Russia has held naval maneuvers in the Black Sea as several NATO countries gathered there for ‘Sea Shield 2019’ exercise. Russian military “thanked” the bloc in a tongue-in-cheek fashion for making the drills more life-like.

Vessels of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet have been actively training amid the Romania-led NATO drills, which concluded on Saturday, the fleet’s press service has said.

“The routine combat training is going on amid the ‘Sea Shield 2019’ exercise of the NATO naval force, which has been a good help for the Black Sea Fleet to hone its skills in a real combat situation,” it added.

READ MORE: Russian Navy tracks NATO squadron entering Black Sea (PHOTOS, VIDEO)

The Russian military has also released a bunch of videos, showing the maneuvers. The Marines loaded into and disembarked from the Azov dock landing ship, honing their skills in performing a maritime assault on an unfamiliar shore.

Like the Navy, Russian land units did not sit still. While NATO vessels were active in the Black Sea, Russian crews of Bastion and Bal anti-ship missile launchers were training as well.

Russian aviation was also active, with Tu-160 strategic bombers and Su-27 escort fighters patrolling the Black Sea together.

While the military might have sounded sardonic when it said it was ‘grateful’ to NATO for the training opportunity, the Russian Foreign Ministry was way more serious about the bloc’s buildup in the Black Sea region. Moscow sees NATO’s activities as “unambiguously negative” and will react appropriately, Deputy Foreign Minister Aleksandr Grushko has said.

READ MORE: Provoking Russia or propping up Poroshenko? NATO ridiculed over plans to ‘shield’ Ukrainian ships

“We believe the security in the region should be ensured through the cooperation of the Black Sea nations. All the mechanisms necessary for that are already in place,” he stressed.

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The Russian scare seems to have reached the shores of Ecuador, with lawyers for Ola Bini, a Swedish software developer arrested in Quito over his links to WikiLeaks, saying police erroneously believed he was a Russian citizen.

Bini was apprehended on Thursday afternoon as he was about to board a flight from the Mariscal Sucre International Airport to Japan. Ecuadorian Interior Minister Maria Paula Romo confirmed the identity of the detainee on Friday, stating that the software developer was being held for investigative purposes.

“This person is linked to WikiLeaks, he has visited the Embassy of Ecuador in London on 12 separate occasions of which we have a record,” Romo told a local radio station on Friday. She also said that Bini is believed to be an associate of former foreign minister Ricardo Patino, who was the top diplomat in Rafael Correa’s government. 

Previously, Romo said that a foreign national and two “Russian hackers” are being investigated for interfering with private communications and an attempt to disrupt the government.

However, as the story developed, a number of lapses and violations by the Ecuadorian authorities emerged. On Friday, Bini’s defense attorneys issued an extensive communique on his arrest, accusing police of sidestepping basic procedures in a rush to detain a suspect.

The lawyers revealed that Bini was arrested following a tip-off received by police on April 11 via a crime hotline from a citizen named “Marco.” He told police that the suspect was Russian, a fact that the Ecuadorian police apparently neglected to double check before taking Bini into custody. They say that when police approached Bini, they showed him a warrant issued for a Russian citizen and, after realizing he was not, asked for his passport to issue a new warrant.

The detention of Bini until an order was reissued was a violation of his rights, the lawyers argue, since police had no valid document justifying his arrest. The lawyers say that Bini was not provided with an interpreter, though he does not speak Spanish, nor was he read his rights immediately. Lawyers could not access Bini until 8am the next day. Before that time, Bini did not receive any legal help and was interrogated while still at the airport.

Their statement calls on Ecuador’s ombudsman office and civil organization to oversee Bini’s case taking into account the irregularities that have already happened. Lawyers say that Bini had no intention of ‘fleeing’ Ecuador and the trip to Japan had been planned a month ago.

In addition to the apparent procedural lapses, Patino, Bini’s supposed co-conspirator, claims he has never heard of Bini.

