Democracy gone Astray: Saturday, August 04, 2018

Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.

This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Saturday, August 04, 2018

Alexei Navalny detained at anti-Putin protest in Moscow

The Russian opposition figurehead Alexei Navalny and 15 others have been arrested in Moscow after he attempted to lead a protest before a presidential election that is expected to return Vladimir Putin to power for another six years.

Navalny, 41, was wrestled to the ground by officers on Sunday as he walked up Tverskaya, Moscow’s main thoroughfare. Amid chaotic scenes, police with truncheons fought off supporters who attempted to pull him free.

Human rights activists earlier this month celebrated the passage of a historic resolution pledging to take steps to avoid contracting with or investing in corporations complicit in human rights abuses — but their victory was short-lived. On Thursday, New Orleans withdrew the resolution after backlash from Jewish groups and pro-Israel politicians prompted city council members to reconsider their support.

The resolution had made New Orleans the first city in the South — and one of the largest in the country — to pass an initiative in accordance with the campaign to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel for its occupation of Palestinian territories, known as BDS.

Last week Turkey opened a new front in the Syrian war by using its air force against the Syrian Kurdish canton of Afrin—which had done absolutely nothing to provoke this attack—even while the battle against ISIS continues in Deir Ezzor, where the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), led by the Kurdish YPG-YPJ, are fighting with US support. Turkey’s attack on the Syrian Kurds has opened up a new front in the war, jeopardized its already fragile relationship with the United States, and given a green light to jihadis to attack the Kurds.

The big news at Davos on Thursday was supposed to be Donald Trump’s arrival. According to reports from the Swiss ski resort, much of the town was locked down for his descent from the skies in a seven-aircraft chopper-cade. Once on the ground, the U.S. President proceeded to bilateral meetings with Theresa May and Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Ministers of Britain and Israel, respectively.

Predictably enough, Trump rapidly made some Trumpian news by needlessly insulting the Palestinian leaders and threatening to withhold U.S. financial aid. But on Thursday night Trump ended up getting upstaged by another elderly Manhattan billionaire: George Soros. As the President was hosting a dinner for various business leaders, Soros was across town, talking about the various threats facing Western democracies, a category in which he included the Trump Administration.

After a year in which the news cycle brought a constant series of shocks and outrages, perhaps the least surprising development of 2017 was the announcement, on December 14, that Vladimir Putin would be running for the Russian presidency once again in March 2018. Since he returned to the Kremlin in 2012, there has been little doubt that Putin would seek another six-year term in office. There can be little doubt, too, that he will win. So far, the other contenders include some of the usual suspects—the social-liberal economist Grigory Yavlinsky, the nationalist provocateur Vladimir Zhirinovsky—as well as a few novelties: TV personality Ksenia Sobchak is standing for the liberal Civic Initiative party; Boris Titov, the Putin government’s commissioner for entrepreneurs’ rights, is running for the neoliberal Party of Growth; and the Communist Party has this time decided to put up Pavel Grudinin, an agronomist and manager of a successful produce farm near Moscow, instead of its perennial losing candidate, Gennady Zyuganov.

The 156 death row inmates in Pennsylvania state prisons go to sleep every night the same way they wake up: in an 8-by-12 foot cell illuminated by artificial light around the clock. On weekdays, they are allowed out of their cells for a maximum of two hours to exercise in a small, enclosed space. They leave their cells thrice a week to take showers and are occasionally allowed to go to the law library. Every once in a while, a death-sentenced prisoner gets a visit with clergy or a family member – without being able to touch them. On weekends, they cannot leave their cells at all. For most of their lives, they sit alone in a suffocating cage the size of a parking space.

Egyptian authorities have arrested a retired general after denying him permission to run in presidential elections in March.

Sami Anan was the last challenger seen as a potential threat to President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, himself a former military chief, whose re-election is considered almost certain.

The arrest of Anan, a former member of Egypt’s supreme military council for armed forces (Scaf), appears to be a calculated move to push him out of the race. Earlier a declaration by the military accused him of election violations and said he would be “summoned for interrogation in front of specialised personnel”.

It was decades coming. A succession of Toronto mayors and city councils, city shelter bureaucrats and budgets that ignored the cumulative evidence, which included shelters bursting at the seams and always far beyond council's mandated 90% capacity.

They ignored the disease outbreaks (tuberculosis, Norwalk virus, Strep A), some of which killed people.

More than a dozen Palestinian members of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, were ejected from the chamber for protesting a speech by Vice President Mike Pence on Monday.

The legislators, who represent Palestinians living inside Israel’s pre-1967 borders, stood at the start of Pence’s address and held up signs with the slogan “Jerusalem is the capital of Palestine” over an image of a mosque and a church in the city. The placards signaled dissent from the Trump administration’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and move the U.S. embassy there next year, despite international consensus that the Israeli annexation of East Jerusalem in 1967 was illegal.

Ecuador's President Lenin Moreno has described WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange as an "inherited problem" that has created "more than a nuisance" for his government.

Earlier this month, Ecuador announced it had granted citizenship to Assange, in an unsuccessful attempt to provide him with diplomatic immunity and usher him out of its London embassy without the threat of arrest by Britain.

