At least ten people have been killed following yet another bombing of Pakistan's tribal belt in the northeast of the country by US assassination drones. ● According to local security sources, the US drones struck a compound and a vehicle at a small market in the town of Datta Khel near the Afghan border. The sources [conveniently] further identified the casualties from the drone attack as "militants" [civilians]. Washington claims the targets of the drone attacks are militants, but local officials and witnesses maintain that civilians have been the main victims of such raids over the past few years.

Amateur videos posted online on Tuesday reportedly showed the aftermath of coalition airstrikes on the village of Kfar Derian in the northern Syrian province of Idlib. The narrator in the videos is heard saying that the footage shows the destruction caused by Western allied air raids. The US has not yet confirmed it carried out airstrikes in Kfar Derian. The videos appeared genuine and corresponded to AP reports of the events. More HERE.

Robert Parry ■ Obama’s Novel Lawyering to Bomb Syria
Peter Symonds ■ US air strikes in Syria, just the beginning
Syrian Radio & TV: Nasrallah: “Int’l Coalition to fight ISIS” a US cloak to re-occupy region
SANA: The U.S. and partner forces launch air strikes against ISIS terrorists in Deir Ezzor and Aleppo
RBTH: Russia: ISIS in Syria should be bombed only with the permission of the UN or Bashar al-Assad
RT.com: 2 more airstrikes "on ISIS targets" in Syria, 3 in Iraq - Pentagon
RT.com: Bombing ‘imminent threat’: US justifies strikes without ‘direct request’ from Syria
RT.com: Obama bombs 7th country in 6 years
RIA Novosti: US Airstrikes Kill 11 Civilians Inculding Children near Syria's Aleppo
TheAntiMedia: Rand Paul: 600 Tons of Weapons Given to Syrian Rebels Last Year Made ISIS Stronger

Itar-Tass: Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov noted to the United States again that terrorists cannot be divided into bad and good. The country’s top diplomat said so in an interview with Russian Fifth TV Channel. || “Today when the Islamic State is named as the US archenemy I would like to recall that they are those who became stronger, developed and started receiving massive funding and other material support from abroad in the times of changes in power in Libya and attempts to do the same in Syria, when all means were good. Then Americans and Europeans stated that they support fighting these regimes aimed against their own People. When we drew their attention to the fact that a large number of extremists and terrorists are fighting on the side of rivals of these regimes, we actually received a reply that ‘this will pass away’ - so, we will topple the regime and then we will deal with these terrorists. But in fact everything was not so.”

Thierry Meyssan ■ While Western public opinion is fed information about the constitution of a purported international coalition to fight against the "Islamic Emirate", the latter changes shape discreetly. Its principal officers are no longer Arab, but Georgian and Chinese. For Thierry Meyssan, this mutation shows that NATO ultimately intends to use the "Islamic Emirate" in Russia and in China. Therefore, both countries must act now against the jihadists before they return to sow chaos in their countries of origin. || The "Islamic Emirate" initially displayed its Arab origin. This organization sprang from "Al-Qaeda in Iraq" who fought not the US invaders, but Iraqi Shiites. It became the "Islamic Emirate in Iraq" and the "Islamic Emirate in Iraq and the Levant." In October 2007, the US Army seized 606 records of foreign members of this organization near Sinjar. The records were inventoried and examined by experts from the Military Academy at West Point. However, a few days after the seizure, Emir al-Baghdadi said his organization included only 200 fighters and they were all Iraqis. This lie is comparable to that of other terrorist organizations in Syria who say they enrol only incidentally a few foreigners, while the Syrian Arab Army estimated at at least 250,000 the number of foreign jihadists who fought in Syria over the past three years. Moreover, Caliph Ibrahim (the new name of Amir al-Baghdadi) now claims that his organization is composed largely of foreigners and that Syrian territory is no longer for the Syrians and the Iraqi territory is no longer for Iraqis, but they are for his jihadists.

