https://www.waterstones.com/author/robert-cook/435753/page
Contact rj.cook@btinternet.com
April 11th 2024
Kyiv: Largest power plant in region destroyed in Russian attack
Russia destroyed the largest power-generating plant in Ukraine’s Kyiv region in a missile attack on Thursday, as President Volodomyr Zelensky accused the West of “turning a blind eye” to his country’s need for more air defenses. Ukraine’s Air Force said it shot down 18 of the incoming missiles and 39 of the drones.
Comment The Western elite’s attitude to Russia has been patroninsing since before the 1917 Revolutions. The west, with its aspiring snobbish bourgeoise and deferential underclass which is lined up for the traditional cannon fodder, still has a colonial mindset. I talked to a lot of people this morning when I was out and about in Milton Keynes.
I saw no sign that anyone saw the danger from the current ansd real imperialist war mongering. They believe all the propaganda coming from spoilt elite politicians with their places booked in a well appointed super bunker. These people have no idea that the cost of living crisis is a cost of war crisis which we lower orders bear the brunt of while weapons makers, supermarkets like Tesco and other elites make fortunes.
These people don’t care how many of us they kill, maim and bereave so long as they protect and extend ‘their’ freedoms and ‘their democracy’ at the expense of the diverse multi cultural masses.
R J Cook
Why Is the American Library Association Whitewashing the History of Ukrainian Nazis?
In honoring a book depicting Ukrainian volunteers in the Waffen SS as heroes and patriots, the group reveals historical ignorance—or indifference to antisemitism.
German imperialism must answer for complicity in Gaza genocide
On 8 and 9 April, the International Court of Justice in The Hague heard a complaint by Nicaragua accusing the German government of violating the UN Genocide Convention and other international agreements.
Biden vows ‘ironclad’ support for Israel amid Iran attack fears
President Joe Biden has promised Israel “ironclad” US support amid fears that Tehran could launch reprisals for an attack that killed senior Iranians.
Mr Biden warned that Iran is threatening to launch a “significant attack” after Israel struck the Iranian consulate in Syria 10 days ago.
“We’re going to do all we can to protect Israel’s security,” he added.
Earlier on Wednesday, Iran’s leader said the Israeli attack in Damascus was equivalent to an attack on Iran itself.
“When they attacked our consulate area, it was like they attacked our territory,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in a televised speech.
“The evil regime must be punished, and it will be punished.”
It is unclear what form any reprisal attack would take.
For Iran to strike Israel directly would risk an even greater escalation in the conflict, and analysts have said Iran does not have the military capability for a significant confrontation.
A possible alternative is an attack via an Iranian proxy like Hezbollah, which has traded fire with Israel across the border from Lebanon almost daily since 8 October. Those exchanges have intensified in recent weeks.
“Hezbollah is very capable, hundreds of thousands of rockets and missiles there, on the border that can reach all the way into southern Israel,” Joe Buccino, former Communications Director at the US military’s Central Command, told the BBC.
“Hezbollah is much more capable than Hamas. So they’d have the capability to do significant damage into Israel.”
On Sunday an Iranian official warned Israel’s embassies were “no longer safe”, suggesting a consulate building could be a possible target.
Experts have also suggested Iran could target Israel with a cyber-attack.
- How might Iran seek to hurt Israel after general’s killing?
- Can US pressure deliver Israel-Hamas truce in Gaza?
- Biden pressure on Israel not enough, say dissenting US officials
Thirteen people were killed in the 1 April attack on the Iranian consulate building, including senior Iranian military leaders. Among them was Brig-Gen Mohammad Reza Zahedi, a senior commander of Iran’s elite Quds Force in Syria and Lebanon.
Israel has not claimed responsibility for the attack, but is widely considered to have been behind it.
US and Israeli forces in the region have been put on high alert in the days since. Last week the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) cancelled leave for soldiers serving with combat units and called up reservists to bolster air defence units.
Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs Israel Katz responded on social media to Ayatollah Khamenei’s comments by saying if Tehran attacked from its territory, Israel would react and “attack in Iran”.
Meanwhile the head of US forces in the region, Gen Michael Kurilla, is to discuss the threat of a possible Iranian attack in talks with Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant and army Chief of Staff Lt Gen Herzi Halevi in Israel on Thursday, according to Israeli media reports.
Mr Biden’s remarks came as he was speaking to journalists at the White House on Wednesday alongside Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.
“As I told Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu, our commitment to Israel’s security against these threats from Iran and its proxies is ironclad – let me say it again, ironclad,” Mr Biden said.
His comments come one day after an interview, recorded a week ago, was aired in which Mr Biden urged Mr Netanyahu to “just call for a ceasefire” in Gaza and in which he said he disagreed with the prime minister’s war strategy.
“I think what he’s doing is a mistake. I don’t agree with his approach,” he said in the interview with US network Univision.
It also comes days after a tense phone call between Mr Biden and Mr Netanyahu in the wake of the Israeli killing of seven humanitarian aid workers in Gaza.
Mr Biden has sharpened his rhetoric over Israel’s conduct in the nearly six-month-old war sparked by Hamas’s 7 October attack, and voiced his growing frustration with Mr Netanyahu. Iran backs Hamas and Iranian officials have praised the attack in which about 1,200 people were killed and 253 taken to Gaza as hostages.
US officials have been attempting to send a message to the Iranians that, despite differences of opinion between Mr Biden and Mr Netanyahu, any attack on Israel will be met with an aggressive US response.
In an effort to ease tensions, the foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar and Iraq spoke to their Iranian counterpart this week, according to Axios.
The ministers were asked to convey a message from Mr Biden’s senior Middle East advisor, Brett McGurk, about the need to de-escalate.
According to Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry, more than 33,000 people – mostly women and children – have been killed in the Israeli offensive, which was triggered by Hamas’s attack.
Additional reporting by Raffi Berg
April 10th 2024
U.K Leading War Monger, War Profiteer & Liar For Corrupt Ukraine – A Future Democracy In Its’ Own Image.
R J Cook
Foreign Secretary Lord David Cameron has urged US politicians to release billions of dollars of extra funding to boost Ukraine’s military, …
Lord Cameron: “Ukraine can win this war” if they get …
In Washington, Cameron plans to urge US lawmakers to approve a new aid package for Ukraine, warning Congress that it is putting the security of …
In Washington, Cameron plans to urge US lawmakers to approve a new aid package for Ukraine, warning Congress that it is putting the security of …
In Washington, Cameron plans to urge US lawmakers to approve a new aid package for Ukraine, warning Congress that it is putting the security of ..
Lord Cameron will push for Ukraine to be given the resources needed to “go on the offensive” in 2025 and will urge congressional leaders to “ …
April 9th 2024
Ukraine war: UN body urges restraint after Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant hit
By Ian Aikman
BBC News
A new drone attack on Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia power plant has raised the risk of a “major nuclear accident”, the UN’s atomic watchdog has warned.
Russia said Ukraine was behind the attack, which it said injured three people. Ukraine has denied involvement.
The giant Russian-held nuclear plant, with six reactors, is on the frontline of the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
The UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has repeatedly warned against such attacks.
IAEA head Rafael Grossi said Sunday’s drone strike was “reckless” and “a major escalation of the nuclear safety and security dangers” facing the plant.
The Zaporizhzhia plant, in southern Ukraine, is the largest in Europe. Russian forces seized it shortly after launching their February 2022 full-scale invasion and have occupied it ever since, alongside most of the Zaporizhzhia region.
The facility stopped generating power in 2022, but needs a constant supply of electricity to cool one of its reactors which is in a state of “hot conservation”, meaning it is not fully offline.
The IAEA, which has a team of experts at Zaporizhzhia, confirmed “physical impact of drone attacks” at the plant, including at one of the reactors.
The plant’s Russian-installed administration said radiation levels were normal and that there was no serious damage.
The IAEA said the damage had not compromised nuclear safety, but it warned that “this is a serious incident with potential to undermine [the] integrity of the reactor’s containment system”.
Mr Grossi specified there had been “at least three direct hits” against the plant’s “main reactor containment structures”.
Russia’s neighbours urge Nato allies to bring back military service
Related Topics
By Nick Beake
BBC News, on the Estonian-Russian border
Rain drips down the glasses of new recruit Toivo Saabas, tracing the contours of the green and black face paint that completes his camouflage.
Lying on the saturated ground, and peering through the sight of his gun, the only frailty that threatens to give away his position is the plume of air he breathes out silently into the icy Estonian forest.
Then comes the deafening call to attack.
The 25-year-old springs to his feet. Forming a line with his brothers in arms, he bounds through the trees towards the Russian border.
As he advances to the clatter of enemy fire, the Southampton University mechanical engineering graduate knows that one day this could all be for real.
“We’re practising for any threat,” he says.
“We’re ready for anything that comes to Estonia and we’re ready to defend the country.”
Toivo, from the capital Tallinn, is among the current crop of young Estonians undergoing their military service – a duty all men over 18 are asked to carry out. For women, it’s voluntary.
As the Cold War ended, and relations with post-Soviet Russia warmed in the 1990s, conscription appeared consigned to history in many parts of Europe.
But not in Estonia, where it would have been impossible for the collective pain of occupation and deportation to have faded away.
- What is Nato and why has Sweden joined?
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And now, following President Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, conscription is being rebooted and expanded across Europe, with those living on Russia’s doorstep urging their Nato allies further afield, including the UK, to follow suit.
This week Norway announced it was increasing the number of conscripted soldiers after Denmark said last month it intends to extend conscription to women and increase the duration of service.
Latvia and Sweden recently restarted military service and Lithuania brought it back after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.
“It takes a toll on you,” says a drenched Toivo, explaining that the training has been the toughest experience of his life.
“But in the end, it’s service for your country. Being prepared for anything is better than kind of sneaking off and trying to evade this service.”
Rain has turned to hail and then to snow in a matter of minutes.
Everyone is soaked to their skin. But as the simulation ends, relief quickly leads to animated conversation and laughter eclipsing the hardship of the previous hours.
“It’s the conscripts in Ukraine I feel sorry for,” says Captain Mikk Haabma who is overseeing proceedings.
“They are fighting for their lives.”
Standing more than 2m tall, the 38-year-old has a natural advantage when it comes to surveying the progress of his new intake.
“Our country is based on reserves and these guys are filling the slots all the time. But also, they’re getting the skills to get by in life – especially building their confidence. In a few weeks from now, these guys will be ready to fight the enemy.”
He means Russia.
‘In the end we have Nato’
Russia has never attacked a country within Nato, whose collective defence pact means that an attack on one member constitutes an attack on all. Indeed, the Kremlin ridicules suggestions it might.
Three Nato countries – the UK, the US and France – each have nuclear weapons, as does Russia, so there would be concerns over the risk of nuclear escalation as a result of such a conflict.
However, if the Russians did attack, I ask, what would they be confronted with?
“A massive defeat,” Captain Haabma replies.
“Of course, they have the numbers, but in the end on a strategic level we have Nato and the technical superiority.”
The transatlantic military alliance – now a club of 32 including new members Finland and Sweden – is celebrating its 75th anniversary this week.
So what is the overwhelming feeling in Estonia today?
A sense of security being part of an enlarged alliance? Or fear about what Vladimir Putin may do next?
“I think it’s both,” replies Kaja Kallas in her prime ministerial office in Tallinn.
For her, Nato allies keeping their promise to spend 2% of GDP on defence is what’s crucial.
“In 1938, it was clear that the war was coming so the defence expenditure was increased by 100% but it was already too late.”
She continues, “This is what we have to do now in order to preserve our way of living, in order to preserve peace in Europe.”
However, in 2024, fewer than two thirds of Nato members are on course to reach their 2% funding goal, a shortfall that perpetually irked US President Donald Trump during his time in the White House.
Ms Kallas, who’s led Estonia since 2021, sees conscription as another integral part of both providing a deterrence to Russia but also stronger defence if it does attack.
“We have a reserve army of 44,000 people that would equal, for Great Britain, around two million people. Two million people who are ready to defend their country and know what they have to do.”
After she mentions Britain unprompted, I ask whether she would in fact recommend conscription to the UK.
“Of course, every country decides for themselves, we are all democracies, but I recommend this in many aspects.”
‘We lost our independence once before’
When I recall that the head of the British Army was rebuked by Downing Street after saying Britain should train a “citizen army” ready to fight a war on land in the future, Kallas widens her eyes.
“Well it doesn’t surprise me because we have different historical backgrounds. We have lost our independence and freedom once and we don’t want to lose it again. They say that you only understand freedom and what it means when you don’t have it.”
A UK Ministry of Defence spokesperson told the BBC there is “absolutely no suggestion of a return to conscription”.
The British government says £50bn is being invested in its armed forces in 2024 to tackle multiple threats, including Russian aggression in Ukraine, and that “increasing recruitment and improving retention across the services is a top priority”.
Military service may well be going through a renaissance, but that doesn’t mean all young Estonians are filled with unbridled enthusiasm for it.
The warmth and buzz of F-Hoone bar in the centre of the capital is a far cry from the rain-soaked forest where the conscripts have been toiling away.
The capital is gearing up for Tallinn Music Week, an annual celebration with live performances embracing a range of genres.
Among those taking the stage will be The Boondocks – a four piece indie rock band originally formed in Pärnu, the coastal city in the south west of the country.
“I’m not a soldier” sings 25-year-old Villem Sarapuu in their track Smokin’ Aces.
But every morning for two months he did in fact pull on military fatigues for his national service.
“To begin with, I really didn’t want to do it,” he confides.
“I don’t think there are many people who are voluntarily going there.”
He says at first it took a considerable mental toll.
“You’re isolated from everyone and the wider world, but you’re still in Tallinn so it’s like a weird limbo.”
After the initial physical training, Villem spent his remaining six months with the military orchestra ultimately performing at the Independence Day parade.
“My friends doing the real service were laughing at me – in a positive way. But I was doing the same thing: it’s representing your country, you don’t have to be in the trenches.
Sitting next to him is band member Hendrik Tamberg, 28.
As a conscientious objector, he was spared military service and instead spent a year caring for vulnerable adults with mental health problems.
“I found it incredibly rewarding but I didn’t have the camaraderie of people going through the tough forest hikes. I did feel that I missed out on something.”
As for lead singer Villem, he says he now looks back at his military training with happy memories and says it’s a stark contrast to a deep collective unease his generation feels at the prospect that Russia may attack.
“If I think about the free will of people, conscription isn’t a very nice thing to force people to do,” he muses.
“But when it comes to a country such as Estonia, pretty small, it’s absolutely necessary to recruit people to do this. Or this country won’t exist any more.”
Additional reporting by Bruno Boelpaep and Maarten Willems.
Lord Cameron rules out Western boots on the ground in Ukraine
By Jennifer McKiernan
BBC political reporter
Lord Cameron has ruled out Western troops being sent into Ukraine to avoid giving Russian President Vladimir Putin “a target”.
The foreign secretary acknowledged that the “war will be lost if the allies don’t step up” on the BBC’s Ukrainecast podcast.
But asked whether Western nations should send troops into Ukraine, Lord Cameron replied “no”.
He added Nato must be in the “best possible shape” by the US elections.
Lord Cameron was speaking at a two-day North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) summit of 32 foreign ministers in Brussels.
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- What is Nato and why has Sweden joined?
Nato boss Jens Stoltenberg has floated plans for a 100 billion euro (£86bn), five-year package of military aid to Ukraine, with the aim of finalising a package in time for the next summit in Washington in July.
The move is aimed at allaying concerns around the outcome of the US election in November, with candidate Donald Trump suggesting the US could cut support, and claiming some Nato members were not paying their way.
One diplomat, quoted by the Reuters news agency, suggested the package “goes some way to protecting in case of Trump. But it is impossible to create something Trump-proof”.
April 6th 2024
Israel’s military says it has recovered body of a hostage from Gaza
Israel’s military says it has recovered the body of a man taken hostage and held in Gaza, in an overnight raid on Khan Yunis.
All of this is approved and made law by the self interested world of this supercilious patronising ruling elite and any WOKE pressure groups that suit their selfish ends.. Meanwhile their greed culture, pleasure bent and self interested ruling classes can’t stop virtue signalling.
R J Cook
Elad Katzir was taken from Kibbutz Nir Oz during the Hamas attacks on southern Israel on 7 October.
His body was recovered from Gaza overnight and brought back to Israel, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and Israel Securities Authority (ISA) said.
He was identified by medical officials, and his family has been informed.
The IDF and ISA said in a joint statement: “The body of the abductee Elad Katzir, who according to intelligence was murdered in captivity by the Islamic Jihad terrorist organisation, was rescued overnight from Khan Yunis and returned to Israeli territory.”
They said his remains were located using “precise” intelligence.
Mr Katzir, 47, was abducted from Nir Oz with his mother Hanna, 77.
She was released in November, while his father, Avraham, was murdered in the kibbutz, the IDF and ISA said.
Fleeing For Our Lives – by R J Cook.
Comment I very much doubt if any hostages are still alive. HAMAS have a a lot to hide. If they are not totally routed Israel’s survival will be at stake. Appeasement never works. Ask why the western ruling elite wants to appease HAMAS brutal terrifying insanity while ruling out anything that can be classed as appeasing the very rational, logical and patient Vladimir Putin.
So if Biden and increasingly Islamic U.K wants a ceasefire, they should start working on evacuating Jews to the U.S, U.K or Europe and let HAMAS have their mythical nation from the river to the sea. I am sure the west will give even more foreign aid from their bottomless pot of lower class tax payers money, to sustain the resultant ever expanding popualtion.
This conflict is rooted in Islamic hatred and racism. Islam is inherently supremacist and ideologcal. Its followers are not interested in their faith’s derivation from Christianity which in turn derived from Judaism.
As former Head of Religious Education at a large secondary school, I am aware how dangerous religion can be, pandering to hysteria and herd instinct, as we have seen with Islamic terrorism and harm done by religious fanatics who are political, with religion working on their psyche as a type of obessive compulsive disorder.
That is why a Paris teacher had his head hacked off for using material upsetting to a Muslim student and another headmaster fleeing for his life. The writing is more than on the wall. It is everywhere.
This insanity suits the ruling western elite whose tactics are the tried and tested divide and rule method. As long as they are safe and making money, they don’t care how many of the masses are killed.
R J Cook
April 3rd 2024
Russia says NATO, at 75, has returned to Cold War mindset
By Reuters
April 3, 202412:58 PM GMT
MOSCOW, April 3 (Reuters) – Russia said on Wednesday that NATO had returned to a Cold War mindset as the alliance marks its 75th anniversary this week.
“Today, in relations with Russia, the bloc has returned to Cold War settings,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told reporters.
She said NATO has no place in the “multipolar world” that Moscow says it seeks to build in order to end U.S. dominance, but that it remains the focus of Russian attention.
President Vladimir Putin launched what he called his “special military operation” in Ukraine in 2022 with the stated aim of preventing NATO from expanding its footprint close to Russia. But the war has served to galvanise the alliance, which has expanded to 32 members by admitting Finland and Sweden.
NATO foreign ministers were meeting in Brussels on Wednesday to discuss proposals that would give the alliance a more direct role in coordinating the supply of arms, ammunition and equipment to Ukraine.
Western governments say they are helping Ukraine fight for its survival in the face of Russia’s invasion. Zakharova said NATO’s history was “full of aggressive adventures that brought wars and destruction to many nations”, and its anniversary was no cause for celebration.
The Reuters Daily Briefing newsletter provides all the news you need to start your day.
Reporting by Reuters; Editing by Nick Macfie
Comment What can a thinking person say about the above ?. Media, military made men and women ( persons ), the mad masses, weapons makers and all other war profiteers are just gagging for war. I have to choose my response to the above carefully, otherwise I will be dealt with as a traitor. Over here in U.K, Germany, France and U.S just can’t wait fof to break out into Russia fast enough. NATO hasn’t learned. Like Dunkirk, Vietnam and Afghanistan, the imbeciles want to send their annoying young men off to death and / or mutilation making room for a people they expect to be more docile and profitable. Where have all the hippies gone, long time passing ?
R J Cook
Macron switches from dove to hawk on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
By Hugh Schofield
BBC News, París
What came over Emmanuel Macron to turn him from appeaser to warmonger in the matter of Russia and Ukraine?
That – crudely put – is the question being asked in chancelleries across Europe, as the French president warms to his new role as the continent’s resister-in-chief to Vladimir Putin.
Certain countries – the Baltics, Poland – welcome President Macron’s apparent conversion to their “realistic” assessment of the Moscow threat.
Others – notably Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Germany – are aghast at this new-found va-t-en-guerre (gung-ho) French spirit.
All are confused and uncertain. How genuine is the new Macron line? Is his recent refusal to rule out sending troops to Ukraine just another of his surprises – testimony to his insatiable need to cut a diplomatic dash?
And how much of his new positioning is purely politics?
European elections are approaching, and the hard-right of Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella looks set to trounce the Macronites.
So is Emmanuel Macron using Ukraine to create a fault line between his side and the opposition, setting a contrast between his own lucid belligerence and Ms Le Pen’s turbid complicity with Moscow in the past?
Read More https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-68575251
Far Wrong By R J Cook
Comment The French voting non Islamic masses are fools if they choose voting for Russia Bashing to defeat Marine Le Pen’s honest assessmeent of France and Europe’s problems in a country where one teacher was hacked to death for upsetting Muslims and a head teacher forced to resign for upsetting them, for his own safety. There was also the horror of the massacre of the entire Charlie Hebdot staff for disrespecting Allah by publishing images offensive to Islam.
The term ‘right wing’ came after the Bourbon Restoration in 1815, when the conservatives in the Chamber of Representatives sat to the right of the speaker and heirs to the Revolution to the left. The new left abuse all onservatives across Europe with the derogatory epithet and condemnation ‘Far Right.’ It never occurs to these people, who have brought us to the brink of a World War Three holocaust, to listen to conservative. They tolerate no suggestion, that they are ‘FAR Wrong.’
