Nobody learned to write a simple narrative better than Georges Simenon, with the result that over a lifetime of 86 years he drew 550 million paid-up readers, not counting millions more of library and other loaners. He rewarded himself with a well-known fortune banked in Switzerland, and carefully counted numbers of orgasms with thousands of willing women. It’s unclear whether the latter were also Simenon’s readers. He admits he preferred to pay the women in cash for the five minutes he says he averaged spending himself on them.
Simenon was also much too busy to develop convictions himself about the wars, judicial and extra-judicial killings, and politics through which he and his readers lived. They don’t even serve as backdrops, soundtracks, or motivations for his characters or their stories. “I’m not interested in politics,” he wrote in his diary in 1960 when he was fifty-seven. “But still I’m intrigued by a problem posed by politics: that of sincerity and insincerity.” Simenon’s uniqueness was to narrate the investigation and pursuit of killing and killers with almost no judgement implied by himself, or his policeman for that matter, of the truth. Truth, Simenon’s works illustrate, doesn’t have the same sale value as sincerity, at least not in the book market. Noone quite as insincere and deceptive as Simenon has been quite as readable.
In the real world that’s called false consciousness; in government operations it goes by other names – propaganda, active measures, disinformation. It’s what official narratives lacking in truth are full of. Like the one the US Government and its media tell every day about the killing and lying crimes Russians allegedly commit. On Simenon’s anniversary, it’s worth pausing to contemplate the method for selling such narratives successfully, over and over.
Every year for fifteen years now, Bruce Misamore, David Godfrey, and Steven Theede have been paid millions of dollars in lawyer and manager salaries, bonuses, and travel expenses by the men who weren’t in Russian jail with Mikhail Khodorkovsky (lead image, left); and then when he got out, by Khodorkovsky too. The objective of them all was to sue the Russian Government for the convictions and penalties for tax evasion, fraud, asset stripping, money laundering, corruption and thuggery on which the Yukos oil company thrived until Khodorkovsky was arrested in October 2003 and the oil company subsequently bankrupted, nationalized, and then reprivatized as Rosneft.
After years of court cases in the US and Europe, the original Yukos group won a compensation award of $50 billion for loss of their oil assets, foregone oil income and interest. This was a record amount, but it’s a figment — an amount that will never be paid by the Russian Government nor collected by Khodorkovsky and his men. Their attempts to seize Russian state assets in France, Belgium and elsewhere in Europe and hold them hostage for the money have also come to nought.
At the same time, the Yukos group have been aiming to dig up the real money they figured they had a better chance of taking and spending. This was almost $2 billion Khodorkovsky had concealed abroad behind trusts and front companies in The Netherlands, Isle of Man, Cyprus, Gibraltar, and other hiding places. After more than thirty court cases over almost fifteen years, Khodorkovsky has now taken as much of the readies as he can, along with his comrades Mikhail Brudno and Leonid Nevzlin in Israel. Altogether, about $1.2 billion.
That has left Misamore, Godfrey and Theede in California, Texas, and Hawaii feeling short-changed. So Godfrey and Theede decided to take what they could from Misamore.
Last month, just six days after Godfrey was judged in a London court to be a liar and a dishonest schemer, Misamore launched a lawsuit in the New York State Supreme Court. He’s now accusing Godfrey and Theede, and two of their lawyer friends, of helping themselves to what he thinks of as his share of the Yukos loot. The amount Misamore is trying to recover is $13.5 million.
For that amount, and at the risk of spending a third of it on legal fees, Misamore is signalling not only Godfrey and Theede, but also Khodorkovsky himself, that he’s willing to tell all he knows. This is the first time in a court of law outside Russia that the truth about Khodorkovsky may be revealed by one of his most trusted Americans.
Slaughtering sheep, goats and chickens with the idea of checking their innards to tell the fortunes of human beings started with the ancient Babylonians, peaked in ancient Rome, and despite the best efforts of the Catholic popes, it was still going strong in medieval England. The killing was called casting the haruspices.
Foie gras and chopped liver are still fashionable in London and New York where Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the guilty Russian oil robber, spends his money trying to improve his reputation and fortune, and run as the Anglo-American candidate for the succession to President Vladimir Putin. Journalists believe Khodorkovsky’s haruspices; the Royal Courts of Justice don’t. Positively liverish is what becomes of the Khodorkovsky narrative when exposed to cross-examination, the truth test, and the penalty for perjury.
