P.S. - Is anyone really that shocked by this??

Ever since ISIS began its bloody rampage across the Middle East, many of us have been suspicious of their origins. The West seemed perfectly willing to support the rebellion against Russian backed Assad, but as soon as those supposedly “moderate” rebels formed ISIS, they turned against them (according to the media at least). But according to a recently declassified document, the US government knew more than they were letting on (gasp) in regards to the formation of ISIS.

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As attempts are underway to “sabotage” a nuclear deal between Iran and the global powers by “subterfuge of all kinds”, former US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is “the rational player in the room” thanks to his anti-war stance towards Tehran, a geopolitical commentator says.

Gates said earlier on Monday that war on Iran would not be an alternative if the ongoing nuclear negotiations fail for any reason.

“Gates is being more rational than a lot of folks” in the US political system, said Dean Henderson, the author of Big Oil & Their Bankers In The Persian Gulf, in a Monday phone interview with Press TV.

He added that those behind the US banking system would benefit form a “neo-colonial setup” in the Middle East with Israel and the Arab countries in power, that is why they would make attempts to hamper a deal between Tehran and the P5+1 – the US, Britain, Russia, France, China, and Germany.

Do our digital homes deserve the same right to privacy as our brick-and-mortar homes?

This is one of the questions Canadians are asking after CBC News revealed that a government spy agency -- the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) -- targeted popular mobile browsers and apps, leaving millions at risk of having their private data hacked.?

This is the latest in a long series of revelations about how the government has been spying on our private online activities on a massive scale -- without ever going to a judge to ask for a warrant.

Presidential hopeful Randy Paul has posted a message and video via social media urging the public to "Let us never forget the brave men and women who paid the ultimate sacrifice in defense of liberty." Rand couldn't even go to the trouble of going to an actual veteran's graveyard, but rather did a voiceover version of a literal cartoon cemetery on a youtube video. Those who didn't ignore Rand's pathetic attempt were critical of it.

Americans’ distrust of the US government has reached unprecedented levels as a result of the National Security Agency’s phone spying program along with recent revelations that Hillary Clinton used private servers for official emails, according to a former US governor.

Beyond the count of years I walked the world,

and my children built their shrines to me.

Decades and centuries and millennia pass,

and still the shrines are built.

Temples insubstantial to men,

clear to my eyes.

No foundations or walls or roofs,

but shrines nonetheless.

Holy ground, consecrated

Today, every day, somewhere in the world,

the earth is prepared for my coming.

My hallowed grounds are everywhere.

In valleys and on mountains,

on broad plains and deep in hidden passes,

in deserts, on city streets.

Nameless, unremembered places.

Jeffrey Sterling recently stood before a judge as his sentence was read. The former CIA officer, the judge declared, would spend 42 months — that’s three and half years — behind bars. The feds had convicted Sterling on nine felony charges, including seven counts of espionage.

By any conventional definition, the United States of America deserves the title of “empire.” The country was built on the conquest of a continent through a series of crushing military victories and squashed rebellions. The regime in Washington, ensconced in its official buildings specifically designed to evoke the glories of Rome, administers territory that stretches across oceans, commands military forces that can project power to every corner of the globe, and annihilates enemies from the heavens without incurring the slightest danger. You can always find greasy democrats and republicans (small d’s and r’s) whining about the cost of maintaining a monarchy, but the Commander in Chief of the Great Republic travels with far more security, expense, and pomp than the Queen of England.

If one considers the known evidence of Israeli prior knowledge of 9/11, the Odigo text messages and the five arrested Mossad agents, for example, as indicative of Israeli state involvement in the crime, the identity of the hidden power behind the cover-up is rather obvious. The "hidden hand" suppressing the information about 9/11 would have to be a high-level person in the Israeli political-military intelligence establishment who has very close relations with media kingpins like Murdoch, Levin, and Eisner. Arnon Milchan (a.k.a. Milchen) is such a person.

In a last-ditch effort to scare lawmakers into preserving unpopular and much-abused surveillance authorities, the Senate Republican leadership and some intelligence officials are warning that allowing Section 215 of the Patriot Act to sunset would compromise national security.

