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| Porn Users Forum » Did Putin make a mistake invading Ukraine? |
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| 03-16-22 03:59am - 1013 days | Original Post - #1 | |
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LKLK (0)
Active User Posts: 1,583 Registered: Jun 26, '19 Location: CA |
Did Putin make a mistake invading Ukraine? Sanctions-savaged Russia teeters on brink of historic default Reuters Marc Jones March 16, 2022, 2:36 AM LONDON (Reuters) - The economic cost of Russia's assault on Ukraine was fully exposed on Wednesday as Vladimir Putin's sanctions-ravaged government teetered on the brink of its first international debt default since the Bolshevik revolution. Moscow was due to pay $117 million in interest on two dollar-denominated sovereign bonds it had sold back in 2013. But the limits it now faces making payments, and talk from the Kremlin that it might pay in roubles - triggering a default anyway - meant even veteran investors were left guessing at what might happen. One described it as the most closely watched government debt payment since Greece's default at the height of the euro zone crisis. Others said an emergency 'grace period' that allows Russia another 30 days to make the payment could drag the saga out. "The thing about defaults is that they are never clear cut and this is no exception," said Pictet emerging market portfolio manager Guido Chamorro. "There is a grace period, so we are not really going to know whether this is a default or not until April 15," he said referring to the situation if no coupon payment is made. "Anything could happen in the grace period." It had nearly $650 billion of currency reserves A Russian government debt default was unthinkable until what Putin called a "special military operation" in Ukraine began in late February. It had nearly $650 billion of currency reserves, coveted investment-grade credit ratings with S&P Global, Moody's and Fitch, and was raking in hundreds of millions of dollars a day selling its oil and gas at soaring prices. Then the tanks rolled and the United States, Europe and their Western allies fired back with unprecedented sanctions, which froze two-thirds of Russia's reserves that it turned out were held overseas. "I think the market now expects Russia not to make the (bond) payments," the head of emerging market debt at Aegon Asset Management Jeff Grills, adding the conflict was one of the few emerging market events capable of really unsettling global markets. That is because Russia's role as one of the world's top commodity producers has sent prices and global inflation skywards. At the same time it has left Russia a virtual pariah state, crippled by sanctions and watching hundreds of the world's largest firms now quit the country after deciding their presence there is no longer feasible. DEFAULT SCENARIOS As for Russia's battered government bonds, most are now changing hands at just 10%-20% of their face value. The two payments on Wednesday are the first of several, with another $615 million due over the rest of March, and the first 'principal' - final full payment of a bond - on April 4 worth $2 billion alone. Experienced investors see three potential scenarios for how Wednesday's crucial deadline plays out. The first is that Moscow pays in full and in dollars, meaning default worries go away for the time being. Big Russian energy providers Gazprom and Rosneft have both made payments on international bonds over the last 10 days so there is still a sliver of hope it could be done if Moscow feels it is in its interests. The second possibility is that Moscow doesn't pay, starting the 30-day grace period countdown clock until default. A third option where Russia pays but in roubles is also possible, although the legal terms of the bonds would mean that is still tantamount to a default. The 30-day grace rule would still apply. "Maybe we will know today (if they pay) but maybe we won't," said Pictet's Chamorro. His firm doesn't hold the bonds, but does hold other Russian bond - and when a country defaults on one of its bonds it tends to mean all its bonds 'cross default'. "In situations like these it's safest to expect the unexpected. You can't really rule anything out". | |
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| 03-17-22 02:28am - 1012 days | #2 | |
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LKLK (0)
Active User Posts: 1,583 Registered: Jun 26, '19 Location: CA |
Trump is sending signals: he won't run with Mike Pence in 2024. So the way is open for a new running mate for Donald Trump. Can Trump pick Ivanka? She would make a lovely running mate for the fightenest president. She would gather votes from women, and Donald would gather votes from men. They would make the greatest power couple in the world. And they could make nice with Vlad Putin, and stop the war, giving Ukaraine to Russia without a struggle. Remember, Donald Trump is a friend to strong dictators throughout the world. ----- ----- Trump signals he won't run with Pence in 2024 Yahoo News Christopher Wilson March 16, 2022, 9:33 AM Former President Donald Trump all but ruled out choosing his former vice president, Mike Pence, as a running mate were he to run again in 2024. “I don’t think the people would accept it,” Trump told the Washington Examiner in an interview published Wednesday. Trump pointed to Pence’s refusal to go along with his request to overturn the 2020 election, which Trump lost but continues to insist he won. Trump argues that Pence could have stopped the certification of then-President-elect Joe Biden’s Electoral College win on Jan. 6, 2021. Pence and legal experts say Trump’s interpretation of constitutional law is incorrect. Some members of Trump’s base have also apparently soured on Pence. When Trump supporters stormed the Capitol building on Jan. 6, some of them chanted “Hang Mike Pence” as they searched for the vice president, who was escorted to safety by the Secret Service. Mike Pence and Donald Trump. Presidential candidate Donald Trump and Indiana Gov. Mike Pence in Westfield, Ind., on July 12, 2016. (Aaron P. Bernstein/Getty Images) “Mike and I had a great relationship except for the very important factor that took place at the end,” Trump told the Examiner. “We had a very good relationship. I haven’t spoken to him in a long time.” The selection of the religiously conservative Pence in the summer of 2016 was seen as a move by Trump to shore up support among evangelicals. At the time, Pence was serving as governor of Indiana following a decade-plus serving in the House of Representatives. To begin their final year in office, Trump appointed Pence as his administration’s lead on the coronavirus in February 2020. Since leaving office, Pence has occasionally taken shots at Trump. Earlier this month, speaking at a convention of top Republican donors, Pence said, “There is no room in this party for apologists for Putin.” Pence did not mention Trump by name, but the former president has showered praise on Russian President Vladimir Putin for years, including in the run-up to the autocrat’s invasion of Ukraine in February. Pence’s maneuvering — including a visit to the Polish-Ukrainian border to help refugees and traveling to Israel with a top GOP donor — has led to speculation that he may be considering a presidential bid of his own in two years. Early polling for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination has found that Trump still has majority support, with Pence and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in a statistical tie for a distant second. In an interview with Fox Business last week, Pence did not rule out a run. “I’m confident the Republican Party will nominate a candidate who will be the next president of the United States of America, and at the right time, my family and I will reflect and consider how we might participate in that process,” Pence said. | |
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| 03-18-22 02:02pm - 1010 days | #3 | |
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LKLK (0)
Active User Posts: 1,583 Registered: Jun 26, '19 Location: CA |
