Reports say Taliban claim it downed the C-130 transport plane carrying six US military personnel and five civilian contractors

An American C-130 transport plane has crashed at Jalalabad airport in Afghanistan, killing six crew members and five civilian contractors, a US military spokesman has said.

"The crew and passengers were killed," Col Brian Tribus said.

The Taliban claimed it shot down the Hercules aircraft, according to Agence France-Presse.


"Our mujahideen have shot down a four-engine US aircraft in Jalalabad," Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said on Twitter. "Based on credible information 15 invading forces and a number of puppet troops were killed."

The Taliban are known to make exaggerated battlefield claims, and the US military has so far not given details on the cause of the crash.

US officials said they were "confident" that the plane had not been shot down and that the incident, at about midnight local time on Thursday (1930 GMT), was under investigation.

Major Tony Wickman, of the 455th Air Expeditionary Wing at Bagram, said: "With high confidence, it does not appear at this time that enemy fire was involved in the aircraft crash. We have first responders on scene working at the crash site doing recovery operations. An investigation is underway to determine the cause of the accident."

The truth is, we don't even need to hear the gory details.

We don't need to know the shooter's name, his background, what psychotropic meds he was on. We don't need to know the victim's names and hear their harrowing tales recanted dramatically over and over on CNN, FOX, and MSNBC.

We don't have to wonder why the shooter is dead now. We know dead men tell no tales.

If you are wasting your time looking that close at what the right hand was doing, you already missed the sleight of hand magic trick in the left.

All that matters is that stories about Putin calling the U.S.'s bluff in Syria and airstriking of the very ISIS terrorists that the CIA trained, armed, and funded have been knocked off of the mainstream U.S. media's front page news in lieu of yet another curiously timed mass shooting.

Having brought chaos, lawlessness and terrorism into Libya and Iraq, the United States is now trying to do the same in Syria. Europe has become fed up with Washington's wrongdoings and says Russia should become a new world leader, Czech journalist Jiri Vyvadil wrote for newspaper Parlamentnilisty.cz.

The White House wants the Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad gone and will do whatever it takes to achieve its objective — even arm Islamic militants to fight against government troops, creating a civil war that resulted in millions of people fleeing the country to save their lives.

Washington's method of conducting foreign policy is to create chaos at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives and destroy entire countries in the name of US economic and political interests. However, the US has constantly failed at it — all of its wars in the last two decades have ended in a fiasco, but Washington still hasn't learned and keeps sticking to the same destructive policy which hasn't worked, the Czech newspaper said.

There is only one solution Vyvadil argues and that's to ditch the United States, as Washington has miserably failed as the leader of the international community.

A new Gallup poll has found that six in 10 Americans say that their trust in mass media ranges from "not very much" to "none at all." Those surveyed were asked about the media reporting the news fully, accurately and fairly.

Just 33 percent said they had a "fair amount" of trust in mass media such as newspapers, TV and radio, and only 7 percent had a "great deal" of trust and confidence that the mass media reports the news, according to a Gallup poll released this week.

Ten years ago, Gallup found an even split of 50/50 among Americans regarding their trust and lack of trust of the media. According to their poll results, the last time the majority of Americans trusted their media was 1976.

"Americans' trust level in the media has drifted downward over the past decade...Some of the loss in trust may have been self-inflicted," wrote Rebecca Riffkin, a Gallup analyst, in a statement.

"Major venerable news organizations have been caught making serious mistakes in the past several years, including the scandal involving former NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams in 2015 that some of his firsthand accounts of news events had been exaggerated or 'misremembered.'"

A video uploaded to Facebook yesterday afternoon, is causing serious backlash against the tactics being used by police to serve an arrest warrant.

As the video begins, several heavily armed men can be seen arresting a man who appeared to be fully compliant with their instructions. Within seconds this "typical" arrest would become yet another example of the incredulous behavior we so often see in the Police State.

As the camera pans upward, one of the men noticeably has his weapon trained on the man filming the incident. The man filming immediately asks them why they have a gun pointed in his direction, to which one paranoid cop replies, "So we don't get shot."

The man who uploaded the video, identified as Corterian Bay Wright, according to his Facebook page, responds by informing the militarized force that he was the one that brought the man being placed under arrest to the door. While having a shotgun aimed directly at him, he continues to plead with the heavily armed thugs to "Put the guns down."

After his requests go unheeded, Corterian informs the men that his fiancee (who is next to him) is pregnant. The man who has his weapon drawn responds in typical authoritarian manner, by trying to order him around on his own property. This smug response is no doubt an attempt to intimidate a man simply for exercising his rights to film the encounter.

