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Ancestry Pulls Slavery-Era Ad After Backlash

April 21, 2019

Ancestry.com on Friday apologized for an ad that showed a mixed-race couple discussing escaping to the North during the Civil War era.

The ad drew widespread criticism on social media for whitewashing slavery, prompting the DNA testing company to remove it from TV and its YouTube channel. Ancestry started running the ad on TV on April 15, according to research firm iSpot.TV.

The ad is part of a campaign by Ancestry showing stories from the past to pique viewers’ curiosity about their ancestors. It depicts a white man holding up a ring and telling a black woman wearing Civil War-era clothing that they can be together if they escape to the North. The woman says nothing as the scene fades to black, with the line: “Without you, the story stops here.”

Critics pointed out that the ad ignores the fact that mixed race couplings during the slavery era were usually not romantic love stories but instead due to rape and violence against slaves.

Many took to Twitter to express complaints about the ad.

“I used this service a few years ago. And when I realized I was more than 10% European, I wept,” tweeted Brittany Packnett. “Not from shame for who I am, but from anger from the trauma of how it may have come to be. This commercial spits on the trauma in our veins and the fight of our ancestors.”

In an emailed statement, Ancestry said the ad was intended to be part of its effort to tell “important stories from history.”

“We very much appreciate the feedback we have received and apologize for any offense that the ad may have caused,” the company said in the statement.

M.J. McCallum, creative director of Muse Communications, called the ad “thoughtless,” but said it could happen to any company that doesn’t prioritize having diverse representation in its ranks.

“I believe it’s the responsibility of brands and their agencies to foster inclusive environments,” he said. “They must encourage their team members to be open, honest and vulnerable to topics like race and culture.”

The Ancestry ad joins a long list of missteps by marketers that are at best tone-deaf and at worst racist.

In 2017, Dove stopped using a Facebook GIF that showed a black woman removing a brown shirt and transforming into a white woman. The ad was meant to show different types of people can use Dove but many saw it as saying the black woman was “dirty” and the white woman was “clean.” Dove apologized .

In 2018, a Heineken ad with the tagline “Sometimes, Lighter Is Better,” showed a bartender sliding a bottle of Heineken down a bar where several people of color were sitting before it stops in front of a light-skinned woman. Heineken apologized and pulled the ad after an online outcry in which many people, including Chance the Rapper , called the ad racist.

And in February , Gucci pulled a sweater off the market after complaints that the oversized collar designed to cover the face resembled blackface makeup. Italian designer Prada, Katy Perry’s fashion line and H&M have also pulled similar racially insensitivity items.

“The idea that an ad won’t be offensive simply because no one who approved it was offended is just not acceptable anymore,” McCallum said. “Yes, there is always a chance that even the best of intentions will be misinterpreted, but there are reliable resources and skilled professionals available for brands to tap into.”

Source: NewsMax America

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Hundreds sign online petition supporting woman suing JD.com CEO in rape case

April 20, 2019

FILE PHOTO: JD.com founder Richard Liu attends a Reuters interview in Hong Kong
FILE PHOTO: JD.com founder Richard Liu attends a Reuters interview in Hong Kong, China June 9, 2017. REUTERS/Bobby Yip/File Photo

April 20, 2019

SHANGHAI (Reuters) – Hundreds of people have added their names to an online petition in support of a University of Minnesota student who said she was raped last August by Richard Liu, the chief executive officer of China’s e-commerce retailer JD.com Inc.

The student, Liu Jingyao, from China, filed a civil lawsuit against JD’s CEO in a Minneapolis court on Tuesday, nearly four months after prosecutors declined to press criminal charges against him.

The law suit identified the student for the first time. The two Lius are not related.

Richard Liu, through his lawyers, maintained his innocence throughout the law enforcement investigation, which ended in December. The company did not immediately respond to an email request for comment.

It was unclear who launched the petition, which carried the hashtag #HereForJingyao, although signatories included Chinese students at foreign universities as well as in China. On Saturday, it was gathering momentum on the social media platform WeChat, with more than 500 names attached.

