BY MICHAEL MAHARREY
We’ve become increasingly comfortable with facial recognition technology. We use it to unlock our phones and to skip the security line at the airport. But the convenience of facial recognition is blinding us to its dangers.

Georgetown University School of Law privacy expert Clare Garvie put together a video that explains why you should be concerned about the growing use of facial recognition technology, even if you think you have “nothing to hide.”

According to Garvie, police databases now contain images of nearly half of all Americans. She argues that without some restrictions on facial recognition, we’re rapidly hurtling toward a Chinese-style surveillance state.

As Garvie puts it, Americans are basically in a perpetual police lineup.

SOURCE: SUMMIT.NEWS

Police in Oklahoma City are investigating “It’s okay to be white” fliers that were posted at the Oklahoma City University School of Law as a potential hate crime.

Although authorities acknowledge that the fliers were “not believed to be a threat” and that posting them wasn’t a crime because no property was damaged, the individual responsible is under investigation anyway.

“Investigators are trying to determine his intent and whether the actions are a hate crime,” reports the Associated Press.

Law school Dean Jim Roth said the OCU is “intentional and relentless” in supporting diversity and the hatred and exclusion “will not be tolerated.”

Meanwhile in another incident, a sign that read “It’s OK to be white” was hung on a bridge over a highway in Massachusetts. A local ADL spokesman said the message “excludes people” and “targets people.”

Massachusetts: It’s Okay to be White pic.twitter.com/dKkdgIuavq

SOURCE: ARSTECHNICA.COM

Mozilla is urging Congress to reject the broadband industry's lobbying campaign against encrypted DNS in Firefox and Chrome.

The Internet providers' fight against this privacy feature raises questions about how they use broadband customers' Web-browsing data, Mozilla wrote in a letter sent today to the chairs and ranking members of three House of Representatives committees. Mozilla also said that Internet providers have been giving inaccurate information to lawmakers and urged Congress to "publicly probe current ISP data collection and use policies."

DNS over HTTPS helps keep eavesdroppers from seeing what DNS lookups your browser is making. This can make it more difficult for ISPs or other third parties to monitor what websites you visit.

Submitted by Nauman Sadiq, an Islamabad-based attorney, columnist and geopolitical analyst focused on the politics of Af-Pak and Middle East regions, neocolonialism and petro-imperialism.

A car bomb exploded in northern Syria killing 13 and wounding 20. The blast on Saturday ripped through a crowded market in Tal Abyad, a town recently occupied by Turkish-backed militant proxies. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the blast targeted pro-Turkey fighters and civilians were also among the dead.

Even though the Turkish Defense Ministry promptly laid the finger of blame on Turkey’s arch-foe, the Kurdish YPG militia, without conducting an investigation, car bombing as a tactic for causing widespread fear is generally employed by jihadist groups and not by the Kurds.

Compare US pillaging with Russia-Iran-Turkey’s active involvement in a political solution to normalize Syria..

What happened in Geneva this Wednesday, in terms of finally bringing peace to Syria, could not be more significant: the first session of the Syrian Constitutional Committee.

The Syrian Constitutional Committee sprang out of a resolution passed in January 2018 in Sochi, Russia, by a body called the Syrian National Dialogue Congress.

The 150-strong committee breaks down as 50 members of the Syrian opposition, 50 representing the government in Damascus and 50 representatives of civil society. Each group named 15 experts for the meetings in Geneva, held behind closed doors.

This development is a direct consequence of the laborious Astana process – articulated by Russia, Iran and Turkey. Essential initial input came from former UN Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura. Now UN Special Envoy for Syria Geir Pedersen is working as a sort of mediator.

Signaling what will be a major uptick in US drone activity across western Africa, US African Command (AFRICOM) announced Friday its airbase Agadez, Niger has gone operational, not just flying surveillance drones as was originally expected, but also armed combat drones.

Flights from the base, called Air Base 201, began last week and the patrols are to aid US-Nigerien military patrols in rooting out regional ISIS militants and other Islamist factions which have been threatening the area. Specifically US officials say the armed drone program is badly needed due to prior ISIS ambushes on US-Nigerien troops.

Hong Kong protesters have set fire to metro stations and vandalized buildings, including an office of China’s official news agency Xinhua, during a night of violent protests after Beijing vowed to tighten control over the restive city.

Police fired tear gas and water cannon Saturday as thousands of protesters defied authorities in another unsanctioned march.

Commercial districts on the main island turned into a battlefield as squads of black-clad protesters — many wearing face masks despite a recent ban on them — clashed for hours with riot police.

US troops are reportedly back in military bases in northeastern Syria which they had previously evacuated ahead of Turkey's military action against Kurdish forces in the area.

Turkey's Anadolu Agency has reported that American forces arrived in the west of Syria’s northern province of Raqqa on Saturday to rebuild their military base.

A US military convoy, including a personnel carrier armored vehicle, a mine flail and a utility vehicle, arrived in Jazira base located west of Raqqa via Syria's northeastern province of Hasakah.

On Friday, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) said that a total of 10 rockets had been fired from Gaza, including eight projectiles that had been intercepted by the Iron Dome air defence system.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Hamas was responsible for all rocket attacks against Israel from Gaza.

“We are in a very sensitive security period, that is explosive in several spheres in the east, north, and south,” Netanyahu said.
“Immediately after the rocket fire on the Gaza envelope, I convened a top level security meeting in the military headquarters in Tel Aviv,” he stressed.

