Democracy gone Astray: Saturday, September 16, 2023

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, September 16, 2023

Pentagon misled Obama administration on gun background check problem, document shows

Devin Kelley shouldn’t have had a gun. He’d pleaded guilty in a 2013 court martial to beating his wife and young child, which barred him from owning a firearm under federal law. But the Air Force never sent records of his guilty plea to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as the law requires, so Kelley’s background check came back clean when he bought a Ruger AR-556 rifle in April 2016.

Last November, he used that rifle to kill 26 people and injure 20 more at a Baptist church in Sutherland Springs, Texas.

Labour has accused Theresa May of an attempt to “deliberately mislead Parliament” by repeating a “discredited” claim about schools.

Earlier this week, the government was reprimanded by its own statistics watchdog for claiming there are 1.9 million more children in good or outstanding schools than in 2010.

During PMQs in the House of Commons, however, the Prime Minister made the same claim and the government is now insisting the number is “factually correct”.

Top Saudi leaders deployed a 15-man hit squad to lie in wait for dissident writer Jamal Khashoggi inside Riyadh’s consulate in Istanbul, The New York Times said in an explosive story.

Among the assassination team was a forensic expert who brought a bone saw to dismember Khashoggi’s body after killing him, the Times reported on Tuesday, citing an unidentified “senior official” as saying.

Al Jazeera could not immediately verify the news report.

Vladimir Putin personally bestowed a “hero of Russia” award on Alexander Mishkin, one of two military intelligence officers who allegedly poisoned Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury, it has been claimed.

The investigative website Bellingcat, which identified Mishkin, said on Tuesday that a photograph existed of him shaking hands with the Russian president. It is unclear when or where the ceremony took place.

The Vostok-2018 war games in eastern Siberia last month marked Russia’s biggest military exercise in more than 30 years, with about 300,000 Russian, Chinese and Mongolian troops taking part.

More than just an exercise, the war games were a public relations opportunity to showcase military hardware, Russia’s second-biggest source of income after oil.

On the evening of September 26, 2017, 28-year-old Loujain al-Hathloul sat at home in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, eyeing her smartphone. A stream of notifications cascaded down the screen as her social media feeds erupted with messages of shock, joy, and speculation. Moments before, an ordinary Tuesday had turned historic: King Salman al-Saud took to state-run television to issue a stunning royal decree: Saudi women, at long last, would be granted the right to drive. The abrupt announcement, orchestrated in concert with a simultaneous press event in Washington, D.C., and a warm commendation from U.S. President Donald Trump, had sent millions of Saudis reeling. For decades, the government had remained intractable on the issue of women’s right to drive, siding invariably with conservative clerics who justified the ban on religious grounds. Human rights groups viewed the ban — unique the world over — as an emblem of a broader oppressive stance toward women, and had long called for its repeal. Yet even the most earnest advocates would have thought such a reversal unthinkable mere hours before.

Never in Doug MacQuarrie's wildest dreams did he expect his organization would find itself on the receiving end of an alleged Russian military intelligence operation.

As the chief operating officer of the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sports, his day-to-day preoccupations involve clean competition on the playing field, not the digital battlefield.

A Russian cyber-attack on the headquarters of the international chemical weapons watchdog was disrupted by Dutch military intelligence just weeks after the Salisbury novichok attack, it emerged on Thursday, amid fresh revelations of spying that escalated the diplomatic war between the west and Vladimir Putin.

At 10:30 a.m. on Oct. 9, 2016, a 64-year-old master spy and known scourge of the Kremlin ambled into a Walmart in Florida and acquired a recreational fishing license.

For the right to fish along the saltwater shoreline, Alexander Poteyev disclosed his real name and date of birth, as well as a phone number, email, and mailing address — an odd choice, because Poteyev was hiding from Russian assassins.

Russian spies have been accused of involvement in a series of cyber-plots across the globe, leading the US to level charges against seven agents.

