EU To Spend Quarter Of Budget On Climate Policies
Not A Lot Of People Know That | April 30, 2018
Bear in mind this is only the tip of the iceberg, as individual countries are already standing the major costs themselves of climate policy.
The EU Budget is about 150bn euro pa. If anything shows how fatuous the whole EU project is, this must be it:
Climate-Linked Spending Set to Rise to a Quarter of EU Budget
Bloomberg | April 30, 2018
- European Commission to present 2021-2027 budget proposal May 2
- Climate to be component of regional aid, transport spending
The European Union’s executive is poised to propose spending 25 percent of funds available in next EU multiannual budget on activities related to climate protection, making sure new economic and political challenges don’t weaken the bloc’s resolve to fight pollution.
The European Commission’s blueprint for the 2021-2027 budget, to be proposed on May 2, will boost the so-called climate mainstreaming from 20 percent in the current multiannual financial plan, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. The funds for reducing emissions and adapting to climate change will be earmarked under policies such as regional aid, transport, research and external relations, said the person, who asked not to be identified because talks on the draft budget are private.
Israel revokes residency of 4 Jerusalemite officials
Palestine Information Center – April 30, 2018
OCCUPIED JERUSALEM – Palestinian human rights sources said that Israel decided on Sunday to strip four Jerusalemite officials of their permanent residency under the pretext of not being loyal to Israel.
Lawyer Fadi al-Qawasmi said that Israel’s Interior Minister Aryeh Deri decided to revoke the residency of MPs Mohammed Abu Tir, Ahmad Attoun, and Mohammed Toutah as well as former Minister of Jerusalem Affairs Khaled Abu Arafa.
Al-Qawasmi said in press statements that the decision came after the Knesset approved a new bill earlier in March that allows the Interior Minister to strip any Jerusalemite of his residency rights if he is involved in “terrorism” or “anti-Israel acts”.
According to al-Qawasmi, the Israeli Supreme Court in mid-September 2017 overturned a decision to revoke the residency of the Jerusalemite MPs. However, it decided to give the Israeli government a time limit to enact a law that gives the Interior Ministry the authority to strip any Jerusalemite of his residency.
The Palestinian lawyer described the bill as “unfair” and “illegal”, saying that it was applied retroactively. He affirmed that he will return to Israeli courts to oppose the decision.
The Palestinians in East Jerusalem and the Druze in the Syrian Golan Heights are considered residents not citizens by the Israeli authorities. Revoking their residency, according to the new bill, means expelling them permanently from these territories.
In 2006 the Israeli authorities confiscated the ID cards of the four Jerusalemite MPs after arresting them following their participation in a protest in Occupied Jerusalem. They spent several months in Israeli jails before they were deported to the West Bank.
Korean “peace pipeline” gains traction
By M K Bhadrakumar | Indian Punchline | April 30, 2018
The two “peace pipelines” – one carrying Iranian natural gas via Pakistan to India and a second transporting Russian gas via North Korea to South Korea – surfaced as tantalizing ideas roughly a decade ago. They were promptly lampooned as “pipedreams”. But the Russia-DPRK-ROK pipeline (RDR) is having the last laugh on its detractors, thanks to the “thaw” on the Korean Peninsula.
The South Korean President Moon Jae-in telephoned Russian President Vladimir Putin on Sunday to personally brief him on the outcome of the inter-Korean summit in Panmunjom last Friday. The Russian readout says that during the conversation, Putin “reaffirmed Russia’s readiness to continue facilitating practical cooperation between the Republic of Korea and the DPRK, including through major trilateral projects in infrastructure and energy.”
The South Korean media reported that Putin “stressed the need to take advantage of the success of the inter-Korean summit to launch economic cooperation projects between the two Koreas and Russia” and flagged, in particular, that “connecting railways, gas pipelines, and electric power transmission between Russia and the Korean Peninsula via Siberia will contribute to the stability and prosperity of the Korean Peninsula.”
Earlier, in a statement in Moscow on Friday, Russian Foreign Ministry had welcomed the Panmunjom summit as “a significant step by Seoul and Pyongyang to national reconciliation and the establishment of strong relationships of independent value.” The statement said, “We are ready to facilitate the establishment of practical cooperation between the DPRK and the Republic of Korea, including through the development of tripartite cooperation in the railway, electricity, gas and other industries.”
Moon understands that Russia is uniquely placed to provide underpinning for inter-Korean reconciliation in practical terms. A Russian rail-cum-pipeline transiting North Korea toward South Korea is a “win-win” project. Russia is a gas superpower, while the two Koreas are dependent on energy imports.
A RDR gas pipeline was discussed in 2011 during a rare visit by then North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il to Russia with then President Dmitry Medvedev at a summit in Ulan-Ude near Lake Baikal in Siberia. They reportedly discussed a pipeline that will send natural gas from Sakhalin Island to South Korea. Russia had previously discussed this idea during a summit at Moscow between the then South Korean President Lee Myung-bak and Medvedev in 2008.
