Category Archives: Issues

Cybersecurity firm finds evidence that Russian military unit was behind DNC hack

The Washington Post reports: A cybersecurity firm has uncovered strong proof of the tie between the group that hacked the Democratic National Committee and Russia’s military intelligence arm — the primary agency behind the Kremlin’s interference in the 2016 election.

The firm CrowdStrike linked malware used in the DNC intrusion to malware used to hack and track an Android phone app used by the Ukrainian army in its battle against pro-Russia separatists in eastern Ukraine from late 2014 through 2016.

While CrowdStrike, which was hired by the DNC to investigate the intrusions and whose findings are described in a new report, had always suspected that one of the two hacker groups that struck the DNC was the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, it had only medium confidence.

Now, said CrowdStrike co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch, “we have high confidence” it was a unit of the GRU. CrowdStrike had dubbed that unit “Fancy Bear.”

The FBI, which has been investigating Russia’s hacks of political, government, academic and other organizations for several years, privately has concluded the same. But the bureau has not publicly drawn the link to the GRU. [Continue reading…]

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Prince Charles: Rising intolerance risks repeat of horrors of past

The Guardian reports: The Prince of Wales has warned that the rise of populist extremism and intolerance towards other faiths risks repeating the “horrors” of the Holocaust.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s religious Thought for the Day slot, the prince delivered an outspoken attack against religious hatred and pleaded for a welcoming attitude to those fleeing persecution.

He said: “We are now seeing the rise of many populist groups across the world that are increasingly aggressive to those who adhere to a minority faith. All of this has deeply disturbing echoes of the dark days of the 1930s.

“My parents’ generation fought and died in a battle against intolerance, monstrous extremism and inhuman attempts to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe.”

The prince did not mention any politicians by name, but his address will be seen by some as a veiled reference to the election of Donald Trump in the US, the rise of the far right in Europe, and increasingly hostile attitudes to refugees in the UK.

“That nearly 70 years later we should still be seeing such evil persecution is to me beyond all belief,” he said. “We owe it to those who suffered and died so horribly not to repeat the horrors of the past.” [Continue reading…]

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Twitter is ‘toast’ and the stock is not even worth $10, says analyst

CNBC reports: Twitter is “toast” as a company and the stock is not even worth $10, according to a research note published Tuesday, following the departure of another top executive at the social media service.

The microblogging platform’s chief technology officer, Adam Messinger, tweeted that he would leave the company and “take some time off”, while Josh McFarland, vice president of product at Twitter, also said he was exiting the company. Both executives announced their departure on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, last month, Adam Bain stepped down as chief operating officer last month to be replaced by chief financial officer Anthony Noto, who has yet to be replaced. Twitter has also lost leaders from business development, media and commerce, media partnerships, human resources, and engineering this year.

The departures prompted Trip Chowdhry, the managing director of equity research at Global Equities Research, and a noted “uber-bear” on tech stocks, to issue a note on Tuesday claiming Twitter is “toast” and “not even a $10 stock”. [Continue reading…]

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Berlin shaken but calm after attack

Der Spiegel reports: The Ferris wheel on Alexanderplatz has come to a standstill and the mulled wine stands are boarded up. The sphere at the top of the TV tower is hidden in the clouds. On the day after the truck attack in the western part of the city, almost all of Berlin’s 60 Christmas markets are closed, including the one at Alexanderplatz. “Out of sympathy and reverence,” says Rudi Bergmann, before quickly adding: “But not out of fear!”

Bergmann has been bringing his Grillhütte stand from Nuremberg to Berlin for the last 20 years, for about a month each time. On this Tuesday, however, his grill is empty. Officials at the Rotes Rathaus, Berlin’s city hall, requested that the Christmas markets be closed for at least a day. Of course, says Bergmann, “you always think it might happen, but then you ignore those thoughts,” he says. Over all those years.

And now? Bergmann shrugs his shoulders. What do you do? Keep on going. Live. Reopen the Grillhütte tomorrow. Because you can’t just hide out of fear. “Doesn’t do any good,” says a woman passing by. “You have to keep going.”

This was the mood in the German capital one day after the attack. Shaken but calm. Berlin has seen a lot in its day. And not only politicians and officials, but also city residents knew that there would eventually be an attack in Berlin. [Continue reading…]

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Trump on the future of proposed Muslim ban, registry: ‘You know my plans’

The Washington Post reports: President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday appeared to stand by his plans to establish a registry for Muslims and temporarily ban Muslim immigrants from the United States.

