darkcalling

Original source (RT):

West Jerusalem has been sidelining diplomacy in favor of a “military solution” to the Gaza war, Moscow said

Israel has been using peace negotiations to mislead the international community and hide its true intentions in Gaza, Russia’s deputy envoy to the UN, Dmitry Polyansky has said.

Speaking at the UN Security Council on Wednesday, Polyansky accused West Jerusalem of “stubbornly seeking a military solution to the problem, while attempting to ignore the decisions of the UNSC.”

“The Security Council is united in the understanding that the rescue of the remaining Israelis and foreigners by military methods is impossible and that there is no alternative to negotiations. The Israeli society understands and recognizes this as well,” the diplomat said.

“However, the Israeli leadership, unfortunately, continues to treat the negotiations only as a ‘smokescreen’ designed to distract the international community.”

(archive link)

The US government has confiscated an airplane reportedly used by Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, claiming it violates Washington’s sanctions against Caracas, CNN reported on Monday.

The US has charged Maduro with drug trafficking and refused to recognize his victory in the last two Venezuelan presidential elections.

“Seizing the foreign head of state’s plane is unheard-of for criminal matters. We’re sending a clear message here that no one is above the law, no one is above the reach of US sanctions,” an unnamed Washington official told CNN, which first reported the story on Monday.

According to CNN, the plane is worth around $13 million and was seized in cooperation with Dominican authorities.

Instead of "protecting human rights," the unilateral sanctions have severely undermined the rights of Uygurs, particularly young Uygur women.

The U.S. sanctions had nothing to do with the alleged human rights concerns. The purpose, he said, is to crush Xinjiang's economy, cause mass unemployment and undermine social stability, said an expert who grew up in Xinjiang.

This article goes over the human cost of the US's illegal, coercive sanctions on China and how they fall primarily on women and set back women's rights in Xinjiang. This is probably in keeping with what the US wants as they want to foster a traditionalist, conservative, reactionary culture and religious extremist movement in Xinjiang to attack China with, to destabilize the region and China as a whole and of course to grow into a large separatist movement as part of the goal of balkanizing China.

(archive link)

Russia often loses all contact with local residents forcibly taken by Kiev troops, the Foreign Ministry has said

Ukrainian troops occupying part of Russia’s Kursk Region have been abducting and sexually abusing local residents, the head of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s special mission to investigate alleged Ukrainian war crimes, Rodion Miroshnik, has claimed.

In an interview with RIA Novosti on Thursday, Miroshnik confirmed numerous earlier reports alleging that Ukrainian forces – including foreign mercenaries – have engaged in numerous atrocities against the civilian population since the start of the large-scale incursion on August 6.

“We have evidence of sexual violence committed by both foreign mercenaries and Ukrainian radicals,” he stated, suggesting that the Ukrainian leadership had deployed “all of its scum” to Kursk Region in an apparent effort to get them out of the country and “dispose” of them. Other apparent crimes by Kiev’s forces include abductions, Miroshnik claimed. “We have data that Ukrainian militants are taking action to kidnap people. They are snatching civilians and taking them away to an unknown location. We often lose contact with them. Where are they taken? To Ukrainian territory, or to secret prisons?” he asked.

(archive link)

The US and its CIA-controlled “soft power” arm utilized the encrypted social media app Telegram to foment riots and protest movements against foreign governments it deems undesirable, former Trump administration official and free speech activist Mike Benz has said.

These statements were made during an interview with American journalist Tucker Carlson on his show Wednesday. Benz, a State Department official under the Trump administration, now runs the free speech watchdog Foundation for Freedom Online.

[...]

The US has championed free speech globally for decades, “in large part” because it allows the country to build resistance and political or paramilitary movements “in countries where the US State Department seeks political control,” the former official said. Durov’s end-to-end encrypted social media app Telegram has been instrumental in this effort, Benz claimed.

The reason “26 US-government-funded NGOs” condemned Russia for attempting to ban Telegram in 2018 was that “the US State Department was using Telegram,” utilizing its encryption and local popularity “to foment protests and riots within Russia – just as they did in Belarus, Iran, Hong Kong, and attempted to do in China,” the former State Department official stated. The app’s encryption is a powerful means of evading state control over media and allowing “US-funded political groups or dissidents to garner tens of thousands of supporters with relative impunity,” he added.

https://www.rt.com/news/603033-telegram-founder-paris-arrest/

The founder has been arrested in Paris on charges of abetting criminals by making a censorship resistant app. He in the past claimed the west (NSA/CIA/etc) asked him to put a backdoor in his app and for what little it's worth he claims he refused.

