- Russia's GRU Dealt Blow As Kremlin Spies Exposed By Black Market Data Sale
Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, has been dealt a blow after a Russian journalist living in Europe reportedly bought the identities of undercover agents on the black market from Moscow police, according to ABC.
Kanev, who lives in self-imposed exile in Europe, told The Associated Press he uncovered the identities by using databases purchased on the black market from Moscow police, traffic police or security agents. He said he cross-checked them with open sources and discussions with security sources. Other Russian journalists have described using similar methods. –ABC
Bankrolled and published by Kremlin opponent Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s “Dossier Project,” journalist Sergei Kanev says he wants to call attention to issues within an organization he thinks has gone from spycraft to “unchecked violence and foreign interference,” according to ABC – however his report describes the GRU as more sloppy than scary, with Kremlin operatives blowing their own cover in some cases.
Journalist and Russian dissident Sergei Kanev Kanev said he identified three agents after they filed police reports for stolen goods, by cross-checking names with databases showing addresses or other information on GRU employees. Another was identified after being arrested over a cafe shootout.
The report also says the Russian Defense Ministry sought to conceal the identities of dozens of children of alleged GRU officers living in a Moscow housing complex by adding 100 years to their ages in administrative registries. GRU agents jokingly called it the “old folks’ home,” Kanev said.
However, pension authorities raised alarm upon discovering the freak concentration of very elderly residents, suspecting some kind of pension fraud. –ABC
The GRU has been accused of conducting the March nerve agent attack in Salisbury, England which targeted former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal. Two alleged GRU agents were identified in the case, however others have suggested they are patsies.
Dutch authorities, meanwhile, reported earlier this month they identified four alleged GRU agents who attempted to hack the Wi-Fi of the Organziation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the primary watchdog group responsible for investigating the Skripal attack as well as suspected chemical attacks in Syria.
All this makes it look like GRU officers “can’t tie their own shoelaces,” said Michael Kofman, an expert on Russian military affairs at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington.
In an interview with the AP, Kanev said he also identified 16 GRU officers who once lived in the same Moscow dormitory as Anatoly Chepiga, one of the Russian officers suspected of poisoning turncoat GRU agent Sergei Skripal in Salisbury. Kanev did not publish their names.
Kanev said that he could identify so many officers was a sign that “Russia is eroding.” –ABC
Of note, none of the “outed” GRU agents are suspected of wrongdoing at this time, which, according to Keir Giles, the director of the Conflict Studies Research Center in Cambridge, England, has exposed Kanev and his oligarch-turned-dissident backer Khodorkovsky “to charges that instead of reforming Russia, they just want to harm it.”
Giles said the revelations highlight a sense among Russian intelligence agencies that they are “above the law” and could reinforce their view that “mass connectivity, unhindered communications, and widespread access to information” is a threat to national security.
Meanwhile, the drip-drip of revelations will continue to dent the image of the GRU, but not deter it from unsavory actions, experts said. Kofman said it’s not unheard of for one agent after another to get burned publicly, and noted that agents like Chepiga and his colleagues could be replaced. –ABC
“They will likely write this off as a consequence of carrying out a lot of operations,” Giles concluded.
- Is NATO Preparing For War In The Arctic?
Authored by Brian Cloughley via Counterpunch.org,
Britain’s Daily Mail is a strident rag that is bought daily by over a million people who agree with its stance that most foreigners are inferior to Brits. Two years ago the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance reported that the Mail and some other papers indulged in “offensive, discriminatory and provocative terminology”, and the Commission’s chairman observed that “the Brexit referendum seems to have led to a further rise in ‘anti-foreigner’ sentiment”.
The highly-respected Economist noted that “unsurprisingly, the Daily Mail spreads more EU-linked lies than anyone else” and that its website “garners 225 million visitors each month”, which is amazing and disturbing, given its campaigns of bigotry and intolerance.
The Mail knows its readers and tells them what they want to hear, and one of its targets is Russia, which it regularly maligns and berates.
On October 23 a main story noted approvingly that on October 25 “some 50,000 troops will kick off NATO’s biggest military exercises since the Cold War in Norway, a massive show of force that has already rankled neighboring Russia. Trident Juncture 18, which runs until November 7, is aimed at training the Alliance to mobilize quickly to defend an ally under attack.” The US 6th Fleet stated that among other major deployments for the maneuvers, the aircraft carrier Harry S Truman and guided missile destroyers of the Eighth Carrier Strike Group moved in to dominate the Norwegian Sea for the first time since 1991.
According to US Air Forces Europe, Trident Juncture is partially funded by the European Deterrence Initiative, and US F-16 strike aircraft and KC-135 Stratotankers have deployed to operate from an air base in neutral, non-NATO Sweden.
This all fits in with the British government’s line that Russia is a threat to the United Kingdom, which is a farcical contention, but serves to whip up patriotic fervor, which wins votes and sells newspapers.
