Seven months ago, the world began to learn the vast scope of the National Security Agency's reach into the lives of hundreds of millions of people in the United States and around the globe, as it collects information about their phone calls, their email messages, their friends and contacts, how they spend their days and where they spend their nights. The public learned in great detail how the agency has exceeded its mandate and abused its authority, prompting outrage at kitchen tables and at the desks of Congress, which may finally begin to limit these practices.

The revelations have already prompted two federal judges to accuse the N.S.A. of violating the Constitution (although a third, unfortunately, found the dragnet surveillance to be legal). A panel appointed by President Obama issued a powerful indictment of the agency's invasions of privacy and called for a major overhaul of its operations.

All of this is entirely because of information provided to journalists by Edward Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor who stole a trove of highly classified documents after he became disillusioned with the agency's voraciousness. Mr. Snowden is now living in Russia, on the run from American charges of espionage and theft, and he faces the prospect of spending the rest of his life looking over his shoulder.

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. He may have committed a crime to do so, but he has done his country a great service. 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 US economy is losing up to a billion dollars a week because of the "fiscally irresponsible" decision to end long-term unemployment benefits, a Harvard economist said on Friday.

Professor Lawrence Katz based his assessment on official forecasts of the impact to the economy of 1.3 million jobless Americans losing benefits

The benefits, which apply to people who are unemployed for longer than six months, expired last week after a bipartisan budget deal on federal spending for the next two years failed to include a reauthorisation of the program.

Democrats have launched a sustained push to reintroduce the federal program, and a Senate vote on a bipartisan bill to restore the benefits for three months is expected early next week.

The Michelangelo Towers hotel is a favourite haunt of international jet-setters, South African old money and the new black elite. Lulled by a grand piano, guests graze on Norwegian salmon and Mozambican prawns while looking out on a giant statue of Nelson Mandela in Africa's wealthiest district.

Come New Year's Day, denizens of the Johannesburg hotel could scarcely have dreamed of the horror unfolding upstairs in one of its luxurious rooms. Patrick Karegeya, a former spy chief in Rwanda living in exile in South Africa, was murdered. Later the room's safe revealed a bloodied towel and a rope, implying that Karegeya had been strangled.

As police began searching for a motive and culprit, Karegeya's fellow Rwandan dissidents were in no doubt: they immediately described it as a political assassination carried out on the orders of the country's president, Paul Kagame. It fitted a pattern, they claimed, of previous killings and disappearances of his opponents in South Africa and elsewhere.

Karegeya, 53, was once a close ally of Kagame and served as Rwanda's intelligence chief for 10 years before he was arrested and jailed for 18 months for insubordination and desertion. He fled the country after he was stripped of his rank of colonel in 2006. His political associates said he had gone to the Michelangelo hotel on Wednesday to meet a Rwandan man who had posed as a friend of the opposition.

President Obama's half-brother told an Israeli newspaper that when he first met Barack, he was struck by his sibling's rejection of Western culture.

"I remember that my impression at the first meeting was that Barack thought that I was too white, and I thought that he was too black," Mark Okoth Obama Ndesandjo told Maariv. "He was an American citizen on a journey in search of his African roots, while I was a resident of Kenya seeking to find his white roots."

"I remember that when I spoke with him about the heroes of Western culture he rolled his eyes impatiently. My feeling was that, here is an American who in many ways is trying to be a local Kenyan youth. This is something I tried to flee my entire life," Ndesandjo said of the brothers' first meeting in Kenya, which Obama described in his 1995 best-selling memoir, "Dreams From My Father."

The Pentagon has unveiled its "roadmap" for future generation of unmanned vehicles, offering a glimpse into more sophisticated and lethal drones over the next 25 years.

The Unmanned Systems Integrated Roadmap, released last week, marks out several milestones which will see the US armed forces increasingly reliant on unmanned aircraft as well as water and ground-based robots in the coming decades.

The Department of Defense is looking to enhance the precision navigation, swarming munitions and increased autonomy of future drones, according to the document.

