#he’s managed to escape the most secure prison in all of Russia and he only got caught because a faulty guy betrayed them

[krunchycrispy]

Jim Hopper is an absolute chad, pass it on

#stranger things #st4 spoilers #(?) #jim hopper #I’m taking no arguments #He protected El from many demigorgons at THE GATE #he’s been to the upside down twice AT LEAST and lived #he’s infiltrated a high tech lab and lived from a blast that turns people into goop #he’s managed to escape the most secure prison in all of Russia and he only got caught because a faulty guy betrayed them #st3 spoilers #st2 spoilers

[useless-catalanfacts]

9 Dec 2020. Raphael Tsavkko Garcia - Brazilian journalist and researcher.

How Spain, allegedly, came close to being invaded by Russia

The latest far-fetched accusation the Spanish state directed at the leaders of the Catalan independence movement could well be from a cheap spy novella.

Europe could have looked strikingly different today if Catalan politicians took Russia up on its alleged offer to help Catalonia achieve independence in 2017 – at least according to the Spanish authorities.

If only they said “da” and agreed to recognise Russia’s annexation of Crimea as legitimate, a clandestine Russian group founded during the Gorbachev era would have sent 10,000 men to Barcelona to force the Spanish state into submission and, amid much chaos and bloodshed, declare former Catalan President Carles Puigdemont as the president of the independent Republic of Catalonia. The Kremlin, meanwhile, would have paid off all of Catalonia’s national debt and supported the new country in the international arena, leaving the European Union embarrassed and divided.

This is not the plot of a cheap spy novella, but the latest far-fetched accusation the Spanish state directed at the leaders of the Catalan independence movement to undermine the legitimacy of their struggle.

Of course, as we all know, Russia did not try to invade Spain to help Catalan pro-independence activists. In fact, it did not even recognise Catalonia as an independent state in the aftermath of the 2017 independence referendum. Moreover, the only “proof” of such an offer ever being made is a recording the Spanish police allegedly found on the confiscated phone of a Catalan politician. So far, the authorities provided no indication that the offer was ever considered by Puigdemont, nor did they provide any additional evidence that there had been an offer. 

However, the authorities pointed to these unsubstantiated claims as one of the reasons behind a massive police operation against the leaders of the Catalan independence movement, which resulted in the arrests of 21 senior Catalan politicians and activists on October 28. 

While the authorities accused the arrested individuals of a variety of crimes, from misuse of public funds and abuse of office to money laundering, the fact that they codenamed the operation “Volkhov” in reference to the World War II front where Spanish fascists fought alongside the Nazis against the Soviet Union clearly indicated that their primary aim was to add weight to their claims that Russia is tacitly supporting the Catalan independence movement. 

People not familiar with the Spanish state’s relentless harassment and persecution of Catalan activists and politicians may find it shocking that a police operation has been named after such a dark chapter in Spanish history, or that state authorities publicly accused an overwhelmingly peaceful political movement of considering unleashing a 10,000-strong Russian militia on Europe on such flimsy evidence. But the Spanish security forces have long been acting as if they are working not for a democratic European state but an erstwhile fascist dictatorship. And being spied on, unlawfully jailed, and accused of treason and terrorism merely for their political views, sadly, is a daily reality for Catalans fighting for independence. 

Since the 2017 independence referendum, the Spanish state has been working round the clock to intimidate and silence Catalan activists and elected officials. In 2019, the Spanish Supreme Court found nine high-profile Catalan politicians guilty of “sedition” for helping organise the independence referendum and sentenced them to 9-13 years in prison. Amnesty International deemed the verdict “an excessive and disproportionate restriction on the peaceful exercise of [the convicted politicians’] human rights” while the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detentions called for the immediate release of these political prisoners. However, turning a blind eye to these criticisms, the Spanish prosecutors not only refused to reconsider their position but demanded the “re-education in the Constitution” of Catalan political prisoners in order to allow them to leave prison for a few hours a day. 

Many activists and politicians, including Puigdemont, meanwhile, were forced to flee the country to avoid being detained. But pro-independence Catalans lucky enough to find an opportunity to leave the country before being arrested could not escape the Spanish state’s harassment and persecution either. The Spanish Secret service illegally spied on them across the borders of the EU, and the state used all avenues available to it to stop their political activities and secure their extradition back to Spain. 

Puigdemont, who is currently living in exile in Belgium, has been a member of the European Parliament since 2019. However, Spain is actively working to convince the European Parliament to lift his parliamentary immunity – which prevents Madrid from asking for his extradition. Another Catalan MEP, Toni Comín, is in the same situation. Former Catalan Vice President Oriol Junqueras, who became an MEP alongside Puigdemont last year, was unable to take his seat in the European Parliament in the first place, as he has been in provisional detention in Spain for the alleged crime of sedition for the last two years. 

Quim Torra, who became the president of the regional government of Catalonia in May 2018 following Puigdemont’s forceful removal from the office, was “disqualified” from the role in September for the unbelievable “crime” of refusing to remove banners in support of the independence movement and Catalan political prisoners from the facade of the Palau de la Generalitat de Catalunya – the historic building housing the offices of the regional government. 

It is not only prominent movement leaders whom the Spanish government, judiciary, and security forces are trying to intimidate and silence through politically motivated investigations and trumped-up charges. About 700 Catalan mayors are currently being investigated for taking part in the 2017 independence referendum. Many Catalan activists are facing charges for “crimes” like organising strikes and blocking roads. Several activists have been charged with “possessing explosives” – which turned out to be just fireworks. Even Catalonia’s most senior police chiefs faced charges of “sedition” for “not doing enough” to stop Catalan voters from taking part in the 2017 referendum – in the end, they were all acquitted. 

All these efforts failed to put an end to the Catalan desire for self-determination, so it would seem Spanish authorities have decided now to malign the independence movement with ridiculous accusations of collaborating with Russia to reach their political aims and to bring destruction and war to the EU. 

The Catalan leaders never hid the fact that they are willing and ready to talk to all nations, and influential political activists and journalists like Julian Assange, to increase support for their movement. They have also been open about their plans to create a Virtual Catalan Republic, a digital infrastructure not subject to Spanish control, as a way to broaden popular participation in regional politics and also make it more difficult for Spanish justice to intervene in their political activities. They are even trying to create a Catalan cryptocurrency and alternative means of digital payment to free themselves from the clutches of the Spanish banking system. These efforts are managed by the Consell per la República Catalana (Council for the Catalan Republic), a private organisation based in Belgium headed by Puigdemont. 

But none of these efforts and initiatives signals a desire on the part of the independence movement to go to war with the EU, let alone invite Russian troops to Europe. Moreover, the idea that Russia would risk a war with the EU and NATO to help liberate a nation that is nowhere near its own territory is as absurdly ridiculous as it is embarrassing. 

While the EU did nothing to stop Spain’s determined repression of Catalan political freedoms beyond issuing occasional empty statements, Madrid still failed to extinguish the flames of independence and freedom in Catalonia. As a result, the Spanish authorities now seem determined to stir Europe’s deep-rooted fears of Russian intervention to be allowed to increase the pressure they have long been putting on their Catalan citizens. Nevertheless, not even this newly invented “Russian connection” is going to be enough to make Catalans give up on their dream of independence. It may, however, help Hollywood screenwriters come up with the plot of their next action-filled spy thriller.

#catalunya #catalonia #independence #europe #current events #actualitat

[multiverseforger]

The character has appeared in several Spider-Man media adaptations over the years, including animated television series and video games. Dimitri Smerdyakov appeared in the Marvel Cinematic Universe film Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019), portrayed by Numan Acar. IGN ranked the Chameleon as Spider-Man's 14th greatest enemy.[2]

Publication history

Fictional character biographyEdit

Dmitri Smerdyakov was born in Soviet Russia. In his youth, he became a servant and half-brother to Sergei Kravinoff, and later a minor associate of Gustav Fiers. Although Dmitri and Sergei were friends, Sergei was often abusive to Smerdyakov, leading to a combination of admiration and resentment towards Kravinoff. Eventually, Smerdyakov emigrated to the United States of America. As he had made a talent for himself during his youth by impressing his brother by impersonating friends and neighbors, he assumed an even more impressive disguise: the identity of Chameleon. During his first known criminal outing, he impersonated Spider-Man, though he was soon exposed and arrested. Shortly afterward, Sergei (now known as "Kraven the Hunter") came to America, and the Chameleon set his old associate's sights on Spider-Man.[10] Both men became long-time enemies of Spider-Man, part of his primary rogues' gallery.

The Chameleon inspired Kraven to begin hunting Spider-Man, inviting Kraven to dispose of the hero.[11] With Kraven, the Chameleon battled Iron Man,[12] and then confronted the Hulk.[13] At one point, the Chameleon disguised himself as Hank Pym, and robbed Pym's laboratory for documents to combat Virus Nine. While delivering the documents and a shrunken Hulk to HYDRA, he was encountered and defeated by Ant-Man.[14] The Chameleon disguised himself as the Torpedo and battled Daredevil.[15]

When his half-brother committed suicide,[16] the Chameleon became obsessed with making Spider-Man suffer for his failure to prevent this. He ingested a serum which made his face permanently featureless and malleable. He attempted to kidnap America's leading expert on superconductors, but was thwarted by Spider-Man.[17] He then kidnapped J. Jonah Jameson. He approached the Maggia for support to be New York's new crime lord, and formed an alliance with Hammerhead.[18] Disguised as a scientist, the Chameleon temporarily removed Spider-Man's powers. He allied himself with the Femme Fatales, the Scorpion, and the Tarantula to eliminate Spider-Man and the Black Cat, but escaped when his plan failed.[19]

The Chameleon's most ambitious play against Spider-Man happened when he formed an alliance with Harry Osborn as the Green Goblin. Before Harry's death, the Chameleon was told Spider-Man's secret identity could be found through Peter Parker, to construct androids of Peter's parents; the Chameleon later admitted that he went through with the plot to confirm once and for all that Peter was Spider-Man. The plan led to a psychotic breakdown for both Spider-Man and the Chameleon, Spider-Man briefly renouncing the civilian identity while the Chameleon is sent to Ravencroft Asylum.[volume & issue needed] But when Doctor Ashley Kafka sneaks him into a basement to try to continue treating him in the belief that he was close to a breakthrough when the court were preparing to put him on trial, the Chameleon escaped and attempted to convince Spider-Man of actually a hallucinating writer who had suffered a mental breakdown after his daughter's death in a car accident but Peter managed to break through this deception due to his own strength of will.[20] The Chameleon's confirmation of Spider-Man's secret identity led him to try to attack Spider-Man through family and friends but this effort met with rather dismal results when Mary Jane Watson subdued him with a baseball bat.[21] Somewhere in between this and subsequent appearances, he appeared to have been destroyed by his nephew Alyosha Kravinoff; Alyosha later threw a Chameleon mask at Spider-Man's feet, referring to it as 'That weakling Dmitri' but apparently recovered, waking in a hospital.[volume & issue needed]

After tricking Spider-Man to the bridge where Gwen Stacy's death occurred, on the pretext of having kidnapped Mary Jane, he declared his own loneliness and love for Peter. When Peter laughed, he threw himself off the bridge.[22] He reappeared some time later in a mental institution, completely incapacitated, believing himself to be Sergei Kravinoff rather than his true self.[volume & issue needed] He later reappeared in his Chameleon identity as part of the Sinister Twelve villain team organized by Norman Osborn as the Green Goblin.[23]

After Spider-Man was unmasked, the Chameleon gathered a gang of villains called the Exterminators,[1] including Will O' The Wisp, Scarecrow, Swarm and Electro, and also blackmailed the Molten Man into his employ all in an effort to defeat Spider-Man and attack the web-slinger's family.[volume & issue needed]

However, the Chameleon was dealt a most humiliating defeat by May Parker's hands, when he attempted to trick May into believing he was Peter, then murder May. But May was not fooled by any means, and defeated the villain with a plate of oatmeal-raisin cookies laced with Ambien. The Rhino was also employed as part of the team up and later defeated Spider-Man only to be unable to collect payment from the Chameleon as he was already captured.[24]

After the "Civil War", the Chameleon showed up among the villains at Stilt-Man's funeral at the Bar with No Name where the Punisher poisoned the drinks and blew up the bar.[25]

The Chameleon next appeared in the newest incarnation of Super Villain Team-Up called MODOK's Eleven. In this limited series, it is revealed that he contacted A.I.M. the moment he was telepathically summoned by MODOK. He then allowed A.I.M. to send in their newest creation, the Ultra-Adaptoid, under the guise of the Chameleon.[volume & issue needed] Additionally, it was revealed in Super Villain Team-Up: MODOK's Eleven that his apparent insanity and demise years earlier were in fact well-crafted ruses designed so that he could fade into the background once more.[volume & issue needed]

The "One More Day" storyline ended with the removal of Peter and Mary Jane's timeline from all memories and no one knows Spider-Man's identity, including the Chameleon.[26]

The Chameleon returns to New York more sadistic and sociopathic than ever before. To complete his hired goal of bombing City Hall, he kidnaps Peter who works for Mayor J. Jonah Jameson. While posing as Parker, he tries to better his life, revealing that he always tries to rectify the problems in the lives of his "faces".[27] Using Peter's security clearance to get access to various materials, the Chameleon was poised to bomb City Hall before Peter escaped and thwarted his plans as Spider-Man. During the resulting confusion, the Chameleon escaped.[28]

Sometime later at an alley building during "The Gauntlet and Grim Hunt" storyline, the distraught Chameleon is met by Sasha Kravinoff and Ana Kravinoff who want his help in avenging Sergei's death.[29] Various follow up issues during The Gauntlet storyline show the Chameleon helping the Kravinoff family into creating an alliance of Spider-Man's enemies as well as Diablo.[30] First, he and Sasha managed to spring Electro from prison.[31] Then Chameleon approached Mysterio stating that he has friends that are "dying" to meet him.[32] When it came to the Grim Hunt part, he posed as Ezekiel in order to get close to Spider-Man to defeat and bring to the Kravinoffs in order to sacrifice as part of a ritual that will revive Sergei.[33] After Sergei is resurrected, the Chameleon states that the problem might stem from inward anger of being resurrected. He and the Kravinoffs discover Spider-Man's corpse, which turns out to be Kaine in Spider-Man's costume instead.[34] The real Spider-Man goes to take revenge on the Kravenoff family. Spider-Man soon arrives and pulled the Chameleon and Alyosha into the huge nest of spiders. Sasha realizes that the Kravinoff family wasn't hunting the spiders, but it was the spiders hunting them.[35]

During the "Origin of the Species" storyline, the Chameleon is invited by Doctor Octopus to join his supervillain team where he gets involved in securing some specific items for Doctor Octopus. He poses as Harry Osborn to trick Spider-Man by telling him that Menace's infant has died. When Spider-Man has been away, the Chameleon got the infant.[36] Doctor Octopus later talks with the Chameleon saying that the baby is the first of a new species. Using a lead gained when he took down Shocker, Spider-Man arrives at the Kravinoff Mansion where he captures the Chameleon who reveals that the baby is still alive and is in the Lizard's clutches.[37]

The Chameleon later becomes a member of Doctor Octopus's latest incarnation of the Sinister Six. He poses as Captain Steve Rogers in order to infiltrate an Air Force base.[38] The Chameleon disguises himself as a tribal chief when he and Mysterio pull off a zombie pirate attack on some natives.[39] Using robots of the other Sinister Six members, Chameleon and Mysterio pulled off this scheme as a diversion so that Doctor Octopus and the other Sinister Six members can infiltrate the Baxter Building to look for specific technology plans while the Future Foundation were investigating the more obvious threat.[40]

The Chameleon later poses as Klaw in order to infiltrate Intelligencia so that he can help the Sinister Six steal their Zero Cannon.[41]

During the "Ends of the Earth" storyline, the Chameleon was present with the Sinister Six when Doctor Octopus tells them about a master plan.[42] The Chameleon was present at Palazzo Senatorio at a summit where the world's greatest minds and the world leaders is carried out to discuss about Doctor Octopus's supposed offer to save the world with the Chameleon disguised as Al Gore. As Al Gore, the Chameleon states that Doctor Octopus would save them. Without a counter-argument, Spider-Man punches Al Gore and reveals to everyone present that Al Gore is actually the Chameleon in disguise. Spider-Man's new costume could detect which person is actually the Chameleon based on heartbeats. A transmission from Doctor Octopus states activating the Octavian Lens which are blocking the harmful UV rays from the sun in order to reinforce this offer. After letting the Chameleon go, Spider-Man secretly places a Spider-Tracer on the Chameleon so that the Avengers could follow him. They follow the Chameleon to the Mediterranean Coasts where the Sinister Six is waiting for the Chameleon. Using many of the stolen objects, the Sinister Six successfully subdue the Avengers leaving only Spider-Man standing.[43] After Spider-Man and the Black Widow escape with Silver Sable's help, the Chameleon suggest that since the Sinister Six's remaining members had each received their $2 billion and their criminal records expunged, they should just leave Doctor Octopus and his scheme. But they stay on board as that would make an enemy out of Doctor Octopus. The Chameleon later gets involved with Mysterio in tricking Spider-Man's allies into thinking they were destroying Symkaria, in order to give Doctor Octopus more time to complete the 200 satellites. However, the Chameleon is captured and the Black Widow threatens to reveal the secret behind his real face.[44]

Following the "Dying Wish" storyline, the Chameleon later fights Superior Spider-Man (Otto Octavius's mind in Spider-Man's body) and the Secret Avengers on the S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier.[45] The Chameleon ends up knocked unconscious and the Superior Spider-Man transports him to his hidden underwater lab where he ends up imprisoned.[46] The Chameleon, Electro, Sandman, Mysterion, and the Vulture are later seen as part of the "Superior Six" team. The Superior Spider-Man has been temporarily controlling their minds in order to redeem them for their crimes, doing this by forcing them do heroic deeds against their will which almost get some of them killed. Every time they are done being controlled, they are put back in their containment cells.[47] They eventually break free of the Superior Spider-Man's control and attempt to exact revenge, while nearly destroying New York in order to do so.[48] With Sun Girl's help, the Superior Spider-Man is barely able to stop the Superior Six.[49]

Following the true Spider-Man's return, the Chameleon attempts to drive Spider-Man insane as revenge for the Superior Spider-Man's earlier treatment of him. However, Deadpool switches costumes with Spider-Man, with the Chameleon unaware of this. He fails at driving Deadpool insane (as Deadpool is already insane), and ends up being shot in the leg by him. Both heroes (in each other's costumes) punch the Chameleon at the same time, knocking him out and later delivered him to the authorities.[50]

At the conclusion of the "Hunted" storyline, the Chameleon is revealed to be one of the attendees at Sergei's funeral as he is pleased that Sergei spared him from the Great Hunt. As he walks away, the Chameleon quotes to his dead stepbrother to sleep well and states "You needn't worry. The world is no longer your burden. Besides, there won't be much of it left soon...Not by the time I've finished."[51

[newstfionline]

Monday, March 15, 2021

Call of the wild: Great outdoors is great escape in pandemic (AP) For those venturing off the beaten path, be advised—it’s a little crowded out there. By nature’s standards, anyway, as the great outdoors has become the great escape. Hiking trails, parks and other open spaces were packed in 2020 with a cooped-up population searching for fresh air during the coronavirus pandemic. Locked down, shut in or just fearful of crowds, people took up hiking, biking, cross-country skiing, snowshoeing, camping, tennis and golf—to name several—in significant numbers. 8.1 million more Americans went hiking in 2020 compared to ‘19, according to a preview of an upcoming outdoor participation report from the Outdoor Foundation, the philanthropic wing of the Outdoor Industry Association. 7.9 million more went camping last year. 3.4 million more participated in freshwater fishing. The foundation’s research also reflected a decline in inactivity for most age groups and across all income levels.

U.S. airport passengers hit highest level since March 2020 (Reuters) The Transportation Security Administration said it screened 1.357 million U.S. airport passengers on Friday, the highest number screened since March 15, 2020, as air travel begins to rebound from a pandemic-related drop. Covid-19 has devastated air travel demand, with U.S. airline passenger demand down 60 percent in 2020 and down 63 percent in January. But with a growing number of Americans getting vaccinated, demand and advanced bookings have started to rise in recent weeks. Friday’s numbers were still down 38 percent over pre-Covid-19 levels.

Winter storm closes roads in Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska (AP) A powerful late winter snowstorm intensified over the central Rocky Mountains on Sunday with heavy snow and wind leading to airport and road closures, power outages and avalanche warnings in parts of Colorado, Wyoming and Nebraska. The National Weather Service in Wyoming called it a “historic and crippling” winter storm that would cause extremely dangerous to impossible travel conditions through at least early Monday. Major roads southeast of a line that crosses diagonally from the southwest corner of Wyoming to its northeast corner were closed Sunday, including roads in and out of Cheyenne and Casper. Farther south, a record of over 2 feet (61 centimeters) of snow had fallen just outside Cheyenne by noon Sunday, the weather service reported. A SNOTEL site at Windy Peak in the Laramie Range reported 52 inches (1.3 meters) of snow in a 24-hour period ending Sunday morning, the weather service said.

FEMA to help manage unaccompanied minors at US-Mexico border (AP) The Biden administration is turning to the Federal Emergency Management Agency for help managing and caring for record numbers of unaccompanied immigrant children who are streaming into the United States by illegally crossing the border with Mexico. Government figures show a growing crisis at the border as hundreds of children illegally enter the U.S. from Mexico daily and are taken into custody. The Homeland Security Department is supposed to process and transfer unaccompanied minor children to the Department of Health and Human Services within three days so that they can be placed with a parent already living in the United States, or other suitable sponsor, until their immigration cases can be resolved. But more children are being held longer at Border Patrol facilities that weren’t designed with their care in mind because long-term shelters run by the Department of Health and Human Services have next to no capacity to accommodate them. Children are being apprehended daily at far higher rates than HHS can release them to parents or sponsors.

Spanish Police Seize Submarine Built to Carry Drugs (WSJ) Spanish police Friday said they had seized a 30-foot long narco-submarine that could carry 2.2 tons of narcotics, a sign of the lengths cartels are going to transport illegal drugs to the booming European market. Police said they discovered the narco-sub in Malaga on Spain’s Costa del Sol last month as part of an international police operation that led to the arrest of 52 people and seizure of more than 400 kilos of cocaine, along with other illegal drugs and cash. The vessel was made of fiberglass and plywood and powered by two 200-horsepower engines, although it had never sailed, police said. Narco-subs are semisubmersibles that float mostly below the waterline and have long ferried cocaine from Colombia to Central America. In 2019, Spanish law enforcement discovered a narco-sub off Spain’s Atlantic coast, confirming persistent rumors that they can reach Europe.

