After seven years of litigation, two trips to a federal appeals court and $3.8 million worth of lawyer time, the public has finally learned why a wheelchair-bound Stanford University scholar was cuffed, detained and denied a flight from San Francisco to Hawaii: FBI human error.

FBI agent Kevin Kelley was investigating Muslims in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2004 when he checked the wrong box on a terrorism form, erroneously placing Rahinah Ibrahim on the no-fly list.

What happened next was the real shame. Instead of admitting to the error, high-ranking President Barack Obama administration officials spent years covering it up. Attorney General Eric Holder, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and a litany of other government officials claimed repeatedly that disclosing the reason Ibrahim was detained, or even acknowledging that she'd been placed on a watch list, would cause serious damage to the U.S. national security. Again and again they asserted the so-called "state secrets privilege" to block the 48-year-old woman's lawsuit, which sought only to clear her name.

Holder went so far as to tell the judge presiding over the case that this assertion of the state secrets privilege was fully in keeping with Obama's much-ballyhooed 2009 executive branch reforms of the privilege, which stated the administration would invoke state secrets sparingly.

They are already sewing your funeral gown, Venezuela. They are now ready to welcome you back to that world of the lobotomized, destroyed nations that are fully submissive to Western political and economic interests - Indonesia, Philippines, Paraguay, Uganda, Kenya, Qatar, Bahrain, and almost the entire Eastern Europe. There are so many places like that - it is impossible to list them all.

They want you back in their deadly embrace; they want you to be corrupt and hopeless, as you were before the "Bolivarian Revolution".

They want you to be the top oil exporter, but with all those horrific slums hanging, like relentless nightmares, over your cities. They want your elites and your military top brass to speak English, to play golf, to drive luxury cars and to commit treason after treason, as they used to commit treason for decades, before your brave predecessor, President Hugo Chavez, began serving and literally saving the poor, in Venezuela and all over Latin America.

Those who are planning to destroy you, those who belong to the so called 'opposition', in their heads, are already portioning you; they are dividing your beautiful body - fighting over which parts should be taken where and by whom. They are arguing which pieces of you should stay at home, and what should be taken abroad - a leg, an arm, and your deep melancholic eyes, the color of the profound pools under the mighty waterfalls of Canaima. They want to sell your jet-black hair, as black as those evenings in the mountains, or like that endless night sky above Ciudad Bolivar.

They want everything, all that is under your skin as well as what is deep inside your body. They want your skin, too, as well as your heart.

Former Texas congressman Ron Paul has announced a petition aiming to secure clemency for Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency whistleblower who revealed extensive US surveillance programs and ignited a national debate on Americans' privacy.

In a video released Thursday on the Ron Paul Channel, an online network the libertarian started last summer, he calls on supporters to sign the petition in an attempt to bring Snowden home to the US safely before his temporary visa in Russia expires in July.

"Edward Snowden sacrificed his livelihood, citizenship, and freedom by exposing the disturbing scope of the NSA's worldwide spying program," he said. "Thanks to one man's courageous actions, Americans know about the truly egregious ways their government is spying on them."

Paul worked as a physician before serving in Congress intermittently in the 1970s and 1980s then again from 1997 until 2013. He is best known for his libertarian positions, which often put him at odds with members of the Republican party. Paul has repeatedly lent public support to Snowden since the former NSA contractor came forward to admit he leaked classified documents to journalists affiliated with the Guardian and the Washington Post.

Ukraine's President Viktor Yanukovich and opposition leaders have signed an EU brokered agreement on ending the political crisis in the country.

The Ukrainian opposition representatives included the leader of the UDAR political party, Vitaly Klitschko, the head of the Batkivshchyna opposition party, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, and the leader of the nationalist Svoboda opposition party, Oleg Tyagnibok.

The breakthrough agreement was witnessed by EU foreign ministers who brokered the deal, including Poland's Radoslaw Sikorski and Germany's Frank-Walter Steinmeier, as well as Director at the Continental Europe Department of the French Foreign Ministry, Eric Fournier.

Russia's Human Rights Commissioner Vladimir Lukin, who was present at the negotiations, noted the positive dynamic of the talks.

"We got acquainted with our partners' position, and now we understand it," he said. However, he added that "the biggest difficulty is that the situation is constantly changing" and there is no clarity as to who will fulfill the agreements and how.

