24 December 19
Christmas Eve is normally a wonderful fundraising day. Last year we pulled in just over three thousand dollars on December 24th.
I have a fear of what today will bring. If 100 of our readers make a donation today I will certainly be proven wrong.
That would be a good and welcome thing.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
Founder, Reader Supported News
If you would prefer to send a check:
Reader Supported News
PO Box 2043
Citrus Hts
CA 95611
Reader Supported News
PO Box 2043
Citrus Hts
CA 95611
23 December 19
Bernie Is the Candidate to Beat Trump. Here's Why.
Meagan Day and Matt Karp, Jacobin
Excerpt: "Do you want to see Donald Trump defeated in 2020? Of course you do. The candidate who is best positioned to do exactly that: Bernie Sanders."
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Navy Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher walks out of military court with his wife Andrea Gallagher during lunch recess on July 2, 2019 in San Diego, California. (photo: Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images)
Meagan Day and Matt Karp, Jacobin
Excerpt: "Do you want to see Donald Trump defeated in 2020? Of course you do. The candidate who is best positioned to do exactly that: Bernie Sanders."
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Navy Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher walks out of military court with his wife Andrea Gallagher during lunch recess on July 2, 2019 in San Diego, California. (photo: Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images)
Trump Hosts Convicted War Criminal at Mar-a-Lago
Joshua Keating, Slate
Keating writes: "Over the weekend, President Trump hosted disgraced former Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher at his residence in Mar-a-Lago."
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Social media. (image: Cathryn Virginia/The Intercept)
Joshua Keating, Slate
Keating writes: "Over the weekend, President Trump hosted disgraced former Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher at his residence in Mar-a-Lago."
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Social media. (image: Cathryn Virginia/The Intercept)
How ICE Uses Social Media to Surveil and Arrest Immigrants
Max Rivlin-Nadler, The Intercept
Rivlin-Nadler writes: "Emails sent by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials expose how ICE used social media and information gleaned by for-profit data brokers to track down and arrest an immigrant in Southern California."
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Max Rivlin-Nadler, The Intercept
Rivlin-Nadler writes: "Emails sent by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials expose how ICE used social media and information gleaned by for-profit data brokers to track down and arrest an immigrant in Southern California."
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In a Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2019 file photo, Igor Fruman arrives for his arraignment, in New York. (photo: Mark Lennihan/AP)
Giuliani Pals Leveraged GOP Access to Seek Ukraine Gas Deal
Desmond Butler and Michael Biesecker, Associated Press
Excerpt: "In a back corner of the swank H Bar in Houston, near a huge photo of Brigitte Bardot with a dangling cigarette and a deck of cards, two Russian-speaking men offered a Ukrainian gas executive what seemed like an outrageous business proposal."
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Desmond Butler and Michael Biesecker, Associated Press
Excerpt: "In a back corner of the swank H Bar in Houston, near a huge photo of Brigitte Bardot with a dangling cigarette and a deck of cards, two Russian-speaking men offered a Ukrainian gas executive what seemed like an outrageous business proposal."
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The exterior of a survival camp operated by Fortitude Ranch in central Colorado, U.S., December 9, 2019. Picture taken December 9, 2019. (photo: Adria Malcolm/Reuters)
Survival Camps Cater to New Fear: America's Political Unrest
Andrew Hay, Reuters
Hay writes: "Aiming an AR-15 rifle across a Colorado valley dotted with antelope and cattle, Drew Miller explains how members of his new survival ranch would ride out an apocalypse."
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Andrew Hay, Reuters
Hay writes: "Aiming an AR-15 rifle across a Colorado valley dotted with antelope and cattle, Drew Miller explains how members of his new survival ranch would ride out an apocalypse."
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The app has been downloaded millions of times through Google and Apple app stores. (photo: Rafael Marchante/Reuters)
Report: Calling App ToTok Used as 'Spying Tool' by UAE
Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "The app has been downloaded millions of times through Google and Apple app stores in the Middle East, Europe, North America, Asia and Africa."
Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "The app has been downloaded millions of times through Google and Apple app stores in the Middle East, Europe, North America, Asia and Africa."
ToTok, an app released earlier this year, is tracking "every conversation, movement, relationship, appointment, sound and image of those who install it on their phones," NYT investigators and American officials familiar with classified intelligence claimed in the report on Sunday.
The app has been downloaded millions of times through Google and Apple app stores in the Middle East, Europe, North America, Asia and Africa, according to the NYT.
Breej Holdings, the company behind ToTok, is likely to be a front company for cyber intelligence and hacking firm Dark Matter, the Times claimed, and is currently under investigation for cybercrimes by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
Both companies had removed the app from their stores last week after NYT reporters contacted their representatives about the app's link with the UAE state.
