UK Foreign Sec supports increased press freedom for all, but not RT
By Simon Rite | RT | May 3, 2019
Britain’s Foreign Secretary says he wants improved global media freedom while at the same time suggesting that RT has a bit more freedom than he’d like.
Jeremy Hunt was marking World Press Freedom Day whilst on a trip to Ethiopia, which may seem like an unlikely setting to work in a dig about a Russian news organisation, but he did it anyway.
He said: “We shouldn’t forget the international context Channels like RT – better known as Russia Today – want their viewers to believe that truth is relative and the facts will always fit the Kremlin’s official narrative. Even when that narrative keeps changing.
After the Russian state carried out a chemical attack in the British city of Salisbury last year, the Kremlin came up with over 40 separate narratives to explain that incident. Their weapons of disinformation tried to broadcast those narratives to the world.”
So what Hunt, actually wants people to think is that there is only one truth and one narrative, and it’s the one the British government tells you.
To prove that, here’s what he said next: “The best defence against those who deliberately sow lies are independent, trusted news outlets. So the British Government is taking practical steps to help media professionals improve their skills.”
Just in case the point needs underlining, Hunt believes the best defence against lies is for independent news outlets to be trained by the British government, who can then be trusted to report the agreed narrative.
During his speech he drew attention to the best of African journalism, particularly highlighting work by BBC Africa. You can see the pattern of what Hunt considers good journalism, which is the stuff he agrees with.
You only need to look at Iraq, Libya and Russiagate to see how facts are being used to fit narratives and none of those have anything at all to do with RT. RT is such an easy target because it is the only real high profile network which can realistically push back on the agreed narratives. The viewer should be able to make up their own mind, but press freedom should always mean a plurality of views and not the domination of an agreed western narrative.
This idea of the independence of the western media has always seemed spurious. In much of the world the major outlets are owned by unaccounted corporate entities, and in Britain, all the national networks have daily government briefings to tell them what the news is, and when the government goes on holiday the media calls it ‘silly season’ because they don’t know what to report. Strange kind of independence.
When it comes down to media freedom, the best advice is not to be a total Jeremy Hunt about it.
Zero Carbon Proposals Slammed As Irresponsible & Arbitrary
By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | April 2, 2019
The GWPF has issued this press release in response to the Committee on Climate Change’s new proposals to cutting CO2 emissions to zero by 2050:
Summary
The recommendation of the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) for a Net Zero emissions target by 2050 is grounded in nothing stronger than irresponsible optimism and arbitrary assumptions about cost and technological feasibility. In point of fact, the technologies seen as necessary, including carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), further expansion of renewable generation, widespread adoption of hydrogen, and the very rapid electrification of the UK’s entire heating and transport systems, are either known failures or are unproven at these scales and would cost two to three times the amounts claimed by the CCC. Attempts to deliver these policies would ultimately fail, but in the attempt the UK would further harm its already declining productivity, and so erode the UK’s ability to compete internationally and thus deliver an acceptable standard of living for its people. This is not a sustainable low emissions strategy, and even if accepted by government is very likely to end only in humiliating and distressed policy correction. A wise government would reject this advice.
The Committee on Climate Change (CCC) is advising the government of the UK to revise and increase the ambitions of the Climate Change Act. The Act already commits the country to an 80% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 as compared to 1990 levels. The new proposal is that it should have ‘Net Zero’ emissions by that year. The UK has, the CCC claims, already reduced its inland consumption emissions by 40% against the 1990 baseline, and it presents the current proposal as a rational continuation of that success story. But this is a selective and misleading history. When the emissions associated with UK consumption through manufacturing in other countries are taken into account, the UK’s carbon footprint was actually still rising up until the 2008 downturn, when it fell because of economic difficulties, and is now showing some signs of returning to the upwards trend as the economy slowly recovers. In essence, the UK simply exported its emissions to other parts of the world, principally China, in substantial part through carbon leakage resulting from high energy costs in the UK, costs which in substantial part were the result of climate policies. This history gives no ground for optimism with regard to the Net Zero target now proposed. Far from being a success on which we can build, UK climate policy has been a failure, resulting only in domestic economic damage and the illusion of reduced emissions.
The overriding problem facing the UK is the comparatively slow growth in productivity. For much of the last century, the UK’s productivity has been below that of the major industrial economies, and the gap has grown in the first two decades of the 21st century. The consequence has been no growth in real wages and incomes, a fact that strains domestic budgets and exacerbates a general reluctance to make the investments required for future economic prosperity.
This deterioration in productivity growth closely follows and is substantially associated with the implementation of policies to reduce energy use and carbon emissions. There are three reasons for this link:
(a) Large amounts of investment and labour have been diverted to capital-intensive renewables, crowding out investment in other infrastructure and sectors with much higher levels of capital and labour productivity.
(b) The resulting increases in energy prices have prompted high-productivity manufacturing and other industries to conclude that they should look elsewhere for growth in both demand and production.
(c) More generally, the efforts and resources of businesses and innovators have been diverted away from improving productivity and towards efforts to reduce carbon emissions. Furthermore, the idea that there is a global opportunity for the UK to grow by exploiting low carbon technologies is demonstrably a myth.
There can be no doubt that these factors have had a major impact on the development of the UK economy in the last two decades. Low carbon growth may be the holy grail, but the reality is almost no growth and slower reductions in carbon emissions per unit of output than in, say, the United States. Yet the CCC is now recommending proposals that are explicitly designed to reinforce this disappointing performance.
If the government accepts the CCC’s proposals, which are marked by a persistent special pleading about the costs and feasibilities, it will immediately sabotage any plan to rectify the UK’s poor productivity performance and weaken international competitiveness. Its recommendations will ensure that the UK suffers from even lower productivity and be still poorer relative to the rest of the world in 2050 than in 2020. At the same time, the slower growth in productivity brought about by these proposals will increase the burden of meeting the CCC’s targets to a level that will not be bearable. The only doubt is how much pain the population will endure, and how much damage will be done, before these infeasible targets are abandoned.
