The US is sending missiles to Syrian rebels as part of a "pilot program" to strengthen the opposition, American media reveals. Addressing criticism the US is arming extremist militants, Washington claims its weapons will not "fall into the wrong hands."

Washington's new initiative aims to find out whether it can supply opposition forces in Syria with weapons without them falling into the hands of Islamist extremists, American officials told USA Today on condition of anonymity.

"They will try this first and see how it goes" before expanding it, said a former official. According to reports, rebel groups have already received anti-tank missiles, known as TOWs, which are specially designed to destroy tanks and pierce reinforced bunkers.

This latest move by the US comes as the head of the Syrian National Coalition for Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, Ahmad Al-Jarba, visits Washington to lobby for more support. Al-Jarba will push for Washington to supply rebel forces with anti-aircraft missiles, the New York Times reports.

In a meeting with Secretary of State John Kerry, Al-Jarba emphasized that his coalition was "moderate and inclusive."

Pope Francis called on "legitimate redistribution" of wealth by the world's governments to undo the "economy of exclusion" underlying capitalist society.

The pontiff appealed Friday to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and the heads of major U.N. agencies in Rome, warning that wealth inequality promoted a "culture of death" at odds with Catholic teachings.

"An awareness of the dignity of each of our brothers and sisters whose life is sacred and inviolable from conception to natural death must lead us to share with complete freedom the goods which God's providence has placed in our hands," Pope Francis said.

These may be "material goods but also intellectual and spiritual ones," Francis said, and he urged the world's people "to give back generously and lavishly whatever we may have earlier unjustly refused to others."

On Sunday morning, prominent Irish politician Gerry Adams woke alone in a cell in Antrim police station. By the following evening, the Sinn Fein president was stepping onto a podium at an election rally at the Devenish Centre, West Belfast as an 800-strong crowd chanted his name.

Adams, who smiled widely, did not look like a man who had spent four nights in police custody. He told cheering supporters that his arrest in connection with the 1972 killing of West Belfast mother of ten Jean McConville was "a sham", but that Sinn Fein would not be diverted from "the job of building the peace".

The Good Friday Agreement, signed in 1998, ended the 30-year "Troubles" that cost over 3,000 lives. Since 2007, Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), has shared power with the Democratic Unionist Party in a devolved parliament in Belfast.

Concerns, however, are being raised about the fragility of the peace in Northern Ireland. The murals and flags that line many streets across this country of just 1.8 million attest to on-going tensions between unionists, who favour a political union between Northern Ireland and the Great Britain, and republicans, who want a united Ireland.

Foreign-backed militants in Syria's northern city of Aleppo have cut water supplies into the city, leaving residents without water for a week.

The al-Qaeda-linked al-Nusra Front has reportedly cut water supplies into eastern part of the city, which is under the control of militants, and government-controlled west of the city.

The cut had forced people to queue in front of wells for collecting water, with reports saying that some people were drinking unclean water.

Militants also cut the electricity supply to government-held areas of the city and the nearby neighborhoods last month.

At least one million people have left Aleppo, Syria's second city, following the ongoing conflict in the Arab country.

Cutting off water supplies came as Syrian military forces have conducted a number of major operations around Aleppo in a bid to entirely drive the foreign-backed militants out of the area.

Monica Lewinsky's Vanity Fair article reluctantly plunges us straight back into the frothing world of '90s gossip. It may be painful but it answers so many questions about today's media.

The Monica Lewinsky confessional in Vanity Fair brings back a torrent of unfond memories of the appalling cast of tabloid gargoyles who drove the scandal. Remember them? Treacherous thatched-roof-haired drag-queen Linda Tripp, with those dress-for-success shoulder pads? Cackling, fact-lacking hack Lucianne Goldberg, mealy-mouthed Pharisee Kenneth Starr - the whole buzzing swarm of legal, congressional and gossip industry flesh flies, feasting on the entrails. And, of course, hitting "send" on each new revelation that no one else would publish, the solitary, perfectly named Matt Drudge, operating in pallid obsession out of his sock-like apartment in Miami.

A once-in-a-lifetime cast! Or so we all thought. But what we didn't know at the time is that they were not some passing cultural excrescence. They were the face of the future. The things that shocked us then - the illicitly taped conversations, the wholesale violations of elementary privacy, the globally broadcast sexual embarrassments, all the low-life disseminated malice - is now the communications industry as it operates every minute of every day.

