An alternative search engine DuckDuckGo has enjoyed a record surge in traffic as NSA scandals spark fears and frighten away Internet users from the more popular Google or Yahoo!.

Over the previous week DuckDuckGo, a private search engine, which claims not to collect users' searches or create any personal user profile, has increased its traffic by 26 per cent and passed 3.1 million of direct queries.

During the weeks before he was killed in a car crash in Los Angeles, reporter Michael Hastings was researching a story about a privacy lawsuit brought by Florida socialite Jill Kelley against the Department of Defense and the FBI.

Hastings, 33, was scheduled to meet with a representative of Kelley next week in Los Angeles to discuss the case, according to a person close to Kelley. Hastings wrote for Rolling Stone and the website BuzzFeed.

Kelley alleges that military officials and the FBI leaked her name to the media to discredit her after she reported receiving a stream of emails that were traced to Paula Broadwell, a biographer of former CIA director David H. Petraeus, according to a lawsuit filed in Federal District Court in Washington, D.C., on June 3.

"Overall Repression on Media in Turkey"

Hayat TV (Life TV), a Turkish channel broadcasting extensive live coverage of the ongoing protests in Taksim Square and Gezi Park, Istanbul, has been ordered to shut down. Regulators have ordered the broadcast to cease at 12:00 p.m. on Friday, June 14 due to a licensing issue; however, Hayat TV asserts this is a pretext to force closure of their broadcast of the protests.

In an open letter published today by blog EUObserver.com (which reports on events in the Arab world), Mustafa Kara, TV Broadcast Coordinator for Hayat TV, asks readers to "support freedom of press" and spread news of the closure (which the station hopes to reverse).

The letter reads in its entirety:

Hayat TV, a progressive Turkish TV channel of the working people, the youth, women and the intellectuals is facing closure. We believe this is a blow to people's freedom of information.

The decision for the closure was made by the broadcasting regulator RTÜK, Radio & Television High Commission with the pretext that Hayat TV has no licence.

This is not true.

Hayat TV has been broadcasting since 21 March 2007 by ofcom license via TURKSAT satellite. But a recent change in broadcasting rules via TURKSAT requires broadcasters to obtain a RTÜK license to be able to broadcast via satellite.

Our application for a RTÜK license has been submitted and pending for a decision. We have taken all the necessary steps and RTÜK agreed that we could carry on broadcasting as it is until a RTÜK license is granted.

However, RTÜK is now making an arbitrary decision to close down our channel because of, we believe, our broadcast of recent protests in Istanbul and across Turkey. RTÜK says they investigated "the complaints received for our coverage of the Gezi Park protests" and made a decision for the closure.

We believe this closure is part of the overall repression on the media in Turkey during the more than two-week-long Gezi Park protests. Four other TV channels have been given a fine by RTUK because of their coverage of the recent events.

RTUK sent a letter to TURKSAT to put an end to Hayat TV broadcast at 12:00 p.m. on Friday, 14th June 2013. We believe this arbitrary and unlawful decision should be reversed. We call on all democratically minded people to show solidarity with Hayat TV.

Mustafa Kara

Hayat TV Broadcast Coordinator

Suppression of media within Turkey (TV channels there initially continued to broadcast a documentary on penguins and a cooking show instead of early coverage of the protests) left many Turkish citizens in the dark about the events as they developed, hearing of them instead through social media and word of mouth. Outrage against this and other government handling of Taksim has fueled the ongoing protests. And with Turkish authorities warning earlier today that they'll raid Taksim Square within 24 hours, it does appear curious timing to restrict live broadcasts of the events.

Obama and other NSA defenders insist there are robust limitations on surveillance but the documents show otherwise

Since we began began publishing stories about the NSA's massive domestic spying apparatus, various NSA defenders - beginning with President Obama - have sought to assure the public that this is all done under robust judicial oversight. "When it comes to telephone calls, nobody is listening to your telephone calls," he proclaimed on June 7 when responding to our story about the bulk collection of telephone records, adding that the program is "fully overseen" by "the Fisa court, a court specially put together to evaluate classified programs to make sure that the executive branch, or government generally, is not abusing them". Obama told Charlie Rose last night:

"What I can say unequivocally is that if you are a US person, the NSA cannot listen to your telephone calls ... by law and by rule, and unless they ... go to a court, and obtain a warrant, and seek probable cause, the same way it's always been, the same way when we were growing up and we were watching movies, you want to go set up a wiretap, you got to go to a judge, show probable cause."

The GOP chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Mike Rogers, told CNN that the NSA "is not listening to Americans' phone calls. If it did, it is illegal. It is breaking the law." Talking points issued by the House GOP in defense of the NSA claimed that surveillance law only "allows the Government to acquire foreign intelligence information concerning non-U.S.-persons (foreign, non-Americans) located outside the United States."