“To Liu Jingyao: You are not alone. We believe in survivors, we believe in your bravery and honesty, we will always stand with you. We must join hands and march together in the face of the challenge of a culture of blaming the victims of rape,” the petition said.

A Chinese-language translation of the indictment was also circulating online.

Liu Jingyao first accused Richard Liu of rape in August when he was visiting the University of Minnesota to attend a program directed at executives from China.

Liu, 46, who started JD.com as a humble electronics stall and expanded it into an e-commerce company with 2018 net revenues of $67 billion, was arrested on Aug. 31 but released without charge about 17 hours later.

A fledgling #MeToo-style movement in support of women’s rights has been slow to gain wide traction in China, where issues like sexual assault have traditionally been brushed under the carpet.

China’s ruling Communist Party, wary about grassroots organizing, has also in recent months put pressure on activists focused on issues like sexual assault on campuses and workers’ rights.

(Reporting by John Ruwitch and Shu Zhang; Editing by Nick Macfie)

Source: OANN

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State Legislature Passes Bill Mandating Physicians to Provide Care to Babies Who Survive Abortion

April 17, 2019

The North Carolina legislature passed a bill Tuesday seeking to spell out and mandate physicians provide care to babies who survive abortion.

The state Senate first passed the “Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act,” SB359, on Monday. The House passed the bill in a 65-46 vote Tuesday, according to The News & Observer.

“Any infant born alive after an abortion or within a hospital, clinic, or other facility has the same claim to the protection of the law that would arise for any newborn, or for any person who comes to a hospital, clinic, or other facility for screening and treatment or otherwise becomes a patient within its care,” according to the legislation. Physicians who violate the bill will be charged with a Class D felony and fined up to $250,000.

North Carolina’s American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) reacted to the bill’s passage immediately and sent Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper a letter urging him to veto the legislation. The bill would “interfere with the patient-provider relationship, target health care providers, and mislead the public about safe, legal abortion care,” according to the letter.

“This extreme anti-abortion bill shamelessly inserts political ideology into the practice of medicine, replacing health care providers’ best judgment with that of politicians,” North Carolina ACLU Senior Policy Counsel Susanna Birdsong said.

The governor’s spokesman, Ford Porter, also criticized the bill, saying in a statement, “This unnecessary legislation would criminalize doctors for a practice that simply does not exist.”

“Laws already exist to protect newborn babies and legislators should instead be focused on other issues like expanding access to health care to help children thrive,” Porter said, according to the Observer.

Abortion is murder, and these are the facts.

Republican Rep. Sarah Stevens applauded the bill’s passage, the Observer reported. “Nurses, doctors, if you see something, you have a duty to report. And that’s a big part of this bill,” Stevens said.

The born-alive bill’s passage comes after U.S. District Judge William Osteen struck down in late March a ban on abortions after 20 weeks, ruling that a “week-or event-specific” ban is not constitutional, Reuters reported. Legal abortions may occur to the point of viability as determined by a presiding physician under Osteen’s ruling.

South Carolina nearly passed a law banning all abortions except those performed in the case of rape, incest and to save the mother’s life, but the bill died in the state’s Senate.

A number of states have passed bills restricting abortion access. Arkansas, North Dakota, Iowa, Mississippi and Kentucky have proposed bills or enacted laws outlawing abortion in the presence of a fetal heartbeat. Many of the abortion bans, however, have remained ineffective following court orders prohibiting enforcement, Cleveland.com reported.

SB359 now heads to Cooper’s desk for signature. He will likely veto the measure.

Dr. Nick Begich joins Alex Jones live in studio to break down why the globalists, as they consolidate power into the hands of corporate interests worldwide, fear the individual.