In June 2018 London’s Sun newspaper carried the headline “Britain will send RAF Typhoon fighter jets to Iceland in bid to tackle Russian aggression” and since then the UK’s defense minister, Gavin Williamson, has maintained that “the Kremlin continues to challenge us in every domain.” (Williamson is the man who declared in March 2018 that “Frankly Russia should go away — it should shut up,” which was one of the most juvenile public utterances of recent years.)
It was reported on September 29 that Williamson was concerned about “growing Russian aggression ‘in our back yard’,” and that the Government was drawing up a “defense Arctic strategy” with 800 commandos being deployed to a new base in Norway. In an interview “Mr Williamson highlighted Russia’s re-opening of Soviet-era bases and ‘increased tempo’ of submarine activity as evidence that Britain needed to ‘demonstrate we’re there’ and ‘protect our interests’.”
Mr Williamson has not indicated what “interests” the United Kingdom could have in the Arctic region, where it has no territory.
The eight countries with territory north of the Arctic Circle are Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden and the United States. They have legitimate interests in the region which is twice the area of the US and Canada combined. But Britain has not one single claim to the Arctic. Not even a tenuous one like Iceland’s, which is based on the fact that the Arctic Circle passes through Grimsey Island, about 25 kilometers north of Iceland’s north coast. Britain’s Shetland Islands, its northernmost land, are 713 kilometers (443 miles) south of the Arctic Circle.
So why does the UK declare that it has “interests” in the Arctic and that the region is “in our back yard”? How can it possibly feel threatened?
The Arctic Institute observed in February 2018 that Russia’s “newer Arctic strategy papers focus on preventing smuggling, terrorism, and illegal immigration instead of balancing military power with NATO. These priorities suggest that Russia’s security aims in the Arctic have to do with safeguarding the Arctic as a strategic resource base . . . In general, the government-approved documents seem to have moved from an assertive tone that highlights Russia’s rivalry with NATO to a less abrasive tone based on securing economic development.”
And economic development is what it’s all about. On September 28 it was reported that “a Danish-flagged cargo ship successfully passed through the Russian Arctic in a trial voyage showing that melting sea ice could potentially open a new trade route from Europe to east Asia.” It is obviously in the best economic interests of the European Union and Russia that the route be developed for commercial transit. To do this requires avoidance of conflict in the region.
So what’s your problem, Defence Minister Williamson?
In January China described its Arctic strategy, “pledging to work more closely with Moscow in particular to create an Arctic maritime counterpart — a ‘Polar Silk Road’ — to its ‘one belt, one road’ overland trade route to Europe. Both the Kremlin and Beijing have repeatedly stated that their ambitions are primarily commercial and environmental, not military.” It couldn’t be plainer that Russia and China want the Arctic to be a profitable mercantile trade route, while continuing exploration for oil, gas and mineral deposits.
As pointed out by Sabena Siddiqi in the Asian Times, “Having a major stake in the Yamal liquefied natural gas project in Russia, which would supply nearly four million tonnes of LNG per annum, development of these regions makes sense for China as well, and its interests converge with Russia’s. Once the Arctic route is fully operational, the Yamal project can double Russia’s share of the global LNG market. The Arctic thawing has also given Russia greater access to minerals and other valuable resources in this region.”
Guess who doesn’t want Russia and China to prosper?
To develop the Arctic requires peace and stability. It would be impossible to reap the benefits of the new sea-route and potentially enormous energy and mineral riches if there were to be conflict. It is obviously in the best interests of Russia and China that there be tranquility rather than military confrontation.
But Britain’s Defence Minister insists there must be a military build-up by the UK in the Arctic “If we want to be protecting our interests in what is effectively our own back yard.” He is backed by the Parliament’s Defence Committee which states that “NATO’s renewed focus on the North Atlantic is welcome and the Government should be congratulated on the leadership the UK has shown on this issue.”
NATO is always on the lookout for excuses to indulge in military action (such as its nine–month aerial blitz that destroyed Libya), and its Arctic-focused Trident Juncture is yet another confrontational military fandango designed to ramp up tension.
The US-NATO military alliance is preparing for war in the Arctic, and is deliberately provoking Russia by conducting massive hi-tech maneuvers ever-closer to its borders. But the Pentagon and its sub-office in Brussels had better be very careful.
- Putin's Approval Rating Plunges After Pension Friction
The latest Gallup poll shows that support for President Trump surged to 44% during the first two weeks of October, just one percentage point below his personal best, which was reached during his first week in office.
Furthermore, as we noted previously, Democrats are worrying that their get-out-the-vote efforts (which have included such novel strategies as catfishing people on twitter) won’t mobilize the two demographic groups that are seen as crucial to a Democratic victory: Young people and Hispanics.
However, as Statista’s Martin Armstrong points out, there is a silver lining for the Russophobic left…
Russian president Vladimir Putin has long enjoyed a high approval rating but, this infographic shows, the latest Levada-Center surveys have revealed a steep drop off in recent months.
You will find more infographics at Statista
The main reason for this change in mood is a planned raising of the retirement age in the country – gradually from 60 to 65 for men and from 55 to 63 for women.
Having been consistently above 80 percent in recent years, the dip in popularity has seen Putin’s rating hit 67 percent.
