Thai authorities have announced plans to charge former prime minister Abhisit Vejjajiva with murder over the 2010 death of a taxi driver who was shot by government soldiers during civil unrest in Bangkok.

The intent to charge Mr Abhisit and his former deputy was announced after a meeting of Thailand's Department of Special Investigation (DSI), police and Thai prosecutors.

"The tripartite meeting has decided to charge former prime minister Abhisit Vejjajiva and former deputy Suthep Thaugsuban under article 288," said DSI chief Tarit Pengdith, referring to the murder provision under Thailand's criminal code.

In September, an inquest found that taxi driver Phan Kamkong was shot and killed by Thai soldiers during political violence around anti-government Red Shirt protests in 2010.

An earlier court ruling found the taxi driver was killed in a volley of army bullets when he ran out of an apartment building to see what was going on after hearing gunfire.

Mr Abhisit and Mr Suthep are expected to be questioned next week.

About 90 people were killed and nearly 1,900 were wounded in a series of street clashes between demonstrators and security forces, which culminated in a bloody military crackdown.

Military drones used to track terrorists or insurgents in Afghanistan have also been flying across the U.S. homeland. Newly released documents show U.S. drone flights by the Air Force, Marine Corps and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for the first time.

The Air Force has tested drones in U.S. skies ranging from hand-launched Ravens to the larger Reaper drones responsible for targeting and killing people overseas - all recorded through the Federal Aviation Administration licenses required to fly in national airspace. That information became public through a Freedom of Information Act request from the nonprofit digital rights organization Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

"The FAA recently announced it wants to slow down drone integration into U.S. skies due to privacy concerns," the EFF said. "We are hopeful this indicates the agency is finally changing its views."

But the advocacy organization noted that the FAA documents don't show any oversight of how drone flights could affect the privacy and civil liberties of Americans.

The advocates run a U.S. drone census that aims to track drone flights made in the homeland by the U.S. military, law enforcement agencies, local police departments and universities. Part of that effort has involved requesting the FAA to release documents showing what agencies and organizations applied for licenses to fly drones in U.S. national airspace.

A veteran BBC TV and radio presenter was charged with three counts of indecent assault by British police on Wednesday, the latest high-profile figure to be questioned since a sex scandal erupted at Britain's publicly funded broadcaster.

The charges will be a further embarrassment for the BBC, which was thrown into turmoil when it was revealed in October that one of its former top stars, the late Jimmy Savile, had been one of Britain's most prolific child sex offenders.

Stuart Hall, 82, best known for hosting the popular TV programme "It's a Knockout" in the 1970s and 80s and who still appears on radio, was not charged with rape, police said.

"The offences are alleged to have been committed between 1974 and 1984 and to involve three girls aged between 9 and 16 years," police said in a statement.

From the start, I thought it was a bit useless to petition the FDA to label genetically modified food. There has been plenty of documented evidence of the FDA's charge forward on releasing GMOs to the American public despite safety concern amongst FDA scientists when GMOs were first introduced into the food supply.

Regardless, I drank the Kool Aid that the Just Label It campaign was pouring. Why not? At least, it would be good for awareness.

When JLI submitted over 1 million signatures to the FDA asking them to label GMOs, and the FDA only counted them as 394 official comments, the people got pissed. What did you expect from the FDA? Did anybody really think they would implement immediate GMO labeling?

Syria will not use any chemical or biological weapons against its own people. The Obama Administration and company are just recycling the same lines that were used months earlier against Damascus.

These statements are disingenuous and hollow. They can easily be deconstructed as rhetoric. All we need to do it look at recent history.

In 2011, were not similar charges put forward against another Arab country? Were they not claiming that the late Muammar Qaddafi would use chemical weapons against his own population? Was it not claimed even earlier that Qaddafi and the Libyan military had brought in black-skinned African mercenaries to kill Libyan citizens? Or that Libyan jets were killing Libyan protesters? What happened to the genocide in Benghazi? Now there is nothing but silence and lost memories. Claims were made, morality and responsibility were invoked, and then a rising Arab country was bombarded. An engine of economic progress in Africa was halted in its tracks overnight and an entire society robbed.

There was also the textbook case of Iraq even before the lies about the Libyan Jamahiriya. Did not the Bush Jr. Administration, Tony Blair, and their circle of war criminals-in-office not lie to the entire international community and say that Iraq had a nuclear weapons program and weapons of mass destruction in 2003? What happened to those WMDs? This is not something that can easily be scoffed at. More than one million Iraqis died over the lies conjured by the Anglo-American duo. Not to mention the ecological damage and the intellectual genocide perpetrated against Iraq's intelligentsia and professional class.

