Roma communities fear deportation in post-Brexit Britain

Fascist favorite targets: Jews, Roma, Gays, Blacks, Browns… anyone one not fascist enough for them

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Charities warn that many lack documentation required to gain settled status

Roma living in the UK are at risk of deportation following Brexit, charities have said, as they warn that many will be unable to provide the necessary documentation to be granted settled status.

Last month, the home secretary, Sajid Javid, said that EU nationals would be asked to answer “three simple questions” in an online form to continue living in the UK once it has left the EU.

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Why Young Feminists Are Sending Wire Coat Hangers to Susan Collins

Roe v. Wade is in danger. This is not a drill.

When Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement last week, he put an immediate target on reproductive rights. Kennedy, the longtime swing vote on the Court, was the crucial fifth vote recognizing a (limited) constitutional right to abortion. Trump has pledged to appoint anti-abortion conservatives in his place — and if he succeeds, the Supreme Court is almost certain to overturn Roe, allowing states to outlaw abortion.

We can’t stop Trump from nominating a right-wing zealot. That means our one, slim chance to save ourselves from a future of forced parenthood lies is to block anti-choice Supreme Court nominees in the Senate. If all 49 Democrats in the Senate vote against an anti-Roe nominee, we’d still need to flip at least one Republican. And that means the path to saving Roe depends on what passes for a moderate in the Republican party these days: Maine Senator Susan Collins.

Collins waffled throughout the weekend, saying she’d prefer a nominee who would “respect [the] precedent” of Roe, then refusing to commit to voting down a nominee hostile to abortion access. Women across the country immediately, organically responded by sending wire coat hangers to Senator Collins’ doorstep.

women are sending hangers to @SenatorCollins‘ office in response to her statement that she won’t take the next SCOTUS pick’s stance on roe v. wade into account https://t.co/8MtajPqZQZ

— Megan Magray (@megkmag) June 29, 2018

Sent mine. You sent yours? https://t.co/GyACBHZJjB

— Dana Bolger (@danabolger) June 29, 2018

It’s a powerful reminder of just how high the stakes are. If we lose Roe, people won’t stop seeking abortions — but many more will die doing it.

Today, abortion is a far safer procedure than childbirth. But it wasn’t always that way. Before Roe, when abortion was only available in a handful of blue cities, hundreds of thousands of women every year sought illegal abortions or attempted to self-induce. Self-induced abortions, sometimes performed with wire coat hangers, were incredibly dangerous. In just one year, one New York hospital treated nearly 1,600 patients for botched abortions. A single Los Angeles hospital admitted 701 patients with septic abortions.

As feminists have pointed out before: “a pro-life world has a lot of dead women in it.”

If Roe falls, unconstitutional abortion bans in twenty-seven states could be revived. Even if abortion remains legal in a handful of states, the women who would most likely need to cross state lines for an abortion would be those least likely to have the financial resources to do so: nearly 70 percent of women who obtain abortions live below 200% of the federal poverty line.  

Overturning Roe would kill some of those women. In the years immediately after Roe — when abortion was technically legal, but not widely available — people went to extreme lengths to end unwanted pregnancies. One Louisiana abortion provider described a woman who “unraveled a wire coat hanger and used it to break her water,” another patient who soaked a cotton ball in turpentine and inserted it into their vagina, and another who injected turpentine into her abdomen with a syringe. He treated one patient who had shot themselves in the stomach to end a pregnancy.  

Nearly one in four U.S. women will have an abortion by the time they turn 45. Some will get abortions because their pregnancies put their lives at risk. Some will get abortions because they’re terrified of what an abusive partner or parent will do upon learning they’re pregnant. Some will get abortions because they simply can’t afford a(nother) child. (Women who carry an unwanted pregnancy to term are three times more likely than women who receive a sought-after abortion to be below the poverty level two years later.) And some will get abortions because they want to. We should all have the right to decide when — and whether — to become parents, to control our bodies, and to control the arc of our lives.

If we lose Roe, none of the reasons people seek abortion will change. People will still need abortions and people will still seek abortions. But many of them will have to risk their lives to get them.

Under pressure, Collins had hedged her bets again, making a flimsy statement on Sunday saying she’d oppose a nominee with an anti-Roe “activist agenda.” But when every potential SCOTUS nominee has been screened by the White House for hostility to legal abortion, that just isn’t good enough, so women are keeping the pressure on and the hangers coming.

Let’s make sure Susan Collins — and other potential swing votes like Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski and Arizona Senator Jeff Flake — know just what they’re deciding when they vote on Trump’s nominee.

You can order a wire hanger here. Susan Collins’ Maine and D.C. office addresses here. You can find Lisa Murkowski’s office addresses here.