- Incompetent Culprit Or Plausible Patsy: Paul Craig Roberts On The Latest 'Bomb' Scare
Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,
I appreciate readers’ confidence that I can explain the mail bomb scare that has been blamed on Cesar Sayoc. I have not followed this story and regret that I don’t have an explanation to provide.
Stephen Lendman raises the question whether Sayoc is a real culprit or a patsy for an operation orhestrated for political reasons.
…beginning on October 22, harmless mail bombs began to be delivered to prominent undemocratic Dem Trump critics.
None exploded. No one was hurt, the mailings intended to sow fear, create alarm, and make headlines.
They likely intended to influence the outcome of the November midterm elections, undemocratic Dem dark forces likely behind them, hoping to regain control of the House and/or Senate…
This seems to me to be, at our present state of information, a legitimate question. If the security agencies and the Democratic National Committee were willing to orchestrate a fake ‘Russiagate’ scheme against Trump for political reasons, why not also a fake bomb attack on Democrats?
Just as the presstitutes went along with “Russiagate” despite the absence of any evidence, RT reports that the US media is blaming “Trump’s ‘hateful rhetoric’ for the packages.”
While driving I listened to a large part of the press conference, and the affair struck me as an orchestration. Every agency involved was present, from the Postal Service to the FBI and Secret Service, the directors of which praised the expert professional performance of their agencies in intercepting the bombs. It seemed to me overdone, especially in view of the FBI’s admission that they could not say that the bombs were functional. Why would a bomber send non-functional bombs?
There are other things to notice and to wonder about. Photos of the packages, if these are the actual mailed packages and not someone’s construction used to cast doubt on the official story, do not show postage sufficient to cover the weight of a bomb. Also, all the anti-Democrat stickers on Sayoc’s van seem very new and unfaded to have spent much time in the Florida sun.
Whether one likes Trump or doesn’t, it is clear that the establishment wants rid of him. He was elected by the “deplorables,” that part of the population that has been left behind by the elite who manage things in their interest alone. The elite are scared that such an electoral outcome could happen again. A defeat of Trump is a defeat of the populist forces that put him in office.
There is no doubt that Americans have been fed a constant stream of lies to justify political agendas, for example, Serbia, Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, Iranian nukes, Libya, Russian invasion of Ukraine, and there are so many unanswered questions about mass shootings, such as the one in Las Vegas, that suspicion of official stories is on the rise. How does one justify believing a government that will lie in order to justify aggression abroad and police state measures at home?
It is entirely possible that Sayoc is an incompetent culprit and that suspicion of the official story is a consequence of the government playing fast and loose with the truth in the past.
From an astute reader:
“We know every detail of this guy’s life within hours and it is presented with photos and all in the NYT. And a symbol – the White Van, almost as good as a White Helmet.”
Another question has come in:
“Who mails bombs to people who don’t open their own mail?”
It is also a legitimate question whether the US government, by which I do not mean simply the Trump administration, is worthy of the trust of the American people. Democracy doesn’t work without public confidence in government. The sacrifice of public confidence to political agendas destroys the basis of political life.
- Canada Secretly Collected Banking Information From 500,000 Canadians Without Their Knowledge
As it turns out, Silicon Valley tech giants aren’t the only institutions surreptitiously collecting massive troves of sensitive data from unsuspecting consumers. On Friday, Canada’s the Global Times published a report exposing a recently launched data collection program adopted by StatCan, the Canadian government’s economic research agency, that the agency introduced to help it collect more accurate data about consumers’ spending habits. The agency has asked Canada’s nine largest banks to turn over all the transaction records and sensitive identifying financial information (including customer’s social insurance numbers) for 500,000 randomly selected Canadians. The agency will collect and crunch this data as part of its statistical research and then, at the end of the year, it will produce a new list of 500,000 Canadians, and perform all of the same operations with their data.
After being called out by Global News, the agency explained that the data would be anonymized shortly after being compiled (meaning that all identifying information, like consumers’ SINs, would be removed).
“Canadians should know we are not accessing all of the payments data for all Canadians. It’s a small sample relative to the total number of households,” he said. “Our access to this data is permitted through both the Privacy Act and the Statistics Act.”
But that’s not exactly true. The fact that it didn’t publicly disclose the plan has left some Canadians feeling uneasy. Given that Canada has a population of roughly 20 million people, the likelihood that any one individuals’ information will be collected. To be sure, the agency said in a letter to Canada’s privacy commissioner that the data would only be used for statistics purposes. But a former privacy regulator who spoke with GN said she was “shocked” to learn of the program.
Ontario’s former privacy commissioner, Ann Cavoukian, said she was shocked by the initiative and said the ability for a government agency to build a massive database of personal banking information raises serious privacy concerns.
“Most people would be surprised and devastated if they thought all of their financial information and bills and activity were being accessed in identifiable form by Statistics Canada or any branch of government,” she said. “Medical and financial records are the most sensitive personal data that exists.”
