Tag: finance

The Greedy Little Nation That Sold Its Soul For House Prices

Via MacroBusiness.com.au,

There was a time when Australia’s housing bubble was not much more than a curiosity. Contained mostly to Sydney it seemed it would pass with a little pop and be forgotten.

Then there was a time when the bubble went national. And suddenly the little pop was going to be a big pop so monetary and fiscal policy began to distort in support of it.

Next there was a time when moral hazard became so great that the bubble grew to engulf all policy and media, marginalising an entire generation from home ownership. Politicians routinely lied to cover the collapse in evidence based policy-making.

Finally, we come to today. When notions of managing the macro-economic levers of an economy now boil down to just one thing:

  • low interest rates to prevent the housing bubble bursting;

  • fiscal repair to prevent the bubble bursting, and

  • mass immigration to prevent the bubble bursting even though it is crushing living standards and gutting wages.

This classic slippery slope upon which one bad policy choice cannoned directly into the next is not over.

Three ridiculous further steps are being mulled that will ensure the complete selling of the nation’s soul in a vain attempt to save house prices.

The first is captured by Anthony Bubalo of the Lowy Institute:

Not long ago I listened to four Australians of Chinese heritage speak at the Lowy Institute about the impact on their communities of the foreign interference question. Some of the issues they raised were similar to those articulated by Muslim Australians when they talked about the effect of terrorism on their relationship with broader society.

…The government is certainly seized of this challenge. New legislation has been passed and a new position, the National Counter Foreign Interference Coordinator, has been created in the Department of Home Affairs, similar to the longer-standing position of Commonwealth Counter-Terrorism Coordinator.

But alongside these measures the government will also need to protect the bonds in our society that allow people and communities to cooperate and trust each other despite cultural, ethnic, religious, or ideological differences.

…Some lessons are obvious, such as the importance of precise language. In the same way that it is vital to distinguish between the ideas of Islamist extremists and those of the Islamic mainstream, we must avoid using the the word “Chinese” in relation to foreign interference to ensure we are not conflating the CCP with Chinese Australians.

Feel good drivel aside, the only response that will work to prevent the spread of influence within said community from corrupting the wider democracy is to cap its numbers. There is no need at all for discrimination. That is anathema in a modern multicultural nation. We should simply slash the permanent migrant intake in total. Problem solved.

Literally, the only thing standing in the way? House prices.

The second slippery slope we find ourselves on is the responses being mulled to collapsed wages. This time from Peter Hartcher:

There is a case to update and improve the current enterprise bargaining system, but it needs to done intelligently. Inflexible new industry standards could be disastrous.

The McManus ACTU also demands the scrapping of the current practice of secret worker ballots before a union can call a legal strike, and banning outright any enterprise agreements that are agreed without a union.

So Aldi supermarkets, for example, a generous employer that offers pay and conditions above and beyond the rest of the industry, resists any union involvement in its workplace negotiations. On the McManus agenda, Aldi would be obliged to deal with the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Union. This union commonly negotiates lower pay for workers so long as the employer eases the way for its workers to join the union.

How can the ACTU endorse these policies while at the same time being in favour of the very mass immigration program that has destroyed industrial relations standards? Easy, house prices. The CFMMMEU now runs the ACTU and it wants more building for its members. In classic building site style, everyone else can fuck off.

Finally, we have the Coalition musing on a new immigration management brain fart, migrant tag and release in the bush:

A new population policy that could produce sweeping changes to keep new migrants in regional Australia and improve the co-­ordination of infrastructure development to take account of growth trends is being developed by the Turnbull government.

The policy, slated to be released later this year, comes amid increasing backbench pressure for a firmer and more clearly articulated immigration policy, with MPs citing concerns in key Sydney and Melbourne electorates about the impact of population growth on quality of life.

Totally unmanageable without migrant proof fences and satellite tracking bracelets. But house prices need support so let’s abolish freedom too.

It’s all so bizarre. All we need to do is cut immigration and let house prices fall. There’ll be a period of adjustment while wages and the currency correct but it won’t be too bad. We’ll still be on the doorstep of Asia. The students and tourists will still come, in greater numbers than ever as we get cheaper, but they’ll also go home not pressuring living standards. Broader tradables (40% of the economy) will boom. Commodity income will surge, lifting the Budget. Our maginalised youth will have much greater opportunities to advance their global opportunities as Dutch Disease ends. Incomes will ultimately be much more sustainable.

Then we can all move on with a much healthier economy, polity, society and strategic outlook.

The alternative is to sell our freedom to China, our standards of living to a few rich developers, our politics to carpet baggers and our society to fractious class wars. Just for higher house prices.

If a more ignominious fate awaited any nation in history then I’m not aware of it.

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Twitter Responds To Conservative Outrage As VICE Confirms “Shadow Ban” Reports

A Wednesday article in VICE confirmed a report last week by the Daily Wire‘s Ryan Saavedra which revealed that Twitter has been “shadow banning” conservative users – limiting the number of people who are able to view content from the affected users. 

