A federal watchdog group said Wednesday that the National Security Agency’s data collection and surveillance program has been “an effective tool” for the country. Seven months earlier, the same bipartisan group found fundamental flaws with another program, arguing in a January report that the NSA’s collection of domestic calling records “lacked a viable legal foundation” and recommended that it be shut down.

Israel arrested six Jewish suspects Sunday in the grisly slaying of a Palestinian teenager who was abducted and burned to death last week, marking a breakthrough in a case that has touched off violent protests in Arab sections of Jerusalem and northern Israel. In a statement, Israeli police and the Shin Bet security agency said the suspects were being interrogated. While the statement did not say how many were taken into custody, an official speaking on condition of anonymity because the investigation was still going on said it was six. In a case that has gripped the country's attention, Mohammed Abu Khdeir, 16, was abducted outside his home in east Jerusalem early Wednesday, and his charred remains were found in a Jerusalem forest shortly afterward.

Intifada-Palestine: Israeli Soldiers Publish Dozens Of Pictures, Posts, Calling For Murdering Arabs

TSA will more than double fees they charge many passengers. ● Between shelling out hundreds of dollars in airfare and forking over even more for ancillary fees, travelers are already spending more than they have in years for plane tickets. And that’s about to get worse. Starting on July 21, the Transportation Security Administration — you know, the folks who are in charge of confiscating your shampoo at the airport and taking you aside for an “additional screening” — will more than double the mandatory fee they charge many passengers and will no longer cap these fees. Under the old law, the fee, which is used for security, was $2.50 for each leg of a flight with a $5 cap on each one-way trip or a $10 cap on each round trip. But beginning July 21, the fee is $5.60 for each leg of a flight and that is not capped; if your layover is more than four hours on a domestic flight or 12 hours for international destinations, that counts as a second leg of the flight and you will be charged an additional fee.

Kicking out the last white farmers may be a ploy to divert attention from an economic catastrophe. ● Zimbabwe president Robert Mugabe has ordered the nation’s remaining white farmers to be booted off their farms in order that the land be given to black Zimbabweans. In the harshest official policy on race and land reform in a country that has been close to bankruptcy, the 90-year old autocrat said Wednesday that whites may no longer own any land in Zimbabwe. Whites would still be allowed to own businesses and urban apartments. Speaking to farmers in Mhangura, a small mining town about 120 miles north of the capital Harare, Mr. Mugabe said all remaining white farmers should leave – and closed the door even on white families renting farms from black owners, as some several hundred have been doing since most were violently chased away a decade ago.