Guardian columnist Owen Jones on how James Damore’s diatribe against women in tech is part of the male backlash that contributed to the rise of Trump
Pussy Riot: Two members of Russian punk band detained
Two members of the Russian feminist punk band Pussy Riot were detained Monday after a protest outside the prison colony where a Ukrainian filmmaker is being held.Two members of the Pussy Riot band on Sunday staged a protest outside the prison colony in Siberia’s Yakutia where Oleg Sentsov is serving his sentence, and put a banner on a nearby bridge reading “Free Sentsov!”Maria Alyokhina tweeted that she and Olga Borisova were detained early Monday. Mediazona, the website focusing on court and legal news that Alyokhina and another band member helped set up, released a video showing a police squad stop the car in which the two women were traveling and take them to the police station.
Source: Pussy Riot: Two members of Russian punk band detained
The WikiLeaks-Russia connection started way before the 2016 election – Vox
In April 2012, the relationship between Assange and Russia became direct for the first time. Specifically, Assange became a star on Russia Today (RT), Russia’s state-funded English-language propaganda outlet.“With WikiLeaks’ funding drying up — under American pressure, Visa and MasterCard had stopped accepting donations — Russia Today began broadcasting a show called ‘The World Tomorrow’ with Mr. Assange as the host,” the New York Times reported in a 2016 piece on Assange’s Russian ties.The exact nature of the arrangement between RT and Assange has never been very clear. Assange and WikiLeaks insist that Assange was never employed by RT, and that RT was only one of many broadcasters that bought rights to air Assange’s show. Either way, though, Assange was paid by the Kremlin. According to the Times, the amount of money he received has never been disclosed.The World Tomorrow had a decidedly anti-American bent, in keeping with much of RT’s programming and Assange’s own writing. Its first episode was a polite interview with Hassan Nasrallah, the head of the Iranian-backed Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah. In the interview, Assange refers to Nasrallah as a “freedom fighter,” telling him “you have fought against a hegemony of the United States.”That this was serving an ideological purpose could have been lost on Assange. RT is designed to be the voice of the Russian state in the English-speaking world, particularly America. It’s part of a broad-based Russian propaganda effort aimed at whitewashing Putin’s government, using attacks on alleged US misdeeds as a key strategy.It’s an old tactic used by Soviet apologists, called “whataboutism.” Whenever an American criticized the Soviet Union, the Soviet apologist would say, “What about the bad things America does?” This wasn’t a genuine moral criticism of the United States, which was often quite deserved, so much as a debating tactic aimed at deflecting a moral critique of Soviet policy.Assange eagerly participated in an extended campaign of whataboutism. Not just that, in fact: He was paid by an authoritarian government, one that kills and arrests dissenters, for doing so. His principles as a transparency activist seem not to have gotten in the way.
Source: The WikiLeaks-Russia connection started way before the 2016 election – Vox
New Report Reveals McConnell And Ryan Took Millions From Russian Oligarch Tied To Putin
During the 2015-2016 election season, Ukrainian-born billionaire Leonid “Len” Blavatnik contributed $6.35 million to leading Republican candidates and incumbent senators. Mitch McConnell was the top recipient of Blavatnik’s donations, collecting $2.5 million for his GOP Senate Leadership Fund under the names of two of Blavatnik’s holding companies, Access Industries and AI Altep Holdings, according to Federal Election Commission documents and OpenSecrets.org.
Source: New Report Reveals McConnell And Ryan Took Millions From Russian Oligarch Tied To Putin
Donald Trump puts Secret Service at a distance, as Russian oligarch’s plane flies into New Jersey during golf vacation – Palmer Report
Then came the discovery today that the private plane belonging to Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, who has close ties to Vladimir Putin, and whose wife attended Trump’s inauguration in January, just happened to land in New Jersey today. Abramovich’s plane arrived at Newark Airport within a few hours of Trump’s own arrival at that same New Jersey airport for his golf vacation – which we reported here. That leads to the necessary question of whether Donald Trump is pushing away the Secret Service because he doesn’t want agents to witness his interactions with anyone who might happen to show up at his golf resort over the next seventeen days.
Minnesota Mosque Hit by Early-Morning Explosion – The New York Times – Thanks #TraitorTrump!
