Sao Paulo - One of the defining images of the World Cup - so far - has been the sight of the Mannschaft - aka the German team - fraternizing with Pataxo Indians a few hundred meters away from the spot where Brazil was "discovered" in 1500. Call it a European re-discovery of the exotic tropics.

Then there's the English Team frolicking by the seaside, inside a military base, with the Sugarloaf as gorgeous backdrop, backed up by a scientific expert in humidity and industrial ventilators aplenty (after all there's the Rumble in the Jungle against Italy this Saturday "deep in the Amazon rainforest", as British tabloids tell it.)

The World Cup - the greatest show on earth - kicks off just as a relentless Made in the West (client states included) anti-Chinese and anti-Russian propaganda/downright vilification shatters all known hysteria levels.

And that means the BRICS are a target; in the case of Brazil, an emerging power sitting strategically over the bulk of the Amazon rainforest just as progressive Latin American integration has dared to turn the Monroe Doctrine into (branded) toilet paper.

Recently, Brazil brought at least 30 million people out of poverty. China invests in medical care and education. Russia refuses to be bullied as in the drunkard Yeltsin years. In the past few years, the World Cup has been all about the BRICS: South Africa in 2010, Brazil now, and Russia in 2018. Qatar in 2022 - if it ever happens - is more like a Gulf petrodollar-fueled bribery racket gone wrong.

It's amusing to check how the City of London - which loves Russian cash, craves Chinese investment and has a soft spot for Brazilian soft power - takes it all in. With an added strand of British humor, they could easily have interpreted the Rumble in the Jungle as NATO battling it out in the middle of the much-coveted rainforest (think the water wars of the near future).

A shadowy hacking group believed to be affiliated with the Chinese military has spent years infiltrating the American aerospace industry and US trading partners in the space industry, a US cybersecurity company said Monday.

Officials from CrowdStrike accused the Shanghai-based unit 61486 of the People's Liberation Army 12th bureau of attacking American and other western networks in cyber-assaults that date back at least as far as to 2007. The space, aerospace and communications sectors were targeted via "popular productivity applications such as Adobe Reader and Microsoft Office to deploy custom malware through targeted email attacks," CrowdStrike said, according to a Reuters report.

A full list of accusations, including phishing emails and Trojan horse documents were outlined in a 62-page report published Monday by CrowdStrike, which conducts forensic investigations for customers who have endured invasive security breaches. When a target downloads or clicks on a certain document, for instance, they could find their entire computer taken over. The hackers then use that power to steal housing blueprints, consumer lists, servers, and other sensitive data, Ars Technica reported.

The group in question is unofficially known as Putter Panda.

The Al-Qaeda linked Islamic Emirate of Iraq and the Levant (IEIL, Arabic الدولة الاسلامية في العراق والشام whose acronym is pronounced "Daesh"), launched on 6 June 2014 a large-scale attack on Iraq. After taking control of Fallujah, it has now seized the district of Nineveh (including the capital Mosul) and is pursuing its offensive in the provinces of Kirkuk and Saladin. More than 150 000 civilians have fled ahead of the jihadists' advance.

On 10 June, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki called on parliament to declare a state of emergency.

The Islamic Emirate in Iraq and the Levant is led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi on behalf of Prince Abdul Rahman al-Faisal, the brother of the current Saudi Foreign Minister and of the Saudi ambassador in Washington. He is funded and supervised jointly by U.S., French and Saudi officers. Over the past month, he has received new weapons from Ukraine, where Saudi Arabia has acquired a weapons factory, and via Turkey, which has created a special rail line alongside a military airport to supply the IEIL.

Iraq has privately indicated to the Obama administration that it would welcome airstrikes with either drones or manned aircraft that target Al-Qaeda offshoot militants in Iraqi territory, US officials say.

A senior US official said the Obama administration is considering options in aiding the Iraqi government's fight against Islamist militants, who have fought for and won major gains in the nation's Sunni-majority areas in recent days, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Those options include "kinetic support" for the Iraqi military in its fight against an Islamist group formerly allied with Al-Qaeda - the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS/ISIL). The group seized two major cities north of Baghdad this week, handily defeating Iraqi security forces along the way, according to reports.

No decisions on action in Iraq have been made, according to the senior official.

The Wall Street Journal sources did not specify whether airstrikes would come from unmanned drones or manned aircraft.

Whenever the term "national security" is cited as justification for the introduction of more secrecy you can feel another tranche of our freedoms and liberties slipping away.

I can barely recognize the British legal system anymore and wonder what happened to the fearless judiciary which once jealously guarded the courts from political interference.

Now it seems the top jobs are going to those craven career-minded individuals willing to become political tools serving no one's interests including the general public.

The erotic reliefs of Hindu temples with their gravity-defying and anatomy-challenging positions have found a new modern competitor in the Ukrainian crisis. Each party wants to get the Jews on their side, while claiming that the other side is anti-Jewish and a Jewish puppet at once. This impossible, Kama-Sutraesque position is the result of extremely confusing alliances: the Kiev regime lists devout Jews and fiery antisemites among its mainstays. The leading figures of the regime (including the president-elect) are of Jewish origin; strongman and chief financier Mr. Igor (Benya) Kolomoysky is a prominent Jewish public figure, the builder of many synagogues and a supporter of Israel. The most derring-do and pro-active force of the regime, the ultra-nationalists of the Svoboda party and the Right Sector, admire Hitler and his Ukrainian Quisling, Stepan Bandera, "liberators of Ukraine from the Judeo-Muscovite yoke". Jews are ambivalent, and the sides are ambivalent about them, and a most entertaining intrigue has been hatched.

