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UK MPs seize documents that could expose Facebook's covert data harvesting


RT
Sun, 25 Nov 2018 09:43 UTC
Mark Zuckerberg
© Global Look Press / ZUMAPRESS.com / Panoramic
The UK Parliament has taken hold of documents from Facebook that may shed light on the online giant's carefree approach to user privacy amid claims that it was fully aware of user data loopholes exploited by Cambridge Analytica.

The documents were seized from the founder of US tech startup Six4Three, who was on a business trip to the UK, the Guardian reported, citing MP Damian Collins, chair of the Commons select committee for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). The DCMS is in charge of investigating a siphoning of Facebook user data by UK consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica. The news on the massive data breach broke in March with Facebook later admitting the data of up to 87 million people might have been shared with Cambridge Analytica without their explicit consent.

It is alleged that the data was harvested to target the users in political campaigns, including in former UKIP leader Nigel Farage's Leave.EU campaign.

The UK parliamentary investigators used the former Six4Three top executive's brief stay in London to force him to hand over documents his firm had obtained from a US court in Six4Three's own lawsuit against Facebook.

Comment: See also:

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MIB

What's being done out in the open today is worse than any conspiracy theory

Caitlin Johnstone
Medium
Wed, 21 Nov 2018 08:02 UTC
Yemen child
Yesterday President Trump posted a statement on the White House website saying his administration will be standing with the House of Saud despite the CIA's assertion that Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman personally ordered the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist who was living and working in the United States.

The statement reads like a long form version of one of Trump's tweets, replete with gratuitous exclamation points and slogans like "America First!" and the lie that Iran is "the world's leading sponsor of terror", which will never be true no matter how many times this administration deliberately repeats it. The world's leading sponsor of terrorism is of course Saudi Arabia, along with Israel and the United States.

Trump's alleged opposition has responded with melodramatic outrage, as though a US president continuing to stand by Saudi Arabia in the face of horrific acts of violence is somehow new and unprecedented and not standard operating procedure for decades. Dismembering a journalist while he's still alive would be a fairly typical Tuesday afternoon for the Saudi government and would not rank anywhere near the top ten most evil things this government has done, but because it involves America and a conspiracy it's a sexy story that everyone laps up. Add in the fact that Trump is more blunt and forthcoming about American depravity and you've got yourself a yarn.

Comment: The mask has been taken off and the sheer lunacy and depravity of the PTB is now out in the open. It has been going on for so long, the Overton window continually shifting ever so gradually, that a mass form of 'normalcy bias' has made people simply shrug at even the most egregious things.

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People

Flashback The elite forces of anti-populism and the fate of the Europeon Union

Will Podmore
Counterpunch
Wed, 11 Apr 2018 00:00 UTC
populism bookcover
Frank Furedi, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent, argues in his book Populism and the European Culture wars: The Conflict of values between Hungary and the EU, that despite the media's attention on the supposed threat to democracy from populist movements, the anti-populist reaction is far worse. In this book he examines the EU's attitude to Hungary as one example.

A free and open debate about whether to leave the EU led to our majority democratic decision to back independence. Furedi notes that for the dwindling minority who want to overturn the vote, "European federalism symbolized a sacred cause, while nationalism was assigned the role of anti-Christ."

As Furedi points out, "Anti-populism has constructed a culturally warped view of populism that casts a movement questioning the elite cultural consensus in a negative light." That intolerant and reactionary viewpoint characterises populist movements as xenophobic, anti-democratic, and totalitarian.
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Info

SOTT Focus: Straight-Talking Tulsi's Rising Star Could Mean Setting Sun for the Democratic Party Establishment

Finian Cunningham
RT
Fri, 23 Nov 2018 14:11 UTC
Tulsi Gabbard
© Getty Images / Tom Williams
Tulsi Gabbard's blistering criticism of President Trump over his pardon to Saudi Arabia has further elevated her prospect of becoming the standard bearer in the 2020 presidential election, shaking up the Dem Party establishment.

