Inside the Kremlin’s hall of mirrors | Peter Pomerantsev | Russia’s Round 2: A New Conflict in Eastern Europe?

Russia | The Guardian

Inside the Kremlin’s hall of mirrors | Peter Pomerantsev

Thursday, April 9th 1:00am

· Peter Pomerantsev

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vladimir putin

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The thing that Margo Gontar found easiest to deal with were the dead children. They were all over her computer screens – on news sites and social media – next to headlines that blamed the deaths on Ukrainian fascist gangs trained by Nato. It was early 2014, Crimea had just been taken over by soldiers who seemed Russian and sounded Russian but who were wearing no national insignia, and who Vladimir Putin, with a little grin, had just told the whole world were not Russian at all. Now eastern Ukraine was being taken over by separatists. Gontar was trying to fight back.

She could usually locate the original images of the dead with a simple Google search. Some of the photographs were actually from other, older wars; some were from crime scenes that had nothing to with Ukraine; some even came from movies. Gontar posted her research on a myth-busting website called StopFake, which had been started in March by volunteers like her at the journalism school of Mohyla University in Kiev. It felt good being able to sort truth from lies, to feel some kind of certainty amid so much confusion.

But sometimes things could get more complicated. Russian state-television news began to fill up with plump, weeping women and elderly men who told tales of Ukrainian nationalists beating up Russian-speakers. These witnesses seemed genuine enough. But soon Gontar would see the same plump women and the same injured men appearing in different newscasts, identified as different people. In one report, a woman would be an “Odessa resident”, then next she would be a “soldier’s mother”, then a “Kharkiv resident” and then an “anti-Maidan activist”.

In July, after the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine, Gontar surveyed the internet, picking up shards of pro-Russian conspiracy theories. She came across the Twitter feed of an air-traffic controller who had spotted Ukrainian army jets following the plane, although she could find no evidence that the air-traffic controller actually existed. She found dozens of sites in Russian and English which, almost as one, suddenly argued that the US had shot down MH17 in a botched attempt to target Putin’s personal jet. There were even claims, circulated by Russian separatist leaders in Ukraine, that the plane had been filled with corpses before it had taken off – a plotline lifted from the BBC TV series Sherlock. The stories were glaringly sloppy, as if their creators did not care about being caught and just wanted to distract from the evidence that Russian-backed militias had shot down the plane. Gontar began to wonder whether she was falling into the Kremlin’s trap by spending so much time trying to debunk its obviously fake stories.

Before long, she found herself, and StopFake, becoming part of the story. Russian media had begun to cite StopFake in their own reports – but would make it look like Gontar was presenting the falsified story as truth, rather than debunking it. It was like seeing herself reflected in a mirror upside down. She felt dizzy.

At times like this, she had always reached out to western media for a sense of something solid, but this was starting to slip too. Whenever somewhere like the BBC or Tagesspiegel published a story, they felt obliged to present the Kremlin’s version of events – fascists, western conspiracy, etc – as the other side, for balance. Gontar began to wonder whether her search for certainty was futile: if the truth was constantly shifting before her eyes, and there was always another side to every story, was there anything solid left to hold on to?

After months working at StopFake, she began to doubt everything. Who was to say that “original” photo of a dead child she found was genuine? Maybe that, too, had been placed there? Reality felt malleable, spongy. Whatever the Russians were doing, it was not simply propaganda, which is intended to persuade and susceptible to debunking. This was something else entirely: not only could it not be disproven, it seemed to vaporise the very idea of proof.

* * *

Late last year, I came across a Russian manual called Information-Psychological War Operations: A Short Encyclopedia and Reference Guide (The 2011 edition, credited to Veprintsev et al, and published in Moscow by Hotline-Telecom, can be purchased online at the sale price of 348 roubles). The book is designed for “students, political technologists, state security services and civil servants” – a kind of user’s manual for junior information warriors. 

The deployment of information weapons, it suggests, “acts like an invisible radiation” upon its targets: “The population doesn’t even feel it is being acted upon. So the state doesn’t switch on its self-defence mechanisms.” If regular war is about actual guns and missiles, the encyclopedia continues, “information war is supple, you can never predict the angle or instruments of an attack”.

The 495-page encyclopedia contained an introduction to information-psychological war, a glossary of key terms and detailed flowcharts describing the methods and strategies of defensive and offensive operations, including “operational deception” (maskirovka), “programmatical-mathematical influence”, “disinformation”, “imitation”, and “TV and radio broadcasting”. In “normal war” the encyclopedia explains, “victory is a case of yes or no; in information war it can be partial. Several rivals can fight over certain themes within a person’s consciousness.”

I had always imagined the phrase “information war” to refer to some sort of geopolitical debate, with Russian propagandists on one side and western propagandists on the other, both trying to convince everyone in the middle that their side was right. But the encyclopedia suggested something more expansive: information war was less about methods of persuasion and more about “influencing social relations” and “control over the sources of strategic reserves”. Invisible weapons acting like radiation to override biological responses and seize strategic reserves? The text seemed more like garbled science fiction than a guide for students and civil servants.

Information war was less about methods of persuasion and more about “influencing social relations”

But when I began to pore over recent Russian military theory – in history books and journals – the strange language of the encyclopedia began to make more sense. Since the end of the cold war, Russia had been preoccupied with the need to match the capabilities of the US and its allies. In 1999, Marshal Igor Sergeev, then minister of defence, admitted that Russia could not compete militarily with the west. Instead, he suggested, it needed to search for “revolutionary paths” and “asymmetrical directions”. 

Over the course of the previous decade, Russian military and intelligence theorists began to elaborate more substantial ideas for non-physical warfare – claiming that Russia was already under attack, along similar lines, by western NGOs and media.

In 2013 the head of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, Valery Gerasimov, claimed that it was now possible to defeat enemies through a “combination of political, economic, information, technological, and ecological campaigns”. This was part of a vision of war which lay not in the realm of physical contact but in what Russian theorists described as the “psychosphere”. These wars of the future would be fought not on the battlefield but in the minds of men.

Disinformation and psychological operations are as old as the Trojan horse. But what distinguished the Kremlin’s approach from that of its western rivals was this new stress on the “psychosphere” as the theatre of conflict. The information operation was no longer auxiliary to some physical struggle or military invasion: now it had become an end in itself. Indeed, as the Russian encyclopedia for its practitioners concluded: 

“Information war … is in many places replacing standard war.”

The idea was clear enough. But what could “invisible radiation” really achieve? Was it simply an attempt to put a hard edge on what the Americans call “soft power”, conducted through cultural outreach and public diplomacy? Or was it really some new form of war – one that could outfox Russia’s enemies without firing a shot?

* * *

Towards the end of last year, I flew to Estonia, the tiny Baltic country – population 1.3 million – that sits 150km west of St Petersburg. After the Russian annexation of Crimea in March 2014, there had been much talk that Estonia could be next in line. (“Today Crimea: Tomorrow Estonia?”, as a headline in the Spectator put it.) A few months before my visit, President Barack Obama had jetted to the capital Tallinn to make a public pledge of America’s commitment to the country’s security. “The defence of Tallinn and Riga and Vilnius is just as important as the defence of Berlin and Paris and London,” Obama said. “So if, in such a moment, you ever ask again, who’ll come to help, you’ll know the answer: the Nato alliance, including the armed forces of the United States of America, right here, present, now.”

As Toomas Ilves, the president of Estonia, walked me down a long corridor in his Tallinn residence, he pointed out portraits of the men who led the country during the country’s first period of independence – between the fall of the Russian empire in 1917 and its occupation by the Soviets during the second world war. They had not met happy fates: “This one was shot, this one was disappeared – apparently killed – this one was deported,” Ilves said as we passed each picture.

Ilves was dressed in his trademark tweeds and bow tie, a counterpoint to his mission to make Estonia the most digitally progressive country in Europe. The government has declared internet access a human right; citizens can vote, get medical prescriptions, deal with taxes and bank electronically and pay for parking with a mobile phone. A new school programme requires all pupils to learn to code from the age of seven. Ilves, who probably tweets more than any other head of state, peppers his conversations and speeches with references to the latest technology.

This “e-Stonia” project is practical – a search for an economic niche – but also symbolic. It is a way to tear away the country from its Soviet stereotype as Moscow’s backward province. That break with the past seemed final when Estonia joined Nato in 2004 – a moment that was meant to mark the emergence of a new digital Estonia on the international stage, free forever from Russian coercion.

Since Soviet times, every year on 9 May, which is known as Victory in World War Two Day, Russian nationalists and war veterans living in Estonia had long gathered to celebrate in the centre of Tallinn, at a statue known as the Bronze Soldier – a large Aryan-looking hunk who commemorated Soviet victory over the Nazis. Around a third of Estonians are Russian, or at least primarily Russophone; the vast majority of these are descendents of Russians who were relocated from the Soviet Union after the second world war, while thousands of Estonians were being deported to the gulag and scattered across the USSR. Between 1945 and 1991, the number of Russians in Estonia rose from 23,000 to 475,000. But after the collapse of the Soviet Union, new citizenship laws required Russians who had arrived after 1945, and their descendents born in Soviet Estonia, to pass Estonian language tests to gain citizenship. Tensions began to grow. Many of the Russians do not see themselves, or their parents, as colonisers: according to the official Kremlin line, Estonia “voluntarily” renounced its independence in 1941. Some felt like second class citizens in the new Estonia: why weren’t prescriptions available in Russian? Why couldn’t Russophone towns have street signs in Russian?

When Russian nationalists would gather at the Bronze Soldier to sing Soviet songs and drape the statue with flags, Estonian nationalists began to organise counter-marches at the same spot. In 2006, one Estonian nationalist writer threatened to blow the statue up. In March 2007, the Estonian parliament voted to move the statue to a military cemetery – officially, for reasons of keeping the peace. But Russian politicians and media responded furiously. “Estonian leaders collaborate with fascism!’’ said the mayor of Moscow; “The situation is despicable,” said the foreign minister. The Russian media nicknamed the country “eSStonia”. A vigilante group calling itself the Night Watch camped around the Bronze Soldier to protect it from removal.

On the night of 26 April, as the statue was about to be removed, Russian crowds started throwing bricks and bottles at Estonian police. Riots broke out. There was mass looting. One man died. Russian media, which are popular in Estonia, reported that he was killed by police (he was not), that Russians had been beaten to death at the ferry port (they had not), that Russians were tortured and fed psychotropic substances during interrogation (they were not).

The next day, employees of the Estonian government, newspapers and banks arrived at work to find their computer systems down, crippled by one of the largest cyber attacks to date. E-stonia had been taken offline.

Today, many in Estonia are convinced the whole affair was coordinated from Moscow. Yet nothing can be proven. After the cyber-attack, a nationalist Russian MP and spin doctor, Sergey Markov, told the media his assistant had coordinated the attack with the help of “patriotic hackers” – but said that he was working independently of the Kremlin. The Estonian security services claimed to have observed meetings between the Night Watch vigilantes and the staff at the Russian embassy. But proving the unrest had been coordinated by the Kremlin was a different matter. All that could be said for sure was that someone wanted the Estonian government to know it was not as safe as it thought. But safe against what? “Sometimes we wonder whether the point of the attacks is only to make us sound paranoid and unreliable to our Nato allies,” Ilves suggested. “And thus undermine trust in the alliance.”

A guiding tactical concept in the Russian information war is the idea of “reflexive control”. According to Timothy L Thomas, an analyst at the US army’s Foreign Military Studies Office, and an expert in recent Russian military history and theory, reflexive control involves “conveying to an opponent specially prepared information to incline him voluntarily to make the predetermined decision desired by the initiator of the action”. In other words, to know your adversary’s behaviour patterns so well you can provoke him into doing what you want.