Source: InfoWars

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Transgender teenager from Brunei seeks asylum in Canada

April 17, 2019

Transgender woman Zoella Zayce, who fled Brunei in anticipation of escalation of sharia law, is pictured at her home in Vancouver
Transgender woman Zoella Zayce, who fled Brunei in anticipation of escalation of sharia law, is pictured at her home in Vancouver, B.C., Canada April 12, 2019. REUTERS/Mark Goodnow

April 17, 2019

By Evan Duggan

VANCOUVER (Reuters) – Zoella Zayce displays no photos of her family in her basement apartment in Vancouver, thousands of miles from where she left them in Brunei. The 19-year-old refugee claimant is a transgender woman, something she never told the family she describes as conservative.

Back home, family and friends sometimes asked if she was gay. It was an alarming question in the Southeast Asian country, which this month introduced new Islamic laws to punish homosexuality, adultery and rape with the death penalty, including stoning.

The laws, elements of which were first adopted in 2014, have been rolled out in the country of 400,000, stirring international outrage.

“I just didn’t feel safe with my family,” said Zayce, who knew from childhood that she was transgender. At 11 or 12, she remembers being forced to visit a cleric who performed a ritual she described as an exorcism or cleansing. “I was traumatized.”

In 2014, she heard about two people fined and jailed for crossdressing: “I knew I had to leave very soon.”

Zayce arrived in Canada late last year, and now awaits the results of her asylum application, which could come as soon as November.

She chose Canada because it was far from Brunei. She thought it would be too expensive for her family or the authorities to come after her. Canada also had the reputation as an open society with strong protections for human rights.

“(Prime Minister) Justin Trudeau was very accepting of people fleeing their countries so that was one of the major things as well,” she said.

She works full time at an office doing data entry, and on the side as a math tutor.

“It’s been very busy for me and I’m glad I can support myself and don’t have to rely on the government,” she said.

She hopes to find a boyfriend and to eventually study computer science.

Zayce hopes for a secular Brunei in which the Sultan would abdicate and make way for democracy and more freedom.

Brunei has defended its right to implement the laws. Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah, 72, who has ruled the oil-rich country for 51 years, is one the wealthiest people in the world.

Brunei’s embassy in Ottawa was not immediately available for comment.

The international community could help by applying trade sanctions against Brunei or scuttling the royal family’s investments around the world, Zayce said.

But mostly, she is concerned with making her own voice heard, even though it means she may never be able to return to her country.

“I just want to let the world know that if I do get sent back to Brunei, I wouldn’t mind dying back there,” she said, starting to cry. “If I do go back, I would have at least lived a good life … on my own terms.”

(Reporting by Evan Duggan; Editing by Steve Orlofsky)

Source: OANN

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Chief executive of China’s JD.com back in spotlight over civil suit accusation of rape

April 17, 2019

JD.com founder Richard Liu attends a Reuters interview in Hong Kong
FILE PHOTO: JD.com founder Richard Liu attends a Reuters interview in Hong Kong, China June 9, 2017. REUTERS/Bobby Yip

April 17, 2019

By Cate Cadell

BEIJING (Reuters) – The personal life of JD.com chief Richard Liu returned to the spotlight of China’s social media on Wednesday, drawing 360 million views to briefly become the top trending item on the Twitter-like Weibo, after a civil lawsuit accused him of rape.

Liu, who was briefly arrested after a University of Minnesota student accused him of rape last August, maintained his innocence throughout the investigation, which ended in December, with prosecutors declining to press charges.

The civil case brought by the student comes as the e-commerce giant faces a backlash over layoffs and its work culture after Liu railed against “slackers”, with his social media backing seeming to wane, in contrast to its support after his initial arrest and release.

“Now it’s coming to light how hard he’s working people and they’re trying to cut staff … Suddenly the sympathy can evaporate pretty quickly,” said Mark Natkin, a managing director at Beijing-based tech consultancy Marbridge Consulting.

Earlier, people had been more willing to commiserate when the business appeared to be going well and employees were being treated well, he added.

Liu’s accuser, identified in the civil lawsuit for the first time as Liu Jingyao, a Chinese student at the U.S. university, has sought undisclosed damages in a Minneapolis court from both Liu and JD.com.

