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Vancouver Off-Topic / Current EventsThe off-topic forum for Vancouver, funnies, non-auto centered discussions, WORK SAFE. While the rules are more relaxed here, there are still rules. Please refer to sticky thread in this forum.
i don't really miss going to the states at all. gonna spend my money here instead, starting with a local getaway this winter on the island.
i think the harper gov would have done the cerb too tbh, they really wouldn't have a choice. ppl would start to starve if they didn't have an income. the difference is the harper gov would have also gave even more to big businesses, filtering the money from the bottom up to the top.
Russia has been offering Afghan militants bounties to kill US and British troops. Trump and co have known about this for months and apparently done nothing. I know the US doesn't actually give a shit about their soldiers but normally they at least pretend a little better than this.
Russia Secretly Offered Afghan Militants Bounties to Kill U.S. Troops, Intelligence Says
The Trump administration has been deliberating for months about what to do about a stunning intelligence assessment.
WASHINGTON — American intelligence officials have concluded that a Russian military intelligence unit secretly offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing coalition forces in Afghanistan — including targeting American troops — amid the peace talks to end the long-running war there, according to officials briefed on the matter.
The United States concluded months ago that the Russian unit, which has been linked to assassination attempts and other covert operations in Europe intended to destabilize the West or take revenge on turncoats, had covertly offered rewards for successful attacks last year.
Islamist militants, or armed criminal elements closely associated with them, are believed to have collected some bounty money, the officials said. Twenty Americans were killed in combat in Afghanistan in 2019, but it was not clear which killings were under suspicion.
The intelligence finding was briefed to President Trump, and the White House’s National Security Council discussed the problem at an interagency meeting in late March, the officials said. Officials developed a menu of potential options — starting with making a diplomatic complaint to Moscow and a demand that it stop, along with an escalating series of sanctions and other possible responses, but the White House has yet to authorize any step, the officials said.
An operation to incentivize the killing of American and other NATO troops would be a significant and provocative escalation of what American and Afghan officials have said is Russian support for the Taliban, and it would be the first time the Russian spy unit was known to have orchestrated attacks on Western troops.
Any involvement with the Taliban that resulted in the deaths of American troops would also be a huge escalation of Russia’s so-called hybrid war against the United States, a strategy of destabilizing adversaries through a combination of such tactics as cyberattacks, the spread of fake news and covert and deniable military operations.
The Kremlin had not been made aware of the accusations, said Dmitry Peskov, the press secretary for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. “If someone makes them, we’ll respond,” Mr. Peskov said. A Taliban spokesman did not respond to messages seeking comment.
Spokespeople at the National Security Council, the Pentagon, the State Department and the C.I.A. declined to comment.
The officials familiar with the intelligence did not explain the White House delay in deciding how to respond to the intelligence about Russia.
While some of his closest advisers, like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, have counseled more hawkish policies toward Russia, Mr. Trump has adopted an accommodating stance toward Moscow.
At a summit in 2018 in Helsinki, Finland, Mr. Trump strongly suggested that he believed Mr. Putin’s denial that the Kremlin interfered in the 2016 presidential election, despite broad agreement within the American intelligence establishment that it did. Mr. Trump criticized a bill imposing sanctions on Russia when he signed it into law after Congress passed it by veto-proof majorities. And he has repeatedly made statements that undermined the NATO alliance as a bulwark against Russian aggression in Europe.
The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the delicate intelligence and internal deliberations. They said the intelligence had been treated as a closely held secret, but the administration expanded briefings about it this week — including sharing information about it with the British government, whose forces are among those said to have been targeted.
The intelligence assessment is said to be based at least in part on interrogations of captured Afghan militants and criminals. The officials did not describe the mechanics of the Russian operation, such as how targets were picked or how money changed hands. It is also not clear whether Russian operatives had deployed inside Afghanistan or met with their Taliban counterparts elsewhere.
The revelations came into focus inside the Trump administration at a delicate and distracted time. Although officials collected the intelligence earlier in the year, the interagency meeting at the White House took place as the coronavirus pandemic was becoming a crisis and parts of the country were shutting down.
