Remove children of suspected radical Muslims: Boris
Press TV – March 5, 2014
London Mayor Boris Johnson says Muslim children with suspected radical parents must be removed from their families, causing controversy amongst the city’s Muslim community.
The London mayor made the remarks in his weekly Daily Telegraph column published on Monday.
He alleged that some Muslim children were being “taught crazy stuff” similar to the views expressed by the two men who killed British soldier Lee Rigby on a south-east London street in May 2013.
In a later interview however, when asked if the children of the UK’s far-right British National Party (BNP) activists should also be removed from their families, Johnson said this should be done in “extreme” cases.
The Muslim Council of Britain warned that Johnson’s remarks risked provoking anti-Muslim sentiment across the UK.
“The people responsible for the murder of Lee Rigby were not sons of radical extremists, nor were those who committed previous atrocities. To tackle their extremism we need to look beyond the need to generate easy headlines,” the council said.
Britain’s largest force, the Metropolitan Police, recorded 500 anti-Muslim crime cases across the country in 2013.
Attacks against Muslims have soared in the UK since the murder of Rigby by Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, who reportedly killed the soldier in “retaliation for the deaths of Muslims in Afghanistan at the hands of British troops.”

UK taxpayer to bear costs of nuclear leaks, not private firms
RT | February 23, 2014
The private consortium that will manage the decommissioning of the UK’s decaying Magnox nuclear reactors won’t be made to bear financial responsibility in the event of a radioactive incident. Taxpayers will have to pick up the tab instead.
Private contractors will be indemnified by the government, despite concerns that exempting them from financial liability for nuclear incidents could prove a disaster for the taxpayer, the Guardian reports.
Earlier this month the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) presented parliament with a departmental minute concerning an indemnity to be given by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) in relation to the proposed Magnox reactors, built five decades ago. Among the reactors are some of the oldest facilities at Sizewell, Hinkley and Dungeness, which have been supplying electricity to the national grid for 40 years.
The Berkeley site in Gloucestershire, which entered service in 1962, was the first commercial nuclear power station in the UK to be decommissioned. After 27 years of operation, generating enough electricity on a typical day to serve an urban area the size of Bristol, the twin reactor station shut down in 1989. The station is currently undergoing work to decommission the site.
Meanwhile, according to the departmental minute, the prospective Parent Body Organizations (PBOs), selected through a competitive process, “are not prepared to accept liability” for certain nuclear liability claims. It adds that “because of the nature of nuclear activities the maximum figure for the potential liability is impossible to accurately quantify.” But there is allegedly only a “low probability” of a claim against the public purse.
Among the fierce critics of the use of the indemnity is Labour MP Paul Flynn, who says the nuclear debate in Parliament has been passed over by the government.
“There have been major nuclear accidents about every decade since Three Mile Island,” Flynn told the Guardian.
“More are very likely from technical failure, terrorism, human error or natural disaster. If risk is minimal, nuclear sites could be insured commercially.”
“The cost of the Fukushima cleanup and damages ranges from $250bn [£150bn] to $500bn and rising,” the politician noted.
“Nuclear installations are uninsurable in normal commercial terms. Only gullible governments can bear the enormous risk. If operators paid for their own insurance indemnities, their case for economic production of nuclear electricity collapses,” he added.
However, Energy Minister Michael Fallon, in his written statement to parliament, entitled “Contingent liability: indemnification by the nuclear decommissioning authority,” argues that there was “a very strong case” for the indemnity.
“An indemnity is a prerequisite to awarding the contract and securing the benefits of the competition. There is only a very low probability of a claim being brought under the indemnity and our assessment is that the benefits of the NDA contracting with a new PBO outweigh the small risk that the indemnity may be called upon,” the minister asserted earlier in February.

UK’s Prince Charles to visit Qatar, Saudi Arabia
Press TV – February 12, 2014
Prince Charles, the heir apparent to the British throne, is set to make a four-day official visit to Saudi Arabia and Qatar later this month.
