7:24 AM 12/26/2018 - Syria military says Israel strikes hit Damascus weapons depot | "The Trump administration’s decision to pull out the roughly 2,000 American soldiers deployed in Syria was partially influenced by a request from Israel’s leadership."
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Syria military says Israel strikes hit Damascus weapons depot
"The Trump administration’s decision to pull out the roughly 2,000 American soldiers deployed in Syria was partially influenced by a request from Israel’s leadership."
Loud explosions have been heard close to Syria's capital Damascus overnight, in what the Syrian military says were Israeli air strikes on a weapons depot.
A Syrian military official told state media the depot was hit, and three soldiers were injured. Syria said most of the missiles were intercepted.
Israel has not confirmed the strikes. It said it activated its air defence systems to bring down a Syrian missile.
There were no casualties or damage to property in Israel, the military said.
Late on Tuesday, Syria's state media published footage of an object moving over Damascus being intercepted.
A loud explosion is then heard, followed by burst of artillery shelling.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have not commented on the reported air strikes.
The IDF later tweeted that its air defence systems were "activated in response to an anti-aircraft missile launched from Syria".
Israel has on numerous occasions targeted Iranian and Hezbollah sites in Syria that it regards as threats to its own security.
Israel rarely admits carrying out such strikes.
But in May, Israel said it had struck almost all of Iran's military infrastructure inside Syria in its biggest assault since the start of the civil war there in 2011.
The strikes came after rockets were fired at Israeli military positions in the occupied Golan Heights overnight.
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA —
In 2018, technology firms such as Facebook and Google faced more scrutiny and negative press over their handling of data breaches and online speech. The issue may mean new rules and more regulations in the future.
The question of who can access personal user data through technology caused many people to rethink how much they trust these companies with their private information. At a recent hearing, House Republican Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy grilled Google over accusations it uses algorithms to suppress conservative voices.
"Are America's technology companies serving as instruments of freedom? Or instruments of control? Are they fulfilling the promise of the digital age? Are they advancing the cause of self-government? Or are they serving as instruments of manipulation used by powerful interests and foreign governments to rob the people of their power, agency, and dignity?," he said.
At the hearing, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said he runs the U.S. technology giant without political preference.
In October, Google acknowledged that several months earlier, it had discovered a data breach involving its Google Plus service, which the company said would be shut down.
Pantas Sutardja, chief executive of data storage company LatticeWork Inc., says such scandals are forcing the companies to take a closer look at how they manage and protect user content.
"2018 has been a challenging year for tech companies and consumers alike. Company CEOs being called to Congress for hearings and promising profusely to fix the problems of data breach but still cannot do it," said Sutardja.
Also this year, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg faced tough questions from U.S. lawmakers over a breach that allowed a political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica, to exploit the data of millions of Facebook users. Zuckerberg apologized to lawmakers, but some legislators say the giant social network cannot be trusted to regulate itself.
Separately, the attorney-general for Washington, Karl Racine, said the U.S. capital had sued Facebook over reports involving Cambridge Analytica's use of data from the social media giant.
The year saw new revelations that foreign operatives were using social media to secretly spread divisive and often bogus messages in the United States and worldwide. Walt Mossberg, a former tech journalist, says consumers are frustrated.
"It doesn't matter to whose benefit they were operating. What bothers people here is that a foreign country, using our social networks, digital products and services that we have come to feel comfortable in, a foreign government has come in and used that against us," he said.
The Facebook data breach has prompted companies like Latticework to create new ways for users to protect their information and themselves, Sutardja says.
"Despite apologizing profusely about leaking customer data, they can't do anything about it because their real master, their boss is Wall Street," he said.
User data was just one area in which tech firms came under criticism.Under pressure, social media companies tightened restrictions on the kinds of speech they tolerate on their sites.
And workers pressed managers about their companies' government contracts and treatment of female colleagues.
Mossberg says he wants federal law to limit U.S. internet firms' collection and use of personal data.
"These are giant companies now. There really are four or five of them that control everything. And governments and citizens of countries around the world need the right to regulate them without closing down free speech. And that's tricky," he said.
Mossberg says he has given up Facebook.
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Berlin is a powerfully queer place—gay culture, politics, activism, clubs, and sex reverberate through the city. Crowds here dance under confetti rain at annual Christopher Street Day, or gay pride, parades. A fierce campaign is under way to protect intersex children from surgery, and antiracism protestersregularly drown out far-right rallies. But “Germany is not the shiny, progressive country it wishes to be portrayed as,” says Katrin Hugendubel, the advocacy director of the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association in Europe (ILGA-Europe), which represents more than 1,000 LGBT organizations.
In 1918, when Bull’s predecessor first opened, Weimar-era Germany was embarking on a scandalous decade. Gay communities in New York, Paris, and London faced the threat of imprisonment, financial ruin, murder, or even execution. Berlin’s reputation for wild immorality and its unusually liberal law enforcement, by contrast, helped turn the city into Europe’s undisputed gay mecca.
By the 1920s, Berlin was home to an estimated 85,000 lesbians, a thriving gay-media scene, and around 100 LGBT bars and clubs, where artists and writers mixed with cross-dressing call girls who supposedly inspired the Some Like It Hot director Billy Wilder. Magnus Hirschfeld’s revolutionaryInstitute for Sexual Science openly lobbied for the decriminalization of homosexuality and helped transgender men apply with government agencies to live legally under their new gender. Audiences, straight and gay, queued up at Eldorado, a Jewish-owned nightclub where trans women and drag queens performed and gave paid dances to visitors. There, patrons watched the drug-addled, bisexual Anita Berber star in naked dances named after narcotics. In 1929, the British writer Christopher Isherwood, whose pivotal years in Berlin were brought to life in the film Cabaret, wrote in his diary: “I’m looking for my homeland and I have come to find out if this is it.”
Isherwood is something of a passion for Brendan Nash. With a shaved head, a hooded jacket, and an endless supply of racy anecdotes, Nash is not your average armchair academic. For the past eight years, he has transported tourists and earnest gender-theory students back in time to search for the ghosts of their pioneering heroes, as part of his popular LGBT walking tour around West Berlin’s “gayborhood” of Schöneberg.
But lately, the tour has taken on a different meaning. Instead of merely teaching history, he’s drawing parallels with the present.
“1932 was the 2016 of its age,” Nash explained to a rapt group, muffled in thick coats in the bright, cold sunshine. Passing around a 90-year-old one million Deutsche Mark note—a legacy of the period’s hyperinflation, which drove many people to embrace populist politicians—that he had found at a flea market, he added: “Desperate people in poverty were being promised jobs, that they could ‘take back control’ and ‘make Germany great again.’”
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10:28 AM 12/25/2018 - Robert Mueller has Mike Pence nailed - YouTube by noreply@blogger.com (Mike Nova)
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10:53 AM 12/25/2018 - Частые и загадочные смерти генералов в России, Безумный мир - YouTube
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На торжественном вечере, посвящённом Дню работника органов безопасности Российской Федерации.
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