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The Canadian Press – Sep 13, 2022 / 5:40 pm | Story: 385050
Photo: The Canadian Press
This image taken from a YouTube footage released by Armenian Defense Ministry on Tuesday, Sept. 13, 2022, shows Azerbaijanian servicemen crossing the Armenian-Azerbaijani border and approaching the Armenian positions. Armenia’s prime minister says that 49 soldiers have been killed in nighttime attacks by Azerbaijan. (Armenian Defense Ministry via AP)
Fighting on the border between Armenia and Azerbaijan killed about 100 troops Tuesday as attacks on both sides fed fears of broader hostilities breaking out between the longtime adversaries.
Armenia said at least 49 of its soldiers were killed; Azerbaijan said it lost 50.
The fighting erupted minutes after midnight with Azerbaijani forces unleashing an artillery barrage and drone attacks in many sections of Armenian territory, according to Armenia’s Defense Ministry. It said shelling grew less intense during the day but Azerbaijani troops were trying to advance into Armenian territory.
Azerbaijan’s Foreign Ministry said it was responding to a “large-scale provocation” by Armenia late Monday and early Tuesday. It said Armenian troops planted mines and fired on Azerbaijani military positions.
The two countries have been locked in a decades-old conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, which is part of Azerbaijan but has been under the control of ethnic Armenian forces backed by Armenia since a separatist war there ended in 1994.
Azerbaijan reclaimed broad swaths of Nagorno-Karabakh in a six-week war in 2020 that killed more than 6,600 people and ended with a Russia-brokered peace deal. Moscow, which deployed about 2,000 troops to the region to serve as peacekeepers under the deal, has sought to maintain friendly ties with both ex-Soviet nations.
The international community urged calm on both sides.
Moscow has engaged in a delicate balancing act, maintaining strong economic and security ties with Armenia, which hosts a Russian military base, while also developing close cooperation with oil-rich Azerbaijan. The Russian Foreign Ministry urged both parties Tuesday “to refrain from further escalation and show restraint.”
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan called Russian President Vladimir Putin and later also had calls with French President Emmanuel Macron, European Council President Charles Michel and Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov spoke by phone with his Azerbaijani counterpart, Jeyhun Bayramov.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke with both Pashinyan and Azerbaijan’s president, Ilham Aliyev. The U.S. has a special envoy in the region, Blinken said, “and my hope is that we can move this from conflict back to the negotiating table and back to trying to build a peace.”
Speaking in parliament early Tuesday, Pashinyan accused Azerbaijan of having had an uncompromising stance at recent European Union-brokered talks in Brussels.
Armenia said the Azerbaijani shelling Tuesday damaged civilian infrastructure and wounded an unspecified number of people.
On Facebook, Aliyev expressed condolences “to the families and relatives of our servicemen who died on September 13 while preventing large-scale provocations committed by the Armenian armed forces in the direction of the Kalbajar, Lachin, Dashkasan and Zangilan regions of Azerbaijan.”
Turkey, an ally of Azerbaijan, also placed the blame for the violence on Armenia. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan expressed support for Aliyev and said in a statement that Turkey and Azerbaijan are “brotherly … in all matters.”
The governor of Gegharkunik province, one of the regions that came under Azerbaijani shelling, said there was a 40-minute lull in the fighting, apparently reflecting Moscow’s attempt to negotiate a truce, before it later resumed. The governor, Karen Sarkisyan, said four Armenian troops in his region were killed and another 43 were wounded by the shelling.
The Armenian government said it would officially ask Russia for assistance under a friendship treaty between the countries, and also appeal to the United Nations and the Collective Security Treaty Organization, a Moscow-dominated security alliance of ex-Soviet nations.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov refrained from comment on Armenia’s request but added during a conference call with reporters that Putin was “taking every effort to help de-escalate tensions.”
The Canadian Press – Sep 13, 2022 / 5:40 pm | Story: 385049
Photo: Gage Skidmore / Flickr
Ken Starr
Ken Starr, a former federal appellate judge and a prominent attorney whose criminal investigation of Bill Clinton led to the president’s impeachment, has died at age 76, his family said Tuesday.
Starr died at a hospital Tuesday of complications from surgery, according to his former colleague, attorney Mark Lanier. He said Starr had been hospitalized in an intensive care unit in Houston for about four months.
In 2020, he was recruited to the legal team representing President Donald Trump in the nation’s third presidential impeachment trial.
For many years, Starr’s stellar reputation as a lawyer seemed to place him on a path to the Supreme Court. At age 37, he became the youngest person ever to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, where Chief Justice John Roberts and justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia also had served. From 1989-93, Starr was the solicitor general in the administration of President George H.W. Bush, arguing 25 cases before the Supreme Court.
Despite his impressive legal credentials, nothing could have prepared him for the task of investigating a sitting president.
In a probe that lasted five years, Starr looked into fraudulent real estate deals involving a long-time Clinton associate, delved into the removal of documents from the office of deputy White House counsel Vincent Foster after his suicide and assembled evidence of Clinton’s sexual encounters with Monica Lewinsky, a former White House intern. Each of the controversies held the potential to do serious, perhaps fatal, damage to Clinton’s presidency.
As Clinton’s legal problems worsened, the White House pilloried Starr as a right-wing fanatic doing the bidding of Republicans bent on destroying the president.
“The assaults took a toll” on the investigation, Starr told a Senate committee in 1999. “A duly authorized federal law enforcement investigation came to be characterized as yet another political game. Law became politics by other means.”
In a bitter finish to his investigation of the Lewinsky affair that engendered still more criticism, Starr filed a report, as the law required, with the U.S. House of Representatives. He concluded that Clinton lied under oath, engaged in obstruction of justice and followed a pattern of conduct that was inconsistent with the president’s constitutional duty to faithfully execute the laws. House Republicans used Starr’s report as a roadmap in the impeachment of the president, who was acquitted in a Senate trial.
In 2020, he was recruited to help represent Trump in the nation’s third impeachment trial. In a memorable statement to Congress during the Trump impeachment trial, Starr said “we are living in what I think can aptly be described as the ‘age of impeachment.’” He said that “like war, impeachment is hell, or at least presidential impeachment is hell.”
Clinton’s legal problems began during the 1992 presidential campaign. Questions arose over the candidate’s ties to the owner of a failed Arkansas savings and loan. The issue faded quickly. But it caught the attention of federal regulators, who began looking into whether money from the S&L had been diverted to a real estate venture called Whitewater in which Bill and Hillary Clinton and the S&L’s owner, Jim McDougal, shared a financial interest.
Bowing to intense political pressure from Republicans and some members of his own party, Clinton called for appointment of a special counsel to investigate Whitewater. A three-member appeals court for independent counsels selected Starr.