The study that underlies the CCC’s proposals is marked by what can only be called ‘fantasy analysis’. Electricity demand is required to double on present levels, when in fact it is falling due to high prices. The CCC’s plans require that all of that additional electricity must come from low carbon sources, as opposed to under 50% today. The CCC itself admits that CCS is ‘essential’ to its vision for the 2050 target, and must be substantially deployed before 2030, with a significant level by 2026. At present it is non-existent in the UK, and non-viable at scale elsewhere. There must be 30 GW of offshore wind by 2030, and 75 GW by 2050; at present there is 8 GW, all heavily subsidised, with no sign that the industry is in fact able to build offshore wind at market competitive rates.
The CCC believes that petrol and diesel cars and vans must be phased out well before 2040, but admits that even the current eye-catching and over-ambitious plans to mandate electric vehicles by 2035 cannot deliver this transformation. It consequently suggests that new fossil-fuelled vehicles must be outlawed by 2030. Such a ban would in all probability destroy the existing market for domestic car manufacture, as Chinese and other Asian companies using cheap energy and cheap labour will make the UK uncompetitive.
The study notes that the UK’s provision of space and water heating must be converted to electricity and hydrogen, but admits that there is currently ‘no serious plan’ in existence for this revolution. That is correct, but unfortunately, the study does not itself provide one.
The CCC states that there must be very large afforestation schemes to act as carbon sinks, at a rate of 20,000 hectares per year up to 2025, and 27,000 hectares per year thereafter. The CCC itself admits that the current rate has been only about 10,000 hectares per year over the last five years. In any case, the use of forestry as a carbon sink only has a short-term impact unless CCS is applied to wood burning, which is not feasible on a small scale and is unaffordably expensive on a large scale.
Overall, the CCC’s reaction to these manifest failures and difficulties is to conclude that the ‘voluntary approach’ has failed hitherto and would not deliver the new proposals. Implicitly, therefore, the policies that it recommends must be mandatory and state-led. But nowhere does the CCC’s report consider whether the state actually has the administrative or technical competence to successfully deliver these remarkable objectives. Nor does it consider whether the cost of doing so is likely to be tolerable to the public. Indeed, strikingly, though the CCC makes assertions about the cost and benefits of increasing the Climate Change Act target to Net Zero, there is no attempt to actually quantify the marginal costs and benefits of each step necessary – the most fundamental requirement for such an exercise. Indeed, many of the costs actually cited in the report ignore the practical realities of installation, operation and maintenance of technologies that are well-understood and have failed to achieve widespread deployment without large subsidies. Experience tells us that, if adopted, the CCC’s programme will cost anything from three to five times the estimates in this report and will take up to twice as long to implement.
In summary, the Committee on Climate Change has not produced a serious assessment of the practical feasibility and costs of a Net Zero 2050 target. On the contrary, it has simply taken the Net Zero target as a given and made irrationally optimistic and arbitrary assumptions comprising a fictional narrative that magically delivers the emissions reduction goal as the Happy Ending. This is unrealistic, irresponsible, and misleading.
The government should obviously reject the Climate Change Committee’s poorly argued advice, which is economically hazardous and does not offer a sustainable emissions reductions trajectory.
https://www.thegwpf.com/gwpf-statement-on-the-proposed-net-zero-2050-emissions-target/
UK Labour leader targeted for accepting ‘Jews control banks’
Press TV – May 1, 2019
Leader of Britain’s opposition Labour Party is facing attacks from pro-Israeli lobbies in the country for merely endorsing thoughts of a thinker who suggested a century ago that Jews control the media and political discourse through their dominance on the European financial system.
Labour politicians and other notable political and social figures called on Corbyn on Wednesday to apologize for a foreword he wrote to a book first released in 1902 and re-published in 2011.
In his foreword to John Atkinson Hobson’s ‘Imperialism: A Study’, Corbyn said the economist’s description of how a certain Jewish household controlled banks and newspapers were “brilliant”, “very controversial at the time” and “a great tome.”
The book mainly argues that men of a singular and peculiar race use centuries of financial experience to control finance in Europe. It says that the dominance puts the Jews “in a unique position to control the policy of nations” and gives them a control that “they exercise over the body of public opinion through the press.”
However, pro-Israeli activists and politicians labeled Corbyn’s endorsement of the idea as a clear form of support for antisemitism and asked him to apologize.
“Jeremy Corbyn endorsed book that peddles racist stereotypes of Jewish financiers and imperialism as “brilliant” and a “great tome”,” said former Labour MP Ian Austin.
“The revelation Jeremy Corbyn wrote the foreword for a reportedly deeply antisemitic book is damning and damaging,” said Euan Philipps, of the campaign group Labour against antisemitism.
Corbyn, well known for his support of the Palestinian cause, has repeatedly been described by pro-Israeli lobbies in Britain as a threat to the life of Jews in the country if he takes office. He has denied having anything against the Jews and has sought to sort out differences with the Jewish community in the UK.
A senior Labour lawmaker said on Wednesday that Corbyn’s endorsement of Hobson’s thoughts in economy and politics was not antisemitic.
“I haven’t read the book myself but as I understand it, Jeremy like many politicians, has quoted this relevant political thinker,” said Rebecca Long-Bailey, a Labour frontbencher, adding, “I think he was looking at the political thought within the whole text itself, not the comments that were antisemitic in any shape or form.”
Extinction Rebellion – The Facts
Windows on the World | April 21, 2019
The corporate backed “protest” group Extinction Rebellion fully explained. The main protagonists in this organisation and their links to Agenda 2030, the UN Global Action Plan and template NGO’S are all explained in this fact filled show.
Do listen and look at the information presented in in these two WOTW shows about the ER cult. Listen and check out the info here
The full spectrum dominance of controlled opposition is explained in the show:
Extinction Rebellion – The Facts
Below are the emails between a member of the public who asked the inner core of Extinction Rebellion a few questions and the sinister responses and threats from their “Dragons”
The Dragons of Extinction Rebellion
The same type of “Dragons” were used in the Occupy power structure once it was under the control of George Soros they can be seen in The Puppet Masters of Occupy
Our previous shows on the ER cult gave a lot of information and context to this show. They are linked above, “Fake Protest Extinction Rebellion” and “Globalist Fake Revolution”. The articles on the website contain internal ER documents and screenshots.
