A federal judge on Tuesday ordered a public library in Missouri to unblock access to "occult" websites, which included websites about Native American religions and the Wiccan faith.

"We are happy to see an end to the library's discriminatory Internet practices," Daniel Mach, director of the ACLU Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief, said Wednesday in a statement. "Public libraries should be maximizing the spread of information, not blocking access to viewpoints or religious ideas not shared by the majority."

The ACLU filed a lawsuit against the Salem Public Library on behalf of Anaka Hunter last year.

According to the lawsuit, Hunter had attempted to research the religions of indigenous American tribes, but discovered many websites were blocked by the library.

The state of Ohio executed a man who killed a security guard while robbing a bookstore amid a drug-fueled crime spree, officials said Wednesday.

Frederick Treesh, who was stealing money to buy more cocaine at the time of the 1994 murder, is the fourth inmate executed so far this year in the United States.

His death by lethal injection was declared at 10:37 am (1537 GMT), a spokesman for the state's prison department told AFP.

He expressed remorse in his last words, telling observers that he wished a photo of his execution could be used to convince others to stay away from drugs.

"This is where drugs lead you. This is true life," Treesh said.

"I am here for Henry Dupree. I'd like to apologize to the family for what I've done. I'm sorry."

Italy's former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has been sentenced to one year in jail after a wiretap trial linked to a 2005 banking scandal.

The ex-premier is accused of violating secrecy laws after making public a police wiretap concerning his political rival in 2005. They were published in Il Giornale, a newspaper run by his brother, who was also sentenced to over two years and three months in prison. The leaks were about the attempted takeover of BNL bank by insurance giant Unipol.

Berlusconi denied any wrongdoing and may seek an appeal trial, until the end of which he won't be put into custody.

Palestinian children detained by the Israeli military are subject to widespread, systematic ill-treatment that violates international law, a UNICEF report said on Wednesday. The United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF) estimated that 700 Palestinian children aged 12 to 17, most of them boys, are arrested, interrogated and detained by the Israeli military, police and security agents every year in the occupied West Bank.

According to the report, most of the youths are arrested for throwing stones. Israel says it takes such incidents seriously, noting that rock-throwing has caused Israeli deaths.

UNICEF said it had identified some examples of practices that "amount to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment according to the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Convention against Torture".

Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said officials from the ministry and the Israeli military had cooperated with UNICEF in its work on the report, with the goal of improving the treatment of Palestinian minors in custody.

"Israel will study the conclusions and will work to implement them through ongoing cooperation with UNICEF, whose work we value and respect," he said.

According to the report, ill-treatment of Palestinian minors typically begins with the arrest itself, often carried out in the middle of the night by heavily armed soldiers, and continues all the way through prosecution and sentencing.

North Korea vowed on Thursday to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the United States, amplifying its threatening rhetoric hours ahead of a vote by U.N. diplomats on whether to level new sanctions against Pyongyang for its recent nuclear test.

An unidentified spokesman for Pyongyang's Foreign Ministry said the North will exercise its right for ''a preemptive nuclear attack to destroy the strongholds of the aggressors'' because Washington is pushing to start a nuclear war against the North.

Although North Korea boasts of nuclear bombs and pre-emptive strikes, it is not thought to have mastered the ability to produce a warhead small enough to put on a missile capable of reaching the U.S. It is believed to have enough nuclear fuel, however, for several crude nuclear devices.

Such inflammatory rhetoric is common from North Korea, and especially so in recent days. North Korea is angry over the possible sanctions and over upcoming U.S.-South Korean military drills. At a mass rally in Pyongyang on Thursday, tens of thousands of North Koreans protested the U.S.-South Korean war drills and sanctions.

Army Gen. Kang Pyo Yong told the crowd that North Korea is ready to fire long-range nuclear-armed missiles at Washington.

US persistent refusal to release data hampering efforts to eradicate contamination

A radioactive heavy metal found in weapons used by the U.S. military and other forces in the war on Iraq continues to plague the country as hundreds of sites are still contaminated and causing the spread of the radioactive substance, according to a new report by Netherlands peace group IKV Pax Christi.

Tens years after the invasion, the U.S. has done almost nothing to clean up the toxic legacy of the war and continues to deny the well-documented harms caused by the radioactive residue that remains.

The particular danger posed by depleted uranium (DU) - used in munitions to penetrate hard surfaces such as armored vehicles - was well know prior to the 2003 start of the war. Despite this and ignoring warnings against the continued use of DU munitions, the findings of the report show that both the U.S. and the U.K. used such weapons far more expansively in Iraq - targeting ordinary vehicles and buildings in highly populated civilian areas.