On the Whitewater front, Starr’s prosecutors investigated Mrs. Clinton’s legal work for Jim McDougal’s S&L. Both she and the president were questioned by Starr’s prosecutors and their videotaped depositions were played for juries in criminal trials of McDougal and his ex-wife Susan. Neither of the Clintons was ever charged in connection with Whitewater.
The investigation of Clinton’s intimate relationship with Lewinsky was a Washington spectacle.
In 1995, Lewinsky went to work at the White House as an intern. During the government shutdown late that year, she and Clinton had a sexual encounter in a hallway near the Oval Office, the first of 10 sexual encounters over the next year and a half. Lewinsky confided the affair to a co-worker, Linda Tripp, who tape recorded some of their conversations and brought the tapes to Starr’s prosecutors. Lewinsky was granted immunity from prosecution and became Starr’s chief witness against the president, who had denied having sexual relations with Lewinsky.
Putting the investigation behind him, Starr embarked on a career in academia, first as dean of the law school at Pepperdine University where he taught constitutional issues and civil procedures, then as president of Baylor University in his home state of Texas. He also became an author, writing “First Among Equals: The Supreme Court in American Life.”
Born in Vernon and raised in San Antonio, Starr earned his B.A. from George Washington University in 1968, his M.A. from Brown University in 1969 and his J.D. degree from Duke University Law School in 1973. He was a law clerk to Chief Justice Warren E. Burger from 1975 to 1977.
As a young attorney at the law firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in Los Angeles, Starr worked with William French Smith, who became attorney general in the administration of President Ronald Reagan. Starr became counselor to Smith, and from there was nominated by Reagan to the federal appeals court.
The Canadian Press – Sep 13, 2022 / 5:37 pm | Story: 385047
Photo: The Canadian Press
Abortion rights supporters demonstrate outside the Senate chamber at the West Virginia state Capitol on Tuesday, Sept. 13, 2022, in Charleston, W.Va., as lawmakers debated a sweeping bill to ban abortion in the state with few exceptions. (Chris Dorst/Charleston Gazette-Mail via AP)
West Virginia’s Legislature passed a sweeping abortion ban with few exceptions Tuesday, approving a bill that several members of the Republican supermajority said they hope will make it impossible for the state’s only abortion clinic to continue to offer the procedure.
“It is going to shut down that abortion clinic, of that I feel certain,” Republican Sen. Robert Karnes said on the Senate floor, amid shouts from protesters standing outside the chamber doors. “I believe it’s going to save a lot of babies.”
Under the legislation, rape and incest victims would be able to obtain abortions at up to eight weeks of pregnancy, but only if they report to law enforcement first. Such victims who are minors would have until 14 weeks to terminate a pregnancy and must report to either law enforcement or a physician.
Rape and incest victims would have to report the assault within 48 hours of getting an abortion, and a patient must present a copy of a police report or notarized letter to a physician before the procedure can be performed.
Abortions also would be allowed in cases of medical emergencies.
West Virginia joins the ranks of states moving to ban abortion in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision earlier this year to end the constitutional right to privacy that protected abortion rights nationwide. That left it to states to decide whether abortion should remain legal, which in turn has ignited intense state-level debates, especially in states controlled by Republicans, about when to impose the ban, whether to carve out exceptions in cases involving rape, incest or the health of the woman giving birth, and how those exceptions should be implemented.
The West Virginia bill now heads to the desk of Republican Gov. Jim Justice, who has signed several anti-abortion bills into law since taking office in 2017. Lawmakers resumed debate on the bill Tuesday after failing to come to an agreement in late July, giving up the chance for the state to become the first to approve new legislation restricting access to abortions since the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in June removing its protected status as a constitutional right.
Both the Senate and the House of Delegates speedily approved the bill, after several hours of debate. Dozens of protesters wearing pink shirts reading “bans off our bodies” and holding signs reading “abortion is healthcare” staged a rally in the Capitol rotunda while lawmakers were in session.
Some of the group sat in the gallery as legislators discussed the bills, with some shouting down to legislators in frustration as they spoke in support of the bill. Legislative leadership asked that the onlookers remain silent as lawmakers conducted business. At one point, at least one protester was escorted out of the building by police.
Lawmakers inserted several provisions they said were specifically targeted at the Women’s Health Center of West Virginia, which was the state’s first abortion clinic when it opened in 1976 following the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Roe v. Wade case. It has existed as the state’s sole abortion clinic for years, making it the ever-increasing target of anti-abortion lawmakers and protesters.
The bill states that surgical abortions can only be performed at a state-licensed hospital by a physician with hospital privileges. Anybody else who performs an abortion, including nurse practitioners and other medical professionals, could face three to 10 years in prison. A physician who performs an illegal abortion could lose their medical license.
Pregnant people who obtain illegal abortions will not face any form of prosecution under the bill, however.
Kaylen Barker, spokesperson for the Women’s Health Center of West Virginia, said the clinic will not be shutting down, even if the staff is no longer able to provide abortions. Like many clinics that perform abortions, the facility did not offer the procedure daily.
Most days are dedicated to services like gender-affirming hormone therapy, HIV prevention and treatment and routine gynecological care — cervical exams, cancer screenings — mostly for low-income patients on Medicaid with nowhere else to go.
Democratic Sen. Owens Brown, West Virginia’s only Black senator, spoke against the bill before it passed the Senate. He said when he looks around at his fellow lawmakers, he sees a body that is overwhelmingly comprised of white, middle-aged to elderly men who are middle-class or above.
Brown compared groups of men passing legislation that overwhelmingly impacts women to laws that were passed by white lawmakers when slavery was legal in the U.S. He said “all laws are not good laws made by men.”
“That’s somewhat irrational in many ways to be able to apply a law that will never apply to you,” he said to his fellow lawmakers. “It’s easy for you to sit there and do that because you will never have to face the consequences of your actions.”
The Canadian Press – Sep 13, 2022 / 2:50 pm | Story: 385016
Photo: The Canadian Press
Liudmyla Dmyttruk, 67, lights up an oil lamp, as she shows the basement where she is living together with her neighbors in the freed village of Hrakove, Ukraine, Tuesday, Sept. 13, 2022.(AP Photo/Leo Correa)
Ukrainian troops piled pressure on retreating Russian forces Tuesday, pressing deeper into occupied territory and sending more Kremlin troops fleeing ahead of the counteroffensive that has inflicted a stunning blow on Moscow’s military prestige.
As the advance continued, Ukraine’s border guard services said the army took control of Vovchansk — a town just 3 kilometers (2 miles) from Russia seized on the first day of the war. Russia acknowledged that it has withdrawn troops from areas in the northeastern region of Kharkiv in recent days.