Image credit: Tyler LaRiviere

Russian Censorship of Telegram

Internet censors have a new strategy in their bid to block applications and websites: pressuring the large cloud providers that host them. These providers have concerns that are much broader than the targets of censorship efforts, so they have the choice of either standing up to the censors or capitulating in order to maximize their business. Today’s Internet largely reflects the dominance of a handful of companies behind the cloud services, search engines and mobile platforms that underpin the technology landscape. This new centralization radically tips the balance between those who want to censor parts of the Internet and those trying to evade censorship. When the profitable answer is for a software giant to acquiesce to censors’ demands, how long can Internet freedom last?

The recent battle between the Russian government and the Telegram messaging app illustrates one way this might play out. Russia has been trying to block Telegram since April, when a Moscow court banned it after the company refused to give Russian authorities access to user messages. Telegram, which is widely used in Russia, works on both iPhone and Android, and there are Windows and Mac desktop versions available. The app offers optional end-to-end encryption, meaning that all messages are encrypted on the sender’s phone and decrypted on the receiver’s phone; no part of the network can eavesdrop on the messages.

Since then, Telegram has been playing cat-and-mouse with the Russian telecom regulator Roskomnadzor by varying the IP address the app uses to communicate. Because Telegram isn’t a fixed website, it doesn’t need a fixed IP address. Telegram bought tens of thousands of IP addresses and has been quickly rotating through them, staying a step ahead of censors. Cleverly, this tactic is invisible to users. The app never sees the change, or the entire list of IP addresses, and the censor has no clear way to block them all.

A week after the court ban, Roskomnadzor countered with an unprecedented move of its own: blocking 19 million IP addresses, many on Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud. The collateral damage was widespread: The action inadvertently broke many other web services that use those platforms, and Roskomnadzor scaled back after it became clear that its action had affected services critical for Russian business. Even so, the censor is still blocking millions of IP addresses.

More recently, Russia has been pressuring Apple not to offer the Telegram app in its iPhone App Store. As of this writing, Apple has not complied, and the company has allowed Telegram to download a critical software update to iPhone users (after what the app’s founder called a delay last month). Roskomnadzor could further pressure Apple, though, including by threatening to turn off its entire iPhone app business in Russia.

Telegram might seem a weird app for Russia to focus on. Those of us who work in security don’t recommend the program, primarily because of the nature of its cryptographic protocols. In general, proprietary cryptography has numerous fatal security flaws. We generally recommend Signal for secure SMS messaging, or, if having that program on your computer is somehow incriminating, WhatsApp. (More than 1.5 billion people worldwide use WhatsApp.) What Telegram has going for it is that it works really well on lousy networks. That’s why it is so popular in places like Iran and Afghanistan. (Iran is also trying to ban the app.)

What the Russian government doesn’t like about Telegram is its anonymous broadcast feature­ — channel capability and chats — ­which makes it an effective platform for political debate and citizen journalism. The Russians might not like that Telegram is encrypted, but odds are good that they can simply break the encryption. Telegram’s role in facilitating uncontrolled journalism is the real issue.

Iran attempts to block Telegram have been more successful than Russia’s, less because Iran’s censorship technology is more sophisticated but because Telegram is not willing to go as far to defend Iranian users. The reasons are not rooted in business decisions. Simply put, Telegram is a Russian product and the designers are more motivated to poke Russia in the eye. Pavel Durov, Telegram’s founder, has pledged millions of dollars to help fight Russian censorship.

For the moment, Russia has lost. But this battle is far from over. Russia could easily come back with more targeted pressure on Google, Amazon and Apple. A year earlier, Zello used the same trick Telegram is using to evade Russian censors. Then, Roskomnadzor threatened to block all of Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud; and in that instance, both companies forced Zello to stop its IP-hopping censorship-evasion tactic.

Russia could also further develop its censorship infrastructure. If its capabilities were as finely honed as China’s, it would be able to more effectively block Telegram from operating. Right now, Russia can block only specific IP addresses, which is too coarse a tool for this issue. Telegram’s voice capabilities in Russia are significantly degraded, however, probably because high-capacity IP addresses are easier to block.

Whatever its current frustrations, Russia might well win in the long term. By demonstrating its willingness to suffer the temporary collateral damage of blocking major cloud providers, it prompted cloud providers to block another and more effective anti-censorship tactic, or at least accelerated the process. In April, Google and Amazon banned­ — and technically blocked­ — the practice of “domain fronting,” a trick anti-censorship tools use to get around Internet censors by pretending to be other kinds of traffic. Developers would use popular websites as a proxy, routing traffic to their own servers through another website­ — in this case Google.com­ — to fool censors into believing the traffic was intended for Google.com. The anonymous web-browsing tool Tor has used domain fronting since 2014. Signal, since 2016. Eliminating the capability is a boon to censors worldwide.

