The December 16th, 2013, edition of The New Yorker published an article with a revealing anecdote about the Obama administration's continuation of Bush era national security policies. Revealing, that is, for those who can see.

Ryan Lizza, in 'State of Deception: Why won't the President rein in the intelligence community?' asks why Obama, once a constitutional law professor who, when running for the Senate in 2003, called the Patriot Act "shoddy and dangerous," became a president who lobbied for the renewal of the Patriot Act and continued the Bush administration's surveillance state policies (minus the creepy 'Total Information Awareness' brand name). The easy answer is that no president has control over the secret government. The assassination of the last president who tried to exert control, John F. Kennedy, proves that point. As the comedian Bill Hicks once joked, whenever a new president gets elected, the real leaders call him into a room, show him the Zapruder film, then say, "Any questions?", and the new president answers, "Only what my agenda is."

But the spooks probably don't like to be so crude unless they have to be. It's much more fun for them to apply their skills in subtle manipulation. L. Fletcher Prouty, in his book The Secret Team: The CIA and its Allies in Control of the United States and the World, gives what I think is the best account of how the game is played. According to Prouty, it's done through 'the briefing'.

From President to Ambassador, Cabinet Officer to Commanding General, and from Senator to executive assistant -- all these men have their sources of information and guidance. Most of this information and guidance is the result of carefully laid schemes and ploys of pressure groups. In this influential coterie one of the most interesting and effective roles is that played by the behind the scenes, faceless, nameless, ubiquitous briefing officer.

He is the man who sees the President, the Secretary, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff almost daily, and who carries with him the most skillfully detailed information. He is trained by years of experience in the precise way to present that information to assure its effectiveness. He comes away day after day knowing more and more about the man he has been briefing and about what it is that the truly influential pressure groups at the center of power and authority are really trying to tell these key decision makers. In Washington, where such decisions shape and shake the world, the role of the regular briefing officer is critical...

The role of the briefing officer is quiet, effective, and most influential; and, in the CIA, specialized in the high art of top level indoctrination.

A heated battle is underway just meters away from a chemical facility in Syria, the Russian foreign ministry has warned, accusing the Islamist rebels of attempts to hamper international efforts to dispose of the deadly weapons.

"The fighting between the Syrian government troops and militants from the Al-Nusra Front and the Army of Islam goes on just about 100 meters away from a chemical facility in Sukkari neighborhood in Homs Governorate," the statement by the Foreign Ministry said.

The endangered facility is used to store chemical agents due to be moved and utilized outside Syria as part of the international plan to destroy the chemical arsenals of President Bashar Assad, the statement stressed.

According to the ministry, the joint mission of Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and United Nations in Damascus has already been notified of the events in Sukkari by the Syrian authorities.

"Moscow is deeply concerned by those reports. We strongly condemn the provocative actions aimed at disrupting the schedule of disposal of toxic substances and their precursors from Syria," the statement said.

Oil behemoths BP and Chevron dumped toxic waste - including some radioactive material - from their drilling operations into coastal waters, claims Louisiana parish Plaquemines in a lawsuit removed to federal court Thursday.

Plaquemines Parish alleges the companies released oil field waste into ocean water "without limitation," violating the Louisiana State and Local Coastal Resources Management Act of 1978. The law requires companies to clear, revegetate, detoxify or restore polluted areas, which the companies did not do, the lawsuit claims.

The pollution, along with the companies' lack of adequate maintenance of their oilfields, has resulted in serious coastal erosion and contaminated groundwater, according to the lawsuit.

"I think the oil companies have an obligation to self-report, I think the oil companies are to blame and I think the oil companies took advantage of the state," John Carmouche, a lead attorney for Plaquemines, told The Advocate in November when the suit first came out in state court.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors have neither the right nor any duty to inspect Iran's military and missile sites, a senior Iranian official says.

"The agency's inspectors have no right and [no] responsibility to do it. There is no authority in the world [responsible] for inspecting such facilities, and there is no treaty in that regard, either," Head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) Ali Akbar Salehi said on Saturday.

"The IAEA is not in a position to conduct such inspections," he underscored, dismissing certain media reports which quoted him as saying that the agency's inspectors will visit Iran's missile industries for more transparency. In November, Iran and the IAEA agreed on a road map based on which Iran would, on a voluntary basis, allow IAEA inspectors to visit the Arak heavy water plant and the Gachin uranium mine in Bandar Abbas, in southern Iran, despite the fact that Tehran is under no such obligation to do so under the Safeguards Agreement.

The voluntary move is a goodwill gesture on the part of Iran to clear up ambiguities over the peaceful nature of its nuclear energy program. Salehi further denied charges leveled by certain Western countries suggesting a diversion in Iran's civilian atomic work.

Portraits of British prime ministers are two a penny over at the National Portrait Gallery. Of course they are. This institution is all about the creation of pleasing sets of this and that, and this is one of the most important sets in the great game that we used to fondly call The Establishment.

These are the (all but one) men who have helped to make this country what it is, for better or for worse, beginning with Robert Walpole, our first Prime Minister, who is depicted, standing, by Sir Godfrey Kneller in about 1710, a Whig in a wig, and a splendid velvet coat, cheeks rouged, posturing, self-preening. Pompously gay as they come. Or perhaps not.

