USA - Human rights advocates were floored on Monday night when NBC News published the details of an alarming Justice Department memo detailing the protocol for sending drones after United States citizens. It's not as if they hadn't suspected that the Obama administration's top secret drone attack protocol contained some unsavory details. They just didn't expect them to be so frightfully broad.

SOLOMON ISLANDS - Homes were damaged and at least four people have been reported dead after a tsunami triggered by an earthquake hit the Solomon Islands. The quake, with a magnitude 8.0, struck at 01:12 GMT near the Santa Cruz islands, the US Geological Survey said.

USA - In the four years since the collapse of Lehman Brothers drove the global financial system to the brink of oblivion, new technologies have changed Wall Street beyond recognition. Despite efforts at reform, today's markets are wilder, less transparent, and, most importantly, faster than ever before.

UK - Barclays set aside another 1 billion pounds ($1.6 billion) to compensate customers for mis-selling products, dropping another British banking bombshell as the industry struggles with the scale of redress for past misdemeanors. UK banks are embroiled in two separate mis-selling scandals, and Barclays said on Tuesday it had made an extra provision of 600 million pounds to compensate customers for payment protection insurance. PPI mis-selling alone has now cost UK banks over 12 billion and could end up more than double that, industry sources estimate.

Tuesday's announcement marked Barclays' fourth provision for PPI, dating back to May 2011 when the industry lost a court case on the selling of products to customers who did not need, or could not use them.

GERMANY - Deutsche Bank says the benchmark LIBOR rate was rigged by individual rogue traders. But co-CEO Anshu Jain carries some responsibility because he organized the investment banking operation in a way that caused conflicts of interest and allowed the fraud to flourish.

USA - Standard & Poor's says it is to be sued by the US government over the credit ratings agency's assessment of mortgage bonds before the financial crisis. The civil lawsuit would focus on S&P's high ratings in 2007 for some mortgage-backed securities that later collapsed in value, said the agency. S&P and other agencies have faced criticism from investors, politicians and regulators for assigning their top AAA ratings to thousands of subprime and other mortgage securities that later collapsed in value. Such agencies are paid by the issuers of bonds and other securities for ratings, raising concern about potential conflicts of interest. Grades assigned by these firms can affect a company's ability to raise or borrow money as well as how much investors will pay for their securities.

NIGER - French troops have been called to protect one of Niger's biggest uranium mines as security fears spike. Analyst John Laughland tells RT, that France taking the military lead in Mali and coming to Niger might be a sign of a continent-size interest. Niger’s President Issoufou asked his counterpart Hollande for military help after the recent hostage crisis at an Algerian gas plant and over the growing threat of militant attacks since France launched its Operation Serval in neighboring Mali. French company Areva plays a major part in mining in Niger, the world's fifth-largest producer of uranium. The company gets much of its uranium from the two mines it operates in the country, at Arlit and Imouraren. Arlit was attacked by militants three years ago and four hostages – three French nationals among them – are still being held.

USA - The US could launch pre-emptive cyber strikes against countries it suspects of threatening its interests with a digital attack, under a new set of secret guidelines to safeguard the nation’s computer systems. The rules – the country’s first on how it defends or retaliates against digital attacks – are expected to be approved in coming weeks, and are likely to be kept under wraps, much like the policies governing the country’s controversial drone programme. A secret legal review into the new guidelines has already decided that President Barack Obama has the power to order such pre-emptive strikes if faced with credible evidence of a looming attack, according to the New York Times, which quoted unnamed officials involved in the review.

NORTHERN IRELAND - The Food Standards Agency is investigating how horsemeat ended up in beef at a cold store in Newry, County Down. It was among a consignment at Freeza Meats, which may be linked to Silvercrest's Irish Republic plant. The FSA said that 12 samples had been tested and two came back positive for horse meat, at about 80%. Gerry McCurdy of the FSA said there was "definitely now the potential" of fraudulent activity. Meanwhile, police in the Irish Republic have been asked to investigate after horsemeat was found in beef products at a third factory.

IRAN - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has volunteered to become the first person sent into space by his country's fledgling space programme. "I'm ready to be the first Iranian to be sacrificed by the scientists of my country and go into space," he is quoted by state media as saying. Iran announced last week that it had successfully sent a monkey to space.

TOKYO, JAPAN - The suffocating smog that blanketed swathes of China is now hitting parts of Japan, sparking warnings Monday of health risks for the young and the sick. The environment ministry's website has been overloaded as worried users log on to try to find out what is coming their way. “Access to our air-pollution monitoring system has been almost impossible since last week, and the telephone here has been constantly ringing because worried people keep asking us about the impact on health,” said an environment ministry official. Pictures of Beijing and other Chinese cities shrouded in thick, choking smog played out across television screens in Japan last week.

NEW YORK, USA - Plan B has become Plan A in the Bloomberg administration’s stealth war on teen pregnancy. Handouts of the “morning-after pill” to sexually active students have skyrocketed under an unpublicized project in which health centers in public schools offer girls a full menu of free birth-control drugs and devices, records obtained by The Post show.

ISRAEL - Israel is considering creating a buffer zone reaching up to 10 miles inside Syria to protect itself from fundamentalist rebels on the other side of the border. The proposal, which has been drawn up by the military and presented to Binyamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, is intended to secure the 47-mile border against a growing Islamist threat if President Bashar al-Assad’s embattled regime loses control of the area. The buffer would be modelled on the Lebanese security zone, in which the Israeli defence forces patrolled jointly with the South Lebanon army, a militia, up to 16 miles inside Lebanon from 1985 to 2000.

WASHINGTON, USA - The results of a new study indicate that suicide rates among veterans in the United States are increasing. An estimated 22 military veterans take their lives every day in America, according to the study helmed by Robert Bossarte, an epidemiologist and researcher who works with the Department of Veterans Affairs. “While the percentage of all suicides reported as Veterans has decreased, the number of suicides has increased,” the conclusion of the study stated.

CHICAGO, USA - In this I-Team report, Chicago's rising murder rate is shown in a new context, how the numbers of shooting deaths compare to the city's most notorious crime era, the one that has tarnished Chicago's reputation around the world for a century. The surprising stats show the city is worse off now in the category of murder than at the height of the era that has driven Chicago's reputation for almost a century, Capone's "gangland" Chicago. Let's compare two months: January 1929, leading up to the St Valentine's Day Massacre, and last month, January 2013. Forty-two people were killed in Chicago last month, the most in January since 2002, and far worse than the city's most notorious crime era at the end of the Roaring Twenties. January 1929 there were 26 killings.