Democracy gone Astray: Saturday, September 23, 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 23, 2023

Russia arrests thousands amid unprecedented pro-Navalny protests

Security forces detained more than 3,000 people and violently broke up rallies across Russia as tens of thousands of protesters ignored extreme cold and police warnings to demand the release of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny.

Prosecutors in St Petersburg said in a statement late Saturday they were probing violations including “on the part of law enforcement” and the use of force against an unidentified woman.

The statement was released after local media published a video showing a middle-aged woman falling to the ground after being kicked by riot police.

China built a wall to protect against foreign invaders, but Russia is erecting a barrier that could weaken its position. On its western border from Finland in the north to Georgia in the south, Russia has pressured neighbors and caused NATO to deploy more military force close to Russia. The Kremlin probably did not intend to hand NATO this opportunity.

Russia uses hard power – intimidation, coercion, disinformation – so often that the Kremlin may underrate the capacity or will of neighbors to resist. Seemingly aware of these risks, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has warned of “NATO’s unprecedented plans to move toward our borders and involve neutral countries – like Sweden and Finland – in its military exercises.”

Groups that call Israel an “apartheid state” will be banned from lecturing at schools, Israel’s education minister has said.

The move targets one of Israel’s leading human rights groups B’Tselem after it began describing Israel and its control of the occupied Palestinian territories as a single apartheid system.

Late on Sunday, Israel’s Education Minister Yoav Galant tweeted he had instructed the ministry’s director-general to “prevent the entry of organizations calling Israel ‘an apartheid state’ or demeaning Israeli soldiers from lecturing at schools”.

Russia’s prison service says it has orders to detain Alexei Navalny, a statement made days before the opposition politician is due to return to Russia after recuperating abroad from a suspected FSB poisoning.

Navalny could face prison time when he gets off the plane in Moscow on Sunday. Officials said they would take him into custody for failing to appear for parole reviews after he was attacked with a novichok-style poison in August.

The assassination attempt left the opposition leader fighting for his life in a Siberian hospital before he was transferred to Germany for treatment.

Israel is celebrating an impressive, record-setting vaccination drive, having given initial jabs of coronavirus shots to more than a 10th of the population. But Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza can only watch and wait.

As the world ramps up what is already on track to become a highly unequal vaccination push – with people in richer nations first to be inoculated – the situation in Israel and the Palestinian territories provides a stark example of the divide.

Not long after Mike Pompeo became the first member of the Trump administration to blame Russia for wide-ranging hacks of US government agencies and private companies which have sent Washington scrambling to fill the breach, the president sought to play the hack down.

In response, one senior congressional Democrat accused Trump of “another scandalous betrayal of our national security”.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal authorities expressed increased alarm Thursday about an intrusion into U.S. and other computer systems around the globe that officials suspect was carried out by Russian hackers. The nation’s cybersecurity agency warned of a “grave” risk to government and private networks.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said in its most detailed comments yet that the intrusion had compromised federal agencies as well as “critical infrastructure” in a sophisticated attack that was hard to detect and will be difficult to undo.

The king of Sweden has said the country has failed in its response to Covid-19, as hospitals in the Stockholm region warned they were struggling to cope with a surge in cases and polls showed public confidence in the authorities had plunged to a new low.

“The people of Sweden have suffered tremendously in difficult conditions,” King Carl XVI Gustaf told the state broadcaster, SVT, in an end-of-year interview. “I think we have failed. We have a large number who have died, and that is terrible.”

The comments were initially taken as a criticism of Sweden’s controversial anti-lockdown strategy, but the royal court later said the king was referring “to the whole of Sweden and the whole society. He is showing empathy for all those affected.”

It’s a habit of David Moore’s, dropping profound quotations into conversation—sometimes it’s the Bible; sometimes it’s the Dhammapada, a Buddhist text. On this particular day, he’s referencing Malcolm X. “Equality is the opportunity,” the Sacramento State University finance professor recites on one of our recent Zoom calls, “to develop all of our dormant potential, all of our dormant capabilities.”

