Washington - The new top U.S. diplomat for Libya has arrived in the county to assume temporary control of the embassy in Tripoli after last month's deadly attack on the consulate in Benghazi that killed the ambassador and three other Americans.

The State Department said Thursday that Laurence Pope, an Arabic-speaking 31-year foreign service officer who retired in 2000, will serve as the charge d'affaires pending confirmation of the person who will be nominated to succeed Ambassador Chris Stevens, who died in the Sept. 11 attack.

The department said that Pope, a former ambassador to Chad and counter-terrorism director, would continue the work that Stevens had been doing and that his appointment underscored a U.S. commitment to work with Libya as it transitions to democracy after decades of authoritarian rule.

Source: The Associated Press

Netanyahu's adherence to the status quo prevents him from dealing with Israel's problems - but rivals present no challenge.

Israel's prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, is running for a second re-election - something that no Israeli leader has achieved since David Ben-Gurion, the country's founding father. On Tuesday, Netanyahu announced an early election in January, which he will almost surely win. His centre-left rivals are too disorganised, unpopular, or inexperienced, while the ruling rightwing block enjoys a stable majority in opinion polls.

In his campaign-launching televised address, Netanyahu put "ensuring that Iran will not have a nuclear bomb" atop his agenda. He made similar declarations before the previous election, in February 2009. Keeping Iran in the headlines serves Bibi's political goals: he appears to be the only possible leader with enough experience, authority and diplomatic skill to deal with the issue. If Iran is the key problem, Netanyahu is the obvious solution.

The recent weeks' global debate about whether Israel would, or should, attack Iran's nuclear installations was a successful prelude to Netanyahu's campaign. Other politicians have little to say about Iran, or they fear to appear soft if they criticise the government's sabre-rattling. In reality, Netanyahu's Iran policy has been a failure. Even by his own account at a recent UN speech, the Iranians are ever closer to the bomb. The public doesn't care, however. There is little appetite for going to war now, or alone. According to successive polls, most Israelis would like to see America's air power, rather than Israel's, bombing Natanz.

Cairo - A Yemeni man working on security issues with the U.S. Embassy in the capital Sanaa was killed Thursday in a drive-by shooting. Some analysts suspect al-Qaida was behind the attack.

The shooting took place in a residential neighborhood west of Sanaa as U.S. Embassy employee Qassem Aqlani was heading to work..

A witness to the shooting, Mansour al Hamadi, said he saw the attackers riding a motor-bike.

He said one of the gunmen called Aqlani by name as he was on his way to work and then shot him in the head with three bullets after catching his attention.

Arab satellite channels said Aqlani was involved in the investigation of a recent attack on the U.S. Embassy compound in Sanaa in which a mob broke through the gate and damaged embassy vehicles and other property.

Moscow - Escalating a confrontation with Russia, Turkey's prime minister said Thursday that Russian military equipment and ammunition bound for Syria's Defense Ministry had been confiscated from a Syrian civilian jetliner on a Moscow-to-Damascus flight, which was forced to land in Ankara on suspicion of illicitly carrying war material.

The accusation by the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which directly contradicted Russian denials, also further inflamed Turkey's already difficult relationship with Syria, where a 19-month-old uprising against President Bashar al-Assad has expanded into a civil war that is threatening the stability of the Middle East.

Mr. Erdogan's accusation, reported by Turkey's semiofficial Anatolian News Agency, came only hours after the Kremlin said no military cargo had been aboard the plane and accused the Turks of illegally grounding and searching it. The Turks, saying they had acted on an intelligence tip, forced the Air Syria flight with 35 passengers aboard to land at an Ankara airport on Wednesday.

"From Russia, an institution equivalent to our Machinery and Chemical Industry has sent military tools, equipment and ammunition to the Syrian Defense Ministry," Mr. Erdogan was quoted as saying about the plane inspection. He was drawing a comparison to Turkey's Machinery and Chemical Industry Institution, or MKEK, a leading provider of defense equipment to the Turkish military.

For the UK, and indeed other advanced economies, the most important point in today's IMF World Economic Outlook is not that it further explodes the myth - repeated again yesterday by the Chancellor - that low interest rates reflect policy "credibility" rather than economic weakness, or that it again emphasises that the UK and others could and should loosen fiscal policy in the face of that weakness. The IMF said all this about the UK back in July, as I explained then. Rather, it is that the Fund has radically revised its opinion about just how damaging the impacts of premature fiscal consolidation have been in the UK and elsewhere.