Speaking outside his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, Trump did not walk back the proposals after he was asked by a reporter whether he was rethinking or reevaluating them in the wake of a fresh terrorist attack in Berlin.

“You know my plans,” Trump said.

He went on to add that the attack on a Berlin Christmas market, which was claimed by the Islamic State, had vindicated him. German authorities are seeking a 24-year-old Tunisian migrant, who they say has ties to Islamist extremists, in connection with the attack, which killed 12 people and injured dozens.

“All along, I’ve been proven to be right. One-hundred-percent correct,” Trump said. “What’s happening is disgraceful.” [Continue reading…]

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Russia is taking the unwelcome place long occupied by the U.S. in Middle East

The Wall Street Journal reports: Victory comes at a cost.

Since entering the Syrian war last year, Russia successfully ended America’s status as the Middle East’s sole superpower, an achievement capped by the fall of Aleppo.

That rise has turned Moscow into the region’s indispensable power broker. In Europe, too, the migrant wave unleashed by the Syrian war strengthened Moscow’s sway, fueling populist parties friendly to President Vladimir Putin.

The assassination of Russia’s ambassador to Turkey on Monday, however, highlighted the flip side of this dizzying rise. As America’s influence has shrunk, Russia has taken the place the U.S. long occupied in the minds of many people in the Middle East: an alien imperialist power seen as waging war on Muslims and Islam.

There haven’t been any recent anti-American protests in the region. But amid the agony of Aleppo, tens of thousands of protesters converged this month outside Russian missions from Istanbul to Beirut to Kuwait City—where the chanting, led by local lawmakers, was clear: “Russia is the enemy of Islam.”

The Turkish policeman who gunned down Ambassador Andrey Karlov on Monday shouted that he was avenging the suffering of Aleppo, which had been subjected to a year of Russian bombing before the Syrian regime and its Shiite allies conquered the rebel-held parts of the city in recent weeks.

The diplomat’s assassination, while condemned by governments, was greeted with open joy on Arabic social media, and in Palestinian refugee camps.

“Russia is certainly being perceived as the new bully in the neighborhood,” said Hassan Hassan, a fellow at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy in Washington. “The way people react to its involvement in the decimation of one of the most revered Sunni cities in the Middle East, Aleppo, is reminiscent of how the U.S. was viewed after its occupation of Iraq. You only need to follow how the killer of the Russian ambassador was glorified throughout the region to get an idea of how Russia is despised by the populace today.” [Continue reading…]

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Celebrity isn’t just harmless fun – it’s the smiling face of the corporate machine

George Monbiot writes: ow that a reality TV star is preparing to become president of the United States, can we agree that celebrity culture is more than just harmless fun – that it might, in fact, be an essential component of the systems that govern our lives?

The rise of celebrity culture did not happen by itself. It has long been cultivated by advertisers, marketers and the media. And it has a function. The more distant and impersonal corporations become, the more they rely on other people’s faces to connect them to their customers.

Corporation means body; capital means head. But corporate capital has neither head nor body. It is hard for people to attach themselves to a homogenised franchise owned by a hedge fund whose corporate identity consists of a filing cabinet in Panama City. So the machine needs a mask. It must wear the face of someone we see as often as we see our next-door neighbours. It is pointless to ask what Kim Kardashian does to earn her living: her role is to exist in our minds. By playing our virtual neighbour, she induces a click of recognition on behalf of whatever grey monolith sits behind her this week.

An obsession with celebrity does not lie quietly beside the other things we value; it takes their place. A study published in the journal Cyberpsychology reveals that an extraordinary shift appears to have taken place between 1997 and 2007 in the US. In 1997, the dominant values (as judged by an adult audience) expressed by the shows most popular among nine- to 11 year-olds were community feeling, followed by benevolence. Fame came 15th out of the 16 values tested. By 2007, when shows such as Hannah Montana prevailed, fame came first, followed by achievement, image, popularity and financial success. Community feeling had fallen to 11th, benevolence to 12th. [Continue reading…]

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Trump’s response to recent attacks risks adding confusion to dangerous situation

Julian Borger writes: While the German police were looking for clues at the scene of the Berlin Christmas market attack and German leaders called for unity and calm, Donald Trump put out a statement from the other side of the world framing it as a jihadist onslaught against Christians.

“[Islamic State] and other Islamist terrorists continually slaughter Christians in their communities and places of worship as part of their global jihad,” his statement on Monday said. “These terrorists and their regional and worldwide networks must be eradicated from the face of the earth.”

