position:opposition politician

Venezuela: Guaidó pledges end of Maduro era in militaristic video | World news | The Guardian
▻https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/apr/30/venezuelas-guiado-says-final-phase-of-plan-to-oust-maduro-has-begun
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBkqmklzRzQ

Flanked by soldiers near Caracas airbase, opposition leader promises liberation

A military uprising appears to be under way in Venezuela after the opposition leader, Juan Guaidó, posted a video of himself flanked by soldiers, promising to end the rule of President Nicolás Maduro .

“The moment is now,” Guaidó said in a three-minute speech, apparently filmed just before dawn on Tuesday near La Carlota, the main military airbase in Caracas. “We are going to achieve liberty and democracy for Venezuela.”

Standing beside Guaidó as he spoke was Leopoldo López, an opposition politician who is meant to be under house arrest.

As the video ended, the camera moves to show a few dozen troops lined up, apparently in front of armoured troop carriers.

Photo Tampering throughout History

▻http://tampering.izitru.com/index.html

Though photo manipulation has become more common in the age of digital cameras and image editing software, it actually dates back almost as far as the invention of photography. The pages that follow contain an overview of some of the more notable instances of photo manipulation in history. For recent years, an exhaustive inventory of every photo manipulation would be nearly impossible, so we focus here on the instances that have been most controversial or notorious, or ones that raise the most interesting ethical questions.

http://pth.izitru.com/img/2015_09_00.jpg

Promoting the narrative that anti-government activists were actually puppets being manipulated by the U.S. government to undermine the Russian government, the Russian national television network REN-TV published a photo showing that U.S. ambassador to Russia John Tefft had attended a Moscow rally of these activists. The U.S. Embassy responded that Tefft had actually spent that day relaxing at home, and then mocked REN-TV’s coverage by releasing a series of composites showing Tefft at a variety of other historical events. After the original source photo was revealed to be from an interview Tefft gave in February at the site where Russian opposition politician Boris Nemtsov had been murdered, REN-TV conceded that the version they had published was a fake that they had found on Twitter.

http://pth.izitru.com/img/2015_05_01.jpg

Ultra-orthodox Jewish newspaper Actuali published on its front page a group photo of the new Israeli coalition government ministers, but it modified the photo to remove three women. Two of the women had been standing side-by-side, so the paper filled the noticeable gap by moving in a minister from another region of the photo which had been cropped. Another ultra-Orthodox news source, the website B’Haderai Haredim, also felt the need to hide the women when publishing the photo, but it took the less extreme measure of pixelating their faces.

http://pth.izitru.com/img/2015_05_00.jpg

After the Azerbaijan Ministry of Defense published a photo depicting its soldiers participating in a Victory Day parade in Moscow, online observers quickly pointed out that the image had been modified to hide the fact that Armenian soldiers were positioned immediately behind them in the parade, which was organized alphabetically. In an original version of the photo, the Armenian flag is clearly visible in the background, but this flag has disappeared in the “official” Azerbaijan version. The two countries have long had an adversarial relationship due to a territorial dispute.

http://pth.izitru.com/img/2015_04_01.jpg

While it may not be the most outrageous example of an ultra-Orthodox Jewish publication removing a prominent woman from a photo, the website Kikar HaShabbat’s approach to removing Kim Kardashian deserves some recognition for its amusingly pragmatic simplicity. Before publishing a photo showing Kardashian and rapper Kanye West having lunch with Jerusalem mayor Nir Barkat, the website hid Kardashian by clumsily compositing a dining receipt over that portion of the photo. When asked about the modification, editor Nissim Ben Haim said it was necessary because Kardashian is a “pornographic symbol” who is inconsistent with the values of their site.

#photographie #manipulation #Photoshop

Washington renames Russian embassy street after slain opposition MP - BBC News

▻http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42640239

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/1024/branded_news/A04A/production/_99543014_wisconsin_ave.jpg

Washington DC has renamed the street the Russian embassy sits on after a murdered Russian opposition politician.

The city council voted to rename the street outside Russia’s embassy complex after Boris Nemtsov, who was shot outside the Kremlin in 2015.

