Posted By: Robert Cook April 12th 2024
https://www.waterstones.com/author/robert-cook/435753/page
Contact rj.cook@btinternet.com
May 3rd 2024
Imperial Overstretch By R J Cook
Britain is a horrible hypocritical nasty little fascist police state where the antiquated Royal Family define the ruling elite caste system. The King is the adulterer who was bugged telling his lover how much he wished he was her Tampax. He is the guy who got into Cambridge on below average grades. After the mysterious death of his ex wife Princess Diana, the road opened to marriage and more recently making the woman who cuckolded her husband Queen. Ironically this queen is now a spokesperson for women’s rights and the fight against domestic violence.
Europe is still in thrall to the Royal fantasy, the lower orders doffing their caps, especially in the
U. K where history is still being rewritten to hide the truth. The cruelty of slavery was not confined to black people as the chattering and upper classes would have us believe. The Russian, German and British Emperors at the start of World War One were all power crazed figureheads and first cousins, one son and two nephews of Queen Victoria.
German Emperor Kaiser Wilhelm and Germany were the scapegoats for causing the 1914-18 wars, and punished by an Anglo French regime who resented Germany’s rapid rise and efficiency since unification in 1871. They wanted utter humiliation for the German people. Consequent German hatred and resentment fuelled the Nazis rise. Meanwhile the Russian Tsarist regime was brutally overthrown by communism, uniting Europe in efforts to overthrow the new Russian regime.
The Lockhart Plot is the story of how a triumvirate of British, French and American diplomats conspired with secret agents, saboteurs and Russian nationalists to bring down Lenin’s regime as it desperately fought for life. There efforts led to Lenin’s early demise and the rise of Stalin as the perfect successor to discredit Communism. Ironically, Hitler was tolerated and even encouraged by some of the western elite as a bulwark against Stalinism. Even more irony was afoot when the alliance against the Nazis in World War Two became utterly dependent on Russia to save them.
Regardless of all the mincing machine technology the boffins on both sides invent for war, the megalomaniacs and greedy bullies haven’t changed. Nor has the hypocrisy and moralising media propaganda being used to justify the land grabbing NATO Ukraine proxy war on Russia. Dumbed down British are easily persuaded that Russia is going to invade and take over Brave little Britain, the democratic icon of the world..
So enter Napoleon Macron and Lord Palmerston Cameron who are assuring Zelensky’s Unctuous Ukraine that they are free to use French and British weapons inside Russia. Maria Zakharova Director of the Russian Information and Press Department has warned France and Britain of very serious consequences if they persist in the attitudes and behaviour. Russia is fighting an existential war, but try explaining that to the dumbed down western masses who, as with Hitler scapegoating the Jews, are easily distracted from what their appalling corrupt leaders are doing to them and from their real problems.
It goes without saying that the U.K police, who monitor this site 24/7 and make sure it is restricted to approved State bodies in the U.K, have issues with me and legal proceedings have been extant since 2020.
This picture was taken at around 3.30 am when I was delivering to Wagamama in Windsor. It was very cold. This location is popular with rough sleepers who were roughly removed for Megan and Prince Harry’s wedding. That is a U.K Class Act.
R J Cook
R J Cook
France’s Macron doesn’t rule out troops for Ukraine – Al Jazeera
French president says in interview that ‘if Russia wins in Ukraine, there will be no security in Europe’. French President Emmanuel Macron said he has not ruled out sending ground troops to Ukraine if Russia breaks through Ukrainian front lines and the government in Kyiv made such a request.
UK supplied Storm Shadow long-range missiles in Ukraine in 2023 & Can Be Used With Other U.K Weapons Inside Russia.
Related Topics
By James Gregory
BBC News
The UK has confirmed it is supplying Ukraine with long-range missiles it requested for its fight against invading Russian forces.
The Storm Shadow cruise missile has a range of over 250km (155 miles), according to the manufacturer.
By contrast, the US-supplied Himars missiles used by Ukraine only have a range of around 80 km (50 miles).
The weapons will give Ukraine the “best chance” of defending itself, UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said.
They are fired from aircraft, so the longer range means Ukrainian pilots will be able to stay further from the frontlines.
Once launched, the Storm Shadow drops to low altitude to avoid detection by enemy radar, before latching onto its target with an infra-red seeker.
The announcement was made in the House of Commons by Mr Wallace. The decision follows repeated pleas from Ukraine for more weapons from the West.
Mr Wallace said the missiles would “allow Ukraine to push back Russian forces based on Ukrainian sovereign territory”.
He said the UK took the decision after Russia “continued down a dark path” of targeting civilian infrastructure in Ukraine.
Mr Wallace wrote to his Russian counterpart Sergei Shoigu in December, he said, to warn that further attacks could result in the UK donating more capable weapons.
He said the missiles were “going into” or already in Ukrainian hands, and described the move as “calibrated and proportionate to Russia’s escalations”.
“None of this would have been necessary had Russia not invaded,” he said.
He said the missiles would be compatible with Ukraine’s existing, Soviet-era planes and praised the technicians and scientists who made that possible.
But he warned the range of the British-supplied Storm Shadows was “not in the same league” as Russia’s own missile systems – with some of Moscow’s weapons being able to travel far further.
Earlier this year, Ukrainian Defence Minister Oleksii Reznikov insisted longer-range missiles would not be used to attack targets within Russia itself.
“If we could strike at a distance of up to 300 kilometres, the Russian army wouldn’t be able to provide defence and will have to lose,” he told an EU meeting.
“Ukraine is ready to provide any guarantees that your weapons will not be involved in attacks on the Russian territory.”
In February, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said he was prepared to send long-range missiles to Ukraine, and the British government opened a bidding process for their procurement.
“Together we must help Ukraine to shield its cities from Russian bombs and Iranian drones,” Mr Sunak said then. “That’s why the United Kingdom will be the first country to give Ukraine longer-range weapons.”
On Thursday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Moscow would take an “appropriate” military response to any British-supplied Storm Shadow weapons used by Ukrainian forces.
The Storm Shadow missile has been operated by both British and French air forces and has been used previously in the Gulf, Iraq and Libya.
The British-supplied missiles can only be fired by aircraft, but French missiles can be fired from ships and submarines.
Kyiv can use British weapons inside Russia – Cameron
Paul Kirby
BBC News
- Published3 May 2024, 13:00 BST
- Updated 37 minutes ago
UK Foreign Secretary Lord Cameron has said it is up to Ukraine to decide how to use British weapons and insisted it has the right to strike targets on Russian territory.
During a visit to Kyiv, he said the UK would provide £3bn ($3.75bn) per year for as long as necessary.
“Just as Russia is striking inside Ukraine, you can quite understand why Ukraine feels the need to make sure it’s defending itself,” Lord Cameron said.
Russia condemned what it called “another very dangerous statement”.
“This is a direct escalation of tension around the Ukrainian conflict, which would potentially pose a threat to European security,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.
Lord Cameron did not directly endorse the idea of British weapons being used to strike targets inside Russia.
But until now, the UK has generally let it be understood – without spelling it out – that weapons such as the long range Storm Shadow missile should only be used inside sovereign Ukrainian territory. There have been several examples of its successful use in Russian-occupied Crimea, including against elements of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.
However, coming on the heels of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s pledge to give Ukraine £3bn ($3.76bn) in military assistance every year for the foreseeable future, it seems Lord Cameron wanted to emphasise that it is up to Ukraine to decide what it does with it.
The US has reportedly urged Ukraine to halt its strikes on oil refineries in Russia, fearing it could provoke an escalation in the conflict.
Mr Peskov also took aim at French President Emmanuel Macron, who said this week that the West would “legitimately” have to consider whether to send ground troops to Ukraine “if the Russians were to break through the front lines, if there were a Ukrainian request”.
Mr Macron’s remarks to The Economist were a “very dangerous trend”, said the Kremlin spokesman. However, the French leader made clear in his interview that if Russia won in Ukraine, there would be no security in Europe.
Russian forces have seized several villages in eastern Ukraine during recent advances, taking advantage of Ukraine’s shortages of weapons and manpower.
Ukrainian intelligence officials also believe Russia is gearing up for a summer offensive in the north-eastern regions of Kharkiv and Sumy.
The commander of the national guard, Oleksandr Pivnenko, warned recently that Russia was preparing “unpleasant surprises” and quietly recruiting 30,000 people a month.
A Russian strike on Kharkiv on Friday killed an elderly woman in her home, and a tram carrying passengers also came under fire, according to Mayor Ihor Terekhov.
Ukraine’s military says Russia’s immediate target is the strategic hilltop town of Chasiv Yar, 15km (9 miles) west of the devastated city of Bakhmut.
Officials believe the eastern town could enable Russian forces to attack major eastern cities such as Kramatorsk and Slovyansk. The military has suggested Moscow is keen to seize Chasiv Yar before Russians mark victory in World War Two on 9 May.
However, a Ukrainian military spokesman has denied that Russian troops have broken through to the Siverskyi Donetsk-Donbas canal on the outskirts of the town.
Russia claimed on Friday that its forces had captured three villages in Ukraine’s east in the past two weeks. Military spokesman Lt Col Nazar Voloshyn said the invading force had gained a foothold in the village of Ocheretyne but Ukrainian soldiers were working to drive them out.
Lord Cameron, who met President Volodymr Zelensky in Kyiv, said it was Russia that had launched an attack into Ukraine and Ukraine “absolutely has the right to strike back at Russia”.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said his remarks were tantamount to admitting the West was involved in a “hybrid war” against Moscow.
The UK has provided billions of pounds in military support for Ukraine since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, ranging from tanks and precision-guided missiles to air-defence systems.
A year ago the UK confirmed it had begun supplying long-range Storm Shadow cruise missiles with a range of more than 250km (155 miles).
Meanwhile, Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said he had appealed to Lord Cameron to help restore the country’s energy infrastructure which has been badly damaged by repeated Russian missile strikes.
Biden backs police repression against non-violent anti-genocide protests
The White House fears that the student response to Israeli genocide foreshadows a mass antiwar movement in the working class.
11:50 – LAUREL DUGGANJoe Biden turns populist as election approaches The President is relaxing cigarette and marijuana rules
May 2nd 2024
Police break barricades and make arrests as they clear Gaza protest in LA
At dawn on Wednesday 17 April, a small group of students pitched their tents at Columbia University, demonstrating against Israeli military action in Gaza and calling on their university to stop doing business with companies they see as supporting the war.
They did so as Minouche Shafik, Columbia’s president, made her way to Capitol Hill to face a Congressional grilling over antisemitism on campus and how she was tackling it.
In nearly four hours of questioning that Wednesday, she defended actions she was already taking. Students, she said, were “getting the message that violations of our policies will have consequences”.
The next afternoon, the Columbia president made a decision that would ignite a wildfire of protest at colleges across the United States.
The students at the protest camp were trespassing, had refused to leave and had created a “harassing and intimidating environment” for many of their peers, she said.
She was sending in the NYPD.
Soon after, officers from the largest police department in the US, wearing riot gear and wielding plastic handcuffs, arrested more than 100 students – the first time mass arrests had been made on Columbia’s campus since Vietnam War protests more than five decades ago.
- Police officers have broken down barricades to clear a pro-Palestinian protest at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA)
- Hundreds of people with tents had set up encampments at UCLA – officers told them to move or face arrest
- Overnight, hundreds of officers entered the site and by Thursday morning most protesters had gone
- Our reporters saw dozens of detained protesters with their hands behind their back, being put on buses
- On Tuesday night, a masked pro-Israeli group assaulted a pro-Palestinian student camp, before officers were called to the campus
- Demonstrations are continuing at dozens of universities across the US; there have been more than 1,000 arrests in total
Comment The above extract is from a BBC biased report. Hence a strong pro Palestine twist. U.S has a large Islamic population which, like the U,K must be placated. Islamists are not into diversity, which is why protest is not tolerated in the Middle East or Pakistan.
Biden has just made a speech about the protests, noting that the U.S is a Civil Society where order must prevail. Asked by a reporter if the protests would make any difference to U.S policy. Biden said a resounding ‘NO’ as he shuffled away from the podium and out of the room.
There is a conflict here, worrying those desperate to dump Trump. As one U.S ageing former Democrat adviser said “Trump is supposed to be the liberal.” He went on to reflect on the risk to Biden’s right to win the next election. Astonishingly he said : LBJ was supposed to defeat Richard Nixon but his stance on Vietnam beat him
The tone of Anglo U.S elite media that I have been monitoring today is strident and trying to disguise this flexing of Islamic and other non white ethnic group muscle as a warning against letting Donald Trump back into the White House.
Another four more years of Biden will continue the United States transformation into a majority non white culture which will not tolerate any deviation in thought or values from their mainstream views. Elite white bourgeoise students don’t live among working class white Americans. I attended two elite universities in the 1970s and know their patronising mindset. There is a revolution underway. It bears no comparison to the late 1960s and early 1970s student protests that I observed but would not join because I saw it for the posturing patronising virtue signalling that it was and still is. Biden is a fool.
The swamp and the rest of the U.S elite like it when they have a fool in place to rule. But the U.S elite with their black and female totems are over extended across the world. Student and ethnic radicals have just seen how scared the elite politicians have been in challenging Palestinians and anti semites. It has been a text book demonstration of the great replacement which will go into hyper drive just as soon as Biden can sort out Israel, then get as many young white men shipped off to the rich man’s NATO Ukraine proxy war on Russia.
R J Cook
May 1st 2024
Is This The Great Replacement ?
The new law on mobilization: Is Ukraine turning into a giant prison?
Ukraine is becoming more and more like a giant prison for its own trapped and disenfranchised population. Now, the authorities even seek to force those back inside who had managed to escape it.
In addition to the billions already allocated to Ukraine, the 2024 defence budget is expected to rise by nearly 43 percent, a war-budget that is expected to continually rise each year to reach an initial sum of €21.4 billion euros, or roughly 2 percent of the Dutch GDP by 2030.
Having largely adopted the AfD’s political programme on refugees and domestic policy, the federal government now wants to overtake it from the right in foreign policy.
Istanbul police declare de facto state of emergency against May Day celebrations
The measures are a show of force by the Erdoğan-led state apparatus against those marking the international day of struggle of the working class.
As anti-genocide student protests sweep the country DeSantis is injecting anti-communist propaganda into all grades throughout the state’s public schools.
On Monday afternoon, organizers of the student encampment at Northwestern University (NU) in the north suburb of Chicago reached an agreement behind closed doors with the university administration and shut down the protest against the genocide in Gaza.
April 30th 2024
Ukrainian border chief says dozens have died trying to flee …
The head of Ukraine’s state border guard has said at least 30 people have died attempting to flee the country since February 2022, as the number of Ukrainians trying to avoid conscription continues to rise.
30 Mar 2022 — On 27 February, James Heappey, UK Minister for the Armed Forces, wrote in the Daily Telegraph: “His failure must be complete; Ukrainian …
Russia live news updates | War in UkraineNewsNowhttps://www.newsnow.co.uk › World › Asia
Putin propagandist: Russia will sink Britain under nuclear tidal wave. The Independent 9h. Russia UK/Russia · Energy & Utilities · Russian Politics.
Home / World News / Britain, France forge new alliance for Ukraine, eye Nato partners
Britain, France forge new alliance for Ukraine, eye Nato partners
But the stakes now are high. War continues to rage in Ukraine. The US’s hard power commitment remains fallible
 "Russian attack, Kyiv, ballistic missiles, Ukraine")
File image of destruction in Ukraine (Photo: PTI)
Aping and Raping by R J Cook
Under Johnson’s leadership, the Conservative Party polled their largest share of votes since 1979 and won their largest number of seats since 1987, resulting in a landslide victory. Their total of 13.9 million votes was the largest number of votes won by any party since 1992. The current Tory Government were elected on lies that they ‘would get Brexit done.’ Tories played on migrant fears. Divide and Rule with appropriate scapegoating has long been a U.K elite tradition for control and their own protection.
Years later having done nothing beyond spending a fortune on rescuing capsized migrants from the English Channel, feeding, clothing, housing and educating them. Belatedly, now under leadership of the unctuous millionaire former banker Rishi Sunak something appears as if it is being done. Mainstream elite media has vaunted him as just a typical average black man called for by their fake egalitarian ideology to lead the self important once great liberal ( sic ) U.K .
So he and his crew came up with the ludicrous policy for sending illegal migrants to Rwanda. It is a policy wide open to the white liberal anti racist outrage, attack and sabotage, much to the satisfaction of the wealthy elite and business folk who need the cheap labour to push prices and profits sky high.
Sunak profited from the incompetence of Blustering Boris Johnson, the Churchill wannabe who broke his government’s own lockdown rules adding absurd praise for an inefficient unfit for purpose National Health Service ( NHS ) struggling to cope with mass immigration, legal and illegal, mental health problems and an ageing population. From top to bottom, health worker egos had been bloated by Boris Johnson’s campaign for us all to clap and thank the NHS for being totally incapable of coping with the demands of ludicrous lockdown. It paved the way for excessive pay demands from a section of the population who saw themselves as life savers.
Johnson’s gross incompetence and war mongering idiocy ensured there would be no Ukraine Peace deal. Johnson was playing the old war game card to cover for incipient disaster. It was also a response to behind the scenes fear of a far right uprising. Propaganda has been raised to a new level of sophistication with the BBC having the audacity to proclaim their news unspun. So came the NATO Ukraine proxy war on Russia. Offering enormous wealth for the western elite, at the expense of Russia’s national security and prospects for regime change to something sympathetic to western elite capitalism, Britain would have to squander more billions of taxpayer’s money for their share of the booty and power.
So far, resurrecting the spectre of the old Russian evil red menace tyranny has worked very well. At the time of the 1917 second Russian Revolution, nine out of ten British people owned nothing at all. It is a moot point as to whether anything has changed in real terms. So persuading the poorly educated brainwashed masses, via elite mass media, that Putin will be worse and take what little hope they have, is essential to elite hegemony. It is the same scapegoating mindset that made Hitler so successful. Scapegoating not only stirs up fear and support for wealth chasing foreign policy, it scrapes together a few more billions from the vulnerable and the underclass to pay for more posturing war.
That is why Sunak has resurrected the same old Tory war on so called benefit scroungers and transsexuals. It is the same mindset. Sunak is fronting a policy campaign to take benefits away from those claiming incapacity benefits, whether due to physical or mental issues. Now Sunak is ramping up the war against transsexuals being allowed treatment in women’s hospital wards. The basic implication is that transsexual women are rapists in waiting. Sunak clearly shares furious feminist fantasy writer J K Rowling’s narrow vicious self centred outlook and prejudice. Obviously it would free up resources for the NHS or war if the whole Gender Reassignment NHS Treatment was cancelled. Obviously the persecution and sadistic murder of young Brianna Ghey has made no difference to the hell male to female transsexuals must endure. Any one lining up for NHS Gender Treatment should receive warning that they will be marked like the Jews of Nazi Europe as a potentially dangerous menance to naturally innocent and pure women worldwide.
The logic of the Rowling and Sunak mindset is that any male brave or insane enough to risk gender reassignment as a solution to an identity issue, must be prepared to wear their new status openly for all to mock,abuse,assualt and ridicule like the Jews of Nazi Germany. Jewish stars and other holocaust badges. A fake multi cultural society like the U.K has amother reason for this transwoman ostracism. It cannot risk an increasingly expanding Muslim urban population of vaing its women in a hospital ward with a transwoman because no such person can exist, therefore their very existence is an offence against Allah and a danger to their women. In the strange world of diversity, these people expect only God to win in the end. So for their protection and Rowling’s sisterhood, transwomen must wear or carry some kind of demeaning badge to show good Godly people that they are less than human and expendable.
The Jews of Europe were legally compelled to wear badges or distinguishing garments (e.g., pointed hats) at least as far back as the 13th century. This practice continued throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, but was largely phased out during the 17th and 18th centuries. With the coming of the French Revolution and the emancipation of western European Jews throughout the 19th century, the wearing of Jewish badges was abolished in Western Europe.
The Nazis resurrected this practice as part of their persecutions during the Holocaust. Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich Main Security Office, first recommended that Jews should wear identifying badges following the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 9 and 10, 1938. Shortly after the invasion of Poland in September 1939, local German authorities began introducing mandatory wearing of badges.
By the end of 1939, all Jews in the newly-acquired Polish territories were required to wear badges. Upon invading the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Germans again applied this requirement to newly-conquered lands. Throughout the rest of 1941 and 1942, Germany, its satellite states and western occupied territories adopted regulations stipulating that Jews wear identifying badges. Only in Denmark, where King Christian X is said to have threatened to wear the badge himself if it were imposed on his country’s Jewish population, were the Germans unable to impose such a regulation.
Nazi propaganda leaflet: “Whoever bears this sign is an enemy of our people”.
The German government’s policy of forcing Jews to wear identifying badges was but one of many psychological tactics aimed at isolating and dehumanizing the Jews of Europe, directly marking them as being different (i.e., inferior) to everyone else. It allowed for the easier facilitation of their separation from society and subsequent ghettoization, which ultimately led to the deportation and murder of 6 million Jews. Those who failed or refused to wear the badge risked severe punishment, including death. For example, the Jewish Council (Judenrat) of the ghetto in Bialystok, Poland announced that “… the authorities have warned that severe punishment – up to and including death by shooting – is in store for Jews who do not wear the yellow badge on back and front.”
This is the mindset that Sunak is a party to applying to male to female transsexuals ( mtf ). For the liberal fascists of today there is no interest in why there has been an explosion of males of all ages queuing up for sex change treatment. For powerful politicians and upper middle class feminists like JK Rowling there can only be one explanation for the sex change phenomenon, today’s women are so utterly attractive that men will ape them to rape them.
R J Cook
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The world out of kilter: reclaim our lives!
