It is named after the Celtic god of thunder, can fly faster than the speed of sound and evades enemy radar with its single-wing stealth design.

This is Taranis, Britain's latest pilotless combat aircraft, which is even capable of selecting its own targets.

The revolutionary superdrone is due to make its maiden flight in the next few weeks and could spearhead the fight against terrorism in Africa.
Military chiefs believe Taranis's ground-breaking technology will allow a powerful new generation of drones equipped with deadly payloads to fly from British bases to attack targets worldwide.

The ultra-hardline Mashreq News has a piece on the American Mafia claiming that the image of the criminal organization as one comprising "Italian criminals" from Sicily is at least in part a Hollywood concoction and that "at the apogee of the years of Mafia groups' activities, the biggest and most mysterious American gangster was a Jewish Zionist." The article then goes on to provide a "portrait" of famous "mob accountant" Meyer Lansky and the "Jewish Mafia" and make numerous strange and unsubstantiated claims drawing on marginal and dubious anti-Semitic literature.

The article then continues by describing Lansky as a "great defender of the formation of the government of Israel." It also claims Lansky "performed an important role in the establishment of the country of Israel" and that he "was the Godfather of the modern government of Israel."

The article even goes as far as to claim that Israel and the Mafia had "the most to gain" from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and that Israel's relations with the Kennedy administration had been brought to a "dangerous dead end" over Israel's "decision to produce a nuclear weapon" and that Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion left his post as prime minister over the impasse.

Self-confessed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other defenders claim they were tortured in Guantanamo, prompting their lawyers to call for the preservation of the CIA secret prisons to use them as evidence.

The pretrial hearing for the suspected terrorist conspirators began Monday. Facing the death penalty for their involvement in the deadly attacks that killed 2,976 people on September 11, 2011, the five prisoners are making a last-ditch attempt to reduce sentence by describing their torture experiences at the Guantanamo Bay US Naval Base.

Mohammed previously accused the US government of killing millions of people and employing inhumane torture procedures "under the name of national security." Attorneys representing the defendants are now calling for the judge to demand the preservation of the CIA "black sites" to use as evidence in the case against the US government. If the attorneys are able to prove that any of the evidence against the conspirators was obtained through torture, then this evidence may be excluded during the trial and lead to reduced sentences.

Defence secretary, who opposes PM's plans to grant gay couples right to marry, denies accusation

Philip Hammond, the defence secretary, has become embroiled in a row over equal marriage amid claims that he likened it to incest.

The minister, who opposes David Cameron's plans to grant gay couples the right to marry, denied equating equal marriage with incest after Pink News reported that he had linked the two issues.

Hammond released a statement after Pink News reported that he had made the comments to two students at Royal Holloway, University of London, on Friday.

The website reported that Hammond "told students in Surrey that allowing gay couples to marry would be like sanctioning 'incest' ... When the students asked why, the MP believed the government should retain a ban on same-sex marriages, he responded by likening the current ban on equal marriage to 'incest', where it is illegal for two siblings to enter into wedlock."

A British lawmaker's suggestion that young women who wear high heels and short skirts put themselves at greater risk of rape has drawn widespread condemnation.

"If you are blind drunk and wearing those clothes how able are you to get away?" Conservative Party lawmaker Richard Graham, of Gloucester, was quoted as saying by his local newspaper, The Citizen.

Twitter said Monday that worldwide requests from governments about its users rose nearly 20 percent in second half of 2012 as it sought to raise awareness about "invasive" actions.

The popular messaging platform said information requests in the July-December period numbered 1,009, up from 849 in the prior six months.

In launching a revamped "transparency report" modeled after one by Google, Twitter said it hopes the data can be useful to those seeking to keep an open Internet.

"We believe the open exchange of information can have a positive global impact," Twitter legal policy manager Jeremy Kessel said in a blog post marking what activists have dubbed Data Privacy Day.

"To that end, it is vital for us (and other Internet services) to be transparent about government requests for user information and government requests to withhold content from the Internet; these growing inquiries can have a serious chilling effect on free expression - and real privacy implications."

