The Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, backed by the UN, essentially ruled that there is no legal basis for China to claim historic rights to vast sections of the South China Sea included in the 'nine-dash line'.

Here it is, in full legalese: "China's claims to historic rights, or other sovereign rights or jurisdiction, with respect to the maritime areas of the South China Sea encompassed by the relevant part of the 'nine-dash line' are contrary to the Convention and without lawful effect to the extent that they exceed the geographic and substantive limits of China's maritime entitlements under the Convention."

Well, nothing is black and white in such an immensely complex case. The Philippines were advised by a powerhouse Anglo-American legal team. China had "no agents or representatives appointed."

Beijing argues that all the attention over the South China Sea revolves around conflicting sovereign claims over islands/rocks/reefs and related maritime delimitations - over which the court has no jurisdiction. Attributing territorial sovereignty over maritime features in the South China Sea goes beyond the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

Italian senator Ornella Bertorotta, a member of the delegation visiting Israel and Palestine, told Sputnik that the Israeli authorities' decision to bar access to the territory is a "mistake."

A delegation of Italian politicians was denied entry to the Gaza Strip on Saturday by the Israeli authorities, who said that the decision was made for security reasons.

"The Gaza Strip is controlled by Hamas, a terrorist organization hostile to Israel. Admission (to the territory) involves special permits, subject to security concerns," the Israeli embassy in Rome said.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's ruling Liberal Democratic Party and its coalition partner won a majority of contested seats in Japan's parliamentary election Sunday, opening a path for them to amend Japan's postwar pacifist constitution.

The results were also an endorsement of Abe's plans to revive Japan's flagging economy, the issue that he built his campaign around. Abe has been trying for four years to get the political support to fully implement "Abenomics," a plan for structural reform of the economy through fiscal stimulus and monetary easing.


"In the near term, the most pressing question will be finalizing a stimulus package, which will occupy the ruling coalition for the next several months," said Tobias Harris, a Japan analyst at the political risk advisory firm Teneo Intelligence.

Half of the seats in the upper house of parliament were up for grabs in Sunday's election. Although the lower house is considered more powerful, the election was significant because it appeared to give Abe's Liberal Democrats and their allies a two-thirds majority in both houses. Previously, they had a two-thirds majority in the lower house, but only a simple majority in the upper chamber.

With two-thirds majorities in both houses, Abe could initiate a constitutional amendment - if his parliamentary allies are on board. Harris said it seemed likely that the Komeito party, Abe's coalition partner, would block a constitutional amendment, though Abe indicated after the vote that he would push for debate in parliament.

"I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent."—Martin Luther King Jr.

The latest shootings—in Texas, Minnesota, Louisiana, Illinois, New York, Missouri and every other state in the nation—are symptomatic of a psychotic outbreak by a nation that has been waging a war against its own citizens for too long.

We have long since passed the stage at which a government of wolves would give rise to a nation of sheep. As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, what we now have is a government of psychopaths that is actively breeding a nation of psychopathic killers.

We're getting distracted, people.

Instead of focusing our ire on the architects of the American police state, who are responsible for turning the streets into mini-war zones, we're getting distracted by the many voices eager to play the blame game by pointing their fingers at someone else.

Police groups are blaming President Obama and the Justice Department for failing to prosecute "cop killers." Texas Republicans are blaming the Black Lives Matter movement for fomenting a "war on cops" mindset. Gun control advocates are blaming "gun lovers and their mouthpieces at the National Rifle Association" for America's gun violence, reasoning that if all Americans were unarmed, police would not have to treat them as potential threats.

News outlets such as Rolling Stone and Mother Jones have concluded that racial bias is to blame for the "disproportionately high number of African-Americans among police shooting victims." The Drug Enforcement Administration has suggested that illegal steroid use could be responsible for "police officers who exhibit rage, aggression and/or poor judgment (all symptoms of possible steroid abuse) in confrontations with citizens."

Human Rights Watch blames police misconduct and excessive use of force on a systemic lack of accountability within law enforcement agencies and the criminal justice system. And civil rights advocates are blaming police militarization and the abundance of laws (overcriminalization) pushed by lawmakers for the nation's over-policing, over-jailing and over-killing.

Yet in the midst of all this finger pointing, no one is stepping forward to take responsibility for the violence that is tearing the nation apart, deepening racial tensions, heightening police tensions, justifying all manner of civil liberties abuses, and pushing us ever closer to a state of lockdown.

Shame on President Obama for not taking personal responsibility for the blowback resulting from America's endless wars abroad, the militarization of local police, and the ramifications of allowing police to use battlefield equipment such as drones, assault weapons, tanks, etc. How telling that the first domestic killing of an American citizen by a drone (in this case, a bomb-equipped police robot) should be carried out during the final term of a president whose targeted drone killings abroad have resulted in the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians.

With Cameron leaving as UK Prime Minister another top politician who demanded that "Assad must go" has left the political scene. The Syrian President Assad is still in place and there is no sign that he will leave in the foreseeable future. It seems that real life facts still have more weight than "regime change" propaganda platitudes.

The facts continue to be persistent that there is therefore again some wind of change detectable in the political atmosphere.

