Bloodstream infections (BSI) are associated with high morbidity and mortality. This scenario worsens with the emergence of drug-resistant pathogens, resulting in infections which are difficult to treat or even…
Category Archives: Viva!
Russian Officers and Militants Identified as Perpetrators of the January 2015 Mariupol Artillery Strike – bellingcat
via aleksey godin
The Bellingcat Investigation Team has determined conclusively that the artillery attack on the Ukrainian town of Mariupol on 24 January 2015, which resulted at least 30 civilian deaths and over 100 injuries, came from Russia-controlled territory. Bellingcat has also determined that the shelling operation was instructed, directed and supervised by Russian military commanders in active service with the Russian Ministry of Defense. Bellingcat has identified nine Russian officers, including one general, two colonels, and three lieutenant colonels, involved directly with the military operation.
Furthermore, Bellingcat has determined that two artillery batteries of Multiple Launch Rocket Systems (MLRS) were transported from Russia into Ukraine the day before the Mariupol operation. In the early morning of 24 January 2015, these batteries were deployed near the village of Bezimenne exclusively for the shelling of targets in and around Mariupol, after which they were repatriated back into Russia.
In the course of analyzing the events in the eve of and on 24 January 2015, Bellingcat has also identified two Russian generals involved with the selection and assignment of Russian artillery specialists to commanding roles in eastern Ukraine.
This investigation was made possible due to access to raw video and audio data that is being submitted by the Ukrainian government to the International Court of Justice as part of an ongoing legal case. This data was made available to a small group of international investigative media for the purposes of independent assessment. Bellingcat and its media partners analyzed a large volume of intercepted calls from and to participants in the armed conflict located in the area of Bezimenne at the time of shelling. Bellingcat conducted detailed cross-referencing of events, names and locations, as well as metadata from the calls, to open source data, including satellite photography data, social media posts, and voice samples from public statements of some of the identified persons. A detailed analysis permitted the identification of persons and military units, and the reconstruction of events leading up to the shelling of residential areas in Mariupol.
While previous reports, including the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission (SMM) to Ukraine report from 24 January 2015, have identified that shelling of Mariupol’s residential areas came from separatist-controlled territory, Bellingcat’s investigation is the first to fully detail and identify the role of active Russian military units, as well as the direct commanding role of active Russian army officers in this military operation.
Our full report identifying the nine Russian officers involved with the military operation that led to the deaths of 30 Ukrainian civilians in Mariupol will be published later this week. Today, we are revealing the names of these individuals, along with a sampling of the telephone conversations that led to their identification.
The Russian officers who were in charge on high and lower levels of the MLRS batteries on the day of the shelling at Mariupol, or provided target instructions from another location in Eastern Ukraine, have been identified by Bellingcat as:
Major General Stepan Stepanovich Yaroshchuk
Alexander Iozhefovich Tsapliuk, call sign ‘Gorets’
Alexander Anatolevich Muratov
Maksim Vladimirovich Vlasov, call sign ‘Yugra’
Sergey Sergeyevich Yurchenko, call sign ‘Voronezh’
Alexander Valeryevich Grunchev, call sign ‘Terek’
The Russian officers who were in charge of selecting and sending artillery commanders and artillery equipment to Eastern Ukraine have been identified by Bellingcat as:
Colonel Oleg Leargievich Kuvshinov
Major General Dmitry Nikolaevich Klimenko
Colonel Sergey Ivanovich Lisai
The two Russian and Ukrainian militants in direct charge of the artillery units that shelled Mariupol have been identified by Bellingcat as:
Alexander Mikhailovich Evtody, call sign ‘Pepel’
Grayr Manukovich Egiazaryan, call sign ‘Shram’
Our full investigation, with biographical details on each of these men, our research process, and our analysis of the shelling attack itself, will be published later this week.
Germany: Identitarian movement classified as right-wing extremist

Germany’s domestic intelligence service has identified the country’s Identitarian movement as an extremist entity. The group, which claims to defend European identity through ethnopluralist ideology, has gained traction.
Tom Steyer, We Welcome You With Folded Arms
You have no constituency other than yourself. There are plenty of better things for you to do with your money.
Kim Darroch has resigned. Now Britain risks becoming a vassal of the US | Martin Kettle