The community to which I would like to belong would not look like any other community.It would have evolved in harmony with the specific qualities of its place, its history, the tastes and desires of the people who made it up.It would be through this rooted belonging that the community could achieve its flowering – its myths, its music, its crafts, its food, its drink, its festivals, its ethos.In such a society, people would decide for themselves, among themselves, how they wanted to live.There would be no remote central “authority” demanding data and taxes, imposing its rigid requirements, ensuring that everything and everybody conformed to its mechanical model of what life should look like.People would grow up to feel free and instinctively resistant to outside interference.They simply would not go along with demands issued from strangers justified only by the rules and jargon these strangers have themselves invented. They would not tolerate the destruction of a much-loved meadow or forest because of targets or plans or the institutionally-enshrined priority afforded the steamroller of “development” and “economic growth”.And, because they lived simply, healthily, naturally, collaboratively, they would not have to waste the greater part of their time and energy on toiling for somebody else’s gain, just to have the bare right to food and shelter.Instead, everyone would contribute to the well-being of their community in whatever way they could. Such a world would only be perfect in the sense that human imperfection forms part of the overall perfection of the organism we call nature, Earth, the cosmos.But it would be a living world, a warm world, a kind world, a real world.And it can be ours, if we truly want it.It is time for us to grab back our future from the greed-soaked hands of the lying robber-tyrants who have, for so long now, pushed our world out of kilter. |
April 29th 2024
Ukraine defeat would cost the West trillions of dollars, warns James Heappey
Zelensky: Russia taking advantage of slow arms delivery
By Vicky Wong
BBC News
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky says Russia is taking advantage of the slow delivery of Western weapons to go on the offensive.
His comments come after the US agreed a $61bn (£49bn) package of military aid for Ukraine.
Mr Zelensky said some of the aid had started to arrive, but added that it needed to be delivered faster.
He was speaking alongside Nato chief Jens Stoltenberg, who said “it’s not too late for Ukraine to prevail”.
The comments come after authorities in the Black Sea port of Odesa said a Russian missile attack had killed four people and injured 28.
Odesa’s regional governor Oleh Kiper said three women and one man had died, and the injured included a five-year-old and a 16-year-old. Civilian houses and infrastructure had been damaged, he said.
Earlier on Monday, Russia said it had taken a second village in two days in the course of its offensive in eastern Ukraine.
At a joint press conference in Kyiv, President Zelensky said: “The Russian army is now trying to take advantage of a situation when we are waiting for supplies from our partners, especially from the United States of America.
“And that is exactly why the speed of deliveries means stabilising the front.”
He specifically singled out Ukraine’s need for artillery shells and air defence systems.
“Our partners have all of these things and they should be working now here in Ukraine destroying the Russian terrorist ambitions.
“Russia’s army is preparing for further offensive actions,” said Mr Zelensky.
- What $61bn US aid boost could mean for Ukraine
- US aid could give Ukraine the weapons it needs to slow Russia’s advance
- What weapons are being supplied to Ukraine?
Mr Stoltenberg agreed that Kyiv needed weapons, saying that “Ukraine has been outgunned for months, forced to ration its ammunition”.
The Nato chief said the six-month delay in US military aid had resulted in “serious consequences on the battlefield”.
But Mr Stoltenberg added that he was optimistic that when the arms were delivered it would help turn the tide.
“Our allies are looking into what more they can do and I expect new announcements soon. So we are working hard to meet Ukraine’s urgent needs,” said the Nato chief.
Russia said it had captured the village of Semenivka, which lies north of Avdiivka which Moscow took in February. On Sunday, Russia said the nearby village of Novobakhmutivka had fallen to its forces.
Ukraine’s commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskyi has said the situation on the frontline has worsened in the face of multiple Russian attacks, and that Ukrainian forces had withdrawn from positions in the eastern Donetsk region.
Earlier this month, the US finally approved billions of dollars in new military aid for Ukraine to help combat Russia’s invasion, putting an end to six months of congressional deadlock and raising Kyiv’s hopes that its dwindling supplies would be restocked.
Ukrainian forces have suffered from a shortage of ammunition and air defence systems in recent months. Officials have blamed delays in military aid from the US and other Western allies for the loss of lives and territory.
Situation on frontline has worsened, Ukraine army chief says
By George Wright
BBC News
Ukraine’s commander-in-chief has said the situation on the frontline has worsened in the face of multiple Russian attacks.
Oleksandr Syrskyi said Ukrainian forces had withdrawn from positions in the eastern Donetsk region.
Russia is trying to take advantage of its superiority in manpower and artillery before Ukrainian forces get much-needed supplies of new US weapons.
The US last week agreed a $61bn (£49bn) package of military aid for Ukraine.
But new US weapons are yet to make their way to the frontlines, where Ukrainian troops have been struggling for months with a shortage of ammunition, troops and air defences.
“The situation at the front has worsened,” Gen Syrskyi said in a post on the Telegram messaging service on Sunday.
He confirmed Ukrainian forces had withdrawn from some of their positions in an area of Donetsk that had formed part of a defensive line, established after Russia captured Avdiivka in February.
Much of the fighting has been taking place around Chasiv Yar, a Kyiv-controlled stronghold which Russia has been trying to reach after seizing Avdiivka.
New defensive lines had been taken up further to the west in some areas, with Gen Syrskyi conceding the loss of territory to the advancing Russians.
Moscow had secured “tactical successes in some sectors,” he said.
Gen Syrskyi added that rested Ukrainian brigades were being rotated in those areas to replace units that had suffered losses.
Russia’s defence ministry earlier on Sunday reported its troops had captured the village of Novobakhmutivka, around 10 km (6 miles) north of Avdiivka.
Gen Syrskyi became commander-in-chief of the country’s armed forces in February.
It followed speculation about a rift between his predecessor, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Earlier this month, Gen Syrskyi warned the battlefield situation in the east of the country had “significantly worsened”.
The commander of Ukraine’s National Guard, Oleksandr Pivnenko, said this week that he was expecting an attempt by Russian forces to advance on Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second city, which is near the Russian border.
US President Joe Biden this week signed off on a $95bn (£76bn) package of aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan after months of gridlock amid opposition to the aid from some in Congress.
The Senate passed a similar aid package in February, but a group of conservatives who oppose new Ukraine support had prevented it from coming to a vote in the House of Representatives.
On Friday, the Pentagon said it would “rush” Patriot air defence missiles and artillery ammunition to Ukraine as part of its new military aid package.
Between February 2022 and January 2024, the US gave Ukraine more than $40bn in military aid, according to German research organisation, the Kiel Institute.
Not one of the assembled journalists raised the criminal role of the Biden administration in the Israeli mass murder in Gaza.
April 27th 2024
The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine has led to ongoing widespread and possibly serious and long-term environmental damage. The Ukrainian government, journalists and international observers describe the damage as ecocide. Explosions inflict toxic damage along with physical destruction.
27 Jun 2022 — From driving the climate catastrophe to propping up police power, BlackRock is one of the most powerful corporate actors on the planet.
25 May 2018 — Divest from the war machine, protesters tell the private equity giant.
5 Apr 2022 — Millions of British pension-holders have helped build the immense Russian war chest that emboldened Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine, …
BlackRock: Funding War, Preaching Social ResponsibilityMedium · Willilam Hartung5 years ago
With $5 trillion in assets under its control, BlackRock is the largest corporation of its kind in the world. In recent years the company has …
28 Dec 2022 — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink have agreed to coordinate investment in rebuilding Ukraine, …
Western Elite Interest In Ukraine Stinks, But The Masses Love All The Retro World War Glory, Wait Till It Goes Nuclear. R J Cook.
J.P. Morgan steps up support for Ukraine
J.P. Morgan has helped the country raise around $25 billion in sovereign debt since 2010, and was the sole buyer of $350 million of Ukrainian bonds in March 2019. The bank also led the nation’s $20 billion debt restructuring in 2022.
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Acute Radiation Syndrome: A Fact Sheet for Physicians
Death is due to infection, dehydration, and electrolyte imbalance. Death occurs within 2 weeks of exposure. Symptoms are extreme nervousness and confusion; severe nausea, vomiting, and watery diarrhea; loss of consciousness; and burning sensations of the skin. Onset occurs within minutes of exposure.
What are the 4 stages of radiation sickness?
This series of disorders in organs is called acute radiation syndrome, which typically follows a course from the prodromal phase to the incubation phase, the onset phase, and finally to the convalescent phase or to death in the worst case.31 Mar 2021
Nowhere to hide: How a nuclear war would kill you—and …
“It is generally believed that humans exposed to about 500 rem of radiation all at once will likely die without medical treatment,” the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission says. But at a distance so close to ground zero, a 300-kiloton nuclear explosion would almost certainly burn and crush to death any human being.
Who Cares About The Masses Being Cooked Or Otherwised Killed When The Likes Of J.P Morgan Has Money To Be Made ? Ukraine Is About Obscene Wealth, Plutocracy & Anything But Freedom For The Masses.
During the 2008 crisis, JPMorgan bought failing investment bank Bear Stearns for $1.4 billion with assistance from the Federal Reserve and much of the assets of troubled lender Washington Mutual for $1.9 billion
Ukraine established a program to attract up to $400 billion in foreign investment to target various areas of the economy, from clean energy to defense to natural resources. Zelenskyy believes this is “the greatest opportunity in Europe since World War Two.”
A coalition of investors, with support from BlackRock and JPMorgan, are aiming to put together $15 billion in aid to rebuild Ukraine.14 Mar 2024
How much of the world’s wealth is owned by BlackRock?
Now, it is the world’s largest asset manager with $10 trillion currently in its portfolio. According to Marketwatch, there is currently around $40 trillion in circulation around the world — which means BlackRock manages a quarter of the world’s money.
Comment So you see why Anglo U.S Led NATO will choose Nuclear War before defeat in their Ukraine proxy war on Russia. So they may make a first strile.
R J Cook
BlackRock is the Biggest Company You’ve Never Heard of
How rich is the owner of BlackRock?
Larry Fink, who founded BlackRock, the world’s largest asset management firm, in 1988 (initially under the purview of Blackstone), currently has a net worth of $1.2 billion. He serves as the Chairman and CEO of BlackRock, which currently manages $8.7 trillion in total assets.5 Mar 2024
Giant conglomerate’s that control the world!!…LinkedIn · Omkar Chitnis360+ reactions · 1 year ago
Together Vanguard and BlackRock owns 21% of Expedia grp, 15% of Bookings holdings, 27% of American Express,13% of Boeing, 10% of Airbnb ,16% of …
Zelenskyy, BlackRock Announce New Investment Initiative to Rebuild …
The implications of these findings on the number of radiation casualties in a nuclear war are discussed. In this paper the basis for calculations of casualties from acute effects of radiation in a nuclear war, which may result in death within 60 days after exposure, is discussed.
Acute Radiation Mortality in a Nuclear War – NCBI
8 Apr 2024 — We believe in the values of democracy, including freedom of speech and expression, and are staunchly against discrimination and hate. We have …
8 Apr 2024 — “Staying on the sidelines during battles of autocracy and democracy, between dictatorship and freedom, is simply not an option for America today …
Comment Because I live in the U.K, a leading war mongering elite profiteering autocracy where voters choose between the two ruling class elite permitted choices, I cannot say what I think of this hideously overpaid Dimon and his class. Russia threatens their plutocracies and obscene wealth derived from raping the planet. It is time the white self styled virtue signalling liberals talked about why so many African and deluded Muslims flow to Britain. Ultimately it is because of what western elite lying meglomaniacs have done to their countries in cahoots with equally ruthless indigenous placemen – a policy in place since the official late 1940s withdrawal from their empires.
R J Cook
| Donald Trump |
| Stormy Daniels Takes Unexpected Hit |
The world out of kilter: occupation and zombification
Due to the corruption of our society, authority is wielded in the interests of a group which neither identifies with the people as a whole nor is prepared to be guided by its wishes.Instead, it seeks to impose its own agenda on the population by any means necessary – by propaganda and persuasion, if possible, or otherwise by outright deceit, intimidation and physical violence.Even worse is that this ruling gang, which is essentially nothing but an occupying force, shares neither the specific local moral codes of the various peoples it rules over, nor the general human sense of right and wrong that would once have been shared by its own ancestors. This is because it is a rogue element, a criminal entity, intent only on increasing its own wealth and power, and has no use for ethics.Indeed, it takes sadistic pleasure out of using, manipulating and inverting the majority population’s values – their sense of justice, their fondness for their homeland or their love of nature – in order to advance its own venal programme.Individuals in such a society are unable to follow their own moral compass, to act according to their own innate desires, to follow their dreams, pay respect to the archetypal template in their unconscious. This is not just because they are physically constrained, by authority, from acting and living in ways that they feel are right, but also because they have been mentally conditioned not to listen to the voice within.They are besieged, through all their waking hours, by messaging, by propaganda that tells them they have to live, think and behave in the ways set out by the ruling gang. A natural society will produce all kinds of individuals who complement each other in the ways that they contribute to its well-being.There are those who are drawn to caring for others, to teaching the young, to growing, to feeding, to building, to physically defending the community, to resolving disputes and so on.There are also the artists, poets, preachers and prophets, the antennae of the people, who are sensitive to the overall feel of the society and can sense when something is wrong.Young people often start out with this gift – think of all the different generations rebelling, in their varying ways, against this modern world! – only to be ground down into compliance by the satanic mills of power. But some carry on noticing and sounding the alert, with the aim of waking up the population as a whole to the danger they are facing.It is therefore important for the ruling occupying force to isolate the small minority who remain connected to their own deep knowing and to the organic spirit of the community.They do this by insulting, mocking, demonising, dismissing, intimidating, criminalising and imprisoning them – by presenting them, in their usual inverted manner, as a menace to the very society whose well-being they are trying to defend.This is psychologically difficult for these social antennae, who risk being deeply wounded by a rejection that they feel comes as much from their own community as from the occupying force. Banding together in self-defence, they can become inward-looking, cultish, and unable to properly communicate with others outside their ranks.Or, as individuals, they can become bitter and angry with those who refuse to listen to them, dismissing most members of their community as ignorant fools who deserve no better.In either case, they have completed the work of the ruling gang by cutting themselves off from the social organism to which they belong.That organism therefore has no more brain, no more soul, but is a social zombie, staggering on towards its own destruction under the malevolent control of the life-sucking criminocracy. |
Ukraine’s Democracy in DarknessThe New Yorkerhttps://www.newyorker.com › magazine › 2024/02/05
29 Jan 2024 — Before the war, Zelensky signed an ambitious law that aimed to shield Ukraine’s politics from the super-rich. The law created a registry of …
Usurpation of power in Ukraine: Zelensky between …
West Supporthttps://www.helpcame.com › post › usurpation-of-powe…
6 Jan 2024 — The decision to postpone the elections raises doubts about his commitment to democratic and separation of powers principles. Throughout history, …
Society or the Individual: Root Causes of Poverty in America
Here’s How Much Joe Biden Is WorthForbeshttps://www.forbes.com › Billionaires
17 Aug 2023 — After cashing in on books and speeches during the Trump era, Joe Biden is once again taking a government paycheck.
19 May 2022 — From 2013 to 2018 Hunter Biden and his firm earned about $11 million via legal work, as board member for a Ukraine firm, and via work with …
According to the White House’s 2021 financial disclosure report, Kamala Harris’ net worth is estimated to be between $6.75 million to $15.29 million. This includes both the assets and liabilities in her name as well as those in the name of her spouse, Douglas Emhoff, whom she married in 2014.8 Mar 2023
Barack Obama’s Net Worth: $70 Million Celebrity Net Worth has reported Barack and Michelle Obama’s net worth as $70 million. Obama’s net worth is in part due to earning $400,000 a year throughout his entire eight-year term as president of the United States.7 Apr 2024
Bill and Hillary Clinton, estimated net worth: up to $250 million combined. Online sources vary when it comes to Bill and Hillary Clinton’s combined net worth. Some claim the couple has earned another $250 million since Bill left the White House in 2001.
what Bill, Hillary and their family members are worth today
WATCH: Biden delivers remarks on military aid bill for Ukraine, Israel and other U.S. allies
Which Corporations Control the World?International Business Degree Guidehttps://internationalbusinessguide.org › corporations
Bankrate, 10 largest banks of the world · WIkipedia, 2013 United States Federal budget · Wikipedia, ICBC · HSBC · Deutsche Bank · Deutsche Bank at a Glance · Assets …
Zelensky Just Another Poor Man Worth only $20 million.
But unlike his predecessor, Zelensky never was a billionaire. He’s currently worth roughly $20 million at most, based on reporting by Forbes Ukraine.
Claim: Zelenskyy has $1.2B in an account, 15 homes, 3 planes, $11M monthly income
Claimed by: Social media
Is the US a democracy or plutocracy?
According to Noam Chomsky and Jimmy Carter, the modern United States resembles a plutocracy though with democratic forms. Paul Volcker, a former chair of the Federal Reserve, also believed the U.S. to be developing into a plutocracy.
Poverty in the United States: 2022 – Census Bureau
The official poverty rate in 2022 was 11.5 percent, with 37.9 million people in poverty. Neither the rate nor the number in poverty was significantly different from 2021 (Figure 1 and Table A-1). The official poverty rate for Black individuals decreased between 2021 and 2022.12 Sept 2023
Compared to other Western industrialized countries, the United States devotes far fewer resources to programs aimed at assisting the economically vulnerable. In fact, the U.S. allocates a smaller proportion of its GDP to social welfare programs than virtually any other industrialized country.
An annual income of $500,000 or more would make you rich. The Economic Policy Institute uses a different baseline to determine who constitutes the top 1% and the top 5%. For 2021, you’re in the top 1% if you earn $819,324 or more each year. The top 5% of income earners make $335,891 per year.7 Dec 2023
According to the most recent report from the U.S. Census Bureau, the poverty threshold for a family of four is $29,960. For an individual, the poverty threshold is $14,891.27 Mar 2024
Most Americans say poverty is the result of inequity in society rather than an individual’s own fault. Two-thirds of the public consider poverty a pervasive problem in the United States and more than a quarter consider themselves poor.25 Jan 2016
Who really owns the United States?Econlibhttps://www.econlib.org › who-really-owns-the-united-st…
30 Aug 2023 — Scott Sumner. The answer is “both“. I’ll try to illustrate this with a few examples.Almost every day, I see a report in the local media (OC …
Who owns the United States?Homework.Study.comhttps://homework.study.com › explanation › who-owns…
In a technical sense, the Federal government owns the most privately held land, although the massive amount of debt incurred through years of borrowing means …
10 Jul 2019 — Rich people essentially control everything, whether they are rich and in public office because they are rich, or merely have bought politicians …
22 answers · 47 votes: Absolutely. It is no secret that our elections (establishment candidates) are completely funded …
Is the USA controlled by a wealthy elite to a greater …
6 answers
31 Jan 2020
Who are the elite families that have supposedly …
1 answer
11 Sept 2023
Is it true there is an elite group of people that …
109 answers
16 Jan 2019
How do the global elite maintain control of the world …
19 answers
Pentagon to ‘rush’ Patriot missiles to Ukraine in $6bn package
By Holly Honderich & Will Vernon
in Washington
The Pentagon says it will “rush” Patriot air defence missiles and artillery ammunition to Ukraine as part of its new military aid package.
However Patriot systems for launching the missiles will not be sent, Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Patriots were “urgently” needed to face a growing Russian air threat and “can and should save lives right now”.
On Saturday, Ukraine said Russia had carried out another massive air attack.
Authorities in Kharkiv said a hospital was damaged. Energy facilities in three regions were attacked, Energy Minister German Galushchenko said.
Russia attacked with cruise missiles, S-300 surface-to-air missiles and Iskander ballistic missiles, Ukraine said, adding that 21 were downed using aircraft, air defence systems and jamming.
Ukraine claimed to have hit two Russian oil refineries across the border. Footage from one in the Russian region of Krasnodar appeared to have caused a large explosion, though local authorities denied significant damage.
Russian authorities said on Saturday they had shot down some 68 Ukrainian drones over Russian territory.
Speaking on Friday, Mr Austin told a news conference that the US was committing to its largest security assistance package to date and would “move immediately” to get the supplies to Ukraine.
The US was using $6bn (£4.8bn) for this purpose, he said. A source confirmed to the BBC that the $6bn was part of a $60bn aid package signed into law by US President Joe Biden on Wednesday, which also includes $1bn in more immediate aid.
The assistance would include air defence munitions, counter-drone systems and artillery ammunition but not Patriot missile systems.
“It’s not just Patriots that they [the Ukrainians] need, they need other types of systems and interceptors as well,” Mr Austin said. “I would caution us all in terms of making Patriot the silver bullet.”
Mr Austin added that he was confident that more of the missile systems would be made available for Kyiv soon. Conversations were ongoing with European partners, he said, to deliver additional capabilities.
The Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Charles Brown, said the assistance should eliminate the Ukrainians’ need to ration shells on the frontline.
- Ukraine’s air defence plea falls short in southern Europe
- What weapons are being supplied to Ukraine?
- LISTEN: Is the US £61bn aid package enough?
Some of the latest funding would also go to building up Ukraine’s own defence industry, so that it can start manufacturing more of the ammunition it desperately needs.
Mr Austin said Russia had already increased domestic production of artillery ammunition and other weapons – as well as being propped up by supplies from Iran and North Korea.
“Understand what’s at stake for Ukraine, for Europe, and for the United States,” he said. “If Putin prevails in Ukraine – Europe would face a security threat it hasn’t seen in a lifetime. Russia will not stop in Ukraine.”
Asked whether the US aid would protect Ukrainian forces, Mr Austin said that the commitment was “material, real, and substantial” although “not instantaneous”.
“It’s going to take some time to get it in there and distribute. The Ukrainians were able to hold – with this capability, they can do a lot better.”
The defence secretary’s words came as Ukraine warned on Friday that Russia was ramping up attacks on its railways.
A Ukrainian security source told the AFP news agency that Moscow wanted to damage Ukrainian railway infrastructure to “paralyse deliveries and movement of military cargo”.
Ukraine only has a handful of Patriots to complement other Western missile defence systems and existing stocks of Soviet-era surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), such as the S-300.
The Patriots are the most capable and expensive air defence systems that Ukraine has. Each Patriot battery costs around $1bn (£800m), and each missile costs nearly $4m.
Germany has already promised an extra Patriot system – and its defence and foreign ministers appealed to their European counterparts earlier this month to respond urgently.
Greece has stocks of Patriots and S-300s but said none could be spared.
