The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has filed a federal lawsuit against officials in DeKalb County, Georgia after a judge imprisoned a black teenager who was too poor to pay $838 in fines. It all started with a traffic ticket near his home.

ACLU attorneys are now asking for an end to a process which, according to the group, allows indignant and impoverished Americans to be wrongly imprisoned for not being able to afford fees.

"Being poor is not a crime. Yet across the county, the freedom of too many people unfairly rests on their ability to pay traffic fines and fees they cannot afford," Nusrat Choudhury, an attorney with the group's Racial Justice Program, said in a statement this week. "We seek to dismantle this two-tiered system of justice that punishes the poorest among us, disproportionately people of color, more harshly than those with means."

Russia's Emergencies Ministry has assessed as successful another stage of providing humanitarian aid to war-torn Donbass.

"A regular stage of humanitarian aid supplies to the Donetsk and Lugansk regions went on like clock-work as all the cargoes were delivered and the task was accomplished," the ministry's press service told TASS on Saturday.

The twelfth convoy of the Russian Emergencies Ministry comprised over 170 trucks that all returned empty to the Russian southern Rostov region.

The trucks were inspected by customs and border officers at the checkpoints of Donetsk (in the Rostov region) and Matveyev Kurgan.

Ukraine's customs officers and border guards were overseeing the procedures earlier in the day when the convoy was heading for Donbass, a TASS correspondent said in an eyewitness's report adding the reporters who were admitted to the border checkpoints could make sure the trucks had come back empty.

A 3-year-old boy shot and wounded his father and pregnant mother with a 9 mm handgun that he pulled out of the woman's purse while searching for an iPad, police in New Mexico said on Sunday.

Both parents needed hospital treatment for non-life threatening injuries after the bullet went through his father's buttocks and into his mother's shoulder, Albuquerque Police Department Officer Simon Drobik said.

Islamic State fighters have admitted that Kurdish forces managed to retake Kobani after the intensified US-led air campaign forced the jihadists to abandon position in the strategic city near the Syrian-Turkish border.

In a recently released ISIS video, two militant fighters say that continued aerial bombardment by fighter jets from the US and some of its Arab allies forced them to retreat, although ferocious and heroic resistance from Kurdish forces defending the town was another key reason why they were forced into retreat.

"The warplanes were bombarding us night and day. They bombarded everything, even motorcycles," said one of the fighters.

The warplanes "destroyed everything, so we had to withdraw and the rats advanced," said another.

Earlier this week, Kurdish officials said the town was almost cleared of ISIS fighters.

Joan Peters, the author of the book From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict over Palestine, died on January 5th, at 78. As David Samel wrote following her death,"The bizarre chapter of Joan Peters's contribution to the Middle East debate does not end with her death. Her arguments, both those she adopted from others and those she formulated herself, still constitute a huge portion of the go-to hasbara repertoire." I interviewed Norman Finkelstein and asked him to reflect on her work and legacy, as he played a central role in debunking much of her work as described in his book Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict.

Adam Horowitz: Could you start by saying a bit about how From Time Immemorial was received?

Norman Finkelstein: First of all the important primary factor is the context. Israel in 1982 took its first major public relations hit since the 1967 war. It was a public relations disaster for Israel. One of the reasons being I think, as Robert Fisk pointed out in Pity the Nation he said unlike all other Arab states Lebanon did not control the press and so mainstream reporters were able at that time to roam freely throughout Lebanon. Mainstream reporters, I should say who had credibility, were able to roam freely through Lebanon during the Israeli attack, and what they were reporting was quiet horrifying. It's forgotten now but even against the Israeli attacks in recent years on Lebanon, on Gaza, they all pale in comparison to what Israel did in Lebanon in 1982. The usual figures are between sixteen and twenty thousand Lebanese and Palestinians, overwhelmingly civilians, were killed during the Israeli attack. All the Lebanese killed in 2006 plus the three massacres in Gaza that doesn't even come to half of the figure that happened in Lebanon.

