In this mad world where our Orstrayan governments are run by bogans, idiots and crap that would make a turdy Abbott look good, we introduce art in the raw, in Newtown, Sydney...:

Actually, Duchamp never exhibited a bidet to our great chagrin, but he did a "fountain" disguised as a pissoir. Or was it the reverse? But to tell the truth, this is what our government is doing pissing on us rather than aiming at the utensil. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/work-inspired-by-duchamp-fountain-840614

The tiny village of Loyga in the Russian far north is not the kind of place you would expect to be at the centre of an international spy scandal.

With fewer than 1,000 inhabitants, it has rail access but no paved roads. It's too small even to show up on Google Maps.

But Loyga has proved crucial to piecing together the story of the real "Alexander Petrov" - the second man the UK authorities suspect over the Skripal poisoning case in Salisbury.

On Monday the Bellingcat online investigations team announced they had discovered Mr Petrov was actually Dr Alexander Mishkin, born in Loyga, in the Archangel region. So BBC Russian began trawling through Russian social media sites.

They looked for people aged between 29 and 49 who were born in Loyga, and within two hours they had found four who all remembered Alexander Mishkin from their school days and recognised him from the photographs uncovered by Bellingcat and, crucially, from the UK official photo of the Skripal suspect "Petrov".

Read more:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45799037

Note: no-one is the tiny village of Loyga remembers Mr Petrov nor Dr Alexander Mishkin, apart from those, mostly a dog and a goat, who were paid by Bloody-cat with US dollars. So farcical that no-one is seriously believing this shit... You're not, are you? Oh shit... 

The curious case of the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury continues to puzzle. So let's get the key, undisputed facts down and approach it logically, without fear or favor, and see what conclusions we come to...

Here are fifteen facts in relation to the Salisbury poisonings case:

1. We haven't seen any photographs or heard anything from Sergei Skripal since 4th March.

The last confirmed images we have of Skripal is CCTV footage of him in a shop in Salisbury at 12.47pm on 27th February.

We haven't seen Yulia Skripal, Sergei's daughter since a short video statement featuring her was released on 23rd May.

2. Investigative website Bellingcat contends that the two suspects identified by the police, and traveling under the names Ruslan Boshirov and Alexander Petrov, are in fact Anatoliy Chepiga, a highly decorated colonel from Russian military intelligence, and Alexander Mishkin, a doctor working for Russian military intelligence.

3. We haven't seen any CCTV footage of the Skripal's house on 4th March, or of the Skripals on the bench where they were found at around 4.15pm.

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/columnists/201810091068735575-skripal-case-russi...

On the first of May, the UK’s National Security Adviser Sir Mark Sedwill told MPs that the agencies he oversaw – MI6, MI5 and GCHQ – had no information on who was responsible for the attack on Sergei Skripal and his daughter two months earlier.

Three days later police searched the room in the City Stay Hotel used by “suspects” Ruslan Boshirov and Alexander Petrov, and took swabs which were “found to contain Novichok” by Porton Down. The police did not make this information public until September 6th, when they chose to break the story of the now notorious “Russian assassins”.

As I have speculated before, and as is now becoming increasingly clear, the “suspects” put in the frame by the UK government were evidently known to its intelligence agencies long before Mark Sedwill’s denial, and in fact before they even reached London, on their way, we are told ad nauseum, to hit the Skripals with toxic perfume.

Obviously that story is not true, but it now appears that the mission assigned to the unwitting Russian couple was much more than simply to be caught on CCTV in the vicinity of the elusive Skripals, and that they were a pivotal part of “Operation Nina”– both in the planning stages and in the extended “action phase”, currently playing out in the media and institutions of the Western world.

The researches of Elena Evdokimova, explained in systematic detail on her twitteraccount, allow us to turn what was previously just informed speculation into solid assertions which now look “highly likely” to be true, and which then become a basis for further well-informed speculation. I use the term “highly likely” with reservation, having previously argued that it lies a long way from certainty. In this context however, it’s only fair to adopt Mark Sedwill’s own interpretation of the phrase as meaning “100% certain”, bizarre as that is.

This adjustment to the standard of proof by the UK’s intelligence agencies was contained in an intelligence briefing to NATO’s chief Jen Stoltenberg, made public on Friday April 13th – the day before the combined US/UK/French missile attack on Damascus. Without labouring the point, it’s worth quoting from Sedwill’s letter to NATO.

Sedwill wrote:

I would like to share with you and allies further information regarding our assessment that it is highly likely that the Russian state was responsible for the Salisbury attack. Only Russia has the technical means, operational experience and the motive. The term “highly likely” is one commonly used by the intelligence agencies when they believe something is 100% certain – since they are unwilling to express that opinion without a caveat in case of error.”

Sedwill wisely left himself a caveat however, concluding that: “there is no plausible alternative explanation.”

So how might we classify “implausible” on the scale of probability? Implausible certainly doesn’t mean impossible, nor perhaps even “highly unlikely”. But to say something is “not plausible” is to make a judgement that reflects one’s point of view, or in this case the UK’s strategic attitude. The “explanation” for the attack on Sergei Skripal being offered by the UK government and its top advisors is clearly not plausible in Russia’s eyes, nor in those of most independent observers and commentators.

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2018/10/15/the-framing-of-russia/

Read from top.

When President Trump chose Riyadh to make his debut on the world stage last year, he was placing a bet on Saudi Arabia, which serenaded him with military bands, dazzled him with a flyover of fighter jets and regaled him with a traditional sword dance.

The mastermind behind that wager — the White House adviser who convinced Trump to visit Saudi Arabia for his maiden foreign trip and who choreographed a veritable lovefest between the new president and the desert kingdom’s white-robed ruler, King Salman bin Abdul Aziz — was Jared Kushner.

The president’s son-in-law has carefully cultivated a close partnership with the heir to the Saudi throne, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whom Kushner has championed as a reformer poised to usher the ultraconservative, oil-rich monarchy into modernity.

But the U.S.-Saudi alliance — and the relationship between Kushner, 37, and Mohammed, 33 — is now imperiled by the un­explained disappearance and ­alleged gruesome murder of ­Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist who had been living in the United States and wrote columns for The Washington Post. The suspected killing has sparked inter­national outcry and calls for tough punishment of Riyadh.

Read more:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/two-princes-kushner-now-faces-a-reckoning-for-trumps-bet-on-the-saudi-heir/2018/10/14/

While the Saudis are threatening to cut supplies of oil, the price of the stuff is going to go up. Other countries, in the OPEC cartel, that do not support the Saudis might short cut them and increase production at a bigger margin. Trump has to play all this carefully and try to look like he is administering a severe punishment, while using a feather... Someone is going to die laughing...

This is the great opportunity for the Saudi to befriend the Iranians...

Read also:

https://www.rt.com/business/441165-oil-prices-iran-venezuela-sanctions/

Read from top.

MI6 boffins discovered that Skripal, far from being a reformed "double agent" working for them, was still a "double agent" working for Russia. The "switch-snitch" had been discovered as usual, when some exclusive information, only known by Skripal and his MI6 handlers ended up on the Russian secret services desk. MI6 operatives knew they had a problem, especially in regard to the task Skripal had been assigned to: investigate the Russian Mafia, which the Russian government also hates.

Contrarily to the Jamal Khashoggi affair, IN WHICH THE SAUDI HAD A POWERFUL MOTIVE to get rid of him, Russia did not have a single motive to get rid of Skripal. He was still one of its assets.

All this information is provided to you by the Gus Leonisky "Intelligence" Network without any proof. The Skripals have not been poisoned but "spirited away" as not to communicate to any Russian personnel ever after. Think about it.

Read from top.

Stephen F. Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian Studies and politics at Princeton and NYU, and John Batchelor continue their (usually) weekly discussions of the new US-Russian Cold War. (Previous installments, now in their fifth year, are at TheNation.com). Cohen comments on the following subjects currently in the news:

1. National intelligence agencies have long played major roles, often not entirely visible, in international politics. They are doing so again today, as is evident in several countries, from Russiagate in the United States and the murky Skripal assassination attempt in the UK to the apparent murder of Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Turkey. Leaving aside what President Obama knew about Russiagate allegations against Donald Trump and when he knew it, the question arises as to whether these operations were ordered by President Putin and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) or were “rogue” operations unknown in advance by the leaders and perhaps even directed against them.