The Israeli military reported that the rockets were fired late on Friday. Eight of them were intercepted by Israel's Iron Dome air defence system. One of the rockets hit a residential building in southern Israel, damaging it.

Tensions near the Gaza Strip border heightened on Friday amid the 81st anti-Israeli protest, dubbed the Great March of Return.

Authored by Matthew Ehret via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

With the transformation of the rules of the “Great Game” in the Middle East emerging out of President Trump’s recent Syrian surprise pullout and Putin’s brilliant manoeuvres since 2015, a sweeping set of development/reconstruction programs led by China now have a chance to become hegemonic across the formerly hopeless, terrorist-infested region.

The fact that the Arab states of the Middle East were targeted for destruction by western geopoliticians over the last 40 years is not un-connected to the region’s historic role as “cross-roads of civilizations” which were once the bridge between East and West along the ancient Silk Road (c. 250 BC). Today’s New Silk Road has brought 150 countries into a multipolar model of cooperation and civilization-building which necessitates a stabilized Middle East in order to function.

Nearly a thousand protesters took to the streets of Brooklyn to demonstrate against the NYPD after a spate of violent arrests on the subway and over its plans to put more officers on the beat to catch anyone who skips paying the fare.

The protesters started gathering in Downtown Brooklyn near Barclays Center at about 7pm Friday, with their signs reflecting the dual nature of the march.

While flashier banners bore slogans such as 'Don't let these pigs touch us,' 'F**k the police,' 'Punch that cop' and 'NYPD out of MTA,' other signs read 'Free transit,' 'Poverty is not a crime' and 'Our subways need more $ for elevators, not for cops.'

Their grievances stem from two issues. One, alleged police brutality against New Yorkers including a group of teenagers who officers were seen fighting with in a recent viral video.

Yesterday, the Keystone pipeline leaked an estimated 383,000 gallons (9,120 barrels) of oil into wetlands in North Dakota. The leak is already the eighth-largest pipeline oil spill of the last decade. The tar sands oil transported through the Keystone pipeline is particularly hard to clean up because, unlike crude oil, it sinks in water.

Keystone operator TC Energy’s (formerly TransCanada) alarming spill and safety record has come under scrutiny as it attempts to build the controversial and much larger Keystone XL pipeline through the midwestern United States and Indigenous treaty lands.

In response, Greenpeace USA Senior Research Specialist Tim Donaghy said:

rom one or more illegally established airbases in Syria, as well as other other regional ones, Pentagon warplanes, attack helicopters, and drones continue terror-bombing Syrian sites at the discretion of its commanders.

US troops still occupy large parts of northern and southern Syrian territory indefinitely, including oil producing areas — looting them for private and CIA profiteering, as well as wanting Damascus denied revenues from its own resources. That’s what grand theft is all about.

All of the above are war crimes as defined under the UN Charter and other international law. The US and its imperial partners remain unaccountable for crimes of war and against humanity in all their war theaters.

The same goes for US economic terrorism against Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, Cuba, and other countries — high crimes gone unpunished.

But the real irritant is that Russia will not bow down to Western dictates. The very fact that Western sanctions have not crippled and destroyed Russia makes Western leaders irate. In a surprising, though understandable way, the sanctions have helped the Russian home-grown production of goods to flourish. After all, Russia must make its own decisions for the survival of its people. It is the West’s growing irrelevance to Russia, which it itself caused, that enrages its governments.

MRAUK U, Myanmar—Here in the town of Mrauk U, in Myanmar’s troubled Rakhine state, there has been little to celebrate during this October’s Thadingyut, the second-most important annual festival of the Buddhist calendar. Normally, the auspicious full moon would be hailed with a floating armada of delicate candlelit paper lanterns and song, theater, and dance.

Yet this year, there are no celebrations.

Instead, at 9 p.m. sharp, a curfew falls as soldiers from the Myanmar Army, known as the Tatmadaw, emerge from their posts to pull barbed wire and steel barricades across roads. Shops and businesses shutter, the streets empty and lights flickering out.

An Israeli prison guard deployed to watch a hospitalized Palestinian prisoner reportedly fired tear gas into the intensive care unit room where the man was convalescing after treatment for injuries sustained during interrogation.

The Hebrew newspaper Maariv reported that an Israel Prison Service guard “accidentally” emitted tear gas in Samer Arbeed’s room at the Hadassah hospital in Jerusalem earlier this month, requiring doctors to intervene.

Maariv said the incident was never reported to the prison service.

Arbeed was hospitalized on 27 September following his interrogation by Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, the Shin Bet.

But being hospitalized has not stopped his ordeal and Israeli prison authorities have continued to question Arbeed even while in the ICU.

As governments in Iraq and Lebanon stagger and stumble under huge waves of popular protest, powerful factions loyal to Iran are pushing to quash political upheaval which challenges Tehran’s entrenched influence in both countries.

Lebanon’s Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri has resigned and the government of Iraq’s Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi has been pushed to the brink of collapse.

Both governments have enjoyed backing from the West. But they have also relied on the support of political parties affiliated with powerful Iran-backed Shi’ite armed groups, keeping allies of Tehran in key posts.

That reflects the relentless rise of Iranian influence among Shi’ite communities across the Middle East, since Tehran formed the militant group Hezbollah in Lebanon in 1982 and after Saddam Hussein was toppled in Iraq in 2003.

