The United States tortures prisoners in violation of international law, former President Carter said Wednesday.

"I don't think it. I know it," Carter told CNN's Wolf Blitzer.

"Our country for the first time in my life time has abandoned the basic principle of human rights," Carter said. "We've said that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to those people in Abu Ghraib prison and Guantanamo, and we've said we can torture prisoners and deprive them of an accusation of a crime to which they are accused."

Carter also said President Bush creates his own definition of human rights.

The US-led coalition said they had come under attack after targeting a "foreign fighter network".

But local people said they were civilians and they blocked the main road to the Pakistani border.

Police opened fire and a number of demonstrators are reported to have been killed or injured.

Protesters blocking the main road to Pakistan carried the bodies of the three men killed.

Police who came to break up the five-hour demonstration say they shot into the air as a warning but the head of Nangahar provincial council says they fired into the crowd, killing two people and injuring a number of others.

A spokesman for the interior ministry said the government was investigating the villagers' claims that civilians had been killed in the raid by US forces operating outside of Nato.

Another example of where we have been sold a bit of a dummy by the food industry concerns artificial sweeteners. In the past I have attempted to highlight the science that shows that artificial sweeteners have considerable potential to cause harm, and at the same time, do not appear to have any obvious benefits for health.

These particular posts have focused mainly on the potential hazards of the artificial sweetener aspartame (NutraSweet, Canderel, Equal). One of the reasons I've focused so much on aspartame is that most of the published research on artificial sweeteners has focused on this particular substance.

There are now hundreds of studies, which have focused on the safety of this substance. The manufacturers use this science in an attempt to convince us that aspartame is safe.

Yet, right from the beginning, there has been plenty of evidence that aspartame has the capacity to cause harm. And there is, as I've highlighted before, evidence of considerable bias in this area: while industry-funded research invariably finds in favor of aspartame, independently-funded work almost always comes to the opposite conclusion. These things, and the fact that anecdotal reports of aspartame toxicity are easy to find, means that aspartame continues to be viewed with suspicion by many.