Couple Wins $1.5 Million in Britain's Lottery Twice in Two Years

             
          

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'Innocent mistake': UK’s nuclear weapons web data routed through Ukraine

UK traffic diverted through Ukraine included nuclear weapon maker AWE http://t.co/Df15sVUsDg pic.twitter.com/8BvpsbwR6w
— Dyn Research (@DynResearch) marzo 13, 2015

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Spy Working In/With Canada Embassy Arrested Over Three London Girls Who Went To Syria

torontosun

ANKARA — An alleged spy detained in Turkey for helping three British girls cross into Syria is a Syrian national working for a country in the U.S.-led coalition against Islamic State, the Turkish foreign minister said on Friday.

He has been named by one Turkish newspaper as Mohammad Al Rashid.

Several Turkish media, citing government sources, have said the detained spy was on contract for Canada but working for the Israeli spy agency, the Mossad.

Tahera Mufti, spokeswoman for CSIS, did not respond to a written request for comment and the federal government refused to comment, claiming it was a matter "of national security."

Islamic State seized swathes of land last June, cementing their rule with a militant interpretation of Islamic law, and is drawing sympathizers from many countries to support their fight.

The U.S.-led coalition, that includes Canada, is using mostly air power in an attempt to push the Sunni militant group back.

"The person who helped the three British girls into Syria is a Syrian national working for another country within the coalition. The situation is so complicated," foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu told reporters in Ankara.

The three girls, two aged 15 and one 16, flew to Istanbul from London on Feb. 17 and then onwards to Syria, where more than 200,000 have been killed in a civil war. Their families have appealed to them to return.

- with QMI Agency files
----------------
Mary Greeley

 

Listen to Russian strategic bombers speaking in code over UK airspace

businessinsider

David Cenciotti, The Aviationist

Shamil Zhumatov/Reuters

Russian Tu-95 bombers fly during a joint Kazakh-Russian military exercise at Otar military range, some 150km (93 miles) west of Almaty, October 3, 2008.

On Feb. 18, two Russian Air Force Tu-95MS Bear bombers on a long-range patrol flew close to the UK airspace off Cornwall.

Although the 60-year old 4-engine powered turboprop planes remained in international airspace, they were shadowed by two RAF Typhoons in QRA (Quick Reaction Alert): something that is becoming a sort of routine considered the frequency of such Russian missions over northern Europe.

Noteworthy, as the Bear H aircraft flew close to UK, Tom Hill, a radio enthusiast and reader of The Aviationist, using an HF receiver, recorded the following 6-minute audio.

It’s a coded message believed to be a message passed by the Tu-95 to a female controller on the Russian Air Force Strategic HF Voice net.

Interestingly, according to one of our sources, for the first time in several months, the entire Bear mission on Feb. 18 was supported by a Russian airborne command and control aircraft: the Ilyushin Il-80 (NATO reporting name “Maxdome”).

Read more: http://theaviationist.com/2015/02/20/audio-tu-95-talks-control/#ixzz3SKHZ4mNy

Charlie Hebdo Terror Mentor's Wife Living on Benefits in UK

Breitbart

by Nick Hallett

The wife of a man who mentored the Kouachi brothers is living on state benefits in Leicester in the UK after deciding France was too strict on Muslims.

Sylvie Beghal, whose husband Djamel is suspected of training the men who attacked satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday, lives rent-free in a four bedroom house after she left France in search of a more “Islamic environment”, the Telegraph reports.

Djamel is a former lieutenant of hate preacher Abu Hamza, who was yesterday sentenced to life imprisonment for terror offences in the US. He recruited another Cherif Kouachi while they were both in prison serving sentences for other terror offences. The two men remained close and were photographed in 2010 by French police playing football with other convicted terrorists.

Beghal also mentored Amedy Coulbaly and Hayat Boumeddiene, who held up a Kosher store yesterday, killing four hostages a day after killing a police woman.

Although he was excluded from the UK on national security grounds in 2009, his family have been allowed to stay.

