The US military is weighing support for French forces in Mali including surveillance drones, a US official said Friday, as Washington backed moves to deny safe haven to extremists in the country.

US commanders were looking at providing intelligence and aerial refueling tankers among a range of options, such as logistical backup and boosting intelligence sharing, which would involve surveillance drones, the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told AFP.

Backed by French air power, Mali on Friday unleashed an offensive against Islamist rebels who have seized control of the north of the West African country and are now threatening to push south.

Senior US officials held talks with their counterparts in the French capital and other allies on drawing up an action plan, the official said.

If you've ever suspected politics is increasingly being run in the interests of big business, I have news: Jeffrey Sachs, a highly respected economist from Columbia University, agrees with you - at least in respect of the United States.

In his book, The Price of Civilisation, he says the US economy is caught in a feedback loop. ''Corporate wealth translates into political power through campaign financing, corporate lobbying and the revolving door of jobs between government and industry; and political power translates into further wealth through tax cuts, deregulation and sweetheart contracts between government and industry. Wealth begets power, and power begets wealth,'' he says.

Sachs says four key sectors of US business exemplify this feedback loop and the takeover of political power in America by the ''corporatocracy''.

First is the well-known military-industrial complex. ''As [President] Eisenhower famously warned in his farewell address in January 1961, the linkage of the military and private industry created a political power so pervasive that America has been condemned to militarisation, useless wars and fiscal waste on a scale of many tens of trillions of dollars since then,'' he says.

Armed groups in Northern Mali vowed on Monday to strike "at the heart of France" to avenge a fierce military offensive against them.

"France has attacked Islam. We will strike at the heart of France," said a leader of the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO), an offshoot of AQIM (Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb).

Asked where they would attack, Abou Dardar told AFP by telephone, "Everywhere. In Bamako, in Africa and in Europe. "

Another MUJAO leader Omar Ould Hamaha, nicknamed "Redbeard", warned on radio Europe 1 that France had "opened the doors of hell" with its intervention and faced a situation "worse than Iraq, Afghanistan or Somalia".

France intervened in the country on Friday and has caused heavy losses in the extremists' ranks.

Preface: My entire purpose for writing this essay is to urge that decision-makers do what is best for our planet and not do something which will cause more harm than good. Environmentalists should check my background below before dismissing this out of hand.

When I pointed out a couple of days ago that a group of scientists and much of the popular press warned in the 1970s of an imminent ice age, I didn't realize they had such a prominent member.

Specifically, as New York Times science columnist John Tierney noted in September:

In 1971, long before Dr. Holdren came President Obama's science adviser, in an essay [titled] "Overpopulation and the Potential for Ecocide," Dr. Holdren and his co-author, the ecologist Paul Ehrlich, warned of a coming ice age.

They certainly weren't the only scientists in the 1970s to warn of a coming ice age, but I can't think of any others who were so creative in their catastrophizing. Although they noted that the greenhouse effect from rising emissions of carbon dioxide emissions could cause future warming of the planet, they concluded from the mid-century cooling trend that the consequences of human activities (like industrial soot, dust from farms, jet exhaust, urbanization and deforestation) were more likely to first cause an ice age. Dr. Holdren and Dr. Ehrlich wrote:

The effects of a new ice age on agriculture and the supportability of large human populations scarcely need elaboration here. Even more dramatic results are possible, however; for instance, a sudden outward slumping in the Antarctic ice cap, induced by added weight, could generate a tidal wave of proportions unprecedented in recorded history.

India's army chief on Monday accused Pakistan of planning an attack in which two Indian soldiers were killed in the disputed Kashmir region last week, and warned of possible retaliation.

Gen. Bikram Singh's strong words are a clear message that India believes the Jan. 8 attack was a deliberate provocation and not an unintentional skirmish of the kind that often breaks out along the Line of Control, the de facto border between the two archrivals in the Himalayan territory.

Pakistan did not immediately respond to the comments, which are likely to raise tensions further.

The tit-for-tat fighting began Jan. 6 when Pakistan accused Indian troops of raiding an army post and killing a soldier. India denied attacking the post, and said its troops fired across the border in response to Pakistani shelling that destroyed a home on the Indian side.

Contrary to popular belief, Libya , which western media described as "Gaddafi's military dictatorship" was in actual fact one of the world's most democratic States.

In 1977 the people of Libya proclaimed the Jamahiriya or "government of the popular masses by themselves and for themselves." The Jamahiriya was a higher form of direct democracy with 'the People as President.' Traditional institutions of government were disbanded and abolished, and power belonged to the people directly through various committees and congresses.

The nation State of Libya was divided into several small communities that were essentially "mini-autonomous States" within a State. These autonomous States had control over their districts and could make a range of decisions including how to allocate oil revenue and budgetary funds. Within these mini autonomous States, the three main bodies of Libya 's democracy were Local Committees, People's Congresses and Executive Revolutionary Councils.

