Libya's ruling national assembly picked Mohammed Magarief, leader of the National Front party, as its president on Thursday in a vote carried out a day after it took power from the outgoing National Transitional Council.

Magarief, a long-time opponent of ousted [murdered] leader Moammar Gadhafi, will head the 200-member congress, which will name a prime minister, pass laws and steer Libya to full parliamentary elections after a new constitution is drafted next year.

His National Front party, which won three seats in the July 7 vote for the national assembly, is an offshoot of the National Front for the Salvation of Libya, an opposition movement to Gadhafi established in 1981.

The vote counting was carried out in front of reporters and was televised live. Magarief won 113 votes versus independent Ali Zidan who secured 85 votes.

Google's Internet search engine is getting more personal by highlighting information drawn from its users' Gmail accounts on its main results page.

The feature announced Wednesday marks Google's latest attempt to deliver data that people are seeking more quickly as it tries to maintain the dominance of its lucrative Internet search engine.

Google is initially testing the feature with 1 million Gmail users who must sign up to participate.

Gmail's more than 425 million users already can search within their e-mail accounts to find something they need, such as an order from Amazon.com or an airline reservation.

Representatives of 27 world and regional states as well as the UN envoy to Tehran are participating in the international consultative conference on the developments in Syria, which started work here in Tehran on Thursday.

At the beginning of the Tehran conference on Syria, Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi addressed the audience on Iran's position and policies to settle the crisis in the Arab country.

He underscored that the settlement of the crisis in Syria needs serious and comprehensive talks between the Syrian government and the opposition groups.

"We need serious and comprehensive talks between the opposition (forces) who have a position among people and the Syrian government in a background of tranquility and stability to settle the crisis in Syria," Salehi said.

There was a time, not too long ago (relatively speaking), that governments and the groups of elites that controlled them did not find it necessary to conscript themselves into wars of disinformation.

Propaganda was relatively straightforward. The lies were much simpler. The control of information flow was easily directed. Rules were enforced with the threat of property confiscation and execution for anyone who strayed from the rigid socio-political structure. Those who had theological, metaphysical or scientific information outside of the conventional and scripted collective world view were tortured and slaughtered. The elites kept the information to themselves, and removed its remnants from mainstream recognition, sometimes for centuries before it was rediscovered.

With the advent of anti-feudalism, and most importantly the success of the American Revolution, elitists were no longer able to dominate information with the edge of a blade or the barrel of a gun. The establishment of Republics, with their philosophy of open government and rule by the people, compelled Aristocratic minorities to plot more subtle ways of obstructing the truth and thus maintaining their hold over the world without exposing themselves to retribution from the masses. Thus, the complex art of disinformation was born.

IDF helicopters ferried masked, armed soldiers to isolated Palestinian village of Jinba, where they raided homes, photographing and mapping the site, say residents.

An unusual operation by the Israel Defense Forces in the South Hebron Hills region has intensified suspicions among Palestinian residents that Israel is moving forward with its plan to demolish villages in the area and expel their residents.

Two Israel Air Force helicopters landed soldiers on Tuesday in Jinba, an isolated village inhabited by cave dwellings in the southern West Bank. It is one of eight villages slated for demolition according to Defense Minister Ehud Barak's plan to allow the military to resume its training in the area, known as Firing Zone 918.

According to reports by the residents, the helicopters landed and took off at the site six times, each time carrying soldiers. The soldiers erected a command center in a tent outside the village, and two jeeps and a Hummer parked next to the tent.

The soldiers, who were masked and armed, raided the village, photographed and mapped the cave dwellings, the tents and the structures, and made extensive searches while causing property damage, the residents said. The soldiers also emptied out the contents of closets and poured out jugs of milk and cream.

Facebook has become such a pervasive force in modern society that increasing numbers of employers, and even some psychologists, believe people who aren't on social networking sites are 'suspicious.'

The German magazine Der Taggspiegel went so far as to point out that accused theater shooter James Holmes and Norwegian mass murder Anders Behring Breivik have common ground in their lack of Facebook profiles.

On a more tangible level, Forbes.com reports that human resources departments across the country are becoming more wary of young job candidates who don't use the site.

The common concern among bosses is that a lack of Facebook could mean the applicant's account could be so full of red flags that it had to be deleted.

Slate.com Advice Columnist, Emily Yoffee, wrote in an advice column that young people shouldn't date anyone who isn't on Facebook.

Aimed -- it seems -- at keeping America's attention firmly on the unacceptable danger of Iran building nuclear weapons, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak are hinting that an Israeli attack on Iran could come at any time.