However, a Pakistani asylum seeker detained at the scene was released on Tuesday for lack of evidence and the hunt was still on for the driver of the truck 24 hours after Trump’s statement.

In contrast to Trump’s declaration, a statement from German president Joachim Gauck did not attempt to reach conclusions, but stressed solidarity among religious and ethnic communities. “The hatred of the perpetrators will not seduce to hate,” he said. “It will not drive a wedge through our coexistence. We will reach out to each other, we will talk to each other and we will care for each other.”

Trump’s readiness to cast blame from afar and to emphasize sectarian division – and the absence of an equivalent statement from his office about an attack on Muslims the same day in Switzerland – has added urgency to concerns that his gut reactions to world events will act as an amplifier and accelerator of global conflict. [Continue reading…]

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Unsealed warrant reveals FBI had no new evidence of actual wrongdoing when Comey intervened in presidential campaign

The Washington Post reports: The FBI told a federal judge that it needed to search a computer to resume its investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server because agents had found correspondence on the device between Clinton and top aide Huma Abedin — though they did not have any inkling what was being discussed, according to newly unsealed court documents.

The documents, made public Tuesday after a Los Angeles lawyer sued for their release, reinforce the impression that when the bureau revealed less than two weeks before the election that agents were again investigating Clinton, they had no new evidence of actual wrongdoing. The FBI’s revelation upended the presidential campaign, and to this day, Clinton and her supporters say it is at least partly to blame for her surprising loss to Donald Trump.

The documents unsealed Tuesday relate to the warrant the FBI obtained to search a computer belonging to disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner for information potentially related to the Clinton email case. Weiner is Abedin’s estranged husband, and the FBI had been investigating him over allegations that he exchanged explicit messages with a teenage girl. [Continue reading…]

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Putin’s oil and gas deals magnify military power in Middle East

Bloomberg reports: After reinventing itself as a major power in the Middle East by force in Syria, Russia is now using its other strong suit, energy, to expand its influence across the region.

A series of agreements is allowing Russia and the Gulf states to cooperate in areas where their interests meet, looking beyond Syria where they have backed opposing sides in a brutal proxy war. Over the past month alone, Russia brokered the first deal between the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and non-OPEC nations in 15 years to cut oil production, secured a $5 billion investment by Qatar in oil giant Rosneft PJSC, and then saw Rosneft agree to pay as much as $2.8 billion for a stake in an Egyptian gas field.

“Russia is really keen to increase leverage in the Middle East by every means,” said Fyodor Lukyanov, chairman of Russia’s Council on Foreign and Defense Policy.

It’s a reflection of how events in the region are combining in favor of Russian President Vladimir Putin as rarely before. A cooling of U.S. alliances in the Gulf in recent years, the havoc cheaper oil has wreaked in energy-dependent economies and a recognition that Russia can no longer be ignored on regional security issues mean Putin is pushing at an increasingly open door. [Continue reading…]

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Russia signs cooperation agreement with anti-immigrant party in Austria

The Wall Street Journal reports: Russia’s ruling party signed a five-year “cooperation agreement” with the anti-immigrant Freedom Party of Austria, one of the clearest signs that the Kremlin is seeking to deepen ties with nationalist and antiestablishment forces in the West.

The two-page agreement, reached in Moscow after Freedom Party leaders met with officials from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party, spells out a common commitment to holding regular joint meetings and public events while working to strengthen social and economic ties between Russia and Austria.

The agreement, seen by The Wall Street Journal, describes “mutual noninterference in internal affairs” and “equal, reliable, and mutually beneficial partnership” as key principles.

The accord is the latest example of Russian efforts to forge ties with antiestablishment, euroskeptic parties in Europe, many of which in turn promote closer ties to Moscow and rolling back the European Union. Marine Le Pen’s National Front has tapped a Russian bank for a loan to help fund its election efforts in France, for instance. Meanwhile, antiestablishment politicians such as Ms. Le Pen, Britain’s Nigel Farage and Geert Wilders, head of the Netherlands’ Party for Freedom, have bashed the EU in interviews on Russian television. [Continue reading…]

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Obama bans drilling in parts of the Atlantic and the Arctic

The New York Times reports: President Obama announced on Tuesday what he called a permanent ban on offshore oil and gas drilling along wide areas of the Arctic and the Atlantic Seaboard as he tried to nail down an environmental legacy that cannot quickly be reversed by Donald J. Trump.