Russian troops were also pulling out from the southern city of Melitopol, the second-largest city in Ukraine’s southern Zaporizhzhia region, the city’s pre-occupation mayor said. His claim could not immediately be verified.
Melitopol has been under Russian occupation since early March. Capturing it would give Kyiv the opportunity to disrupt Russian supply lines between the south and the eastern Donbas region, the two major areas where Moscow-backed forces hold territory.
Melitopol Mayor Ivan Fedorov wrote on Telegram that the Russian troops were heading toward Moscow-annexed Crimea. He said columns of military equipment were reported at a checkpoint in Chonhar, a village marking the boundary between the Crimean peninsula and the Ukrainian mainland.
In the newly freed village of Chkalovske in the Kharkiv region, Svitlana Honchar said Russians’ departure was sudden and swift.
“They left like the wind,” Honchar said Tuesday after loading cans of food aid into her car. “They were fleeing by any means they could.”
Some Russians appeared to have been left behind in the hasty retreat. “They were trying to catch up,” she said.
It was not yet clear if the Ukrainian blitz, which unfolded after months of little discernible movement, could signal a turning point in the nearly seven-month war.
But the country’s officials were buoyant, releasing footage showing their forces burning Russian flags and inspecting abandoned, charred tanks. In one video, border guards tore down a poster that read, “We are one people with Russia.”
Momentum has switched back and forth before, and Ukraine’s American allies were careful not to declare a premature victory since Russian President Vladimir Putin still has troops and resources to tap.
In the face of Russia’s largest defeat since its botched attempt to capture Kyiv early in the war, Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said troops were hitting back with “massive strikes” in all sectors. But there were no immediate reports of a sudden uptick in Russian attacks.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Ukrainian forces were carrying out “stabilization measures” across recaptured territory in the country’s south and east, and rounding up Russian troops, “saboteurs” and alleged collaborators.
In his nightly televised address, Zelenskyy also pledged to restore normalcy in the liberated areas.
“It is very important that together with our troops, with our flag, ordinary, normal life enters the de-occupied territory,” he said, citing an example of how people in one village had already begun receiving pension payments after months of occupation.
Reports of chaos abounded as Russian troops pulled out — as well as claims that they were surrendering en masse. The claims could not be confirmed.
Ukrainian Deputy Minister of Defense Hanna Maliar said Kyiv is trying to persuade even more Russian soldiers to give up, launching shells filled with flyers ahead of their advance.
“Russians use you as cannon fodder. Your life doesn’t mean anything for them. You don’t need this war. Surrender to Armed Forces of Ukraine,” the flyers read.
Authorities moved into several areas to investigate alleged atrocities committed by Russian troops against civilians.
Since Saturday, the Kharkiv regional police have repeatedly reported that local law enforcement officers have found civilian bodies bearing signs of torture across territories formerly held by Russia. It was not possible to verify their statements.
On Tuesday, regional police alleged that Russian troops had set up “a torture chamber” at the local police station in Balakliya, a town of 25,000, that was occupied from March until last week.
In a Facebook post, the head of the police force’s investigative department, Serhii Bolvinov, cited testimony from Balakliya residents and claimed that Russian troops “always kept at least 40 people captive” on the premises.
In one indication of the blow sustained by Moscow, British intelligence said that one premier force, the 1st Guards Tank Army, had been “severely degraded” during the invasion, along with the conventional Russian forces designed to counter NATO.
“It will likely take years for Russia to rebuild this capability,” the analysts said.
The setback might renew Russia’s interest in peace talks, said Abbas Gallyamov, an independent Russian political analyst and former speechwriter for Putin.
But even if Putin were to sit down at the negotiating table, Zelenskyy has made it clear that Russia must return all Ukrainian territory, including Crimea, Gallyamov said.
“This is unacceptable to Moscow, so talks are, strictly speaking, impossible,” he said.
Putin’s previous actions “have restricted his room to maneuver,” so he “wouldn’t be able to put anything meaningful on the table.”
For talks to be possible, Putin “would need to leave and be replaced by someone who’s relatively untarnished by the current situation,” such as his deputy chief of staff, the Moscow mayor or the Russian prime minister, Gallyamov said.
The retreat did not stop Russia from pounding Ukrainian positions. It shelled the city of Lozova early Tuesday in the Kharkiv region, killing three people and injuring nine, said regional Gov. Oleh Syniehubov.
And Ukrainian officials said Russia kept up shelling around Europe’s largest nuclear facility, where fighting has raised fears of a nuclear disaster. The Nikopol area, which is across the Dnieper River from the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, was shelled six times during the night, but no injuries were immediately reported, said regional Gov. Valentyn Reznichenko.
Strikes have also continued unabated on the city of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest and one that has been hammered by artillery for months.
Among Kharkiv’s battle-scarred apartment buildings, one man who returned to feed the birds struck a defiant tone, saying that the success of the Ukrainian counteroffensive would likely prompt harsh Russian retaliation against civilian targets. But he said it would not succeed in intimidating ordinary Ukrainians.
Putin “will strike so we don’t have water, electricity, to create more chaos and intimidate us,” said Serhii who only gave his first name. “But he will not succeed because we will survive, and Putin will soon croak!”
The counteroffensive has provoked rare public criticism of Putin’s war. Meanwhile, some of its defenders in Russia played down the idea that the success belonged to Ukraine, blaming instead Western weapons and fighters for the losses.
Marcy Gordon, The Associated Press – Sep 13, 2022 / 10:45 am | Story: 384951
Photo: The Canadian Press
A screen shows the price of Twitter stock at the New York Stock Exchange.
The former security chief at Twitter told Congress that the social media platform is plagued by weak cyber defenses that make it vulnerable to exploitation by “teenagers, thieves and spies” and put the privacy of its users at risk. Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, a respected cybersecurity expert, appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee to lay out his allegations Tuesday.
“I am here today because Twitter leadership is misleading the public, lawmakers, regulators and even its own board of directors,” Zatko said as he began his sworn testimony.
“They don’t know what data they have, where it lives and where it came from and so, unsurprisingly, they can’t protect it,” Zatko said. “It doesn’t matter who has keys if there are no locks.”
Zatko said “Twitter leadership ignored its engineers,” in part because “their executive incentives led them to prioritize profit over security.”
His message echoed one brought to Congress against another social media giant last year, but unlike that Facebook whistleblower, Frances Haugen, Zatko hasn’t brought troves of internal documents to back up his claims.
Zatko was the head of security for the influential platform until he was fired early this year. He filed a whistleblower complaint in July with Congress, the Justice Department, the Federal Trade Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Among his most serious accusations is that Twitter violated the terms of a 2011 FTC settlement by falsely claiming that it had put stronger measures in place to protect the security and privacy of its users.