The operational chief of the Special Monitoring Mission (SMM) in Ukraine of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) is a British officer whose combat role in Syria between 2016 and 2018 the OSCE is attempting to conceal.
Mark Etherington, a British Army paratrooper, was “working on Syria”, according to the OSCE’s appointment notice a year ago. In May of this year Etherington told the Kyiv Post he was “in Syria.”
The OSCE claims its mission adheres to the “principles of impartiality and transparency”. So Etherington was asked yesterday to clarify if he had performed combat advisory and military intelligence roles in Syria, and whether he is still associated with British forces. He and the OSCE spokesmen are refusing to say.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Dutch Government have released highly sensitive intelligence confirming what is said to be telephone communications between Russian military commanders, the Russian Defence Ministry, and at least one Kremlin staff man in their communications with the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR).
The purported telephone interceptions date from June through August 2014. Tape-recordings and text partially translating and interpreting what was said were presented publicly on November 14 by the Dutch-directed prosecution of crimes committed when Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was destroyed over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014.
In the release, the Joint Investigation Team (JIT), run by Dutch and Australian policemen, announced it “is looking for information on the individuals within the military and administrative hierarchy who enabled the shooting down of MH17 in Eastern Ukraine using a BUK TELAR.” The JIT has already announced its conclusion that the Russian Government was responsible and criminally culpable in the shoot-down of the aircraft. The Malaysian Government, which is a member of the JIT and owner-operator of the aircraft in which 43 Malaysians were killed, has refused to endorse the allegations first announced by the Dutch on June 19.
In fact, as lawyers and analysts of the MH17 case now realize, last week’s disclosure of the top-secret interceptions reveals the JIT has no tape evidence of communications with Moscow on July 17 and 18, 2014, in the immediate aftermath of the aircraft crash. Alternatively, if the JIT has this evidence but is keeping it secret, the latest interception records demonstrate what the JIT cannot prove. In the period when the Russian involvement is most likely to have been direct, as the Dutch allege, and communications ought to have been intense over many hours, the JIT, and its NATO and US sources, have nothing to show.
This means the opposite of the JIT’s conclusion. The latest evidence proves what the JIT doesn’t have.
A new book has just been printed by Harvard University Press, written by a professor of French history at the University of Houston, Texas, explaining five ideas for Americans from events which took place in the court of Empress Catherine II (the Great) in St. Petersburg over five months between October 8, 1773 and March 5, 1774.
The first idea is that it is ethical for Americans to support the overthrow of the ruling regime in Russia. The second is that when it comes to international law or rules-based order in the world, the US is superior to Russia. The third is that Russia’s rulers can spend the modern equivalent of millions of dollars on buying positive PR for themselves abroad, but the message is never credible. The fourth is that the best way to improve Russian morals is to plant a colony of foreigners into the middle of the country’s administration so that “their particular character will spread and become generalized”. And the fifth idea is that Crimea isn’t really Russian because Catherine took it from the Turks by the war ending in the Treaty of Kuchuk-Kainarji, signed on July 21, 1774.
Robert Zaretsky, the author of the book and these ideas, reports the treaty signing on July 23, a mistake by two days. That’s the least of Zaretsky’s mistakes.
Igor Kolomoisky has given the New York Times the interview US intelligence agency officials wanted him to give. As they predicted, he spoke right on cue. The rest, as intelligence agency officials say the world over, is history. Only Kolomoisky and the New York Times don’t know history.
In the mind of Fiona Hill (lead image, right), the recently departed senior director for Russia at the National Security Council (NSC), everybody in Washington is vulnerable to Russian attacks of one kind or another, but not her.
Instead, she admitted in testimony to the Congressional committees investigating impeachment evidence against President Donald Trump, that she’s on an attack operation of her own. “I’m sorry to be very passionate but this is precisely…why I joined the [Trump] administration. I didn’t join it because I thought the Ukrainians had been going after the President.” She says the reason she joined up was to fight the Russians.
“I thought it was very important to step up, as an expert, as somebody who’s been working on Russia for basically my whole entire adult 1ife, given what had happened in 2016 and given the peril that I actually thought that we were in as a democracy, given what the Russians I know to have done in the course of the 2016 elections… I’m extremely concerned that this is a rabbit hole that we’ re all going to go down in between now and the 2020 election, and it will be to all of our detriment.”
