CC TV video showing the moment when two Palestinian teenagers were fatally shot during Nakba demonstrations in the West Bank on May 15th has been released by an non-governmental organization.

The two victims were named by local media as 17-year old Nadim Siyam Nuwarah and Muhammad Audah Abu al-Thahir, who was either 15 or 16. Both teens were shot on separate occasions at a protest near Ofer Military Prison in the occupied West Bank on May 15, and had reportedly been throwing rocks.

Footage purported to show both incidents was released by the Palestinian branch of Defense for Children International. In it, a protester prepares to throw a stone with a slingshot, then seven minutes later, according to the video timestamp, a youth walking along the street falls to the ground as those around him duck, seemingly from gunfire. A little over an hour afterwards, another young man walking away from the direction of the clashes collapses. Again, nearby demonstrators dive for cover.

A CNN happened to catch Israeli soldiers firing in the direction of the boys at the exact moment they were shot dead. The Israeli military denied that any soldiers used live rounds, although that is clearly a lie. The Israeli military regularly murders Palestinian children and teenagers, and the Western media generally ignores it. This is the reason that Western audiences can be manipulated into denouncing the recent kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teens - because they are denied the TRUE facts about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and instead offered an Israeli narrative that continually presents Israelis as victims. The truth is precisely the opposite.

The Wall Street Journal has laid off several staffers in recent weeks as part of a newsroom "re-evaluation," its parent company Dow Jones confirmed on Wednesday.

The layoffs, which were first reported by The New York Times, come six months after Dow Jones CEO Lex Fenwick abruptly resigned amid what the company described as a change to "institutional strategy." Anywhere from 20 to 40 staffers were laid off, including veteran reporters and editors, according to the Times report.

In a statement, Dow Jones said it had been "evaluating many areas of the newsroom to target areas for growth and deploy our resources globally in order to operate efficiently and profitably."

"Unfortunately, as a result we will be eliminating certain positions," the statement read. "As ever, we remain focused on ensuring that we have the right reporting and editing capabilities while continuing to maintain the Journal's high standard of excellence."

While numerous massively indebted administrations around the world hope to divert the attention of what's left of their struggling middle class away from its daily impoverished existence and distract it with flashing lights and glitzy animations showing another all time market high on a daily basis, a significantly more important shift taking place behind the scenes is appreciated by very few: the ongoing de-dollarization of the world. For the latest example of how increasingly more countries are setting the stage for the final currency war, we go again to Russia where VOR's Valentin Mândrescu explains that slowly but surely the BRICS - that proud Goldman acronym which was conceived to perpetuate the great American way of life by releasing trillions in US-denominated debt in heretofore untapped markets - are morphing into an anti-dollar alliance.

BRICS is morphing into an anti-dollar alliance
From VOR

Before the crucial visit to Beijing next week, the governor of the Russian Central Bank, Elvira Nabiullina met Vladimir Putin to report on the progress of the upcoming ruble-yuan swap deal with the People's Bank of China and Kremlin used the meeting to let the world know about the technical details of its international anti-dollar alliance.

Glenn Greenwald, one of the journalists with access to documents leaked by Edward Snowden, will soon expose massive NSA spying on American Muslims, the ACLU has announced.

The leaked data indicate that in public life American Muslims were "subject to the kind of surveillance that Hoover did on Martin Luther King," ACLU executive director Anthony Romero told an Aspen Ideas Festival panel Wednesday.

He didn't provide further details, or any deadline for the expected exposé to be published, explaining that preparing it is labor-intensive because the source material is a database rather than some materials prepared for public presentation.

"It will be interesting to see who is on this list but I don't know," The Atlantic reported him as saying. "It will be interesting to see if there were members of Congress on this list, what kind of judicial review was provided."

This week in Moscow President Vladimir Putin made a major foreign policy statement, while speaking to a worldwide gathering of Russian ambassadors and permanent diplomatic representatives. According to Putin, the West did not give Moscow a choice, but to move to annex Crimea last March to defend Russians and Russian-speakers "that consider themselves part of the wider Russian world" ("Ruskiy Mir"). Putin insisted that NATO planned to swiftly move its forces into Sevastopol and radically change the balance of power in the region, depriving Russia of everything it had been fighting for since the times of Tsar Peter the Great.

According to Putin, the present crisis in Ukraine is a manifestation of the core Western policy of "deterring Russia" that continued despite the end of the Cold war. Putin announced Moscow would continue to defend the rights of Russian "compatriots" living abroad "using political, economic and self-defense humanitarian operations." He declared that the time of U.S. world domination has ended and Russia will be reintegrating the Eurasian landmass [former USSR], while promoting better relations with Europe, "which is our natural partner." The Russian foreign ministry was ordered to work on preparing "a joint space of economic and humanitarian cooperation from Lisbon to Vladivostok," based on absolute noninterference in internal political matters and excluding the U.S. Putin accused Washington of blackmailing Paris to stop the delivery of the French-built Mistral helicopter-carrying assault ships to the Russian Navy (kremlin.ru, July 1). The first Mistral is planned for delivery this year and it could be stationed in Sevastopol (Rossyskaya Gazeta, June 25).

Putin's speech was controversial: while accusing the West of ignoring international law and interfering in others' affairs by promoting so called "democracy," Putin strongly asserted Russia's right to intervene in other nations internal affairs "to defend Russian compatriots abroad." The Kremlin rejects the West ideologically, politically and militarily, but Putin's speech did not spell out fully the practical part of the Russian foreign policy agenda (gazeta.ru, July1).

