The US and NATO have launched a war on Syria by funding and training the terrorists who commit Houla-style massacres in the Arab country, an analyst tells Press TV.

“This is a war of aggression. It is not necessarily using the instruments of conventional theater wars, which is to come in with artillery and air force and so on, but allied Special Forces on the ground,” said Michel Chossudovsky, a professor at the Center for Research of Globalization, Montreal.

He added that the US-backed coalition is staging a “massive casualty-producing event” in Syria, namely the killing of civilians and blaming it on the enemy. The historical origins of the “massive casualty-producing event” go back to “Operation Northwoods,” an infamous 1962 Pentagon Plan, consisting of killing civilians in the Miami Cuban community, with a view to justifying a war on Cuba. “The plans were developed as ways to trick the American public and the international community into supporting a war to oust Cuba's then new leader, communist Fidel Castro,” abcnews.com reported on May 1, 2001.

PressTV: Chossudovsky: Foreign Powers Behind Syria Unrest - Video

Chris Marsden: BBC world news editor: Houla massacre coverage based on opposition propaganda
Russ Baker: Syria: The Dangers Of One-Sided Reporting
Daniel McAdams: Implosion of The Houla Massacre Story
Stephen Lendman: Stepped Up Media War on Syria

10.56am: Egypt: The prominent writer, Alaa al-Aswany, author of the Yacoubian Building, has urged voters to boycott this weekend's presidential runoff. Writing in the Huffington Post, he says:

If the Muslim Brotherhood took their national responsibility seriously, they would call for the elections to be annulled and rerun after [Ahmed] Shafiq was disqualified and put on trial. Unfortunately the Brotherhood is repeating all its mistakes - as soon as the prospect of winning power looms, they lose sight of all other considerations, however important. The second round is illegitimate and will be rigged, just as the first round was rigged, in order to ensure that Shafiq takes the presidency. If Egyptians object to the fraud after Shafiq takes office they will be violently suppressed...Dear reader, if you do go to vote in the second round then you will be giving Shafiq the presidency of Egypt. The second round cannot be valid until the law excluding former politicians is applied to Shafiq, until he goes on trial for corruption, until instances of electoral fraud are investigated and until Article 28 is repealed. Unless these legitimate demands are met I will not be taking part in the second round of the farce. On election day I will go and spoil my ballot paper. If many people spoil their ballot papers, it will send a powerful message that the elections are not valid.

Reuters: Calls to boycott get louder on eve of Egypt vote
LA Times: Egypt court dissolves parliament, keeps Mubarak ally on ballot
Jason Ditz: Egypt Dissolves Parliament, Imposes Martial Law

Johannes Stern: Egyptian junta stages coup against parliament - The US-backed Egyptian military junta dissolved the Islamist-dominated parliament yesterday in a military coup. This came only two days before the run-offs of in Egypt’s presidential elections—the first since the ouster of dictator Hosni Mubarak amid mass working class protests last year. [...] US State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland made clear that Washington is tacitly backing the coup. [...] By voicing no objections to the coup, the US is supporting the SCAF’s counterrevolutionary measures just as firmly as they backed their long-time stooge Mubarak last year as he unleashed deadly violence against mass working class protests. With their counterrevolutionary offensive, Mubarak’s generals signal that they are not only willing to fully reinstate the Mubarak regime but are preparing to eliminate all potential centers of opposition inside the state machine and official politics.

Kirchner makes an appeal over the disputed British-ruled territory on the 30th anniversary of the Falklands War. - Argentina's President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner has appeared before a UN committee, demanding Britain discuss her country's claim to the Falklands Islands, on the 30th anniversary of the war over the disputed territory. Kirchner made a highly unusual appearance at the UN decolonisation committee on Thursday to challenge Britain, which has steadfastly refused contacts on sovereignty. "We are not asking anyone to say yes, the Malvinas belong to Argentina," Kirchner said, using the Spanish name for the British-ruled islands. "We are asking no more, no less than to sit down and talk." Kirchner's decision to speak to a committee that is typically the realm of mid-ranking diplomats is the latest move in her wide-ranging diplomatic offensive to assert her country's claims to the islands, which the Argentine military invaded and occupied for 74 days in 1982. Tensions between Argentina and Britain have escalated in recent months, especially since British companies have started to carry out offshore oil exploration.

There are many studies that have found CCTV to be ineffective - below are a few. [InfoGraphic with links]

The Genius of Mutual Indebtedness.... In an epic rant, trumping Biderman, UKIP's Nigel Farage appears to have reached the limit of his frustration with his 'peers' in the European Parliament after the Spanish bailout. Rajoy's proclamation that this bailout shows what a success the euro-zone has been, sends Farage over the edge as he sees the Spaniard as just about the most incompetent leader in the whole of Europe (up there with favorites like Van Rompuy and Barroso). The erudite Englishman notes that by any objective criteria "The Euro Has Failed" expanding on the insane farce of Italy funding Spain's banking bailout at a loss (borrowing at 6% to fund a loan at 3% as we discussed here). "This 'genius' deal makes things worse not better" as it merely drives other nations towards needing bailouts themselves and while his socialist colleagues in the room are mumbling and checking their blackberries, he reminds them that Spanish national debt will surge and that 100 billion does not solve the problem, and that if Greece leaves, the ECB is failed, is gone, and to rectify this there will be a cash call from the very same PIIS (Ex-G) that are tumbling towards the abyss. Blood pressure surges as he screams "you couldn't make this up" concluding that "the Euro Titanic has now hit the Iceberg and sadly there simply aren't enough lifeboats."

