#Downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17

[thejewishlink]

MH17 Verdicts: 2 Russians, 1 Ukrainian Convicted of Shooting Down Commercial Airliner

MH17 Verdicts: 2 Russians, 1 Ukrainian Convicted of Shooting Down Commercial Airliner

A Dutch court on Thursday convicted two Russians and a pro-Moscow Ukrainian separatist in absentia of the murders of 298 people who died in the 2014 downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over Ukraine and sentenced them to life imprisonment. One Russian was acquitted because of a lack of evidence. Presiding Judge Hendrik Steenhuis said that evidence presented by prosecutors at a trial that…

[sonyaheaneyauthor]

25th July 2014:

Third arrival of MH17 victims. For the third consecutive day, military transport planes from Kharkiv landed at Eindhoven Air Base in the Netherlands.

Eight days earlier, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down by the russians over occupied Donbas, Ukraine, using a russian-made Buk ground-to-air missile. 298 people were killed, citizens of nearly a dozen countries.

[mariacallous]

From the order in which members of The Beatles should be listed to the origins of the Pavlova dessert, “edit wars” have dominated Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, since its inception. Though many of these online discussions pertain to cultural icons and phenomena, some have taken a more sinister turn—especially when it comes to controversial or politically sensitive topics such elections, protests, or wars. This has become particularly apparent in the case of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, shaped by multiple competing and ever-evolving narratives.

Started in May 2001, the Russian-language Wikipedia is among the world’s top six Wikipedia sites and, until recently, has remained a popular source of information in and about the country. However, over the last two decades, it has become embroiled in controversy, largely due to the Kremlin’s state-sponsored disinformation plaguing the platform.

Reliant on government sources and edited by Russian editors, Russian-language Wikipedia pages have often featured pro-Kremlin narratives, especially in relation to Russia’s war against Ukraine. For example, while articles in English have clearly indicated the illegal and disputed nature of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and its occupation of Donetsk, the Russian-language pages have previously downplayed the role of the Russian military and portrayed Donetsk as a people’s separatist republic (though it has since been changed and is now consistent with the English version).

Another example is the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17. While the English-language version acknowledges that the flight was shot down by the Russian military, which is the international consensus, Russian Wikipedia has called it a “catastrophe” without any attribution of guilt. There are also many inconsistencies having to do with famous historical figures appropriated by Russia, such as those of King Volodymyr the Great or Nestor the Chronicler, both of whom lived in Kyiv.

Over the last two years, Russian courts have fined the Wikimedia Foundation, which owns Wikipedia, several times over content related to Russia’s war in Ukraine. Meanwhile, according to a 2022 report, multiple groups of “sock-puppet” editor accounts, which have coordinated their activity to rewrite pages relating to Russian-Ukrainian relations while using false identifiers. These groups have actively undermined Western and Ukrainian information sources and instead endorsed Russian narratives and state-sponsored media.

Though Russia briefly banned Wikipedia in August 2015, it has now taken its digital offensive campaign to the next level.

Earlier this year, Vladimir Medeyko, the former director of Wikimedia Russia, launched an alternative platform called Ruwiki. The new platform started out as a copy-pasted version of the original Russian-language Wikipedia, exploiting a technicality of Wikipedia’s open-source agreement. Today, the new platform contains up to 2 million articles in Russian, as well as 12 other regional languages spoken in Russia, and is not affiliated with the Wikimedia Foundation.

Unlike the well-established Wikipedia model, in which any user with internet access can create, edit, or update articles, which then undergo rigorous community moderation, Ruwiki works in a different way. While any user can contribute content, it is subject to review by a narrow circle of undisclosed, likely government-sanctioned “experts” to avoid “mistakes” and adjudicate “complex issues.” But it is no secret which issues are considered “complex” by the Kremlin, whose disinformation machine has been working relentlessly to justify its invasion of Ukraine and vehemently deny the war crimes committed there.

Ruwiki is an isolated digital ecosystem that has created an alternate reality. In this version, Holodomor, the man-made famine under Stalin’s rule that killed up to 8 million Ukrainians by some estimates, never happened. Ukraine’s regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, and, of course, Crimea are missing from the country’s internationally recognised administrative map. The 2022 Bucha massacre, in which more than 400 Ukrainians were tortured and killed by the Russian military, is explained as an unverifiable “provocation.” And of course, the platform promotes Russia’s official (wrong) narrative that NATO “provoked” the Russian invasion and that NATO soldiers have participated in the war on behalf of Ukraine.

Ruwiki is the perfect example of the “splinternet”—the fragmentation of the global internet into smaller, divergent, and disconnected spaces. Sometimes, splinters form organically on platforms due to cultural and linguistic preferences of their users. But more often, it is a result of targeted government policies that restrict access to certain websites and services in an attempt to curtail free speech. These measures are often undertaken by authoritarian regimes under the guise of digital sovereignty, ensuring the state’s autonomy and control over its communication and digital infrastructures.

In 2011, Iran’s National Information Network (NIN) project, which envisioned the creation of an absolutely independent online ecosystem back in 2011, is a famous case of digital authoritarianism. Another example is Turkey’s new amendments to the Press Law, which came into effect in 2022. The law increased government control over social media and news platforms and has been dubbed as a “draconian” censorship law by media rights activists and opposition leaders.

Similarly, Russia’s Sovereign Internet Law, adopted in 2019, grants the Kremlin the power to isolate the Russian internet from other countries. The law requires Russian internet service providers to hand over many of their powers to the state, including the ability to directly censor unwanted content and prevent users from accessing alternative ways of seeing banned websites.

While these measures to nationalize the internet might seem benign from the perspective of maintaining technological autonomy, such concentration of power in the hands of the state also comes with an unprecedented ability to surveil its domestic population. Since 2019, the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) has direct access, complete with encryption codes, to access any messages transmitted via Russian social media platforms or stored on servers located within the country.

These splinternets undermine the idea of a unified and global internet. They create isolated pockets of content that is easy to censor and can only be accessed by users from within the state, thus cutting them off from internationally produced content. As numerous studies show, such fragmentation is a pathway to a rapid deterioration of democratic discourse on platforms that institute it.

Take, for example, Truth Social, former U.S. President Donald Trump’s social media platform, which routinely echoes radical right-wing narratives on immigration, gun ownership, and the 2020 election. Another example is Ukraine’s 2017 decision to ban Russian social media platforms, VK and Odnoklassniki, in the interest of national security, after the platforms had become a toxic cesspool of hate speech, racism, and xenophobia, with well documented calls to rape and murder Ukrainians.

Similarly, in 2022, Russian TikTok blocked all non-Russian content in Russia. Once splintered from the rest of the platform and left unchecked, it became a hotbed of Russian war propaganda.

However, Russian propaganda on TikTok is not limited to its borders alone. Recent research indicates that accounts affiliated with Russian state media, especially Russia Today and Sputnik, have enjoyed a wide international reach, with their content being shared in multiple languages. Once those accounts were flagged by the platform as Russian state-affiliated in 2022, they became inactive and switched to newly created, unlabelled accounts to avoid detection. Another action, which flew under the radar, was Russia’s use of political influencers to sway public opinion in the United States, ahead of its upcoming presidential election.

In light of these disturbing developments, we can reasonably expect to see Ruwiki move along the same historical pathway. Though other countries like China, Turkey, India, and Pakistan have either banned or threatened to ban Wikipedia, Ruwiki’s full control over facts will allow the Kremlin to retell history on its own terms—including denying its war crimes in Ukraine.

This—combined with the targeted destruction of Ukrainian books, the rewriting of Russian school curriculum, and the murder of Ukrainian public intellectuals in Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories—will help Russia justify its expansionist goals and cement its colonial dominance over the region.

