Latest news with #Western-funded
News18
2 days ago
- Politics
- News18
Australian Reporter Shot By Rubber Bullet While Covering Los Angeles Protests
Last Updated: Nine News, in a statement, said that both Lauren Tomasi and her camera operator are safe and will continue their essential work covering these events. An Australian Nine News reporter, Lauren Tomasi, was hit by a rubber bullet while covering Sunday's Los Angeles riots. She was struck in the leg, and the moment was captured on camera. A police officer is seen on video footage aiming at Lauren Tomasi and her camera operator before shooting. Tomasi can be heard screaming in pain, clutching her calf, as a bystander angrily shouts, 'You just shot the f—— reporter!" Australian journalist shot by U.S. police—caught on live camera. Yet, the West DS funded propaganda dares to lecture India on press freedom, citing biased, Western-funded 'indexes." — Megh Updates 🚨™ (@MeghUpdates) June 9, 2025 Despite being struck by the rubber bullet, Tomasi quickly reassured a bystander, saying, 'I'm good," as she and her cameraman moved to safety. Although Lauren Tomasi hasn't issued a formal statement about the incident, she did post an update on the ongoing protests in Los Angeles. '8 pm. Dozens of police have just moved in. Another attempt to move people on. Flash bang grenades – then fireworks – going off," she said on X. Meanwhile, Nine News, in a statement, said that both Lauren Tomasi and her camera operator are safe and will continue their essential work covering these events. 'This incident serves as a stark reminder of the inherent dangers journalists can face while reporting from the frontlines of protests, underscoring the importance of their role in providing vital information," the network said on Monday, according to a report by The Guardian. The LAPD declared the entire Downtown Los Angeles area an 'unlawful assembly." 'You are to leave the Downtown area immediately," police said in a post on X. Later, Trump ordered the immediate arrest of protestors wearing masks, as security force officials patrolled the streets on horseback and guarded federal facilities in riot gear. The declaration followed two days of clashes, where federal agents used flash-bang grenades and tear gas against crowds protesting the arrest of dozens of migrants in a city with a sizable Latino population. First Published: June 09, 2025, 14:30 IST
India Gazette
3 days ago
- Politics
- India Gazette
Russians find new biggest enemy to replace US survey
America has lost the top spot in the list for the first time in 13 years, according to a poll Russians do not consider the US "the most unfriendly country" anymore, and the title now goes to Germany, according to a survey by the Levada Center, a Western-funded organization which has been designated as a "foreign agent" in Russia. The US has lost the top spot for the first time in 13 years, dropping to fourth place in the poll, which was published on Thursday. Only 40% of those surveyed mentioned the US among Russia's primary enemies, with the number dropping by 36% compared to last year, it said. Attitudes towards America shifted with the return of US President Donald Trump. Since his inauguration, the White House has been making efforts to broker a diplomatic solution to the Ukraine conflict, the pollster noted. According to the study, Germany is now in first place, with 56% of respondents describing it as an "unfriendly country" towards Russia, followed by the UK at 49% and Ukraine at 43%. Before the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in February 2022, only 16% of the Russians considered Berlin an enemy, the Levada Center's data suggests. German chancellor Friedrich Merz, who assumed office in early May, has intensified aggressive rhetoric towards Russia, while also making steps to boost military aid provided to Kiev by Berlin during the conflict with Moscow. Last month, Merz said that Ukraine would be allowed to use Western-supplied weapons against Russia without range limitations. He claimed that would be "possible" to provide Kiev with German Taurus missiles, which have a range of over 500 kilometers and are capable of reaching targets deep within Russian territory, including Moscow. The new chancellor also pledged to assist the government of Vladimir Zelensky with the production of long-range weapons inside Ukraine. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov reacted to the statements by Merz by stressing that Berlin's "direct involvement in the war is now obvious." "Germany is sliding down the same slippery slope it already followed a couple of times in the last century - down toward its own collapse," Lavrov said, referring to the defeats suffered by the country in the First and Second World Wars. READ MORE: NATO to limit Ukraine discussions to avoid provoking Trump Reuters The Levada Center also asked the respondents about the countries they consider Russia's "closest friends." Belarus (80%), China (64%), Kazakhstan (36%), India (32%) and North Korea (30%) were the top five. (
IOL News
06-05-2025
- Politics
- IOL News
South Africa's moral leadership on Palestine must not be betrayed
