December 28, 2018
...That description (click here) still fits parts of this vast and occasionally bleak suburb. But not this tidy, manicured avenue, lined as it is with multimillion-dollar houses – one of which, for me, is the end of a journey that began shortly after the January, 2017, inauguration of U.S. President Donald Trump, when a diplomatic source capped off our lunch in an Eastern European capital with this intriguing comment: “If you want to understand this whole Trump-Russia thing, look into a guy named Boris Birshtein.”
The broad outlines of the man, I discovered, were easy enough to discern: Boris Birshtein was born in 1947 in Soviet-occupied Lithuania. He first gained a measure of fame in the early 1990s, as one of the most powerful businessmen to emerge from the collapse of the USSR. He dabbled – not unlike Mr. Trump – in real estate and entertainment, and he dreamed, as well, of building a hotel in the centre of Moscow. In an era when the former Soviet Union was moving from outright communism to a form of crony capitalism still utterly dependent on political connections, he wielded enormous clout over the fledgling governments of Ukraine, Moldova and Kyrgyzstan; he did so by fashioning himself as a middleman for Western companies, including several in Canada, looking to expand into those newly independent states....
Russia is holding an innocent woman from Belarus as a political prisoner.
I demand the European Union demand the return of Anastasia Vashukevich. She is not a Russian. She is a free woman and does not understand the demands of the Russian government.
This is a woman that is a citizen of a free country and to have her abducted by Russia as some kind of political prisoner is absolutely outrageous. She is innocent of all the charges Russia is placing on her. She is a free woman used to having a great deal of freedom to her actions. She is unable to defend from such accusations. She is innocent. The EU has a responsibility to free her from a Russian abduction.
...Vashukevich, (click here) who has been in a Thai prison since February last year, was given a suspended sentence on Tuesday and ordered to be deported after she pleaded guilty to soliciting and conspiracy along with several co-defendants in a case related to holding a “sex training” seminar.
Vashukevich, also known on social media as Nastya Rybka, earlier claimed to have recordings of Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska talking about interference in the 2016 US election, but never released them....
This is a hot topic and it is completely understandable how a young woman would seek to increase her following on social media by placing highly controversial tapes on her site. She has no way of knowing what is expected of her other than the way she normally lives her life. It is unthinkable Russia would place such value on a simple woman involved with entertainment.
It was not Anastasia's fault that she was enlisted as an escort on a yacht and then was allowed to be in the presence of the men engaging in controversial dialogue. She is an innocent person in this entire mess. The real culprits are those on the yacht that hired a young woman as an escort.
No on should lose sight of the fact it costs money to work. If federal employees are calling out in gradually larger numbers they don’t have money to make it to work; ie: clean clothes and uniforms, lunch, and there is the cost of transportation. In following this failure chain, it doesn’t matter if Congress guarantees their wages if they can’t afford to work. Sooner or later survival of the employees and their families take over.
I hope the Congress is sensitive to those issues.
Do I understand correctly that Right Wing Talk Radio is driving this POLITICAL shutdown of government? When are they going to be held responsible? Ann Coulter should be banned from radio if this is her stunt for ratings.
Freedom of speech does not include assaults against the government. It sounds like Putin is driving her ratings.