“We explained why we cannot do it,” Greek Prime Minister Kyrios Mitsotakis told Skai TV. His said his country’s air defences were “critical systems for the protection of Greek air space”.
According to reports, Spain will supply some Patriot missiles but not a full system.
Recent months have seen Kyiv step up its calls for Western assistance as its stocks of ammunition are depleted and Russia makes steady gains.
Ukrainian officials have blamed delays in military aid from the US and other Western allies for the loss of lives and territory.
Related Topics
April 26th 2024
22 Jun 2021 — Russian President Vladimir Putin has said the 2014 popular uprising that saw former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich forced from office …
Comment Cut through Anglo U.S Elite propoganda and it is obvious that the U.S orchestrated the Ukraine Coup. They are trying the same in Russia and Belarus on their way to China. The following link is more of the same.
The reality is that Ukraine, built on Soviet money and assest stripped by the likes of Poroshenko, owed Russia billions of roubles for unpaid oil and gas bills. In settlement, Russia offered an annual subsidy and trade deal.
When Viktor Yanukovich accepted that deal, the United States et al knew he had to go and so did Putin. In came the CIA and MI6. Minsk was a con on Russia giving time to expand, train and equip the army for the long planned NATO proxy war on Russia, with catostropnhic consequences for the planet.
Meanwhile NATO & EU puppet Ze;lensky has made a fortune, basking in glory and an alliance with the instirutionally corrupt west to which Ukraine and Crimea will be mortgaged until the end of earthly time – which may be sooner than the gullible masses think. Our fantastically rich ruling class have always been gamblers, always want more and to keep the masses down. War is just giant roulette to those parasites.
R J Cook
MYTH The West staged a coup to overthrow the UkrainianPoder360https://static.poder360.com.br › 2014-Coup-1
The 2014 Maidan revolution in Ukraine that led to the ouster of then-president Viktor. Yanukovych was in fact a coup orchestrated by the United States and …
Comment Poisonous propoganda which explains nothing except what is written between the lines and the greedy imbecilic motives for writing it.
R J Cook
April 25th 2024
Russia’s Nuclear Weapons Are Now in Belarus – Foreign Policy
Russia has moved tactical nuclear weapons from its own borders into neighboring Belarus, several hundred miles closer to NATO territory, Western officials confirmed to Foreign Policy, as Russian President Vladimir Putin threatens a wider military showdown with the alliance over its continued support for Ukraine.
Russia. Russia has the largest number of nuclear weapons in the world. There is also discussion in Russia that Moscow and Beijing can make a deal with each other so that both can stand united in front of America.
Tsar Bomba, Soviet thermonuclear bomb was detonated in a test over Novaya Zemlya island in the Arctic Ocean on October 30, 1961. It was the largest nuclear weapon ever set off, it produced the most powerful human-made explosion ever recorded. Now we may see even worse here in Europe and the wider world.
Ukraine war: Nato pledges more advanced air defences to Kyiv
Related Topics
By Jaroslav Lukiv
BBC News
Nato will give Ukraine more advanced air defences after urgent Kyiv pleas and deadly Russian attacks, military bloc head Jens Stoltenberg has said.
His comments come after a crisis Nato-Ukraine summit on Friday.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Kyiv needed “seven more Patriots or similar air defence systems” to defend the country’s cities.
Seven people, including two children, were killed in Russian missile strikes on Friday, Ukrainian officials said.
In other key developments on Friday:
- Ukraine claimed it had downed for the first time a strategic long-range bomber deep in Russian territory. Moscow blamed a technical malfunction for the crash
- After months of delay, the US Congress moved a step closer to passing a $60.8bn (£49bn) aid bill to Ukraine
Speaking after the Nato-Ukraine Council summit held by video link, Mr Stoltenberg said: “Nato defence ministers have agreed to step up and provide further military support, including more air defence.”
He said the 32-member bloc “has mapped out existing capabilities across the alliance and there are systems that can be made available to Ukraine”.
“So I expect new announcements on air defence capabilities for Ukraine soon,” he added.
The Nato chief said there were Patriot and other advanced air defence systems available in stocks of Nato countries that could be given to Ukraine – but he gave no details about what exactly Kyiv might get.
Last week, Germany pledged to supply Kyiv with a third US-made Patriot battery out of its military stocks.
Ukraine currently has several Patriot systems, but not enough to defend its cities from massive Russian attacks.
Meanwhile, President Zelensky said after the summit: “We need seven more Patriots or similar air defence systems, and it’s a minimum number. They can save many lives and really change the situation. You [Nato] have such systems.”
The Ukrainian leader laid out four other key priorities Kyiv has long been pressing for:
- One million artillery shells
- Long-range weaponry
- Advanced warplanes
- Speed of delivery
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is in its third year now, and there are no signs that Europe’s biggest land war since World War Two might end any time soon.
Moscow’s troops have recently been making steady – albeit slow – advances in eastern Ukraine, as Kyiv faces critical arms shortages.
Mr Zelensky recently admitted that Ukraine is outgunned and could lose the war without urgent Western military aid.
Ukraine is critically dependent on advanced armoury supplies from its Western allies, particularly the US, to be able to continue fighting Russia – a far bigger military force with an abundance of artillery ammunition.
Earlier on Friday, Ukrainian officials said seven people, including a boy and a girl, were killed and more than 30 injured in Russian missile strikes on Ukraine’s central Dnipropetrovsk region.
The northern city of Chernihiv was struck in Russia’s deadliest attack for some time earlier this week, leaving 18 dead and dozens wounded.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s Air Force said it had brought down a Russian Tu-22M3 strategic bomber 300km (186 miles) from Ukrainian territory.
It said the plane eventually went down in Russia’s Stavropol region after it had launched a missile strike on Ukraine.
Ukraine’s defence intelligence described the strike as a special operation similar to January’s attack on a Russian A-50 spy plane.
Intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov told BBC Ukraine that “we waited for a long time, prepared, and finally succeeded”.
A source in Ukraine’s intelligence later told the BBC the Russian bomber was shot down on Friday using a Soviet-era S-200 air defence system, which is believed to have been upgraded.
Unverified footage showed a plane on fire spiralling out of control and falling to the ground.
Russia’s defence ministry blamed a technical malfunction after the bomber had carried out a “combat task”.
Two pilots had been found alive, a third crew member was killed and rescue services were looking for a fourth, Stavropol’s regional governor said.
Ukraine war: Kyiv uses longer-range US missiles for first time
Related Topics
By Kathryn Armstrong
BBC News
Ukraine has begun using longer-range ballistic missiles against Russia that were secretly provided by the US, American officials have confirmed.
The weapons were sent as part of a previous US support package, and arrived this month. Officials said they were not announced publicly to maintain Ukraine’s “operational security”.
They have already been used at least once to strike Russian targets in occupied Crimea.
Further US aid is now heading to Kyiv.
More American weaponry is expected to be sent imminently, after President Joe Biden signed off on Wednesday a new package of economic and military support for Ukraine worth $61bn (£49bn).
The missiles that have already been quietly provided are the longer-range version of the Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS), a state department spokesman confirmed on Wednesday.
The US previously supplied Ukraine with a mid-range version of the ATACMS, but had resisted sending anything more powerful, partly over concerns about compromising US military readiness.
Officials were also concerned that the Ukrainians could use the weaponry to strike inside Russian territory, causing the conflict to escalate, according to NBC, which first reported the news.
The Ukrainians have long called for the systems, which can fire missiles up to 300km (186 miles). Mr Biden is said to have secretly given the green light in February.
Briefing reporters on Wednesday, the state department spokesman confirmed that the provision of the longer-range ATACMS had been “at the president’s direct direction”.
The US “did not announce this at the onset in order to maintain operational security for Ukraine at their request”, Vedant Patel explained.
It is not clear how many of the weapons have already been sent, but US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said Washington planned to send more.
“They will make a difference. But as I’ve said before at this podium… there is no silver bullet,” he said.
The longer-range ATACMS give Ukraine the ability to strike deeper into Russian-held areas; particularly bases, storage facilities and logistics hubs.
They were used for the first time last week to strike a Russian airfield in occupied Crimea, US media reported, and then in an attack on Russian troops in the occupied port city of Berdyansk overnight on Tuesday.
Russia said on Wednesday that the new weaponry “will not fundamentally change the outcome” of the war.
Recent months have seen Kyiv step up its calls for Western assistance as its stocks of ammunition are depleted and Russia makes steady gains.
The new aid package that was rubber-stamped by Mr Biden on Wednesday follows months of gridlock amid opposition to the aid from some in Congress.
A billion-dollar weapons package is expected to be the first of many from the $61bn of fresh aid, not all of which will be spent on arms.
US security assistance previously sent to Ukraine since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion totals $44bn.
“It’s going to make America safer, it’s going to make the world safer,” the US president said after signing the new aid into law.
Reacting to the package, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said: “Now we will do everything to make up for half a year spent in debates and doubts.
“What the Russian occupier was able to do during this time, what Putin is now planning, we must turn against him.”
Mr Zelensky recently warned that a Russian offensive was expected in the coming weeks after Ukraine’s loss of the city of Avdiivka during the winter.
Ukrainian forces have suffered from a shortage of ammunition and air defence systems in recent months and officials have blamed delays in military aid from the US and other Western allies for the loss of lives and territory.
Mr Sullivan said on Wednesday it was “certainly possible that Russia could make additional tactical gains in the coming weeks”.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022, tens of thousands of people, most of them soldiers, have been killed or injured on both sides and millions of people have fled their homes.
Additional reporting by BBC weapons analyst Chris Partridge
Related Topics
- US to send new Ukraine aid right away, Biden says
- Published1 day ago
11 Jun 2020 — … oligarch-owned conglomerates. After becoming president, Poroshenko started off strong, generally adhering to the provisional government’s course …
15 May 2019 — In an interview with POLITICO, outgoing leader reflects on his wartime presidency and claims credit for reforms.
Petro Poroshenko, businessman and politician who served as president of Ukraine (2014–19). In 1996 he founded the confectionery manufacturer Roshen and …
Missing:oligarch | Show results with: oligarch
Poroshenko warns against ‘revenge’ of oligarch forces
2 Jan 2023 — According to state prosecutors, Poroshenko allegedly favored supplies of coal from rebel-controlled areas of the Donbas region instead of coal …
politico.euhttps://www.politico.eu › article › petro-poroshenko-war…
15 May 2019 — In an interview with POLITICO, outgoing leader reflects on his wartime presidency and claims credit for reforms.
20 May 2022 — Ukraine’s ex-president Petro Poroshenko: ‘The army is like my child, and I am very proud’. The oligarch talks about his encounters with Putin, …
April 24th 2024
‘Neo Liberalism Is Fascism By Another Name’ – R.J Cook
Biden launches police-state crackdown at US universities
The Biden administration, in alliance with the fascist-led Republican Party, has moved to criminalize political opposition to the Gaza genocide, the greatest war crime of the 21st century.
Deception and vain sacrifices: What the summit meeting of the NATO in Vilnius offered up to Kiev
A special report by Dmitri Kovalevich, correspondent in Ukraine for Al Mayadeen English, July 19, 2023, regarding the Vilnius NATO summit.
On July 11 and 12, the Lithuanian city of Vilnius hosted the summit meeting of leaders of the governments of the NATO military alliance. The Ukrainian leadership held high hopes for the meeting; or at least, this is what they told the people of Ukraine and Western media. Volodymyr Zelensky used the occasion to aggressively press for an invitation to Ukraine to join the military alliance. Membership has long been intimated and often declared by Western leaders, even if it would mean a direct political clash and a potential military clash with nuclear-armed Russia.
The summit meeting was preceded by a months-long information barrage by Western governments and media centered on a hoped-for but highly unlikely admission of Ukraine into NATO. Many corporate media voices along with many politicians sitting in opposition in Western countries called on the NATO governments to accept Ukraine into membership, or at least pledge to accept accession within a specific and foreseeable timeframe. In Ukraine proper, this story was constantly exaggerated and inflamed by analysts and journalists.
Right up to the start of the summit, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was being promised some sort of “surprise” (to use the term of Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas). The implication was that the hawkish governments in Eastern Europe and in Britain would prevail in pressing the U.S. president to make a surprise announcement opening the door for membership by the Kiev regime in the NATO alliance.
Ukraine regime overplays its hand
Zelensky felt so emboldened as to demand that the U.S. and other NATO countries accept Ukraine’s membership, saying that failure to do so would be a betrayal of the Ukrainian people. He wrote on July 11, “It’s unprecedented and absurd when [a] time frame is not set, neither for the invitation nor for Ukraine’s membership. While at the same time, vague wording about ‘conditions’ is added even for inviting Ukraine.”
In the end, Zelensky overplayed his hand. His thinly veiled attempts to blackmail his own Western sponsors soon stirred barely-concealed irritation among Western officials. UK Defense Secretary Ben Wallace responded to Zelensky’s barbs with an appeal to “cool down”. He said, “Whether we like it or not, people want to see gratitude,” meaning that Zelensky and the rest of his leadership group should be grateful for the destruction that NATO has visited upon the country with its weapons, military training and direct financial assistance.
British PM Rishi Sunak joined the media exchange with ‘cooling down’ words of his own. “President Zelenskiy has expressed his gratitude for what we have done on a number of occasions,” Sunak told a press conference at the summit in Vilnius. “I completely understand Volodymyr’s desire to do everything he can to protect his people and to stop this war, and we will continue to give him the support that he needs.”
On the eve of the summit, Ukraine was expected to show maximum military results on the battlefield. For this purpose, Ukrainian soldiers were herded into a six-week ‘counteroffensive’ beginning in early June that, in the end, made no dent in Russia’s robust defenses nor its capacity to take the offensive. But the exercise did cost the lives of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers. And, according to the New York Times, fully 20 percent of the Ukraine regime’s heavy battlefield weapons were lost in combat.
Every day during the counteroffensive, the Ukrainian military, as well as the foreign mercenaries from Western countries (mainly from Poland), went on the attack against strong Russian defensive lines in the land between the Dnieper River and the historic Donbass region. And every day, they would be turned away, sometimes losing up to half of the personnel of attacking units. Due to the widespread presence of mines in the areas targeted by Ukraine, many of the bodies of Ukrainian servicemen cannot be removed for burial. Sky News cited Irish mercenary Rhys Byrne in a July 11 report: “The biggest problem we get when we’re going into trenches is stepping over all the dead bodies that are already there from the last people [who] went in. That kind of stuff really haunts you.”
According to Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, the Ukrainian army’s losses in the counter-offensive since June 4 amounted to more than 26,000 military personnel and some 3,000 military vehicles and equipment. The minister said that Russian troops destroyed more than 1,200 armored vehicles during this period, including 17 German Leopard tanks, 12 American Bradley BMPs and five French AMX wheeled tanks.
Konstantin Gavrilov, head of the Russian delegation to the Vienna talks on military security and arms control, told RT Russian on July 11 that the NATO countries are emptying their arsenals in order to keep the conflict going in Ukraine. “Our interlocutors in Vienna point out that there is a growing understanding among Europeans that their victory in Ukraine will not be easy; in principle, it is impossible. They recognize the power of the Russian army, which has gained tremendous combat experience on the battlefields,” he said.
The situation for NATO is aggravated by the fact that the alliance’s military-industrial complex is in decline and unable to match the quality and quantity of Russia’s production. Ukraine has already received all the available supplies of Stinger MANPADS and Javelin portable air defense systems; the warehouses in the West are now empty and it will take years to replenish them.
The West’s production of missiles also does not keep up with the pace of Ukraine’s use of them, Gavrilov added.
Cue the threats against the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant
Already on the eve of the NATO summit, there were dissatisfied voices in Western media saying that the counter-offensive of the Ukrainian armed forces was too slow and not bringing anticipated results. As if on cue, one week before the summit, Ukrainians began to be actively misled about the possibility of blowing up the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (located some 60 km south and east of the city of the same name (the fifth or sixth largest city in the country, according to pre-war population). The Ukrainian authorities claimed that the Russian military intended to blow up the plant in order to deter the AFU counteroffensive from capturing it, even though the Ukrainian army had not come one step closer to the nuclear plant since June 4.
Russian experts began warning that the AFU intended to attack the plant and use resulting radioactive contamination as a pretext to justify direct NATO military intervention in the name of responding to nuclear disaster. By late June and early July, Ukrainians began to be advised each day by Ukrainian media to stock up on drinking water and on duct tape (to seal their houses from radioactive contamination). Municipal services in various cities were ordered to clean up garbage, claiming that this would facilitate the cleanup after the alleged danger of nuclear disaster. Ukrainians began to rush en masse to pharmacies to buy potassium iodide, which is said to reduce the effects of radiation on the internal organs of the body.
The Ukrainian Telegram channel ‘MediaKiller’ commented on the situation: “The presidential administration [headed by Zelensky] is peddling false rumors about the planting of explosives [by Russia] at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in order to divert attention from the fact that the administration’s counteroffensive has stalled. Such scare tactics are also meant to provoke panic among civilians in the Russian Federation and to artificially create a negative image of the Russian Federation before the entire world.”
In the West, the warnings over the alleged nuclear danger were mostly met with skeptical comments. Ukrainian authorities were not believed, said many, especially since the prevailing winds in the region of the ZNPP blow southward, directly onto Russian-controlled territories. Blowing up a nuclear power plant that results in radiation contamination over one’s own territory– what could be more foolish (and unlikely) than that?
The director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency reported on June 30 that his agency had not found or confirmed anything of what the Ukrainian authorities were claiming, including an alleged ‘mining’ by Russia of the roofs of the six nuclear reactors which make up at the ZNPP (Europe’s largest nuclear power station). Following that, Ukrainian authorities began gradually to tone down their rhetoric while continuing to throw fresh reserves into the military fray and continuing to beg NATO for new weapons.
Ukraine as a live training ground for NATO weaponry
NATO needed the Ukrainian ‘counteroffensive’ in June in order to assess its own capabilities. As a matter of fact, the Armed Forces of Ukraine are now using much of the same equipment as well as military tactics on which NATO’s new military plans, discussed at the summit in Vilnius, are based. The AFU is being trained by NATO instructors at bases in Ukraine and supporting countries in Europe. For the first time since the Cold War began some 75 years ago, NATO is preparing for large-scale military conflict instead of the easier but more limited ‘force-projection’ operations in such distant regions as Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Ukrainian counteroffensive, launched five weeks before the NATO summit, was designed to demonstrate the combat effectiveness of the alliance’s military equipment and tactics in a real conflict with the most likely adversary. Should the offensive fail, the very principles of the new military plans that had only recently been drawn up would be called into question. Simply put, the AFU was assigned its role in a live training exercise.
By the end of July 12, it gradually became clear that the summit in the Lithuanian capital, like the Ukrainian attacks on the front lines, had produced no ‘breakthroughs’. Ukraine was left with a set of standard promises, generally repeating past promises made at previous NATO summits. Zelensky looked dejected and angry at the summit, even making unhappy comments about the U.S. and UK pushing him to act on the battleground but leaving him and the AFU alone to face the Russian army.
No NATO membership for Ukraine
Ukraine was told at the summit that it would be able to work with the alliance, but immediate membership is not on the agenda. Membership can only happen once the regime in Kiev fulfills all the conditions set before it, namely, agreement by all the members of the bloc and, most importantly, achievement of some kind of ‘victory’ in the military conflict, or at least the appearance that victory may someday be achieved. In other words, Ukraine must not only defeat in battle the powerful Russian Federation, it must also stamp out corruption and carry out all the other economic reforms demanded by the West to win NATO membership. To put matters diplomatically, that means ‘never’.
Russian military analyst Malek Dudakov explained to Ukraine.ru on July 12, “To somehow sweeten the pill for Kiev, the G-7 countries have promised to provide Ukraine with security guarantees. The White House, however, is leaning toward an ‘Israel’ scenario, according to which the U.S. has no obligation to come to Israel’s aid in the event of war but does provide $3 billion a year each year with which to buy American weapons.
“Hawks in the West hope to legislate similar, permanent commitments to Ukraine. They fear that the political climate in the United States and Europe could change dramatically in the months and even years ahead and cause the level of support for Ukraine to weaken dramatically.”
The publication writes that this is being done to prolong the Ukrainian conflict as long as possible and prevent it from ending in peace. However, the West wants this on its terms, namely, to place its weapons in the hands of people in other countries and send them off to battle for a Western cause. The ‘Israel’ scenario is precisely a scenario of endless war, as has taken place for many years now in Israel and in Colombia. This is exactly the scenario held out for Ukraine at the Vilnius meeting.
The West doesn’t care about Ukraine or Ukrainians, says Alexei Zubets, director of the Institute of Social and Economic Research at the Financial University of the government of the Russian Federation. Zelensky and Ukraine are absolutely dependent on the West, he explains. More than half of the money that makes up the Ukrainian public budget comes from Western donors. The West has all the leverage and can remove Zelensky in a matter of months.
Ukraine is trapped by its dream of NATO membership
“Zelensky’s regime no longer has a back door. It cannot go to negotiate with Russia and so must accept any position of the West. The West’s position is that Ukraine is a tool to be used to weaken Russia. The country resembles a mercenary that has decided to fight for money. There is no other status for Ukraine in the West. NATO is a ‘white man’s club’ [an ‘elite’ club], and Ukrainians do not conform to the West’s racist category of ‘white people’. Zelensky will accept any of their decisions, in part for reasons of his own personal security.”
An anonymous Ukrainian commentator on NATO policy recently compared Ukraine to a woman who is seduced and leaves her husband, only to lose her children (Crimea and Donbass) after they decide to remain with the father. The woman is left destitute, holding only the empty promise of a lucrative new marriage while being stuck in an empty, trashed house. The comparison may be strained, but it captures the essence of the Ukrainian conflict in general, and NATO promises in particular, as delivered at the summit in Vilnius.
The opinions mentioned in this article do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Al mayadeen, but rather express the opinion of its writer exclusively.
Dmitri Kovalevich
Special correspondent in Ukraine for Al Mayadeen English.
