James Bond Defeats the Terrorists: Today's News for May 24th

(hat tip to Laser Time for the pic)

BBC:

Sir Roger Moore, James Bond actor, dies aged 89

Actor Sir Roger Moore, best known for playing James Bond, has died aged 89, his family has announced.

He played the famous spy in seven Bond films including Live and Let Die and A View to a Kill.

Sir Roger's family confirmed the news on Twitter, saying he had died after "a short but brave battle with cancer".

Aside from honoring the best James Bond who ever lived, in my opinion, I bring this up because I noticed something yesterday. As the news of Moore's death hit the media, the terrorist incident in Manchester got knocked off the media's overly obsessive news feeds.

In his last act, a James Bond defeated the terrorists.

One last point from the story:

The veteran star, who died in Switzerland, will have a private funeral in Monaco in accordance with his wishes, his children said.

Bond buried in Monaco? Nothing could be more appropriate.

On to today's lede in most media:

CNN:

What will the Pope tell President Trump?

Long story short: President Trump is meeting with Pope Francis today. Yawn.

But the CNN story is notable for the following paragraph:

It's a meeting millions have been waiting for, an encounter between two of the world's most intriguing and complex characters: The holy man in white who preaches good news to the poor and the brash businessman in the dark suit who embodies American extravagance.

"Holy man in white"? "Brash businessman in the dark suit"? They could just compare Trump to Darth Vader.

(hat tip to Tee Public for the pic)

Instead of the innocuous Trump-Pope meeting, this is what should be the lede today:

Circa:

Obama intel agency secretly conducted illegal searches on Americans for years

The National Security Agency under former President Barack Obama routinely violated American privacy protections while scouring through overseas intercepts and failed to disclose the extent of the problems until the final days before Donald Trump was elected president last fall, according to once top-secret documents that chronicle some of the most serious constitutional abuses to date by the U.S. intelligence community.

More than 5 percent, or one out of every 20 searches seeking upstream Internet data on Americans inside the NSA’s so-called Section 702 database violated the safeguards Obama and his intelligence chiefs vowed to follow in 2011, according to one classified internal report reviewed by Circa.

The Obama administration self-disclosed the problems at a closed-door hearing Oct. 26 before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that set off alarm. Trump was elected less than two weeks later.

The normally supportive court censured administration officials, saying the failure to disclose the extent of the violations earlier amounted to an “institutional lack of candor” and that the improper searches constituted a “very serious Fourth Amendment issue,” according to a recently unsealed court document dated April 26, 2017.

The admitted violations undercut one of the primary defenses that the intelligence community and Obama officials have used in recent weeks to justify their snooping into incidental NSA intercepts about Americans.

If it was Trump's name attached to this violation of Americans' rights, the MSM would be screaming it for weeks.

In other news...

Gateway Pundit:

BOOM!! Kim Dot.Com DROPS BOMBSHELL! — 

SETH RICH LEAKED DNC EMAILS TO WIKILEAKS

Internet entrepreneur and hacker, Kim DotCom, admitted on Saturday that he was part of an operation along with Seth Rich to get stolen DNC emails to Wikileaks.

In other words, it was not the Russians. It was done from inside the DNC.

Here is the full statement from Kim Dot.com's website:

#SETHRICH WAS A HERO

I KNOW THAT SETH RICH WAS INVOLVED IN THE DNC LEAK.

I know this because in late 2014 a person contacted me about helping me to start a branch of the Internet Party in the United States. He called himself Panda. I now know that Panda was Seth Rich.

Panda advised me that he was working on voter analytics tools and other technologies that the Internet Party may find helpful.

I communicated with Panda on a number of topics including corruption and the influence of corporate money in politics.

“He wanted to change that from the inside.”

I was referring to what I knew when I did an interview with Bloomberg in New Zealand in May 2015. In that interview I hinted that Julian Assange and Wikileaks would release information about Hillary Clinton in the upcoming election.

The Rich family has reached out to me to ask that I be sensitive to their loss in my public comments. That request is entirely reasonable.

I have consulted with my lawyers. I accept that my full statement should be provided to the authorities and I am prepared to do that so that there can be a full investigation. My lawyers will speak with the authorities regarding the proper process.

If my evidence is required to be given in the United States I would be prepared to do so if appropriate arrangements are made. I would need a guarantee from Special Counsel Mueller, on behalf of the United States, of safe passage from New Zealand to the United States and back. In the coming days we will be communicating with the appropriate authorities to make the necessary arrangements. In the meantime, I will make no further comment.

Mind you, this is still not definitive. For example, how did Kim know that Panda was Seth Rich?

In Kim's defense, he did call it in the May 2015 Bloomberg interview he references above:

Kim Dotcom, the founder of the defunct file sharing site Megaupload who wants to bring his Internet Party to the United States in 2016, said Wikileaks founder Julian Assange will be Hillary Clinton’s “worst nightmare.”

In an interview with Emily Chang on Bloomberg’s Studio 1.0, Dotcom was asked about a tweet he sent in December saying that he himself will be “Hillary’s worst nightmare in 2016.”

I'm not a pirate.
I'm not a fugitive.
I'm not a flight risk.

I'm your Internet Freedom fighter

AND

Hillary's worst nightmare in 2016!

— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) December 1, 2014

The interview raises the question of the role hacking could play in an election involving someone as simultaneously high profile and secretive as Clinton.

“I have to say it’s probably more Julian,” who threatens Hillary, Dotcom said. “But I’m aware of some of the things that are going to be roadblocks for her.”

Assange has access to information, Dotcom said, though he added that he didn't know anything more specific.

There is a strong ring of TRUTH to this story. It may not be 100% verifiable, but it is close to that number. There is more than enough here to at least call out the mainstream media for their obsession over Russia.