Former Vice President Dick Cheney on Tuesday predicted there would be an attack on the United States within the next decade that is "far deadlier" than the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

"I doubt it," Cheney told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, when asked if he thinks the U.S. would "get through this decade" without another "massive attack on the homeland."

"I think there will be another attack. And the next time, I think it's going to be far deadlier than the last one. Imagine what would happen if somebody could smuggle a nuclear device, put it in a shipping container, and drive it down the beltway outside Washington, D.C."

Hewitt then asked Cheney if another attack would lead to "military rule" and the reconstitution of the U.S. government. Cheney detailed the "continuity of government" program, which he said was set up during the Cold War so that a "government in waiting" could be in place if necessary.

British Medical Association (BMA) doctors have voted to demand a permanent ban on selling cigarettes to those born after the millennium - i.e. kids who are currently 14 or under. The group's ambitious plan is to make British society tobacco free by 2035.

The motion was passed at a meeting on Tuesday.

"It is not expected that this policy will instantly prevent all people from smoking, but [rather it will] de-normalise cigarette smoking," said London research assistant in academic public health, Dr Tim Crocker-Buqué at the meeting. "The level of harm caused by smoking is unconscionable."

The decision was made at the British Medical Association's annual representatives' meeting on Tuesday. The doctors' voting in favor means that the doctors' union will push for the British government to introduce the ban.

Russia and Austria have agreed on a joint company to construct the Austrian arm of the $45 billion South Stream gas pipeline project, which is expected to deliver 32 billion cubic meters of Russian gas to the country, bypassing Ukraine.

At Tuesday's meeting in Vienna, the creation of South Stream Austria was announced.The company will be 50 percent owned by Gazprom, Russia's largest gas producer, and 50 percent by Austria's OMV Group, the country's largest oil and gas company.

Construction on the Austrian section is expected to begin in 2015 and that the first deliveries will start in 2017, reaching full capacity in January 2018.

OMV spokesman Robert Lechner was more optimistic, and said the first South Stream deliveries could come as early as 2016.

In April, Gazprom and the OMV Group signed a memorandum to implement the South Stream project in Austria.

Craig Monteilh describes how he pretended to be a radical Muslim in order to root out potential threats, shining a light on some of the bureau's more ethically murky practices.
Craig Monteilh says he did not balk when his FBI handlers gave him the OK to have sex with the Muslim women his undercover operation was targeting. Nor, at the time, did he shy away from recording their pillow talk.

"They said, if it would enhance the intelligence, go ahead and have sex. So I did," Monteilh told the Guardian as he described his year as a confidential FBI informant sent on a secret mission to infiltrate southern Californian mosques.

It is an astonishing admission that goes to the heart of the intelligence surveillance of Muslim communities in America in the years after 9/11. While police and FBI leaders have insisted they are acting to defend America from a terrorist attack, civil liberties groups have insisted they have repeatedly gone too far and treated an entire religious group as suspicious.

Gary Shopland says he was recruited by the police to infiltrate the British National party. Shopland worked as the BNP leader Nick Griffin's bodyguard during an election campaign. When his identity as a BNP member was exposed, Shopland claims the police failed to support him or admit he worked undercover for them.

President Vladimir Putin has proposed that the upper house call off the March 1 resolution allowing the head of state to use the armed forces on the territory of Ukraine, said presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov.

"Because of the beginning of the three-party talks to settle down the situation in the eastern parts of Ukraine, the head of state has addressed to the Federation Council to repeal the resolution on the use of Russian armed forces on the territory of Ukraine," ITAR-TASS cited Peskov as saying.

The president sent an address to Federation Council Valentina Matvienko today morning, ahead of leaving on official visit to Vienna.

Deputy Head of the Federation Council's International Committee Andrey Klimov confirmed the upper house will back Putin's proposal and repeal the resolution on Wednesday, June 25.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has called the proposal of his Russian counterpart a "first practical step towards settlement of the situation in eastern Ukraine," reported the Ukrainian president's press-service in a specially released statement.

The EU welcomed Putin's decision to reject the right to use military force to settle the crisis in Ukraine and welcomes its earliest realization, the press-secretary of EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton stated.

Benghazi suspect Ahmed Abu Khattallah, seized by the U.S. on Sunday, once served as a key conduit in an effort staged by the U.S. and Arab interests to aid insurgents fighting in Libya and later in Syria, according to informed Middle Eastern security officials.

It was not immediately clear whether Khattallah himself worked directly with the Americans or if he knew he was part of an effort that involved the U.S..

He did, however, receive funds for his participation in a nexus coordinated by the U.S., Saudis, Turkey and other Arab countries to recruit the fighters that ultimately toppled Muammar Gadhafi's regime, the security officials said.

Khattallah, the senior leader of the Benghazi branch of the Ansar al-Sharia terrorist organization, was later instrumental in helping to recruit fighters from inside Libya to travel to Syria to aid in the insurgency targeting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime in 2011, the officials said.

Khattallah's participation came to a grinding halt following the Sept. 11, 2012, Benghazi attacks in which he is accused of participating.

Ansar al-Sharia was not yet declared a terrorist organization by the State Department during the period of Khatallah's alleged work to help recruit Mideast rebels.

