Troops battle protesters on the the streets as country's new government faces early challenges.Tunisia's junior minister for transportation has said that he and two other ministers with ties to a top labour union have resigned from the newly formed government. Anouar Ben Gueddour said on Tuesday that he has resigned along with Houssine Dimassi minister of training and employment, and Abdeljelil Bedoui, a minister dealing with prime ministerial affairs. They are all members of a general national labour union. Their walkout comes a day after Mohamed Ghannouchi, the Tunisian prime minister, announced a new 'unity government'. The announcement was met with anger by some Tunisians, who said too many members of ousted president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali's party remain in power.

Ghannouchi was one of eight ministers staying on from the previous government of Ben Ali, who resigned and fled on Friday in the Arab world's first such popular revolt. Ghannouchi said that the ministers remaining, including the defence and interior ministers, had acted "to preserve the national interest." "They kept their posts because we need them at this time," Ghannouchi said on French radio. "All of them have clean hands."

Al Jazeera: Tunisia's tide of defiance

Dubbed ‘the Imelda Marcos of the Arab world’ because of her lavish lifestyle and love of designer clothes, Leila Trabelsi is said to have demanded the gold last week as President Zine Al Abidine Ben Ali’s regime collapsed. The chief of Tunisia’s central bank initially refused but Ben Ali, 74, personally intervened, and she flew out with the bullion as she joined him in exile in Saudi Arabia. The source of the claim, leading Tunisian economist Moncef Cheikhrouhou, said militia men had tried to take more gold.

The clan of the former first lady is widely despised as the ultimate symbol of corruption and excess. A former hairdresser, Mrs Ben Ali, 53, is known for her love of fast cars – the family had more than 50 – luxury homes and frequent shopping trips to Dubai, during which she is said to have spent hundreds of thousands of pounds. While many Tunisians faced unemployment, poor living conditions and oppression from Ben Ali’s brutal regime, his family – known as ‘The Mafia’ in the North African country’s capital Tunis – is said to have amassed a £3.5billion fortune. Much of it is kept in France, where some members of the family were still holed up last night.

AWIP: L'Elysée soupçonne la famille Ben Ali d'avoir fui la Tunisie avec 1,5 tonne d'or

Historian Rick Shenkman is interviewed on CNN about his new book, JUST HOW STUPID ARE WE? FACING THE TRUTH ABOUT THE AMERICAN VOTER (Basic Books, June 2008).

The University of Southern California has signed a 5-year, $16 million contract with the Department of Homeland Security to expand USC's DETERlab "mini-Internet" security testbed. The government funding will support a new project dubbed DETECT that will feature advanced cyber security techniques and tools. DETERlab (cyber-DEfense Technology Experimental Research laboratory) boasts a 400-node network divvied up between USC's Information Sciences Institute and UC Berkeley that enables researchers to examine the impact of malware and other security threats without messing with the real Internet. The lab uses the Emulab cluster testbed software developed at the University of Utah. Dell servers, as well as Cisco and HP switches, are among the hardware underpinnings of DETERlab.

(Xinhua) No education, lack of food and winter clothes. In Afghanistan's capital Kabul, hundreds of war displaced children and their families are crying for relief assistance from the government.

Currently, there are 804 families living in the slum, in west of the city, with the largest family of 15 children.

"We do not have enough food and clothes. We need help," Wakiltawos Khan, head of the slum, told Xinhua reporters. "Nine months ago, my five sons were killed by U.S. air strikes in my hometown, and my daughter lost an arm. Kabul is safe, so we moved here. But we can not afford a house and have to stay here," Wakiltawos said.

To escape the ongoing conflict, most of the families are forced to leave their hometowns in south Afghanistan's Helmand province to find a safer place to continue their life. Over the past nine years since the beginning of the Afghan war in October 2001, the Afghan Taliban regime has collapsed, but its leader Mullah Omar and his guest Osama Ben Laden are still in escape, leaving the Afghan civilians suffering almost every day.

According to statistics released by Refugees International, over 100,000 people have been displaced in 2010 alone. There are now over 319,000 internally displaced people in Afghanistan, and the number has been rising over the past two years.

