[Caution - Buzzfeed] The FBI possesses a secret report asserting that Vladimir Putin’s former media czar was beaten to death by hired thugs in Washington, DC ‐ directly contradicting the US government’s official finding that Mikhail Lesin died by accident.
The report, according to four sources who have read all or parts of it, was written by the former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, who also wrote the famous dossier alleging that Russia had been "cultivating, supporting and assisting" Donald Trump. The bureau received his report while it was helping the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Police Department investigate the Russian media baron’s death, the sources said.
FBI spokesperson Andrew Ames declined to confirm or deny the existence of the report and would not comment for this story. Steele's business partner, Chris Burrows, declined to comment on behalf of Steele and their company, Orbis Business Intelligence. Andrew Ames....? Hopefully no relation to Aldrich.
The new revelations come as concerns about Russia’s meddling in the West have intensified to a pitch not seen since the Cold War. Both the UK and the US have blamed the Kremlin for poisoning former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in England this month, using a rare nerve agent that endangered bystanders. (Russia has denied it was behind the poisoning.) In the wake of that attack, the British government has opened a review of all 14 suspicious deaths linked to Russia that a BuzzFeed News investigation exposed last year.
The BuzzFeed News series also revealed new details about Lesin ‐ including that he died on the eve of a scheduled meeting with US Justice Department officials. They had planned to interview Lesin about the inner workings of RT, the Kremlin-funded network that he founded.
[PJ] WASHINGTON ‐ Wyoming Republican Gov. Matt Mead told PJM that local prisons should not release undocumented immigrants who serve time for committing a crime before Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) can take them into custody for entering the U.S. illegally.
Some local jurisdictions such as Fairfax County have terminated their Intergovernmental Service Agreement (IGSA) with ICE so they do not have to hold known undocumented individuals in prison past their release date for local crimes.
In January, Acting ICE Director Thomas Homan announced housing agreements with sheriffs from certain counties that "allow local law enforcement to detain people living in the country illegally who are in jail on criminal offenses for up to 48 hours past their scheduled release," according to press reports.
Mead said local officials should wait until federal authorities are able to take undocumented persons into custody after they serve their sentence for committing crimes inside the United States.
[MIT Tech Review] Fake news may have already influenced politics in the US, but it’s going to get a lot worse, warns an AI consultant to the CIA.
Sean Gourley, founder and CEO of Primer, a company that uses software to mine data sources and automatically generate reports for the CIA and other clients, told a conference in San Francisco that the next generation of fake news would be far more sophisticated thanks to AI.
"The automation of the generation of fake news is going to make it very effective," Gourley told the audience at EmTech Digital, organized by MIT Technology Review.
The warning should cause concern at Facebook. The social network has been embroiled in a scandal after failing to prevent fake news, some of it created by Russian operatives, from reaching millions of people in the months before the 2016 presidential election. More recently the company been hit by the revelation that it let Cambridge Analytica, a company tied to the Trump presidential campaign, mine users’ personal data.
In recent interviews, Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, suggested that the company would use AI to spot fake news. According to Gourley, AI could be used in the service of the opposite goal as well.
Gourley noted that the fake news seen to date has been relatively simple, consisting of crude, hand-crafted stories posted to social media at regular intervals. Technology such as Primer’s could easily be used to generate convincing fake stories automatically, he said, and that could mean fake reports tailored to an individual’s interests and sympathies and carefully tested before being released, to maximize their impact. "I can generate a million stories, see which ones get the most traction, double down on those," Gourley said.
Gourley added that fake news has so far been fed into social-media platforms like Facebook essentially at random. A more sophisticated understanding of network dynamics, as well as the mechanisms used to judge the popularity of content, could amplify a post’s effect.
#1
Remove the unconstitutional two tier system of libel. Either we are equal before the law or not. Public or private makes no difference. Hold the Legacy Infotainment Enterprises to the same standards you'd hold any commercial business to in selling shoddy products. After some really painful experiences they will either be out of business or grasp the concept of quality control. Suddenly, the amount of fake news will diminish.
[ALMASDARNEWS] Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ...Crown Prince of Soddy Arabia ...a kingdom taking up the bulk of the Arabian peninsula. Its primary economic activity involves exporting oil and soaking Islamic rubes on the annual hajj pilgrimage. The country supports a large number of princes in whatcha might call princely splendor. When the oil runs out the rest of the world is going to kick sand in the Soddy national face... as of 2016.... may be seeking to revert his kingdom to an unspecified form of moderate Islam but erasing the impact of 40 years of global funding of ultra-conservative, intolerant strands of the faith is unlikely to be eradicated by decree.