Sylvie Beghal lives with her four children in the city of Leicester. Her landlord told the Telegraph: “She doesn’t have a job. She doesn’t even leave the house much.” If she claims the full housing benefit to which she would be entitled, she would receive more than £10,000 a year. As she has two children under 18, she would also be entitled to around £1,500 in child benefit.

If you add housing benefits to this, Mrs Beghal may have cost the British taxpayer more than £150,000 since she moved to the UK.

Mr and Mrs Beghal married in 1990 in France, before moving to Leicester in 1997. Djamel made sandwiches for a living before starting a computer course. They then moved to Afghanistan, then under control of the Taliban, in 2000, as they “wanted to live in a Muslim country”.

Djamel was arrested at Dubai airport in 2001 and was found to have organised a terror cell while living in Leicester. He was discovered to have links with Algerian group GSPC and Takfir Wal Hirja, a group founded by Bin Laden’s deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri.

In a UK court case, Beghal was described as being so extreme that even Osama bin Laden thought him to be “beyond the pale”.

Mrs Beghal maintains her husband’s innocence, however. She also said that she decided to move back to Leicester “mainly for religious reasons”.

“I wanted to educate my children surrounded by Muslim brothers and sisters. It wasn’t really possible [in France].

“I wanted help for my children. I wanted them to live in an Islamic environment. It is not possible in France since we cannot really live in community.

“Most of all, I was asked to remove my headscarf to work. For me, it was unimaginable. I was not ready to make that kind of compromise.”

Speaking yesterday, she said her husband had nothing to do with the Paris shootings.

“Once again my husband is punished for something he didn’t do. He has been placed in solitary confinement after all the false media coverage. He has nothing to do with the attack against Charlie Hebdo.

“The media is repeating false allegations which have been made against him for 14 years now. Our family too is suffering. We just want to be left alone and lead a peaceful life.”

Fidel Castro ofreció al dictador Leopoldo Galtieri hundir un barco británico

Diario de Cuba

Fidel Castro ofreció al dictador Leopoldo Galtieri hundir un barco británico en medio de la Guerra de las Malvinas, que libraban Argentina y Reino Unido en 1982, según un documento secreto al que tuvo acceso DIARIO DE CUBA.

"Quiero que usted [inaudible] con toda claridad. Esto es una proposición muy cuidadosa, pero detrás de eso está la voluntad de hacer lo que haya que hacer [inaudible]… Enviar un submarino o hundir un barco, o cualquier cosa", dijo Emilio Aragonés Navarro, entonces embajador cubano en Buenos Aires, en una reunión con Galtieri.

El dictador respondió al ofrecimiento con palabras de elogio: "Argentina no lo olvidará, ni ahora, ni lo va a olvidar por muchos años".

El documento sonoro ha sido cedido por el escritor Juan Bautista Tata Yofre, exjefe de la inteligencia argentina durante el gobierno de Carlos Menem. La conversación entre el "presidente" y el representante de Castro se produjo el 10 de abril de 1982 en el Palacio de Gobierno.

La Guerra de las Malvinas había estallado unos pocos días antes, el 2 de abril.

Según escribe Yofre este martes en DIARIO DE CUBA, la grabación entre Galtieri y Aragonés fue una de las primeras de un "sistema" implantado por el militar para registrar las conversaciones con autoridades extranjeras.

Otra guerra cubana

Aragonés Navarro había aterrizado en Buenos Aires el 10 de abril a primera hora, después de que su avión —un Ilyushin 62-M II— fuera interceptado y retenido por la Fuerza Aérea Brasileña, según documentos secretos citados en 2012 por el diario O Globo.

"Que usted tome el cepillo de diente y el calzoncillo para venir a Argentina, que sé que es así, señor embajador (…), es un gesto de Cuba que Argentina no olvida", dijo Galtieri en la reunión.

En otro momento, el diplomático de la Isla afirma: "Lo de Cuba está seguro, cuando usted lo diga. Usted manda mañana a una gente y dice: 'ahora me hace falta que ustedes me den esto'...".

