18 Apr, 2023 21:57

US Senate slams Credit Suisse over Nazi ties

Fired auditor’s report showed the Swiss bank held “possible” Nazi accounts as late as 2020

The troubled Swiss bank Credit Suisse hampered the investigation into accounts possibly held byhigh-ranking German Nazis and SS officers, some of which turned out to beactive for decades, the US Senate announced on Tuesday.

The Senate Budget Committee published the findings on Holocaust Remembrance Day, after issuing its first subpoena since 1991 to obtain the results of the bank’s internal investigation. While the reports are incomplete, theyrevealed “nearly 100” previously undisclosed accounts linked to the Nazis, and raised new questions about Credit Suisse’s potential support for the so-called “ratlines” the defeated Germans used to flee Europe after 1945.

“When it comes to investigating Nazi matters, righteous justice demands that we must leave no stone unturned. Credit Suisse has thus far failed to meet that standard,” said Senator Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican and the ranking member of the committee.

Credit Suisse launched the probe in March 2020, after the Simon Wiesenthal Center claimed to have credible information about accounts potentially holding money looted from Jews during the Holocaust.

The final reports showed Credit Suisse appears to havemaintained accounts for “at least 99 individuals,” either senior officials in Nazi Germany or members of a Nazi-affiliated groups in Argentina. Seventy accounts “with plausible links” to Argentina-based Nazis were opened after 1945, and at least 14 remained open as recently as 2020. However, no current or dormant accounts were found.

The bank held accounts for at least21 “notorious high-level Nazis” from a list provided by the Wiesenthal Center, including an SS officer sentenced by the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal. The probe found accounts for a German executive acquitted by the tribunal and a Nazi scientist, neither disclosed in previous probes. Credit Suisse was part of a $1.25 billion settlement with Holocaust survivors in 1998.

The reports were only obtained after the Senate Budget Committee issued a subpoena, citing its role in approving the budget for the State Department’s Office of the Special Envoy for Holocaust Issues.

Credit Suisse had hired the forensic research firmAlixPartners Ltdto run the review, and US lawyer Neil Barofsky – a former federal prosecutor in New York – to act as an independent ombudsman AlixPartners. In June 2022, Credit Suisse’s newly hired General Counsel Markus Diethelm “temporarily paused” the probe. While AlixPartners was allowed to resume work in October, Barofsky was dismissed in November. Although Barofsky’s contract required him to produce a public report, Credit Suisse insisted on certain redactions, and it was only provided to the Senate under subpoena.

The bank “established anunnecessarily rigid and narrow scope, and refused to follow new leads uncovered during the course of the review,” Grassley said, citing the reports by both Barofsky and AlixPartners.

For example, the bank’s search parameters did not allow the review of legal entities, as well as an account belonging to a Nazi living in Bolivia, citing geographical restrictions.Credit Suisse also refused to look into 366 namesthat Barofsky and AlixPartners identified in historical books on “ratlines” – channels used to smuggle Nazi war criminals out of Europe after 1945.

As a result of pressure from the US Senate, Credit Suisse has agreed to investigate itspotential role in the “ratlines.” The bank almost failed last month, but the Swiss central bank and regulator FINMA declared it to be of “systemic importance” and brokered a takeover by rival UBS worth three billion Swiss francs ($3.3 billion).

https://www.rt.com/news/574969-credit-suisse-nazi-ties-senate/

18 Apr, 2023 21:19

Ukraine hits Russia with US-made kamikaze drone – media

The Switchblade UAV has reportedly been used in an attack on Belgorod Region

Ukrainian forces have allegedly used a US-made unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in an attack onRussian territory for the first time, several media outlets, including Mash and SHOT, reported on Tuesday.

A Switchblade drone, produced by anAmerican AeroVironment company, flew into Russian airspace from Ukraine before falling in Russian Belgorod Region, bordering Ukrainian territory, the reports suggested. The UAV fell just around 500 meters away from the border between the two nations, without inflicting any damage or casualties, local news outlets said.

