The situation in the Donetsk People's Republic remains tense.

Over the past day the Ukrainian military shelled the territory of the Republic six hundred seventy times. The enemy launched three hundred twenty-nine 120mm mortar shells and a hundred seventy-two 82mm mortar shells. In addition, the enemy used in shelling infantry fighting vehicles, grenade launchers and small arms.

The punishers opened fire at the following localities: Zaytsevo, Spartak, Zhabichevo, Yasinovataya, Staromikhaylovka, Dokuchaevsk, Sakhanka, Kominternovo, the Petrovsky district and the airport of Donetsk city.

As a result of a bombardment of the city of Gorlovka by the punishers of the AFU one house in the Lisyanskogo street burnt down.

The UN has released alarming displacement statistics claiming 65 million people are now displaced worldwide. Syria and Afghanistan have raised the bar to set the new world record. And progress in the work being done is slow, the agency head says.

According to UNHCR the current figure stands at 65.3 million, up from 2014's record of 60 million displaced since World War II. The refugee influx into Europe last year has contributed by 10 percent, the agency said on Monday.

"An unprecedented 65.3 million people around the world have been forced from home. Among them are nearly 21.3 million refugees, over half of whom are under the age of 18," UNHCR writes in remarks to its Global Trends report for 2015.

So how is your war on "terrorism" going? I'm not doing too well at it since I have no idea who the enemy is. Like the American black comedian, Dick Gregory, who, on hearing that President Johnson had declared a war on poverty, ran out onto the street with a hand grenade to throw it at some poor people, I have no idea who the real enemy is, who to throw a grenade at. That makes me think.

We are told, the world over, by every government, that we are in a "war against terrorism." But terrorism is an action, a tactic, a strategy. It's a method not person, a group, a country. How can there be a war against a method of war. But they want us to fight a method and never ask the why or the who. That doesn't seem to matter anymore. They tell us not to be concerned with why something happens, only how it happens.

Let's face it, the Americans, with all the creative skills of Madison Avenue, have got us all to use a phrase that George Bush first used in 2001after the strange event in New York that has all the indicia of a state attack on its own people to justify the invasions of Afghanistan and then Iraq. It has become a euphemism and a justification for all the wars they have waged since. The people don't need to know why "terrorists" exist, or who they are and what motivates them, or even whether they really exist, for they are just "terrorists."

Sometimes the war is against a "regime" that is "terrorising" its own people according to the "responsibility to protect" mafia that act as the chorus to the principal players in this theatre, as was done to Yugoslavia and Libya; or a regime that "terrorises the world", as we saw with Iraq. Sometimes the war is a phony war against 'terrorists" who are really mercenary forces fighting for the USA and its allies. We see this in Syria. We have seen it used against Russia. The result is the same.

When the Americans say they are fighting "terrorists" in Iraq, they really mean they are fighting the resistance to their invasion and occupation. When they same the same thing in Afghanistan, the same holds true, they are fighting a national resistance. The Russians, when they say they are fighting "terrorism" in Syria, know that in fact they are fighting the United States and its allies and proxy forces.

The bombings and shootings in Europe, Asia, the US, and Russia are all connected to the real war that is being conducted by the United States against the world it wants to control, and, in fact, can better be described as a war of terror being waged against the rest of us by the United States and its vassal states.

The War On Terror is in fact The American War Against The World. For isn't that what we are dealing with from the United States itself to Latin America, to Africa, Europe to Asia, non-stop wars since World War II ended? You can even say that World War II never did really end. It just went through different stages, from the defeat of the German and Japanese empires in 1945 to the war by the American corporate state against all socialist and worker oriented governments worldwide afterwards and against any country, even of a capitalist orientation, that demanded or demands a fair price for its resources or that won't obey orders from Washington.

The acts of terrorism by US proxy elements and forces in Syria and Ukraine for example are a type of hybrid warfare, used both against the targeted country, for instance Syria, Libya and Russia, and a type of hybrid warfare against its own people and the peoples of its allies to create the necessary propaganda to obtain their support for the very wars in which they are the first victims. In other words, they get the people to cut their own throats.

A TV commercial that could easily double as a neocon, Goldman Sachs dream scenario. (Thank you Susan for finding the video and setting up the scenario)...

The commercial is set in a (New York???) restaurant, and a woman joins a man for dinner in the late evening hours because it is dark outside.

She asks him: "Did you hear about the NATO plane that was shot down by Russia?"

The commercial continues with the two discussing how quickly this woman can sell off her stocks using Interactive brokers because they are available to do trades even after 8:00 pm in a market that has already dropped 2%.

Marketing a service on the basis of a stock market collapse, brought about by a war where Russia attacks NATO.

The elite 1% bankers profiting off of war with Russia...who would have figured.

© prisonplanet.comCIA Director John Brennan

In extremely revealing testimony, director of the CIA John Brennan told the Senate intelligence committee Thursday that CIA has no evidence of a connection between Omar Mateen and the Islamic State

Despite alleged claims made by the Orlando shooter during the massacre, as well as a chorus of media pundits and politicos that followed; including President Obama, and presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, Central Intelligence Agency head Brennan said the intelligence agency has not been "able to uncover any link" between Orlando killer Omar Mateen and the Islamic State (ISIS).

According to a report in The Guardian:

Reinforcing four days of internal government assessments across multiple agencies and a Federal Bureau of Investigation inquiry, the CIA director, John Brennan, contrasted "lone wolf" killers in Orlando and San Bernardino last December with recent terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels, which he told the Senate intelligence committee were "directed" by Isis leadership in Syria and Iraq.

