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Ruth King

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US Announces ‘Massive and Brazen’ Hacking Scheme by Iran By Rick Moran

By on March 24th, 2018

The US Department of Justice announced indictments against nine Iranians and the company they worked for who stole data valued in the billions of dollars from professors and others.

The Iranians were part of a huge scheme to steal valuable research and intellectual property from US and foreign universities. In addition to the indictments, the Justice Department recommended sanctioning the individuals and the company, the Mabna Institute.

The US directly connected the hacking operation to the Iranian government, saying the hackers were working for the Revolutionary Guards.

CNN:

“(W)e have unmasked criminals who normally work in total anonymity, hiding behind the ones and zeros of computer code,” said Manhattan US Attorney Geoffrey Berman, who called it a “massive and brazen cyberassault.”

The move from the Justice Department and Treasury follows other US efforts to indict foreign government-linked cyberattackers, including special counsel Robert Mueller’s indictment of Russian operatives for meddling in the 2016 US election, and the Obama administration’s indictment of Chinese military members for the government-sponsored hacking of US companies.

It also comes at a time of tension with Iran, long an adversary of the US. As President Donald Trump reshuffles his national security and diplomacy team, including firing Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and national security adviser H.R. McMaster, experts speculate Trump may be laying the groundwork to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal that the Obama administration negotiated, though Iran’s cyber efforts were not part of that deal.

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EDUCATION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Who the Hell Is Pankaj Mishra? By Bruce Bawer

By on March 24th, 2018

I presume you know who Jordan Peterson is. If not, it’s time for you to look him up and watch a few of his innumerable, and almost invariably wonderful, YouTube lectures, interviews, and debates. A clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, he first attained a degree of mainstream celebrity two years ago when he stood up publicly to Canada’s notorious Bill C-16, under which citizens refusing to refer to transgender individuals by their chosen pronouns (including freshly invented ones) could be subject to punishment. Since then, his brilliant analyses of Western society today, his challenging reflections on the need for young – and not-so-young – people to face up to responsibilities, develop competence, and seek meaning in life, and his blunt criticisms of the postmodern enemies of free speech and deniers of biology have won him a massive worldwide following, making him, in the view of many, the most prominent and important intellectual of our time. He’s also become a popular object of attack by leftist ideologues and pretenders at revolution who recognize him, his thoughts, and his army of admirers as an existential threat to the domination of contemporary culture by unexamined and pernicious socialist assumptions.

One of the most recent – and prominent – assaults on Peterson was written by one Pankaj Mishra and appeared on March 19 at the website of the New York Review of Books. Entitled “Jordan Peterson & Fascist Mysticism,” it oozes condescension. According to Mishra, Peterson is a practitioner of “intellectual populism” whose latest book is “[p]ackaged for people brought up on BuzzFeed listicles.” Mishra’s characterization of Peterson’s ideas is breathtakingly dishonest. Peterson, he writes, “insists that gender and class hierarchies are ordained by nature and validated by science.” Well, Peterson does recognize that male and female are biological categories and that certain biological and psychological differences exist between the sexes – some of which operate to the benefit of men, others to the benefit of women. Mishra mocks Peterson for taking Jungian archetypes seriously and says he mythologizes “right-wing pieties.” He also alleges that Peterson’s preoccupation with Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago is common among “Western right-wingers who…tend to imply that belief in egalitarianism leads straight to the guillotine or the Gulag.”

