Major responsible for stopping drug smuggling from Egypt suspected of transferring confiscated heroin, hashish to Israeli dealers.

An IDF commander with the rank of Major has been arrested for allegedly heading a drug ring, responsible for selling heroin and hashish smuggled into Israel from Egypt.

The officer was arrested three weeks ago along with nine other suspects, including a Border Police commander according to Israeli media reports, but the Tel Aviv Magistrates' Court had placed a media ban on the case, which was partially lifted on Sunday.

The Central Unit of the Tel Aviv District Police began investigating the case in August when Dan Region Police stopped a vehicle containing 17 kilograms of hashish and thousands of Ecstasy pills.

The investigation uncovered the involvement of an IDF commander, serving in the Southern Command and charged with confiscating drugs in the case.

Police believe that ,with the help of an accomplice, the IDF commander passed drugs confiscated on the Egyptian border to dealers in Israel.

Kabul, Afghanistan - Afghan President Hamid Karzai has said if the United States and Pakistan ever went to war, his country would back Islamabad, drawing a sharp rebuke Sunday from Afghan lawmakers who claimed the country's top officials were adopting hypocritical positions.

The scenario is exceedingly unlikely and appears to be less a serious statement of policy than an Afghan overture to Pakistan, just days after Karzai and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Islamabad must do more to crack down on militants using its territory as a staging ground for attacks on Afghanistan.

"If fighting starts between Pakistan and the U.S., we are beside Pakistan," Karzai said is an interview with private Pakistani television station GEO that aired Saturday. "If Pakistan is attacked and the people of Pakistan need Afghanistan's help, Afghanistan will be there with you."

He said that Kabul would not allow any nation, including the U.S., to dictate its policies.

Both Washington and Kabul have repeatedly said Pakistan is providing sanctuary to militant groups launching attacks in Afghanistan.

A report has revealed that all the fighter jets purchased by Turkey from the US have been rendered impotent against Israel.

In a recent article published in the Turkish newspapers, Milligazete, Turkey's former ambassador to the US and Japan Sukru M. Elekdag pointed to a system called IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) that is loaded on planes sold by the US.

The system can identify friend and enemy targets including planes and warships from long distances. It is also capable of firing missiles automatically.

According to Elekdag, the US gives IFF system codes only to Israel, however, Turkey's fighter jets have a version of the program that identifies Israeli targets as friends by default.

The barefaced lie about Gadaffi being killed in the crossfire bodes ill for the openness, transparency and good government we can expect to see now in Libya. But today I am worrying about the effect on our society of human death as entertainment. I have never been an apologist for Gadaffi, but if his regime tortured and murdered, the remedy is not to torture and murder him - even the Nazis were given due process.

This murder is becoming the norm. It was a NATO air strike which took out Gadaffi's escaping convoy and first wounded him. Two days ago two teenage sons of Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical US/Yemeni cleric executed without trial last week, were executed by a US drone attack as they had dinner. They were aged 16 and 19. They had committed no crime I can find alleged against them. There has been no publicity.

All this killing brings triumphalist politicians smirking on our screens. We seem to have become as dehumanised as ancient Rome. Little human pity is expressed for the way Gadaffi was killed - indeed there is notably less media reflection of pity or revulsion than there was at the (at least judicial) hanging of Saddam Hussein. Is that a measure of the descent into bloodlust barbarism in our society? The complete lack of empathy towards the traveller families being torn from their homes at Dale Farm is part of the same brutalism towards "the other". Why don't we go the whole way and have them eaten by lions in the ring?

History shows that bloody appetite once aroused feeds upon itself. We have already had Defence Secretary Hammond on Sky News today positing NATO action now against Syria, while the current US proto-pretext for attacking Iran - the fantasy plot against the Saudi Ambassador - is as believable as Gadaffi's death in the crossfire.

Military commanders in the Libyan city of Misrata said Saturday that no post-mortem would be carried out on the body of Moamer Kadhafi despite concerns over how the toppled dictator died.

Interim leader Mustafa Abdel Jalil said an investigation was being conducted into the circumstances of Kadhafi's killing following his capture, bloodied but still alive, during the fall of his hometown Sirte on Thursday, after several foreign governments and human rights watchdogs posed questions.

But the military leadership in Misrata, where Kadhafi's body had been stored in a vegetable market freezer overnight and was again put on display for hundreds of curious onlookers on Saturday, insisted the inquiry would involve no autopsy.

"There will be no post-mortem today, nor any day," Misrata military council spokesman Fathi al-Bashaagha told AFP. "No one is going to open up his body."