Italy prepares for an Easter lockdown as Covid-19 cases grow exponentially (CNN) Italy is facing another lockdown, as the government attempts to contain a recent surge of coronavirus cases, marred by the presence of new variants. Half of Italy’s 20 regions, which include the cities Rome, Milan and Venice, will be entering new coronavirus restrictions from Monday, March 15. The measures will be effective through April 6, according to a decree passed by Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi’s cabinet on Friday. In regions demarcated as “red zones” people will be unable to leave their houses except for work or health reasons, with all non-essential shops closed. In “orange zones,” people will also be banned from leaving their town and their region—except for work or health reasons—and bars and restaurants will only be able to do delivery and take-away service. Additionally, over Easter weekend, the entire country will be considered a “red zone,” and will be subject to a national lockdown from April 3 to 5.

Born in Soviet Exile, They Might Die in a Russian One (NYT) Long lines of people waiting to buy milk, toilet paper and other essentials disappeared from Russia decades ago. But one line has only grown longer—the one Yevgeniya B. Shasheva has been waiting in. For 70 years. That is the time that has passed since her birth in a remote Russian region. Her family was sent into exile there from Moscow during the height of Stalin’s Great Purge in the 1930s, when millions were executed or died in prison camps. Throughout the past seven decades, Ms. Shasheva says, she has been waiting to move home to the Russian capital. A 2019 ruling by Russia’s Constitutional Court ordered that the government make this happen, mandating that such “children of the gulag”—around 1,500 of them, according to some estimates—be given the financial means to move to the cities from which Stalin banished their parents. But the process has stalled completely, leaving Ms. Shasheva with nearly 55,000 people ahead of her in line for social housing in Moscow. So she waits 800 miles away in Nizhny Odes, a town so far off the beaten track that wild bears appear regularly on the streets.

US-Turkey reset faces long list of hurdles (AP) Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has toned down his anti-Western and anti-US rhetoric in an apparent effort to reset the rocky relationship with his NATO allies, but so far he’s been met by silence from U.S. President Joe Biden. Nearly two months into his presidency, Biden still hasn’t called Erdogan, which some in Turkey see as a worrying sign. By contrast, former President Donald Trump and Erdogan spoke just days after the 2016 election. Ties between Ankara and Washington—which once considered each other as strategic partners—have steadily deteriorated in recent years over differences on Syria, Turkey’s cooperation with Russia and more recently on Turkish naval interventions in the eastern Mediterranean, which U.S. officials have described as destabilizing. Despite tensions, many within Erdogan’s government were hoping for four more years of the administration led by Trump, who had a personal rapport with Erdogan and didn’t give him any lectures about Turkey’s human rights record. Biden drew ire from Turkish officials after an interview with the New York Times in which he spoke about supporting Turkey’s opposition against “autocrat” Erdogan. Analysts say it’s going to be very difficult to reset the relationship, given the range of issues where the two countries don’t see eye to eye.

At least 39 killed in Myanmar district after Chinese factories burned, media say (Reuters) Security forces killed at least 22 protesters in the poor, industrial Hlaingthaya suburb of Myanmar’s main city on Sunday after Chinese-financed factories in the area were set ablaze, according to local media. A further 16 people were reported killed elsewhere in Yangon and other parts of Myanmar and state television said a policeman had died in one of the bloodiest days of protests against the Feb. 1 military coup against elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi. China’s embassy said many Chinese staff were injured and trapped in arson attacks by unidentified assailants on garment factories in Hlaingthaya and that it had called on Myanmar to protect Chinese property and citizens. As plumes of smoke rose from the industrial area, security forces opened fire on protesters in the suburb that is home to migrants from across the country, local media said.

In China, millennials embrace Spanish (NBC News) Yilin Ye, a student from Anji, in the eastern province of Zhejiang, China, is spending time abroad at the University of Zaragoza in Spain. Ye, 25, said she first started learning Spanish after having heard about its “excellent reputation.” She said she feels she takes on a slightly different persona when she speaks Spanish. “It’s a really beautiful thing, really fascinating,” she said. “When I’m speaking Chinese, I’m more calm. When I’m speaking English, I’m probably a bit more open, and when I speak Spanish, I’m very ‘wow.’” Just how popular is the world’s second-most-popular spoken language in China? There are about 50,000 Spanish speakers in China, a figure scholars say is growing by the year. “The Spanish language is making waves in China,” Lu Jingsheng, an author and national coordinator of Spanish for the Chinese government, said in an interview.

China Eases Visa Rules for Foreigners Who Get Chinese Vaccines (Bloomberg) The China-made vaccine is becoming the ticket to enter the mainland. China said it will ease visa application requirements for foreigners seeking to enter the mainland from Hong Kong if they have been inoculated with Covid-19 vaccines made in China. Foreigners visiting the mainland for work will face less paperwork in visa applications if they are able to show they have received vaccines produced in China. With the vaccine certificates, these travelers will also be able to skip the requirement for a Covid-19 test or fill out a travel declaration form. The rule also expands the scope of applicants eligible for a visa due to humanitarian needs, such as taking care of family or attending funerals, if they have received Chinese vaccines. Other applicants should still follow the earlier visa procedure, according to the statement.

Mysterious attacks on at least a dozen tankers carrying Iranian oil are reportedly due to covert Israeli operations (Business Insider) Israel has used water mines and other weapons to sabotage at least a dozen tankers carrying Iranian oil and bound for Syria, according to a Wall Street Journal report, which cited US and regional officials. In violation of US and international sanctions, Iran has continued trading oil with Syria. Israel is reportedly concerned that the profits from these sales help fund terrorism in the region, and has targeted the tankers as a result. These tankers tend to carry hundreds of millions of dollars worth of oil, per the Journal. A shipping professional told the Journal that Israel conducted three strikes against ships carrying Iranian oil in 2019, and a separate shipping professional said six ships used by Iran were targeted last year. There are not any known instances of ships being sunk as a result of these suspected operations, but at least two were forced to return to Iran. The alleged Israeli attacks may represent a new front in the conflict between these two historic adversaries.

#headlines #news

[cherchersketch]

< Day 13: ARGUS AU >

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crossposted to AO3

The next time they met, everything changed.

Felicity was most definitely not thinking about some thug she had randomly met in Russia. Their encounter was a one-off thing. She had a mission to focus on.

She was definitely not remembering the smirk he gave when she realized he had taken down the last agent instead of her.

He had dimples. What the frak. She was definitely not wondering how he would look like if he fully smiled, for real.

Oliver was definitely not thinking about some hacker he had randomly met in Russia. Their encounter was a one-off thing. He had a mission to focus on. He was definitely not remembering the sound of her laughter.

He was just supposed to stand there and guard the door. A simple mission. They weren’t supposed to have a conversation. He wasn’t supposed to make her laugh like that. And he definitely wasn’t supposed to be looking forward to hearing that laughter again.

Another day, another mission, but this time, she was so close, she could feel it. It was going to be all worth it. The months she’d spent tracking down her criminal of a father, slowly gaining his trust and working her way up his organization. The amount of data she’d amassed was now more than enough to take down the entire operation. She just had to wait for the right time.

Another day, another mission. He was so close now. He’d spent so long cursing his time on Lian Yu but it had unexpectedly come in handy. The months spent training and proving his worth to the Bratva, slowly gaining their trust as he worked as Anatoly’s right hand. The amount of intelligence he’d amassed was now more than enough to take down the entire operation. He just had to wait for the right time.

Unexpectedly, it came in the form of another joint HELIX and Bratva mission. And once again, Oliver and Felicity were paired up.

“Because you two worked together so well the last time,” Anatoly grinned as he gave Oliver a wink.

The mission started well enough. This time, it was a jailbreak. They were attempting to release an ARGUS double agent. She worked in the higher levels of ARGUS, but unbeknownst to them, was secretly feeding information to both HELIX and the Bratva. She was no use to anyone behind bars and ARGUS wasn’t the type to extract their agents from such situations, expecting them to be able to fend for themselves. In desperation, Lyla Michaels had reached out to her seedier allies. Since the prison was located in Russia and employed state-of-the-art technology, another HELIX-Bratva partnership was inevitable.

Felicity pulled off her role as prison warden, escorting Oliver into his cell. Once the coast was clear, she unlocked his door and together, they made their way to the lower levels where Lyla was held. The whole route was surprisingly easy and obstacle-free, no guards appeared to stop or question why a Level 1 warden and prisoner were walking around the Level 4 area, which made Oliver and Felicity even more wary. Though they’d only worked together once before, it felt like something would always go wrong at the last minute.

And besides, unbeknownst to the other, they each had their own secret secondary mission.

When they finally found the cell number they’d been looking for, both heaved a sigh of relief. They glanced at each other.

Oliver opened his mouth to say something, he didn’t know what, but Felicity interrupted first. “Look, let’s just get this over with, ok?”

Oliver nodded.

“Took you guys long enough.” Lyla grimaced as they released her sore hands from the shackles that bound her to the wall.

Glancing at the both of them, Lyla silently counted down under her breath.

“I’m sorry, Oliver.”

“I’m sorry, Felicity.”

But before either of them could do anything more than take out their hidden pistols, Lyla stepped between them.

“Stand down, agents.”

One beat.

Two.

Oliver and Felicity blinked at looked at Lyla, then back at each other.

“You’re working for ARGUS!?”

In the distance, the sound of hurried footsteps could be heard. Stepping out of the cell, Lyla gestures to her two shocked companions.

“Escape now, discussions later. You both brought the intel we need right?”

Nodding mutely, they followed Lyla down the winding corridors, to the back door that led them to freedom.

The journey back to ARGUS headquarters, in a stealthy ARGUS private jet of course, passed in silence, save for the occasional glance Oliver and Felicity threw toward each other. Behind them, Lyla smirked. It was nice to see plans work out smoothly once in a while.

They managed to last til the debriefing in Lyla’s office.

“Did you know?” Lyla looked up from the computers as the data accumulated from both agents were uploaded to ARGUS’s secure servers.

Felicity was glaring at Oliver, arms crossed. Oliver looked at the ground, fiddling with a flechette in one hand.

“I didn’t know about any other ARGUS agents. In fact,” he frowned at Lyla, “what happened to Amanda Waller?”

Ah, Lyla was expecting that.

“Your old mission controller had an... accident. She doesn’t work for ARGUS anymore.”

“She told me she was the head of ARGUS.” Oliver’s hand stopped playing with the flechette.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.” The line guard who’d been silently standing at the door finally spoke up. “Don’t you know it’s rude to speak to the director of ARGUS like that.”

“At ease, soldier.” Lyla held a hand up as she smiled at John Diggle. “She was until the...incident. I’ve been in charge since about 6 months so you wouldn’t know.”

Lyla gestured to Felicity, “She does though since I was her mission controller before that.”

“ We knew that HELIX had ties with certain underground organizations. Since we already had an undercover operative in the Bratva, we decided to steer these two together, kill two birds with one stone in a single operation.”

The pair glanced at each other again before looking away.

“If everything is all in order, may I be excused?” Felicity pointedly ignored Oliver.

“Yes, congrats on a successful mission, agent Smoak. You are dismissed.” Lyla pointedly did not smile, though she did share a knowing glance with John as Oliver’s eyes followed Felicity out the door.

When it slammed shut, Oliver cleared his throat. “So, what now? Am I going back to Lian Yu?”

Lyla shrugged. “Well, that’s up to you now. That was Amanda’s plan but I happen to believe that agents should have some say so, what do you want to do? Continue working at ARGUS, go back to Lian Yu and wait to be rescued?”

Oliver glanced out the window though whatever, or whoever, he was looking for was already gone. “I’ll stay. ARGUS is... fine. For now.”

Lyla nodded,” Alright then. Congrats on the successful mission, agent Queen. You’re dismissed.”

John waited several minutes before speaking up again. “You really need to stop playing matchmaker with our agents.”

Lyla smiled at her husband. “So you see it too.” She tilted a cheek up for John to place a quick kiss. “It’s always better to have something to live for. And I think those two worked well together, don’t you think?”

John just sighed and shook his head.

#Inktober #olicity #olicity AU #olicity fanart #olicity fanfiction #CherCher art #a continuation of the previous one #wow a twoshot #how did that happen #it was supposed to be the ending of the previous one but it was getting way too long #so I separated them into two

[loretranscripts]

Lore Episode 31: Lost and Found (Transcript) - 4th April 2016

tw: murder, gore, blood, human remains, cannibalism

Disclaimer: This transcript is entirely non-profit and fan-made. All credit for this content goes to Aaron Mahnke, creator of Lore podcast. It is by a fan, for fans, and meant to make the content of the podcast more accessible to all. Also, there may be mistakes, despite rigorous re-reading on my part. Feel free to point them out, but please be nice!

Teenagers have a tendency to get up to mischief when they’re bored, that’s as true today as it ever has been. So, when four teenage boys found themselves with a spring afternoon on their hands, they did what any English lad might have done in 1943 – they went poaching. They were only hunting birds’ nests, really. It was April and spring meant nests full of eggs, so they went exploring in their area of Stourbridge, there in the midlands of England. Over the course of that afternoon, their search brought them to a private park known as Hegley Woods, and that’s where they saw the tree. It was a massive elm with an overgrown trunk that looked more like a hedgehog than a plant, with thin, whispy branches that stuck out toward the sky. Locals called it the “Wych Elm”. It was strong, it was climbable, and most importantly it was perfect for nesting, so one of the boys scaled up the side. When he reached the top and began to look for nests, he found something entirely different – a skull was staring up at him from the hollow centre of the tree. The boy assumed it was from an animal and plucked it free from the branches. That’s when he noticed how large it was, and the patches of hair that were still attached to it – human hair. The grisly discovery kicked off one of the biggest unsolved mysteries in modern England. Beneath the skull, lodged in the hollow centre of the tree, was a complete skeleton. It belonged to a young woman of unknown origin and unknown identity. No one stepped forward to claim the body, no killer was ever found, but the public fell in love, and named her, and to this day people still wonder: who put Bella in the wych tree? Humans, you see, are fascinated by dead bodies. They’re the centrepiece of countless mystery stories and a vivid reminder of our own mortality. We can see that fascination in both the innocent wonder of films like Stand by Me and the gruesome realism of CSI. Real life, though, is more complex, it’s more dark than we’d care to admit, and while the odds are good that most people won’t ever stumble upon a dead body, it’s a lot more common than you’d expect. Corpses should be hard to come by, but unfortunately that couldn’t be further from the truth. I’m Aaron Mahnke and this is Lore.

In February of 2013, a number of guests at the Cecil Hotel in Los Angeles called down to the front desk to complain about the water in their rooms. Some described how their shower would run black before clearing up, others complained of the odd taste and odour, and that age-old compaint that we all know and love, poor water pressure, popped up time and time again. So, the maintenance crew was sent up to the roof where the hotel kept water tanks used to supply the rooms, and it’s one of the tanks that they discovered a body. A human body, no less, and it had been there for weeks. It turned out to be a missing woman named Elisa Lam. Her parents had reported her missing in early February, but she had been seen last there in the hotel on the 31st of January, and it had been her decomposing body that had been altering the hotel’s water supply. Finding bodies in unusual places isn’t a new thing, though, and it’s not uncommon, either. In January of 1984, three students from Columbia University were walking home to their dorm when they passed an old carpet, rolled up and discarded on the side of the street. Now, like a lot of you, I’ve been to college, so I think we can all agree that curbside discoveries are frequently wonderful. A random desk, or that ugly couch that’s way too comfortable to be ignored. So, it’s hard to blame these three students for bringing the rug home. When they unrolled it, though, they found a body inside. The man, roughly 20 years old, had been shot to death, as was evident from the bullet holes in his forehead. Needless to say, they didn’t keep the rug and the police were brought in to do a full investigation. In December of 1982, staff were called to a room in a hotel in New Burgen, New Jersey. Occupants complained of a powerful odour in the room, and they weren’t the first. For a number of days leading up to the call, each guest had complained of the same thing, and it seemed to be getting worse. The motel staff finally discovered why: it was the body of Gary Smith, who had been killed by his autotheft partners and stuffed beneath the bed in the room. They had poisoned his hamburger then strangled him when waiting got too hard, and finally hid the evidence beneath the mattress.

In 2011, Abbeville National Bank in Louisiana began renovations to their second floor, an area they had used for storage for decades. Running between the storage area and the active bank facilities was a chimney, and it was just inside the first floor fireplace where workers discovered a few small bones. Climbing inside the fireplace and looking up, they found the source. A body, now little more than a skeleton, had been lodged in the flue. Dental records connected the skeleton to a man reported missing 27 years earlier, in 1984. The man had a criminal record and had been in trouble with the law shortly before his disappearance. Police can’t prove why he was in the chimney, but given the proximity to the bank I feel its safe to guess that he’d been trying to rob it, Santa Claus style. In November of 2011, Russian police raided the home of a historian named Anatoly Moskvin. Inside, they found 29 life-sized dolls, all women, all dressed in fancy clothing. But they weren’t dolls at all. Moskvin, it turns out, was a graverobber with a fetish. For years, the historian had been visiting cemeteries all over western Russia, as many as 750 by some counts, and occasionally brought home corpses that “interested” him. All were females between the ages of 15 and 30, and all had been dead for a very long time. It seems, if we’re to believe the newspapers and media outlets, that stumbling upon a corpse isn’t as rare a thing as we might expect. Maybe it’s a product of the times – with more and more people on the planet, I suppose the odds keep going up that we’ll eventually open a wall or dig a garden bed and find a body. But some bodies are intentionally harder to find. Some killers go to great lengths to hide the evidence of their dirty deeds, and that’s really the core of these stories, isn’t it? Because hiding a body is about more than just making an object disappear. It’s about concealing a crime and escaping the consequences. The trouble is, when those hidden bodies are found, their stories often reveal the greatest horrors of all.

She wasn’t always known as Kate Webster. Sure, when she gave birth to her son in 1874, that was the surname she passed on to him. She claimed to have married a sailor named Webster, but he had died. A decade earlier, though, she had been someone else entirely. Kate Webster had been born Katherine Lawler to a poor family in a small, Irish village in 1849. While most children might have helped out at home or perhaps played with toys, Katherine grew up fast. She spent her childhood learning to pickpocket, and judging by the way the rest of her life played out, it’s a skill she’d been born with. At the age of 15 she was caught and imprisoned for a short time, but by 17, she managed to steal enough money to secure herself passage on a boat to England. But she didn’t use her journey as a chance to make a fresh start. No, Katherine Lawler just kept upping her game. Within a year of arriving in Liverpool, she was caught stealing and sentenced to four years in prison. Once released, she found work cleaning houses in London, as well as working as a prostitute – and then she became pregnant. The father, according to Kate, was a man she called “Mr. Strong”. He’d been her friend, her lover, and her partner in crime for many months, but when he learnt of the pregnancy he abandoned her. Her son, John Webster, was born in April of 1874, and those who knew her couldn’t help but wonder: would this help Kate change her ways? The answer, it turns out, was a clear and obvious no.

Rather than seek reform, Kate simply evolved. She would rent a room in a boarding house and once there, she would begin to sell off the furnishings in her room. When everything was gone, she’d move on and repeat the crime elsewhere. Another thing she repeated, sadly, was prison time. In 1875, while her son John was only a year old, Kate began serving an 18 month term in Wandsworth Prison there in London. It was one of the many stints in police custody, even though she moved around a lot and used various aliases to disguise herself. And all the while, her friend, Sarah Crease, helped by watching and caring for young John. Some think Sarah was an enabler, that she gave Kate the freedom to live her life of crime without the burden of parenthood, but others view Sarah as a hopeful friend. She saw a young boy who needed looking after and she did her best to help out. She also tried to get Kate a real, honest job, something that had the potential to turn the woman’s life around.

In 1879, Sarah’s employer asked if there was someone who could do some house cleaning for a friend of hers, a woman named Julia Martha Thomas. Mrs. Thomas lived in the Richmond area of London, she was a widow in her mid-50s, and had a reputation for being a little strict and prone to anger. But it was a job, and Sarah immidiately suggested Kate Webster. The relationship between Webster and Mrs. Thomas began cordially enough, but quickly devolved into daily arguments. Webster claimed that Mrs. Thomas would follow her around and criticise her work, while Mrs. Thomas claimed Webster came to work drunk most of the time. Needless to say, it wasn’t a match made in heaven, but the two women tried hard to make it work. After a little over a month, Julia Thomas decided it was time to cut Webster loose. Kate, to her credit, tried to change. She begged for just a few more days of employment and, for some unknown reason, Thomas agreed to the terms, but the relationship was eating at her like an ulser, and she couldn’t stop thinking about it. She thought that Kate was stealing from her, but she didn’t have proof yet, and she feared for her life. On March 2nd of 1879, Mrs. Thomas showed up at church clearly upset. She’d just had another argument with Webster, and it had shaken her deeply. Her friends claimed that Thomas seemed distracted and agitated, and she left early to go attend to matters at home. But Kate was waiting for her there, and this time, they would trade more than angry words.

Julia Thomas thought the house was empty, but went searching for Kate Webster anyway. They had unfinished business, and it was time Kate found some place else to work. It was settled – as far as she was concerned, at least. While Thomas was upstairs in the hallway, Webster stepped out of a dark room and attacked her employer. The two women struggled for a moment, and then Kate gave the older woman a shove. Thomas stumbled down the staircase where she slammed into the floor below. Her skull now fractured and bloody, she began to scream where she lay. Kate was immidiately concerned that the neighbours might hear. There was a busy pub right next door, and if someone happened to hear the shouting, Kate was sure to be discovered and arrested. Launching herself down the stairs, she sat upon the injured woman’s chest and began to squeeze her throat with both hands. She wanted the screaming to stop. She needed it to stop, and after a few tense moments, it did. Julia Thomas lay dead on the floor of her own home, and Kate Webster had graduated from theft to murder in the course of just a few heartbeats. But Kate was stronger than her fears, and she knew she had to act fast. She grabbed a razor, a meat saw and a carving knife and set about cutting Thomas’ body into pieces. Later  Webster would admit that, while she believed she had always had a strong stomach, this work in particular tested her limits. There had just been so much blood, she later told the police. Webster put the pieces into a large copper kettle and then boiled them in an attempt to reduce them to a more managable state. It was essentially rendering, a process where meat is cooked until the fat and protein separate. Witnesses would later come forward and talk of the stench coming from the home, but no one complained at the time. This was London in the late 19th century, perhaps people were just a little more forgiving of odd odours back then.

