Association of Tennis Professionals to take action against Wimbledon over Russian ban
Samizdat | May 11, 2022
Wimbledon is likely to be stripped of its rankings points by the ATP men’s tennis tour after a number of leading players condemned the tournament for its ban on Russian and Belarusian players, according to reports.
The decision could be ratified by the ATP board within the next 24 to 48 hours, according to The Telegraph, which reports that chief executive Andrea Gaudenzi “has little choice” but to follow the advice of players on the issue.
The decision would see Wimbledon deprived of its rankings points and would effectively turn this year’s event into an exhibition tournament.
The move has been on the cards since the ATP strongly condemned the announcement on April 20 by the All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC), which organizes the grass court showpiece, that it was banning Russian and Belarusian players because of the conflict in Ukraine.
The decision was mirrored by the UK Lawn Tennis Association (LTA), which will bar players from the two countries from all events in Britain this summer.
UK tennis officials have attempted to justify the ban by saying it is in line with government policy, and that the appearance of stars such as Russian men’s world number two Daniil Medvedev would somehow hand the Russian leadership a propaganda coup.
Both the men’s ATP and women’s WTA tours have suggested that the ban is discriminatory. The two tours have continued to allow Russian and Belarusian players to compete as neutrals – a position shared by the International Tennis Federation (ITF).
Men’s world number one Novak Djokovic has described the Wimbledon sanctions as “crazy,” while 21-time Grand Slam winner Rafael Nadal also said he disagrees with the step. British two-time Wimbledon winner Andy Murray has said is “not supportive” of the ban.
The ATP Player Council includes Nadal, Murray and Swiss icon Roger Federer, as well as nine other men’s stars. Djokovic is part of a separate, independent union.
Players will have an important say in the matter, with three elected player representatives on the ATP board as well as three tournament representatives.
The Daily Mail has reported that a “revolt is brewing” over the issue and that meetings of the ATP hierarchy have been held recently at events in Madrid and Rome.
According to The Telegraph, the women’s WTA “is leaning towards” taking the same step as its male counterpart and is also set to remove rankings points from Wimbledon.
The London Grand Slam – with its mammoth £35 million ($43 million) prize money fund – will still be a major money-spinner for players but will not contribute towards their positions in the world rankings or the race to the end-of-season tour finals.
As a private members’ club, Wimbledon is free to decide which players it invites to the famous tournament at SW19.
Other UK events, however, are held under the auspices of the ATP and WTA and would likely be fined for their non-admittance of Russian and Belarusian players, as well as having rankings points removed.
Aside from US Open champion Medvedev, other big-name stars to be affected by the ban are Russian men’s world number seven Andrey Rublev, Belarusian women’s world number eight Aryna Sabalenka, and two-time Grand Slam winner Victoria Azarenka.
The French Open, which gets underway on May 22, has stated it will not follow in Wimbledon’s footsteps and will allow Russian and Belarusian players to appear as neutrals.
Increased deaths in England for the age-range given the spring booster dose of Covid vaccine
Bartram’s Folly | May 5, 2022
I’ve mentioned previously that the roll out of a dose of vaccine has been associated with an increase in excess deaths (eg, here), and we seem to have seen the same effect in March.
At around the 21st March (week 12) England started to roll out the spring booster doses for those aged over 75 (and other vulnerable individuals). By the 7th April (week 14) the NHS had congratulated itself with the announcement that over 1 million doses had been given.
Here’s the data (from Euromomo) for excess deaths in England for those aged 75-85 since the start of the year:
I’ve highlighted the period where the million booster doses were delivered.
I note that we managed to get through the Omicron wave in the UK with normal levels of excess deaths in those aged 75-85, but as soon as the booster doses were rolled out we rapidly hit the threshold for a ‘substantial increase’.
Of course, it might be a coincidence — we have had rather a lot of coincidences over the last 15 months.
UK pledges more military aid for Ukraine
Samizdat | May 8, 2022
The UK pledged a further £1.3 billion ($1.6 billion) in military support and aid to Ukraine on Saturday. London said the move nearly doubles London’s previous spending commitments to Kiev, and is the country’s highest rate of spending on a conflict since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The extra money will come from a reserve used by the government for emergencies. Like other NATO member states, the UK has been increasingly supplying Kiev with weapons, including anti-tank and anti-aircraft missile systems and armored vehicles.
