On February 10, a district military court in Penza handed down sentences of 6 to 18 years in prison or penal colonies to seven young men from the Russian cities of Penza and St. Petersburg. The draconian sentences were issued following a blatant state frame-up, in which police and officers of the FSB (the Russian equivalent of the FBI) with ties to the far right systematically tortured the accused.

The court found the seven men, aged 23 to 34, who were active in left-wing, anarchist and anti-fascist circles, guilty of having founded a terror organization, the “Network” (“Set”), as well as illegal weapon trafficking. The prosecution alleged that the “Network” had planned to unite Russian anarchists into “militant groups which aimed to violently overthrow the constitutional order” and to conquer power by force through attacks on state institutions.

The defendants were arrested in late 2017 and early 2018. Almost all initially signed confessions but later retracted them, claiming that they had been signed under torture and pressure by the FSB. They also reported that explosives and weapons were planted as evidence in their apartments. Their testimony about the torture and planted evidence was ignored by the court, and the confessions extracted through beatings and electro shocks were the main basis for their conviction. The court also relied on several anonymous witnesses.

The online platform Media Zona published parts of the testimony of Dmitry Pchelintsev, in May 2019, who was accused of having co-founded the “Network.” He described having been interrogated for days under torture, including electro shocks and severe beatings, without being able to speak to a lawyer. The officers also threatened to murder his wife. The Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation has repeatedly refused to investigate the officers involved in the torture.

Pchelintsev recalled a conversation with one of the FSB investigators, Valery Tokarev, who said, “Look Dmitry, you started messing with the state, you opposed the state. We don’t like that and you will simply be ground into powder.” When Pchelintsev asked, “But what information is there, anyway, that I’m some kind of threat to society?” Tokarev responded that the reason was that they were convinced that he would join a revolution if it broke out.

According to a report by the liberal Novaya Gazeta, another defendant, Ilya Shakursky, had been approached by a local neo-Nazi with ties to the prosecution on the popular social media network Vkontakte a year before his arrest. Shakursky recalled that a certain “Vlad Dobrovolsky” had reached out to him on Vkontakte in the fall of 2016 and gave him “important information about a planned attack by neo-Nazis on an anti-fascist event. He said he gave me this information because he was personally offended by the Nazis in Penza. He also told me that some neo-Nazis have close ties to the department for the fight against extremism [of the Interior Ministry] which, in turn, do not hinder the organization of events by the neo-Nazis.”

Shakursky said, “He later told me that an extremist neo-Nazi organization is active in Siberia which aims to fight for the autonomy of Siberia. As a convinced anti-fascist, I considered it my duty to learn more about this organization in order to expose them through articles for the media. … I met Vlad only a few times despite his constant requests for meetings. …At our last meeting in the summer of 2017 he started to talk to me about his plans for radical action and that he wanted to make explosives. I considered him a crazy fanatic and stopped talking to him and ignored his calls.”

Dobrovolsky was later identified as Vlad Gres’ko, a student active in the local neo-Nazi scene. According to the Novaya Gazeta, Gres’ko and Tokarev, the same prosecutor who also tortured and threatened Pchelintsev, are members of the same sports club in Penza. Recordings of the conversations with “Vlad” made by Shakursky were confiscated by the FSB during their raid on his house and the prosecution and the court rejected making them available to the defense at trial.

Shakursky also told the Novaya Gazeta that he recognized a man in the detention center (SIZO), who had tried to provoke a fistfight with him on the streets after one of the meetings with “Vlad.” At the detention center, the man spoke to an investigation officer from the FSB, telling him that he wanted to “shoot the curs [shavka, a term used by Nazis for anti-fascists].” The same investigation officer tortured Pchelintsev and Shakursky and threatened the latter with rape.

So blatant was the state frame-up of these youth that even the business newspaper Vedomosti felt compelled to contrast it to the lack of any kind of prosecution of the far-right National Liberation Movement (NOD), which has ties to Evgeny Manyurov, who attacked the FSB’s headquarters last December, gunning down several people.

The “Network” case illustrates the extensive ties of the Russian state and political establishment to the violent far-right. Russian police are known to collaborate with far-right vigilante groups in hunting down immigrants and leading political parties such as the Stalinist Communist Party and to maintain ties to formally banned far-right organizations like the Movement against Illegal Migration. The Kremlin also cultivates ties to the far-right on an international level, including the Front National in France.