When the boiling was complete, Webster fished out each part from the remaining lard and placed them all into a box she found in the home – most of it, that is. She couldn’t seem to fit the head and one of the feet, so she had to get creative. She tossed the foot into a local trash heap, but the head was more problematic. In the end, she found a Gladstone bag, something like an old physician’s handbag, and stashed the head inside there. And then she cleaned the house, removing as much of the evidence as she could that something horrible had taken place there. It took her two full days to do it, but when she was finished, she put on a dress from her employer’s wardrobe and went to the pub next door to meet a friend for drinks. This friend, a Mrs. Porter, later told police that Webster arrived at the pub carrying a large, black bag. She kept it with her almost the entire evening, as if it contained something very valuable to her. Oddly, though, Webster excused herself from the table at one point, and when she returned a short while later, the bag was gone. Webster’s next order of business was to get rid of the box that contained what remained of Mrs. Thomas, so she enlisted the help of Mrs. Porter’s son to carry it out of the house and to nearby Barns Bridge. He carried the heavy box all the way to the bridge, and then she sent him home, claiming that a friend was on the way to meet her there. This boy would later tell police that, as he was walking away, he heard a large splash. It was as if something heavy had been tossed into the river. Webster had disposed of the body, and I can’t help but wonder if she perhaps sighed with relief when the box finally dipped beneath the surface of the Thames and vanished from sight. The following day, though, things got more complicated. Unware that the box containing Mrs. Thomas had actually floated to the surface and drifted to shore over night, Kate Webster dug in deeper. She took on the identity of her former employer while beginning to sell off all the items in the house. Old habits die hard, apparently. And it was about this time, according to a later witness, that Webster stepped outside and spoke to a pair of neighbourhood boys. She had two bowls in her hand, and they were steaming hot. She told them it was lard – from a pig, she added – and they were welcome to have it for free, if they wanted it. The boys ate two bowls each.

While the police were investigating the discovery of the box full of body parts, they had no clues that might point them to the killer responsible. It even took them a bit of time to figure out that the parts were actually human rather than butcher cast-offs, but even then, all they could be sure of was that the victim had been a middle-aged woman. Kate Webster, meanwhile, was making money hand over fist. She sold off the smaller items first – the jewellery, the knick-knacks, even her victim’s gold teeth – and then began to spread word that the furniture was for sale as well. And that lead to an agreement with a local man, who arrived on March 9th with a small group of men to help him carry the items out of the house. A neighbour woman saw the activity and approached one of the remaining men. “Who ordered the removal of these items?” she asked him. The man simply turned and pointed to Kate Webster, who stood on the front steps of the house. “She did,” he replied, “Mrs. Thomas.” When the police finally arrived, they entered the house and immidiately found signs of something tragic: a charred finger bone in the fireplace, bloodstains on the floor, splatters of grease – or lard – around the copper kettle. But the one thing they wanted to find, a killer, was nowhere to be seen. Kate Webster had skipped town. In the end, the authorities tracked her down in Ireland. She’d taken her son and made her way back to her hometown as fast as she could. When she arrived, she did so while still wearing clothing and jewellery taken from Mrs. Thomas. But her stay there was short-lived – the local police chief, the man who 15 years earlier had put her in jail for the first time, recognised her in the bulletin from Scotland Yard and quickly took her into custody. Everything after that moved quickly. Webster was transported back to England, and at every train stop between Liverpool and London, crowds gathered to jeer and shout at her. By March 30th, she had been formally charged with murder.

Of course, she tried to lie her way out of it. This was the woman who had changed her name dozens of times to outsmart the police, who had moved into room after room and sold off the possessions inside. She was a thief and a liar, so it was only natural for her to try and talk her away out of this too. First, she blamed the murder on Henry Porter, the husband of her friend from the pub, but when his alibi held up she shifted the blame to the man who had come to buy the furniture from the Thomas house. He too was easily dismissed. When it appeared that she wouldn’t be able to squirm out from under the charge of murder, she took credit for the crime, but claimed that she only did it because others told her to. In the end, none of it worked. The formal trial began on July 2nd of 1879, and just six days later, the jury declared her guilty. The judge, a man named Justice Denman, sentenced her to be executed. Yes, Judge Justice – I can’t make these things up. When asked if there was any reason why she should not be executed, Webster told the judge yes, insisting that she was in fact pregnant. A new jury of women were gathered together along with a physician, and after examining Webster they declared that the pregnancy, like everything else the woman had said, was also a lie. She returned to Wandsworth Prison, where she had served time before working for Mrs. Thomas, and it was there that she wrote her formal confession. She described all of the details of the murder, right down to how she burned the internal organs to get rid of them, how she chose her tools, and even how she removed the head. On July 29th, Kate Webster stepped onto the platform inside the prison’s execution chamber, a building that was ironically nicknamed “The Cold Meatshed”. A governer announced the time, a priest administered last rights, and then she was guided onto the trapdoors with a sack over her head. Afterward, she was buried in an unmarked grave, right there at the prison. The records of Wandsworth Prison contain the names of 134 people who were executed over the span of 110 years. Kate Webster was the only woman on that list.

It’s hard to nail down the real reason behind our fascination with death, but it’s safe to at least make a guess. Death puts our mortality on display. No matter how hard we try to avoid it as a topic, to ignore its slow, steady approach from the distance, we can’t seem to get away from it. Whether we want it or not, death will come for us all one day, and the dead body stands as that singular, visceral reminder of our death. In the horror movies, it’s the clue that’s dropped into our laps early on in the film. It highlights the danger our heroes find themselves in, it represents what’s at stake, what could happen if they fail and the true power of the killer. When the London police pulled the box containing the remains of a women from the cold waters of the Thames, they didn’t know a lot, but they did know one thing. There was a killer in London, and whoever it was needed to be stopped. Thankfully, they managed to do just that, but in a wild twist of irony, the body of Julia Thomas has been lost. It might have been a result of the way evidence was handled in the late 19th century, or the state of decay when the remains were found. Whatever the reason, there’s no grave for Julia Thomas, no tombstone with her name etched into the surface. Her body was lost, and then found, and then finally lost again. Well, most of it. As luck would have it, the neighbourhood where her house once stood has gone through some renevation. In October of 2010, a wealthy London homeowner was having an addition built in his backyard, when the work crew unearthed something small and white. It was a skull. The teeth were missing, but there was a fracture at the back of the head, and after doing a bit more research, investigators determined that the structure that once stood in the homeowner’s backyard was a stable – a stable behind the pub that stood next door to Julia Thomas. Her body might be lost forever into the pages of history, but the head that Kate Webster had tried so hard to get rid of has finally been recovered. Oh, and the wealthy homeowner who stumbled upon the skull? None other than English naturalist, Sir David Attenborough.

[Closing statements]

#lore podcast #aaron mahnke #podcast transcripts #kate webster #witch elm #bella in the witch elm #elisa lam #england #ireland #true crime #transcripts #31

[voriiduraki]

Name: Boris Ivanovich 

Known Aliases: Mischa Sirotovsky (real name), Boris the Innocent, The Scholar, the Sovietnik

Birthday day: December 30th

Gender: Cis male

Age: 62 (as of 2017)

Height: 6’7”

Weight: 328 lbs

Hair color: Silver (was light brown)

Eye color: Grey

Nationality: Ukrainian

Sexuality: Heterosexual

Family: Father - Eliezer Sirotovsky, Mother - Ana Sirotovsky, Brother - Danylo Sirotovsky, Uncle - Matviy Sirotovsky, Aunt -Yelyzaveta Sirotovsky, Cousin - Zlata Sirotovsky, Grandfather - Sirotovsky, Grandmother - Sirotovsky, Uncle - Bodashka Miroshnik, Aunt -  Maryshka Miroshnik, Cousin - T. Miroshnik, Cousin - S. Miroshnik, Cousin - G. Miroshnik, Grandfather - Yakov Miroshnik, Grandmother - Rakhila Miroshnik

Appearance: Boris is very wide and very tall and built like a strong man with a bit of a gut. His eyes are steel grey and he has a short, groomed, silver-grey beard. 

His short, silver hair is cut close on the sides with a noticeable, raised scar on the back of his head. As most bratva has numerous tattoos depicting his accomplishments and failures. Boris has always looked a lot older than he really is and looks closer to seventy than sixty. He has a preference for earth tone turtleneck sweaters and dark trousers. On more important business he'll wear a suit. 

Personality: Boris was always friendly and a bit emotional and had a strong love of learning. After his wrongful imprisonment he became a more hardened man that was unafraid to kill if his life depended on it. There wasn't much he was afraid of when he was young. He is very loyal as a person and strongly believes in friendship and takes debts seriously. 

His personality drastically changed after taking a bullet to the back of his head. His emotions are a lot stronger and unhinged. Boris tends to get overtly upset or happy and will laugh or cry to fit these strong emotions even if it's over something minor. He also has an intense phobia of receiving cuts and open wounds that could possibly get infected. Though he can no longer feel pain it still sends him into a panic.

✭ JJBA Verse Info ✭

Stand: Iron Maiden

Stand appearance: Iron Maiden looks to be a small figure of a child or adolescent girl that is made from crude, jagged metal with no distinct facial features. The back of it's head appears missing or blown out to reveal the hollow interior of the stand. Several sharp, curved metal shards protruding from its back in what resembles wings or ribs.

Stand ability: It can create metallic, thorn like spires on any surface that can impale and rip things apart. It is heavily tied to his emotions and requires precision. After sustaining a nearly fatal head injury that caused trauma to his brain, his stand acts according to whatever emotion is overwhelming him at the moment and for this reason he has to limit its use and exercise self control.

-----------------------------------

Early life: Boris was born as Mischa Sirotovsky in a Ukrainian village in 1953. His village was a small, tight knit Ashkenazi Jewish community that was a mining town. Though Mischa had no younger siblings his mother often volunteered to watch the village children while the parents worked and he happily helped her while his father and older brother worked in the coal mines. He was a stand user from birth and believed his stand to be a spirit of sorts. Initially he ignored it until a strange phenomenon of curved, metal spikes appeared. Afraid to tell anyone he just kept it to himself. 

Mischa always had a love of learning and showed interest in reading from a young age. When the children were at his home he would read to them and teach then a new word or fact he had learned. It was then he knew he wanted to pursue knowledge and become a teacher in the bigger cities. At eighteen, when he came of age to work in the mines Mischa informed his family and friends of his decision. They supported him and gave him their blessings. 

Not long after leaving his village Mischa was robbed of all his possessions including his internal passport. When he went to report the crime he was mistaken for a wanted criminal and taken into custody. Without any papers he had no way to prove himself and was transported to a Russia then held in prison awaiting his trial. While in prison he met Dmitri Volkov, the only person who showed him any mercy while in prison. He immediately imprinted on him, following around and trying to stay near him to Dmitri's dismay. But after Mischa saved him from an attack on his life which led him to solitary confinement he was sought out by Dmitri to be his associate and friend and help him start his own organization and, ideally, escape. Four years they managed to bust out of prison with several other men that served in their young organization. Since escaping Mischa has gone by the name of the man he was accused of being. 

The now Boris spent many years as Obschak, in charge of the security branch and head of all the captains in the organization until he was shot in the back of the head during a deal gone wrong with a Hungarian gang after their move to America. The bullet lodged itself in the back of his head damaging part of his brain that allowed him to feel pain thus deadening the sense. This absence of sensory feedback made his brain react more to emotional stimuli, often in extremes. Shortly after his near death experience Boris nearly died from an infected wound failing to have it checked out. This made his mind make the association of open wounds and cuts mean he should react with fear and anxiety. He is prone to panic attacks if he draws blood or gets a large gash. Being far too unhinged for field work he was made Sovietnik, in charge of money and bookkeeping, for Dmitri refused to get rid of his oldest friend and oldest asset. 

Organization Rank: Sovietnik/Right hand of Dmitri

Random Facts: 

※ Boris taught both of Dmitri's sons how to read and write in both Russian and English.

※ His nephew Ghost favors him and often attends synagogue with him.

※ Boris rarely goes by his old name but on occasion when Dmitri wants to discuss a personal matter, will address him by that name.

※ He was afraid of stand before learning of what it truly was in prison with the help of Dmitri.

※ He knows six languages fluently.

※ Despite everything he still has a passion for teaching. He loves it. He tends to give lectures no one asked for.

※ Before he left his village he discussed his stand ability with someone who he respected and looked up to. They knew of what he was talking about being secretly a stand user themself. They told Mischa to never use his stand out of malevolence and cruelty. He has only ever used it for self defense or to protect his comrades when in the field.

※ Boris starting aging prematurely and always looked much older than he really was. 

※He has a pet cat that is an orange Norwegian forest cat/Mainecoon mix named Jacob Ivanovich. 

#//a scholar at heart: boris ivanovich #//boris ivanovich #//character bio

[from-a-distant-end]

original short story: Wilt | Chapter 1

The Elder Beaconmire is an elite subterranean society, submerged profoundly beneath the darkened bowels of the Volga River in southwestern Russia. We rest in solitude with towering buildings of stone jutting from the smoothed riverbed roads, our walls and homes, our temples and shrines all sat imbued with veins of natural luminescence, granted silver life by some unknown, worshiped force or entity. Sentient or inanimate, there appeared to be little mind paid in either direction. We are not proud, generous and cheerful citizens of a concealed city-state, nor prisoners unkindly and unjustly fated to live our lives hidden under waves and rocks, kept away from the entirety of the world. We are not spies, despite our secretive location. We are not assassins, nor any other mass produced, trained murder machine. Unless of course, we’re requested to be.

By Elder’s standards, we are and perfectly maintain to be, a large assembly of rigorously refined and forcibly gifted individuals, who not only excel unmatched in nearly any field, profession, and practice anyone could muster into fruition from even eccentric imaginations, but orchestrate the necessary and paramount competencies of said systematically inculcated tasks and actions with utmost decorum and polished skill. We are what we’re asked to be. And we’re better than you.

---

Oxial College, I realized gravely, was vividly bright and lively, endowed with blissful smiles and myriads of laughter from every and all, as though not a single fellow student had ever dealt with a fraction of an ounce of sadness. Even once in their lifetime. Grins were wide, from ear to ear, proud and eager, surely overcompensating for something I had accidentally overlooked. It was fake, they were fake, I pleaded silently with myself as I sauntered across the plush green lawn, books gripped tightly in hand and pressed against my chest this chilled morning en route to the headmistress’s office. The institute itself was structured as though a fortified castle and stretched into the heavens with grey and white walls of rough stone, with cobblestone paths winding from building to building.

It had to be facetious. I couldn’t conjure a single reason these strangers, these stressed, caffeine-driven college students, would discover any logical means to sustain themselves in such damn endless and potent happiness. And experiencing the equivalent of that intense joy was a task I, at least during the time of its presentation to me, thought impossible to mirror. To harbor emotions so deeply and genuinely without fear of an audience and their ever-growing, ever-changing opinion of me? Unthinkable. I was too immensely self-aware and had my emotion’s ease of access bled out of me years ago.

Yet there I stood before a porcelain sink as I straightened my tie, about an hour later, smiling vacantly at my reflection. It wasn’t as though we found or were gifted with something earning us the desire to carry these positive sensations, I determined with almost sickening immediacy. Somewhere inside me, my opinions were staunched, increasingly suffocated, natural reactions discarded absent of my commands. The giddy sentiments were so overbearingly strong, were forcibly commanded to be felt by our mind and hormones, and shared between everyone like a deadly virus — without permitting input from the various additional emotions humans held. Happiness consumed everything in its orbit, allowing itself alone to portray its glory upon our very faces at any and every waking moment.

No. I was nearly certain we were being drugged. My journey, my mission, was to determine why, how, and by whose hands.

The manner in which we could be subjected to any opiates or another drug of the same nature escaped me entirely and I accepted the unyielding weight as it lay resting on my shoulders. Over serving my life in the very hungry belly of Elder Beaconmire, I’d learned my preferences: It was enormously more rewarding to participate in an assignment one desires to witness unravel, one longs to see the result of. Besides, I had reasoned, it was likely due to the drug itself within our bodies that we lacked a reliable ability to recall any dire instances we may have been presented an opportunity to consume it. So where? Where could I have fallen victim to it, keen as I regarded my senses to be? An outsider aware of unusual and dangerous happenings?

Were the students given these drugs at mealtimes, mixed inside their food or drinks? Released through the vents and wafting from room to room, entering their lungs and bodily system like a haunting incubus? Injected with a syringe while they slumbered, unconscious to those awakened and prowling in the night with malicious intent to spread joy?

My chestnut hair rested sleepily unkempt upon my head as I allowed myself to remember the previous morning, a near lifetime ago:

“Priantierre,” my name had been barked sharply, like stinging venom, the bellowing voice drooping down from the Doyen’s balcony overlooking Elder’s hushed mess hall. She bore her stern gaze into me, through me, as murmurs fluttered about and eyes took to me with both bitter jealously and aggravated interest. I elected to, once again as I had for months now, ignore their attempts at evoking a reaction, and rose from the table I had been sitting at alone with just my older brother and sister.

Both were certainly less keen on concealing their worry regarding my summons than our lifelong peers. Sharing your life beside the same young men and women since birth, only to be pitted against one another in a daily battle of skills, decorum, and deftness proved to sever even the strongest of friendships and alliances.

“Hey,” my brother had mumbled dubiously with a wink before I could manage another step, “O Gracious Overlady has been ruthless since that recent accident. Don’t get wise with her today.”

“That had nothing to do with me, Illarion,” I defended.

“Like Hell it didn’t.” He scoffed lightly with a single wave of his hand. “Go, Priantierre, whatever. Trying to be supportive and offer caution. Forget it.”

My sister chimed in, her voice kept quiet. “Good luck, Priantierre. Tell us if it’s another task assignment this time, okay? Please don’t pack your things and disappear. Mother was devastated, you know. She didn’t need that coupled with,” she seemed to struggle for a moment. “Her illness.”

“Of course, Averniria,” I’d vowed hollowly, stalking away and towards our Doyen’s conference chambers. “I won’t leave without a goodbye.”

High walls loomed around me, lined with heavy tapestries. A grand fireplace warmed the room with a sensation differing greatly to that of the cold, blue sunbeams dancing upon the stone ground, distorted in their flow, and permitted entrance by the thick glass ceiling opened to the river above us. I’d be endlessly enraptured by the swaying swaths of light and their mesmerizing motions while within the confines of this space. Somehow, it was equally paired with prickling intimidation and a rising sense of unease that neither waned nor waxed despite my many visits, confrontations, and meetings I would be invited to attend. I had the cracks in the floors memorized, yet I still feared they’d swallow me whole.

Our Doyen then spoke as I stood myself before her, studying the puzzling manner in which she always somehow embraced both tragedy and benisons so intimately close to her. All while she proceeded to manage balancing her wholesome being with each and every person she was expected to portray — divide herself and her morals between the innumerable tasks of questionable ethics and values that befell her. Well, I resigned, she earned her title and position with ease and rusted elegance. And with her auburn hair and sparkling chocolate eyes, she kept most adolescent boys here on their toes, eager and dedicated to answer to her every order.

“Something arrived in our files that might be of preference to you, specifically,” she had been informing me before pressing a thin stack of crinkled papers bound in twine across her wooden desk.

My interest had instantly been piqued at the information they’d reserved the mission with knowledge I’d prefer it, however, needless to say it wasn’t quite a strenuous accomplishment to achieve. I proceeded to leaf through the sweetly scented pages, grinning to myself as I skimmed its contents. My grin fell just a second later.

A large percentage of partially visually impaired students. Professors with medical degrees. Toxins? Drugs? Unknown sources and methods. Students returning home, without having graduated, harmed with no recollection of who or what caused their injuries. Students never returning home whatsoever, and letters from parents, loved ones demanding to know what became of their children. Several lists of varying lengths consisting of those students’ names who fell under either circumstances.

“We’ve located an all-male college centered in the core of the Oxial Gardens. Perhaps you’ve heard of it?” Our Doyen continued as I read. My reply was a single, curt nod, urgency and confusion silently beginning to boil inside me. “We have reason to believe the members of the staff, whether its professors, custodians, or some third party, are somehow harming the attending students. Blinding them,” she clarified, her fists shaking at the disturbing details of the job. “There’s been far too many concerned reports for the abundance of recorded cases on file to be mere coincidence. We task to you the secure operation of infiltration and information gathering. But we stress no action is to be taken without our approval beforehand. If this concludes to be the worst case scenario, it will do you no favors to be caught where you cannot escape. Is that understood?”

“Of course.”

Despite the unfortunate situation surrounding it, my heart swelled at the notion of catching sight of the famous roses growing within the walls of the Garden with my own eyes. They were supposedly breathtaking, the blooms as crimson as blood and as large as a hand, fingers splayed and all. Fields and fields as far as one could see of those beautiful roses stretched across the land, lying just a short distance from the school grounds. Marriages were largely popular there, several hundred a year, I believed I had once studied, and visitors flew by plane or traveled by ship for such a sightly tour. Botanists flourished both in research and vivacity, a faultless vacation destination for lovers of flowers and shrubs and trees, flocked as though it was a holy site of sanctity and redemption for sinners or nonbelievers discovering the warmth and freedom of faith.

“You will have no companion beside you but those you make inside those buildings,” she’d guided me with finality towards the door. “Examine these papers. Know them better than your life. I grant you permission to keep contact with your family during your time away. I doubt it would draw unwanted attention to you. We’re giving you two months, sixty days, to complete this. However, with your history and skills, I expect it solved within half that time.”

Her words dripped from my lips softly as I allowed my finished tie to drop back down to my chest. “Yes,” I spoke to myself as I had to her that day, “your bidding is my blessing.”

—

I meandered my way across the large, plush lawn of the campus once more, enjoying the softness beneath my shoes as opposed to the rough and rigid stone floors of Elder’s main thoroughfares. Students huddled together in small study groups under the shade of tall oak trees or near bushes of sweet smelling rose bushes, or lay splayed with books and papers about them, dozing and relaxing before class. The light grey jackets of our uniform were scattered, mingling dots among one another as distant as I could observe, sharing laughter and smiles and conversation.

I understood then, in a rush of trepidation, I’d been the lone soul wandering without a friend or entourage — a surefire method to gathering that undesired attention to myself the Doyen had warned me against. I had received an abundance of distasteful glances and glares, envy doused remarks and scorns back between the walls and under the waves of my home, and sincerely pleaded not to find myself in the same predicament here. At the moment, I reveled in the knowledge that I was a stranger. A nameless face in the crowd. A single body amongst many.