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Iran Hacking Operation Swiped 15B Pages of Academic Data, Infiltrated Government Agencies By Bridget Johnson

By on March 24th, 2018

WASHINGTON — Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein today announced the indictment of nine Iranians accused of perpetrating a large-scale hacking campaign on U.S. colleges and businesses on behalf of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Gholamreza Rafatnejad, 38, Ehsan Mohammadi, 37, Abdollah Karima aka Vahid Karima, 39, Mostafa Sadeghi, 28, Seyed Ali Mirkarimi, 34, Mohammed Reza Sabahi, 26, Roozbeh Sabahi, 24, Abuzar Gohari Moqadam, 37, and Sajjad Tahmasebi, 30, all citizens and residents of Iran, are charged with computer fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy and identity theft in conducting a coordinated campaign since 2013 of cyber intrusions into computer systems belonging to 144 U.S. universities, 176 universities across 21 foreign countries, 47 domestic and foreign private sector companies, the U.S. Department of Labor, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the state of Hawaii, the state of Indiana, the United Nations, and the United Nations Children’s Fund.

They worked for the Iran-based Mabna Institute, which was also sanctioned by Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control today along with the nine defendants.

Altogether, the hackers stole more than 31 terabytes of academic data and intellectual property from universities, and email accounts of employees at private sector companies, government agencies, and non-governmental organizations, said the DOJ.

At a news conference today, Rosenstein said the Justice Department is “working with foreign law enforcement agencies and providing the private sector with information that will help to neutralize Mabna’s hacking infrastructure.”

“By bringing these criminal charges, we reinforce the norm that most of the civilized world accepts: Nation-states should not steal intellectual property for the purpose of giving domestic industries a competitive advantage,” he said. “As a result of the indictment, these defendants are now fugitives from justice. There are more than 100 countries where they may face arrest and extradition to the United States. And, thanks to the Treasury Department, the defendants will find it difficult to engage in business or financial transactions outside of Iran.”

U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman said the defendants “targeted more than 100,000 accounts of university professors around the world and, by tricking professors to click on false links, compromised 8,000 accounts,” and “once they gained access to these accounts, the defendants stole massive amounts of academic data and intellectual property.”

“The universities combined had to pay $3.4 billion to access this information. The defendants got it for free,” Berman said. “They targeted data and research from all fields, including science and technology, engineering, social science, medical and other professional fields.”

The stolen documents amounted to more than 15 billion pages of data, he said, comprising “the innovations and intellectual property of some of our country’s greatest minds.”

In the private-sector hacking, the Iranians allegedly infiltrated law firms, technology companies, consulting companies, financial services firms, health care companies, biotechnology companies and others. CONTINUE AT SITE

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How Successful Climate Pressure Tactics Paved The Way For Gun Control Bullying

By on March 24th, 2018

Just like the climate change cabal, powerful gun control interests hide behind the façade of children to promote their policy agenda.

The gun control lobby is borrowing the playbook from one of the most effective propaganda campaigns in history: anthropogenic global warming.

From engaging celebrity activists to bullying private industry to portraying opponents as murderers, the well-funded and highly-orchestrated gun control lobby is copying the same approach that has been successfully deployed by the international climate change movement to sell the dubious claim that humans are causing global warming.
Indoctrination and Exploitation of Children

Textbooks are filled with bogus scientific “studies” about global warming and dire warnings about its consequences. Schools commemorate environmental holidays like Earth Day, so they can push climate dogma. Teachers are encouraged to tag climate change in every subject area from science to health to history. And whoever disagrees, or even mildly objects, is portrayed as a child-hating monster. After all, who wants to deny a safe future for our kids? Climate crusaders are even using children as litigants in lawsuits to sue the federal government for violating “the youngest generation’s constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property, as well as fail[ing] to protect essential public trust resources.”

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Republicans Still Don’t Get Trump Matthew Continetti

By on March 24th, 2018

“The heart and soul of the Republican Party belongs to Donald Trump,” writes Lloyd Green. If so, the GOP has an odd way of showing affection. Green cites a lack of Republican criticism of Trump, the president’s continued popularity within the party, and Trump’s rescue of incumbent Nevada senator Dean Heller from a primary challenge. All true. But when it comes to the president’s priorities and the nationalist populist style of politics he represents, Trump and the Republican Congress could not be farther apart.

