The FBI had somebody wearing a wire at the London Olympics to capture the FIFA corruption taking place in the margins. What were the British authorities doing? Nothing.
Britain prides itself as having in London the world’s leading financial centre. Substantial assets, both financial and real estate, from FIFA corruption are located in London. But Britain has taken over the crown from Switzerland as the major financial destination which will always protect ill-gotten wealth.
Alisher Usmanov played a major role as bagman for the corrupt Russian World Cup bid, particularly with delegates from FIFA’s Asian Confederation. His place as Britain’s third richest resident is very obviously based on extreme Russian corruption and he rose to power and wealth solely with the use of gangster muscle and contacts he gained and expanded while serving a prison sentence for blackmail. But he is a billionaire and beloved by the City of London so there is no danger of him ever being investigated in the UK.
That a key figure in FIFA corruption over Russia’s World Cup bid, is undisturbed in his large shareholding in Arsenal FC, says everything about the complicity of the British establishment.
Usmanov’s friend Gulnara Karimova is a startling example. She is now under formal investigation in Switzerland, France, Sweden and the Netherlands over the glaringly corrupt origins of her billions. Only a fake house arrest by her father has prevented her real arrest. Yet in the UK, where she has three homes including one in the No.1 Hyde Park criminals’ hangout, where she shops regularly and her son is at university, there is no move against her whatsoever.
I am delighted to see the moves against FIFA. But to me they illustrate very plainly what a corrupt stinking hole London has become.
A snow leopard. Now there’s a beautiful creature!
I’ve recently been discovering that there is a huge collection of wildlife videos on YouTube. Some a bit gory, e.g. when big cats are hunting, but others fascinating – watching mothers fighting to protect their young. Some very sad too. The people who film these videos have amazing patience, following animals or herds for days – in one case following a mother polar bear with two cubs, even when she moved miles to a totally different area of ice. They searched and searched to see if both cubs were still alive, and eventually found them all, must have been three or four days later.
I think I’ll go to Gravatar.com and switch to something more appropriate for Myauuu! Fsssst!.
(just for fun)
What life is like for the open air prisoners in Gaza.
‘June 02, 2015
Heading to Gaza
Crossing Rafah
by JOHNNY BARBER
The Rafah Crossing from Egypt to Gaza was opened on May 26th for 2 days after being closed for the past 75 days. The opening allowed Palestinian residents of Gaza who were stranded in Egypt or third countries to return home to Gaza. The crossing remained closed for those trying to leave Gaza. The waiting list for people trying to leave has reached 15,000 people. The waiting list includes thousands of medical patients, students, and people traveling to their work or their families abroad. Many of these people have been trapped in Gaza since the Israeli attack last July.
The last time the crossing was opened was in March when just 2,443 people in total were permitted to travel in both directions. While Morsi was in power in Egypt, nearly 41,000 people were traveling through the crossing each month.
My friend Hanaa* had spent 2 years in the U.S. earning a masters degree.
When she left Gaza in the fall of 2013 it took her 6 months to get authorization from Hamas to leave, and an additional month to get a U.S. visa. She came within days of losing a full scholarship. Many other students remained trapped in Gaza and their scholarships were rescinded.
In the first year of her studies, Hanaa’s father died. He needed routine heart surgery but he was not permitted to leave Gaza. He died on the operating table at Shifa Hospital. He was 50 years old. Hanaa could not return to Gaza to be with her family because there was no guarantee that she could enter Gaza, and if she could, there was an even greater risk she wouldn’t be allowed to leave Gaza to return to her studies.’
/..
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/06/02/crossing-rafah/
“You’re just a pack of pixels. All of you. Me too.”
Ba’al Zevul 27 May, 2015 – 2:25 pm
What a shame these moments of perspicacity don’t last longer.
The shameful cover up continues.
May is not extending Goddard’s remit to NI.
A google search for ‘news’ on the Goddard inquiry comes up with nothing. The long grass keeps on growing longer and longer.
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/inquiry-lacks-the-power-to-uncover-the-truth-about-kincora-court-told-31270675.html
http://www.exaronews.com/articles/5572/former-liberal-democrat-mp-denies-claims-of-child-sex-abuse
http://www.exaronews.com/articles/5561/vishal-mehrotra-sussex-police-refers-its-murder-probe-to-ipcc
and dozens more links.