In addition to the CIA assessment given to the Senate intelligence committee, the FBI has also come to the conclusion that the killer was not in contact with ISIS before his attack at the Pulse nightclub.

Seddique Mateen, the father of the Orlando, Florida nightclub shooter Omar Mateen and self-styled leader of a pro-Taliban Afghan government-in-exile in Florida, is emblematic of the American policy that permits extremist propaganda operatives to be nurtured on US soil. Since the Cold War era, the US Central Intelligence Agency has exceled in finding the most extreme Cubans, Eastern Europeans, Afghanis, Uighurs, and others to concoct and broadcast incendiary propaganda on airwaves funded by the US government.

As the late ABC News and Christian Science Monitor journalist and pre-eminent Middle East expert John Cooley so correctly observed in his book, «Payback: America's Long War in the Middle East», when the United States replaced Britain and France as the major Western power player in the Middle East, it was repeatedly paid back for «poor judgement and often disastrous policy errors». One of the most disastrous policy errors was the decision by the Jimmy Carter administration to provide weapons and other support to some of the most radical Islamist «holy warriors» in Afghanistan. Soon, these Afghan radicals were supplemented by «Arab Legion» jihadists cobbled together from terrorist cells in Egypt, Yemen, Libya, and other countries in the Middle East and North Africa.

NATO is pushing ahead with its military "Schengen zone" in Europe, integrating new members and signing logistic agreements with others to ensure seamless passage for the bloc's troops through Europe. Although the NATO bloc had to be disbanded following the collapse of its major adversaries, the USSR and the Warsaw Pact, in the early 1990s, the Cold War relic is seemingly catching a second wind.

"Under the guise of deterring Russian 'aggression,' the US is pushing for a deepening of the alliance, and further undermining the sovereignty of each member state. NATO is also attempting to expand once again, trying to formally secure Montenegro as a member state in the near future, in addition to pulling Georgia closer to the imperial alliance," Steven MacMillan, a geopolitical analyst and editor of The Analyst Report, writes in his article for New Eastern Outlook.

There is only one stumbling block in the way of NATO's "triumphant march": travel restrictions on the movement of US-NATO troops and equipment in Europe. "We need a Schengen area for American tanks," former Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs Radosław Sikorski said back in October 2015.

The idea was echoed by Elisabeth Braw of the Atlantic Council in her June opinion piece for Foreign Affairs. "NATO's member states are willing to defend one another, and they have the troops and the equipment to do so. But quickly getting those troops and equipment to their destination is a different matter altogether. In some new NATO member states, bridges and railroads are simply not suitable for large troop movements. But one thing frustrates commanders even more: the arduous process of getting permission to move troops across borders," she wrote.

Therefore, the bloc desperately needs a "military Schengen" zone in Europe, Braw argued. "With a military Schengen in place, NATO troops and equipment would be able to cross NATO borders to their destination the same way EU citizens do: without having to show permits," she underscored. However, under the false pretext of the so-called "Russian threat" the US-led Alliance is seeking more control over the continent.

Brazil's current Minister of Education is the latest public official in the Michel Temer administration to be implicated in the country's political corruption scandal.

Brazil's coup imposed Education Minister Mendonca Filho is being investigated for allegedly receiving an illegal bribe of US$29,000 for the purpose of financing his 2014 re-election campaign, Brazil's General Prosecutor Rodrigo Janot announced Friday, making him the latest official in Temer's administration who could be forced to stand down.

During a Supreme Court hearing Friday, General Prosecutor Janot argued that "evidence of possible bribes for his [Mendonca Filho's] political campaign" would result in the court having jurisdiction to investigate potential criminal practices.

The allegations stem from records and documents obtained by Brazilian authorities belonging to the former financial director of UTC, Walmir Pinheiro, who last year agreed to a plea bargain testimony.

As President Obama nears the end of his second term, his administration's patience over the Syrian state of affairs is running out: indeed, a five-year war has not resulted in ousting Syria's legitimate president Bashar al-Assad. On Wednesday US Secretary of State John Kerry "warned" Damascus and Moscow that Washington's "patience was not infinite," while commenting on ceasefire violations in Syria. "Russia needs to understand that our patience is not infinite, in fact it is very limited with whether or not Assad is going to be held accountable," Kerry told reporters after meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in Oslo, Norway.

In his interview with Press TV James Jatras, a former US Senate foreign policy analyst, dubbed Kerry's remark as a "very mixed message." "It is unclear what Secretary Kerry means about either holding Russia or the opposition groups accountable for violating the ceasefire. We know who these terrorist groups are, groups like Ahrar al-Sham, that are allied with al-Nusra [Front] which is [an affiliate] of al-Qaeda. And in effect, the Obama administration has been protecting these people from the Syrian government, army and the Russian Air Force because they are allied with al-Qaeda and they need to be treated as what they are — as terrorist groups," Jatras underscored.

Washington still refuses to provide Moscow with the coordinates of areas controlled by US-backed Syrian opposition, Russian Defense Ministry said, adding that Russian and US military have discussed the prevention of incidents during military operations.

The conference via videolink between Russian and US military officials took place on Saturday, Defense Ministry's spokesman Major-General Igor Konashenkov said in a statement.

According to him, earlier US side claimed that Russia targeted areas held by Syrian opposition on June 16 in southern Syria despite Washington's earlier requests.