Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s first black president and an enduring icon of the struggle against racial oppression, died on Thursday, the government announced, leaving the nation without its moral center at a time of growing dissatisfaction with the country’s leaders. “Our nation has lost its greatest son,” President Jacob Zuma said in a televised address on Thursday night, adding that Mr. Mandela had died at 8:50 p.m. local time. “His humility, his compassion and his humanity earned him our love.” Mr Zuma said that South Africa’s thoughts were with Mr. Mandela’s family. “They have sacrificed much and endured much so that our people could be free,” he said. Mr. Mandela spent 27 years in prison after being convicted of treason by the white minority government, only to forge a peaceful end to white rule by negotiating with his captors after his release in 1990. He led the African National Congress, long a banned liberation movement, to a resounding electoral victory in 1994, the first fully democratic election in the country’s history.

Mail & Guardian: Nelson Mandela dies
NYT: Mandela as Dissident, Liberator and Statesman - Photos
John Pilger: Mandela's greatness may be assured, but not his legacy [11 July 2013]

The Pentagon has loosened its guidelines on avoiding civilian casualties during drone strikes, modifying instructions from requiring military personnel to “ensure” civilians are not targeted to encouraging service members to “avoid targeting” civilians. In addition, instructions now tell commanders that collateral damage “must not be excessive” in relation to mission goals, according to Public Intelligence, a nonprofit research group that analyzed the military’s directives on drone strikes. “These subtle but important changes in wording provide insight into the military’s attempts to limit expectations in regards to minimizing collateral damage and predicting the lethal effects of military operations,” Public Intelligence said in a recent report.

The National Security Agency is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world, according to top-secret documents and interviews with US intelligence officials, enabling the agency to track the movements of individuals — and map their relationships — in ways that would have been previously unimaginable. The records feed a vast database that stores information about the locations of at least hundreds of millions of devices, according to the officials and the documents, which were provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. New projects created to analyze that data have provided the intelligence community with what amounts to a mass surveillance tool. The NSA does not target Americans’ location data by design, but the agency acquires a substantial amount of information on the whereabouts of domestic cellphones "incidentally," a legal term that connotes a foreseeable but not deliberate result.

Washington Post: NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide, Snowden documents show

Eric London: US tracks billions of cell phone location records daily ■ New revelations published yesterday in the Washington Post by whistleblower Edward Snowden show that the United States government has been tracking and storing the live movements of hundreds of millions of people from around the world. The data not only helps the government track the personal lives of innocent people on a minute-by-minute basis, it is also used to monitor, record, and analyze the relationships between individuals. The revelations show that the National Security Agency (NSA) collects roughly 5 billion records each day regarding the exact location of cellphone users. The government collects and stores each piece of information in a massive database that is currently comprised of 27 terabytes of data. [...] The Obama administration has responded to the leaks by flatly lying about the extent of the phone-tracking program. Robert Litt, head attorney for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said that “there is no element of the intelligence community that under any authority is intentionally collecting bulk cellphone location information about cellphones in the United States.” Litt has carefully chosen his words. He claims that because the government focuses on information gathering abroad, any data collected from a US citizen is merely “incidental,” and therefore constitutional. Such a claim is little more than a pseudo-legal justification for a program that is unconstitutional on its face.

Sweden has provided the US with "unique" intelligence on Russia's leadership, according to new documents leaked by US fugitive Edward Snowden and revealed Thursday by Swedish public broadcaster SVT. ● The documents indicate that the US National Security Agency (NSA) sees Sweden's signals intelligence agency, FRA, as a "leading partner" in the surveillance of telecom and Internet traffic, particularly from Russia. "The FRA provided NSA... unique collection on high-priority Russian targets, such as leadership, internal politics," according to a document dated April 18, 2013 and obtained by SVT from the American journalist Glenn Greenwald who has published details of numerous NSA files leaked by Snowden. Another document underlined Sweden's notable access to Russia's communication network thanks to cables passing through Swedish territory.

A prominent Russian lawmaker and the chief of the foreign affairs committee in the Russian parliament has pointed out inconsistency between NATO’s reaction to the recent crackdown on Ukrainian protesters in Kiev and similar police violence in the US. "The NATO has condemned the use of 'excessive force' against Kiev demonstrators. But it was probably OK to beat anti-NATO protesters in Chicago," Duma MP Alexei Pushkov tweeted overnight. The tweet comes after Russia’s foreign policy chief Sergei Lavrov said he was amazed by the fact that the military alliance believed itself to be in a position to issue statements on Ukraine’s domestic affairs.

It's no secret that, increasingly, Big Pharma, in cahoots with traditional medicinal practitioners, have created a society of near-zombies with all of the mood altering medications they push on the public. But even these figures are shocking. According to recently published information from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an astounding 20-plus percent of all 14-year-old boys in the United States have been diagnosed, at one time or another over the course of their lives, with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) - a condition that is, of course, treated with dangerous medications.

Is Japan Sliding Back Into Fascism? ● As we’ve previously reported, the Japanese government is reacting to Fukushima by introducing a bill which would ban journalism. The bill has passed the lower house, and is expected to pass the upper house this week. A Japanese Senator notes: The path that Japan is taking is the recreation of a fascist state. I strongly believe that this secrecy bill represents a planned coup d’état by a group of politicians and bureaucrats ….

A hawkish House Republican says the United States should use tactical nuclear weapons to destroy Iranian nuclear facilities if war with the Islamic republic becomes necessary. | House Armed Services Committee member Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., threw down that bold gauntlet Wednesday morning during a C-SPAN interview in which he also suggested Middle East “culture” fosters dishonest negotiators. Asked if war with Iran is inevitable, Hunter replied: “I sure as Hell hope not.” But if push came to shove and US officials deemed strikes necessary, Hunter turned hawkish. He said any American strike would be a “massive aerial bombing campaign,” adding that such a mission should not feature any “boots on ground.” Then, Hunter said the US should use its “tactical nuclear weapons” on Iranian targets.