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Yoda

Corbyn vows Labour will recognize Palestinian state if it wins UK general election


RT
Wed, 26 Sep 2018 15:26 UTC
corbyn supporters
© Reuters/Hannah McKayDelegates hold up placards in support of Palestine at the Labour Party's conference in Liverpool, Britain, September 25, 2018.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said his party would recognize a Palestinian state as soon as it takes office, during his speech to the party's conference in Liverpool.

To widespread applause, Corbyn said the party would recognize a state of Palestine in order to implement the UN-brokered two-state solution.
"But a quarter of a century on from the Oslo Accords we are no closer to justice or peace and the Palestinian tragedy continues, while the outside world stands by," stated Corbyn.

"As my great Israeli friend Uri Avnery who died this year put it: "What is the alternative to peace? A catastrophe for both peoples.

"And in order to help make that two-state settlement a reality we will recognize a Palestinian state as soon as we take office."

Comment:

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Eye 1

UK court rules intelligence agencies acted 'unlawfully' when spying on NGO campaigning against them


RT
Wed, 26 Sep 2018 14:57 UTC
MI6 building in London
© Toby Melville / ReutersA man near the MI6 building in London
British intelligence services acted unlawfully when they spied on a UK-based NGO, Privacy International, the UK court that handles surveillance cases against the government has stated.

The domestic security service MI5 attained and read various private communications data belonging to Privacy International. The revelations came at a hearing of the Investigatory Powers Tribunal.

Comment: It's been a long haul for Privacy International. The question is whether the ruling will many any difference in the real world. Most likely not.

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Folder

NSA employee who took secret files home sentenced to prison


RT
Wed, 26 Sep 2018 14:55 UTC
National Security Administration (NSA) facility
© Gary Cameron / ReutersFILE PHOTO: An entrance into the National Security Administration (NSA) facility in Fort Meade, Maryland, U.S.
A former employee of the National Security Agency (NSA) was sentenced to 66 months in prison and three years of probation over keeping top-secret files at his Maryland home. But that's just one part of a bigger story.

Nghia Hoang Pho, 68, was sentenced on Tuesday in Baltimore, Maryland by US District Judge George L. Russell, III, the Department of Justice announced. It took nearly a year for Pho to be sentenced, since he pleaded guilty to one count of "willful retention of classified national defense information" in October 2017.

According to the DOJ, the Vietnam-born Pho worked as a developer at the NSA's Tailored Access Operations (TAO) since April 2006. Starting in 2010 and through March 2015, Pho "removed and retained US government property, including documents and writings that contained national defense information classified as Top Secret and SCI" or sensitive compartmented information, and kept them at his Ellicott City, Maryland home.
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Attention

Merkel losing political grip as parliamentary leader Volker unexpectedly voted out

Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge
Tue, 25 Sep 2018 14:07 UTC
volker Kauder Merkel
Bundestag Caucus Leader, Volker Kauder and German Chancellor Angela Merkel
Just days after a scandal involving Germany's top spy threatened to tear apart Angela Merkel coalition, moments ago Germany's chancellor suffered another major blow to her reputation, when her ally, and preferred candidate for Bundestag Caucus Leader, Volker Kauder was unexpectedly voted out of office as the influential head of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group after 13 years on the job.

He was defeated by deputy leader Ralph Brinkhaus in a 125 to 112 vote.

A journalist from Der Spiegel commented: "Merkel era slowly coming to an end".

Comment:

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Info

Duma unanimously passes Putin's amendments to pension reform bill


RT
Wed, 26 Sep 2018 14:21 UTC
Russian State Duma
© Vladimir Fedorenko / SputnikState Duma plenary session
The Russian parliament has approved amendments by Vladimir Putin to the bill providing for a gradual rise in the age of retirement. The changes are expected to soften the impact of the unpopular measure for ordinary citizens.

The nine amendments drafted by President Putin reduce the proposed increase in the retirement age for women, guarantee that pensioners keep all current tax benefits until the reform is fully completed, and offer additional payments to several categories of citizens, such as pensioners living in remote rural areas and representatives of indigenous peoples in northern Russia.
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Target

The drive to destroy Kavanaugh is feminist narcissism at its worst

Heather MacDonald
New York Post
Mon, 24 Sep 2018 13:44 UTC
Brett Kavanaugh
© AP Photo/Alex Brandon
The Democratic response to the allegation that three and a half decades ago, Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh assaulted a girl at a teenage beer party bears many hallmarks of campus culture, from the admonition that "survivors" should always be believed to the claim that the veracity of the accusation matters less than the history of white-male privilege.

But the most significant import from academic feminism is the idea that a long-ago incident of adolescent sexual misbehavior (assuming that the assault happened as described, which Kavanaugh has categorically denied) should trump a lifetime record of serious legal thought and government service.

Now The New Yorker is charging that Kavanaugh exposed himself to a Yale classmate at a party, ramping up outrage to the point that feminists are demanding that the hearings they wanted be canceled - though The New York Times regarded the latest allegation as too flimsy to publish.

