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U.K. Novichok poisoning inquest should be public inquiry, coroner says
Inquiry would allow coroner to examine Russia's possible involvement in death of Dawn Sturgess
The Associated Press ·
Posted: Sep 22, 2021 4:30 PM ET
Police stand near Salisbury, Britain, home of Dawn Sturgess in July 2018. Sturgess died after being exposed to the nerve agent Novichok. The coroner presiding over the inquest into her death wants to examine Russia's possible involvement. (Hannah McKay/Reuters)
A coroner presiding over an inquest into the death of British woman poisoned by a Soviet-developed nerve agent after a similar attack targeting a Russian ex-spy said Wednesday that she wants the probe to be turned into a public inquiry so she can examine Russia's possible involvement.
Unlike an inquest, British law allows a public inquiry to consider sensitive intelligence material during partly closed hearings. The inquiry that coroner Heather Hallett requested in order to consider any role played by the Russian government in the 2018 death of Dawn Sturgess would be unlikely to start before 2023.
Sturgess, 44, and her partner collapsed in the southwest England town of Amesbury after coming into contact with a small perfume bottle containing Novichok, a military grade nerve agent.
The pair were exposed three months after Russian ex-spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, were sickened in a Novichok attack in the nearby city of Salisbury.
Adam Straw, a lawyer representing Sturgess' family and her partner, Charlie Rowley, said the "overriding concern is to ensure the truth of how Ms. Sturgess died is established."
A photo made available by London police shows Sturgess, 44, who died in 2018 after being exposed to Novichok. (EPA-EFE)
"No family should wait five and a half years to find out how someone died," he said.
Britain's government on Tuesday named and charged a third Russian suspect in the Novichok poisonings.
It alleges that three men working for Russia's military intelligence service travelled to the U.K. for a mission targeting the Skripals before flying back to Moscow. Russia vehemently denies the allegations.
Rowley told authorities he found the perfume bottle containing traces of the nerve agent in a trash bin.
Since all three Russian suspects returned immediately to Russia, it begs the absurd question, 'how often are garbage bins emptied in Amesbury?'
Britain has acknowledged that extradition requests for the three suspects would be futile and they cannot be brought to trial as long as they remain in Russia. While there is almost no chance of a criminal trial, lawyers believe a public inquiry is the best way to find out what happened.
The Skripals became seriously ill after Novichok was smeared on Sergei Skripal's door handle in March 2018, but the father and daughter survived.
Sturgess died in July that year after she and Rowley came into contact with the discarded perfume bottle the month before. Rowley later recovered.
Police said they could not account for the whereabouts of the perfume bottle between the attack on the Skripals and when Rowley said he found it three months later.
Cathryn McGahey, a lawyer representing the British government, said she hoped authorities will make a decision about the public hearing by the end of the year.
Porton Down is a microbiology lab that happens to be equidistant from Amesbury and Salisbury
I'm sure that's a coincidence!
Brussels begins infringement proceedings against Austria and other
states for failing to implement EU rules on combating terrorism
24 Sep, 2021 12:42
The European Commission announced that it has launched infringement procedures against Austria, as well as Finland, Croatia and Luxembourg for failing to correctly implement certain elements of EU rules on combating terrorism.
On Thursday, the bloc’s executive body announced that it was sending a letter of formal notice to Vienna, remarking that it now has two months to respond to arguments put forward by Brussels. If there is no response, the Commission may send a “reasoned opinion”.
Oh my gosh, no! Not a reasoned opinion!
Aside from Austria, the EU said that it will be sending formal notices also to Croatia, Luxembourg and Finland for their failure to adopt the union’s terrorism measures.
Under the EU directive, there are regulations that criminalize and sanction terrorist training, going overseas for terrorism, as well as returning to or traveling across the bloc to commit offences.
The rules in place also have provisions for victims, such as making sure people affected receive professional and specialist support and reliable information, both in the wake of incidents and in the long term if needed.
Austrian Social Democrats security spokesman Reinhold Einwallner called for Interior Minister Karl Nehammer and Justice Minister Alma Zadić “to explain how this government failure could occur”, slamming the lack of action in a statement.
“The Austrian population deserves the highest protection of terrorism”, Einwallner remarked, calling it a scandal that Vienna “has been failing to implement the EU-directive since 2017.”
The central European country’s capital was rocked by a terrorist attack on November 2, 2020, when a shooting broke out outside of the city’s main synagogue, which then spread to other locations. The attack claimed four victims and left over 20 injured.
