The Al-Qaeda linked Islamic Emirate of Iraq and the Levant (IEIL, Arabic الدولة الاسلامية في العراق والشام whose acronym is pronounced "Daesh"), launched on 6 June 2014 a large-scale attack on Iraq. After taking control of Fallujah, it has now seized the district of Nineveh (including the capital Mosul) and is pursuing its offensive in the provinces of Kirkuk and Saladin. More than 150 000 civilians have fled ahead of the jihadists' advance.

On 10 June, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki called on parliament to declare a state of emergency.

The Islamic Emirate in Iraq and the Levant is led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi on behalf of Prince Abdul Rahman al-Faisal, the brother of the current Saudi Foreign Minister and of the Saudi ambassador in Washington. He is funded and supervised jointly by U.S., French and Saudi officers. Over the past month, he has received new weapons from Ukraine, where Saudi Arabia has acquired a weapons factory, and via Turkey, which has created a special rail line alongside a military airport to supply the IEIL.

Iraq has privately indicated to the Obama administration that it would welcome airstrikes with either drones or manned aircraft that target Al-Qaeda offshoot militants in Iraqi territory, US officials say.

A senior US official said the Obama administration is considering options in aiding the Iraqi government's fight against Islamist militants, who have fought for and won major gains in the nation's Sunni-majority areas in recent days, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Those options include "kinetic support" for the Iraqi military in its fight against an Islamist group formerly allied with Al-Qaeda - the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS/ISIL). The group seized two major cities north of Baghdad this week, handily defeating Iraqi security forces along the way, according to reports.

No decisions on action in Iraq have been made, according to the senior official.

The Wall Street Journal sources did not specify whether airstrikes would come from unmanned drones or manned aircraft.

Whenever the term "national security" is cited as justification for the introduction of more secrecy you can feel another tranche of our freedoms and liberties slipping away.

I can barely recognize the British legal system anymore and wonder what happened to the fearless judiciary which once jealously guarded the courts from political interference.

Now it seems the top jobs are going to those craven career-minded individuals willing to become political tools serving no one's interests including the general public.

The erotic reliefs of Hindu temples with their gravity-defying and anatomy-challenging positions have found a new modern competitor in the Ukrainian crisis. Each party wants to get the Jews on their side, while claiming that the other side is anti-Jewish and a Jewish puppet at once. This impossible, Kama-Sutraesque position is the result of extremely confusing alliances: the Kiev regime lists devout Jews and fiery antisemites among its mainstays. The leading figures of the regime (including the president-elect) are of Jewish origin; strongman and chief financier Mr. Igor (Benya) Kolomoysky is a prominent Jewish public figure, the builder of many synagogues and a supporter of Israel. The most derring-do and pro-active force of the regime, the ultra-nationalists of the Svoboda party and the Right Sector, admire Hitler and his Ukrainian Quisling, Stepan Bandera, "liberators of Ukraine from the Judeo-Muscovite yoke". Jews are ambivalent, and the sides are ambivalent about them, and a most entertaining intrigue has been hatched.

The Russians tried to pull Israel and American Jews to their side, with little success. President Putin condemned the antisemitism of the Svoboda party; he mentioned the desecration of the Odessa Jewish cemetery in his important talk. The Russians re-vitalised the World War Two narrative, fully identifying the Kiev regime with the Bandera gangs and the Nazi enemy. Still, this rhetoric is not taken seriously by Jews who refuse to feel threatened by cuddly Kolomoysky. "These Nazis are not against Jews, they are against Russians, so it is not a Jewish problem", they say.

The Kiev regime mirrored the Russian attitude, if not Russia's tactics. Being rather short of facts to brandish, they faked a leaflet from Donetsk rebels to local Jews calling upon them to register and pay a special poll tax "for the Jews support the Kiev regime". This rude and improbable hoax was immediately and convincingly disproved, but not before it was used by, no less, Barak Obama and John Kerry. The American Jewish newspaper of record, The Forward, obfuscated the issue by saying that Russians and Ukrainians are antisemites by birth and their denials are to be taken with a grain of salt. This mud-slinging was effective - the hoax has made the front pages, while its debunking was published on the back pages.

The Russians had the facts on their side, and the West knew that: the US refused entry to Oleg Tyagnibok and other Svoboda leaders (now members of Kiev government) because of their antisemitism as recently as in 2013. But Russian appeals to Jewish and American sensitivities failed to make an impact. They know when to feign indignation and when to hush. Pro-Hitler commemorations are frequent in Estonia, Latvia, Croatia, and cause no lifting of a censorious brow, for these countries are solidly anti-Russian. In March of this year, the Obama administration's special envoy on anti-Semitism, Ira Forman, flatly denied everything and said to the Forward that Putin's assertions of Svoboda's antisemitism "were not credible". The US wants to decide who is an antisemite and who is not; like Hermann Goering wanted to decide who is a Jew and who is not in the Luftwaffe. In the Ukrainian crisis, the Jews remain divided, and follow their countries' preferences.

The U.S. dollar is being increasingly dropped as the currency for settling international trade. But perhaps the latest trend provides the most startling evidence yet that the dollar is doomed as the world reserve currency.

The Financial Times reported today that U.S. corporations are using the Chinese renminbi to buy imports over three times more than they had the previous year:

China's renminbi is rapidly displacing the US dollar as a trading currency not only in Asia and Europe but now also in the US home market.

The value of renminbi payments between the US and the rest of the world rose by 327 per cent in April this year from the same month a year ago (see chart) as more US corporations switched to using the Chinese currency to pay for imports from China, according to data from SWIFT, the international currency settlement firm.