Donald J. Trump will visit Russia, and stand should-to-shoulder with his bestest buddy Vlad Putin. Together, they will cheer on Russian soldiers who are invading Ukraine. "My fellow Russians", Trump will say, "we are brothers in blood. Never forget, that we must struggle to bring freedom to oppressed peoples wherever they live." And Putin will hug Trump and give him kisses, while awarding Trump the Russian medal of honor. ----- ----- Putin vows Russia will prevail in Ukraine but glitch hinders TV Reuters March 18, 2022, 8:25 AM Scroll back up to restore default view. LONDON (Reuters) -Russian President Vladimir Putin justified the invasion of Ukraine before a packed soccer stadium on Friday but coverage of his speech on state television was unexpectedly interrupted by what the Kremlin said was a technical problem with a server. Speaking on a stage at the centre of Moscow's Luzhniki Stadium, Putin promised to tens of thousands of people waving Russian flags and chanting "Russia, Russia, Russia" that all of the Kremlin's aims would be achieved. "We know what we need to do, how to do it and at what cost. And we will absolutely accomplish all of our plans," Putin, 69, told the rally from a stage decked out with slogans such as "For a world without Nazism" and "For our president". Dressed in a turtleneck and coat, Putin said the soldiers fighting in what Russia calls its "special military operation" in Ukraine had illustrated the unity of Russia. "Shoulder to shoulder, they help each other, support each other and when needed they shield each other from bullets with their bodies like brothers. Such unity we have not had for a long time," Putin said. As he was talking, state television briefly cut away from his speech and showed earlier pre-recorded footage of patriotic songs, but he later appeared back on state television. RIA news agency cited Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov as saying a technical fault on a server was the reason state television had suddenly cut away from Putin. Putin says the operation in Ukraine was necessary because the United States was using the country to threaten Russia and Russia had to defend against the "genocide" of Russian-speaking people by Ukraine. Ukraine says it is fighting for its existence and that Putin's claims of genocide are nonsense. The West says claims it wants to rip Russia apart are fiction. Before Putin spoke, Russia's stirring national anthem, with the words "Russia is our sacred state" boomed out across the stands of the stadium used in the 2018 Soccer World Cup along with more modern pop hits such as "Made in the U.S.S.R.". Pan-Slavist poetry by Fyodor Tyutchev, whose verses warned Russians that they would always be considered slaves of the Enlightenment by Europeans, was read out. Putin quoted Russia's brilliant 18th century naval commander, Fyodor Ushakov. "He once said that these thunderstorms will go to the glory of Russia," Putin said. "That is the way it was then, that is the way it is now and it will always be that way. Thank you." (Reporting by Reuters) | |
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| 03-18-22 03:57pm - 1010 days | #4 | |
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LKLK (0)
Active User Posts: 1,583 Registered: Jun 26, '19 Location: CA |
Russia owns the Ukraine. If Ukraine doesn't want Russia to rule Ukraine, Ukarine citizens can commit suicide. Because the only good Ukrainian is a dead Ukrainian. ------- ------- Ukrainian Tales Since it became its first imperial possession in the 18th century, Russia has denied Ukraine’s national existence, while seeing it as an exotic threat. Uilleam Blacker | Published in History Today Volume 72 Issue 4 April 2022 ben JonesBen Jones In January 1787 Catherine the Great travelled south from St Petersburg to survey some new imperial possessions. Crimea had been taken from the Ottoman Empire, the partitions of Poland were underway and the last vestiges of Cossack autonomy in the Ukrainian steppes had been eliminated. The journey was a grand event, lasting six months and covering 6,000 kilometres accompanied by thousands of soldiers and sailors. The trip was elaborately stage-managed by Prince Grigory Potemkin, Catherine’s lover and the Governor General of the new territories. Catherine was treated to a private guard consisting of exotically attired Crimean Tatars; she encountered a parade of local Greek women dressed as Amazons (Herodotus had placed these mythical female warriors in the Black Sea steppes); Potemkin also surprised his empress with a spectacular firework display that spelled her name. All this effort gave rise to the myth of the ‘Potemkin village’: the prince, the story goes, ordered the construction of fake villages, nothing more than freshly painted façades, for the empress to view as she passed. These were dismantled and reconstructed further along the route, while herds of cattle were driven from place to place. Meanwhile, the peasantry lived in misery in the barren steppes. The Potemkin village story is almost certainly a rumour spread by the prince’s enemies. Yet it nevertheless speaks to a deep Russian anxiety about its peripheries. Whether with the Finns, the Poles or the Chechens, Russia has always struggled with its subjugated peoples. Catherine, a self-styled Enlightenment ruler, saw it as her duty to understand those peoples – hence her journey. The knowledge she acquired, however, did not lead to mutual appreciation. She realised that the Ukrainian Cossacks in the steppes and the Tatars in Crimea were unreliable, so the Cossacks were dispersed and thousands of Crimean Tatars forced into exile. This, alongside deportations of Armenians and Greeks, led to catastrophic population decline in Crimea. Novorossia Potemkin had encouraged Catherine to annex Crimea precisely in order to emulate European powers that, he said, had ‘distributed among themselves Asia, Africa and America’. Like the Orientalist fantasies of the French or British Empires, Potemkin’s spectacles ignored cultural nuance and turned native peoples into exotic entertainments in order to hide the violence of colonisation. The image of Crimea as Russia’s own Orient would become a durable feature of Russian culture in the 19th century, as seen in popular literary works such as Pushkin’s lurid tale of love and vengeance in the harem, ‘The Fountain of Bakhchisaray’. The conquest of Crimea was not only a foray into Asia: it also had a more ‘native’ significance. It was in 988 in the town of Chersonesus, then part of the Byzantine Empire, that the medieval ruler of Kyivan Rus, Volodymyr the Great, was baptised. From Kyiv, the faith spread north to the territories that later became Russia. Reconnecting with this Christian heritage helped join the dots between Russia’s rising imperial greatness and what it saw as its great Christian mission. It is no wonder, then, that the current Russian state, with its neo-imperialist ambitions and Orthodox nationalism, is so fixated on the same territories that Catherine toured in 1787. In 2014, when Russia invaded Donbas and annexed Crimea, it even revived the name ‘Novorossia’, or New Russia, a term invented under Catherine for the newly annexed steppes. At the same time, Putin unveiled plans for a giant statue of his namesake Prince Volodymyr (Vladimir in Russian) in central Moscow. In July 2021 Putin published a lengthy essay, ‘On the Historical Unity of the Russians and Ukrainians’, in which he aired multiple grievances against Ukrainians, while simultaneously denying their existence as a separate nation. He reached the contradictory conclusion that ‘genuine sovereignty for Ukraine is only possible in partnership with Russia’. Just as Catherine did in the 18th century, Putin proposes to bring order to what he views as an unruly borderland. Ungrateful heirs Ukrainians have long been aware of Russian imperial mythmaking. Nostalgia for the 17th and 18th centuries, when Ukraine’s Cossacks enjoyed significant autonomy and its peasants felt protected by them, developed soon after Russia’s expansion southwards. With Ukrainian historiography obstructed by tsarist censorship, the job of preserving the past fell to writers like Taras Shevchenko, Ukraine’s national poet. Born a serf in 1814, he felt the reality of Russia’s ‘enlightened’ rule, which had drastically worsened the conditions of the peasants in the decades before his birth. Shevchenko, despite his poverty, was able to gain a basic education and displayed a flair for drawing. His owner cultivated him as his personal artist and allowed him to enter the St Petersburg art world. Through the efforts of his well-connected friends, Shevchenko was able to buy his freedom. While he trained as an artist, Shevchenko began to write poetry inspired by folk legends about Ukraine’s past. His narrators were ancient bards haunting the lonely grave mounds of the Cossacks who, in centuries past, had resisted colonisation from all sides: Russia, Poland, the Ottomans. He scolds Ukraine’s elites, the ungrateful heirs to the Cossacks, who are busy making careers in the imperial capital, while the peasants languish in chains. ‘History’, Shevchenko warns, ‘is the epos of a free nation’, which Ukrainians must read in order to understand ‘who we are … and by whom and why we are enslaved.’ Ben JonesBen Jones Shevchenko’s world view was not narrowly nationalistic, however. One of his most famous poems, ‘The Caucasus’, satirises the imperial view of the Muslims of the north Caucuses, another object of Russian expansion, as barbarians in need of Christian instruction. The poem is a damning indictment of a state that purports to bring enlightenment, but in which ‘from the Fin to the Moldovan/each is silent in his own tongue’. Secular martyr The manuscripts of Shevchenko’s unpublished political poems fell into the hands of the secret police and he was arrested in 1847, sentenced to ten years of military service in exile and banned from writing or painting. This fate and his anti-imperial message turned him into a secular martyr in Ukraine, where his image and his words are still regularly encountered. One of the slogans of the Maidan protests in 2013-14, which opposed the government’s sudden decision to abandon an agreement with the EU in favour of closer links with Russia, was a line from ‘The Caucasus’: ‘Fight and you will prevail.’ Shevchenko’s calls to protect history from imperial distortion were not unique, but part of a broader cultural movement. Before Shevchenko, however, this was a cautious, apolitical project pursued by linguists, folklorists and historians. Many were members of the gentry who dabbled in literature, like Vasyl Hohol-Ianovskyi, who wrote quaint Ukrainian-language comedies for a provincial theatre in central Ukraine. Vasyl was an unremarkable writer, but his love of Ukrainian culture had a profound influence on his son, Mykola, known to the world as Nikolai Gogol. Cossacks in Petersburg While Gogol grew up participating in his father’s Ukrainian dramatic projects, as soon as he was old enough he moved to St Petersburg to forge a literary career in Russian – the only viable language for an ambitious writer at the time. When his first works were badly received, he did what writers are often advised to do and wrote about what he knew: Ukraine. He composed a letter to his mother asking for details of traditional Ukrainian culture and used these to produce two volumes of colourful, hilarious tales of Ukrainian village life. He also read widely in Ukrainian history (even applying to become a professor of Ukrainian history in Kyiv). His stories are full of subtle references to the golden age of the Cossacks. Unlike Shevchenko, Gogol never openly expressed anti-imperial views. He was generally conservative in his outlook and the idea that his works might be seen as subversive caused him great anxiety. Yet his Ukrainian tales contain some deeply ambiguous dramatisations of the imperial encounter that took place in 1787. In his story ‘Christmas Eve’ a village blacksmith travels to St Petersburg in order to find a pair of boots fit for the empress as a gift for his fiancée. He accompanies a group of Cossacks to an audience with Catherine and Potemkin: the prince, the empress tells them, has promised to ‘familiarise her with her people’. She then proceeds to ask them a series of absurd questions about their habits and traditions, making clear she has not the foggiest notion of ‘her people’. The Cossacks reply politely, but quickly move on to their own priorities: expressing their dissatisfaction with the brutal dispersion of the Cossack army, which Catherine ordered and Potemkin had executed. Just as the grievances are aired, however, the blacksmith asks for the boots: his naive request charms the tsarina and the tension is diffused. | |
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| 03-18-22 03:58pm - 1010 days | #5 | |
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LKLK (0)
Active User Posts: 1,583 Registered: Jun 26, '19 Location: CA |
ARTICLE CONTINUES: Fake empire Gogol’s ability to subtly mock imperial ignorance of his homeland has not been lost on Ukrainians. One of the most joyfully subversive films made in Soviet Ukraine was The Lost Letter (1972), a loose adaptation of Gogol’s story of the same name, with a screenplay by the dissident Ivan Drach. Two Cossacks make the perilous journey from Ukraine to St Petersburg in order to deliver a message from the Hetman (Cossack leader) to the empress. When they finally gain an audience, Catherine laughs at their naivety in going to such lengths to deliver what turns out to be a trifling note. At this moment of miscommunication and mockery, one of the Cossacks slaps Potemkin, upon which the heroes realise that the rulers are not in fact real, but mere paintings on the palace wall. When they leave in disgust, slamming the door behind them, the entire building shakes like a stage set. The empire itself is a flimsy illusion, a Potemkin village. This last scene did not go down well with the Moscow censor. Much as the USSR positioned itself as anti-imperialist, its view of Ukraine differed little from Catherine’s: The Lost Letter was banned in 1973 for its disrespectful portrayal of the Russian empress. Two years later, Vladimir Putin embarked on his career in the KGB. Uilleam Blacker is Associate Professor in the Comparative Culture of Russia and Eastern Europe at UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies. | |
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| 03-19-22 01:50pm - 1009 days | #6 | |
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LKLK (0)
Active User Posts: 1,583 Registered: Jun 26, '19 Location: CA |
Russia is taking a page from Donald Trump's playbook. The country is stealing trademarks from brands like McDonald's and Starbucks. Trump (and his current wife) stole speeches that actors used in movies. Russia and Trump both believe they have the right to eminent domain, where they can take whatever their eyes behold. In many countries, if the country takes over property, they are supposed to compensate the original owners. But in Russia, and for Trump, payment is not needed: because they are sovereign powers. Trump (and Russia) uber alles. Vote for Trump in 2024. And he will invite Putin to the White House. ------ ------ McDonald's, Starbucks, and others have no recourse for stolen trademarks in Russia Yahoo Finance Alexis Keenan March 18, 2022, 11:45 AM Russia's recent decree essentially legalizing intellectual property theft leaves brands like McDonald's (MCD) and Starbucks (SBUX) with no legal recourse if copycat businesses use the brands as their own. Over the past two weeks, Russian officials have stripped away IP rights from U.S. companies doing business in Russia, along with foreign companies from 23 other “unfriendly” territories. As a result, companies like McDonald's and Starbucks that have left Russia to protest its invasion of Ukraine can do little when Russian businesses steal their trademarks. In fact, trademark applications were filed in Russia this week that bore a striking resemblance to marks belonging to Ikea, Instagram (FB), McDonald's, and Starbucks, trademark attorney Josh Gerbennoted. These companies can't immediately fight back because challenges for unauthorized use are largely limited to Russian courts, Gerben told Yahoo Finance. Gerben expects Russian lawyers to avoid any appearance of sympathy to Western interests. “The fact is that the courts are going to be stacked against you,” Gerben said. “And the fact is you might not have a willing counsel over there to help you, because they fear for their own safety.” Russia's decision to upend its IP rules — in direct response to sanctions from the West — puts company executives in a tough position. On one hand, companies might protect corporate assets by staying put, at least temporarily. And on the other, businesses could stoke costly moral and political backlash, plus jeopardize worker safety, if they continue doing business in Russia. For its part, McDonald's still has some presence in Russia, as certain franchised stores remain open. Trademark application filed March 12, 2022 with Russian Federation's Federal Service for Intellectual Property, also known as Rospatent Trademark application filed March 12, 2022 with Russian Federation's Federal Service for Intellectual Property, also known as Rospatent Just how much IP is in jeopardy is unclear. This week's trademark applications add to separate violations condoned in Russian court, earlier in March. In one case, a Russian judge denied compensation to a Hasbro (HAS) subsidiary, even though an entrepreneur used its "Peppa Pig" and "Daddy Pig" trademarks. The judge acknowledged denying the relief because of Western sanctions, Law360 reported. In theory, the World Trade Organization can settle IP disputes between the U.S. and Russia under the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, according to Justin Hughes, an intellectual property law professor with Loyola Law School. However, even though the U.S. and Russia both signed onto the treaty, that path isn't likely because the U.S. suspended normal trade relations with Russia. “In the past it would have been possible,” Hughes said. But, he added, “The U.S. has already said the normal rules for our international commercial interaction are over.” Trademark application filed March 14, 2022 with Russian Federation's Federal Service for Intellectual Property Trademark application filed March 14, 2022 with Russian Federation's Federal Service for Intellectual Property No U.S. corporation will win in Russian IP court Christine Haight Farley, a law professor and co-director of American University Washington College of Law’s Program on Information Justice & Intellectual Property, agrees U.S. companies have no immediate recourse to protect against stolen IP. “At the moment, it would certainly not be a good idea to bring a lawsuit in Russia,” Haight Farley said. “No U.S. corporation is going to win that legal battle in the court.” As for the WTO, she adds, there’s little chance the path can offer U.S. companies immediate relief, because they must rely on the U.S. government to bring disputes before the organization and, right now, the issue is not likely top of mind for government officials. While the recent applications for McDonald’s and Starbucks’ trademarks may be more brazen assaults on U.S. IP than in Russia’s past, Hughes said the assaults are nothing new. “The Russian Federation has been a notorious zone of counterfeiting and piracy for years and years,” he said. “It’s not like they’re suddenly turning their back on IP. They’ve never been good at enforcing it.” He points out Russia’s designation on the Office of the United States Trade Representative’s (USTR) priority watch list in 2021, 2020, and 2019. More recently, on March 11, the U.S. Trade & Patent Office announced it terminated its engagement with Russia’s intellectual property agency, the Federal Service for Intellectual Property, also known as Rospatent. McDonald’s, Facebook, and Starbucks didn’t respond to requests for information on what if any responsive actions they're taking to protect their IP. An Ikea spokesperson said, “We don't want to speculate. It is too soon to talk about any potential consequences of this.” Alexis Keenan is a legal reporter for Yahoo Finance. Follow Alexis on Twitter @alexiskweed. | |
