FROM TIME to time I ask myself: what would happen if the world’s governments decided to abolish all their spy agencies simultaneously?

by Ramy Abdu

British Middle East policy in the human rights arena has long been suspect.

Evidence of this is plentiful: its complicity with the United States in misleading the public to go along with the war on Iraq, our support for ongoing drone attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and Britain's obvious silence on Israel's collective punishment of nearly 1.5 million residents of the Gaza Strip.

Project Censored's top 2010 story was "US Congress Sells Out to Wall Street," highlighting that since 2001, "eight of the most troubled firms have donated $64.2 million to congressional candidates, presidential candidates and the Republican and Democratic parties." It's no surprise that they own them, what Wall Street Watch.org showed in a March 2009 Essential Information and Consumer Education Foundation report titled,"Sold Out: How Wall Street and Washington Betrayed America."

Two Bush administration lawyers who authorised harsh interrogation techniques on terrorism suspects will not face punishment, according to a US justice department report.

The massacre of more than 150 opposition supporters in Guinea last year in all likelihood amounted to a crime against humanity, investigators from the International Criminal Court (ICC) have said.

The Pakistani army has said it had killed 30 fighters in an air strike in South Waziristan near the Afghan border where the military launched a major offensive in October.

The Netherlands' coalition government has collapsed after the two largest parties failed to agree on whether to withdraw Dutch troops from Afghanistan later this year, as had been planned.

Barack Obama, the US president, is being accused of recycling one of his predecessor's most controversial policies: the transfer of prisoners for interrogation, also known as rendition.