Both pilots safely ejected from the plane that moments later crashed into a residential area in Virginia Beach.

Seven people have been reported injured in the incident. US Navy Captain Mark Weisgerber blamed a "catastrophic mechanical malfunction" for the crash. Commander Rosi from the US Navy said the aircrew of the plane, which belonged to the VFA-106 strike fighter squadron based in Oceana, have been taken to a nearby hospital. They, as well as five other people admitted to local hospitals are not in life-threatening condition.

Witnesses said two apartment buildings near the crash site were on fire, and rescue workers searched for potential casualties. Military police was also on site. Interstate 264 has been closed down. Thick black smoke could be seen rising from the scene. Officials say three people remain unaccounted for as rescue workers searched the damaged apartment complex.

One of the first people on the scene told CBS news that he helped move one of the pilots to a safe distance from the blaze. According to the witness, the pilot was conscious and apologized profusely for crashing into the apartment complex. Reports also suggest at least one apartment building has burnt down completely. Overall, at least 5 buildings and 20 apartment units have been affected by the fire. Several people have also claimed the fighter jet was seen dumping fuel just before the crash, in order to avoid an explosion upon impact.

Raw Story: Navy jet crashes into Virginia apartment building
LA Times: Navy jet crash witness reports: Aircraft 'dropped out of the sky'

Citizens for Legitimate Government - Holy coincidence, Batman! Navy held recent drill to prepare for 'exact' events of Va. crash 06 Apr 2012 The US Navy held a drill on 15 December to prepare for the 'exact' situation that took place Friday, regarding the F/A-18 Navy jet crash. (No link, Fox News, 7PM ET live broadcast)

From the air, the terrain of the Department of Energy’s Nevada National Security Site, with its arid high plains and remote mountain peaks, has the look of northwest Iran. The site, some sixty-five miles northwest of Las Vegas, was once used for nuclear testing, and now includes a counterintelligence training facility and a private airport capable of handling Boeing 737 aircraft. It’s a restricted area, and inhospitable—in certain sections, the curious are warned that the site’s security personnel are authorized to use deadly force, if necessary, against intruders. ■ It was here that the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) conducted training, beginning in 2005, for members of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, a dissident Iranian opposition group known in the West as the M.E.K. The M.E.K. had its beginnings as a Marxist-Islamist student-led group and, in the nineteen-seventies, it was linked to the assassination of six American citizens. It was initially part of the broad-based revolution that led to the 1979 overthrow of the Shah of Iran. But, within a few years, the group was waging a bloody internal war with the ruling clerics, and, in 1997, it was listed as a foreign terrorist organization by the State Department.

Richard Silverstein: Seymour Hersh: U.S. Trains and Facilitates MEK Terror Attacks in Iran - When is a terrorist not a terrorist? When he’s OUR terrorist.

Obama’s unprecedented war on whistleblowers
- Former CIA officer John Kiriakou (L) and
Bradley Manning (Credit: AP/Salon.com)

A former CIA officer who expressed public doubts over the use of waterboarding as an interrogation technique was indicted Thursday on charges that he leaked classified secrets to journalists, including the role of an associate who worked with him on a covert mission to track down and capture a top al-Qaida figure.

The indictment of John C. Kiriakou, returned by a federal grand jury in Alexandria, Va., is part of an aggressive ongoing Justice Department crackdown on leakers and is one of a half-dozen such cases opened during the Obama administration. The five-count indictment charges Kiriakou, who was arrested in January, with divulging to journalists the role of an associate who participated in the capture of suspected al-Qaida financier Abu Zubaydah in the months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The officer’s participation in that mission was classified.

