A group of Russian diplomats and their families made an unusual exit out of North Korea on a hand-pushed rail trolley due to strict Covid measures.
The eight people travelled by train and bus before pushing themselves across the Russian border for about 1km (0.6miles) over train tracks.
North Korea has blocked most passenger transport to limit the virus’s spread.
The country maintains it has not had any confirmed cases, but observers dispute this claim.
h/t DM
The head of Canada’s spy agency said today Canadian companies in almost all sectors of the economy have been targeted by hostile foreign actors — and named Russia and China as two of his main sources of concern.
“The threat from hostile activity by state actors in all its forms represents a significant danger to Canada’s prosperity and sovereignty,” said David Vigneault, director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, in his first public speech in three years.
“Our investigations reveal that this threat has unfortunately caused significant harm to Canadian companies.”
Russia and China are certainties but how could he forget to include Trudeau’s Liberals?
Spiralling addiction, inequality and an oligarch class can pave the way for authoritarianism
An elite openly contemptuous of the poor. Millions of people living in towns where traditional industries (and the measure of security they provided) have vanished. Spiralling addiction. A class of super wealthy oligarchs, much too close to the government, exercising way more power than they ought to. All major communications channels controlled by a tiny coterie of billionaires.
Aleksei Navalny, opposition leader, anti-corruption activist and fierce critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, returned to Russia on January 17 after recovering for five months in Germany from having been poisoned with a military grade nerve agent, Novichok. It was an event widely reported to have been an assassination attempt by Russian state agents.
Upon landing, Navalny was immediately arrested on charges that he had violated the parole terms from a suspended sentence received in 2014 for alleged fraud, a conviction that the European Court of Human Rights ruled was “arbitrary and manifestly unreasonable”.
Marc Polymeropoulos woke up in his hotel room with his head spinning and ears ringing. “I felt like I was going to vomit. I couldn’t stand up. I was falling over,” he recalls. “I have been shot at numerous times and this was the most terrifying experience in my life.”
Polymeropoulos had spent years in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan as a senior officer of the CIA fighting America’s war on terrorism. But that night in Moscow he believes he was targeted by a secret, microwave weapon.
Russian police have detained over 250 anti-Putin protesters today as activists took to the streets and a frozen ocean demanding the release of jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny.
The authorities mounted a massive effort to stem the tide of demonstrations after tens of thousands of people rallied across the country the previous weekend in the largest and most widespread show of discontent the country has seen in years.
The first protests took place in the East, including the port city of Vladivostok where several dozen protesters gathered in the city’s central square despite police closing it off ahead of the rally.
The feds are investigating whether a Pennsylvania woman who was seen on video taking part in the US Capitol riots stole a laptop or hard drive from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office and planned to sell it to the Russians, officials said.
Former FBI official says Canada’s spy catching system caused delay, angst in Delisle case
“…CSIS watched Delisle pass top-secret information to Russia for months without briefing the RCMP. The spy agency, acting on legal advice, opted to keep its investigation sealed for fear of exposing sources and methods of the intelligence trade in open court proceedings.
“Someone had to call Canada’s cops. Strangely, that task went to me,” says Figliuzzi, who led the FBI’s counter-intelligence division as an assistant director.”
Espionage is an old story. Long ago Moses dispatched twelve spies to explore the land of Canaan as a future home for the Israelite people. They reported they had found a land flowing with milk and honey. On December 8, 2020 it was disclosed that individuals, almost certainly Russian, had hacked the U.S. security firm Fire Eye, only one of the many targets compromised in the cybersecurity industry. It soon became apparent that foreign hackers had attacked both governmental and unofficial organizations. A large-scale espionage campaign has breached the U.S. Treasury and Commerce Departments and other government agencies. Microsoft and customers were compromised, and emails had been stolen from U.S. private sector companies. The victim of a highly sophisticated targeted attack, Orion Platform, the server of the network management system Solar Winds, which produces software for the U.S. government and private companies, was breached.
The United States is ratcheting up the threat of sanctions against European companies in an effort to deal a death blow to the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline between Russia and Germany. The pipeline would double shipments of Russian natural gas to Germany by transporting the gas under the Baltic Sea. U.S. President Donald Trump, like his predecessor Barack Obama, has criticized the project because it would make Germany “captive” to Russia for its energy supplies.
Trump has been especially critical of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who, in opposition to the United States and many Eastern European countries, has doggedly pursued the pipeline project, which would funnel billions of dollars to Russia at a time that Germany is free-riding on the U.S. defense umbrella that protects Germany from that same Russia.
That would be the same Teutonic Tart noted here, she luvs her China too – Angela Merkel faces European revolt over China trade policy
Russia has revived a Soviet-era research facility to test weapons in severe Arctic conditions as the Kremlin aims to boost its defence in the resource-rich region. This also comes at a time when the country faces military challenges along its western borders. Sergei Karasev, senior official at the Central Scientific-Research Institute for Precision Machine Engineering, Russia’s weapons maker, announced in a statement on Thursday that it had restored testing chambers at the facility to simulate extreme conditions, including extreme heat, cold and wet weather.
Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) said Saturday it had prevented an attack by a terrorist group with links to the Islamic State (IS) armed group.
The FSB said it had arrested four people who were set to carry out the offensive in the troubled southern republic of Dagestan.
“Members of the group planned to detonate an explosive close to an administrative building belonging to security services, followed by an armed attack against interior ministry employees in the city of Makhachkala,” the FSB said in a statement.
Convicted as an American spy, Paul Whelan is preparing to spend Christmas in a Russian labour camp as talks to negotiate his release have faltered.
In his first detailed interview since his arrest, Mr Whelan has described life locked up alongside murderers and thieves as a “very, very grim existence” and called on his four governments to do more to get him out.
The former US Marine has always insisted he is innocent, describing himself as a hostage of “slimy” Russian politics and a “sham” trial.
Mike Pompeo has become the first member of the Trump administration to blame Russia for wide-ranging hacks of US government agencies and private companies.
“This was a very significant effort,” the secretary of state told rightwing talk radio host Mark Levin on Friday night. “I think it’s the case that now we can say pretty clearly that it was the Russians that engaged in this activity.”
On Saturday, Pompeo announced the closure of two US consulates in Russia at which activity had already been curtailed, due to Covid-19.