The satellite signals behind the Global Positioning System (GPS) which unmanned aircraft currently depend on for navigation are often weak and easily jammed. The Pentagon therefore has tasked the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to address the problem and work on the so-called pinpoint inertial guidance systems that are jam-proof.

A Palestinian youth, who was wounded by the Israeli gunfire in the besieged Gaza Strip, has died of his injuries, medical sources say.

According to Israeli and Palestinian officials, the 16-year-old, identified as Adnan Abu Khater, succumbed to his wounds on Friday a day after Israeli forces shot him in the leg in the Jabalia city, located four kilometers north of Gaza City.

An Israeli military spokeswoman, speaking on condition of anonymity, commented on the Thursday incident, claiming that Israeli troops opened fire on a group of "suspects," who were damaging the border fence. Abu Khater was also among the group.

Israel has recently intensified its military operations on the besieged Palestinian territory.

Snowden gave classified information to journalists, even though he knew the likely consequences. That was an act of courage

In an interview with the Washington Post just before Christmas, Edward Snowden declared his mission accomplished. At first sight it seemed a grandiose, even hubristic, statement. In fact, it betrayed a kind of modesty about the intentions of the former NSA analyst. "I didn't want to change society," he explained. "I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself."

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.

That debate is now actively happening. In a remarkable week before Christmas, a US judge found that the "almost Orwellian" techniques revealed by Mr Snowden were probably unconstitutional. A review panel of security experts convened by President Obama himself made more than 40 recommendations for change. The leaders of the eight major US tech companies met the president to express their alarm. Parliamentarians, presidents, digital engineers, academics, lawyers and civil rights activists around the world have begun a wide-ranging and intense discussion. Even the more reasonable western security chiefs acknowledge a debate was necessary.

Arrow III, an upgraded component of the Israeli missile shield, was successfully tested for the second time, the country's Defense Ministry announced. The kamikaze satellites launched by the system are capable of intercepting missiles in space.

A long-range Arrow III interceptor was fired from Palmahim air base, south of Tel Aviv, on Friday morning. It left the Earth's atmosphere, carried out maneuvers in space and having fulfilled its mission fell into the Mediterranean. The test lasted 10 minutes. No real missiles were targeted.

"The Arrow III interceptor successfully launched and flew an exo-atmospheric trajectory through space," Israel's Defense Ministry said in a statement, Reuters reported.

The kamikaze satellites, fired by the Arrow III system, have been also known as "kill vehicles." They are able to identify and trail chemical, biological or nuclear warheads above the Earth's atmosphere. The interceptors then ram into the missiles and destroy then at an altitude, where the disintegration is safe.

BBC Radio 4′s Today program has WikiLeaks founder in religious slot, as chosen by guest editor - musician PJ Harvey

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has used the unlikely platform of the religious slot on the BBC's Today program to condemn attempts by US and UK governments to acquire a "god-like" knowledge of citizens through mass surveillance.

Assange, who has been holed up in an embassy in London for more than a year, delivered a sermon about the importance of freedom of information, and liberating "hoarded knowledge", in an alternative Thought for The Day on the Today Program.

He said disclosures by the security contractor Edward Snowden about the scale of mass surveillance by the US and UK security services had exposed how governments and corporations seek to "know more and more about us" while "we know less and less about them".

Assange, who has been granted asylum by Ecuador but faces arrest if he leaves the country's London embassy, was chosen to appear by Today's guest editor, musician PJ Harvey, who introduced him as a "person of great courage". She said he had "opened a door to freedom that ought to be the essence of democracy".

The US National Security Agency's massive surveillance activities revealed during the past months "threaten the entire world," an analyst says.

"This is an institution that is attempting to gather everything, everything and use it constantly and threaten the entire world," Sara Flounders, co-director at Intl. Action Center, told Press TV on Saturday.

"NSA spying was always unnecessary, but will it stop? This is happened above and beyond of any of these institutions," she added.

Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden has leaked several documents since June, showing the scale of Washington's spying activities around the world.