Message from @Captain Kirk JT
Discord ID: 496944997266882571
🇺🇸 **Yale study: Illegal immigrant population likely double, possibly triple previous estimates**
*The Washington Times* - <https://archive.fo/BBtyE>
Professors at Yale University have roiled the immigration debate with a new study calculating there are between 16 million and 30 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. — as much as three times more than most demographers figure.
The professors’ model looked at estimates of how many people came illegally, and how many people likely left, and concluded there are a lot more people who arrived than the 11 million suggested by traditional estimates. The model says the most likely figure is double that, at about 22 million.
If true, the numbers would mean U.S. officials have done a poorer job of catching illegal immigrants than imagined, and that one out of every nine people living in the U.S. is here illegally.
“Policy debates about the amount of resources to devote to this issue, and the merits of alternative policies, including deportation, amnesty, and border control, depend critically on estimates of the number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S., which sets the scale of the issue,” said the academics, Professors Jonathan S. Feinstein and Edward H. Kaplan and postdoctoral associate Mohammad Fazel-Zarandi, all at the Yale School of Management.
They published their findings in PLOS ONE, an open access scholarly journal, and sparked fierce pushback from the demographers who study the issue and say the professors’ numbers are impossible.
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🇮🇱 **Israel Is Giving China the Keys to Its Largest Port - and the U.S. Navy May Abandon Israel**
🇨🇳 *Haaretz* - <https://archive.is/g7JF4>
China will operate Haifa port, near Israel's alleged nuclear-armed submarines, and it seems no one in Israel thought about the strategic ramifications.
Shaul Horev dropped a bombshell, but hardly anyone noticed. Horev, an Israel Defense Forces reservist brigadier general who has served, among other posts, as the navy chief of staff and chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, is currently director of the Research Center for Maritime Policy and Strategy at the University of Haifa. At the end of August, the center held a conference, to which participants from the United States were invited, to examine security issues relating to Israel and the Mediterranean region.
In an interview with the religious-Zionist media outlet Arutz Sheva, Prof. Horev noted that one topic that came up at the event was Chinese investments in Mediterranean ports, and in Israel in particular. Pointing out that a Chinese company will soon start operating Haifa Port, he said that Israel needs to create a mechanism that will examine Chinese investments to ensure that they do not put Israel’s security interests at risk.
“When China acquires ports,” Horev said, “it does so under the guise of maintaining a trade route from the Indian Ocean via the Suez Canal to Europe, such as the port of Piraeus in Greece. Does an economic horizon like this have a security impact? We are not weighing that possibility sufficiently. One of the senior American figures at the conference raised the question of whether the U.S. Sixth Fleet can see Haifa as a home port. In light of the Chinese takeover, the question is no longer on the agenda.”
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🇺🇸 **W. Virginia's Decision to Allow Smartphone Voting for Midterms Raises Serious Security Concerns**
*PJ Media* - <https://archive.fo/aIN2T>
For the first time in our nation's history, voters in 24 counties in W. Virginia will be able to vote using their mobile phones. While some are hailing the decision because it will make voting easier for members of the military deployed overseas, experts are warning of possible security breaches.
"Voatz has developed a secure mobile voting application that allows voters to receive, vote, and return their ballots electronically," the press release claims. "The application also utilizes blockchain technology to store electronically submitted ballots until election night, and requires a heightened standard of identity verification for users than traditional absentee ballot processes. This project is unprecedented in United States history, being the first mobile voting application and first use of blockchain technology in a federal election."
In order to use the mobile technology, users register with Voatz by taking a picture of their government ID and also a selfie video of their face. Voatz then uses facial recognition software that (they claim) can verify the voter's identity. Once approved, voters can cast their ballots using Voatz's app. After the vote is cast it is added to the blockchain, a digital ledger of sorts, popularized by digital currencies such as Bitcoin.
The state of W. Virginia admits that there are "substantial" security concerns, but explained that Voatz will be utilizing "federal standards for software development, regular maintenance and security upgrades, in-depth penetration testing, source code auditing and audits of the system’s cloud infrastructure. After surpassing those requirements, the pilot moved forward."
