As clashes between farmers and herders in southeast Kenya escalated Monday with 38 people killed, including nine police officers, the Red Cross suggested the military be deployed to the area.

The tit-for-tat cycle of killings may be related to a redrawing of political boundaries and next year's general elections, the U.N. Humanitarian coordinator for Kenya, Aeneas C. Chuma, said late last month, although on the surface it seems driven by competition for water, pasture and other resources. As the next year's general election in March approaches, political tensions and tribal animosities have increased due to competitions among potential candidates.

In the latest bloodshed, armed farmers allegedly attacked a village of their semi-nomadic livestock-herding neighbors, the Red Cross said. Eight children were among those killed in the dawn attack in which over 300 people from the Pokomo tribe allegedly raided Kilelengwani village of the Orma tribe of herders, said Kenya Red Cross Secretary General Abbas Gullet. The raiders torched 167 houses.

Gullet said the government should consider dispatching the military to the area to reinforce police patrols and impose a curfew in the area to prevent further escalation of the deadly counter-attacks.

A senior Syrian military source reported major rifts among armed groups fighting President Bashar al-Assad government, adding that 85% of the terrorists fighting in Syria are foreign nationals coming from other Arab states.

"The Syrian Army is fighting groups 80% to 85% of which are formed of foreign nationals coming from different Arab countries," the source told al-Ajel news website on Monday.

He revealed that al-Qaeda forces are also among the members of the armed groups fighting against the Syrian people.

The military source also referred to the widening gaps among the members of these armed groups, and said some of them have defected from their relevant groups and formed new gangs.

In relevant remarks yesterday, a French surgeon who treated terrorists in Aleppo said that half of the rebels in Syria are from foreign countries recruited by a number of foreign countries, and that most of his patients in Syria were wounded militants and not civilians.

Yemeni armed forces have killed Said al-Shehri, a man seen as the second-in-command of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), a government website said on Monday.

The Ministry of Defense website said Shehri was a Saudi national who was killed, along with six other militants, in an army operation in the Wadi valley in south-east Yemen. It gave no more details.

The United States has used unmanned drones to target AQAP, which has planned attacks on international targets including airliners and is described by Washington as the most dangerous wing of al-Qaida.

A Yemeni security source said Shehri was killed in an operation last Wednesday which was thought to have been carried out by a U.S. drone, rather than the Yemeni military. The source said another Saudi and an Iraqi national were among the others killed.

The death toll from a car bomb in Syria's largest city has risen to 30, state media said Monday, as the new international envoy to the country said the Syrian people are desperate to see peace and stability.

The Sunday night blast ripped through the northern city of Aleppo, which has become one of the main battlegrounds of the country's civil war. Activists say at least 23,000 people have been killed since the conflict erupted in March 2011.

On Monday, the new U.N.-Arab League envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, said he will travel to Syria this week to meet with regime officials as well as civil society.

"I answer to no one except the Syrian people," Brahimi told reporters in Cairo, where he was meeting with Arab League officials and Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi. "Syrians aspire to peace, stability and to realizing their goals of freedom and political progress."

Germany's equivalent of the FBI has put out a notice inquiring about highly-trained computer professionals who know how to exploit windows, speak different languages, and fight the bad guys. In short, Germany is developing its own spyware.

­Although the Bundeskriminalamt's (BKA) job offer is not overt, it is neither by any means secret. Germany is seeking to develop its own state brand of spyware in an effort to fight crime and curb terrorism. According to the advert, job applicants must "demonstrate a sound knowledge of C++...have a very good knowledge of low-level programming and the security mechanisms of Windows," and exhibit a "high degree of creativity."

Also, if selected, the applicant will be "tenured", meaning that he or she can only be fired through a difficult mutual decision, essentially guaranteeing the applicant a long career with the agency.

In keeping with Germany's equal opportunity laws, female candidates will "be strongly considered."

The leaders of the three parties in Greece's coalition government have failed to agree on a package of spending cuts worth 11.5 billion euro, which the Prime Minister says are crucial to restoring the country's financial credibility.

On Sunday conservative Premier Antonis Samaras, socialist Evangelos Venizelos and Fotis Kouvelis of the Democratic Left, disagreed on cuts on pensions and wages and decided to meet again Wednesday.

Venizaelos and Kouvelis asked international creditors to give them more time to implement austerity measures, AP says.

"We haven't finished and there hasn't been a specific decision. One thing is certain, I'm pushing for the measures to be just and not uneven," Democratic Left's Kouvelis told reporters.

