The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) says gunmen have abducted six of its workers and one Red Crescent volunteer in north-west Syria.

The ICRC has declined to reveal the identity, gender or nationality of the abducted workers but they are believed to include both local and international staff, who are mainly medical specialists.

More than 100,000 people have been killed since the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad began in March 2011, according to the UN.

We've talked plenty about the corrupting influences of the revolving door between industries and the government. Not all lobbyists or lobbying is bad, per se, but it's a symptom of the times we live in and the business of influence.

And, with so much money flowing into lobbying efforts, we're building a system where political entrepreneurship outweighs market entrepreneurship -- and that's exceptionally dangerous for our economy and our future.

The events of last week involving the Guardian and its reporters have renewed debate and inflamed concern about the age-old dilemma of how to strike the balance between individual liberty and collective security.

I believed at the time, and still do, that it was entirely reasonable for the government to seek to get leaked documents back from the Guardian or have them destroyed. Along with the information the newspaper had published, it had information that put national security and lives at risk. It was right for us to want that information destroyed.

The US National Security Agency (NSA) successfully cracked the encryption code protecting the United Nations’ internal videoconferencing system, according to documents seen by Germany’s Der Spiegel.

The publication reported on Sunday that the electronic breaching of the UN, which is headquartered in New York, occurred in the summer of 2012. Within three weeks of initially gaining access to the UN system, the NSA had increased the number of such decrypted communications from 12 to 458.

NSA Director Keith B. Alexander denied that there were any problems with the NSA snooping programs and cited oversight by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to verify that point.

Barton Gellman’s reporting revealed that in October 2011 the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court ruled an NSA process collecting data from fiber optic cables was “deficient on statutory and constitutional grounds,” according to a top-secret summary of the opinion. It ordered the NSA to comply with standard privacy protections or stop the program. This appears to directly contradict Alexander’s claim that “no one at NSA had ever gone outside the boundaries” of their authority.

Edward Snowden isn't yet allowed to step outside the Moscow airport where he's been holed up for weeks, despite reports to the contrary, his Russian lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, said Wednesday.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said Wednesday the U.S. government is seeking "clarity" about Snowden's status. And a spokeswoman for Secretary of State John Kerry said Washington would find it "disappointing" if Snowden were allowed to leave the airport.

Bankruptcy would allow Detroit's state-appointed emergency manager, Kevyn Orr, to liquidate the city's assets to try to meet the demands of creditors and pensioners.

But two pension funds representing retired city workers have resisted the bankruptcy plan, and - with tens of thousands of creditors - the city is already facing a number of lawsuits.

Chinese telecom provider Huawei represents an unambiguous national security threat to the United States and Australia, Gen. Michael Hayden, the former director of the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and now a security consultant and director of Motorola Solutions, told the Australian Financial Review, according to a July 19 report.

Hayden said that despite Huawei's best efforts to ease his concerns, "God did not make enough briefing slides on Huawei to convince me that having them involved in our critical communications infrastructure was going to be okay."

A Pakistani Taliban leader has sent a letter to schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai, 16, expressing shock that she was shot by Taliban gunmen last year.

The Taliban leader also says that his group is not "against education of any men or women or girls". Instead he claims Malala was targeted because she campaigned to "malign [the Taliban's] efforts to establish the Islamic system".

Putin had said earlier that Snowden would have to "stop his work aimed at harming our American partners" if he wanted to stay in the country. That reportedly prompted Snowden to withdraw an asylum request in early July.

But on Friday, Snowden reportedly said that he will not harm the United States in the future.

Over the weekend, a journalist who first published the leaked documents said that Snowden has more damaging information that could be a "nightmare" for the U.S. government.