Tech giants have gotten embroiled in censorship battles for years. Sometimes they fight and sometimes they fold, but until now there have always been options. What this particular fight highlights is that Internet freedom is increasingly in the hands of the world’s largest Internet companies. And while freedom may have its advocates — ­the American Civil Liberties Union has tweeted its support for those companies, and some 12,000 people in Moscow protested against the Telegram ban­ — actions such as disallowing domain fronting illustrate that getting the big tech companies to sacrifice their near-term commercial interests will be an uphill battle. Apple has already removed anti-censorship apps from its Chinese app store.

In 1993, John Gilmore famously said that “The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” That was technically true when he said it but only because the routing structure of the Internet was so distributed. As centralization increases, the Internet loses that robustness, and censorship by governments and companies becomes easier.

This essay previously appeared on Lawfare.com.

Israeli demolition of entire Palestinian village days away, villagers fear

Israeli security forces show up and survey homes in Khan al-Ahmar, which activists and residents fear is a sign of forced displacement of the entire village. Israel’s top court gave its approval to the demolition, an act rights groups say would constitute a war crime.

By +972 Magazine Staff

Students walk in the yard of the school in Khan al-Ahmar, February 23, 2017. (Faiz Abu Rmeleh/Activestills.org)

Students walk in the yard of the school in Khan al-Ahmar, February 23, 2017. (Faiz Abu Rmeleh/Activestills.org)

After getting the green light from Israel’s High Court, Israeli security forces on Sunday reportedly began preparing for the demolition of Khan al-Ahmar, a small Palestinian village in the West Bank, according to the village’s residents, human rights activists, and Palestinian officials.

[tmwinpost]

Video footage provided by Israeli human rights group B’Tselem showed Israeli police officers and military officials walking through the village and inspecting homes Sunday morning. Residents said that one police officer told them they would be better off if they left “voluntarily,” though he declined to provide any more information. B’Tselem has warned that the demolition of Khan al-Ahmar and the forcible transfer of its residents would constitute a war crime.

The preparations come a month after Israel’s High Court formally approved a plan to demolish the hamlet — home to over 170 people, including 90 children — and forcibly transfer them to an area near a garbage dump close to the West Bank town of Abu Dis. Now that no legal hurdles remain, Israeli army bulldozers may arrive at Khan al-Ahmar, caught between the Israeli settlements of Kfar Adumim and Ma’ale Adumim, at any time.

Meanwhile, the village has become an internationally-known site of resistance to Israel’s practice of forcibly transferring Palestinians out of Area C of the West Bank, under full Israeli military control — an area many members of the Israeli government advocate annexing.

Originally from Tel Arad in the Negev Desert, the residents of Khan al-Ahmar were expelled by the Israeli military in the 1950s. After the first expulsion, members of the community leased land for residential purposes and herding in the area where Kfar Adumim is now located. They were then expelled a second time, after which they resettled in their current location. Israeli authorities consistently refused to connect them to running water, electricity, or a sewage system, refused to pave roads for them, prevented construction of homes or structures for public use in the community, and have restricted their pastureland. The policy has forced the residents to live in unlivable conditions, suffering a severe dearth of services in health, education, and welfare.

The legal battle over Khan al-Ahmar began in 2009, after an Italian NGO helped build a tires-and-mud school for the villages’ children, as well as those of the surrounding villages. Just a month after the school opened, the Israeli army ordered it demolished, claiming it had been built too close to an area that had already been approved for development. Following a lawsuit to prevent the demolition of the school later that year, the nearby settlements of Kfar Adumim, Alon, and Nofei Prat — as well as the right-wing NGO Regavim — sued the army to compel it to carry out 257 demolition orders issued against Palestinian structures in the Bedouin community, including the school.

The years-long legal battle that ensued prevented the school, and the entire community, from being demolished. But in August of 2017, Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman announced that the army was preparing to demolish Khan al-Ahmar, as well as the village of Susiya in the South Hebron Hills.

Children demonstrate outside the "Tire School" in the Palestinian Bedouin village of Khan al-Ahmar. June 11, 2018. (Oren Ziv/Activestills.org)

Children demonstrate outside the “Tire School” in the Palestinian Bedouin village of Khan al-Ahmar. June 11, 2018. (Oren Ziv/Activestills.org)

Just days before the Israeli Supreme Court’s ruling, 74 Democratic members of the U.S. Congress sent a letter to Prime Minister Netanyahu urging him not to demolish the village, along with and several other Palestinian communities, including Susiya, in the occupied West bank.

“The destruction of and displacement of such communities would run counter to shared U.S. and Israeli values, while further undermining long-term Israeli security, Palestinian dignity, and the prospects for peacefully achieving two states for two peoples,” the letter said.

