Archived threads in /news/ - Current News - 172. page

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>Belgian police had numerous chances to unmask the Islamic State terror cell that later carried out the Paris and Brussels attacks, according to a confidential report prepared for Belgium’s Parliament.
>In early 2015, Brussels police stopped a car driven by Brahim Abdeslam, later one of the Paris attackers, and arrested him for drug possession. At the time, Brahim was on a terror watch list. He carried a booklet about “parental consent for the Jihad.” Police found a USB thumb drive hidden behind his car radio.
>He was let go after brief questioning. Authorities failed to analyze the thumb drive or other electronics seized after the drug stop from an apartment Brahim shared with his younger brother, also involved in the attacks, Salah Abdeslam. Another unnoticed detail: The email address the suspect supplied, [email protected], was a fake.
>The Comité P report and other documents expose the Belgian security apparatus as underfunded and dysfunctional. Law-enforcement bodies, with no single chain of command, are divided into various fiefs split along linguistic lines—Dutch in the north and French in the south, with a bilingual Brussels divided among overlapping zones.
>Both brothers had earlier brushes with the law. According to the Comité P report, Brahim was involved in 40 offenses starting at age 15, including robbery, weapons possession and drugs. Salah’s 12 offenses included a 2010 break-in at a parking garage, for which he served a month in prison.
>She reported that the brothers were getting radicalized, were in touch with Mr. Abaaoud and were planning something “irreversible.” Another counterterror police officer, assigned to check out the tip, concluded that at least one of the brothers was “radicalized and wanted to go to Syria, because his mother took his passport away.”

http://www.wsj.com/articles/secret-report-shows-just-how-badly-belgium-mishandled-hunt-for-isis-operatives-1483630994

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http://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/Persons-of-Interest-Questioned-After-Man-Beaten-in-Facebook-Live-as-Attackers-Shout-F----Donald-Trump-409709875.html can we please come together as a human race and discourage human torture?

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http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/rubio-cruz-join-forces-to-move-us-embassy-to-jerusalem/article/2610789

>Republican Sens. Marco Rubio, Dean Heller and Ted Cruz are pressing Congress to act on a bill to move the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a dramatic but symbolic action that also would fulfill a campaign promise President-elect Trump made.

>"Jerusalem is the eternal capital of the Jewish state of Israel, and that's where America's embassy belongs," Rubio, a top Trump rival for the GOP presidential nomination before dropping out in March, said in a statement Tuesday. "It's time for Congress and the president-elect to eliminate the loophole that has allowed presidents in both parties to ignore U.S. law and delay our embassy's rightful relocation to Jerusalem for over two decades."

>"I've advocated for America's need to reaffirm its support for one of our nation's strongest allies by recognizing Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel," said Heller, a Nevada Republican. "While administrations come and go, the lasting strength to our partnership with one of our strongest allies in the Middle East continues to endure. My legislation is a testament to that."

>The effort comes after House and Senate Republicans announced that each chamber would consider resolutions denouncing the recent United Nations measure describing Israeli settlements as illegal.
...

http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/04/politics/jerusalem-embassy-senate-bill-rubio-cruz/

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http://www.csmonitor.com/World/2017/0103/Finland-experiments-with-600-a-month-stipend-for-jobless

>Some 2,000 unemployed Finnish citizens will begin to receive a monthly stipend that is not tied to their employment status, marking one of the world’s first forays into universal basic income, which could have groundbreaking implications for how nations combat income inequality.

>The randomly selected Finns will receive €560, or around $587, each month for the next two years – even if they find regular, steady jobs or rake in extra cash by participating in the gig economy. If the program proves successful, Finland may expand it to include all adults, believing the shift could mean long-term savings for the nation's welfare system, which remains complicated and expensive.

>Several nations around the word have floated the idea of a universal basic income, but the waters remain mostly untested, making the investment seem shaky at best to many. But after decades of persistent issues with welfare around the world, including an inequality trap created by systems that discontinue benefits for those who take low-wage jobs, subsequently hampering incentives to work, many are starting to wonder if solutions lie in more radical attempts.

>"Incidental earnings do not reduce the basic income, so working and ... self-employment are worthwhile no matter what," Marjukka Turunen, the head of the legal unit at KELA, the agency that controls Finland's social benefits system, told CNN Money.