How could the Holocaust not be true? How could such a delusion and deception have taken place? How could all those survivors be so wrong in their testimonies? How could all those perpetrators be so wrong in their confessions? How could all those documents, unspecific as they are, have been falsified? Arthur Butz called his groundbreaking revisionist study "The Hoax of the Twentieth Century", but a hoax of this size and nature just defies belief. Conspiracy theories rarely convince, nor do those who propagate them, so surely the sheer absurdity of the revisionists' claim tells us all we need to know. So, if revisionism is to have any credibility at all, it must demonstrate how, if false, the Holocaust narrative, as we know it, came to be.

The first reports of the mass slaughter of Jews by the Germans were propagated in the spring of 1942 by Jewish and Zionist agencies and published in the Jewish press. These entirely uncorroborated reports received immediate and unmatched credibility by being broadcast (on one occasion in Yiddish) back into Poland by the BBC, and by repetition in the American press, particularly the New York Times. They spoke for the first time of extermination, but not only by gas. According to these reports Jews were being steamed to death, suffocated to death, pressed to death and electrocuted as well as being gassed. It is only later in reports compiled by the Soviet authorities, when they liberated the camps of Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944 and 1945, that gassing emerges as the main method of slaughter and even later, as just one element in the shower-gas-cremation sequence which now lies at the heart of the Holocaust narrative.

A disturbing report in Saturday's Washington Post describes an FBI investigation of a large number of government officials suspected of leaking classified information to the press, engulfing an unknown group of reporters along the way. The investigation includes data-mining officials' personal and professional communications to find any contact with journalists. Just to be clear: It seems officials are being targeted for just talking to the press.

While the Obama administration has already shamefully prosecuted more whistleblowers than all other administrations combined, this investigation - given its unprecedented scope and scale - has the potential to permanently chill both press freedom and the public's right to know.

Last year, the New York Times reported on the computer virus known as Stuxnet that attacked Iran's nuclear reactors and the broader Top Secret program cyberattack program code named "Olympic Games." Around the same time, the Associated Press reported on an al-Qaeda double agent who allegedly foiled a terrorist attack. Both stories are subject to investigation.

When I joined the Marine Corps, I knew I would kill people. I was trained to do it in a number of ways, from pulling a trigger to ordering a bomb strike to beating someone to death with a rock. As I got closer to deploying to war in 2009, my lethal abilities were refined, but my ethical understanding of killing was not.

I held two seemingly contradictory beliefs: Killing is always wrong, but in war, it is necessary. How could something be both immoral and necessary?

I didn't have time to resolve this question before deploying. And in the first few months, I fell right into killing without thinking twice. We were simply too busy to worry about the morality of what we were doing.

But one day in Afghanistan in 2010, my patrol got into a firefight and ended up killing two people on a motorcycle who we thought were about to attack us. They ignored or didn't understand our warnings to stop, and according to the military's "escalation of force" guidelines, we were authorized to shoot them in self-defense. Although we thought they were armed, they turned out to be civilians. One looked no older than 16.

It's been more than two years since we killed those people on the motorcycle, and I think about them every day. Sometimes it's when I'm reading the news or watching a movie, but most often it's when I'm taking a shower or walking down my street in Brooklyn.

In direct reaction to Israel provoking the Al Aqsa Intifada, on October 19, 2000, the then United Nations Human Rights Commission (now Council) condemned Israel for inflicting "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity" upon the Palestinian people, some of whom are Christians, but most of whom are Muslims.[i]

This Special Session of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights adopted the Resolution set forth in U.N. Document E/CN.4/S-5/L.2/Rev. 1, "Condemning the provocative visit to Al-Haram Al-Shariff on 28 September 2000 by Ariel Sharon, the Likud party leader, which triggered the tragic events that followed in occupied East Jerusalem and the other occupied Palestinian territories, resulting in a high number of deaths and injuries among Palestinian civilians." The U.N. Human Rights Commission said it was "[g]ravely concerned" about several different types of atrocities inflicted by Israel upon the Palestinian people, which it denominated "war crimes, flagrant violations of international humanitarian law and crimes against humanity."