More than 5 million hens will be euthanized at an Iowa egg-laying facility after the majority of them were found to be contaminated with a lethal strain of avian influenza, or bird flu. It is the worst outbreak yet to be recorded in the US. This is the second time a bird flu epidemic has been reported in Iowa, which provides almost 20 percent of all eggs that are consumed in the United States. [...]

Despite US policy banning federal officials from doing business with kidnappers, particularly terrorists, a government source told the Associated Press the FBI has for years negotiated and paid ransoms to kidnappers both domestically and internationally. The government source said the FBI used a secret exemption begun under the Bush Administration which allowed the bureau to use money to engage [...]

European aviation consortium Airbus said it would file criminal charges over industrial espionage, following reports that US and German foreign intelligence spied on the industry giant. "We are aware that as a large company in the sector, we are a target and subject of espionage," the company said in a statement to AFP on Thursday. [...]

Electric car producer Tesla Motors has adapted battery technology for household and business applications. The wall-mounted batteries will make solar power more accessible and throttle grid consumption to diminish loads and bills. [...]

Citing an anti-Russia policy brief, US lawmakers approved $200 million for providing "lethal weapons of a defensive nature" to the Ukrainian government as part of the $600 billion Pentagon budget proposal for the fiscal year 2016. The House Armed Services Committee passed its proposal for the 2016 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) with a bipartisan vote of 60 to 2, in what Defense News [...]

At a congressional hearing on Wednesday, witnesses said creating a way to grant authorities access to encrypted communications to aid in criminal probes will inevitably by exploited by adversaries. Amid a growing reliance within the tech industry to enable [...]

Angela Merkel's government has been accused of lying to the country's parliament after it was alleged that it knew German spies were conducting economic espionage for the NSA. Revelations show that some spooks were even spying on German companies. Germany’s interior minister, Thomas de Maiziere, who is a close ally of Chancellor Merkel denied on Wednesday that he had lied to parliament about [...]

The US Supreme Court is hearing arguments on lethal injections for the first time in nearly a decade, following a botched execution in Oklahoma and amid a nationwide shortage of the drugs used in the procedure. On Wednesday, the state of Oklahoma and lawyers for three death row inmates there presented their arguments to the Supreme Court, where the nine justices appeared to be sharply split bet [...]

Travis Sanders was out with his family at a lava lake at the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park last week when he was tasered to the ground for trying to take some snaps of the lava with a small toy drone. Sanders was minding his own business and flying his drone over the lava lake when he was apprehended by a park ranger who told him to land it at once. [...]

Texas Governor Greg Abbott told state troopers to monitor a US military training exercise, codenamed Jade Helm 15, after locals showed concern that the looming maneuvers actually look more like an "exercise in the imposition of martial law." The large-scale operation involves elite teams from four branches of the military, including the SEALs and Green Berets, and is set to kick off in seven st [...]

The Department of Defense has asked Congress to allow Russian rocket engines to be used until 2022, in order to keep the country's space program going. The US is partly dependent on the Russian technology for launching its satellites into orbit. General John Hyten, head of the US Air Force Space Command, spoke about extending the use of Russian engines to journalists on Tuesday, TASS reported. [...]

Amnesty International has accused Washington of "sweeping under the carpet" a December Senate report that the CIA tortured militants using the so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" during the post 9/11 War on Terror. Naureen Shah, a researcher for Amnesty, accused the Obama administration of ignoring the painstaking five year investigation, which culminated in the Senate Report. [...]

Iran's supreme leader says the United States has created the “myth” of nuclear weapons to paint Tehran as a “source of threat.” The tough rhetoric comes days before nuclear talks are set to resume in Vienna. "They created the myth of nuclear weapons so they could say the Islamic Republic is a source of threat,” Khamenei said in a televised address to a hall of several hundred military [...]

US army commander in Europe says Russia is a “real threat” urging NATO to stay united. The alliance is not interested in a “fair fight with anyone” and wants to have “overmatch in all systems,” Lieutenant-General Frederick "Ben" Hodges believes. “There is a Russian threat," Hodges told the Telegraph, maintaining that Russia is involved in ongoing conflict in eastern Ukraine. [...]

The recent killings in Ukraine are reported in Western media in a completely distorted way says investigative journalist Tony Gosling. It's a dangerous situation that may provoke further killings and less reporting of certain points of view, he told RT. Opposition journalist Oles Buzina was killed near his home in Kiev on Thursday. Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko has ordered a full investi [...]

The laws of the global economy should be written by the United States and not by the likes of China according to President Obama, as concern over China's influence is growing. Washington hopes a Pacific free trade pact will curb Beijing's investment bank. "When 95 percent of our potential customers live abroad, we must be sure that we are writing the rules for the global economy, not a country [...]

Major American media organizations diligently parrot what US officials want the public to know about global affairs, historian Noam Chomsky told RT. To US leaders, any news outlet that “does not repeat the US propaganda system is intolerable,” he said. The culpability of the West – namely the United States – for world affairs, such as the Ukrainian conflict or tensions with Iran, is ano [...]

After more than half a century at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, a World War II-era aircraft carrier potentially containing one hundred barrels of nuclear waste has been rediscovered by scientists. The United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Thursday that it has once again located the USS Independence. Scientists sunk the carrier in 1951 off the California coast af [...]

Emails published this week by WikiLeaks reveal that a senior State Dept. official asked the CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment for help in countering the narratives of the Russian Federation and the so-called Islamic State. Internal Sony correspondence that was leaked to the web following last year’s colossal SPE hack and now mirrored by the anti-secrecy group shows that Richard Stengel, the [...]