Iran's Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) has captured a US ScanEagle drone over the Persian Gulf waters upon its intrusion into the Iranian airspace.

IRGC Navy Commander Rear Admiral Ali Fadavi made the announcement on Tuesday, adding that the Iranian armed forces enjoy full intelligence command over foreign movements in the Persian Gulf region.

Referring to the captured ScanEagle drone, the Iranian commander pointed out, "Such drones are usually launched from large aircraft carriers."

The ScanEagle drone, which has a 10ft (3m) wingspan, is a long-endurance aircraft built by Insitu, a subsidiary of Boeing.

Iran has released footage of the captured drone.

Heightened concerns over Iran's potential development of a nuclear weapon have prompted the United States to increase its surveillance efforts overseas in the past two months, a new report claims.

The Wall Street Journal alleges this week that the US has ramped-up its number of spy drone missions over the Bushehr nuclear reactor ever since fuel rods were unexpectedly discharged from the facility in October, just two months after the facility became fully operational.

The US has long voiced concern over the possible procurement of a nuclear warhead by Iranians, but surveillance has increased significantly in the weeks following the recent discovery of spent fuel rods, US officials confirm on condition of anonymity.

According to unnamed sources speaking with the paper, the Iranian government was caught moving fuel rods from the Bushehr reactor to a cooling pond during the week beginning October 22. By November 7, an independent report completed by inspectors with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) confirmed the discovery.

DuPont will use seed security firm to monitor if farmers have saved Roundup Ready soybeans.

Agricultural behemoth and genetically modified seed maker Dupont is preparing to send out former police officers as "soybean police" to enforce its seed patents.

As Monsanto has done in the past, DuPont will be looking for evidence that farmers have saved and replanted its Roundup Ready soybean seeds, a practice that violates that company's contract.

Bloomberg reports that Dupont has hired Saskatoon, Saskatchewan-based Agro Protection International to do the policing, a company which conducts farm visits to determine "appropriate usage" of seeds and to create deterrence of illegally using their client's products, the company explains.

Critics see the move as more evidence of corporate control over agriculture.

Colombia's Marxist-led FARC rebels said their peace talks with the government were going well, but the lead negotiator for President Juan Manuel Santos was more reserved as the two sides finished the first round of meetings aimed at ending their protracted conflict.

In separate sessions with the press, neither side spoke of breakthroughs in the talks, but nor was there any sign they had hit irresolvable obstacles as happened in previous peace attempts. They will reconvene in Havana on Wednesday.

The country's bloody guerrilla war, in which tens of thousands of people have died, dates back to 1964 when the FARC, or Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, formed as a communist agrarian movement. It turned later to the illicit drug trade, kidnappings and extortion to sustain itself.

Millions of people have been displaced by the war, which the FARC says is a fight to end Colombia's long history of social inequality.

Avgi Tzenis, 76, is standing in the hall of her small brick row house on Bragg Street in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. She is dressed in a bathrobe and open-toed sandals. The hall is dark and cold. It has been dark and cold since Hurricane Sandy slammed into the East Coast a month ago. Three feet of water and raw sewage flooded and wrecked her home.

"We never had this problem before," she says. "We never had water from the sea come down like this."

Hurricane Sandy, if you are poor, is the Katrina of the North. It has exposed the nation's fragile, dilapidated and shoddy infrastructure, one that crumbles under minimal stress. It has highlighted the inability of utility companies, as well as state and federal agencies, to cope with the looming environmental disasters that because of the climate crisis will soon come in wave after wave. But, most important, it illustrates the depraved mentality of an oligarchic and corporate elite that, as conditions worsen, retreats into self-contained gated communities, guts basic services and abandons the wider population.

Israel has said it will not backtrack on a settlement expansion plan after Britain, France and three other European governments summoned the Israeli ambassadors to London and Paris in protest at the authorisation of 3,000 new homes in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem.

An official in the office of the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, said: "Israel will continue to stand by its vital interests, even in the face of international pressure, and there will be no change in the decision that was made."

Israel announced the construction of the homes after the United Nations general assembly voted to recognise the Palestinian state.

The British prime minister's spokesman said Alistair Burt, the Foreign Office minister, had met the Israeli ambassador in London on Monday morning to complain about the new building programme, and that the Foreign Office had put out its own statement about the row. Sweden, Denmark and Spain also summoned Israeli ambassadors in protest at the plan.

Ask any lawyer about the importance of being precise - or evasive - with language. Alexander Hamilton and his federal supremacists understood. So did railroad lawyer and slave-not-freer Abe Lincoln. (For those who didn't know, Abe only "freed" slaves he had no power to liberate - in the Confederate States. Slaves under his control - including slaves held by his chief warlord U.S. Grant, remained most un-free for the duration of the war.)