As Global Times’s chief political correspondent explained in an editorial criticizing StatCan’s surreptitious collection program, the agency has long struggled to collect accurate data about Canadians’ spending habits by employing a staff of interviewers who phone everyday Canadians and ask them about their spending habits. Say the agency wanted to determine how much money the average Canadian male between the ages of 24 and 50 spent on iTunes every one. Well, its staff of 1,000 interviewers would call thousands of Canadian citizens with this demographic profile and ask them.
But there’s one glaring problem here: Who remembers exactly how much money they spent on iPhone apps and music downloads in any given month? And few people have the time, or the willingness, to check their credit card records and share specific dollar amounts. And even if some did, how would the agency verify whether they were being truthful?
But if StatCan wanted to know what the average 50-year-old male with a cat living in suburban Ottawa spends in music downloads from Apple’s iTunes Store every month, it would have to convince me and other men with those characteristics to participate in a survey – a survey that might be done by phone, by mail or online.
Indeed, Statistics Canada employs the equivalent of nearly 1,000 people as “interviewers,” who spend all day asking everyday Canadians and businesses about their activities so everything we do can be counted up.
For much of the important data about our economy and household spending – upon which many important decisions, such as interest rates and taxation levels, are based – Statistics Canada relies heavily on surveys.
But surveys have an accuracy issue. Do you remember how much you spent on groceries last April? Last month? How much butter did you consume? How many times did you fill up at the gas pump? You might have roughly accurate answers to these questions, but they are probably not as precise as a data scientist would like.
On top of that, StatCan has the same problem that pollsters have: people these days just don’t want to answer the phone or go online for a lengthy survey.
So StatCan devised a plan to improve the accuracy and efficiency of its data collection.
As a result, researchers at StatCan came up with another idea: to feed a computer program to the agency’s massive database of 20 million or more “households.” That database will spit out a list of 500,000 “household” members, who together create a representative sample of the entire country. The list would have the same ratios of men to women, French speakers to English speakers and Calgarians to Haligonians that actually exist in the country.
The representative sample would also be chosen randomly, and on that list would be the name of each person, their social insurance number, date of birth, home address and gender. You would have a one-in-20 chance of being on this list.
But then, next year and the year after that, a new list would be drawn up. Eventually, the odds of making it onto the list would drastically improve for millions of Canadians.
Once the list has been generated, those 500,000 names would be given, under strict privacy controls, to each of Canada’s nine largest banks and credit card companies. Because your bank or credit card company also likely knows your name, SIN, date of birth and so on, each financial institution would be able to draw up its own list of customers that are also on the StatCan list.
Canada’s largest banks are worried that StatCan’s collection program could inspire Canadians to bank with smalle institutions that aren’t subject to the collection. And although StatCan has promised to anonymize the data, the fact remains that no institution is immune to hackers, lest of all government agencies. And now that hackers know StatCan possess this invaluable trove of sensitive personal data, we wouldn’t be surprised to learn that some one, somewhere, will try and steal it.
Read the documents detailing StatCan’s collection efforts below:
391812140 by Zerohedge on Scribd
- In Desperation Move, IBM Buys Red Hat For $34 Billion In Largest Ever Acquisition
In what can only be described as a desperation move, IBM announced that it would acquire Linux distributor Red Hat for a whopping $34 billion, its biggest purchase ever, as the company scrambles to catch up to the competition and boost its flagging cloud sales. Still hurting from its Q3 earnings, which sent its stock tumbling to the lowest level since 2010 after Wall Street was disappointed by yet another quarter of declining revenue…
… IBM will pay $190 for the Raleigh, NC-based Red Hat, a 63% premium to the company’s stock price, which closed at $116.68 on Friday, and down 3% on the year.
In the statement, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty said that “the acquisition of Red Hat is a game-changer. It changes everything about the cloud market,” but what the acquisition really means is that the company has thrown in the towel on organic growth (or lack thereof) and years of accounting gimmicks and attempts to paint lipstick on a pig with the help of ever lower tax rates and pro forma addbacks, and instead will now “kitchen sink” its endless income statement troubles and non-GAAP adjustments in the form of massive purchase accounting tricks for the next several years.
While Rometty has been pushing hard to transition the 107-year-old company into modern business such as the cloud, AI and security software, the company’s recent improvements had been largely from IBM’s legacy mainframe business, rather than its so-called strategic imperatives. Meanwhile, revenues have continued the shrink and after a brief rebound, sales dipped once again this quarter, after an unprecedented period of 22 consecutive declines starting in 2012, when Rometty took over as CEO.
While some of the decline has been from divestitures, most is from declining sales in existing hardware, software and services offerings, as the company has struggled to compete with younger technology companies.
The good news for IBM is that the Red Hat purchase, the largest in the company’s history, will give IBM an immediate cloud revenue boost growth as well as a suite of proven software products to sell through its global sales force. “We will scale what Red Hat has deeply into many more enterprises than they’re able to get to,” Rometty told Bloomberg.
That growth, however, will come at an extraordinary price, one which shareholders may have a tough time justifying.
