www.armytimes.com | The hunt for Osama bin Laden took nearly a decade. It could take even longer to uncover U.S. government emails, planning reports, photographs and more that would shed light on how an elite team of Navy SEALs killed the world’s most wanted terrorist.

Ten months after that electrifying covert mission, an administration that has pledged to be the most transparent in American history is refusing to release documents about it under the Freedom of Information Act. The records could provide insights into how bin Laden died, how the U.S. verified his identity and how it decided to bury him at sea, as well as photographs taken during and after the May 2011 raid on his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

www.telegraph.co.uk | Matan Vilnai, who is stepping down as home front defence minister to become ambassador to China, said the country was “ready as never before”.

“The assessments are for a war that will last 30 days on a number of fronts,” he told the Maariv newspaper.

“It could be that there will be less fatalities, but it could be there will be more, that is the scenario that we are preparing for according to the best experts.”

reuters.com | Syria's prime minister defected to the opposition seeking to overthrow what fleeing premier Riyad Hijab called the "terrorist regime" of President Bashar al-Assad, marking one of the highest profile desertions from Damascus.

Hijab, who like much of the opposition comes from Syria's Sunni Muslim majority, is not part of Assad's inner circle, but as the most senior serving civilian official to defect his departure dealt a heavy symbolic blow to an establishment rooted in the president's minority Alawite sect.

infowars.com | The tragic shooting at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, which is now being treated as an act of domestic terrorism by the federal government, is set to be blamed on a US Army veteran, fitting perfectly the narrative pushed by the Department of Homeland Security that veterans are a terror threat on a par with Islamic extremists.

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reuters.com | President Barack Obama has signed a secret order authorizing U.S. support for rebels seeking to depose Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his government, U.S. sources familiar with the matter said.

Obama's order, approved earlier this year and known as an intelligence "finding," broadly permits the CIA and other U.S. agencies to provide support that could help the rebels oust Assad.