According to the London Evening Standard, a top British prosecutor has "warned that Britons who travel to join the Syrian conflict will face prosecution and potential life sentences on their return."

Sue Hemming said it was a crime to fight in another country even if it was to topple a "loathsome" dictator such as president Bashar Assad.

The head of counter-terrorism at the Crown Prosecution Service said Britons could also face charges for attending rebel training camps.

Her comments, in an interview with the Evening Standard, come as seven British residents including two London women await trial over charges connected to the Syrian conflict.

They follow a recent surge in arrests by police and a warning by the Met's counter-terrorism chief about the growing number of young Britons either traveling to Syria or attempting to go." (Brits who fight in Syria face life in jail, London Evening Standard, February 3, 2014)

What the British prosecutor fails to address is that the British "freedom fighters" are being recruited with the full support of the British government of Prime Minister David Cameron in defiance of UK laws.

The trial this week of a Rwandan genocide suspect in a Paris courtroom is a well-earned victory for the French human rights groups who lobbied so hard and so long for justice. The milestone trial signals the end of France as a safe haven for génocidaries. But more than this, the trial is likely to see intense public scrutiny of one of the great scandals of the past century - the role of France in the 1994 genocide of the Tutsi of Rwanda, which for 20 years journalists and activists have tried so hard to expose.

Pascal Simbikangwa, the defendant in Paris, is said to have been a member of an inner circle of power in Rwanda that devised genocide as a planned political campaign. Developed by Hutu ideologues, it was intended to prevent a power-sharing system of government that was to include the minority Tutsi. The genocide claimed up to a million lives.

The State Department recently issued a collection of previously classified documents that shed new light on the Central Intelligence Agency's role in the June 1954 coup in Guatemala that ousted the president, Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán. Mr. Arbenz had clashed with the United Fruit Company, which for many years exercised decisive influence in Guatemala, and the Eisenhower administration feared that he was leading his country toward Communism. The coup brought Col. Carlos Castillo Armas to power and set off more than three decades of civil conflict and repression in which hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans were killed.

The French government is fighting to break a school boycott by parents convinced that their children are being taught masturbation and a non-existent "gender theory" as part of an effort to promote equality between the sexes.

Education Minister Vincent Peillon on Wednesday told head teachers to summon parents who have withdrawn their children from school to explain that rumours about the government's ABCD of Equality programme are untrue and remind them that school attendance is a legal requirement.

"A certain number of extremists have decided to lie, to frighten parents," Peillon told journalists. "What we are doing in schools is teach the values of the republic and, therefore, respect between men and women."

He also sent a message of "solidarity" to teachers, judging it "unacceptable" that their professionalism should be questioned.

Most of what Americans think they know about capitalism and communism is total nonsense. Here's a clearer picture.

As the commentary around the recent deaths of Nelson Mandela, Amiri Baraka and Pete Seeger made abundantly clear, most of what Americans think they know about capitalism and communism is arrant nonsense. This is not surprising, given our country's history of Red Scares designed to impress that anti-capitalism is tantamount to treason. In 2014, though, we are too far removed from the Cold War-era threat of thermonuclear annihilation to continue without taking stock of the hype we've been made, despite Harry Allen's famous injunction, to believe. So, here are seven bogus claims people make about communism and capitalism.

1. Only communist economies rely on state violence.

Obviously, no private equity baron worth his weight in leveraged buyouts will ever part willingly with his fortune, and any attempt to achieve economic justice (like taxation) will encounter stiff opposition from the ownership class. But state violence (like taxation) is inherent in every set of property rights a government can conceivably adopt - including those that allowed the aforementioned hypothetical baron to amass said fortune.

In capitalism, competing ownership claims are settled by the state's willingness to use violence to exclude all but one claimant. If I lay claim to one of David Koch's mansions, libertarian that he is, he's going to rely on big government and its guns to set me right. He owns that mansion because the state says he does and threatens to imprison anyone who disagrees. Where there isn't a state, whoever has the most violent power determines who gets the stuff, be that a warlord, a knight, the mafia or a gang of cowboys in the Wild West. Either by vigilantes or the state, property rights rely on violence.

The United Nations is hammering the Vatican for what a panel calls a failure to fully address sex abuse in the Catholic Church. "The Holy See has consistently placed the preservation of the reputation of the church and the protection of the perpetrators above children's best interests," the Committee on the Rights of the Child says, per the New York Times. The Vatican "has not acknowledged the extent of the crimes committed, has not taken the necessary measures to address cases of child sexual abuse and to protect children, and has adopted policies and practices which have led to the continuation of the abuse by and the impunity of the perpetrators."

