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© AP Photo/ Khalil Hamra
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."
Warrant reveals FBI agent's 8chan posts attempting to redirect white supremacist rage against Russia
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:
© AP Photo / Andrew Harnik
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.
© 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:
- Putin orders laws for taxing bitcoin & regulating initial coin offerings
- China cracks down on cryptocurrencies with halt on initial coin offerings
- 'Bitcoin is fool's gold': Peter Schiff weighs in on calls to replace gold with cryptocurrencies
- Bitcoin: Is it nothing but monkey business?
© Ben Garrison
© Joahua Roberts/Reuters
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.
© Photo by Alex Wong/Getty ImagesU.S. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) speaks during a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee March 12, 2019 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC.
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.
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.
© RIA NovostiEditor in chief Kirill Vyshinsky at a court hearing in Kyiv on April 4.
"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.
© Sputnik / Evgeny Odinokov
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.
Comment: It's notable that 8chan users immediately suspected US and Israeli involvement in attacks on US national security: