Thursday 31st May 2012. Steve Bell
The culture secretary says it was with a ‘very, very heavy heart’ that he had accepted Adam Smith’s offer to resign.
Wednesday 30th May 2012. Steve Bell
The former News of the World editor has been charged over allegations of lying on oath when he gave evidence in court about phone hacking.
Tuesday 29th May 2012. Steve Bell
Tuesday 29th May 2012. By Kim Willsher Find Article Here:-
IMF boss who caused international outrage when she suggested that Greeks should pay their taxes earns a tax-free salary.
Christine Lagarde, the IMF boss who caused international outrage after she suggested in an interview with the Guardian on Friday that beleaguered Greeks might do well to pay their taxes, pays no taxes, it has emerged.
As an official of an international institution, her salary of $467,940 (£298,675) a year plus $83,760 additional allowance a year is not subject to any taxes.
The former French finance minister took over as managing director of the IMF last year when she succeeded her disgraced compatriot Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who was forced to resign after he faced charges – later dropped – of sexually attacking a New York hotel maid.
Lagarde, 56, receives a pay and benefits package worth more than American president Barack Obama earns from the United States government, and he pays taxes on it.
The same applies to nearly all United Nations employees – article 34 of the Vienna convention on diplomatic relations of 1961, which has been signed by 187 states, declares: “A diplomatic agent shall be exempt from all dues and taxes, personal or real, national, regional or municipal.”
According to Lagarde’s contract she is also entitled to a pay rise on 1 July every year during her five-year contract.
Base salaries range from $46,000 to $80,521. Senior salaries range between $95,394 and $123,033 but these are topped up with adjustments for the cost of living in different countries. A UN worker based in Geneva, for example, will see their base salary increased by 106%, in Bonn by 50.6%, Paris 62% and Peshawar 38.6%. Even in Juba, the capital of South Sudan, one of the poorest areas of the world, a UN employee’s salary will be increased by 53.2%.
Other benefits include rent subsidies, dependency allowances for spouses and children, education grants for school-age children and travel and shipping expenses, as well as subsidised medical insurance.
For many years critics have complained that IMF, World Bank, and United Nations employees are able to live large at international taxpayers’ expense.
During the 1944 economic conference at Bretton Woods, where the IMF was created, American and British politicians disagreed over salaries for the bureaucrats. British delegates, including the economist John Maynard Keynes, considered the American proposals for salaries to be “monstrous”, but lost the argument.
Officials from the various organisations have long maintained that the high salaries are a way of attracting talent from the private sector. In fact, most senior employees are recruited from government posts.
By Paul Joseph Watson Monday, May 28th, 2012. Find Full Article Here:-
News agency uses picture of dead Iraqi children to depict alleged government atrocity.
The British media has been caught yet again with its pants down in the effort to sell a NATO-led attack on Syria, with the revelation that BBC News used a years-old photo of dead Iraqi children to depict victims of an alleged government assault on the town of Houla.
In a report issued hours after the massacre, the BBC used a photo that was first published over nine years ago and taken in Al Mussayyib, Iraq. The image shows a child skipping over the dead bodies of hundreds of Iraqi children who have been transported from a mass grave to be identified.
The caption used by the BBC to describe the image stated that the picture was provided by an activist and “believed to show the bodies of children in Houla awaiting burial”. After the “mistake” was exposed, the BBC changed their original article but did not issue a retraction.
The photographer who took the original picture, Marco Di Lauro, posted on his Facebook page, “Somebody is using my images as a propaganda against the Syrian government to prove the massacre.” Di Lauro told the London Telegraph he was “astonished” the BBC had failed to check to authenticity of the image.
“What I am really astonished by is that a news organization like the BBC doesn’t check the sources and it’s willing to publish any picture sent it by anyone: activist, citizen journalist or whatever. That’s all,” said Di Lauro.
Information surrounding the massacre at Houla clearly suggests that the murders were carried out by death squads and not shelling by government tanks. Video footage of the child victims (warning – graphic) appears to show gunshot wounds to the face and stab wounds. None of the victims appear to have lost any limbs.
As RT reports, “Many of the victims were executed at point blank-range,” a fact inconsistent with the explanation that tank shelling was responsible for the bloodshed. It’s equally as likely that terrorist death squads, responsible for numerous deadly bombings in Syria that have killed scores of people, were responsible for the massacre.
As Tony Cartalucci writes, “Why on earth would the Syrian Government want to kill Syrian children? And even if for some reason they did – why would they do so in a way more or less guaranteed to attract international condemnation and renewed calls for intervention? In other words, ‘cui bono‘?
May 14th 2012 By Carl Herman Find Full Article Here:-
Following US and UK “leaders” Obama and Cameron’s threats to war-murder Iranians under ongoing similar non-specific accusations, US corporate media now “reports” that an un-named alleged official from an un-named nation provided a generic drawing alleged to be from an Iran military base consistent with nuclear weapon development.
A generic search provided 8 million results from the initial AP “news”, such as this one, showing the extent of corporate media’s echo chamber.
