World
‘Trump campaign aides had repeated contacts with Russian intelligence’
Washington: Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald Trumps 2016 presidential campaign and his other associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year prior to the election, officials said.President-elect Trump and then-President Barack Obama were both briefed on details of the extensive communications between suspected Russian operatives and people associated with the Trump campaign and the Trump business, US officials familiar with the matter told CNN.
The communications were intercepted during routine intelligence collection targeting Russian officials and other Russian nationals known to US intelligence, the report said on Wednesday.Among several senior Trump advisers regularly communicating with Russian nationals were then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort and then-adviser Michael Flynn.Adding to US investigators’ concerns were intercepted communications between Russian officials before and after the US elections discussing their belief that they had special access to Trump, said two US law enforcement officials.
The intercepted communications also included other associates of Trump, whom the officials declined to identify. On the Russian side, the contacts also included members of the government outside of the intelligence services, they said. The call logs and intercepted communications were part of a larger trove of information that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was sifting through as part of an investigation on the links between Trump’s associates and the Russian government, as well as the hacking of the Democratic National Committee computers, according to federal law enforcement officials.
Manafort denied that he was in contact with Russians known to US intelligence. “This is absurd,” he said. “I have no idea what this is referring to. I have never knowingly spoken to Russian intelligence officers, and I have never been involved with anything to do with the Russian government or the (Vladimir) Putin administration or any other issues under investigation today,” he said.Manafort, who has held business ties with Russian and Ukrainian individuals, also emphasised that his work for the Yanukovich government in Ukraine should not be interpreted as closeness to the Russians.
The intercepted calls are different from the wiretapped conversations in 2016 between Trump’s former National Security Adviser Michael T. Flynn and Sergey I. Kislyak, Russia’s Ambassador to the US. In those calls, which led to Flynn’s resignation on Monday night, the two men discussed sanctions that the Obama administration imposed on Russia in December.
On Tuesday, top Republican lawmakers said Flynn should be one focus of the investigation, and that he should be called to testify before Congress. Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, said Flynn’s resignation would not stop the committee “from continuing to investigate General Flynn, or any other campaign official who may have had inappropriate and improper contacts with Russian officials prior to the election”.
Shanghai’s rich middle class is leading a wave of online dissent over the strict and prolonged lockdowns imposed in various parts of the country. Chinese internet censorship is struggling as patience is wearing thin in many urban centers, coming up with creative forms of online protests.
Social Media Posts Revealing Lockdown Tension in Shanghai
Drawn-out lockdowns are nothing new in China as authorities insist with the nation’s zero-Covid policy since the start of the pandemic. Currently over This time around, however, metropolitan areas like Shanghai are increasingly difficult to keep quiet, given that its more than 25 million residents have seen weeks of total isolation along with food shortages and many other service interruptions.
Dozens of towns and reportedly over 300 million Chinese citizens have been affected by lockdowns of different severity. As expected, urban netizens have been most outspoken over their difficulties by finding creative ways to get around state censorship and bans placed on topics, news comments and spontaneous campaigns.
Shanghai residents have been using mobile proxies and hijacking seemingly unrelated hashtags to talk about healthcare issues, delivery failures and the overall severity of their situation. The “positive energy” that the Chinese government wants to transmit during the recent prolonged series of lockdowns does not come naturally to those counting food supplies and online censors are working hard to filter words, trending topics and undesired social media sharing.
WeChat groups and message threads are under constant monitoring. Posts questioning the zero-Covid approach have been quickly deleted, including by leading Chinese health experts like Dr. Zhong Nanshan. Video footage is soon censored and protests and investigations are quickly made to disappear.
Where this has not worked, officials have exposed banners with warnings and outright threats like “watch your own mouth or face punishment”, while drones have been patrolling the city skies. Yet, if anything, this has led to further tensions and unspoken confrontation with Shanghai’s educated and affluent middle class.
Creative Online Solutions Harnessing Civic Energy
Announcements by Chinese social media that they would be publishing the IP addresses of users who “spread rumors” have not helped either. Tech industry research has shown that much of Asia’s tech-savvy population has a habit of using mobile proxies and other privacy tools, quickly finding workarounds to browse the internet freely and talk to the world about the hottest topics.
The sheer volume of forbidden posts is already a challenge for the very censorship system, experts explain. Unable to track all trending hashtags, state workers overlook topics that speak about the US, Ukraine or other popular news. Linking human rights elsewhere to their situation, Chinese online dissidents establish their informal channels and “hijack” the conversation to share personal or publicly relevant information about the Covid suppression in their town.
Sarcastic and satirical posts still dominate. Others hope to evade the censors by replacing words from famous poems or the national anthem. One thing is certain – social media, when harnessed with the right creativity, has proven its ability to mount pressure on the government in even some of the most strictly controlled tech environments like China.
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