Seoul can expect huge economic benefits as it would receive gas from Russia on a cheap and stable basis. Gas accounts for one-seventh of its energy consumption. The project held the potential to bring North Korea at least $100 million annually as transit fee alone, apart from giving access to much-needed access to energy at a cheap price. Besides, of course, the RDR would help stabilize the inter-Korean ties.
The fly in the ointment is going to be the United States. Simply put, RDR may fuel regional integration, which can hurt US interests. It remains to be seen how the US can stop the RDR except by undermining the dynamics of the Korean reconciliation. But Moon is a leftist politician and taps into the deep yearning for Korean reconciliation among the South Korean people. Moon is tactful and is making it look as if Donald Trump’s “maximum pressure” approach is working, while in reality pushing his normalization plans vis-à-vis North Korea.
When Moon met Putin in September last year on the sidelines of the Eastern Economic Forum at Vladivostok, there was discussion on South Korean investment in the development of Siberia and Russian Far East. A month ago, South Korean Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha said that the normalization of the North Korean crisis might pave the way for resuming the project involving the construction of a gas pipeline that would connect Russia and the two Koreas. During Sunday’s conversation, Putin invited Moon to visit Russia during the FIFA World Cup in June-July. South Koreans are crazy about football.
From the Russian perspective, RDR’s main attraction lies in the potential for integration of the South Korean and Russian economies. (A parallel Trans-Korean Railway project is expected to be connected to Russia’s Trans-Siberian Railway.) Quite obviously, Russia gains significant advantages through a privileged transportation link to the LNG market in the Asia-Pacific. Thus, Moscow favorably views Moon’s Trustpolitik, whose logical progression could open the door to Korean unification, elimination of nuclear weapons on the Korean Peninsula and reducing the prospect of a US-led war on Russian borders. Looking ahead, South Korean society is already divided on the presence of the US military. South Korea demonstrates greater foreign policy autonomy than Japan – and is less devoted to the rivalry between the US and China than Japan. South Korea refused to yield to US pressure to apply sanctions against Russia.
The UK Government’s Skripal Conspiracy Theory – or The Art of Holding a Mass of Contradictory Thoughts in Your Head
By Rob Slane – TheBlogMire – April 30, 2018
The Official Narrative on the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal is a collection of illogical claims and assertions that cannot be made to fit together, that make no rational sense, and which would require us to hold a mass of contradictory thoughts in our head if we were to accept it. It is in short a conspiracy theory, and a particularly bad one at that.
As I have pointed out before, I am not attempting to counter this conspiracy theory with one of my own. I make no claims to know what happened in the Skripal incident. I am merely stating that the story that the UK Government and media have so far asked the public to believe cannot be true, since it is full of discrepancies and claims that are impossible to reconcile with the known facts.
They are, of course, welcome at any time to show how those contradictions and improbable assertions can be reconciled, but until such time as they advance a compelling and coherent explanation, rational and objective observers shall just have to assume that these contradictions exist for a reason – namely that the official narrative of what happened in the Skripal case is not in fact what really happened in the Skripal case.
So what exactly are those contradictory elements and improbable assertions in the Official Narrative, which place it firmly in the territory of a Very Bad Conspiracy Theory? There are many, but below are 10 of the most obvious:
1. A lethal nerve agent followed by a drink and a meal
The Official Narrative requires you to believe not only that Sergei and Yulia Skripal were poisoned by the military grade nerve agent A-234, a substance which is said to be 5-8 ten times the toxicity of VX nerve agent (which itself has a median lethal dose of 10mg), and the effects of which are said to take place within 30 seconds to two minutes.
… But also that after coming into contact with this substance, they then spent the next four hours wining and dining in the City of Salisbury.
2. A deadly nerve agent without antidote, but where everyone is fine
The Official Narrative requires you not only to believe that Mr and Miss Skripal were poisoned by a deadly nerve agent with no known antidote (according to Gary Aitkenhead, Chief Executive of Porton Down), and for which treatment is “practically impossible”, according to The Handbook of Toxicology of Chemical Warfare Agents.
… But also that just a few weeks later, both were fine and one of them at least was fit to be discharged from hospital.
3. Symptoms that don’t match those produced by the substance allegedly used
The Official Narrative requires you to believe that the Skripals were poisoned by a substance which produces the following symptoms:
“Acetylcholine concentrations then increase at neuromuscular junctions to cause involuntary contraction of all skeletal muscles. This then leads to respiratory and cardiac arrest (as the victim’s heart and diaphragm muscles no longer function normally) and finally death from heart failure or suffocation as copious fluid secretions fill the victim’s lungs.”
… Yet according to witnesses at the bench in The Maltings, Mr Skripal was making “strange hand movements”, “looking up to the sky” and “looking out of it” – symptoms which strongly suggest poisoning by a hallucinogenic, such as BZ or Fentanyl, and not A-234, which tends to produce death, rather than hallucinations.