Furthermore, while Red Hat is expected to report an all-time high $3 billion in revenue as the company’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux product attracts business from large customers – after booking a record 11 contracts valued at over $5 million each and 73 over $1 million, according to JMP Securities – even here growth may be stalling out after last quarter overall revenue missed analysts’ expectations and the forecast for the current quarter also fell short, “fueling concerns Red Hat may be losing deals to rivals” according to Bloomberg. While Red Hat said at the time it believes the slowdown has “bottomed out”, its stock is down 28% over the past six months through Friday.
The bad news is that in its desperation for growth at what amounts to be any price, IBM is almost certainly overpaying for Red Hat. This was confirmed by Rometty’s preemptive defense, telling Bloomberg that IBM “paid a very fair price. This is a premium company. If you look underneath, this is strong revenue growth, strong profit strong free cash flow” she said, adding that IBM will not cut jobs as a result of the deal: “this is an acquisition for revenue growth, this is not for cost synergies.”
Perhaps, but the bigger question is what the deal means for IBM’s balance sheet. In the press release, IBM said that “the company has ample cash, credit and bridge lines to secure the transaction financing. The company intends to close the transaction through a combination of cash and debt.” In other words, no IBM stock, which is already at the lowest level this decade.
So let’s do the math: IBM ended Q3 with cash of $14.7 billion, and a record $46.9 billion in debt. Which means that IBM will likely incur at least $20 billion in additional debt, and as a result IBM’s already shaky A+/A1 rating could soon be downgraded to BBB.
So what is IBM buying for this $34 billion and $20 billion in debt? According to its LTM financials, Red Hat has $3.2BN in revenue and $603MM in EBITDA. These numbers are expected to grow to $3.9BN by 2020, when EBITDA will hit $1 billion. In other words, on an EV basis, IBM is paying roughly 31x (net of $2.2BN in cash) Red Hat’s 2020 forward EBITDA.
Of course, if one assumes continued EBITDA growth for the foreseeable future, this acquisition could make sense. The problem is that between the threat of a recession in the next few years, and aggressive competition from Amazon, Microsoft and others for cloud market share, this is a very aggressive assumption.
Meanwhile, in exchange for this $1 billion in EBITDA, IBM’s net debt will grow from $32.5 billion currently to $52 billion, almost doubling IBM’s net leverage from 1.7x level to a whopping 3.2x, and well on its way to a BBB rating if not worse. Which is why IBM promise that it will “target a leverage profile consistent with a mid to high single A credit rating” is, with all due respect, laughable.
But the worst news for investors may have nothing to do with the massively overpriced acquisition, and with something that IBM noted deep inside its press release:
The company intends to suspend its share repurchase program in 2020 and 2021.
Considering that the only factor that has kept the IBM stock price elevated in the past decade as IBM’s diluted number of shares outstanding declined by 40%, was the company’s buybacks…
… most investors may finally have no choice but to bail on “Big Blue” – which after the Red Hat deal may be renamed “Big Purple” and leaving shareholders with at least one blackened eye – as the company bets everything on what may soon prove to be another disastrous gamble.
- The Vatican Under Siege: What The Church Must Do To Restore Trust?
Authored by Lawrence Franklin via The Gatestone Institute,
On October 12, Pope Francis officially accepted the resignation of Washington’s archbishop, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, from the high-profile post Wuerl had occupied for 12 years. Wuerl’s resignation was the latest and most direct casualty of the sex-abuse scandal that for years has been rocking the Catholic Church. More specifically, Wuerl — a close ally of Pope Francis — stepped down as a result of a nearly 900-page Pennsylvania grand jury report from 2018, which detailed the extent of the rampant sexual abuse of priests against children and of the systemic cover-up of the crimes.
Cardinal Wuerl was among those accused of covering for abusive priests in the grand jury’s exhaustive investigation of Pennsylvania’s dioceses, including the Diocese of Pittsburgh, which Wuerl had headed from 1988 to 2006. As a consequence of his role in re-assigning or reinstating priests accused of sexual abuse, Wuerl requested that the Pope accept the resignation he had previously submitted in 2015, at age 75, as is tradition. Although Pope Francis acceptedWuerl’s resignation, he nevertheless requested that Wuerl stay on as apostolic administrator of the diocese until a new Archbishop to Washington, D.C. is selected.
It was, however, the Pope’s heaping of praise on Wuerl that especially angered the victims of sexual abuse at the hands of clerics. In his letter accepting Wuerl’s resignation, Francis wrote:
“To our Venerable Brother Card. Donald William Wuerl, Archbishop of Washington,
“On September 21st I received your request that I accept your resignation from the pastoral government of the Archdiocese of Washington.
“I am aware that this request rests on two pillars that have marked and continue to mark your ministry: to seek in all things the greater glory of God and to procure the good of the people entrusted to your care. The shepherd knows that the well-being and the unity of the People of God are precious gifts that the Lord has implored and for which he gave his life. He paid a very high price for this unity and our mission is to take care that the people not only remain united, but become witnesses of the Gospel “That they may all be one, as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us, that the world may believe that you sent me” (John 17:21). This is the horizon from which we are continually invited to discern all our actions.