The US justice department said targets included the global chemical weapons watchdog, anti-doping agencies and a US nuclear company.

The allegations are part of an organised push-back against alleged Russian cyber-attacks around the world.

Russia earlier dismissed the allegations as "Western spy mania".

BARCELONA — One year after Catalonia’s illegal independence referendum, the violent demonstrations in Barcelona on Monday made it painfully obvious that the situation has worsened, not improved. Carles Puigdemont may be out of the picture, but the separatists’ new leader, Quim Torra, is pursuing the same misguided agenda as his predecessor.

It’s no surprise Catalonia was in utter chaos on Monday.

Jeremy Corbyn’s blitz of new policies announced at Labour’s conference last week have not won over new voters, a poll for HuffPost UK suggests.

According to the BMG survey, Labour now has a five point lead over the Conservatives – as Theresa May gathers her party in Birmingham for its own party conference.

Boris Johnson is the public’s preferred candidate for PM should Theresa May step down – but he is less popular than Jeremy Corbyn and would most likely lose a general election to Labour, a poll for HuffPost UK has revealed.

From a list of leading Tories, the former foreign secretary was backed by 20% of those asked who should take over as prime minister if May is forced to quit before the next election.

At first glance, Abdulrahman el-Bahnasawy, a Muslim kid from the suburbs of Toronto, seemed an unlikely jihadi. A soft-spoken 18-year-old with delicate features and thick curly hair, he had rejected Islam at 15, announcing to his parents, conservative Egyptian immigrants, that he was now an agnostic. This, he would write later, was just one of the many troubles he caused his family: After he discovered weed at 14, his terrified parents moved with him and his older sister to Kuwait. There, lonely and bullied in school, he began to take every drug he could get his hands on. He attempted suicide several times. Foreshadowing the bipolar disorder and schizophrenia he would later be diagnosed with, he would sit on the toilet in his parents’ house for hours, huffing butane and hallucinating, conversing with “Hamtaramo,” an imaginary pilot who spoke to him through the radio. “He was,” Bahnasawy wrote later, “like a friend.”

Labour has dashed the hopes of anti-Brexit campaigners by blocking moves to formally commit the party to holding a second EU referendum.

A tense, five-hour meeting of local party and union delegates agreed instead to debate a motion that merely kept open the option of a ‘People’s Vote’ on whatever exit deal Theresa May hammers out with Brussels.

Labour’s ruling body could seize effective control of the country if Jeremy Corbyn is forced to quit suddenly as Prime Minister, MPs have warned.

HuffPost UK has learned that the National Executive Committee (NEC) voted on Saturday night to back a change to Labour rules that could mean no acting leader could do anything without its prior approval – in government as well as opposition.

Ecuador in 2017 gave Wikileaks founder Julian Assange a diplomatic post in Russia but rescinded it after Britain refused to give him diplomatic immunity, according to an Ecuadorean government document seen by Reuters.

The aborted effort suggests Ecuadorean President Lenin Moreno had engaged Moscow to resolve the situation of Assange, who has been holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy for six years to avoid arrest by British authorities on charges of skipping bail.

Donald Tusk: May knew EU objections to UK Brexit plan

Keep calm, Madam prime minister, and Brussels will carry on.

European Council President Donald Tusk on Friday evening sought to contain the damage of a disastrous EU leaders' summit in Salzburg, Austria, that plunged the Brexit negotiations into new acrimony.

Faced with headlines at home declaring a "humiliation" by her EU colleagues, U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May came out fighting to declare an "impasse" in the talks, demanding "respect" for the U.K. and issuing a warning that she would not "break up my country."

Russian diplomats held secret talks in London last year with people close to Julian Assange to assess whether they could help him flee the UK, the Guardian has learned.

A tentative plan was devised that would have seen the WikiLeaks founder taken out of Ecuador’s London embassy in a diplomatic vehicle and transported to another country.

