by John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with
Death can be a coincidence, but not in the Russian aluminium business.
So when Dmitry Bosov died of a pistol shot at his home near Moscow on the evening between May 5 and May 6, and Anatoly Bykov was arrested by federal agents in Krasnoyarsk on May 7, everyone with well informed suspicion asked if there is a connection to a Kremlin political calculation made at the highest level.
(more…)
by John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with
Roula Khalaf (lead image, right) is the only editor of a major London newspaper about whom next to nothing important is obvious, not even her name.
She was appointed last year by Tsuneo Kita (left), chairman of Nikkei, the Japanese media group and owner of the paper, to succeed Lionel Barber as editor. On January 20 of this year, Kita assigned Khalaf a seat on the board of Financial Times Limited, the entity through which the Japanese run their marginally profitable London property. The UK company registration reveals that Khalaf is a maiden name, and that her legal name is Roula Khalaf Razzouk.
The disguise is for policy reasons, according to two people close to the matter. Khalaf Razzouk began her career in the Financial Times (FT) in 1995. She has advanced over the past 25 years, FT sources claim, by taking orders from her superiors and never reporting outside the guidelines of the FT’s management. Conformity to the interests of the beneficial owner has been the rule of her journalism; anonymity her method for concealing from readers what the beneficial owner’s interests are. This combination of conformity and anonymity has provided Khalaf Razzouk with one target to be attacked on every front and at every opportunity. That’s the combination of Syria and Russia.
This is Khalaf Razzouk’s policy; and she conceals it for personal reasons also. They spring from her husband’s business interests and his and her background in the well-known el-Solh family of Beirut. From the el-Solhs have come four Lebanese prime ministers on the Sunni moslem side of the Beirut line; a financial and political alliance against the Saudi succession of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman; together with considerable wealth which the family has accumulated over almost a century. The husband’s name is Assaad Wajdi Razzouk. Khalaf manages to keep his personal details as secret as her husband and their families in Beirut keep her secret.
What to make of the truthfulness of the newspaper Khalaf Razzouk is now directing when it demands transparency and accountability from its targets, but not from its director?
(more…)
by John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with
It’s embarrassing to be caught publicly with a case of the crabs, especially if you are a media celebrity. That is, unless you are in the business of selling your celebrity status to advertise other people’s crabs, not your own.
This is the case of Ksenia Sobchak, a socialite from St. Petersburg, and her mother, Lyudmila Narusova, a senator in the upper house of the Russian parliament. For years they have been trading on the fame of Anatoly Sobchak, Ksenia’s father, Lyudmila’s husband. He was the first elected mayor of St. Petersburg; first promoter of the post-KGB career of Vladimir Putin; and himself such a threat to the presidency of Boris Yeltsin twenty-five years ago he had to flee to Paris for a while and then on his return die prematurely. Sobchak suffered from many infections from the lice of his city at the time. Crabs weren’t one of them.
(more…)
by John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with
After the episode of the sermon by the Jesuit priest, blaming the plague on the sinfulness of his congregation – “a calamity has befallen you, my brethren; you have deserved it…no earthly power – not even, note this well , vain human science – can shield you from His hand as it reaches out to you”; and after the journalist’s attempt at bribing the militia to arrange his escape from the plague city; and after the municipal administrator’s acknowledgement that “luckily, I have my work”; the visitor from Paris explained to himself in his diary that regarding the old Chinese custom of “playing the tambourine in front of the genie of the plague…it was quite impossible in reality to know whether the tambourine was more effective than other preventive health measures.”
So it seemed to the leading citizens of a town consumed by a pandemic imagined by the French writer Albert Camus seventy-five years ago.
Camus began writing La Peste (“The Plague”) in Oran, Algeria, then a colony of France, at the beginning of 1941, but he didn’t finish it until 1946. Published a year later, it is Camus’s most widely read novel and is often interpreted as an allegory of the German occupation of France which began in May of 1940, and lasted until August 1944. It isn’t that at all; Camus himself didn’t say so.
Medically, the plague of Oran in the book is the bubonic pandemic known in English as the Black Death. Historically that has never been recorded in Oran; cholera was the plague there. An equally lethal form but with different symptoms and contagion is known as pneumonic plague; Camus described many cases of that in his fictional Oran. Because he himself had contracted tuberculosis at the age of 17 and been sent to the central French alps for sanatorium treatment, Camus understood very well the lung failure we now recognize in the serious stages of Covid-19. The plague of Oran in the novel is reported as starting in mid-April of a year in the 1940s, and ending nine months later in mid-January. In between, the administration ordered a total lockdown, cutting the town off from the outside. Inside the town, district and building quarantines were imposed; along with tracing of contact networks, conversion of public buildings and stadiums to hospitals; nightly curfews; wearing of masks; daily publication of infection case bulletins; and the rushed development of a vaccine.
Reading La Peste in the time of the corona virus we can understand the book, not as an allegory, but as a realistic portrait of what happens to a town and a representative sample of its people during a lethal pandemic.
