A fine example of media manipulation. Worthy of the BBC in fact.
THE BBC will have to divert licence-fee money into its pension fund after it discovered a £1billion “black hole”, worsened by gold-plated payouts to staff.
It may need to pour in extra “deficit payments” of as much as £100m a year – nearly equivalent to the annual budget of Radio 4 – to meet the shortfall.
N-ooo, not plugging a ‘black hole’ with licence money! It attracted predictable comments. more...
Question: If you were a real terrorist group who wanted to appear fearsome and mighty, would you really release a statement claiming responsibility for an “attack” that amounted to little more than a car full of fireworks that killed nobody, injured nobody, and was an abject failure? This claim of responsibility holds about as much credibility as if Barney the Purple Dinosaur had made a video saying he did it. more...
Britain could be battered by speculators on the international money markets within hours of the election result as the futures market in bonds and sterling has agreed to open for the first time at 1am on Friday.
The City is concerned that a hung parliament could mean Britain is unable to take rapid action to cut its budget deficit and force a similar battle with bond dealers that the one that forced Greece to resort to €110bn (£95bn) a bailout package put together by the eurozone countries and the International Monetary Fund . more...
The pension deficits of Britain's biggest companies have deepened over the past 12 months despite the sharp rise in stock markets, new research shows.
The combined pension deficits of companies in the FTSE 100 reached £73bn at the end of April, up from £52bn a year earlier, according to Pension Capital Strategies (PCS), an advisory group that is owned by insurer Jardine Lloyd Thompson. For the FTSE 350, the deficit had increased to £88bn from £60bn.
The projected liabilities of companies' defined pension schemes have outstripped the rise in the value of the assets they hold, thanks in part to an increase in inflation expectations. more...
Baroness Thatcher has delivered a damning verdict on "boring" David Cameron's campaign to take the Tories to power.
The former Conservative PM confided that she has serious doubts about the party leader's ability to deliver victory on Thursday.
In frank conversations with her close confidant and former Tory grandee Lord Tim Bell, Lady Thatcher dubbed Cameron "boring" and "still out of touch with the British public". more...
Gordon Brown insisted he was in a "fight to the finish" as he rounded off a 10-stop whirlwind of campaign visits across London.
The Prime Minister maintained that people were beginning to see the choices facing them in Thursday's poll - as he rounded on the press for concentrating on "froth".
His comments came at the end of a hyperactive day of campaigning around the capital.
Moments later, he had to be sneaked out of a pub the back way after it was besieged by jostling Liberal Democrat activists. More....
The involvement of the National Domestic Extremism team in the Climategate investigation was the subject of both concern and ridicule a few months back. Those who are on the "concerned" side of the argument might be interested in this article at the indispensable (for civil libertarians anyway) Spy Blog. more...
ICM for The Guardian and YouGov for the Sun tonight both point towards a hung parliament. ICM has the Tories on 33 down three from the last ICM poll, Labour down one to 28 and the Lib Dems up one to 28 and others up four to 12. YouGov puts the Tories on 34, the Lib Dems up one to 29 and Labour on 28. Polling on a Bank holiday weekend is particularly difficult. But these two polls will put a bit of a dent in the media narrative that a Tory majority is becoming the most likely result. more...
British voters go to the polls on Thursday in a general election that promises to be historic – for all the wrong reasons.
Firstly, voter turnout threatens to hit a post-Second World War record low. Over the past six decades, the percentage of eligible Britons casting their vote has steadily fallen from 80-70 per cent to around 60 per cent. With public apathy and antipathy towards the three main political parties – the incumbent Labour government, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats – running at all-time highs, there is a real prospect that the British general election of 2010 will see as many citizens forfeiting their democratic right as those turning out to vote. more...
A semi-annual report released by the Pentagon on the Afghanistan war recorded a sharp increase in attacks on occupation troops and scarce support for the corrupt US-backed puppet regime of President Hamid Karzai.
The progress report, mandated by the US Congress, presented a grim picture of the state of the nearly nine-year-old, US-led war, even as a series of incidents in which civilians were killed by US and NATO troops unleashed renewed popular anger against the foreign occupation. more...
Boy, what a week! I’ve been warning about a troubled euro and a building sovereign debt crisis for some time. And the bond and currency market activities this past week are a clear example that the momentum is picking up.
