A California-based group that has been battling the National Security Agency for years in lawsuits flew a giant blimp over the NSA Data Center in Utah early Friday. Parker Higgen, of the San Francisco-based group Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that between 6 a.m. and 7 a.m., he — along with a pilot from Greenpeace — flew a blimp over the data center with a banner that stated: "NSA. Illegally spying below."

US President Barack Obama has asked Congress for more than $65 billion in war funds for the next fiscal year. ● The president sent lawmakers a series of budget amendments on Thursday requesting $58.6 billion to fund the war in Afghanistan and $7.3 billion for global “security programs” run by the State Department. The total includes new requests to support European security and a new counterterrorism fund to combat terrorists across the Middle East and Africa. Republicans in Congress insist there should be a debate on how the funds will be used and some lawmakers have indicated they will not rubber stamp the president’s request.

The radical organization Right Sector fighters are recruited into the Aydar battalion of the Ukrainian National Guard destroyed by the militia with its fighters, Chairman of the Supreme Council of the self-proclaimed Lugansk People's Republic (LPR) Alexey Karyakin said at a press conference on Saturday. Aydar is one of the many "nominal" battalions of the Ukrainian law-enforcers that participated in the hostilities in the South-East of the country. According to a report by the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, on June 17, the Aydar battalion without the consent of the command of the special operation decided to storm the militia in Lugansk, but was ambushed and suffered serious losses despite the received reinforcement. Ukrainian lawmaker admits half Azov battalion fighting in Donbass composed of criminals. Head of the self-proclaimed Lugansk People's Republic Valery Bolotov said that the militia had almost completely destroyed Aydar.

PressTV: US pushes Kiev to confront Moscow: Lavrov
VoR: Ukrainian troops ignore Poroshenko's statement on ceasefire - Lugansk People's Republic
The Saker: June 28th IRAQ SITREP by Mindfriedo
Clara Weiss: Kiev deploys fascists against political opponents

Israeli diplomats have told their American counterparts that Israel would be prepared to take military action to save the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan if it came under attack by jihadist militants, the Daily Beast reported on Saturday. The threat posed to Jordan by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) which has already taken over wide swathes of Iraq and Syria, is of deep concern to the Obama administration and was the subject of a confidential briefing by administration officials to senators last week, according to the online news site. The chief concern is that an attack on Jordan would inevitably "drag" Israel and possibly the United States into the fighting.

Police commissioners have urged the Met to put ultraviolet dye in its new water cannon in order to track people hit by the weapons, Boris Johnson’s policing boss has said. ● Stephen Greenhalgh, Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime, told members of the London Assembly that police and crime commissioners from around the country had advocated the use of “SmartWater” in the crowd control weapon. The substance would remain invisible until those hit by the water had an ultra-violet light shone on them, at which point it would glow fluorescent yellow and identify them as having been at a protest or other public order situation. SmartWater is normally used to invisibly mark valuable belongings such as laptops so that the police can trace their owners if they are ever stolen, and also to permanently stain the clothes of people involved in burglaries. Greenhalgh said there was a “range of views” among police commissioners about the plans to purchase the weapons.

Nearly seven years later, four former mercenaries of Blackwater Worldwide are on trial in US court on charges stemming from a September 2007 attack that left 14 Iraqis dead and wounded 18 others in Baghdad’s Nisour Square. ● In the trial that began June 11 in US District Court in Washington, DC, Nicholas Slatten is accused of first-degree murder, and Dustin Heard, Evan Liberty and Paul Slough are on trial for voluntary manslaughter, attempted manslaughter and gun charges. If convicted, Slatten could be sentenced to life in prison, while the other defendants face a mandatory minimum sentence of 30 years if convicted of the gun charge and at least one other charge. The former Blackwater guards have pled not guilty to all charges. The US Justice Department dropped charges against a fifth guard and a sixth reached a plea deal.

In Hillary Clinton's attempt to seem "one of the people", she made the public relations debacle of portraying herself as "dead broke" at the time she and Bill Clinton left the White House. Of course, the reason this attempt at populist pandering backfired (certainly not helped by her daughter's just as mistimed quote that she "Was Curious If She Could Care About Money And Couldn't", an expected outcome considering such boondoggles as a $600,000 NBC job for doing, well, something, and being married to a hedge fund manager) is because as is well-known, even the least educated American, the bulk of wealth American president families accrue is not while in office but after, when they hit the speaking/book publishing circuit. This is just what WaPo found when it conducted a review of the Clintons’ federal financial disclosure: it found that Bill was paid $104.9 million for delivering 542 speeches around the world between January 2001 and January 2013, when Hillary left her job as secretary of state.