Putin Orders FSB to Vet Ships Entering Russia Ports After Blasts
Starting July 21, the entry of vessels coming from foreign sea terminals is only possible with permission from a port captain, as agreed upon with the Federal Security Service, or FSB, according to a presidential decree published on Monday. The document was signed in accordance with Russia's martial-law regulation.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
CNN
33 minutes ago
- CNN
Haiti sends troops to Mexico for training as gang violence rages on
Haiti has sent 150 soldiers to train in Mexico as the Caribbean country grapples with rampant gang violence. The troops departed Port-au-Prince on Thursday and will spend the next three months on a training course in Mexico. A total of 700 Haitian soldiers will ultimately take part in the program. Haitian Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé said the initiative is part of a broader roadmap focused on restoring security, revitalizing public institutions and setting up elections. 'It illustrates the government's firm determination to restore republican order, reinstate state authority throughout the country, and ensure the protection of every citizen,' a statement from the government read. Mexico's security forces have had extensive experience battling criminal groups, particularly international drug cartels, though those efforts have failed to significantly reduce violence and homicide rates remain at near record levels. CNN has reached out to Mexico's government for more information on how it would train Haitian troops. In Haiti, gang attacks have left thousands dead and wounded in recent years. Over 80% of the capital city Port-au-Prince has been estimated to be under gang control, and nearly 1.3 million people nationwide are internally displaced because of the violence, the UN says. Haiti has repeatedly sought international help to restore security, to little effect. Last year, it welcomed hundreds of Kenyan police officers from a multinational security support mission (MSS) funded largely by the United States. At least two of the Kenyan officers have been killed and the violence has not abated. Since the MSS arrived, gangs have spread increasingly into rural areas, seizing swathes of territory in the agriculturally critical Artibonite region. Last week, armed attacks in the area uprooted an additional 15,000 people, the UN says.
CNN
34 minutes ago
- CNN
Haiti sends troops to Mexico for training as gang violence rages on
Haiti has sent 150 soldiers to train in Mexico as the Caribbean country grapples with rampant gang violence. The troops departed Port-au-Prince on Thursday and will spend the next three months on a training course in Mexico. A total of 700 Haitian soldiers will ultimately take part in the program. Haitian Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé said the initiative is part of a broader roadmap focused on restoring security, revitalizing public institutions and setting up elections. 'It illustrates the government's firm determination to restore republican order, reinstate state authority throughout the country, and ensure the protection of every citizen,' a statement from the government read. Mexico's security forces have had extensive experience battling criminal groups, particularly international drug cartels, though those efforts have failed to significantly reduce violence and homicide rates remain at near record levels. CNN has reached out to Mexico's government for more information on how it would train Haitian troops. In Haiti, gang attacks have left thousands dead and wounded in recent years. Over 80% of the capital city Port-au-Prince has been estimated to be under gang control, and nearly 1.3 million people nationwide are internally displaced because of the violence, the UN says. Haiti has repeatedly sought international help to restore security, to little effect. Last year, it welcomed hundreds of Kenyan police officers from a multinational security support mission (MSS) funded largely by the United States. At least two of the Kenyan officers have been killed and the violence has not abated. Since the MSS arrived, gangs have spread increasingly into rural areas, seizing swathes of territory in the agriculturally critical Artibonite region. Last week, armed attacks in the area uprooted an additional 15,000 people, the UN says.
