About 550 Army majors, including some serving in Afghanistan, will soon be told they have to leave the service by next spring as part of a budget-driven downsizing of the service.

Gen. John Campbell, the vice chief of the Army, acknowledged Friday that telling troops in a war zone that they're out of a job is a difficult task. But he said some of the soldiers could join the National Guard or the Army Reserve.

The decision to cut Army majors comes on the heels of a move to slash nearly 1,200 captains from the ranks. Army leaders were criticized at the time for giving 48 of them the bad news while they were deployed to Afghanistan.

The Army declined to say how many majors will be notified while they are at the battlefront.

"The ones that are deployed are certainly the hardest," Campbell told reporters. "What we try to do there is, working through the chain of command, minimize the impact to that unit and then maximize the time to provide to that officer to come back and do the proper transition, to take care of himself or herself, and the family."

The Ukraine crisis is just one pretexts being used by NATO to create tensions with Russia as the alliance seeks a reason to exist, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said. As NATO expands, it tries "to drive" all Europeans under its "roof," he said.

NATO "is looking for a new sense of existence," Lavrov told Russia's Itar-Tass news agency in an interview. "Russia turned up. If there was no Ukraine, I assure you, there would be another aspect of Russia's inner or foreign politics used for speculations."

Speaking about NATO, Lavrov recalled Russia's urgent withdrawal of troops from Europe 20 years ago on August 31, saying that while there was no reason to rush, post-Soviet officials hoped to become"partners with the West and Europe."

"And if there is no Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, and the troops had left, then what is NATO for here? Why bother with all the attributes that belong to the era of the Cold War?" he said.

"These hopes," however, never came true and NATO keeps expanding, Lavrov said.

US officials have confirmed Swedish media reports of a mid-July incident in which an American spy plane invaded Sweden's airspace as it was evading a Russian fighter jet. The maverick plane was spying on Russia when it was intercepted.

The incident, which happened on July 18, went public last Wednesday after a classified document from Sweden's Defense Ministry was leaked to the press.

The plane, a Boeing RC-135 Rivet Joint, entered Sweden's airspace after permission to do so was denied by traffic control, Svenska Dagbladet (SvD) newspaper said. It passed from the east over the island of Gotland and flew more than 200km over 90 minutes before leaving.

The aerial incursion was caused by a Russian fighter jet, which scrambled from a base in the exclave Kaliningrad Region and approached the American reconnaissance plane.

Neither party involved in the incident confirmed or denied it, but a source in the US military told CNN on weekend that it indeed happen.

"Never in the civilised world have so many been locked up for so little." - "Rough Justice in America," The Economist

Why are we seeing such an uptick in Americans being arrested for such absurd "violations" as letting their kids play at a park unsupervised, collecting rainwater and snow runoff on their own property, growing vegetables in their yard, and holding Bible studies in their living room?

Mind you, we're not talking tickets or fines or even warnings being issued to these so-called "lawbreakers." We're talking felony charges, handcuffs, police cars, mug shots, pat downs, jail cells and criminal records.

Consider what happened to Nicole Gainey, the Florida mom who was arrested and charged with child neglect for allowing her 7-year-old son to visit a neighborhood playground located a half mile from their house.

For the so-called "crime" of allowing her son to play at the park unsupervised, Gainey was interrogated, arrested and handcuffed in front of her son, and transported to the local jail where she was physically searched, fingerprinted, photographed and held for seven hours and then forced to pay almost $4000 in bond in order to return to her family.

Gainey's family and friends were subsequently questioned by the Dept. of Child Services. Gainey now faces a third-degree criminal felony charge that carries with it a fine of up to $5,000 and 5 years in jail.

For Denise Stewart, just being in the wrong place at the wrong time, whether or not she had done anything wrong, was sufficient to get her arrested.

The 48-year-old New York grandmother was dragged half-naked out of her apartment and handcuffed after police mistakenly raided her home when responding to a domestic disturbance call. Although it turns out the 911 call came from a different apartment on a different floor, Stewart is still facing charges of assaulting a police officer and resisting arrest.

And then there are those equally unfortunate individuals who unknowingly break laws they never even knew existed. John Yates is such a person. A commercial fisherman, Yates was sentenced to 30 days in prison and three years of supervised release for throwing back into the water some small fish which did not meet the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission's size restrictions. Incredibly, Yates was charged with violating a document shredding provision of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which was intended to prevent another Enron scandal.

2000 dead and counting...As the world watches Israel continues...