R J Cook
Will Truth Social solve Donald Trump’s money problems? (Edited)
By Natalie Sherman & Chris Newlands
Business reporters, BBC News
The share price of Donald Trump’s media company has fallen from last week’s high when it officially listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange.
But it is still worth more than $7bn (£5.6bn) at current prices – an astonishing sum given the business behind it.
So what is the Truth Social platform, who owns it, how many users does it have, and how much money does it make? And is it the answer to Mr Trump’s spiralling legal bills?
What are Trump Media and Truth Social?
Trump Media & Technology Group was founded in 2021 after Mr Trump lost the presidential election and was temporarily booted from major social media platforms, including Twitter and Facebook, which accused him of inciting violence.
The idea was pitched to him by two men, former contestants on his reality TV show, The Apprentice, who saw an opportunity to create an alternative to the mainstream social media sites.
In 2022 Trump Media launched its first – and to date only – product for the public: the social media platform Truth Social.
Much of Truth Social’s functionality is identical to X. Users are able to post ‘truths’ or ‘retruths’ as well as send direct messages. Adverts, meanwhile, are called ‘sponsored truths’.
Conversations in online forums suggest at least some of those shareholders see their stock purchase as a bet on Mr Trump and a way to support him as his legal troubles, and the bills that accompany them, pile up.
Mr Trump has been ordered to pay more than $350m in damages in a civil fraud case, with interest charges potentially adding another $100m.
So will this solve Donald Trump’s financial problems?
After the merger was completed, Mr Trump saw his net worth more than double to over $5bn overnight, according to Forbes.
Mr Trump is barred from selling his roughly 78m shares for six months, unless the company decides to grant him a waiver.
But he stands to earn a windfall should he decide to cash in – even if the price drops sharply, as many analysts predict.
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Read More https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68716628
April 2nd 2024
Without a Medieval Mindset It Makes No Sense
- Collective Punishment Or Collective Insanity ? by R J Cook
Here in the corrupt west we are supposed to forget how we lower class masses are being abused by a pleasure bent political and corporate elite masquerading as democrats. We are supposed to believe that BBC , Sky and CBS are top of the trustworthy media elite media and that Donald Trump is a criminal and sex offender. We are supposed to be pleased that Ukraine has pushed more than 1,300km (807 miles) from the Ukraine-Russia border boasting responsibility for a drone attack in Russia’s Tatarstan regionin which 12 people were injured, are the deepest into Russian territory since the start of the war. They hit an oil refinery in nearby Nizhnekamsk and the town of Yelabuga, in the Alabuga “special economic zone” where drones are thought to be produced, and around 05:45 local time (02:45 GMT). Media reports, at least 12 people – all of them students – were injured in Yelabuga.
Meanwhile, according to the BBC Seven people working for food aid charity World Central Kitchen (WCK) have been killed in an Israeli strike in Gaza. UK’s foreign secretary. Lord Cameron said British nationals have been killed. Others who died were Australian, Polish, Palestinian, and a dual US-Canadian citizen.
WCK say Australia’s PM has said he expects “full accountability” after Australian worker Lalzawmi “Zomi” Frankcom was listed among the dead. Israel’s military says it is conducting a “thorough review” into the incident.
A Palestinian medical source told the BBC the workers had been wearing bullet-proof vests bearing the charity’s logo. The CEO of World Central Kitchen says it was an “unforgivable attack” . The organisation is pausing its operation.
As if all of this was not enough: Iran’s Revolutionary Guards say seven officers have been killed in an Israeli strike on the Iranian consulate building in Syria’s capital, Damascus. Brig-Gen Mohammad Reza Zahedi, a senior commander of the elite Quds Force, and Brig-Gen Mohammad Hadi Haji-Rahimi, his deputy, were named among the dead.
At this moment, storms and wet weather are engulfing the northern hemisphere. Although not all are immediately apparent or seemingly significant in the midst of conflict, engaging in war negatively impacts our climate in a multitude of ways. On the battlefield, for example, large amounts of greenhouse gases are emitted from the fuel used by military activities.
So the war against climaate change should be abandoned for the war to support the planet eating global elite’s war to control the world, led by the Anglo U.S led NATO and Corporate Global Capitalism. These people’s leadership demonstrates the same psychosis, though more subtle, than the late Adolph Hitler and friends. These people’s lust for land, resources and power is so insane that they will destroy the planet as we know it if necessary, if their plan to villify Russia as the actual Nazis here and to subvert Russia does not work.
The episodes mentioned above are just a few recent moments from the Great World War Three Show. Here in the U.K, mainstream news providers BBC and Sky repeat their pompous messages of ‘unspun’ ‘context’ and ‘verified’ to protect their dumbed down viewers from doubt. Britain leads the western world in sophistcated propanda, claiming the moral right to reach out with BBC world service into Russia, though pressing France to shut down the satellite and thus close down RT services in Europe and the U.K.
Speaking from and about the U.K, here World War Two did not end for the masses in May 1945. Bombed out people remained homeless or living in slums well into the 1950s. I remember the North London bombsites. My Cockney parents were lucky to escape into the Buckimghamshire countryside where my mother had a property owning Uncle who gave her a house at peppercorn rent just to cover his costs. But throughout the 1950s, apart from day trips to Great Yarmouth, Southend and Clacton in a black pre war hire car, it was the Greenline coach from Aylesbury to Marble Arch. The beaches had been opened up after the war and the seaside was the place for hopeful new parents to forget the misery of wartime carnage, bereavement and severe shortages. For me, as a young urchin, playing on London bombsites was a fantasy world far away from the reality my parents and London uncles did not want to talk about.
After years of powerful post war people and propagandists ruling the world while ostracising Russia, we have a revival of the insanity that created the colonial rivalry and jelaousy of Germany’s rising power that provoked World War One and the collective punishment of Germans that caused Hitler, the NAZIS and World War Two. As a college lecturer in Political History in the 1980s, I discovered how resistant my mature students were to the truth about Britain , its wars’ and how everything connects.
Many were openly hostile to the truth. Average British people, especially religious maniacs, still are, believing their costly support for one party Ukraine under its western placeman is a cause worth fighting for. This it will be for the rich if they win before a nuclear hollocaust becomes Putin’s last resort for Russia’s to have a survival of sorts. It is easy for the elite’s elite media to cast Putin in the role of Hitler while war mongering Anglo American fat cats pump out propaganda and censor the news.
The Israel connection is problematic for the United States as what Trump called the ‘swamp’ fights desperately to present Biden and Harris – the president in waiting combining the liberal virtues of darkish skin and gender – as the only options for December’s election. These people are leading a campaign that is tearing the nation apart. Virtue signalling over Ukraine,where dubious dealings have already paid a small fortune to the Biden family, is the perfect fake liberal cover for what is happening in the United States. Israel’s elected leadership is also playing out a psychosis rooted in World War Two, where the Anglo Americans recreated Israel disregarding Palestine, as a haven of ethnic and religious security and religious heaven on earth.
Ethnic is not exactly the right word to divide Jews from Palestinians because Palestinians and Israelis are majority white Caucasian with some Israelis unaware of Arab ancestry and vice versa. Arab culture was advanced until Mohammed’s schism with Christianity created Islam, which many of us believe to be as dogmatic as Catholicism at its Spanish Inquisition and ‘Bloody Mary’ worst. Jews and Muslims cannot face the truth of their common origins and being politically manipulated.
Many of us ponder the origins of the universe and where we come from. I was about 3 years old when I asked my mother where I came from. She said “From under the Gooseberry Bush. We had one of those buses in the garden so I went looking for a hole in the ground from where I might have popped up. I couldn’t find one, so I popped next door and asked Aunt Flo, who hinted that my father had something to do with it. Then three months later, three months before my 5th birthday, I started school. There the council house boys were more explicit. During playtime, they took pleasure in pulling up girls skirts to see the colour of their underwear.
As it became clearer, with ever more truth, I was horrified by human origins. Every morning we said prayers and sung hymns. We learned about death and going to heaven if we were good. Fear of God was planted in we children’s brains. I was told that heaven was above so wondered why we could not all just fly up there. That lasted until I became more aware of the class system, wealth disparities and power in my snobbish little home town. Winslow Hall was just up there road from where I lived and home to a Swedish Princess. Then came my fathers long painful death on a terminal hospital ward in Aylesbury. He was the last of many dying working men’s death rattles that I heard on that ward in October 1962. My life and outlook changed for ever. Now wars is back, life is cheap again.
Sadly death and destruction in war does not dishearten the Muslims who started the trouble in Gaza and Israel. In the absence of intellectual input, it makes them more fanatical, and allowed to take any revenge regardless of international law, which only seems to apply when the US says so anyway. Hence the Moscow attack with Isis gunmen attempting escape to Ukraine. Israel’s attack Iran’s embassy was a war crime but Israel has long time issues with Iran, blaming their government for helping plan the brutal October 7th attack. There is no room for reason here.
Biden wants a peace deal so that he can focus on helping Anglo U.S class interest in Ukraine. Israel is Biden’s Achilles Heel. Iran is one of Russia’s few friends. There are a lot of dangerous games being played. In the U.K this includes planning a Blasphemy Law to protect Islamists as a ‘protected status.’ Islam is a highly charged global movement recognising itself as owners of the only truth. The elite have been playing this divide and rule game for centuries. Biden & Co hope to settle Israel with a two state solution. Without a medieval mindset it would be impossible to understand why that won’t work. But as I have said, we are in the grip of a lying western leadership every bit as psychotic as the late Herr Adolph Hitler and at least ten times as shifty.
R J Cook
If Bus Drivers killed as many people as politicians they would be shot.
https://www.un.org/en/video/colorizing-photos-hiroshima-atomic-bomb-survivors
If current delusional power mad world leaders have their way there will be more and worse to come.
Balance of Power
Welcome to Balance of Power, bringing you the latest in global politics. If you haven’t yet, sign up here.
Recovering in hospital from a hernia operation, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has a lot to contend with.
The top Iranian commander of anti-Israel militias in Lebanon and Syria was assassinated at the Islamic Republic’s consulate in Damascus, almost certainly by Israel; Netanyahu’s forces also killed seven foreign aid workers in Gaza; and outside Parliament, hundreds of tents have gone up where anti-government protesters seeking his removal are setting up camp.
The war in Gaza, heading soon into its seventh month, has been brutal with no end in sight. Now, with Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon threatening retaliation for the strike in Syria yesterday — and growing impatience with him both abroad and at home — Netanyahu is under increasing pressure.
WATCH: The aftermath of the strike in Damascus. Source: Bloomberg
Last week, in an unexpectedly severe ruling from the Supreme Court, subsidies that go to religious seminaries were stopped until he comes up with a law to draft ultra-Orthodox students into the military.
This prompted Netanyahu’s ultra-Orthodox coalition partners to remind him that keeping their students permanently out of military service was a promise he made that drew them into the government 15 months ago and that led to the campaign to weaken the high court; if he can’t live up to it, the coalition may not survive.
That led some of the premier’s centrist partners to warn that they’ll leave if the students aren’t drafted, because the Gaza war has demonstrated the urgent need for more manpower. Netanyahu says he’s looking for a way to keep both sides happy.
The two intense crises of the past year — street demonstrations against the government for its plans to limit the judiciary, and the Oct. 7 Hamas attack that’s leading to the longest war in Israel’s history since independence — may prove too much to handle even for the nation’s longest-serving premier. —Ethan Bronner
An opposition leader has secured his position as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s chief political irritant and potential challenger. Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu defeated Erdogan’s hand-picked candidate in Sunday’s municipal voted to extend his rule over Turkey’s biggest city, while his main opposition Republican People’s Party inflicted further losses on the ruling AK Party nationwide less than a year after Erdogan overcame his country’s economic woes to secure re-election.
April 1st 2024
Israel: Benjamin Netanyahu protests put political divides back on show
By Jeremy Bowen
BBC international editor, in Jerusalem
Israel’s deep political divisions are back on public display.
They were put to one side for a while, as shock and national unity followed the 7 October attacks by Hamas – but six months later, thousands of protesters are once again on Israel’s streets.
The war has turbocharged their determination to unseat Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
In Jerusalem, police used skunk water – a foul-smelling substance fired from water cannons – to clear protesters who had blocked the Begin Boulevard, the city’s major north-south highway.
Well-worn slogans demanding his resignation and early elections were amplified by newer ones calling for an immediate deal to free about 130 Israeli hostages still held in Gaza. An unknown number of them are presumed dead.
The big fear of their families and friends, as well as the protesters, is that many more will die the longer the war drags on without a deal.
Read More
By Jeremy Bowen
BBC international editor, in Jerusalem
Israel’s deep political divisions are back on public display.
They were put to one side for a while, as shock and national unity followed the 7 October attacks by Hamas – but six months later, thousands of protesters are once again on Israel’s streets.
The war has turbocharged their determination to unseat Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
In Jerusalem, police used skunk water – a foul-smelling substance fired from water cannons – to clear protesters who had blocked the Begin Boulevard, the city’s major north-south highway.
Well-worn slogans demanding his resignation and early elections were amplified by newer ones calling for an immediate deal to free about 130 Israeli hostages still held in Gaza. An unknown number of them are presumed dead.
The big fear of their families and friends, as well as the protesters, is that many more will die the longer the war drags on without a deal.
Read More https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-68705643
March 31st 2024
The last days of Julian Assange in the United States
Julian Assange may soon be on his way to the US to face trial for revealing war crimes. What he faces there is terrifying beyond words.
MATT KENNARD
14 March 2024
Babar Ahmad was extradited from Britain to the United States in 2012 on charges of providing material support to terrorism because of two articles published on his website backing the Taliban government in Afghanistan.
He spent eight years fighting the extradition, but when it eventually happened he flew across the Atlantic on an executive jet from RAF Mildenhall in Suffolk. He had no idea what was coming next.
“I think it was, like, a twelve seater plane,” Ahmad tells me. “Three sections of four seats. So there’s two big seats facing each other. Big, square, comfortable leather seats.”
Outside it was pitch black.
“They kept asking, ‘do you need anything? Do you want a glass of water?’ I said, ‘can I have something to read?’”
The US official gave him a newsletter for public workers. “I’m just looking at the baseball result from Connecticut or something.”
Sitting on the plane, there was no chit-chat, but at some point they asked him if he was hungry. Ahmad said he was.
“So they came and they gave me this MRE pack: meals ready to eat. A big pack. They undid one of the cuffs on my right hand just so that I could eat.”
“His job is to do the small talk, to try and get information out of you.”
While he was eating, a homeland security official came and he sat down opposite him. “His job is to do the small talk, to try and get information out of you, and to get you to give some sort of confession, which then later he files as a statement to use against you,” Ahmad says.
Read More https://www.declassifieduk.org/the-last-days-of-julian-assange-in-the-united-states/
Russia shuts down UN watchdog tracking North Korea sanctions
Related Topics
By Frances Mao
Singapore
Russia has shut down a panel of UN experts that have for years monitored sanctions against North Korea.
The panel last week said it was probing reports that Russia violated rules by buying North Korean weapons like ballistic missiles for use in Ukraine.
The UN’s Security Council has imposed a series of sanctions on Pyongyang since 2006 for its nuclear weapons programme.
Those restrictions are still in force – but the experts group set up to monitor violations will now be disbanded.
In a Security Council vote on Thursday, Russia used its veto power as a permanent member to block the renewal, while 13 of the other 14 member states present voted for it. China, Pyongyang’s closest ally, abstained.
Read More https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-68691417
Ukraine war: Several injured as Russian missiles target Kyiv
By Lipika Pelham
BBC News
A three-storey building in Kyiv has been badly damaged, Ukrainian officials say, as the city comes under renewed Russian attack.
They said two ballistic missiles were intercepted, but seven people were injured as debris fell.
Explosions were heard across the Ukrainian capital and a column of smoke was seen rising in the east.
The city’s mayor urged residents to immediately take cover as the attack came virtually without warning.
Moments before the explosions the Ukrainian air force warned in a message on Telegram that a missile was flying towards the city.
It is unusual to have such attacks without an air raid alert.
Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko wrote on his Telegram channel: “Explosions in the capital. Urgently to the shelter!”
Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, posted videos online purporting to show school children running to a shelter.
The country’s air force commander said Russia fired two ballistic missiles from Crimea, which was annexed by Moscow, but both were intercepted by air defences.
Following a string of explosions, missile debris came down in the Pechersky district, not far from the centre of Kyiv, and several other areas.
The attack is the third on Kyiv by Russia in five days.
Read More https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-68653841
Russian network that ‘paid European politicians’ busted, authorities claim
By Ido Vock
BBC News
A Russian-backed “propaganda” network has been broken up for spreading anti-Ukraine stories and paying unnamed European politicians, according to authorities in several countries.
Investigators claimed it used the popular Voice of Europe website as a vehicle to pay politicians.
The Czech Republic and Poland said the network aimed to influence European politics.
Voice of Europe did not respond to the BBC’s request for comment.
Czech media, citing intelligence sources, reported that politicians from Germany, France, Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands and Hungary were paid by Voice of Europe in order to influence upcoming elections for the European Parliament.
Read More https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-68685604
March 30th 2024
Quite A Different Picture by R J Cook
Death Sets Us Free by R J Cook
Death Sets Us Free by R J Cook
Music and song are so unifying so I have come up with this version of an old British World War Two morale booster :
Who do you think you are kidding Mr Putin
if you think old England’s done?
We are the ‘persons’ to stop your little game,
We are the ones whose leaders are insane
We are the ‘persons’ to make you think again.
We are more than women, we are more than men.
Mrs Jones goes off to town on the 8.21
When she gets home she’s ready with her gun gun gun.
England is the land of 1000 genders true
All to join the army and give it to you.
Hand bags at the ready and the rules of war.
Anything you’ve got, then we’ve got even more.
Copyright R J Cook March 30th 2024
Media brainwashing over here in Europe is in hyperdrive. Britain’s mainstream media are pulling out all the stops to undermine Donald Trump’s chances of the presidency because he said he will stop the war. He faced obstruction from the outset when he scraped into power ( sic ) in 2016. He wasn’t supposed to win then and Hilary Clinton lost no time in declaring fraud, sparking protests and writing a book about being so wonderful and cheated of victory. She went on a world tour preaching about her tragic loss and how women needed to rise up, with her rallying cry :”Women’s Rights Are Human Rights, Human Rights Are Women’s Rights.”
From that moment on, the U.S lost all claim to be a democracy. So did its number one cheerleader, the U.K. CBS and BBC America along with Sky News have worked tirelessly to present Trump as a sex offending fraud and conman. Biden must win at all cots to keep War in Ukraine going, even if the nuclear and global risks worsen. The Middle Eastern Crisis is a major outcome ongoing. Russia has friends with a common interest.
The U.S has business partners all sitting on so called diverse multi cultures. The British elite and politically correct are world experts at ‘bringing people together.’ It is great news for British Muslims because the rule against the army recruiting men with beards has been lifted, as you would expect in the face of another global rich man’s war in the face of a hideous World War which will probably go nuclear. Most women can’t grow beards, but with or without they are already welcome to train for the front line.
I think aged politicians should conscript themselves. I would like to see the likes of Boris Johnson wobbling down the ramps, led by brave King Charles III and Queen Camilla setting the best advert for U.K equal opportunities when the landing crafts hit the beaches of Crimea. I would also like an army of screaming angry feminists crack troops from Parliament, descending from the sky over Moscow. I am sure then, that if Vladimir Putin knows what is good for him he will drop the cyanide tab.
This is Rainbow U.K, the land of 1000 mystifying genders all eager to discover what they are made of. So gays and trans people can rest easy. There will be no discrimination when it comes to conscription and the U.K’s contribution to the war for freedom and democracy. The Nazis had a great morale boosting aphorism to keep Jewish slaves content and hopeful. It was ‘Work sets you free.’ I heard rumours that a Civil Service think tank is working on new ideas for a rallying call of their own, including ‘Death sets you free.’
R J Cook
Postscript Joe Biden has spent $8 trillion a year so far in his presidency. The money is borrowed from the global super rich and the interest paid from taxing the struggling masses and underclass. The money goes to that global ruling class. So the rich will get richer even faster. Meanwhile the U.S Marines are being trained to fight the Chinese on Island hopping exercises in the South China Sea. The impact of this NATO and EU war mongering has pushed climate change beyond human control. Read ‘On the Beach’ by Neville Shute.
R J Cook
War a real threat and Europe not ready, warns Poland’s Tusk
By Sarah Rainsford, in Kharkiv, and Paul Kirby
BBC News
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has warned Europe is in a “pre-war era” and Ukraine must not be defeated by Russia for the good of the whole continent.
He said war was “no longer a concept from the past”, adding: “It’s real and it started over two years ago.”
His comments came after Russia launched a massive attack on Ukraine’s energy system on Thursday.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said this week Moscow had “no aggressive intentions” towards Nato countries.
The idea that his country, which has one of the world’s largest nuclear arsenals, would attack Poland, the Baltic states and the Czech Republic – which are all members of the Nato alliance unlike Ukraine – was “complete nonsense”, he said.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-68692195
Comment Matters will soon explode because Ukraine is more than half way through the NATO back door. NATO and EU want and need Ukraine for the wealth and profit of their twisted versions of democracy.
R J Cook
March 29th 2024
Epistemology of NATO’s Ukraine Proxy War on Russia by R J Cook
Updated March 30th 2024
Ramsay insisted that i took powerful mind controlling anti psycchotic drugs.I was a truck driver at the time. Those events, and other official activities, changed my sense of the reality of living in the so called United Kingdom, forever, This is because reality is socially constructed – see Berger & Luckman. There may be a lot wrong with Russia, which I have been nowhere near since 1965. But Britain offers it some serious competition to Russia in Police State Politics.
R.J Cook.
