ABUJA, Nigeria - A car bomb tore through the United Nations' main office in Nigeria's capital Friday, flattening one wing of the building and leaving an unknown number of people dead. - A U.N. official in Geneva confirmed to CBS News that it was a bomb attack, and a Nigerian security official told Reuters news agency it was the result of a car bomb. "I saw scattered bodies," said Michael Ofilaje, a UNICEF worker at the building. "Many people are dead." He said it felt like "the blast came from the basement and shook the building." A medical worker at the scene told Reuters at least 10 people were killed and local media said as many as 40 more were injured, but the death toll was not immediately confirmed by officials and many more victims could still be buried by rubble.

In what amounts to a fight over who gets to write the history of the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath, the Central Intelligence Agency is demanding extensive cuts from the memoir of a former FBI agent who spent years near the center of the battle against Al Qaeda [the CIA]. The agent, Ali H. Soufan, argues in the book that the CIA missed a chance to derail the 2001 plot by withholding from the F.B.I. information about two future 9/11 hijackers living in San Diego, according to several people who have read the manuscript. And he gives a detailed, firsthand account of the CIA's move toward brutal treatment in its interrogations, saying the harsh methods torture used on the agency's first important captive, Abu Zubaydah, were unnecessary and counterproductive.

Jason Ditz: CIA’s Onerous Cuts Into Agent’s 9/11 Book Include Public Testimony

The British government has taken another step to violate the UN resolution, as its Special Forces are revealed to be on the ground in Libya to hunt for fugitive Libyan ruler Muammar Gaddafi. - According to the Daily Telegraph, soldiers from 22 SAS Regiment started leading Libyan opposition fighters after being ordered in by Prime Minister David Cameron. Defence sources admitted that SAS soldiers have been in Libya for several weeks. Adding they had been sent to the country to direct air strikes on major military targets and have been ordered to aid Libyan opposition forces on the ground to find Gaddafi. As a £1 million bounty was proposed on Gaddafi's head, the British soldiers, who dressed in Arab citizen clothes and holding revolutionary forces weapons, have been ordered to look for Libya's falling dictator.

Washington Post: Bodies scattered around Libya’s capital raise specter of mass killings
William Bowles: What is going on in Libya?

Italy has promised Libya's opposition it will transfer over millions of dollars in frozen Gaddafi assets. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi made the pledge at a meeting with the rebels' leader. Also up for discussion were lucrative oil contracts for the future. RT's Sara Firth reports from Milan.

Al Jazeera: US-NATO nations set to reap spoils of Libya war
New York Times: The Scramble for Access to Libya's Oil Wealth Begins

Global Research correspondent Mahdi Nazemroaya, who is stationed in a central Tripoli hotel with the international press, says the journalists are being targeted by the rebels and the NATO forces that support them. While he is speaking to RT, shooting can be heard. “They are specifically targeting the areas where international journalists are, to sow panic here,” he argued. “NATO has done all the heavy work. This is a NATO war. They heavily bombed cities west of [Tripoli], they’ve bombed all night, without even 10 seconds of stopping. They have bombed this entire city and NATO landed the insurgents on the coast of Tripoli.” But the city’s defenders are not pessimistic, continues Nazemroaya. “The situation has gone tenser,” said Nazemroaya. “More members of the hotel staff have returned with guns. Obviously they have been fighting. These are volunteers, not soldiers. They returned with a picture which is not a picture of loss and they are confident.”

Finian Cunningham: Killing the Truth: Western Mainstream Media Complicit in NATO War Crimes in Libya

The death of a Palestinian during the latest round of Israeli attack on the Gaza Strip has raised to 11 the total number of the fatalities caused by Tel Aviv in the besieged enclave over the past 24 hours. - On Thursday, Israeli airstrikes against the coastal sliver claimed the life of a Gaza resident, a Press TV correspondent reported, without specifying the site of the death. Reports noted that two Palestinians were killed during Israeli military aircraft's attacks against different areas across Gaza, including the Toffah and al-Zeytoon neighborhoods located respectively in the east and southeast of the Gaza City in the north of the impoverished sliver. On Wednesday, Israel launched a series of pre-dawn attacks across the Gaza Strip that continued into the early hours of Thursday, killing six people and wounding 30 others.