“The interior minister said that a Swede who was arrested yesterday works with me. I have never seen or met him in my life, I have not traveled with him, nor do I know Russian hackers,” he tweeted, adding that the only Russians he knows are President Vladimir Putin, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, and the Russian ambassador.

Bini is known as an open-source advocate who worked for a company specializing in privacy, cryptography and security. His arrest sparked protest on Twitter, with fellow members of the open-source software community calling for his immediate release.

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From the East India Company to the Raj, India was a British colony until the mid-20th century. And despite nostalgic imperialists extolling the virtues of the empire’s rule, it left behind millions of victims.

The 1919 Amritsar massacre, the grim anniversary of which India marked on Saturday, is one of the best-known examples of the atrocities committed by the British during their two-century colonial rule of India. But, numerically, its total of 1,600 victims looks like a small blot among the millions of deaths India suffered during the empire’s prolonged misrule and exploitation.

The famines

From the 18th to the 20th century, various parts of India endured over a dozen devastating famines, which killed tens of millions of people, most of the events exacerbated, if not outright caused, by the colonial administration.

The East India Company (EIC), merchants with their own army who ruled India on behalf of the British crown, were ruthlessly effective in generating exports and profits from the colonized land – ruthlessness being a key part of the efficiency. Exports of Indian produce – rice, tea, wheat, and even, illegally, opium – were a vital boost for the British economy, helping keep food prices low at home and generating income from sales to other nations, like China.

The EIC did not hesitate to decrease the areas for food crops and even destroy food plants to make room for other crops needed for export, including opium poppies. Many scholars agree that in a lot of the cases, famine would have come anyway, considering the poor rainfall and underdeveloped transportation, among other things – but it was made that much worse by the Brits, who exploited agriculture while failing to offset its troubles with proper investment.

The British response to famine was often inaction, at least until their troops were affected, like in Orissa in 1865, where a third of the regional population died before aid was finally sent in. As the Great Famine of 1876-78 struck Madras and Bombay, the British administration thought the free market would sort it out and government interference would only hurt in the long run. It took 5.5 million deaths for the Brits to begin relief work. At the turn of the century, the British Viceroy cut rations (saying famine relief was “philanthropy” and “complacency”), which resulted in another million deaths.

The most recent and infamous is the Bengal Famine of 1943-44, when 1.5 million people starved to death and another 2.1 million are estimated to have died from related causes.

Until recently, the Bengal Famine was attributed to the sheer ineptitude of the British administration, which could not be bothered to divert attention and resources from the war effort. But the 2010 book ‘Churchill’s Secret War’ lays the blame directly at the feet of then-prime minister Winston Churchill and his “racism.” Citing unearthed documents, author Madhusree Mukerjee says Churchill not only refused to divert supplies from British troops, but blocked Canada and the US from delivering aid, and even forbade India from tapping into its own currency reserves to buy food abroad.

Quelling the Sepoy Rebellion

It would be wrong to fail to recognize the brutality of the Indian mutineers who rose up in 1857 – it was the Indians who started the killing, after all, and the victims on the British side numbered in the thousands. It would be equally wrong to fail to acknowledge what drove them to revolt, or how disproportionate in both scale and brutality the British response was.

The rebellion kicked off in May 1857 over what might seem a trifle: the Brits had introduced to the Indian troops (sepoys, as they were called at the time) new breech-loading Enfield rifles, the paper-wrapped cartridges of which had to be bitten off at one end to prepare for firing. Those cartridges, according to a rumor spread among Indian soldiers, were lubricated with pig and cow lard – making oral contact with them anathema to both Muslims and Hindus.

This minute detail, which was never even proven to be true, capped off a mountain of very real grievances between the British Raj and the Indian population. So, when soldiers in Meerut, Bengal refused to take the offending Enfield cartridges and were subsequently sentenced to long prison terms, then freed by their comrades, who shot their British officers and marched on Delhi – the entire thing quickly spiraled from a soldiers’ mutiny into a popular rebellion.

