Alfie Noakes comments

Are these the ones that contain depleted Uranium which will harm civilians, animals and nature for the next million years?

Yes, some are depleted uranium rounds for the 14 Challenger 2 tanks being donated to Ukraine by the UK. Given what happened to babies born in Fallujah, Iraq after the US used depleted uranium and white phosphorus weapons there in 2004, this is extremely disturbing.

"Kate Hudson, General Secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) said: “Like in Iraq, the addition of depleted uranium ammunition into this conflict will only increase the long-term suffering of the civilians caught up in this conflict. Depleted uranium shells have already been implicated in thousands of unnecessary deaths from cancer and other serious illnesses."

https://declassifieduk.org/britain-supplying-depleted-uranium-rounds-to-ukraine/

The greatest of all Japanese white elephants, in 2021 it was estimated to have an overall expected cost of $95 billion. It died the day its main sponsor Shinzo Abe did, and will remain a fitting tribute to his legacy.

a free and open Indo-Pacific.

Which doesn't actually mean a free and open Indo-Pacific, but one controlled by the US.

This is how the United States dealt with the International Criminal Court in 2018:

"The United States threatened Monday to arrest and sanction judges and other officials of the International Criminal Court if it moves to charge any American who served in Afghanistan with war crimes.

White House National Security Advisor John Bolton called the Hague-based rights body "unaccountable" and "outright dangerous" to the United States, Israel and other allies, and said any probe of US service members would be "an utterly unfounded, unjustifiable investigation."

"If the court comes after us, Israel or other US allies, we will not sit quietly," Bolton said.

He said the US was prepared to slap financial sanctions and criminal charges on officials of the court if they proceed against any Americans.

"We will ban its judges and prosecutors from entering the United States. We will sanction their funds in the US financial system, and we will prosecute them in the US criminal system," he said.

"We will do the same for any company or state that assists an ICC investigation of Americans," he said.

Bolton made the comments in a speech in Washington to the Federalist Society, a powerful association of legal conservatives.

Bolton pointed to an ICC prosecutor's request in November 2017 to open an investigation into alleged war crimes committed by the US military and intelligence officials in Afghanistan, especially over the abuse of detainees."

https://amp.france24.com/en/20180910-usa-trump-threatens-arrest-icc-judges-american-soldiers-afghan-war-crimes

And then there's the Hague invasion Act, which "allows the President to order U.S. military action, such as an invasion of The Hague, where the ICC is located, to protect American officials and military personnel from prosecution or rescue them from custody."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Protection_Act

The handmade stuff is well tasty, you can eat it as sashimi. It's good for you too.

That's sad news. He was terrific in The Wire and as Irvin Irving in Bosch.

LegrandeToday 02:28 pm JST

Yoon is from the conservative pro-US party in other words the Korean version of the LDP (it was also installed by the US), so Yoon and Kishida should get on fine.

Hence the ludicrous propaganda campaign from the state-affiliated media trumpet Kyodo. Every story says exactly the same thing....

https://twitter.com/JonReinsch/status/1624150161336467456

"We're sliding towards a new Cold War. Threats are increasing. Yet here we are staying on a peacetime budget," Tobias Ellwood, Conservative lawmaker and Chair of the Defense Committee told parliament.

Ellwood is an officer of the British Army's notorious 77th Brigade Psychological Warfare unit and an unhinged warmonger who actually wants war with Russia.

The Tories are sinking like a stone, flailing around at immigrants, China and football presenters in increasing desperation as their electoral destruction draws ever closer.

One law for US and one law for the rest:

By Charlie Savage

March 8, 2023

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon is blocking the Biden administration from sharing evidence with the International Criminal Court in The Hague gathered by American intelligence agencies about Russian atrocities in Ukraine, according to current and former officials briefed on the matter.

American military leaders oppose helping the court investigate Russians because they fear setting a precedent that might help pave the way for it to prosecute Americans. The rest of the administration, including intelligence agencies and the State and Justice Departments, favors giving the evidence to the court, the officials said. President Biden has yet to resolve the impasse, officials said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/us/politics/pentagon-war-crimes-hague.html

The BBC is clearly biased. Just watch any of the documentaries about the BBC and Indyref, the vote for Scottish Independence. The same tactics were then used during Brexit. I find the BBC completely unwatchable.

