Lee Heidhues 8.26.2022

Julian Assange has been been persecuted by the Brits and the Americans long enough.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indictment_and_arrest_of_Julian_Assange

The Wikileaks Whistleblower who exposed American  human rights abuses in Afghanistan and Iraq performed a heroic public service.

Assange has been under house arrest, first in the Ecuadoran Embassy in London, and for three years in a British prison while his fight against extradition continues.

This is a human rights violation of the first order. The American government needs to stand down and let Julian Assange, now 51, get on with his life.

Excerpted from The Guardian 8.26.2022

The Australian prime minister, Anthony Albanese, has previously stated “enough is enough” regarding Assange’s ongoing detention.

Lawyers for WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange have filed an appeal against his extradition to the US, as the United Nations human rights chief lends support to the Australian’s cause.

Assange, 51, has been indicted on 17 espionage charges in the US and one charge of computer misuse over WikiLeaks’ publication of thousands of military and diplomatic documents leaked by whistleblower Chelsea Manning. The charges carry a maximum sentence of 175 years in prison.

WikiLeaks says Assange’s legal team filed “perfected grounds of appeal” in the UK’s high court against the US and the UK home secretary, Priti Patel, who approved his extradition in June.

Assange’s lawyers argue he is “being prosecuted and punished for his political opinions”.

His wife said the prosecution was unlawful. “Overwhelming evidence has emerged proving that the US prosecution against my husband is a criminal abuse,” Stella Assange said on Twitter on Saturday.

“The high court judges will now decide whether Julian is given the opportunity to put the case against the US before open court, and in full, at the appeal.”

Assange remains in London’s Belmarsh prison, where he has been in detention since April 2019.

A UK judge blocked his extradition last year but the US government successfully appealed in the high court.

The appeal comes after the UN human rights chief, Michelle Bachelet, met with Assange’s lawyers and his wife in Geneva.

Advocacy group the Assange Defence Committee told AAP they detailed to her his deteriorating health, with the Australian publisher suffering a mini-stroke recently.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/aug/27/julian-assange-files-appeal-against-us-extradition

 

There are limits to Free Speech.  In Germany.

In America people can voice any opinion they want.  No matter how racist, anti-Semitic or misogynist.

Words can hurt. Words have consequences.

A Judge in Germany used such quaint language in handing down a sentence. The Judge called the defendant’s extremist blogs “revisionist history.”

Excerpted from Deutsche Welle 8.26.2022

The Berlin-Tiergarten district court on Friday sentenced far-right video blogger Nikolai Nerling to a nine-month probation sentence.

Judge Stephan Markmiller said that Nerling had used provocative, far-right content in order to gain attention and influence in the far-right scene, and said that some of his content amounted to “revisionist history.”

The 42-year-old, who calls himself “The People’s Teacher,” was convicted, among other things, of insult and incitement in two cases and the use of signs of either organizations either deemed terrorist or otherwise outlawed in Germany.

What did Nerling actually do?

In one example from March 2018, Nerling was accused of uploading an interview he conducted with notorious Holcaust denier Ursula Haverbeck to YouTube.

In the video, the 93-year-old denied the Holocaust, as she had done many times before. For that and other acts, the Berlin regional court sentenced her to a one-year prison term back in January. The prosecution accused Nerling of having known that Haverbeck’s statements were contrary to established historical facts.

He was also charged with publishing another video in which he “deliberately wanted to attack and ridicule a man in his Jewish identity.”

According to the indictment, in 2019 he also published images on his channel showing someone giving the Hitler salute.

The Hitler salute, and various other Nazi symbols or gestures, remain outlawed to this day in Germany.

Another video shows Nerling visiting the city of Lüneburg. During this visit, he commented on and defaced an information board on the crimes of the 110th Infantry Division of the Wehrmacht.

 

In his comments, he questioned the proven fact that the infantry division had deported people to extermination camps, before covering the board in tape.

Nerling, a former elementary school teacher in Berlin, lost his job several years ago because of the extremist content on his YouTube channels.

What did the judge say?

He said Nerling had intentionally played with voicing nationalist or ethnic sentiments or other provocations that were “on the knife edge of what can be prosecuted,” looking to test the law to its limits. In the cases in question, the judge said, he had crossed a line.

In addition to the probation period — slightly less than the prosecution’s request of eleven months — the bench fined Nerling €3,000 (roughly $3,000) to be paid to the anti-racist anti-far-right Amadeu Antonio Foundation.