Sin embargo, Aragonés advierte sobre las peculiaridades del Movimiento de Países No Alineados, cuya presidencia ejercía La Habana en ese momento.

"...Hay cosas que el tiempo no puede jugar a favor nuestro, y es el de los No Alineados. Fidel Castro es el presidente de los No Alineados todavía, pero termina pronto…", recordó el embajador.

Galtieri respondió: "Al señor Fidel Castro, dígale que le agradezco la espontánea, decidida, firme (inaudible), el gesto que ha tenido".

Según cables de la inteligencia brasileña, La Habana operaba un suministro clandestino de armas a Argentina, organizado por la Unión Soviética, con la participación de Brasil, Perú, Libia y Angola, gobernados por João Figueiredo, Fernando Belaúnde Terry, Muamar el Gadafi y José Eduardo dos Santos, respectivamente.

"Los rusos movilizaron a Fidel para ayudar a una dictadura militar ferozmente anticomunista", apuntó el diario brasileño O Globo en 2012.

En mayo de 1982, el entonces vicepresidente cubano Carlos Rafael Rodríguez admitió al diario francés Le Monde que el régimen estaba dispuesto a ayudar a Argentina "por todos los medios, incluso militarmente".

Galtieri gobernó Argentina entre diciembre de 1981 y junio de 1982. Renunció al cargo tras el fracaso del ejército local en la Guerra de las Malvinas.

Transcripción de fragmentos de la grabación

(A partir del minuto 1:43)

Embajador: …Quiero que usted [inaudible] con toda claridad. Esto es una proposición muy cuidadosa, pero detrás de eso está la voluntad de hacer lo que haya que hacer [inaudible]… Enviar un submarino y hundirle un barco, cualquier cosa.

Galtieri: Argentina no lo olvidará, ni ahora, ni lo va a olvidar por muchos años.

(A partir del minuto 2:50)

Galtieri: ...Este es un problema que puede traer consecuencias internacionales (…) Esto se le va a ir de las manos a Estados Unidos, a Rusia, a todos. Estoy consciente. Yo le agradezco, señor embajador...

(A partir del minuto 4:18)

Galtieri: ...Que usted tome el cepillo de diente y el calzoncillo para venir a Argentina, que sé que es así, señor embajador, (…) es un gesto de Cuba que Argentina no lo olvida...

(A partir del minuto 5:07)

Embajador: …Lo de Cuba está seguro cuando usted lo diga. Usted manda mañana a una gente y dice: ahora me hace falta que ustedes me den esto, pero hay cosas que el tiempo no puede jugar a favor nuestro… y es el de los No Alineados. Fidel Castro es el presidente de los No Alineados todavía, pero termina pronto…

(A partir del minuto 8:50)

Galtieri: Al señor Fidel Castro, dígale que le agradezco la espontánea, decidida, firme [inaudible], el gesto que ha tenido...

Continuar leyendo aqui >>

British Imam: 'Sharia Is Coming to a Place Near You'

breitbart

YouSkyNews 

London Imam Anjem Choudary declared, “Sharia will be implemented in America, it’s coming,” and “Sharia is coming to a place near you” while defending the actions of ISIS on Wednesday’s “Hannity” on the Fox News Channel.

Choudary reacted to the murder of journalist James Foley by saying, “If the Americans bomb and murder hundreds of thousands of people and they torture people and they continue to do so in Guantanamo Bay obviously this will have repercussions.”

He claimed that forced conversion of Christians by ISIS “didn't happen.” He also denied the persecution of the Yazidis, stating “the Yazidis, whoever went to the mountain, went to the mountain even before the Islamic State came to the area. First of all they said there were 40,000 then they said there were 20,000 and then they went down, eventually they said there were a couple hundred and they were living in the mountains anyway in villages, so this is a complete pack of lies ... the Christians are actually queuing up to come back into Mosul because they realized the life under the Sharia is much better than the Nouri al-Maliki regime.”

During a long section of the interview on Sharia Law, he refused to say if women would be punished by not dressing properly, and admitted that under Sharia, homosexuals would be punished.  He concluded, “Sharia is coming to a place near you,” and expressed his wish for a worldwide Islamic Caliphate.

