Israel's offensive in Gaza and the tremendous toll of civilian casualties it has caused has prompted the United States government to more carefully scrutinize requests for weaponry.

Last month, Israel requested "through military-to-military channels a large number of Hellfire missiles," according to the Wall Street Journal. The batch was to be the first released to Israel from the Pentagon, Israeli and US officials said.

But White House officials ordered the Pentagon to halt the transfer and instructed US defense agencies to consult with the White House and the State Department following any further Israeli requests for weaponry, according to the report.

Inflation-adjusted federal tax revenues hit a record $2,469,178,000,000 for the first 10 months of the fiscal year this July, but the federal government still ran a $460,450,000,000 deficit during that time, according to the Monthly Treasury Statement.

Each month, the Treasury publishes the government's "total receipts," including all revenue from individual income taxes, corporate income taxes, social insurance and retirement taxes (including Social Security and Medicare taxes), unemployment insurance taxes, excise taxes, estate and gift taxes, customs duties, and "miscellaneous receipts."

In constant 2014 dollars, the $2,469,178,000,000 that the federal government collected from October through July in fiscal 2014 was $129,126,250,000 more than the $2,340,051,750,0000 it collected in October through July in fiscal 2013.

Ukraine's parliament has passed a law that will allow foreign companies from the US and EU to co-manage Ukraine's national gas transportation system (GTS) which has a value of around $25-35 billion, one of the largest in the world.

The motion, proposed by PM Arseniy Yatsenyuk, was only supported by 228 parliament members, just two more than the required 226 to adopt the bill. The first reading of the bill was approved on July 4.

Ukraine will control 51 percent and foreign partners will be offered 49 percent in the venture, which seeks to "strengthen" Ukraine's position as a transit state, according to the bill's advocates.

Together with Western investors Ukraine is planning to create a new company that will control the country's gas transit system. However, it could be hard to find investors willing to participate in the project, some analysts believe, as Russia is currently developing a transit system bypassing Ukraine's territory, which has proved unreliable as a transit partner.

The U.S. posted a record cross-border investment outflow in June as China and Japan reduced their holdings of Treasuries and private investors abroad sold bonds and notes.

The total net outflow of long-term U.S. securities and short-term funds such as bank transfers was $153.5 billion, after an inflow of $33.1 billion the previous month, the Treasury Department said in a report today. The June figure, and $40.8 billion in net selling of Treasury bonds and notes by private investors in June, were the largest on record, the Treasury said.

"Right at the beginning of June, you had a very strong sell-off of Treasuries and that's what frightened a lot of private investors," Gennadiy Goldberg, U.S. strategist at TD Securities USA LLC in New York, said by phone. "As yields stayed lower in subsequent months, some of the investors probably resumed their buying."

Advisory for northern St. Louis issued at least 1 year ago
For the past year, a French government website has warned French travelers to avoid visiting the area north of downtown St. Louis were the police shooting of a black teen Saturday sparked violent, racial tensions that now are being addressed by the White House.

The French government website "France Diplomatie" carries a security warning for St. Louis that reads in French: "St. Louis: Eviter le quartier nord entre l'aéroport et le centre-ville, mais la navette reliant l'aéroport est sûre."

It translates to: "St. Louis: Avoid the northern area between the airport and the city center, but the airport shuttle is safe."

Noticing the French government travel warning last November, KMOX-TV in St. Louis posted an article that began: "It was 250 years ago that Frenchmen Pierre Laclede and Auguste Chouteau founded the fur trading post that would become St. Louis. Now the French government has some warnings for travelers coming here."

Amal el-Wahabi and Nawal Msaad were the first British women to be tried for terror offences linked to Syria, but the jury heard a tale not of extremists but of manipulation from the jihadi frontline

They made unlikely jihadis; Amal el-Wahabi was described by her own barrister as a "foul-mouthed, phone-addicted, weed-smoking kaffir", Nawal Msaad a glamorous university student who had to be warned by the judge for associating with a male defendant in another court.

Wahabi was held in the sway of her husband who had swapped drug-dealing and criminality in the UK for jihad in Syria, while her old schoolfriend Msaad was accused of being an unquestioning mule who was drawn by the promise of €1,000 (£800) to carry money to Turkey.

Msaad was cleared on Wednesday following a four-week trial at the Old Bailey in London. Wahabi, becomes the first British woman to be convicted of terror offences since the Syrian conflict began.

During the trial, jurors heard how the pair, both aged 27, were not extremists and exhibited no support for the jihadist cause; rather they were ignorant dupes who became caught in the ripples of the Syrian conflict washing over communities in the UK.

