In the past few days, the Israeli public has been hit by a blizzard of speculative articles suggesting a military strike against Iran's nuclear sites is imminent.

The talk is now of a timetable of weeks, rather than months and some observers believe that Israel will act in the runup to the US presidential election - at a time when it could be difficult and damaging for President Obama to withhold his backing in the face of a hawkish and vehemently pro-Israel opponent, Mitt Romney, who has already indicated his support for unilateral action by the Jewish state.

On Tuesday, an article in Ma'ariv suggested that Netanyahu and Barak have set a deadline of 25 September for Obama to clearly state that the US itself will take military action. The date is the opening of the UN general assembly in New York, and also the eve of Yom Kippur, one of the most significant dates in the Jewish calendar.

The implication is that, in the absence of a public declaration, Israel will press on with its own plans to strike at the Iranian nuclear programme.

I was on the 15th floor of the Southern U.S. District Court in New York in the courtroom of Judge Katherine Forrest last Tuesday. It was the final hearing in the lawsuit I brought in January against President Barack Obama and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta. I filed the suit, along with lawyers Carl J. Mayer and Bruce I. Afran, over Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). We were late joined by six co-plaintiffs including Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg.

This section of the NDAA, signed into law by Obama on Dec. 31, 2011, obliterates some of our most important constitutional protections. It authorizes the executive branch to order the military to seize U.S. citizens deemed to be terrorists or associated with terrorists. Those taken into custody by the military, which becomes under the NDAA a domestic law enforcement agency, can be denied due process and habeas corpus and held indefinitely in military facilities. Any activist or dissident, whose rights were once protected under the First Amendment, can be threatened under this law with indefinite incarceration in military prisons, including our offshore penal colonies. The very name of the law itself - the Homeland Battlefield Bill - suggests the totalitarian credo of endless war waged against enemies within "the homeland" as well as those abroad.

"The essential thrust of the NDAA is to create a system of justice that violates the separation of powers," Mayer told the court. "[The Obama administration has] taken detention out of the judicial branch and put it under the executive branch."

In May, Judge Forrest issued a temporary injunction invalidating Section 1021 as a violation of the First and Fifth amendments. It was a courageous decision. Forrest will decide within a couple of weeks whether she will make the injunction permanent.

In last week's proceeding, the judge, who appeared from her sharp questioning of government attorneys likely to nullify the section, cited the forced internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II as a precedent she did not want to follow. Forrest read to the courtroom a dissenting opinion by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson in Korematsu v. United States, a ruling that authorized the detention during the war of some 110,00 Japanese-Americans in government "relocation camps."

A massive robot that can carry a seated human pilot - and is armed with twin gatling guns - has gone on show in Japan.

Kuratas is described as the world's first giant boarding robot, no doubt inspired by the "mechs" of Japanese anime and manga comic book culture which features human controllers inside a walking vehicle.

But Kuratas is different in that it offers two types of control system.

The robot can be piloted directly, or remotely by a user connected to a 3G device such as a latop, tablet or smartphone.

The firm that made the robot, Suidobashi Heavy Industry, even released a tongue-in-cheek video showing how to operate the robot.

It was unveiled to the world at the Wonder Festival in the Tokyo suburb of Chiba.

Kuratas, which is referred to as the Vaudeville project in a promotional video, has two humanoid arms and four wheeled legs - and twin six-barrelled gatling guns - which fire BB-sized pellets at the rate of 6,000 rounds per minute.

A US Navy guided missile destroyer was left with a gaping hole on one side after it collided with an oil tanker early Sunday just outside the strategic Strait of Hormuz

Your cellphone knows where you've been. And new research shows it can take a pretty good guess at where you're going next.

A team of British researchers has developed an algorithm that uses tracking data on people's phones to predict where they'll be in 24 hours. The average error: just 20 meters.

That's far more accurate than past studies that have tried to predict people's movements. Studies have shown that most people follow fairly consistent patterns over time, but traditional prediction algorithms have no way of accounting for breaks in the routine.

The researchers solved that problem by combining tracking data from individual participants' phones with tracking data from their friends - i.e., other people in their mobile phonebooks. By looking at how an individual's movements correlate with those of people they know, the team's algorithm is able to guess when she might be headed, say, downtown for a show on a Sunday afternoon rather than staying uptown for lunch as usual.

For this innovation, the researchers - Mirco Musolesi, Manlio Domenico, and Antonio Lima of the University of Birmingham - won this year's Nokia Mobile Data Challenge. It's fascinating from an academic standpoint. But how exactly might it be used in the real world?

It was an exercise in the unthinkable: a 10-kiloton nuclear bomb has decimated a major city in the Midwestern U.S. What will the military do?

More than 9,000 troops and civilians from across the country descended on Indiana and northern Kentucky to find out, during the 19-day Vibrant Response exercise. The exercise, led by U.S. Army North out of Fort Sam Houston, Texas, wrapped up Aug. 13 and included local, state and federal agencies, and involved 300,000 casualties and military units from more than 40 locations across the U.S.

The intent is to allow the military to practice interacting with civilian agencies and test the military's ability to deploy, employ and sustain specialized military response forces in the aftermath of a catastrophic chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear event.

Photos from the exercise can be viewed here.

London that is widely known as a perfect example of surveillance society with its watchful CCTVs, is now a perfect example of a police state after the massive Olympics militarization, a fact even organizers implicitly acknowledge.

Organizers decided earlier this year to dress the official mascot for the 2012 Olympics in London, where the security and surveillance cordon are nicknamed the Ring of Steel, in a Metropolitan police outfit.

The mascots, "Wenlock" and "Mandeville", feature a huge single eye that is actually a camera lens that organizers said can "record everything."

The dolls effectively create an explicit symbol of the pervasive surveillance state and suggest an unwelcome addition to British social life that is now subject to an even more intrusive surveillance system thanks to the biggest and most expensive British security operation in decades for the Olympics.

The irony has been taken up by critics of the Games.

Toronto - American authorities are expected to hand videotapes of Omar Khadr to the Canadian government this week now that the head of the military commission has signed off on their release.

Khadr's Canadian defence team, meanwhile, served three affidavits on the government on Monday in support of its Federal Court application to force Public Safety Minister Vic Toews to make a decision on the prisoner's transfer from Guantanamo Bay to Canada.

The government has a month to respond but the lawyers said they were hoping the hearing would be expedited.

Toews has demanded access to the tapes of two mental-health assessments done of Khadr prior to his trial two years ago in Guantanamo Bay.

Oslo - A year after a far-right militant's bomb and gun attacks exposed flaws in Norway's terror preparedness, police are being criticized for failing to improve their ability to stop a gunman bent on inflicting mass casualties.

In contrast to the 1999 Columbine High School massacre in Colorado, which led to sweeping changes in police tactics and training in the U.S., the massacre of 77 people in July last year hasn't had a tangible impact on Norway's police force, critics say.

"There are hardly been any visible changes from July 22 and until today. That is what our members tell me," said Arne Johannessen, who heads Norway's union for police officers. "Now things have to happen. Now both the leadership in the police and the politicians must take this seriously."

A government-appointed commission on Monday presented a long-awaited 500-page report outlining flaws - and some bright spots - in how police and other authorities responded to Norway's worst peacetime attacks.

The confessed gunman, right-wing extremist Anders Behring Breivik, set off a car bomb outside the government headquarters in Oslo, then drove to the Labor youth division's annual summer camp, disguised as a police officer, and opened fire. Eight people were killed in the explosion, while 69 people died in the massacre on Utoya island, in a lake some 25 miles (40 kilometres) from the capital.