It now stands at five minutes to midnight. Before this change, it stood at seven to midnight, having moved forward two minutes in February 2002. That was the same position it stood at when the clock was unveiled in 1947. It is now closer than at any time since 1984, the peak of the Reagan arms race, when it was moved to three minutes to midnight. That, in turn, was the closest it stood since 1953, when the Soviets developed the H-bomb, and the Clock was moved to two minutes of midnight. The furthest it has ever stood was 17 to midnight in 1991, with the end of the Cold War. (Clock Timeline) From the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Jan. 17:

From The Scotsman, Jan. 18, links and emphasis added:

Mullah Omar, leader of the Taleban, is living in Pakistan under the protection of the country's intelligence service, a captured Taleban spokesman has told Afghan interrogators.

From Air Force Times, Jan. 16:

A small group of out-of-uniform active-duty service members, supported by veterans and academics, gathered inside a Norfolk, Va., church on Martin Luther King Jr. Day to hold a rally calling for the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.

On Jan. 11 a federal grand jury in El Paso, Texas, indicted Cuban-born Venezuelan national Luis Posada Carriles, a longtime "asset" of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), on one count of fraud and six counts of lying to government agents. Posada has been in the custody of US immigration authorities since May 17, 2005; he entered the US illegally in March 2005. The charges, which together carry a maximum sentence of 40 years, enable the US to continue to hold Posada; federal district judge Philip Martinez had given the government until Feb. 1 to justify holding Posada for deportation when it has apparently made no progress in arranging his removal from the US.

Ethiopian occupation troops in Somalia are reportedly hunting down Ethiopian Oromo refugees living in the country. Allied Somali militias are also said to be abducting Oromos and handing them over to Ethiopian troops for reward money. Ethiopian forces in Somalia are reportedly claiming that the refugees are all members of the Oromo rebel forces fighting the Ethiopian government.

Last week's US air raids in the Lower Juba region of southern Somalia near the Kenyan border, caused heavy civilian casualties, according to local reports. Some of the attacks apparently hit groups of nomadic herdsmen on their way to watering holes. Reports of civilian casualites run as high as 80 dead, with large numbers of cattle, goats and other livestock wiped out as well. Thousands of local residents are said to be fleeing towards the border. But with the border sealed, aid workers from Doctors Without Borders and other groups have been unable to cross into the region from Kenya to assist or verify the claims. The air strikes near the towns of Hagar, Bur Gabo, Banka Jiro, Bada Madow and Ras Kamboni areas are said to have continued for three days. (HornAfrik Radio via BBC Monitoring, Jan. 11)

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials were scheduled to appear before Judge L. John Kane in federal court in Denver on Jan. 12 in a follow-up hearing to a civil lawsuit filed by United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 7. The union filed its suit against the government a day after ICE arrested 260 workers at the Swift & Co. meatpacking plant in Greeley, Colorado. The Greeley plant was one of six Swift plants in six states raided by ICE on Dec. 12; a total of 1,282 workers were arrested. The lawsuit charges that the raid was illegal; that federal officials violated the constitutional rights of the arrested workers; and that detainees were treated inhumanely while in custody.

Palestinian immigrant Fawaz Damra, the former imam at the Islamic Center of Cleveland, Ohio, was deported on Jan. 4—a year after reaching an agreement with the US government to give up his fight to remain in the US. That agreement had stipulated that Damra would be deported either to Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Sudan, Egypt or the Palestinian territories. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced on Jan. 5 that Damra had been deported to the Palestinian territories. (AP, Jan. 5; ICE news release, Jan. 5)