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.

A federal appeals court on Monday released a redacted version of the U.S. Justice Department's memorandum of justification for a 2011 drone attack that killed Anwar al Awlaki, an American-born Islamist preacher suspected of having ties to al Qaeda. ● The memo says that because the U.S. government considered al Awlaki to be an "operational leader" of an "enemy force," it was legal for the Central Intelligence Agency to attack him with a drone even though he was a U.S. citizen. The memo says the killing was further justified under Congressional authorization for the use of U.S. military force following the Sept. 11, 2001 hijacked-plane attacks. The Obama administration released the memo in response to a court order following Freedom of Information lawsuits filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and The New York Times.

By now, you’d think the lack of confidence in Congress had hit an irreducible minimum. In 2013, a Gallup survey showed that only 10% of Americans had “a great deal” or “a lot” of confidence in the national legislature. But no, that apparently wasn’t as low as you can go. Gallup’s latest survey shows that only 7% of Americans have confidence in Congress. That’s not just the lowest number since Gallup began asking that question in 1973, but the lowest confidence figure for any institution about which it has polled. The highest Congressional confidence level was 42%, recorded in the first year the question was asked. It has fallen and climbed periodically since then, but has never been this low. In this year’s poll, about a third of respondents expressed “some confidence” in Congress, half have “very little” confidence, and 7% have none. The survey, taken from June 5 to June 8, showed that the institution Americans have the most confidence in is the military, at 74%. [Meaning, they haven't a clue after all.]

The last of Syria’s declared chemical weapons have been handed over. “All declared chemical weapons have left Syria,” OPCW Director General Ahmet Üzümcü told reporters at a press conference Monday. "The last of the remaining chemicals identified for removal from Syria were loaded this afternoon aboard the Danish ship Ark Futura. The ship made its last call at the port of Latakia in what has been a long and patient campaign in support of this international endeavor," Üzümcü announced.

Back in 2006, after the second US invasion of Iraq culminated if not with the discovery of the WMDs (which were the pretext for the invasion in the first place), but the unearthing (literally) and kangaroo court trial of Saddam Hussein, the US was quick to announce "mission accomplished." Recent events have made a mockery of that claim, however what is truly the straw that broke the back of poetic justice, to mix metaphors, are reports from local media that as part of its blitz-campaign to take over northern Iraq, ISIS found and the promptly executed Rauf Rashid Abd al-Rahman, the judge who sentenced Saddam to death: a death which to many was the crowning moment of the second US invasion of Iraq, and the confirmation of successful US foreign policy. It goes without saying that if true, the murder of the man who indirectly did the US bidding in slamming the book shut on the Saddam regime (and with it US claims of Iraqi "liberation") and was responsible for Saddam's death, means the last "Mission Accomplished" posted can now be safely taken down.

The Polish Foreign Minister believes his country’s alliance with the US is worth nothing and compared his government’s stance to giving oral sex and receiving nothing in return, a Polish magazine said, citing a leaked recording of a private conversation. ● Excerpts from the alleged exchange between FM Radoslaw Sikorski and Jacek Rostowski, an MP and former finance minister, were published Sunday by Wprost, which promised a full transcript and audio files later on Monday or Tuesday. The same magazine triggered a political storm in Poland this month by releasing a recording of a conversation between the head of Poland’s central bank and the interior minister, implying a link between the two violating the bank’s independence. According to Wprost, Sikorski is skeptical about the reliance of Poland, one of the staunchest allies of Washington in Eastern Europe, on American protection. “The Polish-American alliance is not worth anything. It’s even damaging, because it creates a false sense of security in Poland,” Sikorski allegedly said. “Complete bullshit,” the tape purportedly records Sikorski as saying. “We will get a conflict with both Russians and Germans, and we’re going to think that everything is great, because we gave the Americans a blowjob. Suckers. Total suckers.”

RT.com: Polish FM's oral sex comment on US 'shows his political realism' – Moscow
BuzzFeed: Polish Foreign Minister: We Gave The US A "Blowjob," Got Nothing

Russia built the one-unit nuclear power plant in Iran. The Bushehr nuclear power plant became first in the Middle East. The Bushehr first unit was put into operation in 2011. This was one of the most difficult projects in the history because the construction had started in 1974 and ended in 1980. Twelve year later Russia and Iran agreed to resume the activities. It took 14 years to build the plant. The Bushehr nuclear power has never been imposed any international sanctions. The plant is being built under the control of the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency). In compliance with the supplements to the 1992 agreement Iran obliged to return spent nuclear fuel back to Russia.

At least 10 Syrian soldiers have been killed and several others injured after Israeli jets attacked Syrian army positions in the Golan Heights. ● The so-called Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a group based in the UK, has confirmed the deadly attacks. The Israeli aircraft targeted the Syrian army positions, while its tanks hit government targets in the Golan Heights region.

