PNN TONIGHT! ( and all this Week )
PNN - Listen Tonight and you will become an Eleven
Brook Hines - Flightless DNC cannibals eat Progressive Wings!
Dona Brazille to lead RULES INTERPRETATION COMMITTEE !
And in other headlines: Mr Fox to Guard Chicken Coop
Michelle Allen - from Food and Water Watch speaks about an UPCOMING EVENT!
W - goes Trumpster Diving
Drew Martin - asks about Lake Okeechobee’s 100 year decline
Dr Reins - discusses Algae Blooms and You!
Ken Hinkle - asks about Green Beach Futures?
Gwen Holden Barry - on Free Speech & Hate Speech the Moral Hazard!
Tonight 7pm East / 4pm Pacific
PNN
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/newmercurymedia/2017/10/22/pnn-listen-you-are-an-11
Exploring
canine mind with dog-friendly methods
A
total of 31 dogs of 13 different breeds attended the study. Prior the
experiment the dogs were clicker-trained to stay still in front of a
monitor without being commanded or restrained. Due to positive
training approach, dogs were highly motivated to perform the task.
The
study is part of the collaboration project of Faculties of Veterinary
Medicine and Behavioural Science, University of Helsinki and
Department of Neuroscience and Biomedical Engineering, Aalto
University. Previously, the research group of professor Outi Vainio
from the University of Helsinki has discovered that socially
informative objects in images, as personally familiar faces and
social interaction, attract dogs' attention.
The
research group of Professor Outi Vainio explores cognition and
emotion in dogs in the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine of the
University of Helsinki. The study has been supported inter alia by
the Academy of Finland and the Emil Aaltonen Foundation.
PNN
1. Dogs produce more facial expressions when humans are looking at them, according to new research from the University of Portsmouth.
Scientists at the University's Dog Cognition Centre are the first to find clear evidence dogs move their faces in direct response to human attention. Dogs don't respond with more facial expressions upon seeing tasty food, suggesting that dogs produce facial expressions to communicate and not just because they are excited.
Brow raising, which makes the eyes look bigger -- so-called puppy dog eyes -- was the dogs' most commonly used expression in this research.
Dog cognition expert Dr Juliane Kaminski led the study, which is published in Scientific Reports.
She said: "We can now be confident that the production of facial expressions made by dogs are dependent on the attention state of their audience and are not just a result of dogs being excited. In our study they produced far more expressions when someone was watching, but seeing food treats did not have the same effect.
"The findings appear to support evidence dogs are sensitive to humans' attention and that expressions are potentially active attempts to communicate, not simple emotional displays."
Most mammals produce facial expressions -- such expressions are considered an important part of an animal's behavioural repertoire -- but it has long been assumed that animal facial expressions, including some human facial expressions, are involuntary and dependent on an individual's emotional state rather than being flexible responses to the audience
Dr Kaminski said it's possible dogs' facial expressions have changed as part of the process of becoming domesticated.
The researchers studied 24 dogs of various breeds, aged one to 12. All were family pets. Each dog was tied by a lead a metre away from a person, and the dogs' faces were filmed throughout a range of exchanges, from the person being oriented towards the dog, to being distracted and with her body turned away from the dog.
The dogs' facial expressions were measured using DogFACS, an anatomically based coding system which gives a reliable and standardized measurement of facial changes linked to underlying muscle movement.
Co-author and facial expression expert Professor Bridget Waller said "Dog FACES captures movements from all the different muscles in the canine face, many of which are capable of producing very subtle and brief facial movements.
"FACS systems were originally developed for humans, but have since been modified for use with other animals such as primates and dogs."
Dr Kaminski said: "Domestic dogs have a unique history -- they have lived alongside humans for 30,000 years and during that time selection pressures seem to have acted on dogs' ability to communicate with us.
"We knew domestic dogs paid attention to how attentive a human is -- in a previous study we found, for example, that dogs stole food more often when the human's eyes were closed or they had their back turned. In another study, we found dogs follow the gaze of a human if the human first establishes eye contact with the dog, so the dog knows the gaze-shift is directed at them.
"This study moves forward what we understand about dog cognition. We now know dogs make more facial expressions when the human is paying attention."
