The CICM British Credit Awards, where tables cost from £3,000 to £4,000, are meant to celebrate the work of bailiffs, credit agencies and debt-collectors.
However, the black-tie event was interrupted by angry activists who blocked the doors, threw paint-bombs at tuxedo-wearing partygoers, and waved placards that read ‘social housing not social cleansing’.
In this globalised world, if we launch weapons of great destructive power into communities abroad, incinerating and shredding women and children, we cannot avoid the fact that those who identify with those communities – ethnically, culturally and religiously – will take revenge on people here. If we are lucky it will be revenge on combatants. If we are unlucky it will be on our innocents. But either way, the truth is this. We caused it.
In the West, journalists are usually threatened with jail rather than assassination, which can be a risk in some countries around the world, but nevertheless there is a lot of fear which is ‘corrosive’ and ‘damages the capacity of the press to serve democracy.’
John Pilger, film-maker and award winning journalist, talks to Going Underground host Afshin Rattansi about the headline events of the year, from CIA torture to the Ukraine crisis. He says the whole tenure of the BBC coverage of the Torture report was ‘does torture work?’ Modern British history is full of torture, and the British were ‘masters’ at it.
The tribunal has almost never sided against the government, so today’s decision did not come as a surprise to those following the proceedings, much of which happened behind closed doors. The matter isn’t entirely over, however: The judges said they would still consider specific instances where data collection on the groups may have violated their rights.
The message was clear: In the United States those in prison deserve it; in foreign lands they are imprisoned unjustly. The Disneyfication of Alcatraz is the equivalent of turning one of Stalin’s gulags into a prison-themed amusement park. Prisons are institutionalized evil. And whitewashing evil is a moral monstrosity.
In support of her contentions, Theresa May utilises the tea-leaf reading habits of such bodies as the JTAC – the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre – which decided in the northern summer to raise the threat level for international terrorism from “substantial” to “severe”. Turn the knob just the right way, and the policy will seemingly follow.
McCulloch admitted that Wilson shot 12 times, that’s a dozen shots. Once again though, nothing to see here. No question from the idiot reporters in the media pool, about how far away Brown was when Wilson shot at him several times, including the fatal shot to his head.
“We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population… In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships, which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security….”
Often confused with the National Public Order Intelligence Unit and the Forward Intelligence Teams, NETCU was the public face of the police’s dealings with protests. Here we revisit how it enabled industry and police to collaborate in the suppression of protest, and show how its former officers continue to provide a service to industry.
UK: Protesters cry and condemn the Met as they clear ‘Occupy Democracy’ for the visit of the President of Singapore
At eighteen minutes past six on Sunday evening, as soon as the Sun had set, police closed in to break up a group of peaceful protesters sitting together in solidarity on the lawns of Parliament Square. Beneath the helpless gaze of Nelson Mandela, one protester after another was manhandled and forcibly dragged from the neck by encircling gangs of policemen – not because their protest was deemed illegal, but because the tarpaulin they were sitting on is classified as “sleeping equipment” by the Met, and is consequently, since the 2011 Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act, banned from the gardens of Parliament Square.
