West using Ukraine as proxy to back terrorists in Africa – Russian UN envoy (VIDEO)

Double standards and hidden agendas are weakening the global fight against extremism, Vassily Nebenzia has warned

Published 6 Aug, 2026 10:55 | U

The terrorist threat in Africa is being intensified by former colonial powers that use Ukrainian proxies to provide extremist groups with dangerous technology, Russia’s permanent representative to the UN, Vassily Nebenzia, has said.

Moscow has repeatedly accused Kiev of employing terrorist methods in its conflict with Russia and of supporting extremist organizations abroad in an effort to undermine Russian interests.

Speaking at a UN Security Council meeting on Wednesday, Nebenzia said African countries, particularly those in the Sahel, are facing mounting security threats because of “support provided to illegal armed groups by former colonial powers driven by neo-colonial ambitions.”

France has significantly reduced its military presence in the region in recent years after several Sahel countries accused it of contributing to instability. French President Emmanuel Macron, however, has blamed Russia for encouraging the power shift.

Nebenzia said Moscow and the Sahel states agree that pressure from African armed groups stems from “criminal collusion between Ukraine, France, certain other countries, and terrorist groups.”

The Kiev regime has long been fully dependent economically and militarily on the EU and NATO countries, which exploit Ukraine to wage a proxy war against Russia,” he said.

“What they do in Africa is no different. By drawing Ukrainians into supporting terrorist groups in the Sahel, Western sponsors are once again pursuing their own objectives using someone else’s hands,” Nebenzia added.

The Russian diplomatalso warned that terrorist groups are increasingly taking advantage of new and emerging technologies, including digital currencies, artificial intelligence, and drones.

He said these developments pose serious challenges for security agencies and law enforcement, and called for a coordinated international response.

According to Nebenzia, efforts to combat terrorism are being further undermined by “double standards,” ”hidden agendas,” and the direct interference of malicious actors.

(https://www.rt.com/russia/643932-nebenzia-ukraine-aftrica-terrorism/

Video too large

More than 600,000 voter files ripped off Arizona site in 2020 by hacker, but DOJ didn't prosecute 1/2

Arizona's largest county suffered a significant breach of its election data inthe days before the 2020 presidential election when a self-described hacker foiled security and obtained 633,000 voter registration files but the Biden Justice Department and local prosecutors declined to bring charges even after the FBI got the suspect to confess, according to declassified documents made public Thursday by the White House.

The scraping of Maricopa County's voter registration files was the most flagged security incident in a cyberintrusion log kept by U.S. spy agencies in the days around the Nov. 3, 2020 election, and it caused an extensive FBI investigation that led agents to a home in Fountain Hills, Ariz., the memos show.

The man the FBI confronted admitted he wrote a computer script to exploit the county voter systems security and scraped the files, which included 930 with "sensitive voter information like domestic violence victims, judges and law enforcement officers," according to the FBI case files declassified and made public by President Donald Trump's White House Government Transparency Task Force.

FBI Director Kash Patel sent a letter to that task force this week stating the bureau spent "significant resources" but could not get the U.S. Attorney's Office in Phoenix, the Arizona Attorney General’s Office, the Maricopa County Arizona Attorney’s Office or the Pinal County, Arizona Attorney’s Office to bring charges despite an admission from the alleged hacker.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office declined to prosecute the alleged hacker on July 12, 2021, under the Biden Administration, according to the FBI. The newly released memos do not state when the other prosecutorial agencies made similar decisions not to bring charges, but the full case was officially closed in 2023.

Just one day before the Nov. 3 election, the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office submitted a tip through the Arizona Counterterrorism Intelligence Center that there had been “an attempt to scrape voter registration information,” according to one FBI summary.

According to that memo, an unidentified intruder gained access to voter registration data on the recorder’s website by using a “Powershell script” that exploited a weakness in security. More than 633,000 voter records were exfiltrated between Oct. 21, 2020, and Nov. 2, 2020, the memos state.

