Writing Tuesday on his official Twitter account, President Mohammed Morsi says he rejects all "dictates," whether domestic or foreign.

The military has said that if no agreement is reached between Morsi and his opponents meeting their demands it will impose its own political road map to resolve the crisis. Its deadline runs out during the day Wednesday

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As revealed by agency documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the NSA is hungry for information on the Internet. Under programs like PRISM, it taps Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, and Yahoo to look at the communications of a literally unknowable number of their users. (It's classified.)

It's inherently hard to talk about how the NSA gets this information because it obtains classified orders for surveillance under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which is administered by a secret court. Anyone who gets a FISA order is legally obliged to keep mum about it.

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I keep a portrait of Machiavelli over my desk at work — an interior design choice that, I have learned, dismays some of my coworkers. Amid a recent mid-afternoon zone out, I received an email from one of them with the title “Who Wants to Serve a Billionaire?” The message contained a link to an article in the Guardian about a growing group of international multi-billionaires, their so-called “superyachts,” and the desperate lower-class Britons and Eastern Europeans who serve them as deckhands.

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Created by Scott Garner, a master's degree candidate in the interactive telecommunications department at NYU, Hell Is Other People relies on the same technology as Foursquare, an app that allows people to "check in" at various establishments to display their location to other users. Unlike Foursquare, which aims to maximize the possibility of face-to-face interaction, Hell Is Other People displays the locations of others, as well as the best routes you can take for how to avoid them.

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“Everybody in the South over 60 used the N-word at some time or the other in the past.”

“I don’t understand why some people can use [the N-word] and others can’t.”

“We have lived with each other and loved each other here for a long time. Sometimes I think there is more prejudice in the North than there is in the South.”

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Just because it's the way we've always done it doesn't mean it's the most awesome way.

In America, we have culture. We have things like baby showers and fireworks on the Fourth of July. And these can be really great, but after searching far and wide for the most awesome cultural practices the globe has to offer, GlobalPost has compiled a list of items that we think Americans should really consider adopting.

In no particular order, except for the first one which is the most awesome:

1) On the Navajo reservation, parents throw a party the first time a baby laughs. It's considered a significant event in that it marks the child's transition from the spirit world to the physical world. Careful though, the person who made the baby laugh is responsible for throwing the party and footing the bill.

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Apart from avoiding worldwide destruction, there was one other silver lining to the Cuban Missile Crisis: it persuaded the two nuclear superpowers that they had to find a better way to communicate.

Even though the idea of a proscribed diplomatic communication system had been discussed in the past, especially in the years since Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953, it took the Crisis itself to bring the idea to fruition. Both nations were inspired to reduce the risk of another confrontation; picking up a phone seemed like a good idea. Such technology was not available, however. The best that could be done was the installation of two terminal points with teletype equipment, a full-time duplex wire telegraph circuit and a full-time radiotelegraph circuit. To allow for this system, Soviet and American negotiators produced a memorandum, “Regard the Establishment of a Direct Communications Link.”

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Some people used Gandolfini's passing as an opportunity to try out fledgling stand-up material, cracking wise about the infamous "Sopranos" finale, in which Tony Soprano orders a side of onion rings before the screen fades to black:

RIP James Gandolfini cause of heart attack maybe onion rings for the table wasn't best choice

— Jim Stevenson (@jimanardo) June 20, 2013

Who knew the biggest threat to James Gandolfini in the Sopranos finale was the onion rings? http://t.co/XGtaopxbPD #rip #jamesgandolfini — Proper Bitch (@aproperbitch) June 20, 2013

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As a white, straight, middle-class, able-bodied, cisgender woman, I know that because of the myriad privileged identities that I hold, the attacks I receive often pale in comparison to others. And yet, every time I submit a piece or send a tweet, I brace myself for the reality that some of the ensuing responses will be incredibly sexist and demeaning, perhaps even violent. It seems that being a woman who speaks her mind about injustice is unacceptable for many inhabitants of the internet.

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Many of the hacks perpetrated by Anonymous are pretty straight-forward. Whether you agree with the hacktivist group’s methods or not, they are at least comprehensible. The latest “op” however really is baffling.

LulzSec Albania, a group of Albanian hackers associated with the LulzSec group of Anonymous allies, have hacked the Swiss Chamber of Commerce in Canada. Nope. You didn’t just have a stroke.

The website of the Swiss Canadian Chamber of Commerce, which was developed using PHP, had a vulnerability to a confirmed SQL injection flaw, which is how the hackers struck.

They stole a database containing names and login information, which the group released on Pastebin.

