Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai called for NATO troops to leave Afghan villages and confine themselves to major bases after the slaughter of 16 civilians by a U.S. soldier, underscoring fury over the massacre and clouding U.S. exit plans.

In a near-simultaneous announcement, the Afghan Taliban said it was suspending nascent peace talks with the United States seen as a strong chance to end the country's decade-long conflict, blaming "shaky, erratic and vague" U.S. statements.

Karzai, in a statement after meeting U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta in Kabul, said as a consequence of the weekend massacre, "international security forces have to be taken out of Afghan village outposts and return to (larger) bases".

The soldier accused of carrying out the shooting was attached to a small special forces compound similar to others around the country which underpin NATO's anti-insurgent strategy ahead of a 2014 deadline for Western combat forces to pull out.

The incident has harmed relations between Afghanistan and the United States and "all efforts have to be done to avoid such incident in the future", Karzai said, warning it also had hurt the trust Afghans had in foreign forces.

Baroness Jenny Tonge has resigned the Lib Dem whip in the House of Lords after refusing to apologise for claiming that Israel would not "last forever".

The Liberal Democrat peer, who once said she would consider becoming a suicide bomber if she were Palestinian, was roundly criticised for the remarks. According to reports on the Guido Fawkes blog she quit as a Liberal Democrat peer after refusing an ultimatum from Nick Clegg to apologise or resign.

Speaking at an event at Middlesex University last Thursday, Baroness Tonge said Israel would one day lose the support of the United States and would then "reap what they have sown".

"Beware Israel," she said. "Israel is not going to be there forever in its present performance. One day the United States of America will get sick of giving £70 billion a year to Israel."

The event was recorded and the video of her comments emerged this week:

The federal investigation of former U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens was "permeated by the systematic concealment" of evidence that would have aided the Alaska politician's defense at trial and would have "seriously damaged the testimony and credibility of the government's key witness," a special prosecutor concluded.

The 514-page report was a response to an investigation ordered by U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, who threw out Stevens' April 2009 guilty verdict in a financial disclosure case after the Justice Department revealed that prosecutors kept key information from defense attorneys.

Three years later, "special prosecutor" Henry L. Schuelke made the report public over objections from the prosecutors involved in the case.

Prosecutors are generally required to turn over helpful evidence to defense lawyers.

Stevens, an Alaska Republican who died in a small-plane crash in 2010, lost his reelection bid shortly after being convicted of seven counts of making false statements on financial disclosure statements to hide about $250,000 in gifts and free renovations to his Alaska house.

The results of Schuelke's investigation were made public in a November order by Sullivan. In the report made public this morning, Schuelke wrote that his team examined and analyzed "well over 128,000 pages of documents, including the trial record, prosecutors' and agents' emails, FBI 302s and handwritten notes, and depositions of prosecutors, agents and others involved in the investigation and trial."

In the end, however, Schuelke recommended against charging the federal prosecutors - Brenda Morris, William Welch, Edward Sullivan, Joseph Bottini and James Goeke, as well as Nicholas Marsh, who committed suicide last year - with a crime. He wrote that prosecuting the Justice Department lawyers would be difficult because Sullivan never issued a "clear, specific and unequivocal order" to disclose evidence that would have helped the defense.

In response to Netanyahu's AIPAC speech, Haaretz's editor-in-chief says that what looks like a preparation for war, acts like a preparation for war, and quacks like a preparation for war, is a preparation for war.

Since his return from Washington, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has mainly been preoccupied with one thing: Preparing public opinion for war against Iran.

Netanyahu is attempting to convince the Israeli public that the Iranian threat is a tangible and existential one, and that there is only one effective way to stop it and prevent a "second Holocaust": An Israeli military attack on Iran's nuclear infrastructure, which is buried deep underground.

In his speech before the Knesset on Wednesday, Netanyahu urged his colleagues to reject claims that Israel is too weak to go it alone in a war against a regional power such as Iran and therefore needs to rely on the United States, which has much greater military capabilities, to do the job and remove the threat.

According to polls published last week, this is the position of most of the Israeli public, which supports a U.S. strike on Iran, but is wary of sending the IDF to the task without the backing of the friendly superpower.

The police across France have detained more than 250 people and confiscated some 5,000 videocassettes in their largest operation to date to fight child pornography.

Among the people charged with possession or trafficking in pornography involving minors, the police said, are two school directors, two teachers and several others who work with children.