Russia's foreign ministry spokesperson has accused the U.S. of "criminal activity" with regards to President Donald Trump's plan to deploy troops to guard oil fields in eastern Syria.

Maria Zakharova said Friday that the Trump administration was engaging in illegal smuggling, and estimated Washington stands to make tens of millions of dollars every month from the oil extracted in the region.

According to state news agency Tass, Zakharova said the U.S. was "bypassing its own sanctions" to take the oil—"worth over $30 million per month"—from Syria. She also suggested the U.S. forces deployed "are not going to leave these areas in the near future."

Palestine’s Christian population is dwindling at an alarming rate. The world’s most ancient Christian community is moving elsewhere. And the reason for this is Israel.

Christian leaders from Palestine and South Africa sounded the alarm at a conference in Johannesburg on October 15. Their gathering was titled: "The Holy Land: A Palestinian Christian Perspective".

One major issue that highlighted itself at the meetings is the rapidly declining number of Palestinian Christians in Palestine.

Increasingly beleaguered, Palestinian Christians in Bethlehem have been driven out from their historic city in large numbers. According to the city’s mayor, Vera Baboun, as of 2016, the Christian population of Bethlehem has dropped to 12 percent, merely 11,000 people.

The most optimistic estimates place the overall number of Palestinian Christians in the whole of Occupied Palestine at less than two percent.

AFRICOM says flights started this week, refuses to say which sort of drones are being used.

US African Command (AFRICOM) announced on Friday that the controversial Nigerien Air Base 201, meant to house US surveillance and combat drones, is now open and operational, and flights began earlier this week.

After an ambush by ISIS against a joint US-Nigerien military patrol, the US began pushing Niger for permission to fly not just surveillance drones, but also armed drones. In the panic after the attack, they got permission, starting the long road to constructing this large base.

And while AFRICOM is championing this as expanding US interests in the region, they are refusing to provide any indication what sort of US drones will be based out of the site, saying there are “security concerns” about that.

The original sin of Julian Assange was the same as that of Galileo Galilei. Galileo sinned by revealing to the people things the elite already knew or at least surmised, but wished to keep secret from the masses, in order not to shake the people’s faith in the official truth. Assange did the same thing with the formation of WikiLeaks The official version of reality was challenged. All lies should be exposed. By far the most sensitive targets of his wide-ranging reality revelations were the lies, the hypocrisy, the inhuman brutality of the United States in its wars of global hegemony. To Assange, these things were simply wrong.

At first, WikiLeaks attracted a great deal of popular attention and even acclaim. Julian Assange became famous. He was a geek, but he didn’t look like a geek. Tall, handsome, striking with his nearly white hair, Julian was something strange: a charismatic geek.

Assad's commentary on the latest White House policy to "secure the oil" in Syria, for which US troops have already been redeployed to some of the largest oil fields in the Deir Ezzor region, was the biggest pressing question. The Syrian president's response was unexpected and is now driving headlines, given what he said directly about Trump, calling him the "best American president" ever – because he’s the "most transparent."

“When it comes to Trump you may ask me a question and I’ll give you an answer which might seem strange. I tell you he’s the best American president,” Assad said, according to a translation provided by NBC.

“All American presidents commit crimes and end up taking the Nobel Prize and appear as a defender of human rights and the ‘unique’ and ‘brilliant’ American or Western principles. But all they are is a group of criminals who only represent the interests of the American lobbies of large corporations in weapons, oil and others,” he added.

In what looked like a scene from The Purge, six members of Antifa went to the Portland home of journalist Andy Ngo — while wearing paper masks of his face.
Unsettling footage of the hooded, gloved, and masked harassers was captured by Ngo’s security camera.

Ngo was violently attacked and robbed by Antifa while attempting to cover a protest in June. He was hospitalized with a cerebral hemorrhage.

I was beaten on the head & robbed on 29 June. Antifa then continued to hurl "milkshakes" at my bleeding face. I was hospitalized with a brain hemorrhage. There still hasn't been a single arrest by @PortlandPolice. Help me seek justice; join my legal fund: https://publiuslex.com/pf/justice-for-andy-ngo/ …

Since then, far-leftists have been sending him death threats and doxing him and his family.

Now, they are going to his home, according to the security footage that Ngo posted online.

Amid recent statements by both Iranian and Hezbollah leaders accusing the United States of hijacking the massive anti-corruption protests which have gridlocked Lebanon for over the past two weeks, the White House has made the dramatic and unexpected move of freezing US military aid to the Lebanese Army.

The money, part of a military aid package totaling $105 million, had been approved by Congress and the State Department, and requested by the Pentagon. Interestingly, proponents of the package argued that it would allow the Lebanese Army to grow more independent, making it less cooperative with Hezbollah.

According to Reuters the aid was frozen two days following Tuesday's resignation of Lebanese Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri, who in a parting speech admitted he'd "reached a dead end" amid the protests which have reportedly involved one million people, or up to 25% of Lebanon's total population, and further called on "all Lebanese to protect civil peace".

BY AARON KESEL
U.S. President Donald Trump is using his executive order signed in 2017 to expand the militarized police forces across the nation in preparation to launch a sweeping crackdown on crime that Trump referenced was “the surge” according to a press event at the International Association of Chiefs of Police Annual Conference and Exposition.

