Europe's top court on Tuesday struck down an EU law forcing telecoms operators to store private phone and email data for up to two years, judging it too invasive, despite its usefulness in combating terrorism.

By allowing EU governments to access the data, "the directive interferes in a particularly serious manner with the fundamental rights to respect for private life and to the protection of personal data," the European Court of Justice (ECJ) said.

Advocate General Pedro Cruiz Villalon declared the legislation illegal and told the European Union's 28 member states to take the necessary steps to withdraw it.

The decision to scupper the 2006 Data Retention Directive comes as Europe weighs concerns over electronic snooping in the wake of revelations about systematic US surveillance of email and telephone communications.

The revelation that US agencies collected data on millions of European citizens - and even tapped the phone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel - sparked a wave of controversy and prompted lawmakers on both sides of the Atlantic to rethink their data surveillance laws.

Daily Show host Jon Stewart observed on Monday that, as the Senate moves closer to declassifying a report trashing the Central Intelligence Agency's "enhanced interrogation" techniques, the political figures behind it - including former Vice-President Dick Cheney - were resurfacing in the public eye.

"He's like the Wilford Brimley of torture," Stewart said of Cheney, before launching into an impression of Cheney doing a Brimley-like ad for waterboarding, gruffly calling it, "The right thing to do."

Stewart also showed footage of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld from Errol Morris' documentary The Unknown Known in which Rumsfeld parries a question about memos related to torture, blames the memos entirely on the Justice Department, then congratulates himself for, in his mind, stumping the questioner.

If the US State Department's Victoria Nuland had not said "Fuck the EU," few outsiders at the time would have heard of Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, the man on the other end of her famously bugged telephone call. But now Washington's man in Kiev is gaining fame as the face of the CIA-style "destabilization campaign" that brought down Ukraine's monumentally corrupt but legitimately elected President Viktor Yanukovych.

"Geoffrey Pyatt is one of these State Department high officials who does what he's told and fancies himself as a kind of a CIA operator," laughs Ray McGovern, who worked for 27 years as an intelligence analyst for the agency. "It used to be the CIA doing these things," he tells Democracy Now. "I know that for a fact." Now it's the State Department, with its coat-and-tie diplomats, twitter and facebook accounts, and a trick bag of goodies to build support for American policy.

A retired apparatchik, the now repentant McGovern was debating Yale historian Timothy Snyder, a self-described left-winger and the author of two recent essays in The New York Review of Books - "The Haze of Propaganda" and "Fascism, Russia, and Ukraine." Both men speak Russian, but they come from different planets.

On Planet McGovern - or my personal take on it - realpolitik rules. The State Department controls the prime funding sources for non-military intervention, including the controversial National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which Washington created to fund covert and clandestine action after Ramparts magazine and others exposed how the CIA channeled money through private foundations, including the Ford Foundation. State also controls the far-better-funded Agency for International Development (USAID), along with a growing network of front groups, cut-outs, and private contractors. State coordinates with like-minded governments and their parallel institutions, mostly in Canada and Western Europe. State's "democracy bureaucracy" oversees nominally private but largely government funded groups like Freedom House. And through Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland, State had Geoff Pyatt coordinate the coup in Kiev.

Attorney General Eric Holder said Tuesday that he has a "vast amount" of discretion in how the Justice Department prosecutes the laws that are on the books.

Holder's remarks, during testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, came in response to GOP accusations that he is flouting the law with its positions on marijuana legalization and criminal sentencing.

Leading the questioning was House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), who asked Holder whether he believed there were any limits to the administration's prosecutorial discretion.

"There is a vast amount of discretion that a president has - and more specifically that an attorney general has," Holder responded. "But that discretion has to be used in an appropriate way so that your acting consistent with the aims of the statute but at the same time making sure that you are acting in a way that is consistent with our values, consistent with the Constitution and protecting the American people."

Republicans on the panel grilled Holder on the Obama administration's decision not to interfere with marijuana legalization efforts in Colorado and elsewhere, as long as states establish adequate regulations.

Basescu: Troops Coming for 'Specific Missions'

The Russian annexation of Crimea has become a catch-all justification for the US to escalate its military presence virtually anywhere even remotely close, and today it was announced they are planning to send hundreds of ground troops to eastern Romania.

There are already 1,000 US troops in Mihail Kohalniceanu, and President Traian Basescu says the US has requested permission to add 600 more "for specific missions" in the Black Sea.

The letter announcing the request to Romania's parliament also reported the US plans an unspecified increase in the number of aircraft at the base, part of the US effort to increase its military might in the Black Sea region.

Despite making a huge deal of increasing their sway there, the Black Sea hasn't seen significant naval combat in generations, nor would there be any conceivable reason to expect Romania, a NATO member for the past decade, would even theoretically be a target for invasion by Russia, which doesn't border them.

Foreign ministers consider holding joint exercises with Azerbaijan, Armenia and Moldova after annexation of Crimea

Nato has drawn up plans to strengthen military co-operation with the former Soviet states on Russia's southern flank after the Kremlin's seizure of Ukraine's Black Sea peninsula of Crimea.

