The timetable for public hearings has been announced by the British government and its judge, Lord Anthony Hughes, to repeat the official allegations of Novichok attacks by Russian agents against Sergei and Yulia Skripal on March 4, then Dawn Sturgess on June 30, 2018.
The first hearing will open on next Monday, October 14, in Salisbury, the Wiltshire county town where the Skripal attack first occurred. The hearings will then move to the International Dispute Resolution Centre in London. On November 25, a session has been scheduled for Hughes to hear police, intelligence agents, and government lawyers argue the agenda item, “Russian state responsibility”. That session will then be followed in early December by closing statements.
The six-year proceeding is due to close by Christmas. By then it will have violated every rule in British court practice on the admissibility of evidence. .
No testimony by the Skripals has been allowed by Hughes. Instead, he has decided that the police, MI5 and Secret Intelligence Service will publish their version of what the Skripals said during interviews they were obliged to give without legal representation in 2018.
If you want to understand who is winning the American war against Russia on the Ukrainian battlefield, and also in the world’s commodity trade markets, you can start by calculating the life expectancy of a NATO-trained Ukrainian soldier on the front line, or of a NATO staff officer in a command bunker he thought was safe. Then you can check the life expectancy of a Russian pig.
The losses of the former are Russia’s tactical gains; they aren’t yet victory in the war.
But it’s the latter, the Russian pig (lead image) who, upon turning into pork, is breaking through the enemy’s defences towards strategic victory of Russian economic power to capture a world market. This means defeat – unrecoverable loss of market share – for the hostile states led by the once powerful pork exporters, Germany, Spain, Denmark, Canada, and the US. As the most recent European Union (EU) pig and pork slaughter data show, the war is pushing up the energy and feed costs of pig farming, and drastically cutting European exports of pork to the Asian consumer market, the biggest in the world.
There, Russia’s strategic ally China has cancelled the closure of its market in effect for Russia since 2008, and simultaneously has begun pork trade restriction moves against Spain, Denmark and The Netherlands, the principal European exporters of pork to China. In trade war retaliation, China is also steadily reducing the volume and value of its pork imports from the US since 2021.
Behind the Ukraine front, the test of who is winning the war against Russia is also who puts their money and their meat where their mouth is. In Russia, meat consumption is rising per capita to a level never recorded before in Russian history. At the same time, the country has become the world’s fifth largest pork producer.
From self-sufficiency in pork production in 2018 to the export of market surplus, this industry achievement has been based on direct and indirect state support measures, including retaliation against EU imports which followed the start of the EU’s anti-Russian sanctions in 2014.
The Russian history of end-of-war negotiations for the capitulation of Germany and for the World War II peace settlement requires it to be understood now: it was the Red Army’s defeat of the enemy on the battlefield all the way to Berlin which preceded and which was the precondition for the paper promises and pacts offered to Moscow by those allies whom Joseph Stalin understood to be permanent enemies of Russia — the United States, United Kingdom, and France.
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has just spelled this out in an especially timed essay published on October 2.
Those lessons are being repeated now because they apply with equal force to the end-of-war negotiations with the US in the process nicknamed Istanbul-II.
For Russian decision-makers in Moscow, and for the Russian people across the country, there can be no long-term security for the country without the military defeat of the enemy on the Ukrainian battlefield, capitulation of the Kiev regime, and withdrawal from Ukrainian territory of its US and NATO allies. This is first of all.
The political “guarantees”, “permanent neutrality” of the Ukraine, and treaty promises for the removal of foreign bases, forces, and weapons to continue war against Russia – terms spelled out in the pact of March 2022 known as Istanbul-I — come second. This is because the terms are unreliable and unenforceable, no matter what president of the US is elected next month and promises the day after — unless and until the Russian military has won the unconditional surrender of its enemies, and secured the battlefield against revival of the war in future. This battlefield security extends from the new Russian western border to the old Ukrainian borders with Poland, Hungary, Romania and Moldova.
Which must come first now — war or politics?
The Russian answers to this question being debated in Moscow today are turning the old German theory of war and the state upside down, reversing the meaning of the well-known maxim of Carl von Clausewitz (lead image, badge), “war is a continuation of politics by other means.” In Europe today — the Russian General Staff and Security Council insist — politics is the continuation of war by other means. Accordingly, the terms of Istanbul-II for the politicians to draft and sign must follow the terms of armistice, unconditional surrender and disarmament to be dictated by the generals.
