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© thehackernews.comData dump, Hacking Team not hacking it.
On Sunday night, unidentified hackers published a massive, 400 gigabyte trove on BitTorrent (peer-to-peer file sharing) of internal documents from the Milan-based Hacking Team, a firm long accused of unethical sales of tools that help governments break into target computers and phones. The breached trove includes executive emails, customer invoices and even source code; the company's twitter feed was hacked, controlled by the intruders for nearly 12 hours, and used to distribute samples of the company's hacked files. The security community spent Sunday night picking through the spy firm's innards and in some cases finding what appear to be new confirmations that Hacking Team sold digital intrusion tools to authoritarian regimes. Those revelations may be well timed to influence an ongoing U.S. policy debate over how to control spying software, with a deadline for public debate on new regulations coming this month.
© UnknownAccording to mainstream media, the current economic crisis in Greece is due to the government spending too much money on its people that it went broke. This claim however, is a lie. It was the banks that wrecked the country so oligarchs and international corporations could benefit.
Except that it is a big fat lie ... not only about Greece, but about other European countries such as Spain, Portugal, Italy and Ireland who are all experiencing various degrees of austerity. It was also the same big, fat lie that was used by banks and corporations to exploit many Latin American, Asian and African countries for many decades.
Greece did not fail on its own. It was made to fail.
In summary, the banks wrecked the Greek government and deliberately pushed it into unsustainable debt so that oligarchs and international corporations can profit from the ensuing chaos and misery.
Comment: As we now know, Greece did it. They voted no to austerity, took the proverbial bull by the horns, and stood up for themselves in a major way. But the geopolitical drama is still unfolding as the troika must now respond, and Greece must stand steadfast in defying the yoke of slavery that the international banks have sought to thrust upon them.
© Flickr/Stowe Boyd
"For it is only criminalsOdysseus/Ulysses took ten years to go back home after the Trojan War. His descendants are now making history in the original home of democracy. And they are not going anywhere. They have already placed their Trojan horse in the home of intolerance and austerity. There's no turning back from restoring dignity. And if the Muses rule it, it will be back to the drachma.
who presume to damage other people nowadays
without the aid of philosophy."
Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities.
The so-called EU "institutions" - along with cosmically mediocre politicians of wealthy EU nations — behaved like barbarians all along, proving, graphically, how the whole Kafkaesque EU construction hates democracy with a vengeance.
Brussels and Berlin proved they are in the regime change business. Updating the exceptionalists on Iraq in 2003, they were advocating the destruction of a democratically elected government via economic Shock and Awe. Their subsequent wet dream was to impose renewed austerity on an interim, unelected technocratic government.
© Reuters / Alkis Konstantinidis
Tsakalotos "will be sworn in with the political oath as finance minister," the presidency official told Reuters.
Tsakalotos was previously the deputy foreign minister responsible for international economic relations.
© Reuters / Kevin Lamarque
"Within the framework of Odessa's anti-corruption pressure, the US government agreed to provide funds for the salaries of the new team of [Mikhail] Saakashvili," Saakashvili wrote on his Facebook page after the meeting with Geoffrey Pyatt, the US Ambassador to Ukraine.
He added that American police officers from California "will train new Odessa police."
Comment: Unbelievable, we the US taxpayers are going to pay for Saakashvili and his cronies. This is just absurd and we have no say in the matter.
More austerity and new rounds of loans? Voters in Greece's emergency referendum were overwhelmingly against it. Whatever happens next, they stood up to the authoritarian tactics of the European Union. Hurrah.
Now signal the panic. Collapse may be impending. Then doom. Contagion could spread to America, too, and trigger global market implosion and derivatives meltdown.Greeks voted overwhelmingly to reject creditors' proposal of more austerity measures in return for rescue loans, in the country's first referendum in 41 years Sunday.
The referendum "will stay in history as a unique moment when a small European nation rose up against debt-bondage," Varoufakis said. (source)
© Flickr / Glenn Pope
Anti-Russian sanctions and NATO's military buildup "merely invite Russian toughness and intransigence. That's the story of the last two years," he pointed out in an article titled America's Losing Russia Strategy.
Apparently, this approach is not working. Russia has long called the restrictive measures counterproductive (with many European countries echoing this sentiment) and slammed the enhanced military presence on it borders as jeopardizing European peace and security.
Comment: Washington is waging a world war aimed against Russia and China, and its greatest weapon is plausible deniability. Also see:
Putin's phone call to Obama and its significance
© AP Photo
On Sunday, more than 61 percent of Greek voters rejected the lenders-proposed bailout plan, which stipulates spending cuts and tax increases in exchange for further financial assistance to the country.
The referendum was preceded by several rounds of talks between Athens and its major international creditors — the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Eurogroup that ended without a deal.
© Unknown"You can't make me do anything I don't want to!"
Just days after the U.N. released its "Report of the Independent Commission of Inquiry on the 2014 Gaza Conflict," Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—during a closed meeting of Israeli officials— remarked that "Israel is considering whether or not to stay in the Human Rights Council in light of the recent UN Gaza report."
Flight or fight? It appears that because the report took a critical stance in questioning Israel's motives and actions during last summer's 51-day-bombardment of Gaza and the West Bank, Netanyahu is more willing to bow out altogether than to confront the issues detailed in the report head-on.
Some crucial findings: Since Operation Protective Edge, Netanyahu and other Israeli officials have maintained the same assertion— that Israel did everything in its power to avoid hitting Palestinian civilians and that it went above and beyond the standards of international humanitarian law. The U.N, report contradicts that very claim and others—in its principal findings and conclusions.
Comment: So we're finally seeing some real criticism of Israel for its atrocities in Gaza coming from the UN, and Israel can't take the heat. What's your next move Israel? Blow up the UN building and blame it on the Palestinians? Bomb the people of Gaza yet again in your psychopathic rage because you can? Even if this UN report is toothless, many more sane people of the world know what you're doing and what you're about. And it ain't anything even remotely human.
Comment: The spyware in question is a Western-made surveillance tool sold to police and intelligence agencies that's "so powerful it can turn on webcams and microphones and grab documents off hard drives," according to the findings of a study published by the University of Toronto Munk School of Global Affairs' Citizen Lab. Invasive? Despicable? How about the Stuxnet computer worm, which damaged centrifuges in an Iranian nuclear plant, that was jointly developed by the U.S. and Israel, according to the New York Times. Weaknesses are "open doors." Do you trust your government?