Stephen Lendman: Palestinian Right of Self-Defense
Tammy Obeidallah: Another Attack on Gaza: 'Retaliation' or Genocide?
PCHR: Weekly Report On Israeli Human Rights Violations in Occupied Palestine

Kandahar - Ahmed Omed Khpulwak was among at least 22 killed, mostly civilians, during a two-pronged militant attack on government buildings in Uruzgan province last month. - An independent investigation has now found he appeared to have been shot dead by American weapons after the attackers were already dead. The BBC has asked the Nato-led coalition to investigate his death and the findings of that formal inquiry are expected to be released soon. Khpulwak, 25, was a reporter for the BBC Pashto service and had done freelance work for The Daily Telegraph. He was working in the office of state broadcaster RTA in the town of Tarin Kowt on July 28 when a suicide car bomb blew up outside and two attackers rushed in. The compound was counter attacked soon after by American special forces soldiers and the two suicide bombers blew themselves up. According to an investigation by the Afghanistan Analysts' Network, an independent Kabul-based research group, Khpulwak may have survived the initial assault only to be shot by coalition forces clearing the building.

Tanks reportedly open fire on protesters in Deir ez-Zour a day after at least 17 killed across the country. - Syrian government tanks have resumed shelling in the town of Deir ez-Zour a day after at least 17 protesters were reportedly killed across the country, activists said. Syrian security forces stormed the area of al-Busaira in Deir ez-Zour on Thursday amid heavy gunfire, conducting house-to-house searches, said the Local Co-ordinating Committees of Syria (LCC), a group of activists representing provinces across the country. "Initial reports by residents describe tens of tanks firing randomly as they stormed the town at dawn. Shuhail has been very active in protests and the regime is using overwhelming force to frighten the people," activists said.

In another incident, the LCC said masked Syrian security force members and masked pro-regime shabiha militiamen attacked Ali Ferzat, Syria's best-known satirical cartoonist, at the capital's Ummayad square while he was returning to his home. "The attackers stole the contents of his briefcase, including his drawings and other personal belongings," the LCC's Omar Idlbi said in a statement. "He was beaten hard, notably on his hands. Passersby found him on the road to the airport and he was taken to hospital," he said.

Jason Ditz: At Least 16 Killed as Syrian Troops Launch New Crackdowns

ISLAMABAD, Aug 26 (Reuters) - Flash floods triggered by monsoon rains wiped out a village in northwest Pakistan, killing at least 33 people, a government official said on Friday. - Rescue officials were looking for survivors after at least 63 people went missing when heavy rains on Wednesday night caused a river to burst its banks in the remote Kohistan district in the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province.

"We have recovered 33 bodies and the search is on for the remaining missing persons," the area's top administrator Imtiaz Hussain Shah told Reuters. "It is just one area in the whole district that has been hit by sudden strong torrents after heavy downpour lashed the area and swept away some 25 to 30 houses scattered over the village."

Last year, monsoon rains caused the worst floods in Pakistan's history, with the country's northwestern areas among the worst hit. The Nation: Kohistan floods: 63 people missing, 33 dead bodies recovered

New York has declared a state of emergency as hundreds of thousands of Americans were on Thursday night told to evacuate their homes in anticipation of Hurricane Irene. - States of emergency were also declare in North Carolina, Virginia and New Jersey. In New Jersey’s Cape May County, as many as 750,000 people were last night told to evacuate. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg ordered the evacuation of hospitals and other vulnerable institutions in the most low-lying areas of New York City, as New York state declared a state of emergency. Projections suggested that Irene would become the first hurricane to directly strike the US mainland since 2008, when Ike killed more than 50 people and caused about $30 billion (£18 billion) in damage.

The Department of Homeland Security has gone after California domain name registrar Dynadot, using a clause within the USA PATRIOT Act to demand the company hand over any and all information they have on WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange. - The sealed order (PDF) cites an ongoing criminal investigation and demands that the company hand over everything it has on any subscribers “associated with WikiLeaks,” including their credit card numbers. The Obama Administration has been attempting to find some sort of legal rationale for moving against Assange, albeit so far without success. WikiLeaks has released massive numbers of classified documents revealing embarrassing and sometimes criminal actions by State Department officials. A number of other documents have been released detailing military crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. The PATRIOT Act provisions are nominally aimed at terrorism, and its use against WikiLeaks underscores the Obama Administration’s willingness to expand its use wherever it may be convenient.