Just days before Iran and Arab forces launched their October 1 operation to expose Israel’s military vulnerabilities, four Palestinian Americans launched the most serious threat to Israel’s survival in the economic war that is under way in parallel.
On September 24 they filed an 89-page brief in a Florida state court to declare illegal US financing of Israel’s war against Palestine through the purchase of Israeli government bonds with American taxpayer money. Their target is $700 million worth of Israel bonds purchased by the Palm Beach County treasury of Florida on the order of a single man, the county’s chief financial officer Joseph Abruzzo.
Starting in September 2023, one month before Hamas launched its break-out from Gaza, Abruzzo signed a purchase of $40 million in Israel bonds. Then from October 10 through March 2024 Abruzzo used county taxpayer funds to buy $660 million worth of securities the Israeli government was issuing to cover its warfighting costs.
Altogether, the Israeli plan is to raise at least $58 billion in new debt this year, with an increasing proportion of this debt to be covered from the US where Goldman Sachs and Bank of America are placing the bonds with small-town officials like Abruzzo.
In Abruzzo’s case, the court papers relate, “Palm Beach County is currently the world’s largest investor in Israel Bonds due to the Defendant’s [Abruzzo] $700 million dollar investment in Israel bonds. These $700 million dollars, sourced from Palm Beach County taxpayers’ property taxes, are being poured into a foreign economy that has an increased risk of default. Defendant purchased $700 million dollars of Israel Bonds amidst a housing crisis in Palm Beach County, an education crisis, and a funding shortfall of $732 million dollars in Palm Beach County’s budget that is leading to several capital-improvement projects such as athletic centers, parks, animal shelters, and bridges to be either delayed or cancelled. At the time the $732 million dollar shortfall in Palm Beach County’s budget was announced, Defendant had already invested $160 million dollars in Israel Bonds.”
After his own budget deficit and treasury debt were announced, Abruzzo “invested an additional $540 million dollars in Israel Bonds.”
In his public justification, Abruzzo told the Miami press on October 10, 2023: “I am proud to show solidarity with the people of Israel and make Palm Beach County the first county in the nation to increase its investment in Israel Bonds following their declaration of war against Hamas.” Six months later, Abruzzo attacked critics of Israel in the Democratic party as it began the presidential election campaign. “Do I hear, especially from the far-left wing of my Democratic party, concerns about investing in Israel? Yes. Are the public leaders in D.C. of the Democratic Party condemning support for Israel? Yes. . . But I would say to them, we’re not going to be deterred. They need to back off and we need to stand united with our greatest ally, Israel.”
At the same time Abruzzo has claimed: “everything I do financially is, down to the penny, putting personal feelings aside,” Abruzzo said. “None of my purchases was done for a political purpose whatsoever. It’s the dollars and cents and getting the most we can for taxpayers. It’s all economic driven.”
Abruzzo has also tweeted that “if we don’t balance the federal budget and curb spending, our nation’s future will be unrecognizable. With interest payments on the national debt now exceeding $1 trillion, the urgency for fiscal responsibility should have been addressed…”
Between supporting Israel with Florida state funds and meeting his county and state taxpayer needs, Abruzzo says Israel should come first. “We must prioritize Israel’s security, not reward nations that enable terrorism and extreme hatred towards the United States. At the same time, let’s focus on helping Americans at home—like the people of North Carolina and Florida still struggling after recent disasters. U.S. aid should reflect these priorities: support our allies and take care of our own.”
The Palestinian American court challenge declares Abruzzo has been lying about his domestic priorities, and that his Israel bond buying is illegal under the Florida state constitution, several state laws, and Palm Beach County policy. “Defendant’s [Abruzzo] investments in Israel Bonds are putting the county’s funds at risk and are ignoring vital local needs… Notwithstanding any other law, when deciding whether to invest and when investing public funds pursuant to this section, the unit of local government must make decisions based solely on pecuniary factors and may not subordinate the interests of the people of this state to other objectives, including sacrificing investment return or undertaking additional investment risk to promote any non-pecuniary factor. The weight given to any pecuniary factor must appropriately reflect a prudent assessment of its impact on risk or returns… Defendant’s Investments in Israel Bonds on and after October 10 Violated His Fiduciary Duty, Local Investment Standards, and The Florida Trust Code as Defined by Florida Statutes 218.415, 518.11, 736.0801, 736.0802, 736.0803, and the Palm Beach County Investment Policy.”