Here is an informative article From OYE News
The structure of ER mirrors the George Soros backed takeover of Occupy with its command structure including “Dragons”who threaten and intimidate anyone who asks questions.
We also have e mail threats from the sinister so called “Dragons” who protect the inner core of ER personnel. This all mirrors previous globalist backed protests.
We also look at the organizations linked to ER and how there are hundreds and globally thousands of these NGO template organizations all using the same narratives, all backed by the big financial interests which are pushing the climate change agenda for profit and ultimately control of the world population and all natural resources. The change agents, social entrepreneurs, psychological nudging, Saul Alinsky rules which all appeared as part of David Cameron’s Big Society.
Gail Bradbrook is one of the founders of Extinction Rebellion along with Roger Hallam and George Barda. Their Company is Compassionate Revolution Ltd and the ER protests came through Rising Up an organisation linked to other template type NGO’s which claim to be “grassroots”.
Gail Bradbrook is a consultant at Citizens Online, her profile was removed from the company’s website before the London “protests” Here it is before it was removed.
On the subject of fake protest groups: Demos the Think Tank which influences all media in the UK and is connected to the security services and MI5 stated:
“The New Democracy will work with a combination of government open infiltration and citizen groups taking Direct Action.”
The show looks at the template NGO’s linked to this “protest” and how they are in line with aims of the UN Agenda 2030, its taxation, restrictions and Smart Cities agenda and everything Globalist.
The use of the world “grassroots” has been hijacked to mean “state controlled and agents of the UN, IMF and World Bank.”
Unlike the Fake Protests we receive no funding!
UK cinemas urged to boycott Israeli film festival
Press TV – April 25, 2019
Twenty filmmakers, screenwriters, actors, and film critics have urged film theaters in the United Kingdom to boycott the Israeli film festival Seret, co-organized by the Tel Aviv government, in protest at the Zionist regime’s atrocities against Palestinians.
“We’re shocked and dismayed to see how many mainstream cinemas … are hosting this year’s Israeli film festival, Seret, whose funders and supporters include the Israeli government and a clutch of pro-Israel advocacy organizations,” the cinema professionals said in a letter published by The Guardian on Thursday.
“Two months ago, a commission set up by the UN human rights council concluded that the actions of Israeli soldiers against Palestinian participants in the Great March of Return in Gaza may constitute ‘war crimes or crimes against humanity’. ‘Particularly alarming,’ said a member of the commission, was ‘the targeting of children and persons with disabilities’,” reads the letter.
“This UN report is the latest in 70 years of reports of mass expulsions, killings, house demolitions, detention without trial, torture, military occupation and military onslaught against the indigenous population, the Palestinians. But none of this appears to disturb the cinemas involved in the festival,” the letter added, protesting at the UK cinemas’ indifference to the Israeli atrocities.
“We cannot understand why cultural institutions continue to behave as if Israel is an ordinary democracy. It is not. Palestinians deserve better than this. UK cinemas should not be hosting Seret,” it reads.
Prominent British filmmakers Ken Loach and Mike Leigh are among the artists who have written the letter.
Other signatories include Amir Amirani (director, producer), Roy Battersby (director), Haim Bresheeth (writer, filmmaker), David Calder (actor), Prof Ian Christie (film writer, broadcaster), Dror Dayan (filmmaker), Helen de Witt (film programmer), Saeed Taji Farouky (filmmaker), Deborah Golt DJ (broadcaster), Ashley Inglis (screenwriter), Paul Laverty (screenwriter), Sophie Mayer (film critic, curator), Rebecca O’Brien (producer), Pratibha Parmar (writer, director), William Raban (filmmaker), Leila Sansour (director), John Smith (artist, filmmaker), and Penny Woolcock (filmmaker).
Earlier, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) had also called on all participants to withdraw from the Seret festival taking place in London, Brighton and Edinburgh, from May 6 – 17.
The Seret festival tries to falsely project Israel as “a melting pot of cultures, religions and social backgrounds,” rather than as an apartheid and colonial regime that has more than 65 racist laws discriminating against its indigenous Palestinian citizens, the Campaign said.
“In addition to Israeli ministries and diplomatic missions, the festival is also sponsored by racist, anti-Palestinian, Israeli government-backed agencies, including the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency,” the Campaign added, in a statement published by the BDS Movement’s website.
Last year, a wave of cancellations and boycotts hit a film festival in Tel Aviv over Israeli government sponsorship, with a total of 14 filmmakers, actors and other artists withdrawing or, if unable to do so, declaring support for the boycott.
Also in 2018, the Oscar-winning star, Natalie Portman, boycotted a ceremony in Israel that would have honored her.
“PACBI, as part of the growing Nobel Prize-nominated Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, calls on filmmakers participating in SERET to withdraw from this blatant propaganda festival and urges people of conscience to boycott it in its entirety,” the statement added.
The BDS movement was initiated in 2005 by over 170 Palestinian organizations that were pushing for “various forms of boycott against Israel until it meets its obligations under international law.”
Media trust ranker NewsGuard launches in UK by greenlighting tabloids, adding ex-NATO chief to board
RT | April 24, 2019
NewsGuard, the trust-rating outfit that continues to approve of US media that spread the Russiagate conspiracy theory, has expanded operations to the UK and added a former NATO chief to its advisory board.
Announcing its UK debut on Wednesday, NewsGuard bragged about including Anders Fogh Rasmussen to their advisory board, describing him only as “former prime minister of Denmark.” While he did serve in that capacity between 2001 and 2009, his most recent public office was secretary-general of NATO (2009-2014), which NewsGuard omits from their tweet – but not from the Advisory Board page.
Rasmussen’s colleagues on NewsGuard’s board include former US Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge and former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden, as well as the self-described former “chief propagandist” for the US government Richard Stengel.
Other new additions to the board are Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and Richard Sambrook, former “Director of Global News for the BBC” who now provides “editing and editorial guidance” for NewsGuard’s “nutrition labels.”
Those labels rank news outlets оn a number of categories, which are then combined into a trustworthiness score, expressed as a green checkmark or red “x.” There is a certain pattern in which kinds of outlets get the former and which get the latter.
