Myanmar's military has acknowledged carrying out airstrikes against ethnic Kachin rebels in the country's north, and says it has captured a hilltop post from where the insurgents launched attacks on government supply convoys.

The statement broadcast on state television Wednesday contradicted government claims two days earlier that the military was not carrying out offensive air attacks on the Kachin, raising questions about how much control the elected government of reformist President Thein Sein has over the army.

State television, quoting the Defense Ministry, said the military on Sunday occupied a Kachin Independence Army hilltop post during a mopping-up operation of the area where attacks had been launched against government supply convoys.

The government has been seeking to supply a base at Lajayang which is very close to KIA headquarters at Laiza, the rebel group's last major outpost.

The government delivered an ultimatum to the Kachin to clear a road by Christmas Day so it could supply its base. The Kachin rejected the ultimatum for fear of a government attack on their own outpost.

KIA spokesman La Nan charged Monday that the supplies being sent to government troops included ammunition as well as rice.

Canada's Idle No More movement began as a small social media campaign - armed with little more than a hashtag and a cause.

But it has grown into a large indigenous movement, with protests and ceremonial gatherings held almost daily in many of the country's major cities.

The movement is spearheaded by Theresa Spence, the leader of the Attawapiskat, a small native band in northern Ontario.

Spence is now 22 days into a hunger strike on Ottawa's Victoria Island, just across from the Canadian parliament.

Spence and other First Nations groups are demanding better living conditions for Canada's aboriginals, and they are angry at the country's government, led by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, which they accuse of trying to erode their land and sovereignty rights.

Canada's aboriginal communities have long been disproportionately affected by poverty.

A recent study by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives found that, in 2006, the average income for aboriginal people was just under $19,000, which is 30 percent lower than the $27,097 average for other Canadians.

Although that is a slightly narrower gap than 10 years previously, it would still take 63 years to achieve income parity.

The same study also found the annual income gap between other Canadians and aboriginals is $7,083 higher in urban settings, and $4,492 higher in rural settings.

Few ideas have done as much damage throughout history as empowering the government to criminalize opinions it dislikes.

Writing in the Guardian today, Jason Farago praises France's women's rights minister, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, for demanding that Twitter help the French government criminalize ideas it dislikes. Decreeing that "hateful tweets are illegal", Farago excitingly explains how the French minister is going beyond mere prosecution for those who post such tweets and now "wants Twitter to take steps to help prosecute hate speech" by "reform[ing] the whole system by which Twitter operates", including her demand that the company "put in place alerts and security measures" to prevent tweets which French officials deem hateful. This, Farago argues, is fantastic, because - using the same argument employed by censors and tyrants of every age and every culture - new technology makes free speech far too dangerous to permit:

"If only this were still the 18th century! We can't delude ourselves any longer that free speech is the privilege of pure citizens in some perfect Enlightenment salon, where all sides of an argument are heard and the most noble view will naturally rise to the top. Speech now takes place in a digital mixing chamber, in which the most outrageous messages are instantly amplified, with sometimes violent effects . . .

"We keep thinking that the solution to bad speech is more speech. But even in the widest and most robust network, common sense and liberal-democratic moderation are not going to win the day, and it's foolhardy to imagine that, say, homophobic tweets are best mitigated with gay-friendly ones.

"Digital speech is new territory, and it calls for fresh thinking, not the mindless reapplication of centuries-out-of-date principles that equate a smartphone to a Gutenberg press. As Vallaud-Belkacem notes, homophobic violence - 'verbal and otherwise' - is the No 1 cause of suicide among French teenagers. In the face of an epidemic like that, free speech absolutism rings a little hollow, and keeping a hateful hashtag from popping up is not exactly the same as book-burning."