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🇺🇸 **BREAKING: Michael Avenatti Reveals Client Making ‘Gang Rape’ Allegation Against Kavanaugh**
*MediaITE* - <https://archive.fo/UfmsE>
Attorney for Stormy Daniels, Michael Avenatti, earlier this week, claimed to have a client with a third allegation against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. He made the announcement, and tweeted lurid accusations, without offering the identity of the client or any evidence.
Today, Avenatti tweeted a name and photo of that client, along with a sworn statement from the alleged victim laying out her serious allegations.
In the statement, Julie Swetnick, a current government employee, alleges Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge attended a party where she was drugged and gang raped by a series of boys. While she does not accuse Kavanaugh of assaulting her, she claims she witnessed him participate in the gang rapes.
```In approximately 1982, I became the victim of one of these “gang” or “train” rapes where Mark Judge and Brett Kavanaugh were present. Shortly after the incident, I shared what had transpired with at least two other people. During the incident, I was incapacitated without my consent and unable to fight off the boys raping me. I believe I was drugged using Quaaludes or something similar placed in what I was drinking.”```
https://twitter.com/MichaelAvenatti/status/1044960940884709378
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🇺🇸 **GEORGE SOROS FUNDED FUSION GPS, HIS SPOKESMAN CONFIRMS**
*The Daily Caller* - <https://dailycaller.com/2018/09/26/george-soros-funded-fusion-gps/>
A spokesman for left-wing billionaire financier George Soros is acknowledging that he indirectly funded Fusion GPS, the firm behind the Steele dossier
Sources have told The Daily Caller News Foundation in the past that Soros helped fund Fusion’s post-election work on Russian interference in the election process
Soros’ spokesman told The Washington Post that Soros donated to the Democracy Integrity Project, a group founded by a former staffer to Sen. Dianne Feinstein
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🇺🇸 **Facebook Loses Around $13 Billion in Value After Data Breach Affects 50 Million of Its Users**
*Fortune* - <https://archive.fo/8XwrF>
2018 continues to be a challenging year for Facebook. The company’s stock closed down 3% Friday following reports that hackers gained access to the personal data on 50 million of its users.
The data breach is the latest in a string of mishaps and controversies that the company has endured, including its involvement in the Russian disinformation campaign during the 2016 U.S. presidential election and Facebook’s sharing its user data in what became the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg defended his company during two days of Congressional hearings in April.
In the latest incident, Facebook said its engineering team discovered on Tuesday that hackers exploited a vulnerability in Facebook’s code that exposed to attackers its site’s so-called access tokens – essentially, digital keys that allow people to stay logged into Facebook without having to re-enter their password.
“We’re taking this incredibly seriously,” Facebook said in a blog post announcing the breach, adding that the company has fixed the vulnerability and notified law enforcement of the hack.
The company’s swift response did little to settle investor unease about the string of snafus at the social media giant. Facebook’s stock fell as much as 5% to $162.57 a share during intraday trading Friday as news of the hack broke. The stock recovered slightly before the market’s official close, but once it did Facebook’s market cap had lost about $13 billion of its value.
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🇺🇸🇲🇽 🇨🇦 **Trump cites 'historic' trade pact with Canada, Mexico**
*Reuters* - <https://archive.fo/gOY3l>
U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday took credit for salvaging a trilateral free trade accord with Canada and Mexico, marking it as a victory in his campaign to reshape global commerce as financial markets breathed a sigh of relief.
The deal, announced on Sunday, is a reworking of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, which underpins $1.2 trillion in trade between the three countries. Trump had described NAFTA as a bad deal for Americans and threatened to eliminate it as part of his “America First” agenda.
The new United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) is aimed at bringing more jobs into the United States, with Canada and Mexico accepting more restrictive commerce with the United States, their main export partner.
While changing NAFTA and bringing down U.S. trade deficits was a top Trump campaign pledge, Sunday’s agreement largely leaves the broader deal intact and maintains supply chains that would have been fractured under weaker bilateral deals.
U.S., Canadian and Mexican stocks were trading higher on Monday, with the benchmark S&P 500 index .SPX rising more than 0.7 percent and the Toronto Stock Exchange's S&P/TSX index .GSPTSE gaining about 0.4 percent.