My schedule lay squished in my classwork folder, and suddenly, like a ton of bricks, my heart slumped heavily at the notion I’d be a student. Regarded as a normal, functioning college freshman, a local boy from a local town, seeking mere education for the upcoming, unknown and terrifying chapters of his life. That was the role I was expected to flawlessly portray for these two months. I was no longer Priantierre of Elder Beaconmire, and had been stripped to simply Prian Chesnokov, a transfer student hailing from the neighboring country of Russia. It had been decided by the Doyens my silvery hair was to be dyed the more natural color of brown, to effortlessly blend in and camouflage with my new peers and I had been reluctant to conform. It was the lone attribute I possessed reflective of my sickly mother.

My absent, unpleasant attempt at a human facial expression must have morphed into some defeated glower, as I appeared to have caught the distressed scrutiny of another boy who’d been hovering over a textbook on a nearby bench. The aerated drug I may have caught a drift of earlier perhaps wore off, I thought, that’s the reason I don’t feel insanely amiable. Assuming, of course, my conjecture was correct on the matter and it was indeed a stimulant of some sort. The informational packet I kept stored away held blank spaces and potholes, and I sincerely began to wonder if I could perfect every piece they were lacking, or if I was merely expected to fill in only the absolutely necessary gaps.

I carried myself a touch more hurriedly as the stranger stood with just as much haste as I had adopted. “Excuse me?” He called out. His voice was sweet, calm, if not rather panicked at the moment, and resonated with me the memory of choir and churches. “Are you doing alright? You seem troubled, is there a way I could maybe assist you?”

Words fought in my throat as I continued swiftly. “No, thank you. I’ll be fine, but your concern is admirable. I really must be heading to class.”

With a world-shattering disappointment, and a dainty wisp of his fingers past mine in an effort to halt my escape, I realized he’d covered the distance I created between us with undying determination. He was hunched over, hands on his knees and breathing deeply as I pivoted to study my relentless pursuer.

“You walked about half the front of the school to catch up to me.” I frowned. “Can I help you with something? I told you I’m alright. I promise. Just a late starter trying to memorize the grounds before I find my way down a sewer grate somewhere.”

The stranger chuckled at this and stood upright, and I was able to analyze him much more closely. Jet black hair with a pair of small, round obsidian earrings, skin kissed with a warm tan, and a build similar to my own with slender shoulders and a fine waist. Yet he was taller than me, grinning wide, and I stood before him growing threatened by his mere forthright and mindlessly considerate manners. The minute stains on his wrist cuffs explained writer, where he favored blue inked pens, his thin calloused fingers suggested he’d mastered the violin or cello some years ago and hasn’t placed it down since.

“My name is Thomas,” he informed me simply, then inhaled slowly to calm himself. “Yes, I was worried about you because of your face and how,” he grappled with himself, then changed his mind. “You looked constipated, I’m sorry. You don’t anymore, which I’m really glad about. But I was nervous when I first saw you, then I thought maybe you were lost and that I could help you find your way. You still look sort of ill. Could I get your name?”

I wanted to die.

Was that a pickup line? I sensed danger, of somewhat homosexual proportions, and I cursed myself for my unique name for what I imagined was the very first time of my entire life. “No,” I blurted.

He was crestfallen, but managed to save his smile. “Okay. I’m sorry. Could I escort you somewhere then? Maybe the nurse, or even your class if you’re having trouble getting there easily. The campus is rather huge, and even took me a week to find my own bedroom. You could imagine how foolish I felt,” he chuckled.

“No. Thank you. I have to know where I’m headed without guidance. You won’t always be there for me,” I attempted lightly, as nausea sprouted inside me. I had to vacate immediately. I’d requested an additional audience with the headmistress, both as an excuse to wander the corridors, and in hopes to gather a second glimpse at her office and the layout I’m expected to have committed to recollection.

“Oh, but I could be,” he offered gently, with a bit too much amorous urgency. “May I just say that you caught my eyes for more than just how nauseated and angry you looked. You…” he allowed himself an entire glance up and down my body at least three times. I felt myself retreat a step. “Well, you’re beautiful, lost stranger.”

A rose, plump and the deepest red of love and adoration, suddenly sat in his grip, outstretched to me. A love confession? “Listen,” I began, and, as tenderly as I could manage, guided the rose back to him. “This isn’t a Western movie, and I appreciate your gesture. Honestly, I do. But I’m a freshman and I can’t subject myself to distractions like love and relationships. I have to focus every moment on school and homework.” I presented a kindhearted smile as well. “My parents would kill me if I get anything less than top grades,” I added for measure, begging with every deity and divinity alive and ruling that Thomas would accept my declination, depart the way he’d come.

His eyes certainly teared at their corners, yet he nodded. “Of course. Please, just at the very least, graciously take the flower to your dorm. Maybe by the window in a vase, so I’ll know where to find you again?”

I’m not interested. “It’d be my pleasure. I’ll do so upon my arrival.”

Thomas beamed at me as though I was the Sun, Moon and Stars. After a shy moment’s hesitation, he tossed me another kind smile and nodded again, slinging his bag back over his shoulder to begin walking, thankfully, away from me. I sighed listlessly as I observed the rose, my upset over the whole ordeal deepening at the perfection he’d gifted to me. With my own eyes and in photographs, computers, television or otherwise, I’d never seen a flower so flawlessly crafted by nature. It would be a heavy crime to discard of it, truly.

A large piece of me yearned to sustain its life as the stranger wished of me to do, never witness its petals shrivel or its stem bend under its own weight. The fragrance was sweet and bold, and I found myself gazing at the place Thomas had been standing patiently mere seconds ago. Guilt slammed into me. I longed for his return so I could express my more sincere gratitude than what I had presented him with. There wasn’t a purpose to my chilled words, how readily I turned from him, turned him from me, as he had only meant the very best.

Well. It’s done, and I could no longer locate him in the scattered sea of grey uniforms even if I agonizingly endeavored to. I dropped the rose to my side, wondering then where I’d come across a vase accessible for student use, and ambled on to the headmistress’s office, allowing myself to regain focus to my original obligation. If I was to gather the information Elder sought, why shouldn’t I begin at the very heavens of this towering totem pole? As far as I was concerned, Thomas wasn’t even a piece of a carving let alone a face on the pillar.

#short story #lgbt #original writing #my writing #Priantierre #my story #mine #my edit #which is just my tag for the stuff i make so ignore it

[segadores-y-soldados]

Overwatch: Companies and Corporations

“And she learned that people were just as easily manipulated.  Now she understood how the world worked - information is power.  So she kept hacking: politicians, corporations, governments…It was an addiction.

“But for the first time…someone noticed her.” - Sombra: Origins Video

Mainly doing this for myself but here’s a list of the major companies and corporations - along with a description, a list of people affiliated with them, those who oppose them, and reasons why you should be suspicious of them - for resource purposes.  I have tried to limit speculation to only the major ideas or theories, so the majority of this is just straight facts or descriptions.

[Why]: If you’re a fan of Overwatch’s storytelling, characters, or world-building, understanding the companies and corporations that make up the fictional world is, quite frankly, the most important aspect aside from understanding the organization of Overwatch itself.  Almost every major company has a connection to a playable character in some way, and many have ties to the much larger story being told about a massive conspiracy and secret “group” trying to control the world.

This is not a comprehensive list, but hopefully should be a major starting point.  All companies and corporations are listed in alphabetical order…

Except the first one.

[Omnica Corporation]

More under the cut

[Omnica Corporation]

[Who]: The Omnica Corporation was a major robotic company that helped begin a global robot manufacturing craze sometime within the next “thirty years” of the Overwatch timeline (between 2015-2016 and approximately 2045-2046).  They started producing robots the world over in massive factories called “omniums” - known locations include Krasnoyarsk, Russia, Detroit, United States, “the Outback” in Australia, and somewhere in Nigeria.

[What]: Sometime after production began, it was discovered (through means or mediators unknown) that the Omnica Corporation was rife with fraud, corruption, and breakdowns.  The omniums could not sustain production, and when the fraud was investigated and pursued, the company was shut down. (source: https://playoverwatch.com/en-us/blog/20130523).

Sometime after the shutdown, roughly around 2045-2046, the Omniums revived themselves, and the “Omnic” robots inside them began a massive military campaign against humanity.  This is known as “the Crisis.”

[Those Against]: Pretty much every one of the “older” characters fought against the Omnics in the Crisis.  Specifically, at least five playable characters formed a group known as “Overwatch” and created a strike team task force on behalf of the United Nations to wage unconventional warfare against the Omniums.  These characters are: Reaper/Gabriel Reyes, Soldier: 76/Jack Morrison, Ana Amari, Reinhart Wilhelm, and Torbjörn Lindholm.  Speculated playable characters who may have fought against the Omnics: Roadhog/Mako Rutledge. 

[Why]: Besides being the corporation that created a whole new “group” of sentient, intelligent, perceptive robotic beings called “Omnics,” the Omnica Corporation literally sets up an major thematic issue underlying the entire story/world of Overwatch:

Corporate greed, mismanagement, and corruption led to a massive global crisis and nearly the end of life as we know it.

This is a thematic issue that we will see repeat itself time and time again - that corrupt companies and corporations are undermining global stability and peace, whether directly or indirectly.  We do not know the specifics of what fraud or corruption Omnica actually engaged in or went through, but the implications are that - had Omnica been a more ethical, more honest corporate entity - they could’ve prevented the Crisis from happening, or could have managed their Omniums better.  And, if you squint real hard, you can maybe - maybe - see the implication that someone within Omnica started the war (source: https://playoverwatch.com/en-us/blog/20130523)

“What came next is well-documented. The omniums began to break down. Independent analysis showed they would never come close to meeting the corporation’s promises of growth and output. Omnica was investigated and forcibly dissolved after evidence of fraud was uncovered, its omniums shut down.

“That is why it came as such a surprise when these defunct, dismantled omniums woke themselves back up and immediately launched a military campaign against all of humanity.”

The question we should be asking here is: how did the Omniums wake themselves back up?  Was there specific human involvement?  Or was it merely human oversight and error that “missed” something when the Omnica Corporation was shut down?

[Axiom]

[Who]: A company that appears to specialize in producing electronic and/or robotic parts.  Not much is known about them.

[What]: Axiom appears to have a branch in Numbani and Sydney.  

[Why]: Axiom is still a relatively minor company within the Overwatch universe (as in, their relationships and roles have not been fully explored yet).  The biggest issue is that Efi Oladele purschaed a vocal processor from them as she was building Orisa.

[Affiliated characters]: Orisa and her creator Efi, but only loosely affiliated.

[Helix Security International]

[Who]: a private security/military company that specializes in enforcing and maintaining order, or preventing conflict (conflict suppression).

[What]: Helix is one of the more “developed” companies within the Overwatch world - not only is it the direct employer of one of the playable characters (Pharah), but it is referenced multiple times across several articles and at least two comics.

The summary: Helix is the main corporation managing defunct Watchpoints and other “Overwatch bases” such as the Temple of Anubis in Giza, Egypt.  It also manages what we know to be for-profit prisons, retaining individuals like Akande Ogundimu (Doomfist).  It is not known if it “inherited” these prisons from Overwatch, or developed the prisons on its own.

An extremely rough timeline of Helix-based events (or events in which Helix is involved) goes like this:

Soldier: 76 steals the new, experimental heavy pulse rifle from Watchpoing: Grand Mesa, which Helix is managing (source: https://playoverwatch.com/en-us/blog/19809235/).

Sometime around “Recall,” the artificial intelligence, colloquially called a “god program,” named Anubis (currently being confined by Helix Securities in the Temple of Anubis in Giza, Egypt) attempts to break out of its confinement.  Pharah’s team is sent in to stop it (or destroy it) (source: comic “Mission Statement”).

Shortly after this, a Talon-associate named Hakim has information on the event (or claims he does).  In conjuction with Reaper (and a small reference to Sombra), they act like they are trying to get access to information about Anubis’ near-escape, but in reality, they are trying to lure in a bounty hunter called “the Shrike.”  In the “Old Soldiers” comic, it is revealed that Hakim and Reaper were actually trying to trap “the Shrike,” but instead caught Soldier: 76 in their trap.  However, “the Shrike” - revealed to be Ana Amari - assists Soldier: 76 and eventually unmasks Reaper (source: comic “Old Soldiers”).

Approximately around the time of Carnival the following year, Akande Ogundimu (Doomfist) breaks out of a Helix-run maximum security prison (source: https://playoverwatch.com/en-us/blog/20877886).

[Affiliated characters]: Fareeha Amari (Pharah) - currently employed by Helix to man one of their Mark VI jet suits.

[Those against]: at the very least, Doomfist and Reaper have been seen fighting Helix Securities members.  Anubis is also a background character who wants to escape Helix’s confinement system.  Lastly, Sombra also expresses interest in accessing Helix’s information.

[Why]: Pharah is undoubtedly a morally-good character, representing ideals such as hope, justice, and safety.  She appears, however, to have gotten these ideas from people like her mother, and the “heroes” she grew up around, such as Reinhardt and the rest of the original Overwatch team.

On the flipside, Helix Securities itself is morally ambiguous.  It is heavily implied that Anubis - though dangerous - is having strange or unethical experiments being conducted on it, and the most recent article involving Helix throws some slight shade on the company for its for-profit prison system:

“Questions have been raised about the effectiveness and methodology of Helix, which in recent years, has greatly increased its profile as the world’s security force. But after a number of high profile incidents, including the breach of a similarly top-secret facility in Egypt, those who have objected to the increased privatization of security following the shuttering of Overwatch will have been dismayed that Helix has requested, and been granted, additional funding by the UN to cope with rising threats.”

Another thing to bear in mind is that we are constantly being shown that the post-Overwatch world is both being “protected” and “preyed upon” by private military-type securities, Helix being chief among them, but other background details show that there were escalations for privatized armed forces as early as pre-Fall of Overwatch.

At the same time that people were questioning Overwatch and its covert operations division Blackwatch’s effectiveness, there were small signs about the privatization of “peacekeeping” going on in the background.

[Lucheng Interstellar]

[Who]: a China-based space industry company ranging in space-travel or space-habitation technology that operates out of Lijiang Tower.  They are at least partially responsible for founding and operation the Horizon Lunar Colony.

[What]: there isn’t much “story” behind the King of the Hill map in Lijiang Tower within the game, but with the newest release of the Horizon Lunar Colony, we have a little bit more to go off of.  Lucheng appears to helped found, supply, and operate the moon colony for some time.

Before things went a little…apeshit.

“But I loved my time there.  The scientists were my family.  I learned so much from them.  I have so many great memories!  We were working together to build humanity’s future amongst the stars.

“…But it wasn’t to be.  Not everyone liked life on the moon.  All the tests…and the rules… The others hatched a plan - no more injections, no more experiments - and the doctors, my friends -

“…They were all gone.” - Winston, Horizon Lunar Colony Preview Video

With the narration by Winston in the video, we have a better understanding of the unethical, probably inhumane treatment of the gorilla troop that lived in the moon colony.  The gorillas were subject to injections that gave them the intelligence of at least humans, and they were seemingly subject to some harsh rules.  Emails in the “New Details Emerge About Possible Fate Of Horizon Lunar Colony” article (https://playoverwatch.com/en-us/blog/20812209) show that the gorillas (or “specimens”) were often put in “in their rooms” when they acted up.  At the very least, one “speciment” (Hammond) was put in a cage.

Lucheng is suspicious for their probably unethical treatment of animal test subjects, the “genetic manipulation” of them, and their radio silence on the issue for what is apparently several years.

[Affiliated characters]: Winston

[Those against]: If he does ever become playable, Hammond is likely top of the list.  Hammond is the only specimen listed alongside Winston as being “missing,” and it is heavily implied that he: 1) escaped his cage, 2) used the ventilation systems of the colony to move about undetected, and then 3) damaged one of the airlocks, causing all the scientists to be launched into space.

[LumériCo] (longest sigh ever)

[Who]: An energy company based in Mexico offering “fusion-based” technology to power whole cities or regions.  The sources of their technology are not known.  They are known for their massive, pyramid-like power plants.  The company originally had Guillermo Portero as its CEO.

[What]: …I almost don’t want to write this.  It’s just…so much.

Here’s the summary:

Waaaaaay back when, Guillermo Portero fought during the Omnic Crisis and became a national war hero for Mexico.  Sometime after, he was elected to be president.  You can see his statue on the Dorado map, and the Castillo map.

In more recent years, Portero stepped down as president, and either founded or became the CEO of a partially-state-funded energy company called LumériCo.  The company promised to deliver on better, more sustainable energy for the country.

In an unknown amount of time, the “girl” who eventually became Sombra began investigating LumériCo, but was “caught” by some sort of…group.  The “girl” had to “upgrade her hardware,” and became Sombra.  Sombra dedicated her hacking efforts to investigating LumériCo.

During this time, LumériCo unveiled its plans for nationwide powerplants.  At roughly the same time, Soldier: 76 (leaving the United States) enters Mexico (source: https://playoverwatch.com/en-us/blog/20119620).  Besides Sombra, Soldier: 76 implies through his in-game line “I wanna know what LumériCo is up to” that he is aware that some sort of corrupt activity is going on with LumériCo.

The extensive and long Sombra ARG takes place.  Everyone is overhyped.

During the Sombra ARG, it is revealed that Portero has connections to Sanjay Korpal of Vishkar (more on this later).  It is also revealed that Porteo is engaging in fraud and other corrupt activities.

The ARG culiminates in an in-universe article about Portero stepping down as CEO, and the reveal of Sombra as a playable character (source: https://playoverwatch.com/en-us/blog/20353652)

[Affiliated characters]: many non-playable characters such as Guillermo Portero and various LumériCo employees.

[Those against]: Obviously, Sombra opposes LumériCo’s efforts.  It is implied that Soldier: 76 does as well.  Lastly, non-playable characters in opposition are members of the Los Muertos gang.

[??? affiliated characters]: at the same time as the final Sombra email leaks were “occurring” in-universe, Roadhog and Junkrat were robbing the Bank of Dorado.  Sometime after (occurring during the “Reflections” comic), Jesse McCree appears at the Calaveras bar in Dorado.

[Why]: so besides being the “corrupt corporation” in the present Overwatch universe, LumériCo factors heavily into Sombra’s background, being her main motivator to investigate corrupt “politicans, corporations, governments.”  LumériCo also represents a massive story that perpetuates the “tale” told by the Omnica Corporation: being “innovative” and “powerful” without ethics or honor is not necessarily a good thing.  Perhaps LumériCo’s power plants were a good, productive, helpful thing for Mexico, but doing things “the wrong way,” even with the best intentions, is not acceptable (at least to some characters).  “The road to hell is paved with good intentions,” “two wrongs don’t make a right,” etc, etc.

“Documents indicate that Mr. Portero used the company’s funds as his own piggy bank, that he was personally involved in bribing public officials and creating a system of kickbacks and payoffs beneficial to LumériCo, and finally, that he proposed a plan to seize privately held land via government expropriation to expand LumériCo’s facilities throughout Mexico.”

LumériCo also provides us with a very stark picture: a war hero like Portero can slowly be corrupted by the same “temptations” and “greed” that affected the world prior to the war.  “You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”

…Right?

Which rolls right into our next one:

[Vishkar Corporation]

(another long sigh)

[Who]: Vishkar is a “megacorporation” specializing in constructing buildings and other large-scale structures through a pioneering technology called “hard light.”    They are based in a fictional city called Utopaea (yes, really) in India.  They employ technicians who are extensively trained (many from childhood) in using hard light technology called “architechs” (no, I did not spell that incorrectly).

[What]: Like Helix, Vishkar is a direct employer for a playable character - Satya Vaswani (Symmetra).  LumériCo and Helix are heavily implied through articles and comics to be shady as all hell - 

But Vishkar is outright shown to be shady as all hell.

The Symmetra “A Better World” comic does not beat around the bush: Vishkar, or at least several people within Vishkar, are pretty goddamn immoral and unethical for the sake of “building a better world.”  It should be noted that the idea of a “better world” is one which is extremely hierarchical, organized, orderly, and restrictive.

The Symmetra comic ends on an uncertain note, with it being heavily implied that Satya’s boss, Sanjay Korpal, is the one who gave the order to blow up a rival construction company to remove their competing bid to build a new city center in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.  The explosion damages not only the rival company, but destroys the nearby “favela” community and hurts several members.

It is not known what Satya herself does afterwards, but the rest of the “Vishkar problem” is told in another character’s story:

But Lúcio’s close-knit community was thrown into chaos when the multinational Vishkar Corporation secured a contract to redevelop large tracts of the city. Lúcio and his neighbors had been told that the development would improve their lives. However, that promise never became a reality. Vishkar imposed controls on the residents in the name of building a more orderly society: enforcing curfews, cracking down on what the company perceived as lawless behavior, and exploiting the populace as a cheap labor force.

Lúcio wouldn’t stand for it. He stole Vishkar sonic technology that had been used to suppress the people, and he converted it into a tool to rally them to action. In a popular uprising, they drove Vishkar out of their neighborhoods. - Lúcio’s hero profile on Play.Overwatch

[Affiliated characters]: Satya Vaswani (Symmetra), Sanjay Korpal

[Those against]: Lúcio Correia dos Santos, other members of Lúcio’s community

[Why]: Between the LumériCo parts of the Sombra ARG, the Symmetra comic, and Lúcio’s profile, it is becoming increasingly clear that there is an interconnected network of “corrupt” corporations working together.  Ostensibly, on the surface, they are collaborating to improve their projects and combine their strengths (e.g. Vishkar using LumériCo’s energy technology to power their construction projects and cities), but beneath the surface, things get dicey as all hell.  With LumériCo’s CEO stealing funds and possibly seizing land, and Vishkar’s management literally blowing up their rivals - as well as the implication of using/training children to become laborers (Symmetra’s story) and using low-class economic populations as cheap, exploited labor (Lúcio’s story) - these “slick, innovative, impressive” corporations are looking more and more like familiar, ugly mirrors to many modern, present-day companies and corporations that engage in unethical and illegal activities to further their profits and businesses.

More importantly, at least some of these corporations are connected to each other.

It’s difficult to tell what their exact goal is, but with each messy, entangled connection, we get a few more pieces of the puzzle.

Which brings us to:

[Volskaya Industries]

[Who]: a Russian mech company that is currently creating military and war mechs to fight against the newly revitalized Siberian Omnium.  Their newest mechs are called “The Svyatogor.”  Production for these mechs can be seen on the playable map.

[What]: Volskaya is apparently the only company currently producing war mechs for the Russian armed forces to use in the “Second Omnic Crisis” that has broken out in Sibera, Russia.  It is not known what their exact profits or objectives are, but the CEO Katya Volskaya at least appears to be patriotic, or genuinely motivated to help her country.  Aleksandra Zayranova (Zarya) speaks highly of her, calling her “a hero” and a statue of Katya (or her predecessor) can be found atop a war memorial on the map.

