Tag Archives: Ukraine

Financial Times: EU issues US-bound staff with burner phones over spying fears

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European Commission officials heading to IMF and World Bank spring meetings advised to travel with basic devices

The European Commission is issuing burner phones and basic laptops to some US-bound staff to avoid the risk of espionage, a measure traditionally reserved for trips to China.

Commissioners and senior officials travelling to the IMF and World Bank spring meetings next week have been given the new guidance, according to four people familiar with the situation.

They said the measures replicate those used on trips to Ukraine and China, where standard IT kit cannot be brought into the countries for fear of Russian or Chinese surveillance.

“They are worried about the US getting into the commission systems,” said one official.

The treatment of the US as a potential security risk highlights how relations have deteriorated since the return of Donald Trump as US president in January. 

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Officials said the guidance for all staff travelling to the US included a recommendation that they should turn off phones at the border and place them in special sleeves to protect them from spying if left unattended.

The advice was unsurprising, according to Luuk van Middelaar, director of the Brussels Institute for Geopolitics, a think-tank.

“Washington is not Beijing or Moscow, but it is an adversary that is prone to use extra-legal methods to further its interests and power.”

https://archive.is/8HLcg#selection-2229.0-2240.0

2paragraphs: Kristi Noem [Bimbo #2] “Mistakenly Sent Email” to Ukrainians Terminating Parole in U.S., Say Two U.S. Senators

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U.S. Senators Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-New Hampshire), who is also Ranking Member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem calling on Noem “to immediately explain how the Department of Homeland Security mistakenly sent an email to Ukrainians on humanitarian parole in the U.S. that they had seven days to leave the country.”

As seen in the letter below, Murkowski and Shaheen explain that “Ukrainians who have participated in the Uniting for Ukraine program have entered the U.S. lawfully, passed rigorous screening and vetting requirements and have been required to find financial support from private U.S. sponsors.”

The Senators added, “Abruptly and cruelly telling victims of Russia’s war to leave the country would not reflect American values — and it risks emboldening Putin to continue the war, despite President Trump’s stated objectives to establish peace.”

Murkowski and Shaheen wrote that “The fact that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) drafted such a notification is alarming,” noting that Congress has not been notified regarding any proposed changes to the program. The lawmakers said their congressional staff inquiries to DHS “resulted in conflicting responses that demonstrated a disturbing lack of interagency coordination or strategy on the status of humanitarian parole for Ukrainians.”

Why would you expect anything better from a bimbo?

Kristi Noem “Mistakenly Sent Email” to Ukrainians Terminating Parole in U.S., Say Two U.S. Senators
U.S. Senators Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-New Hampshire), who is also Ranking Member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem calling on Noem “to immediately explain how the Department of Homeland Security mistakenly sent an email to Ukrainians on humanitarian parole in the […]

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/kristi-noem-mistakenly-sent-email-to-ukrainians-terminating-parole-in-u-s-say-two-u-s-senators/ar-AA1CyjzQ

Guardian: Vance’s posturing in Greenland was not just morally wrong. It was strategically disastrous

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Thanks to Trump’s administration, the US could soon have to fight wars to get things that, just a few weeks ago, were there for the asking

The American vice-president, JD Vance, visited a US base in Greenland for three hours on Friday, along with his wife. National security adviser Mike Waltz and his wife also went along. Fresh from using an unsafe social media platform to carry out an entirely unnecessary group chat in which they leaked sensitive data about an ongoing military attack to a reporter, and thereby allegedly breaking the law, Waltz and Vance perhaps hoped to change the subject by tagging along on a trip that was initially billed as Vance’s wife watching a dogsled race.

The overall context was Trump’s persistent claim that America must take Greenland, which is an autonomous region of Denmark. The original plan had been that Usha Vance would visit Greenlanders, apparently on the logic that the second lady would be an effective animatrice of colonial subjection; but none of them wanted to see her, and Greenland’s businesses refused to serve as a backdrop to photo ops or even to serve the uninvited Americans. So, instead, the US couples made a very quick visit to Pituffik space base.

At the base, in the far north of the island, the US visitors had pictures taken of themselves and ate lunch with servicemen and women. They treated the base as the backdrop to a press conference where they could say things they already thought; nothing was experienced, nothing was learned, nothing sensible was said. Vance, who never left the base, and has never before visited Greenland, was quite sure how Greenlanders should live. He made a political appeal to Greenlanders, none of whom was present, or anywhere near him. He claimed that Denmark was not protecting the security of Greenlanders in the Arctic, and that the US would. Greenland should therefore join the US.

It takes some patience to unwind all of the nonsense here.

Vance’s posturing in Greenland was not just morally wrong. It was strategically disastrous | Timothy Snyder
Thanks to Trump’s administration, the US could soon have to fight wars to get things that, just a few weeks ago, were there for the asking, says professor Timothy Snyder of Yale University

Vance’s posturing in Greenland was not just morally wrong. It was strategically disastrous | Timothy Snyder | The Guardian

Raw Story: ‘Worst of the lot’: Veteran columnist heaps scorn on ‘revolting’ Marco Rubio

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“I think he’s the worst of the lot,” Rubin said of Rubio. “The rest of them are so stupid and so ignorant that they really don’t get it; they’re just playing a game or they’re following Trump or they’re trying to be with the cool kids. Rubio knows better. First of all, he was the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. If anyone should know about preserving security, it’s he — and he was on that same Signal chain.”

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“He also has spent his entire life fighting communism, fighting oppression, fighting Cuba,” she said. “You know what they do in Cuba? They disappear people and they throw them into a hellhole of a jail. He has become the very thing that he has spent his entire career railing against. He used to be a great defender of Ukraine; now he’s instrumental in turning it over to Russia. So the glaring hypocrisy, the soullessness, the willingness to sell down the river all of the dissidents, all of the freedoms, all of the besieged countries that he once defended is really beyond the pale.”

‘Worst of the lot’: Veteran columnist heaps scorn on ‘revolting’ Marco Rubio

‘Worst of the lot’: Veteran columnist heaps scorn on ‘revolting’ Marco Rubio

The Atlantic: The Hungarian Model

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MAGA conservatives love Viktor Orbán. But he’s left his country corrupt, stagnant, and impoverished.

But the nationalist kitsch and tourist traps hide a different reality. Once widely perceived to be the wealthiest country in Central Europe (“the happiest barrack in the socialist camp,” as it was known during the Cold War), and later the Central European country that foreign investors liked most, Hungary is now one of the poorest countries, and possibly the poorest, in the European Union. Industrial production is falling year-over-year. Productivity is close to the lowest in the region. Unemployment is creeping upward. Despite the ruling party’s loud talk about traditional values, the population is shrinking. Perhaps that’s because young people don’t want to have children in a place where two-thirds of the citizens describe the national education system as “bad,” and where hospital departments are closing because so many doctors have moved abroad. Maybe talented people don’t want to stay in a country perceived as the most corrupt in the EU for three years in a row. Even the Index of Economic Freedom—which is published by the Heritage Foundation, the MAGA-affiliated think tank that produced Project 2025—puts Hungary at the bottom of the EU in its rankings of government integrity.

Tourists in central Budapest don’t see this decline. But neither, apparently, does the American right. 

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What is this Hungarian model they so admire? Mostly, it has nothing to do with modern statecraft. Instead it’s a very old, very familiar blueprint for autocratic takeover, one that has been deployed by right-wing and left-wing leaders alike, from Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to Hugo Chávez. After being elected to a second term in 2010, Orbán slowly replaced civil servants with loyalists; used economic pressure and regulation to destroy the free press; robbed universities of their independence, and shut one of them down; politicized the court system; and repeatedly changed the constitution to give himself electoral advantages. During the coronavirus pandemic he gave himself emergency powers, which he has kept ever since. He has aligned himself openly with Russia and China, serving as a mouthpiece for Russian foreign policy at EU meetings and allowing opaque Chinese investments in his country.

Orbán’s Hungary Could Be America’s Future – The Atlantic

The Independent: Under Trump, 80 years of collective security have been dismantled in as many days

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The Atlantic Alliance used to believe it had liberal democratic values in common and a shared interest in collective security and free trade. That, thanks to the US president, is no longer true. Europe must adjust to this altered reality, or die.

It may be that the US’s tilt to the Kremlin, accompanied by the twin-track diplomatic and trade wars now being waged on friends and allies, will before long drive Europe to stand on its own two feet and be the independent force in world affairs that the founding fathers of the project of European unity dreamed about. At long last, Europe begins to assert itself. To borrow a famous phrase from a happier era of US-European relations, Europe, like president Barack Obama, is saying: “Yes we can.”

