Britain's spy agency GCHQ has secretly gained access to the network of cables which carry the world's phone calls and internet traffic and has started to process vast streams of sensitive personal information which it is sharing with its American partner, the National Security Agency (NSA).
The sheer scale of the agency's ambition is reflected in the titles of its two principal components: Mastering the Internet and Global Telecoms Exploitation, aimed at scooping up as much online and telephone traffic as possible. This is all being carried out without any form of public acknowledgement or debate.
UK spy agency taps fibre-optic cables for secret access to world's communications
U.S. Afghanistan auditor tells of free-for-all as subcontractors demand money they’re owed
The U.S. government’s primary auditing agency for Afghanistan has found that subcontractors on U.S.-funded projects in that country frequently aren’t paid, resulting in a litany of problems that include delayed and unfinished jobs, death threats to company workers and allegations of corruption among Afghan police and judicial officials.
Primary contractors are responsible for the failure, but because the nonpayments leave the impression that the U.S. government and coalition forces aren’t fulfilling their obligations, they undermine support for the coalition among the Afghan people and put at risk multimillion-dollar projects that are intended to promote stability, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction said in a letter to U.S. diplomatic, defense and aid officials warning them of what it called “serious problems” of nonpayments.
Prairie2: Birds of different feathers chase different bugs
The markets all tanked again today on ginned up fears that the Federal Reserve is raising interest rates. But it was gold that fell right through the floor losing well over 5% in one day to $1280 per oz.
Gold has lost a third of its value from the peak when the Gold Bugs were sending me nasty mail about me advising people to ignore Glenn Beck.
This week's new unemployment claims jumped back up again, but they're still not so high as to be a real problem.
UN: Israeli forces abuse Palestinian children
A UN human rights group has accused Israel of abuses against Palestinian children that include torture, solitary confinement and threats of death and sexual assault in prisons.
In the report released on Thursday, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child said it expressed its "deepest concern about the reported practice of torture and ill-treatment of Palestinian children arrested, prosecuted and detained by the military and the police".
Bush-era whistleblower claims NSA wiretapped Barack Obama in 2004
A former National Security Agency analyst and a Bush-era whistleblower has revealed that the government’s warrantless wiretappings extended to many high-ranking officials, including then-Senate candidate Barack Obama in 2004.
Russ Tice, speaking on The Boiling Frogs Show, said Wednesday that the NSA had ordered surveillance of a wide range of military officials, lawmakers and diplomats including Obama, The Huffington Post reports.
Assange: WikiLeaks helping Snowden seek Iceland asylum
WikiLeaks is helping Edward Snowden, the self-declared U.S. spy-program leaks source, broker asylum in Iceland, anti-secrecy group founder Julian Assange said.
"I feel a great deal of personal sympathy with Mr. Snowden," Assange told reporters in a conference call from Ecuador's embassy in London on the first anniversary of being holed up in the compound to avoid being sent to Sweden to face questioning in a sexual-offense investigation.
WHO: A third of women worldwide suffer domestic violence
About a third of women worldwide have been physically or sexually assaulted by a former or current partner, according to the first major review of violence against women.
In a series of papers released on Thursday by the World Health Organization and others, experts estimated nearly 40 percent of women killed worldwide were slain by an intimate partner and that being assaulted by a partner was the most common kind of violence experienced by women.
$ 7 billion in gear US sent to Afghan gone to waste
Rushing to wind down its role in Afghanistan by end of 2014, the US military has destroyed over USD 200 million worth of vehicles and other military equipment used by it in the war-torn country, in what has been described as "largest retrograde mission in history".
The massive disposal effort, which US military officials call unprecedented, has unfolded largely out of sight amid an ongoing debate inside the Pentagon about what to do with the heaps of equipment that won't be returning home, the Washington Post reported.
Bev Harris: Nope, this wasn't Zimbabwe, it was Florida.
Two vaults being used in a special election for the Florida House were stolen last week. Unbeknownst to the burglars, they were caught on videotape. The vaults contained a voting machine, the electronic storage device containing all early votes cast, and 850 blank ballots. The motive isn't immediately clear, but here is what we know so far.
In this report, I've gathered some of the answers needed to examine how the burglary might have affected the election.
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