Sen. Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat who heads the Judiciary Committee, said Zatko has detailed flaws “that may pose a direct threat to Twitter’s hundreds of millions of users as well as to American democracy.”
“Twitter is an immensely powerful platform and can’t afford gaping vulnerabilities,” he said.
Unknown to Twitter users, there’s far more personal information disclosed than they —or sometimes even Twitter itself — realize, Zatko testified. He said “basic systemic failures” that were brought forward by company engineers were not addressed.
The FTC has been “a little over its head”, and far behind European counterparts, in policing the sort of privacy violations that have occurred at Twitter, Zatko said.
Zatko’s claims could also affect Tesla billionaire Elon Musk’s attempt to back out of his $44 billion deal to acquire the social platform. Musk claims that Twitter has long underreported spam bots on its platform and cites that as a reason to nix the deal he struck in April.
Many of Zatko’s claims are uncorroborated and appear to have little documentary support. Twitter has called Zatko’s description of events “a false narrative … riddled with inconsistencies and inaccuracies” and lacking important context.
Among the assertions from Zatko that drew attention from lawmakers Tuesday was that Twitter knowingly allowed the government of India to place its agents on the company payroll, where they had access to highly sensitive data on users. Twitter’s lack of ability to log how employees accessed user accounts made it hard for the company to detect when employees were abusing their access, Zatko said.
Zatko also accuses the company of deception in its handling of automated “spam bots,” or fake accounts. That allegation is at the core of billionaire tycoon Elon Musk’s attempt to back out of his $44 billion deal to buy Twitter. Musk and Twitter are locked in a bitter legal battle, with Twitter having sued Musk to force him to complete the deal. The Delaware judge overseeing the case ruled last week that Musk can include new evidence related to Zatko’s allegations in the high-stakes trial, which is set to start Oct. 17.
Sen. Charles Grassley, the committee’s ranking Republican, said Tuesday that Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal declined to testify at the hearing, citing the ongoing legal proceedings with Musk. But the hearing is “more important that Twitter’s civil litigation in Delaware,” Grassley said. Twitter declined to comment on Grassley’s remarks.
In his complaint, Zatko accused Agrawal as well as other senior executives and board members of numerous violations, including making “false and misleading statements to users and the FTC about the Twitter platform’s security, privacy and integrity.”
Zatko, 51, first gained prominence in the 1990s as a pioneer in the ethical hacking movement and later worked in senior positions at an elite Defense Department research unit and at Google. He joined Twitter in late 2020 at the urging of then-CEO Jack Dorsey.
James McCarten, The Canadian Press – Sep 13, 2022 / 5:08 am | Story: 384916
Photo: The Canadian Press
Las Vegas police Captain Dori Koren speaks at a news conference on the arrest of Clark County Public Administrator Robert “Rob” Telles, Thursday, Sept. 8, 2022, in Las Vegas.
The slaying of a Las Vegas newspaper reporter, allegedly at the hands of one of his investigative targets, is driving home a reality the U.S. hasn’t had to confront since the Civil War: journalism on home soil is becoming more dangerous.
Jeff German, 69, an old-school investigative reporter with the Las Vegas Review-Journal, was stabbed to death outside his home last week — months removed from his exposé of the Clark County Public Administrator’s office.
That administrator, Robert Telles, appeared in court Thursday to face murder charges, his forearms bandaged from what police — who allege that traces of his DNA were found under German’s fingernails — described as self-inflicted wounds.
“I would like to have said, ‘No, we didn’t see this kind of thing coming in the United States,'” said Celeste González de Bustamante, a professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin.
“But we’ve often said that what’s happening in other parts of the world, where press freedoms are under significantly more pressure, is a harbinger of what could be coming in places like the United States.”
It worsened considerably during the presidency of Donald Trump, González de Bustamante said, thanks to a brazen weaponization of media distrust that culminated in calling CNN “fake news” and supporters wearing T-shirts that read, “Rope. Tree. Journalist. Some assembly required.”
“People would say, ‘Oh, you know, this is just talk’ — but talk ends up creating an atmosphere and an environment where physical attacks against journalists are OK.”
So far in 2022, the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, an online database managed by the Freedom of the Press Association, has catalogued 28 assaults against members of the media, most of them the result of direct targeting.
It’s a far cry from 2020, when coverage of Black Lives Matter rallies across the country, as well as the superheated atmosphere of that year’s presidential election, resulted in more than 600 reported assaults.
The total for 2021 was 145, many of them coming on Jan. 6 on the grounds of Capitol Hill as Trump supporters swarmed Congress in hopes of disrupting the certification of Joe Biden’s election win.
German’s series of reports, which began in May, described years of turmoil, bullying, workplace hostility and favouritism during Telles’s tenure in the administrator’s office, and likely helped to sink the accused’s re-election bid in June.
Police also found other evidence at German’s home: pieces of a straw hat and bloody shoes that appeared to match those worn by a suspect in an image captured by neighbourhood surveillance video earlier in the day.
Video also shows the suspect driving a vehicle matching the description of an SUV registered to Telles’s wife — a vehicle that investigators towed away from his home on the day of his arrest.
“We cannot remember an elected politician attacking a journalist like this. We hope never to see it again,” the D.C.-based National Press Club said in a statement.
Only 39 journalists have been killed on U.S. soil to date, most of them during the Civil War. Nine have died in the last 30 years, including four who were killed in a mass shooting at a Maryland newsroom in 2018.
“The Capital Gazette, where the newsroom was attacked because of what was written, comes immediately to mind,” the club said.
“It was not long ago. Journalists can be killed while doing their work.”
The political climate in the U.S. and elsewhere around the world, where the media is increasingly under attack from behind political podiums, is exacerbating an already dangerous situation, said González de Bustamante.
“You have an environment where misinformation and disinformation is rampant,” she said, and media literacy — a public understanding of how journalists actually do the work of gathering news — is at an all-time low.
“It’s all of these sort of factors coming together, and creating a real recipe for disaster and for violence.”
The U.S. is hardly the only western country where journalism has become a more perilous career choice.
In Mexico, a hotbed of gang wars, the drug trade and corruption, 15 media workers have died to date in 2022 alone, making it one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists operating outside of a war zone.
And in Canada, a recent study led by Carleton University journalism professor Matthew Pearson and veteran CBC journalist Dave Seglins found media workers reported high rates of anxiety, post-traumatic stress and harassment, both online and on the job.
In his classes, while there is growing awareness and trepidation among students about the dangers, there’s also a willingness to confront them, Pearson said in an interview.
“I see a lot of resolve; I see people who are very committed to this work, and who want to do it in spite of what might come to pass,” he said — and they might be better able to handle online harassment than their older colleagues.
