A company's lies and refusal to clean up toxic waste caused cancer and deaths, one Missouri family said this week.

The Spence family told KSHB that BFI Waste Systems insisted that "nothing bad" was on their property when they bought 80 acres to retire on in Clay County 20 years ago.

The family maintained a small farm with vegetables, fruits and cattle. About three years ago, the Spences began to notice that they were getting sick and that their animals were dying.

Lee Spence has had cancer of the lymph nodes, neurological problems, cognitive impairments and severe pain. He showed the station video of cramping in his legs that looks like "worms crawling under his skin."

Alice Spence also began having neurological problems, seizures, cognitive impairments and tremors. Their son and daughter both face similar neurological issues. Doctors have said that daughter Julia Spence would never be able to have children.

Attorney Ken McClain, who is representing the Spence family, has filed a lawsuit on their behalf, but it could be another year before it goes before a jury.

"My clients were told there was nothing on the site at the very point in time this site had nothing but bad materials in it," McClain explained.

The Obama administration will pay the Navajo Nation a record $554 million to settle claims by the most populous Native American tribe that funds and natural resources on its reservation were mismanaged by the US government for decades.

The agreement will be formally signed on Friday at Window Rock, Arizona, the capital of the Navajo reservation, the largest in the US by land mass.

The accord was borne from litigation that accused the government of mishandling Navajo funds and natural resources on its more than 14 million acres across Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah, all held in trust for the tribe and leased out for purposes of farming, energy development, logging, and mining. The Navajo claims date back as far as 50 years.

In return for $554 million, the Navajo have agreed to drop its lawsuit and forego any future litigation over past US management of Navajo funds or resources held by the federal government, Reuters reported.

The deal does not, though, negate future trust claims or any other claims over water and uranium pollution on the reservation, Navajo Attorney General Harrison Tsosie said. Based on non-disclosure clauses, he could not say how much the Navajo had claimed it was owed ahead of the settlement.

Missouri Highway Patrol personnel acknowledged on Wednesday that officers wore rubber bracelets declaring "I am Darren Wilson" to a protest in the racially divided city of Ferguson on Tuesday night.

Buzzfeed reported that Capt. Ron Johnson confirmed at a press conference that an Instagram post by user MediaBlackoutUSA is real and that the officers in question wore the bracelets as and "individual statement" of solidarity with the white Ferguson Police Department officer who gunned down unarmed black teen Michael Brown in August.

"I think that was not a statement of law enforcement," Johnson said. "I think wearing that was an individual statement" by law enforcement officers.

Wilson has become something of a folk hero to some hardline conservatives. A fund dedicated to defraying his legal expenses raised more than $197,000 before it was suspended for possible legal issues.

A former South Carolina state trooper can be seen shooting a man who was reaching into his car for his license during a traffic stop in footage released on Wednesday, WLTX-TV reported Wednesday night.

The video, taken with a dashboard camera, shows 31-year-old Sean Groubert shooting at 35-year-old Levar Jones multiple times on Sept. 4, hitting him in the hip. At the time, Jones, who was standing outside of his vehicle with his hands up, was reaching inside for his license at Groubert's request.

Jones then falls out of the frame, but can be heard asking Groubert, "Why did you pull me over?"

"A seatbelt violation, sir," Groubert replies. "I just pulled it off right there at the corner to pull in the gas station," Jones yells in response. "Well, I got help coming to you, okay?" Groubert tells him.

Russian courts could get the green light to seize foreign assets on Russian territory under a draft law intended as a response to Western sanctions over the Ukraine crisis.

The draft, which was submitted to parliament on Wednesday by a pro-Kremlin deputy, would also allow state compensation for an individual whose property is seized in foreign jurisdictions.

Italian authorities this week seized property worth about 30 million euros ($40 million) belonging to companies controlled by Arkady Rotenberg, an ally of President Vladimir Putin targeted by the U.S. and European Union sanctions.

The draft law, published on a parliamentary database, would allow for compensation for Russian citizens who suffer because of an "unlawful court act" in a foreign jurisdiction and clear the way to foreign state assets in Russia being seized, even if they are subject to international immunity.

People queue up to cross from Ukraine to Russia at the Uspenka border post, held by pro-Russian separatists, on September 26, 2014.

Ukraine's president may have ordered the closure of his nation's border with Russia but, when asked about it, the rebel commander of this crossing point just smiles and points to the snaking queue of cars traversing the international line.

