Bob Dylan has been charged with incitement to hatred in France after he was quoted comparing Croats with Nazis in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, a judicial source said Monday. ● The world-famous American singer was questioned and charged last month while on a visit to Paris during which he gave several concerts and was awarded the Legion d'Honneur, one of France's top honours, the source said. The charge against him centres on a 2012 interview with Rolling Stone magazine during which he compared the relationship between Croats and Serbs to that of the Nazis and the Jews. "This country is just too fucked up about colour.... People at each other's throats just because they are of a different colour," Dylan told Rolling Stone, discussing race relations in the United States. "Blacks know that some whites didn't want to give up slavery -- that if they had their way, they would still be under the yoke, and they can't pretend they don't know that." "If you got a slave master or Klan in your blood, blacks can sense that. That stuff lingers to this day. Just like Jews can sense Nazi blood and the Serbs can sense Croatian blood."

BBC: Bob Dylan faces French legal inquiry over Croat remarks

The names of nearly three-quarters of a million individuals have been secretly added to watch lists administered by the United States government, but federal officials are adamant about keeping information about these rosters under wraps. ● A report by the New York Times’ Susan Stellin published over the weekend attempted to shine much-deserved light on an otherwise largely unexposed program of federal watch lists, but details about these directories — including the names of individuals on them and what they did to get there — remain as elusive as ever. More than 12 years after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, federal agencies continue to keep lists on hand containing names of individuals of interest: people who often end up un-cleared to enter or exit the US due to an array of activity that could be considered suspicious or terrorist-related to government officials. In 2008, the American Civil Liberties Union claimed that an Inspector General of the Department of Justice report found at least 700,000 individual names on the database maintained by the Terrorist Screening Center, the Federal Bureau of Investigation sub-office tasked with overseeing the “single database of identifying information about those known or reasonably suspected of being involved in terrorist activity.” Five years later, that number of suspicious persons is reportedly close to what it was at the time. Half-a-decade down the road, however, Americans and foreign nationals who end up on the government’s radar are offered little chance to find out how they ended there, or even file an appeal. According to some, that’s just the start of what’s wrong with these lists.

The United Nations will launch an investigation into the massive surveillance programs of American and British intelligence agencies following revelations from US whistleblower Edward Snowden. ● The Guardian reported the UN special rapporteur Ben Emmerson will investigate the use of secret programs to store and analyze billions of emails, phone calls and text messages from around the world by the US National Security Agency and its UK counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). The inquiry will then make a series of recommendations to the UN general assembly next year, according to the report. Emmerson said that the media had a duty and right to publish stories about the activities of the NSA and GCHQ.

Atzmon and O'keefe scrutinize the role of language in political discussion and Palestine solidarity discourse in particular. In this segment they examine Zionism, Israel, Jewish tribalism and the usage of the 'J word'.

Judge's order to social workers behind forced caesarean | In a highly unusual intervention, Sir James Munby has demanded to know why the girl should not be reunited with her mother, a 35-year-old Italian. Fabio Roia, the most senior judge in Milan, said the woman’s treatment by a secret court resembled a horror film – an unprecedented ‘act of extreme violence’ that could not have happened in Italy. The mother, who was suffering from a mental illness, was subjected to a caesarean on the orders of the controversial Court of Protection. Her ex-husband and her parents, who look after her two other children, insisted they would care for the girl. But, in a second secret hearing, a court ruled that her girl should be removed from her care for adoption by a British family. Campaigners said it was wrong for a closed-doors court to force a foreign citizen to have an invasive medical procedure and seize her child against her will.

Telegraph: Brave New World: Child taken from womb by social services

Cellphone users who attempt to install the Facebook Messenger app are asked to agree to terms of service that allow the social networking giant to use the microphone on their device to record audio at any time without their permission. ● The TOS also authorizes Facebook to take videos and pictures using the phone’s camera at any time without permission, as well as directly calling numbers, again without permission, that could incur charges. But wait, there’s more! Facebook can also “read your phone’s call log” and “read data about contacts stored on your phone, including the frequency with which you’ve called, emailed or communicated in other ways with specific individuals.” Although most apps on Android and Apple devices include similar terms to those pictured above, this is easily the most privacy-busting set of mandates we’ve seen so far. Since the vast majority of people will agree to these terms without even reading them, cellphone users are agreeing to let Facebook monitor them 24/7, green lighting the kind of open ended wiretap that would make even the NSA jealous.

Some drivers along a busy Fort Worth street on Friday were stopped at police roadblock and directed into a parking lot, where they were asked by federal contractors for samples of their breath, saliva and even blood. It was part of a government research study aimed at determining the number of drunken or drug-impaired drivers. "It just doesn't seem right that you can be forced off the road when you're not doing anything wrong," said Kim Cope, who said she was on her lunch break when she was forced to pull over at the roadblock on Beach Street in North Fort Worth. [...] "I gestured to the guy in front that I just wanted to go straight, but he wouldn't let me and forced me into a parking spot," she said. Once parked, she couldn't believe what she was asked next.