In a statement on Tuesday, Liu’s attorney, Jill Brisbois, said, “Based on the Hennepin county attorney’s declination to charge a case against our client and our belief in his innocence, we feel strongly that this suit is without merit and will vigorously defend against it.”

She was referring to prosecutors who declined to charge Liu after last year’s investigation.

A lawyer for JD.com, Peter Walsh of Hogan Lovells, said it would defend the company against the claims, which he described as “meritless”.

On Wednesday, some of the highest-trending Weibo comments on the new case contrasted the accusations with Liu’s recent comments that the number of “slackers” in his firm had grown.

“How did he find the time to commit such bad crimes in Minnesota when he was working 996 hours?” said a Weibo user, whose posting received more than 1,200 likes.

The reference is to a practice in the Chinese tech industry of working 72-hour weeks, from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. on six days, which has figured in online debate and protests on some coding platforms.

A JD.com spokesman has declined to comment on layoffs but said the company was making adjustments as a normal part of business.

Another user joked that Liu himself was the company’s “least cost-effective” employee, with the arrest wiping out billions of dollars in shareholder value.

Shares of JD.com are still down 4.5 percent from the period before Liu was arrested. That is despite a slight rise this year following last year’s fall of about 16 percent, for a loss of more than $7 billion in value in the week after his arrest.

“At that time it felt obvious to me that the woman sought to make some money from the situation,” said Gao Wei, a student in the Chinese capital, whose posts defending Liu on messaging app WeChat after his initial arrest drew hundreds of likes.

“I think there is a better understanding of Liu’s character now because of the 996 … even though these are not directly related issues,” Gao, 22, told Reuters.

(Reporting by Cate Cadell; Additional Reporting by Beijing and Shanghai Newsrooms; Editing by Tony Munroe and Clarence Fernandez)

Source: OANN

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MS-13 Members Beg Trump To Let Them In US: We Are Reformed, Taking Bakery & Art Classes!

April 16, 2019

Thousands of MS-13 gang members imprisoned in El Salvador for rape and murder have a message for President Trump: we are reformed criminals who deserve entry into the United States because we are taking “bakery and culture classes.”

Over 1,700 gang members, according to the Daily Mail, are inmates at the high-security Chalatenango prison, and are “taking classes in bakery, tailoring, carpentry, woodwork and even art and culture, in a bid to prepare for life after incarceration” through a rehabilitation program called “Yo Cambio” (I’m Changing).

“We’re people like everyone else: human beings. We’ve changed and we’re showing that those gang members deprived of liberty can contribute something positive to society,” said the program’s coordinator Alexis Castro, a 33-year-old MS-13 gang member serving a 10-year sentence.

Despite being accused of a range of crimes including murder, extortion, and child trafficking for a transnational gang whose motto is “Rape, control, kill,” Castro insists he and his fellow MS-13 comrades are “normal and ordinary people.”

“We’re labeled terrorists but we’ve never been terrorists at any point,” said Castro. “We say to Donald Trump, we’re not terrorists, we’re human, normal and ordinary people.”

Unfortunately for them, given they are in a socialist third world hellhole, “the classes are mostly theoretical as the inmates lack the necessary materials to take part in practical training,” the Mail reports.

Perhaps they should plead to California Governor Gavin Newsom instead, who made a visit to El Salvador in a pledge to help rebuild the country despite the fact his own state is suffering from economic turmoil.

Twitter: Follow @WhiteIsTheFury

Source: InfoWars

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Minnesota student sues JD.com’s CEO Liu, company over rape allegation

April 16, 2019

FILE PHOTO: Richard Liu, founder and CEO of JD.com, leaves Great Hall of the People after NPC session in Beijing
FILE PHOTO: Richard Liu, founder and chief executive officer of e-commerce company JD.com, leaves the Great Hall of the People after the opening session of the National People’s Congress (NPC) in Beijing, China March 5, 2018. REUTERS/Stringer/File Photo

April 16, 2019

(Reuters) – A University of Minnesota student who said she was raped last August by Richard Liu, the chief executive officer of China’s e-commerce retailer JD.com Inc, filed a civil lawsuit against him in a Minneapolis court on Tuesday, nearly four months after prosecutors declined to press criminal charges.

