BANGKOK, Thailand -- Bangkok's political violence worsened on Sunday (Jan. 19) when grenades and gunfire injured 29 people at an anti-government protest, two days after a grenade killed one protester and injured 36 others who were marching to force the prime minister's resignation and stop an election scheduled for Feb. 2.

About 10 people in total have died in scattered shootings, explosions and clashes during the massive street protest which began on Oct. 31, and security officials are bracing for more attacks.

Sunday's (Jan. 19) first explosion occurred downtown during lunchtime at Victory Monument, where hundreds of protesters were peacefully camping in tents in the street next to their huge makeshift stage, to block traffic and disrupt Bangkok's economy in a bid to destabilize the government.

An unidentified man threw a grenade near a media tent erected for journalists, injuring at least 28 people including a Thai reporter, medical officials said.

Witnesses chased the suspect who then threw a second grenade and fired a gun at his pursuers, injuring one more person.

On January 17, the Guardian.uk revealed startling new information about National Security Agency (NSA) bulk collection of mobile phone users’ text messages.

The Guardian published heavily redacted portions of a slide presentation made by the NSA for their British counterpart agency, the Government Communications Security Headquarters (GCHQ). The slide show detailed a series of programs known as DISHFIRE, SPYDER, and MILKBONE that collect not only metadata but also so-called meta-content. Meta-content refers to location, time and user data collected by examining content. This direct revelation of meta-content collection proves without a doubt that President Obama was lying when he claimed “No one is reading your emails.”

The National Security Agency depends on huge computers that guzzle electricity in the service of the surveillance state. For the NSA’s top executives, maintaining a vast flow of juice to keep Big Brother nourished is essential -- and any interference with that flow is unthinkable.

But interference isn’t unthinkable. And in fact, it may be doable.

Grassroots activists have begun to realize the potential to put the NSA on the defensive in nearly a dozen states where the agency is known to be running surveillance facilities, integral to its worldwide snoop operations.

Organizers have begun to push for action by state legislatures to impede the electric, water and other services that sustain the NSA’s secretive outposts.

Those efforts are farthest along in the state of Washington, where a new bill in the legislature -- the Fourth Amendment Protection Act -- is a statutory nightmare for the NSA. The agency has a listening post in Yakima, in the south-central part of the state.

For the last two years, British Prime Minister David Cameron has been unable to remove a serious thorn in his side, in the form of a wave of hard-right sentiment across the country that threatens to split the Conservative vote in two. The UK Independence Party, these days referred to almost unanimously as Ukip, has become the chief banner for vigorously old-fashioned conservatism.

Ukip was founded in 1993 as a single-issue party, focused primarily on opposing Britain's membership of the European Union as an affront to national sovereignty. They initially contained anti-EU elements from both the left and the right concerned about globalisation and immigration respectively, but in the past 10 years the leadership has morphed the party's position to the right so that it has become a hotbed of xenophobia, sexism, homophobia, and frothing-at-the-mouth rage against windfarms.

Where other strains of hard-right conservatism have failed in the past, Ukip has succeeded, partially because they attract protest votes in a political environment that is increasingly hostile to Westminster, but much more due to the no-nonsense charisma of their leader, Nigel Farage.

In late August 2013, President Obama announced a review panel on the intelligence community in the wake of Edward Snowden's revelations. The panel, which the president described as composed of outsiders, was actually composed of intelligence community and Obama administration insiders and delivered the whitewash that many observers expected.

The panel, according to panel member Cass Sunstein, was “not thinking in constitutional terms,” and gave the president cosmetic recommendations that would do little to materially reduce the fine scrutiny that the NSA has placed the entire world under. According to a New York Times analysis of the president's speech, and the Free Press's examination of the accompanying presidential policy directive, President Obama seems to be resolved to apply a much thinner veneer of cosmetics than even his cherry-picked panel advised.