Sending more aircraft carriers to the waters near Iran, it turns out, was just the start. Yes, the U.S. currently has more seapower aimed at Iran in the Persian Gulf than in the fleets of most countries on Earth, Iran included. But that was just the Navy cracking its knuckles.

In the next few months, the Navy will double its minesweeper craft stationed in Bahrain, near Iran, from four to eight. Those ships will be crucial if Iran takes the drastic step of mining the Strait of Hormuz, one of the global energy supply's most crucial waterways. Four more MH-53 "Sea Stallion" helicopters, another minesweeping tool, are also getting ready for Bahrain, to give the U.S. Fifth Fleet early warning for any strait mining.

Then the Navy will prepare to get closer to Iranian shores. Much closer. It's got five close-action patrol boats in the Gulf right now. Once the Coast Guard returns three that the Navy loaned out, the Navy will have five other patrol craft in the United States. All those boats are getting retrofitted. With Gatling guns. And missiles.

Sure, the guns aboard the two aircraft carriers currently near Iran are the seapower equivalent of high-powered, long-range rifles. "But maybe what you need is like a sawed-off shotgun," capable of doing massive damage from a closer distance, said Adm. Jonathan Greenert, the Navy's senior officer. All 10 of those patrol boats, Greenert told reporters at a Friday breakfast in Washington, will get strapped with the Mk-38 Gatling Gun and should make it to the Gulf next year. (Though, alas, they won't have the Gatling/laser gun mashup BAE Systems is working on.) They'll also get close-range missiles that can hit Iranian shores from four miles away - the same kinds Navy SEALs use.

The Russian Prosecutor General's Office has submitted a request to Britain for the extradition of the former head of Bank of Moscow, who fled to the UK in 2011 after charges of embezzlement were brought against him.

"After determining the location in the United Kingdom of [Bank of Moscow's former Chief Executive Officer] Andrei Borodin, who was put on the international wanted list in November 2011, the Russian Prosecutor General's Office has promptly prepared and submitted a request for his extradition for criminal prosecution to the competent British authorities," Russia's Prosecutor General's Office spokeswoman Marina Gridneva said on Friday.

Washington - The ornate ballroom of the Willard Hotel buzzed with activity on a Saturday morning in July. Crowded together on the stage sat a cadre of the nation's most influential former government officials, the kind whose names often appear in boldface, who've risen above daily politics to the realm of elder statesmen. They were perched, as they so often are, below a banner with a benign conference title on it, about to offer words of pricey wisdom to an audience with an agenda.

That agenda: to secure the removal of the Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK) from the U.S. government's list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. A Marxian Iranian exile group with cult-like qualities, Mujahideen-e Khalq was responsible for the killing of six Americans in Iran in the 1970s, along with staging a handful of bombings. But for a terrorist organization with deep pockets, it appears there's always hope.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has returned home almost three weeks after he underwent an operation in Cuba to have a lesion containing cancerous cells removed.

Chavez arrived in Caracas on Friday night, the Associated Press reported.

Surgeons at Havana's Cimeq Hospital operated on the 57-year-old socialist leader for 90 minutes late on February 27.

He had been diagnosed with a two-centimeter-long lesion in the same part of his body from which a cancerous tumor was removed in 2011.

The Venezuelan leader, who came to power in 1999, is seeking another six-year term in the upcoming presidential election, which will be held on October 7, 2012.

Speaking firms representing ex-FBI Director Louis Freeh and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Hugh Shelton have received federal subpoenas as part of an expanding investigation into the source of payments to former top government officials who have publicly advocated removing an Iranian dissident group from the State Department list of terrorist groups, three sources familiar with the investigation told NBC News.

The investigation, being conducted by the Treasury Department, is focused on whether the former officials may have received funding, directly or indirectly, from the People's Mujahedin of Iran, or MEK, thereby violating longstanding federal law barring financial dealings with terrorist groups. The sources, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity, said that speaking fees given to the former officials total hundreds of thousands of dollars.

"This is about finding out where the money is coming from," an Obama administration official familiar with the probe said. "This has been a source of enormous concern for a long time now. You have to ask the question, whether this is a prima facie case of material support for terrorism."

Freeh and Shelton are among 40 former senior U.S. government officials who have participated in a public lobbying campaign - including appearing at overseas conferences and speaking at public rallies - aimed at persuading the U.S. government to remove the MEK from the terror list.

Beijing - Israel Friday took its concern about Iran's nuclear program to one of Iran's main partners, China, and hinted it could launch a pre-emptive attack on the Islamic Republic despite repeated calls by China to allow diplomacy to take its course.