The Syrian army and its allies are closing the only road to the eastern parts of Aleppo. This effort requires intense urban warfare (vid) against Jihadi terrorists. According to a Pentagon spokesperson, that part is held by al-Qaeda:

[I]t's primarily al-Nusra who holds Aleppo, and of course, al-Nusra is not part of the cessation of hostilities.

All attacks on east-Aleppo are thereby completely legitimate and do not break a ceasefire.

US Secretary of State John Kerry will travel to Moscow with a visit this week, officials of the two countries confirmed on Monday. It will be America's top diplomat's fourth official trip to Russia since May 2015.

Kerry will meet with his Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, to "continue to discuss topical issues of bilateral cooperation and international agenda," the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement. According to State Department spokesman John Kirby, such issues as the situation in Syria, Ukraine and Nagorno-Karabakh will be discussed during meetings with Russian officials.

The US Secretary of State will head to the Russian capital on Thursday, coming from France where he will be taking part in Bastille Day celebrations, Kirby said Monday. Moscow confirmed that Kerry would be in the city on July 14-15.

For years it's been rumored that the globalist elite are involved in some pretty strange practices, from mock sacrificing a baby at Bohemian Grove to the testimony that a child was actually murdered in a Bohemian Grove ritual. The testimony and evidence in this article prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the allegations of Bohemian Grove are just the tip of the iceberg.

Bohemian Grove

Paul Bonacci once told investigators Gary Caradori, Ted L. Gunderson, and ex-Senator and attorney John Decamp that he was forced to murder a boy at the creepy California resort Bohemian Grove.

Here's is Bonacci's testimony on Child Murder at Bohemian Grove:

Russian president Vladimir Putin has held phone talks with German chancellor Angela Merkel and French president Francois Hollande to discuss increasing violations of the ceasefire agreement in southeast Ukraine, the Kremlin announced Friday.

Putin stressed the "provocative nature" of Ukraine's military operations in the Donbass region, and called on Merkel and Hollande to pressure Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko into complying with the Minsk agreements.

All three agreed on the need to remove heavy weaponry and the equal withdrawal of forces from the front line.

Israeli forces shot and injured at least five Palestinians and detained three others in the southern occupied West Bank district of Hebron overnight Saturday, as Israeli forces continued to impose a strict siege on the village of Sair after an Israeli man was shot and injured while driving his car around midnight near the nearby illegal Israeli settlement of Teqoa.

A large number of Israeli forces raided Sair in the predawn hours, closing off the entire village.

Israeli forces closed the al-Adisa al-Duwara entrance of the village, as dozens of troops were deployed in the Wad al-Sharq area in central Sair, where clashes erupted and continued until dawn, with Israeli forces firing live ammunition, rubber-coated steel bullets, tear gas canisters, and stun grenades at locals who were throwing rocks.

Local sources told Ma'an that four Palestinians were shot and wounded with rubber-coated steel bullets and dozens more suffered from severe tear gas inhalation. Palestinian Red Crescent medics and volunteers administered first aid on the scene.

Sources in Hebron said Israeli forces carried out searches and seized recordings of security cameras from Palestinian homes and shops in Sair.

An Israeli army spokesperson told Ma'an that Israeli forces sealed off Sair and imposed security checks in response to a shooting Saturday night, when an unidentified gunman or gunmen fired at a passing vehicle near Teqoa northeast of Hebron, wounding the driver, an Israeli civilian.

Perhaps you've heard the expression: "We have met the enemy and he is us." Cartoonist Walt Kelly's famed possum, Pogo, first uttered that cry. In light of alien disaster movies like the recent sequel Independence Day: Resurgence and America's disastrous wars of the twenty-first century, I'd like to suggest a slight change in that classic phrase: we have met the alien and he is us.

Allow me to explain. I grew up reading and watching science fiction with a fascination that bordered on passion. In my youth, I also felt great admiration for the high-tech, futuristic nature of the U.S. military. When it came time for college, I majored in mechanical engineering and joined the U.S. Air Force. On graduating, I would immediately be assigned to one of the more high-tech, sci-fi-like (not to say apocalyptic) military settings possible: Air Force Space Command's Cheyenne Mountain.

For those of you who don't remember the looming, end-of-everything atmosphere of the Cold War era, Cheyenne Mountain was a nuclear missile command center tunneled out of solid granite inside an actual mountain in Colorado. In those days, I saw myself as one of the good guys, protecting America from "alien" invasions and the potential nuclear obliteration of the country at the hands of godless communists from the Soviet Union. The year was 1985 and back then my idea of an "alien" invasion movie was Red Dawn, a film in which the Soviets and their Cuban allies invade the U.S., only to be turned back by a group of wolverine-like all-American teen rebels. (Think: the Vietcong, American-style, since the Vietnam War was then just a decade past.)

Strange to say, though, as I progressed through the military, I found myself growing increasingly uneasy about my good-guy stature and about who exactly was doing what to whom. Why, for example, did we invade Iraq in 2003 when that country had nothing to do with the attacks of 9/11? Why were we so focused on dominating the Earth's resources, especially its oil? Why, after declaring total victory over the "alien" commies in 1991 and putting the Cold War to bed for forever (or so it seemed then), did our military continue to strive for "global reach, global power" and what, with no sense of overreach or irony, it liked to call "full-spectrum dominance"?

Still, whatever was simmering away inside me, only when I retired from the Air Force in 2005 did I fully face what had been staring back at me all those years: I had met the alien, and he was me.