Moore is a bald and clean-shaven 46-year-old, cerebral, his speech often punctuated by a slightly furrowed brow. He is reflecting on his role as an educator, but he is also leaning on the more-than-academic, the more-than-intellectual connection he feels with the civil rights leader. Moore, who says he is the only tenured Black professor in the College of Business Administration, has recently felt the connection on a visceral level. Ever since an incident with another professor two years ago, Moore has been fighting—fighting for justice, fighting for recognition from his university, fighting to bring what happened to people’s attention because, he says, “the public won’t be fooled.”

“17 December 2010 would have been a normal day if the local press and people hadn’t been here,” says Ali Bouazizi. “The fact they decided to stop being afraid of the government changed everything.”

It is 9pm and Ali, who is now 48 years old, has just returned home from work in his mini-market in Sidi Bouzid, a small town in the centre of Tunisia.

He used to see his cousin, Mohamed, almost daily, as the 26-year-old often helped out in Ali’s shop.

“I was very fond of him,” he says. “He was a good person. His only problem was that he would get angry quickly and couldn’t see reason anymore.”

Vladimir Putin has denied Russia was behind the poisoning of the opposition leader Alexei Navalny, calling a recent investigation by Bellingcat a “falsification”.

“Who needs to poison him,” he said during a nationally televised press conference, denying that Russia’s FSB spy agency was involved. “If they’d wanted to [poison him] then they probably would have finished the job.”

His act of despair still shakes the Arab world. Mohamed Bouazizi, the 26-year-old fruit seller whose self-immolation triggered revolutions across the Middle East, has a boulevard named after him in Tunisia’s capital, Tunis. In his home town of Sidi Bouzid, he is depicted in a giant portrait facing the local government headquarters.

But a decade since he set himself on fire in protest at state corruption and brutality, Bouazizi is out of fashion in Tunisia – along with the revolution his death inspired. His family have moved to Canada and cut most ties with Sidi Bouzid. “They were smeared,” says Bilal Gharby, 32, a family friend.

More than half a million people from ethnic minority groups in Xinjiang have been coerced into picking cotton, on a scale far greater than previously thought, new research has suggested.

The Xinjiang region produces more than 20% of the world’s cotton and 84% of China’s, but according to a new report released on Tuesday by the Center for Global Policy there is significant evidence that it is “tainted” by human rights abuses, including suspected forced labour of Uighur and other Turkic Muslim minority people.

Russian hackers are being accused of carrying out the biggest cyber-raid against the US for more than five years, targeting federal government networks in a sophisticated attack, according to American officials and sources.

The hackers, linked to Russian spy agencies, were able to monitor internal emails at the US Treasury and Department of Commerce and may have compromised other bodies, in what is being described as a highly sophisticated state-level attack.

An undercover hit squad working for Russia’s FSB spy agency poisoned the opposition activist Alexei Navalny in August, after shadowing him on multiple previous trips, the investigative website Bellingcat has claimed.

Citing “voluminous” telecoms and travel data, Bellingcat reported that the squad had secretly tracked Navalny since 2017. The operation apparently began after he announced plans to stand against Vladimir Putin in presidential elections.

Explosive report reveals RCMP’s toxic culture of racism, misogyny and homophobia

RCMP’s toxic culture

Racism, misogyny and homophobia — these are the characteristics of Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) toxic culture according to a new report released last month.

The report, “Broken Dreams Broken Lives,” was written by former Supreme Court of Canada justice Michel Bastarache, who had been engaged as an independent assessor to review the more than 3,000 claims of sexual harassment experienced by women who worked for the RCMP. He found that the experiences of these women in the RCMP were nothing short of devastating.

The BC NDP has repeatedly campaigned on promises to increase the supply of affordable housing, and the government even has a 30-point plan to achieve its goals.

