Leading members of the House Armed Services Committee emerged from a classified briefing on the Edward Snowden leaks Wednesday afternoon "shocked" at the amount of information he reportedly leaked beyond the NSA surveillance programs.

Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), chairman of the Armed Service panel's Intelligence, Emerging Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee and also a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said the briefing on the defense consequences of Snowden's leaks was "very highly classified," and therefore details couldn't be discussed.

Thornberry did say that lawmakers "left the briefing disturbed and angered" after hearing that the leaks by the former Booz Allen Hamilton employee "went well beyond programs associated with the NSA and data collection."

In a speech during Thursday morning's National Prayer Breakfast, President Barack Obama acknowledged, "It's also clear that around the world, freedom of religion is under threat."

"No society can truly succeed unless it guarantees the rights of all its people, including religious minorities," he added later.

The Obama administration has been harshly criticized by the Catholic church and civil liberties organizations concerned that Obamacare mandates that organizations provide their employees free access to contraceptives through their health care plans, even if their religious faith calls contraception a sin.

This is part one of a transcript of my September 12, 2013 Interview with Ian-Hughes

In his forthcoming book Imperfect Design: How Our Psychology Threatens Our World, Ian Hughes brings together his experience in science, psychology and political science to demonstrate that a small proportion of people with dangerous personality disorders are responsible for most of the violence and greed that scars our world. His blog disorderedworld.com has just been shortlisted in the "Top 10 Political Blogs" in Ireland.

R.K.: This is the Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show, WNJC 1360 AM out of Washington Township and reaching metro Philadelphia and South New Jersey, sponsored by Opednews.com. My guest for this portion of the show is Ian Hughes. I am speaking to Ian, he's in Ireland. What part of Ireland are you in, Ian?

I.H.: I'm in Dublin at the moment Rob, I'm originally from the North though.

R.K.: Okay. Ian is the author of a book in process, Imperfect Design, and he has a website, disorderedworld.com. He's a government adviser in science and technology and I'm going to talk to Ian about pathological people. The personality disorders and psychopaths because that's what his book is about. So welcome to the show.

Threats to the rights of gay people in Russia are an issue that has been "invented" abroad, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said in an interview broadcast late Thursday.

"This situation has caused a commotion in other countries. I think it is an invented problem," Medvedev said in an interview with CNN, according to a transcript released by the Kremlin.

A law passed by Russia last year that forbids the promotion of non-traditional sexual relationships toward children has been widely condemned and has overshadowed the Winter Olympics, due to open in Sochi next month.

According to the London Evening Standard, a top British prosecutor has "warned that Britons who travel to join the Syrian conflict will face prosecution and potential life sentences on their return."

Sue Hemming said it was a crime to fight in another country even if it was to topple a "loathsome" dictator such as president Bashar Assad.

The head of counter-terrorism at the Crown Prosecution Service said Britons could also face charges for attending rebel training camps.

Her comments, in an interview with the Evening Standard, come as seven British residents including two London women await trial over charges connected to the Syrian conflict.

They follow a recent surge in arrests by police and a warning by the Met's counter-terrorism chief about the growing number of young Britons either traveling to Syria or attempting to go." (Brits who fight in Syria face life in jail, London Evening Standard, February 3, 2014)

What the British prosecutor fails to address is that the British "freedom fighters" are being recruited with the full support of the British government of Prime Minister David Cameron in defiance of UK laws.

The trial this week of a Rwandan genocide suspect in a Paris courtroom is a well-earned victory for the French human rights groups who lobbied so hard and so long for justice. The milestone trial signals the end of France as a safe haven for génocidaries. But more than this, the trial is likely to see intense public scrutiny of one of the great scandals of the past century - the role of France in the 1994 genocide of the Tutsi of Rwanda, which for 20 years journalists and activists have tried so hard to expose.

Pascal Simbikangwa, the defendant in Paris, is said to have been a member of an inner circle of power in Rwanda that devised genocide as a planned political campaign. Developed by Hutu ideologues, it was intended to prevent a power-sharing system of government that was to include the minority Tutsi. The genocide claimed up to a million lives.

The State Department recently issued a collection of previously classified documents that shed new light on the Central Intelligence Agency's role in the June 1954 coup in Guatemala that ousted the president, Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán. Mr. Arbenz had clashed with the United Fruit Company, which for many years exercised decisive influence in Guatemala, and the Eisenhower administration feared that he was leading his country toward Communism. The coup brought Col. Carlos Castillo Armas to power and set off more than three decades of civil conflict and repression in which hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans were killed.

The French government is fighting to break a school boycott by parents convinced that their children are being taught masturbation and a non-existent "gender theory" as part of an effort to promote equality between the sexes.

Education Minister Vincent Peillon on Wednesday told head teachers to summon parents who have withdrawn their children from school to explain that rumours about the government's ABCD of Equality programme are untrue and remind them that school attendance is a legal requirement.

"A certain number of extremists have decided to lie, to frighten parents," Peillon told journalists. "What we are doing in schools is teach the values of the republic and, therefore, respect between men and women."

He also sent a message of "solidarity" to teachers, judging it "unacceptable" that their professionalism should be questioned.

Most of what Americans think they know about capitalism and communism is total nonsense. Here's a clearer picture.

As the commentary around the recent deaths of Nelson Mandela, Amiri Baraka and Pete Seeger made abundantly clear, most of what Americans think they know about capitalism and communism is arrant nonsense. This is not surprising, given our country's history of Red Scares designed to impress that anti-capitalism is tantamount to treason. In 2014, though, we are too far removed from the Cold War-era threat of thermonuclear annihilation to continue without taking stock of the hype we've been made, despite Harry Allen's famous injunction, to believe. So, here are seven bogus claims people make about communism and capitalism.

1. Only communist economies rely on state violence.

Obviously, no private equity baron worth his weight in leveraged buyouts will ever part willingly with his fortune, and any attempt to achieve economic justice (like taxation) will encounter stiff opposition from the ownership class. But state violence (like taxation) is inherent in every set of property rights a government can conceivably adopt - including those that allowed the aforementioned hypothetical baron to amass said fortune.

In capitalism, competing ownership claims are settled by the state's willingness to use violence to exclude all but one claimant. If I lay claim to one of David Koch's mansions, libertarian that he is, he's going to rely on big government and its guns to set me right. He owns that mansion because the state says he does and threatens to imprison anyone who disagrees. Where there isn't a state, whoever has the most violent power determines who gets the stuff, be that a warlord, a knight, the mafia or a gang of cowboys in the Wild West. Either by vigilantes or the state, property rights rely on violence.

The United Nations is hammering the Vatican for what a panel calls a failure to fully address sex abuse in the Catholic Church. "The Holy See has consistently placed the preservation of the reputation of the church and the protection of the perpetrators above children's best interests," the Committee on the Rights of the Child says, per the New York Times. The Vatican "has not acknowledged the extent of the crimes committed, has not taken the necessary measures to address cases of child sexual abuse and to protect children, and has adopted policies and practices which have led to the continuation of the abuse by and the impunity of the perpetrators."

The church "still places children in many countries at high risk of sexual abuse, as dozens of child sexual offenders are reported to be still in contact with children," the panel says. Leaders must "immediately remove" priests linked to child abuse. The Vatican, the BBC notes, responded that while it "takes note of the concluding observations," it "does, however, regret to see an attempt to interfere with Catholic Church teaching on the dignity of the human person." The church also "reiterates its commitment to defending and protecting the rights of the child." The BBC notes that the Vatican has denied UN requests for records on the abuse; church officials say they only release the information when a government seeks it in a legal case.