Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of sixty-seven. Sunrise is 6:48 AM and sunset 6:42 PM, for 11h 53m 43s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 93.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the six hundred eighty-eighth day.
On this day in 1862, the 29th Wisconsin Infantry musters in: “The 29th Wisconsin Infantry mustered in. It would go on to participate in the battles of Port Gibson, Champion Hill, the Sieges of Vicksburg and Jackson, the Red River Campaign, the siege of Spanish Fort and the capture of Fort Blakely, Alabama.”
Recommended for reading in full — New techniques of Russian propaganda, Rand Paul fails to lessen Russian sanctions, suspected Russian assassin was a military agent, not a ‘tourist,’ the new Federal Reserve chairman sees risks of tariffs, and video of Hindu bagpipers in New Jersey —
Kevin Roose reports Is a New Russian Meddling Tactic Hiding in Plain Sight?:
To an untrained eye, USAReally might look like any other fledgling news organization vying for attention in a crowded media landscape. Its website publishes a steady stream of stories on hot-button political issues like race, immigration and income inequality. It has reader polls, a video section and a daily podcast.
But this is no ordinary media start-up. USAReally is based in Moscow and has received funding from the Federal News Agency, a Russian media conglomerate with ties to the Internet Research Agency, the “troll farm” whose employees were indicted by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, for interfering in the 2016 presidential election.
Caught flat-footed by the influence campaigns of 2016, intelligence agencies and tech companies in the United States have spent months looking for hidden Russian footprints ahead of the midterm elections.
USAReally’s website, which began publishing in May, does not advertise its Russian roots. But in many ways, it is operating in plain sight.
Andrew Desiderio reports Rand Paul’s Push to Lift Some Russia Sanctions Fizzles (“‘It was soundly defeated for obvious reasons,’ Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) told The Daily Beast”):
Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-KY) push to lift U.S. sanctions on Russian lawmakers failed on Wednesday, with his colleagues on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee questioning the motives behind the proposal.
An aide said Paul was the only lawmaker to vote for his amendment, which would scrap U.S. sanctions on members of the Russian Federal Assembly if Moscow agrees to lift its sanctions on American lawmakers. The 20 other senators on the foreign relations panel voted against it. The Daily Beast first reported that Paul would be introducing the amendment.
The Kentucky lawmaker’s push to normalize U.S.-Russia relations comes a month after he traveled to Moscow and met with Russian lawmakers. During that trip, he invited members of Russia’s legislature to visit the U.S. But many of them are subject to U.S. sanctions and are therefore unable to travel to the United States.
(Hard to overstate what a despicable fellow traveler Rand Paul has become. See also Appeasement Isn’t Peace.)
The Committee to Investigate Russia writes Skripal Poison Suspect is GRU Colonel:
Ruslan Boshirov and Alexander Petrov, the two Russian men suspected of poisoning former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in England on March 4th, went on RT earlier this month to claim they were in the fitness industry and tourists in Salisbury on holiday the weekend in question.
In fact, Boshirov is really Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga, a Russian military intelligence (GRU) officer.
Online investigative outlet Bellingcat and The Insider uncovered the truth:
The suspect using the cover identity of “Ruslan Boshirov” is in fact Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga, a highly decorated GRU officer bestowed with Russia’s highest state award, Hero of the Russian Federation. Following Bellingcat’s own identification, multiple sources familiar with the person and/or the investigation have confirmed the suspect’s identity.
This finding eliminates any remaining doubt that the two suspects in the Novichok poisonings were in fact Russian officers operating on a clandestine government mission.
While civilians in Russia can generally own more than one passport, no civilian – or even an intelligence service officer on a personal trip – can cross the state border under a fake identity. The discovery also highlights the extent of the effort – and public diplomacy risk – Russia has taken to protect the identities of the officers. President Putin publicly vouched that “Boshirov” and “Petrov” are civilians. As it is established practice that the awards Hero of the Russian Federation are handed out by the Russian president personally, it is highly likely that Vladimir Putin would have been familiar with the identity of Colonel Chepiga, given that only a handful of officers receive this award each year.
(…)
Bellingcat has contacted confidentially a former Russian military officer of similar rank as Colonel Chepiga, in order to receive a reaction to what we found. The source, speaking on condition of anonymity, expressed surprise that at least one of the operatives engaged in the operation in Salisbury had the rank of colonel. Even more surprising was the suspects’ prior award of the highest military recognition.
In our source’s words, an operation of this sort would have typically required a lower-ranked, “field operative” with a military rank of “no higher than captain.” The source further surmised that to send a highly decorated colonel back to a field job would be highly extraordinary, and would imply that “the job was ordered at the highest level.”
The true identity of his accomplice Alexander Petrov remains unclear, but The Telegraph has established that he was travelling under his real first name and had only changed his surname to an alias.
Counter-terrorism police and the security services are understood to know his real name.
Skripal Suspect Boshirov Identified as GRU Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga (Bellingcat)
Skripal ‘hitman’ unmasked as GRU colonel awarded Russia’s highest military honour by Vladimir Putin
Tory Newmyer writes Trump and his Fed chair present conflicting views on trade:
[Federal Reserve Chairman] Powell — measured to the point of hedging on several key fronts, businesslike and brief in his answers — pointed to a fundamentally strong economy as justifying the central bank’s decision to hike interest rates by a quarter-point for the third time this year while penciling in a fourth for December. Yet he warned of a “rising chorus of concerns from businesses all over the country about disruption of supply chains, materials cost increases,” from the administration’s trade confrontations.“If this, perhaps inadvertently, goes to a place where we have widespread tariffs that remain in place for a long time, a more protectionist world, that’s going to be bad for the United States economy,” Powell said. (Watch the whole news conference here.)
(Emphasis in original.)