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NATO continues to act aggressively towards Russia in Arctic airspace

Lucas Leiroz de Almeida
Infobrics
Fri, 28 May 2021 00:00 UTC
planes over arctic
Russia is increasing its military presence in the Arctic, especially in airspace. Moscow is sending Su-34 fighter-bombers to the region and creating various patrol strategies following a series of aggressive incursions by NATO planes on the northern border. As arctic airspace becomes a scenario for bold military maneuvers, tensions rise significantly, raising concerns worldwide.

On April 19, after receiving an alert about a foreign aircraft approaching the northern border, a Russian MiG-31 fighter escorted two foreign aircrafts over the Barents Sea. Both planes were flying dangerously towards the Russian border. They were a P-8A Poseidon and a P-3C Orion, typical patrol aircraft of the US Navy and the Norwegian Air Force, respectively. The Russian aircraft followed them until they changed course and moved away from the border.

This week, a similar event took place in the same region. On May 26, a new Norwegian P-3C aircraft was detected operating dangerous and aggressive maneuvers near the Russian border and once again a Russian MiG-31 plane escorted the foreign aircraft until it moved away from the border. These episodes were not isolated cases, having been only the most alarming and dangerous ones in the midst of several incidents of aggressive NATO incursions into the airspace of the Russian border. In recent months, Western activities in the Arctic have increased considerably. NATO military jets often appear in the Russian zone in the Arctic to conduct intelligence operations, capturing data from the activities of the Russian Northern Fleet.

Comment: See also:

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Blackbox

Roman Protasevich's dramatic arrest by Belarus sparked outrage. But why is Western media failing to report his neo-Nazi links?

Paul Robinson
RT
Sat, 29 May 2021 17:53 UTC
Roman Protasevich neo nazi blearus
© (L) Reuters / Stringer; (R) Telegram / KotsnewsRoman Protasevich attends a court hearing in Minsk, Belarus, April 10, 2017.
Should the murky past of an activist standing up against a dictatorial government be ignored for the sake of winning a PR war? Some believe so, but the case of Roman Protasevich shows the risky consequences of ignoring the truth.

It's probably safe to say that before this week almost nobody in the West had heard of Belarusian opposition activist Roman Protasevich, the editor of a Telegram channel banned by officials in his native country. On Sunday, however, all that changed.

Protasevich became an international cause celebre after the passenger jet he was traveling on from Greece to Lithuania was diverted to the Belarusian capital Minsk, and he and his girlfriend, Sofia Sapega, were arrested on the tarmac.

Comment:

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Eye 2

Report says Terminator-style AI drone 'hunted down' human targets without being given orders in 1st attack of its kind

Patrick Knox
The Sun
Fri, 28 May 2021 17:36 UTC
automated drones human targets
© STMHuge numbers of the drones could be deployed to seek out and destroy humans on their own initiative
A Teminator-style AI drone successfully "hunted down" and liquidated human targets on its own initiative, a UN report reveals. The disturbing revelation has raised concerns about swarms of marauding killer weapons on the loose in war zones, which are no longer under any human control.

A recent investigation by the UN Panel of Experts on Libya found a Turkish-made autonomous weapon — the STM Kargu-2 drone — last year "hunted down and remotely engaged" retreating soldiers loyal to the Libyan General Khalifa Haftar.

The drone is fitted with an explosive charge and hones in on a target in a kamikaze attack, exploding on impact.

It is capable of working in a swarm of 20 drones that loiter in the sky ready to select and engage targets using AI tech.

Comment: A destroyer of worlds?: An AI researchers shares his fears

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Nuke

China urged to increase sea-based nuclear deterrent amid US intensified strategic threat

Zhang Hui
Global Times
Fri, 28 May 2021 08:45 UTC
missiles
© Fan Lingzhi/GTDF-5B intercontinental ballistic missiles
Facing a serious strategic threat from the US, China was urged to increase the number of nuclear weapons, especially its sea-based nuclear deterrent of intercontinental submarine-launched ballistic missiles, to deter potential military action by US warmongers, Chinese military experts said on Friday, after reports that the US' new defense budget will modernize its nuclear arsenal to deter China.

Having a nuclear arsenal appropriate to China's position will help safeguard national security, sovereignty and development interests and establish a more stable and peaceful world order, which will be beneficial for the world, they said.

The US defense budget, set to be sent to Congress on Friday, is expected to include investments in troop readiness, space, and the Pacific Deterrence Initiative aimed at countering China's military existence in the region, and nuclear weapons technology, Reuters reported on Thursday.

