On New Year's Day, a devastating terrorist bombing at a Coptic church in Egypt killed 21 people and injured 79 others.

Although the identity of the culprits was not known, it was assumed that they were Muslim extremists, intent on targeting those they saw as heretics. Religious tensions immediately rose in the country, and angry Copts stormed streets, battled with police, and even vandalized a nearby mosque.

A police officer who for seven years lived deep undercover at the heart of the environmental protest movement, travelling to 22 countries gleaning information and playing a frontline role in some of the most high-profile confrontations, has quit the Met, telling his friends that what he did was wrong.

PC Mark Kennedy, a Metropolitan police officer, infiltrated dozens of protest groups including anti-racist campaigners and anarchists, a Guardian investigation reveals.

America's international standing as a fair and just country does not match its superpower status as the world's greatest democracy.

When it comes to basic human rights it is there in the gutter alongside some of the world's most toxic, tinpot dictatorships and authoritarian regimes.

So there's little surprise that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange fears being extradited to The States where some politicians and Pentagon officials have already called for his execution and Attorney General Eric Holder admits his government may invoke the US Espionage Act.

A shocking report prepared for Prime Minister Putin by the Foreign Military Intelligence Directorate (GRU) states that one of the United States top experts in biological and chemical weapons was brutally murdered after he threatened to expose a US Military test of poison gas that killed hundreds of thousands of animals in Arkansas this past week.

Bank of America Gears Up for WikiLeaks Fallout; Wall Street Takes Note

By Justin Grant January 03, 2011 URL:

Bank of America is gearing up to defend itself in the event that it proves to be the bank that WikiLeaks' Julian Assange has pledged to take down.

After seeing its stock swoon last November amid rumors that Assange was in possession of an executive's hard drive containing potentially damning information about the firm, Bank of America has been on high alert.

An Inquiry into the government's $5.3 billion power sale is to be held only weeks before the state election after its chairman, Fred Nile, said fresh legal advice did not affect its plans and the President of the Legislative Council, Amanda Fazio, revealed that her ''inclination'' was not to intervene.

The Premier, Kristina Keneally, yesterday released new legal advice from the Crown Solicitor, Ian Knight.

The US embassy in Paris advised Washington to start a military-style trade war against any European Union country which opposed genetically modified (GM) crops, newly released WikiLeaks cables show.

Proving that age is no boundary to publishing success, the French book world has been taken by storm by a surprise Christmas bestseller: a political call to arms by Stéphane Hessel, 93.

The unlikely publishing sensation is a former resistance hero whose 30-page essay, Indignez-vous!, calls on readers to get angry about the state of modern society.

Launched in October by Indigène, a small publisher working out of an attic in Montpellier, southern France, the book had a tiny first print-run, 6,000, and sold for €3, unprecedentedly cheap in a country where book prices are regulated and kept high by the law.

“People I don’t even know are calling me horrible names,” said Ms. Corfield, an art teacher who had pleaded the case of struggling teachers. “The mantra is that the problem is the unions, the unions, the unions.”

Last week, the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced he was set to publicly appeal to President Barack Obama to release Jonathon Pollard, a former US naval intelligence analyst, who is currently serving a life sentence in a US prison for spying for Israel. That call is backed by Lawrence Korb, a former US Assistant Secretary of Defence, who says Pollard's continued incarceration is "a miscarriage of justice."

Tonight, in the tenth year of the 21st century, the government of the United States is torturing a young man - one of its own soldiers - whom it has incarcerated but not indicted.

He has been held in solitary confinement for months on end, subjected to techniques of sleep deprivation taken from the Soviet gulag, denied almost all human contact except from interrogators, constantly harassed by guards to whom he must answer every few minutes - all in an attempt to break his mind, destroy his will, degrade his humanity and force him to "confess" to a broader "conspiracy" against state power.

A claim by the Premier, Kristina Keneally, that an inquiry into the government's $5.3 billion power sale is illegal is in serious doubt, with revelations that her department was so unsure of the claim that it sought ''urgent'' legal advice on the day she made it.

Ms Keneally and the Treasurer, Eric Roozendaal, have said the decision to prorogue, or shut down, Parliament two months early, on December 22, had nothing to do with a Legislative Council committee's plans to investigate the sale.