Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister for Arab and African Affairs Hossein Amir Abdollahian lashed out at certain countries for supplying military aid to the Syrian rebels, and voiced Iran's steadfast opposition to foreign military intervention in Syria.

Speaking on Thursday, Amir Abdollahian reaffirmed Iran's support for a political solution to the Syria unrest and warned that foreign interference could further endanger security in Syria and the region.

As regards reports that Syria might have plans to use chemical weapons during the ongoing turmoil in the country, the Iranian official said certain countries bring up such allegations to achieve their vicious objectives.

He said that Syria will neither use chemical weapons nor allow "foreign-backed irresponsible" militants to possibly use such weapons.

Syria is past the period of security crisis but certain parties send weapons into this country and allege that Syria might use chemical weapons in a bid to pursue specific objectives, Amir Abdollahian added.

His remarks came a few days after US President Barack Obama claimed that Syria intends to use chemical weapons against the militants and warned against the consequences of such a move.

NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen also warned on Tuesday that any use of chemical weapons by Syria's government against gunmen would prompt an immediate military response.

Damascus has strongly rejected the allegations.

As President Obama insists on a speedy end to the war in Afghanistan, his administration has other plans. A facility owned by the private security force once known as Blackwater has been awarded a $22 million contract to house US troops through 2015.

The private military company Academi - formerly Blackwater and, more recently, Xe - is the proud winner of a no-bid contract that will keep them profiting off Uncle Sam's wars for the next few years. Under a deal first reported by Wired.com's Danger Room, Academi will assist the recently created US Special Operations Joint Task Force - Afghanistan with housing facilities and office space on their massive 10-acre compound in Kabul named Camp Integrity.

According to Danger Room reporter Spencer Ackerman, Academi won the rights to lease Camp Integrity to the special ops team through May 2015, providing accommodations for some 7,000 elite troops.

US Pres. Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden have both insisted in recent weeks that the United States' war in Afghanistan will end by 2014 and all combatant forces will be removed. Despite a deadline firmly in place, though, the Pentagon has plans to keep upwards of 10,000 troops overseas in order to conduct so-called training and counterterrorism operations for the unforeseeable future. Now thanks to Academi, thousands troops within those Special Operations Forces will be provided a place to stay on their privately-owned and operated facility.

"We've seen these kind of close, intertwined relationships in the field between the public and private forces before," Peter Singer, a scholar at the Brookings Institution, explains to Ackerman. "The US military and the CIA, reportedly, have hired these companies to do everything from building bases, running the facilities and logistics, to serving as the guard forces in both Iraq and Afghanistan. You get to a certain point where you wonder where the US military and private military roles begin and end. But to me, the interesting question is what have we actually learned from these past experiences?"

Thai authorities have announced plans to charge former prime minister Abhisit Vejjajiva with murder over the 2010 death of a taxi driver who was shot by government soldiers during civil unrest in Bangkok.

The intent to charge Mr Abhisit and his former deputy was announced after a meeting of Thailand's Department of Special Investigation (DSI), police and Thai prosecutors.

"The tripartite meeting has decided to charge former prime minister Abhisit Vejjajiva and former deputy Suthep Thaugsuban under article 288," said DSI chief Tarit Pengdith, referring to the murder provision under Thailand's criminal code.

In September, an inquest found that taxi driver Phan Kamkong was shot and killed by Thai soldiers during political violence around anti-government Red Shirt protests in 2010.

An earlier court ruling found the taxi driver was killed in a volley of army bullets when he ran out of an apartment building to see what was going on after hearing gunfire.

Mr Abhisit and Mr Suthep are expected to be questioned next week.

About 90 people were killed and nearly 1,900 were wounded in a series of street clashes between demonstrators and security forces, which culminated in a bloody military crackdown.

Military drones used to track terrorists or insurgents in Afghanistan have also been flying across the U.S. homeland. Newly released documents show U.S. drone flights by the Air Force, Marine Corps and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for the first time.

The Air Force has tested drones in U.S. skies ranging from hand-launched Ravens to the larger Reaper drones responsible for targeting and killing people overseas - all recorded through the Federal Aviation Administration licenses required to fly in national airspace. That information became public through a Freedom of Information Act request from the nonprofit digital rights organization Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

"The FAA recently announced it wants to slow down drone integration into U.S. skies due to privacy concerns," the EFF said. "We are hopeful this indicates the agency is finally changing its views."

But the advocacy organization noted that the FAA documents don't show any oversight of how drone flights could affect the privacy and civil liberties of Americans.

The advocates run a U.S. drone census that aims to track drone flights made in the homeland by the U.S. military, law enforcement agencies, local police departments and universities. Part of that effort has involved requesting the FAA to release documents showing what agencies and organizations applied for licenses to fly drones in U.S. national airspace.