One well-known example during the cold war would take place at the annual Red Square army parades, when the USSR would show off its nuclear weapons and ballistic rockets to the world. The Soviets knew this was one of the very few moments western analysts would be able to see their arsenal, and they would plant fake nuclear weapons with exceptionally big warheads meant to send the west into a panic about the power and innovation of Soviet weaponry. “The aim,” writes Thomas, “was to prompt foreign scientists, who desired to copy the advanced technology, down a dead-end street, thereby wasting precious time and money.”

In Soviet times, “reflexive control” had been the subject of extensive academic study, pioneered by VA Lefebvre, a mathematical psychologist who, according to Thomas, “described reflexive control within the context and logic of a reflexive game”. In the early 2000s, a biannual magazine dedicated to the subject was published by the Russian Institute of Psychology, with articles about the “algebra of conscience” and “reflexive games between people and robots”.

Applied to the landscape of information warfare, “reflexive control” means that the Estonians are kept guessing about the Kremlin’s intentions, and paralysed by inability to formulate a response to provocations whose origins and aims are impossible to determine – whose aims, in fact, may simply be to induce an overreaction. 

“When Russian politicians make threats about being able to conquer Estonia, does that mean they would actually invade?” asked Iivi Masso, Ilve’s security adviser when she joined us at the president’s residence. “Are they just trying to demoralise us? Or do they want western journalists to quote them, which will send a signal to the markets that we’re unsafe, and thus send our investment climate plummeting?”

* * *

A few months after my visit to Estonia, I attended a Nato policy seminar in Kiev that was intended to address these new challenges. The seminar was held in what looked like the ballroom of a grand hotel, with stucco columns and mirrored ceilings. At the head of the room was a small Cornishman, rocking backwards and forwards in front of a PowerPoint presentation. This was Mark Laity, a former BBC defence correspondent who is now the head of strategic communications for Nato.

Projected on a large screen behind Laity was a flowchart that explained the building blocks of a narrative: how conflict leads to the desire for resolution, which is played out through “actions, participants and events”. It was the kind of thing students are taught in the first year of film school, or in undergraduate courses on literary theory. The presentation stressed that the world should be seen as a “system of stories” inside a “narrative landscape”. For the attendants, mainly military men and civil servants, this was a new way of looking at the world. They took notes studiously.

Nato remains undefeated on the battlefield, but Laity wanted to make clear that the “narrative landscape” represented a new and unfamiliar battleground – one in which Nato no longer appeared to hold a clear advantage. This realisation has dawned more clearly over the past year, as the Kremlin appears to be trying to test the limits of the cold war alliance, in sometimes subtle, sometimes overt ways. The semantic lock that seals the North Atlantic treaty is Article 5, which states that a military attack on one Nato nation is an attack on all. Obama cited Article 5 in his Tallinn speech, describing it as “crystal clear”. But what if you could undermine this principle without firing a single bullet? 

Would a cyber-attack on Bulgaria by unknown actors sympathetic to Russia invoke Article 5? What about a tiny insurrection in a Baltic border town, organised by locals with suspicious ties to Russian security services? Would all the countries in Nato go to war to keep Estonian electronic banking online?

Since the beginning of the conflict in Ukraine, the Kremlin seems to have sought to tease and provoke its western neighbours by more conventional means as well. (Russia, of course, insists the reverse is true.) In 2010, one Russian warship was spotted in Latvian waters; in 2014, the total was 40. Latvian aeroplanes were scrambled five times in 2010; in 2014 that figure was over a hundred, as Russian planes swooped into Baltic airspace. Meanwhile, in February, Russian bombers were spotted off the coast of Cornwall.

All these manoeuvres put Nato in a double bind. Not reacting would show the organisation to be pointless. Thus the necessity of Obama’s trip to Tallinn, or of British defence secretary Philip Hammond’s tough words, in March, that “Russia has the potential to pose the single greatest threat to our security”. But, on the other hand, the Kremlin knew perfectly well that Nato had to respond. What if it does not take more than that to make Nato look impotent?

If the battle shifts to the “psychosphere”, Nato’s military supremacy is irrelevant – indeed it becomes an achilles heel as the alliance’s very might makes it more unwieldy and more dramatic to subvert. 

Last winter, I met with Rick Stengel, the US undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, and one of those responsible for formulating the American response to Russia’s ambiguous information operations. Stengel, a former editor of Time magazine, works out of the Washington office from which George Marshall once designed the reconstruction of Europe after the second world war. On weekends he commutes home to New York City, where I met him at his local coffee shop on the Upper West Side.

“At Time, my motto was, ‘We explain the world to America, and America to the world,’” Stengel told me. He sees his new job as the application of this philosophy to a larger stage, one where patient storytelling, based on identifiable facts, can still win the day. Since the annexation of Crimea, Stengel’s team have compiled lists of facts, which it circulates on social media, in an attempt to contradict Kremlin disinformation – like an official US government version of the Ukrainian StopFake website. Stengel calls it “a reality check to the Kremlin line”.

His attentions are not confined to Russia: the State Department has also launched a Twitter campaign against the Islamic State, called “Think Again Turn Away”, which aims to deliver “some truths about terrorism” in order to discourage recruits from joining Isis. (Given Isis’s high recruitment rate, it is not entirely clear that this is meeting with much success.) It is an approach steeped in the premises of liberal journalism: if Stengel presents better arguments and stronger evidence, he believes he should win the debate.

* * *

At the time that I met Stengel in November, posters for RT – Russia’s state-run international news channel – were plastered all over Manhattan. RT America, which began broadcasting in 2010, had launched an advertising campaign promising an alternative view to the American mainstream media. “Before I was sworn in, I had never watched RT,” Stengel told me. The channel is funded by the Kremlin, with an estimated budget of $230m per year, and services in English, German, Spanish and Arabic. RT claims to have a “global reach” of 700 million people, and says its video clips have received over 2bn views online, making it “YouTube’s leading news provider”.

The mantra of Margarita Simonyan, who heads RT, is: “There is no such thing as objective reporting.” This may be true, but RT’s mission is to push the truism to its breaking point. At a time when many in the west have lost faith in the integrity and authority of mainstream media organisations, RT seems dedicated to the proposition that after the notion of objectivity has evaporated, all stories are equally true. In America, where polls show that trust in the media has never recovered to levels seen before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, RT’s posters showed George W Bush celebrating “Mission Accomplished” – with the tag line: “This is what happens when there is no second opinion.” It was hard not to nod in agreement with the message.

The posters, however, do not offer any argument for trusting Putin’s TV network; their main message is that you cannot trust the western media. It is all too easy to show that RT’s coverage is rife with conspiracy theories and risible fabrications: one programme showed fake documents intended to prove that the US was guiding the Ukrainian government to ethnically cleanse Russian speakers from western Ukraine. Another RT report investigated whether the CIA had invented Ebola to use as a weapon against developing nations. Presenters rarely challenge the views of “experts” during discussions of subjects such as the Syria conflict – where Moscow has backed President Bashar al-Assad. One regular guest has suggested that the Syrian civil war was “planned in 1997 by Paul Wolfowitz”, while another has described the death toll as “a joint production of CIA, MI6, Mossad”.

The foibles of RT have been well-documented, not least by StopFake, but journalistic credibility does not seem to be what the network is striving for. If a commitment to the impossibility of objective reporting means that any position, however bizarre, is no better or worse than any other, the ultimate effect, which may be the intended one, is to suggest that all media organisations are equally untrustworthy – and to elevate any journalistic errors by the BBC or New York Times into indisputable signs they are lackeys of their own governments.

The conspiratorial flights of fancy that fill up RT’s airtime are reminiscent of “active measures”, the old-school KGB psy‑ops tactics that the Soviet defector Oleg Kalugin described as “the heart and soul of the intelligence services”. Departments dedicated to active measures did not seek to collect intelligence. Their aim, said Kalugin, was “subversion: to drive wedges in the western community, particularly Nato, and weaken the United States”. 

A favourite tactic was to place fake stories, “dezinformatsiya”, in international news outlets. One story from the early 1980s presented painstakingly concocted medical proof that the CIA invented Aids to kill off the African-American population.

Once the KGB would have spent months planting well-made forgeries. The new disinformation is cheap, crass and quick

Where once the KGB would have spent months, or years, carefully planting well-made forgeries through covert agents in the west, 

the new dezinformatsiya is cheap, crass and quick: created in a few seconds and thrown online. The aim seems less to establish alternative truths than to spread confusion about the status of truth. 

In a similar vein, the aim of the professional pro-Putin online trolls who haunt website comment sections is to make any constructive conversation impossible. As Shaun Walker recently reported in this newspaper, at one “troll factory” in St Petersburg, employees are paid about £500 a month to pose as regular internet users defending Putin, posting insulting pictures of foreign leaders, and spreading conspiracy theories – for instance, that Ukrainian protestors on the Maidan were fed tea laced with drugs, which led them to overthrow the (pro-Moscow) government.

Taken together, all these efforts constitute a kind of linguistic sabotage of the infrastructure of reason: if the very possibility of rational argument is submerged in a fog of uncertainty, there are no grounds for debate – and the public can be expected to decide that there is no point in trying to decide the winner, or even bothering to listen.

* * *

The mindset that the Kremlin’s information warfare seems intended to encourage is well-suited to European citizens at this particular moment. In a recent paper called “The Conspiratorial Mindset in an Age of Transition”, which looked at the proliferation of conspiracy theories in France, Hungary and Slovakia, a team of researchers from European thinktanks concluded that the “current period of transition in Europe has resulted in increased uncertainty about collective identities and a perceived loss of control. These are in turn the ideal conditions for the proliferation of conspiracy.” Conspiratorial inclinations are especially rife among supporters of rightwing nationalist and populist parties, such as the Front National in France or Jobbik in Hungary – which support, and are supported by, Moscow. (Marine Le Pen admitted in November that the FN had taken a €9m loan from a Moscow bank owned by a pro-Kremlin businessman; she insists that the deal had nothing to do with her support of Putin’s annexation of Crimea.) 

Some 20% of the members of the European parliament now belong to parties – largely on the far right – sympathetic to Moscow.

The significance of these parties has grown in tandem with the decline of trust in national governments. At moments of financial and geopolitical uncertainty, people turn to outlandish theories to explain crises. Was this the “invisible radiation” that the Russian information-psychological war encyclopedia had referred to? Once the idea of rational discourse has been undermined, spectacle is all that remains. The side that tells better stories, and does so more aggressively – unencumbered by scrupulousness about their verifiability – will edge out someone trying to methodically “prove” a fact.

Whatever else might be said of the Kremlin’s information strategy, it is undoubtedly in tune with the zeitgeist: one that is also visible in America and Britain, where what Stephen Colbert memorably called “truthiness” can run roughshod over fact-based discourse.

“There are two possible approaches to information war,” the encyclopedia states. The first approach “recognises the primacy of objects in the real world” and attempts to spin them in a favourable or unfavourable direction. The “more strategic” approach, it continues, “puts information before objects”. 

In other words, the encyclopedia seems to be saying that reality can be reinvented.

Russia is hardly alone in its exploration of these methods. In Asia, China has deployed a potent mix of psychological and legal warfare to strengthen its claims to hegemony over the South China Sea. A 2013 report called “China: The Three Warfares”, prepared for the Pentagon by a group of scholars led by Cambridge University’s Stefan Halper, describes the Chinese response to a standoff with the Philippines over a disputed shoal claimed by both countries, which involved economic sanctions, psychological intimidation (in the form of military ships sailing into Filipino waters) and a media campaign depicting Manila’s behaviour as dangerously “radical”. “Twenty-first-century warfare is guided by a new and vital dimension,” writes Halper, “namely the belief that whose story wins may be more important than whose army wins.”