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| 03-19-22 07:52pm - 1009 days | #7 | |
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LKLK (0)
Active User Posts: 1,583 Registered: Jun 26, '19 Location: CA |
Fox news supports commies, just like our good friend and leader, Donald J. Trump Biden needs to take a lesson from Putin: send death squads to kill Fox news reporters, who are trying to incite revolution. We live in a free democracy. Let's kill off the commies who are trying to bring us down. ------ ------ Russian foreign minister praises Fox News for Ukraine coverage Yahoo News Niamh Cavanagh March 18, 2022, 11:42 AM After three weeks of bitter and barbaric fighting in Ukraine, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov praised the coverage of the war from one American media outlet: Fox News. Speaking to the state-owned RT network, Lavrov said Fox News has been “trying to represent some alternative points of view” in its coverage of the war. “We understood long ago that there is no such thing as an independent Western media,” he said in the Friday interview, which was conducted in English. He went on to denounce the social media ban of former President Donald Trump and appeared to criticize the labeling of Jan. 6 insurrectionists as terrorists. “But when you watch other channels, read the social networks and internet platforms, when the acting president was blocked and this censorship continues in a very big way. The substitution of notions whenever something is happening by the way of mass protest, mass demonstrations, which they don’t like, they immediately call it domestic terrorism.” He added: “So it’s a war, and it’s a war which involves the methods of information terrorism.” Last Friday, Fox News host Tucker Carlson suggested that U.S. government officials wanted a war between Russia and Ukraine in a bid to “grab more power.” While otherwise denouncing the Russian invasion, Carlson theorized that the U.S. helped provoke the conflict after emergency powers enacted during the COVID-19 pandemic had come to an end. “At exactly the moment when the emergency powers they awarded to themselves to fight COVID started to wane, our leaders began pushing for conflict with Russia,” the Fox News host said. Meanwhile, retired United States Army Col. Douglas Macgregor declared on Carlson’s show on Thursday that Kyiv had lost the war with Russia and that Ukraine had been “grounded to bits.” The retired colonel added: “There’s no question about that, despite what we report on our mainstream media.” Most military experts, however, say the Russian advance is moving much slower than Moscow expected in the face of severe logistical problems and fierce Ukrainian resistance. Fox News hosts have continued to push certain talking points while reporting on Russia’s invasion, linking the war to various Biden administration policies. Three days into the invasion, “Fox and Friends” co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy declared it “a Green New Deal war,” stating, “This is John Kerry’s war. This is AOC’s war.” Two days before that, while covering Russia’s bombardment of Ukraine, Carlson accused the Biden administration of trying to “degrade and humiliate” the U.S. military by focusing on “white rage” and “maternity flight suits.” Fox News reporter Jennifer Griffin has made waves for her near-constant correcting of the record set forth by the news network's opinion hosts, including primetime host Sean Hannity. And Fox News reporter Benjamin Hall corrected “The Five” co-host Greg Gutfeld in early March after Gutfeld complained about what he saw as a narrative presented solely through the eyes of the Ukrainians. “And they only go in one direction. And I understand why they only go in one direction, because it’s the invaded who experience the atrocity, right? And that’s all we’re going to see,” Gutfeld complained. Moments later, live on air, Hall rebuked the host for making those comments from a studio in New York. “Speaking as someone on the ground, I want to say that this is not the media trying to drum up some emotional response," Hall said from Ukraine. Gutfeld, whose mother-in-law escaped from Ukraine to Poland earlier this month, called it a “cheap attack” on him. Hall was wounded during a Russian attack just five days later. A cameraman, Pierre Zakrzewski, and a producer, Oleksandra Kuvshynova, who were both working for Fox News on the ground in Ukraine, were killed in the attack. | |
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| 03-19-22 08:02pm - 1009 days | #8 | |
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LKLK (0)
Active User Posts: 1,583 Registered: Jun 26, '19 Location: CA |
Trump cannot sue rape accuser to stop her defamation case, U.S. judge rules Reuters Jonathan Stempel March 11, 2022, 12:56 PM By Jonathan Stempel NEW YORK (Reuters) -Donald Trump cannot sue E. Jean Carroll, a writer who says he raped her in the mid-1990s, on the grounds that her defamation lawsuit against him violated a New York state law intended to protect free speech, a federal judge ruled on Friday. U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan accused the former U.S. president of "bad faith" by needlessly delaying the former Elle magazine columnist's lawsuit, which began in November 2019 and could have "long ago" been decided. "The defendant's litigation tactics, whatever their intent, have delayed the case to an extent that readily could have been far less," Kaplan wrote. Letting Trump countersue "would make a regrettable situation worse by opening new avenues for significant further delay," he added. Kaplan also said it would be "futile" for Trump to prove that his counterclaim belonged in federal court. Alina Habba, a lawyer for Trump, said: "While we are disappointed with the court's decision today, we eagerly look forward to litigating this action and proving at trial that the plaintiff's claims have absolutely no basis in law or in fact." Roberta Kaplan, a lawyer for Carroll and not related to the judge, said she and her client "could not agree more" that the case should be over by now. Carroll, 78, accused Trump in a June 2019 book excerpt of raping her in late 1995 or early 1996 in a dressing room at the Bergdorf Goodman department store in midtown Manhattan. She said Trump defamed her when he told a reporter he did not know Carroll, accused her of concocting the rape claim to sell her book and said, "She's not my type." 'FUTILE' TO COUNTERSUE In seeking a dismissal and damages, Trump invoked New York's "anti-SLAPP" law, short for "strategic lawsuits against public participation." The November 2020 law had been meant to protect journalists and others from deep-pocketed companies and people who file frivolous lawsuits designed to silence critics. Trump said Carroll's lawsuit also violated that law because it was meant to harass him for speaking out. But the judge said Trump offered "no satisfactory justification" for waiting 14 months after the law took effect to invoke it. Trump is awaiting a decision from the federal appeals court in Manhattan on whether he is immune from Carroll's lawsuit under a law shielding federal employees from defamation claims, because he discussed her in his capacity as president. Democratic President Joe Biden's administration sided with Trump in that appeal, despite what it called the Republican's "crude and offensive comments" over Carroll's "very serious" accusations. Carroll's lawyers are hoping to compare Trump's DNA with a dress Carroll said she wore during the alleged rape. They also wanted to question Trump under oath, but citing Trump's delays, said last month this was no longer necessary. The case is Carroll v Trump, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 20-07311. (Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; editing by Grant McCool and Cynthia Osterman) | |
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| 03-20-22 03:31pm - 1008 days | #9 | |