It is impossible yet to say whether dogs' behaviour in this and other studies is evidence dogs have flexible understanding of another individual's perspective -- that they truly understand another individual's mental state -- or if their behaviour is hardwired, or even a learned response to seeing the face or eyes of another individual.
Puppy dog eyes is a facial expression which, in humans, closely resembles sadness. This potentially makes humans more empathetic towards the dog who uses the expression, or because it makes the dog's eyes appear bigger and more infant-like -- potentially tapping into humans' preference for child-like characteristics. Regardless of the mechanism, humans are particularly responsive to that expression in dogs.
Previous research has shown some apes can also modify their facial expressions depending on their audience, but until now, dogs' abilities to do use facial expression to communicate with humans hadn't been systematically examined.
2. How dogs see your emotions:
Dogs view facial expressions differently
Dogs view facial expressions differently
A recent study from the University of Helsinki shows that the social gazing behavior of domestic dogs resembles that of humans: dogs view facial expressions systematically, preferring eyes. In addition, the facial expression alters their viewing behavior, especially in the face of threat. The study was recently published in the science journal PLOS ONE.
Threatening faces evoke unique responses in dogs
The study utilized eye gaze tracking to demonstrate how dogs view the emotional expressions of dog and human faces. Dogs looked first at the eye region and generally examined eyes longer than nose or mouth areas. Species-specific characteristics of certain expressions attracted their attention, for example the mouths of threatening dogs. However, dogs appeared to base their perception of facial expressions on the whole face.
Threatening faces evoked attentional bias, which may be based on an evolutionary adaptive mechanism: the sensitivity to detect and avoid threats represents a survival advantage. Interestingly, dogs' viewing behavior was dependent on the depicted species: threatening conspecifics' faces evoked longer looking but threatening human faces instead an avoidance response. Threatening signals carrying different biological validity are most likely processed via distinctive neurocognitive pathways.
"The tolerant behavior strategy of dogs toward humans may partially explain the results. Domestication may have equipped dogs with a sensitivity to detect the threat signals of humans and respond them with pronounced appeasement signals," says researcher Sanni Somppi from the University of Helsinki.
Results provide support for Darwin's views of animal emotions
This is the first evidence of emotion-related gaze patterns in non-primates. Already 150 years ago Charles Darwin proposed that the analogies in the form and function of human and non-human animal emotional expressions suggest shared evolutionary roots. Recent findings provide modern scientific support for Darwin's old argument.
3,
USA Liberty Act Won’t Fix What’s Most Broken with NSA Internet
Surveillance
legal
linchpin for the National Security Agency’s vast Internet
surveillance program is scheduled to disappear in under 90 days.
Section 702 of FISA—enacted in 2008 with little public awareness
about the scope and power of the NSA’s surveillance of the
Internet—supposedly directs the NSA’s powerful surveillance
apparatus toward legitimate foreign intelligence targets overseas.
Instead, the surveillance has been turned back on us. Despite
repeated inquiries from Congress, the NSA has yet to publicly
disclose how many Americans are impacted by this surveillance.
With
the law’s sunset looming, Congress is taking up the issue. The
USA Liberty Act, introduced by Representatives Goodlatte (R-Va.),
John Conyers (D-Mich.), Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), and others, may
offer a chance to address some of the worst abuses of NSA Internet
surveillance even as it reauthorizes some components of the
surveillance for another six years.
But
the first draft of the bill falls short.
The
bill doesn’t effectively end the practice of “backdoor
searching,” when government agents—including domestic law
enforcement not working on issues of national security—search
through the NSA-gathered communications of Americans without any form
of warrant from a judge. It doesn’t institute adequate transparency
and oversight measures, and it doesn’t deal with misuse of the
state secrets privilege, which has been invoked to stave off lawsuits
against mass surveillance.
Perhaps
most importantly, the bill won’t curtail the NSA’s practices of
collecting data on innocent people.
The
bill does make significant changes to how and when agents can search
through data collected under 702. It also institutes new reporting
requirements, new defaults around data deletion, and new guidance for
amicus engagement with the FISA Court. But even these provisions
do not go far enough.
