Author: Blazingcatfur

‘Putin kaput, glory to Ukraine!’ Inside Kherson as it celebrates liberation

Crowds of euphoric residents lined the streets of Kherson today waving yellow and blue Ukrainian flags in greeting as their troops rolled into the city after eight months of brutal Russian occupation.

“Glory to the Ukrainian armed forces! Glory to Ukraine!” they chanted. A cardboard sign taped to a lamppost in Freedom Square read: “Putin kaput!”

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Ukraine - Russia"

Islamist radicals claimed girls were being kidnapped by Hindus to stoke tensions in Leicester, report finds

Islamist radicals claimed girls were being kidnapped and harassed by Hindus to inflame community tensions in Leicester and other English cities, a report has claimed.

Influencers used social media platforms with thousands of followers to spread false rumours about the activities of Hindu nationalists, it stated.

The Henry Jackson Society think-tank claims that disinformation about attacks on Muslims prompted a backlash against the Hindu community.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Islamophobia", Islam, Islam and violence, Islamization of the West, UK

Internal Documents Show How Close the F.B.I. Came to Deploying Spyware

WASHINGTON — During a closed-door session with lawmakers last December, Christopher A. Wray, the director of the F.B.I., was asked whether the bureau had ever purchased and used Pegasus, the hacking tool that penetrates mobile phones and extracts their contents.

Mr. Wray acknowledged that the F.B.I. had bought a license for Pegasus, but only for research and development. “To be able to figure out how bad guys could use it, for example,” he told Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, according to a transcript of the hearing that was recently declassified.

But dozens of internal F.B.I. documents and court records tell a different story. 

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Surveillance Society"

Canada will soon allow assisted dying for mental illness. Has there been enough time to get it right?

The date whispers in Julie Leblanc’s mind when she is feeling most hopeless. It tugs at her thoughts when, for days, she forgets to eat, or doesn’t shower. She thinks about it more than she knows she should.

On March 17, assisted dying will become legal for Canadians with a mental disorder as their sole condition, and Ms. Leblanc can apply.

She has been struggling with mental illness since she was 8 years old. At 13, she was prescribed her first trial of anti-depressants; now at 31, she has tried too many medications to count, and spent much of her life either in therapy or waiting on a list to receive it. Bounced between doctors, she has been given multiple diagnoses – depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, borderline personality disorder.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inMAiD Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide

DeSantis 2024? Think Again.

It should be clear by this time that popularity has nothing to do with electability. Trump filled rally after rally in state after state with countless, full-house, full-stadium crowds, and such numbers do not lie. There really was a red wave in the midterms, but it was macro-engineered to a trickle, as should have been expected. The scam of  “malfunctioning” voting machines, the shortage of paper ballots, the tsunami of mail-in and late ballots, the temporary closing and slow-downs of polling stations, and so on would have been sufficient to determine an electoral result. 2020 was an early run for 2022, which in turn should be regarded as a template for 2024. I am absolutely sure that the Dems are now, even as we speak, preparing favorable ground for the next presidential election. As Stalin is reputed to have said, “It’s not the people who vote that count, it’s the people who count the votes.” To make Trump responsible for Democrat malfeasance is wholly misguided.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inUSA

Woke Fail: Disney Begins Layoffs, Hiring Freeze, and Limiting Employee Travel as Stock Crashes

It’s been a bad week for the Walt Disney Co.

First, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) won re-election in a landslide victory on Tuesday. Then Disney’s corporate earnings disappointed Wall Street, sending its stock crashing to new lows. Now the entertainment giant is reportedly planning layoffs, a targeted hiring freeze, and travel limitation on its employee.

It takes a lot of effort to screw up an institution like Disney.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inHollywood, WTF?

