Reader’s links for March 20 – 2017

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In order to preserve the flow of conversation about various posted items, and also in order to make it easier for visitors to find the list of related links being shared by other readers, regulars and interested parties in one place, each day a post is automatically created at a minute past midnight ET.

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Thank you all for those that take the effort to assist this site in keeping the public informed. Below, typically people can find the latest enemy propaganda, news items of related materials from multiple countries and languages, op-eds from many excellent sites who write on our topics, geopolitics and immigration issues and so on.

About Eeyore

Canadian artist and counter-jihad and freedom of speech activist as well as devout Schrödinger's catholic

75 Replies to “Reader’s links for March 20 – 2017”

  1. Forbes Mag: Iran Cool Travel Destination for 2017 – Visitors Must Adapt to Sharia Law And Customs (breitbart, Mar 20, 2017)
    http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/03/20/forbes-mag-iran-cool-travel-destination-for-2017-visitors-must-adapt-to-sharia-law-and-customs/

    “Forbes Magazine is promoting Iran as one of “The 10 Coolest Places to Go in 2017,” based on a review by Melissa Biggs Bradley, founder of the travel website Indagare.

    “Indagare founder Melissa Biggs Bradley is excited about the trip she just completed, to Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz and Persepolis,” the Forbes article states. “The country seemed to be on the verge last year, and that panned out.

    “Tourism has doubled in the past year, Biggs Bradley notes, thanks to the 2015 nuclear agreement along with regular flights from London, Paris, Vienna, Istanbul, Dubai and Doha.”

    “Visitors to Iran understand that they must adapt to Sharia law and customs, under which alcohol is strictly forbidden and women must wear hijabs, or headscarves, outside their rooms,” Biggs Bradley wrote. “Advanced visas are required for Americans, who must be accompanied by Iranian guides and may not visit Iranians in their homes…”

  2. Police Drag Anti-Mass Migration Campaigner Off Streets for Asking Anti-Islamophobia Protestors Questions (breitbart, Mar 20, 2017)
    http://www.breitbart.com/london/2017/03/20/police-drag-anti-mass-migration-campaigner-asking-anti-islamophobia-protestors-questions/

    “Anti-mass immigration campaigner Tommy Robinson was verbally and physically abused by demonstrators on an anti-Islamophobia march on Saturday, after approaching them and attempting to engage in conversation. Police detained him and ordered him off the streets, saying this was “easier” than “taking on” the aggressive protestors.

    Caolan Robertson from The Rebel Media and Luton-based activist Tommy Robinson approached demonstrators to ask their views on issues such as female genital mutilation and sexual grooming, “triggering” them into a furious reaction.

    Within five minutes of arriving at the protest, according to Robertson, the pair were surrounded by people shouting “Nazi, white supremacist!”, resulting in attending police officers detaining Robinson…”

    • Amazing. Tommy looks fantastic. Tie, haircut, topcoat
      & standing upright like a knight. God bless ya’
      Tommy. PPaleezeee don’t get arrested ..

  3. Migrant Crisis Summit: Libya Demands €800 Million to Stop Smuggler Boats (breitbart, Mar 20, 2017)
    http://www.breitbart.com/london/2017/03/20/migrant-crisis-summit-libya-demands-e800-million-stop-boats/

    “European and North African countries met in Rome Monday to discuss the migrant crisis, which saw more than 150,000 migrants land on Italian shores in 2016 and thousands killed in dangerous conditions on the Mediterranian Sea.

    The European Union already backs Libya’s government with €200 million worth of support to tackle people smugglers – who provide the unseaworthy craft which carry thousands of migrants north into the waiting arms of European coastguards and volunteer ‘rescue’ missions – but now the country is requesting more.

    Libya’s fragile, UN-backed “unity government” has now asked for an additional €800 million worth of equipment for their patrol efforts including ships, helicopters, off-road vehicles, and radar. The Italian government is already providing Libya with ten patrol craft, to be delivered before the summer.

    The Libya Herald reports Libyan Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj flew to Rome with a “shopping list” of demands, including the call for more money and equipment, in the wake of some 20,000 having made the crossing this year alone. An estimated 3,000 migrants were rescued in the Mediterranean in just the past weekend.

    The new agreement struck Monday with Italy and other European nations agreeing to help Libya patrol her coast and keep the smuggler boats from setting off was short on actual detail or a plan to improve the situation, but instead showed a will, said the Italian interior minister. Democratic party minister Marco Minniti said of the meeting:

    “Naturally we haven’t resolved the problem because it’s clear no one has the definitive solution to the problem in their pockets.

    “But we have common will. And this common will has a common objective: to not chase or suffer illegal migration but govern it.”

    Austrian interior minister Wolfgang Sobotka praised the movement with Libya, telling press: “We have to do everything we can to stop the illegal migration across the Mediterranean”, reports Kronen Zeitung.