The verdict has prompted an outpouring of protest. On February 12, an open letter was published on the website scientific.ru, denouncing the case as “fabricated” and an “act of terror” against Russian citizens. As of this writing, the letter, which calls for the immediate revocation of the sentence, has been signed by over 2,700 academics and science journalists. On Monday, February 17, 13 independent book stores in nine cities stopped operation for a day in protest against the verdict.

Right-wing liberal opposition politician Alexei Navalny also denounced the sentence.

Navalny himself, however, has close ties to fascist forces in Russia. The Pabloite Russian Socialist Movement (RSM) has maintained complete silence on the case.

The “Network” case is a blatant state frame-up which is meant to send a message that any anti-capitalist and revolutionary movement will be met with the full force of the state. The sentencing of these youth takes place as the Russian government has robbed 800,000 people of their pensions on the basis of a pension reform that has been opposed by 90 percent of the population. Social inequality is at a record high, and real incomes have declined for five years in a row, with one in eight Russians now officially living on less than $150 a month.

The only official opposition to the Putin government currently comes from the right: the liberal opposition, led by Navalny, which is closely aligned with US imperialism, and its pseudo-left hangers-on. While Navalny has recently tried to tap in into the massive social discontent—and is massively promoted by the Western bourgeois press and liberal media in Russia—public opinion polls show that just a little over 2 percent of the population have confidence in him.

What the oligarchy as a whole fear above all is that the international reemergence of the class struggle will sooner rather than later spread to Russia through mass social protests and strikes outside the control of all the established political parties.

It is revealing that the Western bourgeois press, which is always eager to denounce the “authoritarian regime” in Russia when it targets its right-wing opponents in the oligarchy and upper middle class, has barely commented on the state frame-up of these left-wing youth. The New York Times only published a brief report by the Associated Press. There were almost no reports in the German media.

Underlying this silence is the fact that the same class and political dynamics that are behind the frame-up of these left-wing youth in Russia are also on stark display in the imperialist countries. The German state, in particular, has built and covered up for an extensive network of right-wing extremist terrorists that have targeted immigrants, left-wing political organizations and politicians, while the government and the secret service (Verfassungsschutz) systematically seek to suppress and criminalize any opposition to the far-right from the left.

Analysis over 20 years reveals heavy Anglo-Saxon influence, with French and Danish DNA coming from earlier migrations than the Normans or Vikings.

The Romans, Vikings and Normans may have ruled or invaded the British for hundreds of years, but they left barely a trace on our DNA, the first detailed study of the genetics of British people has revealed.

The analysis shows that the Anglo-Saxons were the only conquering force, around 400-500 AD, to substantially alter the country’s genetic makeup, with most white British people now owing almost 30% of their DNA to the ancestors of modern-day Germans.

People living in southern and central England today typically share about 40% of their DNA with the French, 11% with the Danes and 9% with the Belgians, the study of more than 2,000 people found. The French contribution was not linked to the Norman invasion of 1066, however, but a previously unknown wave of migration to Britain some time after then end of the last Ice Age nearly 10,000 years ago.

Prof Peter Donnelly, director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics at the University of Oxford, who co-led the research, said: “It has long been known that human populations differ genetically, but never before have we been able to observe such exquisite and fascinating detail.”

The study found that people’s ancestral contributions varied considerably across Britain, with people from areas of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland emerging as separate genetic clusters, providing a scientific basis to the idea of regional identity for the first time.

The population of the Orkney Isles was found to be the most genetically distinct, with 25% of DNA coming from Norwegian ancestors who invaded the islands in the 9th century.

The Welsh also showed striking differences to the rest of Britain, and scientists concluded that their DNA most closely resembles that of the earliest hunter-gatherers to have arrived when Britain became habitable again after the Ice Age.

Surprisingly, the study showed no genetic basis for a single “Celtic” group, with people living in Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales and Cornwall being among the most different form each other genetically.

“The Celtic regions one might have expected to be genetically similar, but they’re among the most different in our study,” said Mark Robinson, an archaeologist from the Oxford University Museum of Natural History and a co-author. “It’s stressing their genetic difference, it’s not saying there aren’t cultural similarities.”

The study, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, is the culmination of 20 years of work. Scientists began collecting DNA samples from people in Orkney in 1994 and gradually worked across most of the British Isles.

The participants were all white British, lived in rural areas and had four grandparents all born within 50 miles (80km) of each other. Since a quarter of our genome comes from each of our grandparents, the scientists were effectively obtaining a snapshot of British genetics at at the beginning of the 20th century.

Sir Walter Bodmer, of the University of Oxford, who conceived the study, said: “We’re reaching back in time to before most of the mixing of the population, which would fog history.”

