ACTIVISM - The Greta Thunberg Interview

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NATO & EU - Russia's False Stories

"EXPERTS: RUSSIA PUSHES FALSE STORIES" by Neil MacFarquhar, San Diego Union-Tribune 8/29/2016

NOTE:  This is from the online edition of the newspaper, so no link to article.

They say Kremlin relies on disinformation to sow discord in U.S., Europe

With a vigorous national debate under way on whether Sweden should enter a military partnership with NATO, officials in Stockholm suddenly encountered an unsettling problem: a flood of distorted and outright false information on social media, confusing public perceptions of the issue.  The claims were alarming: If Sweden, a non-NATO member, signed the deal, the alliance would stockpile secret nuclear weapons on Swedish soil; NATO could attack Russia from Sweden without government approval; NATO soldiers, immune from prosecution, could rape Swedish women without fear of criminal charges.

They were all false, but the disinformation had begun spilling into the traditional news media, and as the defense minister, Peter Hultqvist, traveled the country to promote the pact in speeches and town hall meetings, he was repeatedly grilled about the bogus stories.

“People were not used to it, and they got scared, asking what can be believed, what should be believed?” said Marinette Nyh Radebo, Hultqvist's spokeswoman.

As often happens in such cases, Swedish officials were never able to pin down the source of the false reports.  But numerous analysts and experts in U.S. and European intelligence point to Russia as the prime suspect, noting that preventing NATO expansion is a centerpiece of the foreign policy of President Vladimir Putin, who invaded Georgia in 2008 largely to forestall that possibility.

In Crimea, eastern Ukraine and now Syria, Putin has flaunted a modernized and more muscular military.  But he lacks the economic strength and overall might to openly confront NATO, the European Union or the United States.  Instead, he has invested heavily in a program of “weaponized” information, using a variety of means to sow doubt and division.  The goal is to weaken cohesion among member states, stir discord in their domestic politics and blunt opposition to Russia.

“Moscow views world affairs as a system of special operations, and very sincerely believes that it itself is an object of Western special operations,” said Gleb Pavlovsky, who helped establish the Kremlin's information machine before 2008.  “I am sure that there are a lot of centers, some linked to the state, that are involved in inventing these kinds of fake stories.”

The planting of false stories is nothing new; the Soviet Union devoted considerable resources to that during the ideological battles of the Cold War.  Now, though, disinformation is regarded as an important aspect of Russian military doctrine, and it is being directed at political debates in target countries with far greater sophistication and volume than in the past.  The flow of misleading and inaccurate stories is so strong that NATO and the EU have established special offices to identify and refute disinformation, particularly claims emanating from Russia.

The Kremlin's clandestine methods have surfaced in the United States, too, U.S. officials say, identifying Russian intelligence as the likely source of leaked Democratic National Committee emails that embarrassed Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.  The Kremlin uses both conventional media— Sputnik, a news agency, and RT, a television outlet — and covert channels, as in Sweden, that are almost always untraceable.  Russia exploits both approaches in a comprehensive assault, Wilhelm Urme, a spokesman for the Swedish Security Service, said this year when presenting the agency's annual report.  “We mean everything from internet trolls to propaganda and misinformation spread by media companies like RT and Sputnik,” he said.

The fundamental purpose of dezinformatsiya, or Russian disinformation, experts said, is to undermine the official version of events — even the very idea that there is a true version of events— and foster a kind of policy paralysis.

Moscow adamantly denies using disinformation to influence Western public opinion and tends to label accusations of either overt or covert threats as “Russophobia.”

“There is an impression that, like in a good orchestra, many Western countries every day accuse Russia of threatening someone,” Maria Zakharova, the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, said at a recent ministry briefing.

Tracing individual strands of disinformation is difficult, but in Sweden and elsewhere, experts have detected a characteristic pattern that they tie to Kremlingenerated disinformation campaigns.  “The dynamic is always the same: It originates somewhere in Russia, on Russia state media sites, or different websites or somewhere in that kind of context,” said Anders Lindberg, a Swedish journalist and lawyer.

“Then the fake document becomes the source of a news story distributed on far-left or far-right-wing websites,” he said.  “Those who rely on those sites for news link to the story, and it spreads.  Nobody can say where they come from, but they end up as key issues in a security policy decision.”

Although the topics may vary, the goal is the same, Lindberg and others suggested.  “What the Russians are doing is building narratives; they are not building facts,” he said.  “The underlying narrative is, ‘Don't trust anyone.'”  The weaponization of information is not some project devised by a Kremlin policy expert but is an integral part of Russian military doctrine — what some senior military figures call a “decisive” battlefront.

