Move by Petr Necas follows bribery and spying order charges brought against head of his office

The Czech prime minister, Petr Necas, has been forced to quit after a fraud and spying scandal involving his closest aide, pitching the European Union member state into a period of uncertainty.

Under the Czech constitution, the whole government will now have to step down, and there is likely to be horse-trading between the governing coalition, the opposition and the president before a replacement is in place.

Necas quit days after prosecutors charged the head of his office, Jana Nagyova, with bribing members of parliament and ordering intelligence agents to spy on people. One of the surveillance targets, according to lawyers involved in the case, was the prime minister's own wife, whom he is divorcing.

Necas has said he knew nothing about the surveillance, but the charges were so toxic that his coalition partners signalled they could no longer support him.

Necas told a news conference that he would officially resign on Monday.

The death toll from a series of bombings and a shooting across Iraq has risen to 51, with many more injured, Iraqi security and hospital sources say.

Sunday's blasts began with a parked car bomb which exploded in the city of Kut -- 60 kilometers southeast of Baghdad. Six people were killed and 15 others wounded in that attack, The Associated Press reported.

The attack was followed by another car bomb outside the city which targeted construction workers, killing five and wounded 12 others, police officials said.

One of the deadliest attacks took place in the Shia-populated neighborhood of al-Ameen in southeastern Baghdad. Police said a bomber blew himself up inside a cafe, killing at least 11 people and wounding 25 others.

A shooting also broke out near the northern city of Mosul, when a gunman attacked police guarding an oil pipeline. At least four people were killed and five others wounded in the incident.

Other attacks were carried out in the cities of Hillah, Madian, Aziziyah, Mahmudiyah, Nasiriyah, Tuz Khurmatu, Najaf, and Basra on Sunday. Reports said that most of the car bombs hit Shia-majority areas.

Syria says by announcing the cutting off of all diplomatic relations with Damascus the Egyptian government has joined the Israeli-US club, which is conspiring against the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

Addressing a public rally in Cairo on Saturday, Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi announced, "We decided today to entirely break off relations with Syria and with the current Syrian" government.

He said that his government would close the Syrian Embassy in Cairo, adding that it would also recall the Egyptian charge d'affaires from Damascus.

"The Syrian Arab Republic condemns this irresponsible position," the official news agency SANA reported on Sunday quoting an unnamed government official.

Morsi had joined the "conspiracy and incitement led by the United States and Israel against Syria by announcing the cutting of ties yesterday," the official said.

France's Former Foreign Minister, Roland Dumas, has stated in a televised program on LCP that UK government officials not only told him about preparations for war in Syria two years prior to the start of the fake revolution there in 2011, and the subsequent 'civil war' conducted by Western intelligence agencies that has killed 100,000 civilians to date, they also tried to enlist him to support their evil cause.

The reason Dumas gives for this war is that Syria is perceived by Israel to be a regional competitor and thus became a target for Western-backed 'régime change'.

Mark O'Byrne, GoldCore writes:

In new legislation which was enacted May 23rd, the French government decreed that it is forbidden to send all forms of currency - coins and cash and all forms of precious metals - coins, bars and jewellery by mail.

The legislation was published on Legifrance, the French government entity responsible for publishing legal texts online and can be seen here.

It was not announced by the government and not covered in the media. There were no communications and nobody in the government justified or explained this decision.

Bank of America employees regularly lied to homeowners seeking loan modifications, denied their applications for made-up reasons, and were rewarded for sending homeowners to foreclosure, according to sworn statements by former bank employees.

The employee statements were filed late last week in federal court in Boston as part of a multi-state class action suit brought on behalf of homeowners who sought to avoid foreclosure through the government's Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) but say they had their cases botched by Bank of America.

In a statement, a Bank of America spokesman said that each of the former employees' statements is "rife with factual inaccuracies" and that the bank will respond more fully in court next month. He said that Bank of America had modified more loans than any other bank and continues to "demonstrate our commitment to assisting customers who are at risk of foreclosure."

Six of the former employees worked for the bank, while one worked for a contractor. They range from former managers to front-line employees, and all dealt with homeowners seeking to avoid foreclosure through the government's program.

When the Obama administration launched HAMP in 2009, Bank of America was by far the largest mortgage servicer in the program. It had twice as many loans eligible as the next largest bank. The former employees say that, in response to this crush of struggling homeowners, the bank often misled them and denied applications for bogus reasons.

National Security Agency discloses in secret Capitol Hill briefing that thousands of analysts can listen to domestic phone calls. That authorization appears to extend to e-mail and text messages too.

The National Security Agency has acknowledged in a new classified briefing that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls, a participant said.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed on Thursday that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed "simply based on an analyst deciding that."

If the NSA wants "to listen to the phone," an analyst's decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required, Nadler said he learned. "I was rather startled," said Nadler, an attorney and congressman who serves on the House Judiciary committee.

Not only does this disclosure shed more light on how the NSA's formidable eavesdropping apparatus works domestically, it also suggests the Justice Department has secretly interpreted federal surveillance law to permit thousands of low-ranking analysts to eavesdrop on phone calls.

Facility hints at Australia's involvement in data collection.

The Australian government has been building a state-of-the art, secret data storage facility just outside Canberra to enable intelligence agencies to deal with a ''data deluge'' siphoned from the internet and global telecommunications networks.

The high-security facility nearing completion at the HMAS Harman communications base will support the operations of Australia's signals intelligence agency, the top-secret Defence Signals Directorate.

Privately labelled by one Defence official as ''the new black vault'', the data centre is one of the few visible manifestations of Australia's deep involvement in mass surveillance and intelligence collection operations such as the US National Security Agency's PRISM program revealed last week by US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden.

National Defense Authorization Act instructs U.S. to take 'all necessary steps' to help Israel defend its vital national interests, among them preventing a nuclear Iran.

The U.S. House of Representatives passed a defense authorization bill that would make it U.S. policy to take "all necessary steps" to ensure Israel is able to "remove existential threats," among them nuclear facilities in Iran.

"It is the policy of the United States to take all necessary steps to ensure that Israel possesses and maintains an independent capability to remove existential threats to its security and defend its vital national interests," said the amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act passed Friday.

A former French foreign minister says Britain had been planning a war against Syria some two years before to the unrest broke out in the Arab country.

The statement by Roland Dumas came during a recent interview with French Parliamentary TV network, LCP.

"I'm going to tell you something. I was in England two years before the violence in Syria on other business. I met with top British officials, who confessed to me that they were preparing something in Syria," said Dumas.

He continued by saying, "This was in Britain not in America. Britain was organizing an invasion of rebels into Syria. They even asked me, although I was no longer minister for foreign affairs, if I would like to participate."