The White House has announced that US President Barack Obama would veto a new Iran sanctions bill introduced in the Senate.

"Passing new sanctions legislation now will undermine our efforts to achieve a peaceful resolution," White House press secretary Jay Carney said on Thursday.

"We don't believe this proposal is necessary, as I think we've made clear and we have been discussing with members of Congress for quite some time. We don't believe it will be enacted. We certainly know it's not necessary. If it were to pass, the president would veto it," he added.

Earlier on Thursday, a group of Democrat and Republican senators introduced new legislation to impose further sanctions against Iran if the country breaches the terms of the nuclear deal reached last month in Geneva. The Senate bill also calls for "diplomatic, military and economic support" to Israel in case Tel Aviv decides to launch an attack against Iran's nuclear energy program.

Saudi Arabia's Ambassador to Britain Prince Mohammed bin Nawaf bin Abdulaziz al Saud has criticized the West for its policies vis-à-vis Syria and Iran.

In a commentary in the New York Times on Tuesday, Prince Nawaf, who is a member of Saudi Arabia's ruling family, said the West's approaches towards Iran and Syria "risk the stability and security of the Middle East."

"We believe that many of the West's policies on both Iran and Syria risk the stability and security of the Middle East," the Saudi diplomat said.

Nawaf stressed that Saudi Arabia is prepared to act on its own to safeguard security in the region.

"This is a dangerous gamble, about which we cannot remain silent, and will not stand idly by," he wrote.

The criticism is the latest in a series of public statements by senior Saudi officials expressing displeasure with U.S. and Western diplomatic initiatives toward Syria and Iran.

32-year NSA Veteran Who Created Mass Surveillance System Says Government Use of Data Gathered Through Spying "Is a Totalitarian Process"

Bill Binney is the high-level NSA executive who created the agency's mass surveillance program for digital information. A 32-year NSA veteran widely regarded as a "legend" within the agency, Binney was the senior technical director within the agency and managed thousands of NSA employees.

Binney has been interviewed by virtually all of the mainstream media, including CBS, ABC, CNN, New York Times, USA Today, Fox News, PBS and many others.

Last year, Binney held his thumb and forefinger close together, and said:

We are, like, that far from a turnkey totalitarian state.

But today, Binney told Washington's Blog that the U.S. has already become a police state.

Western officials have reacted with alarm at Russia's deployment of tactical missiles on areas bordering NATO members states, describing it as a potentially destabilizing move.

Russian officials have confirmed that missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads have been moved to the Western Military District - a territory that abuts all three Baltic States and Poland - in a measure that marks an escalation in Moscow's campaign to dissuade a U.S.-backed missile shield program in Central Europe.

U.S. State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said at a briefing on Monday that Washington "urged Moscow to take no steps to destabilize the region."

Russian's Defense Ministry has defended the deployment, saying that it violated no international agreements. Russia has not revealed the number and exact location of the missiles, and it remains unclear how long they have been in the region.

"Acting on a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the Center for Effective Government, U.S. District Court Judge Ellen Huvelle concluded that the presidential order is not properly within the bounds of the so-called 'presidential communications privilege,'" Politico's Josh Gerstein reports.

In her opinion, Huvelle wrote there is "no evidence that the [directive] was intended to be, or has been treated as, a confidential presidential communication."

The Obama administration has maintained that the document was only intended for those who "need to know," but the judge argued the order was "distributed far beyond the president's close advisers and its substance was widely discussed by the president in the media."

Henry Swieca is a money man. The New York-based billionaire made his fortune by co-founding Highbridge Capital Corp., a hedge fund that boasted clients like the American International Group.

In 2009, the banking giant JP Morgan Chase, another client of Highbridge, fully took over the flagship hedge fund. Swieca went on to play a role at two more hedge funds: Talpion Fund Management, which he launched, and Clearline Capital, which Swieca joined as a startup investor in February 2013.

