News you may have missed #0111

• Obama supports extending USA PATRIOT Act domestic spy provisions. The move confirms the US President’s support for the Act, whose warrantless communications monitoring provisions he approved with his Senate vote in 2008.
• Poland jails alleged Belarusian spy. The man, known only as “Sergei M.” was sentenced Wednesday to five-and-a-half years in prison by a Warsaw district court for spying against Poland between 2005 and 2006. Meanwhile in Belarus four local army officers are still on trial, accused of spying for Poland.
• Tolkien was trained as a British spy. Novelist JRR Tolkien, whose day occupation was in linguistics research, secretly trained as a British government spy in the run up to World War II, new documents have disclosed.