5:
France’s state of emergency may last months
French President Francois Hollande will present a bill to extend the state of emergency in France, as well as propose severe amendments to the constitution in light of a recent wave of attacks in Paris that killed at least 129 people.
The French leader said on Monday, in an exceptional joint gathering of parliament, that he would make the proposals on Wednesday and parliamentarians would vote on them before the end of the week.
Friday’s “acts of war… were decided and planned in Syria, prepared and organised in Belgium [and] perpetrated on our soil with French complicity,” he said, speaking in Versailles, south of Paris.
“I have asked the prime minister to prepare constitutional amendments,” he added.
Aljazeera
4:
Anonymous Hacking Group Declares War on Islamic State Following Paris Attacks
The Anonymous hackers collective has announced that it’s preparing to unleash waves of cyber attacks on the Islamic State (IS) following the attacks in Paris last week that killed more than 130 people, it said in a video posted online.
A man wearing a Guy Fawkes mask said the IS militants who claimed responsibility for the Paris attacks were “vermin” and Anonymous would hunt them down.
“These attacks cannot remain unpunished,” the man said in the video, speaking in French.
“We are going to launch the biggest operation ever against you. Expect many cyber attacks. War has been declared. Get ready,” the man said, without giving details of what the attacks would involve. “We don’t forgive and we don’t forget.”
Vice News
3:
The SourceAmerica Tapes
Today, 16 November 2015 8:30 am EST, WikiLeaks publishes the 30 hours of secret tapes and transcripts at the heart of the AbilityOne/SourceAmerica scandal.
Thirteen Presidential Appointees (ten Obama, three Bush) are embroiled in a multi-billion dollar corruption scandal being probed by the US Department of Justice and four Inspector Generals. The appointees oversee the federal government’s $3billion a year “AbilityOne” program which is meant to pay for the employment of more than 50,000 disabled people–the largest such program in the United States. Most of that money, $2.3 billion a year, is funneled through the non-profit SourceAmerica to more than 1000 other designated partner organizations. This subsidised disabled labour is then placed (for a fee) with government and industry. Most of the labour is pushed to the military sector, including the DoD, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin & Boeing–who are also “patrons” of SourceAmerica. It is alleged that nearly half of the $2.3billion a year does not go to the severely disabled, but is rorted by pushing the money to corruptly favoured placement organisations that recruit the able bodied or the mildly disabled instead of the mandated 75% severely disabled. The result is billions in tax payer funded labour subsidies and increased profits for the placement organizations.
The 26 tapes are recorded conversations between Jean Robinson (Lead Counsel of SourceAmerica) and Ruben Lopez (CEO of Bona Fide Conglomerate Inc., one of the placement organizations) that discuss the alleged corruption.
Wikileaks
2:
After Paris Attacks, Reports of Islamophobia in France, U.S.
Reports of Islamophobia have already emerged following the Paris attacks. In St. Petersburg, Florida, a mosque received a voicemail from a caller who threatened to “firebomb you and shoot whoever is there in the head.” We’ll have more on the Paris attacks and the aftermath after headlines.
1:
Exploiting Emotions About Paris to Blame Snowden, Distract from Actual Culprits Who Empowered ISIS
Whistleblowers are always accused of helping America’s enemies (top Nixon aides accused Daniel Ellsberg of being a Soviet spy and causing the deaths of Americans with his leak); it’s just the tactical playbook that’s automatically used. So it’s of course unsurprising that ever since Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing enabled newspapers around the world to report on secretly implemented programs of mass surveillance, he has been accused by “officials” and their various media allies of Helping The Terrorists™.
Still, I was a bit surprised just by how quickly and blatantly — how shamelessly — some of them jumped to exploit the emotions prompted by the carnage in France to blame Snowden: doing so literally as the bodies still lay on the streets of Paris. At first, the tawdry exploiters were the likes of crazed ex-intelligence officials (former CIA chief James Woolsey, who once said Snowden “should be hanged by his neck until he is dead” and now has deep ties to private NSA contractors, along with Iran–obsessed Robert Baer); former Bush/Cheney apparatchiks (ex-White House spokesperson and current Fox personality Dana Perino); right-wing polemicists fired from BuzzFeed for plagiarism; and obscure Fox News comedians (Perino’s co-host). So it was worth ignoring save for the occasional Twitter retort.
The Intercept
