Britain's royal household needs to get a little more entrepreneurial, eye possible staff cuts and replace an ancient palace boiler, lawmakers say in a new report.

The report published Tuesday on the finances of Queen Elizabeth II has exposed crumbling palaces and depleted coffers, and discovered that a royal reserve fund for emergencies is down to its last million pounds ($1.6 million).

Legislators on the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee urged royal officials to adopt a more commercial approach and suggested opening up Buckingham Palace to visitors more often.

The panel said the royal household needed more cash to address a serious maintenance backlog on crumbling palaces. It said at least 39 percent of royal buildings - and probably more - were in an unacceptable state, "with some properties in a dangerous or deteriorating condition."

"The boiler in Buckingham Palace is 60 years old," committee chair Margaret Hodge told the BBC. "The household must get a much firmer grip on how it plans to address its maintenance backlog."

"Big Brother is Watching You," George Orwell wrote in his disturbing book 1984. But, as Mikko Hypponen points out, Orwell "was an optimist." Orwell never could have imagined that the National Security Agency (NSA) would amass metadata on billions of our phone calls and 200 million of our text messages every day. Orwell could not have foreseen that our government would read the content of our emails, file transfers, and live chats from the social media we use.

In his recent speech on NSA reforms, President Obama cited as precedent Paul Revere and the Sons of Liberty, who patrolled the streets at night, "reporting back any signs that the British were preparing raids against America's early Patriots."

This was a weak effort to find historical support for the NSA spying program. After all, Paul Revere and his associates were patrolling the streets, not sorting through people's private communications.

To get a more accurate historical perspective, Obama should have considered how our founding fathers reacted to searches conducted by the British before the revolution. The British used "general warrants," which authorized blanket searches without any individualized suspicion or specificity of what the colonial authorities were seeking.

At the American Continental Congress in 1774, in a petition to King George III, Congress protested against the colonial officers' unlimited power of search and seizure. The petition charged that power had been used "to break open and enter houses, without the authority of any civil magistrate founded on legal information."

Following the adoption of the constitution in the January 14-15 referendum, the US-backed Egyptian military junta and its political supporters are seeking to suppress opposition and restore the dictatorship that existed in Egypt before mass working class struggles toppled long-time dictator Hosni Mubarak nearly three years ago.

Last Friday, security forces cracked down on protests called by the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood (MB), killing four and injuring at least 15. According to an Egyptian Health Ministry statement, three protesters were killed in the capital Cairo and one in Fayoum on Saturday. Protesters were also injured in Giza and Minya.

On Monday, a spokesperson for Cairo University - the largest university in Egypt, with 280,000 students - said that the university council had agreed to allow police on the campus. There have been ongoing protests against the military regime, often organized by students close to the MB, throughout this semester. Many students have been killed in clashes with the police forces, including last Thursday.

In a speech at the Police Academy on Tuesday, Defense Minister and de facto dictator General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi threatened that Egyptian army and police will confront with force any attempt to undermine "security and stability." He praised the military and police as "the protective shields of the homeland" and boasted, "the process of securing the referendum proved to the world our ability to enforce security in our country."

"Can we find another way?"

Howard Zinn was one of the many disciples of investigative journalist George Seldes.

He was the author of more than 20 books, including A People's History of the United States, a perpetual best seller.

Zinn's perspective on war was not created in a vacuum.

During World War II Zinn was a bombardier in the 490th Bombardment Group,

His targets included Berlin, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary as well as Royan, a seaside resort in southwestern France on which he dropped napalm.

He documented the last bombing in his book The Politics of History, the research included him discovering that 1.000 civilians were killed in that raid and the raid itself, ordered in the last three weeks of the war, was primarily a career-building exercise for the officers involved.

Many Vets share Zinn's feeling about their war experiences. Very, very few ever find a supportive platform to talk about their experiences and outlooks.

Remember the line from the iconic movie, Dirty Dancing - "nobody puts baby in a corner"? That basically sums up the President's game plan for 2014 that he will unveil tonight in his State of the Union address.

The key elements of the plan have been leaking over the past two days. Yesterday at a White House press briefing, in answer to a question about the State of the Union speech, Press Secretary Jay Carney said:

"I think restoring security and economic vitality to the middle class is a very ambitious goal. Restoring opportunity for all and expanding opportunity for all, those are very ambitious goals. And those are the goals the President has identified...mindful of Congress's reluctance to be cooperative at times, the President is going to exercise his authority. He's going to use his pen and his phone...And it would be the wrong thing to do for this President or any President to judge the progress we make as a nation, in Washington - both in Washington and beyond, only by the number of bills we get passed through Congress, because the opportunity for advancing the agenda that the President has through other means is broad and deep, and he'll explore it." (The italic emphasis on pen and phone and broad and deep is our own.)

Today, the President has fired his first salvo to show the obstructionists in Congress that his pen can sometimes be just as mighty, and a lot faster, than legislation. The White House released news this morning that the President will sign an executive order raising the minimum wage for federal contract workers on new contracts to $10.10 per hour from the current $7.25. According to the announcement, the raise will affect a broad range of workers from janitors to construction workers to "military base workers who wash dishes, serve food and do laundry."

