Tag: NATO

Finland Reclassifies Sex Abuse Laws Amid Migrant Grooming Gang Scandal

The recent spate of sexual attacks on underage schoolgirls as young as ten has spurred the Finnish authorities into action.

A cross-party decision for legislative changes (to be made before elections due in April) has been reached in an attempt to stomp out grooming and sexual abuse.

Finland’s Justice Ministry is set to change rape laws to ensure that sex without consent is always a crime, in line with previous demands from a citizens’ initiative, reports national broadcaster Yle.

The changes, largely influenced by neighboring Sweden, are expected to tighten legislation concerning sex with minors and give more consideration to victims in helpless situations. In the future, sex with a child will always be considered rape, which is not the case nowadays.

Finnish girls dealing with Somali immigrants

Former editor-in-chief of Breitbart News London has warned for years about the Islamic invasion into Europe and has now been proven right.

At present, intercourse with someone below the age of consent is classified as aggravated child abuse. This led to massive outrage when Finnish prosecutors last year failed to charge a man convicted of sexually abusing a 10-year-old with rape.

Previously, a citizens’ initiative on consent law gained 57,000 signatures, but was initially met with a cool reception from Justice Minister Antti Häkkänen and was given the cold shoulder by parliament.

However, following last week’s series of arrests over child sex abuse featuring migrant suspects, Häkkänen changed his tune, which campaigners see as their victory. By his own admission, Häkkänen was shocked by the recent reports of rape and sexual abuse. Nevertheless, he stressed that the changes should be made after more careful consideration.

A similar consent law has been implemented in several countries, including Germany and Sweden. In Sweden, it has led to more convictions of rape, with more severe punishments handed out, according to Swedish Radio.

Additionally, the changes will affect police rules on data gathering to allow them to better track individuals suspected of grooming online. Furthermore, the government is to look at whether aggravated sex crimes constitute sufficient reason to rescind Finnish citizenship.

However, another, more radical petition demanding the deportation of foreign sex offenders is still gathering signatures in light of the recent grooming gang scandal. At the time of writing, it has amassed close to 104,000 signatures, almost double as the consent petition.

This initiative is backed by the right-wing Blue Reform party, who want the Finnish government to interpret international agreement more freely than before. The party’s requirement is to be able to deport refugees convicted of sexual offenses, regardless of whether their home country is considered safe or not.

This would require a constitutional change, an unlikely measure. Still, a number of Finnish politicians, including Interior Minister Kai Mykkänen, call for harsher penalties for foreigners convicted of sex crimes.

Meanwhile, the number of reports of sexual offenses against children increased markedly last year, reaching 1,400 and topping 2017’s figure by 18 percent, Yle reported.

About a quarter of all reported sexual offenses were carried out by people with a foreign background, police inspector Pekka Heikkinen informed, which signals clear over-representation.

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Rep. Ilhan Omar Furthers Homophobic Conspiracy: Lindsey Graham ‘Compromised’

screen shot 2019-01-17 at 10.36.05 am

By John Nolte

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) is now spreading a homophobic conspiracy theory that originated with MSNBC anchor Stephanie Ruhle about Sen. Lindsey Graham being blackmailed by Trump over “something pretty extreme.”

Using her verified Twitter account, Omar wrote of Graham, “They got to him, he is compromised!”

Earlier this week, and without any evidence, Ruhle closed a MSNBC segment about Graham’s support for Trump with the media/left’s latest form of McCarthysim: “It could be that Donald Trump or somebody knows something pretty extreme about Lindsey Graham. We’re gonna leave it there.”

Everyone knows what Ruhle is referring to, which is why she was comfortable saying she would “leave it there.”

For years now, rumors have swirled that the never-married 63-year-old Graham is a homosexual. Ruhle wanted to get this rumor swirling as a means to punish Graham for his energetic and effective support for Trump of late, and it worked…

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And so on….

Ruhle was probably following the lead of Jon Cooper, chairman of the Democratic Coalition, who tweeted about Graham’s “pretty serious sexual kink” on Sunday:

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Regardless, this coordinated smear is straight-up homophobia, the use of homosexuality as a pejorative and weapon.

And we know it’s a smear because 1) Graham has said he is not gay and 2) even if he was, no one would care.

How do you blackmail someone for being a homosexual when no one cares?

