Blog Posts by Olivier Knox, Yahoo! News

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange speaks to the media inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, June 14, 2013. (Anthony Devlin/Reuters/Pool)Wikileaks founder Julian Assange said on Wednesday that his antisecrecy group has been in touch with National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden’s legal team in a bid to help him secure asylum in Iceland.

“I feel a great deal of personal sympathy with Mr Snowden,” Assange told reporters on a conference call. He joined the call from the Ecuadoran embassy in London, where he has lived since entering the diplomatic mission and seeking asylum exactly one year ago.

“We are in touch with Mr Snowden's legal team and have been, are involved, in the process of brokering his asylum in Iceland,” Assange said. “Our people in Iceland have been in contact with his legal team.”

Asked whether Snowden, who reportedly made his disclosures from Hong Kong but whose current location is unclear, could fly to Iceland without being stopped by the U.S. government or America’s allies, Assange replied: “All those issues are being looked at by the people involved.”

But Assange declined to say whether he had

NATO soldiers board a helicopter after a security handover ceremony outside Kabul, June 18, 2013. (Omar Sobhani/Reuters)

President Barack Obama warmly welcomed the announcement on Tuesday of fresh reconciliation talks between Afghanistan's government and the Taliban, as well as plans to launch a new round of direct negotiations between the insurgent force and the United States.

U.S. officials said one of the likely items on the U.S.-Taliban agenda would be the return of U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, held captive by the Taliban-allied Haqqani network since 2009.

"This is an important first step toward reconciliation," Obama told reporters after a meeting with French President François Hollande on the sidelines of the G-8 summit of rich countries. "It's a very early step—we anticipate there will be a lot of bumps in the road—but the fact that the parties have an opportunity to talk and discuss Afghanistan's future I think is very important."

U.S. and Taliban negotiators will hold formal talks "in a couple of days" in the Gulf state of Qatar, where the Taliban will officially open an office on Tuesday,

President Barack Obama speaks to guests at the Waterfront Hall in Belfast June 17, 2013. (Paul Faith/Reuters/Pool)President Barack Obama promised in an interview broadcast late Monday that his decision to arm Syrian rebels does not mean the United States is “taking sides in a religious war.” Obama, speaking to PBS’s Charlie Rose, also played down the “ruckus” over the NSA’s controversial surveillance programs.

“If you're a U.S. person, then NSA is not listening to your phone calls and it's not targeting your emails unless it's getting an individualized court order,” Obama said in the exchange, which was recorded before the president left for Europe.

“There are two programs that were revealed by Mr. Snowden -- allegedly, since there's a criminal investigation taking place -- and they caused all the ruckus,” he told Rose. It was his only reference by name to Edward Snowden, whom the Guardian has credited with being the source for recent exposés of U.S. surveillance.

Obama acknowledged critics’ warnings that the two programs – one which collects telephone records of millions of Americans, one which can

President Barack Obama delivers a keynote address ahead of the G-8 summit in Belfast, Northern Ireland, June 17, 2013. (Paul Faith/AP/Pool)President Barack Obama’s job approval rating fell sharply over the past month—from 53 to 45 percent, according to a new CNN poll. Fifty-four percent of Americans disapprove of the job he’s doing, also up from 45 percent, the survey found.

Sixty-one percent disapprove of the way he’s handling government surveillance of Americans in the aftermath of a series of dramatic reports about National Security Agency spying, while 35 percent approve.

Obama's early second term has been buffeted by a series of controversies—not just about the NSA surveillance, but also allegations of misconduct at the IRS and government spying on reporters. The president was expected to address those issues in a new interview with Charlie Rose, which airs Monday night.

What about Edward Snowden, who says he revealed the government’s secret to expose abuses? Forty-four percent approve of what he did, while 52 percent disapprove. Should the U.S. government attempt to bring him back to U.S. soil and prosecute him?

A Free Syrian Army fighter runs for cover from snipers in Deir al-Zor, June 13, 2013.Picture taken June 13, 2013. (Khalil Ashawi/Reuters)
The White House announcement that President Barack Obama has decided to provide direct military aid to Syria’s rebels didn’t include the word “arms.” And the word “weapons” appears only as part of “chemical weapons,” as in “our intelligence community assesses that the Assad regime has used chemical weapons.”

In fact, Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes, who detailed the decision on a conference call with reporters late Thursday, repeatedly declined their invitation to detail what, exactly, Washington is sending to try to tip the balance in the opposition’s favor.

“This is more a situation where we're just not going to be able to lay out an inventory of what exactly falls under the scope of that assistance other than to communicate that we have made that decision,” Rhodes said. (He used variations on the ‘inventory’ line at least four times during the call.)

That’s a little odd. Here’s how National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden described a decision to escalate aid

Afghan President Hamid Karzai during a ceremony at Kabul University in Kabul, Afghanistan. (Anja Niedringhaus/AP)Sen. Bob Corker, the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is still trying to get answers from President Barack Obama regarding Afghan President Hamid Karzai's claims that he has been getting deliveries of CIA cash for years.

"I write again to request an explanation of the incoherent United States policy in Afghanistan made evident by the claims of cash payments to President Karzai," Corker wrote in a letter to Obama on Thursday. The Tennessee lawmaker—who has made two previous written requests for information, to no avail—noted that a key U.S. goal in the war-torn country has been to battle corruption.

"I am deeply concerned that these alleged cash payments undermine these efforts and enhance corruption in Afghanistan," the senator wrote. "Even if these alleged payments may have short-term value for the United States from a national security or intelligence perspective, they may be severely counterproductive in the long run."

The senator urged Obama to keep key

The sun shines through cloud cover above the U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington, June 13, 2013. The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday issued a mixed ruling in a case concerning patents held by Myriad Genetics Inc over the closely watched issue of whether human genes can be patented. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)Yes, yes, bombshell NSA surveillance revelations, civil war in Syria, the ailing economy, the IRS controversy—there are many, many more important stories to cover. But as someone who was a teen in the 1980s, the idea that a Supreme Court justice might casually reference Tommy Tutone's 1982 smash hit "867-5309/Jenny" in a ruling is just irresistible.

And that, as first noted by SCOTUSblog, is exactly what happened on Thursday: Justice Elena Kagan, writing the opinion in a unanimous decision in American Trucking Associations v. City of Los Angeles, California, noted:

Under that contract, a company may transport cargo at the Port in exchange for complying with various requirements. The two directly at issue here compel the company to (1) affix a placard on each truck with a phone number for reporting environmental or safety concerns (You’ve seen the type: “How am I driving? 213–867–5309”) and (2) submit a plan listing off-street parking locations for each truck when not in service.

What

Free Syrian Army fighters sit at an entrance of a tunnel as they wait for a fellow fighter in Deir al-Zor June 12, 2013. (Khalil Ashaw/Reuters)Syria’s bloody civil war has left at least 92,901 people dead, the U.N. Human Rights Office said Thursday in a new report sure to give ammunition to lawmakers urging President Barack Obama to escalate the U.S. role there.

“Unfortunately, as the study indicates, this is most likely a minimum casualty figure. The true number of those killed is potentially much higher,” U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said in a statement.

So far, Obama has directed humanitarian aid to rebels looking to topple President Bashar Assad, but has rebuffed bipartisan calls from Congress to send arms to moderate segments of an opposition that also includes al-Qaida-affiliated fighters. The issue is certain to arise at the upcoming Group of Eight Summit in Northern Ireland, where the president will come face to face with world leaders like French President François Hollande who have urged a more aggressive international role.

In the statement from its home base in Geneva, the U.N. Human Rights