Bill Van Auken: Obama Justice Department indicts ex-CIA agent for exposing torture - Thursday’s indictment of John Kiriakou for exposing CIA torture of detainees confirms yet again that the Obama administration is continuing and deepening the crimes carried out by the Bush White House. Kiriakou, a CIA agent for 14 years, is being prosecuted for speaking to two journalists about the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah. In December 2007, he appeared in an ABC News interview, becoming the first CIA official to confirm the use of waterboarding of so-called “enemy combatants” and to describe the practice as torture. It is now known that Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in the space of one month while being held in a series of CIA “black sites” from Thailand to Poland to Diego Garcia. Zubaydah, severely wounded when he was captured by US and Pakistani intelligence agents, had already been suffering the effects of a shrapnel wound to the head he received during the CIA-backed war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Under US control, he was beaten, placed in extreme temperatures, and subjected to music played at debilitating volumes, sexual humiliation and sleep deprivation. His interrogators also locked him for protracted periods in a small box, where he was forced to crouch in complete darkness, while the stressful position caused his wounds to open up and bleed. At some point during this ordeal, the CIA removed Zubaydah’s left eye.

Viktor Bout, the Russian arms dealer who was once dubbed the "Merchant of Death", has been handed the minimum possible sentence of 25 years in prison by a New York judge after being convicted on terrorism charges. - Bout's sentencing on Thursday marked the culmination of a sting operation, carried out by the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in Thailand in 2008, in which US informers posed as potential arms buyers for Colombia's FARC rebels. Bout, 45, was arrested in Bangkok in 2008 and subsequently extradited to New York where he was convicted last year. Prosecutors had called for him to be jailed for life, portraying the former Soviet army officer as one of the world's most notorious and unscrupulous arms dealers.

Stephen Lendman: Viktor Bout: Victimized by US Injustice - On February 17, 2010, the US Justice Department indicted Bout and Richard Ammar Chichakli "for allegedly conspiring to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act ("IEEPA") stemming from their efforts to purchase two aircraft from companies located in the United States, in violation of economic sanctions which prohibited such financial transactions."

Right now, the US Congress is sneaking in a new law that gives them big brother spy powers over the entire web -- and they're hoping the world won't notice. We helped stop their Net attack last time, let's do it again.

Over 100 Members of Congress are backing a bill (CISPA) that would give private companies and the US government the right to spy on any of us at any time for as long as they want without a warrant. This is the third time the US Congress has tried to attack our Internet freedom. But we helped beat SOPA, and PIPA -- and now we can beat this new Big Brother law.

Our global outcry has played a leading role in protecting the Internet from governments eager to monitor and control what we do online. Let's stand together once again -- and beat this law for good. Sign the PETITION then forward to everyone who uses the Internet! [Collage]

Members of the US Congress: As concerned global citizens, we urge you to immediately drop the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA). Our democracy and civil liberties are under threat from the excessive and unnecessary Internet surveillance powers it grants. The Internet is a crucial tool for people around the world to exchange ideas and work collectively to build the world we all want. We urge you to show true global leadership and do all you can to protect our Internet freedom.

Stephen Lendman: Draconian Cybersecurity Bills

Günter Grass Poem Attacking Israel for Threatening Iran Is Condemned in Germany. - A new poem by the German Nobel laureate Günter Grass depicting Israel’s undeclared nuclear might as a threat to world peace drew wide condemnation from Jewish groups and commentators in Germany on Wednesday, showing the strength of enduring taboos in German public discourse about Israel more than six decades after the Holocaust. In the poem, titled “What Must Be Said,” Mr. Grass, 84, asks why he has remained silent about Israel’s nuclear might — which Israel has never publicly confirmed — and concludes that he had been constrained by a broader fear of being judged an anti-Semite.

Günter Grass/Süddeutsche Zeitung: Was gesagt werden muss
Günter Grass/3satMediathek: Widerrufen werde ich auf keinen Fall - Video
Stephen Lendman: Günter Grass Addresses Israel's Nuclear Threat
Gilad Atzmon: Art of Resistance – a comment on Günter Grass
Ulrich Rippert: Defend Günter Grass!

Russia Today: Israel slams Nobel Prize-winner over 'anti-nuke' poem
Wayne Madsen: Günter Grass now being flayed by the "anti-Semitism" noise machine - Israelis and Jews condemn Grass's poem. Fat Abe Foxman joins in by belching forth some worn-out canards through his half-chewed corned beef on rye.

