Bellevill, Ontario - The Canadian military was rocked to its core Monday following the bombshell allegation that the colonel in command of the country's largest air force base had killed two women and sexually assaulted two others.

Col. Russell Williams, a 46-year-old career member of the Canadian Forces, was charged Monday with first-degree murder in the deaths of Jessica Lloyd, 27, of Belleville, and Marie France Comeau, a 38-year-old corporal with CFB Trenton's 437 squadron who was killed last November.

"We're all shocked," said Lt. Annie Morin, a public affairs officer at CFB Trenton.

"The wing commander has been a man that's been respected and very much liked, so this news came as a very big shock for pretty much everybody on the base."

In quake crisis, there were sure to be some ungodly fumbles

The horrific destruction and human suffering in Haiti exert an almost irresistible pull on U.S. Christian missionaries eager to help. But as the jailing last week of 10 missionaries from a small Baptist church in Idaho illustrates, best intentions don't always translate into good deeds in the chaotic aftermath of the monster earthquake.

Many mission groups provide essential services for Haitians - indeed some have evolved into key service providers, working alongside nonprofit groups and the U.N. to fill gaps that the Haitian government can't fill.

But other missions, even when well-meaning, risk running afoul of Haiti's culture and laws.

Egypt will build its first nuclear power plant in the Mediterranean coastal town of El-Dabaa, reviving the country's civilian nuclear power program after more than two decades, the El-Ahram newspaper said on Monday.

Egyptian authorities announced in 2007 plans to build nuclear power facilities in the country to meet the increasing demand for electricity.

The north African state's nuclear program was originally suspended after the Chernobyl disaster in the former Soviet Union in 1986.

The paper quoted Egyptian energy minister Hassan Younes as saying the construction of the country's first nuclear power plant would take about 9 years. He said the decision to build the plant in El-Dabaa was based on a report by a team of international experts.

An Introduction by Tom Engelhardt:

Almost every day, reports come back from the CIA's "secret" battlefield in the Pakistani tribal borderlands. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles -- that is, pilot-less drones -- shoot missiles (18 of them in a single attack on a tiny village last week) or drop bombs and then the news comes in: a certain number of al-Qaeda or Taliban leaders or suspected Arab or Uzbek or Afghan "militants" have died. The numbers are often remarkably precise. Sometimes they are attributed to U.S. sources, sometimes to the Pakistanis; sometimes, it's hard to tell where the information comes from. In the Pakistani press, on the other hand, the numbers that come back are usually of civilian dead. They, too, tend to be precise.

Don't let that precision fool you. Here's the reality: There are no reporters on the ground and none of these figures can be taken as accurate. Let's just consider the CIA side of things. Any information that comes from American sources (i.e. the CIA) has to be looked at with great wariness. As a start, the CIA's history is one of deception. There's no reason to take anything its sources say at face value. They will report just what they think it's in their interest to report -- and the ongoing "success" of their drone strikes is distinctly in their interest.

Then, there's history. In the present drone wars, as in the CIA's bloody Phoenix Program in the Vietnam era, the Agency's operatives, working in distinctly alien terrain, must rely on local sources (or possibly official Pakistani ones) for targeting intelligence. In Vietnam in the 1960s, the Agency's Phoenix Program -- reportedly responsible for the assassination of 20,000 Vietnamese -- became, according to historian Marilyn Young, "an extortionist's paradise, with payoffs as available for denunciation as for protection." Once again, the CIA is reportedly passing out bags of money and anyone on the ground with a grudge, or the desire to eliminate an enemy, or simply the desire to make some of that money can undoubtedly feed information into the system, watch the drones do their damnedest, and then report back that more "terrorists" are dead. Just assume that at least some of those "militants" dying in Pakistan, and possibly many of them, aren't who the CIA hopes they are.

Nato and Afghan troops are preparing for a major offensive against Taliban strongholds in southern Afghanistan.

Ahead of the operation, thousands of civilians have fled their homes near the Marjah area of Helmand province. Many will be going to displacement camps near the capital, Kabul.

But as Al Jazeera's David Chater reports, conditions there are dismal.