Russia's State Nuclear Energy Corporation Rosatom has won a contract to build and operate Jordan's first nuclear power plant. The $10 billion contract is one of the world's first reactor projects since the disastrous Fukushima leak of 2011.

The chairman of the Jordan Atomic Energy Commission (JAEC) Khaled Toukan said Atomstroyexport (ASE), Rosatom's international arm, will construct, and possibly operate, the plant which will provide 12 percent (2000 megawatts) of the kingdom's energy needs, and is due for completion in 2020.

ASE will finance 49 percent of the project and Jordan will pay for 51 percent and take a controlling share.

A or build-own-operate (BOO) scheme will be used to construct the two separate 1000-megawatt reactors 25 miles from the capital Amman, the International Business Times reported.

ASE used the same business model to finance a plant in Turkey, where it is building a 4.8 gigawatt facility worth $20 billion.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is expected to make an official state visit to Jordan in November, and will meet with Jordan's King Abdullah II.

Tokyo Electric Power Co must give a more thorough account of the Fukushima disaster and address "institutionalized lying" in the company, before it will be permitted to restart the Kashiwazaki Kariwa plant, according to a local governor.

"If they don't do what needs to be done, if they keep skimping on costs and manipulating information, they can never be trusted," Niigata Prefecture Governor Hirohiko Izumida told Reuters on Monday, adding that these limitations need to be overcome before the plant is restarted.
It is up to Izumida to approve plans to restart the reactor at the TEPCO-run Kashiwazaki Kariwa - the world's biggest nuclear complex, located on the Japan sea coast, north-west of Tokyo. His personal commission would examine both the causes and handling of the disaster at Fukushima and lay them alongside existing regulatory safeguards to ensure a similar crisis could not reoccur.

Angela Merkel was right. Leaders calling it "unprecedented breach of trust."

The National Security Agency monitored the phone conversations of 35 world leaders after being given the numbers by an official in another US government department, according to a classified document provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The confidential memo reveals that the NSA encourages senior officials in its "customer" departments, such the White House, State and the Pentagon, to share their "Rolodexes" so the agency can add the phone numbers of leading foreign politicians to their surveillance systems.

The document notes that one unnamed US official handed over 200 numbers, including those of the 35 world leaders, none of whom is named. These were immediately "tasked" for monitoring by the NSA.

The Justice Department for the first time has notified a criminal defendant that evidence being used against him came from a warrantless wiretap, a move that is expected to set up a Supreme Court test of whether such eavesdropping is constitutional.

Prosecutors filed such a notice late Friday in the case of Jamshid Muhtorov, who was charged in Colorado in January 2012 with providing material support to the Islamic Jihad Union, a designated terrorist organization based in Uzbekistan.

Mr. Muhtorov is accused of planning to travel abroad to join the militants and has pleaded not guilty. A criminal complaint against him showed that much of the government's case was based on intercepted e-mails and phone calls.

The government's notice allows Mr. Muhtorov's lawyer to ask a court to suppress the evidence by arguing that it derived from unconstitutional surveillance, setting in motion judicial review of the eavesdropping.

The New York Times reported on Oct. 17 that the decision by prosecutors to notify a defendant about the wiretapping followed a legal policy debate inside the Justice Department.

The debate began in June when Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. discovered that the department's National Security Division did not notify criminal defendants when eavesdropping without a warrant was an early link in an investigative chain that led to evidence used in court. As a result, none of the defendants knew that they had the right to challenge the warrantless wiretapping law.

Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward said a "rat's nest of concealment and lies" is at the heart of many Obama administration scandals and miscues, including the disastrous Obamacare website rollout.

"They need to review the this secret world and its power in their government because you run into this rats nest of concealment and lies time and time again then and now," Woodward said of the White House during his appearance on CBS' "Face the Nation" Sunday. "You get to a point where it's what do you worry about? Secret governments."

As for Obamacare, Woodward said "it clearly isn't working" and it connects to the idea that America possesses an "incredibly powerful government that gets on automatic pilot and you have people with inexperience who don't know about nuts and bolts questions. People who don't go in and say, 'Well, now is this going to work? Let's test it.'

