He might have quit his job immediately afterwards, but the London barman who attempted a citizen's arrest on Tony Blair has been rewarded with a sizeable bounty for his efforts.

Twiggy Garcia was working at Tramshed in East London when the opportunity arose to confront the former Prime Minister.

As Mr Blair was dining with friends and family, the DJ turned barman laid a hand on the former Prime Minister's shoulder and tried to arrest him for "crimes against peace..namely the decision to launch an unprovoked war against Iraq."

The website that inspired his actions, George Monbiot's Arrest Blair website, has now awarded him a quarter of their funds, a total of £2222. Mr Monbiot explained he satisfied their conditions as not only attempted the citizen's arrest but attracted the attention of the media.

In Mr Monbiot's words the bounty is deserved for "keeping the issue – and the memories of those who have been killed – alive, and sustaining the pressure to ensure that international law binds the powerful as well as the puny. " However Mr Blair's considered response to Mr Garcia, who also goes by the name "Ghoulian Assange" on Twitter, saw the barman come under a torrent of criticism on social media.

It seemed that Mr Blair's unpopularity with a certain portion of the population was rivalled only by an instrinsic dislike of those considered "hipsters".

"Can we alter the title of this article to 'annoying hipster harasses Tony Blair. Realises he looks stupid. Runs'? " tweeted one social media user. As others weighed in with their opinions, it seemed many couldn't decide who to dislike the most.

READ MORE: Man who tried to arrest Tony Blair awarded more than £2000

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A French judge has ordered that the phone of former President Nicholas Sarkozy be tapped as part of a probe on whether he took funds from ex-Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi to help bankroll his 2007 election campaign, the French daily Le Monde reported.

The judge allegedly first ordered Sarkozy's phone be tapped in April 2013, as well as the phones of two of his former ministers, Brice Hortefeux and Claude Gueant, the paper revealed Friday.

But someone involved in the investigation most likely tipped Sarkozy off, as he became extremely careful about using his official phone. He and his lawyer then acquired secret mobile phones, the paper claimed. Investigators eventually found out about them and ordered they also be bugged.

Last year, French judges launched an investigation over allegations that deposed Libyan leader Muammar Gadaffi gave money to Sarkozy's 2007 presidential election campaign. The explosive allegation first emerged in 2011, after Sarkozy played a central role in ordering French armed forces to help topple Gadaffi's regime.

Saif al-Islam, one of Gadaffi's sons, claimed Libya helped finance the French president's election campaign. In an interview with Euronews TV channel, Saif threatened to make public the details of the bank transfers after France played such an instrumental role in toppling his father. He also demanded that the French president return the money.

Sarkozy is suspected of rigging a settlement procedure to make sure Tapie got the cash as a 'thank you' for supporting him in the 2007 election. Tapie already has several corruption convictions, including one for match fixing when he was boss of Olympique Marseille football club.

READ MORE: Sarkozy’s phone ‘tapped’ over Libya cash claims

US Navy destroyer, the USS Truxtun, has crossed Turkey's Bosphorus and entered the Black Sea. With the Crimea Peninsula getting ready to hold a referendum on independence from Ukraine in a week, the US is ramping up its military presence in the region.

USS Truxton is heading to "previously planned" training exercises with the Bulgarian and Romanian navies, AFP reported earlier. At the same time, Fox News declared that NATO's bolstering presence in the Black Sea is a "defensive" measure to counter "Russian military aggression" in Ukraine.

The situation in Ukraine is close to financial and humanitarian catastrophe, urging mass protests in eastern regional centers against self-proclaimed government in Kiev. The autonomous Crimea region is preparing to hold a March-16 referendum on whether it wants to remain part of Ukraine or join Russia, after ousted President Viktor Yanukovich fled the country and the opposition imposed a central government.

Subsequently, Russia's upper chamber of the parliament approved the possibility of Moscow deploying troops to Ukraine and particularly to Crimea – but only to protect ethnic Russians in Crimea.

READ MORE: US warship in Black Sea as Ukraine’s Crimea readies for referendum

National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden answered questions before the European Parliament on Friday, saying that the United States spy agency pressures its allies to take steps towards further enabling widespread and indiscriminate surveillance.

"One of the foremost activities of the NSA's FAD, or Foreign Affairs Division, is to pressure or incentivize EU member states to change their laws to enable mass surveillance," Snowden said in a testimony delivered remotely from Russia. "Lawyers from the NSA, as well as the UK's GCHQ, work very hard to search for loopholes in laws and constitutional protections that they can use to justify indiscriminate, dragnet surveillance operations that were at best unwittingly authorized by lawmakers."

