At least 64 civilians have been killed in joint NATO-Afghan operations in the eastern Kunar province over the past four days, provincial governor says.

Fazlullah Wahidi Governor of Kunar province said Sunday that many of the victims of the ground and air raids on Ghazi Abad district were women and children, a Press TV correspondent reported.

NATO said it is investigating reports that several civilians may have been injured, adding, however, that it is not aware of any civilian deaths.

Civilian casualties in US-led military operations have long been a source of friction between the Afghan government and NATO.

2010 was the deadliest year for Afghan civilians since the US-led invasion almost a decade ago. An estimated 2,400 civilians were killed last year by both US-led forces and militants.

Deadly parasites found in fish farms will pose greater risk to wild fish if production soars because of Chinese deal, conservationists warn

China's appetite for Scottish farmed salmon is threatening dwindling stocks of sea trout and wild salmon, according to conservationists.

A new trade agreement was signed last month with the Chinese vice-premier, Li Keqiang, by Scotland's first minister, Alex Salmond, who boasted that "even if 1% of the people of China decide to eat Scottish salmon, then we'll have to double production in Scotland".

But the prospect of a massive increase in farmed fish production has horrified defenders of Scotland's depleted indigenous wild salmon and sea trout runs.

Now Salmond has also been accused of laying the Scottish government open to the charge that it is in effect "supporting repression". China is halting the import of farmed salmon from Norway in retaliation for the Nobel peace prize being awarded to imprisoned Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo. Not that it will make much difference: many of the larger farmed salmon enterprises in Scotland are Norwegian-owned.

US Eyes Seizure of Suez Canal; Was this the Threat that Forced Mubarak to Quit?

Washington DC - There never was an "Egyptian revolution," but rather a behind-the-scenes military putsch by a junta of CIA puppet generals who evidently could not succeed in their goal of ousting Hosni Mubarak without the help of a heavy-duty ultimatum from Washington in the night between Thursday, February 10 and Friday, February 11, 2011. There is growing evidence that the threat in question involved the seizure or blocking of the Suez Canal, the Egyptian waterway which carries over 8% of all seaborne world trade, which the imperialists tried to grab back in 1956, and from which they would today like to exclude China, Iran, and Russia. As for Mubarak, there are strong indications that he was toppled by Washington and London because he opposed the current US-UK plan to organize a block of Sunni Arab states such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the Gulf states - under a US nuclear umbrella and shoulder to shoulder with Israel - for purposes of confrontation and war with Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, and their Shiite and radical allies.

This means that, with the fall of Mubarak, the Middle East has taken a big step on the road to general war. As for the junta, they have now dissolved parliament, shredded the constitution, and announced six months of martial law.

In the days after Mubarak's fall, the Anglo-American controlled media chorus chanted obsessively that this was one regime change in the Arab world which had been brought about by the Egyptian people, all by themselves. In reality, the relatively limited popular agitation was actually the least important factor in toppling the long-serving Egyptian rais. Since there was no real mass organization capable of seizing power, and no program of economic reconstruction, development, and reform which could have united the efforts of larger sectors of the Egyptian population, Egypt was left to the tender mercies of the now standard CIA/National Endowment for Democracy color revolution, people power coup, or postmodern putsch. According to this recipe, the destabilization was begun by gathering the privileged youth of the upper middle classes - the ones with access to the Internet, Google, Facebook, and Twitter - in Tahrir Square, where, despite their relatively anemic numbers in a city as big as Cairo, they provided a photo opportunity for the Al Jazeera television network, which shamelessly served as the demagogic speaking tube of British intelligence, the former colonial power in Egypt.

The US has developed a pocket-size drone dubbed the Nano Hummingbird for the way it flaps its tiny robotic wings as a mini-spy plane capable of manoeuvring on the battlefield and in urban areas.

The battery-powered drone, which looks like a bird for potential use in spy missions, was built for the Pentagon's research arm as part of a series of experiments in nanotechnology. It is the result of a five-year effort, announced on Thursday by the Pentagon and AeroVironment of California.

Equipped with a camera, the drone can fly at up to 18km/h and hover and fly sideways, backwards and forwards, clockwise and counterclockwise, for about eight minutes.

Industry insiders see the technology eventually being capable of flying through open windows or sitting on power lines, capturing audio and video undetected.

The Hummingbird would be a departure from existing drones, which closely resemble traditional aircraft. The next step is likely to be further refinement of the technology, before decisions are made about whether the drones would be mass-produced and deployed.

Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff of former Secretary of State Colin Powell, said Friday that former vice president Dick Cheney's office misled his old boss with bogus information to sell the Iraq War to the American people. This talk with MSNBC's Cenk Uygur Friday came in the wake of Iraqi defector Rafid Ahmed Alwan Al-Janabi nicknamed "Curveball" admitting he lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

This video is from MSNBC, broadcast Feb. 17, 2011, snipped via Attention101.

"I've been bullied," says Rick Myers, owner of Rhino Construction in Bay St. Louis, MS. Myers, who had 650 workers clearing beaches at the peak of cleanup efforts, says his weekly payroll of $1.4 million during that time didn't take long to burn a hole in his pockets. He, like almost all contractors, took out loans to pay his workers while waiting to receive his payment. Five months later, Myers and other contractors, are still waiting.


"I worked 20 hour days, 7 days a week for 3 months. It was exhaustive. And we did what was asked of us, and we're not getting anything in return," says Myers, who's asking for $650,000 still owed to his company, and an estimated minimum of $280 million owed to the 40 other small businesses he's representing.

Mike Evans, owner of T.H.E. Construction in Taylorsville, MS, says he and the other subcontractors essentially financed BP's cleanup effort, and now they're all suffering for it.

Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto has created a beautiful, undeniably scary time-lapse map of the 2053 nuclear explosions which have taken place between 1945 and 1998, beginning with the Manhattan Project's "Trinity" test near Los Alamos and concluding with Pakistan's nuclear tests in May of 1998. This leaves out North Korea's two alleged nuclear tests in this past decade (the legitimacy of both of which is not 100% clear).

Each nation gets a blip and a flashing dot on the map whenever they detonate a nuclear weapon, with a running tally kept on the top and bottom bars of the screen. Hashimoto, who began the project in 2003, says that he created it with the goal of showing "the fear and folly of nuclear weapons." It starts really slow - if you want to see real action, skip ahead to 1962 or so - but the buildup becomes overwhelming.

A Pakistani court has reissued an arrest warrant for the country's former President Pervez Musharraf for his alleged involvement in the murder of ex-Premier Benazir Bhutto.

On Saturday, Pakistan's anti-terrorism court reissued the arrest warrant for Musharraf, who is in self-imposed exile in London and has stated that he does not intend to appear at any court hearing to face questions over his alleged dereliction of duty over the 2007 assassination of Bhutto, AFP reported.

"Last week the court had issued the arrest warrant, but it could not be served at Musharraf's residence in Islamabad and we were told that he does not live there," said Special Prosecutor Chaudhry Zulfiqar Ali.

"Today the court reissued the warrants and adjourned the hearing till March 5," he added a week after the country's Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) was tasked with bringing the former military ruler to court on the 19th of February.

Escalating violence in the oil states of the Persian Gulf and North Africa have pushed Brent crude prices to a 30-month high of $104 a barrel, and raised widespread concerns over the stability of global oil supplies for the first time since the Mid-East turmoil began.

At least four protesters were killed in a bloody crack-down in Bahrain after tanks entered the capital and security forces smashed a tent city in the main square, opening fire with grapeshot. The situation is fraught with risk since a Sunni monarchy rules a Shia majority with mixed Iranian ancestry and sympathetic ties to Tehran.

"Bahrain is the main danger, not because it is intrinsically important, but because it could trigger intervention by Saudi Arabia," said Faysal Itani, a Mid-East expert at consultants Exclusive Analysis. "We have heard reports that the Saudis have already dispatched troops and equipment to put down the uprising".

Up to 20 people may have been killed in Libya's "Day of Anger" as the Ghaddafi regime faced its first big threat, while there was a fifth day of violent clashes in Yemen. Iran's plans to send two warships through the Suez Canal to bolster its Syrian ally led to hot words with Israel, notching up tensions further.

MoD to review arms export licences after Bahrain clears protesters with UK-made crowd-controls weapons such as teargas and stun grenades

The British government has launched a review of arms exports to Bahrain after it emerged that the country's security forces were supplied with weapons by the United Kingdom.

After a bloody crackdown in the capital, Manama, left up to five people dead and more than 100 injured, Foreign Office minister Alistair Burt said the government will "urgently revoke licences if we judge that they are no longer in line with the [UK and European Union] criteria".

Despite long-running concerns among activists over Bahrain's human rights record, British firms were last year granted licences, unopposed, to export an arsenal of sometimes deadly crowd control weapons. Licences approved included exactly the kind of weapons and ammunition used by Bahraini riot police to clear the Pearl Roundabout protest encampment, including shotguns, teargas canisters, "crowd control ammunition" and stun grenades.

"We closely consider allegations of human rights abuses," said Burt. "We will not authorise any exports which, we assess, might provoke or prolong regional or internal conflicts, which might be used to facilitate internal repression."