Three brothers from Stratford - home to the Olympic Games - have been arrested in a pre-planned counter-terrorism operation.

The three were among six individuals - including one woman - whom investigators arrested on Thursday. The group is understood to have included a former police and community support officer for the Metropolitan police, but Scotland Yard would not confirm that detail.

The raids were carried out by counter-terrorism officers investigating a suspected plot to attack targets in Britain. Although police said they were not linked to any threat to the Olympics, officials say they will intervene quicker than usual in disrupting suspected plots in the runup to the event, which counter-terrorism forces fear is a major target.

A convoy of NATO warships has left Turkey for the Mediterranean Sea purportedly to carry out anti-terrorism operations in the region, a report says.

According to a July 5 report published by the Turkish Hurriyet Daily, the Standing NATO Maritime Group 2 set off from Istanbul.

The group consists of Turkey's TCG Gediz, France's Courbet and Germany's Bayern warships and the three frigates have a total of 545 crew members on board, with Germany leading the mission.

German Rear Admiral Thorsten Kahler said on Wednesday that the mission of the maritime group is "to give a clear message to terrorists in the region that NATO is on duty.""We are not telling our whole schedule, but we will stay in the region."

The PA agreed on Wednesday to exhume Arafat's body after new allegations that he was poisoned with the radioactive element polonium-210 in 2004

Tunisia has called for Arab ministers to meet to discuss the death of former Palestinian President Yasser Arafat after new suspicions that he was murdered, a senior official in the Arab League said on Thursday.

The Palestinian Authority agreed on Wednesday to exhume Arafat's body after new allegations that he was poisoned with the radioactive element polonium-210 in 2004, the same substance found to have killed a former Russian spy in London in 2006.

"The general secretariat received a request today from the Tunisian representative to convene a ministerial meeting to study the circumstances of the death of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat," League Deputy Secretary-General Ahmed Ben Helli told a news conference.

• Shelly Miscavige is credited as the cupid to Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes' doomed alliance
• Theories surrounding the disappearance of Shelly from running away to death from cancer
• A more extraordinary claim is that she was locked up in 'The Hole', after allegedly being caught filing job applications without her husband's consent
• Others claim she was sent on an intense 'behavior modification program' at a remote, confidential location

He is the reclusive and enigmatic leader of the world's most famous cult who played best man at TomKat's wedding.

But perhaps the biggest mystery shrouding Scientology chairman David Miscavige concerns his wife, Shelly, who has not been seen since 2007.

Once a leading Scientologist herself, Shelly Miscavige is even credited as the cupid to Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes' doomed alliance.

Always by her husband's side, it was her to whom Mr Miscavige turned when a lovelorn Cruise begged for help in finding love following the break down of his second marriage to Nicole Kidman.

Believing the role of Hollywood matchmaker to be somewhat beneath him, it was claimed Mr Miscavige handed the task to Shelly who led the hunt for the Cocktail star's perfect match.

After scouring the list of Hollywood's most eligible maidens, her finger fell on the fresh-faced star of Dawson's Creek. Not long after, the couple were married in a lavish ceremony in 2006.

But within a year the organisation's famous First Lady was gone.

She was no longer present at meetings, and her post title, 'COB Assistant', disappeared from internal dispatches.

A campaign by group Why We Protest has been launched to find her, but so far without success.

Very little is known about Shelly's life inside the mysterious world of Scientology and almost no pictures of her appear to remain.

We always knew that the financial markets were rigged, but this is getting ridiculous. It is now being alleged that 20 major banks have been systematically fixing global interest rates for years. Barclays has already been fined hundreds of millions of dollars for manipulating Libor (the London Inter Bank Offered Rate). But Barclays says that a whole bunch of other banks were doing this too. This is shaping up to be the biggest financial scandal in history, and criminal investigations have been launched on both sides of the Atlantic. What those investigations are likely to uncover could shake the financial markets to their very core. In the end, this scandal could absolutely devastate confidence in the global financial system and it could potentially bring down a number of major global banks. We have never seen anything quite like this before.

What Is Libor?

As mentioned before, Libor is the London Inter Bank Offered Rate. A recent Washington Post article contained a pretty good explanation of what that means....

In the simplest terms, LIBOR is the average interest rate which banks in London are charging each other for borrowing. It's calculated by Thomson Reuters - the parent company of the Reuters news agency - for the British Banking Association (BBA), a trade association of banks and financial services companies.

Why Does Libor Matter?

If you have a mortgage, a car loan or a credit card, then there is a very good chance that Libor has affected your personal finances. Libor has been a factor in the pricing of hundreds of trillions of dollars of loans, securities and assets. The following is from a recent article by Maureen Farrell....

These traders influenced the pricing of the London Interbank Offered Rate or Libor, a benchmark that dictates the pricing of up to $800 trillion of securities (yes trillion).

$800 trillion?

That is a number that is hard to even imagine.

Most American consumers do not even know what Libor is, but it actually plays a key role in the U.S. economy as the Washington Post recently explained....

