A United States military drone presumed to be a QF-4 crashed, exploded and sent up a large black cloud of smoke Wednesday morning at Tyndall Air Force Base. - Local news outlets from the Florida panhandle region reported Wednesday morning that an unmanned aerial vehicle crashed on the drone runway at Tyndall AFB during take-off at 8:20 a.m. EST that morning. Eyewitnesses told WJHG News that the drone “came in hard and fast” before it crashed. According to the network, Tyndall officials said the drone was carrying a small self-destruct charge and “had to be destroyed for safety considerations during its return to base following a routine operation.” Following the accident, the UAV reportedly went up in flames and started a ground fire, prompting authorities to close nearby Highway 98. They’ve reported no injuries.

A Florida medical examiner's office said Tuesday that the FBI has ordered the office not to release its autopsy report of a Chechen man fatally shot by a Boston FBI agent in May because of the federal agency's active internal investigation into cover-up of his death. The medical examiner's office said it completed the autopsy report on Ibragim Todashev, a friend of suspected Boston Marathon bomber, on July 8 and that the report was "ready for release." The agent shot and killed Todashev on May 22 in his Orlando apartment during an interrogation related to the Boston Marathon bombings. The FBI and the Justice Department are conducting an internal inquiry into the shooting, but critics have called for an independent inquiry, questioning the blanket of secrecy surrounding the case.

AWIP: FBI agent killed unarmed Todashev: Report
Russia Today: Friend of Boston bombing suspect unarmed when killed by FBI

The White House left no doubt on Tuesday that American "patience" with Russia "playing host" to NSA leaker Edward Snowden is wearing thin. [arrogance] - “The Russian government has an opportunity here to work with us,” press secretary Jay Carney told reporters at his daily briefing. “This should not be something that causes long-term problems for U.S.-Russian relations.” [veiled threat] Washington and Moscow have been “engaging on a number of important issues, both economic and security related issues, and we want to continue that relationship unimpeded by this issue,” Carney added. By turning over Snowden, or at least expelling him, Russia could “resolve this situation that they have been dealing with now for three weeks.” Could the dispute over Snowden lead Obama to cancel his planned attendance at the Group of 20 summit in Russia? Carney did not close out that possibility. "The president intends to travel to Russia in September for the G20 summit. And I don't have any further announcements." By the standards of diplo-speak, that’s nearly a “frank and candid exchange of views” – code for an all out verbal fight. Carney's comments came after Snowden's lawyer asked Russia to give the former NSA contractor-turned-secrets-spiller temporary asylum, saying his client could face persecution and even torture or death. Carney repeatedly underlined that Snowden, if handed over, “should be afforded every bit of due process here in the United States.” [lie]

PressTV: US sends strong warning to Russia over Snowden
Jason Ditz: White House Threatens Russia Over Snowden
The Guardian: Former GOP Senator: Snowden 'Courageous Whistleblower'
The Atlantic: The Creepy, Long-Standing Practice of Undersea Cable Tapping

Several people including women and children have been killed in a car bomb attack in the Syrian town of Kanaker. - According to a report by Syria state television on Wednesday, the car was parked near a mosque in the town, south of the capital Damascus. Several days ago, another Damascus suburb was targeted by a deadly bomb attack. The latest attack comes as Syrian forces have stepped up their offensive against foreign-sponsored militants in Damascus and other cities. On Wednesday, the Syrian government forces managed to kill and injure several foreign-backed militants in al-Khalediyeh neighborhood of the western city of Homs.

SANA: 3 citizens martyred in car bomb in Damascus countryside
Pepe Escobar: Meet a moderate Syrian insurgent
PressTV: Britain pockets £12bn from arms exports to controversial regimes

According to Thomas Drake, a former National Security Agency senior executive who blew the whistle on the agency’s reckless spending and spying in 2006, a previously unknown NSA surveillance program known as FAIRVIEW aims to “own the Internet.” - Last month, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked a series of PowerPoint slides to the Washington Post and the Guardian revealing that the agency was engaged in a large-scale Internet surveillance program, dubbed PRISM, that collects Americans’ chats, emails, photos, and videos. One of the slides, only later released by the two papers, made reference to a group of additional “upstream” collection programs, including two named FAIRVIEW and BLARNEY, but gave no further details about their function. Drake, who was prosecuted under the Espionage Act for his whistleblowing, explained the upstream programs to the Daily Dot. “Upstream means you get inside the system before it’s in the Internet. In its pure form,” he said.

