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According to StatCounter global statistics, mobile traffic jumped from about 4% of all Web traffic at the end of 2010 to over 10.5% now.

According to its public statistics, Facebook had "more than 500 million mobile monthly active users as of April 20, 2012." It also claimed "488 million monthly active users who used Facebook mobile products in March 2012."

Facebook's overall monthly active users is 901 million, so that's 55% of Facebook's monthly active user base who access the social network on a mobile device.

blunt criticism from the US of Israel's announcement on Monday of plans to build an extra 1,500 homes in the settlement of Ramat Shlomo.US state department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said: "We are deeply disappointed that Israel insists on continuing this pattern of provocative action. These repeated announcements and plans of new construction run counter to the cause of peace. Israel's leaders continually say that they support a path towards a two-state solution, yet these actions only put that goal further at risk."

William Hague, the British foreign secretary, urged Israel to revoke the decision, saying that if it was implemented, "it would make a negotiated two-state solution, with Jerusalem as a shared capital, very difficult to achieve". All Israeli settlements were "illegal under international law", he added.

French officials also sharply condemned the move, describing it as illegal colonisation.

Iran has expanded its enrichment capacity and is enriching uranium at a pace that would bring it to what Israel has declared an unacceptable red line in just over seven months, according to a report by the UN nuclear watchdog.

The International Atomic Energy Agency also found that Iranian technicians had removed the fuel rods from the country's only functioning nuclear power station at Bushehr, suggesting the new reactor has serious problems.

Israeli official stated that the red line drawn by Israel's prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, during his UN appearance in September, represented 240kg of 20%-enriched uranium, enough to make a warhead if further enriched to weapons grade.

Jeh Johnson suggested the group would become so degraded that a time would come when the legal authority given to the White House by Congress should no longer be used to justify waging the war that has been fought since 2001.Johnson said that when this happened, America had to "be able to say ... that our efforts should no longer be considered an armed conflict against al-Qaida and its affiliates".Instead, the responsibility for tackling al-Qaida should pass to the police and other law enforcement agencies.

Congress had authorised the president to use "all necessary and appropriate force" against the nations, organisations and individuals responsible for the 9/11 attacks; the US supreme court had endorsed this in 2006 by ruling "our efforts against al-Qaida may be properly viewed as armed conflict".

A fortnight ago the US defence secretary, Leon Panetta, claimed America had "decimated core al-Qaida" and that the group was "widely distributed, loosely knit and geographically dispersed".

If Israel hit Iran's nuclear facilities, would Hezbollah, Iran's allies in Lebanon, join in to retaliate? Would America step in to help its best friend in the Middle East? This filmed simulation shows a group of Israeli ex-spooks, former politicians and military officials split into teams to role-play the consequences. I have not seen the full film, but was in the cutting room for a couple of days helping with translation and the scenes I saw were compelling. Team Israel, taking stock of Iranian missile attacks on civilian targets, makes the operational assumption that the situation won't spiral totally out of control.

The documentary has an interview with an Iranian former nuclear negotiator and foreign policy adviser, who returns the simulated salvo by saying that Israel has grossly underestimated Iran's capacity for retaliation. Iran, he says, would assume American complicity in any Israeli attack and take aim at US targets in the Middle East. When the US staged their own simulation of this same situation, in March, it predicted that an Israeli strike would lead to a wider regional war.

the UK is thinking about putting warplanes in the Persian Gulf as tensions rise. And American military commanders have warned Israel that an attack on Iran could stunt US action, by cutting off key logistics support from Gulf countries that host US bases.

The UK government statement stressed that, unlike the Scottish government, it had obtained formal advice from its law officers and that Scotland would have to negotiate the terms of its EU membership with the UK and all other 26 member states.It said: "This government has confirmed it does hold legal advice on this issue. Based on the overwhelming weight of international precedent, it is the government's view that the remainder of the UK would continue to exercise the UK's existing international rights and obligations and Scotland would form a new state."The most likely scenario is that the rest of the UK would be recognised as the continuing state and an independent Scotland would have to apply to join the EU as a new state, involving negotiation with the rest of the UK and other member states, the outcome of which cannot be predicted."Referring to statements by European commission president, José Manuel Barroso, and his deputy, Viviane Reding, that a newly independent country would be seen as a new applicant, it added: "Recent pronouncements from the commission support that view."