There have been plenty of purely criminal and commercial “rogue” operations by intelligence agents in history, but also “rogue” ones that were purposefully political. We know, for example, that both Soviet and US intelligence agencies—or groups of agents—tried to disrupt the Eisenhower-Khrushchev détente of the late 1950s and early 1960s, and that some intelligence players tried to stop Khrushchev’s formal recognition of West Germany, also in the early 1960s.

It is reasonable to ask, therefore, whether the attacks on Skripal and Khashoggi were “rogue” operations undertaken by political opponents of the leaders’ policies at home or abroad, with the help of one or another intelligence agency or agents. Motive is a—perhaps the—crucial question. Why would Putin order such an operation in the UK at the very moment when his government had undertaken a major Western public-relations campaign in connection with the upcoming World Cup championship in Russia? And why would MBS risk a Khashoggi scandal as he was assiduously promoting his image abroad as an enlightened reform-minded Saudi leader?

We lack the evidence and official candor needed to study these questions, as is usually the case with covert, secretive, disinforming intelligence operations. But the questions are certainly reason enough not to rush to judgment, as many US pundits do. Saying “we do not know” may be unmarketable in today’s mass-media environment, but it is honest and the right approach to potentially fruitful “analysis.”   

2. We do know, however, that there has been fierce opposition in the US political-media establishment to President Trump’s policy of “cooperating with Russia,” including in US intelligence agencies, particularly the CIA and FBI—and at high levels of his own administration.

We might consider Nikki Haley’s resignation as UN ambassador in this light. Despite the laurels heaped on her by anti-Trump media, and by Trump himself at their happy-hour farewell in the White House, Haley was not widely admired by her UN colleagues. When appointed for political reasons by Trump, she had no foreign-policy credentials or any expert knowledge of other countries or of international relations generally. Judging by her performance as ambassador, nor did she acquire much on the job, almost always reading even short comments from prepared texts. 

More to the point, Haley’s statements regarding Russia at the UN were, more often than not, dissimilar from Trump’s—indeed, implicitly in opposition to Trump’s. (She did nothing, for example, to offset charges in Washington that Trump’s summit meeting with Putin in Helsinki, in July, had been “treasonous.”) Who wrote these statements for her, which were very similar to statements regarding Russia that have been issued by US intelligence agencies since early 2017? It is hard to imagine that Trump was unhappy to see her go, and easier to imagine him pushing her toward the exit. A president needs a loyalist as secretary of state and at the UN. Haley’s pandering remarks at the White House about Trump’s family suggests some deal had been made to ease her out, with non-recrimination promises made on both sides. We will see if opponents of Trump’s Russia policy can put another spokesperson at the UN.

As to which aspects of US foreign policy Trump actually controls, we might ask more urgently if he authorized, or was fully informed about, the joint US-NATO-Ukraine military air exercises that got under way over Ukraine, abutting Russia, on October 8. Moscow regards these exercises as a major “provocation,” and not unreasonably.

3. What do Trump’s opponents want instead of “cooperation with Russia”? A much harder line, including more “crushing” economic sanctions. Sanctions are more like temper tantrums and road rage than actual national-security policy, and thus are often counterproductive. We have some recent evidence. Russia’s trade surplus has grown to more than $100 billion. World prices for Russia’s primary exports, oil and gas, have grown to over $80 a unit while Moscow’s federal budget is predicated on $53 a barrel. Promoters of anti-Russian sanctions gloat that they have weakened the ruble. But while imposing some hardships on ordinary citizens, the combination of high oil prices and a weaker ruble is ideal for Russian state and corporate exporters. They sell abroad for inflated foreign currency and pay their operating expenses at home in cheaper rubles. To risk a pun, they are “crushing it.”

Congressional sanctions—for exactly what is not always clear—have helped Putin in another way. For years, he has unsuccessfully tried to get “oligarchs” to repatriate their wealth abroad. US sanctions on various “oligarchs” have persuaded them and others to begin to do so, perhaps bringing back home as much as $90 billion already in 2018.

If nothing else, these new budgetary cash flows help Putin deal with his declining popularity at home—he still has an approval rating well above 60 percent—due to the Kremlin’s decision to raise the pension age for men and women, from 60 to 65 and from 55 to 60 respectively. The Kremlin can use the additional revenue to increase the value of pensions, supplement them with other social benefits, or to enact the age change over a longer period of time.

It appears that Congress, particularly the Senate, has no Russia policy other than sanctions. It might think hard about finding alternatives. One way to start would be with real “hearings” in place of the ritualistic affirmation of orthodox policy by “experts” that has long been its practice. There are more than a few actual specialists out there who think different approaches to Moscow are long overdue. 

4. All of these dangerous developments, indeed the new US-Russian Cold War itself, are elite projects—political, media, intelligence, etc. Voters were never really consulted. Nor do they seem to approve. In August, Gallup asked its usual sample of Americans which policy toward Russia they preferred. Fifty-seven percent wanted improved relations vs. only 36 percent who wanted a tougher US policy with more sanctions. (Meanwhile, two-thirds of Russians surveyed by an independent agency now see the United States as their country’s number-one enemy, and about three-fourths view China favorably.)

Will any of the US political figures already jockeying for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020 take these realities into account?

Stephen F. Cohen

Stephen F. Cohen is a professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New York University and Princeton University and a contributing editor of The Nation.

From the NYT:

I can wait to read it when it's available as one of my 10 free NYT articles for the month...

Read from top.

Please note that "fake news" was invented A LONG TIME AGO... in BC times... A lot of "fake news" was used by the Israelites to maintain their status of superior "victims". 

Fake news is the essence of any spy agency, even going back to times of the knights of the Round Table...

INFEKTION is the way The NYT promotes its news...

ALL religions are based on fake news...

See also:

https://off-guardian.org/2018/11/13/watch-the-ww1-conspiracy/

And:

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/31773

It is one of the great contradictions of our society, whose essential operations are now so inextricably linked to technology, that understanding of and respect for “science” is worse than ever before. This ignorance amongst the presumably well-educated Western public extends to almost all the areas of knowledge one can imagine – it is “in-omniscient”.

So instead of critical understanding of – say – the Carbon cycle or astronomy, we have the denial of catastrophic climate change and the mythology of hyper-temporal space travel. A recent report that a new planet had been discovered, whose “proximity to Australia” made it of special interest illustrates this cognitive disjunction. At only six light years from Earth it is close in astronomical terms – but still about 6000 times the distance to the Sun.

While the detection of this planet is remarkable – like finding a pea on a distant mountain peak – its actual existence has about as much meaning as that would in our daily lives. It only serves to bring home the acute loneliness of humanity as it faces obliteration – drowning in its own waste or turned to ash in a holocaust of nuclear idiocy.

Such scientific illiteracy is of course not universal, though the huge “scientific community” may be increasingly fragmented and specialised, and ever more reliant on information technology to control processes that are almost beyond individual comprehension. One suspects also that holistic understanding of science – or what was once called “Natural Philosophy” – is dying out as its old-school reservoirs are drying up.

All this is a necessary preamble for the strictly scientific case I intend to make – or reinforce – on the apparent poisoning of the five Salisbury “Novichok victims” with the Incapacitant known as “BZ”, or 3-quinuclinidyl Benzilate. That I must do this against a new blizzard of misinformation from the BBC’s notorious “Panorama” programme only makes the presentation of this circumstantial evidence more necessary; for doubters to finally conclude that “it must have been Novichok” simply because there seems no alternative would be most unfortunate.

There is now ample evidence to say – with reasonable certainty – that the Skripals and DS Bailey were initially affected by BZ, and that the Amesbury couple, Sturgess and Rowley also likely were – based on their reported symptoms and some prejudicial assumptions. For those who haven’t been following the story of “Operation Nina”, it is again necessary to repeat that “Novichok” has been categorically proven absent from the Salisbury environment, due to its extreme toxicity and its mode of action. The latest scare stories that “thousands could have died” had the alleged contents of the alleged perfume bottle been spread around only confirm this, because they didn’t. They are a new low in misinformation from the “investigating” authorities.

The discovery of BZ as the likely culprit for the Skripals’ poisoning may not have happened had Russia not obtained the original test results from the Spiez lab, which showed traces of BZ in the Skripals’ blood samples. The hostile reaction to Lavrov’s leaking of the details from the OPCW, UK and Dutch authorities both verified the lab’s findings and increased suspicion about them.