World War I: Poppies pour like blood out from the Tower of London

ITN

 

British Army Now Has Fewer Tanks than Horses

breitbart

By Nick Hallett 

Britain will have just one tank regiment from today, meaning that it will have more horses than tanks, and will only be able to field around tanks in a war.

The Times reports that thousands will gather in Wiltshire today to mark the merger of Britain’s two remaining tank regiments amid concerns that the move could be misguided as tensions with Russia increase.

After a decade fighting insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan with just light infantry, heavy armour became seen as outdated. However, after Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its continuing actions on eastern Ukraine, there are now calls to change priorities.

Lieutenant-General Sir Andrew Ridgway, a long-serving tank officer who is now Colonel of the Royal Tank Regiment, said: "Going down to the small number [of tanks] that we are going to have in future is taking a risk. But defence capability is like insurance: You don’t have the insurance you want. You have the insurance you can afford. The crucial thing is to get your priorities right, to make sure the things you really need are what you have."

Colonel Hamish de Bretton-Gordon added: "Recent conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria appear to signal the demise of the tank but activities in Ukraine especially and Gaza might suggest this is a little premature."

This weekend’s merger is especially ironic as it takes place as Britain prepares to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of its entry into First World War. It was during that war that Britain pioneered modern heavy armour, introducing the first ever tank into active service in 1916.

By the end of the First World War, Britain had 25 tank regiments, rising to 44 after World War II.

However, from today there will only be one Royal Tank Regiment, which will have 56 Challenger 2 tanks. Two other regiments – The King’s Royal Hussars and the Queen’s Royal Hussars – will also each have 56, bringing to total number of tanks in the army to 168.

This means tanks the modern British Army now has fewer tanks than horses, and also puts the UK behind many smaller countries, including neutral Switzerland.

General Ridgway said he did not want the number of tanks to fall any further: "We really have reduced to a very low level," he said.

A spokesman for the Ministry of Defence said: "The Army has been redesigned so that it is more adaptable, agile and can continue to respond to future threats. The amalgamation of 1 and 2 RTR is part of these plans and will not affect our ability to deal with modern threats including the use of a wide range of armoured vehicles and tanks.

"Alongside our allies, we take recent events in Ukraine extremely seriously. That is why we have taken measures aimed at reassuring our Nato allies in Eastern Europe such as UK participation in a major land exercise in Poland involving 1,300 troops and more than 300 military vehicles as announced by the Defence Secretary earlier this week."

Winston Churchill War's Bunker

Hilarious bus stop prank: Public see giant robots and alien invasion

ITN

Explorarán Cuba y Reino Unido oportunidades de negocios

ain/

La Habana, 13 ene (AIN) Sobre energía, industria, agricultura y turismo podrán su atención empresarios de Cuba y Reino Unido, quienes evaluarán mañana en esta capital nuevas oportunidades para fortalecer las relaciones económicas y comerciales.

En el foro de negocios, que tendrá lugar hasta el próximo miércoles en el Hotel Nacional de Cuba, las partes presentarán potencialidades existentes aun en varios sectores económicos, en especial, las novedades que depara la Isla con la Zona Especial de Desarrollo Mariel (ZEDM).

Autoridades cubanas expondrán a los visitantes el desempeño de Cuba en los últimos años, a propósito de los cambios implementados en su política económica y social; así como también, las líneas de desarrollo en áreas priorizadas, entre estas, la energía renovable, la biotecnología y la industria en general.

Conferencias sobre el sistema tributario cubano, la Convención Cubaindustria 2014, y las prioridades de inversión que promueven el grupo empresarial Biocubafarma y el Ministerio de Turismo, ocuparán la primera jornada del foro empresarial.

Para el día 15, los organizadores prevén la presentación de resultados de la cooperación bilateral en la agroindustria y la energía renovable, obtenidos gracias a la asociación de empresas británicas y cubanas.

