NYT | Near Damascus, Hezbollah fighters are defending the shrine of Sayida Zeinab, revered by Shiite Muslims, from encroaching Sunni rebels. To the north, they are not just part of a Syrian government drive to take back the strategic town of Qusair, rebels say, they are leading it. On Tuesday, Syrian opposition activists reported that rebels had killed 15 Hezbollah fighters in Qusair. But they also said the rebels were besieged in the town and in danger of losing it, after black-clad Hezbollah fighters swept them from surrounding villages.

AP | Gun homicides have dropped steeply in the United States since their 1993 peak, a pair of reports released Tuesday showed, adding fuel to Congress' battle over whether to tighten restrictions on firearms. A study released Tuesday by the government's Bureau of Justice Statistics found that gun-related homicides dropped from 18,253 in 1993 to 11,101 in 2011. That's a 39 percent reduction.

NYT | THIRTEEN years ago, researchers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum began the grim task of documenting all the ghettos, slave labor sites, concentration camps and killing factories that the Nazis set up throughout Europe.What they have found so far has shocked even scholars steeped in the history of the Holocaust.The researchers have cataloged some 42,500 Nazi ghettos and camps throughout Europe, spanning German-controlled areas from France to Russia and Germany itself, during Hitler’s reign of brutality from 1933 to 1945.

Natural News | A federal advisory panel whose purpose it is to guide the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in establishing drug labeling and marketing policy has urged the agency to step up its labeling requirements for the popular painkiller Vicodin (hydrocodone) following a trail of dead patients. According to the Los Angeles Times (LAT), the panel voted 19-10 recently to recommend that the FDA reclassify hydrocodone combination drugs as Schedule II narcotics, which would put them in the same strict category as OxyContin (oxycodone) and other widely abused prescription drugs.

ABC News | Two deaf twin brothers in Belgium were euthanized by their doctor after realizing they were going blind and would be unable to see each other ever again, their physician says.The 45-year-old men, whose names have not been made public, were legally put to death by lethal injection at the Brussels University Hospital in Jette, on Dec. 14.

Brietbart | And the American genocide continues, with 333,964 murders in 2011. That’s the figure proudly released by Planned Parenthood Federation of America in their report delineating how many abortions they performed in fiscal 2011. Doing some simple math reveals that the number of abortions performed equates to one abortion every 94 seconds.

TheNewAmerican.com | The tragic shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut on December 14 has proven to be a reference point for opponents of the Second Amendment to propose anti-gun legislation once again. However, reports from the Federal Bureau of Investigation indicate that the focus on semi-automatic rifles is misguided. In fact, according to the FBI, more hammers, clubs, and other blunt objects are involved in murders than rifles or shotguns.

Daily Mail | A former U.S. drone operator has opened up about the toll of killing scores of innocent people by pressing a button from a control room in New Mexico. Brandon Bryant, 27, from Missoula, Montana, spent six years in the Air Force operating Predator drones from inside a dark container. But, after following orders to shoot and kill a child in Afghanistan, he knew he couldn't keep doing what he was doing and quit the military.

Antiwar | Not even a full day had passed before newly reelected President Obama ordered another drone strike in Yemen. Huffington Post: On Wednesday morning, as many Americans sifted through the voter data and exit poll numbers of President Barack Obama’s reelection the night before, the Twitter feeds of close watchers of Yemen lit up with reports of another sort of presidential event: an apparent U.S. drone strike had killed several individuals in that country.

Natural News | Big Pharma wants pregnant women to take prescription drugs, vaccine shots and even chemotherapy. It's the latest insanity from an industry that kills more Americans ever year than died in the entire Vietnam War. And the latest science reveals that antidepressant use during pregnancy is causing babies to be born with physical defects -- or sometimes not born at all because they're miscarried.

Sane Vax | For the first time in history, a biologically plausible mechanism of action has been discovered linking a vaccine to a serious adverse event. Gardasil has left behind its genetic fingerprint in post-mortem central nervous system samples of two girls who took this vaccine. Two teenage girls from opposite ends of the world – both dead before their time have two additional things in common. They both took Gardasil to try and prevent cervical cancer and fragments of the HPV-16-L1 antigen used in Gardasil have been found in blood vessels within their brains.

Natural Society | As of Monday, contaminated steroids have sickened 105 people with a noncontagious but deadly form of fungal meningitis, while 13,000 people may have been exposed to the contamination. Eight have died. Health officials attribute the outbreak to spinal steroid injections for back pain. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) found fungus in sealed vials of the steroid in question, produced by the Massachusetts-based pharmacy, New England Compounding Center (NECC). The NECC voluntarily recalled all of its products on Saturday and surrendered its license to operate until completion of the FDA’s investigation.

BBC | As the number of Nato troops killed by their Afghan counterparts continues to rise - attacks known as "green on blue" - many are left wondering if the breakdown of this relationship will result in an early exit for international forces in Afghanistan. In a circle of trees at the heart of the international mission's headquarters in Kabul, there are 50 flags. One for each of the coalition countries that make up the force that is fighting the Taliban.