“In the coming weeks, Attorney General Barr will announce a new crackdown on violent crime — which I think is so important — targeting gangs and drug traffickers in high crime cities and dangerous rural areas,” Trump said during the International Association of Chiefs of Police conference in Chicago. “Let’s call it the surge,” the White House press release reads.

The President didn’t provide any details on the plan but he stated that the actions would be “very dramatic.”

Trump further expressed his administration’s “achievements” like putting military equipment into the hands of U.S. police officers, as Activist Post reported.

“You can wake her up at 5AM, she won't complain.”

Slavery is one of many industries made more efficient by Silicon Valley, and specifically, Facebook-owned Instagram.

A new BBC investigation reveals the widespread online sale of human beings in the mideast for domestic labor. The buyers and sellers use services from Instagram, Facebook, Apple, and Google to facilitate slavery transactions.

Housekeepers and nannies are purchased and sold as slaves through Instagram, promoted using hashtags, and promoted on other apps in Google Play and Apple's App Store.

These workers live their lives in Kuwait mostly behind closed doors, invisible and with no rights to protest abuse by their employer/enslavers.

Excerpt:

After being alerted to the issue, Facebook said it had banned one of the hashtags involved.

Google and Apple said they were working with app developers to prevent illegal activity.

Here, let me try to dispel a myth peddled by the corporate media and foreign policy think tanks that the Islamic State originated from al-Qaeda in Iraq. Many biased political commentators of the mainstream media deliberately try to muddle the reality in order to link the emergence of the Islamic State to the ill-conceived invasion of Iraq in 2003 by the Republican Bush administration.

Their motive behind this chicanery is to absolve the Obama administration’s policy of nurturing the Syrian opposition against the Syrian government since the beginning of Syria’s proxy war in 2011 until June 2014, when the Islamic State overran Mosul in Iraq and the Obama administration made a volte-face on its previous “regime change” policy of providing indiscriminate support to Syrian militants and declared a war against a faction of Syrian rebel groups, the Islamic State.

SOURCE: NAUMAN SADIQ, BLACKLISTED NEWS

Although Donald Trump claimed credit for expropriating Syria’s oil wealth, it bears mentioning that “scorched earth” policy is not a business strategy, it is the institutional logic of the deep state. President Trump is known to be a businessman and at least ostensibly follows a non-interventionist ideology; being a novice in the craft of international diplomacy, however, he has time and again been misled by the Pentagon and Washington’s national security establishment.

SOURCE: VICE
Every fall, the elite of the literary world and Hollywood convene at a highly secretive writer's retreat hosted by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, and no one talks about it.

Not every Campfire attendee is a household name: Tech entrepreneurs and industry power brokers are also invited to rub shoulders with celebrities.

Now, Motherboard has learned that one of Campfire 2018's attendees was Ghislaine Maxwell, the British socialite who is alleged to have been instrumental in grooming young women into convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein's sex-trafficking ring. Reporting on Maxwell’s alleged role, via victim statements and court records, goes back to 2011.

SOURCE: MINT PRESS

HODEIDA, YEMEN — The country of Yemen, known in the medieval period as “Green Yemen,” is one of the most extensively terraced areas of the world. There, Yemeni farmers transformed rugged mountain slopes into terraces and built dams like the Great Marib, a structure whose history spans long enough that it was mentioned in the Quran. During the medieval period, Yemen had one of the widest ranges of agricultural crops in all of the Middle East.

SOURCE: MOON OF ALABAMA
Ukrainegate is the new Russiagate. The 'whistleblower complain' is the new 'dirty dossier'. The 'former' MI6 spy Christopher Steele wrote the dossier. The current CIA spy Eric Ciaramella wrote the 'complain':

Federal documents reveal that the 33-year-old Ciaramella, a registered Democrat held over from the Obama White House, previously worked with former Vice President Joe Biden and former CIA Director John Brennan, a vocal critic of Trump who helped initiate the Russia “collusion” investigation of the Trump campaign during the 2016 election.
Further, Ciaramella (pronounced char-a-MEL-ah) left his National Security Council posting in the White House’s West Wing in mid-2017 amid concerns about negative leaks to the media. He has since returned to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

“He was accused of working against Trump and leaking against Trump,” said a former NSC official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.

U.S. meat markets had so far been shielded from the effects of a deadly pig disease wiping out Asian herds. That’s starting to change.

As pork supplies plummet in China, the world’s top consumer is desperate for meat and is ramping up imports. As a result, it’s becoming harder to set longer-term protein contracts amid concerns over market volatility and changing trade flows, according to Jayson Penn, chief executive officer of Pilgrim’s Pride Corp., the No. 2 U.S. chicken producer.

“The contracting season is moving somewhat slower this year” for chicken, Penn said on a conference call with analysts following the release of third-quarter earnings. While major fast food restaurant chains are looking for beef contracts, “there are not many sellers willing to forward price,” he said.

The US occupation of the oil production facility at Deir Ez Zor is strategic for the US, and EU foreign policy on Syria, which depends on sanctions to keep the Syrian civilians and government from importing any necessary supplies to repair and re-build Syria, now that the war is over. Syrians are prevented from importing oil due to the sanctions, and without oil, the country cannot re-build. If the Syrian oil production facilities were to be in the hands of the legal owners, the Syrian Ministry of Oil, then repairs could be carried out and Syria would no longer need to import oil, and they could go back to being energy sufficient, as they were before 2011.

