A government audit has revealed that roughly $619 billion in federal grants and loans given out in fiscal year 2012 have not been properly accounted for.

The latest figures come courtesy of the US Government Accountability Office, who on Friday published a report in which it warned that much-needed oversight is all too absent from a federal awards website after it discovered gross instances of "underreporting and inconsistencies" on USASpending.gov.

"Although agencies generally reported required contract information, they did not properly report information on assistance awards (e.g., grants or loans), totaling approximately $619 billion in fiscal year 2012," GAO researchers found while conducting the report. "Specifically, 33 of 37 agencies with a budget authority of at least $400 million reported at least one contract."

According to the study, hundreds of programs across dozens of agencies were not properly accounted for on USASpending.gov - a website created by federal mandate "[t]o provide the public with information about how their tax dollars are spent."

One of the Senate's top Democrats and a major author of the Intelligence Committee's historic report on the CIA's use of torture claims the White House is withholding important facts as it prepares to release the document to the public.

As a result, California Sen. Dianne Feinstein said she will not approve the release of the so-called "torture report" until the Obama administration works with her to smooth over their differences.

According to the Huffington Post, Feinstein claims the White House has redacted too much key information from the report's summary, including the proof needed to justify the Senate's reportedly critical findings.

"I have concluded the redactions eliminate or obscure key facts that support the report's findings and conclusions," she said in a statement on Tuesday. "Until these redactions are addressed to the committee's satisfaction, the report will not be made public."

She added that a letter has been sent to President Obama about the changes she wants to see regarding the redactions.

Lebanese Foreign Minister, Jebran Bassil, himself a Christian, gave a speech during a meeting for the Palestine Committee of the Non-Aligned Movement held in Tehran. He pointed out that the developments in the Gaza Strip, the Iraqi city of Mosul, and the Lebanese northeastern border town of Arsal are the same. Arsal had come under an attack by militants from ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) last weekend, and the Lebanese Army is still engaged in a battle against them.

He stated that the Jewish state of Israel and the Islamic State of ISIL share common principles such as killing in the name of religion, forcibly displacing people in the name of the project of their state, and eliminating the 'Other' in the name of monolithism. He also stated that this is done with Western support, while the Middle East disintegrates and pluralism disappears.

"The hospital became a nightmare," said a patient who survived after a major medical institution in Donetsk was shelled by Ukrainian troops in a series of attacks on residential neighborhoods that resulted in four casualties throughout the city.

"This is absurd," 37-year old Dmitry Kozhur told AP correspondent on the ground. "We came here to keep living, but now we are risking death."

One of the largest medical facilities in Donetsk, the Vishnevsky hospital №1, had its dentistry unit hit by a mortar shell on Thursday, with much of the second floor destroyed and burnt out as a result of the strike.

"There was a sudden explosion," witness Dr. Anna Kravtsova said. "A mortar round flew through the window."

Historically, the Levant is the birthplace of Christianity and the oldest Christian communities have lived in it and the entire Fertile Crescent since the start of Christian history. Early Christian called themselves followers or people of «the Way» before they adopted the term Christian; in Arabic their antiquated name would be «Ahl Al-Deen». [1] Traces of this original name are also available in the New Testament of the Bible and can be read in John 14:5-7, Acts 9:1-2, Acts 24:4 and 14. From the Fertile Crescent these Christian communities spread across Africa, Asia, and Europe. Since that time the ancient communities of Christians, many of which still use the Syriac dialects of Aramaic in their churches, have been an integral and important part of the social fabrics of the pluralistic societies of Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Turkey, and Iran. Nevertheless, the Christians of the Levant and Iraq are now in the cross-hairs.

Deceit and mischief has been at play. It is no coincidence that Egyptian Christians were attacked at the same time as the South Sudan Referendum, which was supposed to signal a split between the Muslims in Khartoum and the Christians and animists in Juba. Nor is it an accident that Iraq's Christian, one of the oldest Christian communities in the world, began to face a modern exodus, leaving their homes and ancestral homeland in Iraq in 2003. Mysterious groups targeted both them and Palestinian refugees... Coinciding with the exodus of Iraqi Christians, which occurred under the watchful eyes of US and British military forces, the neighborhoods in Baghdad became sectarian as Shiite Muslims and Sunni Muslims were forced by violence and death squads to form sectarian enclaves. This is all tied to US and Israeli project of redrawing the map.

The Christian communities of the Levant and Iraq have long distrusted the US government for its support of Israel, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and fanatical militants with anti-Christian leanings. Lebanon's Christians have also been weary of US support for Israeli expansion and ideas about resettling Palestinians into Lebanon. There is also a widely held belief that the US and Israel have been involved in a policy to remove or «purge» the Christians from Iraq and the Levant in some type of Zionist-linked resettlement plan. Since the US-supported anti-government fighters started targeting Christian Syrians, there has been renewed talk about a Christian exodus in the Middle East centering on Washington's war on Syria.

Abstract

At first almost unnoticed after 1850, then with significant intensity after the onset of the Great Depression of 1873 in Britain, the sun began to set on the British Empire. By the end of the 19th Century, though the City of London remained undisputed financier of the world, British industrial excellence was in terminal decline. The decline paralleled an equally dramatic rise of a new industrial Great Power on the European stage, the German Reich. Germany soon passed England in output of steel, in quality of machine tools, chemicals and electrical goods. Beginning in the 1880s a group of leading German industrialists and bankers around Deutsche Bank's Georg von Siemens, recognized the urgent need for some form of colonial sources of raw materials as well as industrial export outlet. With Africa and Asia long since claimed by the other Great Powers, above all Great Britain, German policy set out to develop a special economic sphere in the imperial provinces of the debt-ridden Ottoman Empire. The policy was termed "penetration pacifique" an economic dependency which would be sealed with German military advisors and equipment. Initially, the policy was not greeted with joy in Paris, St. Petersburg or London, but it was tolerated. Deutsche Bank even sought, unsuccessfully, to enlist City of London financial backing for the keystone of the Ottoman expansion policy - the Berlin-to-Baghdad railway project, a project of enormous scale and complexity that would link the interior of Anatolia and Mesopotamia (today Iraq) to Germany. What Berlin and Deutsche Bank did not say was that they had secured subsurface mineral rights, including for oil along the path of the railway, and that their geologists had discovered petroleum in Mosul, Kirkuk and Basra.