In early June, over 300 elected officials, legal scholars, academics, artists, faith leaders, and activists from around the world, including Alice Walker, Noam Chomsky, Ai Weiwei, and others published an open letter voicing their opposition to Israel’s plans to forcibly transfer thousands of Palestinian farming and shepherding communities, including Khan al-Ahmar, from their homes in the West Bank.

Joshua Leifer contributed to this report.

Will Get Fooled Again – Seymour Hersh, Die Welt et l’attaque chimique de Khan Cheikhoun

Le 25 juin 2017, le journal allemand Die Welt a publié le dernier article de Seymour Hersh contestant le récit “mainstream” autour de l’attaque chimique de Khan Cheikhoun (Syrie) le 4 avril 2017. L’attaque, où du sarin a été largué contre la population locale par l’armée de l’air syrienne, a conduit le président Trump à décider de lancer en représailles des missiles de croisière sur une base aérienne syrienne.

Comme pour ses autres articles récents, Hersh a présenté une version alternative des événements, affirmant que la version communément admise des faits était fausse. Et, comme pour ces autres articles récents, Hersh s’est basé sur un petit nombre de sources anonymes, n’a présenté aucune autre preuve à l’appui de sa thèse, et a ignoré ou rejeté les preuves qui vont à l’encontre du récit alternatif qu’il essayait de construire.

Ce n’est pas la première attaque chimique en Syrie pour laquelle Hersh propose un contre-récit basé sur une poignée de sources anonymes. Dans ses longs articles pour la London Review of Books, “Whose sarin?” et “The Red Line and the Rat Line“, Hersh a fait valoir que l’attaque au sarin du 21 août 2013 à Damas était en fait une attaque sous faux drapeau destinée à précipiter les Etats-Unis dans un conflit avec la Syrie. Cette affirmation a été pulvérisée après examen approfondi et a beaucoup dépendu d’une absence de prise en compte des preuves autour des attaques, d’une ignorance des complexités relatives à la production et au transport du sarin, et d’un manque de compréhension des faits les plus solidement établis à propos des attaques.

Avec le dernier article de Hersh, ce type de comportement s’est répété. Il apparaît que la quasi totalité de l’article repose sur une source anonyme, décrite comme « un senior adviser [conseiller confirmé – ndt] de la communauté américaine du renseignement, qui a occupé des postes de haut rang au Département de la Défense et à la CIA ». De même que dans ses précédents articles, les détails de l’attaque tels que décrits par sa source vont à l’encontre de toutes les autres preuves présentées par un éventail d’autres sources.

Quel est donc ce scénario décrit par la source de Hersh, et en quoi contredit-il d’autres affirmations ? Hersh prétend que « les Syriens auraient ciblé un lieu de rencontre entre plusieurs responsables djihadistes le 4 avril en utilisant une bombe guidée fournie par les Russes, équipée avec des explosifs conventionnels ». Cette attaque aurait mené à la libération de produits chimiques, dont du chlore, mais pas du sarin, ce qui aurait causé un grand nombre de victimes ce 4 avril. La source de Hersh est capable de fournir beaucoup d’informations sur la cible, prétendant que des renseignements quant au lieu auraient été partagés avec les Américains préalablement à l’attaque.

Sa source décrit le bâtiment visé comme « un bâtiment en béton de deux étages dans la partie nord de la ville », doté d’un sous-sol abritant « des missiles, des armes et des munitions, ainsi que des produits pouvant être distribués gratuitement à la population, entre autres des médicaments et des détergents à base de chlore utilisés pour traiter les corps des morts avant inhumation ». Selon la source de Hersh, l’étage au-dessus était « un lieu de rencontre établi » et « une installation en dur équipée de dispositifs de sécurité, d’armes, de matériel de communication, de dossiers et d’un centre cartographique ».

La source poursuit en affirmant que la Russie aurait attentivement surveillé le lieu, affirmant qu’il serait utilisé comme point de rencontre djihadiste et surveillant l’endroit avec « un drone pendant des jours », confirmant son utilisation et l’activité autour du bâtiment. Selon la source, la cible aurait été touchée à 6h55 du matin le 4 avril, et une Bomb Damage Assessment [une évaluation des dommages causés par le bombardement – ndt] par l’armée américaine aurait établi qu’une bombe syrienne de 500 livres [environ 227 kg – ndt] « a déclenché une série d’explosions secondaires, qui auraient pu générer un immense nuage toxique qui se serait propagé au-dessus de la ville, formé par la libération d’engrais, de désinfectants et d’autres produits stockés dans le sous-sol, son effet étant amplifié par l’air dense du matin, qui aurait retenu les émanations près du sol ».

