Ruler makes first public reference to execution of Jang Song Thaek, saying ruling party has been strengthened as a result

Kim Jong-un has made his first reference to the execution of his powerful uncle, saying in a new year's addres that North Korea's ruling party had become stronger after it was purged of "factional filth".

Kim called for better relations with South Korea, warning that another war on the Korean peninsula would cause a massive nuclear disaster that would hit the United States.

Kim, the third generation of his family to rule North Korea, did not refer by name to his uncle Jang Song Thaek, whose execution in December in a rare public purge for alleged crimes against the ruling Workers' Party and the national interest.

"Our party took a firm measure to get rid of factional filth that permeated the party," Kim said in a broadcast on state television that appeared to be pre-recorded and did not show if he was speaking to an audience.

"Our unity strengthened hundredfold and party and revolutionary lines became more solid by purging the anti-party and anti-revolutionary faction."

More than a million pupils have been fingerprinted at their secondary school - thousands without their parents' consent, according to new research published on Friday.

Figures show that four out of 10 secondary schools now use biometric technology as a means of identifying pupils - with nearly a third failing in their duty to seek parental consent before introducing the system.

The figures are based on Freedom of Information request returns from 1,255 schools to the civil liberties campaign group Big Brother Watch with the group warning pupils will grow up believing "it is normal to be tracked like this all the time".

The most common uses of the system are at meal-times where headteachers claim it can be a more "discreet" method of ensuring those pupils entitled to free school meals get them - and in school libraries. Some have used the system for registration of pupils at school.

Based on the FOI returns in September, Big Brother Watch estimates 1.28 million pupils have been fingerprinted. Of those surveyed, an estimated 31 per cent did not consult parents before using biometric technology from September.

Both the New York Times and U.K. paper the Guardian published editorials on New Year's Day calling for clemency for NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. The publications said that Snowden's revelations may have revealed some state secrets as part of his mission to expose the National Security Agency's massive spying apparatus, but that the revelations serve the greater need of informing the public that their privacy is being violated.

"Considering the enormous value of the information he has revealed, and the abuses he has exposed, Mr. Snowden deserves better than a life of permanent exile, fear and flight," wrote the Times editorial board.

"He may have committed a crime to do so, but he has done his country a great service," the editorial continued. "It is time for the United States to offer Mr. Snowden a plea bargain or some form of clemency that would allow him to return home, face at least substantially reduced punishment in light of his role as a whistle-blower, and have the hope of a life advocating for greater privacy and far stronger oversight of the runaway intelligence community."

The Guardian's editors, meanwhile, wrote, "Mr Snowden - through journalists, in the absence of meaningful, reliable democratic oversight - had given people enough knowledge about the nature of modern intelligence-gathering to allow an informed debate. Voters might, in fact, decide they were prepared to put privacy above security - but at least they could make that choice on the basis of information."

It seems that the American Studies Association's (ASA) boycott resolution vote has rattled the Zionist cages.

They have proved that Veterans Today was right with our claim that academic espionage was one of the key areas where Israeli intelligence has invested major resources for a long time.

The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations (CoP), commonly Presidents' Conference, has been chosen by the Israeli lobby to lead the counterattack against the ASA historic resolution reported by Press TV last week.

World media described the resolution breakthrough as a sign that the tipping point toward a full Israel boycott was getting closer.

The Israeli lobby bigwigs decided it was time to take risks to diminish the ASA move by stacking up a big list of university heads to oppose it. Robert Sugarman, the Conference's chairman, and Malcolm Hoenlein, its executive vice chairman, said:

"This remarkable response is a clear declaration that American academia will not be party to the efforts to promote the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement."

Israeli espionage has concentrated for several decades now on subverting the leadership of any American institution that could ever be an adversary in terms of opposing Israeli crimes against humanity or their long-term exploitation of America to prop up its failed economy, one that is looted by elite Zionists like our own elite banksters and multinationals have done here. As Thomas Jefferson famously said, "Merchants have no country."

An American human rights activist has slammed the recent bombings in Russia, blaming the terror act on a US-led 'globalist agenda' rather than any sort of a religious effort since all major faiths forbid suicide.

Rejecting the notion that the terror act was the work of a Chechen Islamic movement, Dr. Randy Short said in a Tuesday interview with Press TV that suicide is strictly forbidden in Islam and against the teachings of its holy Prophet Mohammad (peace be upon him).