Back in July, the Fund said that fiscal consolidation had knocked about 2.5% off UK economic growth. This estimate was based on an assumption that the "fiscal multiplier" - the reduction in GDP growth resulting from a reduction in the government's structural budget deficit - was about 0.5. This estimate was quite similar to that coming out of macroeconomic models like ours at NIESR. It was somewhat larger than the impact estimated by the Office of Budget Responsibility. But it was much smaller that the impacts that many of the most credible macroeconomists - Brad Delong and Paul Krugman in the United States, Martin Wolf and Simon Wren-Lewis here - thought likely. [See Krugman here, for example]. It was also significantly smaller than Dawn Holland here at NIESR and colleagues at LSE suggest in the analysis here.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday dismissed lawsuits in San Francisco against the nation's telecommunications companies for cooperating with the Bush administration's secret surveillance program, leaving intact an immunity law supported by President Obama.

The 2008 law shielded the companies from liability for their alleged roles in helping the government intercept phone calls and e-mails between Americans and suspected foreign terrorists without a search warrant. Obama voted for the law as a senator and has defended it in court as president.

The high court, without comment, denied a hearing on an appeal by AT&T customers after lower federal courts upheld the law.

The order does not affect a separate wiretapping suit by the customers against the government, currently pending before a federal judge in San Francisco. The plaintiffs allege that federal agents conducted warrantless "dragnet" surveillance that intercepted millions of messages from U.S. residents. The suit is partly based on testimony in 2003 by a former AT&T technician about equipment in the company's Folsom Street office that allowed Internet traffic to be routed to the government.

Why is there so little trust in the mainstream media these days? CNN ratings have been hovering close to record lows over the past few months. A recent Gallup survey found that 60 percent of all Americans "have little or no trust" in the mainstream media. That was a record high according to Gallup. So why is this happening? Sadly, the truth is that the mainstream media quit telling the truth a long time ago. The mainstream media has an agenda, and more Americans than ever are beginning to recognize this. Once upon a time, control of the news in the United States was at least somewhat decentralized. But now there are just six giant media corporations that control almost everything that we see, hear and watch. The version of "the news" that they give us is designed to serve the interests of those corporate giants and the other corporate giants that spend billions of dollars to advertise their products through those outlets. Watching the news on television can be an extremely frustrating experience these days. Yes, there are little bits and pieces of the truth in there, but you have to wade through an awful lot of "infotainment" to get to those bits and pieces. That is one of the reasons why the "alternative media" has absolutely exploded in recent years. The American people are hungry for the truth, and they are increasingly turning to alternative sources of news on the Internet in an attempt to find it.

A judicial official says French authorities are questioning 12 suspects in connection with an alleged radical Islamic cell believed to have been behind the firebombing of a Jewish grocery north of Paris last month.

Paris prosecutor's office spokeswoman Agnes Thibault-Lecuivre says the suspects were held Monday after raids in Strasbourg, Cannes and the Paris area. Earlier, authorities had said 11 were being questioned.

Police in Strasbourg shot dead suspect Jeremie Louis-Sidney after he opened fire with a revolver Saturday. The 33-year-old was the alleged leader of a cell behind a Sept. 19 grenade attack on a kosher grocery in Sarcelles.

Popular support for Venezuela's revolution shows the growing space for genuine alternatives in the 21st century.

The transformation of Latin America is one of the decisive changes reshaping the global order. The tide of progressive change that has swept the region over the last decade has brought a string of elected socialist and social-democratic governments to office that have redistributed wealth and power, rejected western neoliberal orthodoxy, and challenged imperial domination. In the process they have started to build the first truly independent South America for 500 years and demonstrated to the rest of the world that there are, after all, economic and social alternatives in the 21st century.

Central to that process has been Hugo Chávez and his Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela. It is Venezuela, sitting on the world's largest proven oil reserves, that has spearheaded the movement of radical change across Latin America and underwritten the regional integration that is key to its renaissance. By doing so, the endlessly vilified Venezuelan leader has earned the enmity of the US and its camp followers, as well as the social and racial elites that have called the shots in Latin America for hundreds of years.

So Chávez's remarkable presidential election victory on Sunday - in which he won 55% of the vote on an 81% turnout after 14 years in power - has a significance far beyond Venezuela, or even Latin America. The stakes were enormous: if his oligarch challenger Henrique Capriles had won, not only would the revolution have come to a juddering halt, triggering privatisations and the axing of social programmes. So would its essential support for continental integration, mass sponsorship of Cuban doctors across the hemisphere - as well as Chávez's plans to reduce oil dependence on the US market.