Epistemology of NATO’s Ukraine Proxy War on Russia by R J Cook
My first year undergraduate studies at the University of East Anglia, involved six foundation subjects in my first year before I could progress on to my chosen major in Economics. Philosophy was the most irksome of these subjects because it did not deal with anything you could contact using the five known senses. It was full of abstractions, big words and long sentences used by people called philosophers in their pursuit of reality and truth. Those were the days of elitist university education with small seminar groups. Most students were posh and had comfortably off parents, to put it mildly. Their reality was very different to mine.
My father was an ex wartime soldier and truck driver who died after an accident and two year illness when I was 11 years old. He was 41 when he died in agony on a mild October day in 1962. I was at the hospital visiting him with my mother and sister when he started to die. He had lost the use of his legs and a lung, due to chest injuries. I ran out of the ward, which was basically a big hut erected after the last World War as part of the NHS urgent building.
There were French doors at the back end. I ran through them and lay down curled up on the grass and broke my heart unnoticed, too many memories flooding back. I had heard the death rattle many times during my father’s nine months in the terminal ward. We all knew he was dying, His rattling lungs told me it was his turn. I wanted to hide and pretend it wasn’t happening. My world had changed forever. Mother, sister and I faced new realities and truths. Society would view us very differently. We had no adult male to protect us.
My mother faced an imnpossible job. She had never known her own mother who died two weeks after she was born, knew more tragedy when her 24 year old brother died with the London Irish Rifles, then soon after her 20 year old RAF fiance was killed. Our realities are not fixed over time and our elite governed State is not always our friend. They come first as we see with current media preoccupation with Royalty. Their exalted position with massive inherited wealth is anything but democratic. It is absurd to suggest otherwise in these terrible times where increasing numbers of people are mentally ill and reliant on mind controlling official drugs.
Nine years after my father’s death and a spell in the world of working for a living, I was in a philosophy seminar room discussing the nature of reality and whether each of us humans was more than a dollars worth of chemicals, the subject bemused me. My working class hard reality, witnessing death at an early age, had been a practical struggle for survival. Without her father, my sister ran amok chasing boys or getting them to chase her. Three years older than me, she became pregnant in the grammar school sixth form. I immediately took the place of my father, working before and after school and still finding time to train for my athletics club and the county.
My close and long time school friend and fellow athlete, Steven, mocked me for being more interested in technical matters than literature. He encouraged me to read classic and contemporary literature, although a timetable clash with much needed maths prevented me from formal study of English Literature. Though even then as an aspiring writer and diarist, that was just as well because I could read freely and follow reviews in the Sunday Times. From age 16, I took ‘The Times’ every day, claiming student half price discount. It cost me only 3 old pennies a day.
And so, with all that behind me, there I was in those philosophy seminars listening to lots of new and very big words. My late parents were what were then called fallen middle class. We grew up in one of my maternal great uncle’s many rental houses. That, in rural Buckinghamshire caused identity issues. I was not allowed to play with the children from the council houses.
Epistemology was one of my newly learned words. It means the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope, and the distinction between justified belief and opinion. The subject challenged my sense of having any intelligence at all. I felt like a fraud. These were the days when you needed good O levels and A levels. I had 8 of the former and 6 of the latter. When mother accompanied me and my luggage to the bus stop, seeing me off on the long roundbout bus ride from Winslow to Norwich, she said :”Don’t get mixed up with those drugs.” In my little world of long distance running, text books, model trains and model planes,delivering newspapers and working on a farm, I didn’t know what she was talking about. I soon found out at the University of East Anglia where the pampered children of the upper middle classes needed more than books to intensify their requirements for ‘truth.’ Their sort went on to infect the professions, support Margaret Thatcher’s destruction of the social fabric and parent the new British Ruling Class. These hypocrits are the ones who want World War on Russia because they want even more than their already unfair share of global wealth and power.
It amazed me when my tutor suggested that I had a flair for philosophy and should take it as a major. Of course I ignored him because I wasn’t sure his opinion was true – as you would expect from a natural philosopher in search. I had no idea of what I was, so watched others because their overweening self confidence made me suspect that they knew something I didn’t. So I kept working, buying books like A J Ayer’s ‘Language Truth and Logic’, long distance running representing my university and on major Milron Keynes building sites – using my Irish connections during 20 weeks annual vacations. I met many Irish philosphers on those jobs. They enhanced their reality with lots of beer. Their good company should have made me choose philosophy. But I still did not think it a proper subject.
I have made many mistakes in my life inluding turning down post graduate study at Stockholm University as a member of the International Graduate School.. But my biggest mistake was marriage to someone from a completely different reality to mine. Our divorce, as my languid Irish American lawyer Jack Haskew told me when he took me to lunch at his firm’s expense in 2008, told me “Robert, your divorce was 21 years overdue.” Marriage today is the surest way for a man to sacrifice freedom. This is all the more so in the 21st century of diversity under elite political, feminist and media law.
The quest for truth and reality is a lost cause in the modern age where all men are deemed to be both privileged and toxic unless they buy in to the western elite consensus. The tragedy of Brianna Ghey says it all for any white boy born in the typical one parent female dominated family, who believes what is grandly called ‘gender reassignment’ will elevate them to the female world of truth and goodness. If they are not fools, they have been fooled.
Any white person of the masses, born with male genitals is cursed with the label of toxic masculinity, white male privilege and a ‘mansplainer’ in a world where after any attempt to influence a female ‘partner’ (sic ) will be accused and convicted of coercive controlling behaviour and domestic abuse. Ask Lawrence Fox.
It took me many years to appreciate the benefits of undergraduate philosophy, even though I pursued my interest in an economics major and economic history minor. Back at UEA ( University of East Anglia ) in the summer of 2005, I found myself defending philosophy in a session where a feminist middle aged female social worker was angry that philosophy was still on the curriculum and sociology was not. She, as part of the feminist blob could not stop denigrating philosophy. Like any religious maniac.truth was written in stone for her. Her sort want a stone age where they literally drag men across the cave floor by his hair, rather than use sociology to do it for them. We’ll see what nuclear war has to offer them. Emeritus Professor Tim O’Hagan congratulated me afterwards for my stout defence of his beloved philosophy.
Philosophy, or lack of it, has much to do with understanding the lies underpinning the NATO Ukraine War proxy war on Russia. Sociology with its police state social engineering offshoot has much to do with the propaganda machine that justifies and sells it to the masses. A rational person cannot argue with these people.
Among the philosophy books I struggled to read as an undergraduate was A J Ayer’s ‘Language Truth and Logic’. I was right to believe that philosophy was not worth the bother because it has made my tendency to overthink too much to bear, always looking for evidence in a polarised world where differences can only be resolved by conflict, with violence and murder on the trains, in schools, jails, alleyways, domestic front and battlefield. No one in the west wants to know about NATO provocations or subversion of Russia because the western elite felt entitled to topple an elected Ukraine Government opening it up to rape and genocide in the Don bas.
Philosophy taught me to test language and morality. That does not matter anymore. We are back in the nineteenth century where the Anglo Americans still love the monarchy as a cause celebre with stirring tales of empire, how the west was won and that slavery was all the fault of the white working classes who must pay in guilt and more taxes.
Meanwhile, Russia doesn’t need any lectures on Epistemology. Its leaders know they are fighting an existential war against the planet eating western elites. I think I have progressed beyond my philosophy seminars and Cartesian Dualism with all my old sense of agonising class inferiority in among the rich kids. I think, therefore I know what reality is.
R J Cook
Evan Gershkovich: Waiting for her brother, Putin’s ‘bargaining chip’ in Russian jail
By Steve Rosenberg
Russia Editor
One year ago Danielle Gershkovich got a call from her mother. She could hardly believe the news.
Her younger brother, Evan, a reporter with the Wall Street Journal, had just been arrested: he was the first US journalist in Russia since the Cold War to be charged with espionage. The maximum possible punishment: 20 years in prison.
“It’s been a really difficult year,” Danielle tells me by video call from Washington. “The uncertainty is very hard to deal with.”
Writing letters helps. The jailed American journalist has been sending plenty from prison.
“The best way to support one another is to keep things light,” Danielle says. “We have a lot of sibling banter back and forth, a lot of teasing with love.
“I recently asked him if it’s OK for me see the Dune movie, the sequel. I felt guilty about seeing it, because he can’t.”
Evan’s ordeal began one thousand miles from Moscow in the city of Yekaterinburg. On a reporting trip there, he was detained by the FSB, Russia’s domestic security service. The Russian authorities say the American was “caught red-handed” with “classified information”. He, his employer and the US authorities fiercely deny the spying charge.
Read More https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-68679483
Comment I will be publishing a longer piece on the epistemology of the Ukraine War as soon as it is complete. For the moment, I have to say that western elite media and mainstream political moralising about Gershkovich is nauseating, especially from the U.K and U.S. Their treatment of war crimes whistle blower Julian Assange disqualifies them from judging anyone . There are also the cases of Chelsea Manning and Jack Teixeira. Jack foolishly and fearfully diclosed that fact that Biden et al were lying about not having boots on the ground in Ukraine because unlike the Biden administration he didn’t want World War III and all that goes with it. He got 25 years.
As a truck driver, not so long ago, I had clearance to make deliveries at a number of top secret defence research establishments. I cannot name the organisation, discuss the sites or locations. It was part of my job not to. Had I taken pictures for foreign media even in the absence of this NATO proxy war on Russia ,using corrupt Ukraine, I would quite rightly have been arrested on suspicion of espionage, thus facing dire consequences.
So, all the evidence about Evan Gershkovich suggests that he is a spy. Ironically President Joe Biden has leapt to this U.S spy’s defence with the statement that : “Journalism is not a crime.” Biden has told Russia that ” they will pay for using U.S citizens as bargaining chips. ” Biden is incredible. He went on to describe the journalist’s detention as “wholly unjust and illegal.” Blinken chipped in with “Russia’s media landscape is restrictive and repressive. I look forward to these two great U.S politcians appearing for the defence of Julian Assange in open court. Based on their lofty principles of journalism, the U.S War Crimes whistleblower will walk free and Anglo U.S Democracy will be saved.
R J Cook
Putin Says NATO Airbases ‘Legitimate Target’ if F-16s There Used in Ukraine – Ukraine at War: Update for March 29
Putin says he won’t start a war with NATO. But Western bases hosting Ukraine F-16s would be targets
11 Jan 2024 — Sweden’s mental health helplines have been flooded with calls from youths scared by the prospect of war after top defence officials said …
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-68679483
March 28th 2024
The Effluent Society – Western Elite Capitalism Fighting For Its Life – By R J Cook
The Affluent Society was a book written in 1958 by Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith. The volume sought to very simply outline how the post World War II United States was becoming wealthy in the in the private sector but remained poor in the public sector, lacking social and physical infrastructure, and perpetuating income disparities. It is credited with popularizing the term “conventional wisdom“. Many of the ideas presented were later expanded and refined in Galbraith’s 1967 book, The New Industrial State. In1971,there was the inevitable literary response with ‘The Effluent Society from the cartoonist Norman Thelwell. It was humorous and heartfelt message to conserve the environment and countryside. Includes a wry look at modern at modern society. They have never been more relevant.
Computerisation developed rapidly from World War Two research. Britain’s Lyons Corner Houses were the first to use them for stock control and accounting. Meanwhile they were the big thing for the military and putting people in space. Ruling elites saw no limits to their money making potential. Military assets had to be many steps ahead with this technology to protect the super wealthy and their command of the Western Capitalist system whose elite political leaders thought they had dragged Russia on board – establishing the same public asset stripping that U.K’s PM Thatcher had achieved when she decimated the Public sector. She sold off the public utilities, at knock down prices.
Russia was devastated by U.S puppet and stooge drunken Boris Yeltsin. The corrupt tax dodging City of London world financial centre of the world, where I as an economist once had the misfortune to work, loved Boris. So did England’s’ Premier League Football Clubs and the Tories who had no problem with dirty money stolen from the hard worn Soviet people. It was just more of what the Tories and the then New Labour did to their people.
As for the U.S, yesterday’s Baltimore disaster and Democrat opposition to Trumps plan to rebuild decaying infrastructure, says more than enough. At this moment Sri Lanka’s power generating workers are on strike because the price of a U.S approved IMF loan necessitates the same style of asset striping condition as it did with Greece and any other cash strapped company. So the global elite who make the laws that their obsequious grateful lackeys enforce, get richer and more powerful. Russia post Yeltsin is a major obstacle. So is its’ Global South allies. For their planet eating pleasure bent system to survive and grow, Russia needs to be broken up. Islamic hatred and bigotry is very useful to this end as we saw in Moscow this week.
Tory Government State asset stripping included British Airways, British Gas, British Telecom, British Railways, The National Bus Company all the water utilities and electricity companies. Parcel Force and the Post Office !!!
Thatcher privatised all but the railways. Sir Bob Reid, last chairman of British Railways told me, when I interviewed him for a magazine I worked for in 2003 : “John Major was desperate to follow Margaret Thatcher’s example and find something to privatise. So he picked the railways. I told him it was a bad idea but if he had to do it then he should leave it to my Board of Directors who knew how to run a railway. Major wouldn’t listen.”
The trick with Thatcher’s privatisations was to get City Accountants and bankers to undervalue the assets and income of all the State Assets one by one, with one glossy sale prospectus after another. The undervalued assets and balance sheets were totalled up, then divided up into cheapo shares in numbers suitable for the cash strapped masses to scramble for. I was one of them because we were basically being offered a £10 note for a fiver. The big institutions had a reserved share and were waiting of us little people to claim our £10 because the shares were skyrocketing on the global capital share market which Thatcher and U.S President Regan had promoted. This was the ‘Big Bang’ when all the western world’s stock markets were linked, with the latest high tech and deals going 24/7. This was capitalism on speed.
When I began studying economics in 1968 and was teaching the subject at Spencer Park Boys School in 1979, there was the concept of abnormal profits. Back in 1972, U.K Prime Minister Edward Health railed against the unacceptable face of capitalism. The conventional wisdom was that Britain was on borrowed time. Tory Edward Heath shocked Britain’s ruling elite by nationalising British Leyland motor manufacturers and Rolls Royce. He lost the next election and became a whipping boy for the Tory faction who became known as Thatcherite.
Thatcher’s part in breaking the old British Tory Labour consensus laid foundations for her reign of terror. She was voted in with a landslide, by 40% of the 60% who bothered to vote. British manufacturings share of the British economy withered to 17%. The new Tories were really national socialists like New Labour who succeeded them. Outside an ever expanding public sector primarily dealing with problems of social decline, notably: rampant feminism, rising crime, mental illness, poverty, mass migration, homelessness, single mum families, alcoholism, drug addiction, knife crime disease, domestic violence and feral children.
The Tories were about Police State control as seen during the coal miners strike, greed and cutting taxes for the rich. They were also about cutting corners. Water is a natural monopoly Thames Water Chief Chris Watson says, on just £2 million a year, ”shareholders deserve some reward for what they are doing. We need the 40% increase in bills “to do what the customers are asking us to do”. Thames needs £40 billion fresh investment, so international investors are entitled to a good return.” Capitalism is a con which does a great deal for the rich and not enough for the poor majority – socialism for the over privileged minority.
What mainstream media do not want the public to know the effects that mass immigration, legal and illegal – otherwise known as asylum seeking – are having on water and sewage systems across the western world which massive African, Middle Eastern , Asian and Central American influx is normalising Third World Living under powerful super rich planet eating elites. That is where the distraction of the Ukraine War, sanctifying sport by excluding Russia, comes in. In fact what is called elite level sport is all about what the Roman elite called ‘bread and circuses’ . It makes the elite ever richer and more powerful while offering false hope to the masses.
My researches in the U.K informed me that so many Africa male migrants are hopeful of becoming Premier league footballers. This is a New World Order of diversity that is paranoid delusional. As we saw with the Baltimore Bridge collapes and the dead workers, migrants to the West are required for use as cheap labour and to grow the capitalist profit. The elite think they can control this just as they think they can control the climate, skies, oceans and the global masses.
White men must believe they are privileged, treading on eggs shells with women in an age when women officially never lie. That is why so many white males of all ages offend the likes of TERF feminists like Rowling by opting for sex change. Gays grovel to cis gender women in their camp way but present no rivalry for cis women by hunting men as transwomen often do. Anyone who wants a no nonsense account of transsexualism should read my novel ‘Man Maid Woman’ by R J Cook ( Bankhouse Books 2003 ). Describing Britain’s hideously divided society as divers is a politically correct sticking plaster reminiscent of the good old overtly colonial era so basic to the development of Western Capitalism and Scapegoating.
Thatcherites referred to the new version of the nineteenth century, with accompanying wars to excite the hapless poorly educated masses, with war in the Falklands and the Gulf, as the second industrial revolution. Anyone who argued with consensus, as I did about the rampant use of computers in the maths department employing me as a teacher in the early 1980s, was called a Luddite. My view was that students were being turned into robots – as with AI nowadays. Added to this. Thatcher’s employment secretary Jim Prior was telling the masses in 1983 that they had to get used to high levels of employment. My response was to join the Labour Party, then led by dotty academic left winger Michael Foot. There was a popular joke that he was ‘one foot who would not make a ruler.’ The local party leader kicked me out because I questioned the wisdom of the Coal Miner’s Strike and obsessing about stopping Trident. Socio economic tensions erupted onto the streets. The system had to crack down. The need to ‘bring people together’ and diversity was born with the rise of Tony Blair and New Labour. Boys growing up in broken and single parents families were lectured at school not to be sexist or racist but to be more like their mothers, sisters and aunts. The age of the infant white boy transsexual was born. Religion and black macho culture protected them from this incipient diversity – but not from crime, violence and drugs.
Rowling cannot accept the trans threat to what she calls women’s privileged status and physical safety has so much to do with feminism and its outcomes. Anti racists are desperate to see more marriage between white females with black males. Their every baby will be officially black, in line with anti racist thinking. White men must mind their language about women, blacks and Muslims but feminists and women in general can say what they like about white men, describing them as toxic, also refusing to call trans females; her and she. This divide and rule mentality serves elite defenders, including lower class morons , very well. But the big issue for saving Western capitalism with a transatlantic military to beat anything the rival Russo Chinese might use to defend its version of civilisation, is the really big world threatening issue.
The NATO Ukraine proxy war on Russia is crucial to sustain and develop land, resource and strategic position in command of the Black Sea. Capitalism has even bigger long term worries with China which accounts for 40% of the world’s manufactured goods and to whom the U.S.A is massively indebted. As of May 2023, Japan owns the most of U.S debt at $1.1 trillion. China comes second, with $859 billion, That’s less than the U.S. debt owned by Japan and represents about 2.6% of the total U.S. Debt. In total, other territories hold about $7.4 trillion in U.S. debt. Successful wars against Russia and China would be useful to the U.S Capitalist bastion in more ways than one.
Europe is more complex than the apparent entities of U.K and U.S whose rise and fall have been intertwined, but behind the chaos, western fake democracies have much in common. The dreadful greed and corruption of the U.S is redolent with the war on Donald Trump, with pampered elite lefties eager to apply far right stickers to anyone outside the consensus.
Here in Britain, the grotesque story of Thames Water, which supplies London and for miles around, is very much the ‘unacceptable face of capitalism. The story comes hot on the heels of the British Post Master scandal which wrongfully prosecuted over 800 sub post masters, bankrupting and jailing them because of corrupt Japanese software. Typical of Britain’s elite, police, CPS and courts disinterest in justice, the Post Office and successive governments covered it up. Thames Water owes its allegiance to its international shareholders and paying massive dividends to directors. The argument is that this is necessary to attract international capital which always seeks the biggest return. Thames Water paid £7 billion in dividends last year while carrying £17 billion debt. The company’s CEO says it is doing what its customers want it to. He gets paid a measly £2 million a year, so I guess he will have no problem with the 40% price increase to its customers for its services. The public taxpayers must pay the debts or international capitalists will pull out. Obviously, Thames Water should go into receivership, be revalued at rockbotton and then re nationalised.
Karl Marx fled to Britain to escape German persecution for his radical views on class exploitation. Living in Industrial Revolution late 19th century Britain. He was assisted by Manchester cotton mill owning Friedrich Engels who supplied key data. Russian Revolutionary, Lenin, studied Marx. So came Marxist Leninism, the second Russian revolution, overthrowing the moderate Kerensky. Thus the global rich and old monarchs came to live in fear of communism. They thought they had it sorted with Yeltsin by 1991.
Then the nightmare returned. According to Marx, capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction. Humans are sophisticated animals, with varying natures and basic instincts. Capitalism is not a fair system in anyway democratic. The reason that the wrong people are in charge and nothing changes for the better is that thanks to feminism, women act as a brake on real men and women who could and would change the world for the better. I dare not mention the name of the most obvious example of the men I am talking about. It is not King Charles. Ultimately the masses still have nothing to lose but their chains.
R.J Cook
March 27th 2024
NATO IS OBSESSED WITH KERCH BRIDGE & CRIMEA
6 Dec 2023 — Ukraine will destroy the Crimean (Kerch) Bridge if it gets enough ATACMS and Taurus missiles, said retired US General Ben Hodges, former …
Why Kerch Bridge is so important: Six reasons it is still …
Forces Networkhttps://www.forces.net › ukraine › six-reasons-why-crim…
19 Jul 2023 — Instead of merely attempting to destroy the bridge outright, Kyiv may be playing the long game, understanding that control over the bridge could …
Living Death Sentence For Julian Assange Because He Exposed U.S Dirty Big Secrets & Lies – R.J Cook
22 Feb 2024 — If extradited, the Australian-born Assange faces up to 175 years in prison on spying charges – which again is pretty rich coming from a nation ..
Instant denials of Ukrainian intelligence involvement in Russian terror attack are not credible
The principal mouthpieces of US imperialism, the New York Times and the Washington Post, have initiated a campaign to deny the all but obvious involvement of the US and Ukraine in this attack.
“They’re trying to make it harder for minority parties to exist—it’s crazy. I’m for our voices being heard, normal people, not the billionaires sponsoring all the other parties.”
