"Robinson was chairman of the Young Conservatives [but] as a viewer ...(and former colleague) I have always found Robinson’s reporting to be both insightful and scrupulously fair." Surely this is exactly what you're saying, and exactly what is wrong with the liberal media? See More
John Simpson on Radio 4 Today programme this morning: Iran is a coun...try with a two-thirds moderate majority, but the conservative element is consistently able to manipulate the election result to return a conservative government. Sound familiar? See More- John Simpson on Radio 4 Today programme this morning: Iran is a coun...try with a two-thirds moderate majority, but the conservative element is consistently able to manipulate the election result to return a conservative government. Sound familiar? See More
On Friday 10 July 2015, three members of Veterans For Peace UK met in Trafalgar Square, London and walked down Whitehall towards the residence of the Prime Minister. Once at Downing Street the veterans lined up, faced the police barricades and made the following statements.
Shoot and lie: Israeli forces are killing civilians with impunity
Ben White
On Sunday, an undercover unit of Israel's Border Police conducted an arrest raid in Shuafat refugee camp, an area of Occupied East Jerusalem locked behind the Separation Wall.
...Encountering resistance from local residents, the undercover forces requested assistance, and a large number of uniformed Israeli forces entered the camp. The police, in order to "extract the undercover unit and the detainee", deployed "tear gas, sponge-tipped bullets and stun grenades."
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/…/19862-shoot-and-lie-isr…
Israel couldn't have hoped for a greater piece of propaganda than the BBC film Children of the Gaza War.
John Hilley
http://stopwar.org.uk/…/this-shameful-bbc-film-is-an-abuse-…
Robert Fisk on the Iran nuclear deal
Iran nuclear deal: America has taken Iran's side – to the fury of Israel and Saudi Arabia
http://www.independent.co.uk/…/iran-nuclear-deal-however-th…
Jeremy Bowen, BBC News at Ten last night:
'In Syria, the Vienna powers are on opposite sides. Iran has spent billions supporting President Assad, and the West wants him out.'
No mention of the funds and weapons given to Assad's opponents by the West.
...BBC 'impartiality' in action.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/…/ep…/b061srqz/bbc-news-at-ten-14072015
(From around 12:00)
No scientific evidence of GM food safety
It is “premature” to declare GM safe due to “incomplete” scientific knowledge, finds report commissioned by Norwegian Environment Agency
by Nafeez Ahmed
... See More
Let me be very clear: no. I’ll repeat: NO. The overwhelming majority of scientists do not think this can happen. While changes in the Sun’s activity have a very marginal effect on global warming and/or cooling, human contributions to carbon dioxide in our atmosphere completely overwhelm the Sun’s influence. It’s like tapping on your brakes as your car plunges headlong into a brick wall at 100 kilometers per hour.
by Phil Plait, Bad Astronomy blog, Slate, July 14, 2015
Speedy study claims climate change doubled chances of European heatwave
Researchers hope that near real-time analysis will improve media coverage of climate's links to extreme weather.
Mark Zastrow
...Over much of Europe, the sweltering heatwave of late June and early July has barely subsided. But already, scientists have analysed the possible role of climate change, concluding that global warming made such an event at least twice as likely over much of the continent. In some cities, climate change has made comparable heatwaves four times more likely, they say.
The speedy study comes from a collaboration involving the US-based nonprofit environmental news organization Climate Central and an international team of climate researchers. They posted results on 2 July based on the sweltering temperatures forecasted, and updated their work on 10 July using the previous week’s actual temperatures, with similar conclusions. The work, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, may be the first real-time example of “weather attribution” — assessing the impact of climate change on extreme weather events.
http://www.nature.com/…/speedy-study-claims-climate-change-…
Jeremy Corbyn slates C4 News' Krishnan Guru-Murthy's "tabloid journalism"
BBC Newsnight's Mark Urban:
'I see that both Greek and Iranian hunger for a deal has been leveraged by western negotiators. That's effective statecraft, not a coup.'
https://twitter.com/MarkUrban01/status/620866978434150400
...That's what counts as an 'impartial' view from a senior journalist at BBC News. Note the elite-friendly conflation of what happened on Greece and Iran.
Greece is being treated like a hostile occupied state
A new deal for Athens is the worst of all worlds and solves nothing
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
...Nobel economist Paul Krugman says the EMU demands are “madness” on every level. “What we’ve learned these past couple of weeks is that being a member of the eurozone means that the creditors can destroy your economy if you step out of line. This has no bearing at all on the underlying economics of austerity,” he said.
