Several rockets have struck Israel, with an ISIS-affiliated group in Egypt's Sinai claiming responsibility. There were no casualties. Some view the assault as a follow-up to July 1, the Sinai Province group's biggest one against Egyptian forces in years.

The group released a statement through its Twitter supporters claiming to have launched three Grad missiles in the direction of "occupied Palestine." The authenticity of the statement has not been verified.

Sinai, which borders the Gaza Strip, is thought to be the origin of the attack, according to an unnamed Israeli military source speaking to Reuters. The Israelis say they have so far found fragments from two rockets in the Negev region.

The US Ambassador to the UN, she claims she believes majority of civilian shelling casualties are victims of the separatists.

The penalty for lying to Congress is up to 8 years of imprisonment.

Ambassador Power's testimony was the subject of a story we ran on Monday of this week, and a helpful reader got back to us and pointed out that we had missed the most important part of it.

Apparently, Ambassador Power lied to the committee she was testifying before, thereby committing a felony.

When Vladimir Putin spoke to a meeting of Russia's Security Council on Friday he used a phrase which should have immediately caught the attention of anyone who has kept a close eye on the deteriorating relations between Russia and the West.

Referring to the sanctions imposed on Russia over the crisis in Ukraine, Putin said:

"We cannot expect a change in the hostile policies of some of our geopolitical opponents in the immediate future."

Geopolitical opponents.

A Google search for that exact phrase along with Putin's name indicates that this is the first time he has used it publicly in such a context, at least in the last year, which is the timeframe the search covered.

The US along with their partners in crime, which includes their terrorist mercenary proxy puppets, have been engaged in a multilevel war against their targets. Attempts at erasing the history of the targeted country is part of that strategy. The general idea seems to be a revision of history and replacing it with a more suitable version for the colonizers. Cutting the ties of targeted nations to their history makes people feel more and more alienated from their environment and contributes to the ponerization of society.

When not engaged in attacks on the population of Syria, armed with weapons supplied by the West and protected by US and Israeli Air Force, the terrorist organization known as ISIS has been busy destroying Syrian historical sites, which prompted a reaction from UNESCO.

The head of the UN cultural organisation on Wednesday called for a campaign against the "culture cleansing" being carried out by Islamic State jihadists.

"Extremists don't destroy heritage as a collateral damage, they target it systematically to strike societies at their core," Irina Bokova said in a speech at the Chatham House think tank in London.

Let's just hope this campaign doesn't include more US/NATO involvement and bombs. When NATO bombed the hell out of former Yugoslavia in order to restore 'peace and prosperity', they and their terrorist organization, KLA, caused a vast cultural cleansing alongside the cleansing of thousands of people of their lives.

The willful destruction of institutions dedicated to religion, charity, works of art and sciences and historical monuments by NATO's political and military leaders is a violation of the laws and customs of war as recognized by Article 3(d) of the ICT Statute and the Geneva Convention of 1949. UNESCO's ICOMOS identified 12 historic monuments in Kosovo, central Serbia and Vojvodina that have been totally destroyed and 39, many of which are listed on UNESCO's World Heritage List, have sustained substantial damage by NATO air raids, as of May 1, 1999.

Churches, monasteries, mosques, forts, fortresses, monuments, cemeteries, memorials, archeological sites, museums and various historic or cultural sites and their contents have been damaged and even destroyed by NATO's campaign of devastation. In addition to the structural damages sustained by these buildings, priceless and irreplaceable ancient frescos, literature, art, artifacts, and relics in many churches and monasteries are now compromised by the tremors and blasts of the NATO explosions. This damage inflicted by NATO is reprehensible and irreparable.

Furthermore, the situation has been exacerbated by the KLA. KFOR, under the auspices of NATO, is circuitously allowing the KLA to destroy, loot, burn, demolish and vandalize these sites by not enforcing the peace.

