A NATO Hummer has crashed into a car carrying four female students in Lithuania, sending three of them to hospital, local media reports.

The NATO SUV collided with the VW Passat on Tuesday afternoon as the military vehicle was turning off a minor road at around 50 kilometers per hour.

Preliminary reports suggest the NATO driver was at fault as he did not make way for the Passat according to the news portal Delfi. As a result, three of the students from a local college were hospitalized with head injuries and two of them were taken to Kaunus.

The driver of the Passat, another female student, as well as the two occupants of the NATO vehicle were unhurt.

While the West's corporate media were fixated on NATO adding tiny Montenegro to its membership roster, the Chinese- and Russian-led Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) added India and Pakistan as full members. The flags of India and Pakistan were raised at SCO headquarters in Beijing, following the June 8 - 9 SCO Summit in Astana, Kazakhstan.

SCO is viewed as a counter-weight to NATO in Asia that is designed to prevent the Western military alliance gobbling up as members former Soviet Central Asian states as members.

Western designs on the central Eurasian land mass becomes much more difficult now that the world's most populous democracy, India, and Pakistan, the world's third most populous Muslim nation, are now fully integrated into the security, political, and economic alliance that eschews American influence in a region that extends from Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea in Europe to Hainan Island in Southeast Asia. India and Pakistan join, in addition to Russia and China, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan in SCO.

India and Pakistan, while not agreeing on much else, decided to put their differences aside and recognize that aligning with China and Russia in SCO is preferable to being led into dubious alliances with the United States. For China, the Indians and Pakistanis in SCO is a major boost to its Silk Road initiative, also known as the "One Belt, One Road" project, of creating new highway, rail, and maritime links with countries around the world.

Fears that India and Pakistan would disrupt SCO with their mutual political differences were put to rest when SCO emphasized that its charter strictly prohibits members using the organization to advance any bilateral problems. The same rule applies to the bilateral tensions between India and China. However, as American influence in the world fades, India finds it advantageous to cast its lot with China and Russia rather than with an increasingly anemic United States.

A huge trove of voter data, including personal information and voter profiling data on what's thought to be every registered US voter dating back more than a decade, has been found on an exposed and unsecured server, ZDNet has learned. It's believed to be the largest ever known exposure of voter information to date.

The various databases containing 198 million records on American voters from all political parties were found stored on an open Amazon S3 storage server owned by a Republican data analytics firm, Deep Root Analytics. UpGuard cyber risk analyst Chris Vickery, who found the exposed server, verified the data. Through his responsible disclosure, the server was secured late last week, and prior to publication.

This leak shines a spotlight on the Republicans' multi-million dollar effort to better target potential voters by utilizing big data. The move largely a response to the successes of the Barack Obama campaign in 2008, thought to have been the first data-driven campaign. Through a handful of companies, including data firms, market researchers, and analytics providers, the GOP replicated that Obama campaign strategy by helping its political candidates make data-based decisions about their campaigns.

The US Supreme Court has ruled that high-level officials under former President George W Bush cannot be held personally liable for the treatment of detainees who were rounded up after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.

In a 4-2 decision Monday, a depleted bench of Supreme Court justices ruledon a civil-rights lawsuit that was filed by a group of Muslim, Arab and South Asian non-citizens in 2002. The plaintiffs, among hundreds arrested and detained after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, accused high-level executive officials of violating the US Constitution by allowing illegal detention policies to be implemented.

The ruling reversed an earlier decision by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals that allowed claims to go forward against three former officials in the Justice Department: former Attorney General John Ashcroft, former FBI director Robert Mueller, and former Immigration and Naturalization Service Commissioner James Ziglar. The three officials risked being on the line for personal liability if the court ruled against them.

The six plaintiffs were seeking damages for alleged violations of their constitutional protection to due process. They also argue they were detained as terrorism suspects based on their apparent race, religion, or ethnicity in violation of the equal protection rights component of the Fifth Amendment.

The last thirty days have shown another kind of world that is engaging in cooperation, dialogue and diplomatic efforts to resolve important issues. The meeting of the members of the Belt and Road Initiative laid the foundations for a physical and electronic connectivity among Eurasian countries, making it the backbone of sustainable and renewable trade development based on mutual cooperation. A few weeks later, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting in Astana outlined the necessary conditions for the success of the Chinese project, such as securing large areas of the Eurasian block and improving dialogue and trust among member states. The following AIIB (Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank) meeting in ROK will layout the economical necessities to finance and sustain the BRI projects.

At a recent panel discussion in Washington, screenwriter, film director and producer Oliver Stone briefly addressed the issue of alleged Russian interference in the recent national election, observing that "Israel interfered in the U.S. election far more than Russia and nobody is investigating them." A few days later, in an interview with Stephen Colbert on the Late Show, Stone returned to the theme, responding to an aggressive claim that Russia had interfered in the election by challenging Colbert with "Israel had far more involvement in the U.S. election than Russia. Why don't you ask me about that?"