John Glaser: WikiLeaks Publishes Tens of Thousands More Cables

LONDON — British officials and representatives of Twitter, Facebook and BlackBerry met Thursday to discuss voluntary ways to limit or restrict the use of social media "to combat crime and periods of civil unrest" [sic!], while trying to dodge [the correct] charges of hypocrisy and censorship that trailed Prime Minister David Cameron’s call to restrict use of the networks after this month’s riots.

“You do not want to be on a list with the countries that have cracked down on social media during the Arab Spring,” said Jo Glanville, the editor of Index on Censorship, a magazine that campaigns for freedom of expression, noting that such actions could “undermine democracy.”

If you've not yet read the recent piece by Bradley Keoun and Phil Kuntz of Bloomberg News, "Wall Street Aristocracy Got $1.2 Trillion in Fed’s Secret Loans," please go read the whole thing. The report hits many of my favorite sweet-spots. By far the most important is the fact that, for all the reporting on the Troubled Asset Relief Program and the way every picayune repayment is worthy of an excited press release from the Department of the Treasury, the underreported story of the bailout remains the trillions of taxpayer dollars that the Federal Reserve has disbursed to major financial institutions in an attempt to make them whole, making the TARP just an overhyped sliver of the entire bailout.

MarketWatch: Fallout from the Fed’s secret $1.2 trillion bank bailout

Barry Grey: Fed secretly loaned trillions to big banks - The US Federal Reserve Board secretly handed out trillions of dollars in virtually free loans to major American and European banks at the height of the financial crisis between 2007 and 2010, according to an article posted Sunday by Bloomberg News. The article, based on an independent investigation carried out by Bloomberg of previously sealed Federal Reserve documents, is headlined "Wall Street Aristocracy Got $1.2 Trillion in Loans from Fed." The amount cited in the headline is somewhat misleading, as it refers only to the highest single-day amount of outstanding Fed loans under seven emergency programs the US central bank launched to cover the bad debts of the Wall Street elite. The $1.2 trillion figure is undoubtedly lower than the total amount in loans disbursed over the course of the programs' existence, including loans to banks that came to the Fed for money multiple times. The amounts involved were far greater than the cash injections provided the banks under the US Treasury's $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). Under that program, the ten biggest US banks received a total of $160 billion in cash, while, according to Bloomberg, they obtained $669 billion in emergency loans from the Fed.

Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul says he's the Rodney Dangerfield of U.S. politics, griping recently that he gets no respect from the media in terms of coverage even after finishing a close second to Michele Bachmann in the often game-changing Iowa straw poll. - The media, Paul said at the time, "is frightened by me challenging the status quo and the establishment." But with this week's latest Gallup poll showing the libertarian pulling ahead of Bachmann and gaining on frontrunners Rick Perry and Mitt Romney, Americans are beginning to sit up and take notice of the 12-term Texas congressman who's considered the intellectual godfather of the Tea Party movement. The Gallup survey has Paul running within two points of U.S. President Barack Obama. Mitt Romney, by comparison, runs two points ahead of Obama, while Rick Perry is tied. In a Rasmussen poll, Paul trails the president by just one percentage point. And in a Pew Research poll released Thursday, Paul also nudged ahead of Bachmann to place fourth in a survey that asked Republican voters what candidate they'd prefer. Pizza magnate Herman Cain, whose fortunes have fallen significantly in recent weeks, was third behind Perry and Romney.

The Week: Ron Paul trails Obama by 2 points in the latest Gallup poll - Time to take Ron Paul seriously
Justin Raimondo: Defeating the Tyranny of the ‘Conventional Wisdom’

Daily Caller: Ron Paul on Libya: ‘Victory for Empire, but loss for American Republic’ - GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul today denounced the United States intervention in Libya, criticizing the operation as unconstitutional and costly. “The current situation in Libya may be a short term victory for Empire, but it is a loss for our American Republic,” Paul wrote. “And, I fear it may be devastating to the Libyan people.”