Ali Ahmed, an opposition protestor in the streets of Egypt, explains [very eloquently] why over 20 million Egyptians have taken to the streets to protest Mohammed Morsi's government.

The New Yorker: After the Shooting In Cairo - Note the agents provocateurs who drew the fire and caused the massacre: Fifty-one dead at dawn. A doctor who said he preferred not to give his name lives in an apartment building that overlooks the Republican Guard barracks in Cairo. He told me he woke for the dawn prayer before 4 A.M. Shortly afterward, he heard gunfire and went onto his neighbor’s balcony for a better view. “I saw that the Army retreated about ten metres and began to fire tear-gas cannisters, about ten or fifteen of them,” he said. “I couldn’t see if the other side [the protesters] was shooting, but I heard people through megaphones encouraging jihad. Then I saw four to six motorcycles coming from the direction of the Rabaa intersection to the Republican Guard barracks. Some people were still praying, some were not, because the dawn prayer had finished by then. The men on the motorcycles were all masked, and it was hard to see them through the dark and the tear-gas smoke, but they seemed to be shooting, they were coming from behind the protesters, so they were shooting toward the protesters and the Army. Then the Army started firing. And the protestors were firing. I saw firing from both sides.” As for details, though—what they were firing, whether it was one or two protesters or something more organized—he said that it was dark and that he couldn’t exactly tell.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev charged with using "weapon of mass destruction" in attacks that left three people dead. - The courthouse is expected to be packed for the 19-year-old Tsarnaev's appearance. A spokeswoman for the US attorney's office said space was being reserved in the main courtroom for victims' families, but she did not indicate how many planned to attend. Court officials have set aside an overflow courtroom to broadcast the hearing for the media. Tsarnaev has yet to appear publicly since his arrest on 19 April. His initial court appearance took place in hospital where he was recovering from injuries suffered in a shootout with police [he was unarmed - they tried to kill him] the day before in the Boston suburb of Watertown.

Drones in the United States are currently only authorized to be used for surveillance purposes. But that hasn’t stopped the Department of Homeland Security from considering weaponizing its unmanned aircraft so they can “immobilize” targets "in border areas." [A "border area" will come to your doorstep soon.] - Newly released documents, dated 2010, show that the DHS’s Customs and Border Protection arm has weighed the possibility of adding “non-lethal weapons” to its Predator unmanned aircraft, which are currently used predominantly to monitor border zones in Arizona and Texas. The documents, obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation through a Freedom of Information Act request, show the CPB suggesting in a “law enforcement sensitive” report to Congress that its drones could be upgraded to include the weapons to shoot at “targets of interest.” The documents do not detail specific weapons, but “non-lethal” rounds deployed on drones could feasibly include rubber bullets, tear gas, or a Taser-like shock.

Private First Class Bradley Manning’s trial, at Fort Meade, Maryland, is now is in its sixth week. The defense began its case this week, but it has been hamstrung in advance by military judge Colonel Denise Lind’s ruling that Manning’s political motives were irrelevant to case, which effectively denies the defendant any ability to mount a whistleblower defense. - Manning faces a long list of charges, including aiding the enemy under the Espionage Act, computer fraud and stealing government property. Manning has admitted to leaking hundreds of thousands of military intelligence files to WikiLeaks while serving in Iraq during 2009 and 2010, including clear evidence of war crimes. It was the largest such leak of classified documents in US history. The US government has filed 22 counts against Manning, for a maximum sentence of 149 years in military prison. The most severe charge, “aiding the enemy,” is a potential capital offense, but the government has said that it is not seeking the death penalty. The whole procedure is a travesty of justice against a political prisoner. The extensive pre-trail hearings and the trail itself have been characterized by high levels of secrecy. Many of the prosecution’s witnesses have testified anonymously, and courtroom access has been severely restricted. According to the Center for Constitutional Rights, Manning’s trial has been “more restrictive than military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay.”