The “coalition of the willing” (or “coalition of action”, as French president Emmanuel Macron prefers to call it) is a concrete example of this emerging European consciousness. The project is to provide a safe and secure future for Ukraine, irrespective of what Russia or the US might desire. Russia is rightly distrusted, while there is still hope that the Americans can contribute in some way to keeping the peace in Ukraine – and in Europe more widely.

Under Trump, 80 years of collective security have been dismantled in as many days
Editorial: The Atlantic Alliance used to believe it had liberal democratic values in common and a shared interest in collective security and free trade. That, thanks to the US president, is no longer true. Europe must adjust to this altered reality, or die

Under Trump, 80 years of collective security have been dismantled in as many days | The Independent

Raw Story: ‘It sort of doesn’t matter’: Trump envoy unconcerned with Putin taking over Europe

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“To me, it just — it just — I take him at his word in this sense,” he continued. “So, and I think the Europeans are beginning to come to that belief, too. But it sort of doesn’t matter.”

‘It sort of doesn’t matter’: Trump envoy unconcerned with Putin taking over Europe

‘It sort of doesn’t matter’: Trump envoy unconcerned with Putin taking over Europe

Alternet: GOP rep booed by hundreds at town hall after saying migrants ‘not entitled to due process’

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“When you seek asylum, wait in the other country … There is no due process if you come here illegally because you violated the law. Period! You violated the law, you are not entitled to due process.”

Dumbdumb has that totally backwards — due process is what you are entitled to when you do break the law. We need some minimum IQ requirements for Congress. She’s an immigrant herself; how did she ever pass her citizenship test?

GOP rep booed by hundreds at town hall after saying migrants ‘not entitled to due process’
One Republican member of Congress was met with a rowdy crowd of several hundred people at a town hall in her normally solid-red district who frequently booed and shouted her down — particularly when she defended President Donald Trump’s most controversial policies. Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-Ind.) held a town hall meeting on Friday in Westfield, India…

GOP rep booed by hundreds at town hall after saying migrants ‘not entitled to due process’

Wall Street Journal: Hegseth Brought His Wife to Sensitive Meetings With Foreign Military Officials

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Defense secretary’s handling of sensitive information is under fire after he shared details about a strike on Houthi militants in a group chat on a widely used app

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who is facing scrutiny over his handling of details of a military strike, brought his wife, a former Fox News producer, to two meetings with foreign military counterparts where sensitive information was discussed, according to multiple people who were present or had knowledge of the discussions.

One of the meetings, a high-level discussion at the Pentagon on March 6 between Hegseth and U.K. Secretary of Defense John Healey, took place at a sensitive moment for the trans-Atlantic alliance, one day after the U.S. said it had cut off military intelligence sharing with Ukraine. The group that met at the Pentagon, which included Adm. Tony Radakin, the head of the U.K.’s armed forces, discussed the U.S. rationale behind that decision, as well as future military collaboration between the two allies, according to people familiar with the meeting. 

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Jennifer Hegseth also attended a meeting last month at North Atlantic Treaty Organization headquarters in Brussels where allied defense officials discussed their support for Ukraine, according to two people who attended the meeting. Hegseth’s brother Philip Hegseth has also been traveling with him on official visits, the Pentagon said.

Too stupid to learn?

Exclusive | Hegseth Brought His Wife to Sensitive Meetings With Foreign Military Officials – WSJ

Alternet: ‘Why do that?’ Fox News host defends ‘decorated veteran’ against Musk’s ‘traitor’ smear

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Elon Musk = Surrender Monkey

During a recent visit to Ukraine, Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Arizona) expressed his support for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and additional U.S. military aid for the war-torn country. But far-right Tesla/Space/X/X.com leader Elon Musk, a close ally of U.S. President Donald Trump, disagreed with Kelly’s position and called him a “traitor.”

Many Democrats are calling Musk out, noting that Kelly is a former U.S. Navy combat pilot. Musk, however, defended his attack on Kelly during a Thursday night, March 27 appearance on Fox News.

Fox News host Bret Baier questioned the wisdom of calling Kelly a “traitor,” asking Musk, “Why do that?”

The billionaire Trump ally responded, “Well, I think somebody should be — should care about the interest of the United States above the interests of another country. And if they don’t, they’re a traitor.”

Baier, however, defended Kelly, telling Musk, “Yes. But he’s a decorated veteran, a former astronaut, a sitting U.S. senator.”

Musk doubled down on his position, accusing Kelly of putting “the interest of another country above America.”

‘Why do that?’ Fox News host defends ‘decorated veteran’ against Musk’s ‘traitor’ smear