On Tuesday, not far from the beaches of New Jersey, was a sight hundreds of millions of dollars and years of development in the making: the Army’s football-field-size robot spy blimp took to the air for the first time at a military base in Lakehurst. The 90-minute flight of the Long-Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle (LEMV), manufactured by U.K. firm Hybrid Air Vehicles and U.S. aerospace giant Northrop Grumman and allegedly captured in the video above, is only the beginning of a months-long test program; the lighter-than-air ship won’t head to a warzone until next year at the earliest. But it’s still important news. For years, the Pentagon has tried and failed to get next-generation airships off the ground. No longer. [...] Provided further testing goes smoothly, the LEMV could deploy to Afghanistan for combat trials in early 2013, floating thousands of feet over the battlefield for, Northrop hopes, entire weeks on end, scanning for "insurgents". K.C. Brown, Jr., Northrop’s director of Army programs, told Danger Room the LEMV could also pull double duty, hauling military cargo out of landlocked Afghanistan as part of the Pentagon’s war drawdown. It might make for quite the lighter-than-air mule: Northrop claims the LEMV has enough buoyancy to haul seven tons of cargo 2,400 miles at 30 miles per hour.

Egypt's Navy refused a U.S. request to fire on an Iranian weapons ship heading for violence-torn Syria through the Suez Canal, al-Arabiya reported. - "The Suez Canal is a narrow waterway and it is impossible for military action to take place there," Mohab Mamish, recently appointed chairman of the Suez Canal Authority and former Egyptian Navy commander told al-Arabiya. The U.S. request was made recently, the report said. The Egypt Independent had a similar report, saying it was told by Mamish the Navy refused a United States request to "strike" the Iranian ship.

Next month’s IAEA meeting in Vienna is going to have the same fight that has so often been present at other such meetings, as Israeli officials are expressing outrage at the idea that a vote might be held at the meeting to criticize Israel for its nuclear weapon arsenal. - The vote, which is backed by several of Israel’s neighbors, calls on the nation to declare its nuclear activists and join the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT), which Israel has ruled out ever doing. Instead, Israeli officials say that the whole vote is a plot by Iran to distract attention from its own program. Iran has no nuclear weapons, and is a member in good standing of the NPT. Indeed, it does not appear that Iran had anything to do with this initiative, which is instead a product of the “nuclear-free Mideast” initiative that the Obama Administration initially endorsed, and then later condemned after Israel expressed opposition. Israel is the only nuclear weapons power in the Middle East.

52-year-old Ram Kishen with his government provided
ration card in Satnapur Village, Uttar Pradesh, India.

Poor in India Starve as Politicians Steal $14.5 Billion of Food -- "The theft blunted the country’s only weapon against widespread starvation -- a five-decade-old public distribution system that has failed to deliver record harvests to the plates of India’s hungriest."

Ram Kishen, 52, half-blind and half- starved, holds in his gnarled hands the reason for his hunger: a tattered card entitling him to subsidized rations that now serves as a symbol of India’s biggest food heist. Kishen has had nothing from the village shop for 15 months. Yet 20 minutes’ drive from Satnapur, past bone-dry fields and tiny hamlets where children with distended bellies play, a government storage facility five football fields long bulges with wheat and rice. By law, those 57,000 tons of food are meant for Kishen and the 105 other households in Satnapur with ration books. They’re meant for some of the 350 million families living below India’s poverty line of 50 cents a day.

Instead, as much as $14.5 billion in food was looted by corrupt politicians and their criminal syndicates over the past decade in Kishen’s home state of Uttar Pradesh alone, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The theft blunted the country’s only weapon against widespread starvation -- a five-decade-old public distribution system that has failed to deliver record harvests to the plates of India’s hungriest.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu has pulled out of an international summit because he doesn't want to share a platform with the "morally indefensible" Tony Blair, it emerged yesterday. - The retired archbishop, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for his campaigning against apartheid, said that he had withdrawn from the event because he believed the former Prime Minister had supported the invasion of Iraq "on the basis of unproven allegations of the existence of weapons of mass destruction." In a statement, Archbishop Tutu's office added: "The Discovery Invest Summit has leadership as its theme. Morality and leadership are indivisible. In this context, it would be inappropriate for the Archbishop to share a platform with Mr Blair." Mr Blair and Archbishop Tutu, alongside the chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, were due to appear at the leadership summit in Johannesburg later this week. The Muslim political party Al Jama-ah has already said that it will attempt to arrest Mr Blair when he arrives in Johannesburg for "crimes against humanity".

