US authorities censored part of a preliminary hearing Monday at a Guantanamo military tribunal that touched on CIA secret prisons where suspected 9/11 plotters say they were tortured.

Reporters watched the proceedings against the five 9/11 suspects at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba behind a thick, sound-proof glass wall and listened to piped-in audio with a 40-second delay.

But when a defense lawyer mentioned the CIA secret sites at Monday's hearing, a red light flashed on and the sound from the courtroom was cut off.

The audio from the proceedings was replaced by white noise, preventing journalists from listening to the courtroom debate over evidence related to the CIA "black sites," where the suspected September 11 attackers were detained and interrogated before being transferred to the Guantanamo facility.

The US military plans to set up a base for drones in northwest Africa to bolster surveillance of Al-Qaeda's affiliate in the region as well as allied Islamist extremists, a US official told AFP on Monday.

The base for the robotic, unmanned aircraft would likely be located in Niger, on the eastern border of Mali, where French forces are currently waging a campaign against Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The base was first reported by the New York Times earlier Monday.

The airfield would allow for better intelligence gathering by unarmed drones on the movement of AQIM and other militants, which Washington considers a growing threat, the official said.

If the plan gets the green light, up to 300 US military service members and contractors could be sent to the base to operate the drone aircraft, according to the New York Times.

The State Department has shut down the office of its special envoy for the closure of Guantanamo Bay, a US official said Monday, in a sign of the fading hopes of shuttering the jail.

Daniel Fried, the special envoy in charge of the dossier, will now move to coordinate the State Department's sanctions policy, including for Iran and Syria, and his "former responsibilities will be 'assumed' by the office of the department's legal adviser," The New York Times reported, citing an internal personnel memo.

A US official, who asked not to be named, told AFP that the story, which specified that Fried would not be replaced, was "accurate."

Fried, a veteran diplomat and former ambassador to Poland, was appointed special envoy in May 2009, only months after US President Barack Obama ordered the notorious jail at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to close.

"The shaping of the will of Congress and the choosing of the American president has become a privilege reserved to the country's equestrian classes, a.k.a. the 20% of the population that holds 93% of the wealth, the happy few who run the corporations and the banks, own and operate the news and entertainment media, compose the laws and govern the universities, control the philanthropic foundations, the policy institutes, the casinos, and the sports arenas." - Journalist Lewis Lapham

The pomp and circumstance of the presidential inauguration has died down. Members of Congress have taken their seats on Capitol Hill, and Barack Obama has reclaimed his seat in the White House. The circus of the presidential election has become a faint memory. The long months of debates, rallies, and political advertisements have slipped from our consciousness. Now we are left with the feeling that nothing has really changed, nor will it.

This is not by accident. The media circus leading up to the elections, the name calling in the halls of Congress, the vitriol and barbs traded back and forth among people who are supposed to be working together to improve the country, are all components of the game set up by those who run the show. The movers and shakers behind these engaging, but ultimately trite, political exercises are the elite, the so-called upper class, who benefit from the status quo. This status quo is marked by an economic crisis with no end in sight, by the slow but steady growth of a police state aimed at the lowest rungs of society, and a political circus which keeps us enraptured long enough that we don't question what's really going on.

Meanwhile, this elite, composed of corporations profiting off of our ignorance, avoid being brought to task for their destruction of democratic governance and the economy. These are the corporations who sent our economy into a tail spin and were then rewarded with taxpayer money. These are the corporations who write laws which eliminate real competition in the market in order to secure their profits through lucrative government contracts. These are the corporations who avoid criminal prosecution, and are instead slapped with meager fines which do nothing to halt their felonious activities.

We now live in a two-tiered system of justice and governance. There are two sets of laws: one set for the government and the corporations, and another set for you and me.

Curious as to how the Defense Department could be spying on you next? PBS checked in with DARPA about the latest in drone camera technology for the NOVA special Rise of the Drones, including the world's highest-resolution camera.

Actually seeing the sensor on ARGUS-IS, or Autonomous Real-Time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System, is still classified, but the basics of how it works have been deemed fit for public consumption.

ARGUS-IS uses 368 imaging chips like those found in cell phone cameras, to stitch together a 1.8 billion pixel video. That means from 17,500 feet in the air, ARGUS-IS can see someone on the ground waving their arms. And it generates that kind of high-definition video for an area 15 square miles across. It can see a bird flying through a parking lot from more than three miles in the air.

Israel has admitted that it has been giving Ethiopian Jewish immigrants birth control injections, according to a report in Haaretz. An Israeli investigative journalist also found that a majority of the women given these shots say they were administered without their knowledge or consent.

Health Ministry Director General Prof. Ron Gamzu acknowledged the practice - without directly conceding coercion was involved - in a letter to Israeli health maintenance organizations, instructing gynecologists in the HMOs "not to renew prescriptions for Depo-Provera for women of Ethiopian origin if for any reason there is concern that they might not understand the ramifications of the treatment."

Depo-Provera is a hormonal form of birth control that is injected every three months.

Gamzu issued the letter in response to a complaint from Sharona Eliahu-Chai of the Association of Civil Rights in Israel. Representing several women's rights and Ethiopian immigrant groups, Eliahu-Chai demanded an immediate end to the injections and that an investigation be launched into the practice.

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."