This week, London said it was sending 13 armored vehicles to Ukrainian police and the National Guard. The UK government has also been delivering tanks to Poland in order to replace those Warsaw has donated to Kiev.
Similarly, the US pledged an additional $150 million in military assistance to Ukraine on Friday. The package includes 25,000 155mm artillery rounds, as well as radars and electronic jamming equipment.
Russia has repeatedly criticized the West for “flooding” Ukraine with weapons, and warned in April that foreign arms become legitimate targets once they reach Ukrainian soil.
Is the West at war with disinformation or dissent?
By Rachel Marsden | Samizdat | May 5, 2022
When US President Joe Biden announced on April 27 that a new Disinformation Governance Board would serve the Department of Homeland Security, it was just the latest turn of the screw on freedom. This time, it’s an affront to citizens’ right to a diversity of information.
It’s one thing to correct inaccurate information, but this new entity seems more oriented towards narrative-policing that cracks down on the interpretation of information rather than the accuracy of it. Headed by a former communications advisor to the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry, Nina Jankowicz, one of the board’s first responsibilities will be to address “disinformation coming from Russia as well as misleading messages about the US-Mexico border,” according to CBS News. Interesting that these two issues – immigration and foreign conflicts – are currently viewed as two of Washington’s most significant failures, which have given rise to populist dissent. Make no mistake, it’s the dissent that’s the ultimate target.
The fact that a former Ukraine government spin doctor was viewed as the best person to head up the new initiative tells you everything you need to know about its true purpose. Jankowicz published a book in 2020 whose title suggests that she believes the West to be in an online war with Russia. ‘How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News, and the Future of Conflict,’ portrays Western narratives as truthful and Russian narratives as “fake news.” Doing so obscures the fact that the mainstream Western media has not been immune to propagating narratives peddled by the state that could retroactively be considered fake news or war propaganda. Meanwhile, Russian media has often provided a platform for those seeking to express – or access – dissenting analysis or information that falls outside of the Western media bubble. Clearly, there are some ‘democracies’ that are bothered by this.
The appetite of Western nations to ensure that their citizens are only fed information that they control through their own highly concentrated government or corporate subsidized media isn’t new. It’s just getting more voracious. Perhaps it’s because the more authoritarian their agenda becomes, the more populist sentiment increases and gives rise to events such as Brexit or the election of Donald Trump, as well as trends such as opposition to US-backed conflicts, the rise in popularity of various populist political parties in Europe, and demonstrations against pandemic mandates, which just happen to be associated with government-issued QR codes.
Dissent is the enemy of authoritarian ambition. Supposedly free countries have manipulated their citizens into believing that censorship of certain views is for people’s own safety and security – hence why the military in Canada, the UK, and France, and now Homeland Security in the US, are involved in narrative policing. In reality, their efforts seem to be more about ensuring citizens’ compliance with their own agenda.
The fusion of domestic security and disinformation came to light as early as 2016, when the European Parliament grotesquely conflated Islamic terrorist propaganda with Russian media, in what seemed to be itself a propaganda effort to undermine the Russian media by equating these two totally unrelated things. But one by one, Western governments have placed free speech under national security control.
France, for example, handed off responsibility for online information arbitration to its domestic intelligence agency (the DGSI) and has reportedly considered involving defense-funded startups in the effort.
Canada has also turned to its security apparatus to shape Canadians’ information landscape – at least twice. The Communications Security Establishment, the country’s electronic spying agency, has been tweeting its own interpretations of disputed events occurring in the fog of the conflict in Ukraine as indisputable fact, while routinely denouncing Russia’s interpretation as invalid.
But Canada’s security establishment isn’t at its first rodeo in attempting to prevent citizens’ thinking from deviating from the state’s messaging. Under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the country’s armed forces deployed a months-long, military-grade propaganda campaign, which employed tactics honed during the war in Afghanistan, to mind-bend unsuspecting Canadians towards Trudeau’s Covid narrative, CBC News reported last year.
Not to be outdone, the psychological warfare specialists of the 77th brigade of Britain’s armed forces have also worked to shape messaging both in favor of the government’s Covid policies and against anything contrary out of Russia. “One current priority is combating the spread of harmful, false and misleading narratives through disinformation. To bolster this effort, the British Army will be deploying two experts in countering disinformation. They will advise and support NATO in ensuring its citizens have the right information to protect themselves and its democracies are protected from malicious disinformation operations used by adversaries,” Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said last year.