Indefinite imprisonment or a one-way ticket.

These were the options Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered to African refugees and migrants in Israel earlier in January.

Describing the 40,000-strong community as "infiltrators", Netanyahu said they had "to cooperate with us and leave voluntarily, respectably, humanely and legally, or we will have to use other tools at our disposal, which are also according to the law".

Reuters reports that on Friday, Turkey began cross-border shelling the Kurdish-majority Afrin canton in northern Syria. There are also reports of busloads of Sunni Arab guerrillas of the rebel Free Syrian Army, who had been sheltered in Turkey, being sent into Afrin.

The region is dominated by the People’s Protection Units (YPG), a leftist militia that serves as the paramilitary of the Democratic Union Party, which believes in running society through decentralized socialist cooperatives.

When a power outage knocked out subway service on the Bloor line last week, Uber did what Uber does. The ride-hailing giant ratcheted up surge pricing, to a flurry of angry tweets.

Of course, Uber is used to being hated on. The Twitterverse was ablaze with #deleteuber hashtags virtually every week of 2017.

Now, a year after hundreds of thousands of Uber users ditched the app after its drivers continued operating during taxi driver protests against President Donald Trump’s first attempt at a travel ban, Lyft and two other ride-hailing apps have answered T.O.’s call for a new ride.

Jeffrey Sterling, the former CIA agent convicted under the Espionage Act for talking to a New York Times reporter, has been released from prison after serving more than two years of his 42-month sentence, and is now in a halfway house.

Sterling’s case drew nationwide attention because the Obama-era Department of Justice unsuccessfully tried to force the reporter, James Risen, to divulge the identity of his sources for “State of War,” a book in which he revealed the CIA had botched a covert operation against Iran’s nuclear program. Risen reported that instead of undermining the Iranians, the CIA had provided them with useful information on how to build a nuclear bomb. (Risen is now The Intercept’s senior national security correspondent and directs First Look Media’s Press Freedom Defense Fund.)

The Syrian Kurdish YPG militia has said Turkish forces have fired about 70 shells at Kurdish villages in the Afrin region of north-western Syria, as Ankara said its threatened military assault was “de facto” under way.

The bombardment from Turkish territory began at around midnight and continued into Friday morning. Turkey considers the Syrian Kurdish militia as an extension of Kurdish rebels fighting Turkey and has vowed to attack their Afrin enclave, massing troops and tanks on its border for several days.

Russia has started moving military observers away from an area in northwestern Syria where Turkey is planning an offensive against Kurdish fighters, a Turkish official told Al Jazeera.

Moving the observers comes as Turkey's defence minister on Friday said his country would go ahead with the offensive in the enclave of Afrin, saying Syrian Kurdish fighters there pose a "real" threat to his country.

The Russian foreign ministry on Thursday called for the US government to “bring to justice those responsible” for leaking documents that showed banking behavior by its embassy and diplomats based in America.

The formal statement came in response to a story BuzzFeed News published on Wednesday, which found that American bankers flagged hundreds of transactions as suspicious during the last decade. The Russian foreign ministry said that “a lot of information is deliberately falsified” but also called for an immediate stop to the “illegal dissemination of confidential information.” It added that “this is no longer just a matter of ‘fake news’, but a real crime.”

Belgium has pledged to donate 19m euro ($23m) to UNRWA, the UN's aid organisation for Palestinian refugees, after the US government announced it would slash its funding to the agency by half.

Deputy Prime Minister Alexander De Croo said in a statement on Wednesday that Brussels would allocate the funds over three years.

How do you end up with a neo-fascist propounding his views on immigration on national television? To answer this question, you need to understand how a racially motivated moral panic has brewed in right-leaning media over months, and even years. You then need to see how such a panic is part of a political project, which includes state and federal politicians.

The panic over Sudanese immigrant gangs has reached fever pitch in this new year of 2018. Even though it’s rooted in selective distortions, both of crime rates, and the concept of a “gang”, it’s triggered a hasty policy response.

Steve Bannon and Nigel Farage are both populist figureheads known for championing their own brands of nationalism that had historic implications for their countries in 2016—in the U.S., the election of Donald Trump; in the U.K., the historic decision to leave the European Union. But two years later, these men, who rose from relative political obscurity to the center of power, appear to be falling back to where they started.

A new report from the Anti-Defamation League shows that murders by white supremacists doubled in 2017 — and that they killed more people than Muslim extremists.

As the Huffington Post reported Wednesday, the ADL’s Center on Extremism found that 34 people were killed by extremists last year. Of those, 20 people (or 59 percent) “were killed by right-wing extremists, a designation that includes white supremacists, members of the so-called ‘alt-right’ and ‘alt-lite,’ and members of the anti-government militia movement.”

Of those 34 people, 18 were killed by white supremacists, which marks a 157 percent rise from the seven people killed by white supremacists in 2016.

The ADL’s study was published the same day as a report released by the Department of Justice and Homeland Security that appeared to intentionally skew data to overstate the number of people killed in the United States by “foreign-born” Muslim terrorists.

