[Video] With age come such things as catheters, colostomy bags and adult diapers. Now add another indignity to getting old -- having to drop your pants and show these things to a complete stranger. How many 88 year old American women terrorists are there?

Congress is on the verge of passing the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) with detention provisions that would violate human rights and undermine the rule of law. These provisions would keep Guantanamo open, continue and possibly expand the use of indefinite detention, hinder fair trials and mandate military custody for some terror suspects. President Obama has threatened to veto the legislation over the detention provisions. Urge him to follow through on the veto of the NDAA—or any other legislation that would violate human rights -- and on his promise to close Guantanamo and uphold human rights. Read More.

In a speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition, Gingrich said, “If he will accept it, I will ask John Bolton to be secretary of state.” - John Bolton served a controversial tenure as U.N. Ambassador under George W. Bush, noted for his bad temper, aggressively hawkish foreign policy views, and for the fact that he never won Senate confirmation. He is now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

A former employee with the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has said that American and NATO forces are training Syrian "rebels" in southeastern Turkish city of Hakkari. - Sibel Edmonds also said that she had received information from Turkish and US sources indicating that training Syrian opposition forces, led by defected Syrian colonel Riad al-Assad, had started in May, the Turkish daily Milliyet reported. Edmonds further added that the US is involved in smuggling arms into Syria from Incirlik military base in Turkey in addition to providing financial support for Syrian rebels. Syria has been experiencing a deadly unrest ever since mid-March, with demonstrations being held both against and in support of President Bashar al-Assad's government. Confessions by a number of Syrian rebels about foreign-sponsored plans to carry out armed operations and killing ordinary people as well as security forces prove that recent developments in the country are part of an attempt to incite a revolt in the strategic country neighboring the Israeli regime, aiming to overthrow the current government and replace it with a US-backed regime.

Xinhuanet: Turkey mulls suspension of free trade agreement with Syria

Constant threats of attack and recent revelations about covert activity have terrified Iranian citizens. - The constant rhetoric in the U.S. and Israel about potential military strikes against Iran, along with recent revelations about covert U.S. action inside Iran, has terrified a nation staring down the barrel of a superpowers gun. “I don’t think we can know just yet if war will break out, but I am concerned for my family and my country,” university teacher Maryam Sofi, a mother of two, told Reuters. “I cannot sleep at night, thinking about destruction and bloodshed if Israel and America attack Iran.” Hyperbolic reactions to the recent IAEA report on Iran’s nuclear program have prompted heightened war rhetoric from Israel and the United States. On Thursday, President Obama used a popular euphemism for international aggression, saying “No options off the table means I’m considering all options.” But the IAEA report put forth no definitive evidence of an imminent Iranian nuclear weapons capability, and in fact confirmed the non-diversion of fissile material.

Days after the Pentagon first denied and then admitted that it lost touch with a high-tech drone aircraft, authorities in Iran are now saying that they have the plane — and its condition is pristine.

The unmanned, robotic aircraft — a RQ170 Sentinel drone plane — disappeared last week. American authorities quickly dismissed claims that they lost the plane over Iran, only to later admit that the CIA was flying a reconnaissance mission over Afghanistan when they lost touch with the top-secret stealth drone. Soon after it was believed that communication was cut once the plane waded through the air in Iranian territory. American officials then claimed that satellite imagery showed that the drone had crashed and was beyond repair.

Officials out of Tehran, however, now say that they intercepted the craft and have it in perfect shape. For proof, Iran television has even broadcast footage of the craft. Tehran is saying that they brought down the drone themselves with the Iranian Army’s electronic warfare unit after they caught the craft in Iran, around 140 miles from the country’s border with Afghanistan.

The Sentinel has been in the arsenal of the US military since 2009 and the Pentagon has gone to great lengths to keep its exact capabilities under wraps, though those speaking under condition of anonymity to the Los Angeles Times have revealed that among its powers is the ability to intercept cell phone transmissions and sniff out toxic chemicals from miles above the Earth’s surface, all while remaining undetected. "It's bad — they'll have everything,” one official added to the Times.

