At least six militants and two soldiers w ere killed in Yemen on Tuesday in fighting near a damaged oil pipeline east of the capital Sanaa, a defence ministry official and residents said.

Separately, gunmen and bombers targeted three senior military officers and the transport minister in a series of attacks in the capital Sanaa.

In one incident, two gunmen riding a motorbike shot dead Brigadier Fadel Mohammed Ali, an adviser to the minister of defence, outside the ministry's offices in Sanaa, a police source said. Further details were not immediately available.

Anna Baltzer, a Jewish American with the IWPS, documents the human rights abuses perpetrated by the Israelis.

A Tunisian man has been questioned by the FBI in connection with the September 11 bombing of the US Consulate in Benghazi, Libya that killed four diplomats. After months of failed attempts, he was examined as a "witness" - without legal counsel.

­Ali Harzi was extradited to Tunisia after being arrested in Turkey in October, under strong suspicion of involvement in the terrorist attack in which US Ambassador Christopher Stephens was killed.

He had since refused to be questioned by the FBI without the presence of his lawyer.

"They wanted to interrogate him as a witness, but he has refused," his lawyer Abdelbasset Ben Mbarek explained to AFP, adding that authorities attempted to question him "in secret" without his lawyers.

Fadhel Saihi, an advisor to the Tunisian Justice Ministry, told AFP that Tunisian authorities are cooperating with the US investigation.

However delays with the questioning of Hazri have led to calls for sanctions in the U.S.

In early December Republican representative Frank Wolf urged Congress and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to cut off financial aid to Tunisia until it allowed the FBI to interview Hazri. Tunisia has received over $320 million in US aid since January 2011.

After months of wrangling, the Tunisian court allowed three FBI agents to question Hazri before a judge and through a Moroccan interpreter. Hazri's legal counsel was not allowed to be present, on the basis that he was being questioned as a "witness" and not a defendant.

The United States has carried out more drone strikes this year in Afghanistan than it has during its eight-year-long air war in Pakistan, launching 447 strikes and killing thousands while also reducing its air surveillance.

At a time when the US is transitioning military power to the Afghan government and planning its 2014 withdrawal, it broke a new record with the 447 drone strikes it launched in the war-torn country in 2012. Not only did the US launch more drones this year than ever before, but it carried out more strikes in Afghanistan than it did in Pakistan in the past eight years, which is how long the CIA has been conducting such strikes. About 338 drone strikes have been launched in Pakistan.

The data, which was released by the US Air Force, shows that drone strikes have been steadily increasing in Afghanistan, even after former terrorist leader Osama bin Laden was killed in 2011 and the conflict has been winding down. Last year, the US carried out 294 drone strikes in Afghanistan, which was up from 278 in 2010.

The average number of drone strikes per month has also been on the rise. This year, the average was 33 drone strikes, while last year, it was 24.5 At the same time, drone strikes have been increasingly criticized by both legislators and the American public.

A December report by the Brave New Foundation condemned the use of drones, which have killed hundreds of children - and possibly many more that were not reported. In Pakistan, 178 children were reportedly killed by US drones,

Canada joins the US and EU in removing former armed group Mujahedeen-e-Khalq from its "terrorist blacklist".

Canada has come under fire from officials in Tehran for removing an exiled Iranian opposition group from its blacklist of "terror organisations".

Vic Toews, the Canadian minister of public safety, had announced the delisting of the People's Mujahedin of Iran ["Mujahedeen-e-Khalq" (MEK)], following similar moves made by the European Union and the United States.

Toews also announced the addition of the Quds Force, a unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, to the blacklist.

The Iranian foreign ministry responded on Monday, saying that Canada was "using the issue of terrorism as a tool and violating its international commitments".

It's Not a Tax or Spending Problem ... It's a Devolution Into Lawlessness

The "fiscal cliff" is a myth.

Instead, what we are facing is a descent into lawlessness.

Wikipedia notes:

In many situations, austerity programs are imposed on countries that were previously under dictatorial regimes, leading to criticism that populations are forced to repay the debts of their oppressors.

Indeed, the IMF has already performed a complete audit of the whole US financial system, something which they have only previously done to broke third world nations.

Economist Marc Faber calls the U.S. a "failed state". Indeed, we no longer have a free market economy ... we have fascism, communist style socialism, kleptocracy, oligarchy or banana republic style corruption.

Let's look at some specific examples of our descent into lawlessness.

