Unconfirmed reports say that Britain’s special operations forces have crossed from Turkey into Syria advancing up to ten kilometers inside the country. - DEBKAfile, an Israeli military intelligence website, has reported that unconfirmed first reports from British, French, and Turkish sources say British forces have entered Syria from Turkey, taking the lead of a western military incursion. Moreover, on Sunday 24 June, The Daily Star reported that Britain’s fighter planes were on stand-by to invade Syria in case Britain’s NATO ally, Turkey, decided to launch a strike on Syria. DEBKAfile said the British incursion was aimed at securing the start of western intervention in Syria to topple President Bashar Al Assad. Earlier this year, the Israeli website also revealed that British troops and intelligence agents were operating in the Syrian city of Homs, assisting Syria’s armed rebels in their bloody battle against civilians and the Syrian army.

BBC: Gunmen 'kill seven' at Syrian pro-Assad Ikhbariya TV
Reuters: CIA, Mossad Backed Rebels Attack Syrian Television Station, Kill 7
Tony Cartalucci: NATO Loses Plane Violating Syrian Airspace

The city of Stockton in the US state of California is set to become the largest American city ever to declare bankruptcy as the financial troubles of the US deepen. - A formal bankruptcy filing may come as early as Wednesday following the failure of negotiations between Stockton's officials and creditors. The northern Californian city, which has more than USD 700 million in debt, was ranked as America's most miserable town in 2010. The river port city of 300,000 has suffered a plunge in revenues with the collapse of its housing market. The city has over USD 300 million in outstanding debt, plus USD 450 million in health insurance and pension liabilities for city pensioners. Stockton's financial woes have been blamed on the 2009 US housing market crash. In October 2011, a court rejected the filing of bankruptcy by Harrisburg, a city of nearly 50,000, due to the fact that a state law prohibited municipalities of a certain size from seeking legal protection from creditors.

Reuters: Stockton, California to file for bankruptcy

The Queen and Sinn Fein's Martin McGuinness performed an astonishing act of [mutual] forgiveness in the name of peace when they shook hands today.

Belfast was the scene for an extraordinary encounter between the British monarch and the former IRA commander - now Northern Ireland's Deputy First Minister - which would have been unthinkable as little as ten years ago. Her Majesty somehow even found it within her to smile as she met the man who once headed the terror network responsible for killing Lord Mountbatten - the treasured cousin she knew as 'Uncle Dickie'. He was murdered by the IRA in 1979 along with his young grandson in a bomb blast during a boating trip off Mullaghmore, Co. Sligo. It was an atrocity that sent shockwaves through the Royal Family. Yet today, in a Jubilee year full of surprises, the Queen met Mr McGuinness behind closed doors in a room within the city's Lyric Theatre, and then the pair shook hands again publicly outside in full view of the world's cameras.

The seven-page document, obtained by the Guardian, has been drafted by the “gang of four” — a quartet of European presidents: Herman Van Rompuy of the European Council, Mario Draghi of the European Central Bank, José Manuel Barroso of the European commission, and Jean-Claude Juncker of the 17-country Eurogroup. The incendiary proposals for a banking, fiscal, and economic unions resulting in a “political union” are to be debated at an EU summit on Thursday and Friday. Following two bad-tempered meetings of European leaders in Mexico and Rome over the past week, the Brussels summit looks likely to see major clashes over the future of Europe as well as the immediate crisis surrounding sovereign debt, bad banks, and the euro’s survival. The crisis has shifted from the periphery of the EU to its very heart, with Berlin and Paris seriously at odds for the first time since the Greek drama started 30 months ago. The logic of the draft proposals will also pose major dilemmas for David Cameron, perhaps putting Britain at a crossroads in its relationship with the continent.

The new Paraguayan director of Itaipu, the hydroelectric dam straddling the Brazil-Paraguay border, said the country wants to stop selling to Brazil the energy Paraguay doesn't use from the dam, Jornal da Energia reported Tuesday. Franklin Rafael Boccia Romanach, who was chosen as the Paraguayan director of the dam operated by the two countries.

The U.S. is carefully expanding efforts to provide intelligence, training and at times small numbers of forces to African nations to help counter terrorist activities in the region, the top American military commander for Africa said Monday. Speaking to a conference that included representatives from African nations, Gen. Carter Ham, head of U.S. Africa Command, said coordinated moves by several Africa-based terrorist groups to share their training, funding and bomb-making materials are worrisome and pose a threat to the U.S. and the region. [The US is the threat to the region!]

Image: This is a very brief declassified 1973 CIA memo from the chief of the CIA's Science and Technology Division. It recommends that the CIA Director deny any knowledge of LSD experiments carried out by Dr. Sidney Gottlieb as part of the larger CIA program to develop mind-altering drugs for use in interrogation.

This is a declassified 1973 memo from an official in the CIA Science and Technology Directorate to CIA Director William Colby. It was written in response to increasing questions in Congress and the media regarding the research of Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA chemist who was responsible for the notorious LSD experiments of the 1960s as well as a number of other controversial CIA projects. The memo recommends that Colby deny all knowledge of Gottlieb’s MKULTRA program, a wide-ranging and top secret study of interrogation and “mind control” methodology that was directly responsible for some of the most unethical experiments ever conducted in the field of psychology.

This document is proof of the lengths to which US government officials will go to conceal their involvement in illegal and embarrassing activities. It also sheds light on the nature of the US national security mindset in the middle decades of the Cold War. This memo suggests that five decades of intensive espionage and covert operations on the battlefields of the Cold War had fostered a strain of paranoid elitism that felt scant obligation to account for its activities or submit to any form of oversight. Officials in the US intelligence community and foreign policy apparatus seem to have adopted the position that it was their role to do the dirty work of the nation and only they could judge whether they had gone too far in that pursuit.

A German court has ruled that parents can’t have their sons circumcised on religious grounds in a move which has angered Muslim and Jewish groups in the country. - The court in Cologne decided that a legal guardian’s authority over a child does not allow them to subject them to the procedure, which the court called minor bodily harm, reports The Financial Times Deutschland. Neither does religious freedom, which is protected by law in Germany, give grounds for such decisions to be taken for the children, the ruling says. The court was considering a case against a Muslim doctor, who performed circumcision on a four-year-old boy at his parents’ request. Two days after the procedure bleeding started, after which the boy had to be taken to hospital. German authorities learned about the incident and launched a criminal investigation against the doctor. The initial court trial ruled that there was no violation of the law, but the prosecutor’s office took the case to the Cologne district court. The decision sets a precedent, which may affect medical practice across the country.