The fact that public safety and disinformation have suddenly become routinely conflated should be worrisome to defenders of whatever remnants of democracy that we still have left. Terrorism, health and now disinformation have all served as pretexts for the rapid erosion of our freedoms – all under the guise of protecting us from bad actors. But are we really safer? Or are we just increasingly less free?
DON’T VOTE “#GREATRESET”
By Olly Connelly | Daily Chaos | May 5, 2022
It’s local election day in the UK and, as you’ll be aware, elections are underway also in France and in the US.
Local, constituency or national level, if you vote for someone who is not talking about defeating the #GreatReset, then you are voting for Klaus Schwab, you are voting “to own nothing”, for communism directed by fascists, you are voting for tyranny, for censorship, for more fake pandemics and more fraudulent war, you are voting for divide-rule on an epic scale that is destroying families, communities and societies from within despite the farcical topics such as “how to define a woman” for crying out loud, you are voting for the normalisation of Satanism and paedophilia as can increasingly be seen in Biden’s America, you are voting for genocidal war criminals like Tony Blair to never be brought to account while being BBC-platformed to lecture you on using experimental drugs on your innocent children, you are voting to condone yet more phony elections, for Martial law in Western societies as we saw in Ottawa, for the hundreds of thousands in death toll in places like Yemen while the globalists distract with Ukraine, you are voting for CCP-style oppression and their model social credit score to keep you in check, you are voting for the last of our liberty ie an end to cash, for Google’s bloodstream nanobots and Musk’s brain chip, for Gates’ quaxxines and the final cull of the Mama-Papas defeated by the Bezos drones.
DON’T VOTE FOR SLAVERY.
Don’t vote for the Great Reset. DON’T VOTE FOR ANYONE WHO IS NOT ACTIVELY WARNING AGAINST THE GREAT RESET, THEY ARE A FRAUD, A DECEIT…
… At this stage in the game, I tell you, ANYONE in politics or journalism who is not warning of the dangers of the Great Reset is somewhere between fraudulent and downright evil.
If in doubt, if in any doubt, do not vote. In most cases this is almost certainly the best option, to help de-power the them-us elitism, to deny a mandate and to create a window to be able to say, “WE DID NOT ELECT YOU.”
We should have seen, by now, the vile outcome by supporting cheats and liars. We should have seen that voting for the lesser of the evils DOES NOT HELP. Do not make things worse by voting yet again for PROVEN cheats and liars.
Do not mindlessly vote. And yes, at this stage in the game where practically everyone on the global stage is either bought or blackmailed, A VOTE “NOT TO VOTE”, an abstention from the Big Lie, is in no way dishonourable. A vote for more of what we have in power now, on the other hand, is downright moronic.
Here’s to us, and bugger plutocracy!
UK intensifies crackdown against Russian media
Samizdat | May 4, 2022
The UK is forcing social media, internet service providers and app stores to block content from state-sponsored Russian media outlets – RT and Sputnik news agency. “For too long RT and Sputnik have churned out dangerous nonsense dressed up as serious news to justify Putin’s invasion of Ukraine,” Tech and Digital Economy Minister Chris Philp said on Wednesday.
“These outlets have already been booted off the airwaves in Britain and we’ve barred anyone from doing business with them. Now we’ve moved to pull the plug on their websites, social media accounts and apps to further stop the spread of their lies.”
In March, Britain’s media regulator, Ofcom, revoked RT’s broadcasting license. The EU decided to ban RT from broadcasting the same month. RT Deputy Editor-in-Chief Anna Belkina said at the time that Ofcom revoked the license for “purely political reasons tied directly to the situation in Ukraine.” She said that the regulator “falsely judged RT to not be ‘fit and proper’ and in doing so robbed the UK public of access to information.”
The UK also blacklisted the All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company (VGTRK), which operates Russia-1 and Russia-24 TV channels, among others. The UK government’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) accused the broadcaster of playing “a key role in justifying Putin’s aggression against Ukraine.”
Sanctions were also imposed on InfoRos and the SouthFront news websites. The FCDO accused them of spreading “destabilizing disinformation.”