The numerous incidents on Boeing aircraft in the past three months reflect the drive of the company’s executives to maximize profits for stockholders to the detriment of safety on its fleet of commercial airliners.
Baltimore-area bridge collapses following collision with cargo vessel
While more details will emerge in the coming days, what is certain is that cost-cutting and profiteering played a central role in the disaster.
Terrorist attack in Moscow: The Ukrainian trail
If ISIS or one of its offshoots actually committed the attack in Moscow, this does not speak against but for the complicity of Ukraine and NATO.
Missing:Anglo desperate
Forces Networkhttps://www.forces.net › ukraine › six-reasons-why-crim…
19 Jul 2023 — Instead of merely attempting to destroy the bridge outright, Kyiv may be playing the long game, understanding that control over the bridge could …
Missing:Anglo | Show results with: Anglo
March 26th 2024
Bridge of Lies – By R.J Cook
Worthy historians have attributed the wealth creating industrial revolution to Reformation of the English Church and shock waves across Europe in the 16th century. It was not an act of truth seeking on Henry VIII’s part. The English tyrant’s, debilitating health conditions included Venereal Disease He needed a divorce so that he could vent his lust on young Ann Boleyn,who he also hoped might give him a son.
I doubt most British natives have heard of this woman, daughter of Aylesbury’s Lord of the Manor George Boleyn. The truth of British history was not helped when British broadcaster Channel 5 chose black actress Jodie Turner-Smith as its “Anne Boleyn”. The backlash against Jodie Turner-Smith from history purists like myself, was vilified as far right racism. But imagine the feminist outcry if a transsexual had been cast in the role, and inevitable rampant response from TERFs like J.K Rowling.
However, Henry VIII of the upstart Tudor murderous ancestors of Britain’s current Royals, had no interest in religious reform as such. Henry made himself of what had been the corrupt Roman Catholic Church he had defended in 1513, against Martin Luther’s Protestant uprising. All the Reformation meant to Henry was sex and stealing Catholic treasure and property in England. So it is a serious lie and deception to have a black woman play Ann Boleyn. Had Netflix cast a white girl to play Princess Megan, the anger would have been horrific. That would have been quite right. Anti racists never cease reminding and haunting us with colonial history, blaming the white working class to the point of cultural oblivion and extinction. Bearing in mind their class superiority, this is a neat trick of cultural oppression.
Ironically Africa’s masses are still under the thumb of joint black and white ruling elites which is why it was so easy to trap blacks into slavery in the first place. At the time the white masses were little if any better off than slaves. Historians are not there to tell us this or any other truth. The BBC and their CBS partners may keep telling us their news is unspun because it is full of spin as Ukraine coverage exemplifies. The 19th century European ‘Scramble for Africa’ , so vital to the so called global economy has been replaced by something worse as the Anglo American elite risk World Nuclear War to retain dominance. They are driven by greed with protection by lies, spin, propaganda. Their masses have been sold the moronic idiocy of multi culture . This comes with its inherent conflicts and contradictions. It is concentrated in the tiny British Isles as old colonial overspill sweeps in. They see Britain as the promised land. Some of these people even end up swimming to for ‘their better lives’. These better lives guarantee worsening racial conflict, higher taxes, inflation and pampered elite politicians’ demands for more inevitably corrupt police to control them.
What has this to do with the collapse of the 1970s jerry built Baltimore Francis Scott Key Bridge’ ? Bridges are age old necessities to communication, crossing some very dangerous waters in the first instance. By today’s standards traffic above and below was light. The bridges could cope or be easily mended. Not so today. Container ships have trebled in size since the 1970s, the U.S has $37 trillion national debt spiralling inflation, and rising taxes to fund what might not just be a world to end wars, but a war to end the world as human life needs it to be.
That is no matter to the Anglo British elite. Geriatric Joe Biden is the perfect stooge for the Democrats who are anything but democratic and have pursued a ‘get Trump policy’ from the moment ‘the Donald’ defeated their best, most unscrupulous attempts to impeach him rather than deal with the reality of their divided and divisive country. Their vile efforts to smear Trump as a Rampant Racist Russian agent still knows no bounds. Biden has said that ‘Ukraine is a great investment.’ It is a pity that Biden and his Democrats haven’t invested in rebuilding the likes of a substandard Francis Scott bridge to comply with modern standards. There are more of these dangerous relatively flimsy jerry build bridges across the U.S. One such collapsed in Minneapolis in 2008. Democrats decried and obstructed Trump’s pledge to rebuild crumbling U.S infrastructure.
So consider this curious case of the 948-foot Singapore-flagged cargo ship Dali which had previously hit another bridge in calm water, before striking the 1.6 mile long Baltimore bridge in the early hours of today. It was carrying cargo and apparently en route from Baltimore to Colombo, Sri Lanka. That port handles 1.1 million containers a year. Trucks cross this bridge every day to supply the whole easterm seaboard. Incredibly it took only one ship to knock it down. The latice type continous truss structure was cheap and easily collapsed. The idea of a continuous truss is to spread the load. Whatever, thus happening will be an important lesson to terrorists.
If the current fall out and panic over the loss of this bridge over the waterway into the United State’s 11th largest container port is anything to go by, then imagine the panic and hsyteria if and when the first Russian nuclear missile strikes. Apparently it would one take only two minutes for one to reach Paris and only two to wipe out Britain’s key infrastucture – only one big one exploding in the Irish Sea would send a Tsunami of water and radiation and do the job in no time. As for the U.S, Russia has options including a 53 mile shortcut across the Bering Sea.
Anglo U.S dominated elite media has been busy ridiculing Russian analysis of the Moscow concert hall attacks. They want us to believe it absurd that their Ukraine proxy had anything to do with it, in spite of the gunmen being caught escaping there. We are also supposed to forget how the CIA promoted and funded the ISIS off shoot of Al-Qaeda in their proxy war on Syria for regime change and more oil. Lies and spin are vital in the Anglo U.S war for continued world domination.
So not surprisingly Britain’s Sky News, BBC and CBS were quick to dismiss terrorism for this strategically harmful event. Reporters and experts have said there could have been no deliberate collision, adding that it was an unfortunate accident. Operator MAERSK was founded in 1928 before the container age. It is the world’s second largest container shipping company by both fleet size and cargo capacity, offering regular services to 374 ports in 116 countries.
Such is the demand for their services that the Daliwas a hired vessel. Given the reputation of this company and the current vulnerability of world shipping to war and terrorism, one suspects that MAERSK are about as safe as ships can get. I have little experience of motorised water craft, but enough to know about drift and steering as affected by weather and weight, to know that engine failure is a major problem in confined spaces, as presented by this bridge collision.
With two highly trained experienced pilots on board, there is no reasonable chance it was their fault. Witnesse and video evidence revealed seeing smoke and lights going out just before the bridge approached the wide span. Critical drift from course was inevitable. The question is ‘Why did the power fail at that critical moment ?
The knee jerk response to rule out terrorism during this phoney war stage of World War Three is inevitable. We are supposed to accept the official elite media view. On November 12, 2001, an Airbus A300B4-605R crashed into the neighbourhood of Belle Harbor on the Rockaway Peninsula of Queens, New York City. All 251 passengers and 9 crew were killed along with 5 on the ground. Initial accounts said the tail blew off. In the wake of 9/11, the authorities quickly dismissed another act of terrorism. They blamed the first officer for ‘overuse if rudder’ – making too tight a turn and so losing lift..
There would have been an obvious panic over air travel and its vital revenues. The problem with dismissing serious questions without compelling evidence of investigation is that conspiracy theories are a reasonable response. I am not suggesting that the Baltimore disaster story is a bridge of lies because I will never know – because if it is, as with 9/11, the truth will never be told. These people are too free with the words ‘freedom and democracy’ to be trusted. The long ludicrous desperate campaign to destroy Donald Trump says it all about the U.S establishment and pretty much the same about the European Union. The latest attack on Trump comes from feminists espousing their right to abortion and the abortion pill. Donald Trump is correct to declare that the U.S is a Third World Country, neither are the U.K and the E.U.
R J Cook
The Bridge Of Bridges By R J Cook
- A major bridge in the US city of Baltimore has collapsed into the Patapsco River after a container ship rammed into it
- The bridge snapped and plunged into the water at around 01:30 ET (05:30 GMT) along with vehicles and people
- A huge search operation is under way for at least seven people, authorities say, while two people have been pulled from the water
- The ship can be seen wedged into debris from the Francis Scott Key Bridge, which is 3km (1.6 miles) long and part of a major highway
- Some construction workers were on the bridge at the time it collapsed, the city’s mayor says, adding that the incident is “an unspeakable tragedy”
- Sonar has detected multiple vehicles underwater, where the temperature is around 8C (47F)
- There is no indication the crash was intentional but it is too early to determine what caused it, officials say
- The port of Baltimore near the bridge is the largest in the US for specialised cargo
Retired structural iron worker Priscilla Thompson became emotional as she described the “horrendous crash” early this morning.
“It shook the entire house. It was catastrophic,” she told the BBC’s Tom Bateman.
“It was a beautiful bridge, so fortified and so straight from every angle, the pride and glory, the bridge of bridges”.
“I just made a birthday card for my husband and drew the Key Bridge in it, that’s how close that bridge was to me,” she added.
“I am devastated”.
Read More https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-us-canada-68663071
March 25th 2024
UK Army no longer ‘top tier fighting force’, warns US general
3 Feb 2023 — The British Armed Forces would run out of ammunition “in a few days” if called upon to fight. The Royal Air Force lacks the ability to defend …
Here’s the Elon Musk interview that got Don Lemon’s show canceled
Don Lemon and Elon Musk sat down for an hour-long interview about hate speech, content moderation, and more — but Musk became increasingly irritated by the end.
Don Lemon has published the “tense” interview with Elon Musk that got his show canceled on X. During the interview, Lemon touches on various topics related to hate speech on X and Musk’s own views on right-wing conspiracy theories, with the billionaire becoming noticeably irritated by the interview’s end.
Things start to take a turn about halfway into the interview. Lemon asks Musk about his comments on illegal immigration and the far-right “great replacement” theory and then turns to the topic of content moderation. Lemon asks whether better content moderation on X would let Musk avoid some of the criticism of his posts about the “great replacement” theory.
“I don’t have to answer questions from reporters,” Musk responds. “Don, the only reason I’m doing this interview is because you’re on the X platform, and you asked for it. Otherwise, we’re not going to be doing this interview.” Musk adds that he doesn’t “think people should care what the media thinks about them.”
Lemon and Musk go on to argue about the presence of hate speech on X. Lemon points out a study that found antisemitic posts on X grew from June 2022 to February 2023. Musk responds by saying that studies only “count the number of posts but not count the number of views.”
Lemon then suggests X should take these posts down because “they’re hateful” and “can lead to violence.” Musk responds that Lemon “loves censorship” and that X will only remove content that’s illegal. “You can sign up right now and do 100 things that are hateful, but if nobody reads it, it doesn’t matter,” Musk concludes.
The interview also goes over Musk’s disagreement with companies’ diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies as well as his views on racism. Musk says the country should “move on” from a history of racism and that “we are all descended from slaves.” (“Well not everyone was a slave,” Lemon responds.)
Lemon later says he has personally experienced discrimination and that it’s “insulting” for “someone to say that that hasn’t happened and I should just move forward and ignore the past.” Musk replies by saying Lemon keeps “putting words” in his mouth and that “we should treat people like individuals and base our opinions on them on their character.”
Things get more heated at the very end of the interview, when Lemon mentions Musk’s statement that advertisers could “kill” X with an ad boycott. Lemon asks whether Musk should take responsibility if X fails. “Doesn’t the buck stop with you?” Lemon asks. Musk replies by telling Lemon to “choose your question carefully, there’s five minutes left.” As Lemon attempts to dive deeper into Musk’s upbringing, Musk says there are only a “couple minutes” left and that he has a “whole roomful of people waiting to meet with me.”
There are other parts of the interview worth watching as well, including Musk talking about meeting with Donald Trump and Musk’s prescription ketamine usage. Musk says he uses ketamine, which is a dissociative anesthetic, once in a while when he gets into a “negative sort of chemical mindset.” He also says he met with Trump but denied rumors that the former president asked for a donation for his political campaign.
Lemon, a former host on CNN, was supposed to debut new episodes of his show on X as part of a deal he struck with the platform earlier this year. However, Lemon said Musk decided to cancel the deal after their interview, which Musk later confirmed, saying Lemon’s show is too similar to CNN. Lemon’s show will still be posted on X, but it just won’t appear there first.
A vote for ‘humanity to prevail’ – Palestinian representative
The Palestinian representative to the UN, Riyad Mansour, has welcomed today’s resolution – but says it is overdue.
“It has taken six months, over 100,000 Palestinians killed and maimed, two million displaced, and famine, for this council to finally demand an immediate ceasefire,” Mansour tells the UN.
He says the draft resolution was a “vote for humanity to prevail, for life to prevail”.
“The Palestinians in Gaza pleaded and appealed, shouted, cried, cursed, prayed, defied the odds to survive time and time again. And yet continued to face death, destruction and displacement, depravation and disease. And an occupation-made famine.
“Their ordeal must come to an end, and it must come to an immediate end now.”
Summary
- The UN Security Council has passed a resolution calling for an “immediate ceasefire” in Gaza
- In a change in position, the US refrained from vetoing the measure, which also calls for the release of hostages
- The US move signals divergence with Israel over Israel’s offensive in Gaza – although the White House insists it’s not a policy shift
- In response, Israel has cancelled their delegation’s planned visit to the White House this week
- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu calls it a “clear retreat” from the previous US position
- Today’s resolution was drafted in part by Algeria, the Arab bloc’s current member on the Security Council
- It was approved by 14 votes to none, with one abstention – from the US
Attorney General says $464m penalty against Trump still stands
Court is back for the hush-money case, but let’s stick with this breaking news for a moment regarding Trump’s civil fraud case.
After an appeals court gave him an extra 10 days and reduced the amount owed (for a bond while the ruling is appealed) to $175m, we heard from New York Attorney General Letitia James.
Quote Message: Donald Trump is still facing accountability for his staggering fraud. The court has already found that he engaged in years of fraud to falsely inflate his net worth and unjustly enrich himself, his family, and his organization. The $464m judgment – plus interest – against Donald Trump and the other defendants still stands.”
Donald Trump is still facing accountability for his staggering fraud. The court has already found that he engaged in years of fraud to falsely inflate his net worth and unjustly enrich himself, his family, and his organization. The $464m judgment – plus interest – against Donald Trump and the other defendants still stands.”
And Trump also issued a statement, saying he did nothing wrong and:
Quote Message: We will abide by the decision of the Appellate Division, and post either a bond, equivalent securities, or cash.”
We will abide by the decision of the Appellate Division, and post either a bond, equivalent securities, or cash.”
Comment BBC reports nothing without staggering bias. My expectation is that no expense or efforts will be spared to prevent Donald Trump’s candidature for the U.S Presidency. In contrast evidence of Joe Biden’s seriously questionable financial misconduct, along with his sons massive financial gain in Ukraine is suppressed. Biden on the one hand is fit for the Presidency while his absent minded dumping of state secrets in his garage next to where the cat or dog sleeps is because he is just a kindly old man.
As for Stormy Daniels and the hush money, no one did weird sex, using a cigar, better than saintly Bill Clinton, the husband of saintly Democrat Hilary Clinton – and don’t forget the Whitewater Scandal. As for sex scandals, none can beat the Kennedys.
Trump accused the proceedings as election interference organised by ‘Biden’s thugs, because I am not sure he knows he is alive or not.’ Trump has been speaking to press which has really upset the BBC transtlantic mafia. They are not happy at his reduced fraud charges bond. They were expecting his assest seizures to amount to billions. The Anglo U.S elite have been on his back since his election in 2016. It is remarkable that he got so much done. Their big fear is that Trump will block mpore financial aid and weapons to Ukraine. That proxy war has been in the planning stage for some years and well in the swamp dwellers hands when Trump won in spite of all the racist and rapist slurs. The essence of current prosecutions are 1 ) He did what all businesse do, maximised the value of his assets for loan purposes, and paying his dues 2 ) He allegendly paid hush money to a porn actress. If this were true he was just paying for services rendered. Why wasn’t Prince Andrew taken to court, along with all his high powered sex addicts.
His only court defeat so far was on the word of a New York gossip columist who apparently said he touched her while she was modelling lingerie for him over 30 years ago in a New York store. His lawyer was told to ease of his interrogation for upsetting his accuser, who in spite of writing a gossip diary, could not remember the year of the assault. She was awarded nearly $5million damages and another $40 million for him later calling him a liar. It was her word against his, as it seems will be the case with the porn star Stormy Daniels.
R J Cook
| Why did the Islamic State attack Russia? |
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| Understand foreign affairs from the Indian perspective! This week, the newsletter is written by Stanly Johny, The Hindu’s International Affairs Editor. |
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Russian officials claimed that the gunmen were natives of Tajikistan, the poorest Central Asian republic. After the physical caliphate of the Islamic State that was spread across the borders of Syria and Iraq was destroyed in 2015-18, several trained IS jihadists, including many from Central Asia, moved to Afghanistan, where they set up an operational base in the eastern Nangarhar province. Ever since the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan in August 2021, the IS-K has carried out a number of attacks, mainly targeting Afghanistan’s Shia minority. In the Islamic State’s parlance, the IS-Khorasan is a wilayat, a province that covers the geographical area of Afghanistan and the Central Asian Republics that were part of the erstwhile Soviet Union. In recent years, the IS-K had released propaganda videos aimed at recruiting Muslim youth from Central Asia.
After Friday’s attack, the IS-K claimed that it was part of “a wider war between the Islamic State and countries fighting Islam”.
March 24th 2024
Britain’s Lowest Common Denominator – By R J Cook
British mainstream media pumps out 24/7 morality and propaganda. Its front people are mainly posh upper middle class women, but so long as a lot of them are from the alleged ethnic underclass the sanctimonious equality targets and messages are assured.
So no surprises with the following jibes against Putin’s suspicions of a Ukrainian link to the Moscow Concert Hall attack. I thought so immediately. The U.S has supplied ISIS weapons and used them as pawns before, notably against Assad’s Syria because it was a Russian ally and the U.S. Obviously they chose Ukraine for refuge even if they were not sent from there. Obviously dissident groups will exploit Russia’s serious distraction facing a massive NATO proxy and armed enemy. I also take the view that Vladimir Putin has gained from the Iranian backed HAMAS attack on Israel.
The Middle East is now a powder keg with only Russian and Chinese ships given safe passage through the Red Sea. Western media laughably talks of Russian war crimes as if the west is innocent. The Anglo U.S NATO leadership strongly believes it has the right of immunity to the international laws it claims the right of monopoly in their making. Thankfully I am not the only person in the world who sees the impossible and laughable contradiction here.
Western political morality invented the expedience of multi culture, an obsession with gender identity, feminism, white working class guilt, fighting racism, fighting sexism, open door migration, an inexplicable version of ‘our democracies’ , thought control, language policing and religious tolerance – but not atheism because that would cause offence. Putin knows there is some dangerous stuff here and they want to dump it on him. He knows the west has dictators more than equal to him,with sophisticated techniques and social camouflage.
When I was young, the west laughed at the Soviet Union for rewriting history and geography. Putin knows Russia can’t even compete with that stuff any more. The West excels at lies and hypocrisy. Its masses have the dumbest multi culture which migrants and Muslims run rings around. J K Rowling author of the Potter fantasy series appears obsessed with the notion that the interesting explosion of male to female sex change, is because, boys from very young ages are so sexually aroused by the incredible bulging mass of British women overwhelms them. So the queue up to have their penises inverted, testicles removed and grow breasts as the perfect cover for sexually assaulting and raping British women in public toilets.
Its not just this internecine cultural invasion that Putin fears. Once NATO has Ukraine in the bag, the raping of his land will run right into a Russian regime change and the rise of western style idiocy better known as ‘our democracies.’ NATO will build a massive new naval base in Crimea, with a backdoor into the Middle East and Russia kicked out of Africa. God knows what these greedy planet eaters will do to the Arctic.
As the western white population declines thanks to broken homes, feral children and family breakdown, Africa’s ever expanding population will have plenty of room to expand. With the ice caps melting it will be a lot warmer for them. What the highly intelligent Chinese leadership will make of this, who knows, but the Pentagon and U.S military experts are calculating their NATO response to a combined Russo Chinese Army. Both countries face an existential battle against a culture where the lowest common denominator holds it together. So anything is possible. There are enhanced fears that Vladimir Putin faces an assassination risk.
R J Cook
Zelensky hits back after Russia links Ukraine to Moscow attack
By Sarah Rainsford
Eastern Europe correspondent, Kyiv
As news of the Moscow concert hall attack broke on Friday, Ukrainians knew what was coming: Kyiv would be blamed.
The next thing they expected was more drones and more missiles.
The accusations began almost immediately.
They were just hints at first, until President Vladimir Putin openly claimed that the men who attacked Moscow had tried to flee to Ukraine, helped by contacts there.
Then shortly before dawn on Sunday came the sound of explosions in Kyiv.
When Mr Putin made his comments on Saturday in an address to the Russian nation, Islamic State group (IS) extremists had already announced they had carried out the killings.
The US had confirmed that it passed on intelligence of a threat earlier this month.
Now IS have released a hideously graphic video of their massacre, filmed on bodycams and including shouts of “God is Greatest” from the attackers.
- Bullets, a crush and panic: Moscow concert that became a massacre
- What we know about the attack on a Moscow concert hall
In his evening statement on Saturday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was visibly angry that his country was being blamed.
He described the Russian president and others in Moscow as “scum” for linking the attack there to Kyiv.
He suggested a “miserable” Russian leader was more concerned about pinning the attack on Kyiv than reassuring his own citizens.
