Twitter forced to add information to Starmer’s misleading NHS/local election claim

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Original article republished from the Skwawkbox for non-commercial use.

Not for the first time, Starmer and Labour claim local elections will affect national policies

Keir Starmer has suffered the indignity of corrective action by Twitter after he posted a claim that votes in the local elections next month will affect the NHS.

Starmer claimed that voting for Labour would lead to ‘an NHS that treats patients on time again’ – but of course, local government does not decide NHS policy, capacity or funding:

Starmer, of course, has already committed to increasing privatisation – the key cause of the NHS’s problems – in the NHS. He and his Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting have both accepted large donations from private health investors and Starmer employed a private health lobbyist in his team soon after becoming Labour leader – which he achieved through a series of promises that were all binned and broken after he took over.

Starmer has defended Labour’s recent appalling campaign messages. Now a social media platform has had to attach information to his campaign claim to reduce the extent to which it misleads voters. The scandal comes on the same day news emerged that Starmer accepted corporate hospitality from a firm that had to pay out almost £11 million after installing Grenfell-like flammable cladding to an apartment block.

Original article republished from the Skwawkbox for non-commercial use.

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Labour Twitter loses blue tick

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Original article republished from the Skwawkbox for non-commercial use.

Party at centre of storm yesterday after false claims in local election campaign on social media platform

The Labour party’s ‘blue tick’ marking it as an authentic account has disappeared from its Twitter account. The party was at the centre of a storm yesterday when the social media platform had to attach warnings and ‘context’ to misleading claims in Labour’s local election campaign on the platform.

It’s possible the disappearance of the tick is an effect of Labour’s infamously poor ability to organise, which led to mass data breaches and the loss of sensitive member information to criminals and the loss of control of its systems for months, causing it to fail to pay Twitter’s charge for blue-tick verification – but it’s also possible that the party has been at least temporarily penalised for its and its leader’s rogue behaviour, dishonest claims and reported racism:

Original article republished from the Skwawkbox for non-commercial use.

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WARNING: Graphic Image. Paris attacks 13 November 2015

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WARNING: Graphic Image. For me it was that photo. That was enough. The claim was that it was carefully considered / planned. So would Daesh make a sacrifice to the devil? I have experience of this. Those numbers in the image. Daesh would do that? Hands up? Looks like a different dialect.

Image of Bataclan theatre following Paris attacks 13 November 2015

ed: a certain dialect. I’ve not ever taken any vows.

ed: J’accuse les NeoCons.

9.15 20/11/15: Who don’t have beards? French culture is anti-stubble – even tramps are clean-shaven FFS. To not have beards is a cultural giveaway. 11.10 21/11/15. This is probably incorrect. They may have had small beards or stubble.

24/11/15 10.15 am

Paris attack witness says black Mercedes pulled up and shooters fired rifles from the hip

Witness describes Paris attackers as clean-shaven, muscular, like soldiers or mercenaries, driving a black Mercedes car.

“He was white, clean shaven and had dark hair neatly trimmed.”

Paris Attack Reported on WIKIPEDIA and TWITTER before it happened

Paris attacks reported at wikipedia and twitter before they happenedThat title is a little misleading. The Wikipedia reports are extremely detailed very soon after the events with one incident reported before it had happened. The twitter report was over two days before the Paris attacks.

The 23:18 version includes discussions of the hostage-taking, complete with an approximate number of hostages involved (60), as well as detailed accounts of events at several locations. It even has a detailed bibliography. How could your average Wikipedia author have done this incredible piece of work and in less than two hours? Obviously this was not your average Wikipedia author.

You’re invited to read this early version of the Wikipedia article, which appears at the bottom of this post.

Revisions were subsequently made to the article. But the storyline it established, which is undoubtedly why it was written in the first place and gotten into Wikipedia so quickly, did not change through any of those revisions. It’s the storyline that the article is designed to make stick in the public mind.

As yet (00:41 PM CET), the newspapers are reporting simply bullet lists of events which they’re aware of only very sketchily. But Wikipedia has extensive coverage. within a couple of hours. That just did not sit with me and I continued to investigate.

