NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has urged the British people to demand Prime Minister David Cameron's resignation from government after the Tory chief admitted he has benefited from shares in an offshore trust set up by his father.

The former NSA contractor, who is exiled in Moscow, said "the next 24 hours could change Britain." He called on the British public to emulate their Icelandic counterparts, who forced Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson to resign from office after the Panama Papers revealed his ownership of a secretive offshore company.

Cameron came clean about his tax affairs on Thursday evening, admitting that between 1997 and 2010 he and his wife, Samantha Cameron, owned shares in his father's Blairmore Investment Trust - a multimillion-pound offshore trust fund. Cameron said he sold the shares in 2010, four months before becoming PM. He is under yet more pressure after an unearthed 2013 letter shows he urged the EU to shield offshore trusts from a crackdown.

In a series of tweets, Snowden said it is up to the British public to force Cameron from power. The whistleblower tweeted support for a protest outside Downing Street planned for Saturday.

The US military pushed drugs on troops 'like candy,' contributing to astronomical rates of post-service substance abuse, PTSD, and homelessness while also factoring into many of the war's worst atrocities.

New research has led historians to consider America's war in Vietnam as the first "pharmacological war," with the level of psychoactive substances distributed to military personnel reaching unprecedented, nearly ubiquitous levels. Today, many of the country's Vietnam-era veterans struggle with addiction, more so than from any preceding war, leading to calls for the government to take steps to right a wrong.

Despite the lack of research at the time on the implications of long-term amphetamine use, "pep pills" were routinely distributed to men leaving for long-range reconnaissance ambush missions. Standard Army use was 20 mg of dextroamphetamine, an amphetamine derivative twice as strong as common ADHD medicine Adderall, to provide 48 hours of combat readiness. However, reports find that the abuse of amphetamines was rampant and often demanded by superior officers.

Of nearly a billion pounds in arms sales to 'unfree' regimes in 2015, the UK poured £928 million worth of military kit into theocratic Saudi Arabia, despite its atrocious human rights record, it has emerged.

According to data from HM Customs and Revenue (HMRC), accessed by the Daily Mirror, the UK made a killing by selling weapons and military equipment to the oil-rich Gulf state.

This was despite worldwide horror at the country's execution of minors, among other human rights abuses.

Saudi Arabia features prominently on the annual 'Freedom in the World' study carried out by the think tank Freedom House.

Other countries on the list, to which the UK sells arms, are the United Arab Emirates and Thailand.

The infamous F-35 fighter program has been a financial boondoggle. Already costing over $1 trillion to develop, the US Air Force is about to spend another $500 million to upgrade hangar facilities at the first air base chosen to host the new aircraft. With one aircraft barely off the ground, the Pentagon is prepared to spend another estimated $55 billion to produce a next-generation bomber.

It's unfettered spending like this that leads Col. John A. O'Grady to compare the Pentagon to failed companies like Enron and Lehman Brothers.

"Today, the [US] Defense Department is in alarmingly similar straits - except that the stakes are far higher," he writes for Defense One.

"If the nation should become unwilling or unable to fund a military that can remain globally present, the effects on global stability would be similar to that of the failure of financial giants and mainstays on the world's economy: devastating."

While major anti-choice activists and politicians are rushing to microphones to disingenuously declare, contra Donald Trump, that they would never try to punish women for abortions, their true punitive and frankly creepy side is coming out in Missouri.State legislators there are threatening to arrest Mary Kogut, the president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region and Southwest Missouri, because she won't turn over a list of names of women who got abortions to them. Kogut's lawyers are citing federal law protecting patient privacy to keep this list out of the hands of Republican legislators.

To be more specific, a list of consent forms signed by abortion patients has been subpoenaed by the interim Missouri State Senate Committee on the Sanctity of Life. (Yes, that is their name. I preferred the original name, the State Senate Committee of People Who Are Definitely More Moral Than You Sluts.) It's part of the ongoing witch hunt started when anti-choice activists released a series of hoax videos falsely accusing Planned Parenthood of coercing women into abortion so they could sell fetal tissue on the black market. A dozen similar investigations in other states turned up no evidence of criminal wrongdoing, which was entirely predictable, given the obvious lurid-Christian-right-urban-legend nature of the story the videos were pushing.

Missouri is one of the states where an investigation of Planned Parenthood turned up nada, but so devoted are anti-choicers in the legislature to believing that some kind of debauched and perverted behavior is going on at Planned Parenthood that they are still running pointless investigations.

Under the circumstances, it's easy to see why Kogut and her colleagues at Planned Parenthood are wary of turning a list of names of women who have had abortions to these ghouls. Would you want some Bible-thumping Missouri Republican leering at your name on an abortion consent form? Especially in our day and age when having your name and a general idea where you live means it would take a few minutes to find you on Facebook? Yeah, didn't think so.

The idea of peaceful development of the Crimea sticks in the throat of the so-called Mejlis, an NGO claiming to represent the interest of the Crimean Tatars, reports Russian online magazine Svobodnaya Pressa.

Recently one of them - Mustafa Dzhemilev, People's Deputy of the Verkhovna Rada and representative of the Crimean Tatar People designated by Poroshenko, presented another anti-Russian "project" called the Suicide Battalion.

This new armed group will include Crimean Tatars from the Kherson region of Ukraine that borders the peninsula. According to Dzhemilev, it will defend the border and "strengthen the Ukraine's presence" in the region. The battalion is not intended to put up armed resistance, but to collect information and "deliver it to the attention of the world community".