The Canadian dollar CAD=D4 strengthened to a four-month high against the U.S. dollar, while the Mexican peso MXN=D3 rose to near a two-month high against the greenback before paring some gains.
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🇺🇸 **Feds Force Suspect To Unlock An Apple iPhone X With Their Face**
*Forbes* <https://archive.fo/SC3XR>
It finally happened. The feds forced an Apple iPhone X owner to unlock their device with their face.
A child abuse investigation unearthed by Forbes includes the first known case in which law enforcement used Apple Face ID facial recognition technology to open a suspect's iPhone. That's by any police agency anywhere in the world, not just in America.
It happened on August 10, when the FBI searched the house of 28-year-old Grant Michalski, a Columbus, Ohio, resident who would later that month be charged with receiving and possessing child pornography. With a search warrant in hand, a federal investigator told Michalski to put his face in front of the phone, which he duly did. That allowed the agent to pick through the suspect's online chats, photos and whatever else he deemed worthy of investigation.
The case marks another significant moment in the ongoing battle between law enforcement and tech providers, with the former trying to break the myriad security protections put in place by the latter. Since the fight between the world's most valuable company and the FBI in San Bernardino over access to an iPhone in 2016, Forbes has been tracking the various ways cops have been trying to break Apple's protections.
First came multiple cases in which suspects were told to unlock iPhones with their fingerprints, via Apple's Touch ID biometric login. The same technique was then used on dead subjects. Earlier this year, this publication uncloaked GrayKey, a $15,000-$30,000 tool that could break through the passcodes of the latest iOS models, including the iPhone X. Another contractor, Israel's Cellebrite, announced similar services.
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🇮🇱 **Israel seeks to 'justify another aggression' with false missile claims: Lebanon**
🇱🇧 *Reuters* <https://archive.fo/EWHQK>
Lebanon’s foreign minister said on Monday Israel was trying to “justify another aggression” by falsely alleging there are missile sites near Beirut airport belonging to Iran-backed Hezbollah.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, speaking at the United Nations last week, identified three locations near the airport where he said the Shi’ite group Hezbollah was converting “inaccurate projectiles” into precision-guided missiles.
Lebanese Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil, speaking to foreign ambassadors before taking them on a tour of the area, said there were “many statements ... affirming the possession of accurate missiles by Hezbollah”.
But he added: “This does not mean that these missiles are present in the vicinity of Beirut airport”.
Bassil accompanied the diplomats, who included Russian and Iranian envoys, and journalists on a tour of three sites near the airport, including the grounds of a top division Lebanese football team, Al-Ahed, which Israel identified as one of the sites.
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🇩🇪 **German Police Arrest Six Suspected Neo-Nazis Ahead of Planned Attack**
*Wall Street Journal* <https://archive.fo/c8K0I>
German police said they had arrested six men suspected of planning an attack on immigrants and politicians, as the country struggles with a backlash from far-right groups that has followed an influx of migrants.
The suspects, all of whom were between 20 and 30 years old, were part of skinhead and neo-Nazi groups, the country’s federal prosecutor said on Monday. The attack was allegedly planned to take place on Wednesday, the Day of Germany Unity, which commemorates the anniversary of German reunification.
Police arrested the suspects after a series of coordinated raids in the states of Saxony and Bavaria. During the raids, police found bats, tasers, an air gun and Nazi propaganda, including portraits of Adolf Hitler and Nazi flags, which are banned in Germany.
The group called itself Revolution Chemnitz, after the east German city that saw mass protests following a murder allegedly committed by asylum seekers this month. Neo-Nazis openly protested in Chemnitz, as well as at several other similar events that were since organized in other German cities.
Crime linked to far-right groups and motivated by racism has increased after the migration crisis of 2015, when hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers poured into the country. While the number of assaults has started to drop again this year, authorities and human-rights activists have said racist attacks are becoming more brutal.
“Far-Right terror is posing a real and great danger and we take it very seriously,” German Justice Minister Katarina Barley tweeted on Monday in reference to the arrests.
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🇺🇸 **Multiple Packages Sent To Pentagon Test Positive For Ricin**
*CNN * - <https://archive.fo/NuuU5>
WASHINGTON — Officials at the Pentagon say at least two pieces of mail sent to the facility tested positive for the deadly poison Ricin.