However, during the Blizzcon 2016 reveal of Sombra, it is shown that Katya Volskaya is actually getting some her new “tech” from “the enemy” - Omnics associated (according to Sombra) with Numbani, a city that represents harmony between humans and Omnics (and a city implied to be hated by most human Russians).

“Okay, listen - I’m here to make a friend.  And show you something I found… Tell me, what would happen if the people of Russia learned that their ‘defender against the Omnics’ was actually getting her tech from ‘the enemy?’“ - Sombra, to Katya, in “Infiltration”

[Affiliated characters]: Katya Volskaya, Aleksandra Zaryanova (Zarya)

[Those against (???)]: Sombra, Reaper, Widowmaker, a Talon leader named Vialli

[Those supportive (???)]: Akande Ogundimu (Doomfist), Sombra (?), Reaper (?) (hell, just throw all the question marks in there)

[Why]: Well now

We’ve reached the part where it gets really interesting.

Arguably…there’s nothing…wrong with what Katya is doing - at least not in terms of stealing funds, blowing up rivals, exploiting lower-class workers, injecting animal test subjects with unknown genetic manipulative “stuff,” confining A.I., running for-profit prisons, the works.  In fact, Katya’s stuff seems pretty tame compared to everything else - if the only thing she’s doing “wrong” is getting technology from an Omnic group, then really, the argument lies in how her country perceives her.  The only “wrong” part about this is that it is implied that Russia would not take kindly to the news that she’s using Omnic technology in her new mechs.  In a twisted way, one could argue that she is a patriot for doing “anything” to fight the Siberian Omnium (and boy howdy, this doesn’t even begin to cover the fact that some Omnics in Numbani apparently want her to defeat the Siberian Omnium).

So why is she even important in the grand scheme of things?

We return to Sombra’s web, which implies that Volskaya actually does have ties to LumériCo, who in turn has ties to Vishkar, etc, etc.  And more importantly, at least a group in Numbani (we don’t specifically know who) has ties to Doomfist, represented here by his gauntlet.

Corruption isn’t a corporate hierarchy that “trickles down.”

Corruption is a circle of CEOs, all of them exchanging power with each other.

[Ogundimu Prosthetics] (official name unknown) and/or [Talon]

Yeah, alright, here’s the speculative part.  I’ve put these two together because we simply don’t know enough about either, but we can do some analysis and lay down some guesswork.

“Akande Ogundimu was born into a well-regarded Nigerian family, heir to its prosthetic-technology company. A highly intelligent and charismatic figure, Ogundimu helped to expand his family’s business and position it for the future while dedicating his free time to his first love: competitive martial arts.”

“But when he lost his right arm in the aftermath of the Omnic Crisis, it seemed his martial arts career was finished before he had reached his prime. His company’s cybernetic prosthetics allowed him to recover from his injuries, even making him stronger, but these enhancements rendered him ineligible for competition. He tried to devote himself to his business with the same zeal that he had for fighting, but he found nothing that could fill the void… until he was given a new opportunity by Akinjide Adeyemi, better known to the world as the second Doomfist, the Scourge of Numbani.”

“Eventually, Adeyemi brought him into the Talon organization. Talon’s belief that humanity would be made stronger through conflict resonated with Ogundimu’s personal experiences. Moreover, Talon’s power struggles presented a new challenge that allowed him to use his talent in the boardroom along with his cunning as a combatant.”

What Akande Ogundimu’s profile shows us is that his “business sense” and skills as a corporate leader are significant not only to his personality and background, but to his abilities as a Talon leader.  Talon itself is compared to “a boardroom” - specifically, its cutthroat “power struggles” are compared to a corporate climate.

And it isn’t just limited to Akande’s profile: his in-game dialogue frequently has him focusing on power struggles, conflicts, and, more specifically, the Crisis.

“The world changed after the Crisis. It is overdue for a new test.” - Doomfist on Eichenwalde

Remember what caused the original Crisis?

A corporation that got caught up in fraud and corruption.

Doomfist’s goal is to bring about a global conflict that will drive both humanity and Omnics to be “stronger.”  His ideology is a twisted form of Social Darwinism, but if you’ve read some of my other stuff, you’ll know that he’s not “wrong” in the sense of history.  Forcing conflicts helps a very select group of people:

The Military-Industrial Complex.

This is a term to describe the people, groups, corporations, technologies, and industries that “profit” off of war.  Typically, these are weapons manufacturers or defense companies that produce the supplies needed in wartime endeavors, but in a future like Overwatch that could be:

The power needed to create and sustain technology.

The technology needed to build structures and buildings quickly and cheaply.

The mechs required to fight against giant robots.

The prosthetics to “repair” wounded human combatants.

New forms of armor, and new types of security investments required to fight against massive A.I.s.

The money needed to fund all this.

And an organization to put it all in motion.

And who do we spy in the background of the Talon “boardroom” council?

He looks like a familiar figure.

As I wrote earlier:

This is a thematic issue that we will see repeat itself time and time again - that corrupt companies and corporations are undermining global stability and peace, whether directly or indirectly.

Corruption and the misuse of power are not “structural, hierarchical ladders” in the world of Overwatch.

Corruption and the misuse of power are circular, connected, linked together - 

into a spider’s web.

And where does it all go from here?

(source: https://twitter.com/guzhenn/status/888537238300053504)

Hopefully we’ll find out soon.

#overwatch lore #overwatch #talon #overwatch theories #long post #references #companies #corporations #resources #akande ogundimu #doomfist #sombra #zarya #aleksandra zaryanova

[thatswhywelovegermany]

50 years ago, on April 19, 1967, Konrad Adenauer, first chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, died. Under his leadership, West Germany re-emerged from an international pariah country in ruins, reduced to 50 % of its original size, and occupied by foreign forces to a prosperous, internationally recognized state seeking friendship with its allied partners.

Early political carreer

A born citizen of Cologne, Adenauer retained close ties with his home town throughout his life. During the Weimar Republic, he was mayor of Cologne. There were attempts to persuade him to run for chancellorship of the Weimar Republic, but his reluctance and adverse political circumstances did not make this happen. During the difficult times of the Weimar Republic, he initiated extensive construction programs in and around Cologne to battle unemployment, such as a green belt around the city center, bridges over the river Rhine and the first junction-less dual carriageway for motorized vehicles only between Cologne and Bonn, predecessor of the Autobahn. As a stern democrat, he opposed the national socialist movement and became a target of the Nazis, who awarded a head-hunter’s fee for the one who would shoot him.

Third Reich

After Hitler came to power, Adenauer was removed from the mayor’s office. He received a small pension, kept a low profile and went into hiding at times, seeking shelter in abbeys. In 1934, he was imprisoned for two days in the wake of the Night of the Long Knives (”Röhm-Putsch”). He was arrested again in 1944 after the 20 July Plot and brought to a labor camp, managed to escape, was caught again and was finally released in November 1944.

Immediate post-war period and rise to power

After the war, the US army made him mayor of Cologne again, but after a few months, the British command removed him from office and banned him from the city. He joind the newly founded Christian Democratic Union in summer 1945 and became their leader in the British occupation zone after a ban prohibiting him from any political activity expired in early 1946. By making clever use of his limited powers in political offices, particularly by promoting an image of a representative of the German people against the Allied occupants, he became the most prominent political figure in the immediate post-war years.

Chancellor of post-war Western Germany

After the first elections for a German parliament, he pushed a center-right coalition through, although major forces of his party preferred a Great Coalition with the Social Democratic Party, which would have supported a planned economy. Instead Adenauer’s (and Ludwig Erhard’s) ideas of a social market economy were established as a broad consent in West German politics. In the end, this model was key to the economic rise of Germany from the 1950s until today. Adenauer was elected chancellor on August 14, 1949, and was appointed on September 15, 1949, aged 73. He was re-elected in 1953, 1957, and 1961, his party winning the absolute majority in the 1957 elections. Adenauer resigned on October 12, 1963, not completely voluntarily. He was succeeded by Ludwig Erhard, whom he repeatedly and publicly deemed unsuitable to fill the office of the chancellor.

Final years

Adenauer remained visible in the German public by numerous interviews, continuing to bully his successor. He witnessed the deterioration of chancellor Erhard’s power and reputation with outspoken satisfaction and pubklished words of relief when he learned about Erhard’s resignation only months before his death. Konrad Adenauer died after a short flu-like infection and several heart attacks in his home in Rhöndorf near Bonn, aged 91. His last words were in Cologne dialect: “Da jitt ett nix zo kriesche.” (“There is no reason to cry.”)

Economic policies

Major milestones during his term of office were not only the “Wirtschaftswunder”, the miraculous rise of the industrial power of West Germany. Adenauer left economic affairs mainly to his specialist ministers, most notably Ludwig Erhard. Major achievements in interior policy was a reform of the retirement insurance to current-income-financing. This reduced age-related poverty to a level never achieved before. The integration of millions of refugees from the formerly East German territories was a prime concern. To resompense them for their losses of property and to enable them to participate in post-war economy, the “Lastenausgleich” (”Burden Sharing”) program was set up. This program transferred wealth from those who were unaffected by destruction and displacement to the refugees, thus releasing enormous spending capacities and significantly contributing to the economic miracle. To let as many people as possible participate in the economic upsurge, co-determination and worker participation was codified.

International policies

Adenauer pushed through a firm linkage of West Germany to the Western states and accomplished the recognition of West Germany as a sovereign and internationally acknowledged state – not something taken for granted after what had happened during the Nazi period, leaving Germany as an outcast among the states. Establishing a friendship with France after centuries of hostility was a key concern of Adenauer. Both states initiated the European Coal and Steel Community, which would later evolve through a series of intermediate organizations to the EU, all of which were key institutions to secure unprecedented decades of peace in Western Europe.

Adenauer opted for a firm anti-communist policy and outspokenly opposed Sovied Russia, actively fighting against the idea of a neutral Germany. After the Soviet Union ended the state of war with Germany in 1955, Adenauer went to Moscow and achieved in personal negotiations with Nikita Chruschev the return of the last 9626 prisoners of war to Germany. After his resignation, the German people voted this as Adenauer’s biggest achievement.

Domestic policies

Konrad Adenauers domestic policies were characterized by staunch conservatism, anti-communism and strong support for representative democracy. Both communist and national-socialist parties were banned. However, Adenauer had no qualms to cast positions with specialists who had not only made successful during the third Reich, but who had outspokenly supported Nazi ideas. These personnel decisions were controversial, but maybe pragmatical as the young state needed apt officials, which were hard do find, and had measures in place to keep extremist positions in check. (Similar personnel decisions were made by the East German government, too.) A highly controversial law granted amnesty to individuals who had committed war crimes during the final phase of the world war II due to superior orders out of fear from life-threatening consequences. In summary, his socio-politic activities are seen mostly critical in retrospect.

#konrad adenauer #50th anniversary of death

[cosplayswitzerlandaskblog]

How open would you say Switzerland is to the average person, (not neccesarily just nations) and how willing is he to form new relationships, platonic and/or romantic? Does he have any desire for such relationships? (In addition to the ones he already has?) If you were a person he found generally decent, how difficult would it be to get close to him? (And what type of people does he tend to like?) Sorry is that's a lot, I love your blog!

Holy cow, the amount of questions in one... Will also mean I’ll bring an equal amount of text back, holy hell I’m sorry guys...

Alright, we’ll go one at a time, and it’ll be long so let’s chop off the midsection here:

How open is Switzerland to the average person?

Very closed. It could be said that simply, but I’ll elaborate a bit. 

He’s more guarded towards nations than humans. This comes from the fact that he believes nations to be more likely to contact him for dishonest reasons or to deliberately harm him, as that is what he believes nations to do. Just because we have reached a (to an extend) peaceful period in history doesn’t mean it will last. He’s seen nations force other nations into submission, pressure each other, drain each other from resources and - in few cases - attempt to directly kill on another. He’s seen them doing it for centuries while being on the side line for most of this time. He’s tried being a part of their game, through mercenary. Even as his human population are getting more and more secure and feeling safer and safer in their landlocked territory, he still waits for that bomb to blow and for new wars to erupt around him - and his main priority will always be his people.

For this reason, he’s more stressed around nations than humans, and can act overly guarded, impolite, if not directly rude, towards them. He constantly searches for signs that they might abuse his help or offerings, and he doesn’t dare become personally invested in a person he believes will stab his back in ten years time. Paranoia is a fault of his, and is his main enemy especially in dealing with countries. 

Even so he is (surprisingly for some, maybe) willing to help, and often has fought a hard battle for peace in the midst of wars. On the blog I’ve had him (slightly unwillingly) help Russia hide from his sister, and he does offer or provide tips to help others get in better situations, as long as it doesn’t risk his people. One thing you gotta know about him - his people is always main priority.

It is very different with humans, though. They don’t have the same capacity to hurt him or become a threat, so being close to them doesn’t hold the same amount of danger. They just have the slight disadvantage that they die at times, which provides a bit of that hurt he fiercely attempts to avoid. It’s something all nations have to pull through, but I believe some nations handles it better than others, where I personally think people like France and Turkey are most capable of brushing off (doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt). It’s just something they all have to learn to deal with. But to Switzerland, as a very introverted person, social interaction requires a lot of effort and work to achieve, and making that effort whilst knowing you’ll just end up losing them in what - to you - might come off as a flash in your life... It doesn’t always seem worth it. A great secret of his is that he is extremely sensitive and can’t stop caring for someone or something the moment he has established the first contact.

Therefore he mostly keeps things strictly to business, becoming close with colleagues, meaning politicians and advisers, that he would usually interact with no matter what. A few of these colleagues become actual friends, and to them he can open up fully and address his fears of other nations, stress of daily life and his struggle with ongoing loneliness. On top of it, he is more open with Swiss people (I believe humans and countries have a connection to feel safety and recognition when among one another), and will be seen smiling proudly on rare occasions when he watch elderly people hand in hand, children playing or whichever else that might make an old man nostalgic. 

Once again, though, he is open to provide help, also on a personal level. While being stingy, especially with new buying things, I believe he’s often taken in strangers in his home - as long as they posed no threat. This also means it’s very specific to Swiss people, as he holds higher trust in them, believing them absolutely unlikely to stab his back. But people will be taken in to his home under his own rules and circumstances, as he very fast feel invaded and pressured by strangers on his property. 

It is, for one, under such a case that Liechtenstein was taken in. My belief is that he had no knowledge of how the nation looked when he first met her, and seeing a person in need left him in little doubt - and that says a lot about his personality. When he later realized the identity of his guest and extend of his kindness, he deemed the small country much less of a threat than other nations, and found her in very great need, and kept on supporting her. Later, he became vividly dependent on her presence and support.

How willing is he to form platonic and/or romantic relationships?

Again it can be said very simply. Unwilling. 

For many of the reasons above, he doesn’t freely form bonds to other. Platonically, there is the constant risk of getting hurt - either with a knife in the back or a dying breath by a bedside - as well as the amount of investing he’ll have to put into it. The biggest and most important relation he ever had with another person is his friendship with Austria, as I’ve often referred back to, and he sets that as an example on why close relations is a foolish deal. The many examples of the strife between nations only fueled that assumption, and instead he learned to rely on himself and his people alone. People who, as said, dares to die, so they have to be at a distance as well. His motives are very much driven by anxiety of both loss, getting hurt, as well as the mentioned paranoia constantly telling him that people are out to get him, claiming that especially nations have bad motives and so on and so forth. The existence of Liechtenstein in his life is a miracle he didn’t as for, but which he won’t complain about either.

Romantically I long played with the thought of him being asexual or aromantic, because trust and closeness is so hard on him. I found later that I wouldn’t count it to that, but once again the troubles of social interaction and excessive anxiety limited his abilities. Instead he is (uncomfortable as I am about saying it) quite a sexual person, and there have been the occasional human that has managed to earn his trust or who he’s had such a high gravitation towards that... well, things just happened. Many of these, I know, have been rapidly cut off when he realized what he was doing, in a fit of self-preservation to regain that distance between himself and others, to make sure the situation with Austria never repeats itself. 

Cause yeah, dear Switzerland has taught himself to be alone instead. For safety reasons, as well as a search to escape the stress his anxiousness brings. It is also what leaves him very hard and cold towards others - a facade he’s built to cover up and keep people out. It works and his mountains, becoming an imaginary fence to hold people out of his life. He comes off as harsh, angry, aggressive and sometimes even dangerous when he interacts because he’s learned it makes people cautious of you, and that aura also keeps nations from attempting closeness (even if some, like France, find it possible to ignore). He’s become so good at holding up that unsmiling, unyielding facade for many hundred years that he lost himself within it, and has a hard time distinguishing his real emotions from the coldness he’s learned to emit. And most of these things have been done to make sure he will not experience another loss, will not face another betrayal and doesn’t have to live with another hole in his heart. 

Does he have a desire for such relationships?

Short version: Yes.

Long version: Vash is, what you can call, extremely lonely. A facade or an act doesn’t erase the desires and needs of a human soul. He wishes for companionship, wishes for closeness, yearns for love, even if he doesn’t dare it. He’s so controlled by his fears that he has cut off one of the most basic human needs, making friendship and romance an alienated concept. He went through this for some few hundred years, becoming what he sees now as an ugly side of himself, until his kindness gave him the gift of a little sister. Her presence has made things easier for him, and has managed to open him up even a little towards other people as well, but now he depends on her. She’s his only lifeline, as she exists like a beacon in darkness, guiding him to another, hopefully better place. To him, she’s not allowed to disappear, and once again his fears gets in the way. Ideologically he allows her to do as she pleases. She is not a prisoner, doesn’t hold a contract, she’s just there because she wishes. But he is afraid every time she’s with somebody because he believes they will steal her away, as he is afraid of her being along because something bad might happen. The fear of loss, also formerly mentioned, puts him in a constant dilemma, for a loss is more manageable when you are the cause of it - but actually losing her feels out of the question at this point.

Liechtenstein herself has a desire to help him open up, and is working on it. A thing my wife and I have believed for many years now is that their whole relationship, as seen by outsiders, is a lie. Liechtenstein doesn’t need him. She could stand on her own two feet easily and manage this world, now that they aren’t trying to starve her to death. She’s not dependent on him - he’s the one who’s dependent on her and he is that to an unhealthy degree. She lives with him on his premises and bends the rules just enough to challenge his world view, for she knows she cannot relieve him of the loneliness he still struggles with. She is but a sister and a little girl - she’s not a friend, nor a lover, and she’s only one person in his whole social network. 

Back to the short version: Yes. Even if he denies it to himself, even if he doesn’t want to face the fact, he’s alone, he’s lonely, and he wishes to know more people than he currently has the capacity to manage and trust.

How difficult is it for (in his mind) decent people to get close to him?

Surprisingly easy, actually. You have to be nonthreatening and have clearly honest intentions, as well as patient with the constant mood swings he’ll lash at you to check your boundaries. He needs to see that you are not there to make fun of him, hurt him, or use him, and it will take a long time for him to get to that point - but what he need to see is the consistency, for he does not give his trust easily, and the main obstacle he has is his lack of trust towards everyone.

My experience in RP’ing, though, clearly shows that people/Hetalia nations rarely have what it takes to pull through, and I have yet not managed to provide him a single friend. It simply takes too much time and effort, cause, as said, he doesn’t give up and give himself over easily. Even when I mull down his difficulties a bit and make him a little more willing to approach people, as I have found myself forced to do, his trust is simply too hard for many to get.

What type of people do he tend to like?

 It stands, to an extend, in the explanation of the last question. Honest, trustworthy people, usually with good hearts as well since such people are less likely to hurt others. He has a pretty high moral code despite being old fashioned, and from that he also expects proper morals for others. After that, he also likes quiet, and calm people who don’t attempt to pass his boundaries. They are best if they like nature as well, and he’ll have a harder time respecting and accepting you if you are born into power - such as the old, noble traditions. Hardworking and consistent are also valuable traits, and considering that Vash bonds best over physical labor that might be the best way to reach him.

#ask #to an extend #holy F that's a lot of questions #welcome back to the world of me writing all too much #yet I could write so much more to elaborate all these things #I haven't even mentioned anything about other nations in specifics #and I've only mentioned the top of that anxiety #even if I have often hinted at him being extremely driven by his own fears #Anonymous

[bountyofbeads]

As Talks With Putin Loom, Ukraine Looks in Vain for U.S. Help https://nyti.ms/2qNkgMy

Intercepted calls show deep Russian involvement with Ukraine rebels at time of airline shoot-down

By Michael Birnbaum | Published Nov. 14 at 10:40 AM ET | Washington Post | Posted November 14, 2019 |

BRUSSELS — Senior Kremlin officials were directly involved in the day-to-day affairs of rebels in eastern Ukraine as the conflict there worsened in 2014, prosecutors investigating the downing of a Malaysian airliner that year said Thursday.

There has been little doubt that Russia was deeply involved in the conflict, despite Kremlin denials: Western journalists saw Russian troops move across the border into Ukraine and witnessed Russian troops operating on the ground. And during a key stretch in summer 2014, the rebels’ top leaders were Russian.

But the recordings and transcripts of intercepted phone calls made public Thursday offered a new level of detail about Kremlin involvement in eastern Ukraine as rebels struggled to set up the institutions of a breakaway state, press their advantage with Kyiv and manage the fallout from the July 2014 downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17.

The conflict is still ongoing — and is featuring prominently in U.S. impeachment hearings, as Congress investigates whether President Trump conditioned U.S. military aid for Ukraine on the country investigating his political opponents.

Western investigators say the Malaysia Airlines plane was taken down by a Russian-built missile fired from rebel-held territory, killing all 298 people aboard. The intercepted calls were released by the Dutch-led investigators. The Washington Post could not independently confirm the calls’ veracity.

“The rebels used secure means of communication. A number of these seemed to be provided by the Russian Federation and, moreover, used by Russian top officials in their contact with the fighters,” said David Taylor, a senior investigations officer with the Australian Federal Police, who is working with the international inquiry.

Maria Zakharova, a spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, said the international investigation presupposed Russian guilt from the outset, and was now tasked only with “juggling” evidence that “would testify in favor of the chosen tactic of accusation,” Interfax reported.

In one of the recordings, Alexander Borodai, the then-leader of the rebels, can be heard telling an unidentified person: “I’m carrying out orders and protecting the interests of one and only state, the Russian Federation. That’s the bottom line.”

In a call on July 3, 2014, Kremlin aide Vladislav Surkov — who has been Russia’s point person on eastern Ukraine — told Borodai that Russian fighters “were departing for the south to be combat-ready,” mentioning a “certain Antyufeyev.” A week later, a man named Vladimir Antyufeyev gave a news conference in the rebel capital of Donetsk that he had just arrived from Russia and that he planned to take over security and internal affairs in the aspiring breakaway statelet.

