While pundits and partisans argue about what President Obama's second inaugural address bodes for the next four years of political in-fighting, the assault on privacy rights that began under George W. Bush shows no signs of abating under Obama. Just before the New Year, the President signed into law an extension to a warrantless intercept program that infringes on basic legal precepts of privacy and, many argue, directly contradicts the Fourth Amendment.

In all the drama surrounding the "fiscal cliff," the renewal of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA) - the 2008 legislation that allows for warrantless surveillance of the emails, text messages, and internet searches of US citizens - seems to have slipped under the radar.

Under the renewed law, for the next five years the National Security Agency (NSA) can eavesdrop without a warrant on US citizens who are suspected of engaging in conversations with suspicious non-US-citizens. Conversations have to contain "foreign intelligence information" - but exactly how this broad term is interpreted by the NSA is unclear. What's more, a FISA order on one specific person can be used against entire groups, potentially meaning blanket surveillance on thousands of Americans at a time.

The 2008 FAA was created in the wake of a journalistic expose revealing how the Bush Administration had circumvented a previous law - the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978. That earlier FISA had mandated that the NSA obtain a warrant from a special court if it wanted to spy on Americans. When confronted with the Administration's blatant law breaking, Congress took the route of least resistance, crafting the FAA, which retroactively immunized the culpable parties. It also entrenched the Bush-era blanket surveillance as law.

Thanks to a lifetime of propaganda, people will argue relentlessly that taxation is not an act of violence, they will deny that it perpetuates a complicated form of slavery, and many times get deeply offended when you point out the fact that it is theft.

Yet, peaceful people are taken against their will and thrown in cages every day for not paying taxes. If this action was not carried by the state, everyone would recognize it as a violent kidnapping.

This year in Italy alone around 12,000 people had armed government workers trespass on their property, take them against their will and lock them up in a cage.

US Federal Reserve is reporting a major deposit withdrawal from the nation's bank accounts. The financial system hasn't seen such a massive fund outflow since 9/11 attacks.

The first week of January 2013 has seen $114 billion withdrawn from 25 of the US' biggest banks, pushing deposits down to $5.37 trillion, according to the US Fed. Financial analysts suggest it could be down to the Transaction Account Guarantee insurance program coming to an end on December 31 last year and clients moving their money that is no longer insured by the government.

The Government of Antigua is planning to launch a website selling movies, music and software, without paying U.S. copyright holders.

The Caribbean island is taking the unprecedented step because the United States refuses to lift a trade "blockade" preventing the island from offering Internet gambling services, despite several WTO decisions in Antigua's favor. The country now hopes to recoup some of the lost income through a WTO approved "warez" site.

Antigua and Barbuda is a small country in the Caribbean that for years had a flourishing gambling industry.

A few years ago 5% of all Antiguans worked at gambling related companies. However, when the U.S. prevented the island from accessing their market the industry collapsed.

"What was once a multi-billion dollar industry in our country, employing almost 5% of our population has now shrunk to virtually nothing," Antigua's High Commissioner to London, Carl Roberts, said previously.

A cache of handguns, rifles and shotguns concealed behind a false wall in the days after the Dunblane massacre has been uncovered.

Simon Berni, 41, a builder, was shocked to discover a secret haul of more than 30 shotguns and pistols as well as hundreds of rounds of ammunition.

He said: "It was an incredible arsenal - full, absolutely choc-a-bloc with eight shelves of fire arms and ammunition."

Police are investigating the gun stash uncovered in a semi-detached in a quiet village.

I've been thinking about fault lines, and fractures, and diversity, and when it's all going to implode. I hope I'm still around because it is going to be one gorgeous show. Few things are as entertaining as a truly good disaster.

What is going to kill us is diversity. It isn't working well. By diversity I mean here the intermixing of large groups of people holding utterly differing and opposed values. There is too damned much diversity in America. It isn't getting better.

The current donnybrook over guns is not a political question, like whether to raise or lower taxes. It is a clash of civilizations, a confrontation between two groups who seriously don't like each other and hold irreconcilably different views of life. The two would be happier in separate countries, an idea that has occurred to them. It is that bad.

The Constitution no longer being in effect, the gun-controllers may be able to outlaw guns, chiefly because the federal government also wants to do this, though for different reasons. The gun-controllers think that they are going to stop murder, whereas the feds just want a supine and helpless population. Should they succeed in banning firearms, the result will be a very large element of the population actually hating the rest, and hating the government. Diversity.

Audit trail reveals that donors linked to fossil fuel industry are backing global warming sceptics.