There’s a bumpy road ahead … and not just for Greece. more...
We started out the week with a bang when it was announced that Goldman Sachs was being charged with fraud by the SEC. This sounds ominous at first glance, but in the end it’s a civil matter and will result with no more than a fine and a slap on the wrist. Then toward the middle of the week when the ratings agencies began to write down sovereign debt, first with Greece and then a day later with Spain and Portugal. It seems to me that these agencies no longer serve a purpose as these downgrades are nothing more than an acknowledgement of a situation that we all know existed for quite some time. more...
The world faces a future with little meat to eat and no cotton for clothes because of a catastrophic collapse in bee colonies, experts have warned.
Many vital crops are dependent on pollination by honeybees, but latest figures show a third failed to survive the winter in the U.S..
More than three million colonies in America and billions of bees worldwide have died since 2006. more...
New cars and lorries would be required to carry black boxes to record crash information and manufacturers would help fund the US government's motor industry safety agency, under a series of proposals following Toyota's massive recalls. more...
Gold hit a 2010 high above $1,180 an ounce on Friday, gaining 1 percent as a widening euro zone sovereign debt crisis prompted investors to buy the metal asset in a flight to safety. more...
The police have been urged to investigate allegations that taxpayers’ details have been stolen from a Government database and sold to junk mail companies. more...
NHS bosses have drawn up secret plans to axe thousands of jobs for doctors and nurses after the election, despite Labour's claims that it would protect front line services if it retained power
Health authorities have identified thousands of training posts to be axed as part of swingeing cuts planned by the current Government.
Thousands of training places are being axed across the country by health officials who were told to expect cuts of £650 million a year from the national NHS training budget in the next three years.
In the East of England more than 500 posts for trainee nurses, midwives and hospital medics will be lost by 2012, under the plans.
Hospitals across the South West intend to remove 280 posts for junior hospital doctors. more...
The Governor of the Bank of England was at the centre of an electoral storm last night after saying that the austerity measures needed to tackle Britain’s budget deficit would be so unpopular that whoever wins next week would not get back into government for a generation.
Mervyn King’s opinion, revealed hours before the prime ministerial debate on the economy, came as a respected think-tank predicted that taxes would have to rise by the equivalent of a 6p-in-the-pound increase in income tax over the next ten years. more...
Eric King reports the breaking news that in a letter obtained by Ted Butler, the DOJ’s Antitrust department is considering launching an investigation into silver market manipulation by JP Morgan. Should an announcement of a full formal probe of manipulation by JPM follow, it would be tantamount to a confirmation of what numerous individuals have been claiming over the years, that JP Morgan, the LBMA, the CFTC, various banks, and even that kindly old grandpa who was so much against derivatives except when he was about to lose money as a result of regulation that he is spending the whole weekend telling his investors in Omaha to run, not walk, to Borsheim’s, and buy all their massively overpriced trinkets (you can’t be a quadrillionaire without first being a trillionaire), are nothing but a borderline criminal cabal that traffics in wealth extraction courtesy of a few monopolist players. As Eric King discloses in its letter the Anti-Trust division announces that "it will carefully consider the issue of silver market manipulation by JP Morgan and other traders. Generally the CFTC investigates these types of market manipulations. However, the suggestion that JPMorgan Chase may be signaling other traders, warrants further analysis. The DOJ will carefully consider the issue you raise, and you can be assured that if we conclude that silver traders have engaged in anti-competitive conduct, we will take appropriate enforcement action." more...
Sitting in the sun-dappled square where Seixal's old town meets the River Tagus, Umberto Da Silva was clear about who would suffer as Portugal became the latest victim of Europe's snowballing sovereign debt crisis.
"It is the poor who will pay," the retired factory worker bemoaned. "They are already cutting subsidies. But we will fight, just as we have always done." more...
A prolonged and increasingly violent stand-off between government and red shirt protesters in Bangkok is worsening and could deteriorate into "an undeclared civil war," the International Crisis Group said.
"The Thai political system has broken down and seems incapable of pulling the country back from the brink of widespread conflict," the Brussels-based conflict resolution group said in a report released late on Friday.