Acápite especial tendrá en la fecha, las exposiciones del Consejo británico de la Papa y el grupo Taylor Food, en torno a los procesos de producción, almacenamiento y comercialización de ese tubérculo, de alto consumo en la nación caribeña.

Brian Wilson, embajador de negocios de la Oficina de Comercio e Inversión de Reino Unido (UKTI, por sus siglas en inglés), y Odalys Seijo, presidenta en funciones de la Cámara de Comercio de Cuba, encabezarán el encuentro.

Entre los proyectos que impulsan Londres y La Habana destaca la construcción para 2015 de una planta generadora de electricidad, a partir del procesamiento del bagazo de caña de azúcar y leña de marabú, la cual es fruto de la asociación entre la compañía Havana Energy Ltd y Zerus S.A., sociedad perteneciente al Grupo Azucarero AZCUBA.

Britain's Immigration Crisis: How the BBC Pretended It Wanted a 'Debate'

breitbart

By Raheem Kassam 

Reuters

“We are full, and I think parents who are coming into the city now need to appreciate that they can’t sort of pick and choose anymore. The schools in the city are full to bursting.”

So remarked Anne Steele-Arnett, a British primary school head teacher who spoke to Nick Robinson during the recent BBC documentary entitled The Truth About Immigration.

Despite her assertion, and the evidence to hand, the BBC’s conclusions following its one-hour documentary were clear. Immigration is good, Britons are bigoted, and conservatives are nasty people.

Who would have expected anything different from an institution that has effectively been bounced by public opinion into making a program about an issue that the liberal-left thought was long since settled?

Immigration, for many years, was a staple issue for the left—and, indeed, for many libertarians. If you opposed open immigration, you were either a racist or a reactionary. To this day, I’m unsure which is worse by their logic.

BBC executives cannot have been pleased to make this program, which, intelligently, publicly billed itself as the corporation looking inward and realising that it had not had an “honest debate about immigration” for many years. Despite this effective spin of its own shortcomings, the program swiftly moved to implicate conservatives like Enoch Powell and Margaret Thatcher.

Powell, with his often intentionally mistitled “Rivers of Blood” speech, is charged with making immigration a taboo topic. The Labour Party’s Trevor Phillips, who is also the former head of the spuriously named "Equality and Human Rights Commission," tells us that Powell’s couching of the immigration debate “purely in racial terms” made it “very difficult to get a proper discussion about immigration for nearly half a century.”

So there you have it. One speech, given at a local party meeting by one conservative Member of Parliament 46 years ago, is held up as the rationale for the entire establishment’s cowardice for half a century.

However, not even the selective quotes from both him and from former Prime Minister Thatcher could back up the BBC’s biased conclusions. So it confronted the British public, who overwhelmingly guessed in one of the least entertaining and least scientific polls taken (using slices of pie at a country fair) that immigration was far greater than it actually was. Is this the “serious debate” that we were promised?

“Surely we’re all a nation of bigots, and we need to do some serious soul-searching?” is the question we are no doubt supposed to be asking ourselves. However, if the BBC had bothered to scratch a little deeper, it would have gotten to the bottom of why people feel that immigration is higher than it is, rather than conflating the issue with "scaremongerers" such as former Conservative Party leader Michael Howard and current UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage.

The reason, of course, is that Britons are simply reflecting what institutions like the BBC are foisting upon us. Multiculturalism has featured so heavily across the broadcaster’s scheduling over the past few decades, and the idea that "everything (or nothing) is British" has been rammed down our throats by government and its appendages for so long that it is no wonder that Britons' minds exaggerate the problem.

No, immigrants do not make up one third or even one quarter of the population of Britain. They do, however, make up one eighth, and for the BBC to present this as both a vindication of mass immigration and a number not to be concerned about is thoroughly disingenuous – almost as much as their proposition that this documentary was a result of self reflection.

For years, greater thinkers than you will ever find within the BBC have been warning about an immigration crisis. It has scarcely been about "people coming over and stealing our jobs" – a simple strawman argument perpetuated by the left. Rather, it has often been about the stresses upon the national infrastructure and indeed upon a national identity.

