In the 24 hours since the tragic death of journalist and author Michael Hastings was first reported on Tuesday, those who knew him, worked with him, and covered his work have offered numerous remembrances of the man best known for his Polk Award-winning Rolling Stone piece, "The Runaway General."


That article, which presented a dim view of the U.S. strategy in the Afghanistan war and exposed a military command structure working to actively undermine its civilian leadership, also contained several accounts of less-than-professional behavior and comments by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the International Security Assistance Force commander, the disclosure of which led to McChrystal tendering his resignation in June 2010.

Americans take to streets, Internet to demand feds stop spying on citizensAmericans outraged by the federal government's spying programs took to the streets on Independence Day for "Restore the Fourth" protests in an estimated 100 American cities, including New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, Seattle, Memphis and Miami, plus international cities such as London and Munich.

The "Restore the Fourth" national protest was named after the Fourth Amendment, which was intended to protect Americans against "unreasonable searches and seizures."

The NSA's PRISM online surveillance program was exposed by Edward Snowden only weeks ago. Americans soon learned that at least nine Internet companies reportedly submitted to government surveillance of their servers: Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Facebook, PalTalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL and Apple.

"Restore the Fourth," initially organized on Reddit, describes itself as "a non-partisan, unaffiliated group of concerned citizens who seek to strengthen the Fourth Amendment with respect to digital surveillance by the U.S. government."

Dozens of Fourth of July celebrants were injured Thursday night in a "fireworks mishap" at a Simi Valley, Calif., park, authorities said.

The injury count changed multiple times over the course of a quickly developing breaking news story. As of 11:30 p.m., 28 people were reported injured, Ventura County Fire Department spokesman Mike Lindberry told reporters at the scene.

Of those 28 victims, 20 were transported to the hospital -- 16 suffered minor injuries, four suffered moderate to severe injuries, Lindberry said. Eight people were treated and released on scene.

Initial injury counts reported 20 people were hurt then that figure was revised to 14 before Lindberry detailed those hurt in the explosion.

Between 8,000 and 10,000 people were expected to attend the Independence Day celebration Thursday night.

Witnesses said the professional fireworks show lasted just a few minutes before the huge explosion went off.

"We saw about three minutes of the show. There was some that went up in the area and everything just kind of scattered outwards and then everybody just started running," a witness told NBC4.

"Everything exploded and parts came flying everywhere," another witness told NBC4. "People were running everywhere. So, it was pretty scary."

Many high-profile websites have used US Independence Day to take part in an online protest against the NSA's surveillance of internet use, including email and web browsing history.

Organisations such as Mozilla, WordPress and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), as well as websites such as 4chan, Reddit and the Cheezburger network will be prominently featuring Fourth Amendment imagery throughout their pages. The US's Fourth Amendment protects against "unreasonable searches and seizures".

The protest, which has been organised by the Internet Defense League, will include pop-up banners promoting the Fourth Amendment as well as blog posts from many of the sites involved.

As people gathered around Boston's Old State House to hear the reading of the Declaration of Independence in celebration of the Fourth of July, protesters carrying signs stood along the barricaded area, denouncing recently-revealed secret government surveillance programs.

Spurred by the revelations about the National Security Agency's surveillance activities, about 25 activists gathered at the 9:30 a.m. Restore the Fourth rally.

The release of government documents by former NSA contractor Edward J. Snowden, who is believed to somewhere in a Moscow airport, has sparked protests from various groups and outrage from the Obama administration, which is seeking to prosecute him on espionage and government theft charges. The documents were first published last month by the British newspaper The Guardian. Since the release, President Barack Obama, as well as members of Congress and intelligence officials have told citizens that they are not the target of the agency's surveillance.

Actress Shannon Guess Richardson, who has appeared in very small roles on "The Walking Dead" and "The Vampire Diaries," has been charged with allegedly sending letters laced with the poison Ricin to President Obama and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The indictment formally charges Richardson, 35, with one count of threatening the President of the United States along with two counts of mailing a threatening communication. Federal prosecutors say the actress and mother of five was attempting to frame her estranged husband.

The actress, from New Boston, Texas, was arrested June 7 and faces up to five years in prison on each of the charges, the Justice Department said in a statement. Tonda Curry, Richardson's court-appointed attorney, did not respond to requests for comment.