This digitally mediated historical revisionism is particularly dangerous in light of the increasing use of the internet as the ultimate source of information, especially among Russia’s youth. Splintered from the rest of the world, they will be coming of age in an alternative Kremlin-manufactured version of reality where “nothing is true, but everything is possible.”

[sporadicneckmoneyfan]

Ten years ago, a Malaysia Airlines aircraft carrying passenger flight MH17 from the Netherlands to Malaysia was shot down by Russian forces over the Donetsk region.

All passengers and crew members died, 298 people in total, including 80 children.

On 17 November 2022, the Hague District Court announced its verdict in the case. According to the verdict, Igor Girkin and his subordinates, Sergei Dubinsky and Leonid Kharchenko, were found guilty of the tragedy.

The court also confirmed that Russia was controlling militants in eastern Ukraine when the plane was shot down.

[mariakov81]

Dear westerners. Today is 10 years anniversary of the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17

On 17 July 10 years ago the 298 innocent people, including 80 children, of 17 nationalities were killed by russia.

[greenzaku]

How I remember MH17

17 July marks the anniversary of the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) in eastern Ukraine in 2014. All 298 on board, mostly Dutch, Malaysians, and Australians were killed. I had just finished up with a short term job interstate and was looking for further employment at the time, and had the time to follow the reporting of the incident online. In 2014, I would not have guessed that the event would shape my view of discourse and disinformation in eastern Europe for years to come. Ukraine was on the other side of the world and I had no real interest or understanding of the invasion by Russia back then, but people from my country were on that plane, so I paid attention. The blame game started in earnest.

‘Ukraine fired the missile.’

‘Russia fired the missile’

‘It was an accident.’

‘The Ukrainians are looting the crash site.’

‘The Russians are looting the crash site.’

‘Malaysian Airlines was at fault and shouldn’t have been flying over a warzone.’

‘The pilot was at fault.’

‘The investigation is biased towards Russia/Ukraine/Malaysia/Australia/Netherlands...’

‘Russia/Ukraine tampered with evidence...’

It even got ugly in some less reputable ‘news’ sites and far right conspiracy theories spread online, that it was the ‘missing’ MH370 that crashed into the sea months earlier, that the US did it because reasons, islamophobia, men in black, hijackers, crisis actors, aliens... As a queer person, I paid attention to the fact that several AIDS researchers were on board, and stigma surrounding AIDS was and is still very rife, which fed into the more extreme discourse. The world wanted answers.

Round and round it went. It did eventually emerge that Russia, or ‘separatists’ - really Russian proxies - fired the missile, from a Buk launcher that was later filmed being carted back to Russia carrying three missiles instead of its usual four. The billboard was used to geolocate the truck and Buk’s to the border.

Pardon my terrible MSPaint edit.

The still image is grabbed from a video that was posted by Ukraine’s Defense ministry, but forms part of a broader investigation by Bellingcat, an independent collective of open source researchers, that is too detailed to write here but tracked the movements of the Buk and the truck carrying it to and from the launch site. (link: https://www.bellingcat.com/tag/mh17/)

There was nothing wrong with the plane, the pilot, or the flight path. Passenger planes from Air France, Air India and Singapore Airlines were transiting nearby.

Now, it was obvious that MH17 wasn’t an intentional target. The commanders of the brigade that the Buk belonged to initially posted on social media that they had downed a Ukrainian fighter jet, and then rapidly deleted their celebratory comments when photos of the wreckage appeared online. In my mind, all Russia had to do was acknowledge it was a mistake, or a mistake by ‘separatists’, court martial the guy who pulled the trigger, apologise and fork out some form of compensation. Install a plaque at the site, send flowers, and the world would have eventually looked away from the not-really-civil-war in faraway eastern Europe and their brush with a southeast Asian airline.

