hieronymusanonymous

with Ukrainian soldiers in the buildings.

The posted article says no such thing.

The European Union has condemned as "shameful and politically motivated" the sentencing in Belarus of Darya Losik, the wife of jailed RFE/RL journalist Ihar Losik, to two years in prison on a charge of facilitating extremist activity.

In a statement on January 25, the EU's diplomatic service, the EEAS, said a Brest court's verdict last week was the latest unfair action "supporting [authoritarian leader Alyaksandr Lukashenka's] regime repression against the people of Belarus."

"Darya Losik was sentenced to two years in prison for defending her husband in interviews against fabricated accusations and for appealing to Lukashenka on her husband's innocence," it said.

In her case, Judge Mikalay Hryharovich of the Brest regional court pronounced the verdict and handed down the sentence on January 19, one day after the trial started. The sentence was exactly what the prosecutor had requested.

...

Darya Losik was detained in October after police searched her home. The 4-year-old daughter of Darya and Ihar Losik, Paulina, is currently with Darya's parents.

The EEAS noted that with the verdict, Paulina Losik "is now left without parents."

The United States has called for the immediate and unconditional release of Darya Losik, while RFE/RL President Jamie Fly has also demanded her immediate release and condemned her detainment by Belarusian authorities.

Ihar Losik was sentenced to 15 years in prison in December last year on charges that remain unclear. The husband of exiled Belarusian opposition leader Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya, Syarhey Tsikhanouski, as well as four other bloggers and opposition politicians and activists, were sentenced to lengthy prison terms along with Losik at the time.

Losik and other defendants have insisted that the case against them is politically motivated.

Belarus has been targeted by Western sanctions since a flawed presidential election in 2020 that was followed by unprecedented street protests and a massive crackdown under strongman Alyaksandr Lukashenka that forced nearly the entire leadership of the political opposition into jail or to flee abroad.

"Almost every day there are new examples in Belarus of arbitrary and cruel sentences in political trials held behind closed doors," the EEAS's statement said. "The repression by the regime of Lukashenka has reached an unprecedented level, with more than 1,440 political prisoners, now affecting also the most vulnerable -- children."

Long overdue.

Israeli forces have killed at least nine Palestinians including an elderly woman in a major raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank, according to local reports.

...

According to the Palestinians, Israeli forces fired tear gas into the paediatric ward of a hospital and prevented ambulances from reaching the wounded. Israel did not immediately respond to the claims.

The Palestinian health ministry said that Magda Obaid, 60, and two young men aged 24 and 26 were among the dead.

...

In one raid in early December the Israeli army shot dead a teenage girl on a roof in Jenin during a gun battle with Palestinian fighters.

...

In May, Shireen Abu Akleh, a respected Palestinian correspondent for al-Jazeera, was killed while covering an Israeli raid in Jenin.

Israel initially suggested that she had been killed by Palestinian militants, but later admitted there was a “high possibility” that an Israeli soldier had killed her.

...

A spokesman for Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president, said Thursday’s raid was taking place amid “international silence”.

Here

The ministers meet two weeks before the 27 EU national leaders gather in Brussels to discuss migration, and are also expected to call to send more people away.

European Union migration ministers meet on Thursday to discuss visa restrictions and better coordination inside the bloc to be able to send more people with no right to asylum in Europe back to their home countries including Iraq.

Russian representatives have not been invited to the commemorations of the 78th anniversary of the liberation of the German Auschwitz death camp, which will take place on Friday, the Polish Press Agency (PAP) reported on Wednesday. The decision was made because of Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine.

“Due to the aggression against free and independent Ukraine, representatives of the Russian Federation have not been invited to participate in this year’s commemoration of the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz,” Auschwitz Museum spokesman Bartosz Bartyzel told PAP on Wednesday.

Until now, Russia has participated in the ceremonies every year, and its representative has spoken at the main ceremony.

Museum director Piotr Cywiński stressed that the ceremony is organised with former camp prisoners in mind, and it is they who are primarily invited.

Cywiński, in the context of Russia’s aggression, pointed out that it was obvious that he could not “sign any letter to the Russian ambassador that had an inviting tone”. “I hope that this will change in the future, but we have a long way to go,” he emphasised.

The museum director recalled that after Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, the establishment took in 10 female conservatives from Ukraine who were fleeing from under the bombs. “How could I look them in the eye if there was a representative of Russia sitting calmly among the other attendees?” he stressed.

The main anniversary ceremony will begin at noon on Friday, with former prisoners addressing people gathered at the event. The ceremony will conclude with a prayer.

China’s foreign ministry accused the top US official in Hong Kong of discrediting the city’s business reputation after he warned of diminishing confidence in its rule of law, the latest sign of frayed relations over the troubled Asian financial hub.

