Relationship between the two nations chills further as White House confirms president has pulled out of bilateral summit. ● Barack Obama has pulled out of talks with Vladimir Putin that were due to be held in Russia next month, after Moscow granted asylum to the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. The White House confirmed on Tuesday that it had decided to snub the Russian leader by pulling out of the planned bilateral summit in Moscow, but is expected to take part in the broader G20 meeting of international leaders in St Petersburg. ● Its decision follows days of mounting rhetoric in Washington in response to Putin's decision to give temporary asylum to Snowden, who fled to Moscow after the Chinese government allowed him to leave Hong Kong rather than heed US calls for his arrest. ● In a statement, the White House said that it had concluded there was "not enough recent progress in our bilateral agenda" to hold a US-Russia summit. ● In a separate announcement, the White House said Obama will visit Sweden instead, travelling to Stockholm the day before the St Petersburg summit. "Sweden is a close friend and partner to the United States," it said in a statement. "[It] plays a key leadership role on the international stage including in opening new trade and investment opportunities."

Stephen Lendman: Obama Shoots Himself in the Foot ■ Obama represents the worst of rogue state governance. He's a war criminal multiple times over. He heads a repressive police state apparatus. He's ravaging one country after another. He's waging war on humanity. He's doing it at home and abroad. He risks global war. At the same time, he finds new ways to humiliate himself. He further denigrates America in the process. He cancelled a long-planned Moscow summit with Vladimir Putin.

The journalist involved in the publication of leaks provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden said in a testimony to the Brazilian government that he possesses up to 20,000 secret US government files. ● Glenn Greenwald testified before a Brazilian Senate foreign relations committee on Tuesday. The Brazil-based American reporter – who was approached by Snowden while the whistleblower still worked as a contractor for the NSA - has published details of US electronic surveillance programs taking place domestically and abroad. ● "I did not do an exact count, but he gave me 15,000, 20,000 documents. Very, very complete and very long," Greenwald told Brazilian lawmakers. "The stories we have published are a small portion. There will certainly be more revelations on the espionage activities of the US government and allied governments...on how they have penetrated the communications systems of Brazil and Latin America," he said. ● In addition to his reporting for Britain’s Guardian newspaper, Greenwald has also been a fixture on O Globo, where the journalist shared the alleged details of US electronic surveillance of Brazil and virtually all of Latin America.

Glenn Greenwald: Members of Congress denied access to basic information about NSA ● Documents provided by two House members demonstrate how they are blocked from exercising any oversight over domestic surveillance. Members of Congress have been repeatedly thwarted when attempting to learn basic information about the National Security Agency (NSA) and the secret FISA court which authorizes its activities, documents provided by two House members demonstrate. ● From the beginning of the NSA controversy, the agency's defenders have insisted that Congress is aware of the disclosed programs and exercises robust supervision over them. "These programs are subject to congressional oversight and congressional reauthorization and congressional debate," President Obama said the day after the first story on NSA bulk collection of phone records was published in this space. "And if there are members of Congress who feel differently, then they should speak up." ● But members of Congress, including those in Obama's party, have flatly denied knowing about them.

Congress told that NSA monitoring led to interception of al-Qaida threats but privacy campaigners fear ulterior political motives. ● US embassies in the Middle East are to remain closed for the rest of the week as supporters of the National Security Agency's sweeping surveillance powers used the unspecified terror alert to bolster the case against reining in the controversial measures. ● The closures follow the alleged interception of al-Qaida communications in Yemen, which intelligence committee members in Congress have been told were collected overseas using powers granted to the NSA under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act – not the bulk surveillance programs disclosed by the Guardian and the Washington Post thanks to whistleblower Edward Snowden. ● A privacy group questioned the publicity given to the latest alert after the State Department announced on Sunday evening that the number of embassies and consulates closed "out of an abundance of caution" would be increased, with some remaining shut for up to a week. [They] criticised the widespread linking of the latest terror alerts with the debate over the domestic powers of the NSA. Amie Stepanovich, a lawyer with the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said: "The NSA's choice to publish these threats at this time perpetuates a culture of fear and unquestioning deference to surveillance in the United States."

A brand new video from Dr. David Duke, showing how a mainstream Israeli news-site, YNET NEWS and a courageous Jewish writer, discusses who led the worst genocide and mass murder of all time. It shows the ethnic hatreds behind much of the communist genocide and the same mindset that accompanies the genocide against the Palestinians and the genocide against Israel’s biggest enemy at the time, Iraq, which was instigated by America under the control of Zionist extremists such as Madeline Albright. In the video, Zionist extremist Albright, blatantly endorses the murder 500,000 children in Iraq. One of the most eye-opening, powerful videos you will ever see.