He also stated that suicide is indeed "against the teachings of the Torah as well as the Christian bible," adding that "all Abrahamic faiths reject suicide."

Dr. Short went on to say that such terror acts are the results of a joint US-UK bid to establish what he referred to as a "toxic Islam" to generate proxy wars as part of their global rivalry with the former Soviet Union and even today's Russia.

"This is a creation of a multinational globalist agenda against the resource-rich people who live in the Levantine areas and other oil-rich areas that Brzezinski called the Great Chessboard or the Great Game going back to the initial British invasion of Afghanistan; and going to Afghanistan in the 1970's where the CIA began to create this false Islam and trained these mujahedeen," said Dr. Short.

Former Labour Member of the British Parliament Clare Short says "Israel's claim to be a democracy is eroding very fast" after being threatened with arrest by the Tel Aviv regime's officials.

Short's remarks came following a decision by Israel's former Minister for Strategic Affairs Moshe Ya'alon to outlaw the Council for European Palestinian Relations (CEPR).

The move, enacted two weeks ago but revealed on Tuesday by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, means that all of the CEPR executives and directors could be detained upon arrival in Israel.

Short is also at risk of arrest as she is a member of the board of directors of the Brussels-based NGO.

For the first time in history, all three branches of American government are complicit in violating the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution by facilitating illegal surveillance, Ray McGovern, a former CIA officer, told RT.

The persecution-induced suicide of online activist Aaron Swartz, the sentencing of US Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning and the Edward Snowden asylum saga have all made 2013 the year that saw a clampdown on whistleblowers. Yet the US government's efforts to stifle this kind of activity will hardly stop the new tech-savvy generation from leaking sensitive data, McGovern believes, describing whistleblowing as "unstoppable."

The former CIA officer says the NSA has been dubbed 'No Such Amendment' for its bulk surveillance, which is in violation of the US Constitution, particularly its Fourth Amendment prohibiting groundless and warrantless searches and seizures.

RT: Do you think in the future the work of whistleblowers will be discouraged from all that we've seen this year, the clampdown on whistleblowers throughout the globe?

Ray McGovern: Yes, their work will be discouraged but it will be inevitable. In other words the discouragement will appear more and more crass, more and more ineffectual because the cat is out of the bag. There's this new generation, technical people, without whom people like NSA and General Hayden and General Alexander cannot exist. As Julian Assange said recently, he encourages this new generation to play the role that the industrial generation did in preparing the way for the 20th century. Seize the initiative, act courageously, realize what you have -- what Julian calls "extraordinary power" - they can't make the systems work without you and when you talk about a system's administrator, it is not just one system. It is the administrator that ties together a whole network of systems. The cat is out of the bag. Those who cannot bear, as Martin Luther King Jr. used to say, the natural medicines of air and light on what they are doing, are going to be very frantic, will try to stop this, but it is unstoppable and that's good news for the world and not just the United States.

While some would have you believe the biggest stories of 2013 were about twerking celebrities and over-hyped real-life courtroom sagas, much bigger events were happening with far more lasting national significance. The foundation of an American police state is already laid and coming into full bloom, while most of the country remains blissfully focused on sports, reality shows, establishment pseudo-news, and other distractions.

While all of the injustices that took place in 2013 would require an encyclopedia to cover adequately, this list is designed to illustrate certain trends and significant stories from the past year. If Americans don't fix their apathy and disengagement toward causes that matter, we can expect these trends to continue toward their logical conclusions: an increasingly repressive police state dominating the lives people inside these borders and beyond.

Checkpoints, Warrantless Searches Become a Way of Life

The state of the 4th amendment is in truly bad shape, given the prevalence of warrantless checkpoints and warrantless bag searches being used all around the country for various reasons. No longer restricted to airport terminals, the unconstitutional tactics are now being used in subways, bus stations, on bridges, at parades, and anywhere else the government can get away with them. This is facilitated by the palpable fear of terrorism and with financial incentives from the federal government.

In what was dubbed "Operation Independence," the federal government along with the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department staged a high-visibility terror drill in the LA subway this July. Deputies dressed in paramilitary garb teamed up with agents from the TSA and DHS to require travelers to open up their bags and prove their innocence before being allowed to commute. These tactics have sadly become commonplace in many major cities.

Lech Walesa, Nobel Peace Prize-winning former president of Poland, said President Obama has failed to reclaim America's role as a world leader, especially in terms of morality.

