UNITED KINGDOM

Laws have certain flexibility to them, the vast legroom that allows a degree of significant contortions.  The most resilient ones tend to be those concerning security.  Where safety is perceived to be at stake, the legroom widens.  Interpreters of national security laws tend to make leaps to extend their application as far as possible.  Rather than reading down the effects of legislation, with the tendencies to limit civil liberties, the desire lies in expanding power. The drafting, for that reason, is fundamental.

Due to these "transit risks for European consumers in the territory of Ukraine," Gazprom cut gas exports to Europe by 60%, plunging the continent into an energy crisis "within hours." Perhaps explaining the explosion higher in NatGas prices (and oil) today, gas companies in Ukraine confirmed that Russia had cut off supply; and six countries reported a complete shut-off of Russian gas.

Like the rest of the media, the Guardian protests passionately when 'bad guys' commit an atrocity against 'us', but emotive defences of free speech are in short supply when 'good guys' bomb Serb and Libyan TV, or threaten the life of progressive US filmmakers. Far fewer tears are shed for Serb, Libyan or Palestinian journalists in US-UK corporate media offices.
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Calls for BBC’s Tim Willcox to resign over above comment (Images: courtesy Veterans News Now)

Tim Willcox: “Many critics, though, of Israel’s policy would suggest that the Palestinians suffer hugely at Jewish hands as well.”

 

Poor Tim Willcox, now terrorised for doing a professional job at the Paris anti-terror march.
In a live TV report the BBC’s Willcox was interviewing people in the crowd and talking to a Jewish woman about her fears of persecution. She said: “The situation is going back to the days of the 1930s in Europe.”
Willcox replied: “Many critics, though, of Israel’s policy would suggest that the Palestinians suffer hugely at Jewish hands as well.”
She countered: “We can’t do an amalgam.”
Willcox said: “You understand everything is seen from different perspectives.”

Greece and the troika (the International Monetary Fund, the EU, and the European Central Bank) are in a dangerous game of chicken. The Greeks have been threatened with a “Cyprus-Style prolonged bank holiday” if they “vote wrong.” But they have been bullied for too long and are saying “no more.”
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Heading into the last quarter of his presidency, Barack Obama must decide whether he will let the neocons keep pulling his strings or finally break loose and pursue a realistic foreign policy seeking practical solutions to world problems, including the crisis with Russia over Ukraine.
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And as for freedom of speech and expression, we need only look back to the most recent royal wedding to see how even these sacred 'shining British values' can be exposed as pure illusion
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So the ball is in your court, Europe: will it be a triple-dip (and soon thereafter quadruple: see Japan) recession as your Goldman-controlled central bank plunders ever more of what little is left of middle-class wealth with promises that this year - for real - is when it all turns around, or will Europe acknowledge it has had enough and shifts its strategic, and trade, focus from west (speaking of the TTIP, Germany's agriculture minister just said "We can't protect every sausage" referring to the TTIP) to east?

Zeman’s now publicly asserting that the overthrow of Yanukovych was a coup instead of having merely expressed the democratic intentions of most of the Maidan demonstrators, constitutes a sharp break away from U.S. President Barack Obama, who was behind that Ukrainian coup and who endorses its current leaders.
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