Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan president, is claiming a US citizen has been arrested and interrogated on suspicions he is a mercenary involved in a conspiracy against the government.

Chávez, who faces an election on 7 October, suggested the man is part of a plot to destabilise the country if he is re-elected.

Chávez said the Hispanic man was detained on 4 August while crossing into Venezuela from Colombia. The president said the man was carrying a US passport with entrance and exit stamps from countries including Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya as well as a notebook containing geographical co-ordinates.

The man's identity was not released. Chávez did not say where he was being interrogated.

The UK is to increase the support it provides to rebel fighters in Syria.

Foreign Secretary William Hague is committing an additional £5m to fund communications equipment and medical supplies - mostly to the largest rebel group, the Free Syrian Army (FSA).


However, the assistance will not include any weapons.

The BBC's James Robbins says the move is a significant shift in policy after months of British frustration about divisions within Syria's opposition.

There have also been complaints that the opposition has failed to set out a clear programme for good government, our correspondent added.

Attempts to oust President Bashar al-Assad have led to 17 months of unrest, during which activists claim more than 20,000 people have died.

Former senior intelligence officials have created a detailed surveillance system more accurate than modern facial recognition technology - and have installed it across the US under the radar of most Americans, according to emails hacked by Anonymous.

Every few seconds, data picked up at surveillance points in major cities and landmarks across the United States are recorded digitally on the spot, then encrypted and instantaneously delivered to a fortified central database center at an undisclosed location to be aggregated with other intelligence. It's part of a program called Trapwire and it's the brainchild of the Abraxas, a Northern Virginia company staffed with elite from America's intelligence community. The employee roster at Arbaxas reads like a who's who of agents once with the Pentagon, CIA and other government entities according to their public LinkedIn profiles, and the corporation's ties are assumed to go deeper than even documented.

The details on Abraxas and, to an even greater extent Trapwire, are scarce, however, and not without reason. For a program touted as a tool to thwart terrorism and monitor activity meant to be under wraps, its understandable that Abraxas would want the program's public presence to be relatively limited. But thanks to last year's hack of the Strategic Forecasting intelligence agency, or Stratfor, all of that is quickly changing.

Hacktivists aligned with the loose-knit Anonymous collective took credit for hacking Stratfor on Christmas Eve, 2011, in turn collecting what they claimed to be more than five million emails from within the company. WikiLeaks began releasing those emails as the Global Intelligence Files (GIF) earlier this year and, of those, several discussing the implementing of Trapwire in public spaces across the country were circulated on the Web this week after security researcher Justin Ferguson brought attention to the matter. At the same time, however, WikiLeaks was relentlessly assaulted by a barrage of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, crippling the whistleblower site and its mirrors, significantly cutting short the number of people who would otherwise have unfettered access to the emails.

WikiLeaks remains offline after days of distributed denial-of-service attacks rendered the website inaccessible. Now a group calling themselves AntiLeaks is taking credit and says their actions are in protest to the whistleblower site's founder.

Through Twitter on Wednesday, the self-proclaimed leader of a group going by the name AntiLeaks says that their organization is responsible for a barrage of DDoS attacks on WikiLeaks.org and other affiliated sites that has temporarily wiped one of the most controversial outlets for whistleblowing off the Web.

Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks is a popular method of over-flooding a Web server with traffic until, ideally, the site is crippled and can't support any visitors. Activists have since mirrored WikiLeaks - hosted documents on other sites, but those too have been hit hard by AntiLeaks. By Thursday afternoon, the mirror at Cabledrum.net was still offline and external e-commerce sites launched to raise donations for WikiLeaks were ravaged by DDoS assaults as well.

WikiLeaks was targeted with DDoS attacks earlier this year, but so far the assaults reportedly launched by the AntiLeaks group have made the website unavailable to visitor for nearly a week. In their tweet, a user named DietPepsi identifies himself as the leader of the group and says that their mission is aimed not specifically at WikiLeaks, but Julian Assange, the website's founder and editor that has been in London's Ecuadorian Embassy for over a month awaiting a decision on an appeal for political asylum.

Does the government really peer into the personal business of everyone in America? According to Judge Andrew Napolitano, Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) has put the number of instances that the feds have spied on Americans in the "gazillions."

In a column published this week by the frequent cable news commentator, Judge Napolitano explains that members of Congress are barred from quoting certain statistics disclosed during secret security briefing, so Sen. Paul - the son of GOP congressman and presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) - has reportedly relayed the actual information as accurately as he can without providing a real number.