“Journalists are taught to report both sides,” Stengel told me with frustration. “When the Kremlin says there are no Russian soldiers in Crimea they have to repeat it. How do you combat someone who just makes stuff up?”

Maybe it was the jet lag, or the way darkness descends so suddenly over Manhattan in midwinter, but as I walked away from my meeting with Stengel, I couldn’t help contemplating a vision of a future inundated by disinformation, where no argument could ever be won and no view had more authority than any other. But almost immediately, I caught myself: what if fears like mine were part of the game? 

In information-psychological war there are no clear victories, no flags to be planted and borders to be redrawn, only endless mind games in the “psychosphere”, where victory might be the opposite of what you initially supposed. Is the purpose of RT, for example, to spread news, conspiracies and opinions? Or is its purpose to project an impression of Russian strength and confidence – which means that talking constantly about its brazen attitude only augments that perception?

I began to wonder whether the very idea of information-psychological war – with its suggestion that Russia had discovered a shadowy weapon for which the west has no answer – was itself a species of information warfare. 

Perhaps the encyclopedia, and talk of “invisible radiation” that could override “biological defences”, was simply one more bluff – like the fake nuclear weapons that were paraded through Red Square in order to lead overeager western analysts down a hall of mirrors. And if this was simply a 21st-century update of that classic example of “reflexive control”, inducing your enemy to do what you want him to – then, I wondered, was this essay, the one you are reading, part of the plan?

• Follow the Long Read on Twitter: @gdnlongread

Peter Pomerantsev is the author of Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: the Surreal Heart of the New Russia, a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week 

• This article was amended on 9 April 2015 to fix a typo: the earlier version referred to 1915 where 1917 was meant. 

• This article was amended on 10 April 2015 to clarify that RT America launched in 2010 and to correct an error: RT does not broadcast in Serbian.

Inside the Kremlin’s hall of mirrors | Peter Pomerantsevby Peter Pomerantsev

Saturday April 11th, 2015 at 2:29 PM

Russia | The Guardian

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Fake news stories. Doctored photographs. Staged TV clips. Armies of paid trolls. Has Putin’s Russia developed a new kind of information warfare – fought in the ‘psychosphere’ rather than on the battlefield? Or is it all just a giant

bluff• Read it in Russian/Читайте эту статью на русском: Кремлёвские зазеркальные войны

The thing that Margo Gontar found easiest to deal with were the dead children. They were all over her computer screens – on news sites and social media – next to headlines that blamed the deaths on Ukrainian fascist gangs trained by Nato. It was early 2014, Crimea had just been taken over by soldiers who seemed Russian and sounded Russian but who were wearing no national insignia, and who Vladimir Putin, with a little grin, had just told the whole world were not Russian at all. Now eastern Ukraine was being taken over by separatists. Gontar was trying to fight back.

She could usually locate the original images of the dead with a simple Google search. Some of the photographs were actually from other, older wars; some were from crime scenes that had nothing to with Ukraine; some even came from movies. Gontar posted her research on a myth-busting website called StopFake, which had been started in March by volunteers like her at the journalism school of Mohyla University in Kiev. It felt good being able to sort truth from lies, to feel some kind of certainty amid so much confusion.

Information war was less about methods of persuasion and more about “influencing social relations”

Once the KGB would have spent months planting well-made forgeries. The new disinformation is cheap, crass and quick

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Кремлёвские зазеркальные войны | Питер Померанцевby Питер Померанцев

Saturday April 11th, 2015 at 2:29 PM

Russia | The Guardian

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Фальшивые новости. Отфотошопленные фотографии. Постановочные выступления по телевидению. Отряды платных троллей. Удалось ли России изобрести новый вид информационной войны, которая ведётся в «психосфере» - или всё это не более чем гигантский блеф?

• Read it in English

Проще всего Марго Гонтар было работать с фотографиями мёртвых детей. Эти фотографии занимали все экраны её компьютера — в новостях и сообщениях из соцсетей. Заголовки новостей винили в гибели этих детей украинские банды фашистов, которых готовили в НАТО. На дворе было начало 2014 года, Крым только что был оккупирован отрядами солдат, которые выглядели как русские и говорили по-русски. Однако они не носили никаких знаков различия, а Владимир Путин, ухмыляясь, на весь мир говорил, что они никакие не русские. А потом сепаратисты начали захватывать восток Украины. Марго пыталась сопротивляться.

Оригинал фотографии было найти достаточно несложно, простым поиском в Google. Какие-то были сняты на других войнах, значительно раньше этой. Какие-то — на месте преступления, которое к Украине не имело никакого отношения. Другие вообще были кадрами из художественных фильмов. Гонтар публиковала результаты своих расследований на сайтеStopFake («Нет подделкам»), который в марте запустили энтузиасты вроде неё самой, студенты школы журналистики Киево-Могилянской академии. Ей нравилось отделять истину от лжи, чувствовать хоть какую-то ясность среди полной неразберихи.

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Russia's defence ministry unveils clothing line inspired by 'Crimean spring' - in picturesby Nadia Beard for The Calvert Journal, part of the New East network

Saturday April 11th, 2015 at 2:29 PM

Russia | The Guardian

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Designer of ready-to-wear clothing line presented at Moscow fashion week says range was inspired by the annexation of Crimea and a ‘patriotism and love of Russia’

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Russia’s Round 2: A New Conflict in Eastern Europe?

Saturday April 11th, 2015 at 2:23 PM

U.S. News - News

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Wesley Clark, the former commander of NATO forces and one-time presidential candidate, made a prediction about Russia last week based on a recent fact-finding visit to Ukraine: The enigmatic former Cold War power is planning yet another offensive there, likely between Orthodox Easter this Sunday and the symbolic V-E Day on May 8, which marks the anniversary of Nazi Germany’s formal surrender in World War II. Clark has been advocating for the U.S. to provide greater assistance to its Ukrainian allies, particularly lethal weapons, and believes the U.S. should be poised to respond to what he considers the inevitability of further Russian aggression.

His assertions come amid tense times in Eastern Europe, as Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenkoattempts to guide his country through a fragile and spasmodic cease-fire, in place since February, and to some sort of future free of Russian interference. Yet Russia maintains control of Crimea, which it annexed last year, and observers question whether Kremlin-backed rebels will try to make another land grab to create a bridge connecting the strategically placed peninsula with mainland Russia. Or perhaps President Vladimir Putin’s Russia will maneuver toward a more precious goal: the weakening of NATO, starting with some of the alliance’s newest members that were all too recently within the sweep of Moscow’s sickle.

“They are concerned. They’re really concerned,” William Taylor, acting executive vice president at the United States Institute of Peace, says of Baltic countries like Latvia and their NATO partners. Taylor was a former infantry officer in the Army who served as U.S. ambassador to Ukraine from 2006 to 2009. “Their militaries are beginning to think seriously about how they would respond to a kind of Ukraine-like situation.”

Russian troops remain at or across the country’s border with Ukraine, and Western officials are concerned over the failure so far of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe to fully monitor the area. A special task force of the organization – which has been charged with monitoring both sides’ adherence to the cease-fire – includes civilians from Ukraine and Russia but has been unable to patrol some areas of the border, citing security concerns.

Russia’s effective use over the last year of “little green men" – or forces it can deny having deployed – has only heightened tensions among many operating in the region, serving as a reminder that all players in the conflict have grown more cunning. That specter also has left many in the area wondering: Who could be next?

“We should look very, very carefully because all sides are learning lessons,” says Lt. Gen. Raimonds Graube, chief of the Latvian defense forces, who sat down with U.S. News for an extensive interview late last month. “A new type of hybrid warfare could emerge.”

Latvia and its NATO partners have had to be on guard against more nuanced, unconventional warfare techniques, Graube says, adding: "We do have to be very careful.”

Russian military and intelligence services already have employed so-called hybrid warfare in an attempt to destabilize Ukraine, ultimately creating the circumstances under which they could deploy troops there. The National Defence Academy of Latvia released a policy paper last year breaking down the various phases of Russia’s strategy. The plan's early stages involve misleading an opposing government's leadership and disseminating pro-Russian propaganda among the general population, before ultimately ramping up military presence – along with less conventional tactics like cyberattacks – ahead of an all-out deployment that includes special operations forces.

"The Russian view of modern warfare is based on the idea that the main battlespace is the mind and, as a result, new-generation wars are to be dominated by information and psychological warfare, in order to achieve superiority in troops and weapons control, morally and psychologically depressing the enemy’s armed forces personnel and civil population," the paper says.

The successful use of these tactics has forced NATO to reconsider its traditional Cold War-era strategies and find ways to make its cumbersome bureaucracy more nimble amid Putin’s vision of renewed Russian dominance. The president is motivated by “post-Soviet Union imperialistic sentiments” and yearns for the world balance that existed during his early days in the KGB, when two great alliances wrestled for dominance, Graube says.

Graube also has felt the effects of Putin’s propaganda machine, which the leader used so effectively in Ukraine. Russian news coverage of anti-Russia protests in Eastern Europe often uses camera tricks to make crowds appear smaller, for example, while neo-Nazi rallies get disproportionately more attention.

“For us, it was only a question of when, not if,” he says of the invasion of Ukraine. “And how.”

In the end, Russia was able to lean on plausible deniability while fomenting dissent behind the scenes in Ukraine, insisting that violent rabble-rousers were simply innocent civilians of Russian descent who had grown tired of the country’s increasingly pro-Western government.

In his remarks at the Atlantic Council last week, Clark said he had confirmed that deadly sharpshooters last year in Kiev’s iconic Maidan Square were highly trained Russian special operations Spetsnaz troops. These shadowy forces were then ordered to operate among the protesters, Clark said, inciting dissent and punishing those who fought against closer Ukrainian ties with Russia.

The strength of the NATO alliance, and its Article 5 pledge that all member countries defend each other, has so far deterred Russian advances in places like Latvia, which had to build a military from scratch once it emerged from Soviet control. New U.S.-led and highly publicized military exercises – including a 1,100-mile patrol of U.S. Humvees and Strykers through the Baltics, Poland, the Czech Republic and Germany – have served as visual displays of military unity, albeit a nostalgic rehashing of World War II victory parades.

“There’s a heightened awareness, alertness, preparation,” says Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, commander of U.S. Army Europe. “That’s the one thing: The deterrence effect is much higher than it was maybe a year ago.”

The United States’ ongoing Operation Atlantic Resolve also aims to demonstrate the size and scope of a potential NATO, or even unilateral, response to further Russian aggression. And a NATO summit in Wales last September prioritized the need for quick-response forces – which have yet to take shape – and focused attention on countering so-called little green men tactics.

“If it were a situation, I believe all the right people would be involved in making the right decision in time,” Hodges says.

A year of chaos in Ukraine, however, continues to reverberate. Hodges says the fact that certain parts of the Ukraine-Russia border are not able to be monitored by the OSCE robs European countries of the surest confidence that all parties are complying with the Minsk II cease-fire agreement. The protocol was the second major attempt to create a cease-fire after a previous accord reached in September collapsed.

“We have access on the Ukrainian side, with some limitations,” OSCE Secretary-General Lamberto Zannier told Carnegie Europe in March. “On the separatists’ side, we have a degree of access, but not as much as we would like.”

“Every now and then, we reach the border. But reaching the border in a sporadic manner is not good enough for us to have a firm sense of whether or not anything is passing through that border. And we are escorted by the separatists, which means we always have the sense of being guided and controlled,” he said.