Prior to the Benghazi attacks, the U.S. relationship with those linked to Khattalah's group was so comfortable that it was the February 17th Martyrs Brigade, an Ansar al-Sharia offshoot, that officially served as the armed quick reaction force within the U.S. Special Mission in Benghazi.

Every chance President Obama gets he busily boasts about America's "exceptionalism," as if to convince himself of its truth by simply repeating the same lie over and over again. His speech a month ago at West Point was one big "I/we are so great!" Even the West Point cadets sat in subdued silence and bewilderment. Obama's foreign policy speech convinced no one of America's grand world leadership but only made a bigger fool of the US president than ever before.

Obama is still feebly trying to capitalize on America's past glory, merely resting on its laurels and onetime greatness. Americans have traditionally embraced the notion that they are special and exceptional as the most well endowed, gifted nation on earth. After all, the US was the only superpower left on the planet after the dissolution of the Soviet Union more than two decades ago. Indeed over the last century Americans have been proudly raised to believe that their nation is the richest on earth, possesses the world's most powerful military fighting machine, and sentimentally, nostalgically and historically has always fashioned itself as the land of the free, a land of milk and honey with unlimited opportunity and freedom, and always considered the best country in the world to live in.

But that was then and this is now. Now America's milk is contaminated with Monsanto fed toxins and the bees are fast disappearing due to Monsanto's fed flowers. After waking up from its patriotic pipedream that at this point in time amounts to no more than wishful thinking and delusions of grandeur, Americans today are nervously realizing that the United States is far from what it has been cracked up to be. In fact, its ever-widening, very glaring cracks in such falsely smug notions as exceptionalism, shameless self-promotion and near invincibility belie the cold hard reality that now casts a long and dark foreboding shadow over the once great land. America today is not the greatest nation on earth and it turns out Americans are not nearly so exceptional as Obama would have us believe.

America is dead last in both healthcare and health and well-being of its people in a study that compares the US with ten other developed nations that include Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. As the only developed nation without some form of universal healthcare, Americans spend two to three up to ten times more on various healthcare services than all other nations. We spend $2.3 trillion annually on healthcare, about 18 percent of our Gross Domestic Product and way more than twice as much as other advanced countries.

The Health at a Glance 2013 report of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) shows that the US lifespan that was 41 years ago ahead of the developed world's average longevity by a full year now is more than a full year shorter than the average lifespan, rising from 70.9 to 78.7 while the rest of the developed nations rose from 70 to 80.1 years. People live longer than Americans in 25 other nations including all of Western Europe along with Australia, New Zealand, Japan and Canada. Among developed nations, in 2009 an estimated total of nearly 50 million Americans were unable to even afford healthcare insurance despite the so called Affordable Healthcare Act.

The black-clad fighters of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, sweeping a collapsing army and terrified Iraqis before them as they advance toward Baghdad, reflect back to us the ghoulish face of American empire. They are the specters of the hundreds of thousands of people we murdered in our deluded quest to remake the Middle East. They are ghosts from the innumerable roadsides and villages where U.S. soldiers and Marines, jolted by explosions of improvised explosive devices, responded with indiscriminate fire. They are the risen remains of the dismembered Iraqis left behind by blasts of Hellfire and cruise missiles, howitzers, grenade launchers and drone strikes. They are the avengers of the gruesome torture and the sexual debasement that often came with being detained by American troops. They are the final answer to the collective humiliation of an occupied country, the logical outcome of Shock and Awe, the Frankenstein monster stitched together from the body parts we left scattered on the ground. They are what we get for the $4 trillion we wasted on the Iraq War.

The language of violence engenders violence. The language of hate engenders hate. "I and the public know what all schoolchildren learn," W.H. Auden wrote. "Those to whom evil is done do evil in return." It is as old as the Bible.

There is no fight left in us. The war is over. We destroyed Iraq as a unified country. It will never be put back together. We are reduced - in what must be an act of divine justice decreed by the gods, whom we have discovered to our dismay are Islamic - to pleading with Iran for military assistance to shield the corrupt and despised U.S. protectorate led by Nouri al-Maliki. We are not, as we thought when we entered Iraq, the omnipotent superpower able in a swift and brutal stroke to bend a people to our will. We are something else. Fools and murderers. Blinded by hubris. Faded relics of the Cold War. And now, in the final act of the play, we are crawling away. Our empire is dying.

Egypt's military-dominated government has delivered a humiliating, public slap in the face to John Kerry, the US secretary of state, by sentencing three al-Jazeera journalists to long prison terms only hours after Kerry personally expressed his deep concern about the case in high-level meetings in Cairo. The snub represents a disastrous beginning to Kerry's already fraught Middle East tour, which took him to Baghdad on Monday for crisis talks about the Islamist extremist uprising.

The verdict, by a court responsive to government wishes, will also be seen as a deliberate, crude signal to President Barack Obama, who criticised Egypt's deteriorating human rights record after the former general, Abdul Fattah al-Sisi, seized power in a coup last year. Sisi has since had himself voted president. His elected predecessor, Mohammed Morsi, and thousands of his Muslim Brotherhood supporters remain in jail while hundreds of others have been killed.