Opinion | The killing of Alexei Navalny four weeks before the Russian presidential election appears to portray an increasingly brazen and self-assured Kremlin.
— Read on www.themoscowtimes.com/
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MORNING NEWS NOTES: Haiti and Steve Bannon
HAITI
Notes from Friday’s AMVO (Steve Bannon)
• Steve Bannon and his ilk are on AMVO television yapping on about hundreds of thousands of Haitians being essentially smuggled to this country by the federal government. It’s the same “immigrant scare” theme they have been pumping for years. A guest on Bannon’s show is talking about Haitians are being flown out of Haiti (where the airport is closed) and taken either to this country or to Guantanamo.
• Bannon begins to rave on about Haitians being able to claim amnesty because at Guantanamo they would be on US soil. The guest corrects Bannon and points out that Guantanamo is not considered legally US soil. Bannon is so ignorant he does not remember that Guantanamo was established as the place the Bush administration put all their captured “terrorists” (most of whom are still in custody because they can’t convict them) because it wasn’t on US soil.
• The fact that Guantanamo was outside US soil was the reason it was chosen because with prisoners on Guantanamo, the federal government didn’t need to give “enemy combatants“ the same constitutional rights granted to those in the US.
• Perhaps Bannon is distracted by the imminent threat of his own trial.
See https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/25/politics/steve-bannon-trial-date/index.html
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After Hamas’ announcement, the main points of contention in talks to release the Israeli hostages in Gaza involve the demand to allow residents of northern Gaza to return home amid its fears of the group regaining control of the area
Amid the deluge of reports on a potential hostage deal, two events this weekend attested to the parties’ willingness to try to reach an agreement. The first was Hamas’ decision not to fan the flames on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount/Al-Aqsa compound on the first Friday of the holy Muslim month of Ramadan,contrary to early assessments in Israel and the terror organization’s announcement Thursday evening, under international pressure, of its detailed response to the most recent hostage deal proposal.
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Plaintiffs presented substantial evidence showing that anyone paying attention would have noticed something was quite amiss in Coffee County.
BRIAN KEMP A D BRAD RAFFENSPERGER ARE NOT HEROES. THEY WILL BE PART OF ALLOWING REPUBLICANS TO SUBVERT ANOTHER ELECTION IN 2024.
Excerpts:
In an Atlanta courtroom in January, a judge heard testimony about a brazen plot by Trump supporters to unlawfully access and obtain copies of Georgia’s voting system software in Coffee County in support of Donald Trump’s effort to steal the 2020 presidential election. The evidence presented also revealed that there were efforts to gain access in at least three other Georgia counties, and that Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger did exactly nothing to investigate the Coffee software heist, or the other reported attempts, even though there was ample evidence that something improper had gone on.
While reporters were preoccupied with the spicier allegations threatening to derail the Fulton County DA’s case, the little-watched three-and-a-half-week trial revealed new information about the scope of the plot to take voting system software in Georgia by election deniers, and the jaw-dropping lack of action by Secretary of State Raffensperger to respond.
During the trial the plaintiffs presented substantial evidence showing that anyone paying attention would have noticed something was quite amiss in Coffee County, and that should have triggered an investigation by Raffensperger’s office, but didn’t. (Some of this evidence is outlined in an earlier Slate article.)
But the trial also revealed new information about attempts to gain access to Georgia’s voting machines in other counties. Plaintiffs revealed an email chain that showed that the election supervisor in Butts County had been contacted by Georgia’s (now) Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, requesting a forensic examination of the county’s voting software. (Willis’ criminal investigation of Jones was derailed when she was disqualified from the case by a conflict of interest.) Bartow County’s election supervisor testified that he’d been asked by his local GOP chair—and several unidentified attorneys—for access to copy his county’s election software. He replied with a hard no, and reported it to the secretary of state’s office.
Plaintiffs also presented a text message from a former member of the Coffee County Board of Elections to the attorney for neighboring Ware County, with a link to a story from the Gateway Pundit. The story claimed that the Trump team had obtained a voting machine from Ware, and the message said, “You have anyone to verify through?” The Ware county attorney responds, “I will verify,” and responds with a jpeg labeled “ware-county-confirmation,” but the actual image was never provided to the plaintiffs, and can’t be viewed.