Joining the sexual McCarthyites this week is Rep. Omar, who decided to further this conspiracy theory without citing any evidence. But it could be she’s too busy supporting Louis Farrakhan and defending her anti-Semitic comments about “the evil doings of Israel.”

Fox News reports that the freshman congresswoman is facing some blowback for her homophobic smear of Graham, but it is obviously not coming from the establishment media:

Harmeet K. Dhillon, a national committeewoman for the Republican National Committee, slammed Omar’s comment for bigotry: “Breathtaking bigotry, homophobia from a member of Congress. It’s not funny, and puzzling why Dems get away with outdated stereotypes and dumb conspiracy theories like this.”

“Is this a reference to the prominent & pernicious homophobic rumor that is circulating the internet? Because I might expect that from a troll, but you’re a Congresswoman,” Jerry Dunleavy tweeted.

“Here’s an elected representative promulgating the homophobic conspiracy theory, without evidence, that Lindsay Graham is a gay, blackmailed, shill,” writer Tiana Lowe seconded.

Omar hangs with hate leader Farrakhan, spreads anti-Semitism, and is now joining a homophobic smear campaign. But our oh-so progressive media continue to cover up for her.

As far as Graham, he is up for re-election in 2020 and because our media never leave their provincial and bigoted bubble, they will always see southerners as hicks and actually believe their smear campaign will cost Graham votes.

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(CENSORSHIP) – SWEDISH PUBLIC BROADCASTER CENSORS WORD “ISLAM” FROM MONOLOGUE ABOUT WHY SAUDI GIRL LEFT ISLAM

Swedish Public Broadcaster Censors Word "Islam" From Monologue About Why Saudi Girl Left Islam

Ruthless enforcement of political correctness exposed

 | Infowars.com – JANUARY 17, 2019

Sweden’s taxpayer-funded public broadcaster censored the world “Islam” from a monologue by refugee Rahaf Mohammad about why she left Islam.

During an interview, SVT omitted the words “Islam” and “haram” from the translation. Haram means “forbidden” in Arabic.

Mohammad used the word while describing how she was locked up for six months and suffered abuse from her family for getting her hair cut short because Islam forbids it.

The edit is major given that Mohammad’s entire plight is based around her rejection of Islam. As an apostate, she is under threat of death if returned to her native Saudi Arabia.

Sweden Democrat politician Kent Ekeroth first drew attention to the omission, accusing the network of state-sponsored censorship. The original English subtitles can briefly be seen behind the overlayed Swedish translation, meaning that the words “Islam” and “haram” were deliberately removed by SVT.

“For a Swedish SVT viewer, it is basically impossible to see the English subtitles that reflect what she actually tells. Instead, you are left to read the Swedish translation that omits most of what she said in that sentence,” he wrote.

The act of censorship was met with derision, with one person updating the network’s logo and name from Sveriges Television to “Stasi Vision TV”.

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“It’s like doing away with the word ‘Nazism’ in a report about World War II survivors! Or ‘communism’ in a report about the Soviet Union,” Twitter user Mikael Nilsson remarked.

The ruthless patrolling of politically correct boundaries is commonplace in Sweden, where a bizarre journalistic hive mind serves to manage acceptable discourse and shield Islam from criticism.

It appears as though Mohammad is set to prove herself problematic to leftists who simultaneously attempt to claim they are advancing “progressive” virtues while defending Islam, the least progressive belief system on the planet.

As we reported yesterday, one of the first things she did after arriving in Canada was proclaim her love for bacon.

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‘THE SMOKING GUN’: Google Manipulated YouTube Search Results for Hot Topics …Leaked Convo: ’Tons of White- and Blacklists That Humans Manually Curate’… …Pro-Life Videos Demoted — After Left-Wing Journo Complaint!

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By Allum Bokhari

In sworn testimony, Google CEO Sundar Pichai told Congress last month that his company does not “manually intervene” on any particular search result. Yet an internal discussion thread leaked to Breitbart News reveals Google regularly intervenes in search results on its YouTube video platform – including a recent intervention that pushed pro-life videos out of the top ten search results for “abortion.”

The term “abortion” was added to a “blacklist” file for “controversial YouTube queries,” which contains a list of search terms that the company considers sensitive. According to the leak, these include some of these search terms related to: abortion, abortions, the Irish abortion referendum, Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Waters, and anti-gun activist David Hogg.