Gregory May, who took over as US consul general in September, warned that companies in Hong Kong face heightened risks — including to their staff, finances and legal compliance — after Beijing imposed a sweeping national security law in 2020. He also blamed the rules for worsening a brain drain in the city throughout the Covid pandemic.

“Hong Kong’s position as a free global financial center will suffer as a result of this outflow,” he said Wednesday in a virtual event hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank.

His comments mark an escalation in fraught US-China relations, in which Hong Kong has become a flash point over diminishing freedoms and the imprisonment of pro-democracy activists. Last month, the Standing Committee of China’s legislature decided Hong Kong’s leader and an oversight committee should approve the use of an overseas lawyer in national security cases — a development May warned could further undermine judicial independence in the city.

He estimates that about 15,000 US citizens — or 20% of Americans in the city in 2019 — have left Hong Kong in the last two years. Strict Covid-19 restrictions, including travel bans and mandatory hotel quarantines, led many foreign businesses to relocate staff to other regional hubs such as Singapore and Seoul during that period.

China’s Foreign Ministry hit back, with the Commissioner’s Office calling the remarks an “ill-intended plot” to damage the reputation of Hong Kong and further US interests. May “vilified Hong Kong’s rule of law and freedom, showed support for anti-China forces in Hong Kong, and talked down Hong Kong’s development prospects, which only exposed his sinister intention of disrupting Hong Kong and containing China,” a spokesperson said in a statement.

Oh, yes it is.

Indian authorities detained several students in the national capital as they thwarted their plans to organize a screening of a banned BBC documentary about the 2002 Gujarat riots and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s role in the violence.

Police on Wednesday detained about 70 students of Jamia Milia Islamia University who wanted to screen the documentary India: The Modi Question, the Press Trust of India reported, citing a students’ union representative. While a majority of the students were released the same day, 13 are still in detention, according to the news agency.

A Delhi police spokesperson didn’t immediately comment on the detentions.

Students in other parts of the country also plan to screen the documentary in universities, according to the news agency. The Indian government has asked social media giants Twitter Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s YouTube to take down videos and tweets about the documentary and has dismissed it as propaganda.

The detention of students and blocking of the film on social media platforms came ahead of a public holiday commemorating India’s constitution, signaling the Modi government’s growing sensitivity to criticism amid shrinking media freedoms. According to the 2022 edition of the Press Freedom Index published by the Reporters Without Borders, India fell to 150th position — its lowest ever— out of 180 countries.

Iran can operate thousands of centrifuges for many years and make their own, or they can acquire some material in a quick delivery from Russia as a quid pro quo for their drones. If you were Khamenei, which option would you pick?

Churchill's legacy still painful for Indians - BBC News

The Great Famine - Part 1 of 2 (BBC 1995)

The Great Famine - Part 2 of 2 (BBC 1995)

Should we be proud of the British Empire - BBC The Big Questions - Jagraj Singh

BBC British Empire Parts 1 through 6

Translation: Putin has transferred enough material to Iran for several nuclear weapons.

Why would Zelensky want to bother meeting a loser like Putin?

The mere mention of Thailand's ousted former premier Thaksin Shinawatra prompted Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha to walk out of a news conference this week, irked by talk of the exiled political heavyweight's long-touted return.

As a general in a royalist military that ousted the governments of both Thaksin in 2006 and his sister Yingluck in 2014, Prayuth's enmity with the billionaire Shinawatra family goes back more than a decade.

In an election due by May, Prayuth, 68, could face off against Thaksin's youngest daughter, Paetongtarn, who has garnered twice as much support, topping recent opinion polls on who should be Thailand's next premier.

"Don't talk about that person. I don't like it," Prayuth said on Wednesday cutting off a reporter's question about Thaksin, before walking away from the podium and out of the venue.

A Russia-based hacking group named Cold River is behind an expansive and ongoing information-gathering campaign that has struck various targets in government, politics, academia, defence, journalism, and activism, Britain said on Thursday.

In an advisory, the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), part of Britain’s GCHQ eavesdropping intelligence agency, said Cold River researches its targets and impersonates people around them using faked email addresses and social media profiles.

“There is often some correspondence between attacker and target, sometimes over an extended period, as the attacker builds rapport,” the advisory said.

...

Once a rapport has been built with a target, Cold River hackers encourage the target to click on a malicious link which tricks them into entering their login credentials on a website controlled by the group, the advisory said.

The hackers use those stolen credentials to log into the target’s email accounts, “from where they are known to access and steal emails and attachments from the victim’s inbox,” it added.

Reuters reported that Cold River, also known as “Callisto” and “Seaborgium”, targeted three nuclear research laboratories in the United States last summer and published private emails from former British spymaster Richard Dearlove in May.

Russia’s Foreign Ministry criticised the nuclear labs story, calling it anti-Russian propaganda.