Wouldn't it be fun if we could somehow revive an average American citizen who had been frozen in a cryogenic capsule from, say, the 1950s? Then, on revival, we allow this presumably open-minded person to sample international news developments that have occurred over the intervening decades since the time he was put into deep-frozen sleep; and, more especially, recent international developments.

We may hazard a guess that the salient impression that this time-traveler would perceive is the stark role-reversal in geopolitics between his native United States of America and that of his country's supposed arch-enemy - Russia. While, the latter, of course, is no longer known as the Soviet Union and has adopted aspects of the capitalist economy, nevertheless Moscow still remains in many ways the primary centre of global rivalry to Washington.

However, what our awakened experimental subject would find shocking and disorientating is that the «evil empire» epithet that was so prevalently propounded against Russia during the Cold War era has now in fact become more fitting as a description for the foreign policy conduct of Washington.

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RUSH: Have you seen the big news according to the mainstream press? What do you think the big news is in the mainstream press? No, it's not Verizon. This Verizon story, which we're gonna get into, by the way, folks, sit tight. I can't do it all in the opening monologue. This Verizon story -- and I don't think it's just Verizon. I think that's just what we know. But it's broken by the UK Guardian. The American media hasn't broken a single Obama scandal. The American media hasn't taken the lead on any of the four major Obama scandals. They're just playing follow the leader.

Glenn Greenwald is the guy who wrote the story for the UK Guardian, and he got a leak from somewhere in the Justice Department. Somebody in the government had to leak it to him and they probably leaked it to others in the Drive-By Media in this country who are not interested. And, in fact, I wasn't gonna get into this now, but since Snerdley brought it up, our old buddy, Ron Fournier, the former bureau chief of the AP and White House correspondent, now works at the National Journal.

We have in the Obama administration -- there's nobody even close to the violation of privacy and civil liberties, nobody even close. They can talk about Bush here, but nobody compares to what Obama's done. In fact, folks, as you know, I read the tech blogs. And I don't mean to beat you over the head with that, but we have new people tuning into this program each and every day. I'm sorry if some of this is repetitive or redundant, but it's quite necessary. And in all these tech blogs, they just love Obama.

They have bought the myth. They drink the Kool-Aid that Obama's the greatest civil libertarian, that Obama's into privacy, that Obama's just the greatest liberal that's ever been -- and they can't believe this. They just can't believe that Obama would do this! They hated Bush for doing this! They can't believe that Obama did this. I don't expect this to change anything, but our buddy Ron Fournier has this Verizon story with the NSA monitoring.

President Obama, meet the second-term curse.

Revelations that the U.S. government has been collecting a massive database of telephone usage by millions of Americans - citizens not suspected of any wrongdoing - created a firestorm Thursday that would be damaging for any administration. But it is is especially problematic for Obama because it stokes controversies he already was struggling to contain and reinforces criticism that has dogged him from the start.

Republicans have long depicted Obama as an advocate of a big, dangerous and overreaching government, back to the federal bailout of the auto industry he undertook during the financial crisis that greeted his first inauguration. That has been their fundamental philosophical objection to his signature Affordable Care Act, now just months away from implementation of its major provisions.

In recent weeks, it has fueled outrage over the targeting by the Internal Revenue Service of conservative Tea Party groups seeking non-profit status, and over the use of secret subpoenas and search warrants against the Associated Press and Fox News in Justice Department investigations of news leaks.

During a 2007 speech at the University of Oregon, Samantha Power, President Obama's nominee for ambassador to the United Nations, told a questioner that changing "our whole order" regarding world governance "would be welcome."

However, she said the new order "isn't going to happen any time soon, given who has the power and who have the guns."


Instead, she advocated "convincing those building blocks, those nation-states who comprise the UN, that it is in their national interest to give something up in the short term in order to get something back in the long term."

"PRISM is not an undisclosed collection or data mining program," Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said in a fact sheet on the program.

The National Security Agency's classified PRISM program is an internal government computer system used to manage foreign intelligence collected from Internet and other electronic service providers, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said in a statement Saturday.

The disclosure Saturday marks the most extensive explanation the government has offered of what the program is, how it works and what it is authorized to collect.

Clapper said he declassified the details of the NSA's surveillance and intelligence collection programs "in hope that it will help dispel some of the myths and add necessary context to what has been published" about government surveillance of Americans' phone records and foreigners' Internet use.

The National Security Agency and the FBI are siphoning personal data from the main computer servers of nine major U.S. Internet firms, The Washington Post and the London-based Guardian reported Thursday night. Clapper said those reports lacked context about how the program is governed.

More and more, we're counting on having angels in office and making ourselves vulnerable to devils.

Let's assume that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, their staffers, and every member of Congress for the last dozen years has always acted with pure motives in the realm of national security. Say they've used the power they've claimed, the technology they've developed, and the precedents they've established exclusively to fight al-Qaeda terrorists intent on killing us, that they've succeeded in disrupting what would've been successful attacks, and that Americans are lucky to have had men and women so moral, prudent, and incorruptible in charge.

Sir Jonathan Evans, who stepped down as director-general of MI5 last month, has become latest heavyweight non-executive director at HSBC.
The 55-year-old, who joins in August, will be on the main board as well as a member of the new financial system vulnerabilities committee, set up identify areas where the bank may become exposed to financial crime or system abuse.

HSBC is acting to restore is reputation after being fined $1.9bn (£1.2bn) for exposing America's financial system to exploitation by drug cartels and terrorists due money laundering breaches. It is also facing investigations by regulators looking into alleged Libor rigging and accusation that it has helped customers avoid tax.

During his 33 years at M15 his focus was on international and domestic counter-terrorism, including cyber threats.

"His experience and expertise gained from a career at the highest level of public service combating threats to data security, critical infrastructure and from international terrorism and organised crime will be of considerable value to the Board as it addresses its governance of systemic threats," said Douglas Flint, the chairman of HSBC.

Abby Martin breaks down the latest surveillance scandal by the National Security Agency, in which the servers of firms such as Google, Facebook, and Apple are subject constant government surveillance.

What happens when you allow commercial interests free rein over a nation state's food and agricultural policies? Consumers and farmers end up paying the price. Take the current predicament of wheat contamination in the US .

Genetically engineered (GE) wheat is not approved to be grown for commercial use in the US or anywhere else in the world. Yet the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has announced that unapproved GE wheat has been found growing in an Oregon wheat field ⁽¹⁾. An Oregon farmer sprayed his wheat field, intending it to lay fallow for the next year. Despite multiple sprays of Monsanto's Round Up, the farmer found that the crops unexpectedly persisted, just as GE crops are engineered to do. This prompted him to send samples to a scientist at Oregon State University , who determined that the crops were infused with the RoundUp Ready gene. The USDA confirmed the results.

Data covertly collected by the US National Security Agency (NSA) from American telecom and Internet firms has been shared with its British counterpart, media reports revealed.

Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) has been given information gathered in the US-run PRISM system, which grants the American spy agency a direct line to data stored on the servers of Google, Facebook, Apple, Yahoo and five other tech giants.

Documents obtained by the Guardian revealed that the GCHQ has had access to PRISM since at least June 2010, having generated 197 intelligence reports from it last year. Access to the information has allowed the British electronic eavesdropping and security agency to bypass the formal legal process required to obtain such information from a non-UK-based company.

Throughout PRISM's seven-year existence, operatives at the NSA and FBI have collected email, video and voice chat, videos, photos, voice-over-IP (Skype) chats, file transfers and social networking details, with the ostensible purpose of thwarting terror attacks.