As Vaccine Demand Collapses, U.K. Faces £4 Billion of Waste, With 80% of its 650 Million Dose Stockpile Unused
By Nick Bowler | The Daily Sceptic | May 4, 2022
The U.K. has used just 142 million of the stockpile of 650 million vaccine doses it purchased, leaving an estimated £4 billion worth of vaccines unused and, at current levels of take-up, likely going to waste. The vaccines typically have an expiration date of six to 12 months after manufacture – though it’s not clear how many of the 650 million doses have already been manufactured and put in storage and how many are on order for future manufacture and delivery.
Officials have not revealed exactly how much was paid for the Pfizer vaccines, which comprise nearly a third of the total ordered, but the U.S. Government is reputed to have paid around $20 (£16) a dose.
The Moderna vaccine is said to have cost a bit less, perhaps about $15 (£12) per dose, and the Astra Zeneca considerably less, perhaps as low as $4 (£3) per dose as it was sold at cost. There are no data on the other five types ordered, all of which are as yet completely unused.
If an average price of $10 (£8) per dose is assumed, the total bill for all the unused vaccine doses will amount to around $5 billion or £4 billion. Will the public be forgiving of this massive waste of public funds on account of it occurring with good intentions during a state of emergency? That remains to be seen.
It is however far from the only example of pandemic profligacy. The losses due to fraud and delinquent business loans are colossal, with City AM reporting that the Treasury’s £4.3bn fraud write-off is likely to be eclipsed by £20bn of Covid loan defaults. The Government has also written off £8.7bn it spent on protective equipment bought during the pandemic, with £673m of equipment unusable, £750m not used before its expiry date, £2.6bn of equipment judged to be unsuitable for use in the NHS, and £4.7bn being due to the Government paying more for it during the acute global shortage than it is now worth. The Government also spent £569m buying 20,900 ventilators, of which only 2,150 (10%) were used, the rest being left idle in a Ministry of Defence warehouse.
This gross misuse of taxpayers’ money must be examined in the independent inquiry and by Government so the lessons can be learned and in future a robust management system applied in real time so that even stocks purchased in haste and with urgency are kept in reasonable proportion to anticipated demand.
The over-reaction and panic in spring 2020 resulted in decisions that have now turned out to be a huge waste of public money. If there was perceived to be a shortage of anything that might conceivably be needed to fulfil the needs of the public emergency, the public purse was always open.
Actually, the purse appeared to be treated more like Mary Poppins’ bottomless magic carpet bag, with no sign of any prudent oversight applied to funding decisions as long as they served the purpose of proving to the public that the Government was ‘doing something’ about Covid. The results of that fiscal incontinence are now clear for all to see.
Yes, TCW is being censored
TCW Defending Freedom | May 3, 2022
AFTER many reports over the weekend that the site was not working for some users, we have established that we are being blocked by the adult content filter on the Internet Service Provider (ISP) Three.
Affected users get the message above, which does not make it clear that the site is being censored, but gives an erroneous message about the SSL certificate. This makes it look like a misconfiguration on our part, but this is not the case.
We have contacted Three to enquire exactly why TCW has been added to their adult content filter.
Three use the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) guidelines, which you can find here.
TCW can appeal to BBFC to be unblocked by Three, and you can be sure that we are following this process. We have also registered the censorship with the Open Rights Group’s Blocked! website.
In the meantime, Three users may wish to reconsider their choice of ISP. Customers of Three can request that the adult filter be turned off by contacting customer services. A non-censoring ISP would be a good idea too – we can recommend Andrews and Arnold. A good VPN (Virtual Private Network) might be an idea too, if you would prefer that your ISP does not control the content you are able to access online. IVPN are great.
We will be tweeting @ThreeUKsupport and @ThreeUK to see what they have to say. It would be helpful if some of our readers could do this too.
If this can happen to TCW, it can happen to any site on the internet. Resist online censorship, for that is what this is.
Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov interview with Xinhua News Agency
Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs | April 30, 2022
Question: What do you think is at the root of the Ukrainian crisis? What can the international community do to solve this problem?
Sergey Lavrov: When we talk about the Ukrainian crisis, first of all we need to look at the destructive policy of the Western states conducted over many years and led by the United States, which set a course to knock together a unipolar world order after the end of the Cold War. NATO’s reckless expansion to the East was a key component of those actions, despite the political obligations to the Soviet leadership on the non-expansion of the Alliance. As you know, those promises were just empty words. All these years, NATO infrastructure has been moving closer and closer to the Russian borders.