BBC: Iran shows film of captured US drone
Xinhuanet: Iran calls for UN condemnation of U.S. drone aggression
PressTV: Iran airs footage of downed US drone
John Glaser: Downed US Drone in Iran Reveals Broader Covert War
Seumas Milne: War on Iran has already begun. Act before it threatens all of us

PressTV: Iran urges UN to condemn US violation - Iran has strongly censured the violation of its airspace by a US spy drone, urging the United Nations to condemn such contravention and adopt necessary measures to end these “dangerous and illegal” acts.

If Iran doesn't have such a program - and it almost certainly does not, as both the Americans and the Jews know - then Zionist military aggression would be the best way to force the Iranians to start and accelerate such a program. In other words, one way or the other, Zionist plans seem to be the best possible way to ensure that Iran has a nuclear bomb. Are the Jews nuts? Without a doubt. We always have to remember that 'Iran talk' has nothing to do with Iran, and everything to do with the pressing need of a fascist military dictatorship to be in wars or talk about wars. Israel can't manage this attack by itself, and they can't trick the Americans into doing it for them.

Prime Minister David Cameron said Britain refused to sacrifice sovereignty to save the euro, remaining outside an agreement by European nations to tighten budget rules. - Cameron broke ranks with French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel after he failed to secure safeguards that would have stopped European Union plans to police financial services in London, Europe’s trading hub. In a clash that may reshape Europe’s balance of power, the euro users opted to enshrine closer fiscal union in a new treaty that leaves out the U.K. instead of amending EU treaties that date back to the 1950s. Nine non-euro members -- Denmark, Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, Sweden, the Czech Republic, Latvia, Lithuania and Romania -- indicated they may follow suit after consulting with their national parliaments. “We wish them well,” Cameron told reporters after all- night talks with his European counterparts in Brussels. “My judgment was that what was on offer just wasn’t good enough for Britain. It’s better to allow those countries to do their own thing on their own.”

The Economist: Europe's great divorce

[VIDEO] Nigel Farage: Mr Juncker, as President of the Eurogroup, your detachment from reality is almost unbelievable. You're behaving like a political ostrich, pretending none of it is happening. You've just told us just a few moments ago that Greece fundamentally has no problems because she's a member of the eurozone. It's just deluded. And you wrote recently, that the euro's thirteen-year history is a success story. Well, it's a very odd kind of success, isn't it? And actually, saying that beggars belief and I think hardly makes you credible. I think it's about time that you and others in this room woke up to the fact that we are inflicting misery on millions of people; through unemployment, through poverty, through a lack of democracy, and that it's an error to try and keeping countries trapped inside the euro prison. The recent proposal is that Greece should write down her debt by 50% and remain a member of the eurozone. Surely, Mr Juncker if that happenes the same would happen to Portugal and Ireland too. Do you think it's possible for any member state of the euro to write down their debts and stay a member of the euro?

Russian news website Life News has published emails it claims show correspondence between the US State Dept. and the Russian election watchdog Golos discussing payments for work done to discredit the results of Russia’s parliamentary vote. - Life News says it has come into the possession of 60 megabytes of Golos' private online correspondence. According to Life News, they are letters sent and received by Golos Executive Chief Lilya Shibanova and her deputy Grigory Melkonyants. Judging by the documents published on the site, the group which claimed to be independent was actually funded in order to defend the interests of US State Department. In one of the letters Yulia Kostkina, a financial analyst for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) sends Melkonyants a list of remarks and guidelines considering Golos' activities.

