Ukrainian troops and pro-Russian separatists were locked in fierce fighting in the east of Ukraine on Thursday after rebels rejected a call to lay down their arms in line with a peace plan proposed by President Petro Poroshenko, government forces said. ● Heavy fighting broke out at around 4 a.m. (0100 gm) near the town of Krasny Liman, which itself has been under government control since early this month. No details of the fighting were immediately available from the rebels side. Poroshenko, installed as a president on June 7, is pushing a peace plan to end the separatist rebellion including an offer of a unilateral ceasefire by government forces and amnesty for the separatists as long as they put down their weapons. Poroshenko was due later on Thursday to meet regional officials from the Donetsk and Luhansk areas of eastern Ukraine to explain his plan - though he rules out meeting separatists. Separatist rebellions erupted in eastern Ukraine in early April after street protests in Kiev toppled the Moscow-backed leader Viktor Yanukovich and Russia in turn annexed the Crimean peninsula. Eastern rebels have called for union with Russia. Kiev has accused Russia of fomenting the unrest in the east and of allowing volunteer fighters from Russia to cross into Ukraine to support the rebels. This is denied by Moscow.

If there’s one person who has absolutely zero business criticizing anyone for how they’re running the country, it’s Dick Cheney. This should be obvious to pretty everyone by now, but apparently the Wall Street Journal didn’t get the message. Today, the paper published an editorial by Cheney and his daughter Liz in which the former Vice President blasts the “collapsing Obama doctrine” of foreign policy.” Taking the rapid advance of ISIS radicals through northern Iraq as his cue, Cheney accuses President Obama of “emboldening” America‘s enemies. He writes: "Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many. Too many times to count, Mr. Obama has told us he is ‘ending’ the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – as though wishing made it so. His rhetoric has now come crashing into reality…America‘s enemies are not ‘decimated.’ They are emboldened and on the march."

Chelsea Manning: The Fog Machine of War
Paul Waldman: Dick Cheney's amazing chutzpah on Iraq
RT.com: You've been lied to all the time: Chelsea Manning issues dire warning about Iraq
RINF: Why Bush and Blair Should Be Prosecuted for War Crimes
AWIP: Wes Clark - America's Foreign Policy "Coup" - Video
Craig Murray: Deadly Fiasco
Paul Craig Roberts: Professor Francis Boyle on Impeachment of Bush and Obama

US is describing the sorties as surveillance flights --The aircraft are heavily armed fighter jets. ● The United States began flying surveillance missions over Iraq in F-18 Super Hornet fighter jets on Wednesday, it emerged late in the afternoon. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has asked President Obama for air strikes against the Islamist offshoots of al-Qaeda [al-CIAduh] who have been carving a wide swath through his country. So far the White House has been unwilling to agree, but the surveillance missions mark the first declared U.S. flyovers since American troops left Iraq at the end of 2011.

Jason Ditz: Obama to Congress: I Don't Need Your OK on Iraq
VoR: Obama could take military action in oil-rich Iraq without Congress' approval
The Independent: US rules out military action until Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki stands down

■ We brought peace and democracy to Ukraine by our overthrowing their corrupt but democratically elected pro-Russian President and installing a corrupt regime that on May 2nd massacred hundreds of civilians who opposed the coup and thus caused a civil war that now has our people bombing the residents of southeastern Ukraine whom we call “terrorists” while terrorizing them, into hoped-for submission to the regime that we have imposed upon them (those people refused to vote in the election that we held for them).
■ Shortly after Obama had become President, he and Hillary Clinton brought peace and democracy to Honduras by our being the only government in the Western Hemisphere to back the junta that overthrew that country’s democratically elected progressive President and by replacing him with a string of fascist ones producing the world’s highest murder-rate in that country.
■ Yet, despite all of the peace and democracy that we are bringing to the world, Gallup international finds that the nation most often cited around the world as being a threat to peace is the United States. Russian propaganda must have fooled them to believe that. Or did American propaganda fool us to believe what we do?