April 23rd 2024
Epstein had ‘sex tapes’ of Prince Andrew and Bill Clinton, witness claimed … The court was not given any proof of the … sex offender. She also …
Epstein had ‘sex tapes’ of Prince Andrew and Bill Clinton, witness claimed … The court was not given any proof of the … sex offender. She also …
Bill Clinton: A ReckoningThe Atlantichttps://www.theatlantic.com · 6 years ago
The widespread liberal response to the sex-crime accusations against Bill Clinton found their natural consequence 20 years later in the …
Ukrainian parliament expands conscription to dragoon young people to the front
The new mobilization law comes amidst a staggering loss of life and hints by Zelensky that NATO’s proxy forces in Ukraine are planning another “counteroffensive.”
UAW President Fain dines with billionaires, warmongers at White House reception for Japanese PM
Fain’s attendance expressed the fact that the union bureacuracy is joining hands with imperialism for World War III.
Threat of war between Israel and Iran grows as new offensives launched in Gaza
Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz threatened Thursday, “If Iran attacks from its territory, Israel will respond and attack in Iran.”
The US-Japanese summit: A major step towards war with China
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s visit to the US this week marks a major step in Washington’s consolidation of alliances throughout the Indo-Pacific and its accelerating preparations for war with China.
“Army of the future”: Germany restructures its military for total war
The German defence minister has made no secret that the restructuring of the Bundeswehr (Armed Forces) means creating an offensive military machine able to conduct total war.
April 22nd 2024
| Europe |
| The coming civil war on Europe’s Right The EU will never allow populists to win |
Democrats and Republicans approved massive additional funding to war against Russia in Ukraine, to Israeli genocide in Gaza, and to the US-led war buildup against China over Taiwan.
The hush money trial of Donald Trump and the crisis of class rule in America
The opening of the trial marks a new stage in an intense crisis at the highest levels of the American state that has been building for 50 years. This August will mark the 50th anniversary of the resignation of Richard Nixon in 1974 as a result of the crisis stemming from his campaign’s break-in at the Watergate headquarters of the Democratic National Committee.
April 21st 2024
Pathetic Fake News For Morons.
Photo altered to look like it’s Marjorie Taylor Greene wearing a Soviet shirt and raising arm – and now a Russian Hat Complete with Red Star.
Back in 2013, a photo shows Marjorie Taylor Greene wearing a Soviet shirt and giving a Nazi salute. Today the New York Times showed an image of Marjorie wearing a Russian hat. Many years ago I saw the reality of working class poverty in the U.S. It is a lot worse now. British morons believe what they see on TV and on package holidays. They believe that U.S is the land of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. It is if you are rich !!!
By Ciara O’RourkeJune 22, 2022
Old photos of lawmakers have the potential to cause political embarrassment if they show the person in such a compromising pose as, say, giving a Nazi salute.
That’s how some people have interpreted a gesture being made in a supposed “leaked photo” of U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga.
In the image, it appears as if Greene is wearing a Soviet T-shirt and a pair of underwear outside of her pants. She is also raising one of her arms in a way some people think looks like a Nazi salute but could also be interpreted as a superhero pose, as she’s also wearing a cape.
But a reverse image search of the photo shows this picture has been altered. It appears that Greene’s face has been superimposed on the face of the person in the photo. In what looks like the original image, it’s clear that it’s not Greene but rather another person pictured raising her arm.
9 Apr 2024 — Greene wrote. “The American people disagree — they believe our border is the only border worth fighting a war over, and I agree with them.
Greene refuted the claims, stating that “Those calling this tragedy are the very people responsible for the tragedy the American people live through every day.”.
Russia says US facing humiliation in Ukraine like in Vietnam
“Washington’s deeper and deeper immersion in the hybrid war against Russia will turn into a loud and humiliating fiasco for United States such as Vietnam and Afghanistan,” Zakharova said. Russia, she said, will give “an unconditional and resolute response” to the U.S. move to get more involved in the Ukraine war
Russia says deeper U.S. hybrid war using Ukraine will end …CNBChttps://www.cnbc.com › 2024/04/21 › russia-says-deep Russia says deeper U.S. hybrid war using Ukraine will end in Vietnam-style humiliation. Share Share Article via Facebook Share Article via .
US facing Vietnam-style humiliation in Ukraine: Russia
Luxury Bunkers For Rich & Powerful
- Project Greek Island was a secret bunker under the luxurious Greenbrier Hotel
- Government employees posed as hotel staff to keep it stocked with supplies
- A 1992 news story blew the government’s cover, and it was decommissioned
- READ MORE: Why the world’s billionaires are building bunkers and fortresses
By Peter Hess For Dailymail.Com
Published: 18:20, 11 April 2024 | Updated: 19:51, 11 April 2024
The Greenbrier Hotel has long enjoyed a reputation as Washington DC elite’s favorite vacation spot.
But it is also the location of a secret bunker that can hold the entire US Congress.
The luxury hotel located in Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, concealed an emergency bunker hidden 750 feet below the surface that was developed in 1958 specifically for US politicians to take shelter in the event of a nuclear attack.
Putin warns the West: Russia is ready for nuclear war | Reuters
The five million tonnes of soot produced by the ensuing fires would cause global temperature to fall by an average of 1.3C. The disrupted global climate would have an overwhelming impact on food production.
How would a nuclear war affect the world?
A recent scientific paper estimates that over 5 billion people could starve to death, including around 99% of those in the US, Europe, Russia, and China – because most black carbon smoke stays in the Northern hemisphere where it’s produced, and because temperature drops harm agriculture more at high latitudes.29 Jun 2023
Here’s How Bad a Nuclear War Would Actually Be | TIME
With the largest possible nuclear exchange between the US and Russia, new models suggest the ocean would cool so profoundly that the world would be thrust into a “nuclear little ice age” lasting thousands of years.
What countries would survive a nuclear war?
Researchers found Australia, New Zealand, Iceland, the Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu most capable of continuing to produce food despite the reduced sunlight and fall in temperatures – and help reboot a collapsed human civilisation.9 Feb 2023
Analysis: Nuclear war would be more devastating for Earth’s …
Where you should head to survive an apocalyptic nuclear winter …
Survivors of a nuclear attack would suffer from injuries caused by ionizing and UV radiation, physical trauma, burns, malnutrition, and psychosocial stress.
28 Jul 2020 — Final casualty numbers remain unknown; by the end of 1945, injuries and radiation sickness had raised the death toll to more than 100,000.
Nakatani Etsuko says her father rarely spoke of the day that the world’s first atomic weapon killed 140,000 people in his city of Hiroshima, Japan.
But she says he did mention one thing: “That there were so many dead bodies in the river, you couldn’t see the water.”
Etsuko’s father was a teacher in Hiroshima. He was out of town when the bomb fell on Aug. 6, 1945. But he returned to the city the next morning to check on his school.
It was gone. All 319 students were dead. He couldn’t save anybody, but Etsuko says he stayed to help cremate the bodies and collect the bones to give to the parents.
2 May 2023 — Some 75,000 others were injured. A mushroom cloud appears above Nagasaki. The photo was taken on Aug. 9, 1945, by the U.S. Army. (ACME).
From luxury bunkers to tactical vehicles, the ultra-rich … – CBC
Bunker mentality: How Mark Zuckerberg, Kim Kardashian, Tom …
From luxury bunkers to tactical vehicles, the ultra-rich … – CBC
U.S Led Western Style Democracy Allows No Dissent
Former Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) went after Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) for her anti-Ukraine position in an interview on CNN Friday.
“Moscow Marjorie has reached a new low,” Buck said in an interview on CNN’s “Erin Burnett OutFront” with anchor Erica Hill. “You know, during the Russian Revolution, [Bolshevik Revolution leader Vladimir] Lenin talked about American journalists who were writing glowing reports about Russia at the time as ‘useful idiots.’”
“And I don’t even think that Marjorie reaches that level of being a useful idiot here,” Buck continued. “She is just mouthing the Russian propaganda, and really hurting American foreign policy in the process.”
Comment Ken Buck has the perfect name for his self centred bigotry. This Ukraine proxy war on Russia is very much about the Bucks. Mike Johnson has even brought his twisted version of Christianity into this. He is a really useful idiot. I an always pleased to hear from Marjorie Taylor Greene, a woman who is more concerned for her nation’s common people than churning out more fervid feminist selfish drivel, about women and their need for safe spaces. She is a brave woman. Women in western politics are supposed to be slavish clones – and usually are..
Meanwhile
Democrats are taking extraordinary steps to prevent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from hindering their efforts to keep the White House in November.
From rallying Kennedy’s family around President Biden, to dumping opposition research and holding press briefings about how he helps former President Trump, Democrats watching Kennedy qualify for more state ballots are pulling out all the stops to prevent him from hurting Biden in the fall. ( The Hill ).
R J Cook
April 20th 2024
Another Giant Leap Towards World War III led by Greyhaired
well off Speaker Mike Johnson, who frightened a house full of comfortably off old men from my generation and febrile feminists, got his way.
Britain’s posh Foreign Minister Lord Cameron, could not wait to tweet his excitement that the war will go global thanks to Johnson. Biden’s re election is guaranteed.
The House of the (Un)Represesentatives were terrified by Speaker Johnson with lies about Russian Iranian allied intentions. He came out with NATO’s favourite cliche ; an axis of evil. It is a job to see how these slandered countries can avoid total war. It is all about the big money and defending the Anglo – U.S led NATO EMPIRE which is anything but defensive.
When George Bush Snr announced the New World Order, Putin’s rise fated regime change, so Russia was on the list and has been subverted ever since. The United States is already a fascist country and the U.K is a police state.
It is not just this new vote for more taxpayer money and debt, it is what the Anglo U.S NATO elite wants and won’t stop wanting as long as they think they can get it.
As always the working classes pay. Ukraine is facing white suicide. Never mind because African migrants will love living in a Nuclear Wasteland. Old Military mad men see it as another chapter in ‘taking the commies down.’ Ukraine is looking for a fourth army to cover the first three’s failures. Conscription age has been dropped to 25 for the rich folk’s freedom and democracy ( sic ).
The Anglo-U.S mindset is exactly what it was in 1914 – 18. Here Britain’s much loved Field Marshall age calculated that they would win because he had a whole empire’s worth of canon fodder to draw on. Zelensky, a Churchill admirer like his friend Boris Johnson, shares the mindset. Interestingly, by today’s one sided moralising standards, Churchill was a war criminal who twice campaigned to destroy the Soviet Union in 1917 and 1945 – arguing in favour of a nuclear solution at the end of World War II because his super wealthy class were terrified of Communism and still are. They never expected Putin after their puppet, western loving whore Yeltsin, seemed to have Russia sown up for indefinite rape and cultural collapse.
Russia may well now look at the U.S supply lines and do something about it. The U.S may do something stupid to Iran, using their Israel proxy who have already shown their colours there. The U.S has a history of using proxies and Israel has desperate need to please its master in pursuit of more resources and licence for genocide in Gaza. Putin knows this.
So todays’s Johnson vote just lit a fuse. As for Cameron’s excitement, he is a pompous emblem of Imperial delusion. He is the idiot who brought us what his elite like to call Brexit, also doing much to wreck Syria and Libya.
This is why Trump is such a problem for the ruling elite, their lackeys and my generation who think they should live forever. But don’t worry because Biden’s Democrats care so much about transsexuals who will have the pleasure of dying in a dress, without harassment. This is a sign that the U.S won’t back off. It is total warfare.
R J Cook
5 hours ago — Johnson tweeted his own excitement, rallying the house : “I believe that Xi and Vladimir Putin and Iran really are an axis of evil. … “Russia is not doing that; they’re not attacking Christianity.” …
Crucial $60.8bn Ukraine aid package approved by US House of Representative
9 Oct 2020 — … election will be legitimate, warning that widespread voting by mail could be a catalyst for election fraud. Democrats have pushed for voting …
Charges of sexual misconduct on Bill Clinton’s part resurfaced during the 2016 presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton. When a lewd recording of Hillary’s …
Clinton–Lewinsky scandalWikipediahttps://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Clinton–Lewinsky_sca…
The Clinton–Lewinsky scandal was a sex scandal involving Bill Clinton, the president of the United States, and Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern.
Linda Tripp · Sex scandal · Internship · Vast right-wing conspiracy
The Whitewater scandal was a real estate controversy involving Bill and Hillary Clinton that came to public attention in the 1990s. · The Clintons partnered with …
Whitewater controversyWikipediahttps://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Whitewater_controversy
Neither Bill Clinton nor Hillary Clinton were ever prosecuted, after three separate inquiries found insufficient evidence linking them with the criminal conduct …
History · Origins of Whitewater… · Failure of Whitewater… · Reaction of Congress
4 Aug 2023 — J. Parnell Thomas (R-NJ) was convicted of salary fraud and given an 18-month sentence and a fine. He was imprisoned in Danbury Prison.
Sydney Massacre & New York Immolation No Mystery To Me As A Social Scientist – by R J Cook
Image R J Cook Appledene Photographics.
I had just moved up to London from Portsmouth in late 1977. London was no surprise to me,having been birthplace to my parents and sister. We had large extended families on both sides. It was only 50 miles from where I was born and our only summer holiday venue in the 1950s, apart from day trips to Southend or Clacton. I saw my first black people there and learned about World War Two and all the bomb sites where I played war games with my half German cousin. I loved the big gliding six wheel trolley buses with their chirpy conductors and ticket machines. Most of all I loved Oxford Street and Selfridge’s big department store with its toy department.
In 1963, a year after my father died, an international athlete Ron Gomez recruited my friend and I into Southgate Harriers, so we had lots of free rides into the North London that I wished I had been born in. When I bemoaned being born in the countryside, my cockney father reassured me, in true cockney style that : “ Just because a kitten is born in a kipper box does not make it a kipper.”
So in a sense, I was back home living in a spacious flat at the top of Dartmouth Park Hill in 1977, a stone’s throw from where I had used to run the National Cross Championships on Parliament Hill Fields.
Kentish Town was one tube stop along on the Northern Line from my local Tuffnel Park. Here they had a good library which also offered long playing records. I recall monopolising a collection by Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie. From this I learned to play Guthrie’s ‘The City of New Orleans’ song and others, being an aspiring Bob Dylan at the time.
They had some good books in that library too. Early on, I found ‘Soft City’ by Jonathan Raban, a young former lecturer at the University of East Anglia, which I had left only three years earlier. Like me,he had recently moved to London, so had written a book about it. The book has a very disturbing introduction. Raban writes of a young Japanese student in the gutter outside the British Film Institute on the Southbank. He describes trendy cinema goers exiting the building at night time, stepping past the male figure lying face down in the gutter. No one stopped to wonder why, quickly concluding that the young man was just another down and out dosser not worth spoiling their pleasant evening over.
It was only many hours later that the authorities were called. The young man had been the latest victim of a gang calling themselves ‘The Envies.’ Raban noted that the man had his spinal chord cut by a knife with ‘surgical precision.’ Sociologically the ‘Envies’ were derivative of the same anomic mindset chronicled by Louis Yablonsky in his definitive ‘The Violent Gang’ , about the after dark gang attacks on innocent people in New York’s Central Park.
Using mental illness as if it is just a touch of the flu to explain or exonerate crime may be convenient to excuse ethnic terrorists or women for the sake of the group they are from. If it is going to be a rule to protect black or feminist culture from their adverse consequences, then for justice sake it should be an excuse for all.
But when the building blocks for human society choose to define ‘women’ and so called ‘ethnic minorities’ as protected statuses, then the unprotected will feel diminished, marginalised and excluded. That way leads to alienation and consequences that the comfortable and elite do not want to understand. These people demand more protection and the right to have as much money and fun as they like whenever they like.
Positive discrimination,TV Advertising, virtue signalling and scapegoating white men is all to obvious to those on the outside. But to self interested frightened women that is all lies, excuses for privileged white men’ and nonsense. For them the answer is more laws and police for their protecton, including making misogyny illegal while women are free to talk of privileged white males and toxic ( white ) masculinity. Donald Trump is a victim of this resentment.
Women’s groups do this while condemning those males who take matters to the logical conclusion by seeking medical gender reassignment surgery. These self styled TERF feminists don’t argue.They insist. Arguing with them is automatically misogyny. TERFS insist that transsexuals are actually transvestites, so obsessed with venting their sick biological and violent urges on women that they will go under deep cover for the chance to rape them.
Inevitably, after the Sydney massacre, they want more laws and safe spaces because there is no telling where men’s urges will take them. Laws against misogynyare more laws to make men pretend to like them – or else ! Power always corrupts and thrives on fear. Impressionable small boys endure this misandry in the class room. Then most go home to one parent female dominated often single parent homes,where boys have either never seen their fathers or seen them driven from the family home which they paid for and often go on paying for after separation and divorce if they were foolish enough, like me, to get married in the first place.
It is time that men wise up to the fact that sex is just not worth it. Romance is a female con trick and it is cruel to bring children into this horrible, ultimately elite controlled feminist power structure. It is not difficult to understand INCELS. It is the involuntary bit I don’t get.
INCELS would get more respect by calling themselves VCELS and not seem so desperate to get their message across. As an old neighbour used to say, “You can’t talk sense to nonsense.”. Boys without old fashioned fathers, extended families, uncles and mentors, as I had, are very vulnerable to this pernicious anti white male culture. The Asians and Black males are culturally different,with the latter strongly associated with knife crime. Ultimately, as with the black gang killing of young Cody Fisher, the multi cultures have serious and dangerous points of fusion that white liberal virtue signallers and feminists do not want to or cannot recognise because they have the worst of zealous prejudices.
The ruling elite set this process in train during the declining years of Empire. They think this internecine infighting will keep the masses busy and distracted while they milk new technology created and developed by nerds. They will ultimately be proven wrong, but millions will die prematurely first. The fact that the NATO Ukraine proxy war on Russia is also a culture war, is too abstract for the masses so I will say no more about this key element well known to the ruling class war mongering ‘leadership.’
Women are not interested in how developing young male minds – and drug plus alcohol infested degenerating old male minds – see all of this while everything must be seen from the female viewpoint, with their ongoing demands agreed, as the best of them preen and posture in the streets, shopping mals and work place. With this mindset matters will only get worse – and some of those increasingly sick male minds are police officers as the recent sacking of another 25 from Thames Valley Police attests. Men are not all the same and some of the worst, like women, will seek alternative routes to power, including the police.
Young white men are supposed to content themselves as passive recipients of the digital world. I saw this coming with the approved emergence of pocket calculators in my maths lessons and spell check devices for my so called ADHD boys the humanities department that I was foolish enough to join. Changing the logic of numbers for matters of prevailing opinion never suited men. Working for the local council paid well, but it was a box as far as constructive thinking was concerned. That box has gotten smaller, so requires much smaller minds. As a social scientist I have no difficulty understanding the Sydney Bondi massacre of the self immolation of Maxwell Azzarello, 37 who threw conspiracy-theory pamphlets into the air.
White men were key to the risk taking that created and maintained the modern world with all its technology. The ruling elite now thinks it time to give women all the control and flood the west with what it expects to be homogenous cheap labour because all poor black people are the same. The elite do not want the masses to know that all rich people are the same, white or black. It is their sick joke that modern life is all about the fight for diversity and democracy. It is all about them. Susan Howatch wrote a wonderful account of such people, called ‘The Rich Are Different.’ Before Orwell’s 1984 met the ‘sensitivity readers’ he predicted that ‘Big Brother’ would divide the sexes. It is a truth we must never know. Sydney’s Bondi killings will mean more laws, police and sectioning of men.
No wonder so many men and even women commit suicide, in a world where believing is seeing. It is quite logical that people do funny things when the State keeps telling them what to see and a little voice in the head has doubts,gets given the anti psychotics or street drugs and goes insane. That is westerm culture and what our young are supposed to see as worth fighting for. Maybe I am deluded, but I see it for the elitist politically correct drivel that it is.
When you read this, remember Dr C R Ramsay of Aylesbury’s Whiteleaf Centre, guided by Thames Valley Police have already decided for reasons they still refused to disclose ( March 2019 ) that I am a paranoid schizophrenic, bi polar, delusional and long term alcoholic in need of powerful anto psychotics -which I refused. Interestingly, in spite of all these records, I have been signed off repeatedly as fit to have my HGV licence renewed. So either I am insane or the police and Dr Ramsay are. No wonder we have the constant threat of knife wielding maniacs and gunmen.
R J Cook
April 20th 2024
Man who set himself on fire outside Trump’s Manhattan hush money trial dies
By Thomas Mackintosh
BBC News
A man who set himself on fire outside the Manhattan court where former President Donald Trump’s hush-money trial is being held has died.
Maxwell Azzarello, 37, doused himself in a liquid before throwing conspiracy-theory pamphlets into the air.
It happened as the jury selection for Mr Trump’s trial was completed.
He was taken to hospital on Friday in critical condition, where he later died, CBS News – the BBC’s US partner – confirmed.
Mr Trump was in the building to attend jury selection, where he has had a security detail, but the former president left during the incident.
New York City police said early on Saturday that Mr Azzarello was declared dead by hospital staff, NBC reported.
Money sets the agenda, offering a choice of front person like a a Windows programme over a dark net DOS full of dirty Epsteinian Sex, corrupt business and official State Murder. This guy died for nothing, It is tragic and an outcome of persecuting Donald Trump exposing the U.S dominated global leadership for what it is.Young people are being corrupted or driven insane by a system defined by rancid old men and feminists. I am very sad for his parents but it is the norm one way or another.
Bob Dylan got it right with his line ‘all the criminals in their coats and their ties are free to drink Martinis and watch the sun rise.’. Diversity is a con because any blacks,women, gays or trans front people will still have to have the same mindest and kneel to their ruling class puppet masters – as Obama and Michelle epitomised. As long as we have the jet setting global elite using religion and feminism to divide and fool, there will never be peace.
I think Ukraime is a step too far. It is the final countdown to the final showdowm which is why the Swamp has to engulf Donald Trump on hypocritical sex and fraud allegations which are a foregone conclusion, and which his accusers ‘know’ all about from experience. The United States Global Empire, like its U.K colonial parent,was built on rape, genocide, duplicity, hypocrisy and sharp practice..
R J Cook..