The existence of the blacklist was revealed in an internal Google discussion thread leaked to Breitbart News by a source inside the company who wishes to remain anonymous. A partial list of blacklisted terms was also leaked to Breitbart by another Google source.

In the leaked discussion thread, a Google site reliability engineer hinted at the existence of more search blacklists, according to the source.

“We have tons of white- and blacklists that humans manually curate,” said the employee. “Hopefully this isn’t surprising or particularly controversial.”

Others were more concerned about the presence of the blacklist. According to the source, the software engineer who started the discussion called the manipulation of search results related to abortion a “smoking gun.”

The software engineer noted that the change had occurred following an inquiry from a left-wing Slate journalist about the prominence of pro-life videos on YouTube, and that pro-life videos were replaced with pro-abortion videos in the top ten results for the search terms following Google’s manual intervention.

“The Slate writer said she had complained last Friday and then saw different search results before YouTube responded to her on Monday,” wrote the employee. “And lo and behold, the [changelog] was submitted on Friday, December 14 at 3:17 PM.”

The manually downranked items included several videos from Dr. Antony Levatino, a former abortion doctor who is now a pro-life activist. Another video in the top ten featured a woman’s personal story of being pressured to have an abortion, while another featured pro-life conservative Ben Shapiro. The Slate journalist who complained to Google reportedthat these videos previously featured in the top ten, describing them in her story as “dangerous misinformation.”

Since the Slate journalist’s inquiry and Google’s subsequent intervention, the top search results now feature pro-abortion content from left-wing sources like BuzzFeed, Vice, CNN, and Last Week Tonight With John Oliver. In her report, the Slate journalist acknowledged that the search results changed shortly after she contacted Google.

The manual adjustment of search results by a Google-owned platform contradicts a key claim made under oath by Google CEO Sundar Pichai in his congressional testimony earlier this month: that his company does not “manually intervene on any search result.”

A Google employee in the discussion thread drew attention to Pichai’s claim, noting that it “seems like we are pretty eager to cater our search results to the social and political agenda of left-wing journalists.”

One of the posts in the discussion also noted that the blacklist had previously been edited to include the search term “Maxine Waters” after a single Google employee complained the top YouTube search result for Maxine Waters was “very low quality.”

Google’s alleged intervention on behalf of a Democratic congresswoman would be further evidence of the tech giant using its resources to prop up the left. Breitbart News previously reported on leaked emails revealing the company targeted pro-Democrat demographics in its get-out-the-vote efforts in 2016.

According to the source, a software engineer in the thread also noted that “a bunch of terms related to the abortion referendum in Ireland” had been added to the blacklist – another change with potentially dramatic consequences on the national policies of a western democracy.

youtube_controversial_query_blacklist

At least one post in the discussion thread revealed the existence of a file called “youtube_controversial_query_blacklist,” which contains a list of YouTube search terms that Google manually curates. In addition to the terms “abortion,” “abortions,” “Maxine Waters,” and search terms related to the Irish abortion referendum, a Google software engineer noted that the blacklist includes search terms related to terrorist attacks. (the posts specifically mentions that the “Strasbourg terrorist attack” as being on the list).

“If you look at the other entries recently added to the youtube_controversial_query_blacklist(e.g., entries related to the Strasbourg terrorist attack), the addition of abortion seems…out-of-place,” wrote the software engineer, according to the source.

After learning of the existence of the blacklist, Breitbart News obtained a partial screenshot of the full blacklist file from a source within Google. It reveals that the blacklist includes search terms related to both mass shootings and the progressive anti-second amendment activist David Hogg.

This suggests Google has followed the lead of Democrat politicians, who have repeatedly pushed tech companies to censor content related to the Parkland school shooting and the Parkland anti-gun activists. It’s part of a popular new line of thought in the political-media establishment, which views the public as too stupid to question conspiracy theories for themselves.

Here is the partial blacklist leaked to Breitbart:

2117 plane crash Russian

2118 plane crash

2119 an-148

2120 florida shooting conspiracy

2121 florida shooting crisis actors

2122 florida conspiracy

2123 florida false flag shooting

2124 florida false flag

2125 fake florida school shooting

2126 david hogg hoax

2127 david hogg fake

2128 david hogg crisis actor

2129 david hogg forgets lines

2130 david hogg forgets his lines

2131 david hogg cant remember his lines

2132 david hogg actor

2133 david hogg cant remember

2134 david hogg conspiracy

2135 david hogg exposed

2136 david hogg lines

2137 david hogg rehearsing

2120 florida shooting conspiracy

The full internal filepath of the blacklist, according to another source, is:

//depot/google3/googledata/superroot/youtube/youtube_controversial_query_blacklist

Contradictions

Responding to a request for comment, a YouTube spokeswoman said the company wants to promote “authoritative” sources in its search results, but maintained that YouTube is a “platform for free speech” that “allow[s]” both pro-life and pro-abortion content.

