Former Brexit volunteer alleges campaign ‘cheated’

On By peanutgallerynhIn Europe,, Privacy,Leave a comment

Shahmir Sanni told Channel 4 that the organization “Vote Leave” coordinated spending over the legal limit, using a Canadian data firm called Aggregate IQ, otherwise known as AIQ. British election law enforces a spending cap on donations, which includes when groups coordinate donations.

…Sanni claims a donation of £625,000 by Vote Leave to another Brexit group, “BeLeave,” was funneled to AIQ.

…Channel 4 says it has seen documents that it claims show multiple ties between AIQ and Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL.

Former Brexit volunteer alleges campaign ‘cheated’ – CNNPolitics

hmmmm

The Fall of Benjamin Netanyahu and the Future of Israel

On By peanutgallerynhIn Middle East,Leave a comment

Nir Hefetz, a former journalist, has been described as “Netanyahu’s spin doctor,” the man responsible for massaging press coverage of the first couple. But after Hefetz’s arrest in February, he agreed to turn state’s evidence and hand over recordings of the Netanyahus discussing an alleged criminal conspiracy. He is the third confidante of the prime minister known to have cooperated with the authorities in recent months.

The Fall of Benjamin Netanyahu and the Future of Israel

hmmm

Investigators raid Cambridge Analytica’s London offices

On By peanutgallerynhIn Domestic Affairs,, Europe,, Privacy,Leave a comment

Elizabeth Denham, head of the ICO, sought the warrant after a whistleblower said Cambridge Analytica had gathered private information of 50 million Facebook users to support Donald Trump’s 2016 U.S. presidential campaign.

Britain is investigating whether Facebook, the world’s largest social media network, did enough to protect data.

…U.S. and European lawmakers have demanded an explanation of how the British consulting firm gained access to the data in 2014 and why Facebook failed to inform its users, raising broader industry questions about consumer privacy.

Investigators raid Cambridge Analytica’s London offices | VentureBeat

hmmmmm

Religious Freedom Counts First In This HHS Civil Rights Division

On By peanutgallerynhIn Chick Stuff,, Domestic Affairs,Leave a comment

“Director Severino presents himself as a civil rights lawyer. And what he has done as OCR director is turn the idea of civil rights on its head,” says Harper Jean Tobin, policy director at the National Center for Transgender Equality.

That’s because Severino — a devout Catholic and political conservative — has put the right to religious [discrimination] front and center …in health care.

Religious Freedom Counts First In This HHS Civil Rights Division : Shots – Health News : NPR

Perhaps it is human nature to want to discriminate against others after you, yourself, have been the victim of of discrimination.

….Or maybe this guy is just a bigoted asshole.

‘Lone DNC Hacker’ Guccifer 2.0 Slipped Up and Revealed He Was a Russian Intelligence Officer

On By peanutgallerynhIn Domestic Affairs,Leave a comment

Guccifer 2.0, the “lone hacker” who took credit for providing WikiLeaks with stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee, was in fact an officer of Russia’s military intelligence directorate (GRU), The Daily Beast has learned. It’s an attribution that resulted from a fleeting but critical slip-up in GRU tradecraft.

…Trump’s longtime political adviser Roger Stone admitted being in touch with Guccifer over Twitter’s direct messaging service. And in August 2016, Stone published an article on the pro-Trump-friendly Breitbart News calling on his political opponents to “Stop Blaming Russia” for the hack. “I have some news for Hillary and Democrats—I think I’ve got the real culprit,” he wrote. “It doesn’t seem to be the Russians that hacked the DNC, but instead a hacker who goes by the name of Guccifer 2.0.”

Five months later, in January 2017, the CIA, NSA, and FBI assessed “with high confidence” that “Russian military intelligence (General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate or GRU) used the Guccifer 2.0 persona and DCLeaks.com to release US victim data.”

…“Almost immediately various cyber security companies and individuals were skeptical of Guccifer 2.0 and the backstory that he had generated for himself,” said Kyle Ehmke, an intelligence researcher at the cyber security firm ThreatConnect. “We started seeing these inconsistencies that led back to the idea that he was created hastily… by the individual or individuals that affected the DNC compromise.”

…Guccifer was connecting through an anonymizing service called Elite VPN, a virtual private networking service that had an exit point in France but was headquartered in Russia.

…But on one occasion, The Daily Beast has learned, Guccifer failed to activate the VPN client before logging on. As a result, he left a real, Moscow-based Internet Protocol address in the server logs of an American social media company, according to a source familiar with the government’s Guccifer investigation.

