Government surveillance no longer targets individuals, but entire populations, former CIA contractor Edward Snowden has said. The whistleblower appeared via video link in a Toronto debate over the NSA intelligence gathering programs.

Commenting on the antics of the National Security Agency, which have been described in the past as "Orwellian in nature," Snowden said every citizen is affected by intelligence gathering programs

"It's no longer based on the traditional practice of targeted taps based on some individual suspicion of wrongdoing," Snowden said in the brief video. "It covers phone calls, emails, texts, search history, what you buy, who your friends are, where you go, who you love."

Snowden's video link was screened during a Munk debate in Toronto, where former US National Security Administration director General Michael Hayden and Harvard law Professor Alan Dershowitz went head to head with Glen Greenwald and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian over government surveillance.

A specter is haunting Washington, an unnerving vision of a Sino-Russian alliance wedded to an expansive symbiosis of trade and commerce across much of the Eurasian land mass -- at the expense of the United States.

And no wonder Washington is anxious. That alliance is already a done deal in a variety of ways: through the BRICS group of emerging powers (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa); at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Asian counterweight to NATO; inside the G20; and via the 120-member-nation Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). Trade and commerce are just part of the future bargain. Synergies in the development of new military technologies beckon as well. After Russia's Star Wars-style, ultra-sophisticated S-500 air defense anti-missile system comes online in 2018, Beijing is sure to want a version of it. Meanwhile, Russia is about to sell dozens of state-of-the-art Sukhoi Su-35 jet fighters to the Chinese as Beijing and Moscow move to seal an aviation-industrial partnership.

This week should provide the first real fireworks in the celebration of a new Eurasian century-in-the-making when Russian President Vladimir Putin drops in on Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing. You remember "Pipelineistan," all those crucial oil and gas pipelines crisscrossing Eurasia that make up the true circulatory system for the life of the region. Now, it looks like the ultimate Pipelineistan deal, worth $1 trillion and 10 years in the making, will be inked as well. In it, the giant, state-controlled Russian energy giant Gazprom will agree to supply the giant state-controlled China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) with 3.75 billion cubic feet of liquefied natural gas a day for no less than 30 years, starting in 2018. That's the equivalent of a quarter of Russia's massive gas exports to all of Europe. China's current daily gas demand is around 16 billion cubic feet a day, and imports account for 31.6% of total consumption.

Can anyone doubt that the United States is governed for the corporate good? The lofty concept of 'for the people' evaporated into mythical fairy dust generations ago.

In the new millennium, any pretense to serve the people, rather than the corporation, has been swept away; apparently, the elected, so-called representatives, and the corporations who own them, are convinced that the 99% are sufficiently lulled into a somnolent belief that the U.S. is the greatest country in the world, and what's good for business is good for them. Those with that bizarre belief overlook some very basic and rudimentary facts:

"Police are specialists in violence. They are armed, trained, and authorized to use force. With varying degrees of subtlety, this colors their every action. Like the possibility of arrest, the threat of violence is implicit in every police encounter. Violence, as well as the law, is what they represent." - Kristian Williams, activist and author

Living in a free society means not having to look over your shoulder to see whether the government is watching or fearing that a government agent might perpetuate violence upon you.

Unfortunately, as I detail in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, subjected as we are to government surveillance, body scanners, militarized police, roadside strip searches, SWAT team raids, drones, and other trappings of a police state, "we the people" do not live in a free society any longer.

Not only are we no longer a free people but we have become a fearful people, as well, helped along in large part by politicians eager to capitalize on our fears. As Julie Hanus writes for Utne: "Since the 1980s, society at large has bolted frantically from one panic to the next. Fear of crime reduced us to wrecks, but before long we were also howling about deadly diseases, drug abusers, online pedophiles, avian flu, teens gone wild, mad cows, anthrax, immigrants, environmental collapse, and - let us not forget - terrorists."

Now thanks to an increasingly militarized police force and police officers who shoot first and ask questions later, we've got one more fear to add to that growing list, and with good reason: fear of the police - local, state and federal agents.

Who wouldn't be afraid of police officers who go around shooting unarmed citizens, tasering women - young and old alike, and forcing law-abiding Americans to the ground at gunpoint?

Such was the case when a Missouri police officer shot and wounded an unarmed panhandler. Texas police, during a raid on a home where music was reportedly being played too loudly, repeatedly tasered a 54-year-old grandmother, kicking and punching other members of the household. A 20-year-old Florida woman who was tasered by a police officer while she was handcuffed ended up in a permanent vegetative state and eventually died. And then there was the homeless man who was shot and killed by Albuquerque police for squatting on public land.

