Over the past months, the level of intense cooperation between Israel and Saudi Arabia in targeting Iran has become clear. I've posted here about secret meetingsbetween top Israeli and Saudi intelligence figures which have allowed coordination of the campaigns involving both Syria and Iran. But Shalom Yerushalmi, writing in Maariv, dropped an even more amazing bombshell. Saudi Arabia isn't just coordinating its own intelligence efforts with Israel.

It's actually financing a good deal of Israel's very expensive campaign against Iran. As you know, this has involved massive sabotage against IRG missile bases, the assassination of five nuclear scientists, the creation of a series of computer cyberweapons like Stuxnet and Flame. It may also conceivably involve an entire class of electronic and conventional weapons that could be used in a full-scale attack on Iran. Who knows, this might even include the sorts of bunker buster bombs only the U.S. currently has access to, which could penetrate the Fordo facility.

It might include scores more super-tankers which could provide the fuel necessary for Israeli planes to make it to Iran and return. All of this is expensive. Very expensive. We can see just how expensive by examining Barry Lando's October 2012 investigative piece also based on Israeli sources which says the Saudi funding may exceed $1-billion:

A friend, with good sources in the Israeli government, claims that the head of Israel's Mossad has made several trips to deal with his counterparts in Saudi Arabia—one of the results: an agreement that the Saudis would bankroll the series of assassinations of several of Iran's top nuclear experts that have occurred over the past couple of years. The amount involved, my friend claims, was $1 billion dollars. A sum, he says, the Saudis considered cheap for the damage done to Iran's nuclear program.

The Israeli military has launched airstrikes on what it called the "terror infrastructure" in Gaza, following an earlier rocket attack on Israeli territory which the IDF blames on Hamas.

Four targets identified as being part of the terror infrastructure were hit in the southern part of the Gaza strip, The Jerusalem Post reported citing an IDF spokesperson. There were no reports of any casualties or damage.

General Directorate of Ports in the Syrian coastal province of Latakia seized about two tons of narcotics near the beach of Cape of Ras al-Bassit, local media reported, as cited by Prensa Latina.The confiscated drugs, which was floating in the sea in leather bags, consisted of more than 800 kilograms of hashish paste and nearly six million tablets of Captagon, the drug of choice by the members of the terrorist group Islamic State (IS).

The general director of Ports of Latakia, Maitham al-Yousuf, told reporters that the stash was spotted on Saturday by a patrol that ran along the beach, about 400 kilometers northwest of the capital. For his part, Latakia Governor Ibrahim Khader al-Salem accused the countries that sponsor terrorism against Syria of being responsible for the drug.

"It is a desperate attempt at destabilizing national security and sabotaging the minds of young people by preventing them from exercising their normal life and trying to continue their education," said the governor.

According to experts, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) began production of Captagon in 2011 in a laboratory in Bulgaria and it is now [also] manufactured elsewhere in the world.

Part of the profits from the illegal trade in Captagon, experts say, is used to finance armed extremist groups that are trying to overthrow the Syrian government led by President Bashar al-Assad.

Captagon, the drug used by the jihadists with the Islamic State to get tough and fearless.

Iranian security experts have thwarted an industrial espionage attempt on Islamic Republic's oil ministry, cyber police chief announced, claiming the attack originated in the US.

Speaking at a cyber crime forum in Tehran on Tuesday, the head of Iran's Cyber Police (FATA) Brigadier General Seyed Kamal Hadianfar announced that Cyber Attacks Emergency Center had defended the oil ministry against hackers. The alleged attack took place during a four-day holiday on March 21-24.

"These hackers were from the US" Hadianfar said, as cited by FARS news agency. "The IP address for these hackers was in America."

The chief of cyber police said that Tehran had already informed Washington via an official letter and issued an "international judicial order" as FATA passed the issue to the foreign ministry.

FATA discovers, identifies and solves some 90 percent of Internet crimes committed against Iran, Iran's Interior Minister Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli said speaking at the same event. "Iran has had a low number of cyber crimes as compared to other countries despite the presence of over 46 million Internet users in the country," the minister added.

The cyber standoff between Iran and the US has been widely reported over recent years. Both US and Tehran have accused each other of cybercrimes aimed at strategic sectors of the government and the economy.

US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter declared in a television interview broadcast Sunday that Iraqi forces were routed at Ramadi because they lacked the "will to fight," not because they were outgunned by the Sunni-based insurgent group Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

In the harshest public criticism of the performance of Iraqi government troops since their collapse last summer in Mosul, Carter said, "What apparently happened was that the Iraqi forces just showed no will to fight. They were not outnumbered but in fact they vastly outnumbered the opposing force, and yet they failed to fight. They withdrew from the site."

Carter sought to deflect blame from the Obama administration for the debacle in Ramadi, which has led to mounting calls in Congress and much of the media for a more aggressive US intervention in Iraq and Syria, including the possible deployment of ground troops.

