Puppet MastersS


Pirates

International Criminal Court issues arrest warrant for Putin for suspected 'unlawful deportation of child population' from Ukraine to Russia


TASS
Fri, 17 Mar 2023 16:45 UTC
International Criminal Court
© Michel Porro/Getty Images
The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia's Children's Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova, the court said in a statement on Friday.

The statement said they could be responsible "for the war crime of unlawful deportation of population (children) and that of unlawful transfer of population (children) from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation."

ICC arrest warrants are usually secret in order to protect victims and witnesses and also to safeguard the investigation. However, the court stated that it authorized the public disclosure of the existence of the warrants, the names of the suspects and the crimes for which the warrants are issued, because "the conduct addressed in the present situation is allegedly ongoing, and that the public awareness of the warrants may contribute to the prevention of the further commission of crimes."

Comment:





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Cell Phone

Contracts show CDC bought phone data to monitor Americans' compliance with lockdowns

Zachary Stieber
ZeroHedge
Fri, 17 Mar 2023 21:30 UTC
CDC building
© Associated Press
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) purchased data from tracking companies to monitor compliance with lockdowns, according to contracts with the firms.

The CDC paid one firm $420,000 and another $208,000. That bought access to location data from at least 55 million cellphone users.

The contracts, approved under emergency review due to the COVID-19 pandemic, were aimed at providing the CDC "with the necessary data to continue critical emergency response functions elated to evaluating the impact of visits to key points of interest, stay at home orders, closures, re-openings and other public heath communications related to mask mandate, and other merging research areas on community transmission of SARS-CoV-2," the contracts, obtained by The Epoch Times, state.

Comment: From the research paper:
Unique in the Crowd: The privacy bounds of human mobility Scientific Reports volume 3, Article number: 1376 (2013)

Abstract

We study fifteen months of human mobility data for one and a half million individuals and find that human mobility traces are highly unique. In fact, in a dataset where the location of an individual is specified hourly and with a spatial resolution equal to that given by the carrier's antennas, four spatio-temporal points are enough to uniquely identify 95% of the individuals. We coarsen the data spatially and temporally to find a formula for the uniqueness of human mobility traces given their resolution and the available outside information. This formula shows that the uniqueness of mobility traces decays approximately as the 1/10 power of their resolution. Hence, even coarse datasets provide little anonymity. These findings represent fundamental constraints to an individual's privacy and have important implications for the design of frameworks and institutions dedicated to protect the privacy of individuals.
Makes one feel all warm and fuzzy about the CDC's reassurances, doesn't it? And this study was done TEN years ago.

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Magnify

Scott Ritter: The Nord Stream - Andromeda cover up

Scott Ritter
Consortium News
Tue, 14 Mar 2023 00:00 UTC
Divers
© Oetzipopoetzi, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia CommonsDivers taking a safety stop at 5 metres
U.S. intelligence was too quick to leak information about the German investigation to The New York Times. It raises the distinct impression that the real culprit is nervous about the investigative work of Seymour Hersh.

Back in 2000, the television series Andromeda premiered, based upon unused material from Gene Roddenberry, the creator of the Star Trek series and franchise. The plot is premised on the notion of a spaceship, "Andromeda," frozen in time, which is given the opportunity to reverse the clock and undo history.

The series ran five years.

Fast forward to the present.

History has dealt a tough hand to the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden, who openly confessed his intent to "bring an end" to the Nord Stream pipeline system which delivered Russian natural gas to Europe through four pipelines (Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2, consisting of two pipelines each).

Since then, the Biden White House was compelled to deny the president's stated intent after an explosive report by Pulitzer-Prize winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh detailed damning information which, if true (and there is no reason to suspect it's not) casts the responsibility for a series of underwater explosions that took place on Sept. 26, 2022, on Biden himself.

Comment: Finally! Logic, knowledge, science and process come together and Ritter breaks it down.

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Star of David

Warning of civil war, Herzog unveils framework for judicial reform; PM rejects it


The Times of Israel
Wed, 15 Mar 2023 09:28 UTC
herzog
© ScreenshotIsraeli President Isaac Herzog • March 15, 2023
President Isaac Herzog on Wednesday unveiled his "People's Framework" proposal to replace the government's plans to radically overhaul the judicial system, in a primetime address to the nation in which he urged both sides of the debate "not to destroy the country" in a power struggle over the judiciary, but rather seize the opportunity for "a formative constitutional moment."