Liu, through his lawyers, maintained his innocence throughout the investigation of the woman’s allegation.

The lawsuit in Hennepin County court seeks more than $50,000 in damages and names Richard Liu and JD.com as defendants. It identifies the student as Liu Jingyao.

Richard Liu’s attorney, Jill Brisbois, could not be immediately reached for comment on the lawsuit. A spokesman for JD.com also could not be immediately reached for comment.

(Reporting by Koh Gui Qing and Lawrence Delevingne in New York; editing by Grant McCool)

Source: OANN

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Hungary Accuses Sweden of “Trying to Force” Migrants Into Country

April 16, 2019


The Swedish prime minister is a known “pro-migration politician” who is now “trying to force illegal migrants on Hungary and punish Hungarians for saying no to mandatory resettlement quotas”, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said in a statement to MTI on Monday, commenting on Stefan Lofven’s remarks in a Swedish daily slamming Hungary’s migration policy.

In a statement published on the internet site of the Dagens Nyheter, Lofven said those refusing to shoulder responsibility in the EU should “pay a price.” Those states “cannot receive the same EU funding they receive today. Hungary is one of the member states getting the most. A country that is given one of the largest funding in the bloc cannot shun responsibility when it comes to migration,” Lofven said.

Szijjarto said Hungary had shouldered “real responsibility” by protecting western and northern Europe from migration by sealing the EU’s external border. EU funds are not handouts, he said, but compensation laid down in EU treaties, allocated for opening our markets to western European players, he said.

An increase in rape of 44% in Sweden in the last 10 years is a catastrophic number to say the least.

At stake in the upcoming elections in May is whether the European Parliament will have politicians promoting security in Europe rather than resettlement quotas, no-go zones, gang warfare and terror threats, he insisted.

(Photo by Arno Mikkor / Wiki)

Lorinc Nacsa, an MP of the co-ruling Christian Democrats, told a separate press conference that it was “unacceptable” that “pro-migration politicians should openly threaten those who stand against migration”.

“The pro-migration politicians seek to force their own will on all European nations,” he said. “Hungarians have made it clear several times that they do not want Hungary to become a migrant destination,” Nacsa said, adding that a focal point of the ruling parties’ programme is that “no country should be obliged to take in migrants against its own will.”

Now that the Russia collusion conspiracy has crumbled, the cries from the left for Trump’s taxes to be released are getting louder. Former special agent of the Criminal Investigation Division of the Internal Revenue Service, Joe Banister, joins Alex to reveal why Trump should not release his taxes.

Source: InfoWars

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Explainer – Looking for America: Is Julian Assange heading to the United States?

April 15, 2019

FILE PHOTO: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange arrives at the Westminster Magistrates Court, after he was arrested in London
FILE PHOTO: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange arrives at the Westminster Magistrates Court, after he was arrested in London, Britain April 11, 2019. REUTERS/Hannah McKay/File Photo

April 15, 2019

By Guy Faulconbridge and Michael Holden

LONDON (Reuters) – British police dragged Julian Assange from the Ecuadorean embassy last Thursday after his asylum was revoked, ending his seven-year stay there and opening the way for his extradition to the United States.

Assange’s supporters, who cast him as a dissident facing the wrath of a superpower, fear the 47-year-old will end up on trial in the United States.

The United States wants Assange for one of the largest compromises of classified information in U.S. history.

What happens now?

WHO IS ASSANGE?

Assange was born on July 3, 1971 in Australia. In his teens, he gained a reputation as a talented computer programmer and in the mid-1990s he was arrested and pleaded guilty to hacking. He founded WikiLeaks in 2006.

He shot to fame in early 2010 when WikiLeaks published a classified U.S. military video showing a 2007 attack by Apache helicopters in Baghdad that killed a dozen people, including two Reuters news staff.

WikiLeaks published hundreds of thousands of secret U.S. diplomatic cables that laid bare often critical U.S. appraisals of world leaders, from Russian President Vladimir Putin to members of the Saudi royal family.

