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Oh the irony: AP sues over access to FBI records involving fake news story

Michael Biesecker
AP
Thu, 27 Aug 2015 21:56 UTC
US Department of Justice
© Getty Images
The Associated Press sued the U.S. Department of Justice Thursday over the FBI's failure to provide public records related to the creation of a fake news story used to plant surveillance software on a suspect's computer.

AP joined with the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press to file the lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

At issue is a 2014 Freedom of Information request seeking documents related to the FBI's decision to send a web link to the fake article to a 15-year-old boy suspected of making bomb threats to a high school near Olympia, Washington. The link enabled the FBI to infect the suspect's computer with software that revealed its location and Internet address.

Comment: So now AP is worried about fake news stories from the government because of planted software on its computers?

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Cloud Lightning

New York will fund $100M flood protection project to shield lower Manhattan from 'changing climate'

Erin Durkin
New York Daily News
Thu, 27 Aug 2015 21:10 UTC
Image
© Craig Warga/New York Daily News
Flood walls, levees, and more parkland will be added under the $100 million project to safeguard lower Manhattan from major storms.
The city will spend $100 million to build a new flood protection system to shield lower Manhattan from major storms, Mayor de Blasio will announce Thursday.

The project — stretching from the top of Battery Park City around the tip of Manhattan and up to the Lower East Side — will use measures like levees, flood walls, and more park land to soak up storm water and protect the area from the "absolute devastation" it experienced during Sandy, said Dan Zarrilli, director of the Mayor's Office of Recovery and Resiliency.

"With a changing climate, the risks are growing," Zarrilli said.

Comment: New York may want to change their mind on what to prepare for: Ice age cometh: Brutal winters point to Earth turning colder.

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Heart - Black

IDF celebrates anniversary of Gaza op - they should be begging Palestinians for forgiveness

John Wight
RT
Thu, 27 Aug 2015 20:41 UTC
Anybody still laboring under the misconception that we live in a world underpinned by international law, democracy, and human rights have some explaining to do when it comes to the plight of the Palestinian people.
gaza destruction
© Mohammed Salem / Reuters
Destruction in Gaza from Operation Protective Edge.
It is a plight brought back into sharp focus on the anniversary of Israel's military operation in Gaza last year, Operation Protective Edge, during which over 2,000 Palestinians were killed, 500 of them children, with thousands more injured or maimed, many permanently.

No amount of apologetics or denial can possibly deflect from the glaring and grievous injustice of this event, which despite the suffering endured by a civilian population, was commemorated by the Israel Defense Forces, the IDF, with the following recent tweeted message: "One yr ago today, Op. Protective Edge ended. 67 soldiers fell in defense of the country. May their memory be blessed."

The country referred in this message, it is worth recalling, exists on land taken by force from those who lived there previously. Since then the Palestinian people who have managed to remain - dismissed, dehumanized, and demonized - have posed a threat to no-one apart from those who continue to oppress, kill, and occupy them. If resistance to the aforementioned can be described as terrorism then the word is bankrupt of all meaning.

The siege of Gaza, under which 1.8 million people have been forced to exist in what is tantamount to a vast prison camp for the past ten years, shames the West, without whose continued financial, political, and diplomatic support Israel would find its ability to consistently flout international law vis-à-vis its oppression of a people whose only crime is that they continue to exist.

Comment: The probability of Israel showing any remorse for its persecution of the Palestinian people is just about nil.

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Snakes in Suits

More fear: French intelligence fears Islamist 'missile strike on airliner' or 9/11-style attack

Henry Samuel and David Chazan
The Telegraph
Thu, 27 Aug 2015 20:37 UTC
Image
© Alamy
French security forces are bracing for the eventuality of civil unrest.
French security forces are bracing for the eventuality of civil unrest and fear there could be a missile strike on a passenger airliner or a September 11-style attack, according to sources close to French intelligence.

"Airlines have been warned of a possible attack on a plane with an anti-tank missile," a source told The Telegraph. "But pilots are unsure how to take evasive action."

After Friday's thwarted attempt to massacre passengers on an Amsterdam-Paris train and a series of terrorist attacks and attempted killings in France this year, President François Hollande warned the nation to prepare for more violence, considered inevitable as the Islamist threat grows.

Comment: This article paints the picture that France is helpless in the face of terrorism and blowback from Libya. Now France "needs" to call in the army in the guise of protecting the people to clean up undesirable neighborhoods and increase security check points.

