The United States is not the first superpower to act as if it'€™s exceptional and will likely not be the last, although US leaders could be squandering a fruitful opportunity for improved international relations, Noam Chomsky said in an interview with RT. [...]

The father of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has arrived in Moscow. Lon Snowden's flight touched down at Sheremetyevo Airport - where his son famously spent five weeks in transit limbo before receiving asylum in Russia. The plane carrying Lon Snowden landed in Moscow Thursday morning, RT crew on the scene reported. [...]

Edward Snowden’s revelations of NSA surveillance programs prove that the US has abandoned the rule of law, betraying its own constitution, whistleblower Thomas Andrews Drake, told RT. A group of US whistleblowers and activists has present Snowden with a Sam Adams Award for ‘Integrity in Intelligence’ in Moscow on Wednesday. [...]

The top Republican in the House of Representatives warned President Barack Obama over the weekend that he’s ready to let the United States default — and that the White House is to blame. House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) told ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday that Republicans in his chamber would not immediately honor the White House’s request to raise the US debt ceiling, setting the stag [...]

Improved surveillance, take down of opposition websites for "€œillegal content€" and paid pro-government commentators are among the increasingly sophisticated tools used by authorities to restrict internet freedom, a new report claims. The 2013 Freedom on the Net report, compiled by non-profit Freedom House, says that 34 out of the 60 countries it surveyed suffered a falloff in internet freedom [...]

The objective of the United States National Security Agency is to eliminate privacy around the world, the American writer who helped expose the NSA'€™s far-reaching surveillance powers said on Tuesday. Glenn Greenwald of the UK’s Guardian answered questions about the ongoing NSA leaks and his source, the now notorious former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, [...]

Agriculture giant Monsanto has announced acquisition of the Climate Corporation, a climate data research company, expecting that its info will help farmers maximize crop yields with fewer resources. The $930 million cash purchase is set to give the company an upper hand in the quickly expanding field of scientific weather data, something that would put vast amounts of climate information at farmer [...]

California Governor Jerry Brown has signed a law barring state cooperation with any attempt by the federal government to indefinitely detain people. The legislation targets the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). Brown signed into law AB351, which goes beyond any other state in rejecting federal indefinite detention power, according to the Tenth Amendment Center. [...]

The US Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case on whether a conviction for domestic violence precludes Americans from obtaining a firearms license. The Obama administration has argued that ending the prohibition would invalidate bans in much of the US. The Justices announced Tuesday they would hear eight cases of the more than 2,000 appeals that accumulated over the summer. [...]

The United States is home to 442 billionaires like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. It conjures images of movie star mansions, Beverly Hills, and Manhattan's 5th Avenue. But the truth is, 1 in 6 Americans are "food insecure," which is how politicians describe people who don't have enough food to survive. In many states, including Texas, Florida, Mississippi and Alabama, hunger affects over 19% of [...]

In an address from the White House Rose Garden Tuesday afternoon, President Barack Obama blamed Republican lawmakers for triggering the first government shutdown in nearly two decades. Obama spoke roughly 12 hours after a longstanding budget stalemate on Capitol Hill caused a midnight shutdown, impacting a number of government agencies and initiatives across the board. [...]

Former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio, who spent over four years in prison for insider trading, now says his conviction was based on his company'€™s refusal to cooperate with NSA requests to spy on its customers. Nacchio says he feels “vindicated” by ongoing revelations provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that the NSA does, in fact, access massive amounts of metadata and communique in [...]

Contrasting reactions in India and Brazil to revelations by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden about the US government'€™s intrusive surveillance of communications in the two countries are a study in varying diplomatic style, substance and context. Recent confirmation from journalists working with Snowden that India was a prime victim caught in the crosshairs of the NSA’s megalithic data-swe [...]

American investigative journalists Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald say they have teamed up to prepare a report on the National Security Agency's role in what one of them described as the "US assassination program." “The connections between war and surveillance are clear. I don't want to give too much away but Glenn and I are working on a project right now that has at its center how the Nation [...]

For the first time in more than 30 years the President of the United States has spoken with Iran's leadership. Barack Obama announced he believes the two sides can reach a deal regarding the future of the Islamic Republic's nuclear program. From the White House Friday afternoon, Obama said he just got off the phone with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and discussed “our ongoing efforts to reach [...]

The US National Security Agency has been exploiting US citizens' personal information drawn from its large collection of metadata to create complex graphs of social connections for foreign intelligence purposes, the latest Snowden leaks have revealed. Documents obtained by the New York Times from the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden say that the practice has been going on since November 2010, [...]

The UN Security Council has unanimously adopted a resolution outlining the details of taking under international control and ultimately destroying Syria’s chemical arsenal. "Today's historic resolution is the first hopeful news on Syria in a long time," UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told the council immediately after the vote. [...]

The longstanding notion of US exceptionalism has deep roots in the American psyche, but as the world experiences a “tectonic shift in global geopolitics” the very idea of Washington’s superiority is being challenged, analyst Eric Draitser told RT. Earlier this week, President Barack Obama reaffirmed Washington's desire to engage in the affairs of other states, particularly in the Mi [...]

A US military request for funding to renovate the prison base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba was denied by Pentagon officials in the Obama administration who, while pledging to close the prison, have been consistently prevented from doing so by Congress. General John F. Kelly, the chief of US Southern Command and the officer in charge of Guantanamo Bay, requested $195.7 million to update and modify the p [...]