Swieca, whose net worth is $1.2 billion as of September 2013, is well-known as a financial guru. His every move is covered by the financial press. But he's less known for what his foundation pours money into: right-wing, pro-Israel causes. Along with a host of charitable groups and domestic Jewish centers, the Swieca Family Foundation, which he runs with his Israeli-American wife Estee, has poured tons of cash into pro-Israel groups--including to religious extremist groups that operate in the most sensitive of holy places. Swieca did not return requests for comment on his donations.

According to tax records reviewed by AlterNet, Swieca, an Orthodox Jew, has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to the American Israel Education Foundation, the non-profit offshoot of the powerful lobbying group called the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. He's also handed over cash to groups like the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces; the right-wing, anti-Muslim David Horowitz Freedom Center; and the Hebron Fund, a Brooklyn-based organization that funnels American money into illegal Israeli settlements in Hebron, a big city in the West Bank that has the most intense regime of settler violence and enforced segregation in the occupied Palestinian territories.

But perhaps most alarmingly is Swieca's funding of the Temple Institute, an organization that promotes the building of the Third Temple on the third most holy site for Muslims. In early December, the Washington Post disclosed that Swieca and his wife funded the Jerusalem-based Temple Institute's move to "to a large, renovated space in the Old City's Jewish Quarter, overlooking the Western Wall." The move put the institute just a short walk away from the place where they hope the Third Temple arises.

An open letter to the people of Brazil

The following letter was published today in the Brazilian newspaper A Folha in Portuguese and this original text was provided via the Facebook page of Glenn Greenwald's husband David Miranda:

Six months ago, I stepped out from the shadows of the United States Government's National Security Agency to stand in front of a journalist's camera. I shared with the world evidence proving some governments are building a world-wide surveillance system to secretly track how we live, who we talk to, and what we say. I went in front of that camera with open eyes, knowing that the decision would cost me family and my home, and would risk my life. I was motivated by a belief that the citizens of the world deserve to understand the system in which they live.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated on Wednesday his government's commitment to continue building and developing Israeli settlement projects, without any interruptions. Netanyahu said: "We are building continuously. We will continue building and developing everywhere, including the settlements."
According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Netanyahu's uncompromising stance comes in response to several weeks of intense pressure from the Americans urging Israel to stop announcing new plans for settlement expansion.

In his speech to the Likud convention, Netanyahu also reiterated that he will put any agreement reached with the Palestinians before the Knesset and to a referendum. He stressed that settlements are not the reason for why the peace negotiations have stalled, and instead blamed the Palestinians' refusal to recognise Israel a national home for Jews.

Concerning the Iranian issue, Netanyahu vowed that Israel would not allow Iran to become a nuclear power. He said: "I choose my words precisely. Israel will not allow Iran to own nuclear weapons or to even reach the stage where it could become a nuclear power."

The governor of a Russian region has been assaulted and robbed of $275,000 worth of jewelry while in his house in the south of France, his spokeswoman said Tuesday.

Lev Kuznetsov, the governor of Krasnoyarsk region in Siberia, was shot with an air gun by intruders and his wife was hit with a baton during the attack on Saturday, according to his spokeswoman Stella Alekseeva.

Google revealed a sharp rise in requests from governments asking for political content to be removed from the web in its latest transparency report published on Thursday.

From January to June the search giant received 3,846 government requests to remove content from its services - a 68% increase over the second half of 2012.

"Over the past four years, one worrying trend has remained consistent: governments continue to ask us to remove political content. Judges have asked us to remove information that's critical of them, police departments want us to take down videos or blogs that shine a light on their conduct, and local institutions like town councils don't want people to be able to find information about their decision-making processes," Susan Infantino, legal director, said in a blogpost.

"These officials often cite defamation, privacy and even copyright laws in attempts to remove political speech from our services. In this particular reporting period, we received 93 requests to take down government criticism and removed content in response to less than one third of them. Four of the requests were submitted as copyright claims," she said.