The killings of the US ambassador to Libya and three of his staff were likely to have been the result of a security breach, I can reveal.

Chris Stevens had been back in the country only a short while and the details of his visit to Benghazi, where he and his staff died, were meant to be confidential, but American officials believe the attack was planned. The US administration is now facing a crisis in Libya. Sensitive documents have gone missing from the consulate in Benghazi and the supposedly secret location of the "safe house" in the city, where the staff had retreated, came under sustained mortar attack. Other such refuges across the country are no longer deemed "safe".

Some of the missing papers from the consulate are said to list names of Libyans who are working with Americans, putting them potentially at risk from extremist groups, while some of the other documents are said to relate to oil contracts.

According to diplomatic sources, the US State Department had credible information 48 hours before mobs charged the consulate in Benghazi, and the embassy in Cairo, that American missions would be targeted, but no warnings were given for diplomats to go on high alert and "lockdown", under which movement is severely restricted.

Three U.S. congressmen and a top-level government official attended the opening of the Church of Scientology's National Office in Washington, D.C., Thursday.

Their attendance marked a significant endorsement from members of a government that was once partially at war with the organization.

Lawmakers in attendance were Texas Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, Indiana Republican Rep. Dan Burton and Illinois Democratic Rep. Danny Davis. Liz Gibson, Senior Program Manager at the Federal Emergency Management Agency was also in attendance.

According to the cast and crew of The Innocence of Muslims, the man previously thought to have directed it - Nakoula Basseley Nakoula - was just the producer. The moviemaker, it turns out, is known for his work in soft-core porn.

In a story broken by American culture website Gawker.com, it turns out that while filmmaker Alan Roberts has titles like Happy Hooker Goes to Hollywood and The Sexpert to his name, he had yet to achieve recognition for his work. But all that may change, if information making him out to be the man who filmed the movie that has caused virulent demonstrations in more than twenty countries turns out to be true.

According to Gawker's Adrian Chen, who spoke to a number of the film's cast and crew, Nakoula, also known as Sam Bacille, was present during the filming - but there was no doubt who was really in charge.

"Alan was working under Sam, sort of," said Eric Moers, a grip and electrician on the set. "But Alan was directing the movie; there was no question about it. Sam would just say [things like] 'Move faster, we have things to do.'"

Turkey's national air carrier, Turkish Air, has been transiting Al-Qaeda and Taliban militants from North Waziristan in Pakistan to the Turkish borders with Syria, sources revealed on Saturday, mentioning that the last group were flown to Hatay on a Turkish Air Airbus flight No. 709 on September 10, 2012.

"The Turkish intelligence agency sent 93 Al-Qaeda and Taliban terrorists from Waziristan to Hatay province near the border with Syria on a Turkish Air Airbus flight No. 709 on September 10, 2012 and via the Karachi-Istanbul flight route," the source told FNA on Saturday, adding that the flight had a short stop in Istanbul.

The 93 terrorists transited to the Turkish border with Syria included Al-Qaeda militants from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan and a group of Arabs residing in Waziristan, he added.

The source, who asked to remain anonymous due to the sensitivity of his information, further revealed that the Turkish intelligence agency is coordinating its measures with the CIA and the Saudi and Qatari secret services.

FNA dispatches from Pakistan said new al-Qaeda members were trained in North Waziristan until a few days ago and then sent to Syria, but now they are transferring their command center to the borders between Turkey and Syria as a first step to be followed by a last move directly into the restive parts of Syria on the other side of the border.

British troops were involved in the firefight to repel the deadly Taliban attack on the military base in Afghanistan where Prince Harry is currently based, it was revealed this morning.
At least two US Marines were killed in the strike on the base in Helmand province, which houses American and British troops among others.

Major Adam Wojack, a spokesman for International Security Assistance Force in Kabul, confirmed British forces had been involved in repelling the attack, alongside American troops.

He said 18 attackers were killed and another one was wounded and being given medical treatment.

The sprawling base was now secure, he said, but it was unclear if operations were still ongoing outside the wire.

Maj Wojack said: "The base is secure and we are assessing damage."

A spokesman for the Ministry of Defence in London said: "After swift action by ISAF forces, which included UK personnel, the incident was contained." It is understood that the British troops were directly involved in the exchanges of fire.

Police in Sydney, Australia, fired tear gas at protesters staging a demonstration against the anti-Islam film that has sparked mass public outrage across the Arab world.

Hundreds of demonstrators threw projectiles at officers outside the US consulate in Sydney, shouting "Down, down USA," AFP reported.
Protesters waved banners calling for the beheading of those who insulted the Prophet Mohammed, news outlet the Australian reported.

