Author Archives: News Sources

Justice Department charges Russian spies and criminal hackers in Yahoo intrusion

The Washington Post reports: The Justice Department announced Wednesday the indictments of two Russian spies and two criminal hackers in connection with the heist of 500 million Yahoo user accounts in 2014, marking the first U.S. criminal cyber charges ever against Russian government officials.

The indictments target two members of the Russian intelligence agency FSB, and two hackers hired by the Russians.

The charges include hacking, wire fraud, trade secret theft and economic espionage, according to officials. The indictments are part of the largest hacking case brought by the United States.

The charges are unrelated to the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and the FBI’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign. But the move reflects the U.S. government’s increasing desire to hold foreign governments accountable for malicious acts in cyberspace. [Continue reading…]

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Study describes the ‘weaponisation’ of healthcare in Syria

The Guardian reports: The “weaponisation” of healthcare in Syria, involving the targeted destruction of medical facilities and the killing of hundreds of healthcare workers, is unprecedented and has profound and dangerous implications for medical neutrality in conflict zones, according to an authoritative study.

“Syria has become the most dangerous place on earth for healthcare providers,” say the researchers involved. Their study of the attacks on healthcare in Syria since 2011, published by the Lancet medical journal, reveals that the death toll among medical workers is at least 814. Some of those health workers were tortured and executed.

There were nearly 200 attacks on healthcare facilities in 2016 alone, say the researchers in their first report for the Lancet Commission on Syria, led by the Faculty of Health Sciences at the American University of Beirut.

The authors define what they call the weaponisation of healthcare in Syria as a situation “in which healthcare facilities are attacked, workers are targeted, medical neutrality is obliterated and international humanitarian laws are violated to restrict or prevent access to care as a weapon of war”.

They criticise UN agencies and the international community for failing to hold the aggressors, who are breaking international conventions, to account. [Continue reading…]

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Syrian military, not rebels, severed Damascus water supply, UN finds

The New York Times reports: Syrian military airstrikes on rebels were responsible for severing water supplies to 5.5 million people in the Damascus region for weeks starting last December, the United Nations said on Tuesday, rebutting government claims that insurgents were to blame.

In a bombing campaign to drive rebel forces from the Barada Valley north of Damascus, Syrian air force jets launched multiple strikes on their positions around the al-Feijeh spring, which supplied water to the capital, the United Nations Commission of Inquiry monitoring the conflict in Syria said in a report.

The airstrikes amounted to a war crime, the commission said, because the effect of the attack — denying water to so many people — was “grossly disproportionate” to the military advantage that the government could have anticipated or achieved.

When water supplies to the capital were halted in late December, the government blamed rebels, first saying that they had poisoned the water and later that they had damaged the infrastructure. Water service was not restored until February.

The United Nations investigators said video of the bombings, witness testimony and satellite imagery showed the water supply system had been damaged in at least two airstrikes using high-explosive bombs. [Continue reading…]

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Scandal fatigue and the Trump ethical swamp

Timothy L. O’Brien writes: Thanks to some fine work by two Bloomberg news reporters, David Kocieniewski and Caleb Melby, we now know that a major Chinese financial services firm may invest $4 billion in a Manhattan skyscraper owned by the family of President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. And that Kushner’s family stands to take home about $500 million for itself from the transaction.

All sorts of goodies are sprinkled around this potential deal, which is being circulated to attract additional investment. It would be the biggest investment — ever — in a single Manhattan building. Some of the Kushner family’s debt on the property would get erased for about a fifth of its value. The Kushners would become equity partners with the Chinese firm, Anbang Insurance Group.

Best of all for the Kushners, the deal would rescue the family company from the consequences of overpaying for the building, 666 Fifth Avenue, which it purchased in 2007 for $1.8 billion. It would also buy out another prominent Trump political backer who invested in the building, Steve Roth of Vornado Realty, for 10 times his original investment.

