Gruesome new details are surfacing after 16 Afghan villagers including nine children were shot in their houses by at least one US serviceman. Witnesses to the atrocity now say that several drunken American soldiers were involved.

­Neighbors at the village where the killings took place said they were awoken past midnight by crackling gunfire:

"They were all drunk and shooting all over the place," Reuters cites Agha Lala, a villager in Kandahar's Panjwayi district.

Lala's neighbor Haji Samad lost all of his 11 relatives in the rampage, including children and grandchildren. He claims Marines "poured chemicals over their dead bodies and burned them."

Twenty-year-old Jan Agha says the gunfire "shook him out of bed." He was in the epicenter of the horrible shooting, witnessing his father shot as the latter peered out of a window to see what was going on.

Abby and Robbie Martin grew up in Pleasanton, CA, a city located ten miles from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), a secret nuclear weapons production facility. They initially set out to explore the psychological impacts of taking nuclear testing into virtual space. But as their investigation unfolded, they found that the LLNL - in conjunction with Site 300 - has built an impressive greenwashing PR campaign cloaking a sinister reality.

Despite a moratorium on nuclear testing, the nuclear arms race continues unabated at very high costs. In addition to the startling cases of LLNL's mismanagement of dangerous materials and 'accidental' releases, the facilities are still testing every radioactive component of a nuclear bomb in open air, according to sources.

Malignant melanoma (skin cancer) rates are six times higher among children born in Livermore; melanoma has been linked to radiation exposure. And the amount of radiation which has been expelled from the lab since its inception is equivalent to that released from the bombing of Hiroshima. Most disturbingly, the Livermore community is largely unaware of what the lab is actually doing and what its potential impacts are on its health and the environment.

Poll announcement comes as former UN chief Kofi Annan presses for a response over ceasefire and aid proposals

The Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, whose armed forces are engaged in a bloody crackdown on opponents of his rule, has called parliamentary elections for May.

The 7 May elections were announced under a new constitution passed last month. HAssad's opponents say the constitution is illegitimate while he still clings to power.

The announcement of elections, on a government website, came as the former UN chief Kofi Annan, who held talks with Assad at the weekend, said he was waiting for Syria's reply on "concrete proposals" for an immediate cessations to hostilities and allowing humanitarian aid into conflict zones.

"I am expecting to hear from the Syrian authorities today, since I left some concrete proposals for them to consider," Annan said. "Once I receive their answer we will know how to react."

Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai called for NATO troops to leave Afghan villages and confine themselves to major bases after the slaughter of 16 civilians by a U.S. soldier, underscoring fury over the massacre and clouding U.S. exit plans.

In a near-simultaneous announcement, the Afghan Taliban said it was suspending nascent peace talks with the United States seen as a strong chance to end the country's decade-long conflict, blaming "shaky, erratic and vague" U.S. statements.

Karzai, in a statement after meeting U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta in Kabul, said as a consequence of the weekend massacre, "international security forces have to be taken out of Afghan village outposts and return to (larger) bases".

The soldier accused of carrying out the shooting was attached to a small special forces compound similar to others around the country which underpin NATO's anti-insurgent strategy ahead of a 2014 deadline for Western combat forces to pull out.

The incident has harmed relations between Afghanistan and the United States and "all efforts have to be done to avoid such incident in the future", Karzai said, warning it also had hurt the trust Afghans had in foreign forces.

Baroness Jenny Tonge has resigned the Lib Dem whip in the House of Lords after refusing to apologise for claiming that Israel would not "last forever".

The Liberal Democrat peer, who once said she would consider becoming a suicide bomber if she were Palestinian, was roundly criticised for the remarks. According to reports on the Guido Fawkes blog she quit as a Liberal Democrat peer after refusing an ultimatum from Nick Clegg to apologise or resign.

Speaking at an event at Middlesex University last Thursday, Baroness Tonge said Israel would one day lose the support of the United States and would then "reap what they have sown".

"Beware Israel," she said. "Israel is not going to be there forever in its present performance. One day the United States of America will get sick of giving £70 billion a year to Israel."

