#protesters detained russia

[thelostdreamsthings]

{Why is Telegram a big headache for the Jews, USA and France?

Why did they decide to literally kidnap the owner Pavel Durov at the Paris Airport?

Pavel Durov, founder and CEO of Telegram, was arrested today in France, there are different charges against him.

Telegram is the main source of information about the Israeli genocide and massacre in Gaza.

Thousands of videos of Jews massacring children have been posted on Telegram channels by journalists living in Gaza.

Israel is trying to stop that flow of information and that is why it has killed over 100 journalists in Gaza alone.

The most accurate information about the situation on the ground in Ukraine comes out on Telegram, and NATO can't control it.

Many people use Telegram as their source of information because the information comes directly from the field.

Many dead NATO soldiers appear on Telegram and the CIA and NATO command can no longer hide their direct involvement in the war broke out in Russia.

Telegram did a lot of damage to the French army in Africa.

The Africans organized all their protests, resistance and everything else against the French occupation forces through Telegram.

Russian mercenaries, obviously, use different platforms, but Telegram played for them an important role in accelerating the deterioration of France's military posture, especially in Africa.

This is a famous photo of Telegram founder Pavel Durov giving Putin his middle finger.

In 2011, Durov said that the Russian government had requested him to cancel the accounts of anti-government figures on his social media platform.

Durov not only did not follow, but also publicly released this photo of "raising the middle finger to Putin" in the media, which received cheers from the West.

After the 2014 Ukrainian coup, Durov refused to provide the Russian government with information on users involved in the Ukrainian colorful revolution.

In the same year, he left Russia, claiming that Russia was "unable to keep up with the information age". Shortly after, he acquired French and UAE citizenship and stated that he had no plans to return to Russia.

Today, Durov was arrested by France on charges of using the platform to "support terrorist activities" and "pedophilia" after refusing to provide user information to the United States and Israel, facing 20 years of imprisonment.

Durov helped Ukrainians stage a coup d'état in 2014.

Then the whole West glorified him.

He also trolled the Russian FSB and sent them the “encryption keys” to telegram in 2017.

Back then the west cheered his fight on.

The founder of Telegram has been detained by French intelligence services at Le Bourget Airport in Paris while exiting a private jet.

He is expected to be presented to a judge later this evening, facing multiple charges, according to TF1.

Potential charges include terrorism, drug-related offenses, complicity, fraud, money laundering, concealment, and possession of child exploitation content.

The main concern of EU authorities regarding Telegram is its encrypted messaging, as reported by TF1}

{And despite Durlov helped NATO in the 2014 coup in Ukraine, Russia is working to free Telegram founder Pavel Durov after he was arrested in France.}

If Pavel Durov could be arrested on these charges, then any country can arrest the leaders of Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft… any tech company that helps people communicate!

France is a 🤡 puppet of USA and Israel, who are mad at not having backdoor to Telegram.

Regarding Pavel Durov, Julian Assange, TikTok, Scott Ritter etc. etc. ⬇️

"The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater." Frank Zappa

[mariacallous]

Georgian riot police in Tbilisi have violently cracked down on a pro-EU demonstration sparked by Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze’s announcement that Georgia was halting its EU membership bid ‘until 2028’.

Thousands of demonstrators stayed overnight on Rustaveli Avenue, periodically clashing with the riot police who were using pepper spray, water cannons, tear gas, and physical violence against demonstrators, opposition figures, and journalists.

Mtavari Arkhi published video footage showing the law enforcement officer allegedly firing rubber bullets at demonstrators.

While several demonstrators were detained throughout the night, the Interior Ministry has yet to confirm the number of detainees.

The protest in Tbilisi and several other cities, including Batumi, Kutaisi, Gori, Zugdidi, and Telavi erupted shortly after Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze  stated that the country was halting its EU membership bid ‘until the end of 2028’.

In Tbilisi, protesters gathered around the ruling Georgian Dream party’s headquarters before proceeding to march to Rustaveli Avenue, where parliament is located.

Georgia’s outgoing President Salome Zourabichvili made an appearance at the protest in Tbilisi, where she addressed the riot police, calling on them to remember who they served.

‘It is not your duty to tear people apart. Do you serve Russia or Georgia? To whom did you swear an oath? I am interested in your answer. Will you not answer the president?’ Zourabichvili asked them. ‘For how many GEL are you serving another country?’

There was no response from the riot police. 

Tensions between the protesters and police continued to escalate throughout the night, as police heavily reinforced their numbers as the protest went on. 

The Ministry of Interior later published a statement saying that the demonstration had gone ‘beyond the norms established by the Law of Georgia on Assemblies and Demonstrations’.