Moreover, as Mr. Trump seeks re-election in November, he wants to strike a peace deal with the Taliban to end the Afghanistan war.
Both American and Afghan officials have previously accused Russia of providing small arms and other support to the Taliban that amounts to destabilizing activity, although Russian government officials have dismissed such claims as “idle gossip” and baseless.
“We share some interests with Russia in Afghanistan, and clearly they’re acting to undermine our interests as well,” Gen. John W. Nicholson Jr., the commander of American forces in Afghanistan at the time, said in a 2018 interview with the BBC.
Though coalition troops suffered a spate of combat casualties last summer and early fall, only a few have since been killed. Four Americans were killed in combat in early 2020, but the Taliban have not attacked American positions since a February agreement.
American troops have also sharply reduced their movement outside military bases because of the coronavirus, reducing their exposure to attack.
While officials were said to be confident about the intelligence that Russian operatives offered and paid bounties to Afghan militants for killing Americans, they have greater uncertainty about how high in the Russian government the covert operation was authorized and what its aim may be.
Some officials have theorized that the Russians may be seeking revenge on NATO forces for a 2018 battle in Syria in which the American military killed several hundred pro-Syrian forces, including numerous Russian mercenaries, as they advanced on an American outpost. Officials have also suggested that the Russians may have been trying to derail peace talks to keep the United States bogged down in Afghanistan. But the motivation remains murky.
The officials briefed on the matter said the government had assessed the operation to be the handiwork of Unit 29155, an arm of Russia’s military intelligence agency, known widely as the G.R.U. The unit is linked to the March 2018 nerve agent poisoning in Salisbury, England, of Sergei Skripal, a former G.R.U. officer who had worked for British intelligence and then defected, and his daughter.
Western intelligence officials say the unit, which has operated for more than a decade, has been charged by the Kremlin with carrying out a campaign to destabilize the West through subversion, sabotage and assassination. In addition to the 2018 poisoning, the unit was behind an attempted coup in Montenegro in 2016 and the poisoning of an arms manufacturer in Bulgaria a year earlier.
American intelligence officials say the G.R.U. was at the center of Moscow’s covert efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. In the months before that election, American officials say, two G.R.U. cyberunits, known as 26165 and 74455, hacked into Democratic Party servers and then used WikiLeaks to publish embarrassing internal communications.
In part because those efforts were aimed at helping tilt the election in Mr. Trump’s favor, his handling of issues related to Russia and Mr. Putin has come under particular scrutiny. The special counsel investigation found that the Trump campaign welcomed Russia’s intervention and expected to benefit from it, but found insufficient evidence to establish that his associates had engaged in any criminal conspiracy with Moscow.
Operations involving Unit 29155 tend to be much more violent than those involving the cyberunits. Its officers are often decorated military veterans with years of service, in some cases dating to the Soviet Union’s failed war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Never before has the unit been accused of orchestrating attacks on Western soldiers, but officials briefed on its operations say it has been active in Afghanistan for many years.
Though Russia declared the Taliban a terrorist organization in 2003, relations between them have been warming in recent years. Taliban officials have traveled to Moscow for peace talks with other prominent Afghans, including the former president, Hamid Karzai. The talks have excluded representatives from the current Afghan government as well as anyone from the United States, and at times they have seemed to work at crosscurrents with American efforts to bring an end to the conflict.
The disclosure comes at a time when Mr. Trump has said he would invite Mr. Putin to an expanded meeting of the Group of 7 nations, but tensions between American and Russian militaries are running high.
In several recent episodes, in international territory and airspace from off the coast of Alaska to the Black and Mediterranean Seas, combat planes from each country have scrambled to intercept military aircraft from the other.
__________________ 1991 Toyota Celica GTFour RC // 2007 Toyota Rav4 V6 // 2000 Jeep Grand Cherokee
1992 Toyota Celica GT-S ["sold"] \\ 2007 Jeep Grand Cherokee CRD [sold] \\ 2000 Jeep Cherokee [sold] \\ 1997 Honda Prelude [sold] \\ 1992 Jeep YJ [sold/crashed] \\ 1987 Mazda RX-7 [sold] \\ 1987 Toyota Celica GT-S [crushed]
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Originally Posted by maksimizer
half those dudes are hotter than ,my GF.