Bill Clinton was a masterful practitioner of the Art of Word (I did not have sex with that woman...). Which, by certain Talmudic parsings, he didn't. Not exactly. Wiggle room, you see. Of a piece with Hamilton's brilliant flim-flam about the "general welfare."

That is how it is done.

To undo it, there must be a rebirth of what they called in cowboy flicks, straight-talking. Calls things by their proper name - and challenge those who don't or won't. Make them say what they mean - openly. If you fail to do so, you've accepted their terms.

Which means, they've already won. Ask any progressive.

Or just wait. He'll soon be "asking" you to "help."

Most people are innocent victims of verbal (and written) rights-rape. For example, public schools. Well, no - they're not. Yes, they are "open" to the public - in the sense that the public is forced at gunpoint to send its children to them. Which gives us a clue as to the proper name that ought to be used in every instance of discussion: Government schools. It is what they are, in plain, direct - and thus, honest - language. Nothing less. Which of course is why honest language is not generally used to describe them. Because that might get people thinking along certain lines. "Public" sounds so much... friendlier. Free, almost - a vicious irony if ever there was. You're not free to decline to pay for them (even if you don't use them). And most kids are certainly not free to not attend them. Very much what you'd expect of a government school. Because the essential attribute of government is coercion - force. The thing that must never be openly stated - but always euphemized.

France and Britain are reportedly considering moves against Israel over Tel Aviv's decision to expand settlement construction in occupied territories, diplomats told an Israeli newspaper. This may include recalling ambassadors for the first time.

This comes as Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the construction of thousands of new homes in Jewish settlements in the area known as E1, between Ma'aleh Adumim and Jerusalem - a step widely seen as retaliation for recognition of Palestine as non-member state by the United Nations.

"This time it won't just be a condemnation, there will be real action taken against Israel," a senior European diplomat told Haaretz daily.

The three European diplomats who spoke to the paper indicated that London and Paris were coordinating their moves against Israel, and have discussed the extraordinary step of recalling their ambassadors for consultations. The action, whatever it may be, could be implemented in the next few days.

"London is furious about the E1 decision," one of the diplomats said.

The interview below with Osama bin Laden was conducted by the Karachi, Pakistan, daily newspaper, Ummat and published on September 28, 2001, 17 days after the alleged, but unsubstantiated, al Qaeda attack of September 11, 2001, on the World Trade Center twin towers and Pentagon. The interview was sensational. The alleged "mastermind" of 9/11 said that he and al Qaeda had nothing to do with the 9/11 attack. The British Broadcasting Corporation's World Monitoring Service had the interview translated into English and made public on September 29, 2001.

Osama bin Laden's sensational denial was not reported by the US print and TV media. It was not investigated by the executive branch. No one in the US Congress called attention to bin Laden's refusal of responsibility for the greatest humiliation ever inflicted on a superpower.

To check my memory of the lack of coverage, I googled "Osama bin Laden's interview denying responsibility for 9/11." Some Internet sites reproduced the interview, but the only mainstream news source that I found was a 1 minute YouTube video from CNN in which the anchor, after quoting an al Jazeera report of bin Laden's denial, concludes that "we can all weigh that in the scale of credibility and come to our own conclusions." In other words, bin Laden had already been demonized, and his denial was not credible.

The sensational news was unfit for US citizens and was withheld from them by the american "free press," a press free to lie for the government but not to tell the truth.

Obviously, if bin Laden had outwitted not only the National Security Agency, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the FBI, but also all 16 US intelligence agencies, all intelligence agencies of Washington's NATO puppet states, Israel's Mossad, and in addition the National Security Council, NORAD, US air traffic control, and airport security four times on the same morning, it would be the greatest feat in world history, a movement building feat that would have made al Qaeda the most successful anti-imperialist organization in human history, an extraordinary victory over "the great satan" that would have brought millions of new recruits into al Qaeda's ranks. Yet the alleged "mastermind" denied all responsibility.

Those who fought colonial rule in the late 1950s allege they were abused by the British

Britain is facing fresh legal action from victims of alleged abuse and mistreatment by UK security forces during the fight against colonial rule in Cyprus between 1955 and 1959. Scores of veterans from the Eoka insurgency are pressing ahead with claims that they were subject to brutal treatment and are seeking an apology and damages from the British government. The move follows an earlier High Court decision to allow Kenyans to sue Britain over torture during the Mau Mau uprising in the 1950s.

Vasos Sophocleous, president of Eoka Fighters' Federation, the group bringing the action, says he still suffers from the abuse he says he received at the hands of the British. "I was tortured 10 or 15 times over 17 days, all types of torture, of the body, of the mind, everything. I cannot describe them; it's not easy for me to speak about them. I still suffer. I feel pain in my back. I feel pain in my knees. I still cannot hear out of my left ear. If there is, and I believe that there is, a real democratic court, then I'm very hopeful that we will win because I believe the court will do their duty. They have admitted already, 40 or 50 years later, that they tortured people in Cyprus."