A statement from the council said the decision to honour the “slain democracy activist” passed unanimously.

Russian politicians criticised the move, with one MP labelling it a “dirty trick”.

The decision was specifically targeted at “the portion of Wisconsin Avenue in front of the Russian Embassy”, according to the Washington council’s statement.

Russia’s Interfax news agency quoted the leader of the nationalist LDPR party, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, as saying US authorities “specifically want to play dirty tricks in front of the Russian Embassy”.

#toponymie (oui, oui !) #russie #états-unis #mots #noms et vraiment marrant si ce n’était pas aussi affligeant. #guerre_des_noms aussi et comme entre le Japon et la Corée, tant que la « guerre » reste cantonée à une confrontation « intellectuelle », ça va.

#Cambodia: Appeal Court should overturn unfair conviction of land rights defender #TepVanny, say international CSOs

We, the undersigned, call on the Court of Appeal to overturn the unjust conviction of Ms. #Tep_Vanny on charges of intentional violence with aggravating circumstances based on her peaceful activism at a 2013 protest, for which she received a draconian sentence of two years and six months’ imprisonment on 23 February 2017. The Court of Appeal will hear Ms. Tep Vanny’s appeal against conviction tomorrow, 27 July 2017. On 15 August 2017, Ms. Tep Vanny will have spent one year in detention; her imprisonment is a clear attempt to silence one of Cambodia’s most fearless and outspoken defenders of human rights ahead of the national elections in July 2018.
Tomorrow’s appeal is one of three previously dormant years-old cases punitively reactivated against Ms. Tep Vanny. In August 2016 the prosecutor of the Phnom Penh Municipal Court reactivated the long-
dormant charges of intentional violence with aggravating circumstances against Ms. Tep Vanny while she was in pre-trial detention prior to her spurious conviction on other charges for taking part in a “#Black_Monday” protest to call for the release of the “#Freethe5KH” detainees,1 who were being held in arbitrary
pre-trial detention at the time.2 The case under appeal dates back to Ms. Tep Vanny’s participation in a 2013 peaceful protest in front of Prime Minister Hun Sen’s house, during which a group of #Boeung_Kak_Lake activists called for the release of a detained fellow community member. This protest had ended in violence against protesters at the hands of Daun Penh security guards, in which Ms. Tep Vanny herself was injured.
On 23 February 2017, Ms. Tep Vanny was convicted on these charges and sentenced to 30 months in prison and a fine of five million riel (about US$1,250), as well as being ordered to pay compensation totaling nine million riel (about US$2,250) to the plaintiffs, two Daun Penh security guards.
Ms. Tep Vanny’s trial did not comply with international standards for fair trial rights: no credible evidence was presented to justify the charges against her and neither the plaintiffs nor any prosecution witnesses gave live testimony at either of the two hearings; instead only written statements were provided, preventing cross-examination. Community members outside the court faced unprovoked violence from para-police and, following delivery of the verdict, riot police entered the court room and physically restrained a number of defense witnesses.3
The re-opening of these charges appears to be a politically motivated attempt to restrict and punish Ms. Tep Vanny’s work as a land activist and human rights defender, as part of the Cambodian authorities’
ongoing crackdown on dissenting voices. Peaceful assembly and free expression are not crimes, and human rights defenders should not be penalized for peacefully exercising their fundamental freedoms. We call on the Court of Appeal to exercise its independence and rectify the injustice of Ms. Tep Vanny’s flawed trial by overturning her conviction and sentence. We call on the Cambodian authorities to cease their judicial harassment of Ms. Tep Vanny, as well as other Boeung Kak Lake activists, and to release her from prison.

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European Fascists & Neo-Nazis to meet to defend Russian interests :: khpg.org
▻http://khpg.org/index.php?id=1426778817

Leading members of many of Europe’s far-right parties are about to descend on a Russian conference aimed at creating a pan-European movement “that will uphold traditional values” and “lobby Russia’s interests”. According to Kommersant, its organizers hope to find ‘allies in Europe’ among far-right and neo-Nazi politicians who will support Russia’s ‘conflict with Ukraine’ and seek to get sanctions removed.

