Poor Rudi, the Tutti Frutti. The former federal prosecutor, Mayor of NYC and all around idiot dictator supporter just can't seem to git 'er done. His fumbling and bumbling just doesn't produce the results he and DJT want, i.e., kleptocratic dictatorship. The New Republic reports:
Uh-Oh: Giuliani’s “Biden Sources” Charged With Being Putin AgentsThe Ukrainian officials Rudy Giuliani used to investigate Joe Biden were just charged with treasonUkraine’s Security Service notified Rudy Giuliani’s top Ukrainian allies on Monday that they are suspects of treason, citing evidence that the officials participated in activities aiding Russian President Vladimir Putin.
A Ukrainian member of parliament, Oleksandr Dubinsky, ex-Ukrainian lawmaker Andriy Derkach, and ex-prosecutor Kostyantyn Kulyk are suspected of joining an organization founded by chief members of Russia’s Military Intelligence while Giuliani worked to dig up dirt on President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden in 2019, according to a statement.
We can rest assured that (AARR) America's authoritarian radical right will either deny this as fake news or more likely just ignore it to minimize the embarrassment. It certainly won't tarnish Rudy's image with the AARR as a valiant patriot fighting for God Almighty against the evil socialist pedophile deep state hoards, and evil Joe and evil Hunter and the evil missing laptop. Just about everything anywhere near DJT is just plain sewage.
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The legal sleaze coming from DJT's court cases is breathtaking, terrifying and outrageous. The Hill reports about who leaked videos of co-defendants doing plea deals in the Georgia criminal state RICO prosecution:
Leaked videos. An apparent confession, later represented as a “typo.” Demands for a protective order.
Media reports detailing confidential interviews with four defendants who were divulging their knowledge to state prosecutors in the Georgia racketeering case involving former President Trump set off a bizarre “whodunnit”-style hearing in state court Wednesday afternoon.
It culminated with a confession by one defendant’s lawyer and a Georgia judge weighing whether to issue a protective order placing restrictions on how defendants can disseminate materials they receive in discovery.
“In being transparent with the court and to make sure that nobody else gets blamed for what happened — and so that I can go to sleep well tonight — Judge, I did release those videos to one outlet,” said Jonathan Miller, an attorney for defendant Misty Hampton. “And in all candor, I need the court to know that.”
Miller’s admission capped a whirlwind series of developments that began Monday, when footage surfaced of proffer sessions the four defendants who pleaded guilty — ex-Trump lawyers Jenna Ellis, Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, plus former Georgia bail bondsman Scott Hall — participated in as part of their deals with state prosecutors.
Their confessions, published first by ABC News and the Washington Post, bolster the narrative laid out in Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s 98-page indictment that Trump led the charge on efforts to subvert Georgia’s 2020 presidential election results in his favor.
Like I said, just about everything anywhere near DJT just turns into sewage, most of which never generates any serious repercussion for the sleazy scumbags involved.
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Ethnic cleansing: Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal of ethnic, racial, or religious groups from a given area, with the intent of making a region ethnically homogeneous. Along with direct removal, extermination, deportation or population transfer, it also includes indirect methods aimed at forced migration by coercing the victim group to flee and preventing its return, such as murder, rape, and property destruction.
Putin publicly says he wants to obliterate the Ukrainian language and culture. He is dead serious about it. Ukrainian children are being taken into Russia and undergoing “re-education” to speak Russian and hate their Ukrainian heritage. China is currently doing the same kind of brutal ethnic cleansing or “re-education” to the Uighurs in China. The NYT reports about Ukrainian civilians in Russian-occupied territory fleeing to avoid being brutalized and re-educated:
The Russian soldiers turned up at her home close to midnight with an ominous message.“They said, ‘If in two weeks you don’t have a Russian passport, we will talk to you in a different way,’” recalled Evelina, a social worker who until this month lived under Russian occupation in southeastern Ukraine.
She didn’t wait to have that conversation. Instead, she bundled a few possessions into a suitcase and left with her teenage daughter, heading for territory controlled by Ukraine.
In the Russian-governed lands, she said, it has become so tense that “you are afraid to look out your own window.”
The military deadlock that has settled in across southeastern Ukraine poses a looming security threat to the rest of the country, and menaces Europe with a long period of instability. But for the estimated 4 million to 6 million Ukrainians living in Russian-held areas, as Evelina was, the stalemate means something more dispiriting: an occupation with no end in sight.
