According to a senior member of the staff of then-Secretary of the Navy John Dalton, the test firing of a new generation Navy missile from the submarine USS Seawolf accidentally struck TWA flight 800 en route from New York to Paris on July 17, 1996. According to the former Navy official, the missile test was so important for the Clinton administration, it was being shown live on a Navy closed-circuit television feed at the White House. The Seawolf's missile was to have struck a drone reportedly being towed by a Navy P-3 Orion maritime surveillance aircraft. However, to the horror of the Navy personnel involved with the test and senior White House staff gathered to witness the missile's successful launching, it veered off course and intercepted the TWA 800 Boeing 747, killing the 230 passengers and crew on board the aircraft.

ABC News Paris correspondent and former John F. Kennedy Press Secretary and U.S. Senator Pierre Salinger reported that a U.S. Navy missile, according to his sources, had downed TWA 800. A vicious smear campaign was launched against Salinger and he was eventually fired by ABC. This editor subsequently spoke at length with Salinger about both TWA 800 and Pan Am 103. We agreed that the investigations of both involved U.S. government cover-ups.

The Seawolf, which had recently completed sea trials but had not yet been fully commissioned into service, was participating in a major Navy exercise off Long Island in exercise area W-105. The exercise was dubbed GLOBAL YANKEE '96. Ironically, the Seawolf was to be commissioned in Groton, Connecticut on July 17, 1997, the anniversary of the shooting down of TWA 800, but the Navy, sensitive to the date, altered the commissioning to July 19, two days later. Margaret Dalton, the wife of Navy Secretary John Dalton, carried out the submarine's "christening" in Groton.

A commander of one of the Ukrainian neo-nazi battalions, the Donbass, Semyon Semyonchenko, has just returned from the US, where he met with senior senators from both parties, and received commitments of material support.

He posted a comment on Facebook in which he gives a detailed explanation of this assistance.

He was also received by IRI (International Republican Institute) and NDI (National Democratic Institute), the international branches of the two main American political parties, and met with democratic Senator Robert Menendez and republican senator Robert Corker.

"Menendez and Corker are the two senators who have sponsored the Ukraine Freedom Support Act, a bill that will allocate money to provide assistance to Ukraine, including the supply of weapons. Radar, anti-tank weapons, drones, communications systems and many other useful things for our army. "

The nation's biggest and baddest for-profit prison company suddenly cares about halfway houses - so much so, that they want in on the action.

About a year after acquiring a smaller firm that operates halfway houses and other community corrections facilities, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) CEO Damon Hininger announced a few weeks ago that "[r]eentry programs and reducing recidivism are 100 percent aligned with our business model."

Wait, what?

High recidivism rates mean more people behind bars, and CCA depends on more and more incarceration to make its billions. Since when do they actually want people to do well after they get out, instead of being sucked back into the system?

It's tempting to be hopeful. Is this a long-overdue acknowledgment that it's morally bankrupt to make money off of imprisoning human beings? Is the nation's largest for-profit prison company really admitting that mass incarceration has destroyed too many communities and that locking fewer people behind bars is a good thing?

Vatican detectives analyzing a computer used a by an archbishop arrested earlier this week discovered over 86,000 pornographic photos and 160 sexually explicit video files of children, reports the International Business Times.

According to investigators, another 45,000 pictures had been deleted.

Former Archbishop Jozef Wesolowski, 66, was arrested at the Vatican earlier this week on charges that he paid to have sex with minors when he was a papal ambassador in the Dominican Republic from 2008 to 2012.

Wesolowski is the first Vatican official to be arrested within the city state on charges of pedophilia.

The former archbishop was recalled to Rome by the Vatican last year while still a diplomat in Santo Domingo and relieved of his duties following accusations from Dominican media that he was paying for underaged sex partners.

Until earlier this week, he had been free to roam Rome, but is now being held in in a small room in the basement of the Collegio dei Penitenzieri, which hosts the Vatican's court and military police.

Vatican authorities are now investigating if Wesolowski was part of a network of pedophiles and whether he abused children in other posts during his career.

Wesolowski previously served in South Africa, Costa Rica, Japan, Switzerland, India and Denmark.

If convicted, Wesolowski faces 12 years in jail in the first trial for sexual abuse to be held inside the Vatican City.

His trial is expected to start in January.

Eighteen years after it was published, "Dark Alliance," the San Jose Mercury News's bombshell investigation into links between the cocaine trade, Nicaragua's Contra rebels, and African American neighborhoods in California, remains one of the most explosive and controversial exposés in American journalism.

The 20,000-word series enraged black communities, prompted Congressional hearings, and became one of the first major national security stories in history to blow up online. It also sparked an aggressive backlash from the nation's most powerful media outlets, which devoted considerable resources to discredit author Gary Webb's reporting. Their efforts succeeded, costing Webb his career. On December 10, 2004, the journalist was found dead in his apartment, having ended his eight-year downfall with two .38-caliber bullets to the head.

