Starting April 1, 2013, health care provider Orlando Health will implement a tobacco-free hiring rule that requires testing of all job applicants for nicotine use. And no, it is not an April Fool's prank.

The company will rescind job offers to applicants who test positive for cotinine, a byproduct of nicotine, though the workers can reapply in 180 days. Orlando Health will study applicants' levels of cotinine to determine if they are smokers or if they have simply been exposed to secondhand smoke.

Orlando Health says the policy will not apply to volunteers, students or contractors offered a job before April 1 or existing employees being grandfathered in under a tobacco-free policy. The health care provider operates Orlando Regional Medical Center, MD Anderson Cancer Center Orlando, Arnold Palmer Hospital for Children, Winnie Palmer Hospital for Women & Babies, the Howard Phillips Centers, Dr. P. Phillips Hospital, South Seminole Hospital and Health Central Hospital.

The policy will also ban workers from using tobacco products during their shifts, even if they leave the office, and will prevent tobacco use in company vehicles and on company grounds. Additionally, the move will encourage current tobacco users at the company to quit, providing tools and incentives such as access to classes, programs and monetary support for quitting.

President Barack Obama raised anew the issue of cutting entitlements such as Medicare and Social Security as a way out of damaging budget cuts, a White House official said on Sunday, as both sides in Washington tried to limit a fiscal crisis that may soon hit millions of Americans.

Signaling he might be ready to explore a compromise to end automatic spending cuts that began late Friday, Obama mentioned reforming these entitlement programs in calls with lawmakers from both parties on Saturday afternoon.

"He's reaching out to Democrats who understand we have to make serious progress on long-term entitlement reform and Republicans who realize that if we had that type of entitlement reform, they'd be willing to have tax reform that raises revenues to lower the deficit," White House senior economic official Gene Sperling said on Sunday on the CNN program "State of the Union."

Republicans have long argued that the only way to tame budget deficits over the long haul is by slowing the cost of sprawling social safety net programs.

These include the Social Security retirement program and Medicare and Medicaid healthcare programs for the elderly, disabled and poor that are becoming more expensive as a large segment of the U.S. population hits retirement age.

While Obama also has proposed some savings on these programs, he has insisted that significant new tax revenues be part of the deficit-reduction formula, an idea Republicans so far reject.

President Barack Obama has the legal authority to unleash deadly force - such as drone strikes - against Americans on U.S. soil without first putting them on trial, Attorney General Eric Holder wrote in a letter released Tuesday.

But Holder, writing to Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, underlined that Obama "has no intention" of targeting his fellow citizens with unmanned aerial vehicles and would do so only if facing "an extraordinary circumstance."

Paul had asked the Obama administration on Feb. 20 whether the president "has the power to authorize lethal force, such as a drone strike, against a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil and without trial." On Tuesday, he denounced Holder's response as "frightening" and "an affront to the Constitutional due process rights of all Americans."

"The U.S. government has not carried out drone strikes in the United States and has no intention of doing so," Holder assured Paul in the March 4, 2013 letter. The attorney general also underlined that "we reject the use of military force where well-established law enforcement authorities in this country provide the best means for incapacitating a terrorist threat."

Holder added: "The question you have posed is therefore entirely hypothetical, unlikely to occur, and one we hope no President will ever have to confront."

But "it is possible, I suppose to imagine an extraordinary circumstance in which it would be necessary and appropriate under the Constitution and applicable laws of the United States for the President to authorize the military to use lethal force within the territory of the United States," Holder said. "For example, the President could conceivably have no choice but to authorize the military to use such force if necessary to protect the homeland in the circumstances of a catastrophic attack" like Pearl Harbor or 9/11.

A great many people around the county were rightfully shocked and horrified by the recent excellent and hard-hitting PBS documentary, The Untouchables, which looked at the problem of high-ranking Wall Street crooks going unpunished in the wake of the financial crisis. The PBS piece certainly rattled some cages, particularly in Washington, in a way that few media efforts succeed in doing. (Scroll to the end of this post to watch the full documentary.)

Now, two very interesting and upsetting footnotes to that groundbreaking documentary have emerged in the last weeks.

The first involves one of the people interviewed for the story, a former high-ranking executive from Countrywide financial who turned whistleblower named Michael Winston. You can see Michael's segment of The Untouchables at around the 4:20 mark of the piece. The story Winston told during the documentary is essentially an eyewitness account of the beginning of the financial crisis.

Two buses torched a day after Israel began running separate bus lines for Palestinian workers and Jewish settlers.

