Paid surveys, which show good values for Kurz, have been processed as bogus invoices via the Ministry of Finance. This leads to the charge of infidelity. In addition, between mid-2016 and the first quarter of 2018, a total of 1.3 million euros was paid to the media through advertisements for compliant reporting (see the electronic subscription edition of the SN from 2021-10-07). The allegation of bribery and corruption is derived from this. Did Federal Chancellor Kurz rise from Foreign Minister to Chancellor only on the basis of bad polls? The allegations weigh heavily: They are determined against the Chancellor, his team, two media makers and two pollsters. A piquant detail on the side is that the judge who, at the urging of the ÖVP, questioned Kurz instead of the economic and corruption prosecutor on the allegation of false testimony before the Ibiza investigative committee, approved the house searches at the ÖVP headquarters and at Kurz's confidants. In addition, the ORF (Austrian state television) has now sent out unmistakable chat messages about the cause in the main news.
It would be desirable for the ÖVP as a party to acknowledge responsibility and draw conclusions and propose a successor candidate for Chancellor Kurz. Because of the serious allegations and their clarity, that would also be in the interests of the ÖVP voters. The Greens, who stood up as the party for clean environment and clean politics, cannot go on like this. Without the ÖVP there will be new elections sooner or later, because a majority in parliament is not possible without the FPÖ. With a party of corona deniers who rail against the vaccination (allegedly with the support of ServusTV), a responsible policy is probably not feasible in the long term. But what would the result of new elections be? A strengthened FPÖ, which then makes finding a majority even more difficult. One can only wish that the coalition between the ÖVP and the Greens can continue. That both parties can work together well, constructively and fruitfully, was just lately shown by the eco-social tax reform a few days ago (although a few environmentally-political horsefeet remain). The ÖVP must confess its responsibility and cannot rely on blackmailing the Greens or a cover-up by the media. It is quite possible that many media will boil up the allegations against Kurz for months without ever specifying what he is accused of; however, relying on souped-up reporting alone does not seem to be expedient in the long term to me.
In v0.8 we fixed an error that arose when the key obtained via X509_get_X509_PUBKEY was freed independently of the X509 certificate though it in deed is part of the cert. The error was found in networking.c. At the same time the author grepped for other usages of the X509_get_X509_PUBKEY function in all other files. It is a miracle why grep did not return any result at that time. Consequently the same error remained unfixed in dane-unbound.c and dane-direct.c. I had been a bit in wonder that this was the only point where the function was used but I did trust in the result of grep. For now I had discovered the error simply by reading the sources. Make sure you do not use any version before 0.8.4 without manually adding this fix because it is a severe security issue. It may crash a̅tea when a TLSA record contains a full cert or pubkey rather than a hash of it (which will be hardly used in practice though the TLSA response could be spoofed to pretend this)!
On September 2nd, the Court of Justice of the European Union passed a groundbreaking judgment: The parallel justice of the ECT (Energy Charter Treaty) is illegal. It is thwarting the switch to renewables, for example by requiring the Netherlands to pay billions in compensation to the coal companies UNIPER and RWE and by intimidating governments across Europe. Italy has already left the contract. France, Spain, Poland, Greece and Slovenia are calling for the entire EU to exit or want to exit themselves. Unfortunately, the ruling from September is not yet legally binding. Corresponding judgments are expected not before 2022. Over a million people have already signed the petition against the ECT which we have linked.
According to Global Witness more than 227 people were assassinated in 2020 who were engaging to protect nature and/or their base of live/living. The numbers are higher in reality because the data can not be collected correctly in countries with infringement of press freedom an civil liberties. According to Water Protector Legal Collective (WPLC) it were 331. Global Witness demonstrates that since the Paris Agreement there were four environmental defenders murdered each week. The numbers are on the rise and are now according to GW twice the number of 2013. WPLC says that 70% of the people killed were involved in in indigenous and land rights. Indigenous people are according to GW affected with a third of all killings right above the average as they only pose 5% of all global inhabitants. The deadliest countries were Columbia with 65 people being killed – since the end of the FARC the numbers have risen even more – Mexico with 30 people being killed, the Philippines with 29 and Brazil with 20 people officially counted.