The finding of BZ in the blood samples by Spiez lab was confirmed however, but with the bizarre claim it was present as a result of being a “control sample” in the testing for Novichok. Neither BZ nor its “precursors” bear the remotest resemblance to Novichok and other related nerve agents, neither physically nor in their effects, so this claim is quite mendacious. It is those effects that I’ll now focus on.

To understand the extreme difference between Incapacitants such as BZ and Nerve agents like Novichok/A 234, VX and Sarin, a little knowledge of neurophysiology is necessary, and particularly on the way that nerve impulses are transmitted. Both types of chemical produce their effects on muscles, glands and brain by affecting this “neurotransmission”.

The transmission of nerve impulses across the junctions between nerves and muscles or glands is mediated by the “neurotransmitter” Acetylcholine. A Ch is produced at the nerve ending and migrates across the junction – synapse – to the muscle or gland receptors. Following this action an enzyme – Acetylcholine Esterase – rapidly breaks down the A Ch so that the stimulus to the gland or muscle ceases.

Nerve agents are described as “Anti-Choline-esterase” or Choline-esterase Inhibitors, and act so the A Ch from nerve impulses accumulates and causes continuous stimulation of the muscle or gland, with consequent symptoms of excessive fluid secretion and muscle paralysis, including of heart and diaphragm.

By contrast, BZ and related Anti-Cholinergic substances (which include Atropine and Scopolamine) prevent Acetyl Choline from acting on the receptor sites across the synapse by being absorbed onto and blocking those sites. This interruption to nerve impulses has an entirely different action on the body, with very distinct and visible symptoms I’ll describe shortly.

So the two classes of chemical are in fact antagonistic, and with opposite or very different effects. It may also be noted that consequently these antagonists may act as antidotes for each other; Atropine is for example the choice antidote for nerve agents; that BZ might be assumed to have similar activity against Novichok raises some interesting questions.

When we consider the reported symptoms of poisoning exhibited by the Skripals when they were noticed behaving oddly in the Salisbury Maltings area, the discovery – or revelation – of BZ in their blood samples starts to make sense. One of the strange but apparently characteristic symptoms of BZ intoxication, described in this document from the US Military, is a reaching up action, as if “picking clothes” or “wool-gathering”. This was also described by the only recorded witness, Freya Church:

She was slumped over on the man’s shoulder. To be honest, I thought they might be homeless but they were perhaps better dressed.”

I just thought this is weird, especially as she was clearly quite a bit younger than him.”

She had a red bag at her feet. He was gesturing at the sky, doing some kind of movements with his hands.”

He was looking up and his eyes were glazed.”

There was no one else there near them at this point. No one was helping them.”

Regrettably we have no more descriptions of the Skripals’ condition, except from Salisbury Hospital staff, as reported previously. No doubt the normal case notes for them would be in the hospital records for the first 48 hours while they were in A&E as suspected Opiate overdose victims. Those notes are now of considerable interest in fact, as the other symptoms of BZ intoxication are quite distinct.

Unlike nerve agents, BZ does not cause paralysis and loss of consciousness within minutes of exposure. Symptoms may not appear for up to four hours, but then last for up to four days, depending on the dose. Those symptoms listed in the US manual above and elsewhere – and evidently witnessed in trials during the development of BZ as a “military grade” agent include the following – hallucinations and bizarre behaviour, fast heartrate for 2 days, dilated pupils with dry eyes, red-hot flush, disrobing, senseless speech, delirium and stupor.

It is quite clear from this that the A&E staff who treated the Skripals on admission must have observed some of these symptoms and reacted accordingly – which as ward nurse Sarah Clarke reported was simply that “they were needing support with their breathing, and support with their cardio-vascular system”. It is however usual to treat suspected Opioid overdose cases with Naloxone injection immediately; that the patients would not have responded to this or responded adversely would surely have been noted.

Opioids like Fentanyl are depressants, with symptoms quite unlike those of BZ – including tachycardia and hyperthermia, and this seems to be acknowledged by the BBC’s Mark Urban:

as they continued treating their patients, the early theory about opioid poisoning was discarded”.

In fact we might question whether that “theory” or clinical diagnosis of opioid poisoning was ever seriously considered, and “discarded” as soon as the patients were examined. Perhaps then doctors would have realised they were dealing with something unusual, and contacted the experts at Porton Down, though the reference to “phone calls starting” early on Monday morning suggests otherwise.

At this point however, some more questions arise, as the BBC report states that the Skripals’ Cholinesterase levels were “next to zero” – indicating a nerve agent or Cholinesterase inhibitor was present. But it is not clear whether this clinical observation and test was made following the intervention by Porton Down specialists. The interview comments from SDH staff are ambiguous on this point:

Lorna Wilkinson, Director of Nursing:

by the Tuesday, through various tests and diagnostics that we were running, that’s where it became apparent we were looking at a cholinesterase inhibition….”

Dr Christine Blanchard, Medical Director:

whilst a district general hospital, a laboratory, cannot test specifically for a nerve agent, we can request tests for eg anticholinesterase levels. It was our colleagues in Porton Down that helped us with the testing.”

Following this “helpful intervention”, no further clinical details are available, other than the doctors’ reference to “untested drugs” being tried, and then finally the rather rapid and unexpected recovery of both patients.

Given that the effects of BZ last no longer than four days maximum, a further – and highly problematic – question arises; why did the Skripals not then recover from their “incapacity”?

What other conclusion can we draw than this: that Yulia and Sergei Skripal were given some “special treatment” by Porton Down experts that kept them in a comauntil it was expedient for them to “recover”?

Is it possible that the reported presence of trace amounts of “degraded Novichok” in the Skripals’ blood samples (along with the clearly false claim they contained “Novichok of high purity”) was evidence of this “special treatment”?

It also appears, now we have access to Det Sgt Bailey’s personal account, that he received rather different treatment:

I was conscious throughout the whole time,” he said. “I had lots of injections… I had five or six infusions at any one time in my arms. Physically, I felt quite numb after a while.”

Incapacitated even?

Sixties drop out, Scientist-farmer, cheesemaker-Luddite, late life activist for the Resistance, Putin/Assad/Nasrallah lover. Atheist. Traveller-student through MENA-Russia-Europe. Abandoned UK frying pan for Australian fire. Marginalised dissident. Author for Russia Insider/AHT and OffG.

Hacking syndicate Anonymous has just released its fourth tranche of documents hacked from the internal servers of the Institute for Statecraft and its subsidiary, the Integrity Initiative. Several explosive files raise serious questions about the shadowy British state and NATO-funded ‘think tank’ and its connections with the Skripal affair.

The files were released just after 2:30pm GMT on January 4 — I've barely scratched the surface of the content, but what I've seen so far contains a panoply of bombshell revelations — to say the least, the organization(s) now have serious questions to answer about what role they played in the poisoning of Sergei Skripal in March, and its aftermath both nationally and internationally.

One file apparently dating to "early 2015" — "Russian Federation Sanctions" — written by the Institute's Victor Madeira outlines "potential levers" to achieve Russian "behaviour change", "peace with Ukraine", "return [of] Crimea", "regime change" or "other?". The suggested "levers" span almost every conceivable area, including "civil society", "sports", "finance" and "technology".

In the section marked "intelligence", Madeira suggests simultaneously expelling "every RF [Russian Federation] intelligence officer and air/defense/naval attache from as many countries as possible". In parentheses, it references 'Operation Foot', the expulsion of over 1000 Soviet officials from the UK in September 1971, the largest expulsion of intelligence officials by any government in history.

The section on sports also suggests "advocating the view [Russia] is unworthy of hosting [sporting] events" — and the section marked "information" recommends the sanctioning of 'Russian' media "in West for not complying with regulators' standards".

In April that year, Institute for Statecraft chief Chris Donnelly was promoted to Honorary Colonel of SGMI (Specialist Group Military Intelligence), and in October he met with General Sir Richard Barrons. Notes from the meeting don't make clear who said what, but one despaired that "if no catastrophe happens to wake people up and demand a response, then we need to find a way to get the core of government to realise the problem and take it out of the political space."

"We will need to impose changes over the heads of vested interests. We did this in the 1930s. My conclusion is it is we who must either generate the debate or wait for something dreadful to happen to shock us into action. We must generate an independent debate outside government. We need to ask when and how do we start to put all this right? Do we have the national capabilities [and/or] capacities to fix it? If so, how do we improve our harnessing of resources to do it? We need this debate now. There is not a moment to be lost," they said.

