Extensive research by the U.S. Geological Survey, the Afghan Geological Survey, and the Department of Defense has yielded volumes of information about areas of high mineral potential in Afghanistan, including rare earth elements, gold, iron, and copper. The USGS says the research will be used by the Afghan Government as they consider developing these minerals resources.

Many of these Afghan mineral priority areas, including the rare-earth rich Khanneshin, are world-class resources that could lead to significant commercial development. This research comes from a 2009-2011 USGS study funded by the DOD Task Force for Business and Stability Operations (TFBSO).

"The USGS is exceptionally pleased by the contribution we have been able to make to future development of Afghanistan's world-class mineral resources, made possible through the application of modern remote-sensing tools," said USGS Director Marcia McNutt. "There is always increased risk for commercial ventures investing in new mining facilities in frontier areas such as Afghanistan, but by making information on the locations and estimated quantities and grades of ores publicly available, we lower that risk, spurring progress."

Beijing - China stepped up its criticism Tuesday of a proposed U.S. law to punish countries with artificially low currencies, saying there would be serious repercussions for the world's two biggest economies if it is passed.

The criticism comes after U.S. senators voted Monday to open a week of debate on the bill that would allow the government to impose additional duties on products from countries that subsidize exports by undervaluing their currencies.

How worried China is about the proposed law can be seen by the fact that the Foreign Ministry, the Commerce Ministry and central bank all issued statements denouncing it.

But the legislation faces considerable hurdles before it becomes law. The Obama White House, while agreeing that China's currency, the yuan, is undervalued, has been wary of unilateral sanctions against the Beijing government.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said the Senate move "seriously violated WTO rules and seriously disturbed China-U.S. trade and economic relations."

Up to a million French people denounced their neighbors to the Nazis during the Second World War, historians have revealed.

But more betrayals were over petty family and neighbour disputes than accusations of being French Jews.

The findings were aired at the world's first international conference on French denunciation in the Second World War, in Caen.

They challenge some of the popular misconceptions about denunciation in wartime France.

Historians now say only a very small percentage related to Jews and a large proportion - around a quarter - of the letters were about French family dramas often involving husbands, wives, lovers and village rivals.

"Denunciation was a very easy way of getting rid of someone," said Laurent Joly, the historian who organised the conference.

I don't expect you to believe me. I want you to read this, take it with a grain of salt, and do the research yourself. You may not believe me, but I want your movement to succeed. From a former tea partier to you, young new rebels, there's some advice to prevent what happened to our now broken movement from happening to you. I don't agree with everything your movement does, but I sympathize with your cause and agree on our common enemy. You guys are very intelligent and I trust that you will take this in the spirit it is intended.

I wish I could believe this Occupy Wall Street was still about (r)Evolution, but so far, all I am seeing is a painful rehash of how the government turned the pre-Presidential election tea party movement into the joke it is now. We were anarchists and ultra-libertarians, but above all we were peaceful. So, the media tried painting us as racists. But when that didn't work they tried to goad us into violence. When that failed, they killed our movement with money and false kindness from the theocratic arm of the Republican party. That killed our popular support.

I am sharing these observations, so you guys know what's going on and can prevent the media from succeeding in painting you as violent slacker hippies rebelling without a cause, or from having the movement be hijacked by a bunch of corporatists seeking to twist the movement's original intentions. If you think this can't happen, it happened to the Independence Party and the tea party movement. Don't let it happen to your movement as well.

An Italian court says it won't delay a ruling on charges that Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi paid a teen for sex.

The same court, in a separate case, indicted three of Mr Berlusconi allies accused of having paid young girls to attend sex parties at the premier's villa in Arcore, near Milan.

They will stand trial from November 21.

Italy's head of state, who celebrated his 75th birthday last week amid a string of legal cases, was not present when his team asked for judgment to be postponed to February, pending a Constitutional Court ruling on the Milan court's competence in the case.