While last week’s report focused on a site-wide “Quality Filter Discrimination” shadow ban which prevents anyone not already following a user from viewing their posts, Vice notes that many conservative accounts aren’t able to be found when typing names into the Twitter search engine. 

The Republican Party’s chair Ronna McDaniel, several conservative Republican Congressmen, and Donald Trump Jr.’s spokesman no longer appear in the auto-populated drop-down search box on Twitter, VICE News has learned. It’s a shift that diminishes their reach on the platform — and the same one being deployed against prominent racists to limit their visibility. The profiles continue to appear when conducting a full search — but not in the more convenient and visible drop-down bar. (The accounts appear to also populate if you already follow the person.)

Vice found the same wasn’t true for Democrats: 

Democrats are not being “shadow banned” in the same way, according to a VICE News review. McDaniel’s counterpart, Democratic Party chair Tom Perez, and liberal members of Congress — including Reps. Maxine Waters, Joe Kennedy III, Keith Ellison, and Mark Pocan — all continue to appear in drop-down search results. Not a single member of the 78-person Progressive Caucus faces the same in Twitter’s search.

After being shown screenshots of the searches, a Twitter spokesperson told VICE News: “We are aware that some accounts are not automatically populating in our search box and shipping a change to address this.” Asked why only conservative Republicans appear to be affected and not liberal Democrats, the spokesperson wrote that “I’d emphasize that our technology is based on account *behavior* not the content of Tweets.”

The undercover investigative journalists at Project Veritas even caught a Twitter employee admitting to the shadow bans in January: 

Abhinav Vadrevu:  “One strategy is to shadow ban so you have ultimate control. The idea of a shadow ban is that you ban someone but they don’t know they’ve been banned, because they keep posting but no one sees their content.”

“So they just think that no one is engaging with their content, when in reality, no one is seeing it. I don’t know if Twitter does this anymore.”

Meanwhile, Olinda Hassan, a Policy Manager for Twitter’s Trust and Safety team said on December 15th, 2017 at a Twitter holiday party that the development of a system of “down ranking” “shitty people” is in the works:

“Yeah. That’s something we’re working on. It’s something we’re working on. We’re trying to get the shitty people to not show up. It’s a product thing we’re working on right now.”

Twitter responds

Twitter’s product lead Kayvon Beykpour issued a mostly useless explanation over the platform on Wednesday morning, suggesting that they’re “always working to improve our behavior-based ranking models,” and that their “breadth an accuracy doesn’t make judgements based on political views.”

CEO Jack Dorsey, meanwhile, says “It suffices to say we have a lot more work to do to earn people’s trust on how we work.” No word on whether that will be before or after midterms.  

We’ve heard questions from some of you relating to our work to drive healthy conversation on Twitter. People are asking us 1) about the breadth and precision of our work & 2) the impact of our work on the Search experience. We wanted to address these questions transparently here.

In May, we started using behavioral signals and machine learning to reduce people’s ability to detract from healthy public conversation on Twitter. This approach looks at account behavior & interactions with other accounts that violate our rules.

On 1) We’re always working to improve our behavior-based ranking models – their breadth and accuracy will improve over time. It’s important to note that these behavior signals are not binary, and they are one of many other signals that factor into ranking.

To be clear, our behavioral ranking doesn’t make judgements based on political views or the substance of tweets. We recently publicly testified to Congress on this topic https://judiciary.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Pickles-Testimony.pdf

On 2) Some accounts weren’t being auto-suggested even when people were searching for their specific name. Our usage of the behavior signals within search was causing this to happen & making search results seem inaccurate. We’re making a change today that will improve this.

We believe this work is really important to creating a healthier Twitter and we want to continue improving. Your feedback helps us do that so please keep it coming.

Meanwhile, conservative outrage erupted Wednesday in response to Vice‘s report. 

In May, Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign manager, Brad Parscale, along with Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, wrote a letter calling for the CEOs of Facebook and Twitter to address concerns over conservative censorship ahead of the 2020 election, as well as a call for transparency.

“We recognize that Facebook and Twitter operate in liberal corporate cultures,” the letter reads. “However, rampant political bias is inappropriate for a widely used public forum.”

The letter notes “In 2016, former Facebook workers reported that they manipulated the “trending” section to exclude news tailored to conservative users, despite those topics trending on their own,” while “A former trending news curator admitted in an interview that nearly all members of the trending news teams identified as liberal… Moreover, some Facebook employees in 2016 reportedly pushed to ban then-candidate Donald Trump’s Facebook posts and label them as hate speech” 

Meanwhile, conservative Twitter users have accused the company of unfairly targeting them, purging thousands of their followers in an attempt to stem “fake news” content, and unnecessarily prompting them to confirm their identity. Twitter claims its tools are free from political bias, but has allegedly targeted predominantly Republicans as part of a “shadow banning” practice, which covertly limits those accounts’ visibility on the platform.

