Whenever the Security Council (sporadically) or the General Assembly (more frequently) lambastes Israel, the reaction from the Jewish state is highly predictable: either launch a military strike on Palestinians or announce new settlements in the occupied territories.

Since the Israelis last month exercised the first option, causing devastation in Gaza, they opted for 3,000 new settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank immediately after the 193-member General Assembly adopted a resolution last week elevating Palestine from an "observer" to a "non-member state".

The settlements were condemned not only by the United States but also by the European Union and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

Paradoxically, the retaliation followed even after Israel disparaged the General Assembly vote as "insignificant", according to a New York Times editorial.

The UK government has agreed to pay £2.2m ($3.5m) to a Libyan dissident and his family who say MI6 was involved in their illegal rendition.

Sami al-Saadi and his family were forcibly transferred to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's Libya in 2004.

Their lawyers say the pay-out ends the family's legal action against the UK, in which they were arguing MI6 was instrumental in their kidnap.

The UK still faces a further allegation of rendition from another Libyan.

Mr al-Saadi was a leading Gaddafi opponent and says that he was forced on board a plane in Hong Kong, along with his wife and four children, in a joint UK-US-Libyan operation.

The family were flown to Libya where Mr al-Saadi was subsequently held and tortured.

Hearing ahead of full inquest also hears Litvinenko was working for MI6 when he was poisoned with polonium-210

The government's evidence relating to the death of Alexander Litvinenko amounts to a "prima facie case" that he was murdered by the Russian government, the coroner investigating his death has been told.

The former KGB officer was a paid MI6 agent at the time of his death in 2006, a pre-inquest hearing also heard, and was also working for the Spanish secret services supplying intelligence on Russian state involvement in organised crime.

Litvinenko died in a London hospital in November 2006, three weeks after drinking tea which had been poisoned with the radioactive isotope polonium-210.

The director of public prosecutions announced in May 2007 that it would seek to charge Andrei Lugovoi, a former KGB officer, with murder, prompting a diplomatic crisis between the UK and Russia, which refused a request for Lugovoi's extradition. Britain expelled four Russian diplomats, which was met by a tit-for-tat expulsion of four British embassy staff from Moscow. Lugovoi denies murder.

DOJ officials unblinkingly insist that the banking giant is too powerful and important to subject to the rule of law

The US is the world's largest prison state, imprisoning more of its citizens than any nation on earth, both in absolute numbers and proportionally. It imprisons people for longer periods of time, more mercilessly, and for more trivial transgressions than any nation in the west. This sprawling penal state has been constructed over decades, by both political parties, and it punishes the poor and racial minorities at overwhelmingly disproportionate rates.

But not everyone is subjected to that system of penal harshness. It all changes radically when the nation's most powerful actors are caught breaking the law. With few exceptions, they are gifted not merely with leniency, but full-scale immunity from criminal punishment. Thus have the most egregious crimes of the last decade been fully shielded from prosecution when committed by those with the greatest political and economic power: the construction of a worldwide torture regime, spying on Americans' communications without the warrants required by criminal law by government agencies and the telecom industry, an aggressive war launched on false pretenses, and massive, systemic financial fraud in the banking and credit industry that triggered the 2008 financial crisis.

The Obama administration overruled recommendations from within the US Department of Homeland Security and implemented new guidelines earlier this year that allow the government to gather and analyze intelligence on every single US citizen.

Since the spring, a little-know intelligence agency outside of Washington, DC has been able to circumvent the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution and conduct dragnet surveillance of the entire country, combing massive datasets using advanced algorithms to search and seize personal info on anyone this wish, reports the Wall Street Journal this week.

There's no safeguard that says only Americans with criminal records are the ones included, and it's not just suspected terrorists that are considered in the searches either. The National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) has been provided with entire government databases and given nearly endless access to intelligence on everyone in the country, regardless of whether or not they've done anything that would have made them a person of interest. As long as data is "reasonably believed" to contain "terrorism information," the agency can do as they wish.

