Murdoch's New York Post to staff: Stay away from CNN, New York Times, Washington Post
President Donald Trump slams them as "fake news", and now articles based on reporting from their journalists are no longer welcome at Rupert Murdoch's tabloid.
Crikey asks our leaders what they’d do about the Murdoch media’s influence
Not surprisingly we got no answers. No worries though. We'll keep right on asking.
Not surprisingly we got no answers. . .
FBI asks police across US to 'overshare' tips on extremists
With regulations gutted and tax breaks banked, corporate funders and enablers desert Donald Trump
Corporate America is frantically distancing itself from Donald Trump in the dying days of his presidency after spending four years financing him, enjoying his tax giveaways, his attacks on workers and gutting of regulations to fatten corporate profits. The rank hypocrisy even extended to Scott Morrison’s top adviser on Covid-19 economic recovery. Continue reading
The European Central Bank admits that it can never run out of money
I think it worth sharing this from an article on the Brave New
Europe website (where articles from this blog also appear, frequently)
in which
Read the full article…
Cyber attackers leaked confidential COVID-19 vaccine data
Hackers posted confidential documents regarding COVID-19 medicines and vaccines on the internet after a data breach late last year at the European Medicines Agency.
'Largest illegal darknet marketplace' DarkMarket taken offline
US agencies like the FBI, DEA narcotics law enforcement division and IRS tax authority all contributed to the investigation, along with police from Australia, Britain, Denmark, Switzerland, Ukraine and Moldova, with Europol playing a "coordinating role."
German prosecutors in the cities of Koblenz and Oldenburg said on Tuesday that they had shut down what was "probably the largest illegal marketplace on the Darknet" called DarkMarket and arrested the man believed to operate it near Germany's border with Denmark.
DarkMarket: world's largest illegal dark web marketplace taken down
Published on: 12 Jan 2021
DarkMarket, the world's largest illegal marketplace on the dark web, has been taken offline in an international operation involving Germany, Australia, Denmark, Moldova, Ukraine, the United Kingdom (the National Crime Agency), and the USA (DEA, FBI, and IRS). Europol supported the takedown with specialist operational analysis and coordinated the cross-border collaborative effort of the countries involved.
DarkMarket in figures:
- almost 500 000 users;
- more than 2 400 sellers;
- over 320 000 transactions;
- more than 4 650 bitcoin and 12 800 monero transferred.
What New Anti-Money-Laundering Rules Will Mean For The U.S. Art And Antiquities Market
One of the provisions added to the National Defense Authorization Act for 2021 makes antiquities dealers subject to the Bank Secrecy Act. One of the key rules requires identifying the individuals behind LLCs — meaning that it will be much harder to buy and sell items anonymously. There’s a strong likelihood that the law will be applied to the larger art market in the next few years. – Artnet
Parler Users Breached Deep Inside U.S. Capitol Building, GPS Data Shows
Gizmodo: “At least several users of the far-right social network Parler appear to be among the horde of rioters that managed to penetrate deep inside the U.S. Capitol building and into areas normally restricted to the public, according to GPS metadata linked to videos posted to the platform the day of the insurrection in Washington. The data, obtained by a computer hacker through legal means ahead of Parler’s shutdown on Monday, offers a bird’s eye view of its users swarming the Capitol grounds after receiving encouragement from President Trump — and during a violent breach that sent lawmakers and Capitol Hill visitors scrambling amid gunshots and calls for their death. GPS coordinates taken from 618 Parler videos analyzed by Gizmodo has already been sought after by FBI as part of a sweeping nationwide search for potential suspects, at least 20 of whom are already in custody. The siege on January 6, which lasted approximately two hours, resulted in five deaths, including that of a Capitol police officer whom authorities say was bludgeoned with a fire extinguisher and later succumbed to his injuries. Windows were smashed, tables overturned, and graffiti scrawled and scratched into the walls of the 220-year-old building—some calling for the murders of journalists sheltering in place nearby. Gizmodo has mapped nearly 70,000 geo-located Parler posts and on Tuesday isolated hundreds published on January 6 near the Capitol where a mob of pro-Trump supporters had hoped to overturn a democratic election and keep their president in power. The data shows Parler users posting all throughout the day, documenting their march from the National Mall to Capitol Hill where the violent insurrection ensued…”
ProPublica: Insurrectionists made no effort to hide their intentions, but law enforcement protecting Congress was caught flat-footed. “This story is part of an ongoing collaboration between ProPublica and FRONTLINE that includes an upcoming documentary. The invasion of the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday was stoked in plain sight. For weeks, the far-right supporters of President Donald Trump railed on social media that the election had been stolen. They openly discussed the idea of violent protest on the day Congress met to certify the result. “We came up with the idea to occupy just outside the CAPITOL on Jan 6th,” leaders of the Stop the Steal movement wrote on Dec. 23. They called their Wednesday demonstration the Wild Protest, a name taken from a tweet by Trump that encouraged his supporters to take their grievances to the streets of Washington. “Will be wild,” the president tweeted. Ali Alexander, the founder of the movement, encouraged people to bring tents and sleeping bags and avoid wearing masks for the event. “If D.C. escalates… so do we,” Alexander wrote on Parler last week — one of scores of social media posts welcoming violence that were reviewed by ProPublica in the weeks leading up to Wednesday’s attack on the capitol. Thousands of people heeded that call. For reasons that remained unclear Wednesday night, the law enforcement authorities charged with protecting the nation’s entire legislative branch — nearly all of the 535 members of Congress gathered in a joint session, along with Vice President Mike Pence — were ill-prepared to contain the forces massed against them…”
- See also Washington Post Timeline – How pro-Trump insurrectionists broke into the U.S. Capitol
- See also The Verge – Online researchers scramble to identify Capitol raid participants. A number of groups have begun archiving footage from the attack. “There’s so much available footage of the rally that simply collecting it has proven to be a challenge. Since the attack began, the open-source intelligence outlet Bellingcat has been collecting first-hand media from the attack, a process they opened up to volunteers as a Google sheet when the severe scale of the attack became clear. There are now more than 100 videos and a dozen full-length live streams in the spreadsheet, all ruthlessly monitored for duplicates and any identifiable faces….”
- See also The New York Times – The storming of Capitol Hill was organized on social media.
Three word slogans – Part 2
One of the most successful three word slogans in recent-ish political history– the Thatcher Opposition’s “Labour Isn’t Working” – almost didn’t get seen by the client.Continue reading