The US National Security Agency (NSA) is linked to the latest decision by European satellite provider Intelsat to take Iranian channels off the air, a political analyst tells Press TV. - “The removal of Iranian channels from the air in July 1 is directly linked to the NSA (US National Security Agency) spying, and not merely spying, but the NSA destruction of the access to communications across the world,” said Ralph Schoenman in a Friday interview with Press TV. On June 19, communications satellite services provider Intelsat said it will no longer provide services to Iranian channels, including English-language news channel Press TV. The decision has been made under the pretext that the company should be “abiding by” the sanctions against the president of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB). Intelsat noted that it had been ordered by the US government to avoid extending IRIB’s license, saying that it will stop providing services to Iranian channels as of July 1. “The attempts are being made by United States through this banning on Intelsat and other locations to prevent the truth of its operation from being understood by the people of the world,” Schoenman said.

A video allegedly showing an extrajudicial public beheading of two Bashar Assad loyalists has been uploaded onto the internet. Its authenticity has been verified by pro and anti-Assad sources, though it remains unclear who is behind the execution. - In the nine-minute clip, a group of several hundred people, including men, women and children stands around a hill, when the sentenced men, bound with ropes and wearing bags on their heads are led out. As the crowd closes in with shouts of Allah Akbar (“Glory to God!”) the two, who are wearing civilian clothes, are laid on the floor, and a bearded ‘executioner’ methodically saws through the throat of first one, then the other with a knife. The heads of the dead men are then placed on top of their bodies as the crowd continues to bay. The phone-filmed video was uploaded on Wednesday to video-sharing site YouTube by Syrian Truth, a group that supports President Bashar Assad, which previously uncovered a clip of an anti-government fighter eating what appeared to be a human heart. According to the voices in the footage, it was shot in Khan al-Assal, near the city of Aleppo the north of the country. The authenticity of the video was also endorsed by resources that have chiefly backed the rebels in the internal conflict that has lasted over two years – such as the UK-based Observatory for Human Rights and all4Syria.info, which moved to condemn its contents. The identities of all parties involved in the video remain unclear.

Chris Marsden: US ships arms to Al Qaeda-linked forces in Syria
Russia Today: Horrific video of beheading raises questions of arms supply to Syrian rebels
Intifada Palestine: Three Christians beheaded by militants belonging to the Syrian opposition
PressTV: US-backed Takfiri militants behead 2 Christians including priest in Homs

Turkish government officials are investigating Twitter and similar social media platforms in an attempt to identify and eventually prosecute the organizers of mass demonstrations, Erodgan administration officials said this week. - In the latest attack on social media’s role in protests, the country’s Transportation and Communications Minister Binali Yildirim called on social media networks on Friday to cooperate with authorities in the probe. "Yes to the Internet ... but an absolute no to its misuse as a tool for crimes, violence, chaos and disorder," Yildirim said quoted as saying by the local Dogan news agency. Authorities have scoured social networks searching for protest leaders since national unrest began on May 28 at a rally in Instanbul's Taksim Square. Police have turned over at least 35 names to prosecutors in the city, according to Turkey's Aksam newspaper.

The Economist: A familiar face appeared in many of the protests taking place in scores of cities on three continents this week: a Guy Fawkes mask with a roguish smile and a pencil-thin moustache. The mask belongs to “V”, a character in a graphic novel from the 1980s who became the symbol for a group of computer hackers called Anonymous. His contempt for government resonates with people all over the world. The protests have many different origins. In Brazil people rose up against bus fares, in Turkey against a building project. Indonesians have rejected higher fuel prices, Bulgarians the government’s cronyism. In the euro zone they march against austerity, and the Arab spring has become a perma-protest against pretty much everything. Each angry demonstration is angry in its own way. Yet just as in 1848, 1968 and 1989, when people also found a collective voice, the demonstrators have much in common. Over the past few weeks, in one country after another, protesters have risen up with bewildering speed. They have been more active in democracies than dictatorships. They tend to be ordinary, middle-class people, not lobbies with lists of demands. Their mix of revelry and rage condemns the corruption, inefficiency and arrogance of the folk in charge. Nobody can know how 2013 will change the world—if at all.