"These efforts to interpret new powers out of vague laws is an intentional strategy to avoid public opposition and lawmakers' insistence that legal limits be respected," Snowden added.

The NSA lobbied heavily for leaders in Sweden, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and Germany to authorize mass surveillance operations, including programs in which intelligence is gathered and then shared across borders with allied nation-states abroad, the former intelligence contractor said.

"Each of these countries received instruction from the NSA, sometimes under the guise of the US Department of Defense and other bodies, on how to degrade the legal protections of their countries' communications," he said, including one instance in Germany where officials there were allegedly pressured by the US to modify the country's G-10 law "to appease the NSA" while at the same time "it eroded the rights of German citizens under their constitution."

According to Snowden, "an EU member state like Denmark may give the NSA access to a tapping center on the [unenforceable] condition that NSA doesn't search it for Danes, and Germany may give the NSA access to another on the condition that it doesn't search for Germans. Yet the two tapping sites may be two points on the same cable, so the NSA simply captures the communications of the German citizens as they transit Denmark, and the Danish citizens as they transit Germany, all the while considering it entirely in accordance with their agreements. Ultimately, each EU national government's spy services are independently hawking domestic accesses to the NSA, GCHQ, FRA, and the like without having any awareness of how their individual contribution is enabling the greater patchwork of mass surveillance against ordinary citizens as a whole."

READ MORE: Snowden: NSA pressured EU into creating ‘European bazaar’ of spy networks

Memorials held in Fukushima Prefecture, where communities are still dealing with damage caused by 2011 disaster.

Marches have taken place in Japan to mark the third anniversary of the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami that left nearly 20,000 people dead or missing and devastated local infrastructure.

Although the anniversary of the event falls on Tuesday, several events and protests were planned in the region on Saturday, when more people could attend them.

In snowy Koriyama, a committee of anti-nuclear groups – mostly unions - coordinated the "No Nuclear Fukushima Citizen's Rally" to commemorate the disaster and to warn the community of what they said were the dangers of nuclear energy.

"I'm here because I want to hear the voices of the people who live here," said Hiroyuki Inoue, a 34-year-old construction worker who had travelled from Tokyo for the event, which included local vendors and entertainers.

The capital voted in a man many see as a pro-nuclear candidate , Yoichi Misuzoe, as its governor in February, a sign, some say, that political will to listen to the concerns in the affected communities is waning there.

"I don't support Masuzoe – there are some people who have forgotten [the ongoing nuclear crisis] but many of us haven't," said Inoue.

"We're still protesting."

Koriyama was a place to which many were evacuated from the 20km nuclear exclusion zone, only to find out that Koriyama itself, about 55km west of the damaged Daiichi plant, had higher levels of radiation.

READ MORE: Protests mark Japan earthquake anniversary

Today Catholic Pope Francis Bergoglio was named as the chief defendant in a child trafficking case involving Catholic orphans. Pope Francis will be asked to defend his role in child trafficking during Argentine's 1970s Junta Dirty War. This case of orphaned children from missing political prisoners was set for trial on March 31 2014 in a Brussels international court.

A witness has agreed to come out of hiding in Spain to testify against Pope Francis.The Argentine civil servant took extensive notes of meetings between the now-Pope Francis and Junta military officials.

Who is the real Catholic Pope Francis - a devil or an Angel?

Pope Francis's fast ascension to head the Argentina Catholic Church was suspected to be a result of an agreement between Pope Francis and the Junta military to traffic children from Catholic orphanages.

The witness wasn't alone in his accusations against Pope Francis. According to a 2005 Los Angeles Times article, the now-Catholic Pope Francis was accused by a human rights group of trafficking babies, plus helping to kidnap opponents of Argentine's military Junta during the Dirty War. Lawyers filing the 2005 complaint represented the Plaza de Mayo human rights group.

Catholic Pope Benedict's Feb. 2013 guilty verdict came after months of deliberation by 36 jury members and six international judges on 150 cases surrounding over 50,000 missing Canadian native children.

The international jury found that native children were being raped, tortured and murdered in residential schools across Canada - the majority of which were Catholic-run institutions. The 80 schools were jointly owned by the Canadian government, Queen Elizabeth and the Catholic, Anglican and United Church of Canada.

The Catholic Pope, Canadian government and Queen Elizabeth were not alone in their crimes against vulnerable children. The 50,000 missing native children were also found to be subjects of illegal CIA mind control experiments including drug testing. The drug tests were operated in association with pharmaceutical companies like Eli Lilly, Upjohn and Bayer. The drug companies funded the United, Anglican and Catholic churches which ran the 80 Indian residential schools in connection with the Canadian Government, Catholic Church and English Crown.

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READ MORE: Catholic Pope Francis charged, trial set, for trafficking orphans