After residents of Beech Grove, Indiana, hit their pillows Monday night and turned off their lights, their collective shuteye was over and done just after midnight when explosions, gunfire and low-flying helicopters were heard nearby.

Of course 911 calls flooded police dispatch lines, but some folks took to social media as well:


"Whole neighborhood was out bc we thought the world was ending," one resident tweeted. Some reported seeing people rappelling from helicopters.

No American has been more associated with the Navy SEAL mystique than Chris Kyle, known as the deadliest sniper in military history. His bestselling autobiography, American Sniper — a story of honor, glory, and quiet heroism — has sold more than a million copies. The movie adaptation became the highest-grossing war film in American history.

"All told," Kyle wrote in his book, "I would end my career as a SEAL with two Silver Stars and five Bronze [Stars], all for valor."

But Kyle, who was murdered by a fellow military veteran several years after leaving the Navy, embellished his military record, according to internal Navy documents obtained by The Intercept. During his 10 years of military service and four deployments, Kyle earned one Silver Star and three Bronze Stars with Valor, a record confirmed by Navy officials.

Kyle was warned at least once before American Sniper was published that its description of his medal count was wrong, according to one current Navy officer, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak about the case. As Kyle's American Sniper manuscript was distributed among SEALs, one of his former commanders, who was still on active duty, advised Kyle that his claim of having two Silver Stars was false, and he should correct it before his book was published.

Fear of escalating racial tensions may be why much of gun violence goes unaddressed in US society. A new analysis shows that African Americans constituted the majority of both casualties and perpetrators in 358 multiple shootings last year.

The Mass Shooting Tracker, a list of incidents where at least four people were injured by a gun in 2015, grabbed headlines late last year for showing an average of at least one "mass shooting" per day in the US. The data, gathered from web searches of news stories and collected on Reddit, an online news and social networking forum, along with information from the Gun Violence Archive, is part of a new analysis published in Sunday's edition of The New York Times.

The New York Times found that of the 358 such shootings last year, among the 67 percent of cases where the races of those involved was reported, three-fourths of the victims and three-fourths of the alleged shooters were black.

Traditionally, when the mass media reports on gun violence, it is following a massacre like the Charleston church shooting last year, where nine were killed. While the high-profile tragedy occurred in a black church with all victims being African-Americans, often the face for such events is the shooter's, usually white, and the dead, if covered as more than a statistic, are commonly seen as white as well, such as in most school shootings.

In one of the presidential campaign year's more grisly spectacles, protesters in New Mexico opposing Donald Trump's candidacy threw burning T-shirts, plastic bottles and other items at police officers, injuring several, and toppled trash cans and barricades.

Police responded by firing pepper spray and smoke grenades into the crowd outside the Albuquerque Convention Center.

During the rally, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee was interrupted repeatedly by protesters, who shouted, held up banners and resisted removal by security officers.

The banners included the messages "Trump is Fascist" and "We've heard enough."

Trump lashed back at protesters, tweeting Wednesday: "The protesters in New Mexico were thugs who were flying the Mexican flag. The rally inside was big and beautiful, but outside, criminals!"

Russian cargo planes airlifted 32.5 metric tons of humanitarian aid to the Islamist-besieged Syrian city of Deir ez-Zor, the Russian Defense Ministry said in a daily bulletin on its website.

Over the past week, the city had received an average of over 36 tons of humanitarian cargo, mostly food rations and cereals.

"Russian aircraft using parachute systems have delivered 32.5 tons of food products received from the UN to Deir ez-Zor, which had been besieged by Daesh militants," the ministry said Tuesday.

Russia has been supplying food, medicine and construction materials to besieged and hard-to-reach areas in Syria since the beginning of 2016.

Lorenzo Davis began working with Chicago's Independent Police Review Authority (IPRA) in 2008 as an investigator after 23 years with the Chicago Police Department. By July 2010, he was promoted to supervising investigator before moving up to deputy chief administrator in October 2011 and finally, chief administrator in February 2014.

