The hard-pressed chief of bankrupt 2014 Winter Olympics builder Mostovik has now been charged with tax evasion and embezzlement in the Siberian region of Omsk, adding to earlier charges of withholding wages from employees.

Oleg Shishov, who is CEO of Mostovik and a member of the region's legislative assembly, was put under house arrest early last week for allegedly failing to pay Mostovik employees for six months straight.

Shishov was then slapped with two additional charges: evading more than 515 million rubles ($10.9) in taxes from 2009 to 2012 via falsified tax documents and embezzling 500 million rubles ($10.6 million) from the Omsk regional budget, according to a statement last week on the regional investigative department's website.

The Denver police department has been accused of using excessive force after a video, which they allegedly deleted, survived on the cloud and was turned into FOX 31.

The incident started as two officers approached David Nelson Flores, who was in his vehicle with his seven-and-a-half-months pregnant wife and their child, to shake him down after suspecting him of being in possession of a substance deemed illegal by the state.

Upon their approach, officers said they saw Flores put a white sweat sock in his mouth. Because the US is involved in an immoral war on drugs, this 'sock in mouth' move apparently gave the officers the right to yank Flores out of his car and proceed to pummel the man on the asphalt.

According to the police report however, a pair of plain clothes officers "assisted" suspect David Nelson Flores out of his car and they all "fell to the ground."

The pummeling was for Flores' own good, according to the police report. They bashed in his face and head so he wouldn't "choke."

The Ebola death toll is up to 5,689 out of nearly 16,000 cases reported in eight countries by November 23, the World Health Organization said in its latest update.

Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia were the hardest hit by the virus outbreak, with 600 new cases recorded just last week.

"The total number of cases reported in Sierra Leone since the outbreak began will soon eclipse the number reported from Liberia," the WHO said.

Sierra Leone had 6,599 cases in comparison to 7,168 in Liberia.

A month ago, those figures stood at 5,235 for Sierra Leone and 6,535 for Liberia, with the number of deaths, respectively, 1,500 and 2,413, according to the WHO.

The situation is said to be more or less stabilizing in Guinea and Liberia, but just the opposite is happening in Sierra Leone, according to the update. However, officials in Sierra Leona insist that the outbreak is losing momentum.

"We believe that now that those treatment centers are ready, the transmission of new cases will start reducing," Sierra Leone's minister of information, Alpha Kanu, told journalists. "I don't think we can get any higher than we are now - we are at the plateau of the curve and very soon we will have a downward trend, once we have somewhere to take people."

The World Health Organization said it was able to isolate more than 70 percent of those infected with Ebola in Guinea, referring to the international target set for December 1, but had failed to do so in the other two countries.

"Liberia and Sierra Leone report that fewer than 70 percent of patients are isolated, though there is wide variation among districts," the WHO said, adding that the final goal is to isolate 100 percent of those infected by January 1.

Meanwhile, eight more cases have been reported in Mali, with six dying.

The police officer who fatally shot a 12-year-old boy carrying a pellet gun fired within 1½ to two seconds of pulling up in his cruiser, police said Wednesday. During those few moments, he ordered the youngster three times to put up his hands, they said.

The city released a surveillance video that shows the shooting of Tamir Rice, who was carrying an airsoft gun that shoots non-lethal plastic pellets.

Much of the footage shows what appears to be a bored kid alone in a park on an unseasonably warm November afternoon. Tamir is seen pacing, occasionally extending his right arm with what appears to be a gun in his hand, talking on a cellphone and sitting a picnic table with his head resting on his arms.

The gun wasn't real. It can be bought at sporting goods stores for less than $20. Tamir's was lacking the bright orange tip that is usually put on such weapons to indicate they're not real guns.

The patrol officer who shot Tamir was identified Wednesday as Timothy Loehmann, a 26-year-old rookie who began his career in Cleveland on March 3. He previously spent five months in 2012 with a department in the Cleveland suburb of Independence, but four of those months were in that city's police academy.

Loehmann's partner that day was identified as Frank Garmback, 46. He has been with the department since 2008. Both are on paid administrative leave pending a decision by the Cuyahoga County prosecutor's office whether to pursue any criminal charges.

A Houston pastor has come under fire for refusing to bury a 93-year-old woman who had been a member of his church for 50 years but had not tithed enough as her death neared.

Barbara Day told KRIV that she was devastated by the way pastor Walter F. Houston treated her when she contacted him about a funeral at Fourth Missionary Baptist Church for her mother, Olivia Blair.

"It was like the last insult in the world, there was nothing else that I could do for my mommy but funeralize her in the church that she loved and worshiped all of her life, even as a little girl," Day said, explaining that Houston told her that Blair "had not paid her dues, and she had not attended the church in recent years."

"For the last two years, my mother has been in either a nursing home or she's been in a hospital," she pointed out. "And the last few months, she was in a coma!"

Day said that she could not understand why Houston would force her to find another place for the burial after her mother had supported him for so many years, and her stepfather had also been buried at the church.

Nearly one in five U.S. households will celebrate Thanksgiving on food stamps this year, according to the latest data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture on participation in the Supplemental Nutrition and Assistance Program.

Back in fiscal 2000, there were 106,061,000 households in the United States and, according to a USDA report published in November 2012, there was a monthly average of 7,335,000 households - or 6.9 percent - getting food stamps that year.

