Norway certainly is ready, willing and able to assert its territorial rights and is willing to enforce an international Court order even if the defendant is the mighty Russian power at its border.
Excerpted from The New York Times 9.3.2026
Norway Seizes Russian Ship, Testing Moscow in the High Arctic
Empowered by an international court order, Norway captured the vessel as part of a global effort to seize Russian assets. The Russians called it “piracy.”
For the past several days, Norwegian security services had been tracking a Russian research ship.
Armed with a court order that is part of a global effort to recover Russian assets, Norwegian police officers boarded the ship while it was docked in Barentsburg, a tiny Russian outpost in Svalbard. The officers confronted the captain of the ship, a somewhat clunky, 200-foot-long oceanographic vessel, and announced that they were “arresting” it.
The seized ship was part of a broader effort to enforce an international court judgment ordering Russia to pay a Ukrainian energy company, Naftogaz, more than $4 billion for expropriating that company’s assets in Crimea. The ship, owned by the Russian government and called Professor Molchanov, after a famous Russian scientist, is now prohibited from leaving Barentsburg until Norwegian courts decide what to do next.
“We have only acted as a messenger,” said Lars Fause, the governor of Svalbard.
Censorship and book burning are a sad historical phenomena. Recent history has found this activity in countries around the world. Nazi Germany, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and Russian obliteration of Ukrainian libraries.
America is not immune. The House Un American Activities Committee (HUAC) strove to ban books in overseas libraries which were deemed “too Communist” and “nonconformist”. Even in the midst of the 21st century certain localities in America have successfully moved to ban books from libraries and schools.Book Bans – PEN America
American Book Banning: Trends, Causes, and Impact
Book banning in the United States has surged in recent years, with both schools and public libraries facing unprecedented levels of censorship.
Scale of the Problem PEN America’s 2025 report found 6,870 book bans enacted in the 2024–25 school year across 23 states and 87 public school districts, affecting nearly 2,600 authors, illustrators, and translatorsPEN America. This is the highest number of bans in a single school year ever recorded. The American Library Association (ALA) documented 4,235 unique titles challenged in 2025, with 5,668 books actually banned from libraries, plus 920 restricted through access controls American Library Association. These bans disproportionately target works by authors of color, LGBTQ+ authors, and books addressing racism, sexuality, gender, and history PEN America+1.
Who Is Driving the Bans ALA data shows that 92% of challenges in 2025 were initiated by pressure groups, government officials, or decision-makers, not individual parents American Library Association. This reflects a coordinated political and activist push to influence school and library curricula.
Bibliocide—attacks on the written word—is a common tactic of totalitarians and terrorists. The Nazis burned books in Germany in the 1930s, as did the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in the 1970s. Bosnian Serbs destroyed Sarajevo’s National and University Library in 1992, and in 2015 ISIS devastated Mosul Central Library.
During the Khmer Rouge regime (1975–1979), the government carried out a systematic campaign to destroy books, newspapers, and other printed materials as part of its broader cultural and political purge. This was part of Pol Pot’s “Year Zero” policy to erase Cambodia’s pre-1975 history, culture, and intellectual life, replacing it with a Maoist-inspired agrarian socialist society
The Ukrainian Culture Ministry says Russia has damaged or destroyed 906 libraries since 2022. Numerous cases of book burning and library sacking have been documented. Among them: In 2022 the Petro Mohyla Church library was burned in Mariupol. Books were burned in Rovenky in 2023. Yulia Kakulia-Danyliuk, a librarian in Kapytolivka, has described the destruction in that village: “Everything was smashed and broken, books were scattered everywhere. There was filth.”
Kapytolivka holds particular significance, having been home to Volodymyr Vakulenko, a poet and children’s book author, who was abducted and murdered by Russian troops in 2022. When the librarian returned after the village’s liberation, only 4,500 of 16,500 books remained. She found books on Ukrainian culture and history in the toilets, covered in human waste. “All of them had been soiled. That was done deliberately.”
Oleksandra Matviichuk, head of the Center for Civil Liberties (which was awarded the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize), describes the destruction of books as “part of a broader genocidal policy of Russia. We know from history that the burning of libraries accompanied genocides throughout the centuries as an erasure of someone else’s identity. Putin openly says that there is no Ukrainian nation, no Ukrainian language, no Ukrainian culture.”
In America the book burning mania took hold in the early Cold War era.
HUAC and the Era of “Book Burnings”
During the 1950s, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and other anti-communist forces in the U.S. government were linked to reports of book burnings at American-funded overseas libraries. These libraries, numbering about 230 and holding nearly two million books, served millions of visitors annually and were intended to present a “balanced” view of the United States The New Republic.