WHY WAS HE IN THE ECUADOREAN EMBASSY?

Assange took refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy in June 2012 to avoid being extradited to Sweden, where authorities wanted to question him as part of a preliminary sexual assault investigation.

That investigation was later dropped but because he had breached his British bail in 2012, he was arrested last week and found guilty of failing to surrender to Westminster Magistrates’ Court.

Following his arrest, U.S. prosecutors announced charges against him and Swedish prosecutors are considering reopening the rape investigation.

JAIL IN THE UNITED KINGDOM?

Westminster Magistrates’ Court’s Judge Michael Snow said Assange faces up to 12 months in jail when he is sentenced at a later date at Southwark Crown Court.

The British criminal action against Assange will take precedence over extradition proceedings although Nick Vamos, lawyer at London-based firm Peters & Peters and former head of extradition at Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service, said in practice it would make little difference.

    “Even if he gets a maximum 12-month sentence, that means he will serve six and it will take at least six months for his extradition proceedings to be resolved,” Vamos told Reuters.

    So while he is in custody, the extradition hearings can proceed. The British judge gave the U.S. government a deadline of June 12 to outline its case against Assange.

SO DOES ASSANGE END UP IN SWEDEN OR THE UNITED STATES?

The courts will have to rule on any extradition request and Home Secretary Sajid Javid would decide which one takes precedence.

Vamos said the home secretary would take into account the seriousness of the offence and which request was issued first, and expected a Swedish one would take supremacy.

    “Even though technically it would be a re-issued request, in effect it would be just a repeat of the request that was issued many years ago and therefore it would be treated as if it was the earliest one,” he said.

    “The fact that his extradition had already been ordered on it once would be in the home secretary’s mind. The U.S. government can wait a bit longer, they’ve taken quite a long time to sort out whether they were ever going to charge him or not …

“We don’t know what happened in Sweden, we don’t whether he committed that offense and there’s a victim there who’s been waiting for justice for many years and I think that should take priority.”

WHAT IS THE U.S. CASE?

Just hours after Assange’s arrest, U.S. prosecutors announced charges against him for conspiring with former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to gain access to a government computer.

The indictment, filed in March 2018 and unsealed on Thursday, said Assange in March 2010 engaged in a conspiracy to help Manning crack a password stored on Defense Department computers connected to the Secret Internet Protocol Network (SIPRNet), a U.S. government network used for classified documents and communications.

Manning, formerly Bradley Manning, was jailed on March 8 after being held in contempt by a judge in Virginia for refusing to testify before a grand jury in what is widely believed to be related to the Assange investigation.

Manning was convicted by court-martial in 2013 of espionage and other offences for furnishing more than 700,000 documents, videos, diplomatic cables and battlefield accounts to WikiLeaks while she was an intelligence analyst in Iraq. Former President Barack Obama commuted the final 28 years of Manning’s 35-year sentence.

WHAT IS THE SWEDISH INVESTIGATION?

Assange was accused by two Swedish women of sexual assault and rape in 2010. After opening an initial investigation, prosecutors dropped it, only to reopen it and issue an European arrest order for Assange, who had left the country for Britain.

Assange, who denied the allegations, fought through the courts to get an extradition order and the preliminary investigation dropped.

His lawyers said he feared that should he go to Sweden, authorities could hand him over to the United States.

Prosecutors ended the preliminary investigation into allegations of sexual molestation and unlawful coercion in 2015 as the statute of limitations had already passed, but kept open the rape probe.

In May 2017, then chief prosecutor Marianne Ny dropped the preliminary investigation into rape without filing any charges, saying that there was no prospect of Assange being handed over within a reasonable timeframe.

Swedish prosecutors said on April 11 they had received a formal request to reopen the rape investigation from the legal counsel representing the alleged victim.

The request was assigned to Deputy Chief Prosecutor Eva-Marie Persson, who said prosecutors would look into the matter and determine how to proceed.

