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Канцлер Германии Олаф Шольц во вторник провел телефонный разговор с российским президентом Владимиром Путиным, сообщает пресс-служба кабмина ФРГ.

Лидеры России и Германии обсудили ситуацию на Украине, в том числе вопросы безопасности на Запорожской АЭС, а также ситуацию с продовольствием в мире. Канцлер снова предложил РФ уладить ситуацию с Киевом дипломатическим путем.

«Коснувшись ситуации на Запорожской АЭС, канцлер подчеркнул необходимость обеспечения ее безопасности. В этом контексте он призвал избегать любых шагов по эскалации и немедленно выполнять меры, рекомендованные в докладе МАГАТЭ», — говорится в сообщении германского правительства.

Разговор продлился около полутора часов. Шольц и Путин договорились продолжить контакты.

Напомним, 11 сентября по инициативе Елисейского дворца состоялся телефонный разговор между президентом Франции Эммануэлем Макроном и Владимиром Путиным. Главной темой переговоров стала ситуация на Запорожской АЭС.

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OPINION:

Over the last six years, Americans have witnessed some of the darkest times in the history of Federal law enforcement. And the August raid of Mar-a-Lago is sadly only a speed bump along the way.

While our cities continue to be bludgeoned by a historic crime wave, the FBI and Department of Justice have made it clear that their aggressive political agenda is more important than the people they serve. This has come at a tremendous cost to the country — particularly low-income and minority citizens — and if continued will result in a further division between these agencies and the American people.

In June of 2016, Christopher Steele created the “Steele Dossier.” The document was used by the FBI and DOJ as the basis for a three-year investigation aiming to prove Mr. Trump had colluded with Russia to win the 2016 presidential election. Surprisingly, the dossier turned out to be funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign as a piece of opposition research. The result was millions of taxpayer dollars lost in a probe that turned out to be a hoax. In the meantime, an all-out urban war has occurred in Chicago. That same year 762 homicides happened and through December of 2021, a mind-blowing 3,289 murders were tallied. Even though the deaths were overwhelmingly among black and poor Americans, the FBI has sat on the sidelines. 

Also consider that in April of 2019 a laptop was dropped off at a Wilmington, Delaware repair shop by a man who identified himself as Hunter Biden. The shop owner, John Paul Mac Isaac, realizing the seriousness of the material on the computer, made a copy on a hard drive.  Instead of investigating the evidence of major federal crimes that were revealed on the hard drive, FBI agents actually investigated the shop owner and helped push the lie that the Hunter laptop was Russian disinformation in meetings with the major social media companies.

Simultaneously there has been an explosion of gang-related crime nationwide. A staggering 15% of all homicides in the U.S. are tied to gangs each year. Gangs feel so free to operate that they even use social media. They also overwhelmingly operate in urban communities. Los Angeles alone reports that gangs engage in 16 crimes a day! Minorities and the working class who live in these urban communities are the victims of this lawlessness.  Though fighting gangs is a key responsibility of the FBI, the agency wastes time on a Delaware shopkeeper.

The claims made against former President Donald Trump are in sharp contrast to the FBI’s actions in 2016 after Hillary Clinton took a hammer to her illegal private servers that exposed thousands of emails containing classified information. She wasn’t a former president, yet she was never charged.  

In an unprecedented move, the FBI used aggressive tactics, including going to a federal magistrate (with partisan ties,) instead of an Article III judge to get permission, to raid Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence.

Since Joe Biden’s presidency, America has been experiencing a crime wave that was kicked off by the “Summer of Love” riots of 2020. Then over $2 billion of damage occurred and few have been held responsible. A recently leaked FBI training video about “militia violent extremism” did not include the violence of Antifa, Black Lives Matter adherents or the growing instances of “black on white violent assaults,” but instead chose to highlight pro-2nd Amendment logos and the Gadsden flag as part of domestic terrorist groups.

The working class – and Blacks especially – have been hardest hit by the national crime wave. When combined with Mr. Biden’s policies of soaring inflation and gas prices, these Americans’ hopes of achieving the American Dream are all but wiped out.

Instead of pursuing a political agenda, the FBI should focus like a laser on its actual responsibilities, so it provides the criminal justice relief our nation desperately needs. Federal law enforcement used to be a reliable and unprejudiced resource of our nation, but in less than a decade it has turned into a political tool of the left. An overhaul is needed before more damage is done. The neediest in our communities can’t wait much longer.

