There’s Always Money To Wage War Abroad And Never Funds To Fight Poverty At Home

The West Have Turned A Blind Eye To The Drug Trafficking In Ukraine.
Over the past decades, Ukraine has played the role of a drug trafficking hub, with illicit substances flowing to and from many regions – including Afghanistan, where ISIS and the Taliban still heavily rely on the drug business as a source of income.
Under the West’s watch, Ukraine has morphed into a gangsters’ paradise with all sorts of illicit drugs passing through its territory and the domestic production and consumption of synthetic narcotics booming.
Back in June 2002, the U.S. Justice Department emphasised Ukraine’s growing importance as a transit point for heroin trafficking largely originating from Afghanistan which went through the Balkan and Northern routes.
The U.S.-backed 2014 coup in Ukraine exacerbated the problem and was followed by a spike in corruption, gang crime, and weapons smuggling.
The role of Ukraine as a transit point for extremists and illicit drugs to Europe has also increased.

In July 2015, Italian MEP Matteo Salvini drew attention to ISIS sympathisers fighting on the side of the Kiev regime against the Russian-speaking Ukrainians in Donbass.
In 2019 and 2020, British, Polish and Ukrainian investigative journalists revealed that ISIS jihadists used Ukraine as a transit point.
Having sustained defeat from the Russian Air Forces in Syria, ISIS started to use Ukraine as a safe haven.
Ukraine’s role as a hub for ISIS terrorists could be closely connected with drug trafficking.
Establishing a foothold in Afghanistan in 2015, ISIS militants used the Afghan opiate trade as a source of income since at least 2014.
U.S. global policy think tank RAND pointed out in July 2017 that ISIS viewed conflict zones in Ukraine and Syria as an ample opportunity to connect to underground criminal networks to facilitate the drug trade.
ISIS recruits traveled back and forth, relying on drug trafficking as a means of generating revenue.
In 2021, the Russian Interior Ministry drew attention to the increasing use of Ukrainian ports for the transit of opiates from Afghanistan.

Ukraine has become a lucrative market for methamphetamine, a synthetic drug, which today is taking a leading position in the drug market not only in Afghanistan but in the entire world.
Ukrainians have become one of the main consumers of the psychotropic substance.
Afghan experts believe that today, during the conflict, the Ukrainian army can use methamphetamine in order to maintain the combat readiness of its military personnel.
The drug ensures the absence of fear, the removal of fatigue, the unique ability to not eat or drink for two or three days, and not to be distracted by any inconvenience.
Afghan experts consider Ukraine as an emerging transit point for this type of drug on its route to Europe, where the demand for Afghan-produced methamphetamine is rising.
It appears, however, that neither Western nor Ukrainian authorities are interested in addressing the problem which continues to worsen.
( Ekaterina Blinova, 01.04.2024 )  ..  infowars.com

Taking into account the present situation in Ukraine, there is no war on drugs there at all. And by definition, it doesn’t work. Moreover, today it should be noted that a large number of those Ukrainian citizens who have concentrated in Europe were previously involved in drug trafficking. On the one hand, we are dealing with supplies, and in Europe we are dealing with sales, which are carried out by the same Ukrainians who were doing this before fleeing to Europe. This radically changes the situation.
( Alexander Mikhailov, a retired Russian Lieutenant General of Drug Police )

British spy planes have recorded up to 1,000 hours of footage over Gaza, including from the day Israel assassinated three UK aid workers.
The Royal Air Force (RAF) has flown 200 surveillance flights over Gaza since December 2023.
The UK government refused to give any details about the flights which began on December 3, 2023.
The flight missions continues as Israel invades the supposedly “safe” southern city of Rafah.
All the British spy flights have taken off from RAF Akrotiri, the UK’s sprawling air base on Cyprus, and have been in the air for around six hours.
Gaza sits around 30 minutes flight time from the base so it is likely the RAF has gathered around 1,000 hours of surveillance footage over Gaza.
A British spy flight was in the air on Monday April 1, 2024 when three Britons were killed in an Israeli strike on aid workers in Gaza.
John Chapman, 57, James Henderson, 33, and James Kirby, 47, were among seven World Central Kitchen workers killed in the targeted assassination.
( Matt Kennard, 08.05.2024 )  ..  declassifieduk.org

