The initial reports of a disturbance on a flight landing in Detroit were all over Twitter news feeds on Christmas: Read the full story

The truth about Prince may be orders of magnitude stranger than fiction.

For the past six years, he appears to have led an astonishing double life. Publicly, he has served as Blackwater’s C.E.O. and chairman. Privately, and secretly, he has been helping [the C.I.A.] to craft, fund, and execute operations ranging from inserting personnel into “denied areas”—places U.S. intelligence has trouble penetrating—to assembling hit teams targeting al-Qaeda members. Read the full story

Dear President Obama,

Do you really want to be the new “war president”? If you go to West Point tomorrow night (Tuesday, 8pm) and announce that you are increasing, rather than withdrawing, the troops in Afghanistan, you are the new war president. Pure and simple. And with that you will do the worst possible thing you could do — destroy the hopes and dreams so many millions have placed in you. With just one speech tomorrow night you will turn a multitude of young people who were the backbone of your campaign into disillusioned cynics. You will teach them what they’ve always heard is true — that all politicians are alike. I simply can’t believe you’re about to do what they say you are going to do. Please say it isn’t so. Read the full story

The operators of the Large Hadron Collider have successfully sent a beam of protons around the ring of the world’s largest particle collider.

It is the first time the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, has been operational since September 2008, when an electrical connection in the collider’s magnets melted, causing a tonne of super-cooled liquid helium to leak into the tunnel.

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, announced the success on Twitter on Friday afternoon ET.

“We have completed the ring!” read the post on the social networking and microblogging site. Read the full story

The CIA built one of its secret European prisons inside an exclusive riding academy outside Vilnius, Lithuania, a current Lithuanian government official and a former U.S. intelligence official told ABC News this week.

Where affluent Lithuanians once rode show horses and sipped coffee at a café, the CIA installed a concrete structure where it could use harsh tactics to interrogate up to eight suspected al-Qaeda terrorists at a time.

“The activities in that prison were illegal,” said human rights researcher John Sifton. “They included various forms of torture, including sleep deprivation, forced standing, painful stress positions.” Read the full story

The 32-year-old man of Algerian descent was one of two brothers detained in the south-east town of Vienne on Thursday.

Police believe they had been in contact over the internet with people linked to al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, and had been planning attacks in France. Read the full story

NEW YORK —  Law enforcement agents have raided residences in New York City as part of a terrorism investigation, and are preparing to brief Congress about the investigation.

New York Police Department spokesman Paul Browne confirms that searches were conducted in the borough of Queens on Monday by agents of a joint terrorism task force. He would not discuss the matter further. Read the full story

Tire, Lebanon (Reuters) – At least two rockets from Lebanon struck northern Israel Friday, prompting Israeli artillery to shell the fruit groves from which they were fired, security officials on both sides of the border said.

No casualties were reported by Israeli police, who said two rockets landed. Lebanese security sources, who reported at least two outgoing missiles and 15 incoming Israeli shells, did not say who might have fired the rockets. Read the full story