St. Petersburg opposition politician Boris Vishnevsky notes that this gathering of nationalists and neo-Nazis from all over Europe is taking place in the run-up to the seventieth anniversary of victory over Nazi Germany. This is not the only irony, of course. Over the last year and more Russia has persistently enlisted the aid of fascist and neo-Nazi groups and parties to support its aggression against Ukraine while claiming that it is fighting a ‘fascist regime’ in Ukraine. A considerable number of the former and current leaders or prominent figures in the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk ‘people’s republics’, like Ukrainian Pavel Gubarev, Russian Alexei Milchakov; Alexander Borodai and Alexander Proselkov, and very many others have or had strong ties to far-right or neo-Nazi Russian organizations.

The ‘International Russian Conservative Forum’ in St. Petersburg on March 22 has been organized by the Rodina Party, described by far-right researcher Anton Shekhovtsov as fascist and headed by Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister, Dmitry Rogozin. The Forum’s website begins with a long quote from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s address at the Valdai Club in which the former KGB officer says that “many Euro-Atlantic countries have effectively rejected their roots, including the Christian values forming the basis of western civilization”.

The Forum’s ‘mission’ includes developing “a new concept for humanity’s development as a response to the liberal-trans-national ideology destroying it” and “integrating the possibilities of political and civic conservative organizations of Europe and Russia in conditions of destructive instability and economic sanctions”.

11 parties, some with deputies in the European Parliament, will be represented, many by their leaders. The parties are all far-right, some with neo-Nazi leanings and, as Vishnevsky points out, can all be relied on to support Putin on the international stage. They include Greece’s Golden Dawn party; the National-Democratic Party of Germany [NPD]; Austria’s Freedom Party; the British National Party* ; Italy’s New Force [Forza Nuova) with its leader Roberto Fiore expected; the Party of the Swedes; and others. Kommersant notes that Marine Le Pen from France’s National Front has decided not to go, and believes this is out of fear of damaging her reputation before presidential elections (due in 2017). Certainly a change of heart need not be suspected with Le Pen having come out strongly in support of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and Putin generally, and her party having received a hefty loan from a Russian bank in 2014.

Nemtsov planned to reveal Russian links to Ukraine conflict - Poroshenko | Daily Mail Online
▻http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/reuters/article-2973433/Nemtsov-planned-reveal-Russian-links-Ukraine-conflict--Poroshenko.html

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said on Saturday Russian opposition politician Boris Nemtsov was murdered because he planned to disclose evidence of Russia’s involvement in Ukraine’s separatist conflict.

Poroshenko paid tribute to Nemtsov, who was shot dead late on Friday, and said the fierce critic of President Vladimir Putin had told him a couple of weeks ago that he had proof of Russia’s role in the Ukraine crisis and would reveal it.

“He said he would reveal persuasive evidence of the involvement of Russian armed forces in Ukraine. Someone was very afraid of this ... They killed him,” Poroshenko said in televised comments during a visit to the city of Vinnytsia.

Opposition politician abducted in #Iraq
▻http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/opposition-politician-abducted-iraq

Armed men in military uniform raided the home of a senior Baghdad politician overnight and whisked him and several of his guards away, police said Saturday. “Armed men came last night and detained the head of Baghdad provincial council Riyadh al-Adhadh and four of his guards from his house in Adhamiyah,” a police colonel told AFP. An official in the council said “Adhadh and several of his guards were abducted from his house very late at night” and taken to an unknown location. read more

Italy plans tough new measures against rioters (via @NetLib)
►http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/italy-plans-tough-new-measures-against-rioters/2011/10/18/gIQA8hpouL_story.html

Roberto Maroni said he agreed with opposition politician Antonio Di Pietro, a former magistrate, who suggested reviving a law from the 1970s, when Italy was racked by leftwing protests and urban guerrilla violence that came close to destabilising the state. The law allowed police to use firearms, when necessary, and banned the wearing of helmets or masks during demonstrations. It also provided for preventive detention of demonstrators suspected of planning violence.

#riots #police #Italie #émeutes