World News

Press TV  | Former special advisor to Arafat, Bassam Abu Shareef, said the investigation conducted by British forensic experts had revealed that the late Palestinian leader was poisoned by thallium, IRNA reported on Tuesday.

The Saudi Gazette | The District Court in Jeddah pronounced the verdict on Saturday after the girl confessed that she had a forced sexual intercourse with a man who had offered her a ride. The man, the girl confessed, took her to a rest house, east of Jeddah, where he and four of friends assaulted her all night long.

Huffington Post | The death of a 36-year-old woman, Jawahar Abu Rahmah, at a protest against the route of Israel's "separation wall" in the West Bank village of Bil'in last Friday, is deeply troubling on many counts.

Al Jazeera | Israeli troops have shot dead a sleeping Palestinian man during a dawn raid in the city of Hebron in the occupied West Bank.  Family members found Suliman al-Qawasmeh, 66, in a pool of blood in the bedroom after soldiers broke into several homes in the city's al-Sheikh neighbourhood on Friday.

Ahram | Egypt’s majority Muslim population stuck to its word Thursday night. What had been a promise of solidarity to the weary Coptic community, was honoured, when thousands of Muslims showed up at Coptic Christmas eve mass services in churches around the country and at candle light vigils held outside.

RAW Story | US firms complained in 2006 of corruption by Israeli officials at the Karni crossing into Gaza, then the Palestinian territory's main commercial transit point, a leaked US diplomatic cable showed Thursday.

Wall Street Journal | The Committee to Protect Journalists, or CPJ, which defends media workers around the world, tracks and investigates the circumstances surrounding the deaths of journalists, and it created an interactive infographic showing where, how and why most were killed last year.

Aletho News | Knesset Member Yariv Levin, of the right-wing Likud party, together with the pro-settlement group The Legal Forum for the Land of Israel, are currently working on an “anti-subversive” bill aimed at anarchists and supporters of the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS).

Haaretz | Three cables cited by the Aftenposten newspaper, which has said it has all 250,000 U.S. cables leaked to WikiLeaks, showed that Israel kept the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv briefed on its internationally criticized blockade of the Gaza Strip.

BBC | The influential governor of Pakistan's Punjab province, Salman Taseer, has died after being shot by one of his bodyguards in the capital, Islamabad.  Mr Taseer, a senior member of the Pakistan People's Party, was shot when getting into his car at a market.

Al-Awda | The holidays have arrived and people all over the world are celebrating with their loved ones. Yet, this time of the year symbolizes a period of continuing terror and constant uncertainty for Palestinians imprisoned in the Gaza Strip, which remains today in its fourth year under a criminal siege.

Telegraph | Laurent Gbagbo, who is widely viewed as having lost a recent election, is refusing to leave office despite attempts to persuade him from West African leaders and others in the broader international community.

Foreign Policy | It's part of the deal when someone who was once a member of a guerrilla rebel group runs for president at the head of a mainstream political party: People are bound to try to find out what "really" happened.

Global Post | With peace talks going nowhere fast, the Palestinian Authority has mounted a new political battleground in South America, persuading a handful of countries to unilaterally recognize the state of Palestine.

Mail & Guardian | The activists, acting under the name Anonymous, said in a statement on their website: "We are targeting Mugabe and his regime in the Zanu-PF who have outlawed the free press and threaten to sue anyone publishing WikiLeaks."

Business Insider | Last night it was claimed by Kuwaiti sources that the former PM was paid $42.5 million this year for advising the government, according to Daily Mail. His firm Tony Blair Associates prepared a report called "Kuwait 2035" earlier this year.

BBC | So unprotected sex with a CIA asset gets Julian Assange in the media spotlight as a bad guy and everyone claims that is rape, even though it was consensual sex, but the Israeli ex-president rapes a person and no one says anything...

Haaretz | The head of Israel's Reform Judaism movement on Tuesday harshly criticized a letter by 30 rabbis' wives calling on Jewish girls not to date Arabs, work with them or perform national service in the same places where they work.

CNN | According to the document, a soldier alerted his commander that the dead American was not armed. In response, the commander "proceeded to send another officer with an AR-15 rifle, in order to be placed in the vehicle, using the hands of the deceased to try to simulate an attack against military personnel, and that he had died when the attack was countered," the document states.

CBC | A memo sent by Alberta Health Services to Emergency Medical Services workers on Wednesday directed drivers "to respond within the posted speed limits even when responding with lights and siren."  "It just doesn't make a lot of sense," said Elisabeth Ballermann, president of the Health Sciences Association of Alberta, which represents EMS workers.

NY Times | Leaked cables reveal the Drug Enforcement Administration’s global reach, noting dealings with Lansana Kouyaté of Guinea, left, Ricardo Martinelli of Panama, center left, and Ernest Bai Koroma of Sierra Leone.

Telegraph | Mossad insiders say he will make the pledges to officials in London and, he hopes, in private meetings with the foreign secretary, William Hague, and the home secretary, Theresa May, as part of an urgent drive to rebuild relations with the UK government, thrown into disarray earlier this year.

Al Jazeera | The Australian navy has become embroiled in an embarrassing drugs scandal.  Australian authorities have begun investigating 17 Australian Defence Force personnel for allegedly running a drugs ring a drugs ring out of their base near the Harbour Bridge.

Daily Mail | It was trumpeted as the world's largest retail mall, with shoppers able to browse through 1,500 stores, take a stroll along a mock Venetian canal or even have lunch in front of an 85ft replica of the Arc de Triomphe.

Al Jazeera | This Sensitive and classified documents includes Israel's 2006 war on Lebanon and January's assassination in Dubai of Hamas militant Mahmud al-Mabhuh would be released, Assange told Al-Jazeera in an interview.