The statute of limitation for rape is 10 years, a deadline which would be reached in the mid-August next year.

HOW COULD ASSANGE FIGHT EXTRADITION?

    “Everybody can challenge an extradition request on the basis it would be contrary to their human rights for them to be extradited,” Vamos said.

    “So Assange could argue that it would be impossible for him to have a fair trial in the U.S. given what happened to Chelsea Manning, given the notoriety, the publicity about his case that effectively he’s been tried in the media, public statements by U.S. officials (that) it’s impossible for him to have a fair trial.”

    He could also bring up potential conditions he would face in U.S. prisons.

    “He could argue the entire request is politically motivated that he is being prosecuted by reason of his political opinions or his political affiliations, that it’s revenge, it’s vindictive, it’s a vendetta,” Vamos said. “All of those arguments have legs.” 

    Sweden’s original request for Assange’s extradition went to Britain’s Supreme Court which backed the request.

    If a lower court orders his extradition, then he could again appeal the decision to London’s High Court and ultimately again to the Supreme Court if he can identify a challenge based on a point of law.

    For U.S. requests, the courts’ decision has to be ratified by the Home Secretary but Vamos said in effect this was now just a rubber-stamping exercise.

(Additional reporting by Niklas Pollard and Simon Johnson in STOCKHOLM and Mark Hosenball in WASHINGTON; editing by Robin Pomeroy)

Source: OANN

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Ecuador Hacked After Julian Assange Arrest

April 14, 2019

Two days after the Thursday arrest of Julian Assange at Ecuador’s London embassy, several government websites were hacked; including Ecuador’s official website, the Central Bank of Ecuador, the Ministry of the Interior and the Ecuadorian Assembly in the UK, according to Gateway Pundit‘s Cassandra Fairbanks, who was in London last week and documented the run-up to Assange’s arrest. 

Concurrent with the breach, a hacking group operating under the name “AL1NE3737” released a database containing the full names and passwords for what appear to be 728 Ecuadorian government employees.

Furthermore, Ecuador’s sites were hit with Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. According to DefCon Lab.

Among those involved in these attacks stand out from the groups / hacker DeathLaw , 5UB5, Cyb3r C0nven Security and Al1ne ( Pryzraky ).

DoS actions has consistently been against the Ecuadorian government targets, the country that gave Julian Assange to the UK police.” –DefCon Lab

Norm Pattis joins Alex Jones and Paul Joseph Watson to give his take on the recent arrest of Julian Assange.

…

The hacker Al1ne ( Pryzraky ) performed page defacements against and released a list of vulnerable targets related to the government of Ecuador

As noted by Fairbanks, “The cyber attack was reminiscent of 2010’s “Operation Avenge Assange” which was launched by the broader “Operation Payback” effort. The movement lead to hacktivists hitting companies such as PayPal, PostFinance, Mastercard, Visa, and others who had blocked services to WikiLeaks with a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack. This is when a website is flooded with fake traffic until it crashes and goes offline.”

Following Assange’s Thursday arrest, more than 70 MPs and peers signed a letter urging the UK home secretary to ensure that the WikiLeaks founder is extradited to Sweden if Swedish authorities request it.

Sweden is considering whether to open a previously-dropped investigation into allegations of rape and sexual assault against Assange.

The United States, meanwhile, wants to try Assange for the largest-ever leak of government secrets in 2010.  On Thursday, the Justice Department hit him with an indictment that claims the WikiLeaks founder helped former US Army intelligence analyst crack DoD password using Linux.

“The indictment alleges that in March 2010, Assange engaged in a conspiracy with Chelsea Manning, a former intelligence analyst in the U.S. Army, to assist Manning in cracking a password stored on U.S. Department of Defense computers connected to the Secret Internet Protocol Network (SIPRNet), a U.S. government network used for classified documents and communications,” reads a DOJ press release.

Materials Manning released included videos of various US airstrikes in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the “Iraq War Logs” and “Afghan War Diary.”

Assange faces five years in prison if convicted in the Manning case.

Source: InfoWars

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