4. That Salisbury District Hospital mistook the symptoms of military grade nerve agent for opioid poisoning
The Official Narrative requires you to believe that the Skripals were the victims of poisoning by a lethal nerve agent, which produces the symptoms mentioned above, including “involuntary contraction of all skeletal muscles”, “respiratory and cardiac arrest” and “finally death from heart failure or suffocation.”
… Yet it also requires you to believe that Salisbury District Hospital completely mistook the symptoms of nerve agent poisoning for opioid poisoning — even though the symptoms are very different — since on the following day a press release was issued stating that they were treating the pair for exposure to Fentanyl:
(This, by the way, is extremely interesting. The screen shot above is the original report on the website of Clinical Services Journal, and it can now be found on the website, web.archive.org. The original piece, however, has since been updated on the Clinical Services Journal, not with a correction, but with the reference to Fentanyl being removed altogether (compare here with here h/t Dilyana Gaytandzhiev)
5. A lethal nerve agent that can be dealt with by water and baby wipes
The Official Narrative requires you not only to believe that the substance which poisoned the Skripals is so deadly that Mr Skripal’s house may need to be demolished and a multi-million pound clean-up of Salisbury with chaps in HazMats a necessity.
…But that the same substance can be treated with warm water, soap and baby wipes, as evidenced by the advice given by Public Health England (PHE) a week after the incident, to anyone who may have come into contact with it:
“Wash the clothing that you were wearing in an ordinary washing machine using your regular detergent at the temperature recommended for the clothing. Wipe personal items such as phones, handbags and other electronic items with cleansing or baby wipes and dispose of the wipes in the bin (ordinary domestic waste disposal)… Other items such as jewellery and spectacles which cannot go in the washing machine or be cleaned with cleansing or baby wipes, should be hand washed with warm water and detergent and then rinsed with clean cold water. Please thoroughly wash your hands with soap and water after cleaning any items.”
6. The nerve agent went undetected on a door handle for weeks
The Official Narrative requires you not only to believe that the assassins poured “military grade nerve agent”, in liquid form, on the handle of Mr Skripal’s front door, and that the British Government had possession of an FSB “assassin’s handbook” detailing this procedure.
… But that despite apparently having this handbook, the door handle theory was only mentioned more than three weeks after the incident, during which time many people (such as the unsuspecting policewoman at the top of this piece), came within a few feet of a door apparently smeared with lethal nerve agent, with no protective clothing, and suffered no ill effects.
7. The highly volatile nerve agent that was still highly pure weeks later
The Official Narrative requires you not only to believe that the substance examined in blood and environmental samples by the OPCW, weeks after the incident was:
“…of high purity. The latter is concluded from the almost complete absence of impurities.”
… But also that the substance used is known to be both unstable and vulnerable to water – and Salisbury definitely had plenteous rain and even snow between the incident and the coming of the OPCW!
8. That the substance used is proof of Russian state culpability
The Official Narrative requires you to believe that because the substance allegedly used was first developed in Russia (actually Soviet Union), there are only two explanations for the poisoning:
- It was an act of the Russian state
- That the Russian state lost control of its stocks
… Yet it requires you to believe this in the full knowledge that not only have other countries produced it (the United States has been patenting “Novichok” products for years; Iran produced it in 2016; and the United Kingdom possesses samples of it), but according to the chairman of the OPCW, Ahmet Uzumcu, A-234 could be produced:
“…in any country where there would be some chemical expertise.”
9. That the movements of Detective Sergeant Bailey on 4th March cannot be officially confirmed
The Official Narrative requires you to believe not only that Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey, who is a member of Wiltshire Criminal Intelligence Department (CID), was poisoned with the same substance as the Skripals.
…But that his movements cannot be established, since it has still not been officially confirmed whether he was at the bench in The Maltings or at Mr Skripal’s house (and in point of fact, either scenario is remarkably odd, since D.S. Bailey is a member of CID, and there was no suggestion until at least 24 hours after the incident that a crime may have been committed).
10. The cleansing of Salisbury hotspots, but not all Salisbury hotspots
The Official Narrative requires you to believe not only that there are parts of Salisbury that may be contaminated with a lethal substance, and that this will require a clean up operation involving thousands of man hours, costing millions, and taking months to complete.
…But that some of these areas were no danger to the public for a month-and-a-half, when they were cordoned off with nothing more than police tape. In addition, some of the areas that the Skripals were known to have walked down after apparently coming into contact with the substance, such as the Market Walk, have been free to the public to walk through since the start of the incident and remain completely open (I know this personally, because as a Salisbury resident, I have walked through the Market Walk in the last few days).
* * *
Put all these things together — and this is not to even mention the current condition and whereabouts of the Skripals — and what you have is a theory in which claims are flatly contradicted by basic facts, many so-called facts are simply not facts at all, and assertions are made without any recourse to the reality on the ground. It is abundantly clear that the Official Narrative not only did not happen; it cannot have happened. As things stand it is “highly likely” that what we have been told is a conspiracy theory of “high purity”, “of a type developed by Whitehall.”