Why the lies? Acknowledging the mistake would have been magnitudes cheaper and simpler than the overall war effort. Why was continuing to perpetuate a firehose of falsehoods more important than the truth and trying to repair relations? I couldn’t answer those questions then, but now realise that keeping the information space muddied and flooded with crap is now the norm for disinformation coming out of Russia. Its like they can’t help themselves.

Fast forward to today.

The ‘separatist’ commanders are still involved in the invasion of Ukraine, now unmasked as regular Russians. No commercial flights operate over the country for now. Disinformation, so heavily weaponised during the long months of pandemic lockdown and the former president of the US, runs rife. I posted my own little memorials to the tragedy on social media, year after year, and got bot farm and troll reactions downvoting or pushing them into invisibility. I’m not important enough in the big scheme of things to have a flesh and blood russian troll come to debate me, not that I have the time and energy for it. I’m also not the only person who refuses to forget it, even if the loss pales in significance to the atrocities perpetuated on Ukraine from last year. The lies meant that when the 2022 invasion started along with the inevitable discourse, we also remembered which side was more likely to be lying. The Netherlands and Australia are very supportive of Ukraine, Malaysia is officially neutral (mostly due to convoluted reasoning of America = bad imperialists, America supports Ukraine, so supporting Russia good etc) though many individuals still go against the grain to donate or volunteer. I can’t change what others think, but at least I can prevent them from forgetting.

[quotesfrommyreading]

Nowadays, less violence is required to misinform the public: There have been no mass arrests in Putin’s Russia on the scale used in Stalin’s Russia. Perhaps there don’t need to be, because Russian state-run television, the primary source of information for most Russians, is more entertaining, more sophisticated, more stylish than programs on the crackly radios of Stalin’s era. Social media is far more addictive and absorbing than the badly printed newspapers of that era, too. Professional trolls and influencers can shape online conversation in ways that are helpful to the Kremlin, and with far less effort than in the past.

The modern Russian state has also set the bar lower. Instead of offering its citizens a vision of utopia, it wants them to be cynical and passive; whether they actually believe what the state tells them is irrelevant. Although Soviet leaders lied, they tried to make their falsehoods seem real. They got angry when anyone accused them of lying, and they produced fake “evidence” or counterarguments. In Putin’s Russia, politicians and television personalities play a different game, one that we in America know from the political campaigns of Donald Trump. They lie constantly, blatantly, obviously. But if you accuse them of lying, they don’t bother to offer counterarguments. When Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was shot down over Ukraine in 2014, the Russian government reacted not only with a denial, but with multiple stories, plausible and implausible: The Ukrainian army was responsible, or the CIA was, or it was a nefarious plot in which 298 dead people were placed on a plane in order to fake a crash and discredit Russia. This constant stream of falsehoods produces not outrage, but apathy. Given so many explanations, how can you know whether anything is ever true? What if nothing is ever true?

Instead of promoting a Communist paradise, modern Russian propaganda has for the past decade focused on enemies. Russians are told very little about what happens in their own towns or cities. As a result, they aren’t forced, as Soviet citizens once were, to confront the gap between reality and fiction. Instead, they are told constantly about places they don’t know and have mostly never seen: America, France and Britain, Sweden and Poland—places filled with degeneracy, hypocrisy, and “Russophobia.” A study of Russian television from 2014 to 2017 found that negative news about Europe appeared on the three main Russian channels, all state-controlled, an average of 18 times a day. Some of the stories were invented (the German government is forcibly taking children away from straight families and giving them to gay couples), but even true stories were picked to support the idea that daily life in Europe is frightening and chaotic, Europeans are weak and immoral, the European Union is aggressive and interventionist.