Investigators in the United States won't be handed over the decryption keys necessary to access digital data seized from the home of internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom in early 2012, a New Zealand judge ruled this week.

Authorities raided Dotcom's mansion outside of Auckland, New Zealand, nearly two-and-a-half years ago as part of an operation conducted with the aid of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation in response to felony copyright infringement and racketeer allegations brought in America against the German-born hacker-turned-businessman.

Computer hard drives seized from Dotcom's Coatesville, NZ home were cloned and given to the FBI after the incident. This past January, though, the New Zealand Court of Appeals ruled that the American feds should never have legally acquired the copied data.

Dotcom's attorneys have long sought the return of the largely encrypted hard drives, but Torrent Freak reports that the founder of the file-sharing site Megaupload was likely to only receive as much on the condition that in exchange he hand over to local authorities the keys necessary to decrypt the contents.

According to Radio New Zealand, Justice Helen Winkelmann of the nation's high court ruled Wednesday that federal officials there are formally barred from giving the password to the FBI if it's provided by Mr. Dotcom, because the FBI only acquired the encrypted data in the first place using flawed warrants.

On Twitter, however, Dotcom suggested that authorities in the US may have already been able to crack into the illegally seized hard drives.

The implementation of the European Union's so-called "right to be forgotten" policy is already having a worrying impact on the media, with at least two outlets revealing on Wednesday that links to articles of theirs have been scrubbed from Google.

A European court ruled in May that Google must remove links to articles from its search engine if the subjects of the post asked it to. The court specified that links could be scrubbed if they were "inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive in relation to the purposes for which they were processed and in the light of the time that has elapsed."

When the ruling came down, some worried that it would place too much power in the hands of public figures who wished to have unflattering information - and, especially, press coverage - about themselves hidden.

On Wednesday, the Guardian and the BBC both disclosed that just such an occurrence seemed to have taken place with stories of theirs.

A voice quickly whispers, "They kidnapped me," then someone says, "Heads down," followed by what sounds like gunshots, in the emergency call Gil-Ad Shaer made to police on June 12.

The recording was leaked to the public on Tuesday. It was previously under a gag order, but after the recording began criss-crossing the country on WhatsApp and social media on Tuesday, the gag order was partially lifted.

In the beginning of the recording, Shaer can be heard saying, "They kidnapped me." Hebrew-language radio can be heard in the background as well as voices speaking in Hebrew telling the three youths to put their heads down followed by what sounds like a burst of gunfire.

Since they first learned of the kidnapping late on the night of June 12, the security forces have had a working assessment that the teenagers were murdered soon after being kidnapped, as they sat in the back seat of the vehicle they had entered at the hitchhiking post outside Alon Shvut. Although other possibilities continue to be weighed, according to this view, Shaer's phone call to the police triggered an immediate end to their lives.

The police have been heavily criticized for not responding quickly enough to the emergency call. An internal police probe led to the removal from their posts of four senior police officials.

The 2 minute, 9 second call, which was received at 10:25 p.m. on June 12, was not given the proper urgency or handed over to security services until around five hours later, when one of the boy's parents reported him missing to police.

Internal Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovich on Wednesday visited the Makor Chaim Yeshiva high school in Kfar Etzion, the school of two of the three teenagers kidnapped by Hamas terrorists last Thursday. Speaking at the school he admitted that there had been some failures on the part of Israeli police in handling the case.

It was revealed Sunday that the kidnapped teens made an emergency call to police minutes after the kidnapping, only to be dismissed as pranksters. Just one day before, it surfaced that the police acted slowly in alerting the military, resulting in a significant and potentially crucial time lapse between when parents reported the kidnapping to the police, and the notification of security sources and the IDF by police over the issue.

Aharonovich acknowledged that the criticism being heard against the police is justified, saying "we need to check things. I heard a recording of the (emergency call phone) conversation, and in the coming days it will be published for the public."

The minister's words follow statements by two top-ranking police officers on Monday, both of whom reiterated the commitment to launch an investigation over the issue, but stated that the priority now is focusing on the search for the missing boys.

Ten days ago, at a security cabinet meeting, Mossad Chief Tamir Pardo outlined a scenario spookily similar to the kidnapping of the three Israeli teens missing since Thursday night.

The meeting dealt with the report of the Shamgar Committee on prisoner exchanges and on the Habayit Hayehudi bill that prohibits granting pardons to terrorists.

Pardo, along with other defense establishment officials present, tried to convince the ministers not to advance the bill. He was against it because it would limit the government's room for maneuver in future abduction cases, would keep its hands tied, and prevent it from considering other solutions for dealing with a potential crisis.

Pardo gave as an example the kidnapping of the 200 schoolgirls in Nigeria by the militant group Boko Haram. He addressed Economy Minister Nafatali Bennett, whose party promoted the bill, and used it to draw a comparison of something that could happen in Israel in the future.

"What will you do if in a week three 14-year-old girls will be kidnapped from one of the settlements?," he asked. "Will you say there is a law, and we don't release terrorists?"

Pardo did not convince the ministers, however. At the cabinet meeting three days later, the appeal of Science and Technology Minister Jacob Perry was rejected and the bill passed to a Knesset vote. By Wednesday, the bill passed its preliminary reading in the Knesset.