The moderate-conservative candidate and victor in Iran's presidential election, Hasan Rowhani, is known for his negotiating skill over the country's nuclear weapons program and a reformist some hard-liners in Iran previously saw as too liberal and conciliatory, analysts say. Rowhani obtained more than 50% of the more than 36 million votes cast in Friday's election, Mostafa Mohammad Najjar said at a press conference Saturday. Tehran Mayor Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, a conservative candidate who had been running far behind in second place, conceded defeat. Iran has more than 50 million eligible voters, and turnout in Friday's election was believed to be high. As a result, analysts predict. Rowhani, who was declared the winner Saturday by Iran's interior minister, might take the country's top political post and bring hope to the country's liberal classes but not wield any real power, especially on the nuclear issue. A cleric, Rowhani first studied religion before graduating with a law degree in 1972, eventually earning a master's degree in law at Caledonian University in Glasgow, Scotland. He was swept up in the 1979 Iran's Islamic Revolution as a firm opponent to the shah and became an ally and part of the inner circle of revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, serving in various roles in the government following Khomeini's ascension to power. Regardless, some Iranians hold out hope that he will fulfill his promises due to his background as a skilled negotiator and conciliator.

Pepe Escobar: Centrifugal force puts spin on Iran presidential election

■ Social conditioning of children begins in public schools at an early age. You teach children to accept “Lockdown Drills” during school hours, and then they will eventually accept it as part of their lives in their adulthood. ■ It was reported last month by the New York Daily News that New York City Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott announced that all schools will be required to “conduct lockdown drills each year”. Training will begin this summer according to the report: The policy revealed by Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott in a letter to principals Wednesday will require school leaders to attend a two-hour training program over the summer and appoint staff response teams and command posts. ■ The policy is intended to prepare students and staff members for emergency situations that involve severe weather conditions, another Sandy Hook Massacre or any suspected acts of terrorism such as the Boston Bombings. “The drills would be a response to severe weather conditions, intruders entering the building or suspicious packages found inside or outside the building, among other crises. No one can enter or exit schools during a lockdown” the report said. Conditioning children to except lockdowns in an emergency situation is social conditioning. It involves the authorities to control the situation in any circumstance.

El Ministerio de Sanidad de Turquía investiga una actividad no autorizada de los médicos voluntarios de Estambul que organizaron un punto de ayuda sanitaria a todos los manifestantes heridos durante las protestas gubernamentales en la plaza Taksim. - El Gobierno turco ha exigido a la Asociación Médica explicaciones sobre esta iniciativa, que revele los nombres y cargos de los que trabajaron en el parque Gezi (al lado de la plaza Taksim), así como el número y los datos de los pacientes, el carácter de las heridas y los tratamientos ofrecidos, según el periódico turco ‘Hürriyet’. La ola de protestas en Turquía dura ya dos semanas. Los enfrentamientos entre manifestantes y las fuerzas policiales en este país han dejado seis víctimas mortales y unos 5.000 heridos.

Deniz Erkmen: Resist Istanbul: Or how I got teargassed again and started losing hope that this government will ever stop the violence

When New Zealand politicians say the “haircut” OBR document from 2011 is different from what is happening right now in Cyprus, they’re just spouting propaganda. Yes, in small detail it may be a little bit different, but in its designed effect just the same. And how is it even more dirty than it looks? They aim at the savings of what people have in the bank, they make a seemingly fair difference between what is on different sides of a $100,000.= threshold, BUT do not tell people that the big corrupt fish do not have their savings in the local bank, they are off shore, far away, and the rest invested in greedy shares and other investments.

In an interview with the French TV station LCP, former French minister for Foreign Affairs Roland Dumas said: ‘’ I’m going to tell you something. I was in England two years before the violence in Syria on other business. I met with top British officials, who confessed to me that they were preparing something in Syria. This was in Britain not in America. Britain was organizing an invasion of rebels into Syria. They even asked me, although I was no longer minister for foreign affairs, if I would like to participate. Naturally, I refused, I said I’m French, that doesn’t interest me.’’ ‘’This operation goes way back. It was prepared, preconceived and planned… in the region it is important to know that this Syrian regime has a very anti-Israeli stance. Consequently, everything that moves in the region- and I have this from the former Israeli prime minister who told me ‘we’ll try to get on with our neighbours but those who don’t agree with us will be destroyed. It’s a type of politics, a view of history, why not after all. But one should know about it.’’