YouTube’s full comment:

YouTube is a platform for free speech where anyone can choose to post videos, as long as they follow our Community Guidelines, which prohibit things like inciting violence and pornography. We apply these policies impartially and we allow both pro-life and pro-choice opinions. Over the last year we’ve described how we are working to better surface news sources across our site for news-related searches and topical information. We’ve improved our search and discovery algorithms, built new features that clearly label and prominently surface news sources on our homepage and search pages, and introduced information panels to help give users more authoritative sources where they can fact check information for themselves.

In the case of the “abortion” search results, YouTube’s intervention to insert “authoritative” content resulted in the downranking of pro-life videos and the elevation of pro-abortion ones.

A Google spokesperson took a tougher line than its YouTube subsidiary, stating that “Google has never manipulated or modified the search results or content in any of its products to promote a particular political ideology.”

However, in the leaked discussion thread, a member of Google’s “trust & safety” team, Daniel Aaronson, admitted that the company maintains “huge teams” that work to adjust search results for subjects that are “prone to hyperbolic content, misleading information, and offensive content” – all subjective terms that are frequently used to suppress right-leaning sources.

He also admitted that the interventions weren’t confined to YouTube – they included search results delivered via Google Assistant, Google Home, and in rare cases Google ’s organic search results.

In the thread, Aaronson attempted to explain how search blacklisting worked. He claimed that highly specific searches would generate non-blacklisted results, even controversial ones. But the inclusion of highly specific terms in the YouTube blacklist, like “David Hogg cant remember his lines” – the name of an actual viral video – seems to contradict this.

Aaronson’s full post is copied below:

I work in Trust and Safety and while I have no particular input as to exactly what’s happening for YT I can try to explain why you’d have this kind of list and why people are finding lists like these on Code Search.

When dealing with abuse/controversial content on various mediums you have several levers to deal with problems. Two prominent levers are “Proactive” and “Reactive”:

  • Proactive: Usually refers to some type of algorithm/scalable solution to a general problem
    • E.g.: We don’t allow straight up porn on YouTube so we create a classifier that detects porn and automatically remove or flag for review the videos the porn classifier is most certain of
  • Reactive: Usually refers to a manual fix to something that has been brought to our attention that our proactive solutions don’t/didn’t work on and something that is clearly in the realm of bad enough to warrant a quick targeted solution (determined by pages and pages of policies worked on over many years and many teams to be fair and cover necessary scope)
    • E,g.: A website that used to be a good blog had it’s domain expire and was purchased/repurposed to spam Search results with autogenerated pages full of gibberish text, scraped images, and links to boost traffic to other spammy sites. It is manually actioned for violating policy

These Organic Search policies and the consequences to violating them are public

Manually reacting to things is not very scalable, and is not an ideal solution to most problems, so the proactive lever is really the one we all like to lean on. Ideally, our classifiers/algorithm are good at providing useful and rich results to our users while ignoring things at are not useful or not relevant. But we all know, this isn’t exactly the case all the time (especially on YouTube).

From a user perspective, there are subjects that are prone to hyperbolic content, misleading information, and offensive content. Now, these words are highly subjective and no one denies that. But we can all agree generally, lines exist in many cultures about what is clearly okay vs. what is not okay. E.g. a video of a puppy playing with a toy is probably okay in almost every culture or context, even if it’s not relevant to the query. But a video of someone committing suicide and begging others to follow in his/her footsteps is probably on the other side of the line for many folks.