A secretive funding organisation in the United States that guarantees anonymity for its billionaire donors has emerged as a major operator in the climate "counter movement" to undermine the science of global warming, The Independent has learnt.

The Donors Trust, along with its sister group Donors Capital Fund, based in Alexandria, Virginia, is funnelling millions of dollars into the effort to cast doubt on climate change without revealing the identities of its wealthy backers or that they have links to the fossil fuel industry.

However, an audit trail reveals that Donors is being indirectly supported by the American billionaire Charles Koch who, with his brother David, jointly owns a majority stake in Koch Industries, a large oil, gas and chemicals conglomerate based in Kansas.

THE full extent of a secret dossier compiled on Dunblane killer Thomas Hamilton is revealed in the Mail on Sunday today.

A 100-year closure order has been placed on a catalogue of evidence relating to Hamilton's activities in the years preceding the massacre of 16 children and a teacher at Dunblane Primary School in 1996.

The extraordinary ban on evidence means the public has no access to reports into:

. Police investigations and allegations of abuse at boys' camps and boys' clubs run by Hamilton.

. Hamilton's links with Freemasonry.

. Reports about the killer's use and possession of firearms.

Families of Dunblane victims may call for a new inquiry following proof that most of the documents banned from the public domain until 2096 are subject to an illegal closure order.

On November 22, 2012, the Los Angeles Times published an alarming piece of news entitled "Cyber Corps program trains spies for the digital age ". The "cyber-warriors" who are headed for organizations such as the CIA, NSC, FBI, the Pentagon and so on, are trained to stalk, " rifle through trash, sneak a tracking device on cars and plant false information on Facebook [emphasis added]. They also are taught to write computer viruses, hack digital networks, crack passwords, plant listening devices and mine data from broken cellphones and flash drives."

Not surprisingly, less than a month later, it was rumored that Iran 's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei had started a Facebook page. The style and content of the site ruled out its authenticity, but the State Department was amused. In spite of the potential for alarm, State Department Spokeswoman Victoria Nuland jokingly expressed Washington 's curiosity to see how many "likes' Khamenei would receive. This is no joking matter. Any message on this page would be attributed to Khamenei with a potential for dangerous ramifications.

Barely a month later, on January 24, 2013, Guardian's blaring headlines exposed fake blogs and Facebook pages made for BBC Persian's Iranian journalists with claims that these were made in order to harass, intimidate, and discredit the journalists. These fake blogs, according to The Guardian charges, are not by the American Cyber Corps warriors, but are alleged to be the creation of the Iranian 'Islamic cyber-activists' in "what appears [emphasis added] to be an operation sponsored by the authorities".

As the French-led military operation begins, Jeremy Keenan reveals how the US and Algeria have been sponsoring terror in the Sahara.

On 12 October 2012, the UN Security Council voted unanimously in favour of a French-drafted resolution asking Mali's government to draw up plans for a military mission to re-establish control over the northern part of Mali, an area of the Sahara bigger than France. Known as Azawad by local Tuareg people, northern Mali has been under the control of Islamist extremists following a Tuareg rebellion at the beginning of the year. For several months, the international media have been referring to northern Mali as 'Africa's Afghanistan', with calls for international military intervention becoming inexorable.

While the media have provided abundant descriptive coverage of the course of events and atrocities committed in Azawad since the outbreak in January of what was ostensibly just another Tuareg rebellion, some pretty basic questions have not been addressed. No journalist has asked, or at least answered satisfactorily, how this latest Tuareg rebellion was hijacked, almost as soon as it started, by a few hundred Islamist extremists.

In short, the world's media have failed to explain the situation in Azawad. That is because the real story of what has been going on there borders on the incredible, taking us deep into the murky reaches of Western intelligence and its hook-up with Algeria's secret service.

Azawad's current nightmare is generally explained as the unintended outcome of the overthrow of Libya's Muammar al-Qadafi. That is true in so far as his downfall precipitated the return to the Sahel (Niger and Mali) of thousands of angry, disillusioned and well-armed Tuareg fighters who had gone to seek their metaphorical fortunes by serving the Qadafi regime. But this was merely the last straw in a decade of increasing exploitation, repression and marginalization that has underpinned an ongoing cycle of Tuareg protest, unrest and rebellion. In that respect, Libya was the catalyst for the Azawad rebellion, not its underlying cause. Rather, the catastrophe now being played out in Mali is the inevitable outcome of the way in which the Global War On Terror has been inserted into the Sahara-Sahel by the US, in concert with Algerian intelligence operatives, since 2002.