Realism was also Camus’s declared objective. He makes Joseph Grand, a townhall apparatchik whose job was compiling numbers of infections and deaths in a daily report of rates and graphs, into a would-be novelist in his spare time. But in the hundreds of pages Grand wrote, he never managed to get beyond the first sentence. After narrowly surviving a bout of the plague himself, when he burned his manuscript, he started on the first sentence again. “I’ve cut out all the adjectives”, Camus reported him saying.
The master of French realism without adjectives at the time Camus was composing his story was Georges Simenon with his tales of Jules Maigret, a detective chief inspector in Paris. Camus acknowledged reading and learning from Simenon; they also shared editors at the Gallimard publishing house. But they spent different wars — Camus in the underground resistance press, ill-fed and in hiding; Simenon above ground, comfortably settled and well off. There is almost no German war or occupation in either man’s books.
“Understand and judge not” was Simenon’s motto, expressed in the mouth of Maigret. He didn’t really mean it. “How hard it must be”, Camus’s motto was expressed by Bernard Rieux, the doctor and central character in La Peste, “to live only with what one knows and what one remembers, and deprived of what one hopes.” Camus did mean it. Deprived of hope is what a pandemic like Covid-19 does to you. Understanding that in Moscow today is what reading Camus’s book is for.
(more…)
By John Helmer, Moscow
Every spring, when it’s certain no more snow will fall on Moscow, it helps to remember these things, and look forward with hope.
(more…)
by John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with
Armed British police, plus ambulance and medical crews, drone and helicopter pilots, firefighters, and the head doctor of the Salisbury District Hospital’s emergency department were preparing for the attack on Sergei and Yulia Skripal just four days before Russian military assassins arrived from Moscow allegedly carrying a lethal chemical weapon in a perfume bottle.
Not counting the Skripals and the Russians, the British forces numbered at least two hundred. They were mobilized through the afternoon and night of February 27 until the morning of February 28, in the centre of Swindon, Wiltshire; that is a city 70 kilometres (40 miles) north of Salisbury, also in Wiltshire. The Skripals collapsed at 4:15 in the afternoon of March 4, in the centre of Salisbury. At least two of the paramedics who arrived at the scene to evacuate them to hospital had been practising in the Swindon operation.
“There is no intelligence that Swindon is at risk,” a senior police officer had warned, “but I hope members of the public understand we need to be ready and prepared for any eventuality. This is Wiltshire Police getting ourselves – along with our colleagues in the fire and ambulance services – in the best position so we’re ready for anything.”
Until the Skripals are released by the British authorities and permitted to speak freely to their family, their lawyers, and the press, it is not known whether they too were warned in advance to be “ready for anything.”
(more…)
by John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with
A new ruling by three Dutch judges in the trial of Russia for having shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 will allow the Ukrainian secret service, the SBU, to present fabricated witness evidence without investigation or cross-examination by defence lawyers representing one of the four military officers accused of launching a BUK anti-aircraft missile at MH17. On July 17, 2014, the aircraft was destroyed above eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board.
The two Dutch defence lawyers, Sabine ten Doesschate (lead image, centre) and Boudewijn van Eijck (right), have attempted to keep the court proceeding secret since mid-March when they were asked to clarify if they had filed a challenge to the use of secret witness statements in the trial, which began hearings in public on March 9.
A secret hearing followed on April 6 when ten Doesschate appeared in person. Two weeks later, a 16-page judgement was signed by three judges of the District Court of The Hague, Alexander Boogers, B.W. Mulder, and Mariette Renckens; an official translation into English was then prepared. Ten Doesschate and van Eijck were asked last Thursday morning, April 23, to confirm that the judgement had been issued.
“Should you fail to respond,” ten Dosschate and van Eijck were told, “you will be reported as conducting yourselves in a manner that is inconsistent with the duties of a lawyer in defence of a client in a serious criminal case, with the intention on your parts, individually and collectively, to dissemble, mislead, falsify, and prejudice the defence you claim to represent and for which you are receiving money in payment.” Ten Doesschate and van Eijck have refused to answer.
International criminal lawyers who have reviewed the detailed summary of the lawyers’ argument in the new court document have condemned ten Doesschate and van Eijck for their failure to make an adequate defence. They are “sweetheart lawyers working for the prosecution”, commented one.
Reviewing the Dutch ruling, Christopher Black, a Canadian attorney who defended in the international war crimes trials for Yugoslavia and for Rwanda, said “the defence in this trial has now been reduced to a fig leaf. From reading this [ruling] and the language [the judges] use, it appears the defence will never have a chance to properly contest the charges. Since they cannot do that, they should walk out, hold a press conference explaining why, and face the consequences.”
(more…)
by John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with
One nurse and two doctors have testified that they were in charge of the medical treatment of Sergei and Yulia Skripal when they were admitted to Salisbury District Hospital in the early evening of March 4, 2018. Sarah Clark (lead image, left) was the senior sister in charge of the shift at the Radnor Ward’s Intensive Care Unit (ICU). Duncan Murray (centre) was the doctor in charge of the unit. Stephen Jukes (right) was one of several doctors assigned to the ICU; he was the one responsible for the Skripals.