Hill testified that she’s certain that “what happened in 2016” was that the Kremlin intervened to help Trump defeat Hillary Clinton. “We’re in peril as a democracy because of other people interfering here. And it doesn’t mean to say that other people haven’t also been trying to do things, but the Russians were [the ones] who attacked us in 2016, and they’re now writing the script for others to do the same. And if we don’t get our act together, they will continue to make fools of us internationally.”
“He’s [President Vladimir Putin] looking out there for every opening that he can find, basically, and somebody’s vulnerability to turn that against them. That’s exactly what a case officer does. They get a weakness, and they blackmail their assets. And Putin will target world leaders and other officials like this. He tries to target everybody.”
So, in the logic of Hill’s analysis of how the Russians operate against everybody, including herself, what evidence is there that Hill hasn’t, by concealment, calculation, corruption, or by mistake, succumbed to Putin’s attack, too? Not once was Hill asked by either the Democrats or Republicans during the deposition, nor did she volunteer her own explanation, of how she managed to inoculate herself and is now telling the truth.
If Hill is telling the truth, and equally if she isn’t, she has inflicted serious damage on her own colleagues and superiors, the US Government’s Russia-hating professionals. In her testimony Hill depicts them as lying to each other and to the press; constantly scheming for and against the President; incapable of coordination among themselves, agreement with their allies, or negotiation with their enemies. Most valuable of all to the Kremlin, Hill reveals that the American warfighter is predictable in everything he or she understands, plans or does.
To reveal this much is precious intelligence for Moscow because the Russian secret services and Putin would be less willing to believe it if it had come from home-grown agents. Either Hill is a willing dupe, or she is the fool she is warning her colleagues to beware of.
Alexei Mordashov is the largest single shareholder of Tui, the Germany-based tourism company. After the September crash of Thomas Cook, Tui is the leading tourism brand and travel company in the world. In theory Tui has gained from the misfortune of its market competitor. But in practice the gain has been offset because of Tui’s losses from the crash of the Boeing 737 MAX, which Tui had been counting on to expand its capacity to carry additional travellers to their holidays.
Tui is already the biggest operator of the 737 MAX in the UK, and the second in Europe after Norwegian Air Shuttle. Tui has ordered another 72 of the aircraft from Boeing.
The 737 MAX crashes on October 29, 2018, and March 10, 2019, killed 346 passengers and crew. The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was forced to follow worldwide bans of the aircraft on March 13. This decertification, and the widespread perception that Boeing had acted corruptly and illegally in the approvals process for the new aircraft, have cut Tui’s share price from its high last November 8, 2018, by 21%. That’s a drop from a market capitalization of €9 billion then to €7 billion now.
This €2 billion subtraction means that Mordashov’s near-25% stake in Tui has lost him half a billion dollars already. He will also not be receiving any dividend: Tui’s loss in the nine months to June 30 has ballooned to €240 million. The losses to the company and to Mordashov are expected to grow when the accounts for the end of Tui’s financial year, September 30, are published shortly.
So why did Tui’s chief executive, Friedrich Joussen, summon a reporter for the Financial Times of London to announce in the headline this morning: “Tui stands by Boeing 737 Max — with safeguards”. Joussen claimed, according to the newspaper, that he and his company plan “to add 2m more airline seats next summer to cater for extra demand following the collapse of major rival Thomas Cook this year. He said that the aircraft would be the 737 Max model 8: ‘If they are approved to be safe we would fly them. It will be potentially the most checked aircraft,’ he said…. ‘We need to know what the damage is but we don’t know what the damage is until it’s flying again.’
By damage, Joussen meant losses on Tui’s balance-sheet. He didn’t mean death to passengers from a faulty aircraft Boeing has been lobbying the US Government to certify for flying again, since the ban was imposed by a hesitant FAA eight months ago. Passenger death, or Tui’s profit – that’s the tradeoff Joussen discussed with his management and board before letting fly in the Financial Times this morning.
There is another profit tradeoff which Mordashov has in mind. This is to make a public show of Tui’s backing for Boeing now in exchange for Boeing’s help to lobby the US Government to lift the sanctions on Mordashov’s engineering company, Power Machines, imposed since January 2018.
