Viewers, beware: while you're watching TV, your TV might be watching you back. A security firm discovered that Samsung's Smart TV can give hackers access to the device's built-in camera and microphones, allowing them to watch everything you do.

The Malta-based firm ReVuln posted a video showing its team of researchers hacking into one of the Samsung TVs and accessing its settings, channel lists, widgets, USB drives, and remote control configurations. The security flaw allows hackers to access any and all personal data stored on the TV.

"We can install malicious software to gain complete root access to the TV," the video writes.

With this access, hackers can use the Smart TVs built-in camera and microphones to see and hear everything in front of it. Instead of just watching TV, viewers could themselves be watched without knowing it.

But this flaw isn't present in just one specific model. The vulnerability affects all 11 Samsung televisions of the latest generation. The Smart TVs have many of the same features as a computer, but lack the same kind of protection. The devices do not have security features such as firewalls and antivirus software.

Fortunately for concerned viewers, the problem has a silver lining: hackers must first breach the network that the television is connected to, as well as know the IP address of the device. As a result, security breaches would likely only occur as a targeted attack against an individual, rather than randomly. Unlike an Internet virus, a hacker would have to exploit the network manually.

The gunman who killed 20 first-graders and six adults at a Connecticut elementary school, shooting many multiple times, used a military-style rifle rigged to quickly reload, the state's chief medical examiner said Saturday.

Dr. H. Wayne Carver II, the medical examiner, said the victims at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown died Friday morning from "a very devastating set of injuries."

Carver said of the seven autopsies he personally performed, the victims had "three to 11 wounds apiece" and were shot in the head, extremities and torso -- two of them at close range.

"I believe everybody was hit more than once," he said.

Carver said the shooter was able to reload so quickly because he had taped two magazines together.

Law-enforcement officials identified the suspected shooter as 20-year-old Adam Lanza and said he was found dead inside the school. Officials said the alleged shooter's mother, Nancy Lanza, was believed to be among the victims.

Earlier, a law-enforcement official incorrectly identified the suspect as 24-year-old Ryan Lanza, who is Adam's brother. Ryan was questioned by investigators Friday but isn't believed to have had any role in the shooting.

Two federal law-enforcement officials familiar with the investigation said the firearms recovered at the scene - Glock and Sig Sauer handguns - were registered to the alleged shooter's mother and are legal. A third firearm was registered to Ms. Lanza as well, the officials said.

The registration answers one of the questions about the origin of the firearms believed used in the mass shooting. Under federal law, Adam Lanza would have been prohibited from buying handguns from a licensed dealer because of his age.

According to state court records, the suspected gunman's parents divorced in 2009. Both Nancy and Peter Lanza filed certifications of their completion of a parenting-education program, a Connecticut state requirement in divorce proceedings if the couple has children under the age of 18.

Newtown Connecticut School Shooting

Witness describes apparent accomplice arrested from woods

Why is this significant?

Because the .233 Bushmaster rifle we are being told 20-year-old Adam Lanza took with him on his shooting spree was found in the trunk of a black Honda car, allegedly his mother's, long after the shooting ended. This leaves the suspect with just two handguns, a Glock and a Sig Sauer, to fire "hundreds of rounds", according to eyewitnesses.


In order to account for the multiple gunshot wounds found on every victim by the coroner, the story has now been completely reversed so that "Only the rifle was used on the victims," which "the shooter was able to reload so quickly because he had taped two magazines together."

Yes, this from his rifle that he left in the trunk of his car!

This story connects far-flung places. Kenya, Malaya, Northern Ireland and now Syria. The one over-arching theme is British counter-insurgency strategy, or more plainly, the use of state terrorism by British forces to achieve political objectives.

The story came alive again this week with two seemingly unrelated news developments. First, we learn of deeper involvement of Britain's military in the violence raging across Syria. British military officers and Special Forces are reportedly training - in Jordanian territory - foreign-backed militants to step up their campaign of terrorism across Syria.

These terror gangs, whom the Western mainstream media call "freedom fighters", have been plunging Syria into bloody chaos for the past 22 months, with car bombs ripping through civilian neighbourhoods and death squads massacring whole villages, the latest being Aqrab in Hama Province where over 125 people where murdered this week. Ample evidence shows that the mercenaries, recruited from various countries including Libya, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, are covertly supplied with weapons and training from the US, Britain and France via the conduits of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey.