As the rebels sought to restore pre-British Mughal rule, the uprising soon engulfed the north of the country, its first stages marked by massacres of British civilians, soldiers, and loyal Indian troops. Estimates of British deaths range from 6,000 to 40,000, with historical accounts speaking of murders of women and children, rape, and torture.

However, as the Brits got their feet under them, and were reinforced from home, they started to respond in kind. Word of the rebels’ atrocities spread through the British papers, and the soldiers were seen not as conquerors anymore, but as bringers of vengeance for innocent lives.

No response was deemed disproportionate – and an estimated 800,000 Indians died in the quelling and its aftermath. Brits perpetrated massacres as they recaptured Delhi and other cities. Sepoys were bayoneted, tortured, and tied to cannon muzzles to be shot point-blank. But illustrations of that are scarce among those depicting British soldiers as heroic liberators.

After the rebellion, the rule over India was transferred from the EIC to the crown, under what is known as the British Raj – until the partitioning and independence of 1947.

Partitioning of India

The same ruling that brought India independence also resulted in one of, if not the worst instances of mass migration in history, a division of enormous territories along religious lines and a scar on both the land and the collective consciousness of two peoples – as well as over a million deaths and thousands of stories of atrocities and hardship which could have been avoided with better planning on the part of the retreating Brits.

The British government decided to cede power to Indian leadership in 1946, but the initial plan was to keep the country whole – merely designating grouped provinces as majority Muslim and majority Hindu, to accommodate the deepening split between the country’s two major religious groups, represented by the two largest political parties – the Muslim League and the Indian National Congress.

That plan came crashing down when in August communal tensions boiled over into what is now known as the Great Calcutta Killings. The Muslim League staged a Direct Action Day, ostensibly a peaceful protest to demand a separate homeland for Muslims, which spiraled into a massacre of an estimated 4,000 people over the span of days.

The British plan was then altered and accelerated – India would be split, Pakistan would be created, and independence would come several months earlier. The sometimes-voiced trope that the fate of the partition was decided over a single lunch is a bit of an embellishment – but several weeks of planning hardly proved a better time frame.

The partition plan, with the border slashing through the mixed Hindu-Muslim regions of Punjab and Bengal, was presented in June 1947 by the last British viceroy, Louis Mountbatten, who did not see the need to organize an orderly transfer of populations, believing local authorities would sort it out as needed.

What resulted was the uprooting of 15 million people and the deaths of over a million. Let loose by the officially announced religious divide, yesterday’s neighbors began killing each other and taking away each other’s homes and livelihoods, settling old feuds with blood and perpetrating localized ethnic cleansing. Afraid of becoming minorities in what used to be their own land, people fled in both directions across the border, as well as out of the regions altogether. Punjab and Bengal, as well as Sindh, Uttar Pradesh, and Kashmir (a disputed flashpoint to this day) were among the worst affected areas.

Survivors’ accounts, refreshed by the recent 70th anniversary of the partition, tell of torched houses, viciously slaughtered locals, frantic flights in caravans that were attacked and looted, women abducted and raped. Over 5,000 such accounts have been collected by one online resource, complete with a map that shows the mind-boggling scale of the displacement.

British imperialists argue that in the end, India is better off, pointing to the staples of progress colonial rule brought in. But whether or not railroads, education, and cricket were worth two centuries of ruthless economic exploitation, cultural suppression, and millions of lives, is a question few are prepared to ask without flinching.

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US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said he doesn’t think Benjamin Netanyahu’s election vow to annex the West Bank will have a negative impact on a two-state peace plan, despite the removal of a large part of one state.

Asked whether he thought Netanyahu’s promise to officially annex the West Bank – already riddled with settlements constructed by Israel on occupied Palestinian land in violation of international law – would hurt the peace process, Pompeo said, “I don’t.”

“I think that the vision we’ll lay out is going to represent a significant change from the model that’s been used,” he told CNN.

