of an estimated 550,000 Israeli Jews, according to the human rights group B'Tselem.

Givat Oz Vgaon is one of more than one hundred smaller colonies known as "outposts" that also dot the map of the territory. Though outposts are considered illegal even under Israeli law, they are often provided with state resources, including funding, and are protected by the Israeli military.

"There was no peace and there will never be peace, not because we do not want [peace], but because there is no one to make peace with," Lior said, as reported by The Times of Israel.

Using even more racist and orientalist language, he added: "This is their character, they are for war, and the traits of a nation do not change."

He also said the Israeli government ought to force Palestinians to "return" to Saudi Arabia, employing old Israeli tropes that claim Palestinians are not indigenous to historic Palestine.

Video has surfaced appearing to show a New York City police officer taking $1,300 from a man who says he was robbed and then pepper-sprayed by the cop during a stop-and-frisk last month that ended without arrest.

The New York Daily News published exclusive video of the September 16 incident on Wednesday this week and reported that the Brooklyn district attorney's office is now investigation allegations of wrongdoing concerning the action exhibited in the clip.

Attorneys for Lamard Joye, the man who is seen on film being frisked, robbed and assaulted by the cop, told the Daily News that the footage demonstrates disturbing conduct not just on the part of the one officer, who has yet to be named by the New York Police Department, but his fellow colleagues as well amidst a series of scandals that has surrounded the agency for ages.


"One of the most disturbing things about the video is the other cops standing around watching and doing nothing to stop the wrongdoing," lawyer Robert Marinelli told the paper.

According to the NYPD, the incident started to unfold on Sept. 16 when police were dispatched to respond to a call concerning a man with a gun.

"When officers arrived at the scene, they encountered numerous people at the location. As a result of the allegations, the matter is under investigation by the Internal Affairs Bureau and CCRB," or Civilian Complaint Review Board, the NYPD told the New York Times.

As President Petro Poroshenko signed the lustration law, the trash dumping of lawmakers in Ukraine is gaining momentum. The General Prosecutor warned that there is a thin line between the so-called 'trash lustration' and lynching.

Poroshenko signed the law that establishes the legal framework for checking government officials linked to the rule of ousted President Yanukovich. The law is aimed at restoring "trust in the authorities and creating conditions for building a new system of power bodies in line with European standards," his press-service said.

Meanwhile, mob rule has gained wide popularity among Ukrainian radicals, who attack officials on the streets, beat them and throw them into rubbish cans.

The violence has sprung up due to the passiveness of law enforcement, while the increase of such incidents can lead to serious consequences, wrote Ukraine's General Prosecutor Vitaly Yaryoma in an article published by LB.UA on Thursday.

"Silent, observant position of law enforcement provokes the so-called 'trash lustrators' to further lawlessness, as it is well known, appetite comes with eating" he wrote. "However the line between 'lynching' and 'trash lustration' is very thin."

On Wednesday Odessa activists targeted the General Prosecutor himself. They set up a garbage can in front of his office in Kiev with a sign "For Yaryoma" and "lustrator."

The methods used by the US military to feed inmates in Guantánamo Bay against their will presents a long-term risk to their health, a federal court heard on Tuesday.

Steven Miles, a doctor and professor of medical ethics at the University of Minnesota, told a courtroom that lubricating the feeding tubes at Guantánamo, used on hunger-striking detainees, can cause a form of chronic inflammatory pneumonia, and questioned whether the force feeding was medically necessary.

The condition, resulting from olive oil reaching the lungs due to misplaced insertions, would be hard to detect by physicians for released or transferred detainees, as it might look on x-rays like tuberculosis or lung cancer, Miles testified, calling the olive oil lubrication "astonishing to me".