apnews.myway.com | Angry over civilian deaths, President Hamid Karzai announced plans Saturday to ban Afghan security forces from requesting international airstrikes on residential areas.

If he issues the decree as promised, the move would pose a significant new challenge to government troops who have relied heavily on foreign air power to give them an advantage against insurgents on the battlefield even as the U.S. and other countries prepare to end their combat mission in less than two years.

The declaration came as anger mounted over a joint Afghan-NATO operation this week that Afghan officials said killed 10 civilians, including women and children, in northeast Kunar province.

washingtonpost.com | President Obama is unlikely to shift his stance against the expansion of a U.S. role in Syria’s civil war, despite a death toll topping 60,000 and acknowledgment that key members of his national security staff favored a plan first proposed in June to arm the Syrian rebels.

U.S. officials said that the issue was shelved in October after an extended “red team” analysis by the CIA concluded that the limited-range weaponry the administration was comfortable providing would not have “tipped the scales” for the opposition.

A pilot who wrote a conspiracy theory book about 9/11 is dead after he shot his two teenage children and family dog before turning the gun on himself.

Relatives and friends of Phillip Marshall were stunned by the violent crime which took place in Calaveras County on Saturday.

Their bodies were discovered when friends of the teens went to the family home on Sandalwood Drive and looked through the windows, they could see 54-year-old Phillip Marshall lying on the floor in a pool of blood.

The former airline pilot's controversial conspiracy book The Big Bamboozle: 9/11 and the War on Terror was released last year. 

While he was writing it, Marshall believed that his life was in danger because of the allegations involved.

According to Santa Barbara View, during the editing and pre-marketing process of Marshall’s book, he expressed some degree of paranoia because the nonfiction work accused the George W. Bush administration of being in cahoots with the Saudi intelligence community in training the hijackers who died in the planes used in the attacks.

Was Phillip Marshall murdered for what he wrote in his book?  This possibility raises an important question for anyone covering this story, and that question is, "Will I be murdered for writing this?".  In light of that, I would just like to say for the record, I will never harm myself or my family, under any circumstances.  Should anything like that happen, you can be certain that I was in fact murdered.  

Phillip Marshall was interviewed on Coast To Coast AM on 9-08-12.

You can get his book at the Amazon Link Below.

investmentwatchblog.com | South Korea has deployed cruise missiles on the North Korean border, missiles that can hit targets anywhere in North Korea.

This came in a statement for journalists by an official of the South Korean Defence Ministry, Kim Min Sok.

According to him, Seoul will also speed up the development of ballistic missiles with an effective range of 800 kilometres and will set up a national missile defence system.

The statement came in the wake of Pyongyang’s underground nuclear test on the February 12. North Korea’s test has triggered bitter criticism from several countries, as well as the UN Security Council.

guardian.co.uk | A Nato air strike in eastern Afghanistan has killed 10 civilians, five of them children, and wounded five other children, Afghan officials said.

Civilian deaths in air strikes have been one of the most emotive and high-profile issues of the war in Afghanistan, although in recent years UN statistics show that the Taliban have caused the majority of civilian casualties.

If confirmed the latest deaths are likely to spark protests and renew tensions over civilian casualties between the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, and the Nato-led military coalition.

rtnews.com | Britain has lost 447 of its military drones in Iraq and Afghanistan. The aircraft have crashed, broken down or gone missing during operations, adding to international outrage over civilian deaths and debate over the safety of their use in Britain.

­The UK’s Ministry of Defence (MOD) has reported that the loss of 447 unmanned drones was due to technical faults, controller error or not wanting to remove them from volatile enemy areas, according to the Guardian newspaper.

Small handheld devices, large UAVs, and a missile-carrying drone were all lost in the last five years.