Destructive protests by anarchists and extremists signal divided left as Biden administration begins

WAPO LIBERAL CLAPTRAP

FALSE EQUIVALENCIES

THE  DIVIDED LEFT IS IN THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY

A UNITED LEFT IS OUTSIDE THE PARTY

The hundreds of far-left and anarchist demonstrators who gathered in protest mere hours after President Biden swore the oath of office Wednesday signal a fracturing on the left that could become a scourge for the new administration, political leaders and experts say.

© Maranie R. Staab for The Washington Post Protesters burn a “Biden for President” flag outside of the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in Portland on Wednesday.

VANDALISM IS NOT VIOLENCE
Some activists are carrying their destructive tactics into a new administration to voice rejection of centrist ideologies they believe will do little to address existential worries over climate change, economic inequality, foreign wars and racism. 

The vandalizing of the Oregon Democratic Party headquarters by extreme-left demonstrators on ­Inauguration Day has split Portland liberals, and federal agents’ launching of tear gas at crowds that descended on the city’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement headquarters produced scenes reminiscent of similar summer standoffs ordered by President Donald Trump.

In Seattle, a march organized by anarchists and the city’s Youth Liberation Front branch roved through neighborhoods, chanting expletives at both Trump and Biden, some breaking windows at the original Starbucks. In Denver, dozens of demonstrators burned an American flag and yelled epithets at police.

James Ofsink, president of Portland Forward, a local advocacy group for liberal causes, said the growing tension in Portland’s progressive circles — and the elation with which right-wing pundits and politicians have watched far-left demonstrators destroy Democratic structures, sometimes literally — is emblematic of a larger tug of war happening in the nation.

“Portland is going to continue to be a microcosm of the political divides, especially among the left, that we’re seeing across the country,” Ofsink said. “The idea that middle-of-the-road Democrats can say with a straight face that we need to take things slowly or do things in a very deliberate way rubs a lot of people the very wrong way.”


Violent and destructive activity among far-left groups has been increasing nationwide, according to a recent study by the Transnational Threats Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a  RIGHT WING nonprofit policy research group. 

Though nearly 70 percent of terrorist attacks and plots in the U.S. last year were committed by white supremacists and far-right militia groups, according to the study, the portion led by anarchist and anti-fascist groups rose to 20 percent from 8 percent in 2019. 

FALSE EQUIVALENCY (NO TERRORIST ATTACKS HAVE BEEN ATTRIBUTED TO ANY @ ORGANIZATION) ALL ARMED ATTACKS WERE WHITE POWER NO ANARCHIST ARMED ATTACKS.

© Maranie R. Staab/For The Washington Post Portland police officers confront a group of protesters prior to their planned march Inauguration Day in Portland, Ore.

Seth G. Jones, the center’s director, said violent far-right events like the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville — which resulted in the death of a counterprotester — have prompted many of the far-left groups to arm themselves and organize more events that have also become increasingly violent and destructive.

“There is additional danger coming down the road where we have this extremism almost feeding on each other, almost inspiring one another,” Jones said. “Based on recent trends, we can expect violent far-left networks to conduct explosive, incendiary and firearm attacks against police, government and corporate targets.”

Portland has been a hotbed of both extreme-right and extreme-left activity, a trend that Wednesday’s destruction suggests will continue.

More than 100 protesters in black bloc — all-black attire meant to anonymize the wearer in a crowd of similarly dressed people — had gathered on Wednesday at Revolution Hall, a music venue in the southeast part of the city, before a handful of demonstrators broke off to bash in the windows of the vacant Democratic headquarters while others shielded them from view with large, black umbrellas.[California church known for its anti-LGBTQ beliefs is bombed]

Hours later, another group protested outside Portland’s ICE headquarters — a demonstration that had been advertised on social media with the tagline, “What’s outrageous? Kids in cages!” — calling for the dissolution of the agency. Prosecutors allege protesters “threw large rocks” at federal officers, the demonstration ending in explosions and clouds of gas as federal agents unleashed a barrage of chemicals and sparking munitions that skidded across the pavement toward crowds of protesters.

Fourteen people were arrested during several Inauguration Day protests in the city. Prosecutors are pursuing charges against four individuals, the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office said in an email Friday — all in their 20s and alleged to have participated in a riot. Prosecutors cautioned that number may not be final, as an investigation is ongoing and police are expected to file additional reports.