The event was recorded and the video of her comments emerged this week:

The federal investigation of former U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens was "permeated by the systematic concealment" of evidence that would have aided the Alaska politician's defense at trial and would have "seriously damaged the testimony and credibility of the government's key witness," a special prosecutor concluded.

The 514-page report was a response to an investigation ordered by U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, who threw out Stevens' April 2009 guilty verdict in a financial disclosure case after the Justice Department revealed that prosecutors kept key information from defense attorneys.

Three years later, "special prosecutor" Henry L. Schuelke made the report public over objections from the prosecutors involved in the case.

Prosecutors are generally required to turn over helpful evidence to defense lawyers.

Stevens, an Alaska Republican who died in a small-plane crash in 2010, lost his reelection bid shortly after being convicted of seven counts of making false statements on financial disclosure statements to hide about $250,000 in gifts and free renovations to his Alaska house.

The results of Schuelke's investigation were made public in a November order by Sullivan. In the report made public this morning, Schuelke wrote that his team examined and analyzed "well over 128,000 pages of documents, including the trial record, prosecutors' and agents' emails, FBI 302s and handwritten notes, and depositions of prosecutors, agents and others involved in the investigation and trial."

In the end, however, Schuelke recommended against charging the federal prosecutors - Brenda Morris, William Welch, Edward Sullivan, Joseph Bottini and James Goeke, as well as Nicholas Marsh, who committed suicide last year - with a crime. He wrote that prosecuting the Justice Department lawyers would be difficult because Sullivan never issued a "clear, specific and unequivocal order" to disclose evidence that would have helped the defense.

In response to Netanyahu's AIPAC speech, Haaretz's editor-in-chief says that what looks like a preparation for war, acts like a preparation for war, and quacks like a preparation for war, is a preparation for war.

Since his return from Washington, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has mainly been preoccupied with one thing: Preparing public opinion for war against Iran.

Netanyahu is attempting to convince the Israeli public that the Iranian threat is a tangible and existential one, and that there is only one effective way to stop it and prevent a "second Holocaust": An Israeli military attack on Iran's nuclear infrastructure, which is buried deep underground.

In his speech before the Knesset on Wednesday, Netanyahu urged his colleagues to reject claims that Israel is too weak to go it alone in a war against a regional power such as Iran and therefore needs to rely on the United States, which has much greater military capabilities, to do the job and remove the threat.

According to polls published last week, this is the position of most of the Israeli public, which supports a U.S. strike on Iran, but is wary of sending the IDF to the task without the backing of the friendly superpower.

The police across France have detained more than 250 people and confiscated some 5,000 videocassettes in their largest operation to date to fight child pornography.

Among the people charged with possession or trafficking in pornography involving minors, the police said, are two school directors, two teachers and several others who work with children.

The police said those detained were all men, from different walks of life. ''No social class has been spared,'' a police official said. ''They are mainly married professionals. Some apparently made the videotapes, others distributed them and some just bought them.''

The crackdown on Wednesday and today involved no fewer than 600 police officers, an indication of the Government's alarm about sexual abuse of children. The action also appears to be a response to growing public indignation in France and elsewhere about the recurrent reports of kidnapping, rape or incest involving the very young.

Specialists say they are not certain whether the number of such crimes has risen sharply or whether the cases have simply become more notorious as it has become more socially acceptable to report or discuss such abuse publicly.

Twitter removed all but one account using Syrian president's name and half of those using first lady's after complaint

Twitter closed down a string of accounts purporting to be authored by the Syrian president and the first lady, emails reveal.

A senior aide to Asma al-Assad, Fares Kallas, took issue with the site over 11 accounts. Half of the accounts using the first lady's name and all but one of those using the president's name were closed down.

The author of one account, @Syrianpresident, described it as a "parody account" and said it had attracted 2,500 followers.

Kallas wrote to Twitter complaining that this and other accounts were "fraudulent Twitter accounts purporting to be the president of Syria and the first lady of Syria and we would like to officially request for these accounts to be removed or suspended. We believe that each of the following are clearly intending to mislead people via impersonation rather than act as spoof/humorous accounts."

Twitter told the Assad office: "We do suspend accounts that are clear attempts at impersonation," but added: "Twitter users are allowed to create parody, commentary and fan accounts."