HANOI, April 8 (Reuters) – U.S.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken will visit Vietnam next week, Senator Jeff Merkley told a news conference in Hanoi on Saturday, as part of Washington’s efforts to move diplomatic relations with Hanoi on to a higher level this year.
Sophia wanted to show people that they don’t need to spend a lot of money to make amazing clothes and posted a clip demonstrating how she turned charity shop curtains into a stunning bustier dress with tied straps.
UKRAINE/BELARUS BORDER, April 8 (Reuters) – More than 30 children were reunited with their families in Ukraine this weekend after a long operation to bring them back home from Russia or Russian-occupied Crimea, where they had been taken from areas occupied by Russian forces during the war.
The International Criminal Court last month issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia’s children’s rights commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, accusing them of abducting children from Ukraine.
Kateryna Rashevska, a lawyer from a Ukrainian NGO called Regional Centre for Human Rights, told the briefing they were collecting evidence to build a case that Russian officials deliberately prevented return of the Ukrainian children.
She said: ‘I fell in love with the print and kept the fabric for “something special”. You will find with fellow sewers that we have bags of fabrics that we have collected over the years for “something special” and they never get used.’
She says that she remembers when she got her first commission from a work colleague, who wanted a dress for a party, she went home ‘crying’ because she was ‘flattered’ that someone believed in her and ‘trusted’ her to make her a dress.
Toler, whose investigative consortium has done several probes of Russian intelligence operations, said he believed he had traced the posting back to Thug Shaker Central on Discord, which was then reposting by users to a bigger group.
An FBI probe was launched Friday to determine the source of the leak, however a senior official told The New York Times that tracking down the perpetrator could prove difficult because a large number of officials have the security clearances needed to access the information.
“Now the fifth rescue mission is nearing its completion. It was special regarding the number of children we managed to return and also because of its complexity,” said Mykola Kuleba, the founder of the Save Ukraine humanitarian organisation that helped arrange the rescue mission.
Moscow has not concealed a programme under which it has taken thousands of Ukrainian children from occupied areas, but presents this it as a humanitarian campaign to protect orphans and children abandoned in the conflict zone.
The leak comes amid speculation that a wave of classified document breaches could be being orchestrated by Russia, in what was described by a senior intelligence official as ‘a nightmare for the Five Eyes’ – a reference to the intelligence sharing agreement between the United States, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
In Ukraine, the documents suggested a misalignment between US and Ukrainian military strategies, with intelligence reports appearing to show the US continues to spy on top military and political leaders in the region.
The documents – while up to several months old – offer detailed insights into which Russian intelligence agencies have been most compromised, and clues as to how the United States has gleaned so much secret Kremlin information.
Lvova-Belova said earlier this week that her commission acted on humanitarian grounds to protect the interests of children in an area where military action was taking place and had not moved anyone against their will or that of their parents or legal guardians, whose consent was always sought unless they were missing.
Pentagon officials are said to be launching a huge probe into the leak. The leaked documents shared online – at least some of which are believed to be genuine – consist of photographs of printed sheets of paper.
However, the scandal is already being noted as one of the most damaging national security breaches in recent memory, which may have further implications into the legitimacy of US espionage into the future.
The three said they had been separated from their parents who were pressured by Russian authorities to send their children to Russian summer camps for what was billed as two weeks, from occupied parts of Kherson and Kharkiv regions.
While the breach underscored America’s ability to infiltrate Moscow’s upper echelons, it has also sparked fears that Russian intelligence may now have a clearer understanding of exactly what the US does and does not already understand, providing an opportunity to cut off sources of information.
In recent days, photos that were posted to several social media platforms showed the documents as if someone had taken them from a secure area, unfolded them from their pocket and quickly took pictures of the papers, an official said.