© Maranie R. Staab for The Washington Post Protesters broke the windows of the Democratic Party of Oregon’s office in Portland during a march held on Inauguration Day.

Mark Bray, author of “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist’s Handbook,” said the graffiti that the Portland protesters left behind and the flags some carried included anarchist symbols. There is a “fair amount of overlap” between the ideologies of anarchists and antifascists. Both tend to be anti-government, opposed to both the Democratic and Republican parties, and frequently protest on Inauguration Day and at the parties’ annual conventions.

“Broadly speaking they want directly democratic, self-managed communities at the regional and macro-regional levels,” said Bray, a historian and lecturer at Rutgers University who helped organize Occupy Wall Street. “They want decision-making from the bottom up versus the top down. They reject capitalism.”

Portland’s protests undercut claims by Republicans that far-left groups have embraced Biden and have committed destructive acts in support of his policies, said Oren Segal, vice president of the Center on Extremism at the Anti-Defamation League.

“There have been so many efforts to link Biden to the radical elements of the left, including antifa,” he said. “This demonstrates a disconnect between that messaging from the Trump administration and elected officials, who tended to lump together the left more broadly with these radical elements.”

Many  LIBERALS   on the left have criticized how such groups have demonstrated their ideologies, fearing it weakens their unity and message. Gregory McKelvey, a political consultant and vice chair of the Democratic Party of Oregon’s Black Caucus, noted that some activists “who want to empathize with the extreme left finding it hard to do so right now.”

BAD TIMING

“I don’t think these tactics work. It alienates people, and growing the coalition is essential to creating change,” McKelvey said. “I also think Trump was abhorrent and Inauguration Day was a day of the country really getting to exhale and celebrate and to do so and feel as though someone is telling you there is no cause for celebration when clearly there is, it’s frustrating.”

© Maranie R. Staab for The Washington Post Protesters in Portland march during a demonstration against racial injustice on Inauguration Day.

But McKelvey, who has for years attended racial justice demonstrations in Portland, added that many in the city’s activist community also continue to lash out against police and the government as a result of months of trauma — being on the receiving end of crowd-control munitions, including tear gas, as well as the ongoing pandemic and economic anxiety.

“We can argue about if this is strategic or not, but I do think there is also an element of lashing out because the world is messed up right now and people are messed up right now,” he said.

McKelvey worries that the conversation that has followed Wednesday’s clashes has distracted from the key issues he and other community organizers hope that the Biden administration will address, including climate change and systemic racism.

“On the scale of everything that’s going on in the world, for anybody’s top priority to be ‘there were four broken windows or graffiti on the DPO building,’ it doesn’t compare to the fact that George Floyd was murdered and we still have a flawed criminal justice system in our country,” he said. “I might think broken windows is bad, but it’s not going to be my fight.”

Three of those arrested as a result of the destruction in Portland on Wednesday were accused of damaging the offices of the Democratic Party of Oregon. Austin Nuchraksa, 25, is accused of smashing a window at the party headquarters with a “silver metal baton,” according to court documents, after marching with a group that carried banners declaring “WE DON’T WANT BIDEN — WE WANT REVENGE” and “WE ARE UNGOVERNABLE.”[Move on or fight on: Americans remain sorely divided as Biden’s quest for unity begins]

After Nuchraksa was detained by police, officers said they smelled gas and found four green beer bottles, wrapped in socks, with cloth wicks protruding from each bottle’s mouth, according to court records. The homemade molotov cocktails were “leaking gasoline all over the inside of the backpack,” prosecutors wrote. Nuchraksa was charged with participating in a riot, first-degree criminal mischief and unlawful possession of a destructive device.

Kai-Ave Douvia, 22, is accused of using a “pry-bar kind of tool” to break windows at the DPO building, according to court documents. He was charged with first-degree criminal mischief and participating in a riot.

Nicole Rose, 25, is accused of helping to break windows at the DPO by handing a “metal baton” to another demonstrator who then used the baton to break the glass, according to court documents. Rose later took the baton back and used it to “break the rest of the window,” prosecutors wrote. She was identified using live-streamed video of the event and charged with second-degree criminal mischief and participating in a riot.