Exactly. The BBC's origins back in 1922 were explicitly political in nature. As Des Freeman wrote last year:

The British Broadcasting Company was set up as a public company in October 1922 partly because the government saw it as a more efficient model for broadcasting than the emerging commercial free-for-all in the US. But the government also recognised the power of propaganda after World War One and the use of radio in the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and were anxious to maintain control over the spectrum. As Jean Seaton puts it in Power without Responsibility, the BBC’s monopoly was created ‘because the government were concerned that the new medium might interfere with the security and military use of the airwaves’ and believed that a publicly owned company might be a more reliable bulwark against ‘subversion’.

https://www.counterfire.org/article/eight-things-you-need-to-know-about-the-bbc/

Sunak’s spokesman, Max Blain, said the government “would never” embroil the king in politics.

Okay.

“His Majesty has met with a number of foreign leaders recently,” he said, including Polish President Andrzej Duda and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy. “This is no different.”

So he's embroiled in politics, then. That's clear.

UK: Liz Truss advised King Charles to stay away from COP27 climate summit

https://www.carbonbrief.org/daily-brief/uk-liz-truss-advised-king-charles-to-stay-away-from-cop27-climate-summit/

So it's only politics the Tory government approves of that he can be embroiled in. Thanks for clarifying that.

Pitiful

It's been widely known for years that Adams held racist views, so his rant isn't really surprising. The latest herd-smear on Musk is surely in response to his tweet that "Nobody is pushing this war more than Nuland," not the kind of thing even a Pentagon contractor like Musk can say in the current climate of war hysteria.

The lack of any real, informed, intellectual debate (politics, religion, philosophy, etc) and almost always viewing the world and everything through the tiny, opaque lens of Japan itself and its culture like there is no other explanation.

There was a thriving, popular intellectual culture in Japan until the late 1960s when it was deliberately destroyed by the LDP.

The Liverpool fans are very angry about this season with much of the blame on the owners who have not invested enough in the players to have a top-quality squad and a top-quality second team.

Jamie Carragher said in a recent article on the BBC website that FSG actually offered to put up the money for Tchouameni last summer, but the player chose Real Madrid instead. Klopp then decided he'd stick with what he had in midfield, which has clearly proved to be a disaster.

FSG have been lambasted for their tight-fisted transfer dealings and rightly so, but not all the problems at Liverpool have been caused by that.

It includes words adapted from Psalm 98

It's a long time since I tread any Psalms but I can't recall one about a deeply unpopular, unelected billionaire spending 120m pounds on a party to inherit a gold hat and some castles, while his "subjects" eat at food banks and die of cold in winter.

After years of minimal coverage this is the second article trumpeting a "revival" in Ainu culture in a couple of days. Anyone would think that a major international event was going to be held in Japan and the government was desperate to burnish its hitherto appalling record in this area.

Oh, hang on a minute....

What does this US ambassador think gives him the right to interfere with another country’s internal affairs and legislation?

Because weaponizing social issues to promote foreign policy interests has been adopted by the US, UK and other western countries whose governments were shocked by the massive demonstrations against the illegal Iraq invasion and war 20 years ago.

Remember the furore over Qatar's laws against homosexuality and sex outside marriage just before the World Cup last year? Where do you think that came from?

It's like watching a Japanese Ryan Giggs.

Let's hope he only resembles Giggs on the field.

It can be done by using gatling gun is much cheaper for same objective

Back in 2015 Raytheon lost a billion-dollar blimp that drifted over Maryland, frightened the Amish horses in Pennsylvania and was eventually shot down by coppers with shotguns.

https://theintercept.com/2015/10/28/military-blimps-rampage-deflates-raytheons-hopes-to-sell-more/

https://www.usnews.com/news/offbeat/articles/2015/10/29/army-blimp-breaks-loose-drifts-for-hours-over-pennsylvania?src=usn_tw

A truly remarkable career and so many brilliant songs it's astonishing. Thanks for all the music Burt.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tf1d65OHYXo

To dismiss him as anti Semite, is so wrong.

