The chair of House Oversight Committee has subpoenaed Secretary of State John Kerry for the second time this month over the 2012 Benghazi consulate attack, prompting an angry rebuke from the US State Department and Democrat representatives.

Darrell Issa issued the second subpoena on Thursday for Kerry to appear on May 29 before his committee and testify on the Benghazi attack, in which four members of the US diplomatic mission, including US Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens, were killed. It came days after he revoked the first subpoena for May 21, which the State Department said was in conflict with the secretary's schedule.

Economic interests, such as untapped shale gas resources, already sliced and diced by Western energy giants, are behind the Kiev government's 'anti-terrorist' operation against the pro-federalist regions, foreign policy expert Nebojsa Malic tells RT.

The eastern Donetsk and Lugansk regions cut ties with Kiev and declared independence from Kiev after a popular vote last Sunday. Yet federalist activists have no doubt that a new wave of government crackdown is on its way.

And they do have every reason to think so, because, as RT's Gayane Chichakyan reports, reinstating control over the restive regions isn't the only agenda driving Kiev's ongoing offensive, as the core of the conflict is probably only business as usual.

A District Court judge in Washington, DC has ordered the Federal Bureau of Information to release documents likely to reveal the identity of two confidential informants.

Since 2012, photojournalist Laura Sennett has been attempting to get her hands on any and all documents the FBI has collected on her ahead of an armed raid they conducted at her Arlington, Virginia home four years earlier.

On April 12, 2008, Sennett attended a late night demonstration at a Washington, DC hotel orchestrated by International Monetary Fund protesters who hoped to wake up guests - namely those who had booked rooms to attend a major IMF meeting.

According to court documents, Sennett heard about the event from another activist and decided to show up to take photographs from outside the hotel. Courthouse News Service, who posted a copy of this week's District Court ruling, reported that the photographer has previously had her work featured on CNN and the History Channel.

The Russian Foreign Ministry said Friday that the authors of a United Nations report on Ukraine attempting to justify the punitive operation in the country were carrying out a political order to "whitewash" the self-proclaimed authorities in Kiev.

"We are obliged to state that the report has little to do with the overall real situation in human rights field in Ukraine. The total absence of objectivity, the flagrant irregularities and the 'double standards' leave no doubt that the authors have carried out a political order on 'whitewashing' the self-declared authorities in Kiev," Russian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Alexander Lukashevich said Friday.

"It is deeply regrettable that the report actually justifies the criminal punitive operation in Southeastern Ukraine, and is silent on the victims among civilians, attempting to place the responsibility for human rights violation on the 'pro-Russian forces,'" Lukashevich added.

Video taken in Soma, where mining accident killed 301, shows Erdogan telling a man he will be slapped for booing him.

A video has emerged of Turkey's prime minister threatened a young man with a slap if he booed him on a visit to a town recovering from a mining disaster.

The video, released by Turkey's Dogan News Agency, was apparently taken during Recep Tayyip Erdogan's visit on Wednesday to the eastern town of Soma - a day after nearly 300 people died as they worked underground.

In the video, Erdogan walks with his bodyguards as Soma residents around him boo. Then he approaches a young man and says: "If you boo this country's prime minister, you get slapped."

The city of Homs has finally been retaken by the Syrian Arab Army. The scenes of devastation left behind by nearly 3 years of fighting are surreal, but residents - who have begun returning in small numbers - vow to rebuild the city. Fighting concluded when the Syrian government granted a ceasefire to encircled militants occupying the city's center.

An estimated 2,000 militants evacuated the city to rural positions where government forces will be able to engage them. Lacking the cover Homs' urban terrain provided them, and without the well entrenched positions and logistical lines they had established throughout fighting that began in 2011, militants stand little chance of continuing their campaign of violence, let alone returning to Homs.

Indeed, Homs - considered by the West who has sponsored the militants, as the "capital of the revolution" - is a symbol of what is to come across the rest of Syria. Similar ceasefires will alleviate urban centers that had been invaded and occupied by militants - many of whom are not even Syrian - and push the fighting into Syria's rural regions where those that insist on continuing hostilities will be systematically eliminated by Syrian security forces.

Homs is the third largest city in Syria - its liberation from foreign militants is a significant turn in the still ongoing conflict. Aleppo, the largest city in Syria, still suffers under heavily contested occupation by foreign militants emanating from and receiving support by NATO-member Turkey.

To read the headlines, it seems that the USA has emerged out of the blue to the point of becoming the world's oil and gas production giant. All thanks to the Shale Revolution. Recently President Obama made various noises that the US could solve the Ukraine gas dependency on Russian gas because of the spectacular growth of extracting natural gas, and more recently, oil, from shale rock formations across the US. There's only one thing wrong with this picture - "It ain't gonna happen..."