"As you can see, it is very much open," the border post commander at Uspenka who identifies himself by his nickname "Arshi" says.

Uspenka is just a speck on the map in eastern Ukraine, but hundreds of vehicles had motored there Friday to travel along a country road from the rebel-held Donetsk region to Russia, and in the other direction.

In the view of all those interviewed there by AFP, that border post -- and even the border itself -- were bound to disappear soon.

"Oh, the border is supposed to be closed, is it? I wasn't aware," Archi comments archly.

"What Kiev says or decides is of no interest to me. This is no longer Ukraine here. Soon, when we are united with Russia, we won't even have this outpost here, or it'll be hardly anything at all, just a little checkpoint."

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko announced the temporary closure of the 2,000-kilometre (1,200-mile) border Thursday in a bid to halt the flow of weapons from Ukraine's former Soviet master to pro-Russian separatists.

But by the time of the signing of the ceasefire for eastern Ukraine, on September 20, the rebels already controlled a 260-kilometre stretch of the border.

Workers laid off by an American auto parts company in Argentina have burnt US flags during a protest march on Washington's embassy in the country's capital, Buenos Aires.

The Wednesday evening protest rally was triggered by job losses at a manufacturing plant run by US auto parts maker Lear as the Argentine automotive industry reels from an ailing economy.

Hundreds of Argentinean workers, many of them laid off by the American company, rallied in front of the US embassy to demand their jobs back.

The angry protesters set fire to US flags and chanted slogans against the owners of Lear as armed police officers blocked off any access to the grounds of the heavily guarded embassy.

The North American multinational auto parts company has recently dismissed over 300 of its workers.

The Pennsylvania attorney general's office is blaming a woman for getting raped by an inmate while at work at a state prison, saying she should have locked the door to her office. The prisoner has a history of rape, including of a woman at another jail.

The 24-year-old state prison clerk is suing over her rape at a central Pennsylvania prison. The defendants include the state Department of Corrections and three employees. The woman worked at the Rockview prison near Bellefonte in 2013 when she was attacked by inmate Omar Best, a criminal with three prior convictions for sex-related crimes. Best had been transferred to Rockview after committing a felony assault on a female prison worker at a different facility.

"Despite this knowledge, defendants... still allowed Omar Best to have unsupervised access to the offices of female employees," the attorney general's office wrote in the response to the woman's suit.

The PA Attorney General blames woman for her own rape http://t.co/DlaLIp2xqapic.twitter.com/HdxTcD3eml
- ThinkProgress (@thinkprogress) September 25, 2014

In mid-July 2013, just a month after the plaintiff began working at the Bellefonte facility, she told her superiors that inmates were coming into the hallways that led to her office, and that she was uncomfortable with Best, who sometimes emptied the trash in that area of the building. She was especially distressed by Best entering her office, ThinkProgress reported. She was told that Best would no longer be allowed in her office, according to the Washington Examiner.

Best raped the woman on July 25, 2013. First, he entered her office, pretending to empty the trash can. He grabbed her from behind, strangled her until she was unconscious, then raped her. The ordeal lasted 27 minutes before closed-circuit television showed the inmate leaving the room ‒ the victim's own office ‒ of his own accord. Prison staff later found the woman on the office floor, still unconscious.

At least twenty-three people were killed by officers from various United States police departments in the past week. That means about three people died in the custody or at the hands of police every day from September 18-24.

The frequency in which police use force, especially lethal force, would seem to deserve quite a bit of attention, however, it is rarely highlighted by news media. For the most part, it goes ignored.

Only when there was a crisis in Ferguson after a white police officer killed an unarmed black teenager did media examine how often people are killed by police in the US.

The "Killed by Police" Facebook page keeps track of deaths as they occur and, from May 1, 2013, to August 24, 1,450 people have been killed. When calculated, about three people were killed each day.

The following incidents were noted by the page over the past week:

In a wonderful 45-minute interview with John Ward of Anglo-Far East bullion dealers, fund manager, author, and geopolitical strategist James G. Rickards explains the methods, objectives, and perpetrators of gold market manipulation.

The methods, Rickards says, include strategic dumping of official gold reserves, which isn't done much anymore; dumping paper gold on the futures markets to panic weak-handed and skittish longs, especially hedge funds, which is "child's play"; and gold leasing by central banks to investment banks that leverage the gold supply by a factor of 10, effectively devaluing gold, since most gold investors don't realize that there is no metal behind their claims, just the market-manipulating power of the central banks and their investment bank agents.