I am shocked and saddened that your organization would label me as an anti-Semite and self-hating Jew. It is utterly defamatory, and such allegations are entirely based on distortions of what I believe and what I have done. To confuse my criticisms of Israel with self-hatred of myself as a Jew or with hatred of Jews is a calumny. I have long been a critic of American foreign policy but that does not make me anti-American; it is freedom of conscience that is the core defining reality of a genuinely democratic society, and its exercise is crucial to the quality of political life in a particular country, especially here in the United States where its size and influence often has such a large impact on the lives and destiny of many peoples excluded from participating in its policy debates or elections.

It is always difficult to negate irresponsible accusations of this kind. What follows is an attempt to clarify my honestly held positions in relation to a litany of charges that have been given currency by a campaign conducted by UN Watch ever since I was appointed by the UN Human Rights Council to be Special Rapporteur for the human rights situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories in 2008. What follows are brief attempts at clarification in response to the main charges:

On New Year's Eve 2003, Khaled el-Masri, an unemployed car salesman from Germany on vacation in Macedonia, was removed from a bus and kidnapped by the CIA due to a confusion of names. His evidently bore some similarity to an al-Qaeda suspect the Agency wanted to get its hands on. Five months later, after spending time under brutal conditions in an "Afghan" prison called "the Salt Pit" (run by the CIA), he was left at the side of a road in Albania. In between, his life was a catalogue of horrors, torture, and abuse.

Last week, the European Court of Human Rights finally rendered a judgment in his favor, confirming the accuracy of the story he's told for years about his sufferings, fining the Macedonian government for its role in his case, and concluding for the first time in a court of law that "the CIA's rendition techniques amounted to torture." El-Masri's attempt to bring a case in the U.S. legal system against "George Tenet, the former director of the C.I.A., three private airline companies, and 20 individuals identified only as John Doe" for his mistreatment was long ago thrown out, thanks to the "state secrets privilege" -- such a trial, so the government claimed, could compromise U.S. national security. In this way, American courts, including the Supreme Court, typically avoided the subject of Bush administration and CIA torture tactics.

El-Masri was one of more than 9,000 individuals who were then being held in a globe-spanning archipelago of injustice, a series of "black sites" and borrowed prisons (as well as borrowed torturers in many cases). Some of those prisoners were, like el-Masri, innocent of any crime whatsoever; some like him had been kidnapped by the CIA; most, whether reasonable suspects or not, were charged with nothing. The crown jewel of this system was, of course, the U.S. prison built in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which the present promised to close within a year of coming into office and which still couldn't be more open.

The three European men with Somali roots were arrested on a murky pretext in August as they passed through the small African country of Djibouti. But the reason soon became clear when they were visited in their jail cells by a succession of American interrogators.

U.S. agents accused the men - two of them Swedes, the other a longtime resident of Britain - of supporting al-Shabab, an Islamist militia in Somalia that Washington considers a terrorist group. Two months after their arrest, the prisoners were secretly indicted by a federal grand jury in New York, then clandestinely taken into custody by the FBI and flown to the United States to face trial.

Zero Dark Thirty, Hollywood's version of how we killed Osama bin Laden essentially says that torture works. Torture is disturbing, but tough, and American heroes do it.

Do not be misled. Pay attention: The men and women who hunted, found, and killed Osama bin Laden -- and heroes they are -- did not need to use torture. Torture is un-American. It is evil. We found bin Laden using painstaking intelligence work, not waterboards.


The shocking opening scenes and the underlying premise of Zero Dark Thirty, the latest fillip of the torture hagiography to afflict and pervert American society insidiously propagates the view that torture is necessary; tough men and women must make tough decisions, right? It becomes clear how deeply America's moral frames of reference have deteriorated when we realize that it was Kathryn Bigelow, a Hollywood director and power, and not a known shill for the Neoconservatives, whose film presents torture as having been instrumental in finding Osama bin Laden, and that "enhanced interrogation" is Americans doing what Americans must do to protect home and hearth.

