Putin and his Like have murdered Millions in Russia - TURTH HURTS DOESN'T IT VLAD

Russia’s Supreme Court has ordered the country’s oldest human rights watchdog to shut down for refusing to toe the Kremlin line that it was a “foreign agent.”

The ruling against Memorial International—which fought for human rights in contemporary Russia while also investigating Soviet repressions—came despite more than 138,000 people signing a petition to save the group, with Mikhail Gorbachev and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dmitry Muratov among those demanding that authorities back off.

The Prosecutor General’s Office only doubled down, however, demanding Memorial be liquidated for supposedly failing to properly display the controversial “foreign agents” label on its website and published materials. The label has long been viewed as a tool for political repression against groups critical of the Kremlin.

Yan Rachinsky, the head of the organization, vowed after Tuesday’s ruling to appeal the decision and go to the European Court of Human Rights, if necessary.

‘Memorial’ Human Rights Activists in Russia Face Arrest, Arson, Murder

While it has long been clear that the organization was in the Kremlin’s crosshairs, the order to shut the group down sparked outrage at the court. At least 200 supporters of Memorial had braved brutal December temperatures to throw their support behind the group. Several demonstrators were reportedly detained after the ruling, and chants of “shame!” erupted in the courtroom as the decision was read out.

The Prosecutor General’s Office had complained that Memorial “creates the false image of the U.S.S.R. as a terrorist state, and whitewashes and rehabilitates Nazi criminals.”

Supporters have argued that the group provoked the wrath of Russian authorities by doing the exact opposite, however. The group has long been seen as crucial in fending off the whitewashing of Josef Stalin and the Stalin-era secret police, a trend that has crept up in Russia in recent years, and led to concerns of a full revision of history under Vladimir Putin.

The group sought to preserve the memory of victims of Stalin-era horrors and cautioned against leaving them out of history—a practice that apparently struck a nerve with authorities.

According to The Moscow Times, a state prosecutor who argued against Memorial in court did nothing to hide his disdain for the group’s scrutiny of Soviet-era abuses, asking, “Why do we, the offspring of victors, have to repent and be embarrassed, instead of being proud of our glorious past?”

Frame-Up: The Outrageous Arrest of a Chechen Human Rights Defender

The group has also documented abuses in Chechnya, as well as Russia’s growing list of political prisoners in recent years, including Alexei Navalny and other members of the opposition.

Many view the group’s closure as the final nail in the coffin of Russian civil society.

The veteran human rights activist Lev Ponomaryov, in a blog post immediately after Tuesday’s ruling, said the decision means “that in the incoming [year of] 2022, repression will be unleashed to the max.”

“Happy New Year, future victims of repression!” he titled the blog post.

In an open letter penned in mid-November, dozens of prominent Russian figures had warned the group’s demise would mark one of the most detrimental events of the 21st century.

“The disappearance of Memorial in Russia will become a symbol of a deep moral fall and the definitive symbolic estrangement of the Russian man from the civilization of the 21st century,” the letter read.

“The wounds that have not healed over the 30 post-Soviet years are bleeding again.”

Washington Cesspool Is Alive and Well

Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell described the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 as “horrendous” in a surprising interview Thursday, and said he was looking forward to what the House select committee investigating it discovers.

“I think the fact finding is interesting. We’re all going to be watching it,” McConnell told Spectrum News. “It was a horrendous event, and I think what they’re seeking to find out is something the public needs to know.”

The Staff: Just a quick question. I agree with the above but I would also like to know just how deep into China his wife is with Her business dealings. Ship building, crew training and much more. Also how about telling the American people about the old slush fund that We the People paid for to pay off men and women who were sexually assaulted by congressmen and/or senators? That sort hit and then disappeared like the swamp being drained.

This Explains What the Liberals Believe

 

Putin - Your a Bully who wants to Restore the old ways,

The Russian foreign ministry released a list of actions on Friday that it wants NATO to take amid the ongoing threat of an invasion of Ukraine, Reuters reported.

Russia demanded NATO rescind its 2008 promise to Ukraine and Georgia that the two nations would join the organization, as well as pledge that it would not deploy weapons to countries that are along its border, Reuters reported.

The requirement would give Russia an effective veto power over NATO membership, which both the U.S. and Ukraine have said is off the table, Reuters reported.

“It is a fundamental principle that every nation has the right to choose its own path … including what kind of security arrangements it wants to be part of,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Friday.

“NATO’s relationship with Ukraine is going to be decided by the 30 NATO allies and Ukraine, no one else,” he added. “We cannot accept that Russia is trying to re-establish a system where big powers … have spheres of influence, where they can control and decide what other members do.”

The foreign ministry alleged that Ukraine becoming a part of NATO would lead to defense weapons being placed in the country that would create security risks for Russia, Reuters reported.

