Jacob Appelbaum, a Berlin-based U.S. journalist with access to some of Edward Snowden's documents, claims there have been a series of raids on his apartment, saying he suspects possible U.S. involvement.

In an interview with "Berliner Zeitung" published on Saturday he described strange scenarios which have been haunting him. "When I flew away for an appointment, I installed four alarm systems in my apartment," Appelbaum said.

"When I returned, three of them had been turned off. The fourth, however, had registered that somebody was in my flat - although I'm the only one with a key. Some of my effects - the positions of which I carefully note - were indeed askew. My computers had been turned on and off," he added.

"The monitoring pressure has ultimately destroyed my relationship with my girlfriend," he mourned. The internet activist, journalist and cybersecurity specialist is a core member of the Tor encrypted network and has well-documented ties to WikiLeaks.

His decision to move to Berlin was made because he considered Germany to have better privacy protection, and because he felt unsafe in the U.S. after repeated detentions at American airports following his trips abroad.

Gunfire hit three U.S. military aircraft trying to evacuate American citizens in a remote region of South Sudan that on Saturday became a battle ground between the country's military and renegade troops, officials said. Four U.S. service members were wounded in the attack in the same region where gunfire downed a U.N. helicopter the day before.

The U.S. military aircraft were about to land in Bor, the capital of the state of Jonglei and scene of some of the nation's worst violence over the last week, when they were hit. The military said the four wounded troops were in stable condition.

The U.S. military said three CV-22 Ospreys - the kind of aircraft that can fly like a helicopter and plane - were "participating in a mission to evacuate American citizens in Bor." A South Sudan official said violence against civilians there has resulted in bodies "sprinkled all over town."

"After receiving fire from the ground while approaching the site, the aircraft diverted to an airfield outside the country and aborted the mission," the statement said. "The injured troops are being treated for their wounds." It was not known how many U.S. civilians are in Bor.

After the aircraft took incoming fire, they turned around and flew to Entebbe, Uganda. From there the service members were flown to Nairobi, Kenya aboard a U.S. Air Force C-17 for medical treatment, the statement said.

An official in the region who insisted on anonymity to share information not made public said the Americans did not tell the top commander in Bor - Gen. Peter Gadet, who defected from the South Sudan military this week - that they were coming in, which may have led to the attack. The U.S. statements said the gunfire was from unknown forces.

Western leaders "behave with duplicity and act according to their selfish interests, without understanding the reality or nature" of the Syrian conflict, Syrian President Bashar Assad has said.

Bashar Assad also said Monday his country is being confronted by a major offensive by Islamist extremists.

"The country is facing a takfiri ideology," Assad said, using a term for Sunni Muslim extremists.

"This is terrorism without limits, an international scourge that could strike anywhere and anytime," he said, quoted by the official SANA news agency.

Assad made the remarks while receiving what SANA said was a delegation of "academics, researchers and activists" from Australia who had came to express "solidarity" with his government.

The president also criticised Western leaders, who "behave with duplicity and act according to their selfish interests, without understanding the reality or nature" of the Syrian conflict.

The Defence of Pakistan Council (DPC)'s grand national jirga Sunday asked the government to allow the Pakistan Air Force (PAF) to shoot down the drones if the US refused to stop the drone attacks. The jirga also asked the government to immediately halt military operations in the tribal areas, particularly in North Waziristan, and open dialogue with the Taliban in line with the unanimous decisions of Parliament, the All Parties Conference and the Cabinet's Committee on National Security.

DPC Chairman Maulana Samiul Haq, who also heads Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Sami (JUI-S), presented the declaration which was adopted unanimously.Leaders of all the component groups of DPC stood by his side as he read out the two-page declaration, which was almost similar to his welcome address delivered at the outset of the conference.

Samiul Haq asked the federal government to take effective measures for stopping drone strikes and to take up the issue categorically with the US.

He said the attack on the military checkpoint in North Waziristan a few days back and the killing of security forces personnel was part of the US conspiracy to sabotage the process of dialogue. "Military operation anywhere in the country, particularly in North Waziristan, should be stopped and effective steps be taken for resumption and success of talks," he stressed.

© Unknown

The Russian president runs rings around the supposed liberal leaders of the west as he advances his authoritarian agenda.

This has been the year of Vladimir Putin's ascendancy. The Russian president has made Barack Obama look like a conman's stooge - a lame duck president so weak that he can barely waddle to the pond. Putin has managed to protect his client dictatorship in Syria - even after it broke one of the few taboos limiting man's inhumanity to man by using chemical weapons. He has Edward Snowden, perhaps the most damaging leaker in recent history, under the vigilant eyes of his secret police in Moscow. He has out-manoeuvred the pro-European demonstrators in Kiev and bought off the Ukrainian government.

At home, his control over the state and civil society is so complete that he can afford to play the merciful tsar and release dissidents and his former rival Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

Forbes magazine was not making a mistake when it called Putin the world's most powerful person in 2013. However, the Centre for Strategic Communications, a thinktank for the Kremlin's pet intellectuals, assessed his power more precisely last week when it acclaimed him "world conservatism's new leader". If you can rid yourself of the idea that being a conservative means merely supporting private enterprise, you will see what it meant.

President Obama's news conference on Friday was full of banter and holiday wishes, in keeping with the year-end White House ritual. But Mr. Obama's demeanor and words were often downbeat, leaving no doubt that the gathering was not, as he said at the beginning, "the most wonderful news conference of the year."