Mr Zelensky then turned the tables on Moscow, saying it had sent “hundreds of thousands of [its own] terrorists” to Ukraine since the full-scale invasion began in February 2022.
He said those troops were now brutalising Ukraine, instead of protecting Russia against the real threat of extremism.
“They burn our cities… they torture and rape.”
Ukrainian police have opened thousands of criminal cases against Russian soldiers since February 2022, including one killing we investigated where two unarmed civilians were shot in the back.
Read More https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-68649229
At Guantánamo, the US government sought to hold detainees in a place where neither US nor international law applied. The facilities at Guantánamo have become emblematic of the gross human rights abuses and torture perpetrated by the US government in the name of counterterrorism
11 Oct 2023 — Special forces bosses tried to cover up a “campaign of murder” in Afghanistan, a lawyer claims.
Whitehall’s cover-up of SAS killings in Afghanistan
Afghanistan inquiry hears senior officers hid SAS killingsBBChttps://www.bbc.com › news
11 Oct 2023 — Special forces bosses tried to cover up a “campaign of murder” in Afghanistan, a lawyer claims.
13 Dec 2023 — Evidence given to the Afghanistan inquiry reveals the army’s special forces unit deleted key data related to the killing of over 50 Afghans.
20 Feb 2024 — Members of UKSF have been accused of killing unarmed Afghans, planting weapons on them, falsifying reports and then covering up the crimes. Mr …
Over the years, she spoke out against the Iraq war, hunger, homelessness, sex trafficking, mass incarceration and death penalty. Julian Assange is being persecuted for telling the truth, a shameful truth, a dangerous truth that defies the narrative in many situations
11 Oct 2023 — The SAS shot dead two Afghan adults who were sleeping in an incident in August 2012 in which two children were seriously injured, a public …
Moscow attack: Putin says all four suspects arrested after 133 killed at concert hall
Russian President Vladimir Putin says all four gunmen who carried out a deadly attack at a packed concert venue in Moscow have been arrested.
At least 133 people were killed and more than 140 injured when the attackers stormed the building, firing indiscriminately and setting it alight.
Authorities said 11 people were detained in total, and the four gunmen were caught while heading to Ukraine.
The Islamic State (IS) group says it was behind the attack.
On Saturday Amaq, the IS channel on Telegram, posted an image of the four masked men they claimed were involved in the assault. Russia has not commented on the IS claim.
The group later released highly graphic footage from the attack. The video, which has been verified by the BBC as genuine, shows one of the gunmen opening fire on several people. The BBC will not be broadcasting this video.
In a televised address, Mr Putin condemned the massacre – the deadliest in Russia for nearly 20 years – as a “barbaric terrorist act” and repeated earlier suggestions by Russian security services that the attackers had tried to escape to Ukraine.
Kyiv dismissed the claim that it was some way involved in the attack as “absurd”.
“To suggest the suspects were heading to Ukraine, would suggest they were stupid or suicidal,” Andriy Yusov, a spokesperson for the Ukrainian military intelligence directorate, told the BBC.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky accused Mr Putin of seeking to “blame” Ukraine for the attack. “This worthless Putin, instead of dealing with his citizens of Russia, addressing them, remained silent for a day – thinking how to bring this to Ukraine,” he said in his nightly address.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-68646380
Gaza war: How the crisis is testing the limits of US diplomacy
By Tom Bateman, state department correspondent
Travelling with the US secretary of state
A security guard thrust open the door of Antony Blinken’s armoured car and the US secretary of state strode out down a line of yellow barricades.
“We’re working to get them home,” he declared, gripping the hands of Israeli protesters in Tel Aviv calling for a deal to release the hostages held by Hamas.
It was a striking moment but not altogether spontaneous.
The street had by now been buzzing with security officials readying his route towards the protesters.
Those of us in the travelling press were told to expect the interaction in the 20 minutes or so leading up to it. It was firmly caught on camera.
This was a strong message from America’s top diplomat to both the Israeli public and its prime minister – the US was committed, engaged and pushing everything to get a ceasefire-for-hostage-release deal over the line.
In other words the message is: The US is trying to stop the war – albeit with firm conditions.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-68642467
March 23rd 2024
From The Hollow Men – By T.S Elliot
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but with a whimper
Definitely World War 3 Now.
Million in Ukraine lose power after Russian attack
Ukraine says Russian attacks on critical infrastructure left five dead and widespread blackouts.
Big missile attack targets Ukrainian capitalFleeing Ukraine’s embattled border villages
Comment If attacking infrastructure is a war crime then Britain’s World War Two RAF was led by war criminals and full of war criminals. Then there was Dresden, Cologne, Nagasaki and Hiroshima to name just a few. Smug Anglo U.S NATO defined international law so think it doesn’t apply to them.
R J Cook
Fleeing Ukraine’s embattled border villages
Big missile attack targets Ukrainian capital
EU to cap some Ukrainian imports to quell protests
Thousands of children to leave Russian border city
- AttributionEurope
No choice for Ukrainians: More Putin means more war
- AttributionEurope
- Posted5 days ago5d
“Work is underway to enable Ukrainian agricultural products to return to their original markets in Africa and the Middle East so that they do not remain blocked in Europe.” Read more. C
Former PM Morawiecki chimed in, saying that Tusk was “posturing to be a sheriff” when in fact he was just deflecting attention from the fact that he was not keeping his election promises such as tax cuts. Read more…
Comment is not a conservative. He came back from the EU to destroy conservatism. R J Cook
| “We, as conservatives, want to protect the classical values and Judeo-Christian roots that are pivotal to the future EU. Forgetting our past, as demanded by the mainstream ‘cancel culture,’ endangers our future.” Read more… |
Islamic State’s deadly Moscow attack highlights its fixation with Russia
Kyiv worries Putin will exploit the bloodshed in Moscow to escalate his war in Ukraine
Not entirely. Islamic State has in the past claimed attacks it had nothing to do with. However, the group’s claim it is behind the Moscow attack …
- Four people directly involved in the Moscow concert hall attack are among 11 detained, Russia’s security chief tells President Putin
- At least 115 people were killed when gunmen attacked a packed concert venue on the outskirts of Moscow, Russia says
- More than 140 others were wounded at the Crocus City Hall, according to the FSB Federal Security Service
- The US says it’s credible that the Islamic State group could be behind the attack, after it said the group did it. Russia has not commented
- A large fire engulfed the roof of the complex and dramatic video shows panicked concertgoers taking cover as shots and explosions ring out
- The White House says it is working to find out more about the situation and Ukraine has denied any involvement in the attack
Andrei Vorobyov, the governor of the Moscow region, says the number of victims in the attack on Crocus Concert Hall could still “rise significantly”.
As a reminder, at least 115 people are known to have been killed in the attack.
More than 140 others were wounded and 16 of those people are still in an “extremely serious condition”, including one child, Russian authorities say.
Another 44 people are in serious condition, with a total of 107 victims being treated at hospital, the ministry says.
A phone line has also been opened for relatives of victims to find the “location and condition of relatives hospitalised in Moscow city medical institutions”, Russia’s state-owned news agency Tass is reporting.
The Islamic State’s influence and model are spreading. Even in many Muslim countries where the Islamic State does not have a strong presence, its rise is radicalizing their populations, fomenting sectarianism, and making a troubled region worse.1 The Islamic State’s successes in Syria and Iraq alarmed many observers in Washington and prompted the Obama administration to overcome its longstanding hesitation to become more militarily involved in Iraq and Syria. But there is one person for whom the Islamic State’s rise is even more frightening: Ayman al-Zawahiri. Although the Al Qaeda leader might be expected to rejoice at the emergence of a strong jihadist group that delights in beheading Americans (among other horrors), in reality the Islamic State’s rise risks Al Qaeda’s demise. When Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi rejected Al Qaeda’s authority and later declared a caliphate, he split the always-fractious jihadist movement. The two are now competing for more than the leadership of the jihadist movement: they are competing for its soul.
Irresponsible arms transfers by countries including the UK, USA, Russia, China, Germany and France have provided the armed group with a huge and lethal arsenal.
For years, weapons of war have been freely flowing into Iraq. Slack controls over Iraqi military stockpiles and endemic corruption by successive Iraqi governments have added to the problem.
March 22nd 2024
Another U.S Proxy by R J Cook.
Moments ago a BBC News broadcast from the U.S said that the U.S made a speedy defence of Ukraine to stop Russia blaming them for the Moscow arena attack. The BBC, always pushing the saintly Biden government line said it was Islamic State who had owned up to the crime. As a matter of fact, as IS record and history in Syria attests, Islamic State is another U.S creation and proxy in their Imperialist wars.
R J Cook
At least 40 killed, more than 100 wounded in Moscow …
War Crime In Moscow – UK & US Enbassies warned their citizens weeks ago to stay away from large Moscow venues. How did they know ? Anything is possible now with so much western finance and political reputations at stake. This is world war where plausible deniability is essential to westen plans. Inevitably U.S denies any Ukraine ( i.e their ) involvement in this massacre. Whatever the evidence, the west has its story ready with the usual spin.
R.J Cook.
Media: Mass shooting at Moscow’s Crocus City Hall leaves …
Gunmen burst into a big concert hall in Moscow on Friday and fired automatic weapons at the crowd, injuring an unspecified number of …
40 dead, dozens injured after shooting at Moscow music venue, Russian officials say
The American oligarchy and the 2024 election
The contest between Biden and Trump is in reality a competition for the favor of the few hundred billionaires who monopolize the wealth of the United States and control its political system.
Why is Ukraine so important to the United States?
Seizing billions in Russian foreign exchange reserves is a big deal and a repeat of what the so called Great Powers did to 1919 Germany. They set the seeds for World War 2 divided Germany, emasculating the western section. Putin is fluent in Germany and saw the fallout during his role with the KGB who were never worse than the CIA and MI6 – who have spent years and a fortune subverting Russia into their selfish planet eating ways.
War mongering so called Democrats have to stop Trump by foul means which is why they subverted their so called Democracy to spuriously impeach him after his unacceptable 2016 election victory. They have to win this Ukraine proxy war. Vain posturing Macron has added to the fray that this is an issue of credibility for Europe.
Russia has responded to this with an acceptance that this is effectively all out war and have launched a massive attack on corrupt Ukraine’s infrastructure. Zelensky is excited by imminent arrival of U.S F 16s which will be used to hunt and destroy Russian bombers. Russia is also under direct attack from the Ukrainain proxies, covert NATO forces and mercenaries. All out war and nuclear conflict appears imminent and it will be the ignorant brain washed masses who pay the price.
Why is Ukraine so important to the United States?
Ukraine is a key regional strategic U.S & NATO partner that has undertaken significant efforts to modernize its military and increase its interoperability with NATO in readiness for the proxy war if intimidation failed. It remains an urgent security assistance priority to provide Ukraine the equipment it needs to defend itself against Russia’s war against Russia’s existential war – profiting the corrupt western pleasure and power obsessed elite..
Niger has cancelled its security pact with the the United States. Houthi rebels have promised they will not attack Russian and Chinese vessels. This is a little bit worse than Britain’s phoney war. I have watched the delusional imbeciles at work in the U.K parliament and their equals. Democrats spent a fortune trying to get rid of him in 2016 – 20, then setting him up for the so called Capitol Hill insurrection, fraud and sex offences. Britain’s Generals are on the bandwagon, feeding of yesterday’s parliamentary debate and well publicised in the Tory Daily Express, proclaiming that Britain needs a New Model Army. The U.S recently described Russian activity on Africa as encroachment.
The world is divided. In this new phoney war, the west is not the only half making plans. China knows they have to do something more than sign a security pact with Russia. They know they are next. The U.S and U.K will be keeping a close eye on the Global South. Russia, the victim of a self seeking NATO proxy war is running out of options and will have much in hand that western spies and traitors don’t know about. This is the U.S war for the New World Order, first mentioned by President George Bush Senior after the first Gulf War so brilliantly engineered by the United States.
Russia needs a strong leader and has one in Vladimir Putin. The corrupt fake Anglo U.S Democratic ( sic ) led NATO doesn’t like this. They thought they had sorted matters promoting alcoholic imbecile Boris Yeltsin who set the stage for all of this.
I once had political ambitions. This was before realising, after years as a senior council member and selection process as a prospective parliamentary candidate for a mainstream party, that I did not have the necessary capacity for lies, deceit, duplicity, hypocrisy and bullying. That is UK MP George Galloway and Donald Trump’s problem too. Western politics is endemically corrupt. Russia is not the United States despite the best western elite efforts to subvert it. Hopefully it never will be, but they are up against a powerful force of a very nasty greedy elite of the same mindset that wiped out the long forgotten Red Indians. There is no obvious limit to what this posturing elite will do to get its way.
Russia is also up against a slavish brain washed very controlled mass of people who will suffer dire consequences if they do not rally to their leader’s assorted flags for democracy ( sic ). It is anyone’s guess how the U.K’s wonderfully diverse population of freedom loving ethic migrants, asylum seekers and LGBTQI will respond to this cause, where the only real diversity is between the haves and have nots, the rich and the poor. The rest is a confidence trick to divide and fool them. That is what the masses will be fighting for.
R J Cook
United States Democracy – By R J Cook
Read the following aricle from Bloomberg and ask the question, who could possibly believe that this United States cancerous larger version of the United Kingdom, which supports its global hegemony, could possibly be a ‘Democracy’ ? This item alone proves that U.S elections are all about money and lies being used to rig elections and jail desperate protestors.
That is where the distracting war Ukraine proxy war on Russia is so helpful to big and little Satan. As for the EU, its is gullible and easily misled by dangerous posers, as was interwar Germany by Perfidious Albion. Apart from Marx, Goethe Schopeneur, and Nietsche, Europe is not renowned for worthwhile intellectuals. They were centuries ago, but most inspiring.
No doubt they are regarded as sexist and divisiive now. Goethe famously said “You have to be a good hater.” I started reading all their stuff when I was 14. Goethe’s words are most relevant these days, behind the rainbow facade. Unfortunately events have left Nietsche behind. God has been resucitated in all his ‘divide and fool’ glorious forms with all manner of anti hate laws guaranteeing him immortality, at least until Nuclear War cleanses the planet of human greed, lies and hypocrisy.
R J Cook
Welcome to Balance of Power, bringing you the latest in global politics. If you haven’t yet, sign up here.
It’s becoming a money problem.
In the case of Donald Trump, who likes to brag about about how rich he is, he doesn’t have anywhere near the size of Joe Biden’s war chest.
The incumbent Democrat president is running laps around his Republican rival in a tight rematch of 2020.
Fund-raising is a huge part of making it to the White House. Candidates are forced to drop out soon after the cash dries out. That’s what happened when the billionaire Koch brothers pulled the plug on Nikki Haley, Trump’s last challenger to be the Republican nominee.
In many ways Trump defied conventional wisdom about US politics. In 2016, he was able to prevail over Hillary Clinton by shattering records of small-dollar donations, building a loyal base of individuals.
But the hordes of MAGA supporters may not be enough in what will be the most expensive presidential election in history. The Democratic Party have three times what Trump and the Republican National Committee have.
Then there are Trump’s legal bills. And while his popularity seems to grow with every new indictment (which he denounces as political persecution), it’s hitting his wallet.
On Monday, the billionaire has to come up with $454 million to post bond. Beyond the public bravado, Trump is strapped for cash, and as Nancy Cook and colleagues report, he is personally calling wealthy donors to help out.
Interestingly, Trump earlier this month met up with Elon Musk — on-and-off the world’s richest man, who over the years turned away from Democrats and is actively courted by the GOP. So far he’s saying he’s not donating to either. That could change.
Meanwhile, the doors of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida have flung open for dinners with the host.
In a political system where cash is king, the money gap he’s desperately trying to close should serve as a reminder to anyone already banking on Trump 2.0 not to assume he will win. —Flavia Krause-Jackson
Comment Fortunes have been and will still be spent, along with massive U.S, UK and EU media propaganda to smear Donald Trump and corrupt the United States Election.
BBC’s news programmes are punctuated by the line ‘Broadcasting across the U.K and the world.’ They use the term like page breaks. The pseudo left liberal rainbow pressure groups and elite money men and women have to win at all cost.
Democracy is alright and will be perfect for them once there are no more challengers to their smug self interested fixed agenda. No one does posturing hyporcrisy better than the U.K and its overgrown infantile U.S elite offspring.
R J Cook
Israel allegedly carried out mass summary executions at Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital
Based on interviews with survivors who were detained and tortured at the hospital, Euro-Med said that Israeli forces had been carrying executions for three days in a row.
As more information emerges in the suspicious death of Barnett, lawyers for the longtime Boeing Quality Manager released his full whistleblower complaint Wednesday.
Wall Street hits record high on the back of Fed decision
According to “dot plot” projections by members of the Fed’s governing body, interest rates will drop 0.75 percentage points by the end of the year.
Australia: Tasmanian Labor leader tries to distance herself from AUKUS
Rebecca White and the Labor leaders are trying to secure enough votes to form a government by posturing as having reservations about the preparations for a potentially catastrophic US-led war with China.
The lawsuit accuses both the trustees and billionaire backers of UPenn alongside the United States government of attacks on universities and academic staff under McCarthyite conditions.
March 21st 2024
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Putin is correct to scorn British Democracy – R J Cook
If Britain was a democracy they would not need to keep reminding us otherwise. Britain has a parasitical House of Lords full of placemen, vested interests, with former Government Ministers and MPs in their dotage, including Russia haters like Churchill’s grandson Nicholas Soames. The millionaire BBC acclaimed first black Prime Minister Rishi Sunak hit the panic button when George Galloway got back into parliament on his ‘Workers Party’ ticket. Then came former top Tory Lee Anderson who would not apologise for telling the truth about Islam and immigration defecting to the new Reform Party. He was immediately labelled far right, which is the white liberals weapon of choice. Germany and France have seen the same response to the AFD and LePen. Britain is a major problem on the world stage. Superficially the tiny country is all about diversity and equality. But it does not stand close scrutiny.
Feminism and anti racism works well, along with a crippling tax system to pay for all the equally rabble rousing wars, is crucial to the democratic freedom loving myth. This mentality is a perfect fit with equally corrupt Ukraine. The mere sight and sound of pompous old Etonian, one time Prime Minister and now elevated to Lord Cameron says it all about the U.K. His Lordship is now the unelected moralising Foreign Secretary.
Britain may be a tiny target for Russian ‘Satan Missiles’ where only one landing in the Irish Sea would be enough to cause a massive 1600 foot Tsunami and massive radiation cloud turning Putin’s number one enemy into a nucleat wasteland.
Meanwhile, instead of seeing this country for what it is, the masses are more concerned about pampered ‘Princess’ Kate’s health. The true political significance of Buckingham Palace issuing a scandalous fake family photo showing ‘ all well’ goes right over their empty and air inflated heads. British people should be concerned about massive legal and illegal immigration along with all the rubbish about multi culture and diversity. Rampant Rowling on the subject of men changing sex just for the pleasure of raping Britain’s female beauties in public toilets, says more about fanatical feminists than about transsexuals who obviously are taking extreme measures to avoid women !
In Britain, 90% of the population live, if that is not too strong a word, on 10% of the land. Meanwhile, 10% of the population own 90 % of the land. I am not talking about the slavery of mortgages which are owned by the elite, many not repaid in a slave’s lifetime due to rampant divorce, helping the kids and the likes of the cost of war inflation crisis which knows no bounds.
The masses have little if any time or encouragment to think. Britain’s ruling classes measure size in money, land and share holdings. That truth should have become obvious when Thatcher’s public asset stripping Tories took over in 1979. Thatcher freed up the flow of money and the inflow of third wold cheap labour for the global elite’s profit.
British people have small minds, so the reality of big Britain being the reality of big banking, an area where the City of London thrives and from which comes the real power, escapes them. Appealing to the working women’s vanity has long been big business. Their empowerment is about ball breaking and blaming men. Those small minds are all too ready to blame Putin and his so called ‘Closely controlled State.’ Few, if any state, is as controlled as Britain and its slavish masses. Putin is right to scorn it. Scorning him back is no way to face reality. But that is the last thing the British are supposed to do. They like scapegoats and fantasy which is why J K Rowling and Harry Potter were so popular.
R J Cook
.
Putin claims landslide in Russian election and scorns US democracy
By Paul Kirby
BBC News
Vladimir Putin was always going to claim his fifth term as president with a landslide, faced with three other candidates all rubber-stamped by the Kremlin.
But when election officials said results gave him more than 87% of the vote, he said Russia’s democracy was more transparent than many in the West.
In truth no credible opposition candidate was allowed to stand.
Supporters of dead Putin critic Alexei Navalny did stage symbolic protests.
Their “Noon against Putin” initiative meant that long queues of voters formed at midday in Russian cities including Moscow and St Petersburg and in even greater numbers outside many embassies abroad, but it was never going to have any impact on the result.
Monitoring group OVD-Info said at least 80 Russians were arrested. There was no repeat of the sporadic attacks on some polling stations that happened on Friday.
- LIVE: West condemns Russia’s ‘pseudo-election’
- Predicting Putin’s landslide was easy, but what comes next?
Western countries lined up to condemn the vote as neither free nor fair.
Germany called it a “pseudo-election” under an authoritarian ruler reliant on censorship, repression and violence.
UK Foreign Secretary Lord Cameron condemned “the illegal holding of elections on Ukrainian territory”.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said “the Russian dictator is simulating another election”.
In the words of Navalny ally Leonid Volkov, savagely beaten with a meat hammer in exile in Lithuania last week: “The percentages drawn for Putin have, of course, not the slightest relation to reality.”
Russians had three days to vote and people in Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine had even longer, in an attempt to persuade residents to take part.
One election commission official was reported killed in the occupied town of Berdyansk on Sunday and residents spoke of pro-Russian collaborators going from home to home with ballot boxes accompanied by armed soldiers.
But on Russia’s carefully controlled state TV channels the result was hailed as a triumph.