Parscale and McDaniel pointed out that during congressional testimony, Facebook apologized for suppressing “Diamond & Silk,” two popular Trump supporters with a highly popular YouTube channel, which the platform deemed “unsafe to the community” for no reason.

 

They also noted that Facebook says it’s “working with a third party to encourage voter registration,” and asked for transparency over how those advertisements are displayed in people’s news feeds. “This is to make sure that the new feature does not become essentially an in-kind contribution to liberal candidates.“

Since Facebook and Twitter are platforms used widely by the majority of voters, we request an explanation about how you will ensure all content is managed equally and fairly. How will you safeguard voters’ access to fair content on your platform? How will you guarantee that conservative voices are no longer censored, and conservative news no longer buried or otherwise hidden?

In an interview with Fox News, McDaniel and Parscale reiterated their concerns: 

McDaniel: “It’s a legitimate fear. Brad and I hear it all the time as we’re traveling the country. People are very concerned that conservative voices are going to be suppressed on social media. Of course, many of their users are conservatives and so Brad and I feel preemptively, we have to get out ahead of this, talk to Facebook, talk to Twitter, ask them for transparency, let us know what you’re going to do to make sure that every voice has a say on these social media platforms especially before this critical midterm.”

Parscale: “Every day I receive thousands of messages saying, “I’m being shadow-banned.” And what we want to do in this letter is make sure that we understand what’s happening. We want to ask them for transparency. I think the public deserves that transparency and we need to know that conservative voices have a chance to get their message out. This is a big problem.”

Watch: 

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Is Bill Browder The Most Dangerous Man In The World?

Authored by Philip Giraldi via Unz.com,

The darling of the war party needs to answer some questions…

At the press conference following their summit meeting in Helsinki, Russian President Vladimir Putin and American President Donald Trump discussed the possibility of resolving potential criminal cases involving citizens of the two countries by permitting interrogators from Washington and Moscow to participate in joint questioning of the individuals named in indictments prepared by the respective judiciaries. The predictable response by the American nomenklatura was that it was a horrible idea as it would potentially require U.S. officials to answer questions from Russians about their activities.

Putin argued, not unreasonably, that if Washington wants to extradite and talk to any of the twelve recently indicted GRU officers the Justice Department has named then reciprocity is in order for Americans and other identified individuals who are wanted by the Russian authorities for illegal activity while in Russia. And if Russian officials are fair game, so are American officials.

A prime target for such an interrogation would be President Barack Obama’s Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, who was widely criticized while in Moscow for being on an apparent mission to cultivate ties with the Russian political opposition and other “pro-democracy” groups. But McFaul was not specifically identified in the press conference, though Russian prosecutors have asked him to answer questions related to the ongoing investigation of another leading critic, Bill Browder, who was named by Putin during the question and answer session. Browder is a major hedge fund figure who, inter alia, is an American by birth. He renounced his U.S. citizenship in 1997 in exchange for British citizenship to avoid paying federal taxes on his worldwide income.

Bill Browder is what used to be referred to as an oligarch, having set up shop in 1999 as Hermitage Capital Management Fund, a hedge fund registered in tax havens Guernsey and the Cayman Islands. It focused on “investing” in Russia, taking advantage initially of the loans-for-shares scheme under Russia’s drunkard President Boris Yeltsin, and then continuing to profit greatly during the early years of Vladimir Putin. By 2005 Hermitage was the largest foreign investor in Russia.

Yeltsin had won a fraudulent election in 1996 supported by the oligarch-controlled media and by President Bill Clinton, who secured a $20.2 billion IMF loan that enabled him to buy support. Today we would refer to Clinton’s action as “interference in the 1996 election,” but at that time a helpless and bankrupt Russia was not well placed to object to what was being done to it. Yeltsin proved keen to follow oligarchical advice regarding how to strip the former Soviet Union of its vast state-owned assets. Browder’s Hermitage Investments profited hugely from the commodities deals that were struck at that time.

Browder and his apologists portray him as an honest and honorable Western businessman attempting to operate in a corrupt Russian business world. Nevertheless, the loans-for-shares scheme that made him his initial fortune has been correctly characterized as the epitome of corruption by all parties involved, an arrangement whereby foreign investors worked with local oligarchs to strip the former Soviet economy of its assets paying pennies on each dollar of value. Along the way, Browder was reportedly involved in money laundering, making false representations on official documents and bribery.

Browder was eventually charged by the Russian authorities for fraud and tax evasion. He was banned from re-entering Russia in 2005 and began to withdraw his assets from the country, but three companies controlled by Hermitage were eventually seized by the authorities. Browder himself was convicted of tax evasion in absentia in 2013 and sentenced to nine years in prison.