“It would make business partners of Kushner Cos. and Anbang, whose murky links to the Chinese power structure have raised national security concerns over its U.S. investments,” Kocieniewski and Melby wrote.

That observation is made all the more pungent by the fact that Trump and China’s president, Xi Jinping, have been discussing the terms of a possible diplomatic summit meeting that may take place as early as next month. [Continue reading…]

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Jared Kushner heavily involved in planning Xi Jinping’s visit to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort

The New York Times reports: When President Trump and President Xi Jinping of China sit down for their first meeting next month in Palm Beach, Fla., they could use the balmy breezes and tranquil views at the Mar-a-Lago resort: Relations between the United States and China are as complex and chilly as they have been since the early days of the Reagan administration.

The list of issues that could open a new rift between these two men is long, such as the deployment of American antimissile batteries in South Korea, Mr. Trump’s campaign threats of a trade war or escalating tensions over the South China Sea and Taiwan.

The debate over where to hold Mr. Trump’s meeting with Mr. Xi captures the underlying angst. Chinese officials pushed for an invitation to Mr. Trump’s private resort, American officials said, because it would be more relaxed and informal than a summit meeting at the White House. Equally important, it would reduce the pressure on the two leaders to produce any agreements, which in the current environment is viewed as unrealistic.

Inside the Trump administration, the visit lays bare the unsettled nature of policy toward China. The White House is divided into camps, with a fiercely ideological, anti-China faction vying against more pragmatic elements. Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has emerged as an influential, moderating voice. He is heavily involved in planning the presidential visit, a senior official said, and took part in a National Security Council meeting on Monday at which North Korea and China were discussed. [Continue reading…]

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Republicans are threatening to expose Trump as the emperor with no clothes

Aaron Blake writes: It’s almost as though Republicans are tired of having President Trump’s evidence-free allegations laid at their feet. Almost.

Late Monday, a spokesman for House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) threatened to subpoena the Trump administration to produce evidence of Trump’s claim that President Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower during the campaign. The White House has declined to produce this evidence publicly, offering various excuses, including the Constitution’s separation of powers and — most recently on Monday — arguing that Trump wasn’t speaking literally when he made the claim.

The Justice Department missed Nunes’s deadline to provide evidence Monday, which drew Nunes’s subpoena threat.

“If the committee does not receive a response, the committee will ask for this information during the March 20 hearing and may resort to a compulsory process if our questions continue to go unanswered,” Nunes spokesman Jack Langer said.

Then, on Tuesday, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) made his own threat. Last week, Graham — who is clearly skeptical of the wiretapping claim and chairs a subcommittee looking into it — asked the Justice Department and the FBI to provide copies of any warrants or court orders related to the alleged wiretapping. Having not received anything, Graham said Tuesday that he would announce his next steps Wednesday and may push for a special committee. [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: A UK spy agency did not eavesdrop on Donald Trump during and after last year’s U.S. presidential election, a British security official said on Tuesday, denying an allegation by a U.S. television analyst.

The official, who is familiar with British government policy and security operations, told Reuters that the charge made on Tuesday by Fox News analyst Andrew Napolitano, was “totally untrue and quite frankly absurd.” [Continue reading…]

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Did Trump have his own tax return leaked? That was the big question after Maddow

The Washington Post reports: It wasn’t the smoking gun President Trump’s critics had hoped for. Far from it.

Some even thought MSNBC host Rachel Maddow’s apparent scoop on Trump’s leaked 2005 tax return made him look good. After all, the New York Times had once suggested that he had avoided taxes, and others that he was faking the extent of his wealth.

The White House circulated a response before the segment aired, complete with its go-to “dishonest media” broadside.

“You know you are desperate for ratings when you are willing to violate the law to push a story about two pages of tax returns from over a decade ago,” a White House spokesperson said anonymously in a statement.

Donald Trump Jr. seized on the report minutes after the show ended, tweeting, “Thank you Rachel Maddow for proving to your #Trump hating followers how successful @realDonaldTrump is $ that he paid $44mm in taxes!”