In the wake of the attack, the Austrian Interior Ministry confirmed reports that the gunman had met with a group of fellow jihadists from Switzerland and Germany in Vienna several months prior. Nehammer also admitted that Austrian officials had made “intolerable mistakes” and had failed to act on information from Slovakia about suspects trying to buy ammunition there in the summer.
Poland must pay €500,000 daily for ignoring
top EU court’s ruling on Turow mine
Is EU's overreaction being pushed by the 'Climate Change' hysteria crowd?
20 Sep, 2021 15:25 / Updated 1 day ago
on June 28, 2021. © AFP / Michal Cizek
Poland must pay a daily penalty of €500,000 ($585,550) for ignoring a previous order from the European Union’s top court to cease operations at the Turow lignite mine, with its CEO slamming the fine as “bizarre”.
On Monday, the EU’s Court of Justice (CJEU) confirmed it was enforcing the financial penalty against Warsaw, stating that Poland must pay the European Commission the daily half-million euro fine until it sees compliance with the earlier order.
Judges from the Luxembourg-based court said that the fine is “necessary… to deter that member state from delaying bringing its conduct into line with that order.”
Wojciech Dabrowski, the CEO of the company that operates the mine, Polska Grupa Energetyczna (PGE), said that the court’s decision to impose fines was “bizarre” and that the firm does not agree with the action taken. The Polish government has also vowed that the mine's operations will continue despite the ruling.
The Czech Republic took legal action against Poland in February over activities at the mine, which also sits close to the German border, claiming that it spoiled its citizens’ drinking water. After Warsaw failed to obey the court orders in May to “immediately cease lignite extraction activities at the mine”, Prague asked the court to fine Poland €5 million per day.
Poland’s PM Mateusz Morawiecki criticized the May ruling, calling it “very dangerous” for the central European country’s energy security and for the 5,000 people employed at the mine.
Unlike neighboring Germany, Poland is still heavily reliant on coal as a major source of power, accounting for around 70% of its total energy production. In 2018, the mine at the centre of the legal action produced some 6.5 million tons of the brown coal, lignite.
If the EU was a genuine union for the betterment of all, it would find a better way to deal with this issue. A big stick is not what unions are about, or shouldn't be. There must be some carrots they can throw around such as assisting Poland to switch to better sources of power.
The EU lied, refugees died: Belarus’ deadly game treats desperate
people as pawns. But the West sees them as something even worse
25 Sep, 2021 08:06
Poland Erects A Border Between Belarus And The EU. © Getty Images / Dominika Zarzycka
By Tarik Cyril Amar, a historian at Koç University in Istanbul working on Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe, the history of World War II, the cultural Cold War, and the politics of memory.
Just a few days ago, four migrants died of exhaustion and hypothermia while trying to cross the border between Poland and Belarus. Nobody knows how many others have perished in this same way, dreaming of a new life in the West.
The would-be asylum seekers have unwittingly become pawns in a wider geopolitical game. EU states, which stand accused of turning back desperate people along the frontier, have alleged that the Belarusian government has laid on flights to troubled destinations such as Iraq and Afghanistan and is now ‘weaponizing’ refugees to create a border crisis for Brussels. The lives at stake, however, have received little sympathy.
At around the same time as the bodies of the four people who had dreamed they would be welcome in Poland were found, the country’s president, Andrzej Duda, gave an address to the UN General Assembly in New York. The contrast is stunning.
Duda made a special point of lecturing his global audience on the merits of “solidarity,” and was clearly trying to cash in rhetorically on the name of the Polish trade union movement that resisted Communism in the 1980s. And not just any solidarity, but that between the wealthy global “North” and the neglected “South.” Tying himself into a bit of a geographical pretzel, Duda even claimed that the “North” had let down Ukraine – apparently now part of the “South,” if you ignore its location, economy, and massive privileges of Western support – over the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that Polish conservatives can’t stop bemoaning.
And also at the same time, actual people from the real Global South were being systematically abused in a deadly game of chicken between Belarus’ embattled autocrat, Alexander Lukashenko, and Polish nationalist populists. The essence of the row is simple: Lukashenko, unhappy over EU pressure on his domestic crackdown on the opposition and increasingly repressive rule, is trying to use migrants to deliver payback by encouraging or compelling them to cross the border into the EU – that is, Poland, as well as Lithuania and Latvia.
The countries he has reportedly targeted in this manner have responded by locking down their frontiers with fences and troops and by, declaring states of emergency. Lithuania and Latvia did so first. Poland followed at the beginning of September, severely restricting the media and the civil rights of its own population in the significant area bordering on Belarus.
