The German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) has revealed that al-Qaeda is responsible for numerous terrorist attacks in Syria, including the Houla massacre. - The BND estimates that al-Qaeda has carried out “about 90 terrorist attacks” in Syria between late last December and early July, German daily Die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote in an article on July 16. The revelation was made public by the German government in response to a parliamentary question.

The German government also confirmed that it had received numerous reports from the BND on al-Qaeda’s involvement in the May 25 massacre in the Syrian town of Houla in the central province of Homs, in which 108 people, including dozens of children and women, were killed execution-style.

However, the German government stated that the reports were supposed to remain classified "by reason of national interest."

PressTV: US helps Al-Qaeda infiltrate Syrian rebels
John Rosenthal: German Intelligence: "al-Qaeda" All Over Syria
Tony Cartalucci: Turkey Running Proxy-Invasion of Syria

The biggest conventional bomb ever developed is ready to wreak destruction upon the enemies of the US. Air Force Secretary Michael Donley said its record-breaking bunker-buster has become operational after years of testing. - The Pentagon has spent $330 million to develop and deliver more than 20 of the precision-guided Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) bunker-busters, which are designed to blast through up to 200 feet of concrete. Although there has previously been a bigger nuclear device, the new conventional rocket is six times the weight of the previous bunker-buster used by the US Air Force, and carries an explosive payload of 5,300 pounds.

US military chiefs openly admitted the weapon was built to attack the fortified nuclear facilities of “rogue states” such as Iran and North Korea. Although the Pentagon insists that it is not aimed at a specific threat, unnamed officials within the ministry have repeatedly claimed the bomb is being tailor-made to disable Iranian nuclear facilities at Fordo, or at least to intimidate Tehran.

Attacking Iran Could Leave Attacking Ships 'Vulnerable'... With an apparent eye toward continuing the Pentagon’s seemingly endless naval buildup off the coast of Iran, officials and analysts are fretting over what they see as Iran’s growing “retaliation capability,” saying it would put those US ships in the Persian Gulf at risk if they started attacking Iran. Unlike America’s enormous fleet of huge warships, cost and practicality has led to a very different sort of navy in Iran, one which is planning to rely almost entirely on small speedboats and a quick deployment of sea mines to fend off the invading leviathans. Incredibly, officials and analysts suggest this strategy may actually work, as Iran’s large number of tiny ships can use “swarming” tactics in defending the Iranian coast, and that huge US ships, mostly built with an eye toward fighting other huge ships, would be at a marked disadvantage trying to contend with so many smaller targets.

The spate of mass murders and shooting sprees across the US are the outcomes of the American culture not the mere result of a self-motivated action, an American scholar says.

In a Tuesday article published on Press TV Website, Dr. Eugene Michael Jones criticized the official accounts of shooting rampages in the US, including that of the recent massacre at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, which suggest that such threats are posed by “lone gunmen.” What these reports do not reveal is that the “American culture creates its own ‘natural born killers’ from the pool of alienated white men in their twenties,” he pointed out. According to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, only in 2012 there have been 22 mass shootings across the US. Jones argued that such killing sprees in the American society are “a result of a toxic mixture of feminism, which belittles men in everything from TV commercials to affirmative action programs, video games which teach them how to kill without remorse, pornography, which makes it impossible to relate to members of the opposite sex, and Jewish comic book superheroes, like X-men, who convey approval for revenge on society by the people it has marginalized.” He also lashed out the FBI for its questionable role in handling cases of mass murders, saying the agency “is one of the prime suspects in cases like this.”

“The same thing has been happening over here for almost as long as we have had our own internal secret police, which is to say, as long as we have had the FBI sending out agents provocateurs and creating the mayhem we thought we were paying them to prevent,” Jones pointed out.

A dramatic gash in the surface of the Earth that could rival the majesty of the Grand Canyon has been discovered secreted beneath Antarctica's vast, featureless ice sheet. - Dubbed the Ferrigno Rift for the glacier that fills it, the chasm's steep walls plunge nearly a mile down (1.5 kilometers) at its deepest. It is roughly 6 miles (10 km) across and at least 62 miles (100 km) long, possibly far longer if it extends into the sea. The rift was discovered during a grueling 1,500-mile (2,400 km) trek that, save for a few modern conveniences, hearkens back to the days of early Antarctic exploration. And it came as a total surprise, according to the man who first sensed that something incredible was literally underfoot, hidden by more than a half-mile (1 km) of ice.

German U-boat may be at bottom of Labrador river: Divers believe they have located WWII submarine 100 kilometres from ocean. - An important piece of history from the Second World War may be sitting in a river in Labrador. Searchers believe they've found a German U-boat buried in the sand on the bottom of the Churchill River. The discovery has yet to be authenticated. Two years ago, searchers scoured the bottom of the Churchill River with side-scanning sonar. They were looking for three men lost over Muskrat Falls. When they reviewed the footage from that search, they made an unexpected discovery.