“I recognize in your request the heart of the shepherd who, by widening his vision to recognize a greater good that can benefit the whole body (cf. Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, 235), prioritizes actions that support, stimulate and make the unity and mission of the Church grow above every kind of sterile division sown by the father of lies who, trying to hurt the shepherd, wants nothing more than that the sheep be dispersed (cf. Matthew 26:31).
“You have sufficient elements to “justify” your actions and distinguish between what it means to cover up crimes or not to deal with problems, and to commit some mistakes. However, your nobility has led you not to choose this way of defense. Of this, I am proud and thank you.
“In this way, you make clear the intent to put God’s Project first, before any kind of personal project, including what could be considered as good for the Church. Your renunciation is a sign of your availability and docility to the Spirit who continues to act in his Church.
“In accepting your resignation, I ask you to remain as Apostolic Administrator of the Archdiocese until the appointment of your successor.
“Dear brother, I make my own the words of Sirach: “You who fear the Lord, trust in him, and your reward will not be lost” (2:8). May the Virgin Mary protect you with her mantle and may the strength of the Holy Spirit give you the grace to know how to continue to serve him in this new time that the Lord gives you.”
A few months earlier, in July, Pope Francis also accepted the resignation of Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, from the College of Cardinals, after he had been removed from public ministry in June over “credible allegations” of his sexual abuse of a minor nearly five decades ago, when he was a priest in New York.
In August, former Papal Nuncio (ambassador) to the United States, Carlo Maria Viganò, called upon Pope Francis to resign the Papacy. Viganò justified this demand by claiming that the Pontiff had covered up allegations of sexual-abuse crimes by McCarrick. Viganò also named several high-ranking, pro-Pope Francis officials — including Wuerl — whom he accused of abetting a homosexual sub-culture inside the Vatican.
In a September 13 piece in National Review, Michael Brendan Dougherty posed two questions about why McCarrick’s influence had endured, despite frequent and long-standing allegations of his predatory sexual behavior.
The first was: Did Francis spare McCarrick because he sought McCarrick’s counsel on how the Vatican should reform the American Episcopate (bishops)?
The second was: Does Francis overlook the sins of those prelates he views as allies, such as McCarrick, in order to advance his papal agenda?
If the response to either of those questions is yes, then the Vatican’s factional infighting between liberals and conservatives may have reached a critical level. This moment may demand a massive restructuring of church structure to sustain Catholicism’s vitality as the moral compass for half of the world’s Christians.(Non-Catholic Christians such as Orthodox and Protestant sects comprise the other half of the world’s 2.2 billion Christians.)
Viganò’s 11-page “indictment” was published at a vulnerable moment for the Catholic Church, already reeling from ever-widening evidence of sexual abuse of innocents by predator priests. Viganò had launched his attack during the Pope’s visit to Ireland, a country where respect for the Catholic Church had already declined, following revelations of sexual crimes by priests and decades of harsh treatment of young women who have given birth to children outside of marriage.
Given public knowledge of the bitter factional disputes within the Vatican, Viganò’s detailed accounts of political maneuvering within the College of Cardinals and the Roman Curia (the Catholic Church’s administrative bureaucracy) are indeed plausible. He is allied with high-ranking Vatican conservatives who are opposed to the apparent liberal agenda of Francis, such as permitting divorced and remarried Catholics, in some cases, to receive the Eucharist (Communion). He is also allied with whoever is against the Vatican’s recent pastoral rhetoric on same-sex attraction; and with those who are skeptical of what they perceive as the Pope’s antipathy to capitalism. Other high-ranking church officials have denounced the West for failing to support Christians being persecuted in Muslim lands.
These denunciations can be interpreted as criticism of Pope Francis’s perceived unwillingness directly to confront the issue of clerical sexual crimes. Additionally, some Catholics have criticized the pope’s tendency to grant unscripted in-flight media interviews, and then seeming to blame them for confusion among Catholic laypeople as to where he stands on key theological and social questions.
Viganò himself has been a casualty of inside-the-Vatican bureaucratic wars during his tenure as Secretary-General of the Vatican Governorate (2009-2011), the equivalent of serving as Mayor of Vatican City. While in this position, he was accused by some of his Vatican City adversaries of, among other things, nepotism and exhibiting “a harsh and intransigent managing style.” However, these accusations may have been generated by Viganò’s uncompromising opposition to financial improprieties he had previously uncovered in the Vatican Bank.
Those criticisms prompted Viganò’s removal at the time by Pope Benedict XVI from his position as the Vatican Bank’s Secretary-General. Subsequently, Benedict dispatched him to the United States to serve as nuncio (ambassador from the Vatican). Viganò may also be disappointed by the failure of Popes Benedict and Francis to appoint him as president of Vatican City, a post that automatically includes a promotion to Cardinal.