If anything, the portrayal of America has been worse. U.S. citizens who rarely think about Russia would be stunned to learn how much time Russian state television devotes to the American people, American politics, even American culture wars. In March, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, displayed an alarmingly intimate acquaintance with Twitter arguments about J. K. Rowling and her views on transgender rights at a press conference. It’s hard to imagine any American politician, or indeed almost any American, talking about a popular Russian political controversy with the same fluency. But that’s because no American politician lives and breathes the ups and downs of Russian partisan arguments in the same way that the Russian president lives and breathes the battles that take place on American cable networks and on social media—battles in which his professional trolls and proxies compete and take sides, promoting whatever they think will be divisive and polarizing.

Within the ever-changing drama of anger and fear that unfolds every night on the Russian evening news, Ukraine has long played a special role. In Russian propaganda, Ukraine is a fake country, one without history or legitimacy, a place that is, in the words of Putin himself, nothing more than the “southwest” of Russia, an inalienable part of Russia’s “history, culture and spiritual space.” Worse, Putin says, this fake state has been weaponized by the degenerate, dying Western powers into a hostile “anti-Russia.” The Russian president has described Ukraine as “fully controlled from the outside” and as “a colony with a puppet regime.” He invaded Ukraine, he has said, in order to defend Russia “from those who have taken Ukraine hostage and are trying to use it against our country and our people.”

In truth, Putin invaded Ukraine in order to turn it into a colony with a puppet regime himself, because he cannot conceive of it ever being anything else. His KGB-influenced imagination does not allow for the possibility of authentic politics, grassroots movements, even public opinion. In Putin’s language, and in the language of most Russian television commentators, the Ukrainians have no agency. They can’t make choices for themselves. They can’t elect a government for themselves. They aren’t even human—they are “Nazis.” And so, like the kulaks before them, they can be eliminated with no remorse.

  —  Ukraine and the Words That Lead to Mass Murder

[titles-for-tangents]

I’m bringing this up because this seems to be the only article I’ve read so far that really addresses how much of human history we’d be losing. To quote:

“Musk himself acknowledges that Twitter is a public forum, and it’s this fact that makes the potential loss of the platform so significant. Twitter has become integral to civilization today. It’s a place where people document war crimes, discuss key issues, and break and report on news.

“It’s where the US raid that would result in Osama bin Laden’s death was first announced. It’s where people get updates on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It’s where news of the downing of flight MH17, a Malaysia Airlines plane that was likely shot down by pro-Russia forces in Ukraine in 2014, first surfaced. It is a living, breathing historical document. And there’s real concern it could disappear soon.

“‘If Twitter was to ��go in the morning”, let’s say, all of this—all of the first-hand evidence of atrocities or potential war crimes, and all of this potential evidence—would simply disappear,’ says Ciaran O’Connor, senior analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a global think tank. Information gathered using OSINT (open-source intelligence) has been used to support prosecutions for war crimes, and acts as a record of events long after the human memory fades.”

The article notes how even the Library of Congress tried documenting stuff on Twitter for eight freaking years and simply had to stop in 2018 just due to the sheer deluge of information. Think about just how much has happened post-2017 in particular, post- the #Me Too movement. The #Black Lives Matter movement. How many crimes actively caused by the police that people captured on camera and help fuel #Defund the Police. How former President Trump would howl random insanities, instructions, and declarations in a complete breach of protocol both security and otherwise and Twitter was instrumental in deplatforming him, and not only did we get to have five minutes of peace for once, suddenly it opened up the conversation about how large social media sites can and should deplatform hate speech. Twitter is where we all noticed someone cracked into the CDC’s account in one of the first of many moments where the public’s trust in them began to wither and crumble during a pandemic. According to William Kilbride, executive director of the Digital Preservation Coalition, “There’s no indication that those formal records of government agencies have ever been archived, or indeed how they’d go about doing that.”