Steve James: Transcripts released this week by the Irish Independent record conversations in 2008 between leading Irish bank executives, joking about how they had scammed billions of euros to bail out the now-defunct Anglo-Irish Bank. The conversations provide an insight into the reckless, sneering cynicism of the ruling elite as they proceeded to swindle the working people to the tune of trillions of euros. The conversations focussed on the Anglo-Irish Bank board’s attempt to stem the massive losses it suffered following the collapse of the Irish property bubble out of which it had made billions. The board’s sting was to downplay the scale of the bank’s mounting losses and sucker the authorities into offering large sums of cash. The hope was that, once committed, the Irish government and central bank would be unable to back out of further support. In one conversation, the retail banking director Peter Fitzgerald asked the head of capital markets, John Bowe, how he had arrived at a sum of €7 billion to bail out the bank. Bowe responded, “as Drummer [David Drumm, Anglo-Irish CEO] would say, I picked it out of my arse.”

AWIP: Ireland: Inside Anglo Irish Bank - the secret recordings

RINF Alternative News looks at the reality of the global surveillance network and explains how PRISM is just a small part in a decades-long agenda to monitor citizens. [Source 1] [Source 2] [Source 3] [Source 4] [Source 5] [Source 6] [Source 7] [Source 8] [Source 9] [Source 10] [Source 11] [Source 12]

[...] So the truth is much worse than Edward Snowden is telling us. Our rulers are not just criminals - they are madmen, psychopathic liars and mass murderers of the worst imaginable sort. If the mainstream media publicized the most dangerous whistleblowers, the American National Security State would come crashing down. Let us hope and pray that Edward Snowden's example will inspire other whistleblowers to come forward...and that the most powerful and dangerous truths will finally be revealed.

The Chinese Ministry of National Defence has accused the United States of hypocrisy over cybersurveillance and said the disclosures made by Edward Snowden bolstered the case for China's internet security efforts. - These were the harshest public comments so far from the Chinese government about Mr Snowden's revelations. Until now, the Chinese government's comments on the disclosures have come through its foreign ministry, which has used relatively muted words to answer reporters' questions about Mr Snowden's allegations. Mr Snowden, a former CIA [NSA] employee, has described US monitoring of Chinese internet sites and installations, and Prism, a National Security Agency program to mine internet information. In recent days, Chinese state-run media have amplified criticisms of the United States, and the remarks from the defence ministry spokesman, Colonel Yang Yujun, struck a tougher tone. He did not refer explicitly to the United States, but he left no doubt about his target.

Reports indicate the British intelligence agency GCHQ has monitored internet users much more heavily than its counterparts in the US. Constanze Kurz of the Chaos Computer Club explains why that should alarm us.

Deutsche Welle: Following the revelation of the US surveillance program Prism, there are now reports that British intelligence agencies have gone even further than the American National Security Agency (NSA) in intercepting data from the internet. Does that surprise you?
Constanze Kurz: There have been reports for years that the British have been helping themselves to the communication cables that cross their islands. As such, it was only surprising to see the extent to which these agencies were able to operate without legal intervention.

DW: Is the British surveillance program Tempora in fact more ominous than its US counterpart Prism?
CK: It's when taken together that both programs seem especially ominous. The British as well as the Americans have rules for this groundless monitoring - namely that part of the communication has to take place outside of the US or Great Britain. By cooperating, the American and British agencies can now exchange the data mutually. And that amounts to a large percentage of global communication. With the British, we're talking about over 20 petabytes (Ed. Note: 20 million gigabytes) that - according to the "Guardian" publications - have been combed through and saved for a certain amount of time. The number of people who are involved there is enormous and actually no longer in acceptable relationship to a democracy.

DW: What goals are the intelligence agencies pursuing?
CK: The goal of fighting terrorism that always gets mentioned is, in my view, outrageous nonsense. It has more to do with exercising control - just as people always complain of with dictatorships. If one were to go through these huge mountains of data for the sake of fighting terror, that would be an inconceivably inefficient method. Traditional intelligence methods would be much more effective there. In the end, there's only the very big and increasing need for control among the governments. I find that very unsettling, and we should definitely not resign ourselves to it.

The UK government’s spying scandal is causing concerns among Europeans with the EU chief justice writing to British authorities demanding urgent answers. - The EU's Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding has written to Foreign Secretary William Hague demanding answers by the end of the week on leaked reports that Britain's spy services are tapping cables that carry the world's phone calls and Internet traffic. "I have sent a letter to express my concern," Reding told a briefing on Wednesday, adding: "I have asked for a very urgent reply by the end of this week." The EU chief justice demanded answers about the scope and extent of the online eavesdropping program and called for clear answers about the alleged details published in British papers this week. The revelations, published by The Guardian newspaper, are based on leaked documents from U.S. former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, who has been accused by the White House of espionage. The report on the British programme codenamed Tempora has sparked a fresh outcry from privacy campaigners. Reding said she had asked Hague to “clarify the extent of the programme, whether the data stayed in Britain or was passed to other countries, whether the spying was limited to individual cases and what the possibilities for legal redress were”.