Russia's air force has begun five days of large-scale military exercises in the south of the country. As the world's attention is focused on the conflict in neighboring Ukraine, Russian military has stressed that the drills were scheduled last year.

"These air force and air defense exercises are taking place in accordance with military preparedness plans for 2014 approved last year," the Russian Ministry of Defense said in a statement. "For the first time ever they will involve three military districts."

More than 100 aircraft - including SU-27, SU-24, SU-34 and MiG-31 planes, and Russia's array of military helicopters - are rebasing themselves from airfields in the north and west of the country, to create a massed force at the Ashuluk test site near Astrakhan.

From there they will carry out "multiple sorties that will take tactical and practical actions against ground and air targets, using electronic and live weapons in unfamiliar conditions." The war games will "also work to improve cooperation between anti-aircraft units and airborne equipment."

Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman on Monday suggested that Israel and the Palestinian Authority consider transferring control of the Gaza Strip to the United Nations, Haaretz reports.

"Everyone is asking, what happens after the operation ends? Suppose Israel defeats Hamas. There are a few options. International control of Gaza, by the U.N., should certainly be considered," he said to the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.

Lieberman highlighted previous instances in which either the region was overseen by another government, such as the early-to-mid 20th century British Mandate over Palestine, or the U.N. mandates in Kosovo or Timor.

"We saw it works quite well there," he said. "It requires an agreement between us and the Palestinian Authority. It doesn't require consent from the U.N., just from the parties involved - Israel and the P.A."

As every schoolchild knows, there are three check-and-balance branches of the U.S. government: the executive, Congress, and the judiciary. That's bedrock Americanism and the most basic high school civics material. Only one problem: it's just not so.

During the Cold War years and far more strikingly in the twenty-first century, the U.S. government has evolved. It sprouted a fourth branch: the national security state, whose main characteristic may be an unquenchable urge to expand its power and reach. Admittedly, it still lacks certain formal prerogatives of governmental power. Nonetheless, at a time when Congress and the presidency are in a check-and-balance ballet of inactivity that would have been unimaginable to Americans of earlier eras, the Fourth Branch is an ever more unchecked and unbalanced power center in Washington. Curtained off from accountability by a penumbra of secrecy, its leaders increasingly are making nitty-gritty policy decisions and largely doing what they want, a situation illuminated by a recent controversy over the possible release of a Senate report on CIA rendition and torture practices.

All of this is or should be obvious, but remains surprisingly unacknowledged in our American world. The rise of the Fourth Branch began at a moment of mobilization for a global conflict, World War II. It gained heft and staying power in the Cold War of the second half of the twentieth century, when that other superpower, the Soviet Union, provided the excuse for expansion of every sort.

The U.S. government has long lavished overwhelming aid on Israel, providing cash, weapons and surveillance technology that play a crucial role in Israel's attacks on its neighbors. But top secret documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden shed substantial new light on how the U.S. and its partners directly enable Israel's military assaults - such as the one on Gaza.

Over the last decade, the NSA has significantly increased the surveillance assistance it provides to its Israeli counterpart, the Israeli SIGINT National Unit (ISNU; also known as Unit 8200), including data used to monitor and target Palestinians. In many cases, the NSA and ISNU work cooperatively with the British and Canadian spy agencies, the GCHQ and CSEC.

The relationship has, on at least one occasion, entailed the covert payment of a large amount of cash to Israeli operatives. Beyond their own surveillance programs, the American and British surveillance agencies rely on U.S.-supported Arab regimes, including the Jordanian monarchy and even the Palestinian Authority Security Forces, to provide vital spying services regarding Palestinian targets.

The new documents underscore the indispensable, direct involvement of the U.S. government and its key allies in Israeli aggression against its neighbors. That covert support is squarely at odds with the posture of helpless detachment typically adopted by Obama officials and their supporters.

US steps to increase military cooperation with Ukraine, providing its National Guard arms and training amid Kiev's military operation, can be considered complicity in war crimes, Russian MP Irina Yarovaya believes.

"In a situation, when the National Guard of Ukraine is leading punitive operations in the Donbass, the US promises to allocate $19 million for training and equipping this military structure - which also includes militants of the ultra-nationalist organization Right Sector - can be considered a direct financial and organizational complicity of the US in the genocide of civilians in south-east of Ukraine, as well as war crimes," the head of Russia's Lower House committee for security and countering corruption, Irina Yarovaya, told the press.

The Obama administration officially informed Congress on Friday of its plans to train and equip the Ukrainian National Guard.