The Context
HUAC’s role: Established in 1938, HUAC targeted alleged communists and “subversive” activities. While it investigated individuals, its influence extended to shaping cultural and informational policy abroad Wikipedia.
Overseas libraries: Originally founded in Latin America in 1942–43 to model public libraries abroad, they emphasized free access to all printed materials. By the Eisenhower era, their purpose had shifted toward promoting U.S. perspectives and discouraging “non-conformity” The New Republic.
Targeted content: Books deemed “too communist” — including works by or about communists — were removed from shelves. This included literature banned under dictatorships the U.S. had fought against, such as in Germany, Austria, Japan, Korea, and Trieste The New Republic.
Political Backing
Eisenhower administration: Reports indicated that State Department directives, sanctioned by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, ordered U.S. libraries abroad to remove such books. President Eisenhower publicly distanced himself from these orders, but his administration’s actions were tied to HUAC’s anti-communist agenda The New Republic.
McCarthyism: Senator Joseph McCarthy, though not directly involved with HUAC, was part of the broader anti-communist climate that enabled such censorship Intellectual Freedom Blog.
Most of America has tuned out to the ongoing Russian carnage being inflicted on the people of Ukraine.
The mainstream media only gives the Putin led aggression scant coverage.
The Russian onslaught is well into its fifth year and the truth of the matter is most of the world has lost interest.
Much of this has to do with the undeniable fact that Donald Trump has regarded the Ukraine carnage a side show.
And, given the problems of his own making, think Iran Trump is happy enough to let Putin do what he wants while Ukraine burns and its citizens perish.
Excerpted from Deutsche Welle 6.2.2026
Russia launched a major missile and drone attack on Ukrainian cities, including Kyiv, Dnipro and Kharkiv, overnight into Tuesday, killing at least 22 people and wounding over 100 others.
This comes after days of warnings that Moscow was planning another major attack. On Tuesday evening, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned that ”another large-scale attack may occur tonight,” according to Ukrainian intelligence.
Russia launched 73 missiles and 656 drones at Ukraine starting 6 p.m. local time on Monday (1500 GMT), Ukraine’s air force said, adding that 40 missiles and 602 drones had been neutralized.
Kyiv was the main target, but drones struck 38 other sites across Ukraine, the air force said on Telegram
Meanwhile, Russia’s Defense Ministry said it used high-precision, long-range weapons to strike Ukraine’s defense industry facilities. In a statement, the ministry said it carried out a “massive strike” and claimed to use “high-precision weapons.”
“The strike objectives have been achieved, all designated targets have been hit,” it claimed.
Following the attack, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy urged Europe to develop its own air defense systems.
“Europe needs its own anti-ballistic defense so that this war can finally be brought to an end,” he wrote on social media on Tuesday. He also called for more support from Washington, saying their Patriot systems — which can intercept Russian ballistic missiles — are “absolutely necessary.”
Looking afar from the West Coast of America to most Americans Europe seems far away and inconsequential. Only as a tourist destination and photo op.
The reality is that Europe is an integral bastion economically and culturally for the United States.
It’s shocking to read that Donald Trump is striving to turn this centuries long relationship on its head as he seeks to solidify his indecipherable relationship with Vladimir Putin. Trump’s not so secret goal is to let Europe fend for itself while he withdraws into Fortress America.
Excerpted from The Wall Street Journal 12.6.2025
Nathalie Tocci, director of the Institute for International Affairs in Rome and a former EU diplomatic adviser, said the document lays out a fairly coherent vision of a world dominated by three big powers—the U.S., China and Russia—who have areas of cooperation and zones of influence.
“I think it’s fairly clear that Europe is seen by the administration as being on the colonial menu” for domination by either the U.S. or Russia, she said. “So to me, the real question is: ’What else needs to happen for us Europeans to wake up to this?’ ”
For years, the U.S. government has published an annual National Security Strategy that lays out how Washington sees the world and its approach to dealing with looming threats, from China to Russia to drug-traffickers in Latin America.
Flags of the European Union.
This week, the Trump administration’s version seemed to reserve its harshest tone for a new target: America’s closest allies in Europe.
The 30-page document painted European nations as wayward, declining powers that have ceded their sovereignty to the European Union and are led by governments that suppress democracy and muzzle voices that want a more nationalistic turn.
It says the continent faces “civilizational erasure” through immigration that could render it “unrecognizable” in two decades—as well as turning several North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies into majority “non-European” countries. It concludes the region could grow too weak to be “reliable allies.”
Trump has castigated the European countries for not spending sufficiently on the military. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_in_Germany. The German government now is considering reinstituting compulsory military service. Germans are protesting.