Congress
has an opportunity and a responsibility to rein in NSA surveillance
abuses. This is the first time, since 2013 reporting by the
Washington Post and the Guardian changed the worldwide perception of
digital spying, that Congress must vote on whether to reauthorize
Section 702. Before this debate moves ahead, leaders in the House
Judiciary Committee should fix the shortcomings in this bill.
The
Problems of 702
Section
702 is supposed to give the NSA authority to engage in foreign
intelligence collection. The NSA is only allowed to target
non-Americans located outside U.S. borders. This legal authority has
been the basis for two controversial data collection programs:
Upstream
surveillance: data collection that siphons off copies of digital
communications directly from the “Internet backbone,” the
high-capacity fiber-optic cables run by telecommunications companies
like AT&T that transmit the majority of American digital
communications.
PRISM
(also known as “downstream surveillance”): data collection
gathered from the servers of major Internet service providers, such
as Google, Facebook, and Apple.
These
programs flourished under President Bush and President Obama. As the
Washington Post reported, their NSA director took an expansive view
on data collection:
“Rather
than look for a single needle in the haystack, his approach was,
‘Let’s collect the whole haystack,’ ” said one former
senior U.S. intelligence official who tracked the plan’s
implementation. “Collect it all, tag it, store it. . . . And
whatever it is you want, you go searching for it.”
Unfortunately,
the Liberty Act won’t address most of these fundamental problems.
Here’s an analysis of some of the key provisions in the bill,
and we’ll have future articles exploring specific topics in more
detail.
Leaving
the Backdoor Ajar
Agents
for the NSA, CIA, and FBI have long rifled through the communications
collected under Section 702, which include American communications,
as well as the communications of foreigners who have no connection to
crime or national security threats. With no approval from a judge,
they’re able to search this database of communications using a
range of personal identifiers, then review the contents of
communications uncovered in those searches. Government agents can
then use these results to build a case against someone, or they may
simply review it without prosecution.
Ordinarily,
if the FBI wants to intercept or collect a U.S. person’s
communications, they must first get permission from a judge. But as a
result of Section 702, the FBI today reviews NSA-collected
communications of U.S. persons without permission from a judge.
Privacy advocates call this the “backdoor search loophole.”
This
practice violates the Fourth Amendment right to privacy against
unreasonable searches and seizures. And it can be difficult to prove
because government agents may not disclose when they use evidence
from the 702 database in prosecutions or for any other purposes.
The
first draft of the Liberty Act doesn’t resolve the problem. It
still allows government agents—including domestic law enforcement
agents—to query the 702 database, including using identifiers
associated with American citizens, such as the email address of an
American. The main improvement is that when an agent conducts a query
looking for evidence of a crime, she must obtain a probable cause
warrant from a judge to access the results.
But
the warrant requirement is limited due to a number of troubling
carve-outs. First, this court oversight requirement won’t be
triggered except for those searches conducted to find evidence of a
crime. No other searches for any other purposes will require court
oversight, including when spy agencies search for foreign
intelligence, and when law enforcement agencies explore whether a
crime occurred at all.
Metadata—how
many communications are sent, to whom, at what times—won’t
require court oversight at all. In fact, the Liberty Act
doesn’t include the reforms to metadata queries the House had
previously passed (which unfortunately did not pass the Senate). In
the Massie-Lofgren Amendment, which passed the House twice, agents
who conducted queries for metadata would be required to show the
metadata was relevant to an investigation. That relevance standard is
not in the Liberty Act.
Finally,
some may interpret vague language in the bill as putting
responsibility for assessing probable cause in the hands of the
Attorney General, the main governmental prosecutor, rather than in
the hands of the FISA Court. This language should be clarified to
ensure the judge’s role in approving the applications is the same
as in other FISA proceedings.
Targeting
Procedures
The
bill will require the NSA to exercise “due diligence in determining
whether a person targeted is a non-United States person reasonably
believed to be located outside of the United States,” and requires
agents to consider the “totality of the circumstances” when
making that evaluation.
