Tag: journalists

Journalist plugs in unknown USB drive mailed to him—it exploded in his face

It’s no secret that USB flash drives, as small and unremarkable as they may look, can be turned into agents of chaos. Over the years, we’ve seen them used to infiltrate an Iranian nuclear facility, infect critical control systems in US power plants, morph into programmable, undetectable attack platforms, and destroy attached computers with a surprise 220-volt electrical surge. Although these are just a few examples, they should be enough to preclude one from inserting a mysterious, unsolicited USB drive mailed to them into a computer. Unfortunately, one Ecuadorian journalist didn’t get the memos.

As reported by the Agence France-Presse (via CBS News) on Tuesday, five Ecuadorian journalists have received USB drives in the mail from Quinsaloma. Each of the USB sticks was meant to explode when activated.

Upon receiving the drive, Lenin Artieda of the Ecuavisa TV station in Guayaquil inserted it into his computer, at which point it exploded. According to a police official who spoke with AFP, the journalist suffered mild hand and face injuries, and no one else was harmed.

According to police official Xavier Chango, the flash drive that went off had a 5-volt explosive charge and is thought to have used RDX. Also known as T4, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (PDF), militaries, including the US’s, use RDX, which “can be used alone as a base charge for detonators or mixed with other explosives, such as TNT.” Chango said it comes in capsules measuring about 1 cm, but only half of it was activated in the drive that Artieda plugged in, which likely saved him some harm.

On Monday, Fundamedios, an Ecuadorian nonprofit focused on media rights, put out a statement on the incidents, which saw letters accompanied by USB-stick bombs sent to two more journalists in Guayaquil and two journalists in Ecuador’s capital.

Fundamedios said Álvaro Rosero, who works at the EXA FM radio station, also received an envelope with a flash drive on March 15. He gave it to a producer, who used a cable with an adapter to connect it to a computer. The radio station got lucky, though, as the flash drive didn’t explode. Police determined that the drive featured explosives but believe it didn’t explode because the adapter the producer used didn’t have enough juice to activate it, Fundamedios said.

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BUSTED: Rolling Stone Editor-in-chief spiked reporting on friend getting arrested for child porn

A new report has revealed that the man who edited Rolling Stone’s initial story on the FBI raid of ABC producer James Gordon Meek, who was later revealed to have been charged with possessing child pornography, removed all references to the charge from the report, and was an associate of the accused producer.

On October 18, former Rolling Stone journalist Tatiana Siegel broke the news that the FBI had raided Meek’s home in April and that the Emmy award-winning ABC producer had disappeared from the public eye.

According to a new report from NPR, Rolling Stone Editor-in-Chief Noah Shachtman had removed from her piece key information from Siegel’s sources that Meek had been raided by the FBI as part of a child pornography federal investigation.

Shachtman, the outlet reported, considered Meek “a peer with whom he was friendly,” a concern that Siegel had brought up to corporate officials. Shachtman reportedly told colleagues that the two travel in the same professional circles. A 2021 tweet, from before Shachtman taking the helm at Rolling Stone, Meek was seen on Twitter suggesting a Niger band for Shachtman to listen to.

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The Purge: Wikipedia Slanders Pulitzer Prize Winner Seymour Hersh, Giving Kremlin a Field Day

Mainstream media desperately tried to memory-hole the biggest bombshell report of the year, Seymour Hersh’s Nord Stream revelations, attacking the Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist instead. It was a field day for the Kremlin, which delighted in pointing out what ridiculous propaganda tools the mainstream media have become.

Instead of trying to verify or question Hersh’s minutely researched report based on an inside source familiar with the alleged CIA attack on the Nord Stream pipeline Sept. 26, 2022, the floundering Fake News instead took to attacking the 85-year-old prize-winning former hero of the left, who exposed the My Lai massacre, Watergate and Abu Ghraib.

Leading the way for the character assassination campaign, Reuters labeled Hersh “no stranger to controversy”, as if that were a bad thing for an investigative journalist. “The White House dismissed Hersh’s report, which relied on a single source to support its claim about the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines, as ‘utterly false and complete fiction.’ Reuters was unable to corroborate Hersh’s self-published article”, the WEF and Pfizer-tied “Reuters” wrote.

