"A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty." - James Madison

"Here [in New Mexico], we are moving more toward a national police force. Homeland Security is involved with a lot of little things around town. Somebody in Washington needs to call a timeout." - Dan Klein, retired Albuquerque Police Department sergeant

If the United States is a police state, then the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is its national police force, with all the brutality, ineptitude and corruption such a role implies. In fact, although the DHS' governmental bureaucracy may at times appear to be inept and bungling, it is ruthlessly efficient when it comes to building what the Founders feared most - a standing army on American soil.

The third largest federal agency behind the Departments of Veterans Affairs and Defense, the DHS - with its 240,000 full-time workers, $61 billion budget and sub-agencies that include the Coast Guard, Customs and Border Protection, Secret Service, Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) - has been aptly dubbed a "runaway train."

In the 12 years since it was established to "prevent terrorist attacks within the United States," the DHS has grown from a post-9/11 knee-jerk reaction to a leviathan with tentacles in every aspect of American life. With good reason, a bipartisan bill to provide greater oversight and accountability into the DHS' purchasing process has been making its way through Congress.

A better plan would be to abolish the DHS altogether. In making the case for shutting down the de facto national police agency, analyst Charles Kenny offers the following six reasons: one, the agency lacks leadership; two, terrorism is far less of a threat than it is made out to be; three, the FBI has actually stopped more alleged terrorist attacks than DHS; four, the agency wastes exorbitant amounts of money with little to show for it; five, "An overweight DHS gets a free pass to infringe civil liberties without a shred of economic justification"; and six, the agency is just plain bloated.

To Kenny's list, I will add the following: The menace of a national police force, a.k.a. a standing army, vested with so much power cannot be overstated, nor can its danger be ignored. Indeed, as the following list shows, just about every nefarious deed, tactic or thuggish policy advanced by the government today can be traced back to the DHS, its police state mindset, and the billions of dollars it distributes to police agencies in the form of grants.

At least five people were killed and seven others injured after a gas blast caused massive blaze at an oil and gas refinery in Western Siberia Sunday night.

The disaster at Achinsk refinery in Krasnoyarsk region happened late on Sunday as the night shift was putting equipment back online after scheduled maintenance, the plant's owner reported.

EU ministers have agreed to 7% cap on the use of food-based biofuels in transport fuel. The agreement comes after a long-standing controversy, with biofuels being criticized for adding to environmental problems.

The so-called "first generation" biofuels are made from crops such as maize, beetroot, or rapeseed. They were initially backed by the EU as a way to tackle climate change and reduce EU dependence on imported oil and gas. However, research has since shown that biofuels do more environmental harm than good.

Making fuel out of crops has been criticized for displacing other crops and forcing the clearing of valuable habitats and virgin vegetation, particularly mangrove swamps in Southeast Asia. Biofuels have also been blamed for inflating food prices by competing with food production, which leads to shortages and higher prices in some of the world's poorest countries.

Police officers allegedly beat a 70-year-old man under suspicion of DUI for non-compliance when he was actually suffering from a diabetic attack.

The event was caught on dash cam video.

Thomas Mathieu stopped his car in a turn lane because he felt he was about to have a low blood sugar incident.

Mathieu claims he did this so he would not cause danger to others on the road.

What happened next Mathieu does not remember.

"I don't know what happened from there on," said Thomas Mathieu to News 4 San Antonio. "I woke up with my face in the ground."

The dash cam video shows the entire disturbing incident.

Families in Norway are handing over their houses free to disadvantaged families while they go off on their summer holidays, in a trend started by Kristine Åsbø, from Nærbø south of Stavanger.

Åsbø has achieved minor celebrity in Norway since she announced the scheme on Facebook on Monday, offering to give out her family's charming wooden house and their BMW estate car to a disadvantaged family.

As well as the car and house, the family will get a host of additional goodies, including pizza vouchers, a course at a local surf school, a season ticket to the indoor play area Leo's Lekland, and free entrance to both the local zoo and to Stavanger's oil museum.