Thousands of readers have been trying to read the latest stories on this website. So many in fact that they have been fooling our defence forces into thinking they are drones – not the sort which the Houthis have been operating successfully in Saudi Arabia, or the Turks less than successfully in Libya. More the home-made contraptions which the US is paying its proxies to attack Hmeimim, the Russian airbase in northern Syria.
Defeating drone swarm warfare requires electronic jamming technology which we keep secret for obvious reasons.
You can tell our secrets are working when you encounter delays in website display and other functions. There are also filters and other devices protecting different parts of the website, text and photographs. If you are a genuine reader of investigative reporting, please be patient – blame the wait on the disgruntled targets of our recent stories.
Under threat of formal investigation for breaking the law and lying to the press, David Ridley (lead image), the English county coroner in charge of investigating the alleged Novichok poisoning death of Dawn Sturgess, has announced a new inquest hearing. This week through the coroner’s office in Salisbury, a new date was confirmed: the next court session is scheduled to take place on February 18, 2020. Sturgess died on July 8, 2018.
Asked to explain his reason for another four months of delay, Ridley refused to say that fresh evidence in the case has been found, or is expected to be uncovered by continuing police investigation. Instead, he has asked the press spokesman for the Wiltshire County Council to claim on his behalf that there is “complex legal argument in respect of which the Senior Coroner needs to give appropriate and careful consideration to before handing down a written ruling”.
The coroner’s silence signals that after fifteen months of investigation by one of the largest police, military and intelligence service operations in recent British forensic history, the allegation that there was a Russian chemical warfare attack in England last year cannot be substantiated in a court of law. (more…)
Not everything that glisters is gold, Shakespeare wrote as a warning about the seeming value of precious metal. Nor plisters is platinum.
The shine has been off for years now because the price of platinum has fallen steadily, and because the risks of mining it in South Africa have accelerated even faster. South Africa, with more than 90% of global reserves and supplying almost 70% of mine production of the metal, remains the market leader. But on account of the country’s political corruption, collapse of infrastructure, miner wage strikes, and falling mineable metal grades, the country has become an unstable, high-risk, high-cost source. So the stock markets for listed South African-based miners have been slashing the share price and devaluing the metal the companies have yet to dig up and sell.
Russia, which is the world’s second largest source of platinum reserves and mine production, is much more attractive by comparison: South Africa’s loss is Russia’s gain. And not just for Norilsk Nickel, the dominant Russian miner, but also for small platinum mining companies. Right now, they say they have the proven deposits; what they need is the cash to pay for the mining operations to dig it out, refine and sell it.
The problem for Russian platinum miners is that the supply of relatively low-cost alluvial – river-dredged — sources of the metal are petering out. To make up for this, junior Russian miners must raise investment to finance costly underground excavation. If they succeed, their combined output of platinum will double. It’s on speculation of this that the share price of Eurasia Mining quadrupled in London last week. (more…)
The Polish government in Warsaw, facing re-election in less than a year, wants all the credit from Washington for their joint operation to sabotage the Nord Stream gas pipelines on the Baltic seabed.
It also wants to intimidate the German chancellor in Berlin, and deter both American and German officials from plotting a takeover by the Polish opposition party, Civic Platform, next year.
Blaming the Russians for the attack is their cover story. Attacking anyone who doesn’t believe it, including Poles and Germans, Warsaw officials and their supporting media claim they are dupes or agents of Russian disinformation.
Their rivals, Civic Platform (PO) politicians trailing the PiS in the polls by seven percentage points, want Polish voters to think that no credit for the Nord Stream attack should be earned by the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party. They also want to divert the Russian counter-attack from Warsaw to Washington.
“Thank you USA” was the first Polish political declaration tweeted hours after the blasts by Radoslaw Sikorski (lead image, left), the PO’s former defence and foreign minister, now a European Parliament deputy. In support and justification, his old friend and PO ministerial colleague, Roman Giertych, warned Sikorski’s critics: “Would you nutters prefer that the Russians find us guilty?”
The military operation on Monday night which fired munitions to blow holes in the Nord Stream I and Nord Stream II pipelines on the Baltic Sea floor, near Bornholm Island, was executed by the Polish Navy and special forces.
It was aided by the Danish and Swedish military; planned and coordinated with US intelligence and technical support; and approved by the Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki.