China, which has close energy and trade ties with Iran, has urged a negotiated solution to the dispute over Iran's nuclear ambitions and long opposed unilateral sanctions on Iran.

"For us, it's crucial to explain our position to our Chinese partners," Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman told reporters on a visit to Beijing. "It's crucial to clarify our position to China in the hope they understand our concerns, our problems," he said, adding that Israel would "continue the dialogue" with China.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao warned Iran in January against any effort to acquire nuclear weapons but apart from that, China has shied away from speaking out strongly against Iran.

That position on Iran underscores the tricky path China is trying to steer between pressure from the United States and its allies and, on the other hand, expectations from Iran, which looks to China as a sympathetic power and a big oil customer.

King George Tupou V of Tonga, who introduced democracy to the South Pacific archipelago after riots following his ascension in 2006, died in a Hong Kong hospital on Sunday, the Tongan government said on Monday.

He was 63. Tupou V's younger brother and the heir to the throne, Crown Prince Tupouto'a Lavaka, was with him when he died while on a visit to Hong Kong. A government statement confirming his death was read on local radio.

The New Zealand government, a major aid donor to Tonga, said he would be remembered for ushering in significant political change.

"He believed that the monarchy was an instrument of change and can truly be seen as the architect of evolving democracy in Tonga. This will be his enduring legacy," said Prime Minister John Key in a statement.

Shortly after Tupou V ascended the throne in 2006, demonstrations demanding greater democracy turned into riots in which eight people died and large parts of the commercial centre of the capital, Nuku'alofa, were destroyed.

The Oxford-educated king then said he would relinquish most of his power in the last Polynesian monarchy to a broadly popularly elected government after 165 years of feudal rule.

In response to the February 25th killing of two US soldiers by an unidentified Afghan, who was angered by the most recent "Koran burning" episode by the always sensitive US army, the Commander of US forces in Afghanistan, General John Allen, told US troops:

"There will be moments like this when you're searching for the meaning of this loss. There will be moments like this, when your emotions are governed by anger and a desire to strike back. Now is not the time for revenge, now is not the time for vengeance, now is the time to look deep inside your souls, remember your mission, remember your discipline, remember who you are."

This little detail, as motive, seems to have been 'forgotten' by the mainstream media in their coverage of the recent massacre of 16 Afghan villagers by up to 20 drunken US soldiers. Indeed, the reports that up to 20 'drunken' troops were involved in the massacre have also been conveniently ignored by the Western media, who have chosen to go with the US military-provided "lone crazed assassin" lie that has served so well to cover up previous planned murders by US forces of Empire. The fact of the matter is, General Allen knew that his troops were planning 'revenge', but obviously could do nothing to stop it.

On Monday, the settlement between five major banks and the federal and state governments of foreclosure-related fraud charges was filed in federal district court in Washington, DC. The agreement must be approved by the court to take effect.

The settlement, reported to be worth $25 billion, was announced February 9 and hailed by President Obama as a serious rebuke to the banks and boon to distressed homeowners. (See: "Obama administration brokers pro-bank mortgage fraud settlement").

It is nothing of the kind. It quashes investigations by 49 state attorneys general into wholesale fraud and illegality committed by the five biggest mortgage servicers in their rush to foreclose on homeowners and seize their houses. The abuses first surfaced in the fall of 2010, amid reports of "robo-signing" of foreclosure papers and court submissions.

It was revealed that bank employees and contractors routinely vouched for the accuracy of documents affirming the banks' title to targeted homes without having ascertained the facts or having even read the documents they were signing. The process was rife with forgeries, fraudulent notarizations, inflated job descriptions of the signers and other violations of the law.

A new feature story in this month's Wired blows the lid off plans for a massive new National Security Agency data center in Utah that represents the resurrection of a program that Congress killed in 2003, known as "Total Information Awareness," targeting literally all electronic communications all over the world - including those made by American citizens.

The proposal was to build computing systems that could suck up every electronic communication on the planet and filter them through a smart super-computer that would flag certain conversations, emails, transactions and other items of interest for further review. It was a program so monstrous in scope that after a brief legislative battle, Congress imposed strict regulations on the type of technology that could accomplish those ends, prohibiting it from ever being used against Americans.

But if well sourced intelligence reporter James Bamford is to be believed, as of this year, their efforts to stop it are moot.

According to Bamford, the NSA's new data center in Utah will be the most all-encompassing spy machine ever conceived, capable of breaking almost any encryption, reading any email and recording any phone call anywhere in the world, even if it's not made over the Internet. A network of ultra-sensitive satellites enhance the center's intelligence-finding capabilities with the unique ability to sniff electronic communications from a massive distance.