The Saker ■ When I heard this morning that Putin had asked the Federation Council to repeal the resolution on the use of Russian armed forces on the territory of Ukraine I was frankly baffled. Truly, I had not expected such a move. I had noticed yesterday that the so-called "consultations" (as opposed to "negotiations") between the Russian Ambassador to Ukraine Mikhail Zurabov, a senior representative for the OSCE Tagliavini, Ukraine's second president Kuchma, Ukrainian Choice movement leader Medvedchuk and the Donetsk People's Republuc's Prime Minister Borodai, South-East movement leader Tsaryov and representatives of the Lugansk People's Republic had resulted in the Novorussian leaders agreeing to a temporary cease-fire, but I did not expect that the situation would change so rapidly. Let's recall what was going on just a few days ago. - How did we get here?

Andrew Korybko ■ Ethnic and cultural cleansing in Ukraine [...] What Koval has proposed to do to the citizens of Donbass is completely illegal under international law and characterized as a crime against humanity. Forcible deporting and transferring a population, imprisoning them for no reason other than their address, and specifically targeting an ethnic and cultural group is explicitly forbidden under Article 7 of the Rome Statute. Perhaps because Yatsenyuk and others in his administration believe the protesters in the east to be “subhuman”, they do not feel that “human rights” apply to them. Accordingly, these “sub-humans” won’t have the right to their former property as well (due to the forcible resettlement), so it is likely that their homes and businesses will be the “free land” that Kiev has promised to its militant henchmen deployed in the east.

VoR: Military helicopter downed near Slavyansk
Itar-Tass: Self-proclaimed Donetsk, Lugansk republics adopt act on unification

Sergei Glazyev: On Eurofascism
Olga Chetverikova: A Fourth Reich is already under Construction in Ukraine

Eric Zuesse ■ In response to the Obama Administration’s Ukrainian coup that replaced the democratically elected pro-Russian President of Russia’s neighboring country by a regime that is seeking to join NATO and become a base for U.S. nuclear missiles, Russia is girding for America’s expected attack. BurkoNews, an organization of journalists who live in Crimea, headlined on 22 June 2014, “Why Is Russia Preparing for the Nuclear War?” and reported: “From the middle of May to early June 2014, the Russian Federation [i.e., 'Russia'] undertook two large command-staff exercises testing the realization of a local nuclear attack. According to military experts there were never such dense and extensive testing scenarios of nuclear war even in the Soviet Union. … The 12th General Directory of the Ministry of Defense, which is the most secret department, was involved in the exercises.”

The United States Senate voted Thursday to confirm David Barron, the former Obama administration official who drafted the legal justification for assassination by drone-fired missile, to a lifetime seat on the First Circuit Court of Appeals. It was a near-party-line vote, 53-45, with every Republican voting against, joined by only two Democrats. Every prominent liberal in the Senate voted to rubber-stamp the nomination. Those voting for Barron including the self-proclaimed “socialist,” independent Bernard Sanders of Vermont, as well as Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, promoted as a potential presidential candidate by the Nation magazine and other liberal groups.

PressTV: Court releases memo of US justifying drone killings of Americans abroad
David Swanson: So That's Why They Kept the Drone Kill Memo Secret
Barry Grey: Memo on drone killings of US citizens makes case for presidential dictatorship

Speaking at the end of a day-long series of meetings in Baghdad, US Secretary of State John Kerry warned Monday that President Obama could order military strikes against Sunni militants without waiting for the political restructuring of the Iraqi government that Washington has been demanding. Kerry underscored the debacle facing the regime of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, which has lost control of a third of the country’s territory to a Sunni uprising headed by the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Shams (ISIS), an Islamic fundamentalist group with roots in Al Qaeda. Indicating that US military action could come quickly, Kerry said that any decision by Obama to order an attack should not be considered an act of “support for the existing prime minister or for one sect or another.” Pentagon officials also announced Monday that the Iraqi government had agreed to provide immunity from prosecution for all US military personnel deployed to Iraq in the course of the present crisis. This was the principal issue that blocked the conclusion of a Status of Forces Agreement between the US and Iraq in 2011, leading to the complete removal of all US troops from the country.

xymphora ■ The destruction of Iraq: Cui bono?

Mike Whitney ■ Splitting up Iraq: It’s All for Israel ■ [The] Obama people [...] want to partition the country consistent with an Israeli plan that was concocted more than three decades ago. The plan was the brainstorm of Oded Yinon who saw Iraq as a serious threat to Israel’s hegemonic aspirations, so he cooked up a plan to remedy the problem. Here’s a blurb from Yinon’s primary work titled, “A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties”, which is the roadmap that will be used to divide Iraq.

