At least 60 people have been killed as a result of separate US-led airstrikes in Afghanistan's provinces of Paktia, Kunar and Helmand, Press TV reports.

Local officials in the eastern province of Paktia said 13 Taliban militants were killed in two airborne assaults in the Zurmat district of the province, situated more than 100 kilometers (62 miles) south of the capital city of Kabul on Saturday.

The unnamed authorities noted that two militant commanders -- identified as Abdul Rahman and Jome al-Din -- were also killed in the attacks.

The Taliban have not yet confirmed any casualties, and made no comments on the airstrike.

On Friday, at least 45 people were killed when foreign forces carried out an airstrike in Afghanistan's southern province of Helmand.

Pontiff wraps up first overseas trip as head of Catholic church with address to worshippers on Copacabana beach in Rio

Pope Francis wrapped up a triumphant first overseas trip as pontiff with a Sunday mass on Copacabana beach attended by three million worshippers, according to Rio authorities' estimates.

In the evangelical, simple and radical style that has characterised his week-long visit to Brazil, Francis made an appeal to pilgrims to return to their home countries and revitalise the Catholic church.

He urged followers to be more active in their faith by reach out to "to the fringes of society, even to those who seem farthest away, most indifferent".

"The church needs you, your enthusiasm, your creativity and the joy that is so characteristic of you," he told the vast throng, hundreds of thousands of whom had slept overnight on the 4km-long beach.

© Unknown

An American investigative journalist has uncovered evidence suggesting the CIA peppered local food with the hallucinogenic drug LSD

A 50-year mystery over the 'cursed bread' of Pont-Saint-Esprit, which left residents suffering hallucinations, has been solved after a writer discovered the US had spiked the bread with LSD as part of an experiment.

In 1951, a quiet, picturesque village in southern France was suddenly and mysteriously struck down with mass insanity and hallucinations. At least five people died, dozens were interned in asylums and hundreds afflicted.

For decades it was assumed that the local bread had been unwittingly poisoned with a psychedelic mould. Now, however, an American investigative journalist has uncovered evidence suggesting the CIA peppered local food with the hallucinogenic drug LSD as part of a mind control experiment at the height of the Cold War.

The mystery of Le Pain Maudit (Cursed Bread) still haunts the inhabitants of Pont-Saint-Esprit, in the Gard, southeast France.

On August 16, 1951, the inhabitants were suddenly racked with frightful hallucinations of terrifying beasts and fire.

One man tried to drown himself, screaming that his belly was being eaten by snakes. An 11-year-old tried to strangle his grandmother. Another man shouted: "I am a plane", before jumping out of a second-floor window, breaking his legs. He then got up and carried on for 50 yards. Another saw his heart escaping through his feet and begged a doctor to put it back. Many were taken to the local asylum in strait jackets.

Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald on Sunday revealed that he would be publishing new details that backed up former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edwards Snowden's claim that low-level analysts could listen to the phone calls of any American or even read President Barack Obama's emails.


"The story that we've been working on for the last month that we're publishing this week very clearly sets forth what these programs are that NSA analysts - low-level ones, not just one that work for the NSA, but private contractors like Mr. Snowden - are able to do," Greenwald told ABC News host George Stephanopoulos. "The NSA has trillions of telephone calls and emails in their databases that they've collected over the last several years."

Today on "This Week," Glenn Greenwald - the reporter who broke the story about the National Security Agency's surveillance programs - claimed that those NSA programs allowed even low-level analysts to search the private emails and phone calls of Americans.


"The NSA has trillions of telephone calls and emails in their databases that they've collected over the last several years," Greenwald told ABC News' George Stephanopoulos. "And what these programs are, are very simple screens, like the ones that supermarket clerks or shipping and receiving clerks use, where all an analyst has to do is enter an email address or an IP address, and it does two things. It searches that database and lets them listen to the calls or read the emails of everything that the NSA has stored, or look at the browsing histories or Google search terms that you've entered, and it also alerts them to any further activity that people connected to that email address or that IP address do in the future."

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has issued certificates for two types of unmanned aircraft for civilian use. The move is expected to lead to the first approved commercial drone operation later this summer.

The two unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) are the Scan Eagle X200 and Aero Vironment's PUMA. They both measure around 4 ½ feet long, weighing less than 55 pounds, and have a wing span of ten and nine feet respectively.

Both the Scan Eagle and the PUMA received "restricted category type certificates"which permit aerial surveillance. Prior to the FAA's decision, the only way the private sector could operate UAS in US airspace was by obtaining an experimental airworthiness certificate which specifically restricts commercial operations.