NATO's political and military leadership and its responsible personnel have demonstrated a marked disregard for Serbia's historical and religious heritage by targeting and destroying religious and historical landmarks that serve as an integral part of Serb national and religious heritage and history.

So the destruction is nothing new, it has been happening for a long time, but don't expect much outcry from Western officials when it comes to US/NATO activities, even though the actions of NATO are just as destructive as those of ISIS: "Extremists don't destroy heritage as a collateral damage, they target it systematically to strike societies at their core."

As we move closer to the 5 July referendum, it becomes clearer every day - Brussels, Washington and Berlin are waging an open "class war" against Greece, because the Greek people, the citizens of a sovereign country - the first democracy in Europe, the country that gave Europe her name - these people have had the audacity to democratically elect a socialist government. Now they have to suffer. They do not conform to the self-imposed rules of the neoliberal empire of unrestricted globalized privatization of public services and public properties from which the elite is maximizing profits - for themselves, of course - it is outright theft of public property.

The weapon is finance; the instruments are the mega-banksters of Europe and Washington. They are like dehumanized missiles. The fight is no-holds-barred - all out, no scruples. The savages of Brussels have the audacity to call for Mr. Tsipras' resignation in case the Greek referendum rejects the austerity package. - Can you imagine!

Madame Lagarde, the heartless Iron Lady of the IMF, keeps referring to the Greek government as 'children'. She keeps asking to talk to 'adults' - inferring that what Greece suggests and proposes as an alternative to the killer plan of the troika is mere child's talk. - What an abject arrogance.

And that in the face of senior IMF economists who have already months ago declared that austerity doesn't work in the case of Greece - and, in fact, in no case. To revive the economy of a country, the economy needs oxygen to breathe, to recover - just the contrary of an austerity program. Austerity is strangulation by debt and suffocation by complete annihilation of a nation's social safety net.

In the early 2000's the independent Evaluation Department of the World Bank issued an analysis of structural adjustment and so-called budget support loans of the 1990s around the world. The report was negative throughout. It was an internal report and, as far as I know, never hit the road, i.e. the media. Even as an internal report it disappeared quickly form the Bank's intranet. A 'structural adjustment' loan is exactly that - a blank check against severe austerity. Austerity doesn't work. And less so with a heavy debt burden at 6% or 7% interest, money that the ECB generates electronically (as all banks do), lends it to European predator banks in Germany, France - you name it - for 1% or less - which in turn onlend the money at usurious rates of up to 7% to Greece and other which are in the crosshairs of the troika.

Madame Lagarde of the IMF knows it; the Goldman Sachs banker who heads the European Central Bank (sic) knows it - and even in the European Commission there must be some economists who understand 101 of economics.

Russia is not expecting a soon change in the hostile policies it's subject to, President Vladimir Putin said at a meeting of the country's Security Council, adding that Moscow is not going to "trade its sovereignty."

"We cannot expect a change in the hostile policies of some of our geopolitical opponents in the immediate future," Putin said, without elaborating on the countries he was referring to.

"The reasons for pressuring Russia are clear: the country is conducting an independent policy and doesn't trade its sovereignty. This is not to everyone's liking, but it can't be any other way," he said.


Putin pointed to what he called attempts to split Russian society "to find the weak link," but maintained that they had not yielded the desired results. Those attempts came from those who introduced and continue to support "restrictive measures" against Russia, the president said.

Russia should look into all challenges it now faces and define the strategy of the country's national security, Putin said.

"It is necessary to quickly analyze the entire spectrum of potential challenges and risks - political, economic and informational, and others, and on this basis to adjust the strategy of the national security."

Putin's statement comes after the Pentagon unveiled its new military strategy where it said that Russia, North Korea and Iran are among its new challenges together with non-state groups - particularly the "violent extremist organizations" such as Islamic State and the Taliban.