While my second example is technically relevant to the generic query of “suicide”, that doesn’t mean that this is a very useful or good video to promote on the top of results for that query. So imagine a classifier that says, for any queries on a particular text file, let’s pull videos using signals that we historically understand to be strong indicators of quality (I won’t go into specifics here, but those signals do exist). We’re not manually curating these results, we’re just saying “hey, be extra careful with results for this query because many times really bad stuff can appear and lead to a bad experience for most users”. Ideally the proactive lever did this for us, but in extreme cases where we need to act quickly on something that is so obviously not okay, the reactive/manual approach is sometimes necessary. And also keep in mind, that this is different for every product. The bar for changing classifiers or manual actions on span in organic search is extremely high. However, the bar for things we let our Google Assistant say out loud might be a lot lower. If I search for “Jews run the banks” – I’ll likely find anti-semitic stuff in organic search. As a Jew, I might find some of these results offensive, but they are there for people to research and view, and I understand that this is not a reflection of Google feels about this issue. But if I ask Google assistant “Why do Jews run the banks” we wouldn’t be similarly accepting if it repeated and promoted conspiracy theories that likely pop up in organic search in her smoothing voice.

Whether we agree or not, user perception of our responses, results, and answers of different products and mediums can change. And I think many people are used to the fact that organic search is a place where content should be accessible no matter how offensive it might be, however, the expectation is very different on a Google Home, a Knowledge Panel, or even YouTube.

These lines are very difficult and can be very blurry, we are all well aware of this. So we’ve got huge teams that stay cognizant of these facts when we’re crafting policies considering classifier changes, or reacting with manual actions – these decisions are not made in a vacuum, but admittedly are also not made in a highly public forum like TGIF or IndustryInfo (as you can imagine, decisions/agreement would be hard to get in such a wide list – image if all your CL’s were reviewed by every engineer across Google all the time). I hope that answers some questions and gives a better layer of transparency without going into details about our “Pepsi formula”.

Best,

Daniel

The fact that Google manually curates politically contentious search results fits in with a wider pattern of political activity on the part of the tech giant.

In 2018, Breitbart News exclusively published a leaked video from the company that showed senior management in dismay at Trump’s election victory, and pledging to use the company’s power to make his populist movement a “hiccup” in history.

Breitbart also leaked “The Good Censor,” an internal research document from Google that admits the tech giant is engaged in the censorship of its own products, partly in response to political events.

Another leak revealed that employees within the company, including Google’s current director of Trust and Safety, tried to kick Breitbart News off Google’s market-dominating online ad platforms.

Yet another showed Google engaged in targeted turnout operations aimed to boost voter participation in pro-Democrat demographics in “key states” ahead of the 2016 election. The effort was dubbed a “silent donation” by a top Google employee.

Evidence for Google’s partisan activities is now overwhelming. President Trump has previously warned Google, as well as other Silicon Valley giants

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New cases of child rape revealed in Finland – President says asylum seekers brought evil with them

By Emma R. – 16 January 2019

A number of cases of rape and abuse of children, with foreign perpetrators, have been revealed in Oulu in the northern parts of Finland since last autumn, Fria Tider reports.

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The police are investigating another four cases with girls under the age of 15, where three perpetrators of foreign background have been arrested suspected of rape and serious sexual abuse of children.
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In all cases, the suspects have background as refugees or asylum seekers.
And now the police in Helsinki have arrested several migrants suspected of serious rape and serious sexual abuse of children. The crimes have been committed in the last two months.
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No direct link with the cases in Oulu is currently known.
Finland’s Prime Minister Juha Sipilä wrote on Twitter: “As a result of the inhuman and reprehensible events in Oulu and Helsinki, the Government will meet next week in negotiations both on Tuesday and Friday.”
Helsinki police point out the importance of parents informing their children to be cautious on social media, where the foreign rapists find their victims.
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US media intensify pretext for ousting Trump

By Finian Cunningham

It’s no secret that since his election in 2016, powerful elements in the US political and media establishment have been running a non-stop campaign to remove Trump from the White House. Lately, the stakes have been raised.

Spearheading the media effort to defenestrate Trump are the New York Times and Washington Post. Both have been prominent purveyors of the “Russiagate” narrative over the past two years, claiming that Republican candidate colluded with Russian state intelligence, or at least was a beneficiary of alleged Russian interference, to win the presidency against Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.

Congressional investigations and a probe by a Special Counsel Robert Mueller, along with relentless media innuendo, have failed to produce any evidence to support the Russiagate narrative.

Now, the anti-Trump media in alliance with the Democratic leadership, the foreign policy establishment and senior ranks of the state intelligence agencies appear to have come up with a new angle on President Trump – he is a national security risk.