Three major UK tabloids – The Sun, the Daily Mirror, and the Daily Star – all got an overall “green” rating, for instance. While NewsGuard claims to be rating outlets rather than individual articles, if you have their extension installed in your browser (and it comes by default with Microsoft’s Edge), you’ll see a NewsGuard symbol next to actual story headlines in your searches.
Media critic John Nolte of Breitbart – in the “red” category just like RT – pointed out on Monday that NewsGuard’s seal of approval can be found on nine of the top 12 debunked stories pushing the ‘Russiagate’ conspiracy theory. He provided screenshots.
Even after the 448-page report by special counsel Robert Mueller spelled out “no collusion” between US President Donald Trump and Russia, multiple mainstream media outlets that have pushed this conspiracy for almost three years have refused to apologize or correct their reporting, claiming instead it was “mostly” proven correct.
“That big, green checkmark of approval still sits next to some of the most misleading stories in history,” Nolte wrote, adding, “In all my decades of following the media, I have never seen a more Orwellian attempt to mislead people by deliberately labeling lies as truth and truth as lies.”
From the Folks Who Lie, Cheat and Steal for a Living — Project Fake Duck
By Rob Slane | The Blog Mire | April 24, 2019
Mike Pompeo, the former CIA director and now chief diplomat of the United States, made the following remarks in a recent interview:
“I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. It’s — it was like — we had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.”
That perhaps won’t come as too much of a surprise to many people, but it is nonetheless welcome to have it admitted by no less a person than the former director of that organisation.
However, in the light of the stunning, albeit unwitting, revelation in The New York Times, that the then deputy director of the CIA (now director), Gina Haspel, used pictures of sick children and dead ducks allegedly from the Salisbury poisoning to persuade Donald Trump to expel 60 Russian diplomats — even though no children became ill and no ducks died — one wonders whether those entire training courses Mr Pompeo refers to include modules on “How to lie to the President,” and “The use of fowl play to manipulate the Commander-in-Chief”.
But there is, I think, even more to the duck story than meets the eye. In order to explain why this is so, it is necessary to first set out a timeline of events connected with it:
4th March
Two people were found unconscious on a bench in The Maltings in Salisbury in what was initially thought to be a Fentanyl overdose.
5th March
Military personnel in HazMats intensely searched a bin located adjacent to the Avon Playground (see here and here)
13th March
Theresa May spoke to Donald Trump by phone. According to Downing Street’s report of the conversation:
“The Prime Minister set out the conclusion reached by the UK government that it was highly likely that Russia was responsible for the attack against Sergei and Yulia Skripal. President Trump said the US was with the UK all the way, agreeing that the Russian government must provide unambiguous answers as to how this nerve agent came to be used.”
According to the British Government, no further phone calls took place between the two leaders after this until 28th March.
18th March*
The parents of Aiden Cooper and the two other boys involved in feeding the ducks were contacted by police and checked out for possible symptoms of poisoning, but were given the all clear.
(*I have stated 18th March, but this is an approximate date based on an interview with Aiden Cooper’s father, Luke, who said that the police came knocking on the door “two weeks after” the incident, which would make it on, or close to, 18th March.)
20th March
President Trump called President Putin, to congratulate him on his election win. He did not, however, mention the Skripal case. According to the Washington Post:
“Trump also chose not to heed talking points from aides instructing him to condemn the recent poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain with a powerful nerve agent, a case that both the British and U.S. governments have blamed on Moscow… Trump’s failure to raise Moscow’s alleged poisoning of the former spy in Britain risked angering officials in London, who are trying to rally Britain’s closest allies to condemn the attack.”
Between 20th and 23rd March
The Deputy Director of the CIA, Gina Haspel, used fake images of sick children and dead ducks to persuade President Trump to take the toughest action against the Russian state, which involved the expulsion of 60 diplomats and the closing of the Russian consulate in Seattle.
Saturday 24th March
The first mention in the media (The Mirror ) that Mr Skripal fed ducks near the Avon Playground, giving bread to three boys. The article also contained two very significant statements. The first was this:
“The incident involving the boys, who are believed to have been given the all-clear, was confirmed by Public Health England and described by British officials to US authorities [my emphasis].”
The second was the first mention in the media of the possibility of the door handle as the place of poisoning:
“The shocking revelation is one of a series we can make today, including how investigators are now focusing on the double agent’s front door handle as the “ground zero” where spooks planted the deadly poison.”
25th March
At his Mar-a-Lago resort, President Trump was briefed by his aides who explained that the number of diplomats the US would be expelling – 60 – was roughly the same amount as the Europeans.
26th March
The expulsion of 60 Russian diplomats by the US was publicly confirmed. On the same day, Theresa May made a statement to the House of Commons, in which she said the following:
“And as I announced today, 18 countries have announced their intention to expel more than 100 Russian intelligence officers, including 15 EU member states as well as the US, Canada and the Ukraine. And this is the largest collective expulsion of Russian intelligence officers in history.”
It should also be noted that her statement contained an outright falsehood. She stated:
“Sergei and Yulia Skripal remain critically ill in hospital. Sadly, late last week doctors indicated that their condition is unlikely to change in the near future and they may never recover fully.”
This was not true, since “late last week”, Yulia Skripal was being taken out of an induced coma by doctors, which was completed by 23rd or 24th March (see here for further details).
28th March
The door handle as the place of poisoning was said to have been confirmed. On the same day, The Sun carried an interview with Aiden Cooper and his parents about the duck feed incident. In the piece, Aiden’s father, Luke, confirmed that it was “two weeks” after the poisoning that police had contacted them.
What can we make of this?
The first thing to say is that a key piece of evidence in this whole saga is to be found in the event that took place 5th March. Approximately 24 hours after the incident on the bench, military personnel in Hazmats were filmed searching very intensely in a particular bin. But there are three very curious points to note about this bin:
- It is not located near the bench on which the poisoned pair were found.
- It is absolutely not on the route from the Sainsbury’s car park to Zizzis or The Mill, and would in fact constitute a bizarre detour, if your intended destination was Zizzis or The Mill.
- It absolutely is located next to the Avon Playground, and is in fact the exact location of the duck feed.