"We cannot touch the disability benefits. We cannot make what we call horizontal cuts in pensions," Venizelos said.

As Iranians reel under the pressure of international sanctions, a Russian Deputy Foreign Minister said Washington's unilateral sanction regime against Iran is a violation of international law.

­Saying that Russia has found no evidence that Iran is intent on developing a weapon, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov warned the United States and Israel on the "disastrous" consequences of attacking Iran.

"We warn those who are no strangers to military solutions...that this would be harmful, literally disastrous for regional stability," Ryabkov told reporters on Thursday.

A military attack on Iran "would set off deep shocks in the security and economic spheres that would reverberate far beyond the boundaries of the Middle East region," he said.

Saying there were no indications of a weapon component to Tehran's nuclear program, Ryabkov pushed for continuing monitoring by the UN nuclear agency was a strong guarantee.

"As before, we see no signs that there is a military dimension to Iran's nuclear program. No signs," Ryabkov, the head of Russia's delegation on Iran, as saying.

Meanwhile, as Iranians reel under the pressure of international sanctions, the Russian diplomat said Washington's unilateral sanction regime against Iran is a violation of international law.

A series of car bombs in six mainly Shia districts around the Iraqi capital Baghdad has killed at least 32 people and injured more than 100 others, police and hospital officials say.
The late Sunday bombings were part of a wave of terrorist attacks that swept across Iraq since Saturday, leaving at least 88 people dead, and more than 400 injured, AFP reported.

According to an interior ministry official and a medical source, a car bomb killed at least 13 people and injured about 32 in northern Baghdad, another in Shuala left five dead and 22 wounded , while a third in Urr killed four and wounded 13 and a fourth in Hurriyah killed three and injured at least 14 people.

In the west of Baghdad, a car bomb killed seven people and wounded at least 21.

Violence has increased in Iraq since December 2011, when an arrest warrant was issued for fugitive Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi, who has been charged with running a death squad targeting Iraqi officials and Shia Muslims.

More than 20 years after the last drill bit went into the Chukchi Sea floor off northern Alaska, a Shell drilling rig on Sunday began work that the company hopes will lead to a bonanza that adds to its bottom line and extends Alaska's oil economy.

"Today marks the culmination of Shell's six-year effort to explore for potentially significant oil and gas reserves, which are believed to lie under Alaska's Outer Continental Shelf," Shell Alaska Vice President Pete Slaiby said in a statement.

Welcomed by the Obama administration, the exploration in Alaska's Arctic waters has become a major battleground for environmental groups, which fear oil spills in the pristine area already threatened by warming temperatures and reduced sea ice.

"The melting Arctic is a dire warning, not an invitation to make a quick buck," said Dan Howells, a campaign director for Greenpeace.

Shell has paid the U.S. $2.8 billion for lease rights to areas in the Chukchi and neighboring Beaufort Sea, and the U.S. estimates those waters hold 26 billion barrels of recoverable oil and 130 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

There was a time when the NSA would not know the content of this sentence minutes (or depending on the speed of typing, hours) ahead of our general readership. Those days are now gone, primarily thanks to the Patriot Act, which however merely accelerated the inevitable Orwellian destination to which American society was otherwise headed and which made constant "supervision" and "vigilance" of every US citizen a necessity (for some eyewatering details read "We Are This Far From A Turnkey Totalitarian State" - Big Brother Goes Live September 2013). There was, however, one aspect of society over which the US government did not have Chinese-type "firewall" supreme authority: the Internet. Now, as a result of an Executive Order being quietly drafted, the president of this once great country, together with the Department of Homeland Security formed in response to the events of September 11, is about to grasp supreme control over this last bastion of New Normal expression and content dissemination, naturally under the guise of protecting the people. Because as Bloomberg reports, President Obama's administration is drafting an executive order that would create a program protecting vital computer networks from cyber attacks.

The premise: the US government needs to defend the feeble and defenseless private sector from all enemies, foreign and domestic, because, it would appear, the private sector is incapable of defending itself. And Uncle Sam is more than happy to supervise and take charge of said "defense." "An executive order is one of a number of measures we're considering as we look to implement the president's direction to do absolutely everything we can to better protect our nation against today's cyberthreats," White House spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said in an e-mailed statement today. "We are not going to comment on ongoing internal deliberations." Also, did we mention that the US president's decision for the greater private good would be unilaterally imposed, without the benefit of a democratic vote: after all executive orders, of the type Obama has issued 134 so far, do just that: circumvent the popular vote. We did? Good.