Russian Defense Ministry, Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov spoke about satellite images in Syria which show the extent of past US involvement in the oil smuggling business, which was conducted with the Kurds using a US company “Sadcab”, and the profits were funneled through US private military contractors.

A video of the incident was uploaded to Twitter. The video shows 15-year-old Othman Helles barely get his two feet on the fence before he is shot dead. Helles is clearly unarmed, and cannot be taken as a serious threat to a soldier with a rifle and full body armor.

Since these protests began, children, paramedics, journalists, and disabled people have been killed by Israeli forces. The worst the protesters can do is hurl rocks across the fence or send burning kites, hardly a threat to the Israeli soldiers.

This conviction could just be a sorry attempt to appease the UN and other critics of the way the IDF has handled these protests. Since the first day of the Great March of Return, the UN has called for investigations into the massacres.

More than 100,000 people have died as a result of the war in Yemen, according to an explosive new report by an American NGO.

Based on data collected from a variety of sources, including the United Nations, the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project (ACLED) said the death toll from the four-year-long war was considerably higher than most previous estimates.

Out of the over 100,000 people estimated to have been killed since a Saudi-led coalition intervened in Yemen's war in 2015 against the Houthi movement, at least 12,000 civilians were killed in direct attacks, the ACLED said.

Already, 2019 has so far been the second deadliest year of the conflict, with more than 20,000 deaths reported. By 2020, ACLED estimated that 102,000 will have been killed as a direct result of violence.

A major incident has unfolded along Lebanon's southern border with Israel on Thursday involving an Israeli drone. Hours ago Lebanese media reported that Hezbollah operatives shot down an Israeli aircraft, identified as an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), likely with an anti aircraft missile, specifically a MANPAD (or man-portable air-defense system).

Russian President Vladimir Putin pledged to protect Christians threatened by the conflict in Syria, appealing to the plight of religious minorities as justification for Russia's involvement.

After a meeting with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban on Wednesday, Putin expressed sorrow over the persecution experienced by Christians in the Middle East, according to the Associated Press. Russian leaders have worked to develop close ties with Syria's Christian communities. Melkite Catholic Archbishop Jean-Clement Jeanbart has called Russia's intervention in the country a source of "hope for the country's Christians.

"The Middle East is the cradle of Christianity, and Christians are in peril there, facing persecution, being killed, raped, and robbed," said Putin. "Russia will do everything to protect Christians in the Middle East. We must help them restore and preserve their holy sites, preserve their congregations."

McKenzie said the US was under no illusions it had destroyed Isis, and warned the group would try to take revenge.

“They will be dangerous. We suspect they will try some form of retribution attack,” he said. “We don’t see a bloodless future because unfortunately this ideology is going to be out there.”

However McKenzie predicted that the campaign against Baghdadi would grind down Isis capabilities.

The men were jolted awake again sometime after midnight. The main gate to the clinic, which was next to the guard’s room, had been blown in, and the staff heard hurried footsteps in the ruined entryway. The intruders ran past the guard’s room and into the clinic’s main building. The clinic staff huddled in the darkened room as several doors were kicked in across the compound yard. After what one of the clinic workers described as five or six minutes, the staffers, worried that they’d surprise the intruders when they eventually reached the guard’s room, called out, “We’re in here!”

SOURCE: NEW YORKER
This spring, a team of engineers at WhatsApp detected a series of suspicious calls on the messaging service’s networks, many of them emanating from phone numbers in Sweden, the Netherlands, Israel, and other countries. At first, WhatsApp wasn’t sure what was happening. Then the engineers, working with their counterparts at Facebook, which owns WhatsApp, realized that the voice and video calls were somehow infecting targeted phones with advanced spyware, using a penetration method that the company had never encountered before. Most disturbing to the investigators was that it appeared many of the targeted phones became infected whether the calls were answered or not—what’s known as a zero-click vulnerability.

Alternative media circles have been buzzing for the last two days ever since news broke about the arrest of Grayzone journalist Max Blumenthal, who was reportedly jailed for two days after a SWAT-style police team showed up threatening to break his door down last Friday.

Blumenthal is charged with simple assault alleged to have taken place five months ago during the notorious standoff when the US government was working to remove the official Venezuelan government from its DC embassy and replace it with diplomats from the Guaido-led puppet government it was attempting to force into power. Dissident journalists, including Blumenthal, stationed themselves in the embassy in opposition to the illegal eviction and to document the behavior of the evictors. Blumenthal calls the assault charge “a 100 percent false, fabricated, bogus, untrue, and malicious lie.”

In February 1943, the Soviet victory over the Nazi Reich marked the turnaround of the Second World War. The next steps were inevitable. It was not until the Anglo-American landing in Normandy (June 1944), the Yalta conference (February 1945), the suicide of Chancellor Hitler (February 1945) and finally the surrender of the Reich (8 May 1945) that this new world emerged. In one year (June 44-May 45), the Great Reich had been replaced by the Soviet-US duopoly. The United Kingdom and France, which were still the world’s two leading powers twelve years earlier, were to witness the decolonization of their empires.

It is a moment like this that we are experiencing today.

SOURCE: BOING BOING
Tomorrow, Toronto’s City Council will hold a key vote on Sidewalk Labs’s plan to privatize much of the city’s lakeshore in the name of creating a "smart city" owned by Google’s parent company, Alphabet.