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Eye 2

U.S. puppet state Saudi Arabia and their psychopathic genocide in Yemen

Catherine Shakdam
RT
Tue, 25 Aug 2015 18:47 UTC
Image
© Khaled Abdullah / Reuters
Blanketed by its wealth and protected by political alliances, Saudi Arabia has covertly run and promoted a new movement in the Middle East: religious eugenics, under the false pretense of opposing the rise of Iran. From Syria to Bahrain and Yemen the evidence is overwhelming.

Earlier this August, the Red Cross added its voice to those of other humanitarian and rights groups in its condemnation of Saudi Arabia's war in Yemen, lifting the lid on Riyadh's little house of horrors in southern Arabia.

In no uncertain terms Peter Maurer, the head of the international Red Cross told reporters he had seldom witnessed such degree of devastation. He said: "Yemen after five months looks like Syria after five years ... The images I have from Sanaa and Aden remind of what I have seen in Syria."

He stressed "the firepower with which this war is fought on the ground and in the air is causing more suffering than in other societies, which are stronger and where infrastructures are better off and people are wealthier and have reserves and can escape."

A country in ruins, Yemen is also a nation in permanent mourning, as every day its people are relentlessly slain - casualties of a violent and murderous colonial war - the latest victims of Riyadh's expansionist military campaign in the Middle East.
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Recycle

The rotting corpse of Minsk 2.0

Christopher Black
New Eastern Outlook
Fri, 21 Aug 2015 01:24 UTC
tank
The Minsk-2 ceasefire agreement is dead but no one wants to bury the rotting corpse. Since it was signed in February of this year the Donbas governments and Russia have bent over backward to comply with the terms of that agreement hoping against hope that the Kiev junta would do the same. They hoped in vain.

Poroshenko and his fascist allies instead have refused to change the constitution to accommodate the concerns of the Donbas republics, have tried to suppress the Communist Party and other parties in opposition, have refused to withdraw heavy weaponry from the line of contact, have maintained increasingly heavy artillery attacks on the civilian populations and areas and cut off routes for essential foodstuffs, medical aid and technical equipment. Rather than enjoying a ceasefire, the peoples of the Donbas are under a state of siege.

Poroshenko openly calls for a military solution to the crisis and has increased the draft in the west. The NATO alliance continues to pour in its forces disguised as "advisers" and "mercenaries" and puts additional pressure on Russia with multiple military exercises from the Baltic to Bulgaria, where more tanks have been recently dispatched to "send Russia a message."

Comment: Russia and Donbass have played the game of geopolitics well, despite the carnage and massive war crimes committed by Kiev and NATO against them. Knowing full well that peace was the last thing Kiev/NATO wanted (despite lip service to the contrary), Russia not only drafted all the important portions of the Minsk agreements to show that they were fully committed to a rational, peaceful resolution to the conflict; Donbass fully complied with their end of the bargain.

So when the agreements inevitably fail, it will be demonstrably Kiev's failure. What then? It looks like DPR and LPR haven't given up their wish to join the Russian Federation:
In late autumn, the integration of the two Novorossiya republics, the DPR and LPR, into the structure of Russia will reach a qualitatively new level: it is expected that after a month, after holding local elections to the government of Novorossiya, a referendum will be carried out which will put forth the question of the DPR and LPR joining the Russian Federation.
Moscow has consistently stated its wish that DPR and LPR remain part of Ukraine, albeit as semi-autonomous regions. Will that change? Or will the people's will have some effect on the so-far intransigent Kiev 'government'?

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Safe

China confirms it has begun liquidating US Treasuries

Tyler Durden
Zerohedge
Thu, 27 Aug 2015 19:30 UTC
Image
On Tuesday evening, we asked what would happen if emerging markets joined China in dumping US Treasurys. For months we've documented the PBoC's liquidation of its vast stack of US paper. Back in July for instance, we noted that China had dumped a record $143 billion in US Treasurys in three months via Belgium, leaving Goldman speechless for once.

We followed all of this up this week by noting that thanks to the new FX [currency] regime (which, in theory anyway, should have required less intervention), China has likely sold somewhere on the order of $100 billion in US Treasurys (UST) in the past two weeks alone in open FX ops to steady the yuan. Put simply, as part of China's devaluation and subsequent attempts to contain said devaluation, China has been purging an epic amount of Treasurys.