According to Microsoft, "a PowerShell script is a plain text file saved with a .ps1 extension that contains a sequence of commands (called cmdlets), variables, and logic to automate tasks."

Voter registration files do not include ballots, and there's no evidence votes were changed in the incident, But the U.S. intelligence community has been warning since 2020 that if bad actors gained access to such files they could hamper the ability of voters to cast ballots in the future. China has obtained about 220 million such files, documents released last month by President Donald Trump show.

The Maricopa County incident appeared frequently in the Intelligence Community’s cyber instruction logs in the days leading up to and on the day of the presidential election. Those logs were also made public, with redactions for sensitive information, by the White House. They show that by 7:15 AM on Election Day, the Intelligence Community knew that the Maricopa intrusion had scooped up non-public information.

https://justthenews.com/government/courts-law/6amhundreds-thousands-voter-files-were-hacked-arizona-2020-doj-declined

>>24908274

2/2

At the time, Maricopa County election officials said that the suspect accessed the website where people could register to vote, but could not pierce the server where the county’s voter registration files are actually stored. The county also said that the only information obtained on individual voters were voter registration numbers, but this is contradicted by the FBI, which identified more than 900 voter records that contained private information, like domestic violence victim status.

The FBI traced the intrusion to a Fountain Hills, Ariz., home and agents were dispatched several days after the election to interview the subject and execute a search warrant on the premises.

The man was forthcoming, telling federal agents exactly how he discovered the vulnerability in the Maricopa County Recorder’s website and how he wrote a computer script to exploit it, according to an FD-302 memorializing the interview. An FD-302 is the official FBI form used by special agents to write down a summary of an interview with a witness, suspect, or informant.

The suspect, who described himself as a “hacker or tinkerer,” told the agents that he first discovered the vulnerabilities in Maricopa’s website about two months earlier, in September 2020. “He noticed his voter ID appeared in the URL” after entering his own voter information and “tested the vulnerability by entering several seven-digit numbers into the URL path resulting in access to different voter registration information,” the agents wrote.

The man said that after discovering the vulnerability, he developed a “PowerShell script” that he ran from the beginning of October until around November 2, 2020, the day before the election. At that point, Maricopa County had detected the intrusions and “fixed their firewall,” according to the FBI memo.

The man estimated he obtained between 1 million and 2 million voter files.

The FBI agents noted that the suspect eventually “realized the gravity of the situation and became scared,” knowing that “he would get a visit from [law enforcement].” Though he considered telling the media about his actions, he decided to keep his breach a secret and scrubbed his hard drives and deleted files from his Google Cloud, according to the FBI-302.

The same day of the interview, FBI agents executed a search warrant on the suspect’s home. The search was publicly reported by Forbes in December 2020. The Arizona Daily Independent also reported that a home was targeted by FBI agents seeking evidence of a cyberattack on a then-unnamed organization.

The agents reportedly seized eight hard drives, three computers, and a bag of USB sticks.

Forbes reported that a man who lived at the address was previously investigated by police in 2011 when he lived in Wisconsin. While working as the IT administrator for the City of Ashland, local police questioned him over a series of spoof emails sent out ahead of a local election.

After both federal and state prosecutorial agencies declined to bring charges using the FBI’s findings, the investigative team requested that the bureau close the case in May 2023, nearly three years after the intrusions were first detected, an additional FBI memo shows. The agents cited the declinations to justify closing the file.

https://justthenews.com/government/courts-law/6amhundreds-thousands-voter-files-were-hacked-arizona-2020-doj-declined

Capitol agenda: Summer exit eludes Senate

All 100 senators still need to agree to a deal to speed up consideration of an agenda that would otherwise take weeks to accomplish.

Calen Razor

CALEN RAZOR

08/06/2026, 8:00AM ET

Don’t expect the typically strong smell of Thursday jet fumes in the halls of the Senate just yet.