April 19th 2024
Using Those Usual References That He Uses & The Tortured Poet’s Department – By R J Cook
An impassioned Donald Trump exited the New York Court House today following his show trial for allegedly paying a porn star sex saleswoman and hideously named ‘Stormy Daniels,’ hush money in case it harmed his election chances. This charge has been upgraded to committing fraud in order to hide the payment allegedly taken from Trump’s business accounts.
The immaculate Democrats think we have all forgotten the Clinton’s Whitewater Scandal or the multiple sex allegations culminating in the Clinton’s sexual exploitation of vulnerable young intern Monica Lewinsky. Lewinsky provided forensic evidence that the then President Clinton ejaculated over the little black dress that she was wearing at the time in the Oval Office.
Lewinsky also described a sex act involving one of Clinton’s cigars when both of them were supposed to be working . Another woman described Clinton flashing his distinctive penis at her when she was servicing his hotel room. Claims that Clinton travelled on sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s private jet to his private island were never verified because Epstein managed to break his neck in two places, using paper sheets to hang himself in his cell, before trial, while guards were conveniently not looking. Epstein’s little black book of contacts went missing while Ghislane Maxwell took the rap.
But there was other evidence to incriminate the U.K Queen’s son in Epstein’s underage circle. The evidence was so strong that the Queen paid £12 million hush money to the underage girl her son Andrew had abused. It took many years to bring this to light and is relevant here because the self righteous U.K and U.S Elite are not without sin. And if fraud and corruption are so evil,why are the U.S and U.K so embedded with corrupt Ukraine and Zelensky ?
The horrible smug complacency of corrupt U.K’s BBC who hushed up the Jimmy Saville and Hugh Edward’s sex scandals – the latter off sick on full pay – was exemplified tonight when news reader and commentator Lewis Vaughan Jones trivialised Donald Trump’s justified anger at what was being done to him and why, along with what it meant about his country, with the dismissive remark that the former U.S President “was using all those usual refrains that he uses.” Of course Trump correctly calling Biden the worst President in U.S History on the BBC, was like showing the cross to Count Dracula.
The BBC cannot take criticism of the kindly old Biden who has to have allowances for being so old – and best of all there is a black woman waiting in the wings. She has the third virtue of being a Democrat favouring the path to Nuclear World War Three, just like all the other Democrats and the imbecilic patriotic masses.
Enough people have already been killed in this hideous NATO regime change proxy war on Russia, along with its Israel and Gaza spin off horror show, there should be no doubt that they will kill as many more of us as it takes.
What makes it even more hideous, in my view, is that the BBC showed so much more interest in narcissistic Taylor Swift and her new ‘Tortured Poet ‘ album and whether she had endorsed President Biden as they thought she should, than they did to World War Three.
R J Cook
April 19th 2024
Protecting Democracy by R J Cook
Protecting Democracy by R J Cook
U.S President Biden, U.K Foreign Secretary Cameron, President Emile Macron, Donald Tusk and many more are rallying their minions into a capitalist war on Russia and what they call an axis of evil extending from Moscow to Tehran. Ben Hodges III ex U.S Supreme Allied, Commander in Europe has said that Europe has nothing to fear from fighting Russia. Meanwhile there have been mysterious accidents at United States defence facilities. The reality is that there is no shortage of alienated white men in the shadows, not willing for call up and with no cause to fight the ruling class elite’s latest war for regime change .
The west urgently needs a peace movement but that will never happen because armies of police will have internet intelligence, primed and ready to make arrests on sight before any suspect can raise a placard. Police will have every authority to raise their batons and make examples in any western style democracy that the elite feels threatened. When the call up comes there won’t be armies of women for the front line, but they will be out in force with the white feathers.
Vladimir Putin knows exactly what NATO are doing, providing crucial intelligence by satellite and special forces. They are providing an abundance of weapons and military coordination on the ground.
Frederick Benjamin “Ben” Hodges III is a retired United States Army officer who served as commanding general, United States Army Europe. He has been Senior Advisor to Human Rights First since June 2022 and also serves as NATO Senior Mentor for Logistics. Hodge says that Russia does not have the resources to beat Russia. He said that the U.S must muster the political and economic will to defeat their axis of evil with Iran and China. Russia has to be beaten to deter China and Iran. China is already being threatened with U.S led world sanctions if they do not condemn Russia.
Meanwhile we have to ignore the Anglo U.S illegal invasion of Iraq and colonisation of eastern Syria where they conrol that countries oil, profiting by $30 million a month stolen from a country rife with poverty for a nation that consumes 52% of all natural resources each year. This is all in the name of democracy. That is why Julian Assange has been jailed because he might just have to much to say about how democracy commits war crimes to protect it ( sic ).
R J Cook April 4th 2024
Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges – Spirit of America
Prophets of War
Mark Milley Net Worth in 2023? – Sarkari Exam
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Search for: What is the net worth of General Milley?
What is Gen Milley’s new job?
Since retiring from the military last year, former Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army Gen. Mark Milley has become a senior adviser to JPMorgan Chase bank, joined the faculties of Princeton and Georgetown, and embraced the lucrative paid speaking circuit.11 Mar 2024
What is the net worth of General Milley?
General Mark Milley – Net Worth. News: In the latest news, it is believed that General Mark Milley, a well-known and respected figure in the U.S. Armed Forces, has a net worth of around $5 million.9 Jan 2024
‘Das Leben lebt nicht’
What is Propaganda?
by Mike Driver
“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes ‘What the hell is water?’” – David Foster Wallace
In this analogy we are all fish, I’d like to claim to be the wise old fish for the purpose of this article but the old guy is swimming in the same water as the rest of us. The thing is our sea isn’t filled with water it’s composed entirely of propaganda. In this late stage of corrupt oligarchic capitalism and fake democracy there literally is nothing else. It is everywhere and everything. It comprises our entire experience.
Has the western way of attending to the world made us more vulnerable to the influence propaganda?
To understand
The least thing fully you would have to perceive
The whole grammar in all its accidence
And all its system, in the perfect singleness
Of intention
WS Merwin
To understand the isolated objects and events of everyday existence we need to grasp the entire underlying basis of the entire system. We need to understand that when we pull at one piece of the universe it is attached to all the others. We need to realise that there are no simplifying causes in our complex system. To understand the smallest thing we need to understand everything. Until everything is continuous.
I recently visited the Kruger national park in South Africa and it is on a bush walk where you start to realise the power of trying to look at the world like an indigenous person. This is stupendously difficult for the western mind, like trying to walk headlong into a gale. The game drive is far more suited to our truncated attention span. Drive, see lion, take photo, drive, see giraffe, take photo, every encounter a small packet of transmissible information. When you walk, you notice your guide is attending to the world in a completely different way, a flow state more like a continuous and dynamic film than a static atomised photograph. A way of attending to the world that prioritises context, harmony and coherence. The herd of buffalo approach and retreat like waves on a beach, the lion print is days or hours old, the wind down or upward, this plant good for that ailment, everything attached by an invisible thread to everything else. The Pale Chanting Goshawk a verb, a bird that is goshawking not a noun frozen in time.
Over a number of hours paying this kind of attention to the wild you find yourself breathing more slowly, moving to a different rhythm, awed by the knowledge of your guide and the vast web of interconnectedness that surrounds us everywhere.
There is an entire realm of knowledge either lost or ignored. What gives us in the west the authority, the arrogance to assume we can discount these ancient ways of seeing? This is the hubris that engulfs us. Many millions of people and counting have died as a direct result of resisting the western way of knowing. A way of knowing that seeks control and believes in godlike powers of intervention. A way of knowing that sees the world as individuated separate events, parts to be manipulated. A way of attending to the world that misses the gestalt, the big picture. Is there a different way to look at what is happening to us and to understand our place in the universe? A way of looking and understanding that everything is continuous, nothing is discrete. Or are we condemned to be led by the men who live in the shadows, constantly feeding us bits of disembodied information, shaping our very perception of reality to their own ends?
The rate of change in the cultural environment, especially the digital environment, has drawn a veil over reality. The digitally minded, the reductionists, would have us believe homo sapiens is evolving in response to these changes – becoming less human, more machine-like, ‘transhuman’ they tell us. I suspect something even more sinister is happening.
Sigmund Freud’s nephew tells us exactly what is going on:
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country… We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of… In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind. – Edward Bernays, Propaganda
As the familiar advice goes – when someone tells you who they are, believe them.
How then did they pollute the water?
Firstly they have taken advantage of our inability to contextualise, because we think linearly we fail to spot that the side effect of (manufactured) events is actually the intention. The propaganda of ‘cause’ obscures the nefarious machination.
For those with a more technical mind, Stafford Beer’s concept, ‘the purpose of a system is what it does’ (POSIWID), provides us with some intellectual systems thinking foundations. However I don’t think Stafford’s idea picks up the darkness and coordination involved, so I’m running with the side effect is the intention (TSEITI):
Oh look, we inadvertently transferred trillions from all of you to the billionaire class as a result of bailing out the banks, locking the world down and concocting a fake climate crisis.
Modern Monetary Theory, Covid and Climate Change is the propaganda.
The wealth and power transfer is the intention.
Oops, all the young orthodox Christian men have been killed in the defence of Ukraine. Defending democracy in the most corrupt country in Europe is the propaganda. The meat grinder was the intention all along.
Oh dear, we’ve triggered a cancer crisis via those safe and effective gene therapies we didn’t force on several billion people. A supposedly deadly ‘virus’ in ‘pandemic’ was the propaganda. The opportunity to fleece you for more unsafe and ineffective pharmaceuticals was the intention all along. At the time of writing it is starting to look like the intention may even be considerably worse than just mere theft as the excess death toll rises inexorably in highly vaccinated countries
The climate propaganda is particularly nefarious; the corporates spend several generations polluting the planet then pass the blame to you for driving your car, heating your house or taking a holiday.
Almost every significant historical event over the last century and a half or so becomes clearer when looked at through the side-effect-is-the-intention lens. WW1, WW2, the Russian Revolution, what were the outputs of these events? What was the propaganda that ensnared people? Why did hundreds of millions of people die? If I had the time and patience this list could be book-length. I’ll leave you to work out the intention of your favourite raft of bullshit.
So what is it that is truncating our attention span, destroying our ability to see in context and to act in good conscience? In the broadest sense the enemy is media, the more digital, available and addictive this media becomes the worse it is.
And of course we are now all addicted to the crack cocaine version of media. The internet and all its bastard sons, social media, smart phones, google, fucking phone cameras, ear buds, sat nav and every smart dumb thing that keeps pulling us back to the glass vampire.
Jonathan Crary in his excellent book Scorched Earth:
“Near the end of his life, in 2007, Jean Baudrillard observed that the logic of Western modernity required that it be imposed on the entire world, that no peoples or places should escape its demands. The West, he writes, exports its economic and cultural models everywhere in the name of universality but it is a nullifying universality, emptied of any truths, leaving in its wake all that has been de-sacralized, unveiled, objectified, financialized.
“It is a challenge to the rest of the world ‘to debase themselves in their turn, to deny their own values … to sacrifice everything by which a human being or a culture has some value in its own eyes.'”
The internet is the ultimate hypnotist, the purveyor of propaganda in its purest form, the creator of this decontextualised world. Your true consciousness is analogue, there is no algorithm running your mind. This is the basest of all propaganda lies. The origin of consciousness remains a mystery. All speculations of computational-like function require an even bigger leap of faith than dragging God into the debate. “Computation” is the phlogiston explanation of consciousness.
The side effect of digitising the world is to sever you from your analogue conscious mind. The truth is that relationships, time, value, purpose, experience, sacrifice, humour, love, consciousness, and the sacred are irreducible to algorithm or anything else. And everybody knows this. Meaning precedes reason.
We don’t need to worry about artificial intelligence so much as we should be wholly concerned with the ‘artificialising’ of intelligence.
Once the world is digitised, behaviour is driven from the outside. The lie they sell you is that your unconscious desires are driving your behaviour. Bullshit, it’s all propaganda: fear porn, actual porn, manufactured crisis, the science, climate malarkey, nudges, lies, trickery, deception, politics, debt, consensus, tv, Netflix, social media, education, race, employment, news, suggestion, hypnotic repetition, drugs – legal and illegal, atheism, bad parenting advice, academia, institutional subservience, centralisation, new age mumbo-jumbo, the internet, trans, psychological conditioning, behavioural science and war. All lies. Everywhere.
“The loss of memory by a nation is also a loss of its conscience” – Zbigniew Herbert
How do we shake ourselves from this hypnotic trance, how can we wake ourselves up? How can we remember what we really are?
The writer Barry Lopez tried to live his life as a ‘Continuous respectful attention to the presence of the Divine’. Theodore Adorno said ‘Das Leben lebt nicht’ – Life no longer lives. I think he meant us. Rilke said ‘Du musst dein Leben ändern’ – You must change your life.
Is there anything more astonishing than waking to the morning, the slow wheel of the universe turning silently? I heard a Black Redstart while walking in the forest yesterday. It shouldn’t have been there. Too early in the season. Switch everything off, it said. Switch everything off. Du musst alles ausschalten – You must turn everything off.
The ladder out of the sea of propaganda is an intense interaction with the sublime. Sublimity is pure context, it is absolute consciousness. Have you ever woken in the early hours, a storm raging outside? Have you been moved to absolute silence by the beauty of a sunrise or sunset? Can you put your phone down for long enough to become that moment yourself? This can only take place in the absence of artificiality.
Complete disconnection is the only answer. We must turn the internet off. If this sounds too radical please tell me what your freedom is worth, what your soul is worth.
I think we can all sense something: like music from very far away or the light from a JMW Turner painting. Something like a memory not made yet or the warmth from a log fire when you walk in from the cold. Something calling your very soul: ‘come home, come home’, it whispers, ‘this isn’t the life you intended’.
Listen. The old world is waiting for you, ‘still spinning its one syllable between the earth and silence’.
U.S Strategy To Lead Europe Into World War 3 Carnage Hots Up And Is Ever More Obvious
Putin’s Fleet could be forced out of Crimea as command …
Rising gold price a sign of emerging financial crisis
The ever-increasing US debt, now on an unstainable and “unprecedented” trajectory, is a key factor putting a question mark over the role of the dollar as the global currency.
Magicians Magic Cloak Of War – By R J Cook
Comment For those readers without an economics background, the dollar is the leading reserve currency. That means that countries outside of the United States hold reserves of traded wealth in dollars as an alternative to bulky and vulnerable gold. The phrase ‘as good as gold’ came from reference to currencies like the U.S Dollar and Pound Sterling being comparable to gold. The British pound was literally reference to a £ Sterling being equal to the value of one pound of gold.
Well into the 1970s when I worked in the City of London, the British £ note bore the false promise that the Bank of England would pay the bearer the weight of one pound in Gold. By that time, the British Economy was in serious decline and could never have spared such weight in gold for the rapid fall in value of the British currency because demand for its goods and services, outside the City of London, was in terminal decline.
So other countries could not afford to hold their trading curreny reserves in gold. Thus the value collapsed, which is why Britain ran to the International Monetary Fund ( IMF ) for a bale out. The United States is facing the same problem and has only survived this long with blustering political front men like Biden and Obama, and war mongers like the two Bushes and Clinton – who used war in the Balkans to distract from serious sexual misconduct, worse than the allegations Trump is facing.
The problem with Trump is that, ignoring his private sex life, which never involved vulnerable young women like Monica Lewinsky as with Clinton, who mainstream still media protects, he is a successful business man and realist. He was hounded from the outset by the aged Nancy Pelosi et al because he wants detente with Russia, not the build up to devastating nuclear war.
Humans are hypocrits about sex and are using it to attack Trump. They have now dragged up the contentious subject of transsexual mtf women who he will apparently have nothing better to do than persecute if he comes to power.
In reality the biggest menance to trannexual women’s hope of a peaceful life in the U.S and U.K are the kind of extreme feminists who dominate mainstream media and so called libera democrat politcs. The notion Trump has or ever would fixate on persecuting trans women with the same relish as the U.K’s poisonous J K Rowling, who has been given full support from the U.K’s Hindu, P.M Rishi Sunak, is absurd.
Like the U.S Democrats, Sunak works like a magician, smooth talking, smirking, showing his teeth mouthing the slogan, “Now You See It, Now You Don’t.” So we have Biden & Co from the self serving Washington Swamp and the good old war mongers routine trick of the noble and just war. The common people don’t have ever to have seen the rich man’s democracy that they are supposed to die for. They simply have to believe it. This is the Alice in Wonderlaand World where ‘believing is seeing’ .So just leave it all to magicians like Trump with his magic cloak of war, behind which all the nasty people will vanish.
By the time this trick is complete, many will have died but the Anglo U.S global capitalist elite will be even wealthier with total power. For now all the war mongering borrowing and massive tax payer funded interest, to the banks so many of them have shares in, has been worth it for the pay off. As Biden admitted ;”Ukraine is a great investment”. Biden and son Hunter should know because they have already made a small personal fortune from it.
R J Cook
April 19th 2024
Inside the disinformation industry A government-sponsored agency is censoring journalism
Freddie Sayers
April 17, 2024 7 mins
“Our team re-reviewed the domain, the rating will not change as it continues to have anti-LGBTQI+ narratives… The site authors have been called out for being anti-trans. Kathleen Stock is acknowledged as a ‘prominent gender-critical’ feminist.”
This was part of an email sent to UnHerd at the start of January from an organisation called the Global Disinformation Index. It was their justification, handed down after a series of requests, for placing UnHerd on a so-called “dynamic exclusion list” of publications that supposedly promote “disinformation” and should therefore be boycotted by all advertisers.
They provided examples of the offending content: Kathleen Stock, whose columns are up for a National Press Award this week, Julie Bindel, a lifelong campaigner against violence against women, and Debbie Hayton, who is transgender. Apparently the GDI equates “gender-critical” beliefs, or maintaining that biological sex differences exist, with “disinformation” — despite the fact that those beliefs are specifically protected in British law and held by the majority of the population.
The verdicts of “ratings agencies” such as the GDI, within the complex machinery that serves online ads, are a little-understood mechanism for controlling the media conversation. In UnHerd’s case, the GDI verdict means that we only received between 2% and 6% of the ad revenue normally expected for an audience of our size. Meanwhile, neatly demonstrating the arbitrariness and subjectivity of these judgements, Newsguard, a rival ratings agency, gives UnHerd a 92.5% trust rating, just ahead of the New York Times at 87.5%.
So, what are these “ratings agencies” that could be the difference between life and death for a media company? How does their influence work? And who funds them? The answers are concerning and raise serious questions about the freedom of the press and the viability of a functioning democracy in the internet age.
***
Disinformation only really became a discussion point in response to the Trump victory in 2016, and was then supercharged during the Covid era: Google Trends data shows that worldwide searches for the term quadrupled between June and December 2016, and had increased by more than 30 times by 2022. In response to the supposed crisis, corporations, technology companies and governments all had to show they were taking some form of action. This created a marketplace for enterprising start-ups and not-for-profits to claim a specialism in detecting disinformation. Today, there are hundreds of organisations who make this claim, providing all sorts of “fact-checking” services, including powerful ratings agencies such as GDI and Newsguard. These companies act as invisible gatekeepers within the vast machinery of online advertising.
How this works is relatively straightforward: in UnHerd’s case, we contract with an advertising agency, which relies on a popular tech platform called “Grapeshot”, founded in the UK and since acquired by Larry Ellison’s Oracle, to automatically select appropriate websites for particular campaigns. Grapeshot in turn automatically uses the “Global Disinformation Index” to provide a feed of data about “brand safety” — and if GDI gives a website a poor score, very few ads will be served.
“These companies act as invisible gatekeepers within the vast machinery of online advertising.”
The Global Disinformation Index was founded in the UK in 2018, with the stated objective of disrupting the business model of online disinformation by starving offending publications of funding. Alongside George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, the GDI receives money from the UK government (via the FCDO), the European Union, the German Foreign Office and a body called Disinfo Cloud, which was created and funded by the US State Department.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, its two founders emerged from the upper echelons of “respectable” society. First, there is Clare Melford, whose biography published by the World Economic Forum states that she had previously “led the transition of the European Council on Foreign Relations from being part of George Soros’s Open Society Foundation to independent status”. She set up the GDI with Daniel Rogers, who worked “in the US intelligence community”, before founding a company called “Terbium Labs” that used AI and machine learning to scour the internet for illicit use of sensitive data and then sold it handsomely to Deloitte.
Together, they have spearheaded a carefully intellectualised definitional creep as to what counts as “disinformation”. Back when it was first set up in 2018, they defined the term on their website as “deliberately false content, designed to deceive”. Within these strict parameters, you can see how it might have appeared useful to have dedicated fact-checkers identifying the most egregious offenders and calling them out. But they have since broadened the definition to encompass anything that deploys an “adversarial narrative” — stories that may be factually true, but pit people against each other by attacking an individual, an institution or “the science”.
GDI founder Clare Melford explained in an interview at the LSE in 2021 how this expanded definition was more “useful”, as it allowed them to go beyond fact-checking to targeting anything on the internet that they deem “harmful” or “divisive”:
“A lot of disinformation is not just whether something is true or false — it escapes from the limits of fact-checking. Something can be factually accurate but still extremely harmful… [GDI] leads you to a more useful definition of disinformation… It’s not saying something is or is not disinformation, but it is saying that content on this site or this particular article is content that is anti-immigrant, content that is anti-women, content that is antisemitic…”
Larger traffic websites are rated using humans, she explains, but most are rated using automated AI. “We actually instantiate our definition of disinformation — the adversarial narrative topics — within the technology,” explains Melford. “Each adversarial narrative is given its own machine-learning classifier, which then allows us to search for content that matches that narrative at scale… misogyny, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, anti-black content, climate change denial, etc.”
Melford’s team and algorithm are essentially trained to identify and defund any content she finds offensive, not disinformation. Her personal bugbears are somewhat predictable: content supporting the January 6 “insurrections”, the pernicious influence of “white men in Silicon Valley”, and anything that might undermine the global response to the “existential challenge of climate change”.
