US officials are far more concerned than they are publicly acknowledging about the gigantic cyberattack against JPMorgan that affected as many as 76 million households.

And they believe Russians with at least loose connections to the country's government are behind the attack, according to a new report from The New York Times.


JP Morgan revealed Thursday that as many as 76 million households and 7 million small businesses may have had private data compromised in the breach, one of the largest and most serious into a US corporation.

Data that may have been compromised in the breach include contact information and "internal JPMorgan Chase information" relating to the users, according to an SEC filing from the company.

If latest reports are to be believed, the Islamic State militants might be conspiring to deliberately infect jihadists with the deadly Ebola virus and send them to America in order to spread the disease in the US - an event that could see America being attacked in a new pseudo-war.

The Israeli News Agency, a site which claims to be Israel's first online news organisation has confirmed the authenticity of the report saying it "clears all news items relating to Israeli security with the Israel government press office."

The agency said, citing "Israeli security sources", that dozens of ISIS fighters in Syria have fallen ill and had symptoms of Ebola. This news quickly ignited a new conspiracy theory claiming that ISIS is planning to send Ebola-infected militants into the US to spread the disease.

"While Western nations fighting the Islamic State might consider this reported Ebola outbreak among radical jihadists to be welcome news, there is a very big, very dangerous downside to Islamic terrorists being carriers of the virus," Norvell Rose, the winner of numerous journalism honours, writes for WesternJournalism.com.

The article also cites the Israeli News Agency (INA) for inference into why the news could prove dangerous for the Americans. The INA in its report quoted a source it identified only as "AVi", who is "a global anti-terrorism consultant" as saying: "We know that ISIS has training camps in Africa and it is highly possible that this is where contact with the virus was made.

Members of the German media are paid by the CIA in return for spinning the news in a way that supports US interests, and some German outlets are nothing more than PR appendages of NATO, according to a new book by Udo Ulfkotte, a former editor of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of Germany's largest newspapers.

Ulfkotte is a serious mainstream journalist. Here he is on Germany's leading political talk show a couple of years ago. The book is a sensation in Germany, #7 on the bestseller list. Its political dynamite, coming on the heels of German outrage of NSA tapping of their phones. Check out the RT.com story on it in the video below.

Here at Russia Insider, it has long been apparent to us that there is something distinctly odd about the German media regarding Russia. We follow it, and it is much more strident than even the anglo-saxon media regarding Russia, while German public opinion is much more positive towards Russia than in other countries.

Another interesting thing about it is that it is very disparate. Some major voices are very reasonable about Russia, but most are negative, and some are comically apocalyptic. This is what one would expect if there was some financial influence ginning the system.

© RIA Novosti / STF
Gleb Pavlovsky

The interview below, conducted in January 2012 by Tom Parfitt, then working for the Guardian in Moscow, has never before been published. It is a remarkable document - arguably the most revealing single account of Putin's vision of rule, and its roots, to have emerged so far. From late 1999 to 2011, Pavlovsky was a key adviser to Putin in the management of Russian opinion - one of the regime's two leading 'political technologists', along with Vladislav Surkov. The profiles of the pair were quite distinct. Where the half-Chechen Surkov, born in 1964, is a pure product of post-communism, who rose through banking and business to the counsels of the Kremlin as a post-modern ideologue and part-time novelist, Pavlovsky - born in Odessa over a decade earlier, in 1951 - was a dissident student in the late 60s, taxed with 'anarchism and left extremism'. Arrested in the early 80s for his part in an underground journal, after collaborating with the authorities he was exiled to the north, rather than jailed. Under Gorbachev he returned to Moscow, becoming an active publicist in the democratic ferment of the time, before throwing in his lot with Yeltsin and helping to organize the rigged election that kept him in the Kremlin in 1996. Thereafter he was an architect of 'managed democracy' under Putin, whom he could observe closely for over a decade of service, until in the spring of 2011 he opposed his patron's return to a third Presidency, and was dismissed. Intellectually sharper and more historically minded than Surkov (also, if less drastically, side-lined), Pavlovsky draws a striking portrait of Putin's background, temperament and outlook - above all his attitude to capital. He also offers a vivid insider's account of the way in which the political consensus Putin had enjoyed started to fall away once he decided to brush Medvedev aside and move back to the Kremlin - requiring, in Pavlovsky's view, a now full-out financialization of a political system that has become a 'hybrid of an insurance company and a casino'. Pavlovsky, famous in the eyes of critics for his 'swaggering cynicism and épatage', describes himself as a 'specialist in the construction and protection of government'. Since this interview, he has been outspokenly critical of the regime's handling of the crisis in the Ukraine, as unleashing blind emotions on the street of just the sort that the political technology he helped build was designed to suppress. In a recent article, he has singled out the role of Russian television for attack, fearing that it has become a quasi-independent and potentially destabilizing power within the regime, as a 'pathogenic' force whipping up a popular hysteria that may come back to haunt it.

The US military expects to increase the number of troops deployed to Liberia to fight the Ebola outbreak to nearly 4,000, up from a planned 3,000-strong force, the Pentagon said on Friday.

About 200 soldiers are already in Liberia setting up a headquarters for the US mission, which is aimed at training health care workers and setting up medical facilities for international aid teams.

President Barack Obama earlier this month announced that about 3,000 troops would eventually head to West Africa to help with efforts against the deadly virus.

After raising a storm of controversy for manipulating its users emotions in the name of scientific research, Facebook announced new steps to consider future studies more carefully.