It seems to me that the only explanation for why this bin, which is a good 50 yards or so away from the bench, and which is not on the route from the car park to Zizzis or The Mill, was the focus of such intense scrutiny, is that it was known already by the evening of 5th March that the Skripals had been there. Why else would it have been checked? Whether this was because police had already seen the clear CCTV footage of the Skripals in this area that was subsequently shown to the parents of the three children two weeks later, or whether it was known because Mr Skripal was being watched on 4th March, I do not know. But I can think of no reason why this particular bin would have been searched so meticulously, other than the one I have advanced, which is that it was already known on 5th March that the Skripals had been around it.
But if this is the case, it raises the following point:
That as early as 5th March, police knew that Mr Skripal had been in contact with three boys near that bin, and that he had shared bread with them in order to feed ducks.
If this is so, it leads to the huge question of why the boys’ parents were not contacted until two weeks later. Clues to why that might be are also in the timeline I have set out.
Mrs May spoke to Mr Trump on 13th March, the day after she originally set out the case against Russia in the House of Commons, and the day before she formally charged the Russian Government with being behind the case, expelling 23 Russian diplomats. On the surface of it, it seems that Mr Trump stood fully behind Mrs May, and that he would agree with whatever action was proposed to him, since — according to the British Government’s summary of the call — he said that “the US was with the UK all the way.”
However, the fact that this was not so was seen by what happened on 20th March. This was the day when Mr Trump phoned the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, and despite being advised by his aides not to congratulate him on his re-election, Mr Trump ignored them and did so anyway. But even more crucially, he also failed to mention anything about the Skripal case, which again went against the advice of his aides, who had urged him to condemn it in the conversation. Given that his reaction to seeing Ms Haspel’s fake pictures was to agree to the expulsion of 60 diplomats, I think we can safely say that at the time of his call to Mr Putin, he had not yet seen these images.
The fake pictures of the sick children and dead ducks were, I submit, very probably a reaction to that conversation. Although Mr Trump was apparently “with the UK all the way” on 13th March (at least that’s how Downing Street put it), it seems that on 20th March, he still wasn’t nearly as troubled by the event as Ms Haspel and Co. hoped he would be. She was angling for the “strong option” of expelling 60 diplomats, and there was Mr Trump not even bothering to mention it in his conversation with Mr Putin. And so he had to be “persuaded” by the deputy director of the organisation that “lies, cheats and steals”.
(As an aside, I have stated that this meeting with Ms Haspel probably took place between 20th and 23rd March. The reason for the former data is that, as stated above, I am sure that Mr Trump had not been shown these pictures when he spoke to Mr Putin on 20th March. The reason for the latter date is that the New York Times tells us that this meeting occurred at the White House, and by late afternoon on 23rd March Mr Trump was on his way to his Mar-a-Lago resort, and he didn’t return until late on Sunday 25th, the day before the public announcement of the expulsion of the diplomats. So Project Fake Duck had to have happened between those two dates).
All this raises huge issues in the US, where it appears that the CIA deputy director fed the President of the United States false information to twist his arm to achieve the outcome she wanted to see. That’s for journalists in the US to take up, if they care to, but what happened in Britain?
As I mentioned above, the activity around the bin next to the Avon Playground convinces me that the duck feed must have been known to the authorities as early as 5th March. And yet the parents of the boys involved were only contacted on 18th March. If Mr Skripal had really been contaminated with “Novichok” at the time of that incident, the best you could say of the investigators in relation to this is that they were woefully incompetent; the worst being that they were criminally negligent.
But of course, the fact that none of the boys or ducks became contaminated with the “Novichok” that Mr Skripal was apparently so covered with that they had to incinerate the table in Zizzis at which he was sat a few minutes after this incident, and the fact that the authorities didn’t bother contacting the parents of the boys for a fortnight, all indicates that he was not in fact contaminated at all at that time.
But if this is the case, why did the duck feed make it into the media at all? Given that it was almost certainly known about on 5th March, but the authorities decided not to do anything about it for two weeks (i.e. no public appeals showing the CCTV of Mr Skripal with the boys), why was it ever even mentioned at all? I think that there are two reasons, which are not mutually exclusive.
The first is that the British authorities, aware that their claims of a poisoning by the world’s deadliest nerve agent didn’t exactly match what actually happened — only three people ever experienced symptoms of poisoning and needed treatment — wanted to make it look far more dramatic than it actually was. And so they not only decided to finally visit the boys and their parents two weeks after the fact, but the story was then leaked to the media intentionally to add another sinister dimension to the event — the possible poisoning of children!
To give credence to the theory that officials were intent on exaggerating the fallout of the poisoning, because their claims of what happened didn’t actually match well with the facts, look at what Theresa May said of the incident in her statement to the House of Commons on 26th March:
“While Public Health England have made clear that the risk to public health is low — and this remains the case — we assess that more than 130 people in Salisbury could have been potentially exposed to this nerve agent.”
She really should win an award for the use of the most weasel words in one sentence, although I appreciate that she herself has set the bar pretty high on a number of other issues. More than 130? Could have been? Potentially exposed to this nerve agent? Absolute rot of course. Firstly, if the world’s deadliest nerve agent had been used and traipsed all over Salisbury by Mr Skripal and his daughter, as we were told, then an awful lot more than 130 would have been exposed. But more to the point, this didn’t actually happen. What happened is that three people were affected. Not four. Not five. Not 10. Not 130. Not 10,000. No, just three.
In other words, there was a blatant attempt to exaggerate what happened, or what might have, could have, potentially happened, with the Prime Minister getting in on the act. The duck feed, in my view, was part of this blatant attempt to embellish the story, even though the truth was that it had been known from 5th March that it had happened, yet nobody bothered to contact the parents because it was known that the children were never in any danger.
I am, of course, unsure whether British officials fed this story, together with fake pictures, to the CIA, or whether the CIA faked them, or whether both worked in concert together on Project Fake Duck. However, I have to say that the latter of these three possibilities seems to me to be by far the most plausible. I simply cannot imagine that British officials would dare to feed the CIA fake pictures, in the knowledge that these could be used to deceive the President. And I simply cannot imagine that the CIA would pass off pictures as being received from British Intelligence, in order to deceive the President.