According to a statement on the British government website, released on Wednesday, the Prince of Wales is expected to begin his trip to the Middle East region from Saudi Arabia on February 17 and end it in Qatar on February 20.
He will meet King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud and Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani during his trips.
In March 2013, Prince Charles and his wife Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, also visited Saudi Arabia as part of a nine-day tour of the Middle East, with stops in Jordan, Qatar and Oman.
This comes as Britain as well as Saudi Arabia and Qatar are considered as major foreign supporters of the ongoing militancy in Syria.
The UK has also played a major role in fanning the flames of unrest in Syria by arming and training militants fighting against the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

British ministers answer for GCHQ mass surveillance in European court
RT | January 24, 2014
The court in Strasbourg has ordered British ministers to provide submissions on mass surveillance programs by the UK’s spy agency to find out whether GCHQ’s secret activities went against the European convention on human rights.
Four European civil rights groups filed a case against Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) at the European Court of Human Rights over its surveillance methods in September, after being denied the chance to challenge its practices in an open court in the UK.
The UK’s Big Brother Watch, English PEN and Open Rights Group, as well as the German internet activism group, Constanze Kurz, accused GCHQ of violating the European Convention of Human Rights, insisting that alleged hacking of vast amounts of online data, emails and social media breached Article 8 of the Convention, which guarantees European citizens the right to a private family life. Their case refers to two surveillance programs by the domestic spying agency, Prism and Tempora. The campaigners, who teamed up under the umbrella title of Privacy Not Prism, claimed that GCHQ has “illegally intruded on the privacy of millions of British and European citizens.”
In line with the data revealed by former US National Security Agency, Edward Snowden, about the mass surveillance programs operated by the US and Britain, the group said that “GCHQ has the capacity to collect more than 21 petabytes of data a day – equivalent to sending all the information in all the books in the British Library 192 times every 24 hours.” Meanwhile, under UK law, intelligence agencies are supposed to seek permission from the Secretary of State to read an individual’s text messages.
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ordered the British government to provide their submissions by May, and the campaigners expect the court to make a ruling before the end of the year.
According to the lawyer for the groups, the ECHR has acted “remarkably quickly” communicating the case to the British government.
“It has also acted decisively by requiring the government to explain how the UK’s surveillance practices and oversight mechanisms comply with the right to privacy. This gives hope the ECHR will require reform if the government continues to insist that nothing is wrong,” Daniel Carey told the Guardian.
Both GCHQ and British ministers have insisted that none of their intelligence programs violated privacy laws and human rights.
According to GCHQ, all of its work is “carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework which ensures that our activities are authorized, necessary and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight, including from the secretary of state, the interception and intelligence Services commissioners and the parliamentary intelligence and security committee.”
Foreign Secretary William Hague has continuously dismissed allegations that GCHQ breached the law, saying law-biding citizens have no reason whatsover to be alarmed.
“If we could tell the whole world and the whole country how we do this business, I think people would be enormously reassured by it and they would see that the law-abiding citizen has nothing to worry about,” he said in June.
“If we did that, it would defeat the objective – this is secret work, it is secret intelligence, it is secret for a reason, and a reason that is to do with protecting all the people of this country,” Mr Hague explained.
Last week a joint investigation conducted by the UK’s Guardian newspaper and Channel 4 News, and based on the new documents leaked by Snowden, revealed that the NSA created a secret system called Dishfire to collect hundreds of millions of text messages a day. The documents showed that GCHQ had used the NSA database to search the metadata of “untargeted and unwarranted” communications of people in the UK. According to the Guardian report, “The NSA has made extensive use of its vast text message database to extract information on people’s travel plans, contact books, financial transactions and more – including of individuals under no suspicion of illegal activity.”
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British MPs raise alarm over drug trials, say only half data published
RT | January 5, 2014
British MPs have voiced concern that doctors and researchers are being denied access to around half the results from all clinical trials. An influential parliamentary committee has condemned the selectiveness as damaging medicine as a whole.
