Witness reports mid-air explosion as six people killed, including Najib Razak's principal private secretary and senior member of his party

The Malaysian prime minister's chief of staff and and his country's former ambassador to the US were among six people killed when a helicopter crashed south of Kuala Lumpur on Saturday.

The helicopter went down in a rubber plantation in the town of Semenyih, killing everyone on board, including Najib Razak's principal private secretary, Azlin Alias.

Also among the dead was Jamaluddin Jarjis, an MP and senior member of Najib's political party, UMNO, also a former Malaysian ambassador to the US.

"I am personally grief-struck. Jamaluddin Jarjis was my friend of many years and no truer friend could I have," Najib said in a statement.

"Azlin Alias was my chief of staff and a truly outstanding government servant. The contributions of these two men to the government, to UMNO and to Malaysia were very significant."

Najib added that he had ordered an investigation into the cause of the crash, saying that "no stone will be left unturned".

The transport minister, Liow Tiong Lai, said in a separate statement that all six bodies had been recovered and sent to a hospital in the capital, Kuala Lumpur.

"This is indeed a great loss and my thoughts and prayers are with their families and the families of the other victims during this tragic time," the minister said.

A witness told Malaysia's official Bernama news agency that the helicopter "exploded in mid-air" during heavy rain.

"Then, the debris, tail and blades were thrown all over the place," the witness, Roslan Harun, was quoted as saying.

Saudi Arabia has rejected Russia's amendments to a Security Council draft resolution which would see an all-inclusive arms embargo on all parties in the Yemeni conflict, as it continues to spiral out of control with civilian death toll climbing up.

"There is little point in putting an embargo on the whole country. It doesn't make sense to punish everybody else for the behavior of one party that has been the aggressor in this situation," Saudi Arabia's representative to the UN Abdallah Al-Mouallimi said after a closed emergency UN Security Council meeting on Saturday.

I think I've never understood the American - and international - fascination with money, with gathering wealth as the no. 1 priority in one's life. What looks even stranger to me is the idolization of people who have a lot of money. Like these people are per definition smarter or better than others. It seems obvious that most of them are probably just more ruthless, that they have less scruples, and that their conscience is less likely to get in the way of their money and power goals.

America may idolize no-one more than Warren Buffett, the man who has propelled his fund, Berkshire Hathaway, into riches once deemed unimaginable. For most people, Buffett symbolizes what is great about American society and its economic system. For me, he's the symbol of everything that's going wrong.

According to a just released UN report that monitors al Qaeda and ISIS terrorist groups, from the time ISIS splashed onto the headlines last June in its infamous trek southward from Syria into Iraq to take over the second largest city Mosul without encountering any opposition, a whopping 20,000 foreign recruits from over 100 countries - that's most nations on earth - have since converged on Iraq and Syria alone to join up as terrorists ostensibly fighting to rid the Middle East of the so called Western infidels. Another 5000 new recruits from foreign countries are additionally fighting in other war zones like Libya and now Yemen.

During the Reagan-Bush administration the US through the CIA created and began backing the terrorist organization that came to be known as al Qaeda in early 1980's Afghanistan as the US proxy mercenary ally successfully fighting our cold war enemy the Soviet Union. Then the US-NATO under Clinton successfully deployed al Qaeda as the US proxy mercenaries in the Balkans during the 1990's. Then at the time of 9/11 when the Bush neocons used 19 box-cutting Moslem stooges (15 from Saudi Arabia) as their war on terror proxy mercenary ally to successfully carry out their false flag attack on the United States, an estimated al Qaeda core membership consisted of less than 1,000. The neocons in charge have since caused two costly US war defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan, producing two devastated failed states that are still mired in US caused sectarian civil war violence. Now in 2015 if this UN report's numbers are to be believed, the neocons finally turned what they had created into what they wanted all along - their forever war on terror.

An International Business Times article from last September estimated that only 2300 ISIS fighters were from foreign countries. In just a half year that number according to the UN has swelled apparently up to 25000, multiplying more than ten times. The latest UN figures cite a 71% increase in foreign recruits since mid-last year. In any event, if the UN report is at all accurate, an exponential increase in the number of foreigners from around the world are becoming Islamic State terrorists. What does that say about the West's so called "war on terror?" Much like the so called war on drugs, it's a contrived "war" that that's never won, but has incarcerated millions most often poor minorities into the sprawling US prison industrial complex while the international crime syndicate called the US federal government continues profiting billions from another "unwinnable" war. War on terror is used much the same way, the only profiteers are the military industrial complex of the US arms industry, the sprawling private contractor industry, and the ever-growing security complex industry. The primary victims are mostly innocent Middle Eastern Moslems living in nations caught in an imperialistic blood for oil endgame.