“In a strange way, they are actually more equipped to deal with online harassment than some older folks … this is the generation who has grown up with the idea of cyberbullying, with the presence of cyberbullying.”
Still, earlier this month, a coalition of Canadian media organizations wrote to urge Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to take steps to make it easier to investigate and prosecute those who target journalists online.
“This is a profound and spreading social harm that we cannot afford to ignore and that we must find ways to counter,” read the letter from the Canadian Association of Journalists.
Harassment was a particular concern for reporters in the field during the “Freedom Convoy,” a three-week blockade of Ottawa’s parliamentary district by protesters opposed to COVID-19 restrictions and vaccine mandates.
Pierre Poilievre, a veteran Conservative MP who openly courted the support of protesters in the early February days of his bid to lead the party, saw that strategy pay off over the weekend with a convincing first-ballot victory.
Whether he’ll continue to cultivate those connections remains to be seen.
In the meantime, journalists will press ahead, even if they find themselves as torn — as Pearson said he does at times — between an abiding passion for the work and the personal risk that can come with it.
“I would just implore any person with any political power to really think about the messages that they deliver to their supporters and the people who get vehemently behind them,” he said.
“And to really think about the ways in which we frame our hostility toward the media, and the responsibilities that they might have in doing so.”
The Canadian Press – Sep 12, 2022 / 4:31 pm | Story: 384871
Photo: The Canadian Press
Ukrainian State Emergency Service firefighters put out the fire after a Russian rocket attack hit an electric power station in Kharkiv, Ukraine, Sunday, Sept. 11, 2022. The Kharkiv and Donetsk regions have been completely de-energised in the rocket attack.(AP Photo/Kostiantyn Liberov)
Ukrainian troops expanded their territorial gains Monday, pushing all the way to the country’s northeastern border in places, and claimed to have captured a record number of Russian soldiers as part of the lightning advance that forced Moscow to make a hasty retreat.
A spokesman for Ukrainian military intelligence said Russian troops were surrendering en masse as “they understand the hopelessness of their situation.” A Ukrainian presidential adviser said there were so many POWs that the country was running out of space to accommodate them.
Blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flags fluttered over newly liberated towns across a wide swath of reclaimed land. The Ukrainian military said it had freed more than 20 settlements in 24 hours. In recent days, Kyiv’s forces have captured territory at least twice the size of greater London, according to the British Defense Ministry.
After months of little discernible movement on the battlefield, the momentum has lifted Ukrainian morale and provoked rare public criticism of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war.
“In some areas of the front, our defenders reached the state border with the Russian Federation,” said Oleh Syniehubov, governor of the northeastern Kharkiv region.
The counteroffensive left the Kremlin struggling for a response to its largest military defeat in Ukraine since Russian forces pulled back from areas near Kyiv after a botched attempt to capture the capital early in the invasion.
The Russian Defense Ministry acknowledged the setback in a map that showed its troops pressed back along a narrow patch of land on the border with Russia — a tacit admission of big Ukrainian gains.
Reports of chaos abounded as Russian troops pulled out.
“The Russians were here in the morning. Then at noon, they suddenly started shouting wildly and began to run away, charging off in tanks and armored vehicles,” Dmytro Hrushchenko, a resident of recently liberated Zaliznychne, a small town near the eastern front line, told Sky News.
Video taken by the Ukrainian military showed soldiers raising the Ukrainian flag over battle-damaged buildings. In one scene, a fighter wiped his boots on a Russian flag on the ground. Other videos showed Ukrainians inspecting the wreckage of Russian military vehicles, including tanks.
In his evening address, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said his forces have liberated more than 6,000 square kilometers (2,300 square miles) in the east and the south since the beginning of September.
Now Ukrainian teams are disarming land mines and other unexploded weapons in the recaptured areas and searching for any remaining Russian troops, officials said.
It was not yet clear if the Ukrainian blitz could signal a turning point in the war. Momentum has switched back and forth before, but rarely with such a big and sudden swing.
Ukrainian presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovich did not specify the number of Russian prisoners but said the POWs would be exchanged for Ukrainian service members held by Moscow. Military intelligence spokesman Andrey Yusov said the captured troops included “significant” numbers of Russian officers.
Ukraine’s deputy interior minister accused fleeing Russian forces of burning official documents and concealing bodies in an attempt to cover up rights violations in the areas they controlled until last week.
The mood was jubilant across the country.
In Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city and the capital of the region where the gains have been made, authorities hailed that power and water had been restored to about 80% of the region’s population following Russian attacks on infrastructure that knocked out electricity in many places across Ukraine.
“You are heroes!!!” Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov wrote on Telegram, referring to crews who restored utilities in Ukraine’s second-biggest city. “Thanks to everyone who did everything possible on this most difficult night for Kharkiv to normalize the life of the city as soon as possible.”
Meanwhile in Russia, signs of disarray emerged as Russian military bloggers and other commentators chastised the Kremlin for failing to mobilize more forces and take stronger action against Ukraine.
Russia has continuously stopped short of calling its invasion a war, instead describing it as a “special military operation” and relying on on a limited contingent of volunteers instead of a mass mobilization that could spur civil discontent and protest.
Ramzan Kadyrov, the Moscow-backed leader of the Russian region of Chechnya, publicly criticized the Russian Defense Ministry for what he called “mistakes” that made the Ukrainian blitz possible.
Even more notable, such criticism seeped onto state-controlled Russian TV.
“People who convinced President Putin that the operation will be fast and effective … these people really set up all of us,” Boris Nadezhdin, a former parliament member, said on a talk show on NTV television. “We’re now at the point where we have to understand that it’s absolutely impossible to defeat Ukraine using these resources and colonial war methods.”
Some in Russia blamed Western weapons and fighters for the losses.
“It’s not Ukraine that attacked Izium, but NATO,” read a headline in the state-supported Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper, referring to one of the areas where Russia said it has withdrawn troops.
Elsewhere, residents of a Russian village just across the border from Ukraine were evacuated after shelling by Ukrainian troops killed one person, according to Russia’s Tass news agency.
The report cited the head of the local administration in Logachevka, who said Ukrainian troops opened fire at a border checkpoint.
Pro-Kremlin separatists reported that Ukrainian troops were approaching the town of Lyman, a rail hub captured by Russia in late May that offers access to bridges over the nearby Siversky Donets river.
Denis Pushilin, head of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, acknowledged that the situation was “difficult.”
Even amid Ukraine’s ebullience, the casualties kept mounting. Ukraine’s presidential office said Monday that at least four civilians were killed and 11 others wounded in a series of Russian attacks in nine regions of the country. The U.N. Human Rights Office said last week that 5,767 civilians have been killed so far.
Among Monday’s attacks were strikes on residential areas in Kharkiv that killed at least one civilian and set multiple fires, local officials said.