It turns out that Ukraine's new president, Petro Poroshenko, has been working for the U.S. government since at least 2006 and they knew he was corrupt. ● The evidence that the U.S. was behind the toppling of the Ukrainian government early this year is so overwhelming at this point that the subject really isn't up for debate, however initially it was unclear how the election of Petro Poroshenko fit in. The ecstatic response by Washington when he was declared the winner, and their unbending support in spite of his ongoing military assault against civilians in the east, made it clear that he was the chosen one, but the paper trail wasn't immediately obvious. As it turns out, the evidence that Poroshenko is in the pocket of the U.S. State Department has been available all this time, you just had to know where to find it. In a classified diplomatic cable from 2006 released by Wikileaks.org, U.S. officials refer to Poroshenko as "Our Ukraine (OU) insider Petro Poroshenko". A separate cable also released by Wikileaks makes it clear that the U.S. government was considered Poroshenko corrupt.

Julian Assange, a modern day hero and enemy of state, is preparing to mark two years in captivity inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, with another major leak of state secrets and a fresh challenge to escape legal limbo. Having spent two years inside a small ground-floor apartment in the heart of Knightsbridge, London, the 42-year-old year old founder of WikiLeaks is still making his presence felt with a new batch of documents implicating Canada and 49 other countries, it's expected to be released later on Thursday.

On the eve of the two year anniversary of captivity, Assange in a phone interview with journalists has once again stressed that the US Department of Justice is engaged in a witch hunt investigation of a publisher – the longest since the introduction of the Espionage Act of 1917. “It is against the stated principles of the United States and the values supported by its people to have a four-year pre-law investigation against a publisher,” Assange said.'

Robert Stevens: CIA planned rendition of Edward Snowden
John Wight: ‘God’s Lonely Man’: Assange’s years of purgatory
Bill Van Auken: Defend Julian Assange!
Le Monde: Julian Assange, deux ans dans l'ambassade d'Equateur à Londres

Det danske samarbejde med NSA om fiberkabler viser, at det tætte efterretningssamarbejde mellem de to lande ser ud til at handle om masseovervågning. Derfor skylder politikerne nu en række svar. ● »Hvis FE deltager i de her aktiviteter og understøtter NSA på den her måde, så må man spørge danske politikere, om de er enige i den her collect it all-strategi, hvor det gælder om at indsamle al information i hele verden. Er det en strategi, som danske politikere støtter? Og hvis det ikke er, hvad laver FE så i det samarbejde,« spørger Peter Lauritsen, leder af Forum for overvågningsstudier og lektor i Informations- og Medievidenskab ved Aarhus Universitet.

"'FE must explain to us what is happening and why'" || The Danish cooperation with the NSA on fiber cables show that the close intelligence cooperation between the two countries seems to be about mass surveillance. Therefore our politicians now need to come up with some answers. "If FE participating in these activities and supports the NSA in this way, then one must ask Danish politicians whether they agree with it here collect it all strategy, where the goal is to collect all the information in the world. Is it a strategy that Danish politicians support? And if not, what are the FE as the cooperation "asks Peter Lauritsen, head of the Forum for surveillance studies and associate professor of Information and Media Studies at Aarhus University. (Google Translate) [FE = Forsvarets Efterretningstjeneste = Danish Defence Intelligence Service]

NSA ‘third party’ partners tap the Internet backbone in global surveillance program
Dokumentation: Her er dokumenterne fra Edward Snowden
Der Spiegel: New NSA Revelations: Inside Snowden's Germany File

White man speaking 'fluent British English' led al-Shabaab attack in Kenya that left 60 dead, witnesses claim. ● Several people in Mpeketoni, which was attacked by as many as 40 Islamist gunmen on Sunday, told The Telegraph that the gang's leader was pale-skinned and spoke English and Arabic. One of the witnesses is a primary schoolteacher who speaks good English, unlike many people in the remote corner of Kenya near the Lamu archipelago that earlier this week became the country's latest terror target. The accounts strengthened suggestions that the attackers were part of a well-trained team sent by al-Shabaab under the co-ordination of an experienced foreign jihadi now working with the Somali Islamists. "I saw a white man who was speaking in fluent British English commanding the rest of the attackers," said Mary Gachoki, who lives in Mpeketoni.