If you use Twitter for any reason, please find a way to back up your data now. The article goes on to say, “Many users have taken it upon themselves to independently back up their data, while the Internet Archive can be used to permanently store snapshots of Twitter’s webpages in a more reliable place than Twitter’s own servers. But both methods are not without their own issues: multimedia often isn’t stored alongside such methods of archiving tweets—something that would impact the vast numbers of accounts posting images and videos from Iran’s revolution, or documenting Russia’s invasion of Twitter—while accessing the information easily requires knowing the exact URL of any given tweet to access it. ‘You may have trouble finding that if it’s not already been preserved in some way somewhere else on the internet,’” says Eliot Higgins, whom the author notes as the “founder of open-source investigators Bellingcat, who helped bring the perpetrators of the downing of MH17 to justice.”

Storage already was a very real problem, and the recollection of that data is going to be far, far hairier if possible at all. I’m not on Twitter so I’m sure someone much more versed in legal and I.T. issues would be able to clarify if users will be able to get their data back. Don’t get me wrong: watching Elon Musk go bankrupt and his empire burn all around him has been and will continue to be cathartic as hell, especially over the class action lawsuits coming against him. But that will be just the first half of the parade before people try to get back their records of lost art, lost journalism, lost quotes, lost photography and films, lost records of how people have been faring during the pandemic across all walks of life. There’s a very real chance we’re not going to get those back. Yes, much of Twitter is full of brainrot. It’s also full of celebrities, artists, and organizations where their accounts can be as professional as they want it to be. Think about how many tweets you see copy-pasted to Tumblr and copy-pasted Tumblr posts get retweeted back to Twitter. Think about how Eli Lily just had to confront their horrible insulin prices this past week alone and how once again, the conversation turns to accountability and how life can simply be better than this dystopian, sick age we’re living in. This is arguably bigger than even the loss of Vine; I would say it’s a wee bit closer to the burning of the Library at Alexandria.

While there absolutely is worth in having community corkboards, the next social medial empire that will fall like Facebook is going to care even less about you and wipe out even more important moments in human history. Social media sites like Twitter are (again I need to use this word) instrumental as fuck for helping to instigate very real social change, even if they’re created for dumb and/or fun reasons and get quickly grandfathered into serious issues simply because they’ve been popular for so long they’ve just stuck around long enough to see them. Sites like Twitter have allowed people to get out the message out to vote and directly interact with politicians for better and worse. Sure, something will take its place, and Mastodon is already there to try to do just that. We should have healthy competition and no one should run a monopoly to encourage their status as billionaire (we shouldn’t have billionaires in the first place for that matter, but that’s a discussion for another day). The point is the fate of this closing era is going to be at the whims of a very particular twit this weekend, and the window of time to save what we can from the already burning pyre is rapidly closing.

I really, really don’t want to see Twitter to go up in flames. The best outcome for this would be to see all of its employees get much better-paying, unionized jobs and Elon Musk continues to peel and reveal himself for the insufferable jackass that he is.

[dailystraitsdotcom]

MH17 Tragedy Podcast Launched

Australian Federal Police launches podcast on MH17 tragedy

Sydney, July 16: The Australian Federal Police (AFP) has launched a new podcast today, titled ‘Search Among the Sunflowers: Looking for truth in the world’s biggest crime scene,’ which delves into the complex investigation of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17. The podcast release coincides with the upcoming 10-year anniversary of the incident on 17 July.Flight MH17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine…

[sonyaheaneyauthor]

russian fighters celebrate in the wreckage of civilian passenger flight Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. The rubble was looted of the victims' possessions.

MH17 was shot down over occupied Donbas, Ukraine on the 17th of July 2014, using a russian-made Buk ground-to-air missile. 298 people were killed.

The victims were from:

Australia (27)

Belgium (4)

Canada (1)

Germany (4)

Indonesia (12)

Malaysia (43)

Netherlands (193 including one dual Dutch/US citizen)

New Zealand (1)

Philippines (3)

United Kingdom (10)

[mariacallous]

Ten years ago, Eliot Higgins could eat room service meals at a hotel without fear of being poisoned. He hadn’t yet been declared a foreign agent by Russia; in fact, he wasn’t even a blip on the radar of security agencies in that country or anywhere else. He was just a British guy with an unfulfilling admin job who’d been blogging under the pen name Brown Moses—after a Frank Zappa song—and was in the process of turning his blog into a full-fledged website. He was an open source intelligence analyst avant la lettre, poring over social media photos and videos and other online jetsam to investigate wartime atrocities in Libya and Syria.

