Oregon Blaze Conspiracies | Hezbollah & Irish Terrorism | Poisoning Them Softly, and more

“They don’t need to get an army of 10,000 trolls and bots to jump in when they’ve already got QAnon that’ll come in and go ‘exactly, that’s the deep state again’ and ‘Trump is going to be our saviour’,” he said.
“There’s almost an unholy alliance in a sense between anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists and foreign disinformation because their interests converge to an extent and they each do the job of amplifying the other one’s interests and content.”

The Implications of the Poisoning of Alexey Navalny (Pierre Morcos and Cyrus Newlin, CSIS)
Russia’s leading opposition leader Alexey Navalny is alive, which was not a foregone conclusion three weeks ago. On August 20, he collapsed on a plane from the Siberian city of Tomsk to Moscow and was rushed to a local hospital in Omsk. Following his delayed transfer to Berlin, German chancellor Angela Merkel on September 2 announced that Navalny was “beyond a doubt” the victim of an attack with a military-grade chemical nerve agent from the Novichok group, citing the findings of German military chemical weapons specialists. Merkel alluded to “serious questions that only the Russian government can answer—and must answer,” chiefly whether the Russian state carried out an attempted assassination of its most prominent political opponent using a banned nerve agent under the Chemical Weapons Convention or if it has lost control over its chemical weapons stockpile. Just over two years since the 2018 attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, England, this latest incident has once again jolted Europe and Russia’s fragile relations, with wide-ranging political, economic, and strategic ramifications. And as large demonstrations continue across Belarus and in Khabarovsk, Navalny’s attempted assassination also sheds light on the nervous state of Russia’s leadership.

Hezbollah’s Links with Irish Terror Group Exposed (Arab News)
Hezbollah provided the New IRA with finances and shipments of weapons, according to an undercover agent who infiltrated the Irish terror group.
Former British secret service operative Denis McFadden made the assessment after spying on the New IRA from within for more than 20 years.
Irish and British security services suspect that the New IRA’s links with Iran-backed Hezbollah may have led to the import of arms including mortars and assault rifles.
MI5 agent McFadden is now in witness protection after his work led to the arrest of 10 people in Northern Ireland on terrorism-related charges.

Wolf Says “Lone, Homegrown” Terror Threat Is Top DHS Focus 19 Years after 9/11 (Charles Creitz, Fox News)
Nineteen years after Al Qaeda attacked America, the terror threat to the United States has “changed and it’s morphed over the years,” Acting Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Chad Wolf told “Special Report” Friday.
“From a threat perspective, we still see a number of the traditional threats that we battled on 9/11,” Wolf told host Bret Baier. ”[We see in] counterterrorism some of the foreign terrorist organizations that are still certainly a threat to the homeland, but we see more of a domestic threat here in the country as well over the last several years.

Facebook Removing Posts Linking Oregon Blazes to Extremist Groups (Straits Times)
Facebook has started removing false claims that the deadly wildfires in Oregon were started by various left-wing and right-wing groups, a spokesman for the social media company said, after the rumors left state officials inundated with queries for information.
Since early last week, state officials in the United States have been attempting to debunk misinformation on social media that has blamed extremist groups on both sides for the deadly blazes.
Facebook, which earlier was attaching warning labels to such posts, decided to move to the stricter approach after “confirmation from law enforcement that these rumors are forcing local fire and police agencies to divert resources from fighting the fires and protecting the public”, Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said in a statement on Twitter.