Other phone calls between rebels refer to “special phones, you cannot buy them. They are gotten through Moscow. Through FSB,” Russia’s intelligence agency. Others refer to cash support from Russia and a request from Borodai to a Russian cellphone number that “our helicopters” carry out raids.

And, in conversations among themselves, the rebels talked about how a top Russian general had delivered equipment to them on the order of “the person beginning with ‘Sh.’ Do you know him?”

“No, I do not,” the second person said.

“Well, Shoigu. Shoigu,” the first person said, referring to Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu.

The international group of investigators, known as the Joint Investigative Team, said that it had published the calls in the hopes of securing witnesses who would tell them more about the details.

Over the summer, they issued indictments for several of the top rebel commanders at the time of the plane’s downing.

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As Talks With Putin Loom, Ukraine Looks in Vain for U.S. Help

Kiev wants Western support as it seeks to end its conflict with Russia. But amid the impeachment drama, Washington, its staunchest backer, is increasingly out of the picture.

By Anton Troianovski | Published Nov. 14, 2019, 12:01 a.m. ET | New York Times | Posted November 14, 2019 |

KIEV, Ukraine — Ukrainians are used to hearing the West call for stability in their country. This fall, the roles have reversed.

“Ukraine would very much like to see a stable political situation in the States,” Oleksandr Turchynov, the previous Ukrainian president’s national security adviser, said in an interview. The relationship between Kiev and Washington, he added, “is a question of life and death for us.”

As the impeachment spectacle unfolds in Washington, attention is focused on President Trump and the ramifications for domestic politics. But the scandal is having a major impact on Ukraine, weakening President Volodomyr Zelensky’s position as he hopes to start face-to-face talks in coming weeks with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia over ending the war with Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine.

Mr. Putin has sent signals that he’s prepared to dial down tensions with Ukraine, especially since this could help him escape from economic sanctions imposed by Europe and the United States. But he wants to end the war on his terms, and thanks to the disarray in American policy in Ukraine, politicians and officials in Kiev say, the chances of that are improving.

In that respect, Ukraine seems to have joined a long list of foreign policy issues where Mr. Trump has intervened in such a way as to advance the Kremlin’s interest, whether in pressuring NATO, withdrawing from Syria, pushing Brexit, siding with right-wing European populists or defending Russia against charges of meddling in the 2016 election.

“We are not interested in any chaos within the United States political system because we are really, really relying on it,” the lawmaker Bohdan Yaremenko, the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the Ukrainian Parliament and a Zelensky ally, said. Less American engagement in Ukraine, Mr. Yaremenko said, would offer Russia a “clear sign that they could allow themselves more in Ukraine — to be more aggressive, more active.”

Sitting on the East-West divide, Ukraine has sometimes been called the new Berlin Wall. The ouster of its Russia-friendly president in 2014 seemed to mark a turning point, aligning Kiev with the West. Now, the Kremlin seems poised, if not to reverse the tide, at least to shift it more in its favor.

In one sign of Moscow’s increasing leverage, Mr. Zelensky recently reached out for a direct meeting with Mr. Putin, without Western leaders present as intermediaries. In another, the business tycoon Ihor Kolomoisky — one of the country’s most influential figures — said he favored rebuilding ties with Russia.

In the past, American diplomats worked closely with Kiev in any talks with Moscow. They presented a united front to the Kremlin, cajoled the European Union to maintain sanctions and tried to reassure a nervous Ukrainian public. Kurt D. Volker, the State Department special envoy for Ukraine, traveled to the country frequently, held talks with Russian officials and agitated on behalf of Kiev at the White House, on Capitol Hill and in Europe.

But with American policy and personnel scrambled by revelations about Mr. Trump’s push for Ukraine to investigate Democrats, the United States is now largely absent from the political and diplomatic process over resolving the war in the east, Ukrainian and Western officials in Kiev say.

Since this spring, as Mr. Trump’s pressure campaign built toward its highest pitch, at least nine officials who had a hand in Ukraine policy have either resigned or become distanced from the Trump administration after testifying in the impeachment inquiry: Mr. Volker; John Bolton, the former national security adviser; Fiona Hill, the former adviser on Europe and Russia at the White House; Marie Yovanovitch, the former ambassador to Ukraine; Michael McKinley, a senior adviser to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; Lt. Col. Alexander S. Vindman, the top Ukraine expert on the National Security Council; and the diplomats Gordon D. Sondland, William B. Taylor Jr. and George P. Kent.

Only Mr. Taylor is still active in Ukraine, serving as the acting United States ambassador. On Wednesday, Mr. Taylor testified to the House Intelligence Committee, which is leading the impeachment inquiry, that his aide was told in July that Mr. Trump cared more about “investigations of Biden” than he did about Ukraine.

But Ukrainian and Western officials in Kiev said they doubted that Mr. Taylor spoke for Mr. Trump, who dismissed the veteran diplomat as a “Never Trumper” after he offered damaging testimony in the impeachment inquiry.

Americans had been “providing this backup and legitimacy of the Ukrainian position,” said Oksana Syroid, who heads a Ukrainian political party, Self Reliance, that supports closer ties with Washington.

But with the expanding cloud of controversy surrounding United States-Ukraine relations, Ukraine is now “kind of naked,” Ms. Syroid said. “We are alone confronting Russia.”

Mr. Zelensky in recent weeks has pushed forward with a plan for the mutual withdrawal of troops at several points on the front lines of the war in coordination with the separatists. The moves, which have not gone smoothly, are meant to pave the way for Mr. Zelensky’s first official meeting with Mr. Putin.

“We have to resolve all the issues by looking each other in the eyes, not by talking on the phone,” Mr. Zelensky said recently in explaining the need to meet with Mr. Putin.

No date has been set for the meeting, but Mr. Zelensky’s administration sees a window of opportunity to negotiate. The Kremlin has taken some conciliatory steps, such as exchanging prisoners with Kiev, while Russians are growing tired of the war and of Western sanctions, Mr. Yaremenko, the Zelensky ally in Parliament, said.

Many Ukrainians are already nervous about their inexperienced president negotiating with Mr. Putin. Some 20,000 people marched in the Ukrainian capital last month to protest Mr. Zelensky’s peace plan, warning of an imminent “capitulation.”

Four-way summits between Ukraine, Germany, France and Russia took place five times under Mr. Zelensky’s predecessor, Petro Poroshenko, during the Obama administration. At the time, State Department officials were coordinating almost daily with the Europeans and Ukrainians to present Moscow with a united front.

Ms. Syroid said she believes both Democrats and Republicans are now thinking twice about even communicating with Ukrainians for fear of being bound up in the impeachment maelstrom. Some officials in Kiev said Ukraine had become “toxic” in Washington.

Mr. Sondland, the American ambassador to the European Union who played a key role in managing Ukraine policy, told congressional investigators that he pointedly ignored a “Hello, how are you?” text message this fall from a top adviser to Mr. Zelensky.

“I just didn’t want to respond once the matter had become contentious,” Mr. Sondland said, according to the transcript of his deposition released on Nov. 5.

Ukrainians are now baffled about whom they should speak with in Washington. State Department officials are discussing whether to divide the role of Ukraine envoy among several diplomats instead of replacing Mr. Volker, who was working part time in the job, and without pay.

“Right now, there is no one,” Mr. Turchynov, the former national security adviser, said, “who knows in detail the situation in Ukraine and can at any moment give advice, consult, have our back and pass on objective information about events happening in the country to the highest political level in America.”

The shadow cast onto Ukraine by the impeachment process has not gone unnoticed in Moscow. The revelations about the Trump administration’s pressure campaign back up a core element of the Kremlin’s propaganda about American involvement in Ukraine: that faraway Washington only sees the country as a means to its own ends, without caring for the well-being of regular Ukrainians.

Similarly, Mr. Trump’s orders that United States troops abandon their Kurdish allies in northeastern Syria but guard the country’s oil fields played into the longtime Russian message that America is an unreliable ally and that its interests in the Middle East are just pecuniary.

Mr. Putin has already taken strategic advantage of Mr. Trump’s erratic foreign policy to emerge as a kingmaker in the Middle East. One question now is how Mr. Putin might seek to capitalize on the confusion over American support for Ukraine. Despite the war, many Ukrainians still have close personal or cultural ties to their eastern neighbor, and a September poll found that 54 percent of Ukrainians have a positive view of Russia.

For now, many Ukrainians insist that the impeachment-related tumult hasn’t shaken their long-term faith in America, and they note the strong voices of support they’ve received from Congress and from the officials testifying in the impeachment inquiry.

But signs of a possible shift are emerging. One senior European official who works closely on Ukraine policy said that Ukrainians suffered from a misguided belief that the United States would fix everything. Now, the official said, Ukrainians ought to finally recognize that the European Union is their closer, more reliable partner.

On Oct. 28, one of Ukraine’s business newspapers, Delovaya Stolitsa, published a column that concluded with a similar point:

“It’s clear that today Ukraine’s vectors need to be moved closer to a balance of relationships with the leading players (other than Russia, of course), and their less infantile governments, which don’t drag other countries into their no-holds-barred political fights.”

______

Andrew E. Kramer contributed reporting from Kiev, Ukraine, and Lara Jakes from Washington.

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Why Ukraine and Russia are still at war

By Will Englund | Published November 13 at 2:07 PM ET | Washington Post | Posted November 14, 2019 |

MOSCOW — America’s top diplomat in Ukraine, William B. Taylor Jr., described Russia on Wednesday as Ukraine’s “bully neighbor.” Taylor’s remarks during the first open hearing of the impeachment inquiry repeatedly came back to the ongoing conflict between Ukraine and pro-Russian separatists that began in 2014. The war has seen Russia play a shadowy role in provoking and then supporting fighters in two of Ukraine’s eastern regions, including Donbas.

Here’s what happened and where the conflict stands.

ROOTS IN AN UPRISING

The war broke out after a popular uprising in Kyiv sent the corrupt and Kremlin-friendly president, Viktor Yanukovych, into exile across the border in Russia. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, who takes an exceedingly dim view of popular revolts, feared that Ukraine would leave Russia’s orbit in favor of the European Union. Putin engineered the annexation of the Crimean peninsula, where Russia already had a naval base, and then stoked the uprising in the mostly Russian-speaking Donbas region against the “fascists” who had supposedly taken control in Kyiv.

The separatists are a mixed group. They include local fighters — including some from the ranks of organized crime — and some militiamen from the Russian side. Moscow denies it directly supports the eastern Ukraine units. But Russian aid keeps the fight alive. Last year, a Dutch-led international team of investigators concluded that a missile that downed a Malaysia Airlines jetliner over eastern Ukraine in 2014 came from the Russian military. The attack killed all 298 aboard. Russia denies any link to the disaster.

LOW-LEVEL FIGHTING CONTINUES

More than five years later, the war continues on a low-grade basis. The separatists have not been defeated, but Putin’s backing has driven a wedge between most Ukrainians and Russia that will take generations, perhaps, to heal. The United States and other countries imposed sanctions on Russia, which remain in place, for grabbing Crimea. Under President Barack Obama, the United States provided Ukraine with a limited amount of military materiel and training. President Trump’s delay of about $400 million in military assistance in the summer is at the heart of the impeachment inquiry. But the Trump administration also approved for the first time the sale of Javelin antitank missiles to the Ukrainians.

ABOUT 13,000 DEATHS

About 13,000 people have died in the war, on both sides, and many Ukrainians are weary of it. Potential friends in the European capitals also are getting restless. American diplomats — among them Taylor and George Kent, deputy assistant secretary of state — tried this summer to focus attention on the threat of Russia and the strategic importance of Ukraine to U.S. security. They lobbied strongly for continued security assistance. Both were deeply alarmed by Trump’s attitude toward Ukraine.

DIVIDED OPINIONS OVER THE BREAKAWAY REGION

Opinion is split in Kyiv over whether residents of the separatist regions can ever be successfully reintegrated into Ukrainian society. In the spring, the actor Volodymyr Zelensky, a newcomer to politics, won the presidency in an easy victory, and his supporters later swept control of the parliament. Without getting into specifics, he has talked about finding a way to end the war. Some worry that he is an easy mark for the Kremlin, others that he has been too cozy with right-wing Ukrainian nationalists. Both may have a point.

CAUTIOUS OVERTURES FOR PEACE

In September, Ukraine and Russia swapped 70 prisoners, and another exchange may be on the way. In October, Zelensky said he was willing to explore a path to peace talks called the Steinmeier Formula. That led to protests in Kyiv against “capitulation.” It has now also brought about a very careful and tentative disengagement in a few towns along the front line. The view among analysts in Ukraine is that Zelensky’s bargaining position with Russia has been weakened by Trump’s attempt to force Ukraine to do his bidding by investigating the Bidens and the country’s supposed role in the 2016 U.S. election. The impeachment inquiry has further driven Zelensky into a tight spot.

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#trump scandals #trumpism #president donald trump #trump administration #impeach trump #trump news #today news in hindi #news today trump #trump ukraine whistle blower complaint and impeachment inquiry #ukrainegate #ukraine #national security #national news #russia #trump putin #vladimir putin #putin #putinspuppet #republican politics #politics and government #us politics #politics #u.s. news #u.s. military #military #pentagon #impeachment inquiry now #impeachtrump #impeach45 #impeachable

[ecotone99]

[MS] Russian Grandmother (Part two)

As you can imagine, Sabrina's dead and the death of the man in my car port made headlines news. The man who died on my car port was ID as a man named Riley Wilson. Didn't know the guy. Had never met him. I agreed to come down to the police station for questioning. A limo was in front of my friend's house and Markus came out and told me that he needed to talk to me. My friend and I ran back into the house.

"Please listen to me. I had nothing to do with Sabrina's death. Nothing to do with it. Please believe me."

My friend opened the window and Markus walked towards the window. I could hardly believe it.

"I'm not coming outside." I said.

"Okay, that I will talk to you thru the window."

"Okay, I said, "fair enough."

"I know that you two spent Thanksgiving together and you probably spent the entire weekend together."

"That's true but I never saw you at the house. "

"I left Thanksgiving morning and it was late so I was at the home of a friend."

I didn't tell him about my dream, it had to be a dream as according to my friends, I never left the house.

"I left Sabrina's home right before dark. I know that you weren't there. You never came by."

"Where do you go?" I asked.

"I went to the train station but realized that the Amtrak train wasn't running on Thanksgiving day. I then went to a hotel under an assumed name. I found out about Sabrina's death on the TV."

Two police cars pulled up to the driveway.

"Hey, people would you move out of the way. Out of the way.

Someone must have tipped off the press as they were there. Curious neighbors were inside peering out the window. It was like a media circus.

I've known Detective Dimitri Smirnov since he was a child. His grandfather was the first police chief back in 2000.

"I told you not to bother Mrs. Vasiliev. Is he harrassing you?"

"Now, he's not. He just wants to find out what happened." I said.

"OKay Mr. Wellson, please come inside with me."

Now we have Markus Wellson in the home of my friend.

He went into another room with Detective Bill Williams who was babysitting him until they could eliminate him as a suspect.

I told Detective Smirnov the entire story. When I told him about the dream, he looked at me like he wasn't sure what to think.

"So you are telling me, Mrs. Vasiliev, that grandma Tanya Vasiliev killed this Riley Wilson because he was going to burn down your house."

"Yes, I am. I also know that she left your some cookies in the kitchen for you and Detective Williams."

Detective Smirnov was dumbfounded. She hadn't been back to the house but seemed to know everything that had happened at her house. He knew something had happened to Mrs. Vasiliev but what.

His cell phone rang. He listened for a couple of minutes and then said okay, Bye. He went and knocked on the door.

"Okay, Mr. Wellson is free to go. He's eliminated as a suspect."

Markus Wellson usually hated scenes like this, the press and paparazzi but he gave them a statement and then left.

"Okay, well Mrs. Vasiliev, I don't think it's safe to stay at your home right now. We still don't know who this Riley Wilson character is, except that we believe that he killed Sabrina. You had said that Sabrina thought that Markus would be angry about the fact that she called and talked to William Molton. He told her not to and he was angry that she had talked to him."

"Sabrina had briefly dated William Molton, the baseball star. She didn't like him and said she felt like he was stalking her. She had called him to ask him to stop doing this. Markus had told her not to do this because it wouldn't end very well and he was right. "

I didn't sleep very well that night. When I did finally fall asleep, I heard my name called out. I looked up and there was Sergi standing by the foot of my bed. He could see that I was scared and told me that he had not come for me (it wasn't my time yet for quite a while). He walked closer to the bed. He looked very healthy, not sickly.

"I'm here to protect you. Sabrina was murdered by Riley Wilson. William Molton hired him to do the job. Markus Wellson doesn't know how close he came to be murdered as William had pictures of them sleeping in the hammock. I can't tell you how much I miss you. It's been rough for me. Really rough. I haven't totally left this world. I'm between two worlds, the living and the dead. Sabrina has accepted her fate and has moved on. I'm here until you are out of danger. Right now you are in grave danger but it had nothing to do with Sabrina's murder. It's stuff that I've done in my past that I had never told you about. This was to protect you but unfortunately sometimes you can not protect someone from another's person's past. The internet will tell all. I prayed that this would never come out but it has, but don't worry darling. The Russian grandmother will protect you and she will make William Molton's life miserable towards the end of all this. "

When I asked Sergi what he did, he wouldn't tell me. He then waked goodbye.

The next day I went to work and when I walked in, everyone stopped and looked at me. Not a pin dropped. Then everyone went back to work. My supervisor called me into his office and said that I would have to take a leave of absence for my own safety and the safety of the company. I looked shocked.

"You haven't seen the news on the internet."

"No, I haven't. "

We weren't supposed to be looking on the internet for news, but everyone did. The TV was now on.

"Some very interesting things about Sergi Vasiliev. He was born in Moscow in 1956 and after high school enlisted in the army where he was stationed in Siberia. Apparently when he was a baby his father was arrested by the KGB and sent to the gulag in Siberia. Sergi apparently became a KGB agent and volunteered to be sent to Siberia to try to find out what happened to his father. in 1980 he got married to a woman named Sasha whose father had suffered a similar fate. Both found out that their fathers had died shortly after arriving at the gulag. Sasha got caught and was killed in 1981. Sergi shot to death a prison guard the day before he was to be executed and then stole an army truck and escaped. This was December of 1981. The truck was found abandoned several days later and it was presumed that he had died. Shortly after this happened, his mother who was living in Moscow disappeared. Somehow both of them managed to escape Russia. They surfaced in the US in New York in June of 1982. Then migrated to Florida in 1984. In 1985 both became US citizens.

We do know that he married an US citizen Debra Miller in 1986 and then settled into what is Little Moscow, Florida. They had two children and Sergi died in 2001 of a massive heart attack. The people who live in Little Moscow had nothing but praise for the man. 'Leave him alone. He was a good man."

I still was in disbelief about Sergi killing someone. I still couldn't believe it. This was a man who would cry if he heard about animals being abused, a man who rather than killing a mouse that came into our home, captured it, took it out to the woods and let it go. He never spanked our children and he never raised his hand to me nor was he verbally abusive towards anyone. He treated his mother with the utmost respect and treated her well. She had a good son.

It was self-defense. He didn't kill this man in cold blood. It was either him or the security guard. He had always told me to be careful if you are poking around or investigating things. He said it could be your last day on earth if you weren't careful. Apparently it was almost his. "

At that point I broke down and cried. I was so upset I was hyperventilating and had to taken to the hospital. I didn't know that he was married before. It most likely was too painful for him to talk about and I know he never told me about his first wife. My son and daughter took me home, I packed and then I left. Two police cars were there for my protection and then we left.

I knew that this was the doing of William Molton. Because his hit man was found dead in my car port, he was now coming after me. What made me feel a little better was that I had the support of my family and friends. From the police I found out that many in the community had hidden pasts (this I knew) and no one in the Russian community wanted to harm me or my children. In a rare statement the Russian government, Russian businessmen and many other Russians denied having any involvement in Sabrina's death. They blamed William Molton for spreading false rumors although they didn't dispute the fact that Sergi was a KGB agent at one point and said that Sergi had been arrested for killing another KGB agent who was also a prison guard. He did escape afterwards. Those were the only things in the story that were true.

I would have hoped that this was the end of attacking Sergi but it wasn't. I shouldn't have watched TV that night but now there were internal documents from the KGB depicting Sergi as someone who was mentally unstable, violent and a loose cannon. I started crying. My son turned the TV off and scolded me for watching this trash. A couple of days later the TV network had to issue an apology as these documents didn't exist and they had been made up. They claimed they got the documents from Little Moscow PD but this was proven to be false. Most likely it was William Molton's doing but we could never prove it.

After ten days the lies and attacks on Sergi stopped. Detective Smirnov put a stop to it going on national TV. I was grateful to him.

I knew life in Russia was tough and many people got paid under the table for stuff. Some of it was legal, some of it was a gray area (not illegal but maybe not kosher). Not defending it but that is how it was. I know that in Little Moscow, things like gambling, doing odd jobs and sometimes being paid under the table to avoid paying taxes was done. This was done in other communities as well.

Sabrina character was attacked and she was portrayed as a sleazy type girl who used men for her own advancement. I knew this was false. She never was a stripper nor did she work as a prostitute. This was also said about her which was false. Her parents were killed in an car accident in Moscow and she went to live with her maternal grandmother who immigrated to the US sometime after 1995 (not sure when they came here). Both became US citizens.

About a month I went back home and felt safe. I knew that Tanya was looking out for me. I could feel her presence in the house. The story finally died down. William Molton's life was a beginning to be a living hell. Tanya decided to make his life miserable. Tanya was a terrible singer (you would cringe when you heard her try to sing). She sang in Russian and then would play very loudly Russian military music 24/7. Then you would heard a woman who was talking non-stop in Russian. A couple of times she scratched his face and neck and once slapped him good in the face when he cursed at her.

William Molton's wife left him, his kids moved out and he ended up having to retire from baseball as Tanya sang on the TV broadcast whenever he was playing on TV, at the clubhouse and locker room. She drove him to drink. Finally after 3 months of this constant singing and music playing, William Molton finally told police what he had done. After this, Tanya left him for good. He also admitted that he was behind the Death threats that I received by e-mail and mail at work. He had someone who used a fake Russian accent to call me at my son's home and threaten my son.

A couple of days after this I felt totally at peace. I looked up and saw Tanya and Sergi looking at me. Sergi blew me a kiss, Tanya waved goodbye and also blew me a kiss. I saw their souls go up into heaven and I knew both were finally at peace.