Russia Today: Medvedev: Protests a manifestation of democracy

Alex Lantier: US officials threaten Russia amid post-election protests - Amid deep popular disaffection and opposition protests against the regime of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin following Russia’s December 4 parliamentary elections, US officials are mounting a campaign to destabilize Russia. The elections, which were marked by numerous instances of vote fraud, saw Putin’s United Russia party officially receive only 49.5 percent of the vote, down 15 percent from 2007. This reflects broad and deeply-felt anger with the disastrous social conditions of post-Soviet Russia. In response, Washington has ratcheted up military and political tensions with the Kremlin, including by backing ongoing protests politically dominated by Russia’s official right-wing “opposition” parties. US officials are seeking to exploit the fact that protests are limited to relatively small layers of the urban middle class and dominated by the official “opposition,” to push Russian politics in a right-wing direction favorable to US imperialism.

The US Air Force sent the incinerated remains or partial remains of at least 274 soldiers to a Virginia garbage dump over a period lasting several years, Pentagon records have revealed. Military officials purposefully hid the practice from families who had believed that their loved ones’ remains had been disposed of in a dignified manner.

The story came to public attention last month when the Washington Post documented that at least one soldier’s remains were transported from Dover Air Base in Delaware, the main entry point for troops killed in the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, to the King George County landfill in Virginia. On Wednesday, the Post revealed that, based on official records, the remains of at least 274 soldiers were dumped at the site. The real number could be far higher. According to military records, the incinerated remains from an additional 1,762 unidentified corpses returned from Iraq and Afghanistan were also disposed of at the landfill between 2004 and 2008.

Jason Ditz: Air Force Dumped at Least 274 Troops in Landfill
AWIP: Remains of 274 US troops dumped'

After six decades of waiting, relatives of men killed in a notorious massacre during Indonesia's bitter struggle for independence finally got what they wanted: an official apology from the Dutch state. - Tjeerd de Zwaan, ambassador to Indonesia, apologized on his country's behalf Friday before hundreds of villagers in Rawagede, scene of the Dec. 9, 1947 killings of up to 430 boys and young men by Dutch troops. The crowd, tense with emotion, erupted in cheers and applause. Tears rolled down the cheeks of surviving widows, now in their late 80s and early 90s, some of whom had doubted they would ever hear those words. "It makes me feel my struggle for justice was not useless," said Cawi binti Baisa, who was 20 when her husband of two years headed to the rice paddy in the morning never to return. Dutch troops clinging to their retreating colonial empire arrived in Rawagede just before dawn 64 years ago and opened fire, sending sleepy residents scattering from their homes in panic.

[Editor's Comment:] And now for the United States...and Israel.

Though the existence of a secret CIA prison somewhere in Romania has been a fairly widely recognized fact for years, its exact location and use remained a secret. Until now. - The prison, codenamed “Bright Light,” [sic!] was operated int he basement of a Romania government building in northern Bucharest. The prison was one of several “black sites” operated by the CIA in which to disappear captives. The Romanian government termed the basement “the most secure room in all of Romania” but said they didn’t believe it was a prison.

French court fines first women for full-face veils ... court slapped fines on women for wearing the full-face covering Islamic niqab veil for the first time Thursday, case could have legal implications across Europe. - Police have issued several on-the-spot fines since the ban came into effect in April but the hearing saw the first two court-issued fines, and the pair vowed to appeal their case all the way to the European Court of Human Rights. France is not the only country to try to ban the Muslim full-face veil — Belgium and some Italian cities have similar laws while other countries are planning to follow suit — so a European ruling could have broad effect. The court in the northern cheese-making town of Meaux ordered Hind Ahmas, 32, to pay a 120-euro (about US$160) fine, while Najate Nait Ali, 36, was fined 80 euros. It did not order them to take a citizenship course, as the prosecutor had requested. The two veiled women arrived too late to attend the court hearing, but addressed journalists in front of the building.

“We’ve been sentenced under a law that violates European law. For us, it’s not about the size of the fine, but the principle. We can’t allow women to be convicted for freely following their religious beliefs,” Ahmas said.

While all eyes were fixed on Muammar Qaddafi's capture, the Libyan rebels murdered their other captives just a few feet away.