House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (Va.), the chamber’s second-ranking Republican, was badly beaten in a primary contest Tuesday by an obscure professor with tea party backing — a historic electoral surprise that left the GOP in chaos and the House without its heir apparent. ● Cantor, who has represented the Richmond suburbs since 2001, lost by 11 percentage points to Dave Brat, an economist at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Va. It was an operatic fall from power, swift and deep and utterly surprising. As late as Tuesday morning, Cantor had felt so confident of victory that he spent the morning at a Starbucks on Capitol Hill, holding a fundraising meeting with lobbyists while his constituents went to the polls. By Tuesday night, he had suffered a defeat with few parallels in American history. Historians said that no House leader of Cantor’s rank had ever been defeated in a primary. That left stunned Republicans — those who had supported Cantor, and even those who had worked to beat him — struggling to understand what happened.

Al Jazeera: Cantor defeated in Republican primary upset
Justin Raimondo: House GOP Leader Defeated by Anti-NSA Challenger

In what may be the bloodiest “friendly fire” incident involving US troops in 13 years of war and occupation in Afghanistan, five special operations soldiers were killed Monday in an air strike they themselves had called in against Afghan insurgents who ambushed their patrol. The incident took place in a remote area of southern Zabul province, which borders Kandahar and is a center of armed opposition to the US-backed regime in Kabul. The deaths came just days before the June 14 second round of Afghan presidential elections and in the wake of US President Barack Obama’s announcement of plans for a drawdown of US forces in Afghanistan, now numbering approximately 33,000 out of a total of nearly 50,000 US, NATO and other foreign forces that occupy the country.

A member of Kurdish security forces stands guard
Tuesday as families fleeing violence in the Iraqi city
of Mosul wait at a checkpoint in outskirts of Arbil,
in Iraq's Kurdistan region. (Reuters)

xymphora ■ "Islamic Jihadis Take Over Second-Biggest City In Iraq … But Al Qaeda Wasn’t Even IN Iraq Until the U.S. Invaded" Prince Bandar - and/or his successor - working on a Yinon plan for Iraq. The goal of World Jewry is, as always, to keep the gentiles fighting each other. ZOG will block the Americans from being able to do anything about it, and there is no reasonable prospect that Iraq is capable of helping itself. For the foreseeable future, there is an Islamist terrorist country in a highly strategic location. - Have they found Saddam's weapons of mass destruction yet?

Barry Grey ■ Al Qaeda offshoot ISIS captures Mosul from Iraqi government forces || Coming just two and a half years after the withdrawal of the last of a US occupation force that at its peak numbered over 157,000—deployed in a war sold to the US public as a struggle against terrorism—the fall of Mosul to Al Qaeda-linked guerrillas also constitutes a searing indictment of the criminal character of US policy in the region. With the takeover of the west bank and center of Mosul, a mostly Sunni city of 1.8 million people 220 miles north of Baghdad, ISIS controls a large swath of territory stretching from the eastern outskirts of Aleppo in Syria to Fallujah and part of Ramadi in Iraq’s western Anbar Province, to large parts of Nineveh Province and its capital, Mosul. ISIS’ goal is to establish an Islamic caliphate comprising the two countries.

Oded Yinon ■ A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties || Iraq, rich in oil on the one hand and internally torn on the other, is guaranteed as a candidate for Israel's targets. Its dissolution is even more important for us than that of Syria. Iraq is stronger than Syria. In the short run it is Iraqi power which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel. An Iraqi-Iranian war will tear Iraq apart and cause its downfall at home even before it is able to organize a struggle on a wide front against us. Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us in the short run and will shorten the way to the more important aim of breaking up Iraq into denominations as in Syria and in Lebanon. In Iraq, a division into provinces along ethnic/religious lines as in Syria during Ottoman times is possible. So, three (or more) states will exist around the three major cities: Basra, Baghdad and Mosul, and Shi'ite areas in the south will separate from the Sunni and Kurdish north. It is possible that the present Iranian-Iraqi confrontation will deepen this polarization. [Additional links here and here]

Al Jazeera: Half a million flee unrest in Iraq's Mosul
Al-Manar TV: ISIL Controls Several Areas in Iraq’s Kirkuk Province
Antiwar.com: Al-Qaeda Seizes Iraq’s Mosul, Moves on Kirkuk
P. Cockburn: Battle to Establish Islamic State Across Iraq and Syria