These days, Webb is being cast in a more sympathetic light. He's portrayed heroically in a major motion picture set to premiere nationwide next month. And documents newly released by the CIA provide fresh context to the "Dark Alliance" saga - information that paints an ugly portrait of the mainstream media at the time.

On September 18, the agency released a trove of documents spanning three decades of secret government operations. Culled from the agency's in-house journal, Studies in Intelligence, the materials include a previously unreleased six-page article titled "Managing a Nightmare: CIA Public Affairs and the Drug Conspiracy Story." Looking back on the weeks immediately following the publication of "Dark Alliance," the document offers a unique window into the CIA's internal reaction to what it called "a genuine public relations crisis" while revealing just how little the agency ultimately had to do to swiftly extinguish the public outcry. Thanks in part to what author Nicholas Dujmovic, a CIA Directorate of Intelligence staffer at the time of publication, describes as "a ground base of already productive relations with journalists," the CIA's Public Affairs officers watched with relief as the largest newspapers in the country rescued the agency from disaster, and, in the process, destroyed the reputation of an aggressive, award-winning reporter.

(Dujmovic's name was redacted in the released version of the CIA document, but was included in a footnote in a 2010 article in the Journal of Intelligence. Dujmovic confirmed his authorship to The Intercept.)

The Russian foreign minister issued a blistering attack on the West and Nato on Saturday, accusing them of being unable to change their Cold War "genetic code" and saying the United States must abandon its claims to "eternal uniqueness."

Sergey Lavrov's assault appeared to be an extension of the increasingly anti-Western stance of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is riding a wave of popularity at home with his neo-nationalist rhetoric and policies.

Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly, Lavrov said the crisis in Ukraine was the result of a coup d'etat in that country backed by the United States and the European Union for the purpose of pulling Kiev out of its "organic role as a binding link" between East and West, denying it the opportunity for "neutral and non-bloc status."

Lavrov also said the Russian annexation of Crimea earlier this year was the choice of the largely Russian-speaking population there. Former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev transferred control over the strategic Black Sea region to Ukraine from Moscow in the 1950s.

While the rhetoric was tough, Andrew Weiss, a top Russia expert at the Carnegie Foundation, said the Lavrov speech "hewed closely to themes the Russians have put forward throughout the Ukraine crisis."

While U.S. military sources claimed the latest airstrikes were a success, a human rights monitor has reported only civilians were among the dead.

As the United States continued airstrikes against the Islamic State (I.S.) group on Sunday, Republican house speaker John Boehner has warned the U.S. may have "no choice" but to deploy ground forces to battle the militants.

"At some point, somebody's boots have to be on the ground," Boehner told ABC News on Sunday. Describing I.S. fighters as "barbarians," the top House Republican claimed "at the end of the day, I think it's gonna take more than air strikes to drive them outta there."

"They intend to kill us. And if we don't destroy them first, we're gonna pay the price," he stated.

President Barack Obama has claimed no U.S. ground troops will be sent to Iraq and Syria to battle I.S, though the Pentagon has already dispatched over 1000 U.S. troops to Iraq. It says the troops will only provide support to Iraqi security forces.


However, Boehner's warning that ground troops could soon be inevitable is just the latest in a wave of Republican outcry against Obama's pledge to keep the United States from entering another Middle Eastern quagmire.

Earlier in September, Republican senator Lindsey Graham warned I.S. is an "army" that is "intending to come here." Graham claimed that if U.S. ground troops aren't sent to battle I.S., "we all" could be "killed" by the militant group.

"If they survive our best shot ... then they will open the gates of hell to spill out on the world," Graham warned.

Currently, I.S.'s operational capacity is largely limited to Iraq and Syria, where they were hit with another wave of U.S.-led airstrikes on Sunday. At least three oil refineries were hit by airstrikes near the I.S. stronghold Raqqa.

The ISIL or IS threat is a smokescreen. The strength of the ISIL has deliberately been inflated to get public support for the Pentagon and to justify the illegal bombing of Syria. It has also been used to justify the mobilization of what is looking more and more like a large-scale US-led military buildup in the Middle East. The firepower and military assets being committed go beyond what is needed for merely fighting the ISIL death squads.

While the US has assured its citizens and the world that troops will not be sent on the ground, this is very unlikely. In the first instance, it is unlikely because boots on the ground are needed to monitor and select targets. Moreover, Washington sees the campaign against the ISIL fighters as something that will take years. This is doublespeak. What is being described is a permanent military deployment or, in the case of Iraq, redeployment. This force could eventually morph into a broader assault force threatening Syria, Iran, and Lebanon.