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Trump idolizes Putin. Now the reasons are becoming clear. Putin has more money than Trump. More power than Trump. ------ ------ March 28, 2022 Issue How Putin’s Oligarchs Bought London From banking to boarding schools, the British establishment has long been at their service, discretion guaranteed. By Patrick Radden Keefe March 17, 2022 Butlers holding up trays of a helicopter ship and mansion. “In London, money rules everyone,” a Russian magnate told the journalist Catherine Belton. “Anyone and anything can be bought.”Illustration by Álvaro Bernis Roman Abramovich was thirty-four years old—baby-faced, vigorous, already one of Russia’s richest oligarchs—when he did something seemingly inexplicable. The year was 2000. Abramovich, an orphan and a college dropout turned Kremlin insider, had amassed a giant fortune by taking control of businesses that once belonged to the Soviet state. He owned nearly half of the oil company Sibneft, and much of the world’s second-biggest producer of aluminum. A man of cosmopolitan tastes, he favored Chinese cuisine and holidays in the South of France. But now, he announced, he was going to relocate to the remote Chukotka region, a desolate Arctic hellscape, where he would run for governor. Chukotka, which is some thirty-seven hundred miles from Moscow, is comically inhospitable. The winds are fierce enough to blow a grown dog off its feet. When Abramovich arrived, the human population was meagre, and struggling with poverty and alcoholism. After he was elected governor—he got ninety-two per cent of the vote, his closest challenger being a local man who herded reindeer—he was confronted with the baying of his new constituents: “When will we have fuel? When will we have meat?” There was no Chinese food in Chukotka. “People here don’t live, they just exist,” Abramovich marvelled. Shy by nature, he was not a natural politician. He pumped plenty of his own money into the region, but appeared to derive no pleasure from his new job. Nor could he explain, to anyone’s satisfaction, what he was doing there. When a reporter from the Wall Street Journal trekked to Chukotka to pose the question, Abramovich claimed that he was “fed up” with making money. The Journal speculated that he was working an angle—did he have a lead on some untapped natural resource beneath the tundra? Abramovich acknowledged that his own friends “can’t understand” why he made this move. They “can’t even guess,” he said. Three years after gaining his governorship, Abramovich leapt from wealthy obscurity to tabloid prominence when he bought London’s Chelsea Football Club. In 2009, he settled into a fifteen-bedroom mansion behind Kensington Palace, for which he reportedly paid ninety million pounds. His mega-yacht Eclipse featured two helipads and its own missile-defense system, and he took to hosting New Year’s Eve parties with guests like Leonardo DiCaprio and Paul McCartney. It was a long way from Chukotka. Indeed, that unlikely interlude seemed mostly forgotten, until the publication of “Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took on the West” (2020), a landmark work of investigative journalism by the longtime Russia correspondent Catherine Belton. Her thesis is that, after becoming the President of Russia, in 2000, Vladimir Putin proceeded to run the state and its economy like a Mafia don—and that he did so through the careful control of ostensibly independent businessmen like Roman Abramovich. When Abramovich went to Chukotka, Belton tells us, he did so “on Putin’s orders.” The first generation of post-Soviet capitalists had accumulated vast private fortunes, and Putin set out to bring the oligarchs under state control. He had leverage over government officials, so he forced Abramovich to become one. “Putin told me that if Abramovich breaks the law as governor, he can put him immediately in jail,” one Abramovich associate told Belton. A “feudal system” was beginning to emerge, Belton contends, in which the owners of Russia’s biggest companies would be forced to “operate as hired managers, working on behalf of the state.” Their gaudy displays of personal wealth were a diversion; these oligarchs were mere capos, who answered to the don. It wasn’t even their wealth, really: it was Putin’s. They were “no more than the guardians,” Belton writes, and “they kept their businesses by the Kremlin’s grace.” Belton even makes the case—on the basis of what she was told by the former Putin ally Sergei Pugachev and two unnamed sources—that Abramovich’s purchase of the Chelsea Football Club was carried out on Putin’s orders. “Putin’s Kremlin had accurately calculated that the way to gain acceptance in British society was through the country’s greatest love, its national sport,” she writes. Pugachev informs her that the objective was to build “a beachhead for Russian influence in the UK.” He adds, “Putin personally told me of his plan to acquire the Chelsea Football Club in order to increase his influence and raise Russia’s profile, not only with the elite but with ordinary British people.” | |
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| 03-20-22 03:33pm - 1008 days | #10 | |
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Article continues: The stark implication of “Putin’s People” is not just that the President of Russia may be a silent partner in one of England’s most storied sports franchises but also that England itself has been a silent and handsomely compensated partner in Putin’s kleptocratic designs—that, in the past two decades, Russian oligarchs have infiltrated England’s political, economic, and legal systems. “We must go after the oligarchs,” Prime Minister Boris Johnson declared after the invasion of Ukraine, doing his best to sound Churchillian. But, as the international community labors to isolate Putin and his cronies, the question is whether England has been too compromised by Russian money to do so. For the past several years, Oliver Bullough, a former Russia correspondent, has guided “kleptocracy tours” around London, explaining how dirty money from abroad has transformed the city. Bullough shows up with a busload of rubberneckers in front of elegant mansions and steel-and-glass apartment towers in Knightsbridge and Belgravia, and points out the multimillion-pound residences of the shady expatriates who find refuge there. His book “Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Oligarchs, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats, and Criminals,” just published in the U.K., argues that England actively solicited such corrupting influences, by letting “some of the worst people in existence” know that it was open for business. Invoking Dean Acheson’s famous observation, in 1962, that Britain had “lost an empire but not yet found a role,” Bullough suggests that it did find a role, as a no-questions-asked service provider to the crooked élite, offering access to capital markets, prime real estate, shopping at Harrods, and illustrious private schools, along with accountants for tax tricks, attorneys for legal squabbles, and “reputation managers” for inconvenient backstories. It starts with visas; any foreigner with adequate funds can buy one, by investing two million pounds in the U.K. (Ten million can buy you permanent residency.) London property is always an option for such investments. After King Constantine II was ousted in the wake of a military coup in Greece, in 1967, he moved into a mansion overlooking Hampstead Heath; ever since, global plutocrats have sought safe harbor in the city’s leafy precincts. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian buyers raced into London’s housing market. One real-estate agent described his Russian clients “gleefully plonking saddlebags of cash on the desk.” According to new figures from Transparency International, Russians who have been accused of corruption or of having links to the Kremlin have bought at least 1.5 billion pounds’ worth of property in Great Britain. The real number is no doubt higher, but it is virtually impossible to ascertain, because so many of these transactions are obscured by layers of secrecy. The Economist describes London as “a slop-bucket for dodgy Russian wealth.” Bullough has made a careful study of this process. In an earlier book, “Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How to Take It Back” (201  , he explained that, for moneyed arrivistes in the U.K., a glamorous new home is the first step on a well-established pathway for laundering reputations. Next up: hire a P.R. firm. “The PR agency puts them in touch with biddable members of parliament,” Bullough says, “who are prepared to put their names to the billionaire’s charitable foundation. The foundation then launches itself at a fashionable London event space—a gallery is ideal.” Ultimately, the smart billionaire will “get his name on an institution, or become so closely associated with one that it may as well be.” Major gifts to universities are popular. So are football clubs.What’s most apt about Bullough’s butler analogy is the appearance of gray-flannel propriety, which can impart an aura of respectability to even the most disreputable fortune. The mercenary grubbiness of Britain’s role might be “hard to comprehend,” Bullough suggests, “because it is so at variance with Britain’s public image.” Yet