Operation IRIS Begins

On 4 March 2018, former Russian military officer and double agent for MI6 Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned in Salisbury, England.

Within days, the Institute had submitted a proposal to the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, "to study social media activity in respect of the events that took place, how news spread and evaluate how the incident is being perceived" in a number of countries.

The bid was accepted, and the Initiative's 'Operation Iris' was launched. Under its auspices, the Institute employed 'global investigative solutions' firm Harod Associates to analyze social media activity related to Skripal the world over.

It also conducted media monitoring of its own, with Institute 'research fellow' Simon Bracey-Lane producing regular 'roundups' of media coverage overseas, based on insights submitted by individuals connected to the Initiative living in several countries. One submission, from an unnamed source in Moldova, says they "cannot firmly say" whether the country's media had its "own point of view" on the issue, or whether news organizations had taken "an obvious pro-Russian or pro-Western position", strongly suggesting these were key questions for the Initiative.

Moreover though, there are clear indications the Institute sought to shape the news narrative on the attack — and indeed the UK government's response. One file dated March 11 appears to be a briefing document on the affair to date, with key messages bolded throughout.

It opens by setting out "The Narrative" of the incident — namely "Russia has carried out yet another brutal attack, this time with a deadly nerve agent, on someone living in Britain".

"Use of the nerve agent posed a threat to innocent British subjects, affecting 21 people and seriously affecting a police officer. This is not the first time such an attack has been carried out in the UK…14 deaths are believed to be attributable to the Kremlin…Russia has poisoned its enemies abroad on other occasions, most notably then-candidate for the Presidency of Ukraine, Viktor Yushchenko, in 2004. Russian political activist Vladimir Kara-Murza has been poisoned twice; and the journalist Anna Politkovskaya was also poisoned and later shot dead. Since Putin has been running Russia, the Kremlin has a history of poisoning its opponents in a gruesome way," the "narrative" reads.

The file goes on to declare the British response has been "far too weak…it's essential the government makes a much stronger response this time" — and then lists "possible, realistic, first actions", including banning RT and Sputnik from operating in the UK, boycotting the 2018 World Cup, withdrawing the UK ambassador from Moscow and expelling the Russian ambassador to the UK, and refusing/revoking visas to leading Russians within Vladimir Putin's "circle", and their families.

It's not clear who the document was distributed to — but it may have been given to journalists within the Initiative's UK 'cluster', if not others. This may explain why the Institute's "narrative", and its various recommended "responses" utterly dominated mainstream media reporting of the affair for months afterwards, despite the glaring lack of evidence of Russian state involvement in the attack.

It's extremely curious so many of the briefing document's recommendations almost exactly — if not exactly — echo several of the suggested "levers" outlined in the 2015 document. It's also somewhat troubling the "Global Operation Foot" spoken of in that file duly came to pass on March 28 2018, with over 20 countries expelling over 100 Russian diplomats.

Likewise, it's striking Victor Madeira, the Institute staffer who made the recommendations in 2015, made many media appearances discussing the poisoning following the incident routinely documented by the Institute. Security consultant Dan Kaszeta also wrote a number of articles for the Integrity Initiative website about chemical weapons following the attack — including a July 14 article, How could Novichok have poisoned people four months after the Skripal attack?—  receiving 40 pence per word.

The Institute's bizarrely intimate connections with the incident don't end there. Another document apparently dating to July 2018 contains the contact details of Pablo Miller, Skripal's MI6 recruiter, handler and — unbelievably — neighbor in Salisbury. Anonymous claims the document is an invitee list for a meeting the Institute convened between a number of individuals and Syria's highly controversial White Helmets group, but this is yet to be verified.

Whatever the truth of the matter, the latest document dump raises yet further questions about how and why it was BBC Diplomatic and Defense Editor Mark Urban — who was in the same tank regiment as Miller after leaving University — came to meet with Skripal in the year before his poisoning. When I attended the launch of his book on the affair in October — The Skripal Files — he was evasive on whether he played a role in connecting him with Skripal, and denied Miller was Skripal's recruiter. 

The latest trove also raises yet further questions about the activities of the Institute for Statecraft and Integrity Initiative. In light of these revelations, reading the record of Donnelly's meeting with General Barrons takes on an acutely chilling quality. It may be that purely serendipitously the pair got their "catastrophe", their "something dreadful", which "[woke] people up" and made the government "realise the problem" posed by Russia — or it could be they one way or another played a facilitative role of some kind.

After months of refusing to answer the vast number of questions I and thousands of others have submitted to the paired organizations, it's high time for them to break cover, and be honest with the public.

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/europe/201901041071225427-skripal-integrity-init...

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Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/europe/201901041071225427-skripal-integrity-init...

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Read also:

https://www.businessinsider.com.au/illegals-of-directorate-s-russia-undercover-covert-sleeper-agents-2017-12?r=UK&IR=T

Business Insider's CEO and Editor-In-Chief Henry Blodget is a Yale history graduate who previously worked on Wall Street until he was banned for life from the securities industry because of his violations of securities laws and subsequent civil trial, which ended with a $2 million fine plus a $2 million disgorgement and the permanent ban in 2003.[19][20] Nicholas Carlson, whose past experiences include Internet.com and Gawker Media's Silicon Valley gossip blog, Valleywag, is Deputy Editor. Senior Editor Jim Edwards' previous position was Managing Editor at Adweek.[citation needed]

In January 2009, the Clusterstock section appeared in Time's "Best 25 Financial Blogs,"[21] and the Silicon Alley Insider section was listed in PC Magazine's "Our Favorite Blogs 2009."[22] 2009 also saw Business Insider's selection as an official Webby honoree for Best Business Blog.[23]

In 2012, Business Insider was named to the Inc. 500. In 2013, the publication was once again nominated in the Blog-Business category at the Webby Awards.[24] In January 2014, The New York Times reported that Business Insider's web traffic was comparable to that of The Wall Street Journal.[25] In 2017, Digiday included imprint Insider as a candidate in two separate categories–"Best New Vertical" and "Best Use of Instagram"–at their annual Publishing Awards.[26]

The website has, however, faced criticism for what critics consider its clickbait-style headlines.[27][28][29] In 2013, The New Yorker criticized the website for prioritizing publishing speed over accuracy.[30] In 2018, the website received criticism from some media outlets after deleting a controversial column about Scarlett Johansson.[31][32]

Read more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Insider

See also:

https://www.thriftbooks.com/a/victor-madeira/2589939/

A third Russian agent implicated in the Salisbury nerve agent attack aborted his planned exit from the UK, raising the prospect he remained in the country.

The Russian military intelligence officer - using the false name Sergey Fedotov - travelled to the UK on the same day as two hitmen who carried out the attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal.

Fedotov was then booked on to the same flight back to Moscow with the assassins. But it is now understood, according to sources, that Fedotov checked himself and his baggage off the plane before departure.

It is not clear why but it raises the prospect that Fedotov stayed in the UK, at least in the days after the deployment of military-grade nerve...

by David Macilwain

In some particularly clear thinking on the failure of dissident opinion, Caitlin Johnstone has identified the keystone on which the Western powers have built their grand edifice of lies – their ability to control the narrative. Put in simple language – which is the only language that works – it is their ability to “spin a tale” that prevails over hard facts in this “cyber-war”. Call it “the Art of Storytelling” if you prefer.

The problem for us “dissidents” – which is to say for the most part “pro-Russian dissidents” – is that we focus on facts, and believe that incontrovertible facts and evidence will ultimately prevail over spin and lies. I personally am certainly guilty of this – boring people with facts – cherishing a rather Christian belief in truth and goodness, and a certain faith in the ability of ordinary people to see through sham and bullshit.

But we aren’t dealing with ordinary people, nor extraordinary people – some of whom are our greatest asset – but with people who appear to be terminally corrupt and ruthless in their ability to twist the narrative and twist the minds of their audience. To make this claim about the essential badness of Western powerbrokers risks losing some of those who are at least able to see that their leaders may not be as pure as they pretend. But it is important to state this unpalatable truth, and provide clear examples; too often excuses are made for conduct that is inexcusable, on the basis that the crimes committed were not intended, or that the ends justified the means.

We might consider for example how relatives of the thousands of civilians killed by US coalition bombs in Mosul or Raqqa would be unimpressed by such excuses, seeing that despite their deaths the alleged target of the strikes – IS – survives to kill another day. The direct support of Islamic State fighters by the US coalition has been proven repeatedly, yet the US is undeterred in continuing to use the “fight against IS” as its reason for remaining in Syria and Iraq, as well as for new interventions in Africa.

