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Month: December 2018

Top U.S. intelligence official confirms Russian propagandists tried to meddle in the midterms

Top U.S. intelligence official confirms Russian propagandists tried to meddle in the midterms

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BuzzFeed reports: Russian internet propagandists tried to influence American voters ahead of the 2018 midterms, according to a new report compiled by the top US intelligence official. The report doesn’t address how effective those efforts were, and it says there was no corresponding campaign that compromised the actual infrastructure of the US voting system. The report, overseen by Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and delivered to the White House on Friday, is classified and not expected to be made…

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Russians launched pro-Jill Stein social media blitz to help Trump win election, reports say

Russians launched pro-Jill Stein social media blitz to help Trump win election, reports say

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NBC News reports: Two days before the 2016 presidential election, an Instagram account called @woke_blacks posted a message in support of long-shot Green Party candidate Jill Stein. “The excuse that a lost Black vote for Hillary is a Trump win is bs,” it read. “It could be late, but y’all might want to support Jill Stein instead.” According to a report commissioned by the Senate, the account was a fake, part of the Russian campaign to sway the 2016 presidential…

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Retreating ISIS army smuggled a fortune in cash and gold out of Iraq and Syria

Retreating ISIS army smuggled a fortune in cash and gold out of Iraq and Syria

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The Washington Post reports: More than a year after the collapse of its self-declared caliphate, the Islamic State is sitting on a mountain of stolen cash and gold that its leaders stashed away to finance terrorist operations and ensure the organization’s survival years into the future, intelligence officials and terrorism experts say. As the Islamist militants retreated from former strongholds in Iraq and Syria, they carried vast sums in Western and Iraqi currency and gold coins — a trove estimated…

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U.S. envoy to coalition fighting ISIS quits over Trump’s Syria move

U.S. envoy to coalition fighting ISIS quits over Trump’s Syria move

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The Associated Press reports: Brett McGurk, the U.S. envoy to the global coalition fighting the Islamic State group, has resigned in protest over President Donald Trump’s abrupt decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria, a U.S. official said, joining Defense Secretary Jim Mattis in an administration exodus of experienced national security figures. Only 11 days ago, McGurk had said it would be “reckless” to consider IS defeated and therefore would be unwise to bring American forces home. McGurk decided to…

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A tumultuous week began with a phone call between Trump and the Turkish president

A tumultuous week began with a phone call between Trump and the Turkish president

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The Washington Post reports: When he spoke to President Trump on the telephone a week ago Friday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s agenda had not changed from when they met two weeks earlier at the Group of 20 summit in Argentina. He repeated his inability to understand why the United States was still arming and supporting Syrian Kurdish fighters to conduct a ground war against the Islamic State. To Turkey, which shared a 500-mile long border with Syria, they were…

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Partition in Iraq rests on Orientalist ideas

Partition in Iraq rests on Orientalist ideas

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Alice Su writes: The entrance to Karemlash, a small village in northern Iraq, is marked by a sign featuring Jesus Christ, hands beckoning, next to the words ‘Wellcome Back’ [sic]. His beaming smile has taken on an ironic cast for the residents of this minority enclave. Since the Islamic State (ISIS) militant group destroyed Karemlash in 2014, at least 20 to 30 per cent of the Christian families in the village have left Iraq altogether, according to a local priest….

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Remainers condemn Jeremy Corbyn pledge to push on with Brexit

Remainers condemn Jeremy Corbyn pledge to push on with Brexit

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The Guardian reports: Jeremy Corbyn has been criticised by remain supporters throughout Westminster after he stressed that Brexit would go ahead even if Labour won a snap general election in the new year. In an interview with the Guardian on Friday, Corbyn said the party would campaign for Brexit if there was a second referendum on the UK’s membership of the bloc, but that he would seek a refashioned exit deal with the European Union. He also renewed his criticism…

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The sugar that makes up DNA could be made in space

The sugar that makes up DNA could be made in space

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Science News reports: Parts of DNA can form in space. For the first time, scientists have made 2-deoxyribose, the sugar that makes up the backbone of DNA, under cosmic conditions in the lab by blasting ice with radiation. The result, reported December 18 in Nature Communications, suggests that there are several ways for prebiotic chemistry to take place in space, and supports the idea that the stuff of life could have been delivered to Earth from elsewhere. “It tells us…

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The day I tasted climate change

The day I tasted climate change

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James Temple writes: In early November, gale-force winds whipped a brush fire into an inferno that nearly consumed the town of Paradise, California, and killed at least 86 people. By the second morning, I could smell the fire from one foot outside my door in Berkeley, some 130 miles from the flames. Within a week, my eyes and throat stung even when I was indoors. Air quality maps warned that the soot-filled air blanketing the Bay Area had reached “very…

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Brazil’s Amazon rain forest is in the crosshairs, as defenders step up

Brazil’s Amazon rain forest is in the crosshairs, as defenders step up

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Andrew Revkin writes: By now, anyone worried about the fate of the Amazon rain forest or the indigenous and traditional communities depending on this vast, rich ecosystem knows the litany of potentially devastating steps [Brazil’s newly elected far-right president, Jair] Bolsonaro has threatened to take. He won on a platform mainly built around change and order after the worst string of corruption scandals and economic troubles in Brazil’s modern history. But he also wooed rural landowners and businessmen, appealing to…

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Nuclear weapons, President Trump, and General Mattis

Nuclear weapons, President Trump, and General Mattis

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With SecDef Mattis to leave office, some folks are worried that President Trump might be more likely to start a war. Sadly, even if Mattis stayed, he could do nothing – NOTHING – to stop Trump from starting a NUCLEAR war, & it takes only minutes. https://t.co/pAXo46OGxS pic.twitter.com/eYRuOD7Rph — Stephen Young (@StephenUCS) December 21, 2018 Lisbeth Gronlund writes: Many people trusted that Secretary of Defense Mattis would be able to rein in the dangerous impulses of his erratic boss who,…

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How Trump may unwittingly be helping ISIS make a resurgence

How Trump may unwittingly be helping ISIS make a resurgence

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The International Crisis Group reports: Trump’s decision to pull military forces out of Syria is the latest wild swing in U.S. Syria policy during his presidency, as the U.S. national security staff has repeatedly battled the president’s own instinct to avoid open-ended engagements in the Middle East. Until Trump’s about-face, those officials tied the presence of U.S. troops to ISIS’s “enduring defeat”, which, per their expansive definition, required fundamental change to Syria’s political system and the exit of Iranian-commanded forces…

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Kurdish fighters discuss releasing almost 3,200 ISIS prisoners

Kurdish fighters discuss releasing almost 3,200 ISIS prisoners

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The New York Times reports: America’s Kurdish allies in Syria are discussing the release of 3,200 Islamic State prisoners, a prominent monitoring group and a Western official of the anti-Islamic State coalition said on Thursday, a day after President Trump ordered the withdrawal of all American troops from the country. Top officials of the Syrian Democratic Forces, the Kurdish-led and American-supported militia fighting the Islamic State in eastern Syria, met on Wednesday to discuss the option of releasing about 1,100…

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U.S. accuses Chinese nationals of infiltrating corporate and government technology

U.S. accuses Chinese nationals of infiltrating corporate and government technology

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The New York Times reports: The Trump administration ramped up its pressure campaign on Beijing on Thursday, as the Justice Department accused two Chinese nationals with ties to the country’s Ministry of State Security of infiltrating the biggest providers of internet services and boring into government computer systems, including a major Department of Energy laboratory. The indictment of the two men came just months after the Justice Department lured one of the Chinese intelligence agency’s officers to Belgium, where he…

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