Those arrested have been released on their own recognizance, according to Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office records. The Washington Post’s efforts to reach them Friday were unsuccessful.

Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler (D) has not publicly spoken about the protests and did not respond to a request for comment.

Several others were arrested for the vandalism at the ICE federal building. Trevor Colter, 26, allegedly threw a “projectile” at officers outside the building while officers attempted to disperse the crowd, according to the District Attorney’s office. Colter, who was charged with rioting, resisting arrest and second-degree disorderly conduct, was later found to be carrying a large knife, bear spray, a collapsible baton and three fireworks, according to court documents.

Protesters who participated in Wednesday’s demonstrations in Portland said the people who perpetrated destruction and committed acts of vandalism at the Democratic Party’s building were a small number of more than 100 protesters who had gathered for a march meant as a left-wing rebuke of the Biden presidency.

Later, outside the ICE headquarters, protesters chanted “not my president” and lit a Biden campaign flag on fire. Some spray-painted a message onto the federal building in a condemnation of Trump’s immigration policies that separated migrant children from their parents: “Reunite families now.”

Julie Tate in Washington and Jennifer Oldham in Denver contributed to this report.

BERNIE BEATS MICHELLE FOR INAGURATION 

HAUTE COUTURE 

"I was just sitting there trying to keep warm, "

Memes Of Bernie Sanders’ Anti-Fashion Inauguration Look, Sanders Reacts

Bernie Sanders sparked a social media frenzy on Wednesday thanks to his dressed-down look to attend the inauguration of President Joe Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris.

Sporting a drab parka and wooly mittens, the Vermont Senator found himself at the centre of a meme movement, with social media users placing the photo of Sanders in the audience in a variety of different milieus, from sitting on a park bench with Tom Hanks' Forrest Gump to joining Jean-Luc Picard and "Star Trek: The Next Generation" on the bridge of the Enterprise.

RELATED: Bernie Sanders Reacts To His Inauguration Outfit Going Viral: ‘We’re Not So Concerned About Good Fashion’

Some celebrities decided to get into the fun, with Jennifer Aniston joining the meme-making in a big way.

In fact, the star of "The Morning Show" offered up three hilarious shots of herself with Sanders on Instagram Story, including a magazine cover and another with herself and the cast of "Friends".

  

© Provided by ET Canada  

© Provided by ET Canada

Sarah Jessica Parker also joined in, with Bernie joining her and her "Sex and the City" co-stars (tellingly, minus Kim Cattrall) in a scene from the HBO hit.

Hilarie Burton took a similar approach, Photoshopping Sanders into a photo of the "One Tree Hill" cast.

Demi Moore was joined by Sanders in an iconic scene from "Ghost".

There were even memes from "Real Housewives" stars Lisa Rinna and LuAnn de Lesseps.

In addition, a pair of celebrated Canadians also got into the act, with Ryan Reynolds and Dr. David Suzuki also sharing Sanders meme pics.

Janet Jackson, Amy Schumer and more all joined in as well.
Meanwhile, Sanders himself is even getting in on the action, and is now selling a line of meme-themed merchandise benefiting Meals on Wheels in his home state of Vermont.

Sanders was then asked about his inauguration ensemble during an appearance on "Late Night with Seth Meyers", telling the host he had seen a lot of the memes.

He insisted of the viral image, "I was just sitting there trying to keep warm, trying to pay attention to what was going on."

Canada reports 146 more COVID-19 deaths as feds approve rapid PCR test

FBI investigating explosion, graffiti at church known for anti-LGBT views

Jennifer Aniston, Janet Jackson & More Celebs Share Hilarious Memes Of Bernie Sanders’ Anti-Fashion Inauguration Look, Sanders Reacts

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A moon rock decorates Biden’s Oval Office
Posted by Kelly Whitt | SPACE | January 23, 2021

A lunar sample collected during Apollo 17, the final mission to the moon, is now on display in President Biden’s Oval Office.



This moon rock – from the Apollo 17 mission to the moon in 1972 – now sits on a bookshelf in President Joe Biden’s Oval Office. Image via NASA.