The 37-year-old Hawaiian representative this week blasted Trump for being "Saudi Arabia's b*tch" after he controversially backed the Saudi regime over the brutal murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Trump said the US-Saudi relationship was too important to consider a rupture with the oil kingdom's rulers.

Trump's prioritizing of commercial and strategic interests over the brutal killing of a US-resident journalist in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2 was met with widespread disdain among American politicians and media this week. But Gabbard's put down was probably the most scathing and memorable.
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Eye 2

All of the Empire's accusations against Russia are lies

Eric Zuesse
The Saker Blog
Fri, 23 Nov 2018 20:03 UTC
(L) Sergei Magnitsky ; (R) William 'Bill' Browder
© HO / HERMITAGE CAPITAL MANAGEMENT / AFP; GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA / AFP / Drew Angerer(L) Sergei Magnitsky ; (D) William 'Bill' Browder
The first accusation, which is the source of the Magnitsky Act sanctions against Russia, was in 2012 under U.S. President Barack Obama, and it alleged that Sergei Magnitsky had been a whistleblower in Russia who was a lawyer who uncovered corruption in Russia's Government and was imprisoned for that and beaten to death there for that. Magnitsky was, in fact, no whistleblower, and no lawyer, but the accountant of American billionaire Bill Browder, who had been charged by the Russian Government (and who then fled Russia) as having tax-defrauded the Russian Government of $230 million. And, Magnitsky's death in prison was due to inadequate medical care of his pancreatitis by the medical personnel there, not (as Browder alleged) to any "beating."
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Bullseye

Europe is the loser in Washington's geopolitical games against Russia - Lavrov


RT
Sat, 24 Nov 2018 21:06 UTC
NATO exercise
© Reuters / Cezary AszkielowiczUS and Polish soldiers take part in NATO exercise Anakonda 2018 in Poland.
The blindness of the EU bureaucrats allows the US to instigate dangerous military activity near Russian borders, jeopardizing the security of the whole European continent, Sergey Lavrov, Russia's Foreign Minister, said.

The Ukrainian crisis, which was used as a justification for sanctions against Moscow, is "a result of geopolitical games, played by the US and their allies in several countries, as well as the blindness of the bureaucrats in Brussels," Lavrov, who was visiting Portugal on Saturday, said in an interview with local Publico paper.

The EU leadership "not only sacrificed it's principles and values by turning a blind eye to the armed coup in Kiev, in which a democratically elected president was deposed, but followed Washington's lead and joined the anti-Russian sanctions," he added.

Comment: Countries like Britain are at the forefront of anti-Russian propaganda and seem to be suicidal in their aggression towards Russia, meanwhile other European nations, like Italy and Austria can see through the hysterics and are hoping to form constructive partnerships; will Europe sacrifice itself to the folly of an ailing empire which is incapable of accepting reality?

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Eye 2

20 civilians killed including 9 children in latest US-led airstrike on Syria - Second in two days


RT
Sat, 24 Nov 2018 17:29 UTC
jet sky
© AP Photo / Vadim Ghirda
Damascus has repeatedly accused Washington and its allies of carrying out indiscriminate attacks in civilian-populated areas in northeastern Syria often involving the use of banned white phosphrorus and cluster bombs.

US-coalition airstrikes against targets in the terrorist-held city of Hajin, Syria on Saturday have left 20 civilians including nine children dead, Syrian state television has reported.

According to the Ikhbariya television channel, the civilians were killed during an airstrike on a market area in Hajin. Among them were eight women who were related to one another.

Comment: Below is just a selection of some of the recent strikes, most of which seem to be targeting civilians, with women and children featuring prominently amongst the victims:

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Beer

Russia will check if Americans really went to the Moon - Roscosmos chief


RT
Sat, 24 Nov 2018 15:57 UTC
US moon
© Reuters / NASAUS astronaut Buzz Aldrin salutes the American flag on the surface of the Moon after he and fellow astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first men to land on the Moon.
Have the Americans been on the Moon or it's just a hoax as conspiracy theorists claim? All questions will be answered when the Russian cosmonauts visit the Earth's satellite, Russia's space boss, promised.