Today, the Globe and Mail published a summary of Sidewalk Labs’s leaked "yellow book", a 2016 document that lays out Sidewalk Labs’s vision for Toronto and future projects in Detroit, Denver, and Alameda.

The plan lays out a corporate-owned city similar to Lake Buena Vista, the privately owned municipality established by the Walt Disney Company on a massive tract of central Florida land that contains the Walt Disney World resort.

At the end of each opinion piece the New York Times makes the following statement: ‘The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor.’ Essentially, the pretext of this statement is that the New York Times does not censor or reject opinion simply because it is not aligned with the opinions of the editorial staff, and will print what does and does not resonate with the newspaper’s editors in equal measure. In other words, the New York Times purports to be strong advocates and facilitators of free speech and dissenting views.

Journalist Max Blumenthal was arrested on October 25 and charged with “assault” in a political case that he says is “completely false” and “manufactured” by Venezuela opposition supporters.

From April to May, supporters of Juan Guaido’s attempted coup in Venezuela surrounded the Venezuela embassy in Washington, D.C. They engaged in verbal and physical assaults that authorities largely permitted.

Blumenthal, the editor of The Grayzone, reported on antiwar and international solidarity activists, who attempted to protect the embassy from the right-wing opposition.

According to Grayzone reporter Ben Norton, “A team of D.C. police officers appeared at Blumenthal’s door at just after 9 AM, demanding entry and threatening to break his door down. A number of officers had taken positions on the side of his home as though they were prepared for a SWAT-style raid.”

The Pentagon intends to retain control of Syria’s oilfields going forward, and says they will repel anyone else trying to take that oil with “overwhelming force.” This has become the chief, and materially only, military goal of the US military operation in Syria.

Since President Trump announced his intention to control the oil, and conceivably to try to take some of it on behalf of the US, the Pentagon has been revising the Syria mission around controlling the oil. This has included sending more troops and tanks.

Pentagon officials have tried to build this narrative around keeping ISIS from reclaiming the oilfields, since they held them once. With ISIS barely existing anymore, that’s not a realistic threat, and Defense Secretary Mark Esper conceded on Monday that the deployments of US forces are meant to “deny access” to the oil to either Russia or the Syrian government.

Via GreatGameIndia.com,

India’s second (and largest) nuclear power unit stopped operating on 19th October 2019. It is suspected that the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant was hit by a cyberattack and the authorities were already alerted of the threat months in advance. Even as cybersecurity experts are investigating the case, the authorities were quick to dismiss any occurrence of a spyware infiltrating their systems. The power plant project built in collaboration with Russia has been a target of foreign players since its inception.

WASHINGTON (Sputnik) - The Trump administration wants political leaders in Lebanon to rapidly create a new government in the wake of the resignation of the country’s prime minister, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement.

"In light of Prime Minister [Saad] Hariri’s resignation, the United States calls on Lebanon’s political leaders to urgently facilitate the formation of a new government that can build a stable, prosperous, and secure Lebanon that is responsive to the needs of its citizens," Pompeo said on Tuesday.https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=images+yemeni+children%2C+dead+or+dying+from+saudi+airstrikes&qpvt=Images%3a++Yemeni+children%2c+dead+or+dying+from+Saudi+Airstrikes&form=IGRE&first=1&cw=1129&ch=597

CROWN PRINCE OF SAUDI ARABIA MOHAMMAD BIN SALMAN (L) IS WELCOMED INDIAN PRIME MINISTER NARENDRA MODI (R) WITH AN OFFICIAL WELCOMING CEREMONY AT PRESIDENTIAL PALACE IN NEW DELHI, INDIA ON FEBRUARY 20, 2019 [INDIAN FOREIGN MINISTRY/HANDOUT/ANADOLU AGENCY]
Just one year after Saudi journalists Jamal Khashoggi’s brutal murder in his country’s Consulate in Istanbul, world leaders are flocking to Riyadh to attend a flagship investor meeting known as “Davos in the desert”.
Although there has been very little progress in bringing those responsible for the grisly murder to justice, the CIA and several other intelligence agencies believe that the killing was authorised by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman, the de facto ruler of the Kingdom.

Five presidents and the heads of some of the world’s biggest banks and arms manufacturers are reported to be among those heading to Saudi Arabia for the potentially lucrative event.

SOURCE: JACOB G. HORNBERGER
Not long after President George W. Bush declared a “war on terrorism,” I wrote that this war would end up being as perpetual as the federal government’s war on drugs. Some 18 years later, the U.S. government’s killing of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Syria confirms how right I was.

After all, given all the media hype about the killing, you would think that the war on terrorism had been won and had finally been brought to an end. Some people were undoubtedly even getting ready for a ticker-tape parade in Washington, D.C., to celebrate the end of the war on terrorism.

Alas, not even close! Despite the much-ballyhooed killing of Baghdadi, there are still lots more terrorists, both big and little, in the world to kill. After 18 years of terrorism warfare, the Pentagon and the CIA are just getting a good start killing terrorists.

BY B.N. FRANK
Many people are aware that California utility company PG&E is being held accountable for playing a significant role in the state’s devastating wildfires.

What many may not know is that insurance companies have taken legal action against PG&E after their “Smart” Meters caught fire on California homes.

