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Big Trump-Russia Report Is Coming, but How Much Will Remain Secret?

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On May 23 of this year, President Trump gave Attorney General Bill Barr “full and complete authority” to declassify information relating to the actions of the FBI and intelligence community in investigating the 2016 Trump campaign.

Granting Barr that authority “will help ensure that all Americans learn the truth about the events that occurred, and the actions that were taken, during the last presidential election and will restore confidence in our public institutions,” the White House said.

The move immediately set off speculation. What would Barr do? Would the public see a flood of secret documents, like records of informants and spying on the Trump campaign, like documents relating to the start of the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” probe, like papers on the use of the secret FISA court and wiretap authority? Congressional investigators and journalists who had long wanted to see such documents were in a state of high anticipation. . .

But now, anticipation is building again. On Friday, Justice Department inspector general Michael Horowitz sent a letter to key members of Congress saying he has finished his investigation into what Republicans call “FISA abuse,” but which GOP lawmakers suspect will be a much more wide-ranging look at the origins of the Trump-Russia probe. . .

How much will be hidden? Some lawmakers have said they think as much as one-fifth of the Horowitz report might be redacted. That would be entirely antithetical to the public’s need to understand the beginnings of the Trump-Russia affair. (Read more from “Big Trump-Russia Report Is Coming, but How Much Will Remain Secret?” HERE)

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Russia to Begin Peace Talks With Taliban

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A Taliban negotiating team arrived in Russia on Friday, less than a week after President Trump announced that peace talks with the Islamic militant group in Afghanistan were essentially “dead.” . . .

The Russian state news agency Tass, citing the Taliban’s Qatari-based spokesman, Suhail Shaheen, reported that the delegation had met with Zamir Kabulov, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s envoy to Afghanistan. A Taliban official confirmed the visit to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

Russia has been accused of aiding the Taliban as a safeguard against a burgeoning affiliate of the Islamic State (ISIS) that has close ties to the Islamic Movement of Afghanistan, a militant group in Central Asia. Russia has stepped up its defenses in Central Asia and has claimed thousands of ISIS fighters were in northern Afghanistan. . .

On Saturday, Trump announced he had called off secret meetings with Afghan government leaders and Taliban officials that were to take place at Camp David. The president noted that the Taliban had claimed responsibility for a recent attack in Kabul that left 12 dead, including an American soldier.”

“What kind of people would kill so many in order to seemingly strengthen their bargaining position?” Trump asked in a statement on Twitter, before adding that if the Taliban cannot agree to a cease-fire, “then they probably don’t have the power to negotiate a meaningful agreement anyway.” (Read more from “Russia to Begin Peace Talks With Taliban” HERE)

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Surprise: India and Russia Challenging China in South China Sea

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India is challenging Chinese influence in the South China Sea with its outreach to regional powers, including Russia, with which it has agreed to launch a maritime route that would partly go through the hotly contested waters, analysts said.

Under the memorandum of understanding signed by India and Russia – two traditional security allies – during a regional economic forum this week, a new Indo-Pacific sea route will extend from the port city of Vladivostok, in Russia’s Far East, to Chennai, on the Bay of Bengal in eastern India.

The shipping route will partly traverse the South China Sea, the scene of numerous territorial disputes involving China and neighbouring countries over the years.

In addition to cooperating on the planned maritime route, India and Russia could ramp up their alliance in the military and technological spheres, according to a joint statement released at the economic forum in Vladivostok. . .

“This could signal that India’s cooperation with Russia is now coming to a substantial phase,” Hu Zhiyong, a research fellow at the Institute of International Relations of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, said in an interview. (Read more from “Surprise: India and Russia Challenging China in South China Sea” HERE)

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Mysterious Radiation Cloud over Europe Traced to Secret Russian Nuclear Accident

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A vast cloud of nuclear radiation that spreadover continental Europe in 2017 has been traced to an unacknowledged nuclear accident in southern Russia, according to an international team of scientists.

