Anyone caught smoking on high-speed trains will be fined up to 2,000 yuan ($330) as of Jan 1, according to a railway safety regulation issued by the State Council.

The penalty aims to ensure normal operation of the railway system and passenger safety as China's railway system readies for the annual challenge of coping with an expected 258 million passenger journeys during the 40-day Spring Festival travel season.

Passengers intercepting trains, walking on railway lines, jumping off running trains or throwing garbage from trains will also face a fine of up to 2,000 yuan, the safety regulation said.

According to an official from the Beijing Railway Bureau who spoke on condition of anonymity, the fine is expected to considerably reduce the number of smoking passengers and ensure travel safety.

About one-third of Maryland colleges and universities have decided to follow a recent national trend to ban smoking on college campuses.

The majority of institutions clearing the air are community colleges and the 10 campuses within the University System of Maryland, which adopted a system-wide smoke-free policy last year. Only two private schools in the state, both with religious affiliations, have enacted smoking bans.

Across the country, colleges and universities are rapidly adopting smoke-free policies. Since 2010, the number of smoke-free campuses has more than doubled, and 1,127 institutions now prohibit puffing on their premises, according to the American Nonsmokers Rights Foundation, which collects national data on smoke-free initiatives.

"We're seeing activity in all corners of the country and by all kinds of campuses," said Liz Williams, a project manager for the American Nonsmokers Rights Foundation. "In the last four years, we've seen a massive uptake [of smoke-free policies]."

Iraq has too many competing interests, internal and external, and there is too much struggle for power on many sides, so it's unlikely that the parties behind the violence will let it get better, Lily Hamourtziadou at Iraq Body Count, told RT.

RT: You've been researching the victims of terrorism in Iraq for a long time. Where do you get the information and how credible is it?

Lily Hamourtziadou: Our research is daily and what we do is we check many media sources, any media source that is available to us in English or in Arabic. We collect any information we have on civilian casualties on a particular day. We have a very large database that contains names, ages, places where attacks have taken place, as well as who the perpetrators were if they are identified. And that enables us to monitor the violence, to provide some statistics and to see whether it is increasing or decreasing, who is doing the killing, who the targets are.

Both print and online Russian media have been informed of the four swear words that must never appear either in articles or in readers' comments. Newspapers and websites which don't comply could lose their license.

The list of unprintable words was compiled by Roskomnadzor (Federal Supervision Agency for Information Technologies and Communications) and include:

"Obscene terms for male genital organs, obscene terms for female genital organs, obscene terms for sexual intercourse and obscene terms for a woman of easy virtue, as well as all of the derivatives from the above mentioned words," a watchdog's document reads, as cited by Izvestiya daily.

All the other explicit words and phrases will be allowed if content they appear in is marked with a 16+ age limit. In the case of TV and radio, users of bad language will only be able to have their say after 9 pm.

Don't Be Foolish

Albert Einstein said:

A foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of the truth.

Indeed, scientists have shown that people will go to absurd lengths - and engage in mental gymnastics - in order to cling to their belief in what those in authority have said.

Part of the reason so many are so vulnerable to naive belief in authority is that we evolved in small tribes ... and we assume that the super-elites are just like us.

In reality, there are millions of psychopaths in the world ... and they are largely running D.C. and on Wall Street.

These people have no hesitation in lying to promote their goals.

The Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs told Morley Safer of 60 Minutes and CBS News:

Look, if you think any American official is going to tell you the truth, then you're stupid. Did you hear that? - stupid.

And studies show that the super-rich lie, cheat and steal more than the rest of us.

Financial analyst Rob Kirby says, "There is colossal fraud and price control going on. There are no free markets." Kirby goes on to say, "What we've seen over the last six months is a ramp-up in interest rate swaps to the tune of $12 trillion . . . . What the build in these interest rate swaps is achieving, it's stemming the rise in interest rates." Kirby, who has 15 years experience in trading derivatives, says these complicated derivatives overseen by the U.S. Treasury control the price of virtually everything. Kirby contends, "I refer to this as a price control grid. They are able to dictate and arbitrarily set the price of all strategic goods in the market, whether it's capitol, whether it's energy or whether it's precious metals." As an example of control, Kirby explains, "We have 10-year U.S. bond rates under 3%, and I would say the United States is actually insolvent, and we have countries like Greece where 10-year bonds are yielding over 9%." When does this end? Kirby points to the finite physical gold market and massive Chinese global buying for a clue. Kirby says,

"When China doesn't get their gold, that's when this ends, and that might be when we have a war."