“Such irresponsible behavior creates unacceptable threats to our security and provokes serious military risks for all parties involved, right up to the point of a large-scale conflict in Europe,” the ministry’s statement said.

“In the fundamental interests of European security, it is necessary to formally disavow the decision of the 2008 NATO Bucharest summit that ‘Ukraine and Georgia will become NATO members,’” it added.

U.S. intelligence estimates Russia has amassed approximately 100,000 troops at its border with Ukraine and devised plans to invade. Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov said a Russian invasion would prove to be a “bloody massacre.”

The Staff: Putin is just a bully who has taken control of a country that cries for freedom. No one wants to control Russia but the bully has to keep telling his citizens war could happen anytime. The only war would ever start is if HE started it cover up the failure of his time in power. Should the bully start another invasion, the world should bankrupt him buy cutting oil income and gas so Russia would fail and the Army raise up and remove him. Remove him from the banking system and make his currency zero in value.   

STOP CHINA

China has been buying up agricultural land in the United States for years, a trend that a U.S. lawmaker said must end in order to safeguard the U.S. food supply chain.

For this reason, Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.) introduced an amendment to the House’s fiscal year 2022 agriculture appropriations legislation (H.R.4356) in June. In a recent interview with NTD, the lawmaker explained what his amendment would do.

“China, frankly, is an adversary. We want to make sure that we control our food supply. I think it’s a natural, important, national security issue,” Newhouse said.

The amendment was adopted unanimously by the House Appropriations Committee on June 30. On July 29, the House approved the agriculture appropriations legislation as part of a package of seven 2022 spending measures (H.R.4502).

If enacted, the amendment would empower the secretary of agriculture to prohibit the purchase of agricultural land in the United States by companies owned by China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia, according to the language of the legislation. In China, there’s no distinction between private businesses and state-owned companies, since the Chinese Communist Party can exercise control over private firms through Chinese law or through embedded Party cells.

The measure also would prohibit the four countries from taking part in programs administered by the secretary of agriculture.

Newhouse said the current language of his amendment has been changed. He had initially named only China (pdf), but not the three other nations.

“During the rules process, it was changed somewhat by the Democrats to include several other countries,” he said. “But the fact remains that communist China is the threat. They’re the ones that are buying up most of the assets of that list of nefarious countries that are not our friends. And that’s where the focus should be.”

Chinese firms have been buying U.S. agricultural land for the past decade. According to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Chinese investors controlled 191,652 acres in the United States worth about $1.86 million before the start of 2020, compared to 13,720 acres, worth $81,425, as of the end of 2010.

Workers inside Smithfield Foods’ Sioux Falls, S.D., pork processing plant wear protective gear and are separated by plastic partitions as they carve up meat on May 20, 2020. (Courtesy Smithfield Foods via AP)

Buying Companies

One of the deals involved China’s meat processor WH Group, which purchased Virginia-based Smithfield Foods for $4.7 billion in 2013. With the purchase, the Chinese company now owns the largest pork producer in the United States, as well as 146,000 acres of prime farmland.

Another deal involved two Chinese entrepreneurs who bought a 22,000-acre ranch in Utah in 2011 to grow alfalfa and export it to China.

China’s agricultural investments haven’t been limited to the United States. According to a 2018 USDA report (pdf), China’s direct overseas investments in agriculture, forestry, and fishing jumped to $3.3 billion in 2016 from $300 million in 2009. The report found that these overseas investments were closely aligned with the communist regime’s policies, including the “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI).

“Chinese officials have ambitious strategic plans for agricultural investments to reshape patterns of agricultural trade and increase China’s influence in global markets,” the report reads.

Beijing launched the BRI in 2013 to develop Beijing-centered land and maritime trade routes in an effort to boost the country’s geopolitical influence.

Chinese overseas investments also include buying and investing in foreign agribusinesses. According to the report, WH Group acquired California-based pork processor Clougherty Packing and a meat and poultry processing company in Poland in 2017.

Another Chinese firm, Brights Food, invested in seven foreign companies between 2010 and 2016, according to the report. These companies included a dairy firm in New Zealand, a yogurt company in Australia, a wine business in France, a cereal company in the UK, and an olive oil company in Italy.

Newhouse said he took “proactive” action with his amendment to address the challenge posed by Chinese investments before “the problem gets so big that we can’t correct it.”

“We see the trend,” he said. “We see the number of acres and companies that have been purchased by the communist government of China. And we should stop it now.”

BOYCOTT CHINA

The approaching Beijing Winter Olympics - the most divisive games since the 1936 Berlin Olympics - face several challenges: Boycott calls in the West; a Muslim gulag with more than one million detainees in Xinjiang; the new omicron variant of COVID-19; and a silenced #MeToo accuser, Peng Shuai, who is China's top tennis player. No wonder Beijing is lobbying U.S. businesses, warning that they cannot expect to make money in China if they stay silent.