    The spending of British and European money in Libya has come under considerable criticism this year, as the poor conditions of migrant camps set up in the country courted criticism. Future spending may see camps established in other North African nations.

    While a not insignificant amount of money, the €800 million now discussed will be dwarfed by coming European contributions if a new “African Marshall Plan“, an aid package designed to boost African nations, is put into place. President of the European Parliament Antonio Tajani said if the bloc doesn’t start pumping cash into the continent immediately, “20 million Africans are going to come to Europe in the coming years”.”

    • What has traditionally happened to African
      overpopulation ?? Mebbe we just need to leave the natural way of things to work themselves out. Provide some Naval Ships to shell any boaters who want to
      disturb the ancient rythms ..

      • The left is forcing that and other nasty solutions by the people who want freedom to survive.

  4. FBI’s Russian-influence probe includes a look at far-right news sites

    WASHINGTON

    Federal investigators are examining whether far-right news sites played any role last year in a Russian cyber operation that dramatically widened the reach of news stories — some fictional — that favored Donald Trump’s presidential bid, two people familiar with the inquiry say.

    Operatives for Russia appear to have strategically timed the computer commands, known as “bots,” to blitz social media with links to the pro-Trump stories at times when the billionaire businessman was on the defensive in his race against Democrat Hillary Clinton, these sources said.

    The bots’ end products were largely millions of Twitter and Facebook posts carrying links to stories on conservative internet sites such as Breitbart News and InfoWars, as well as on the Kremlin-backed RT News and Sputnik News, the sources said. Some of the stories were false or mixed fact and fiction, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the bot attacks are part of an FBI-led investigation into a multifaceted Russian operation to influence last year’s elections.

    Investigators examining the bot attacks are exploring whether the far-right news operations took any actions to assist Russia’s operatives. Their participation, however, wasn’t necessary for the bots to amplify their news through Twitter and Facebook.

    The investigation of the bot-engineered traffic, which appears to be in its early stages, is being driven by the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division, whose inquiries rarely result in criminal charges and whose main task has been to reconstruct the nature of the Kremlin’s cyber attack and determine ways to prevent another.

    An FBI spokesman declined to comment on the inquiry into the use of bots.

    Russia-generated bots are one piece of a cyber puzzle that counterintelligence agents have sought to solve for nearly a year to determine the extent of the Moscow government’s electronic broadside.

    “This may be one of the most highly impactful information operations in the history of intelligence,” said one former U.S. intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.

    Bureau director James Comey confirmed Monday at a House Intelligence Committee hearing what long has been reported: that the FBI is investigating possible links between individuals in the Trump presidential campaign and the Russian campaign to influence the election and whether there was any coordination between the two.

    The ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, one of multiple congressional panels examining Russia’s intervention, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday that there was “circumstantial evidence of collusion.” There also is “direct evidence . . . of deception, and that’s where we begin the investigation,” said Rep. Adam Schiff of California.

    U.S. intelligence agencies charged in January that Russian President Vladimir Putin had ordered the offensive, in which cyber operatives also hacked tens of thousands of emails from Democratic National Committee staff, Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta and other Democrats.

    A top priority of investigators is to determine who delivered those hacked emails to WikiLeaks, a London-based transparency site that published them online, the sources said. News stories about the emails embarrassed Clinton at key points in the campaign. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has denied that the Russian government was the source of the email dump.

    As for the bots, they carried links not only to news stories but also to Democratic emails posted on WikiLeaks, especially those hacked from Podesta and made public in October, said Philip Howard, a professor at the Oxford University Internet Institute who has researched the bot attacks.

    Howard said that, as an example, bots had spread links to fictional stories that accused Clinton of involvement in running a child-sex ring in the basement of a Washington pizza parlor. The posts inspired a North Carolina man to drive to Washington and fire an assault weapon in the restaurant, according to police reports.

    Howard’s study of bot-generated Twitter traffic during last fall’s Trump-Clinton campaign debates showed that bot messages favorable to Trump significantly outnumbered those sympathetic to Clinton.

    He said his research showed that Americans who call themselves “patriotic programmers” also activated bots to aid Trump. In interviews, they described coding the computer commands in their spare time, Howard said.

    Unlike counterintelligence investigators with more cyber-sleuthing capabilities, Howard has not established that Russia was the source of the bot attacks he studied.

    Russia also used “trolls,” hundreds of computer operatives who pretended to be Trump supporters and posted stories or comments on the internet complimentary to Trump or disparaging to Clinton. Sources close to the inquiry said those operatives likely worked from a facility in St. Petersburg, Russia, dedicated to that tactic.

    “Russian bots and internet trolls sought to propagate stories underground,” said Mike Carpenter, a former senior Pentagon official during the Obama administration whose job focused on Russia. “Those stories got amplified by fringe elements of our media like Breitbart.”