The West was never concerned about the fact that their actions grossly violated their international obligations not to strengthen their own security at the expense of the security of others. In particular, Washington and Brussels arrogantly rejected the initiatives put forward by Russia in December 2021 to ensure our country’s security guarantees in the west: to stop the expansion of NATO, not to deploy armaments that pose a threat to Russia in Ukraine and to return the Alliance’s military infrastructure to the 1997 configuration, when the NATO-Russia Founding Act was signed.
It is well-known that the United States and NATO member states have always viewed Ukraine as a tool to contain Russia. Over the years, they have actively fuelled anti-Russia sentiments there, forcing Kiev to make an artificial and false choice: to be either with the West or with Moscow.
It was the collective West that first provoked and then supported the anti-constitutional coup d’etat in Kiev in February 2014. Nationalists came to power in Ukraine and immediately unleashed a bloody massacre in Donbass, and set the course on the destruction of everything Russian in the rest of the country. Let me remind you that it was precisely because of this threat that the people of Crimea voted in a referendum for the reunification with Russia in 2014.
Over these past years, the United States and its allies have done nothing to stop the intra-Ukrainian conflict. Instead of encouraging Kiev to settle it politically based on the Minsk Complex of Measures, they sent weapons, trained and armed the Ukrainian army and nationalist battalions, and generally carried out the military-political development of Ukraine’s territory. They encouraged the aggressive anti-Russia course pursued by the Kiev authorities. In fact, they pushed the Ukrainian nationalists to undermine the negotiating process and resolve the Donbass issue by force.
We were deeply concerned about the undeclared biological programmes implemented in Ukraine with Pentagon’s support in close proximity to the Russian borders. And, of course, we could not disregard the Kiev leadership’s undisguised intentions to acquire a military nuclear potential, which would create an unacceptable threat to Russia’s national security.
In these conditions, we had no other choice but to recognise the Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics and launch the special military operation. Its aim is to protect people from genocide by the neo-Nazis, as well as to demilitarise and denazify Ukraine. I would like to stress that Russia is acting to fulfil its obligations under bilateral agreements on cooperation and mutual assistance with the DPR and LPR, at the official request of Donetsk and Lugansk under Article 51 of the UN Charter on the right to self-defence.
The special military operation launched on February 24 is progressing strictly in accordance with the plan. All its goals will be achieved in spite of our opponents’ counteractions. At the moment we are witnessing a classic case of double standards and hypocrisy of the Western establishment. By publicly supporting the Kiev regime, NATO member states are doing everything in their power to prevent the completion of the operation by reaching political agreements. Various weapons are flowing endlessly into Ukraine through Poland and other NATO countries. All of this is being done under the pretext of “fighting the invasion”, but in fact the United States and the European Union intend to fight Russia “to the last Ukrainian.” They do not care at all about the fate of Ukraine as an independent subject of international relations.
The West is ready to jeopardise the energy and food security of entire regions of the globe to satisfy its own geopolitical ambitions. What other explanation is there for the unrestrained flywheel of anti-Russian sanctions launched by the West with the start of the operation and which they aren’t thinking of stopping?
If the United States and NATO are truly interested in settling the Ukrainian crisis, then, first, they must come to their senses and stop supplying weapons and ammunition to Kiev. The Ukrainian people do not need Stingers and Javelins; what they need is a solution to urgent humanitarian issues. Russia has been doing this since 2014. During this time, tens of thousands of tonnes of humanitarian cargo have been delivered to Donbass, and about 15,000 tonnes of humanitarian aid have already arrived in the part of Ukraine liberated from the Kiev regime, the DPR and the LPR, since the launch of the special military operation.
Second, it is essential that the Kiev regime stops cynical provocations, including in the information space. Ukrainian armed formations are barbarically shelling cities using civilians as living shields. We saw examples of this in Donetsk and Kramatorsk. Captured Russian servicemen are being abused with animal cruelty, and these atrocities are being posted online. At the same time, they use their Western patrons and global media controlled by the West to accuse the Russian army of war crimes. As they say, laying the blame at somebody else’s door.