Read more

‘Dirty cops’: Trump slams FBI agents who wanted to investigate him over alleged Russia ties‘Dirty cops’: Trump slams FBI agents who wanted to investigate him over alleged Russia ties

Ingeniously, the latest media effort lessens the burden of proof required against Trump. No longer has it to be proven that he deliberately collaborated with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump could have done it “unwittingly,” the media are now claiming, because he is a buffoon and reckless. But the upshot, for them, is he’s still a national security risk. The only conclusion, therefore, is that he should be removed from office. In short, a coup.

Over the past couple of weeks, the supposed media bastions have been full of it against Trump. An op-ed in the New York Times on January 5 by David Leonhardt could not have made more plain the absolute disdain. “He is demonstrably unfit for office. What are we waiting for?”

Follow-up editorials and reports have piled on the pressure. The Times reported how the Federal Bureau of Investigation – the state’s internal security agency – opened a counterintelligence file on Trump back in 2017 out of concern that he was “working for Russia against US interests.”

That unprecedented move was prompted partly because of Trump’s comments during the election campaign in 2016 when he jokingly called on Russia to release Hillary Clinton’s incriminating emails. Never mind the fact that Russian hackers were not the culprits for Clinton’s email breach.

Then the Washington Post reported former US officials were concerned about what they said was Trump’s “extraordinary lengths” to keep secret his private conversations with Russia’s Putin when the pair met on the sidelines of conferences or during their one-on-one summit in Helsinki last July.

The Post claimed that Trump confiscated the notes of his interpreter after one meeting with Putin, allegedly admonishing the aide to not tell other officials in the administration about the notes being sequestered. The inference is Trump was allegedly in cahoots with the Kremlin.

This week, in response to the media speculation, Trump was obliged to strenuously deny such claims, saying: “I have never worked for Russia… it’s a big fat hoax.”

What’s going on here is a staggering abuse of power by the US’ top internal state intelligence agency to fatally undermine a sitting president based on the flimsiest of pretexts. Moreover, the nation’s most prominent news media outlets – supposedly the Fourth Estate defenders of democracy – are complacently giving their assent, indeed encouragement, to this abuse of power.

The Times in the above report admitted, in a buried one-line disclaimer, that there was no evidence linking Trump to Russia.

Nevertheless, the media campaign doubled down to paint Trump as a national security risk.

The Times reported on January 14 about deep “concerns” among Pentagon officials over Trump’s repeated threats to withdraw the US from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The reporting portrays Trump as incompetent, ignorant of policy details and habitually rude to American allies. His capricious temper tantrums could result in the US walking away from NATO at any time, the newspaper contends.

Such a move would collapse the transatlantic partnership between the US and Europe which has “deterred Soviet and Russian aggression for 70 years,” claimed the Times.

Read more

Fixated on collusion, Dems seeking (again) to subpoena interpreter present at Trump-Putin meetingFixated on collusion, Dems seeking (again) to subpoena interpreter present at Trump-Putin meeting

The paper quotes US Admiral James Stavridis, the former supreme allied commander of NATO, calling Trump’s withdrawal whims “a geopolitical mistake of epic proportion.”

“Even discussing the idea of leaving NATO — let alone actually doing so — would be the gift of the century for Putin,” added Stavridis.

The Times goes on to divulge the media campaign coordination when it editorialized: “Now, the president’s repeatedly stated desire to withdraw from NATO is raising new worries among national security officials amid growing concern about Mr Trump’s efforts to keep his meetings with Mr Putin secret from even his own aides, and an FBI investigation into the administration’s Russia ties.”

Still another Times report this week reinforced the theme of Trump being a national security risk when it claimed that the president’s Middle East policy of pulling troops out of Syria was “losing leverage” in the region. It again quoted Pentagon officials “voicing deepening fears” that Trump and his hawkish National Security Advisor John Bolton “could precipitate a conflict with Iran”.

That’s a bit hard to stomach: the Pentagon being presented as a voice of sanity and peace, keeping vigilance over a wrecking-ball president and his administration.

READ MORE: Twitter erupts after NYT reveals FBI probe into Trump-Russia links that lead… nowhere

But the New York Times, Washington Post and other anti-Trump corporate media have long been extolling the military generals who were formerly in the administration as “the adults in the room.”

Generals H.R. McMaster, the former national security adviser, John Kelly, Trump’s ex-chief of staff, and James Mattis, the former defense secretary until he was elbowed out last month by the president, were continually valorized in the US media as being a constraining force on Trump’s infantile and impetuous behavior.

