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Seals are wonderful creatures…?

Navy SEALs to shift from counterterrorism to global threats

WASHINGTON (AP) — Ten years after they found and killed Osama bin Laden, U.S. Navy SEALs are undergoing a major transition to improve leadership and expand their commando capabilities to better battle threats from global powers like China and Russia.

The new plan cuts the number of SEAL platoons by as much as 30% and increases their size to make the teams more lethal and able to counter sophisticated maritime and undersea adversaries. And there will be a new, intensive screening process for the Navy's elite warriors, to get higher-quality leaders after scandals that rocked the force and involved charges of murder, sexual assault and drug use.

Rear Adm. H. Wyman Howard III, top commander for the SEALs, laid out his plans in an exclusive interview with The Associated Press. He said the Navy’s special operations forces have been focused on counterterrorism operations but now must begin to evolve beyond those missions. For the past two decades, many have been fighting in the deserts of Iraq and mountains of Afghanistan. Now they are focused on going back to sea.

That decision reflects the broader Pentagon strategy to prioritize China and Russia, which are rapidly growing their militaries and trying to expand their influence around the globe. U.S. defense leaders believe that two decades of war against militants and extremists have drained resources, causing America to lose ground against Moscow and Beijing.

The counterterrorism fight had its benefits, allowing the SEALs to sharpen their skills in developing intelligence networks and finding and hitting targets, said Howard, who heads Naval Special Warfare Command, which includes the SEALs and the special warfare combatant-craft crewmen. "Many of these things are transferable, but now we need to put pressure on ourselves to operate against peer threats."

As a result, Howard is adding personnel to the SEAL platoons to beef up capabilities in cyber and electronic warfare and unmanned systems, honing their skills to collect intelligence and deceive and defeat the enemy.

“We are putting pressure on ourselves to evolve and understand our gaps in capability and what our true survivability is against these threats” posed by global competitors, he said.

Adm. Mike Gilday, the chief of naval operations, said the goal is to better integrate the SEALs into the Navy's missions at sea.

“As the Navy Special Warfare community returns more and more to its maritime roots, their increased integration across the Fleet — above, under, and on the sea — will unequivocally enhance our unique maritime capabilities to help us compete and win against any adversary," Gilday said in a statement to the AP.

Increasing the size of the SEAL platoons will add high-tech capabilities. And decreasing the number of units will allow Howard to rid the force of toxic leaders and be more selective in choosing commanders. That decision is a direct result of the erosion in character that Navy officials have seen within the force.

In recent years, SEALs have been involved in a number of high-profile scandals. One of the most well-known was the arrest of Navy Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher on war crimes charges that included murder of an Islamic State militant captive and attempted murder in the shootings of civilians during a 2017 deployment to Iraq.

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https://www.yahoo.com/news/navy-seals-shift-counterterrorism-global-041833236.html

New York Post Reporter Who Wrote False Kamala Harris Story Resigns

The article splashed across the cover of Saturday’s New York Post seemed designed to enrage Republicans who railed against the Biden administration’s immigration policies.

Under the tabloid-ready headline “KAM ON IN,” The Post, which is controlled by conservative media baron Rupert Murdoch, claimed that copies of a children’s book written by Vice President Kamala Harris were provided at taxpayer expense in a “welcome kit” for unaccompanied migrant children at a shelter in Long Beach, California.

The story whipped around conservative media and elicited denunciations from leading Republicans, including the party chairwoman. A reporter for the Murdoch-owned Fox News, which published its own online article about the claims, asked about it at a televised White House press briefing.

But the claims were untrue. And on Tuesday, the Post reporter who wrote the original article said she had resigned from the paper because of “an incorrect story I was ordered to write,” describing the episode as “my breaking point.”

In fact, no books by Harris were provided by government officials at the shelter, and the sole copy seen in the photograph that The Post published on its front page had been donated through a neighborhood toy and book drive for the migrant children, local officials told The Washington Post.

Despite these facts, The New York Post initially repeated the falsehoods in a follow-up article falsely claiming that “thousands” of copies of Harris’ book had been distributed at migrant shelters.

The rise and collapse of the tabloid’s false accusations about the vice president illustrated the speed at which political misinformation can be weaponized in the modern media environment. The Post later issued brief corrections, but only after its falsehoods had been amplified at face value by leading Republican lawmakers and cable news stars.

“Now they’re forcing taxpayers to buy Kamala Harris’ book to give to those illegal immigrants?” Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., wrote on Twitter on Sunday, adding a link to the Post story; Cotton’s tweet was later deleted.

On Tuesday, the author of the original Post article, Laura Italiano, wrote on Twitter that she had resigned from the paper, describing the Harris article as “an incorrect story I was ordered to write and which I failed to push back hard enough against.” She added, “I’m sad to leave.”

Italiano, a veteran Post journalist and longtime chronicler of the New York City courts, is a well-liked figure in the paper’s newsroom. She did not respond to inquiries about her resignation or how the Harris article came to be. Representatives for The Post did not respond to calls and emails Tuesday night.