And despite Western powers’ rhetoric, other serious and pressing issues remain. Graube says cyberattacks are a daily concern for countries like Latvia, which recently teamed up with the Michigan National Guard through the National Guard Bureau's State Partnership Program to develop a cyberdefense unit. Guardsmen with master’s degrees and doctorates, who spend their civilian careers protecting banks from electronic attacks, are now helping craft NATO’s latest tools for a new war frontier.

Still, for all its power and its track record of defeating the Soviet Union, NATO remains a very slow-moving organization, requiring the approval of all member countries before agreeing on a military action. The alliance always remains ready for a conventional fight, if uniformed soldiers move tanks and infantry battalions into sovereign territory.

But Putin may redeploy the same hybrid tactics he used to seize Crimea to, for example, march on the town of Mariupol. Annexation there would create the land bridge he would need to connect the Crimean peninsula and its navy ports with continental Russia.

That kind of striking move might be too much for European powers, who have so far exerted sanctions against Russia only as a last resort, fearing the rising cost of Russian energy they desperately need.

“I would like to believe those sanctions, plus the low price of oil, has made Mr. Putin more cautious,” Taylor says. “But we have to prepare for him being not so cautious.”

If anything, Putin’s Russia and its crumbling economy have proved they can – at least so far – stave off all-out ruin. Some also believe NATO's efforts are misdirected and only make the alliance look cynical.

Perhaps, then, the Russian president has already achieved his goal by smearing the West's Cold War record.

“Those who put their hopes in a Russian collapse, or social uprising against Putin, their moment has passed,” says Robert English, a former Department of Defense analyst who now specializes in Russia policy at the University of Southern California. “Russia weathered that crisis.”

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· · · · · · ·

Russian Fighter Jet Forced U.S. Plane To Change Course

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» Год хаоса и независимости - Газета.Ru
10/04/15 23:52 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Владислав Сурков - Google News. Газета.Ru Год хаоса и независимости Газета.Ru К первым относилась команда помощника президента Сергея Глазьева, ко вторым – другого помощника Владислава Суркова . «Политичес...

» СБУ расскажет о роли Суркова в событиях на Майдане - BBC Russian
10/04/15 23:51 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Владислав Сурков - Google News. Цензор.Нет (Сатира) FaceNews.ua СБУ расскажет о роли Суркова в событиях на Майдане BBC Russian В феврале этого года президент Украины Петр Порошенко заявил, что бойцы спецпо...

» Duma Deputy Ponomaryov: 'I Do Not Intend To Become A Political Emigre' - RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty
10/04/15 23:51 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from vladislav surkov - Google News. RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty Duma Deputy Ponomaryov: 'I Do Not Intend To Become A Political Emigre' RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty On one side, there is the FSB, the GRU, and ...

» Помощник президента РФ Владислав Сурков поздравил президента РЮО Леонида Тибилова с Днем Конституции - Государственный комитет по информации и печати РЮО
10/04/15 23:50 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Владислав Сурков - Google News. Государственный комитет по информации и печати РЮО Помощник президента РФ Владислав Сурков поздравил президента РЮО Леонида Тибилова с Днем Конституции Государственный комит...

» Шокин: приказ стрелять по Майдану отдал Янукович - NEWSru.ua
10/04/15 23:50 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Владислав Сурков - Google News. РБК Украина Шокин: приказ стрелять по Майдану отдал Янукович NEWSru.ua "Мы тут справку подготовили, я процитирую: "В феврале 2015-го года глава СБУ заявил, что сов...

» Шокин: СБУ докажет, что Сурков курировал работу снайперов на Майдане - Диалог.UA - Всегда два мнения
10/04/15 23:49 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Владислав Сурков - Google News. Диалог.UA - Всегда два мнения Шокин: СБУ докажет, что Сурков курировал работу снайперов на Майдане Диалог.UA - Всегда два мнения Напомним, что 20 февраля 2015 во время церем...

» В обнуленном мире - Радио Свобода
10/04/15 23:49 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Владислав Сурков - Google News. Радио Свобода В обнуленном мире Радио Свобода Яркий британский документалист Адам Кертис высказывает в своем недавнем фильме "Озеро горечи", показанном по Би-би-си в конце я...

» СБУ не смогла представить доказательств причастности Суркова к событиям на Майдане - Взгляд
10/04/15 23:47 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Владислав Сурков - Google News. Взгляд СБУ не смогла представить доказательств причастности Суркова к событиям на Майдане Взгляд СБУ не предоставила генпрокуратуре Украины ни одного подтверждения тому, что...

» Генпрокуратура не в курсе причастности Суркова к расстрелам Майдана - Обозреватель
10/04/15 23:47 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Владислав Сурков - Google News. Обозреватель Генпрокуратура не в курсе причастности Суркова к расстрелам Майдана Обозреватель На данный момент Служба безопасности Украины не подтвердила информацию, озвучен...

» Генпрокурор Украины: СБУ не доказала причастность Суркова к расстрелам Майдана - Московский комсомолец
10/04/15 23:47 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Владислав Сурков - Google News. Обозреватель Генпрокурор Украины: СБУ не доказала причастность Суркова к расстрелам Майдана Московский комсомолец Ранее глава СБУ Валентин Наливайченко заявил, что ведомство...

» Националистическое движение "Русские" оказалось под угрозой закрытия - Интерфакс
10/04/15 23:43 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Русский национализм - Google News. Националистическое движение " Русские " оказалось под угрозой закрытия Интерфакс Как сообщалось ранее, в конце марта обыски прошли сразу у четверых заявителей с...

» Russians honor slain opposition figure 40 days on - Reuters
10/04/15 23:42 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Рамзан Кадыров - Google News. Reuters Russians honor slain opposition figure 40 days on Reuters The main suspect, Zaur Dadaev, served with Chechen police troops who answer to Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov ...

» Gideon's Spies | Gordon Thomas
10/04/15 23:02 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story . “Literally impossible to put down.”— The New York Times “A fascinating look at a spy organization that has remained off-limits to most journalists. A first-rate nonfiction account.R...

» CIA Director Discusses ISIS, Iranian Nuclear Negotiations - Harvard Crimson
10/04/15 22:51 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from cia - Google News. Haaretz CIA Director Discusses ISIS, Iranian Nuclear Negotiations Harvard Crimson CIA Director John O. Brennan discusses policies in the Middle East at the Institute of Politics on Tuesd...

» CIA Director Says Iran's Economic Peril Helped Drive Nuclear Deal - New York Times
10/04/15 22:50 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from cia - Google News. New York Times CIA Director Says Iran's Economic Peril Helped Drive Nuclear Deal New York Times CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — The director of the Central Intelligence Agency has provided the first ...

» CIA Director Says the War on Terror May Never End - Defense One
10/04/15 22:48 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from cia - Google News. Defense One CIA Director Says the War on Terror May Never End Defense One Last night, Director of Central Intelligence John Brennan participated in a question-and-answer session at Harva...

» Особое мнение : Глеб Павловский
10/04/15 22:39 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Горячие интервью (звук) | Эхо Москвы. Гости: Глеб Павловский Ведущие: Ольга Журавлева Прямая линия с президентом - это как «Интерстеллар». Можно посмотреть, можно не посмотреть... Download audio: http://cd...

» Националистическое движение "Русские" может закрыться
10/04/15 22:36 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Информационное агентство Росбалт. Росбалт, 11/04/2015 01:43 МОСКВА, 11 апреля. Дk...

» Хакеры завладели личными данными клиентов Lufthansa
10/04/15 22:34 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Информационное агентство Росбалт. Хакеры получили доступ к личным данным участников программы накопления миль авиакомпании Lufthansa. Как сообщает Spiegel, хакеры осуществили взлом произошел с помощью так ...

» Ariel Cohen: Putin's chilling message to the West - Kyiv Post
10/04/15 22:32 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Putin - Google News. Kyiv Post Ariel Cohen: Putin's chilling message to the West Kyiv Post Vladimir Putin's 10-day disappearance shortly after the murder of opposition politician Boris Nemtsov and his triu...

» Putin’s Chilling Message to the West
10/04/15 22:32 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from New Atlanticist. April 7, 2015 Russian President Vladimir Putin addresses the audience during a concert in Moscow March 18 to mark the first anniversary of Russia's annexation Crimea from Ukraine. (Reuters...

» ФСБ видит в «Исламском государстве» угрозу для России - Газета.Ru
10/04/15 22:28 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story . Спецслужбы видят реальную угрозу &...

» Порошенко урегулировал деятельность разведки Украины
10/04/15 22:16 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Новости Украины 24 часа в сутки : ЛІГАБізнесІнформ. Закон будет способствов ...

» Holder warns DOJ staff members against soliciting prostitutes
10/04/15 21:32 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from The Current - Breaking USA News. Mar. four, 2015: U.S. Attorney Common Eric Holder addresses reporters in Washington. (Reuters) Attorney Standard Eric Holder despatched a memo to staff members of the Depar...

» Russia's Next Target - Wall Street Journal
10/04/15 20:35 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Russia - Google News. Wall Street Journal Russia's Next Target Wall Street Journal Russian forces on Thursday conducted a drill near Moldova, the small, Kremlin-menaced nation wedged between Ukraine and Ro...

» Украинская прокуратура расследует исчезновение документов по делам против Юлии Тимошенко - Коммерсантъ
10/04/15 20:34 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from В мире – Новости Google. Комсомольская правда Украинская прокуратура расследует исчезновение документов по делам против Юлии Тимошенко Коммерсантъ Генеральная прокуратура Украины проводит служебное расслед...

» Киев не намерен снимать экономическую блокаду Донбасса и переводить пенсии населению - Московский комсомолец
10/04/15 20:34 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from В мире – Новости Google. Московский комсомолец Киев не намерен снимать экономическую блокаду Донбасса и переводить пенсии населению Московский комсомолец Официальный представитель МИД Украины Евгений Переб...

» Что несет Украине карьерный взлет Дмитрия Яроша?
10/04/15 20:32 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story . Недавнее назначение лидера украи&#...

» Ярош и Порошенко: кто кому служит? - ИА REGNUM
10/04/15 20:31 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from В мире – Новости Google. BBC Russian Ярош и Порошенко: кто кому служит? ИА REGNUM Казалось бы — еще недавно лидер «Правого сектора» был в команде Коломойского, грозил президенту Порошенко и начальнику Генш...

» Рогозин назвал Турчинова дебилом - Газета.Ru
10/04/15 20:30 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from В мире – Новости Google. Комсомольская Правда в Украине Рогозин назвал Турчинова дебилом Газета.Ru Вице-премьер России Дмитрий Рогозин прокомментировал в своем твиттере заявление секретарь СНБО Украины Але...

» Poland’s warning to Europe: Russia’s aggression in Ukraine changes everything | Natalie Nougayrede
10/04/15 20:30 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Russia | The Guardian. Five years after the Smolensk plane crash, Warsaw has grown impatient with taking a diplomatic backseat The train was trundling through the Warsaw suburbs towards the north-west. It ...

» Poland's warning to Europe: Russia's aggression in Ukraine changes everything - The Guardian
10/04/15 20:29 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Russia - Google News. The Guardian Poland's warning to Europe: Russia's aggression in Ukraine changes everything The Guardian Russia's aggression against neighbouring Ukraine has changed almost everything....

» To Counter NATO in Baltic, Moscow Ready to Use Nuclear Weapons, Regnum Writer Says
10/04/15 20:29 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Window on Eurasia -- New Series. Paul Goble               Staunton, April 10 – Faced with superior NATO forces in the larger Baltic Sea region an...

