GCHQ technicians watched as journalists took angle grinders and drills to computers after weeks of tense negotiations

New video footage has been released for the first time of the moment Guardian editors destroyed computers used to store top-secret documents leaked by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Under the watchful gaze of two technicians from the British government spy agency GCHQ, the journalists took angle-grinders and drills to the internal components, rendering them useless and the information on them obliterated.

The bizarre episode in the basement of the Guardian's London HQ was the climax of Downing Street's fraught interactions with the Guardian in the wake of Snowden's leak - the biggest in the history of western intelligence. The details are revealed in a new book - The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man - by the Guardian correspondent Luke Harding. The book, published next week, describes how the Guardian took the decision to destroy its own Macbooks after the government explicitly threatened the paper with an injunction.

In two tense meetings last June and July the cabinet secretary, Jeremy Heywood, explicitly warned the Guardian's editor, Alan Rusbridger, to return the Snowden documents.

Heywood, sent personally by David Cameron, told the editor to stop publishing articles based on leaked material from American's National Security Agency and GCHQ. At one point Heywood said: "We can do this nicely or we can go to law". He added: "A lot of people in government think you should be closed down."

Downing Street insiders admit they struggled to come to terms with Snowden's mega-leak, and the fact that the 29-year-old American was able to upload top secret British material while working at an NSA facility in faraway Hawaii. Snowden wasn't even a full-time NSA employee, but a private contractor, one of 850,000 Americans with access to top secret UK information. "We just sat up and thought: 'Oh my God!'" one Downing Street insider said.

China's new high-speed maneuvering warhead is a "great concern" because it appears designed for use with both nuclear and conventional Chinese military forces, a Pentagon intelligence official said Thursday.

Lee Fuell, a technical intelligence specialist with the Air Force National Air and Space Intelligence Center, said during a congressional China commission hearing the recently tested hypersonic glide vehicle "is basically a ballistic missile-launched system that gets the target - or gets the payload fast and high, pitches over, dives to hypersonic speed, and then basically just glides to the target."

"At this point, we think that's associated with their nuclear deterrent forces," Fuell said. "Of great concern would be if they were to apply the same technology and capability with a conventional warhead or even just without a warhead because of the kinetic energy that it has."

Combined with medium-range ballistic missiles "hypersonic vehicles of any kind - whether they're glide vehicles or cruise missiles - are extremely difficult to defend against because just the time is so compressed between initial detection, being able to get a track, being able to get a fire control solution," Fuell said.

The campaign by the French government, mass media and influential organizations to silence the Franco-Cameroonese humorist

Dieudonné M'Bala M'Bala continues to expose a radical split in perception within the French population. The official "mobilization" against the standup comedian, first called for by Interior Minister Manuel Valls at a ruling Socialist Party gathering last summer, portrays the entertainer as a dangerous anti-Semitic rabble rouser, whose "quenelle"* gesture is interpreted as a "Nazi salute in reverse".

For his fans and supporters, those accusations are false and absurd.

The most significant result of the Dieudonné uproar so far is probably the dawning realization, among more and more people, that the "Shoah", or Holocaust, functions as the semi-official State Religion of France.

On RTL television last January 10, the well-known nonconformist commentator Eric Zemmour (who happens to be Jewish) observed that it was "grotesque and ridiculous" to associate Dieudonné with the Third Reich. Zemmour described Dieudonné as a product of the French left's multiculturalism. "It's the left that has taught us since May '68 that it is prohibited to prohibit, that we must shock the bourgeois. It is the left that has turned the Shoah into the supreme religion of the Republic..."

Zemmour suggested that Dieudonné was provoking "the respectable left-wing bourgeoisie" and that he "reproaches Jews for wanting to conserve the monopoly of suffering and steal primacy in suffering from descendants of slavery".

The debt of the U.S. government has increased $6.666 trillion since President Barack Obama took office on Jan. 20, 2009, according to the latest numbers released by the Treasury Department.

When President Obama was first inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2009, the debt of the U.S. government was $10,626,877,048,913.08, according to the Treasury Department's Bureau of the Public Debt. As of Jan. 31, 2014, the latest day reported, the debt was $17,293,019,654,983.61 - an increase of $6,666,142,606,070.53 since Obama's first inauguration.

The US National Security Agency likely collects intelligence on congressional lawmakers and members of their staff, a Justice Department official admitted at a committee hearing on Tuesday.

Deputy Attorney General James Cole of the US Department of Justice testified during a House Judiciary Committee hearing which was examining proposals to reform the NSA surveillance policies that have been revealed in an ongoing series of disclosures since June. Among the most damning revelations leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden was the realization that the NSA indiscriminately forces companies to provide phone records belonging to millions of Americans.

Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA.) pressed Cole Tuesday on whether the NSA dragnet includes the number codes that pertain to congressional offices.

"Mr. Cole, do you collect 202-225 and four digits afterwards?" Issa asked, as quoted by the National Journal.

"We probably do, Mr. Congressman," Cole replied. "But we're not allowed to look at any of those, however, unless we have reasonable, articulable suspicion that those numbers are related to a known terrorist threat."

Texas' oil and gas regulator has opened a new investigation into allegations that methane is contaminating North Texas water after residents complained that independent sampling by university researchers revealed high levels of the explosive gas in their residential wells, the state agency and scientists said.