Mr. Obama invoked an obscure provision of a 1953 law, the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which he said gives him the authority to act unilaterally. While some presidents have used that law to temporarily protect smaller portions of federal waters, Mr. Obama’s declaration of a permanent drilling ban from Virginia to Maine on the Atlantic and along much of Alaska’s coast is breaking new ground. The declaration’s fate will almost certainly be decided by the federal courts.

“It’s never been done before,” said Patrick Parenteau, a professor of environmental law at the University of Vermont. “There is no case law on this. It’s uncharted waters.”

The move — considered creative by supporters and abusive by opponents — is one of many efforts by Mr. Obama to protect the environmental policies he can from a successor who has vowed to roll them back. The president, in concert with United Nations leaders, rushed countries to ratify the Paris Agreement on climate change, putting the multinational accord into force in record time, before Mr. Trump’s inauguration.

Environmentalists are already drawing comparisons between Mr. Obama’s use of the 1953 law to ban new drilling to what critics and opponents called his novel and audacious efforts to craft new climate change regulations: He turned to an obscure, rarely used provision in the 1970 Clean Air Act to write sweeping regulations that would require states to shift their electricity systems from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources. [Continue reading…]

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Lawyer: ‘Appalled’ by FBI warrant that shook Clinton

USA Today reports: The FBI warrant that shook Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign in its final two weeks has been unsealed, and the lawyer who requested it says it offers “nothing at all” to merit the agency’s actions leading up to the Nov. 8 election.

The warrant was released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by Los Angeles lawyer Randy Schoenberg, who wants to determine what probable cause the agency provided to suspect material on disgraced congressman Anthony Weiner’s computer might be incriminating to Clinton. Weiner is the estranged husband of Clinton’s top aide, Huma Abedin. Under the Fourth Amendment, search and seizure can only be granted when proof of probable cause of criminal findings has been documented.

The letter confirms news reports in late October that the FBI had detected “non-content header information” suggesting correspondence with accounts involved in its already-completed investigation of Clinton’s private email server. The FBI request concludes there is “probable cause to believe” that the laptop contained “evidence, contraband, fruits and/or items illegally possessed,” without providing specifics.

“I see nothing at all in the search warrant application that would give rise to probable cause, nothing that would make anyone suspect that there was anything on the laptop beyond what the FBI had already searched and determined not to be evidence of a crime, nothing to suggest that there would be anything other than routine correspondence between” Clinton and Abedin, Schoenberg said in an email to USA TODAY. It remains unknown “why they thought they might find evidence of a crime, why they felt it necessary to inform Congress, and why they even sought this search warrant,” he said. “I am appalled.” The FBI’s Manhattan office did not immediately return a call seeking comment. [Continue reading…]

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After the USSR fell, the world fell asleep

Gary Kasparov writes: It is difficult to describe what life in the U.S.S.R. was like to people in the free world today. This is not because repressive dictatorships are an anachronism people can’t imagine, like trying to tell your incredulous children that there was once a world without cellphones and the internet. The U.S.S.R. ceased to exist in 1991, but there are plenty of repressive, authoritarian regimes thriving in 2016. The difference, and I am sad to say it, is that the citizens of the free world don’t much care about dictatorships anymore, or about the 2.7 billion people who still live in them.

The words of John F. Kennedy in 1963 Berlin sound naive to most Americans today: “Freedom is indivisible, and when one man is enslaved, all are not free,” he said. That for decades the U.S. government based effective foreign policy on such lofty ideals seems as distant as a world without iPhones.

Ronald Reagan’s warning that “freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction” was never meant to be put to the test, but it is being tested now. If anything, Reagan’s time frame of a generation was far too generous. The dramatic expansion of freedom that occurred 25 years ago may be coming undone in 25 months. [Continue reading…]

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When did conservatives stop believing in personal responsibility?


Here we go again! It’s a clash of civilizations.

I guess the next president of the United States hadn’t been briefed before he got on Twitter. Otherwise he would have been aware that in the attack in Zurich the target of the gunman was a group of worshipers gathered at an Islamic center.

The local police have since found a body which they have identified as the gunman and have ruled out any connection to ISIS in the attack.

Even before more details become known, I’m willing to draw some tentative conclusions. The gunman was a gun-owner (Switzerland has a high level of gun ownership) and he hated Muslims.

The attack in Zurich occurred at 5.30pm before the attack in Berlin at 8.15pm in which 12 people were murdered and 48 injured. If the gunman was motivated by revenge of some type it wasn’t for an atrocity that had yet to take place.

Earlier in the day, Russia’s ambassador to Turkey, Andrey G. Karlov, was murdered by Mevlut Mert Altintas, a 22-year-old off-duty or former Turkish police officer.

