Matt Hancock was seen breaking social distancing rules just moments before joining Boris Johnson for Prime Minister's Questions.

The health secretary walked up to a colleague in the main Commons chamber - straight into a taped area showing where MPs should avoid to maintain the two metre distance mandated by government coronavirus rules.

Mr Hancock was seen on camera putting his hand on the other MP's shoulder, with the pair standing inches apart for around 10 seconds.

Russia's space agency's deputy head, Sergey Saveliev, warns that American plans to militarize the cosmic expanse risk causing destabilization. Roscosmos favors an international agreement to prevent an arms race in outer space.

"We are consistently speaking out, using all possible negotiating platforms, including the Conference on Disarmament, in order to [encourage] the adoption of a resolution," he said, in a post on the state-owned organization's website.

According to Saveliev, Russia wants to establish a comprehensive partnership with the United States in the field of space exploration. The Roscosmos official added that Moscow is of the view that it should be done in the spirit of reciprocity and equality.

"What's been most striking to me is just how one-sided the rules are when Americans take on their own government.... It has been dismaying to learn the extent to which rules and laws shield the government from accountability for its abuses — or even lawbreaking.... It's been a long and frightening lesson.... The rules seem rigged to protect government lawlessness, and the playing field is uneven. Too many processes favor the government. The deck is still stacked." — Journalist Sharyl Attkisson

The system is rigged.

The system is rigged, the government is corrupt, and "we the people" continue to waste our strength by fighting each other rather than standing against the tyrant in our midst.

Because the system is rigged, because the government is corrupt, and because "we the people" remain polarized and divided, the police state will keep winning and "we the people" will keep losing.

Because the system is rigged and the U.S. Supreme Court — the so-called "people's court" — has exchanged its appointed role as a gatekeeper of justice for its new role as maintainer of the status quo, there will be little if no consequences for the cops who brutalize and no justice for the victims of police brutality.

Because the system is rigged, there will be no consequences for police who destroyed a private home by bombarding it with tear gas grenades during a SWAT team raid gone awry, or for the cop who mistakenly shot a 10-year-old boy after aiming for and missing the non-threatening family dog, or for the arresting officer who sicced a police dog on a suspect who had already surrendered.

This is how unarmed Americans keep dying at the hands of militarized police.

By refusing to accept any of the eight or so qualified immunity cases before it this term that strove to hold police accountable for official misconduct, the Supreme Court delivered a chilling reminder that in the American police state, 'we the people' are at the mercy of law enforcement officers who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to 'serve and protect."

This is how qualified immunity keeps the police state in power.

Lawyers tend to offer a lot of complicated, convoluted explanations for the doctrine of qualified immunity, which was intended to insulate government officials from frivolous lawsuits, but the real purpose of qualified immunity is to rig the system, ensuring that abusive agents of the government almost always win and the victims of government abuse almost always lose.

How else do you explain a doctrine that requires victims of police violence to prove that their abusers knew their behavior was illegal because it had been deemed so in a nearly identical case at some prior time: it's a setup for failure.

Do you know how many different ways a cop can kill, maim, torture and abuse someone without being held liable?

The cops know: in large part due to training classes that drill them on the art of sidestepping the Fourth Amendment, which protects us from being bullied, badgered, beaten, broken and spied on by government agents.

This is how "we the people" keep losing.

NATO's chief says that the United States intends to consult with allies on plans to draw down U.S. forces in Germany, plans that have rattled some members of the 30-member alliance.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg also said that the alliance had no intentions to deploy land-based nuclear missiles in Europe, even as Russia deploys missiles that Washington says violated a key Cold War-era arms treaty.

Speaking to reporters following a June 17 meeting of alliance defense ministers, the NATO chief said the subject of the U.S. plans for decreasing its troop numbers in Germany came up for discussion.

By calling out Germany for failing to pay its fair share of the cost of NATO, US President Donald Trump has challenged the legitimacy of the foundational premise upon which the alliance was built. This is a good thing.

A group of international academics, during a recent conference at the US Center for Strategic and International Studies, have concluded that a second Trump term in office could fatally weaken the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the transatlantic alliance charged with deterring perceived Russian aggression and protecting the international rules-based order that has dominated international relations since the end of the Second World War. This conclusion came on the heels of a decision by the Trump administration to withdraw some 9,500 troops from Germany as punishment for Berlin's failure to keep a promise to raise its defense spending to levels matching two percent of its GDP.