» Путин созвал Совбез из-за Украины и Йемена - УНИАН
10/04/15 20:28 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from В мире – Новости Google. УНИАН Путин созвал Совбез из-за Украины и Йемена УНИАН Президент РФ Владимир Владимир Путин провёл оперативное совещание с постоянными членами российского Совета безопасности по Ук...

» Russia May Soon Have ‘More Blocked Websites than Working Ones,’ Legal Expert Says
10/04/15 20:28 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Window on Eurasia -- New Series. Paul Goble               Staunton, April 10 – It is a measure of how Moscow has tightened the screws on the medi...

» One Person Killed in Fire at Rosneft Oil Refinery
10/04/15 20:27 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from The Moscow Times Top Stories. A fire broke out at the Angarsk refinery of Russia's biggest oil firm Rosneft in east Siberia on Friday, killing one worker, Rosneft said.

» ФСБ: в рядах боевиков ИГ насчитывается около 1,7 тысячи граждан России - РИА Новости
10/04/15 20:27 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from В мире – Новости Google. РИА Новости ФСБ: в рядах боевиков ИГ насчитывается около 1,7 тысячи граждан России РИА Новости Заместитель директора ФСБ генерал армии Сергей Смирнов заявил, что также в настоящее ...

» Pope Francis accused of blocking appointment of French ambassador to Vatican 'because he is gay'
10/04/15 20:26 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from - Europe RSS Feed. Liberal Catholics’ hopes for a more progressive Church under Pope Francis have taken another knock with claims that the Pontiff has refused to accept France’s new choice of Ambassador to...

» СБУ сообщает о задержании уже 40 человек в Одесском регионе - РИА Новости
10/04/15 20:26 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from В мире – Новости Google. РИА Новости СБУ сообщает о задержании уже 40 человек в Одесском регионе РИА Новости Пресс-секретарь Службы безопасности Украины Елена Гитлянская сообщила, что "в целом СБУ зад...

» Порошенко пообещал защитить украинцев в Приднестровье, если их обидят - Комсомольская правда
10/04/15 20:24 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from В мире – Новости Google. Комсомольская правда Порошенко пообещал защитить украинцев в Приднестровье, если их обидят Комсомольская правда Президент Украины Петр Порошенко за свое недолгое правление пообещал...

» Ford takes control of Russia joint venture - Reuters
10/04/15 20:24 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Russia - Google News. Reuters Ford takes control of Russia joint venture Reuters Ford's equity stake in Ford-Sollers, which is responsible for local production, sales and imports of Ford cars in Russia , r...

» Russian National Culture Matters But Less than Many Think, Pain Says
10/04/15 20:22 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Window on Eurasia -- New Series. Paul Goble               Staunton, April 10 – Russian national culture is not the determinant of the country’s d...

» «Вы не цитируете Путина. Вы цитируете какой-то идиотизм» - Коммерсантъ
10/04/15 20:19 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from В мире – Новости Google. Коммерсантъ «Вы не цитируете Путина. Вы цитируете какой-то идиотизм» Коммерсантъ Президент Украины Петр Порошенко прокомментировал появившуюся в начале недели информацию в СМИ о то...

» New Laws on Archives and Names Show Ukraine ‘Increasingly Diverging’ from Russia, Scholar Says
10/04/15 20:19 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Window on Eurasia -- New Series. Paul Goble               Staunton, April 10 – “The mental gap between Ukraine and Russia is growing, and the tra...

» Майкл Макфол: Путин не заинтересован в разрешении украинского конфликта
10/04/15 20:18 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Uploads by Голос Америки. Майкл Макфол: Путин не заинтересован в разрешении украинского конфликта Бывший посол США в России считает взаимодействие с Кремлем бесполезным на данном этапе Originally published...

» Russia's Middle Class Reluctant to Blame Putin for Economic Downturn
10/04/15 20:17 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from The Moscow Times Top Stories. It was when her nine-year-old son said he wanted to be ill to keep her home that Yekaterina Chatskaya knew the cuts at her Moscow clinic had gone too far and she was working t...

» Whoa. The Russian ruble is having a 'miracle' surge - CNNMoney
10/04/15 20:17 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Russia - Google News. CNNMoney Whoa. The Russian ruble is having a 'miracle' surge CNNMoney The ruble collapsed last year as the Russian economy started showing serious cracks. Russia was hit hard by the d...

» After 'Interns' Star Came Out in Russia, a Mix of Fury and Shrugs - New York Times
10/04/15 20:16 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Russia - Google News. New York Times After 'Interns' Star Came Out in Russia , a Mix of Fury and Shrugs New York Times MOSCOW — In February, Odin Biron, an American actor who plays a naïve American son of ...

» Analysts: Iran Deal Offers Chance to Rehabilitate Foreign Relations
10/04/15 20:15 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Voice of America. The tentative framework over Iran’s nuclear program agreed to this month is in renewed doubt over the timing of when Western sanctions should be lifted. But many analysts say the progress...

» Линия разграничения в Донбассе остается линией огня - Вести.Ru
10/04/15 20:14 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from В мире – Новости Google. Вести.Ru Линия разграничения в Донбассе остается линией огня Вести.Ru В поселок Спартак, расположенный в пригороде Донецка, прибыли наблюдатели ОБСЕ. Минувшей ночью украинские войс...

» Катынь и Смоленск
10/04/15 20:14 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Uploads by Радио Свобода. Катынь и Смоленск Что значат д...

» Iran-China Alliance Not Considered Threat to Nuclear Talks
10/04/15 20:13 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Voice of America. The U.S. State Department says it does not believe Iran’s alliance with a new multi-billion dollar China-led development bank will destabilize the ongoing Iran nuclear talks.   Iran is on...

» Senate nears veto-proof tally on Iran bill
10/04/15 20:06 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story . Washington (CNN) Senate backers of a bill the White House fears could dismantle a potential nuclear deal with Iran are closing in on a veto-proof threshold of support. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee i...

» Venezuela's president sees opportunity for better U.S. ties
10/04/15 20:05 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Reuters: World News. CARACAS (Reuters) - Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro on Thursday said he saw an opportunity to improve strained ties with the United States, softening his stance toward U.S. Preside...

» Ambassador: US handed Cambodia to `butcher' 40 years ago
10/04/15 20:04 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from AP Top Headlines At 6:13 p.m. EDT. PARIS (AP) -- Twelve helicopters, bristling with guns and U.S. Marines, breached the morning horizon and began a daring descent toward Cambodia's besieged capital. Reside...

» Ahead of World War II Anniversary, Questions Linger Over Stance of Japan's ... - New York Times
10/04/15 20:04 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from world - Google News. New York Times Ahead of World War II Anniversary, Questions Linger Over Stance of Japan's ... New York Times PELELIU ISLAND, Palau — Visiting the remote Western Pacific site of one of ...

» Probe ordered into deputies' beating of fleeing horseman - TheNewsTribune.com
10/04/15 20:03 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Top Stories - Google News. Probe ordered into deputies' beating of fleeing horseman TheNewsTribune.com HESPERIA, Calif. — A Southern California sheriff on Thursday ordered an immediate investigation after ...

» Bernice Tannenbaum, Who Fought U.N. Resolution on Zionism, Dies at 101
10/04/15 20:03 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from NYT > World. Ms. Tannenbaum, a former president of Hadassah, persuaded President Ronald Reagan and the United States Senate to condemn a United Nations resolution equating Zionism with racism.

» Nordic Nations Agree On Defense Cooperation Against Russia
10/04/15 20:02 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty. Five Nordic nations have agreed to work more closely on defense after declaring Russia the "biggest challenge to European security."

» Smolensk Plane Crash Remembered On Fifth Anniversary
10/04/15 20:02 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty. Commemorations are planned in Warsaw on April 10 to mark the fifth five year anniversary of the plane crash that killed Poland's president and other senior officials.

» Obama to Meet Raul Castro at Panama Summit
10/04/15 20:02 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Uploads by VOA News. Obama to Meet Raul Castro at Panama Summit President Barack Obama is taking part in a two-day summit in Panama City, where he is expected to encounter Cuban President Raul Castro. It w...

» Top US, Cuba diplomats hold highest-level meeting in decades
10/04/15 20:01 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from AP Top Headlines At 6:13 p.m. EDT. WASHINGTON (AP) -- The top U.S. and Cuban diplomats have met in Panama in the highest-level meeting between the two governments in more than half a century....

» Top U.S., Cuba Diplomats Hold Highest-Level Meeting in Decades
10/04/15 20:01 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from TIME. (WASHINGTON) — The top U.S. and Cuban diplomats have met in Panama in the highest-level meeting between the two governments in more than half a century. The U.S. State Department says Secretary...

» The Daily Vertical: The Kremlin's Maidanphobia
10/04/15 19:59 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty. The Daily Vertical is a video primer for Russia-watchers that appears Monday through Friday. Viewers can suggest topics via Twitter @PowerVertical or on the Power Vertica...

» Venezuela
10/04/15 19:59 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Uploads by AFP news agency. Venezuela Former Latin American leaders called Thursday for "free and fair" elections in Venezuela and the release of "political prisoners," in pointed criticism of the governme...

» U.S. military convoy comes under attack by suicide bomber with explosives
10/04/15 19:59 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from World: World News, International News, Foreign Reporting - The Washington Post. KABUL – A U.S. military convoy in eastern Afghanistan came under attack Friday when a suicide bomber detonated a car filled w...

» Syrian Peace Talks in Moscow End in Disarray - ABC News
10/04/15 19:58 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from World - Google News. Sacramento Bee Kansas City Star Syrian Peace Talks in Moscow End in Disarray ABC News Talks between the Syrian government and the opposition ended in acrimony Friday with the parties f...

» Blackstone and Wells Fargo to Buy GE Capital's Real Estate Assets - MarketWatch
10/04/15 19:58 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Top Stories - Google News. Blackstone and Wells Fargo to Buy GE Capital's Real Estate Assets MarketWatch NEW YORK & SAN FRANCISCO, Apr 10, 2015 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Blackstone BX, -0.03% and Wells Fargo ...

» Stallone Thanks UK Piracy Police After Arrest
10/04/15 19:34 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from World News - Breaking international news and headlines | Sky News. A British man is being questioned on suspicion of leaking films online, including Expendables 3 which cost the studio millions.

» How a sunken ship explains the U.S. military alliance with South Korea
10/04/15 19:34 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from World: World News, International News, Foreign Reporting - The Washington Post. SEOUL — Defense Secretary Ashton Carter honored slain South Korean sailors Friday in a visit to the wreckage of a naval vesse...

» No Breakthrough at Russia-Mediated Syrian Peace Talks
10/04/15 19:33 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Voice of America. Members of the Syrian government and some opposition groups ended concluded talks Friday in Russia with no signs of progress on how to end the four-year civil war. It was the second round...

» Ukrainian Tycoon Kolomoyskiy 'Invited' To Talk To Prosecutors
10/04/15 19:33 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty. Ukraine's prosecutor-general says he has "invited" powerful oligarch Ihor Kolomoyskiy to answer questions regarding the attempted murder of a lawyer a decade ago.

» Ukraine Military, Rebels Accuse Each Other of Increased Attacks
10/04/15 19:32 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Voice of America. Ukraine's military and pro-Russian rebels accused each other on Friday of intensifying attacks in separatist eastern territories despite a two-month-old cease-fire deal. The conflict has ...

» Man jailed for branding girlfriend while she slept
10/04/15 19:32 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Network Front | The Guardian. Spanish judge sentences Antonio Ricardo Lema Sanjurjo to three years in prison for causing first- and second-degree burns burning victim as she slept A man in northern Spain h...

» Vatican suspected of rejecting gay French ambassador
10/04/15 19:31 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Network Front | The Guardian. Vatican has not responded to nomination of Laurent Stéfanini, a senior diplomat described as an exemplary candidate in the Italian press The Vatican has been dragging its feet...