In the UK anyone who supports the Palestinian cause and criticizes the world's last apartheid regime for murdering children and journalists is herd-smeared as an anti-Semite. That's how things work there now.

Reuters attempting to deflect from Seymour Hersh's article by labeling it a "blog post" is as laughable as their long history as paid propaganda merchants for Western governments:

"A series of official documents declassified in January 2020 revealed that Reuters was secretly funded by the British government throughout the 1960s and 1970s to assist an anti-Soviet propaganda organization run by the MI6 intelligence agency. The U.K. government used the BBC as a pass-through to conceal payments to the news group.

The revelation prompted a Reuters spokesman to declare that “the arrangement in 1969 [with the MI6] was not in keeping with our Trust Principles and we would not do this today.”

However, the newly leaked documents analyzed by The Grayzone appear to reveal that both Reuters and the BBC are engaged yet again in a non-transparent relationship with the U.K.’s foreign ministry to counter and undermine Russia.

In 2017, the non-profit arm of the Reuters media empire, the Thomson Reuters Foundation (TRF), delivered a formal tender offering to “enter into a Contract with the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, as represented by the British Embassy Moscow, for the provision of a project ‘Capacity Building in Russian Media.’” The letter was signed by Reuters CEO Monique Ville on July 31, 2017."

https://consortiumnews.com/2021/02/22/reuters-bbc-in-covert-uk-program-to-push-western-agenda/

according to the Cabinet Office, which conducted the annual diplomatic affairs survey

As everyone must surely know by now, surveys emanating from the Cabinet Office aren't design to reflect public opinion but to direct it. That's why they ask such questions as, "Politics is really complicated and difficult to understand. Don't you think it should be left to the experts".

Comedy's Liz Truss is coming to Tokyo! Where can we buy tickets?

You need only gently propose that we might return to wearing masks on public transport to provoke hundreds of people on social media to bray “freedom!” and denounce you as a tyrant. Against their tiniest of freedoms – keeping their faces uncovered on trains and buses – the trolls weigh freedom from disability and even death, and decide that their right to breathe germs on to other people is the indispensable liberty.

These people display certain traits associated with antisocial personality disorder such as lacking concern, regret or remorse about other people's distress, irresponsible behavior and showing disregard for normal social behaviour. They seem to lack basic human empathy and compassion for others.

Both Russian Doll and Knives Out were fantastic, so I'll be watching this for sure. Lyonne is terrific.

Zoroto 07:14 am JST

Translation: the government wants to cut subsiding treatments and vaccines. Purely a cost measure that can be redirected to appease the US warmongers. This has nothing to do with health reasons.

Newgirlintown 07:53 am JST

Just remember that this is mainly for economic reasons.

Yep, Kishida's vaunted New Capitalism is actually cutting the budget for the protection of the public health and economic support for the worst affected, in order to fund the American military-industrial complex. Contemptible.

Hercolobus 07:23 am JST

Hats off to Mori. Finally he said something that makes sense.

In their dotage these dinosaurs occasionally find the wherewithal to throw off the shackles and talk sense. In his autobiography a few years ago former PM Yasuhiro Nakasone freely discussed running a sex slave brothel in Borneo during the war, something he repeated at a Foreign Correspondent's event in Tokyo. Needless to say it didn't please the Abe government of the time and Nakasone was excommunicated. Given Mori's appalling history of grotesque pronouncements maybe he's trying to even the balance?

During the 2014 Tokyo governor's election Sukarno shilled for her friend, the now-disgraced far-right, historical revisionist former Chief of Staff of Japan's Air Self-Defense Force Toshio Tamogami. Tamogami lost to the now-disgraced Yōichi Masuzoe, yet still obtained some 600,000 votes. Tamogami was later given a five-year prison sentence for making illegal payments to his campaign staff, suspended of course.

She's an obvious fit for Ukraine's current leadership and their backers in Washington.