Germany 'among countries offering intelligence', according to new claims by former US defence analyst

At least six European Union countries in addition to Britain have been colluding with the US over the mass harvesting of personal communications data, according to a former contractor to America's National Security Agency, who said the public should not be "kept in the dark".

Wayne Madsen, a former US navy lieutenant who first worked for the NSA in 1985 and over the next 12 years held several sensitive positions within the agency, names Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Spain and Italy as having secret deals with the US.

Madsen said the countries had "formal second and third party status" under signal intelligence (sigint) agreements that compels them to hand over data, including mobile phone and internet information to the NSA if requested.

Under international intelligence agreements, confirmed by declassified documents, nations are categorised by the US according to their trust level. The US is first party while the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand enjoy second party relationships. Germany and France have third party relationships.

Serving and former priests hired rentboys for sex in churches from pimp who sold consecrated hosts to satanists, says defrocked clergyman.

Italian investigators have opened an inquiry into claims by a convicted paedophile priest that an underage prostitution ring has been operating inside the Holy Roman Church with clergymen hiring rentboys for sex inside churches.

Don Patrizio Poggi, 46, told Italian authorities that a former Carabinieri pimped boys for nine clergymen.

Poggi, who served a five-year sentence for abusing teenage boys while he was a parish priest at the San Filippo Neri church in Rome, said he made the allegations to "protect the Holy Church and the Christian community."

The boys were chosen because they were starving and desperate, he claimed, according to Il Messaggero newspaper.

With friends like these, does the CIA need enemies?

A look at the evidence that the US regime created Bin Laden's 'al Qaeda' by recruiting disaffected and unemployed youths from Muslim countries and shuttling them to Afghanistan via the US embassy in Saudi Arabia.

A priest, a banker and a spook... not the start of a joke or a John LeCarre spy novel, but merely the latest addition to a long list of financial scandals involving the Vatican Bank. Yet despite its quasi comedian if convoluted plotline, the latest attempt to defraud the Catholic church will likely pale in comparison to the most infamous incident involving the Institute of Religious Works (or IOR) as the Vatican Bank is also known.

That one involves one Roberto Calvi, the chairman of Banco Ambrosiano, who in 1982 was found hanging from London's Blackfriars bridge, a short distance away from JPMorgan's gold vault, his pockets stuffed will cash and bricks in what at the time was a presumed hit by the mafia taking revenge for funds lost through the collapse of Calvi's bank - a bank in which the Vatican was a significant shareholder.

That particular murder will likely remain unsolved, and the question whether the Vatican uses the mob as its tool of "retribution and righteous punishment" will remain unanswered, as the man who stonewalled the Vatican's response at the time on the grounds of sovereign immunity: the US archbishop Paul Marcinkus who was then-head of the Vatican Bank, took his secrets to the grave with him in 2006.

This time, however, with plenty of living loose ends, we may finally get a glimpse into how deep the rabbit hole involving the legal, and more importantly illegal, (ab)use of Catholic funds really goes.

Fast forward to today when we learn courtesy of the FT that the priest involved in the developing financial scandal is one Monsignor Nunzio Scarano, 61, a banker-turned priest, who was ordained at the age of 35 after working for many years at the Banca d'America e d'Italia, a Naples-based lender which was acquired in the late 1980's by Deutsche Bank. His Vatican career began in the financial wing of the Holy See, or Apsa, where he worked his way up to a senior post in the organization's analytical accounting division. He had been recently suspended once the Vatican learned he was under investigation for alleged money laundering.

Files show vast scale of current NSA metadata programs, with one stream alone celebrating 'one trillion records processed'

A review of top-secret NSA documents suggests that the surveillance agency still collects and sifts through large quantities of Americans' online data - despite the Obama administration's insistence that the program that began under Bush ended in 2011.

Shawn Turner, the Obama administration's director of communications for National Intelligence, told the Guardian that "the internet metadata collection program authorized by the Fisa court was discontinued in 2011 for operational and resource reasons and has not been restarted."