If population levels continue to rise at the current rate, our grandchildren will see the Earth plunged into an unprecedented environmental crisis, argues computational scientist Stephen Emmott in this extract from his book Ten Billion

Earth is home to millions of species. Just one dominates it. Us. Our cleverness, our inventiveness and our activities have modified almost every part of our planet. In fact, we are having a profound impact on it. Indeed, our cleverness, our inventiveness and our activities are now the drivers of every global problem we face. And every one of these problems is accelerating as we continue to grow towards a global population of 10 billion. In fact, I believe we can rightly call the situation we're in right now an emergency - an unprecedented planetary emergency.

We humans emerged as a species about 200,000 years ago. In geological time, that is really incredibly recent. Just 10,000 years ago, there were one million of us. By 1800, just over 200 years ago, there were 1 billion of us. By 1960, 50 years ago, there were 3 billion of us. There are now over 7 billion of us. By 2050, your children, or your children's children, will be living on a planet with at least 9 billion other people. Some time towards the end of this century, there will be at least 10 billion of us. Possibly more.

We got to where we are now through a number of civilisation- and society-shaping "events", most notably the agricultural revolution, the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution and - in the West - the public-health revolution. By 1980, there were 4 billion of us on the planet. Just 10 years later, in 1990, there were 5 billion of us. By this point initial signs of the consequences of our growth were starting to show. Not the least of these was on water. Our demand for water - not just the water we drank but the water we needed for food production and to make all the stuff we were consuming - was going through the roof. But something was starting to happen to water.

A gun report ordered in by Obama has ended up highlighting the fact that legal guns are actually saving lives and diffusing crime.

In a recent study orchestrated by the CDC and carried out by the Institute of Medicine and National Research Council, it was found that individuals involved in violent crimes who defended themselves using techniques other than carrying a gun were more likely to be injured when compared to those who were carrying a concealed firearm.

All-in-all, the Obama ordered report ended up finding more pros than cons in regards to the right to an open or concealed weapon. The report also reminds us of the numerous causes of gun deaths, citing thatmost gun deaths are at the hands of those who used a gun for their suicide - not homicide. The report highlights the poor state of America's suffering mental health. The report states that suicide by guns outweighs the amount of deaths caused by violent crimes by 61%.

I recently conducted an interview with Representative Joe Carr from Tennessee on this very issue:

West St. Louis County - Strange circles and symbols are taking shape along interstate 44. It's enough to cause some phone calls from curios Google map users.

"We've had similar calls and we've explained that what you're seeing from the sky is some of our experimental treatments," says Tiffany Knight, PhD an Associate Professor of Biology with Washington University.

What some might suspect is from a UFO is really from a university, as in, Washington University at the Tyson Research Center.

That's a 2,000 acre outdoor laboratory for ecosystem studies.

"So you don't necessarily think of aloes as living in Missouri but they do," says Knight. "We have cacti living in there."

"Really?" asks Patrick Clark.

"We have those that are native to Missouri in our glades," adds Knight. "So we do get some of these almost desert like plant and animal species."

Opposition plans large-scale demonstrations on Sunday, with some hoping army may step in to facilitate transition of power

Egypt is holding its breath for mass demonstrations to mark the first anniversary of President Mohamed Morsi's election on Sunday, amid speculation the army might intervene in the event of large-scale civil unrest.

Opposition activists claim an unverifiable 15 million Egyptians have signed a petition demanding Morsi's removal, and expect a significant proportion of that number to take to the streets on 30 June. There have already been outbreaks of fighting in two cities, where Morsi's still-sizeable support base has launched counter-protests. As a result, many opposition actors hope the army, who deployed armoured vehicles on Cairo's streets on Wednesday, will be forced to intervene and facilitate a transition of power.

A senior military source told the Guardian on Thursday that the army did not want to intervene. But they stated that if Sunday's protests were as widespread and prolonged as those that drove Egypt's 2011 uprising, and if serious fighting broke out between Morsi's supporters and his opponents, then the army may regard the protests as a more legitimate representation of the people's will than the elections that brought Morsi to office a year ago - and would step in to facilitate a transition of power to a technocratic caretaker government.

The eventual scale of the protests nevertheless remains uncertain, and could yet prove highly exaggerated. But some of Morsi's opponents are convinced 30 June will be as pivotal as the 2011 uprising that toppled Hosni Mubarak.