In a reminder of the war’s toll, a council member in Izium accused enemy forces of killing civilians and committing other atrocities. Maksym Strelnikov told reporters Monday in an online briefing that hundreds of people had died during the fighting and after Russia seized the town in March.
Many died from shelling and could not get a proper burial, he said. His claims could not be immediately verified, but similar scenes have played out in other places captured by Russian forces.
The Ukrainian military also claimed to have found more evidence of human rights violations by Russian occupiers. It did not elaborate.
Izium was a major base for Russian forces in the Kharkiv region. The first Ukrainian flag was raised over the city on Saturday, according to Strelnikov. Residents, some wrapped in the country’s flag, greeted Ukrainian forces and offered them food.
Ukraine said the Russians continued shelling Nikopol across the Dnieper River from the Zaporizhzhia power plant, damaging several buildings there and leaving Europe’s largest nuclear facility in a precarious position. The last operational reactor in that plant has been shut down in a bid to prevent a radiation disaster as fighting raged nearby.
The Washington-based Institute for the Study of War said Monday that Kyiv “will likely increasingly dictate the location and nature of the major fighting.”
The British Defense Ministry said the retreat would likely further deteriorate the trust Russian forces have in their commanders and put Moscow’s troops on the back foot.
Photo: ISW
The Canadian Press – Sep 12, 2022 / 12:19 pm | Story: 384815
Photo: The Canadian Press
Former President Donald Trump, center, stands on his golf course with others at Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Va., Monday, Sept. 12, 2022. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
Donald Trump’s lawyers dismissed as a “storage dispute” the former president’s retention of top-secret documents at his Florida home, urging a judge Monday to keep in place a directive that temporarily halted key aspects of the Justice Department’s criminal probe.
Setting the stage for possible further delays to the investigation, the Trump team also said it opposed the candidates the Justice Department proposed for an independent arbiter who is to be tasked with reviewing the documents seized during the FBI’s Aug. 8 search of Mar-a-Lago.
In a 21-page filing, Trump’s lawyers referred to the documents that were seized as “purported ‘classified records,’” suggesting his lawyers do not concede the Justice Department’s contention that highly sensitive, top-secret information was found by the FBI in its search last month. The lawyers asserted there is no evidence any of the records were disclosed to anyone and said that at least some of the documents belong to Trump himself rather than the Justice Department.
The filing underscores the significant factual and legal disagreements between lawyers for Trump and the U.S. government as the Justice Department looks to move forward with its criminal investigation into the illegal retention of national defense information at Mar-a-Lago and into the potential obstruction of that probe.
“This investigation of the 45th President of the United States is both unprecedented and misguided,” they wrote. “In what at its core is a document storage dispute that has spiraled out of control, the Government wrongfully seeks to criminalize the possession by the 45th President of his own Presidential and personal records.”
The investigation hit a roadblock last week when U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon granted the Trump team’s request for the appointment of an independent arbiter, also known as a special master, to review the seized records and prohibited for now the department from examining the documents for investigative purposes.
The Justice Department has asked the judge to lift that hold and said it would contest her ruling to a federal appeals court. The department said its investigation risked being harmed beyond repair if that order remained in place, noting that confusion about its scope and meaning had already led the intelligence community to pause a separate risk assessment it was doing.
But Trump’s lawyers said in their own motion Monday that Cannon should not permit the FBI to resume its review of classified records.
“In opposing any neutral review of the seized materials, the Government seeks to block a reasonable first step towards restoring order from chaos and increasing public confidence in the integrity of the process,” the lawyers wrote.
In the meantime, both sides on Friday night each proposed different names of candidates who could serve in the role of a special master, though they disagreed on the exact scope of duties the person should have. Cannon has said the yet-to-be-named arbiter would be tasked with reviewing the documents and weeding out from the investigation any that could be covered by claims of either executive privilege or attorney-client privilege.
The Justice Department recommended either Barbara Jones, a retired judge in Manhattan who has served as special master in prior high-profile investigations, or Thomas Griffith, a retired federal appeals court jurist in the District of Columbia who was appointed to the bench by former President George W. Bush. The department said in its proposal that the special master should not have access to classified documents, or be empowered to consider claims of executive privilege.
On Monday, the Trump team told the judge that it was objecting to both of those candidates but said it was not prepared to say why publicly at the moment.
Trump’s lawyers have proposed either Raymond Dearie, a retired judge in the federal court based in Brooklyn, or prominent Florida lawyer Paul Huck, Jr. The lawyers said the arbiter should have access to the entire tranche of documents and should be able to evaluate executive privilege claims.
In its filing Monday, the Trump team again voiced a broad view of presidential power, asserting that a president has an “unfettered right of access” to his presidential records and absolute authority to declassify any information without the “approval of bureaucratic components of the executive branch” — though it did not say, as Trump has maintained, that he had actually declassified them.
The Justice Department has said Trump, as former commander-in-chief, had no right to hold onto the presidential documents. And the criminal statutes that the department has used as the basis of its investigation, including one criminalizing the willful retention of national defense information, do not actually require that the records be classified.
In any event, the Justice Department says more than 100 documents with classification markings were found in last month’s search. It has made public a photograph that agents took inside Mar-a-Lago depicting folders of records marked as classified.
The order from Cannon, who was appointed to the federal bench by Trump two years ago, was easily the most consequential of her brief judicial career and has elevated her public profile.
Earlier this month, a Houston woman was arrested on allegations she made threats against Cannon as the judge mulled the special master question. Tiffani Shea Gish left a series of threatening, profanity-laced voicemails for Cannon, according to an FBI affidavit filed in federal court in Texas.
Last week, a judge ordered that Gish be held in jail pending trial. A motions hearing for Gish was scheduled for Tuesday. A federal public defender listed for her did not immediately return a message seeking comment on Monday.
Trump, who often spends time at his various properties, was at his Virginia golf club Monday.
Seth Borenstein, The Associated Press – Sep 12, 2022 / 9:30 am | Story: 384771
Photo: The Canadian Press
Nunay Mohamed, 25, who fled the drought-stricken Lower Shabelle area, holds her one-year-old malnourished child at a makeshift camp for the displaced on the outskirts of Mogadishu, Somalia, June 30, 2022.
Record high temperatures in urban Europe as heat waves bake the planet more often. Devastating floods, some in poorer unprepared areas. Increasing destruction from hurricanes. Drought and famine in poorer parts of Africa as dry spells worsen across the globe. Wild weather worldwide getting stronger and more frequent, resulting “in unprecedented extremes.”
Sound like the last few summers?
It is. But it was also the warning and forecast for the future issued by top United Nations climate scientists more than 10 years ago.