We all remember Secretary of State John Kerry lying through this teeth last summer, when he swore that US intelligence reports proving that Syria used chemical weapons in Ghouta were “as clear as they are compelling.” However, the US administration never provided any proof of Syria government responsibility and now we know why: there was none. Kerry was all bluster and bluff, and when that became obvious his boss was forced to back down from plans to bomb Syria. Well Kerry is back at it again. Bluster and bluff about "proof" while simultaneously desperately seeking evidence:

Here is John Kerry [...] meeting with newly-elected Petro Poroshenko in Ukraine: Secretary of State John Kerry also spent time talking with Mr. Poroshenko, privately urging him to provide evidence of Russian involvement with separatists with which to confront Russian officials.

Sampath Perera ■ Jinnah International Airport in Pakistan’s southern port city of Karachi was raided by an Islamist insurgent group late Sunday night. The fighting continued until Monday, causing a suspension of all operations at the airport, which is used by about 44,000 passengers daily. At least 37 people died, including 10 attackers, according to official accounts. [...] Soon after his election, Sharif pledged support for the US “war on terrorism,” which has served as a vehicle for asserting American hegemony over the region. However, his election promises of negotiations with the TTP reflected concerns within the Pakistani elite about the conflict’s damage to the crisis-ridden economy. The TTP’s apparent ability to target positions in major cities and industrial centres is undermining his government’s agenda to attract foreign investment. [...] The intensifying crisis in Pakistan is inseparably bound up with the escalating geo-political tensions in the region produced by Washington’s drive for dominance over the resource-rich Central Asian landmass, which is accompanied by its “pivot” to Asia to encircle China economically and militarily.

Today, lawyers announced the largest settlement to date involving Occupy Wall St protesters and the City of New York, with the city paying out $583,024 to 14 who were falsely arrested. ● After the police stopped and encircled the marchers, Captain Taylor told the marchers that they were blocking the sidewalk and had to disperse. Some marchers heard the order and tried to exit the area blocked off by the police. Other police officers prevented many of them, including the plaintiffs, from leaving. In addition to the plaintiffs, approximately 20 others were arrested, including citizen journalists and legal observers. Garrett O’Connor, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, described his arrest: “Captain Taylor personally prevented me from obeying his order, by stepping in my way and putting his hand on my chest when I tried to leave. A few seconds later, I was on the ground with my face on the pavement and several police officers on top of me.” Those arrested were held at the 9th precinct before being issued Desk Appearance Tickets and released. “This systematic false arrest and misconduct by high ranking NYPD officers is a symptom of an institutional practice of chilling expressive speech activity and suppressing protest in New York City,” said Wylie Stecklow of Stecklow Cohen & Thompson. “The police, led by supervising officers, stopped peaceful protesters on the sidewalk, surrounded them with a blue wall of police, told them to disperse, and then arrested them before they possibly could. This was an unacceptable violation of basic constitutional rights perpetrated by the Bloomberg-Kelly NYPD."

Karachi’s Airport has resumed operations today, but a deadly late night attack shut it down for many hours overnight. It appears that ten militants entered the airport Sunday night, most likely uniformed as airport security personnel, and killed up to 18 people before they were killed by airport security and rapidly responding military units. The TTP, Pakistan’s Taliban, has claimed responsibility for the attack. The New York Times and Reuters, however, chose to be very selective in how they reported the TTP’s claim of responsibility. Both news outlets left out the TTP’s prominent mention of the US drone strike in November that killed TTP leader Hakimullah Mehsud in describing the TTP’s reasons for the attack. By contrast, AP and the Washington Post included the TTP’s reference to the drone strike.

Billions of dollars are unaccounted for in the books of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. || Parliamentarians of 28 NATO countries have no idea how much taxpayers money flows through the military alliance and whether it is spent legitimately, says the Dutch National Court of Auditors. This is due to an administrative backlog of decades and abundantly marking expenditures as 'undisclosed'. Following is an English translation of a story in de Volkskrant. 'NATO might be wasting a lot of money, or maybe they are short of cash. Frankly, we have no idea', says Saskia Stuiveling, president of the Dutch National Court of Auditors. The findings of the official controlling body of the Dutch government are a result of extensive research on NATO expenditures over the past forty years. It will launch a website in English on Tuesday June 10, 2014, to reveal the messy accounts of NATO.