Police pushed the protesters back, and the crowd later marched to nearby Hyde Park.­

One protester was reportedly hospitalized with a head injury, and is in stable condition.

The filmmaker allegedly responsible for the anti-Muslim film Innocence of Muslims, which sparked anti-US protests around world, was called in by Los Angeles police for questioning, county officials confirmed.

Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, 55, was taken to a police station in Cerritos, California, where he was interviewed by federal probation officers, L.A. County Sheriff Department spokesperson Steve Whitmore confirmed.

Media and law enforcement officials staked out a house reportedly owned by Nakoula at the end of a cul-de-sac in the southern California city for around 48 hours, until the man emerged wearing a coat, hat, scarf and glasses.

Nakoula's Coptic Christian bishop claimed the man told him that he was not involved in the film, but that the media had linked his name to the video that mocked the Prophet Mohammed.

• Follows four days of clashes over anti-Islam film
• Egypt's Islamist president faces tough balancing act
• United States is major aid donor to Egypt

Hundreds of riot police sealed off the area near the U.S. Embassy in Cairo on Saturday and the interior minister said he would restore calm after four days of clashes between police and Egyptians incensed by a film denigrating the Prophet Mohammad.

A 35-year-old protester was killed and dozens of people were injured in clashes overnight.

The authorities closed the street leading to the embassy where the demonstrators had spent four days throwing rocks and petrol bombs at police.

The area was quieter early on Saturday. A Reuters reporter saw police push several young men into trucks. Two of the men looked bruised and one was stripped down to his underwear.

"Not so rough," shouted one as he was hustled away.

Police formed cordons on roads into Tahrir Square near the U.S. mission and plain-clothes officers wielding sticks frisked passers-by. The square, the focus of last year's popular uprising that overthrew President Hosni Mubarak, was strewn with garbage and a torched vehicle was towed away.

The US is sending more spies, Marines and drones to Libya, trying to speed the search for those who killed the US ambassador and three other Americans, but the investigation is complicated by a chaotic security picture in the post-revolutionary country, and limited American and Libyan intelligence resources.

The CIA has fewer people available to send, stretched thin from tracking conflicts across the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

And the Libyans have barely re-established full control of their country, much less rebuilt their intelligence service, less than a year after the overthrow of dictator Moammar Gaddafi.

The US has already deployed an FBI investigation team, trying to track al-Qaida sympathizers thought to be responsible for turning a demonstration over an anti-Islamic video into a violent, coordinated militant attack on the US consulate in Benghazi.

Ambassador Chris Stevens, and three other embassy employees were killed after a barrage of small arms, rocket-propelled grenades and mortars tore into the consulate buildings in Benghazi on Tuesday, the 11th anniversary of 9/11, setting the buildings on fire.

President Barack Obama said in a Rose Garden statement the morning after the attack that those responsible would be brought to justice. That may not be swift. Building a clearer picture of what happened will take more time, and possibly more people, US officials said on Friday.

Intelligence officials are reviewing telephone intercepts, computer traffic and other clues gathered in the days before the attacks, and Libyan law enforcement has made some arrests. But investigators have found no evidence pointing conclusively to a particular group or to indicate the attack was planned, White House spokesman Jay Carney said, adding, "This is obviously under investigation."

It was 1993, during congressional debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement. I was having lunch with a staffer for one of the rare Republican congressmen who opposed the policy of so-called free trade. To this day, I remember something my colleague said: "The rich elites of this country have far more in common with their counterparts in London, Paris, and Tokyo than with their fellow American citizens."

That was only the beginning of the period when the realities of outsourced manufacturing, financialization of the economy, and growing income disparity started to seep into the public consciousness, so at the time it seemed like a striking and novel statement.

At the end of the Cold War many writers predicted the decline of the traditional nation-state. Some looked at the demise of the Soviet Union and foresaw the territorial state breaking up into statelets of different ethnic, religious, or economic compositions. This happened in the Balkans, the former Czechoslovakia, and Sudan. Others predicted a weakening of the state due to the rise of Fourth Generation warfare and the inability of national armies to adapt to it. The quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan lend credence to that theory. There have been numerous books about globalization and how it would eliminate borders. But I am unaware of a well-developed theory from that time about how the super-rich and the corporations they run would secede from the nation state.

I do not mean secession by physical withdrawal from the territory of the state, although that happens from time to time - for example, Erik Prince, who was born into a fortune, is related to the even bigger Amway fortune, and made yet another fortune as CEO of the mercenary-for-hire firm Blackwater, moved his company (renamed Xe) to the United Arab Emirates in 2011. What I mean by secession is a withdrawal into enclaves, an internal immigration, whereby the rich disconnect themselves from the civic life of the nation and from any concern about its well being except as a place to extract loot.