Browder, who refers to himself as Putin’s “public enemy #1,” has notably been able to sell his tale of innocence to leading American politicians like Senators John McCain, Lindsay Graham, Ben Cardin and ex-Senator Joe Lieberman, all of whom are always receptive when criticizing Russia, as well as to a number of European parliamentarians and media outlets. In the wake of the Helsinki press conference he has, for example, claimed that Putin named him personally because he is a threat to continue to expose the crimes of the mafia that he claims is currently running Russia, but there is, inevitably, another less discussed alternative view of his self-serving narrative.

Central to the tale of what Browder really represents is the Magnitsky Act, which the U.S. Congress passed into law to sanction individual Kremlin officials for their treatment of alleged whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky, arrested and imprisoned in Russia. Browder has sold a narrative which basically says that he and his “lawyer” Sergei Magnitsky uncovered massive tax fraud and, when they attempted to report it, were punished by a corrupt police force and magistracy, which had actually stolen the money. Magnitsky was arrested and died in prison, allegedly murdered by the police to silence him.

The Magnitsky case is of particular importance because both the European Union and the United States have initiated sanctions against the identified Russian officials who were allegedly involved. In the Magnitsky Act, sponsored by Russia-phobic Senator Ben Cardin and signed by President Barack Obama in 2012, the U.S. asserted its willingness to punish foreign governments for human rights abuses. The Act, initially limited to Russia, has now been expanded by virtue of 2016’s Global Magnitsky Act, which enabled U.S. sanctions worldwide.

Russia reacted angrily to the first iteration of the Act, noting that the actions taken by its government internally, notably the operation of its judiciary, were being subjected to outside interference, while other judicial authorities also questioned Washington’s claimed right to respond to criminal acts committed outside the United States. Moscow reciprocated with sanctions against U.S. officials as well as by increasing pressure on foreign non-governmental pro-democracy groups operating in Russia. Some have referred to the Magnitsky Act as the start of the new Cold War.

The contrary narrative to that provided by Browder concedes that there was indeed a huge fraud related to as much as $230 million in unpaid Russian taxes on an estimated $1.5 billion of income, but that it was not carried out by corrupt officials. Instead, it was deliberately ordered and engineered by Browder with Magnitsky, who was actually an accountant, personally developing and implementing the scheme, using multiple companies and tax avoidance schemes to carry out the deception. Magnitsky, who was on cardiac medication, was indeed arrested and convicted, but he, according to his own family, reportedly died due to his heart condition, possibly exacerbated by negligent authorities who failed to medicate him adequately when he became ill.

The two competing Browder narratives have been explored in some detail by a Russian documentary film maker Andrei Nekrasov, an outspoken anti-Putin activist, who was actually initially engaged by Browder to do the film. An affable Browder appears extensively in the beginning describing his career and the events surrounding Magnitsky.

As Nekrasov worked on the documentary, he discovered that the Browder supported narrative was full of contradictions, omissions and fabrication of evidence. By the time he finished, he realized that the more accurate account of what had occurred with Browder and Magnitsky had been that provided by the Russian authorities.

When Nekrasov prepared to air his work “The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes,” he inevitably found himself confronted by billionaire Browder and a battery of lawyers, who together blocked the showing of the film in Europe and the United States. Anyone subsequently attempting to promote the documentary has been immediately confronted with 300 plus pages of supporting documents accompanying a letter threatening a lawsuit if the film were to be shown to the public.

A single viewing of “The Magnitsky Act” in Washington in June 2016 turned into a riot when Browder supporters used tickets given to Congressional staffers to disrupt the proceedings. At a subsequent hearing before Congress, where he was featured as an expert witness on Russian corruption before a fawning Senate Judiciary Committee, Bill Browder suggested that those who had challenged his narrative and arranged the film’s viewing in Washington should be prosecuted under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 (FARA), which includes penalties of up to five years in prison.

Because of the pressure from Browder, there has never been a second public showing of “The Magnitsky Act” but it is possible to see it online at this site.

Bill Browder, who benefited enormously from Russian corruption, has expertly repackaged himself as a paragon among businessmen, endearing himself to the Russia-haters in Washington and the media. Curiously, however, he has proven reluctant to testify in cases regarding his own business dealings. He has, for example, repeatedly run away, literally, from attempts to subpoena him so he would have to testify under oath.

When one gets past all of his bluster and posturing, by one significant metric Bill Browder might well be accounted the most dangerous man in the world. Driven by extreme hatred of Putin and of Russia, he personally and his Magnitsky Myth have together done more to launch and sustain a dangerous new Cold War between a nuclear armed United States and a nuclear armed Russia. Blind to what he has accomplished, he continues to pontificate about how Putin is out to get him when instead he is the crook who quite likely stole $230 million dollars and should be facing the consequences. That the U.S. media and Congress appear to be entranced by Browder and dismissive of Moscow’s charges against him is symptomatic of just how far the Russia-phobia in the West has robbed people of their ability to see what is right in front of them. To suggest that what is taking place driven by Browder and his friends in high places could well lead to tragedy for all of us would be an understatement.

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It’s Gotten So Bad, Darts Outperform The Best Hedge Funds

First thing this morning, an overzealous WSJ Heard of the Street editor Spencer Jakab decided to mock Jeffrey Gundlach’s predictions made three months ago at the Ira Sohn conference, recalling how Gundlach had the temerity to go against the grain of virtually every single hedge fund when revealing his trade recommendations:

Gundlach’s suggestion to short the shares of Facebook and to go long on an exchange-traded fund of oil and gas explorers, for example, would have lagged behind an S&P 500 Index fund by 24 percentage points through Monday’s close.

And surely at 6am this morning, Mr. Jakab would have preferred the following sellside “recommendations”:

Of course, we now know that just 10 hours later, following a historic 20% drop and $130 billion less in market cap, making fun of Gundlach for advising the Sohn conference to short Facebook was not exactly… prudent.

Jakab, however, at least correctly quoted Gundlach’s words, that “Nothing new ever occurs in the business of speculating. What’s happened in the past will happen again and again and again”, and was also right to mock the stupidity of the professional investor crowd, which as today’s fiasco showed are about a clueless as everyone else, and all they really do is chase momentum while collecting 2 and 20.

And here’s why: as Jakab reports, “at the time of the conference, Heard on the Street columnists took on the stock pickers by throwing darts to create a portfolio of 10 stocks to go up against the 12 stocks picked by the Sohn speakers.”

Readers an probably guess where this is going:

Three months later, the darts have prevailed. The Heard team’s 10 picks, eight long and two short, have returned 7.23% on average. The combined performance of 12 picks by Sohn attendees has been slightly negative, lagging behind the S&P 500 by more than 6 percentage points.

What were some of the names the best and brightest in the business could come up with? The top “expert” pick belonged, ironically, to former Facebook exec (and current critic) Chamath Palihapitiya who said to buy Box. Since than it is up 16% which is great… until one compares the top 5 dart returns.

The top pick from the darts was railcar leasing company GATX , up 27% in the past three months.

The other dart “picks” were PagSeguro, Paychex, Park Hotels and Four Corners, all of which have outperformed their respective “2 and 20” recos.

In parting, Jakab tells us that he will update this competition ever three months until the next Sohn conference.

Maybe the Heard on the Street team will be invited to throw its darts on stage next year.

And maybe he can charge a 20% dart performance fee: they deserve it, which is far more than we can say about all those hedge funds who decided to follow the flocks and all invested in the biggest stock disaster (so far) of 2018.

 

 

 

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A South Carolina Nuclear Fuel Plant Has Leaked Radioactive Pollution

Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

Radioactive uranium has leaked through the floor of the Westinghouse South Carolina nuclear fuel plant and contaminated the soil. The Westinghouse fuel factory on Bluff Road, located in Richland County, also has a nearly 35-year history of groundwater pollution from the plant.

The most conflicting part of the entire uranium leak is that officials with the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control said they have no reason to believe the uranium has trickled off the site or that public water supplies are threatened.

But, the agency also said it does not have the results of recent groundwater tests on the Westinghouse property either, meaning they actually don’t really know what the extent of contamination could be. Those test results will show whether pollution in the soil washed into the area’s shallow groundwater, which seeps into creeks in the Congaree River floodplain.

However, the plant does have a 35-year history of polluting the groundwater. According to The State, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission says the uranium, a toxic substance used to make nuclear fuel rods, seeped through a 3-inch hole in a concrete floor in part of the factory where an acid is used. The hole extends 6 feet into the ground, according to the NRC, which learned of the leak back on July 12.

Much like the Fukushima radiation issues, we likely won’t know the extent of the dangers to human health until its too late. It seems like for some reason there isn’t a lot of information available, and the information readily obtainable is contradictory. Most of the mainstream media and government agencies were silent on the extent of radiation contamination in the wake of the Fukushima plant’s damage.

NRC records show uranium pollution reached 4,000 parts per million in the soil beneath the plant. Those levels are 1,300 times higher than the amount of uranium typically found in soil, records show. Soil usually contains about three parts per million of uranium, according to the Health Physics Society, a radiation safety organization. –Health Physics Society

Elevated levels of uranium in drinking water can increase a person’s risk of kidney damage, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Over the course of a lifetime, exposure to uranium also can increase a person’s risk of cancer, the agency says. Roger Hannah, a spokesman for the NRC in Atlanta, also said it does not appear the uranium has spread off the site, calling the contamination “very localized.’’ However, he added that the agency is currently still investigating the leak to learn more about what happened and how badly the surrounding area could have been contaminated.

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Syrian City Rocked By Deadliest Terror Attack In The Last Two Years

The deadliest terror attack in Syria in the last two years just rocked a city in southern Syria, yet few in the West will likely ever hear of it even as the reported death toll soared late in the day to over 215 civilians killed, with over 180 more wounded.

The Eiffel Tower won’t be lit up with colors of the Syrian flag in memory of victims, nor will viral #neverforget hashtags make the rounds on social media — and we don’t expect too many official condolences issued from European or Western political leaders, as has happened with terror attacks that hit the Western world over recent years (though to its credit the US State Department tonight belatedly condemned the “barbaric ISIS-claimed attacks that took place”).

This in spite of the fact that as ISIS is on its last legs in the tiny southwest pocket of southwest Syria adjacent to the Israeli-occupied Golan and the Jordanian border, and as Syrian and Russian jets continue to pound Islamic State positions, “whole families were butchered, scores of on the spot executions, children, women & elderly killed in their homes, another dark day for Syria,” in the description of Syrian-British reporter Danny Makki.

Aftermath of one of the suicide blasts in Sweida. Via SANA

Early Wednesday morning four suicide bombers stuck a popular open-air market and other locations in Sweida city, a provincial capital in the country’s south. Syrian state media said a motorcycle bomber detonated himself in the marketplace just after dawn, after which a series of other ISIS attacks followed.

Islamic State media channels quickly claimed responsibility for the massacre, even as the Syrian Army continues to advance against ISIS and other al-Qaeda terrorists in Daraa and Quneitra provinces, where the particular ISIS group near the Israeli border goes by the name of Jaish Khaled Bin al-Waleed.

Syrian State media reports that authorities thwarted other potential attacks and “hunted down two terrorist suicide bombers who had been wearing explosive belts and killed them before they were able to blow themselves up in the residential areas in the city.”

The chaotic aftermath, reportedly with bodies strewn about the crowded marketplace, made casualty counts hard to come by, as initially Reuters counted 50 among the dead, but late in the day reported 215 killed and 180 injured, including 75 ISIS fighters.

Some of the terrorists involved in the coordinated attacks and who apparently survived the initial attacks were reportedly rounded up by mobs of angry Sweida residents and hung in front of a public building. 

Journalist Danny Makki, reporting from on the ground in southern Syria, observed “ISIS isn’t finished, its nowhere near finished, it managed to kill over 150 people in one of Syria’s safest provinces in one day.”

As ISIS continues to go underground while facing defeat under Syrian and Russian bombardment, many more such suicide attacks are likely to continue. 

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First Assassination Markets Appear On Prediction Platform Augur

Authored by Josiah Wilmoth via CCN.com,

Everyone knew that it was inevitable that assassination markets would quickly pop up on decentralized prediction market platform Augur, but that doesn’t make the fact that users are now betting on whether U.S. President Donald Trump will be assassinated by the end of the year any less jarring.

Assassination Markets Let Augur Users Gamble on Trump Murder

Yet this market exists, and, though not the most popular bet on Augur, more than 50 shares have been traded on it as of the time of writing. Similar markets, moreover, exist for a number of other public figures, allowing users to gamble on whether 96-year-old actress Betty White and U.S. Senator John McCain — who has been diagnosed with brain cancer — will survive until Jan. 1, 2019.

Source: gateway.ipfs.io

Some decentralized application (dApp) browsers are filtering out these markets from the user interface, hiding them from bettors. However, there’s no way to remove them from the network, making them available through any overlay that does not engage in front-end censorship.

Moreover, it’s not too difficult for users to create proxy markets that avoid key-word filtering. “Will Donald Trump still be president at the end of 2018?” is close enough to “Will Donald Trump be killed in 2018?” to attract the same type of gambler.

Grappling with the Logical Outgrowth of a Decentralized Prediction Market

Now that assassination markets are here, a fierce debate has emerged in cryptocurrency circles over what — if anything — should be done about them, as well as who should be held responsible for these clearly-illegal death markets.

The core issue stems from the fact that, in addition to the pure revulsion that these markets should engender in any decent human being, they also create a financial incentive for someone to place a large bet that a public figure will be assassinated and then murder that person for profit. Consequently, the mere presence of these markets makes it more likely that these events will occur, however slim that increase may be.

Augur supporters argue that a project’s developers should not be held liable for how a decentralized technology is misused since the creators do not have the power to censor unethical markets. Many have also compared the platform to the propagation of technologies like encryption and cryptocurrency, tools which have been used for both social good and criminal activities. Death markets, by extension, are a necessary evil if one hopes to achieve censorship resistance.

However, up until about 12 hours ago, Augur’s developers possessed a “kill switch” that could lock up all contracts on the network in the event of a critical bug and save the platform from falling prey to another DAO hack situation. Because two weeks had passed since the platform’s launch without such an incident, they transferred ownership of the kill switch to a burn address, meaning that no single entity can control the network.

Aside from questions surrounding the legality of prediction markets in general, some have questioned whether the fact that assassination markets appeared prior to the destruction of the kill switch makes Augur at all liable, particularly in the horrific event that someone committed murder as a result.

The ‘Ethics of the Crowd’

Granted, the Augur team knew this debate was coming, which is why they took steps to make assassination markets less accessible — or, depending on one’s level of cynicism, to provide themselves with legal cover.