Gazillion, suggests Napolitano, is close enough.

"[W]hen asked what he learned at these secret briefings and aware that he could be prosecuted for telling the truth, [Sen. Paul] chose a fictitious word to describe the vast number of violations of privacy at the hands of federal agents: gazillions," writes Naolitano in an op-ed he has titled "What Rand Paul Learned From Secret Security Hearings."

Napolitano explains that elected lawmakers can "interrogate government officials about government behavior that they are afraid to reveal," but are prohibited from publicizing that intel outside of Capitol Hill.

The Army is testing its $517 million spy blimp in the skies over the New Jersey military base where the German airship Hindenburg crashed in 1937.

The Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle spent more than 90 minutes around Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in Ocean County on Tuesday.

Manufacturer Northrop Grumman says the 302-foot long airship is designed to be a high altitude observation platform.

It can be operated by a crew or by remote control.

Army spokesman John Cummings tells the Asbury Park Press the primary objective of the maiden flight was to perform a safe launch and recovery.

The airship is 100 feet longer than the Goodyear Blimp and is filled with helium.

The Hindenburg was filled with hydrogen when it burst into flames at Lakehurst, killing 36 people.

In back-to-back interviews on the Gary Null Show and the Tommy Schnurmacher Show, Gerald Celente sees another mega geopolitical quake to match the shock-and-awe of 9-11 in America's not-too-distant future.

"I'm worried about the drumbeats of war getting louder and louder," Celente told CJAD talk show host Tommy Schumacher, Monday. "It's coinciding, as well, with the economic collapse that's happening throughout Europe."

Celente went on to say that, when sociopath and psychopath politicians get into trouble with their constituents due to a poor economy, those pols, who can divert the public's attention away from the nation's financial problems and redirect the collective anger toward the threat of an outside enemy, will use their power to take that nation to war at a politically advantageous time.

"It's reaching a critical mass right now, and I haven't felt this way since December 14, 2000," said Celente, and noted that he senses desperation in the voice and actions of Israel's, Benjamin Netanyahu, the present and very unpopular prime mister in that Mideast country. "I have that feeling now" with Netanyahu, said Celente.

"This guy, Netanyahu, he has 60 percent disapproval rating right now, and I've seen it before," Celente continued. "I remember Bill Clinton, you know, wag the dog. Every time he'd get into trouble with Monica Lewinsky, it was bomb over Baghdad. They continually do this."

After wavering earlier this summer whether to remain in the U.S. or flee from a "fascist" dictatorship shaping up in America, the 65-year-old Celente told InfoWars' talk show super-star personality, Alex Jones, that he will not allow a "bunch of freaks" in Washington chase him out. Celente said he will stay and fight.

But the personal struggle on this question continues to weigh heavily on his mind.

Mitt Romney says corporations are people, but people are not corporations - at least when it comes to releasing his tax returns.

In an interview with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee said he would not be releasing more than two years of tax returns because "I am not a business."

Executive editor Josh Tyrangiel asked Romney why the American people shouldn't be entitled to the same information from a presidential candidate that he would have required as the CEO of Bain Capital before investing in a company.

"If you're an investor and you're looking at a company, and that company says that its great strength is wise management and fiscal know-how, wouldn't you want to see the previous, say, five years' worth of its financials?" Tyrangiel wondered.

As part of an ongoing lawsuit against the U.S. government, a federal judge has ordered the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to release more documents relating to Cold War-era experimentation on American soldiers.

Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley in Oakland, California, ruled the VA must hand over documents pertaining to the use of at least 7,800 service personnel as "human guinea pigs" by the U.S. Army and the Central Intelligence Agency.

"It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages."
-- Admiral William D Leahy, Chief of Staff to Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman

"The Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing."- Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe

This week 67 years ago, a new era of global terror was born when the US dropped two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Never before had the world witnessed such man-made power to destroy. And ever since the world has had to live with the threat of repeated devastation.

But the bombings were not merely terrible acts of war. They signaled a US policy of holding the world hostage to its global terrorism.

On this fateful day in August 1945, an American B-29 Flying Fortress unleashed a hell on earth over the Japanese city of Nagasaki with a single atomic bomb, nicknamed Fat Man.

The day before, Radio Tokyo and the American media were already reporting the devastation inflicted on the city of Hiroshima where, on the morning of 6 August, another American B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, had dropped the first atomic bomb - codenamed Little Boy.