The vast dragnet operations of the NSA include “industrial espionage,” whistleblower Edward Snowden told the German television network ARD TV in an exclusive interview airing Sunday evening.

In his first televised appearance since speaking with journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras in Hong Kong, Snowden spoke at length with German journalist Hubert Seipel on his current predicament as an exile living in Russia.

In text released ahead of the interview, ARD TV quoted Snowden saying the NSA does not limit its espionage to issues of national security, giving the example of the German engineering firm Siemens.

“If there is information about Siemens that benefit the national interest of the United States, but have nothing to do with national security, then take this information anyway,” Snowden said, according to ARD, which recorded the interview in Russia.

The National Security Agency tapped the mobile phone of Germany’s ex-Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder because of his opposition to the U.S.-led war on Iraq, German media reported Tuesday.

According to a joint report by Süddeutsche Zeitung daily and regional public broadcaster NDR, the surveillance of Angela Merkel’s predecessor began in 2002, with his name being number 388 on a list of people whose communications should be surveilled.

“We had reason to presume that [Schroeder] was not contributing to the success of the alliance,” Süddeutsche quotes an unnamed source as saying.

Schroeder, a Social Democrat, held office from 1998 until 2005, with his second term beginning in 2002.

He was s staunch opponent of the Iraq war, saying at the beginning of his second election campaign that his country would not be providing troops for what he called an “adventure.”

U.S. President Barack Obama spoke with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin by phone Friday morning, but no consensus on how best to move forward over the crisis in Ukraine was reached and each country represented the call, not surprisingly, with sharply different narratives.

On Thursday, Obama signed off on a series of “soft” sanctions against Russia, but Putin is reportedly undeterred by the U.S. placement of some travel restrictions on officials.

“The U.S. has the right [to sanction], and we have the right to respond to it,” said Vladimir Lukin, a Russian government official who has worked on the Ukrainian crisis, told Interfax, a Russian news agency. “But all that is, of course, not making me happy.” Lukin was referring to previous Russian warnings that it would respond to economic sanctions by western countries, with counter-sanctions of its own.

While Obama repeated his objections to a move by Crimea to schedule a vote on whether it would remain part of Ukraine, Putin said that his country would defend the right of Crimeans to seek Russian protection as they continue to ask for it.

“Russia cannot ignore calls for help and it acts accordingly, in full compliance with international law,” Putin said on his call with Obama. The Russian Federation Council on Friday also offered its official endorsement of the Crimea referendum.

According to statements from the White House, Mr. Obama urged Mr. Putin on the call to authorize direct talks with Ukraine’s newly established government in Kiev, allow entry of international monitors and return his military forces to the bases that Russia maintains in Crimea.

Click Here: cheap Cowboys jersey

Putin responded by saying that the government Kiev was ushered in by an “anti-constitutional coup” and he continues to view it as not “legitimate” it as it has no popular mandate across the country.

The New York Times explains the tensions surrounding the Crimea vote, currently set for March 16, by noting how both international powers are leveraging their outsized influence to make declarations about representing the will of the Ukrainian people:

Meanwhile, the Guardian reports that “Ukraine’s border guard operation now believes Russia has 30,000 troops in the region, almost twice the estimate of 16,000 given by the Ukrainian government earlier this week.”

Lastly, as events on the international and diplomatic level continued to unfold, voices on the street in Crimea reveal the worry by many that what will be forgotten as world powers like the U.S., Russia, and the EU squabble over their own interests and desires, the interests of Ukrainians–on all sides of the complex situation–will be forgotten. As the Moscow Times reports from a pro-Russian rally in the regional capitol of Simferopol:

_________________________________

As a result of steadily climbing Arctic temperatures, the polar jet stream has been thrown off its usual course, setting off wild weather patterns such as the extremely harsh winter in the Northern and Eastern U.S. this year. This chilly reality is likely to become the new norm, a group of U.S. scientists said at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on Saturday.

“The jet stream, a ribbon of high altitude, high-speed wind in northern latitudes that blows from west to east, is formed when the cold Arctic air clashes with warmer air from further south,” Agence France-Presse explains. “The greater the difference in temperature, the faster the jet stream moves.” Because the air coming from the Arctic is warming, the jet stream has weakened and “has begun to meander, like a river heading off course.”

“Weather patterns are changing,” said Jennifer Francis, a climate expert at Rutgers University, at the meeting. “We can expect more of the same and we can expect it to happen more frequently.”

In a nondescript industrial estate in El Segundo, a boxy suburb in northern Los Angeles just a mile or two from LAX international airport, 20 people wait in a windowless canteen for a ceremony to begin. Outside, the sun is shining on an unseasonably warm February day; inside, the only light comes from the glare of halogen bulbs.

There is a strange mix of accents – predominantly American, but smatterings of Swedish, Russian, Spanish and Portuguese can be heard around the room, as men and women (but mostly men) chat over pepperoni pizza and 75-cent vending machine soda. In the corner, an Asteroids arcade machine blares out tinny music and flashing lights.

It might be a fairly typical office scene, were it not for the extraordinary security procedures that everyone in this room has had to complete just to get here, the sort of measures normally reserved for nuclear launch codes or presidential visits. The reason we are all here sounds like the stuff of science fiction, or the plot of a new Tom Cruise franchise: the ceremony we are about to witness sees the coming together of a group of people, from all over the world, who each hold a key to the internet. Together, their keys create a master key, which in turn controls one of the central security measures at the core of the web. Rumours about the power of these keyholders abound: could their key switch off the internet? Or, if someone somehow managed to bring the whole system down, could they turn it on again?

The keyholders have been meeting four times a year, twice on the east coast of the US and twice here on the west, since 2010. Gaining access to their inner sanctum isn’t easy, but last month I was invited along to watch the ceremony and meet some of the keyholders – a select group of security experts from around the world. All have long backgrounds in internet security and work for various international institutions. They were chosen for their geographical spread as well as their experience – no one country is allowed to have too many keyholders. They travel to the ceremony at their own, or their employer’s, expense.

What these men and women control is the system at the heart of the web: the domain name system, or DNS. This is the internet’s version of a telephone directory – a series of registers linking web addresses to a series of numbers, called IP addresses. Without these addresses, you would need to know a long sequence of numbers for every site you wanted to visit. To get to the Guardian, for instance, you’d have to enter “77.91.251.10” instead of theguardian.com.

Australia’s Victorian state parliament passed a draconian anti-protest bill on Tuesday, prompting protests in the Melbourne parliament chamber that were violently shut down by security.

The Summary Offenses and Sentencing Amendment Bill has been widely criticized as a crackdown on freedom of expression and public protest, as well as an attack on marginalized, poor, homeless, and undocumented people.

When opponents of the bill voiced their opposition during debate in the chamber on Tuesday, security “proceeded to drag people by their arms, legs and their necks out of the gallery for daring to express the concerns of the community,” said protester Samantha Castro in an interview with 7 News describing the scene, which was captured on the video below.

In addition, a riot police squad was called to the scene to disband the approximately 30 protesters. The demonstrators “were representative of a much larger movement, of many [thousands] of people who do not want to see democracy further stifled in this state,” wrote Nicola Paris of nonviolent direct action group CounterAct, in a statement about the action.

Now passed, the bill drastically expands police powers to force individuals or groups of people in public places to “move on” on the suspicion that they will cause violence, obstruction, or sell drugs, and it expands powers to ban, imprison, and fine people who are deemed not in compliance.