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: Fred ||
03/28/2018 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[10 views]
Top|| File under: Govt of Saudi Arabia
#1
...A valid view. On the other hand, it's amazing how many 'national liberation' movements went away when the Soviets cratered and stopped sending money.
End by decree, no. It will take decades to completely right. But when there is no more funding, and no place to run (a LOT of Islamic monsters regularly beat feet for the KSA when the heat started to come down, that's gone away too), a fair amount of the horror will start to fade into the shadows. I never thought I'd say this about a king of Saudi Arabia, but long life and health to him, and confusion to his enemies.
Mike
Posted by: Mike Kozlowski ||
03/28/2018 5:21 Comments ||
Top||
[Breitbart] NEW YORK ‐ Glenn R. Simpson, the co-founder of the controversial opposition research firm Fusion GPS, may have used unwitting reporters to help get the FBI to take more seriously the largely discredited 35-page anti-Trump dossier produced by his group, according to a recently released book. Yes, most will 'say' they were unwitting, or say nothing at all.
Christopher Steele, the author of the dossier, reportedly provided the anti-Trump dossier claims to the FBI on July 5, 2016. Fusion GPS firm hired Steele to do the anti-Trump work that resulted in the compilation of the dossier. Fusion GPS was paid for its anti-Trump work by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and the Democratic National Committee via the Perkins Coie law firm.
The book, Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump, is authored by reporters Michael Isikoff and David Corn.
In their work, Isikoff and Corn relate Simpson and Fusion GPS set up a series of off-the-record briefings with reporters at the Tabard Inn in Washington, DC. At these briefings, Steele informed the individual reporters of the claims inside the dossier.
Isikoff and Corn write that Simpson had hoped the briefings would prompt reporters to call the FBI about the dossier charges so that the bureau would take the claims more seriously.
#11
In 1975 ... Edward Cohen, a financial editor with the Washington Post, and his wife, Fritzi, a political activist & lawyer, became the Tabard’s new owners.
[Townhall] Secretary of Defense James Mattis dispelled reports Tuesday that he was apprehensive about working with President Trump’s incoming National Security Advisor John Bolton.
"I'll tell you right up front, it's going to be a partnership, we are going to go forward," Mattis told reporters during a news conference at the Pentagon.
When asked about his differing world views with Bolton, Mattis responded, "I hope that there's some different world views. That's the normal thing you want unless you want group think."
Mattis acknowledged that the two hadn’t met yet but said Bolton was coming to the Pentagon later this week for discussions.
"We are going to sit down together and I look forward to working with him," Mattis said.
He emphasized that he had no reservations about Bolton’s appointment.
"No reservations, no concerns at all," he said. "Last time I checked he's an American. I can work with an American, OK? So I'm not the least bit concerned with that sort of thing."
[NYT] Rarely in my lifetime have I seen the type of civic engagement schoolchildren and their supporters demonstrated in Washington and other major cities throughout the country this past Saturday. These demonstrations demand our respect. They reveal the broad public support for legislation to minimize the risk of mass killings of schoolchildren and others in our society.
That support is a clear sign to lawmakers to enact legislation prohibiting civilian ownership of semiautomatic weapons, increasing the minimum age to buy a gun from 18 to 21 years old, and establishing more comprehensive background checks on all purchasers of firearms. But the demonstrators should seek more effective and more lasting reform. They should demand a repeal of the Second Amendment.
Concern that a national standing army might pose a threat to the security of the separate states led to the adoption of that amendment, which provides that "a well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." Today that concern is a relic of the 18th century.
For over 200 years after the adoption of the Second Amendment, it was uniformly understood as not placing any limit on either federal or state authority to enact gun control legislation. In 1939 the Supreme Court unanimously held that Congress could prohibit the possession of a sawed-off shotgun because that weapon had no reasonable relation to the preservation or efficiency of a "well regulated militia."
During the years when Warren Burger was our chief justice, from 1969 to 1986, no judge, federal or state, as far as I am aware, expressed any doubt as to the limited coverage of that amendment. When organizations like the National Rifle Association disagreed with that position and began their campaign claiming that federal regulation of firearms curtailed Second Amendment rights, Chief Justice Burger publicly characterized the N.R.A. as perpetrating "one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime."
