The House Judiciary Committee approved a reauthorization of the FISA Amendments Act, which gives the government broad powers to spy on the communications of Americans as long as one of the parties is reasonably believed to be outside the U.S. Just yesterday, Senator's Ron Wyden and Mark Udall received a response from the NSA, whom they had asked for a number of how many persons inside the U.S. have been spied on by the NSA. Well NSA said they can't say because it would violate your privacy. Aaron Swartz, Executive Director of Demand Progress discusses.

Smokers, beware: tobacco penalties under President Obama's Affordable Care Act could subject millions of smokers to fees costing thousands of dollars, making healthcare more expensive for them than Americans with other unhealthy habits.

The Affordable Care Act, which critics have also called "Obamacare", could subject smokers to premiums that are 50 percent higher than usual, starting next Jan 1. Health insurers will be allowed to charge smokers penalties that overweight Americans or those with other health conditions would not be subjected to.

A 60-year-old smoker could pay penalties as high as $5,100, in addition to the premiums, the Associated Press reports. A 55-year-old smoker's penalty could reach $4,250. The older a smoker is, the higher the penalty will be.

Nearly one in every five U.S. adults smokes, with a higher number of low-income people addicted to the unhealthy habit. Even though smokers are more likely to develop heart disease, cancer and lung problems and would therefore require more health care, the penalties might devastate those who need help the most - including retirees, older Americans, and low-income individuals.

On January the 17th, 32-year-old Belgium MP Laurent Louis, considered one of the most controversial and demonized national political figures, delivered the most powerful truth ever told in a political arena.

First, he explained why he voted against the Belgian support to war in Mali, that it was based on lies and rooted in neo-colonialism. Then he expressed his disgust and wrath against the criminal foreign policies of the Western elite and its submission to foreign financial and interest groups, before scolding his colleagues who voted for interventionist war with "fuck you's". Finally, he says that the war on terror is a lie and that 9/11 was a false flag to justify aggressive military action in the Muslim world.

Click on the "Captions" icon to get the English subtitles. You won't be disappointed.

Lebanese intelligence forces have detained a local man on charges of collaboration with Israel's Mossad intelligence agency for more than two decades.

The man, identified as Ali Taufiq Yari, was paid some 600,000 US dollars for passing on classified information about the Hezbollah resistance movement and the Lebanese Army to the Tel Aviv regime, Al-Manar television network reported on Monday.

The former city council member in Baalbek passed the most significant information on to the Israeli intelligence officials during the war of aggression Israel launched against Lebanon in 2006.

Yari, who had reportedly joined Mossad in 1990, was described by Lebanese officials as the highest paid spy to be captured so far.

I was shocked when I heard that Mary Jo White, a former U.S. Attorney and a partner for the white-shoe Wall Street defense firm Debevoise and Plimpton, had been named the new head of the SEC.

I thought to myself: Couldn't they have found someone who wasn't a key figure in one of the most notorious scandals to hit the SEC in the past two decades? And couldn't they have found someone who isn't a perfect symbol of the revolving-door culture under which regulators go soft on suspected Wall Street criminals, knowing they have million-dollar jobs waiting for them at hotshot defense firms as long as they play nice with the banks while still in office?

I'll leave it to others to chronicle the other highlights and lowlights of Mary Jo White's career, and focus only on the one incident I know very well: her role in the squelching of then-SEC investigator Gary Aguirre's investigation into an insider trading incident involving future Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack. While representing Morgan Stanley at Debevoise and Plimpton, White played a key role in this inexcusable episode.

As I explained a few years ago in my story, "Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?": The attorney Aguirre joined the SEC in 2004, and two days into his job was asked to look into reports of suspicious trading activity involving a hedge fund called Pequot Capital, and specifically its megastar trader, Art Samberg. Samberg had made suspiciously prescient trades ahead of the acquisition of a firm called Heller Financial by General Electric, pocketing about $18 million in a period of weeks by buying up Heller shares before the merger, among other things.