A veteran BBC TV and radio presenter was charged with three counts of indecent assault by British police on Wednesday, the latest high-profile figure to be questioned since a sex scandal erupted at Britain's publicly funded broadcaster.

The charges will be a further embarrassment for the BBC, which was thrown into turmoil when it was revealed in October that one of its former top stars, the late Jimmy Savile, had been one of Britain's most prolific child sex offenders.

Stuart Hall, 82, best known for hosting the popular TV programme "It's a Knockout" in the 1970s and 80s and who still appears on radio, was not charged with rape, police said.

"The offences are alleged to have been committed between 1974 and 1984 and to involve three girls aged between 9 and 16 years," police said in a statement.

From the start, I thought it was a bit useless to petition the FDA to label genetically modified food. There has been plenty of documented evidence of the FDA's charge forward on releasing GMOs to the American public despite safety concern amongst FDA scientists when GMOs were first introduced into the food supply.

Regardless, I drank the Kool Aid that the Just Label It campaign was pouring. Why not? At least, it would be good for awareness.

When JLI submitted over 1 million signatures to the FDA asking them to label GMOs, and the FDA only counted them as 394 official comments, the people got pissed. What did you expect from the FDA? Did anybody really think they would implement immediate GMO labeling?

Syria will not use any chemical or biological weapons against its own people. The Obama Administration and company are just recycling the same lines that were used months earlier against Damascus.

These statements are disingenuous and hollow. They can easily be deconstructed as rhetoric. All we need to do it look at recent history.

In 2011, were not similar charges put forward against another Arab country? Were they not claiming that the late Muammar Qaddafi would use chemical weapons against his own population? Was it not claimed even earlier that Qaddafi and the Libyan military had brought in black-skinned African mercenaries to kill Libyan citizens? Or that Libyan jets were killing Libyan protesters? What happened to the genocide in Benghazi? Now there is nothing but silence and lost memories. Claims were made, morality and responsibility were invoked, and then a rising Arab country was bombarded. An engine of economic progress in Africa was halted in its tracks overnight and an entire society robbed.

There was also the textbook case of Iraq even before the lies about the Libyan Jamahiriya. Did not the Bush Jr. Administration, Tony Blair, and their circle of war criminals-in-office not lie to the entire international community and say that Iraq had a nuclear weapons program and weapons of mass destruction in 2003? What happened to those WMDs? This is not something that can easily be scoffed at. More than one million Iraqis died over the lies conjured by the Anglo-American duo. Not to mention the ecological damage and the intellectual genocide perpetrated against Iraq's intelligentsia and professional class.

Let us be clear, Syria threatened to use chemical weapons against any invading force on July 23, 2012. Firstly, the statement was made in a defensive context. Secondly, it was directed against military threats. This is very different from planning on using chemical weapons against your own citizens, specifically civilians.

Due to its close proximity to Washington DC, in recent years Maryland has become one of the worst police states in the country.

Last month, we reported on a botched FBI raid in Maryland, where unarmed teenagers were shot at simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Then, just the other day in Baltimore, an activist and blogger had his house surrounded by police over a trumped-up charge that was over 3 years old.

Now, in a more rural area of Maryland, a man named Terry Porter became the target of a massive manhunt involving FBI and state police after being reported to be a "survivalist" with a "collection of guns" who outlined his anger over the presidential reelection to an undercover officer.

This situation apparently stemmed from an anonymous tip from someone who reported Terry to the police because he owned guns and invested in a bomb shelter.

Communist East Germany allowed Western drug companies to use its medical patients as unwitting guinea pigs for tests with untried pharmaceuticals in return for hundreds of thousands in hard currency, a television documentary by Germany's ARD television channel has revealed.

The disturbing disclosures about the former communist state's patients-for-cash scheme comes only weeks after an admission by the Swedish furniture giant Ikea that East German political prisoners were used to make its products before the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989.

The ARD documentary Tests and the Dead, which was aired for the first time this week, sheds light on other dubious practices East Germany resorted to in an attempt to sustain its failing economy.

The film reveals how Western pharmaceutical companies deliberately turned to financially strapped Eastern Bloc countries in their search for human guinea pigs after the 1960s Thalidomide scandal, which had suddenly obliged them to carry out rigorous tests on their products before they could be sold.

The FBI records the emails of nearly all US citizens, including members of congress, according to NSA whistleblower William Binney. In an interview with RT, he warned that the government can use this information against anyone.

Binney, one of the best mathematicians and code breakers in the history of the National Security Agency, resigned in 2001. He claimed he no longer wanted to be associated with alleged violations of the Constitution, such as how the FBI engages in widespread and pervasive surveillance through powerful devices called 'Naris.'

This year, Binney received the Callaway award, an annual prize that recognizes those who champion constitutional rights and American values at great risk to their personal or professional lives.