Like any other employee starting a job at a new office, a new U.S. president can decorate the Oval Office with photos, artwork and other decorative items of his choice. The 46th president, Joe Biden, has chosen to incorporate a moon rock into his environs. The moon rock, collected in 1972 during Apollo 17, the last lunar mission, is meant as a symbol of earlier generations’ ambitions and accomplishments. It also represents support for America’s current Moon to Mars exploration approach.

The Biden administration requested the moon rock, which was provided by the Lunar Sample Laboratory Facility at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.

The prism-shaped case in which the moon rock resides is labeled Sample 76015,143 and inscribed with the following:

Apollo 17 astronaut Ronald Evans and moonwalkers Harrison Schmitt and Eugene Cernan, the last humans to set foot on the moon, chipped this sample from a large boulder at the base of the North Massif in the Taurus-Littrow Valley, 3 km (almost 2 miles) from the Lunar Module. This 332 gram piece of the moon (less than a pound), which was collected in 1972, is a 3.9-billion-year-old sample formed during the last large impact event on the nearside of the moon, the Imbrium Impact Basin, which is 1,145 km or 711.5 miles in diameter. You can see this impact basin for yourself during the next full moon. Look for Mare Imbrium as a very large dark circular shape in the upper left portion of the moon: this giant lava plain covers the floor of one of the largest craters in the entire solar system.

The lunar Mare Imbrium, or Sea of Rains, via Pete Lawrence’s Moon guides.

The irregular sample surfaces contain tiny craters created as micrometeorite impacts have sand-blasted the rock over millions of years. The flat, sawn sides were created in NASA’s Lunar Curation Laboratory when slices were cut for scientific research. This ongoing research is imperative as we continue to learn about our planet and the moon, and prepare for future missions to the cislunar orbit and beyond.


Harrison Schmitt was the only geologist to visit the moon. He and Eugene Cernan collected the 1972 rock samples and were the last people to walk on the moon. Many hope that, in the coming years, NASA’s ongoing Artemis mission will change that. Artemis originally had the goal of placing the next man and first woman on the moon by 2024. New technologies being developed for the mission did not progress as rapidly as hoped over the past several years, so that date now looks unlikely, but many are still hopeful the mission will continue to move forward under Joe Biden.

President Bill Clinton also had a piece of the moon in his Oval Office. His lunar sample was labeled 10057,30 and was presented to him in 1999 by the astronauts who collected it: Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and Michael Collins. Clinton’s moon rock was cut from a larger chunk labeled 10057; a different sample cut from the same chunk was placed into a stained glass window in the Washington National Cathedral in 1974.

President Richard Nixon presented lunar samples to all 50 states plus many nations and territories, although many of those samples have since gone missing.

Back in the heyday of the Apollo program, everyday Americans could check out moon rocks for educational purposes. The program continues today, but with much more stringent guidelines. Colleges and universities with geoscience programs can request samples for use by advanced geology students in petrology or microscopic petrography courses. The loan is limited to a two-week period.

Bottom line: A lunar sample collected during Apollo 17, the final mission to the moon, is now on display in President Biden’s Oval Office.

Read more from the Washington Post: A look inside Biden’s Oval Office

Hydrogen gas-fuelled airships could spur development in remote communities
Barry E. Prentice, Professor of Supply Chain Management, University of Manitoba 3 days ago

What do tomatoes, hemp and hydrogen gas have in common? Only one thing: they were all victims of misinformation that banned their use. Harmless products that could have had a positive role in the economy and society were shunned for generations. 

© (Piqsels) Hydrogen gas was banned for use in airships based on misinformation and outright falsehoods 100 years ago.

It seems incredible today to think that Europeans believed tomatoes were poisonous for about 200 years. People did get sick, and some died after eating tomatoes. The culprit was pewter dishes favoured by the upper classes. Tomato acid leached out enough lead out to be poisonous.

The advent of porcelain dishware and Italian pizza finally sorted out the real problem. But once a myth is born, it can be hard for the truth to emerge. Europe lagged a long time behind North America in tomato consumption.

The prohibition of hemp, the fibre of the cannabis plant, has a more nuanced story and competing explanations. Some accounts sound like conspiracy theories.

The alleged conspirators were industrialists in paper, plastics and pharmaceuticals who sought drug regulations to eliminate hemp as their competitor. This is difficult to prove, but economist George Stigler’s seminal article in 1971 on the economics of regulation lends support to the theory.

