Former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson has been relentlessly roasted by social media, after evidence emerged that she plagiarized material for her new book. Abramson says she will “review” the passages in question.

The author’s recently released literary offering, ‘Merchants of Truth,’ has been billed as “the definitive in-the-room account of the revolution that has swept the news industry.” But it appears that at least part of her “in-the-room account” was lifted from other sources without providing proper attribution.

After flipping through the new book, Vice News correspondent Michael Moynihan tweeted a now-viral thread, which compared excerpts from ‘Merchants of Truth’ with material from the New Yorker, the Columbia Journalism Review, Time Out magazine – and even a master’s thesis.

Moynihan said that he stumbled upon the allegedly plagiarized material while trying to verify claims that Abramson had made about Vice News in her book. Although he only focused on the chapters that dealt with the Brooklyn-based news outlet, the journalist concluded that Abramson’s book was “clotted with mistakes.”

The Vice correspondent wasn’t the only one to notice something fishy about Abramson’s authoritative prose: journalist Ian Frisch noted that the former New York Times bigwig had taken a few liberties with his own reporting.

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https://www.rt.com/usa/450862-jill-abramson-plagarism-nyt-book/

A disturbing media report claims that the British Army allowed soldiers to shoot unarmed civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. Soldiers say they killed children and covered up civilian deaths by planting weapons beside bodies.

Speaking to Middle East Eye (MEE), soldiers detailed the relaxed rules of engagement that instructed them to shoot at unarmed civilians who they thought were involved in surveillance of the British troops, with one veteran describing it as a “killing spree.”

In Basra, Iraq, in 2007 soldiers say they were told it was okay to shoot anyone holding a phone or a shovel, or anyone who looked suspicious. The relaxation of the rules was said to be due to concerns that these unarmed civilians were acting as spies for combatants, or that they were involved in planting roadside IEDs.

“We were shooting old men, young men. This is what I witnessed,” a soldier told MEE. “I have never seen such lawlessness.”

The soldiers who spoke to MEE revealed instances in which young boys were killed and explained there were cover-ups to make slain civilians appear as though they were combatants. When two unarmed teenagers were killed in Helmand in Afghanistan, an ex-soldier alleges that a Soviet-era assault rifle and a machine gun were taken from storage in the base and placed next to the dead teenagers’ bodies before they were photographed.

“I think that explains why we were keeping those weapons on the bases,” he said.

A Royal Marine told the outlet that one of his men was forced to admit to killing an Afghan boy, who was about eight years old, when the boy’s father arrived at the base carrying his dead child and demanded an explanation.

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https://www.rt.com/uk/450695-uk-army-civilian-deaths-coverup/

The Liberal Attack on Western Destiny

Engineering Third World Migration