Major Israeli banks, credit institutions, and communication companies are among the advertisers in an extreme right wing weekly magazine that called for building concentration camps. An Israeli Jewish orthodox magazine "Ma'ayanei Hayeshua" (Fountains of Salvation) that is distributed freely in hundreds of synagogues all across the country has been the center of attention after calling in its editorial for the concentration of Arabs in extermination camps. In the article, published on 25 of December 2010, the editors attack rabbis who refused to support the call against renting apartments to Palestinians and accuse them of being too cowardly to follow the biblical commend of wiping out the people of Amalek ( who through the context of the article clearly means Palestinians). In the last segment of the editorial the editors wrote "It will be interesting to see whether they (the moderate Rabbis) leave the concentration of the Amalekites [Palestinians] in extermination camps to others, or whether they will declare that wiping out Amalek is no longer relevant".

This blunt call for a genocide against Palestinians is not new in publications of the Israeli extreme right, but this is the first time it appears in a “family” magazine with prominent advertisers. Among the companies advertising in the website of of Maayanei Hayeshua there are three major banks in Israel: Bank Hapo'alim, Bank Le'umi and Bank Discount, along with the Isracard Group that is working together with Visa, Europay and Mastercard. The national phone company, Bezeq, also advertises their international call service on the website. Even an academic institution, the Jerusalem College of Technology, published its advertisement inside the print version of the magazine.

Following an agreement that would give private US security group Blackwater access to the West Bank, Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said the move meant Palestinians were "under double attack." Chief of the PA security forces in the West Bank Adnan Dmeiri, who confirmed the arrival of the security personnel, said the agents would only be fulfilling their mandate to protect US officials when they are in the West Bank and institutions in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. "They will not reside in Palestinian areas," Dmeiri said, dismissing the concern. Hamas' Barhoum, however, accused the PA of coordinating with US intelligence, and called the move a reflection of the "multinational authority" ruling the West Bank, which aims to "oppress the freedom of the Palestinians, their sovereignty on their land enable the Israeli occupation to apply its agenda of rubbing out all those defending the Palestinian cause."

The arrival of Blackwater security personnel to Palestine "represents the largest danger to the lives and sovereignty of Palestinians," Barhoum said, adding that he believed it "confirmed the existence of US-Israel security cooperation," and would add to the "violations of freedoms and human rights already carried out in the West Bank."

Venezuela has overtaken Saudi Arabia as the world leader in oil reserves with certified deposits leaping to 297 billion barrels at the end of 2010, President Hugo Chavez's government said Saturday. Energy Minister Rafael Ramirez told Reuters that the new reserves, which pushed the total 41 percent higher than the previous year, were booked in the South American OPEC member's vast Orinoco extra heavy crude belt. A jubilant Chavez told parliament that Venezuela's reserves now surpassed those of Saudi Arabia. "We have enough for 200 years," the former soldier said in a speech in which he denied he was a dictator, complained that he was being unfairly "demonized" and offered to give up much-criticized decree powers a year ahead of schedule.

There are suggestions that countries, including Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, have exaggerated their oil reserves in the past, though the producers deny doing so. Some analysts point out that some OPEC members' reserves figures have not changed in years, suggesting new discoveries had exactly matched output, while others say the lack of independent verification gave rise to doubts.

Bill Gates is promoting a plan to use wireless technology to register every newborn on the planet in a vaccine database. In a keynote address to the mHealth Summit, which focuses on using mobile technology to improve health care, Gates said that improving survival rates among children under the age of 5 would benefit not just individual families, but societies and the planet as a whole.

"The key thing, the most important fact that people should know and make sure other people know: As you save children under 5, that is the thing that reduces population growth," he said. "That sounds paradoxical. The fact is that within a decade of improving health outcomes, parents decide to have less children."

The number of children who die before their fifth birthday has already dropped from 20 million in 1960 to 8.5 million today, a statistic Gates attributes mostly to vaccination.

Angry Swiss lawmakers have called for the ouster of US diplomats implicated in an illegal surveillance program in Switzerland. The call comes a day after the Swiss Ministry of Justice said it was investigating reports that the US embassy in Geneva has been conducting illegal surveillance on Swiss territory, according to the Associated Press. "If the suspicion turns out to be true, then the Federal Council has to send a signal," Green Party lawmaker Josef Lang told the Zurich daily Tages-Anzeiger. "It should expel the US agents from the country and summon the ambassador."