The murder of Riley Wilson was never solved although police said that the killer was the ghost of the Russia grandmother Tanya Vasiliev.

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[yahoonews7]

Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/GettyST. PETERSBURG, Russia–It’s been more than a year now since someone murdered three Russian journalists on a dark road in a remote corner of the Central African Republic.Within days of the killings on the night of July 30-31, 2018, as The Daily Beast reported at the time, there were suspicions the journalists had been set up. Since then, the official investigations have gone nowhere or been diverted down blind alleys, and if the Kremlin and its front men have their way—which they normally do in the Central African Republic—the case will go completely cold. But the families of the victims, their colleagues, and the exiled Russian tycoon who sent the journalists on their fatal mission in the first place say they are determined to see justice done. Their investigations have peeled back layer after layer of an ostensibly private “company” noteworthy for conspiracy and corruption, which Russian President Vladimir Putin evidently employs to extend his influence around the world.Russian Journalists Murdered in Africa May Have Been Set UpAmericans concerned about the ruthlessness of Moscow’s operations to subvert or dominate other countries should take note as evidence mounts that some of the central figures in the cyberattacks on the U.S. presidential election in 2016 may also be implicated in the Africa homicides. The victims were Orkhan Dzhemal, 51, a famous Russian war correspondent; Alexander Rastorguyev, 47, a film director; and Kirill Radchenko, 33, a cameraman. They had traveled to Africa to make a documentary about the “Wagner Group,” a highly secretive private military contractor allegedly created by the infamous Russian billionaire and Putin crony, Yevgeny Prigozhin.He is the same figure named in a detailed indictment by the Mueller probe in February 2018 and in the subsequent Mueller Report released this year as the money man behind the Internet Research Agency, a troll factory here in St. Petersburg that set out to defeat Hillary Clinton, then help elect Donald Trump in 2016. (Prigozhin told a Russian state news agency that he was not upset about his indictment. “Americans see what they want to see,” he said.) But the troll factory is just one of many operations that are part of what his underlings refer to as “The Company.”Prigozhin, often given the anodyne sobriquet “Putin’s chef,” initially built his fortune on huge Russian government catering contracts, but the tentacles of his organization are spread far and wide, and in some surprising places. He even has a firm that makes candy, and there are many here who would tell you the sweets have a sinister background. “These are bloody chocolates, produced by the same people who attack and kill journalists,” claims Yegor Alekseyev, a blogger from St. Petersburg. “Two men broke my nose and smashed my teeth in 2016 after I published stories about Prigozhin’s  ‘troll factory.’ These are dangerous people backed up by the [Russian government’s] special services.”In 2014, when Putin made his move to take the Crimean peninsula away from Ukraine and launch covertly a separatist revolution in the east of that country that has now cost more than 13,000 lives, combatants linked to a mysterious organization of mercenaries started showing up. Many of its recruits appeared to have come from Russian military intelligence, the GRU, especially the special forces component known as Spetsnaz. They answered to a former officer named Dmitry Utkin, nicknamed “Wagner.” These operatives also surfaced in Syria, in Sudan, and in the Central African Republic. Their objective was not only to extend Russian influence, but to take control of industries and especially natural resources, further enriching their backer, who was soon reported to be Prigozhin. He has issued pro forma denials, but evidence of Prigozhin’s ties to the group has continued to mount, especially in the private investigations of those trying to get to the bottom of the Central African murders. * * *DUELING INVESTIGATIONS* * *Mikhail Khodorkovsky was once reputedly the richest man in Russia–an oligarch so wealthy and powerful that Putin felt threatened, and finally managed to put him away in prison for almost a decade. When Khodorkovsky was released in 2013, he went to Britain and has since worked as one of Putin’s most active opponents in exile.It was Khodorkovsky who funded the fatal trip to the Central African Republic by Dzhemal, Rastorguyev, and Radchenko to report on the Wagner Group’s activities, and it is Khodorkovsky who has underwritten the most exhaustive investigation of their murder. “Somebody has to put evidence together for the day Putin’s crooks end up in court,” Khodorkovsky told The Daily Beast last year. He hired journalists, military experts, private detectives and others to delve into the killings, and issued a “final report” under the auspices of his Dossier Center on the anniversary of the murders.The picture that emerges over the course of almost 80 pages is highly detailed and deeply disturbing. For starters, the Dossier investigators addressed the official version put forth by Russian authorities and the CAR security forces, many of them trained and funded by the Kremlin directly and also by Wagner personnel. Their claim is that the Russian documentary makers were ambushed on a back road at night by bandits wearing turbans and speaking Arabic who shot all three of them dead. The killers let the local driver, named as Bienvenue Douvokama, escape in his car and the sketchy account of the attack came from Douvokama. When the official version failed to satisfy the victims’ families, friends, or colleagues in the independent press, a Prigozhin-backed news agency, RIA FAN, conducted its own investigation of the murder and named Dominique Christophe Raineteau as the mastermind, claiming that he was a French mercenary or agent in league with terrorists.“We have our vision of what happened in CAR,” RIA FAN editor Yevgeny Zubarev wrote in an email to The Daily Beast. “It was a planned provocation but you are never going to publish our conclusions… Your publication is neither going to mention in a negative light Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the main suspect of this crime; nor the Western (French) special services, the possible accomplices,” wrote Zubarev.Actually, the RIA FAN conclusions are quite interesting, because they do not agree at all with the official government versions blaming unknown Arabic-speaking thieves. The general thrust of the RIA FAN report is that the Russian journalists were killed in order to embarrass Russia (if not indeed to blame Prigozhin and Putin). The agent who organized the murders, according to RIA FAN, was Raineteau, a French mercenary who is protected by the French secret services, and Khodorkovsky himself, who supposedly paid Raineteau to set up the team Khodorkovsky had sent. RIA FAN notes the extensive French-Russian rivalry for resources and dominance in Africa as the motive for the French plot, and says Khodorkovsky’s motive is to “discredit any activity of Russia abroad, particularly in Africa and the revenge directed at the Russian Federation.”All of this makes for a fascinating narrative of conspiracy, and is typical of disinformation that tries to ascribe presumed motives—“who benefits from the crime”—as proof when it is really self-serving conjecture. There is some hearsay in the RIA FAN report, but the documentary evidence linking Raineteau to the killing is virtually nonexistent, while the account compiled by Khodorkovsky’s investigators appears to be based largely on minute examination of phone records and emails (albeit without any explanation of how they were obtained). The narrative developed by the investigators for Khodorkovsky’s Dossier Centre goes roughly like this:The three journalists made a critical mistake when they were looking for a “fixer” to set up appointments, transportation, lodging, translation and the like while they were in the CAR.  Even though they were investigating one Prigozhin operation, Wagner, they asked a journalist working for another Prigozhin company, RIA FAN, for help. This may not be quite as unusual as it sounds, because journalists working for conflicting media often believe they have more common bonds as professionals in the field than as servants for their bosses in the home offices. That may have been the case where the request for advice from FAN journalist Kirill Romanovsky was concerned.He in turn suggested they contact by text message a Dutch man with experience in the CAR as a United Nations employee or contractor who went by the name of “Martin.”The RIA FAN report would later suggest Martin was none other than the mysterious French operative Raineteau. But the Dossier Centre investigation concludes “with a high degree of probability that the fixer ‘Martin’… never existed.” Rather, “he was invented by the coordinators of a thoroughly planned operation.”“Martin” did not show up at the airport as expected, when the crew arrived, and they never once laid eyes on him or, for that matter, spoke to him on the phone. Everything was handled by text messages, including Martin’s claim that he was 376 kilometers from the CAR capital Bangui in the town of Bambari, where they were headed initially the day they were killed. According to the Dossier Centre report, cell phone records show “Martin,” or at least that phone, never left the capital.The Dossier Centre investigation notes that the local driver the crew hired, Bienvenue Douvokama, is believed to be an agent or informer for the local gendarmerie, and was in “constant operational contact with gendarme Emmanuel Kotofio” who “tracked the journalists’ movements and was in their immediate vicinity.” (Kotofio is quoted by RIA FAN saying he and Douvokama are old friends and just like to shoot the breeze.)Kotofio, in turn, “maintained contact with a man identified by the Dossier Centre as an ‘instructor in surveillance, counter-surveillance, recruitment and intelligence work’” from another Prigozhin company, M-Finans, run by one Aleksandr Sotov, who then reported to Valery Zakharov, a Russian adviser to the president of the CAR and head of a team of instructors in Prigozhin’s “Company.”On the fatal night of July 30, according to the Dossier Centre, Kotofio the gendarme passed through a military checkpoint at the town of Sibut, on the same road the journalists would take only minutes later. With Kotofio were three Caucasians, “presumably Russians,” according to the Dossier Centre report. Kotofio drove back to the checkpoint later at 8 p.m. The journalists’ driver reported their murder about 45 minutes later at a village near the scene.The following day, according to the Dossier Centre, a “disinformation campaign” began to confuse and impede any outside investigation.According to emails obtained by the Dossier Centre, which cannot be independently verified, Prigozhin is personally involved in running the Company’s projects in the Central African Republic.* * *THE PAIN OF THE FAMILIES* * * The Kremlin remains deaf to the victims’ families’ demands to question Prigozhin and his men on the ground, including commanders of the Russian militia working for CAR’s leadership. Alexander Radchenko’s, the father of the cameraman, says it is easy for him to connect the dots identifying the main suspects. Since July 30, 2018, the day his son’s body was found in CAR, Radchenko has been analyzing reports by private investigators and journalists, and read and watched interviews with Moscow’s key man in CAR, Valery Zakharov, a former Russian military intelligence officer, who is now the country's main security adviser. “The investigators–along with Russian diplomats, FSB, GRU–back up the Russian military instructors working in CAR instead of questioning the main guy, Zakharov,and his bosses,” Radchenko told The Daily Beast on Tuesday.The heartbroken father has written more than 30 petitions to Russian state detectives investigating the criminal case. Some of his requests ostensibly were taken into consideration, but most of them were ignored. Radchenko told The Daily Beast that in his opinion the murder was “undoubtedly a set up.”  Over the last six months, the father says, he has seen enough evidence collected by independent reporters to conclude that “Yevgeny Prigozhin, Valery Zakharov and his aide Alexander Sotov are the principal suspects to be questioned about the murder of my son.” But Radchenko sounds hopeless: “Every time I ask the state detective on this case, Igor Zolotov, to call them for questioning, he seems too shy and tells me: ‘We should not bother such important men, they must be busy.’”Putin’s Man in the Central African Republic: Is Valery Zakharov at the Heart of Russian Skulduggery? Khodorkovsky’s team has tried to fill that investigative gap. “We have done our part of the job, presented mobile phone billing to demonstrate that Zakharov, his aid Alexander Sotov, the gendarme they trained and the crew called each other dozens of times during the two days before the murder,” Maxim Dbar, Khodorkovsly’s spokesman, told The Daily Beast. “We have no authority to question the key suspects."Irina Gordiyenko, a reporter for independent Novaya Gazeta, especially wants to know who killed Orkhan Dzhemal, the father of her son. “I want to ask both Zakharov and Sotov about the billing data, what sort of actions they coordinated from the moment of the journalists’ arrival in CAR,” Gordiyenko said in a recent interview with The Daily Beast. “I have questions for Zakharov about CAR gendarmes being trained in Russia. I want to ask the Russian MID [ministry of foreign affairs] why the journalists’ belongings have not been moved to Russia, why our diplomats consult with Prigozhin’s Wagner about the official version of the murder to give to the public.”Somebody shot Rostorguyev from a 7.62 mm Kalashnikov assault rifle. Two bullets hit the journalist’s heart. “Only a professional could fire so accurately in the dark,” Gordiyenko added her doubts. The United States imposed sanctions against billionaire Prigozhin and his Concord holding company in 2016 for constructing a military base for Russian forces near Ukraine. But neither the sanctions, nor the links to the CAR murder that shook the entire country, has slowed the growth of Prigozhin’s business empire. Concord keeps working on immense state contracts, his Zinger Development group is planning to build an artificial island in the Gulf of Finland, and foreign tourists keep buying his chocolates at Eliseyev Emporium, a historic architectural landmark on Nevsky Prospect. Jessica from Vermont was purchasing Marzipans shaped as carrots, half a pound of Lukum and chocolates with lime taste. “I am not sure I know who Prigozhin is, I am sorry,” the tourist told The Daily Beast.Prigozhin has access to the highest offices in the Kremlin and cooperates closely with the defense ministries of both Russia and the CAR. The power is on his side. “The murder of the three journalists is not going to be investigated, at least there will never be public knowledge of who ordered the killing,” a political analyst close to the Kremlin, Sergei Markov, told The Daily Beast. “Prigozhin has created private military forces to help Russia, he is fighting the war against Russia’s enemies that are constantly undermining our power, so of course Moscow will not go against him to support the dossier created by Putin’s enemy, Khodorkovsky.” In the eyes of much of the world, however, Putin’s name will be linked forever to the murder of the three journalists just as it is linked to the killing of journalists Anna Politkovskaya or Natalia Estemirova.Dzhamal, Rastorguyev, and Radchenko were—and remain—important symbols for Russians who still believe the search for solid facts and the truth is the only way to combat corruption and the disinformation used to disguise it, even if the quest costs you your life.Anna Nemtsova reported from St. Petersburg, Christopher Dickey from Paris.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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[courtneytincher]

The CAR Murders: A Critical Cold Case in the New Cold War Points to ‘Putin’s Chef’

Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/GettyST. PETERSBURG, Russia–It’s been more than a year now since someone murdered three Russian journalists on a dark road in a remote corner of the Central African Republic.Within days of the killings on the night of July 30-31, 2018, as The Daily Beast reported at the time, there were suspicions the journalists had been set up. Since then, the official investigations have gone nowhere or been diverted down blind alleys, and if the Kremlin and its front men have their way—which they normally do in the Central African Republic—the case will go completely cold. But the families of the victims, their colleagues, and the exiled Russian tycoon who sent the journalists on their fatal mission in the first place say they are determined to see justice done. Their investigations have peeled back layer after layer of an ostensibly private “company” noteworthy for conspiracy and corruption, which Russian President Vladimir Putin evidently employs to extend his influence around the world.Russian Journalists Murdered in Africa May Have Been Set UpAmericans concerned about the ruthlessness of Moscow’s operations to subvert or dominate other countries should take note as evidence mounts that some of the central figures in the cyberattacks on the U.S. presidential election in 2016 may also be implicated in the Africa homicides. The victims were Orkhan Dzhemal, 51, a famous Russian war correspondent; Alexander Rastorguyev, 47, a film director; and Kirill Radchenko, 33, a cameraman. They had traveled to Africa to make a documentary about the “Wagner Group,” a highly secretive private military contractor allegedly created by the infamous Russian billionaire and Putin crony, Yevgeny Prigozhin.He is the same figure named in a detailed indictment by the Mueller probe in February 2018 and in the subsequent Mueller Report released this year as the money man behind the Internet Research Agency, a troll factory here in St. Petersburg that set out to defeat Hillary Clinton, then help elect Donald Trump in 2016. (Prigozhin told a Russian state news agency that he was not upset about his indictment. “Americans see what they want to see,” he said.) But the troll factory is just one of many operations that are part of what his underlings refer to as “The Company.”Prigozhin, often given the anodyne sobriquet “Putin’s chef,” initially built his fortune on huge Russian government catering contracts, but the tentacles of his organization are spread far and wide, and in some surprising places. He even has a firm that makes candy, and there are many here who would tell you the sweets have a sinister background. “These are bloody chocolates, produced by the same people who attack and kill journalists,” claims Yegor Alekseyev, a blogger from St. Petersburg. “Two men broke my nose and smashed my teeth in 2016 after I published stories about Prigozhin’s  ‘troll factory.’ These are dangerous people backed up by the [Russian government’s] special services.”In 2014, when Putin made his move to take the Crimean peninsula away from Ukraine and launch covertly a separatist revolution in the east of that country that has now cost more than 13,000 lives, combatants linked to a mysterious organization of mercenaries started showing up. Many of its recruits appeared to have come from Russian military intelligence, the GRU, especially the special forces component known as Spetsnaz. They answered to a former officer named Dmitry Utkin, nicknamed “Wagner.” These operatives also surfaced in Syria, in Sudan, and in the Central African Republic. Their objective was not only to extend Russian influence, but to take control of industries and especially natural resources, further enriching their backer, who was soon reported to be Prigozhin. He has issued pro forma denials, but evidence of Prigozhin’s ties to the group has continued to mount, especially in the private investigations of those trying to get to the bottom of the Central African murders. * * *DUELING INVESTIGATIONS* * *Mikhail Khodorkovsky was once reputedly the richest man in Russia–an oligarch so wealthy and powerful that Putin felt threatened, and finally managed to put him away in prison for almost a decade. When Khodorkovsky was released in 2013, he went to Britain and has since worked as one of Putin’s most active opponents in exile.It was Khodorkovsky who funded the fatal trip to the Central African Republic by Dzhemal, Rastorguyev, and Radchenko to report on the Wagner Group’s activities, and it is Khodorkovsky who has underwritten the most exhaustive investigation of their murder. “Somebody has to put evidence together for the day Putin’s crooks end up in court,” Khodorkovsky told The Daily Beast last year. He hired journalists, military experts, private detectives and others to delve into the killings, and issued a “final report” under the auspices of his Dossier Center on the anniversary of the murders.The picture that emerges over the course of almost 80 pages is highly detailed and deeply disturbing. For starters, the Dossier investigators addressed the official version put forth by Russian authorities and the CAR security forces, many of them trained and funded by the Kremlin directly and also by Wagner personnel. Their claim is that the Russian documentary makers were ambushed on a back road at night by bandits wearing turbans and speaking Arabic who shot all three of them dead. The killers let the local driver, named as Bienvenue Douvokama, escape in his car and the sketchy account of the attack came from Douvokama. When the official version failed to satisfy the victims’ families, friends, or colleagues in the independent press, a Prigozhin-backed news agency, RIA FAN, conducted its own investigation of the murder and named Dominique Christophe Raineteau as the mastermind, claiming that he was a French mercenary or agent in league with terrorists.“We have our vision of what happened in CAR,” RIA FAN editor Yevgeny Zubarev wrote in an email to The Daily Beast. “It was a planned provocation but you are never going to publish our conclusions… Your publication is neither going to mention in a negative light Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the main suspect of this crime; nor the Western (French) special services, the possible accomplices,” wrote Zubarev.Actually, the RIA FAN conclusions are quite interesting, because they do not agree at all with the official government versions blaming unknown Arabic-speaking thieves. The general thrust of the RIA FAN report is that the Russian journalists were killed in order to embarrass Russia (if not indeed to blame Prigozhin and Putin). The agent who organized the murders, according to RIA FAN, was Raineteau, a French mercenary who is protected by the French secret services, and Khodorkovsky himself, who supposedly paid Raineteau to set up the team Khodorkovsky had sent. RIA FAN notes the extensive French-Russian rivalry for resources and dominance in Africa as the motive for the French plot, and says Khodorkovsky’s motive is to “discredit any activity of Russia abroad, particularly in Africa and the revenge directed at the Russian Federation.”All of this makes for a fascinating narrative of conspiracy, and is typical of disinformation that tries to ascribe presumed motives—“who benefits from the crime”—as proof when it is really self-serving conjecture. There is some hearsay in the RIA FAN report, but the documentary evidence linking Raineteau to the killing is virtually nonexistent, while the account compiled by Khodorkovsky’s investigators appears to be based largely on minute examination of phone records and emails (albeit without any explanation of how they were obtained). The narrative developed by the investigators for Khodorkovsky’s Dossier Centre goes roughly like this:The three journalists made a critical mistake when they were looking for a “fixer” to set up appointments, transportation, lodging, translation and the like while they were in the CAR.  Even though they were investigating one Prigozhin operation, Wagner, they asked a journalist working for another Prigozhin company, RIA FAN, for help. This may not be quite as unusual as it sounds, because journalists working for conflicting media often believe they have more common bonds as professionals in the field than as servants for their bosses in the home offices. That may have been the case where the request for advice from FAN journalist Kirill Romanovsky was concerned.He in turn suggested they contact by text message a Dutch man with experience in the CAR as a United Nations employee or contractor who went by the name of “Martin.”The RIA FAN report would later suggest Martin was none other than the mysterious French operative Raineteau. But the Dossier Centre investigation concludes “with a high degree of probability that the fixer ‘Martin’… never existed.” Rather, “he was invented by the coordinators of a thoroughly planned operation.”“Martin” did not show up at the airport as expected, when the crew arrived, and they never once laid eyes on him or, for that matter, spoke to him on the phone. Everything was handled by text messages, including Martin’s claim that he was 376 kilometers from the CAR capital Bangui in the town of Bambari, where they were headed initially the day they were killed. According to the Dossier Centre report, cell phone records show “Martin,” or at least that phone, never left the capital.The Dossier Centre investigation notes that the local driver the crew hired, Bienvenue Douvokama, is believed to be an agent or informer for the local gendarmerie, and was in “constant operational contact with gendarme Emmanuel Kotofio” who “tracked the journalists’ movements and was in their immediate vicinity.” (Kotofio is quoted by RIA FAN saying he and Douvokama are old friends and just like to shoot the breeze.)Kotofio, in turn, “maintained contact with a man identified by the Dossier Centre as an ‘instructor in surveillance, counter-surveillance, recruitment and intelligence work’” from another Prigozhin company, M-Finans, run by one Aleksandr Sotov, who then reported to Valery Zakharov, a Russian adviser to the president of the CAR and head of a team of instructors in Prigozhin’s “Company.”On the fatal night of July 30, according to the Dossier Centre, Kotofio the gendarme passed through a military checkpoint at the town of Sibut, on the same road the journalists would take only minutes later. With Kotofio were three Caucasians, “presumably Russians,” according to the Dossier Centre report. Kotofio drove back to the checkpoint later at 8 p.m. The journalists’ driver reported their murder about 45 minutes later at a village near the scene.The following day, according to the Dossier Centre, a “disinformation campaign” began to confuse and impede any outside investigation.According to emails obtained by the Dossier Centre, which cannot be independently verified, Prigozhin is personally involved in running the Company’s projects in the Central African Republic.* * *THE PAIN OF THE FAMILIES* * * The Kremlin remains deaf to the victims’ families’ demands to question Prigozhin and his men on the ground, including commanders of the Russian militia working for CAR’s leadership. Alexander Radchenko’s, the father of the cameraman, says it is easy for him to connect the dots identifying the main suspects. Since July 30, 2018, the day his son’s body was found in CAR, Radchenko has been analyzing reports by private investigators and journalists, and read and watched interviews with Moscow’s key man in CAR, Valery Zakharov, a former Russian military intelligence officer, who is now the country's main security adviser. “The investigators–along with Russian diplomats, FSB, GRU–back up the Russian military instructors working in CAR instead of questioning the main guy, Zakharov,and his bosses,” Radchenko told The Daily Beast on Tuesday.The heartbroken father has written more than 30 petitions to Russian state detectives investigating the criminal case. Some of his requests ostensibly were taken into consideration, but most of them were ignored. Radchenko told The Daily Beast that in his opinion the murder was “undoubtedly a set up.”  Over the last six months, the father says, he has seen enough evidence collected by independent reporters to conclude that “Yevgeny Prigozhin, Valery Zakharov and his aide Alexander Sotov are the principal suspects to be questioned about the murder of my son.” But Radchenko sounds hopeless: “Every time I ask the state detective on this case, Igor Zolotov, to call them for questioning, he seems too shy and tells me: ‘We should not bother such important men, they must be busy.’”Putin’s Man in the Central African Republic: Is Valery Zakharov at the Heart of Russian Skulduggery? Khodorkovsky’s team has tried to fill that investigative gap. “We have done our part of the job, presented mobile phone billing to demonstrate that Zakharov, his aid Alexander Sotov, the gendarme they trained and the crew called each other dozens of times during the two days before the murder,” Maxim Dbar, Khodorkovsly’s spokesman, told The Daily Beast. “We have no authority to question the key suspects."Irina Gordiyenko, a reporter for independent Novaya Gazeta, especially wants to know who killed Orkhan Dzhemal, the father of her son. “I want to ask both Zakharov and Sotov about the billing data, what sort of actions they coordinated from the moment of the journalists’ arrival in CAR,” Gordiyenko said in a recent interview with The Daily Beast. “I have questions for Zakharov about CAR gendarmes being trained in Russia. I want to ask the Russian MID [ministry of foreign affairs] why the journalists’ belongings have not been moved to Russia, why our diplomats consult with Prigozhin’s Wagner about the official version of the murder to give to the public.”Somebody shot Rostorguyev from a 7.62 mm Kalashnikov assault rifle. Two bullets hit the journalist’s heart. “Only a professional could fire so accurately in the dark,” Gordiyenko added her doubts. The United States imposed sanctions against billionaire Prigozhin and his Concord holding company in 2016 for constructing a military base for Russian forces near Ukraine. But neither the sanctions, nor the links to the CAR murder that shook the entire country, has slowed the growth of Prigozhin’s business empire. Concord keeps working on immense state contracts, his Zinger Development group is planning to build an artificial island in the Gulf of Finland, and foreign tourists keep buying his chocolates at Eliseyev Emporium, a historic architectural landmark on Nevsky Prospect. Jessica from Vermont was purchasing Marzipans shaped as carrots, half a pound of Lukum and chocolates with lime taste. “I am not sure I know who Prigozhin is, I am sorry,” the tourist told The Daily Beast.Prigozhin has access to the highest offices in the Kremlin and cooperates closely with the defense ministries of both Russia and the CAR. The power is on his side. “The murder of the three journalists is not going to be investigated, at least there will never be public knowledge of who ordered the killing,” a political analyst close to the Kremlin, Sergei Markov, told The Daily Beast. “Prigozhin has created private military forces to help Russia, he is fighting the war against Russia’s enemies that are constantly undermining our power, so of course Moscow will not go against him to support the dossier created by Putin’s enemy, Khodorkovsky.” In the eyes of much of the world, however, Putin’s name will be linked forever to the murder of the three journalists just as it is linked to the killing of journalists Anna Politkovskaya or Natalia Estemirova.Dzhamal, Rastorguyev, and Radchenko were—and remain—important symbols for Russians who still believe the search for solid facts and the truth is the only way to combat corruption and the disinformation used to disguise it, even if the quest costs you your life.Anna Nemtsova reported from St. Petersburg, Christopher Dickey from Paris.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines

Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/GettyST. PETERSBURG, Russia–It’s been more than a year now since someone murdered three Russian journalists on a dark road in a remote corner of the Central African Republic.Within days of the killings on the night of July 30-31, 2018, as The Daily Beast reported at the time, there were suspicions the journalists had been set up. Since then, the official investigations have gone nowhere or been diverted down blind alleys, and if the Kremlin and its front men have their way—which they normally do in the Central African Republic—the case will go completely cold. But the families of the victims, their colleagues, and the exiled Russian tycoon who sent the journalists on their fatal mission in the first place say they are determined to see justice done. Their investigations have peeled back layer after layer of an ostensibly private “company” noteworthy for conspiracy and corruption, which Russian President Vladimir Putin evidently employs to extend his influence around the world.Russian Journalists Murdered in Africa May Have Been Set UpAmericans concerned about the ruthlessness of Moscow’s operations to subvert or dominate other countries should take note as evidence mounts that some of the central figures in the cyberattacks on the U.S. presidential election in 2016 may also be implicated in the Africa homicides. The victims were Orkhan Dzhemal, 51, a famous Russian war correspondent; Alexander Rastorguyev, 47, a film director; and Kirill Radchenko, 33, a cameraman. They had traveled to Africa to make a documentary about the “Wagner Group,” a highly secretive private military contractor allegedly created by the infamous Russian billionaire and Putin crony, Yevgeny Prigozhin.He is the same figure named in a detailed indictment by the Mueller probe in February 2018 and in the subsequent Mueller Report released this year as the money man behind the Internet Research Agency, a troll factory here in St. Petersburg that set out to defeat Hillary Clinton, then help elect Donald Trump in 2016. (Prigozhin told a Russian state news agency that he was not upset about his indictment. “Americans see what they want to see,” he said.) But the troll factory is just one of many operations that are part of what his underlings refer to as “The Company.”Prigozhin, often given the anodyne sobriquet “Putin’s chef,” initially built his fortune on huge Russian government catering contracts, but the tentacles of his organization are spread far and wide, and in some surprising places. He even has a firm that makes candy, and there are many here who would tell you the sweets have a sinister background. “These are bloody chocolates, produced by the same people who attack and kill journalists,” claims Yegor Alekseyev, a blogger from St. Petersburg. “Two men broke my nose and smashed my teeth in 2016 after I published stories about Prigozhin’s  ‘troll factory.’ These are dangerous people backed up by the [Russian government’s] special services.”In 2014, when Putin made his move to take the Crimean peninsula away from Ukraine and launch covertly a separatist revolution in the east of that country that has now cost more than 13,000 lives, combatants linked to a mysterious organization of mercenaries started showing up. Many of its recruits appeared to have come from Russian military intelligence, the GRU, especially the special forces component known as Spetsnaz. They answered to a former officer named Dmitry Utkin, nicknamed “Wagner.” These operatives also surfaced in Syria, in Sudan, and in the Central African Republic. Their objective was not only to extend Russian influence, but to take control of industries and especially natural resources, further enriching their backer, who was soon reported to be Prigozhin. He has issued pro forma denials, but evidence of Prigozhin’s ties to the group has continued to mount, especially in the private investigations of those trying to get to the bottom of the Central African murders. * * *DUELING INVESTIGATIONS* * *Mikhail Khodorkovsky was once reputedly the richest man in Russia–an oligarch so wealthy and powerful that Putin felt threatened, and finally managed to put him away in prison for almost a decade. When Khodorkovsky was released in 2013, he went to Britain and has since worked as one of Putin’s most active opponents in exile.It was Khodorkovsky who funded the fatal trip to the Central African Republic by Dzhemal, Rastorguyev, and Radchenko to report on the Wagner Group’s activities, and it is Khodorkovsky who has underwritten the most exhaustive investigation of their murder. “Somebody has to put evidence together for the day Putin’s crooks end up in court,” Khodorkovsky told The Daily Beast last year. He hired journalists, military experts, private detectives and others to delve into the killings, and issued a “final report” under the auspices of his Dossier Center on the anniversary of the murders.The picture that emerges over the course of almost 80 pages is highly detailed and deeply disturbing. For starters, the Dossier investigators addressed the official version put forth by Russian authorities and the CAR security forces, many of them trained and funded by the Kremlin directly and also by Wagner personnel. Their claim is that the Russian documentary makers were ambushed on a back road at night by bandits wearing turbans and speaking Arabic who shot all three of them dead. The killers let the local driver, named as Bienvenue Douvokama, escape in his car and the sketchy account of the attack came from Douvokama. When the official version failed to satisfy the victims’ families, friends, or colleagues in the independent press, a Prigozhin-backed news agency, RIA FAN, conducted its own investigation of the murder and named Dominique Christophe Raineteau as the mastermind, claiming that he was a French mercenary or agent in league with terrorists.“We have our vision of what happened in CAR,” RIA FAN editor Yevgeny Zubarev wrote in an email to The Daily Beast. “It was a planned provocation but you are never going to publish our conclusions… Your publication is neither going to mention in a negative light Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the main suspect of this crime; nor the Western (French) special services, the possible accomplices,” wrote Zubarev.Actually, the RIA FAN conclusions are quite interesting, because they do not agree at all with the official government versions blaming unknown Arabic-speaking thieves. The general thrust of the RIA FAN report is that the Russian journalists were killed in order to embarrass Russia (if not indeed to blame Prigozhin and Putin). The agent who organized the murders, according to RIA FAN, was Raineteau, a French mercenary who is protected by the French secret services, and Khodorkovsky himself, who supposedly paid Raineteau to set up the team Khodorkovsky had sent. RIA FAN notes the extensive French-Russian rivalry for resources and dominance in Africa as the motive for the French plot, and says Khodorkovsky’s motive is to “discredit any activity of Russia abroad, particularly in Africa and the revenge directed at the Russian Federation.”All of this makes for a fascinating narrative of conspiracy, and is typical of disinformation that tries to ascribe presumed motives—“who benefits from the crime”—as proof when it is really self-serving conjecture. There is some hearsay in the RIA FAN report, but the documentary evidence linking Raineteau to the killing is virtually nonexistent, while the account compiled by Khodorkovsky’s investigators appears to be based largely on minute examination of phone records and emails (albeit without any explanation of how they were obtained). The narrative developed by the investigators for Khodorkovsky’s Dossier Centre goes roughly like this:The three journalists made a critical mistake when they were looking for a “fixer” to set up appointments, transportation, lodging, translation and the like while they were in the CAR.  Even though they were investigating one Prigozhin operation, Wagner, they asked a journalist working for another Prigozhin company, RIA FAN, for help. This may not be quite as unusual as it sounds, because journalists working for conflicting media often believe they have more common bonds as professionals in the field than as servants for their bosses in the home offices. That may have been the case where the request for advice from FAN journalist Kirill Romanovsky was concerned.He in turn suggested they contact by text message a Dutch man with experience in the CAR as a United Nations employee or contractor who went by the name of “Martin.”The RIA FAN report would later suggest Martin was none other than the mysterious French operative Raineteau. But the Dossier Centre investigation concludes “with a high degree of probability that the fixer ‘Martin’… never existed.” Rather, “he was invented by the coordinators of a thoroughly planned operation.”“Martin” did not show up at the airport as expected, when the crew arrived, and they never once laid eyes on him or, for that matter, spoke to him on the phone. Everything was handled by text messages, including Martin’s claim that he was 376 kilometers from the CAR capital Bangui in the town of Bambari, where they were headed initially the day they were killed. According to the Dossier Centre report, cell phone records show “Martin,” or at least that phone, never left the capital.The Dossier Centre investigation notes that the local driver the crew hired, Bienvenue Douvokama, is believed to be an agent or informer for the local gendarmerie, and was in “constant operational contact with gendarme Emmanuel Kotofio” who “tracked the journalists’ movements and was in their immediate vicinity.” (Kotofio is quoted by RIA FAN saying he and Douvokama are old friends and just like to shoot the breeze.)Kotofio, in turn, “maintained contact with a man identified by the Dossier Centre as an ‘instructor in surveillance, counter-surveillance, recruitment and intelligence work’” from another Prigozhin company, M-Finans, run by one Aleksandr Sotov, who then reported to Valery Zakharov, a Russian adviser to the president of the CAR and head of a team of instructors in Prigozhin’s “Company.”On the fatal night of July 30, according to the Dossier Centre, Kotofio the gendarme passed through a military checkpoint at the town of Sibut, on the same road the journalists would take only minutes later. With Kotofio were three Caucasians, “presumably Russians,” according to the Dossier Centre report. Kotofio drove back to the checkpoint later at 8 p.m. The journalists’ driver reported their murder about 45 minutes later at a village near the scene.The following day, according to the Dossier Centre, a “disinformation campaign” began to confuse and impede any outside investigation.According to emails obtained by the Dossier Centre, which cannot be independently verified, Prigozhin is personally involved in running the Company’s projects in the Central African Republic.* * *THE PAIN OF THE FAMILIES* * * The Kremlin remains deaf to the victims’ families’ demands to question Prigozhin and his men on the ground, including commanders of the Russian militia working for CAR’s leadership. Alexander Radchenko’s, the father of the cameraman, says it is easy for him to connect the dots identifying the main suspects. Since July 30, 2018, the day his son’s body was found in CAR, Radchenko has been analyzing reports by private investigators and journalists, and read and watched interviews with Moscow’s key man in CAR, Valery Zakharov, a former Russian military intelligence officer, who is now the country's main security adviser. “The investigators–along with Russian diplomats, FSB, GRU–back up the Russian military instructors working in CAR instead of questioning the main guy, Zakharov,and his bosses,” Radchenko told The Daily Beast on Tuesday.The heartbroken father has written more than 30 petitions to Russian state detectives investigating the criminal case. Some of his requests ostensibly were taken into consideration, but most of them were ignored. Radchenko told The Daily Beast that in his opinion the murder was “undoubtedly a set up.”  Over the last six months, the father says, he has seen enough evidence collected by independent reporters to conclude that “Yevgeny Prigozhin, Valery Zakharov and his aide Alexander Sotov are the principal suspects to be questioned about the murder of my son.” But Radchenko sounds hopeless: “Every time I ask the state detective on this case, Igor Zolotov, to call them for questioning, he seems too shy and tells me: ‘We should not bother such important men, they must be busy.’”Putin’s Man in the Central African Republic: Is Valery Zakharov at the Heart of Russian Skulduggery? Khodorkovsky’s team has tried to fill that investigative gap. “We have done our part of the job, presented mobile phone billing to demonstrate that Zakharov, his aid Alexander Sotov, the gendarme they trained and the crew called each other dozens of times during the two days before the murder,” Maxim Dbar, Khodorkovsly’s spokesman, told The Daily Beast. “We have no authority to question the key suspects."Irina Gordiyenko, a reporter for independent Novaya Gazeta, especially wants to know who killed Orkhan Dzhemal, the father of her son. “I want to ask both Zakharov and Sotov about the billing data, what sort of actions they coordinated from the moment of the journalists’ arrival in CAR,” Gordiyenko said in a recent interview with The Daily Beast. “I have questions for Zakharov about CAR gendarmes being trained in Russia. I want to ask the Russian MID [ministry of foreign affairs] why the journalists’ belongings have not been moved to Russia, why our diplomats consult with Prigozhin’s Wagner about the official version of the murder to give to the public.”Somebody shot Rostorguyev from a 7.62 mm Kalashnikov assault rifle. Two bullets hit the journalist’s heart. “Only a professional could fire so accurately in the dark,” Gordiyenko added her doubts. The United States imposed sanctions against billionaire Prigozhin and his Concord holding company in 2016 for constructing a military base for Russian forces near Ukraine. But neither the sanctions, nor the links to the CAR murder that shook the entire country, has slowed the growth of Prigozhin’s business empire. Concord keeps working on immense state contracts, his Zinger Development group is planning to build an artificial island in the Gulf of Finland, and foreign tourists keep buying his chocolates at Eliseyev Emporium, a historic architectural landmark on Nevsky Prospect. Jessica from Vermont was purchasing Marzipans shaped as carrots, half a pound of Lukum and chocolates with lime taste. “I am not sure I know who Prigozhin is, I am sorry,” the tourist told The Daily Beast.Prigozhin has access to the highest offices in the Kremlin and cooperates closely with the defense ministries of both Russia and the CAR. The power is on his side. “The murder of the three journalists is not going to be investigated, at least there will never be public knowledge of who ordered the killing,” a political analyst close to the Kremlin, Sergei Markov, told The Daily Beast. “Prigozhin has created private military forces to help Russia, he is fighting the war against Russia’s enemies that are constantly undermining our power, so of course Moscow will not go against him to support the dossier created by Putin’s enemy, Khodorkovsky.” In the eyes of much of the world, however, Putin’s name will be linked forever to the murder of the three journalists just as it is linked to the killing of journalists Anna Politkovskaya or Natalia Estemirova.Dzhamal, Rastorguyev, and Radchenko were—and remain—important symbols for Russians who still believe the search for solid facts and the truth is the only way to combat corruption and the disinformation used to disguise it, even if the quest costs you your life.Anna Nemtsova reported from St. Petersburg, Christopher Dickey from Paris.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. 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September 02, 2019 at 10:23AM via IFTTT

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[voriiduraki]

Boris Ivanovich (Mischa Sirotovsky)

Age: 62

Height: 6’7”

Weight: 368 lbs

Hair color: Silver (was light brown)

Eye color: Grey

Nationality: Ukrainian

Family: Father - Eliezer Sirotovsky, Mother - Ana Sirotovsky, Brother - Danylo Sirotovsky, Uncle - Matviy Sirotovsky, Aunt -Yelyzaveta Sirotovsky, Cousin - Zlata Sirotovsky, Grandfather - Sirotovsky, Grandmother - Sirotovsky, Uncle - Bodashka Miroshnik, Aunt -  Maryshka Miroshnik, Cousin - T. Miroshnik, Cousin - S. Miroshnik, Cousin - G. Miroshnik, Grandfather - Yakov Miroshnik, Grandmother - Rakhila Miroshnik

Appearance: Boris is very wide and very tall and built like a strong man with a bit of a gut. His eyes are steel grey and he a has a short, groomed, silver-grey beard.

His short, silver hair is cut close on the sides with a noticeable, raised scar on the back of his head. As most bratva has numerous tattoos depicting his accomplishments and failures. Boris has always looked a lot older than he really is and looks closer to seventy than sixty. He has a preference for earth tone turtleneck sweaters and dark trousers. On more important business he'll wear a suit.

Personality: Boris was always friendly and a bit emotional and had a strong love of learning. After his wrongful imprisonment he became a more hardened man that was unafraid to kill if his life depended on it. There wasn't much he was afraid of when he was young. He is very loyal as a person and strongly believes in friendship and takes debts seriously.

His personality drastically changed after taking a bullet to the back of his head. His emotions are a lot stronger and unhinged. Boris tends to get overtly upset or happy and will laugh or cry to fit these strong emotions even if it's over something minor. He also has an intense phobia of receiving cuts and open wounds that could possibly get infected. Though he can no longer feel pain it still sends him into a panic.

Stand: Iron Maiden

Stand appearance: Iron Maiden looks to be a small figure of a child or adolescent girl that is made from crude, jagged metal with no distinct facial features. The back of it's head appears missing or blown out to reveal the hollow interior of the stand. Several sharp, curved metal shards protruding from its back in what resembles wings or ribs.

Stand ability: It can create metallic, thorn like spires on any surface that can impale and rip things apart. It is heavily tied to his emotions and requires precision. After sustaining a nearly fatal head injury that caused trauma to his brain, his stand acts according to whatever emotion is overwhelming him at the moment and for this reason he has to limit its use and exercise self control.

Early life: Boris was born as Mischa Sirotovsky in a Ukrainian village in 1953. His village was a small, tight knit Ashkenazi Jewish community that was a mining town. Though Mischa had no younger siblings his mother often volunteered to watch the village children while the parents worked and he happily helped her while his father and older brother worked in the coal mines. He was a stand user from birth and believed his stand to be a spirit of sorts. Initially he ignored it until a strange phenomenon of curved, metal spikes appeared. Afraid to tell anyone he just kept it to himself.

Mischa always had a love of learning and showed interest in reading from a young age. When the children were at his home he would read to them and teach then a new word or fact he had learned. It was then he knew he wanted to pursue knowledge and become a teacher in the bigger cities. At eighteen, when he came of age to work in the mines Mischa informed his family and friends of his decision. They supported him and gave him their blessings.

Not long after leaving his village Mischa was robbed of all his possessions including his internal passport. When he went to report the crime he was mistaken for a wanted criminal and taken into custody. Without any papers he had no way to prove himself and was transported to a Russia then held in prison awaiting his trial. While in prison he met Dmitri Volkov, the only person who showed him any mercy while in prison. He immediately imprinted on him, following around and trying to stay near him to Dmitri's dismay. But after Mischa saved him from an attack on his life which led him to solitary confinement he was sought out by Dmitri to be his associate and friend and help him start his own organization and, ideally, escape. Four years they managed to bust out of prison with several other men that served in their young organization. Since escaping Mischa has gone by the name of the man he was accused of being.

The now Boris spent many years as Obschak, in charge of the security branch and head of all the captains in the organization until a he was shot in the back of the head during a deal gone wrong with a Hungarian gang after their move to America. The bullet lodged itself in the back his head damaging part of his brain that allowed him to feel pain thus deadening the sense. This absence of sensory feedback made his brain react more to emotional stimuli, often in extremes. Shortly after his near death experience Boris nearly died from an infected wound failing to have it checked out. This made his mind make the association of open wounds and cuts mean he should react with fear and anxiety. He is prone to panic attacks if he draws blood or gets a large gash. Being far too unhinged for field work he was made Sovietnik, in charge of money and bookkeeping, for Dmitri refused to get rid of his oldest friend and oldest asset.

Organization Rank: Sovietnik/Right hand of Dmitri

Random Facts:

※ Boris taught both of Dmitri's sons how to read and write in both Russian and English.

※ His nephew Ghost favors him and often attends synagogue with him.

※ Boris rarely goes by his old name but on occasion when Dmitri wants to discuss a personal matter, will address him by that name.

※ He was afraid of stand before learning of what it truly was in prison with the help of Dmitri.

※ He knows six languages fluently.

※ Despite everything he still has a passion for teaching. He loves it. He tends to give lectures no one asked for.

※ Before he left his village he discussed his stand ability with someone who had enough study to be a rabbi. They knew of what he was talking about being secretly a stand user themselves. They told Mischa to never use his stand out of malevolence and cruelty. He has only ever used it for self defense or to protect his comrades when in the field.

※ Boris starting aging prematurely and always looked much older than he really was.

#//character bio #//boris ivanovich #oc character #jjba oc #oc rp #long post #i really fucking love my boy #i judt finished his bio after like months or research and procrastinating