Republican strategist Karl Rove ripped the media on Tuesday for attacking Bush administration officials who justified the use of torture. He also praised President Barack Obama for using drone strikes to kill suspected terrorists, including U.S. citizens.

The former Bush adviser said on Fox News that officials like Alberto Gonzales, John Yoo, Jay Bybee and others were "excoriated" and "hounded" by liberals and the media. Yet the Obama administration has faced little criticism for justifying the use of drone strikes against U.S. citizens.

The author of the so-called "Don't Say Gay Bill" said Tuesday that homosexuality was "very dangerous" and compared it to injecting heroin.

During an tense interview with TMZ, Tennessee state Sen. Stacy Campfield (R) said homosexuality was dangerous because of HIV/AIDS.

"The homosexual community gets AIDS at a 50 times higher rate than the heterosexual community," he claimed. Campfield said AIDS was such large problem in Africa because sodomy was more prevalent in that part of the world. He added that sodomy was a "deadly thing to do."

Latest demand comes from local and southern state governments, including Louisiana and Mississippi, hit hard by pollution following 2010 blowout

BP has been hit by a new $34bn (£21.7bn) claim for alleged economic losses and punitive damages resulting from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The latest demand comes from local and southern state governments, including Louisiana and Mississippi, hit hard by the pollution that followed the blowout on the BP-operated Macondo well in April 2010.

BP described the methodology for calculating the claims as "seriously flawed" and the oil company said it was confident it would not have to make additional financial provisions.

BP refused to say what provisions it has already made for the $34bn claims, but admits to having taken a further $4.1bn "charge" in the final three months of 2012, bringing the total amount set aside so far to $42.2bn.

The CIA is secretly using an airbase in Saudi Arabia to conduct its controversial drone assassination campaign in neighbouring Yemen, according to reports in the US media.

Neither the Saudi government nor the country's media have responded to the reports revealing that the drones that killed the US-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and his son in September 2011 and Said al-Shehri, a senior al-Qaida commander who died from his injuries last month, were launched from the unnamed base.

Iranian state media highlighted the story, which is also likely to be seized upon by jihadi groups. Saudi Arabia has previously publicly denied co-operating with the US to target al-Qaida in Yemen. Evidence of Saudi involvement risks complicating its relationship with the government in Sana'a and with Yemeni tribal leaders who control large parts of the country.

Newspaper ends self-censorship after hearing that rival news outlet was about to publish the location

Newspaper editors are always conscious of the need to balance the public's right to know with the requirements of national security. And, most often, they oblige governments by acceding to requests not to publish sensitive information that might jeopardise operations.

But self-censorship, despite a sensible public interest justification, is increasingly difficult to attain in a competitive digital media world, as the Washington Post can testify.

For more than a year, the paper refrained from disclosing the location of a secret US military base in Saudi Arabia from which CIA drones were launched.

The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns the conviction and prison sentence handed down today against a Somali freelance journalist charged with insulting the government by interviewing a woman who said she was raped by government forces. CPJ calls for the sentence to be overturned and for reporter Abdiaziz Abdinuur to be released immediately pending appeal.

The Bernadir Regional Court in Mogadishu sentenced Abdiaziz to one year in prison on charges of insulting the government and making false accusations, according to local journalists and news reports. Abdiaziz was sent to the central prison in Mogadishu. The woman whom Abdiaziz had interviewed was also sentenced to a year in prison on the same insult charge, while three other defendants, including the alleged victim's husband, were released, news reports said.

Murder of Chokri Belaid, leader of Unified Democratic Nationalist party, triggers 1,000-strong protest outside interior ministry

A Tunisian opposition party leader who had been critical of the Islamist-led government and radical Muslim violence has been shot dead.

Chokri Belaid, leader of the Unified Democratic Nationalist party, was shot outside his home in Tunis on Wednesday morning and died in hospital shortly after.

President Moncef Marzouki cut short a visit to France and cancelled a trip to Egypt scheduled for Thursday after the killing, which triggered a 1,000-strong protest outside the interior ministry.

Few people embody the corporatist revolving door greasing Washington as purely as Elizabeth Fowler

When the legislation that became known as "Obamacare" was first drafted, the key legislator was the Democratic Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Max Baucus, whose committee took the lead in drafting the legislation. As Baucus himself repeatedly boasted, the architect of that legislation was Elizabeth Folwer, his chief health policy counsel; indeed, as Marcy Wheeler discovered, it was Fowler who actually drafted it. As Politico put it at the time: "If you drew an organizational chart of major players in the Senate health care negotiations, Fowler would be the chief operating officer."

What was most amazing about all of that was that, before joining Baucus' office as the point person for the health care bill, Fowler was the Vice President for Public Policy and External Affairs (i.e. informal lobbying) at WellPoint, the nation's largest health insurance provider (before going to WellPoint, as well as after, Fowler had worked as Baucus' top health care aide). And when that health care bill was drafted, the person whom Fowler replaced as chief health counsel in Baucus' office, Michelle Easton, was lobbying for WellPoint as a principal at Tarplin, Downs, and Young.

Whatever one's views on Obamacare were and are: the bill's mandate that everyone purchase the products of the private health insurance industry, unaccompanied by any public alternative, was a huge gift to that industry; as Wheeler wrote at the time: "to the extent that Liz Fowler is the author of this document, we might as well consider WellPoint its author as well." Watch the five-minute Bill Moyers report from 2009, embedded below, on the key role played in all of this by Liz Fowler and the "revolving door" between the health insurance/lobbying industry and government officials at the time this bill was written and passed.

If those North Korean propaganda games weren't odd (and unsettling) enough, the country's state media is incorporating Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and "We Are the World" to show the U.S. under attack. Yeah.

Never mind that "We Are the World" was written by Americans (Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson) or that North Korea probably (um, definitely?) didn't get permission to use this bit from Modern Warfare 3, the entire thing is one complete and very scary mindfuck.

Uploaded by North Korean propaganda agency Uriminzokkiri, the video, as LiveLeak points out, is a dream sequence that shows a North Korean rocket - the same kind the country recently launched into space. As an elevator music version of the USA for Africa charity song plays, the rocket circles the globe, an elated Korea is reunited, and at around the 2:15 mark, an American flag is draped over a bombed out New York City.

More than half of Conservative parliamentary party decline to support PM on issue at heart of his modernising agenda

Parliament took a historic step towards embracing full equality for gay people when MPs voted on Tuesday overwhelmingly in favour of equal marriage at the end of a charged Commons debate that exposed the deep rift over David Cameron's modernising agenda at the heart of the Conservative party.

The 225-vote majority, greeted with rare applause in the public gallery, was marred for the prime minister, who suffered a humiliating rebuff when more than half of the parliamentary Tory party declined to support the government on an issue he has personally invested in.

Owen Paterson, the environment secretary, led an unofficial rebellion by an estimated 136 Tory MPs in rejecting Cameron's plea. The opponents - including two tellers - included Adam Afriyie, the MP for Windsor, who has been running a Tory leadership campaign.

About 40 Conservatives, including the attorney general, Dominic Grieve, either formally abstained or did not vote in the second reading of the bill, which was subject to a free vote in which MPs were entitled to follow their consciences.