>Officials hope that such a system will tackle a troubling disincentive problem: when low-income citizens crave stability, they may be less likely to pursue work, knowing that higher paychecks that don’t actually lift them and their families out of poverty could lead to the cancellation of income subsidies and welfare benefits.
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>House Republicans, defying their top leaders, voted Monday to significantly curtail the power of an independent ethics office set up in 2008 in the aftermath of corruption scandals that sent three members of Congress to jail.

>The move to weaken the Office of Congressional Ethics was not public until late Monday, when Representative Robert Goodlatte, Republican of Virginia and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, announced that the House Republican Conference had approved the change with no advance public notice or debate.

>In its place, a new Office of Congressional Complaint Review would be set up within the House Ethics Committee, which before the creation of the Office of Congressional Ethics had been accused of ignoring credible allegations of wrongdoing by lawmakers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/02/us/politics/with-no-warning-house-republicans-vote-to-hobble-independent-ethics-office.html

They're not even pretending anymore.

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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4067902/Seven-migrants-arrested-homeless-man-set-fire-Christmas-Eve-Berlin-subway-station.html

>Seven migrants have been arrested after a homeless man was set on fire on Christmas Eve at a Berlin subway station.

>The men, aged 15 to 21, are suspected of torching the victim as he slept on a platform bench at Schönleinstraße station. Six of the suspects are Syrian and one is Lybian and an attempted murder investigation has been launched.

>Thomas Neuendorf, the vice chief of the press office at Berlin Police, told Bild that detectives believe the 21-year-old to have been the main perpetrator. He, along with his alleged accomplices, were arrested on yesterday.

>After torching the homeless man, the suspected assailants hopped onto a train to make their getaway.

>CCTV footage captured them watching and laughing as the man was burning on the platform. It appeared they were celebrating, according to local press. Remarkably, the victim escaped almost unscathed, thanks to the rapid intervention of several witnesses.

GERMANY. YES.

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http://adage.com/article/digital/ad-fraud-scheme-cost-advertisers-3-million-day/307235/

>A complex ad fraud scheme has been siphoning $3 million to $5 million per day since October from the largest U.S. brands and media companies, making it the most profitable and advanced operation seen by the industry to date, according to a new report from WhiteOps, an anti-ad fraud security firm.

>By comparison, other large, well-known ad-fraud attacks garnered $200,000 to $900,000 a day, WhiteOps said.

>A group of Russian hackers were behind the attack, creating more than half a million fake users and 250,000 fake websites to pull off the scheme, according to WhiteOps. Bots, which are used to mimic human behavior to dupe advertisers in paying for impressions never seen by humans, were used to view some 300 million video ads a day, according to the report.

>Collectively dubbed "Methbot" by WhiteOps, the bots scammed publications like the Huffington Post, The Economist, Fortune, ESPN, Vogue, CBS Sports and Fox News, the company said. Overall, about 6,000 publishers were hit, according to the report. Social media websites weren't immune to the attack, either, as platforms like Facebook were also hit, it said.

>WhiteOps said it would not release the names of the brands affected by the attack.

>The Methbot operation targeted the most expensive advertising on the internet: full-sized video ads served in full view on name-brand sites to users who were logged in to social media and showed signs of engagement like mouse movement, WhiteOps said. The operation was able to avoid notice for weeks by mimicking many of the telltale signals of human interaction monitored by advertisers and anti-fraud firms.
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While the nation was preoccupied celebrating the holidays and welcoming a new year, two disturbing news articles—reiterating what Judicial Watch has reported for years—shed additional light on the critical situation in the southern border region. The first, an investigative piece by one of the country’s largest newspapers, documents how hundreds of employees and contract workers at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have taken millions of dollars in bribes to let drugs and illegal immigrants into the United States. A few days later the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) is cited in a Texas news report confirming that El Paso, long known as America’s “safest city,” is a major corridor for Mexican cartels smuggling drugs into the U.S.

