Sweden's Pirate Party says it has had a surge in membership, giving its leaders hope that anti-corporate feeling will translate into electoral success.

Party leader Rick Falkvinge told BBC News that "in terms of membership it is now the fourth largest party in Sweden".

Mr Falkvinge said support for the Pirate Party was not only coming from young people, but also "a considerably older crowd saying 'enough is enough'."

Barack Obama has outlined his vision of a world free of nuclear weapons in a major speech in Europe.

Speaking to a 20,000-strong crowd in front of Prague's historic castle, Mr Obama said the US had a moral responsibility to act in ridding the world of nuclear weapons.

"Today's hearing confirmed one of my worst fears," said Kim Alexander, founder and president of the non-profit California Voter Foundation. "The audit logs have been the top selling point for vendors hawking paperless voting systems."

"To discover that the fail-safe itself is unreliable eliminates one of the key selling points for electronic voting security," Alexander said.

Finley said his staff was also shocked to find that two of the logs contained a "clear" button that allowed officials to delete them. Finley said this violated federal voting system standards, which require voting systems to maintain an indestructible archival record of all system activity related to the vote tally and, in particular, any activity involving unusual intervention by an election official.

California Assemblyman Joel Anderson plans to introduce a bill to force Google Earth and similar services to blur images of so-called 'soft targets' like schools, hospitals, churches and government buildings to protect them from terrorists. 'All I'm trying to do is stop terrorists,' said Anderson. 'I don't want California to be helping map out future targets for terrorists.'

Wikileaks now has 6,780 reports from the Congressional Research Service free to download. As the post on Wikileaks notes, CRS reports are technically public domain, but have remained in a quasi-secret state, because CRS only releases them to members of Congress.

However, the really interesting thing will be what the response is from both Congress and the CRS -- both of whom have mostly fought against any attempts to publicly release the documents.

Israeli ground troops have entered the Gaza Strip, Israeli military officials have confirmed, a week after the offensive against Hamas began.

An Israeli military spokeswoman confirmed ground operations had begun and said the objective was "to destroy the Hamas terror infrastructure in the area of operations".

The militant group's exiled political leader, Khaled Meshaal, earlier warned Israel against a ground offensive, saying that a "black destiny" awaited Israeli forces if the entered Gaza.

"We will not break, we will not surrender or give in to your conditions," he said in a speech from the Syrian capital, Damascus.

Israeli air force jets have bombed the Islamic University in the Gaza Strip, a significant cultural symbol for Hamas.

The university is a centre of support for Hamas - the Islamist militant group which controls the Gaza Strip. Many of its top officials graduated from there.

The exiled leader of Hamas, Khaled Meshaal, has called for a new intifada, or uprising, against Israel, while the movement's Gaza leader, Ismail Haniya, called the attack an "ugly massacre".

US President-elect Barack Obama has been asked about the type of pet dog his family would be bringing to the White House.

Speaking at his first news conference since securing the presidency, he said the choice of dog was 'a major issue' which had generated huge interest.

US agents have broken up a plot to assassinate Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and shoot or decapitate 102 black people in a murder spree in the state of Tennessee.

Jim Cavanaugh, special agent in charge of the Nashville field office for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said the two men planned to shoot 88 black people and decapitate another 14.

The men also sought to go on a national killing spree, with Mr Obama as their final target, Mr Cavanaugh said.

The office of the Alaska governor, which by state law is required to make such messages public, says it could cost more than $15m for anyone conducting an exhaustive search. (...) requests won't be honored until November 17, two weeks after the presidential election is held.

Critics say her use of the Yahoo account could violate Alaska open records laws that require official communications to be available to members of the public.

State bean counters say it will cost $960.31 to search each employee's account. If email for all 16,000 employees are processed, the exact figure is $15,364,000.96. They figure it will take 13 hours per email account. That figure doesn't include the cost of the paper. The office will only make the email available in hard copy.