Herzog called his plan, drafted after hundreds of hours of deliberations in recent weeks with politicians, jurists and experts from across the political spectrum, "a golden path" that offers the best chance for a broad national agreement on reform.
"This framework protects each and every one of you, the citizens of Israel. This framework protects Israel as a Jewish and democratic state."
He said his framework, if adopted, would constitute a victory for all Israelis. He stressed:
"The proposal is fully obligated to the principles of the Declaration of Independence. It entrenches the independence and autonomy of the judicial system, and entrenches human rights and civil [for all Israelis], men and women alike, including Israel's minorities."
He warned that having heard passionate views on the controversy from hundreds of Israelis in recent weeks:
"Those who think that a real civil war, with human lives, is a border we won't cross, have no idea." In Israel's 75th year, the abyss is within touching distance. A civil war is a red line. At any price, and by any means, I won't let it happen.

"I heard real, deep hatred," albeit from "a very small minority of people... I heard from people, from all sides, that, heaven forbid, the idea of blood in the streets no longer shocks them."

Comment: We shall wait and see if Herzog's good deed goes unpunished. Taking bets...

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Dollar

Credit Suisse still has a fight on its hands despite $54 billion lifeline

Mark Thompson
CNN Business
Thu, 16 Mar 2023 05:05 UTC
CSuisse
© Stefan Wermut/Bloomberg/Getty Images
A scramble by Switzerland's authorities to shore up confidence in Credit Suisse went some way to calming panicked investors Thursday, but the country's second-biggest bank may yet need more help if it is to survive.

Credit Suisse said it would borrow up to 50 billion Swiss francs ($53.7 billion) from the Swiss National Bank, taking advantage of a lifeline offered by the central bank late Wednesday after the lender's stock had crashed as much as 30% to a new record low. It also said it would buy back some of its own debt.

In a statement early Thursday, CEO Ulrich Körner said:
"I took 'decisive action' to strengthen the bank as its continues to implement a major overhaul announced last fall. My team and I are resolved to move forward rapidly to deliver a simpler and more focused bank built around client needs."
Credit Suisse's shares soared 32% at the open but erased some of those gains to close up 19% in Zurich. The cost of buying insurance against the risk of default by the bank eased back from record highs hit Wednesday.

The bank has lost about a quarter of its stock market value since the start of 2023, and more than 70% in the past 12 months, as a series of scandals, missteps and compliance failures have steadily undermined the confidence of investors and clients.
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Light Saber

Pentagon paying private companies to create propaganda, censorship tech for the Feds

Margot Cleveland
The Federalist
Fri, 17 Mar 2023 18:47 UTC
military surveillance civilians social media censorshop
© U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Roland Hale, 1st Inf. Div. Public Affairs / Flickr CC by 2.0, cropped
Our tax dollars are funding the development of media-monitoring products that can be deployed to censor ordinary Americans via Big Tech.

The Department of Defense is grooming for-profit, media-rating grifters to develop AI censorship technology for the U.S. government, an investigation by The Federalist reveals. Open-source research reveals this troubling development is driving the warp-speed growth of the Censorship-Industrial Complex — and several other concerning details.

Following last week's congressional hearings on the Censorship-Industrial Complex, attention focused on the media-ratings giant NewsGuard and its relationship with the DOD after the company's CEO declared it is not "government-funded." But, as The Federalist reported, in 2020 NewsGuard received a $25,000 award from the federal government to conduct a pilot study, after winning the COVID-19 Disinformation Challenge. The prize package included the opportunity to learn the ropes of profiteering by participating in a "Government Contracting 101 session" and a "Small Business Innovation Research (SBIRC) crash course."

The following year, NewsGuard scored a nearly $750,000 award from the federal Small Business Innovation Research Center (SBIRC), to allow NewsGuard to further develop its "Misinformation Fingerprints" program in conjunction with the DOD. That program relies on NewsGuard's questionable "reliability" ratings of news websites and its database of so-called "hoaxes, falsehoods and misinformation narratives." From there, the project uses "AI and social listening tools to identify the initial source of the hoax," and to find instances of the hoax being "repeated or amplified" online.

Comment: Apparently no site is beneath notice.SOTT was honored to make the cut:

Warning: Do NOT Read This! NewsGuard 'News Rating Agency' Gives SOTT.net Red 'Fake News' Label

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Mr. Potato

Mendacity: Biden claims high school gay marriage 'epiphany' despite voting record

Mark Moore
New York Post
Fri, 17 Mar 2023 18:33 UTC
biden interview daily show gay marraige
© The Daily ShowPresident Biden says he had an “epiphany” about gay marriage in high school, but his voting record as a senator suggests otherwise.
President Biden has said he experienced an "epiphany" while in high school that led him to support gay marriage — but his voting record as a senator and remarks made over the following decades suggest otherwise. ​

Biden, 80, was asked during an interview Monday by​The Daily Show host Kal Penn about his evolving views on same-sex marriage and how the federal government could protect LGBTQ Americans.