But on Galiano Island, people seeking approval for an affordable rental project have run up against the party’s president, Craig Keating, who is among those opposing their project.

French police violently dismantled a makeshift migrant camp in the heart of Paris overnight, clashing with migrants and activists.

Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin tweeted that some of the scenes were "shocking", and ordered the police to provide a full report on their actions.

Dozens of small tents were removed from Place de la République, with occupants sometimes being tipped out by police.

The homeless migrants say they are forced to live on the streets.

STOCKHOLM — As it becomes clear that a second wave of COVID-19 is hitting lockdown holdout Sweden hard, debate in the country has moved to a new question: Whose fault is it?

This week, blame flew in at least three directions.

Some experts blamed the government, saying its light-touch strategy was too soft and had allowed the pandemic to take hold again.

The government pushed back, saying current rules were appropriate — and were being tightened where necessary. It blamed citizens for not following the rules already in place.

ROME — The Italian mafia are doing all they can to prevent coronavirus from harming their business — including orchestrating violence at anti-lockdown protests.

According to Italian authorities, the mob planned and directed demonstrations in Naples that descended into violence and attacks on police on Friday. Similar protests have taken place across the country for the past four days, with bar and restaurant owners expressing concerns that tighter measures, brought in by the government to counter a surge in coronavirus cases in the country, will destroy their businesses.

So much of politics today feels completely divorced from reality.

Bullshit isn’t new, but the sheer volume of it, the constant flood of misleading stories, contradictory narratives, and outright disinformation, has changed the political landscape. The information space, thanks to digital technology, seems more out of control than ever.

A 2019 book by Peter Pomerantsev, a Soviet-born ex-reality TV producer turned journalist and academic, claims that we’re experiencing a brand of reality-bending politics that really began in post-Soviet Russia. It’s a politics built on a distinctive form of propaganda, the goal of which is to confuse, not convince.

With the vote counting still underway on Saturday night, the British Columbia NDP is on track to be re-elected with a large majority.

As of 10:45 p.m., the NDP were leading or elected in 55 constituencies, the BC Liberals in 29 and the BC Greens in three. There are 87 seats in the B.C. legislature.

The NDP had received about 44 per cent of the vote, the BC Liberals 35 per cent and the Greens 16 per cent.

The arrival of a United Arab Emirates delegation in Israel has been slammed as “shameful” by Palestinian officials.

The delegation – UAE’s first official visit to Israel – was welcomed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi and Finance Minister Israel Katz at Ben Gurion Airport on Tuesday.

The five-hour visit would be restricted to the airport near Tel Aviv, due to coronavirus concerns, Israeli organisers said, and it comes after the two countries signed an agreement at the White House to normalise ties last month.

To help the Belarusian people choose their own government, we must deter Russia from intervening more directly in Belarus’s affairs by making it clear any such intervention will incur economic and other material costs.

When I watched Belarus’s dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, steal an election on Aug. 9 and then allow the beating and imprisonment of protesters and opposition leaders, it seemed like déjà vu.

In 2010, when I was U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), Lukashenko similarly claimed reelection through massive fraud. Protesters were beaten and his opposition imprisoned. The repression was so horrifying in 2010 that the protests quickly ended.

Two centuries ago, Russian czars proudly proclaimed that they “liberated” Armenians from the rule of Ottoman Turkey and Iran.

Right after World War II, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin planned to invade and annex eastern Turkey to “expand” Soviet Armenia and get access to the Mediterranean.

Post-Communist Russia seems to be following the same pattern of “protecting” Armenians from their neighbours – Turkic-speaking ex-Soviet Azerbaijan and its closest ally, Turkey.

The European Union on Wednesday imposed sanctions on six senior Russians over the poisoning of opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

The assets of Alexander Bortnikov, the head of the Federal Security Service (FSB), will be frozen and he will face a travel ban. Also targeted are Sergei Kiriyenko, first deputy chief of staff in Vladimir Putin’s administration and a former prime minister; Kremlin official Andrei Yarin; deputy ministers of defense Alexei Krivoruchko and Pavel Popov; and Sergei Menyaylo, a presidential envoy to the Siberian Federal District — Navalny collapsed on a flight from the Siberian city of Tomsk.