Belton and Bullough are joined in their dispiriting diagnosis by Tom Burgis, the author of the excellent book “Kleptopia: How Dirty Money Is Conquering the World” (2020). And by Britain’s National Crime Agency, which found that “many hundreds of billions of pounds of international criminal money” is laundered through U.K. banks and subsidiaries every year. And by Parliament’s own intelligence committee, which has described London as a “laundromat” for illicit Russian cash. And by the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Commons, which declared in 2018 that the ease with which Russia’s President and his allies hide their wealth in London has helped Putin pursue his agenda in Moscow. Advertisement Each time Putin has taken a provocative step in recent years—including the assassination of Alexander Litvinenko in Mayfair, in 2006; Russia’s annexation of Crimea, in 2014; and the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, in 2018—British politicians and commentators have acknowledged London’s complicity with his regime and vowed to take steps to address it. But this has largely amounted to lip service. The English political establishment, like everything else in London, appears to be for sale. Boris Johnson, in his tenure as London’s mayor, was a pitchman to foreign buyers, boasting that property in the city had grown so desirable it was “treated effectively as another asset class.” Russian oligarchs have donated millions of pounds to the Conservative Party, and have enlisted British lords to sit on the boards of their companies. At a fund-raising auction at the Tory summer ball in 2014, a woman named Lubov Chernukhin—who was then married to Vladimir Chernukhin, one of Putin’s former deputy finance ministers—paid a hundred and sixty thousand pounds for the top prize: a tennis match with Johnson and David Cameron, who was Prime Minister at the time. Johnson defended the match, decrying “a miasma of suspicion” toward “all rich Russians in London.” A Russian magnate told Catherine Belton, “In London, money rules everyone. Anyone and anything can be bought.” The Russians came to London, the source said, “to corrupt the U.K. political elite.” Another reason that London’s oligarchs have been able to forestall a day of reckoning is their tendency to pursue punishing legal action against people who challenge them, exploiting a legal system that is notably friendly toward libel plaintiffs. In January, 2021, the Russian dissident and anti-corruption campaigner Alexey Navalny, who had recently survived an assassination attempt, released a video, titled “Putin’s Palace,” in which he accused the Russian President of being “obsessed with wealth and luxury,” and presented information about a billion-dollar compound that Putin had reportedly built for himself on the Black Sea. “Russia sells oil, gas, metals, fertilizer, and timber in huge quantities—but people’s incomes keep falling,” Navalny said. The oligarchs “influence political decisions from the shadows.” At one point, he held up a copy of Catherine Belton’s book. Not long afterward, Roman Abramovich sued Belton and HarperCollins in London. “Putin’s People” had been on shelves for nearly a year, leading Belton to suspect that Navalny’s endorsement had likely prompted the suit. (Navalny has described Abramovich as “one of the key enablers and beneficiaries of Russian kleptocracy.”) Within days, three other Russian billionaires filed lawsuits against the book, as did Rosneft, the national oil company. To Belton, it felt like “a concerted attack.” “Do you want heater side or humidifier side tonight?” Cartoon by Adam Douglas Thompson And a terrifying one. Abramovich’s suit named Belton personally, meaning that her own home and savings would be at stake. The case was projected to cost ten million pounds if it went to trial, and under English law those who lose a suit can be ordered to pay their adversary’s legal costs. That’s part of why the rich like to take detractors to court in London. (Indeed, last fall, the Kazakh mining giant E.N.R.C. sued Tom Burgis over claims he made in “Kleptopia”; the case was dismissed on March 2nd.) Libel tourism is another chronic English problem that everyone bemoans but nobody does anything about. This has meant terrific business for the oligarchs’ morally flexible attorneys; according to the British trade publication The Lawyer, some law firms charge a “Russian premium” for their services, of up to fifteen hundred pounds an hour. The attorneys who represent oligarchs have managed to remain largely unsullied by their unsavory doings. One lawyer involved in the HarperCollins suit is Geraldine Proudler, who previously sued the anti-corruption activist Bill Browder on behalf of a Russian official who was accused of involvement in the torture and murder of the lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in 2009. (Browder prevailed in that case.) Remarkably, Proudler has served as a trustee of English PEN, which advocates free speech and human rights. | |
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| 03-20-22 03:35pm - 1008 days | #11 | |
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Article continues: In assessing this dire legal situation, it’s important to consider not just the cases that are brought against books and articles but also the books and articles that are never published in England to begin with. In 2014, the American political scientist Karen Dawisha submitted her book “Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia?” to her longtime publisher, Cambridge University Press. After reviewing the manuscript, Dawisha’s editor, John Haslam, wrote to her praising the book but saying that Cambridge could not publish it. “The risk is high that those implicated in the premise of the book—that Putin has a close circle of criminal oligarchs at his disposal and has spent his career cultivating this circle—would be motivated to sue,” he explained. Even if the press ultimately prevailed, the expense of the proceedings could be ruinous, Haslam said. In a controlled fury, Dawisha wrote back that the U.K. had apparently become a “no-fly zone” when it came to publishing “the truth about this group.” The oligarchs “feel free to buy Belgravia, kill dissidents in Piccadilly with Polonium 210, fight each other in the High Court, and hide their children in British boarding schools. And as a result of their growing knowledge about and influence in the UK, even the most significant institutions . . . cower and engage in pre-emptive book-burnings.” (The book was ultimately published by Simon & Schuster in the United States.) A major difficulty for would-be chroniclers of the kleptocrats is that, in England, a person bringing a libel suit does not have to prove that an assertion is untrue, so long as there’s evidence of “serious harm”; instead, the author must prove that it is true. This is a fiendishly burdensome standard when it comes to, say, establishing the true ownership of a super-yacht, or the subtle dynamics of an influence campaign orchestrated by ex-K.G.B. spies. In “Kleptopia,” Tom Burgis remarks that in the former Soviet Union the “skill prized above all others” was the ability to obfuscate the origins of stolen money. (On paper, Putin’s real-estate portfolio consists chiefly of one conspicuously modest apartment. He has denied that the palace on the Black Sea belongs to him.) Here, the professional facilitators of London’s butler class come in handy. There is a booming industry in financial dissimulation: the creation of shell companies, tax shelters, offshore trusts. Haslam, in his letter to Dawisha, had objected that “Putin has never been convicted” for the crimes described in the book. But, by making it perilous to publish allegations, however well documented, that haven’t yet resulted in a criminal conviction, the legal system can grant well-financed malefactors a free pass from scrutiny. According to an investigation by BuzzFeed News, U.S. intelligence believes that at least fourteen people have been assassinated on British soil by Russian mafia groups or secret services, which sometimes collaborate, but British authorities tend not to name suspects or bring charges. (Instead, they have concluded with an unsettling frequency that such deaths are suicides.) In an interview with NPR in late February, Bill Browder was asked whether he would name Russian oligarchs who had not yet been sanctioned but should be. “I live in London,” he said. “So it’s very unwise to name names.” Catherine Belton named names. But she, too, is bedevilled by the challenge of producing absolute proof in a world of shadowy deniability. There is the official record—property deeds, legal convictions—and then there is what everyone knows. “It’s not just his money,” a onetime associate of Abramovich’s told her. “He is Putin’s representative.” As the oligarch Oleg Deripaska once explained, “If the state says we need to give it up, we’ll give it up. I don’t separate myself from the state. I have no other interests.” (He later claimed to have been joking.) Time and again in “Putin’s People,” Belton tells the official version of a story, and then shares what she understands