What I can imagine is that both sides had a need to find a way to exaggerate the case. British officials needed to make what happened seem more dramatic, and what better way than to finally get around to visiting the boys who had received bread from Mr Skripal, and then pass the details to a journalist in a major British newspaper, who would then publish a story showing the sheer callousness of the poisoning — children were involved. As for the deputy director of the CIA, she also had a need to exaggerate the case, since it was her desire to take the harshest diplomatic response against Russia, and yet the President was probably too bored or distracted by Twitter to care or even notice. “Any pictures you’ve got will be welcome.” “Oh yes, we can get those for you.” And so the lying, cheating and stealing was used on the President himself, and Duckgate was spawned. Except no mainstream journalist will touch it of course.
But I think that there is another reason why the duck feed made it into the media, despite the fact that the boys and their parents were ignored for two weeks. It is to do with that other significant incident mentioned in the timeline above: the naming of the door handle as the place of poisoning.
I believe I have pretty conclusively shown why the door handle was not, and indeed could not have been, the location of the poisoning. The duck feed itself is ample evidence, since none of the boys became contaminated and no ducks died. But if that doesn’t convince you, the fact that in the days following 4th March unprotected police officers were seen going in and out of Mr Skripal’s house via the same front door which, weeks later, was said to have the highest concentration of the world’s deadliest nerve agent on, really ought to put it to bed for good (you can read a more detailed debunking here).
If you accept this conclusion, it necessarily follows that the door handle theory, rather than being an honest account of what really happened, was actually an attempt to divert attention from the actual place of poisoning, and also an attempt to try to explain how it was that Detective Sergeant Nicholas Bailey became the third person to be poisoned. And indeed this explains why the duck feed, which was ignored for two weeks (because it was known that the boys were not in any danger), suddenly became a thing. Why? Well imagine that investigators had come out with the claim that Mr Skripal had been poisoned at the door handle, but the boys and their parents were not contacted. That would have left open the potential for the boys’ parents, at some point, to raise the claim that their sons had been in contact with Mr Skripal, and the authorities had done nothing to contact them, thus putting their lives in danger. And so I believe that by far the most plausible explanation for this is that it was decided to contact the parents of the boys, even though it was two weeks after the incident, and even though it was known that they were never in any danger, in order to ensure that there was no possible comeback after the door handle explanation was made public.
However, like the whole of this saga, the incident has merely ended up raising more questions. It has raised the question of why the boys and their parents weren’t contacted for a whole fortnight, even though it was surely known by 5th March that they had fed ducks with Mr Skripal. It has raised the question of why these boys and the ducks they fed did not become ill. It has raised the question of why the incident was then used, together with fake pictures, to deceive the President of the United States.
The answer, as I have attempted to set out above, is essentially two-fold:
Firstly, because the poisoning and its aftermath didn’t actually chime with the claim of “Novichok” being used, something more dramatic was needed to up the ante. The fact that children were known to have been with Mr Skripal that afternoon was then exploited by both British officials and the CIA to further their own agendas.
Secondly, because the duck incident presented a potential problem for the door handle theory, in that the boys received bread from the apparently highly contaminated Mr Skripal just 15-30 minutes after he left his house, a visit to the parents of the boys was deemed necessary to avoid a potential claim of negligence later on.
Let me end by saying this: I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the first mention of the duck feed, the first mention of the door handle explanation, and the first mention of British officials describing the duck feed incident to US authorities all appeared in the same article (The Mirror ). The issues are intrinsically tied together, and they all provide more evidence that the truth has been covered up. But then again, when you’re talking about the sorts of people who think nothing of lying, cheating and stealing for a living, I don’t suppose that should surprise us.
David Attenborough’s BBC show would better have been called “Climate: Change The Facts”
Reviewing “Climate Change: the Facts” | April 21, 2019
… If you are going to present a film called Climate Change: the Facts the very least you should be doing is, well, presenting the facts. Well here they are, in two of the areas which made up such a hefty part of the film: wildfires and hurricanes. Are wildfires increasing? They are according to Attenborough. One of the scientists who takes part in the programme, Professor Michael Mann of Penn State University, goes as far as to say there has been a “tripling in the extent of wildfires in the Western US”. He is not specific about his evidence for this claim, nor said over what timeframe wildfires are supposed to have trebled, but it is not a fair assessment of the data collected by the US Environment Protection Agency (EPA). This shows no upwards trend in the number of wildfires in the US over the past 30 years.
But then again, go back further, to the 1920s, and you see that both the number of US wildfires and acreage burned in them has plummeted.
That is nothing to do with the climate – more down to firefighters getting better at tackling fires. But that reduction in wildfires – which, after all, were occurring naturally long before Europeans arrived in the US – has brought with it a problem: deadwood is not being cleared out at the rate which it used to be. As a result, when a wildfire does take hold, it tends to be a more powerful fire, which is one reason large acreages tend to get burned when fires do take hold. That was a large part of the debate which followed the wildfires in California last November.
But I know what will have entered the heads of many of Attenborough’s viewers: that wildfires are being caused by climate change and that is that. […]
The same will be true for hurricanes. If you are a child, for whom hurricanes are a novel phenomenon, watching the film will have given you the impression that hurricanes are pretty much a function of man-made climate change. A voiceover, indeed, makes the claim that climate change is causing ‘greater storms’. But again, the data on cyclone activity in the Atlantic, Gulf and Mexico and Caribbean does not support that idea. Figure one shows a very slight upwards trend in the number of hurricanes occurring in these waters but a flat or perhaps slightly downwards trend in the number of hurricanes making landfall in the US. There are two other methods of measuring hurricane activity which are used by the EPA. The first, the accumulated cyclone index (figure two) shows no obvious trend over the past 70 years. The second, the ‘power dissipation index’ shows an upwards spike in the early years of this century, followed by a reversion to mean since then.
Not that this seems to prevent documentary-makers like Attenborough resorting to footage of houses being demolished by winds and lorries being blown off bridges to show the supposed climate change we are already experiencing.