Israel's large Palestinian minority is often spoken of in terms of the threat it poses to the Jewish majority. Palestinian citizens' reproductive rate constitutes a "demographic timebomb", while their main political program - Israel's reform into "a state of all its citizens" - is proof for most Israeli Jews that their compatriots are really a "fifth column".

But who would imagine that Israeli Jews could be so intimidated by the innocuous Christmas tree?

This issue first came to public attention two years ago when it was revealed that Shimon Gapso, the mayor of Upper Nazareth, had banned Christmas trees from all public buildings in his northern Israeli city.

"Upper Nazareth is a Jewish town and all its symbols are Jewish," Gapso said. "As long as I hold office, no non-Jewish symbol will be presented in the city."

The decision reflected in part his concern that Upper Nazareth, built in the 1950s as the centrepiece of the Israeli government's "Judaisation of the Galilee" programme, was failing dismally in its mission.

Far from "swallowing up" the historic Palestinian city of Nazareth next door, as officials had intended, Upper Nazareth became over time a magnet for wealthier Nazarenes who could no longer find a place to build a home in their own city. That was because almost all Nazareth's available green space had been confiscated for the benefit of Upper Nazareth.

Instead Nazarenes, many of them Palestinian Christians, have been buying homes in Upper Nazareth from Jews - often immigrants from the former Soviet Union - desperate to leave the Arab-dominated Galilee and head to the country's centre, to be nearer Tel Aviv.

The exodus of Jews and influx of Palestinians have led the government to secretly designate Upper Nazareth as a "mixed city", much to the embarrassment of Gapso. The mayor is a stalwart ally of far-right politician Avigdor Lieberman and regularly expresses virulently anti-Arab views, including recently calling Nazarenes "Israel-hating residents whose place is in Gaza" and their city "a nest of terror in the heart of the Galilee".

Although neither Gapso nor the government has published census figures to clarify the city's current demographic balance, most estimates suggest that at least a fifth of Upper Nazareth's residents are Palestinian. The city's council chamber also now includes Palestinian representatives.

When Monsanto revolutionized agriculture with a line of genetically engineered seeds, the promise was that the technology would lower herbicide use - because farmers would have to spray less. In fact, as Washington State University researcher Chuch Benbrook has shown, just the opposite happened.

Sixteen years on, Roundup (Monsanto's tradename for its glyphosate herbicide) has certainly killed lots of weeds. But the ones it has left standing are about as resistant to herbicide as the company's Roundup Ready crops, which are designed to survive repeated applications of the agribusiness giant's own Roundup herbicide.

For just one example, turn to Mississippi, where cotton, corn, and soy farmers have been using Roundup Ready seeds for years - and are now struggling to contain a new generation of super weeds, including a scourge of Italian ryegrass.

"Fight resistant weeds with fall, spring attack," declares a headline in Delta Farm Press, a farming trade magazine serving the Mississippi River Delta. The article's author, a Mississippi State University employee, lays out the challenge:

Webster - The police chief in Webster, N.Y., says that four firefighters were shot while responding to a blaze in the town near Rochester and that two are dead.

Chief Gerald Pickering says "one or more shooters" fired at the firefighters Monday morning. Officials say they had arrived at the scene of the blaze near the Lake Ontario shore around 6 a.m.

Officials say a fire started in one home and spread to two others and a car. Officials say there is no active shooter at the scene.

Source: Associated Press

One of the most difficult things to convey to people who are relatively new to information that appears in the so-called alternative media is just how diabolical the controlling elite really are.

People can seem to accept that the world is run by a bunch of ruthless bankers, or perhaps they realize that presidents and national leaders are puppets to corporate interests, or perhaps they even have come to grips with the fact that "The Elite" are willing to destroy nations and people to consolidate power and form a one-world government. Poison the planet with depleted uranium? Yes. Poison the food supply with GMO's? Definitely.

But one topic that has been routinely shrugged off as manifestly impossible is that those at the very top of the pyramid, including well-known politicians and public figures, have engaged consistently -- and on a widespread basis -- in the organized sale, rape, torture and murder of children. Frankly, we had a hard time fully believing it ourselves until recently. But the evidence has become so overwhelming that we must have the courage to look into the very worst cesspit; one which better belongs in paintings of Hell's torments, not on the evening news.

According to Missingkids.com, 800,000 children under the age of 18 go missing each year globally -- 2,185 per day. Their hotline received an average of 580 calls per day to this point in the last quarter of 2012 -- 3.5 million calls since the organization's inception in 1984. It is clearly an epidemic of staggering proportions.