For more than a decade Judicial Watch has exposed the pervasive corruption among DHS agents charged with protecting the U.S-Mexico border. They include Border Patrol officers accepting bribes to help transport illegal immigrants and contraband into the U.S. and DHS employees from various agencies collaborating with Mexican smuggling operations to allow drugs, weapons and possibly terrorists into the country. A few years ago, two veteran Border Patrol agents got convicted for operating a multi-million-dollar human smuggling business in which illegal aliens were transported into the U.S. in government vehicles. In 2013 two officials assigned to crack down on corruption at DHS got indicted for ordering the falsification of records—including active criminal probes—to obstruct an investigation into crooked federal agents suspected of participating in the illegal smuggling of undocumented aliens and/or narcotics into the United States.
http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2017/01/dhs-agents-bribed-let-drugs-illegal-aliens-u-s-el-paso-major-corridor-mexican-drugs/

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https://www.wired.com/2017/01/year-donald-trump-kills-net-neutrality/

>2015 was the year the Federal Communications Commission grew a spine. And 2017 could be the year that spine gets ripped out.

>Over the past two years, the FCC has passed new regulations to protect net neutrality by banning so-called “slow lanes” on the internet, created new rules to protect internet subscriber privacy, and levied record fines against companies like AT&T and Comcast. But this more aggressive FCC has never sat well with Republican lawmakers.

>Soon, these lawmakers may not only repeal the FCC’s recent decisions, but effectively neuter the agency as well. And even if the FCC does survive with its authority intact, experts warn, it could end up serving a darker purpose under President-elect Donald Trump.
....
related:
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/how-much-danger-net-neutrality-now
Sweden:
https://www.emarketer.com/Article/Swedes-Tussle-Over-Net-Neutrality/1014972
The Netherlands:
http://www.theverge.com/2016/12/28/14098280/at-least-somebody-cares-about-net-neutrality
India:
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/internet/trai-seeks-public-view-on-net-neutrality/articleshow/56334970.cms

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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/30/world/asia/china-ivory-ban-elephants.html

>China announced on Friday that it was banning all commerce in ivory by the end of 2017, a move that would shut down the world’s largest ivory market and could deal a critical blow to the practice of elephant poaching in Africa.

>The decision by China follows years of growing international and domestic pressure and gives wildlife protection advocates hope that the threatened extinction of certain elephant populations in Africa can be averted.

>“China’s announcement is a game changer for elephant conservation,” Carter Roberts, the president and chief executive of the World Wildlife Fund, said in a written statement. “With the United States also ending its domestic ivory trade earlier this year, two of the largest ivory markets have taken action that will reverberate around the world.”

>According to some estimates, more than 100,000 elephants have been wiped out in Africa over the past 10 years in a ruthless scramble for ivory driven by Chinese demand. Some Chinese investors call ivory “white gold,” while carvers and collectors call it the “organic gemstone.”

>Elly Pepper, a wildlife advocate with the Natural Resources Defense Council, which is based in New York, wrote that China’s announcement “may be the biggest sign of hope for elephants since the current poaching crisis began.”

>Wildlife advocates have said for years that the most important step in putting poachers out of business would be shutting down the ivory industry in China.
...
http://www.voanews.com/a/conservationists-applaud-china-plan-to-phase-out-ivory-in-2017/3658113.html

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http://www.techspot.com/news/67620-cnn-uses-fallout-4-illustrate-russian-hacking-activities.html

>Video games being used as footage for real-life news stories isn’t a new phenomenon, but it’s still quite amusing when it happens. Now, CNN has become the latest organization to feature a gaming clip in one of its reports.

>In a video aired late last month during a segment on President Obama’s sanctions against Russia for its cyberhacking, a sharp-eyed viewer noticed the clip contained the hacking terminals from Fallout 4. Reddit user Poofylicious posted a screenshot of the distinctive green lettering from the mini-game, though the section appears to have now been removed from CNN’s report.

>It seems many news outlets still make strange choices when picking footage to represents hacking. If it’s not a clip from The Matrix or 1995’s Hackers, then a generic keyboard or a hooded youth in a V for Vendetta mask is used for B-roll footage.

>Bethesda, the company behind Fallout 4, has taken the incident in good humor. Studio Vice President Pete Hines tweeted: “Wait till they discover FO4 players were actually helping Russians and cracking real security through that mini game.”

>Bethesda Game Studios' Twitter account joined in by posting an image of one of the terminals, along with the message that it was an early look at the next season of Mr. Robot.
...

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Angered that “Christian music” was being played inside a McDonald’s, a Florida man cursed at employees and other patrons and demanded that they “turn it off and play Muslim and Hindu music,” according to cops who arrested the customer.