The former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden appeared Sunday night in his first extended television interview. Citing published statements by unnamed US intelligence and military operatives calling for his assassination, he warned that he faces "significant threats" to his life and that US "government officials want to kill me."

The interview, broadcast by the German television network ARD, was largely blacked out by the US media. The New York Times carried not a word of what Snowden said, while the cable and broadcast news programs treated the interview with near total silence.

The American media's reaction stood in stark contrast to that of both broadcast and print media in Germany, where the interview conducted with Snowden in Russia was treated as a major political event.

The interview itself was preceded by a segment dedicated to Snowden on Germany's most popular news talk show, with commentary delivered before a sizable live television audience. Those who spoke out in Snowden's defense received enthusiastic applause, while the defenders of Washington's spying operations, including a right-wing German journalist and a former US ambassador to Germany, were treated coolly or with outright derision.

Nick Clegg approves scheme to strip away British citizenship in move to stem Tory rebels' support of criminals' deportation

Nick Clegg has signed up to a plan drawn up by Theresa May to strip foreign-born terror suspects of British citizenship - a move that would render them stateless - if they are judged to present a threat to national security.

In a last-ditch bid to reduce a damaging Tory rebellion in the Commons on Thursday, the home secretary rushed out the plan, which was branded by Liberty as "irresponsible and unjust".

The move came as Tory rebels warned of a "parliamentary riot" if ministers pressed ahead with plans to "time out" a separate amendment that would strip foreign criminals of the ability to resist deportation on the grounds that they have a right to a family life. The amendment is supported by more than 100 MPs, including the former Labour cabinet minister Hazel Blears.

One rebel said: "The government is risking a parliamentary riot over the way they are handling the agenda - trying to squeeze off the vote on the deportation of foreign criminals."

Clegg said he supported the home secretary's proposal to strip naturalised British citizens of their citizenship if they are judged to present a threat to national security. It would even apply to those who have no other citizenship, rendering them stateless.

They will look like two giant white blimps floating high above I-95 in Maryland, perhaps en route to a football game somewhere along the bustling Eastern Seaboard. But their mission will have nothing to do with sports and everything to do with war.

The aerostats - that is the term for lighter-than-air craft that are tethered to the ground - are to be set aloft on Army-owned land about 45 miles northeast of Washington, near Aberdeen Proving Ground, for a three-year test slated to start in October. From a vantage of 10,000 feet, they will cast a vast radar net from Raleigh, N.C., to Boston and out to Lake Erie, with the goal of detecting cruise missiles or enemy aircraft so they could be intercepted before reaching the capital.

Aerostats deployed by the military at U.S. bases in Iraq and Afghanistan typically carried powerful surveillance cameras as well, to track the movements of suspected insurgents and even U.S. soldiers. When Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales murdered 16 civilians in Kandahar in March 2012, an aerostat above his base captured video of him returning from the slaughter in the early-morning darkness with a rifle in his hand and a shawl over his shoulders.

Defense contractor Raytheon last year touted an exercise in which it outfitted the aerostats planned for deployment in suburban Baltimore with one of the company's most powerful high-altitude surveillance systems, capable of spotting individual people and vehicles from a distance of many miles.

Historian Niall Ferguson says Britain could have lived with German victory and should have stayed out of war

Britain could have lived with a German victory in the first world war, and should have stayed out of the conflict in 1914, according to the historian Niall Ferguson, who described the intervention as "the biggest error in modern history".

In an interview with BBC History Magazine, Ferguson said there had been no immediate threat to Britain, which could have faced a Germany-dominated Europe at a later date on its own terms, instead of rushing in unprepared, which led to catastrophic costs.

"Britain could indeed have lived with a German victory. What's more, it would have been in Britain's interests to stay out in 1914," he said before a documentary based on his book The Pity of War, which will be screened by BBC2 as part of the broadcaster's centenary season.

The Laurence A Tisch professor of history at Harvard University rejected the idea that Britain was forced to act in 1914 to secure its borders and the Channel ports. "This argument, which is very seductive, has one massive flaw in it, which is that Britain tolerated exactly that situation happening when Napoleon overran the European continent, and did not immediately send land forces to Europe. It wasn't until the peninsular war that Britain actually deployed ground forces against Napoleon. So strategically, if Britain had not gone to war in 1914, it would still have had the option to intervene later, just as it had the option to intervene after the revolutionary wars had been under way for some time."

It was remarkable, he said, that Britain intervened on land so early in 1914, when quite unprepared.

Opposition parties did not support offer of amnesty to arrested protesters in exchange for end of Kiev occupations

Ukraine's parliament approved a law on Wednesday that would grant an amnesty to arrested protesters but - to the opposition's fury - depended on the demonstrators vacating all occupied government buildings.

After 12 hours of negotiations the amnesty was agreed by 232 votes from pro-government members amid applause from the ruling party and angry shouts of "Shame!" from the opposition.

Protesters are holding three administrative buildings in Kiev, including the building housing the city administration.

Yuri Miroshnychenko, President Viktor Yanukovych's representative in parliament, said the protesters would now have to leave the buildings. But he insisted the opposition headquarters in Trade Union House, as well as Independence Square and Khreschatyk Street, where the protest camp is located, would not be touched.