This apparently standard practice of withholding critical medical test information impairs decision-making by professionals, worsens patients’ treatment and prevents independent assessment of medicines, the MPs wrote. And the practice, they say, dates back all the way to the 1980s.
In the report, the MPs write that they are “surprised and concerned to discover that information is routinely withheld from doctors and researchers about the methods and results of clinical trials on treatments currently prescribed in the United Kingdom. This problem has been noted for many years in the professional academic literature, with many promises given, but without adequate action being taken by government, industry or professional bodies.”
“This has ramifications for the whole of medicine. The ability of doctors, researchers and patients to make informed decisions about treatments is being undermined,” said Richard Bacon, a senior member on the committee that published the report.
The MPs argue that this is a great problem also because the issue of access to clinical trials from previous years is absent from all new proposals. And test results on humans provide researchers with key evidence to support or oppose the use of a given medicine. There are unprecedented dangers when this framework is not operating as intended, they said.
Compounding the problem further, MPs say, is that aside from the non-publication of all clinical trial tests, for some reason positive results started popping up twice as much as negative ones. This is bad when all trial results on all uses of all chemicals should be provided, the report argues.
As a result, the committee’s MPs have given strong recommendations to the government and the country’s health bodies – among them, firstly, that the full results of clinical trials from now on be disseminated to all doctors and researchers in the UK, with full audits carried out regularly to check for transgressions; and secondly, that the Department of Health and the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) ensure that all past and future trial results and the methods used to achieve them be published in a unified register for further use.
Bacon expressed alarm that the absence of past results invariably impact doctors’ decisions on treatment. “Regulators and the industry have made proposals to open up access, but these do not cover the issue of access to the results of trials in the past which bear on the efficacy and safety of medicines in use today,” he said.
The worrying implication here is that so much medicine has been tested and approved over the past few decades, but only half of it we know the full truth about, it turns out.
One particular medicine that became a focus for alarm was Tamiflu – the popular flu medicine that gained popularity in 2009-10 during the great flu pandemic. Apparently, the UK Department of Health, without having access to exhaustive information on the medicine, had made a 424-million-pound decision to stockpile it between the years 2006-7 and 2012-13.
That kind of attitude, the MPs argue, is predicated on judgment, rather than real science. There is still no agreement on how the popular medicine works and disagreement on whether full information was provided to regulators by the MHRA during the licensing process. As it turns out from studies conducted by the non-profit NGO, Cochrane Collaboration, Tamiflu “did not reduce influenza-related lower respiratory tract complications.”
The organization is now in talks with Roche to receive the full details of Tamiflu’s testing, which will be included in a thorough upcoming review on its effectiveness. Both the government and the medical bodies will take part, as MPs share the think tank’s concern when it wrote that “we find it perplexing that the regulators continue to state that they had all the available evidence.”
Regarding Tamiflu and the wider practice as a whole, Bacon recommended that “before spending money in future to maintain the stockpile, the department needs to review what level of coverage is appropriate. It should look at the level of stockpiling in other countries, bearing in mind that the patent for the medicine runs out in 2016.”

UK food poverty a ‘public health emergency’, say leading experts
RT| December 4, 2013
A group of high-profile academics has written an open letter warning that food poverty has become an “emergency” in the UK. Use of food banks has tripled in the past year alone, but the government says this does not mean more people are starving.
“This has all the signs of a public health emergency that could go unrecognised until it is too late to take preventive action,” said the letter, co-signed by six leading public health experts, and addressed to the prestigious British Medical Journal (BMJ).
The authors, led by David Taylor-Robinson from the Medical Research Council, speculate that “the rising cost of living and increasingly austere welfare reforms” from the Conservative-Liberal government are at fault.
“The effects of these policies on nutritional status in the most vulnerable populations urgently need to be monitored… Access to an adequate food supply is the most basic of human needs and rights.”