EI | The pretty two-story home with a red-tiled roof built by Adel and Iman Kaadan looks no different from the rows of other houses in Katzir, a small hilltop community in northern Israel close to the occupied West Bank.

Guardian | The United Nations is investigating a complaint on behalf of Bradley Manning that he is being mistreated while held since May in US Marine Corps custody pending trial. The army private is charged with the unauthorised use and disclosure of classified information, material related to the WikiLeaks, and faces a court martial sometime in 2011.

Press TV | Over the weekend, Israel's Channel 2 TV broadcast an interview conducted in 2000 with the then-head of Israel's Abu Kabir forensic institute, Dr. Jehuda Hiss who revealed that forensic pathologists harvested organs from dead bodies, including Palestinian corpses in the 1990s, the Associated Press reported.

Russia Today | A massive oil pipeline explosion destroyed parts of a central Mexican city on Sunday, incinerating people, cars, houses and trees as gushing crude oil turned streets into flaming rivers. At least 28 people were killed, 13 of them children, in a disaster authorities blamed on oil thieves.

MEM | A veteran British MP has attacked the Westminster coalition government's proposed change to the universal jurisdiction laws. Sir Gerald Kaufman also claimed that British Jewry is waking up to the truth of Israel's human rights abuses.

BBC | The International Committee of the Red Cross sent evidence to US diplomats about widespread torture by Indian security forces in Kashmir, according to cables obtained by Wikileaks.

Press TV | Jonathan Ratel, who serves in Kosovo as part of the EU's rule of law mission, has announced that the seven suspected Kosovons working as physicians for a clinic called Medicus in the capital, Pristina, belong to an international network that trades in the organs of people suffering from extreme poverty, the Associated Press reported.

Guardian | Kosovo's prime minister is the head of a "mafia-like" Albanian group responsible for smuggling weapons, drugs and human organs through eastern Europe, according to a Council of Europe inquiry report on organised crime.

CNN | Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, made its own history Tuesday as its homicide rate reached 3,000 deaths for the year -- 10 times the number of killings annually that the border city counted just a few years ago.

Salon | Since his arrest in May, Manning has been a model detainee, without any episodes of violence or disciplinary problems.  He nonetheless was declared from the start to be a "Maximum Custody Detainee," the highest and most repressive level of military detention, which then became the basis for the series of inhumane measures imposed on him.

Al Jazeera | At least 10 Palestinians were invited to attend the event in northern Israel, where the four-day fire left 41 people dead and ravaged large swaths of forest.

New York Times | After World War II, American counterintelligence recruited former Gestapo officers, SS veterans and Nazi collaborators to an even greater extent than had been previously disclosed and helped many of them avoid prosecution or looked the other way when they escaped, according to thousands of newly declassified documents.

Mirror | Nicky, who describes himself as a "maths geek, not a rebel or rioter", said: "Then the policeman asked, 'Does your mum know about this?' I said, 'Yes, of course, she supports it.' "But the policeman carried on, 'Are you sure your mum wants you out protesting at night?'

Guardian | Police have been accused of attempting to prevent seriously injured protesters being treated at the same hospital as officers hurt during last week's tuition fees demonstration, igniting claims that one student's life could have been put at risk.

Boston.com | Yesterday, in central London, thousands of students and others gathered to protest as Britain's Parliament met to vote on a proposal to raise university tuition fees significantly - nearly tripling them - as part of a continuing set of austerity programs.

Daily Mail | Jailed WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, Russian officials said this afternoon.  The Kremlin urged non-governmental organisations to consider 'nominating Assange as a Nobel Prize laureate'.

Al Jazeera | Deeming it an unacceptable gesture, Somanahalli Mallaiah Krishna, India's external affairs minister, said on Thursday that the matter would be taken up before US officials to prevent a recurrence of such incidents.

The Truth Seeker | Three blister packs of the painkiller, each able to hold ten pills, were retrieved from Dr Kelly’s coat pocket when his body was found in woods near his home.  Only one tablet remained, leading his post mortem examination report to state he may have taken up to 29 pills.

Forget the Box | Since Israel’s rebirth in the 1940’s (more so starting in the late 60’s), the Jewish State has always been able to count on the unrelenting support of the United States for military aid and diplomatic aid through the United Nations.

OS News | It looks like several companies are learning what happens when you mess with the internet - and they're learning it the hard way. Several major companies have been hit by the collective powers of Anonymous after 4chan launched several distributed denial-of-service attacks

Indy Bay | A number of commentators, particularly in Turkey and Russia, have been wondering why the hundreds of thousands of American classified documents leaked by the website last month did not contain anything that may embarrass the Israeli government, like just about every other state referred to in the documents.

The Nation | Despite the fact that it was the seventh demolition since last July, this time the destruction of the Bedouin village Al-Arakib in the  Israeli Negev was different. The difference is not because the homeless residents have to deal this time with the harsh desert winter; nor in the fact that the bulldozers began razing the homes just minutes before the forty children left for school, thus engraving another violent scene in their memory

Press TV | Neighbors and acquaintances of whoever sells or rents an apartment to non-Jews in areas where Jews live must warn him, keep their distance from him and refrain from business with him, the rabbis said.

WSWS | Leaked State Department documents provide further evidence that United States authorities knew that the ex-Soviet republic of Georgia, a key ally of Washington in the Caucasus region, initiated the August 2008 war with Russia.

Cnet | That further limits the revenue sources for WikiLeaks, which has seen its finances systematically attacked in the last few days, as the Swiss authorities shut down a bank account used by editor Julian Assange, and PayPal permanently restricted the account used by the group.