Emptied of about half of its population and under the thumb of a harsh military rule, the swath of Russian-occupied territory, an area the size of the Netherlands, is stuck in a distressing state of limbo: run by Russia but recognized by most of the rest of the world as Ukrainian.
Demographics in these regions are changing as working-age people flee, leaving an older and poorer population.
Russian soldiers quarter in abandoned houses and crime has risen. Russian businessmen are strong-arming local business owners into selling stores and farms, and Central Asian migrants have shown up to trade in markets and work as laborers.
Repression, including torture in makeshift detention sites in basements, targets those who reveal pro-Ukrainian views, altering the political makeup of the area in Russia’s favor but also shifting the cultural landscape away from Ukrainian language and identity.
Russia now controls about 17 percent of Ukrainian land, a half-moon-shaped expanse of farmland, villages and cities in the southeast. The region is off-limits to rights groups and most independent reporters, but accounts by people who have left the occupied areas offer a window into this portion of Ukraine.
Evelina took an unusual but increasingly popular route back into Ukrainian-controlled territory: traveling into Russia and heading north and west, then back into Ukraine through an unofficial border crossing near the northern city of Sumy.
That path is taken by about 100 Ukrainians daily. They hire drivers or take public transportation in Russia to get to the border. From there, they stagger into Ukraine, a thin stream of exhausted families walking two miles on a rutted rural road between the two armies, an unlikely corridor of peace between two nations fighting a violent war.
Russia is just like China. The dictators brutalize innocent people, torture or murder the recalcitrants and keep the press and NGOs the hell away. What the world and local populations get to hear are propaganda fake stories about happy re-educated people who now see the errors of their obliterated past.
To sharpen and localize the criticism, the Russian and Chinese dictators are the people that DJT and radical right elites admire and publicly praise. Knowingly or not, admitting it or not, that is what most of the American authoritarian radical right supports. What they support is disgusting and evil, not merely debatable and maybe immoral.
Q: Is that over the top or reasonable criticism of the Putin, Chinese dictators and American dictator-lovers?
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The WaPo reports (not paywalled off) about Israel's ongoing attack on a Gaza hospital:
Israeli troops scour Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital for evidence of Hamas presence
The presence of Israeli forces inside Gaza’s largest hospital stretched into its second day Thursday, amid the wait for more concrete evidence of extensive Hamas infrastructure at the facility that precipitated the raid.
Israel also said no further evidence of Hamas activities in the hospital was scheduled to be made public for now, following the release Wednesday of photographs and video showing small caches of rifles and laptops that the Israel Defense Forces identified as Hamas material. The military did not show evidence of tunnels or a command center it has said exists under the hospital.
Israel described the incursion as a “precise and targeted” mission to push Hamas from one of its main command centers. The operation was in compliance with international law, Israel said, because the military gave the staff days of warning to evacuate patients and Hamas activities there had stripped the hospital of its protected status under the Geneva Conventions.
But humanitarian groups condemned the incursion and said Israel’s actions highlighted the need for an immediate humanitarian cease-fire, calls for which Israel and the United States have rejected.
“There has been a breakdown of the most basic respect for humane values, the killing of so many civilians cannot be dismissed as collateral damage. The only winner of such a war is likely to be extremism and further extremism,” [Volker Turk, the UN’s high commissioner for human rights] said. .... The absence of electricity and fuel for generators has led to a breakdown in the enclave’s sewage systems and hospitals so that “massive outbreaks of infectious disease, and hunger, seem inevitable,” he said.
Commentators in Israel said the military would need to show more evidence to support assertions that Shifa has been a Hamas stronghold for more than a decade, something doctors working there have denied.
Anger at Netanyahu has been high as even some of his supporters blamed him for both the failure to prevent the Hamas attack on Oct. 7. and his long-standing policy of bolstering Hamas in the first place, a strategic attempt to sow division between Palestinian factions.
Polls taken in the weeks after the attack showed two-thirds of Israelis wanted to see Netanyahu replaced.
Other sources are reporting that Israel is having a hard time finding evidence of a major Hamas operation, but is still looking. Does it make sense that a major underground Hamas military facility under a building is hard to find and report evidence of? Maybe Israel’s intelligence was wrong and there was no major Hamas presence there. Maybe we will know in the next few days. Maybe we will never know. What if there was a small Hamas presence, does that make any difference?
Did Israel really allow innocents to safely flee? Maybe. Maybe not.
Have one or more Israeli governments supported Hamas? Very likely yes.
So many questions, too much uncertainty, and too much propaganda.
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