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you're supposed to include at least a paragraph of text you KIKE
why are you all shitting up my channel
🇺🇸 **Trump Engaged in Suspect Tax Schemes as He Reaped Riches From His Father**
*New York Times* <https://archive.fo/duPUl>
The president has long sold himself as a self-made billionaire, but a Times investigation found that he received at least $413 million in today’s dollars from his father’s real estate empire, much of it through tax dodges in the 1990s.
President Trump participated in dubious tax schemes during the 1990s, including instances of outright fraud, that greatly increased the fortune he received from his parents, an investigation by The New York Times has found.
But The Times’s investigation, based on a vast trove of confidential tax returns and financial records, reveals that Mr. Trump received the equivalent today of at least $413 million from his father’s real estate empire, starting when he was a toddler and continuing to this day.
Much of this money came to Mr. Trump because he helped his parents dodge taxes. He and his siblings set up a sham corporation to disguise millions of dollars in gifts from their parents, records and interviews show. Records indicate that Mr. Trump helped his father take improper tax deductions worth millions more. He also helped formulate a strategy to undervalue his parents’ real estate holdings by hundreds of millions of dollars on tax returns, sharply reducing the tax bill when those properties were transferred to him and his siblings.
These maneuvers met with little resistance from the Internal Revenue Service, The Times found. The president’s parents, Fred and Mary Trump, transferred well over $1 billion in wealth to their children, which could have produced a tax bill of at least $550 million under the 55 percent tax rate then imposed on gifts and inheritances.
The Trumps paid a total of $52.2 million, or about 5 percent, tax records show.
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🇺🇸 **FBI Probe of Kavanaugh Is Expected to Wrap Up Very Soon**
*Wall Street Journal* <https://archive.fo/m81Mj>
People familiar with the process said Tuesday that the FBI investigation into the allegations of sexual misconduct against Judge Kavanaugh could wrap up very soon, well ahead of the end-of week deadline.
GOP aides on the Hill and another person familiar with the process said they were expecting the bureau to conclude its report as soon as late Tuesday or early Wednesday. Agents had interviewed at least four key people as of Tuesday in its background investigation of Judge Kavanaugh. The White House had given the bureau until Friday to wrap up the probe.
Senators would then be shown the FBI's findings, but it wasn't clear if the public would get a look as well.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) said on Tuesday the report was expected "soon" and "will be made available to each senator and only senators will be allowed to look at it."
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🇺🇸 **Confidence in Pope Francis Down Sharply in U.S.**
*Pew Research Center* <https://archive.fo/VXYJ3>
By a two-to-one margin, American Catholics now give Francis negative marks for his handling of the sex abuse scandal
As allegations and investigations of sex abuse in the Catholic Church become more widespread, a new Pew Research Center survey finds that confidence in the way Pope Francis is handling the crisis has plummeted among U.S. Catholics. Just three-in-ten Catholic adults say Francis is doing an “excellent” or a “good” job addressing the issue, which is down 24 points since 2015 and 14 points from when Pew Research Center last asked the question in January of this year.
While seven-in-ten American Catholics say their overall opinion of Pope Francis is favorable, six-in-ten now say he is doing an “only fair” or “poor” job handling the sex abuse scandal, including 36% who say his efforts on this front have been poor. This is nearly double the share who said he was doing a poor job at the beginning of this year, and triple the share who said this in 2015.
The declining confidence in Francis’ handling of the sex abuse crisis is broad-based, occurring across a wide variety of subgroups of U.S. Catholics. Since 2015, for instance, the share who give the pope “excellent” or “good” ratings for his handling of the issue declined by 24 points among Catholic men and 23 points among Catholic women. Similarly, both younger and older Catholics have grown increasingly critical of the pontiff’s handling of the situation.
Even among Catholics who say they attend Mass weekly, the share who give Francis positive marks for his handling of the sex abuse crisis has been cut in half since 2015; 34% in this group now give Francis “excellent” or “good” ratings for his handling of the issue, whereas 67% gave him a positive evaluation in 2015.