Riot police then escalated by deploying large amounts of pepper spray and water cannons to disperse the protesters from the sides of parliament onto Rustaveli Avenue.

Throughout the protest, footage regularly emerged of police violently assaulting and detaining protesters.

Human rights organisations condemned the riot police’s use of force on Rustaveli Avenue, describing them as measures ‘carried out with the use of unlawful and disproportionate force’. 

Police have attempted to push the protesters off of Rustaveli Avenue, where they have set up makeshift barricades and lit fires along the street.

At around 06:00 the opposition Coalition for Change group stated that two of their leaders, Elene Khoshtaria and Nana Malashkhia, were injured during the protest.

Journalists detained, beaten, and water cannonned

During the protest, numerous reports emerged of journalists being targeted by riot police.

OC Media’s journalist and co-director, Mariam Nikuradze, was hit by one of the earlier deployment of the water cannons. She sought medical care at an ambulance nearby shortly after, reporting that there was likely pepper spray mixed in with the water.

Nikuradze’s camera additionally got damaged when she was hit by the water cannon. The police have also knocked Nikuradze’s phone out of her hand as she was filming them marching through the street. 

Riot police have also fired tear gas directly at OC Media’s editor-in-chief Robin Fabbro on Lesia Ukrainka Street, a side street off of Rustaveli Avenue. There were only a few other people on the street, and Fabbro was wearing a vest that clearly stated he was a member of the press. 

Publika’s journalist Aleksandre Keshelashvili was also reportedly temporarily detained by the police. In a Facebook post, Keshelashvili wrote that upon his detention, he tried to tell the police that he was a journalist, but said that it only made the police — who were masked — insult him and beat him more.

Keshelashvili says that the police confiscated his cameras, press ID, and gas mask. 

TV Formula published footage appearing to show a riot police officer tackling and hitting their journalist, Guram Rogava, on the head, and later being hospitalised as a result. 

According to them, the officer was ‘first beating a fallen civilian, then ran towards Guram Rogava and deliberately hit him in the head’.

TV Pirveli reported that one of their camera operators, Niko Kokaia, was injured while covering the protests on Rustaveli, accusing the police of spraying pepper spray in his face from close range. 

‘TV Pirveli assigns the responsibility to the Minister of Internal Affairs, Vakhtang Gomelauri, and we call on him to give us the opportunity to fulfill our professional duties’, the station wrote. ‘We explain that special forces are particularly aggressive towards TV operators. Their goal is to disable the TV signal’.

At around 07:00, RFE/RL’s journalist, Dato Tsagareli, was reportedly punched in the stomach by a masked riot police officer while he was covering the protest.

During the protest, riot police also appeared to be deliberately hitting on-duty journalists on Rustaveli Avenue with water cannons. 

President Zourabichvili has posted on X in solidarity with journalists, saying that she stood ‘with the Georgian media, who are disproportionately targeted and attacked while doing their job and reporting continuously.

[jaskierx]

nicolas maduro: since becoming president of venezuela in 2013 i've overseen more than 20,000 extrajudicial killings and 7 million venezuelans have been displaced

nicolas maduro: the state controls the media and content that makes the government look unfavourable will not be broadcast

nicolas maduro: i'm fully in support of russia's actions in ukraine and have close ties with vladimir putin

nicolas maduro: i rewrote the constitution in 2017 to make it easier to hold onto power for as long as possible, then i called an election early and banned the opposition parties from participating in it

nicolas maduro: this year's election had significant irregularities including censorship of voter information websites and suppression of voter registration leading to millions of venezuelans being unable to cast their vote

nicolas maduro: i announced the results of the election before the votes had been counted and i have refused to release the vote tallies. i definitely won though. the vote count was accurate to within

nicolas maduro: i announced the results of the election before the votes had been counted and i have refused to release proof of the vote tallies

nicolas maduro: the only countries to publicly congratulate me on winning the election are russia, china, cuba, and iran, none of which have free and fair elections

nicolas maduro: the carter center, an independent pro-democracy organisation, have pointed out numerous electoral irregularities and concluded that the voting figures i reported are 'statistically improbable'. they have concluded that they cannot verify the results

nicolas maduro: when other countries in south america asked for confirmation of the election results, i responded by suspending flights and cutting off power to their embassies

nicolas maduro: vote tallies supplied by poll watchers do not match the election result. so i've had a lot of them detained and many have had to flee their homes

nicolas maduro: i'm also cracking down on protesters and encouraging people to use an app to anonymously report protesters to the state. protestors and opposition politicians are being detained and killed and i have assured people that the full force of the law will be used against them

nicolas maduro: the united states, and many other countries, have expressed concern about all of this, and indeed have been expressing concern for several years about me, my policies, and the many ways that my presidency resembles a dictatorship

nicolas maduro: free palestine tho :)

people on this fucking website: the man is a hero! the people have spoken! the usa are trying to stage a coup because they don't like the fair results of a democratic election because the leader that venezuelans have chosen is pro-palestine! daddy maduro says fuck zionists 🥰

[sailorsally]

going to the ‘sakartvelo’ or ‘Georgia’ tags on here to find russians post idyllic photos of Georgia and Tbilisi as if we weren’t under war with our Putin pawn of an illegal government. As if the spec ops that have been trained in Belarus haven’t been poisoning and maiming young men and women on the streets, as if peaceful protesters haven’t been unlawfully detained for weeks, threatened with rape, beaten mercilessly. seems like if you are russian, the world is always idyllic and you can always sip more Georgian wine and eat another slice of Khachapuri even though across the street the same people you allowed to stay in power for decades are now robbing another country of their future and freedom.

dear russians, where are you gonna run once the whole world is russia?

[justforbooks]

Patriot by Alexei Navalny

The late Russian activist’s memoir is an insightful, sharp, even humorous account of his fight against Putin’s regime – and a warning to the world

Alexei Navalny was watching his favourite cartoon show, Rick and Morty, when he suddenly felt unwell. He was 21 minutes into an episode where Rick turns into a pickle. The late Russian opposition leader was on a flight back to Moscow after campaigning ahead of regional elections in the Siberian city of Tomsk in August 2020. Something was clearly wrong, and Navalny staggered to the bathroom.

There, he recalls, he had the grim realisation: “I’m done for.” He told a sceptical steward that he’d been poisoned and then lay down calmly in the aisle, facing a wall. Life didn’t flash before his eyes. Instead, he compares his experience of death – or near-death, as it turned out – to something from a dark fantasy. It was like being “kissed by a Dementor and a Nazgûl stands nearby”.

He is clear who gave the order to kill him with the nerve agent novichok: Vladimir Putin. Navalny calls Russia’s president a “bribe-taking old man” and a “vengeful runt” who sits on top of a “sinister regime”. The assassins were members of the FSB, the KGB’s successor agency. Navalny spent 18 days in a coma, waking up in hospital in Germany.

It was while recovering in Freiburg that he wrote the first part of his extraordinary memoir, Patriot. The second section consists of letters from prison, following his January 2021 return to Moscow, when he was dramatically arrested at the airport. Navalny says he embarked on an autobiography knowing the Kremlin could finish him off. “If they do finally whack me, this book will be my memorial,” he notes.

It took three years for his gallows humour prophecy to come true. Navalny died in February this year, his likely murder taking place in an Arctic penal colony. He was 47. Prison documents hint he was poisoned and the authorities removed the evidence: clothes, vomit, even snow he had come into contact with.

This is a brave and brilliant book, a luminous account of Navalny’s life and dark times. It is a challenge from beyond the grave to Russia’s murder-addicted rulers. You can hear his voice in the deft translation by Arch Tait and Stephen Dalziel: sharp, playful and lacking in self-pity. Nothing crushes him. Up until the end – his final “polar” entry is on 17 January 2024 – he radiates indomitable good humour.

Patriot includes a manifesto for how the country might be transformed: free elections, a constitutional assembly, decentralisation and a European orientation. Days before his murder, he predicted the Putin regime would crumble, while acknowledging the resilience of autocracies.

Trained as a lawyer, Navalny first attracted attention as a transparency activist. He bought shares in notoriously corrupt oil and gas companies and asked awkward questions at shareholder meetings. The Kremlin controlled TV and most newspapers, so Navalny wrote up his exposés online. In 2011 he founded FBK, an anti-corruption organisation which grew into a grassroots national movement run by volunteers. He expresses pride at the way his campaigns encouraged young Russians to take part in opposition politics. Police detained him for the first time in 2011 when he attended protests against rigged Duma elections. Undaunted, he stood two years later to be mayor of Moscow, coming second, before finding himself in an “endless cycle” of rallies, arrests and spells in custody.

The Kremlin’s response to all this was vicious. His brother Oleg was jailed after a fake trial, a provocateur threw green gunk at Navalny, blinding him in one eye. In 2016 he tried to run for president. His videos – of Putin’s tacky Sochi palace and former president Dmitry Medvedev’s dodgy schemes – attracted millions of views. Navalny writes movingly about his wife, Yulia, – whom he met on holiday in Turkey – as a soulmate throughout this period.

Given his understanding of Putin’s Stalinist methods, why did he return to Moscow? His answer is that the struggle to make Russia a normal state was “my life’s work”. He wasn’t prepared to dump his homeland or his convictions, he says. At first, jail conditions were bearable. Well-wishers sent sacks of letters and a tiramisu cake. In one dispatch, Navalny ponders the “amazing ability of human beings to adapt and derive pleasure from the most trivial things”, such as instant coffee.

Behind bars, he chatted to his cellmates and read. He preferred Maupassant to Flaubert and enjoyed Oliver Twist (though he wonders if Dickens got working-class dialogue right). The FSB spied on him 24/7; his warders wore body cameras and barked commands.

As conditions worsened, he made fewer diary entries. More criminal “convictions” piled up – for insulting a war veteran and for extremism. He was shuffled from one penitentiary to the next. Meanwhile, “perverted” prison staff refused to treat his back pain, prompting a hunger strike. He was categorised as a flight risk and woken throughout the night, put in a tiny punishment cell and denied his wife’s letters.

None of these privations stopped Navalny from denouncing Putin’s all-out invasion of Ukraine as an “unjust war of aggression”. The reason for the war is Putin’s desire to hold on to power at any cost, and an obsession with his “historical legacy”, he writes. Critics regard Navalny as a closet nationalist. But Patriot calls for Russia to withdraw its troops, respect Ukraine’s 1991 borders and pay compensation.

During one of Yulia’s visits, Navalny told her there was a “high probability” he would never get out of prison alive. “They will poison me,” he said. “I know,” she replied. He sketches out what this means – no chance to say goodbye, never meeting his grandchildren, “tasseled mortar boards tossed in the air in my absence”. Maybe an unmarked grave. His philosophy: hope for the best, expect the worst. His death is a terrible loss, for Russia and for all of us.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[beardedmrbean]

Jörg Dornau, a member of the far-right Alternative for Germany party in the Saxony state parliament, has used political prisoners to work on his onion plantation in Belarus, a Belarusian news outlet reported Tuesday.

Dornau inked a deal with a local Center for the Isolation of Offenders to employ Belarusians convicted of political infractions at his Belarus-based agricultural company, OOO Zybulka-Bel, according to independent local outlet Reform.news.

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko ramped up political repression and instituted a mass crackdown on dissent, locking up opponents, in the aftermath of a 2020 presidential election widely dismissed as fraudulent.

One of the laborers at Dornau’s farm told the outlet he sorted onions for about €5 per day after being detained in February 2024 for liking a post on social media.

He described difficult working conditions, with breakfast at 7 a.m. and no food or water until the end of the working day at 8 p.m.

“We were brought to a shelter,” he said. “It was a horrible basement, people had all kinds of clothes on, so our hands and feet were freezing.”

The onions, he noted, “were tasty.”

The work was overseen by a foreman who would decide whether the detainee would be paid, he said. The labor was not forced, according to the prisoner, and the earned money was supposed to go toward the maintenance of the detention center.

Dornau, according to the report, made at least one visit to his onion plantation to see his employees in person.

“I’ve even seen him. A tall, bald man,” the prisoner said, with a description that matches Dornau’s physical traits. “He came once in his car with German registration. He came into the shelter where we were picking onions together with hired workers.”

Dornau did not respond to multiple requests for comment by POLITICO on Tuesday.

“The presumption of innocence applies until full legal clarification,” Andreas Harlaß, a spokesperson for the AfD in Saxony, told POLITICO.

He has represented the far-right populist AfD party in the Saxony parliament in eastern Germany since 2019 and has come under scrutiny for his business dealings in Belarus, a Russia-friendly dictatorship ruled with an iron fist by Lukashenko.

Dornau was ordered to pay a fine of €20,862 by the Saxony parliament last month for failing to reveal his involvement in Zybulka-Bel. The company was registered in Belarus in October 2020, even as pro-democracy protests roiled the country.

As of Tuesday, there are more than 1,300 political prisoners in Belarus, according to the Belarusian human rights organization Viasna.

Belarus has been targeted by waves of sanctions by the European Union over the years, most recently in August for ongoing internal repression and human rights violations.

[nullnvoid911]

Russian policemen detain demonstrators protesting against mobilization in St. Petersburg, Russia.

AP (uncredited), September 24, 2022

[saddayfordemocracy]

Dmitry Alexandrovich Markov (23 April 1982 – 16 February 2024) 

Russian photographer Dmitry Markov has died at the age of 42, local media in his hometown of Pskov said Friday 16.03.2024, citing his friends.

Markov, who relied solely on an iPhone for his photography, became famous for capturing images of everyday life in Russia and its regions.

His photo of a masked riot police officer sitting under a portrait of Dictator Vladimir Putin became a symbol of the 2021 protests against the imprisonment of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny.

The photo was sold for 2 million rubles ($21,760) in an online auction, with the proceeds going to people detained or fined during the rallies in support of Navalny.

Markov had suffered from drug addiction during his life. He volunteered in an orphanage and worked as an assistant tutor at a charity that helps people with disabilities.

Markov published three books of his photography and his Instagram page with photos of Russia has more than 800,000 followers.

Rest in Power !

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"The most notorious internee held in any of the Canadian [internment] camps was Leon Trotsky. When news reached North America in March 1917 that the Russian tsar, Nicholas II, had abdicated, Trotsky was living in exile in New York City. He immediately arranged to return to his homeland. On March 27 he boarded the Norwegian freighter Christianiafjord with his wife and two sons, bound for Petrograd. Trotsky had been under surveillance in New York where British authorities took note of his departure. The situation in Russia was confused, but the Allies knew that socialists like Trotsky wanted to withdraw Russian troops from the war. It was widely believed that they were enemy agents funded by the Germans to divide the Allied war effort. At Halifax, the British naval commander received orders to board the Christianiafjord when it arrived and to detain Trotsky and the other Russians with whom he was travelling.

On April 1 the freighter steamed into Halifax harbour. Naval officers marched Trotsky and his comrades to jail cells in the Citadel, the imposing stone fortification overlooking the city. Then, while Natalia Sedova Trotskaya and the boys were lodged with a police employee in town, the men were interned in a prisoner-of-war camp, a converted iron foundry at Amherst near the New Brunswick border.

Trotsky was not cowed by his treatment. Quite the opposite: he defiantly petitioned the Russian government and the British prime minister, protesting his illegal detention. Meanwhile, he began to harangue his fellow prisoners with speeches, in fluent German, proclaiming the need for a revolution in Germany. “That month the concentration camp very much resembled a perpetual mass meeting,” he later wrote. To the dismay of officials, he became a hero to the 800 other detainees. He was “by far the most popular man in the whole camp,” the commander reported. Another officer recalled that Trotsky “gave us a lot of trouble at the camp, and if he had stayed there any longer [...] would have made communists of all the German prisoners.”

Trotsky was a citizen of a country with which Great Britain, and therefore Canada, was an ally in the fighting, and he was travelling with perfectly legal permits and visas. His internment was giving Canada a black eye internationally. At rallies in New York and Russia, speakers denounced Canada as a tyranny, no better than the Tsarist autocracy. Finally, after a month in confinement, he won his release. A crowd of cheering prisoners lined his path as he walked to the gate, followed by an impromptu camp band doing its best to play the Internationale. And with that, Leon Trotsky’s sojourn in Canada ended."

- Daniel Francis, Seeing Reds: the Red Scare of 1918-1919, Canada’s First War on Terror. Arsenal Pulp Press, 2011. p. 17-18.

[black-arcana]

WITHIN TEMPTATION's SHARON DEN ADEL Doesn't Understand Far-Right Surge In Her Home Country Of The Netherlands

In a new interview with Metal Musikast, Sharon Den Adel of Dutch metallers WITHIN TEMPTATION once again was asked about why she and her bandmates feel the need to voice their political views in some of their recently released songs, including "Wireless" and the title track of their new album "Bleed Out", which have highlighted such current topics as the war in Ukraine and the suspicious death of Mahsa Amini, an Iranian woman "detained" for not wearing a hijab. She said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): "Well, I think it's very difficult to separate your music from who you are as a person, of course. And seeing this happening in Europe, an invasion by Russia into Ukraine, and Kyiv is only two hours flight from [my home], and so it feels really in my backyard that this war is happening. And seeing the propaganda from Russia, setting up the European countries towards each other instead of that we are… We are trying to stick together, but the propaganda does get to certain countries, like Slovenia and Hungary and some others. And also in our own country [the Netherlands], this year we voted, apparently as a country, for far right, which I don't understand. And that party also, yeah, has a lot of same ideas as some other countries, which are pro-Russia. Not to say that our country is pro-Russia at all, but I think that was a vote against, that people weren't satisfied with the government that we have and thought it could be like a protest vote. But, to me, that's pretty stupid. In many countries now, people start to vote for far-right parties because they're fed up with the government, how it was, because, well, things didn't go perfect, of course, but on the other hand, to start voting for far right is another thing. But we are, as a country, very supportive of Ukraine, but it's more like the propaganda does reach certain people also in our country. And that worries me, because I think we should stand shoulder to shoulder to help Ukraine."

Den Adel also talked about WITHIN TEMPTATION's music video for the band's newest single, "A Fool's Parade", featuring Ukrainian producer and vocalist Alex Yarmak. Recorded amidst the streets of Kyiv with renowned Ukrainian video director Indy Hait, the clip captures Sharon at important Ukrainian landmarks. Asked what it was like to make a music video in the capital city of a country at war, Den Adel said: "Well, I was never scared to go there, because I was in good hands, to my opinion. We were helped to do this video and to organize everything, what we wanted to do in Kyiv, by the organization called Music Saves Ukraine. And they told us about the app that you had need to have. For instance, if you go into Kiev, which we did by night train from Poland, because there's no commercial flights from Amsterdam to Kyiv anymore. So we had to go by night train from Poland to Kyiv. And they told us to download an air-alerts app because everyone in Ukraine has that, and you can select a region that you are in and any incoming dangerous drones or airplanes, like MiGs, who are carrying a supersonic bomb or anything, they will put that in the app and you know what the danger is and how much time you have to go to a shelter. And there's shelters everywhere, even in the hotel that I was. And we once had to go underneath the metro station, because there was a MiG on their way. And sometimes it has a bomb, sometimes it doesn't. It's sometimes just looking and scouting where they can do something with the next airplane. And this time it wasn't wearing any supersonic bomb, which was good for us because it can wipe out a complete area in a matter of seconds."

She continued: "It's strange to be there, because normal life continues in Kyiv for 90 percent, to my opinion, when I was there, because when I left the bombing was actually intensified by Russia on Kyiv. But they have a good air defense system, which most rockets and bombs don't hit Kyiv itself, but the debris, of course, does, and the pieces of that, of the thing that they are trying to attack them with, it's coming still down on buildings and buildings do get hits and also bystanders. But if you know in time that they're coming, then you can go to a shelter. Most of the time it goes okay. So I wasn't scared because I knew this knowledge upfront. And, yeah, it is when the air alert goes off and when you see military people walking in streets, it's a different picture than the rest of Europe, of course."

Last November, the far-right Freedom Party (PVV) won the largest number of seats in the Dutch national elections. Many people believe the shift was triggered by economic and cultural anxieties that have whipped up fears about immigrants.

According to a press release from WITHIN TEMPTATION's publicist, "A Fool's Parade" "showcases the band's commitment to raising awareness of Ukraine's ongoing battle against Russia's invasion. The song itself serves as a condemnation of Russia's deceitful actions and sheds light on the harsh realities faced by Ukraine. WITHIN TEMPTATION remains steadfast in their support for Ukraine, with involvement in initiatives such as the Ukraine Aid OPS foundation, advocating for more much-needed solidarity." All royalties from the new single will be donated to Music Saves UA for the duration of the Russia-Ukraine war.

In March 2022, WITHIN TEMPTATION was one of the artists who took part in a telethon concert in support of Ukraine. "Save Ukraine - #StopWar" united more than 20 countries and bring together more than 50 participants. The marathon was broadcast from Warsaw on the Polish TV channel TVP. In addition, broadcasters from many countries around the world rebroadcasted the marathon on their local channels.

The "Bleed Out" album was released last October.

[stele3]

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-advances-ukraine-fast-pace-moving-into-kurakhove-analysts-say-2024-11-26/

[nando161mando]

One detainee, Nikita Shevchenko, remains unaccounted for a day after he was detained. SotaVision said that he may have engaged in a verbal altercation with an E Centre officer, and was taken to a separate room.

https://freedomnews.org.uk/2024/10/07/food-not-bombs-activists-arrested-in-russia/

[mariacallous]

Authorities in France arrested Pavel Durov, the founder and CEO of the messaging app Telegram, on Saturday, sparking a public controversy over online speech, encryption, and digital rights as well as a potential diplomatic fallout in Europe. 

Prosecutors in Paris released a list of charges against a “person unnamed” in a criminal investigation in connection with which Durov is being questioned. Those charges include possession of child pornography, money laundering, and association with organized crime. Durov has not been charged but is being detained and questioned; French authorities can keep Durov in custody until Wednesday, at which time they must either release him or charge him with a crime. 

Telegram struck a defiant tone in a statement posted to its platform Sunday, saying that its moderation policies were in line with industry standards “and constantly improving” while adding that Durov had “nothing to hide.”

“It is absurd to claim that a platform or its owner are responsible for abuse of that platform,” the company said. 

Durov, who founded Telegram in 2013 in his native Russia, has long styled himself as a champion of unfettered free speech online. The platform has adopted a lighter-touch approach to content moderation than many of its social media peers, even as it has grown to nearly a billion global users. 

“Unless they cross red lines, I don’t think that we should be policing people in the way they express themselves,” Durov told the Financial Times in a rare interview in March this year, saying the platform planned to improve its content moderation without elaborating on what he considers a red line. 

In another interview in April with right-wing media personality Tucker Carlson, Durov said the company would cooperate with “legitimate” demands to take down content. 

“If there was a group of people who were promoting violence, there was terrorist activity that was spreading violence in some parts of the world, publicly posting things that any decent human being would disallow or wouldn’t want to be posted, we would help them,” he said. “But in some other cases where we thought it would be crossing the line, it wouldn’t be in line with our values of freedom of speech and protecting people’s private correspondence, we would ignore those.”

That approach has seen Telegram being used by protesters and dissidents around the world as well as the authoritarian governments they are often fighting against, and it has become a leading source of information and intelligence in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. 

Despite Russia’s historical baggage with Durov and Telegram (the Russian government unsuccessfully tried to ban the app in 2018), the country’s military has become dependent on the app for battlefield communication as well as propaganda in support of Russian President Vladimir Putin. “In the last two years of the war, no platform has played a greater role in helping us get insight into Russian thinking about the war than Telegram,” said Eto Buziashvili, a Tbilisi, Georgia-based researcher with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.

Multiple Russian officials have expressed outrage at Durov’s detention. Unless France provides strong evidence to back up its claims, “we are witnessing a direct attempt to restrict freedom of communication and, one might even say, direct intimidation of the head of a large company,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters in a briefing on Tuesday, adding that Moscow is “ready to provide all necessary assistance and support” to Durov.

Durov’s arrest was also slammed by X owner and fellow tech billionaire Elon Musk—who has espoused a similarly unbridled approach to online speech and is engaged in his own content moderation fight against European authorities—as well as former U.S. National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, who called it “​​an assault on the basic human rights of speech and association.” 

French President Emmanuel Macron sought to quell accusations of government censorship on Monday, pushing back in a post on X against what he referred to as “false information” about Durov’s arrest. “The arrest of the president of Telegram on French soil took place as part of an ongoing judicial investigation,” Macron wrote. “It is in no way a political decision.” He also added that France remained “deeply committed to freedom of expression and communication, to innovation, and to the spirit of entrepreneurship.” 

Both Russia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have requested consular access to Durov. Durov is a citizen of both countries as well as France. A spokesperson for the UAE foreign ministry said the country is “closely following” his case.

Durov has a complicated relationship with Russia, having fled the country in 2014 after refusing (in his own telling) to share data from VK—another hugely popular social network that he founded—with the Russian government. He sold his stake in VK and eventually moved to Dubai, where he has largely been based since and where Telegram is now located. 

But the geopolitical implications of Durov’s arrest go beyond his citizenships. Countries around the world, particularly in Europe, have been grappling with how to regulate social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, X, and TikTok, attempting to draw the line between free expression and illegal content. Governments in many cases have also sought to break through the end-to-end encryption provided by messaging services such as WhatsApp and Signal to protect user privacy, citing a need to police potentially illegal content. 

Telegram sits at the intersection of both of those debates. It allows users to exchange private messages (though its encryption is somewhat weaker than other messengers) while also letting them create public broadcast channels that function more like social networks, albeit with far less content moderation. 

“In a lot of use cases around the world, especially where we see the use of Telegram in conflict zones and for broader public messaging, it very much hedges more toward a social media app than a point-to-point communications app,” said Graham Brookie, vice president for technology programs at the Atlantic Council and senior director of the Digital Forensic Research Lab. “Telegram has very intentionally taken a very, very light touch to what the rest of the industry would refer to as trust and safety or content moderation,” he added. 

That combination of privacy and lax oversight has made the platform a haven for bad actors, including cyber criminals, drug dealers, and even terrorist groups such as the Islamic State. 

France appears to be taking issue with multiple aspects of Telegram’s model, calling out the illegal activity and content available on the platform in its statement on Monday detailing the charges against the “unnamed” person that Durov is being questioned about, which include three charges related to “cryptology” and the provision of encryption services. 

But the broad nature of the charges and the lack of detail from the French government leave room for the case to be distorted in the public eye, according to Brookie. “We’re in this dangerous gray area where a lot of projection can be put onto whatever the reason [is] for his apprehension in France,” he said. 

Durov’s arrest and the conversation around it could create misconceptions about encryption and hurt activists and dissidents around the world who rely on encrypted messaging for safety, said Mallory Knodel, a researcher at New York University who studies cryptography. “These kinds of violations could happen on any platform … and these alleged crimes are not related to whether the service is encrypted,” she said. “I do worry about this sort of perception of encrypted applications as being a place that enables these kinds of crimes to be committed.” 

And despite the proliferation of harmful content on Telegram and what she terms a lack of “duty of care” for vulnerable users on the part of its leadership, Knodel said arresting a technology executive for content shared on their platform sets another dangerous precedent. 

“Arresting a CEO is a harsh measure in any country,” she said. “It’s definitely an extreme measure, and it feels like it’s intended to send a message.”

[head-post]

Georgian rally in support of EU integration continues

A protest rally against the suspension of Georgia’s European integration on Rustaveli Avenue in Tbilisi passed without incident on Tuesday.

One of the opposition leaders, former Georgian Prime Minister Giorgi Gakharia, told the Pirveli TV channel that the protests, which have lasted for 13 days, have brought results.

“Today the current Georgian authorities are not recognised by the international community. Very soon this will be followed by a downturn in the economy, after which the authorities will definitely sit down at the negotiating table on two issues – the release of all detained protesters and the appointment of new parliamentary elections. This will definitely happen,” Gakharia said.

In turn, the current Prime Minister of Georgia Irakli Kobakhidze told journalists that he hopes for a reset of relations with the US and the EU after the new American President Donald Trump takes office.

Footage from the protests continues to appear on social media. A Georgian mercenary who lost both his legs in the fighting in Ukraine was seen in one of the videos.

The US is seeking to influence protests in Georgia through non-profit organisations and support for the unrest, The New York Times reports.

“On the streets of Georgia, it’s starting to look a little like the Ukraine of 10 years ago, before the war, when tensions with Russia started brewing,” the text says.

As the piece notes, major powers “have often intervened in conflicts in the region.” The United States and its European allies, the NYT writes, are trying to influence the events in Georgia by supporting non-profit organisations and segments of the population seeking to bring the country closer to the US. Such a move “irritated” the Georgian government, the publication notes.

The situation in Georgia will be discussed next week at meetings of the EU foreign ministers and heads of state.

Protests in Georgia began in late November after the ruling Georgian Dream party decided to postpone EU accession talks until 2028.

Read more HERE

[allthegeopolitics]

The 39-year-old tech chief was reportedly detained after his private jet landed at Le Bourget airport on the outskirts of Paris. News broadcasters BFMTV and TF1 have quoted unnamed sources as saying the Russian-born entrepreneur - who became a French citizen in 2021 - was the subject of a search warrant. Both outlets suggest the investigation was focused on a lack of moderators on Telegram and potential criminal activity by users.

Neither French police, the Interior Ministry, nor Telegram have commented on those claims. [...] [Telegram] offers end-to-end encryption - effectively protecting data from being intercepted - and has a strong focus on privacy. Telegram is particularly influential in Russia, Ukraine and the republics of the former Soviet Union. This focus makes the app popular with pro-democracy movements and other protesters in countries with strict laws. [...]

Continue Reading.

[tomorrowusa]

Journalists covering a demonstration in Moscow by wives of Russian soldiers were arrested by Putin's police.

Some 20 journalists were detained by police in central Moscow on Saturday at a rally of Russian soldiers' wives calling for their men to be returned from the front in Ukraine. Independent Russian news outlet SOTA reported that 27 people were taken from the demonstration and transported to the nearest police station. Reuters news agency said one of its journalists was among those detained while filming women laying red carnations at the tomb of the unknown soldier in the shadow of the Kremlin's walls in central Moscow. Moscow police did not comment on the raid. "Journalists should be free to report the news without fear of harassment or harm, wherever they are. We are committed to covering world events in an independent, unbiased, and reliable way, in keeping with the Thomson Reuters Trust Principles," a Reuters spokesperson said in a statement. The demonstration was organized by a group called The Way Home, which urged "wives, mothers, sisters and children" of reservists from across Russia to come to Moscow to "demonstrate (their) unity." The Moscow prosecutor's office said Saturday that the rally had not been coordinated with the authorities. Authorities warned against calling for and participating in unauthorized demonstrations. For several weeks, wives of currently mobilized Russian men have been campaigning for their husbands' return from the front, as well as opposing further mobilization. 

In Russia, an "unauthorized demonstration" is one which does not support Putin and his fascist policies.

Speaking of fascists, Tucker Carlson is apparently in Moscow.

Tucker Carlson Being Spotted in Moscow Sparks Frenzied Speculation

The reported appearance of former Fox News host Tucker Carlson in the Russian capital has sparked intense speculation over the purpose of the conservative media personality's visit to Moscow. Carlson arrived in Moscow on February 1, and was spotted attending the Bolshoi Theater in the capital, according to Russian outlet, Mash. Questions quickly swirled over why the TV anchor would have traveled to Moscow, and whether he intended to interview Russian President Vladimir Putin during the visit.

A Tucker interview with dictator Vladimir Putin would probably be as incisive as his interview with Trump. 😝 Perhaps Putin will let him see the famous Trump pee tapes.

Maybe we'll get lucky and he'll decide to defect while in Russia. His views are much more in tune with a totalitarian state than with the United States.