Tony Blair misled Parliament and the public about the legality of the Iraq War, according to explosive documents released last night. Former Attorney General Lord Goldsmith said the then prime minister’s claims that Britain did not need a UN resolution explicitly authorising force were not compatible with his legal advice. In testimony to the Chilcot Inquiry, made public for the first time yesterday, Lord Goldsmith said Mr Blair based his case for invasion on grounds that ‘did not have any application in international law’. He said he felt ‘uncomfortable’ about the way Mr Blair ignored his legal rulings when making the case to Parliament. Asked whether ‘the Prime Minister’s words were compatible with the advice you had given him’, he replied: ‘No.’

The shattering testimony is a watershed moment for the Iraq Inquiry, as it is the first time that Lord Goldsmith has directly contradicted Mr Blair. The claims will form the centrepiece of Mr Blair’s ­second grilling by the inquiry on Friday. The written questions and answers from Lord Goldsmith’s second testimony to the inquiry, released yesterday, detail how the Attorney General was frozen out of government decision-­making over the drafting of Resolution 1441, which he eventually used to justify the war after months of pressure from Mr Blair and his closest aides. The UK and U.S. tried to get a second UN resolution explicitly justifying an invasion but abandoned the effort when France threatened to veto their plans in the UN Security Council.

A rights group says at least twenty-six children have been shot dead by Israeli forces as they were searching for construction materials in bombed-out buildings near the border in 2010. The report by "Save the Children" said the children were killed while they were searching for construction material left over from Israel's 22-day deadly war on Gaza at the turn of 2009. According to the report the Israeli blockade on the territory "has put children's lives at risk." The UNICEF-led working group called for an immediate end to the 4-year-long blockade on the territory, saying it has forced children to drop out of school and work to help support their families. Numbers of them have been hit by Israeli gunfire, while they were searching for construction materials near the so-called buffer zone. At least twenty-six children were shot by Israeli forces close to the border last year, according to the report.

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of being interviewed by the inimitable Scott Horton on Antiwar Radio about my recent article, The Phantom Menace: Fantasies, Falsehoods, and Fear-Mongering about Iran's Nuclear Program.

Our discussion (consisting mostly of me rambling on and on, and Scott graciously and patiently waiting for me to stop talking) ranged from, as Antiwar describes, "the numerous failed predictions – primarily by the US and Israel – of Iran's imminent creation of a nuclear weapon; how the latest Israeli estimate of a 2015 Iran nuke is explained, not by a longtime mistaken assumption about Iran’s nuclear intentions, but by the effectiveness of sanctions, espionage and assassination; the vastly overstated Iranian "breakout" capability that could also be ascribed to well over 100 other countries; Israel's genuine concerns of an emboldened Hezbollah and a "brain drain" of educated Israelis migrating to the US and Europe; and how Iran’s leaders are portrayed by Western media as irrational "mad mullahs" who want to destroy the world and can't be reasoned with."

[The graphic shows the precession of the equinoxes from 600 BC to 2600 AD. In 600 BC, the intersection of the ecliptic and celestial equator is in western Aries and marked by the Vernal Equinox. In the year 2007, the intersection is in Pisces. (Click on image to enlarge.)]

It's a great conversation starter: "What's your sign?" But before you ask or answer that question, consider this: your zodiac sign corresponds to the position of the sun relative to constellations as they appeared over 2200 years ago! The science behind astrology may have its roots in astronomy but don't confuse these two disciplines. Astronomy can explain the position of the stars in the sky but it’s up to you to determine what, if anything, their alignment signifies.

The Constellations of the Zodiac: The ecliptic, or the position of the Sun as it’s perceived from the revolving Earth, passes through the constellations that formed the Zodiac - Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius and Pisces. Zodiac signs were originally determined by which constellation the Sun was "in" on the day you were born. Early astronomers observed the Sun traveling through the signs of the Zodiac in the course of one year, spending about a month in each. Thus, they calculated that each constellation extends 30 degrees across the ecliptic. However, a phenomenon called precession has altered the position of the constellations we see today.

You will most likely find that once precession is taken into account, your zodiac sign is different. And if you were born between November 29 and December 17, your sign is actually one you never saw in the newspaper: you are an Ophiuchus! The eliptic passes through the constellation of Ophiuchus after Scorpius. Now you really have something cool with which to start that conversation!

BBC: Have the Zodiac and star signs changed?