» WorldViews: Cubans love the pope and the Catholic Church, but they’re just not that into religion
10/04/15 19:30 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from World: World News, International News, Foreign Reporting - The Washington Post. Religion in Cuba is complicated, and a new survey on the island offers a rare snapshot of religious identity in a Communist n...

» Tsarnaev conviction undermines argument from McCain, Graham - MSNBC
10/04/15 19:30 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Top Stories - Google News. MSNBC Tsarnaev conviction undermines argument from McCain, Graham MSNBC A jury this week convicted Dzhokhar Tsarnaev for his role in the Boston Marathon, nearly two years to the ...

» Obama Administration Launches Cuba Charm Offensive
10/04/15 19:29 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Voice of America. A photo of the former adversaries shows U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry shaking hands with Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez, slight smiles playing across their faces. The image o...

» China rejects Obama's criticism in islands dispute - USA TODAY
10/04/15 19:29 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Top Stories - Google News. USA TODAY China rejects Obama's criticism in islands dispute USA TODAY BEIJING — The Chinese government on Friday dismissed criticism from President Obama, who said Beijing is pu...

» Will A Nuclear Deal Bring The U.S. And Iran Together?
10/04/15 19:25 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty. A nuclear deal would remove some long-standing barriers between Iran and the United States, but don't expect the walls to come tumbling down.

» Russia says move to cap its NATO mission has Cold War echoes
10/04/15 19:25 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Reuters: World News. MOSCOW (Reuters) - A move by NATO to cap the size of Russia's diplomatic mission at the alliance's Brussels headquarters has echoes of the Cold War, RIA news agency quoted Russian Fore...

» Ex-Blackwater guards seek new trial just days before sentencing for Iraq deaths
10/04/15 19:24 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Reuters: World News. WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Four American former Blackwater guards, convicted in connection with the killings of 14 unarmed Iraqis in 2007, have asked a U.S. judge for a new trial just days...

» GE dismantles GE Capital; plans $90B to investors - USA TODAY
10/04/15 19:22 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Top Stories - Google News. USA TODAY GE dismantles GE Capital; plans $90B to investors USA TODAY General Electric (GE) said today it is selling its GE Capital banking business, in the latest attempt to sim...

» Czech President Won't Attend Moscow Parade
10/04/15 19:22 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from WSJ.com: World News. The Czech president reversed a decision to attend a military parade in Moscow next month after coming under heavy pressure, including from his own government, amid tensions between Rus...

» Podcast: Putin Flexes His Missiles
10/04/15 19:22 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty. Is Russia's nuclear posturing just bluster? The geopolitical equivalent of Vladimir Putin's fondness for being photographed shirtless? Or does it point to something darker?

» Iran Would Extend Deal Talks Past Deadline
10/04/15 19:04 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from WSJ.com: World News. Iran will extend talks for a final nuclear deal with world powers beyond a June 30 deadline if the extension is required to satisfy red lines drawn this week by supreme leader Ayatolla...

» Russia Complains About NATO Reducing Delegation
10/04/15 19:04 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Aleksei Meshkov said April 10 NATO's decision to reduce the number of Russian representatives at the alliance "smacks of a Cold War spirit"

» Obama Nears Decision on Cuba’s Status on Terror List
10/04/15 19:04 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from NYT > World. President Obama may remove Cuba’s designation as a state sponsor of terrorism. The White House also said it had not ruled out a meeting between Mr. Obama and the Cuban president at a gather...

» Obama foreign policy doctrine takes shape
10/04/15 19:03 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from World News. US president banks on President banks on policy of engagement with erstwhile enemies Iran and Cuba

» Argentine court orders arrest of Justin Bieber over assault claim - Reuters
10/04/15 19:03 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from World - Google News. Reuters Argentine court orders arrest of Justin Bieber over assault claim Reuters BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) - An Argentine judge ordered the arrest of pop star Justin Bieber if he sets fo...

» Meet the Pro-Russian ‘Partisans’ Waging a Bombing Campaign in Ukraine
10/04/15 19:03 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from TIME. Soon after midnight on April 1, a separatist group calling itself the Kharkov Partisans issued another one of its video warnings to the Ukrainian government. It claimed that within the next 48 hours ...

» Can Iran Nuclear Deal Survive Many Hurdles Ahead?
10/04/15 19:02 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Voice of America. U.S. and Iranian negotiators are working to transform a recent interim deal to limit Tehran’s nuclear ambitions into a final agreement. But analysts say there are obstacles to a final acc...

» U.S. Defense Chief Talks Tough on North Korea
10/04/15 19:01 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from WSJ.com: World News. U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter struck a harsh tone on North Korea Friday, and said the U.S. would deploy its best equipment to the region.

» WorldViews: The U.S. and Cuba will soon agree to reopen their embassies. Here’s what happens next.
10/04/15 19:01 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from World: World News, International News, Foreign Reporting - The Washington Post. President Obama and Cuba's Raul Castro are expected to meet Saturday on the sidelines of the Summit of the Americas, and the ...

» Israeli forces reportedly kill Palestinian in riot
10/04/15 19:00 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from CNN.com - World. A 27-year-old Palestinian man was shot and killed Friday, allegedly by Israeli forces, during a riot that grew out of a West Bank funeral procession for his cousin, with whom he is now exp...

» Obama, Raúl Castro Speak Before Summit
10/04/15 18:59 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from WSJ.com: World News. President Obama and Cuban President Raúl Castro spoke on the phone ahead of their arrival in Panama for a summit of leaders from the Americas.

» Islamic State launches deadly assault in Anbar province
10/04/15 18:59 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from World: World News, International News, Foreign Reporting - The Washington Post. BAGHDAD — Islamic State militants launched a devastating assault on Iraqi government forces in the provincial capital of Anba...

» Islamic State launches deadly assault in Anbar province - Washington Post
10/04/15 18:59 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from World - Google News. AsiaOne Islamic State launches deadly assault in Anbar province Washington Post BAGHDAD — Islamic State militants launched a devastating assault on Iraqi government forces in the provi...

» Argentine Judge Orders Arrest Warrant for Justin Bieber - New York Times
10/04/15 18:57 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Top Stories - Google News. Argentine Judge Orders Arrest Warrant for Justin Bieber New York Times BUENOS AIRES, Argentina — An Argentine judge has issued an arrest warrant for Justin Bieber on Friday, sayi...

» Justice Department warns employees against frequenting prostitutes - Washington Post
10/04/15 18:55 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Top Stories - Google News. Justice Department warns employees against frequenting prostitutes Washington Post The Justice Department is sending a memo to all of its employees Friday warning them that solic...

» S&P Lowers Ukraine's Credit Rating
10/04/15 18:55 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty. The Standard & Poors rating agency has downgraded Ukraine's credit rating to CC, a notch lower than the previous CCC- level, and says the outlook is negative.

» Secret Service Officer Arrested for Destruction of Property - TIME
10/04/15 18:54 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Top Stories - Google News. TIME Secret Service Officer Arrested for Destruction of Property TIME A secret service officer has been arrested in Washington, D.C. and charged with destruction of property. The...

» US Man Charged with Plotting Suicide Attack on Army Base
10/04/15 18:54 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Voice of America. A Topeka, Kansas man has been charged in federal court with attempting to detonate a car bomb at a military base as part of a plot to support Islamic State, the U.S. Department of Justice...

» Obamas paid $93362 in federal taxes, return shows - USA TODAY
10/04/15 18:54 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Top Stories - Google News. USA TODAY Obamas paid $93362 in federal taxes, return shows USA TODAY WASHINGTON — President Obama and his wife paid $93,362 in federal taxes last year on a combined income of $4...

» Former US Ambassador: Putin Has Not Interest in Resolving Ukraine Conflict
10/04/15 18:51 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Voice of America. Former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul tells VOA that Russian President Vladimir Putin has no interest in resolving the conflict in Ukraine because it serves his interest. McFaul...

» China Infrastructure Bank - World Bank Rival or Partner?
10/04/15 18:51 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Voice of America. Iran has just joined 34 other countries to become the newest member of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. The new development bank, launched late last year by the People’s Republic...

» Kerry to Brief US Congress on Iran Nuclear Deal
10/04/15 18:51 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Voice of America. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry will brief a skeptical Congress next week on a framework nuclear deal with Iran. President Barack Obama's deputy national security advisor, Ben Rhodes, ...

» Russian Ruble Touches Four-Month High
10/04/15 18:50 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty. The Russian ruble rose in trading on April 10, reaching a high point for 2015.

» Same Surveillance State, Different War — The Atlantic
10/04/15 18:20 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Master Feed : The Atlantic. How government justification for mass surveillance during the war on drugs turned into rationalization for spying on citizens in the war on terror It's been a long 22 months sin...

» US Government Makes Baltimore Police Keep Surveillance With Hailstorm Device Secret: Report
10/04/15 18:19 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story . (Newser) – Baltimore police are under orders from the US government to withhold information about secretive cellphone surveillance technology from the public and even the courts, and are encouraged to s...

» Data on police shootings limited
10/04/15 18:19 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story . Topics Officer-Involved Shootings Yesterday at 4:29 PM By Ben Poston Los Angeles Times NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. — Since 1985, police in North Charleston, S.C., have recorded four "justifiable homicid...

» The FBI Busts Up Another Of Its Own Terrorist Plots And Politicians Rush To Blame The First Amendment
10/04/15 18:18 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story . Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog, Like other recent sensational “terror plots,” however, the criminal complaint unsealed yesterday demonstrates the key role of an undercover l...

» Baltimore Police Using Technology Secretly To Tap Into Thousands Of Cell Phones « CBS Baltimore
10/04/15 18:16 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from CBS Baltimore. BALTIMORE (WJZ) — Accessing your data. Baltimore City police have been using technology to tap into thousands of cell phones. Alex DeMetrick reports the secret deal with the FBI even k...

» Tells the Facts, Names the Names
10/04/15 18:15 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names. “I predict that we will see a whole new wave of UAVs emerging with payloads more unusual than tasers, dart guns and paintball guns.” — Guy ...

» ISIS-Inspired Kansas Man Accused of Plotting Another Ft. Hood-Type Attack
10/04/15 18:14 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from ABC News: U.S.. A 20-year-old Kansas man allegedly joined the U.S. Army last year so he could launch an ISIS-inspired attack on American soldiers like the deadly strike on Ft. Hood, Texas, in 2009, federal...

» Florida prison system under fire amid allegations of abuse, fatal shower scalding
10/04/15 18:13 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story . The exterior of Florida State Prison near Starke, Florida.  (Reuters) Florida's state-run prison system is being hammered with allegations that guards abused and even killed inmates -- including one inci...

» San Diego’s homegrown FBI hacking hit
10/04/15 18:13 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story . # Mobile phone and computer snooping by police, long a staple in the war against crime, got a boost here 15 years ago with the opening of the nation's first FBI-run regional computer forensics laboratory. # "...

» As encryption spreads, U.S. worries about access to data for investigations
10/04/15 17:58 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story . National Security Agency Director Adm. Michael Rogers takes questions at the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association's Cybersecurity Technology Summit on April 2. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Image...

» FBI Warns of Fake Govt Sites, ISIS Defacements — Krebs on Security
10/04/15 17:55 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Krebs on Security. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is warning that individuals sympathetic to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Shams (ISIS) are mass-defacing Websites using known vulnerabilities ...

» Baltimore Police used secret technology to track cellphones in thousands of cases
10/04/15 17:53 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Baltimore Police used secret technology to track cellphones in thousands of cases - Baltimore Sun. The Baltimore Police Department has used an invasive and controversial cellphone tracking device thousands...