Let us be clear, Syria threatened to use chemical weapons against any invading force on July 23, 2012. Firstly, the statement was made in a defensive context. Secondly, it was directed against military threats. This is very different from planning on using chemical weapons against your own citizens, specifically civilians.

Due to its close proximity to Washington DC, in recent years Maryland has become one of the worst police states in the country.

Last month, we reported on a botched FBI raid in Maryland, where unarmed teenagers were shot at simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Then, just the other day in Baltimore, an activist and blogger had his house surrounded by police over a trumped-up charge that was over 3 years old.

Now, in a more rural area of Maryland, a man named Terry Porter became the target of a massive manhunt involving FBI and state police after being reported to be a "survivalist" with a "collection of guns" who outlined his anger over the presidential reelection to an undercover officer.

This situation apparently stemmed from an anonymous tip from someone who reported Terry to the police because he owned guns and invested in a bomb shelter.

Communist East Germany allowed Western drug companies to use its medical patients as unwitting guinea pigs for tests with untried pharmaceuticals in return for hundreds of thousands in hard currency, a television documentary by Germany's ARD television channel has revealed.

The disturbing disclosures about the former communist state's patients-for-cash scheme comes only weeks after an admission by the Swedish furniture giant Ikea that East German political prisoners were used to make its products before the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989.

The ARD documentary Tests and the Dead, which was aired for the first time this week, sheds light on other dubious practices East Germany resorted to in an attempt to sustain its failing economy.

The film reveals how Western pharmaceutical companies deliberately turned to financially strapped Eastern Bloc countries in their search for human guinea pigs after the 1960s Thalidomide scandal, which had suddenly obliged them to carry out rigorous tests on their products before they could be sold.

The FBI records the emails of nearly all US citizens, including members of congress, according to NSA whistleblower William Binney. In an interview with RT, he warned that the government can use this information against anyone.

Binney, one of the best mathematicians and code breakers in the history of the National Security Agency, resigned in 2001. He claimed he no longer wanted to be associated with alleged violations of the Constitution, such as how the FBI engages in widespread and pervasive surveillance through powerful devices called 'Naris.'

This year, Binney received the Callaway award, an annual prize that recognizes those who champion constitutional rights and American values at great risk to their personal or professional lives.

A series of events just from this week makes clear who is actually violating the consensus of the international community

The phrase "rogue nation" is one of the terms that get tossed around often in political discourse without much effort devoted to its actual meaning. Let's try to apply this term to a series of events just from the last week, beginning with this one:

"The 193-nation UN General Assembly on Thursday overwhelmingly approved the de facto recognition of a sovereign Palestinian state . . . . There were 138 votes in favor, nine against and 41 abstentions. . . . .The assembly approved the upgrade despite threats by the United States and Israel to punish the Palestinians by withholding funds for the West Bank government.. . . .The Czech Republic was unique in Europe, joining the United States, Israel, Canada, Panama and tiny Pacific Island states likes Nauru, Palau and Micronesia in voting against the move."

In response, Israel announced it would "punish" the Palestinians for the UN vote by approving more settlements (which virtually the entire world deems illegal) and withholding tax revenue that was to pay employees of the Palestinian Authority; that behavior by Israel resulted in this:

"Australia and Brazil summoned their Israeli ambassadors on Tuesday to protest against Israel's decision to expand Jewish settlements in east Jerusalem and the West Bank and withhold tax revenue from the Palestinian Authority.

"The moves followed similar actions in Europe including Spain, France, Britain, Sweden and Denmark in the wake of the Palestinians winning de facto UN recognition of statehood."

US President Barack Obama's renewed warning against Syria this week, that any use of chemical weapons by Syrian government forces is a red line triggering direct military assault on the country, can be seen as the Western powers moving towards their endgame of "regime change."

Washington first raised the specter of Syrian chemical weapons several months ago and warned then that it would be forced to act militarily in order to "secure" such alleged stockpiles.

Now the American president and his officials are rekindling fears of this contingency, with the added alleged development that the Syrian government of President Bashar Al Assad has become so desperate to survive that it is preparing to mobilize chemical warheads.

Speaking in Washington, Obama upbraided the Syria government that "the world is watching" and that there would be "consequences" for any such deployment.

US secretary of state Hillary Clinton echoed the warning and described the use of these weapons as "a red line." Tellingly, she added that if there is "any evidence" that the Syrian military had begun to use chemical warheads then "we are certainly planning to take action."