Britain's Prince William has called for the "despicable" illegal trade in elephants, rhinos and tigers to be stamped out, ahead of an international conference on Thursday to clamp down on poaching.

Representatives from 50 states have gathered in London for the talks, aimed at improving law enforcement in the -- mainly African -- countries where poaching is rife and stemming growing demand in Asia.

The London Summit on Illegal Wildlife Trade is being hosted by the British government and Princes Charles and William, who called it a turning point in the fight against trafficking.

"Tonight we are here with a single, shared purpose -- to use our collective influence to put a stop to the illegal killing and trafficking of some of our world's most iconic and endangered species," he told guests at an evening reception.

"Never before has a group like this come together -- in these numbers -- to stop the illegal trade in wildlife. All of us in this room have a duty to make sure that tomorrow, 13th February, is a date that marks the beginning of the end of this despicable trade."

The leaked private phone conversation between senior US State Department official Victoria Nuland and the American ambassador to Ukraine - in which Nuland is heard to disparage the European Union with a vulgar expletive - comes as a welcome relief. It is a moment of clarity, in which the US government inadvertently comes clean on its hidden agenda...

All the elusive speculation about what Washington's agenda in Ukraine is now laid to rest. Nuland's own words make it clear that the US agenda is all about orchestrating regime change in Kiev. Needless to say, that constitutes an infringement of that country's sovereignty and should now be a matter of applying sanctions under international law against the US.

It also undermines the political cause of protesters in Maidan Square. They are now seen, more than ever, as a Trojan Horse for external political interference in Ukraine. This is not a cause of patriotism, as we have been led to believe in the Western media, but rather more like grubby treachery to serve a foreign agenda.

For nearly three months, the American and European governments have been playing a frustratingly devious game of piously pretending to support the people of Ukraine in their bid for attaining EU integration and democracy. The charade has been frustrating because there is abundant evidence to show that both Washington and Brussels are engaging in regime change by subterfuge, but all the while the West maintains that it is simply acting as an honest broker to resolve a regional political crisis.

"The Unknown Putin" - a documentary by well-known Russian journalist Andrei Karaulov. The first part of the film is devoted to the struggle for oil, which was unfolding during the first presidential term of Vladimir Putin. There were a lot of serious, yet unknown incidents that occured during that struggle. Andrei Karaulov formulated his idea of the documentary as follows: he wanted to understand what Putin had to experience from 2000 till 2010.

I just finished reading a ridiculous hit piece published at Eurasia.Net accusing the Turkish people of being conspiracy theorists for believing that the imperial US and EU are engaged in schemes towards regime change around the world. According to the article and its sources, one must be ignorant, uninformed, uneducated and a big time conspiracy theorist in order to believe that the US-EU are engaged in political manipulations and regime change operations around the world.

Here is one of the article sources attributing the Turkish people's distrust of the West to their ignorance, paranoia and conspiracy mindedness:

A number of confirmations have come in from readers that Washington is fueling the violent protests in Ukraine with our taxpayer dollars. Washington has no money for food stamps or to prevent home foreclosures, but it has plenty of money with which to subvert Ukraine.

One reader wrote: "My wife, who is of Ukrainian nationality, has weekly contact to her parents and friends in Zhytomyr [NW Ukraine]. According to them, most protesters get an average payment of 200-300 grivna, corresponding to about 15-25 euro. As I additionally heard, one of the most active agencies and 'payment outlets' on EU side is the German 'Konrad Adenauer Stiftung', being closely connected to the CDU, i.e. Mrs. Merkel's party."

Johannes Loew of the Internet site elynitthria.net/ writes: "I am just back from Ukraine (I live in Munich/Germany) and I was a lot at the Maidan. Most of those people get only 100 grivna. 300 is for Students."

As I reported on February 12, "Washington Orchestrated Protests Are Destabilizing Ukraine," Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, a rabid Russophobe and neoconservative warmonger, told the National Press Club last December that the US has "invested" $5 billion in organizing a network to achieve US goals in Ukraine in order to give "Ukraine the future it deserves."

A new report on the U.S. drone missile strike that killed 12 members of a Yemeni wedding convoy has renewed calls for the Obama administration to make public its own investigations into the incident - and explain how such strikes are consistent with international laws of war.

The detailed, 28-page report from Human Rights Watch describes conflicting accounts of the December 12 attack, but nevertheless concludes that some, if not all, of the victims may have been civilians.