Giuliani will ‘absolutely’ face criminal charges for Ukraine meddling: Ex-SDNY prosecutor

Published 4 mins ago

on September 29, 2019

By Tom Boggioni

Appearing on MSNBC with host Alex Witt, a former SDNY prosecutor who served with Rudy Giuliani when he was a U.S. Attorney said there was no doubt in his mind that the former New York City mayor will face criminal charges over his dealings with officials in Ukraine.

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“It’s been a long time coming, the levels of disappointment with Rudy,” Flannery began. “When I first knew him, I thought he was the kind of fellow we would find on the Supreme Court in his Bobby Kennedy days before he went to Washington. Now I see a guy who should be arrested for impersonating a criminal defense attorney.”

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“Absolutely, ” Flannery shot back without missing a beat. “We have a combination of bribery, we have the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act at risk here because we’re paying a favor, withholding funds and expecting a condition precedent that favors the president favorably before the funds are given, and we also have efforts to conceal the very document we had in this conversation by people in the White House.”

“We have the State Department involved, we have the Justice Department involved,” he continued. “This is a major scandal and hopefully by Halloween, we’ll figure out how to identify the articles of impeachment that correspond to this misconduct.”

Watch below:

Why The Times Published Details of the Whistle-Blower’s Identity

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/26/reader-center/whistle-blower-identity.html

Our executive editor, Dean Baquet, addresses readers’ concerns about the decision to publish information on a person who is central to the Trump impeachment inquiry.

By The New York Times

Sept. 26, 2019
Updated 7:34 p.m. ET

On Thursday, The Times published exclusive details about the identity of the whistle-blower whose claims led Democrats to begin an impeachment inquiry against President Trump this week. (The article reported that the whistle-blower is a C.I.A. officer who was previously detailed to work at the White House and had expertise on Ukraine.)

Many readers, including some who work in national security and intelligence, have criticized The Times’s decision to publish the details, saying it potentially put the person’s life in danger and may have a chilling effect on would-be whistle-blowers.

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The president and some of his supporters have attacked the credibility of the whistle-blower, who has presented information that has touched off a landmark impeachment proceeding. The president himself has called the whistle-blower’s account a “political hack job.”

We decided to publish limited information about the whistle-blower — including the fact that he works for a nonpolitical agency and that his complaint is based on an intimate knowledge and understanding of the White House — because we wanted to provide information to readers that allows them to make their own judgments about whether or not he is credible.


We welcome your thoughts in the comments. We’ll be reading them.





It works for me. Part of whistle blowing almost in all instances requires signing your name to it in a forthright manner. This information needs to come out. It would seem to me that identifying the whistle blower at least to some degree would have a "moderating" effect on someone determined to cause the whistle blower to disappear or shut up.

Just saying.
Very very little more at the link.

Want to go get a beer?

GOP State Senator Runs Ad Saying She’s ‘Not Afraid To Shoot’ Gun Control Groups Down


Amanda Chase is facing backlash over the ad, which she said was a mistake.


By Amy Russo

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The initial ad run by state Sen. Amanda Chase, who represents Chesterfield County, read, “I’m not afraid to shoot down gun groups.

In a statement Friday, Chase called the “ludicrous unauthorized” message a mistake, releasing an edited ad that reads, “I’m not afraid to shoot down any attacks by anti-gun groups, because gun rights are women’s rights.”

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“Gun violence prevention advocates and constituents deserve an apology not excuses,” Pohl wrote.

Chase’s first ad has also sparked backlash from the state’s Democratic party, Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring and Parkland, Florida, shooting survivor David Hogg, who called out the senator online.

On the same day that @GiffordsCourage endorsed over 40 Virginia Democrats, @AmandaChaseVA released an ad saying she would “shoot down” gun violence prevention groups

Inciting violence like this is beyond dangerous. She needs to delete the adhttps://t.co/x1wEne2zy1
— Virginia Democrats (@vademocrats) September 20, 2019

If you’re as disgusted by this as I am, then support our Democratic nominee @pohlforvirginia. She’s been named a “Gun Sense Candidate” by @MomsDemand and she’ll be a voice and a vote for commonsense gun safety measures. Contribute now! https://t.co/vdgFSAC27k https://t.co/8IzTU5PtCF
— Mark Herring (@MarkHerringVA) September 21, 2019

🚨 VA state senator #AmandaChase just threatened to shoot and kill children that support gun control 🚨

If you threaten to shoot children that simply don’t want to die you shouldn’t be able to own a gun— let alone be an elected official.

Call Sen Chases office
804-698-7511 pic.twitter.com/g88lAhJJ6O
— David Hogg text VOTE to 954-954 (@davidhogg111) September 21, 2019

The name of the digital agency purportedly involved has not yet been released, though Chase said one of its representatives “admitted fault.” She has vowed to reveal the name of the company if it does not publicly apologize by noon on Monday.

How to Thwart Facial Recognition


By Malia Wollan

July 30, 2019

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/magazine/how-to-thwart-facial-recognition.html

“Why not give the camera what it wants, which is a face?” says Leonardo Selvaggio, an interdisciplinary artist. Just don’t give it your face. To enable people to obfuscate facial-recognition software programs, Selvaggio, who is 34 and white, made available 3-D, photo-realistic prosthetic masks of his own face to anyone who wants one. He tested the masks by asking people connected to him on Facebook to upload pictures of themselves in the prosthetic: It didn’t matter if they were skinny women or barrel-chested men; short or tall; black, brown, Asian or white — the social network’s facial-recognition software recognized them as Selvaggio. “There’s nothing more invisible to surveillance and security technology than a white man,” he says.