The UK Are Judged To Have Weak Leadership And Poor Economic Management.
Weak leadership, poor economic management and Brexit have dragged Britain out of the top 10 countries in a global index on good government.
The decline of Britain under the Tories has been charted by the global Chandler Good Government Index (CGGI) which saw it take 11th place.
At a time when Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has been under siege from his own Tory MPs, the UK’s place on the annual list was made worse by scores for “leadership and foresight” putting it in 20th place.
It was also hit by coming 27th in “financial stewardship”.
The findings come amid a report of an exodus by companies from the City of London.
The UK’s global influence score was high but was harmed by being outside the EU, meaning that its status on international trade had dropped from joint second to 28th.
The findings were the conclusion of CGGI’s panel of experts and leaders in the world of business and government.
( David Maddox, 16.05.2024 )  ..  independent.co.uk

Israel Accused Of Deliberately Targeting And Shooting Palestinian Children.
Children account for more than one in three of the more than 32,000 people killed in Israel’s months-long assault on Gaza.
Tens of thousands more young people have suffered severe injuries, including amputations.
Nine doctors gave the Guardian accounts of working in Gaza hospitals this year, all but one of them foreign volunteers.
Their common assessment was that most of the dead and wounded children they treated were hit by shrapnel or burned during Israel’s extensive bombardment of residential neighbourhoods, in some cases wiping out entire families.
Others were killed or injured by collapsing buildings with still more missing under the rubble.
But doctors also reported treating a steady stream of children, elderly people and others who were clearly not combatants with single bullet wounds to the head or chest.
Some of the physicians said that the types and locations of the wounds, and accounts of Palestinians who brought children to the hospital, led them to believe the victims were directly targeted by Israeli troops.

Other doctors said they did not know the circumstances of the shootings but that they were deeply troubled by the number of children who were severely wounded or killed by single gunshots, sometimes by high-calibre bullets causing extensive damage to young bodies.
In mid-February 2024, a group of UN experts accused the Israeli military of targeting Palestinian civilians who are evidently not combatants, including children, as they sought shelter.
Israeli and foreign human rights groups have documented a long history of snipers firing on unarmed Palestinians, including children, in Gaza and the West Bank.
Palestinians in Gaza also report a terrifying new development in the latest Gaza war – armed drones able to hover over streets and pick off individuals.
Called quadcopters, some of these drones are used as remote-control snipers that Palestinians say have been used to shoot civilians.
The Israeli military also has a long history of covering up the killing of children.
( Chris McGreal, 02.04.2024 )  ..  theguardian.com

UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s attack on Yemen has already cost the British public up to £19million in missile costs alone.
As many as 53 missiles, some costing over a million pounds each, have been fired by the Royal Navy and Air Force.
The military mission, which has not been voted on in parliament, continues to grow despite signs it is failing to achieve core objectives.
Instead of making the Red Sea safer for shipping, it has put British-linked trade vessels directly in the sights of the Houthis, resulting in the catastrophic sinking of the Rubymar, a UK-owned bulk carrier.
The Houthis, which are Yemen’s de-facto government with control of the capital and majority of the population, say their blockade is meant to stop Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
The true cost of Sunak’s attack on Yemen is currently classified as secret and will only be published when the Ministry of Defence releases its annual accounts in July.
Defence secretary Grant Shapps, who ridiculed the Houthis’ “absurd claims to be the Robin Hood of Yemen”, is in fact being forced to borrow money from other government departments to pay for the attacks.
( Phil Miller, 19.03.2024 )  ..  declassifieduk.org

There’s always money to wage war abroad and never funds to fight poverty at home. The economic cost to us of launching air strikes against some of the poorest people on the planet compounds the environmental damage to our planet of flying thousands of miles to do so. Meanwhile, folk here go hungry and our planet burns. The elite are enriched but the rest pay the price.
( Kenny MacAskill, an Alba MP for East Lothian )