As of this August, according to the most recent data released by USDA, there were 22,729,389 households on food stamps. That equaled 19.75 percent of 115,048,000 households in the country at that time.

In each of the two previous fiscal years, the percentage of American households on food stamps in the average was near 20 percent, hitting 19.4 percent in 2012, 20.4 percent in 2013.

Greek leaders at San Diego State University have announced that they were suspending all fraternity parties and social functions indefinitely after a weekend that not only involved taunting people protesting sexual assault, but also the seventh sexual assault at a fraternity house since the semester began in September, U-T San Diego reports.

The InterFraternity Council admitted that the fraternity members who pelted participants in Friday's Take Back the Night protest against sexual assault with eggs and waved dildos at them behaved in a manner that did "not reflect the values of the Greek community at SDSU."

"I've been to about three demonstrations before," Jordan Busse, who helped organize the Take Back the Night protest, told KPBS. "This is the first time where I've actually felt scared."

She said that men at both the Sigma Phi Epsilon and Delta Sigma Phi fraternities shouted obscenities and waved dildos at the protesters, and that drivers along fraternity row threw eggs at them.

On Saturday, police responded to a sexual assault on the very same street on which the protesters had been taunted.

This confluence of events prompted Greek leaders to suspend all fraternity "social activities in order to focus on educating its members about sexual assault prevention."

Although the suspension is indefinite, critics noted that it began the week of Thanksgiving, when no fraternity events are planned because most students return home for the holiday.

However, SDSU student president and Sigma Phi Epsilon member Jonathan Cole told KPBS that "[w]hen we get back, [the length of the suspension] is one of the discussions we'll have."

All three of their babies have been taken away from them and placed in the care of strangers. Levi was 10 months old when his mother, local singer and songwriter Erica May Rengo, gave birth to his twin brother and sister, at their home in Bellingham, Washington.

"Our birth was glorious," she said, and the twins were reportedly healthy, full-term babies, who had no problem quickly figuring out how to breastfeed. The little family was overjoyed until CPS stepped in to "help."

It is another medical kidnapping according to the parents. The Rengos have chosen a wholesome, holistic lifestyle, based in their Christian faith. But CPS has stepped in to override the parents' decisions. Now Erica and Cleave are living what they call a nightmare, separated from their children for reasons that don't make any sense at all to them.

Decision to Home Birth

It was only natural for Erica to choose normal, family-centered birth. Erica herself was born at home, and says that her mother was a homebirth educator and La Leche League leader (a world-wide support and education group for breastfeeding mothers). She and Cleave chose a birth-center birth with their first baby, but decided to birth at home the second time. She knew that her body was perfectly designed to work for birth. She believed this was the direction God was showing them for the birth. Erica was very careful during her pregnancy to watch her diet and exercise, in preparation for the birth. She read, researched, and prepared.

She describes her homebirth as "exquisite" and "empowering." Morna Kai Grace and Daniel Clemente were born into their parents' loving arms.

The birth was perfect. There were no complications with the birth or afterwards. But Erica and her husband Cleave had agreed to notify the local paramedics, in an effort to appease concerned family members who were fearful of their decision to birth at home. That is where their problems began.

When faced on the battlefield with a numerically superior enemy, one must attempt to divide his enemy into smaller, more easily dispatched opponents - or even more ideally, divide them against one another, and have them defeat each other without ever drawing your sword. For Wall Street's 0.1%, divide and conquer is a way of life.

Divide and Conquer

Never in human history has there been a more effective way for tyrants to rule over large groups of people who, should they ever learn to cooperate, would easily throw off such tyranny.
At the conclusion of the Anglo-Zulu War, the British despoiled Zululand, divided it into 14 separate chiefdoms, each led by a proxy obedient to the British Empire. The British ensured that these 14 chiefdoms harbored animosities toward one another and fostered petty infighting between them to ensure British interests would never again be challenged by a unified Zulu threat. Before the British, the Romans would employ similar tactics across Germania and Gaul.

US Q3 GDP was revised up by the BEA to 3.89%, but that's no longer what financial markets react to. They sit and wait for more QE somewhere on the planet to be doled out. Will Americans, if they see this at all, take those numbers, add them to the sweet drop in prices at the pump and spend what they save on more holiday purchases? I'm not saying I know, but I do see that US consumer confidence is down, as is global business confidence - the latter at a five year low.

The Case/Shiller index reports a "broad-based slowdown" for US home prices, and that in the rear view mirror that looks at Q3. So that's not where those 3.89% came from, it wasn't housing (wonder what it was). The Gallup Christmas survey lost 8% of exuberance in one month. What this adds up to is that Americans may not spend all of that saved gas money, and that means there's a real danger of deflation coming to America too - as if Japanese and European attempts to export their own were not enough yet.

While the media continue to just about exclusively paint a picture of recovery and an improving economy, certainly in the US - Europe and Japan it's harder to get away with that rosy image -, in ordinary people's reality a completely different picture is being painted in sweat, blood, agony and despair. Whatever part of the recovery mirage may have a grain of reality in it, it is paid for by something being taken away from people leading real lives. US unemployment numbers are being massaged three ways to Sunday, as is common knowledge, or should be; the amounts of working age people not working, and not being counted as unemployed either, is staggering.