SCGNews ■ Israel Helps ISIS with Airstrikes Against the Syrian Government || Yesterday Israel launched airstrikes against Syria yet again, hitting at least military targets and killing several Syrian soldiers. These strikes were supposedly in response to a cross border rocket attack that left an Israeli teenager dead at the Golan Heights border. The reality of the matter however, is that there is no evidence that the Syrian government had any involvement in the initial rocket attack, and it is far more likely to be the work of the Syrian rebels. The irony here, is that by launching airstrikes against the Syrian government in response to an attack that was most likely carried out by the Syrian rebels, Israel is actually encouraging future attacks like this. It's easy for the rebels to launch missiles across into Israel, and Israel's response is essentially free air support. So clearly it is in the rebel's interest to shoot over into the Israeli side as often as possible.

Moon of Alabama ■ Elijah J. Magnier has an interesting interview with an ISIS commander, Abu Baqr-al-Janabi, in Baghdad. There are plans for ISIS to take the city and there are apparently sleeper cells of fighters waiting for the big attack signal. But, says the commander, ISIS and the attached other forces, will first have to consolidate their positions and eliminate Iraqi government position in their back. The Iraqi government is already giving up some outer position and is consolidating its side by securing only Baghdad, the south and some economically important assets. The 300 military "advisers" the U.S. had announced to send to Iraqi headquarters will likely never arrive. There is disagreement over their legal status and the Iraqi government, given the U.S. commitment to another regime change in Baghdad, may well conclude that these soldiers would likely be malign actors rather than trustworthy allies. The Maliki government, like the Iranians, probably sees the whole ISIS attack as the result of a U.S. conspiracy. My hunch for now is that ISIS will not go for the big fight in Baghdad in the near term but will rather try to launch some substantial diversion elsewhere.

Antiwar.com: ISIS Captures Key Iraq Refinery, Will Let Tribes Run It
Matt Carr: ISIS: Made in Washington?
The Truth Seeker News Brief: Mounting Evidence of Western Support For ISIL Militants
Antiwar.com: Over 300 killed Across Iraq
The World Post: UN: At Least 1,075 Killed In Iraq In June

Norway, one of the world's richest nations, is about to ban begging in a move some see as a sign of rising anti-immigrant sentiment. Whatever the motivation, it's the work of misguided people who want to hide what they can't understand. ● A recent government-commissioned report says there are between 500 and 1,000 foreign beggars on the streets of Oslo. The city estimates it will spend 5 million kronor ($824,000) this year just cleaning up after them. Locals believe most of them are Roma, a group commonly known as Gypsies who arrived from Romania and other east European countries in search of free food and clothes in the oil-rich country, which was largely unscathed by the global financial crisis and boasts one of the world's highest incomes per capita. Local charity organizations are relatively generous, but no one will rent housing to the beggars, so they are forced to squat or live rough, which in Norway often means sleeping on the ground in sub-zero temperatures. Politicians from the anti-immigrant Progress Party, part of the country's ruling coalition, believe the beggars are part of organized crime syndicates. It's an idea that has a long history all over the world.

RT.com: Norway wants to criminalize begging
The World Post: One Of The World's Richest Countries Wants To Ban Begging

Germany Gives Up On Trying To Repatriate Its Gold, Will Leave It In The Fed's "Safe Hands" ● Several months after it was revealed that Germany was able to only recover a miserable 5 tons of its gold in all of 2013 (under 10% of the 84 tons it was scheduled to repatriate), Germany appears to have given up entirely in its attempt to recover gold which "simply is not there", and as Michael Krieger reports, citing Bloomberg, has decided to keep "it" (by "it" we don't mean the gold since that clearly has not been at the Fed for decades, but merely the paper promises of ownership: for more see China's gold rehypothecation scandal and how the unwind works) at the NY Fed after all. That is to say, in the "safe hands" of former Goldmanite Bill Dudley.

Head Of German Gold Repatriation Initiative Responds To Bloomberg Story About Repatriation Halt

Jon Faine, of Radio 774 ABC Melbourne, interviews and insults former Australia Liberal prime minister Malcolm Fraser, in the process attempting to defend the indefensible, Israel. In his book, Dangerous Allies, Mr Fraser's suggests that it is time for Australia to formulate its own foreign policy and not, in future—as Captain Kirk might have put it—To blindly go where its current allies seek to lead it (my phrase, not Mr Fraser's). Faine is almost as rude and overbearing to this guest as he was towards Kevin Bracken, who was (at the time I made a video about his encounter with Faine), Victorian Branch Secretary of the Maritime Union and the President of the Victorian Trades Hall Council and was attempting to point out some of the many anomalies in the official 9/11 report, but was prevented from doing so by Faine's obnoxious monologues. In this video, I show excerpts from the Kevin Bracken video, which was uploaded in October, 2010, as well as from Friends of Israel — Enemies Inside the Gates, from which Jon Faine appears to have learned nothing. He is a gatekeeper for Israel, and has no business being in front of a microphone in the studios of the publicly-funded Australian Broadcast Corporation.