Gospels and child sacrifice: Inside a NYC ultra-Orthodox anti-vaccination rally

Vast majority of rabbis are urging vaccination amid measles outbreak centered in Orthodox community, but a few vocal holdouts see a US government-led conspiracy

The weirdest part of an Orthodox anti-vaccine conference here was probably when the emcee, a rabbi wearing a black hat and white beard, quoted the Gospel of Luke.

“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!” he cried, reciting the Gospels nearly verbatim in referring to advocates of vaccination.

The rabbi might have been talking about the 200 people gathered in the basement of a haredi Orthodox wedding hall in Brooklyn to hear about the dangers of vaccines.

While the scientific consensus supports vaccination and regards it as a historic boon to public health, the crowd and the emcee, Rabbi Hillel Handler, do not put much stock in that science. In Handler’s version of reality, doctors, rabbis and politicians are all hoodwinked by a massive conspiracy orchestrated by drug companies and the US government’s Centers for Disease Control to make money off of vaccines.

Handler and the other speakers charged the CDC and its purported stooges with hiding the dangers of vaccines and destroying evidence that they are harmful. They cited no credible evidence.

“This is all being orchestrated by the drug companies, which are very close to the CDC,” Handler told the crowd in a gender-segregated room at a catering hall in the Midwood neighborhood. “The doctors all march in lockstep with the CDC. The doctors don’t think they’re marching in lockstep. They don’t understand that the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, is a totally corrupt swamp. … They are criminals.”

https://www.timesofisrael.com/gospels-and-child-sacrifice-inside-a-nyc-ultra-orthodox-anti-vaccination-rally/

Peter Ford on Syria

Idlib

In brief, what is happening at the moment is not a full scale assault by Syrian government forces aimed at liberating the whole of Idlib. Rather it is a limited operation, the main goal of which is to chip away at the southern fringes of what is effectively the Al Qaida caliphate. You would never gather it from the media but from these southern fringes, which includeslivers of northern Hama and Lattakia provinces, the jihadi forces have (since the Sochi ceasefire agreement of last September) been launching forays in the direction of Hama. They have killed scores of government soldiers at a time, sending drones with bombs into the Russian base near Lattakia, and shelling Christian villages just outside the seam line. The first purpose of the Syrian government operation is to halt these violations. The second is to retake the southern tip, and the third is to restore free movement to two important highways linking Aleppo with the rest of the country (this was supposed to happen under the Sochi agreement but the Turks could not make the jihadis comply).

These jihadi forces number upwards of a staggering 50,000 (not 10,000 as some pro-jihadi sources would have you believe). About 20-30,000 of these are Hayat Tahrir Ash Sham (HTS), which has cosmetically distanced itself from Al Qaida without changing any of its ideology or practices. Alongside it are fighting about 5-10,000 fighters belonging to groups still vowing allegiance to Al Qaida and perhaps 10,000 former Free Syrian Army remnants left after their leaders fled before HTS’s assault following Sochi.

Humanitarian situation

According to the UN, about 160 civilians have been killed in a month of fighting (pro-jihadi sources claim more), an average of about five per day: bad but hardly a blitzkreig as portrayed.

Also according to the UN about 270,000 civilians have fled, mostly to northern Idlib. The Syrian government have been distributing leaflets in affected zones warning of impending

bombing. Trying to remove the jihadis’ human shields is definitely part of their strategy. 22 health facilities have been attacked: the government say this is because the jihadis are using them as bases, which is almost certainly true based on experience in other now liberated areas.

Outlook

The fighting has ebbed and flowed. Villages have been taken, lost and retaken. The jihadis have been bolstered with arms supplied by Turkey (including tanks and deadly US-made TOW

anti-tank weapons) and paid for by Qatar, which also pays salaries. As long as Turkey continues to prop up the jihadis and Qatar to fund them, fighting is likely to continue, with

the government continuing to put its faith in softening up with aerial bombing and artillery shelling rather than risk its sparse ground forces. The war of attrition could go on for a long

time, but one thing is sure: the government and the Russians will not abandon Idlib to the jihadis.

https://www.veteranstoday.com/2019/06/05/peter-ford-on-syria/

Trump: Unarmed Civilians Are ‘Sitting Ducks’

President Donald Trump said on June 5 that unarmed civilians are “sitting ducks” by obeying laws that prevent carrying guns for self-defense.

“When somebody has a gun illegally and nobody else has a gun because the laws are that you can’t have a gun, those people are gone,” Trump told “Good Morning Britain’s” Piers Morgan during an interview that covered a range of gun control topics.

“They have no chance,” he added.

Morgan brought up the Virginia Beach shootings as the latest example of America’s high gun crime rate.

“America has a particular issue with gun violence. There’s been a 150 mass shootings in America this year alone. In Britain, we have 35 gun deaths a year,” Morgan said.

“Yeah, but in London you have stabbings allover. I read an article where everyone’s being stabbed,” Trump replied. “They said your hospital is a sea of blood all over the floors.”

“We have a problem with knife crime,” Morgan responded.

Trump told Morgan that the Paris shootings in November 2015 that killed 130 would never have happened had “two or three of those people had a gun.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/trump-unarmed-civilians-are-sitting-ducks_2952476.html

238 Google Play apps with >440 million installs made phones nearly unusable

Carefully concealed plugin bombarded users with ads during inopportune times.

