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Israeli intelligence officers who were supporting terrorists in Syria have been arrested


Times of Islamabad
Tue, 04 Jun 2019 13:59 UTC
syrian soldiers

SAA soldiers in Syria
A senior Syrian military analyst said that the army has arrested nearly 30 foreign intelligence agents during the operations to take back the strategic town of Kafar Naboudeh in Northern Hama.

The Arabic-language website of Sputnik news agency quoted Brigadier General Ali Maqsoud as saying on Thursday that the Syrian army tactically withdrew from Kafar Naboudeh in Northern Hama after killing over 200 terrorists in three massive offensives by them.

He added that the terrorists reinvigorated their positions immediately after arriving in the town with the support of the foreign experts and intelligence officers of several countries, including Turkey and Israel.
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Magnify

House Judiciary to launch 'top to bottom' antitrust investigation of US' largest tech firms

Sean Moran
Breitbart
Mon, 03 Jun 2019 00:00 UTC
Big Tech, antitrust investigation technology
© AFP / Damien Meyer
Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI) said they will focus less on specific companies and more on the “tremendous concentration of market power” that Silicon Valley has on the Internet.
The House Judiciary Committee said Monday that it will launch a "top-to-bottom" antitrust investigation of America's largest tech companies, including Amazon, Facebook, and Google, making antitrust behavior of big tech a bipartisan issue.

The Democrat-led investigation arises after the Donald Trump Department of Justice (DOJ) announced an antitrust investigation into Google, and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has moved into its final steps towards a potential probe into Google.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-NY) said in a statement Monday, "The open Internet has delivered enormous benefits to Americans, including a surge of economic opportunity, massive investment, and new pathways for education online. But there is growing evidence that a handful of gatekeepers have come to capture control over key arteries of online commerce, content, and communications."

Although Congress does not have the regulatory power of the DOJ or the FTC, it can outline possible legislation and subpoena tech executives and documents relating to big tech's practices on privacy, tech censorship, and competition.

Comment: See also:

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Family

Why falling birth rates aren't something to celebrate

Chelsea Follett
Human Progress
Sun, 21 Apr 2019 00:01 UTC
newborn baby
Traditionally, Easter is a celebration of new life and fertility, replete with rabbit imagery - a symbol of fecundity. Both globally and in the United States, birth rates are falling, and there is considerable debate as to whether that is a good or bad thing. On one side of the argument are those who believe that declining birth rates are a good thing, particularly from an environmental perspective. They are urging people to have fewer children. On the other hand, there are those who believe that overpopulation is not an acute problem, because birth rates are already declining. In fact, they argue, a smaller population could have negative economic consequences.

Let's look at the former first. Earlier this month, HBO host Bill Maher said, "I can't think of a better gift to our planet than pumping out fewer humans to destroy it," and he claimed that the world is "too crowded." He is not alone in that belief. More than a third of U.S. millennials worry about the environmental effect of childbearing, including congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who recently questioned the ethics of producing more children.

Comment: See also:

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Handcuffs

Assange won't face charges over role in devastating CIA leak

Natasha Bertrand
Politico
Sun, 02 Jun 2019 12:54 UTC
Julian Assange
© Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP/Getty Images
The decision surprised national security experts and some former officials, given prosecutors' recent decision to go after the WikiLeaks founder on Espionage Act charges.

The Justice Department has decided not to charge Julian Assange for his role in exposing some of the CIA's most secret spying tools, according to a U.S. official and two other people familiar with the case.

It's a move that has surprised national security experts and some former officials, given prosecutors' recent decision to aggressively go after the WikiLeaks founder on more controversial Espionage Act charges that some legal experts said would not hold up in court. The decision also means that Assange will not face punishment for publishing one of the CIA's most potent arsenals of digital code used to hack devices, dubbed Vault 7. The leak - one of the most devastating in CIA history - not only essentially rendered those tools useless for the CIA, it gave foreign spies and rogue hackers access to them.

Comment: One can only assume that the US feels they have enough to go after Assange with the Manning leak to be able to avoid having to admit the legitimacy of the Vault 7 material. There's no question they're out for blood, how they get it is almost immaterial.

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Brick Wall

Left-wing activists shut down Harvard's president. Harvard didn't even threaten to punish them

Greg Piper
The College Fix
Mon, 03 Jun 2019 00:01 UTC
divestment protest graphic
© Elena Ramos
Divestment is their new 'favorite tactic'

Universities tell students it's okay to disrupt campus events when administrators fail to punish activists for previous disruptions.

Harvard University went even further with anti-fossil fuel activists: It didn't threaten to punish them at all.

Isa Flores-Jones of Divest Harvard told The Harvard Crimson that "none of" the group's members were "directly" threatened with discipline, much less punished, for their shutdown of President Lawrence Bacow's event with the Harvard Kennedy School in April.

Comment: Regardless of the justness of their cause, this whole 'scream-and-shout-not-letting-others-speak' and rejecting invitations for actual dialogue will be the downfall of the social justice movement. That Harvard has chosen to do nothing in response shows who's really in charge in the Universities.

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Compass

Thirty-two tips for navigating a society that is full of propaganda and manipulation

Caitlin Johnstone
Medium
Mon, 03 Jun 2019 00:01 UTC
compass
For as long as there has been human language, humans have been using it to manipulate one another. The fact that it is possible to skillfully weave a collection of symbolic mouth noises together in such a way as to extract favors, concessions, votes and consent from other humans has made manipulation so common that it now pervades our society from top to bottom, from personal relationships between two people to international relationships between government agencies and the public.