And yet, even with multiple attempts to access voting systems, which the secretary was alerted to, witnesses from the secretary’s office testified that there was no investigation opened into any of these events.
The lack of any investigation by the secretary’s office looks even worse when juxtaposed with a video of Raffensperger’s top aide, Gabe Sterling, dismissively telling an audience at the Carter Center in April 2022 that the alleged voting system intrusions in Ware and Coffee counties conclusively did not happen. How could the secretary’s office determine that the breaches didn’t happen when it didn’t even look?
It gets worse. Back in early 2022, when plaintiffs first presented evidence that the breach in Coffee County had likely occurred, the secretary of state claimed to the public and the court that an investigation had been opened
But during the trial, the secretary’s investigator assigned to the Coffee County breach allegations testified that he had been told to “hold off,” and that the secretary’s office never actually did any investigation of the Coffee County breach.
After months of holding off, the secretary’s investigators turned the matter over to the Georgia Bureau of Investigations and the state attorney general. The GBI has since been excoriated for doing a “badly inadequate” job, and the Georgia attorney general has not charged anyone involved.
Which brings us back to the other trial in Fulton County. Currently, with the stunning lack of action from the state of Georgia, the Fulton County DA is the only law enforcement office that has sought to hold those directly involved in alleged voting system software breach accountable. (There are several others implicated who have not been charged.)
And even though these potential crimes were caught on video, and documents show that the plan involved efforts to breach voting systems in multiple states, and that it was allegedly directed and paid for by Powell for the Trump campaign, publicly available evidence indicates there is no federal investigation into this multistate plan.
What we know for sure is that allies of Donald Trump who sought to overturn the 2020 presidential election gained copies of the voting software used in Georgia and in other states. These events present serious threats to the 2024 election and future elections. Yet, as the Curling trial has established, they’ve been plainly ignored by the Georgia secretary of state and attorney general.
It’s well past time for the Department of Justice to step in and investigate. This matter is too serious for the federal government to continue to stand by and rely on local officials, who clearly couldn’t be bothered to act on their own.
— Read on slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/03/trump-infiltrate-voting-machines-georgia-2020.html
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The pressure points that give America leverage over Israel.
— Read on www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/how-biden-can-get-tough-netanyahu -
The Russian autocrat’s answer to the problem of succession.
— Read on www.foreignaffairs.com/russian-federation/vladimir-putin-forever-putinism -
Ukrainian drone strikes have been able to hit refineries deep in Russian territory, indicating a new vulnerability. But it is unclear if that will impact the fighting.
— Read on www.nytimes.com/2024/03/14/world/europe/ukraine-drone-strike-russia-oil.html -
Ukrainians living in regions illegally annexed by Russia are being coerced to vote in the presidential election of their wartime occupier, Vladimir Putin, an exercise denounced by Ukraine as an illegitimate effort by Moscow to tighten control over its …
— Read on abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/ukrainians-living-russian-occupation-coerced-vote-putin-108122513 -
MORNING NEWS NOTES
ISRAEL
- The US and the international community are calling for a rejuvenated Palestinian Authority as a possibility of governing post-war Gaza, but it seems President Abbas is going to appoint an insider as the new Prime Minister (NYT).
- Some 2.2 million Gazans are now in Rafah and Egypt is closing down entry into Egypt as Netanyahu continues to maintain that Israel is going after Hamas fighters in Rafah (NYT)
- Canada promised equal amounts of money to aid Palestinian and Israeli women who were victims of sexual assault. Israel’s special envoy for combating Antisemitism accused Canada of creating a false equivalency.
- Stabbing attack in Southern Israel. The assailant is a 22-year-old Israeli citizen originally from Gaza. The man grew up in Gaza, moved to Israel and was granted citizenship. Police ask the public to be “alert to suspicious individuals and objects” (Haaretz).
- Senate Majority Leader, Shumer, calls for new elections in Israel (Haaretz).
- IDF says it plans to “flood” Gaza with aid. This is in response to international pressure (Haaretz).
- The international aid ship has left Cyprus for Gaza, but it is still unclear how the ship will be unloaded, or the aid distributed (Haaretz). (Note: Several commentators have remarked on how this could easily become a disaster.)
- Hamas has drawn Israel into a trap. It wins politically every time Israel kills Palestinian civilians (Opinion, Haaretz).