 

The judge also warned Nerling’s supporters, about a dozen of whom had shown up at the court, that he would not tolerate them shouting statements or clapping during the proceedings.

https://www.dw.com/en/german-court-sentences-former-teacher-over-far-right-video-blogs/a-62947778

Every Picture tells a Story.  San Francisco Swamp Dwelling  Political Opportunist Reactionaries Edition.

 

Lee Heidhues 8.23.2022

The City’s daily morning newspaper is becoming a subsidiary of the Nextdoor Law and Order freaks. This incident is just more fodder for increasingly paranoid and uptight San Francisco.

Nightcrawlers Heather Knight @hknightsf and Dion Lim @dionlimTV would be in full battle mode bashing the Real DA Chesa Boudin. Sadly this true Progressive was politically lynched by the MAGA billionaires, a fearful electorate and shameless so called journalists like Knight and Lim.

A theme for these Nightcrawlers would be the classic Lou Reed song, “Vicious.”

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=lou+reed+vicious

One neighbor had it right. Michele Sahl, told ABC 7, “It’s really terrible because we shouldn’t do that to another human being, number one, and why can’t San Rafael take care of this? San Francisco tries to take care of its homeless people, not without challenges, but I’m very disappointed.”

Excerpted from The San Francisco Chronicle 8.23.2022

The San Francisco City Attorney’s Office is investigating the San Rafael Police Department after a marked patrol vehicle was filmed allegedly dropping a homeless man off in a residential area of San Francisco.

The incident was filmed by a resident of the vicinity of Lake Street and 14th Avenue in the Richmond District. The video was shared with ABC7 News, which first reported on the incident. The video shows an officer emerging from an SUV, and removing the man and his belongings before driving off.

In a statement to The Chronicle, City Attorney David Chiu said, “It is disturbing to think another jurisdiction would drop off someone experiencing homelessness or mental health challenges in the middle of a residential neighborhood with no services or resources around. We need all cities and counties working together to solve our homelessness and mental health crises.” It was unclear what specific law or laws may have been broken.

“While we are just beginning to look into this, make no mistake — we will hold any jurisdiction accountable that is proven to engage in this behavior,” Chiu said.

This incident happened during daylight last month. The person can be seen on the video scattering his belongings after being dropped off on 14th Avenue near Mountain Lake Park. The neighbor who filmed the video asked not to be identified.

San Rafael police Sergeant Scott Eberle, who supervises the department’s Downtown Foot Patrol unit, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Chronicle.

Earlier, he told ABC7 that the man had been picked up at Northgate Mall in the Terra Linda neighborhood of San Rafael after allegedly threatening a security guard at a retail establishment. The man was not armed and was determined by the responding officer not to be a threat. He asked that he be driven to San Francisco, and that request was granted by the officer’s supervisor.

“We made a mistake,” Eberle told ABC7. “That is what we did, we dropped this subject off in San Francisco.”

After being dropped off, the man started taking off his clothes and throwing rocks, possibly even lighting a fire in the field where he had been left. The neighbor who made the video called San Francisco police, who arrived on the scene at around 5:30 p.m. July 30 to find “a person in distress,” according to the incident report. Medics were summoned and the man was transported to a local hospital by the San Francisco Fire Department.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/S-F-wants-answers-after-San-Rafael-officer-17392568.php

Lee Heidhues 8.22.2022

I want to learn all I can about the car bombing assassination of Darya Dugina as she drove from a wealthy Moscow suburb on August 20, 2022.

The Western media; New York Times, Wall Street Journal, BBC and Deutsche Welle are giving this blatant political hit major coverage.

It’s worthwhile to learn more by reading the Moscow Times which offers up a point of view not found in Putin controlled State Media. This is a major story which will have an impact on the now six month old war of aggression against Ukraine.

As expected the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) has already fingered an unlikely suspect. Kremlin watchers are scoffing at the FSB analysis.

What remains unknown is, “Who is really responsible?” We may never get an answer to that question.

Excerpted from Moscow Times 8.22.2022

Russia said Monday that Ukraine was responsible for carrying out a car bombing that killed Darya Dugina, the adult daughter of nationalist ideologue and Ukraine war supporter Alexander Dugin, as experts said the assassination would likely spook Kremlin loyalists. 

The high-profile assassination — of which her father Alexander Dugin is thought to have been the intended target — has sent shockwaves through the Russian elite, with political experts suggesting it has likely made pro-war pundits and Kremlin supporters fearful for their lives.

Dugina, 29, died Saturday evening when a car bomb exploded in the Toyota Land Cruiser she was driving near Moscow.