Mr Berlusconi is accused of having bought sex from Moroccan nightclub dancer Karima El Mahroug, nicknamed "Ruby the Heart Stealer", when she was 17 - a crime punishable by three years in jail.

The Department of Justice produced it prior to the assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki. But they won't release it.

Outside the U.S. government, President Obama's order to kill American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki without due process has proved controversial, with experts in law and war reaching different conclusions. Inside the Obama Administration, however, disagreement was apparently absent, or so say anonymous sources quoted by the Washington Post. "The Justice Department wrote a secret memorandum authorizing the lethal targeting of Anwar al-Aulaqi, the American-born radical cleric who was killed by a U.S. drone strike Friday, according to administration officials," the newspaper reported. "The document was produced following a review of the legal issues raised by striking a U.S. citizen and involved senior lawyers from across the administration. There was no dissent about the legality of killing Aulaqi, the officials said."

Britain is to get its first 'hands-free' pedestrian crossing - so that devout Jews do not have to break a religious law that prohibits them from using electricity or operating machinery on the Sabbath.

The crossing is near a busy synagogue, and pressing a button to operate it is considered a breach of the strict rules that apply to Orthodox Jews.

Traffic will be held every 90 seconds from Friday evening until nightfall on Saturday, covering the Jewish Sabbath period.

The crossing will be situated on one of London's busiest roads - the North Circular at the Henlys Corner junction. But planners insist it will not cause traffic chaos.

The system will come into operation in December when the junction fully reopens after a massive ten-month upgrade costing £8 million.

The decision to include automatic crossings was taken after leaders at Finchley United Synagogue explained their predicament to staff at Transport for London, which is responsible for maintaining main roads in the capital. TfL says the 'hands-free' green man has not added to the cost of improvements.

Jean-Pierre Joseph is a lawyer in Grenoble, France. He has defended many groups and individuals in France who have run afoul of France's draconian 'cult-police'. Here he talks to the Centre d'Information et de Conseil des Nouvelles Spiritualités (CICNS) and explains the background to France's cult laws and the way in which state 'anti-cult' organisations regularly infringe civil rights, clearly to the advantage of Big Pharma, Agri-business (like Monsanto), and to the detriment of all French peoples. MIVILUDES is little more than the reincarnation of the Inquisition which persecuted and destroyed the Cathars and, in the process, the entire society of Southern France.

Ancient rantings scanned to 1,200MP

As if there weren't enough strange rantings on the internet already, Google has just uploaded five of the Dead Sea Scrolls in super high resolution.

Of course, the Dead Sea Scrolls are strange rantings that - unlike your average YouTube contribution - are of great historic and religious significance. The scrolls were written 2,400 years ago by a desert-dwelling Jewish tribe, and recount important passages from the Old Testament as well other passages that aren't included in the Bible. Over 850 of them were discovered in 11 caves along the West Bank and are the oldest known surviving copies of Biblical and extra-biblical documents.

The five scrolls that will be uploaded by Google are: The Book of Isaiah, the War Scroll, the Temple Scroll, the Commentary on Habbukuk Scroll and the Community Rule Scroll.

Linux programmer Hans Reiser, who in 2008 was found guilty of murdering his estranged wife in Oakland, California, is going to federal court to demand a new trial, claiming his attorney forced him to take the stand against his will.

The murder case, in which Reiser ultimately received a 15-to-life sentence, began with no body, no crime scene, no reliable eyewitness and virtually no physical evidence. It ended with Reiser convicted of killing Nina, his 31-year-old wife, after he took the stand and proceeded to slowly hang himself over the course of 11 days of testimony.

In a rambling, 117-page handwritten civil rights lawsuit penned from Mule Creek State Prison, Reiser - legendary in Silicon Valley as the creator of the ReiserFS file system - attacked his lawyer, the credibility of witnesses and even the trial judge. In seeking unspecified financial damages that "are large compared to the troubled state budget," Reiser said he could not get a fair trial because the "hive mind" of the state's judicial system suffers from a collective mental illness.