Newsmax noted that Walesa, 70, said the there was "hope in the world" that "Obama would reclaim moral leadership for America" after his election in 2008, but that "failed," he said in an interview CNN aired Wednesday.

Walesa - the famed leader of Poland's solidarity movement against communism in the early 1980s and who supported Republican Mitt Romney in the 2012 election - said "...in terms of politics and morality, America no longer leads the world."

"We have to do everything that we can to recreate, to reclaim America's role, and it seems that Obama would manage that, but he didn't accomplish that," Walesa said. "America did not regain its leadership status. We're just lucky that there were no bigger conflicts in the world, because if it had bigger conflicts, then the world would be helpless."

The announcement of the year's most-searched news stories on Yahoo might fool you into thinking that the sensationalized murder cases of NFL star Aaron Hernandez, or boyfriend slayer Jody Arias, were the dominant legal events of the year. Hardly.

The fact is, 2013 featured a slew of crucial cases and legal developments that are poised to shape the legal and political landscapes for years to come. From gay marriage to government surveillance, here's a brief guide to the decisions and debates within the law that mattered most.

1. Supreme Court guts Voting Rights Act

The biggest legal story of the year - the United States Supreme Court's decision in June to strike down the heart of the Voting Rights Act - might actually prove to be the biggest political story of 2014. In Shelby County v. Holder, the court declared on a 5-4 vote that jurisdictions with long histories of racial discrimination in voting laws (mostly in the South) no longer had to get pre-approval from federal officials before changing their voting rules. The law violated equal protection by treating various voting jurisdictions differently, the conservative justices ruled.

Perhaps recognizing the bipartisan support that exists for the law (Congress had renewed the particular provision that offended the court, Section 4, as recently as 2006), the justices invited lawmakers to go ahead and fix what they ruled to be broken in the statute. But there is little reason to think that such a remedy is on the way: No amendment to the Voting Rights Act, no new and improved preclearance provision, is pending on Capitol Hill. And this means the 2014 midterm elections will be influenced significantly by voter-suppression efforts now underway in jurisdictions that once were covered by Section 4. In fact, just hours after the court struck down Section 4 in Shelby County, for example, eager officials in Texas moved to restore dubious voter identification requirements that had been blocked by the federal courts under Section 4.

2. Government surveillance finally goes too far

And by far the biggest political story of the year - the disclosure of widespread domestic surveillance efforts leaked by former CIA contractor Edward Snowden - may prove to be the biggest legal story of 2014. This is especially true in the wake of a dramatic ruling last week in Washington by U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, a George W. Bush appointee, who declared that portions of the NSA's surveillance program "likely" violated the Fourth Amendment rights of citizens to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures. The case, styled Klayman v. Obama, concerns the bulk gathering of phone call metadata and now heads to (the newly replenished) D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals on its way, perhaps, to the Supreme Court itself.

And this is just a prologue: From the Snowden surveillance revelations will soon flow a series of cases that will challenge in federal courts virtually all aspects of what we know about the program.

3. New fronts open in same-sex marriage fight

A pair of much-watched Supreme Court rulings on same-sex marriage in June gave gay and lesbian couples across the country greater rights and benefits - the justices struck down the core of the Defense of Marriage Act, the provision that defined marriage as only between a man and a woman, and they blocked a California referendum to halt same-sex marriages. But these landmark rulings don't mark the end in the legal or political war over same-sex marriage - and no justice suggested they did.

Already, in fact, we are seeing courtroom clashes that raise some of the questions the Supreme Court stoically refused to answer in June. For example, can a same-sex couple that is lawfully married in a state (like California) that recognizes such marriages get divorced in a state (like Mississippi) that does not? That lawsuit is only beginning to wend its way through the courts and in the year ahead, we'll see hundreds of these sorts of legal conflicts played out in state and federal courts all over the country. Just this past week, a federal judge in Utah struck down that state's same-sex marriage ban while the Supreme Court of New Mexico, in a unanimous decision, declared that the state's constitution could not preclude such marriages. The stakes will be high: Same-sex marriage proponents want to press the advantages they gained in 2013, and expand same-sex marriage rights. Opponents of same-sex marriage, embattled after the June rulings, want to draw their own lines, and keep same-sex marriage from spreading more than it already has. The justices in Washington won't revisit this issue in 2014. But they may have to in 2015.