 

© (AP Photo/Paul Sancya) In this August 2019 photo, rows plants are shown at an industrial hemp farm in Michigan.

The best-documented cause of hemp’s vilification is racism. Notable racist slurs by U.S. government official Harry Anslinger, who drafted the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, leave no doubt of his bias. As commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, he targeted racialized minorities who used hemp plants.

The fear-mongering has ended in most places and important uses for hemp and cannabis are making a valuable contribution to health care, nutrition and fibre. But the stigma of the false claims continue, as does prohibition in many places.
Hydrogen ban

Unlike the prohibition on hemp, hydrogen gas bans in the United States and Canada are extremely narrow. It’s legal to use hydrogen for almost every conceivable purpose, except one: as a gas to provide buoyancy for airships, more commonly known as blimps (although there are differences between airships, blimps and dirigibles).

In fact, Canada still has a ban enshrined in its air regulations that states: “Hydrogen is not an acceptable lifting gas for use in airships.”

Canada’s ban on this use of hydrogen is strange given that Canada has never had an airship industry. The origins of the false information that led to this ban on the use of hydrogen are even more surprising.

Helium was discovered in natural gas in Kansas in 1903, and an experimental refinery was built in Texas in 1915. At great expense, a few barrage balloons were filled with helium during the First World War.

After the war, the need for helium was unclear. But officials from the U.S. Bureau of Mines wanted to protect their newly established helium refinery. They took advantage of the Roma airship accident in 1922 to sell helium to the military.

The Roma was a hydrogen-filled, Italian-built airship sold to the U.S. army. During trials, its rudder broke and the airship crashed in Norfolk, Va., hitting power lines during its descent. All 34 crew members were lost. 

 

© (National Archives) The Italian airship Roma flying over Norfolk, Va., in 1921.

Spreading a falsehood via the media that the crew would have survived had the airship had been filled with helium, the Bureau of Mines was given an audience in Washington, D.C. Before Congress, they staged a demonstration with two balloons and a burning splint.

The one filled with helium doused the burning splint. The one marked hydrogen would have put the flame out too, if it were more than 75 per cent pure, but contaminated hydrogen gas is explosive. When the burning splint touched the balloon, it went off like a cannon, rattling the windows in Congress.

Based on this poorly designed high school chemistry level experiment, U.S. politicians banned the use of hydrogen in airships.
Rubber-stamped laws

After the Second World War, when the U.S. became the dominant world air power, its regulations were rubber-stamped into the laws of other nations, including Canada. This is how Canada came to have a regulation banning hydrogen in airships that is grounded in neither science nor engineering research. The ban stems from a political decision made in a foreign country 98 years ago based on misinformation.

Hydrogen gas is increasingly heralded as the mobile energy source of the green economy. Hydrogen fuel cells are used for electric cars, buses, boats, forklifts, trains and recently a converted Piper airplane.

Read more: Hydrogen trains are coming – can they get rid of diesel for good?

It is perfectly legal to carry hydrogen in a high-pressure container to power any vehicle, including an airship, but not if carried in a zero-pressure container (gas cell) to lift the airship.

The prohibition on hydrogen has held back research and created doubts about the economic viability of airships that must depend on scarce, finite supplies of helium.

Lies and misinformation have consequences. Canada needs a transportation solution to the chronic problems of food insecurity, crowded housing and poverty in remote Indigenous communities.

Hydrogen-filled cargo airships could do for the Northern economy what the railways did for Western Canada 125 years ago. In the 21st century, myths and misrepresentations should not go unchallenged. Regulatory decisions made when we were still hand-cranking cars should either be justified or removed from the books.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Barry E. Prentice owns shares in Buoyant Aircraft Systems International (BASI), an airship research organization with no production and only one employee. He is also the president of ISO Polar, a not-for-profit think tank that encourages the use of cargo airships for northern transportation.

THE UNFINISHED BOURGEOIS REVOLUTION!

Tens of thousands protest across Russia in support of poisoned Putin critic Navalny

Tens of thousands of people have joined protests across dozens of cities in Russia, demanding the release of Alexey Navalny, the Kremlin critic who was jailed last week after he returned to the country for the first time since recovering from a poisoning with a nerve agent.

© Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images Protesters clash with riot police during a rally in support of jailed opposition leader Alexey Navalny in downtown Moscow on Jan. 23, 2021.