But the documents indicate that the amount of internet metadata harvested, viewed, processed and overseen by the Special Source Operations (SSO) directorate inside the NSA is extensive.

While there is no reference to any specific program currently collecting purely domestic internet metadata in bulk, it is clear that the agency collects and analyzes significant amounts of data from US communications systems in the course of monitoring foreign targets.

On December 26 2012, SSO announced what it described as a new capability to allow it to collect far more internet traffic and data than ever before. With this new system, the NSA is able to direct more than half of the internet traffic it intercepts from its collection points into its own repositories. One end of the communications collected are inside the United States.

- Secret program launched by Bush continued 'until 2011'
- Fisa court renewed collection order every 90 days
- Current NSA programs still mine US internet metadata

The Obama administration for more than two years permitted the National Security Agency to continue collecting vast amounts of records detailing the email and internet usage of Americans, according to secret documents obtained by the Guardian.

The documents indicate that under the program, launched in 2001, a federal judge sitting on the secret surveillance panel called the Fisa court would approve a bulk collection order for internet metadata "every 90 days". A senior administration official confirmed the program, stating that it ended in 2011.

The collection of these records began under the Bush administration's wide-ranging warrantless surveillance program, collectively known by the NSA codename Stellar Wind.

According to a top-secret draft report by the NSA's inspector general - published for the first time today by the Guardian - the agency began "collection of bulk internet metadata" involving "communications with at least one communicant outside the United States or for which no communicant was known to be a citizen of the United States".

Eventually, the NSA gained authority to "analyze communications metadata associated with United States persons and persons believed to be in the United States", according to a 2007 Justice Department memo, which is marked secret.

Britain's Queen Elizabeth II can expect a sweet 5% raise next year, thanks in large part to record profits from real estate.

The Crown Estate, a public body that manages property for the monarch, posted a record profit of 252.6 million British pounds ($387.2 million) for the last financial year -- up by 5.2% from last year.

The good news for the nation is that all the profit from the estate is paid into the public coffers.

The queen is then paid a grant each year by the Treasury equal to 15% of the profit from two years before.

Chilean police have arrested 122 people, many of them teenagers, after raiding secondary schools that had been taken over by their students.

The schools are due to be used as polling stations on Sunday when Chileans choose candidates for the presidential election in November.

The occupation was part of a two-year campaign calling for education reforms.

Police clashed with students in the capital Santiago on Wednesday night after a national protest on Wednesday.

The violence was among the worst seen in Chile since the demonstrations began in 2011, the BBC's Gideon Long reports from Santiago.

The country's powerful student movement has staged major demonstrations over the past two years demanding free and improved education.

Sporadic school and university takeovers have been part of the campaign.

Several alleged 'spokesmen', 'ringleaders' and 'recruiters' of nebulous international terror organisation 'The Database', a.k.a. ' al Qaeda', have been exposed as American citizens with strong connections to Jewish organizations. Does this make them 'self-hating Jews'... or something else?

After weeks of violent clashes between police and protesters across Turkey a new form of resistance has emerged - the "Standing Man".

Standing silently, and initially alone, Turkish performance artist Erdem Gunduz stood, with his hands in his pockets, facing the Ataturk Cultural Centre in Taksim Square, Istanbul, for eight hours.

With extraordinary speed, Gunduz become the latest symbol of the resistance movement. In days that followed, thousands of people would emulate his solitary act, standing silently, for minutes or hours, in places across Turkey.

The contrast with the images of tear gas clouds and water cannon could not have been greater. Faces obscured by masks and helmets were revealed to show expressions of quiet contemplation.

Violent scenes are still occurring around Turkey, including in Istanbul once again this past weekend, but the Standing Man protests continue unabated.

The following images explore one aspect of the protest in Taksim Square, ongoing since before the communal standing took off. Public reading and informal education has been notable since the earliest days of the protest, but has since merged with the Standing Man to form "The Taksim Square Book Club".

The chosen reading material of many of those who take their stand is reflective, in part, of the thoughtfulness of those who have chosen this motionless protest to express their discontent.