Russian President Vladimir Putin described the incident Monday as a “vile crime” shortly before the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) said the person responsible was a Ukrainian woman named Natala Vovk.

In a condolence message, Putin described Dugina as “a Russian patriot.”

“The fact that Dugina was an ordinary political commentator expands the geography of fear — pro-Kremlin speakers will understand the war is not an abstraction and it threatens them personally,” political analyst Abbas Gallyamov told The Moscow Times.

A Ukrainian presidential adviser, Mykhaylo Podolyak, denied that Kyiv was behind the bombing, suggesting instead it was the result of Russian political infighting. 

“Vipers in the Russian special services started an intraspecies fight,” he tweeted Monday.

At the same time, the killing provoked an outpouring of anger from Russian officials and pro-Kremlin pundits, who expressed few doubts Ukraine was behind the killing. 

Russian state TV Channel One anchor Olesya Loseva said on prime time television that the targeting of Dugina was an “act of intimidation” and a “signal to all of us.”

State media journalist and war correspondent Alexander Sladkov said “it is impossible not to use the terrible crime as an excuse to confirm the worldwide threat of the Kyiv regime.”

The killing is likely to trigger “a radicalization of the conservative camp, which has lost one of ‘its own’ and craves revenge,” political analyst Tatiana Stanovaya said in a tweet Sunday.

In a statement carried by Russian news agencies, the FSB outlined Monday its version of how the attack was carried out by Ukrainian intelligence.

According to the FSB, Vovk arrived in Russia last month and rented an apartment in the same building where Dugina lived. She supposedly tailed Dugina in a Mini Cooper using a series of different license plates, fleeing to neighboring Estonia after the killing took place.

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/08/22/a-signal-to-all-of-us-moscow-blames-kyiv-for-killing-of-ideologues-daughter-a78627

Lee Heidhues 8.21.2022

(UPDATED with link to video report by Deutsche Welle)

The Dogs of War are relentless and uncompromising.

There are no innocent bystanders in War.

Darya Dugina, daughter of Vladimir Putin’s hard line adviser, was killed in a car bombing on the outskirts of Moscow. War has many collateral victims. It eventually impacts those who are responsible for the carnage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darya_Dugina

2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine (excerpted from Wikipedia)

Dugina was an outspoken supporter of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. In particular, she claimed that the war crimes against Ukrainian civilians by the Russian army during the invasion were staged.^[15][16] In June 2022, she visited occupied Donetsk and Mariupol.^[8] On 4 July 2022, she was sanctioned by the British government, which accused her of being a “frequent and high-profile contributor of disinformation in relation to Ukraine and the Russian invasion of Ukraine on various online platforms”.^{[17][18][8][19]} She responded by saying that she is an ordinary journalist and should not have been sanctioned.^[6]

Excerpted from Moscow Times 8.21.2022

The daughter of Alexader Dugin, a hardline Russian ideologue close to President Vladimir Putin, has been killed in a car bombing on Moscow’s outskirts, authorities said on Sunday.

Dugin, sometimes called  “Putin’s Rasputin” or “Putin’s brain,” is an outspoken Russian ultra nationalist intellectual.

Dugina has long advocated the unification of Russian-speaking territories in a vast new Russian empire and wholeheartedly supported Moscow’s operation in Ukraine. 

According to family members quoted by Russian media, Dugin — a vocal supporter of Kremlin’s offensive in Ukraine — was the likely target of the blast as his daughter borrowed his car at the last minute.

Darya Dugina was killed when a bomb placed in her Toyota Land Cruiser went off as she drove on a highway near the village of Bolshie Vyzyomy, some 40 kilometers (25 miles) outside Moscow, Russia’s Investigative Committee said in a statement.

Dugina, a journalist born in 1992 who herself openly supported the offensive, died at the scene and a homicide investigation has been opened, said the committee, which probes major crime cases in Russia.

In July Britain put her on a list of sanctioned Russians for allegedly spreading online disinformation about Ukraine.

He was put on a Western sanctions list after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, a move he also backed.

The head of one of Ukraine’s breakaway separatist regions blamed the blast on Kyiv authorities. “The Ukrainian regime terrorists tried to liquidate Alexander Dugin, but blew up his daughter,” DNR chief Denis Pushilin wrote on Telegram.

Ukrainian presidential adviser, Mykhailo Podolyak denied that Kyiv authorities were behind the bombing.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova wrote on Telegram that “if the Ukrainian theory is confirmed… and it must be verified by competent authorities, it will amount to state terrorism on the part of the Kyiv regime.”