Michel Chossudovsky: The U.S. is Channeling Chemical Weapons to Al Qaeda in Syria
Russia Today: ‘Syria govt not driven to wall’ to use chemical weapons – Lavrov
PressTV: Russia questions US evidence on Syria’s use of chemical weapons
McClatchy: Chemical weapons experts still skeptical about U.S. claim that Syria used sarin
PressTV: Ron Paul blasts Obama on Syria war escalation - Video
RIA Novosti: No-Fly Zone in Syria Would Break International Law - Lavrov
The Examiner: Zbigniew Brzezinski: Obama Syria plan is 'chaos, baffling, a mess, tragedy'

Local police departments across the United States have for years been amassing a DNA database of arrestees, suspects, persons of interest, witnesses and even victims. These programs will be dramatically expanded in the wake of the US Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in Maryland v. King, handed down June 3, which ruled constitutional the widespread police practice of seizing the DNA of non-convicted arrestees. It was left to Justice Antonin Scalia to point out the ruling’s obviously unconstitutional implications: “Make no mistake about it: As an entirely predictable consequence of today’s decision, your DNA can be taken and entered into a national DNA database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason.”

The Liberty Crier: Now Feds Want Your Mental Health Records

On the basis of secret government directives, Canada’s national security apparatus is conducting mass surveillance of Canadians parallel to, if not directly patterned after, the domestic spying operations of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC), the NSA’s Canadian counterpart and longstanding partner, has been scrutinizing the metadata of Canadians’ electronic communications since at least 2005. Moreover, the NSA routinely provides Canada’s security agencies with intelligence on Canadians and CSEC reciprocates by providing U.S. intelligence officials with information about people living in the U.S. This arrangement allows both agencies to circumvent legal bans on warrantless surveillance of their own citizenry’s communications.

■ Are you on the list? Are you one of the millions of Americans that have been designated a threat to national security by the U.S. government? Will you be subject to detention when martial law is imposed during a major national emergency? As you will see below, there is actually a list that contains the names of at least 8 million Americans known as Main Core that the U.S. intelligence community has been compiling since the 1980s. ■ A recent article on Washington’s Blog quoted a couple of old magazine articles that mentioned this program, and I was intrigued because I didn’t know what it was. So I decided to look into Main Core, and what I found out was absolutely stunning – especially in light of what Edward Snowden has just revealed to the world. It turns out that the U.S. government is not just gathering information on all of us. The truth is that the U.S. government has used this information to create a list of threats to national security that the government would potentially watch, question or even detain during a national crisis. If you have ever been publicly critical of the government, there is a very good chance that you are on that list.

■ We collect nice shiny things. We build other things out of them sometimes. And then we sell the things we find and make to one another. And playing with Wedgie was okay after all, because he was buying a lot from all of us. Candy, jewelry from smooth stones, shiny seashells. Everybody was happy. Or at least nobody wanted to protest, because as fun as it was that Wedgie was buying, he could get very threatening when people would doubt him. ■ The thing was, Wedgie had been buying more than he had been selling for quite some time now. He was always in the red, living “above his means”, like they say. Wedgie had stopped paying in money altogether, because he never had any. He would pay with little pieces of paper instad, where it said how much he owed us, and he promised to pay for real later. He was writing those small pieces of paper in his room at night, and paid the rest of us with them, promising to replace them with real money later. He never said when that “later” would actually be. ■ Nobody else could pull this off. Only Wedgie. Because if somebody were to stand up to him… Wedgie was rather large and could look mean. Could be very mean, too. And besides, everybody wanted their money back the day Wedgie would have real money to pay us back, so everybody kept accepting the small pieces of paper that Wedgie was making in his room. “Five Wedgiemoneys”, they would say.