A ce stade, il n’est pas inutile d’examiner les déclarations faites par les gouvernements syrien et russe en réponse aux accusations affirmant que la Syrie aurait largué du sarin sur Khan Cheikhoun. Walid Mouallem, le ministre des Affaires étrangères de la Syrie, déclara dans une conférence de presse deux jours après l’attaque que le premier raid aérien avait été mené à 8h30 du matin heure locale, attaquant « un dépôt d’armes avec des armes chimiques appartenant au Front al-Nosra ». A l’époque, des observateurs avaient déjà noté que l’horaire de l’attaque allégué intervenait des heures après les premiers signalements de victimes, et que les deux horaires contredisent l’heure de 6h55 du matin avancée par la source de Hersh, ainsi que l’horaire sensiblement différent fourni par le Pentagone, approximativement entre 6h37 et 6h46 du matin, heure locale. Ce n’est pas tout : le ministère syrien des Affaires étrangères a également décrit la cible comme étant un dépôt d’armes chimiques, et non un lieu de réunion avec d’autres produits entreposés dans le sous-sol.

Carte issue du Pentagone retraçant la trajectoire de vol de l’avion qui a attaqué Khan Cheikhoun.

La Russie a également publié sa propre version des faits. Le site russe Sputnik écrivait :

« Selon Konachenkov [le porte-parole du ministère russe de la Défense – ndt], mardi, “de 11h30 à 12h30, heure locale [de 8h30 à 9h30 GMT], l’aviation syrien a mené des frappes dans la banlieue orientale de Khan Cheikhoun contre un grand entrepôt de munitions et d’équipement militaire utilisés par les terroristes”.

Konachenkov a déclaré que des munitions d’armes chimiques ont été livrées en Irak par des  miliciens depuis cet entrepôt.

Konashenkov a ajouté qu’il y avait, sur le territoire de cet entrepôt, des ateliers de fabrication de bombes remplies de substances toxiques. Il a noté que ces munitions contenant des substances toxiques étaient également utilisées par des miliciens à Alep. »

Ces affirmations s’accordent avec celles de son allié syrien, mais pas avec celles de Hersh et de sa source. Face aux allégations d’utilisation d’armes chimiques, ni la Russie ni la Syrie ne mentionnent avoir ciblé « un point de rencontre djihadiste ». Elles décrivent le lieu comme un « vaste entrepôt » dans « les environs méridionaux de Khan Cheikhoun », et non comme un « bâtiment en béton de deux étages dans la partie nord de la ville » avec des « dispositifs de sécurité, des armes, du matériel de communication, des dossiers et un centre cartographique ». De fait, le seul point commun entre le récit de Hersh et les récits russe et syrien concerne le fait que c’est un appareil syrien qui a effectué le bombardement.

En outre, ni la Syrie ni la Russie n’ont présenté de preuve pour étayer leurs affirmations. Si, comme le prétend Hersh, la Russie avait surveillé le site avec « un drone pendant des jours », elle disposerait non seulement de la localisation précise du site bombardé, mais également d’images du site. Or, la Syrie comme la Russie ne sont pas parvenus à présenter publiquement ne serait-ce qu’une seule image de l’endroit, de même qu’elles n’ont fourni aucun détail sur sa localisation. Si cela avait été le cas, il aurait été possible de vérifier facilement sur Terraserver – qui possède des images satellite de Khan Cheikhoun avant et après la date de l’attaque – si le site avait été bombardé. De concert avec la Russie et la Syrie, la source de Hersh semble incapable de fournir la localisation exacte du site de l’attaque, malgré l’apparente connaissance approfondie qu’elle semble en avoir.

En ignorant le fait que la version des événements décrite par Hersh va à l’encontre des récits rapportés de tous les côtés, les déclarations relatives à l’exposition aux produits chimiques sont aussi intéressantes à examiner. Hersh se réfère à « une Bomb Damage Assessment (BDA) » de l’attaque par l’armée américaine. Une évaluation à propos de laquelle il ne fournit aucune source et qui décrirait « une série d’explosions secondaires, qui aurait pu générer un immense nuage toxique qui se serait propagé au-dessus de la ville, formé par la libération d’engrais, de désinfectants et d’autres produits stockés dans le sous-sol ». Les symptômes des victimes sont décrits comme « cohérents avec la libération d’un mélange de produits chimiques, dont du chlore et des organophosphorés utilisés dans de nombreux engrais, pouvant causer des effets neurologiques similaires à ceux du sarin ». Il convient ici de signaler que les organophosphorés sont utilisés comme pesticides, et non comme engrais. On ne sait pas si cette erreur est due à Hersh lui-même ou à sa source anonyme. Toujours est-il que ce n’est pas la seule erreur factuelle du rapport, puisque Hersh affirme qu’un SU-24 a été utilisé dans l’attaque, et non un SU-22, comme l’affirment toutes les autres sources, dont le gouvernement américain [les SU-22 et SU-24 sont des avions de combat de fabrication russe utilisés par l’armée de l’air syrienne – ndt].