The operation is a repeat of the Bornholm Bash operation of April 2021, which attempted to sabotage Russian vessels laying the gas pipes, but ended in ignominious retreat by the Polish forces. That was a direct attack on Russia. This time the attack is targeting the Germans, especially the business and union lobby and the East German voters, with a scheme to blame Moscow for the troubles they already have — and their troubles to come with winter.
Morawiecki is bluffing. “It is a very strange coincidence,” he has announced, “that on the same day that the Baltic Gas Pipeline opens, someone is most likely committing an act of sabotage. This shows what means the Russians can resort to in order to destabilize Europe. They are to blame for the very high gas prices”. The truth bubbling up from the seabed at Bornholm is the opposite of what Morawiecki says.
But the political value to Morawiecki, already running for the Polish election in eleven months’ time, is his government’s claim to have solved all of Poland’s needs for gas and electricity through the winter — when he knows that won’t come true.
Inaugurating the 21-year old Baltic Pipe project from the Norwegian and Danish gas networks, Morawiecki announced: “This gas pipeline is the end of the era of dependence on Russian gas. It is also a gas pipeline of security, sovereignty and freedom not only for Polish, but in the future, also for others…[Opposition Civic Platform leader Donald] Tusk’s government preferred Russian gas. They wanted to conclude a deal with the Russians even by 2045…thanks to the Baltic Pipe, extraction from Polish deposits, LNG supply from the USA and Qatar, as well as interconnection with its neighbours, Poland is now secured in terms of gas supplies.”
Civic Platform’s former defence and foreign minister Radek Sikorski also celebrated the Bornholm Blow-up. “As we say in Polish, a small thing, but so much joy”. “Thank you USA,” Sikorski added, diverting the credit for the operation, away from domestic rival Morawiecki to President Joseph Biden; he had publicly threatened to sabotage the line in February. Biden’s ambassador in Warsaw is also backing Sikorski’s Civic Platform party to replace Morawiecki next year.
The attack not only escalates the Polish election campaign. It also continues the Morawiecki government’s plan to attack Germany, first by reviving the reparations claim for the invasion and occupation of 1939-45; and second, by targeting alleged German complicity, corruption, and appeasement in the Russian scheme to rule Europe at Poland’s expense. .
“The appeasement policy towards Putin”, announced PISM, the official government think tank in Warsaw in June, “is part of an American attempt to free itself from its obligations of maintaining peace in Europe. The bargain is that Americans will allow Putin to finish building the Nord Stream 2 pipeline in exchange for Putin’s commitment not use it to blackmail Eastern Europe. Sounds convincing? Sounds like something you heard before? It’s not without reason that Winston Churchill commented on the American decision-making process: ‘Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.’ However, by pursuing such a policy now, the Biden administration takes even more responsibility for the security of Europe, including Ukraine, which is the stake for subsequent American mistakes.”
“Where does this place Poland? Almost 18 years ago the Federal Republic of Germany, our European ally, decided to prioritize its own business interests with Putin’s Russia over solidarity and cooperation with allies in Central Europe. It was a wrong decision to make and all Polish governments – regardless of political differences – communicated this clearly and forcefully to Berlin. But since Putin succeeded in corrupting the German elite and already decided to pay the price of infamy, ignoring the Polish objections was the only strategy Germany was left with.”
The explosions at Bornholm are the new Polish strike for war in Europe against Chancellor Olaf Scholz. So far the Chancellery in Berlin is silent, tellingly.
The only Russian leader in a thousand years who was a genuine gardener and who allowed himself to be recorded with a shovel in his hand was Joseph Stalin (lead image, mid-1930s). Compared to Stalin, the honouring of the new British king Charles III as a gardener pales into imitativeness and pretension.
Stalin cultivated lemon trees and flowering mimosas at his Gagra dacha by the Black Sea in Abkhazia. Growing mimosas (acacias) is tricky. No plantsman serving the monarchs in London or at Versailles has made a go of it in four hundred years. Even in the most favourable climates, mimosas – there are almost six hundred varieties of them — are short-lived. They can revive after bushfires; they can go into sudden death for no apparent reason. Russians know nothing of this – they love them for their blossom and scent, and give bouquets of them to celebrate the arrival of spring.