The difficulty, however, is that most of these issues are highly contentious and require robust, uncensored discussion to find solutions. Challenges to scientific orthodoxy are particularly important, as the multiple failures of the official response to Covid-19 amply demonstrated. Indeed, one of the examples of GDI’s work that Melford highlighted in her LSE talk was an article about the Delta variant of Covid-19. “This is a Spanish language site talking about how a third of deaths in the United Kingdom from the Delta variant are amongst those people who are vaccinated, which is clearly untrue,” says Melford. “It is Chipotle that has been caught next to this ad unwittingly, and unfortunately for them have funded this highly dangerous disinformation about vaccines.”
The statistic being reported comes from a June 2021 Public Health England report into Covid variants that sets out the 42 known deaths from the Delta variant from January to June: 23 were unvaccinated, 7 vaccinated with one shot and 12 fully vaccinated. In other words, 29% were fully vaccinated — around a third — and 17% partially vaccinated, making a total of 45% vaccinated. To further complicate the question, Melford misread the Spanish headline, and it actually referenced two thirds, or 66%, which is wrong again.
Examples like this are far from rare. The GDI still hosts an uncorrected 2020 blog about the “evolution of the Wuhan lab conspiracy theory” surrounding Covid-19’s origins, which concludes that “cutting off ads to these fringe sites and their outer networks is the first action needed”. This is despite the fact that Facebook and other tech companies long ago corrected similar policies and conceded that it was a legitimate hypothesis that should never have been censored.
***
In the US, a number of media organisations have started to take action against GDI’s partisan activism, prompted by a GDI report in 2022 that listed the 10 most dangerous sites in America. To many, it looked simply like a list of the country’s most-read conservative websites. It even included RealClearPolitics, a well-respected news aggregator whose polling numbers are among the most quoted in the country. The “least risk of disinformation” list was, predictably enough, populated by sites with a liberal inclination.
In recent months, a number of American websites have launched legal challenges against GDI’s labelling system, which they claim infringes upon their First Amendment rights. In December, The Daily Wire and The Federalist teamed up with the attorney general of Texas to sue the state department for funding GDI and Newsguard. A separate initiative to prevent the Defense Department from using any advertiser that uses Newsguard, GDI or similar entities has been successful, and is now part of federal law.
But GDI is a British company and, on this side of the Atlantic, the Conservative Government continues to fund it. A written question from MP Philip Davies last year revealed that £2.6 million was given in the period up to last year, and that there is still “frequent contact” between the GDI and the FCDO “Counter Disinformation and Media Development” unit.
***
Yesterday, I was invited to give evidence to the House of Lords Communication and Digital Committee during which I outlined the extent of the threat to the free media of self-appointed ratings agencies such as the Global Disinformation Index. The reality, as I told Parliament, is that GDI is merely the tip of the iceberg. At a time when the news media is so distrusted and faces a near-broken business model, the role of government should be to prevent, not encourage, and most certainly not fund, consolidations of monopoly power around certain ideological viewpoints.
But this isn’t simply a matter for the media. Both companies and those in the advertising sector also need to act: it cannot be good marketing for brands to target only half the population. Last year, Oracle announced it was cutting ties with GDI on free speech grounds, but as we discovered, it seems they are still collaborating via the Grapeshot plaform: is Larry Ellison aware of this?
At its heart, the disinformation panic is becoming a textbook example of how a “solution” can do more harm than the problem it is designed to address. Educated campaigners such as Clare Melford may think they are doing the world a service, but in fact they are acting as intensifying agents, lending legitimacy to a conspiratorial world view in which governments and corporations are in cahoots to censor political expression. Unless something is done to stop them, they will continue to sow paranoia and distrust — and hasten us towards an increasingly radicalised and divided society.
***
This article has been updated to reference the fact that Clare Melford misread the headline about deaths from the Delta variant, and it actually claimed 2/3 not 1/3.
Freddie Sayers is the Editor-in-Chief & CEO of UnHerd. He was previously Editor-in-Chief of YouGov, and founder of PoliticsHome.freddiesayers
Man arrested in Poland over alleged Russia plot to kill Zelensky
By Ido Vock
BBC News
A Polish man has been arrested and charged with planning to co-operate with Russian intelligence services to aid a possible assassination of Volodymyr Zelensky, authorities said.
Polish prosecutors said the man, named as Pawel K, was allegedly tasked with collecting information about an airport in Poland used by Ukraine’s president.
The arrest was made on the basis of Ukrainian intelligence, they added.
Authorities did not specify whether the man actually passed any information on.
He could face up to eight years in prison if found guilty. The suspect is in custody and the investigation is ongoing.
In a statement, Polish prosecutors alleged Pawel K had offered his services to Russian military intelligence. He contacted Russians “directly involved in the war in Ukraine,” they added.
They said Pawel K had been tasked with collecting information about security at Rzeszow-Jasionka Airport in south-east Poland.
Before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Rzeszow-Jasionka Airport was a small regional airport. But it has since has become a key hub in the vast operation to supply Western military aid to Ukraine.
Military and cargo aircraft from the US and across Europe regularly fly in and out of the airport to deliver supplies to waiting trucks that make the 100km (62 mile) journey to the Ukrainian border.
Ukrainian airspace is closed to most flights, so leaders travelling in and out of the country tend to fly in to neighbouring countries such as Poland and travel on to Kyiv by train.
Mr Zelensky is known to have flown out of Rzeszow-Jasionka on foreign visits. In December 2022, he flew back to the airport after a visit to Washington. Other foreign dignitaries, such as US President Joe Biden, have transited via the airport on their way to Ukraine.
Last year, Polish authorities said they had arrested a group of foreign citizens on suspicion of spying for Russia. They were reported to have installed dozens of cameras, including some around Rzeszow-Jasionka Airport.
On Thursday, neighbouring Germany arrested two alleged Russian spies suspected of planning to sabotage German military aid for Ukraine.
War a real threat and Europe not ready, warns Poland’s Tusk
By Sarah Rainsford, in Kharkiv, and Paul Kirby
BBC News
In the long term, the radiation caused serious diseases in survivors, such as leukemia and other cancers. This article examines the life of an A-bomb survivor, …
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.
However, he warned that if Ukraine used Western F-16 warplanes from airfields in other countries, they would become “legitimate targets, wherever they might be located”.
After Russia launched its full-scale war in Ukraine in February 2022, relations with the West reached their lowest ebb since the worst days of the Cold War.
Almost 100 missiles and drones were used in the latest Russian attack on Ukraine, leaving several regions experiencing partial blackouts.
It was the second attack of its kind – in which Russia fires a large number of weapons simultaneously to overwhelm Ukraine’s defences – in the space of a week.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has called the tactic “missile terror” and warned attacks on hydro-electric power plants could lead to a major environmental disaster.
Speaking to the BBC, the mayor of Kharkiv – where small businesses are relying on generators and industry is struggling amid blackouts – described the damage to the grid as “very serious” and said it could take two months to fully restore.
Appealing for urgent military aid for Ukraine, Mr Tusk warned the next two years of the war would decide everything, adding: “We are living in the most critical moment since the end of the Second World War.”
Delivering his stark intervention on European security, he pointed out Russia had attacked Kyiv with hypersonic missiles in daylight for the first time.
He said Mr Putin’s attempt to blame Ukraine for the jihadist attack on Moscow’s Crocus City Hall without evidence showed the Russian president “evidently feels the need to justify increasingly violent attacks on civil targets in Ukraine”.
Mr Tusk used his first interview with European media since returning to the office of Polish prime minister at the end of 2023 to urge leaders around the continent to bolster their defences.
He said Europe did not need to create “parallel structures to Nato” but the continent would be a more attractive partner to the US if it became more self-sufficient militarily, regardless of who wins America’s November presidential election.
Poland now spends 4% of its economic output on defence, while other European nations have not yet achieved the Nato target of 2%.
Mr Tusk, a former president of the European Council, has warned Europe must be prepared for war before.
He revealed Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez had asked fellow EU leaders to stop using the word “war” in their summit statements because people did not want to feel threatened.
Mr Tusk said he had replied that in his part of Europe, war was no longer an abstract idea, warning “literally any scenario is possible”.
He continued: “I know it sounds devastating, especially to people of the younger generation, but we have to mentally get used to the arrival of a new era. The pre-war era.”
When he was Polish prime minister for the first time, from 2007 to 2014, he said few other European leaders beyond Poland and the Baltic states realised Russia was a potential threat.
Mr Tusk was more optimistic about what he called a real revolution in mentality across Europe.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s newly appointed commander-in-chief Gen Oleksandr Syrskiy admitted in a rare interview that Russia was outgunning Ukrainian forces “about six to one” on the front line.
He said Ukraine had lost territory it would “undoubtedly have retained” had it been supplied with sufficient ammo and air defence system, and described the situation in some battle areas as “tense”.
Ukraine war: Children among nine dead in Russian strike on Dnipropetrovsk region
By Paul Kirby
BBC News
Two Russian strikes in Ukraine’s central Dnipropetrovsk region have killed nine people, including three children, officials say.
The station in the main city Dnipro came under attack, and several homes were hit further east in Synelnykove.
President Volodymyr Zelensky said the attack highlighted the need for every city to have adequate air defences.
In a separate strike, Ukraine said that for the first time it had downed a long-range bomber in Russian territory.
According to Ukraine’s interior ministry, two children aged six and eight were among six people killed when private homes were targeted by Russian strikes on the town of Synelnykove. A third child died later in hospital and several other people were reported wounded.
In the regional capital Dnipro another two people were killed and 20 were wounded when a five-storey building was hit.
Rescue services were continuing to search the rubble and warned that the number of victims would rise, the ministry added. A maternity hospital also came under fire.
Ukraine has for months warned that it is running low on weapons capable of bringing down Russian missiles and drones, and Nato’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, has spoken of an “urgent, critical need” for fresh military aid.
Earlier this week, the northern city of Chernihiv was struck in Russia’s deadliest attack for some time, leaving 18 dead and dozens wounded. Three Iskander cruise missiles hit residential buildings close to the centre of the city, the regional leader said.
For months, a US military aid package worth $60.8bn (£49bn) has been blocked by Republican representatives in Congress. However, the Republican leader of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, has said he is determined to bring the matter to a vote, which could take place as early as Saturday.
Meanwhile, the air force in Kyiv said it had brought down a Russian Tu-22M3 strategic bomber 300km (186 miles) from Ukrainian territory. It said the plane eventually went down in Russia’s Stavropol region after it had launched a missile strike on Ukraine.
Ukraine’s defence intelligence described the strike as a special operation similar to an earlier attack on a Russian long-range radar plane.
In January, Ukraine’s military said it had brought down an A-50 spy plane and a control centre plane over the Sea of Azov. Ukrainian media reported on Friday that the bomber had been hit by a missile fired from an upgraded Soviet S-200 air defence system.
Unverified video on Friday showed a plane on fire spiralling out of control to the ground and Stavropol regional governor Vladimir Vladimirov said only that the plane had crashed in a Russian field some distance north of the main city.
Russia’s defence ministry blamed a technical malfunction after the bomber had carried out a “combat task”. Two pilots had been found alive, a third crew member was killed and rescue services were looking for a fourth, the governor said.
Ukrainian air force chief Lt Gen Mykola Oleschuk said Russia had fired six Kh-22 cruise missiles overnight and two of them had been destroyed for the first time.
The Tu-22M3 is described as a supersonic bomber and the air force commander said the planes were used to carry Kh-22 missiles for attacks on Ukrainian cities.
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Israel Strikes Iran Again
- An Israeli missile has struck Iran, two US officials have told the BBC’s US partner CBS News
- Iranian state media cite unconfirmed reports of explosions in the central province of Isfahan, but have downplayed reports of an attack. Israel has not officially commented
- Video from Isfahan posted by BBC Persian shows orange flashes in the night sky and the sound of what appears to be bursts of anti-aircraft fire
- Isfahan is home to a large airbase, a major missile production complex and several nuclear facilities. The global nuclear watchdog says no nuclear sites were damaged
- Iran has been on high alert in the wake of Israel pledging to respond to Iran’s unprecedented missile and drone attack on Israel on Saturday night
- Tehran has maintained it was retaliation for a presumed Israeli air strike on its consulate in Syria on 1 April, in which 13 people were killed
Previous attacks targeted Isfahan’s nuclear and military sites
It is not clear what, if anything, was targeted in the overnight Israeli strike in Iran. However, it should not really come as a surprise that explosions were reported in the central province of Isfahan.
Isfahan is the home of several nuclear facilities, including the Isfahan Nuclear Technology Centre and the Natanz uranium enrichment plant.
Iran accused Israel of sabotaging the latter in April 2021, when there was an explosion in an underground area that damaged a large number of centrifuges. Israeli media reported at the time that it was an operation by the Mossad intelligence agency.
There are also a number of important military sites in Isfahan, including Shahid Babaei airbase and facilities for the development and production of missiles.
In January 2023, Iran blamed Israel for a attack on a what it called a “workshop complex” in the centre Isfahan city, which it said involved three drones and caused minor damage. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at the time that his country had been “taking action against certain weapons development” in Iran, but he neither confirmed nor denied involvement.
Why would Isfahan be targeted?
A nuclear and chemical weapons expert has told the BBC the selection of Isfahan, Iran’s second city, as a potential target was “very significant”.
Hamish De Bretton Gordon, a former commander of UK and Nato nuclear forces, notes the city has many military bases around it – with one of them apparently being the target overnight.
“[The reported attack] was fairly near to where we believe Iran is building nuclear weapons, so I expect it was a nod to them,” he tells BBC News.
De Bretton Gordon goes on to make the case the purpose of the strikes was a “very much a demonstration of capability and perhaps intent”.
Quote Message: Iran fires 300 plus miles at Israel, they virtually all get shot down. Israel fires one, perhaps two missiles, at an Iranian target – which appears to have got through and caused damage.”
Iran fires 300 plus miles at Israel, they virtually all get shot down. Israel fires one, perhaps two missiles, at an Iranian target – which appears to have got through and caused damage.”
He adds that Israel “vastly overmatches” Iran in conventional military power, so Tehran would prefer to use proxies for attacks and avoid going “toe to toe with Israel, where it knows it would get a real hammering”.
On the Iranians downplaying the significance of the attack, De Bretton Gordon says they don’t want to acknowledge that any Israeli missiles have got through their “very antiquated” air defence systems and hit targets.
April 18th 2024
The BBC could not hide its’ glee today – By R J Cook
The BBC could not hide its’ glee today, at the thought of problems about getting impartial jurors for Trump’s Trial. He has already been tried by media and found guilty. So why should jury bias be an issue as long as they are not for Trump !! ?
New York is a pretentious place and has been ever since the British stole it from the Dutch, who weren’t much better. Once has to agree that it has some remarkable buildings, like Trump Tower. The city set the standard for sky scapers.
But its trendies, epitomised by the well off bright young people in ‘Friends’, compensate for any embarrassment or guilt about obscene pay cheques, lavish life styles and exclusive apartment blocks by virtue signalling and patronising black people who are all the same to affluent white liberals and must vote Democrat as part of a blob. Oviously the most disadvantaged people in New York are black women.
Such saintly black women who reach the heights of the legal profession are the most virtuous of all. They are not just there to promote justice. They are there to advance the great ideal of U.S Democracy which was created by rich slave owners like George Washington, for rich people. Its advancement was built on genocide of the long forgotten Red Indians. The blacks were treated like Royalty by comparison.
But there is no mileage in Red Indian votes because what few exist lost their identity centuries ago. However, blacks are easily packaged by disingenous Democrat politicians. So the black New York DA has no reason to doubt Trump will be convicted. The great and good Democrats and English speaking people on both sides of the famous ‘Pond’ will do as the elite media tells them. So by election time I fear Donald Trump will be long gone.
With Biden still signing the war budget cheques up until next January, the United States and its drooling old U.K parents may well be long gone with him as the self centred arrogant idiots in charge continue to lie about how they set up Russia for the Ukraine war, why they did it, what they want and why they can’t back down even if Nuclear War becomes inevitable. The lower classes who pay most of the taxes have paid in advance for all their leaders and rich peoples’ comfortable well stocked bunkers.
We of the lower orders will be the ones fried alive or suffering like wild animals, starving, killing each other for morsels to survive before suffering a lingering horrible death, surrounded by other walking dead and stinking corpses, including loves ones. Think about that on Saturday when a feminised Congress desperate to be ‘kept safe’ votes another $60 billion of taxpayers money and more debt to save corrupt Ukraine and all the profits that will come with it for the elite.
Old generals and colonels will stir up the men even more with their fantasy U.S, U.K and EU armies, with all its young conscripts, ordered by old men like Churchill fantasist Boris Johnson calledback to power as a born leader, a man of destiny, planning or quoting old World War 2 speeches about glorious sacifice to invade and begin a process of raping Russia that will make the Yeltsin years appear like heaven. Russia is lined up for degradation and hell.
R J Cook
From BBC On Trump
The most action happened in the last hour of court today, after a slow afternoon.
After more than half of a new group of prospective jurors were dismissed because they said they could not be impartial, Trump’s team and prosecutors began to run out of challenges.
This means we saw seven jurors seated on the panel in rapid time.
It comes after two jurors had to be replaced – one because of potential lies about his criminal history, and another because of worries about privacy and impartiality.
There are many reasons as to why a prospective juror may be dismissed – from their political leanings to childcare responsibilities.
Many have simply said they could not be impartial in the high-profile case.
Artist Mark DeMuro was one of the hundreds of prospective jurors, but he never made the cut because his art satirizes the former president.
His pieces include a depiction of Trump as a golden calf – referencing the Biblical story in which people start worshipping a false god shaped as a cow.
Jurors are meant to be impartial and have no biases for or against Trump, which has made this selection process especially difficult.
DeMuro told Reuters news agency that he withdrew because he knew his portrayals of Trump could be found online.
Trump’s lawyers could “say that I clearly, having satirized him in the way that I have, would not be an acceptable jurist”, he says.
“So that’s why I withdrew.”
Summary
- Jury selection has resumed on day three of Donald Trump’s hush-money trial in New York – the first criminal trial of a former president
- A juror who was selected earlier this week has been excused after she said she had concerns about being identified
- “I don’t believe at this point that I can be fair and unbiased,” she said, adding that it would be difficult to ignore outside opinions
- Dozens of potential jurors were dismissed on Monday and Tuesday after saying they could not be impartial
- Prosecutors say Trump has on 10 occasions breached a gag order designed to stop him attacking those involved in the case
- Trump is accused of trying to cover up a $130,000 hush-money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election – which he won
- Daniels claims she and Trump had sex in 2006, and she was then paid by Trump’s then-lawyer Michael Cohen to stay quiet about it
- Trump is accused of falsifying his business records by saying the money he gave Cohen was for legal fees
- He has pleaded not guilty to 34 counts of fraud and also denies having an affair with Daniels
Juror with suspected criminal history back in hot seat
Madeline Halpert
Reporting from court
We’re about to hear from juror number four, who prosecutors say may have lied about his criminal history.
This morning, a lawyer with the Manhattan District Attorney’s office said they found evidence the candidate had committed a crime related to tearing down political advertisements.
And his wife may have been charged in a corruption case brought by the DA’s office, the prosecutor added.
Earlier this morning, Trump’s team declined to dismiss the juror immediately, but both sides will have a chance to question him now.
The laywers, judge and the juror are speaking privately. We can’t make out what they are saying but can hear some laughter among them.
Jury is shrinking, not growing
Kayla Epstein
in New York
Jury selection is now into its third day, and we have actually lost a juror rather than gaining any.
We are now down to six. Here is how we got here:
As my colleague Madeline Halpert reported earlier, Juror #2 asked to be excused because people in her life had started to figure out her identity based on news reports.
It goes to show the extremely high stakes not just for Donald Trump, his lawyers, and the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, but the 12 regular people who will be swept up in the trial along with them.
The court went back and forth over the most revealing questions – about employers and employment history. Justice Merchan ultimately agreed with Trump’s lawyers that it was important to obtain information about prospective juror’s employers.
But he issued a caveat: those answers will be struck from the court records, and he directed the dozens of reporters watching from an overflow courtroom not to publicly report those answers.
A lot has happened already this morning including a selected juror dropping out and more than half of the new candidates being dismissed.
This is what it looks like inside the court in Manhattan as the former US president watches on.
A speeding ticket and lawyer – potential jurors continue to be examined
Madeline Halpert
Reporting from court
Once again, we’re hearing from more than a dozen prospective jurors.
The first is a woman who works as an attorney and is engaged to an investment banker.
The second is from the Upper West Side who has no prior criminal history, except she notes, a speeding ticket – “I didn’t enjoy that,” she says, eliciting chuckles from the crowd.
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Ukraine warns of WW3 ahead of long-stalled Congress aid vote
By Sumi Somaskanda & Holly Honderich
BBC News
Ukraine’s prime minister has told the BBC there will be a “Third World War” if Ukraine loses its conflict with Russia, as he urged the US Congress to pass a long-stalled foreign aid bill.
Denys Shmyhal expressed “careful optimism” that US lawmakers would pass the hotly contested measure, which has $61bn (£49bn) earmarked for Kyiv.
The House of Representatives is set to vote on the package this Saturday.
The proposal includes funding for Israel as well as the Indo-Pacific.
Russia says any fresh American aid for Ukraine will not make a difference on the battlefield, as the situation on the front line is looking “unfavourable” to Kyiv.
Speaking to the BBC in Washington DC on Wednesday, Ukrainian Prime Minister Shmyhal said of the US security assistance: “We need this money yesterday, not tomorrow, not today.”
“If we will not protect… Ukraine will fall,” he added. “So the global, the global system of security will be destroyed… and all the world will need to find… a new system of security.
“Or, there will be many conflicts, many such kinds of wars, and in the end of the day, it could lead to the Third World War.”
This is not the first time Ukraine has issued such an alarming warning about the consequences of its potential defeat.
Last year, President Volodymyr Zelensky said that if Russia won the conflict, it could next invade Poland, triggering World War Three.
But Kremlin officials have ridiculed such claims as Western scaremongering. Last month President Vladimir Putin dismissed suggestions that Russia might one day attack Eastern Europe as “complete nonsense”.