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Originally Posted by RevYouUp
reading this thread is like waiting for goku to charge up a spirit bomb in dragon ball z
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Originally Posted by Good_KarMa
OH thank god. I thought u had sex with my wife. :cry:
Did comedian Sacha Baron Cohen crash rally in downtown Olympia?
BY ROLF BOONE
Social media was abuzz Saturday evening with chatter that comedian Sacha Baron Cohen made a surprise appearance during a conservative rally in downtown Olympia earlier in the day.
The rally, which was billed as “March for Our Rights 3,” took place at Heritage Park for most of the afternoon. About 500 people attended the rally, according to Washington State Patrol troopers at the scene.
Videos on Twitter appear to show a man in costume, similar to something Cohen might wear, singing a satirical song that poked fun at political beliefs.
Yelm City Councilman, James Blair, thinks it was the comedian, according to his own Facebook post. That post has since been deleted.
“Sacha Baron Cohen pulled a (expletive) stunt at the March For Our Rights 3 event,” Blair says in his post.
“He came on stage disguised as the lead singer of the last band, singing a bunch of racist, hateful, disgusting (expletive),” Blair writes. “His security blocked event organizers from getting him off the stage, or pulling power from the generator. After the crowd realized what he was saying, and turned on him, his security then rushed the stage and evacuated them to a waiting private ambulance that was contracted to be their escape transport.”
Blair could not be reached by email Saturday evening.
Cohen most recently is known for a cable TV show called, “Who is America?” That show, like a lot of Cohen’s humor, lures unsuspecting public figures into awkward situations. On the big screen, he is known for his “Borat” and “Bruno,” characters.
Despite the rumors of Cohen making an appearance, others attended the rally for more serious reasons, such as Alan Swinney of central Texas, who makes a point of going to such rallies.
He also had “proud boy” tattooed on one arm.
“I swore an oath to the Constitution,” he said, “and people’s constitutional rights get violated at conservative rallies. I just make sure that doesn’t happen.”
Trump retweets a video of a man screaming white power, but watch the whole video. You have seniors in a retirement community screaming and yelling at each other. This is what America has become. Pretty sad.
__________________ Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.
Remember when 2020 started off with threat of war between Iran and USA? (right when the Australian wildfires stopped, and before the Coronavirus started spreading)
Twitch has temporarily banned President Donald Trump, in the latest surprise and high-profile suspension from the streaming service. Trump’s account was banned for “hateful conduct” that was aired on stream, and Twitch says the offending content has now been removed.
One of the streams in question was a rebroadcast of Trump’s infamous kickoff rally, where he said that Mexico was sending rapists to the United States. Twitch also flagged racist comments at Trump’s recent rally in Tulsa.
I didn't know he was a gamer.
__________________ Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.
I'm numb to this guy's antics at this point. Nothing is surprising or baffling anymore. It was days ago where the acting president posted a video with his supporters shouting "White Power".
Kanye West just declared he’s running for President on Twitter. Can 2020 get any more messed up?
__________________ Do Not Put Aftershave on Your Balls. -604CEFIRO Looks like I'm gonna have some hot sex again tonight...OOPS i got the 6 pack. that wont last me the night, I better go back and get the 24 pack! -Turbo E kinda off topic but obama is a dilf - miss_crayon Honest to fucking Christ the easiest way to get a married woman in the mood is clean the house and do the laundry.....I've been with the same girl almost 17 years, ask me how I know. - quasi
Only consequence might be Kanye taking a small portion of the Democratic vote thereby handing his hero Trump another 4 years. Maybe that is his real strategy.
Only consequence might be Kanye taking a small portion of the Democratic vote thereby handing his hero Trump another 4 years. Maybe that is his real strategy.
He can't even make the ballot in some states.
__________________ Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.
Only consequence might be Kanye taking a small portion of the Democratic vote thereby handing his hero Trump another 4 years. Maybe that is his real strategy.
That was my first thought as well, but thinking about it more, the only person dumb enough to vote for Kanye has to be someone dumb (and bad) enough to vote for Trump... right?
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