Selvaggio thought up the project, which he calls URME Surveillance, when he was living in Chicago, where law-enforcement officials have access to more than 30,000 interlinked video cameras across the city. He wanted to start conversations about surveillance and what technology does with our identity. He knew that researchers have found that facial-recognition software exhibits racial biases. The programs are often best at identifying white and male faces, because they have been trained on data sets that include disproportionate numbers of them, and particularly bad at identifying black faces. In law-enforcement contexts, these errors can potentially implicate people in crimes they didn’t commit.

Selvaggio sees two routes to elude facial-recognition programs. The first is to disappear: go offline and off the grid. Selvaggio prefers the second option, which is to flood the system with weird, incongruous data. Wear someone else’s likeness or lend out your own. (Before donning a prosthetic mask, check to see whether your city or state has anti-mask laws, which may make wearing one illegal.) Even without a mask, though, you can confuse some facial-recognition programs by obscuring parts of your face with makeup, costuming, hairdos and infrared light. Artificial-intelligence programs look for elliptical, symmetrical faces, so obscure an eye, cover the bridge of your nose, wear something that makes your head look unheadlike. “They have all of our information,” Selvaggio says. “So then let’s make more information that isn’t even true, and then let’s make more information on top of that.”

The Most Notorious Weapon Ever Produced?

There are no simple answers for fixing the F-35 program, as tempting as it is to look for a single root cause for its problems.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/23/magazine/f-35-joint-strike-fighter.html?action=click&module=RelatedCoverage&pgtype=Article®ion=Footer

By Valerie Insinna

Published Aug. 23, 2019
Updated Aug. 24, 2019



What is there left to say about the F-35 joint strike fighter? It’s the most expensive program in the Pentagon’s history and potentially its most ambitious, and it’s arguably the most notorious weapon ever produced. This week for At War, I wrote about its troubled history and the challenges the Defense Department is still facing.

As an air-warfare reporter, I’ve covered the minutiae of the F-35 program and the aircraft’s manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, for the past five years. When people ask whether it’s as big a disaster as they’ve heard, it’s hard to know what to say. I can’t help respecting the ambition of an effort that has tried to solve so many problems and has overcome technical and bureaucratic hurdles that would have killed another program, resulting in a plane that pilots seem to love and say is desperately needed. At the same time, it’s frustrating to watch the continued struggles knowing that American taxpayers will sink more than $1 trillion into an effort that has been poorly managed and resulted in so much waste.

Some officials in the Pentagon feel the same. This year, the Pentagon’s inspector general investigated Patrick Shanahan, then the acting defense secretary, over accusations of favoritism toward Boeing, Shanahan’s previous employer. One accusation derived from a Politico report in which a former senior Defense Department official said Shanahan had called the F-35 “[expletive] up” and suggested that Boeing would have done a better job running the program.

When the inspector general interviewed Shanahan about his comments, he said the capabilities of the F-35 were “awesome” but acknowledged that he criticized the program over having “insufficient spare parts in the inventory, the cost per flight-hour not decreasing fast enough and the logistics support system not having the functionality that the war fighters need to sustain the aircraft.” Military leaders from the F-35 program office, the Navy and the Air Force have publicly made similar complaints. In the end, the inspector general concluded that Shanahan had not crossed any lines.


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Russia detains two North Korean vessels after one opens fire: reports

2 Min Read

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-northkorea-incident-idUSKBN1W21GQ

MOSCOW (Reuters) -

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A Russian border patrol discovered two North Korean schooners and 11 motorboats fishing illegally off its far eastern coast and detained the first vessel, prompting the second one to open fire, the FSB was quoted as saying.
Related Coverage

Three Russian border guards were wounded in the incident.

“Both vessels have been detained,” local media cited the FSB as saying, adding later that more than 80 North Koreans had been detained.

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The detained vessels are being taken to Russia’s Far East port of Nakhodka, Interfax news agency quoted FSB as saying.

Moscow in July accused North Korea of illegally detaining one of its fishing vessels. Pyongyang said the crew had been detained for violating the rules of entry into North Korea.

Reporting by Polina Ivanova and Anastasia Teterevleva; Writing by Tom Balmforth

House Dems announce rule changes to make Trump’s impeachment inquiry just like Nixon’s
September 7, 2019
Grant Stern
https://occupydemocrats.com/2019/09/07/house-dems-announce-rule-changes-to-make-trumps-impeachment-inquiry-just-like-nixons/

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All impeachment inquiries originate in the Judiciary Committee, and now they are planning a formal resolution to lay out procedures for this fall’s impeachment inquiry, which Politico first reported late last night.

As a result, House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-NY) will be given additional powers to rapidly convene hearings, on a vote which a reliable source on the Hill close to the process just told Occupy Democrats, “will take likely place this week, likely on Tuesday or Thursday of this week because, on Wednesday, Congress will primarily be dedicated to commemorating the September 11th attacks.”

One of the House Judiciary Committee’s biggest proposed changes will be abandoning its much-maligned 5-minute alternating partisan question format, in favor of the same hearing plan that turned the two top Senate Watergate committee counsels into key actors in that probe, which CNN revealed as part of their report with significantly more details:

“[The resolution] is expected to follow the precedent set in 1974 over the committee’s procedures during then-President Richard Nixon’s impeachment proceedings.


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Where is the US response to the disaster in the Bahamas?