“This is an incredible level of support and unity around the figure of Vladimir Putin,” said one correspondent excitedly, “and a signal to Western countries”.
President Putin was more subdued as he took questions from reporters, but he did hail Russia’s presidential campaign as far more advanced than the US, citing Russia’s use of online voting, which officials said brought in eight million voters.
Mr Putin had earlier been filmed performing a single keystroke to exercise his democratic right.
“It’s transparent and absolutely objective,” he suggested, “not like in the US with mail-in voting… you can buy a vote for $10”.
The Russian leader made the same false claim about US elections earlier this year but never offered any evidence.
Meanwhile, independent Russian watchdog Golos, which has been branded a foreign agent, said that Russia had never before “seen a presidential campaign that fell so far short of constitutional standards”.
- Why Putin’s fifth term as Russian leader was never in doubt
- Rosenberg: Russia’s stage-managed election
- Putin: From Russia’s KGB to a presidency defined by war
Vladimir Putin is now set to stay in power until at least 2030, and has ruled Russia since 2000 – the longest-serving Kremlin leader since Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.
Golos was barred from observing the vote but reports of irregularities have emerged, as well as pressure on public sector employees to vote either in polling stations or online.
Voters were not able “to form and express their free will, or to establish the true outcome of the vote”, it said.
President Putin praised opposition campaigners for encouraging voters to turn out in greater numbers, although he condemned those who spoilt their ballots and said action would be taken against them.
Article 23: What is Hong Kong’s tough new security law?
Related Topics
By Kelly Ng
BBC News
Hong Kong has passed a new security law that the government says is necessary for stability, but raises fears that civil liberties will be further eroded.
The law, called Article 23, covers treason, sedition and state secrets, and allows for trials to be held behind closed doors.
When will Hong Kong’s Article 23 be introduced?
The bill was passed with little opposition on 19 March, following a month-long consultation.
The city’s leader John Lee says he will sign Article 23 into law on 23 March.
China’s Vice Premier Ding Xuexiang has said it would protect “core national interests” and allow Hong Kong to focus on economic development.
How long has Hong Kong’s Article 23 been planned?
For decades: an attempt to pass the bill back in 2003 was shelved after massive protests.
Half a million Hongkongers came out onto the streets and more than 90,000 submissions were made during a three-month consultation.
Then-chief executive Tung Chee-hwa’s administration withdraw the legislation and the strong opposition also saw the resignation of security minister Regina Ip.
The government claims the decision to introduce Article 23 in 2024 follows a 99% support rate during the latest public consultation.
It also follows a national security law (NSL) imposed by Beijing in 2020. Authorities credit it with restoring stability in the city after widespread pro-democracy protests in 2019.
At least 260 people have already been arrested under the NSL, which critics say reduced the city’s autonomy.
Mr Lee has said Article 23 is also necessary, to guard against “potential sabotage and undercurrents that try to create troubles”.
How does Article 23 change Hong Kong security laws?
The 2024 version of Article 23 allows for closed-door trials and gives the police rights to detain suspects for up to 16 days without charge.
The city’s leader will also be given authority to ban organisations and companies from operating in Hong Kong, should they be found “working for foreign forces”.
The draft bill expands on the Beijing-imposed national security law, which already criminalises secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces. Other offences it covers include:
- Theft of state secrets and espionage: The bill has a broad definition of “state secrets”. It includes “major policy decisions”, “economic or social development” and Hong Kong’s “external affairs”, among other things. The wording in this section of the bill is almost identical to China’s state secrets law, which Beijing is looking to broaden.
- Sabotage endangering national security: This is a new offence that targets people who endanger national security either intentionally or by “being reckless”. It also wants to criminalise computer-related acts that harm national security. Doxxing – the malicious act of publishing people’s personal information online – of police officers was cited in the consultation paper as a possible example of such an offence.
- External interference: This new offence will deal with acts of collaborating with “external forces” to influence or interfere with national and local authorities. Examples include receiving financial support or direction from these “external forces”, which could include foreign governments, political organisations or individuals.
- Insurrection: This will deal with acts such as assisting an armed force – or the organisation to which the force belongs – in an armed conflict against China. Authorities have repeatedly cited unrest due to the months-long pro-democracy protests in 2019 as grounds for legislating this new offence.
- Treason: In addition to treason, which includes offences such as levying war against China, the new bill seeks to criminalise unauthorised military drilling and “misprision of treason”, committed by someone who has knowledge of treason but does not report it.
Those found guilty of treason, insurrection, inciting a member of the Chinese army to mutiny, or colluding with an external force to damage or weaken public infrastructure could be sentenced to life imprisonment.
Read More https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-68508694?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-gb
Comment This is typical BBC, U.K State & Worldwide Broadcaster propaganda. Confident that their, war mongers, profiteers, and the paranoid who still want revenege for the Russian Revolution have won that war, they are going to go on turning up the heat on China.
They and the global ruling elite think they have Russia sorted and on the way down. The war on China will accelerate in due course if their isn’t a well provoked nuclear holocaust beforehand. Criticising China’s Hong King is an essential part of implanting the seeds of Chines revolt and cultural destruction.
This arrogant elite asked for this security law because they never meant to give back the city stolen by the cancer of Brirish Imperialism in the nineteenth century.
R J Cook
March 20th 2024
Finland: Ukraine is free to bomb Russia with our weapons
Helsinki also urged Germany to “seriously consider” sending long-range Taurus cruise missiles to help Kyiv.
Free article usually reserved for subscribers
February 29, 2024 7:34 pm CET
By Pierre Emmanuel Ngendakumana
Ukraine can use weapons provided by Finland to hit targets on Russian soil, senior officials in Helsinki said.
Finland’s Defense Minister Antti Häkkänen said his country has not set any restrictions on what Ukraine can do with the weapons it provides, Finnish broadcaster Yle reported on Thursday. Häkkänen added that blocks have been imposed mainly by countries which have provided Ukraine with long-range weapons systems.
“If necessary, Ukraine should also strike military targets on the Russian side. It is a completely legitimate defensive battle that Ukraine is waging. The U.N. Charter allows military targets to be attacked across land borders,” said Jukka Kopra, chair of the Finnish parliamentary defense committee.
Ukraine can use weapons provided by Finland to hit targets on Russian soil, senior officials in Helsinki said.
Finland’s Defense Minister Antti Häkkänen said his country has not set any restrictions on what Ukraine can do with the weapons it provides, Finnish broadcaster Yle reported on Thursday. Häkkänen added that blocks have been imposed mainly by countries which have provided Ukraine with long-range weapons systems.
“If necessary, Ukraine should also strike military targets on the Russian side. It is a completely legitimate defensive battle that Ukraine is waging. The U.N. Charter allows military targets to be attacked across land borders,” said Jukka Kopra, chair of the Finnish parliamentary defense committee.
That’s a stark difference from other Western countries including Germany, where Chancellor Olaf Scholz is reluctant to send long-range Taurus cruise missiles to Ukraine, fearing the weapons will be used to strike targets deep inside Russia and draw Germany directly into war with Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
“I encourage Germany to seriously consider it. The German government does know that they would be of great importance,” said Häkkänen.
Laura Kayali contributed to this report.
Anglo – U.S Corrupt Travesty Of Democracy
Trump needs a $464m bond in six days. What if he can’t get it?
By Madeline Halpert
BBC News, New York
Donald Trump’s lawyers are asking a New York court to put a $464m (£365m) fine in a civil fraud case on hold, as the former president finds himself in a precarious financial situation that could ultimately see his most prized properties taken.
If Mr Trump wants to continue his appeal in the case, he must submit the full amount in cash or secure a bond from a private company by 25 March.
But on Monday, his lawyers said that despite their “diligent efforts” it had been “practically impossible” to find a company willing to act as a guarantor of the full sum and asked for a pause.
“We really are in a moment of serious crisis for Trump personally, as well as for his business,” said Professor Will Thomas from the University of Michigan Ross Business School.
So with the clock seemingly ticking, here’s what could happen next in the case.
1) Trump gets a pause
A panel of appeals court judges will decide by 25 March whether the $464m judgement can be paused while Mr Trump appeals.
This would be a best case scenario for the former president, who is no doubt eager to avoid having to pay an estimated 16% of what Forbes reports is his $2.6bn net worth.
The fact that Mr Trump has assets in the state of New York that can be seized, however, could reassure a court that he would be able to pay the penalty if he lost the appeal, according to Mr Thomas.
“I think it is very likely that he will get some kind of stay – unless they find some other stopgap option,” he told the BBC.
Renato Mariotti, a lawyer who represents large real-estate developers, said it was hard to predict how the court would treat a former president.
“But my clients wouldn’t get a pause,” he said.
2) He secures a bond
Mr Trump could still find a way to secure a bond – for a fee – if his request for a stay is rejected, although according to his lawyers, this could be difficult.
The bonding company would be agreeing to pay the financial penalty if Mr Trump loses his appeal and cannot do so himself.
But his legal team said they had already approached 30 companies without success.
To secure a bond, an individual has to demonstrate to the company providing the guarantee that they have enough liquidity – usually in the form of cash plus stocks or securities which can be sold quickly – to cover the amount.
Mr Mariotti said the fact he could not secure a bond could mean two things: “Trump is not nearly as wealthy as he has led the public to believe – or he didn’t prepare for this possible judgement.”
3) A compromise option
The New York appeals court could come back to Mr Trump with a middle-of-the-road option, experts said.
The court could require Mr Trump to post a bond of a smaller amount while he appeals against the ruling.
Mr Trump, however, has already asked an appeals court to allow him to post a bond covering $100m instead. His lawyers argued he would “suffer irreparable harm” if forced to pay the full sum up front.
That request was rejected by a ( prejudiced Democrat ) judge.
Alternatively, the court could ask Mr Trump to sign a sworn statement saying he has assets in New York and understands they could be seized if he loses the appeal, Mr Thomas said.
Ultimately, if Mr Trump does not get a pause and the court offers no compromise option, he could appeal directly to New York’s Court of Appeals.
But with a deadline of 25 March to pay the judgement or post a bond, he is working on a tight timeline.
4) Mr Trump pays the penalty
Without a bond to cover the full amount, Mr Trump could attempt to pay the judgement with his own money.
He told a court last year that he had $400m in liquid assets.
To get cash quickly to cover the rest of the fine, experts said he could try to refinance his properties or quickly sell some of his assets – but selling real estate properties could take time.
He could also declare bankruptcy, which would allow him to avoid paying the judgement.
But bankruptcy could be costly – and prove a hit to Mr Trump’s reputation in an election year, Mr Thomas said. “Practically, it’s the most devastating thing that Donald Trump could ever do to his self image,” he said.
5) New York takes Trump’s assets
If Mr Trump cannot find a way to pay the fraud judgement or secure a bond by 25 March, the New York Attorney General Letitia James can begin to collect the fee and take his assets.
She has said she will do so if he fails to pay.
Experts say this is another worst case scenario for Mr Trump, as he could lose some of his most famous properties.
They can take any of his buildings – not just those in New York – including the 58-floor Trump Tower and his sprawling Florida club, Mar-a-Lago.
Ms James would likely not sell these assets until the appeals process is over, Mr Thomas said. This is because if she were to lose the appeal to Mr Trump, her office would have to pay him back after losing value on properties they sold quickly.
But if Ms James does eventually sell the assets, there would be a court-ordered process to do so, with the first $464m going to New York state to pay the judgement, and any money left over going to Mr Trump, said Mitchell Epner, an attorney who handles commercial litigation.
Mr Epner said the state could seize multiple assets, as none of Mr Trump’s properties on their own appear to be worth $450m.
With additional reporting from Nada Tawfik
Comment The corruption and villification of Trump is disgisting and a travesty of democracy. The Anglo U.S led western elite and its lackeys have to stop Trump at all costs because they have to prepare for Nuclear War.. They will do so in the dreadful creepy police state name of western style freedom loving democracy.
R J Cook
March 19th 2024
Ruling Elite Hedonism & Insanity by R J Cook
The CIA invented the generalised term ‘conspiracy theory.’ Their reasons are clearly for the sake of cover up via the schoolboy tactic of ridiculing any person or persons getting too close to State Secrets and abuse of the public. The following story, below, and attached link makes clear that the CIA were forewarned and well prepared for the massive Capitol Hill protest. Why and how ? The attached link answers none of the questions regarding suspected FBI informant Ray Epps who was seen opening doors to welcome protestors into the Capitol government assembly hall.
Following January 6 2020, conspiracy theories were shared on Twitter and by former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, accusing Epps of being an agent provocateur and linking his wife to Dominion Voting Systems.[2] In July 2023, Epps started litigation against Fox News for amplifying these conspiracy theories.[3] In September 2023, he was charged with and pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor count of disorderly conduct for his participation in the attack,[4] and was sentenced to a year of probation. So he was off the hook.
On January 5, 2021, in Washington, D.C., Epps was filmed participating in two street gatherings. At one of the gatherings, he urged people to “go into the Capitol” the next day, though others in the crowd reacted by repeatedly chanting “Fed!”, accusing him of working for the federal government. In the early afternoon of January 6, 2021, Epps was filmed in desert camouflage clothing, telling a group of people that when “the president is done speaking, we go to the Capitol”. In another video from that day, Epps was filmed moving towards police barricades around the Capitol, and talking to another protester, Ryan Samsel. Footage does not show Epps engaging in violence. He was part of the crowd surrounding the Capitol, but he did not enter the building.
Due to that footage, Epps appeared on an FBI list of wanted suspects after the attack. Two days later, Epps called the FBI to say that he had told Samsel to calm down. Samsel corroborated this in an FBI interview later that month, stating that Epps had told him “Relax, the cops are doing their job”.In his phone call, Epps repeated claims that the election was stolen, as a recording of the call shows.
On multiple occasions, starting June 2021, Fox News host Tucker Carlson used his television show to share conspiracy theories about the Capitol attack being set up by agent provocateurs, and accused Epps of being an agent of the government. In January 2022 Carlson stated that Epps had “stage-managed the insurrection.”
Two peculiarities about this ‘event’ are firstly that with so many so called rioters only got a minimum of 60 days, why did Epps only get a 10 month probation order when pictures revealed on RT showed Epps inviting people into the Capitol ? His phone records confirm that Epps incited the riot in no uncertain terms. There is no corresponding evidence that Trump had anything to do with the debacle. Secondly, why did he tell another protestor Ryan Samsel to calm down because the police are in control ? A year after the attack, of the approximately 277 rioters were sentenced to prison for January 6 crimes.
The most important question is what evidence is there that outgoing President Donald Trump had anything to do with the rioters ? Interestingly Hillary Clinton had a piece of advice for Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden in 2020: “Whatever happens, do not concede defeat on the night of the Nov. 3 election.” Why was that acceptable and not an anti democratic incitement to insurrection.
Democrat ( sic ) Hilary Clinton, lost the 2016 presidential election to President Donald Trump, and never stopped complaining that she was cheated. George Soros was among those blamed for the massive feminist protestors reacting to Trump’s much maligned 2016 victory who could not accept their feminist icon’s defeat. Clinton’s record with women and abuse cases are long forgotten.
Soros is major Democrat donor. In 2018 ,he was has accused by critics including Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, of purportedly funding a caravan of Central American migrants marching toward the U.S. Others have charged him with hijacking a campaign by Florida high school students demanding gun control. Trump tweeted that women who confronted Republican senators about Brett Kavanagh’s nomination to the Supreme Court were actually professional protesters, paid by Soros. That is what life is like in the prime model of Western style democracy. Something very dangerous is happening in the U.S led western elite run world.
A key Trump advisor, Peter Navarro has just been given four months in jail for contempt of Congress because he refused to testify in the Donald Trump witch hunt. Navarro said he was pissed and afraid for what is being done to the United States. The House Select Committee were and still are desperate for evidence that the January 6th 2020 Capitol Riot was organised by Trump and his advisers.
There is an obvious double standard with the legal process, especially in New York and Washington controlled by the Democrats as they take us, along with their British and EU ( who have agreed to massive tariffs on Russian grain imports and seizing more of their money ) elite cheer leaders running in to World War Three as they give way to Ukraine’s Zelensky’s demands for fast tracked membership of NATO. I hope I am wrong, but Vladimir Putin and Russia are engulfed in an existential crisis. Zelensky has reiterated his determination to have Vladimir Putin dragged in to the Hague for trial as a war criminal.
Meanwhile U.S Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin announced that they will not let Ukraine fail and that the U.S economy has gained massively from the war. Austin, currently in Germany, has told his audience that “ Ukraine’s Security is on the line.” That is the cover story. Republican Senator Limdsey Graham has said that ” Once Ukraine gets back on its feet it will be an economic powerhouse because of their access to mass deposits of critical minerals, oil and gas.”
Meanwhile Donald Trump told his last Saturday rally in Ohio “I’ll tell you Zelensky is one of the greatest salesmen in history. Every time he comes to the country, he walks away with $50 billion or $60 billion. I have never been able to do that. He’s a better salesman. He’s a much better salesman than I am.” Trump called the war “a disaster that never should have happened.” He also said it was unfair because of Russia’s superior military might.
The Wall Street Journal today reported Ukraine’s impossible choice, conceding territory or lives. The EU has today authorised Ukraine stealing £235 billion of £481 billion in Russian State assets thus shaking the foundations of the global economc system. Britain’s war mongering Daily Express today offered their expert opinion that 22 million fake voters got Putin elected. This has always been an economic war, with Russia the ultimate prize. Then it will be China’s turn, then Iran.
This war is about money, western elite greed, lies, hypocrisy, arrogance, mass murder, elite hedonism and insanity. This power mad elite have lied about why and how this war started and what they want from it. They don’t care about consequences and cost of living issues they have caused. It is all about them. There will be no benefit for the masses and increasing prospects of absolute hell on earth.
R J Cook
CIA: New documents reveal agency’s role in Jan. 6 Capitol riots
ByGemma Iso
March 15, 2024
Recently extracted communications records shed light on the involvement of the CIA during the chaos of the Jan. 6 Capitol riots. The revelation comes from 88 pages of documents disclosed by Judicial Watch, offering a glimpse into the agency’s previously undisclosed actions amidst the turmoil.
CIA direct engagement
Among the disclosed information, it was revealed that the CIA had deployed “several” dog teams in the vicinity of the Capitol and had assigned “bomb techs” to handle explosive devices discovered near the Republican National Committee and Democratic National Committee headquarters. These documents, though heavily redacted, mark the first concrete evidence of the CIA’s direct engagement during the tumultuous event.
One of the disclosed texts under the header “January 7 Intel Chain” mentioned the participation of “two CIA bomb techs” aiding in the investigation of a pipe bomb scene, while another reference indicated the standby presence of “several CIA dog teams.”
Discrepancies
Additionally, the documents highlighted discrepancies in initial reporting, notably concerning the tragic death of Ashli Babbitt, an unarmed ex-Air Force veteran, who was fatally shot inside the Capitol. Judicial Watch’s recent revelation of a new video depicting the shooting has reignited scrutiny over the incident. Contrary to initial reports, the texts suggested Babbitt was shot in the shoulder as she was pushed through a doorway to the Speaker’s Lobby, not in the chest on the House floor as previously believed.
As investigations continue into the events of Jan. 6, these newly disclosed documents provide a fresh perspective on the involvement of intelligence agencies during one of the darkest days in recent American history.
Like what the American Oversight declared, the assault on January 6, 2021, instigated by Trump and carried out by a heavily armed mob, targeted not only the U.S. Capitol but also democracy and the principles of the rule of law.
Read More News
Woke Americans upset at Japanese film Shogun for not having Black actors
The post CIA: New documents reveal agency’s role in Jan. 6 Capitol riots appeared first on The Independent News.
Ukraine Corruption
In Western Style Democracy Corrupt Elites Can Fool Or Frighten Most Of The People Most Of The Time – They Want The Same For Russia & China Then The Rest Of The World Will Fall Into Place
– R J Cook
Surprise Suprise
A former FBI informant has been charged with lying about United States President Joe Biden and his son Hunter’s ties to a Ukrainian energy firm.
David Weiss, the special counsel leading a criminal probe into Hunter Biden, said on Thursday that a grand jury had indicted Alexander Smirnov on charges of making a “false statement” and “creating a false and fictitious record”.
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Alexander Smirnov charged over claims Joe and Hunter Biden received bribes from Kyiv-based Burisma.
Weiss said Smirnov, 43, was arrested at Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas, Nevada, after returning to the US from abroad.
If convicted, Smirnov could face up to 25 years in prison.
“Despite repeated admonishments that he must provide truthful information to the FBI and that he must not fabricate evidence, the defendant provided false derogatory information” about the Bidens, prosecutors said in the indictment filed in federal court.
Smirnov claimed that Hunter Biden, who sat on the board of Kyiv-based Burisma, used his father’s name to solicit millions of dollars in bribes from the company.
Smirnov told the FBI that Burisma executives had said they hired Hunter Biden to “protect us, through his dad, from all kinds of problems” and that they paid Hunter and Joe Biden $5m each in 2015 or 2016, according to the indictment.
Republicans seized on Smirnov’s claims to accuse the Biden family of corruption and justify a US House of Representatives inquiry into the president’s impeachment.
Then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy cited bribery allegations made by a “trusted FBI informant” when he announced the impeachment inquiry into Biden last year.
Hunter Biden’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, said the indictment vindicated months of warnings that Republicans were engaging in conspiracy theories fuelled by people with political agendas.
Comment The evidence tells me that the Democrats are tops with conspiracy, but they simply must win the next election.
R J Cook
Analysis of Hunter Biden’s hard drive shows he, his firm took in about $11 million from 2013 to 2018, spent it fast
The hard drive and documents from Senate Republicans indicate few of Biden’s deals ever came to fruition and shed light on how fast he was spending his money.