The documents revealed nothing about the president’s financial ties, the subject of intense scrutiny from Democrats and others who think Trump may have concealed business relationships in Russia.

All told, Trump seemed to make it through the segment in pretty good shape — so good that a cyberspace chorus wondered for hours after the fact: Did Trump leak his own tax return? [Continue reading…]

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Neil Gorsuch has web of ties to secretive billionaire, Philip Anschutz

The New York Times reports: The publicity-shy billionaire Philip F. Anschutz inherited an oil and gas firm and built it into an empire that has sprawled into telecommunications, railroads, real estate, resorts, sports teams, stadiums, movies and conservative publications like The Weekly Standard and The Washington Examiner.

Mr. Anschutz’s influence is especially felt in his home state of Colorado, where years ago Judge Neil M. Gorsuch, a Denver native, the son of a well-known Colorado Republican and now President Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court, was drawn into his orbit.

As a lawyer at a Washington law firm in the early 2000s, Judge Gorsuch represented Mr. Anschutz, his companies and lower-ranking business executives as an outside counsel. In 2006, Mr. Anschutz successfully lobbied Colorado’s lone Republican senator and the Bush administration to nominate Judge Gorsuch to the federal appeals court. And since joining the court, Judge Gorsuch has been a semiregular speaker at the mogul’s annual dove-hunting retreats for the wealthy and politically prominent at his 60-square-mile Eagles Nest Ranch.

“They say a country’s prosperity depends on three things: sound money, private property and the rule of law,” Judge Gorsuch said at the 2010 retreat, according to his speaker notes from that year. “This crowd hardly needs to hear from me about the first two of the problems we face on those scores.”

With the Senate Judiciary Committee set to take up Judge Gorsuch’s nomination next week, Democrats have based much of their criticism of him on the argument that his judicial and economic philosophy unduly favors corporations and the wealthy. But his relationship with Mr. Anschutz, 77, whose fortune is estimated by Forbes to be $12.6 billion, has received scant attention.

The Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation, which developed the list of potential Supreme Court nominees from which Mr. Trump selected Judge Gorsuch, receive funding from Mr. Anschutz. But it is not clear how well the two know each other, in part because the mogul and those around him keep a low profile. [Continue reading…]

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Wikileaks-Russia link revealed: site hosted in Russia, hacking suspect named

Inquisitr reports: The Wikileaks site is at least partly hosted on servers based in Russia — servers that it added just one week before the site released thousands of hacked emails from the account of John Podesta, chairman of the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, in October of last year according to findings published in an online report on Sunday.

The Podesta emails, while containing no major revelations, revealed members of Clinton’s campaign speaking privately, in frank terms that proved embarrassing and likely damaging to her campaign for president against Donald Trump. United States intelligence agencies, according to a report issued by the Director of National Intelligence in January, concluded that a Russian government-sponsored hacking effort was behind the Podesta leak and other cyber-attacks — which were designed to help throw the election to Donald Trump.

Sunday’s online report, authored by freelance journalist Laurelai Bailey, examined a list of internet IP addresses used by Wikileaks to host its site, which houses numerous large troves of leaked and hacked documents, and found two addresses of servers in Russia and hosted by a company run by an individual named Peter Chayanov.

“Now the actual owner of the IP addresses is a man by the name of Peter Chayanov, whose IP addresses have hosted spammers and hackers, according to my sources, who work in internet backbone companies,” Bailey wrote. “Chayanov’s IP space is a virtual equivalent of a bad neighborhood that makes you lock your car doors when you drive through it. So this further implies a connection to Wikileaks and Russian hackers.”

To read the full report by Bailey, click on this link. [Continue reading…]

Patribotics reports: The internet is tightly controlled in Russia. Cyber criminals have to answer to Putin. Mr. Chayanov is the head of a firm called Hostkey, which hosts mail spammers and other malware and hacking tools, despite offering web space to Wikileaks. Wikileaks chose to use a Russian hacker to host their site – and they knew that he was connected to Vladimir Putin and operated with the blessing of Putin’s government.