It is high time for the West to stop unconditionally whitewashing and covering up for Kiev. Otherwise, Washington, Brussels and other Western capitals should consider their responsibility for complicity in the bloody crimes perpetrated by the Ukrainian nationalists.
Question: What measures has Russia taken to protect the lives and property of civilians? What efforts has it made to establish humanitarian corridors?
Sergey Lavrov: As I mentioned earlier, the special military operation is proceeding according to plan. Under this plan, the Russian military personnel are doing everything in their power to avoid victims among civilians. Blows are carried out with high-precision weapons, first of all at military infrastructure facilities and places where armoured vehicles are concentrated. Unlike the Ukrainian army and nationalist armed groups that use people as living shields, the Russian army provides the locals with all kinds of assistance and support.
Humanitarian corridors open daily from Kharkov and Mariupol to evacuate people from dangerous districts, but the Kiev regime demands that the “national battalions” in control of those areas do not release the civilians. Nevertheless, many are able to leave with the assistance of Russian, DPR and LPR servicemen. During the special military operation, the hotline of the Interdepartmental Coordination Headquarters of the Russian Federation for Humanitarian Response in Ukraine has received requests for assistance in evacuating 2.8 million people to Russia, including 16,000 foreign citizens and employees of UN and OSCE international missions. In total, 1.02 million people have been evacuated from Ukraine, the DPR and LPR, of which over 120,000 are citizens of third countries, including over 300 Chinese nationals. There are over 9,500 temporary accommodation facilities operating in Russian regions. They have space for rest and hot meals, and everything that may be necessary. Newly arrived refugees are provided with qualified medical and psychological assistance.
Russia is taking measures to ensure civilian navigation in the Black and Azov seas. A humanitarian corridor opens daily, a safe lane for ships. However, Ukraine continues to block foreign ships, creating a threat of shelling in its internal waters and territorial sea. Moreover, Ukrainian naval units have mined the shore, the ports and territorial waters. These explosive devices disconnect from their anchor lines and drift into the open sea, so they pose a serious danger to both the fleets and the port infrastructure of the Black Sea countries.
Question: Since the special military operation was launched in Ukraine, Western counties have adopted a large number of unprecedented sanctions against Moscow. How do you think these sanctions will affect Russia? What are the main countermeasures taken by Russia? Some say that a new Cold War has begun. How would you comment on that?
Sergey Lavrov: It is true that the special military operation was used by the collective West as a pretext to unleash numerous restrictions against Russia, as well as its legal entities and individuals. The United States, Great Britain, Canada and EU countries do not conceal that their goal is to strangle our economy by undermining its competitiveness and blocking Russia’s progressive development. At the same time, the Western ruling circles are not embarrassed by the fact that anti-Russian sanctions are already beginning to harm ordinary people in their own countries. I mean the declining economic trends in the United States and many European countries, including growing inflation and unemployment.
It is clear that there can be no excuse for this anti-Russian line and it has no future. As President Vladimir Putin said, Russia has withstood this unprecedented pressure. Now the situation is stabilising, though, of course, not all risks are behind us.
In any case, they will not succeed in weakening us. I am confident that we will restructure the economy and protect ourselves from our opponents’ possible illegitimate and hostile actions in the future. We will continue to give a fitting and adequate response to the imposed restrictions, guided by the goal of maintaining the stability of the Russian economy and its financial system, as well as the interests of domestic businesses and the entire nation. We will focus our efforts on de-dollarisation, de-offshorisation, import substitution, and promotion of technological independence. We will continue to adapt to external challenges and step up development programmes for promising and competitive industries.
During the period of turbulence, our retaliatory special economic measures needed to ensure the normal functioning of the Russian economy will be continued and expanded. As a responsible player on the international market, Russia intends to continue scrupulously fulfilling its obligations under international contracts on export deliveries of agricultural products, fertilisers, energy carriers and other critical products. We are deeply concerned about a possible food crisis provoked by the anti-Russian sanctions, and we are well aware how important the deliveries of essential goods, such as food, are for the socioeconomic development of Asian, African, Latin American, and Middle Eastern countries.
I will be brief as regards the second part of your question. Today we are not talking about a new “cold war,” but, as I said earlier, about the persistent desire to impose a US-centric model of the world order coming from Washington and its satellites, who imagine themselves to be “arbiters of humankind’s fate.” It has reached the point where the Western minority is trying to replace the UN-centric architecture and international law formed after World War II with their own “rule-based order.” These rules are written by Washington and its allies and then imposed on the international community as binding.