The report also linked ToTok to the artificial intelligence firm PAX AI, a data-mining firm based in Abu Dhabi, the UAE capital, with ties to Dark Matter.
A former National Security Agency (NSA) official, who performed a forensic analysis on the app for the Times, said ToTok appeared to be a duplicate of the Chinese app YeeCall.
The spokesmen for the Emirati government, PAX AI and Breej Holding all refused to respond to any of the NYT's queries.
The UAE has been under scrutiny for conducting surveillance operations on its critics, helped by cybersecurity companies and experts linked to Israel and the United States.
Reports this year revealed how a group of former NSA operatives and other elite US intelligence veterans helped the UAE spy on a wide range of targets through the previously undisclosed programme - from "terrorists" to human rights activists, journalists and dissidents.
According to a NYT report last year, the UAE asked the Israeli cybersecurity firm NSO group to hack into the phones of the Qatari emir and a Saudi prince among other political and regional rivals.
The spyware was also implicated in the gruesome killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was dismembered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul last year.
Several alleged targets of the spyware, including a close friend of Khashoggi and several Mexican civil society figures, are currently suing NSO in an Israeli court over the hacking.
Wind farm. (photo: Getty Images)
'I Never Understood Wind': Trump Goes on Bizarre Tirade Against Windmills
Richard Luscombe, Guardian UK
Luscombe writes: "He says he knows more about Isis than his generals, and claims to understand politicians 'better than anybody.' Now there is another subject in which Donald Trump's expert knowledge surpasses that of everybody else: wind turbines, though he calls them windmills."
Richard Luscombe, Guardian UK
Luscombe writes: "He says he knows more about Isis than his generals, and claims to understand politicians 'better than anybody.' Now there is another subject in which Donald Trump's expert knowledge surpasses that of everybody else: wind turbines, though he calls them windmills."
President’s nonsensical rambling remarks about windmills in segment from weekend speech raised eyebrows
e says he knows more about Isis than his generals, and claims to understand politicians “better than anybody”. Now there is another subject in which Donald Trump’s expert knowledge surpasses that of everybody else: windmills.
“I’ve studied it better than anybody I know,” the president asserted in a bizarre segment from a weekend speech to young conservatives in West Palm Beach, Florida, close to his winter retreat at Mar-a-Lago where he is spending the holidays.
“I never understood wind. You know, I know windmills very much. They’re noisy. They kill the birds. You want to see a bird graveyard? Go under a windmill someday. You’ll see more birds than you’ve ever seen in your life.”
Trump ripped into a range of familiar targets in a speech lasting more than one hour at the Turning Point USA student action summit, from the Democrats and House speaker Nancy Pelosi, to his recent impeachment and the so-called Never Trumpers in the Republican party who he said were “the dumbest human beings on earth”.
But it was his rambling and often nonsensical remarks about windmills, during a diatribe against the Green New Deal and renewable energy resources, that raised eyebrows.
“They’re made in China and Germany mostly,” Trump said of wind turbines, of which there are more than 57,000 across the US, according to the American Wind Energy Association. “But they’re manufactured tremendous if you’re into this, tremendous fumes. Gases are spewing into the atmosphere. You know we have a world, right? So the world is tiny compared to the universe. So tremendous, tremendous amount of fumes and everything.
“You talk about the carbon footprint, fumes are spewing into the air, right? Spewing. Whether it’s in China, Germany, it’s going into the air. It’s our air, their air, everything, right?”
It was unclear what exactly Trump meant, or how Trump equated windmills converting clean air into energy to toxic fumes fouling the atmosphere. But he did share his thoughts on their appearance.
“You see all those [windmills]. They’re all different shades of color,” he said. “They’re like sort of white, but one is like an orange-white. It’s my favorite color, orange.”
The president’s “war on wind” is not new: earlier this year he was ridiculed for his claims that windmills destroyed property values and caused cancer from their noise.
He is accused of having begun his tirades against wind mills after wind farm developments were proposed near the golf course he owns in Scotland.
There is some evidence that windmills have a negative impact on wildlife: a 2013 study by the Wildlife Society estimated widespread fatalities in California, including close to a million bats and more than half a million raptors, including bald and golden eagles.
The president’s final words on the subject, before hailing himself an “an environmentalist” presiding over an environment “in very good shape”, concerned the long-term aesthetics of wind turbines.
“You know what they don’t tell you about windmills? After 10 years they look like hell. They start to get tired, old,” he said, lamenting that owners of ageing windmills not replacing them without government subsidies was “a really terrible thing”.
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