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🇺🇸 **Juul gets a surprise visit from the FDA as part of agency’s crackdown**
*The Verge* <https://archive.fo/PH2pI>
The inspection ‘resulted in the collection of over a thousand pages of documents’
The Food and Drug Administration is tightening its leash on e-cigarette giant Juul Labs. On Friday, the FDA conducted a surprise inspection of the company’s headquarters, and took thousands of pages of documents in the process, CNBC reports.
The inspection was part of the FDA’s efforts to curb youth vaping, the agency says in an email to The Verge. “The new and highly disturbing data we have on youth use demonstrates plainly that e-cigarettes are creating an epidemic of regular nicotine use among teens,” the FDA says.
Back in April, the agency asked Juul to turn over information that might explain why the devices are so popular with young people. And on Friday, inspectors went to find documentation about Juul’s sales and marketing tactics for themselves. The inspection “resulted in the collection of over a thousand pages of documents,” the FDA says.
The FDA also inspected Juul’s contract manufacturing facilities earlier this year to check if they met FDA requirements, the FDA says. And just over two weeks ago, the agency gave an ultimatum to Juul and four other companies that manufacture the popular e-cig brands Vuse, MarkTen XL, blu, and Logic: the companies have until mid-November to prove that they can keep kids from using their vapes, or else face having their flavored products taken off the market.
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i hate this pope so much
@w7 your now head archivist
congrats
Conference about Iran/Iraq/N Korea w/ Sec of State Pompeo
**BREAKING NEWS**
🇺🇸 **William Clyde Allen III, of Logan, Utah, was taken into custody by the FBI. He is suspected of mailing seeds used to make ricin to President Trump and the Pentagon**
*Breaking 911* - <https://twitter.com/Breaking911/status/1047626801034514435>
🇷🇺 **Vladimir Putin: Sergei Skripal Is a Scumbag and a Traitor**
*The Guardian* <https://archive.fo/6zK70>
Russian president attacks former spy but angrily denies Kremlin ordered his poisoning
Vladimir Putin has called the former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal a “scumbag” and a “traitor”, as he angrily denied allegations that the Kremlin ordered his poisoning with a nerve agent.
Speaking at an energy forum in Moscow, the Russian president accused the west of portraying Skripal, who was poisoned with novichok in Salisbury, as an innocent victim.
“I see that some of your colleagues are pushing the theory that Mr Skripal was almost some kind of human rights activist,” Putin said following a question from a moderator.
“He was simply a spy. A traitor to the motherland. There is such a concept – a traitor to the motherland. He was one of those.”
Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, were found slumped on a park bench in the English city on 4 March. Britain says Russian intelligence officers poisoned them with novichok.
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🇺🇸 **U.S. withdraws from international accords, says U.N. world court 'politicized'**
*Reuters* <https://archive.fo/ZYfSP>
The Trump administration on Wednesday pulled out of two international agreements after Iran and the Palestinians complained to the International Court of Justice about U.S. policies, the latest withdrawal by Washington from multilateral accords.
The U.S. national security adviser John Bolton slammed the highest United Nations tribunal as “politicized and ineffective” as he announced that the United States would review all international agreements that could expose it to binding decisions by the ICJ.
Earlier on Wednesday the ICJ handed a victory to Tehran, ordering the United States to ensure that sanctions against Iran, due to be tightened next month, do not affect humanitarian aid or civil aviation safety.
Tehran had argued that the U.S. sanctions imposed since May by the Trump administration violated the terms their 1955 Treaty of Amity. Washington responded by pulling out of the treaty, a little-known agreement that was signed long before Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution that turned the two countries into arch enemies.
In the nearly two years since being elected, President Donald Trump has withdrawn the United States from a nuclear agreement between six powers and Iran, pulled out of a global climate accord, left the U.N. cultural agency, and threatened NATO military allies that the United States would “go its own way” if members did not spend more on defense.
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🇺🇸 **U.S. Readies New Charges Against Russian Hackers**
🇷🇺 *Wall Street Journal* <https://archive.fo/ZYfSP>
The U.S. Justice Department said it would announce charges Thursday against seven Russian military intelligence officers, while the British and Dutch governments accused the intelligence unit of directing a series of high-profile online hacks.
In the first of the apparently coordinated announcements, the U.K. said the hacks by the Russian military agency, the GRU, included the 2016 leak of Democratic National Committee emails and the release of U.S. and other athletes’ antidoping test results.