In the United States, the two biggest indices for adjustable rate mortgages and other consumer debt are the prime rate (that is, the rate banks charge favored or "prime" consumers) and LIBOR, with the latter particularly popular for subprime loans. A study from Mark Schweitzer and Guhan Venkatu at the Cleveland Fed looked at survey data in Ohio and found that by 2008, almost 60 percent of prime adjustable rate mortgages, and nearly 100 percent of subprime ones, were indexed to LIBOR.

Echoing the laments of pundits like Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood argued Saturday that China outpaces the United States in building major transportation infrastructure like high-speed rail because of its authoritarian system and because the Chinese don't have the Republican Party holding up progress.

"The Chinese are more successful [in building infrastructure] because in their country, only three people make the decision. In our country, 3,000 people do," LaHood said in a short interview with The Cable on the sidelines of the 2012 Aspen Ideas Festival on June 30. "In a country where only three people make the decision, they can decide where to put their rail line, get the money, and do it. We don't do it that way in America."

During his conference session at the festival, LaHood blamed Republicans in Congress, especially the Tea Party freshman class elected in 2010, for the relative lack of progress in moving forward with high-speed rail even though the administration has obligated more than $11 billion to the effort.

On Friday, June 29th, German Chancellor Angela Merkel acquiesced to changes to a permanent Eurozone bailout fund - "before the ink was dry," as critics complained. Besides easing the conditions under which bailouts would be given, the concessions included an agreement that funds intended for indebted governments could be funneled directly to stressed banks.

According to Gavin Hewitt, Europe editor for BBC News, the concessions mean that:

[T]he eurozone's bailout fund (backed by taxpayers' money) will be taking a stake in failed banks.

Risk has been increased. German taxpayers have increased their liabilities. In future a bank crash will no longer fall on the shoulders of national treasuries but on the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), a fund to which Germany contributes the most.

In the short term, these measures will ease pressure in the markets. However there is currently only 500bn euros assigned to the ESM. That may get swallowed up quickly and the markets may demand more. It is still unclear just how deep the holes in the eurozone's banks are.

The ESM is now a permanent bailout fund for private banks, a sort of permanent "welfare for the rich." There is no ceiling set on the obligations to be underwritten by the taxpayers, no room to negotiate, and no recourse in court. Its daunting provisions were summarized in a December 2011 youtube video originally posted in German, titled "The shocking truth of the pending EU collapse!":

An Israeli Border Police officer has been caught on video kicking a Palestinian child in the southern West Bank. The police have launched a probe into the incident, documented by an Israeli human rights organization.

The footage shows a 9-year-old boy walking down the road when a uniformed police officer runs up to him and grabs him by the arm, causing the boy to fall on the ground. Another policeman then walks up to them and kicks the screaming child.

After that, the soldiers let the child run away, and leave the site. In response to the incident, the Israeli Border Police issued a statement denouncing the policemen's behavior, which it claims "contrasts the values of the force."

Iran claims it has the capability to destroy US bases "within minutes" after concluding a massive military exercise in which it launched hundreds of missiles.

"[US] bases are all in range of our missiles, and the occupied lands [Israel] are also good targets for us," Amir Ali Haji Zadeh, commander of the elite Revolutionary Guard told the FARS news agency.

The three-day Great Prophet 7 training exercise wrapped up on Wednesday. It simulated rapidly releasing batteries of guided missiles and Iran-made drones at mock-ups of US bases.

Haji Zadesh claimed that 35 US bases are within the 2,000 km range of Iran's rockets, although the actual number of bases within this area is closer to 10.

The aggressive rhetoric comes on the back of a spike in tension between Iran and the US, already locked in a long-running stand-off over Iran's nuclear program. Washington and the EU believe it is aimed at producing nuclear weapons, while Tehran denies the accusations.

Al Jazeera published a report Wednesday based on an extensive scientific investigation of the 2004 death of Yasser Arafat. Though he was 75 years old when he died, many noted the marked deterioration in his appearance in his final weeks and speculated that he was poisoned or that he had AIDS. An Israeli journalist who interviewed Ariel Sharon noted that the Israeli leader refused to deny Israeli involvement in Arafat's demise:

[Maariv journalist Uri] Dan reveals a little and conceals much when he hints that Arafat's death was not caused by any illness. He himself suggested to Sharon that Arafat be captured and brought to trial in Jerusalem, like Eichmann, but Sharon reassured him that he was dealing with the problem in his own way. Then Arafat fell ill, was flown to Paris for treatment and died. Was Sharon involved? This is what Dan wrote then in Maariv - that in the history books, prime minister Ariel Sharon will be remembered as the man who eliminated Yasser Arafat without killing him. Let every reader figure it out for himself.

Now, a team of researchers has tested personal artifacts provided by Arafat's widow, Suha, and found highly elevated doses of polonium (in some cases 10 times the expected dose) in many of these objects. They found a type of polonium not occurring naturally that could only be produced in a nuclear reactor. Suha Arafat is asking that the PA exhume her husband's body and test it for polonium. What they find will determine whether the element killed him or not.

This news returns us to 2006, when elements of the Russian intelligence services arranged to poison a former agent, Alexander Litvinenko, with polonium. It was the first known instance in which someone was killed by polonium poisoning. If the Al Jazeera report is correct, then the Russian may have to cede pride of place to Arafat, who would now become the unfortunate record-holder.