In a report that changed the way the world thinks about the harms of global warming, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s special report on extreme events, disasters and climate change warned in 2012: “A changing climate leads to changes in the frequency, intensity, spatial extent, duration, and timing of extreme weather and climate events, and can result in unprecedented extreme weather and climate events.” It said there would be more heat waves, worsening droughts, increasing downpours causing floods and stronger and wetter tropical cyclones and simply nastier disasters for people.
“The report was clairvoyant,” said report co-author Michael Oppenheimer, a Princeton University climate scientist. “The report was exactly what a climate report should do: Warn us about the future in time for us to adapt before the worst stuff happens. And the world proceeded to do what it usually does. Some people and governments listened, others didn’t. I think the sad lesson is the damage has to occur very close to home or else nobody pays attention now.”
In just the United States alone, the number of weather disasters that cost at least $1 billion in damage — adjusted for inflation — went from an average of 8.4 a year in the decade before the report was issued to 14.3 a year after the report came out, with more than a trillion dollars in U.S. weather damage since in just the billion-dollar extremes, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Unprecedented record heat hit Northern California in September and 104 degrees in England (40 degrees Celsius) earlier this summer.
The 594-page report’s 20-page summary highlighted five case studies of climate risks from worsening extreme weather that scientists said will be more of a problem and how governments could deal with them. In each case scientists were able to give a recent example:
— Flash floods in “informal settlements.” Look at flooding in poor sections of Durban, South Africa, this year, said report co-author and climate scientist Maarten van Aalst, director of the International Red Cross and Crescent Climate Centre in the Netherlands. Or Eastern Kentucky or the Pakistan this year or Germany and Belgium last year, report authors said.
— Heat waves in urban Europe. “We’ve got that one in spades. That’s been consistent,” said Susan Cutter, a University of South Carolina disaster scientist. “I think every year there have been longer periods of heat in Europe.”
— Increasing property losses from hurricanes in the United States and the Caribbean as storms get wetter and stronger, but not more frequent. Oppenheimer pointed to the last few years when Louisiana has been smacked repeatedly by hurricanes, last year when Hurricane Ida killed people in New York because of heavy rainfall flooding basement apartments and 2017 when record rain from Hurricane Harvey paralyzed Houston and Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico with Hurricane Irma in between.
— Droughts causing famine in Africa. That’s happening again in the Horn of Africa and last year in Madagascar, van Aalst said.
— Small islands being inundated by a combination of sea level rise, saltwater intrusion and storms. That’s tougher, but co-author Kris Ebi, a University of Washington climate and health scientist, pointed to record strong Tropical cyclone Winston striking Vanuatu and Fiji in 2016.
“Right now people are feeling it,” van Aalst said. “It’s no longer the science telling them. All those warnings came true.”
In fact, reality has likely been worse, with more and stronger extremes than the authors would have predicted when they finished writing it in 2011 and published it a year later, said co-authors Ebi and Cutter.
That’s partly because when real life played out, disasters compounded and cascaded with sometimes unforeseen side effects, like heat waves and droughts causing hydroelectric power plants to dry up, nuclear power plants unable to get cooling water and even coal power plants not getting fuel deliveries because of dried rivers in Europe, scientists said.
“Imagining something scientifically or saying this exists in a scientific assessment is a radically different thing compared to living it,” said co-author Katharine Mach, a climate risk scientist at the University of Miami. She said it was similar to the COVID-19 pandemic. Health officials had long warned of viral pandemics but when it came true, the lockdowns, school closures, economic consequences, supply chain problems were sometimes beyond what dry scientific reports could envision.
Before this report, the overwhelming majority of climate studies, official reports and debate talked about long-term consequences, the slow but steady rise in average temperatures and sea level rise. Extreme events were considered too rare to study to get good statistics and science and wasn’t seen as a big issue. Now much of the focus in science, international negotiations and media coverage is about climate change extremes.
Weather disaster deaths both in the United States and globally are generally trending lower, but scientists say that’s because of better forecasts, warning, preparedness and response. From 2002 to 2011, before the report, the United States averaged 641 weather deaths a year and now the 10-year average is down to 520 on average but 2021 was the deadliest year in a decade with 797 weather fatalities. At the same time the 10-year U.S. average for heat deaths crept up a bit, from 118 to 135 a year.
“We are adapting fast enough to reduce the impacts,” Cutter said. “We are not reducing greenhouse gas emissions to actually go after the cause of the warming.”
Stanford University climate scientist Chris Field, who led the report project a decade ago, said the scientists got the warnings right, but “we may have been too conservative” in the language used. In addition to the dry facts and figures presented he wishes he had used wording that would be “grabbing people by the shoulders and shaking them a little bit more and saying these are real risks.”
The Canadian Press – Sep 12, 2022 / 5:52 am | Story: 384754
Photo: The Canadian Press
The King’s Body Guard of the Yeomen of the Guard walk, ahead of the arrival of King Charles III and the Queen Consort at Westminster Hall.
In his first visit to Britain’s Parliament as monarch, King Charles III spoke of feeling the “weight of history which surrounds us” and referenced his “medieval predecessors” as he pledged to follow in his late mother Queen Elizabeth II’s footsteps and uphold the principles of constitutional monarchy.
Charles’s speech to legislators on Monday is the latest historic event to take place in Westminster Hall, a vast 900-year-old building that’s been at the heart of Britain’s history for a millennium.
The oldest building in Parliament, it was where Guy Fawkes and Charles I were tried, where kings and queens hosted magnificent medieval banquets, and where ceremonial addresses were presented to Queen Elizabeth II during her silver, golden and diamond jubilees. It is also where Elizabeth’s coffin will lie in state for public viewing from Wednesday.
A look at Westminster Hall’s centuries of history, and the rituals dictating the relationship between Britain’s monarchy and government:
WESTMINSTER HALL
First built in 1097, Westminster Hall is the oldest existing part of the medieval Palace of Westminster still surviving in its original form. Most of the present Houses of Parliament was built after a fire in 1834.
The hall, believed to be the largest in Europe in medieval times, was the site of lavish coronation feasts celebrating kings and queens from Richard I in the 12th century to Anne Boleyn in the 1500s.
Later the hall was used as law courts for numerous famous trials — including that of Charles I, who was tried there and convicted of high treason before he was beheaded in 1649.
In a bid to quell a growing power struggle between the crown and Parliament, Charles I attempted to arrest lawmakers in the House of Commons in 1642. That triggered the English Civil War, which ended with a temporary abolition of the monarchy and a decade of rule under Oliver Cromwell.
CROWN VS PARLIAMENT
The deposing and execution of Charles I spelt the beginnings of modern Britain’s system of constitutional monarchy. In the decades that followed, rules were laid down to ensure that the monarch serves as a nonpartisan head of state and he or she cannot make laws without the consent of a democratically elected Parliament.