However, Chinese military experts believe that US attempts of increasing military deployment in the Indo-Pacific region will not increase returns for the US as most countries in the region will not allow the flames of war initiated by the US to burn themselves.
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Arrow Down

Appellate Court strikes down racial and gender preferences in Biden's COVID relief law

Glenn Greenwald
greenwald.substack.com
Fri, 28 May 2021 00:00 UTC
Judge Thapar
© UnknownJudge Amul Thapar
A federal appellate court on Thursday invalidated the racial and gender preferences in President Biden's $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act as unconstitutional. The Cincinnati-based Sixth Circuit of Appeals ruled that provisions of that law, designed to grant preferences to minority-owned small-restaurant owners for COVID relief, violate the 14th Amendment's guarantee of equal protection under the law:
No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
The specific provision struck down was part of the law's $29 billion Restaurant Revitalization Fund grant program for small, privately owned restaurants struggling to meet payroll and rent due to the COVID crisis. The law, which was passed almost entirely by a party-line vote in March, grants priority status to restaurants that have 51% ownership or more composed of specific racial and ethnic groups as well as women. By effectively relegating struggling businesses owned by white males or ethnicities and nationalities excluded from a priority designation "to the back of the line," the COVID relief program, ruled the court by a 2-1 decision, ran afoul of core constitutional guarantees.

Comment: Race-based compensation is currently up for consideration in other occupations:
The Small Business Association isn't the only government department opening its purse wider for certain races. Biden's American Rescue Plan provides billions of dollars of debt relief to "socially disadvantaged" farmers and ranchers, in the name of remedying "systemic racism."

A group of white farmers has already sued the Farm Service Agency and secretary of agriculture over this, setting up another constitutional showdown that, based on Thursday's ruling in Ohio, they will likely win.

One of the farmers, a disabled man with two prosthetic legs, called the American Rescue Plan "out-and-out racist." He stated: "Everything - that we have all learned growing up is racism - is wrong, and now, all of a sudden, the federal government seems to think that racism is acceptable in certain ways. And it should never be acceptable."


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Beaker

New study claims Covid-19 has no 'credible natural ancestor', created in Wuhan lab

Kunal Gaurav
Hindustan Times
Sat, 29 May 2021 08:49 UTC
Wuhan Inst. Virology
© Reuters/FileSecurity personnel outside Wuhan Institute of Virology in Hubei Province, China
The novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 has no 'credible natural ancestor' and was created by Chinese scientists while working on 'gain-of-function' research in a Wuhan lab, according to a Daily Mail report citing a new study. The report claimed that the scientists took a natural coronavirus 'backbone' found in bats and added a new 'spike' which turned it into deadly and highly transmissible SARS-CoV-2.

British Professor Angus Dalgleish and Norwegian scientist Dr Birger Sørensen authored the new 22-page paper which is set to be published in the Quarterly Review of Biophysics Discovery, as per Daily Mail. The study reportedly claimed that the Chinese scientists also tried to cover their tracks by reverse-engineering the viruses to make it look like they naturally arose from bats.

Quoting the authors, Daily Mail said that the duo had "prima facie evidence of retro-engineering in China" for a year but was ignored by academics and major journals. The study also accuses Chinese labs of "deliberate destruction, concealment or contamination of data."

Comment: Whenever the US is on a mad tear to implicate, look for obfuscation and cover-up rather than pursuit of legitmate breadcrumbs back to the slice.

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Syringe

Trust the experts: Fauci once argued for risky viral experiments — even if they can lead to pandemic

Gabrielle Fonrouge
New York Post
Fri, 28 May 2021 16:58 UTC
Fauci
© APDr. Anthony Fauci
Dr. Anthony Fauci once argued that conducting experiments on contagious viruses to increase their potency was worth the risk, even if the work could accidentally lead to a pandemic, it was revealed Friday.

The nation's chief medical advisor wrote in the American Society for Microbiology in October 2012 of the public health benefit to gain-of-function viral experiments — which center on manipulating viruses and making them stronger — as long as there is significant oversight.

In the article, first reported by The Australian, Fauci also noted that a pause on such studies should continue until researchers can figure out how to do them more transparently.

Gain-of-function experiments are the sort of work that was being conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology when the COVID-19 pandemic first started in China in late 2019 and some experts fear a lab accident is what led to the global outbreak that killed 3.4 million.