Bien que Hersh semble croire que le sarin n’a pas été utilisé dans l’attaque, d’autres sources – et non des moindres – ne sont pas du même avis. Parmi elles, l’OPCW [l’Organisation pour l’interdiction des armes chimiques – ndt], a qui a été confiée la mission d’enquêter sur l’attaque. Le 19 avril 2017, l’OPCW a publié une déclaration de son directeur général, l’ambassadeur Ahmet Üzümcü, décrivant les résultats des analyses des échantillons prélevés sur les victimes de l’attaque, vivantes et mortes. On peut y lire ceci :

« Les résultats de ces analyses, effectuées par quatre laboratoires désignés par l’OPCW, révèlent une exposition à du sarin ou à une substance similaire au sarin. Des détails supplémentaires sur ces analyses seront rendus public mais les premiers résultats déjà obtenus sont incontestables. »

Un rapport ultérieur de l’OPCW, daté du 19 mai, fournit de plus amples analyses des échantillons du site, dont des animaux morts sur place, et des échantillons environnementaux. Des traces de sarin ou de substances similaires au sarin ont été détectées dans beaucoup d’échantillons, de même que des produits de dégradation du sarin, et du sarin lui-même ont été détectés dans au moins deux échantillons.

Annexe 3 du rapport de l’OPCW daté du 19 mai 2017

Ces résultats sont cohérents avec les renseignements publiés par le gouvernement français :

« Les analyses réalisées par les experts français sur des échantillons environnementaux, prélevés à l’un des points d’impact de l’attaque chimique survenue à Khan Cheikhoun, le 4 avril 2017, révèlent la présence de sarin, d’un produit secondaire spécifique (le diisopropylméthylphosphonate – DIMP), formé lors de la synthèse de sarin à partir d’isopropanol et de DF (difluorure de méthylphosphonyle), et d’hexamine. L’analyse des échantillons biomédicaux montre également qu’une victime de Khan Cheikhoun, dont le sang a été prélevé en Syrie le jour même de l’attaque, a été exposée au sarin. »

De multiples sources, qui se fondent sur ce rapport et d’autres, affirment que du sarin a été utilisé dans l’attaque, malgré ce qu’en dit Hersh, pour qui des produits chimiques auraient été accidentellement libérés. Le fait que Hersh ne se réfère à aucun de ces rapports révèle, au mieux, la négligence grossière d’informations essentielles relatives à la nature de l’attaque et, au pire, la méconnaissance délibérée d’informations contredisant le récit qu’il tente d’échafauder.

Pour en revenir au lieu de l’attaque, cette ignorance ou cette méconnaissance d’informations contradictoires est tout aussi apparente. Des documents relevant du domaine public daté du jour de l’attaque, de même que les analyses des images satellite effectuées par des sources diverses (dont cet excellent article du New York Times) pointent systématiquement vers les mêmes sites d’impacts, dont l’un est le cratère spécifique présenté comme la source de la libération de sarin le jour de l’attaque. Aucun de ces éléments ne pointe vers la structure décrite par Hersh, et il n’existe aucune preuve qu’un quelconque site, semblable à ce qui a été décrit par Hersh, aurait été attaqué. Des journalistes ont visité la ville peu de temps après l’attaque, et nul n’a fait mention d’un lieu tel que celui décrit par Hersh.

D’aucuns pourraient rétorquer que tous les individus et les groupes sur le terrain, tous les docteurs s’occupant des victimes, et chaque personne à laquelle les journalistes présents sur le terrain ont parlé auraient simplement omis de mentionner le lieu décrit par Hersh, mais il existe un moyen très simple de clarifier ce point. N’importe qui peut accéder aux images satellites de la ville avant et après la date de l’attaque grâce à Terraserver ; la source de Hersh doit simplement fournir les coordonnées du bâtiment attaqué, et n’importe qui possédant une connexion internet pourra regarder le lieu exact, et voir le bâtiment détruit. Un moyen simple pour Hersh et Die Welt de préserver leur réputation.

(Traduction française : Norma Mabowitz pour Conspiracy Watch)

The post Will Get Fooled Again – Seymour Hersh, Die Welt et l’attaque chimique de Khan Cheikhoun appeared first on bellingcat.

Slowly and patiently, Sturgeon is preparing for a new Scottish independence battle | Kevin McKenna

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The first minister may appear too patient and careful, but her tactics are worthy of Napoleon

Nicola Sturgeon is gathering her forces once more for another tilt at Scottish independence. Her strategy has been a careful one; too careful for some. Thus when she called for an independence referendum in 2016 she already knew that an embattled Theresa May could not possibly grant it. This was a tactical advance that allowed her to measure the appetite for a second referendum at Holyrood and in Scotland while reminding Westminster that the issue would never go away.