Stalin didn’t attempt the near-impossible, to grow lemons and other fruit in the Moscow climate. That was the sort of thing which the Kremlin noblemen did to impress the tsar and compete in conspicuous affluence with each other. At Kuskovo, now in the eastern district of Moscow, Count Pyotr Sheremetyev built a heated orangerie between 1761 and 1762, where he protected his lemons, pomegranates, peaches, olives, and almonds, baskets of which he would present in mid-winter to the Empress Catherine the Great and many others. The spade work was done by serfs. Sheremetyev beat the French king Louis XIV to the punch – his first orangerie at Versailles wasn’t built until 1763.
Stalin also had a dacha at Kuskovo But he cultivated his lemons and mimosas seventeen hundred kilometres to the south where they reminded him of home in Georgia. Doing his own spade work wasn’t Stalin showing off, as Charles III does in his gardens, like Louis XIV before him. Stalin’s spade work was what he had done in his youth. It also illustrated his message – “I’m showing you how to work”, he would tell visitors surprised to see him with the shovel. As to his mimosas, Stalin’s Abkhazian confidante, Akaki Mgeladze, claimed in his memoirs that Stalin intended them as another lesson. “How Muscovites love mimosas, they stand in queues for them” he reportedly told him. “Think how to grow more to make the Muscovites happy!”
In the new war with the US and its allies in Europe, Stalin’s lessons of the shovel and the mimosas are being re-learned in conditions which Stalin never knew – how to fight the war for survival and at the same time keep everyone happy with flowers on the dining table.
Agatha Christie’s whodunit entitled And Then There Were None – the concluding words of the children’s counting rhyme — is reputed to be the world’s best-selling mystery story.
There’s no mystery now about the war of Europe and North America against Russia; it is the continuation of Germany’s war of 1939-45 and the war aims of the General Staff in Washington since 1943. Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu (left) and President Vladimir Putin (right) both said it plainly enough this week.
There is also no mystery in the decision-making in Moscow of the President and the Defense Minister, the General Staff, and the others; it is the continuation of the Stavka of 1941-45.
Just because there is no mystery about this, it doesn’t follow that it should be reported publicly, debated in the State Duma, speculated and advertised by bloggers, podcasters, and twitterers. In war what should not be said cannot be said. When the war ends, then there will be none.
Alas and alack for the Berlin Blockade of 1948-49 (Berliner Luftbrücke): those were the days when the Germans waved their salutes against the unification of Germany demilitarised and denazified; and cheered instead for their alliance with the US and British armies to fight another seventy years of war in order to achieve what they and Adolf Hitler hadn’t managed, but which they now hope to achieve under Olaf Scholtz — the defeat of the Russian Army and the destruction of Russia.
How little the Germans have changed.
But alas and alack — the Blockade now is the one they and the NATO armies aim to enforce against Russia. “We are drawing up a new National Security Strategy,” according to Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock. “We are taking even the most severe scenarios seriously.” By severe Baerbock means nuclear. The new German generation — she has also declared “now these grandparents, mothers, fathers and their children sit at the kitchen table and discuss rearmament.”
So, for Russia to survive the continuation of this war, the Germans and their army must be fought and defeated again. That’s the toast of Russian people as they salute the intrepid flyers who are beating the Moscow Blockade.
Last week the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) board of governors voted to go to war with Russia by a vote of 26 member countries against 9.
China, Vietnam, India, Pakistan, Egypt, Senegal and South Africa voted against war with Russia.
The IAEA Secretary-General Rafael Grossi (lead image, left) has refused to tell the press whether a simple majority of votes (18) or a super-majority of two-thirds (23) was required by the agency charter for the vote; he also wouldn’t say which countries voted for or against. The United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres then covered up for what had happened by telling the press: “I believe that [IAEA’s] independence that exists and must be preserved is essential. The IAEA cannot be the instrument of parties against other parties.” The IAEA vote for war made a liar of Guterres.
In the IAEA’s 65-year history, Resolution Number 58, the war vote of September 15, 2022, is the first time the agency has taken one side in a war between member countries when nuclear reactors have either been attacked or threatened with attack. It is also the first time the IAEA has attacked one of its member states, Russia, when its military were attempting to protect and secure a nuclear reactor from attack by another member state, the Ukraine, and its war allies, the US, NATO and the European Union states. The vote followed the first-ever IAEA inspection of a nuclear reactor while it was under active artillery fire and troop assault.