Putin and Assange are thus already linked.

But it is much worse for Wikileaks – and the internet in general – even than it looks. In order not to bury the lede, I will report what appear to be the conclusions of the web developers and hackers on Twitter discussing Laurelai’s story, and then report on how they appeared to have arrived there.

* Wikileaks has handed Chayanov access to everything stored on its site and servers

* The Russian hacker and spammer can ‘monitor traffic’

* He can tell who is reading anything on the Wikileaks site anywhere in the world

* The Russian hacker has access to all documents that have been sent to Wikileaks

* He can probably bust the anonymity of any computer or user who thought they were anonymously donating to Wikileaks

* It is not reasonable to suggest that this hacker is other than linked with Russia’s GRU – if he has it, they have it

* Through Julian Assange and his website, it appears that the Russian hacker and his government can track any readers of the Wikileaks site and any donors of material to it, thus allowing Russia to ‘blackmail’ anyone who ‘sent secrets’ to Wikileaks as a ‘whistleblower’. [Continue reading…]

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The Trump-Putin honeymoon is over, but the marriage was a sham

James Miller writes: The Russian government’s love affair with Trump had more to do with fostering anti-Americanism than with seeking rapprochement. Russian media coverage reflects this. A careful study of the Kremlin-controlled media, working in both English and Russian, shows that the Russian media was never pro-Trump, but it was anti-Clinton. Trump received mostly neutral treatment, mixed with positive and negative coverage, while the Kremlin spread conspiracy theories and attacked Clinton’s policies. Russian articles about Trump tended to spread the narrative that the United States is a failing democracy and the game was rigged against any politician, like Trump, who did not view Russia as the enemy. They even warned that the establishment would likely find a way to sabotage Trump’s success. In this way, many articles that were “pro-Trump” were really just anti-Clinton, as Clinton was painted as a member of the establishment by both the Russian media and the Trump campaign.

But the Kremlin’s narrative about Trump was formed when Clinton had a commanding lead in the polls. In all likelihood, they never expected him to win. This means that the Kremlin has to find a new narrative to attack the United States. The anti-Americanism that is resurfacing in the Russian media now is just a return to form.

In an interesting twist, the Russian media is now warning that American society is fraying and a constitutional crisis may be brewing. Kiselyov used his TV show on March 5 to voice concern about what is happening in America. Partisanship and controversy are tearing the country apart, he said. “America is in the grips of hatred,” he warned viewers, a situation made more worrisome because of its culture of “free-flowing firearms.” [Continue reading…]

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Trump to drop climate change from environmental reviews, source says

Bloomberg reports: President Donald Trump is set to sign a sweeping directive to dramatically shrink the role climate change plays in decisions across the government, ranging from appliance standards to pipeline approvals, according to a person familiar with the administration’s plan.

The order, which could be signed this week, goes far beyond a targeted assault on Obama-era measures blocking coal leasing and throttling greenhouse gas emissions from power plants that has been discussed for weeks. Some of the changes could happen immediately; others could take years to implement.

It aims to reverse President Barack Obama’s broad approach for addressing climate change. One Obama-era policy instructed government agencies to factor climate change into formal environmental reviews, such as that for the Keystone XL pipeline. Trump’s order also will compel a reconsideration of the government’s use of a metric known as the “social cost of carbon” that reflects the potential economic damage from climate change. It was used by the Obama administration to justify a suite of regulations. [Continue reading…]

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Even deeper cuts being discussed for EPA

Axios reports: The Environmental Protection Agency isn’t fighting the White House’s initial budget that proposes to cut the agency’s budget by about $2 billion — or roughly 25% — and reduce the agency’s workforce by roughly 3,000 employees.

Climate change programs would be gutted under the proposal and the workforce attached to these programs would be cleared out of the agency — in line with the aggressive vision of EPA transition head Myron Ebell.