The experts say the cloud of radiation detected over Europe in late September 2017 could only have been caused by a nuclear fuel-reprocessing accident at the Mayak Production Association, a nuclear facility in the Chelyabinsk region of the Ural Mountains in Russia, sometime between noon on Sept. 26 and noon on Sept. 27. . .

The lead author of the new research, nuclear chemist Georg Steinhauser of Leibniz University in Hanover, Germany, said that more than 1,300 atmospheric measurements from around the world showed that between 250 and 400 terabecquerels of radioactive ruthenium-106 had been released during that time.

Ruthenium-106 is a radioactive isotope of ruthenium, meaning that it has a different number of neutrons in its nucleus than the naturally occurring element has. The isotope can be produced as a byproduct during nuclear fission of uranium-235 atoms.

Although the resulting cloud of nuclear radiation was diluted enough that it caused no harm to people beneath it, the total radioactivity was between 30 and 100 times the level of radiation released after the Fukushima accident in Japan in 2011, Steinhauser told Live Science. (Read more from “Mysterious Radiation Cloud over Europe Traced to Secret Russian Nuclear Accident” HERE)

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Federal Judge Took Democrats’ Russia Collusion Lawsuit Against the Trump Campaign to the Woodshed

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. . .Back to the lawsuit, the judge was quite clear, there was no wrongdoing on behalf of the Trump campaign since they didn’t break any laws concerning obtaining the information from the Wikileaks dump. Those emails from John Podesta and the Clinton campaign aired out a lot of dirty laundry and made things quite awkward on the eve of their 2016 convention in Philadelphia. In short, the judge, a Clinton appointee, took a hatchet to the Democrats’ case, saying it was divorced from the facts (via Fox News):

A federal judge in frank terms Tuesday dismissed a lawsuit by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) against key members of the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks over hacked DNC documents, saying they “did not participate in any wrongdoing in obtaining the materials in the first place” and therefore bore no legal liability for disseminating the information.

The ruling came as Democrats increasingly have sought to tie the Trump team to illegal activity in Russia, in spite of former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s findings that the campaign in fact refused multiple offers by Russians to involve them in hacking and disinformation efforts.

The DNC asserted in court filings that the Trump team’s meetings “with persons connected to the Russian government during the time that the Russian GRU agents were stealing the DNC’s information” were “circumstantial evidence” that they were conspiring with the Russians to “steal and disseminate the DNC’s materials.”

(Read more from “Federal Judge Took Democrats’ Russia Collusion Lawsuit Against the Trump Campaign to the Woodshed” HERE)

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South Korea Fires Warning Shots as Russian, Chinese Military Planes Enter Airspace

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South Korea has reportedly fired warning shots after Russian military planes violated the nation’s airspace on Tuesday, according to South Korea’s Defense Ministry.

The Associated Press reported that, according to South Korea’s Defense Ministry, “multiple Russian military planes violated the South Korean airspace off its east coast” and “Chinese military planes also intruded into South Korea’s aerial identification zone.” . . .

The provocation comes after “two Russian military aircraft violated South Korea’s air defense identification zone [last Thursday], prompting the Air Force to scramble fighter jets in response,” the Korea Herald reported.

The incident comes as North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un “inspected a large newly built submarine, state news agency KCNA reported on Tuesday, potentially signalling continued development of a submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) program,” Reuters reported. . .

“We can clearly see that it is a massive submarine — much larger than the existing one that’s been well known since 2014,” said Ankit Panda, a senior fellow at the U.S.-based Federation of American Scientists. “What I find significant about the political messaging here is that this is the first time since a February 2018 military parade that he has inspected a military system clearly designed to carry and deliver nuclear weapons. I take that as an ominous signal that we should be taking Kim Jong Un’s end-of-year deadline for the implementation of a change in U.S. policy with the utmost seriousness.” (Read more from “South Korea Fires Warning Shots as Russian, Chinese Military Planes Enter Airspace” HERE)

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Russian Intelligence Agency Suffers ‘Largest Data Breach in Its History’

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. . .According to BBC Russia, the Russian intelligence agency’s computer systems have been penetrated by an outfit calling itself “0v1ru$” and 7.5 terabytes of data has been stolen. 0v1ru$ then passed the data along to the larger, well known group Digital Revolution who then disseminated the information to various media outlets. . .