Before the Battle of Austerlitz in 1805 Napoleon restrained his generals when the Russian and Austrian forces attempted to cajole the French army’s right flank into a premature skirmish. He knew it was not the right time and place. “The enemy is making a false move, why should we interrupt him,” said Napoleon. It seems that Scotland’s first minister has been urging her chief strategists in a similar vein.

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Trump anti-abortion supreme court pick ‘not acceptable’, says Collins

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As battle lines are drawn for the coming fight over Donald Trump’s second supreme court nominee, a senator who could help to decide the fate of the nomination warned on Sunday that a justice who would seek to reverse federal abortion rights protections “would not be acceptable”.

Related: Is Trump really winning? The truth about the president’s popularity

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Counting Down the Days of the Hunger Strike by Oleg Sentsov, a Ukrainian Political Prisoner Held in Russia

via aleksey godin – Free Ukrainian prisoners in Russia!

Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people in Russia and in other countries are counting the number of days that Oleg Sentsov, a Ukrainian film director incarcerated in Russia, has been on hunger strike. Every day, hundreds of people note the count in their Facebook posts: “Day Ten,” “Day Seventeen.” Today is Day Twenty-Two.

Sentsov, who is forty-one, is serving a twenty-year sentence in a high-security prison camp in the Russian Far North. He has been on hunger strike since May 14th. He is demanding that Russia release all Ukrainian political prisoners. He is not demanding that he himself be released; from all appearances, he is prepared—indeed, is planning—to die. As a result, different people have adopted different slogans or hashtags to support him: some hope to #FreeOlegSentsov, while others are desperate to #SaveOlegSentsov.

Ten days after Sentsov began his hunger strike, a group of about seventy human-rights activists, lawyers, and filmmakers gathered in Moscow to talk about what they could do to keep him from dying. They didn’t come up with a solution.

Sentsov was arrested in May, 2014, less than two months after Russia occupied Crimea. He was born in Crimea and, like many local residents, is an ethnic Russian who holds Ukrainian citizenship. Unlike an apparent majority of Crimeans, though, he identifies strongly as a Ukrainian citizen and was active in the revolutionary movement that overthrew Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Moscow President, in February, 2014. Soon after, Russia invaded Ukraine, occupying the Crimean Peninsula and waging a slow war in the east of the country. Sentsov became active in the volunteer movement that supported fighters on the Ukrainian side, delivering food and supplies. He made note of this at his trial, in his own speech, which he used to describe the war that Russia denied it was waging.

Sentsov stood accused of terrorism. The prosecution claimed that he had been involved in setting fires to the doors of the unofficial representative offices of the ruling Russian party in Crimea, United Russia, and in plotting to blow up a Lenin monument. There was no evidence of Sentsov’s participation in either the fires or a plot to destroy the monument. Protest by small-scale arson is an established part of radical protests in Russia. These fires are generally set at night, when the offices are not occupied, and are limited to scorching the doors or windows. As a matter of practice, Russian courts, both before and after the Sentsov trial, regarded such fires as crimes against property. As for the Lenin monument, the charge was explicitly political. For Ukrainians, these monuments had become, bizarrely but intuitively, symbols of Russian imperialism. More than a hundred had been brought down during the first months of the revolution, in a process that became known as Leninopad, or “Leninfall.” Russian-occupied Crimea, however, preserved its Lenin monuments and even restored one that had been removed before the occupation. Not only did the prosecution present no evidence that Sentsov planned to blow up a monument; it had no evidence that an alleged plan to destroy an inanimate object constituted terrorism, either.

At the conclusion of his trial, three years ago, Sentsov refused to engage with the charges against him. “I’m not going to ask you for anything—leniency and all that,” he began. “The court of an occupying power by definition can’t be just. Nothing personal, Your Honor.” Sentsov rejected the very idea that he, a Ukrainian citizen who was arrested on land that most of the world considers part of Ukraine, could be tried in a Russian court.

The court sentenced Sentsov to twenty years in a high-security facility, and he was shipped off to the Arctic Circle, more than three thousand miles from Crimea. The camp is as difficult to get to as any place in Russia. The country has reserved this kind of punishment for its most hated political prisoners, such as the former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who spent more than ten years behind bars, much of it beyond the Arctic Circle, before he was released and fled to Berlin immediately afterward.

Sentsov’s hunger strike appears to be timed for the World Cup, which begins in Russia on June 14th. With the attention of international media trained on Russia, perhaps the Kremlin can be compelled to pay attention to Sentsov’s demand, especially if there is a risk that foreign dignitaries or even teams will decline to attend the tournament.

According to Sentsov’s lawyer, Dmitry Dinze, Sentsov spent months preparing for his hunger strike. He began rejecting food packages from family and friends—the main source of sustenance for inmates in Russia—and gradually lessened his food intake before announcing that he was going to stop eating altogether. Then, through Dinze, Sentsov issued a terse statement saying that he demanded the release of all Ukrainian political prisoners held in Russia and that he was prepared to die. He did not provide a list of the people he considers Ukrainian political prisoners in Russia, but, according to Dinze, there are sixty-four people who fit that description.