Trump won the nomination and the presidency after distinguishing himself from the party in four ways. Since Ronald Reagan, Republicans have tended to support global economic integration, immigration, democratic internationalism, and entitlement reform. And yet Trump opposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership, called to renegotiate NAFTA, and wanted tariffs on China. His 2015 immigration plan championed a wall across the southern border, workplace enforcement, an end to birthright citizenship, and a tripling of border and customs agents. He repudiated the Iraq war and questioned the future of NATO. He swore that Social Security and Medicare would be off-limits. His brashness, colorfulness, insults, willingness to transgress norms, humor, novelty, and lack of political experience separated him from the GOP pack.

This program and its avatar won three Great Lakes states that had been missing from the Republican column for a generation. Trump also came within striking distance in Minnesota and New Hampshire. Obviously we do not know the exact relation between Trump’s nationalism and populism and the roughly 78,000 votes in three states that gave him an Electoral College victory. But the unexpected shape of his upset suggests that the trademark Trump issues of immigration, trade, nonintervention, and retirement security played some role both in attracting support for him and depressing turnout for Hillary Clinton.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Passover and Islam Eileen F. Toplansky

By on March 24th, 2018

The Jewish holiday of Passover beckons mankind to the promise of freedom. As the late Holocaust survivor, Simon Wiesenthal said, “freedom is not a gift of heaven, you have to fight for it every day.” During the seder or festive meal, Jews the world over are enjoined to remember how difficult their lives were under the yoke of Egyptian slavery and they thank G-d for giving them the choice to be free, responsible, and independent people.

The central motif of the haggadah or text read during the seder is to answer the question “what makes this night different from all other nights?” Peppered with rabbinic ideas, in-depth questions, and insightful commentary, the text is an effort to “learn, study and analyze the events” surrounding the time in ancient Egypt when Hebrews were not free, but were slaves.

Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik classifies “two slave systems: slaves owned by individuals, as in ancient Greece or the United States, and slaves owned by the state, as in Nazi Germany, China, and the former Soviet Union where the state is the absolute master.” Slaves in a state system exist in a depersonalized prison. There is no personal relationship imaginable.

As each day brings new horrors emanating from the Islamic world against Muslims and non-Muslims, I am struck by the stark contrast between the message of Passover and the inhumane and slave-like treatment of so many human beings in the Muslim world. The other progeny of Abraham must begin asking their own questions. It will require a sea change of major proportions for Muslims and a realignment of reason over emotion for liberal non-Muslims.

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Palestinians Tortured; Media Silent by Bassam Tawil

By on March 23rd, 2018

The real story now is no longer about what the foreign correspondents are reporting related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Rather, it is about what they are not reporting.

In its report — which so far appears to have been of less than no interest to both the foreign media and international human rights groups — the Palestinian Independent Commission for Human Rights states that it has received complaints of torture and mistreatment from 46 Palestinians detained by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas during the month of February 2018 alone.

Both Palestinian dictatorships, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, therefore have nothing to worry about; they can go about their business of torturing and illegally detaining their own people. No one is watching.

What happens when Palestinians make allegations of torture and assaults on their public freedoms? If the finger is being pointed at Israel, the international media falls over itself to bring the story to the broadest possible audience.

The story would not even end there. Human rights organizations and United Nations agencies would blast Israel for “abusing” Palestinian human rights and the Security Council would hold an emergency session to condemn Israel.

The response, however, when Palestinians fall victim to the practices of their own governments — the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank and Hamas in the Gaza Strip — is a completely different one. That is when silence descends upon the international media community hides behind a blue wall of silence

How can one account for this sinkhole in communications? Simple: when the story is not about alleged atrocities committed by Israel, from the point of view of the Western media outlets it is presumably not a tale worthy of being told.

