But Communist party leadership's clean-up is only skin-deep, say analysts, as Beijing censors crack down on expression of dissenting views.

An anti-corruption drive in China has netted suspects that include an executive accused of cavorting with gigolos, a young woman who owns 11 apartments, a provincial official with 47 mistresses and a vice-mayor with ties to a drug gang. Many alleged misdeeds were exposed by internet users - mostly whistleblowers and rogue journalists - and promulgated via unusually freewheeling coverage in state-owned media.

Another, less vaunted government clampdown - this one on dissenting views - leaves little hope for a Chinese people-power renaissance. Over the past week authorities have surreptitiously replaced an outspoken editorial in a liberal newspaper with brazen propaganda, scrubbed an open letter calling for constitutional governance from the internet, and closed down an outspoken Beijing-based magazine for advocating political reform.

Communist party secretary Xi Jinping said corruption could lead to the "end of the party". His administration has ruthlessly singled out venal officials and is implementing a series of regulations to limit displays of official waste. Yet analysts say that Xi's anti-graft drive is only skin-deep, and that party leaders will be hard pressed to eradicate corruption while maintaining their perennially hard line on dissent.

"For a short period of time, you can have draconian measures that can deter corruption, but in the long term the best way to deal with it is to make sure that there are checks and balances," said Steve Tsang, a professor of Chinese studies at the University of Nottingham.

2012 was a dismal year for Fox News. The PR arm of the GOP failed to fulfill its prime directive: advancing the interests of Mitt Romney and the Republican Party. It spent much of the year constructing an alternative reality that left millions of its flock in shock when President Obama won an overwhelming reelection. It refused to accept the facts on the ground and denigrated polls (even its own) when the results conflicted with the fictional narrative it was peddling. And perhaps most painful of all, Fox surrendered its ratings lead to MSNBC. Two-thirds of its primetime lineup (Hannity and Van Susteren) dropped to second place behind the competition on MSNBC (Maddow and O'Donnell). However, Fox's travails did not occur for lack of effort. It was clearly operating at the top of its capacity to distort and deceive. In the process it unleashed some of the most feverishly biased reporting, even for Fox News. What follows are a few of the worst departures from ethical journalism by Fox in the last year.

1) Romancing Petraeus: Fox News CEO Roger Ailes tries to recruit for the GOP.

The Washington Post's Bob Woodward revealed that Fox News CEO Roger Ailes had dispatched a Fox News defense analyst, to Kabul, Afghanistan to recruit Gen. David Petraeus as a GOP candidate for president. The notion of a news network soliciting candidates for political office is a perversion of the role journalists play in society. In response, Ailes claimed that it was "a joke" and that he "thought the Republican [primary] field needed to be shaken up." Where Ailes got the idea that it was his right and/or duty to shake up the GOP primaries is unexplained. News people are supposed to report the news, not make it. Woodward's story affirms that Fox News is a rogue operation. Its intrusion into the political process debases journalism by breaching all standards of ethical conduct. And it debases democracy as well by exploiting its power and wealth to manipulate political outcomes.

2) Fox News produces its own anti-Obama video.

Last May on Fox & Friends, the program's hosts introduced a video that purported to examine "Four Years of Hope and Change." What it was in reality was a four-plus minute campaign video that presented a variety of soundbites by President Obama accompanied by ominous graphics and eerie music that falsely implied his campaign promises were unkept. The video (which Media Matters thoroughly debunks here) could not have been a more pro-Romney, anti-Obama attack had it been produced by the Republican National Committee. Apparently Fox News also recognized the gross inappropriateness of its anti-Obama attack ad. Minutes after the video was posted online it was removed. Later, an edited version was re-posted, and then that too was removed. Eventually, Fox EVP Bill Shine issued a statement scapegoating an "associate producer" and concluding that the matter "has been addressed." But it's difficult for Fox to absolve itself of responsibility for this atrociously unethical affair. By now it is so obvious that Fox exists only to promote Republicans and bash Democrats that this video fits squarely within its mission.

I have just spent the last few days of 2012 in the city of Haifa. Accidentally, I met a few of my acquaintances who in the past deemed me at best as deluded and at worst as a traitor. They seemed more embarrassed today - almost confessing that mine and my friends' worst predictions about Israel's future seemed to be materializing painfully in front of their very eyes.

In fact, our predictions came very late in the day. Already in 1950, with unsettling accuracy, Sir Thomas Rapp, the head of the British Middle East Office in Cairo, foresaw the future. He was the last person sent by London to decide whether or not Britain should establish diplomatic relations with Israel. He approved but warned his superiors in London:

"The younger generation is being brought up in an environment of militarism and thus a permanent threat to the Middle East tranquillity is thereby being created and Israel would thus tend to move away from the democratic way of life towards totalitarianisms of the right or the left" (Public Record Office, Foreign Office Files 371/82179, E1015/119, a letter to Ernest Bevin the Foreign Secretary, 15 December 1950).

It is the totalitarianism of the right which is going to be the hallmark of the Jewish state in 2013. And some of the liberal Zionists who were once willing to devour me and like-minded Jews in Israel now realize we, like Sir Thomas before us, may have been right. And maybe because of their more benign attitude I would like to reciprocate by attempting, for a very short while, a different approach in 2013.

Abby Martin takes a look at the hysteria of the fiscal cliff and how it was a distraction from under-reported stories of FBI spying on the Occupy movement and failure to pass the Violence Against Women Act.