The Dutch government said its intelligence services had disrupted an attempted hack in April into the international body tracking chemical weapons’ use and Canada said it had assessed with “high confidence” that the GRU was responsible for illegally obtaining information from the World Anti-Doping Agency, based in Montreal.
The British Foreign Office said the GRU was guilty of “indiscriminate and reckless” cyberattacks over the last three years that targeted a range of political and media institutions.
The statement comes following a serious deterioration in British relations with the Kremlin following an alleged chemical-weapons attack this year on Sergei Skripal, a former GRU officer living in Britain, for which the U.K. holds his former employer responsible.
In another announcement on Thursday, the Dutch government said its intelligence services disrupted a GRU cyberhack of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which monitors the use of chemical weapons, in April this year.
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🇨🇳 **Chinese spying microchips found in Apple, Amazon computers: report**
*Fox Business* <https://archive.fo/2kxvt>
Chinese hackers have reportedly implanted spying in servers used by numerous data centers of such U.S. corporate giants as Apple and Amazon, Bloomberg Businessweek reported Thursday.
The Chinese initiative targeted nearly 30 companies, Bloomberg Businessweek said in an exclusive report based on a lengthy investigation. The outlet said the hacking is "the most significant known supply chain attack ever against U.S. companies."
No consumer data was reportedly compromised.
The malicious microchips were traced to subcontracting factories that manufactured motherboards for Super Micro, based in San Jose, California. Agents with the People’s Liberation Army bribed or bluffed factory officials to change motherboard designs so the Chinese chips could be implanted in the motherboards.
While the news agency says Apple and Amazon found the chips in servers as long ago as 2015, the two corporate giants deny the claim that the presence of the chips was anything more than a manufacturing mistake.
Apple removed Super Micro servers in 2015 and cut ties with Super Micro the following year.
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🇲🇾 **Malaysian prime minister calls Jews 'hook-nosed' **
*The Guardian* <https://archive.fo/Dc8UX>
The Malaysian prime minister has described Jews as “hook-nosed” and blamed them for creating the troubles in the Middle East – reigniting accusations of antisemitism against him.
Mahathir Mohamad, who at 93 became the world’s oldest head of government after starting his second stint as prime minister in May, has for decades been accused of antisemitism for his attacks against Jews, whom he has accused of perpetrating a humanitarian crisis in the Palestinian territories.
“If you are going to be truthful, the problem in the Middle East began with the creation of Israel. That is the truth. But I cannot say that,” he said in an interview on BBC’s Hard Talk.
Calling Israelis “special”, Mahathir challenged historical accounts that 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, saying the figure was 4 million.
When asked about the description of Jews in his book The Malay Dilemma, he said: “They are hook-nosed. Many people called the Malays fat-nosed. We didn’t object, we didn’t go to war for that.”
The Anti-Defamation League, a US-based organisation against antisemitism, was not immediately available for comment but attacked Mahathir’s “decades-long record of antisemitic conspiracy theories” in a tweet in May. “The world cannot accept this from any leader,” the tweet read.
Last week, when addressing the UN general assembly in New York, Mahathir said the world “rewards Israel” for breaking international laws and committing acts of terrorism against Palestinians.
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🇺🇸 **CNN Analyst Max Boot Claims Trump Blaming Soros Is Like Blaming ‘The Jews’**
*Daily Caller* <https://archive.fo/sdyhX>
Max Boot, CNN analyst and Washington Post columnist, claimed on Friday that when President Donald Trump blamed some of the anti-Kavanaugh protests on George Soros, he was really blaming his “problems on the Jews.”
Boot tweeted, “Funny (actually not so funny) how authoritarians or would-be authoritarians always blame their problems on the Jews–and now in particular on George Soros who has replaced the Rothschilds as the symbol of Jewish finance.”
His tweet was a response to an early morning tweet from President Donald Trump, which claimed that Soros (and others) were responsible for financing a number of the protesters who have ambushed senators on elevators and in the halls of the Senate office building.
And in at least one case, the president is correct in tracing the money back to Soros. One of the women who ambushed Arizona Republican Sen. Jeff Flake in an elevator last week came from the Center for Popular Democracy, an organization that is funded in part by the billionaire.
