Jonathan Freedland adds more crap to The Guardian's crap.  Why? What is the purpose of this? Try to make Corbyn look bad? Why does the Guardian allows this crap on its ficticious pages? 

and jonathan freedland adds more guardian crap..

We are all at the mercy of disinformation. But particularly our opinions can be swayed by trolls, sockpuppets and cash used by clever manipulators of "public" opinions in their favour.  Despite paying attention to the source of information, it is not always simple as to know what's true or not. We had the famous "intelligence failure" in regard to the war on Saddam, failure which was a construct from the start as the "intelligence" agencies and their masters, the president and acolytes, knew there was no WMDs in Iraq, but created the information for public consumption through a very compliant media.

Government sockpuppetry[edit]

Main article: State-sponsored Internet propaganda

As an example of state-sponsored Internet sockpuppetry, In 2011, a California company called Ntrepid was awarded a $2.76 million contract from US Central Command for "online persona management" operations[42] to create "fake online personas to influence net conversations and spread US propaganda" in Arabic, Persian, Urdu and Pashto.[42] The activity was part of Operation Earnest Voice (OEV), a programme first developed in Iraq as a weapon of psychological warfare.

On September 11, 2014, a number of sockpuppet accounts reported an explosion at a chemical plant in Louisiana. The reports came on a range of media, including Twitter and YouTube, but US authorities claimed the entire event to be a hoax. The information was determined by many to have originated with a Russian government-sponsored sockpuppet management office in Saint Petersburg, called the Internet Research Agency.[43] Russia was again implicated by the US intelligence community in 2016 for using paid trolls in the US Election.[44]

The Institute of Economic Affairs claimed in a 2012 paper that the United Kingdom government, and the EU, fund charities whose purpose is to campaign and lobby for causes the government supports. In one example 73% of responses to a government consultation was the direct result of campaigns by alleged "sock puppet" organizations.

Read more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sockpuppet_(Internet)

A small group of very wealthy Americans indirectly support several "reinformation" sites and online advertising campaigns in Europe.

It is not only the United States that carry out misinformation operations. For several years, a small group of American billionaires, who finance in their country the right wing of the Republican Party, have also supported campaigns to disseminate false information in several countries of the European Union.

Unlike agents of the Internet Research Agency - the Russian organization of online propaganda - these businessmen do not have many teams, or armies of false accounts on Twitter or Facebook. But their money allows them to finance small groups of activists and specialized political communication companies, whose action is then multiplied online by the purchase of ads on social networks to spread their message.

At the heart of the scheme is Robert Mercer, the co-CEO of the powerful Renaissance Technologies investment fund, and his daughter Rebekah, who funded the launch of Breitbart News, the conspiracy site spearheading the "alt-right" ( "Right alternative", far-right movement) and Donald Trump's campaign. Steve Bannon, the former advisor to the president, was the editor. "It was the Mercers who laid the groundwork for the Trump revolution," Bannon said in an interview in the Washington Post in 2018. If you look at who the political donors of the last four years are, they have had the greatest impact."

Read more:

https://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/article/2019/03/07/des-milliardaires-ameri...

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Revelations that Glencore used a secret multi-million dollar project to bolster support for coal have outraged environmentalists and transparency advocates, who are calling for democratic reform to bring such campaigns out of the shadows.

Glencore used one of the world’s best political operatives, the C|T Group, to run a vast, secret communications campaign aimed at shifting public and government attitudes towards coal.

The campaign, named Project Caesar, used an annual budget of between £4m and £7m to spread sophisticated pro-coal, anti-renewables messaging across social media, using slick video, memes and graphics through supposedly grassroots Facebook groups.

Project Caesar also involved significant government relations and traditional media campaigns.

Former prime minister Kevin Rudd described Project Caesar as a “national disgrace” in a tweet on Thursday, while environmentalists and transparency groups called for integrity reforms.

The Transparency International Australia chief executive, Serena Lillywhite, said the revelations reinforced the need for the routine publication of federal ministers’ diaries, a practice already employed in NSW.

The publication of diaries would have allowed the public to see whether Glencore or its representatives were meeting with those in power during Project Caesar, and what they discussed.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/mar/08/national-disgrace...

Note: such trolling and disinformation campaign are not illegal "unless they come from the Rooskies"... Please note that Rupert Murdoch — using his traditional techniques — was responsible for the election of Trump, not the "Russians".

• A dark money group based in California contributed $2 million to The Democracy Integrity Project, the organization that has contracted with Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele to investigate President Donald Trump.
• The Democracy Integrity Project’s founder, a former staffer for Sen. Dianne Feinstein, has acknowledged to the FBI that the group provides information to the press, lawmakers and investigators.
• Fund for a Better Future is the second Democracy Integrity Project donor to have been identified. George Soros gave $1 million to the group.

A dark money group with links to several high-profile liberal activists contributed $2 million to The Democracy Integrity Project, an organization founded by a former Dianne Feinstein staffer that has contracted with Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele to investigate President Donald Trump.