SANA: Syria complains to United Nations over new Israeli attack
Al-ManarTV: Syria Denounces ’Israel’ Raids as ’Flagrant Violation’ of Territory
Jason Ditz: Israeli Air Strikes Pound Multiple Syrian Army Sites

Israeli occupation army detained 37 Palestinians in the West Bank under the pretext of a search operation launched to find three missing soldiers continued for the 11th day. An Israeli occupation army spokeswoman said 37 Palestinians were detained overnight as Zionist troops raided 80 locations, focusing on northwest Hebron, Jenin, and Beit Awwa. Zionist soldiers also raided seven Hamas-affiliated charities, she added.

Poroshenko is showing his power as the new Ukrainian president, but his options are narrowing. Is he just playing the role of translator from English to Ukrainian, under the influence of the US? How far will Washington go for such a "prize" as Ukraine? Or is the US just playing a game of double standards? CrossTalking with Don DeBar, Ivan Eland and Marcus Papadopoulos.

SCGNews: The U.N. Says 257 civilians Have Been Killed in East Ukraine but Refuses to Condemn the Ongoing Bombardment

All Russian forces in Siberia, the Urals and beyond have been put on combat-ready alert, Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu said after President Putin ordered surprise drills. ● Over 65,000 of Russia’s troops in the Central Military District have been put on alert to verify troops’ combat-readiness during massive war games of all branches of the armed forces. The exercises involve the relocation of military personnel and hardware, firing training and complex inspections. “In accordance with president’s order, today starting from 11:00 Moscow time [07:00 GMT] all troops of the Central Military District have been placed in a state of full combat readiness," Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu said at staff meeting. The drills will last for a week, from June 21 through 28, Shoigu said.

Itar-Tass: Putin supports ceasefire in Ukraine, calls for peace talks
Le Monde: Vladimir Poutine approuve le cessez-le-feu ukrainien
Le Monde: Ukraine: Petro Porochenko propose la paix mais est en guerre

Court Hands Google a Worldwide Site Blocking Injunction | a Canadian court has ordered Google to completely block a group of websites from its worldwide search results. The ruling was handed down despite Google's protestations that the court has no jurisdiction over Google locally or in the US. ● Google’s dominance of the Internet, particularly in search, has seen the company become embroiled in the disputes of countless other companies. Day after day, Google is expected to take action in third parties’ intellectual property complaints to avoid becoming liable itself. Prime examples can be found in the millions of DMCA-style notices the company processes each week. Google must remove those entries or face being accused of facilitating infringement. ● Another case that Google has become involved in, Equustek Solutions Inc. v. Jack, sees two Canadian entities face off (the latter previous employees of the former) over stolen intellectual property used to manufacture competing products. While Google has no direct links to the case, the plaintiffs claim that the company’s search engine is helping to direct people to a network of websites operated by the defendants which are selling the unlawful products. Google already removed links from its Google.ca results voluntarily, but that wasn’t enough for Equustek who wanted broader action. In a ruling handed down in British Columbia, Justice L.A. Fenlon agreed, ordering Google to remove the infringing websites’ listings from its search results. Despite protestations from Google that any injunction should be limited to Canada and Google.ca, the Judge targeted Google’s central database in the United States, meaning that the ruling has worldwide implications.

PhysOrg: Google removes Singapore hate blog against Filipinos

More than 400 large American drones have crashed since 2001, each accident causing from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars in damage, according to the findings of new research by the Washington Post after examining more than 50,000 pages of federal and military records. ● Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, became a popular American weapon during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But in 2015, the Federal Aviation Administration plans to open up American airspace to commercial, police, and military drones. The government has argued the use of domestic drones is absolutely safe, but the recent data about drone crashes shows there are still significant problems to be solved. ● According to the Washington Post, UAVs have crashed into houses, farms, roads and, in one case, even an airborne Air Force plane. No one has died as a result of a drone accident yet, but on many occasions, disaster has only been avoided by chance. The US military divides drone accidents into two different categories: There have been 194 Class A incidents, each of which either destroyed the aerial vehicle or resulted in at least $2 million in damage. More than half of these accidents took place in warzones, in Afghanistan and Iraq, but nearly 25 percent were in the US. Class B accidents caused between $500,000 and $2 million of damage. There have been 224 such events in total.

The European Parliament, acting on a request by French prosecutors, voted Tuesday to strip far-right lawmaker Marine Le Pen of her judicial immunity so that she may be tried over a remark she made about Muslims in 2010. ● Le Pen, the leader of France‘s National Front party and a member of the European Parliament since 2004, faces charges of inciting racial hatred for comparing Muslims praying in the street to the Nazi German occupation of Paris during World War II. ● The remark led to protests at a Paris mosque, where people had been praying outside due to overcrowding. The conservative government of the day later banned Muslims from praying in the street, after helping to accommodate the overflow. ● On Monday, Le Pen repeated her 2010 comment, shrugging off the threat of a court case. She said her crime was to have "dared say what the French think, which is that street prayers - which are continuing to take place on French territory - are an occupation." "I will go to court with my head held high to explain that there have to be people in this country who tell the French the truth," she told LCI television, arguing that she was being pursued for a "thought crime."