Donald Trump’s role in the Washington ambassador’s exit has driven a stake through the heart of the UK’s postwar self-image
The chief of Britain’s Foreign Office does nothing casually. He is a past master at saying nothing unintended in public. So when the Foreign Office permanent secretary, Simon McDonald, went before MPs this lunchtime after the devastating resignation of Britain’s Washington ambassador, Kim Darroch, his incisive directness was a revelation. It was the most eloquent evidence possible that the Darroch affair is not just a diplomatic storm but an existential challenge to Britain’s entire foreign policy.
What precedent was there, the foreign affairs committee chair Tom Tugendhat asked McDonald straight off, for the head of state of a friendly government to do what Donald Trump has done this week and make it impossible for Britain’s senior representative in that country to do his job? McDonald’s answer was monosyllabic, crisp and explosive. “None,” he said.
Reckitt Benckiser to pay $1.4bn fine over opioid treatment sales

Nurofen maker reaches deal with US over alleged fraudulent marketing of Suboxone
Reckitt Benckiser has agreed to pay a $1.4bn (£1.1bn) fine to settle a US investigation into sales of a treatment for addiction to opioids by its former prescription drugs business Indivior.
The maker of Nurofen and Durex said it had reached a deal with the US Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission to resolve the long-running inquiry into sales and marketing of Suboxone Film, an opioid-based drug.
Tory MPs condemn Boris Johnson over Kim Darroch resignation