"The stand-off in the streets of Bangkok between the government and red shirt protesters is worsening and could deteriorate in undeclared civil war." more...
The improvement in the stock market following the quantitative easing (QE) and thus zero cost money has artificially boosted investors’ confidence through strongly improving markets, though in our point of view this confidence is paper thin and it won’t take much to rock investors’ confidence. The moment the stock market drops steeply the confidence will be gone.
The economy is not improving and will not improve, with widespread unemployment of 17%, a constantly deteriorating housing market, and huge private and public debt resulting in some corporate bonds (Berkshire Hathaway, P&G, J&J, Lowe’s Cos) trading at yields below treasury yields. Imagine, if the hundreds of billions of stimulus dollars were able to create only 114,000 (162,000 minus 48,000) jobs in March of this year, what the job creation will be once the stimulus drops away. more...
GORDON BROWN is facing an official inquiry over whether he used misleading figures to suggest Labour’s points-based entry system has achieved a sharp fall in immigration.
Sir Michael Scholar, the independent statistics watchdog, has been forced to intervene after questions were raised about a key speech Brown made on immigration at the beginning of the election campaign. more...
The Believe System, an acronym for Biometric Enrollment, Locally stored Information and Electronic Verification of Employment the name "The Believe System" is in itself disturbing. more...
PRESIDENT OBAMA has been caught in a shocking cheating scandal after being caught in a Washington, DC Hotel with a former campaign aide, sources say.
And now, a hush-hush security video that shows everything could topple both Obama's presidency and marriage to Michelle!
A confidential investigation has learned that Obama first became close to gorgeous 35 year-old VERA BAKER in 2004 when she worked tirelessly to get him elected to the US Senate, raising millions in campaign contributions. more...
According to a survey by Pro Thema, 51.3% of Greeks have said they would protest in the streets should new Austerity measures happen. Many already are.more...
Everyone and their brother intuitively knows that the current government fiscal deficits in the developed world are unsustainable. They have to be brought under control, but that requires some short-term pain. Today we look at a rather remarkable piece of research from the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) on what the fiscal crisis may morph into in the future, how much pain will be needed, and what will happen if various countries stay on their present courses. Some countries could end up paying north of 20% of GDP just on the interest to serve their debt, within just 30 years. more...
Fiat money buckling, an inflationary depression, years of reckless spending, Greek debt unpayable, Euro zone in jeopardy, a loss of integrity in US markets, criminal charges for Goldman Sachs, side pockets a new hedge fun trick, Banks on subprime offensive, Fed works the printing presses overtime... more...
Greece's finance minister today outlined the savage spending cuts and tax increases his debt-ridden country must face to stave off bankrupcy.
The Mediterranean country has reached agreement with the EU and IMF on an aid package but will have to implement harsh austerity measures, including cuts to civil servants' salaries and pensions.
Finance minister George Papaconstantinou said the government is faced with a 'choice between collapse or salvation' of the country, and has to implement the measures, which aim to reduce the budget deficit to below 3 percent of gross domestic product by 2014, from the current 13.6 percent of GDP. more...
Extrajudicial killings, beatings, mental torture, abductions
The United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) occupies center-stage again in the Philippines, the laboratory in 1950-1960s for the Phoenix assassination program in Vietnam inspired by CIA agent Edward Lansdale who is credited for defeating the communist-led Huk uprising. Attention is being given to the CIA systematization of coercive techniques in handling prisoners, including diverse forms of torture, zealously implemented by the police/military officials of the corrupt, unpopular Gloria Arroyo regime. more...
Noting that periodically sub-Saharan Africa receives some attention in the US and at least since Mr Clinton moved into the Big House has occasionally been given attention by news and pundits-- of all persuasions-- I remain struck by the determination to treat the events in the Congo Basin/ East Africa as unique and detached deformities of the Dark Continent. Reporting and commentary acquire more colour and sparkle but once squeezed into view, reveal themselves to be the same dubious paste of unknown content. This situation has by no means improved now that the Big House is occupied by a man of Kenyan and Kansan descent. One example washed through the US liberal journal, Atlantic, is an article by Samantha Powers. The writing to the Left is not much better since with few exceptions her assumptions are shared widely across the North American and European political spectrum. more...
