Islamabad - Pakistan has charged Osama bin Laden's three widows with illegally entering and living in the country, the interior minister said Thursday.

The three women have been in Pakistani detention since May last year, when U.S. commandos raided the house where they, bin Laden and several of their children were staying. The commandos shot and killed bin Laden, and then buried his body at sea.

Rehman said the three had been charged in court, but he did not say when. It was unclear if they had a lawyer.

He said their children were free to leave Pakistan, but could stay with their mothers for the duration of the trial.

A Pakistani legal expert contacted about the case, Hashmat Habib, said the maximum punishment the women could receive was five years in jail. One of their relatives has reportedly visited Pakistan recently to urge authorities to let them leave the country. The decision to charge them could be a formal part of that process.

UK: London - In turning one of its best-known hackers into an informant and breaking open the highest profile elements of the "Anonymous" movement, authorities have dealt a serious blow to a group they found a growing irritant.

But as the broader "Anonymous" label - complete with its iconic Guy Fawkes mask imagery - is used by ever more disparate causes worldwide, it may be all but impossible to shut it down for good.

U.S. authorities revealed on Wednesday that leading Anonymous hacker "Sabu" - real name Hector Xavier Monsegur, aged 28 - had been arrested last June in his apartment in a Manhattan housing complex.

According to a newly released court transcript, he agreed to cooperate with authorities in return for likely leniency - helping U.S. prosecutors bring charges against five more men, including two in Britain and two in Ireland. All had also been previously arrested.

"Sabu was seen as a leader," said Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer of Finnish security firm f-secure. "Just yesterday people were looking up to him... it's a very serious blow. It's probably not going to be the end of Anonymous but it's going to take a while for them to recover, particularly from the paranoia."

The Italian branch of the hackers group Anonymous took down the Vatican's website on Wednesday, saying it was an attack on the Roman Catholic Church's scandals and conservative doctrine.

The Vatican website www.vatican.va was inaccessible. A spokesman said he could not confirm that the crash was the work of the hackers group but said technicians were working to bring it back up.

A statement on the Italian website of the loosely-knit cyber-activists group accused the Church of being responsible for a long list of misdeeds throughout history, including the selling of indulgences in the 16th century and burning heretics during the Inquisition.

Abdo Hussameldin resigns on YouTube denouncing Bashar al-Assad and saying he is joining anti-government revolt


Syria's deputy oil minister, Abdo Hussameldin, has announced his defection on YouTube, becoming the first high ranking civilian official to abandon President Bashar al-Assad since the uprising against his rule erupted a year ago.

"I Abdo Hussameldin, deputy oil and mineral wealth minister in Syria, announce my defection from the regime, resignation from my position and withdrawal from the Ba'ath party. I join the revolution of this dignified people," Hussameldin said in a YouTube video uploaded on Wednesday and seen early on Thursday.

"I say to this regime: you have inflicted on those who you claim are your people a whole year of sorrow and sadness, denying them basic life and humanity and driving Syria to the edge of the abyss," he said, adding the country's economy was "near collapse".

The authenticity of the video, which was taken at an undisclosed location, could not be immediately confirmed.

Assad appointed Hussameldin, 58, to his position through a presidential decree in 2009.

The US denies an interest in Uganda's oil, but there are many other reasons for its presence in the region. None of them altruistic, claims war correspondent Eric Margolis.

American "aid" to Uganda is being offered without any third-party help, which is a sure sign that the effort is for its own sake, rather than humanitarian reasons.

The White House is deploying a hundred troops in the African country with the official aim of helping the authorities in a fight against a guerilla group that has been dragging on for two decades.

But award-winning war correspondent Eric Margolis told RT that if Washington had humanitarian interests in mind it would not be going in alone.

The people behind this campaign are MASSIVELY misguided. Or it's a CIA-sponsored psy-ops.

Take for example the fact that one of the 12 'policy makers' (US politicians) that they are targeting to help them ensure Joseph Kony is arrested is George 'Dubya' Bush. The puppet president who presided over the murder of 1.5 million Iraqi civilians. And we're all meant to believe that people like him are going to care about the plight of Ugandan children? Kony is Bush's ideological brother for god's sake.