Join Greg Hunter as he goes One-on-One with Rob Kirby of KirbyAnalyitics.com.

Jacob Zamansky, Zamansky & Associates partner, Scott Reckard, Los Angeles Times reporter, and Marc LoPresti, LoPresti Law Group, discuss the accusations levied against Wells Fargo Bank who is accused of opening customer accounts, without consent, to me...

3-year-old Palestinian killed as IDF attacks six targets in Gaza; Defense Minister: Gaza won't be quiet as long as Israel isn't quiet; IDF shoots Palestinian near security fence.

© ReutersPalestinian shouts as he inspects a Hamas training camp after being hit by Israeli air strike in Gaza Strip, Dec. 24, 2013.

The Israel Defense Forces struck targets in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday afternoon, hours after a contract worker employed by Israel's Defense Ministry was shot and killed Tuesday by gunfire originating from the coastal territory.

The Israel Air Force attacked six separate sites across the territory linked to Hamas and the Islamic Jihad. Palestinians said that a 3-year-old girl was killed in one of the attacks on the Al-Maghazi refugee camp, and that her mother and brother were wounded. The Associated Press said a total of 10 people were wounded in the attacks.

The IDF said in a statement that the Israel Air Force, tanks as well as infantry corps soldiers attacked two sites in the southern Strip, though ground forces did not enter the territory. The IDF said that one of the targets was a weapons building site and defined the second as a "terror infrastructure" site. The IDF also struck two additional sites in the central Gaza Strip and another "terror infrastructure" sites in the north as well.

"The IDF responded with a wave of attacks and are currently considering our next steps," a senior IDF officer said. He added that while the army wants to avoid an escalation, soldiers in the Gaza Division were on high alert "in case the situation deteriorates."

Hamas told Israel's Ch. 10 following the attacks that it was not interested in an escalation with Gaza.

Israeli warplanes have carried out an airstrike in the Gaza Strip in response to the fatal shooting of an Israeli civilian, the Israel Defense Force has confirmed. At least one Palestinian has been reportedly killed in the strike.

Hospital officials cited by Reuters said a 3-year-old girl was killed by shrapnel in al-Bureij camp in the central Gaza Strip as she was standing with her family outside their home.

Three relatives of the girl, including two young siblings, were also reportedly injured.

According to Hamas Health Ministry official Ashraf al-Kidra, a total of 10 people were wounded in the strikes.

Following the strike, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) issued a statement saying IAF aircrafts and IDF tanks and infantry targeted "terror sites in the Gaza Strip" including a weapons manufacturing facility, "terror" infrastructures, and a concealed rocket launcher.

Secret documents reveal more than 1,000 targets of American and British surveillance in recent years, including the office of an Israeli prime minister, heads of international aid organizations, foreign energy companies and a European Union official involved in antitrust battles with American technology businesses.

Do criticisms of N.S.A. programs by a presidential panel and a federal judge show that Edward Snowden is a principled whistleblower?

While the names of some political and diplomatic leaders have previously emerged as targets, the newly disclosed intelligence documents provide a much fuller portrait of the spies' sweeping interests in more than 60 countries.

Britain's Government Communications Headquarters, working closely with the National Security Agency, monitored the communications of senior European Union officials, foreign leaders including African heads of state and sometimes their family members, directors of United Nations and other relief programs, and officials overseeing oil and finance ministries, according to the documents. In addition to Israel, some targets involved close allies like France and Germany, where tensions have already erupted over recent revelations about spying by the N.S.A.

Details of the surveillance are described in documents from the N.S.A. and Britain's eavesdropping agency, known as GCHQ, dating from 2008 to 2011. The target lists appear in a set of GCHQ reports that sometimes identify which agency requested the surveillance, but more often do not. The documents were leaked by the former N.S.A. contractor Edward J. Snowden and shared by The New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel.

The reports are spare, technical bulletins produced as the spies, typically working out of British intelligence sites, systematically tapped one international communications link after another, focusing especially on satellite transmissions. The value of each link is gauged, in part, by the number of surveillance targets found to be using it for emails, text messages or phone calls. More than 1,000 targets, which also include people suspected of being terrorists or militants, are in the reports.

It is unclear what the eavesdroppers gleaned. The documents include a few fragmentary transcripts of conversations and messages, but otherwise contain only hints that further information was available elsewhere, possibly in a larger database.

Some condemned the surveillance on Friday as unjustified and improper. "This is not the type of behavior that we expect from strategic partners," Pia Ahrenkilde Hansen, a spokeswoman for the European Commission, said on the latest revelations of American and British spying in Europe.