Germans are dancing to stay warm this winter … Just four years after laughing at Trump

The world’s eyes have been on America this week, thanks to the midterms. Cockburn, however has been gazing across the Atlantic with amusement. A new dance class is being offered in Germany called “Let’s Move — Tanzt Euch Warm,” or “dance yourselves warm,” to combat rising energy costs as the temperature falls.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Ukraine - Russia", Germany, Trump Derangement Syndrome

Iranian activist Masih Alinejad: ‘It’s the start of the end for the Islamic Republic’

The first thing to notice about Masih Alinejad is her hair: a mass of corkscrew curls sometimes worn loose like a radiant halo, occasionally pinned up, almost always with a flower pinned above her left ear. This is not a gratuitous comment on her appearance, but at the heart of a battle that brought her to Paris this week to speak to President Emmanuel Macron.

Alinejad is the international face and voice of angry women in Iran who are being beaten, jailed and even killed for throwing off their compulsory headscarves and showing their hair. Today in Paris, she has a very clear message for the French president and other western leaders: stop shaking hands with Iranian clerics, stop dealing with Iran.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inIran

Ukraine war: Russians kept in the dark by internet search

In many places, searching the web is a gateway to a wider world of information, but in Russia, it is part of a system that helps trap people in an alternative reality.

Shortly after 20 people were killed in a Russian missile attack on the Ukrainian city of Kremenchuk in June, Lev Gershenzon – a former manager at Russian tech company Yandex – typed the city’s name into its search engine to find out more.

The results he got back shocked him.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Ukraine - Russia"

A Cold Winter for Europe: Blame Strategic Blindness

The story goes back to early 2000’s when German’s then Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder decided to develop strategic relations between Berlin and Moscow. He went so far as to offer partnership to Russia in EADS, a multinational European defense and aerospace powerhouse. In November 2004, Schroeder called Russian President Vladimir Putin a “flawless democrat.” Unsurprisingly, in 2004, Schroeder hailed Turkey’s Islamist autocrat, then prime minister (now president) Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as a “great reformer.”

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Ukraine - Russia"

U.S. seeks 15 years for Elizabeth Holmes over Theranos fraud

Nov 12 (Reuters) – Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes should spend 15 years in prison and pay $800 million in restitution to investors defrauded in the blood testing start-up, U.S. prosecutors recommended late on Friday.

The Department of Justice recommendation, made in a court filing, came as Holmes prepares to be sentenced next week.

“Considering the extensiveness of Holmes’ fraud… the sentencing of 180 months’ imprisonment would reflect the seriousness of the offenses, provide for just punishment for the offenses, and deter Holmes and others,” the prosecutors said.

She duped a lot of elite folk. That can’t help.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCrime

NYT Essayist with Soros Ties Pushes ‘Climate Reparations’ for ‘Third World Corruptocrats’

A climate extremist tied to billionaire George Soros was grilled online for pushing thinly veiled climate reparations as the world’s elites converge for another United Nations conference in Egypt on the environment.

World Resources Institute (WRI) President Ani Dasgupta exploited the suffering of “millions of people in vulnerable countries” to advocate for climate reparations in a New York Times Nov. 11 essay. To be absolutely clear, emphasized Dasgupta: “It’s not a matter of charity.” Soros funded the WRI’s radical support of climate reparations with $1,053,207 between 2016 and 2019.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inGeorge Soros, Green-Scam, WTF?

The fall of Sam Bankman-Fried is crypto’s Enron moment

The ‘next Warren Buffett’ looks more like Jeff Skilling

In recent weeks, the world’s richest man and his flailing attempts to figure out what to do with Twitter have dominated the news cycle. However, his unhinged management-by-tweets reality show are nothing compared to an almighty tussle between two crypto-bros.

Internet magic money (aka crypto) billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, better known as SBF, is the man behind FTX, a crypto exchange. He seems to have angered fellow magic money billionaire and fremeny, Changpeng Zhao, better known as CZ and CEO of the rival exchange Binance. It might have to do with FTX cozying up to regulators to get the regulations beneficial to the FTX but not its rivals.

A Ponzi scheme if ever there was.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Digital Currency"