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Israel escalates tensions with Iran by waging information war


Sputnik
Wed, 19 Jun 2019 14:43 UTC
Iran soldiers
© AP Photo/ Khalil Hamra
Tel Aviv has repeatedly accused Tehran of supporting 'terrorist' groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas, and of waging proxy wars in countries such as Syria which could pose a threat to Israel's security. Iran has denied the charges, and accused Israel and its allies of engaging in military aggression across the region.

Iran may attempt to provoke Israel along one of its borders to try to escalate the ongoing hostilities with the US, Israeli and Western intelligence sources have told the Haaretz newspaper .

According to the unnamed officials, Iran has been "disappointed" over its apparent inability to pressure the US into rethinking its tough sanctions regime, and as a result "might opt for a provocation along the Israeli border."
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Mr. Potato

Warrant reveals FBI agent's 8chan posts attempting to redirect white supremacist rage against Russia

Henry Krinkie
Current Events Enquiry
Mon, 17 Jun 2019 12:00 UTC
fbi terrorism
The unsealing of an application for a search warrant by the federal government on 8chan's servers has unintentionally revealed that a federal agent has been trolling the site and attempting to redirect the users' conspiracy theories against the Russian government instead of the CIA or Mossad.

The legal case stems from the April 27th shooting at a California synagogue by white supremacist and 8chan user John Earnest. The day of the shooting, Earnest is believed to have posted to 8chan a link to an anti-Semitic Pastebin manifesto and a not-so-cryptic suggestion that he was about to commit a murderous act of violence to back up his beliefs. In the accompanying affidavit to the search warrant application, FBI Special Agent Michael J. Rod requests the "IP address and metadata information about Earnest's original posting and the postings of all of the individuals who responded to the subject posting and/or commented about it. Additionally, agents seek information about any other posting coming from the IP address used by Earnest to post the subject posting."

In Appendix 1, Rod attaches a serious of screen caps from an 8chan thread that took place the day of the synagogue attack (it is not ultimately clear that Earnest took part in this thread). What is notable is that next to the "Anonymous" user label on some of the posts is a "(You)" marking:

Comment: It's notable that 8chan users immediately suspected US and Israeli involvement in attacks on US national security:

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Bad Guys

Gulf of Oman Tanker attack: War Scripted By Washington

Finian Cunningham
Sputnik News
Thu, 20 Jun 2019 00:50 UTC
John Bolton, Mike Pompeo
© AP Photo / Andrew Harnik
The drama of attacks on oil and tanker assets in the Middle East can't seem to get any more tense. The danger of war breaking out between the US and Iran is reaching a crescendo. However, if this goes down, it is a war scripted by Washington.

Nearly a week after the Trump administration blamed Iranian forces for bombing two cargo ships in the Gulf of Oman, now the US' biggest oil company, Exxon, has reportedly come under rocket attack in southern Iraq. That could be easily construed as a major threat to US interests. A "cause" for military "response".

No group claimed responsibility for the latest rocket assault on Exxon's facilities near the southern city of Basra. But it won't be long before US officials accuse "Iranian-backed" Shia militia based in Iraq.

Comment: UK Royal Marines Reportedly Deployed to Gulf in Wake of Tanker Attacks Blamed on Iran

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Bad Guys

Fool's Gold: FacebookCoin is a Trojan Horse of Corporate Oligarchy

Michael Krieger
Liberty Blitzkrieg
Wed, 19 Jun 2019 00:00 UTC
Facebook coin
© Nick Carter
ZUCK: yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard
ZUCK: just ask
ZUCK: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns
FRIEND: what!? how'd you manage that one?
ZUCK: people just submitted it
ZUCK: i don't know why
ZUCK: they "trust me"
ZUCK: dumb fucks
- Leaked messages sent by Mark Zuckerberg to a friend at Harvard as he was building Facebook
Years ago, Mark Zuckerberg made it clear that he doesn't think Facebook is a business. "In a lot of ways, Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company," said Mr. Zuckerberg. "We're really setting policies." He has acted consistently as a would-be sovereign power. For example, he is attempting to set up a Supreme Court-style independent tribunal to handle content moderation. And now he is setting up a global currency.

- From Matt Stoller's recent article: Facebook's Undemocratic Currency

Comment: See also:
Crypto Mania
© Ben Garrison


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Candy Cane

Trump trumps Biden's promise to cure cancer, says US will also eradicate AIDS

Ben Feuerherd
New York Post
Tue, 18 Jun 2019 21:20 UTC
Trump rally
© Joahua Roberts/Reuters
President Trump vowed to push America into new "medical frontiers" at a campaign rally on Tuesday evening, saying the US will eradicate AIDS and cure cancer.

Trump made the proclamation at his 2020 reelection campaign kickoff in Orlando, Florida.

"We will push onward with new medical frontiers," Trump said at the rally.

"We will come up with the cures to many, many problems, to many, many diseases, including cancer and others. And we're getting closer all the time," he added. "We will eradicate AIDS in America once and for all and we're very close."

Comment: He might as well promise to eliminate all pain on the planet. The US actually is in a position to greatly reduce much of the world's suffering, since it is the source of so much of it. But yeah, promise puppy dogs and ponies instead.