to be the real story—the word on the street. She describes “an emerging KGB capitalism in which nothing was quite as it seemed.” This is what it looks like when a national economy is designed by ex-spies. “Putin’s People” does include a denial from someone close to Abramovich, who said that he was not “acting under Kremlin direction” when he bought the Chelsea Football Club. Belton also uses a phrase that concedes the empirical limitations of her reporting: “whatever the truth of the matter.” But this was not enough for Abramovich, whose representatives argued that Sergei Pugachev was an unreliable source. “At no stage is the reader told that actually Abramovich is someone who is distant from Putin and doesn’t participate in the many and various corrupt schemes that are described,” his lawyers asserted. They later argued, “It would be ludicrous to suggest that our client has any responsibility or influence over the behavior of the Russian state.” In December, the case was settled. Belton and HarperCollins agreed to some changes and clarifications in future editions; the book would be amended to contain a more strenuous denial on the Chelsea claim, and to emphasize that the allegations relating to the team could not be characterized as incontrovertible facts. They also agreed to cut the line about Abramovich being “Putin’s representative,” and to include additional comments from his spokesperson. Chelsea released a smug statement expressing satisfaction that Belton had “apologized to Mr. Abramovich.” HarperCollins committed to making a payment to the charity of his choosing. Belton greeted this settlement as a victory—she would not have to go to trial, or make major changes to her book. But she seemed exhausted and demoralized. “This last year has felt like a war of attrition,” she said. The Observer columnist Nick Cohen, reflecting on the case, ventured that “oligarchs can manipulate the truth here as surely as Putin can in Russia.” In the days following Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, a slow-motion comedy began to unfold in the various exotic ports in which billionaires moor their yachts. Some of these mega-vessels started motoring out to international waters, presumably on instructions from anxious Kremlin-affiliated owners. Others were reportedly setting course for the Maldives, which has no extradition treaty with the United States. The Graceful, a hundred-million-dollar yacht that is widely believed to belong to Vladimir Putin, had made a hasty departure from a German port on the eve of the invasion, and relocated to Russian waters, in Kaliningrad. Officials in France seized a boat linked to Igor Sechin, the C.E.O. of Rosneft. Boris Johnson, meanwhile, announced that “oligarchs in London” would find that there was “nowhere to hide,” and said that he would form a kleptocracy cell at the National Crime Agency, to target “corrupt Russian assets hidden in the U.K.” The real test, however, is not so much what legal authorities are created as how they are used. In 2018, Britain introduced a promising new ordinance concerning “unexplained wealth,” which meant that a potentate could be required to account for the source of the funds used to buy a particular asset or risk losing it altogether. Yet it has so far been used in only four cases, none of them targeting Russian oligarchs. In one proceeding, against the family of the former President of Kazakhstan, authorities froze three properties. After the move was challenged in court, though, the order was reversed. If a lack of political will was to blame for the paucity of cases, so was a lack of resources. The National Crime Agency is notoriously underfunded. Addressing the issue of why there hadn’t been more “unexplained wealth orders,” the agency’s director said, “We are, bluntly, concerned about the impact on our budget, because these are wealthy people with access to the best lawyers.” But, given the bloodshed in Ukraine, and the international community’s surprising resolve to isolate the Kremlin economically, couldn’t things be different this time? One great irony of the story that Bullough relates in “Butler to the World” is that, after decades of obliging the global criminal élite, Britain now has a singular opportunity to turn the tables. Lured by “Tier 1” visas and luxury real estate and fabulous shopping and the comfortable prospect of lasting impunity, the oligarchs entrusted their fortunes to the butlers of Britain. If the British government were to have a genuine change of heart and start demanding transparency and freezing assets, a sanctuary could become a snare. After all, what does Putin own on paper? If he has left his many assets in the care of a coterie of front men who have built lives for themselves in London, then London has the upper hand. It could help isolate Putin—by pinching off his access to resources, and perhaps even by motivating the front men to pressure him to change his behavior, or to abandon him altogether. | |
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| 03-20-22 03:36pm - 1008 days | #12 | |
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Article continues: Roman Abramovich, for one, seems to have grown worried about the long-term prospects of British hospitality. In late February, he reportedly flew to Belarus to help Russian and Ukrainian negotiators secure a “peaceful resolution” to the conflict. (The lawyers who had previously claimed that it would be “ludicrous” to think there was a relationship of influence between Abramovich and the Kremlin volunteered no explanation for why he might now have a seat at the table.) Abramovich also said that he was putting Chelsea up for sale. There should be no shortage of potential buyers; last year, Newcastle United was purchased by a consortium of investors representing the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, which is chaired by Mohammed bin Salman, who authorized the murder and dismemberment of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Net proceeds from any sale would be dedicated to a fund for “all victims of the war in Ukraine,” Abramovich pledged. Even so, it appeared as if he were seeking to unload assets while he still had the chance. There was talk that Abramovich was also looking to sell his home in Kensington. A Chinese buyer was said to be circling. On March 10th, the British government finally sanctioned Abramovich, along with six other Russian oligarchs. The Chelsea Football Club can no longer charge for tickets or sign new players, but it can continue to play, and players and staff still get paid; Abramovich just can’t profit from the team. How much will these sanctions accomplish? Not enough, Bullough seems to suggest, given the multitude of tricks available for obscuring transactions. The system, he writes, “derives its power and resilience from the fact it does not rely on any one place: if one jurisdiction becomes hostile, money effortlessly relocates to somewhere that isn’t.” Ironically, this is the very rationalization that Britain’s butler class has long offered in its own defense: if deep-pocketed foreigners can’t do their business here, they’ll just take it elsewhere. In recent weeks, some have worried that dirty money is so woven into the fabric of British life that, as one parliamentary report from 2020 suggests, it “cannot be untangled.” But many Londoners share another fear, which is that it can—that the money will simply migrate to a more permissive jurisdiction. Dubai, for one, seems positively eager to sink to the occasion. And what becomes of Britain if that happens? The prospects for a post-Brexit economy were looking bleak already. Will Britain find itself, once again, without a role? On March 5th, Chelsea played Burnley. Prior to kickoff, at Turf Moor, Burnley’s stadium in Lancashire, both teams on the pitch and the fans in the stands paused for a show of solidarity with the people of Ukraine. For a solid minute, everyone stood clapping. In the midst of this, however, a discordant sound could be heard, as visiting Chelsea fans chimed in with a chant of their own. They were singing the name of the club’s beloved owner, who had just announced that he would be selling the team. His largesse is credited with transforming Chelsea from a moribund club to a championship-winning juggernaut. These supporters appeared unfazed by the accusations against him; they were just grateful for his munificence, and sorry to see him go. “Abramovich!” the English fans chanted. “Abramovich!”  Published in the print edition of the March 28, 2022, issue, with the headline “Do Stay for Tea.” | |
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| 03-23-22 03:24am - 1006 days | #13 | |
