The New York Times - 10/17/13, By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT and CHARLIE SAVAGE

During his tenure at the Defense Department, Jeh C. Johnson helped shape the Obama administration’s national security policies. Alex Wong/Getty Images

But he has also criticized the Obama administration for being too secretive about matters like targeted killings using drone strikes.'

“The problem is that the American public is suspicious of executive power shrouded in secrecy,” Mr. Johnson said in a speech at Fordham University this year. “In the absence of an official picture of what our government is doing, and by what authority, many in the public fill the void by imagining the worst.”

More: NYTimes.com

RT - Edited 10/20/13

Organizers estimated that 70,000 people took part in the protest, while authorities placed the number closer to 50,000.

Earlier this week, Prime Minister Enrico Letta - who is presiding over a fractious Left-Right coalition - presented the 2014 budget that immediately came under a firestorm of criticism from both sides of the political spectrum.

More: RT.com

euronews - 10/18/13

Italy’s new budget, announced this week, included spending and tax cuts aimed at returning the economy to growth.

Around 20,000 protesters were reportedly on the streets of Rome to show their opposition.

NYtimes, By: James Risen, 10/17/2013

WASHINGTON — Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, said in an extensive interview this month that he did not take any secret N.S.A. documents with him to Russia when he fled there in June, assuring that Russian intelligence officials could not get access to them. Mr. Snowden said he gave all of the classified documents he had obtained to journalists he met in Hong Kong, before flying to Moscow, and did not keep any copies for himself. He did not take the files to Russia “because it wouldn’t serve the public interest,” he said.

For more on this story visit www.nytimes.com