"One hundred and ninety seven people from neighboring countries drowned in the Red Sea, inside Sudanese territorial waters, following the burning of a boat that was illegally transporting them to Saudi Arabia," Sudan Media Centre cited a Sudanese official as saying.

Sudanese authorities said only three people had been rescued, stating that efforts to find survivors were underway, AFP reported on Tuesday.

Four Yemenis who were thought to be the owners of the Cuban-flagged boat have been arrested in connection with the incident, officials said.

Sudanese authorities added they had foiled a people-trafficking plan that aimed at transferring 247 immigrants from Somalia, Eritrea, Chad, and Nigeria through Sudan's coastal region of Tokar.

Somali refugees, fleeing violence in their country, often try going to Saudi Arabia via the sea with the help of smugglers. Many end up first in the kingdom's poor southern neighbor Yemen which is closer to Somalia.

Newspaper and five of its journalists face lawsuit amid spate of leaks about alleged sexual attack

The hotel maid at the centre of the attempted rape case against the former head of the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, is suing the New York Post for libel after the newspaper accused her of working as a prostitute.

The lawsuit was filed against the Post and five of its journalists after a stream of articles over the weekend that claimed she had engaged in sex work both in the Sofitel hotel where Strauss-Kahn had been staying at the time of the alleged assault and afterwards when the maid was under the protective care of New York police.

The legal action, reported by Reuters, says that "all of these statements are false, have subjected the plaintiff to humiliation, scorn and ridicule throughout the world by falsely portraying her as a prostitute or as a woman who trades her body for money and they constitute defamation and libel per se."

President Barack Obama's political sepulcher will be war. His extinguishment as a political comet could have been avoided if he had respected the exclusive constitutional responsibility of Congress to commence war.

To defeat fifty al Qaeda in Afghanistan, he has deployed tens of thousands of troops at an annual cost exceeding $120 billion to support a corrupt and tribal government devoid of popular legitimacy. President Hamid Karzai was elected with at least one million fraudulent votes. He is seeking to oust scores of parliamentarians to accommodate his own toadies. The signature of the now-failed Kabul Bank was a secret multi-million dollar, no document loan to political favorites of the Karzai administration. Justice is for sale.

President Obama has inflated the danger of al Qaeda manifold to justify his exorbitant fool's errand. If his troop to al Qaeda militant ratio in Afghanistan had been employed during World War II in fighting Germany and Japan, the United States would have deployed 3.5 billion military personnel abroad, vastly more than the entire United States population.

Tobacco bill proposes outlawing shop sales, with only doctors allowed to prescribe cigarettes to addicts unable to kick habit

Iceland is considering banning the sale of cigarettes and making them a prescription-only product.

The parliament in Reykjavik is to debate a proposal that would outlaw the sale of cigarettes in normal shops. Only pharmacies would be allowed to dispense them - initially to those aged 20 and up, and eventually only to those with a valid medical certificate.

The radical initiative is part of a 10-year plan that also aims to ban smoking in all public places, including pavements and parks, and in cars where children are present. Iceland also wants to follow Australia's lead by forcing tobacco manufacturers to sell cigarettes in plain, brown packaging plastered with health warnings rather than branding.

Internal U.S. government documents show that the Transportation Security Administration, under the guidance of the Department of Homeland Security Secretary, deliberately misled the public on the health risks associated with body-scanning devices.

Documents recently obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) reportedly revealed that the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has been caught covering up a growing number of cases of cancer among TSA airport body scanner operators who conduct the screenings in close proximity to the radiation-emitting devices.

Marc Rotenberg, Executive Director of EPIC, told 9News Now "We think that the Department of Homeland Security has not been forthcoming with the public about the true extent of radiation risk with the airport body scanners" after reviewing the documents. EPIC found evidence that the Department of Homeland Security failed to properly evaluate the level of risk from airport body scanners.

Some of the documents indicate that a large number of TSA workers have fallen victim to cancer, strokes and heart disease. TSA workers are concerned that they are being exposed to dangerous levels of radiation while they're conducting the screenings. Union representatives in Boston have cited rising cancer cases (PDF) in the TSA's workforce there and asked the agency to allow its members to wear radiation monitoring devices. To date, the TSA has refused requests for dosimeters.

In the near future the noise you hear in your outside trash container might not be that pesky raccoon or the neighbor's dog, but the FBI, looking for evidence to link you to some criminal or terrorist activity. That would be particularly true if you have had any contact knowingly or unknowingly, socially or otherwise with someone the bureau finds suspicious. If past experience is any guide, that could be nearly anyone.