On September 5, the UK named two agents of the Russian military intelligence (GRU) as the main suspects in the Skripal poisoning case.

The two are accused of depositing a nerve agent in the Salisbury home of Sergei Skripal, a former Russian double agent, which poisoned him and his daughter in March this year.

It’s been almost three years since 52% of voters in the EU referendum voted for the UK to leave the European Union, unleashing a wave of uncertainty. Will Britain negotiate a deal or crash out of the EU without one? What does that mean for jobs? For property? For the economy? For those EU citizens living in the UK?

For many, the constant to-ing and fro-ing has resulted in Brexit fatigue. But for others, the climate of uncertainty has taken a toll on their mental health and wellbeing. Tim (who asked us not to use his surname) has lived with depression and anxiety for more than three years, which he says has been exacerbated by the Brexit vote. “I’m very engaged politically and I was absolutely devastated by the referendum outcome,” he explains. “It’s been dwelling on my mind for the last two years.”

Super PACs funded by some of the nation’s richest people are pouring tens of millions of dollars into the midterm elections, outpacing even the party committees that were once the biggest spenders in the field.

The 10 largest outside groups not tied to a particular candidate have already spent more than $150 million on so-called independent expenditures, money that pays for advertising on television or online, paid canvassers, polling research or mailers.

A Russian military aircraft was brought down by a Syrian missile over the Mediterranean Sea, killing all 15 people on board, the Russian defence ministry said.

Moscow blamed Israel for the crash, saying the reconnaissance plane was caught in the crossfire as four Israeli fighter jets attacked targets in northwestern Syria.

Julian Assange planned to leave the U.K. and seek refuge in Russia as authorities closed in on him, according to a leak of WikiLeaks data.

“I, Julian Assange, hereby grant full authority to my friend, Israel Shamir, to both drop off and collect my passport, in order to get a visa,” Assange wrote to the Russian consulate in London in a letter dated November 30, 2010. The letter is part of a trove of WikiLeaks emails, financial records, secretly recorded footage and other documents leaked to the Associated Press.

The knock came one night late last year, a persistent bang on the metal door. The family inside shuddered as the sound echoed through the sparsely furnished farmhouse. Officially, their village had been liberated from the so-called Islamic State in October 2017, along with the nearby town of Hawija. But the military campaign had been hasty. The militants had sought refuge in the nearby mountains, leaving Iraqi forces to sweep through the area unchallenged.

The UK economy would rapidly start to contract in the event of a disruptive exit from the EU next spring, according to a stark International Monetary Fund report that highlights the recession risks of a no-deal Brexit.

Christine Lagarde, the IMF’s managing director, added that there would be costs to the UK under any outcome that involves leaving the EU.

Expressing the IMF’s growing concern at the possibility of an acrimonious divorce next March, Lagarde said: “If that happened there would be dire consequences. It would inevitably have consequences in terms of reduced growth, an increase in the [budget] deficit and a depreciation of the currency.

Boris Johnson has dug his own “political grave” following his remarks comparing Theresa May’s Brexit plan to a suicide vest, his former close aide has declared.

Guto Harri, Johnson’s Communications Director during his first term as Mayor of London, broke his silence to launch a withering assessment of his former boss’s conduct.

Documents uncovered by investigative journalists have provided the first public evidence that the suspects in the Salisbury novichok attack have formal ties to the Russian ministry of defence.

British authorities have charged Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov with conspiracy to murder Sergei and Yulia Skripal and Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey. The former Russian spy and his daughter were found collapsed on 4 March; the police officer fell ill after trying to help them. Prosecutors say Petrov and Boshirov work for Russian military intelligence, whichPresident Vladimir Putin has denied.

Oleh Derevianko was on the road to his parents’ village in Ukraine on a bright June day in 2017 when he got a call from the CEO of a telecommunications company. Computer systems were failing at Oschadbank, one of the largest banks in Ukraine, and the CEO suspected a cyberattack. Could Derevianko’s digital security firm investigate? Derevianko told his response team to look into it and kept driving. Then his phone buzzed again. And again. Something big was happening.