Cuba has admitted being behind a stash of weapons found on board a North Korean ship seized in the Panama Canal. The Cuban foreign ministry said the ship was carrying obsolete Soviet-era arms from Cuba for repair in North Korea. The ship was seized by Panama last week after "undeclared military cargo" was found hidden in a shipment of sugar. United Nations sanctions prohibit the supply of arms to North Korea [by what right?] in the dispute over its nuclear programme. A Cuban foreign ministry statement said Cuba reaffirmed its commitment to "peace, disarmament, including nuclear disarmament, and respect for international law". It said the vessel was carrying 240 tonnes of obsolete defensive weapons - two anti-aircraft missile complexes, nine missiles in parts and spares, two MiG-21bis fighter planes and 15 MiG engines. The Cuban statement said they were all made in the mid-20th Century and were to be repaired and returned to Cuba.

The army seized the convoy which comprised of several trucks and vehicles which belonged to armed rebels in al-Ays village of Reef (outskirts of) Aleppo in Northern Syria. - The army also killed many terrorists in clashes in al-Ays village of Reef Aleppo. Meantime, the army discovered and seized an arms cache in Bani Zayd district of Aleppo, Syria’s second largest city. The army destroyed the depot and killed all the terrorists in the area in heavy clashes. Syria has been experiencing unrest since March 2011 with organized attacks by well-armed gangs against Syrian police forces and border guards being reported across the country. Hundreds of people, including members of the security forces, have been killed, when some protest rallies turned into armed clashes. The government blames outlaws, saboteurs, and armed terrorist groups for the deaths, stressing that the unrest is being orchestrated from abroad.

Nineteen organizations, including a church and gun ownership and marijuana legalization groups, have filed a lawsuit against the U.S. National Security Agency for a surveillance program that targets U.S. residents’ phone records. ■ The groups accuse the NSA, the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation of violating their members’ First Amendment rights of association by illegally collecting their telephone call records. ■ The groups object to the NSA’s bulk collection of telephone records, disclosed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden in early June. The collection of all Verizon phone records, including records of calls made, the location of the phone, the time of the call, and the duration of the call, violates the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment by giving “the government a dramatically detailed picture into our associational ties,” said Cindy Cohn, legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, representing the plaintiffs.

Russia Today: Obama administration drowning in lawsuits filed over NSA surveillance

Patrick Henningsen: NSA is more than just a spy network, it’s global fascism - Putting the overall theme of government abuse of power into perspective, this week provided a solid example of what should happen in an advanced civilized democracy. Luxembourg’s long-serving Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker announced his resignation this week over a spying scandal involving illegal phone-taps, alongside a number other highly corrupt activities. In normal times, what happened in Luxembourg should also happen in other countries like the US, or Great Britain - but these are far from normal times. ■ Internationally, citizens have already signed over most of their privacy simply by using the digital services of US multinationals like Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Skype, Yahoo and others. All of these corporation operate within a ‘profit-first’ ethical vacuum where, in many cases, they are actually charging the NSA for the privilege of consuming their customers’ communications and data. According to the recent Snowden leaks, the level of collusion between Microsoft Corp and the NSA is astonishing, where Microsoft allows the NSA to skirt encryption protocols on Outlook, Skype video and cloud services, and where data captured by the NSA is routinely passed on to both the FBI and the CIA (Guardian July 12, 2013). ■ The horrible irony here is too obvious to ignore: the US government, through its NSA, is giving away taxpayer dollars so these corporations can profit from handing over all of your personal communications and data. ■ Such an unholy alliance between partnering governments and transnational corporations could be defined as fascism, but the global nature of this operation might require a new term to define what means as a global phenomenon.

● Archaeologists have unearthed what they believe to be a vampire burial ground on a building site in Poland. The team of historians discovered graves containing four skeletons with their heads removed and placed between their legs near the southern town of Gliwice. Decapitating a suspected vampire was common practice in medieval times because it was thought to be the only way to ensure the dead stay dead.
● The exact fate of the skeletons is yet unclear, but the archaeologists noted that, apart from being headless, there was no trace of any earthly possessions, such as jewellery, belts or buckles. 'It's very difficult to tell when these burials were carried out,' archaeologist Dr Jacek Pierzak told the Dziennik Zachodni newspaper. The remains have been sent for further testing but initial estimations suggest they died sometime around the 16th century.
● It comes a year after archaeologists in Bulgaria claimed to have discovered two ‘vampire’ corpses in excavations near a monastery in the Black Sea town of Sozopol, both more than 800 years old and pierced through the chest with heavy iron rods. Bulgaria’s national museum chief Bozidhar Dimitrov said as many as 100 such ‘vampire corpses’ have been found in the country in recent years. ‘They illustrate a practice which was common in some Bulgarian villages up until the first decade of the 20th century,’ he explained.