Spain's foreign minister, José Manuel García-Margallo, said an independent Scotland would have to "join the queue" for EU membership.

almond retaliated by quoting from an expert on the EU's borders, Graham Avery, a former strategy director at the commission who was made one of a number of honorary directors general of the European commission after he retired.In a submission to the Commons foreign affairs select committee, Avery supported Salmond's position that it was inconceivable that an independent Scotland would be expected to leave the EU and then reapply. Salmond said his opinion "rather puts the lie to the scaremongering campaign of Labour and their unionist colleagues in the Conservative party".

For energy-poor western Europe, Georgia is a vital conduit for Caspian basin oil and gas exports that are not, for now at least, under Moscow's manipulative control. Vladimir Putin's Kremlin views Georgia very much as part of its backyard, a "near abroad" property (though the phrase is not much used these days) that should conform to Russian interests. Europe believes it belongs inside its post-Soviet, liberal pro-market "eastern neighbourhood".

The idea Georgia might one day join Nato – it already contributes through the Partnership for Peace scheme – and the EU is anathema to Russian nationalists. It is not coincidental that since 2008, when Putin sent his tanks deep into Georgian territory in support of independence for the breakaway satraps of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, Russia has effectively controlled about one-fifth of Georgia's total land mass.

The problem for both sides of this strategic equation is that Georgia's leaders – they might better be termed overlords – tend not to do what they are told, even by putative friends. Saakashvili's authoritarian, sometimes confrontational style, pockmarked by serial rights abuses including a recent prison torture scandal, has embarrassed his Brussels backers. The west wants a stable Georgian government, not one engaged in a personalised, potentially dangerous feud with the Putin regime.Yet the man behind the Georgian Dream opposition, billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, could also prove an awkward customer, should he be confirmed as prime minister. Ivanishvili made his money, lots and lots of it, during Russia's corrupt oligarch era. He still reportedly holds a chunk of Gazprom shares. Saakashvili predictably labelled him a Kremlin stooge, a charge he denies.

In a speech to business leaders in New York City Oct. 11, Panetta for the first time admitted the U.S. armed forces were prepared to take on an offensive role against any cyber attackers who seek to cause significant harm to the U.S. - or the loss of life to its citizens. Prior to this statement, the military has acknowledged only a defensive stance against such attacks.

The Washington Post reports that among those new rules of engagement, "for the first time, military cyber-specialists would be able to immediately block malware outside the Pentagon’s networks in an effort to defend the private sector against an imminent, significant physical attack, The Post has reported. At present, such action requires special permission from the President."

at least one academic paper has argued that companies be drafted to participate in cyberwarfare. "Cyberwarfare… will penetrate the territorial borders of the attacked state and target high-value civilian businesses," wrote University of Dayton Professor Susan Brenner in 2011. "Nation-states will therefore need to integrate the civilian employees of these (and perhaps other) companies into their cyberwarfare response structures if a state is able to respond effectively to cyberattacks. "While many companies may voluntarily elect to participate in such an effort, others may decline to do so, which creates a need, in effect, to conscript companies for this purpose," Brenner and her co-author, attorney Leo Clarke, added.

US military commanders have warned their Israeli counterparts that any action against Iran would severely limit the ability of American forces in the region to mount their own operations against the Iranian nuclear programme by cutting off vital logistical support from Gulf Arab allies.

The US Fifth Fleet is headquartered in Bahrain and the US air force has major bases in Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Oman. Senior US officers believe the one case in which they could not rely fully on those bases for military operations against Iranian installations would be if Israel acted first.