Takfiri militants are seeking to destabilize Iraq at the service of imperialist powers and Zionists to help them lay hand on oil resources in the Arab country, a political analyst tells Press TV. ● In an interview with Press TV on Saturday, Kevin Barrett said the current tension in Iraq, just like Syria crisis, is part of a bigger plan aimed at breaking up the Middle East through destabilization. He said the United States, NATO and Israel along with Saudi Arabia have been creating and propping up extremist militant groups like the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) to “massively destabilize” countries in the Middle East.

As ISIS, a group thought to consist of only a few thousand people led by a shadowy figurehead, defeats forces many times its size to capture a large part of Iraq, RT looks into what is ISIS, and how has it achieved its terrifying triumphs. So, what is ISIS? And is it even ISIS, or is it ISIL? - The world’s most committed and fanatical radical organization has only recently gone by its current name, after the unrecognized Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) was proclaimed in April last year. Al-Sham has been most commonly translated from Arabic as the Levant, hence ISIL. It was previously known as Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad, Al-Qaeda in the Islamic State of Iraq. The frequent name changes are not cosmetic – but the direct result of the transforming circumstances which have allowed ISIS to rapidly flourish. Initially focused on achieving dominance in Iraq, it was kept under control in the relatively calm period between the initial sectarian strife that broke out following the US-led invasion in 2003, and the outbreak of hostilities following the American military withdrawal in 2011. Since then, it has become a major player, receiving another critical boost when the civil war in Syria turned into a sectarian conflict, bringing in millions of dollars in funding and thousands of fresh recruits from around the world.

PressTV: ISIL Saudi creation trained by Western agents
Yuram Abdullah Weiler: Reviling the victim: West still in denial over cause of Iraq violence

David Swanson ■ People forget the extent to which Democrats, who controlled the U.S. Senate at the time, pushed for and supported the 2003 attack on Iraq. Remember them or not, theeeeeeeeeey’re back! The Center for American Progress, the head of whose “action fund,” former Democratic Congressman from Virginia’s Fifth District Tom Perriello, slipped through the revolving door into a State Department job in February, is now pushing for “principled” bombings of Iraq. Principled or not, the Center for American Progress is funded by Lockheed Martin and other huge war profiteers. C.A.P. has just put out a report recommending that air strikes be considered. For that to happen, many other things need to not be considered.

Matt Carr ■ Iraq: A Brief History of Bombing || Faced with the prospect of the imminent disintegration of the Iraqi state, the installation of of a jihadist caliphate in the heart of the Middle East, an all-out sectarian civil war, and the final collapse of US policy in Iraq, the Obama administration is reaching once again into that trusty tool of US foreign policy: air strikes. Since World War II, bombing has been the weapon of choice for successive governments in all the wars America has fought. It’s a weapon that has been used against Iraq – and also in support of Iraq – on numerous occasions, and with very different political and military objectives. And with Iraq’s cities once again appearing in the Imperium’s bomb sights, its worth looking back at some of these precedents, and the policy twists and turns that made them possible.

US-led forces in Iraq used depleted uranium weapons in civilian-populated areas during the 2003 military campaign, according to a new Dutch NGO study that also exposes a lack of adequate cleanup efforts by the invading troops. ● For the first time the location of several sites where the invaders fired some 10,000 depleted uranium rounds were released by the Dutch Defense Ministry, and published in a study by Dutch peace group PAX. Most of the DU rounds fired by the US-led coalition were in heavily populated areas, the group says. Samawah, Nasiriyah and Basrah are just some urban areas where ammunition was deployed - with around 1,500 anti-armor rounds fired directly at Saddam Hussein's infantry forces. The GPS coordinates of DU rounds were initially handed over to the Dutch Defense Ministry because the Netherlands was worried about the potential contamination of its own troops in the country. The ministry later shared the information with PAX under a freedom of information law. Most of the firing locations remain unknown, as more than 300,000 DU rounds are believed to have been fired by US-led coalition. NGO says that the health risks of more than 440,000 kg of DU fired by Western forces remains unclear, as “neither coalition forces nor the Iraqi government have supported health research into civilian DU exposure.”

US fired depleted uranium at civilian areas in Iraq
Depleted uranium used by US forces blamed for birth defects and cancer in Iraq

[Translated From Russian by Gleb Bazov. Original] In the course of the night from 18th to 19th [of June], the enemy implemented a large-scale transfer of troops from the vicinity of Dolgenkoye village, where they have their stronghold and encampment, to the region of Krasniy Liman. Altogether, over 130 various items of military equipment were moved, including approximately 20 tanks and 40 APCs (“BMD,” “BMP” and “BTR”). The saboteur-intelligence group of the militia was able to take out one of the “BTR” APCs in the column by exploding a landmine. In addition, in the course of the night, the militia conducted strikes against the stronghold of the enemy in the Kombikormoviy neighbourhood. Early in the morning on June 19, 2014, the enemy, with tanks and motorized infantry, and supported by two ground attack fighters Su-25, a division of self-propelled howitzers, a GRAD MLRS battery and several mortar batteries, dealt a massive blow against the positions of the Krasniy Liman detachment of militia located in the vicinity of Yampol settlement. The first attack was repelled, and an enemy tank was hit. [File photo/AFP]

Itar-Tass: Russia’s Armed Forces ready for any scenario in Ukraine — defense minister