“The role of nonmilitary means of achieving political and strategic goals has grown, and, in many cases, they have exceeded the power of force of weapons in their effectiveness,” Gen. Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the general staff of the Russian Armed Forces, wrote in 2013.  A prime Kremlin target is Europe, where the rise of the populist right and declining support for the EU create an ever more receptive audience for Russia's conservative, nationalistic and authoritarian approach under Putin.  Last year, the European Parliament accused Russia of “financing radical and extremist parties” in its member states, and in 2014 the Kremlin extended an $11.7 million loan to the National Front, the extreme right party in France.

“The Russians are very good at courting everyone who has a grudge with liberal democracy, and that goes from extreme right to extreme left,” said Patrik Oksanen, an editorial writer for the Swedish newspaper group MittMedia.  The central idea, he said, is that “liberal democracy is corrupt, inefficient, chaotic and, ultimately, not democratic.”

Another message, largely unstated, is that European governments lack the competence to deal with the crises they face, particularly immigration and terrorism, and that their officials are all U.S. puppets.

MacFarquhar writes for The New York Times.

SWEDEN - The Nature House

"Couple wraps home in greenhouse to grow food and stay warm during cold Swedish winters" by By Susan Gardner, Daily KOS 1/2/2016

Talk about thinking outside the proverbial box!  When the going gets cold, the smart sustainability devotees experiment with …. greenhousing a whole structure.  Via Ecowatch, meet Marie Granmar and Charles Sacilotto:

The couple recently gave Fair Companies a tour of their “Naturhus” (or Nature House) that’s surrounded by a 4-millimeter pane of glass that cost roughly $84,000 to install.

The Naturhus was built on the site of an old summer house on a Stockholm archipelago and was inspired by Swedish eco-architect Bengt Warne, who was also Sacilotto's mentor.

There are many advantages of living in a greenhouse for this family.  Sunlight helps warm the home during the day and residual heat is stored in the bedrock below the house.  The roof deck can be used for year-round activities such as sunbathing, reading or playing with their son.

Of course, a couple this dedicated doesn’t only go for the non-obvious extreme—they’ve tackled other sustainability challenges along the way.  They collect rainwater for plants and household use, they compost, they grow their own food within the greenhouse.  And Sacilotto even designed a sewage system that “begins with a urine-separating toilet and uses centrifuges, cisterns, grow beds and garden ponds to filter the water and compost the remains,” according to Ecowatch.

Check out the Fair Companies video that explores this “Naturhus” in more detail.

WAR ON TERROR - From Sweden

"Police Say Early Detonation of Bomb Averted Disaster in Sweden" by JOHN F. BURNS and RAVI SOMAIYA, New York Times 12/13/2010

Excerpt

Two days after a bomber killed himself and slightly wounded two people in a commercial district here crowded with Christmas shoppers, investigators offered glimpses of a suspect who, in the pattern of other Islamist terrorists, moved unobtrusively between Europe and the Middle East as he prepared to martyr himself, only to botch the operation in a manner that suggested a clumsy do-it-yourself attack.

The bomber was identified Monday as Taimour Abdulwahab al-Abdaly, a 28-year-old Swede of Iraqi origin, who reportedly had been living with his wife and children in a house in Luton, just north of London, until as recently as three weeks ago. The town is notorious now as the early morning starting point for the four bombers who attacked the London transit system on July 7, 2005, killing 56 people, including themselves.

Police investigators searched the Luton house as well as an apartment in Stockholm’s northwestern suburbs, and carried away potential evidence, including a family car that was mounted on a flatbed and taken away from the Luton home.

The Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter reported in its Monday editions that Mr. Abdaly had also recently visited Jordan. A sound recording delivered by e-mail to a Swedish news agency minutes before the explosions included an apology to his family for having lied to them about previous trips to the Middle East, which he said had not been for business but for jihad, or holy war.

Swedish and British investigators, who appeared to be working in close cooperation, were careful for the time being not to point to Al Qaeda or any other terrorist organization as having played a part. But at a Stockholm news conference, Tomas Lindstrand, Sweden’s chief prosecutor for terrorist offenses, said that while the bomber was “definitely on his own in the execution” of the explosions, “from experience, we know that there are usually more people involved in such actions.”

The case recalled that of Faisal Shahzad, the 30-year-old American of Pakistani origin who botched his attempt to set off a powerful bomb in Times Square in May and was sentenced to life in prison. He received training from the Taliban and financing from abroad, but tried to carry off the bombing alone.

The two explosions set off by the Stockholm bomber occurred on side streets crossing the pedestrian mall called Drottninggatan, the city’s principal shopping street, and suggested that a catastrophic outcome had been narrowly averted. Mr. Abdaly appeared to have started by igniting an assembly of gas canisters in a white Audi 80 Vantage car bought for about $1,500 from a second-hand dealer in late November in the provincial city of Vadstena, causing an eruption of flame but limited damage.