© Navalny team Youtube page/AFP via Getty Images Alexei Navalny speaking while waiting for a court hearing at a police station in Khimki, Russia, Jan. 18, 2021.

The protests were one of the largest displays of popular opposition to the rule of president Vladimir Putin in years, mushrooming in almost every large city across Russia and attracting unusually big crowds. Almost everywhere, the protesters were confronted by heavily armored riot police who moved to disperse them.

By early evening, police had detained over 1,600 people, according to OVD-Info, a group that monitors arrests, and that number seemed likely to grow.

© Getty Images Young protesters hold banners as climb atop a lamppost in Pushkin Square, Moscow, Jan. 23, 2021.

In Moscow, Navalny's wife, Yulia Navalny, was detained at the protest, where lines of riot police later dispersed the crowd with batons.

Navalny had called for the nationwide protests on Saturday after authorities sent him to prison a week ago, setting up a test of the strength of Navalny's support in the country, following his poisoning and return to Russia.

© Dmitri Lovetsky/AP People gather to protest against the jailing of opposition leader Alexey Navalny in St.Petersburg, Russia, Jan. 23, 2021.

Protests were held in almost every large city, beginning first in Russia's far east which is seven hours ahead of Moscow and then continuing throughout the day, spreading across Siberia until reaching cities on the border of Europe. Videos posted online showed crowds-- ranging from several hundred to a few thousand-- gathering in groups or marching in long processions, chanting slogans including, "Putin is a thief."

In Moscow, part of the city center was flooded with thousands of people. While there's no definitive reported number on the size of the crowd, Reuters estimated it at 40,000. Moscow's police, who commonly undercount crowd size, said it was just 4,000.Russia extends Navalny's detention as outcry over his arrest grows

In the far eastern city of Vladivostok, a crowd of around 3,000 people gathered. Video posted on social media appear to show riot police officers charging at demonstrators with batons.

In many large eastern cities and in Siberia, other video posted online show long processions of people marching and chanting slogans such as "Putin is a thief."

© Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images Protesters clash with riot police during a rally in support of jailed opposition leader Alexey Navalny in downtown Moscow, Jan. 23, 2021.

The protests, although not huge outside of Moscow, were still remarkable for their size and geographic spread, stretching into regions normally indifferent to Navalny.

Navalny has traditionally had little pull beyond Moscow and St. Petersburg and his previous calls for nationwide protests have usually only seen small crowds of a few hundred in most regional cities.

Crowds, ranging from several hundred to a few thousand took to the streets in often biting cold. In the Siberian city Omsk, where an estimated thousand people marched the temperature was -20 degrees Fahrenheit. In Novosibirsk, videos filmed by local media showed riot police with steel shields chasing protesters onto a frozen lake.

© Natalia Kolesnikova/AFP via Getty Images Police detain a protester during a rally in support of jailed opposition leader Alexey Navalny in downtown Moscow on Jan. 23, 2021.

In the far eastern city Vladivostok, an estimated crowd of 3,000 marched. Videos posted on social media showed police charging protesters with batons.

In many cities, demonstrators pelted helmeted riot police with snowballs and in some places tussled in knee-deep snow.

Navalny has traditionally had little pull in Russia's vast regions outside Moscow and previous calls for nationwide protests have previously seen only small crowds of a few hundred in most of the large regional cities. The marches on Saturday appeared larger than usual.

© Natalia Kolesnikova/AFP via Getty Images People attend a rally in support of jailed opposition leader Alexey Navalny in downtown Moscow on Jan. 23, 2021.

Ahead of the protests, authorities launched a wave of arrests, detaining activists at their homes, including several of Navalny's top lieutenants. The prosecutor general's office issued a warning that anyone attending the protests risked arrest, and opened a broad criminal case on charges relating to unauthorized public events.

Navalny's support is strong among students, so universities and schools warned against attending, threatening expulsion.

Navalny is Russia's best-known opposition leader and is viewed as president Vladimir Putin's most troublesome political opponent. He has built a grassroots movement, galvanized by his investigations into alleged acts of corruption among powerful officials and businessmen close to Putin.