Robert Stevens: More details emerge of the UK’s illegal mass spying - UK charity Privacy International has begun a legal case calling for the British government to end the use of data collected by the US National Security Agency’s (NSA’s) mass surveillance system, Prism. The papers also call for an injunction on the “Tempora” system, used by the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) programme to systematically spy on the entire British population. GCHQ monitors all outgoing and incoming communications via its access to the fibre-optic cables through which all UK Internet traffic passes. Some 600 million “telephone events” are monitored each day by tapping more than 200 fibre-optic cables, including those that connect the UK to the US. According to the Guardian, the legal claim was submitted to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT). The IPT is a tribunal, supposedly tasked with investigating claims regarding the UK’s spy agencies. It was created under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) 2000, meets in secret and is not required to make a determination on a complaint. On this basis, it is not possible to have a complaint heard before an open public court.

Peter Symonds: Snowden confirms Australian agencies involved in NSA global spying - A classified National Security Agency (NSA) map leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden confirms that four Australian intelligence facilities are directly involved in the NSA’s electronic spying operations in the United States and around the world. The map published by American journalist Glenn Greenwald in collaboration with the Brazilian newspaper, O Globo, has revealed the locations of dozens of facilities in the US and its close allies that are involved in systematically intercepting and storing huge amounts of telecommunications and Internet data. The four Australian sites are the US Australian Joint Defence Facility at Pine Gap near Alice Springs, and three Australian Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) facilities—the Shoal Bay Receiving Station near Darwin, the Australian Defence Satellite Communications Station at Geraldton in Western Australia, and the naval communications station HMAS Harman outside Canberra.

Ambassador Bashar Ja'afari said the cache included about 280 containers filled with various toxic substances, such as ethylene glycol, ethanolamine, diethanolamine and triethanolamine. - “This is enough to destroy a whole city, if not the whole country,” Ja'afari said, without mentioning the date when the discovery was made. “At the moment, an investigation is underway with regard to this batch of chemical weapons,” RIA Novosti reported. The Syrian ambassador said the cache was “controlled and supervised by armed antigovernment groups”.

PressTV: Syria militants used chemical weapons in Aleppo: Russia
Russia Today: Russian inquiry to UN: Rebels, not Army, behind Syria Aleppo sarin attack
RIA Novosti: Syrian Rebels Used Sarin Nerve Gas – Russian Ambassador to UN
SANA: Russia presents evidence on use of chemical weapons by opposition in Khan al-Asal

Michel Chossudovsky: The Forbidden Truth: The U.S. is Channeling Chemical Weapons to Al Qaeda in Syria, Obama is a Liar and a Terrorist - A WMD saga modeled on Iraq based on fabricated evidence is unfolding. The Western media in chorus relentlessly accuse the Syrian government of premeditated mass-murder, calling upon the “international community” to come to the rescue of the Syrian people. “Syria crosses ‘red line’ on chemical weapons. How will Obama respond?” The Syrian “opposition” is calling upon the US and its allies to implement “a no fly zone”. In turn, the White House has acknowledged that the red line “has been crossed”, while emphasizing that the US and its allies will “increase the scope and scale of assistance” to the rebels. The chemical weapons pretext is being used to justify further military aid to the rebels, which in large part have been decimated by Syrian government forces. These defeated opposition rebel forces –largely composed of the Al Qaeda affiliated Al Nusrah– are supported by Turkey, Israel, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

Michel Chossudovsky: Fighting Al Qaeda by Supporting Al Qaeda in Syria: The Obama Administration is a “State Sponsor of Terrorism” - A major transition in US counter-terrorism doctrine is unfolding. While Barack Obama, following in the footsteps of George W. Bush, remains firmly committed to waging a “Global War on Terrorism” (GWOT), his administration is now openly supporting selected rebel units in Syria which are part of the Al Qaeda network. Known and documented, Al Qaeda is a creation of the CIA, which has covertly supported the “Islamic Terror Network” since the heyday of the Soviet Afghan war. While Al Qaeda is a US sponsored “intelligence asset”, a “New Normal” has been established. An Al Qaeda affiliated organization, namely Syria’s Al Nusrah, is being supported “overtly” by the US President, rather than “covertly” by the CIA.