It was not clear what Reuters had done to try and “corroborate” the story.

No one at Reuters seems to have spoken to the Russian, German, Swedish or Danish investigators about the charges, for example.

TASS did, and were informed the Swedish Prosecutor’s Office “is unable to tell you anything about that because of confidentiality.” The Copenhagen Police also had “no further comment” on the bombshell report, which is not exactly a denial.

Speaking in the German Parliament on Wednesday, Green “Climate and Economics Minister” Robert Habeck said any information on the Nord Stream blast is “classified” and “part of a classified investigation. Therefore this is not a topic for parliamentary Question Time.” It was also far from a denial of Hersh’s claims.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said Hersh’s report contains “nothing unexpected”: “We assumed the involvement of the US and at least some of Washington’s NATO allies in this outrageous crime, which was an armed attack on a key element of critical infrastructure.”

In classic Stalinist style, Hersh’s Wikipedia entry was retconned to label Hersh a “conspiracy theorist”.

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ABC Journalist Who Went Missing Last April After FBI Seized Classified Documents From His Laptop Arrested for Transporting Child Pornography

A former ABC journalist who went missing after the FBI raided his home and seized his laptop has been arrested for transporting child pornography.

As reported last year, Emmy-winning investigative journalist James Meek went missing after the FBI raided his Virginia home and seized classified information from his laptop in April 2022.

James Gordon Meek, 52, went missing after the feds raided his Arlington penthouse apartment, the Rolling Stone reported.

Meek produced the Hulu documentary “3212 Unredacted” which detailed the 2017 Pentagon coverup of the deaths of US special forces in Niger.

The “lightning raid” was conducted after a search warrant was approved by a federal magistrate judge in the Virginia Eastern District Court, Rolling Stone reported.

“If agents got hold of Meek’s records, the move would have had to have been approved by US Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco.” The New York Post reported.

Meek’s attorneys lashed out at the US government for leaking information to Rolling Stone.

“The allegations in your inquiry are troubling for a different reason: They appear to come from a source inside the government,” Meek’s attorney Eugene Gorokhov told Rolling Stone. “It is highly inappropriate, and illegal, for individuals in the government to leak information about an ongoing investigation.”

“We hope that the DOJ promptly investigates the source of this leak.”

Meek’s last public statement was in the form of a tweet on April 27, 2022 – His colleagues at ABC said Meek “fell off the face of the earth.”

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Ukrainian Diplomat Uses Twitter to Celebrate the Shooting of Female Russian Journalist

A Ukrainian diplomat is using Twitter to celebrate the shooting of a female Russian journalist while she covered the ongoing war in Ukraine, claiming in his Tweet that the journalist got “what she deserved” and “better piss off.” Attacks on the press have been part and parcel of Ukraine’s military strategy, and the Zelensky government has become known for imprisoning even Ukrainian journalists if they run afoul of the government’s approved talking points.

“Brave Russian propagandist in Ukraine gets what she & all [Russian] invaders deserve,” wrote Ukrainian diplomat Andrij Melnyk in his tweet. “So you just better piss off,” he added, attaching a video that shows a female Russian journalist, providing on-the-ground coverage in Ukraine and being shot by Ukrainian forces.

In the video, the Russian journalist can be seen peering out from behind a door and providing a narrative to viewers, in her native language, before a sudden impact jerks her back and forces her to drop her camera. Screaming ensues and she is dragged back through the doorway she was in the middle of by her male companion. It’s unclear if he’s a soldier or a fellow journalist, embedded with Russian ground forces.

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Number Of Imprisoned Journalists Worldwide Hits New Record

The number of journalists imprisoned worldwide has hit a new record at 533, according to an annual report by press fredom watchdog, Reporters Without Borders.

The total number is up from 2021, when 488 journalists were imprisoned, according to the RSF’s Annual Press Freedom Review published last week.

“More than a quarter of them were imprisoned during the year,” according to the Paris-based watchdog which has kept records on imprisoned reporters since 1995.