Israel issued tenders to build hundreds of new apartments in eastern Jerusalem and the West Bank. - Israel's Construction and Housing Ministry on Tuesday reportedly published tenders for 632 units in the eastern Jerusalem neighborhood of Har Homa; 180 units in Givat Zeev, located to the north of Jerusalem in the West Bank; and 69 in Katzrin on the Golan Heights. A ministry spokesman told the French news agency AFP that the tenders are not new, although anti-settlement activists said it was the first time the orders were made public.

Stephen Lendman: Israel Plans Theft of 10% More West Bank Land

Israeli violations of international law and humanitarian law in the OPT continued during the reporting period (29 March – 04 April 2012)

Shooting: During the reporting period, IOF killed 3 Palestinians, including a civilian and a child, in the Gaza Strip. A 4th civilian died of a previous wound in the West Bank. Additionally, 73 civilians, including 18 children were wounded by IOF in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. ■ In the Gaza Strip, IOF killed a Palestinian civilian and wounded 40 others, including 16 children, during the dispersion of peaceful demonstrations organized in commemoration of the 36th anniversary of the Palestinian Land Day. ■ On 31 March 2012, IOF killed a Palestinian in the central Gaza Strip. The claimed that he was armed and was digging near the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel. ■ On 03 April 2012, IOF killed a Palestinian child near the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel. ■ On 02 April 2012, , Israeli aircrafts dropped leaflets in the border areas in the north of Beit Lahia town in the northern Gaza Strip, warning the Palestinian population of getting close to the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel. The leaflets included a threat that IOF would violently respond to an attempt to get as close as to 300 meters from the border, and that “whoever attempts to get close to the border would be driven away by all means, including shooting.” The leaflets were concluded by the phrase “he who warns is executed.” The leaflets included also maps of the Gaza Strip, and warnings related to firing home-made rockets by Palestinian resistance groups. ■ In the West Bank, IOF wounded 33 civilians, including two children, during the dispersion of peaceful demonstrations organized in commemoration of the 36th anniversary of the Palestinian Land Day and in protest to the construction of the annexation wall and settlement activities. ■ On 02 April 2012, a Palestinian civilian dies of a previous wound he had sustained on 27 March 2012 during an Israeli incursion into Rammoun village, northeast of Ramallah.

An avalanche smashed into a Pakistani army base on a Himalayan glacier along the Indian border on Saturday, burying around 100 soldiers, the military said. - Helicopters, sniffer dogs and troops were deployed to the remote Siachen Glacier to rescue those trapped, according to a military statement. Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, the army spokesman, said he had no word on whether any people had survived the avalanche. The avalanche hit a battalion headquarters in the glacier’s Gayari sector at 5:45 a.m, according to a security official who didn’t give his name because he is not an official spokesman. Siachen is on the northern tip of the divided Kashmir region claimed by both India and Pakistan. Both countries station thousands of troops there, who brave viciously cold temperatures, altitude sickness and high winds for months at a time. Troops have been deployed at elevations of up to 6,700 metres (22,000 feet) and have skirmished intermittently since 1984, though the area has been quiet since a cease-fire in 2003. The glacier is known as the world’s highest battlefield.

Hungary's new anti-vagrancy laws — the toughest in Europe — now mean that homeless people sleeping on the street can face police fines or even the possibility of jail time. - Advocacy and human-rights groups are alarmed by the new efforts to crack down on and effectively criminalize homelessness, where the ranks of the needy have increased during the country's dire financial crisis. Debt, joblessness and poverty are on the rise. The country's bonds have been downgraded to "junk" status, and the nation's currency, the forint, has dropped sharply against the euro.

Thousands of mostly young people have taken to the streets of Athens following the suicide of 77-year-old Dimitris Christoulas on Wednesday. They are protesting against the government’s draconian austerity policies, which have been dictated by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. The police responded by brutally breaking up the demonstrations. - Christoulas killed himself with a handgun in Athens’ central Syntagma Square, in front of the Greek parliament where a series of brutal cuts packages have been passed in recent months. In a letter he explained that he preferred to take his life with dignity rather than end up scavenging through garbage looking for food. He urged young people to rise up against the government, which he compared to the puppet regime under Nazi occupation during World War II.

AWIP: Demonstrators gather in Syntagma after suicide