It is also important to recognise the true intent – the true mal-intent – of those leading the “Western coalition” in its war on the “Resistance” (simplistic generalisations that must suffice at this point). If we fail to do so, or get lulled into apathy by the sweet-talking of the cultured left and the progressive humanitarians, then the next wave of militarised disinformation may overwhelm us.

In fact it appears that such a wave is already on its way. Thanks to the recent diversionary focus on Venezuela, this latest humanitarian offensive against Syria has passed under the radar. Given the scale and mind-blowing deception of msm reporting of the US coup operation against Maduro, and incomprehensible stupidity shown by some European and Colonial leaders in supporting it, things in Syria may not go ahead quite as planned. But we need to know the plan.

A couple of weeks ago, a seminar was convened at a Cambridge college as the launch of “the Cambridge Initiative for Making and Sustaining Peace”, led by senior research fellow Adam Coutts:

The speaker series examines the major challenges and possible policy options for humanitarian intervention and conflict prevention. In this first event two leading practitioners – Sir Stephen O’Brien and Hamish de Bretton Gordon will explore the ongoing conflicts and protracted humanitarian crises in Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Sudan among others and peace building efforts across the Globe.

The Sunday before this event, Hamish de Bretton Gordon had a highly misleading and emotive article published on a popular news website beating up an ongoing humanitarian crisis in Syria and the need to “intervene”, and promoting the Cambridge seminar the following Wednesday. Video or transcripts of the event are not yet available, but from personal contact it is clear that Bretton Gordon’s presentation was making the same false case as his article; malicious war-enabling propaganda in its essence.

His article “Syria’s children are its future but it’s they who have suffered most” bears the dis-informative and frankly preposterous subtitle:

Hamish de Bretton Gordon warns that the Putin/Assad pact could be the final nail in the coffin for Syria’s freedom. Alongside Professor David Nott and Richard Benyon MP, he warns that leaving Syria’s fate in the hands of Vladimir Putin and Bashar al Assad threatens millions.”

But continuing with the “narrative-enabling” injured children theme, the article leads with an attention grabbing photo of an injured girl sitting on a hospital bed, with the byline:

The West’s failure to intervene to directly support the humanitarian effort in Syria is shaming.”

The “shaming” Bretton Gordon refers to goes back to the UK parliament’s vote against a military strike on Syria in 2013, which also stymied the plans of Doctors under Fire; more of that later. Along with other false claims in the article, this strongly suggests that the intent of those behind the “Cambridge Initiative” is to generate support for the ongoing occupation of Idlib by Western-backed militias in the guise of “humanitarian intervention” and “conflict prevention”. Bretton Gordon makes the extraordinary and extraordinarily offensive claim in his article that:

Axiomatically, many of the civilians in Idlib actually hope that Assad will use chemical weapons, so at least the US and UK will strike the Syrian regime.”

Evidently he sees no distinction between “striking the Syrian regime” and “humanitarian intervention”, so nor should we; he simply verifies the duplicitous spin used by the Western coalition for the last seven years in creating a pretext for regime change. That spin includes the pretence that the West has “failed to intervene” – when it was their violent and illegal “intervention” dating back to 2011 that finally caused the need for military and humanitarian intervention by Russia.

The Emmanuel College seminar, initiated by Adam Coutts, featured former UN humanitarian affairs head and Magdalene college alumna Sir Stephen O’Brien, whose imprimatur misled observers and gave de Bretton Gordon a most credible platform for his tired chemical weapons propaganda. But just as Caitlin Johnstone observes on the Russiagate story – this completely false story is also a key narrative of the West’s cyber-war, and its credibility amongst ordinarily ignorant consumers of Western mainstream news has never been higher. For them the story-teller’s expert credentials only reinforce their beliefs.

Little more can be done to expose the lies over chemical weapons, both in Syria and in Salisbury; their use either by Syrian or Russian authorities has been completely disproven, while the West’s claims are now accepted as fraudulent by the leaders and citizens of the resistance countries and their allies. It’s now over five years since Seymour Hersh raised questions over the Ghouta Sarin attack, but his questions go unanswered and mostly unnoticed. With acute irony, this week I stumbled on Hersh’s “The Killing of Osama Bin Laden” going cheap in a remainders bookshop. The cover article – the one that did get discussed in the media – was however only a quarter of the book; there was scant mention on the cover that Hersh’s three articles on Syria and chemical weapons made up the remainder, and the reminder.

On the first page of “The Red line and the Rat line” we were reminded that in 2013, and following that UK Parliament’s rejection of a “punitive strike” on Damascus, Obama finally also baulked, though the reason was unclear. Hersh’s intelligence sources claimed that:

Obama’s change of mind had its origins at Porton Down, the defence laboratory in Wiltshire. British intelligence had obtained a sample of the sarin used in the August 21 attack and analysis demonstrated that the gas used didn’t match the batches known to exist in the Syrian army’s CW arsenal.”

By his own admission, de Bretton Gordon has been frequently and illegally in Syria since early in 2013 in several capacities, including assistance to “field hospitals” and “first responders” in “treating victims of chemical weapons attacks”. His close involvement with Porton Down over the Salisbury poisoning and relationship with the UK military also rather suggests another key “capacity”.

Whether Bretton Gordon was involved in that particular MI6 operation or not, neither he nor President Obama would reveal this startling truth on the origin of the Sarin, and persisted in their campaign to demonise the Syrian government, while facilitating the violent insurgency by the terrorist groups occupying Damascus’ suburbs – in the full knowledge that they were actively colluding in war crimes and crimes against humanity. The truth about the killing of children for the Ghouta videos remains as key evidence in Syria’s Nuremberg trials, should justice finally take its course.

Being unable to expose the lies over chemical weapons that are now fossilised in the Western media and public mind leaves us one other option – exposing the liars. This may not prove as difficult as it seems, as the simple act of telling a story may constitute an open admission of guilt.

Unlike Colonel Alison McCourt, whose story was completely private until recently, Hamish de Bretton Gordon wears his black heart on his sleeve, in articles and interviews and on twitter. As he explains in the article quoted above –

As the UN inspectors, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons cannot themselves get to the sites of these attacks, I have re-trained first responders on handling chemical casualties and collecting evidence of the attacks.”

The “first responders” to whom Bretton Gordon refers are of course the notorious White Helmets. Attempts to whitewash the dreadful crimes of these mercenaries, their trainers and sponsors in Whitehall and Washington may succeed with Guardian readers, but won’t ever wash in Moscow, Damascus or Aleppo. The latest revelations also show that staging chemical weapons attacks is one of their more innocuous activities, despite the barbaric “handling” of their victims in those video productions.

With his extensive knowledge and experience of real chemical weapons use, it could hardly be doubted that Hamish de Bretton Gordon’s training on handling victims of nerve agent exposure would reflect the danger of these agents to both victim and first responder. Splashing around with some fire hoses wearing an Avon gas mask and no gloves quite clearly does not.

This theatre of course also demonstrates the absence of toxic nerve agents in the places where it has taken place – in Khan Shaikoun in April 2017, and Douma a year later. While Chief Nurse McCourt’s assistance to the collapsed Skripals demonstrated a similar absence of toxic agent, we might wonder if it was “theatre” of a different kind, but the links between Syria and Salisbury remain as clear as ever, and as close as the intersecting career paths of these two distinguished servants of the British Army and Intelligence services.

Just two weeks before the White Helmets’ gas attack stunt in Douma hospital and two weeks after the Salisbury poisoning, Adam Coutts had organised a seminar at Magdalene college that included other members of “Doctors under Fire” – David Nott, Toby Cadman and Dr Saleyha Ahsan, as well as de Bretton Gordon and Sir O’Brien. The recording of this event, posted only last week on youtube, provides extensive testimony from the actors themselves on their close involvement with terrorist groups in Aleppo, working in hospitals they occupied, including the M10 hospital in East Aleppo. Following the liberation of East Aleppo in December 2016, the M10 was found to have been a headquarters for both Al Qaeda terrorist groups and the White Helmets; David Nott’s cooperation with these groups was unavoidable.

