Hamid Karzai condemned the actions of Staff Sergeant Joseph Chamblin as inhuman, which came to light in a YouTube video.

Washington - A US marine staff sergeant who urinated on dead Taliban insurgents and posed for photographs with the bodies has pleaded guilty to two charges in a military court.

His sentence was a reduction in rank and forfeiture of $500 (£307) in pay.

Staff Sergeant Joseph Chamblin pleaded guilty on Thursday at a special court martial at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, to dereliction of duty for failing to properly supervise junior marines. He also pleaded guilty to wrongfully urinating on a deceased enemy combatant.

The incident occurred during a counter-insurgency operation in Helmand province in Afghanistan in July 2011. It came to light in January this year when a videotape of the incident was posted on YouTube and other websites.

The video showed four men in camouflage marine combat uniforms urinating on three corpses. One of them joked, "Have a nice day, buddy," while another made a lewd joke.

The video was one of a series of offensive incidents involving US service members that roused Afghan ire and led to heightened tensions between Washington and Kabul earlier this year.

RT pretty much spells it out for you.

Newtown - In the frantic moments after a gunman stormed into Sandy Hook Elementary School on Friday and gunned down 26 people, most of them children, authorities expected to encounter a second shooter as they converged on the building, according to a recording of a 911 tape that was independently verified by Hearst Connecticut Newspapers on Tuesday.

"I have reports of two shooters running past the building, past the gym, which would be rear," a dispatcher said on the tape, before trailing off. Shortly afterward, the operator told a State Police trooper who was racing to the scene from the nearby Troop A barracks in Southbury to "make sure you have your vest on."

A review of the recording suggests that authorities were unaware of the grisly scene they were walking into.

In the following passage of my previous article on the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, I made the following reference to Ryan Lanza being the named second suspect caught armed in the adjacent woods:

Perhaps most astonishingly, this suspect arrested in the woods was named in an Associated Press report as 24-year-old Ryan Lanza. The original report has long since vanished of course, but you can see it referenced here. This was despite the fact that Ryan had already been named as the deceased suspect inside the school, lying next to two handguns.

I have since found the original Associated Press report, which in fact states that it was "Ryan's younger brother", Adam Lanza, who was arrested in the woods. So let's take a closer look at this revealing report.

Barack Obama has signed into law a bill that establishes normal trade relations with Russia for the first time in decades, including the repeal of the 1974 Jackson-Vanick Amendment that denied "most favored nation" status to countries restricting human rights.

But the bill also included the so-called "Magnitsky" Act, which calls for sanctions against any Russian who was involved in the 2009 death of lawyer and whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky. Russia is incensed by what it considers interference with an internal matter.

The editor-in-chief of a well known pro-government newspaper, Komsomolskaya Pravda, was the first high-profile individual to be affected. He received a fax on Friday Dec. 14, the same day the law was enacted, informing him that his visa to the United States had been revoked due to the provisions of the Magnitsky Act. It is not clear what his connection to the Magnitsky case is.

What happened to Sergei Magnitsky?

Sergei Magnitsky, the auditor of the Hermitage Capital fund, was accused of tax evasion. He was held in prison for nearly a year, during which time he told doctors on several occasions that he was feeling ill. In spite of his complaints, he never received medical treatment, and his health got worse. He died on Nov. 16, 2009 after having finally been transferred to a medical facility and treated for chronic hepatitis and diabetes.

This Intel report is the Rosetta Stone for everything that Israel has done since before its so called birth, but which was more like letting a Frankenstein monster loose on the land. We had loyal Americans who saw the trap back then, yet we walked right into it. Why have we done it, and for whom?

The history of America's involvement with Israel has been an ongoing tragedy. The Palestinians have of course suffered the most, having been invaded by legions of atheist and communist Jews, primarily from Eastern Europe. And yes, they claim 'God gave us the land'.

They teamed up with the 5th column Zionists already there who had been carefully and methodically laying plans for taking over the land and doing to the Palestinians what they claimed the Nazis had done to them--killing and kicking the Palestinians out to make more lebensraum (growing space) for more Jews.

Generations of Israeli Lobby fellow travelers have worn the sordid mantle of 'Palestinian holocaust Deniers', to coin a phrase, with no shame whatsoever. Golda Meir was their Hebrew Klan Grand Dragon. She produced a low cost and instant holocaust hat trick. "There are no Palestinian people," she said.

One of the main tasks of Israeli espionage has always been to protect Israel from judgment day for their crimes against humanity against the Palestinian people. To them this is a war, and they take no prisoners. When are we going to figure this out, when it comes to dealing with them?