More than half of those jailed are in five countries: China (110), Myanmar (62), Iran (47) Vietnam (39) and Belarus (31) – with 32 of the 47 in Iran having been arrested since protests broke out in September over the death of Masha Amini, a 22-year-old woman who died in police custody while breaching the country’s strict dress code.

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Massive Omnibus Bill Includes Funding For Monuments To DC Journalists

Congress has an absolutely horrible approval rating and so does the media. This story is a perfect explanation of why those two things are true.

The massive omnibus bill currently making its way through congress includes funding for a monument to the media in Washington, DC.

Why? Who among the American people asked for such a thing? Who does this help?

Breitbart News reports:

Omnibus Bill: Taxpayers to Erect Monument to Journalists in D.C., Give over $1B Subsidy to Media

Taxpayers will fund the erection of press statues in Washington, D.C., along with handing out media subsidies worth over $1 billion, if the Omnibus bill is passed into law in the coming days.

According to section 708 of the bill, the establishment media will be given a “commemorative” location in Washington, D.C., to honor “journalists”:

The location of a commemorative work to commemorate the commitment of the United States to a free press by honoring journalists who sacrificed their lives in service to that cause within Area I, as depicted on the map entitled ‘‘Commemorative Areas Washington, DC and Environs’’, numbered 869/86501 B, and dated June 24, 2003, is approved.

The statues will be located in “Area I,” according to the bill, which appears to encompass areas of the Mall in Washington, D.C., along with the White House, Tidal Basin, Theodore Roosevelt Island, and the Potomac shoreline in Virginia.

No budget or allocation of money was disclosed in the bill.

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DOJ to Charge ABC News Journalist Who “Fell Off the Face of the Earth” After FBI Seized Classified Documents From His Laptop in Home Raid

As previously reported, an Emmy-winning investigative journalist went missing after the FBI raided his Virginia home and seized classified information from his laptop in April.

James Gordon Meek, 52, went missing after the feds raided his Arlington penthouse apartment, the Rolling Stone reported.

Meek produced the Hulu documentary “3212 Unredacted” which detailed the 2017 Pentagon coverup of the deaths of US special forces in Niger.

The “lightning raid” was conducted after a search warrant was approved by a federal magistrate judge in the Virginia Eastern District Court, Rolling Stone reported.

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Third Journalist Confirmed Dead While Covering World Cup 2022 in Qatar – FIFA Open Books of Condolence for Three Journalists

It has been confirmed that a third journalist have died suddenly in November while covering the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.

ITV Sport’s Technical Director Roger Pearce, 65, passed away while reporting his eighth Fifa World Cup tournament in Qatar.

His death was reported on ITV’s broadcast before the Wales-USA game on November 21.

“We have very sad news to bring you from here in Qatar,” said presenter Mark Pougatch.

“Our technical director, Roger Pearce, who was here for his eighth World Cup, sadly passed away. Roger was a hugely respected figure in the TV sport broadcasting industry, for ITV he has been instrumental in the logistical planning and delivery of rugby world cups as well as the football world cups as well as the Euros.”

“He always had a smile on his face and left a smile on your faces. He was utterly dedicated, professional, charming and hugely popular. He will be missed by so many people inside the industry and at home,” he concluded.

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Second Journalist Dies Suddenly While Covering the FIFA World Cup 2022 in Qatar

It has been reported that Al Kass TV photojournalist Khalid al-Misslam died suddenly on Saturday while covering the FIFA World Cup 2022 in Qatar.

“Al Kass TV photojournalist Khalid al-Misslam passed away recently,” Qatari news media outlet Gulf Times reported.

“Al- Misslam, a Qatari, died suddenly while covering the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022. We believe in Allah’s mercy and forgiveness for him, and send our deepest condolences to his family. We are all Allah’s and to Him we return,” the post concluded.

The cause of Khalid Al-Misslam’s death has not yet been revealed.

According to Express, Al Kass TV barely mentioned their photojournalist’s death on their live show, and it seems they are waiting for more information before issuing a statement.

Khalid al-Misslam is the second journalist to have died while covering the 2022 World Cup.

On Friday, longtime U.S. soccer journalist Grant Wahl died in Doha, Qatar on Friday while covering the World Cup for CBS Sports, his wife confirmed.

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