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🇺🇸 **Kavanaugh confirmation all but sure after long, bitter fight**
*Associated Press* <https://archive.fo/rcopY>
After weeks of shocking accusations, hardball politics and rowdy Capitol protests, a pair of wavering senators declared Friday they will back Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation, all but guaranteeing the deeply riven Senate will elevate the conservative jurist to the nation’s highest court on Saturday.
The announcements by Republican Susan Collins of Maine and Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia ended most of the suspense over a political battle that has transfixed the nation — though die-hard Democrats insisted on arguing through the night to a mostly empty Senate chamber.
Some of them continued raising concerns that Kavanaugh would push the court further to the right, including with possible sympathetic rulings for President Donald Trump, the man who nominated him. But the case against Kavanaugh had long since been taken over by allegations that he sexually abused women decades ago — accusations he emphatically denied.
In the pivotal moment Friday, Collins, perhaps the chamber’s most moderate Republican, proclaimed her support for Kavanaugh at the end of a Senate floor speech that lasted nearly 45 minutes. While she was among a handful of Republicans who helped sink Trump’s quest to obliterate President Barack Obama’s health care law last year, this time she proved instrumental in delivering a triumph to Trump.
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🇺🇸 **ISIS Warns of Knife Attack 'Surprises' at Concerts**
*PJ Media* <https://archive.fo/cpuN7>
Shortly after the one-year anniversary of the mass shooting that targeted an outdoor concert on the Las Vegas Strip, a pro-ISIS media group is circulating an online poster warning of knife attacks at musical events.
Previous releases from Remah Media Production included a January poster showing a jihadist standing in front of a cityscape vowing to "sink America" and another showing jihadists standing in front of a nondescript legislative building vowing that "soon you will taste agony." The group has also released video nasheeds, or songs to inspire terrorists.
In the new poster, a jihadist wearing a suit jacket stands with a large knife behind his back while behind concert-goers whose attention is fixed on the stage.
"Wait for our surprises," warns the text, signed "Islamic State."
In May 2017, a suicide bomber claimed by ISIS killed 22 people leaving an Ariana Grande concert at the Manchester Arena in the UK. Since the Oct. 1, 2017, massacre on a country music festival, ISIS has both claimed and idolized shooter Stephen Paddock, encouraging would-be terrorists to poach from his tactics such as how he used a sniper's perch in a suite on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay to kill 58 people and wound hundreds more.
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🇺🇸 **Staffer who 'doxed' GOP senators faces nearly 50 years in federal prison**
*Washington Examiner* <https://archive.fo/3kbyL>
Jackson Cosko, a 27-year-old Washington, D.C., resident, was arrested Wednesday by U.S. Capitol Police when he was caught sneaking into the offices of Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., after 10 p.m. Tuesday and using an aide’s computer and log-in.
He was charged with five federal offenses: making public restricted personal information, making threats in interstate commerce, unauthorized access of a government computer, identity theft, and witness tampering.
The criminal complaint against him also charges him with second-degree burglary and unlawful entry, which are both criminal offenses in D.C.
Cosko appeared Thursday afternoon before Magistrate Judge Deborah Robinson in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, who ordered him detained pending a Tuesday hearing.
From August until his arrest, Cosko worked as an unpaid fellow with the office of Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, which said it ended his fellowship and is cooperating in the investigation.
Prior to that, he worked for roughly 17 months as an aide to Hassan and before that was employed by former Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif. According to an affidavit, five U.S. senators’ restricted personal information was posted on Wikipedia.com by Cosko.
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🇺🇸 **Kavanaugh confirmed, quickly sworn in; major Trump victory**
*Associated Press* <https://archive.fo/7uCKN>
Brett Kavanaugh was sworn in as a Supreme Court justice Saturday night after the bitterly polarized U.S. Senate narrowly confirmed him. The Senate vote delivered an election-season triumph to President Donald Trump that could swing the court rightward for a generation after a battle that rubbed raw the country’s cultural, gender and political divides.
Kavanaugh was quickly sworn in at the court building, across the street from the Capitol, even as protesters chanted outside.
