America's military interventions and its deadly drone strikes overseas along with its massive spying efforts have turned the country into the "greatest threat to world peace," a US policy analyst says.

A recent WIN/Gallup International survey suggests the US is considered the greatest threat to peace in the world. According to the poll, 24 percent of people worldwide see the United States as the biggest threat.

"The new poll results are very bad news for the United States as they show increasingly that around the world, people view America as the greatest threat to global peace, said Patrick Basham, a scholar with the Cato Institute and founding director of Democracy Institute in Washington.

An IRS whistleblower lawsuit that attempts to finger an overseas non-profit affiliated with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as a dark money conduit that put tens of millions into Karl Rove's hands during the 2010 elections may soon die in an obscure federal court - unless the judge allows evidence-gathering over the IRS's objections.

Robert Jacobson, a Tuscon, Arizona physician who brought the lawsuit, believes that a nonprofit created by the State Department in conjunction with the U.S. Chamber to build a much-ridiculed exhibition at the 2010 Shanghai Expo in China had another purpose - diverting large slices of the $70-plus million in donations to Rove for campaigns to retake the House. The idea was that money from GOP-friendly corporations and even the Chinese government would evade oversight by flowing through barely regulated nonprofits.

"I took it to U.S. Tax Court to do discovery," Jacobson said this week (discovery is the legal term for gathering evidence). "We were in the midst of doing informal discovery, which is the process the IRS has to avoid trials. The [tax agency's] chief counsel hates whistleblowers... They have a routine to kill whistleblowers."

Suffice it to say that federal courts have ruled,and the Supreme Court has affirmed, that the IRS doesn't have to pursue whistleblowing investigations if it finds there is no penalty money to be collected. Jacobson filed his case against Shanghai Expo three years ago. Between 2008 and 2012, the IRS received 33,064 whistleblower complaints and made 630 awards, recouping $1.46 billion and paying $180.1 million in awards, it reported to Congress. Last year, the IRS concluded that since the Shanghai Expo nonprofit had disbanded there was no point in pursuing a further investigation.

Croatian police has arrested a former top spy sought by Germany in a case that sparked a row between the European Union and Zagreb.

Josip Perkovic, a former Yugoslav secret service agent and Croatia's ex-intelligence chief, was taken into custody on Wednesday, his lawyer Anto Nobilo said.

The former spy is wanted for his alleged role in the killing of a Croatian dissident in 1983 in Germany.

Nobilo said Perkovic would oppose extradition to Germany and that a Zagreb court was to rule on the case within eight days.

The arrest came on the same day as Zagreb lifted a limitation it had imposed on extraditions with the EU.

Croatia had changed its laws a few days before it joined the bloc on July 1, effectively stopping an extradition of Perkovic.

Russia's President Vladimir Putin has discussed public security and anti-terrorism measures in Volgograd, following two recent bomb attacks in the southern city.

At least 18 people were killed in a bomb blast in Volgograd's main railway station on December 29 followed by a second explosion on a trolley bus during rush hour on December 30, which left 16 dead.

The Russian president met with top regional and federal officials after reaching Volgograd on Wednesday to discuss "what is being done here and all across the country to maintain public security," RIA Novosti reported.

The meeting was attended by Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) chief, interior minister, health minister as well as Volgograd region governor among others.

After the meeting, Putin laid flowers at one of the bomb sites and exchanged sympathies with survivors at a hospital in the city.

A controversial provision in a recent US budget deal that will trim pension increase for working-age military retirees has angered younger military veterans in the United States, a report says.

The deal approved by Congress and signed last week by President Barack Obama.

The one-percentage-point reduction in the annual cost-of-living increase has provoked outrage among veterans, some of whom argue that the country is reneging on a solemn pact, The Washington Post reports.

"This is a pact between the greater population of the United States and the fraction of people who served and sacrificed. If you didn't want to pay us what you promised us, then you probably shouldn't have promised it," retired Lt. Col. Stephen Preston said, as quoted by the Post.

"I'm not an angry man, but I was very, very angry," Preston, 51, said in a telephone interview with the newspaper from his home in Tampa.

Many lawmakers have vowed to roll the cut back when Congress returns to work next week even though GOP lawmakers have fulminated about the need to cut the cost of federal health and retirement benefits, the report says.

Toronto mayor Rob Ford has put his name on the ballot to run for another term, defying repeated calls for him to step down after admitting he smoked crack "in a drunken stupor".

Ford was the first candidate to show up at city hall when registration opened Thursday for the city's municipal election on 27 October.

He promised "Ford more years", the Toronto Star reported. He also called himself "the best mayor this city has ever had".