Let’s compare this typical corporate media “reporting” with revealing objective data:
The US waged unlawful war on Iran for 35 consecutive years with the overthrow of their democracy from 1953 to 1979, and then supported Iraq’s War of Aggression from 1980-1988 that war-murdered ~ one million Iranians.
US corporate media lies in omission of this history, then lie in omission that US war-murder threats are both criminal and ignore that all inspections find Iran’s treaty-guaranteed programs for nuclear energy and medical isotopes fully accountable. They lie in omission by failing to report that Iran is in compliance with all treaty terms, and that the US is in violation for not eliminating its nuclear arsenal per treaty terms. Corporate media also lie in omission (such as here) by not reporting that the Non-Proliferation Treaty does not have any authority to enter military bases. To make this last point clear, imagine if Iran demanded access to US military bases to prove what we know, the US has expanded technology and efficiency of their nuclear arsenal in Orwellian opposite of treaty terms. Would the US comply and US media demand such access?
Corporate media lie in commission by stating Iran’s president threatened Israel, when the crystal-clear content and context is stating Israel is wiping the Palestinians off the map.
US corporate media lie in omission that US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are in direct violation of war law and UN Security Council Resolutions, and that all “reasons” for those wars are disclosed by US government agency reports as known lies as they were told. This is immediate and vital history when considering the same actors’ rhetoric with a new war target.
24th May 2012 By Emily Beament
Conservationists in the UK have condemned plans that would allow buzzard nests to be destroyed and the birds of prey taken into captivity to protect pheasant shoots.
The Environment Department (Defra) is to spend up to £375,000 researching ways to keep buzzards from targeting captive-reared pheasants.
Proposed methods include destroying nests to prevent birds breeding, catching and relocating buzzards to places such as falconry centres or providing alternative food sources for the predators.
The ( Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) RSPB said the idea of taking wild buzzards into captivity or destroying their nests was “totally unacceptable”, and criticised Defra for spending hundreds of thousands of pounds on the project when money was tight for conservation measures.
In a document setting out plans for the research project, Defra said the 2011 National Gamekeepers Organisation survey found that three quarters of gamekeepers (76%) believed buzzards had a harmful effect on pheasant shoots.
Buzzards are thought to target pheasant release pens if they find there is a readily available source of food and the Government’s conservation agency Natural England has received a number of requests to license the killing of the bird of prey, which is a protected species.
By Heidi Moore 23rd May 2012. Find Full Article + Comments Here:-
And perhaps worse: if Facebook had set out to showcase a car-crash of an IPO, it could not have done it better…. A company that produces NOTHING nor creates ANYTHING is worth $100 Billion. We are truly going collectively insane.
It is three trading days after Facebook went public, and we now know that the IPO will live forever in the history books – just not in the way anyone had planned. Had Facebook openly set out to sabotage its own IPO, it could not have invented a better or more remarkable debacle: a tale of financial chaos fit for history books.
Facebook stock has lost 20% of its value in only three days. In that alone, it is not remarkable. Large IPOs rarely perform well just after going public. Fund manager Och-Ziff, for instance, fell 24% in its first week as a public company. (And thereafter: Och-Ziff went public in 2007 at $32 a share, and now trades at just over $7).
No, what makes Facebook stand out is that, at nearly every junction where wisdom, care and moderation ought to have intervened, they did not. In law enforcement, this is called a “smash and grab” – just knocking out the windows and taking everything in sight. On Wall Street, the disregard of the IPO for normal investors brought up a vulgar old traders’ saying: “Pigs get slaughtered.” Translation: greed gets punished.
As far as autopsies go, this is a complicated one, from the spiritual to the mechanical.
There was gracelessness: Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, made it clear for months that he disdained the company’s IPO, and deigned to show up to only one meeting with potential investors. That couldn’t have done much to convince those investors to believe that Facebook took the Wall Street system seriously enough to give them a good return on their investment.
There was greed: executives and insiders made the IPO primarily a way to enrich their own fortunes – rather than the company’s – and their stock dump accounted for 57% of the shares sold in the offering (reinforcing the old joke that “IPO” stands not for “initial public offering”, but “insider profit opportunity”). To pour more money in the pockets of these insiders and the company coffers, Morgan Stanley, the lead underwriter, hiked the price the company was charging investors – $38 – and flooded the market with tens of millions of extra shares. (The investment bank then had to rush back into the market and buy millions of those shares to artificially support the price of the stock on the first day.)
22nd May 2012 by Adam Vaughan Find Full Article Here:-
The EU’s food safety body ruled there is ‘no specific scientific evidence’ that the insect-resistant strain is harmful to health or the environment.
France’s attempt to ban the planting of a Monsanto strain of genetically modified maize was rejected by the EU’sfood safety body on Monday.
In response to scientific evidence submitted by France backing its bid to ban the GM maize, the European Food Safety Authority ruled that “there is no specific scientific evidence, in terms of risk to human and animal health or the environment” to support a ban.
In 2008, France banned the the strain MON 810 following public protests against the GM maize, but this was overturned by a French court in 2011. However, in March the French government reinstated the ban, with the then agricultural minister Bruno Le Maire saying the move was “to protect the environment”.
The Monsanto-owned strain, marketed as YieldGard by the US company, is an insect-resistant strain of maize that was introduced in 1997.