The Trump Administration, in fact, is now discussing making even deeper cuts to the EPA, according to a source privy to the White House’s internal deliberations. Senior Trump officials consider the EPA the leading edge of the administration’s plans to deconstruct the administrative state. [Continue reading…]

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Russia appears to deploy forces in Egypt, eyes on Libya role

Reuters reports: Russia appears to have deployed special forces to an airbase in western Egypt near the border with Libya in recent days, U.S., Egyptian and diplomatic sources say, a move that would add to U.S. concerns about Moscow’s deepening role in Libya.

The U.S. and diplomatic officials said any such Russian deployment might be part of a bid to support Libyan military commander Khalifa Haftar, who suffered a setback with an attack on March 3 by the Benghazi Defence Brigades (BDB) on oil ports controlled by his forces.

The U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the United States has observed what appeared to be Russian special operations forces and drones at Sidi Barrani, about 60 miles (100 km) from the Egypt-Libya border. [Continue reading…]

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Monica Crowley lost White House job, now she’s got one with pro-Russian oligarch

The Daily Beast reports: A would-be Trump White House appointee who withdrew in the face of plagiarism allegations is now lobbying on behalf of a Ukrainian oligarch who has recently advocated greater concessions to the Russian government, according to newly filed documents.

Monica Crowley told the Justice Department’s National Security Division that she will represent billionaire Victor Pinchuk in discussions with U.S. government officials “and other policy makers” regarding “issues of concern to Mr. Pinchuk.”

Crowley, a Fox News contributor, was in line for a senior post at the White House National Security Council until reports from CNN and Politico reported that she had plagiarized large portions of her 2012 book What the (Bleep) Just Happened and her Columbia University Ph.D. dissertation.

Crowley dismissed the plagiarism allegations in her first public remarks on the controversy last week. “What happened to me was a despicable straight-up political hit job,” she said during an appearance on the Fox News show Hannity. “It’s been debunked, my editor has completely supported me and backed me up.” (It has not been debunked.)

She nevertheless withdrew from consideration for the post shortly after the allegations surfaced. Crowley will now be “providing outreach services on behalf of Mr. Victor Pinchuk,” according to a Friday filing with DOJ’s foreign agent registration office. [Continue reading…]

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Defense Secretary Mattis withdraws Patterson as choice for undersecretary for policy

The Washington Post reports: Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has withdrawn retired senior diplomat Anne W. Patterson as his choice for undersecretary for policy after the White House indicated unwillingness to fight what it said would be a battle for Senate confirmation.

U.S. officials said that two members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), were strongly opposed to Patterson’s nomination because she served as U.S. ambassador to Egypt from 2011 to 2013, a time when the Obama administration supported an elected government with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood that was ultimately overthrown by the Egyptian military.

The withdrawal leaves Mattis with a bench still empty of Trump-appointed senior officials, a situation that stretches across the administration as Cabinet secretaries have not chosen or the White House has not approved nominees. Although Obama administration holdovers remain in a few jobs, after eight weeks in office, President Trump has not nominated a single high official under Cabinet rank in the Defense or State departments. [Continue reading…]

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Steve King, the nativist who just comes right out and says it

Ed Kilgore writes: Nothing upsets conservative “nationalists” like Stephen Bannon more than the charge that bigotry is at the center of the movement that gave us President Trump. While Bannon admits there is racism and anti-Semitism at the fringes of the alt-right, with which his old journalistic perch at Breibart has associated, he insists on treating such influences as marginal.

It is worth remembering that this is a persistent claim among right-bent political activists who may or may not themselves be bigoted, but who are clearly trafficking in appeals to bigots. When George Wallace shifted his focus from defending segregation to attacking unpopular desegregation methods like school busing, he argued he was just favoring the color-blind posture of his old enemies in the civil-rights movement. But he — and we — knew better when it came to the visceral politics of race he espoused.

