For an intelligence agency seeking new recruits, the promises of adventure and intrigue found within the pages of famous spy novels might seem like a useful recruiting tool.
But promoting a double agent who lies to his family, betrays his country and ultimately takes his own life, is possibly not a strategy that will produce the best candidates.
Doh! – Hackers share details of Canadian military spy plane on dark web
Al Jazeera staff say rightwing platform will ‘irreparably tarnish’ brand
More than a hundred staff at the Qatar-funded media organisation Al Jazeera have signed an open letter to management objecting to the launch of a rightwing digital platform that they say betrays its journalism and will “irreparably tarnish the network’s brand and work”.
The internal letter, seen by the Guardian and sent to top leaders of the media network, said the launch of Rightly on Thursday was “an affront to the ethical, journalistic and editorial vision and guidelines of Al Jazeera”.
The memo said the new conservative platform, which many staff learned about through media reporting, was “met with shock, confusion and criticism”, and came amid a period of budget cuts and layoffs that had left women of colour in particular doing more work without extra compensation.
The Canadian military is facing down what experts call an institutional “crisis” amid twin military police probes into both the current and former chiefs of defence staff.
In what appears to be an unprecedented situation, the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service (CFNIS) is investigating both Chief of Defence Staff Adm. Art McDonald, who stepped aside late Wednesday night, and former chief of defence staff Gen. Jonathan Vance, who is facing allegations of inappropriate behaviour with two female subordinates.
Justin should order them all to pick their preferred pronouns!
In assessing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s reluctance to condemn China’s treatment of its Uighur Muslims as a genocide, one has to factor in his past admiration and affection for dictators.
By contrast, Trudeau was quick and decisive when it came to agreeing that a democracy — Canada — had committed genocide.
Joe Biden is a Chinese asset. His family’s business dealings with Beijing have compromised his leadership of America and the free world. Look at his recent statement in which he suggested that ‘cultural differences’ might explain why the Chinese thought it was OK to brutally oppress Uighurs. An unnamed source within the intelligence community has revealed that Biden could not unequivocally condemn China’s human rights abuses because Xi Jinping has ‘has something’ on him. The 46th President therefore cannot be trusted to stand up to Xi on the world stage.
‘The Russians deploy kompromat as leverage over foreign assets,’ says my source. ‘Chinese agencies use something called “black materials” to extort western authority figures into doing what they want.’
We Are Not Safer At Home
At the start of the pandemic last year, Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti chose “safer at home” as the motto for his lockdown policies. If the past year has shown us anything, it’s how misguided that notion is. Lockdowns have created not just economic devastation for America’s small businesses, restaurants, museums, and zoos. They have also taken a significant toll on the mental and physical health of everyone from small children to the elderly (while doing little to contain the virus itself). To get a sense of this, compare two states that took opposite approaches: New York and Florida.
JUST IN – U.S. has carried out airstrikes against Iran-backed militia in #Syria in an operation approved by Joe Biden (Reuters)
— Disclose.tv 🚨 (@disclosetv) February 25, 2021
U.S. carries out airstrike against Iranian-backed militia target in Syria – officials
The U.S. Air Force’s top officer wants the service to develop an affordable, lightweight fighter to replace hundreds of Cold War-vintage F-16s and complement a small fleet of sophisticated—but costly and unreliable—stealth fighters.
The result would be a high-low mix of expensive “fifth-generation” F-22s and F-35s and inexpensive “fifth-generation-minus” jets, explained Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Brown Jr.
If that plan sounds familiar, it’s because the Air Force a generation ago launched development of an affordable, lightweight fighter to replace hundreds of Cold War-vintage F-16s and complement a small future fleet of sophisticated—but costly and unreliable—stealth fighters.
I thought we were on the cusp of autonomous fighter jets etc.
When Lothrop Stoddard (1883-1950) is still recalled, it is as a prominent racist who had a major but malign influence on the budding field of international relations, who acted as theoretician for the Ku Klux Klan, and who contributed the concept of Untermensch (sub-human) to the Nazis.
Stoddard, however enjoyed a high and favorable profile during the 1920s. He had earned a Ph.D. in history from Harvard University and traveled widely. President Warren Harding praised him, and F. Scott Fitzgerald obliquely referenced him in The Great Gatsby.
Stoddard also wrote a prescient 1921 study, The New World of Islam, a survey of 250 million Muslims “from Morocco to China and from Turkestan to the Congo.” Despite his consuming racism, Stoddard impressively recognized trends underway in Islam. As Ian Frazier observed in the New Yorker, “Whatever his philosophy and methods, his guesses sometimes proved out.”
Four people have been charged in Sydney and Canada over alleged attempts to extort $10 million from a senior Iraqi politician, after what was described as a year-long campaign of intimidation.
Dual raids were launched at dawn on Wednesday after a string of attacks on a Sydney home and online extortion attempts linked to an address in Canada.
The target was the family of a “very senior politician” who is a dual Australian and Iraqi citizen and “spends almost all of his time in Iraq”, Australian police said.
A Connecticut high school track athlete said she was ‘disappointed’ after President Joe Biden’s Justice Department withdrew from a lawsuit aiming to prevent transgender athletes from competing in girls’ high school sports.
Alanna Smith, who filed the lawsuit with fellow athletes Selina Soule and Chelsea Mitchell, appeared on Fox News with her lawyer to say girls have ‘missed out’ on placing on awards podiums after competing against ‘biological males.’
Berlin’s Senate has announced on Twitter that it has banned the “jihadist-Salafist association Jama’atu Berlin,” also known as Tauhid Berlin.
The tweet Thursday said police in Berlin and Brandenburg had carried out early-morning searches of properties belonging to the group’s members.
A spokesman cited by the German press agency dpa said around 800 police — including special operations commandos — took part in the raids, which targeted the districts of Reinickendorf, Moabit, Wedding and Neukölln. No arrests were immediately reported.
California’s Covid-19 death toll rose above 50,000 on Wednesday, after Los Angeles county reported another 806 deaths during the winter surge.
The county, which has a quarter of the state’s 40 million residents, said the deaths mainly occurred between 3 December and 3 February. The department of public health identified them after going through death records that were backlogged by the sheer volume of the surge’s toll.
“If the Democratic Party is trying to create violent extremism, they are doing exactly what you would do if you want to create it,” Carlson said Tuesday evening during an interview with Sen. Josh Hawley. “They are making people paranoid and crazy. People feel totally undefended and afraid.”