Ideally, senators would be leaving town for a five-week recess after business Thursday, but a legislative pile-up and pressure from President Donald Trump has made that impossible.

All 100 senators still need to agree to a deal to speed up consideration of a measure to extend government funding through Dec. 11, a Russia sanctions bill, dozens of nominees including Todd Blanche and a bipartisan college athletics bill — an agenda that would otherwise take weeks to accomplish.

Republicans also need to make a decision about whether they’re going to attempt to take an initial step on a third party-line spending bill, which includes election security measures Trump is demanding.

Senate Majority Leader JohnThune said Wednesday evening the vibes were “starting to pick up” in terms of a deal taking shape. But he cautioned on jet fumes:

“You’re not going to be smelling those anytime real soon. …We’ve obviously got, like I said, a stack of stuff to do,” he said.

While Thune hasn’t ruled out taking up a budget blueprint for the GOP bill, he said it was “hard to say at this point” if the votes were there.

However senators are eyeing an exit strategy to allow Republicans to leave town while giving Trump a small win by taking up his elections measure. With that option, Republicans would bring up legislation related to the SAVE America Act instead of advancing a budget resolution, three people granted anonymity to discuss internal discussions said.

Thune said it “remains to be seen” whether that’s enough for hard-liners who have threatened to oppose leaving town without a vote on it.

Also still in limbo is Trump’s attorney general pick Todd Blanche, who met Wednesday with GOP holdouts Sens. Bill Cassidy and Lisa Murkowski.Neither said afterward how they would vote on the nomination — and Blanche needs to secure at least one of their votes.

Government funding legislation is also stuck in the pile-up, with Republicans grappling with intraparty wrangling over hemp language. And an agreement to speed up consideration of the Russia sanctions measure is also in limbo as Democrats work through concerns in their ranks about it.

And Democrats are waiting for smoke signals from Republicans on whether they’ll force them to vote on cryptocurrency legislation that many of them currently oppose (more on that below). Dems are eager to avoid taking that vote ahead of the recess, potentially fueling tens of millions of dollars of campaign spending by industry allies.

What else we’re watching:

— JOHNSON BULLISH ON SPEAKERSHIP: Mike Johnson said he is planning to remain speaker if House Republicans hold onto the House — but didn’t weigh in on his future plans if Democrats flip the majority. “I don’t have to answer that question because we’re gonna win,” Johnson told Dasha Burns on Tuesday in an interview for POLITICO’s The Conversation. “I’m gonna remain speaker of the House,” he added. Johnson would face difficult political headwinds to stay on as minority leader if Democrats take back the chamber, but he dodged on the topic, reiterating his optimism.

— FARM BILL OUTLOOK DIMS: Agriculture ranking member Amy Klobuchar is signaling she’ll oppose the GOP-led farm bill up for a markup Thursday, likely scuttling chances it’ll advance. At issue is a provision to delay requirements that states pay for part of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits. Agriculture Chair John Boozman has offered a one-year delay while Democrats are asking for two years. The nutrition aid requirements were passed as part of the GOP’s megabill last summer. Boozman needs to win support from at least one Democrat to advance the bill out of committee given Sen. Mitch McConnell’s prolonged absence.

https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2026/08/06/congress/summer-exit-eludes-senate-01026760

Senate’s summer pileup is threatening a quick recess escape

Republicans are discussing several options, including holding fresh votes related to the SAVE America Act.

Jordain Carney

Ideally, the Senate would be adjourning for a five-week break in less than 24 hours.

Instead, Republican senators are still navigating what Majority Leader John Thune described as a “train wreck” as they face a pileup of legislation, key nominations and public pressure from President Donald Trump and angry conservatives to show progress on a GOP election bill Trump views as his “No. 1 priority.”

They’re heading into Thursday — when the scent of jet fumes typically starts wafting through the halls of Congress — without a deal that would let them speed up votes on a government funding bill or long-stalled Russia sanctions bill.

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/08/05/senate-summer-recess-escape-01026713