What's more is the NCTC can retain that information for years, reviewing it whenever they'd like to take a look.

The update to the agency's policies, reported by RT at the time and reexamined this week in the Journal, expose any person in the country to invasive and nearly endless government surveillance.

"This is a sea change in the way that the government interacts with the general public," Mary Ellen Callahan is reported by the Journal to have said during a Situation Room meeting earlier this year within the walls of the White House. At the time, Callahan was chief privacy officer at DHS as well as one of the only staffers inside the Obama administration concerned with what was about to happen.

According to documents obtained by the Journal through Freedom of Information Act requests and conversations between the paper and persons familiar with that Situation Room sound-off, Ms. Callahan unsuccessfully argued against updating a 2008 Justice Department memo about what intel the NCTC can have and how they use it. Just weeks after that meeting, new guidelines were authorized and, within months, Ms. Callahan was working elsewhere.

The Government has given the green light for "fracking" for shale gas to resume in the UK.

Moves by gas company Cuadrilla to exploit the unconventional gas in Lancashire were put on hold 18 months ago after fracking, which uses high-pressure liquid to split rock and extract gas, caused two small earthquakes.

Energy Secretary Ed Davey said today that fracking could resume in the UK, subject to new controls which aim to reduce the risk of seismic activity.

Mr Davey said shale gas represented a promising new potential energy resource for the UK, although it was not yet known what contribution it could make to the energy mix, jobs and the economy.

He insisted that exploiting shale gas in this country would not undermine efforts to cut emissions to tackle climate change.

David Cameron and other EU leaders will today approve banking union in Europe after Britain won concessions to protect the City of London.

EU finance ministers including George Osborne reached agreement after a marathon all-night 14-hour session in Brussels. The landmark deal, the first step towards "fiscal and economic union" in the eurozone, will make the European Central Bank (ECB) the supervisory body for about 200 of the biggest banks in the 17-member euro area and non-euro nations that decide to take part.

Although the UK will not join banking union, there are fears that London's premier position as a financial centre will be undermined by the 17 euro nations voting en bloc on the European Banking Authority (EBA), which sets banking rules throughout the EU.

Metropolitan Police's child abuse investigation team have interviewed several adults who claim that they were sexually assaulted as children by MPs in a paedophile ring

Scotland Yard detectives are looking into allegations that senior politicians abused children in the 1980s and escaped justice because they were protected by their powerful connections.

During past weeks officers from the Metropolitan Police's child abuse investigation team have interviewed several adults who claim that they were sexually assaulted as children by MPs in a paedophile ring.

The team was set up following claims by Labour MP Tom Watson in the House Commons that the police should look afresh at claims of a "powerful paedophile network linked to Parliament and No 10".

Until today when the Metropolitan Police confirmed its existence, the inquiry, Operation Fairbank, had been operating in secret at the headquarters of the Child Abuse Investigation Team at Empress State Building in Earl's Court, London.

Google's Chairman Eric Schmidt said £2.5 billion tax avoidance 'is called capitalism'

The head of the internet giant Google has defiantly defended his company's tax avoidance strategy claiming he was "proud" of the steps it had taken to cut its tax bill which were just "capitalism".

In an interview in New York Eric Schmidt, Google's Chairman, confirmed the company had no intention of paying more to the UK exchequer. Documents filed last month show that Google generated around £2.5 billion in UK sales last year but paid just £6m in corporation tax.

The Californian based search giant has also been revealed to have sheltered nearly $10bn of its revenues in Bermuda allowing it to avoid some $2bn in worldwide income taxes in 2011.

But Mr Schmidt said such schemes were legitimate and the company paid taxes "in the legally prescribed ways".

The following is five-part video showing how the psychopaths in power in the Western Empire once again engineered a fake media revolution, bombed innocent civilians, blamed their deaths on their target 'régime', and got away with it by presenting it all under the guise of 'humanitarian intervention'.

Part 1


Part 2