Gambia's President Yahya Jammeh came under attack for sending nine prisoners to the firing squad, leaving the tiny nation jittery as another 38 convicts await execution in the coming weeks. - The 47-year-old former soldier, who seized power in a 1994 coup, dismissed concerns expressed by the African Union and rights bodies that had urged him not to carry out his plans. He executed a first batch of prisoners on Sunday night. On Tuesday amid a chorus of calls to halt further killings, Amnesty International said many of the 38 people "at imminent risk of execution" had faced politically motivated charges and had not been given a fair trial. Gambia's interior ministry announced Monday that nine death row prisoners had been executed by firing squad the night before, a week after Jammeh vowed to carry out all death sentences by mid-September.

CNN: U.N. slams 'stream of executions' in Gambia
Washington Post: Gambia uses firing squad to execute 9 death row inmates; US expresses concern

Ukraine's former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko will remain in jail, as the country's High Specialized Court dismissed the cassation appeal against her seven-year prison sentence. - The ex-prime minister was arrested and jailed last October for abusing the powers of her office, most notably in the 2009 gas import deal she signed with Russia. Tymoshenko was also ordered to pay $190 million in fines. The appeal was a last-ditch attempt by Tymoshenko’s defense attorneys to overturn the verdict. In the wake of this defeat, the defense may take their case to the European Court of Human Rights.

Russia Today: Human rights court begins hearings on Tymoshenko case

Courts are supposed to check the abuse of executive power, not cravenly serve it. But in the US and Israel, that is now the case. - The US military announced on Monday that no criminal charges would be brought against the US marines in Afghanistan who videotaped themselves urinating on the corpses of Taliban fighters. Nor, the military announced, would any criminal charges be filed against the US troops who "tried to burn about 500 copies of the Qur'an as part of a badly bungled security sweep at an Afghan prison in February, despite repeated warnings from Afghan soldiers that they were making a colossal mistake".

Parallel to that, an Israeli judge Tuesday dismissed a lawsuit against the Israeli government brought by the family of Rachel Corrie, the 23-year-old American student and pro-Palestinian activist who was killed by a military bulldozer in 2003 as she protested the demolition of a house in Gaza whose family she had come to befriend. Upon learning of the suit's dismissal, Corrie's mother, Cindy, said: "I believe this was a bad day, not only for our family, but for human rights, humanity, the rule of law and also for the country of Israel."

Stephen Lendman: Israeli Court Legitimizes Murder

BETHLEHEM (Ma'an) -- Palestinian leaders and factions on Tuesday slammed an Israeli court's decision which rejected accusations of negligence over the 2003 killing of American activist Rachel Corrie.

An Israeli court had cleared Israel's military of any blame for the death of Corrie, who was crushed by an army bulldozer while trying to stop the demolition of a home in Rafah in southern Gaza. The PLO executive committee deplored what it described as "a miscarriage of justice." "Despite the testimonies of eyewitnesses, the audio-visual evidence and the overwhelming proof that Rachel was deliberately murdered, the Israeli court insists on victimizing her again in her tragic death," senior PLO official Hanan Ashrawi said in a statement. "This proves that once again the occupation has distorted the legal and judicial systems in Israel and that the lack of accountability for its violence and violations has generated a culture of hate and impunity," she added. Ashrawi said Israel's practice of blaming the victim now applied to international activists and all victims of Israeli violence, and not just Palestinians.

Stephen Lendman: Israeli Court Legitimizes Murder
Chris McGreal: Rachel Corrie verdict exposes Israeli military mindset