President Donald Trump’s “vision” for the Middle East has already diverged significantly from the model that’s been used.

This has included a unilateral declaration recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which the United Nations has repeatedly declared illegitimate since Israel officially annexed the Syrian territory in 1981.

It has also seen the relocation of the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, defying international law that holds the eastern part of the city to be occupied Palestinian territory. It’s hard to see how this vision could do anything other than hurt the peace process.

Pompeo has been noticeably cagey since Netanyahu’s re-election regarding the two-state solution that until very recently represented the official goal of US policy toward Israel and Palestine.

During a Senate hearing on Wednesday, he refused to answer when Democrats asked him to affirm his support for a Palestinian state, instead responding: “Ultimately the Israelis and Palestinians will decide how to resolve this,” and promising that Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and his aide Jason Greenblatt would soon unveil a proposal “to resolve a problem that’s been going on for decades and decades that previous administrations couldn’t solve.”

“We’re hopeful that we have some ideas that are different, unique, which will allow the Israelis and the Palestinian people to come to a resolution of the conflict,” Pompeo added.

Trump has been touting Kushner’s “peace plan” for years, though he has yet to reveal its contents and even threatened to withhold it entirely if Netanyahu didn’t win a fifth term. Now that the PM’s future is secure, Trump has said he will unveil the plan in June. It’s unclear how much more of the surrounding area Netanyahu plans to annex before then.

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Venezuela will strongly retaliate against Brazil, the nation’s leader Nicolas Maduro has said, calling on the Brazilian Army to resist President Jair Bolsonaro’s attempts to intervene in its neighbor’s affairs.

The people of Venezuela stand united against the “threats of war and military intervention” voiced by the Brazilian right-wing leader, Nicolas Maduro said on Saturday. He blasted Bolsonaro as “a fascist rookie” and “a Hitler imitator,” and warned that Caracas will find ways to retaliate against any attacks coming from its neighbors.

Maduro also called on the Brazilian Army to “stop the madness” and thwart the attempts to create a conflict in the region.

A former army captain, Bolsonaro has never hidden his deep animosity towards the socialist government of Venezuela. Under his tenure, Brazil was among the first nations to openly back the opposition leader Juan Guaido as the ‘interim president’ during his standoff with Maduro.

In a radio interview earlier this week, the Brazilian leader said that he was working with US President Donald Trump to sow dissent within Venezuela’s armed forces in the hopes of ousting Maduro. He also said that he will consider helping Washington should the US launch a military invasion into Caracas.

His remarks were a departure from the ones previously made by Brazil’s vice president, who explicitly ruled out military intervention in Venezuela.

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“The Masons were here” and “Big Brother is watching” are just two of the many secret messages that were accidentally included in thousands of Oculus virtual reality devices, the Facebook-owned company has revealed.

In a series of tweets Nate Mitchell, head of VR for Facebook, said the firm had mistakenly included the secret ‘easter egg’ messages on the soon-to-be-released Oculus Rift S and Oculus Quest controllers. The messages were only supposed to be included in prototypes of the machines.

“While I appreciate Easter eggs, these were inappropriate and should have been removed,” Mitchell said. “The integrity and functionality of the hardware were not compromised, and we’ve fixed our process so this won’t happen again,” he added.

The messages are emblazoned on the ‘flex’ portion of the Touch controllers, Business Insider reported.

“To be clear, no devices have been sold with these messages yet, since Quest and Rift S have not yet shipped,” Johanna Peace, an Oculus representative, said.

“That said, as mentioned in Nate’s tweet, the messages will be inside tens of thousands of controller pairs that will ship to consumers when Quest and Rift S ship. We think it’s important to be transparent with our community and take responsibility when there’s an error,” she added.

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A US sailor stationed in Okinawa was found dead next to a local woman after an apparent murder-suicide, Japanese officials reported. The small southern island hosts roughly half of all American troops in Japan.