Though most of the Islamic State forces are from the Middle East and North Africa, increasingly "radicalized" members from Western nations are entering Syria and Iraq through US ally-NATO member Turkey. Islamic extremists have been historically trained inside Turkey along with other allies like Jordan. The obvious concern is that after these recruited extremists hone their terrorist skills fighting in places like Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen, they will soon be returning home to commit terrorist acts on Western soil. Recall in January the Hebdo terrorists apparently had recently returned home from training in Yemen prior to initiating their killing spree in France. The likelihood of a false flag occurring inside the United States and/or Europe allegedly perpetrated by returning Islamic State terrorists remains high. At least that is what this latest UN report and the Washington feds would want us to believe. It's all part of the fabricated war on terror. This scenario in turn would be the convenient crisis used to unleash martial law.

Iraq war veteran confronted former White House advisor Karl Rove during a speaking engagement on Tuesday and demanded he apologize for the war, the Hartford Courant reported.

"I have taken responsibility for my actions and dealt with my demons while advocating for a peaceful resolution of a war that was an act of aggression with no clear goal," said the former soldier, who identified himself as Ryan Henowitz. "Can you take responsibility and apologize for your decision in sending a generation to lose their humanity and deal with the horrors of war, which you have never had the courage to face? Will you apologize to the millions of fathers and mothers who lost their children on both sides of this useless war?"

The encounter happened while Rove was speaking at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. He had been brought in by the school's College Republicans and another group, Young America's Foundation. The Eastern Connecticut Young Democrats posted footage of the exchange online.

Henowitz said he served as a Medic in the 2nd Battalion of the Army's 7th Infantry Regiment.

"I saw my friends torn apart and Iraqi children screaming for their parents as indiscriminate shrapnel scarred them and us in ways that we will never know," he told Rove. "We were exposed to more questions about life and death then any 20 year old should have. These scars stay with me and other veterans who are now one of the highest demographics to commit suicide at a rate of 22 suicides per day, and over thousands disabled."

The number of countries applying to be founding members of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) rose to 46 by the Tuesday deadline.

The AIIB is a multilateral development bank proposed by China to provide financing to infrastructure projects in the Asia region.

The soaring participation reflects China's growing international clout and many countries' desire for a more inclusive, balanced and mutually beneficial international economic order, Xinhua news agency reported.

The growing infrastructure demand in cash-strapped Asian countries will necessitate the need for more than $700 billion each year by 2020.

More countries are urging Washington to approve IMF quota reforms to allow a better balance of power, but previous attempts to give greater weight to rising states have stalled out of national interests.

Monsanto company arguably holds an inordinate amount of the global food supply, not only with its genetically engineered seed but its complimentary product, Roundup herbicide, which contains the active ingredient glyphosate.

Which is why they spat lividly when a subset of WHO publicly announced that glyphosate is a probably cause of cancer. They demanded a retraction. The report published in The Lancet Oncology discussed chromosomal and DNA damage, and glyphosate found in human blood and intestines. Catherine Frompovich expounds on it in What's Your "Daily Value" of Glyphosate?

Since they hold more capital than Lucifer, it stands to reason they would have a propaganda wing that disseminates information and decimates those who stand in the way. Snippets of proof have surfaced before. Although shrouded in secrecy, this time someone from the company got a little too gleeful at the thought of "debunking" naysayers whether they be scientists, activists, bloggers or you.

In the first ever public statement on the subject by a senior Israeli politician, the former President denies that a loan given to Israel in 1961 by West Germany was spent on the development of nuclear weapons.

Former Israeli President Shimon Peres has broken years of silence surrounding Israel's possession of nuclear weapons, telling Der Spiegel that a loan issued to Israel by the Federal Republic of Germany [FRG] in 1961 was spent on the development of the Negev desert, and not on the development of an atomic weapon, as has been speculated.

It's hard to think of books saying what a great place Russia is. Occasionally an author makes a real effort to understand and empathize with the Russian people (Hedrick Smith's 1976 tome The Russians stood out as a Cold War example), but in general anybody who gets information about the country from what's in the local branch of Chapters, Barnes and Noble, or Waterstones will most likely decide that Russia is an absolute dump which just keeps getting worse.

Two books which I have just finished reading are no exception: Oliver Bullough's The Last Man in Russia: The Struggle to Save a Dying Nation, published in 2013, and Lev Golinkin's A Backpack, A Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka, which came out at the end of last year.

Bullough intertwines a biography of Soviet dissident priest Dmitry Dudko with descriptions of Stalin's Siberian labour camps and the later, more subtle, repressive techniques of the KGB, along with an analysis of Russians' predilection for alcohol. He paints a picture of a nation suffering from a severe psychological illness, which has manifested itself in mass drunkenness, a low fertility rate, and early deaths.

Russia aims to become the first country in the BRICS group of leading emerging economies to ratify an agreement on the foreign currency reserve pool, according to Russian Foreign Ministry Ambassador-at-Large Vadim Lukov.

"An agreement will be ratified soon on establishing a pool of foreign currency reserves. Russia will most likely be the first country to do this," Lukov said on Friday.

South Africa will contribute $5 billion, Russia, India and Brazil will allocate $18 billion each while China will provide the remaining funds, according to the envoy.

The goal of the pool is so that BRICS member states could urgently replenish their liquidity from it in different proportions to resolve problems with their balance of payments.