- “…at no point in the last five months has there been a clear Israeli policy on allowing supplies into the Strip (Haaretz).”
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Netanyahu is trying his utmost to avoid the truth that even if Israelis support the war, they wish he was not the one leading it
The Agam Institute Jewish sample studies found that 48 percent of Jewish Israelis want Netanyahu to resign either after the war or right now – the highest of the 13 polls in this series; and the bigger portion says now (29 percent). Nearly 60 percent say he is motivated by political considerations in the conduct of this war in the same study – and you can bet that if Arab voters had been asked, the average would go up.
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News Notes
Wednesday 13 March 2024
BOEING WHISTLEBLOWER
Al-Sibai, Noor (3/12/24) “Boeing Whistleblower’s Attorneys Say they don’t see Any Indication of Suicide Risk. Yahoo News.
- This death occurred during the several day process of giving a deposition against Boeing.
- John Barnett, a 62-year-old man, had traveled to Charleston, South Carolina from Louisiana to finally be deposed for his 2017 Occupational Safety Health Administration (OSHA) complaint against Boeing, his ex-employer.
- Barnett’s attorney, Brian Knowles, told the Corporate Crime Reporter blog, that he failed to show up at one of the sessions over the weekenk. His attorneys were unable to contact him and so phoned his hotel.
- Barnett’s body was found at the hotel where he was staying in his truck in the parking lot.
- His lawyers are urging investigators to take a closer look after an initial determination that the death wounds were self-inflicted.
- One of Barnett’s attorneys said that he (Barnett) was reaching the end of a retaliation lawsuit and “was in very good spirits” Barnett was “looking forward to putting this phase of his life behind him and moving on.”
- Lawyers released an email statement which read, in part: “We didn’t see any indication that he would take his own life.” “No one can believe it.”
- Barnett alleged that he experienced stress as his superior began retaliating against him for raising safety concerns.
Editor (3/10/2024) Corporate Crime Reporter blog. Boeing Whistleblower Found dead in Charleston After Brek in Depositions.
- John Barnett’s lawyer called this a “tragic day.” “The defense examined him all day yesterday (Friday) and did not finish. We agreed to continue this morning…Turkewitz (one of the attorneys) kept calling…his phone would go to voicemail…”
- For almost 30 years, Barnett was a quality manager at Boeing.
- Attorneys said: “He loved his work”
- For twenty-eight years he was with Boeing in Everett, Washington. Then, he was transferred in 2010 to the new plant in Charleston. That’s where Boeing builds the 787 Dreamliner.
- According to an article in CCR, “Things started to going downhill,” after Barnett moved to Charleston.
- He gave an interview to CCR in 2019. “The new leadership didn’t understand processes.” “They brought them in from other areas of the company.” “They said they were all buddies there.”
- “That entire team came down. They were from the military side…(their approach was) we are going to do it the way we want to do it. Their motto at the time was – we are in Charleston and we can do anything we want.”
- “They started pressuring us to not document defects, to work outside the procedures, to allow defective material to be installed without being corrected. They started bypassing procedures and not maintaining configurement control of airplanes, not maintaining control of non-conforming parts – they just wanted to get the planes pushed out the door and make the cash register ring.”
- Barnett had been speaking to reporters recently about Boeing production issues, including the incident involving the mid-air blow out of a door plug on an Alaska Airlines flight on January 5, causing decompression of the airplane. (See note)
- “Once you understand what’s happening inside of Boeing, you’ll see why we’re seeing these kinds of issues,” Barnett told ABC News in Australia in late January.
Article about Barnett
- CCR, Interview with John Barnett (below)
- https://www.corporatecrimereporter.com/news/200/john-barnett-on-why-he-wont-fly-on-a-boeing-787-dreamliner/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CThe%20defective%20parts%20was%20the,tracking%20non%20conforming%20parts%20properly.%E2%80%9D
Articles about Boeing
• Pilot lost control of Boeing jet because controls went blank. https://www.yahoo.com /news/pilot-lost-control-boeing-jet-183102753.html
Notes:
- (3/13/24) Boeing is refusing to give information to the NTSB. Managers knew before and requested to have the plane grounded. The airline refused.
- (MSNBC is covering the “Kate photograph” controversy, but not the killing of Boeing whistleblower, or at least not more than a mention.)
Law, Power, and Justice 