The US man, who was not immediately identified, was attached to III Marine Division, Stars and Stripes reported citing a military spokesman. The body of the 31-year-old was discovered on Saturday next to that of a woman in her 40s. The two were reportedly in a relationship, which ended with the sailor stabbing the woman to death before taking his own life.

The Japanese police reportedly found the dead pair in a six-story apartment building in the Kuwae district of Chatan, a town on the western coast of Okinawa. The police said the woman’s child witnessed the incident when it happened in the early morning and called a relative, who in turn notified law enforcement.

“We are aware of an incident resulting in the death of an apparent US Navy sailor with III Marine Division and a resident of Okinawa,” the spokesman, First Lt. David Mancilla said. “This is an absolute tragedy and we are fully committed to supporting the investigation into the incident.”

The incident was discussed by Japan’s Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Takeo Akiba and US Ambassador William Hagerty during a phone call, the Japanese foreign ministry said as cited by Associated Press.

Okinawa, the southernmost of Japan’s bigger islands, hosts about half of the 54,000 US troops stationed in Japan while amounting to only 1 percent of the country’s territory. For decades the military presence has been a major point of contention for local residents, who complain about things like environmental pollution, noise from aircraft operated by American bases and the danger posed by their flyovers.

US service members have also been involved in a number of high-profile crimes against locals, fueling anti-American sentiment. Tokyo shuns local authorities when they attempt to oppose the presence of American troops in Okinawa, saying it is necessary for national security.

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The failed face-to-face talks with President Donald Trump raise doubt whether the US is really committed to improving relations with North Korea, its leader Kim Jong-un said, while promising to beef up the nation’s defense.

Pyongyang will give the US till the end of the year to drop “its current calculation method” with regards to bilateral talks and come up with “a correct posture” instead, Kim said, the state-run KCNA news agency reported on Saturday. In that case, North Korea will consider holding a third summit with President Trump sometime in the future, he explained.

Addressing the nation’s parliament, Kim said that his talks with US President Donald Trump in February raised “a strong question” whether the country was right in making concessions. The meeting, which was cut short by the White House and ended without an agreement, also cast doubt on the “true willingness” of Washington to improve relations with North Korea.

According to Kim, the problem lied in the “American-style way of dialogue” which amounted to making “unilateral” demands without being ready to “sit face-to-face with us and settle the problem.”

As Pyongyang waits for the US to change its stance, it will “keep increasing the defense capabilities,” the North Korean leader stressed. He didn’t specify what branches of the military will be strengthened and how.

Donald Trump, meanwhile, wrote on Twitter that another meeting with Kim “would be good in that we fully understand where we each stand.” The relationship between the leaders “remains very good, perhaps the term excellent would be even more accurate,” he added.

The president’s tone was in contrast with the stricter stance of US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, who earlier said that he wanted to “leave a little space” for easing the sanctions on Pyongyang but affirmed that the restrictions will largely remain in place as long as the US deems North Korea a nuclear threat.

Trump and Kim met for the first time in Singapore last year. They agreed to pursue peace, and North Korea pledged to work toward “complete denuclearization” of the Korean Peninsula. In the months leading up to the talks, Pyongyang froze its nuclear and ballistic missile tests and demolished the only known nuclear test site.

The next round of talks, held in Hanoi, Vietnam, quickly fell apart. The US flatly rejected the proposal to partially lift the sanctions on North Korea in exchange to additional assurances that Pyongyang will not restart nuclear and ballistic missile tests. Trump’s National Security Advisor, John Bolton, later clarified that the White House found Kim Jong-un’s idea of a ‘step-by-step denuclearization’ unacceptable as well.

North Korean officials have since expressed a readiness to resume the nuclear and ballistic missile program if the US continues its aggressive policy toward the nation.

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Sporadic clashes with police marred Yellow Vests protests in Toulouse, the city chosen as the ‘capital’ of this week’s anti-government marches in France. Act 22 is the first since a controversial anti-rioting law took effect.