The team also looked at data from 6,209 individuals from 10 European countries to reconstruct the contributions their ancestors made to the genetic makeup of the British.

The analysis shows that despite the momentous historical impact on British civilisation of the Roman, Viking and Norman invasions, none of these events did much to alter the basic biological makeup of people living here. The findings support records suggesting that few high ranking Roman officials settled in Britain and that they and their families remained largely segregated from the local Celts.

The Danish Vikings, who ruled over large swathes of Britain from 865AD, are known to have inter-married with locals, but the latest study shows that the conquering force, while powerful, must have comprised relatively few fighters.

“There were very large numbers of people – hundreds of thousands – in those parts of Britain, so to have a substantial impact on genetics there would have to be very large numbers of them,” said Robinson. “The fact that we don’t see that reflects the numbers rather than the relative allure or lack thereof of Scandinavian men to British women.”

The analysis also settles a long-running dispute about the nature of the Anglo-Saxon takeover of England following the collapse of the Roman empire. The replacement of the Celtic language by Anglo-Saxon and the complete shift towards North-West German farming and pottery styles has led some to suggest that local populations must have retreated to Wales or even been wiped out in a genocide.

“[Our results] suggest that at least 20% of the genetic makeup in this area is from Anglo-Saxon migrants, and that there was mixing,” said Robinson. “It is not genocide or complete disappearance of Britons.”

The authors suggest that DNA analysis should now be regarded as a powerful historical tool, sometimes providing more impartial information than traditional sources.

“Historical records, archeology, linguistics – all of those records tell us about the elites. It’s said that history is written by the winners,” said Donnelly. “Genetics complements that and is very different. It tells us what is happening to the masses… the ordinary folk.”

https://www.filmscoremonthly.com/cds/detail.cfm/CDID/454/Star-Trek-III-The-Search-for-Spock/

When FSM released the long-awaited expanded edition of James Horner’s Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) in 2009, it didn’t take a Vulcan scientist to assume that the score’s companion piece, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984), might also see the light of day. FSM delivers—thanks to the good graces of Paramount Pictures and Capitol Records.

James Horner’s Star Trek III continues his superlative work for the Final Frontier, with emotional developments of the B-theme (the “Enterprise theme”) and Spock’s theme from the earlier film, as well as exotic atmospheres for the all-important Vulcan mysticism that drives the story. The film’s villains, the Klingons, receive a new theme with exciting barbaric instrumentation. From the grand “space opera” setpieces (“Stealing the Enterprise,” “Bird of Prey Decloaks”) to intimate, spiritual moments (“The Mind-Meld,” “Returning to Vulcan”), Horner’s Star Trek III is one of the finest scores in the Star Trek canon.

The Star Trek III soundtrack has been available before but only in a 43-minute LP sequence. FSM’s 2CD set features two programs, both newly mastered from recording engineer Dan Wallin’s first-generation digital film mixes: Disc one features the complete score as intended for the film itself, including such long-desired cues as “Grissom Destroyed,” “A Fighting Chance to Live” (featuring the Enterprise’s self-destruct countdown and immolation in Genesis’s atmosphere) and “Genesis Destroyed.” In addition, previously unreleased film versions of cues such as “Klingons” and “Stealing the Enterprise” make their premiere, with differences that are subtle but noticeable to devoted fans. Disc two features a recreation (in better sound quality) of the familiar LP sequence—complete with Group 87’s pop version of “The Search for Spock.”

The 20-page booklet features liner notes by Jeff Bond and Lukas Kendall and colorful art direction by Joe Sikoryak. Climb the steps of Mount Seleya today!

A reader sent me a link to a YouTube video of Webster Tarpley being interviewed on Russia Today (RT) television on December 29 about the false-flag “attempted terror” attack that occurred on Christmas Day on Delta’s Northwest Airlines Flight 253 from Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport to Detroit. The video is interesting because it shows how Tarpley lies to protect Israel and the Mossad by putting the blame for the attempted bombing on the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which is currently headed by Leon E. Panetta, a man I have met on several occasions when he was my Congressman for the Monterey Bay area of California.

Webster Tarpley spews his usual disinformation when he says that Al Qaida in Yemen is “a creation wholly of the U.S. intelligence agencies.” Who exactly is Tarpley protecting with these lies and who is he really serving?