Further analysis by another independent scientist, Geoffrey Thyne, of testing done by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and natural gas company Range Resources indicates the contamination is spreading to more wells and the levels are increasing in some cases. Thyne said his preliminary analysis strengthens his belief that the contamination originates at wells drilled by Fort Worth-based Range.

"The leak continues and it's spreading," Thyne told The Associated Press. "I can say, based on the current data, there are at least two other wells that show the same source ... which is the Range well."

The Texas Railroad Commission, the state agency that oversees oil and gas drilling, opened its new investigation in August, spokeswoman Ramona Nye said in an email. Additional information will be released when the investigation is complete, possibly in February, she said.

The Missing Times: News Media Complicity in the UFO Cover-Up is a book written by independent journalist Terry Hansen in 2000. Having seen it referenced in several books on UFOs from the last decade or so and recommended by several experts in the field, I decided to check it out. As our regular readers will know, we at Sott.net like to keep up to date on the various oddities, anomalies, and instances of 'high strangeness' that pop into our reality on a regular basis. And, being an alternative news website that analyzes and comments on mainstream media coverage (i.e., propaganda) of everything from weather to warfare, the book's focus on the inner workings of media coverage on the topic suggested it might be right up our alley, so to speak. As it turns out, The Missing Times is a great resource for information on censorship and propaganda in general, not just UFOs and media, and it has some far-ranging applications, as we'll see.

First of all, a bit of an overview of the book itself: it begins with a short introduction on the way news media has covered (or not covered) big UFO stories, particularly the 1975 Malmstrom Air Force Base UFO/ICBM encounters. Widely reported in the local and regional press, it took a full two years for these highly sensational (i.e., newsworthy) events to reach the national news.

Hansen observes that there are two realities in media: the official reality, represented by major national news corporations (which reflect official government views), and folk reality, which is often represented in local or regional, 'small-town' reporting. UFO stories, in particular, often make it into the local press, where they're reported fairly accurately, but rarely if ever do they get serious coverage in the national press. And when they do, it's usually because the story has already become so large that they need to cover it or risk looking like they are censoring it. Even then, their reporting is rarely if ever serious or objective. Rather, it's loaded with 'spin', name-calling, and 'wink-and-nod' levity. What's the reason?

The ferocious row over the Kremlin's notorious anti-gay law in the run-up to the Sochi Olympics has sparked a bout of Russia-bashing that is not only often unfair, but also counter-productive. Russia's vaguely worded law, approved by Vladimir Putin last summer, bans the promotion of homosexuality to minors. It is an unnecessary, clumsy piece of legislation, in many respects similar to the Thatcher-era Section 28, and is designed solely to boost support for Putin in Russia's conservative heartland. It has also triggered a spike in homophobic violence, the subject of worldwide protests today in support of Russia's LGBT community, and a Dispatches documentary on Channel 4.

But while western opponents of the Kremlin's law may have noble intentions, their criticism has far too often been both hysterical and hypocritical. Condemnation has also at times resembled hate speech, as in Hugh Laurie's recent suggestion that Russians have nothing whatsoever of value to offer the world. Laurie's outburst was mild, however, compared to statements by Stephen Fry and Jay Leno, who have both likened the Kremlin's law to Nazi persecution of Jews.

I have no wish to defend Putin or the hateful anti-gay comments being made by Russian politicians and celebrities. Life in Russia for LGBT people is often deeply unpleasant, and they deserve the support of the international community. But a sense of perspective is in order, especially if critics want to claim the moral high ground. Otherwise they play straight into the hands of the Kremlin-run media, whose raison d'etre is increasingly founded on its gleeful willingness to highlight western inconsistencies. The new legislation is certainly not, as US-based gay rights activists have claimed, "one of the most draconian anti-gay laws on the planet".

An Islamic militant group in Russia's North Caucasus claimed responsibility for twin suicide bombings in the southern city of Volgograd last month and posted a video threatening to strike the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.


Source: Associated Press

Corporatocracy is distinctly the dominate practice when it comes to doing business with the federal government. The once embryonic relationships between favored companies and agency bureaucrats, have germinated into distinctive hybrid organisms. Grafting into self-generating species resistant and virtually immune from pest control methods can be found in every area of government expenditures. The big daddy of cozy dealing is that preverbal military-industrial-security complex.

Who can forget all the government money spent in Iraq and Afghanistan that went to favored corporations with no bid contracts? A prime example of this practice is the notorious Cheney affiliated company, Halliburton Made $39.5 Billion on Iraq War.

"According to the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan, the level of corruption by defense contractors may be as high as $60 billion. Disciplined soldiers that would traditionally do many of the tasks are commissioned by private and publicly listed companies.

Even without the graft, the costs of paying for these services are higher than paying government employees or soldiers to do them because of the profit motive involved. No-bid contracting - when companies get to name their price with no competing bid - didn't lower legitimate expenses."

However, this sum is merely chump change when compared to the video report that Rumsfeld Announces $2.3 Trillion Missing from Pentagon. It is one thing to provide contracts to buddy companies, but it quite a different and an outrageous matter to abandon even the appearance of accounting audits of public funds.