At
face value, this sounds promising. We do want the NSA to exercise due
diligence when evaluating targets of surveillance. However, this
provision is more of a fig leaf than a real fix, because even if
targeting is improved, it won’t resolve the problem of Americans’
communications being collected. Right now, countless Americans are
surveilled through so-called “incidental collection.” This means
that while the official target was a non-American overseas, American
communications are swept up as well. Even though Americans were never
the intended “target,” their emails, chats, and VOIP calls end up
in a database accessible to the NSA, FBI, and others. Tightening up
targeting won’t address this problem.
In
addition, the bill doesn’t change the NSA’s practice of
intercepting communications of countless innocent foreigners outside
the United States. People outside our national borders are not
criminals by default and should not be treated as if they were. If
the United States wants to uphold our obligations to human rights
under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, we
must respect the basic privacy and dignity of citizens of other
countries. That means not vacuuming up as many communications as
possible for all foreigners overseas. This is an especially pressing
issue now, as the European Union decides whether to limit how
European data can be held by American companies. The recently enacted
Privacy Shield falls short of the privacy commitments enshrined in
European law.
Retention
of Communications
After
the NSA uses Section 702 to collect vast quantities of
communications, the NSA stores these records for years to come. Every
day the NSA holds these sensitive records is a day they can be
misused by rogue government employees or deployed by agency
leadership in new ways as part of inevitable “mission creep.”
That’s why privacy advocates call for legislation that would
require the NSA to purge these Section 702 communications by a fixed
deadline, except for specific communications reasonably determined by
analysts to have intelligence or law enforcement value.
Unfortunately,
the Liberty Act does not solve this problem. Rather, it would only
require that if the NSA determines that a communication lacks foreign
intelligence value, then the NSA must purge it within 90 days.
However, it’s unclear how often the NSA reviews its collected data
to assess its foreign intelligence value. Since the bill requires no
review, this provision may have little practical effect.
Whistleblowers
Left Unprotected
Whistleblowers
like Thomas Drake, Mark Klein, Bill Binney, and Edward Snowden were
fundamental to the public’s understanding of NSA surveillance
abuses. But they risked their careers and often their freedom in the
process. The United States has a pressing need to improve protections
for whistleblowers acting in the public good—including federal
contractors who may be witness to wrongdoing.
The
Liberty Act includes a section that would extend certain
whistleblower protections to federal contractors. However, these
protections only apply to “lawful disclosure” to a handful of
government officers, such as the Director of National Intelligence.
It does not provide any protection when a whistleblower speaks to the
media or to advocacy organizations such as EFF.
Furthermore,
the bill only protects whistleblowers against “personnel action,”
so whistleblowers could still face criminal prosecution. The
Espionage Act—a draconian law from 1917 with penalties including
life in prison or the death penalty—has become the tool de jour to
intimidate and punish public-interest whistleblowers. The Liberty Act
will provide whistleblowers no protection against prosecution under
the Espionage Act.
To
make matters worse, the bill also creates new penalties for the
unauthorized removal or retention of classified documents, including
when done negligently. This will likely be another tool used to go
after whistleblowers. This section of the bill must be significantly
narrowed or cut.
Ending
“About” Collection
The
National Security Agency announced in April the end of a
controversial form of spying known colloquially as “about
surveillance.” After collecting data directly from the backbone of
the Internet and doing a rough filter, government agents use key
selector terms about targeted persons to search through this massive
trove of data. In the past, these searches would not merely search
the address lines (the to and from section of the communications) but
would directly search the full contents of the communications, so
that any mention of a selector in the body of the email would be
returned in the results. Thus, communications of people who were not
surveillance targets, and were not communicating with surveillance
targets, were included in the results.
The
NSA was unable to find a way to conduct this type of “about”
searching while adhering to restrictions imposed by the FISA Court,
and thus the agency discontinued the practice in April. However, this
is currently a voluntary policy, and the agency could begin again. In
fact, NSA Director Mike Rogers testified before Congress in June that
he might recommend that Congress reinstitute the program in the
future.
The
Liberty Act codifies the end of “about surveillance.” It provides
that the NSA must limit its targeting “to communications to or from
the targeted person.” While the NSA’s upstream program will still
collect the communications passing through the Internet backbone,
including the communications of vast numbers of innocent U.S. and
foreign citizens, the end of “about” surveillance will reduce the
number of communications stored in the 702 database.