PressTV: Germany describes UK/US global spying operation as disaster

Felicity Arbuthnot: Lies, Perfidies and Tony Blair - Having learned nothing from the catastrophes of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, it seems President Obama, the equally clueless UK Prime Minister Cameron and his culturally challenged Foreign Secretary William Hague are cheer-leading another bloodbath in formerly peaceful, secular, outward looking Syria. Having covertly provided arms and equipment to insurgents from numerous different countries for over two years, they have now moved to the overt stage, a move over which even arch hawks such as former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, and former Republican Senator Richard Luger, six term leader of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee urged caution. Luger said such action would boost extremists, with Brzezinski dismissing Obama’s talk of “red lines” as thoughtless and risking: “a large-scale disaster for the United States.”

Newly published images from the U.S.-run Guantanamo Bay prison display the extent of abuse prisoners face at the notorious prison complex. - Some of the images reveal how prisoners are force-fed if they go on hunger strike. One picture shows that prisoners on hunger strike are strapped to a metal restraint chair and fed through the nose with plastic tubing. Another picture shows a chart given to detainees to indicate their level of pain and demonstrate their emotions while in detention. Over 130 of the 166 Guantanamo Bay prisoners are on their 142nd day of hunger strike, protesting their conditions. Human rights groups have condemned the force-feeding of hunger-striking detainees, saying it is a form of torture. A hunger striker at the prison has said that American officials are using increasingly brutal tactics to break up the nearly five-month strike. Shaker Aamer said American officials make prisoner’s cells “freezing cold to accentuate the discomfort of those on hunger strike” and force "metal-tipped" tubes into hunger strikers' stomachs twice a day in order to keep them alive, the Guardian reported. Aamer, who is the last British inmate at Guantanamo, explained that the harsh force-feeding process causes inmates to vomit over themselves.

[It's not clear whether the photos in the following two links are the photos referred to in the article above. -Ed.]
Guantanamo Joint Medical Group Hunger Strike Response Photos
Photo Gallery | Guantánamo hunger strike

A review of top-secret NSA documents suggests that the surveillance agency still collects and sifts through large quantities of Americans' online data – despite the Obama administration's insistence that the program that began under Bush ended in 2011. Shawn Turner, the Obama administration's director of communications for National Intelligence, told the Guardian that "the internet metadata collection program authorized by the Fisa court was discontinued in 2011 for operational and resource reasons and has not been restarted." But the documents indicate that the amount of internet metadata harvested, viewed, processed and overseen by the Special Source Operations (SSO) directorate inside the NSA is extensive.

Washington's Blog: Do You Have ANY IDEA How Widespread the Spying Really Is?
The Guardian: The NSA files

The US Army confirmed on Thursday that access to The Guardian newspaper’s website has been filtered and restricted for its personnel. The policy is due to classified documents described in detail in the stories. Gordon Van Vleet, spokesman for the Army Network Enterprise Technology Command, or NETCOM, said in an email to the Monterey Herald that the Army is filtering "some access to press coverage and online content about the NSA leaks." The spokesman said the procedure was routine part of "network hygiene" [Newspeak/1984/Orwell] measures to prevent unauthorized disclosures of sensitive information. In a later phone conversation he clarified that the filtering was “Armywide” rather than restricted to some US Army facilities.

Monterey Herald: US Army Blocks Soldier Access to Guardian Website

Faced with several days of overt threats from the Obama Administration and top senators threatening to revoke a key US-Ecuador trade pact if they dare to grant asylum to Edward Snowden, the Ecuadoran government has told the US what they can do with their frozen broccoli and fresh cut flowers, and has cancelled the pact themselves.

The first of four parts where Professor Bob Carter uses the scientific method on the popular theory with global warming being linked to CO2 levels. He examnines the hypothesis and it fails the test. Inconvenient Truth author Al Gore would find his presentation contradicted by this presentation? Will Kyoto`s greenhouse reduction goals be in vain? [Part 2 of 4] + [Part 3 of 4] + [Part 4 of 4]

The UK looks set to become the first country to allow the creation of babies using DNA from three people, after the government backed the IVF technique. - It will produce draft regulations later this year and the procedure could be offered within two years. Experts say three-person IVF could eliminate debilitating and potentially fatal mitochondrial diseases that are passed on from mother to child. Opponents say it is unethical and could set the UK on a "slippery slope". They also argue that affected couples could adopt or use egg donors instead. Designer baby: "It is a disaster that the decision to cross the line that will eventually lead to a eugenic designer baby market should be taken on the basis of an utterly biased and inadequate consultation." One of the main concerns raised in the HFEA's public consultation was of a "slippery slope" which could lead to other forms of genetic modification. Draft regulations will be produced this year with a final version expected to be debated and voted on in Parliament during 2014.

