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.

Hillary Clinton will testify in front of Congress about the terrorist attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya - despite receiving a concussion and being hospitalized for a blood clot, it was revealed on Thursday.

The Secretary of State cancelled appearances before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee after she fainted and hit her head on December 9.

She sent two aides to testify in her place.

Some conservatives initially claimed she was using the health issue to dodge testifying on the contentious issue.

Republicans have been battering the Obama Administration and any officials associated with the September 11 terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate, which killed four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens.

UN Ambassador Susan Rice, who was reportedly President Barack Obama's first choice to replace Clinton as Secretary of State, was forced to withdraw herself from potential nomination after she came under heavy criticism for referring to the attack as a riot caused by Libyans furious about an anti-Islamic video that was released by an American director.

Americans, Gallup tells us, admire Hillary Clinton more than any other woman in the world - again. This latest accolade marks the 17th time Gallup has found Clinton to be the Most Admired Woman (MAW?) since she became first lady nearly 20 years ago. Only Eleanor Roosevelt (13 MAWs) comes close. Only Mother Teresa (1995 and 1996) and Laura Bush (2001) have interrupted Clinton's winning streak, and even then, Clinton came in second.

And therein lies America's cosmic flaw. A country that could time and again embrace Hillary Clinton as its MAW has lost its mind or its memory or both.

Does the phrase "congenital liar" tinkle any bells? I know such non-admirable sentiments are thought to be in the worst of taste, if not also banishable offenses. Still, as conjured by the late New York Times columnist William Safire in 1996, the phrase described the then-first lady for her shameless prevarications. These included what sure looked like bribery ("cattle futures"), defrauding taxpayers ("Whitewater"), obstructing justice - or, rather, "finding" her Rose Law Firm billing records (under subpoena for two years) just days after the statute of limitations ran out - among other corrupt behaviors that must have slightly suppressed Hillary-admiration that same year. The phrase remains apt.

"I remember landing under sniper fire," Clinton declared on the presidential campaign trail in 2008, describing a 1996 trip to Bosnia. "There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down (chuckles) to get into the vehicles to get to our base." It was a vivid but debunkable whopper, as CBS footage of the event proved. In reality, Clinton, accompanied by daughter Chelsea, made her ceremonial way into Bosnia through a warm throng marked by smiling faces and a kiss from a local girl - not bullets. Admirable?

The walls around Israel are growing as the country's army builds a new physical barrier, this time on its border with Syria. The wall will reportedly begin in the southern part of the occupied Golan Heights, extending north from there.

Israel says the move is designed to safeguard its citizens from fallout from the conflict in war-torn Syria. Others say the wall is just a new installment in one of Israel's most recognizable tools of injustice.

"It's a wall of oppression. It's a wall of segregation. It's a wall of stealing the land of the people," Jamal Juma, of the Stop the Wall movement, told RT.

Juma says the wall will end up only remaining in place temporarily, as those who oppose it will stand up for their rights.

"Walls around the world that have been built to suffocate and oppress people have fallen down. Why would the Israeli wall stay? We are not going to settle for it. We are not going to accept the system they are imposing on us," he said.

At least 11 people have been killed and 40 injured after a car blast ripped through a gas station near a hospital in Damascus' Barzeh al-Balad district. The number of casualties is likely to rise as many of the injured are in critical condition.

The blast took place near Hamish Hospital at the Qassioun Petrol station, which was packed with people waiting in line for fuel, Syrian state news agency SANA reports.­

Local al-Ikhbariya TV has reportedly broadcast footage showing at least ten burnt bodies and Red Cross medics working at the scene.

A local told Reuters that he saw ambulances loading burnt bodies and wounded people with severe burns.

"The station is usually packed even when it has no fuel," the resident said, as cited by Reuters. "There are lots of people who sleep there overnight, waiting for early morning fuel consignments."