There is a first time for everything but this is the end of the IAEA. On to the scrap heap of good intentions and international treaties, the IAEA is following the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), and the UN Secretary-General himself. Listen to this discussion of the past history when the IAEA responded quite differently following the Iranian and Israeli air-bombing attacks on the Iraqi nuclear reactor known as Osirak, and later, the attacks on Pakistan’s nuclear weapons sites.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) decided this week to take the side of Ukraine in the current war; blame Russia for the shelling of the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP); and issue a demand for Russia to surrender the plant to the Kiev regime “to regain full control over all nuclear facilities within Ukraine’s internationally recognized borders, including the Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant.”
This is the most dramatic shift by the United Nations (UN) nuclear power regulator in the 65-year history of the organisation based in Vienna.
The terms of the IAEA Resolution Number 58, which were proposed early this week by the Polish and Canadian governors on the agency board, were known in advance by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres when he spoke by telephone with President Vladimir Putin in the late afternoon of September 14, before the vote was taken. Guterres did not reveal what he already knew would be the IAEA action the next day.
Never mind that King Solomon said proverbially three thousand years ago, “a merry heart doeth good like a medicine.”
With seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines, Solomon realized he was the inventor of the situation comedy. If not for the sitcom as his medicine, the bodily and psychological stress Old Solly had to endure in the bedroom would have killed him long before he made it to his death bed at eighty years of age, after ruling his kingdom for forty of them.
After the British sitcom died in the 1990s, the subsequent stress has not only killed very large numbers of ordinary people. It has culminated today in a system of rule according to which a comic king in Buckingham Palace must now manage the first prime minister in Westminster history to be her own joke.
Even the Norwegians, the unfunniest people in Europe, have acknowledged that the only way to attract the British as tourists, was to pay John Cleese of Monty Python and Fawlty Towers to make them laugh at Norway itself. This has been a bigger success for the locals than for the visitors, boosting the fjord boatman’s life expectancy several years ahead of the British tourist’s.
In fact, Norwegian scientists studying a sample of 54,000 of their countrymen have proved that spending the state budget on public health and social welfare will only work effectively if the population is laughing all the way to the grave. “The cognitive component of the sense of humour is positively associated with survival from mortality related to CVD [cardio-vascular disease] and infections in women and with infection-related mortality in men” – Norwegian doctors reported in 2016. Never mind the Viking English: the Norwegian point is the same as Solomon’s that “a sense of humour is a health-protecting cognitive coping resource” – especially if you’ve got cancer.
The Russians understand this better than the Norwegians or the British. Laughter is an antidote to the war propaganda coming from abroad, as Lexus and Vovan have been demonstrating. The Russian sitcom is also surviving in its classic form to match the best of the British sitcoms, all now dead – Fawlty Towers (d. 1975), Black Adder (d. 1989), You Rang M’Lord? (d. 1988), Jeeves and Wooster (d. 1990), Oh Dr Beeching! (d.1995), and Thin BlueLine (d. 1996).
The Russian situation comedies, alive and well on TV screens and internet streaming devices across the country, are also increasingly profitable business for their production and broadcast companies – not despite the war but because of it. This has transformed the Russian media industry’s calculation of profitability by removing US and European-made films and television series, as well as advertising revenues from Nestlé, PepsiCo, Mars, and Bayer. In their place powerful Russian video-on-demand (VOD) streaming platform companies like Yandex (KinoPoisk), MTS (Kion), Mail.ru (VK), and Ivi (Leonid Boguslavsky, ProfMedia, Baring Vostok) are now intensifying the competition for audience with traditional television channels and film studios for domestic audiences. The revenue base of the VOD platforms is less vulnerable to advertisers, more dependent on telecommunications subscriptions.
Russian script writers, cameramen, actors, designers, and directors are now in shorter supply than ever before, and earning more money. “It’s the Russian New Wave,” claims Olga Filipuk, head of media content for Yandex, the powerful leader of the new film production platforms; its controlling shareholder and chief executive were sanctioned last year.
By Olga Samofalova, translated and introduced by John Helmer, Moscow @bears_with
It was the American humourist Mark Twain who didn’t die in 1897 when it was reported that he had. Twain had thirteen more lively years to go.
The death of the Russian aerospace and aviation industry in the present war is proving to be an even greater exaggeration – and the life to come will be much longer. From the Russian point of view, the death which the sanctions have inflicted is that of the US, European and British offensive against the Soviet-era industry which President Boris Yeltsin (lead image, left) and his advisers encouraged from 1991.