» World coalition attacks botnet infecting 12,000
10/04/15 17:50 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story . A graphic representation of the dangers posed by botnets, stealth robotic computer networks that place malicious hardware on the computers of unsuspecting users. (Photo: Europol European Cybercrime Centre) An...

» 2015-04-10#Immigration
10/04/15 17:49 from Mike Nova - Google+
2015-04-10 #Immigration Immigration Activists Hide Material Training Exec. Amnesty ‘Navigators’ In ‘Path To Power’ Immigration Activists Hide Material Training Exec. Amnesty ‘Navigators’ In ‘Path To Power’ Friday April 10 th , 2015  at  ...

» Federal Data on Police Shootings Limited | Officer.com
10/04/15 17:29 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story .

» FBI, international cybercrime task force beat botnet
10/04/15 17:28 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story . A new group of international cybercrime fighters claimed one of its first kills Thursday, pulling the plug on malicious servers that hijacked at least 12,000 machines, most of them in the United States. The e...

» A Former Black Panther-Turned-FBI Informant Brings a Camera Crew to Work
10/04/15 17:27 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Colorlines. Saeed Torres is a Harlem-born former Black Panther and self-described “revolutionary” who, while imprisoned in the early ’90s, began spying on his Muslim community for the FBI...

» FBI agreement requires police to hide surveillance use from the courts | Politics
10/04/15 17:27 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story . Police agreements with the Federal Bureau of Investigation ask officers to hide the capabilities of high-tech surveillance equipment from the courts and the public, according to records obtained by the ACLU. ...

» Fake FBI agent swindled man out of his home: lawsuit
10/04/15 17:25 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from | Fake FBI agent swindled man out of his home: lawsuitNew York Post. Shady Brooklyn real-estate workers conned a Flatbush man out of his home after one posed as a FBI agent and threatened to arrest him unl...

» Defense says FBI probe of accused officers was flawed
10/04/15 17:24 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Philly.com News. Jeremy Roebuck, Inquirer Staff Writer Last updated: Friday, April 10, 2015, 1:09 AM Posted: Thursday, April 9, 2015, 8:58 PM After seven days of testimony alleging that an elite Philadelph...

» The Boston Bombing: Was Tamerlan Tsarnaev an FBI Informant? | Global Research
10/04/15 17:23 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Global Research. Originally published by  Who What Why by Lara Turner We asked each member of our Boston Marathon Bombing reporting team to share their personal experience or perspective on one a...

» FBI: Man Plotted Suicide Bomb Attack at Kansas Military Base
10/04/15 17:21 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from ABC News: U.S.. A 20-year-old man accused of planning a suicide attack at Fort Riley was arrested Friday while trying to arm what he thought was a 1,000-pound bomb near the Kansas military base as part of ...

» The CIA gets a makeover
10/04/15 17:00 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from David Ignatius: Most Recent Articles and Archives. Director of the Central Intelligence Agency John Brennan speaks at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York last month. (Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters) CIA...

» No time for passivity in Ukraine
10/04/15 16:59 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story . Ukrainian servicemen during a training session near the eastern city of Mariupol, Ukraine on April 1. (Roman Pilipey/European Pressphoto Agency) By Editorial Board April 9 at 7:51 PM WHILE WESTERN attention i...

» Puerto Ricans who can’t speak English qualify as disabled for Social Security
10/04/15 16:57 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story . Hundreds of Puerto Rico’s residents qualified for federal disability benefits in recent years because they lacked fluency in English, according to government auditors. The Social Security Admi...

» The Iran deal: Anatomy of a disaster
10/04/15 16:55 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Charles Krauthammer: Most Recent Articles and Archives. President Obama speaks at the White House about the Iranian nuclear talks. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais/ASSOCIATED PRESS) “ Negotiations . ....

» Obama, Castro to hold bilateral meeting Saturday
10/04/15 16:39 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story . President Obama walks across the Miraflores locks during his tour of the Panama Canal in Panama City on April 10. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP) PANAMA CITY — President Obama and Cuban President Raú...

» Yemen’s War Leaves Aden Crumbling and Starving
10/04/15 16:37 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story . ADEN, Yemen — Rooftop snipers have emptied the streets of this dusty seaside city and swelled its hospitals and morgues. Weeks of fighting between armed groups have left nearly 200 people dead and the c...

» Czech President to Skip Controversial Moscow Victory Day Parade | News
10/04/15 16:35 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story . David W Cerny / Reuters Czech Republic's President Milos Zeman (L) welcomes a group of Ukrainian Czech repatriates at Prague's Ruzyne Airport March 15, 2015. The Czech government has granted residence permits...

» Russian Ruble Falls Sharply as Incredible Rebound Falters | Business
10/04/15 16:31 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story . Vedomosti Russian ruble and U.S. dollar banknotes are seen on a table at a bank in Moscow. The Russian ruble fell sharply Friday afternoon, having surged to fresh 2015 highs in the morning, after the Central ...

» ‪Russian Capital Flight Slows Sharply in First Quarter‬ | Business
10/04/15 16:30 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story . A Gordeyev / Vedomosti Capital flight from Russia has slowed sharply. ‪Net capital outflow from Russia was $32.6 billion in the first quarter of the year, down from $72.9 billion in&...

» Russia held military exercise in Transnistria
10/04/15 16:23 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Military & Defense. Russia held a military exercise in an internationally unrecognized pro-Russian separatist region of Moldova on April 9, the Wall Street Journal reports citing Russian news agencies....

» White House hacking reports highlight digital cold war between US, Russia
10/04/15 16:22 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Christian Science Monitor | World. Reports this week about Russian involvement in computer intrusions at the US State Department and White House bring fresh attention to growing tensions between the t...

» Russia’s Next Target - WSJ
10/04/15 16:21 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story . Russian forces on Thursday conducted a drill near Moldova, the small, Kremlin-menaced nation wedged between Ukraine and Romania. According to Russian news agencies, 400 Russian troops participated in exercise...

» Russia's ruble: From down-and-out to darling
10/04/15 16:20 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story . <a target="_blank" href="https://adclick.g.doubleclick.net/pcs/click?xai=AKAOjstGg14MzTsWe_NwkSQrsLW6foHudNwv15uaQ43sOPLhAckiRPBlXSKdQR-p_LSrds6x3JVfB1oOeV0iEsQlLOmXic1TiiJcWZjEuMa7hi2b...

» Immigration Activists Hide Material Training Exec. Amnesty ‘Navigators’ In ‘Path To Power’
10/04/15 16:12 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Comments on: Immigration Activists Hide Material Training Exec. Amnesty ‘Navigators’ In ‘Path To Power’. Following Breitbart News’ report about the training immigration activists planned to help ille...

» Hatton Garden gem heist: Police knew about alarm but didn't attend
10/04/15 15:58 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from News | Mail Online. Thieves made off with up to £200million-worth of jewels after bold break-in An alarm went off around the time the heist is thought to have started Police admit they were told of al...

» Larry Kramer’s Novel ‘The American People’ Adds a Gay Dimension to History
10/04/15 15:57 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story . Fourteen years ago, the playwright and activist Larry Kramer was preparing to die. His liver was failing, and the prognosis was grave. He summoned an old friend, Will Schwalbe, editor in chief of Hyperion Boo...

» Review: Judith Miller’s ‘The Story: A Reporter’s Journey’
10/04/15 15:56 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story . Continue reading the main story In late 2002 and through 2003, Judith Miller, an investigative reporter at The New York Times, wrote a series of articles about the presumed presence of chemical and biological...

» Review: ‘One of Us,’ by Asne Seierstad, on Anders Breivik’s Rampage in Norway
10/04/15 15:56 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story . The nonfiction horror story told in “One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway” moves slowly, inexorably and with tremendous authority. It’s a sober book that smells ...

» NATO Caps Size of Russia’s Mission After Internal Reports of Espionage
10/04/15 15:55 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story . WASHINGTON — For a year after the North Atlantic Treaty Organization cut back its cooperation with Russia as punishment for the country’s incursions into Ukraine , Russia’s NATO mission has ...

» Russian Nuclear Submarine Catches Fire During Repairs
10/04/15 15:54 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story . MOSCOW — A Russian nuclear submarine caught fire while undergoing repairs in a dry dock outside the city of Arkhangelsk and smoke billowed from it through the day on Tuesday. But emergency officials tol...

» With Details of Iran Deal Still in Flux, White House Opens Sales Effort
10/04/15 15:52 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story . WASHINGTON — President Obama has compared the preliminary accord on limiting Iran’s nuclear program to signing a contract to buy a house, emphasizing that the deal is not done until it closes. But...

» China Is Said to Use Powerful New Weapon to Censor Internet
10/04/15 15:51 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story . SAN FRANCISCO — Late last month, China began flooding American websites with a barrage of Internet traffic in an apparent effort to take out services that allow China’s Internet users to view webs...

» For Mentally Ill Inmates, a Cycle of Jail and Hospitals
10/04/15 15:50 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story . It was not a particularly violent crime that sent Michael Megginson to Rikers Island . He was arrested for stealing a cellphone. But in jail, Mr. Megginson, who is 25 and has been in and out of psychiatric ho...

» 9-Year-Old Girl Pregnant After Being Raped By Islamic State Group Militants
10/04/15 13:51 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from International Business Times. A 9-year-old girl from a minority group in Iraq is pregnant after being raped by at least 10 different men with the Islamic State group, news reports said. She was seen by aid...

» 2,596,2122,596,2122015-04-10#MassGrave
10/04/15 13:47 from Mike Nova - Google+
2,596,212 2,596,212 2015-04-10 #MassGrave Hundreds of bodies found in mass grave (raw) Hundreds of bodies found in mass grave (raw) Friday April 10 th , 2015  at  11:59 AM 1 Share Hundreds of bodies found in mass grave (raw) Forensic tea...

» The Iran Nuclear Deal Is Good–for the Mullahs - Washington Wire
10/04/15 13:20 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Washington Wire. By Aaron David Miller Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in Tehran on April 9.  Agence France-Presse/Getty Images The agreement over Iran’s nuclear program wil...

» Opinion: Contradictions in Obama's Doctrine
10/04/15 13:20 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from ASHARQ AL-AWSAT. I tried to ignore US President Barack Obama’s interview with the New York Times because I was sure it would be part of his propaganda campaign for the framework nuclear deal with Ira...

» US liberal groups push congressional Democrats on Iran nuclear bills - Middle East
10/04/15 13:19 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story . US progressive groups rallied on Thursday to persuade Democratic senators not to support a bill giving Congress a vote on a nuclear deal with Iran, echoing the White House's insistence that the measure could ...

» White House Takes Shot At Netanyahu On Twitter Using Iran Bomb Diagram « CBS DC
10/04/15 13:19 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from CBS DC. Latest News WASHINGTON (CBS DC/AP) — The White House Twitter account took a shot at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday, tweeting a cartoon bomb graphic nearly identical to...

» Obama’s doctrine and legacy | New York Amsterdam News: The new Black view
10/04/15 13:18 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Amsterdam News stories. Special to the AmNews If President Barack Obama’s intention is to forge a legacy, one mainly based on his foreign policy, he has made several decisive steps toward that goal. ...

» The White House's Netanyahu-trolling cartoon is pretty misleading
10/04/15 13:16 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Vox - All. The White House tweeted out a cartoon on Wednesday afternoon, defending the Iran nuclear framework agreement, that was unmistakably designed to mock Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It...

» When Debating Iran's Nuclear Program, Sort Fact from Fiction | Scott Ritter
10/04/15 13:15 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from The Huffington Post | Full News Feed. American policy makers have made it a point, expressed consistently over time, to emphasize that intelligence estimates do not, in and of themselves, constitute policy...