Other than their complete ignorance of the fact that the US political elite is populated by the world's worst war criminals, the makers of this video are also massively ignorant of the truth about WHY Uganda, and many other African nations, are subjected to the brutal excesses of war lords and have been for so many decades.

Washington - Even as the United Nations' nuclear watchdog said in a new report Friday that Iran had accelerated its uranium enrichment program, American intelligence analysts continue to believe that there is no hard evidence that Iran has decided to build a nuclear bomb.

Recent assessments by American spy agencies are broadly consistent with a 2007 intelligence finding that concluded that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program years earlier, according to current and former American officials. The officials said that assessment was largely reaffirmed in a 2010 National Intelligence Estimate, and that it remains the consensus view of America's 16 intelligence agencies.

At the center of the debate is the murky question of the ultimate ambitions of the leaders in Tehran. There is no dispute among American, Israeli and European intelligence officials that Iran has been enriching nuclear fuel and developing some necessary infrastructure to become a nuclear power. But the Central Intelligence Agency and other intelligence agencies believe that Iran has yet to decide whether to resume a parallel program to design a nuclear warhead - a program they believe was essentially halted in 2003 and which would be necessary for Iran to build a nuclear bomb. Iranian officials maintain that their nuclear program is for civilian purposes.

Israel and the United States have reportedly entered into a secret understanding in which Israel agrees to hold off on any plan to attack Iran's nuclear facilities until at least 2013. In exchange for this, the United States has undertaken to provide Israel with the latest in so-called "bunker-busting" bombs, capable of penetrating the kind of hardened underground facilities that are believed to be safeguarding Iran's nuclear program.

As well, according to a report in today's Maariv newspaper, Washington has agreed to sell Israel the latest in long-range refueling aircraft.

The new military equipment is believed to improve the chances for success in any attack on Iran, and to make it worthwhile for Israel to delay any plan to attack the facilities it says are intended to produce nuclear weapons that will put Israeli security at risk.

In the first week of February, this year, Israeli secret agency, Mossad's Chief Tamir Pardo visited India with a three member delegation. Pardo's detailed talks with the Chief of Indian spy agency, RAW, Sanjeev Tripathi was part of Indo-Israeli secret alliance. The major aim of this meeting was to accelerate joint initiatives through their secret agencies so as to manipulate the strategic developments in South and Central Asia including Middle East. The purposes behind latest liaison of the top spymasters were also to intensify covert activities particularly to destabilise Pakistan and Iran, and to disrupt their cordial relationship besides exploiting US hardlining approach against China.

Another major aim of Mossad's head with his counterpart was to prepare a clandestine plan to obtain the secret designs of India and Israel in Afghanistan after the withdrawal of foreign troops from that country. Both are also disappointed by the new peace initiative by Pakistan and Afghanistan which does not favour their collective interests. So they intend to create misunderstanding between Kabul and Islamabad by sabotaging their new cooperation including their peace deals with the Afghan militants. Although Indo-Israeli secret alliance has full tactical support of the US regarding China, Iran and Pakistan, yet it is also working against America where similarities of interests are more important in case of New Delhi and Tel Aviv. In these terms, the two countries also seek to thwart the peace talks, being held in Qatar between the US and Taliban militants. Some reliable sources suggest that with the help of their affiliated militant groups, Mossad and RAW which have established their tentacles in Afghanistan have decided to intensify subversive acts on the US-led NATO installations in order to create obstacles in the withdrawal schedule of foreign forces, and to implicate both Afghan militants and Pakistan in this respect.

A document released by the WikiLeaks website has revealed that undercover US-led NATO forces are operating inside Syria against the Syrian government, Islam Times reported Wednesday.

WikiLeaks released a confidential email from an analyst working for the US-based intelligence firm Stratfor, in which he claims to have attended a meeting in the Pentagon with several NATO officials from France and Britain in December last year.

The analyst said he learned that US-led NATO troops are already on the ground in Syria, training armed gangs.

"SOF [special operation forces] teams (presumably from the US, UK, France, Jordan and Turkey) are already on the ground, focused on recce [reconnaissance] missions and training opposition forces," the analyst claimed in his letter.

The Stratfor analyst went on to say that "the idea 'hypothetically' is to commit guerrilla attacks, assassination campaigns" to overthrow the Syrian government.

This fact is revealed despite claims by the Western military alliance denying the deployment of forces to Syria.