Now with him in their custody, in their clutches, where they can sentence him to a brutal prison sentence for the rest of his life he may like many people be willing to cut them a deal on a backdoor so he can save his own life. Such a deal may not be publicly apparent and may even be carefully disguised and hidden behind a public legal drama that is fiction.

I don't think any immediate emergency action is warranted but I would encourage those using it to evaluate what this means for their continued usage and the threat it presents to them say 6 months from now.

We have to wait and see, he could be cleared and leave quickly, he could face a trial which may or may not say anything about him allowing western intelligence to compromise it. As they could try and hide the fact he cut a deal behind a public apparent defeat by his lawyers if they want to keep it under wraps to better utilize such access against Russians for example who are heavy, heavy users of the app and it could present a trove of intelligence to say nothing of abilities to compromise top Russian officials were they to get in bed with the eyes agreement agencies.

Point is they snatched him at the airport when he landed and it can't be anything but politically motivated.

At the very least I expect them to force him to submit to public censorship of "disinformation" which means the Russian perspective. Oh they'll bust a few pedophiles and drug rings as well but it's mainly about controlling yet another app that's available in the west and sticking a knife in Russia's back.

Here's something interesting from Ars:

As Rob Lee, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, noted tonight, "A popular Russian channel says that Telegram is also used by Russian forces to communicate, and that if Western intelligence services gain access to it, they could obtain sensitive information about the Russian military." https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/08/shocker-french-make-surprise-arrest-of-telegram-founder-at-paris-airport/

This once again shows the need for tech sovereignty among anti-imperialist nations. It's not enough to use something that's not directly controlled by the enemy because the enemy will find ways to pressure, blackmail, coerce those third parties into doing their bidding anyways. It's important for these countries to have platforms safely headquartered within one of these other friend nations that are resistant to just one person being arrested, where even someone with extraordinary access wouldn't be a threat because of security service involvement.

(archive link)

Ukrainian forces that have occupied part of Kursk Region have committed atrocities against civilians while using them as human shields, the commander of the Akhmat Special Forces from Russia's Chechen Republic has claimed.

In a post on Telegram on Monday, Apty Alaudinov recounted an episode in the border town of Sudzha, where he said Ukrainian troops had entered a residential house with children inside.

“In this building, they settled down on the ground floor… and chased children and teachers upstairs to use them as a shield,” he said, adding that this practice is widespread. He claimed that first-person footage filmed by the Ukrainians had ended up in Russian hands, and showed the brutality of Kiev’s forces.

“I received a huge number of photos in which I saw civilians who were simply shot at point-blank [range], in the head and from the back. All these civilians, unfortunately, died,” he said, expressing his condolences and vowing revenge.

As fighting continues on the border, videos have surfaced on social media showing Ukrainian troops grabbing people off the street, blindfolding them, and pushing them into trucks.

(archive link)

A false flag operation using radioactive warheads is reportedly aimed at spent nuclear fuel

Ukrainian forces have begun preparations to target nuclear waste storage sites at a Russian power plant with radioactive warheads and to then blame Moscow, according to intelligence received by Russia.

“Sources on the other side report that the [Ukrainians] are preparing a nuclear false flag – an explosion of a dirty atomic bomb,” military journalist Marat Khairullin said Friday on his Telegram channel. “They plan to strike the storage sites of spent nuclear fuel of a nuclear power plant.”

The special warheads intended for the attack have already been delivered to the Vostochny Mining and Processing plant in Zhovti Vody, in Ukraine’s Dnepropetrovsk Region, according to Khairullin.

As possible targets of the attack, Khairullin indicated either the Zaporozhye NPP in Energodar or the Kursk NPP in Kurchatov, noting that the Ukrainian government and its Western backers are “desperate and willing to try anything.”

A security official in the Russian Military Administration of Kharkov Region corroborated Khairullin’s claim to RIA Novosti on Friday. The attack is intended to use radioactive warheads to target spent fuel storage sites at a nuclear power plant, and the ammunition has already been delivered to Zhovti Vody.

Kiev’s intention is to accuse Moscow of a false flag so it could justify using nuclear weapons against Ukraine, the security official said. The Ukrainian government has received orders from its Western backers to “escalate as much as possible,” he added.

According to the security official, the intelligence came from Ukrainian prisoners of war.

Sergey Lebedev, introduced as leader of the Nikolaev Region underground, who said the planned attack would be carried out with NATO weapons, with the consent of the West.