This week, a day after Navalny was jailed, his team released a new film claiming to lift the lid of an extravagant secret palace built by Putin on the Black Sea coast close to the city of Sochi. The film, which Navalny said is based on leaked blueprints, describes the interior of the palace, alleging it contains a personal casino, amphitheater, vineyard and even an underground hockey rink for Putin.

© Reuters People attend a rally in support of jailed Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny in Moscow, Russia Jan. 23, 2021.

Navalny is currently in a jail in Moscow. He was detained at the airport almost immediately upon his arrival in Moscow last Sunday from Germany, where he had been recovering from the nerve agent poisoning that nearly killed him. He was then ordered to stay behind bars for at least 30 days by a makeshift court set up inside a police station, and could be sentenced to years in prison at a parole hearing later this month, on Jan. 29.

Police detained Navalny for allegedly violating the terms of a suspended sentence from 2014, when he was found guilty of embezzlement in a trial that the European Court of Human Rights later ruled was unjust. Russia's prison service has requested that his three and a half-year sentence be converted into real prison time.

Though Navalny has been jailed before over his activism, he has never been imprisoned long, most observers believe because the Kremlin has never wanted to risk the political fallout.

© Evgenia Novozhenina/Reuters A law enforcement officer detains a woman during a rally in support of jailed Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny in Moscow, Jan. 23, 2021.

But following Navalny's poisoning, some observers believe that calculus may well have changed.Navalny says Russian agent accidentally admitted to poisoning him

The Kremlin has denied any involvement in Navalny's murder attempt, but an investigation by the independent group Bellingcat in December claimed it had found evidence identifying an alleged hit squad from Russia's domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Security Service or FSB, that trailed Navalny for years and was present in Siberia when he fell sick in August. Navalny himself has published audio from a phone call with one of the alleged team members, in which the agent appears to unwittingly acknowledge the plot.

Navalny on Friday released a statement from jail via his lawyers in which he said he was feeling well and if anything were to suddenly happen to him while in jail, it should be treated as foul play.

"Just in case, I declare: My plans don't include hanging myself on a prison's window bars, or open my veins or cut my throat with a sharpened spoon," Navalny said in the statement posted on Instagram. "I'm being very careful walking downstairs. My blood pressure is measured every day, and it's like a cosmonaut's, so a heart attack is excluded."

3,400 arrested at protests demanding Navalny's release


MOSCOW — Russian police arrested more than 3,400 people Saturday in nationwide protests demanding the release of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, the Kremlin's most prominent foe, according to a group that counts political detentions.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

The protests in scores of cities in temperatures as low as minus-50 C (minus-58 F) highlighted how Navalny has built influence far beyond the political and cultural centres of Moscow and St. Petersburg.

In Moscow, an estimated 15,000 demonstrators gathered in and around Pushkin Square in the city centre, where clashes with police broke out and demonstrators were roughly dragged off by helmeted riot officers to police buses and detention trucks. Some were beaten with batons.

Navalny’s wife Yulia was among those arrested.

Police eventually pushed demonstrators out of the square. Thousands then regrouped along a wide boulevard about a kilometre (half-mile) away, many of them throwing snowballs at the police before dispersing.

Some later went to protest near the jail where Navalny is held. Police made an undetermined number of arrests there.

The protests stretched across Russia’s vast territory, from the island city of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk north of Japan and the eastern Siberian city of Yakutsk, where temperatures plunged to minus-50 Celsius, to Russia’s more populous European cities. Navalny and his anti-corruption campaign have built an extensive network of support despite official government repression and being routinely ignored by state media.

“The situation is getting worse and worse, it’s total lawlessness," said Andrei Gorkyov, a protester in Moscow. "And if we stay silent, it will go on forever.”

The OVD-Info group, which monitors political arrests, said at least 941 people were detained in Moscow and more than 350 at another large demonstration in St. Petersburg. Overall, it said 3,454 people had been arrested in some 90 cities. Russian police did not provide arrest figures.

Undeterred, Navalny's supporters called for protests again next weekend.

Navalny was arrested on Jan. 17 when he returned to Moscow from Germany, where he had spent five months recovering from a severe nerve-agent poisoning that he blames on the Kremlin and which Russian authorities deny. Authorities say his stay in Germany violated terms of a suspended sentence in a 2014 criminal conviction, while Navalny says the conviction was for made-up charges.