The man kept the weapon trained on Corterian, even after the suspect being arrested was secured in a vehicle and the individuals who were witnessing the encounter had complied with demands to go back inside their house. When Corterian makes yet another polite request for the men to stop pointing his weapon at him, the men continue to bark orders for him to go upstairs. Corterian astutely recognizes the inherent ridiculousness of this order and responds simply "I ain't gotta go where you want me to go."

After several more moments of an intense "standoff" between the two men, the man finally relents and lowers his weapon.

This is what filming the police looks like in Police State USA.

Police are responding to reports of shooting outside of town hall in Inglis, Florida. Witnesses say there are multiple victims, according to local TV stations.

The Levy County Sheriff's office has confirmed that at least three have been shot dead and 1 airlifted to UF Health Shands Gainesville with serious injuries, TV 20 reports.

The LCSO has also said that the suspect is dead after shooting himself.

51-year-old Donald Gould, the homeless piano player who was seen in a viral video earlier this year, is filing a lawsuit against the city of Sarasota over the criminalization of homelessness. Gould says that the homeless population of the city is regularly harassed by police, banned from public places and are being forced out of the area by the local government.

"It's pretty much harassment - we are human beings for crying out loud," Gould told WTSP.

"Here they write you a citation then trespass you so you can't step on the property anymore and these are public places like the park, library," he added.

"Seems to be a criminal offense to be homeless in this city shouldn't be that way," Paul Lonardo, one of the other plaintiffs in the case said.

Andrea Mogensen, an attorney with the ACLU is helping to represent the homeless population of the city in the lawsuit, along with Gould and four other plaintiffs.

"The city has dumped the social problem of homelessness on the police power and asked the police department to move everyone out of the city and that is unconstitutional," Mogensen said.

According to the lawsuit, police issued citations to homeless people 608 times for lodging outdoors and 274 times for trespassing.

Sarasota Police Chief Bernadette DiPino says that the officers are ticketing and arresting homeless people for their own good.

More than 200 refugees engaged in a mass brawl in a shelter in the German city of Hamburg, leaving several people injured in a third such incident in Germany this week.

A scuffle between two large groups of Syrians and Afghanis broke out in a crowded refugee center in Hamburg on Wednesday and lasted all through the day till late night, according to local media.

The groups were attacking each other with iron bars and wooden pieces of furniture as well as were throwing rocks. The refugees have also set a dustbin on fire.

Four people were injured in the clashes. Two teenagers, 16, suffered lacerated head wounds with one 18 year old man and a member of a security service being also injured, the German newspaper Bild reports, citing police sources.

Police had to bring in as many as 50 officers to take the situation under control and managed to stop the fighting by 2 a.m. with the police patrols still present at the scene on Thursday morning. The investigators are now questioning the witnesses.

According to police reports, the causes of the brawl are yet not clear, with no arrests made so far.

One more scuffle occurred on Wednesday in another Hamburg's shelter, Bild reports. A quarrel between refugees broke out when one of them accused his neighbor of stealing his mobile phone. As a result, four people were arrested including the suspected thief, but later they were released.

The two scuffles in Hamburg were just the latest in a series of brawls in German refugee centers.

On Sunday, 300 Albanians clashed with 70 Pakistanis in a shelter in the town of Kassel-Calden in the German region of Hessen after two refugees had brawled over the dispensation of food. 14 people including three police officers were injured in that fighting, as reported by the German media.

He called them his grandmas.

The Rev. Alex Orozco befriended the elderly women shortly after his assignment to St. Rose of Lima parish in Short Hills.

Orozco was a new priest, charming and kind and afire with enthusiasm.

And always, it seemed, willing to accept money, parishioners said.

For a car. For a big-screen TV. For a house in the Poconos. For another house in his native Colombia. For credit card bills. For a second car. For plane tickets. For furniture. For dental work.

From 2013 through the end of last year, Orozco allegedly took more than $250,000 in cash and goods from women in the wealthy parish after telling them hard-luck stories about the financial woes afflicting him, his family members and his friends.

The case has sparked a criminal investigation by the Essex County Prosecutor's Office and has raised broader questions about the limits on what clergymen should accept from generous parishioners and whether some of those transactions rise to the level of fraud or theft.

According to an unofficial count conducted by Ozymandias Media, an independent research group, a dog is shot by law enforcement every 98 minutes.

In an investigative report, it was discovered that a single police department in Buffalo, NY, shot 92 dogs in less than three years. In Southwest Florida, the News-Press discovered 111 instances of dog shootings among multiple agencies between 2009 and 2012, representing about 37 per year. According to the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Police shot approximately 90 dogs per year between 2008 and 2013.

It is an undisputed fact that cops frequently kill dogs.

Video after gruesome video, pop up online showing how police often and without hesitation pull the trigger and kill man's best friend. Every so often, however, a compassionate officer will show restraint and refuse to kill the beloved family pet.