Forbes:

BBC Russia broke the news that 0v1ru$ had breached SyTech’s servers and shared details of contentious cyber projects, projects that included social media scraping (including Facebook and LinkedIn), targeted collection and the “de-anonymization of users of the Tor browser.” The BBC described the breach as possibly “the largest data leak in the history of Russian intelligence services.”

As well as defacing SyTech’s homepage with the Yoba Face, 0v1ru$ also detailed the project names exposed: “Arion”, “Relation”, “Hryvnia,” alongside the names of the SyTech project managers. The BBC report claims that no actual state secrets were exposed.

The projects themselves appear to be a mix of social media scraping (Nautilus), targeted collection against internet users seeking to anonymize their activities (Nautilus-S), data collection targeting Russian enterprises (Mentor), and projects that seem to relate to Russia’s ongoing initiative to build an option to separate the internal internet from the world wide web (Hope and Tax-3).

(Read more from “Russian Intelligence Agency Suffers ‘Largest Data Breach in Its History'” HERE)

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The OTHER Malaysian Airlines Flight: Three Russians and Ukranian Charged with Shooting down MH17

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By Townhall. Just days after The Atlantic published their comprehensive investigation on the whereabouts of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, which disappeared into thin air in March 2014, a European joint task force revealed it has leveled charges against four men — one Ukranian and three Russians — for a second Malaysian airlines tragedy: the July 2014 explosion of MH17.

The BBC reports that the four men, who investigators believe were in direct contact with Russian officials, are accused of transporting missiles into an area of Ukraine for the purpose of shooting down a passenger jet. The four “did not push the button themselves,” investigators say, but provided the local milita with the means used to down the Malaysian airlines flight.

The joint investigative team is Dutch and plans to prosecute the four men — Igor Girkin, Sergei Dubinsky and Oleg Pulatov from Russia, and Ukrainian Leonid Kharchenkoin — in the Netherlands under Dutch law. The trial won’t begin until 2020, however, since Dutch authorities say they still have at least eight more persons of interest to investigate in relation to the case.

Investigators believe that Girkin, a former Russian intelligence official, was in “direct contact with the Russian Federation” and that he and his team were well aware of what they were arming local militias to do, and that they’d reported their progress to Russian officials. . .

Unsurprisingly, Russia has refused to cooperate with the investigation and disputes the Dutch investigators’ findings. Russian officials say they do not believe any of their anti-aircraft missiles ever crossed the Russian border into Ukraine, even though investigators believe that the missile that hit MH17 belonged to the “53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile brigade,” based in Kursk. (Read more from “The OTHER Malaysian Airlines Flight: Three Russians and Ukranian Charged with Shooting down MH17” HERE)

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MH17: Four Charged with Shooting down Plane over Ukraine

By BBC News. For the first time since Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was shot down in July 2014, prosecutors have announced charges against suspects in the case. . .

The passenger jet left Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport at 10:15 GMT on 17 July 2014 and was due to arrive at Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia the following day.

A few hours after take-off, the plane lost contact with air traffic control about 50km (30 miles) from the Russia-Ukraine border.

At the time, an armed conflict was raging on the ground in eastern Ukraine between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian government forces, and several government military aircraft had been downed in the previous weeks, while government air strikes were being carried out on rebel-held areas.