ECB President tells insiders that secretive group of international bankers – responsible to no nation state – will become primary engine of world government
In a speech before the elitist Council On Foreign Relations organization in New York earlier this week, President of the European Central Bank Jean-Claude Trichet called for the imposition of global governance to be bossed by the G20 and the corrupt Bank of International Settlements in the name of safeguarding the global economy.
In an address entitled “Global Governance Today,” Trichet proclaims how the elite need to impose “A set of rules, institutions, informal groupings and cooperation mechanisms that we call “global governance”. more...
As someone who often sees the glass half empty rather than half fall, I'm in my element this weekend. The dark clouds just keep on swirling overhead – there has been no end of gloomy forecasts.
My favourite is the reported comment by Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England. He is reported to have said that whichever party wins the election will have to impose spending cuts of such severity that they will find themselves exiled from power for a generation. more...
Prescriptions of Valium, the highly addictive pill for stress and anxiety disorders, have risen by more than 11 per cent in three years.
Senior doctors expressed alarm that the drug diazepam, commonly known as Valium, is now being dispensed almost 5 million times a year in England. more...
WASHINGTON, DC – A new study, “Thimerosal Exposure & Increasing Trends of Premature Puberty in the Vaccine Safety Datalink”, published in the most recent issue of the peer-reviewed Indian Journal of Medical Research1, confirms a significant association in American children between an increasing rates of premature puberty and increasing exposure to mercury from Thimerosal-containing childhood vaccines. more...
The reality facing many American newspaper publishers continues to look stark, as figures released Monday show deep circulation declines, with average weekday sales down almost 9 percent since the same time last year. more...
I went to my appointment with “Dr C’ in Los Angeles with a shopping list of the most commonly abused types of drug: pain relievers, tranquillisers, stimulants and sedatives. Beforehand, a local addiction specialist, Bernadine Fried, had briefed me on how to approach your doctor like an addict and still come away with fistfuls of pills. more...
Greece has reached agreement with the IMF and European Union on a rescue package for the debt-laden country, prime minister George Papandreou said.
His government is set to announce harsh spending cuts through 2012 as part of the loan agreement worth some 120 billion euros (£104 billion).
Greeks would be called upon to make "great sacrifices" to avoid catastrophe, Mr Papandreou said in a live televised address. More....
The energy regulator has expressed concerns over number of cases in which power companies have broken into the homes of customers.
A couple from Glasgow are seeking an apology after British Gas broke down the door of their flat, removed their meter, installed a pre-pay replacement and left a note accusing them of “tampering” with the original more...
THE BBC will have to divert licence-fee money into its pension fund after it discovered a £1billion "black hole", worsened by gold-plated payouts to staff.
It may need to pour in extra "deficit payments" of as much as £100m a year - nearly equivalent to the annual budget of Radio 4 - meet the shortfall.
News of the black hole will renew public disquiet at the lucrative retirement benefits racked up by its top executives.
The combined value of the retirement pots of five senior BBC executives is £35m - led by Mark Byford, the deputy director-general, who has accrued an annual retirement income of £229,500 from a pot that would cost almost £8m to buy on the open market. more...
The world may be on the brink of biological disaster after news that a third of US bee colonies did not survive the winter
Disturbing evidence that honeybees are in terminal decline has emerged from the United States where, for the fourth year in a row, more than a third of colonies have failed to survive the winter.
The decline of the country's estimated 2.4 million beehives began in 2006, when a phenomenon dubbed colony collapse disorder (CCD) led to the disappearance of hundreds of thousands of colonies. Since then more than three million colonies in the US and billions of honeybees worldwide have died and scientists are no nearer to knowing what is causing the catastrophic fall in numbers. more...
A FURIOUS row has erupted over moves that could see Scottish school and library books supplied from England. more...
ALEX Salmond has announced he will, after all, take part in a Scottish leaders' debate to be staged by the BBC tonight.
In a U-turn following the SNP's court defeat last week over being included in the UK party leaders' debates, the First Minister declared yesterday he is to replace the party's Westminster leader, Angus Robertson, as the Nationalist representative more...
The Greek debt crisis now threatens to spiral out of control - in spite of IMF rescue efforts - and the fate of the entire eurozone is at stake.