In 2015 hundreds of PG&E smart meters simultaneously exploded in Stockton, CA after a truck caused a power surge. Scary, right?

Tens of millions of “Smart” Meters have been installed by different utility companies worldwide and “Smart” Meter fires and explosions aren’t isolated to PG&E. Hundreds of thousands of have been recalled or replaced throughout North America due to failure, malfunctioning, overheating, fires and explosions. Some American elected officials have been taking action against their forced installation.

SOURCE: AP
Dem. presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard was joined Tuesday by families who lost loved ones in the 9/11 attacks to demand that federal authorities release the findings of their investigation into the Saudi government's role in the attacks.

BY BEN NORTON
Max Blumenthal, the editor of the news site The Grayzone, was arrested on the morning of October 25 on a fabricated charge related to the siege of the Venezuelan embassy in Washington, DC that took place between April and May.

A team of DC police officers appeared at Blumenthal’s door at just after 9 AM, demanding entry and threatening to break his door down. A number of officers had taken positions on the side of his home as though they were prepared for a SWAT-style raid.

Blumenthal was hauled into a police van and ultimately taken to DC central jail, where he was held for two days in various cells and cages. He was shackled by his hands and ankles for over five hours in one such cage along with other inmates. His request for a phone call was denied by DC police and corrections officers, effectively denying him access to the outside world.

Power is concentrated in hands on Intel Committee Chair Adam Schiff
He will get to approve Republican witnesses and their requests for subpoena
After Intel finishes its investigation, it will write a public report.

Matter then goes to Judiciary panel which writes articles of impeachment
Trump and his lawyer cannot participate in process until that final stage
House votes on resolution on Thursday, which is Halloween.

Embattled Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri has submitted his resignation as people remain on the streets across Lebanon for the thirteenth day of anti-government demonstrations against the country’s economic crisis.

“I have reached a dead end today. I will head to the Baabda Palace to submit the government's resignation to President Michel Aoun,” Hariri said as he addressed the Lebanese nation in a televised speech on Tuesday evening.

“Posts are not important; what’s important is the country's dignity and safety,” he added, calling upon people from all strata of the Lebanese society to preserve the stability and security of the country.

Hariri highlighted that he wants to make a “positive shock,” saying, “No one is bigger than his country.”

He also told Lebanese political parties that “It is our responsibility to protect Lebanon.

Under the constitution, Hariri’s cabinet would stay on in a caretaker capacity until a new government is formed.

Countries who side with India in its standoff with Pakistan over the disputed Kashmir region face being at the receiving end of the Islamic Republic’s missiles, according to the country’s minister for Kashmir affairs.

Speaking at a function on Monday, Minister Ali Amin Gandapur warned that Pakistan was willing to go to war over the contested territory. “If the tension with India escalates on the issue of Kashmir, Pakistan will be forced into a war,” he said.

Gandapur added that he regrets that the world has done nothing to resolve the issue and issued a stark warning to countries considering supporting India in the dispute.

According to Leif Östling, former CEO of one of the world's leading truck manufacturers, immigration has spiralled out of control and has placed Sweden on the brink of “internal wars”, where military force may be needed to quell unrest in migrant areas.

In a lengthy interview with SwebbTV, the former Scania CEO has claimed that the arrival of new migrants poses severe integration problems and may have drastic repercussions for the Swedish economy and society as a whole.

“Now this is a simple question there, and it's because we've taken in far too many people from outside. And we did. Those who come from the Middle East and Africa live in a society that we left almost a hundred years ago”, Östling said.

Jordanian woman Heba al-Labadi was admitted to the Bnei Zion Hospital in the city of Haifa Thursday, after going on a monthlong hunger strike to protest her detention without trial by Israeli officials.

According to a report by The Times of Israel, Labadi, 32, received fluids at the hospital on Thursday and Monday before being sent back to the Kishon Prison in northern Israel where she is being held. She was arrested by Israeli officials on August 20 at the Allenby Bridge that connects the West Bank with Jordan “because of suspicion of her involvement in serious security violations,” according to the Israeli Shin Bet security service.

Labadi has been held in administrative detention for months without any formal charges, with Israeli authorities claiming that she is a danger to the country’s security.

Boeing's CEO is set to appear before the Senate Commerce committee today to address the controversy surrounding the two fatal 737 Max crashes that took the lives of 346 people. According to Bloomberg, Chief Executive Officer Dennis Muilenburg will also address new allegations that the company withheld safety information from regulators subsequent to the crashes, a story we first reported on about two weeks ago.

He will be the first official from Boeing to testify publicly, and the company's storied history and now-tarnished reputation (not to mention Muilenburg's job) may hang in the balance.

Muilenberg's upcoming testimony, released by the company on Monday, states: "We know we made mistakes and got some things wrong. We own that, and we are fixing them. We have developed improvements to the 737 Max to ensure that accidents like these never happen again."

From a comment on Facebook from Jeff McQueen:

After our daughter of fifteen years of age was moved to tears by the speech of Greta Thunberg at the UN the other day, she became angry with our generation “who had been doing nothing for thirty years.”

So, we decided to help her prevent what the girl on TV announced of “massive eradication and the disappearance of entire ecosystems.”

We are now committed to give our daughter a future again, by doing our part to help cool the planet four degrees.

From now on she will go to school on a bicycle, because driving her by car costs fuel, and fuel puts emissions into the atmosphere. Of course it will be winter soon and then she will want to go by bus, but only as long as it is a diesel bus.