First, US importers can slash the cost of imports from China by agreeing to trade in renminbi rather than US dollars, Lodge said. Second, a recent surge in the popularity of a host of renminbi-denominated financial market instruments are making it easier for US corporates both to hedge currency risk and to earn an investment return from the renminbi they hold.

Who's winning the battle for Ukraine? Despite continued signs of trouble in Ukraine's eastern provinces, some pretty prominent people have recently offered a decidedly upbeat interpretation of events there. The first was U.S. President Barack Obama, who, during his commencement speech at West Point last week, cited the Western response to the crisis as a telling example of successful multilateral diplomacy. In his words, "the mobilization of world opinion and international institutions served as a counterweight to Russian propaganda, Russian troops on the borders, and armed militias." It's not over, he warned, but this effort "has given a chance for the Ukrainian people to choose their future."

A second optimistic appraisal came from New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, who announced on May 27 that Vladimir Putin had "blinked" and proclaimed that the Russian leader "got pretty much everything wrong." According to Friedman, "Putin's seizure of Crimea has weakened the Russian economy, led to China getting a bargain gas deal, revived NATO, spurred Europe to start ending its addiction to Russian gas and begun a debate across Europe about increasing defense spending." His close-to-gleeful summary: "the country Putin threatens most today is Russia."

There's a grain of truth in these optimistic assessments, in the sense that Russia has paid a price for its recent actions. And Obama and Friedman are correct to remind us that Russia is not the looming geopolitical threat that some hawks tried to conjure up when it seized Crimea. But what both Obama and Friedman miss is the real -- and completely normal --motivation behind Putin's behavior. It ain't rocket science: Putin was willing to pay a substantial price because Russia's vital interests were at stake. On balance, I'll bet Putin still sees this matter as a net win.

Edward Snowden has secured his highest endorsement yet in the US when former vice-president Al Gore described the leaking of top secret intelligence documents as "an important service".

Asked if he regarded Snowden as a traitor or whistleblower, Gore veered away from the "traitor" label. He refused to go as far as labelling him a whistleblower but signalled he viewed him as being closer to that category than a traitor, saying: "What he revealed in the course of violating important laws included violations of the US constitution that were way more serious than the crimes he committed."

Snowden, the former CIA and National Security Agency computer specialist, leaked US and British documents to the Guardian and Washington Post in June last year, starting a worldwide debate on the balance between surveillance and privacy. His revelations have led to proposed changes in legislation in the US and a backlash against government surveillance by major telecoms and internet companies.

Russia has offered Ukraine a final gas price of $385 per 1,000 cubic meters, and if Kiev continues to ask for a lower price, rapport between the two countries will fall apart, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday.

"We believe our proposals offered more than a partnership aimed to support the Ukrainian economy during its difficult period when it was in need. But if our proposals are rejected, then we move into a completely different stage, it's not our choice," Putin said at a meeting with government officials.

The price has now been set at $385 per thousand cubic meters, $100 less than the previous $485 price Moscow set but more than the $268.50 price Kiev demanded.

"Gazprom has offered its Ukrainian partners the exact same conditions that the government had under Viktor Yanukovich - a $100 discount on the contract price, with a final price of $385 per thousand cubic meters," Putin said.

"Gas price for Ukraine in the $ 385 would be acceptable, and Russia can still provide discounts depending on volume," EU Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger said.

Documents reveal US money trail to Egyptian groups that pressed for president's removal.

President Barack Obama recently stated the United States was not taking sides as Egypt's crisis came to a head with the military overthrow of the democratically elected president.

But a review of dozens of US federal government documents shows Washington has quietly funded senior Egyptian opposition figures who called for toppling of the country's now-deposed president Mohamed Morsi.

Documents obtained by the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley show the US channeled funding through a State Department programme to promote democracy in the Middle East region. This programme vigorously supported activists and politicians who have fomented unrest in Egypt, after autocratic president Hosni Mubarak was ousted in a popular uprising in February 2011.

The State Department's programme, dubbed by US officials as a "democracy assistance" initiative, is part of a wider Obama administration effort to try to stop the retreat of pro-Washington secularists, and to win back influence in Arab Spring countries that saw the rise of Islamists, who largely oppose US interests in the Middle East.

Activists bankrolled by the programme include an exiled Egyptian police officer who plotted the violent overthrow of the Morsi government, an anti-Islamist politician who advocated closing mosques and dragging preachers out by force, as well as a coterie of opposition politicians who pushed for the ouster of the country's first democratically elected leader, government documents show.

What sort of criminal is the target of most federal prosecutions? Mobsters? Bank robbers? No: illegal immigrants. And where do they go? To private prisons, for whom America's immigration system is a giant profit center.

A new report from the ACLU takes a deep look at Criminal Alien Requirement [CAR] prisons - privately run federal prisons designed to house people convicted of breaking immigrations laws. You might be shocked to learn how big of a business this has become. From the report:

Nationwide, more than half of all federal criminal prosecutions initiated in fiscal year 2013 were for unlawfully crossing the border into the United States - an act that has traditionally been treated as a civil offense resulting in deportation, rather than as a criminal act resulting in incarceration in a federal prison. This is dramatically changing who enters the federal prison system. The tipping point came in 2009, when more people entered federal prison for immigration offenses than for violent, weapons, and property offenses combined - and the number has continued to rise each year since.

Thanks to very deliberate choices on the part of our legal system, more immigration violations now end with prison, rather than with deportation. In Texas alone, there are five CAR prisons housing nearly 14,000 inmates convicted of immigration crimes.