The Israeli Military “executed” 13 Palestinian children by “direct shooting” over a week in and around Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital.
Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor declared it a war crime and crime against humanity, further describing it as “part of the genocide that the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip have been experiencing for the past six months”.
The Israeli army has conducted “systematic and horrifying” military operations in and near the Gaza City hospital, including extrajudicial executions and the deliberate killing of civilians, Euro-Med Monitor added.
The organisation reported that its field team received “identical testimonies” concerning the killings and executions of Palestinian children aged 4 to 16.
It added: “Some of the fatal shootings occurred during an Israeli army siege while the victims’ families were inside their homes. Others occurred when the victims attempted to escape via routes that the Israeli army had designated as ‘safe’ after forcibly evacuating them from their homes and places of residence.”
( The New Arab Staff, 28.03.2024 )  ..  newarab.com

Around 80% Of Tory MPs Are Members Of The Conservative Friends Of Israel.
Some 126 of the UK Tory party’s 344 MPs have accepted funding from pro-Israel lobby groups.
The value of the donations or hospitality amounts to over £430,000, with the organisations paying for sitting Conservative MPs to visit Israel on 187 occasions.
Some of those trips also involved visits to the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and a small number were co-sponsored by groups which do not form part of the Israel lobby.
The main funder is Conservative Friends of Israel, a parliamentary group which does not disclose its own sources of funding.
Other notable donors include the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Australia-Israel Cultural Exchange, and the European Leadership Network.
Thirteen Tory politicians have accepted over £50,000 in total to travel to Israel since October 7, 2023 including for “solidarity” missions.
The Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI) is a pro-Israel lobby group set up in 1974 and has long standing links with the Israeli state, and is “beginning to resemble the Westminster outpost for Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud coalition”, according to veteran journalist Peter Oborne.
Around 80% of Tory MPs are members of CFI.
Over the past decade, it has taken more MPs on overseas trips than any other political donor in Britain.
Publicly available data shows that CFI has funded 118 sitting Tory MPs to travel to Israel on 160 occasions, providing over £330,000 towards the visits.
( John Mcevoy, 23.05.2024 )  ..  declassifieduk.org

PM Rishi Sunak And His Wife Add £120Million To Their Personal Fortune As The UK Becomes The Homelessness Capital Of The World.
Rishi Sunak and his wife Akshata Murty have added £120million to their personal fortune over the past year, bringing their estimated wealth to £651million, according to the latest edition of the Sunday Times Rich List.
The family’s rise in wealth has been largely linked to Murty’s shares in her family firm Infosys, which was co-founded by her billionaire father, with her shares reportedly growing in value by £108.8million to nearly £590million last year.
However, the Prime Minister’s personal wealth has also rose, with Downing Street recently revealing that he made a £1.8million profit on his holding in a U.S. investment fund last year, while paying an effective rate of tax of just 23%.
The Sunak family’s surging wealth comes as new analysis by the Financial Times reveals that the UK has become the homelessness capital of the world, with the number of people without homes rising rapidly, well beyond any other developed nation in the world.
The analysis follows the Government’s attempts to pass a new law containing a provision to allow rough sleepers to be criminalised for the crime of having a bad odour.
The provision, which would allow for the fining and imprisonment of rough sleepers unable to use washing facilities, led to widespread outrage, forcing Downing Street to issue new guidelines discouraging the prosecution of homeless people for smelling.
( Adam Bienkov, 17.05.2024 )  ..  bylinetimes.com

The UK Tory Government Is Shielding Israel From War Crime Charges.
The UK government has provided special diplomatic immunity to scores of foreign officials accused of committing serious violations of international law.
Since 2013, the UK Foreign Office has granted over 50 “special mission” certificates to military and political figures from Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Rwanda and Iran.
In September 2011, David Cameron’s coalition government passed new legislation requiring the consent of the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP – none other than Keir Starmer) before such arrest warrants could be issued.
The law was implemented with Israeli officials in mind.
Britain’s foreign secretary William Hague declared: “We cannot have a position where Israeli politicians feel they cannot visit this country”.
Israel’s former foreign minister Tzipi Livni visited Britain a month later, putting the new legislation to the test.
A human rights group and law firm asked the DPP to approve an arrest warrant for Livni over war crimes allegedly committed during Operation Cast Lead.
That was the bombardment of Gaza in 2008-09 when Israel killed over 300 Palestinian children.
Instead of waiting for the DPP to review the evidence, the Foreign Office attributed “special mission” status to Livni’s visit, granting her temporary diplomatic immunity from arrest.
Following this incident, the Foreign Office established “special mission” immunity as common practice.
The UK has granted “special mission” immunity to at least seven Israeli officials who have been accused of serious violations of international law.
( John McEvoy and Phil Miller, 02.05.2024 )  ..  declassifieduk.org