The NSA's media defenders have similarly stressed that the NSA's eavesdropping and internet snooping requires warrants when it involves Americans. The Washington Post's Charles Lane told his readers: "the government needs a court-issued warrant, based on probable cause, to listen in on phone calls." The Post's David Ignatius told Post readers that NSA internet surveillance "is overseen by judges who sit on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court" and is "lawful and controlled". Tom Friedman told New York Times readers that before NSA analysts can invade the content of calls and emails, they "have to go to a judge to get a warrant to actually look at the content under guidelines set by Congress."

Russian President Vladimir Putin said chemical laboratories in Iraq are producing chemical weapons for the terrorists in Syria, confirming a detailed report by Far News Agency (FNA) last month which said former Ba'ath regime officials are involved in the production and procurement of such weapons to the Syrian terrorists.

"We know that Opposition Fighters were detained on Turkish territory with chemical weapons," Mr. Putin told a press conference in Lough Erne, Northern Ireland after meeting the leaders of the industrialized nations in a G8 Summit.

"We have information out of Iraq that a laboratory was discovered there for the production of chemical weapons by the opposition. All this evidence needs to be studied most seriously," he continued.

Putin questioned the credibility of allegations by the US, UK and France that Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad's forces had used chemical weapons, and attributed equivalent horrors to the forces supported by the West.

Employees of Bank of America say they were encouraged to lie to customers and were even rewarded for foreclosing on homes, staffers of the financial giant claim in new court documents.

Sworn statements from several Bank of America employees contain a number of damning allegations, the latest claims entered as evidence in a multi-state class action lawsuit that challenges the bank's history with foreclosures.

According to testimonies obtained by journalists at ProPublica, supervisors at various Bank of America branches across the United States encouraged employees to regularly deny loan modification applications with no reason. At times, they were told to make up excuses to customers who risked losing their homes.

In one of the sworn statements, an ex-bank staffer said he would be directed to deny upwards of 1,500 loan modification applications at a single time with no apparent reason.

Former investigators of the TWA Flight 800 airplane crash have revealed that an explosion came from outside the plane, thereby contradicting the government's conclusion that the fatal crash was an accident.

The investigators claim they were silenced from telling the truth by their superiors, and were forced to conclude that the 1996 crash was an accident sparked by a fuel tank explosion. In a new EPIX film called "TWA Flight 800", the former National Transportation Safety Board investigators communicate their beliefs that an outside explosion was responsible for the deadly crash that occurred nearly 17 years ago, killing all 230 people on board.

The documentary film revolves around the crash of the Trans World Airlines Flight 800, a Boeing 747-131 that exploded and plunged into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of New York on July 17, 1996. The plane had been en route from New York to Paris, but went up in flames over the Atlantic Ocean, just 12 minutes after take-off from John F. Kennedy International Airport. There were no survivors, and some speculated that the plane might have been the target of a terrorist attack.

Hypothetical: "Can I have an extra 2 years to pay my $7,000 in back property taxes Uncle SAM?" Response: "No. We are going to take it from you tomorrow. Oh, by the way. and we misplaced $28,000 dollars of your money. See you tomorrow."

The Federal Reserve has kinda, sorta misplaced $9,000,000,000,000 as shown by a recent video surfaced on you tube (see video below). Your tax money is being stolen. No one at the federal reserve is keeping track of what happened to 9 trillion dollars.

With black budgets and under the table deals can we just guess where all the money has gone? Into the pockets of the Bilderberg fortune 100 attendees. We provided detailed evidence the organization exists with actual documents from their conference recently released to us! Read the documents at Unusual Bilderberg Documents Uncovered at Georgetown University.

So thats $28,125 roughly stolen from every American citizen. Its time for a class action lawsuit . The Federal Reserve is private isn't it?

While US politicians boast strong ties with Israel, CIA officials suggest Israel is one of its biggest counter-intelligence threats. With spyware that rivals that of American agencies, it is extremely difficult to detect the extent of its spying.

In a CIA ranking of the world's intelligence agencies and their willingness to help the US fight the War on Terror, Israel fell below Libya.

Speaking to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity, current and former US intelligence officials blame Israel for incidents that indicate attempts to acquire secret information.

One CIA station chief noticed that the communication equipment that he used to contact CIA headquarters from Israel had been tampered with, even though it was in a locked box. Another CIA officer based in Israel had his home broken into. While nothing was stolen, the officer noticed his food had been rearranged.

In addition to home intrusions and equipment tampering, CIA officials also suspect that a leak by Israel led to the capture and presumed death of an important US agent inside Syria's chemical weapons program.

'Do as we say, not as we do!'

Vice-President Joe Biden criticising the Bush administration for domestic spying back in those dark times before he and Obama rescued Americans from the descent into totalitarianism...