Neither Mash, nor SHOT provided any photos or video from the alleged drone crash site. The Russian military has not commented on the incident.

The Switchblade is a miniature kamikaze drone capable of dive-bombing targets. It can weigh up to 15 kilograms and has a length of between 49 and 130 centimeters depending on the modification. The US has suppliedKievwith some700 Switchblade drones, as well as1,800 Phoenix Ghost kamikaze drones.

Russia has repeatedly witnessed Ukrainian drone attacks, particularly in its regions bordering Ukraine, amid the ongoing conflict between Moscow and Kiev. Some Ukrainian attacks also targeted regions deeper inside Russia. In March, one of three people as an explosives-laden UAV hit a town in Tula Region located south of Moscow, some 250km away from the nearest border with Ukraine.

In December 2022, Ukrainian UAVs attacked Dyagilevo and Engels military airfields located 500km (310.6 miles) and 700km (435 miles) from Ukrainian-held territory, respectively. Three servicemen were killed and two aircraft received minor damage, the Russian Ministry of Defense said at the time.

Ukrainian forces usually used locally-producedor Soviet-made drones like revamped Tu-141 Strizh (‘Swift’) reconnaissance UAVs in such attacks, according to media reports. In February, Mash reported that a Ukrainian drone that crashed in an apartment block in the Russian city of Belgorod was carrying a “British-madeplastic explosive device containing metallic shrapnel.”

Moscow has repeatedly accused the collective West of enabling Ukraine to strike deeper intoRussian territory. In his annual address to the Federal Assembly in February, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Kiev’s handlers had been directly involved in drone attacks on the country’s facilities housing strategic, nuclear-capable aviation.

The US and its allies have been supplying Kiev with all sorts of weapons ranging from portable anti-tank missiles to infantry fighting vehicles, tanks and artillery pieces. Yet, Washington has repeatedly refused to provide the Ukrainian troops with longer-range weapons like the ATACMS surface-to-surface missiles, citing a risk of an all-out war between Russia and NATO if such weapons were used to target Russian territory.

https://www.rt.com/russia/574966-ukraine-hit-russia-us-drone/

This RT article makes sense now

18 Apr, 2023 18:15

Tech giant rolls out ‘drone detector’posted earlier

Kaspersky has announced a suitcase-sized, portable anti-UAV system

Leading Russian software company Kaspersky has developed a portable device fordetecting small drones. The Antidrone Portable is a security product intended for government and commercial use, the company said.

The radio frequency detector weighs less than 5 kg and fits into a rolling suitcase. The operator uses a tablet based on Kaspersky’s Antidrone software to track drones with a graphical interface. The device can determine theexact locationof most drone models within a kilometer-wide radius, along with the position of theiroperator, the company said. With a battery life of up to two hours, Antidrone Portable can be used to patrol the perimeter of a protected area.

https://www.rt.com/russia/574955-kaspersky-portable-drone-detector/

18 Apr, 2023 21:31

‘We’ve got aliens living on this planet’ – India’s first cosmonaut

The real “aliens” are those who destroy our planet for personal gain, Rakesh Sharma told RT

Traveling to space aboard a Soviet rocket made Rakesh Sharma realize the importance of caring for our own planet, he told RT in a new interview. While Sharma said that he looks forward to making contact with extraterrestrial life, he added thata certain kind of “alien” already lives on Earth.

Sharma was a fighter pilot in the Indian Air Force when he was selected in 1982 to train with the USSR’s Interkosmos space program. Two years later he became the first Indian citizen to enter space when he blasted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome aboard a Soyuz rocket bound for the Salyut 7 space station.

Being in space “gives you a wider perspective of your own existence,” Sharma told RT in an interview broadcast on Tuesday. “You return…a lot more mindful about the fact that there is no other place which is as comfortable as planet Earth, and therefore we really need to look after it and take care of [its] resources and use them frugally.”