    “They very carefully timed release of information to shift the news cycle away from stories that clearly hurt Mr. Trump, such as his inappropriate conduct over the years,” he said, referring to the October release of a video in which Trump bragged about grabbing women’s genitals. That event corresponded with a surge in bot-related traffic spreading anti-Clinton stories.

    An additional Russian tool was the news from its prime propaganda machine, Russia Today, with a global television and digital media operation and a U.S. arm, RT America.

    Last Nov. 19, Breitbart announced that its website traffic had set a record the previous 31 days with 300 million page views, driven substantially by social media.

    Breitbart, which has drawn criticism for pursuing a white nationalist agenda, was formerly led by Stephen Bannon, who became chief executive officer of Trump’s election campaign last August and now serves as Trump’s strategic adviser in the White House. The news site’s former national security editor, Sebastian Gorka, was a national security adviser to Trump’s campaign and presidential transition team. He now works as a key Trump counterterrorism adviser.

    Breitbart’s chief executive officer, Larry Solov, did not respond to phone and email requests seeking comment.

    Bannon and Gorka have controversial profiles. Bannon has been accused of taking anti-immigrant and racist positions. Last week, the Jewish newspaper Forward reported that Gorka had taken a lifelong loyalty oath to a Hungarian far-right group that for decades was allied with the Nazi Party.

    The White House declined to respond to questions about Gorka.

    Breitbart is partially owned by Robert Mercer, the wealthy co-chief executive of a New York hedge fund and a co-owner of Cambridge Analytica, a small, London-based firm credited with giving Trump a significant advantage in gauging voter priorities last year by providing his campaign with at least 5,000 data points on each of 220 million Americans.

    InfoWars is published by Alex Jones, a Texas-based conservative talk show host known for embracing conspiracy theories such as one asserting that the U.S. government was involved in the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. During the 2016 campaign, InfoWars.com was a loyal Trump public relations tool. Trump was on Jones’ show and praised his reporting.

    “It’s the major source of everything,” Roger Stone, a longtime Trump confidant and campaign adviser, said last fall. Stone, who has regularly appeared on Jones’ show and was on Monday, has said he invites an FBI investigation into his campaign role. The Senate Intelligence Committee has asked Stone to preserve documents in connection with the Russian election inquiry.

    Jones responded to questions from McClatchy on his talk show.

    “I’m not gonna sit here and say, ‘I’m not a Russian stooge,’ because it’s a (expletive) lie,” he said, denying any contact with the Kremlin operatives about bots. He said this issue stemmed from “this whole ridiculous narrative of the bitching left.”

    “It’s as if we didn’t build InfoWars,” he said. “It’s as if we don’t have a huge audience.”

    Noting he had appeared on RT “probably 100 times or more,” he said sarcastically, “There’s my Russian connection.”

    Boosted by bots, the surge in readership for such websites amplified Clinton’s negatives. Some stories falsely described her health problems as dire. Jones said Monday that people gravitated to his website “because we were the first to report Hillary Clinton falling down.” He referred to Clinton appearing to collapse last Sept. 11 after visiting the World Trade Center memorial. She was diagnosed with pneumonia.

    “The full impact of the bots was subterranean and corrosive,” Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman, told McClatchy in an interview. “The distribution channels were being flooded with this information. . . . We perhaps underestimated the strategy of pushing fake news out through social media and how it impacted the race.”

    Donna Brazile, the former interim director of the DNC, said that neither the party committee nor the Clinton campaign had used bots to widen the reach of their anti-Trump messages.

    At least one of the congressional committees investigating the Russian meddling is looking into the bots.

    The Senate Intelligence Committee “intends to look actively at ‘fake’ news and the ways that Russian bots and trolls were used to influence the election,” said Rachel Cohen, a spokeswoman for Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the panel’s ranking Democrat.

    Russia’s offensive might have been anticipated from a speech a top Kremlin official made in February 2016.

    In the speech in Moscow, Andrey Krutskikh told a conference of Russian computer security officials that the Putin government would be unleashing a cyber nuclear attack reminiscent of Russia’s 1949 development of the atom bomb. Krutskikh, whose speech was first reported by Washington Post columnist David Ignatius and independently confirmed by McClatchy, also reportedly said the offensive would cause U.S. officials to gain respect for Russia’s cyber capabilities.

    “Russia has again figured out from its old Soviet playbook that its greatest weapon in the world is information,” said Lauren Goodrich, senior Eurasia analyst at the Stratfor Corp., a global intelligence firm based in Austin, Texas. “Its information and disinformation campaigns have skyrocketed.”

    She said the Kremlin’s budget for “public information” had quadrupled this year as it mounted similar cyber attacks on behalf of right-wing candidates in France, Germany and other European countries.

    http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/white-house/article139695453.html