The 44-year-old activist is well known nationally for his reports on the corruption that has flourished under President Vladimir Putin's government.

His wide support puts the Kremlin in a strategic bind — risking more protests and criticism from the West if it keeps him in custody but apparently unwilling to back down by letting him go free.

Navalny faces a court hearing in early February to determine whether his sentence in the criminal case for fraud and money-laundering — which Navalny says was politically motivated — is converted to 3 1/2 years behind bars.

Moscow police on Thursday arrested three top Navalny associates, two of whom were later jailed for periods of nine and 10 days.

Navalny fell into a coma while aboard a domestic flight from Siberia to Moscow on Aug. 20. He was transferred from a hospital in Siberia to a Berlin hospital two days later. Labs in Germany, France and Sweden, and tests by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, established that he was exposed to the Soviet-era Novichok nerve agent.

Russian authorities insisted that the doctors who treated Navalny in Siberia before he was airlifted to Germany found no traces of poison and have challenged German officials to provide proof of his poisoning. Russia refused to open a full-fledged criminal inquiry, citing a lack of evidence that Navalny was poisoned.

Last month, Navalny released the recording of a phone call he said he made to a man he described as an alleged member of a group of officers of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, who purportedly poisoned him in August and then tried to cover it up. The FSB dismissed the recording as fake.

Navalny has been a thorn in the Kremlin’s side for a decade, unusually durable in an opposition movement often demoralized by repressions.

He has been jailed repeatedly in connection with protests and twice was convicted of financial misdeeds in cases that he said were politically motivated. He suffered significant eye damage when an assailant threw disinfectant into his face. He was taken from jail to a hospital in 2019 with an illness that authorities said was an allergic reaction but which many suspected was a poisoning.

Daria Litvinova And Jim Heintz, The Associated Press

Saturday's letters: Superlab cancellation akin to quashing Keystone

What is the similarity between Jason Kenney and Joe Biden? Both politicians made promises based on ideology and applied some of them almost instantly the first day on assuming government leadership. Kenney immediately stopped further progress of the superlab in Edmonton while President Biden killed the Keystone XL pipeline. Both projects were in advanced early stages of construction.

© Provided by Edmonton Journal Design of the Edmonton superlab.

Obviously, the superlab and the Keystone pipeline have nothing in common — except that both projects have cost the taxpayers of Alberta dearly.

Thomas Mojelsky, Edmonton

Keystone’s demise presents opportunity

With the cancellation of Keystone XL, Premier Kenney has essentially gambled away $1.5 billion of Alberta taxpayers’ money, betting on Trump being re-elected (which would have been arguably overall far worse for Canada than losing a pipeline). Biden has long ago made it clear he would cancel Keystone XL. Blaming Biden or Trudeau for this is, therefore, disingenuous.

The UCP could waste more of our dollars suing the U.S., which is unlikely to succeed, or invest in the new, diversified economy. The good news, should Kenney and the UCP recognize it, is that Alberta has some of the world’s best conditions for accessing solar and wind energy. There are many more potential jobs for building green energy infrastructure than for pipelines. Our provincial and federal governments should help retrain displaced pipeline workers for the renewable energy industry, which represents where the puck is going, not where it has been.

Victor Dorian, Edmonton

Recall legislation needed now

In a previous letter to the Journal editor, I lamented the absence of recall legislation promised by the UCP during the last election campaign. It’s time to revisit that promise. Since then, what have the UCP done that is beneficial to Albertans? They have fought with doctors and nurses, they have disregarded the advice of various experts regarding pandemic responses, they have gone on warm tropical vacations after telling us to stay home, they are giving away coal leases to their buddies with very little public consultation.

How about blowing $1.5 billion on a pipeline that everyone knew was going to be cancelled as soon as the U.S. changed presidents, which really never was in doubt. These are just a few of the poor decisions made by the UCP. This has to stop, and without the recall legislation they promised us, just think of the damage they will inflict on us until the next election.

Ed Matthews, Edmonton

UCP made $1.5 billion vanish

The United Clown Party of Alberta, led by the head clown, Mr. Kenney, just made over $1.5 billion of taxpayers’ dollars disappear. The next act in the circus? Hard-working Albertans can look forward to a dance with the federal government and mountains disappearing through coal mining. Stay tuned!

Bill Smith, Strathcona County