That was fitting - 2013 was far from the most wonderful of Mr. Obama's five crisis-filled years. And though he held out hope as he parried with reporters for more than an hour that "2014 can be a breakthrough year for America," he offered little hint of new ideas or strategies to advance his once-ambitious agenda past hostile Republicans.

"The end of the year is always a good time to reflect and see what can you do better next year. That's how I intend to approach it," Mr. Obama said. "I am sure that I will have even better ideas after a couple days of sleep and sun."

It was as if the president could already smell the exhaust fumes of Marine One, which within hours would whisk him and his family from the South Lawn of the White House on the beginning of their annual holiday trip, a full two weeks in Hawaii. "I know you are all eager to skip town and spend some time with your families. Not surprisingly, I am, too," he said.

President Vladimir Putin's decision to pardon disgraced oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky was indeed a bombshell.

Having been a witness of - and wrote extensively about - the "Yukos affair," I fully expected Khodorkovsky to serve out his full sentence, then to slowly fade away.

How to explain Putin's political calculus? Western media and the world of punditry immediately explained Putin's decision as a mixture of "a man at the pinnacle of power" who could afford to do so, as well as an attempt to "clean-up" Russia's human rights record before the Sochi Winter Olympic Games. Both explanations are mildly interesting, but neither is compelling. Putin does not have to prove anything to anyone.

Khodorkovsky was not a prisoner of conscience - he was a criminal who would have been sentenced to life in other jurisdictions for the crimes he committed. Khodorkovsky can hardly have been called a businessman either - he, like other oligarchs during the 1990s, stole, extorted, and even possibly ordered murders when making empires from looted state property. He was also a political fraudster - buying political influence from virtually anyone who would take his dirty money. It was only in prison did Khodorkovsky "find religion" in an attempt to rebrand himself as a man of the people and supporter of democracy.

Last Friday, Los Angeles Police Department officers shot dead a mentally ill man who had already gotten out of his car after a police chase with his hands up. The incident, which was broadcast on national television for all to judge, was the latest in a string of more than a dozen police shootings that have surfaced in the news just in the last few months. Before that, it was the fatal shooting of 19-year-old Tyler Comstock after his father called the cops to report that his son drove away in his car. And other incidents involved death during traffic stop, calls to police for help with a mentally ill family member, and a man whose watering hose was mistaken for a gun.

This guy didn't need to be dead and this officer doesn't need to have this kind of shooting on his conscience for the rest of his life. ... It's bad for all.

While national data is not collected on police shootings, available studies suggest excessive use of police force is rarely punished. In the Iowa incident, the county attorney deemed the shooting legally justified, raising renewed questions about when police can and should turn to use of a gun, when another tactic or tool might do the job. While the LAPD incident is still under investigation, a critical look back at several of the other recent incidents through ThinkProgress interviews with former officers, firearms trainers, and academics, reveal that policy and training may be as much to blame as human error.

When You Call The Cops For Help

The Iowa chain of events started when Tyler Comstock got into an argument with his father because he wouldn't buy him a pack of cigarettes. When Comstock drove away in his father's truck, his father called the cops to intervene. His father lamented afterward, "It was over a damn pack of cigarettes. ... And I lose my son for that."

Criminal justice professor and former Baltimore police officer Peter Moskos said the family was wrong to call the police. While many think officers play a role in community affairs, Moskos says police view their jobs otherwise. "This idea that cops are always at your beck and call is the basis of the 911 system and it doesn't work," Moskos said. "When you call the police, you have to remember what cops do is arrest people. If you don't want to be arrested, you probably shouldn't call the police."

Or if you don't want someone to die. Several other recent incidents involved calls to police to calm down a mentally ill relative, and to report a suspicious person who turned out to be seeking help for a car accident. Kyle Kazan, a former police officer in Los Angeles County, said shootings in these sorts of circumstances are "not uncommon," because when the cops show up, "they don't know why this person is acting up."

There is no evidence that pictorial warnings on cigarette packs has an effect on smokers' behavior. These are the results of a recent study by researchers at the Karolinska Institute. Now the Principal, of the Swedish Public Health Institute, refuses to pay bill for the study.

In October, the EU Parliament elected that pictorial warnings on cigarette packs will be mandatory throughout the EU. The images and warnings must cover 65 per cent of the front and back of the packages and this type of horror images are already available in Australia, for example. Within a number of years the images on the right, will also adorn cigarette packets sold in Sweden. The goal is to reduce smoking, and fewer young people to start smoking.

But the impact of the images actually is debated - and now research into horror pictures has led to a big brawl between researchers at the Karolinska Institute and the State Public Health Institute, FHI.

While everyone is distracted with the holiday festivities, Congress has been hard at work, screwing us over in the name of national security.

Yesterday the 2014 National Defense Authorization Act was fast-tracked through the Senate, with no time for discussion or amendments. And you know, its Christmas time, so they just passed it so that they could recess for the holidays. The new version of the NDAA has already been quietly passed by the House of Representatives.

It authorizes massive spending, including$527 billion in base defense spending for the current fiscal year, funding for the war in Afghanistan, and funding for nuclear weapons programs.

The indefinite detention allowed by the original NDAA is still here, and it's actually worse now, because there are provisions that will make it easier for the government to target those who disagree. Section 1071 outlines the creation of the "Conflict Records Research Center", where the unconstitutionally obtained information that the NSA has collected is compiled and shared with the Department of Defense. The information, called in the wording "captured records," can be anything from your phone records, emails, browsing history or posts on social media sites.

The New American reports in detail on the expansion of powers: