The great attraction of Siberia for three centuries of settlers, free and otherwise, had been the chance to start afresh in a land where no one would ask too many questions about a person’s past. Shaking off history remains the oldest tradition of them all
It was at one of the smaller towns along the Trans-Siberian Railway, one of the two-minute stops that are so easy to miss altogether between Novosibirsk and Krasnoyarsk, that the government inspectors boarded our train. My husband Timothy and I were alerted to their presence when the stewardess who had taken our tickets came to our cabin shortly after 9 p.m. and told us that “inspectors of the regime” were aboard, and could we please lock our door and not open it for any reason until she came to fetch us. We did as she said, and also closed the window curtains. It was not necessary to turn out the lights, for we had not figured out how to turn them on or indeed whether they were working or broken. The last thing Timothy said before we lapsed into silence was, “This supports my bribe theory.”
Former Green Party and independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader labeled 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton a “deep corporatist and a deep militarist” who has made peace with the nation’s power structure.
“I think Hillary is not the Hillary of when she was 30 years old. She made peace with the power structure and she is a deep corporatist and a deep militarist. One can almost forgive the corporatism. She moved to New York with Bill because that’s where the power is and Wall Street but her militarism is absolutely shocking,” he said during a discussion about his new book, Return to Sender, which focuses on unanswered letters Nader wrote to U.S. presidents about an array of issues.
Nader cited the war in Libya during President Obama’s first term to support his position on Clinton.
“Barack Obama’s schizophrenic — and at times, contradictory — policy towards Syria has led us to this point where U.S. forces are serving in support of anti-ISIS elements, including Al-Qaeda. Not fourteen years after 9/11, is this what America signed up for?”
U.S. coalition aircraft struck ISIS positions in support of Syrian rebels, including Jabhat al-Nusra, Al-Qaeda’s official Syria affiliate, along with another prominent jihadist group, Ahrar al-Sham. This is a dramatic shift from just a year and a half ago, when Obama administration officials said they would support Islamist groups as long as they weren’t allied with Al-Qaeda.
Agence France Presse reports:
US-led aircraft bombed Islamic State group fighters as they battled rival Syrian rebels, including Al-Qaeda loyalists, for the first time, a monitoring group said on Sunday.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights described the overnight raids in northern Aleppo as an intervention on the side of the rival rebels, which include forces who have been targeted previously by US-led strikes.
“We, through democratic means, have brought an end to an era of oppression.” — Kemal Kilicdaroglu, leader of the main opposition, Republican People’s Party (CHP).
Erdogan is now the lonely sultan in his $615 million, 1150-room presidential palace. For the first time since 2002, the opposition has more seats in the parliament than the AKP.
For the first time since his Islamist party won its first election victory in 2002, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was nowhere to be seen on the night of June 7. He did not make a victory speech. He did not, in fact, make any speech.
Not only failing to win the two-thirds majority they desired to change the constitution, the AKP lost its parliamentary majority and the ability to form a single-party government. It won 40.8% of the national vote and 258 seats, 19 short of the simple majority requirement of 276. Erdogan is now the lonely sultan at his $615 million, 1150-room presidential palace. For the first time since 2002, the opposition has more seats in parliament than the AKP: 292 seats to 258.
“My commitment is… to reject any oppression in the name of religion… a goal that we will reach in a peaceful and law-abiding way.” — Raif Badawi.
In another example of Saudi “justice,” Badawi’s lawyer, Walid Abu’l-Khayr, was jailed. He was sentenced to 15 years in jail, to be followed by a 15-year travel ban.
What is happening to Badawi is a perfect reminder to anyone who claims to be “offended” by “Islamophobia” why it might exist, who is to blame for it, and that it is precisely behavior such as this that justifies it.
You may have seen the face of Raif Badawi, a young Saudi man, or a short article about him, or impressive efforts by The Independent, to bring attention to the cruel punishments inflicted on him by a series of deeply illiberal Saudi courts: 1000 lashes — “very harshly,” the flogging order read — to be administered 50 at time for 20 weeks, or five months.
Raif Badawi is a 31-year old author, blogger and social activist, who gently tried to introduce just the smallest traces of enlightened thinking to the government and the religious elite of Saudi Arabia from his home in Jeddah.
The U.S. government gives up personal data secrets with barely a fight.
U.S. government incompetence seems to grow by the month, and now we know it’s becoming a threat to national, and even individual American, security. The Obama Administration announced last week that Chinese hackers made off this year with personnel files that may have included those of all 2.1 million federal employees, plus former employees going back to the 1980s.
This is no routine hack. The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) lost background-check data to the Chinese nine months before this breach and still hadn’t locked the cyber front door. OPM’s inspector general issued a damning report last November that parts of its network should be shut down because they were riddled with weaknesses that “could potentially have national security implications.” You can’t ring the alarm much louder than that, but the failure to take basic precautions continued.
In other words this isn’t a James Bond movie. It’s a Dilbert cartoon. Despite years of warnings, and after the Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden debacles, the federal bureaucracy can’t protect its most basic data from hackers. Private companies like Target are pilloried, not least by politicians, for their data leaks. But the feds have $4 trillion to spend each year plus access to the most advanced encryption systems. Will anyone in government take responsibility for this fiasco?
A liberal Saudi reformer may not survive his Medieval sentence.
Saudi Arabia’s highest court on Sunday upheld a 1,000-lash flogging sentence against the country’s leading liberal dissident, Raif Badawi. The blogger and activist will also be jailed for 10 years and fined $266,000. Mr. Badawi has now exhausted the appellate process, and the ruling can’t be overturned save for a pardon by King Salman.
Mr. Badawi’s alleged crimes include founding the Saudi Liberal Network, an online-only forum promoting reform, individual rights and gender equality in the Kingdom, where women are still barred from driving cars and authorities behead people suspected of practicing witchcraft.
So the man who would be the next Ottoman sultan will have a harder road than he imagined. That’s the big news from Sunday’s parliamentary elections in Turkey, where voters denied President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, or AKP, a majority for the first time in 13 years.
Mr. Erdogan had hoped to get 330 seats to be able to call a referendum to change the constitution to give himself more powers as chief executive. But preliminary results as we went to press suggested that the AKP would win about 41% of the vote, or some 258 seats, well short of the 276 for a majority.
The plan will ensure that energy plants operate like cars in stop-and-go traffic, cutting efficiency.
‘Flexibility” is the advertised hallmark of the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed Clean Power Plan, which by 2030 would reduce carbon-dioxide emissions from U.S. power plants by 30% from 2005 levels. The central feature of the plan is a forced shift away from inexpensive coal-fired power. Not to worry, says EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy: “With EPA’s flexible proposal, states choose the ways we cut carbon pollution, so we can still have affordable, reliable power to grow our economy.”
Under the plan, the EPA will set a carbon-dioxide-emissions target for every state, and give each state roughly a year to develop and implement a “state plan” to meet it. Of course, the EPA must approve the plan before it can go into effect. How is that flexible? The EPA allows states to choose any combination of four “building blocks” to reach its target—reducing coal, increasing natural-gas, more renewables and nuclear energy, and enhancing energy-efficiency standards.
A former security agent shows the leader lived large while preaching revolutionary sacrifice.
For 17 years Juan Reinaldo Sánchez was part of the elite team of Cuban security specialists charged with protecting the life and privacy of Fidel Castro. But in 1994 his loyalty came into question when, with a daughter already living abroad, a brother jumped on a raft for Florida. Castro fired him.
Sánchez was imprisoned for two years and tortured. In 2008 he defected to the U.S., making him the only member of el maximo lider’s personal escort ever to flee the island.