New York Times
36 minutes ago
- New York Times
New Reports on Russian Interference Don't Show What Trump Says They Do
The Trump administration in recent weeks has released a series of reports intended to undermine the conclusion reached by intelligence agencies before President Trump's first term that Russia had favored his candidacy in 2016 and sought to improve his chances of winning. That assessment, an unclassified version of which was made public in January 2017, has long infuriated Mr. Trump. In disclosing the reports, he and his team are proclaiming that President Barack Obama and his team torqued the intelligence analysis process to deliberately discredit Mr. Trump's election. The administration has coupled that case with overheated and attention-grabbing claims. Mr. Trump has accused Mr. Obama of treason, and his top officials have made criminal referrals about national security officials under Mr. Obama — all as the administration is trying to distract supporters who are angry about its broken promise to release the Jeffrey Epstein files. Still, even if the administration's use of the reports is wildly overstated, some of the information has not been made public before. It provides some messy details about how the intelligence community assessment was hurriedly produced during Mr. Obama's final months in office. The assessment said that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had ordered a multifaceted information operation targeting the U.S. presidential election, including by hacking and releasing Democratic emails and by seeding social media with messages promoting Mr. Trump and denigrating his rival, Hillary Clinton. The assessment also attributed three motivations to Mr. Putin. Two have not been seriously challenged: He wanted to undermine public faith in democracy and to damage Mrs. Clinton, who until election night was widely seen as the next U.S. president. But Mr. Trump and his allies have long chafed at the third asserted goal — that Russia also hoped to help him win. Their case seeking to undermine the assessment has focused on the unusually rushed and tightly controlled process to complete the document, in which senior leaders like John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. director, and James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director, played a more direct role than would is typical. And their criticism has focused on two main elements. One is the role played by the so-called Steele dossier. The dossier, a compendium of later-discredited claims about Trump-Russia ties compiled by a former British spy, was part of a Democratic-funded political opposition research effort. The other is how the intelligence agencies used information from a well-placed U.S. mole in the Kremlin, whom the C.I.A. later spirited out of Russia. The Dossier The government had already warned the public before the 2016 election that Russia was behind the hacking and dumping of Democratic emails. In early December 2016, after Mr. Trump's surprise victory, Mr. Obama directed the intelligence community to produce a comprehensive analysis of Russia's election meddling, drawing on all available sources of information. The terms of that mandate appear to have led the top officials overseeing the process to include material that might otherwise have been excluded. The Steele dossier is an example. It had been known that the F.B.I. thought the dossier should be used because the standard was to draw on all available sources, while C.I.A. analysts objected because the sourcing for the claims was then unknown. Ultimately, agency leaders negotiated a compromise and put a summary of it in an annex appended to the assessment. Mr. Brennan has publicly said the Steele dossier material was not incorporated or used in the assessment itself because of the C.I.A.'s concerns. In 2017, he told Congress that the dossier 'was not in any way used as a basis for the intelligence community assessment that was done.' The newly disclosed material complicates that narrative. For one, it showed that Mr. Brennan internally defended appending a summary of the dossier to the assessment after C.I.A. analysts resisted the compromise, too. For another, the material has revealed that the classified version of the assessment alerted readers to the existence of the annex. It did so in a fourth bullet point under the judgment that Mr. Putin aspired to help Mr. Trump's chances of winning. 'For additional reporting on Russian plans and intentions, please see Annex A: Additional Reporting from an F.B.I. Source on Russian Influence Efforts,' the bullet point said. Mr. Trump's allies have argued that this sentence means the information from the Steele dossier was incorporated into the assessment itself. 'Counting On' Mr. Obama's mandate to take account of all available information also led the C.I.A. to draw upon some raw intelligence that it might otherwise not have seen fit to publish, or disseminate for analysts to use. The newly disclosed material shows that after Mr. Obama's direction, Mr. Brennan ordered a 'full review,' including the publication of any relevant intelligence that had been collected before the election but not disseminated. The C.I.A. then published 15 additional reports containing raw intelligence it had previously gathered. Three became support for the assessment's judgment that Mr. Putin's motives included wanting to bolster Mr. Trump's chances of winning the election. C.I.A. officials had previously held back each of those three, according to a newly declassified 2020 report by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee, because of tradecraft concerns about the information within them. It said the assessment did not flag those worries. The most important of them was something the U.S. mole in the Kremlin had said: that Mr. Putin made public the hacked Democratic emails after deciding that Mr. Trump, 'whose victory Putin was counting on, most likely would not be able to pull off a convincing victory.' The 2020 House committee report said the statement had originally not been disseminated because analysts were not sure what the mole had meant or who specifically the mole had heard that from. The report criticized the assessment for interpreting that phrase to mean Mr. Putin hoped Mr. Trump would win, without flagging that its reading was disputed. Separately, a review of the procedures and analytic tradecraft that went into the assessment, commissioned by John Ratcliffe, Mr. Trump's current C.I.A. director, argued that the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. should not have put the judgment that Mr. Putin was trying to help Mr. Trump at 'high confidence' when only one source explicitly and directly backed that finding. But the review did not challenge the judgment itself as the best reading of the available evidence, instead praising the National Security Agency's view that it merited 'moderate confidence.' And the review acknowledged that analysts might infer support for the judgment from other evidence, including the public behavior of senior Russian officials and state-controlled media — and logic. 'Most analysts judged that denigrating Clinton equaled supporting Trump; they reasoned that in a two-person race the trade-off was zero-sum,' it said. 'This logic train was plausible and sensible, but was an inference rather than fact sourced to multiple reporting streams.' Contrary Findings The reports released by the Trump team are limited to evaluating the use of intelligence that was available in December 2016, and do not address subsequent developments. That includes Mr. Putin's statement at a news conference with Mr. Trump in Helsinki, Finland, in 2018, in which he said through a translator that he had indeed wanted Mr. Trump to win the election 'because he talked about bringing the U.S.-Russia relationship back to normal.' Others who have had access to the previously classified information and files from that period have reached different conclusions. John Durham, a special counsel appointed in Mr. Trump's first term who hunted for a basis to fault the actions of law enforcement and intelligence officials early in that investigation, already scrutinized the drafting of the 2017 intelligence assessment and did not criticize anything about it in his final report. And in a five-volume 2020 report, the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee — led by then-Senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican who is now Mr. Trump's secretary of state and national security adviser — reached its own conclusion that Russia's motivations had included aspiring to improve Mr. Trump's chances of winning. Indeed, citing one aspect of the interference — the social media operation by a Russian entity known as the IRA — the Senate report suggested that the 2017 intelligence assessment's judgment was, if anything, understated. 'However, where the intelligence community assessed that the Russian government 'aspired to help President-elect Trump's election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him,' the committee found that IRA social media activity was overtly and almost invariably supportive of then-candidate Trump, and to the detriment of Secretary Clinton's campaign,' the Senate report said. Overstated Claims The finely tuned distinctions and marginal questions raised by the newly available information in the documents sharply contrasts with the overstated and sometimes sensationalized claims Trump administration officials keep making about them. This month, when Mr. Ratcliffe rolled out his review, he also blamed the assessment for establishing a narrative that the Trump campaign may have colluded with Russia, leading to the inquiry led by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel. 'They stamped it as Russian collusion and then classified it so nobody could see it,' Mr. Ratcliffe told The New York Post. 'This led to Mueller. It put the seal of approval of the intelligence community that Russia was helping Trump and that the Steele dossier was the scandal of our lifetime.' In reality, the Mueller investigation grew out of an F.B.I. investigation that began in July 2016, five months before the assessment, and its basis was a lead from the Australian government, not the Steele dossier. Mr. Ratcliffe also made a criminal referral of Mr. Brennan that accuses him of lying to Congress, leading the Justice Department to open an investigation. Last week, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, released an 11-page timeline and some underlying documents that misleadingly conflated different types of hacking. In a Fox News appearance, she cited the newly declassified existence of 2016 intelligence reports assessing that Moscow was not trying to hack into vote-tallying machines as somehow undermining the fact that Russia hacked and released Democratic emails to affect the election. Ms. Gabbard also said that the materials used for her timeline were proof of a 'treasonous conspiracy' by Mr. Obama and his national security team, and that she, too, was making a criminal referral. Mr. Trump reacted gleefully, reposting materials on social media based on her timeline and remarks, including a fake video of Mr. Obama being led off to prison. On Tuesday, Mr. Trump said, 'Whether it's right or wrong, it's time to go after people. Obama's been caught directly.' The next day, it came to light that Attorney General Pam Bondi had told Mr. Trump in May that his own name appeared in the Epstein files. Hours later, Ms. Bondi announced the creation of a 'strike force' to assess the information provided by Ms. Gabbard.