The document underscores how radically the Trump administration is reshaping traditional American foreign policy, and it is likely to deepen divisions in the trans-Atlantic alliance, which has largely kept the peace in Europe since World War II and promoted Western values across the world.
The document landed like a bucket of cold water in European capitals. European leaders reading the document need “to assume that the traditional trans-Atlantic relationship is dead,” said Katja Bego, a senior researcher at Chatham House, a think tank in London.
It’s no surprise that Felon Trump is best buddies with Russian thug war mongering president Vladimir Putin. The former KGB agent who has no problem with his compliant courts jailing Russian journalists and political foes.
Vladimir Putin with his KGB ID circa late 1980’s
What Putin does to journalists in Russia is something that Felon Trump would like to do in America.
And not to only journalists. Felon Trump wants to prosecute his political foes. Trump has been successful in 2025 in making the once independent Department of Justice led by his flunkie Attorney General https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pam_Bondi a revenge sledge hammer.
Excerpted from Deutsche Welle 12.4.2025
A Moscow court on Thursday upheld five-and-a-half year prison sentences for four Russian journalists, including two former Deutsche Welle reporters who previously worked for the organization’s Moscow bureau.
Konstantin Gabov and Sergey Karelin, along with Antonina Favorskaya and Artyom Kriger, were convicted in April on charges of participating in an “extremist organization” — a reference to the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), an NGO founded by opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
Navalny, a prominent critic of President Vladimir Putin, died in February 2024 while imprisoned in an Arctic penal colony.
Russian authorities classified the FBK as an extremist organization in 2021, a designation that has since been used to prosecute journalists, activists and opposition figures associated with Navalny’s movement.
Prosecutors said the group created materials for the FBK YouTube channel. All four journalists denied the charges, saying they did not work for the foundation but merely reported on its activities.
Following Thursday’s judgment, the group is now expected to be transferred from pre-trial detention centers to penal colonies to serve their sentences.
Their conviction has sparked international criticism and raised concerns about press freedom in Russia.
Konstantin Gabov and Sergey Karelin, along with Antonina Favorskaya and Artyom Kriger, were convicted in April on charges of participating in an “extremist organization”
On Thursday, Antonina Favorskaya, Artyom Kriger, Konstantin Gabov and Sergey Karelin were set to deliver their closing arguments. The verdict must be handed down within five days.
Now, this deadline has been pushed back by a week, with the defendants now scheduled to make their final statements on March 20. The circumstances for the delay were unknown at the time of publishing.
The trial has taken place behind closed doors. Few details are known, but the imprisoned journalists (outlined below) have been writing letters to stay in touch with the outside world.
3.12.2025
The convicted felon Donald Trump must be salivating as four Russian journalists stand trial and face six year prison terms for alleged “extremist” ties. The entire assault on the press is nothing more than a show trial so Vladimir Putin can show the Russian people who’s boss.
Two thugs agree the Press is an “Enemy of the State.”
Trump’s thug buddy Vladimir Putin treats journalists in a manner the criminal American president wishes he could introduce to America. Harassment, kangaroo court and imprisonment.
Fortunately there is the First Amendment in America which protects all journalists, including bloggers. Even the wannabe dictator Trump will be trumped in his rhetorical assault on the free press.
Americans can never forget that thug Putin detained Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich for over 16 months as an intimidation tactic against the press. He was freed. Unfortunately, Russian reporters can’t expect the same verdict.
One has to hope that a free press in America survives Donald Trump.
Excerpted from Deutsche Welle 3.12.2025
Four Russian journalists are currently on trial in Moscow, charged with involvement in an “extremist” group.
Left to right: The journalists Konstantin Gabov, Antonina Favorskaya, Artyom Kriger and Sergey Karelin have been on trial for alleged “extremist” ties Image: Maxim Shemetov/REUTERS
The group in question is the Foundation for Fighting Corruption, founded by the late opposition leader Alexei Navanly, who died in early 2024 in an Arctic penal colony under unclear circumstances. In 2021, Russian authorities designated and banned the foundation as extremist.
All four defendants deny the charges and argue they did not work for the foundation but rather were reporting on it independently.
On Thursday, Antonina Favorskaya, Artyom Kriger, Konstantin Gabov and Sergey Karelin will deliver their closing arguments. The verdict must be handed down within five days.
If found guilty, the defendants face up to six years in prison. The Russian human rights project Political Prisoners Memorial has classified them political prisoners.
The trial has taken place behind closed doors. Few details are known, but the imprisoned journalists (outlined below) have been writing letters to stay in touch with the outside world.
Top photo: Antonina Kravtsova in handcuffs being taken to court is more widely known under her pseudonym Antonina Favorskaya
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