A series of news reports linking Israel's intelligence agency the Mossad to a blast at a military facility in Iran, in which 17 people were killed and a further 15 wounded, has gained widespread coverage in the Israeli media on Monday.

While Iranian officials insist the explosion at the Bid Ganeh base was accidental, caused by the movement of ammunition, claims from anonymous western and Israeli officials that Saturday's blast was a covert Israeli operation have gained momentum.

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Charlie Hebdo, a satirical French magazine, recently became much more famous than it ever was. Early this month it came out with a provocative issue whose cover presented a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad and the headline “100 lashes if you don’t die laughing.” Shortly afterwards the offices of the magazine were firebombed and its website got hacked, reportedly by a group of Turkish Muslims.

I was just reading an interview with Rageh Omaar about his idealism and journalism etc on The Guardian and there are some startling things mentioned in there.

For one, there are an estimated 27 million slaves in the world and:

According to research accepted by the US government, it is cheaper to purchase a slave today than it was at the height of the Atlantic slave trade.

Let’s re-contextualize America’s continuing problems on the porous Aghanistan-Pakistan border, the 2,600 km line established in 1893. Both sides are largely inhabited by ethnic Pashtuns. They are about 60 percent of the population in Afghanistan, slightly more in the opposite Pakistani province.

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As with terrorists operating across the east-west Pakistan-Afghan frontier, the Mexican cartels are moving north. The violent Mexican cartels operate now in 195 U.S. cities. In September, one carried out an assassination in Texas. More recently the U.S. Justice Department busted an alleged plot by Iran to deploy a Mexican cartel to kill the Saudi ambassador to Washington.