Similarly Saleyha Ahsan, a Sandhurst graduate who served in Bosnia before training as a doctor, was involved in the highly suspect filming of a staged “Napalm attack on a school” five days after the Ghouta attack. The BBC Panorama story about this event now looks even more suspect in the light of Panorama’s involvement in the Skripal poisoning hoax and the double role of BBC commentator Mark Urban.

So where does this leave us? Two thousand more words onto the pile? Or something that will pique the story-tellers into denials that only verify their guilt?

Either way the corroborating material collected here serves to confirm long-held suspicions about the UK’s chemical weapon PR liason officer Hamish de Bretton Gordon, and the service he continues to perform in Britain’s offensive against Russia, her allies and interests.

David Macilwain

Sixties drop out, Scientist-farmer, cheesemaker-Luddite, late life activist for the Resistance, Putin/Assad/Nasrallah lover. Atheist. Traveller-student through MENA-Russia-Europe. Abandoned UK frying pan for Australian fire. Marginalised dissident. Author for Russia Insider/AHT and OffG.

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2019/02/07/the-sarin-storyteller/

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A Russian flag was hung briefly from scaffolding on Salisbury Cathedral on Saturday night, almost a year after the former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter were poisoned with novichok in the city. The flag was taken down on Sunday after cathedral staff were made aware of it.

It is thought that someone climbed the scaffolding and put the flag there during the hours of darkness. The first anniversary of the nerve agent attack on Skripal, 67, and his daughter Yulia, 33, who were discovered collapsed on a park bench in the city centre, will fall on 4 March.

Two men identified as suspects in the attack, Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, went on Russian state-funded TV in September last year to claim they had travelled to Salisbury as tourists, to visit its cathedral.

Salisbury MP John Glen said: “Thankfully, it [the flag] has been removed now – what a stupid stunt – mocking the serious events sadly experienced in Salisbury last year.”

Jo Broom, a Conservative councillor for the St Martin’s and Cathedral ward, said: “My initial reaction was one of huge shock and disbelief that someone would think this was in any way a good thing to do. If it was a joke, it was in very poor taste. Particularly when we are going into the first anniversary of the novichok attack, and are trying to move forward and look to the positive.”

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/feb/17/russian-flag-appears-on-...

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Still no sight of the Skripals who for all we know are IN PERFECT HEALTH... The only death so far in this saga has been a "drunken woman" who might have been seen as dispensable by MI5, and used to "strengthen their false flag event...

UK wants Sergei Skripal dead

World » Europe 

Russia's Ministry for Foreign Affairs is seriously concerned about the state of health of former Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia.

The British side does not provide any information about Skripal's condition - Russian officials learn about his state of health only from news reports. 

"We have no information about the condition of either Sergey Skripal himself or his daughter Yulia. All our inquiries that we send to the British authorities remain unanswered," an employee of the Russian embassy in the UK said.

According to 338 Telegram channel, the British authorities deceived Sergei and Yulia Skripal and can not free them now, because of the fear of their subsequent behaviour and public statements that they may make. As it was said in the channel, Yulia Skripal was given a petty post in British intelligence services for her agreement to take part in a campaign against Russia. However, the consequences of the incident significantly exceeded Yulia's expectations. 

British intelligence services can go to extreme measures to eliminate Sergei Skripal and his daughter to finally put an end to the case of their mysterious poisoning. It is worth mentioning that Sergei Skrypal's niece, Victoria Skripal, said that her uncle had already died.

See more at http://www.pravdareport.com/news/world/142259-sergei_skripal/?utm_referr...

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Trump isn't colluding with Russians — he's conspiring with Putin

Trump’s Russia collusion didn’t stop with the election — but what he’s done since taking office is even worse

The question is no longer whether Trump and his campaign colluded with Russians in advance of the election of 2016. The New York Times reported recently that “Donald J. Trump and at least 17 campaign officials and advisers had contacts with Russian nationals and WikiLeaks, or their intermediaries,” during the 2016 campaign for president. “Among these contacts are more than 100 in-person meetings, phone calls, text messages, emails and private messages on Twitter.”

Read more:

https://www.salon.com/2019/02/20/trump-isnt-colluding-with-russians-hes-...

Reading more of this crap and you would think that Salon's article is as saintly truthful as the Bible. And it is. The Bible is a collection of fabricated stories used to bamboozle the masses into submission to the hierarchical oligarchs including the pope.

So far not a speck of "the Rooskies did it", nor of "Putin did it" either, anywhere in Mueller's garden of weedy crooks who worked for Trump...

The saga is why did Obama and his cronies "organised" spying on Trump's electioneering camp and gave Hillary several "free passes", though Comey saw some (MAJOR) irregularities in her emails...

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Intelligence services investigated “increased” and “unusual” activity at the Russian embassy in London in the days before and after the Novichok poisoning, reports suggest.

MI5, MI6 and GCHQ looked into “frantic comings and goings” at the building in Kensington in the days leading up to the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury on March 4 2018. 

In the wake of the deadly nerve agent attack the observations were “deemed to be significant and of interest”, it is understood.

“The intelligence agencies have been investigating unusual and increased activity at the Russian embassy in Kensington in the days leading up to and after the attack on the Skripals,” a security source told the Press Association.

Read more:

https://www.itv.com/news/2019-03-04/novichok-poisoning-probe-over-unusua...

stirring the old pot with a regularity that smells of MI6 collusion about a fake story that cannot be let to die...

see also:

https://www.rt.com/news/452946-skripal-anniversary-truth-novichok/

and the most funny one:

https://www.itv.com/news/2019-03-04/prime-ministers-twitter-tribute-to-s...

by Kit Klarenberg

In several reports to date, I've documented how the Integrity Initiative - the shadowy UK government-funded military intelligence front - and its assorted operatives and media assets systematically shaped news reporting on, and Whitehall's response to, the apparent poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia on 4 March 2018.

Now, on the anniversary of that fateful and ever-mystifying day, I'll attempt to track some of the activities of the Initiative's parent, the Institute for Statecraft, and other key figures and organizations directly and indirectly connected to the body in the years immediately prior.

Troublingly, the information collected here inevitably represents but a negligible fragment of a much wider clandestine picture. The full extent of the British state's sinister and long-running secret machinations leading up to the Salisbury incident certainly isn't ascertainable at this time, and may well never be.

'Peculiar Struggle'

In July 2014, Institute for Statecraft ‘senior research fellow' Victor Madeira wrote an article for the organization's website, Russian Subversion — Haven't we been here before?. In it, he suggested that far from a "new type of warfare", the West's tussle with Russia in the wake of the Maidan coup was "actually only the latest chapter in a 100-year-old playbook the Bolsheviks called active measures", albeit "modernised to exploit the speed and reach of 21st-century mass/social media".

After attempting to link various tactics employed by the Soviet Union to the modern day, Madeira somewhat chillingly concludes the piece with a quote from Ronald Lindsay, UK ambassador to Germany, who in February 1927 urged Whitehall to realise they were engaged in a "new kind of war" with the then-burgeoning Soviet Union.

"Anti-subversive measures could not be gradual; they had to be part of a package of 'economic boycott, breach of diplomatic relations' as well as 'propaganda and counter-propaganda, pressure on neutrals.' He argued a diplomatic breach with Moscow would at least turn 'the present peculiar struggle into an armed conflict of the old-fashioned sort' that Great Britain and the West could win," Madeira records.

A document authored by the academic — who 2010 — 2014 tutored and lectured at Cambridge under former MI6 chief Richard Dearlove — in January 2015 (Russian Federation Sanctions) makes clear he, and presumably his Institute employers, support Lindsay's strategy and aims.

The file sets out a number of "potential levers" for achieving a number of "main aims", including "peace with Ukraine", the "return" of Crimea, "behaviour change" and/or "regime change" — for, much to Madeira's evident chagrin, the wave of sanctions imposed upon Russian individuals and businesses the previous March weren't having a sufficiently deleterious impact on the Kremlin, or the Russian people.

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/world/201903041072947977-skripal-integrity-initi...

The Times reported on April 16 that the British government had supplied images of “young children hospitalized” and of dead ducks, inadvertently poisoned after interactions with Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia at a park in Salisbury in March of last year. The paper pointed to the “sloppy work of the Russian operatives” who were blamed for what London calls a nerve agent attack last year.

While the original story claimed the images were used to convince US President Donald Trump to expel 60 Russian diplomats from the US in response to the Skripal episode, the Times now says no such photos exist.

“An earlier version of this article incorrectly described the photos that [CIA Director] Gina Haspel showed to President Trump during a discussion about responding to the nerve agent attack in Britain,” reads the correction, issued almost two months after the original story was published.

Haspel, instead, presented the president with generic images illustrating the harmful effects of some nerve agents, while the British claims of sick kids and poisoned birds were based on “early intelligence reports,” the corrected story says.

While the Times amended the story and added an editor’s note, the paper apparently forgot to scrub a photo caption describing a “slipshod attack that also sickened children, killed ducks and required careful cleanup.”

Prior to the correction, there were already signs that something was off about the story. Shortly after the Skripal incident, British tabloid the Daily Mirror reported that three children were indeed hospitalized after feeding ducks in a Salisbury park with the Skripals, but blood tests revealed that the children were fine.

One of the boys reportedly even ate some of the bread supplied by Skripal and intended as bird-food. According to UK authorities, Sergei Skripal’s hands were coated in a highly-lethal nerve agent at that moment; it is unclear how the child could have avoided poisoning.

READ MORE: ‘Highly likely’ is the new evidence: Five times Western officials had no proof but media fell for it 

This is only one aspect of the Skripal story that does not make sense, but the UK authorities still maintain it could have only been an officially sanctioned assassination attempt by the Kremlin – which Moscow outright denies. The episode has fueled tensions between Russia and the West. Nearly 20 countries, most of them in the EU, moved to expel some Russian diplomats in response to the incident last year, in addition to the 60 ejected from the United States.

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/461250-new-york-times-corrects-skripal-novichok/

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Paramedics saved the life of one of the Wiltshire novichok victims by administering an anti-nerve agent drug at the scene that had never been used on a patient before in the UK, it can be revealed.

The Guardian has also learned that a number of paramedics have reported feeling ill after being present at the Salisbury and Amesbury incidents.

One of the paramedics who had helped the former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter when they collapsed in Salisbury was among those who went to the aid of Charlie Rowley when he also fell critically ill four months later in Amesbury.

Instinct told him that a second nerve agent poisoning may have taken place and Rowley was given the drug. Speaking in detail for the first time about its role responding to the poisonings a year ago, South Western Ambulance Service NHS foundation trust (SWASFT) said it believed this saved Rowley’s life.

SWASFT also confirmed that staff had reported symptoms including headaches, sore throats and eye problems, and that some remained concerned about the possible long-term effects on their health. The health problems reported by the paramedics raise the possibility that more people were affected by novichok than has been officially stated.

The attack on Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, in March last year was the first time chemical weapons had been used in Europe since the second world war and put huge pressure on all the emergency services.

Wayne Darch, the head of emergency preparedness, resilience and response at SWASFT, said: “There wasn’t a plan on the shelf for what we were dealing with. We were writing the book as we were dealing with the situation put in front of us. It was intense.” SWASFT believes the actions of its staff tending to the Skripals at the scene and in ambulances on the way to Salisbury district hospital also saved them.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/jul/08/revealed-anti-nerve-agen...

This info of course is given out today to make sure our media does not let the Russian bone fall through the holes in the grate of bullshit...

So what is this miracle anti-nerve agent?... Oxime? One has to say that should victims be deeply affected by nerve-agents, this antidote has buckleys chance to be effective...

...

The most effective oxime reactivators have a positive charge. But the blood-brain barrier which exists between brain cells and blood capillaries does a good job of blocking these charged chemicals from infiltrating the brain, either by preventing entry or escorting them out once they enter. Therefore, 2-PAM and other approved oximes do not reach high enough levels in the brain to reverse the deadly grasp of OP nerve agent.

A promising new antidote

To protect people from nerve agent poisoning, we need a brain-penetrating molecule to reverse the AChE inhibition. Our lab group and several others worldwide are attempting to create such an antidote that restores AChE activity in the brain following severe OP poisoning.

To date, several of our oxime drugs have been as good as or more effective than 2-PAM for increasing 24-hour survival for animals exposed to lethal doses of OPs, using highly relevant mimics of two nerve agents sarin and VX, as well as an insecticidal chemical in a laboratory animal model. 

We have convincing evidence that our oximes can get through the blood-brain barrier and enter the brain after OP exposure, and that our laboratory animals show more normal activity of AChE with our novel oximes but not with 2-PAM. Our animals also recovered more quicklyfrom seizure-like behavior with our oxime antidote compared to 2-PAM. Our lead oxime seems likely to remain in the brain, and it has prevented some damage to brain structures, while 2-PAM did not – a finding we describe in an upcoming publication.

Read more:

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-08-brain-nerve-agent-antidote.html

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And by the way the "poisoning" was not Novichok, but most likely BZ... or Bullshit Zymogens... If you don't know what bullshit is, I can't help you — but you can check what Zymogens are...

Gabbard, a Democratic presidential hopeful, became the most-googled candidate during the second primary debate – but the surge of public interest came with renewed attacks against her anti-interventionist agenda. In case you’ve missed it all, Gabbard has been branded a ‘Russian’ spoiler for whichever candidate is eventually picked, and, once again, an apologist for Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Joining the chorus of bashers on Sunday was Elliot Higgins, the founder of the UK-based ‘citizen investigation’ outlet Bellingcat, who wrote a whopping 4,000-word piece attacking Gabbard’s negative attitude toward regime change wars. In particular, Higgins didn’t like her skepticism over chemical weapons attacks in Syria reflected on her campaign website. The attacks were used by Washington to justify missile attacks against the country’s government – and by extension continued illegal US military presence in the country.

The mammoth piece starts with screenshots featuring logos of RT and InfoWars (Russian propaganda, dear readers, conspiracy theories!) and goes on to criticize anyone doubting the US-favored narrative about what happened in Syria.

MIT Professor Theodore Postol gets an honorable mention, with whom Higgins no longer debates in person since their encounter in 2018. Back then, Higgins failed to address Postol’s technical criticisms of his investigations and instead resorted to mocking applauses and calling his opponent a tool of Russian propaganda.

While the West squarely laid the blame for most, if not all, chemical incidents in Syria on the government forces – and Bellingcat did their best to “prove” it – Damascus and Moscow have insisted the attacks mentioned by Gabbard and Higgins were false-flag operations by Al-Qaeda-affiliated militants.

Particularly infamous was the one in Douma on April 7, 2018, in which the Oscar-winning ‘White Helmets’ doused unsuspecting children with cold water on camera, so as to fake the treatment of the alleged “victims.” They might not have expected for witnesses to later come forward and speak on the record at the Hague, denouncing the whole affair as staged.

Syrian war aside, some may find a bit of irony in how Bellingcat has found a good use for US taxpayer money, which it receives through one of its sponsors, the National Endowment for Democracy – and then gets to do a little meddling in the 2020 presidential campaign.

READ MORE: Eliot Higgins’ Bellingcat channel suspended by YouTube, then quickly restored

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/465786-bellingcat-higgings-attacks-gabbard-syria...

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A very bad article in Science — the AAAS magazine

The poisons were so fearsome that U.S. government scientists were forbidden from publicly uttering their name. Then, in 2018, one of the Novichok compounds was used in an attempt to assassinate a former Russian spy on U.K. soil—spurring the United States and allies to lift the veil of secrecy and mount a drive to outlaw the obscure class of nerve agents, concocted in a Soviet weapons lab during the height of the Cold War. Now, their effort to amend the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) is about to pay off.

On 9 October, the Executive Council of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the body that administers the treaty, reviewed a revised proposal from Russia that would bring Novichoks under the treaty's verification regime, along with a class of potential weapons known as carbamates. If the Russian proposal and a similar one from the United States, Canada, and the Netherlands are approved at a treaty review meeting next month, as expected, they would be the first update to the list of banned chemical weapons since the CWC came into force in 1997. “This is a historic milestone for the treaty,” says Gregory Koblentz, a chemical and biological weapons expert at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

The newfound glasnost on Novichoks, also known as fourth-generation nerve agents, should spur research on their mechanism of action and on countermeasures and treatments. “Fourth-generation agents are now on the list of compounds we can study,” says David Jett, director of the Countermeasures Against Chemical Threats Program at the U.S. National Institutes of Health. The U.S. government limits work on Novichoks to a handful of defense labs, but academic researchers may now partner with these labs and conduct computer modeling or other studies that don't require the chemicals. Such research, Jett hopes, will “provide more information on the toxicity of these threat agents.”

