From the BBC:

The European parliament has approved a damning report on secret CIA flights, condemning member states which colluded in the operations.

The UK, Germany and Italy were among 13 states which allowed the US to forcibly remove terror suspects, lawmakers said.

The EU parliament voted to accept a resolution condemning member states which accepted or ignored the practice.

The EU report said the CIA had operated 1,245 flights, some taking suspects to states where they could face torture.

The report was adopted by a large majority, with 382 MEPs voting in favour, 256 against and 74 abstaining.

Addendum

The Beeb followed up with CIA flights controversy here to stay.

An excerpt from the AP story on CTV.ca:

A court on Tuesday ruled in favour of Belgian newspapers that sued Google Inc., claiming that the Web search Internet search leader infringed copyright laws and demanded it remove their stories.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company that operates the world's most-used search engine immediately said it would appeal, claiming its Google News service was "entirely legal."

A Brussels court ruled in favor of Copiepresse, a copyright protection group representing 18 mostly French-language newspapers that complained the search engine's "cached" links offered free access to archived articles that the papers usually sell on a subscription basis.

It ordered Google to remove any articles, photos or links from its sites -- including Google News -- that it displays without the newspapers' permission.

But in the future, it said it would be up to copyright owners to get in touch with Google by e-mail to complain if the site was posting content that belonged to them. Google would then have 24 hours to withdraw the content or face a daily fine of 1,000 euros (US$1,295).

The Beeb analyses why the Bushies and company finally negotiated a fairly soft deal with North Korea over that country's nuclear program.

From the Feb. 12 Washington Post article:

The growing Sunni-Shiite divide is roiling an Arab world as unsettled as at any time in a generation. Fought in speeches, newspaper columns, rumors swirling through cafes and the Internet, and occasional bursts of strife, the conflict is predominantly shaped by politics: a disintegrating Iraq, an ascendant Iran, a sense of Arab powerlessness and a persistent suspicion of American intentions. But the division has begun to seep into the region's social fabric, too. The sectarian fault line has long existed and sometimes ruptured, but never, perhaps, has it been revealed in such a stark, disruptive fashion.

Newspapers are replete with assertions, some little more than incendiary rumors, of Shiite aggressiveness. The Jordanian newspaper Ad-Dustour, aligned with the government, wrote of a conspiracy last month to spread Shiism from India to Egypt. On the conspirators' agenda, it said: assassinating "prominent Sunni figures." The same day, an Algerian newspaper reported that parents were calling on the government to stop Shiite proselytizing in schools. An Egyptian columnist accused Iran of trying to convert Sunnis to Shiism in an attempt to revive the Persian Safavid dynasty, which came to power in the 16th century. ...

The violence remains confined to Iraq and, on a far smaller scale, Lebanon, but to some, the four-year-long entropy of Iraq offers a metaphor for the forces emerging across the region: People there watched the rise of sectarian identity, railed against it, blamed the United States and others for inflaming it, then were often helpless to stop the descent into bloodshed.

"This tension is the most dangerous problem now in the region," said Ghassan Charbel, editor of the Arabic-language daily al-Hayat.

From the AP story on CTV.ca:

A top U.S. general said Tuesday there was no evidence the Iranian government was supplying Iraqi insurgents with highly lethal roadside bombs, apparently contradicting claims by other U.S. military and administration officials.

Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said U.S. forces hunting down militant networks that produced roadside bombs had arrested Iranians and that some of the material used in the devices were made in Iran.

"That does not translate that the Iranian government per se, for sure, is directly involved in doing this," Pace told reporters in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta. "What it does say is that things made in Iran are being used in Iraq to kill coalition soldiers."

Democracy Now! talks to John "Rick" McArthur of Harper's magazine and Craig Unger, author of House of Saud, House of Bush, on the now-infamous NYT story by Michael R. Gordon about Iran's alleged supplying ...   more »