In 2009, Mr. Gaddafi invited the New York Times to Libya to spend two weeks observing the nation's direct democracy. Even the New York Times, that was always highly critical of Colonel Gaddafi, conceded that in Libya, the intention was that "everyone is involved in every decision...Tens of thousands of people take part in local committee meetings to discuss issues and vote on everything from foreign treaties to building schools." The purpose of these committee meetings was to build a broad based national consensus.

It is a ferocious war waged by assassination, massacre, imprisonment and persecution that has killed tens of thousands of people. But non-Muslims - and many Muslims - scarcely notice this escalating conflict that pits Shia minority against Sunni majority.

The victims of the war in recent years are mostly Shia. Last week a suicide bomber walked into a snooker club in a Shia district of Quetta in Pakistan and blew himself up. Rescue workers and police were then caught by the blast from a car bomb that exploded 10 minutes later. In all, 82 people were killed and 121 injured. "It was like doomsday," said a policeman. "There were bodies everywhere."

Responsibility for the bombing was claimed by the banned Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a Sunni fundamentalist group behind many such attacks that killed 400 Shia in Pakistan last year.

The dead in Quetta come from the Shia Hazara community, many of whom migrated from Afghanistan in the last century. "They live in a state of siege," says Ali Dayan Hasan, of Human Rights Watch. "Stepping out of the ghetto means risking death. Everyone has failed them - the security forces, the government, the judiciary." In this they are little different from the 30 million Shia in Pakistan who are increasingly beleaguered and afraid in the midst of a rising tide of anti-Shia sectarianism.

The atrocity in Quetta will soon be forgotten outside the area ,but the victims were not the only Shia community to come under attack last week. In Bahrain, where the Shia majority is ruled by the Sunni al-Khalifa royal family, the high court confirmed prison sentences - including eight life sentences - on 20 activists who took part in the pro-democracy protests in 2011. This happened even though the original sentences were passed by military courts using evidence extracted by torture.

The west African nation becomes the eighth country in the last four years alone where Muslims are killed by the west.

As French war planes bomb Mali, there is one simple statistic that provides the key context: this west African nation of 15 million people is the eighth country in which western powers - over the last four years alone - have bombed and killed Muslims - after Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia and the Phillipines (that does not count the numerous lethal tyrannies propped up by the west in that region). For obvious reasons, the rhetoric that the west is not at war with the Islamic world grows increasingly hollow with each new expansion of this militarism. But within this new massive bombing campaign, one finds most of the vital lessons about western intervention that, typically, are steadfastly ignored.

First, as the New York Times' background account from this morning makes clear, much of the instability in Mali is the direct result of Nato's intervention in Libya. Specifically, "heavily armed, battle-hardened Islamist fighters returned from combat in Libya" and "the big weaponry coming out of Libya and the different, more Islamic fighters who came back" played the precipitating role in the collapse of the US-supported central government. As Owen Jones wrote in an excellent column this morning in the Independent:

"This intervention is itself the consequence of another. The Libyan war is frequently touted as a success story for liberal interventionism. Yet the toppling of Muammar Gaddafi's dictatorship had consequences that Western intelligence services probably never even bothered to imagine. Tuaregs - who traditionally hailed from northern Mali - made up a large portion of his army. When Gaddafi was ejected from power, they returned to their homeland: sometimes forcibly so as black Africans came under attack in post-Gaddafi Libya, an uncomfortable fact largely ignored by the Western media. . . . [T]he Libyan war was seen as a success . . . and here we are now engaging with its catastrophic blowback."

It's Death of Little Nell time again in the field of climate "science." The New York Times - aka Pravda - has announced the closure of its Environment Desk. Rumours that the entire environment team, headed by Andy Revkin, have volunteered to be recycled into compost and spread on the lawn of the new billion dollar home Al Gore bought with the proceeds of his sale of Current TV to Middle Eastern oil interests are as yet unconfirmed. - UK Telegraph

Dominant Social Theme: A tragedy of unparalleled proportions has befallen the environment. It is getting harder and harder to save the world ...

Free-Market Analysis: The irascible and brilliant James Delingpole has just posted an article over at the UK Telegraph announcing the closure of the New York Times's environmental desk. Big news, indeed ...

It is an article that lampoons its subject even while declaring victory. Delingpole, in fact, deserves this moment. A novelist and a determined opponent of the power elite's global warming propaganda, he has been at the forefront of mainstream debunkery of "warmist" nonsense.

A US defense report has called for contingency planning to neutralize a vast Chinese tunnel network with both "conventional and nuclear forces." James Corbett told RT the "Underground Great Wall" scare is being used to mask US nuclear ambitions.

Orders for the Commander of the US Strategic Command (STRATCOM) to submit a report on means of nullifying China's underground tunnel network were outlined in the new National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) signed by President Barack Obama on January 2.

The NDAA-directed report will further seek to identify knowledge gaps regarding China's nuclear weapons programs, a request which was likely spurred by a controversial 2011 study out of Georgetown University entitled "Strategic Implications of China's Underground Great Wall."

The researchers claimed that China's Second Artillery Corps, a secretive branch of the country's military tasked with protecting and deploying its ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads, had dug some 3,000 miles of tunnels which currently housed up to 3,000 nuclear warheads - ten times US intelligence estimates.