How are these events all tied together — apart from in a Trump tweet and by virtue of having occurred on the same day?

They all involve confusion around the meaning of personal responsibility.

With the assassination of Karlov, Altintas certainly wasn’t carrying out an act of random violence and yet whether the career diplomat (an expert on Korea) and representative of the Russian state shares personal responsibility for Russia’s policy on Syria is open to question. It seems most likely he became a target of choice because his public appearance provided the gunman with an opportunity.

In Berlin and Zurich it’s even clearer that the individual victims were given death sentences by their attackers who saw them as indistinguishable from the vast collective (Westerners and Muslims) that each was taken to represent.

If a change in thinking is called for — and indeed it is — it should focus on the promotion of personal responsibility.

Acts of violence that can inflame passions and irrationality across whole societies, must be seen for what they are: the actions of individuals.

Just as gun-owners across Switzerland are not responsible for the murderous intent on one man in Zurich, likewise millions of refugees across Europe are not responsible for the grotesque violence of a 23-year-old Pakistani refugee initially suspected of having carried out the attack in Berlin. Indeed, the latest report quotes a police source who said: “we have the wrong man.”

But this is the paradox in the get-tough approach to counter-terrorism: Because justice cannot be served on individuals who so often die while carrying out their acts of violence, the reactive impulse to throw a counterpunch often results in wild strikes that land far from the mark.

The violence that grabbed the headlines yesterday is the responsibility, first and foremost, of the three men who carried out the the attacks.

This shouldn’t be turned into a showdown between a self-proclaimed civilized world and an ill-defined adversary.

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Israel’s settlement Regulation Bill violates international law

Yael Ronen and Yuval Shany write: The proposed (and euphemistically titled) “Regulation Bill” is a bill pending before the Israeli Knesset which seeks to authorize the expropriation of private Palestinian property in order to render legal hundreds, if not thousands, of houses constructed unlawfully by Israeli West Bank settlers. It raises significant legal problems under Israeli law and under international law, as the latter is interpreted and applied by Israeli courts. Among many other problems, the Bill interferes with private property rights of Palestinian land owners in order to benefit Israeli settlers, and runs contrary to long-standing jurisprudence of the Israeli Supreme Court, according to which the construction of settlements in the West Bank can be permitted only on non-private land. It also raises serious issues concerning the power of the Israeli Knesset to regulate land rights in an area not subject to Israeli law (unlike East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, Israel has never extended its domestic law to the West Bank). It is for these reasons that the Attorney-General of the State of Israel has objected to the Bill and has taken the extraordinary step of declaring that he would not defend the State in litigation concerning the constitutionality of the Bill. Yet a group of lawyers, most of whom belong to a right-wing think tank, the Kohelet Policy Forum (where Eugene Kontorovich heads the international law department) have testified before a Knesset Committee and have published several op-eds maintaining that the Bill is valid under Israeli law, arguing inter alia that the Knesset may pass legislation which violates international law. They have also alleged as an alternative claim that the Bill does not violate international law, for reasons which are cited by Kontorovich in his Just Security post. In the following lines we address only this alternative claim, namely, that the draft Bill does not violate international law. We also disagree with the main claim made by the Kohelet lawyers, and believe that if the Bill is passed, it should be struck down by Israeli courts as unconstitutional. [Continue reading…]

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Why the State Department is worried about Donald Trump and his tweets

Politico reports: en President-elect Donald Trump announced last week that he wanted ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson to be his secretary of state, many in the foreign policy establishment were worried. Aside from the fact that Tillerson has zero public service experience, his history of striking oil deals with foreign leaders, notably Vladimir Putin, raises questions about his ability to defend U.S. interests that may conflict those of ExxonMobil.

But the State Department has a bigger disruption to worry about.

The person who actually sets the department’s diplomatic agenda — in ways both overt and subtle — isn’t the secretary of state; it’s the president. The president’s words, as uttered in speeches and other official statements, literally shape American foreign policy. In turn, State Department bureaucrats rely on the commander in chief to articulate clear, thoughtful and consistent views, based on facts and a knowledge of history. Only then can the entire weight of the large State Department bureaucracy follow seamlessly behind him — and carry out his goals.

As Trump veers from one surprise tweet to the next — at times misspelled 140-character statements that seem to contradict decades of U.S. foreign policy, State Department bureaucrats are facing a unique challenge: How to follow the lead of a president who seems uninterested in consistency, protocol and nuance? [Continue reading…]

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