The Dutch government expelled two alleged Russian spies this year after they were accused of planning to hack into a Swiss chemicals laboratory where novichok nerve agent samples from the Salisbury attack were analysed, it has emerged.

The men were arrested in The Hague this spring as part of an operation involving British, Swiss and Dutch intelligence agencies.

As the United States grew more hostile toward Chinese investment in the country this year by blocking a handful of high-profile deals, many investors and advisers were confident China would find opportunities elsewhere.

That confidence has proven premature.

In recent months, Germany, France, Britain, the European Union, Australia, Japan and Canada have all joined an unprecedented global backlash against Chinese capital, citing national security concerns. Dealmakers now wonder whether this dynamic will run its course or should be taken as a new normal.

It’s been a rough couple of days for Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov.

Last Wednesday, the suspected Russian hit-men were accused by British police of the attempted murder of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in March this year, as well as grievous bodily harm against a police officer who first responded to the scene. Police claim the two used the deadly nerve agent Novichok to carry out the deed.

The two men accused of poisoning a Russian former spy and his daughter in the U.K. said they were only in Britain as tourists.

Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov — British police believe those names are fake — gave their first press interview to RT, Russia’s state-funded television channel, on Thursday. Last week they were charged by U.K. authorities with conspiracy and the attempted murder of Sergei Skripal, a Russian ex-spy who passed information to the British, as well as his daughter Yulia and a police officer investigating the poisoning.

My relationship with Israel started before I can remember. Growing up Orthodox, I started learning to read Hebrew at roughly the same time I started learning to read English, although my Hebrew had a decidedly Biblical vocabulary. Gamal (camel), ohel (tent), and elohim (God) are among the first words I learned to read in that curvaceous, inky print. Zionism was inextricable from the Jewish studies curriculum that took up half my school day. We learned the story of God promising Abraham a land and we prayed facing Jerusalem, for the preservation of Israel against its enemies.

Russia’s secretive military intelligence agency, the GRU, is testing the limits of Western countries with its aggressive tactics and bold operations, prompting action from the Trump administration and some European allies as they seek to counter its behavior.

The Trump administration has sanctioned several GRU officers for launching cyberattacks and has expelled dozens of suspected Russian intelligence officers operating in the U.S. in response to the poisoning of an ex-Russian spy in England this year.

{mosads}The effort to thwart the GRU is part of a broader push by the U.S. government to take a firm stance against Russian aggression, one that has at times been overshadowed by President Trump’s contradictory statements about Russian interference in the 2016 election and his overtures to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi has vehemently defended the imprisonment of the two Reuters journalists who were given seven-year jail terms after reporting on the massacre of Rohingya Muslims in Rahkine state.

Aung San Suu Kyi had remained notably silent over the case, which was widely condemned by international governments and the UN as a miscarriage of justice and a symbol of the major regression of freedom of expression in Myanmar.

According to Misha Mitchell, an attorney for a conservation group in Louisiana’s ecologically sensitive Atchafalaya Basin, Energy Transfer Partners and other private oil interests broke the law when they began building a section of the Bayou Bridge Pipeline on a parcel of private land in the iconic river swamp without permission from the landowners.

Mitchell filed a lawsuit against the pipeline project on behalf of landowner Peter Aaslestad and his family after construction began on their property in late July, but work continued on the property until Monday, when Energy Transfer Partners struck a deal in a local court with the plaintiffs to temporarily halt construction.

European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker on Wednesday shot down the U.K. government's negotiating position on Brexit, saying it cannot "choose" the parts of the EU it wants to remain a part of and discard the rest.