Viganò’s allegations against Pope Francis were buoyed by some recently surfaced corroborating evidence, including a letter from 2006 indicating that the Vatican had been aware of McCarrick’s alleged predatory behavior for some time. This letter, addressing McCarrick’s alleged pattern of sexual abuses, was written by Father Boniface Ramsey. Ramsey then was a faculty member at Immaculate Conception Seminary at Seton Hall University in New Jersey. The university was in the Diocese of Newark, where McCarrick was archbishop at the time. The letter appears to confirm Viganò’s charge that McCarrick’s sexual criminal activity had been known by the Vatican for several years.
On September 27, Viganò released an additional letter, appealing directly to Canadian Cardinal Marc Ouellet, Prefect of the Congregation of Bishops, to reveal documents that would further corroborate Viganò’s allegations. Cardinal Ouellet, however, refused to substantiate them. Instead, he defended the Church as having been grievously wounded by Viganò’s unproven assertions.
Some prominent Catholics imply that the Vatican gave a pass to McCarrick because of the Cardinal’s prodigious fund-raising capabilities for the Catholic Church’s Papal Foundation in America. That theory, which connects McCarrick’s fund-raising prowess to the Vatican’s toleration of the Cardinal’s aberrant behavior, was furthered by an announcement on September 13 that West Virginia’s only bishop, Michael Bransfield, had resigned over allegations of sexual harassment. Bransfield was the President of the Papal Foundation for several years in conjunction with his tenure as Rector of the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C. He had worked closely with Cardinal McCarrick, raising millions for the favorite charities of Popes Benedict XVI and Pope Francis.
As for former Ambassador Viganò, he reserved some of his most pointed criticism for those in the Vatican who allegedly promoted the careers of members of homosexual networks in the Holy See. It seems likely that Viganò supports Catholic teaching that “homosexuality is a psychological and moral disorder… that is always sinful, depraved, and ruinous of character.” In addition, Viganò assertedthat one Vatican prelate possessed a “pro-gay ideology” and another favored the promotion of homosexual clerics to positions of authority.
In his original letter, Viganò also sardonically ridiculed the Pope’s public condemnation of clerical careerism, as if that were the source of the Church’s problem, when the real issue was predatory sexual behavior. Viganò may be calling out the inadequate response of the Pope because he is genuinely horrified. The Pope’s silence on Viganò’s specific charges, however, as well as his thinly veiled comparison of Viganò to the devil, may lend further credibility to Viganò’s accusations and character.
Moreover, Pope Francis, a week before he accepted Wuerl’s resignation, ordered a search of the Vatican Archives to determine how McCarrick managed to climb the ladder of Catholic hierarchy despite allegations that he had abused both seminarians and younger priests.
The President of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, urged Francis to establish a more exhaustive investigation — called an “Apostolic Visitation” — of McCarrick’s crimes. This would be similar to the investigation that the Vatican approved recently in Chile, which helped lead to the resignation of almost all of its bishops.
More significant than the personalities involved in these allegations of misconduct, however, is the greater question of what the American Catholic Church can do to redeem its moral authority among its approximately 70 million lay faithful. What must the Church do to restore the trust of the billions of Christians and non-Christians around the world? How can the Vatican recalibrate its primary mission that every human’s ultimate and proper destination is union with the divine presence of God?
One thing Pope Francis should not do is resign — at least not immediately. Such a dramatic move might throw the Church into chaos and lead to a feeding frenzy by secular enemies of Catholicism and cynical media outlets. If, however, reports are verified that Francis, while Archbishop of Buenos Aires, defamed accusers of predator priests, refused to meet with them, and denied that any abuse occurred under his watch, then he may not possess the moral authority to cleanse the Church of predatory priests, and those who protected them, without resigning himself. These reports about the Pope’s tenure in Argentina were echoed in a cover story on Francis’s papacy raised in Der Spiegel, charging that there are currently 62 cases on trial in Argentina concerning allegations of clerical sex crimes.
While Francis is still Pope, he should first demand that any cleric or lay person guilty of sexual abuse or its cover-up resign immediately. The Vatican should then invite lay investigative authorities to review all allegations of criminal behavior, including any possible related blackmail activity. Only when innocent clergy, seminarians, and lay Catholics believe that a total eradication of inappropriate sexual activity within the Church’s hierarchical structure has occurred, will harmony be restored to the Church.
Such a purge is not likely to result in an open-season hunting period on homosexuals inside the church. The church teaching on homosexual behavior as immoral is likely to remain constant, but continued compassion towards those with a same-sex attraction is also likely. The Vatican, it seems, still needs to make a policy decision on whether to allow homosexual-oriented clergy. Paedophilia, on the other hand, needs to be treated with zero tolerance.
The Catholic Church, one of humanity’s oldest institutions in civilization, will endure. Moreover, its followers embrace as article of faith the words of Jesus that “the gates of hell will not prevail against it (the church).” All the same, to remain relevant in this contemporary moment, the Church would do well to draw open the curtains to let fresh air and new ideas into its hallowed halls.
The Vatican could convene a new Vatican Council where resolutions could be adopted to permit priests to marry and have children. In a world where women are increasingly recognized as equals before the law, such a council could also decree that female priests are permissible. These changes would be superficial and would not alter the eternal truths and dogma of the Catholic faith.