Somehow, that does not seem to be conducive to ‘helping the Climate’.

The worst moment was one of a number of ‘worst’ moments. I have sat in many courtrooms and seen judges abuse their positions, This judge, Vanessa Baraitser– actually she isn’t a judge at all; she’s a magistrate — shocked all of us who were there.

Her face was a progression of sneers and imperious indifference; she addressed Julian with an arrogance that reminded me of a magistrate presiding over apartheid South Africa’s Race Classification Board. When Julian struggled to speak, he couldn’t get words out, even stumbling over his name and date of birth.

When he spoke truth and when his barrister spoke, Baraister contrived boredom; when the prosecuting barrister spoke, she was attentive. She had nothing to do; it was demonstrably preordained. In the table in front of us were a handful of American officials, whose directions to the prosecutor were carried by his junior; back and forth this young woman went, delivering instructions.

Prince Turki criticized congressional representatives on Wednesday for the “horror” and “disdain” they express for Saudi Arabia, saying U.S. lawmakers are unable to perform their jobs to address “issues of racism and racial inequality” and to reform gun ownership laws. He also said that most U.S. media has a “consistently blinkered view” of Saudi Arabia, one that portrays negative events in the kingdom as “being the norm.”

The murder last year of Khashoggi, a U.S resident and Washington Post columnist, as well as the long-running war and humanitarian crisis in Yemen and the detention of Saudi female activists have all strained the kingdom’s relations with much of the Washington establishment outside the White House. Senior lawmakers in both parties remain unified on the issue of punishing the kingdom.

This past Friday marked the 80th Great March of Return in the occupied Gaza Strip. Since March 2018, protesters have gathered near the Israel border fence every Friday. Israeli forces have killed over 300 Gazans since the protests started, most near the border fence.

At the most recent demonstrations, 95 protesters were injured, among them 43 children, 2 paramedics, and a journalist. 36 of those wounded were shot with live bullets, the rest either hit with rubber bullets or tear gas canisters.

Demonstrators are demanding an end to the blockade that has been in effect since 2007. The economy of Gaza is in dire straits, unemployment is around 50 percent, and about 70 percent for the occupied territories’ youth.

Israeli forces have killed children, journalists, paramedics, and disabled people since the protests began. In February, the UN released a report accusing Israeli soldiers of war crimes for how they targeted the civilian protesters.

New Delhi (Sputnik): India and Pakistan are doing little to deescalate their border conflict, and the situation on the ground appears to be worsening with each passing week.

At least four civilians have been killed since Thursday and several injured in heavy shelling and firing at different sectors along the Line of Control (LoC), the de-facto border that divides Kashmir between India and Pakistan.

A worrying development is the high and consistent use of artillery by both sides. In previous periods of tension the use of artillery was quite limited and would usually end up with a flag-meet. But this time, the situation seems different.

Pakistan administered Kashmir a Terrorist Controlled Country: Indian Army chief

Speaking at an army function in New Delhi on Friday, Indian Army Chief General Bipin Rawat categorically stated that Pakistan administered Kashmir is “illegally occupied by Pakistan and being controlled by terrorists.”

SOURCE: RT
As anti-government unrest in Iraq continues, authorities have ordered a counter-terrorism force to help restore security in Baghdad. The turmoil is the latest political crisis to hit Iraq after the US-led invasion in 2003.
"Counter-Terrorism Service forces have been deployed in some areas of Baghdad to protect state buildings from undisciplined elements taking advantage of security forces being busy with protecting protests and protesters," the unit said in a statement.

Two sources who spoke to Reuters said the elite troops had been instructed to "use all necessary measures" to end ongoing protests against Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi’s government.

As many as 67 Iraqis have been killed in two days of protests, according to reports. The anti-government demonstrations, which began in early October, are believed to have already killed more than 100 people.

SOURCE: NEW EASTERN OUTLOOK

Timing is Everything

The supposed military operation – unfolding just miles from the Syrian-Turkish border – comes at a time when the prospects of America’s proxy war in Syria have reached all time lows.

First – US proxy forces jointly armed and aided by Turkey as well as other US allies – have been all but eliminated from the battlefield with their remnants residing in Idlib, increasingly encircled by Syrian forces.

Attempts by the US to intervene in Syria directly to oversee the overthrow of the government in Damascus was also thwarted by Russia’s military intervention beginning in 2015.

SOURCE: FINIAN CUNNINGHAM VIA THE STRATEGIC CULTURE FOUNDATION
No wonder Democratic Party bosses and mainstream media are trying to bury presidential contender Tulsi Gabbard. She is the only candidate, perhaps the only politician in the US, who is telling the American public exactly what they need to know about what their government and military are really up to: fighting illegal regime-change wars, and to boot, sponsoring terrorists for that purpose.

It didn’t come much clearer nor more explicit than when Gabbard fired up the Democratic TV debate this week. It was billed as the biggest televised presidential debate ever, and the Hawaii Representative told some prime-time home-truths to the nation:

President Donald Trump announced plans to violate several longstanding tenets of international law on Sunday morning during a controversial press conference celebrating the death of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, legal experts say.

“We are leaving soldiers to secure the oil,” Trump said. “And we may have to fight for the oil. Maybe somebody else wants the oil, in which case they have a hell of a fight.”