Official statistics show that the number of those admitted to hospitals with malnutrition has risen from 3,161 in 2008/09 to 5,499 in 2012/13.
Even those who are not on the verge of starvation are suffering. The signatories cite a recent report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies that claimed that families are spending 8.5 percent less on food than before the recession, and there has been a “reduction in quality” of produce consumed during a “substitution towards processed sweet and savoury food and away from fruit and vegetables” particularly by poorer and single-parent families.
Leading food bank charity The Trussell Trust, which operates 400 outlets, says that three times more people have asked it for help than just a year ago. Nearly 350,000 people have received at least three days’ worth of meals from it in the 12 months leading to October.
British Red Cross has also started its first food aid collection drive since World War II.
The government has not only refused to take blame for increased food poverty, but has questioned that there has been an increase at all.
“The benefits system supports millions of people who are on low incomes or unemployed and there is no robust evidence that welfare reforms are linked to increased use of food banks,” said an official statement in response to the open letter.
“In fact, our welfare reforms will improve the lives of some of the poorest families in our communities with the universal credit making three million households better off – the majority of these from the bottom two fifths of the income scale.”
Government officials have said that the rise of food banks – which are made up from private donations – has actually been the result of greater generosity from private citizens, and charities opening new access points. Another issue is that of entitlement to receiving meals from the food banks. In order to be given a free meal, a needy individual has to be issued a voucher by a local official, policeman, or church minister. In recent months, employment office workers have begun to offer more food vouchers, whereas before, they might have handed out cash benefits.
But no definitive, non-ideological estimations of the scale of the food poverty problem are likely at least until the publication of an official Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) report on the issue commissioned last February, which has been completed but not released to the public.
The authors of the BMJ letter and The Trussel Trust have both hit out at the government for failing to publish the report – supposedly finished in July – implying that it is hiding the devastating effect of its welfare reforms, which include stricter criteria for receiving state aid and greater penalties for those who fail to comply with them.
In response Defra has said that it is simply conducting the “necessary review and quality assurance process” before publication.
UN to probe security agencies’ snooping
RT | December 3, 2013
The United Nations is set to carry out an investigation into the spying activities of the US and UK, a senior judge has said. The probe will examine the espionage programs and assess whether they conform to UN regulations.
UN special rapporteur Ben Emmerson QC told British newspaper The Guardian that the UN will conduct an inquiry into the NSA and the GCHQ’s spying antics. Following Edward Snowden’s revelations, which blew the whistle on both agencies’ intelligence gathering programs, Emmerson said the issue was at “the very apex of public interest and concerns.”
The report will broach a number of contentious issues, said Emmerson, including whether Snowden should be granted the legal protection afforded to a whistleblower, whether the data he handed over to the media did significant harm to national security, whether intelligence agencies need to scale down their surveillance programs and whether the UK government was misled about the extent of intelligence gathering.
“When it comes to assessing the balance that must be struck between maintaining secrecy and exposing information in the public interest, there are often borderline cases,” Emmerson told The Guardian.
Emmerson also mentioned the raid this summer on The Guardian’s London offices in search of hard drives containing data from Snowden. Addressing the allegations made by the chiefs of British spy agencies MI5, GCHQ and MI6, that publishing Snowden’s material was “a gift to terrorists,” Emmerson said it was the media’s job to hold governments to account for their actions.
“The astonishing suggestion that this sort of responsible journalism can somehow be equated with aiding and abetting terrorism needs to be scotched decisively,” said Emmerson, who will present the conclusions of his inquiry to the UN General Assembly next autumn.
Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger is set to appear before a Commons home affairs committee in a hearing about the newspaper publishing of Snowden’s security leaks. British Prime Minister David Cameron issued a statement in September, warning of a possible crackdown if media continued to publish information on covert intelligence gathering programs.
He said the government had not yet been “heavy-handed” in its dealings with the press, but it would be difficult not to act if the press does not “demonstrate some social responsibility.” Cameron added that the UK was a more dangerous place after the Guardian published Snowden’s material.
