The techniques are a key pillar of the ‘Insider Threat Program’, an unprecedented government-wide crackdown under which millions of federal bureaucrats and contractors must watch out for “high-risk persons or behaviors” among co-workers. Those who fail to report them could face penalties, including criminal charges.

Federal employees and contractors are asked to pay particular attention to the lifestyles, attitudes and behaviors – like financial troubles, odd working hours or unexplained travel – of co-workers as a way to predict whether they might do “harm to the United States.” Managers of special insider threat offices will have “regular, timely, and, if possible, electronic, access” to employees’ personnel, payroll, disciplinary and “personal contact” files, as well as records of their use of classified and unclassified computer networks, polygraph results, travel reports and financial disclosure forms.

But even the government’s top scientific advisers have questioned these techniques. Those experts say that trying to predict future acts through behavioral monitoring is unproven and could result in illegal ethnic and racial profiling and privacy violations.

The vote of 98-49 came after a full day of sometimes emotional debate. Before the measure can head to the state Senate, it needs a final vote from the House, which is expected on Wednesday. The House approved the same proposal during a previous special session of the legislature, but it failed to pass in the Senate after Democratic Senator Wendy Davis staged an 11-hour filibuster that gained national attention.

Planned Parenthood, the country's largest provider of abortions, says the proposed stricter standards for clinics could cause all but six of the 42 abortion facilities in Texas to shut down. Bill author Republican Jodie Laubenberg said no facility would be forced to close.

Texas Governor Rick Perry, a Republican who opposes abortion, called lawmakers back to Austin for a second special session to reconsider the proposal. Most lawmakers in the Republican controlled Senate favor the bill.

"The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, once a stark symbol and source of grievance in the Arab world, is now almost a sideshow in a Middle East consumed by sectarian strife (and) economic misery… And yet Mr Kerry, backed by Mr Obama, still believes that tackling the problem is worth the effort," The New York Times said.

In the few months since he entered office, the American secretary of state has visited the region more times than his predecessor Hillary Clinton had during her entire term. Seemingly, this has to do with Kerry's personal scheduling problems, but actually the frequency of his visits is indicative of a severe problem on a federal level.

The vast amount of energy Kerry is investing in an attempt to conquer the Sisyphean challenges here is placing American foreign policy in a ridiculous light. The US cannot make peace between Arabs and other Arabs, yet it believes it can make peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Washington has repeatedly failed to grasp the situation in Egypt and Syria, but thinks it has a good understanding of the situation in Jerusalem and Ramallah.

Is it possible that John Kerry is more talented than all the American mediators who came before him? Not at all. He exposed his ignorance in Middle Eastern affairs when, as a senior senator, he insisted on welcoming Assad back into the family of nations, met with the Syrian leader twice in Damascus and showered him with compliments. Kerry's mediation skills are limited to pressuring Israel to make dangerous concessions for the sake of negotiations that will lead nowhere.

Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the President of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, told Vatican officials in a 2007 letter that the transfer offered "improved protection of these funds from any legal claim". Cardinal Dolan, who is now the Archbishop of New York, has been credited with helping to root out a serious sexual abuse scandal in his previous archdiocese of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

However, he has long insisted that he never deliberately sought to protect church funds from victims of abuse by clergy in the archdiocese, which he led as Archbishop between 2002 and 2009. Yet on June 4 2007 he proposed moving the assets to "an autonomous pious foundation", which he had established a month earlier, intended to fund the upkeep of cemeteries in the archdiocese.

The letter was published among more than 6,000 pages of documents released as part of a settlement between the archdiocese and lawyers for 570 people with lawsuits pending against it.

The UN's Committee on the Rights of the Child released its demands for information from the Holy See on Tuesday. The committee said that "in the light of the recognition by the Holy See of sexual violence against children committed by members of the clergy, brothers and nuns in numerous countries around the world, and given the scale of the abuses", the Vatican should provide detailed information on all cases of child sexual abuse committed by clergy.

The Vatican was told to show whether it had implemented measures "to ensure that no member of the clergy currently accused of sexual abuse be allowed to remain in contact with children," amid claims from around the world that bishops often moved abusive priests from one parish to another.

The UN committee demanded to know about specific cases in which bishops or other Catholic leaders had failed to report suspected abuse to the police. Geoffrey Robertson QC, the human rights lawyer, who has strongly criticised the Catholic Church's cover-up of sex abuse scandals around the world, said: "The committee's enquiries will inevitably lead it to conclude that the Vatican has broken multiple articles of the convention on a huge scale in many countries. The result in human suffering is incalculable."

The former admitted that he had underestimated how deeply his spending cuts would bite into overall economic output and therefore of tax revenues. The latter leads one of the parties in the governing coalition and in his departing speech said that the austerity imposed by Portugal's eurozone partners couldn't go on.