Giyane, at 7:58am on 2nd June 2015, you make some excellent points in your post. Thank you – and also thank you for your earlier good vibes and for understanding what I’ve been trying to say on these subjects. I do appreciate it. Salam.
@Kempe 1:57pm yesterday
Your physics is good!
I asked <>
You replied, helpfully and accuratelyWell, safer.
Contrary to popular belief it’s the isotopes with short half-lifes that are the dangerous ones. Because they decay faster they emit more radiation. With a half life of 38.8 years when first released that Strontium 90 particle would’ve been at least twice as radioactive as it is today.
in practise, what this means is is that after around FIVE HALF-LIFE PERIODS HAVE ELAPSED then there is little risk left over from the very hot highly active Strontium-90 particles that are on the beach environment around Dounreay
so, with Dounreay closed in the late twentieth century, we only have to wait 5 x ~30 = 150-200 years, in other words, to the late twenty-second century for the beaches in Caithness to be low-risk.
I will immediately book my holiday.
To be completely fair & accurate, the environmental protection squad around Dounreay have mentioned that it will cause much less environmental disruption if they leave the remaining (presumably hundreds) of extremely hot particles in situ. Any aggressive clean-up would be worse for the environment than the rare chance that a particular hot particle will enter the food chain. Strontium is unfortunately a close analogue with Calcium, hence bio-available, and one of the worst possible environmental contaminants from a reactor.
I’m persisting with this as I saw one of my esteemed Welsh colleagues die, shortly after a radiation hazard ‘non-incident’, that might or might not have been the cause for his post event decline. One doesn’t play with words around high-activity items.
I wouldn’t go on some Caithness beaches without a crowd-sourced gamma/beta instrument. As for JAPAN at present, sheesh!
http://blog.safecast.org/ or http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2015/ph241/english1/
back to FIFA! congrats to the FBI, who always get their man.
oops, when you enclose ” is it therefore safe, as it is ‘closed’? ” in brackets it disappears
YouKnowMyName:
Some points:
* Each half-life period results in a halving of the radioactivity from that particular isotope. Therefore, five half-life periods divides the radioactivity by 2 to the power 5 = 32. Depending on the original degree of contamination this may not be enough; consequently, other nuke-heads consider ten half-life periods to be the appropriate interval.
* What is the strontium 90 decaying into? And what is that decaying into? etc… It isn’t over until only stable decay products are left.
* Did the contamination consist of only strontium 90 in the first place?
* When strontium 90 decays, may it “activate” other substances, ie. convert other substances into radioactive isotopes?
* You rightly point out, but I wish to re-emphasise: if ingestion is a possibility, biochemistry has to be considered too.
– – – – –
My personal view is that nuclear fission should not be used for electricity generation on Earth, but is an essential technology for human exploration away from Earth, and for producing isotopes of research, medicine and industry. Power generation from nuclear fission would be unnecessary if nations could achieve sufficient political cooperation to distribute, on a global scale, electricity generated from renewable sources.
I’m particularly worried about the future environmental consequences of economic collapse:
* World-wide, there are hundreds of nuclear power stations containing, at a guess, hundreds of thousands of tonnes of nuclear fuel and radioactive reaction products. The vast majority of the reactors are of pressurised, water-cooled design. We know the likely end-game if these receive inadequate attention – loss of coolant, meltdown, and hydrogen explosions dispersing contaminants into the environment. An economic crash like the one in 1929 could leave many reactors without adequate maintenance.
* Likewise, the US alone has hundreds of thousands of tonnes of depleted UF6 left over from uranium enrichment, all stored on land in decaying steel cylinders, which require staff to repeatedly patch them up. It’s barely radioactive at all, but uranium is a highly potent poison chemically, and UF6 is very soluble in water – it’s in the ideal form for contaminating the water supply and hence the food chain. It’s another disaster waiting to happen if the economic environment ceases to support the necessary staff.
YouKnowMyName, yes, most text enclosed within gets stripped out by WordPress, because those characters denote HTML tags. It’s a security feature to prevent people posting malicious Javascript embedded within comments.
…and WordPress stripped out the “less than” and “greater than” symbols in my previous comment, so here it is in words instead:
Well, energy security is now officially high-profile National Security so I guess the fission source choice will be with us for a while. Clean-up will certainly take a while longer – how do you write ” keep very away ” in the language that the descendents of the WW3 involved nations will speak & write in 7000 years?