We must realise that the United States has been carrying out this destructive policy for several decades now. It is enough to recall NATO’s aggression against Yugoslavia, attacks on Iraq and Libya, attempts to destroy Syria, as well as the colour revolutions that Western capitals staged in a number of countries, including Ukraine. All of this came at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives and resulted in chaos in various regions of the planet.
The West tries to crudely suppress those who carry out an independent course in their domestic and foreign policy. Not just Russia. We can see how bloc thinking is being imposed in the Asian-Pacific Region. We can recall the Indo-Pacific strategy promoted by the United States, which has a pronounced anti-China tendency. The US seeks to dictate the standards according to which Latin America should live, in the spirit of the outdated Monroe Doctrine. This explains many years of the illegal trade embargo on Cuba, sanctions against Venezuela, as well as attempts to undermine stability in Nicaragua and other countries. The pressure on Belarus continues in the same context. This list can go on.
It is clear that the collective West’s efforts to oppose the natural course of history and solve its problems at the expense of others are doomed. Today the world has several decision-making centres; it is multipolar. We can see how quickly Asian, African, and Latin American countries are developing. Everyone is getting a real freedom of choice, including where it comes to choosing their development models and participation in integration projects. Our special military operation in Ukraine also contributes to the process of freeing the world from the West’s neocolonial oppression heavily mixed with racism and a complex of exceptionalism.
The faster the West accepts the new geopolitical situation, the better it will be for the West itself and for the entire international community.
As President Xi Jinping said at the Boao Forum for Asia, “We need to uphold the principle of indivisible security, build a balanced, effective and sustainable security architecture, and oppose the pursuit of one’s own security at the cost of others’ security.”
Question: Russian-Ukrainian talks have attracted close attention of the international community. What are the main obstacles to the talks today? How do you regard the prospects of a peace treaty between the two parties? What kind of bilateral relations does Russia intend to have with Ukraine in the future?
Sergey Lavrov: At present the Russian and Ukrainian delegations are holding discussions on the possible draft almost daily, via videoconference. This document should contain such elements of the post-conflict situation as permanent neutrality, the non-nuclear, non-bloc and demilitarised status of Ukraine, as well as guarantees of its security. The agenda of the talks also includes denazification, recognition of the new geopolitical reality, the lifting of sanctions and the status of the Russian language, among other things. Settling the situation in Ukraine will make a significant contribution to the de-escalation of the military and political tensions in Europe and the world in general. The establishment of an institution of guarantor states is envisaged as a possible option. First of all, they will be the permanent members of the UN Security Council, including Russia and China. We share information on the progress in the talks with Chinese diplomats. We are grateful to Beijing and other BRICS partners for their balanced position on the Ukrainian issue.
We are in favour of continuing the talks, although the process is difficult.
You are right to ask about the obstacles. For example, they include the militant rhetoric and incendiary actions of Kiev’s Western patrons. They are actually encouraging Kiev to “fight to the last Ukrainian,” pumping the country with weapons and sending mercenaries there. Let me note that the Ukrainian security services staged a crude bloody provocation in Bucha with the help of the West, to complicate the negotiation process among other things.
I am confident that agreements can only be reached when Kiev starts to be guided by the interests of the Ukrainian people, and not the advisors from far away.
Speaking about Russian-Ukrainian relations, Russia is interested in a peaceful, free, neutral, prosperous and friendly Ukraine. Despite the current administration’s anti-Russian course, we remember the many centuries of all-embracing cultural, spiritual, economic and family ties between Russians and Ukrainians. We will definitely restore these ties.
Why Won’t They Say Who Funded These Ukraine Ads?
By Michael Tracey | May 2, 2022
On April 17, I was in London Bridge train station in central London, and couldn’t help but notice that the entire station was blanketed with these digital “Be Brave Like Ukraine” ads. Stylized in a nifty semi-Cyrillic font, the ads feature the classic blue and yellow color scheme that has now become so ubiquitous across “The West” — perhaps most prominently in London, where a local acquaintance told me she’s seen more Ukraine flags on display over the past two months than she ever saw of the UK’s own national flag.