Dirty Money Is Being Laundered Through London And British Overseas Territories.
Nearly 40% of the dirty money in the world is laundered through the City of London and other crown dependencies.
Since legislation was passed in the House of Commons in 2016 the UK has faced prevarication from overseas territories which are reluctant to set up public registers that disclose the ultimate owners of funds in tax havens.
Andrew Mitchell, the Deputy Foreign Secretary, said that this is money often stolen from Africa and Africans by corrupt businessmen, bent politicians and war lords and so on.
It is widely accepted that after the resignation of David Cameron as prime minister in 2016 the momentum inside the government about fighting corruption in the overseas territories dissipated.
Nevertheless, in 2018 the UK passed a law requiring the government to issue a draft order in council imposing beneficial ownership registers by 2020, following a Conservative backbench revolt.
Andrew Mitchell, then a backbencher, was one of the rebel Tory MPs.
The British Virgin Islands and the Cayman Islands have still not introduced public registers, and are now citing European court of Justice (ECJ) rulings to place restrictions on those able to access the registers.
Neither the British Virgin Islands or the Cayman Islands are subject to ECJ rulings.
( Lucy Nash, 14.05.2024 )  ..  theguardian.com

A Man With Limited Education Or Understanding Of English Was An Unwitting Casualty Of Blair’s Wars.
In March 2007, Tony Blair was preparing to step down as prime minister after a decade in power.
But the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that he had plunged Britain into were far from over.
British soldiers were coming under relentless fire from Basra to Helmand – battles Blair had picked in a doomed bid to impress Washington.
Both campaigns would end in defeat, costing hundreds of British lives.
They left behind a bitter legacy of broken veterans and betrayed local allies.

Yet their trail of destruction went much further afield than the official tributes have acknowledged.
With the army besieged from Sangin to the Shatt-al-Arab, Britain’s infantry battle school sought to harden platoon commanders for “high intensity expeditionary operations”.
Nestled below the Brecon Beacons at Dering Lines, the school’s Welsh weather normally lacked the heat soldiers would endure abroad.
Conveniently though, Britain still had access to vast swaths of Kenya.

In this former colony, the UK military had training grounds four times larger than the Salisbury Plain.
It was perfect, or so they thought, for conducting the final phase of a tactics course in hot, dry conditions.
A hundred miles north of Nairobi, a white Kenyan coffee magnate let the old colonial power conduct war games at his ranch in Ole Naishu for around a quarter of a million pounds a year.
Local civilians, sometimes dressed as Taliban, were paid considerably less to participate in the exercises.
Among them was 28-year-old Robert Swara Seurei, a labourer with limited education or understanding of English.
Robert was about to become an unwitting casualty of Blair’s wars.
The true circumstances of his tragic death can finally be told for the first time.
( Phil Miller, 14.05.2024 )  ..  Full Story:  declassifieduk.org

The U.S. President And The U.S. Secretary Of State Repeated The Israeli Lies And Propaganda About October 7.
The Jewish extremist responsible for concocting some of Israel’s worst atrocity propaganda about October 7, 2023, has admitted that one of his stories about Hamas executing children was untrue.
Yossi Landau of the group ZAKA concedes in a new interview with Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit that dead bodies he previously claimed to have seen in Kibbutz Be’eri were “not children.”
The interview is part of Al Jazeera’s new documentary, October 7, which confirms that Israel itself killed a number of the Israeli dead that day – as The Electronic Intifada has reported all along.
Landau also seems to have been responsible for the definitively debunked Israeli lie that 40 babies had been executed by Hamas.
As well as that, Landau was involved in promoting Israel’s stories about an alleged Palestinian campaign of sexual violence on October 7 – which has now entirely collapsed.