Snowden’s revelations of the international spying activities of the UK and US have embarrassed the White House and Downing Street. Recent leaks show that the NSA and GCHQ not only monitored millions of civilian communications using programs such as PRISM and Tempora, but also eavesdropped on high-profile businessmen and politicians. Moreover, it was revealed that the NSA also spied on the UN’s headquarters in New York.
Both nations have sought to justify their intelligence gathering programs as being in the interests of national security.
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UN envoy ‘shocked’ by UK’s ‘unacceptable’ persecution of The Guardian over Snowden leaks
RT | November 16, 2013
A senior United Nations official responsible for freedom of expression has warned that the UK government’s response to revelations of mass surveillance by Edward Snowden is damaging Britain’s reputation for press freedom and investigative journalism.
The UN special rapporteur, Frank La Rue, has said he is alarmed at the reaction from some British politicians following the Guardian’s revelations about the extent of the secret surveillance programs run by the UK’s eavesdropping center GCHQ and its US counterpart the NSA (National Security Agency), it was reported in the Guardian.
“I have been absolutely shocked about the way the Guardian has been treated, from the idea of prosecution to the fact that some members of parliament even called it treason. I think that is unacceptable in a democratic society,” said La Rue.
Speaking to the Guardian La Rue said that national security cannot be used as an argument against newspapers for publishing information that is in the public interest even if doing so is embarrassing for those who are in office.
The Guardian as well as other major world media organizations including the New York Times, the Washington Post and Der Spiegel began disclosing details about the US and UK’s mass surveillance programs in June, after receiving leaked documents from former NSA contractor, Edward Snowden.
The publications have sparked a huge global debate on whether such surveillance powers are justified, but in Britain there have been calls for the Guardian to be prosecuted and the editor, Alan Rusbridger, has been called to give evidence to the home affairs select committee.
The Prime Minister David Cameron has even warned that unless the newspaper begins to demonstrate some social responsibility, then he would take “tougher measures” including the issuing of D notices, which ban a newspaper or broadcaster from touching certain material.
While on Friday the New York Times wrote an editorial entitled “British press freedom under threat”. It said, “Britain has a long tradition of a free inquisitive press. That freedom, so essential to democratic accountability, is being challenged by the Conservative-Liberal coalition government of Prime Minster David Cameron.”
The op-ed added that Britain, unlike the US has no constitutional guarantee of press freedom.
“Parliamentary committees and the police are now exploiting that lack of protection to harass, intimidate and possibly prosecute the Guardian newspaper,” the leader read.
Frank La Rue’s intervention comes just days after a delegation of some of the world’s leading editors and publishers announced they were coming to Britain on a “press freedom mission”.
The trip is being organized by the Paris based, World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA), and will arrive on UK soil in January. WAN-IFRA says it will include key newspaper figures from up to five continents and that this is the first mission of this kind to the UK ever.
The delegation is expected to meet government leaders and the opposition, as well as press industry figures and civil society and freedom of speech organizations. Their discussions are expected to focus on the political pressure brought to bear on the Guardian.
“We are concerned that these actions not only seriously damage the United Kingdom’s historic international reputation as a staunch defender of press freedom, but provide encouragement to non-democratic regimes to justify their own repressive actions,” Vincent Peyregne, the Chief of the WAN-IFRA, told the Guardian.
newspaper posed a threat to the UK national security.
Also in October, British Prime Minister David Cameron called on The Guardian and other newspapers to show “social responsibility” in the reporting of the leaked NSA files to avoid high court injunctions or the use of D-notices to prevent the publication of information that could damage national security.
La Rue’s remarks come as an international delegation is set to visit Britain over growing concerns about press freedom in the country and a government crackdown on media reporting leaks and scandals.
Organized by the World Association of Newspaper and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA), the delegation, which includes publishers and editors from five continents, will arrive in January.
The team will reportedly meet with government, opposition figures and media representatives.