According to recent news reports, officials of the national police force are preparing for another assault on our civil liberties. They are planning to give their agents more leeway to intrude into the lives of those they decide need further looking into by amending the domestic operations manual that sets out guidelines for conducting investigations. They would have enhanced ability to search not only household trash but also databases and could assign surveillance teams to scrutinize every aspect of American lives - shades of J. Edgar Hoover and his infamous Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO).

At the risk of overstating the case, that's just plain scary.

Link that with reports of a mysterious FBI investigation into the activities of peace advocates and politically active labor organizers, and the past is not only prologue, it never went away. The Washington Post reported that the probe involving raids on seven homes and the issuance of subpoenas for 23 people last fall has triggered a major protest at the Justice Department. The investigation apparently is examining possible material support for Colombian and Palestinian groups designated as terrorists, the newspaper said.

Israeli occupation forces demolished Tuesday a Palestinian house in Khirbet Biet Iskaria located in the south of Bethlehem.

Awad Abu Sawi, the Bethlehem director of the local Committee Against the Wall and Settlements, said that an Israeli force escorted by three bulldozers raided the village and started the demotion after declaring the area as "a military closed zone".

The house owned by the Palestinian citizen, Mahmoud Saeed, was inhabited by 11 persons.

The house owner said that he was handed an Israeli demolition notice under the pretext of illegal construction, noting that several house in the same area are subjected to Israel's threat.

Stating that Israel used to demolish Palestinian homes in that area aiming at pushing them from their own land in order to expand its illegal settlements.

Residents are terrified of a series of demolitions as Israeli forces are still existing in the area.

No suggestion of snags at iTunes, though

Hackers claim to have broken into Apple's systems before posting a list of names and password hashes online.

The FT, in a story careful to make a number of caveats, attributes the hack on what would appears to be Apple's business intelligence unit on infamous and recently disbanded prankster hackers LulzSec. None of this has been confirmed and Apple is yet to say anything about the supposed hack.

The caged bird sings
with fearful trill
of the things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom...

- Maya Angelou

There is a telephone pole outside my house - seven steps down the front porch, one step across the sidewalk, and there it is - that leans only slightly enough to the right to raise concern. It does it's job tolerably well, as least as well as its sagging brethren that hover along and above my tired old Brighton sidestreet. It offers no complains. It does its duty.

Take a close look, however, and all of a sudden this simple, slightly splintered nondescript thing makes you think. There are at least three hundred nails sticking out of its old hide, and some of those nails look old enough to have held the Son and Savior Himself, in His well-documented agony, had this particular piece of pine been available on Golgotha.

Once upon a time a utility worker planted that pole in that spot, another utility worker strung the wild carnival of electrical wires that are still festooned above my house, and now I get to enjoy electricity and cable television and all the nonsense that goes along with both.

The nails in that pole will get you thinking if you look at them long enough. Hundreds of them, in spirals and straight lines and T-shapes, all over and up and down the thing. Buried deep, rusted to the quick, part of the essential wood now...and each one of them once carried a message. Lost Dog. Lost Cat. Ride Needed. Have You Seen This Girl. Concert Tonight. Strike Tomorrow.

Each message, once upon a time, was important enough to nail up, and each message is remembered now only by the nails left behind. The paper wound up in the river long ago, along with whatever message that was so important at the time, but the nails are still there for the counting in the old skin of the pole.

I feel like posting something up on that pole, you know, for the Fourth.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn faced a potential new sexual assault investigation Monday after a young French writer said she would formally accuse him of trying to rape her during a 2002 book interview - a dizzying turn of events just as the former IMF chief's fortunes seemed to be growing brighter.

With France debating his possible return to presidential politics, Strauss-Kahn swiftly hit back at author Tristane Banon's plans to take him to court over the attempted rape accusations, labeling her account "imaginary" and countering with his own plans to file a criminal complaint of slander.

The sordid exchange may have deep ramifications for the 2012 presidential race in France, where the surprise weakening of the sexual assault case against Strauss-Kahn in New York last week sparked a fierce debate about whether he should return to politics if the American case against him collapses completely.

Before Banon's announcement, polls showed voters were evenly split about whether Strauss-Kahn, 62, should try to revive a career that until recently had him on track to take on conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy in the race to be France's next leader.

"DSK Back?" the left-leaning daily Liberation asked on its front page Monday.

Some politicians and pundits see Strauss-Kahn, who won plaudits for his stewardship of the International Monetary Fund, as a victim of overzealous American prosecutors and journalists who denied him the presumption of innocence when a maid accused him of forcing her to perform oral sex in his Manhattan hotel room.