This is a clear over-reaction that contradicts the spirit and the letter of Polish law, which reserves a state of emergency for – unsurprisingly – emergencies. That is, situations that pose far greater challenges and cannot be dealt with by ordinary means.
The Polish measures, undertaken by a government with a well-deserved reputation for repeatedly undermining democracy and the rule of law, reek of panic-mongering and nationalist populism. They have come with the rhetorical cover you would expect: Lukashenko’s dirty tricks are denounced as a “hybrid war,” thereby invoking the dire necessities of wartime in a situation that has nothing to do with it. Here, Polish conservatives follow in the footsteps of the US, with its dishonest “wars” on drugs and on terror.
And, just as in the American case, one big lie requires more to be added to it: Polish government members have indulged in hyperbole, presenting their intransigence towards the migrants as protecting all of the EU from a non-existent great migration crisis (and, as if in passing, darkly warning of the also non-existent dangers emanating from pre-scheduled and transparent Russian-Belarusian military maneuvers).
Really, non-existent migration crisis? Only because the doors are slamming shut on them.
In reality, the Polish state of emergency has made it easy for the authorities to impede the work of those Poles who do care for refugees, restricting the access of not only the media but also activists and NGOs, such as the Ocalenie Foundation, which are trying to help them. In particular, a group of 32 refugees from Afghanistan who have been stranded in inhospitable terrain and under very harsh conditions near the village of Usnarz Górny, between Poland and Belarus, for more than 44 days, and counting. According to the foundation, which has managed to stay in touch with the group despite its deliberate isolation by the state of emergency, their plight is now “dramatic.” They are surrounded by barbed wire on all sides, weak with hunger, cold, and in despair. At the same time, Polish border guards have repeatedly prevented doctors and UN representatives from reaching them.
Poland’s president, Duda, meanwhile, has used the same speech in which he held forth on “solidarity” to insist that his country will stand firm and not give in to what he called Belarus’ “instrumentalizing of migrants” and the “use of their difficult situation” to endanger the safety of the Polish border.
Perhaps rankled by some, far too reticent, criticism of his country’s brutal course, or perhaps aware that the UN presents a very different audience from the one he faces at home, Duda was clearly trying to signal at least some recognition of the migrants’ suffering. Yet words are cheap. In reality, there is a glaring contradiction that makes his talk hypocritical: It is impossible to both stay firm – that is, to continue Poland’s current policy – and to do justice to the humanity of the victims of both Lukashenko’s strategy and Poland’s response.
Poland is, of course, by no means alone in betting on deterrence by brutality. The US has done so for a long time, and the current scandal over the treatment of Haitian migrants stranded in the small Texan border town of Del Rio shows, once again, that this attitude is bipartisan: Despite his promises to do better, when the going gets tough, President Biden uses the tools of his predecessor Donald Trump, even if both the Democrats and the opposing Republicans pretend otherwise, for obvious if different reasons.
The EU as a whole has a nasty record of abusing migrants and letting them die, rather than letting them in. This year alone, for instance, almost 1,400 migrants have already lost their lives trying to cross the Mediterranean, continuing a steady trend that reached a peak in 2016, with 3,557 estimated deaths. After a history of scandals over harsh camps, Greece has just opened a facility that critics describe as akin to a prison.
In that sad sense, both Poland and Belarus, one inside and the other outside the EU, turn out to be really very European: ruthless and bereft of compassion. For the migrants lost between them, exhaustion and hypothermia were the immediate causes of death, yet politics is the fundamental one. And these lethal politics are produced by both governments together. The last thing a Polish president should dare to speak about right now is solidarity.
52% of Germans won’t miss Chancellor Angela Merkel,
new poll indicates a day before general election
25 Sep, 2021 09:42
German Chancellor Angela Merkel at a campaign event in Munich, September 24, 2021.
© Matthias Schrader / AP
As her long service as chancellor comes to an end, more than half of all Germans will not be missing Angela Merkel, a new poll has shown. The country’s new leader will be determined on Sunday.
In a poll of 5,007 people conducted by Civey for the Augsburger Allgemeine newspaper between September 22 and 24, respondents were asked if they would miss Merkel after her chancellorship ended.
The majority (52%) said they would not miss the veteran politician, who has continuously governed Germany since 2005. Just 38% said they would miss Merkel, while the rest were undecided.
Merkel, Germany’s second-longest-serving chancellor since World War II, will step down after this Sunday’s general election. The state premier of North Rhine-Westphalia, Armin Laschet, is tapped to succeed her as chancellor if the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) draws enough votes.
The CDU’s main rivals are the Social Democratic Party, led by Vice Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and the Greens, whose chief candidate is Annalena Baerbock, the party’s co-leader.
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