A recent report by Ed West and the New Culture Forum exposed the BBC’s bias on the matter. It even went so far as to reveal that it is "common practice" for the BBC to give a platform to many pro-immigration spokesmen with no dissenting voices. It was noted that the corporation suffers from left-wing "groupthink," preventing its journalists from challenging institutional bias.

So did this half-hearted, pseudo-apology, "debate" documentary resolve any of the issues to which the BBC is supposedly now attuned? 

No.

We are left with an overwhelming feeling that, somehow, right-wing politicians created tensions by forewarning about the problems of mass immigration – problems that have indeed come to pass, but which few will point out because of the very real fear of being labeled a racist, bigot, or otherwise.

I, as someone born to immigrants from Tanzania whose parents came from India, still find myself at the receiving end of such insults. Gillian Duffy, a life-long Labour party supporter, was famously called a “bigoted woman” by the former Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, for daring to remark, “You can't say anything about immigrants.” She was swiftly proved correct.

However, the BBC could not mask the very real admission of guilt by the former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, who revealed that he deeply “regretted” the Labour government’s moves to open Britain’s borders to masses of Eastern European economic migrants – despite almost every other major European country's placing restrictions upon them.

Straw, throughout the documentary, made the point that his government got it all horrifically wrong:

The Home Office researchers concluded that there was likely to be net migration of around 13,000 people a year, looking forward over the following ten years. The predictions were completely catastrophic. I mean they were wrong by a factor of ten.

He stopped short of issuing a formal apology, stating, “Personally I am skeptical about apologies, other than personal apologies… It is right to say we got it wrong, and we deeply regret it.”

And yet, all things considered, the viewer was undoubtedly supposed to switch off his television set after watching this tripe and realize, “Oh, my taxes could rise if immigration levels drop.” The last ten minutes were dedicated to insisting that Britain desperately needs more economic migrants.

The blow to the BBC and to those seeking to end the documentary with this stark warning is that not only is this assumption spurious at best, but the people it presented this information to, including Asian immigrants, and indeed Nigel Farage, said, “So be it…”

“There are some things in a society, in a community,” said Farage, “that actually matter more than just money. Quality of life, overcrowded Britain, lack of social housing, youth unemployment. These are very real issues.”

For the BBC and the leftist intelligentsia, these are wounding words.

No longer can social democrats and Europhiles stake an unchallenged claim to the welfare of the poorest and the cohesion of civil society. The liberal left’s staple issue has been torn away from it. I suppose I can hazard a guess at their response before it even arrives.

We’re all racists and bigots now.

Restaurant review: Viva Cuba el Che a la Carta

en la ciudad inglesa de Leeds un antro de la propaganda para idiotas izquierdistas

Read at Yorkshire Evening Post >>

Scotland's Royal Bank Fined For Violating Iran, Cuba Sanctions

OPB

The bank was fined $100 million Wednesday for violating the U.S. sanctions. It had given its U.K. employees step-by-step instructions on how to keep transactions from being detected for sanctions violations. 

Canada sells historic Macdonald House to Mumbai-based developer

CTV News 

www.ctvnews.ca

OTTAWA -- Canada's top diplomat in the United Kingdom says security concerns were one consideration in the $530-million sale of the historic London mansion that houses part of the Canadian High Commission.

But High Commissioner Gordon Campbell said Canada managed to sell Macdonald House at One Grosvenor Square in London to the highest bidder, an Indian developer.

The Mumbai-based Lodha Group will take over the downtown property in London's posh Mayfair district in December 2014. The deal was announced Thursday after the Harper government declared its intention to sell it earlier this year.

Canada plans to consolidate its diplomatic activity at another historic property, Canada House on Trafalgar Square in the heart of London.

Campbell wouldn't say who else was interested in the Canadian property, but he hinted that the government was sensitive to the good neighbour it was leaving behind on Grosvenor Square -- the U.S. embassy.

London has become a favoured destination of deep-pocketed Russian oligarchs looking for property, which has led some to pejoratively label the city Londongrad. Relations between the U.S. and Russia soured over the last year because of Moscow's decision to grant asylum to Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency leaker that Washington wanted to prosecute.