Leaks or revelations are often more compelling because of what they don't reveal. Through Operation Paperclip, the U.S. organized a monumental transfer of black technology by actively recruiting Nazi criminals for employment by U.S. intelligence. Author H. P. Albarelli excavates the part that was missing from the recently-outed official report: the U.S. pointedly chose fervent Nazi scientists with experience in chemical, biological and radioactive warfare to become the architects of the CIA's darkest military experiments with human guinea pigs, reminiscent of Nazi Germany.

Marvin Washington Brooks had been terribly ill for nearly three months. A year prior in early-1952, he had been diagnosed with cancer and had been admitted as "a patient for treatment" to the University of Texas Medical School's M.D. Anderson Hospital. Brooks had served as an infantryman in the Army during World War II. He had received a Purple Heart for being wounded during the Battle of the Bulge. Not long after he was admitted to the M.D. Anderson Hospital, Brooks began to receive weekly treatment from a team of physicians led by an older doctor with a heavy German accent and three distinctive scars across his face. Brooks was told the treatment could significantly affect his cancer in positive ways. But Brooks had become increasingly ill, with constant vomiting, weight and hair loss, and patchy skin with large areas appearing as if severely sunburned. Within about six months of the weekly treatment, Brooks was in constant pain. He died the first month of 1955, two days before what would have turned 47 years old. Brooks was never informed that he was one of 263 cancer patients who were secretly being experimented upon with "whole body irradiation." Brooks, nor his wife or family, had ever been consulted about the experiments. Nor had Brooks, or anyone else, given the hospital permission to experiment on him. Nobody ever told Brooks, or anyone in his family, that the German physician who saw him weekly was Dr. Herbert Bruno Gerstner, a former Nazi doctor who had been secretly brought to the United States in 1949.

On November 17, 2010 the CIA's Director of Public Affairs, George Little, wrote a short letter to the editor of the New York Times. Little, on behalf of the agency, protested a just published Times article that detailed CIA "interactions with former Nazi officials in the early years of the post World War II era." Mr. Little wrote, "We would like to make clear that the agency at no time had a policy or a program to protect Nazi war criminals, or to help them escape justice for their actions during the war."

The anti-GMO movement in the U.S. has achieved some preliminary victories in GMO food labeling but that's not all that needs to be done.

"The harder they come the harder they fall, one and all."-- Jimmy Cliff, reggae classic

After enjoying a year of maximum profits, record stock prices, the defeat of a major GMO labeling campaign in California, pro-industry court decisions, and a formidable display of political power in Washington, D.C. - including slipping the controversial Monsanto Protection Act into the Federal Appropriations bill in March -- the Biotech Bully from St. Louis now finds itself on the defensive.

It is no exaggeration to say that Monsanto has now become the most hated corporation in the world.

Plagued by a growing army of Roundup-resistant superweeds and Bt-resistant superpests spreading across the country, a full 49 percent of American farmers are now frantically trying to kill these superweeds and pests with ever-larger quantities of toxic pesticides, herbicides and fungicides including glyphosate (Roundup), glufosinate, 2,4D ("Agent Orange'), dicamba, and neonicotinoids (insecticides linked to massive deaths of honey bees).

Talks between Israel and Turkey on compensation for the victims of a deadly 2010 Israeli raid on Freedom Flotilla - a Gaza-bound aid flotilla - have stalled over disagreement on the legal definition of the damages, said Turkey's deputy Prime Minister in comments published on Thursday.

Bulent Arinc told a group of journalists that Israel wanted to make a voluntary payment out of compassion, while Turkey insists that Israel accept liability for a "wrongful act." His words were reported by Zaman and Hurriyet Daily News newspapers.

Israel and Turkey have been working on repairing ties that were frayed after the May 31, 2010 raid which killed eight Turks and one Turkish-American when Israeli commandos stormed a ship bound for the Gaza Strip. Israel maintains a blockade on the territory.

Roger Stone claims Johnson 'micro-managed' Kennedy's Dallas motorcade, demanding it pass through Dealy Plaza on the afternoon he was shot

He also says that Johnson, instructed Richard Nixon to hire Jack Ruby several years before he shot Lee Harvey Oswald

The revelations are made in his book 'The man who killed Kennedy - the case against LBJ' out later this year

A renowned Republican strategist and lobbyist has claimed that former president Lyndon B. Johnson set up John F. Kennedy's assassination, which occurred on November 22, 1963.

Roger Stone, 61, makes the claim in his upcoming book 'The Man who killed Kennedy - the case against LBJ,' which is set to be published in October.

He also writes that Richard Nixon and Johnson had a documented relationship with Jack Ruby, Lee Harvey Oswald's killer, years before he shot Oswald in the basement of Dallas police headquarters in 1963, reports The Daily Caller.