The lawsuit asks the court “[to rule] that Defendant’s role in the Israel Bonds Government, Industry, and Financial Services Leadership Group violates Defendant’s duty of impartiality. Order Defendant to terminate his role in the Israel Bonds Government, Industry, and Financial Services Leadership Group. Permanently enjoin Defendant from investing in Israel Bonds while the war in Gaza is ongoing, as this poses an economic threat to Palm Beach County’s general fund and endangers Palm Beach County taxpayers.”
The court papers do not accuse Abruzzo of personal corruption in his contacts with Israeli bond salesmen, and there is no record of the contacts Abruzzo has had with the bond placement banks, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America, or with Israeli government agents — except for an email and letters of receipt from the Development Corporation for Israel, the bond issuer, after Abruzzo had paid over the Palm Beach money. An archive of emails and other evidence, indicating inducements to local officials from the Israelis, including the Florida state chief financial officer but not Abruzzo, have been reported here.
There is no also no mention in the court papers of Abruzzo’s re-election campaign. November 5 is his election day.
Local press reports indicate, however, there has been a surge in the number of Jewish voters in Abruzzo’s county constituency since he was first elected to the state legislature, and then comptroller in November 2020. A local rabbi invited to preside at Abruzzo’s official swearing-in said: “if anyone can protect our public records and our public funds with integrity and honesty and responsibility, Joe Abruzzo, you are the one to do that.”
Jewish voters comprise 16% of the registered voters in the 22nd US Congressional district which includes Palm Beach. In the Palm Beach County population of 1.5 million, the Jewish community adds up to less – just 9%. That minority, however, has dominated Abruzzo’s campaign for re-election to the comptroller’s post.
Israel’s war against the Palestinians is also a war by the Jewish community in Florida against Arab Americans in the state. The plaintiffs in the case against Abruzzo have asked the court to protect their identities because they have testified to “significant concerns for personal safety, privacy, and potential harm to themselves and their family based on their involvement with Palestinian issues and advocacy.” These include threats of death and arrest by Israeli forces against their family members in Palestine. In Florida, “given the state’s willingness to conflate speech protected by the First Amendment with criminal activity, Plaintiffs’ admissions that they have sent thousands of dollars to family and friends in Gaza exposes them not only to criminal liability, but to life in prison.”
Pokrovsk, in the northwestern corner of Donetsk region, is almost a Russian city again.
Established as a minor Russian rail junction in 1880, it was badly damaged by the Italians and Germans who captured the city between 1941 and 1943, killing more than 8,000 Red Army defenders, 5,000 residents, and all the Jews. After the war, the city, then named Krasnoarmeiskoye and later Krasnoarmeisk, more than doubled to a peak of around 80,000 in the last years of the Soviet Union. The city economy was based on the area’s mines which worked to dig out the largest coal reserves in the Ukrainian territory.
The coalmines were taken over in the post-1991 Ukrainian free-for-all by Rinat Akhmetov’s Metinvest group. Akhmetov, a Donetsk native and son of a coalminer, declared earlier this year: “Ukraine hopes Pokrovsk will feed its industry with coal for decades more from estimated reserves of 200 million tonnes. For that to happen, the country’s army must stop Russia’s creeping advance despite being hampered by ammunition shortages caused by a Republican-inspired halt to US military aid and Europe’s failure to rapidly expand arms production.”
Akhmetov dictated that from London where he owns many homes.
The defeat of the Zelensky regime in the Donbass has ended Akhmetov’s production chain of coal from Pokrovsk, coke from Avdeyevka, and steel from Mariupol. Pokrovske Coal has reported that from the first half of 2023 to the first half of this year, its mine output has dropped by 25%, from 1.6 million tonnes of coal concentrate to 1.2 million tonnes, “because of optimisation of mining operations amid changes in geological conditions.” Akhmetov’s annual production reports don’t reveal the volume of coal and coal concentrate produced at Pokrovsk.