Officials in Jerusalem and in Washington have suggested, however, that they believe Netanyahu has been privately asked by President Barack Obama not to attack until after America's election day; and many Israeli strategic analysts believe that a military strike can indeed wait until then. However, Netanyahu is trying to maintain the pressure, not only on Iran but on the United States, by declaring that time is running out for a peaceful solution. He barely conceals the fact that he would prefer that the U.S. carry out the attack on Iran.

The prime minister is not saying publicly that Israel's foreign espionage and operations agency -- the Mossad -- is highly active, day and night; and its main focus, for eight years now, has been Iran's nuclear program. The agency's director from 2002 through 2010, Meir Dagan, made a point of redirecting the Mossad's priorities: with a lot less emphasis on Palestinian politics and militant groups, and a laser beam of attention on Iran.

We reported last month that at least four assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists in Tehran were carried out by Mossad operatives. The Israeli attackers were part of an elite unit within Israeli intelligence, called Kidon (the Hebrew word for Bayonet). Since its creation, in the wake of the Palestinian terrorist attack that killed 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972, many espionage experts have concluded that Israel's assassins respect no rules and know no boundaries.

The more the public grows skeptical of the global warming hoax, the more desperate the charlatans behind it become.

There is no global warming if by that one means a sudden, dramatic increase in the overall temperature of the Earth. It is not, nor ever was, caused by an increase in carbon dioxide (CO2) in the Earth's atmosphere; currently a miniscule 0.038 percent. Climate science has demonstrated that CO2 increases show up centuries after a major change in the Earth's temperature, not before.

In recent testimony before the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, Dr. John Christy, Alabama's state climatologist, a professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, said, "It is popular again to claim that extreme events, such as the current central U.S. drought are evidence of human-caused climate change.

Actually, the Earth is very large, the weather is very dynamic, and extreme events will continue to occur somewhere, every year, naturally. The recent 'extremes' were exceeded in previous decades."

Recent examples of the Warmists to convince the public that the Earth is in peril include an opinion by the president of the radical Environmental Defense Fund, Fred Krupp, in The Wall Street Journal, and a PBS television report featuring NASA's Dr. James Hansen, offering a statistical analysis as bogus as his 1988 testimony that global warming was man-made and going to kill us all if we didn't destroy the economy by outlawing CO2 emissions.

This makes no sense from a humanitarian point of view or from an economic one.

If conservatives and "moderates" of both parties get their way in the 2012 Farm Bill now winding its way through Congress, America's recession is about to get a whole lot worse for poor people. In the hallowed name of deficit reduction, the House Agriculture Committee is proposing cuts of up to $16 billion from federal food stamps (a Senate version would cut $4.5 billion) - even as they protect billions in crop insurance for large-scale farmers and insurance corporations.

What will this radical excising mean, both for America's poor and the economy at large?

The answer is both simple and multilayered. The costs of these cuts will be immediate and long-term, felt palpably in people's stomachs and throughout the "lower tiers" of the economy - the rungs of poverty and hunger inhabited by at least 48 million Americans (not counting millions more who qualify for food stamps but have not accessed them).

The so-called "Big Six" agrichemical companies - Monsanto, Syngenta, Dow Agrosciences, BASF, Bayer, and Pioneer (DuPont) - are sitting pretty. Together, they control nearly 70 percent of the global pesticide market, and essentially the entire market for genetically modified seeds. Prices of the crops they focus on - corn, soy, cotton, etc. - are soaring, pushed up by severe drought in key growing regions. Higher crop prices typically translate to increased pesticide sales as farmers have more money to spend on agrichemicals and more incentive to maximize yield.

The companies operate globally - and have gained a stronghold in that emerging center of industrial agriculture, Brazil - but the biotech-friendly US is their profit center. They've got a big chunk of US agriculture pretty well sewn up - their GMO seeds dominate our corn, soy and cotton crops, which account for more than 53 percent of US farmland, and have won approval for GMO alfalfa (hay), which accounts for another 19 percent. The vast annual US corn crop - which accounts for 40 percent of the globe's corn most years - is a particular bonanza, not just for GMO seeds but also a stunning amount of insecticides, fungicides, and herbicides.

But two things could mess up the Big 6 here in the US: 1) any delay in the regulatory process for a new generation of seeds engineered for resistance to multiple herbicides; and 2) any major move to require labeling of foods containing GMOs, a requirement already in play in many other countries - including the European Union, China, Japan, and South Korea - and one for which the US public has expressed overwhelming support. Unsurprisingly, the Big 6 are investing millions of their vast profits into forestalling both of those menaces.