Americans, take your money elsewhere!

That's what banks around the world have been telling their U.S. customers, as they try to avoid having to comply with a new tax law due to come into force next year.

Jimmy Sexton, an American, was forced to close his checking account at Volksbank in Austria earlier this year. And Genevieve Besser, an American living in Germany, was given two months notice last year to close her securities account at ING-Diba, the German arm of Dutch bank ING (INGVF).

The U.S. Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, which requires businesses to report all assets held by Americans, aims to recoup the hundreds of billions the U.S. says it loses each year from tax evasion. But it's also leading global banks big and small to dump U.S. customers rather than wrestle with the complicated law.

"U.S. citizens living abroad are really having a hard time with their banks," said Gerard Laures, a partner in the financial services tax division at KPMG.

Proper compliance -- which means reporting everything from basic savings accounts, pension funds, investments, and more -- could easily cost institutions millions each year, he estimated. And penalties are severe; businesses face a 30% tax on U.S.-sourced income if they fail to comply.

"Many banks have taken the decision to tell U.S. customers to go away," Laures said.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's powerful uncle was stripped naked, thrown into a cage, and eaten alive by a pack of ravenous dogs, according to a newspaper with close ties to China's ruling Communist Party.

The man who was believed to be in charge of training his young nephew to take over was executed as a traitor, indicating a shake-up in Kim Jong Un's regime. NBC's Andrea Mitchell reports.

Jang Song Thaek, who had been considered Kim's second-in-command, was executed last month after being found guilty of "attempting to overthrow the state," North Korea's state-run news agency reported.

The official North Korean account on Dec. 12 did not specify how Jang was put to death.

U.S. officials told NBC News on Friday that they could not confirm the reports. "This is not ringing any bells here," said one senior official.

Hong Kong-based pro-Beijing newspaper Wen Wei Po reported that Jang and his five closest aides were set upon by 120 hunting hounds which had been starved for five days.

Kim and his brother Kim Jong Chol supervised the one-hour ordeal along with 300 other officials, according to Wen Wei Po. The newspaper added that Jang and other aides were "completely eaten up."

The newspaper has acted as a mouthpiece for China's Communist Party. The report may be a sign of the struggle between those in the party who want to remain engaged with North Korea and those who would like to distance themselves from Kim's regime.

As biotech giant pays huge sums for data analysis about farms, many are terrified about how it might be harnessed.

Imagine cows fed and milked entirely by robots. Or tomatoes that send an e-mail when they need more water. Or a farm where all the decisions about where to plant seeds, spray fertilizer and steer tractors are made by software on servers on the other side of the sea.

This is what more and more of our agriculture may come to look like in the years ahead, as farming meets Big Data. There's no shortage of farmers and industry gurus who think this kind of "smart" farming could bring many benefits. Pushing these tools onto fields, the idea goes, will boost our ability to control this fiendishly unpredictable activity and help farmers increase yields even while using fewer resources.

The big question is who exactly will end up owning all this data, and who gets to determine how it is used. On one side stand some of the largest corporations in agriculture, who are racing to gather and put their stamp on as much of this information as they can. Opposing them are farmers' groups and small open-source technology start-ups, which want to ensure a farm's data stays in the farmer's control and serves the farmer's interests.

Seems 17 days in paradise just isn't enough for Michelle Obama.

When President Obama and his daughters left Hawaii to return to the White House, the first lady stayed behind in the $25,000-a-week vacation mansion. The president let his wife stay on with friends as a "birthday present," the White House said.

Yes, America, like it or not, you just bought the first lady a really nice present. See, when she flies home solo, likely on an Air Force C-40B Special Mission Aircraft flown from Washington, D.C., it'll cost taxpayers about $126,000, according to the website WhiteHouseDossier.com.

But the price tag for the extended holiday will soar much higher. Dozens of staff and Secret Service personnel have stayed behind as well, at taxpayer cost, of course.

Michelle's penchant for vacations is legendary: She took three before March one year. Her jaunt to Spain's Costa del Sol in 2010 -- on a plane packed with friends -- cost taxpayers millions. She also jetted off to the Bahamas and summers in the Vineyarhhhd (as who doesn't).

Each year, too, she takes off for the tony slopes of Aspen for a quick ski (one year flying directly from Florida to make a little sun-n-ski adventure).

But then, the first lady, who turns 50 Jan. 17, must be exhausted: Fighting fat is hard work, people.

A Pew study finds that the percentage of Republicans who believe that Darwin's theory of evolution is correct has dropped 11 percent in about five years. That is suggestive of the country's broader polarization, the authors say.

In another sign of the deep and growing partisan divide, American views on evolution are growing apart, as well.

Less than five years ago, 54 percent of Republicans and nearly two-thirds of Democrats said the human species evolved over time. Today, however, the share of Republicans adhering to modern theories of human evolution has dropped significantly - to 43 percent - while the number of Democrats has climbed to 67 percent, though within the sampling error range, according to a Pew Research Center study of the public's views of human evolution, released Monday.

"The gap is coming from the Republicans, where fewer are now saying that humans have evolved over time," said Cary Funk, a senior researcher at the Pew Research Center's Religion & Public Life Project, according to Reuters.

As a whole, 6 of 10 Americans say they believe that "humans and other living things have evolved over time," with a third rejecting evolution altogether, saying that "humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time."

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said on Friday it has approved a vaccine made by GlaxoSmithKline Plc for use in the event of an H5N1 bird flu epidemic.

The vaccine will be added to the national stockpile and will not be available for commercial use, the FDA said. The vaccine does not have a trade name in the United States.

