As the Julian Assange case took a turn for the dramatic with his asylum request to Ecuador, in an exclusive interview to RT Christine Assange called the Australian government a puppet of the US that aided and abetted the persecution of her son.

RT: Now Julian hasn’t been charged yet, but he’s already seeking political asylum, so why now? Is it too early to take such a step?
Christine Assange: Julian not only hasn’t been charged, he hasn’t even been questioned despite asking the Swedish government to do so for the last two years. The concern is of course that given the flagrant abuses of his human and legal rights in the Swedish case for two years, their refusal to adhere to their own police procedures and their own prosecutorial standards, that were he to go to Sweden, where he would be jailed straightaway, uncharged and unquestioned, he would not have the opportunity then to seek political asylum.

Glenn Greenwald: Assange asks Ecuador for asylum
Glenn Greenwald: Julian Assange's right to asylum
Kate Randall: WikiLeaks founder Assange seeks asylum in Ecuadorian embassy in London
WL Central: Live Blog: Assange requests political asylum from Ecuador
WL Central: Open letter to the Australian people from Christine Assange, mother of Julian Assange
Wikileaks: Effective Declaration of Abandonment from Australian Government
ABCnet.au: Assange faces arrest for breaching bail conditions

Google claims that they have been told by authorities from various governments, by way of more than 1,000 requests, to remove content from YouTube in the last 6 months of 2011. Google says this is “an alarming trend”. This is an attempt to subvert responsibility from the mega search engine, who works for the National Security Agency (NSA). A US Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia, ruled last month that the NSA does not need to confirm nor deny (known as a “Glomar” response) its collaborations with Google; how the two work together to spy on American citizens in the name of protecting the public from false flag “cyber-attacks”.

Monsanto may soon be forced to pay as much as 7.5 billion dollars back to the farmers who say that the mega corporation took their rightfully earned income and taxed their small businesses to financial shambles. - It all started with a monumental lawsuit launched by over 5 million farmers against Monsanto looking to recover financial losses from ridiculous seed taxes that bankrupted many families. Back in April, a Brazilian court ruled that Monsanto absolutely was responsible for paying back the exorbitant amounts of cash back to the farmers, ordering the company to issue back all of the taxes collected since 2004 — a minimum of 2 billion dollars. Afterwards, Monsanto appealed the decision and the case is now suspended until a further hearing is initiated by the Justice Tribune of the local court stationed in Rio Grande do Sul. Recently, however, the Brazilian Supreme Court declared that any decision reached in a local court case should apply nationally. The result? Monsanto now faces even larger charges, due to the larger legal application on a national level. Now, the charges total or exceed 7.5 billion dollars.

The documentary "Psywar," featuring CMD founder John Stauber, by Metanoia Films — This film explores the evolution of propaganda and public relations in the United States, with an emphasis on the "elitist theory of democracy" and the relationship between war, propaganda and class. Includes original interviews with a number of dissident scholars including Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Michael Parenti, Peter Phillips ("Project Censored"), John Stauber ("PR Watch"), Christopher Simpson ("The Science of Coercion") and others. The film explores corporate and government use of propaganda and public relations to manipulate American people. The movie explores how the U.S. government staged events to manipulate public opinion about the Iraq war, like the rescue of Private Jessica Lynch, the supposedly spontaneous mob that pulled over the larger-than-life statue of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. It also discusses the Pentagon pundit scandal, and the hidden activities of the Rendon Group, a PR firm specializing in spinning war. The film exposes government and corporate activities to blur the lines between real news and fake news, as well as the development over time of public relations misinformation campaigns, strategic corporate campaigns to generate goodwill and the perception of good works, the use of staged photo-ops, and other manipulative PR tools that have turned the land of the free and the home of the brave into a place where citizens are now manipulated with great efficiency, and on a massive scale.

A US Senate report indicates that the United States has now nearly 15,000 troops in three bases across Kuwait- - triple the average number of American forces in the Middle Eastern country before the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. - The Senate Foreign Relations Committee released the report on Tuesday, considering how to promote the US interests in the Persian Gulf region after the American forces left Iraq last year. According to the report, having the military bases throughout the region is a "lily pad" model to allow for a rapid escalation of military forces. US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has recently said there are roughly 40,000 American troops in the area to "respond to" the region’s possible conflicts.

Russia Today: US clings onto Gulf with tens of thousands of troops in region

19-year-old Sahar Sabet says an Apple Store in Georgia refused to sell her an iPad after a store representative overheard her speaking in Farsi. - "Very hurtful, very embarrassing. I actually walked out in tears," Sabet told WSBTV about her experience. When a reporter from the station returned to the same Apple Store with Sabet, the employee once again reiterated that it is Apple company policy to not sell products to anyone from Iran. The WSBTV reporter recorded video of the exchange on her phone. Sabet is a U.S. citizen and a student at the University of Georgia but the iPad was to be a gift for a cousin living in Iran. "When we said 'Farsi, I'm from Iran,' he said, 'I just can't sell this to you. Our countries have bad relations,'" Sabet said.

“The malware was designed to spy on Iran's computer networks and send back intelligence used for an ongoing cyberwarfare campaign”, The Washington Post reported on Tuesday.

US National Security Agency, CIA and Israel's military worked together to create the Flame virus, the newspaper said. Flame is a new malware similar to the Stuxnet virus that had previously targeted Iran's nuclear facilities. Stuxnet, first indentified by the Iranian officials in June 2010, is a malware designed to infect computers using a control system favored by industries that manage water supplies, oil rigs, and power plants. In July 2010, media reports claimed that Stuxnet had targeted industrial computers around the globe, with Iran being the main target of the attack. They said the country's Bushehr nuclear power plant was at the center of the cyber attack. However, Iranian experts detected the worm in time, averting any damage to the country's industrial sites and resources.