"We've set such a task - to go there and check if they were there or not," Dmitry Rogozin joked in response to the popular question about the moon exploration. "The Americans say - they've been there. We'll verify that."

Switching to a more serious tone, he said that no country is currently capable of fulfilling a successful lunar program on its own. Russia expecting to cooperate with the US in exploring the Earth's satellite, Rogozin said as he visited a Russian spacecraft engine manufacturer in Moscow.

Russian cosmonauts will set foot on the Moon for the first time in the early 2030s as part of a 14-day mission, a recently revealed roadmap of the Russian lunar program said.

Comment: See also:

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Russian Flag

Russia's strategic game in Libya

Lorenzo Vita
pravda.ru
Thu, 15 Nov 2018 01:14 UTC
Putin/Gaddafi
© Getty ImagesRussian President Vladimir Putin • Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi
The strategy of Vladimir Putin, in the difficult Libyan chessboard, has always been particularly silent. The Kremlin, after the fall of Muhammar Gaddafi, moved with caution, aware that the end of the colonel had a disastrous effect on the construction of the Russian strategy in the Mediterranean after the fall of the Soviet Union. But the West, which has made a hell out of that Libya, has not supplanted the other superpowers. After Gaddafi, another leader did not arrive, but the war exploded: civil and not. And in this quagmire, Russia has managed to transform itself into an increasingly dynamic and increasingly necessary actor. Italy knows it very well, since Giuseppe Conte [the now in Office Italian Prime Minister] went to Moscow to drag Russia to his side.

Russia's politics in Libya

Unlike what happened in Syria, Moscow did not immediately (and definitively) choose an ally. Here there was not a Bashar al Assad to defend against the advance of the Islamic State. And there were no gangs of jihadists ready to defeat an allied government or opposing powers eager to overthrow the system of alliances. There was chaos. And in the chaos, Putin preferred to play in a different way, focusing not on one player, but trying to dialogue with everyone. The Kremlin has never hidden the sympathies for Khalifa Haftar, the strong man from Cyrenaica. Evidence of this is also the latest recent trip by the Libyan Marshal to Moscow, where he met Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. The two discussed, you read on the official page of the Libyan National Army, "the strategies to resolve the Libyan crisis and the fight against terrorism".
Khalifa Haftar
© IpsiKhalifa Haftar
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Question

Merkel's potential successors: How they stand on foreign policy

Ulrich Speck
Handelsblatt
Fri, 23 Nov 2018 11:43 UTC
Merz/Spahn/AKK
© ImagoFriedrich Merz • Jens Spahn • Annegret-Kramp Karrenbauer
On December 8, the Christian Democrats will choose a new leader, who may succeed Angela Merkel as chancellor. A foreign-policy expert analyzes how the candidates would change Germany's geopolitical direction.

Three top candidates have emerged to succeed Angela Merkel as leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) on December 8, and thus plausibly as chancellor in 2021 or even earlier. The rest of Europe and even the world has a stake in this contest. How would each of the potential heirs change Germany's geopolitical direction?

These are the candidates: Annegret-Kramp Karrenbauer, 56, is the party's secretary general. Friedrich Merz, 63, was sidelined by Merkel in the early 2000s but has since been successful in business. And Jens Spahn, 38, is currently Merkel's health minister. A fourth potential candidate decided not to run this time, but could enter the race for chancellor later: Armin Laschet, 57, the premier of North Rhine-Westphalia.

None of the four would represent a fundamental break with German tradition. All four will honor the two main pillars of Christian-Democratic and German foreign policy: a dual commitment to the trans-Atlantic relationship and to the European Union.
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