François Hollande calls brutal gang assault on 16-year-old Roma boy 'unspeakable and unjustifiable attack on all the principles on which our republic was founded' Warning: graphic image readers may find distressing. ● A mob of about 20 balaclava–wearing vigilantes snatched the teenager from his family after he was accused of burgling a nearby flat. They dragged him from the squalid Roma camp where his family had moved a month ago, hauled him across the tram lines to the nearby housing estate, and pummelled him in the basement of a building. A neighbour, a Roma who has been living in the area for several years, later found the boy unconscious in a car park, slumped in a trolley, wearing his red T–shirt and track suit bottoms, his face swollen and bruised. ● President François Hollande denounced last Friday's assault as an "unspeakable and unjustifiable attack on all the principles on which our republic was founded". But critics say government policy has stigmatised France's 20,000–strong Roma community, who mostly come from Romania and Bulgaria. The attack on Darius, whose surname has not been disclosed, was "the result of several years of inefficient public policy which maintains the misery of these Roma communities and allows the racism latent in French society to prosper", said Le Monde newspaper in its frontpage editorial.

Le Monde: Lynchage d’un jeune Rom : non à l’indifférence

It has been a while since both Ukraine, and the ongoing Russian response to western sanctions (which set off the great Eurasian axis in motion, pushing China and Russia close together, and accelerating the "Holy Grail" gas deal between the two countries) have made headlines. It is still not clear just why the western media dropped Ukraine coverage like a hot potato, especially since the civil war in Ukraine's Donbas continues to rage and claim dozens of casualties on both sides. Perhaps the audience has simply gotten tired of hearing about mixed chess/checkers game between Putin vs Obama, and instead has reverted to reading the propaganda surrounding just as deadly events in the third war of Iraq in as many decades. However, "out of sight" may be just what Russia's political elite wants.

War, famine, mass extinctions and devastating plagues - all of these are coming unless some kind of miraculous solution is found to the world's rapidly growing water crisis. By the year 2030, the global demand for water will exceed the global supply of water by an astounding 40 percent according to one very disturbing U.S. government report. As you read this article, lakes, rivers, streams and aquifers are steadily drying up all over the planet. The lack of global water could potentially be enough to bring about a worldwide economic collapse all by itself if nothing is done because no society can function without water. Just try to live a single day without using any water some time. You will quickly realize how difficult it is. Fresh water is the single most important natural resource on the planet, and we are very rapidly running out of it. The following are 25 shocking facts about the Earth's dwindling water resources that everyone should know...

The US Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit ruled Monday that a District Court in Chicago was wrong to allow a terrorism defendant’s lawyer access to secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court documents relating to his defendant. The [...] appeal demonstrates the complicity of the American legal system, particularly the higher courts, in the push by the executive branch to dismantle the separation of powers and establish the framework of a police state. The court order spins pragmatic arguments to obscure and conceal the anticonstitutional role of the FISA court in rubber-stamping the massive illegal spying apparatus of the US government. Hoping to stop future legal challenges, the ruling sharply warns lower courts against questioning the pseudolegal dictates of the FISA court. [...] The unanimous ruling of the three-judge appellate court was authored by Judge Richard Posner, a particularly right-wing judge appointed by President Ronald Reagan. Judge Posner was joined by Judges Michael Kanne and Ilana Rovner. Using language fitting of a military order, Judge Posner writes that Judge Sharon Coleman of the US District Court in Chicago “disobeyed” the FISA court law when she ordered that a defendant’s lawyer had the constitutional right to examine FISA documents pertaining to his case.

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Eric London: Federal judge allows US government to destroy evidence in suit against NSA

Rossiter wrote an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal titled “Sacrificing Africa for Climate Change,” in which he called notions of climate catastrophe “unproved science,” and shortly thereafter received word from the institute that his position was terminated. ● “I am simply someone who became convinced that the claims of certainty about the cause of the warming and the effect of the warming were tremendously and irresponsibly overblown,” he said in an exclusive interview Tuesday with The College Fix. “I am not someone who says there wasn’t warming and it doesn’t have an effect, I just cannot figure out why so many people believe that it is a catastrophic threat to our society and to Africa.” For this belief – based in a decade’s worth of statistical research and analysis on climate change data – Rossiter was recently terminated as an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive Washington D.C. think tank.