I have warned for some time that government was eyeing up pensions. There is about $19.4 trillion dollars in private pension funds. How will they justify taking over these funds to the people? This is the question debated in secrecy behind the curtain. I have warned that if government seizes pension funds, it will come after 2015.75. The Supreme Court, without any justification constitutionally, just determined how that will be accomplished.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last week in the unanimous 8-page decision, Tibble v Edison, stating that employers have a duty to protect workers in their 401(k) plans from mutual funds that perform poorly or are too expensive. That is simply astonishing since there is no constitutional requirement for even government to provide social benefits. The Supreme Court held in the 1980 case HARRIS v McRAE, that there is no duty imposed upon the state to provide a public program, for that would convert the constitution from a negative restrain upon government to a positive obligation to provide for everyone.

Russia has erected 40km of fortified walls, and more than 100km of defensive trenches on its border with the rebel Ukrainian regions of Lugansk and Donetsk.

"The engineering fortification of the state border is aimed at ensuring stability in the Rostov region, and preventing the illegal circulation of firearms," Russia's border service said in a statement.

The government agency said that it intercepted over 60 illegal weapons shipments across the border since the beginning of the year. In doing so, it confiscated 40 firearms, 200 grenades, 100 shells and 40 landmines.

"The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control."—William Binney, NSA whistleblower

We now have a fourth branch of government.

As I document in my new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, this fourth branch came into being without any electoral mandate or constitutional referendum, and yet it possesses superpowers, above and beyond those of any other government agency save the military. It is all-knowing, all-seeing and all-powerful. It operates beyond the reach of the president, Congress and the courts, and it marches in lockstep with the corporate elite who really call the shots in Washington, DC.

You might know this branch of government as Surveillance, but I prefer "technotyranny," a term coined by investigative journalist James Bamford to refer to an age of technological tyranny made possible by government secrets, government lies, government spies and their corporate ties.

Beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it will all be recorded, stored and used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government's choosing. Privacy, as we have known it, is dead.

The police state is about to pass off the baton to the surveillance state.

Having already transformed local police into extensions of the military, the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department and the FBI are preparing to turn the nation's soldier cops into techno-warriors, complete with iris scanners, body scanners, thermal imaging Doppler radar devices, facial recognition programs, license plate readers, cell phone Stingray devices and so much more.

This is about to be the new face of policing in America.

The National Security Agency (NSA) has been a perfect red herring, distracting us from the government's broader, technology-driven campaign to render us helpless in the face of its prying eyes. In fact, long before the NSA became the agency we loved to hate, the Justice Department, the FBI, and the Drug Enforcement Administration were carrying out their own secret mass surveillance on an unsuspecting populace.

Just about every branch of the government—from the Postal Service to the Treasury Department and every agency in between—now has its own surveillance sector, authorized to spy on the American people. Then there are the fusion and counterterrorism centers that gather all of the data from the smaller government spies—the police, public health officials, transportation, etc.—and make it accessible for all those in power. And of course that doesn't even begin to touch on the complicity of the corporate sector, which buys and sells us from cradle to grave, until we have no more data left to mine.

Whereas over the past year, ever since the outbreak of the hostilities over the fate of Ukraine following the Victoria Nuland orchestrated presidential coup, relations between Russia and NATO have devolved to a Cold War 2.0 state as manifested by countless interceptions of Russian warplanes by NATO jets and vice versa as depicted in the following infographic...

... at least China was mercifully allowed to stay out of the fray between the Cold War enemies.

This all changed this month when first the Pentagon's annual report to Congress this month cast China as a threat to regional and international peace and stability, followed several weeks ago when, with China aggressively encroaching into territories in the South China Sea claimed by US allies in the region such as Philippines, Vietnam and Japan, the US decided to get involved in yet another regional spat that does not directly involve it, and started making loud noises about China's territorial expansion over the commodity-reach area.

China promptly relatiated by threatening a US spy plane during a routine overflight, while immediately thereafter the US retaliated at China's escalation, and warned that building sea "sandcastles" could "lead to conflict."

The Yemeni army, backed by popular committee forces, has destroyed four Saudi battle tanks after storming a base in Saudi Arabia's southwestern city of Jizan. Yemen's Arabic-language al-Masirah satellite television network reported the development late on Monday. It also reported that the Yemeni army targeted three Saudi vehicles in the southwestern Saudi city of Najran, which is located near the border with Yemen, with rockets and artillery shells. Meanwhile, at least six people were killed and a woman sustained injuries in the US-backed Saudi airstrikes on a village in the district of Harad in Yemen's western province of Hajjah early on Tuesday. We remember, Saudi Arabia is continuing its US-backed military aggression against Yemen since March 26, 2015.

The Syrian army has launched a major offensive against the ISIL Takfiri terrorists who recently overran the city of Palmyra in central Homs province. According to the military sources, the air force struck more than 160 Islamic State's targets, killing and wounding terrorists and destroying weapons and vehicles equipped with machine-guns. Moreover, various military operations are also being carried out in the areas around the al-Suknah, the Arak, and al-Hail gas fields and all the roads leading to Palmyra. Over 50 ISIS militants have been killed during the offensive aimed at regaining the city from terrorists' control, the Syrian state television reported.