This Saturday marked the 22nd consecutive week of the “Gilets Jaunes” movement as France once again saw anti-government protests, which were held in cities such as Lyon, Bordeaux, Marseilles, and Strasbourg. In the French capital of Paris alone, some 5,000 demonstrators took to the streets, according to the French Interior Ministry.

Unlike some earlier protest gatherings, no major rioting has occurred so far this weekend. However, Toulouse, which was declared a “capital” of this Saturday’s protests, still saw street violence as the protest march there spiraled into clashes with police less than an hour after its beginning.

The protesters were seen throwing stones, bottles, and firecrackers at the officers, who responded with tear gas. Police also blocked several streets and used water cannons to disperse the crowd. At least 23 people were detained in Toulouse following the clashes that left at least two people injured, according to Le Figaro.

Marches in Paris and elsewhere were largely peaceful. Still, police arrested 15 people in the French capital, RFI reported. According to French authorities, some 31,000 protesters took part in the ‘Yellow Vests’ rallies across France, including around 2,000 in Toulouse.

Many protests seemed peaceful…

…and more jovial than full of rage

Some participants used the occasion to show support to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who was arrested on Thursday in London.

This week a new controversial anti-rioting law came into force in France after the country’s Constitutional Council partially censured it. Some of its provisions, including one that bans covering one’s face during a mass gathering, was criticized by human rights organizations. Some of the protesters on Saturday apparently ignored it by wearing gas masks and other gear.

The protest movement is meant to keep pressure on the French government despite it officially declaring on Monday an end to a three-month period of public debate on its economic policies. French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe said the government needs to digest some two million online contributions and 10,000 hours of town hall meetings before formulating a path forward.

The continued protests were ignited by a hike in fuel taxes last November, which prompted the protesters to adopt the now-iconic motorist visibility vest as their symbol. It soon escalated into a massive movement against President Emmanuel Macron’s business-friendly austerity policies.

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The US attempt to prosecute WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is a spiteful assault on civil freedoms conducted by an ailing superpower that is struggling to preserve its dominance, UK-based journalist John Pilger told RT.

One should not mistake what is happening to Assange for anything but the persecution of a man, who embarrassed the US by exposing to the public Washington’s brutality in the Middle East, award-winning British journalist John Pilger told RT’s Going Underground program.

“The United States has aroused the ire because what we are in the midst of is the world’s greatest superpower struggling to maintain its dominance. Its information dominance, its technological dominance, its cultural dominance. And WikiLeaks has presented an extreme hurdle to this,” he argued.

Assange was arrested by the British authorities on Thursday after Ecuador revoked his political asylum and allowed the police to drag him out of the embassy in London. The US accuses the publisher of conspiring with WikiLeaks source Chelsea Manning in her leaking of classified materials related to US military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan.

WikiLeaks publications based on the Manning leak, especially the so-called “collateral murder” video, dealt a massive blow to US attempts to cover up the “homicidal nature of its colonial wars,” Pilger said.

“Anybody watching that video really has to read very little else of the WikiLeaks revelations about the nature of the American wars, because there it is. There is some kind of consensual belief – I’m trying to figure for a polite term for ‘brainwashing,’ frankly – that we don’t do these kinds of things, we perpetually benign,” he explained.

Pilger says the attack on WikiLeaks is emblematic for the current state or journalism in the West, which has betrayed its mandate to be the public’s watchdog for the actions of their governments.

“We’ve handed a whole world of abandonment of basic democracy, which is based on dissent, on challenging, on holding power to account, on revelation, on the embarrassment of power. Not trivial embarrassment, the embarrassment of odd celebrity, but real embarrassment. And WikiLeaks provided that public service of journalism,” he said.

The journalist said Assange was arrested “on a political whim” and his likely prosecution and imprisonment in the US “opens up a whole chapter of diminishing the very principles that came out of the Second World War, upon which the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is base. It shows how fragile they are.”

Watch the entire interview.

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