"If you want to get personal, that's fine," Ford told reporters, according to the Star. "I'm sticking to my record, and talk is cheap. You're going to see action like you've never seen before."

He was more restrained on Twitter, tweeting a photo of himself signing up to run again and saying simply, "Just filed my paperwork for the 2014 election. Vote on October 27."

The conservative mayor of Canada's largest city has said he would run again, even after the revelations last year about his drug use.

The sheriff of Bastrop County, Texas, is a pretty happy man.

He just took possession of a Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicle for his police force. It's a gift from the US military -- paid for by taxpayers -- part of a surplus giveaway program to police deparments.

Bastrop County Sheriff's Office Lt. Joey Dzienowki told the Austin Statesman, "I look at this as the fire department looks at a new fire truck." Gee, I wonder when the kids can get a free ride on the Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle, July 4th? "When it's not in use on calls, the county's SWAT team will use the MRAP in training and the county may display it at various events for citizens to examine," Dzienowki explained to the Statesman.

To be fair to Lt. Dzienowski, he also avows, "We're not militarizing the department at all." Given that law enforcement agencies in cities and hamlets alike across the land are being given such defense department surplus items, you can be sure that one of the goals of the program is indeed to blur the distinction between local police and the military. This was begun long ago, and was most visibly evident in the emergence of SWAT teams a few decades back.

The suicide blasts in Volgograd signal that it's time for international players to stop dividing terrorists into "good" and "bad" ones based on geopolitical agenda, and to unite the globe in a battle against the threat, Russia's Foreign Ministry stated.

"A strike, cynically planned on the eve of New Year celebrations, is another attempt by the terrorists to open a domestic 'front,' spread panic and chaos, cause interfaith strife and conflicts within the Russian society," the ministry said in a statement.

The two consecutive suicide attacks in the southern Russian city of Volgograd - which killed more than 30 people on Sunday and Monday - will not see Russia retreating in its "tough and consistent battle against the insidious enemy that knows no boundaries and can only be stopped collectively," the ministry said.

The ministry stressed that the Volgograd blasts were staged using the same template as recent terror attacks in the US, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Nigeria, and other countries.

"The position of some politicians and political strategists, who are still trying to divide terrorists as 'good' and 'bad' ones, depending on current geopolitical aims, is becoming evidently mischievous," the ministry stressed. "Terrorism is always a crime and the punishment for it must be inevitable."

Security researcher Jacob Appelbaum dropped a bombshell of sorts earlier this week when he accused American tech companies of placing government-friendly backdoors in their devices. Now Texas-based Dell Computers is offering an apology.

Or to put it more accurately, Dell told an irate customer on Monday that they "regret the inconvenience" caused by selling to the public for years a number of products that the intelligence community has been able to fully compromise in complete silence up until this week.

Dell, Apple, Western Digital and an array of other Silicon Valley-firms were all name-checked during Appelbaum's hour-long presentation Monday at the thirtieth annual Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg, Germany. As RT reported then, the 30-year-old hacker-cum-activist unveiled before the audience at the annual expo a collection of never-before published National Security Agency documents detailing how the NSA goes to great lengths to compromise the computers and systems of groups on its long list of adversaries.

Spreading viruses and malware to infect targets and eavesdrop on their communications is just one of the ways the United States' spy firm conducts surveillance, Appelbaum said. Along with those exploits, he added, the NSA has been manually inserting microscopic computer chips into commercially available products and using custom-made devices like hacked USB cables to silently collect intelligence.

The NSA appears to be making its own decisions about how democratic governments should be operating, what policies they follow and in general doesn't trust them to do their jobs, Jim Killock, Executive Director of the Open Rights Group, told RT.

The latest revelations from Edward Snowden, published in Germany's Der Spiegel, show that the NSA is not only listening to people's phone calls and reading their e-mails, but actually has a special unit dedicated to bugging computers even before they get to the stores. Chips are installed in computers to be sold in geographical areas that the NSA deems to be worth spying on, the newspaper reports.

RT: Do the latest NSA revelations mean we can't even trust our own laptops?

Jim Killock: Sometimes it will mean that some people shouldn't trust their laptops, but also governments have to [watch] their own security organizations, and parts of what Der Spiegel's articles described today is how the NSA is hacking the Mexican government in order to find out more about how the Mexicans are dealing with drug issues, and so on. I think it's really quite dangerous and dramatic because the NSA appears to be making its own decisions about how the democratic governments should be operating, their policies and not trusting them to do their job.

RT: Who could be the target of this operation to intercept laptops? Are we talking about foreign governments or individuals as well?