Other
Positive Changes in the Bill
Critically,
unlike some other pending reauthorization proposals, the Liberty Act
will maintain Section 702’s “sunset,” ensuring that Congress
must review, debate, and vote on this issue again in six years.
Permanent reauthorization, which we strongly oppose, would prevent
this Congressional check on executive overreach.
The
Liberty Act makes some other modest improvements to the NSA’s
surveillance practices. It gives the Privacy and Civil Liberties
Oversight Board the ability to function without an appointed chair,
which has been a persistent problem with this accountability body. It
also puts in place new reporting requirements.
The
bill would require the FISA Court to appoint an amicus curiae to
assist it in reviewing the annual “certification” from the
Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence regarding
the NSA’s Section 702 targeting and minimization procedures. This
would be a helpful check on this currently one-sided process.
However, the FISA Court could dispense with this check whenever it
found the amicus appointment “not appropriate” – a nebulous
test that could neuter this new safeguard.
A
Few More Missing Pieces
Many
vital fixes to the worst surveillance abuses of the NSA are missing
from this bill.
Congress
should clear a pathway for individuals to contest privacy abuses by
the NSA. This includes ensuring that Americans whose data may have
been “incidentally” collected by the NSA under Section 702 have
legal standing to go to court to challenge this violation of their
constitutional rights. It also requires an overhaul of the
controversial state secrets privilege, a common law doctrine that
government agencies have invoked to dismiss, or refuse to provide
evidence in, cases challenging mass surveillance.
Congress
should crack down on “incidental collection,” and ensure the
communications of innocent Americans are not collected in the first
place.
Finally,
we need to empower the FISA court to review and approve the targets
of NSA surveillance. Currently, the NSA receives only general
guidelines from the FISA Court, with no individual review of specific
targets and selector terms. This means the NSA has little obligation
to defend its choice of targets, resulting in little recourse when
agents are over-inclusive of inappropriate targets.
Next
steps for the Judiciary Committee
Congress
still has time to get this right. This bill hasn’t gone to markup
yet, and the Judiciary Committee is likely to amend the bill before
passing it to the floor. We urge the Judiciary Committee members to
make changes to the bill to address these shortcomings.
As
public awareness of NSA surveillance practices has grown, so too has
public outrage. That outrage is the fuel for meaningful change. We
passed one bill to begin reining in surveillance abuses in 2015, and
from that small victory springs the political will for the next, more
powerful reform. Join EFF in calling on Congress to rein in these
surveillance abuses, and defend privacy for Internet users of today
and in the years to come.
PANAMA PAPERS JOURNALIST - Murdered
Daphne Caruana Galizia, an investigative journalist from Malta who was known for her reporting on governmental corruption, was killed in an explosion near her home Monday, officials say.
Galizia, who had just published a story on her blog, was driving away from the house in a rented Peugeot 108 around 3 p.m. when the car went up in flames, according to local media reports.
The explosion sent detritus far into the surrounding fields and badly burned the body. Photos showed the Peugeot’s mangled shell in a field, dozens of yards from the blast site. Witnesses described a small explosion followed seconds later by a larger one as the burning car skidded down the road and into the field.
“I am never going to forget, running around the inferno in the field, trying to figure out a way to open the door, the horn of the car still blaring, screaming at two policemen who turned up with a single fire extinguisher to use it,” Galizia's son, Matthew, wrote on Facebook the morning after his mother's death. “They stared at me. 'I’m sorry, there is nothing we can do', one of them said. I looked down and there were my mother’s body parts all around me. I realised they were right, it was hopeless.”
Daphne Caruana Galizia, a blogger whose investigations focused on corruption, was described as a ‘one-woman WikiLeaks’
The journalist who led the Panama Papers investigation into corruption in Malta was killed on Monday in a car bomb near her home.
Daphne Caruana Galizia died on Monday afternoon when her car, a Peugeot 108, was destroyed by a powerful explosive device which blew the vehicle into several pieces and threw the debris into a nearby field.
Murdered Panama Papers journalist’s son attacks Malta’s ‘crooks’
Read more
A blogger whose posts often attracted more readers than the combined circulation of the country’s newspapers, Caruana Galizia was recently described by the Politico website as a “one-woman WikiLeaks”. Her blogs were a thorn in the side of both the establishment and underworld figures that hold sway in Europe’s smallest member state.