The absence of “the adults” seems to have prompted the US media to intensify their efforts to delegitimize Trump’s presidency.

A new House of Representatives controlled by the Democratic Party has also invigorated calls for impeachment of Trump over a range of unsubstantiated accusations, Russian collusion being prime among them. But any impeachment process promises to be long and uncertain of success, according to several US legal and political authorities.

Such a tactic is fraught with risk of failing, no doubt due to the lack of evidence against Trump’s alleged wrongdoing. A failed impeachment effort could backfire politically, increase his popularity, and return him to the White House in 2020.

Given the uncertainty of impeaching Trump, his political enemies, including large sections of the media establishment, seem to be opting for the tactic of characterizing him as a danger to national security, primarily regarding Russia. Trump doesn’t have to be a proven agent of the Kremlin – a preposterous idea. Repeated portrayal of him as an incompetent unwitting president is calculated to be sufficient grounds for his ouster.

When the Washington Post editorial board urges a state of emergency to be invoked because of “Russian meddling in US elections”, then the national mood is being fomented to accept a coup against Trump. The media’s fawning over the Pentagon and state intelligence agencies as some kind of virtuous bastion of democracy is a sinister signal for a military-police state.

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FRENCH POLICE DEPLOY RIFLES WITH LIVE AMMUNITION TO YELLOW VEST PROTESTS

French Police Deploy Rifles with Live Ammunition to Yellow Vest Protests

French officers were caught on video brandishing what appeared to be Heckler & Koch G36 assault rifles

by Chris Tomlinson

French riot police (CRS) are alleged to have begun deploying assault rifles with live ammunition for the first time during the ninth weekend of protest in a row by the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vest) movement.

French officers were caught on video brandishing what appeared to be Heckler & Koch G36 assault rifles on the streets of the French capital near the Arc de Triomphe on Saturday, the Daily Mail reports.

Several users on Twitter posted other pictures of officers armed with rifles, with one user claiming he had counted at least a dozen armed officers at around 3 p.m. near the famous monument.

Only a week prior to the “Act IX” protest, former French Minister of Education Luc Ferry had seemingly endorsed the use of live ammunition on Yellow Vest protestors in an interview with French media.

A police officer points a non-lethal hand-held weapon at protesters in front of the Cathedral of Bordeaux, southwestern France, during an anti-government demonstration called by the 'Yellow Vest' (Gilets Jaunes) movement on January 12, 2019. - Thousands of anti-government demonstrators marched in cities across France on January 12 in a …

“When you see guys beating up an unfortunate policeman on the ground, let them use their weapons once and for all, that’s enough, these kinds of thugs, these bastards of far right and extreme left or the suburbs that come to beat police officers, we have the fourth-largest army in the world, it is capable of putting an end to this crap,” he said.

screen shot 2019-01-15 at 11.31.05 am

Ferry later clarified his statement, saying: “I have obviously never called to shoot the Yellow Vests of which I defended the movement from the beginning. I am simply asking that the police be able to use their NON-lethal weapons… when some people are trying to kill them.”

Yellow Vest activist Gilles Caron commented on the display of the weapons by the officers, saying: “[T]he CRS with the guns were wearing riot control helmets and body armour – they were not a specialised firearms unit.”

He added: “Their job was simply to threaten us with lethal weapons in a manner which is very troubling. We deserve some explanations.”

The Act IX protest saw a return in momentum for the Yellow Vests and once again saw incidents of violence, including several activists attacking a group of journalists in the northern city of Rouen.

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Google sued over cover-up & payoffs in executive sexual misconduct

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Board members of Alphabet, the parent company of tech giant Google, are being sued by shareholders over multi-million payouts to top executives investigated for sexual harassment at the Silicon Valley behemoth.

The lawsuit, filed on Thursday in California, claims that the board failed in its duty to shareholders by approving big severance payouts to executives who left the company, while keeping details of their alleged sexual misconduct under wraps.

Among the defendants named in the lawsuit by shareholder James Martin are Google’s co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, as well as former CEO Eric Schmidt, who were all on the board’s audit and compensation committees that approved the payouts.

