The outcome of the Sunday elections of heads of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics (DPR, LPR), as well as People's Councils elections, have made it clear that people in Donbass support the policy of integration with Russia, head of the Russian Center for Current Politics Alexei Chesnakov told TASS on Monday.

When commenting on the elections' outcome, he pointed to some important conclusions. "First, the election campaigns and the unprecedented voter turnout prove that people support the policy the Donbass republics' authorities adopted in 2014. It undoubtedly is a victory for pro-Russian voters and pro-Russian political forces," the expert stressed. "Second, the Donbass republics have shown that their political institutions are mature enough to create conditions for legal elections," he added.

"Third, the current authorities have achieved clear success, which is a result of people's trust in their leaders," Chesnakov went on to say. "Despite the hardships that the ongoing blockade has been causing, both [Acting DPR head] Denis Pushilin and [Acting LPR head] Leonid Pasechnik have managed to show their high efficiency in a relatively short period of time. The elections have given great impetus to efforts to resolve a number of economic issues, which include the need to increase public employees' wages, reduce fuel prices, counter corruption and remove obstacles hindering business activities. This shows that people support their social and economic policies and strongly oppose Kiev's policy of punishment towards Donbass," the expert pointed out.

Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi spent his last moments begging for a plastic bag to be removed from his head, according to a Turkish investigative journalist. The killing lasted for about seven minutes.

In an interview with Al Jazeera, Nazif Karaman, the head of investigations at the Turkish Daily Sabah newspaper, cited audio recordings of Khashoggi's final words as he was being murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.

According to Karaman, the recordings indicate that it took the killers about seven minutes to choke Khashoggi to death with a plastic bag placed over his head.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan earlier said audio of Khashoggi's gruesome murder had been shared with Saudi Arabia, the US, the UK, France and Germany. Ankara has claimed to have the recording since the beginning of October, when the killing took place.

A Tennessee man was arrested Wednesday after he flew into a rage over an Xbox video game and fired over a dozen rounds from two different handguns into his bedroom ceiling and walls, a report said.

Casey L. Jones, 30, had been playing on his Microsoft Xbox when he suddenly reached a breaking point, screaming at the game and smashing the console with his fist, the Knoxville News Sentinel reported, citing court records.

Jones then went up to his bedroom nightstand, picked up a Springfield XDS handgun and fired several rounds into the ceiling, the paper reported. Jones proceeded to grab a second handgun, a Springfield XDM, and fired another volley through the walls. One of those rounds went through a window, striking a neighbor's house.

Court records state Jones made threats of self-harm, which he has a history of making. An unidentified woman in the home at the time said there was no argument beforehand and he never turned the gun on her.

Mark Twain AKA Samuel Clemens ( 1835-1910) best known for his literary works like Tom Sawyer & Huckleberry Finn, was also a man with deep rooted empathy for any underclass containing people of color. Few readers of his works realize that he was also a staunch opponent of imperialism, having been president of the Anti Imperialist League from 1901 to his death in 1910. Twain wrote about the treatment of the Chinese in San Francisco during the Civil War when he was a newspaper reporter.

In 1865 he astonished many passersby, even those who fought for the abolition of slavery years earlier, when he chose to walk arm in arm through the San Francisco streets with the editor of the recently established Afro American newspaper, the Elevator. Of course, one of his most famous quotes was on his definition of politics: "To protect us from the crooks and scoundrels".

He also said something that resonates so strongly today:

Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really believe it."

We just had a mid-term election that broke the record for both voter turnout and money spent, a real conundrum to say the least. The Two Party/One Party 'food fight' did have one added caveat, something that got this writer to actually do something I never do, and that was to vote across the board in my state of Florida for all Democrats. Why? Well, as Bob Dylan sang so profoundly: "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows."

Trades Union Congress concerned over tech being used to control and micromanage

Britain's biggest employer organisation and main trade union body have sounded the alarm over the prospect of British companies implanting staff with microchips to improve security.

UK firm BioTeq, which offers the implants to businesses and individuals, has already fitted 150 implants in the UK.

The tiny chips, implanted in the flesh between the thumb and forefinger, are similar to those for pets. They enable people to open their front door, access their office or start their car with a wave of their hand, and can also store medical data.

The first two Holy Temples of the Israeli city ceased to exist centuries ago, having been demolished at the hands of the Babylonians and later by the Romans. Despite multiple calls to rebuild the temple, they have remained largely unheard.

Biblical conspiracy theorists have voiced a warning that the erection of a third Holy Temple in Jerusalem, which religious activists have recently called for, inevitably carries Jesus Christ's imminent return.

Jewish eschatological teachings have it that the Holy Temple will rise up from the ground for the third time when Armageddon nears.

Agency urged to update its files

Roughly 6.5 million people with active Social Security numbers are age 112 and older, according to an audit by the Social Security Administration's inspector general.

The March 4 audit concluded that the administration "did not have controls in place to annotate death information" on the the main electronic file, called Numident, for Social Security numberholders who exceeded maximum reasonable life expectancies and were likely deceased.

"We obtained Numident data that identified approximately 6.5 million numberholders born before June 16, 1901 who did not have a date of death on their record," the report states.

TLDR: Joseph Tainter argues that the root cause of civilizational collapse is because of over-investment into and declining marginal returns on complexity. Societies invest in complexity to solve their problems and typically need to expend ever more organizational and physical energy to maintain that level of complexity; eventually, this expenditure undermines their material base, opens up a large potential gap where they could reap the exact same benefits but at a lower level of complexity (and cost), and the likelihood of collapse converges to one.

You can read excellent summaries of the book by Ugo Bardi, and Joseph Tainter himself.

Introduction

Ruins and relics of long dead civilizations, now overtaken by vines of verdant chaos, or buried under the shifting sands of time, hold a certain morbid fascination for us - these once great, hubristic and monumental societies that flourished and then collapsed, leaving only ruins and legends in their wake. We cannot help entertaining thoughts about the sustainability of own, global, industrial civilization; the "possibility that a civilization should die doubles our own mortality".

What is collapse? Tainter starts off by defining collapse - when an empire, chiefdom or tribe experiences a "significant loss of an established level of socio-political complexity", manifesting itself in decreases in vertical stratification, occupational specialization, regimentation, centralization, information and trade flows, literacy, artistic achievement, territorial extent and investment in the "epiphenomena of civilization" (palaces, granaries, temples, etc). He summarizes a large number of historic collapses - Harappa, the Western Chou, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Mycenaean Greece, the Roman Empire and different American cultures.

A get rich quick scheme has spectacularly backfired on a headmaster and vice-principal as the pair have both been fired for racking up outrageous energy bills by using their school to run a secret cryptocurrency mining workshop.

Principal Lei Hua is said to have used eight school computers to run a clandestine Ethereum mining network in the Hunan province for close to a year, according to The South China Morning Post.

Hua's cryptocurrency plot was undertaken with help of a vice-principal, reported HK01 news. The coin mining occurred at Puman Middle School and it was foiled thanks to a plucky school manager who had been keeping an eye on bizarre energy increases at the property.

"We are one American nation. We must unite. We have to unify. We have to come together."

Every faction in our irreparably fractious and fragmented country calls for unity, following events that demonstrate just how disunited the United States of America is.

They all do it.

Calls for unity come loudest from the party of submissives-the GOP. The domineering party is less guilt-ridden about this elusive thing called "unity."