Nafeez Ahmed in the Huffington Post:

[...] Qatada's burgeoning terror career was incubated directly by MI5. As Richard Norton-Taylor of the Guardian recalls: "Hours before a new anti-terrorism law allowing foreign terrorism suspects to be held without charge or trial, Qatada left his London home. Mysteriously, MI5 and the police could not find him anywhere. Several months later, he was discovered in a council house in Bermondsey, south London and incarcerated in Belmarsh jail."

Jon Mitchell writes:

Yesterday, when I wrote about the social media campaign that Israel was waging alongside its attack on Hamas, I thought it was interesting. I thought it was a straightforward and effective way of presenting the cause behind the attack. Whether you thought the offensive was right or wrong, you had to admit the propaganda's effectiveness.

Well, day two has changed matters. The IDF Blog now has atrocious gamification badges with points and rewards for sharing the content to social media. For example, if you visit the site 10 times, you get the "Consistent" badge. If you search the blog multiple times, you're promoted to "Research Officer." Yes, Israel has gamified war. This is absolutely horrendous.

How "copyright" is being used by repulsive fascists to prevent free speech.

Just how easy is it to silence your critics on the Internet by using the DMCA? Apparently, very easy indeed. Yesterday, a writer who reports on religion and current affairs had his entire website taken offline after he allegedly breached the copyright of the operator of a Facebook page. His crime? Reproducing a 16-word Facebook posting made by his copyright adversary that accused an anti-racist, anti-fascist organization of being worse than pedophiles.

Robert Fisk in the Independent.

How the government howled. With the help of a neighbouring state, "terrorists" were trying to destroy the government and its army, blowing up and murdering its supporters. "Terrorists" were crossing the international border, arms were being shipped over the frontier and given to rebels fighting the government, "non-lethal" aid was being sent to the opposition. I couldn't help remembering this when I crossed that same border four days ago. Not from Turkey into Syria, but from the Irish Republic into Northern Ireland.

Rick Falkvinge writes.

Iraq had suddenly started selling its oil for Euros instead of for US Dollars.

RT report.

According to Debka, the trusted member of President Ahmadinejad's crew took with him to the States two suitcases full of "the most complete and updated footage" that US intelligence has ever been offered of Iran's top secret military facilities and other related structures, something the site claims to include "exclusive interior shots of the Natanz nuclear complex, the Fordo underground enrichment plant, the Parchin military complex and the small Amir-Abad research reactor in Tehran."

Babar Ahmad in the Guardian.

After my initial arrest in December 2003 during which Metropolitan police officers inflicted at least 73 injuries on me, I would have thought that the police would give to the CPS any material found in my house with a view to considering prosecuting me in the UK. After six days in custody I was released without charge and I returned to my full-time job at Imperial College London. However, as has recently been uncovered in legal documents, the Metropolitan police only showed a fraction of the material seized in my house to the CPS, sending the rest straight to the US so that it could seek my extradition (which it did do eight months later). What is even more concerning is that, at the time the senior police officer in charge of my case decided to effectively "outsource" my case to the US, he himself was a suspect in the separate investigation into the police assault on me (though he was never charged).

From the Khaleej Times.

Based on diplomatic sources in Tripoli, the news report alleges that the French secret serviceman had mixed with the revolutionaries and shot Gaddafi. Apparently, Sarkozy was afraid that the dictator would divulge details of his connection with him if he was captured alive and put through trial.

This reasoning has some credibility because as soon as Nato attacks on the Libyan regime started, Gaddafi threatened to disclose specifics of his connection with Sarkozy, including those about the millions of dollars he allegedly pumped into his re-election campaign.

Huffington post report.

The director of public prosecutions will not allow a private prosecution of terror suspects Babar Ahmad and Syed Ahsan, because no real evidence has been provided and any case against the men would be "bound to fail" in a British court.

Guardian report.

Al-Jazeera's editorial independence has been called into question after its director of news stepped in to ensure a speech made by Qatar's emir to the UN led its English channel's coverage of the debate on Syrian intervention.

[...]

In September 2011, Wadah Khanfar, a Palestinian widely seen as independent, suddenly left as director-general after eight years in the post and was replaced by a member of the royal family, Sheikh Ahmed bin Jassim al-Thani, a man with no background in journalism.

Glenn Greenwald in the Guardian.

The massive, flamboyant FBI raid on Hamoodi's home predictably generated substantial media coverage in his community. "FBI agents today searched the home of a Columbia businessman and former Iraqi who has been an outspoken critic of the war in Iraq," read the first line of a long article in the local Columbia Daily Tribune. "People of course automatically assumed terrorism", said Owais.

Several years later, Hamoodi was finally indicted and for the first time learned of his "crime": that, as this excellent Inside Columbia article on his case put it, he "ran afoul of a couple of Gulf War-era executive orders, an act of Congress and Treasury Department regulations" banning the sending of any money to Iraq.

Nafeez Ahmed in the Huffington Post.

While the usual cheerleaders and critics have been out in force, lost in the debate are serious questions about the repercussions of this move not just for habeas corpus and the prosecution of terrorism in British jurisdiction, but more importantly for the dubious role of the British intelligence services in secretly facilitating the activities of Islamist extremists on UK soil.

Sacramento Bee report.

Egypt's chief forensic doctor told a state-run newspaper in an interview published Saturday that Hosni Mubarak has never suffered a stroke and that he is not in critical condition, contradicting earlier medical reports that the former president's health was deteriorating.

Glyn Moody reports for Techdirt.

[...] surely the most bizarre proposal for dealing with "abuse" -- an attempt to dress up as lamb the tired old mutton of "terrorism" -- is the following:

The use of platforms in languages abuse specialists or abuse systems do not master should be unacceptable and preferably technically impossible.

Incredible though it might sound, that seems to suggest that less common foreign languages would be banned from the European Internet entirely in case anybody discusses naughty stuff without the authorities being able to spy on them (haven't they heard of Google Translate?) You could hardly hope for a better symbol of the paranoid and xenophobic thinking that lies behind this crazy scheme.

Reuters report.

Alaeddin Boroujerdi, head of the Iranian Parliament's national security and foreign policy committee, said on Saturday that intelligence and security officials had detected explosive material inside devices supplied for Iran's nuclear activities.

"It was planned that these devices would explode once used and damage all of our systems, but in the end with the knowledge of our experts, this enemy conspiracy was foiled," Boroujerdi was quoted as saying by ICANA, Iran's parliamentary news agency.

"The Siemens company must be held accountable for its actions," he said.

Haaretz report.

A monitoring device disguised as a rock exploded last month when Iranian troops near Fordow nuclear plant disturbed it, the Sunday Times reported, citing Western intelligence sources.

According to the report, Iran's Revolutionary Guards were on patrol last month to check terminals connecting data and telephone links at the underground nuclear enrichment plant, when they saw the rock and tried to move it.

"Iranian experts who examined the scene of the explosion found the remains of a device capable of intercepting data from computers at the plant, where uranium is being enriched in centrifuges," said the report, "It is feared a significant source of intelligence may have been lost for the West."