The near party-line Senate vote was 50-48, capping a fight that seized the national conversation after claims emerged that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted women three decades ago — which he emphatically denied. Those allegations magnified the clash from a routine Supreme Court struggle over judicial ideology into an angrier, more complex jumble of questions about victims’ rights, the presumption of innocence and personal attacks on nominees.
Acrimonious to the end, the battle featured a climactic roll call that was interrupted several times by protesters in the Senate galleries before Capitol Police removed them. Vice President Mike Pence presided over the roll call, his potential tie-breaking vote unnecessary.
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🇺🇸 **U.S. rejects Iran's legal claim to recover $1.75 billion in frozen assets**
🇮🇷 *Reuters* <https://archive.fo/bnRK0>
The United States on Monday asked judges at the International Court of Justice to throw out a claim by Iran to recover $1.75 billion (1.5 billion euros) in national bank assets seized by U.S. courts. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2016 that the assets must be turned over to American families of victims of the 1983 bombing of a U.S. Marine Corps barracks in Beirut, among others.
The hearings at the tribunal were separate from Iran’s claim relating to current U.S. sanctions against Teheran. Iran’s claim in both cases is based on a 1955 Amity Treaty, which was signed 24 years before Iran’s Islamic Revolution that turned the two countries into arch enemies.
“The actions at the root of this case center on Iran’s support for international terrorism,” Richard Visek, legal advisor to the U.S. Department of State, said on Monday, calling on the court to reject Iran’s suit.
Washington announced last week it would withdraw from the Amity Treaty after the tribunal ordered the U.S. to ensure that sanctions against Iran do not affect humanitarian aid or civil aviation safety. It will take a year for a withdrawal from the Amity Treaty to take effect and Iran’s case against the asset seizure, which was filed in 2016, will continue regardless.
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🇸🇾 **Syrian rebels complete withdrawal of heavy weapons from Idlib frontline: Anadolu**
*Reuters* <https://archive.fo/qf5vY>
Under the agreement struck last month between Turkey and Moscow, the main backer of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, rebels deemed as radicals are required to withdraw by the middle of this month from the zone, and heavy weaponry must be withdrawn by Oct. 10.
The Turkey-backed National Front for Liberation (NFL) rebel alliance said on Saturday that the process of withdrawing heavy weapons had begun.
Anadolu gave no further details about the withdrawal of heavy weapons from the frontline. Earlier, it said the rebels were expected to clear the demilitarized zone by Monday.
Other Syrian rebels are due to remain within the demilitarized zone to assist Turkish troops monitoring and patrolling the area, the NFL has said.
The Turkey-Russia agreement halted a threatened Syrian government offensive. The United Nations had warned such an attack would create a humanitarian catastrophe in the Idlib region, home to about 3 million people.
The main jihadist group in the Idlib area, Tahrir al-Sham, has yet to say whether it will comply with the agreement.
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🇺🇸 **Brett Kavanaugh just hired the Supreme Court's first all-women law clerk team**
*The Week/NYTimes* - <https://archive.fo/ZFqe2>
The newly confirmed Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh has already fulfilled one of his promises.
After weeks of contentious hearings, the Senate voted to confirm the polarizing nominee Saturday evening. And Kavanaugh was already on the job Sunday morning with the court's first-ever all-women team of law clerks by his side, The New York Times reports.
Even before sexual assault allegations rocked his confirmation process, concerns swirled around Kavanaugh's stance on women's right. Specifically, Democratic senators feared he would provide the court with a conservative majority that could facilitate the rolling back of Roe v. Wade. Kavanaugh tried to counter those concerns at his first round of confirmation hearings, touting how "no federal judge ... has sent more women law clerks to clerk on the Supreme Court than I have." He also said he had four female law clerks ready to work for him "on a moment's notice," which would make him "the first justice in the history of the Supreme Court to have a group of all-women law clerks."
Those four women — Kim Jackson, Shannon Grammel, Megan Lacy, and Sara Nommensen — were at the Supreme Court on Sunday, aiding Kavanaugh ahead of his first case hearings this week, the Times details. Jackson will become one of three black law clerks working at the Supreme Court this term. She has previously worked for Kavanaugh, along with one of the other black clerks, per The Washington Post.
Kavanaugh will kick off his Supreme Court career Tuesday with a case about crimes involving firearms.
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