In 2008, the Supreme Court overturned Chief Justice Burger's and others' long-settled understanding of the Second Amendment's limited reach by ruling, in District of Columbia v. Heller, that there was an individual right to bear arms. I was among the four dissenters.
That decision ‐ which I remain convinced was wrong and certainly was debatable ‐ has provided the N.R.A. with a propaganda weapon of immense power. Overturning that decision via a constitutional amendment to get rid of the Second Amendment would be simple and would do more to weaken the N.R.A.'s ability to stymie legislative debate and block constructive gun control legislation than any other available option.
That simple but dramatic action would move Saturday's marchers closer to their objective than any other possible reform. It would eliminate the only legal rule that protects sellers of firearms in the United States ‐ unlike every other market in the world. It would make our schoolchildren safer than they have been since 2008 and honor the memories of the many, indeed far too many, victims of recent gun violence.
Constitution of the United States of America, Article V:
The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress...
#2
At least he 1 - acknowledged the actual legal process of repeal and 2 - can make it an argument among his brethren, like Jefferson's letter about the separation of church and state, that you need to follow that legal process and not corrupt the law to play to your personal desires.
#5
A couple of more retirees would be good so long as they are replaced with Constitutionalists. Enough of those leftists who try to make the law from the bench.
#7
By what I've seen of the 'marches' the vast majority of attendees were well-grown ADULTS and not 'schoolchildren' at all. Usually the same crowd who attend the March for Murder Women.
I think they store them (the marchers) in unused warehouses around the Washington DC area.
After in-person scientific sampling of 1700+ in the anti-firearms march, statistics showed that approximately 10% of the crowd were 18 and under. Of the remaining 90%, the average age was 49 years old. The press showed big crowds from a distance, but all the closeups they show were children, to hide the fact that it was 90% older adults.
Statistically this was the same composition as the Mom's March anti-firearms protest, and possibly the pro-life March for Life.
Compare and contrast the coverages between the March for Life and this event - similar sizes, similar enthusiasm. The former get very little if any news mention, and usually some old nuns are shown.
Same sponsors too - Bloomberg, NY City based.
This was not a youth march any more than a oak-colored plastic veneer pressboard table is "solid oak".
The press is lying and misrepresenting things to the public again.
This was purely a propaganda event, no different from the old Soviet Pravda/Isvetiya trash, and the idiocy of the totalitarian Kim family dynasty Potemkin villages in North Korea. And this is our own press, willfully conspiring to push disinformation as truth to achieve their political goals.
When will the press be held accountable for lying to the public in order to promote their political aims? Someone needs to be frog-marched, or strung up for treasonously and deliberately undermining fundamental liberties.
#9
I'm hearing - and reading - that NRA memberships and fundraising are up. If Brady and Bloomberg's front organization were making big hauls it would be big news. It isn't so I guess they're not. I don't wish ill on anyone, but I think some of the Parkland kids are going to react poorly to getting the final stage of the Cindy Sheehan treatment.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
03/28/2018 15:01 Comments ||
Top||
#10
When will the press be held accountable for lying to the public in order to promote their political aims?
Sorry, OldSpook. I don't see any sign of that happening any time soon. The best thing that could happen would be if people simply stop watching the old dinosaur network and cable news but they seem every bit as glued to it as they always have been.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
03/28/2018 17:38 Comments ||
Top||
#11
Concern that a national standing army might pose a threat to the security ...Today that concern is a relic of the 18th century.
Is it also a relic that the agencies of the gov't, other than the army, are armed to the teeth with military grade munitions?
I'm much more concerned that the EPA or BLM etc. will start firing at the citizenry than I am of the 1st Div.
The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
Posted by: European Conservative ||
03/28/2018 20:36 Comments ||
Top||
#13
When will the press be held accountable for lying to the public in order to promote their political aims?
Mainstream media overall circulation numbers continue to trend downward, taking advertising rates and totals with them, resulting in downsizing journalism staffing, while internet news sites are getting nore attention. Nobody will pronounce upon Progressive reporting, it will just continue getting less and less attention, earning less and less money, and supporting fewer and fewer highly paid reporters and all their suport staff, until one day the world will realize the Progressive press went the way of the buggy whip.
Andrew Breitbart’s reasoning for setting up the Huffington Post is interesting. See here.
