The US embassy in Paris advised Washington to start a military-style trade war against any European Union country which opposed genetically modified (GM) crops, newly released WikiLeaks cables show.

Proving that age is no boundary to publishing success, the French book world has been taken by storm by a surprise Christmas bestseller: a political call to arms by Stéphane Hessel, 93.

The unlikely publishing sensation is a former resistance hero whose 30-page essay, Indignez-vous!, calls on readers to get angry about the state of modern society.

Launched in October by Indigène, a small publisher working out of an attic in Montpellier, southern France, the book had a tiny first print-run, 6,000, and sold for €3, unprecedentedly cheap in a country where book prices are regulated and kept high by the law.

“People I don’t even know are calling me horrible names,” said Ms. Corfield, an art teacher who had pleaded the case of struggling teachers. “The mantra is that the problem is the unions, the unions, the unions.”

Last week, the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced he was set to publicly appeal to President Barack Obama to release Jonathon Pollard, a former US naval intelligence analyst, who is currently serving a life sentence in a US prison for spying for Israel. That call is backed by Lawrence Korb, a former US Assistant Secretary of Defence, who says Pollard's continued incarceration is "a miscarriage of justice."

Tonight, in the tenth year of the 21st century, the government of the United States is torturing a young man - one of its own soldiers - whom it has incarcerated but not indicted.

He has been held in solitary confinement for months on end, subjected to techniques of sleep deprivation taken from the Soviet gulag, denied almost all human contact except from interrogators, constantly harassed by guards to whom he must answer every few minutes - all in an attempt to break his mind, destroy his will, degrade his humanity and force him to "confess" to a broader "conspiracy" against state power.

A claim by the Premier, Kristina Keneally, that an inquiry into the government's $5.3 billion power sale is illegal is in serious doubt, with revelations that her department was so unsure of the claim that it sought ''urgent'' legal advice on the day she made it.

Ms Keneally and the Treasurer, Eric Roozendaal, have said the decision to prorogue, or shut down, Parliament two months early, on December 22, had nothing to do with a Legislative Council committee's plans to investigate the sale.

The headline is not meant to imply that I think he will. As things are he can't because of the stranglehold on American policy for Israel/Palestine of the Zionist lobby and its stooges in Congress, the mainstream media and many institutions of state including the Pentagon and intelligence agencies. My purpose is only to offer an answer to this question: What could happen if President Obama was able to put America's own real interests first?

I wonder if Hillary Clinton really believes in the pompous invective that shoots from her lips with the rapidity of machine gun fire.

We had a classic example of it just the other day when she let rip in her grating, robotic monotones over a Moscow court's decision to jail an oil tycoon.

To be fair to Clinton, she was not alone. There was a whole gaggle of disapproving foreign ministers who poured forth their ridiculous brand of Western arrogance which has poisoned the international atmosphere for far too long.

Today the press is a propaganda ministry for the government. Any member who departs from his duty to lie and spin the news is expelled from the fraternity. A public increasingly unemployed, broke and homeless is told that they have vast enemies plotting to destroy them in the absence of annual trillion dollar expenditures for the military/security complex, wars lasting decades, no-fly lists, unlimited spying and collecting of dossiers on citizens supplemented by neighbors reporting on neighbors, full body scanners at airports, shopping centers, metro and train stations, traffic checks, and the equivalence of treason with the uttering of a truth.

On a day where we're supposed to feel kindness to all, why not show the profound hypocrisy of the Zionist and Jewish establishment?

Whatever she does Kristina Keneally is doomed to lose the state election. But she does have some choices about whether to lose smart or lose dumb.

The recent actions by her Treasurer, Eric Roozendaal, moving with all the finesse and guile of his predecessor, Michael Costa, to further privatise the supply of electricity, and the Premier's subsequent efforts to prevent parliamentary scrutiny of his actions suggest she is likely to lose dumb.

NSW Labor Headed For Defeat

How much faith do we have in intelligence gathering in Afghanistan? Scores to be settled by locals? Frankly, somebody designated as an "enemy" by Western forces may not be anything of the sort, simply a legitimate resistance to foreign occupation.

Besides, the West is in bed with a Kabul government backed and run by drug lords. Once again, Australia has been co-opted into the dirty business of propping up an illegitimate regime: