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Brought forth by seven unnamed juvenile prisoners, the case hinges on the idea that the Michigan Department of Corrections (MDOC) has consistently failed to keep prisoners under the age of 18 apart from the more hardened adult inmates. It alleges that at least two of the plaintiffs were repeatedly raped because their older cellmates were selling access to the younger ones. It goes on to implicate corrections officers for allowing the rape to continue.

“MDOC staff was aware of the assaults and aware that male adult prisoners were paying John Doe 5’s cellmate access for access to John Doe 5 for purposes of sexually assaulting him,” the suit claims.

Deborah LeBelle, an attorney based in Ann Arbor, told MLive.com that she was aware of the suit when it was initially filed in October, but decided to bring it back to light because of the seriousness of the allegations. When the suit was re-filed, it was classified as a violation of the Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act, a Michigan law that forbids differential treatment based on religion, race, color, national origin, age, sex, height, weight, familial status, or marital status.

LeBelle told the Michigan news site she was stunned that teens who may have barely gone through puberty are locked up with adults – which also increases their risk of recidivism.

Others are much less well known. One of these battlefronts was in unconventional research—parapsychology (or psychotronics as the Soviets called it), mind control and remote influence and the such like. Some of the US work on these topics is now public and has famously become the basis for various books, TV documentaries and for the Hollywood film “The Men Who Stare at Goats”.

But much less is known about the Soviet equivalents. Today that changes thanks to the work of Serge Kernbach at the Research Center of Advanced Robotics and Environmental Science in Stuttgart, Germany. Kernbach provides an overview of Soviet efforts in unconventional research between 1917 and 2003 based on publications in Russian technical journals and recently declassified documents.

He shows how Soviet research evolved more or less independently of work in the western world but focused on many of the same unconventional themes as secret US programs. And he shows how the Soviets and the Americans used what little they knew of each other’s work to create a self-sustaining cycle of funding. This psychotronic arms race cost as much as $1 billion and only ended in the early 21st century when the funding bubble burst.

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Over the years, the Soviets focused on a number of areas, many of which mirrored US efforts. For example, the US Project MKULTRA, was a 20-year CIA program that studied ways of manipulating people’s minds and altering their brain function.

The Soviets had a similar program. This included experiments in parapsychology, which the Soviets called psychotronics. The work built on a long-standing idea in Soviet science that the human brain could receive and transmit a certain kind of high frequency electromagnetic radiation and that this could influence other objects too.

Various researchers reported that this “human energy” could change the magnetisation of hydrogen nuclei and stimulate the immune systems of wheat, vine and even humans. They even developed a device called a “cerpan” that could generate and store this energy.

Like MKULTRA, this program also included a study of the effects of electromagnetic waves on humans and led to the development psychotronic weapons, which were intended to alter people’s minds.

Kernbach also describes significant Soviet research on non-local signal transmission based on the Aharonov-Bohm effect. This occurs when a charged particle is influenced by an electromagnetic field, even when it is confined to a region where the field strength is zero.

Soviet scientists appear to have called this effect “spin-torsion” and built a number of devices to exploit it. But just how successful this was isn’t clear and this line of work appears to have been killed off in 2003.

One thing that Kernbach’s analysis lacks is any detailed discussion of the results of these programs. Consequently, it’s hard to escape the sense that this research is steeped in jargon and pseudoscience

All this research required substantial investment, says Kernbach. Numbers are difficult to come by but he concludes that Soviet spending on unconventional research must have reached the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars and may have hit $1 billion.

It certainly matched US spending and on projects such as MKULTRA this was in the hundreds of millions. “Soviet and US costs are comparable at least on a level of separate programs,” he says.

Although Kernbach says much of this research was discontinued in 2003, it is not clear whether Russia (or the US) has ongoing programs in these areas. However, Kernbach says there are as many as 500 researchers in Russia that are still active in the field of psychotronics (as measured by the numbers still attending conferences on this topic).

“They got the notion they were going to come to give me a lobotomy,” Roman Tritz, a World War II bomber pilot, told the newspaper in a report published Wednesday. “To hell with them.”

Tritz said the orderlies at the veterans hospital pinned him to the floor, and he initially fought them off. A few weeks later, just before his 30th birthday, he was lobotomized.

Besieged by psychologically damaged troops returning from the battlefields of North Africa, Europe and the Pacific, the Veterans Administration performed the brain-altering operation on former servicemen it diagnosed as depressives, psychotics and schizophrenics, and occasionally on people identified as homosexuals, according to the report.

The VA’s use of lobotomy, in which doctors severed connections between parts of the brain then thought to control emotions, was known in medical circles in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and is occasionally cited in medical texts. But the VA’s practice, never widely publicized, long ago slipped from public view. Even the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs says it possesses no records detailing the creation and breadth of its lobotomy program.

IBM lobbied Congress hard to pass a law letting it share personal data of customers in China and elsewhere with the U.S. National Security Agency, in a bid to protect its intellectual property rights, according to a complaint filed in the U.S. District Court in Manhattan.

The plaintiff in the complaint, Louisiana Sheriffs’ Pension & Relief Fund, said this threatened IBM hardware sales in China, particularly given a program known as Prism that let the NSA spy on that country through technology companies such as IBM.

The Baton Rouge pension fund said the revelation of Prism and related disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden caused Chinese businesses and China’s government to abruptly cut ties with the world’s largest technology services provider.

Perhaps he was afraid of being pointed to as the propagator of an exclusion and segregation system in so many ways similar to that in South Africa until June 1991, when the four main pillars of apartheid were abolished? A crime against which Nelson Mandela fought relentlessly?

The question deserves to be asked. Nelson Mandela is dead, but the apartheid lives on in a uncodified, illegal but very real form, especially in Israel. A disguised apartheid, rampant, despised. Many believe that the use of the term “apartheid” is exaggerated or outrageous for the Jewish state, but they forget that apartheid takes various forms derived from the domination of one group over another or several others and leading to exclusion, marginalization or expulsion. Apartheid is not only the product of the occupation, it is the consequence of the colonisation and the wish to get rid of a group of people by sticking them in particular locations or Bantustans to be replaced by another group. Removing or confining the Palestinians to leave the field open to the Jewish community. Is not that the definition given in 1973 by the UN resolution 3068 which decided that “the crime of apartheid means inhumane acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of humans on any other race of human beings and systematically oppressing it”. Who can deny that this is not a reality in Israel today? For years, Western leaders regularly call for an end to colonization, the destruction of Palestinian homes, the brutality of the army at the end of the blockade of Gaza, the release of political prisoners without getting any echo from the Israeli authorities.

Almost every week, new housing programs are advertised in the West Bank or Jerusalem. Almost every week, Palestinians are killed.

Fischer, 70, would replace Janet Yellen as the Fed’s No. 2 official, according to the people, who asked for anonymity because the decision isn’t final. There are no plans by the White House to announce the choice this week, one of the people said.