Since 2014, when the sanctions war began, the question of what Moscow would do when the supply of original aircraft components was first threatened, then prohibited, has been answered. The answer began at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in 1947 when the first Supplemental Type Certificate (STC) or Parts Manufacturing Approval (PMA) was issued by Washington officials for aircraft parts or components meeting the airworthiness standards but manufactured by sources which were not the original suppliers.
China has been quicker to implement this practice; Chinese state and commercial enterprises have been producing PMA components for Boeing and Airbus aircraft in the Chinese airline fleets for many years. The Russian Transport Ministry has followed suit; in its certification process and airworthiness regulations it has used the abbreviation RMA, Cyrillic for PMA. This process has been accelerating as the sanctions war has escalated.
So has the Russian process of replacing foreign imports entirely.
The weakest link in the British government’s four-year long story of Russian Novichok assassination operations in the UK – prelude to the current war – is an English medical expert by the name of Guy Rutty (lead image, standing).
A government-appointed pathologist advising the Home Office, police, and county coroners, Rutty is the head of the East Midlands Forensic Pathology Unit in Leicester, he is the author of a post-mortem report, dated November 29, 2018, claiming that the only fatality in the history of the Novichok nerve agent (lead image, document), Dawn Sturgess, had died of Novichok poisoning on July 8, 2018. Rutty’s finding was added four months after initial post-mortem results and a coroner’s cremation certificate stopped short of confirming that Novichok had been the cause of her death.
Rutty’s Novichok finding was a state secret for more than two years. It was revealed publicly by the second government coroner to investigate Sturgess’s death, Dame Heather Hallett, at a public hearing in London on March 30, 2021. In written evidence it was reported that “on 17th July 2018, Professor Guy Rutty MBE, a Home Office Registered Forensic Pathologist conducted an independent post-mortem examination. He was accompanied by Dr Phillip Lumb, also an independent Home Office Registered Forensic Pathologist. Professor Rutty’s Post-Mortem Report of 29th November 2018 records the cause of death as Ia Post cardiac arrest hypoxic brain injury and intracerebral haemorrhage; Ib Novichok toxicity.”
Hallett, Rutty, Lumb, and others engaged by the government to work on the Novichok case have refused to answer questions about the post-mortem investigations which followed immediately after Sturgess’s death was reported at Salisbury District Hospital; and a cause of death report signed by the Wiltshire Country coroner David Ridley, when Sturgess’s body was released to her family for funeral and cremation on July 30, 2018.
After another three years, Ridley was replaced as coroner in the case by Hallett in March 2021. Hallett was replaced by Lord Anthony Hughes (lead image, sitting) in March 2022.
The cause-of-death documents remain state secrets. “As you have no formal role in the inquest proceedings,” Hallett’s and Rutty’s spokesman Martin Smith said on May 17, 2021, “it would not be appropriate to provide you with the information that you have requested.”
Since then official leaks have revealed that Rutty had been despatched by the Home Office in London to take charge of the Sturgess post-mortem, and Lumb ordered not to undertake an autopsy or draw conclusions on the cause of Sturgess’s death until Rutty arrived. Why? The sources are not saying whether the two forensic professors differed in their interpretation of the evidence; and if so, whether the published excerpt of Rutty’s report of Novichok poisoning is the full story.
New developments in the official investigation of Sturgess’s death, now directed by Hughes, have removed the state secrecy cover for Rutty, Lumb, and other medical specialists who attended the post-mortem on July 17, 2018. The appointment by Hughes of a London lawyer, Adam Chapman, to represent Sergei and Yulia Skripal, opens these post-mortem documents to the Skripals, along with the cremation certificate, and related hospital, ambulance and laboratory records. Chapman’s role is “appropriate” – Smith’s term – for the Skripals to cross-examine Rutty and Lumb and add independent expert evidence.
Hughes’s appointment of another lawyer, Emilie Pottle (lead image, top left), to act on behalf of the three Russian military officers accused of the Novichok attack exposes this evidence to testing at the same forensic standard. According to Hughes, it is Pottle’s “responsibility for ensuring that the inquiry takes all reasonable steps to test the evidence connecting those Russian nationals to Ms Sturgess’s death.” Pottle’s responsibility is to cross-examine Rutty and Lumb.