The Irish economy is back in recession after a brief period of hope. New car registrations in May were down 11 percent on the previous year and the bad loans ratio is 25 percent, the same as in Greece. The release of tape recordings of Irish bankers, boasting to each other of the way they had tricked the government into bailing them out, has soured the public mood, already depressed after five years of crisis.

And the bill is mounting. Adding together the direct bailouts of Greece and the packages issued to Ireland and Portugal, plus purchases of Spanish and Italian bonds and bank support package for Spain, the total is now $870 billion.

And there is no end in sight.

The vessel, known as the Akademik Lomonosov, is intended to be the first of many floating nuclear power plants, that Russia will put into mass production and then use to provide energy to remote areas, and to export to other countries around the world. The 21,500 tonne ships will have a crew of 69, and each carry two KLT-40 naval propulsion reactors which will produce a combined 70MW of electricity, enough to power a small city of 200,000 people.

As Thierry Meyssan wrote on July 8 in, “Does Morsi’s fate foreshadow that of the Muslim Brotherhood?”: “It was not the street, but the United States that drove out Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and General Hosni Mubarak. And it is still the United States who installed the Muslim Brotherhood to succeed them.”

The failure of the Muslim Brotherhood to be inclusive and represent all Egyptians was totally predictable. King Abdullah of Jordan called the Muslim Brotherhood a “Masonic cult” in an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg back in March. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that cults and democracies don't mix, especially when it is a contest between a mature fascist cult and a baby democracy.

F William Engdahl wrote about the Nazi roots of the Muslim Brotherhood in an article written last September called, “Salafism+CIA: The winning formula to destabilize Russia, the Middle East”: “During the Third Reich, Hitler's Germany had supported the Muslim Brotherhood as a weapon against the British in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East. After the defeat of Germany, British Intelligence moved in to take over control of the Muslim Brotherhood. Ultimately, for financial and other reasons, the British decided to hand their assets within the Muslim Brotherhood over to their CIA colleagues in the 1950s.”

It is for the good that the Egyptian people kicked these rascals out of power. The shame belongs to those in Washington and other capitals who support the Muslim Brotherhood's thuggish tactics and terrorism against Christians, Sufis, Shiites, Jews, etc.

Simultaneously, the country is becoming a tinderbox for militant labour unrest, peasant rebellion and indigenous resistance. After 500 years of domination by imperial powers, the population of Indonesia is organizing and resisting the ‘new order’ of global corporate colonization. Much like Brazil and Turkey, Indonesia has been praised by the imperial powers as a “model democracy” and the IMF hails its progress as an “emerging economy.”

The illusions of Turkish and Brazilian state-capitalist ‘democracy’ have been revealed by massive urban uprisings. The conditions are present for Indonesia to become home to its own national uprising, the only question may be: what will be the spark?

The demolition of a park in Istanbul sparked the urban uprising in Turkey, and the plan to raise bus fares sparked the urban uprising in Brazil. So perhaps the question is not if Indonesia will experience similar circumstances, but rather: when, and what will be the spark? Only time will tell, and no doubt, the Indonesians will let us know when it has happened.

On the 18th of May, a couple in Philadelphia gave birth to a baby that came from an embryo that was selected thanks to a cutting edge procedure known as “next-generation sequencing”. This procedure allows scientists to read every letter of the human genome very rapidly and very cheaply. So will millions of parents soon be lining up to check their potential offspring for “genetic abnormalities”? Has the era of genetically pure “Gattaca babies” now begun?

This new technology is being heralded as a great “breakthrough” in the field of human fertility. According to the Guardian, the scientists that helped develop this new procedure are promoting it as a way to help couples produce a much higher percentage of “healthy” babies…

So what happened to the less desirable embryos? That is a very good question. Unfortunately, this is just the beginning.

From its beginnings, the Occupy movement was of considerable interest to the DHS, the FBI, and other law enforcement and intelligence agencies, while true terrorists were slipping past the nets they cast in the wrong places. In the fall of 2011, the DHS specifically asked its regional affiliates to report on “Peaceful Activist Demonstrations, in addition to reporting on domestic terrorist acts and ‘significant criminal activity’.”

Aware that Occupy was overwhelmingly peaceful, the federally funded Boston Regional Intelligence Center (BRIC), one of 77 co-ordination centers known generically as “fusion centers,” was busy monitoring Occupy Boston daily. As the investigative journalist Michael Isikoff recently reported, they were not only tracking Occupy-related Facebook pages and websites but “writing reports on the movement’s potential impact on ‘commercial and financial sector assets.’”

It was in this period that the FBI received the second of two Russian police warnings about the extremist Islamist activities of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the future Boston Marathon bomber. That city’s police commissioner later testified that the federal authorities did not pass any information at all about the Tsarnaev brothers on to him, though there’s no point in letting the Boston police off the hook either. The ACLU has uncovered documents showing that, during the same period, they were paying close attention to the internal workings of… Code Pink and Veterans for Peace.