Bloomberg: The EU Smiled While Spain’s Banks Cooked the Books

Following the 2008 financial crisis, the Federal Reserve provided more than $4 trillion in near zero-interest loans and other help to banks and businesses whose executives also served as directors for the national bank. - At least 18 current and former Fed regional bank directors had a direct stake in the trillion-dollar bailout given to teetering institutions, according to a report produced by the Government Accountability Office, but released by Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont).

“This report reveals the inherent conflicts of interest that exist at the Federal Reserve,” Sanders said in a prepared statement. “At a time when small businesses could not get affordable loans to create jobs, the Fed was providing trillions in secret loans to some of the largest banks and corporations in America that were well represented on the boards of the Federal Reserve Banks.”

Sanders wants to end the potential conflicts of interest that come with having bank executives serving on the Fed’s boards. The senator introduced legislation in May that would prohibit banking industry and business executives from serving as directors of the Fed’s 12 regional banks. To bolster his case, Sanders cited the example of Jamie Dimon, chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase. A director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York since 2007, Dimon was part of the Fed’s leadership when it approved $391 billion in emergency funds to JPMorgan Chase to help it through the Wall Street chaos. In another example, Jeffrey Immelt, the CEO of General Electric, was a member of the New York Federal Reserve when it created the Commercial Paper Funding Facility, which then lent $16 billion to…General Electric.

Political campaigns are increasingly purchasing private data about Internet users to target them with hand-crafted advertisements.

Political campaigns are quickly becoming more and more demographic-specific and it’s not a coincidence. By matching personalized user information voluntarily offered to major Silicon Valley companies like Yahoo and Microsoft with other troves of data mined by third-party researches, specialized user profiles that link voter history with other items such as income and retail purchases are being sold to political action committees and other groups to help narrow in on niche markets leading up to election day.

When Americans create complimentary email accounts with services such as Yahoo, for example, they willingly hand-over personal information about not just their names and address but their online activity. Those logs are then managed by major Web entities that can track the online histories of their customers through cookies, though they preserve their clients’ anonymity. These anonymity-masked statistics are usually left to sit on servers with no outside purpose, but its been revealed that both Yahoo and Microsoft have sold off that personal information to companies that are using the contents to build specific profiles to be purchased by vote-hungry political campaigns.

Somewhere completely else in cyberspace, third-party companies are harvesting detailed data that links the names of Americans with publically available statistics, such as registered political party and campaign donations; at the same time, other companies are collecting other information about users that may be of interest to campaign committees, including income, education and more, that requires a bit more digging to develop. And although it was once difficult to match a person’s online profile with their life off the Web, campaign consultant groups such as Aristotle, CampaignGrid and Targeted Victory have developed ways to do just that, report both ProPublica and The New York Times.

The forest boy known previously as 'Ray' has been identified as Robin van Helsum. from the Dutch town of Hengelo, Dutch police confirmed Friday morning. - "We are 100 percent certain that he is this 20-year-old boy, because his stepmother positively identified him," a police spokeswoman told Die Welt newspaper. "We have made contact with his family and friends," she said. "A photo where you could see him with a chain round his neck showing his name provided the proof. We are very glad that he has been found." His father had died earlier in 2012, not in August 2011 in a forest - which was what van Helsum told Berlin authorities. Van Helsum showed up in central Berlin on September 5 2011 and told astonished officials he had no idea where he was from – but that he had walked for five days to reach them. In reality, Dutch daily the Volkskrant reported on Thursday that he had disappeared from his home just days before he appeared as "Ray" in Berlin. He was apparently last seen en route to the city with a friend.

AWIP: Mystery 'forest boy' shows face 10 months on

The annexation wall cuts off occupied Jerusalem from
the West Bank. This is in breach of international law.

■ IOF continued to fire at Palestinian communities and agricultural areas in the Gaza Strip.
■ IOF use force to disperse peaceful protest organized by Palestinian civilians in the West Bank.
■ Dozens of demonstrators suffered from tear gas inhalation.
■ IOF conducted 43 incursions into Palestinian communities in the West Bank and two limited ones into the Gaza Strip.
■ IOF arrested 18 Palestinian civilians, including 4 children, in the West Bank.
■ IOF razed 43 dunums[1] of agricultural land and destroyed irrigation networks and agricultural pools in the Gaza Strip.
■ IOF continued to attack Palestinian fishermen in the Gaza Strip.
■ IOF launched 6 Palestinian fishermen.
■ Israel has continued to impose a total closure on the OPT and has isolated the Gaza Strip from the outside world.
■ IOF arrested a Palestinian civilians at a checkpoint in the West Bank.
■ IOF have continued efforts to create a Jewish demographic majority in East Jerusalem.
■ The Israeli municipality of Jerusalem approved the construction of 2,500 housing units in “Gilo” settlement in the south of Jerusalem.
■ IOF razed houses and barnyards in Jabal al-Mukabber neighborhood and ‘Anata village.
■ IOF have continued settlement activities in the West Bank and Israeli settlers have continued to attack Palestinian civilians and property.
■ IOF closed 6 wells in Jenin.
■ IOF handed dozens of demolitions orders in the south of Hebron.
■ Israeli settlers uprooted 35 olive trees in the south of Hebron.

A recent survey shows the US President Barack Obama administration’s increasing use of assassination drone strikes against civilian targets is being widely condemned around the world. - According to a Pew Research Center survey, in 17 out of 21 countries surveyed, especially in the Middle East, Mexico, and Greece, more than half of the people disapprove of US drone attacks on civilians. Washington claims the non-UN-sanctioned airstrikes target only “terrorist leaders” and “those who threaten the lives of the American citizens.” The New York Times reported on May 29, 2012, that Obama personally approves the names put on the "kill lists" used in the targeted killing operations carried out by American assassination drones.

The 21-nation survey also revealed that international approval of Obama's foreign policy has dropped sharply during his term in office.