US-Syrian and US-Iranian Security Dialogue?

Before the US-led bombings in Syria started there were unverified reports being circulated that Washington had started a dialogue with Damascus through Russian and Iraqi channels to discuss military coordination and the Pentagon bombing campaign in Syria. There was something very off though. Agents of confusion were at work in an attempt to legitimize the bombardment of the Syrian Arab Republic.

The claims of US-Syrian cooperation via Russian and Iraqi channels are part of a sinister series of misinformation and disinformation. Before the claims about US cooperation with Syria, similar claims were being made about US-Iranian cooperation in Iraq.

Earlier, Washington and the US media tried to give the impression that an agreement on military cooperation was made between itself and Tehran to fight ISIL and to cooperate inside Iraq. This was widely refuted in the harshest of words by numerous members of the Iranian political establishment and high-ranking Iranian military commanders as disinformation.

After the Iranians clearly indicated that Washington's claims were fiction, the US claimed that it would not be appropriate for Iran to join its anti-ISIL coalition. Iran rebutted. Washington was dishonestly misrepresenting the facts, because US officials had asked Tehran to join the anti-ISIL coalition several times.

You would think war-themed video games copy real life, and not the other way around. Not this time. A Washington think tank has hired the maker of the acclaimed "Call of Duty" game to envision the kind of future wars the US could be fighting.

The key reason for this, according to the Atlantic Council think tank, is that, with all its money and capabilities, America really isn't thinking creatively about the various threats it could face in the 21st century.


Dave Anthony, the creator of the billion-dollar Call of Duty franchise, will be joining other authors, screenwriters and entertainment figures in an initiative called 'The Art of Future War Project,' set to launch next week, according to AFP.

The idea came rather suddenly, when former Pentagon official Steven Grundman walked in on his son playing 'Call of Duty: Black Ops II,' which depicts a 2025 cold war between China and the United States. In it, the two superpowers are vying for rare earth elements in secret missions.

"He was struck how realistic our portrayal in 'Call of Duty: Black Ops II' was of a future conflict," Anthony told the news agency.

"It occurred to me that the perspective of artists on this question is compelling and insightful, and it's also different," Grundman was cited as saying by the Washington Post. "One feature that struck me was the combination of both familiar technologies and novel ones."

"I didn't want to satisfy myself with an approach everyone was doing," he added. "It's a crowded field of ideas," Grundman said, explaining his belief why military think tanks alone aren't up to the task.

According to Anthony, the game itself was the result of brainstorming by a number of creative professionals of all sorts, including Batman screenwriter David Goyer, as well as Oliver North, the former marine who later became a TV personality at the height of the Iran-Contra affair in the 1980s, when US officials secretly sold weapons to the Islamic state, despite there being an arms embargo.

"You get everybody in a room like that, and all the different perspectives come together," Goyer said. "That combination was fascinating. What I would like to bring to Washington is that kind of thinking."

Anthony himself also believes that the real-world Pentagon could benefit from fantasy-based thinking for the simple reason that the US isn't preparing even for the scenarios it knows it might face, often on the pretext that there isn't adequate funding, or that certain bridges can be crossed when reached.

The face of Hong Kong's student democracy movement came under furious attack by a pro-Beijing newspaper today, upping the ante in the fight over the former British colony's political future.

On Thursday, Wen Wei Po published an "expose" into what it described as the U.S. connections of Joshua Wong, the 17 year-old leader of student group Scholarism.

The story asserts that "U.S. forces" identified Mr. Wong's potential three years ago, and have worked since then to cultivate him as a "political superstar."

Evidence for Mr. Wong's close ties to the U.S. that the paper cited included what the report described as frequent meetings with U.S. consulate personnel in Hong Kong and covert donations from Americans to Mr. Wong. As evidence, the paper cited photographs leaked by "netizens." The story also said Mr. Wong's family visited Macau in 2011 at the invitation of the American Chamber of Commerce, where they stayed at the "U.S.-owned" Venetian Macao, which is owned by Las Vegas Sands Corp.

When asked about Wen Wei Po's allegations that he was being manipulated by U.S. forces, Mr. Wong denied the idea. "Of course it's false," Mr. Wong told China Real Time. In a subsequent statement posted online, Mr. Wong denied every detail in Wen Wei Po's story. The American Chamber of Commerce said no spokesperson was available to comment. The U.S. consulate in Hong Kong also declined to comment.

Mr. Wong came to local fame in 2012 after his Scholarism group, made up of secondary school students, protested against a plan by the Hong Kong government to implement "patriotic education" classes in Hong Kong schools. The plan was later shelved. Now, the group is at the forefront of a student movement protesting against a decision by Beijing last month that said that future candidates for Hong Kong's top post must be vetted by central authorities.