At the Autumn Meeting of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly (PA), Russian official Sergey Naryshkin made the Ukrainian crisis a top European security issue, while speaking at a conference on new security challenges in the region. At a meeting on "New Security Challenges: The Role of Parliaments" on Friday, Naryshkin, the Head of the Lower House of Russian Parliament, who leads the Moscow delegatio [...]

The new President of Afghanistan Ghani Ahmadzai has paved the way for US troops to stay in the country. He has signed a security deal with the US, which will see just under 10,000 American soldiers present, to help train and assist Afghan forces. National security adviser Hanif Atmar and U.S. Ambassador James Cunningham signed the bilateral security agreement in a televised ceremony at the pres [...]

One more mass grave has been found in a village in eastern Ukraine, say self-defense forces. The site was located days after OSCE mission confirmed the discovery of three mass burial sites in areas recently abandoned by Kiev forces. The new site of the suspected murders is near Nyzhnia Krynka village, not far from the town of Makeevka, self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) First Dep [...]

Publicly announcing that US intelligence agencies “underestimated” the presence and activity of Islamic State militants in Syria, US President Barack Obama in an interview with CBS called the country a “ground zero” for international jihadists. “Over the past couple of years, during the chaos of the Syrian civil war, where essentially you have huge swaths of the country that are compl [...]

Prostitution, drug trafficking and other illegal activities have finally been included in Spain's gross domestic product, boosting it by 9 billion euros according to the latest statistics. Latest data from the National Statistics Institute (INE) reveals the drug trade, prostitution, illegal weapon sales and gambling contributed some €9 billion, or 0.87 percent of country’s total GDP in 2013 [...]

The European Commission has suspended its aid to European farmers hit by the Russian import ban. The amount of submitted claims for some products is several times higher than EU’s annual trade with Russia, with some sources blaming Poland for the exaggerations. [...]

Switzerland has reportedly decided it will not extradite National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden to the US if he comes to testify against the NSA's spying activities, Swiss media said. In the document, titled “What rules are to be followed if Edward Snowden is brought to Switzerland and then the United States makes an extradition request,” Switzerland’s Attorney General stat [...]

Foreign Policy magazine – Russia’s fierce critic – met with the leader of Azov Battalion, an irregular force assisting Kiev to cleanse eastern Ukraine of “terrorists.” The group boasts fierce tactics, “values far from European,” and Nazi-like attributes. Azov, which has an estimated personnel of 500 people, is one of about 50 volunteer battalions formed by Maidan activists and ult [...]

A federal judge on Thursday said oil giant BP acted with gross negligence ahead of the catastrophic 2010 spill in the Gulf of Mexico, paving the way for the corporation to pay perhaps billions of dollars in fines. “BP’s conduct was reckless,” United States District Judge Carl Barbier wrote in a decision handed down early Thursday from a federal courthouse in Louisiana. [...]

Microsoft has been told it must handover emails stored abroad to US prosecutors by a New York court. However, the software giant says it will fight the ruling, saying that an email deserves the same privacy protection as a paper letter sent by mail. The company says they will not release any emails to US authorities, while it appeals the ruling, made by Chief Judge Loretta Preska of the US Dist [...]

Close to 200 state and local police departments in the United States have been suspended for losing military-level equipment transferred to them by the Pentagon, a new investigation found. According to the media outlet Fusion, its independent investigation into the Pentagon’s “1033 program,” which equips state and local police departments across the US with excess military equipment, turn [...]

The officer-involved shooting death of teenager Michael Brown this week and the subsequent protests across the United States have rekindled interest in another case of alleged excessive force blamed on the Ferguson, Missouri Police Department. Nearly four years to the day before Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson opened fire and killed Brown, 18, a complaint filed in federal court accused th [...]

The governor of Missouri will reportedly relieve St. Louis County law enforcement from policing the ongoing demonstrations in the town of Ferguson, paving the way for possible state or federal intervention. Rep Wm. Lacy Clay (D-Missouri told Bloomberg News on Thursday morning that Gov. Jay Nixon, also a Democrat, had confirmed to him that county police will be pulled from their duties in Ferguson [...]

Israel gets signals from the US that it can do whatever it wants, so Tel-Aviv keeps refurbishing its weapons so that it could kill more Gazans, independent researcher and writer Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich told RT. It seems that we are having incremental ceasefires for an incremental genocide. One has to understand the thinking that is behind all this as much as one does regret a single death; I do [...]

The Ukrainian army is using indiscriminate Grad missiles to attack densely populated areas in Donetsk, which violates international humanitarian law, Human Rights Watch alleged. It also blamed militia for taking cover in those areas. [...]

Closing arguments ended and a jury began deliberating in former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura's defamation lawsuit against the estate of "American Sniper" author Chris Kyle. Both men were US Navy SEALs. [...]

Criminal prosecution is likely to be expanded on Americans involved in recruiting and supervising activities of German officials spying for the US intelligence, Germany's Justice Minister Heiko Maas told Welt am Sonntag. If investigators find a body of evidence that alleged double agents in Germany’s federal intelligence service and Defense Ministry have been spying to the benefit of American in [...]

A live interview with former Vice-President Dick Cheney and his family was marred by protesters accusing him of war crimes and torture. One protester tried to "arrest" the politician, but was taken away, as live video of the event went black. Cheney made a rare appearance, together with his wife Lynne and daughter Liz, on Monday to be interviewed by Politico's Mike Allen in Washington. [...]

Facial recognition surveillance software being tested by British cops that allows "faster than ever" data searching and tracking of subjects is raising concerns among privacy activists. NeoFace software analyses dozens of facial features from digital CCTV images or police body cameras and matching them with the 90,000 photos stored on Leicestershire Police's database, which had become the first un [...]

Cannabis could be used to prevent cancer spreading, according to groundbreaking research conducted by British scientists. Research carried out by a team from the University of East Anglia showed how the main psychoactive ingredient in cannabis, Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), could be useful for shrinking tumors. [...]

Germany may scrap its decades-old policy of not spying on key NATO allies in response to the latest spy scandal, which exposed a German intelligence officer as a double-agent leaking secret documents to the US. After the defeat of Nazis in World War II, the new authorities of West Germany adopted a policy of turning a blind eye to the intelligence activities of some of the victors, [...]

A Russian MP claims the US kidnapped his son from the Maldives on bogus cyber-fraud charges and may be preparing to offer him as bait in a swap deal for Edward Snowden. Roman Seleznyov, 30, was arrested at Male international airport as he was about to board a flight to Moscow. [...]