• Horace Cooper is a senior fellow with the National Center for Public Policy Research, chairman of the Project 21 National Advisory Board and a legal commentator.

More FBI whistleblowers have stepped forward to Congress and accused high-ranking bureau officials of bringing unauthorized smartphones into top-secret facilities, a security breach that can expose classified materials.

This time, the FBI said it is investigating the complaints and “takes all security matters seriously.”

The alleged security violations occurred in a sensitive compartmented information facility or SCIF set up for the executive offices on the 7th floor of the FBI‘s J. Edgar Hoover Building, according to the whistleblower.

The new complaint follows The Washington Times’ exclusive report last week detailing an FBI agent disclosing to Congress that FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate, among other top agents, broke security rules and jeopardized classified material by using a smartphone inside of SCIFs.

The FBI denied the whistleblowers’ accusations about Mr. Abbate but said the bureau was looking into the new allegations.

An FBI agent told The Times that this kind of behavior among the bureau’s executives is prevalent at field offices across the country.

The new disclosure sent to House Judiciary Committee Republicans came from a former program manager of the FBI‘s Defensive Electronic Group who was responsible for technical surveillance countermeasures on the seventh floor of the FBI‘s Washington headquarters. It is on the seventh floor where the highest ranking FBI officials have offices.

The former FBI employee said several violations were detected during a security sweep of the seventh floor SCIF.

“During the exam, I observed dozens of strong Bluetooth signals. As I began looking for possible sources, I observed several phones on desks and in use inside the SCIF,” the former FBI employee said in the disclosure to lawmakers. “I had just begun looking for them when the Chief Security Officer responsible for the area shut me down. He specifically directed me not to pursue it or take any action.”

“Cell phones are not permitted inside. Based on the readings I observed, I believe every employee there was violating the cell phone policy,” he said in the whistleblower disclosure.

The FBI said in a statement to The Times:

“The FBI takes all security matters seriously. Recently, we were made aware of these allegations of security violations in FBI space, and we have referred this information to the Inspection Division, Security Division, and the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General for review. The FBI has also taken considerable steps to ensure that employees are aware of their rights when making protected disclosures under the regulations.”

SCIFs have the most highly classified and potentially sensitive records collected by the U.S. government, including documents summarizing threats to homeland security, surveillance records on suspected terrorists and the names of informants.

The U.S. intelligence community has rules governing how SCIFs are built and managed, which include restrictions on the use of portable electronic devices and those with recording capabilities and embedded technologies.

Managers must approve such devices to enter a SCIF, and the officials must conduct a risk assessment before giving a greenlight, according to technical specifications published by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence last year. Medical devices are similarly subject to reviews and approvals.

SCIFs are not only located in government buildings or only inside the U.S., and managers of SCIFs outside the U.S. have different rules.

Former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence housed a SCIF during his presidency. The FBI also used a SCIF at the law firm Perkins Coie, representing prominent Democratic clients.

Bringing a cellphone into a SCIF presents security challenges that are not limited to a hacker accessing a microphone or camera.

Mordechai Guri, head of research and development at the Cyber Security Research Center at Ben Gurion University in Israel, recently published a study showing how unconnected smartphones may be used to steal data from computers separated from the internet, which is how sensitive material is examined in SCIFs.

One method involved using the gyroscope sensor in a smartphone, which is the mechanism that determines the phone’s rotation, such as whether someone is viewing the device horizontally or vertically.

Mr. Guri’s “GAIROSCOPE” method creates a covert communications channel between the smartphone and air-gapped computers through malicious software that creates ultrasonic frequencies on the computers. The computers are not connected to the internet, and the unconnected smartphones can detect the frequencies from a few meters away.

Another method disclosed by Mr. Guri changes a computer’s blinking LED lights into morse code to transmit data from the secure computers.

© Copyright AFP 2022. All rights reserved.

Power lines and factory chimneys in Dniprovsky District

Wikimedia Commons

Following Russian missile strikes on Sunday, parts of eastern Ukraine including the Kharkiv and Donetsk regions have been left without electricity, said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

He added via Twitter that “Zaporizhzhia, Dnipropetrovsk and Sumy have problems with the power supply as well.” The power blackouts were also confirmed by local officials, including the Kharkiv mayor.