Lebedev pointed out that a large number of Western journalists have already arrived in the Sumy Region near Kursk, as well as the Ukrainian-controlled part of Zaporozhye, suggesting that this is part of Kiev’s preparations for the nuclear false flag.

The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) acts as the US government's "white gloves" and has long engaged in subverting state power in other countries, meddling in their internal affairs, inciting division and confrontation, misleading public opinion, and conducting ideological infiltration, all under the pretext of promoting democracy, according to a report released on Friday by the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

Rest of the story at the link. Full report link again is:

https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/xw/wjbxw/202408/t20240809_11468618.html

(They use mainstream foreign press sources only, no grayzone or similar likely to be easily dismissed stuff)

By Tarik Cyril Amar, a historian from Germany working at Koç University, Istanbul, on Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe, the history of World War II, the cultural Cold War, and the politics of memory

(original non-archive link)

On 6 August, a court in Berlin sentenced a young woman called Ava Moayeri to a fine of €600 for shouting “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free.” One of Moayeri’s lawyers, Alexander Gorski, deplored this as “a rather dark day for freedom of expression in Germany.”

He’s right, even if his comment is an all too understated response to a scandalous miscarriage of justice. Indeed, it is hard to answer the question of what is wrong with this sentence, because, quite literally, everything is. Judge Birgit Balzer’s reasoning, for one thing, was embarrassingly shoddy, irresponsibly misinformed, and ethically and legally misguided, about which more below.

Beyond Balzer’s failure to do justice to the important issue she had to adjudicate, the case and sentence also represent a larger problem, in Germany and beyond: the West’s perverse pampering of Israel. One form taken by this pampering is to allow the Israeli regime to abuse the memory of the Holocaust, a genocide targeting Jews, to claim impunity for its own crimes against humanity, including genocide targeting Palestinians.

Balzer, too, explicitly invoked the Holocaust to justify her sentence. Yet Moayeri, the daughter of Communists from Iran, made clear that she has nothing to do with either glorifying violence or antisemitism. On the contrary, her concern is with showing solidarity to the Palestinian victims of Israeli violence and standing up for their rights. Balzer felt entitled to disregard this perfectly plausible position, attribute entirely unproven motives to Moayeri, and, on that fundamentally flawed basis, punish her. In effect, it is clear that Moayeri’s right to peaceful protest and a perfectly legitimate political position was suppressed to protect Israeli narratives from any challenge. And these narratives, in turn, are used to shield Israel from accountability for its crimes, and thus they also withhold help from Israel’s victims.

The whole article is worth reading and perhaps bookmarking as the author takes apart the legal case against this activist for Palestine showing how it doesn't even fit the standards of German law.

Suggesting a US intelligence connection and that Ukraine didn't have capabilities on its own to orchestrate this without direct US assistance.

(archive link)

A Malian official has reportedly questioned Kiev’s ability to act alone in providing intelligence to armed groups

Mali and Niger have asked the UN Security Council to investigate claims that Ukraine provided intelligence to Tuareg rebels, who killed Malian soldiers and Russian Wagner Group contractors in a recent ambush, according to RIA Novosti.

Fousseinou Ouattara, deputy chairman of Bamako’s parliamentary committee on security and defense, announced the move in an interview, the Russian news agency reported on Wednesday.

“It must have been [intelligence] that was mainly transmitted through the Americans, because they are capable of obtaining such information,” Ouattara said, casting doubt on Ukraine’s ability to independently assist armed groups in Africa.

(Rest of the story at the link)

(archive link)

The RT contributor is reportedly being investigated as a “foreign agent”

Federal agents and state police have searched the house of former US Marine and UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter in New York state on Wednesday.

State Police and FBI agents descended on the street of Bethlehem township, south of Albany, around noon, according to the local outlet Times-Union. They carried “more than two dozen boxes” out of the house just before 5pm local time.

The law enforcement executed a search warrant “related to concerns apparently the US government has about violations of the Foreign Agent Restriction Act (FARA)” Ritter told reporters gathered outside the house after the agents left.

He denied any allegations of wrongdoing and said the federal government was trying to intimidate him.

Ritter is a former US Marine Corps major who served as a UN weapons inspector in Iraq during the 1990s. He opposed the 2003 US invasion, insisting that Saddam Hussein’s government did not have weapons of mass destruction, as Washington claimed at the time.

He has also been an RT contributor and saw his passport seized by the US government when he tried to attend the St Petersburg International Economic Forum in June.