In its disorganized way, the internet supplied him with so much evidence that he was beating UN investigators to their conclusions. So he figured he’d go pro. He called his website Bellingcat, after the fable of the mice that hit on a way to tell when their predator was approaching. He would be the mouse that belled the cat.

Today, Bellingcat is the world’s foremost open source intelligence agency. From his home in the UK, Higgins oversees a staff of nearly 40 employees who have used an evolving set of online forensic techniques to investigate everything from the 2014 shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine to a 2020 dognapping to the various plots to kill Russian dissident Alexei Navalny.

Bellingcat operates as an NGO headquartered in the Netherlands but is in demand everywhere: Its staffers train newsrooms and conduct workshops; they unearth war crimes; their forensic evidence is increasingly part of court trials. When I met Higgins one Saturday in April, in a pub near his house, he’d just been to the Netherlands to collect an award honoring Bellingcat’s contributions to free speech—and was soon headed back to collect another, for peace and human rights.

Bellingcat’s trajectory tells a scathing story about the nature of truth in the 21st century. When Higgins began blogging as Brown Moses, he had no illusions about the malignancies of the internet. But along with journalists all over the world, he has discovered that the court of public opinion is broken. Hard facts have been devalued; online, everyone can present, and believe in, their own narratives, even if they’re mere tissues of lies. Along with trying to find the truth, Higgins has also been searching for places where the truth has any kind of currency and respect—where it can work as it should, empowering the weak and holding the guilty accountable.

The year ahead may be the biggest of Bellingcat’s life. In addition to tracking conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, its analysts are being flooded with falsified artifacts from elections in the US, the UK, India, and dozens of other countries. As if that weren’t enough, there’s also the specter of artificial intelligence: still too primitive to fool Bellingcat’s experts but increasingly good enough to fool everyone else. Higgins worries that governments, social media platforms, and tech companies aren’t worrying enough and that they’ll take the danger seriously only when “there’s been a big incident where AI-generated imagery causes real harm”—in other words, when it’s too late.

[swldx]

Voice of America 0355 1 Mar 2024

9775Khz 0259 1 MAR 2024 - VOICE OF AMERICA (UNITED STATES OF AMERICA) in ENGLISH from MOPENG HILL. SINPO = 55334. English, s/on with dead-carrier. @0259z Yankee Doodle int fb news anchored by male (Alexis Stroke?) @0300z. Yemen’s Houthis will introduce military “surprises” in their Red Sea operations, the Iran-aligned group’s leader Abdul Malik al-Houthi said in a televised speech on Thursday. “Our military operations will continue and advance and we have surprises that our enemies will not expect at all,” al-Houthi said. At least 112 Palestinians seeking humanitarian aid were killed in Gaza City early Thursday and scores more were injured in what witnesses and Gazan health officials said was the result of Israeli fire. Israel disputed that, saying scores of people trampled each other and were run over by fleeing aid trucks. Gaza hospital officials initially reported an Israeli strike on the crowd at the al-Nabusi roundabout in the western part of Gaza City. Witnesses later said Israeli troops opened fire as people pulled flour and canned goods off aid trucks. Congress passed another short-term spending measure Thursday that would keep one set of federal agencies operating through March 8 and another set through March 22, avoiding a shutdown for parts of the federal government that would otherwise kick in Saturday. The bill now goes to President Joe Biden to be signed into law. Jack Teixeira, the Massachusetts Air National Guard member accused of leaking highly classified military documents on a social media platform, is expected to plead guilty in his federal case, according to court papers filed Thursday. Prosecutors asked the judge to schedule a change of plea hearing, but no other details were immediately available. The judge set the hearing for Monday in Boston's federal courthouse. California’s coveted coastal cliffs eroding in atmospheric rivers. While such storms are not uncommon to the West Coast, meteorologists say they are likely to become more extreme over the next century if planetary warming from fossil fuel-driven climate change continues at current rates. Over the years, California has built a lot of infrastructure along its coast, and plowed monetary investment into the idyllic and much sought-after real estate. There is a nuclear power plant right on the coast in San Onofre that is vulnerable to erosion and sea rise. The train line along the coast has been closed when landslides cover the tracks. The Dutch government has spent more than 166 million euros ($180 million) dealing with the aftermath of the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine in 2014, from repatriating victims' bodies to investigating and prosecuting some of those involved in the downing, according to an official report Thursday. The Boeing 777 flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur was shot down on July 17, 2014, using a Russian-made Buk missile fired from territory in eastern Ukraine controlled by separatist rebels. All 298 passengers and crew were killed, including 196 Dutch citizens. @0305z “Daybreak Africa” anchored by male announcer (w/African accent). Backyard fence antenna w/MFJ-1020C active antenna (used as a preamplifier/preselector), Etón e1XM. 100kW, beamAz 350°, bearing 84°. Received at Plymouth, MN, United States, 14087KM from transmitter at Mopeng Hill. Local time: 2059.