His comments were confirmed by two other Misrata military chiefs.

Bashaagha said that the new regime's military commander for the capital, Abdelhakim Belhaj, was expected to travel to Misrata later on Saturday to view the corpse of the man who ruled Libya with an iron rod for 42 years.

A former NYPD narcotics detective snared in a corruption scandal testified it was common practice to fabricate drug charges against innocent people to meet arrest quotas.

The bombshell testimony from Stephen Anderson is the first public account of the twisted culture behind the false arrests in the Brooklyn South and Queens narc squads, which led to the arrests of eight cops and a massive shakeup.

Anderson, testifying under a cooperation agreement with prosecutors, was busted for planting cocaine, a practice known as "flaking," on four men in a Queens bar in 2008 to help out fellow cop Henry Tavarez, whose buy-and-bust activity had been low.

"Tavarez was ... was worried about getting sent back [to patrol] and, you know, the supervisors getting on his case," he recounted at the corruption trial of Brooklyn South narcotics Detective Jason Arbeeny.

"I had decided to give him [Tavarez] the drugs to help him out so that he could say he had a buy," Anderson testified last week in Brooklyn Supreme Court.

"Politics is the management of people. It is important to understand the psychology as well as the symptoms of problems." - Henry Kissinger. The quote is from a Time Magazine article by Hugh Sidey called, "The Presidency: Majesty, Poetry and Power," that was published on October 20, 1980.

"People first feel things without noticing them, then notice them with inner distress and disturbance, and finally reflect on them with a clear mind." - Giambattista Vico; The New Science, pg. 94.

"No, the demons are not banished; that is a difficult task that still lies ahead. Now that the angel of history has abandoned the Germans, the demons will seek a new victim. And that won't be difficult. Every man who loses his shadow, every nation that falls into self-righteousness, is their prey.... We should not forget that exactly the same fatal tendency to collectivization is present in the victorious nations as in the Germans, that they can just as suddenly become a victim of the demonic powers." - Carl Jung; The Postwar Psychic Problems of the Germans (1945).

"Politics," said Henry Kissinger, "is the management of people." Based on this definition, shadow politics is the management of the mass death of people. Specifically, it is the management of public perceptions about acts of mass destruction and mass death as carried out by government leaders.

The premeditated destruction of Iraq by the United States government provides a present-day example of how government leaders justify the mass murder of foreign populations to their own people. Neoconservative thinking was the ideological source of both the destruction of Iraq and the destruction of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001.

Neoconservatism and Environmentalism are the two schools of thought in this age that call for the mass destruction and mass death of human communities. Neocons want to conquer the Earth, and Environmentalists want to save it. Both groups are politically powerful, media savvy, financed by big money, and filled with psychotics who have fantasies of mass destruction and mass death.

Superb investigative journalism by the New York Times has brought the paper under attack by the natural gas industry. That campaign of intimidation and obfuscation has been orchestrated by top shelf players like Exxon and Chesapeake aligned with the industry's worst bottom feeders. This coalition has launched an impressive propaganda effort carried by slick PR firms, industry funded front groups and a predictable cabal of right wing industry toadies from cable TV and talk radio. In pitting itself against public disclosure and reasonable regulation, the natural gas industry is once again proving that it is its own worst enemy.

I confess to being an early optimist on natural gas. In July of 2009, I wrote a widely circulated op-ed for the Financial Times predicting that newly accessible deposits of natural gas had the potential to rapidly relieve our country of its deadly addiction to Appalachian coal and end forever catastrophically destructive mountaintop removal mining. At that time, government and industry geologists were predicting that new methods of fracturing gas rich shale beds had provided access to an astounding 2000-5000 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in the lower 48 -- enough, they claimed to power our country for a century.

These rich reserves might have allowed America to mothball or throttle back our 336 gigawatts of mainly antiquated and inefficient coal fired electric plants replacing them with underutilized capacity from existing gas generation plants. That transition could reduce U.S. mercury emissions by 20%-25%, dramatically cut deadly particulate matter and the pollutants that cause acid rain and slash America's grid based CO2 by an astonishing 20% -- literally overnight! Gas could have been a natural companion for wind and solar energy with its capacity to transform variable power into base load, and could have been a critical bridge fuel to the new energy economy rooted in America's abundant renewables.

Report finds genetically modified crops fail to increase yields let alone solve hunger, soil erosion and chemical-use issues

British documentary dispatches dealing with the case of the murder of PC Yvonne Fletcher who was shot dead on April 17th 1984 in St. James' Square, London, outside the Libyan embassy. While the official story pointed the finger of blame at Libya, the facts tell a very different story.