According to the report, In a State of Uncertainty: Impact and implications of the use of depleted uranium in Iraq, the US expended over 400 tonnes of DU ammunition in Iraq, both during the first Gulf War in the early 1990's and the subsequent invasion in 2003. British forces, reportedly, used three tonnes.

Both the U.S. and the U.K. have failed to admit the widely reported adverse health affects of exposure to DU. However, as the report points out:

New and alarming reports of increased cancer rates and birth malformations emerged in the years after the official ending of the hostilities in Iraq, as well as amongst veterans of Coalition forces who were present during and after the fighting; which again pointed to the use of DU as the cause of these health problems.

After invading Iraq ten years ago, the United States spent $60 billion on a vast reconstruction effort that left behind few successes and a litany of failures, an auditor's report said Wednesday.

The ambitious plan to transform the country after the fall of Saddam Hussein has been marked by half-finished projects and crushed expectations, according to the final report of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, Stuart Bowen.

The aid effort was plagued by in-fighting among US agencies and an improvised "adhocracy" approach, with no one clearly in charge of a massive investment that was supposed to put Iraq on a stable footing, said the report to Congress.

"Management and funding gaps caused hundreds of projects to fall short of promised results, leaving a legacy of bitter dissatisfaction among many Iraqis," it said.

The officer remains on active duty as Elizabeth, N.J. police investigate

Police in New Jersey are investigating a video that appears to show an officer punch a woman in the face.

In the sharpest challenge yet to Roe v. Wade, Arkansas adopted Wednesday what is by far the country's most restrictive ban on abortion, at 12 weeks of pregnancy, around the time that a fetal heartbeat can be detected by abdominal ultrasound.

The law was passed by the newly Republican-controlled legislature over the veto of Gov. Mike Beebe, a Democrat, who called it "blatantly unconstitutional." On Tuesday the state Senate voted to override his veto by a vote of 20 to 14; on Wednesday the House enacted the bill into law by a vote of 55 to 33, with several Democrats joining the Republican majority.

The law contradicts the limit established by Supreme Court decisions, which give women a right to an abortion until the fetus is viable outside the womb, usually around 24 weeks into pregnancy, and abortion rights groups promised a quick lawsuit to block it.

Adoption of the law, called the "Human Heartbeat Protection Act," is the first statewide victory for a restless emerging faction within the anti-abortion movement that has lost patience with the incremental whittling away at abortion rights - the strategy of established groups like National Right to Life and the Catholic Church while they wait for a more sympathetic Supreme Court.

"When is enough enough?" asked the bill's sponsor in the legislature, Senator Jason Rapert, a 40-year-old Republican and conservative Christian, who compared the more than 50 million abortions in the United States since Roe v. Wade, in 1973, to the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide. "It's time to take a stand."

General David Petraeus and 'dirty wars' veteran behind commando units implicated in detainee abuse

The Pentagon sent a US veteran of the "dirty wars" in Central America to oversee sectarian police commando units in Iraq, that set up secret detention and torture centres to get information from insurgents. These units conducted some of the worst acts of torture during the US occupation and accelerated the country's descent into full-scale civil war.

Colonel James Steele, then 58, was a retired special forces veteran nominated by Donald Rumsfeld to help organise the paramilitaries in an attempt to quell a Sunni insurgency, according to an investigation by the Guardian and BBC Arabic. After the Pentagon lifted a ban on Shia militias joining the security forces, the membership of the Special police commandos was increasingly drawn from violent Shia groups like the Badr brigades.

A second special advisor, retired Colonel James H Coffman (now 59) worked alongside Steele in detention centres that were set up with millions of dollars of US funding. Coffman reported directly to GeneralDavid Petraeus, sent to Iraq in June 2004 to organise and train the new Iraqi security forces. Steele, who was in Iraq between 2003 - 2005, and kept returning to the country through 2006, reported directly to Rumsfeld.

The allegations made by both American and Iraqis witnesses in the Guardian/BBC documentary, for the first time implicates US advisors in the human rights abuses committed by the commandos. It is also the first time that General David Petraeus - who last November was forced to resign as director of the CIA after a sex scandal - has been linked through an advisor to this abuse. Coffman reported to Petraeus and described himself in an interview with the US military newspaper Stars and Stripes as Petraeus's "eyes and ears out on the ground" in Iraq.