Secret Warfare: Operation Gladio and NATO’s Stay-Behind Armies

Synopsis of the Book

Chapter One: A terrorist attack in Italy

This chapter describes the discovery of the secret stay-behind army “Gladio” in Italy. The chapter takes the reader back to the Peteano terrorist attack of 31 May 1972. In that year an anonymous phone call after the attack suggested that the left-wing terrorist organization “Red Brigades” had carried out the atrocity, and for many years Italy believed that the crime had been carried out by the political left. Yet in 1984 Italian judge Felice Casson reopened the Peteano case after having discovered large-scale manipulations. The chapter describes how Casson during his investigations discovered the Italian secret stay-behind army “Gladio” hidden within the military secret service and how it had linked up with right-wing terrorist Vincenzo Vinciguerra who confessed to having carried out the Peteano terrorist attack. The chapter focuses on the agitated Italian public debate that followed when Vinciguerra exposed the so called “strategy of tension” through which members of the secret stay-behind armies and the military secret services had manipulated the public through terrorism. The secret armies supplied right wing terrorists with explosives to carry out terrorist attacks on the Italian population who were thereafter blamed on the communist party and the political left in general in order to discredit the political opponent. “The terrorist line was followed by camouflaged people, people belonging to the security apparatus, or those linked to the state apparatus through rapport or collaboration”, Vincenzo Vinciguerra testified. Right-wing organisations across Western Europe “were being mobilised into the battle as part of an anti-communist strategy originating not with organisations deviant from the institutions of power, but from the state itself, and specifically from within the ambit of the state’s relations within the Atlantic Alliance.

Chapter Four: The secret war in the United Kingdom

The chapter takes the reader back to World War Two when British Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered that under the label “Special Operations Executive” (SOE) a secret army had to be created “to set Europe ablaze”. SOE operated behind enemy lines, and following World War Two the British were widely recognised as the leading experts in secret warfare. The chapter describes how the British foreign secret service MI6 together with the British Special Forces “Special Air Service” (SAS) and the CIA during the Cold War set up and trained the secret stay-behind armies in Western Europe. Among those trained by the SAS ranged Decimo Garau, an instructor at the Italian Gladio base Centro Addestramento Guastatori (CAG) on Capo Marargiu in Sardinia

26/11/15 22.50 Comments are very welcome. There is a comments policy that it needs to be relevant and non-commercial. You are welcome to disagree or take issue. The vast majority of comments to this blog are commercial spam that get caught by Akismet. If you have something to say it will be published although I don’t check that often.

16/11/15 23.00 UK Prime Minister David Cameron is currently banging the drum to have UK military bomb – allegedly IS/ISIS/Daesh in Syria. I am opposed to that for a few reasons; 1. There is not a clear objective

2. Despite what DC says innocent people are clearly going to be killed and injured

3. The situation is hugely complex and I don’t see that UK can or should contribute anything to resolving it

4. I suspect that Cameron is following the NeoCon objective of getting rid of al Assad for greater NeoCon objectives. ed: i.e. bombing who?

later ed: You shouldn’t rush into things in an emotional state. You need to consider things rationally. There’s a real danger that people are manipulated through their emotions.

 

Continue ReadingWARNING: Graphic Image. Paris attacks 13 November 2015

Politics news allsorts

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Image of GCHQ donught buildingHuge tech firms have formed the Reform Government Surveillance group to demand changes to excessive surveillance by world governments. The group has published an open letter to President Obama and Congress:

Dear Mr. President and Members of Congress,

We understand that governments have a duty to protect their citizens. But this summer’s revelations highlighted the urgent need to reform government surveillance practices worldwide. The balance in many countries has tipped too far in favor of the state and away from the rights of the individual — rights that are enshrined in our Constitution. This undermines the freedoms we all cherish. It’s time for a change.

For our part, we are focused on keeping users’ data secure — deploying the latest encryption technology to prevent unauthorized surveillance on our networks and by pushing back on government requests to ensure that they are legal and reasonable in scope.

We urge the US to take the lead and make reforms that ensure that government surveillance efforts are clearly restricted by law, proportionate to the risks, transparent and subject to independent oversight. To see the full set of principles we support, visit ReformGovernmentSurveillance.com

Sincerely,

AOL, Apple, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter, Yahoo

Malcolm Rifkind, chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee is dismissive of the call:

“So I start off by recognising that, in the modern world, the terrorists use all the technology available to them.

“It would be foolish for the intelligence agencies in free societies not to start by using that technology.

Isn’t there a contradiction there?

Amnesty International is to start legal action against the UK government through the Investigatory Powers Tribunal. While it’s quite clear that Amnesty is not involved in terrorism, that will be used as the justification since it is the normal BS justification.

 

MPs to honour Mandela today.

Iain Duncan Smith again

I watched the 4th episode of The Revolution Will be Televised last night. First broadcast on 1st December, it’s very good.

Continue ReadingPolitics news allsorts