British monarchs are still barred from entering the House of Commons to this day because of the actions of Charles I.
Every year, the monarch presides over the ceremonial state openings of Parliament in the unelected upper chamber, the House of Lords. During these annual events, an official known as Black Rod summons elected lawmakers from the House of Commons to the House of Lords to hear the monarch’s speech, and traditionally the door of the Commons is slammed in Black Rod’s face — a symbol of the independence of the House of Commons.
As head of state, Charles III, like his predecessors, reigns but does not rule. Apart from appointing new prime ministers and the annual task of opening new sessions of Parliament, monarchs stay out of the political limelight and are constitutionally obliged to follow the government’s advice.
Charles will, however, hold weekly audiences with Prime Minister Liz Truss, though what is discussed during such meetings is never made public.
The Canadian Press – Sep 12, 2022 / 5:33 am | Story: 384753
Photo: The Canadian Press
In this photo released by the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, technicians work on the Arak heavy water reactor’s secondary circuit, near Arak.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz made clear Monday that he doesn’t expect an agreement with Iran in the immediate future to restore Tehran’s tattered nuclear deal with world powers, though he said there’s no reason for Iran not to sign up and European countries would remain “patient.”
Scholz spoke after meeting in Berlin with Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid, who insisted that restoring the 2015 agreement would be a mistake. Germany, along with France, Britain, Russia and China, is still a party to the deal.
The European countries “have made proposals, and there is no reason now for Iran not to agree to these proposals, but we have to take note of the fact that this isn’t the case, so it certainly won’t happen soon, although it looked for a while like it would,” Scholz said. “We remain patient, but we also remain clear: Iran must be prevented from being able to deploy nuclear weapons.”
The United States unilaterally pulled out of the accord in 2018 under then President Donald Trump and reimposed sanctions on Iran, prompting Tehran to start backing away from the deal’s terms.
Iran earlier this month responded to a final draft of a roadmap for parties to return to the tattered nuclear deal. A probe by the International Atomic Energy Agency into man-made uranium particles found at three undeclared sites in the country has become a key sticking point in the talks for renewing the agreement.
Iran’s hard-line president, Ebrahim Raisi, has said that the IAEA investigation into the issue must be halted in order for the 2015 deal to be renewed.
The IAEA, the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency. has for years sought answers from Iran to its questions about the particles. U.S. intelligence agencies, Western nations and the IAEA have said Iran ran an organized nuclear weapons program until 2003. Iran long has denied ever seeking nuclear weapons.
Germany, France and Britain said in a statement at the weekend that “Iran must fully and, without delay, cooperate in good faith with the IAEA.”
Dusan Stojanovic, The Associated Press – Sep 12, 2022 / 5:25 am | Story: 384750
Photo: The Canadian Press
A view of Montenegro’s government building in Podgorica, Montenegro, Monday, Sept. 12, 2022.
At the government headquarters in NATO-member Montenegro, the computers are unplugged, the internet is switched off and the state’s main websites are down. The blackout comes amid a massive cyberattack against the small Balkan state which officials say bears the hallmark of pro-Russian hackers and its security services.
The coordinated attack that started around Aug. 20 crippled online government information platforms and put Montenegro’s essential infrastructure, including banking, water and electricity power systems, at high risk.
The attack, described by experts as unprecedented in its intensity and the longest in the tiny nation’s recent history, capped a string of cyberattacks since Russia invaded Ukraine in which hackers targeted Montenegro and other European nations, most of them NATO members.
Sitting at his desk in Montenegro’s capital, Podgorica, in front of a blackened PC screen, Defense Minister Rasko Konjevic said government officials were advised by cyber experts, including a team of FBI investigators that was dispatched to the Balkan state, to go offline for security reasons.
“We have been faced with serious challenges related to the cyberattack for about 20 days, and the entire state system, the system of state administration, and the system of services to citizens are functioning at a rather restrictive level,” Konjevic told The Associated Press.
He said experts from several countries are trying to help restore the Montenegro government’s computer system and find proof of who is behind the attack.
Montenegro officials said the attack that crippled the government’s digital infrastructure was likely carried out by a Russian-speaking ransomware gang that generally operates without Kremlin interference as long as it doesn’t target Russian allies. The gang, called Cuba ransomware, claimed responsibility for at least part of the Montenegro cyberattack, in which it created a special virus for the attack called Zerodate.
Montenegro’s Agency for National Security blamed the attack squarely on Russia.
Russia has a strong motive for such an attack because Montenegro, which it once considered a strong ally, joined NATO in 2017 despite the Kremlin’s opposition. It has also joined Western sanctions against Moscow over the Ukraine invasion, which led Moscow to brand Montenegro an “enemy state” along with several other countries that joined the embargo.
“In such attacks, there are usually organizations that are a mask for state intelligence services,” Konjevic said, adding that the defense ministry’s NATO-related data is protected “in a special way” while the other possible leaks “are being investigated.”
The cyberattack comes amid an apparent attempt by Moscow to destabilize the Balkan region that was at war in the 1990s through the Kremlin’s Balkan ally Serbia, and thus at least partly shift the world’s attention from the war in Ukraine.
Montenegro, which split from much larger Serbia in 2006, is currently run by an interim government that has lost parliamentary support because of Prime Minister Dritan Abazovic ’s shady deals with the influential Serbian Orthodox Church without the consent of the whole coalition that supported the government.
Montengro’s roughly 620,000 people are deeply split between those who want the country to restore its close ties to Serbia and Russia and those who want it to continue on its path of the European Union membership.
“A real war is being waged in Ukraine, with bombs, a war of conquest by Russia,” political analyst Zlatko Vujovic said. “Something similar is happening in Montenegro. There are no bombs, but there is a huge tension, a huge hybrid conflict in which the interests of Russia and its and Serbian intelligence services are interconnected.”
Other Eastern European states deemed enemies of Russia have also faced cyberattacks, mostly nuisance-level denial-of-service campaigns that render websites unreachable by flooding them with junk data but don’t damage them. Targets have included networks in Moldova, Slovenia, Bulgaria, North Macedonia and Albania.
Last week, Albania severed diplomatic relations with Iran and kicked out its diplomats after a cyberattack in July that it blamed on the Islamic Republic.
“Montenegro remains a target within both the public and private sector, as well as many other countries in that region,” said Patrick Flynn, head of the advanced programs group at Trellix, a U.S.-based cybersecurity company. “We have observed a blend of historically based nation state actors and well-known ransomware groups.”
“This recent focus on NATO member countries reinforces the need for hyper vigilance within key businesses as well as government (and) critical infrastructure cyber security environments,” he said in an email to the AP.
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