If the Skripals were to exercise their legal right to apply to the British High Court for review of the terms of their confinement in secret and in isolation – or if their Russian next of kin in Yaroslavl, or the Russian Embassy in London applied to the court on their behalf — Clark, Murray and Jukes would be summonsed to testify to what they witnessed at the hospital two years ago. What they would say under cross-examination and in fear of committing perjury would not be the same thing they have already said publicly.
Photographs of the crime scene, the Salisbury Hospital Radnor Ward, where the three medical staff say they treated the Skripals, have just been obtained. The hospital ward was a crime scene because evidence of the weapon allegedly used in the crime against the Skripals was in their bloodstreams and in the medical records kept by the nurses and doctors in the ward. The photographs illustrate one of the gaps between what was true then and what is false now.
(more…)
by John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with
Malcolm Turnbull is the most intelligent man ever to become Australian prime minister, and to have left office more stupid than he began. Among the governments south of the Equator, this is without precedent. Since Turnbull served as head of government for only three years, 2015 to 2018, when he was 61 to 64 years of age, he has set the medical record for non-traumatic early-onset senescence in the cerebrum; that’s the part of the brain responsible for learning. He didn’t; he can’t.
This week Turnbull has published a book of selections from his life aimed at refreshing his credentials to retake the political power he lost to rivals. His display of the symptoms that caused him to lose it is undiminished.
(more…)
by John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with
The last people to say they saw Sergei and Yulia Skripal together were two medical staff members at Salisbury District Hospital. The first was Senior Sister Sarah Clark, who was in charge of the evening shift at the Salisbury hospital’s Intensive Care Unit; the second was Dr Stephen Davies, a consultant in the Emergency Department of the hospital.
According to the British Government, the two Skripals were attacked by a chemical nerve agent in the centre of Salisbury at about 4:15 on the afternoon of Sunday, March 4, 2018, then rushed by ambulance to the Salisbury hospital. The nerve agent was reported later – at least thirty-six hours later, perhaps longer – to have been identified by the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down as an organophosphate chemical warfare agent called Novichok produced in Russia. The British Government’s version of what happened is that the nerve agent was despatched from Moscow with assassins of the Russian military intelligence agency GRU. Two men have been named and publicly accused by British prosecutors with attempted murder and other crimes.
The Skripals survived the alleged attack, and have recovered from its medical effects. Public releases by the hospital claim Yulia Skripal was released on April 9, 2018; her separation from her father was confirmed thereby. Sergei Skripal was reportedly released from hospital on May 18. In two subsequent telephone calls Yulia made to her cousin and grandmother in Russia, and in a brief televised statement filmed by the US news agency Reuters on May 23, she referred to her father’s medical recovery, but did not say he was living with her. The Reuters film was recorded in a parkland corner of the Royal Air Force base at Fairford, north of Salisbury. The base is run by United States Air Force intelligence and bomber staffs.
Yulia’s last telephone contact with her family in Russia was on July 24, 2018. She has not been heard from since.
Sergei Skripal has been recorded in three brief telephone calls to his niece’s and mother’s home in Yaroslavl; they took place on April 4, 2019; May 9, 2019; and June 26, 2019. Only the May 9 call has been broadcast by the Russian media; it lasted for less than 30 seconds. Sergei did not mention Yulia nor did he say he was living with her. He has been incommunicado since June 26, 2019.
Describing her role in treating the Skripals at Salisbury Hospital, Clark gave an interview to the BBC which was broadcast on May 30, 2018. Contacted at the Radnor Ward Intensive Care Unit this week, Clark now refuses to confirm she had personally seen the two Skripals at the hospital following their admission, claiming she is “not allowed to give any information”.
Two years ago Davies was working at the Emergency Department of Salisbury Hospital when the Skripals were admitted. Days later he wrote a letter to The Times newspaper reporting what he claimed then were the circumstances. Davies continues his work in the Emergency Department, and was contacted there this week. He now refuses to answer any question about the Skripals.
The British Government has prevented the Skripals from speaking publicly or testifying in court to what they believed had happened to them. Their whereabouts are secret.
When the hospital staff witnesses are no longer sticking to their eyewitness testimony, then everything which has followed, including press statements from the hospital, the Metropolitan Police in London, and two court records – one from the Court of Protection of the High Court in London, and one from the Wiltshire and Swindon Coroner’s Court in Salisbury – can no longer be taken as credible evidence in the case.
Not only have the Skripals disappeared into a form of British immuration, but they have also been separated from each other. This exceptional isolation is fresh evidence that the official narrative of the Skripal case is false, and that the Skripals are being held, not for their protection by the British from the Russians, but in punishment and solitary confinement.
(more…)
| S | M | T | W | T | F | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | ||||||
| 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 |
| 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 |
| 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 |
| 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 |
| 30 | ||||||