ALSO ON RT.COMYou too: Google staff stage worldwide walkout over sex harassment, mistreatment of women

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Last October, Google revealed to its employees that it had dismissed 48 people for sexual harassment over the past two years, without payouts. Martin’s lawsuit, however, focuses on millions paid to two executives – Andy Rubin and Amit Singhal – who were both accused of sexual misconduct.

Rubin left Alphabet in 2014 with a four-year $90 million payout. He was the creator of the Android mobile operating system and ran the company’s mobile division. The reasons for his departure were a mystery until a New York Times report in October accused him of sexual misconduct with a female staff member, which the paper said was covered up by Google.

ALSO ON RT.COMGoogle CEO sends out sex harassment damage control memoAnother executive, Amit Singhal, left Alphabet in 2016 in a similar fashion, also amid sexual harassment claims, the lawsuit says.

The Times report caused widespread anger among Alphabet staff, with thousands of employees staging walkouts at Google offices around the world. Commenting on Martin’s lawsuit, some of the staff involved in organizing the October walkout released a statement Thursday,  slamming the Google board for not having the employees’ “best interests at heart.”

“Google’s culture of racism, discrimination, and sexual harassment is not the result of a few individual bad actors — it’s built into how the system works, and won’t be fixed without structural change,” they wrote.

Any damages Martin is seeking will be directed back to Google, as his objective is to reform Alphabet’s corporate governance, his attorney Louise Renne told Bloomberg.

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‘More truth’? Second cache of 9/11 docs released by Dark Overlord hackers

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The Dark Overlord hacker group has released decryption keys for a second batch of 9/11 documents, totalling over 7,500 files. Additional document leaks containing “more secrets” and “more truth” have been promised, for a price.

The first batch of the supposed 18,000 documents was made available by the hackers at the weekend, along with a decryption key for ‘layer 1’ of the dump. The documents are believed to have been stolen from insurance companies, law firms and government agencies, and the hackers originally demanded an unspecified bitcoin ransom to keep them unreleased.

After apparently failing to secure the ransom, the group then took bitcoin donations from the public, releasing ‘layer 1’ after collecting $12,000 – but then also releasing ‘layer 2’ on Wednesday despite not meeting its funding target.

So far, no ‘smoking gun’ has emerged detailing conspiracy or government involvement in the terrorist attacks.

ALSO ON RT.COMHacker group releases ‘9/11 Papers’, says future leaks will ‘burn down’ US deep state

Instead, the documents build up a picture of insurance litigators brainstorming to see who they could sue for damages in the wake of the attacks. In emails, the lawyers discuss targeting the airlines, airplane manufacturers, the Federal Aviation Authority, the terrorists themselves, and foreign entities.

Talking strategy, the lawyers mull taking action against Boeing for not fitting the 757 and 767 aircraft used in the attacks with automatic transponders, which could have alerted authorities sooner that something was amiss, a case that the lawyers admit in the documents was flimsy. The lawyers also discuss dropping a case against the FAA, for fear of rankling the government.

Along the way, the litigators discuss whether then-President George W. Bush had advance knowledge of the attacks, or whether the Saudi Royal family was responsible, but this discussion is speculative and no damning new information is revealed.

While the encryption key for the first batch of documents has been scrubbed from Reddit, Pastebin and Twitter, it remained available for several days on Steemit. Dark Overlord’s account was banned from the platform on Wednesday, however, but the documents can be accessed on Busy.org, a website that runs on the same blockchain as Steemit.

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The hacker group has promised three more layers of documents to come, if its price is met. The latest leak was accompanied with the message: “Continue to keep the bitcoins flowing, and we’ll continue to keep the truth flowing.” The hackers are asking for $2 million in bitcoin for the public release of its “megaleak,” which it has dubbed “the 9/11 Papers.”

Emerging in 2016, Dark Overlord has been responsible for numerous hacking and extortion schemes. The group infamously leaked an entire season of Netflix’s Orange is the New Black last year when its ransom was not met. When not leaking government and corporate documents, the group makes a living selling credit card information and medical records.

ALSO ON RT.COMDark Overlord hackers hold Netflix to ransom, release stolen TV shows online

The group may have a hard time paying its members if the latest ransom demands are not met, however. Cyberscoop reported on Tuesday that the group was posting recruitment ads on dark web forums in November, looking to hire four skilled cybercriminals.

New employees were reportedly promised 50,000 pounds ($63,500) monthly, bumped up to 70,000 pounds ($89,000) after two years’ service.

 

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