Did you catch the (almost) hilarious US ‘Putonium explosion’ from Cat litter? Could be a $500million dollar problem http://www.nature.com/news/nuclear-waste-facility-on-high-alert-over-risk-of-new-explosions-1.15290 (the half a billion is just to clean up the first burst drum in the national repository)
On the other hand, taking a random page from the Internet – a DIY single PV 200W panel with plug & play micro-inverter, I’ve heard that German/Austrian supermarkets are starting to sell things like this: http://www.solartec-shop.com/Solaranlage-Solarpaket-Solarset-Solarmodul-Sun-Invention-Light-oder-Optimus-mit-integriertem-Energiespeicher
Less than £500 for a device that will hopefully pay for itself fairly quickly, either for use off-grid or ‘quietly’ just plugged-in without a Feed In Tariff and no ‘annoying’ contracts. It brings peak production of power at solar mid-day, can be slung in a garden, thrown on a garage, or decorate a garden shed. I bet they aren’t on sale at Asda yet, but will be in a decade. Thankfully that will ADD to national energy security.
Cat litter. FFS.
Base-load. Squonk pointed out to me – the world needs a global-scale electricity distribution grid. Renewables can produce plenty of power, but only tidal generation is predictably reliable; there will always be times when the Sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing in any given place. So we need to aggregate over continent-scale areas.
As for spent fuel disposal, have you looked at AMSTER and the like? It would still take centuries to cook it all down, but we’d be reducing the problem instead of increasing it, and we’d get the electricity off it:
http://www.killick1.plus.com/Paper17-amster.pdf
http://www.killick1.plus.com/amster.pdf
As Resident Dissident posted it on this thread originally I think the time has come to respond with some credibility to yet another series of comments from RD having no credibility whatsoever. But hey, it makes a good story. I have been following the Vladimir Kara-Murza case since it was brought to my attention with the veiled allegation of poisoning by RD.
What actually happened was that Kara-Murza was rushed into hospital with suspected kidney-failure. Antidepressants were found in his bloodstream which I discovered with the minimum of searching the credible press. A coma was induced and treatment began. He has gradually been recovering since then.
http://ria.ru/society/20150610/1069172277.html
According to the above article the kidney failure appears to have been caused by Kara-Murza taking two incompatible medications. So I just left a message on the Kara-Murza Twitter page asking them why they do not thank the doctors who saved Kara-Murza’s life rather than continually making accusations that he was poisoned. It was deleted within a minute. This is Kara-Murza’s page full of accusations of poisoning, including the BBC, which is always happy to spread anti-Putin muck far and wide.
https://twitter.com/search?q=karamurza&src=typd
His page is as full of shit as Resident Dissident himself. Kara-Murza is a journalist, friend of the late Boris Nemtsov, and involved with an ever-decreasing minority opposition to Putin.
Funded by the west they are full of the same anti-Putin gobbledygook that has enabled the Russian people to see right through them. No wonder Putin’s popularity is increasing. It is what happens when you get some credibility.
Resident Dissident should try it someday. 🙂
Dross
The story about anti pressants is one that was put around in the Putin controlled media – the family denied it – as you will see if you bothered to check one of the 4 links to the Interpreter that I posted earlier. Since only the family should have the ethical ability to pass on medical details I think you will find it is a smear invented by the Putin regime that you have now passed on twice.
As for attacking the family of a seriously ill man through his Twitter account you clearly have no shame or ethical standards whatsoever.
As to the current status and what Kara Murza’s family currently think may have happened anyone genuinely interested. rather than engaging in malicious smears (I also remember the same from Mr Goss in respect of the deceased Nemtsov – and his sick joke regarding the murder of Sergei Magnitshky) can look here. (the post was at 14:21
http://www.interpretermag.com/russia-update-june-8-2015/
“credible press” from Mr Goss – I’m surprised he didn’t add a Smiley to that as well.
Resident Dissident, the link you gave is two days old. The one I gave is today.
Goss
It may be today – but it is from an unreliable source and it repeats the smear about anti – depressants that the family rebuffed over a week ago!
Didn’t the other side of Molotov Ribbentrop Pact that Putin now supports say something about how a lie repeated often enough becomes the truth
http://wap.ria.ru/society/20150604/1068198081.html
Resident Dissident; “a lie repeated often enough becomes the truth”
So that’s the masterplan behind all your Russia is the aggressor propaganda over Ukraine.