"The Gulf states' one great fear is Iran going nuclear. The other is a regional war that would destabilise them," said a source in the region. "They might support a massive war against Iran, but they know they are not going to get that, and they know a limited strike is not worth it, as it will not destroy the programme and only make Iran angrier."

DARPA is funding Boston Dynamics to create a line of tough robots to partner with soldiers and go where wheeled or treaded vehicles can’t. Earlier web sensations include BigDog, AlphaDog, PETMAN, and SandFlea, among others.

BigDog can travel over very rough terrain (snow, mud, rocks, hillsides) righting itself as it goes. PETMAN can perform complex motions (push up, squat and turn, or kneel) and likewise can adapt on the fly. Why not the WildCat?

Agents with Israel's spy agency, Mossad, have posed as CIA agents in operations to recruit members of the Pakistani group Jundallah, according to a report in US-based Foreign Policy magazine. Using US dollars and passports, the agents passed themselves off as members of the US Central Intelligence Agency in the operations, according to memos from 2007 and 2008, said the report which was published on Friday. It is unclear whether the recruitment programme is ongoing.

"Israel has done this before. I know of a report very widely accepted in the US of Israeli Mossad agents in the United States, actually recruiting American Muslims," Mark Perry, who authored the report, told Al Jazeera.

Jundallah [which translates to "soldiers of God"] says it is fighting for the interests of Iran's southeastern Sistan-Baluchistan province's large ethnic Baluch community, whose members, unlike most Iranians, mainly follow the Sunni branch of Islam. The Baluch straddle the border with neighbouring Pakistan and Afghanistan and Jundallah fighters have taken advantage of the unrest in the region to find safe haven in the border area.

Israel and the secular government of Azerbaijan share the same goal: to check the spread of political Islam in general and Iran in particular.

Theirs is an alliance reinforced by hardware. In February 2012, Israel sold Azerbaijan $1.6bn (1.3bn euros) of sophisticated weapons systems.

Earlier this year, America's Foreign Policy magazine suggested the alliance between Israel and Azerbaijan went deeper than many had previously thought. The magazine reported that Israel had secured an agreement to use Azerbaijan's airfields in case it went ahead with a military strike against Iran's nuclear facilities.

any decision over Iran's nuclear programme rests with Khamenei who finds himself caught between two factions inside the regime, a small hawkish group pushing for more nuclear "advances" and a majority shy to show opposition. It emerged recently that an internal report by the Revolutionary Guards suggested that Iran needed only to resist "three more years" under sanctions to achieve its nuclear goals.

Israel should topple the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, if he presses ahead with a request for recognition of the state of Palestine by the United Nations general assembly in two weeks' time, the hardline foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, has urged.In a draft paper distributed to the media, Lieberman argued that overthrowing the Palestinian leadership was Israel's only viable option, faced with the certainty of an overwhelming vote in support of the Palestinian bid."A reality in which the United Nations recognises a Palestinian state according to a unilateral process will destroy all Israeli deterrence and completely harm its credibility," the paper said.

Lieberman's extreme stance comes as the Israeli cabinet is considering a range of punitive measures it could take in response to the vote, expected on 29 November. These include the full or partial annulment of the 1993 Oslo Accords, financial penalties and an acceleration of settlement expansion.The minister of strategic affairs, Moshe Yaalon, warned the Palestinians would pay a "heavy price" if they submitted a resolution seeking "non-member state" status at the UN general assembly. It would be a "flagrant breach" of the Oslo Accords, which provided for a limited measure of self rule for the Palestinians, he told army radio.Another government minister, Gilad Erdan, called for the immediate annexation of all Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

The Israeli foreign ministry sent a diplomatic cable on Sunday to all Israeli representatives across the globe warning that the Palestinian resolution was a "clear violation of the fundamental principle of negotiations".It continued: "The adoption of the resolution will give Israel the right to re-evaluate previous agreements with the [Palestine Liberation Organisation] and consider cancelling them partially or completely, and would make progress in the peace process more difficult in the future."