Weekend War On Terror Reading

- Waziristan was the scene of Britain’s longest 20th-century counter-insurgency campaign, with fighting going on for 11 years from 1936-47 -- "I never imagined it would be in the news all these years on," he says. "It's very odd to see those familiar barren hills on TV."

- The man who could be the next head of MI6 - Charles Farr, the director-general of the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism, the part of the Home Office that oversees RIPA, among other things.

- An innovative study by UCLA about the "surge" in Iraq:

"If the surge had truly 'worked,' we would expect to see a steady increase in night-light output over time, as electrical infrastructure continued to be repaired and restored, with little discrimination across neighborhoods," said co-author Thomas Gillespie, an associate professor of geography at UCLA. "Instead, we found that the night-light signature diminished in only in certain neighborhoods, and the pattern appears to be associated with ethno-sectarian violence and neighborhood ethnic cleansing."