Attackers killed at least 32 pilgrims in Iraq on Thursday, the police said, in what appeared to be a spate of sectarian-motivated violence as the country continued to struggle with a political crisis in its fractured government.

At the culmination of one of Shiite Islam's holiest rituals, at least 28 people were killed and 35 were wounded when a car bomb exploded in central Musayyib, a police official in Babil Province said. The apparent targets were pilgrims returning from the holy city of Karbala, where Shiites observe the end of the 40-day annual mourning period for the death of Imam Hussein ibn Ali, a grandson of the Prophet Muhammad.

In another attack in southeast Baghdad, a roadside bomb exploded as a minibus carrying Shiite pilgrims passed, killing 4 people and wounding 15, the police said.

The Shiite pilgrimage to commemorate the imam's death, banned while Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq, has flourished since the American-led invasion overthrew him in 2003. Millions travel to Karbala, where the imam is buried, or to neighboring areas each year. Attacks on the pilgrims reflect some of the sectarian frictions that have plagued Iraq in recent years. At least 27 people were killed in 2010; about 52 in 2011; and 53 in 2012 in attacks related to the pilgrimage.

Two days after gunmen killed seven of his employees, the head of a Pakistani aid organization blamed their deaths not only on the militants who pulled the trigger, but also on America's Central Intelligence Agency.

"The militants are taking revenge for the fake [vaccination] program in Abbottabad," Javed Akhtar, the executive director of the non-governmental organization (NGO) Support With Working Solution, told ABC News in a telephone interview.

Akhtar was referring to a hepatitis vaccination program created by the CIA and run by Pakistani Dr. Shakil Afridi in the town where Osama bin Laden lived. Afridi and a team of Pakistani nurses worked in the town, hoping to obtain a DNA sample from a bin Laden family member to prove he was living there. The campaign failed to get bin Laden DNA, admitted a senior U.S. official at the time, although Afridi did speak on the phone with Osama bin Laden's courier, whom the CIA used to track down the terror leader.

Bin Laden was killed on May 1, 2011 in a nighttime raid by America's elite Naval Special Warfare Development Group, commonly known as SEAL Team Six. Afridi was arrested after the raid and remains in Pakistani custody, convicted of treason. He never finished administering the vaccination regimen he started on some of the town's children.

Taxpayers across the country are subsidizing the manufacturers of assault rifles used in multiple mass killings, including the massacre of 20 children and six adults at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn. last month.

A Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting examination of tax records shows that five companies that make semi-automatic rifles have received more than $19 million in tax breaks, most within with the past five years.

"I feel horrified at the power of the gun industry over our political system, that it could exert such influence," said Newtown resident Barbara Richardson, who lives between the homes of one of the 6-year-old victims and the shooter.

Saying she respects hunters who are ethical and good neighbors, she "absolutely [does] not" support taxpayer subsidies to help manufacture assault rifles: "They're weapons of mass destruction."

For the second year in a row, the president signs into law a bill he purports to have major problems with

This time last year, President Obama said that he had "serious reservations" about certain provisions of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act. But he signed it anyway. This year, the same provisions over which he was so reserved remain in the 2013 version of the bill, along with a number of brand-new problematic amendments. The president threatened a veto on the new bill's prohibitions on closing Guantánamo Bay detention center. But he didn't veto; he signed the bill again on Thursday.

Once again, Obama expressed his misgivings in a signing statement, but stressed that "the need to renew critical defense authorities and funding was too great" to reject the bill, which approved a $633 billion armed forces budget for the 2013 fiscal year. Also approved in the NDAA are controversial provisions that will likely make closing Guantánamo Bay detention center impossible in Obama's presidency, and provisions elsewhere in the act that allow for the indefinite military detention of U.S. citizens.

"It's the second time that the president has promised to veto a piece of a very controversial national security legislation only to sign it," said Shahid Buttar, executive director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, according to HuffPo. "He has a habit of promising resistance to national security initiatives that he ultimately ends up supporting and enabling."