The blackout comes a day after a counterattack by Ukrainian troops forced the Russian army to retreat from regions in Kharkiv. Zelensky has accused Moscow of deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure in acts of revenge: “Even through the impenetrable darkness, Ukraine and the civilized world clearly see these terrorist acts. Deliberate and cynical missile strikes on critical civilian infrastructure. No military facilities,” he said via Telegram.

Belgorod, Russia

Wikimedia Commons

Several independent Russian and Belarusian outlets, like the video news channel Vot Tak TV, are reporting that the most ardent supporters of Moscow’s invasion have been condemning the Russian army’s retreat from Kharkiv over the past 24 hours, and are calling on the Kremlin to mobilize the troops for an all-out war.

There are also reports of panic within Belgorod, the Russian city just 20 miles now from Ukrainian troops at the border. “Many people are afraid that we will be made into a sacrificial lamb. A Belgorod People’s Republic, as they write in Ukraine,” Russian Verstkaquotes a Belgorod resident. “Of course, it’s nice to smell the flowers, eat watermelons and watch on TV how bad everything is in Europe and what is being built in Moscow. But ordinary people want to know at least the approximate actions if there is an attack on our city. At the sound of the alarm, should I run to the basement or stay home?”

Another local recalled that Moscow boasted early in the war that if “even one shot was fired on Russian territory, measures will be taken. And ordinary ordinary people on the Internet wrote that nothing would happen to US! […] Wake up, people, this is the Third World War. It’s time to mobilize all the border areas.”

Li Zhanshu meeting with Vladimir Putin

Kremlin

China’s Xi Jinping is set to meet with Russia’s Vladimir Putin this week at a summit in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan. It will be the Chinese leader’s first trip abroad since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and just a month away from what is expected to be his election to a third term in office.

But at this moment, it is most significant in light of his meeting with Putin, whose invasion of Ukraine is facing a major counter-offensive by Kyiv.

Senior Russian and Chinese officials have continued to play up their united front, in preparation for the long-awaited face-to-face between the two heads of state. Beijing has refused to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, instead repeatedly blaming the conflict on NATO and the United States.

The visit comes after the revelation over the weekend of last week’s meeting between Li Zhanshu, China’s third-ranking leader of the Chinese Communist Party, and a close ally of Xi, and Vyacheslav Volodin, chairman of Russia’s State Duma, and other Russian lawmakers in Moscow.

According to the Russian lawmakers, Li voiced explicit support for Russia’s war on Ukraine, saying, “On the Ukrainian issue, we see how they have put Russia in an impossible situation. And in this case, Russia made an important choice and responded firmly.”

These claims are not included in the statement from the Chinese side, and run contrary to Beijing’s previous efforts to maintain a veneer of neutrality.

TAZ

“Something New in the East,” German daily die Tageszeitung declares on its front page, reporting on the success of Ukrainian forces in pushing Russia back in the northeast.

The headline is a play on the 1929 German book Im Westen nichts Neues (literally meaning “In the West Nothing New,” the World War I novel by Erich Maria Remarque translated into English as All Quiet on the Western Front, adapted into an Academy Award-winning film in 1930).

German Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht

Wikimedia Commons

Germany will not be supplying Ukraine with “main battle tanks”, according to the German Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht. “No country has delivered Western-built infantry fighting vehicles or main battle tanks so far,” Lambrecht said in Berlin on Monday according to German Die Welt. “We have agreed with our partners that Germany will not take such action unilaterally.”

The announcement comes at a time when calls for Germany to support Ukraine’s advances in the northeast by delivering tanks are growing. Amy Gutmann, the U.S. new ambassador in Berlin, has urged the German government to “take more of a leadership role.”

“We have to do even more,” she added. “We are defending our own prosperity, our own democracy when we support Ukraine. My impression is that Germany wants to take more of a leadership role, and we hope that it will fulfill that.”

Russian soldier near the Zaporizhzhia power plant

Flickr

French President Emmanuel Macron reiterated his demand for a ceasefire in Ukraine and Russian withdrawal from the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant during a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to information released by the Elysee Presidential Palace.

Meanwhile, Rafael Grossi, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said “he remains gravely concerned about the situation” at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant (ZNPP) as long as any shelling continues.

Zaporizhzhia is the site of the largest nuclear plant in Europe. The facility sits in the Russian occupied part of southern Ukraine and has been on the fire line between Russian and Ukrainian forces.