So now you had credible reportage of what Israel was doing and it was a major public relations setback for Israel. You could say the first layer of Jewish support for Israel, the first layer, peeled away and that was the layer of what you would call the Old Left, mainly those were identified with the Soviet Union and therefore identified with Israel because the Soviets supported the creation of the state of Israel in '48 and also because a lot of the signature institutions of Israel in that era were of a socialist leftist orientation, most famously the kibbutzim.

And so before 1982 the pro-Soviet, pro-Communist Old Left even those who were disaffected from the Soviet Union which still fell within the umbrella of the Old Left, they were still pretty much pro-Israel, there were just really a tiny handful of exceptions. The best known being of course Professor Chomsky. There was also Maxime Robinson in France, but in general the support was totally for Israel, overwhelmingly for Israel.

Four out of every ten Italians no longer want the euro, according to a survey released on Friday by the Institute of Political, Economic and Social Studies, Eurispes.

The percent of Italians who want Italy to leave the Eurozone has risen from 26% at the start of 2014 to 40.1% now, the polling agency says.

More than half of the Euroskeptics think the single currency is the chief cause of Italy's economic woes, as it has deprived the country of the possibility of devaluating its currency at will.

Bill Maher closed Real Time on Friday by ripping Republicans' embrace of the phrase "middle-class economics."

"It's the new bullsh*t, and it's what's for dinner," he said, noting that both Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney had started decrying income inequality. (At least, before Romney eliminated himself as a presidential candidate on Friday.)

Even former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) tried to get into the act, Maher noted, before showing footage of her mangling the term "status quo" during her infamous speech in Iowa last week.

To the issues dividing Americans by race, add the publication of satirical cartoons about religion.

A survey released by the Pew Research Center this week found that Americans, by more than 2-to-1, believe it's OK to publish cartoons poking fun of religion, such as those printed by the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. But that seemingly overwhelming support for the right to make fun came largely from white respondents to the survey, the organization reported. A plurality of non-whites, just shy of a majority, said they were opposed to such satire.

Why that divide exists has much to do with the way the country's dominant culture has treated minority groups over the years, say experts on race and religion. No one likes being the butt of jokes - and if that's been your role in society, you're more sensitive to the offense, they said.

"Non-white Americans might be more sensitive than whites to negative media images of Islam (and religious diversity in general) because they understand how it feels to believe, rightly or wrongly, that one's community is under attack by the media and mainstream society," said Henry Goldschmidt, director of education programs at Interfaith Center of New York, a nonprofit organization that promotes communications among different faith, ethnic and cultural traditions.

Anyone paying attention knows that 9/11 has been used to create a police/warfare state. Years ago NSA official William Binney warned Americans about the universal spying by the National Security Agency, to little effect. Recently Edward Snowden proved the all-inclusive NSA spying by releasing spy documents, enough of which have been made available by Glenn Greenwald to establish the fact of NSA illegal and unconstitutional spying, spying that has no legal, constitutional, or "national security" reasons. Yet Americans are not up in arms. Americans have accepted the government's offenses against them as necessary protection against "terrorists."

Neither Congress, the White House, or the Judiciary has done anything about the wrongful spying, because the spying serves the government. Law and the Constitution are expendable when the few who control the government have their "more important agendas."

Bradley Manning warned us of the militarization of US foreign policy and the murderous consequences, and Julian Assange of WikiLeaks posted leaked documents proving it.

Were these whistleblowers and honest journalists, who alerted us to the determined attack on our civil liberty, rewarded with invitations to the White House and given medals of honor in recognition of their service to American liberty?

Thousands of people gathered in Madrid on Saturday in an anti-governmental rally organized by the Spanish anti-austerity left-wing party Podemos, following the recent victory of the eurosceptic Syriza party in Greece's parliamentary elections.

"Thousands of people have already filled up Cibeles [a square in Madrid], have come to tell the government of Rajoy [Mariano Rajoy, Prime Minister of Spain] that they will not continue tolerating the plundering to which we are subjected to, that we will chuck them out," Podemos wrote on its Facebook page.

More than 260 buses with more than 10,000 people from all over the country came to Madrid ahead of the rally, local media reported. Around 100 people have volunteered to carpool, a Podemos spokesperson told Sputnik.