“What I would say is an attack on a mosque is an attack on a synagogue, it’s an attack on a church, it’s an attack on all faith communities, so we stand with you, a million Protestants in Minnesota,” said the Rev. Curtiss DeYoung, the chief executive of the Minnesota Council of Churches.The mosque had recently been the target of harassment, receiving threatening and hateful messages, Mr. Omar told The Star Tribune.“People talking about us, telling us, accusing us that we shouldn’t be here, that we are like a burden to the community or we are like harming it,” Mr. Omar said.
With genetic morph, a weird type of anthrax has emerged—and it’s on a rampage | Ars Technica – (nature developed a new potential pandemic source to deal with “over-population” of animals in areas affected by deforestation and growth of human development.)
Classic anthrax is caused by Bacillus anthracis, which tends to strike ungulates (hoofed mammals) in seasonal outbreaks in arid locales, such as the African savannahs. The bacteria can cause infection in skin, lungs, or intestines. In humans, B. anthracis causes ghastly skin lesions and severe respiratory and intestinal infections—which have mortality rates as high as 85 to 60 percent, respectively.The alternative anthrax bacteria appear to cause an identical anthrax disease in animal models. But, those bacteria aren’t B. anthracis; they’re cousins, B. cereus, commonly found in soil and food. Usually, these are relatively harmless, with some strains known to cause a minor fraction of food poisoning cases. But the ones causing alternative anthrax are different. They just so happen to have gotten their grips on B. anthracis’ virulence plasmids—circular, shareable bits of DNA that contain the genetic code for their disease-causing gene products.
Source: With genetic morph, a weird type of anthrax has emerged—and it’s on a rampage | Ars Technica
Hamilton 68: Tracking Putin’s Propaganda Push… To America
Digging deeper, the 54 stories related to partisan politics include 30 hostile to the Democratic Party, 14 supportive of President Trump, 2 hostile to the Republic Party establishment, and 2 targeting the U.S. Intelligence Community. Of 18 stories related to Syria, 14 attacked US actions, while 4 lauded the actions of Russia and their allies. The 9 articles targeting Robert Mueller and his investigation were uniformly hostile.
Source: Hamilton 68: Tracking Putin’s Propaganda Push… To America
Far-right attacking Trump adviser McMaster for being ‘controlled by Jews’ – U.S. News – Haaretz.com
President Donald Trump’s National Security Adviser General H. R. McMaster is being targeted in recent days by a far-right campaign that is accusing him, simultaneously, of being controlled by rich Jews and of harming the state of Israel. The campaign is coming from media outlets and writers affiliated with Steve Bannon, President Trump’s senior political adviser, who has been accused in the past of making anti-Semitic comments.The campaign against McMaster intensified after he fired a number of mid-level officials from the National Security Council, who were considered loyal to Bannon and to the former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. The latter was forced to resign after less than a month in office because he lied to Vice President Mike Pence about his ties to Russia. The driving force behind the campaign has been far-right blogger Mike Cernovich, who started sharing links to a website called, McMaster Leaks, which is devoted to attacks on McMaster, on social media.The website featured a brazen anti-Semitic caricature depicting McMaster and retired General David Petraeus, who is considered close to a number of senior NSC officials – as two puppets being controlled by Jewish billionaire George Soros, who himself is being controlled by “the Rothschilds,” the famously rich Jewish family of bankers. After the caricature was mocked on social media, the website edited it, replacing the word “Rothschilds” on the top of the pyramid with the word “Saudis,” but keeping in Soros depiction in place.Yet McMaster, according to his rivals on the far-right, isn’t only being controlled by the Rothschilds – it turns out he is also “hostile to Israel,” according to articles that have been published in recent days on Breitbart, the far-right website formerly edited by Bannon, and on the Conservative Review (by a reporter who used to work as an editor at Breitbart). These articles, quoting “administration officials” and a Facebook post by Israeli journalist Caroline Glick, accuse him of such “sins” as opposing an Israeli request to include Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at Trump’s visit to the Western Wall during his visit in Israel earlier this year.McMaster, it should be noted, was the Trump administration’s most senior representative and speaker earlier this year at the Israeli embassy’s annual Independence Day event. He was warmly received by the crowd and gave a speech in which he expressed the administration’s strong support for Israel, and promised to always safeguard the Jewish state’s security interests.
Source: Far-right attacking Trump adviser McMaster for being ‘controlled by Jews’ – U.S. News – Haaretz.com







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