Don't look for the exchange with Colbert on YouTube. CBS deleted it from its broadcast and website, demonstrating once again that the "I" word cannot be disparaged on national television. Stone was, of course, referring to the fact that the Israel Lobby, most notably acting through its American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), is undeniably a foreign lobby, no less so than anyone representing the presumed interests of Russia or China. It operates with complete impunity on Capitol Hill and also at state and local levels and no one dares to require it to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, which would permit scrutiny of its finances and also end its tax-exempt "educational" status. Nor does Congress or the media see fit to inquire into AIPAC's empowerment of candidates based on their fidelity to Israel, not to mention the direct interference in the American electoral process which surfaced most visibly in its support of candidate Mitt Romney in 2012.

The last president that sought to compel the predecessor organization of AIPAC to register was John F. Kennedy, who also was about to take steps to rein in Israel's secret nuclear weapons program when he was assassinated, which was a lucky break for Israel, particularly as Kennedy was replaced by the passionate Zionist Lyndon Baines Johnson. Funny how things sometimes work out. The Warren Commission looked deeply into a possible Cuban connection in the shooting and came up with nothing but one has to wonder if they also investigated the possible roles of other countries. Likewise, the 9/11 Commission Report failed to examine the possible involvement of Israel in the terrorist attack in spite of a considerable body of evidence suggesting that there were a number of Israeli-sourced covert operations running in the U.S. at that time.

Looking back from the perspective of his more than 40 years of military service, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Thomas Moorer described the consequences of Jewish power vis-à-vis U.S. policy towards Israel, stating that "I've never seen a president - I don't care who he is - stand up to them [the Israelis]. It just boggles your mind. They always get what they want. The Israelis know what is going on all the time. I got to the point where I wasn't writing anything down. If the American people understood what a grip those people have got on our government, they would rise up in arms. Our citizens don't have any idea what goes on."

US-led coalition forces said they have killed Turki al-Bin'ali, the Islamic State' self-proclaimed "Grand Mufti" or chief cleric, in an air strike in Syria on May 31. Bin'ali was one of Islamic State's most visible preachers and appeared regularly in its propaganda videos. He was placed under U.S. sanctions for helping Islamic State recruit foreign fighters, according to the U.S. Treasury according to Reuters.

In a statement released on Tuesday, CENTCOM said that Al-Bin'ali had a central role in recruiting foreign terrorist fighters and provoking terrorist attacks around the world. As chief cleric to ISIS since 2014, he provided propaganda to incite murder and other atrocities, attempted to legitimize the creation of the "caliphate," and was a close confidant of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

It isn't about ideology, it's about commercial matters which underpin a long history.

The peoples of Asia, in particular those of the Persian Gulf, carry within them, cultural norms, and identities that span millennia. Persia and China have dominated the scene, with footnotes from Portugal and Britain. Persia's influence began with Elam in the bronze age at ~ 2700 BCE, succeeded by the Assyrians 900-700 BCE, the Medes 700-500 BCE, the Achaemenids which extended control to the south coast of the Persian Gulf by 490 BCE, and from what is now Tunisia to Xingjang Province in the PRC, southward from today's Kzahstan to the sea, the kingdom of Alexander conquered this space, and extended their control to what is now Pakistan between 324-200 BCE.

However, it was the Parthians who incorporated the littoral territories of the southern coast of the Persian Gulf into their domain between 200-100 BCE. The Sassanides added what is now Yemen, Oman, Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Turkey, Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbijan, consolidating their control between 226-650 AD.

Our last summary said that the end of the war in Syria is now in sight:

Unless the U.S. changes tact and starts a large scale attack on Syria with its own army forces the war on Syria is over.

There are a few civilian lunatics in the White House who push for widening the war on Syria into an all out U.S.-Iran war. The military leadership is pushing back. It fears for its forces in Iraq and elsewhere in the larger area. But there are also elements within the U.S. military and the CIA that take a more aggressive pro-war position.

Yesterday a U.S. F-18 jet shot down a Syrian air force bomber near the city of Raqqa. The U.S. Central Command ludicrously claims that this was in "self-defense" of its invading forces and its Kurdish proxies (Syria Democratic Forces - SDF) within a "deconflicting zone" after the SDF was attacked in the town of Jardin.

In recent years, the "Russian threat" has become a mainstay in Sweden's political narrative. With the debate mostly focused on Russia's "aggression" in the Baltic, other areas of Sweden have not been deemed as eligible targets. A fresh report "sets things straight" by envisaging yet another equally ludicrous scenario for a Russian assault.

Sweden's anti-Russian paranoia seems to know no boundaries, as the"Russian threat" keeps surfacing in the media, political manifestos and military reports. According to a report prepared by Sweden's Royal Military Academy, there is the threat of a Russian invasion of northern Sweden, if Russia were to expand the security zone around its bases on the Kola Peninsula.