"It was as if Art Samberg woke up one morning and a voice from the heavens told him to start buying Heller," Aguirre recalled. "And he wasn't just buying shares - there were some days when he was trying to buy three times as many shares as were being traded that day."

On Wednesday Russia blamed Western countries for creating the current turmoil in Africa by arming Libyan rebels, Timothy Heritage and Gabriela Baczynska of Reuters report.

"Those whom the French and Africans are fighting now in Mali are the [same] people who ... our Western partners armed so that they would overthrow the Gaddafi regime," Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told a news conference.

The toppling of Libyan ruler Muammar Qaddafi led to "perhaps the greatest proliferation of weapons of war from any modern conflict," Emergency Director of Human Rights Watch Peter Bouckaert told The Telegraph.

The following is an excerpt from A Secret History of Torture (Counterpoint Press, 2012)

Two days after the 9/11 attacks, during a meeting of Bush's closest advisers, Cofer Black declared the country's enemies must be left with 'flies walking across their eyeballs'. It was an image of death so striking that Black became known among the President's inner circle as 'the flies on the eyeballs guy'. Unlike its allies - the UK, France, Spain and Israel - the US had little experience of serious terrorist attacks on its own territory, nor any understanding of the need for a patient response. Bush was impressed by Black. Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, could see that the President wanted to kill somebody. The problem, as successive attorneys general had warned one president after another, was that they did not enjoy unfettered powers of life and death over the nation's enemies. The CIA had been banned from carrying out assassinations since 1976.

The President turned to his Department of Defense and found that it had no cogent, off-the-shelf plan for responding to an attack of this nature on the United States. The CIA, on the other hand, did have something in its arsenal: it had the rendition program.

Since 1987, the CIA had been quietly apprehending terrorists and 'rendering' them to the US for prosecution, without any regard for lawful extradition processes. In 1995, President Bill Clinton - apparently with the full encouragement of his vice-president, Al Gore - agreed that a number of terrorists could be taken to a third country, including countries known to use torture, a process that would come to be known as extraordinary rendition.

There is a growing national movement to end the drone warfare that has been expanded during the Obama years. Even as Obama gives an inaugural speech that many thought to be inspiring and suggestive of change, reports indicate that the drone program continues to escalate. So, we must continue to do everything we can to stop the killer drones.

I believe Obama became a war criminal in 2009, a few days after he took the oath of office and swore he would uphold the constitution. It was only a few days after his first inauguration that he ordered his first drone strike, killing innocent people and beginning his legacy as a murderer. Drone warfare is immoral killing hundreds of innocent children, women, and men. It is illegal, constituting extra-judicial killing. Obama has a "kill list" that he looks at every week and makes a unilateral decision that this person should die. He also targets people who are engaged in what is considered suspicious-looking activities whether he knows who they are or not.

I made plans to join others in an action of nonviolent civil resistance organized by the National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance (NCNR). We wanted to expose Obama's hypocrisy on Inauguration Day as he swore to uphold and defend the US Constitution, even as he defiles its most basic principles through drone warfare.

PAKISTAN

Name | Age | Gender

Noor Aziz | 8 | male
Abdul Wasit | 17 | male
Noor Syed | 8 | male
Wajid Noor | 9 | male
Syed Wali Shah | 7 | male
Ayeesha | 3 | female
Qari Alamzeb | 14| male
Shoaib | 8 | male
Hayatullah KhaMohammad | 16 | male

Blogger discovers development with 'striking similarity' to already discovered camps next to existing an prison.

Analysis of updated Google Earth satellite images has identified what appears to be another of North Korea's notorious prison camps.

Blogger Curtis Melvin, who publishes North Korean Economy Watch, discovered a new development next to existing prison Camp 14, sharing 3km of fencing, and near the disused Camp 18.

While not confirmed as a new prison, Melvin observed a "striking similarity" to existing camps and a visible security fence. He has speculated that the area is an extension of Camp 14, a new camp or a new type of facility altogether.

Melvin said this new area was constructed some time between December 2006 and September 2011, and has identified what appear to be guard posts, a staff entrance, residential units and an abandoned coal mine.