The conversion of the British Navy under Churchill to oil from coal meant a high risk strategy as England had abundant coal but no then-known oil. It secured a major concession from the Shah of Persia in the early 1900s. The Baghdad rail link was increasingly seen in London as a threat to precisely this oil security. The British response to the growing German disruption of the European balance of power after the 1890s was to carefully craft a series of public and secret alliances with France and with Russia - former rivals - to encircle Germany. As well, she deployed a series of less public intrigues to disrupt the Balkans and encourage a revolt against the Ottoman Sultan via the Young Turks that severely weakened the prospects for the German Drang nach Osten. The dynamic of the rise of German assertiveness, including in addition to the Baghdad rail, the decision in 1900 to build a modern navy over two decades that could rival England's, set the stage for the outbreak of a war in August 1914 whose real significance was a colossal and tragic struggle for who would succeed the ebbing power of the British Empire. The resolution of that epic struggle was to take a second world war and another quarter century before the victor was undeniably established. The role of oil in the events leading to war in 1914 is too little appreciated. When the historical process behind the war is examined from this light a quite different picture emerges. The British Empire in the decades following 1873 and the American Century hegemony in the decades following approximately 1973 have more in common than is generally appreciated.

Blasts are rocking Gaza, smoke is rising over the city, apparently from an Israeli air strike, Reuters reports. This comes after Israeli authorities ordered military to respond to "at least 18 rockets from Gaza" by attacking "terror sites," the army said.

"The renewed rocket attacks by terrorists at Israel are unacceptable, intolerable and shortsighted. Hamas' bad decision to breach the ceasefire will be pursued by the IDF (Israel Defence Forces), we will continue to strike Hamas, its infrastructure, its operatives and restore security for the State of Israel," Lieutenant-Colonel Peter Lerner, an Israeli military spokesman said in a statement.

The first Palestinian fatality - a boy, according to Al-Arabiya - has reportedly lost his life in the Israeli strikes. Six other people have been wounded.

Among the rockets allegedly fired by Gaza, one was intercepted by the Iron Dome system over the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon. Two more rockets fell in open areas without causing casualties or damage, Haaretz reported.

Israelis frequently accuse Palestinians of using human shields.

That claim is highly questionable.

However, in 2005, the Israeli high court found that Israeli soldiers had used Palestinian civilians as human shields 1,200 times in the past 5 years. As Ynet reported at the time:

Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz on Tuesday demanded that the High Court review a ruling it issued last Thursday in which it declared that the 'human shield' procedure employed by the IDF when detaining Palestinian terror suspects is illegal and violates international law.

Sources at the Ministry of Defense said that Mofaz' comments are not an attempt to subvert the Court's decision, adding that the defense minister intends to use democratic means to revoke the ruling.

According to defense officials, the Israel Defense Forces made use of the 'human shield' procedure on 1,200 occasions over the last five years, and only on one occasion did a Palestinian civilian get hurt.

An 18-year-old Palestinian was killed in 2002 during one such operation.

Mofaz instructed the IDF to freeze the use of the 'human shield' and 'early warning' procedures in its arrest operations in the territories until the Court holds a new hearing on the issue.

The European Union is likely to consider filing appeals with the World Trade Organization (WTO) after Russia announced import bans on products from the EU, Lithuania's Foreign Minister Linas Linkevicius said Thursday.

"We will consult with our partners. It is in the interest of the WTO to protect members of the European Commission. This is done cooperatively. So, I think these issues will be address. It is too early to speak about all the implications, we need to carefully review and draw conclusions. Now, it's hard to say, it's too soon," Linkevicius said, as quoted by RIA Novosti.

Lithuania is one of the EU nations that is most dependent on trade with Russia, which imported €25 billion of goods from the Baltic state in 2013. From that, €1.3 billion of exports to Russia were agriculture goods and alcoholic beverages.


This would not be Lithuania's first complaint in the WTO over Russia's so-called trade discrimination. At the end of June Riga filed a formal complaint with the WTO over Moscow's pork ban, which it announced in January after two cases of African swine fever were discovered in Poland and Lithuania.

In 2013, Russia imported $6.7 billion of meat and meat products in total. The largest suppliers came from now-banned countries like Denmark (6.6% of total Russian meat products), Germany (6.4%), USA (5.3%), and Canada (3.8%).

Kiev has suspended a ceasefire with the self-defense forces at the site of the Malaysian Airlines plane crash in eastern Ukraine, after the international recovery team searching for victims halted their efforts over security concerns.

The fighting is now feared to escalate as Kiev seeks to regain control over the area largely controlled by militia.

"The ceasefire in the plane crash zone, announced by the President of Ukraine at the request of international experts, which has been thoroughly observed by the Ukrainian Armed Forces, will not be in place at the beginning of the second phase of the investigation," the Ukrainian government said in a statement on Thursday.

This comes after The Netherlands, who lead the international probe, announced it was halting the mission to recover victims and debris of the July 17 MH17 crash because of fighting between Ukrainian forces and rebels in the area.


Prime Minister Mark Rutte said that the risk posed to the team of Australian, Dutch and Malaysian experts working in the area was too great to continue the operation under current conditions.