Amidst a national crisis, South Africa stands firm in its moral leadership on Palestine. This article critiques calls for rapprochement with Israel, arguing that abandoning this stance would betray the principles of justice and solidarity that define our history, argues the writer. Image: UN Photo/ICJ-CIJ/Frank van Beek Imraan Buccus South Africa is in deep crisis. The scale of unemployment, the collapse of public services, the precipitous decline of major cities, and pervasive corruption have left many people disillusioned. The ANC, once the bearer of our democratic hopes, has squandered much of its legitimacy. It would be naïve to deny these failures. But amid this bleak domestic reality, there is one area where South Africa has stood firm and offered rare global moral leadership: its unwavering support for the Palestinian people. That principled stance, culminating in the genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, has resonated across the globe and reminded many of what ethical internationalism can look like in an age of cynicism. Why Normalising Ties with Israel Is Morally Indefensible It is precisely because of this moral clarity that William Gumede's recent call in the Sunday Times for rapprochement with Israel is so alarming. In his piece, Gumede argues that the Government of National Unity should reinstate ties with Israel, drop its genocide application at the ICJ, and learn from countries like India and China that have maintained economic relations with Israel despite ongoing atrocities. But this position is morally indefensible. At a time when the Israeli state is executing a campaign of mass slaughter in Gaza — described as genocide not just by South Africa but by leading legal scholars, UN experts, and global human rights organisations — to advocate normalisation is to capitulate to power over principle. The Hidden Networks Behind the Call for Rapprochement Gumede couches his argument in the language of pragmatism. He invokes trade, technology, and economic growth. But there are moments in history when pragmatism, stripped of principle, becomes complicity. The brutal reality unfolding in Gaza — the killing of over 50,000 people, the use of starvation as a weapon, the targeted bombing of hospitals and schools — is not a sideshow to be politely ignored while we talk commerce. It is the central question of our moral standing in the world. For South Africa, a country whose freedom was won with the solidarity of the world's peoples, to turn its back on another people facing annihilation would be a betrayal of our history and of the very idea of justice. Gumede's article fails to disclose his deep entanglement in Western-funded networks that are aggressively hostile to South Africa's stance on Palestine. His NGO, the Democracy Works Foundation, has received substantial support from actors including the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Westminster Foundation for Democracy (WFD), and the International Republican Institute (IRI). USAID and the IRI are part of a wider ecosystem of 'democracy promotion' that drives the foreign policy objectives of the US. Exporting Democracy — or Engineering Regime Change? For decades the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was one of the central institutions in this ecosystem. USAID, operating under the guidance of the U.S. State Department, allocated billions annually to advance what it called development and democratic governance. But it did so in ways that reinforced U.S. economic and geopolitical interests. In November 2023, Democracy Works Foundation (DWF) was awarded a $4.5 million cooperative agreement by the US Mission to South Africa. This funding directly tied the DWF to a foreign government with a long record of shielding Israel from international accountability. Of course, Donald Trump's presidency took an axe to USAID, as part of a broader shift in US foreign policy away from multilateralism and soft power diplomacy toward a more openly coercive and transactional posture. However, this retreat from traditional 'democracy promotion' strategies does not fundamentally alter the ideological infrastructure that organisations like Democracy Works Foundation are part of. In fact, in the context of declining funding, there is now a strong incentive for organisations like DWF to show their commitment to US foreign policy in order to compete for a shrinking funding pool. The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), created in 1983 by the US Congress, is another key player. It was designed to take over many of the political functions once carried out by the CIA, under the more acceptable banner of civil society support. As the NED's first president Allen Weinstein openly acknowledged, "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA." The NED operates through four core institutes: the International Republican Institute (IRI), the National Democratic Institute (NDI), the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE), and the Solidarity Center. It has funded projects across the world that align with U.S. strategic interests. While it promotes itself as an NGO, the NED is funded and supervised by the US Congress and plays a strategic role in US foreign policy. As leading academics have repeatedly shown, the NED has played a significant role in many US-backed coups and attempted coups against elected governments around the world. Among the NED's grantees, the International Republican Institute (the IRI) has played a particularly prominent role. Founded in 1983 and closely linked to the US Republican Party, the IRI has an extensive history of interventionist programming under the banner of "party development" and "democratic reform." It has supported regime change efforts in Haiti, Venezuela, and Honduras — all countries where left-wing governments or movements challenged US power. In South Africa, the Democracy Works Foundation has partnered with the IRI to build the capacity of political parties across Southern Africa. These initiatives may seem innocuous, but they must be read against the backdrop of the IRI's ideological commitments and political history. An organisation like the IRI does not give money for projects that it does not deem to be ideologically aligned to its core mission. When an NGO long embedded in these kinds of structures begins calling for rapprochement with a state accused of genocide, it would be naïve in the extreme to think that it is not acting as a part of a broader ecosystem of Western imperial power. It is a real political alignment that should be a matter of public concern.