The church "still places children in many countries at high risk of sexual abuse, as dozens of child sexual offenders are reported to be still in contact with children," the panel says. Leaders must "immediately remove" priests linked to child abuse. The Vatican, the BBC notes, responded that while it "takes note of the concluding observations," it "does, however, regret to see an attempt to interfere with Catholic Church teaching on the dignity of the human person." The church also "reiterates its commitment to defending and protecting the rights of the child." The BBC notes that the Vatican has denied UN requests for records on the abuse; church officials say they only release the information when a government seeks it in a legal case.

Just in case you had any lingering doubt about the uselessness of many U.S. public schools, I bring to you Marinette Middle School. Yes, the administrators of this school thought it would be a fantastic idea to gather sixth graders around and ask them in front of all their classmates questions like; if their parents are alcoholics, use drugs or are divorced.

This story emerge only a week after I published the very disturbing article: Lunches Seized and Tossed in Trash at Salt Lake City Elementary School for Kids with Unpaid Balances.

Now, from local station NBC26 we discover that:

A distinguished member of the U.S. Supreme Court gave a sobering reminder of how history can and likely will repeat itself when the conditions are right. Justice Antonin Scalia said that he would not be surprised if Americans were once again imprisoned in concentration camps by the federal government.

The 77-year-old justice was answering questions after giving a classroom lecture to a group of law students in Honolulu. One student asked about the deplorable 1944 Korematsu v. United States decision, in which the U.S. Supreme Court verified the constitutionality of the president ordering the mass-imprisonment of Americans in the name of national security.

Scalia cited the wartime "panic" as a reason Americans accepted President Franklin Roosevelt's hostile treatment of citizens of his own country.

Mohamed Morsi, the deposed Egyptian president, appeared in public on Tuesday for the second time since his detention after the military takeover in July, this time locked in a soundproof glass cage as the defendant at a criminal trial.

The installation of the cage, a novelty in Egyptian courts, underscored the extent of the effort by the new government to silence the former president and his fellow defendants, about 20 fellow leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood. It dominated the courtroom debate, with lawyers for the defendants arguing that it deprived the accused of their right to hear or participate in their own trial and supporters of the government crediting the soundproof barrier with preserving order in the court.

"The glass cage was the hero of today's trial," Egyptian state television declared.

For his first appearance, at another trial in the same makeshift courtroom in November, Mr. Morsi insisted on wearing a dark business suit instead of the customary white prison jumpsuit, and then stole the spotlight by disrupting the proceeding. He shouted from the cage, which was not soundproof, that he was the duly elected president and the victim of a coup, and his fellow defendants shut down the trial by chanting against military rule.

Appearing on Tuesday in ordinary prison dress, Mr. Morsi passed his cage angrily and bided his time for a chance to speak again. When the judge turned on the microphone so that Mr. Morsi could acknowledge his presence, he shouted out, "I am the president of the republic, and I've been here since 7 in the morning sitting in this dump," according to an account on a Brotherhood website that was confirmed by people who had been present.

Panic is making an enemy of telephones for Catherine Yeung, the director for equities at Fidelity Investment Management Ltd. in Hong Kong.

"My children hate that BlackBerry," said Yeung, whose clients have been calling amid two weeks of declines that erased $3 trillion from global stocks. She's advising calm, noting that profits are rising and shares just got a lot less expensive.

"Being a contrarian and getting in when things seem bad is often a good thing," she said in an interview today. "The companies we are looking into can still deliver attractive margins. Things are getting cheap."

Strategists from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. to AMP Capital Investors and JPMorgan Chase & Co. are also telling clients to hang on after losses that began with currencies in Turkey and Argentina spread to developed markets. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index slid 2.3 percent yesterday, capping its first 5 percent retreat in eight months, while Japan's Topix index plunged 4.8 percent for its biggest decrease since June.

"We didn't expect the U.S. would be this weak," Kathy Matsui, chief Japan strategist for Goldman Sachs in Tokyo, said by e-mail. "Since we do not see sufficient reason to change our fundamental earnings outlook and stock prices have fallen, the market still appears attractive to us."

The American equity gauge rose from a three-month low today, adding 0.9 percent to 1,757.17 as of 1:35 p.m. in New York.