A book company said Wednesday that it will release on September 11 a firsthand account of the raid that killed al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

Christine Ball, director of marketing and publicity for Dutton, a subsidiary of Penguin Group USA, said the book was written by a Navy SEAL under a pen name.

The book is entitled No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama bin Laden.

A Department of Defense official said the SEAL is no longer on active duty.

U.S. Special Operations Command has not reviewed the book or approved it, the official said. Officials only recently became aware the former SEAL was writing a book but were told it encompasses more than just the raid and includes vignettes from training and other missions.

They would like to see a copy, the official said, to make sure no classified information is released or the book contains any information that might out one of the team members.

Officials have been told that some of the profits are going to charity.

After more than 10 years of war against al Qaeda and the accompanying global "war on terrorism," we have failed to learn that our actions create reactions. Our presence creates destabilization, then radicalization. Occupations create insurgencies. In Afghanistan, we have fueled the very insurgency we struggle to fight.

Al Qaeda had relatively little if any presence in Iraq prior to the U.S. invasion. The U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the subsequent destruction and violence, enabled al Qaeda to flourish. Al Qaeda and its affiliates are now conducting an accelerated campaign of relentless attacks and suicide bombings in Iraq.

Last year's intervention in Libya is another example. The U.S. and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies spurred a civil war, taking sides despite persistent questions about the nature of the opposition. The war and the chaos that followed have allowed radical groups to gain another foothold.

Considering he made his name with the biggest leak of secret government documents in history, you might imagine there would be at least some residual concern for Julian Assange among those trading in the freedom of information business. But the virulence of British media hostility towards the WikiLeaks founder is now unrelenting.

This is a man, after all, who has yet to be charged, let alone convicted, of anything. But as far as the bulk of the press is concerned, Assange is nothing but a "monstrous narcissist", a bail-jumping "sex pest" and an exhibitionist maniac. After Ecuador granted him political asylum and Assange delivered a "tirade" from its London embassy's balcony, fire was turned on the country's progressive president, Rafael Correa, ludicrously branded a corrupt "dictator" with an "iron grip" on a benighted land.

The ostensible reason for this venom is of course Assange's attempt to resist extradition to Sweden (and onward extradition to the US) over sexual assault allegations - including from newspapers whose record on covering rape and violence against women is shaky, to put it politely. But as the row over his embassy refuge has escalated into a major diplomatic stand-off, with the whole of South America piling in behind Ecuador, such posturing looks increasingly specious.

Can anyone seriously believe the dispute would have gone global, or that the British government would have made its asinine threat to suspend the Ecuadorean embassy's diplomatic status and enter it by force, or that scores of police would have surrounded the building, swarming up and down the fire escape and guarding every window, if it was all about one man wanted for questioning over sex crime allegations in Stockholm?

Russia rebuffed President Barack Obama's threat of unilateral action against Syria Tuesday, as officials said 2,500 refugees fled across the border into Turkey in just 24 hours - one of the highest daily refugee flows of recent weeks.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, speaking after meeting China's top diplomat, said Moscow and Beijing were committed to "the need to strictly adhere to the norms of international law ... and not to allow their violation".

Obama on Monday threatened "enormous consequences" if his Syrian counterpart used chemical or biological arms or even moved them in a menacing way.

The president used some of his strongest language yet to warn Assad not to use chemical or biological weapons - after Syria acknowledged for the first time that it had such weapons and could use them if foreign countries attacked it.

The odds the United States will slip back into recession next year have risen, ratings agency Standard & Poor's said, citing risks from the European debt crisis and budget tightening at year-end. The US ratings firm raised the chance of the US falling into recession to 25 percent, up from a 20 percent chance estimated in February, as the world's largest economy struggles to recover from a severe 2008-2009 slump.

It also pointed to the looming possibility of the government being forced by existing law to severely cut spending and increase taxes on January 1, the so-called fiscal cliff that would crunch the economy. "Economic activity has downshifted sharply from earlier this year," S&P said in a report on North American credit conditions amid global uncertainty, dated August 20. "At the same time, possible contagion from the European debt crisis, the potential so-called 'fiscal cliff', and the risk of a hard landing for China's economy have added greater uncertainty to US economic prospects," it said.

On Aug. 17, Germany became the latest country to remove longstanding protections for civilian populations from military intervention in domestic conflicts. In a new court ruling, which repealed laws created out of the Nazi era in Germany, the government can now use the military against citizens in extreme cases, joining the U.S. and other nation states who have removed the dividing line between civilian and military policing.

The German military will in future be able to use its weapons on German streets in an extreme situation, the Federal Constitutional Court says.

The ruling says the armed forces can be deployed only if Germany faces an assault of "catastrophic proportions", but not to control demonstrations. - BBC

Iranian Defense Minister Brigadier General Ahmad Vahidi announced on Tuesday that the number of military products manufactured by the Iranian Defense Ministry has witnessed a 21% growth this year.

Addressing a ceremony on the occasion of the National Day of the Defense Industry today, Vahidi said that defense products in Iran are unique in terms of quantity and variety, irrespective of all the pressures and restrictions imposed against Iran in the global market.

"We in Iran's defense industry have 1,436 different products with an almost limited market and that means we have been able to commercialize through indigenization," the minister underlined.

He announced that the defense ministry produced 192 products in the last Iranian year (ended on March 19), and added, "We at the defense ministry had a 21% growth in production, 178% increase in technology and inventions, 286% growth in academic projects and a 138% boost in the number of the industrial projects which have been accomplished."

German spies are stationed off the Syrian coast and are passing on information designed to help rebels in their fight against President Bashar al-Assad, a newspaper reported on Sunday.

Agents from Germany's foreign intelligence service (BND) are operating on ships off the coast with technology allowing them to observe troop movements 600 kilometres (400 miles) inside the country, said the Bild am Sonntag weekly.

Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey left Afghanistan shortly after two rockets damaged his plane in Bagram airbase.

Two rockets hit Dempsey's plane when it was parked at Bagram Airbase, north of Kabul, late on Monday night and slightly wounded two ground staff. They also damaged a nearby helicopter.

Dempsey, who had been in the country for talks with NATO and Afghan commanders on a string of recent shootings, left the country on another aircraft.

Before leaving Afghanistan, Dempsey met his Afghan counterpart General Sher Mohammad Karimi, who raised the issue of insider attacks by local forces that have killed 10 American occupiers in the past two weeks.

Following the meeting with General Karimi, Dempsey told reporters "this time, without prompting, when I met General Karimi, he started with a conversation about insider attacks - and, importantly, insider attacks not just against us, but insider attacks against the Afghans, too".

The US top army general escaped the rocket attack unharmed as he was not aboard the plane when it was hit by the [alleged] insurgents.

"He was nowhere near the aircraft. We think it was a lucky shot," NATO senior spokesman Colonel Thomas Collins said.

The ground-to-air weapons have been delivered across the Turkish border and were partly paid for by Saudi Arabia

CIA spies have smuggled up to 14 Stinger missiles into Syria so rebels can defend themselves from air strikes.

The ground-to-air weapons have been delivered across the Turkish border to the Free Syrian Army and were partly paid for by Saudi Arabia, a security source claimed.