May 19, 2022, 9:29 AM BST
By Tom Winter, Sarah Fitzpatrick, Chloe Atkins and Laura Strickler
From 2013 through 2018 Hunter Biden and his company brought in about $11 million via his roles as an attorney and a board member with a Ukrainian firm accused of bribery and his work with a Chinese businessman now accused of fraud, according to an NBC News analysis of a copy of Biden’s hard drive and iCloud account and documents released by Republicans on two Senate committees.
The documents and the analysis, which don’t show what he did to earn millions from his Chinese partners, raise questions about national security, business ethics and potential legal exposure. In December 2020, Biden acknowledged in a statement that he was the subject of a federal investigation into his taxes. NBC News was first to report that an ex-business partner had warned Biden – Read More https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/analysis-hunter-bidens-hard-drive-shows-firm-took-11-million-2013-2018-rcna29462
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s move to equate wartime corruption with treason is triggering a backlash from officials and watchdogs, who warn the plan could hobble Ukraine’s main anti-graft forces.
Two senior officials following the proposal, who were granted anonymity to speak candidly, say concerns are growing within Ukraine’s anti-graft agencies that Zelenskyy’s plan will take top corruption cases away from their oversight and pass them to the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), which falls under the president’s command.
The SBU could, potentially, have the power to bury corruption cases involving top officials. The move, the officials say, could put Ukraine’s anti-corruption infrastructure under threat, and anti-corruption watchdogs are sounding the alarm.
Black Future – The Road To Haiti By R J Cook
The Anglo U.S Planet eating elite are very worried about Russian and Chinese initiatives in the African world. From the outset of European Empire building these people have used God and missionairies to dumb them down. Now they could not be dumber. Of course this strategy was not just for the blacks. They used it on their own people for centuries and are bringing it back again under cover of religious tolerance, diversity and hate laws against Islamopbia.
Britain’s elite ruled the Islamic world for centuries, so think they can control it. As Winston Churchill’s son Randolph put it : “Britain built its empire on the cheap”. They are still doing this ,though the empire is not so obvious and they work as part of a hypocritical international collective. The BBC is their not so ” hidden hand”. Here is an extract from their latest take on Haiti:
‘Only God can change this place’: Haitians see no end to spiralling violence
By Will Grant
BBC News, Cap-Haitien, Haiti
“Port-au-Prince is in panic mode,” a friend in the Haitian capital texted me.
Residents of Petionville, a wealthier area of of the city, are shaken after their most violent day so far in the country’s spiralling security crisis.
More than a dozen bullet-ridden bodies lay in the street – the victims of the latest gang rampage.
As well as the early morning killing spree, the home of a judge was also attacked – a clear message to the country’s elites vying for power.
All this in what is supposedly the safe part of town.
Unicef’s executive director, Catherine Russell, has called the situation in Haiti “horrific” and likened the lawlessness to the post-apocalyptic film, Mad Max.
Certainly the latest violence in Port-au-Prince is a reminder, if any were needed, that Haiti remains closer to anarchy than stability.
- Running the gauntlet to flee Haiti gang territory
- The rise and fall of Haiti’s Ariel Henry
- The gangsters and rebels jostling over power in Haiti
In that malaise, the UN has also estimated, because of the closure of so many hospitals in the capital, some 3,000 pregnant women were at risk of having to give birth with no maternity care.
We visited the maternity ward of Cap Haitien’s public hospital. The first cries of Baby Woodley, just a day old, were the same as those of children born anywhere: for food and for comfort.
But as most children born there, she will grow up to find that such essentials are far from guaranteed in Haiti.
Lying in an adjacent bed, Markinson Joseph was recovering from giving birth two days ago to a baby boy. Through an interpreter, she told me that she would get her baby out of the country altogether if she got the chance.
“But me and my husband don’t have the money to flee,” she said.
Dr Mardoche Clervil, the hospital’s obstetrician, showed us around dark and empty wards and said that the gangs’ control of the roads in and out of Port-au-Prince was making it tough to find enough fuel to keep the lights on, or the ceiling fans whirring.
More importantly, it has also hampered efforts to bring in the drugs and equipment they need.
He said that pregnant women had travelled from Port-au-Prince to give birth in the relative safety of Cap-Haitien.’ Read More : https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-68602114
Comment Comfortable virtue signalling white liberals and other opportunists never cease in their efforts to stoke up the State sponsired smokescreen to prevent criticism of black culture, political corruption and gang violence – which is being imported into the west, making policing a nightmare close to impossible.
It is always white people of the masses who feel the brunt and take the blame. African culture must remain dumb for the benefit of the global elite Mafia – rewriting history wherever and whenever required.
Russia trying to come up with workable strategies to deal with a Global South wallowing in overpopulation, disease, ignorance, self pity, religious bigotry, escapism and reverse racism will go on making the planet an ever more dangerous place to live. This mentality is a big factor driving the westerm proxy war for regime change in Russia. The masses will certainly need God’s help when they get their way in taking down Putin and dominating Russis.
Those young Russians who think the world’s way forward is more up to the minute dress shops for the girls, more pleasure parlours, booze and easy sex are on the way to heaven on earth, know little about the heavily mind policed and censored west – where even out homes, if we are lucky enough to have one, are part of the public space. They will be choosing the road to Haiti and hell.
R J Cook
March 18th 2024
| War The deception behind America’s support for Ukraine MALCOM KYEYUNE |
The Predators versus The People: the global mafia exposed!
 winter oak March 18 by Paul CudenecThe Predators versus The People, a new downloadable book by Meeuwis T. Baaijen, really is essential reading for anyone (and this should mean everyone!) who wants to understand the world we live in.The breadth of his take is staggering, his clarity is refreshing and his determination to take his analysis right through to its logical conclusion is laudable.Having already conducted research into some of the issues concerned, I immediately recognized the picture Baaijen paints as a true one, supported by evidence with which I am familiar.And I was delighted to find that, when he explored questions I had not addressed in detail, his conclusions very much confirmed my provisional suspicions as to what was involved.There is nothing more important to communicate to our fellow human beings than the hidden reality that we are ruled by a global criminal mafia – Glafia as Baaijen calls it – or the “criminocracy” in my own terminology.Such is the threat posed by this entity, which aims to “steal our planet, freedom, and future” as the book’s subtitle rightly warns, that large-scale resistance is urgently required.But how can people be expected to fight against something which they don’t even know exists and whose suggested existence they have been brainwashed into regarding as a figment of deluded or ill-intentioned thinking?The Predators provides a solid platform for spreading awareness of the stark reality of the sociopathic Glafia and its domination project.Its overall vision provides a framework in which other researchers can investigate the thousands of threads that make up the worldwide web of corruption, without ever losing sight of the Big Picture.And this framework of understanding can be the basis of a new movement of international resistance that will go beyond merely identifying the criminocrats and aim to bring their odious rule to an end.[The Predators versus The People can be dowloaded in any one of seven languages – English, Dutch, German, French, Italian, Spa |
Stop the reintroduction of military conscription in Germany!
An internal paper from the defence ministry, quoted by Der Spiegel, plans to “present options for a German military service model” by 1 April.
Crocker is in a position to know. Beginning his diplomatic career with a posting in the US consulate in the inland port city of Khorramshahr, near Iran’s oilfields, in 1972 during the Shah’s reign, he later served in Lebanon, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Kuwait.
As Trump escalated his violent rhetoric and defense of his January 6 foot soldiers at an Ohio rally, Biden attended a $400-a-plate dinner in Washington D.C.
Netanyahu doubles down on planned assault on Rafah
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday that Israel would proceed with its plans to assault Rafah, the southernmost city in Gaza where over 1.5 million refugees are sheltering.
The suspicious “suicide” of Boeing whistleblower John Barnett
One can and should ask, who benefits from the silence surrounding the challenges to the official narrative of Barnett’s death?
Putin’s fifth term as Russian president was predictable, but what comes next?
By Steve Rosenberg
Russia Editor
As predictions go, a Putin landslide was the easy one.
No crystal ball or tea leaves required there.
After all, in Russia the Kremlin tightly controls the political system, including elections.
But what will Vladimir Putin do with his 87%? What will a fifth Putin term look like?
Putin 5.0 may not be so different from Putin 4.0
Don’t expect an “Abracadabra moment” where, with a wave of a magic wand, the hawk suddenly turns into a dove.
Read More https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-68596231
Freedom & Democracy Are For The Rich by R J Cook
Comment Whatever may be or is wrong with Russia does not make so called western democracies pleasant places for their ever expanding lower classes to live in or bastions of freedom ,fair play, honesty and justice. My parents suffered the poverty of low class life in post war Britain. My late ex soldier front line father was worn out and dead by the age of 41. Ny mother died due to medical neglect and an illness contracted due to absence of proper cleaning.
Britain’s BBC dominates western world media and international ‘enlightened’ pseudo international and human rights preachers. Their news broadcasts claim to be ‘unspun’. There ‘news preachers repeat set phrases with effectively subliminal messages, such as : ‘Threats to our democracy’ along with ‘Broadcasting around the world and across the U.K.’ Note, the rest of the world comes first because they play a key role in the global elite’s power and wealth obsessed elite. BBC and mainstream U.K politicians have to keep on reminding us that ‘this is our country’ where we all have choices.’
When discussing Adolph Hitler, my wonderful fiery Welsh radical history teacher said “If you are going to tell a lie, tell a big one. The main problem with Hitler is that he ended up believing his own lies.”
So the BBC has to keep telling us that the Russian election is rigged and the country is a dictatorship. The reality that as soon as Trump entered the U.S Presidential race, the same bunch of virtue signalling Democrats, mainstream media, prominent blacks, women’s groups and war profiteers came out of the darkness to do what they had done all through his first term. All manner of ludicrous charges have been brought against him.
Over here in the U.K, Prime Minister Sunak made an emergency address to the nation, outside Number 10 Downing Street. He told a worried press that his govenment were working on emergency rules to marginalise and effectively ban what the mainstream U.K political consensus consider extremists. He reassured Muslim groups that he was targeting the Far Right, not them. His address was a panic response to radical former Labour MP George Galloway’s surprise By Election victory and a Tory defector leading the new U.K Reform Party – the latter being discredited as Far Right, which is their smug and ultimate weapon for destroying those who refuse to ‘come together’ with them.
Interestingly, thanks to the current international ‘inclusive’ ruling elite’s self righteous philosophy, the Middle East is critically unstable, the cost of war crisis is devastating the world economy where they have invested so much of their peoples taxes in a dangerous proxy regime change war on Russia in the name of well known corrupt Uktaine’s ‘freedom and democracy.’ There are plenty of overpaid academics and politicians riding on this bandwagon from which they broadcast their vile claims to moral superiority. If they were not hypocrits and liars, Britian and the U.S would free, pardon and compensate war crimes whsitle blower Julian Assange. Chelsea Manning is no doubt aware of the likely consequences of an Assange trial, She is not free. Freedom and Democracy are for the rich.
R J Cook
March 17th 2024
The Usual Western War Mongering Propaganda – R J Cook
A victorious Putin might try to seize the entire country – or impose a settlement and a puppet regime. In any event, Ukraine’s independent existence as a free nation would cease. Its democracy and EU aspirations would be extinguished. The impact on Europe would be dire.
The Ukraine War is just more of Russian Revolutionary Politics. The western imperialist global elite have feared Russia since their Romanov partners in crime were executed in 1917. These greedy short sighted morons have brought us two previous world wars, the inter war year hypocritical undeserved punishment of Germany created perfect conditions for the bitter and twisted resentful NAZI party. Britain’s elite, like Europe and the United States asked for this carnage and they are asking for it again – which is why they are more afraid of Trump, the so called Far Right like AFD and Le Pen than Muslin extremists. That is why they appease the latter.
Mass education is pretty bad and anyone surviving it and still bright enough to see the confidence trick, reviving the Red Menace again, will be vilified by the media,ostracised by neighbours and even jailed as they are doing in Ukraine. The military bands are playing. Here in U.K were are told people in Russia and their reclaimed parts of Donbas are voting at gun point. As Hitler discovered, no one does propaganda like the British, which is why the monarchy is still in place – ignoring the brief 11 year Republic , 1649-60.
Ironically nasty tyrannical Britain trades on a reputation for freedom fighting, so contrary to life as most people live it. Mainstream politics makes a big deal of diversity to raise up women and non white ethnic groups. It is not acceptable to look at white working class history. This is the age of ‘privileged white males’ who need reconditioning to be more supportive of women. The following is the reality of working men fighting for the rich folk’s freedom, power and privilege.
MAKIV, Ukraine — Few men of fighting age are left in this village in Southwest Ukraine, and those who remain fear they will be drafted at any moment.
Their neighbours are already hundreds of miles east in trenches on the front lines. Some have been killed or wounded. Several are missing. Others from this rural area — about 45 miles from the borders of Romania and Moldova — have fled abroad or found ways to avoid the war, either with legitimate exemptions or by hiding. Apart from a few sneaky snipers,women are not in anything resembling a front line role.
While Ukrainian men were forced to stay for a war provoked and nurtured by NATO back in 2008 while womenfolk were helped to leave. This very corrupt country, so very suitable for the EU and war mongering arms loving NATO, is under martial law. Any journalist or politician who sides with Russia is an assassination target – as we saw with last week’s car bombing. That is what Europe is. Jail is the least a dissident journalist can expect. That says a lot about the U.K, Ukraine’s number one cheer leader.
R J Cook
How will the Ukraine war end? Only when Vladimir Putin is toppled
A ceasefire on Russia’s terms would embolden the tyrant to pick new targets for his expansionist aimsSat 16 Mar 2024 16.00 GMTLast modified on Sat 16 Mar 2024 20.32 GMT
Pope Francis’s suggestion that Ukraine’s leaders should admit defeat, find “the courage to raise the white flag” and negotiate a halt to the war with Russia provoked justified fury in Kyiv and eastern Europe. He was wrong to say Ukraine is beaten, and gravely remiss in failing to condemn Moscow’s illegal aggression and war crimes. Yet Francis is not alone in wondering how this conflict ends.
Two years on, there’s no sign of a winner. Maybe that’s just as well, in the sense that outright victory for either side could be disastrous for all. Does this unheroic consideration tacitly influence the cautious approach of Kyiv’s two biggest western backers, the US and Germany? If so, it makes the absence of a credible peace process all the more regrettable – and potentially very dangerous.
Putin is letting the war simmer while he mounts a repeat coup disguised as an election
Vladimir Putin again threatened to use nuclear weapons last week after France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, said Nato should consider sending troops to ensure Ukraine prevails. Much of what Putin says is posturing or brinkmanship, for he believes time is on his side. He is letting the war simmer while he mounts a repeat coup this weekend disguised as an election.
But Putin was not so complacent 18 months ago when advancing Ukrainian forces threatened to retake Crimea and expel the invaders. It was revealed last week that US officials rushed radiation detectors and potassium iodide tablets to Kyiv, acting on intelligence estimates indicating a 50-50 chance of a Russian tactical nuclear strike to prevent Crimea falling.
So great was the concern that the White House asked a group of experts to devise a new nuclear “playbook” of contingency plans, optional American military responses and escalation scenarios, the New York Times reported. All this was based on the calculation that a nuclear strike was more likely than at any time since the end of the cold war. Though the risk has diminished since 2022, it’s still high.
The “Russia loses” scenario is especially hazardous in that Putin characterises Ukraine as a war against the US and Nato – and polling suggests that most Russians believe him. For him, defeat is unacceptable, since it would imply Russia’s wider defeat by America and could result in his overthrow. If cornered, this cowardly skunk would blame the west and take everyone down with him.
The prospect of Ukraine losing the war is similarly alarming, for different reasons. The human consequences would be terrifying, with millions more refugees fleeing westwards. If Bucha and Mariupol are any guide, atrocities, war crimes and abductions would proliferate. A victorious Putin might try to seize the entire country – or impose a settlement and a puppet regime. In any event, Ukraine’s independent existence as a free nation would cease. Its democracy and EU aspirations would be extinguished.
Ukraine’s defeat would have lasting global repercussions, setting a dreadful precedent of seizing territory by force
The impact on Europe would be dire. A Russian success would certainly be viewed in Poland and the three Baltic states as a prelude to new expansionist wars of aggression. Pro-western Moldova, on Ukraine’s southern border, is a likely target. Huge economic disruption and an arms race would ensue as Nato and the EU scrambled to boost Europe’s defences. Far-right and pro-Russia populist parties would be emboldened.
Ukraine’s defeat would have lasting global repercussions, setting a dreadful precedent of seizing territory by force and targeting civilians. Would this encourage China to attack Taiwan? Or others to do likewise? It’s entirely plausible. The UN charter would be trashed and, with it, the most basic tenets of the Geneva conventions and humanitarian law.
US international leadership – and Nato – would suffer irreparable setbacks, too. This is particularly true if Washington’s withholding of military aid, as is the case now, contributed to Ukraine’s defeat. Who then would trust the US to keep its word, especially if Donald Trump succeeds Joe Biden? Putin-friendly Trump reportedly says he “will not give a penny” to Ukraine.
The US defense secretary Lloyd Austin warned last month that “if Putin is successful, he will not stop” at Ukraine. And the knock-on effect would be devastating. “Other leaders around the world, other autocrats, will be encouraged [that] we failed to support a democracy… Quite frankly, if Ukraine falls, I really believe Nato will be in a fight with Russia.”
Unless the western democracies can unite around the aim of ensuring a comprehensive Russian defeat, regardless of the inherent risks, negotiations – though not as framed by Pope Francis – appear the only way through. Yet, typically, Turkey’s latest proposal for a two-way peace summit has been rejected by Kyiv. Other would-be mediators have got nowhere. And Ukraine’s 10-point plan is scorned by Moscow. No peace process, no peace.
There is a middle way, say the American foreign policy gurus Richard Haass and Charles Kupchan. Ukraine should negotiate a ceasefire with Russia, they argue. “Kyiv would not give up on restoring territorial integrity or holding Russia economically and legally accountable for its aggression, but it would acknowledge its near-term priorities need to shift from attempting to liberate more territory to defending and repairing the more than 80% of the country that is still under its control.”
A western-backed ceasefire might stop the death and destruction and create breathing space for diplomacy without sacrificing Ukraine’s broader objectives. The trouble is, Putin, who thinks he’s winning, must agree. And one or both sides could simply use a pause to rearm and regroup, ready to go at it again if and when talks break down.
A ceasefire is tempting but, at best, would be a temporary stop-gap. And as Macron said, in a rebuke to the pope, peace in Ukraine cannot mean “capitulation”. The only sure way to permanently end this war on just terms is to remove from power, by whatever legitimate means available, the messianic mass murderer who started it: Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. There will be no peace until the tyrant falls.
Simon Tisdall is the Observer’s foreign affairs commentator
Comment These are not my views, but it is impossible to argue with U.K white liberal mainstream media.
This media is presenting the Russian election as taking place at gunpoint. They also assure us that NATO has the means to shoot down any Russian nuclear missiles. So no worries.
R J Cook
March 16th 2024
The Manchester Arena False Flag
Iain Davis
Richard D. Hall is an independent investigative journalist and documentary film-maker who has gone further than any other journalist to examine the evidence surrounding the alleged 2017 Manchester Arena bombing.
If we look at the evidence, which is the only way to ascertain the truth, the Manchester Arena bombing was, in my view, a false flag.
The official Manchester Arena Bombing narrative asserts the following as “fact.”
On 22nd of May 2017, 22 people were killed by a 22 year old Islamist terrorist Salman Abedi who committed suicide when he detonated his TATP (triacetone triperoxide) backpack bomb at around 22.30. The bomb detonated just after Ariana Grande ended her set following the conclusion of her 22nd song.
Initially 59 people were reportedly injured, 38 directly by the bomb. By 2018 it was more than 800. The majority must have been injured in the stampede and this significantly increased number includes those psychologically traumatised by the event.
Read More with this link.
March 15th 2024
Rampant Wildfires Are Threatening a Collapse of the Amazon Rainforest
Rainforests in South America are burning this year faster than ever before, setting the course for a collapse of the Amazon in the coming decades.
The Amazon Rainforest is on fire. Or much of it, at least. On February 28, Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research announced that 2,940 fires had burned in the Brazilian Amazon over the course of that month—a record-breaking number for a February. Many of them are still blazing.
Real-time satellite monitoring shows that so far in 2024, more than 10,000 wildfires have ripped across 11,000 square kilometers of the Amazon, across multiple countries. Never have this many fires burned so much of the forest this early in the year. Scientists worry this is pushing the region closer and closer to a tipping point, where widespread degradation and repeated burning of the forest will become unstoppable.
“Fire is a contagious process,” says Bernando Flores, a researcher at Brazil’s Federal University of Santa Catarina, who studies changes in the Amazon. “If nothing is done to prevent fire from penetrating remote areas of the Amazon, the system may eventually collapse from megafires and become trapped in a persistently flammable, open-vegetation state.”
The Amazon Rainforest spans 6.7 million square kilometers, accounting for more than half the planet’s remaining rainforest. It is home to 10 percent of the planet’s terrestrial biodiversity, and plays a vital role in stabilizing both local and global climates. The Amazon stores between 15 and 20 years’ worth of global CO2 emissions, and it has a cooling effect on the world thanks to the moisture that its plants store and transpire into the atmosphere.
Since the 1980s, the Amazon Basin has been warming at an average of 0.27 degrees Celsius per decade. Some parts, including the forest’s central and southeast regions, have been warming even faster, at a rate of 0.6 degrees per decade. Today, dry season temperatures are, on average, 2 degrees higher than they were 40 years ago.
A recent paper published by Flores and colleagues in the journal Nature finds that patterns of rainfall have also changed. In the southern Bolivian Amazon, for example, annual rainfall has declined 20 millimeters per year since the 1980s. The Amazon has become “more flammable” as a result, Flores says.
These trends have come to a head this year. A study published in late January by researchers from World Weather Attribution, a scientific collaboration that tracks the influence of climate change on weather, found that the drought that has afflicted the Amazon Basin since the middle of last year is primarily being driven by climate change. This historic drought, the most severe ever recorded in the Amazon, has also been amplified by the El Niño weather phenomenon—a cyclical climate pattern defined by unusually warm temperatures over the central and eastern Pacific Ocean, which typically lasts for 9 to 12 months.