Since the Augur platform is decentralized, the network relies on the “wisdom of the crowd” to determine the outcome of markets. It also relies on the crowd to rule on whether markets are not ethical. Reporters — the mass of for-profit individuals on the network who verify the outcome of events — can flag individual markets as unethical, preventing any bettors from profiting from them.

However, there’s no guarantee that reporters will ultimately decide to censor payouts for these markets, and in fact, individual reporters could be financially penalized for flagging a market as unethical if doing so causes them to break from consensus.

In any case, at this point, the debate is largely moot. Augur is an open-source project, so even if the developers did find a way to block these markets, it’s likely that a splinter group would fork the platform and remove whatever restrictions they had put in place.

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CNN Journo Banned From Rose Garden EU Announcement

CNN drew a snarl from the Trump administration on Wednesday after their White House correspondent, Kaitlan Collins, was banned from Wednesday afternoon’s impromptu joint press conference given by President Trump and Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission. 

Collins claims that she was disinvited from the event over questions she asked earlier about Russian President Vladimir Putin and Trump’s former attorney, Michael Cohen, which Trump ignored. 

“They said ‘You are disinvited from the press availability in the Rose Garden today,’” Collins told CNN‘s Brian Stelter. “They said that the questions I asked were inappropriate for that venue. And they said I was shouting.”

CNN responded with a statement: 

“Just because the White House is uncomfortable with a question regarding the news of day doesn’t mean the question isn’t relevant and shouldn’t be asked, ”adding “This decision to bar a member of the press is retaliatory in nature and not indicative of an open and free press. We demand better.”

A video clip of the exchange shows that Collins was speaking the same way journalists in the press pool usually speak.

Collins said she reacted by saying, “You’re banning me from an event because you didn’t like the questions I asked.”

Collins said Shine and Sanders asserted that “we’re not banning your network. Your photographers can still come. Your producers can still come. But you are not invited to the Rose Garden today.” –CNN

The White House shot back, claiming that Collins acted unprofessionally and said she wasn’t planning to attend anyway: 

“At the conclusion of a press event in the Oval Office a reporter shouted questions and refused to leave despite repeatedly being asked to do so. Subsequently, our staff informed her she was not welcome to participate in the next event, but made clear that any other journalist from her network could attend. She said it didn’t matter to her because she hadn’t planned to be there anyway. To be clear, we support a free press and ask that everyone be respectful of the presidency and guests at the White House.” 

While CNN is playing the indignant outrage card, perhaps they should bear in mind that their network’s Jim Acosta intentionally disrupted the historic signing ceremony between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

Acosta was caught on hot mic during the event telling other reporters: “Hey, if they’re not going to let me in the f—ing meeting, that’s what happens. That’s the way it goes, baby,” the CNN reporter said based on the clip posted by Breitbart’s Joshua Caplan.

In January, Trump ordered Acosta “out” of the Oval Office after the Senior White House Correspondent peppered the president with charged questions about immigration, following an alleged comment made by Trump last week in which he is said to have referred to Haiti and several other impoverished nations as “shitholes.” 

In April the head of the Trump 2020 campaign, Brad Parscale, called for Acosta’s credentials to be revoked after he shouted a Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals question during the White House Easter Egg roll (via the Daily Caller‘s Benny Johnson). 

And in July, a former CNN producer called out Acosta for giving “all good journalists a bad name” after he heckled President Trump during remarks about the five journalists who lost their lives in the deadly newsroom attack in Annapolis, Maryland. 

“This attack shocked the conscience of our nation and filled our hearts with grief. Journalists, like all Americans, should be free from the fear of being violently attacked while doing their job,” President Trump said.  

This prompted CNN’s Jim Acosta to start heckling Trump – asking the President “Will you stop calling the press the enemy of the people?“

A man in front of Acosta is visibly annoyed, turning around several times to shush the CNN employee. 

For that, former CNN digital producer Steve Krakauer took Acosta to task for drawing links between Trump’s criticism of the media and the shooting – even after it was known that the shooter had a long-standing grudge against the paper, had been reported to police at least twice, and that a restraining order against the suspect had been taken out against him by a journalist. 

“Truly an embarrassment, on multiple levels. Jim Acosta’s self-serving antics give all good journalists a bad name,” tweeted Krakauer. 

As John Nolte of Breitbart pointed out – Acosta was literally manufacturing fake news, as there’s no way Trump could have heard him. 

Acosta is clearly too far away to be seen or heard by the president.

Nevertheless, although there is no way he will be heard, Acosta drops all pretense of professionalism to still holler a question to the president

In other words, Acosta knows Trump cannot hear him, but like a heckler out to spoil the moment for everyone else, he still screams his question at him.

…

Watch as Acosta turns around to look at his cameraman and appears to ask if they got the shot. Then the camera lights are shut off, which again reveals just how staged and artificial all of this is. –Breitbart

“This is not journalism,” concluded Nolte.  

Given Acosta’s rich history with the Trump administration, perhaps the White House didn’t want to risk yet another ambush during a delicate moment in history by an employee of CNN. 