The Greek debt crisis is serious... deadly serious. Those who still think the situation will turn out okay - that it will "blow over" - are clinging to foolish hopes, just as they have done at great cost in the past.
And what do I mean by "deadly serious?" Put it this way. The world may soon face the credible threat of systemic collapse for the entire eurozone. more...
The Conservatives win the election and form a government. Amongst the shattered dreams of the Labour party, panic is widespread. They now need to find jobs, and having proved how bad they are, at everything, it is not a pretty spectacle. The bloggers are up in arms, particularly the more libertarian among us, because we knew that we only had two years to kill off the European monster. From 2012 we succumb, but totally. We will think it's all over, and it will be then. The Tories, only marginally less europhile than the LibDems, will bend over just as far as Labour did, and they will ensure that the work of Ted Heath is completed some 38 years after it all began. more...
The most toxic aspect of Brown’s debacle yesterday, when he accused pensioner Gillian Duffy of being a ‘bigoted woman’, was that the appalling attitude he displayed could not be dismissed as a one-off, heat of the moment, poor fellow under enormous pressure sort of thing. That whole constellation of contempt for ordinary people, consisting of a) the view that their attitudes on immigration and a host of other matters are pig-ignorant and prejudiced and b) the politicians’ pretence that they are on the side of these ordinary people, shaking their hands and beaming at them and telling them they are the kind of people who make this country great, was suddenly revealed in all its grubby cynicism. It was that mixture of utter contempt, hypocrisy and profound mendacity which characterises the 'progressive' mind and the politicians who lay claim to that mantle which Brown so shockingly illuminated.
Even after he had grovelled, and grovelled again, he was still coming up with the whopper that Labour was now getting immigration under control. And that mixture of contempt and mendacity, of course, is precisely what voters have long understood, and goes a long way to explaining their terminal disaffection from the political process. more...
DAVID CAMERON has unveiled a detailed blueprint for the first days of a future Conservative government as the polls suggest he is on course to win the largest number of seats in the general election.
In a Sunday Times interview, the Conservative leader revealed the four pieces of legislation that would dominate his debut Queen’s speech. more...
Our politicians are trying desperately to convince us that they know how to run the country. Well, we’ve been listening to them and they’re rubbish. Their entire economic argument chases its tail around how much public expenditure each party will cut, how much we will be taxed, what and when. It’s all about the deficit and a mythical economic recovery, the basis for which or the possibility of it not occurring were never mentioned. And recovery is doubtful. In parallel, the Institute for Fiscal Studies says that there are massive spending holes in all their published budgets because they’re concealing how enormous the government’s deficit is. Call me a prophet of doom – I don’t care. Doom is on the horizon. more...
The drama playing out in Greece has been watched with a mix of curiosity, schadenfreude and fear around the world. In the UK, as the markets brace for an indecisive election result and the country grapples with the biggest deficit in decades, the scrutiny of a nearby nation in dire straits has been particularly intense.
Some portray the UK as a country in fiscal crisis, unable to decide what it wants out of the polls and headed for the debt downgrade spiral that has plunged Greece into street fighting and strikes. more...
MAY DAY protests in Greece turned violent yesterday as youths in gas masks and hoods set fire to vehicles, smashed shop fronts and threw molotov cocktails and rocks at police in an explosion of fury over austerity measures they claim will hurt only the poor.
Tourists were cut off from their hotels as thousands of communists, civil servants and private-sector workers converged on a main square in Athens to vent their rage at the European Union and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). more...
The 2010 Food Crisis has already begun in India, and, while things seem bad enough already, the situation is going to get much worse the coming global food shortages this summer. more...
Kerry McCarthy: The reply from the electoral office.
Re: FAO Stephen McNamara Re Kerry McCarthy
From: Electoral Services Electoral Services (electoral.services@bristol.gov.uk)
Sent: 01 May 2010 13:47:59
To:
Cc: Fair Comment (faircomment@bristol.gov.uk); Stephen McNamara (stephen.mcnamara@bristol.gov.uk)
Please see message from Mr McNamara:
Dear Mr xxxx
I have as the acting Returning Officer made a complaint to the police.
This is now a police matter and therefore I forwarded your email to them
regards
(Name removed for privacy sake but this is official.)
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A fine example of media manipulation. Worthy of the BBC in fact.