Western and Latin American media and corporate elites had convinced themselves that they were at last in with a shout, that this election was "too close to call", or even that a failing Venezuelan president, weakened by cancer, would at last be rejected by his own people. Outgoing World Bank president Robert Zoellick crowed that Chávez's days were "numbered", while Barclays let its excitement run away with itself by calling the election for Capriles.

It's all of a piece with the endlessly recycled Orwellian canard that Chávez is some kind ofa dictator and Venezuela a tyranny where elections are rigged and the media muzzled and prostrate. But as opposition leaders concede, Venezuela is by any rational standards a democracy, with exceptionally high levels of participation, its electoral process more fraud-proof than those in Britain or the US, and its media dominated by a vituperatively anti-government private sector. In reality, the greatest threat to Venezuelan democracy came in the form of the abortive US-backed coup of 2002.

Even senior western diplomats in Caracas roll their eyes at the absurdity of the anti-Chávez propaganda in the western media. And in the queues outside polling stations on Sunday, in the opposition stronghold of San Cristóbal near the Colombian border, Capriles voters told me: "This is a democracy." Several claimed that if Chávez won, it wouldn't be because of manipulation of the voting system but the "laziness" and "greed" of their Venezuelans - by which they seemed to mean the appeal of government social programmes.

Which gets to the heart of the reason so many got the Venezuelan election wrong. Despite claims that Latin America's progressive tide is exhausted, leftwing and centre-left governments continue to be re-elected - from Ecuador to Brazil and Bolivia to Argentina - because they have reduced poverty and inequality and taken control of energy resources to benefit the excluded majority.

That is what Chávez has been able to do on a grander scale, using Venezuela's oil income and publicly owned enterprises to slash poverty by half and extreme poverty by 70%, massively expanding access to health and education, sharply boosting the minimum wage and pension provision, halving unemployment, and giving slum communities direct control over social programmes.

To visit any rally or polling station during the election campaign was to be left in no doubt as to who Chávez represents: the poor, the non-white, the young, the disabled - in other words, the dispossessed majority who have again returned him to power. Euphoria at the result among the poor was palpable: in the foothills of the Andes on Monday groups of red-shirted hillside farmers chanted and waved flags at any passerby.

Of course there is also no shortage of government failures and weaknesses which the opposition was able to target: from runaway violent crime to corruption, lack of delivery and economic diversification, and over-dependence on one man's charismatic leadership. And the US-financed opposition campaign was a much more sophisticated affair than in the past. Capriles presented himself as "centre-left", despite his hard right background, and promised to maintain some Chavista social programmes.

But even so, the Venezuelan president ended up almost 11 points ahead. And the opposition's attempt to triangulate to the left only underlines the success of Chávez in changing Venezuela's society and political terms of trade. He has shown himself to be the most electorally successful radical left leader in history. His re-election now gives him the chance to ensure Venezuela's transformation is deep enough to survive him, to overcome the administration's failures and help entrench the process of change across the continent.

Venezuela's revolution doesn't offer a political model that can be directly transplanted elsewhere, not least because oil revenues allow it to target resources on the poor without seriously attacking the interests of the wealthy. But its innovative social programmes, experiments in direct democracy and success in bringing resources under public control offer lessons to anyone interested in social justice and new forms of socialist politics in the rest of the world.

For all their problems and weaknesses, Venezuela and its Latin American allies have demonstrated that it's no longer necessary to accept a failed economic model, as many social democrats in Europe still do. They have shown it's possible to be both genuinely progressive and popular. Cynicism and media-fuelled ignorance have prevented many who would naturally identify with Latin America's transformation from recognising its significance. But Chávez's re-election has now ensured that the process will continue - and that the space for 21st-century alternatives will grow.

Not content with focusing public ire on those social spongers who have the temerity to be unemployed or disabled, government has scored a great populist coup, and caused great rejoicing in the land of the tabloids, by decreeing that it is quite acceptable to kill burglars with machine guns, rocket propelled grenade launchers, tactical nuclear weapons or any of the other items the British householder keeps by them for such an emergency.

But if a burglar were to strip my home of its entire contents, it would not reach a tenth in value of the money that is going to be taken from me in taxation by government for the rest of my life to fund the bank bailouts in which my cash was given to reckless and incompetent bankers to cover their gambling losses.

Not only have they taken all my money, the majority of the money I shall be paying to cover it for the rest of my life, will consist of interest to the bankers because the government borrowed at interest from the bankers the money it then gave gratis to the bankers to bail them out.