Al Qaeda head Ayman al-Zawahiri threw his support behind rebels in Syria as the country's Arab neighbours cut it adrift and vowed to support the uprising against president Bashar al-Assad.

Arab League ministers meeting in Cairo called for a joint Arab and United Nations peacekeeping mission in the troubled country and vowed political and material support for the rebels.

The call came as regime troops continued their deadly assault on areas of the flashpoint city of Homs.

Speaking in a video message, al-Zawahiri described the Assad government as a "cancerous regime" that was suffocating the people of Syria.

picture by Gus Leonisky

A report has recommended the immediate privatisation of sections of the New South Wales rail network, to improve services and drive down costs.

Lobby group Infrastructure Partnerships Australia (IPA) commissioned the report, and is now pushing the State Government to act on its findings.

Earlier this month Transport Minister Gladys Berejiklian announced the Government's own review to improve the efficiency of RailCorp, saying the organisation costs about $10 million a day.

The BBC will today apologise to an estimated 74 million people around the world for a news fixing scandal, exposed by The Independent, in which it broadcast documentaries made by a London TV company that was earning millions of pounds from PR clients which it featured in its programming.

The US Marine Corps is once again in damage control after a photograph surfaced of a sniper team in Afghanistan posing in front of a flag with a logo resembling that of the notorious Nazi SS - a special unit that murdered millions of Jews, gypsies and others.

The Corps said in a statement that using the symbol was not acceptable, but the marines in the photograph taken in September 2010 would not be disciplined because investigators determined it was a naive mistake.

Former clerk of the Senate Harry Evans says Mr Slipper should just get on with the job"You can't recreate a tradition once it's dead, and I think it was well and truly dead in Australia and has been well and truly dead for a number of years," he said.

WASHINGTON — The international hackers group known as Anonymous turned the tables on the F.B.I. by listening in on a conference call last month between the bureau, Scotland Yard and other foreign police agencies about their joint investigation of the group and its allies.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/04/us/fbi-admits-hacker-groups-eavesdropping.html?_r=1&hp      

Just months ago, as he toyed publicly with announcing his own candidacy, Trump was bad-mouthing Romney. But that, he told reporters, was back before he had really got to know the Mormon millionaire.

Mrs Rinehart's three oldest children, John Langley Hancock, Bianca Hope Rinehart and Hope Rinehart Welker, have started legal action to remove her as the trustee of the Hope Margaret Hancock trust, set up by their late grandfather Lang Hancock, alleging ''serious misconduct''.

Dollars to doughnuts.

Earlier this week, The Wall Street Journal published an opinion article by Rabbi Aryeh Spero titled “What the Bible Teaches About Capitalism,” which argued that Americans should laud Mitt Romney’s private equity career.