It is little wonder that terrified kids are skipping school to protest against climate change. Never mind climate change denial, a worse problem is the constant exaggeration of the subject. I had thought David Attenborough would be above resorting to the subtle propaganda which others have been propagating, linking every adverse weather event to climate change. But apparently not. — Ross Clark, The Spectator, 20 April 2019
… [W]e have already seen what can happen when ‘panic’ determines policy: the introduction of measures conceived by a need to be seen to be doing something under pressure from groups such as Extinction Rebellion.
Without making this clear, the film revealed one of the worst examples of this unfortunate effect. A powerful sequence showed an orangutan, fleeing loggers who have been eradicating Borneo’s rainforest.
This is disastrous for both wildlife and the climate because, as the film pointed out, a third of global emissions are down to deforestation, because giant trees lock up a lot of carbon.
But why are Borneo’s forests being cut down? The reason, as Attenborough said, is palm oil, a lucrative crop used in products ranging from soap to biscuits. Unfortunately, he left out the final stage of the argument.
Half of all the millions of tons of palm oil sent to Europe is used to make ‘biofuel’, thanks to an EU directive stating that, by 2020, ten per cent of forecourt fuel must come from ‘renewable’ biological sources. Malaysia says this has ‘created an unprecedented demand’.
To put it another way: misguided ‘action’ designed to save the planet is actually helping to damage it – although the EU has pledged to phase out palm oil biofuel by 2030.
Another example of a misconceived effort to save the planet is Drax power plant in Yorkshire which is fed, thanks to £700 million of annual subsidy, by ‘renewable’ wood pellets made from chopped-down American trees – while pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere than when it burnt only coal.
In theory, the trees it burns will be replaced – but a large part of its supply comes from hardwood forests that take 100 years to mature.
There are times when climate propaganda – for this is what this was – calls to mind the apocalyptic prophets of the Middle Ages, who led popular movements by preaching that the sins of human beings were so great that they could only be redeemed by suffering, in order to create a paradise on earth. Perhaps this is how Attenborough, nature journalism’s Methuselah, sees himself. But climate change is too important to be handled in this manner. It needs rational, well-informed debate. Too often, cheered on by the eco-zealots of Extinction Rebellion, the BBC is intent on encouraging quite the opposite. —David Rose, Mail on Sunday, 21 April 2019
… A former top executive at the BBC has warned that it is “at risk of being eaten” as new figures reveal that more than 880,000 television licences were cancelled last year. Cancellations among the under-75s rose from 860,192 in 2017-18 to 882,198 in the period from March 2018 to the end of February, new data shows. Mosey, 61, criticised the dumbing-down of news and “the nonsense put on social media by BBC” staff. —The Sunday Times, 21 April 2019
How Has Former MI6 Spymaster Richard Dearlove Dodged Scrutiny Despite Links To Russiagate?
By Tyler Durden – Zero Hedge – 04/18/2019
One of the figures involved in the Obama administration’s “Russiagate” scandal who has largely avoided scrutiny is former MI6 spymaster Sir Richard Dearlove, who is intimately linked to several key players in what many now believe was a high-level Set-up against the Trump campaign during the 2016 US election.
Dearlove, who served as chief of MI6 from 1999 to 2004, had contact during the 2016 campaign with dossier author Christopher Steele. He is also a close colleague of Stefan Halper, the alleged FBI and CIA informant who established contact with several Trump campaign advisers. Dearlove and Halper attended a Cambridge political event in July 2016 where Halper had his first contact with Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. –Daily Caller
Of note, Dearlove is best known for peddling a report alleging that Saddam Hussein had WMDs, which then-UK Prime Minister Tony Blair used to justify launching a war against Iraq.
In 2014, the retired British spymaster hosted an event at Cambridge University along with Halper. In attendance was then-director of the Defense Intelligence Agency Michael Flynn, as well as a Russian-born college student Svetlana Lokhova. Both Dearlove and Halper reportedly expressed concerns about Flynn’s contacts with Lokhova – which the 38-year-old Russian-born academic says is complete bullshit.
Stefan Halper and the Pentagon, which paid him over $1 million during the Obama administration for “research.”
“General Flynn was the guest of honor and he sat on one side of the table in the middle. I sat on the opposite side of the table to Flynn next to Richard Dearlove because I was the only woman at dinner, and it’s a British custom that the only woman gets to sit next to the host,” Lokhova told Fox News, who added that she has never been alone with Flynn. On the contrary, the unplanned encounter was professional and mildly productive.
Sir Richard Dearlove (L), Prof. Christopher Andrew (center), and then-Defense Intelligence Agency Director Michael Flynn (R), at Cambridge University, Feb. 28, 2014. (Photo courtesy Svetlana Lokhova via the Daily Caller)
Dearlove – who has feigned not knowing “Trump-Russia” dossier author Christopher Steele, discussed ongoing matters with the former MI6 spy during a meeting in London’s posh Garrick Club according to the Washington Post.
And as the Daily Caller‘s Chuck Ross points out, “Despite his presence at those key junctures, Dearlove has mostly dodged media attention, as well as that of American lawmakers investigating the origins of the Russia probe,” adding “That’s perhaps a testament to Dearlove’s 38 years in MI6.”
As journalist Daniel Lazare wrote last year in Consortium News,
A few things stand out about this august group. One is its in-bred quality. After helping to run an annual confab known as the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar, Dearlove and Halper are now partners in a private venture calling itself “The Cambridge Security Initiative.” Both are connected to another London-based intelligence firm known as Hakluyt & Co. Halper is also connected via two books he wrote with Hakluyt representative Jonathan Clarke and Dearlove has a close personal friendship with Hakluyt founder Mike Reynolds, yet another MI6 vet. Alexander Downer served a half-dozen years on Hakluyt’s international advisory board, while Andrew Wood is linked to Steele via Orbis Business Intelligence, the private research firm that Steele helped found, and which produced the anti-Trump dossier, and where Wood now serves as an unpaid advisor.
Everyone, in short, seems to know everyone else. But another thing that stands out about this group is its incompetence. Dearlove and Halper appear to be old-school paranoids for whom every Russian is a Boris Badenov or a Natasha Fatale. In February 2014, Halper notified US intelligence that Mike Flynn, Trump’s future national security adviser, had grown overly chummy with an Anglo-Russian scholar named Svetlana Lokhova whom Halper suspected of being a spy – suspicions that Lokhova convincingly argues are absurd.