In the 2012 paper, Fauci acknowledged the risky research could lead to serious lab accidents but the chance is rare and the work is "important" because it helps the scientific community prepare for naturally occurring pandemics.


Comment: Look how that turned out... But then again, very smart people like Fauci probably see the Covid-19 pandemic as a similarly "important" success: as helping the scientific community prepare for an actual, naturally occurring pandemic. Now they know how much they can get away with.


"In an unlikely but conceivable turn of events, what if that scientist becomes infected with the virus, which leads to an outbreak and ultimately triggers a pandemic?" he wrote at the time.

"Many ask reasonable questions: given the possibility of such a scenario - however remote - should the initial experiments have been performed and/or published in the first place, and what were the processes involved in this decision? Scientists working in this field might say - as indeed I have said - that the benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks."
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Snowflake

Hunter Biden boasted that he 'smoked crack' with late DC Mayor Marion Barry

Jon Levine and Bruce Golding
New York Post
Fri, 28 May 2021 16:50 UTC
Marion Barry
© Bill Clark/Roll Call via Getty ImagesMarion Barry, before his death, said he did not smoke crack.
Hunter Biden boasted that he "smoked crack" as a college student with then-Washington, DC, Mayor Marion Barry, according to a recording that surfaced Friday.

During the 8-minute, 15-second audio clip, President Biden's son and another man were debating whether slain civil rights icons Martin Luther King Jr. and Mohandas Gandhi ever used cocaine when Barry's name came up.

"Although the mayor from DC did," the other man said.

"Marion Barry," Biden said.

"You know what? I actually smoked crack with Marion Barry. I swear to f-king God."

The other man responded, "Jesus."

"I was in Georgetown and he used to go to a place right next to The Guards," Biden said, apparently referring to a since-shuttered bar near the Georgetown University campus.

"And I was a sophomore, I guess, there was — a junior when that happened. But he used to come there and drink, like late-late. And I would be there. And he would go the bathroom."
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Star of David

10 Israeli leaders who warned against enshrining de facto Israeli apartheid

Mehdi Hasan
MSNBC
Sat, 29 May 2021 16:22 UTC
israeli figures apartheid
© MSNBC; Getty ImagesAre these former Israeli leaders also "antisemites" for warning about apartheid?
An open letter from four Jewish Democrats really misses the mark.

Here are two statements that can be true at the same time: Most criticism of Israel isn't antisemitic; Some criticism of Israel is extremely antisemitic.

Neither one contradicts the other. But you might not know it from some of the recent coverage of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

Last week, Pakistan's foreign minister invoked long-standing tropes about Jewish power and influence by referring to Israel's "deep pockets" and "control" of the media in an interview with CNN that went viral. I am all for criticizing examples of media bias and double standards but these were undeniably "antisemitic slurs," which is exactly what I tweeted after watching the minister's comments. Pro-Pakistani government trolls on Twitter then spent several days and hundreds of tweets condemning me as a "sellout" and a "Zionist apologist," among other choice labels.

Comment: While it is commendable that those politicians were willing to call a spade a spade, their solution, especially Ben Gurion's and Rabins remained the removal of Palestinians from their homes.

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Cow Skull

To distract from Gaza slaughter, Israel lobby manufactures antisemitism freakout

Max Blumenthal
The Grayzone
Mon, 24 May 2021 00:00 UTC
antisemitsm porpaganda
With deceptively edited videos and dubious allegations, the Israel lobby has manufactured an antisemitism epidemic to turn the media's gaze away from dead children in Gaza.

Following an 11-day assault on the Gaza Strip in which the Israeli army killed over 220 people, including more than 65 children, and days of videotaped rampages of Jewish extremist mobs against Palestinian people and property inside Israeli cities, Israel lobbyists in the US and Canada have launched a carefully coordinated public relations campaign to deflect outrage.

Having failed to successfully defend massacres of entire families in their homes and the deliberate demolition of civilian residential towers and media offices in Gaza City, the US Israel lobby and the Israeli government it advocates for have manufactured an epidemic of antisemitic violence with the goal of portraying American Jewry as the true victim of the crisis.

Led by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Israel lobbyists have portrayed a series of street scuffles between supporters of Palestine and pro-Israel activists as anti-Jewish pogroms. In nearly every case, no evidence exists to substantiate claims that Jews were targeted as Jews for violent assault. There is ample proof of deception, however, as video and photographic evidence reveals pro-Israel elements provoking demonstrators, initiating violence and falsifying or embellishing their testimonies.
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