Trump's actions, and the concerns of the international academics about the possible demise of NATO, are perhaps best evaluated in the context of an observation made by NATO's first secretary general, Lord Ismay, that the purpose of alliance was "to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down." Ismay's statement, made in 1952 - three years after the founding of NATO - reflected the false pretense upon which the post-war order was based. It also reflected the intellectually vacuous premise of NATO's role in protecting the same as justification for the continued existence of an alliance founded on a lie and sustained on misguided principles sustained by that lie.

President Trump signed a bill condemning China's concentration camps for the Uyghur Muslim community just hours after excerpts from former National Security Advisor John Bolton surfaced which claim Trump encouraged Chinese President Xi Jinping to build the camps.

Xi has drawn international criticism for his persecution of China's Muslim Uyghur population, including detaining around 1 to 2 million in concentration camps.

In the excerpt, reported by the Wall Street Journal, Bolton claims that "according to our interpreter, Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps. Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do." He added that Trump called Xi "the greatest Chinese leader in 300 years!"

Shortly after the report, the White House put out a statement that Trump signed the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2020, which

"condemns gross human rights violations of specified ethnic Muslim minority groups in the Xinjiang region in China and other purposes, including specified authority to impose sanctions on certain foreign persons."

The Department of Justice is preparing proposals to roll back the legal immunities enjoyed by Big Tech companies under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), in measures that will be announced as early as Wednesday, sources told the Wall Street Journal.

Via the WSJ:

"The Justice Department is set to propose a rollback of legal protections that online platforms have enjoyed for more than two decades, in an effort to make tech companies more responsible in how they police their content, according to a Trump administration official."

Section 230 gives Big Tech companies immunity from lawsuits arising from user-generated content. If a person is defamed on Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or other big tech platforms like Reddit, those platforms are not legally liable for the content like a traditional publisher might be. This allows social media platforms to host billions of posts from users without a potentially crippling legal risk.

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the Trump administration cannot carry out its plan to shut down the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which has allowed nearly 800,000 young people, known as Dreamers, to avoid deportation and remain in the U.S.

Chief Justice John Roberts was the swing vote in the 5-4 decision, which deals a big legal defeat to President Donald Trump on the issue of immigration, a major focus of his domestic agenda.

Roberts wrote in the decision that the government failed to give an adequate justification for ending the federal program. The administration could again try to shut it down by offering a more detailed explanation for its action, but the White House might not want to end such a popular program in the heat of a presidential campaign.

A damning official report has finally put in writing what many of us knew anyway: the Home Office does not have a clue about the scale of illegal immigration in the UK.

'Take back control of our borders' was a cornerstone of the 2016 Leave campaign in the Brexit referendum.

It was reinforced as a slogan when Boris Johnson campaigned in last year's general election, and overwhelmingly succeeded, in getting a new mandate to push the constipated Brexit agreement through Parliament.

But taking back control? It. Just. Ain't. Working.

An internal CIA report about the Vault 7 fiasco paints a damning picture of the main US spy agency. WikiLeaks released the CIA's hacking tools, likely leaked by an insider, while CIA chiefs were too busy cooking up Russiagate.

Vault 7 was the name given to cyber attack tools developed by the CIA's Center for Cyber Intelligence (CCI), and published by WikiLeaks in March 2017. It was the largest data breach in Langley's history, with long-lasting consequences. For example, Chinese cybersecurity companies recently used Vault 7 evidence to show that the US has been hacking China for over a decade.

According to a just-released internal CIA report, "CCI had prioritized building cyber weapons at the expense of securing their own systems. Day-to-day security practices had become woefully lax."

"Most of our sensitive cyber weapons were not compartmented, users shared systems administrator-level passwords, there were no effective removable media controls, and historical data was available to users indefinitely," the report goes on to say.

The heavily-redacted document actually dates back to October 2017 and was only made public Tuesday by Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), in an effort to pressure the new Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe into imposing new security measures. While the CIA ineptitude is the obvious takeaway, no one seems to have noticed the real bombshell: the timing of the breach and its implications.

The report says the CIA "did not realize the loss had occurred until a year later, when WikiLeaks publicly announced it in March 2017." Now, what all was happening between March 2016 and a year later? You guessed it: Russiagate!