What was the motivation? The hackers themselves say “for the lulz.”—but what lulz?

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“A chilling intrusion” declared one op-ed in the Baltimore Sun.

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But what he doesn't see are the deadly police protest crackdowns in the streets of Istanbul that have caused many to question whether Turkey is ready to join the bloc of European countries.

“The EU gave Turkey time for reforms before it can come in and live up to EU standards knowing this would take ages,” the Greek official told International Business Times on a recent afternoon in New York City. “But Turkey needs help.”

In other words, if the EU is concerned about the violence between anti-government protesters and police that has left as many as five dead and thousands injured then the best way for the 27-country political union to deal with that problem would be to accept Turkey as a member. That would give the EU the leverage necessary to force the Turkish authorities to show more respect for human rights and more restraint in the face of domestic protests. Such a course of action would offer the added advantage of letting Europe benefit from Turkey's economic vitality.

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This year, alongside the cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin and Chongqing as well as the regions of Guangdong and Hubei, Shenzhen is imposing greenhouse gas targets on hundreds of companies, ranging from power plants to airport operators. The goal is to develop a national carbon market over the next decade that could help put the brakes on the world’s largest carbon dioxide emitter.

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Two girls, no more than 15 years old, spotted the wounded rat from about 10 feet away. They held each other close, squealing and giggling, inching toward the animal theatrically. Staring them down, I scowled. How could they not appreciate this creature’s suffering or be touched by its desperation? I looked on, saying nothing.

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Wait, it gets even more shocking: Shyamalan lied.

Or so claims the writer who says he really penned She's All That.

In the 2000s, Shyamalan never shied away from the limelight, especially when it came to promoting the works of M. Night Shyamalan. But after a series of increasingly gratuitous cameos, high-profile flops, and the lasting damage done by the bizarre staged documentary that accompanied the release of 2004’s The Village, Shyamalan stepped out of the spotlight for a while, even allowing producer-star Will Smith to take the blame for Shyamalan's latest bomb, After Earth.

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“They missed me. They needed me to be here,” she said.

Rascón was returning home after nine months and 12 days in jail. She was arrested last year in a worksite raid and charged with several counts of identity theft for allegedly working with false documents.

A felony conviction would have made her ineligible for legalization should Congress pass federal immigration reform in the future. Identity theft is also considered a crime of “moral turpitude,” a deportable offense.

But after fighting the charges in court, Rascón was victorious in getting the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office to drop the felony charges.

Her case is among a handful of cases being fought by a team of attorneys who are challenging the legality of a controversial practice in Arizona: charging undocumented immigrants as felons for identity theft.

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Soon after, she declared to her parents at their Brampton, Ontario home that she'd come up with a solution to her phagophobia.

"I want to be cremated," she said. "That way I don't have to worry about the bugs eating me."

Jim Cuthbertson looked down at his 10-year-old daughter and reluctantly told her that there are also bugs that live in and feed on ashes.

Sixteen years later, this memory re-surfaced as Jamie sat down to prepare what will be her last digital will and testament using the If I Die app.

The resulting three-minute video shows Jamie smiling into her webcam, her long bangs framing her dark brown eyes. "A bug-proof coffin is totally worth it," she says. "You can also throw in some of my favourite things and photos of the people and animals I loved."

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It has no coastline but plenty of fetid canals. Its inhabitants don’t speak much English, the planet’s default lingua franca. The streets are choked with gridlock, stray dogs own the back alleys and, for much of the year, the city is deluged with monsoon rains.

And yet Bangkok, with its projected 15.9 million international overnight visitors in 2013, has taken the top spot, according to an annual index by MasterCard. The lead was snatched from mainstay London. Bangkok is forecast to best England’s capital by 200,000 visitors this year. Paris ranks third, and the affluent city-state of Singapore comes in fourth. New York ranks a distant fifth.

On the surface, this statistic offers an obvious lesson: Bangkok’s allure — a swirl of intoxicating cuisine, cheap shopping, glittering temples and raucous nightlife —is potent enough to overpower its drawbacks.

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Last week when I found myself in Times Square late in the evening hours, there was a man in a perfectly pressed suit, sitting in chair before the TKTS booth staring intently into space. There was a girl in glittery underwear and bunny ears hopping around a construction area for tips. There was the golden off-the-clock mime asking for a cigarette from a businessman who had also just left the office. In other words, at any hour in Times Square, especially in the evening, has some seedy tone of surreality. Similarly, this week’s Times Square After Hours program, called Cabin Fever: An Alpine Fantasy, was a performance event with its own more elevated touches of the surreal, most notably a human/taxidermy collaboration.

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