The feminist nostrum that the personal is political is being weaponized to subordinate the public realm of ideas to the private realm of sexual relations - all, ironically, in the service of a highly political end: preventing a judicial conservative from being seated on the high court.
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Info

Liberal political bias: Google staff plotted ways to combat Trump's travel ban


RT
Sat, 22 Sep 2018 18:23 UTC
Google
© Armin Durgut/Global Look Press
News that Google staff brainstormed over tweaking its search engine algorithms to counter Trump's travel ban is part of an "ongoing problem" of liberal bias in big tech, the editor of a media watchdog has told RT.

In what she described as a "poisonous connection" between liberal political bias and Silicon Valley's biggest tech firms, Carrie Sheffield, national editor of the conservative-leaning Accuracy in Media (AIM), called it "chilling" that politically conservative voices were being silenced.

"There is a dearth of conservative and libertarian thought that is openly expressed in Silicon Valley and is quite often suppressed," she claimed citing data from the Lincoln Network, a conservative organization based in Silicon Valley.

Author and journalist Eric Burrows argues that the Google discussions represented a wider effort by social media companies to control the way all users used their platform.
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Chess

Erdogan: Turkey will continue buying gas from Iran despite US sanctions


RT
Wed, 26 Sep 2018 11:31 UTC
Turkey oil pipelines
© Umit Bektas / ReutersAnkara, Turkey
Ankara plans to stay committed to its long-term energy-supply deal with Tehran despite Washington's threats to punish countries that do business with Iran, Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said.

"We need to be realistic... Am I supposed to let people freeze in winter?... Nobody should be offended. How can I heat my people's homes if we stop purchasing Iran's natural gas?" Erdogan said in an exclusive interview with Reuters.

He said that there were similar situations with Iranian gas imports during the presidency of Barack Obama. At the moment, Turkey is buying 50 percent of its gas from Russia, with the rest imported from Azerbaijan, Iran, Iraq and Algeria.

Comment: Also see:

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Chess

About time! Senate Judiciary schedules Kavanaugh vote for Friday


RT
Wed, 26 Sep 2018 11:31 UTC
Brett Kavanaugh
© Joshua Roberts / ReutersUS Supreme Court nominee judge Brett Kavanaugh is sworn in during a Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing, September 4, 2018
The Senate Judiciary Committee has scheduled a vote on the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the US Supreme Court for Friday, a day after it is supposed to hear from both Kavanaugh and the woman accusing him of sexual misconduct.

On Thursday, the committee is supposed to hear from both the judge and Christine Blasey Ford, a California professor who says Kavanaugh attempted to rape her at a high school party sometime in the summer of 1982. It is not clear whether Ford will show up to testify, however.

The vote was initially scheduled for Monday the 24th, until Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) agreed to postpone it for the sake of hearing from Ford. Democrats on the committee, as well as Ford's attorneys, demanded a FBI investigation into her claims. They also wanted to further postpone the hearing so Ford could drive from California to Washington, as she was reportedly afraid of airplanes, and that Kavanaugh testify ahead of Ford, which is at best unusual.

Comment: Also see:

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Bad Guys

US arrests Chinese national reportedly serving as an 'agent of Beijing'


RT
Wed, 26 Sep 2018 11:31 UTC
US embassy Beijing China
© Thomas Peter / ReutersGuards at the entrance to the US embassy in Beijing, China, April 5, 2018
In a move likely to hit relations already soured by a bitter trade war and election interference accusations, the US has now arrested a Chinese national it accuses of working as an unregistered foreign agent.

Ji Chaoqun, 27, was arrested in Chicago on Tuesday. The Chinese national is suspected of working "at the direction of a high-level intelligence officer in the Jiangsu Province Ministry of State Security," the complaint against him claims. The intelligence officer allegedly asked him to provide information on engineers and scientists, including US defense contractors, who might be of interest to the ministry. Ji reportedly collected information on eight such individuals, including his fellow Chinese nationals working in the US. Ji reportedly collected information on eight such individuals, including his fellow Chinese nationals working in the US.

Comment: The New York Times reports that one of Ji Chaoqun's handlers was also arrested.
Mr. Ji's handler at a regional arm of China's Ministry of State Security, which collects domestic and foreign intelligence, was also arrested, according to an F.B.I. affidavit. The officer, identified only as Intelligence Officer A, was arrested sometime before April. It is not clear where he was arrested or by whom. [...]

"They just wanted me to purchase some documents on their behalf," Mr. Ji told the F.B.I. of his handlers, adding that they had told him that making the payments for the reports from China would be too onerous.

The F.B.I. contends that the M.S.S. was "testing Ji's skills as a potential asset by tasking him to purchase these background check reports."

Mr. Ji emailed the files to his handler and called them "midterm test questions."

He also asked an engineer to provide him with technical information from an unnamed aircraft engine supplier, a defense contractor that does aviation research for the military. He then provided the information to the Chinese government.

After graduating in 2015, Mr. Ji enlisted in the Army Reserves in the spring of 2016 under a program that allows immigrants to qualify for American citizenship in exchange for serving in the military.

As part of his application, Mr. Ji lied about his contacts with Chinese intelligence officials, according to court documents.
Also see:

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