Top photo – The Dogs of War – Wall Street Journal

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/08/21/car-bomb-kills-daughter-of-kremlin-hardline-ideologue-a78619

Attached is a link to video report by Deutsche Welle 8.21.2022

https://www.dw.com/en/daughter-of-putin-ally-alexander-dugin-killed-by-car-bomb/av-62881831#spark_wn=1

Lee Heidhues 8.20.2022

How quaint to learn that a Prime Minister’s attendance at a dance party rises to the level of scandal.

How reassuring to read that not every country and city sinks into the political cesspool of law and order extremism which is the current State of Play in San Francisco.

The story about Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Martin, who assumed office at the age of 34 in 2019, seems to be a real person with a life outside politics. Not caught up in the politics of destruction consuming much of America and San Francisco in particular.

Excerpted from Deutsche Welle 8.20.2022

Once again, Finland’s Prime Minister Sanna Marin made international headlines. But this time it was with a video showing her at a private party, dancing with friends.

What ensued was a very classic “Finnish scandal,” which is actually not a scandal at all, but because Finnish politics tend to be so uptight and slightly boring, you have to get creative to stir things up every once in a while.

It is at the same time indicative of the very high moral standards that are applied to politicians and that they are expected to live up to. Consequently, the threshold is very low for Finnish politicians to resign over what seem like rather insignificant incidents elsewhere.

For example, in 2008 then-Foreign Minister Ilkka Kanerva was sacked over a text message scandal: he had been sending text messages to a controversial female celebrity. Sanna Marin herself became prime minister after her predecessor Antti Rinne resigned over a scandal related to a post office strike.

Some of the more memorable Sanna “scandals” were “breakfastgate” over her breakfast expenses or the controversy over the revelation that she likes cleaning, even the official residence, herself.

Much of the rather absurd domestic controversies smack of misogyny, as Marin has been leading Finland steadfastly through several exceptionally difficult situations, starting with the pandemic and now the NATO membership process. It is a lot to take in that a competent prime minister can be a 36-year-old woman, mother of a small child, who despite having one of the toughest jobs in the country, also manages to have a social life, go to festivals, and even to party occasionally.

Usually, the domestic “scandals” do not make international headlines. What was different this time was the allegation that she would have possibly been doing drugs.

It was based on a sentence in the leaked party video that was misheard as “jauhojengi” (“flour gang”) and interpreted to mean drugs. In fact, Marin and her friends seem to be singing along to the lyrics of a Finnish pop song that mentions “jallu,” a Finnish alcoholic drink. No one would call drugs “flour” anyway in Finland, which makes the whole business even sillier.

Top Photo – Time Magazine cover March 1, 2021

https://www.dw.com/en/opinion-much-ado-about-nothing-sanna-marin-and-a-very-finnish-scandal/a-62873009

Lee Heidhues 8.20.2022

Puppet District Attorney Brooke Jenkins is nothing more than Mayor London Breed’s servant and protector, a cheerleader for the San Francisco Police Department, the Police Officers Association and the increasingly law and order paranoid citizenry of San Francisco.

For the sake of honest and ethical government she should resign immediately.

A ‘Quintessential Grifter’.

The $153,000  Jenkins collected as a “Volunteer” from MAGA billionaires, and failed to report until after she was anointed as acting DA by Mayor London Breed, ethically compromises her and disqualifies her from serving as the chief law enforcement officer of San Francisco.

Acting District Attorney Brooke Jenkins of San Francisco should not remain in office another day.

Her record as an assistant district attorney is already the subject of potential prosecutorial misconduct. 

• Withheld exculpatory evidence from criminal defense counsel
• attempted to send a legally insane defendant to prison
• coached a four year old to testify in a criminal trial

Brooke Jenkins, seeking to advance her career, turned on District Attorney Chesa Boudin who had advanced her career and spent eight months to destroy him in the June 7, 2022 Recall.

Her ruthless well paid gambit worked. She has been handsomely rewarded financially and politically for her treachery. The voters must remove Brooke Jenkins on November 8 and restore credibility to the District Attorney’s office.

 

 

Lee Heidhues 8.18.2022

Yesterday was my birthday and our wedding anniversary.  It was a foggy, windy, cool Wednesday. Perfect summer weather in San Francisco.

Liz and I celebrated the occasion by having lunch in the Cafe followed by an hour tour of the Guo Pei fashion exhibit at the Legion of Honor.

A fixture since 1922 in the beautiful northwest corner of San Francisco overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

Guo Pei fashion is stunning, artistic, edgy, intricate and a feast for the eyes.

Photos – Liz and Lee

https://legionofhonor.famsf.org/guo-pei