Leading Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny says he believes President Vladimir Putin was responsible for his poisoning.

"I assert that Putin is behind this act, I don't see any other explanation," he told German news magazine Der Spiegel in an interview.

Germany, where Mr Navalny is recovering, says he was poisoned by a Novichok nerve agent. Its findings were confirmed by labs in France and Sweden.

The Kremlin denies any involvement.

Responding to the interview on Thursday, Mr Putin's spokesman said there was no evidence that Mr Navalny had been poisoned with a nerve agent, and said CIA agents were working with the opposition leader.

Gaza City – The second Intifada – commonly referred to by Palestinians as al-Aqsa Intifada – began after then-Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon sparked the uprising when he stormed al-Aqsa Mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem with more than 1,000 heavily armed police and soldiers on September 28, 2000.

The move sparked widespread outrage among Palestinians who had just marked the anniversary of the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre, for which Sharon was found responsible for failing to stop the bloodshed, following Israel’s invasion of Lebanon.

Occupied East Jerusalem – As more Arab countries normalise relations with Israel, it presses on with a policy of “silent transfer” – an intricate system that targets Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem with residency revocation, displacement through house demolitions, barriers in obtaining building permits, and high taxes.

Palestinian researcher Manosur Manasra notes Israel launched this policy of transfer against Palestinians in East Jerusalem almost immediately after the 1967 war and the subsequent occupation of the eastern part of the city.

Thousands of mosques in Xinjiang have been damaged or destroyed in just three years, leaving fewer in the region than at any time since the Cultural Revolution, according to a report on Chinese oppression of Muslim minorities.

The revelations are contained in an expansive data project by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), which used satellite imagery and on-the-ground reporting to map the extensive and continuing construction of detention camps and destruction of cultural and religious sites in the north-western region.

China’s network of detention centres in the northwest Xinjiang region is much bigger than previously thought and is being expanded, even as Beijing says it is winding down a “re-education” programme for ethnic Uighurs that has been condemned internationally, new research released by an Australian think-tank showed on Thursday.

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) said it had identified more than 380 “suspected detention facilities” in the region, where the United Nations says more than one million Uighurs and other mostly Muslim Turkic-speaking residents have been held in recent years.

The chances of a new arms treaty with Russia look slim as Russian negotiators appear to be unwilling to accept the Trump administration’s terms for a new deal.

Reuters reported Monday that a Russian news agency quoted deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov as saying that the chances of extending the START treaty, which eliminated strategic nuclear weapons held by the U.S. and Russia, was “minimal.”

Before European leaders agree to a landmark investment accord with Beijing, they want to know what kind of China they’d be striking a deal with.

Is it the internationalist, multilateralist country trumpeted by Beijing’s top diplomats abroad? Or is it the one centered around a more Marxist vision, as presented by President Xi Jinping at home? Suspicions are growing among EU leaders that it’s the latter.

It is not a secret that US President Donald Trump is obsessed with either voiding or emulating the legacy of his predecessor, Barack Obama. Trump now seeks to defeat Obama’s political heir, Joe Biden, in the upcoming presidential election and wants to stack up enough peace-making deals to earn the elusive Nobel Peace Prize, just as Obama did in 2009.

As his poll numbers began to sink last summer, foreign policy “victories” became that much more necessary to distract from political troubles at home and boost his rating. Thus, Trump instructed his advisers to scout out deal-making opportunities around the world before the 2020 presidential election.

Representatives of the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Israel, and United States governments will converge in Washington, DC on Tuesday to sign historic normalisation accords between the Gulf nations and Israel.