The Russians tried to pull Israel and American Jews to their side, with little success. President Putin condemned the antisemitism of the Svoboda party; he mentioned the desecration of the Odessa Jewish cemetery in his important talk. The Russians re-vitalised the World War Two narrative, fully identifying the Kiev regime with the Bandera gangs and the Nazi enemy. Still, this rhetoric is not taken seriously by Jews who refuse to feel threatened by cuddly Kolomoysky. "These Nazis are not against Jews, they are against Russians, so it is not a Jewish problem", they say.

The Kiev regime mirrored the Russian attitude, if not Russia's tactics. Being rather short of facts to brandish, they faked a leaflet from Donetsk rebels to local Jews calling upon them to register and pay a special poll tax "for the Jews support the Kiev regime". This rude and improbable hoax was immediately and convincingly disproved, but not before it was used by, no less, Barak Obama and John Kerry. The American Jewish newspaper of record, The Forward, obfuscated the issue by saying that Russians and Ukrainians are antisemites by birth and their denials are to be taken with a grain of salt. This mud-slinging was effective - the hoax has made the front pages, while its debunking was published on the back pages.

The Russians had the facts on their side, and the West knew that: the US refused entry to Oleg Tyagnibok and other Svoboda leaders (now members of Kiev government) because of their antisemitism as recently as in 2013. But Russian appeals to Jewish and American sensitivities failed to make an impact. They know when to feign indignation and when to hush. Pro-Hitler commemorations are frequent in Estonia, Latvia, Croatia, and cause no lifting of a censorious brow, for these countries are solidly anti-Russian. In March of this year, the Obama administration's special envoy on anti-Semitism, Ira Forman, flatly denied everything and said to the Forward that Putin's assertions of Svoboda's antisemitism "were not credible". The US wants to decide who is an antisemite and who is not; like Hermann Goering wanted to decide who is a Jew and who is not in the Luftwaffe. In the Ukrainian crisis, the Jews remain divided, and follow their countries' preferences.

The U.S. dollar is being increasingly dropped as the currency for settling international trade. But perhaps the latest trend provides the most startling evidence yet that the dollar is doomed as the world reserve currency.

The Financial Times reported today that U.S. corporations are using the Chinese renminbi to buy imports over three times more than they had the previous year:

China's renminbi is rapidly displacing the US dollar as a trading currency not only in Asia and Europe but now also in the US home market.

The value of renminbi payments between the US and the rest of the world rose by 327 per cent in April this year from the same month a year ago (see chart) as more US corporations switched to using the Chinese currency to pay for imports from China, according to data from SWIFT, the international currency settlement firm.

First, US importers can slash the cost of imports from China by agreeing to trade in renminbi rather than US dollars, Lodge said. Second, a recent surge in the popularity of a host of renminbi-denominated financial market instruments are making it easier for US corporates both to hedge currency risk and to earn an investment return from the renminbi they hold.

Who's winning the battle for Ukraine? Despite continued signs of trouble in Ukraine's eastern provinces, some pretty prominent people have recently offered a decidedly upbeat interpretation of events there. The first was U.S. President Barack Obama, who, during his commencement speech at West Point last week, cited the Western response to the crisis as a telling example of successful multilateral diplomacy. In his words, "the mobilization of world opinion and international institutions served as a counterweight to Russian propaganda, Russian troops on the borders, and armed militias." It's not over, he warned, but this effort "has given a chance for the Ukrainian people to choose their future."

A second optimistic appraisal came from New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, who announced on May 27 that Vladimir Putin had "blinked" and proclaimed that the Russian leader "got pretty much everything wrong." According to Friedman, "Putin's seizure of Crimea has weakened the Russian economy, led to China getting a bargain gas deal, revived NATO, spurred Europe to start ending its addiction to Russian gas and begun a debate across Europe about increasing defense spending." His close-to-gleeful summary: "the country Putin threatens most today is Russia."

There's a grain of truth in these optimistic assessments, in the sense that Russia has paid a price for its recent actions. And Obama and Friedman are correct to remind us that Russia is not the looming geopolitical threat that some hawks tried to conjure up when it seized Crimea. But what both Obama and Friedman miss is the real -- and completely normal --motivation behind Putin's behavior. It ain't rocket science: Putin was willing to pay a substantial price because Russia's vital interests were at stake. On balance, I'll bet Putin still sees this matter as a net win.

Edward Snowden has secured his highest endorsement yet in the US when former vice-president Al Gore described the leaking of top secret intelligence documents as "an important service".

Asked if he regarded Snowden as a traitor or whistleblower, Gore veered away from the "traitor" label. He refused to go as far as labelling him a whistleblower but signalled he viewed him as being closer to that category than a traitor, saying: "What he revealed in the course of violating important laws included violations of the US constitution that were way more serious than the crimes he committed."

Snowden, the former CIA and National Security Agency computer specialist, leaked US and British documents to the Guardian and Washington Post in June last year, starting a worldwide debate on the balance between surveillance and privacy. His revelations have led to proposed changes in legislation in the US and a backlash against government surveillance by major telecoms and internet companies.