Her most recent revelations pointed the finger at Malta’s prime minister, Joseph Muscat, and two of his closest aides, connecting offshore companies linked to the three men with the sale of Maltese passports and payments from the government of Azerbaijan.
No group or individual has come forward to claim responsibility for the attack.
Malta’s president, Marie-Louise Coleiro Preca, called for calm. “In these moments, when the country is shocked by such a vicious attack, I call on everyone to measure their words, to not pass judgment and to show solidarity,” she said.
After a fraught general election this summer, commentators had been fearing a return to the political violence that scarred Malta during the 1980s.
In a statement, Muscat condemned the “barbaric attack”, saying he had asked police to reach out to other countries’ security services for help identifying the perpetrators.
“Everyone knows Ms Caruana Galizia was a harsh critic of mine,” said Muscat at a hastily convened press conference, “both politically and personally, but nobody can justify this barbaric act in any way”.
Muscat announced later in parliament that FBI officers were on their way to Malta to assist with the investigation, following his request for outside help from the US government.
The Nationalist party leader, Adrian Delia – himself the subject of negative stories by Caruana Galizia – claimed the killing was linked to her reporting. “A political murder took place today,” Delia said in a statement. “What happened today is not an ordinary killing. It is a consequence of the total collapse of the rule of law which has been going on for the past four years.”
According to local media reports, Caruana Galizia filed a police report 15 days ago to say that she had been receiving death threats.
The journalist posted her final blog on her Running Commentary website at 2.35pm on Monday, and the explosion, which occurred near her home, was reported to police just after 3pm. Officers said her body had not yet been identified. According to sources, one of her sons heard the blast from their home and rushed out to the scene.
Caruana Galizia, who claimed to have no political affiliations, set her sights on a wide range of targets, from banks facilitating money laundering to links between Malta’s online gaming industry and the Mafia.
What are the Panama Papers? A guide to history's biggest data leak
What is Mossack Fonseca, how big is it, and who uses offshore firms? Key questions about one of the biggest ever data leaks
Read more
Over the last two years, her reporting had largely focused on revelations from the Panama Papers, a cache of 11.5m documents leaked from the internal database of the world’s fourth largest offshore law firm, Mossack Fonseca.
The data was obtained by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and shared with media partners around the world, including the Guardian, by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) in Washington.
Caruana Galizia’s son, Matthew Caruana Galizia, is a journalist and programmer who works for the ICIJ.
Her family have filed a court application demanding a change of inquiring magistrate. Investigations into the case are being led by Consuelo Scerri Herrera, the magistrate who was on duty at the time. But Herrera had come under criticism by Galizia in her blog. The family’s petition states that they “have no trust” in Scerri Herrera and “do not believe that she can conduct a magisterial inquiry through the seriousness and impartiality that is needed in the search for truth”.
Advertisement
Earlier this year, during Malta’s presidency of the European Union, her revelations caused major concern in Brussels.
MEPs openly called for Muscat’s departure amid a growing scandal involving his wife, a Panamanian shell company and alleged payments from the president of Azerbaijan’s daughter.
Muscat, who has been premier since 2013, went to the polls a year early after his wife was implicated in the scandal. He has always denied any wrongdoing and promised to quit if any evidence emerges of his family having secret offshore bank accounts used to stash kickbacks – as Caruana Galizia had alleged.
Responding to news of the attack, the German MEP Sven Giegold, a leading figure in the parliament’s Panama Papers inquiry, said he was “shocked and saddened”.
“It is too early to know the cause of the explosion but we expect to see a thorough investigation,” said Giegold. “Such incidents bring to mind Putin’s Russia, not the European Union. There can be absolutely no tolerance for violence against the press and violations of the freedom of expression in the European Union.”
Opposition politicians claim rule of law has been under threat since Muscat returned Malta’s Labour party to power in 2013 following a long period in opposition. Four police commissioners have resigned under his leadership. The fifth, Lawrence Cutajar, took up his post in August 2016.
There have been several car bomb killings in Malta during recent years. While the perpetrators have not been identified, the violence is thought to have been linked to disputes between criminal gangs. None are thought to have been politically motivated.