[cyberbenb]

Navalny: Girkin 'illegally detained political prisoner'

Imprisoned Russian opposition political Alexei Navalny said on July 25 that Igor “Strelkov” Girkin, the recently arrested Russian war criminal, is a “political prisoner” who was “detained illegally."

“As long as (Girkin) remains in custody on these ridiculous and obviously politically motivated charges, he is a political prisoner,” Navalny wrote on his Telegram channel.

Navalny, a prominent anti-Kremlin figure sentenced to prison in 2021 in what international organizations called a sham trial, acknowledged that Girkin has been convicted by a Dutch court for the downing of the MH17 airliner.

He also noted that the former commander of Russian proxy forces in Donbas admitted to taking part in hostilities in Ukraine. The downing of MH17 and Girkin’s acts in Ukraine should be investigated by Russian authorities and courts should provide a “fair assessment” of the events, Navalny said.

He argued that Girkin was not detained over his past acts in Ukraine, but on false charges of extremism, simply for criticizing Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu.

Russia after Wagner revolt: Will Putin stay afloat or face more turmoil?

The rebellion organized by Russia’s Wagner mercenary group in June is seen by many analysts as a sign of weakness and fragility of Vladimir Putin’s regime. First, several thousand armed mercenaries managed to march for hundreds of kilometers from Rostov to the vicinity of Moscow, and no one

The Kyiv IndependentOleg Sukhov

While conceding that Girkin’s criticism of the Kremlin actually calls for more drastic measures in the war against Ukraine, Navalny urged that “law and justice” must be respected regardless of the warlord’s views.

“To gloat that Strelkov fell victim to his own power is to publicly support lawlessness,” Navalny commented.

Girkin, a former officer of the Federal Security Service (FSB), was arrested by Russian authorities on July 21 on extremism charges.

In April 2014 he organized the seizure of the town of Sloviansk, Donetsk Oblast, initiating Russia’s war in the Donbas. Girkin admitted later in an interview that he had “pulled the trigger” of Russia’s war.

He proclaimed himself the “defense minister” of Russia’s proxy forces in Donetsk Oblast in 2014.

Girkin has also been found guilty by a Hague court of participating in the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, which killed 298 people in 2014.

During the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he has often lambasted the Kremlin for mishandling the war effort. He intensified his criticism of Putin over the past weeks.

Girkin co-founded the Club of Angry Patriots, a hardline nationalist movement pushing for more extreme measures to achieve victory over Ukraine.