Israel and not America was behind the hacking of millions of French phones, it was claimed today. ● In the latest extraordinary twist in the global eavesdropping scandal, Israeli agents are said to have intercepted more than 70 million calls and text messages a month. Up until now the French have been blaming the U.S., even summoning the country’s Paris ambassador to provide an explanation. But today’s Le Monde newspaper provides evidence that it was in fact Israeli agents who were listening in. France first suspected the U.S. of hacking into former president Nicolas Sarkozy’s communications network when he was unsuccessfully trying for re-election in 2012. Intelligence officials Bernard Barbier and Patrick Pailloux travelled from Paris to Washington to demand an explanation, but the Americans hinted that the Israelis were to blame.

Le Monde: The NSA's intern inquiry about the Elysée hacking revealed
(Le Monde: Comment Paris a soupçonné la NSA d'avoir piraté l'Elysée)
PressTV: ‘Israel intercepted millions of French calls’

Die NSA späht das Handy von Angela Merkel offenbar bereits seit mehr als zehn Jahren aus. Das geht aus einer geheimen Datei des US-Geheimdienstes hervor, die dem SPIEGEL vorliegt. Von ihrer Berliner Botschaft spionieren die USA anscheinend das gesamte Regierungsviertel aus. ● Das Handy von Angela Merkel steht anscheinend seit 2002 auf einer Liste mit Aufklärungszielen des amerikanischen Geheimdienstes NSA. Das ergibt sich aus einem Auszug, der offenbar aus einer geheimen NSA-Datei stammt. Aus dem Dateiauszug geht außerdem hervor, dass dieser Ausspähauftrag offenbar auch wenige Wochen vor Präsident Obamas Berlin-Besuch im Juni 2013 gültig war. In dem Auszug, der dem SPIEGEL vorliegt, ist die Nummer unter "GE Chancellor Merkel" eingetragen. Demnach hat das für Europa zuständige Referat S2C32 "European States Branch" Merkel als Ziel benannt. Für die Umsetzung ist in der Datei eine Einheit mit dem Namen Special Collection Services (SCS) eingetragen. Aus dem Eintrag geht nicht hervor, welche Art von Daten überwacht wurden, ob etwa alle Gespräche mitgeschnitten oder nur Verbindungsdaten ausgewertet wurden.

GCHQ fears a legal challenge under the Human Rights
Act if evidence of its surveillance methods becomes ad-
missible in court. (Photo: © Unknown )

The UK intelligence agency GCHQ has repeatedly warned it fears a "damaging public debate" on the scale of its activities because it could lead to legal challenges against its mass-surveillance programmes, classified internal documents reveal. ● Memos contained in the cache disclosed by the US whistleblower Edward Snowden detail the agency's long fight against making intercept evidence admissible as evidence in criminal trials – a policy supported by all three major political parties, but ultimately defeated by the UK's intelligence community. Foremost among the reasons was a desire to minimise the potential for challenges against the agency's large-scale interception programmes, rather than any intrinsic threat to security, the documents show.

Christoph Dreier: NSA wiretapping scandal dominates European Union summit ■ At the summit, all 28 EU leaders agreed that Merkel and Hollande should clarify the issues with US President Barack Obama and prepare a report for the next EU summit in December. A delegation of high-ranking government and intelligence officials will travel to Washington next week. The purpose of such a delegation is not to expose the criminal activities of US intelligence agencies, but to assist in a cover-up. For months, all EU leaders have worked to suppress the revelations by Edward Snowden of the systematic monitoring of the entire world population. The British, German and French intelligence work closely with US intelligence in their own surveillance activities.

Russia Today: Germany, Brazil enlist 19 more countries for anti-NSA UN resolution
PressTV: German spooks heading to Washington
PressTV: Snowden files reveal enormous GCHQ efforts to escape legal challenge

UN Urges More Transparency in Killings ● The UN conference on drone strikes opened today in New York with calls from UN experts to see more transparency around the use of drones for extraterritorial executions by nations, and condemnations by several nations of the unlawful use of the attacks en masse by the United States. The Obama Administration was quick to dismiss any complaints, insisting the killings of several thousand people worldwide without any legal oversight by CIA drones was “legal and just.”

■ In January of 2011, we were told that "spontaneous," "indigenous" uprising had begun sweeping North Africa and the Middle East in what was hailed as the "Arab Spring." It would be almost four months before the corporate-media would admit that the US had been behind the uprisings and that they were anything but "spontaneous," or "indigenous." As we will see, preparations for the "Arab Spring" and the global campaign that is now encroaching on both Russia and China, as predicted in February 2011's "The Middle East & then the World," began not as unrest had already begun, but years before the first "fist" was raised, and within seminar rooms in D.C. and New York, US-funded training facilities in Serbia, and camps held in neighboring countries, not within the Arab World itself.

■ The year 2011 was surely the year of the dupe. Youth enamored with lofty, naive notions of "freedom" sold to them by corporate-fascist funded NGOs were brought into the streets to create chaos and division which was then capitalized on by covert political and even military maneuvering by the West and its proxy forces. In Egypt the nation is teetering on the edge of being fully integrated into the Wall Street/London international order, while a big-oil representative is enjoying his new position as prime minister of Libya. In Tunisia a life-long stooge of Western machinations is now president, and an alarming campaign of NATO-backed violence and terrorism is gripping Syria.

■ With the encirclement of Russia and China, these dupes have witlessly brought the world to the edge of World War III, and clearly done nothing at all to improve their own state of being. As their nations fall under the control of increasing Western influence, the resources once used to placate them and defend their nationalism will now be diverted into the bottomless maw of the parasitic banking combines that are currently destroying both North America and Europe. (Also see: "The Middle East & then the World")

It is widely reported and accepted that there has been no increase in average global temperatures for at least 16 years. Surprisingly (or not so surprisingly), the delegates in attendance at the UN's Bonn Climate Change Conference (June 3-14, 2013) were either completely unaware of the global warming standstill or didn't think it mattered.

Daily Mail: Global warming stopped 16 years ago, Met Office report reveals
Steve Goreham: Why the climate models of global warming are wrong