Allies accused by human rights lawyer of covering up the truth on kidnapping and torture of terrorist suspects

A UN human rights advocate has called on Britain and the US to release confidential reports into the countries' involvement in the kidnapping and torture of terrorism suspects, accusing them of "years of official denials, sophistry and prevarication" to cover up the truth.

In a speech to the UN human rights council in Geneva introducing a report on the issue, Ben Emmerson, a British barrister who is the UN's special rapporteur on protecting human rights within efforts to combat terrorism, demanded that Britain publish the interim findings of a report by a retired judge, Sir Peter Gibson, into the involvement of MI5 and MI6 in the removal and mistreatment of terrorist suspects.

In a response delivered at the council, British officials said the government was "looking carefully at the contents of the report by the Gibson inquiry on its preparatory work, with a view to publishing as much of it as possible". There was no word on when this might happen.

Emmerson also asked the US to release a similar report by the Senate's select committee on intelligence into the CIA's secret detention and interrogation programme.

Claims that deputy PM Uhuru Kenyatta orchestrated post-election violence in 2007-08 in which more than 1,000 died

The Kenyan presidential candidate who faces charges at the international criminal court has taken an early lead as votes were counted the day after the country's election.

With about a third of ballots counted, early results showed the deputy prime minister, Uhuru Kenyatta, with 54% of the vote, ahead of the prime minister, Raila Odinga, with 41%. Few votes have been counted from Odinga's stronghold, the western city of Kisumu.

Isaak Hassan, the chairman of Kenya's electoral commission, said on Tuesday that results from 10,000 polling stations were in, but officials await results from 23,000 more stations.

"Nobody should celebrate, nobody should complain," he said. "We therefore continue to appeal for patience from the public, the political parties as well as the candidates."

The candidates need more than 50% of the vote to win, otherwise the two will contest a runoff in April. The vote commission has seven days to release certified results.

Hassan said the number of spoiled ballots - was "quite worrying".

American democracy urgently needs laws to protect our privacy from the national security state's new surveillance technologies

Military surveillance technologies trickle down to domestic law enforcement faster than ever before. Drones are only one highly controversial example of this endemic problem. And while cutting-edge technologies bring new - and yes, different! - threats to our personal privacy, the right response can be found in the spirit of a document written well before human beings ever conceived of an all-seeing eye in the sky: the Bill of Rights.

Organizations like the ACLU are doing their best to counter the threats posed by emerging technologies with a host of privacy protection bills at the state and federal levels. But we need to come to grips with the fact that the digital revolution necessitates something broader than scattershot law reform, though that will help. Ultimately, we need a mass movement for privacy. We also need to fundamentally rethink our relationship to the government in the post 9/11 era.

Despite the 6.5% stock market rally over the last three months, a handful of billionaires are quietly dumping their American stocks . . . and fast.

Warren Buffett, who has been a cheerleader for U.S. stocks for quite some time, is dumping shares at an alarming rate. He recently complained of "disappointing performance" in dyed-in-the-wool American companies like Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, and Kraft Foods.

In the latest filing for Buffett's holding company Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett has been drastically reducing his exposure to stocks that depend on consumer purchasing habits. Berkshire sold roughly 19 million shares of Johnson & Johnson, and reduced his overall stake in "consumer product stocks" by 21%. Berkshire Hathaway also sold its entire stake in California-based computer parts supplier Intel.

What you are about to hear is not science fiction or conspiracy theory but a glimpse of what is going on behind the closed doors of the United States Pentagon.

In a small auditorium labeled BC232 a man is presenting a discussion on how the military industrial complex can spread a virus and use a vaccine to extinguish what the pentagon calls undesirable human behavior. Specifically in this case religious behavior.

This is dark science my friends. With all the mandatory vaccine programs in the United States do not be deceived for a moment that something like this will not or possibly hasn't already been used on the American public.

The long-dreaded sequestration has arrived, bringing with it potentially catastrophic consequences for governmental programs designed to benefit those most in need. The NAACP estimates these across-the-board cuts will result in 100,000 fewer low-income children being prepared for school through Head Start, 17 million fewer "Meals-on-Wheels" delivered to seniors suffering from food insecurity, and 1.6 million fewer unemployed Americans served through job training, education, and employment services.

Yet, as thousands of "Israel-first" citizen lobbyists descend on Capitol Hill tomorrow as part of the annual policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) - the largest and most influential of the many groups comprising the "Israel lobby" - concern for these millions of Americans will not be on its legislative agenda. 

