The US National Security Agency has never said what it was seeking when it illegally invaded the computers of Petrobras, Brazil’s huge national oil company, but Brazilians assumed: the company’s troves of data on Brazil’s offshore oil reserves, or perhaps its plans for allocating licenses for exploration to foreign companies, the New York Times reports. It has become known that the agency also got its hands on the computer systems of China Telecom, one of the largest providers of mobile phone and Internet services in Chinese cities. But documents released by Edward Snowden leave little doubt that the main goal was to learn about Chinese military units, whose members cannot resist texting on commercial networks. The agency’s interest in Huawei, the giant Chinese maker of Internet switching equipment, and Pacnet, the Hong Kong-based operator of undersea fiber optic cables, is more obvious: once inside those companies’ proprietary technology, the NSA would have access to millions of daily conversations and emails that never touch American shores.

New York Times: Fine Line Seen in U.S. Spying on Companies
RT.com: Chinese media vents spleen over US cybercrime charges
Eric London: NSA records and stores content of all phone calls in "two" countries
Patrick Martin: US pushes cyber-war confrontation with China

Stefan Molyneux ■ Washington's use of strong arm tactics with China and Russia at the same time was a serious strategic error. || Right now Putin is in China meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Shanghai. Though the talks are ongoing, they have already released a joint statement which takes several jabs at U.S. foreign policy. Specifically, the two countries committed to "reject unilateral sanctions rhetoric". Putin and Xi also agreed to expand military cooperation and expressed "grave concern" over the crisis in Ukraine, and condemned the funding of regime change. The U.S. government was not named explicitly in the condemnation, but the inference was very clear. [...] Some pro-Western analysts are watching the emergence of this Russia-China Alliance with alarm, insisting that it will have a disastrous impact if allowed to continue, and calling for diplomatic efforts to disrupt it. Incidentally these are often the same people who avidly pushed for tougher sanctions against Russia during the Ukrainian crisis, and who refused to report on the overwhelming evidence of U.S. involvement in the coup. What on earth did the Obama administration expect would happen when they injected themselves into territorial disputes between China and their neighbors, while at the same time saber rattling in eastern Europe, and imposing punitive 'sanctions' against Putin's inner circle? Then, to top it all off, the U.S. government filed charges against China this week for corporate espionage. Taken as a whole it would be difficult to come up with a more effective way to push these two countries together if one tried.

Xinhuanet: China, Russia ink long-awaited gas deal
New York Times: China and Russia Reach Major Gas Deal
President of Russia: Press statement following Russian-Chinese talks
President of Russia: Meeting with Jiang Zemin

Government officials in the Bahamas want their U.S. counterparts to explain why the National Security Agency has been intercepting and recording every cell phone call taking place on the island nation. ● Responding to a report published by The Intercept on Monday, which revealed that the NSA has been targeting the Bahamas’ entire mobile network and storing the audio of every phone call traversing the network for up to 30 days, Bahamian officials told the Nassau Guardian that they had contacted the U.S. and vowed to release a statement regarding the revelations. In a front-page story published Tuesday, Bahamian Minister of Foreign Affairs Fred Mitchell told the Guardian that his government had reached out to the U.S. for an explanation. Mitchell said the cabinet was set to meet to discuss the matter and planned to issue a statement on the surveillance. The Bahamian minister of national security told the paper he intended to launch an inquiry into the NSA’s surveillance but did not provide a comment.

The Saker ■ I think that we can all agree that the situation in the Ukraine is one of total chaos. So what is really going on? I think that while it is premature to make grand conclusions and predictions, we can begin by agreeing on a number of basic facts.

First, there is no doubt in my mind whatsoever that the junta in Kiev is clearly provoking Moscow in every possible way. If one could maybe see some marginal and far-fetched military rationale for the kind of random artillery strikes the Ukies are unleashing on Slavianks, Kramatorsk and other cities, the arrest of the LifeNews news-crew makes no sense at all. They were put on their knees, beat up, held with their faces to the ground - all on video which was then "leaked" to Youtube as if the death squads were provoking the Kremlin with a "what are you gonna do about it?"

Second, I believe that the appointment of Biden's son to the board of directors of the main Ukie energy company whose concessions are all in the eastern Ukraine is also a way of further provoking the Kremlin.

Americans Are More Afraid of Being Tortured By Our Government than British, Australians, Canadians – Or Even Chinese – Are Afraid of Torture By Their Governments. ● And Most People – Including Most Americans – Know that Torture Is NEVER Necessary Or Acceptable “To Gain Information That May Protect The Public”. Amnesty International conducted a global survey to find out how afraid people were of being tortured by their own governments if they are taken into custody. The survey shows that the British, Australian, Canadian – and even Chinese people – are less afraid of being tortured than Americans. Specifically, Amnesty asked whether people agreed with the following statement: If I were taken into custody by the authorities in my country, I am confident that I would be safe from torture - Here are some of the results.

Jordan Shilton ■ The annual rich list published by the Sunday Times has revealed a staggering rise in wealth for Britain’s super-rich. || The headline story, made public a week prior to the release of the list on May 18, was that the number of billionaires in Britain had surpassed 100 for the first time. With a total of 104 billionaires, Britain has witnessed the emergence of more than 20 new billionaires over the past year and has the highest concentration of billionaires of any country. In its entirety, the list reveals that the richest 1,000 people in Britain possess combined wealth of £519 billion, equivalent to a staggering one third of the country’s GDP. This is a rise of 15.4 percent from the 2013 list, when the super-rich held total wealth of £449 billion. Since 2008, the year of the global financial crisis and the implementation of a multi-billion-pound bailout of the banks, the wealth of the super-rich in the UK has doubled. As well as being the product of speculation and outright criminality, the rapid rise of such obscene levels of wealth over the past five years confirms the true purpose of the austerity policies of successive governments since the financial crisis.

Malaysia’s former prime minister says the CIA spy agency is hiding crucial facts about the destiny of the missing Malaysian Airlines plane. ● Commenting on his personal weblog on Sunday, Mahathir Mohamad questioned crash scenario for the plane. He said CIA and the Boeing Company may be withholding data on the flight, but for some reasons, media outlets are not printing anything on this story. The former Malaysian premier also said the plane could have been switched onto autopilot remotely by the US spy agency and may have landed somewhere, and then had its Malaysian Airlines markings removed.

Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad: BOEING TECHNOLOGY – WHAT GOES UP MUST COME DOWN

Almost everybody knows of the “original” Protocols of Zion—and their historical background. They were probably complied by Czarist agents towards the end of the nineteenth century as a weapon in their war against the large-scale Jewish Communist uprising which they faced. The Protocols have been derided as a forgery, slander, and lies—yet remain one of the most widely read books in the world on the Jewish Question. In my new book, I show that it is actually irrelevant if the original Protocols were written by Czarist agents or not. In fact, as I point out, they are in reality a highly predictive work of “fiction”—much like George Orwell’s 1984, or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Although the characters and storyline in both those works are “fiction”, the idea which underlay both those books was most certainly fact. Thus, they were works of “fiction”—just like the Protocols of Zion. I show that in the case of the Protocols, truth is stranger than fiction! For in this illustrated book, I show documents, quotes, photographs and facsimiles of Jewish Supremacist extremism that far exceeds even the assertions contained in the Protocols.