It didn’t start with the NSA. ■ As Congress and the American people grapple with the fallout from Edward Snowden’s stunning revelations – which continue to come in, thanks to Glenn Greenwald and the Guardian – we are hearing a kind of defense coming from the authoritarians in our midst: none of this is new, they argue, so what’s all the fuss about? In a sense, they are right: the "legal" and political outlines of an American police state have been emerging from the fulcrum of war and the turbulence of our domestic politics since World War II. The only difference now is the technology, which has developed far beyond the imagination of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI’s first director, who widely deployed the earliest wiretapping capabilities of government snoops. ■ It began, at least in a systematic way, during the presidency of yet another "progressive" hero, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who spied on his political enemies on the right without the least bit of concern with the Fourth Amendment. His aim was to destroy and possibly jail those who opposed his policies at home and abroad. And although wiretapping was widely practiced, low tech often sufficed, as shown in the story of Rose Wilder Lane’s wartime encounter with the authorities.

As hundreds of commuters emerged from Amtrak and commuter trains at Union Station on a recent morning, an armed squad of men and women dressed in bulletproof vests made their way through the crowds. The squad was not with the Washington police department or Amtrak’s police force, but was one of the Transportation Security Administration’s Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response squads — VIPR teams for short — assigned to perform random security sweeps to prevent terrorist attacks at transportation hubs across the United States. With little fanfare, the agency best known for airport screenings has vastly expanded its reach to sporting events, music festivals, rodeos, highway weigh stations and train terminals. Not everyone is happy.

More information on the malicious software that infected Tor Browser through Freedom Hosting's servers, which were then seized by law-enforcement: it turns out that infected browsers called home to the NSA. Or, at least, to an IP block permanently assigned to the NSA. Researchers say Tor-targeted malware phoned home to NSA.

● Initial investigations traced the address to defense contractor SAIC, which provides a wide range of information technology and C4ISR (Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance) support to the Department of Defense. The geolocation of the IP address corresponds to an SAIC facility in Arlington, Virginia.
● Further analysis using a DNS record tool from Robotex found that the address was actually part of several blocks of IP addresses permanently assigned to the NSA. This immediately spooked the researchers.
● "One researcher contacted us and said, 'Here's the Robotex info. Forget that you heard it from me,'" a member of Baneki who requested he not be identified told Ars.
● The use of a hard-coded IP address traceable back to the NSA is either a strange and epic screw-up on the part of someone associated with the agency (possibly a contractor at SAIC) or an intentional calling card as some analyzing the attack have suggested.

This is an edited abridgement by Lasha Darkmoon of Professor Amitai Etzioni’s ground-breaking article in the Yale Journal of International affairs, Who Authorized Preparations for War with China? It is followed by extracts from Paul Craig Roberts’ impassioned response to the same article. Additional comments by Dick Eastman and Lasha Darkmoon. This important material has been condensed to roughly one-fifth of its original length. ■ World War Three being hatched in Washington by the usual culprits in their quest for world domination. The American Puppet President, Obama, blissfully unaware of the bloodbath to come. And the sheeple still going about their business like Hieronymus Bosch phantoms in a bad dream—all whirled round on the wheel of birth, copulation and death. It ain’t pretty.

The Washington Post, one of the United State leading national newspapers, announced Monday that it had been sold for $250 million to Jeffrey Bezos, the multi-billionaire founder of online retail firm Amazon.com. ● Bezos’ purchase of the Washington Post is only the latest in a series of acquisitions of major newspapers by wealthy investors. It comes only days after billionaire hedge fund manager and Boston Red Sox owner John Henry announced plans to buy the Boston Globe from the New York Times Co. ● The sale follows reports that several billionaires, including the Koch Brothers, key backers of the right-wing Republican Tea Party movement, have been looking into purchasing the Los Angeles Times, one of eight newspapers that the Tribune Co. has been seeking to sell. ● The Washington Post, the leading newspaper in the nation’s capital, is known for having published the Pentagon Papers in 1971 and helping to expose the criminal activities of the Nixon administration related to the Watergate scandal, which led to Nixon’s resignation in 1974. Since then, along with the rest of the US “mainstream” media, the Post has moved steadily to the right, backing the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and editorially lobbying for more aggressive action in Syria and elsewhere. In domestic policy, it has generally supported the attacks on democratic rights carried out in the name of the “war on terror.” It defends the NSA mass spying operations and supports austerity measures. The newspaper has a national readership and a daily circulation of nearly 475,000. It has been owned by the Graham family for 80 years. [Image]