Her abrupt exit underscored some of the tensions currently roiling The Post, a classic pugilistic city tabloid that was often a vessel for coverage favorable to former President Donald Trump during his term in office.

Murdoch, who spoke frequently with Trump, installed a new editor at the tabloid last month, Keith Poole, who formerly served in a top position at Murdoch’s London paper The Sun. At least eight journalists at The Post have departed the paper recently, including a White House correspondent, Ebony Bowden.

Fox News and The Post, given their shared Murdoch ownership, have long demonstrated a certain symbiosis. (Just last week, The Post ran a gossip item complaining that Glamour magazine was not writing features about female Fox News stars.)

Fox News hosts including Tucker Carlson, Greg Gutfeld and Martha MacCallum discussed the Post article on their programs Monday. Peter Doocy, Fox News’ White House correspondent, cited “a report in the last couple days in The New York Post” before asking Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, on Monday if Harris “is making any money” from her books supposedly being distributed in the shelters. Psaki said she would “have to certainly check on that,” which The Post described in a follow-up story as Psaki’s having offered “no answers.”

On Tuesday’s “Fox & Friends,” co-host Ainsley Earhardt told viewers that the claims about the Harris book were “not accurate,” citing that morning’s fact-checking column in The Washington Post. Also on Tuesday, Fox News updated its article about the Harris book to note that only a single copy had been seen at the shelter and that it had been delivered as “part of a citywide book and toy drive.”

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https://www.yahoo.com/news/york-post-reporter-wrote-false-115325517.html

Austen Museum Wants to Discuss Slavery. Will Her Fans Listen?

As part of the discussion over racism that followed the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis last year, museums have asserted solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and begun to rethink and recast how they portray history.

Among them is a museum dedicated to the writer Jane Austen in the English village of Chawton, where she lived from 1809 until shortly before her death in 1817 at age 41.

This month, the museum, Jane Austen’s House, touched a nerve when its director said that it would include details about Austen and her family’s ties to the slave trade, including the fact that her father was a trustee of a sugar plantation on the Caribbean island of Antigua.

The museum’s director, Lizzie Dunford, told The Daily Telegraph that updated displays would also explore the broader context of the time in which Austen lived, when her family members would have consumed products of the slave trade such as tea, cotton and sugar.

“The slave trade and the consequences of Regency-era colonialism touched every family of means during the period. Jane Austen’s family were no exception,” Dunford said, adding, “This is just the start of a steady and considered process of historical interrogation.”

The reaction from the British tabloids was swift. The Express called the decision “woke madness,” while The Daily Mail said it was “a revisionist attack” and a “BLM-inspired interrogation” of the author’s love for drinking tea. The museum then issued a statement saying that it “never had any intention to interrogate Austen, her characters or her readers for drinking tea.”

The museum said visitors had increasingly asked about Austen’s connection to the slave trade, which was banned in the British Empire in 1807.

“It is therefore appropriate that we share the information and research that already exists on her connections to slavery and its mention in her novels,” the museum’s statement said.

In a statement to The New York Times on Tuesday, Dunford said the museum’s role was to champion what she called Austen’s timeless genius.

“The suggestion that we would do anything to bring this into disrepute is outrageous,” she said.

The museum’s plans come amid a broader examination of the legacy of the British Empire and its role in the slave trade. Last year, the statue of a 17th-century slave trader was torn down in Bristol, England, and the National Trust, a conservation charity, revealed that a third of the properties it manages had direct links to colonialism or slavery.

Myretta Robens, founder and president of the Republic of Pemberley, a 500-member Austen fan group, said she did not have a problem with the museum adding context about colonialism. She did not, however, want discussion of race and current events to spill into the group’s conversations about Austen’s novels, and she said she had quashed a few heated debates.

“We don’t want combat,” she said of her fan group. Referring to two of Austen’s most well-known characters, Robens said, “It’s hard to talk about Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy and talk about the current environment in the same forum.”

Claudia L. Johnson, a professor at Princeton University who wrote the book “Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures,” said readers have idealized Austen as far back as the mid-1800s, when society was undergoing rapid change because of industrialization.

“A large part of her readership has always wanted to isolate her from the sort of messy hubbub of history, and to imagine that she lived in this quieter, more civil world,” Johnson said. “There is this deep longing to isolate Austen from all of the storms and stresses of modernity.”

"In addressing the topic of slavery, Sherard Cowper Coles, president of the Jane Austen Society, said, “This is England’s story, and as our understanding increases, we should tell it and update it.”

But Cowper Coles, a former diplomat who was Britain’s special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2009-10, cautioned: “Expecting people to have consciousness outside of their time is not fair. But equally, in our time, we are aware of slavery, we’re living with its consequences in Minneapolis and many other places.”

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https://www.yahoo.com/news/austen-museum-wants-discuss-slavery-115250443.html

>>13531433

How do you provoke and stoke division? Make a commercial, saying that these were purposely targeting a specific "color" of society.

Ever notice how everything they do to "Help" one color, is in itself, RACIST?

Kek worthy with clear eyes. What IS their real goal? Health, or Continued division, Control, and FEAR PORN?