■ In the early morning of April 26, 2006, the 1st Squad, 2nd Platoon of the Kilo Company abducted Hashim Ibrahim Awad from his home. Members of the eight-man squad testified that they had planned in advance to select a random Iraqi male for ambush.
■ The Marines captured Awad, a 52-year-old father of 11 children, at around 2 a.m. They bound and gagged him, and brought him to a roadside ditch prepared by the squad to look like the site of an attempted IED bomb placement. Half an hour after Awad was abducted, the squad opened fire on the man and killed him.
■ Afterward, the squad removed the bindings from their victim, and positioned his body with a shovel, an AK-47, and empty bullet casings, to make the scene resemble that of a firefight. Afterward, Hutchins and his comrades described the incident as an ambush and a “good shoot.” Afterward, the squad filed a formal report that asserted Awad had been caught digging a hole for a roadside bomb and had engaged them in a firefight.

Kevin Rudd [was] installed [yesterday] as Australian prime minister, three years after he was removed in an inner-party coup, following one of the most serious political crises in the 122-year history of the Labor Party. Following last night’s 57 to 45 vote by the Labor caucus to restore Rudd to the Labor leadership, the entire ruling establishment has closed ranks behind the decision. The overriding motivation behind the decision to back the reinstatement of Rudd was the fear within ruling circles that the unpopularity of Gillard has been so deep and widespread, because of her role in the coup against Rudd three years ago, that the Labor Party was heading towards an electoral wipeout in the forthcoming federal election, scheduled for September 14. Recent polls have indicated that, under Gillard’s leadership, the Labor Party might have received fewer than 30 seats in the 150-seat House of Representatives.

Patrick O’Connor: The political crisis in Australia

Israeli Gen.Amos Yadlin

■ Backing and arming the so-called Syrian opposition distracts from the threat posed by Israel and its expansionist agenda by internalizing the enemy in order to weaken the State. As former Israeli Intelligence Chief, Amos Yadlin told the audience at the Israel Policy Forum in February 2013: “And this military [Syrian], which is a huge threat to Israel, is now also weakening and, in a way, disintegrating. We still have risk from Syria– a risk of being an AlQaeda country, a Somalia-type country — but from military point of view, each one of these are less dangerous than the Syrian regular army.” ■ Perpetuating adversaries to kill each other is a time-tested tactic – one which was used during the bloody eight year Iran-Iraq war; a war which according to Leon Wieseltier[i] was a “distraction” when Israeli boots were on the ground in Southern Lebanon. In that war, the United States was providing arms and intelligence to both sides. ■ When asked what the logic was in aiding both sides in the bloody war, a former official replied: “You had to have been there”[ii]. ■ But why Syria? The Need for Water: The primary goal of the early Zionist leadership was to control and secure the region’s waters. At the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, Chaim Weizmann declared that ‘it was of vital importance not only to secure all water resources feeding the country, but to control them at the sources – and the development of these waters became the primary aim of the Yishuv as a whole. ■ This policy remained in place. As Israel’s third Prime Minister Levi Eshkol put it, water was “the blood flowing through the arteries of the nation”. As previously stated, the chaos we witness in Syria today has been in the making for years with the aid and backing of Israel-firsters in order to accommodate Israel’s agenda – expansion and control of regional water supplies while weakening its adversary/ies. ■ Israel faced one of its worst droughts in 1990-91. A second more serious drought in 1998, forced it to turn to water rich Turkey. Turkey and Israel engaged in serious negotiations starting in May 2000 to import 50 billion cubic meters of fresh water from Turkey using tanker ships, but using tankers was not cost effective for the transport of water. Alternate plans were suggested. ■ In September 2000, the same year that young Bashar-al Assad succeeded his father as President of Syria, a strategy paper entitled “The Geopolitics of Water” by the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS) opined that “Since extensive water planning proposals will necessitate the establishment of pipelines and energy grids stretching across borders, a political and military structure that can ensure the safety and security of the carriers will be the prerequisite to effective water sharing”...“But an effective regional system would require political-military cooperation against Syria”.