Caruana Galizia was 53 and leaves a husband and three sons.
Former Opposition leader Simon Busuttil testified in court this morning, as did the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, that crook Keith Schembri, in the case he himself brought against Dr Busuttil for libel damages.
Mr Schembri is claiming that he is not corrupt, despite moving to set up a secret company in Panama along with favourite minister Konrad Mizzi and Mr Egrant just days after Labour won the general election in 2013, sheltering it in a top-secret trust in New Zealand, then hunting round the world for a shady bank that would take them as clients.
(In the end they solved the problem by setting up a shady bank in Malta, hiding in plain sight.)
His government salary is just peanuts to him, Mr Schembri said, because he has retained his companies and his shares and that is where he makes his money. But the way he is using his government influence to benefit his private business in Malta is entirely a separate corruption/trading in influence issue and is not an argument in his defence.
He also said that he was unable to reply to the corruption accusations in the past two years – but it hasn’t been two years – because of a “medical condition”. Would this be the medical condition that they claimed he didn’t have, when the Prime Minister’s chief of staff disappeared for months, I wondered why, found out, and then reported on it?
There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate.
https://daphnecaruanagalizia.com/2017/10/crook-schembri-court-today-pleading-not-crook/
https://daphnecaruanagalizia.com/
PANAMA PAPERS JOURNALIST - Murdered
Daphne Caruana Galizia, an investigative journalist from Malta who was known for her reporting on governmental corruption, was killed in an explosion near her home Monday, officials say.
Galizia, who had just published a story on her blog, was driving away from the house in a rented Peugeot 108 around 3 p.m. when the car went up in flames, according to local media reports.
The explosion sent detritus far into the surrounding fields and badly burned the body. Photos showed the Peugeot’s mangled shell in a field, dozens of yards from the blast site. Witnesses described a small explosion followed seconds later by a larger one as the burning car skidded down the road and into the field.
“I am never going to forget, running around the inferno in the field, trying to figure out a way to open the door, the horn of the car still blaring, screaming at two policemen who turned up with a single fire extinguisher to use it,” Galizia's son, Matthew, wrote on Facebook the morning after his mother's death. “They stared at me. 'I’m sorry, there is nothing we can do', one of them said. I looked down and there were my mother’s body parts all around me. I realised they were right, it was hopeless.”
Daphne Caruana Galizia, a blogger whose investigations focused on corruption, was described as a ‘one-woman WikiLeaks’
The journalist who led the Panama Papers investigation into corruption in Malta was killed on Monday in a car bomb near her home.
Daphne Caruana Galizia died on Monday afternoon when her car, a Peugeot 108, was destroyed by a powerful explosive device which blew the vehicle into several pieces and threw the debris into a nearby field.
Murdered Panama Papers journalist’s son attacks Malta’s ‘crooks’
Read more
A blogger whose posts often attracted more readers than the combined circulation of the country’s newspapers, Caruana Galizia was recently described by the Politico website as a “one-woman WikiLeaks”. Her blogs were a thorn in the side of both the establishment and underworld figures that hold sway in Europe’s smallest member state.
Her most recent revelations pointed the finger at Malta’s prime minister, Joseph Muscat, and two of his closest aides, connecting offshore companies linked to the three men with the sale of Maltese passports and payments from the government of Azerbaijan.
No group or individual has come forward to claim responsibility for the attack.
Malta’s president, Marie-Louise Coleiro Preca, called for calm. “In these moments, when the country is shocked by such a vicious attack, I call on everyone to measure their words, to not pass judgment and to show solidarity,” she said.
After a fraught general election this summer, commentators had been fearing a return to the political violence that scarred Malta during the 1980s.
In a statement, Muscat condemned the “barbaric attack”, saying he had asked police to reach out to other countries’ security services for help identifying the perpetrators.
“Everyone knows Ms Caruana Galizia was a harsh critic of mine,” said Muscat at a hastily convened press conference, “both politically and personally, but nobody can justify this barbaric act in any way”.
Muscat announced later in parliament that FBI officers were on their way to Malta to assist with the investigation, following his request for outside help from the US government.