Most of the major portraits are to be found on the first and second floors of the old gallery - Grey, Disraeli, Gladstone, Churchill.... These are all formal acts of portraiture, officially sanctioned and paid for, here to set off dignity, decorum, clout. Many of them, face-forward or in profile, are close to life size, and they hang in such a way that we often have to lift our heads up slightly in acts of - perhaps rather unwilling - homage. All this is perfectly calculated, these portraits and their staging here, as if in the decorous solemnity of a country house that just happens to have snuck in behind the boisterous blare of Trafalgar Square, just as Van Dyke's great portraits of the Stuarts - soon-to-be-headless Charles, for example, rampant on a horse to lift him up and out of his own miserable stature - or Holbein's, of the Tudors - massy, spread-legged Henry - were calculated to show off the men of steel upon whom, in the end, we could depend.

China's Defense Ministry on Friday issued a strongly worded statement criticizing Japan's plans to increase defense spending, accusing Tokyo of turning up the temperature on regional tensions.

Amid ongoing territorial tensions between Beijing and Tokyo in the East China Sea, Japan this week announced a five-year defense plan that has attracted an uncharacteristically outspoken response from China.

China "resolutely opposes" the five-year defense plan adopted by Japan on Tuesday, Defense Ministry spokesman Geng Yansheng said in a statement posted on the ministry's website.

Tokyo is attempting to sell a so-called "proactive pacifism" under the pretext of safeguarding national security, Geng said. Japan "continues to deny its history of World War II aggression, challenge the post-war order, and harm the feelings of the people of those victimized nations," he said.

Israeli occupation authorities opened up dams to the east of Gaza city on late Friday.

Eyewitnesses said many residential areas and farming land east of Gaza city were flooded when the Israeli authorities opened up the dams.

The residents of the area appealed to the concerned authorities to intervene before sewage water completely submerge their properties.

Earlier on Friday, Chairman of Government's Disaster Response Committee Yasser Shanti said the Israeli authorities opened up dams just to the east of the border with the Gaza Strip earlier in the day.

As the end of the year approaches, President Barack Obama is suffering the worst approval rating at this point in a two-term presidency since the Nixon administration.

According to a new Washington Post/ABC News poll, Obama's approval rating stands at 43 percent, an 11-point drop from the same point last year. The poll found that 55 percent of Americans disapprove of the president's performance, a sharp rise compared to 42 percent last year.

What's more, Obama's approval rating is even lower than President George W. Bush's at this point in his presidency. By the end of Bush's fifth year in office, roughly 47 percent of Americans approved of his performance, four points more than Obama currently enjoys. Of all post-World War II presidents, only President Richard Nixon faced worse numbers at this point in his second term - a brutal 29 percent thanks to the damaging Watergate scandal.

We're Number One... In Obliterating Wedding Parties

The headline -- "Bride and Boom!" -- was spectacular, if you think killing people in distant lands is a blast and a half. Of course, you have to imagine that smirk line in giant black letters with a monstrous exclamation point covering most of the bottom third of the front page of the Murdoch-owned New York Post. The reference was to a caravan of vehicles on its way to or from a wedding in Yemen that was eviscerated, evidently by a U.S. drone via one of those "surgical" strikes of which Washington is so proud. As one report put it, "Scorched vehicles and body parts were left scattered on the road."

It goes without saying that such a headline could only be applied to assumedly dangerous foreigners -- "terror" or "al-Qaeda suspects" -- in distant lands whose deaths carry a certain quotient of weirdness and even amusement with them. Try to imagine the equivalent for the Newtown massacre the day after Adam Lanza broke into Sandy Hook Elementary School and began killing children and teachers. Since even the New York Post wouldn't do such a thing, let's posit that the Yemen Post did, that playing off the phrase "head of the class," their headline was: "Dead of the Class!" (with that same giant exclamation point). It would be sacrilege. The media would descend. The tastelessness of Arabs would be denounced all the way up to the White House. You'd hear about the callousness of foreigners for days.

And were a wedding party to be obliterated on a highway anywhere in America on the way to, say, a rehearsal dinner, whatever the cause, it would be a 24/7 tragedy. Our lives would be filled with news of it. Count on that.

But a bunch of Arabs in a country few in the U.S. had ever heard of before we started sending in the drones? No such luck, so if you're a Murdoch tabloid, it's open season, no consequences guaranteed. As it happens, "Bride and Boom!" isn't even an original. It turns out to be a stock Post headline. Google it and you'll find that, since 9/11, the paper has used it at least twice before last week, and never for the good guys: once in 2005, for "the first bomb-making husband and wife," two Palestinian newlyweds arrested by the Israelis; and once in 2007, for a story about a "bride," decked out in a "princess-style wedding gown," with her "groom." Their car was stopped at a checkpoint in Iraq by our Iraqis, and both of them turned out to be male "terrorists" in a "nutty nuptial party." Ba-boom!

A fast-moving corruption inquiry into the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan widened Saturday with the arrests of two sons of ministers, the general manager of state-owned Halkbank, and 13 others in connection with allegations of corruption and bribery.

The arrests came a day after 49 people, including the mayor of an Istanbul district, were referred to court for arrest. The suspects are accused of various corruption charges including bribery, gold smuggling and violating zoning laws.

The government has responded with its own counterstroke, dismissing 14 more high-ranking police officials as it continues to purge the state of those it believes are pushing the investigation, which Mr. Erdogan and his top party officials consider a plot.