UNITED KINGDOM

Jeux!

(ANTIWAR.COM) — The British Defense Secretary is announcing that 800 commandos are being deployed into Norway starting next year, and continuing every winter for at least a decade. The troops will join US and Dutch troops there, and are targeting Russia. The program is built around claims of Russian aggression, and the idea that global warming will lead Russia […]

If something cannot go on forever, it will stop
— Economist Herbert Stein

The pulse of negotiations, a flurry of communications, and the person central to this is one who threatens to go nowhere – for the moment.  But go somewhere these parties would wish Julian Assange to do.  For six years, cramped within a space in London a stone’s throw away from Harrods, one he has made his tenuous home, a citadel of sporadic publishing and exposes; for six years, an unruly, disobedient tenant whose celebrity shine has lost its gloss for certain followers and those who did, at one point, tolerate him.

Two weeks ago the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) gave a landmark ruling against the UK government’s mass surveillance program, stating that it violated human rights and offered “no real safeguards” to the public.  This surveillance programme, according to the Strasbourg court, allowed the British intelligence agencies’ to violate the right to a private and family life with “insufficient oversight” over which communications were chosen for examination.

Amongst the highly prolific author HG Wells’ many publications is a less well-known book titled A Short History of the World. Given the potential immensity of such a subject, the fact that Wells produced a book of very modest length (my copy is a mere 350 pages or so) no doubt would encourage some to dismiss it as trite and superficial. Obviously it’s superficial, but it might be reasonable to say the same of something twenty or fifty times longer – depending on how well it’s written.

On September 17 the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation held a briefing for members of the press to present documented new evidence that the Ukrainian armed forces helped to bring down the Malaysian airliner that was flying over the Donbass in July 2014.

The propaganda mills of the British and American governments – spokespersons, media, think tanks – are working overtime churning out ‘talking points’ to justify the upcoming large scale bombing of Syria on the pretext of use of prohibited weapons. Here is a guide from a former insider to the top dozen of these lies. 1. There are more babies than jihadis […]
The post The Bluffer’s Guide to Bombing Syria appeared first on BSNEWS.

In my last blog post I argued that power in our societies resides in structure, ideology and narratives – supporting what we might loosely term our current “neoliberal order” – rather than in individuals.

It’s fitting that the same society that produced George Orwell with his warnings of a totalitarian dystopia stacked with all-prying monitors, surveillance and paranoia should yield up some of the most invasive surveillance regimes imaginable.  While some states have found the revelations from Edward Snowden the sort that should initiate, at the very least, modest changes, the United Kingdom preferred opposite approach.  It had, after all, been an indispensable ally to the US National Security Agency, its equivalent GCHQ always intent on going one better.