New Democratic Peoples Front

Charles Ingabire was gunned down in a bar in Kampala on Wednesday, but details are only now emerging. He was editor of Inyenyeri News, an online publication critical of the government of Rwandan President Paul Kagame. Several critics of Mr Kagame have been attacked or killed in recent years. The government denies any responsibility.

Police say he had two bullet wounds and they are questioning a security guard and barmaid who worked at the bar. "They're helping with investigations," Ibn Senkumbi told news agency Reuters. Police say Mr Ingabire was drinking with an unidentified man at the bar near Makerere University when has killed.

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A former Tibetan monk set fire to himself as an anti-China political protest inTibet’s Chamdo township on Thursday but survived, according to reports on Friday by Tibet advocacy groups. It was the 12th self-immolation by a Tibetan this year and the first inside Tibet.

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The rail roko (stop the trains) agitation of the victims of the Bhopal gas tragedy turned violent after the Bhopal police lathicharged victims at one of the venues.

The agitation, which has the protesters blocking all the major railway lines going through Bhopal, turned violent at Barkhedi in old Bhopal after some anti-social elements reportedly took advantage of the crowded situation at the venue and started pelting stones at the police and authorities.

"The police lathicharged a group of women protesters after they burnt an effigy. This angered the men who retaliated by pelting stones at the police. In the process, some people sustained injuries and a police vehicle was torched," Rachna Dhingra of the Bhopal Group of Information and Action told The Hindu.

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The Senate on Thursday blocked a second attempt to spare U.S. citizens from potential indefinite military detentions and was set to vote on a third effort to do the same later in the day.

Under a provision of the mammoth defense authorization bill, the military would be granted the authority to detain and hold anyone indefinitely if that individual is suspected of having ties to al Qaeda, including any American arrested in the United States.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, offered an amendment to curb the measure by specifying that it applied to suspects captured "abroad." The amendment failed on a vote of 45 to 55. Feinstein was expected to get a vote later in the day on another amendment that would explicitly exclude U.S. citizens from military detention.

The heated debate has crossed party lines, with three Republicans -- Sens. Rand Paul (Ky.), Mike Lee (Utah) and Mark Kirk (Ill.) -- favoring the amendment, and 10 Democrats and independent Sen. Joe Lieberman (Conn.) opposing it. The debate also has left many Americans scratching their heads as to whether Congress is actually attempting to authorize the indefinite detention of Americans by the military without charges.

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Under Sections 1031and 1032 of the National Defense Authorization Act for the Fiscal Year 2012, the United States Congress has proposed to give the Department of Defense the explicit power to take civilians into military custody, detain them indefinitely with no charges or trial.

Well hidden in the 682-page long National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the Bill under the title ‘Detainee Matters’ has received tragically sparse coverage in the American national media, widely-read national newspapers and broadly-watched national television channels blocking the existence of this impending legislation described by rights organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) as a draconian piece of law.

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Last weekend Venezuelans welcomed home the first shipment of international gold reserves being returned to the country by the government of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. The arrival to Caracas of some US $300 million worth of gold comes just three months after the Venezuelan President announced plans to repatriate the vast majority of the country’s gold sent to Europe and North America by previous governments.

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A senior German official said Wednesday that the government has approved the subsidized sale of another Dolphin-type military submarine to Israel.

The official said Germany has set aside €135 million ($180 million) in next year's budget to pay for about a third of its cost.

Dolphin-class submarines are capable of carrying nuclear-tipped missiles, but there is no evidence that Israel has armed them with such weapons.

Israel already has three Dolphin submarines from Germany — one half-funded and two entirely funded by Berlin, a staunch Israeli ally.

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The first round of Egypt’s parliamentary elections saw a 62 percent voter turnout, the judicial committee supervising the elections said Friday

Councilor Abdel-Moez Ibrahim, head of the Supreme Electoral Commission (SEC), said the turnout was “unprecedented,” adding that it was the “most in Egypt’s history as far back as the pharaohs, even with the forgery of the former regime.”

Out of 13,614,525 eligible voters in the nine governorates of the first round, 8,449,115 voted on Nov. 28-29.

During the brief press conference held to announce the results of the first round, Ibrahim highlighted the main complaints, stressing that the violations reported do not void the elections, while promising to avert them in the following two rounds.

The main violations including campaigning outside polling stations, long queues and lack of facilities for people with disabilities, the delay in the arrival of judges and ballots in “limited cases,” the delivery of unstamped ballots, minor incidents of violence and improper places allocated for sorting and counting the votes.

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The plans for a new global deal on climate change lie broken and abandoned. The usual suspects are meeting again, this time in Durban, but there is even less hope of progress than there was in Cancun last year. The shadow of the disastrous failure in Copenhagen in 2009 still looms over the proceedings like a shroud.

Indeed, even to talk of "progress" is to miss the point. All the effort in Durban is going into preventing further backsliding on the commitments that were made fourteen years ago in the Kyoto Protocol to cut the greenhouse gas emissions of the developed countries. The idea of a better, bolder treaty is dead, and even the extension of the modest Kyoto targets for emission reductions beyond 2012 is gravely in doubt.

So the real world of physics and chemistry and global heat balances will just have to wait ten or twenty years while we human beings sort out our politics and diplomacy. If it won’t wait, then we will pay a very high price indeed. How did we get into this mess?

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