The calls for a coordinated boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics (labeled by critics the "Genocide Games") raise the question of whether such action can help influence China's behavior under a president whose record in power is increasingly drawing comparisons to the past century's most brutal rulers.

Robert O'Brien, national security adviser to then-President Trump, last year equated Xi Jinping to Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. Some others have compared Xi to Adolf Hitler, even coining the nickname "Xitler." Xi, for his part, has cultivated a Mao Zedong-style personality cult and embarked on completing the expansionist agenda that the communist China's founder left unfinished.

Indeed, Xi has sought to model himself on Mao, the 20th century's top butcher. Like Mao Zedong Thought, Xi Jinping Thought has been enshrined in China's constitution and made the central doctrine guiding the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Xi, like Mao, is reverently referred to as renmin lingxiu, or "people's leader."

China's new Mao, while ideologically committed to classical Marxism-Leninism, is apparently seeking to build fascism with Chinese characteristics.

Under Xi, China has emerged as a wrathful, expansionist power that pursues "wolf warrior" tactics and debt-trap diplomacy and flouts international law at will. Two successive U.S. administrations have described as genocide Xi's Xinjiang gulag, the largest mass incarceration of people on religious grounds since the Nazi period.

The international costs of Xi's despotism are apparent from the devastating consequences of the China-originating pandemic. Two years on, the world still does not know whether COVID-19 began as a natural spillover from wildlife or was triggered by the accidental leak of a lab-enhanced virus in Wuhan. What is apparent, though, is that Xi's regime lied about the initial spread of the disease, hid evidence of human-to-human transmission and silenced doctors who sought to warn about the emergence of a novel coronavirus.

More ominously, a massive cover-up in China to obscure the genesis of the virus suggests the world may never know the truth. Beijing has refused to cooperate with international investigations, characterizing them as "origin-tracing terrorism," and instead peddled conspiracy theories.

Thanks to Xi's scofflaw actions, China's global image has been badly dented, forcing the country to increasingly rely on its coercive power. According to a global survey, unfavorable views of China are at or near historic highs in most advanced economies.

But instead of undertaking a course correction, Xi is doubling down on his renegade actions, as underscored by China's stepped-up bullying of Taiwan. After Beijing's success in swallowing Hong Kong, redrawing the geopolitical map of the South China Sea and changing the territorial status quo in the Himalayan borderlands with India, Nepal and Bhutan, risk is growing that Xi's expansionism could make Taiwan its next target.

Beijing will have the honor of becoming the world's first city to host both a summer and winter Olympics. But since the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics, the human rights situation in China has worsened, with Xi establishing a techno-authoritarian state whose soaring budget for internal security has overtaken the country's massive military budget. An increasingly repressive internal machinery, aided by an Orwellian surveillance system, has fostered a state strategy to culturally smother ethnic minorities in their traditional homelands, including through demographic change and harsh policing.

It was in 2015 that Beijing defeated Almaty (Kazakhstan) to win the bid to host the 2022 Winter Olympics. Just in the period since 2015, China, among other things, has established forward military bases on human-made islands in the South China Sea, set up the Xinjiang gulag, militarized the Himalayan borderlands, weaponized debt and gobbled up Hong Kong.

The world must not turn a blind eye to such actions, which thus far have not invited any meaningful Western sanctions. Xi has only been emboldened by the fact that his draconian, expansionist actions have essentially been cost-free.

Just as other powers' appeasement emboldened Hitler's expansionism, leading to World War II, the international failure to impose tangible costs for Chinese aggression is likely to beget more aggression. Indeed, the present business-as-usual approach to China is tantamount to appeasement.

If the Beijing Winter Olympics were held without any censure of the Xi regime, it would be an insult to every Uyghur, every Tibetan, every jailed Hong Kong democracy activist and every imprisoned Chinese political dissident. A boycott-free Games that wrap up smoothly would only encourage Xi to embark on fresh repression and expansionism.

Make no mistake: If Xi's China stays on its present path, open conflict with the West and with its neighbors, from Japan to India, would become inevitable.

For the CCP, sports and politics have long been inseparable. From its boycott of the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne (Australia) to its more recent bullying tactics against the N.B.A., England's Premier League and others, the party has treated sports as politics by other means. It has used threats of withdrawing lucrative sports contracts, broadcast deals and sponsorship opportunities to buy silence on its human rights record.

When China can wield sports as a political weapon, is there any reason why democratic powers should avoid giving it a taste of its own medicine to help put the CCP on notice? A coordinated boycott of the Games would convey to the Chinese people that the CCP's rogue actions risk isolating China.

Harmonized action on the Games, even if largely symbolic, could serve as a first step toward galvanizing a larger international movement against Xi's regime, if not triggering a "boycott China" movement along the lines of the sustained global boycott that helped end the apartheid system in South Africa.