Hundreds of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails have agreed to end a weeks-long hunger strike in exchange for promises of better conditions, averting fears of widespread unrest if any of the inmates had died.

Israel Prisons Service spokeswoman Sivan Weizman confirmed late Monday that a deal had been reached. Egypt and Jordan played key roles in mediating between the Israelis and prison leaders representing all Palestinian factions.

The Palestinians won key concessions, including more family visits and limits to a controversial Israeli policy that can imprison people for years without charge.

The agreement also saw roughly 20 prisoners released from solitary confinement back into the general prison population. These include Hamas member Abdullah al-Barghouthi, serving 67 life sentences for helping to plan a series of suicide bombings that killed scores of civilians.

In return, Israel extracted pledges by militant groups "to prevent terror activities," and averted the potentially explosive scenario of prisoners dying in a hunger strike.

Thousands of supporters of former dictator Muammar Gaddafi are still being held in Libyan prisons, with many of them tortured - according to a UN report. Many jails are secret and under the control of armed rebels who refuse to comply with the country's new government.

The cousin of the British Queen, Prince Michael of Kent, has received £320,000 ($514,000) from a Russian ex-politician who fled to London in 2000.

The Moscow Times reported that Prince Michael received £320,000 from Boris Berezovsky, the Russian ex-politician who has been convicted of economic crimes in abstentia, during the six-year period between 2002 and 2008.

"A fund controlled by Berezovsky funneled 56 payments of between £5,000 and £15,000 to offshore companies into a family business owned by the prince's secretary," said the newspaper.

Bahraini Prime Minister Prince Khalifa bin Salman Al Khalifa has declared Manama's support for a Saudi plan to unify the six Arab states of the [Persian] Gulf Cooperation Council, a report says.

According to a report published by the Saudi newspaper al-Riyadh on Sunday, the Bahraini premier said the "option of a union has become urgent."

Riyadh is reportedly seeking to initially merge with Manama in line with a proposal to unify the six Arab states of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman.

MI5 says some Metropolitan Police officers have links with terrorist groups.

British intelligence agency MI5 has warned the British Police that some police officers were suspected of attending terrorist training camps.

The Telegraph revealed that some police officers have lost their jobs after Scotland Yard was warned by the MI5. The newspaper also disclosed the identity of one of the officers who resigned over the allegations that he had attended a terrorist camp in 2001.

Abdul Rahman, who had been a constable for almost three years, resigned from Scotland Yard when MI5 warned the force that he was suspected of being at a terrorist training camp in Pakistan in 2001.

The Telegraph also reported that one or two other officers had lost their jobs as a result of MI5's suspicion that they might have links with terrorist groups.

Over the last few months, most headlines regarding Kodak have focused on the company's financial struggles. Early this year, Kodak filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Protection, and, not too long after, announced plans to step away from the digital camera market and move more towards home photo printers and high-speed commercial inkjet presses. Today brings something totally different: News that, up until 2006, Eastman Kodak had its very own nuclear reactor in New York.

According to a recent report in Democrat and Chronicle, Kodak kept a small nuclear reactor underground at Kodak Park, the company's Rochester, NY headquarters. The reactor was apparently for research purposes and was contained insider a bunker with two-foot-thick concrete walls. Albert Filo, a former Kodak research scientists, is quoted as saying the reactor was used to check the purity of materials as well as for tests related to neutron radiography. According to D&C, "only key personnel" could go into the chamber where it was stored, and never while it was running.

Now, the fact that Kodak had a nuclear reactor, no matter how small, is surprising, but the fact that it was there for nearly 30 years and so few people knew about it is that much more surprising. Apparently Kodak never made a public announcement regarding the facility and a spokesperson for the company told the Democrat and Chronicle that he wasn't sure whether police, fire, or hazardous-material officials were ever notified. Word of the reactor only got out a few months back, when a former employer mentioned it to a reporter.

When the reactor was dismantled in 2006, federal regulators ensured Kodak provided detailed plans of how it planned to remove the reported 3.5 pounds of highly enriched uranium it had been keeping in the basement for nearly 30 years.

Two news reports by major wire services this weekend demonstrate just how pervasive misinformation and propaganda are in the mainstream media when it comes to the Iranian nuclear issue.

The first:

Reuters reported this week that Catherine Ashton, the European Union's High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and chief nuclear negotiator for the P5+1, has high hopes for the new round of talks with Iran resuming May 23rd in Baghdad and will approach the meeting as a "serious set of discussions that can lead to concrete results."

Sounds positive enough, especially when coupled with the statement Ashton made at the end of last month's meeting in Istanbul. "We have agreed that the Non-Proliferation Treaty forms a key basis for what must be serious engagement, to ensure all the obligations under the NPT are met by Iran while fully respecting Iran's right to the peaceful use of nuclear energy."

However, another comment made by Ashton on Friday is cause for considerable concern. She told reporters in Brussels, "My ambition is that we come away with the beginning of the end of the nuclear weapons programme in Iran. I hope we'll see the beginnings of success."

"In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or the propaganda might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies - the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.

In the past most people never got a chance of fully satisfying this appetite. They might long for distractions, but the distractions were not provided. Christmas came but once a year, feasts were "solemn and rare," there were few readers and very little to read, and the nearest approach to a neighborhood movie theater was the parish church, where the performances though frequent, were somewhat monotonous. For conditions even remotely comparable to those now prevailing we must return to imperial Rome, where the populace was kept in good humor by frequent, gratuitous doses of many kinds of entertainment - from poetical dramas to gladiatorial fights, from recitations of Virgil to all-out boxing, from concerts to military reviews and public executions. But even in Rome there was nothing like the non-stop distractions now provided by newspapers and magazines, by radio, television and the cinema.

In Brave New World non-stop distractions of the most fascinating nature are deliberately used as instruments of policy, for the purpose of preventing people from paying too much attention to the realities of the social and political situation. The other world of religion is different from the other world of entertainment; but they resemble one another in being most decidedly "not of this world." Both are distractions and, if lived in too continuously, both can become, in Marx's phrase "the opium of the people" and so a threat to freedom. Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only those who are constantly and intelligently on the spot can hope to govern themselves effectively by democratic procedures.

"A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time, not on the spot, not here and now and in their calculable future, but somewhere else, in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera, of mythology and metaphysical fantasy, will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those would manipulate and control it."

Half a million Britons could lose their disability benefit under plans for radical welfare reform, local media reported.

The Work and Pensions Secretary said that he is determined to introduce radical reforms to disability benefits which will see more than two million claimants reassessed in the next four years.

Iain Duncan Smith said that the number of claimants has risen by 30 percent in recent years "rising well ahead of any other gauge you might make about illness, sickness, disability".

"Losing a limb should not automatically entitle people to a pay-out", he suggested.

The cost of disability living allowance, which is intended to help people meet the extra costs of mobility and care associated with their conditions, now outstrips unemployment benefit and will soon be £13 billion annually.

Faced with a power shortage for Israelis, the environment minister offers to cut the life-saving power Israel is selling to Gaza strip.

Israel's minister of environmental protection, Gilad Erdan (Likud), has demanded that the government stop supplying power to the Gaza Strip in order to prevent power failure in Israeli cities this summer. In an official letter addressed to all government ministers (below), Erdan notes that 4.5 percent of Israel's power supply is sold to Gaza.