Russia Today
05-05-2025
- Russia Today
Ex-Bellingcat child porn researcher commits suicide after conviction for abusing own child
A former Bellingcat operative, known under the alias Daniel Romein, has allegedly taken his life after being sentenced to prison for sexually abusing his own daughter. Romein has been involved in the investigation of the MH17 crash by the Western-funded 'open-source intelligence' group, as well as in the Stop Child Abuse initiative, dedicated to geolocating explicit materials involving minors. The bombshell revelation was first made by independent Dutch journalist Eric Van De Beek last month, with the affair further explored in a piece released by the Grayzone last Friday. Van De Beek denied that Romein died from a 'cardiac arrest' in December 2022, stating a close friend confirmed the Bellingcat operative took his own life. The child porn researcher, who worked for Bellingcat between 2014 and late 2019, was sentenced to 36 months in prison earlier that year for prolonged sexual abuse of his daughter, the journalist claimed, citing an anonymized court case on the matter. The case was released by Dutch authorities only in March this year after repeated inquiries by independent media, Van De Beek noted. The case details the abuse the daughter of the defendant experienced roughly between October 2011 and October 2016, when she was six to 10 years old. The material offers an extremely graphic depiction of the relationship between the father and his underage daughter, which involved oral sex, genital rubbing, and other sexualized behavior. The affair was exposed years later when the defendant's daughter disclosed it to her mother and stepfather. The court's materials quote a lackluster letter of apology sent by the defendant to his daughter when the affair became public, in which he appeared to blame her. The case also reveals the defendant was convicted of possession of child pornography 'over 15 years' prior. Inquired by the Grayzone, Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins denied that Romein's firing in December 2019 was related to his pedophilic endeavors. However, the group's founder 'tacitly acknowledged' the researcher was the target of the sexual abuse allegations. 'It is not clear whether the [court] judgment is about Mr. Romein, as it is anonymized,' he told the outlet in a mailed statement. In August 2021, Romein was stripped of his European Press Prize, awarded for his work on the Stop Child Abuse project. At the time, the Netherlands-based non-profit cited 'unidentified substantiated complaints' from different individuals as the reason for its decision. When asked by Grayzone if the complaints were related to sexual abuse, Higgins stated they were due to the researcher's 'unacceptable online behavior.' Despite advertising itself as an investigative group specializing in fact-checking and open-source intelligence, Bellingcat has been receiving state funding from multiple Western states. This has raised questions about its credibility, with Moscow, for instance, having squarely accused it of working closely with Western intelligence services to 'put pressure on either [Russia] or individuals and entities.'
Yahoo
12-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Former Georgia President Mikheil Saakashvili imprisoned for 9 years on embezzlement charges
March 12 (UPI) -- A court in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, on Wednesday sentenced the country's former president, Mikheil Saakashvili, to nine years in prison after being convicted of embezzling millions of dollars of public funds for his own use. The prison term imposed by Tbilisi City Court Judge Badri Kochlamazashvili will run concurrently with a six-year sentence Saakashvili began serving in 2021 for abuse of power. As the sentence was read out protests erupted among the supporters of the 57-year-old Saakashvili, who served two straight terms as president after coming to power in the so-called Rose Revolution more than two decades ago, alleging it was politically motivated and accusing the judge of being a puppet of the administration of the authoritarian Georgia Dream party. Special State Guarding Service head, Temur Janashia, who was jointly charged with Saakashvili with misappropriating $3.2 million of public money, was fined $106,000 at the same hearing for a lesser offense of abuse of power. Both men denied the charges. The reformist Saakashvili, noted for standing up to Russia, anti-corruption policies, including firing the entire police force, slashing taxes and growing the economy, was arrested during a clandestine visit to Georgia ahead of elections in 2021 eight years after he left the country under a cloud following violent crackdowns on public protests, scandals and allegations of political violence. Saakashvili is fighting additional ongoing prosecutions, including a charge alleging he crossed the border into Georgia illegally. He returned despite a threat of prison saying he had to come back to "save the country" by helping the opposition United National Movement he founded oust the Georgian Dream party, following 2020 elections UNM claimed were stolen. European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, refuted Saakashvili's claims of political persecution when it looked at his case last year, backing authorities' handling of the matter and saying it was line with legal standards in Europe. The populist Georgia Dream party has veered sharply to the right in recent year and turned its back on Europe, with which it had been pursuing closer ties, pivoting toward Russia in the wake of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The European Union suspended a bid by Georgia to join the 27-member country bloc in July due to concerns over a deteriorating human rights situation in the country and a controversial law forcing NGOs and media operating in Georgia that were wholly or partly Western-funded to register as foreign agents.