…U.S. investigators identified Guccifer 2.0 as a particular GRU officer working out of the agency’s headquarters on Grizodubovoy Street in Moscow.

…Guccifer 2.0 maintained a sporadic online presence throughout the election, posting to his dedicated WordPress blog and on Twitter, and spilling more DNC documents, sometimes in private emails to journalists.

…Guccifer 2.0 reached down the ballot as well, posting documents from the Democrats’ national campaign committee on his WordPress blog. There, readers could find internal Democratic candidate assessments relevant to battleground states like Pennsylvania and Florida; internal assessments of key congressional districts, with granular analyses of their demographics; and campaign recruitment material.

…Sometime after its hasty launch, the Guccifer persona was handed off to a more experienced GRU officer, according to a source familiar with the matter. The timing of that handoff is unclear, but Guccifer 2.0’s last blog post, from Jan. 12, 2017, evinced a far greater command of English that the persona’s earlier efforts.

…“The attribution of Guccifer 2.0 as an officer of Russia’s largest foreign intelligence agency brings the investigation closer to the Kremlin’s doorstep—and to Trump himself.”

EXCLUSIVE: ‘Lone DNC Hacker’ Guccifer 2.0 Slipped Up and Revealed He Was a Russian Intelligence Officer

hmmmm

Pointy-Headed Medieval Skulls in Germany May Have Been Bulgarian ‘Treaty Brides’

On By peanutgallerynhIn Science and Stuff,Leave a comment

And when the team compared these ancient genes to modern peoples’, they found that the men and the women whose skulls were not modified closely matched northern and central European populations. However, the female skulls with ACD belonged to southeastern European ancestors like Romanians and Bulgarians. (Second-century Romania is considered to be the earliest location in Europe where the practice was common, but there, it was as common for men as for women, Price writes.) One of the women even showed East Asian ancestry.

…The skulls might have belonged to high-status or noble southeastern European women who traveled to Bavaria to marry for political alliances. ACD is believed to have been practiced only amongst the wealthy, Price reports.

…The “political marriages” part of Burger’s theory can be debated, but the research debunks the theory about the Huns bringing skull modification to Western Europe.

Pointy-Headed Medieval Skulls in Germany May Have Been Bulgarian ‘Treaty Brides’ | Smart News | Smithsonian

wild

Hannity and Ingraham Bash Shep Smith After He Calls Them ‘Entertainment’

On By peanutgallerynhIn Media and Culture,Leave a comment

Despite having previously declared himself “not a journalist,” Sean Hannity on Friday demanded he be taken seriously as a news reporter by his colleagues at Fox News.

https://twitter.com/seanhannity/status/791132954298818561

…In a Tuesday afternoon tweet, the right-wing firebrand criticized his colleague Shepard Smith for describing the Fox News opinion lineup as entertainment rather than informative.

Hannity and Ingraham Bash Shep Smith After He Calls Them ‘Entertainment’

what a whiny snowflake

Escaping Kakuma: How women find freedom through soccer in a refugee camp

On By peanutgallerynhIn Africa,, Media and Culture,, Money, Class, and Poverty,, Schools,Leave a comment

The refugee camp is the third largest in the world, but it has been around for so long that it has lost any pretense it is supposed to be temporary.

…The refugees that reside there come from nations with prominently conservative cultures — primarily South Sudan and Somalia — where women are expected to stay in their homes and handle traditional household duties, like cooking, cleaning, and child-raising. The women you do see in the market are often carrying heavy loads of firewood. Every duty related to maintaining a homestead almost exclusively fall on women, while men — people who in a better world would be working — talk away their days.

…Unless you seek them out, refugee women are largely invisible in Kakuma. To be a refugee man is to feel ignored by the world. To be a refugee woman, then, is to be erased from it.

…There were still many more stories to tell within the world’s third-largest refugee camp, however, a place where sports have greater meaning as a way to combat idleness within an oft-forgotten population. This is a story about the women of Kakuma.

…Angelina Jolie Primary School stands apart from Kakuma’s hatchet-shaped cartography. It was opened in 2005 — funded by the actress and special envoy to the UNHCR — as a boarding school for bright or at-risk girls. There, they can be nurtured in a safer environment, away from the problems within Kakuma’s traditional borders. The girls are given a more focused education — the classrooms are much smaller than in the coed schools that pack upwards of a 100 students in one room — and they perform, on average, much better than the rest of Kakuma on Kenya’s standardized testing for secondary schools.

Escaping Kakuma: How women find freedom through soccer in a refugee camp – SBNation.com

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