“This goes beyond harsh into pure vindictiveness, complete destruction of national sovereignty, and no hope of relief. It is, presumably, meant to be an offer Greece can’t accept; but even so, it’s a grotesque betrayal of everything the European project was supposed to stand for,” he said.
[...]
The crushed Syriza leader must sell a settlement that leaves Greece in a permanent debt trap, under neo-colonial control, and so economically fragile that it is almost guaranteed to crash into a fresh crisis in the next global downturn or European recession.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/…/Greece-is-being-treated-like-a…
The Problem of Greece is not Only a Tragedy: It is a Lie
By John Pilger
An historic betrayal has consumed Greece. Having set aside the mandate of the Greek electorate, the Syriza government has willfully ignored last week’s landslide “No” vote and secretly agreed a raft of repressive, impoverishing measures in return for a “bailout” that means sinister foreign control and a warning to the world.
...Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has pushed through parliament a proposal to cut at least 13 billion euros from the public purse – 4 billion euros more than the “austerity” figure rejected overwhelmingly by the majority of the Greek population in a referendum on 5 July.
These reportedly include a 50 per cent increase in the cost of healthcare for pensioners, almost 40 per cent of whom live in poverty; deep cuts in public sector wages; the complete privatization of public facilities such as airports and ports; a rise in value added tax to 23 per cent, now applied to the Greek islands where people struggle to eke out a living. There is more to come.
http://www.counterpunch.org/…/the-problem-of-greece-is-not…/
’16 people were killed in Gaza’– How the ‘NYT’ whites out Israeli violence
'— Don’t dare tell a reader how those 16 people died. No; cunningly use the passive voice in the vignette — “16 people were killed” — without mentioning who killed them. Don’t try and find any of the relatives of these 16 people or of any of other 2200 victims. Above all, don’t try and find the al Bakr family, whose four children were killed while playing soccer on a Gaza beach, even though this site and other reporters have been welcomed by family members.'
Medialens shared Cartoonralph's photo.
Social mobility explained - I did a second international version
Eurozone 'agreement' reached to crush and humiliate the people of Greece.
It's a corporate coup.
Next.... Greeks being sold as slaves in marketplaces all across Europe?
... See More
At last! If you're on Twitter, please follow Joe Emersberger @rosendo_joe for high-quality political analysis.
https://twitter.com/rosendo_joe
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/staff/jemersberger
... See More
So, if you want to make sure nothing fundamental changes in a 'fundamental' review of the BBC, these are the kind of people you need in your 'expert panel'.
(h/t Mark Doran)
'Public service' broadcasting is safe in their hands.
... See More
Bug-Out Scenarios
How do climate scientists cope with existential dread?
By Eric Holthaus
...There’s been a rush of dystopic news on climate change in the past week or so. An off-the-charts burst of west winds in the Pacific Ocean is locking in one of the strongest El Niños on record, virtually guaranteeing that 2015 will be the hottest year in human history. The weather system has spawned a rare triplet of China-bound typhoons. All-time temperature records were set in Spain, France, the United Kingdom, and Germany in a crushing heat wave. Widespread wildfire in Alaska is burning through permafrost, and lingering smoke from huge Canadian fires gave Minneapolis its worst air quality in a decade. In the Pacific Northwest, under intensifying drought, even the rain forest is on fire.
If this is what climate change looks like already, the future is pretty much screwed, right? Well, maybe. Despite a few memorable moments of intense realism on the global stage, world leaders have essentially done nothing. Existential dread is fairly common among those who work on climate change on a daily basis.
That’s the theme Esquire’s John H. Richardson explored this week in a fascinating and frank discussion with Jason Box and other climate scientists. I’ve had my own run-ins with climate change despair, and this article strikes me as a fascinating insight into the psychology of an increasingly apocalyptic science. You should read the whole thing, but here are some highlights. Richardson describes Box as “oddly detached from the things he’s saying, laying out one horrible prediction after another without emotion, as if he were an anthropologist regarding the life cycle of a distant civilization.”
But that doesn’t mean Box is unfeeling. In a photo caption, Richardson reveals the money quote highlighting Box’s ever-present malaise: “The customary scientific role is to deal dispassionately with data, but Box says that ‘the shit that’s going down is testing my ability to block it.’ ”
/Full article:
http://www.slate.com/…/climate_scientists_despair_most_deva…
BBC propaganda piece: 'The decline of US power?'
BBC New York correspondent Nick Bryant serves a classic of its kind:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-33440287
...Chockful of nuggets - take a look....