If the prevalence of abusive Google Play apps has left you numb, this latest report is for you. Carefully concealed adware installed in Google-approved apps with more than 440 million installations was so aggressive that it rendered mobile devices nearly unusable, researchers from mobile security provider Lookout said Tuesday.

BeiTaAd, as the adware is known, is a plugin that Lookout says it found hidden in emojis keyboard TouchPal and 237 other applications, all of which were published by Shanghai, China-based CooTek. Together, the 238 unique apps had a combined 440 million installs. Once installed, the apps initially behaved normally. Then, after a delay of anywhere between 24 hours and 14 days, the obfuscated BeiTaAd plugin would begin delivering what are known as out-of-app ads. These ads appeared on users' lock screens and triggered audio and video at seemingly random times or even when a phone was asleep.

"My wife is having the exact same issue," one person reported in November in this thread discussing BeiTaAd. "This will bring up random ads in the middle of phone calls, when her alarm clock goes off or anytime she uses any other function on her phone. We are unable to find any other information on this. It is extremely annoying and almost [makes] her phone unusable."

Lookout's post said the developers responsible for the 238 apps went to great lengths to conceal the plugin. Early versions of the apps incorporated it as an unencrypted dex file named beita.renc inside the assets/components directory. The renaming had the effect of making it harder for users to know the file was responsible for executing code.

Later, app developers renamed the plugin to the more opaque icon-icomoon-gemini.renc and encrypted it using the Advanced Encryption Standard. The developers then obfuscated the decryption key within the code through a series of functions buried in a package named com.android.utils.hades.sdk. In later versions still, developers used a third-party library called StringFog, which used XOR- and base64-based encoding to hide every instance of the string "BeiTa" in the files.

"All of the applications we analyzed that contained the BeiTaAd plugin were published by CooTek, and all CooTek apps we analyzed contained the plugin," Kristina Balaam, a security intelligence engineer at Lookout, wrote in an email. "The developer also went to great lengths to hide the plugin's presence in the app, suggesting that they may have been aware of the problematic nature of this SDK. However, we cannot attribute BeiTa to CooTek with complete certainty."

Ars has asked representatives from both CooTek and Google to comment. This post will be updated if either or both respond.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/06/238-google-play-apps-with-440-million-installs-made-phones-nearly-unusable/

McCabe: 'It's Outrageous' for Trump to Accuse Me or Comey of Treason

WASHINGTON – Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe responded to President Donald Trump arguing that he is guilty of "treason" for his role in the Russia and Trump campaign collusion probe, saying "it's outrageous."

"I can't describe for you how impactful it is to see the president of the United States mention your name in the same sentence as treason and the death penalty," McCabe said last week during an MSNBC segment focused on Special Counsel Bob Mueller's statement about the Russia probe.

"People who know what treason means understand that nothing that the FBI did, that the Department of Justice did or that I did or any of the folks I worked with, has anything to do with treason or plotting a coup or trying to take down a government. The fact is really we at the FBI investigated Russia and in 2016 the investigation that focused on Russia and threats from Russia took us to the president's campaign and so we did our job," he added.

Toward the end of May, Trump said that “they have unsuccessfully tried to take down the wrong person – if you look at Comey, if you look at McCabe, if you look at probably people higher than that, if you look at Strzok, if you look at his lover, Lisa Page, his wonderful lover."

McCabe said Mueller's final report, which didn't find collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, validates the decisions that the FBI made under the Obama administration.

"I think Director Mueller's report, his statements following the report, completely validate the decisions we made. There clearly was a threat to U.S. national security in the conduct of the Russians interfering with our 2016 election," he said.

McCabe previously stated that Trump could possibly be an asset of the Russian government. When asked if he stands by his claim, McCabe replied, "Based on what Director Mueller's team revealed in the report, I'd have to say no, we still have not seen clear evidence of that."

https://pjmedia.com/trending/mccabe-its-outrageous-for-trump-to-accuse-me-or-comey-of-treason/

Here’s The Eye-Popping Amount Of Cash Google, Amazon And Facebook Dumped On DC Lobbyists In 2018

Google, Amazon and Facebook plowed a record amount of money into Washington, D.C., a year before congressional Democrats announced a wide-ranging antitrust investigation into the Silicon Valley giants.

They dumped a combined $48 million into lobbying in 2018, up 13% from 2017, government disclosures from January show. House Democrats announced a planned probe of Google and Facebook’s business practices Monday, nearly a year after the companies made their contributions.

Google was the biggest spender in 2018, increasing its lobbying contributions 18% to $21.2 million. Facebook’s spending amount grew nearly 10% to $12.6 million. All three companies spent the bulk of their lobbying on in-house lobbying crews. The efforts largely went toward market and data regulation issues, according to the data.

Neither Facebook, Amazon, nor Google have responded to The Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment about Democrats’ potential probe.

The House’s investigation comes several days after a Wall Street Journal report noted that the Department of Justice is preparing an antitrust probe against Google’s search engine and business model. It would be the first such investigation since the Federal Trade Commission conducted a probe of Google but closed it in 2013 without taking action.

https://dailycaller.com/2019/06/05/breakup-amazon-google-facebook/