For thousands of years, people have been writing about happiness. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristippus concluded that happiness lies in the pursuit of external pleasure. Others, from Antisthenes to Buddha, have stressed that looking inwards and leading an ascetic life based on virtue, simplicity and inner peace is the route to happiness. And then there are those like Schopenhauer who seem to think that we can only be occasionally happy in what is essentially a miserable world: life only oscillates like a pendulum, back and forth between pain and boredom.

It is well documented that many other countries have created health care systems that are more popular than ours, cover everybody, are more effective as measured by better health outcomes, are better able to restrain increases in costs and, therefore, have per-capita costs that are a fraction of ours.

Sri Lanka’s newly elected President Maithripala Sirisena announced Friday that the import of the World’s most used herbicide glyphosate will be banned with immediate effect. The release of already imported stocks has also been stopped.

Sirisena, a farmer and ex Health Minister, stated that glyphosate is responsible for the increasing number of chronic kidney disease (CKDu) patients in Sri Lanka and added that the move would protect the Sri Lankan farming community...

By Brandon Turbeville

While the Western mainstream media and even independent gatekeepers like Noam Chomsky for years spread the lie that any suggestion that the United States and NATO were supporting ISIS was a “conspiracy theory,” recently uncovered and declassified documents from the Defense Intelligence Agency have proven the Western press and the likes of Chomsky wrong and, yet again, the so-called “conspiracy theorists” right.

This is because, on May 18, Judicial Watch published a selection of recently declassified documents that were obtained from the US Department of Defense and the US State Department as a result of a lawsuit filed against the US government...

Tel Aviv — Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has been sentenced to eight months in prison for unlawfully accepting money from a U.S. supporter.

Monday's verdict in Jerusalem District Court caps a dramatic downfall of a man who only years earlier led the country and hoped to bring about a historic peace agreement with the Palestinians.

Olmert was convicted in March in a retrial. The sentencing comes in addition to a six-year prison sentence he received last year in a separate bribery conviction, ensuring the end of the former premier's political career.

In his almost 30-year career as an advocate for environmental justice, Louisiana attorney Stuart Smith has fought many of the biggest energy companies in the world and has come away victorious in his fair share of cases.

In the midst of the last-minute Congressional debate about whether to re-authorize Patriot Act Section 215, the Justice Department Inspector General (IG) released a long awaited report on Thursday on how the FBI has used (and abused) Section 215 for the past few years.

Under pressure from the U.S. and agrochemical industry lobbyists and amid ongoing negotiations for a controversial trade deal, the European Union dropped planned rules that could have led to the banning of 31 pesticides containing hazardous chemicals, a new investigative report has revealed.

An organization that typically promotes the Republican propaganda agenda received information from the Democratic Obama Administration, and they publicized information from it that concerned the 2012 Benghazi attack, which was a failure by the State Department — something that congressional Republicans have been investigating for years.

It was eighteen years ago this month that I first handed to a Vancouver Sun newspaper editor a list of possible mass grave sites of Indian residential school children on Canada’s west coast, based on government documents and statements from eyewitnesses who buried children there. I and these witnesses were flatly ignored: not only then, but every other time over the subsequent years that we presented such evidence to the same newspaper.

Year after year, despite all our public protests, forums, and documenting of the location of the mass graves of these children, the Vancouver Sun‘s indifference to the worst crime in Canadian history continued. And this same blind eye approach was replicated by every other “mainstream” media outlet across Canada — even when, in December of 2011, these media received from me evidence of bone and clothing samples unearthed from the Brantford residential school mass grave.

By Janet Phelan

This year, the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) celebrated its 40th birthday in Geneva, at the Palais Nacions. Amidst speeches and backslapping within the coterie of the BWC crowd, the question that hangs in the air is—Are we really any safer?

The Biological Weapons Convention was signed by the three depositary countries—Russia, Great Britain and the United States—in 1972 and entered into force in 1975. The announcement by the Nixon administration in 1969 that the US would unilaterally renounce the use of biological weapons and discontinue its biological weapons program provided an impetus towards the establishment of the treaty.