Bigelow's views -- like those of so many millions of Americans -- seem to have been colored by the big lie about torture perpetrated by the Bush Administration, and now the Republican Party, for eight years and beyond: Americans must work on the "dark side, if you will" to protect ourselves. Torture is legal -- because, well, because a political hack in the Justice Department, at the behest of the vice president, says so. So, therefore, it is acceptable. A message not-so-subliminally enhanced by the zeitgeist-shaping avatars of pop culture like the execrable 24, which shows tough-guy Jack Bauer saving us all every week by torturing people, and doing what needs to be done, damn the law and all hand-wringers. Even left-wing Hollywood now weaves it into our national consciousness as part of our imagined reality. Even Hollywood filmmakers.

Human rights commissioner reveals sharply increased estimate of death toll as reports say dozens killed in petrol queue air strike.

At least 60,000 people have died in Syria's conflict, the UN human rights commissioner has said, citing an "exhaustive" study which has sharply increased the number of those believed killed.

Before the new UN-commissioned survey it had been estimated that up to 45,000 people had perished during the conflict, so the new calculation increases the death toll by a third.

The revised estimate came as it was reported that dozens had been killed on Wednesday after a government war plane bombed a petrol queue in a suburb of Damascus.

According to the UN report, almost three-quarters of those listed as killed on both sides of the conflict were men.

Estimating casualties is a notoriously difficult process in the midst of an ongoing war, but in this case the UN says it has established the name, place and date of death of each of those it says it has counted.

The real death toll is likely to be greater because reports containing incomplete information were excluded and a significant number of killings may not have been documented at all.

"There are many names not on the list for people who were quietly shot in in the woods," said Rupert Colville, a spokesman for the human rights commissioner, Navi Pillay.

House Republicans abruptly pulled the plug Tuesday night on their promise to take up this week an emergency supplemental disaster aid bill for Northeast states damaged by Hurricane Sandy.

The decision is a stunning reversal since just hours before New Jersey lawmakers were preparing for floor debate Wednesday as outlined under a strategy promoted by no less than Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.).

Indeed the Appropriations Committee had gone so far as to file a $27 billion bill Tuesday together with an amendment to be offered by Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-N.J.) seeking an additional $33 billion to match the Senate passed package of last week.

Absent a change of heart, the upshot now is that the Senate bill will die with this Congress on Thursday at noon. And the whole affair is sure to bring back memories of the famous Daily News headline in 1975 - "Ford to City: Drop Dead."

"I am stunned, stunned," Rep. Rob Andrews (D-N.J.) told POLITICO. "I assume there is as tactical consideration here, that the Republican leadership didn't want to be anywhere near a big spending bill after the fiasco of their handling the tax debate. I understand the tactics but there is a real human need here that is being ignored."

The Iowa Department of Public Safety has secured $110,000 in federal funds that will be used to implement a state-wide face recognition program that will start with tracking convicted sex criminals.

Terry Cowman, the special agent in charge of the Iowa sex offender registry program, tells the Globe Gazette newspaper that the DPS is around one-third of the way to having enough money to make science fiction a reality in the Midwestern state. His fingers are crossed that an additional grant will be awarded in 2013 that will provide another $180,000, at which point the agency can start digitizing around 10,000 images to be used in an expansive and expensive surveillance program based off of biometric analysis.

When all of the images are scanned in and the state is done training its staff, the Gazette's says Cowman and his crew will be able to comb through security camera images and even Facebook photos in order to pick out people from a crowd and cross-reference them with a list of over 5,600 registered sex offenders using only their personally identifiable facial features, or biometrics.

"Biometrics is really coming up to play a big part in law enforcement and investigations and things like that," Cowman adds to reporter Mike Wiser. "What's interesting about facial rec is it is kind of the future of where we're at."

Iowa isn't the first location to look towards biometrics, but it will be a big step in the grand scheme of implementing intensive face recognition programs elsewhere if it indeed gets off the ground. The state isn't likely to see much opposition when it comes to cracking down on criminals that prey on innocent children, but investigators may soon find themselves on a slippery slope once anyone is under the government's microscope.