Sharma is not the only space traveler to return with a newfound perspective on Earth’s fragility. American astronaut Edgar Mitchell famously remarked that gazing down at our planet made him “want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a b***h!” Like several other Western astronauts, Mitchell returned to Earth a believer in alien life. Sharma, however, sees things differently.

“I think we are aliens living on this planet,” he said. “There are people who are really greedy, who don’t bother about the environment, people who don’t share.” The idea of neglecting mankind’s “common destiny” and sowing “conflict for profit,” he explained, should be viewed as “alien.”

Sharma also believes that there is life in outer space. “I think it's typically arrogant of us humans to think we are the only intelligent life in this vast universe,” he said. “It’s just that our sense of distance is limited…and science hasn’t yet opened all the doors. There has to be alien life more evolved than us, and I look forward to that kind of contact.”

Much has changed since Sharma traveled to Salyut 7. India is currently preparing to launch a domestically-developed spacecraft into low Earth orbit, and aims to follow this milestone with the country’s first crewed launch as early as next year. Meanwhile, the private space industry is booming, and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has declared that he will establish a colony on Mars by 2050.

“Technologically we will be capable of doing this,” Sharma said. However, the cosmonaut questioned whether “we will be able to derive anything from it on a happiness scale.”

“There’s no point in building a far-off hell when you have paradise right here,” he added. “Let’s practice sustainability on Earth before we move out.”

https://www.rt.com/india/574965-india-cosmonaut-alien-life/

18 Apr, 2023 21:21

Twitter unveils ‘hate speech’ shadow ban policy

The company will hide some “hateful” tweets behind a warning screen rather than removing them

Twitterwill conceal so-called “hate speech” that violates its rules behind a warning screen that requires a click-through, the platform announced on Monday in a blog post.

The new policy is supposed to give moderators more choices than simply the binary 'leave up versus take down' approach typical to most content moderation, Twitter said.

In addition to being hidden behind a warning screen reading “Visibility limited: this Tweet may violate Twitter’s rules against Hateful Conduct,” offending tweets will beexcluded from search results, trends, and “recommended” screens, with other down-ranking options possible. Advertising will not appear near them.

The new policy is meant to embody the “freedom of speech, not freedom of reach” paradigm that Musk first teased after acquiring the platform in November, when speculation was still swirling regarding whether he would deliver on his promises to liberate Twitter from corporate state censors.

At the time, he promised that “negative/hate tweets” would be “max deboosted & demonetized,” unlinked to ads, and excluded from all but the most specific search results.

Bringing deboosting – a key part of the once-secretive practice of shadow-banning – out into the open better aligns this form of moderation with Twitter’s “commitment to transparency,” the platform said in its explanation of the new policy.

Users will be able to “submit feedback on the label” if they disagree with Twitter’s actions, and while this does not mean anyone will read or respond to the feedback, aproper appeals processis reportedly in the works.

Twitter revealed that while the labels are currently destined solely for violations of the Hateful Conduct policy, the platform plans to expand them to “other applicable policy areas in the coming months” so as to ensure “enforcement actions” become “more proportional and transparentfor everyone on our platform.”

The platform came under fire earlier this month for turning its “enforcement actions” against users of the blogging platform Substack, which recently rolled out a Twitter-like function called Notes. Tweets containing Substack links were deboosted and replies disabled, while new tweets could not be posted. Several prominent Substack users left the platform, including Matt Taibbi, the journalist hand-selected by Musk to publish the ‘Twitter Files’ and expose the “censorship-industrial complex” the billionaire is supposedly determined to dismantle.

Musk has since replaced stick with carrot, offering Twitter users the chance to monetize their content and keep all the money they earn the first year.

https://www.rt.com/news/574967-twitter-hate-speech-deboost-shadowban/