Last Thursday US Secretary of State John Kerry and Vice President Joe Biden met separately with Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian President Serzh Sarkesian while the South Caucasus adversaries attended a 50-nation nuclear summit in Washington boycotted by Russian President Vladimir Putin. But no sooner did Kerry pronounce "an ultimate resolution" to the ongoing Azeri-Armenian dispute over the autonomous Nagorno-Karabakh (NG) enclave, while Aliyev was flying home the next day his Azerbaijani military was launching a major overnight offensive into the contested region marking the bloodiest fighting since Russia's brokered truce that ended a three year war back in 1994.

The US Empire has consistently refused to recognize the democratic rights of the people of Nagorno-Karabakh, the vast majority 95% being Armenian who voted overwhelmingly to declare its independence from Azerbaijan in 1991 during the waning months of the Soviet Empire while both Azerbaijan and Armenia were still outer Soviet states. This fateful decision resulted in a bloody conflict where up to 30,000 Azeris and 6,000 Armenians lost their lives in the ensuing war fiercely fought over the region's self-declared autonomy. Azeri residents in Nagorno-Karabakh fled to outlying Azerbaijan districts that geographically surround the disputed region with estimated totals of nearly three quarters of a million displaced Azeris and up to a half million displaced Armenians. By war's end the Armenian military prevailed, protecting the sovereignty of their people who had been living on that same turf of land for centuries. The autonomous enclave vigorously defended by Armenian troops during the war has since the 1994 treaty been a de facto governed independent region despite its non-contiguous location separate from the Republic of Armenia while enveloped by angry Azeri citizens vowing revenge insisting that Armenians have stolen near one fifth of their country.

Azerbaijan's latest violent escalation was gleefully egged on by Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu:

The whole world should know that Turkey will stand shoulder to shoulder with Azerbaijan against these Armenian attacks until the end of the world. Our 78 million-strong population will continue to stand on Azerbaijan's side until all of its lands under occupation have been liberated.

The Russian military have given access to journalists from 11 countries to the liberated Syrian city of Palmyra. Moscow noted the absence of American journalists in the group. The group of 27 media professionals from Germany, Italy, Belgium, China, Serbia and other nations were transported from the Russian military base in Khmeimim to Palmyra on Thursday.

They were carried halfway across the country by Mil Mi-8 AMTSh military transport helicopters guarded by Mil Mi-35 helicopter gunships. The journalists were taken to the historic part of the city, which was badly damaged by the Islamic State while they controlled the city. They also had a chance to speak to local residents and Russian military engineers, who are taking part in demining the city.

Noticeably absent among the group were journalist from the US, Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov noted. He said that four US-based media outlets cancelled their accreditation requests on the eve of the trip, "as if they were following an order."

Al-Qaeda has made major financial gains as a result of the war in Yemen, running its own mini-state and pocketing $100 million in looted bank deposits and revenue from running the country's largest port, a Reuters investigation has revealed. The group's deep pockets and increased power are down to the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen, which has reportedly helped it become stronger than at any time since its emergence almost 20 years ago.

Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) has a major presence in Mukalla, a city of 500,000 people, where it runs the third largest port in Yemen. As part of its port "management," the group operates speedboats manned by armed fighters who impose fees on ship traffic. Yemeni government officials and local traders estimate that the group earns up to US$2 million every day in taxes on goods and fuel coming into the port. In addition, it is believed the group has managed to extort $1.4 million from the national oil company. The group also looted Mukalla's central bank branch, gaining an estimated $100 million, according to two senior Yemeni security officials. The economic empire of Mukalla was described to Reuters in detail by more than a dozen diplomats, Yemeni security officials, tribal leaders, and residents.

AQAP has abolished taxes for local residents in Mukalla, and group members have integrated themselves with southern Yemenis who have felt marginalized by their northern counterparts for years. The group has also made propaganda videos in which they have boasted about paving local roads and stocking hospitals. In doing so, the group has managed to win over many locals. "I prefer that Al-Qaeda stay here, not for Al Mukalla to be liberated," said one 47-year-old resident. "The situation is stable, more than any 'free' part of Yemen. The alternative to Al-Qaeda is much worse."


AQAP has managed to expand its territory by using many of the tactics used by Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL). It boasts 1,000 fighters in Mukalla alone, and controls 600km (373 miles) of coastline. The group also claimed responsibility for the 2015 Charlie Hebdo attack, which left 12 people dead at the satirical magazine's Paris office.

Russia's permanent representative to NATO Aleksandr Grushko has confirmed that a Russia-NATO joint anti-terror project may have been able to stop the attacks that hit Europe in recent months if the program hadn't been scrapped by the alliance.

"This was a multinational project. It was aimed at preventing terrorist attacks in public places. Full-scale tests that had been carried out in one of the NATO member states showed that if the project had been completed...it would have let us prevent such situations as occurred at Brussels' airport and metro to a significant extent," said the diplomat, confirming media reports.

Earlier, a source told TASS that the joint STANDEX (Stand-off Detection of Explosives) project - which was designed to "detect explosives remotely in real time in public places, in the first turn, on public transport systems, metro stations, airports and railway stations" - was based on sophisticated technology which allowed the precise location of bombs planted in large crowds. The system used spectrum analysis of microparticles in the air, and provided the identification of both the presence of explosives and the pin-point location of the person in the crowd.