But even as the cat was out of the bag for Zero Hedge readers and even as, to mix colorful escape metaphors, the genie has been out of the bottle since mid-August for China which, thanks to a steadfast refusal to just float the yuan and be done with it, will have to continue selling USTs by the hundreds of billions, the world at large was slow to wake up to what China's FX interventions actually implied until Wednesday when two things happened: i) Bloomberg, citing fixed income desks in New York, noted "substantial selling pressure" in long-term USTs emanating from somebody in the "Far East", and ii) Bill Gross asked, in a tweet, if China was selling Treasurys.

Comment: Another sign that the economies of the world are all fighting for survival and quickly will use all of their options available to forestall a catastrophic event from happening or reduce their exposure to US debt.

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Star of David

Israel's destruction of Mamilla cemetery part of effort to remove Palestine from Jerusalem

Pablo Castellani and Chiara Cruciati
Mondoweiss
Thu, 27 Aug 2015 18:30 UTC
Image
© Pablo Castellani
Tombs in the historic Mamilla cemetery in West Jerusalem. In the background the construction site of the Israeli Museum of Tolerance set to open in 2017.
Mamilla cemetery does not exist anymore. What exists now is a hotel, a school, a parking lot, a public garden, a nightclub and the US consulate. Also a museum to celebrate tolerance. But the meaning of tolerance in West Jerusalem, a few steps away from the Old City, is surreal — to build the story of a new Jerusalem, the Israeli authorities are erasing its past. Mamilla cemetery is a prominent cornerstone of the Arab, Islamic and Palestinian identity of the city. But today it's a forgotten place.

Since the creation of the State of Israel, the Israeli government has worked to remove the graveyard from the heart of West Jerusalem. "In 1948, the year of Nakba, the catastrophe of the Palestinian people, the upper part was immediately transformed into a public park, renamed 'Independence Park', aimed at celebrating the victory in the '48 war. They created the garden, uprooting and removing dozens of ancient tombs." explains Nader Dajani as he walks between what remains of the cemetery of his ancestors. The Dajani family is one of the most ancient and wealthy families in Palestine, several of its members are buried in Mamilla.

"In the Israeli project the only things that deserve to survive in Mamilla are two shrines: one belongs to a famous local scholar, and one to Ahmad Dajani, a well known sheikh. The only reasons behind this decision is the archaeological importance of the shrines and also their sizes: it's easy to remove a small tomb, a stone; it's harder to uproot a huge one".

Comment: On and on it goes, where will it stop? Rewriting history to justify their existence is what psychopaths do all around the world. It is always the victors of wars that write the history in their view and shut out the real truth of events.

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Brick Wall

Poles showing their xenophobia on immigrants: "People don't understand them, don't like them"

Adam Leszczyński
The Guardian
Thu, 02 Jul 2015 18:55 UTC
polish flag
© Filippo Monteforte/AFP/Getty Images
Poland accepts few refugees and has been little affected by the crisis in Europe, yet its views on immigration are among the most pungent on the continent

"We don't want terrorists here," the Polish pensioner says, when asked about EU plans to resettle refugees more broadly across the continent. "Have you seen what they're doing in the west?"

It's a popular view here, if a baffling one. Poland is little affected by the refugee crisis in Europe, and accepts vanishingly small numbers of migrants. And yet the country has some of the most pungent views on immigration on the continent. A recent survey for the television station TVN found that two-thirds of Poles share the same hostility towards immigrants expressed by the Warsaw grandmother cited above.

According to a study in 2013 by the Centre for Research on Prejudice - a professional academic centre at the University of Warsaw - as many as 69% of Poles do not want non-white people living in their country.
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Red Flag

EU's already weak foundations being tested by migrant crisis

Finian Cunningham
Strategic Culture Foundation
Mon, 24 Aug 2015 18:17 UTC
Image
© Darrin Zammin Lupi, Reuters
The influx of migrants into the European Union could be dealt with humanely and practicably - if EU members worked together in solidarity. But the haphazard influx is inciting tensions between member states precisely because of the lack of EU solidarity. Germany - the biggest destination for refugees - is showing its exasperation with other states, which is in turn eroding the very foundations of the 28-member bloc.

The freedom of movement for European citizens between European Union member states is one of the foundational rights of the bloc since it declared itself a Single Market back in 1987. So, the latest warning from Germany that it may withdraw from treaty provisions that afford this right is a blow to the heart of the EU and its outward image of «unity».

Germany's interior minister Thomas De Maiziere was speaking after latest figures show that his country was projected to receive a record 800,000 migrants seeking asylum this year. That is four times the number that Germany processed last year, according to Eurostat figures cited by the BBC.

«Germany's interior minister says he cannot rule out suspending participation in the agreement allowing passport-free travel between most European states», reported the BBC.

Comment: See also:

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