The UAE agreement, announced in August and since dubbed the “Abraham Accords” by White House officials, makes the UAE the third Arab country and first in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) to agree to establish relations with Israel.

Russia has agreed to a $1.5bn loan with Minsk, President Vladimir Putin said at talks on Monday with Alexander Lukashenko, the embattled Belarusian leader, adding that the Belarusian people should resolve the crisis without foreign interference.

Putin, in comments broadcast on television from the talks in Russia’s Sochi, said he thought a proposal by Lukashenko to carry out constitutional reform was logical and timely.

Lukashenko arrived in Sochi to meet Putin on Monday, as protests continued across Belarus seeking the end of his rule following a disputed August 9 election.

ATHENS — Greece is getting out the credit card and going on a big military spending spree as it faces growing tensions with Turkey.

Despite the deep recession caused by the coronavirus crisis and a rising budget deficit, Athens has decided it’s time to act. Fighter jets, frigates, torpedoes and helicopters are all on Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’ shopping list.

France, which has given Athens political and military backing in its confrontation with Ankara, will be a big beneficiary of the procurement push. A deal between the two countries was on the agenda when Mitsotakis met French President Emmanuel Macron in Corsica ahead of a summit of Mediterranean leaders on Thursday.

Canadian police forces have received millions of dollars from oil companies, banks and financiers, through shadowy charitable foundations that have little public oversight and increasingly serve as a “cash cow” of private money.

These police-affiliated organizations based in large cities across Canada have funded helicopters, armoured vehicles and surveillance technology for police departments, as well as many community and youth-oriented programs, according to an investigation by The Tyee.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said there was “proof beyond doubt” that Alexey Navalny was poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent amid a widening rift between Western powers and Russia over the suspected attack on the Kremlin critic.

Stoltenberg’s comments on Friday were in line with statements by Berlin earlier in the week, with a special German military laboratory claiming to have proof a chemical nerve agent from the Novichok group was used.

A new research paper accuses Amazon of spying on its employees in order to thwart potential unionization efforts — a characterization that aligns with the corporation's recently-posted job opening for a pair of intelligence analysts to monitor "labor organizing threats" among its employees.

The research paper, which was written by an anti-monopolist research and advocacy group called the Open Markets Institute, found that Amazon uses analytics to try to catch workers before they can unionize. As one example, Open Markets describes how the company uses demographic and socioeconomic data points to figure out which Whole Foods stores (which the company owns) are at risk of unionizing, something that had been alluded to in previous reports. Open Markets writes that Amazon does so by studying data which includes the number of families below the poverty line and how diverse the staff is. It also claims that Amazon has created a "heat map" so that management can better assess who might unionize and uses security cameras to spread out workers who are potentially discussing unionizing activity.

On Nov. 19, 2018, I was driving from my home in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, across the border to El Paso, Texas, when a Customs and Border Protection agent in his booth looked at my car, looked at me, and waved me to the left, through yellow poles separating the lanes, and into one of a half-dozen parking spaces off to the side. He told me to park under a roofed area and sit on a metal bench alongside my car.

I was a freshly minted 26-year-old U.S. diplomat, stationed at the U.S. Consulate General in Mexico, just a few miles from the border. Ciudad Juarez and El Paso are effectively two halves of a single metropolitan area of over 2 million people, and the line between them is one of the busiest border crossings in the world. Residents of one side frequently drive over the border to shop, go to the doctor or dine at restaurants. All the diplomats working at the consulate visit El Paso frequently; some even send their children to school on the Texas side, and cross the border as often as twice a day for school activities.

Last week, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was the victim of a suspected poisoning on a flight to Moscow from Siberia, which left him unconscious and in intensive care. Navalny, who rose to prominence during the 2011-2012 Russian presidential election, has a significant social media following, including roughly 2 million Twitter followers and 4 million subscribers to his YouTube channel.

Repeatedly jailed for leading an anti-corruption campaign targeting Russian President Vladimir Putin and his closest associates, including former Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, Navalny was barred from running against Putin in Russia’s 2018 presidential election.