The quick, perfunctory debate over the government's ability to spy on a large share of Americans' communications was desperately shallow. Amendments that would have offered some small degree of oversight were pushed aside.

Appearing on "The Young Turks" Thursday, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) agreed with Republicans that cuts are needed to restore the nation's fiscal outlook, but he wants to look in the last place conservatives are interested in curtailing: corporate welfare.

"If Republicans want to have a conversation about cuts, we should have a conversation about cuts," Ellison, a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, told host Cenk Uygur. "Let's start with Medicare Part D and say, 'If you want to save money, you want to cut the deficit, let's let there be competitive bidding for Medicare Part D prescription drugs. That would save about $150 billion."

He added that eliminating oil, gas and coal tax breaks and subsidies would leave "another $100 billion" in government coffers. Ellison also suggested that America's nuclear arsenal could be trimmed down to save even more money.

In the 1960s and 70s European leaders criticised US foreign policy freely - their successors' compliance has been disastrous.

It was exactly 40 years ago this week that the White House announced the end of the Christmas bombing of North Vietnam and the renewal of peace talks in Paris. It was the beginning of the end of the Vietnam war, but looking back at that conflict from a European perspective, the interesting thing is just how much criticism there was of it from western European leaders. Take this example from late 1972:

We should call things by their proper names. What is going on in Vietnam today is a form of torture. There cannot be any military justification for the bombings [...]. People are being punished, a nation is being punished in order to humiliate it, to force it to submit to force. That's why the bombings are despicable. Many such atrocities have been perpetrated in recent history. They are often associated with a name: Guernica, Oradour, Babi Yar, Katyn, Lidice, Sharpeville, Treblinka. Violence triumphed. But posterity has condemned the perpetrators. Now a new name will be added to the list: Hanoi, Christmas 1972

That fiery condemnation of US bombings wasn't made by Leonid Brezhnev, the then leader of the Soviet Union, or by Fidel Castro, but by the prime minister of Sweden, Olof Palme. That's right, the prime minister of a western European and non-communist nation was likening US policy in Vietnam to Nazi war crimes. If you're surprised, then you've got good reason to be, as today it would be unheard of for the leader of a major western European country to criticise the United States in such strong terms.

But Palme wasn't the only western European leader of the 60s and 70s to stand up to the superpower and take an independent stance on foreign policy issues. In 1966, the French president Charles de Gaulle pulled his country out of Nato's military command, and a year later all US military bases in France were closed down and Nato's headquarters moved to Brussels. In a letter to US president Johnson, de Gaulle declared that France needed to "recover the full exercise of her sovereignty across her entire territory."

The US should not lecture other countries while Washington is unable to protect the civil liberties of its own citizens, American blogger Kevin Gosztola said in an interview with RT.

The 2013 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which was signed on Wednesday by President Barack Obama, has already been criticized by many within the US for allowing warrantless wiretapping of Americans and indefinite detention for suspicions of terrorism. The NDAA also allows for the notorious Guantanamo Bay military prison to remain open, despite President Obama's campaign pledge to shut down the facility years ago.

Many in the United States know very little about the secretive NDAA, Gosztola told RT.

RT: The White House earlier threatened to veto the [NDAA], but ended up rubber-stamping it anyway - why was that? And what are the implications?

Kevin Gosztola: For the most part, the reason why we are not seeing Obama veto this legislation as he could have is because he just doesn't want to use all the political power that he might have to get his agenda accomplished. It's just not something that he wants to take any risk on, because there are a lot of people in the Congress of the United States who do not support his commitment to closing this facility. So, the implication right now is that you have, there are 166 individuals still in the prison. Many of them are there being held indefinitely. Only nine are on trial or have been convicted, and so you've got a situation here where many men are possibly going to be languishing in this facility for quite some time.

The CIA is being sued for withholding information about its cooperation on domestic spying as part of the New York Police Department's counter-terrorism surveillance program.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) filed a lawsuit at the end of December seeking the release of a report by the CIA's inspector general that examined the legality of spying on American soil.

CIA spy activity at home made headlines in 2011 when a series of investigative reports by the Associated Press exposed the CIA's role in the NYPD's Intelligence Unit, which kept tabs on New York's Muslim community despite a lack of evidence of any crimes.

AP's Pulitzer Prize-winning enquiry found that the CIA played a crucial role in instructing the NYPD on its surveillance program, which spied on mosques, student groups and Muslims in general.

The agency's director general responded to the allegations by launching a self-investigation into the collaboration. In December 2011, the CIA announced that it found "no evidence" its actions had broken the law. The agency also denied that it was directly involved spying inside the country. Soon after, the AP revealed that a CIA operative was being removed from assignment with the NYPD.

A lawsuit filed in Oregon accuses five Portland officers of unlawfully storming a residence and forcing a sleeping woman to stand in her underwear as they tased her partner and searched the area.

The case, filed by a Portland couple against the Portland Police Bureau, alleges that on August 17, 2011, a neighbor called the police after hearing shouting in Sarah Lynn Hill and Brett Lopez's argument. The couple states that they had an argument at the apartment, but there was no physical violence.

On arrival, the police accessed the balcony and shined lights into the apartment, where the couple was sleeping. According to the suit, filed December 31 in Multnomah County Circuit Court, an hour into the scene, officers decided to enter the apartment through an unlocked front door.