Is this a treaty or what? ...

The US is up in arms over Chinese construction of islands in the South China Sea. US spy planes buzzing the islands are asked to keep away.

Meanwhile, the US continues to construct more military bases in the region.

A Justice Department inspector general’s report shows that for seven years the Federal Bureau of Investigation violated statutory law designed to restrict the agency’s surveillance power. During this period, the agency sought individuals’ records under the business records provision of the PATRIOT Act without adopting proper “minimization procedures” to protect privacy of US persons.

Only 54 officers have been charged for thousands of fatal shootings at the hands of police across the United States over the past decade, according to a new report.

From the first sudden, and quite dramatic, appearance of the fanatical Islamic group known as ISIS which was largely unheard of until a year ago, on the world’s stage and which promptly replaced the worn out and tired al Qaeda as the world’s terrorist bogeyman, we suggested that the “straight to beheading YouTube clip” purpose behind the Saudi Arabia-funded Islamic State was a simple one: use the Jihadists as the vehicle of choice to achieve a political goal: depose of Syria’s president Assad, who for years has stood in the way of a critical Qatari natural gas pipeline, one which could dethrone Russia as Europe’s dominant – and belligerent – source of energy, reaching an interim climax with the unsuccessful Mediterranean Sea military build up of 2013, which nearly resulted in quasi-world war.

The law allows authorities to bar foreign civil society groups seen as threatening Russia’s “defence capabilities” or “constitutional foundations” and go after local activists working with them, the Kremlin statement said.

The results are in: Ireland has officially become the world's first nation to legalize same-sex marriage by popular vote.

With a final count of 62.1 percent voting yes, with a total turnout of 60 percent, marriage equality is now legal in Ireland.

“It is the MISSION of the police that is lethal, racist, oppressive and unacceptable to Black America; the equipment and clothing is incidental.”

President Obama took his police “reform” shell game to Camden, New Jersey, this week, announcing a ban on the sale of some types of military equipment to local police departments, and restrictions on other weapons, gear and equipment. As with all of the administration’s responses to the nine-month-old Black Lives Matter movement, it was an exercise in public relations and calculated diversion, crafted to camouflage the essential nature of the Mass Black Incarceration State – what Michelle Alexander calls the New Jim Crow.

The Dr. Zbig “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski-style strategy has always been to lure Russia into another Afghanistan in Ukraine, leading to a collapse of the Russian economy with the Big Prize being a Western takeover of Russia’s oil and natural gas wealth, and by extension Central Asia’s. Ukrainians would be used as cannon fodder, as were Afghans since the 1980s Arab-Afghan jihad.

Yet the Obama administration overplayed its hand, and realpolitik now spells out the deepening of the Russia-China strategic partnership across the entire Eurasian land mass; Eurasia as a prospective, massive commercial emporium stretching from Beijing to Berlin, or from Shanghai to St. Petersburg and beyond towards Rotterdam and Duisburg.

Without the exceptionalist obsession of some key Beltway factions, none of the elements of Cold War 2.0 would be in play, as Russia is a natural ally of the US in many fronts. That in itself reveals the state of “strategic thinking” by the current US administration.

The Sunday Express revealed earlier this month how Harding met MPs Cyril Smith and Leon Brittan in the 1980s when he ran a north London antiques store.

Thirty-five years ago he appeared alongside paedophile television presenter Jimmy Savile in a Christmas special of Jim’ll Fix It.

The lodge boasts of its Government Communications Headquarters heritage on its website.

A source close to Harding revealed: “The Mercurius Lodge is known as the Spies Lodge because it was set up by GCHQ and over the years many intelligence officers have become members.

“These are people trained to find out sensitive information and yet none of them had any idea of Keith’s background and past convictions.

The USA Freedom Act has failed in the Senate, stalling an effort to reform certain federal surveillance programs before an end-of-the-month deadline ends the government’s ability to collect the phone records of Americans.

The US State Department released the first batch of emails sent or received by former Secretary Hillary Clinton in 2011 and 2012. Totaling 842 printed pages, the 296 messages are heavily redacted, but some things can still be gleaned from their content.