In his annual State of the Union speech to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, Juncker said he regrets Brexit "deeply," but reinforced the uncompromising message that has been delivered by chief negotiator Michel Barnier in recent weeks on key aspects of Theresa May's Brexit plan.

One of Jeremy Corbyn’s closest aides has not been granted a Parliamentary pass due to unspecified security concerns – but has continued to work in his Commons office for more than nine months.

HuffPost UK can reveal that Iram Awan, the Labour leader’s Private Secretary, has not had her application approved by the authorities on the advice of the security services, due to questions over known associates.

But Awan, a British-born national whose role includes providing “strategic advice” to Corbyn, has been escorted into Parliament on a routine basis by other members of his team.

Russia linked to 2014 wiretapping scandal in Poland

Reports say man convicted of organising recordings owed millions to Russian coal firm

Update: In May 2019 a spokesman for Robert Szustkowski contacted the Guardian to complain about this article. The readers’ editor investigated and concluded that: there was a high public interest in journalistic scrutiny of the restaurant eavesdropping case in Poland, the effects of which were continuing; Robert Szustkowski was a newsworthy figure; coverage of him ought to be accurate; and appropriate opportunities to respond to coverage ought to be provided to him. Accordingly, this article has been clarified and augmented with information received after publication, and a footnote has been added containing an English translation of an excerpt from a Polish court decision, in Robert Szustkowski’s favour, about related Polish media coverage. A further footnote was added in January 2021.

The two men accused by the UK of carrying out a nerve agent attack in Salisbury have been identified and are civilians, not criminals, Vladimir Putin has said.

“We know who they are; we have found them,” the Russian president said at an economic forum in the eastern city of Vladivostok, adding that the two men – named by the UK as Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov – may soon make appearances in the media to protest their innocence.

West Bank, Palestine – Mahmoud Ahmad Zaal Odeh was shot and killed by an Israeli settler while tending to his 30 dunums (7.5 acres) of farmland in Ras al-Nakleh, next to his home village of Qusra, south of Nablus in the occupied West Bank.

Zaal Odeh was 46-years-old at the time of his death in November last year, and he left behind not only his wife but also seven children – four girls and three boys.

Russia’s and China’s expanding economic and military reach could foster extremism in developing nations, and the U.S. must engage the rest of the world in trying to prevent that threat from materializing, a task force spearheaded by the leaders of the 9/11 Commission argues in a new report.

The report, released Tuesday, the 17th anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks, comes as President Donald Trump has pursued overtures to Russian President Vladimir Putin and other autocrats, tried to slash foreign aid spending and broken with America’s traditional democratic allies to an unusual degree.

Allies of Jeremy Corbyn have rejected fresh claims his handling of Labour’s anti-Semitism crisis has coincided with a big fall in party members.

Centrist campaigners renewed their attacks on the party leader as they alleged that total party membership had dropped markedly in recent months.

HuffPost UK has learned Labour sent out 506,320 ballots for its recent NEC elections, based on the number of members eligible to vote for seats on the ruling body.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has urged the international community to prevent a Syrian government offensive in Syria’s Idlib, as the United Nations says it fears the century’s “worst humanitarian catastrophe” there.

“Not only innocent Syrians, but the entire world stands to pay the price [otherwise],” he said.

Erdogan, who met with his Russian and Iranian counterparts at a summit in Tehran last week, also said Russia and Iran had a responsibility to stop a potential humanitarian disaster in Idlib.

In early July, Theresa May summoned her cabinet to Chequers, the British prime minister’s country residence 40 miles from Downing Street, where Churchill used to escape from the Blitz to plan the war and watch the Marx Brothers. They were there to discuss the terms on which the United Kingdom would leave the European Union: complex and contentious matters that had divided the country, particularly May’s Conservatives, and not least her ministers. May wanted to end those squabbles, and in effect remind them of what Lord Melbourne, Queen Victoria’s first prime minister in the 1830s, said to his own cabinet: “It is not much matter which we say, but mind we must all say the same.”