Here's just one for starters:
Obama 'has drawn criticism for disengaging too much'.
Yes, Bryant really said that.
Today
Vigil for Gaza: One Year On
5.30pm to 7.30pm
Whitehall, opposite Downing Street
Please bring flowers and messages to remember the 2,000+ Palestinians massacred by Israel during July and August last year.
(Via Amena Saleem)
Following the Guardian piece pushing for war illustrated by photos from Fallujah (see our previous FB post), here's a reminder of US war crimes committed there:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2I7kkWBdSc
and the cover-up by BBC News (one of many media alerts we issued at the time):
... See More
As usual, the Guardian is not averse to running propaganda pieces pushing for war.
Here's David Kilcullen, 'a counterinsurgency and military strategist', and former senior adviser to the disgraced US General David Petraeus.
http://www.theguardian.com/…/i-see-no-alternative-to-a-larg…
A new NASA study of ocean temperature measurements shows that in recent years, extra heat from greenhouse gases has been trapped in the waters of the Pacific and Indian oceans. Researchers say this shifting pattern of ocean heat accounts for the slowdown in the global surface temperature trend observed during the past decade.
Researchers Veronica Nieves, Josh Willis and Bill Patzert of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, found a specific layer of the Indian and Pacific oceans between 300 and 1,000 feet (100 and 300 meters) below the surface has been accumulating more heat than previously recognized. They also found the movement of warm water has affected surface temperatures. The results were published Thursday in the journal Science.
by Carol Rasmussen, NASA Earth Science News Team
Edward Abbey got it right:
'We're up against the megamachine. A megalomaniacal megamachine.'
From our media alert, 'Game Over For The Climate?' in 2012:
...==
Do leading environmentalists really have nothing more astute, inspiring and hard-hitting to say about a global industrial system of destructive capitalism which is consuming the planet? As one of the characters in Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang observes in the battle against the corporate assault on nature:
‘We're not dealing with human beings. We're up against the megamachine. A megalomaniacal megamachine.’
Feeling ‘a profound connection with nature’ is vital for one’s well-being. But it will not get us very far if we do not also recognise and then dismantle the destructive financial practices of global ‘investors’, institutions of state-corporate power - with the media a key element - and the warmongering 'adventures' that are crushing people and planet.
http://www.medialens.org/…/684-game-over-for-the-climate.ht…
==
'We are destroying Earth.' (via @H_Huntebrinker)
Correction: Global capitalism is destroying Earth. #CFCC15
https://twitter.com/medialens/status/619423561820844032
... See More
"Deniers will keep on denying apparently, but the signs of climate change are everywhere. As the planet has warmed up, severe weather events are happening in every corner of the globe, alerting us to the need for strong, immediate action."
Anastasia Pantsios, EcoWatch
BP Deal: Path to a ‘Cleaner Gulf’–or Guaranteed Future Disasters?
By Janine Jackson
“BP Deal Will Lead to a Cleaner Gulf” is the headline the New York Times puts over a July 8 editorial that, in its tone and substance, makes a pretty good illustration of why it almost assuredly won’t.
...The jig is up, really, with the Times‘ first words: “Though no amount of money can ever compensate for the staggering damage caused by the 2010 BP oil spill….” Let’s just pause a moment and travel to an alternate universe in which that sentence begins with a “since” instead of a “though,” and goes on to ask whether that industry is worth maintaining, given the danger it poses to the planet.
Meanwhile, back on Earth, the story continues:
http://fair.org/…/bp-deal-path-to-a-cleaner-gulf-or-guaran…/
Our latest media alert, in case you missed it yesterday:
Daesh, The Revolutionary Neoliberal Party and the British Falsehood Corporation
http://www.medialens.org/…/796-daesh-the-revolutionary-neol…
Does the BBC help cultivate a pro-GMO agenda in the UK?
From the executive summary
A recent BBC Panorama programme, entitled GM Food – Cultivating Fear, suggested that opposition to GMOs is “morally unacceptable” and that those who oppose GMOs are prone to “making things up” instead of relying on facts and sound science.
... See More
This is a long piece but it's well worth reading in full, at a slow pace...
When the End of Human Civilization Is Your Day Job
Among many climate scientists, gloom has set in. Things are worse than we think, but they can't really talk about it.
... See More
The artist taxi driver tells you what he thinks of Osborne's Budget from the Neoliberal Revolutionary Party:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TthhPhrQ8os&feature=youtu.be