I had a few natural questions upon seeing these ads. First, who crafted them? That answer came quickly: Just go to the “brave.ua” website and you’ll discover the ads were crafted by a consortium within the Ukraine government, including the office of Zelensky.
The answer to other natural questions have not come so quickly, though. Those questions include: Who paid for these ads? How much did they cost? Who organized their placement in some of the most expensive advertising real estate in the world? (They’ve also been displayed in Times Square, among other high-profile locations.)
Strangely, this information has proven difficult to acquire.
First I tried querying the TFL, the government body in charge of transport in London. They had no clue about the ads. Then I tried Network Rail, which runs most of the railways in England. They had no clue either. Finally I tried the massive global advertising agency which apparently owns the digital screens in question, JCDecaux. And… it initially seemed like they might have the answer. I know this because the “Corporate Communications Director” for JCDecaux inadvertently sent me an email where she deliberates with her colleague about how to answer my questions:
Kinda funny that the “Corporate Communications Director” still doesn’t have the hang of communications skills like sending your sensitive internal emails to the right recipient. Either way, this person did not in fact “come back to me tomorrow.” Days passed, and I heard nothing. Then, finally, here was the answer:
Curious, don’t you think? Why would a multinational advertising conglomerate based in France, with branches in the UK, US, and elsewhere, be so skittish about providing basic details about this Ukraine government advertising campaign? Shouldn’t they be proud of it, and therefore happy to provide the details? I thought the message of the ads was to “Be Brave Like Ukraine.” Apparently that “Bravery” doesn’t extend to allowing for transparency in the financial arrangements of these PR maneuvers, which have resulted in “Western” capitals being saturated with imagery that to the naked eye may seem benign — but, functionally, amounts to obvious pro-war propaganda.
Because bear in mind that these government-crafted ads have flooded London, NYC, Washington DC, etc. at the same time as Ukraine officials are furiously lobbying the UK and US governments to ramp up their military involvement in the war. Those lobbying efforts have been incredibly successful, with Respectable Mainstream outfits like The New Yorker finally now admitting that the scale of the US commitment constitutes “a full proxy war with Russia.” (Not so long ago, I was attacked as a peddler of “Putin’s talking points” for using the term “proxy war” on TV.)
It went largely unremarked upon when the head of the Pentagon, flanked by the head of the State Department, transited into Kiev for a secret mission on April 25 — and then hours later, a series of giant explosions ripped through a Russian military logistics hub approximately 90 miles inside Russia. This after US officials began leaking that they would no longer even pretend to recognize any distinction between “defensive” and “offensive” combat operations conducted by the Ukraine military — effectively acknowledging their willingness to provide both weaponry and real-time intelligence to launch attacks on Russia itself.
In the UK, the Armed Services Secretary, James Heappey, followed this up by declaring that it would be “entirely legitimate” for arms delivered by “Western countries” to be used for offensive strikes within Russian territory. Foreign Secretary Liz Truss then went further than even any US official when she declared that total “victory” in Ukraine must also include driving Russia out of Crimea, raising the stakes higher still.
With each passing week, both these countries adopt a more and more aggressive, bombastic war footing.
Meanwhile, the nice-seeming “Be Brave Like Ukraine” ads are covering major transportation centers. It doesn’t take much elaborate dot-connecting to apprehend that the ads are one facet of the larger PR campaign to draw the US, UK, and other governments further and further into the war. This campaign has been demonstrably effective. And the ad agency which facilitated the ads is choosing to conceal from the public basic details about their provenance — such as who even paid for them. Really makes you think.
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From the Archives
The great ADHD swindle
By Daniel Ken | TCW Defending Freedom | May 20, 2023
Over more than two decades in the classroom I’ve taught thousands of children and teenagers: some were lovely and lots were hard-working. On the other hand, quite a number were disruptive and argumentative, and a number were violently opposed to learning. But I don’t think I’ve taught more than a handful of kids who could be properly described as having the symptoms of ADHD. And that handful could just as easily have had something else wrong with them. Because here’s the thing: despite the fact that the best part of a million children are medicated for the condition, ADHD doesn’t exist.
There’s no definitive medical test for it, experts can’t agree on what it actually means, and most of the symptoms disappear if the child in question has lots of exercise, good diet and, crucially, a set of clear behavioural boundaries, preferably set early in childhood and, for the boys at least, enforced by a stable adult male living at home. … continue
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