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LifeLock Bug Exposed Millions of Customer Email Addresses

Via KrebsOnSecurity.com,

Identity theft protection firm LifeLock – a company that’s built a name for itself based on the promise of helping consumers protect their identities online – may have actually exposed customers to additional attacks from ID thieves and phishers. The company just fixed a vulnerability on its site that allowed anyone with a Web browser to index email addresses associated with millions of customer accounts, or to unsubscribe users from all communications from the company.

The upshot of this weakness is that cyber criminals could harvest the data and use it in targeted phishing campaigns that spoof LifeLock’s brand. Of course, phishers could spam the entire world looking for LifeLock customers without the aid of this flaw, but nevertheless the design of the company’s site suggests that whoever put it together lacked a basic understanding of Web site authentication and security.

LifeLock’s Web site exposed customer email addresses by tying each customer account to a numeric “subscriberkey” that could be easily enumerated. Pictured above is customer number 55,739,477. Click to enlarge.

Pictured above is a redacted screen shot of one such record (click the image to enlarge). Notice how the format of the link in the browser address bar ends with the text “subscriberkey=” followed by a number. Each number corresponds to a customer record, and the records appear to be sequential. Translation: It would be trivial to write a simple script that pulls down the email address of every LifeLock subscriber.

Security firm Symantec, which acquired LifeLock in November 2016 for $2.3 billion, took LifeLock.com offline shortly after being contacted by KrebsOnSecurity. According to LifeLock’s marketing literature, the company has more than 55 million customer accounts.

KrebsOnSecurity was alerted to the glaring flaw by Nathan Reese, a 42-year-old freelance security researcher based in Atlanta who is also a former LifeLock subscriber. Reese said he discovered the data leak after receiving an email to the address he had previously used at LifeLock, and that the message offered him a discount for renewing his membership.

Clicking the “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of the email brought up a page showing his subscriber key, which was in the 55 million ballpark (55739477, to be exact). From there, Reese said, he wrote a proof-of-concept script that began sequencing numbers and pulling down email addresses. Reese said he stopped the script after it enumerated approximately 70 emails because he didn’t want to set off alarm bells at LifeLock.

“If I were a bad guy, I would definitely target your customers with a phishing attack because I know two things about them,” Reese said.

“That they’re a LifeLock customer and that I have those customers’ email addresses. That’s a pretty sharp spear for my spear phishing right there. Plus, I definitely think the target market of LifeLock is someone who is easily spooked by the specter of cybercrime.”

LifeLock’s Web site is currently offline.

Misconfigurations like the one described above are some of the most common ways that companies leak customer data, but they’re also among the most preventable. Earlier this year, KrebsOnSecurity broke a story about a similar flaw at Panerabread.com, which exposed tens of millions of customer records — including names, email and physical addresses, birthdays and the last four digits of the customer’s credit card.

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Appeals Court Upholds Open Carry, Finds Hawaii Infringed On Gun Owner’s Rights

A three-Judge panel on the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Tuesday that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to openly carry a gun in public for self defense, after finding that a Hawaii court overstepped its authority to regulate the posession of firearms outside the home. 

The ruling by the San Francisco-based panel is the sixth US circuit court to similarly interpret the Second Amendment, which could clear a path for the US Supreme Court to weigh in on the issue – which would be the USSC’s first significant gun rights case since 2010. 

The extent of the right to gun ownership is one of the most hotly contested debates in the United States, where there has been a steady stream of mass shootings.

In a 2-1 decision on Tuesday, the panel found Hawaii infringed on the rights of plaintiff George Young when it twice denied him a permit the state requires to openly carry a gun in public. –Reuters

“We do not take lightly the problem of gun violence,” wrote Judge Diarmuid O’Scannlain in Tuesday’s ruling. “But, for better or for worse, the Second Amendment does protect a right to carry a firearm in public for self-defense.”

Hawaii’s Attorney General Russel Suzuki says the ruling will “undermine Hawaii’s strong gun control law and our commitment to protect the public.” (Of course when seconds count, even Magnum PI was minutes away.) Suzuki said that state and local authorities would consult on potential next stepss. 

In 2016, the 9th Circuit ruled that the Second Amendment did not grant citizens the right to carry concealed firearms in public, based on a case originating in Southern California – a case which the US Supreme Court declined to rule on.

Alan Beck, a lawyer for the plaintiff in Tuesday’s ruling, said he believed the question about openly carrying firearms would eventually end up before the Supreme Court.

“I think the Supreme Court is receptive to this,” Beck said in a phone interview. –Reuters

Dissenting on Tuesday’s opinion was Judge Richard Clifton, who said that the Second Amendment did not preclude licensing rules in Hawaii and elsewhere. 

Open carry laws vary by state and type of firearm. The most restrictive states, for example, are California, Illinois, Florida and the District of Columbia – which prohibit residents from openly carrying any sort of firearm. Hawaii is somewhat less restrictive, as one one of just 15 states which requires a license or permit to openly carry a handgun.  

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