This has made it very difficult to figure out what's going on, both in our lives and in the world. Here are some tips for navigating this complex manipulation-laden landscape, whether that be the manipulations you may encounter in your small-scale personal interactions or the large-scale manipulations which impact the entire world:

Comment: See also:

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Snakes in Suits

Key Mueller figure George Nader charged with transporting child porn

Morgan Chalfant and Jacqueline Thomsen
The Hill
Mon, 03 Jun 2019 17:47 UTC
george nader
George Nader, a Lebanese American businessman with links to associates of President Trump, has been arrested on a charge of transporting child pornography.

U.S. officials arrested Nader at John F. Kennedy Airport on Monday morning, the Justice Department said. Nader was charged under seal after he arrived in Washington from Dubai in January 2018 with a cellphone containing images of minors engaged in sexual conduct, officials said.

The criminal complaint, dated April 19, 2018, was made public after his arrest Monday.

Nader was a key figure in special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference, sitting for multiple interviews and providing information on his effort to broker a meeting in the Seychelles between Trump ally and Blackwater founder Erik Prince and a Russian financier.

He was arrested after landing at JFK and is expected to be arraigned Monday afternoon, according to the Department of Justice.

Nader pleaded guilty to the same charge in 1991.

An affidavit that was unsealed Monday alleges that a search warrant approved in a "matter unrelated to child pornography" allowed for the search of any items on Nader's person as well as his baggage. Among the items cleared for search were electronic devices, including cellphones.
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Eye 1

Facial recognition and mass surveillance being introduced to US schools

Mac Slavo
SHTFplan.org
Sun, 02 Jun 2019 00:00 UTC
Surveillance coming to schools
We are staring our Orwellian future right in the face. Beginning in New York, facial recognition is coming to schools in the United States and it'll be switched on for testing next week.

The dystopian future George Orwell warned about in his accidental historical predictions book, 1984, has arrived. According to an article by Engadget, the Lockport City School District in New York will start testing a facial and object recognition system called "Aegis" on June 3rd. According to BuzzFeed News, that will make it the first in the U.S. to pilot a facial recognition mass surveillance system on its students and faculty.
The district installed cameras and the software suite back in September, using $1.4 million of the $4.2 million funding it received through the New York Smart Schools Bond Act. Funding provided through the Bond Act is supposed to go towards instructional tech devices, such as iPads and laptops, but the district clearly had other plans. -Engadget
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Cell Phone

Chinese intellectual property 'theft': Indicting Huawei Is an embarrassment to the US tech industry

Moshe Adler
Counterpunch
Fri, 31 May 2019 21:41 UTC
Huawei’s European Research Center

Huawei’s European Research Center in Munich, Germany
With its criminal indictment at the beginning of the year the US government has successfully made Huawei the poster child for technology theft by China. But the indictment is an embarrassment. Huawei is not a thief.

Huawei is charged with stealing technology for a robot that T-Mobile-USA uses to test phones. The robot, "Tappy," taps phones repeatedly to determine their durability. Huawei wanted T-Mobile to offer its phones to its subscribers, and eager for its phone to pass the test, sent engineers to T-Mobile's lab to learn how Tappy works. One of the conditions T-Mobile set for permitting Huawei to examine Tappy was that the robot would not be photographed. But a Huawei engineer did photograph it, and the indictment alleges that this was a breach of a trade secret. It first tells to what length T-Mobile went to keep Tappy a secret, and then it recounts how the Huawei engineer went about photographing it secretly. Reporting about the indictment NPR told its readers "[w]e would like to include a photo here of Tappy, but photographing the robot is expressly prohibited by T-Mobile, and Tappy is kept under very tight security in a lab at T-Mobile headquarters in Bellevue, Wash." What the indictment does not say is that Tappy is not a secret but a sales-prop. T-Mobile invites customers to "Say Hello to T-Mobile Tap Happy" in a video that displays it in operation. Huawei did sign a confidentiality agreement that prohibited it from photographing Tappy, but when it did, it was not photographing a secret.
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Arrow Down

Russian Syrian war veteran killed near Moscow defending people assaulted by angry mob


RT
Mon, 03 Jun 2019 20:04 UTC
Russian Syrian war veteran
© vk.com/ivancosmassage
A former special forces soldier, who fought against terrorists in Aleppo, has tragically died in the Moscow region as he rushed to defend a group of people attacked by a vengeful gang and was stabbed to death.

The tragic incident took place in the town of Putilkovo located close to the Russian capital. Nikita Belyankin, a Syrian war veteran and a former serviceman with the Russian military intelligence (GRU) special forces unit, was walking down the street with his girlfriend when he saw about a dozen angry men beating two people lying on the ground outside a local bar. One of them had already suffered a stab wound.

Belyankin rushed to help the victims and first fired a warning shot from his rubber-bullet handgun in an attempt to disperse the crowd. The attackers, however, assaulted him instead. "He could not just move along in such a situation and not interfere," Belyankin's friend told the Russian media.

The former war veteran then used all his ammo firing at the attackers' legs in a bid to stop them but they still eventually managed to corner him. In the scuffle that ensued one of the mobsters stabbed him right in the heart.
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