Before being subject to the usual 'lone(r) gunman' propaganda technique, there were many initial reports of a least two shooters being present at the Sandy Hook Elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut on that fateful December morning.

It is clear that 20-year-old Adam Lanza could not have done this all by himself (assuming he was actually involved - we have no way of knowing and no way of ever finding out for sure). The shooting dead of 28 people, with at least 100 rounds let off, took place within three minutes... and we're being asked to believe that "autistic, troubled" Lanza pulled it off with two handguns?

Watch and listen as an eyewitness describes a "fully-grown man wearing camo pants and dark jacket" being led out of the nearby woods in handcuffs.

Just as we have seen in the Fort Hood base mass shooting in 2009, the Aurora theater mass shooting in July 2012 and most recently the Connecticut school massacre in December 2012, the gunning down of six people during worship at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, on August 5, 2012 was blamed on a 'lone gunman', later named as Wade Michael Page, a "white supremacist".

Now, let's listen to the testimony of someone who was actually there...

Caracas - Venezuela's government reacted with fury on Friday to U.S. President Barack Obama's criticism of ailing Hugo Chavez's "authoritarian" government at a time of national anxiety over his battle to recover from cancer surgery.

In an interview with U.S. network Univision, Obama declined to speculate on the 58-year-old socialist president's health in Cuba, where he is in a delicate state after his fourth operation since mid-2011 for cancer in his pelvic region.

But he did say U.S. policy was aimed at ensuring "freedom" in Venezuela. "The most important thing is to remember that the future of Venezuela should be in the hands of the Venezuelan people. We've seen from Chavez in the past authoritarian policies, suppression of dissent," Obama said.

Those remarks went down badly with officials in Caracas where emotions are running high over the future of Chavez and his self-styled revolution in the South American OPEC nation.

In power since 1999, Chavez is due to start a new six-year term on January 10 after winning re-election just weeks before Obama did. His health crisis has thrown that into doubt, and Chavez has named a successor in case he is incapacitated.

"With these despicable comments at such a delicate moment for Venezuela, the U.S. president is responsible for a major deterioration in bilateral relations, proving the continuity of his policy of aggression and disrespect towards our country," the Venezuelan government said in a statement.

After more than 900 days of detainment in United States military jails for allegedly disclosing state secrets, the haunting imprisonment of accused WikiLeaks source Pfc. Bradley Manning was discussed in court for the first time at the latest round of pretrial motion hearings that began on Nov. 27 in Fort Meade, MD. Below is an account of those court proceedings. The case will continue intermittently into 2013.

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If there's a bad time to discuss holiday shopping, it's while waiting for someone to describe being tortured.

I was soaking wet and still half asleep when our driver turned to the back seat of the press shuttle and said something so totally irrelevant and ill-timed that I knew right then and there that she was either innocently naïve or politely retarded.

"Can you believe it," she said, "Christmas is already less than a month away."

Festive fucking cheer is not particularly on the mind, at least not on this Tuesday morning at Fort Meade, Maryland. The sprawling 6.6-square mile United States Army base just outside of Washington, DC is the venue for the pretrial motion hearings in the case against Private First Class Bradley Manning. By the time the trial is over, a soldier considered a hero by some could be sentenced to life in prison. I was likely not the only one uninterested in having a holly jolly ol' time, but that didn't do anything to change the fact that our driver had just adjusted the FM dial to pick up "Santa Baby."

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When only 22 years old, Pfc. Manning was arrested at his barrack in Baghdad and dragged off to Kuwait, then to perhaps the worst locale yet - Quantico, Virginia - for the longest stretch of the two-and-a-half years of imprisonment that's been condemned by the United Nations and Nobel laureates as tantamount to torture. Pfc. Manning won't be court-martialed by a military judge until next March, and at that point he'll likely have spent over 1,000 days - ten percent of his life - in solitary confinement.

This, of course, is because the US says Manning took 250,000 diplomatic embassy cables and a trove of sensitive military documents and sent them to the website WikiLeaks. Among the documents Pfc. Manning allegedly leaked are the Afghan War Diaries, the Iraq War Logs, secret diplomatic communications, and a video of US soldiers firing at Iraqi civilians and journalists from the air in a clip that was dubbed "Collateral Murder."