- Germany arrests alleged Russian spies planning to sabotage Ukraine aid
- Ukraine could face defeat in 2024. Here’s how that might look
- Lawmakers to vote soon on stalled Ukraine aid
Russia has never attacked a country within Nato, which includes Poland. Nato’s collective defence pact means that an attack on one member constitutes an attack on all.
In Wednesday’s interview, Prime Minister Shmyhal was asked about a recent claim by Republican House Foreign Affairs Chairman Michael McCaul that members of his own party were being “infected” by Russian propaganda.
Mr Shmyhal said: “We should understand that disinformation and propaganda is influencing here in the United States on many people, in European Union on many people, such as in Ukraine.”
Opposition from the right wing of the Republican party has blocked potential assistance to Ukraine for months.
https://emp.bbc.co.uk/emp/SMPj/2.52.1/iframe.htmlMedia caption,
BBC documentary shows Ukrainian defence mission
Some of those lawmakers have objected to sending tens of billions of dollars in aid overseas, without first passing funds for US-Mexico border security.
These conservatives have also dismissed as smears any suggestion that they could be Kremlin dupes.
President Joe Biden said in a statement on Wednesday he would sign the package into law immediately once passed by Congress “to send a message to the world: We stand with our friends”.
Ukraine is critically dependent on weapon supplies from the US and the West to keep fighting Russia, which has superior numbers and an abundance of artillery ammunition.
Months of congressional impasse have already had profound effects on the battlefield.
Ukraine has found itself outmanned and outgunned and forced into retreat because of ammunition rationing and falling morale.
In February, it retreated from Avdiivka, a town near occupied Donetsk that it had held since the conflict began in 2014.
Oleksandr Tarnavskyi, a general overseeing the withdrawal, cited a 10-to-one artillery ammunition advantage for his enemies and said pulling back after months of fighting was “the only correct solution”.
President Zelensky blamed an “artificial deficit of weapons” as he made urgent appeals for more military aid to avoid a “catastrophic” situation.
President Biden has cited “dwindling supplies as a result of congressional inaction” as a reason for the retreat.
Avdiivka’s loss was the heaviest for Ukraine since its troops pulled out of Bakhmut in May 2023.
Both came after months of attritional warfare in which Russian forces levelled buildings with massed artillery and poured waves of troops into the frontline.
General Sir Richard Barrons, a former commander of the UK’s Joint Forces Command, recently stated he feared that Ukraine could face defeat this year unless it was given the weapons and ammunition it needed to secure its lines.
“We are seeing Russia batter away at the front line, employing a five-to-one advantage in artillery, ammunition, and a surplus of people,” he said.
“Ukraine may come to feel it can’t win. And when it gets to that point, why will people want to fight and die?”
Both sides have suffered heavy losses in the battles but mounting casualties have left Ukraine, unlike Russia, with a shortage of manpower.
The government earlier this month lowered the age of conscription from 27 to 25 in an effort to raise hundreds of thousands of new recruits.
President Zelensky has said 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed since 2022. US officials, however, believe at least 70,000 have died and many more are injured.
A BBC investigation calculates that at least 50,000 Russian troops have been killed. Tens of thousands are believed to have been injured.
Russia has transformed its industrial base into a wartime economy – with some 40% of the national budget due to be devoted to defence and security in 2024, and deals struck with Iran and North Korea covering ammunition, missiles and drones.
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April 17th 2024
“Something will have to give”—IMF warns of build-up of US debt
Nick Beams
The opening chapter of the World Economic Outlook report of the International Monetary Fund, released at its spring meeting in Washington yesterday, presented a generally upbeat report on the state of the global economy, at least on the surface. But not far below it there are gathering storms.
In his foreword to the report, IMF economic counsellor Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas wrote: “The global economy remains remarkably resilient, with growth holding steady as inflation returns to target.’
Despite “gloomy predictions,” the world had avoided a recession and the banking system proved “largely resilient.” He was also gratified that despite the surge of inflation and the cost-of-living crisis there had been no “wage-price spirals.”
In other words, because of the actions of the trade unions in all the major economies in suppressing wage demands and imposing sub-inflationary agreements, workers had been made to bear the cost of the inflationary spiral set off by the COVID pandemic and the boost to energy prices flowing from the Ukraine war.
In contrast to the generally upbeat outlook on the immediate situation, examination of the IMF’s own data and projections for the medium-term told a different story with growth over the next five years unlikely to return to anywhere near previous historical norms.
And even the immediate projections for the major economies show a significant slowing of economic output. Within the G7, the US economy leads the way with growth for this year expected to be 2.7 percent, an upgrade of 0.6 percentage points on the previous estimate.
But it is all downhill from there. The next best performer is Canada with expected growth of 1.2 percent. The German economy, by some measures now the third largest economy in the world after the US and China, is expected to grow by only 0.2 percent, the lowest in the G7.
Japan, now relegated to the world’s fourth largest economy, will grow by 0.9 percent with the UK coming in at 0.5 percent, after experiencing no growth in 2023.
On the growth of the US economy, which was described as “exceptional,” Gourinchas sounded a warning about the increase in government spending. It had led to a “fiscal stance that is out of line with long-term fiscal sustainability.”
This is a reference to the rise of US public debt, now equivalent in size to US GDP which is expected to accelerate in coming years and is characterised by the Treasury department itself as “unsustainable.”
“This raises short-term risks to the disinflation process, as well as longer-term fiscal and financial stability risks for the global economy since it risks pushing up global funding costs. Something will have to give,” Gourinchas wrote.
While he did not specify it, the key driving force of this expansion is the escalation of military spending as well as large handouts to major corporations under the Inflation Reduction Act, the Chips Act and other measures.
The IMF also expressed concern about the Chinese economy which has been a mainstay of global growth since the global financial crisis of 2008. It continues to be heavily impacted by the property crisis and the IMF has called for strong measures to provide an increase in domestic demand to lift growth.
But there is little sign of that. The Chinese government is seeking to boost manufacturing, especially in high tech areas such as green energy and electric vehicles, which it can turnout at lower cost than in the West, leading to a risk this will “further exacerbate trade tension in an already fraught geopolitical environment.”
These conflicts were on display during the IMF gathering. US Treasury secretary Janet Yellen has been organising meetings with her counterparts with the aim, among other things, of developing a unified response against the outflow of high-tech exports from China that cut into the US and other markets.
This was a central topic of her discussions with Chinese officials and government representatives during her visit earlier this month in which virtually no agreement was reached.
In comments at the weekend on the eve of the IMF meeting, she made clear what was at stake.
“This is a complicated issue that involves their entire macroeconomic and industrial strategy. “It’s not going to be solved in an afternoon or a month,” she said.
These remarks underscore the existential nature of the conflict. The US is demanding the total subordination of China to its demands that it completely scrap its focus on what president Xi Jinping calls the development of “new productive forces” because this is seen as one of the chief threats to its continued domination of the global economy.
From the Chinese side this strategy is seen as the only way to sustain economic growth, even at the much lower target of 5 percent, to maintain “social stability” that is, to try to prevent the eruption of struggles by the Chinese working class which would threaten the regime of the ruling capitalist oligarchy represented by the Communist party.
This conflict can only intensify under conditions where, as the IMF made clear in Chapter 3 of its report published last week, global growth is markedly slowing.
In a blog on the chapter, two of its authors warned that in the coming period growth is “set to fall far below its historical average.”
“The world economy,” they wrote, “faces a sobering reality. The global growth rate—stripped of its cyclical ups and downs—has slowed steadily since the 2008–09 global financial crisis.”
It said economic growth was expected to reach just 2.8 percent by 2030, well below the historical average of 3.8 percent.
The prospect of weaker growth was “exacerbated by strong headwinds from geoeconomic fragmentation, and harmful unilateral trade and industrial policies.”
They noted that half of the growth decline was the result of a fall in total factor productivity (TFP), which measures the input of capital and labour and how these resources are used.
In recent years increasingly “insufficient distribution of resources across firms has dragged down TFP and, with it, global growth.”
It was not referred to, but one of the key factors in this process is that corporations have used their profits and even run up debts not for productive investments but to finance share buy backs to meet the demands of hedge funds and other parasitic financial institutions for a boost in “shareholder value.”
Overall, the IMF gathering was not so a meeting to deal with growing global economic problems but was more akin to a war council in which the immediate target is China on the one hand, and the working class on other.
There was an insistence on the need to continue the fight against inflation, the code phrase for driving down real wages, the need to increase productivity, the intensification of exploitation, and the maintenance of financial buffers—that is, cuts in social spending—to deal with mounting debts.
Insofar as the resolution of economic problems was addressed, the IMF said “multilateral cooperation” would be needed.
But that has gone by the board. Its passing was highlighted in remarks this week by the Australian Labor prime minister Anthony Albanese in which he announced government support for war-related industries.
Starting with the US, he listed a series of nationalist measures introduced by a range of countries to boost their economic and national security.
This “strategic competition,” which is directed towards war, he said, was now a “fact of life.”
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Comment The United States and the World needs Donald Trump. That is why the swamp dwelling global elite want to destroy him before he tries doing anything else to stop them provoking nuclear war in the name of their hypocrisy and fake democracy.
R J Cook
US imposes new sanctions on Iran amid looming threat of Israeli attack
The United States and its imperialist allies will imminently announce new sanctions targeting Iran, as the US-led war drive against Tehran continues to accelerate.
Ban on the Palestine Congress: Another step towards a German police state
Since hundreds of police officers broke up a Palestine Congress in Berlin last Friday, new details have come to light every day about the arbitrariness and ruthlessness with which the police disregarded the law and trampled on democratic rights.
Zelensky Won’t Disclose Total Number Of Ukraine Troops Wounded , Dead Or Missing, But BBC Verifies 50,000 Russian Dead !
Updated 7:54 PM BST, February 25, 2024
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Sunday that 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed in action in the two years since Russia launched its full-scale invasion.
Zelenskyy said that the number was far lower than estimates given by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government.
“31,000 Ukrainian military personnel have been killed in this war. Not 300,000, not 150,000, not whatever Putin and his deceitful circle have been lying about. But nevertheless, each of these losses is a great sacrifice for us”, Zelenskyy said at the “Ukraine. Year 2024” forum in Kyiv.
The Ukrainian leader said that he wouldn’t disclose the number of troops that were wounded or missing. He also said that “tens of thousands of civilians” had been killed in occupied areas of Ukraine, but said that no exact figures would be available until the war was over.
Russia’s meat grinder soldiers – 50,000 confirmed dead ( by the BBC ).
Russia’s military death toll in Ukraine has now passed the 50,000 mark, the BBC can confirm.
In the second 12 months on the front line – as Moscow pushed its so-called meat grinder strategy – we found the body count was nearly 25% higher than in the first year.
BBC Russian, independent media group Mediazona and volunteers have been counting deaths since February 2022.
New graves in cemeteries helped provide the names of many soldiers.
Our teams also combed through open-source information from official reports, newspapers and social media.
More than 27,300 Russian soldiers died in the second year of combat – according to our findings – a reflection of how territorial gains have come at a huge human cost.
Russia has declined to comment.
Comment Reality Check, Biden has repeated on record that he stands for regime change in Russia. His family have done well out of Ukraine. At this moment, the BBC is broadcasting its white liberal message that the House of Representatives must not sack the speaker. They must get on and vote more resources to beat the Russians. Panic is rife and the worst is possible. Like myself and this website, ordinary hard working hard pressed U.S citizens do not support a Ukraine war led by Washington swamp dwellers, the U.K Political elite and other western war mongers.
R J Cook
Lord Cameron lands in Israel for talks over Iran attack
By James Landale
Diplomatic correspondent, in Jerusalem
UK Foreign Secretary Lord Cameron has arrived in Israel for talks with its leaders about their response to Iran’s unprecedented drone and missile attack.
He is expected to meet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has vowed to retaliate after the assault.
The visit comes as the UK and others seek to prevent further escalation in the Middle East.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called for “calm” in talks with Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday.
The Israeli government has vowed to retaliate after Iran sent more than 300 drones and missile towards Israel overnight on Saturday.
Almost all the projectiles were intercepted by Israel’s air defence systems, with the help of the US, UK, France, and Jordan.
Iran’s direct attack on Israel was carried out in response to a strike in Syria on 1 April which killed senior Iranian military figures. Israel has not publicly confirmed it was behind the attack.
On Tuesday evening, Mr Sunak spoke to his Israeli counterpart and warned that “significant escalation will only deepen instability in the region”, adding: “This is a moment for calm heads to prevail.”
Lord Cameron is one of several Western foreign ministers who are expected to visit Israel in the coming days to convey that message in person.
The foreign secretary is also due to meet Israeli President Isaac Herzog and Foreign Affairs Minister Israel Katz, and will discuss the humanitarian situation in Gaza.
The visit will include meetings in the occupied West Bank, after which Lord Cameron will travel to a gathering of G7 ministers in Italy to discuss further sanctions on Iran.
Comment It says it all that incompetent snooty upper class failed Prime Minister David Cameron is back in a key government post as Lord Cameron Foreign Secretary. That is more fake U.K Democracy.
R J Cook
April 16th 2024
Trump trial: Dozens of jurors rejected as they say they cannot be impartial
By Madeline Halpert & Kayla Epstein
BBC News, New York
Donald Trump’s unprecedented criminal trial has begun with half of a group of potential jurors ruled out within minutes on impartiality grounds.
Mr Trump denies falsifying business records to conceal a hush-money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels.
Sixty of 96 potential jurors were quick to say in the New York court that they could not be impartial.
Those left were then asked multiple questions, including about their news and book reading habits.
“I just couldn’t do it,” one prospective juror was heard saying as she left court on Monday.
The dismissals were an indication of how challenging it could be to find a group of 12 impartial jurors for a case concerned with a high-profile sex scandal involving a former president running once again for the White House.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office alleges that Mr Trump directed his former attorney, Michael Cohen, to pay Ms Daniels $130,000 (£104,000) in exchange for her silence about an alleged sexual encounter that the former president denies took place.
Prosecutors say he did so to “unlawfully influence” the 2016 election. Mr Trump has pleaded not guilty.
Comment In the old days of a pre liberal ( sic ) biased justice system, the law of sub judice would have collapsed this case. Across the western world, but especially with the U.K & U.S symbiotic media relationship, Donald Trump is judged guilty. No way can there be an average juror who can come up with anything but a guity verdict. Trump cannot expect a fair trial any more than Julian Assange can. A lot of powerful people have a lot of power and money riding on an adverse relationship with Russia, including members of the elite business and ruling classes. Democratic prosecutors take anti Trump black and female voters for granted and have mainstream media on side.
Why on earth a person’s sex life, outside the issues of rape, should matter in this so called modern age, I don’t know. Founder FBI boss J Edgar Hoover famously said that you could always get someone you didn’t like if you spied on their sex life. Trump is a threat. Biden displays mental competence issues, but we are supposed to have faith in his understudy Harris because she has the great virtues of being female and black.
In my view the future under Biden & Co, will be bright orange and then black when the nukes start flying. But there is no point talking sense to nonsense. The only people who read this site in the U.K, are the police and mental health authorities. That is my world and has been for many years. That is freedom in the mother of western style democracies
R J Cook
April 14th 2024
War Profiteering
the United States
The majority of committed support by country has come from the United States, whose total aid commitment is valued at about $75 billion. The U.S. is followed by Germany and the United Kingdom for highest commitments overall. The European Union as a whole has committed approximately $93 billion in aid to Ukraine.23 Feb 2024
14 Apr 2023 — Top 10 hedge funds made £1.5bn profit from Ukraine war food price spike. Hedge funds have emerged as some of the biggest winners from the …
27 Mar 2024 — The UK has pledged almost £12 billion in overall support to Ukraine since February 2022, of which £7.1 billion is for military assistance. £2.3 …
Countries That Have Committed the Most Aid to Ukraine
Oil prices lower after Iran attack on Israel
By Michael Race, Peter Hoskins & Nick Edser
Business reporters, BBC News
Oil prices fell on Monday after after Iran’s reprisal attack on Israel over the weekend.
Brent crude – a key benchmark for oil prices internationally – was lower but still trading close to $90 a barrel on Monday morning.
Prices had already risen in expectation of action by Iran, with Brent crude nearing a six-month high last week.
Analysts said the markets would be looking to see how the conflict could affect global supply chains.
Oil price fluctuations can cause ripple effects across the world due to countries being heavily reliant on the commodity, which is used to produce fuels such as petrol and diesel. Fuel and energy prices have been a major driver behind the higher cost of living worldwide in the past couple of years.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, oil prices soared to $120 a barrel over supply fears as western nations imposed sanctions on Russia, one of the world’s major oil exporters. The jump led to not only higher prices at the pumps, but also countless other goods as businesses adjusted their prices to cover higher costs.
Analysts said Israel’s reaction to the attack would be key for global markets in the days and weeks ahead.
Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant has said the confrontation with Iran is “not over yet”.
His comments came after Iran launched drones and missiles towards Israel at the weekend after vowing retaliation for an attack on its consulate in the Syrian capital Damascus on 1 April. Israel has not said it carried out the consulate strike, but is widely believed to have been behind it.
At the end of last week, the price of Brent crude touched $92.18 a barrel, the highest since October, but early on Monday it had fallen back to around $89.70.
While oil prices dipped slightly, the price of gold edged higher, to hover near record highs, trading close to $2,400 an ounce.
Gold is often seen as a safe investment at times of uncertainty and rose sharply ahead of the weekend.
Comment War is a necessary game in the world of the super rich. It is about their investments and freedom. It is the perfect waste of the lower class tax payer’s money.
R J Cook
A Lot More Of This – By R J Cook
I was fortunate to attend the University of East Angli ( UEA ) in 1971 to study six integrated social sciences. These were economics, economic history, philosophy, sociology, social psychology and social anthropology. We were enouraged to think and make connections. Those were the days when only 3% of the population attended university and academics had enough time to notice us as individuals rather than members of a blob, before the mass student influx of Thatcher’s era, and took an interest in teaching. For the more practically minded there were male dominated apprenticeships.
Then along came Thatcher asset stripping public assets, driving up male unemployment, breaking up families, marginalising men as the root of all evil, promoting feminism in the Thatcher ego maniac self righteous mould, exploding parasitical service industries and turning previously useful polytechnics into what have become known as ‘unis.’ Ironically, although Thatcher sold off all the productive male dominated state industries, she expanded the national and local police state infrastructure which is dominated by women.
These women have proved so costly in the pay and working conditions demands that the U. K’s Birmingham City Council has gone bankrupt and more councils will follow. Women’s pay is very important. The world wide Westfield Shopping Pleasure Centres, to whom I delivered in West London, rely on women’s high propensity to spend on eating out, fashion, shoes, perfume and make up. In my view women construct their own reality. Their contribution to politics appears to be primarily about women’s rights. As Hilary Clinton said in 2016, “Women’s Rights are Human Rights, Human Rights are Women’s Rights.” Women’s groups purport to be high minded when in reality they are Hive Minded which is why so many flourish as police officers and state bureaucrats where they feel safe.
By the time I returned to university as a post graduate at London University after five years out working in ‘the real world’ ( sic ), with an interest in learning more about psychology and sociology, both subjects had suffered a major feminist cultural shift. What happened to sociology was particularly interesting. When I took Brian Heading’s UEA courses on Sociological Thought and Theory, I learned where this academic discipline had come from and the difficulties of grounding theories in what might loosely be called ‘reality.’ Heading usefully had first class honours in zoology from Cambridge University and a sideline in his family’s farm. He had a good idea of what people like himself and me took for granted as reality.
The cultural shift had disposed of the agonising quest for a theory to capture the truth of the social world. Women’s hive mind had taken over the subject matter of sociology when I returned to and eventually lectured in the subject. Feminist sociologists replaced Marx’s exploited proletariat with themselves as the exploited underclass who had to unite and rise up against male oppressors. This was because they had nothing to lose but the chains that held them to the kitchen sink and marital bed. Hannah Gavron became the new high priestess of feminists dominated sociology with her epic self and subject defining work ‘The Captive Housewife.’ This is what passes for social reality and there is no turning back.
So we come to the post mortem on the Sydney massacre in the exclusive Bondi neighbourhood. We are supposed to sympathise with third world migrants, but what about 40 year old Joel Cauchi who was first ‘diagnosed’ with mental health problems aged 17 whose only asset after 40 years on earth was a storage unit.
I know a man of similar age whose mother signed a contract to help him kill himself when aged 13, if his life got any worse. The father called in outside help from the local mental health facility in Aylesbury Bucks, but on the word of the mother, who had shut her son away in his bedroom for years, washing and taking him to the toilet from a young adult and beyond, lying that he was receiving home tuition.
The father was told, in 2006, that he was the one who needed treatment for mental illness. That son was sectioned to a severe male mental health ward in 2020, then aged 32. I cannot be more specific for legal reasons but the evidence was copied to the authorities many years ago, police labelling the father an insane alcoholic domestic abuser without any evidence of trace of investigation. It is a horrible story and already a tragedy for the man while his mother, a woman of high status, and authorities are unaccuntable.
So to unlock the mystery of why Joel Cauchi committed his crimes, which appear to have targeted women and a man who got in his way, conventional pre DSM social science would need to study his family history in an age that normalises one parent female headed families, Rowling style anti trans hate crimes, media defining white males as toxic and and privileged.
There is no place for nineteenth century functionalist sociologist Emile Durkheim with his ‘Rules of Sociological Method’ and pathological social factors because it, like all the theory that I was taught, conflicts with feminism. Only the female hive mind counts for truth because only they know what it is like to suffer. So Bondi 13/4 will be more grist to their mill for female martyrdom along with the hero ( sic ) Sydney female Police Inspector who came to the rescue. The world can only get worse so long as women are ‘a protected status’ and mtf transsexuals are labelled ‘rapists in waiting.’ There is no place for grounding truth in a world where vested interests are far more sophisticated, elusive and dangerous than in the good old class war days of Marxism. Look out Russia, the western elite wants you to have a lot more of this.
R J Cook
April 14th 2024
16 Mar 2022 — Almost 1 in 4 Australian men think using sexist or misogynistic language online is sometimes acceptable. Former Australian Prime Minister …
What it’s like to be homeless in Sydney
After years of sleeping on a park bench, Glen celebrated moving into his own home – with help from our Missionbeat service, Glen now has a permanent place where he can sleep in peace and cook his favourite meals.