He has engaged a New York law firm to sue Russia for his losses.
The population of Pokrovsk city remained steady at about 60,000 in 2014 through 2021. It is now estimated to have dropped to 26,000 at the start of this month, when the Ukrainian military ordered the evacuation of civilians. Russian has been the native language of almost two-thirds of the population
Born in Pokrovsk and a resident of the city for 30 years, a professional psychologist and newspaper editor left the city ahead of the final battle between advancing Russian forces and the Ukrainian retreat. Her name is not published to protect family members who have remained. In the form of a question-and-answer interview, this is her story.
As a rule, on these pages I (Gilbert Doctorow, lead image) do not write critiques or responses to the writings of others, but today will be an exception. A colleague in Germany sent me the link below to a remarkable essay by John Helmer which is too important to ignore. Then one reader of my essays spontaneously asked me to comment on the points Helmer makes in the article in question. I now will do just that.
“The law is an ass” is an English expression of almost four hundred years of age. While credit for inventing the very first use of it has been argued over, there is no doubt that it was Charles Dickens in his Oliver Twist of 1838 who began the popularity of combining law and judges with donkeys.
In a court hearing, Dickens wrote, Mr Bumble — victim of a woman whom he wanted to marry for her money, but who turned out to be more domineering than he expected — was told that “the law supposes that your wife acts under your direction”. “ ‘If the law supposes that,’ said Mr. Bumble, squeezing his hat emphatically in both hands, ‘the law is a ass – a idiot’”. Dickens’s characterization of Bumble – self-important, stupid, hypocritical – has turned into the noun bumbledom, which describes the pomposity of petty officials of the state.
An expert source claims that Bumble’s expression has been gaining steadily in popularity over the past 186 years.
And so it has also come to pass — more uniquely than ever before in English legal history, more than even Dickens can have imagined — that a retired English judge named Anthony Hughes (lead image, left) – titled Lord Hughes of Ombersley — has put on public display his personal combination of all three — Bumble, Bumbledom, and the law as an ass.
Hughes did this in a five-page ruling he issued on September 23. Hughes is directing the secret inquiry into two events on the British Government’s road to war against Russia in the Ukraine — the alleged Russian Novichok poisoning of Dawn Sturgess of June 2018, following the alleged Russian Novichok attack on Sergei and Yulia Skripal of March 2018.
Sturgess died; the Skripals survived. The book tells the full story.
Hughes has ruled the Skripals will not and must not be called to give evidence, neither in open court, nor by remote videolink, nor in tape-recorded voice, nor even in the written transcript of what English police claim the Skripals said under questioning in 2018.
The two survivors of the only Russian Novichok poisoning ever alleged to have occurred outside Russia will not now be subjected to cross-examination or to any form of forensic questioning that is the requirement of the English criminal law, nor to their physical appearance in court that is their fundamental right under the English legal doctrine of habeas corpus.
“I have concluded that neither Sergei nor Yulia Skripal will be called to give oral evidence,” Hughes has announced. “I have no doubt that the public exposure which would follow these witnesses being called would be intrusive and uncomfortable and would risk disrupting both their daily personal and family lives and those of people connected to them in many different ways…The overwhelming risk, which quite alters the position in the present case, is of physical attack on one or both of the Skripals. There is every reason to be satisfied that an attack similar to that which appears to have taken place in 2018 remains a real risk, either at the hands of persons with the same interest as the 2018 attackers, or via others interested in supporting the same supposed aim, if either Sergei or Yulia can be identified and their current whereabouts discovered.”
Hughes has come to judgement here — days before he commences what he calls open proceedings — on what the entire process of his inquiry has yet to substantiate in evidence and to decide. Hughes has ruled that the Russian state, through its agents, attacked and attempted to kill the Skripals, and aim to do so again if Hughes lets the Skripals appear before him in any form at all.
Verifiable evidence of what the Skripals themselves believe – if they are alive — is to be substantiated only by their police guards. It is this police and MI6 record – compiled in the absence of lawyers representing the Skripals — which Hughes has now ruled to accept in violation of all the British rules of the admissibility of evidence.