Facebook was widely criticized in June after researchers published the results of a study that measured the impact of showing almost 700,000 users more positive or negative stories in their news feeds. The study found a tiny but possibly significant impact on users' happiness from the manipulations.

"We were unprepared for the reaction the paper received when it was published and have taken to heart the comments and criticism," Mike Schroepfer, Facebook's Chief Technology Officer, said in a blog post on Thursday. "It is clear now that there are things we should have done differently."

Under the new policy, Facebook researchers will have to seek approval for sensitive projects from a new committee that will include members from the company's engineering, research, legal, privacy and policy teams. Notably absent are any reviewers from outside Facebook.

Ukraine is on the brink of committing economic suicide after imposing a crippling 55 percent tax on private gas producers, while parliament prepares to vote on next year's budget, which aims for a continuation of the same.

The Oct. 14 budget vote - which is already a month late - is a major condition for Ukraine's next credit tranche from the European Union, but if the 2015 budget goes through as proposed, it will decimate independent gas production, remove any potential for Ukrainian energy independence and deal a further blow to the already struggling economy.

"Kiev's attempt at fiscal discipline to fund the war effort in the east and stave off an economic crisis is not working, and the end result is going to be economic suicide," Robert Bensh, majority shareholder of Cub Energy, Ukraine's fourth-largest independent gas producer, told Oilprice.com from Kiev.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko signed off on the new tax code on Aug. 1, which effectively doubles the tax private gas producers in Ukraine will have to pay, calling into question any new investment, as well as commitment, by key producers already operating in the country.

For now, the new code will remain in force until the end of this year, during which time private gas drillers will be required to pay 55 percent of their subsoil revenue for extracting under five kilometers. This is up from 28 percent. Additionally, for any extraction beyond five kilometers, the tax will be 28 percent, up from 15 percent.

Despite strong lobbying efforts, the interim government plans to continue the new tax regime for next year, if it approves the budget.

The dire economic situation ahead of the Oct. 26 elections is accompanied by a growing sense of pessimism internationally.

Serbia has made it very clear that it will not join the European Union's sanctions against Russia, Serbian Ambassador to Russia Slavenko Terzić said on Friday.

"We do not want to join the sanctions against Russia . . . At this point, the Serbian leadership has clearly and precisely stated that we will never join sanctions again Russia," Terzić told reporters.

According to the ambassador, sanctions are "anachronistic political means" and "cannot resolve political issues". He noted that European countries may suffer from the bans themselves, as the countries' economies are closely linked.

The European Union has imposed several rounds of sanctions against Russia's largest banks, energy and defense companies, as well as certain individuals, over Moscow's alleged meddling in the Ukrainian conflict.

In August, Moscow was forced to respond with a one-year ban on certain food imports from the countries that had previously imposed sanctions against Russia.

An Internet video released Friday purports to show an Islamic State group fighter beheading British hostage Alan Henning. The video mirrored other beheading videos shot by the Islamic State group, which now holds territory along the border of Syria and Iraq.

The video ended with an Islamic State fighter threatening a man they identified as an American.

"Obama, you have started your aerial bombard of Shams (Syria), which keep on striking our people, so it is only right that we strike the next of your people," a masked militant said.

The Associated Press could not immediately verify the video's authenticity, though it was released in the same manner as other Islamic State group videos.

This is the fourth such video released by the Islamic State group. The full beheadings are not shown in the videos, but the British-accented, English-speaking militant holds a long knife and appears to begin cutting the three men, American reporters James Foley and Steven Sotloff and British aid worker David Haines.

Henning, 47, nicknamed "Gadget," had joined an aid convoy and was taken captive on Dec. 26, shortly after crossing the border between Turkey and Syria.

What are the odds?

You put about $68 billion annually into a maze of 17 major intelligence outfits. You build them glorious headquarters. You create a global surveillance state for the ages. You listen in on your citizenry and gather their communications in staggering quantities. Your employees even morph into avatars and enter video-game landscapes, lest any Americans betray a penchant for evil deeds while in entertainment mode. You collect information on visits to porn sites just in case, one day, blackmail might be useful. You pass around naked photos of them just for... well, the salacious hell of it. Your employees even use aspects of the system you've created to stalk former lovers and, within your arcane world, that act of "spycraft" gains its own name: LOVEINT.

You listen in on foreign leaders and politicians across the planet. You bring on board hundreds of thousands of crony corporate employees, creating the sinews of an intelligence-corporate complex of the first order. You break into the "backdoors" of the data centers of major Internet outfits to collect user accounts. You create new outfits within outfits, including an ever-expanding secret military and intelligence crew embedded inside the military itself (and not counted among those 17 agencies). Your leaders lie to Congress and the American people without, as far as we can tell, a flicker of self-doubt. Your acts are subject to secret courts, which only hear your versions of events and regularly rubberstamp them -- and whose judgments and substantial body of lawmaking are far too secret for Americans to know about.

You have put extraordinary effort into ensuring that information about your world and the millions of documents you produce doesn't make it into our world. You even have the legal ability to gag American organizations and citizens who might speak out on subjects that would displease you (and they can't say that their mouths have been shut). You undoubtedly spy on Congress. You hack into congressional computer systems. And if whistleblowers inside your world try to tell the American public anything unauthorized about what you're doing, you prosecute them under the Espionage Act, as if they were spies for a foreign power (which, in a sense, they are, since you treat the American people as if they were a foreign population). You do everything to wreck their lives and -- should one escape your grasp -- you hunt him implacably to the ends of the Earth.

As for your top officials, when their moment is past, the revolving door is theirs to spin through into a lucrative mirror life in the intelligence-corporate complex.