More than 122,0001 people are homeless on any given night. Even in an affluent city like Sydney, people are forced to sleep in temporary and unsafe places.
Glen’s story, from homeless to hopeful
For as long as he can remember, bench number two at a park in Sydney was Glen’s* ‘home’. A series of challenging life events, including the death of his daughter, had left 51-year-old Glen without hope. Overcome with grief and mentally exhausted, Glen felt his life spiral out of control.
Missionbeat, on a mission to help Sydney’s homeless
When Glen met our team at Missionbeat, he was struck by their willingness to help. Funded by our compassionate supporters, Missionbeat is our mobile outreach service that cares for rough sleepers on the streets of Sydney. Recognised by the iconic Missionbeat van, our teams provide essential support, information and care to help people move from homelessness to housing.
Over time, Glen’s connection and friendship with the team grew until he was ready to apply for long-term housing.
“Getting someone off the street isn’t as simple as dropping them into a room. We need to learn their stories, their struggles, their dreams,” says Patrick from Missionbeat. “Sometimes, it takes months to build trust and give people the dignity they deserve.”
It wasn’t an easy journey but after a year of working together, Glen celebrated moving into his own home.
Missionbeat stuck with me and helped me when there was no one else out there. I was a train wreck, but they’ve done a lot to help me. They’ve gotten my life back to where it was.
From homeless to having a safe home
Glen experienced transformative improvements to his mental health and wellbeing since moving into his new home. “It’s been two weeks, I’ve calmed down a lot, getting hold of my mental health issues, everything, I’m getting on top of now, which is a positive thing for me,” he shared.
More than a warm bed or hot shower, having his own kitchen is the best part and he is excited to begin cooking his favourite dishes and recipes.
“The best part of the house would be my kitchen, because I get to cook again, “says Glen. “I’m thinking spaghetti bolognese, or curried sausages that my mum taught me to cook.”
A lot of this wouldn’t be possible if Missionbeat hadn’t done what they have for me.
Ending homelessness isn’t a linear process, but when a vulnerable person knows someone cares about their survival it empowers them to believe homelessness can end.
A sudden life change can lead to homelessness
Like Glen, no one is immune to homelessness.
Unexpected changes and circumstances out of their control can cause people to become more vulnerable and less secure. Life events such as the death of a loved one, sudden job loss or relationship breakdowns can expose people to a chain of events that results in losing hope and being unable to maintain a home.
For thousands of Australians, the risk of losing their home is a constant fear. The high cost of rental housing combined with the lack of affordable housing options, particularly for low-income earners, can force many individuals and their families out of their homes with no place to live.
Read more about three leading causes of homelessness.
Study shows generational decline in Australia’s mental health
28 November 2023
It’s not just the kids
The mental health of Australians has been declining since around 2010 and this is seen in earlier generations, not just the youths of Gen Z, according to a new study led by the University of Sydney.
It’s widely agreed that young people’s mental health has declined in developed countries in recent years. However, it has been debated whether this is an effect seen just in the post-millennium cohort, as well as whether it is a temporary shift that recovers with age, or a more permanent and worrying trend.
The new study, published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), sought to answer this question by tracking the mental health of a dedicated cohort of Australians for 20 years from 2001 to 2020.
Drawing on data from the HILDA survey, a nationally representative survey of 9000 households, the researchers assessed how a birth cohort’s mental health changed as they aged and compared the mental health of each cohort (those born in each decade from 1940 to 1990) at the same age.
They found that people born in the 1990s have poorer mental health for their age than any previous generation and do not show the improvements in mental health as they age, as experienced by earlier generations. Importantly, the researchers found that this decline in mental health from around 2010 also impacted those born in the 1980s and, to a lesser extent, even the 1970s.
“Much of the focus to date has been on the declining mental health of school-aged children and adolescents, where we expect their mental health to eventually improve as they enter adulthood. But this study shows this pattern is changing and that it is not just the kids we need to worry about,” said lead author Dr Richard Morris, senior research fellow in the University of Sydney’s Faculty of Medicine and Health.
“Our data not only shows a continuing decline in the mental health of the current crop of young people but continues to affect older generations today heading into their 40s and 50s. We are not seeing the rebound out of young adulthood that previous generations saw as they aged.”
Dr Richard Morris
Professor Nick Glozier says the study findings are very robust—using multiple measures of mental ill-health. However, it does not address the cause of this population-level mental health decline.
“That’s a very difficult question to answer,” said consultant psychiatrist and senior author Professor Nick Glozier, Professor of Psychological Medicine at the University of Sydney. “But what we are looking for is a shared experience that is likely to have impacted all generations or age cohorts at that time, be it in different ways, with young people the most affected.”
Authors from the University of Sydney, University of Melbourne and ANU discuss several local and global challenges that could be impacting this trajectory including the advent and growth of social media, lack of physical activity and poor sleep, climate change and the changing nature of work.
Although likely to reflect megatrends in society, the researchers are unable to account for the possible impact increased community awareness of mental health and less stigma could have on survey results. They also note that the same deterioration in younger generations was not seen for life satisfaction results.
They write: “This study provides a starting point for more in-depth analysis, and we hope it will encourage other researchers to closely examine the changes that have happened in mental ill-health in Australia in the last decade.”
Read More https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2023/11/28/study-shows-generational-decline-in-australias-mental-health.html
Westfield Bondi mall attack: Sydney knife suspect identified by police
By Jay Savage
in Sydney
A knife-wielding man who killed six people in a Sydney shopping centre before being shot dead has been identified by Australian police.
Joel Cauchi, 40, sent the crowded Westfield Bondi Junction complex into panic on Saturday when he began stabbing people with a long blade.
Five women and a man died. Several others, including a baby, were injured.
Authorities said the attack was most likely “related to the mental health” of Mr Cauchi.
Asked whether she believes he was targeting women, New South Wales Police Commissioner Karen Webb told reporters on Sunday it would be “an obvious line of inquiry”.
But she added she would not describe the stabbings as an “act of terror”, reiterating that police believed there was “no ideological motivation”.
Mr Cauchi was previously known to police but had never been arrested or charged in his home state Queensland. He had lived itinerantly for several years and was first diagnosed with a mental illness at 17, Queensland Police said.
Authorities said nine people had been taken to hospital after the stabbings, and another three people had sought medical attention overnight. About 40 paramedics were initially involved in the response.
The shopping centre in Sydney’s affluent east remained closed on Sunday and forensic investigators pored over the scene.
By mid-afternoon several hundred bouquets of flowers had been placed close to the entrance, on Oxford St.
https/www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-68810428
April 13th 2024
Iran launches drones at Israel in retaliatory attack
Iran has launched drones at Israel, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said, appearing to mark a widely anticipated reprisal attack.
The IDF said the wave could take hours to reach Israel, a distance of 1,100 miles (1,800km).
It said Israeli forces were on high alert and “monitoring all targets”.
Iran had vowed to retaliate after an attack on its consulate in Syria on 1 April – for which it blamed Israel – killed several Iranian commanders.
Shortly before news of Iran’s drone launch, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel’s “defensive systems” were deployed.
“We are ready for any scenario, both defensively and offensively. The State of Israel is strong. The IDF is strong. The public is strong.”We appreciate the US standing alongside Israel, as well as the support of Britain, France and many other countries.”
Iran’s IRGC seizes ‘Israeli-linked’ ship near Strait of Hormuz
The difficult hunt for an impartial Trump jury in Manhattan
By Madeline Halpert
BBC News, New York
On Monday, hundreds of New Yorkers from across the island of Manhattan will find themselves facing a historic prospect: sitting on the jury of the first criminal trial of a former president.
Donald Trump is accused of falsifying his business records to disguise a hush money payment made shortly before the 2016 election to an adult film star with whom he allegedly had an affair.
It will be up to the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and Mr Trump’s legal team to weed through the masses of New Yorkers to find 12 people capable of setting aside their feelings about one of the most polarising US politicians, to give him a fair trial.
Mr Trump’s lawyers have already complained that the city’s Manhattan borough, comprised predominately of Democrats, will not allow for an impartial jury.
And experts agree it will prove challenging.
“There’s nobody in the country who doesn’t have an opinion one way or another,” former Manhattan prosecutor Jeremy Saland says.
“But those in New York have been exposed to Donald Trump and his father and children for literally generations, from every tabloid to the internet to Home Alone.”
“A jury should be fair no matter what, listen to the evidence and hold prosecutors to the burden,” he says.
“So no easy task.”
42 questions to hundreds of people
The jury process will involve several stages that could last well over a week, former Brooklyn and Manhattan prosecutors told the BBC.
Because of the high-profile nature of the trial, as many as 500 people from New York’s Manhattan and neighbouring Roosevelt Island could be chosen as prospective jurors.
From this group, the defence and the prosecution – overseen by Justice Juan Merchan – will select 12 people and several alternates to be seated.
Those jurors will be anonymous to the public, but Mr Trump’s team and prosecutors will know their identities.
The process will begin with dismissing jurors who are unable to participate in the six-week trial because of hardships such as childcare obligations and travel restrictions, says Julie Rendelman, a former Brooklyn prosecutor.
Experts say the second stage could pose the biggest challenge: removing those who will not be impartial.
“Everyone, anyone, no matter who you are, no matter whether you wear blue or red goggles, needs to give the former president the same rights that any of us do, which is that he’s innocent until proven guilty,” says Mr Saland, the former Manhattan prosecutor.
To start weeding out those who are biased, prosecutors and the defence team will analyse questionnaires filled out by the prospective jurors.
The jurors will be asked questions including which news outlets they read and what podcasts they listen to; whether they follow Mr Trump on social media and if they have ever attended a rally for the former president.
They will also be asked if they support or consider themselves a part of any right or left-wing radical groups, specifically:
- The QAnon movement: an online movement based around a sprawling conspiracy theory that alleges elites in politics, the media and business have created a child trafficking network
- Proud Boys: an all-male fraternity founded in 2016, Proud Boys regularly participated in violent street protests and pro-Trump events
- Oath Keepers: a militia made up of current and former military members, law enforcement officials and other first responders
- Three Percenters: another anti-government, pro-gun rights movement, the Three Percenters were co-founded by an Oath Keepers member
- Boogaloo Boys: a nebulous anti-government movement that made waves during anti-lockdown and Black Lives Matter protests in 2020
- Antifa: short for “anti-fascist”, this loose confederation of left-wing activists swelled in numbers and activity after Mr Trump was elected
Mr Merchan has stressed that jurors will not be dismissed based on political affiliation alone. “The issue is if the juror can be impartial and can reach a verdict consistent with the law,” he said in February.
But Mr Trump’s lawyers have already sparred with the defence about what exactly this means.
Lawyers for the DA’s Office previously argued anyone who believed President Joe Biden did not legitimately win the 2020 presidential election should be disqualified from serving on the jury, a question Mr Trump’s team objected to.
Ultimately, the query was not included in the 42 questions potential jurors must answer. Instead, jurors will be asked a host of other questions such as those above.
They will also be asked if they have ever served on a jury before, and if so, if they reached a verdict.
People who have served on a hung jury – a case where a jury could not reach a verdict – are less likely to be picked because “the concern is they’re the ones who hung it up”, says former Manhattan prosecutor Diana Florence.
Potential jurors also must indicate if they or close family and friends have ever been a victim of a crime, and if so, which one. This allows both sides to judge whether someone might be prejudiced in Mr Trump’s falsification of business records case because of previous experiences.
Some of the questions are even more personal, asking jurors what their children do for a living and if they take any medication that would prevent them from being able to concentrate during the trial.
‘Vetting’ jurors
Prosecutors and Mr Trump’s legal team will be able to challenge those that they don’t want to be included on the jury.
Each side has 10 “peremptory” challenges, jurors they can dismiss for no particular reason, said Ms Florence.
Both Mr Trump and the DA’s Office have an unlimited number of “for cause” challenges, meaning they need a valid reason to dismiss those jurors.
This time will prove pivotal for both sides to remove people who will not be objective about the trial, including those intentionally trying to make their way onto the case by misrepresenting their views on Mr Trump, Mr Saland says.
“It’s critical that the prosecutors and the defence vet those jurors and get rid of those that they think are not going to do their job,” he adds.
To help, lawyers for the defence and prosecution will likely hire experts to look through jurors’ social media posts, which can provide a “treasure trove of information as to their potential views and biases”, Ms Rendelman said.
Both sides will also be looking for those who have not yet made up their mind about the case – a significant challenge for a trial that has received such intense media coverage.
But Mr Trump’s case won’t be the first high-profile trial for prosecutors and defence teams looking for an impartial pool of New Yorkers, experts noted.
It took almost two weeks to narrow down jurors for disgraced Hollywood director Harvey Weinstein’s New York sexual assault trial in 2020.
It could take just as much time – if not more – to find people willing to grant Mr Trump a fair trial, Ms Rendelman says.
“We are human, and so our biases creep in, even when we don’t want them to,” she adds.
“It’s doable, but it’s going to be difficult.”
Comment This is just one of a number of highly dubious strategies to criminalise Donald Trump from standing for president. Logically there has been so much western , notably U.K and U.S, anti Trump presumption of guilt propaganda that fair trial is impossible. So he should be acqutted. To my mind the object of the exercise here is to get the kind of jury who will automatically convict Trump.
Trump is a problem when it comes to the avaricious war profiteering NATO Ukraine proxy war on Russia. He can’t be trusted, so must be destroyed. New York’s racially prejudiced black population can be relied on to do their best for the white fake virtue signalling Democrats. So World War Three hots up with the nuclear element ever closer.
R J Cook
Australia PM hails cop who shot Sydney attacker as ‘a hero’
By Hannah Ritchie
BBC News
An Australian police officer has been hailed as a hero by the country’s prime minister, after she confronted and shot dead a man who fatally stabbed six people at a Sydney shopping centre.
“There is no doubt that she saved lives,” PM Anthony Albanese said, calling Saturday’s attack “a horrific act of violence”.
Police described how the unnamed officer bravely tracked the attacker through the mall, challenged him and shot him dead after he raised his knife towards her.
Comment Spare me the feminist female worship and male pronouns in the ( P) Rowling era. If we must laud cops for doing their jobs, call her a heroine for shooting this lunatic. Then ask why we are not allowed to know the ethnicity of this killter and why terrorism was immediately ruled out.
R J Cook
Biden ‘considering’ ending Julian Assange case — after Trump also flirted with idea
R J Cook.
Ukraine could face defeat in 2024. Here’s how that might look
By Frank Gardner
BBC security correspondent
The former commander of the UK’s Joint Forces Command has warned that Ukraine could face defeat by Russia in 2024.
General Sir Richard Barrons has told the BBC there is “a serious risk” of Ukraine losing the war this year.
The reason, he says, is “because Ukraine may come to feel it can’t win”.
“And when it gets to that point, why will people want to fight and die any longer, just to defend the indefensible?”
Ukraine is not yet at that point.
But its forces are running critically low on ammunition, troops and air defences. Its much-heralded counter-offensive last year failed to dislodge the Russians from ground they had seized and now Moscow is gearing up for a summer offensive.
So what will that look like and what are its likely strategic objectives?
“The shape of the Russian offensive that’s going to come is pretty clear,” says Gen Barrons.
“We are seeing Russia batter away at the front line, employing a five-to-one advantage in artillery, ammunition, and a surplus of people reinforced by the use of newish weapons.”
These include the FAB glide bomb, an adapted Soviet-era “dumb bomb” fitted with fins, GPS guidance and 1500kg of high explosive, that is wreaking havoc on Ukrainian defences.
“At some point this summer,” says Gen Barrons, “we expect to see a major Russian offensive, with the intent of doing more than smash forward with small gains to perhaps try and break through the Ukrainian lines.
“And if that happens we would run the risk of Russian forces breaking through and then exploiting into areas of Ukraine where the Ukrainian armed forces cannot stop them.”
But where?
Last year the Russians knew exactly where Ukraine was likely to attack – from the direction of Zaporizhzhia south towards the Sea of Azov. They planned accordingly and successfully blunted Ukraine’s advance.
Now the boot is on the other foot as Russia masses its troops and keeps Kyiv guessing where it is going to attack next.
“One of the challenges the Ukrainians have,” says Dr Jack Watling, senior research fellow in land warfare at the Whitehall thinktank the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi), “is that the Russians can choose where they commit their forces.
“It’s a very long front line and the Ukrainians need to be able to defend all of it.”
Which, of course, they cannot.
“The Ukrainian military will lose ground,” says Dr Watling. “The question is: how much and which population centres are going to be affected?”
It is quite possible that Russia’s General Staff have yet to go firm on which direction to designate as their main effort. But it is possible to broadly break down their various options into three broad locations.
Pots & Kettles by R J Cook
Comment It is a moot point as to whether the source of evil lies in east or west, or whether there is a lesser of two evils. This site is monitored by police who put a PNC Criminal Vehicle Marker on my car, on October 9th 2008, giving themselves authority to pursue and stop me on sight – with the right to shoot me if I don’t stop and they ever feel threatened. I cannot say more for legal reasons. To date, police refuse to explain themselves.
This country may have a languid looking aristocracy with Houses of Parliament full of seasoned oldmilitary types, feminists and new age leftie men, but for them, the word tolerance applies only to tolerating them. British Democracy simply means voting for one of three versions of the same consensus agenda. Anyone outside of that agenda is deemed far right or a Russian agent.
I find it quite terrifying. I fell out with a friend this morning. He described Britain’s young men as ‘nancy boys’ who are useless and afraid to fight. He said they shoud be forced to go. I suggested that if anyone should be forced to go it is corrupt lying would be soldier police officers, alomg with th other liars, cheats and incompetent money grabbers responsible for the U.K Post Office Scandal and outrage.
Like so many of the British population, he had no patience to hear the backgound and how the power and resource grabbing NATO – who pay lip service to human rights, hence Julian Assane, Chelsea Manning and Guantanimo Bay – set up a proxy war on Russia up fora regime change that will clear the way to taking China.
But my now former friend’s would not back off. Having allegendly seen action in another dirty little war in Vietnam, he suggested the Russians would soon be coming up my drive and then it would be too late because “Putin hates us “. To him the Third World War will be another war for freedom and demcracy in the face of tyranny. As far as I can tell, we already have tyranny. We have no right to oppose this war to further the rights of Ukraine, a country even more corrupt than the U.S , U.K, EU and international planet eating global corporate capitalism. This is all about pots calling kettles black
R J Cook
Ukraine war: Key power plant near Kyiv destroyed by Russian strikes
By Sarah Rainsford in Kharkiv & Laura Gozzi
BBC News
A major power plant near Kyiv was completely destroyed by Russian strikes early on Thursday, energy company Centrenergo said.
Trypillya power plant was the largest electricity provider for three regions, including Kyiv, officials said.
“The scale of destruction is terrifying,” said Centrenergo chairman Andriy Hota.
Russia has long been deliberately and systematically targeting Ukraine’s energy system.
Mr Hota told the BBC that Thursday morning’s strikes destroyed “the transformer, the turbines, the generators. They destroyed 100%”.
A fire broke out in the turbine workshop of the Trypillya plant – located 50km (31 miles) to the south of Kyiv – following Thursday’s large-scale airborne attack.
The Centrenergo boss said the plant was targeted by multiple missiles. Staff on shift were able to escape, he said, because they ran for cover as soon as the first drone hit.
Residents were urged to shut their windows, charge all their devices and stock up on water.
More than 80 missiles and drones targeted sites across Ukraine in the early hours of Thursday. Many targeted energy infrastructure and almost a third made it through Ukraine’s air defences.
Hours later, Centrenergo confirmed its Trypillya plant had been put out of use. Mr Hota said his company’s entire generative capacity in Ukraine was now destroyed.
It was one of Ukraine’s largest providers of electricity and heat. It operated two other power plants – one in the Kharkiv region which was destroyed in late March, and one in an area of the Donetsk region that was taken over by Russia in 2022.
The Kharkiv and the Trypillya plants used to generate some 8% of the country’s electricity, according to Mr Hota. The Trypillya thermal plant provided power to the three central regions of Zhytomyr, Cherkasy and Kyiv.
The destruction of the Trypillya plant would not be a critical issue for Ukraine in the summer, he believed, although by winter it would become a “giant problem”.
While the plant can be rebuilt with help from spare parts from Europe, he says it will remain vulnerable to attack without Ukraine’s allies providing powerful air defences.
“We can repair. We can do the impossible. But we need protection.”
At least two more thermal power plants suffered “significant damage” overnight in the west of Ukraine, placing even more strain on electricity supply nationwide.
The DTEK power company was already down to 20% capacity after repeat attacks in March.
The company told the BBC that the latest missile and drone strike on these “purely civilian power stations” would make the task of providing critical power to the grid harder.
“Attack by attack, Russia is trying to strangle Ukraine’s energy system and with it our hard-won freedom,” DTEK said.
The Kharkiv region in the north-east has been hard hit again after its power plants suffered major damage in late March.
The mayor there described the situation as “very difficult” and announced more blackouts for households and businesses.
For a time on Thursday, the Kharkiv metro stopped running to save power. It has since resumed, but the power supply is dipping and surging so the trains are only working very intermittently.
President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that Russia had been “obliged to respond” to the strikes on Ukrainian energy sites following Kyiv’s attacks on Russian targets, although this is a war he launched without cause two years ago.
“Unfortunately, we observed a series of strikes on our energy sites recently and were obliged to respond,” he said.
“I want to emphasise that, even for humanitarian reasons, we did not carry out any strikes in winter. What I mean is that we didn’t want to leave social institutions without power – hospitals and the like. But after a series of attacks on our power facilities, we had to respond.”
“Strikes on energy”, he added, were part of Russia’s aim of “demilitarising” Ukraine – one of his stated goals when the invasion began in February 2022.
In a separate development, four people died and several more were injured in the southern city of Mykolaiv in a rare series of daytime strikes on Thursday.
The Ukrainian Southern Military Command said on Telegram that private houses, cars and industrial facilities were damaged in the “insidious” attack.
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