I happen to know something about Webster Tarpley, having been part of the same four-man panel during Jimmy Walter’s 9-11 Truth Tour in Europe in the summer of 2005. During the tour Tarpley put the blame for 9-11 on a nebulous group that he never actually identified but one would infer was tied to NATO and the CIA. Tarpley, like all the other panelists on the tour, never mentioned any Israeli or Zionist role in 9-11. My speech, on the other hand, focused on the real evidence that 9-11 was an Israeli false-flag terror atrocity designed to start the “War on Terror” and change the face of America. Finally, in Rome, in the presence of journalist Maurizio Blondet and others, I asked Mr. Tarpley why he insisted on blaming nebulous U.S. entities, without providing any evidence, while avoiding the real evidence of Israeli/Mossad involvement in the terror attacks of 9-11?

In the RT video about Al Qaida in Yemen, Mr. Tarpley provides the same faulty logic and avoids any mention of Israeli intelligence, which has carried out large-scale operations in Yemen since 1949.

Here are the relevant quotes from Tarpley on RT television:

“Al Qaida, of course, is functioning, as always, as the CIA Arab-Islamic legion.” (Note the use of affirmative phrases to bolster his lie.)

“Al Qaida in the Arab Peninsula is a creation wholly of the U.S. intelligence agencies.”

[The Christmas bomber Abdul Mutallab] is a “protected patsy”, according to Tarpley, “an asset controlled by U.S. intelligence.”

Webster Tarpley and his wife, the former Leah J. Peltier, live in the Washington, D.C. area. Leah is 17 years younger than Webster and reportedly a high school drop-out who only obtained a college degree in 2009. She has been with Tarpley since his days with the Lyndon LaRouche movement in the early 1990s. Her lack of real estate expertise or education notwithstanding, Leah is the Executive Vice President of Operations at the Washington D.C. office for the privately-owned Cresa Partners LLC, where she has worked only since 2007.

Leah Tarpley works under Gene S. Sachs, a “managing principal” and member of the board of directors of the Boston-based company. Leah is not the only Tarpley working for Mr. Sachs. Chloe Tarpley is also listed as an administrator in his firm. Chloe, who has only worked for Cresa Partners since May of 2008, is Webster Tarpley’s daughter. Her biological father is Joseph Peltier, who said that her mother was a high school drop-out who got involved with Tarpley through the Larouche movement.

It is interesting to note that the Tarpley women work for the preferred agent of one of the world’s largest defense contractors. Mr. Sachs’ biggest client is BAE Systems North America. Sachs has completed more than 275 assignments for BAE in twenty states of the United States in the past five years. BAE Systems is the world’s third largest defense contractor and Britain’s leading aerospace/defense company.

In the company’s own words:

BAE Systems Inc. is the U.S. subsidiary of BAE Systems plc, an international company engaged in the development, delivery and support of advanced defense and aerospace systems in the air, on land, at sea and in space. Headquartered in Rockville, Maryland, BAE Systems, Inc. employs some 45,000 employees in the US, UK, Sweden, Israel and South Africa generating annual sales in excess of $10 billion. BAE Systems Inc. consists of three operating groups that provide support and service solutions for current and future defense, intelligence, and civilian systems; design, develop and manufacture a wide range of electronic systems and subsystems for both military and commercial applications; and design, develop, produce, and provide service support of armored combat vehicles, artillery systems and intelligent munitions.

Sachs has been the preferred real estate provider for BAE Systems NA since 2000 and manages some 18.5 million square feet of property for the sprawling British defense contractor. He is also the Treasurer of CresaPartners in Washington, according to Hoover’s, so with two members of the Tarpley family working in his office, we can see that Mr. Sachs has a significant influence over the income flow for the Tarpley household.

If Mr. Tarpley has any solid evidence that Al Qaida in Yemen is, in fact, “a creation wholly of U.S. intelligence agencies” he should bring this information to the attention of the U.S. government and Leon E. Panetta, the Director of the CIA. Mr. Tarpley should explain who controls Al Qaida in Yemen, which he says is “functioning, as always, as the CIA Arab-Islamic legion.” Pray tell Mr. Tarpley, which part of the CIA is running Al Qaida in Yemen? Is it under the direction of Mr. Panetta or is it a rogue outfit of the agency?

Mr. Tarpley should be asked if the CIA was running Al Qaida in Yemen when the USS Cole was bombed in 2000, an attack that killed 17 sailors and wounded 39 others. Perhaps Mr. Tarpley can explain the logic of why the CIA would attack a U.S. Navy ship in Yemen.

Tarpley mentions that the Christmas bomber Abdul Mutallab flew through Amsterdam but he doesn’t mention the conspicuous fact that security for both Schiphol Airport and Delta Airlines is provided by the Mossad-run company, International Consultants on Targeted Security — the same company that provided passenger screening services at the crucial airports on 9-11.

So who is Webster Tarpley really serving with his disinformation?