(This article was also published on The Saker's Blog) - The Ukrainian Defense Minister Valerii Geletei is hardly a credible figure. Not only did he recently declare that Russia had threatened the Ukraine with nuclear strikes, he even told a Ukrainian journalist that Russia had already executed two tactical nuclear strikes on the city of Lugansk (apparently to explain why the Ukrainian forces had to retreat from there). The Junta later denied the story and blamed it on the journalist who first published it. Despite these antics, Geletei nonetheless caught the world's attention when he promised the Ukrainian Rada that the Ukraine would retake Crimea and organize a victory parade in Sevastopol. The Rada (Ukraine's parliament) greeted that promise with a standing ovation. The truth is that this will never happen. Here is why:

What follows is the most powerful recorded police checkpoint scene I have witnessed since posting: Extremely Powerful Video – Happy 4th of July from a Police State Checkpoint, last summer. While the former incident happened in Tennessee, the following occurred in Illinois. The American pleb who was accosted by Illinois State Police was DeKalb resident Ryan Scott. While it starts off slow, make sure you watch it all the way to the end. While one of the the police officers is reasonable, the other one can’t stop yelling and seems to derive a particular pleasure from repeatedly informing the citizen he supposed to “protect and serve” that “driving is not a right, it’s a privilege.” What’s also interesting, is you have to wonder if the second officer would have acted even more aggressively if Ryan hadn’t informed him he was being recorded at the end of the conversation. He seems to have backed down slightly upon understanding the repercussions of the recording. It just goes to show the importance of filming police encounters. In Liberty, Michael Krieger

Glenn Greenwald ■ If you’re an Australian citizen, you have a greater chance of being killed by the following causes than you do by a terrorist attack: slipping in the bathtub and hitting your head; contracting a lethal intestinal illness from the next dinner you eat at a restaurant; being struck by lightning. In the post-9/11 era, there has been no terrorist attack carried out on Australian soil: not one. The attack that most affected Australians was the 2002 bombing of a nightclub in Bali which killed 88 of its citizens; that was 12 years ago. Despite all that, Australia’s political class is in the midst of an increasingly unhinged fear-mongering orgy over terrorism. The campaign has two prongs: ISIS (needless to say: it’s now an all-purpose, global source of fear-manufacturing), and the weekend arrest of 15 people on charges that they planned to behead an unknown, random individual based on exhortations from an Australian member of ISIS.

James Cogan ■ Got "Security"? -Australian police kill teenager amid anti-Muslim terrorism hysteria

Someone has updated the Georgia Guidestones with a new ‘2014‘ corner piece. If this doesn’t creep you out, you probably have no idea what these stones are. Some obvious questions you may be asking include, who originally built the Georgia Guidestones? Who installed the ’2014 cube’? Why? Is this just a sick joke, or do the ‘new 10 commandments‘ for the ‘Age of Reason‘ serve some sort of purpose? Why 2014? There are dozens of unanswered questions and no one seems to have a good answer. Apparently a notch showed up in photos around 2009, flash forward to the present and this cube has appeared inside the notch. Did the builder of the Georgia Guidestones die in 2014? Or do these mysterious figures know something we don’t?

“I want people to consider, what if that happened to your family member or daughter?” || The U.S. military used a camera as a torture device at Abu Grahib. To add further humiliation to detainees who were already put in cages, urinated on, stripped naked then stacked in macabre human pyramids, their photos were taken during these degrading acts. “I wanted to use the camera to restore these peoples’ humanity through beautiful portraiture,” says photographer Chris Bartlett, whose exhibition, “Iraqi Detainees: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Ordeals,” opens tonight in New York. When confronted with images of torture, Bartlett says, even the greatest liberal or humanist among us has the tendency to flinch and look away. “It’s such a disturbing and disgusting issue that people want to turn off from it.” Bartlett, who often works in high fashion photography, shooting subjects like candy colored Tory Burch handbags, said he wanted to take “very kind, respectful, beautiful, portraits to draw people into the subject and learn more about their stories.”