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Document

GOP Sen. Josh Hawley takes aim at Big Tech's legal protection with new bill

James Rogers
Fox News
Wed, 19 Jun 2019 20:22 UTC
Josh Hawley
© Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images
U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) speaks during a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee March 12, 2019 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC.
Sen. Josh Hawley has announced legislation that would remove tech titans' protection from liability for third-party content on their platforms.

The Missouri senator's bill specifically targets Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

The Act, which became law in 1996, provides key legal protection to big tech. Section 230 states that "no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."

Hawley, however, says that the Communications Decency Act was passed when the Internet was still in its infancy, whereas big tech firms are now among the world's most powerful companies. His legislation, the Ending Support for Internet Censorship Act, would remove the protection that big tech receives under Section 230 unless the firms submit to an external audit that proves their algorithms and content moderation are politically neutral.

Comment: The outcome here will not likely be as good as Hawley proposes. Control over social media is what powers in the US have wanted all along, which is why they invented the whole charade over 'Russian interference' in US elections.

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Pirates

US and NATO are consumed by 'Black Sea Madness'

Martin Sieff
Strategic Culture Foundation
Sat, 15 Jun 2019 00:00 UTC
NATO in Black Sea
Whom the gods would destroy, Friedrich Nietzsche famously said, they first make mad. What would Nietzsche make of the current, truly mad US and NATO obsession with charging into the Black Sea? It is a useful thought to ponder.

The Black Sea was far outside NATO's traditional theater of operations for most of the Alliance's history. However, Brussels and Washington have been piling up their military assets and visibility in the region like bees at a honey pot - or like a rogue herd of elephants charging off the edge of a cliff.

Yet NATO's "In Your Face" presence in the Black Sea protects no one. On the contrary, it puts America's allies in the region at grave risk by escalating tensions and increasing the danger that full scale war could break out by deliberately manufactured incident (Just think the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964) and or through a random error or clash that escalates out of control.

The US/NATO forward presence in the Black Sea is strategic madness. And it replicates parallel incendiary US exercises in fake macho stupidity against Beijing in the South China Sea: A region from which the Chinese people suffered invasion and societal collapse on a genocidal scale following defeats by Britain and France in the First Opium War (1839-42) and by Imperial Japan in its terrible invasion of summer 1937.
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Bad Guys

Kiev never wanted real trial, just to use me for blackmail - detained Russian journalist Vyshinsky


RT
Wed, 19 Jun 2019 21:07 UTC
Kirill Vyshinsky
© RIA Novosti
Editor in chief Kirill Vyshinsky at a court hearing in Kyiv on April 4.
Russian journalist Kirill Vyshinsky, arrested in Ukraine over treason changes, says the authorities had never aimed for an actual trial and simply put him behind bars in order to use him as a bargaining chip.

"The motive and the goal of my detention were purely political, so, of course, I believe that my case is political as well," Vyshinsky told Ruptly video agency following his hearing in a Kiev court on Tuesday. The trial has nothing to do with "finding out the truth, punishing the guilty, and so on," he stressed.

"[My case] is an embarrassment for the country. It is ridiculous to prosecute a journalist for doing his job, with having political goals in mind."

Vyshinsky was arrested in May 2018 when he was the chief of the RIA Novosti Ukraine news agency. The prosecutors claim that he had committed treason by backing the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Luhansk (DPR and LPR) in the east of Ukraine. The journalist denied the charges, insisting that he covered the positions of both sides of the conflict. If proven guilty, he would face up to 15 years in prison.

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Bad Guys

US predictably mulls sanctions against Turkey over S-400 purchase


Sputnik
Wed, 19 Jun 2019 20:57 UTC
S-400 defense
© Sputnik / Evgeny Odinokov
The United States is weighing three packages of sanctions against Turkey over purchasing Russian S-400 air defense systems, media reported Wednesday.

The US National Security Council and departments of State and Treasure are yet discussing the options, but the idea to target Turkey's defence sector under the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, which hits entities doing business with Russia, gets widest support at the moment, Bloomberg reported with reference to three anonymous sources familiar with the matter.

The media added that such sanctions would ban the Turkish defence sector companies from buying US components or selling their products in the United States.
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Newspaper

Boosting uranium production was "minimal response" after US abandoned nuclear deal - Iran


RT
Wed, 19 Jun 2019 13:54 UTC
nuclear us iran
© Global Look Press / Imago Stock & People / Christian Ohde
The boosting of uranium production by Iran was the least that could be done in response to the US leaving the Iran nuclear deal, and the 60-day deadline for EU to negotiate the lifting of American sanctions is final, Tehran says.

Reducing obligations under the 2015 agreement between the world powers and Tehran (known as the JCPOA) was a "minimal response" after the US unilaterally abandoned the agreement a year ago, Iran's President Hassan Rouhani claimed.

On May 8, Iran warned the EU, another signatory of the agreement, that it will partially suspend implementation of the nuclear deal unless the Europeans can negotiate the lifting of US sanctions on Tehran. Iranians gave the parties 60 days to do this.

Comment: See also:

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