Original Article
Source: rawstory.com
Author: Noor Al-Sibai

Former CIA agent arrested for keeping notebook full of sensitive information

A former CIA officer has been arrested for keeping details of US agents, safe houses and other secrets years after retiring from the agency and moving to Hong Kong.

The former intelligence officer, Jerry Chun Shing Lee, was detained at JFK airport on Monday, more than five years after FBI agents discovered he had kept a small address book and pocket calendar containing secret operational notes from his time at the CIA, about “asset meetings, operational meeting locations, operational phone numbers, true names of assets and covert facilities” according to court documents.

Maykop, Republic of Adygea, Russia - When Baibers Suleiman arrived in Lebanon in 2014, having fled the war in Syria, he did not feel at ease.

"We felt alienated, foreign, although we were just three hours away from our home," the 36-year-old Syrian electrician says. He and his 30-year-old wife Sara felt they needed to leave.

A Syrian friend of Baibers' living in Russia suggested they go there.

A dozen people including a 14-year-old kid were given misdemeanor citations on Sunday in El Cajon, California, after they defied the city’s recently enacted ban on distributing food to the needy on public land.

Local charities intend to challenge the law in court. Sunday’s arrests will help give them standing to bring their case. A group called Break the Ban has vowed to push forward with another scheduled food distribution day near the end of the month.

Putin Says Communism Comes From the Bible, Compares Lenin to a Saint

Russian President Vladimir Putin has compared Vladimir Lenin to a saint and declared that Soviet communist ideas come from the Bible.

Putin was speaking during a documentary about the recently-restored Valaam Monastery on state-funded channel Rossiya 1, which tells the story of the building—located near the border with Finland—over the years.

DJIBOUTI — “World War III will start here.”

We had been driving around the streets of this African city for more than an hour, and my companion — an agent from the national intelligence service whom I will call Mohammed — was excited by the implications of what he had been showing me.

Strategically placed at the entrance to the Red Sea, commanding a large percentage of the trade and energy flows between Europe and Asia, Djibouti is home to more foreign bases than any other country. We drove by one of the four surviving French bases. The perimeter was wide, but the building immediately reminded you of an old Foreign Legion fort, with its run-down walls and picturesque watch towers.

Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has accused the US of forming a “terror army”, after Washington announced plans for a 30,000-strong force inside Syria to protect territory held by its mainly Kurdish allies.

On Sunday, the US-led coalition said it was working with its Syrian militia allies, the mainly Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), to set up the new border force. The force would operate along the borders with Turkey and Iraq, as well as within Syria along the Euphrates river, which separates most SDF territory from that held by the government. The announcement was one of the few insights into the Trump administration’s longer-term thinking for Syria.

Editor’s note: After publication, The Nation received letters from David Kennedy and other proponents of the Ceasefire model that challenged this article’s characterization of the model and its effectiveness. An internal review determined that the story contained a number of inaccuracies related to the BRAVE program and the description of Kennedy’s model, which we have corrected in the text as well as in the headline and sub-headline of the story. More significantly, the piece inaccurately identified New York City’s Operation Crew Cut as a Ceasefire program; it is not, and Kennedy has no relationship with it or the gang indictments that it has produced. We have removed the paragraph which made those claims, as well as quotes that contained comment on other non-Ceasefire programs. The story also overreached in contending that evidence has definitively shown that Ceasefire does not work; in fact, while research is inconclusive on whether reductions in violence can be sustained, cities that have implemented the model do usually find at least a short-term drop in violence. Finally, we failed to contact Kennedy for comment, which represents a serious lapse in our process. We deeply regret these errors.

Update, July 17, 2018: After we corrected this story to our satisfaction, David Kennedy submitted a letter to the editor. It appears in full at the end of the article.

The assault by Bashar al-Assad’s regime on the last Syrian province under rebel control could spark a “new wave of migration”, a top Turkish official has warned, amid growing alarm over a campaign that has displaced more than 100,000 people.

The fighting in Idlib, which has intensified in recent days amid rebel counterattacks, has raised fears of a humanitarian catastrophe in an area already crowded with refugees. “This displacement is the biggest perhaps in the Syrian revolution since its beginning until today,” said Mounir Mustafa, the deputy chief of the civil defence rescue workers organisation known as the White Helmets.

UPDATE: Toronto police say an 11-year-old girl's report of having her hijab cut by a scissors-wielding man as she walked to school last week did not happen. Police had been investigating the alleged incident as a hate crime and now say their investigation is concluded. Read the latest on this story.

ORIGINAL STORY: TORONTO — An 11-year-old Toronto girl said a scissors-wielding man came up behind her and cut her hijab repeatedly as she walked to school Friday, describing the incident as one that left her terrified and confused.

The island nation of Malta lures millions of tourists every year with its dramatic Mediterranean scenery and historic sights, but increasingly it seems rich Russian visitors are attracted by something they can take with them when they leave — Maltese citizenship.

Malta has just published a list of its newest citizens, and it's striking for the number of wealthy Russians on it. The list contains the names of the owners of Russia's biggest information technology companies, distilleries, real estate conglomerates and banks — more than 730 Russians in all.

Democracy gone Astray