Instead, AIPAC will be lobbying to avert the impact of sequestration on record-breaking levels of U.S. military aid to Israel. It will also be pushing for legislation to boost the U.S.-Israel "strategic alliance" and green light an Israeli attack on Iran, measures which will both inevitably entail demands for additional U.S. taxpayer-funded weapons to Israel.

Israel stands to lose approximately $250 million of its $3.1 billion military aid package from the United States under the terms of the sequestration. The Jewish Week calls AIPAC's gambit to exempt these cuts a "very risky strategy at a time when millions of Americans will be feeling the bite of the sequestration debacle," which "could easily backfire and damage Israel far more than any cuts in its very generous grant aid program."

In thinking about drones strikes and targeted killings, it can be instructive to picture them hitting people you know, either deliberately or as collateral damage. Doing so may not even be much of a stretch, nor should it be. (It's already the case for people living in parts of Pakistan and Yemen.) Last week, I moderated a live chat on the ethics of drone warfare with Michael Walzer, the author of "Just and Unjust Wars"; Jeff McMahan, a professor of philosophy at Rutgers, who has also written about just-war theory; and The New Yorker's Jane Mayer, who is a master of the subject. The discussion took some interesting turns, touching on the idea of a secret committee that the President would be asked to check with before killing an American and the question of whether China would ever assert the right to call in a drone strike on a dissident living in San Francisco. After Walzer and McMahan suggested some criteria for strikes - criminality, risk of American lives - I asked them this:

Doesn't a journalist working abroad who is about to release classified information about a war crime - thus committing a crime - that will provoke retribution or a break with allies - endangering Americans - fit this definition of a target?

Walzer didn't initially think that it did. The danger to Americans, he said, had "to come directly not indirectly from the target before he can be a target." McMahan had a different view:

If the release of classified information really would seriously endanger the lives of innocent people and the only way to prevent the release of the information was to kill the journalist, then the journalist would be liable to attack. But the evidential standards in such a case would be very high and would be unlikely to be satisfiable in practice.

Lord James of Blackheath, speaking in the House of Lords on February 16 2012

Warren Buffett says even though he and other top earners are paying higher taxes this year, he thinks he's still paying a lower rate than his secretary.

In 2013, capital gains for those earning more than $400,000 ($450,000 for couples) will be taxed at 20%, up from 15%. And high-income households also will pay an additional 3.8% in Medicare taxes on their investment income for the first time. The top marginal tax rate also rose for the wealthiest wage earners, but since Buffett's income is from investment gains, not wages, that's not a factor.

But part of the problem is that his secretary's tax bill also went up since a partial payroll tax holiday ended, raising what she pays for social security by 2 percentage points.

Now, just as diplomacy is yielding results, has never been a better time to ignore the lobbying of Israel's prime minister for war

"If Iran were to acquire nuclear weapons, this could presage catastrophic consequences, not only for my country, and not only for the Middle East, but for all mankind ... the deadline for attaining this goal is getting extremely close."

The above quote - from a speech given by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to a joint session of the United States Congress - is notable not only for its sense of urgency and dire threat, but also for the date on which the speech was given: 10 July 1996. That was far from the first time Netanyahu had sounded the alarm for the need to take drastic action against a purportedly imminent Iranian nuclear weapon: in a 1992 address to the Israeli Knesset, he declared, "within three to five years, we can assume that Iran will become autonomous in its ability to develop and produce a nuclear bomb" - an assertion he repeated without irony in 1995, when, in his book Fighting Terrorism, he again predicted full Iranian nuclear weapons capability within "three to five years".

This past Sunday, Prime Minister Netanyahu declared his belief that ongoing nuclear talks between Iran and the P5+1 nations were futile and represented merely an effort by Iran to "buy time" to develop a nuclear weapon. Coming from an individual with nearly 20 years of public statements consistently citing the purported imminence of such a weapon, this is a questionable statement to say the least. But given the present atmosphere of heightened tension surrounding this issue, such comments are particularly dangerous and revealing.

The present round of negotiations between the P5+1 and Iran represent the only meaningful channel left to avoid another potentially disastrous war in the Middle East - and another conflict that would be likely to draw in the United States, as well. By many accounts, the latest round of talks between the two sides this past week in Kazakhstan represented the most significant mutual softening of positions since negotiations began; they were encouraging enough at the end to be described by participants as a "turning point" in a situation that, to date, has most often been characterized by bellicose rhetoric and shared distrust.