» Poll Finds Most Americans Don't Trust Iran on Nuclear Deal - NBC News.com
10/04/15 13:15 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story . Poll Finds Most Americans Don't Trust Iran on Nuclear Deal collapse story Most Americans don't trust that Iran will abide by an eventual agreement to curtail its nuclear program and not develop an atomic weap...

» More than 100,000 fake Turkish passports given to ISIL
10/04/15 13:10 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story . Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant ( ISIL ) militants were given more than 100,000 fake Turkish passports in order to travel to Turkey and then enter Syria to join ISIL, a daily reported on Thursday. Accord...

» Obama Telephones Corker to Discuss Iran Nuke Agreement
10/04/15 13:10 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from ABC News: Politics. The White House says President Barack Obama and Sen. Bob Corker have discussed the tentative agreement to limit Iran's nuclear program. Corker, a Tennessee Republican and the Senate For...

» Should the U.S. guarantee safety in the Mideast?
10/04/15 13:09 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Should the U.S. guarantee safety in the Mideast? - Los Angeles Times. To the editor: Professor Steven L. Spiegel's idea of the U.S. entering into formal defense treaties with Israel, Saudi Arabia and other...

» Could the Corker-Menendez bill kill an Iran deal? A top Dem supporter pushes back.
10/04/15 13:09 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story . Virginia Senator Tim Kaine is among the most prominent Democratic supporters of the Corker-Menendez bill on Iran. He may be one of the most important players in determining whether it passes and what it ultim...

» White House swipes at Netanyahu with tweet of Iran bomb diagram
10/04/15 13:08 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story . Now Playing Amb. Gillerman: WH 'deteriorating' relationship with Israel The White House took an apparent swipe at Benjamin Netanyahu on Twitter Wednesday, posting a diagram similar to one used by the Israeli ...

» The Arab Reaction to the Iran Deal
10/04/15 13:07 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from From the Potomac to the Euphrates. Saudi King Salman attends the opening meeting of the Arab Summit in Sharm el-Sheikh (Stringer/Courtesy Reuters). My research associate, Amr Leheta, wrote this terrific po...

» Chertoff: Iran Deal Worthless Without the Right Enforcement Mechanisms | TIME
10/04/15 13:06 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story . Michael Chertoff was secretary of Homeland Security from 2005 to 2009. He is now executive chairman of The Chertoff Group, a global security and risk-management advisory firm. How will we enforce Iranian comp...

» 5 reasons Iran nuke deal fails: Column
10/04/15 13:05 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story . Kicking the nuclear can down the road while praying Iran changes doesn't offer much hope. A handout picture made available by the official website of the Iranian Supreme Leader shows the Supreme Leader, Ayato...

» Nuke deal 'fact sheets' vary between US, Iran, others
10/04/15 13:04 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story . Officials and pundits have repeatedly emphasized that the devil is in the details for an Iran nuclear deal, but there may also be demons in the basics. Key disagreements about what's been decided have emerged...

» A Struggle to Secure Iraq’s Shared Past, and Perhaps Its Future
10/04/15 13:02 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story . BAGHDAD — Looted and shuttered after American troops seized Baghdad a dozen years ago, the National Museum of Iraq has officially reopened its doors — a response to Islamic State thugs’ taki...

» Differences Emerge in U.S., Iran Interpretations of Nuclear Deal
10/04/15 13:01 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from U.S. News - News. By: Shahir Shahidsaless, Contributor for Al-Monitor Al-Monitor After eight days and nights of intense negotiations, on April 2 Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and Federica M...

» Hundreds of bodies found in mass grave (raw)
10/04/15 12:59 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story . Hundreds of bodies found in mass grave (raw) Forensic teams examined and worked to remove hundreds of bodies found in a mass grave in Tikrit, Iraq. The victims are believed to be hundreds of soldiers killed b...

» Why is ISIS destroying Iraq’s cultural heritage? | Opinion , Commentary
10/04/15 12:58 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from The Daily Star >> Opinion. In recent months ISIS has taken to destroying priceless architecture and antiquities in northern Iraq. Since declaring a “caliphate” in June 2014 ISIS has targe...

» U.S. official: No timetable on Mosul invasion
10/04/15 12:56 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story . Story highlights U.S. official said in February that Iraqi troops could go into Mosul in April or May Officials say now that there's no timetable, an invasion could come sooner or later They note that recaptu...

» ISIS launches English radio
10/04/15 12:22 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story . DM London ISIS has launched English-language radio news bulletins on its Iraqi broadcast service - complete with information on the latest suicide bombings and ‘martyrdom operations’. The extremis...

» US to Tehran: Hands off Yemen
10/04/15 12:21 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story . ADEN: Washington warned Thursday it would not “stand by” while Iran supports rebels in Yemen, where a Saudi-led coalition hit anti-government targets at the start of a third week of bombings. In t...

» The Saudi concert | The Jakarta Post
10/04/15 12:20 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story . The war within a religion in the Afro-Arab world is set to intensify if Pakistan responds positively to Saudi Arabia’s appeal and joins the military offensive against the Shia militants in Yemen. While ...

» Tensions Between Iran and Saudi Arabia Deepen Over Conflict in Yemen
10/04/15 12:18 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story . CAIRO — Tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia deepened on Thursday as Iranian leaders lashed out with rare vehemence against the continuing Saudi air campaign in Yemen , even hurling personal insults a...

» Obama’s Mindless Spin on Iran
10/04/15 12:18 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from The latest from The Weekly Standard by Jay Cost. Widget tooltip If one were to deny Barack Obama the use of straw-man attacks, misrepresentation of facts, accusations that opponents are operating in bad fa...

» It Begins: The Shaping and Selling of Obama's Legacy
10/04/15 12:16 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from RealClearPolitics - Articles. Perhaps it’s the field of potential and actual candidates who claim to want his job, or thoughts of a presidential library where two terms of Barack Obama history will g...

» Yazidi sex slaves 'gang-raped in public' by Isis fighters, harrowing accounts reveal - Middle East - World
10/04/15 12:15 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story . Hundreds of women and children were abducted from the town of Sinjar, in northern Iraq, and held hostage by Isis for over eight months. Some were sold to fighters as sex slaves or given as ‘prizes’...

» ISIS kills 52 men in Iraq
10/04/15 12:14 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from The Guardian Nigeria. ISIS killed 52 men, the majority Iraqi police officers,  at the al Qaim border crossing with Syria this week, according to Sohaib al Rawi, governor of Iraq’s Anbar province...

» The war against Islamic State (2): Mosul beckons
10/04/15 12:13 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story . Planting the Iraqi flag in Tikrit. But too many fight only for their sect IN A barren military camp near Mosul in Iraq, 500 balaclava-clad men train for urban warfare under the watchful eye of their leader, a...

» Iran is not cooperating with the deal
10/04/15 12:12 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from American Thinker. Like some of you, I had my doubts about all this talk of a deal with Iran.  First, I get very nervous when they cheer in the streets of Iran but worry in Israel.  Sorry, but I'd...

» Yazidi women 'gang-raped in public' by Isis fighters, harrowing accounts reveal
10/04/15 12:11 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Gulf News, News in Gulf, Latest Middle East News, Daily News | World News - Times of India. Yazidi women released by Isis this week were gang-raped in public by fighters and tortured by their captors, acco...

» ISIS: the mad, bloody residue of the war on terror
10/04/15 12:10 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Spiked. Key to the emergence of ISIS, in Cockburn’s telling, has been the civil war in Syria, a conflict that was rapidly transformed from a popular uprising against the brutal, economically struggli...

» JK Alternative Viewpoint » Blog Archive » The history of the Islamic State:rise of this Sunni terrorist group-STANLY JOHNY
10/04/15 12:08 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from JK Alternative Viewpoint. The veteran journalist Patrick Cockburn’s latest book traces the history of the Islamic State and identifies the reasons for the rise of this Sunni terrorist group. By STANL...

» Sweden to Join U.S.-Led Coalition Against ISIS
10/04/15 12:04 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Comments on: Sweden to Join U.S.-Led Coalition Against ISIS. by AFP 10 Apr 2015 0 (AFP) Sweden will send up to 120 troops to northern Iraq to train Iraqi and Kurdish fighters as part of the U.S.-led coalit...

» 10 doctors ‘shot dead’ after refusing to treat ISIS militants
10/04/15 12:04 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from | 10 doctors ‘shot dead’ after refusing to treat ISIS militantsNew York Post. Ten doctors who refused to treat wounded Islamic State militants faced a familiar punishment meted out by the terror group R...

» Who Is to Blame for the Rise of ISIS — Bush or Obama?
10/04/15 11:52 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Christianpost.com > Church & Ministries. March 19, 2015 | 3:49 pm (Photo: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque) U.S. President Barack Obama speaks at the White House Summit on Countering Violent Extremism in Wash...

» Obama Realigns American Foreign Policy
10/04/15 11:51 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from American Thinker. Foreign policy pundits are not quite sure about the Obama administration’s Middle East strategy. It appears that the administration is either playing a balance-of-power game in the ...

» Why Obama chose the Iran talks to take one of his presidency’s biggest risks
10/04/15 11:48 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story . A handout picture released by the White House on April 1, 2015 shows President Obama and Vice President Biden, with the national security team, participating in a secure video teleconference from the Situatio...

» Rand Paul: Kurds would fight ISIS 'like hell' if promised a country
10/04/15 11:46 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story . Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) says he supports creating a new nation for the Kurds in exchange for their help fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). “I think they would fight like hell if we prom...

» U.S. Advisers May Be Working With Terrorist-Labeled PKK to Fight ISIS - The Daily Beast
10/04/15 11:44 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story . The U.S. relationship is informal amid a tangled roster of Kurdish warriors, but the PKK troops are too good to ignore. MATARA, Iraq — On the volatile front lines facing the so-called Islamic State outs...

» China’s March Westward and the ISIS Challenge
10/04/15 11:41 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from International Policy Digest. By Aurangzeb Qureshi for Global Risk Insights In recent years, China is slowly returning to its former glory as the “Middle Kingdom” as it was once was during the 6...

» National View: InsideSources — Cyber security and the importance of investing and innovating - Opinion - southcoasttoday.com
10/04/15 11:39 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story . © Copyright 2015 Local Media Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.    Privacy Policy  |  Terms of Service  |  Local Media Group Publications Original content available for n...

» Normalization and a De-facto Alliance Between Washington and Tehran | Raghida Dergham
10/04/15 11:35 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from WorldPost Blog on The Huffington Post. Within one week, this is what Tehran sowed and reaped: The Islamic Republic of Iran celebrated the opening of a new historical chapter with the United States and the ...

» ISIS 'demand $30m ransom for Assyrian hostages'
10/04/15 11:29 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story . Reuters Displaced Assyrians, who fled from the villages around Tel Tamr, gather outside an Assyrian Church in al-Hasaka city. More than 250 Assyrian hostages held by Islamic State could be released in return ...

» Russian warns of ISIS' influence in Russia | News , World
10/04/15 11:28 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from The Daily Star >> News. MOSCOW: A senior Russian intelligence official has warned of the potential influence of ISIS inside Russia. Gen. Sergei Smirnov, deputy chief of the FSB intelligence agency, w...

» US bombs ISIS in Saddam Hussein's hometown after Iran-backed offensive stalled
10/04/15 11:26 from Mike Nova's Shared Newslinks
mikenova shared this story from Military & Defense Contributors. REUTERS/Stringer A military vehicle, belonging to Shi'ite fighters known as Hashid Shaabi, burns after being hit by Islamic State militants, during clashes in northern ...