Unknown assailants have set fire to two buses which Israel began operating as Palestinians-only lines to be used by Palestinian labourers travelling between the West Bank and Israel.

"Two buses were apparently set on fire but we are looking into all possibilities," police spokeswoman Luba Samri told AFP news agency on Tuesday, saying the incident took place in the Arab-Israeli town of Kfar Qassem which lies very close to the Green Line.

Police sources quoted by army radio said the buses had been torched as a protest against the new transportation system which came into effect on Monday.

The incident took place just hours after Israel began running separate bus lines for Palestinian workers and Jewish settlers, in a move which was bluntly denounced by an Israeli rights group as "segregation" and "simple racism."

But Israel's transport ministry denied the charge, saying Palestinians with a permit to work in Israel were allowed to travel "on all public transport lines."

The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating a commercial pilot's report that he spotted a small unmanned aircraft at John F. Kennedy International Airport.

The Alitalia pilot told air traffic controllers that he saw the unmanned aircraft as he approached the runway at Kennedy at about 1:15 p.m. Monday. The pilot said the aircraft was about 4 to 5 miles southeast of the airport and was flying at an altitude of about 1,500 feet.

Allies accused by human rights lawyer of covering up the truth on kidnapping and torture of terrorist suspects

A UN human rights advocate has called on Britain and the US to release confidential reports into the countries' involvement in the kidnapping and torture of terrorism suspects, accusing them of "years of official denials, sophistry and prevarication" to cover up the truth.

In a speech to the UN human rights council in Geneva introducing a report on the issue, Ben Emmerson, a British barrister who is the UN's special rapporteur on protecting human rights within efforts to combat terrorism, demanded that Britain publish the interim findings of a report by a retired judge, Sir Peter Gibson, into the involvement of MI5 and MI6 in the removal and mistreatment of terrorist suspects.

In a response delivered at the council, British officials said the government was "looking carefully at the contents of the report by the Gibson inquiry on its preparatory work, with a view to publishing as much of it as possible". There was no word on when this might happen.

Emmerson also asked the US to release a similar report by the Senate's select committee on intelligence into the CIA's secret detention and interrogation programme.

Claims that deputy PM Uhuru Kenyatta orchestrated post-election violence in 2007-08 in which more than 1,000 died

The Kenyan presidential candidate who faces charges at the international criminal court has taken an early lead as votes were counted the day after the country's election.

With about a third of ballots counted, early results showed the deputy prime minister, Uhuru Kenyatta, with 54% of the vote, ahead of the prime minister, Raila Odinga, with 41%. Few votes have been counted from Odinga's stronghold, the western city of Kisumu.

Isaak Hassan, the chairman of Kenya's electoral commission, said on Tuesday that results from 10,000 polling stations were in, but officials await results from 23,000 more stations.

"Nobody should celebrate, nobody should complain," he said. "We therefore continue to appeal for patience from the public, the political parties as well as the candidates."

The candidates need more than 50% of the vote to win, otherwise the two will contest a runoff in April. The vote commission has seven days to release certified results.

Hassan said the number of spoiled ballots - was "quite worrying".

American democracy urgently needs laws to protect our privacy from the national security state's new surveillance technologies

Military surveillance technologies trickle down to domestic law enforcement faster than ever before. Drones are only one highly controversial example of this endemic problem. And while cutting-edge technologies bring new - and yes, different! - threats to our personal privacy, the right response can be found in the spirit of a document written well before human beings ever conceived of an all-seeing eye in the sky: the Bill of Rights.

Organizations like the ACLU are doing their best to counter the threats posed by emerging technologies with a host of privacy protection bills at the state and federal levels. But we need to come to grips with the fact that the digital revolution necessitates something broader than scattershot law reform, though that will help. Ultimately, we need a mass movement for privacy. We also need to fundamentally rethink our relationship to the government in the post 9/11 era.

Despite the 6.5% stock market rally over the last three months, a handful of billionaires are quietly dumping their American stocks . . . and fast.

Warren Buffett, who has been a cheerleader for U.S. stocks for quite some time, is dumping shares at an alarming rate. He recently complained of "disappointing performance" in dyed-in-the-wool American companies like Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, and Kraft Foods.

In the latest filing for Buffett's holding company Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett has been drastically reducing his exposure to stocks that depend on consumer purchasing habits. Berkshire sold roughly 19 million shares of Johnson & Johnson, and reduced his overall stake in "consumer product stocks" by 21%. Berkshire Hathaway also sold its entire stake in California-based computer parts supplier Intel.