The Church needs to be revolutionary in action in a revolutionary era. Its high clerics must lead, not manage. It must not seek to be popular or even welcomed in the halls of state power. The Catholic Church needs to recast itself as the conscience of the world, although this could invite censure, even persecution, and risk alienation from secular authorities and some leaders of other religions over issues such as abortion, immigration, capital punishment, religious freedom, the equality of women, and freedom of conscience. The Church’s hierarchy must not shy away from confrontation with some of society’s materialistic, one-dimensional view of man.
If the papacy can regain its moral authority, it might also be able to rally Christians to the cause of defending Western civilization from religious totalitarian extremism, responsible for the martyrdom of hundreds of thousands of the faithful in recent decades — around 90,000 in 2016 alone.
The failure of the Vatican to posit a comprehensive rebuttal of Viganò’s allegations has seriously wounded this Papacy. The Pope’s indecision is sapping his once-wide international acclaim. His lack of exigency is characterized by his decision to wait until January before formally addressing the issue of sexual criminality among the clergy in front of Church’s bishops. There is also confusion and anger within the body of the Catholic faithful. If support for Francis continues to ebb, it will, and should, lead to his resignation as Pontiff.
- Hillary Teases 2020 Run: "I'd Like To Be President"
President Trump’s wish may be about to come true.
During a Q&A with Recode’s Kara Swisher this weekend, Hillary Clinton addressed the question of whether she would run for President again in 2020. Her response was ‘mixed’ as while initially answered “no” when asked, she quickly followed up – after some groans of sadness from her lapdog audience that “well, I’d like to be President,” she admitted with a smug cackle…
“Look, I think, hopefully, when we have a Democrat in the Oval Office in January of 2021, there’s going to be so much work to be done.”
Clinton went on to brag about why she would be qualified to be president (now when have we heard that before)…
“The work would be work that I feel very well-prepared for, having been in the Senate for 8 years, having been a diplomat in the State Department. It’s just gonna be a lot of heavy lifting.”
Finally, after Swisher pressed her, Clinton concluded:
“I’m not even going to think about it until we get through this November 6th election about what’s going to happen after that.”
Full clip below (via The American Mirror)
As a reminder, it was a year ago that President Trump said that he hopes Hillary Clinton runs for president in 2020.
“Oh I hope Hillary runs,” Trump said during a press conference at the Rose Garden.
“Is she going to run? I hope – Hillary, please run again!”
And, as The American Mirror points out, it’s not entirely out of the question. Newsweek reported earlier this month:
A longtime aide to Hillary Clinton hinted that while it’s unlikely, it’s not impossible that the United States gets a rematch election in 2020. Yes, there seems to be an ever-so-slight chance President Donald Trump could see a familiar foe come his bid for re-election.
The aide, Philippe Reines, made the comments in a Politico piece—titled “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Hillary?”—that examined, in detail, what Clinton’s role might be moving forward in Democratic politics. The former secretary of state has remained in the public eye after her shocking election loss to Trump, and she’s set to soon embark on a speaking tour with her husband, Bill Clinton, the former president. Her future could be appearing at rallies and, importantly, fundraising for Democrats.
“It’s curious why Hillary Clinton’s name isn’t in the mix – either conversationally or in formal polling – as a 2020 candidate,” Reines said.
“She’s younger than Donald Trump by a year. She’s younger than Joe Biden by four years. Is it that she’s run before? This would be Bernie Sanders’s second time, and Biden’s third time. Is it lack of support? She had 65 million people vote for her.”
Still, for now…
- Brutally Honest: Facebook Removes, Then Restores, Images From Yemen
Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk,
A couple of questions describe the problem with censorship: Who controls the censors? What biases do they have?
Please consider Photo of a Starving Girl in Yemen Prompts Facebook to Remove Posts of Article.
For a few hours after The New York Times published an article about conflict and hunger in Yemen, Facebook temporarily removed posts from readers who had tried to share the report on the social platform.
At issue was a photograph of a starving child.
The article included several images of emaciated children. Some were crying. Some were listless. One, a 7-year-old girl named Amal, was shown gazing to the side, with flesh so paper-thin that her collarbone and rib cage were plainly visible. Tens of thousands of readers shared the article on Facebook, but some got a message notifying them that the post was not in line with Facebook’s community standards.
Facebook had addressed the issue by Friday night.
“As our community standards explain, we don’t allow nude images of children on Facebook, but we know this is an important image of global significance,” a spokeswoman said in an emailed statement. “We’re restoring the posts we removed on this basis.”
It took Facebook a few hours to realize it made a mistake in removing brutally honest images of the effects of the civil war in Yemen.
The images expose the blatant hypocrisy of the US in backing the corrupt Saudi Arabia regime in its war in Yemen.
This was not a nude image. It is not a “community standards” image. Nor was there any doubt about the authenticity of the image.
Any censor can judge “community standards” however they want, but Facebook is an international phenom, not Podunk USA.
Facebook could have and should have said “we f*ed up yet again” but never expect that.
Rather than rejecting that image, Facebook should have promoted it.
Instead, we had temporary censorship. Next time it might not be temporary.
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