An unidentified preschool in Richmond, Virginia is refusing to allow parents to pack their child's lunch from home, unless they have a doctor's note.

A letter from the school was recently posted by a mom on her blog My2CrazyCurls.com. She packed a lunch anyway for her son, and then got the letter again with a handwritten part at the top: "Ms Brooks, Please do not send a lunch to school unless a doctor's note is sent in connection with this letter."

The letter, also featured on the website Momdot.com, states:

TheBlaze reported on the chilling objective stated by Al Qaeda terrorists in the 2012 Benghazi attack - "We're here to kill Americans" - as a preview of a "60 Minutes" segment, "Benghazi."

The report aired Sunday and examines the horrific attack on the U.S. mission in Libya that took the lives of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans on Sept. 11, 2012, noting that there were many unheeded warnings about the attack as well as misinformation regarding what sparked it - i.e., it wasn't caused by an anti-Muslim YouTube video, rather it was an Al Qaeda operation from the beginning.

President Obama repeatedly assured Americans that after the Affordable Care Act became law, people who liked their health insurance would be able to keep it. But millions of Americans are getting or are about to get cancellation letters for their health insurance under Obamacare, say experts, and the Obama administration has known that for at least three years.

Four sources deeply involved in the Affordable Care Act tell NBC NEWS that 50 to 75 percent of the 14 million consumers who buy their insurance individually can expect to receive a "cancellation" letter or the equivalent over the next year because their existing policies don't meet the standards mandated by the new health care law. One expert predicts that number could reach as high as 80 percent. And all say that many of those forced to buy pricier new policies will experience "sticker shock."

None of this should come as a shock to the Obama administration. The law states that policies in effect as of March 23, 2010 will be "grandfathered," meaning consumers can keep those policies even though they don't meet requirements of the new health care law. But the Department of Health and Human Services then wrote regulations that narrowed that provision, by saying that if any part of a policy was significantly changed since that date -- the deductible, co-pay, or benefits, for example -- the policy would not be grandfathered.

Buried in Obamacare regulations from July 2010 is an estimate that because of normal turnover in the individual insurance market, "40 to 67 percent" of customers will not be able to keep their policy. And because many policies will have been changed since the key date, "the percentage of individual market policies losing grandfather status in a given year exceeds the 40 to 67 percent range."

Gen. Keith Alexander, the head of the embattled National Security Agency, is calling on governments to stop journalists from public disclosure of his agency's secret documents.

"I think it's wrong that that newspaper reporters have all these documents, the 50,000-whatever they have and are selling them and giving them out as if these-you know it just doesn't make sense," Alexander said in an interview with the Defense Department's "Armed With Science" blog.

"We ought to come up with a way of stopping it. I don't know how to do that. That's more of the courts and the policymakers but, from my perspective, it's wrong to allow this to go on," the NSA director added.

Gen. Alexander accused journalists of "selling" classified documents on the NSA's surveillance activities worldwide, insisting that media reports on his agency were a "dramatic, convenient lie."

Press TV has conducted an interview with Susan Lindauer, a former CIA asset from Washington, about the United States spying on its people as well as its European allies.

Below is an approximate transcription of the interview.

Press TV: How vast and extensive is this NSA spying program?

Lindauer: It has been revealed that the NSA spied on 124 billion phone conversations throughout the world in a one-month period. Thus it is enormous; it is beyond the scope of comprehension for ordinary citizens but the implications are vast because it is a Stasi program whereby it applies to the industrial espionage.

But it also allows the United States to impose our laws on other countries on an extraterritorial basis and we are hunting down citizens of foreign countries whose activities might very well be legal within their own country, but which violate our own US policies.

And then we are sabotaging them or even arresting them and extraditing them to the United States for prosecution and this goes well beyond terrorism cases. So, it is something that ordinary citizens should be afraid of; it is not just the government elite that should be. This is affecting the whole society.