The effort to marginalize the role of racial or religious bigots in cultural conservatism works best when everybody’s got the memo and is refusing to say things that cross the line. But right there in Washington, within close proximity of the cameras, is at least one member of Congress who, to use a phrase sometimes said of Wallace in his heyday, just comes right out and says it: Iowa’s Steve King. No, King doesn’t admit to racially or religiously discriminatory sentiments, as much as he flirts with them. But for years he has been closely associated (along with his very close friend, former Congressman Tom Tancredo of Colorado) with a brand of nativism that views both illegal and legal immigration as threats to what can only be described as European-American “civilization,” and who is willing to trade in crude stereotypes of people of color. [Continue reading…]

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‘Never Trump’ Republicans join call for select committee to investigate Russia and Trump

Josh Rogin writes: Democrats in Congress have long argued that the ongoing intelligence committee investigations into Russia’s interference in the presidential election and the Trump campaign’s ties to the Kremlin are unlikely to get to the bottom of the issue. Now a group of “Never Trump” Republicans are planning to pressure GOP leaders to establish a bipartisan select committee to take over the inquiries and settle the matter once and for all.

Stand Up Republic, a nonprofit organization led by former independent presidential candidate Evan McMullin and his running mate, Mindy Finn, is launching a public campaign aimed at building support among Republicans for consolidating the various congressional Russia-related investigations into one empowered and fully funded select committee. The organization’s ad, which goes live Tuesday with a six-figure television ad buy, makes the case that the Russia issue is too important not to investigate fully.

“Trump’s Russia crisis. Secret contacts. Conflicting stories. Mounting signs of hidden ties and shady deals. Fear our president is compromised,” says the narrator. “The values of liberty, justice and honor shaped America. Generations fought for freedom, and presidents of both parties stood against foreign tyrants like Vladimir Putin. Why won’t Donald Trump? Tell Congress to name a bipartisan select committee to get the truth?” [Continue reading…]

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How the Netherlands made Geert Wilders possible

The Atlantic reports: In the 17th century, Dutch settlers flocked to the southern half of what is now Manhattan to establish New Amsterdam, a fur-trading post that would welcome Lutherans and Catholics from Europe; Anglicans, Puritans, and Quakers from New England; and Sephardic Jews who were, at the time, discouraged from settling in America’s other nascent regions. Though its English conquerors would rename the city New York, the values of diversity and tolerance that the Dutch introduced would remain the region’s hallmarks for centuries to come.

In the modern-day Netherlands, however, the Dutch Republic’s founding pledge that “everyone shall remain free in religion” will soon collide with the ambitions of one of the country’s most popular politicians.

“Islam and freedom are not compatible,” claims Geert Wilders, the Party for Freedom (PVV) leader who campaigns on banning the Quran, closing Dutch mosques, and ending immigration from predominantly Muslim countries. “Stop Islam,” the phrase that sits atop Wilders’s Twitter page, aptly summarizes his party’s platform. In December, Dutch courts found Wilders guilty of carrying his rhetoric too far, convicting him of discriminatory speech for rallying supporters in an anti-Moroccan call-and-response. Nonetheless, Wilders is a leading contender to receive the plurality of votes in the country’s parliamentary elections on March 15.

The nation’s peculiar path from “live and let live” to “Make the Netherlands Ours Again” (as Wilders recently said) has as its guideposts a changing definition of tolerance, some instances of political opportunism—and a pair of grisly assassinations.

From the mix of faith groups that inhabited New Amsterdam to the peaceful coexistence of Protestants, Catholics, and socialists throughout the Netherlands in the 20th century, the Dutch brand of multiculturalism has often been more “salad bowl” than “melting pot.” Each sect of society had its own schools, media outlets, and social groups; tolerance was the act of respecting those boundaries.

“Historically, Dutch tolerance has been more of a pragmatic strategy,” said Jan Rath, a professor of urban sociology at the University of Amsterdam. “Tolerance has been a way to contain oppositions or complications.” [Continue reading…]

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