An Israeli government preservation agency is working with Israeli settlers who are colonizing Palestinian territory and displacing residents under the guise of protecting historic archaeological sites, according to the British Foreign Office.
Ministers say they are concerned that the Israel Antiquities Authority - the Israeli government agency in charge of preserving historic artifacts - is undermining efforts for peace in the region by working with "radical" settlers, the Elad group.

"We are aware of the link between the Elad group and the Israel Antiquities Authority. We are concerned that this link has led to Israel Antiquities Authority's support of radical settler activities in and around the Old City under the guise of tourism and protection of Jewish history," Conservative Foreign Office Minister Joyce Anelay was quoted as saying by the Independent.

"Such actions not only aggravate mounting pressures in East Jerusalem but serve to increase tension around the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif and further complicate future attempts to negotiate a political resolution on the city."

You may have heard that President Putin placed a call to President Obama on Thursday, June 25th. As many in the media have noted, this call came after several months since they last spoke directly, and many more months of 'estrangement' and strained relations between the two.

According to the Kremlin's website, Putin and Obama discussed the crises in Ukraine, the on-going war in Syria, the Iran nuclear deal and the growing menace of terrorism in the form of 'IS'. Out of this discussion, says the website, an agreement was made between the two presidents that Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and US Secretary of State John Kerry would hold a meeting to discuss this last issue. It was also agreed that US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin would be in contact to discuss implementation of the Minsk agreements.

But as anyone who has been following the developments of all of these flash points might rightly predict, the meetings and the discussions to come will probably amount to absolutely nothing; the U.S. is relentless in its crazed drive for world dominance at any cost. And we know from Putin's and the Russian government's many protective countermeasures - militarily, economically and diplomatically - that they are acutely aware of this.

So why make the call?

Leaving this question aside for a moment, and the ability of Putin to engage in realpolitik when he needs to, a sampling of the Western take on the conversation will prove useful.

With recent news of Greek bank closures and something called "capital controls", ignorant hysteria is spreading, virus-like, through the mainstream media over the "inevitable contagion" that threatens to do away with the EU and, (ultimately no doubt) leave us vulnerable to the unsavory predilections of the jihadi hoard on the doorstep. But let's not get ahead of ourselves, so to speak.

Human beings have been domesticated like cattle over millennia by insidious and ruthless predator-parasites who easily walk among us. Their predatory nature has been largely sanitised and camouflaged by centuries of our begrudging tolerance and cowardly acceptance. Almost all of our great institutional ideas have been adjusted, perverted, corrupted and even radically transformed into environments that greatly favour their ways and tactics.

Economics, governance, education, welfare, health, are now little more than facades of their original ideals filled with processes of entrapment, exploitation and frustration of potential that are working solely to empower and enrich the predators who control them.

Now through the focus of a number of researchers, these predators are coming to light and being described as "successful psychopaths" -- they are composed of the majority of 5% of humanity, who have successfully avoided being diagnosed clinically and have not been apprehended during criminal and immoral activities and then institutionalised.

The "ways" of the psychopath are simplistic and become easy to observe when we finally learn to see "the wood for the trees" and we learn that many of our critical social and economic "givens" are in fact evolutionary artefacts of the influences that psychopaths have had on our cultures and societies for millennia.

They have told us that, like domestic cattle, we need their fences (controls) and their oversight (surveillance) to protect us from the wolves (or terrorists) that would come and decimate us and our little ones and we have been told that the world is a terrible hostile place and that life is fraught with adversaries, a self--fulfilling prophecy when societies and cultures are governed by psychopaths. Their measures are in reality to make us defensive, terrorised and so easily influenced and ultimately such fear will intellectually infantilise us, divide us and then herd us like cattle for a more thorough and systematic control and exploitation.

The psychopath is operating cognitively at what Economics Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman called "System 1" or fast thinking, this is a cognitive template that is in place in infancy, the processes of which are situated largely within the limbic system, memory based and emotionally controlled. This type of primitive "fast and dirty" thinking when amplified through trial and error experiences is ideal for operating in chaotic and conflict based environments such as on the battlefield or in video games.