Landau also accompanied UN official Pramila Patten on her visit to the kibbutzim as research for her report on alleged sexual violence by Palestinians.
The report claimed rape may have taken place, but presented no evidence and was based almost entirely on official government sources.
As the documentary shows, however, Landau’s lies were highly influential.
Along with other atrocity propaganda, they were passed on by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to U.S. President Joe Biden, who in turn lied that he had actually seen photos of the “beheaded babies.”
The White House was later forced to clarify that Biden had not seen any such photos.
The photos, of course, did not exist, because no such executions had taken place.
As the documentary shows, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken repeated other such atrocity stories publicly, also taken from ZAKA’s innovative lies

Yossi Landau is the southern regional head of ZAKA, a Jewish extremist group.
Working in close coordination with the Israeli government and military, ZAKA describes itself as an emergency rescue organisation, with more than 3,000 volunteers around the country.
ZAKA’s male-only volunteers are not medically trained, have no professional qualifications and completely lack medical expertise.
In fact, ZAKA is an ultra-Orthodox religious group which specialises in removing bodies and body parts in the aftermath of an emergency.
It transports them to morgues in line with strict Jewish religious law, in order to prepare them for burial.
It adamantly opposes forensic autopsies and other such medical science.
The removal of bodies has been done at the cost – some would say with the intent – of destroying important forensic evidence in the wake of the October 7 Palestinian military assault.
The indiscriminate Israeli retaliation to that attack left an undetermined number of Israelis dead, in what the Israeli military has admitted was an “immense” number of what it called “friendly fire” incidents.
( Asa Winstanley, 27.03.2024 )  ..  electronicintifida.net

British Support For Zionist Colonisation In Palestine.
Israel’s present use of collective punishment against Palestinians owes much of its origins to British rule in Palestine.
So too do the aerial bombardments, military raids, use of Palestinian civilians as human shields and the infrastructure of military law deployed against an occupied, overwhelmingly civilian population.
Britain ruled Palestine during its “mandate” between 1920-48, and its repressive infrastructure came into full force during the 1936-39 Great Arab Revolt.
In 1936, Palestine erupted into a national uprising following two decades of peaceful resistance against British rule and several failed uprisings over the 1920s, as the political and economic situation became dire for the Arab majority.
The uprising called for an end to British support for Zionist colonisation and a guarantee of Palestinian self-determination.
Britain, however, saw it as a threat to its rule and responded with brutal repression.
By the end of the revolt, 10% of the adult male Arab population were either killed, wounded, imprisoned or exiled by the British.
This brought the revolt to an end but also devastated Palestinian society and left it defenceless against Zionist militia groups during the 1948 Nakba.
Then, over two-thirds of the Palestinian people were ethnically cleansed from their country to establish the State of Israel.
( A. Bustos, 07.05.2024 )  ..  declassifieduk.org

Ukrainian Corrupt Mafia Has Conned Us All.
Boris Johnson’s former top adviser Dominic Cummings launched an attack on Western support for Ukraine.
Cummings who fell out with Johnson in 2020, said that the West “should have never got into the whole stupid situation” and claimed sanctions against Russia have had a greater impact on European politics than in Moscow.
Cummings said; “This is not a replay of 1940 with Zelenskyy as the Churchillian underdog. This whole Ukrainian corrupt mafia state has basically conned us all and we’re all going to get f**ked as a consequence.”
Cummings has long been critical of support for Ukraine, a stance that puts him sharply at odds with his old boss Johnson, a vocal supporter of Zelenskyy and Ukraine’s war effort.
( Noah Keate, 09.05.2024 )  ..  politico.eu

The UK Government Authorised Arms Sales To Israel Right After An Airstrike Killed Three British Charity Workers In Gaza.
On April 1, 2024, Israeli forces launched a series of airstrikes on a convoy of aid workers in Gaza, killing three Britons, a Polish national, a Palestinian, an American-Canadian dual citizen, and an Australian.
The Israeli Air Force carried out the bombing with a Hermes 450 drone.
According to Campaign Against the Arms Trade, this drone may be powered by a R902(W) Wankel engine produced in Britain by UAV Engines Limited (UEL).
New court documents show that the UK government decided to continue arms exports to Israel on April 8, 2024, one week after the strike on the aid workers who were employed by the charity World Central Kitchen (WCK).
On April 3, 2024, two days after the Israeli airstrike on the aid workers, Foreign Secretary David Cameron recommended that the UK continue arms sales to Israel.
Five days later, UK Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch authorised the continuation of extant licences and new licences to Israel.
( John McEvoy, 23.04.2024 )  ..  declassifieduk.org