"We had over 106 tours of the actual property by international investors from all over the world," Campbell told The Canadian Press from London.

"We had a whole matrix of decisions we had to go through, including best value, lowest risk, any security risks certainly were all pursued."

In the end, Campbell said, the property was sold to the highest bidder.

"We had lots of very good bidders and this was the highest evaluated bid that we had, and it's a very good bid for Canada."

Read more: http://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/canada-sells-london-diplomatic-mansion-for-530m-to-indian-developer-1.1565232#ixzz2m3Xob8cv

Bitcoins hard drive worth £4m accidentally thrown away

ITN

Imagination: an antidote to the plague of austerity

Transition Network
Rob Hopkins

"What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination.... If I sit still and don't do anything, the world goes on beating like a slack drum, without meaning. We must be moving, working, making dreams to run toward; the poverty of life without dreams is too horrible to imagine."
Sylvia Plath, from Notebooks, February 1956

Our theme for November is austerity and Transition responses to it. It is a subject that our Social Reporters are exploring with great gusto at the moment. Caroline Jackson recently documented what the unfolding of spending cuts look like in her community in Lancaster, concluding with the question "there’s a challenge for us in Transition here – I wonder how we will respond?" That's what I'd like to explore here, and to ask "what is Transition's unique contribution to the challenges of austerity?"

In the UK, as elsewhere, debates around austerity tend to polarise along political divides. The Right argue that the economy is saddled with huge debts and that we have to "get our house in order" before anything else, cutting back in all areas of government expenditure (although whilst also bailing out the banks, cutting taxes for the rich and not collecting corporate taxes). The Left argue that's really the last thing we need to do, that actually what we need to do is to borrow more money in order to stimulate growth and kick start economic growth again. Both miss the point completely. In The Power of Just Doing Stuff I quoted FEASTA's Graham Barnes who wrote:

“The austerity versus Keynsian spending debate is about as useful as arguing whether the Earth is flat or sitting on the back of a pile of turtles.”

The reality is we have reached the end of the age of cheap energy, and, almost certainly, of economic growth. Our urgent imperative is to begin a steep reduction of carbon emissions (10% a year, if Kevin Anderson is right), and we stand atop mountains of debt accumulated in the process of generating GDP (creating one dollar of growth in the 1970s required $1.74 of debt, it's now $5.67) and an increasingly fragile economic system. Under such circumstances it's not about how we recreate the kind of blunt, “gross value added” growth that both left and right have long used as a measure, rather how we get real about our situation and respond accordingly. Whether austerity is the right approach or not, the reality is that as a government-led approach to the economy, it looks likely to be here to stay for some time to come, with Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls pledging to match to coalition government's spending cuts.

I could spend this entire post delivering a long rant about austerity: how there is easily enough money to overcome it, and to tackle the climate crisis, locked up in offshore banking accounts (beautifully explored in Nick Shaxson's latest report 'The Finance Curse'), how in the US (and almost certainly in the UK and elsewhere too) the bulk of what little economic growth there has been over the past couple of years actually goes to the rich, not to everyone else, or in pointing out, as the Red Cross did recently when looking at austerity across Europe, that it simply doesn't work as an economic approach:

"Whilst other continents successfully reduce poverty, Europe adds to it. The long-term consequences of this crisis have yet to surface. The problems caused will be felt for decades even if the economy turns for the better in the near future … We wonder if we as a continent really understand what has hit us."

I could bring it closer to home, stating how the use of food banks in the UK has increased threefold on this time last year, up to half a million people over the last 12 months, how some families receiving food parcels from food banks are sending them back because they are too poor to be able to afford to heat the food the parcel contains, or how, in the case of council funding cuts, the drastic cutting back of public services has only just begun. Newcastle City Council has spoken of how it is being forced to make "bloody great cuts", cutting all arts funding, and showing how by 2017 it looks like it will be unable to even meet its basic legal responsibilities as a Council. At the same time, bonuses in the City of London are up 64%, and RBS and Lloyds are enjoying combined half-year profits of £3.5bn.