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Gatestone Chairman, Ambassador John R. Bolton, Selected by President Trump as National Security Advisor

By on March 23rd, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12080/john-bolton-national-security-advisor

Gatestone Institute is so proud that its chairman, Ambassador John R. Bolton, will be leading the United States’ National Security Council. We warmly congratulate both him and President Donald J. Trump on an appointment that is great for America, great for its allies and great for the free world.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Sara Dogan:Texas SJP and MSA Activists Revealed as Neo-Nazis in Poster Campaign Students advocate violence against Jews, praise Adolf Hitler.

By on March 23rd, 2018

Continuing its campaign to expose the campus organization Students for Justice in Palestine as neo-Nazis, the David Horowitz Freedom Center placed posters this week on the campuses of the University of Texas-San Antonio and the University of Texas-Arlington. The posters document comments that student activists affiliated with SJP have made on social media praising Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and calling for the extermination of the Jews. The posters also expose Berkeley Professor Hatem Bazian, a co-founder of SJP, as an anti-Semite and supporter of the anti-Israel terror group Hamas.

Statements shared by SJP activists on social media, which are documented on the posters include:

“How many Jews died in the Holocaust? Not enough”

“Wow White Jews are so entitled LMFAOOO Please die.”

“Had to write about a leader for DCL class. Wrote about Hitler. Cuz he’s a boss.”

Students for Justice in Palestine was co-founded in 2001 by Hamas-supporting Berkeley professor Hatem Bazian who has openly called for an intifada, or violent uprising, in America, and has shared anti-Semitic memes on social media. One of the posters placed on the campuses exposes Bazian’s recent anti-Semitic tweet which featured a caricature of an Orthodox Jew with the caption “MOM LOOK! I IS CHOSEN! I CAN NOW KILL, RAPE, SMUGGLE ORGANS & AND STEAL THE LAND OF PALESTINIANS *YAY* ASHKE-NAZI.”

SJP employs funds from the terrorist party Hamas—funneled to American campuses through an intermediary group, American Muslims for Palestine, chaired by Professor Bazian—in order to launch an all-out political assault on the Jewish state and to create a climate of hatred towards Jews and students who support Israel on campus.

As a result of this support and funding from Hamas, SJP has become the principal collegiate organization in the Hamas terror network and the campus propaganda war against Israel. It heavily promotes the Hamas-endorsed and funded Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel, a form of economic terrorism which seeks to weaken, delegitimize, and ultimately destroy the Jewish state.

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Time to End Mueller’s Investigation About Nothing By Bob Calco

By on March 23rd, 2018

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s sprawling investigation into “Trump-Russia collusion” has devolved into a ludicrous media spectacle, a meandering situation comedy “about nothing” that is in quest of something, anything to be about.

If, after all of these months of investigation, he has no evidence of Trump colluding with Russia, then the conclusion is clear: it simply didn’t happen.

In recent weeks and months, the media has been busy dumpster-diving in Moscow for Russian Facebook bots, and chasing hot tips from a Russian prostitute turned part-time sex seminarist resisting extradition to Russia from a Bangkok jail.

They have been faithfully “reporting” as fact every illegal, anonymous leak from the conflicted special counsel’s office about its supposed next moves, which they assure their viewers and readers are getting closer and closer to Trump’s inner circle. Because OMG! RUSSIA!

Meanwhile, Mueller’s crack team was reduced to scouring the seashores of Seychelles for the next nothingburger “bombshell,” and then (when that didn’t blow up) they promptly pivoted to investigating the ominous possibility that some officials in the United Arab Emirates may have sought political influence with the new administration. Can you imagine?

The absurdity of it all has finally reached a point where it is doing irreparable harm to the reputation of America’s once-vaunted justice system. (The reputation of the press is too far gone at this point to hope for rehabilitation.)

Mueller’s partisan inquisition is based on a pack of lies. Its remit isn’t tied to a particular statute believed to have been violated and it is written in an open-ended way that it is, in fact, unprecedented for invocation of the special counsel law.

It is time, somehow, to end it. Now.

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