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Republicans are the party of truth and honesty. Republicans are giving a black judge the chance to defend her record, even though she is soft on child porn offenders. Why do we love America? Because we give everyone, even blacks and softie Democrats, the chance to live in our neighborhood. Bring back Trump, so he can make America great again!!! ------ ------ Jackson defends herself against Republican attacks: 'Nothing could be further from the truth' Yahoo News Christopher Wilson March 22, 2022, 8:02 AM Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson began her second day of Supreme Court nomination hearings by defending herself against Republican accusations she had been too lenient when sentencing child porn offenders. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin, D-Ill., used the first round of questioning Tuesday morning to let Jackson rebut the charges, which senators had mentioned in Monday’s opening session of the hearings. Two of the committee’s members — Sens. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., and Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn. — referred to cases where Jackson issued sentences on child porn offenders in her time as a federal judge, while Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., encouraged his colleagues to pursue that line of questioning. Jackson, who if confirmed would be the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court, was able to respond to the accusations for the first time on Tuesday. "As a mother and a judge who has had to deal with these cases, I was thinking that nothing could be further from the truth,” she said when asked what was going through her head when she heard the accusations. Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson testifies on her nomination to become an associate justice of the Supreme Court during a Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing on Tuesday. Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson at her Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing on Tuesday. (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images) “These are some of the most difficult cases judges have to deal with, because we’re talking about pictures of sex abuse of children. We’re talking about graphic descriptions that judges have to read and consider when they decide how to sentence in these cases, and there’s a statute that tells judges what they’re supposed to do." Durbin had attempted to preempt the attack in his opening statement Monday, citing an article in the conservative magazine National Review that called the allegation against Jackson “meritless to the point of demagoguery.” Jackson detailed how she was affected by the stories of young abuse victims who had told her they couldn’t maintain normal relationships as adults, turned to drugs and could not leave their homes because of the trauma. “In every case when I am dealing with something like this, it is important to me to make sure that the children’s perspective, the children’s voices, are represented in my sentencings,” she said. Jackson testifies during her Senate confirmation hearing. Jackson testifies during her confirmation hearing. (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images) Jackson added that when defendants attempt to argue that they are just “lookers,” who view child porn but do not participate in its creation, she tells them “about the victim statements that have come in to me as a judge.” “I say to them that there’s only a market for this kind of material because there are lookers — that you are contributing to child sex abuse," Jackson continued. "And then I impose a significant sentence, and then all of the additional restraints that are available in the law. These people are looking at 20, 30, 40 years of supervision. They can’t use their computers in a normal way for decades. I am imposing all of those constraints because I understand how significant, how damaging, how horrible this crime is.” In a series of tweets last week, Hawley announced his staff had discovered an “alarming pattern when it comes to Judge Jackson’s treatment of sex offenders, especially those preying on children.” During his opening statement Monday, Hawley listed seven cases involving Jackson that he was concerned about, and added that he was eager to hear her response. “Some have asked why did I raise these questions ahead of the hearing — why not wait until the hearing and spring them on Judge Jackson, as it were, and my answer to that is very simple: I’m not interested in trapping Judge Jackson, I’m not trying to play ‘gotcha.’ I’m interested in her answers,” Hawley said. Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., speaks during Jackson's confirmation hearing. Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., at Jackson's confirmation hearing. (Jacquelyn Martin/AP) “Because I found in our time together that she was enormously thoughtful, enormously accomplished, and I suspect has a coherent view, an explanation and a way of thinking I look forward to hearing.” Multiple analyses ofJackson’s record have concluded that Hawley’s criticism of her was misleading. Andrew McCarthy, a conservative former prosecutor who wrote the National Review article that was referred to by Durbin and other Democrats, said that “the implication that [Jackson] has a soft spot for ‘sex offenders’ who ‘prey on children’ because she argued against a severe mandatory-minimum prison sentence for the receipt and distribution of pornographic images is a smear.” The line of attack, some argue, echoes the QAnon conspiracy theory, which falsely accuses Democrats of running child sex-trafficking rings. With Democrats able to confirm Jackson with their 50 votes in the Senate, she is expected to replace retiring Justice Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court. The Senate confirmed her to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia last summer by a 53-44 vote, with three Republicans voting in favor: Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Graham. Graham, however, has signaled that he won’t back Jackson this time around, calling her nomination a win for the “radical left.” | |
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| 03-23-22 09:56am - 1005 days | #14 | |
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Putin allies warn of nuclear holocaust. Trump stands on podium and shouts that Biden is dragging Russia into a hole. That Russia must fight back against US aggression, that Russia could send nuclear missiles into the US. But since Trump is Russia's friend, the state of Florida should be spared. Thank God for Trump and the Republican party: fighting to preserve freedom throughout the entire world. But wait. Will Putin and Trump force the US to invade Russia? To execute both Putin and Trump on live TV? Think what a thrill that would be! -------- -------- Putin ally warns of nuclear dystopia due to United States Reuters Guy Faulconbridge March 23, 2022, 7:42 AM By Guy Faulconbridge LONDON (Reuters) - One of President Vladimir Putin's closest allies warned the United States on Wednesday that the world could spiral towards a nuclear dystopia if Washington pressed on with what the Kremlin casts as a long-term plot to destroy Russia. Dmitry Medvedev, who was president from 2008 to 2012 and is now deputy secretary of Russia's Security Council, said the United States had conspired to destroy Russia as part of an "primitive game" since the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union. "It means Russia must be humiliated, limited, shattered, divided and destroyed," Medvedev, 56, said in a 550-word statement. The views of Medvedev, once considered to be one of the least hawkish members of Putin's circle, gives an insight into the thinking within the Kremlin as Moscow faces in the biggest confrontation with the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. The United States has repeatedly said that it does not want the collapse of Russia and that its own interests are best served by a prosperous, stable and open Russia. The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment outside usual business hours. Russia's invasion of Ukraine has killed thousands of people, displaced nearly 10 million and raised fears of a wider confrontation between Russia and the United States - the world's two biggest nuclear powers. Putin says the operation was necessary because the United States was using Ukraine to threaten Russia and Moscow had to defend against the "genocide" of Russian speakers by Ukraine. Ukraine says Putin's claims of genocide are nonsense. Medvedev said the Kremlin would never allow the destruction of Russia, but warned Washington that if it did achieve what he characterised as its destructive aims then the world could face a dystopian crisis that would end in a "big nuclear explosion". He also painted a picture of a post-Putin world that would follow the collapse of Russia, which has more nuclear warheads than any other country. The destruction of the world's biggest country by area, Medvedev said, could lead to an unstable leadership in Moscow "with a maximum number of nuclear weapons aimed at targets in the United States and Europe." Russia's collapse, he said, would lead to five or six nuclear armed states across the Eurasian landmass run by "freaks, fanatics and radicals". "Is this a dystopia or some mad futuristic forecast? Is it Pulp fiction? No," Medvedev said. (Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Jon Boyle and Philippa Fletcher) | |
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