TAPE RECORDINGS from inside doomed Anglo Irish Bank reveal for the first time how the bank's top executives lied to the Government about the true extent of losses at the institution. The astonishing tapes show senior manager John Bowe, who had been involved in negotiations with the Central Bank, laughing and joking as he tells another senior manager, Peter Fitzgerald, how Anglo was luring the State into giving it billions of euro. Mr Fitzgerald had not been involved in the negotiations with the Central Bank and has confirmed he was unaware of any strategy or intention to mislead the authorities. Mr Bowe, in a statement last night, categorically denied that he had misled the Central Bank. The audio recordings are from the bank's own internal telephone system and date from the heart of the financial crisis that brought the State to its knees in September 2008. Anglo itself was within days of complete meltdown – and in the years ahead would eat up €30bn of taxpayer money. Mr Bowe speaks about how the State had been asked for €7bn to bail out Anglo – but Anglo's negotiators knew all along this was not enough to save the bank. The plan was that once the State began the flow of money, it would be unable to stop. Mr Bowe is asked by Mr Fitzgerald how they had come up with the figure of €7bn. He laughs as he is taped saying: "Just, as Drummer (then-CEO David Drumm) would say, 'picked it out of my arse'." - Mr Bowe's comments in the audio recording reveal that Anglo's strategy was to lure the State in, leaving taxpayers with no choice but to continue to provide loans to "support their money". The recording also shows Mr Bowe and Mr Fitzgerald laughing as they say how there is no realistic chance of ever repaying the loans.

BBC: Irish shock and anger as tapes reveal bankers' behaviour - Very few people in the Republic of Ireland doubted that the banks were less than honest in their dealings with both the Irish Central Bank and the government. But to hear how apparently blatantly dishonest they were has shocked many. Sometimes it is not just what is said it is the tone that matters.

72% of Likely U.S. Voters Know the NSA Has Monitored the Private Communications of Congress, Military Leaders and Judges. - The government keeps on lying about how it’s spying on Americans without authorization from a court. It keeps lying about the scope of its spying. It keeps lying about the need for mass surveillance (and here) and the way that the information gained from spying will really be used … to harass political opponents. Indeed, NSA whistleblower Russel Tice – a key source in the 2005 New York Times report that blew the lid off the Bush administration’s use of warrantless wiretapping –recently said that the NSA illegally spied on General Petraeus and other generals, Supreme Court Justice Alito and all of the other supreme court justices, Barack Obama, the White House spokesman, and many other top officials. The mainstream media will not interview Tice about this explosive issue. And yet – in very heartening news – a new poll by Rasmussen shows that the American public understands much of what is really going on.

Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall had called the NSA out for flat out lying on a "fact sheet" the agency had posted about its section 702 surveillance efforts. The NSA's response? They quietly deleted the pdf document from their website. Because it's not like the internet notices when you suddenly delete the document you put out to defend your overreaching surveillance techniques... You'd think that, of any agency out there, the NSA would recognize the most that simply deleting something on your local computers doesn't make it actually disappear from the world. But, here's the best part: Separately Tuesday, another NSA official said the removal of the fact sheets and letter from the senators were unrelated.

■ Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, was rightly imprisoned for life in 1998 for sending bombs that maimed and killed three people and injured 23 more, from 1978 to 1992. No one can excuse his terrorism. Kaczynski’s ideas, however, described in a manifesto entitled, "Industrial Society and Its Future," cannot be dismissed, and are increasingly important as our society hurtles toward individual disempowerment at the hands of technology and political forces that erode autonomy. ■ “Industrial Society and its Future” was published on September 19, 1995 by The New York Times and The Washington Post, to comply with Kaczynski’s demand, in exchange for him stopping the bombings. Kaczynski, who is still alive, wrote that the increasing industrialization of America and the world, and our increasing reliance on technology, would end up short-circuiting the ability of human beings to think for themselves and act on their own ideas and abilities. ■ He saw the political “left” as embracing these technologies with special fervor, because they were in keeping with the “leftist” ideology that centralized power was the way to govern men. He saw these “leftists” as psychologically disordered—seeking to compensate for deep feelings of personal disempowerment by banding together and seeking extraordinary means of control in society. ■ Well, Kaczynski, while reprehensible for murdering and maiming people, was precisely correct in many of his ideas.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee has lashed out at Western governments, calling them hypocritical for spying on the internet while reproaching other oppressive nations for doing the same; adding that the revelations may change the way people use computers. The British computer scientist, who invented the Web in 1989, accused the West of "insidious" online spying after whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked details of the US National Security Agency’s (NSA) dragnet telephone and internet surveillance programs, implicating US and UK in a wave of international criticism.