The fallout from the new government's budget is still being seen in Australia, but it is already obvious that climate change is a loser when it comes to funding. Prime Minister Tony Abbott has long been skeptical of global warming and the science behind it, but with his new-found legislative power it seems as though he is looking at making that viewpoint into law. According to critics, there is no longer even the pretence of working towards limiting the effects of climate change as the government works to protect the interests of fossil fuel producers and businesses. Whether or not there is a real connection between big business interest and the new budget, Abbott and his cabinet have taken the axe to climate change research and are poised to fundamentally damage all scientific research in Australia in the process.

The budgetary facts are inescapably grim for researchers and scientists based in renewable energies and research. The funding for all government programs related to climate change is set to shrink at an alarming rate, going from $5.75 billion this year to a scant $500 million in the next four years. Additionally, the Emissions Reduction Fund which is meant to help lower greenhouse gas emissions in Australia is going to be reduced to only $1.14 billion. This was devastating news after Environment Minister Greg Hunt had gone on record promising to provide $2.55 billion to fund the program. Nevertheless, it is not only climate change programs that are feeling the pinch of the Abbott budget. The Commonwealth Science and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), Australia's national science agency, will have $111 million worth of funding slashed over the next four years, which will affect an uncertain number of programs and a loss of tenth of the CSIRO workforce.

In honour of World Press Freedom Day, the Maison des Journalistes (MDJ), a French non-profit organization that offers shelter and support to journalists forced to flee their home countries, opened its doors to FRANCE 24.

Based in Paris's 15th arrondissement, the MDJ was founded in 2002, and has since housed more than 250 journalists from 54 different countries.

Johnny (who declined to give his last name), a journalist from the Central African Republic (CAR), left his home in the capital Bangui after his brother was killed. For the past four months, he has been living in a tiny room at the non-profit overlooking a nearby cemetery.

"The first few nights were rough, but I got used to it," he said of his new lodgings.

Even during the paranoia and antagonism of the Cold War, the United States and Russia managed to find common cause in space. In July 1975, both countries celebrated the first joint space flight, as Apollo and Soyuz spacecraft docked in orbit, astronauts and cosmonauts smiling for the cameras as they shook hands through the air lock.

But now the spirit of co-operation appears to have died, with the International Space Station - the $150bn (£89bn) international research laboratory that is still physically divided along Cold War lines - becoming the rope in a tug-of-war between American and Russian politicians.

The dispute began in April, when a leaked Nasa memo revealed that the agency would be suspending all contact with the Russian government because of the country's "ongoing violation of Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity".

The White House chief of staff says President Barack Obama is "madder than hell" about reports of treatment delays at veterans' hospitals across the country.

Top aide Denis McDonough tells CBS' Face the Nation that Obama is demanding that Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki (shin-SEHK'-ee) and others in the administration "continue to fix these things until they're functioning the way that our veterans believe they should."

"The world today has 6.9 billion people and that's headed up to about 9 billion. If we do a really great job, we could lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 percent." ~ Bill Gates (video here)

Bill Gates believes the density of the population in poor areas is too big, and with his depopulation plans he can 'solve' that problem. Consider his huge buyout of Monsanto stock - he owns millions of shares of Monsanto and Cargill stock, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation keep scooping it up. He owns more than $23 million worth, or 500,000 Monsanto shares.

Seattle-based Agra-Watch, part of the Community Alliance for Global Justice, has said:

"Monsanto has a history of blatant disregard for the interests and well being of small farmers around the world... [This] casts serious doubt on the foundation's heavy funding of agricultural development in Africa."

It also casts serious doubt on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and its true interests in supporting the 'poor' populations they so proudly claim they are trying to 'help.

'Gates also funds programs that blast men's reproductive organs with radiation so that they can no longer produce progeny, and covert nanotechnology that delivers dangerous vaccines. The Gates Foundation is also teaming up with the British government in raising $4 billion to fund their birth control agenda worldwide by 2020.

Obama's new India problem: What to do with Narendra Modi? (+video)

Narendra Modi will be the next prime minister of India, but until Friday, he was banned from traveling to the US because of allegations related to a 2002 riot. It's a new complication for already-rocky US-India relations.

On Friday, President Obama did what just about everyone knew he must and invited Narendra Modi, India's new prime-minister-in-waiting, to the United States.

It was anything but a routine invitation.

Mr. Modi remains the only person ever to be banned from traveling to the United States under the International Religious Freedom Act. Until Friday, the Obama administration had not officially clarified whether the future leader of the world's largest democracy would even be allowed to come to Washington.

In truth, there was little suspense. India is important to US Asia policy, and recent relations have been so rocky that it would have been unthinkable for Mr. Obama to respond to the success of Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) with anything other than overt enthusiasm.

But the fact that the decision came only now - only after it was abundantly clear that the BJP had won India's recent elections in a landslide of historic proportions - hints at a reluctance.

Unfairly or not, Modi is in many ways the face of the 2002 Gujarat riots, which saw some of the worst religious violence in India's recent history. For a American president who has taken pains to reach out to the Muslim world - not to mention a president who is himself a minority - that represents an unneeded complication in America's already-strained friendship with India.