Fund for a Better Future (FBF) donated $2,065,000 to The Democracy Integrity Project (TDIP) in 2017, according to IRS filings reviewed by The Daily Caller News Foundation.

TDIP was founded on Jan. 31, 2017, by Daniel Jones, a consultant who worked for Feinstein, a California Democrat, when she controlled the Senate Intelligence Committee. Jones has disclosed to the FBI that he hired Fusion GPS and Steele, the author of the anti-Trump dossier, to continue an investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

He also told an associate that TDIP operated as a “shadow media organization helping the government.” Jones suggested to the associate, Adam Waldman, that his TDIP team planted several anti-Trump articles.

Little is known about the donors behind both TDIP and FBF. Both of the organizations are 501(c)(4)s, the type of public advocacy group most closely associated with “dark money” contributions. FBF has contributed to a mix of environmental organizations and politically active groups, including Planned Parenthood Action Fund, Priorities USA — the political group that backs Democrats — and the League of Conservation Voters, a progressive dark money group.

Scott Walter, the president of Capital Research Center, a conservative watchdog that tracks liberal groups’ funding, said the arrangement is a prime example of “dark money.”

...

According to FBF’s most recent audit, the organization has four main donors, none of whom are identified.

One other prominent TDIP donor has been publicly identified.

George Soros contributed $1 million to TDIP, a spokesman for the billionaire financier told The New York Times in October. That disclosure came only after TheDCNF reported that Jones told his associate, Waldman, that Soros was one of TDIP’s funders.

Read more:

https://dailycaller.com/2019/03/10/dark-money-fusion-steele-soros/

The Daily Caller is a conservative American news and opinion website based in Washington, D.C.

The Daily Caller was founded by Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel. After raising $3 million in funding from businessman Foster Friess, the website was launched on January 11, 2010. The organization started with a reporting staff of 21 in its Washington office. It was launched as an alternative to the liberal The Huffington Post, similarly featuring sections in broad range of subjects beyond politics.

By late 2012, The New York Times reported that the site had quadrupled its page view and total audience and had become profitable without ever buying an advertisement for itself.[3]

By 2013, the site was receiving over 35 million views a month according to Quantcast, surpassing rival sites such as The Washington Times, Politico, and Forbes.[4] The site has an active community, with over 200,000 comments made each month.

Notable figures have commented on The Daily Caller. Karl Rove has said that "The Daily Caller is necessary reading for anyone who wants to be up to speed with what's going on with politics in America." Larry Kudlow referred to the site as "one of [his] faves."[4]

Read more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daily_Caller

News from the world of Italian school buses:

The driver of a school bus has been arrested in Milan after allegedly hijacking the vehicle with 51 children onboard and setting it on fire.

One of the children called the police after the driver stopped the bus on a highway in the outskirts of the city, Italian media reported.

After police arrived, the suspect allegedly doused the vehicle with an inflammable liquid, reportedly shouting: “Nobody gets off here alive.”

The bus, which had been travelling from the city of Cremona in Lombardy, went up in flames but the police managed to get all the passengers off. Twelve children and two adults were taken to hospital suffering from smoke inhalation.

The Milan prosecutor said, “It was a miracle they survived and we have to thank the police for that.”

The driver, we subsequently learn, was a naturalized Italian citizen from Senegal, who very nearly killed all these children — as many as Muslims who died in the Christchurch mosque — to protest Italy’s immigration policy.  As La Repubblica reported, before setting the bus on fire, the man shouted,  “I want to be done, deaths in the Mediterranean must be stopped.”

Here’s how The Guardian headlined the piece:

“Driver in Italy” — this, even though the fact that he was born in Senegal has everything to do with his crime! Here’s how the BBC headlined it:

“Italian driver.”

The Daily Mail, which actually reports this news with chilling detail, uses this accurate and informative headline:

As I write this, around 4:30 Central US time, there is no story about this on the website of The New York Times or the Washington Post. 

There was an attempted mass murder of children on a school bus in Italy, by an immigrant angry over the fact that Italy is not opening its doors fully to migrants.

If not for the police, and a student on board who concealed his smartphone and used it to alert authorities, we would have had another Christchurch in terms of the number of deaths.

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/senegal-immigrant-italy-c...

As usual, on the eve of important elections, the SMH (Sydney Morning Herald — 22 3 19) shows its true CONservative colours. And now flying under the Channel Nine banner, we can expet this channel to do the same and try to sway voters...

The SMH editorial is a classy disgrace, that basically supports a NSW government that is anti-action on global warming, demolishes good stadiums for no reason, has destroyed koala habitats by relaxing laws on land clearing, has polluted and reduced the flow of rivers to the point of several massive fish kills, has destroyed Sydney's nightlife and its music venues, favours more cars over public transport, though it has invested in a few train lines and has also destroyed Sydney central business district with the construction of a 1929-solution tram line when modern electric buses and a restriction on cars in the CBD would have done a far better job, and by end of all this, this moribund CONservative government is ARROGANT beyond belief. Time for a change, even if it's not "for the best", it could not be worse.

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