The city of Portland recently sent the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) information they requested about the chemicals contained in the crowd control agents that have been sprayed on Black Lives Matter protesters by law enforcement since May — and their documents reveal that the tear gas contains chemicals that are apt to pose a health risk to those exposed, particularly given the high quantities sprayed. The documents provide insight into the potential health and environmental hazards posed by the tear gas that has blanketed protesters in the streets of downtown Portland nearly every night for months.

Solar panels are an increasingly important source of renewable power that will play an essential role in fighting climate change. They are also complex pieces of technology that become big, bulky sheets of electronic waste at the end of their lives—and right now, most of the world doesn’t have a plan for dealing with that.

But we’ll need to develop one soon, because the solar e-waste glut is coming. By 2050, the International Renewable Energy Agency projects that up to 78 million metric tons of solar panels will have reached the end of their life, and that the world will be generating about 6 million metric tons of new solar e-waste annually. While the latter number is a small fraction of the total e-waste humanity produces each year, standard electronics recycling methods don’t cut it for solar panels. Recovering the most valuable materials from one, including silver and silicon, requires bespoke recycling solutions. And if we fail to develop those solutions along with policies that support their widespread adoption, we already know what will happen.

MOSCOW — The list of suspects who wished Alexei Navalny ill is a long one. The Russian opposition leader and anti-corruption crusader has as many enemies as he has lodged accusations of graft against Russia’s political elite.

He is also Vladimir Putin’s most politically powerful opponent — and he was in the middle of organizing a challenge to the Russian president’s political party’s hold on regional power in elections next month.

An air ambulance is on its way from Germany to collect Russian opposition politician Alexey Navalny who is fighting for his life in a hospital in Siberia after falling ill from suspected poisoning during a flight to Moscow.

Spokesman Kira Yarmysh said Navalny, 44, was flying from Siberia to the Russian capital on Thursday after a work trip to Tomsk when his plane was forced to make an emergency landing after he fell ill.

MOSCOW — Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny is in a coma and on a ventilator in a hospital intensive care unit in Siberia after falling ill from suspected poisoning during a flight, his spokesperson said Thursday morning.

The 44-year-old foe of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin felt unwell on a flight back to Moscow from Tomsk, a city in Siberia, Kira Yarmysh said on Twitter.

She said the plane made an emergency landing in Omsk, Siberia, and that Navalny was suffering from “toxic poisoning.”

Taiwan faces an increasingly difficult position as China pressures the democratic island to accept conditions that would turn it into the next Hong Kong, its top diplomat told visiting US Health Secretary Alex Azar on Tuesday.

Azar arrived in Taiwan on Sunday as the highest-level US official to visit in four decades, a trip condemned by China which claims the island as its own.

Chinese fighter jets on Monday briefly crossed the median line of the sensitive Taiwan Strait, and were tracked by Taiwanese anti-aircraft missiles, part of what Taipei sees as a pattern of harassment by Beijing.

BEIJING — China has sentenced a fourth Canadian citizen to death on drug charges in less than two years following a sharp downturn in ties over the arrest of an executive of Chinese tech giant Huawei.

Ye Jianhui was sentenced Friday by the Foshan Municipal Intermediate Court in the southern province of Guangdong. Ye had been found guilty of manufacturing and transporting illegal drugs, the court said in a brief statement.

Another suspect in the case was also given the death penalty and four others sentenced to between seven years and life in prison, it said. Death sentences are automatically referred to China’s highest court for review.

How Larry King Got Duped Into Starring in Chinese Propaganda

This story was published originally by ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for ProPublica‘s Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox as soon as they are published.

Jacobi Niv had paid Larry King a few thousand dollars apiece to narrate half a dozen videos for companies or projects in Israel, where King is still a big name. But what Niv wanted King to tape on March 27, 2019, wasn’t the usual infomercial. It was more like a disinfomercial.