Monica is right when she writes that "only a few years later, with the advent of social media, the humiliation would have been even more devastating." Or maybe not: When the feds pressured her to talk that fateful night in the Ritz Carlton bar in Pentagon City, she'd have pulled out her iPhone and called her mom, who'd have told her to say nothing without a lawyer present. She just might have walked away from the hell that followed.


Monica is actually right about a lot of things in this piece, even as her vision is fogged by habituation to a culture she helped midwife. She is right that, for some, the stain of humiliation can indeed be irrevocable. Not everyone has the survival skills of William Jefferson Clinton. Scandal on the web leaves the shame a click away, forever. True, when you've been burned by the press it's strange to keep applying for (as she writes) "jobs that fell under the umbrella of 'creative communications' and 'branding.'"

The kidnapping of over 200 Nigerian school girls, and the massacre of as many as 300 civilians in the town of Gamboru Ngala, by the militant al-Qaeda affiliated group, Boko Haram, has shocked the world.

But while condemnations have rightly been forthcoming from a whole range of senior figures from celebrities to government officials, less attention has been paid to the roots of the crisis.

Instability in Nigeria, however, has been growing steadily over the last decade - and one reason is climate change. In 2009, a UK Department for International Development (Dfid) study warned that climate change could contribute to increasing resource shortages in the country due to land scarcity from desertification, water shortages, and mounting crop failures.

A more recent study by the Congressionally-funded US Institute for Peace confirmed a "basic causal mechanism" that "links climate change with violence in Nigeria." The report concludes:

"...poor responses to climatic shifts create shortages of resources such as land and water. Shortages are followed by negative secondary impacts, such as more sickness, hunger, and joblessness. Poor responses to these, in turn, open the door to conflict."

Unfortunately, a business-as-usual scenario sees Nigeria's climate undergoing "growing shifts in temperature, rainfall, storms, and sea levels throughout the twenty-first century. Poor adaptive responses to these shifts could help fuel violent conflict in some areas of the country."

Tragically, President George H.W. Bush passed up a chance for a rapprochement with Iran because, after the Soviet Union imploded, the national-security apparatus needed a new threat to stave off budget cutters in Congress. Iran became the "manufactured crisis," according to author Gareth Porter's new book by that title.
Doubly tragic, Bush's successor, Bill Clinton, compounded the dangerous folly by hyping the bogus threat. Why? That might be a good question for progressives to ask possible presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who enjoys basking in her husband's supposed presidential successes.

Porter writes,

"That ramping up of pressure on Iran by the Clinton administration was still driven by the same bureaucratic incentives that had appeared at the end of the Cold War, but it shifted into overdrive because it was linked to support of the Israeli government's drive to portray Iran as the great threat to peace in the world. Clinton's advisers saw the threat of nuclear proliferation as the path to beefing up the national-security apparatus. It was perfect for justifying new weapons systems and a continuing role as world policeman."

Clinton's State Department refused to put Boko Haram on the list of terror groups.

Boko Haram received arms indirectly from the US.

Now this group's activity is softening American and British minds to the idea of putting US and UK troops in Nigeria in"'purely an advisory role."

Do you think this tolerance for and "indirect" arming of terror groups that just happen to create outrages to justify our latest indefensible military adventures is an accident?

We don't.

With pressure mounting to avert a transportation funding crisis this summer, the Obama administration Tuesday opened the door for states to collect tolls on interstate highways to raise revenue for roadway repairs.

The proposal, contained in a four-year, $302 billion White House transportation bill, would reverse a long-standing federal prohibition on most interstate tolling.

Though some older segments of the network - notably the Pennsylvania and New Jersey turnpikes and Interstate 95 in Maryland and Interstate 495 in Virginia - are toll roads, most of the 46,876-mile system has been toll-free.

"We believe that this is an area where the states have to make their own decisions," said Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx. "We want to open the aperture, if you will, to allow more states to choose to make broader use of tolling, to have that option available."

One of the most unmistakable signs of the return of German militarism is the barrage of war propaganda in the media. The conservative Die Welt and FAZ, the liberal Süddeutsche and Zeit and the "Green" taz newspaper have all published a torrent of articles urging German rearmament and more aggressive action against Russia.

The most recent example of such propaganda is provided by Dirk Kurbjuweit in the magazine Der Spiegel .

In an essay entitled "The Power of the Powerless," Kurbjuweit declares that the West needs the "properties of [the war god] Mars, i.e. weapons, military capabilities, and on occasion the resolve to use them." He adds, "Not to rearm, not to engage in economic competition, to stay out of world affairs would be equally noble and insane".