“Having considered the representations of those responsible for their present security,” Hughes has judged, “I am more than satisfied that it would simply not be possible to maintain proper security if either of them were to be called to give evidence. That would be so whether they gave evidence from an open witness box, or by means of some electronic link from a remote room. In either case their present integrated security arrangements could not be maintained consistently with the necessity of being brought to a suitable location which is itself secure and which has an electronic link which is immune to interception. Moreover, if they were to be seen, or their voices heard, there could be no proper control of the likelihood that people who may have dealings with them (however casual or innocent) would recognise them and that that recognition would become more widely known, whether through social or other media or otherwise.”
As Bumble said, “if the law says that, the law is a ass.”
Dickens’s town beadle had such a high sense of his own importance, he failed to notice when he was making an ass of himself, as well as of the law. Hughes hasn’t read the book.
by Slobodan Despot, Montreux, and John Helmer, Moscow @bears_with
A plea bargain for the Russian Telegram owner Pavel Durov (aka Paul Du Rove, lead imagelower right)) has been arranged in Paris with President Emmanuel Macron (upper right) by their common friend, Xavier Niel (upper left), a French internet billionaire with a history of his own internet sex business, including paedophilia, which also ended in a plea bargain with all charges dropped.
Durov issued his announcement of changes in Telegram’s terms of internet service and user privacy on September 23. “We’ve made it clear that the IP addresses and phone numbers of those who violate our rules can be disclosed to relevant authorities in response to valid legal requests. These measures should discourage criminals. Telegram Search is meant for finding friends and discovering news, not for promoting illegal goods.”
Durov claimed that Telegram’s search feature “has been abused by people who violated our terms of service to sell illegal goods. Over the past few weeks [his staff had used artificial intelligence to ensure that] all the problematic content we identified in Search is no longer accessible. We won’t let bad actors jeopardise the integrity of our platform for almost a billion users.”
Four days later on September 27 in an interview on a television channel owned by one of Niel’s business partners, he claimed the credit for supporting Durov after Durov had telephoned him for help. Niel had come to the rescue, he explained, because Durov was his “copain”. “First of all, for me he didn’t cross the line because he wasn’t convicted. What I know is that, once you have been in prison for having had legal problems, everyone disappears. Everyone disappears in this setting. Me, when I have a buddy [copain — chum, mate, pal, friend] who is in difficulty and who makes a phone call to me and well, here I am, here I am.”
Niel has not disclosed the extent of the behind-the-scenes discussions held with Macron, who has revealed his own special interest in the case after it was initiated, not by the French internet regulators or prosecutors, but by the foreign intelligence agency, Direction générale de la Sécurité extérieure (DGSE).
In the history of imperial conquest and rule of the Arabs – that’s Turkish, Italian, British, French, American, Israeli – decapitation of leaders has always been preferable to genocide of peoples because it’s much cheaper.
Slavery, as the Portuguese empire first developed it, was the cost accountant’s solution to making genocide pay for itself – pay lucrative profits in fact.
How profitable the bribery and killing methods of American decapitation of the secular Arab nationalists have been since 1943 is the story told in The Jackals’ Wedding.
The combination of decapitation and genocide now being pursued by the Israelis lacks the usual cost-accounting restrictions. This is because the imperial ideologies have turned into God-dictated duty, Crusader zealotry revived, but this time Judaeo rather than Christian, rabbinical rather than papal.
It is also because the US government is paying the bill.
Faith in the transubstantiation of the Jewish state would wither away much quicker than the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem without US cash, capital, and underwriter guarantees. That kingdom lasted 192 years; Israel is 76 years old; Zionism, 127 years.
In self-defence, popular resistance and national liberation of the Arabs, religious conviction can only be as effective as there is military capacity for the fight. The will to fight without the weapons is doomed; just as the war-fighting capacities of the Arabs are doomed if they are inadequate – sabotaged and betrayed off the battlefield; out-gunned if used in combat; held back without a fight.
For reminder of how long the present long war will be, let’s repeat this from the beginning last October.
The last time an obscure official of junior rank named Vladimir Medinsky (lead image) was recorded officially as having words with President Vladimir Putin was on November 20, 2019.