It is the first H5N1 vaccine approved in the United States to contain an adjuvant, or booster, that turbo-charges the body's immune response to the vaccine.

"This vaccine could be used in the event that the H5N1 avian influenza virus develops the capability to spread efficiently from human to human, resulting in the rapid spread of disease across the globe," Dr. Karen Midthun, director of the FDA's biologics division, said in a statement.

The FDA approved the vaccine for use in people over the age of 18 who are at increased risk of exposure to the virus. It would be distributed by public health officials if needed.

The approval comes amid some uncertainty over the safety of modern adjuvants such as the one used in GSK's bird flu vaccine.

Scientists are calling it "libricide." Seven of the nine world-famous Department of Fisheries and Oceans [DFO] libraries were closed by autumn 2013, ostensibly to digitize the materials and reduce costs. But sources told the independent Tyee in December that a fraction of the 600,000-volume collection had been digitized. And, a secret federal document notes that a paltry $443,000 a year will be saved. The massacre was done quickly, with no record keeping and no attempt to preserve the material in universities. Scientists said precious collections were consigned to dumpsters, were burned or went to landfills.

Probably the most famous facility to get the axe is the library of the venerable St. Andrews Biological Station in St. Andrews, New Brunswick, which environmental scientist Rachel Carson used extensively to research her seminal book on toxins, Silent Spring. The government just spent millions modernizing the facility.

Edward Snowden's leaks should prompt reconsideration of whether Amnesty International has standing to challenge mass surveillance, a rights group told the high court Friday.

In 2008, Amnesty International and the American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal complaint on behalf of labor, legal, media and human-rights organizations opposing warrantless surveillance as unconstitutional.

Saying the groups could not prove that the government actually spied on them, and that their fear of injury under Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was merely speculative, a Manhattan federal judge initiall sided with the government on summary judgment.

When the 2nd Circuit reversed in March 2011, it said the critics did indeed have standing to fight as the entities would be more than tangentially related to the "persons of interest" who could be the target of any possible surveillance. That 63-page decision said government surveillance poses a threat that is great enough to have caused immediate harm. The groups have gone to great lengths to avoid the chance that wiretaps could compromise their communications with clients and sources, according to the ruling.

This claim of "future injury" was too " speculative ," however, for a five-member majority of the Supreme Court in February 2013.

Months later in June, Snowden eliminated doubt that the policy-challenging plaintiffs - along with millions of other U.S. citizens - were being spied on by disclosing a top-secret court order that forces Verizon to "turn over, every day, metadata about the calls made by each of its subscribers over the three-month period ending on July 19, 2013."

It's not just the NSA anymore. Here's how local law enforcement collects your call data, even if unrelated to crime.

By now, it's well known that the National Security Agency is collecting troves of data about law-abiding Americans. But the NSA is not alone: A series of new reports show that state and local police have been busy collecting data on our daily activities as well - under questionable or nonexistent legal pretenses. These revelations about the extent of police snooping in the U.S. - and the lack of oversight over it - paint a disturbing picture for anyone who cares about civil liberties and privacy protection.

The tactics used by law enforcement are aggressive, surreptitious and surprising to even longtime surveillance experts. One report released last month made front page news: an investigation by more than 50 journalists that found that local law enforcement agencies are collecting cellphone data about thousands of innocent Americans each year by tapping into cellphone towers and even creating fake ones that act as data traps.

A new report by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law details how police departments around the country have created data "fusion centers" to collect and share reports about residents. But the information in these reports seldom bears any relation to crime or terrorism. In California, for example, officers are encouraged to document and immediately report on "suspicious" activities such as "individuals who stay at bus or train stops for extended periods while buses and trains come and go," "individuals who carry on long conversations on pay or cellular phones," and "joggers who stand and stretch for an inordinate amount of time." In Houston, the criteria are so broad they include anything deemed "suspicious or worthy of reporting." Many police departments and fusion centers have reported on constitutionally protected activities such as photography and political speech. They have also demonstrated a troubling tendency to focus on people who appear to be of Middle Eastern origin.

Are you a conservative, a libertarian, a Christian or a gun owner? Are you opposed to abortion, globalism, Communism, illegal immigration, the United Nations or the New World Order?

Do you believe in conspiracy theories, do you believe that we are living in the "end times" or do you ever visit alternative news websites (such as this one)?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, you are a "potential terrorist" according to official U.S. government documents. At one time, the term "terrorist" was used very narrowly. The government applied that label to people like Osama bin Laden and other Islamic jihadists. But now the Obama administration is removing all references to Islam from terror training materials, and instead the term "terrorist" is being applied to large groups of American citizens. And if you are a "terrorist", that means that you have no rights and the government can treat you just like it treats the terrorists that are being held at Guantanamo Bay. So if you belong to a group of people that is now being referred to as "potential terrorists", please don't take it as a joke.

The first step to persecuting any group of people is to demonize them. And right now large groups of peaceful, law-abiding citizens are being ruthlessly demonized.

Below is a list of 72 types of Americans that are considered to be "extremists" and "potential terrorists" in official U.S. government documents. To see the original source document for each point, just click on the link. As you can see, this list covers most of the country...

1. Those that talk about "individual liberties"

2. Those that advocate for states' rights

3. Those that want "to make the world a better place"

4. "The colonists who sought to free themselves from British rule"

5. Those that are interested in "defeating the Communists"

6. Those that believe "that the interests of one's own nation are separate from the interests of other nations or the common interest of all nations"