The plane crashed in the Donetsk area, in territory controlled by separatists. Parts of the wreckage were found distributed over an area of about 50 sq km (19 square miles). (Read more from “MH17: Four Charged with Shooting down Plane over Ukraine” HERE)

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Russia to Make Film Blaming U.S. And CIA for Nuclear Accident

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By PJ Media. . .Recently, HBO broadcast the emotionally gripping account of what happened during the 1986 disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. The series Chernobyl, which ended a few days ago, depicted the stupidity, negligence, bureaucratic bungling, heroism, and the conspiracy of silence from the government that kept the true cost in lives and rubles of the disaster secret for decades. The series was a huge hit — even in Russia. . .

But the portrayal in the series of Soviet government culpability in keeping vital information from the operators at the power plant and the KGB efforts to hush the whole thing up apparently didn’t sit well with Putin’s regime. The Cultural Ministry is funding a film of the disaster that tells a much different story.

The premise is ludicrous because the seeds of the reactor’s destruction were sown before the plant was even built. There was a fatal flaw in the RBMK reactor design that led directly to the explosion of the reactor core. Inadequately trained plant personnel, who were conducting a safety test at the time of the explosion, were also a major contributing factor.

But in Putin’s Russia, up is down, black is white, and, when in doubt, always blame America and the CIA:

‘One theory holds that Americans had infiltrated the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and many historians do not deny that, on the day of the explosion, an agent of the enemy’s intelligence services was present at the station,’ Muradov explained to the Moscow Times.

(Read more from “Russia to Make Film Blaming U.S. And CIA for Nuclear Accident” HERE)

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Russia Is Making Its Own ‘Correct’ Version of Chernobyl That Will Blame AMERICA and the CIA for the Nuclear Disaster Following the Unexpected Success of the New HBO Show

By Daily Mail. Furious at the breakout success of the HBO series Chernobyl, Russia is planning to make its own series portraying the nuclear disaster as the work of an American CIA operative.

Russian television broadcaster NTV announced that it had commissioned the series, and principal photography has already begun in Belarus under director Alexei Muradov.

In response to the HBO series’ depiction of Soviet bureaucrats bungling the response both during and after the 1986 nuclear accident in the Ukrainian SSR, the Russian version plans to tell the tale of a heroic KGB agent trying to thwart a supposed CIA sabotage plot. . .

The Chernobyl disaster occurred during a failed safety test of the No. 4 reactor in the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, and there is no credible evidence to suggest that the accident was part of a CIA plot.

The HBO miniseries covering the disaster finished its five-episode run on June 3, and as of Thursday had the highest audience ranking on IMDb, with 9.6 out of 10 stars – beating even such mega-hit series as Breaking Bad and Game Of Thrones. (Read more from “Russia Is Making Its Own ‘Correct’ Version of Chernobyl That Will Blame AMERICA and the CIA for the Nuclear Disaster Following the Unexpected Success of the New HBO Show” HERE)

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Russia Cuts Disturbing Homosexual Sex Scene from ‘Rocketman’

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A Russian media company has reportedly cut all scenes featuring gay sex and men kissing from the Elton John biopic Rocketman because of laws banning “homosexual propaganda”.

An estimated five minutes of footage have been cut from the film in an attempt to play down the sexuality of one of the world’s most famous gay celebrities for a conservative Russian audience.

The cuts were first reported by Russian journalists after the film’s 30 May release in Moscow. Anton Dolin, a popular Russian film critic, wrote on Facebook that “all scenes with kissing, sex and oral sex between men have been cut out… The nastiest part is that the final caption has been removed from the finale.”

While the original caption said that John lives with his husband and that they are raising children together, the Russian version says instead that he established an Aids foundation and continues to work with his musical partner. . . .

On Friday, John and the film’s makers released a joint statement condemning the cuts: “We reject in the strongest possible terms the decision to pander to local laws and censor Rocketman for the Russian market, a move we were unaware of until today. (Read more from “Russia Cuts Disturbing Homosexual Sex Scene from ‘Rocketman'” HERE)

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