Despite a long history with law enforcement and the IPRA, Davis is now suing the agency alleging that he was fired for not listening to his superiors when they commanded him to change his reports to favor officers accused of misconduct. Davis originally sued the city of Chicago, the IPRA Chief Administrator Scott Ando, and First Deputy Chief Administrator Steven Mitchell in a federal court. A federal judge dismissed that suit, claiming that Davis's first amendment rights were not violated because he was acting as a government agent not a private citizen. Davis is now suing the agency in Cook County Court.

Watching the mad, mad, mad, mad world that is the 2016 presidential campaign, I was trying to remember a presidential campaign that was as jaw-dropping, at least in my lifetime, and easily settled on 1968.

For those too young to remember, imagine: As fighting in Vietnam rages on and the Tet Offensive makes us all too aware of the futility of our Southeast Asian military fiasco, Minnesota Sen. Eugene McCarthy decides to run as an antiwar candidate against incumbent President Lyndon Johnson. Supported by an army of "Clean for Gene" college students knocking on doors and making phone calls, McCarthy does surprisingly well, and then New York Sen. Robert Kennedy gets into the race, too. Johnson makes a surprise announcement that he will not seek a second term in the White House and McCarthy and Kennedy duke it out in the primaries.

In the midst of all this, civil rights giant Martin Luther King Jr., is assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, and riots erupt across the cities of the United States. Two months later, Kennedy is murdered in the kitchen of a Los Angeles hotel just minutes after winning the California primary. In August, eight years after his defeat by John F. Kennedy, the Republicans bring back Richard Nixon as their presidential candidate and the Democrats select Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who has not run in a single primary, as their party's standard bearer. Simultaneously, a police riot against protesters outside the Democratic convention in Chicago leaves an indelible image of chaos, tear gas and blood. Nixon wins the election with a well-executed campaign set to the accompaniment of dog whistle signals against minorities and left-wing dissenters.

Oh, and one other thing — Alabama Gov. George Wallace, arch segregationist and race baiter, runs as the third-party candidate of the American Independent Party, campaigning as a rebel populist seeking the votes of the angry, white working class. He wins almost 10 million votes and carries five states in the South.

Catherine Hall

Catherine Hall withdraws from $330,000 prize due to Tel Aviv University's complicity in the occupation.

Famed British feminist historian Catherine Hall announced she will withdraw her acceptance of a prestigious award presented by Tel Aviv University for political reasons. Hall was awarded $330,000 by the Dan David Foundation, and was supposed to accept the award at a university ceremony held Sunday. The BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) movement called on her and other recipients to refuse the prize due to Tel Aviv University's complicity in the occupation.

In a surprise move, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week forced out his long-serving defence minister, Moshe Yaalon. As he stepped down, Mr Yaalon warned: "Extremist and dangerous elements have taken over Israel."

He was referring partly to his expected successor: Avigdor Lieberman, leader of the far-right Yisrael Beiteinu party, whose trademark outbursts have included demands to bomb Egypt and behead disloyal Palestinian citizens.

But Mr Yaalon was also condemning extremism closer to home, in Mr Netanyahu's Likud Party. Mr Yaalon is to take a break from politics. With fitting irony, his slot is to be filled on Likud's backbenches by Yehuda Glick, a settler whose goal to destroy Jerusalem's Al Aqsa mosque and replace it with a Jewish temple has the potential to set the Middle East on fire.

Israeli commentators pointed out that, with Mr Lieberman's inclusion, the government will be the most extreme in Israel's history - again.

French prime minister Manuel Valls, who began a visit to the region on Saturday, is likely to face an impregnable wall of government hostility as he tries to drum up interest in a French peace plan.

Michigan is rolling out a convoy of gasoline trucks as the state braces for a possible fuel shortage over the upcoming holiday weekend. The governor has declared an energy emergency, extending truckers' work hours to ensure gas supplies.

"We want to make sure the fuel Michiganders need for their travels to work, school or a long weekend trip is available," the office of Governor Rick Snyder (R) said in a statement as he issued Executive Order 2016-10. "This executive order will help ensure there are no artificial shortages of fuel impacting the state's residents or visitors."

The governor cited the shutdown of a fuel pipeline in Wisconsin and an unplanned outage of the Marathon refinery in Detroit as the two main reasons for the State of Energy Emergency in Michigan.