Nato foreign ministers were meeting in Brussels on Tuesday to discuss the alliance's response to the Ukraine crisis amid continued fears of Russia's territorial ambitions and what the Americans term a "tremendous" buildup of Russian forces on Ukraine's eastern border.

Before the meeting, a Nato committee drafted plans "for promoting stability in eastern Europe in the current context" by increasing military co-operation with Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Moldova - all in Russia's "near abroad" and considered by Moscow as falling within its sphere of influence.

A confidential seven-page paper leaked to the German news weekly Der Spiegel proposed joint exercises and training between Nato and the three countries, increasing the "interoperability" of their militaries with Nato, and their participation in Nato "smart defence" operations.

With every step in the march towards tyranny, some muffled voice in the media decries the move as "Orwellian." It happens so often that George Orwell's novel may have lost its power as a cautionary tale.

It may be time to conduct an inventory of society and see how well we match the dystopian prediction. George Orwell was an unrelenting social critic constantly tormented by a vision of the future that he imagined. In what many consider his masterpiece work, 1984, he brings this vision to life.

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.

The novel (spoiler alert) follows Winston through his life living under the watchful eye of Big Brother, an ever-present and fictional figurehead that takes care of the constantly warring nation. Most citizens truly adore Big Brother, and the constant surveillance makes certain those that don't at least behave as though they do.

Winston commits acts of mental rebellion with the encouragement of a colleague named O'Brian. He falls in love, with another young thought criminal named Julia. In the end, O'Brian turns out to be working for Big Brother and Julia and Winston are sent to the Ministry of Love for imprisonment, torture, and reeducation.

More disturbing than the actual plot is the amazing detail Orwell uses to describe the society and the mechanisms by which the ruling elite maintain control. It provides a ready description of mechanisms that citizens should be wary of, or a ready template for an oppressor to establish a government. Those mechanisms and their modern counterparts are discussed below.

A wealthy Dubai sheikh is scouring Venice for a small army of female assistants to help him spend his cash

It seemed like an April Fools' joke. On Tuesday 1 April, news circulated in Italy that a Dubai sheikh had a job opening - in fact, he had 60 of them. The advertisement was posted on behalf of an, as yet unknown, Sheikh from Dubai. The candidate requirements? Applicants must be female, attractive, stylish, aged (or at least look) between 18 and 28, from the province of Venice, able to speak English (French and Arabic a bonus) and, most importantly, possess supremely sharp shopping skills.

In return they would be offered €100 (£83) a day and the opportunity to join the sheikh on a visit to Europe, where they would attend various high-end dinners and events, stay in luxury accommodation and fly "by private jet only" between Madrid, Paris, London, Stockholm, Ibiza, Milan and Venice. The role itself? To assist his numerous wives and daughters with their shopping.

Mauro Belcaro, owner of Italian fashion company Rosy Garbo and casting agency Padua DOC, is in charge of recruitment. He quickly confirms the ad's legitimacy. "I got a call from an agency in Dubai because we regularly cast fashion models and other roles in the industry," he says. They wanted Italian women because of "their strong taste in fashion".

Whole lotta love: Maduro 'the hippy' reared on Led Zeppelin and Lennon

It might seem an unlikely claim for Venezuela's president, Nicolás Maduro, to make after weeks of violent unrest in the country but the burly, moustachioed, former bus driver describes himself as a bit of a hippy and a fan of John Lennon's campaigns for peace and love.

Both have been in short supply in Venezuela in recent months as the country's worst civil conflict in a decade has left up to 39 dead, many more injured and several opposition figures jailed for inciting violence. Protesters have continued an often violent campaign to overthrow the government, including arson attacks on universities, bus stations and other public buildings.

But the president at the centre of this storm shrugs off opposition accusations that he has been acting like a dictator and using excessive force. Instead, Maduro insists that he and his ministers would have joined the protests themselves if they had really been about shortages - and are inspired by musical and political icons who championed non-violent protest.

In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, Venezuela's president claims the Obama administration is fomenting unrest with the aim of provoking a Ukraine-style 'slow-motion' coup

Venezuela's president has accused the US of using continuing street protests to attempt a "slow-motion" Ukraine-style coup against his government and "get their hands on Venezuelan oil".

In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, Nicolás Maduro, elected last year after the death of Hugo Chávez, said what he described as a "revolt of the rich" would fail because the country's "Bolivarian revolution" was more deeply rooted than when it had seen off an abortive US-backed coup against Chávez in 2002.

Venezuela, estimated to have the world's largest oil reserves, has faced continuous violent street protests - focused on inflation, shortages and crime - since the beginning of February, after opposition leaders launched a campaign to oust Maduro and his socialist government under the slogan of "the exit".

"They are trying to sell to the world the idea that the protests are some of sort of Arab spring," he said. "But in Venezuela, we have already had our spring: our revolution that opened the door to the 21st century".