Discontent among the people with the French-imposed government in the capital of Bangui in the Central African Republic (CAR) has erupted in demonstrations by both the Muslim and Christian communities.

These developments are taking place amid the increasing deployment of foreign military forces mandated for peacekeeping operations by United Nations Security Council and other regional bodies.

The number of troops now occupying the CAR include a bolstered French force of 2,000 along with 6,000 personnel from regional African states (MISCA), European Union Forces (EUFOR) of 1,000 and the impending intervention of some 12,000 other soldiers under the rubric of the Security Council. Nonetheless, the minority Muslim community is still facing organized violence while more people are being forced out of Bangui and other cities across the country.

Interim President Catherine Samba-Panza was appointed after the forced removal at the aegis of Paris of the previous transitional leader Michel Djotodia in January. A Muslim, Djotodia came to power in March 2013 when Seleka Coalition rebels entered Bangui without any real opposition from French troops that were already maintaining a presence in the CAR.

A US Defense Department official has anonymously confirmed to AP that five ISAF servicemen killed by friendly fire in southern Afghanistan were actually American soldiers. This could become the worst friendly-fire incident in 13 years of the Afghan War.

On Tuesday, international coalition officials confirmed that five servicemen died on Monday in what appeared to be a friendly-fire incident, without giving the details or disclosing the nationalities of the deceased.

Reportedly, the servicemen came into contact with adversaries in Arghandab district of Zabul province and came under an airstrike alongside the enemy forces.

The soldiers who died in the incident allegedly called in the airstrike that killed them.

"ISAF troops were returning to their bases after an operation when they were ambushed by the insurgents. The airstrike mistakenly hit their own forces and killed the soldiers," shared local Police Chief Ghulam Sakhi Roghlewanai.

Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, a spokesman for the Taliban movement, claimed that a group of insurgents engaged with an ISAF unit when assault helicopters got into combat and mistakenly attacked the foreign unit.

Heavily-armed, Al-Qaeda-affiliated militants have seized the Iraqi city of Mosul, driving back government forces. Officials say the Iraqi Army's soldiers are demoralized and are no match for the attacking militant forces.

"The city of Mosul is outside the control of the state and at the mercy of the militants," an Interior Ministry official told AFP on Monday. It is now the second city to fall under control of Islamist fighters since the beginning of this year. In January militants seized the city of Fallujah, displacing over 70,000 people

On Monday night fighters from Al-Qaeda affiliated group Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS) stormed provincial government headquarters armed with rocket-propelled grenades and heavy machine guns.

A recently unclassified report from the Pentagon from 1998 has revealed an investigation into using laser beams for a few intriguing potential methods of non-lethal torture. Some of the applications the report investigated include putting voices in people's heads, using lasers to trigger uncontrolled neuron firing, and slowly heating the human body to a point of feverish confusion - all from hundreds of meters away.

A US citizen requested access to the document, entitled "Bioeffects of Selected Non-Lethal Weapons," under the Freedom of Information Act a little over a year ago. There is no evidence that any of the technologies mentioned in the 10-year-old report have been developed since the time it was written.

The report explained several types of non-lethal laser applications, including microwave hearing, disrupted neural control, and microwave heating. For the first type, short pulses of RF energy (2450 MHz) can generate a pressure wave in solids and liquids. When exposed to pulsed RF energy, humans experience the immediate sensation of "microwave hearing" - sounds that may include buzzing, ticking, hissing, or knocking that originate within the head.

"The main goal of this attack was to damage the government, including by hijacking planes and destroying state installations," said Shahidullah Shahid, a Taliban spokesman, as Reuters reports a well trained and heavily armed group of Taliban fighters attacked Pakistan's largest airport in an attempt to hijack a plane. 27 people were killed (including 10 militants ) as the Taliban spokesman added ominously, "this was just an example of what we are capable of and there is more to come. The government should be ready for even worse attacks." This attack comes a day after John Kerry's dismissal of threats by some released Taliban prisoners that they will return to the battlefield and kill Americans as "a lot of baloney."

As Reuters reports, a squad of highly trained Taliban fighters attacked Pakistan's biggest airport in what they clearly expected to be a protracted siege.

Seven fighters were shot dead by Pakistani forces after five hours of intense gunfire at Karachi's Jinnah International Airport. Three died after detonating their suicide-bomb belts.

At least 27 people, including 10 militants, were killed.
...
Wearing Airport Security Force uniforms and armed with automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, the group shot its way into the airport after arriving at the cargo terminal in two mini-vans.

A senior police officer said that the militants then split into two groups, with one attacking a gate called Fokker to create a diversion and the other storming the cargo terminal.

Another senior police officer, Raja Umar Khattab, told Reuters that the attackers then broke into groups of two and pressed ahead with the assault.

"They operated in pairs. That's why their bodies were found lying in pairs," he said. "It seems there was some ill-planning on their part. They did fire two rockets but they didn't hit their targets."

He added: "They wasted 10 men, but couldn't inflict serious damage on the airport. They didn't wear suicide vests, but instead used suicide belts. This is the reason why their faces and upper bodies were not badly mutilated."

Having previously admitted its an idiot and a liar over Greece forecasts, constantly missed world expectations with a much more rosy picture of hockey-stick-like growth than actually occurs, and now Ukraine's insanely optimistic assessments; we thought it only fair to point out that, yet again, Christine Lagarde has been forced to say "we got it wrong." This time the IMF underestimated UK growth - a year after blasting the nation's planners for "playing with fire" by cutting its budget spending. As Bloomberg reports, pressed on whether she had apologized to Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, Lagarde stopped short of saying so and said "Do I have to go on my knees?"

Neenah, Wisconsin. - Inside the municipal garage of this small lakefront city, parked next to the hefty orange snowplow, sits an even larger truck, this one painted in desert khaki. Weighing 30 tons and built to withstand land mines, the armored combat vehicle is one of hundreds showing up across the country, in police departments big and small.

The 9-foot-tall armored truck was intended for an overseas battlefield. But as President Obama ushers in the end of what he called America's "long season of war," the former tools of combat - M-16 rifles, grenade launchers, silencers and more - are ending up in local police departments, often with little public notice.

During the Obama administration, according to Pentagon data, police departments have received tens of thousands of machine guns; nearly 200,000 ammunition magazines; thousands of pieces of camouflage and night-vision equipment; and hundreds of silencers, armored cars and aircraft.

The equipment has been added to the armories of police departments that already look and act like military units. Police SWAT teams are now deployed tens of thousands of times each year, increasingly for routine jobs. Masked, heavily armed police officers in Louisiana raided a nightclub in 2006 as part of a liquor inspection. In Florida in 2010, officers in SWAT gear and with guns drawn carried out raids on barbershops that mostly led only to charges of "barbering without a license."

Benson - Area residents expressed concern Thursday about a proposal to extend a major natural gas pipeline through the Triangle.

Duke Energy and Piedmont Natural Gas have teamed up on the pipeline and are seeking bids from companies to build and operate it for the two Charlotte-based utilities.

Duke and Piedmont said the growing demand for gas, both to supply customers and to power electric plants, necessitates a second pipeline to North Carolina. The first connects the state to the Gulf Coast, and they requested that the 20 bidders on the project provide them with geographic diversity in the source of the natural gas.

Houston-based Spectra Energy, which is competing to build the pipeline, has proposed a route from the shale gas hotbed in southwestern Pennsylvania through Maryland, West Virginia and Virginia. In North Carolina, Spectra's pipeline would cross Warren, Franklin, Wake, Johnston, Harnett and Cumberland counties before terminating in Robeson County.

Many local officials don't know anything about the project, however.

"I have not been contacted, and this morning I talked with six other mayors in Wake County. They have not been contacted," Garner Mayor Ronnie Williams said.

But some Garner residents have. Spectra sent them letters providing background on the $4 billion project - it would carry enough gas to meet the annual needs of 4 million homes - and asking for permission to survey their land. Some live near major electric transmission lines.

Transmission lines also run near Marjorie Shahravar home outside Benson, and she said receiving letters from Spectra upset her.

"I'm not real comfortable with the process," Shahravar said, adding that she's more concerned about safety than about the impact of a pipeline across the wooded 10-acre property she and her husband have owned since 1991.

An Open Letter to the Graduates of West Point

On May 2014 President Obama delivered the commencement address to the graduates of United States Military Academy at West Point. Beyond the easy banter and eulogy to past and present war heroes, Obama outlined a vision of past military successes and present policies, based on a profoundly misleading diagnosis of the current global position of the United States.

His presentation is marked by systematic lies about past wars and current military interventions. The speech's glaring failure to acknowledge the millions of civilians killed by US military interventions stands out. He glosses over the growth of NSA, the global police state apparatus. He presents a grossly inflated account of the US role in the world economy. Worst of all he outlines an extremely dangerous policy of confrontation with rising military and economic powers, in particular Russia and China.

Distorting the Past: Defeats and Retreats Converted into Victories

One of the most disturbing aspects of President Obama's speech is his delusional account of US military engagements over the past decade. Obama's claim that, "by most measures America has rarely been stronger relative to the rest of the world", defies belief. After 13 years of war and occupation in Afghanistan, the US has failed to conquer the Taliban and is leaving behind a fragile puppet regime on the verge of collapse. The US was forced to withdraw from Iraq after causing the deaths of hundreds of thousand of civilians, the displacement and wounding of millions and the ignition of a sectarian war, which has propelled a pro-Iranian regime to power in Baghdad. In Libya, the Obama pushed NATO to destroy the entire country in order to overthrow the secular Gadhafi government, thus undermining any possibility of reconciliation among opponents. He has brought bands of Islamist terrorists to power who are profoundly hostile to the United States.

The international pressures against Israel's crimes in Palestine are escalating as the US global dominance is gradually fading away, a political analyst tells Press TV.

In a Saturday interview with Press TV, Richard Herman, with Orange County Friends of Palestine, pointed to marginalization of anti-Israel movements by the US in the past years and noted, "Those days are changing and today there are more and more actions against Israel, against the crimes that Israel commits and those are building and over time...they will mount up to the point where the UN will finally vote against Israel...."

"As the United States declines in its world domination, the UN and all the countries of the world will act against Israel," he pointed out.

The analyst noted that at present the UN is unable to take any action against Israel's crimes as the organization is extensively under the US sway.