Her post was shared nearly 25,000 times, on Wednesday she appeared on God Morgen Norge, the country's leading breakfast TV programme, to talk about the scheme, and on Thursday she announced that she had found a family to take over her house from 25 July to 25 August.

Barack Obama traveled to a Native American reservation in North Dakota, his first visit as US president to "Indian Country," where he focused Friday on education and economic development.

The president, accompanied by First Lady Michelle Obama, visited the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe reservation in the central far northern state.

The Sioux, which include the Lakota and Dakota nations, are the people of Sitting Bull, the chief famous for his victory over the US cavalry in the 1876 Battle of Little Bighorn.

Ahead of the visit officials announced a series of initiatives on improving education and economic development for Native American communities.

Obama began the visit with a stop at a local elementary school, where he and his wife met with tribal children in their classrooms.

When the couple arrived at Standing Rock, dancers in colorful tribal outfits greeted the Obamas, who met with senior tribal officials.

A federal judge in Idaho agreed this week that officials have no right to keep protesters from demonstrating on the lawn of the state capitol building in Boise.

United States District Judge Lynn Winmill's Wednesday decision declares that efforts in 2012 to remove protesters from a localized Occupy Wall Street offshoot were unconstitutional.

As that movement began to gain momentum across the US in late 2011, Idaho Gov. Butch Otter signed a law that enacted a handful of rules concerning Occupy Boise protesters wishing to protest on state property, including provisions that outlawed anything on the capitol property considered to be camping.

Judge Winmill wrote this week that a lawsuit filed on behalf of the protesters in 2012 is now moot since the laws were later rescinded, but he nevertheless agreed to make a decision requested by Occupy Boise that could open the door for future protests like the ones that were previously outlawed.

As part of the ruling, Winmill issued a permanent injunction that hereby blocks the state from removing protest tents because he said such conduct "targets political speech for suppression."

Prime Minister Manuel Valls warned the French left it could "disappear" and populist leader Marine Le Pen get through to a presidential election run-off, calling on his Socialist party to back his government's business-friendly reform plans.

France's Socialists are reeling from humiliating losses in local and European elections this year, with the latter seeing the hard-right National Front top a national vote for the first time.

President Francois Hollande has promised to reverse a rise in unemployment to record highs, helped by tax cuts for companies and lower public spending, but this policy shift is being challenged by the left wing of his Socialist party.

"I called for a sense of responsibility. The left could disappear and France could fall apart such has been the succession of crises - economic crisis, crisis of identity, cultural crisis," Valls said.

Pope Francis has launched a scathing attack on the global economic system, warning it is near collapse because of a 'throwaway culture' of greed and the 'atrocity' of youth unemployment.

The Roman Catholic leader openly blasted the 'idolatrous' economy for disregarding the young, which he says has led to shocking levels of youth unemployment and will lead to a lost generation.

The 77-year-old also criticised the economy - which he said had 'fallen into a sin of idolatry, the idolatry of money' - for surviving on the profits of war.

The Pope's damning message came amid comments he made about the break-up of countries such as Scotland and Catalonia, which came as a huge blow to the Scottish Yes campaign.

In an interview with Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia, he said: 'Our world cannot take it anymore. Our global economic system can't take any more.'

'We discard a whole generation to maintain an economic system that no longer endures - a system that to survive has to make war, as the big empires have always done.'

A mom says she was left mortified Monday after a JetBlue flight attendant refused to let her daughter use the restroom before takeoff, ultimately resulting in the young child relieving herself at her seat.

"We were on the tarmac," Jennifer Devereaux told WCVB-TV. "We hadn't taken off yet so I asked the flight attendant if she could quickly use the bathroom. The flight attendant snapped back at me, 'No, sit down.' I sat down immediately. I was pretty shocked."

The mom told the local outlet that she was traveling with her two children for the 30-minute flight. Her 3-year-old daughter Summer couldn't hold it.