The surface numbers are indeed impressive to a layman or politician. According to US Government Energy Information Administration data, between 2005 and 2010 the contribution from shale gas to total US-marketed gas production rose from less than 2% to more than 20%. And 2011 set an all-time record for US production as the result of shale gas growth.

However the shale gas comes from a small number of areas with significant and viable shale rock formations that have trapped gas and oil in the interstices of the sedimentary shale rocks. The main shale gas areas are the Barnett shale in Texas' Fort Worth basin; the Fayetteville and Woodford shales of the Arkoma basin in Arkansas and Oklahoma; the Haynesville shale on the Texas Louisiana boarder; the Marcellus shale in the Appalachian basin, and the most recently exploited, the Eagle Ford shale in southwest Texas.

While the United States has warned against buying Chinese routers due to surveillance concerns, a new book about the Edward Snowden revelations states America has beenintercepting and tinkering with routers intended for foreign customers.

According to Glenn Greenwald - one of the journalists entrusted with Snowden's leaked documents - the National Security Agency has been implanting devices into routers headed overseas since at least 2010.

In an extract from Greenwald's new book, titled No Place to Hide, the journalist states the NSA "routinely receives - or intercepts - routers, servers, and other computer network devices being exported from the US before they are delivered to the international customers."

Once the agency gets its hands on these products, it embeds devices that are linked to the NSA's own system, giving officials access to foreign networks and information from all the users connected to that network.

"In one recent case, after several months a beacon implanted through supply-chain interdiction called back to the NSA covert infrastructure," a 2010 NSA report states, according to Greenwald. "This call back provided us access to further exploit the device and survey the network."

The opposition Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has called its predicted landslide win in India's election a "people's victory".

Party president Rajnath Singh said it marked "a new era" for India.

Votes counted so far suggest the BJP is on course for the most resounding victory by any party for 30 years, trouncing the outgoing Congress Party.

After a decade of rule by Congress, the BJP is expected to steer India sharply to the right.

The new prime minister will be Narendra Modi, chief minister of the western state of Gujarat, who is seen as a no-nonsense, can-do leader who stands for development and muscular nationalism, says the BBC's Soutik Biswas.

He campaigned on promises he would revive the country's slowing economic growth. Mr Modi told cheering supporters that the result was a "new chapter" in the history of independent India.

The Yatsenyuk regime's anti-terrorism operations in the southern and eastern oblasts (regions) of Ukraine are really a use of martial force against Ukrainian civilians opposed to the coup-installed regime in Kiev. Predominately peaceful Ukrainian citizens opposing the coup leaders and not "armed separatists" have been the main target of the regime's militias.

The discourse about "pro-Russian" separatists is a misleading attempt to hide the real nature of the protests against the regime, which is opposition to a coup. The main issue is one of anti-coup protesters versus a junta and not separatists and federalists versus Kiev. To refer to the junta in Kiev as the government of Ukraine is to reject or ignore its illegality.

Welcome to Ukraine Nulandistan

Wherever the US government says it is promoting democracy and freedom, as US Assistant-Secretary of State Victoria Nuland professes about Ukraine, there has been destruction, impoverishment, sectarianism, fighting, and death. Welcome to post-coup Ukraine or Nulandistan. It follows the precedents and traditions of destabilization and violence honoured by US officials like Senator John McCain in the Syrian Arab Republic (McCainistan) and by Hillary Clinton in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya (Clintonistan).

Arseniy Petrovych Yatsenyuk, who has illegally taken the post of Ukrainian prime minister with the support of the US and European Union, was never favoured by many of the authentic protesters in Euro-Maidan or even the grassroots members of his allies. When, without any election or public discussion, he was arbitrarily given the office of prime minister, many in the Euro-Maidan protest movement booed him and some even cried "bullet to his head." His party boss, the infamously corrupt Yulia Volodymyrivna Tymoshenko, was booed too after she arrived. In reality, Yatsenyuk and the other Ukrainian politicians identifying themselves with Euro-Maidan, like the ultra-nationalist Svoboda's Oleh Tyahnybok, appropriated the hopes and dreams of the Ukrainians that were protesting against not only the Ukrainian government of Viktor Fedorovych Yanukovych, but the entire corrupt Ukrainian political establishment. Hiding behind the protesters, Yatsenyuk and Tymoshenko's Batkivshchyna Party used the militias of their ultra-nationalist political allies to launch a violent coup in Kiev.

There is no functioning democracy in Ukraine and, with the full support of the European Union and the US government, free speech inside Ukraine is under attack by the new regime and its thugs. Yatsenyuk's coup-installed regime has cracked down on media freedoms, sent the Ukrainian military and security forces to attack anti-coup protesters under the pretext of NATO-backed anti-terrorism operations, and started purges and witch hunts all over Ukraine. This started with the head of the National Television Company of Ukraine, Aleksandr Panteleymonov, being threatened and beaten into resigning by Svoboda deputies Igor Miroshnynchenko and Andrey Ilyenko.