The police said those detained were all men, from different walks of life. ''No social class has been spared,'' a police official said. ''They are mainly married professionals. Some apparently made the videotapes, others distributed them and some just bought them.''

The crackdown on Wednesday and today involved no fewer than 600 police officers, an indication of the Government's alarm about sexual abuse of children. The action also appears to be a response to growing public indignation in France and elsewhere about the recurrent reports of kidnapping, rape or incest involving the very young.

Specialists say they are not certain whether the number of such crimes has risen sharply or whether the cases have simply become more notorious as it has become more socially acceptable to report or discuss such abuse publicly.

Twitter removed all but one account using Syrian president's name and half of those using first lady's after complaint

Twitter closed down a string of accounts purporting to be authored by the Syrian president and the first lady, emails reveal.

A senior aide to Asma al-Assad, Fares Kallas, took issue with the site over 11 accounts. Half of the accounts using the first lady's name and all but one of those using the president's name were closed down.

The author of one account, @Syrianpresident, described it as a "parody account" and said it had attracted 2,500 followers.

Kallas wrote to Twitter complaining that this and other accounts were "fraudulent Twitter accounts purporting to be the president of Syria and the first lady of Syria and we would like to officially request for these accounts to be removed or suspended. We believe that each of the following are clearly intending to mislead people via impersonation rather than act as spoof/humorous accounts."

Twitter told the Assad office: "We do suspend accounts that are clear attempts at impersonation," but added: "Twitter users are allowed to create parody, commentary and fan accounts."

US soldiers were asked to disarm during a speech by Leon Panetta, the American defence secretary, in a sign of grown concern over spates of seemingly random violence in Afghanistan.

Less than a week after a US staff sergeant allegedly massacred 16 civilians in Kandahar, American soldiers were banned from bringing guns into a talk by Mr Panetta at a base in Helmand province.

Around 200 troops who had gathered in a tent at Camp Leatherneck were told "something had come to light" and asked abruptly to file outside and lay down their automatic rifles and 9mm pistols.

The Western governments' and mainstream media's narrative of a one-sided humanitarian crisis in Syria is rapidly unwinding to reveal a self-serving deception to justify a re-run of Libya-style NATO conquest. In reality, it is the Western powers and their Israeli and Arab henchmen who are fuelling a humanitarian crisis and creating the conditions for all-out war. All of which, it should be said, constitutes criminality comparable to Nazi Germany's wars of aggression.

The latest crack in the Western façade over Syria comes in the form of leaked correspondence from Western private intelligence firm Stratfor, which reports that US-led NATO special forces have been operating inside Syria alongside armed opposition groups. Stratfor is closely aligned with Pentagon planners; indeed can be viewed as a private wing of the Pentagon. The document, disclosed by Wikileaks, cites US military sources discussing a campaign of destabilisation against the Syrian government of Bashir Al Assad, involving training opposition groups and deploying guerilla tactics, including assassinations. In other words, discussing a scenario that approximates to what is actually happening in Syria.

Given Straftor's credentials as a reliable think-tank for the US military-industrial complex, the disclosure can be seen as a damning indictment of NATO criminality and Western mainstream media complicity.

Since political turmoil erupted in Syria a year ago, the monotonous "big lie" narrative from Western governments and the corporate-controlled news media has been one of "brutal state repression against a civilian population" committed by the Assad government.

Question: What's the cost to a company of one disgruntled former employee?

Answer: About $2 billion if it's Goldman Sachs.

That's how much of the bank's market value was wiped out after one of its directors, Greg Smith, resigned from the company and penned an op-ed piece in The New York Times attacking the firm's culture and treatment of clients.

The bank's shares fell 3.3 percent in trading Wednesday as London-based Smith's article set Wall Street and the media ablaze with discussion about the behavior of big banks bailed out by taxpayers after the financial crisis. The share price decline meant Goldman lost some $2 billion in market value.

Still, Smith may not be out of pocket after his scathing condemnation of the bank, which appeared at the tail-end of Wall Street's bonus season.

Annual incentive payouts for top bank employees often reach into the millions, although this year Wall Street bonuses are expected to be down sharply from a year ago, according to Johnson Associates, a New York-based compensation consulting firm.

Year-end incentives declined sharply in 2008 during the economic crisis, but have rebounded over the past two years, Johnson Associates said.