The president answered Penn, "I can remember exactly where my epiphany was" before launching into a story about his father dropping him off when he was a high school senior.

"I remember about to get out of the car and I look to my right and two well-dressed men in suits kissed each other. ​... And I'll never forget it, I turned and looked at my dad and he said, 'Joey, it's simple. They love each other​,'​" Biden recalled.

Comment: A life-long liar doesn't even recognize his own lies any more. Creepy Joe re-writes his life as needed.

The excerpt from Biden's 2006 interview:
MR. RUSSERT: The president used his radio address yesterday, and tomorrow in the Rose Garden, to talk about a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.

SEN. BIDEN: You know, think about this. The world's going to Hades in a handbasket. We are desperately concerned about the circumstance relating to avian flu — we don't have enough vaccines, we don't have enough police officers — and we're going to debate, the next three weeks, I'm told, gay marriage, a flag amendment, and God only knows what else.

I can't believe the American people can't see through this. We already have a law, the Defense of Marriage Act. We've all voted — not, where I've voted, and others have said, look, marriage is between a man and a woman and states must respect that. Nobody's violated that law, there's been no challenge to that law. Why do we need a constitutional amendment? Marriage is between a man and a woman. What's the game going on here? And now we're going to also vote, right after that, about desecration of the flag. If you can't...


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Bullseye

Kremlin spokeswoman Maria Zakharova: US blackmailing 'neutral' European state


RT
Fri, 17 Mar 2023 17:08 UTC
Maria Zakharova
© Sputnik / Russian Foreign MinistryRussian Foreign Ministry’s spokeswoman Maria Zakharova
Washington is attempting to make Switzerland drop its arms re-export ban, foreign ministry has warned

The US ambassador to Switzerland appeared to blackmail the Swiss government when he asserted in a recent interview that Bern is in no position to maintain neutrality over the conflict in Ukraine, a senior Russian diplomat has insisted.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova was commenting on recent remarks made by US envoy Scott Miller, and connecting them with this week's fall in the share price of Credit Suisse, a leading Swiss financial institution.

"Considering that the second-largest Swiss bank plunged right after three American banks went bust, such a statement looks like direct blackmail," Zakharova said Thursday on social media.

Comment:

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Star of David

Israel explains reluctance to arm Ukraine - bound by 'certain agreements' with Russia


RT
Fri, 17 Mar 2023 18:19 UTC
Benjamin Netanyahu
© AP Photo / Atef Safadi
Israel is not supplying Ukraine with any weapons because it is bound by certain agreements with Russia over neighboring Syria, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Thursday.

Speaking at a joint press conference with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Berlin, Netanyahu was asked whether Israel would continue to refrain from sending arms to Kiev. The prime minister admitted that when it comes to this issue, Israel had found itself "in a complex situation."

"Israeli pilots and Russian pilots are flying within spitting distance of each other over the skies of Syria," he said, adding that several years ago he had decided to stop Iran, Israel's arch enemy, from creating a "third front" against the Jewish state on its northern border.

Israel has repeatedly warned Syria against sheltering Hezbollah militia members, an organization it has designated as terrorist and deems to be linked to Iran. Syrian officials have on numerous occasions accused Israel of conducting deadly strikes on the nation's territory.

"To prevent that [the third front], we used air power... To do that, we had an arrangement struck with the Russian government and with the Russian Air Force, and the Russian Army in Syria that we do not shoot down each other's planes," he noted, adding that no other European country supporting Ukraine had similar circumstance in its relations with Moscow.
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Attention

Label 'unfriendly countries' more apropos to elites than countries per se — Putin


Tass
Fri, 17 Mar 2023 17:39 UTC
The Russian president lamented the fact that the political systems in many countries "often bring people to prominence who have a rather low level of education and general cultural awareness.

Pres Putin
© Mikhail Metzel/POOL/TASS
MOSCOW - Russian President Vladimir Putin has termed the phrase 'unfriendly countries' inexact and incorrect, because it is not so much the countries themselves but rather their elites or leaders that are unfriendly.

"The phrase 'unfriendly countries' has entered the public consciousness and into common usage here. But, it does not accurately reflect existing realities. You could say that it doesn't reflect the reality at all, because what we have are unfriendly elites in a certain number of countries, unfriendly rulers," Putin stated at the congress of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RSPP) on Thursday.

He lamented the fact that the political systems in many countries "often bring people to prominence who have a rather low level of education and general cultural awareness; at times they do not understand what they say and do." "The result, as is well known, is clear for all to see. Their activities are detrimental to their own people and to their own businesses," the president stressed.
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