Like other nerve agents, the known Novichok agents bind to acetylcholinesterase, an enzyme that dismantles the neurotransmitter acetylcholine after it's released into synapses. Without rapid medical intervention, the buildup of acetylcholine blocks brain signals from reaching muscles that control respiration and maintain blood pressure. Distinctive chemical groups jutting from the Novichok molecules may allow them to bind to other enzymes—and perhaps trigger a long-lasting syndrome in victims who survive an attack.

Chemical weapons experts had been whispering about Novichoks for decades. The first public clues came from Vil Mirzayanov, a Soviet military chemist who divulged the Novichok program in 1992. In a 2008 memoir, he revealed details about the chemicals' structures and claimed that some Novichok agents are several times more toxic than VX, the deadliest known nerve agent developed for warfare, which North Korean operatives used to assassinate Kim Jong-un's half-brother at the Kuala Lumpur airport in 2017. However, Mirzayanov did not publish toxicity data on A-234, the compound believed to have been used in last year's U.K. attack.

Treaty nations have long resisted adding Novichoks to the CWC's so-called Schedule 1 list of chemical weapons, which compels signatories to declare and destroy any stockpiles. “People were worried about a Pandora's box,” fearing such a listing would force them to regulate ingredients of the weapons, Koblentz says. That could hamper the chemical industry and might clue in enemies on how to cook them up. (Who has the agents now is anyone's guess.) Indeed, the U.S. government for years classified the Novichok agents as top secret. “There was a desire among Western countries to keep the information as limited as possible to avoid proliferation issues,” Koblentz says.

Last year's assassination attempt against former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, U.K., thrust the Novichok agents into the spotlight. The botched attack gravely sickened Skripal, his daughter Yulia, two police officers who investigated the crime scene, and a couple—Charlie Rowley and Dawn Sturgess—who a few months later happened on a perfume bottle containing the agent. After long hospitalizations, the Skripals, the officers, and Rowley recovered; Sturgess died. The United Kingdom charged two Russian men, reportedly military intelligence officers, as the alleged assailants, and obtained a European warrant for their arrest; they remain at large in Russia.

Now, Novichok agents are shaping up as a potential area of comity. The Canadian-Dutch-U.S. proposal targets two broad groups of Novichoks, one of which includes A-234. The Russian proposal covers the same compounds and adds a third group of Novichoks and two families of carbamates. The United States studied carbamates, which also inhibit acetlycholinesterase, as potential weapons during the Cold War; some carbamates are reportedly twice as toxic as VX, note Koblentz and Stefano Costanzi, a nonproliferation expert at American University in Washington, D.C., in a review in the current issue of The Nonproliferation Review. (There are many less toxic carbamates as well, some of them in use as insecticides or drugs.)

Russia initially opposed the three-nation proposal to bring the Novichoks under the CWC, arguing it was scientifically “substandard” and politically motivated. But after months of wrangling, the sides have resolved their differences. In a sign of the new openness, the U.S. Department of Commerce in August published a description of both the Novichok agents and the carbamates that the two proposals would cover in the Federal Register—including structural information.

If nations approve the Schedule 1 listings next month, CWC negotiators could then choose to puzzle out which precursor ingredients to cite on other treaty schedules. “It's complicated,” Costanzi says. “There could be many precursors, and it will be difficult to find an optimal solution that minimizes the risk of chemical proliferation without hindering legitimate industrial uses or revealing synthetic pathways for the preparation of Novichoks.” But that task will be well worth the trouble. “It's not like Novichoks are relics of the past,” Koblentz says. “These are weapons that are still killing people.”

Other agenda items at next month's treaty meeting are far more contentious. Russia and Syria are expected to denounce the work of an OPCW panel tracing the origins of chemical weapons used in Syria's civil war and identifying the parties that used them. And Russia and its allies are likely to continue to resist efforts to eliminate a treaty provision permitting use of aerosolized incapacitants for law enforcement. Russia exploited that loophole in 2002, when it pumped two powerful opioids, remifentanil and carfentanil, into a theater in Moscow to subdue armed terrorists—killing scores of hostages along with the terrorists.

Richard Stone

Richard Stone is senior science editor at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Tangled Bank Studios in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

Read more:

Science  25 Oct 2019:

Vol. 366, Issue 6464, pp. 404-405

DOI: 10.1126/science.366.6464.404

Gus:

I posted this article in full, mainly because it is full of inaccuracies, which is worry for a reputable magazine such as Science — a posting on Science that smells as if Russia was the only country using poisons and being evil.

Read from top and other related articles on this site...

In summary, the whole Skripal affair as told by the British government is too full of holes and contradictions not to be questioned: "The botched attack gravely sickened Skripal, his daughter Yulia, two police officers who investigated the crime scene, and a couple—Charlie Rowley and Dawn Sturgess—who a few months later happened on a perfume bottle containing the agent. ..."

Here we should smell a rat — a political rat creeping into solid sciences. Many serious analysts have brought a lot of strong proofs forward that would show that the Skripals were never subjected to Novichok. Had they been "exposed to Novichok" (even in a "botched attack"???) as suggested, they both would have died within a few minutes. All the scenarios proposed by MI6 and MI5 cannot be sustained. 

This is ridiculous for Science and the AAAS to publish this crap. It is commendable though that the world authorities plan to ban the substance, other nerve agents and derivatives.

On 4 March 2018 emergency services received a phone call from members of the public in Salisbury who had seen an old man and a young woman ill on a bench. It was a call that would set in motion a chain of events leading to a major crisis with Russia.

Read more crap:

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-51722301

By now, we should all know that the investigation and conclusion were a crock. As well we have had no sighting of "the old man" (Sergei Skripal) nor of his daughter, Yulia, after her "interview" which was mostly controlled by MI6. Has the Beeb been instructed by MI6 to revive this dead fire?

Like many such episodes, it's most likely it was interpreted (and possibly concocted) by the UK to froth up the hate of the West towards Russia. Read from top. The story of the Skripals had gone cold because the MI6 and police versions of it have been too contradictory, full of holes and have been senseless — as explained in this line of comments. Like MH17, it appears that this was part of a long line of "blame Russia" for all the ills in the world... Now, it's not-blame China with the coronavirus for the shitty economy we're in, but the underlying sentiment is there. All in all, the USA might pull ahead, because Trump has been forcing US enterprises to relocate in the USA. I would bet the patch on my trousers if I had one that the virusepidemicalisation fear is a soft addition to the sanctions against that country. It seems to be working like a dream, without having to add tariffs to Chinese goods. Be afraid of Chinese imports is good enough... And the Chinese factories have also been affected by this coronafear... I am too cynical, no "aren't I" about it...

This is the UK government’s version of what happened. Unvarnished and unsatirised. None of it is disputed, exaggerated or speculative.

If you can see any unanswered questions, logical gaps or peculiar coincidences… you are likely a Russian bot.

See:

https://off-guardian.org/2020/03/04/the-skripal-case-two-years-on/

And yes, the BBC today (5/3/20) stirred some dead wood about this story (see above comment). Read from top.

The whereabouts of Sergei and Yulia Skripal have remained unknown since they were discharged from hospital after surviving a poisoning by a toxic chemical, which the UK authorities branded Novichok, in Salisbury in March 2018.

An unnamed senior British government official has confirmed to the Sunday Times that the father and daughter at the heart of one of the biggest scandals between London and Moscow have spent more than a year in an MI6 safe house before being given new identities and moved to New Zealand so that they could start a new life there.

However, the ex-double agent’s niece, Viktoria Skripal, who lives in Russia, said that she didn’t trust the report at all.

“I know nothing about this. And I don’t believe it,” she insisted, recalling that it’s not the first time that the possibility of the Skripals moving to another country is mentioned.

The whereabouts of Sergei and Yulia Skripal have remained unknown since they were discharged from hospital after surviving a poisoning by a toxic chemical, which the UK authorities branded Novichok, in Salisbury in March 2018.

An unnamed senior British government official has confirmed to the Sunday Times that the father and daughter at the heart of one of the biggest scandals between London and Moscow have spent more than a year in an MI6 safe house before being given new identities and moved to New Zealand so that they could start a new life there.

However, the ex-double agent’s niece, Viktoria Skripal, who lives in Russia, said that she didn’t trust the report at all.

“I know nothing about this. And I don’t believe it,” she insisted, recalling that it’s not the first time that the possibility of the Skripals moving to another country is mentioned.

read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/491123-skripal-new-zealand-uk/

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