It's shitty and grim and however much we might rail against it, it looks unlikely that a change of government (all the major parties at least) would do much different. The reality is that the age of cheap energy is over, and our living off the fat of a hundred years of surplus energy is coming to an end. There are, of course, activist avenues open to you if you want to use them, campaigns for transparency in international finance, UK Uncut and so on. I think we need something else though, something that sits alongside those more campaign-based responses, something without which we will never make any headway.

Keep reading Here >>

Rare glimpse of Victorian London’s working class captured by street photographer

photoblog

By Yuka Tachibana, Producer, NBC News

A book of photographs depicting the grueling poverty lived by many residents of Victorian London is due to be auctioned on Thursday.

"In or around 1877, photography was mainly about beautiful landscapes or portraits of the wealthy, but these images [photographer John] Thomson deliberately set out to take were those of the Victorian underclass," John Trevers of auctioneers Dominic Winter told NBC News. "This was the first time those in abject poverty scratching out a living on the streets of London were photographed."

"This was a pioneering work of social documentation," he added.

Scottish photographer John Thomson, a pioneer of street photography, captured images of London's working class in the 1870s. The photos were originally published in a monthly magazine, Street Life in London, between 1876 and 1877. 

The photos would likely have made a real impact when they came out, Trevers said.

"People wouldn't have been aware of the conditions in which London's underbelly suffered, and to see it in flesh and blood through Thomson's photos would have been quite a shock to the system," he said, adding that it isn't known how many copies of the magazine have survived.

The book is expected to fetch a price of between $6,000 and $9,000.

'Wall workers'

'Crawlers', one of a series of pictures of 19th century London by pioneering street photographer John Thomson

'Cheap fish St. Giles'

'Street advertising'

Left: 'Covent Garden labourers'
Right: 'Covent Garden flower women.'

Left: 'Street doctor'
Right: 'The London boardmen'

Britain: "A World Capital for Islamic Finance"/ Gatestone Institute

By Soeren Kern

"I want London to stand alongside Dubai and Kuala Lumpur as one of the great capitals of Islamic finance anywhere in the world." — David Cameron, Prime Minister, Great Britain.
But critics say that British ambitions to attract investments from Muslim countries, companies and individuals are spurring the gradual establishment of a parallel financial system based on Islamic Sharia law. The Treasury also said some sukuk Islamic bond issues may require the government to restrict its dealings with Israeli-owned companies in order to attract Muslim money.

The London Stock Exchange will be launching a new Islamic bond index in an effort to establish the City of London as one of the world's leading centers of Islamic finance.

Britain also plans to become the first non-Muslim country to issue sovereign Islamic bonds, known as sukuk, beginning as early as 2014.

The plans are all part of the British government's strategy to acquire as big a slice as possible of the fast-growing global market of Islamic finance, which operates according to Islamic Sharia law and is growing 50% faster than the conventional banking sector.

Although it is still a fraction of the global investment market -- Sharia-compliant assets are estimated to make up only around 1% of the world's financial assets -- Islamic finance is expected to be worth £1.3 trillion (€1.5 trillion; $2 trillion) by 2014, a 150% increase from its value in 2006, according to the World Islamic Banking Competitiveness Report 2012-2013, published in May 2013 by the consultancy Ernst & Young.

But critics say that Britain's ambitions to attract investments from Muslim countries, companies and individuals are spurring the gradual establishment of a parallel global financial system based on Islamic Sharia law.

British Prime Minister David Cameron announced the plans during a keynote speech at the ninth World Islamic Economic Forum, which was held in London from October 29-31, the first time the event has ever been held outside the Muslim world.

"Already London is the biggest center for Islamic finance outside the Islamic world," Cameron told the audience of more than 1,800 international political and business leaders from over 115 countries.

"And today our ambition is to go further still. Because I don't just want London to be a great capital of Islamic finance in the Western world, I want London to stand alongside Dubai and Kuala Lumpur as one of the great capitals of Islamic finance anywhere in the world."

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