At the time Medinsky was the Minister of Culture, and he was briefing Putin on one of his portfolio activities, the St. Petersburg International Cultural Forum. “Over 15,000 people attended the forum in St Petersburg,” Medinsky counted. “It lasted almost five days: it started earlier and ended later than scheduled… it was attended by 96 countries and saw the signing of over 90 international contracts for museum exhibitions, guest performances and exchanges…for the first time, and this is a very good trend, the forum was not just a club for cultural figures but also a place that attracted a lot of attention from the younger generation. Tens of thousands of St Petersburg students went to the forum.”
Putin said next to nothing: “Yes…Why?..Good…Very good…A very good festival, we need to cooperate with them…Good. Thank you.”
Eight weeks later on January 24, 2020, the Kremlin announced that Putin had removed Medinsky from the culture ministry, and instead appointed him an assistant to the President. There were no other details in the official announcement; nothing leaked then or later to the press on whether this was a demotion or promotion. What is certain is that Medinsky’s talk of cultural events was camouflage. Putin had told Medinsky he was changing his role for one of the most personal foreign policy operations on Putin’s agenda.
This didn’t materialize in public until Medinsky appeared as the leader of the Russian delegation to negotiate end-of-war terms with the Ukrainian government in Istanbul between March 29 and April 1, 2022.
Medinsky was sharply criticized by the General Staff, State Duma, and press for the terms he initialled in the draft agreement. After these domestic attacks combined to reverse Putin’s support for the pact and the Kiev regime appeared to withdraw under Anglo-American orders, Medinsky disappeared from view. But he has retained the role of Putin’s negotiator in the preparation of a sequel agreement, Istanbul-II.
He reappeared publicly at the Kremlin on July 5, 2024, when Medinsky was listed by the Kremlin in negotiation of end-of-war terms between Putin and Hungarian prime minister Victor Orban, and through Orban, US presidential candidate Donald Trump. In the Kremlin communiqué of the Orban talks, Medinsky was ranked ahead of foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and Putin’s foreign policy adviser, Yury Ushakov. The Kremlin has not explained what the former expert on Russian culture and history was doing there. Despite evidence made public by Orban himself, the Kremlin has denied the discussion in which Medinsky participated was about terms for an end of the Ukraine war with the US, after the presidential election on November 5.
A Moscow source confirms Medinsky was identified to Orban as Putin’s personal messenger. “He remains the chief negotiator but he has not been seen with the Chinese or with the Indians. This means that Putin is only serious about Orban – of course not about Orban, but Trump whom Orban went on to meet in Miami on July 11.”
Then last week, on September 20, Medinsky reappeared again in public, this time – and for his first time – at a weekly session of the Security Council.
According to the Kremlin communiqué, Putin began by announcing “we all know that in recent years, history has often been used as a means of achieving political goals with regard to our country. This is often done in an opportunistic and unscrupulous manner. As such, this can be viewed as a current policy issue, and our country, its official authorities need to define their attitude to it. Therefore, I propose that we discuss this today. We have two speakers, Mr Medinsky and Mr Lavrov.”
What Medinsky had to say about Russian history remains top secret. His Security Council speech has not been quoted on the Kremlin website; the Kremlin’s Telegram platform has ignored it. Asked for a copy or a summary of Medinsky’s remarks, the Kremlin press office replied: “If we get it, we’ll add it. Follow the website”. So far as Moscow political observers can remember, this is the first time that an official statement on Russian history has been classified.
Russian sources believe the reason is the same as Medinsky’s November 2019 meeting with Putin. It is camouflage. Only this time, the sources add, Putin’s purpose is to expose the camouflage himself, confirming he is ready for Istanbul-II, and is employing Medinsky in the president’s effort to override opposition to the end-of-war negotiations from the General Staff and from the Deputy Secretary of the Security Council, former president Dmitry Medvedev.
“Whatever Medinsky says is Putin’s thoughts exactly, more powerfully than Medvedev,” a Moscow source explains. “Putin wants the Americans to understand this.”
By making public Medinsky’s presence with Orban on July 5, and now at the Security Council on September 20, Putin is sending a signal to Trump, and also to the Biden Administration, that they should reciprocate with a negotiating signal of their own and stop the Kiev regime’s plans to escalate on the battlefield, with F-16 operations, and with long-range missile attacks on Russian territory.