[IsraelTimes] Two babus bureaucrats seem to be PA president's most likely successors as he marks birthday with health apparently on decline, but the leader-board can easily be shaken up
Paleostinian Authority President the ineffectual Mahmoud Abbas ... a graduate of the prestigious unaccredited Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow with a doctorate in Holocaust Denial... turned 83 on Monday, and with his health rumored to be on the decline, speculation mounted over the leadership struggle that will ensue when he is no longer in power.
Continued on Page 49
[American Thinker] I have a 1956 Norman Rockwell print of a frumpy, sweet-faced teacher standing in front of a class of clean-scrubbed, straight-backed children. They had just written "Happy Birthday, Miss Jones!" on the blackboard for her. It's a scene light-years away from a 21st-century school massacre, and it may take some time for the more Pollyannaish among us to readjust to what the 21st-century school really is. This may explain the freak-out over the idea of arming teachers: Miss Jones with a Ruger tucked into her belt is just too hard to swallow.
This worries me, because we can't fix a problem we don't have the courage to really acknowledge. Our schoolrooms are still full of great kids, sweet-natured and teacher-loving, but these days, every class has an ever increasing number of students carrying major psychological damage. I'll never forget a class of freshmen I had one year. Of the 27 students in that section, nine were seriously mentally disturbed. I know a teacher who's trying to deal with a student who has already thrown rocks through the principal's office windows and is currently threatening to burn down the school with a flamethrower. He's six years old.
It's been ten years since I've been in a public school classroom, but even back then, the horrible parenting I was seeing had me worried. I'll never forget the young man who chose to write his narrative essay about the night his father tried to strangle him. He was nervous about testifying at his dad's trial. Or the young woman whose father was willing to pay for the braces she needed as long as she would bring home friends for him to have sex with. And the young man, fatherless and troubled, who brought a hatchet to school to use on me if I made him give a speech. His terrified mother's warning saved both my life and his.
#1
...The author makes a good point - the number of truly damaged kids in public schools today is a national problem. The fact that we won't do much about it for fear of offending Certain Protected Groups(TM) is a national disgrace.
Because of that, arming teachers is not a good idea. I understand that there may be no good answers here, but the fact is that almost daily in this country, teachers are assaulted by the kids they're trying to instruct, and one of those teachers is going to use their weapon to defend themselves - statistically, it's going to happen.
And there's another side to this coin: I had two teachers in elementary school - fourth and sixth grades - who were so vicious (to include surprise, no-justification physical assaults) that I am utterly convinced that if either one of them had a firearm, they would have - at best - brandished it constantly and at worst used it.
Whatever answers there might be for this problem, arming teachers ain't it. I'm absolutely willing to concede that the overwhelming majority of teachers are sane, stable individuals who would unhesitatingly run to the defense of their kids. But all it will take will be one teacher to feel that they are in mortal danger from a berserk student - or completely lose their sh!t - and it'll be hard to find a single voice in defense of the 2A.
Mike
Posted by: Mike Kozlowski ||
03/28/2018 5:43 Comments ||
Top||
#2
Well, schools are microcosm of society - if you've a society operating on the premise that the worst are the victims and the best are the victimizers...
Mind you, IMO the problem is not the occasional incidents of violence but the constant stream of credentialed semi-illiterates.
#3
I've said it here before. Leftism's core value is the lowest common denominator. It isn't share-the-wealth, it's share-the-misery. "Progress" it definitely is not, unless you are a predator looking for easy pickings with no consequences.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
03/28/2018 7:25 Comments ||
Top||
#4
It's not about arming all teachers or administrators. It's about installing the uncertainty principle among the targeted population. Perps seek the least route of expected resistance.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[Caution - Buzzfeed] The FBI possesses a secret report asserting that Vladimir Putin’s former media czar was beaten to death by hired thugs in Washington, DC ‐ directly contradicting the US government’s official finding that Mikhail Lesin died by accident.
[PJ] WASHINGTON ‐ Wyoming Republican Gov. Matt Mead told PJM that local prisons should not release undocumented immigrants who serve time for committing a crime before Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) can take them into custody for entering the U.S. illegally.
Crown Prince of 
[Breitbart] NEW YORK ‐ Glenn R. Simpson, the co-founder of the controversial opposition research firm Fusion GPS, may have used unwitting reporters to help get the FBI to take more seriously the largely discredited 35-page anti-Trump dossier produced by his group, according to a recently released book.