The Nationalist party leader, Adrian Delia – himself the subject of negative stories by Caruana Galizia – claimed the killing was linked to her reporting. “A political murder took place today,” Delia said in a statement. “What happened today is not an ordinary killing. It is a consequence of the total collapse of the rule of law which has been going on for the past four years.”
According to local media reports, Caruana Galizia filed a police report 15 days ago to say that she had been receiving death threats.
The journalist posted her final blog on her Running Commentary website at 2.35pm on Monday, and the explosion, which occurred near her home, was reported to police just after 3pm. Officers said her body had not yet been identified. According to sources, one of her sons heard the blast from their home and rushed out to the scene.
Caruana Galizia, who claimed to have no political affiliations, set her sights on a wide range of targets, from banks facilitating money laundering to links between Malta’s online gaming industry and the Mafia.
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Over the last two years, her reporting had largely focused on revelations from the Panama Papers, a cache of 11.5m documents leaked from the internal database of the world’s fourth largest offshore law firm, Mossack Fonseca.
The data was obtained by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and shared with media partners around the world, including the Guardian, by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) in Washington.
Caruana Galizia’s son, Matthew Caruana Galizia, is a journalist and programmer who works for the ICIJ.
Her family have filed a court application demanding a change of inquiring magistrate. Investigations into the case are being led by Consuelo Scerri Herrera, the magistrate who was on duty at the time. But Herrera had come under criticism by Galizia in her blog. The family’s petition states that they “have no trust” in Scerri Herrera and “do not believe that she can conduct a magisterial inquiry through the seriousness and impartiality that is needed in the search for truth”.
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Earlier this year, during Malta’s presidency of the European Union, her revelations caused major concern in Brussels.
MEPs openly called for Muscat’s departure amid a growing scandal involving his wife, a Panamanian shell company and alleged payments from the president of Azerbaijan’s daughter.
Muscat, who has been premier since 2013, went to the polls a year early after his wife was implicated in the scandal. He has always denied any wrongdoing and promised to quit if any evidence emerges of his family having secret offshore bank accounts used to stash kickbacks – as Caruana Galizia had alleged.
Responding to news of the attack, the German MEP Sven Giegold, a leading figure in the parliament’s Panama Papers inquiry, said he was “shocked and saddened”.
“It is too early to know the cause of the explosion but we expect to see a thorough investigation,” said Giegold. “Such incidents bring to mind Putin’s Russia, not the European Union. There can be absolutely no tolerance for violence against the press and violations of the freedom of expression in the European Union.”
Opposition politicians claim rule of law has been under threat since Muscat returned Malta’s Labour party to power in 2013 following a long period in opposition. Four police commissioners have resigned under his leadership. The fifth, Lawrence Cutajar, took up his post in August 2016.
There have been several car bomb killings in Malta during recent years. While the perpetrators have not been identified, the violence is thought to have been linked to disputes between criminal gangs. None are thought to have been politically motivated.
Caruana Galizia was 53 and leaves a husband and three sons.
Former Opposition leader Simon Busuttil testified in court this morning, as did the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, that crook Keith Schembri, in the case he himself brought against Dr Busuttil for libel damages.
Mr Schembri is claiming that he is not corrupt, despite moving to set up a secret company in Panama along with favourite minister Konrad Mizzi and Mr Egrant just days after Labour won the general election in 2013, sheltering it in a top-secret trust in New Zealand, then hunting round the world for a shady bank that would take them as clients.
(In the end they solved the problem by setting up a shady bank in Malta, hiding in plain sight.)
His government salary is just peanuts to him, Mr Schembri said, because he has retained his companies and his shares and that is where he makes his money. But the way he is using his government influence to benefit his private business in Malta is entirely a separate corruption/trading in influence issue and is not an argument in his defence.
He also said that he was unable to reply to the corruption accusations in the past two years – but it hasn’t been two years – because of a “medical condition”. Would this be the medical condition that they claimed he didn’t have, when the Prime Minister’s chief of staff disappeared for months, I wondered why, found out, and then reported on it?
There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate.
https://daphnecaruanagalizia.com/2017/10/crook-schembri-court-today-pleading-not-crook/
https://daphnecaruanagalizia.com/