”When we have El Niño, or drought, the forest is drier and more susceptible to wildfire,” says Dolors Armenteras Pascual, an ecologist and professor at the National University of Colombia. Record-high temperatures and this extreme drought have sapped the Amazon’s trees of their moisture, leaving the forest understory littered with woody debris that has grown dry, primed to ignite. Amid this heat and dry air, the trees of the Amazon also struggle to draw the water they need from parched soil. They are “degraded” as a result.
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“Degradation means that you still have standing forest, but you are losing some of the structure, some of the functioning,” says Armenteras Pascual. “You might even look and think it’s really a beautiful forest, but it’s not so healthy.”
Being degraded also makes a forest more prone to wildfire. And once a part of the Amazon burns, it’s more likely to catch fire again. “When a forest burns, trees die, releasing organic matter above the soil and opening the canopy,” says Flores. “Hence, more fuel is available and more sunlight and wind can desiccate this fuel, causing the ecosystem to become more flammable. The consequence is that burnt forests are much more likely to burn again.”
When considering the impacts of human disturbance and extreme drought over recent decades, as much as 38 percent of what remains of the Amazon Rainforest may already be degraded, Flores and his colleagues found.
By considering all of the factors contributing to the degradation of the Amazon—climate change, drought, deforestation, wildfires—the team also developed models projecting heat, degradation, and fire trends into the future. The findings are gloomy. By 2050, their models show, temperatures over the Amazon Basin are expected to be 2 to 4 degrees Celsius warmer than they are today, depending on greenhouse gas emissions over the next two and a half decades. By 2050, the Amazon’s dry season may be a month longer than it is now. Wildfires are expected to increase in frequency and severity.
As a result, they estimate nearly half the Amazon may reach a “tipping point” by 2050, when it will cease being a forest at all and transition into savannah and grassland.
The impacts of this would be devastating on local and global levels. A 2021 report from the Science Panel for the Amazon found that 10,000 of the rainforest’s plant and animal species are at risk of extinction due to climate change and habitat destruction. A widespread collapse like this may well push these species over the edge. Many of the Amazon’s 40 million human inhabitants may be displaced by unbearable heat, and Indigenous peoples in particular would lose their livelihoods, ways of life, and knowledge systems.
As alarmist as this might sound, Armenteras Pascual thinks the warnings of Flores and his colleagues are, if anything, understated. “It’s not like half of the Amazon will collapse and the other half will go on just fine,” she says. “The whole system might collapse—the whole system in terms of hydrology, which is probably the most important role of the Amazon globally, its role in cooling the climate.”
If the Amazon were to undergo a “large-scale collapse” by 2050, as Flores and his colleagues warn, it may emit as much as 120 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, currently equivalent to about 3.5 years of global CO2 emissions. Global temperatures may rise 0.3 degrees Celsius as a result.
For now, the unusually high number of fires are expected to continue burning through the month of April, when the rainy season begins. “It’s fire season,” Armenteras Pascual, who is working with the Colombian government to monitor emissions from fires in the Northern Amazon, says. “Just this past week we had 7,000 hectares burning that no one is talking about, in one of the nature preserves that we have near the border with Venezuela.”
“There are some fires here in Colombia as well,” she adds. Data from the satellites shows that just over 1,000 fires burned in the Colombian Amazon in the first week of March. “Fires are burning,” Armenteras Pascual says, “and they’re picking up.”
Ukraine war: Europe split clouds Macron talks with Scholz in Berlin
Related Topics
By Paul Kirby
BBC News
Emmanuel Macron has said that France, Germany and Poland are “united” after a rift was exposed over Europe’s response to Russia’s war in Ukraine.
The French president had warned the “security of Europe and the French is at stake” and if Russia wins Europe’s credibility will be “reduced to zero”.
But Germany’s Olaf Scholz has been far more cautious, ruling out the deployment of the country’s Taurus cruise missiles.
Ukraine faces a critical arms shortage.
The German chancellor has come under pressure to extend his government’s help, because a $60bn (£47bn; €55bn) US military aid package for Ukraine has been blocked in Congress by Republicans on the right.
Germany remains Europe’s biggest source of military aid for Ukraine, but Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who joined the two leaders in Berlin later, said it was now up to their three countries to “mobilise all of Europe” to provide Ukraine with help.
He denied reports of a rift at a press conference, calling them “exaggerated” and “malicious rumours”.
“True solidarity with Ukraine? Less words, more ammunition,” he had posted on social media earlier on Friday.
Their meeting came as a Russian missile attack on the southern Ukrainian port city of Odesa killed 20 people and left dozens more wounded, according to the regional head. Among those killed and wounded were emergency medical teams.
As members of Ukraine’s DSNS emergency service arrived to search for casualties and put out fires, more Russian rockets reportedly landed at the scene and the DSNS released several photos of wounded colleagues.
Differences over the response to the war have deepened between Paris and Berlin in recent weeks, after the German chancellor said long-range Taurus missiles would need German soldiers on the ground in Ukraine to look after them and that was a limit that he was not prepared to cross.
President Macron has equally angered some of his European partners by suggesting that sending Western troops could not be ruled out.
In an extended live interview on French TV on Thursday night he said it was not his wish, although “all these options are possible”.
Stressing that France was a force for peace, he warned that Russia was seeking to extend its power and would not stop now: “If we leave Ukraine alone, if we let Ukraine lose this war, then for sure Russia will threaten Moldova, Romania and Poland.”
Ahead of Friday’s meeting of the three leaders, billed as a bid to revive the so-called “Weimar Triangle”, the German chancellor told Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky over the phone that the summit was of great importance to “organise as much support as possible for Ukraine”.
Mr Zelensky went on social media to say he had told the German leader that Ukraine’s priorities were “armoured vehicles, artillery, and air defence”.
At a press conference following Friday’s meeting in Berlin, Mr Tusk said he, Emmanuel Macron and Olaf Scholz “spoke with one voice, above all, about the security of our continent”.
The leaders also said a “capacity coalition” to provide long-distance artillery to Ukraine would be set up, while vowing to “never prompt escalation” there.
Mr Scholz said the three countries wanted to ensure that Ukraine could defend itself against Russia’s invasion.
Nato Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg warned on Thursday that Ukrainians were “not running out of courage, they are running out of ammunition”, more than two years after Russia’s full-scale invasion began.
He said the shortage was one of the reasons why Russia had made recent advances on the battlefield, and he called on Nato allies to provide Ukraine with what it needed.
A Czech-led initiative to source weapons from outside Europe has already raised enough funds to buy at least 300,000 shells and Prague officials say the first deliveries will arrive by June at the latest.
Russia’s military captured the eastern town of Avdiivka after months of trying in February and Ukraine’s commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskyi said on a visit to the area on Friday that Russian forces had been trying to break through Ukrainian lines “for several days in a row”.
“Russian advances are supported by intense artillery fire and the active use of spotter drones and drones capable of dropping munitions.”
Related Topics
Comment The U.S, EU and U.K wealthy elite have a lot of money invested in Ukraine and facilitating Russian regime change. This ruling elite has no care for the masses, so they are ready and willing to risk Nuclear War.
R J Cook
March 13th 2024
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Three Ukraine-based Russian paramilitary groups say they have crossed into Russia and are now fighting government troops there
By Jaroslav Lukiv
BBC News
The Freedom of Russia Legion (FRL) and Siberian Battalion (SB) posted videos purportedly showing their fighters in Russia’s Belgorod and Kursk regions.
The FRL and an exiled Russian politician claimed two villages were now in control of “liberation forces”.
Russia’s defence ministry said the breakthrough attempts were thwarted.
It claimed more than 234 Ukrainian troops had been killed and several tanks had been destroyed.
According to Belgorod’s regional governor, Vyacheslav Gladkov, one member of Russia’s territorial defence forces was killed and 10 civilians were injured.
These numbers have not yet been verified by the BBC.
Ukraine’s military denied any involvement in Tuesday’s cross-border raids. Andriy Yusov, a spokesman for the country’s military intelligence, said the paramilitary groups were “independent organisations” of Russian nationals, and therefore operating “at home”.
In a separate development, Russia said Ukraine had launched 25 drones on targets across Russia, but the attack was thwarted.
However, videos have emerged which appear to show several Russian oil facilities on fire.
In the Ivanovo region, just east of Moscow, an Il-76 military transport plane with eight crew and seven passengers crashed shortly after take-off, Russia’s defence ministry was quoted as saying by Russian state-run news agencies.
The ministry said an engine fire caused the crash. It gave no details of survivors.
Videos have emerged purportedly showing the plane on fire circling in the sky, and later plumes of black smoke from the crash site.
Elsewhere, at least three people were killed and 38 injured on Tuesday night when a Russian missile struck two apartment buildings in the central Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih, according to the minister of internal affairs.
Ihor Klymenko said children were among the victims and that the number of deaths may go up as the search and rescue operation is continuing.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the country would “inflict losses on the Russian state in response – quite rightly”.
- The Ukrainian sea drones hunting Russian warships
- Is Europe doing enough to help Ukraine?
- Ukraine war in maps: Russia makes limited advances
A full-scale invasion of Ukraine launched by Russian President Vladimir Putin is now in its third year, with no signs that the biggest war in Europe since World War Two could end soon.
On Tuesday, the FRL posted what it said was a video from the Russian-Ukrainian border.
“Like all our fellow citizens, in the Legion we dream of a Russia freed from Putin’s dictatorship. But we don’t just dream: we make every effort to make these dreams come true. We will take our land away from the regime, centimetre by centimetre,” an armed FRL soldier in the footage is heard saying.
Meanwhile, the SB said “fierce fighting is going on the Russian Federation territory”, publishing a clip purportedly showing its fighters engaging with Russian government forces.
It also condemned Russian presidential elections on 15-17 March, in which Mr Putin is widely expected to be declared the winner.
“Ballots and polling stations in this case are fiction. You can really change your life for the better only with weapons in your hands,” the SB said.
Another Ukraine-based Russian group, the Russian Volunteer Corps (RDK), also published footage of what it said were its fighters engaging with Russian government troops.
“The army of the Kremlin regime lays down its weapons without even starting the battle,” it said.
The videos have not been independently verified.
The border village of Tetkino in the Kursk region appeared to be one of the targets in Tuesday’s raids, with the FRL claiming that “liberating forces” now had full control over the settlement.
The BBC has verified the authenticity of FRL footage depicting a strike on an armoured personnel carrier in Tetkino.
Kursk Mayor Igor Kutsak ordered all schools in the regional capital to be put on remote learning from 13 to 15 March “in connection with recent events”.
He also warned that the “missile alert” regime was still in place in the city, which has a population of more than 400,000.
Earlier on Tuesday, Ukraine-based Russian opposition politician Illya Ponomarev claimed that the border village of Lozovaya Rudka, Belgorod region, was “under full control of liberating forces”.
In a statement later on Tuesday, the Russian defence ministry said its forces together with border guards and FSB security service units “thwarted an attempt by the Kyiv regime to make a breakthrough” into Russia.
It said enemy fighters – backed by tanks and armoured personnel carriers – had tried to invade Russia “simultaneously in three directions in the areas of the settlements of Odnorobovka, Nekhoteevka and Spodaryushino, Belgorod region”.
It added that another four attacks had targeted Tetkino, but were “repulsed”.
The Ukraine-based Russian armed groups have made several cross-border raids since the full-invasion of Ukraine began.
Last May, Russia’s military said a similar attack in the Belgorod region was rebuffed and armed insurgents defeated.
Related Topics
March 11th 2024
Trump will not give a penny to Ukraine – Hungary PM Orban
By Jaroslav Lukiv
BBC News
Donald Trump will not fund Ukraine’s fight against Russia’s invasion if he is elected US president again, Hungarian PM Viktor Orban has said.
“He will not give a penny in the Ukraine-Russia war. That is why the war will end,” the conservative premier said after meeting Mr Trump in Florida.
The former US president has pledged to end the war “within 24 hours” if elected – but provided no details.
Mr Orban is openly backing his long-term ally in the 2024 White House race.
“It is obvious that Ukraine cannot stand on its own feet,” Mr Orban told Hungary’s M1 TV channel late on Sunday.
“If the Americans don’t give money and weapons, along with the Europeans, then the war is over. And if the Americans don’t give money, the Europeans alone are unable to finance this war. And then the war is over.”
He added that Mr Trump had “pretty detailed plans” on how to end the Russia-Ukraine war – but did not elaborate. The BBC has asked the Trump campaign for comment.
As president Mr Trump would have to sign off spending bills that come from Congress. He has in the past expressed scepticism that the US should go on funding Ukraine’s defence.
At their Friday meeting in Mr Trump’s Mar-a-Lago mansion, the former US president praised his guest. “There’s nobody that’s better, smarter, or a better leader than Viktor Orban. He’s fantastic,” he said.
During his US visit, Mr Orban did not meet current US President Joe Biden, who is expected to be Mr Trump’s main rival in the presidential elections in November.
It is highly unusual for a visiting foreign leader to schedule talks with former counterparts without calling on the current leadership.
The Hungarian prime minister has repeatedly drawn strong criticism from fellow EU leaders for maintaining close ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin, ever since he launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022.
Unlike many other Western nations, Mr Orban refuses to send weapons to its neighbour Ukraine, stating repeatedly that Kyiv is unable to win against a nuclear-armed Russia.
EU leaders are increasingly concerned that a second Trump presidency would see a significant reduction in US military and financial aid to Ukraine and also the Nato military alliance.
A $95bn (£75bn) foreign aid bill – including $60bn in military assistance to Ukraine – has been stalled in US Congress because of Republican opposition.
The Republicans – openly encouraged by Mr Trump – say they will not allow the bill to clear the final hurdle in the House of Representatives without first agreeing additional funding for US border security.
At a rally last month he told supporters the cash should be loaned rather than given without strings.
“They want to give them $60 billion more. Do it this way. Loan them the money. If they can make it, they pay us back.”
Russian forces have recently made gains in eastern Ukraine, as Kyiv experiences acute shortages in ammunition.
Ukraine is critically dependent on weapons from the US, the main supplier, and other Western allies to keep fighting Russia – a much bigger military force with an abundance of artillery ammunition.
NATO plans for troop deployments in Ukraine threaten nuclear war
Biden’s State of the Union message: Get ready for World War III!
Biden’s State of the Union remarks, consisting of a string of wild assertions, focused on one overriding priority: the escalation of war with Russia.
The NATO powers have made a decision to massively escalate their direct involvement in the Ukraine war, including the potential direct deployment of NATO troops to Ukraine.
Amid ongoing recruitment crisis, Zelensky government prepares to mobilize Ukrainian convicts
The measures to further expand the draft follow the announcement of the mobilization of another 500,000 men to the front, where hundreds of thousands have already died.
Sweden joins NATO amid escalation of US-led war on Russia
The finalization of Sweden’s membership comes amidst a significant deterioration of NATO’s position in Ukraine and threats to directly deploy NATO combat troops against Russia.
‘On The Beach’, an unimaginable nightmare – This Is Too Close To The Truth For Vain Greedy Political Ostriches.
After a nuclear World War III has destroyed most of the globe, the few remaining survivors in southern Australia await the radioactive cloud that is heading their way and bringing certain death to everyone in its path. Among them is an American submarine captain struggling to resist the knowledge that his wife and children in the United States must be dead. Then a faint Morse code signal is picked up, transmitting from somewhere near Seattle, and Captain Towers must lead his submarine crew on a bleak tour of the ruined world in a desperate search for signs of life. On the Beach is a remarkably convincing portrait of how ordinary people might face the most unimaginable nightmare.
Russian Official Killed by Car Bomb in Ukraine
Published Mar 06, 2024 at 6:54 PM EST
A Russian election official in an occupied area of Ukraine has reportedly been killed after being targeted with a car bomb.
Russia’s Investigative Committee said in a release on Wednesday that an unnamed official, a woman who served as a member of the Kremlin-backed election commission in the occupied Zaporizhzhia city Berdyansk, had been killed in the “terrorist act” on the same morning.
“According to the investigation, on March 6, 2024, in the morning, an improvised explosive device was laid under the vehicle of a voting member of the precinct election commission,” the release said.
“When a woman got into the interior of a car parked near a house on Herzen Street in the city of Berdyansk, it worked,” the statement continued. “The victim died of her injuries in a medical institution.”
Prathaan
The committee went on to say that the ongoing investigation was working to identify “those involved in the commission of this crime” based on “forensic examinations” and statements from witnesses.
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A Facebook post by The Main Directorate of Intelligence of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry (GUR) on Wednesday claimed that the woman killed in the blast was Svitlana Samoilenko, who allegedly “organized [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s pseudo-elections in the occupied territories of the Zaporizhzhia region.”
“During the preparations for the pseudo-elections, Putin’s Svitlana Samoilenko sought to curry favor with Muscovites: she intimidated and terrorized Berdyansk residents, forcing them to participate in illegal fake voting,” GUR said.
While releasing the victim’s purported identity, Ukraine did not explicitly claim responsibility for the car bombing.
Newsweek reached out for comment to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs via email on Wednesday evening.
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Yevgeny Balitsky, the Kremlin-installed governor of Zaporizhzhia, wrote in a Telegram post on Wednesday that the bombing was an attempt to “intimidate” pro-Russia officials in Zaporizhzhia and prevent their “legitimate expression of will.”
“The victim of today’s attack by Kiev terrorists was an innocent woman—a mother, wife, patriot of her country, who taught at the city Center for Children’s Creativity, raised our children, and worked for the benefit of the Zaporizhzhia region,” Balitsky wrote.
“She was a member of the election commission, and this is a planned terrorist act—an attempt to intimidate,” he continued. “They hope to prevent our legitimate expression of will, which is impossible.”
Berdyansk, located on the northern Sea of Azov coast in southeastern Ukraine, has been under Russian control since only three days after Putin launched his full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022.
Zaporizhzhia is one of four Ukrainian regions that Putin claimed to have annexed for Russia in September 2022. He also announced the annexation of Ukraine’s Donetsk, Luhansk and Kherson regions. Crimea was illegally annexed by Russia in 2014.
All of the allegedly annexed regions of Ukraine, none of which are currently under full Russian control except Crimea, will participate in Russia’s upcoming presidential election, which is set to take place between March 15 and 17.
While Putin is facing a small number of challengers, anti-war candidates have been banned from running, and polls indicate that the incumbent Russian president is virtually guaranteed to be reelected.
However, most international observers believe there will be no fair contest as elections in Russia, and possibly even opinion polls, are manipulated in order to artificially favor Putin.
Yevgeny Balitsky, the Kremlin-installed governor of Zaporizhzhia, wrote in a Telegram post on Wednesday that the bombing was an attempt to “intimidate” pro-Russia officials in Zaporizhzhia and prevent their “legitimate expression of will.”
“The victim of today’s attack by Kiev terrorists was an innocent woman—a mother, wife, patriot of her country, who taught at the city Center for Children’s Creativity, raised our children, and worked for the benefit of the Zaporizhzhia region,” Balitsky wrote.
“She was a member of the election commission, and this is a planned terrorist act—an attempt to intimidate,” he continued. “They hope to prevent our legitimate expression of will, which is impossible.”
Berdyansk, located on the northern Sea of Azov coast in southeastern Ukraine, has been under Russian control since only three days after Putin launched his full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022.
Zaporizhzhia is one of four Ukrainian regions that Putin claimed to have annexed for Russia in September 2022. He also announced the annexation of Ukraine’s Donetsk, Luhansk and Kherson regions. Crimea was illegally annexed by Russia in 2014.
All of the allegedly annexed regions of Ukraine, none of which are currently under full Russian control except Crimea, will participate in Russia’s upcoming presidential election, which is set to take place between March 15 and 17.
While Putin is facing a small number of challengers, anti-war candidates have been banned from running, and polls indicate that the incumbent Russian president is virtually guaranteed to be reelected.
However, most international observers believe there will be no fair contest as elections in Russia, and possibly even opinion polls, are manipulated in order to artificially favor Putin.
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Russian election collaborator is ‘liquidated’ after huge Ukraine car bomb blast – U.K Daily Express
Svitlana Samoilenko “intimidated and terrorised Berdyan residents, forcing them to participate in illegal fake voting”, claims the Ukrainian security forces.
By Ciaran McGrath, Senior News Reporter
19:16, Wed, Mar 6, 2024 | UPDATED: 20:34, Wed, Mar 6, 2024
The IED was apparently placed under Svitlana Samoilenko’s car (Image: Ministry of Defence of Ukraine)
A ‘collaborator’ helping organise the Russian Presidential election in the occupied Zaporizhzhia region has been “liquidated”, Ukraine’s security forces have said, after she died in an apparent car bomb explosion.
Earlier Moscow aligned Vladimir Rogov had confirmed the death of one person in an explosion.
Vladimir Putin ally threatens the US with nuclear strikes on state TV broadcast
The recent State of the Nation address by Putin only heightened tensions, as he asserted the readiness of his country’s strategic nuclear forces.
22:24, Fri, Mar 8, 2024 | UPDATED: 23:12, Fri, Mar 8, 2024
Putin’s ally listed three NATO countries he thinks Russia should attack. (Image: Getty)
The United States has been issued a chilling threat from a prominent ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin as tensions in the Ukraine war explode onto the global scale.
Vladimir Solovyov, a leading figure in Kremlin-backed media, has openly suggested the possibility of launching nuclear strikes specifically targeting the United States.
Solovyov’s alarming remarks were made during his show “Evening with Vladimir Solovyov,” where he engaged in a disturbing discussion on potential targets for nuclear strikes.
He said: “Why do I think that we should carry out a strike against the West? Because I can see right through them! They say ‘Russia can’t tell us how to help Ukraine!’ It’s not for you to dictate how Russia can respond!
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