Frontrunner to become PM accused of lack of leadership and called on to apologise
Boris Johnson has been heavily criticised by fellow Tory MPs over his role in Sir Kim Darroch’s decision to resign as the UK ambassador to Washington, with one backbencher saying the frontrunner in the Conservative leadership contest should come to the Commons to apologise.
An urgent question in the Commons about Darroch’s departure, which followed the leak of diplomatic cables critical of Donald Trump’s White House, resulted in repeated condemnation of Johnson, and only one Conservative MP came to his defence.
Russian Hackers Who Posed As ISIS Militants Threatened Military Wives
via aleksey godin
PARIS (AP) — Army wife Angela Ricketts was soaking in a bubble bath in her Colorado home, leafing through a memoir, when a message appeared on her iPhone:
“Dear Angela!” it said. “Bloody Valentine’s Day!”
“We know everything about you, your husband and your children,” the Facebook message continued, claiming that the hackers operating under the flag of Islamic State militants had penetrated her computer and her phone. “We’re much closer than you can even imagine.”
Ricketts was one of five military wives who received death threats from the self-styled CyberCaliphate on the morning of Feb. 10, 2015. The warnings led to days of anguished media coverage of Islamic State militants’ online reach.
Except it wasn’t IS.
The Associated Press has found evidence that the women were targeted not by jihadists but by the same Russian hacking group that intervened in the American election and exposed the emails of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign chairman, John Podesta.
The false flag is a case study in the difficulty of assigning blame in a world where hackers routinely borrow one another’s identities to throw investigators off track. The operation also parallels the online disinformation campaign by Russian trolls in the months leading up to the U.S. election in 2016.
Links between CyberCaliphate and the Russian hackers — typically nicknamed Fancy Bear or APT28 — have been documented previously. On both sides of the Atlantic, the consensus is that the two groups are closely related.
But that consensus never filtered through to the women involved, many of whom were convinced they had been targeted by Islamic State sympathizers right up until the AP contacted them.
“Never in a million years did I think that it was the Russians,” said Ricketts, an author and advocate for veterans and military families. She called the revelation “mind blowing.”
“It feels so hilarious and insidious at the same time.”
‘COMPLETELY NEW GROUND’
As Ricketts scrambled out of the tub to show the threat to her husband, nearly identical messages reached Lori Volkman, a deputy prosecutor based in Oregon who had won fame as a blogger after her husband deployed to the Middle East; Ashley Broadway-Mack, based in the Washington, D.C., area and head of an association for gay and lesbian military family members; and Amy Bushatz, an Alaska-based journalist who covers spouse and family issues for Military.com.
Liz Snell, the wife of a U.S. Marine, was at her husband’s retirement ceremony in California when her phone rang. The Twitter account of her charity, Military Spouses of Strength, had been hacked. It was broadcasting public threats not only to herself and the other spouses, but also to their families and then-first lady Michelle Obama.
Snell flew home to Michigan from the ceremony, took her children and checked into a Comfort Inn for two nights.
“Any time somebody threatens your family, Mama Bear comes out,” she said.
The women determined they had all received the same threats. They were also all quoted in a CNN piece about the hacking of a military Twitter feedby CyberCaliphate only a few weeks earlier. In it, they had struck a defiant tone. After they received the threats, they suspected that CyberCaliphate singled them out for retaliation.
The women refused to be intimidated.
“Fear is exactly what — at the time — we perceived ISIS wanted from military families,” said Volkman, using another term for the Islamic State group.
Volkman was quoted in half a dozen media outlets; Bushatz wrote an articledescribing what happened; Ricketts, interviewed as part of a Fox News segment devoted to the menace of radical Islam, told TV host Greta Van Susteren that the nature of the threat was changing.
“Military families are prepared to deal with violence that’s directed toward our soldiers,” she said. “But having it directed toward us is just complete new ground.”
‘WE MIGHT BE SURPRISED’
A few weeks after the spouses were threatened, on April 9, 2015, the signal of French broadcaster TV5 Monde went dead.
The station’s network of routers and switches had been knocked out and its internal messaging system disabled. Pasted across the station’s website and Facebook page was the keffiyeh-clad logo of CyberCaliphate.
The cyberattack shocked France, coming on the heels of jihadist massacres at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket that left 17 dead. French leaders decried what they saw as another blow to the country’s media. Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said evidence suggested the broadcaster was the victim of an act of terror.
But Guillaume Poupard, the chief of France’s cybersecurity agency, pointedly declined to endorse the minister’s comments when quizzed about them the day after the hack.
“We should be very prudent about the origin of the attack,” he told French radio. “We might be surprised.”
Government experts poring over the station’s stricken servers eventually vindicated Poupard’s caution, finding evidence they said pointed not to the Middle East but to Moscow.
Speaking to the AP last year, Poupard said the attack “resembles a lot what we call collectively APT28.”
Russian officials in Washington and in Moscow did not respond to questions seeking comment. The Kremlin has repeatedly denied masterminding hacks against Western targets.
‘THE MEDIA PLAYED RIGHT INTO IT’
Proof that the military wives were targeted by Russian hackers is laid out in a digital hit list provided to the AP by the cybersecurity company Secureworks last year. The AP has previously used the list of 4,700 Gmail addresses to outline the group’s espionage campaign against journalists , defense contractors and U.S. officials . More recent AP research has found that Fancy Bear, which Secureworks dubs “Iron Twilight,” was actively trying to break into the military wives’ mailboxes around the time that CyberCaliphate struck.
Lee Foster, a manager with cybersecurity company FireEye, said the repeated overlap between Russian hackers and CyberCaliphate made it all but certain that the groups were linked.
“Just think of your basic probabilities,” he said.
CyberCaliphate faded from view after the TV5 Monde hack, but the over-the-top threats issued by the gang of make-believe militants found an echo in the anti-Muslim sentiment whipped up by the St. Petersburg troll farm — an organization whose operations were laid bare by a U.S. special prosecutor’s indictment earlier this year.
The trolls — Russian employees paid to seed American social media with disinformation — often hyped the threat of Islamic State militants to the United States. A few months before CyberCaliphate first won attention by hijacking various media organizations’ Twitter accounts, for example, the trolls were spreading false rumors about an Islamic State attack in Louisiana and a counterfeit video appearing to show an American soldier firing into a Quran .
The AP has found no link between CyberCaliphate and the St. Petersburg trolls, but their aims appeared to be the same: keep tension at a boil and radical Islam in the headlines.
By that measure, CyberCaliphate’s targeting of media outlets like TV5 Monde and the military spouses succeeded handily.
Ricketts, the author, said that by planting threats with some of the most vocal members of the military community, CyberCaliphate guaranteed maximum press coverage.
“Not only did we play right into their hands by freaking out, but the media played right into it,” she said. “We reacted in a way that was probably exactly what they were hoping for.”
Boris Johnson Shows That He’s Donald Trump’s Poodle

John Cassidy writes on Boris Johnson’s failure to stand up for Kim Darroch, the now former British Ambassador to Washington, after a series of characteristically vituperative attacks by Trump, and the response by Conservative Members of Parliament.
Former British PM warns of Brexit crisis for Queen
Former UK premier John Major has said he would challenge in court any move to force through a “no-deal” Brexit by suspending parliament. Major warned it could drag Queen Elizabeth II into a “constitutional controversy.”












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