Today I begin a series of articles to pin the holocaust tails on their correct donkey. I am going to use sources with which the general public is unfamiliar, the declassified American Intel files on Israel. And yes, these have been open since the early 1980's, but might as well have been in a library on the moon.

Israeli penetration into not only our media and publishing, but also our political arena has virtually banished these documents from the historical narrative. The fear is that they could be used to deprogram pro-Israeli zombies and expose all the treasonous Americans who have aided and abetted the Israelis in hiding their crimes.

Let us start at the beginning. A crime against an entire people, to holocaust them from their own land, has to have a plan. Here it is

'You come from a culture where it is okay to kill children,' the Iraqi woman said. We were sheltering against the wall of a building in Fallujah in April 2004 while the city was under attack by US forces.

I began to protest, but she continued, in broken English: 'Let me say it another way. You come from a culture where your people think it is okay to kill our children.'

What could I say? There were several little bodies at my feet, bloodied remains laid out on the footpath and covered with thin sheets. The children had been shot by US snipers that day, among at least 1000 civilians killed in that ferocious attack.

This Iraqi woman knew there would be no collective outrage at the killing of Fallujah's children. No front-page headlines. We would not know their names, see their faces or hear their stories. Their killers would not be pursued, labelled 'mad' or 'evil', or made to face a court. There would be no calls for 'change.'

Some commentators have compared the response to deaths of the children in the small American community of Newtown with the young victims of US wars. The point is valid. A life is a life, and all life is precious; a fact that has enough weight of its own without the need to draw comparisons.

Despite International Criticism, Interior Ministry Pushing Through More Schemes

Yesterday's announcement for 1,500 more settlement units in occupied East Jerusalem took a lot of people by surprise. Israel usually staggers such announcements so they can finish diplomatic damage control on the one before announcing another, and the dispute over E1 is still fresh in everyone's minds. It seems this is just the new normal for Israel heading into the election.

That's because the Interior Ministry is now reporting that its panel didn't finish with the 1,500, and in fact is going to keep meeting throughout the week to rubber stamp expansions in two more settlements in East Jerusalem, making this week's announcements up to 6,000 units.

© Spencer Platt/GettyA memorial to the victims of the Sandy Hook school shootings in Connecticut. The children killed by US drones in north-west Pakistan 'have no names, no pictures, no memorials of candles and teddy bears'.

Barack Obama's tears for the children of Newtown are in stark contrast to his silence over the children murdered by his drones

"Mere words cannot match the depths of your sorrow, nor can they heal your wounded hearts ... These tragedies must end. And to end them, we must change." Every parent can connect with what President Barack Obama said about the murder of 20 children in Newtown, Connecticut. There can scarcely be a person on earth with access to the media who is untouched by the grief of the people of that town.

It must follow that what applies to the children murdered there by a deranged young man also applies to the children murdered in Pakistan by a sombre American president. These children are just as important, just as real, just as deserving of the world's concern. Yet there are no presidential speeches or presidential tears for them, no pictures on the front pages of the world's newspapers, no interviews with grieving relatives, no minute analysis of what happened and why.

Numerous commentators have rightly lamented the difference in how these childrens' deaths are perceived. What explains it?

Over the last several days, numerous commentators have lamented the vastly different reactions in the US to the heinous shooting of children in Newtown, Connecticut as compared to the continuous killing of (far more) children and innocent adults by the US government in Pakistan and Yemen, among other places. The blogger Atrios this week succinctly observed:

"I do wish more people who manage to fully comprehend the broad trauma a mass shooting can have on our country would consider the consequences of a decade of war."

My Guardian colleague George Monbiot has a powerful and eloquent column this week provocatively entitled: "In the US, mass child killings are tragedies. In Pakistan, mere bug splats". He points out all the ways that Obama has made lethal US attacks in these predominantly Muslim countries not only more frequent but also more indiscriminate - "signature strikes" and "double-tap" attacks on rescuers and funerals - and then argues:

"Most of the world's media, which has rightly commemorated the children of Newtown, either ignores Obama's murders or accepts the official version that all those killed are 'militants'. The children of north-west Pakistan, it seems, are not like our children. They have no names, no pictures, no memorials of candles and flowers and teddy bears. They belong to the other: to the non-human world of bugs and grass and tissue.

"'Are we,' Obama asked on Sunday, 'prepared to say that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?' It's a valid question. He should apply it to the violence he is visiting on the children of Pakistan."