First, passenger airliner MH370 vanished from Planet Earth. Then MH370 vanished from the news cycle. First, MH17 was shot down by "Putin's missile" - as Planet Earth was told. Then MH17 vanished from the news cycle.

Where's Baudrillard when we need him? Had he been alive, the dervish of simulacra would have already deconstructed these two Malaysian planes as mirror images; from absolute vanishing to maximum exposure, then vanished again. They might as well have been abducted - and shot - by aliens. Now you seem them, now you don't.

Black boxes, data recorders - everything MH17 is now floating in a black void.
The British are taking forever to analyze the data - and if they have already done so, they are not talking. It's as if they were singing, I see a black box / and I want it painted black ... void.

The Pentagon, with 20-20 vision over Ukraine, knows what happened. Russian intelligence not only knows what happened but offered a tantalizing glimpse of it in an official presentation, dismissed by the "West". The best technical analyses point not to "Putin's missile" - a BUK - but to a combination of R-60 air-to-air missile and the auto-cannon of an Su-25.

A reader led me to this fair assessment by former USAF and Boeing engineer Raymond Blohm: "With proper vectoring, a Su-25 need not be quite as fast as a Boeing 777 in cruise. It just has to get to a missile-firing position. Since the 777 was not maneuvering, it would be simple to pre-calculate when to get in a certain spot in the sky below the 777. From there, it's the missile that has the speed and altitude capability to hit the 777. (The R-60 is a very capable missile.) After the missile takes out an engine, both the 777's max speed and its max altitude are well within the Su-25 fighter's speed & altitude capabilities. Then, the Su-25 can show off its cannon power."

Canisters of tear gas thrown indiscriminately into crowds, armored vehicles rolling through city streets and men in camouflage wielding machine guns - it seems like a scene from Fallujah or Kabul or perhaps from the dark days of the U.S. civil rights movement.

But as the world knows, this is Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014.

Even as the community struggles to come to grips with the tragic shooting death of yet another unarmed young African-American man, the events unfolding in Ferguson have thrown a spotlight on a second alarming trend: the increasing militarization of local police departments.

In response to protesters expressing outrage over the killing of 18-year-old Mike Brown, the St. Louis County and Ferguson police departments have turned the streets of this majority-African-American suburb into a veritable war zone, firing rubber bullets, menacing demonstrators with dogs and in general displaying excessive force for the purposes of security and crowd control.

"This militarization that we are witnessing - police officers dressed as soldiers, using military vehicles and military weapons to engage largely unarmed protesters - is outrageous," said Tom Nolan, chairman of the department of criminal justice at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, who served for 27 years in the Boston Police Department. "It's a disgrace."

But as jarring as the images coming from Ferguson are, experts say the tinderbox situation on the ground was also inevitable, given how the federal government has readily handed over military-grade weapons, armor and equipment to local law enforcement with scant oversight or training.

Back in the early 1990s, the North American Free Trade Agreement was one of the hottest political issues in the country. When he was running for president in 1992, Bill Clinton promised that NAFTA would result in an increase in the number of high quality jobs for Americans that it would reduce illegal immigration.

Ross Perot warned that just the opposite would happen. He warned that if NAFTA was implemented there would be a "giant sucking sound" as thousands of businesses and millions of jobs left this country. Most Americans chose to believe Bill Clinton. Well, it is 20 years later and it turns out that Perot was right and Clinton was dead wrong.

But now history is repeating itself, and most Americans don't even realize that it is happening. As you will read about at the end of this article, Barack Obama has been negotiating a secret trade treaty that is being called "NAFTA on steroids", and if Congress adopts it we could lose millions more good paying jobs.

A Russian aid convoy rumbled toward rebel-held territory in eastern Ukraine on Thursday, stirring fears of a direct confrontation between Russia and Ukraine after months of hands-off sparring through armed proxies between the two bitterly estranged neighbors.

Warning that Ukraine would deploy "all forces available" to halt the convoy if it refused to submit to inspection by Ukrainian border guards, Ukraine's military spokesman, Andriy Lysenko, said that "any attempt to introduce any convoy without the permission of Ukraine would be considered an act of open aggression."


The convoy of around 260 trucks, mostly military vehicles that had been recently spray-painted white and covered with white tarpaulins, came within miles of the Ukrainian border on Thursday but then halted its advance, turning onto a long dusty road near a Russian military base on the outskirts of the Russian town of Kamensk-Shakhtinsky.

Ukraine and its Western allies have cast a mistrustful eye on the Russian mission from the start, regarding it more as a cynical ploy to help beleaguered rebel forces stave off defeat and thus extend a war that they say the Kremlin itself has covertly stoked, and is the primary cause of the humanitarian crisis that the aid convoy is supposed to relieve.