Official Russian media have covered Sentsov’s hunger strike with a tone of mockery and resentment. “A Terrorist Has Taken Himself Hostage and Is Demanding That Russia Surrender” was the title of a piece by a prominent columnist for the largest state news agency. There is a grain of truth to that statement. In the Soviet era, political prisoners used the hunger strike to claim a kind of power: once they stopped being afraid of hunger, torture, and death, they could not be controlled, even in a prison. Instead, they made it their wardens’ problem to try to keep them alive. And, if they died, they had succeeded in snatching death back from the abyss of totalitarian anonymity.

Soviet dissidents used the hunger strike as means of protest, which meant, largely, a means of attracting the world’s attention. To go on hunger strike, one had to be prepared die and, worse, to face the torture of being force-fed. The best-known Soviet hunger strike was undertaken by Anatoly Marchenko, a dissident who had spent most of his adult life behind bars. In 1986, halfway through a ten-year sentence, he stopped eating and demanded that the Soviet Union release all political prisoners—a demand that seemed utterly unrealistic at the time. His hunger strike lasted a hundred and seventeen days, for about half of which he was forcibly fed. In December, 1986, a few days after ending his hunger strike, Marchenko died. Within a few months, all Soviet political prisoners were released; it is now generally believed that the release had been in the works, but was speeded up by Marchenko’s protest.

Sentsov is surely aware of the way in which his demand echoes Marchenko’s, and of the likelihood that he will die for his cause as well. “He has decided that he is not going to serve out his twenty-year sentence,” Karinna Moskalenko, who is the founder and director of an organization that brings cases to the European Court for Human Rights, and is probably Russia’s most prominent human-rights lawyer, said. “He wants his death to have meaning.”

Moskalenko, who is not Sentsov’s attorney, was present at the meeting in Moscow. Speaking with me afterward over the phone, she said that she’d told the assembled group that there was no legal avenue for trying to save Sentsov. The European Court, which technically has the capacity to order Russia to release an inmate, explicitly refuses to expedite cases when an inmate is on hunger strike, to insure that the court cannot be manipulated. Nor can the Moscow authorities simply choose to release Sentsov or other inmates. The procedure would involve clemency, but to ask for it, Sentsov, who considers himself a foreign citizen illegally held and tried in Russia, would have to acknowledge Moscow’s authority over him.

What else is there to do? At least two of the other Ukrainian inmates have also begun a hunger strike, as have two men who are not behind bars, an animator and a journalist. Writers, actors, and directors have written open letters. Russian film directors are making one-minute clips about individual Ukrainian inmates in Russian prisons. An unknown number of people have staged one-person protests—they stand up in crowded places holding a poster—but these are difficult because a special police regime, introduced in advance of the World Cup, requires a permit for one-person protests, which normally need no official sanction. Many of the protesters have been detained or at least threatened by police. A St. Petersburg woman who was sentenced to fifteen years in jail for her protest has also begun a hunger strike.

Although most open letters have called on President Vladimir Putin to show mercy or to avert a death that would bring shame to Russia, Alexey Navalny, the country’s best-known anti-Putin activist, wrote, “I would never ask the Russian authorities for mercy. That’s like a unicorn—a creature that doesn’t exist in nature. I would rather address the thing they love and love to boast about: the desires to cheat, defraud, and fool everyone.” He wrote:

Dear Kremlin and V. V. Putin,

Why don’t you outdo Oleg Sentsov. Fool him. Make a fool of him.

His feat, and his sacrifice, and his death will secure for him a place
in history next to Bobby Sands, Marchenko, and other titans of
humanity.

And then there will be films about him, and books, and streets named
for him. There will be new sanctions, of course. You have to be
smarter. Why don’t you shock everybody by releasing him and all 64
Ukrainian political prisoners?

As psychologically insightful as Navalny’s suggestion is, it is as unlikely as any other scenario in which Sentsov is released. Navalny knows as much. He also wrote that it was easy for him to keep track of the days of Sentsov’s hunger strike, because on the day it began Navalny himself was arrested and jailed for thirty days for organizing what the state considers an illegal protest:

When I’d been in jail for a week, that meant he had been on hunger
strike for a week. When I’d done fifteen days, so had he. But the
future looks completely different for him and me. I will go another
fifteen days and will be released. I will hug my loved ones, take a
shower, and eat some homemade food.

Oleg Sentsov, on the other hand, will die. He will die alone in his
cell, thousands of kilometres from his family. He will die knowing
that the case against him was entirely fabricated and he is guilty of
nothing. He is no terrorist, of course.

Before he dies, he will have been tortured—we all know what “feeding
by force” is in a Russian prison.

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