Dearlove, meanwhile, has showered praise upon Halper – a longtime suspected CIA and FBI informant, and has been involved in US politics at the highest levels for decades, becoming George H.W. Bush’s National Director for Policy Development during his presidential campaign. After Bush lost to Reagan, Halper worked as Reagan’s Deputy Assistant Secretary of State – where he served under three different Secretaries.
He then became a senior advisor to the Department of Defense and DOJ between 1984 and 2001. Halper’s former father-in-law was Ray Cline, former Deputy Director of the CIA. He also allegedly spied on the Carter administration – collecting information on foreign policy (an account disputed by Ray Cline).
Halper received a DoD contract from the Obama administration for $411,575 – made in two payments, and had a start date of September 26, 2016 – three days after a September 23 Yahoo! News article by Michael Isikoff about Trump aide Carter Page, which used information fed to Isikoff by “pissgate” dossier creator Christopher Steele. The FBI would use the Yahoo! article along with the unverified “pissgate” dossier as supporting evidence in an FISA warrant application for Page.
Most famously, however, Halper is known for infiltrating the Trump campaign on behalf of the Obama DOJ – spying on advisers Carter Page and George Papadopoulos, who he lured into his orbit under the guise of seeking legitimate professional relationships.
Meanwhile, his buddy Richard Dearlove has remained largely out of the spotlight despite his glaring connections to Russiagate.
Facebook bans British anti-immigrant groups including EDL, BNP and Britain First
RT | April 18, 2019
Facebook has banned 12 high-profile, anti-immigrant British organizations and individuals including the English Defence League, the British National Party, Britain First and Jayda Fransen.
The silicon valley company said it took the decision because it bans users who “proclaim a violent or hateful mission or are engaged in acts of hate or violence.”
“Individuals and organisations who spread hate, or attack or call for the exclusion of others on the basis of who they are, have no place on Facebook,” it said in a statement.
The following organizations and people are now prohibited from the site: The British National Party and Nick Griffin, Britain First and Paul Golding and Jayda Fransen, English Defence League and Paul Ray, Knights Templar International and Jim Dowson, National Front and Tony Martin, and Jack Renshaw.
They were all outlawed under Facebook’s ‘Dangerous Individuals & Organisations policy’. They will no longer be allowed a presence on Facebook or Instagram and posts and other content which expresses praise or support for them will also be banned.
“Our work against organised hate is ongoing and we will continue to review individuals, organisations, pages, groups and content against our Community Standards,” the statement added.
The Knights Templar International said it was “horrified” by the ban, and that it was investigating legal options. “Facebook has deemed our Christian organisation as dangerous and de-platformed us despite never being charged, let alone found guilty of any crime whatsoever,” it said in a statement. “This is a development that would have made the Soviets blush.”
In February the social media giant banned EDL founder Tommy Robinson from its platforms saying the prominent anti-immigration activist repeatedly breached its policies on Hate speech.
Featured Video
Did the 9/11 Hijackers Really Fly the Planes?
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
Book Excerpt
Biden’s Closed Circle on Russia
An excerpt from ‘The Great Betrayal’
By James W. Carden | The Realist Review | June 14, 2026
Joe Biden’s presidency may ultimately come to be seen as a cautionary tale. Here was a president who showed little interest in entertaining arguments that might have contradicted his most deeply held assumptions.[1] And there were precious few within the upper ranks of the administration who might have attempted to do so, after all, only policy hands and political operatives who had come up through the ranks of the Clinton and Obama administrations or had longstanding ties to the citadels of the foreign policy community were invited into the fold. … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Historic blow to South Korea’s military intelligence agency
- Russian frigate fires warning shots in English Channel
- Radio Free Europe, the Cold War ‘Weapon’ Congress Still Funds
- UN: Israel continues to violate Lebanon airspace in defiance of Iran-US MoU
- Araghchi: Israeli occupation of Lebanese land a violation of MoU
- Hezbollah fighters confront intruding Israeli forces in southern Lebanon
- The Straight of Hormuz is Open for Iranian Business… Oil is Moving and Iran is Getting Paid
- Biden’s Closed Circle on Russia
- Lebanon Accuses Israel Of Violating The Chemical Weapons Convention By Spraying Toxic Herbicide Over Farmland
- Did the 9/11 Hijackers Really Fly the Planes?
- If Americans Knew
- Israeli army ‘murdered child’ in Gaza and then dumped body on a roadside
- The Forward’s Hit Piece on Thomas Massie and USS Liberty Veterans
- Israel’s former defense minister compares settler ideology to Nazism
- The Pro-Israel Lobby’s Quiet Cash Shuffle
- Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN) Propagandizes for Israel’s Wars
- A grim milestone: Gaza’s death toll surpasses 73,000 – Daily Update
- Jared Kushner’s Israel-linked island, and other dubious projects
- Why Are Crypto Billionaires and AIPAC Spending $8+ Million to Elect Adrian Boafo?
- Why the Mainstream Media Should Stop Using the ADL as Their Go-To Antisemitism Source
- Censorship and Thuggery Won’t Save Israel’s Reputation
- No Tricks Zone
- Beyond The Pitch: Why FIFA’s World Cup Is One Of Humanity’s Best Investments
- Climate Alarmists Now Using Natural Phenomena To Support Their Claims
- New Study: Significant CO2 Fluxes From Non-Volcanic Sources Are Largely Neglected In Carbon Budgets
- Women Climate Scientists Being Harassed, Insulted By Skeptics, Claims Berkeley Earth Researcher
- Germany’s Longterm Spring Climate Data Show “No Climate Trend”
- New Study: Solar Photovoltaic, Wind Power Fail To Meet Annual Energy Demands 62% Of The Time
- Germany’s Die Welt: “Too Much Is Too Much” … Green Energies Are Cannabalizing Each Other!
- Germany’s Ecological Holocaust… Once Fairy Tale Forests Getting Cleared For Wind Turbines
- A Grand Solar Minimum Has Arrived…Global Cooling Of At Least 1°C Is Expected By The 2030s, 2040s
- European “Expert Commission” Urges COVID-19-Like Global Climate State Of Energency!
Aletho News 