Joseph Allen, 46, walked into the McDonald’s around 10:20 AM Tuesday and created “a threat to the safety of others,” according to a Largo Police Department report.

Allen, cops say, “began cursing at customers and employees” due to the “Christian music” being played over speakers in the fast food restaurant (seen below). The “Christian music” to which Allen referred was apparently Christmas tunes.

Allen, who appeared intoxicated, approached McDonald’s workers "in an aggressive manner," leaving the employees “in fear for their safety.”

Police responding to a 911 call confronted Allen, who reportedly admitted to cursing at McDonald’s workers and customers. A search of Allen turned up a small bag of methamphetamine in a pants pocket. Seen above, Allen was booked into the county jail on disorderly conduct and narcotics possession charges.

Allen, a convicted felon, is locked up in lieu of $2150 bond. His lengthy rap sheet includes busts for assault; robbery; grand theft; trespass; battery; disorderly intoxication; lewd and lascivious exhibition; distributing stolen property; criminal mischief; and carrying a concealed weapon.

http://thesmokinggun.com/buster/christmas/mcdonalds-music-arrest-284931

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http://www.stripes.com/news/us/pentagon-seeks-to-avert-low-ball-bids-on-development-contracts-1.447167

>The Pentagon is seeking ways to crack down on contractors that make low-ball bids for multibillion-dollar development projects in anticipation of collecting other Defense Department funds later.

>Contractors oppose a proposed regulation saying that Pentagon contracts specialists could recalculate bids as higher than submitted. That would increase the risk that a company would lose the bidding to a competitor.

>The question is whether some contractors rely too much in their bid calculations on estimates of future Pentagon reimbursement for their independent spending on research and development of unrelated projects. That's as opposed to a bid based more on a contract's technological risk and labor-cost projections, as well as the fruits of a bidder's own prior independent research and development expenses.

>Counting on future reimbursements can give bidders "a significant competitive advantage" so "we just want to make sure that things are transparent," Claire Grady, the Defense Department's director of procurement policy, said in an interview.

>The Pentagon actively encourages companies to spend their own funds on independent research and development that meets military needs, and repays some of the expenditures. The Pentagon reimbursed industry $3.8 billion in fiscal 2015 and $3.5 billion in 2014 for its share of these "IR&D" expenditures. The expenses are typically reimbursed as indirect costs spread across a company's entire business base.

>Facing strong opposition -- led by the Council of Defense and Space Industry Associations, an umbrella group for contractors -- the Pentagon announced on Dec. 22 that it would extend the time for industry comments on the proposed regulation by a month, through Feb. 2. The extension increases the chances the proposal could be scrapped or revised by the incoming Trump administration.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/01/world/africa/burundi-assassination-emmanuel-niyonkuru.html?_r=0

>LONDON — Burundi’s environment minister was shot to death while en route home from a New Year’s celebration early Sunday morning, an act that could exacerbate the country’s nearly two-year-long political crisis.

>Emmanuel Niyonkuru, 54, the minister for water, environment and planning, was shot to death around 12:45 a.m. while returning to his home in the Rohero section of Bujumbura, the capital, according to a statement by Pierre Nkurikiye, a spokesman for the national police. He said that a woman who was with him had been detained for questioning.

>President Pierre Nkurunziza called the killing an “assassination” and said on Twitter: “Condolences to the family and to all Burundians. This crime will not go unpunished.”

>Violent protests broke out after April 2015, when Mr. Nkurunziza decided to run for a third term, even though the constitution limits the president to two five-year terms. (The constitutional court ruled that his first term did not count, since he had been elected by members of Parliament and not directly by voters.) He went on to win a new term, in an election that most of his rivals boycotted and that American and European observers described as neither fair nor free.

>Hundreds of people have been killed in the violence, which has displaced an estimated 300,000 people. The United Nations has warned of summary executions and other crimes that might amount to crimes against humanity — an assertion that Mr. Nkurunziza has rejected. In October, Burundi moved to withdraw from the International Criminal Court, the Hague-based tribunal responsible for investigating war crimes and crimes against humanity, the first country to do so.

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When will Russia and China stop protecting these silly fucks and agree to a forced regime change?
http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/01/world/asia/north-korea-intercontinental-ballistic-missile-test-kim-jong-un.html