In some strange and beautiful ways, Israel is a new country now. The old fights are all still there, but we’re nevertheless seeing a pivot underway within Israeli society. Arab-Jewish, religious-secular, many of the old divides are giving way to a new commitment to each other. https://t.co/ZhBl1wOQkL
— Haviv Rettig Gur (@havivrettiggur) November 9, 2023
Day: November 9, 2023
Heavily armed security forces are reported to have raided Kadi-Yurt, a Chechen village near the border with Daghestan, detaining ‘at least 50’ individuals.
Chechen opposition Telegram channels 1ADAT and Niysoo on Wednesday announced that a raid had taken place in the village, with 1ADAT claiming that 50–60 people were detained in what they termed ‘mopping-up operations’.
Footage published online appeared to show armoured vehicles entering the village and blocking the road entering it, with others showing security forces entering houses.
Ibragim Yangulbayev, head of the Chechen public movement 1ADAT and the corresponding Telegram channel, told OC Media that the raid began at around 17:00.
‘Residents and their friends contacted us and said that raids with military equipment were currently taking place in the village of Kadi-Yurt’, said Yangulbayev. He stated that the reason for the raid was ‘religious ideology’, as Sufism is considered the only permissible form of Islam in Chechnya.
Yangulbayev claimed that the head of Chechnya Ramzan Kadyrov had planned to visit the village, and so weapons were collected, and the phones of many local residents were checked and ‘blocked’ to prevent them from filming or contacting others.
‘In the end, Kadyrov did not come, [so] some [of the people detained] were sent to Kadyrov, some were detained in illegal prisons, all were taken to Grozny’, claimed Yangulbayev.
Security and military forces had left the village by 21:00, but no information has yet been made public regarding those detained.
‘Right now, nothing is known about what happened to these people. We are waiting for what information will come’, said Yangulbayev. ‘Relatives are waiting for their loved ones. Some of the abductees were released during the raid, and in the end, about fifty to sixty people were taken away.’
Neither Chechnya’s Interior Ministry nor Head of Chechnya Ramzan Kadyrov have yet commented on the events.
The post Security forces ‘detain dozens’ in raid on Chechen village appeared first on OC Media.
#FBI – FBI director didn’t accept new Md. headquarters decision, sought do-over https://t.co/cXK1DgJApe
— Michael Novakhov (@mikenov) November 9, 2023
Save
FBI Director Christopher A. Wray said last month he could not accept a federal official’s decision to relocate the agency’s headquarters from downtown Washington to the Maryland suburbs, criticizing the politically fraught and drawn out site selection process as fatally flawed, according to a letter obtained by The Washington Post.
The Oct. 12 letter sent from the FBI director to the top official at the General Services Administration — the agency that oversees federal real estate — called on the agency to scrap its Maryland selection and restart the entire process. Wray said a former GSA official in charge of the process until their departure last month, made questionable decisions that ignored the recommendations of a panel convened to choose the most suitable location.
The GSA rejected Wray’s appeals. The Post reported Wednesday that federal officials chose a 61-acre site adjacent to the Greenbelt Metro station in Prince George’s County, Md., to house the new FBI headquarters — a plot of land owned by the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, also known as Metro.
The letter from Wray to Robin Carnahan, the head of GSA, was a remarkable rejection of the results of a hard-fought selection process that has taken years, pitting officials in Maryland and Virginia against each other as they vied for a massive new federal complex, which has promised to generate billions of dollars in taxpayer revenue. After receiving the letter, the GSA decided it was proceeding anyway with the Greenbelt site decision.
On Thursday morning, Wray spoke to senior FBI leaders about the decision and sent an email to the workforce, telling them a three-person panel working on the decision had unanimously recommended a different site, one in Springfield, Va.
“The site selection panel wrote a detailed consensus report articulating the basis for its recommendation of Springfield,” Wray wrote, but that recommendation was overruled by a GSA official.
“Unfortunately, we have concerns about fairness and transparency in the process and GSA’s failure to adhere to its own site selection plan,” Wray wrote. “Despite our engagement with GSA over the last two months on these issues, our concerns about the process remain unresolved.”
Wray’s letter to the workforce emphasized “our concerns are not with the decision itself but with the process … For our part, we will continue to be clear about our process concerns, even as we work with GSA toward the design and construction of a facility.”
He also said the FBI hopes to secure funding to build office space in D.C. that would house up to 1,000 employees. It’s unclear if that building would be at its current location on Pennsylvania Avenue.
The GSA picked Greenbelt as the new headquarters site over two other finalists in the competition: Landover, which is also in Prince George’s County, and Springfield, in Fairfax County, Va.
In his Oct. 12 letter to GSA, Wray said the agency “cannot accept a site selection decision with these unresolved issues,” and asked that a new official be appointed “to re-run the site selection process.”
Those issues, according to the letter, include whether the official overseeing the site selection process disagreed on what Wray called “key areas,” and the official “disagreed with the panel’s unanimous rating of the Greenbelt site” in order to increase the rating of Greenbelt.
That official had worked previously for Metro, which owns the Greenbelt parcel, which the FBI said was a concern given how the decision-making was done. That official, Wray said, “was later granted overarching power to select the site without adhering to the recommendation of the unanimous panel and with limitless ability to decide when outside information should and should not be considered in making the site selection decision.”
The letter did not suggest “a lack of integrity” by the official, but said “for a project of this magnitude and significance,” the official making the decision “simply should not have previous, direct affiliation with one of the parties of this procurement.”