Thought Id start this one going because its rather dead on this board at the moment and I suppose all my usual muckers are either at the Stella tennis event watching Dim Tim (lose again) or at Henly Regatta eating cucumber sandwiches (they wish,...NOT).

Anyway please feel free to just talk to yourself blast away and let it go on any company or subject you wish. Just wish Id thought of this one before.

cheers GF.

Probably his doppleganger.

:o)

I read that the Novichok ('newbie', 'newcomer') agents consist of two separate 'non-toxic' components that, when mixed, become the active nerve agent.

Hmmm?

Q. If this is correct, how can one do as the Russians have requested and (safely) submit a sample of the active nerve agent?

IMHO, this silly request is 'a divergence'.

More on Novichok nerve agents HERE

The Russian ambassador also questioned the validity of the truthfulness of the information concerning the severely ill police officer, who it had been reported in the media, had been poisoned by the Novochok nerve agent.

"Who is he? Where is he? We haven't seen him?"

as was commented upon on the radio yesterday ........

whereas blair's aceptance of WMD in iraq was, at best, a matter of interpretation of info from intelligence sources, this poisoning investigation has been carried out forensically by porton down and the like ........ there will certainly be other telltales and similar which are not divulged for very good security reasons

unless i am much mistaken, the russians have not categorically denied any involvement by any of their agencies, and have instead just responded with sarcastc and other silly comment
the russians certainly did not take the opportunity offered to repsond in any meaningful way

corbyn assuredly did himself no favours, and rather showed his colours
many of his own party were less than amused and i think yvette cooper even stood up and castigated him from the floor

She did and was cheered loudly by the Conservative benches.

What I admire is the hypocrisy of a tory government and party condemning the Russian for "poisoning" and other horrendous crimes while flogging arms to, along with other trades to Saudi Arabia and others for pieces of silver.

I admire the two-faced approach when offered a cheque.

Also, I admire a government who is damning the EU for "corruption" but asking for and hoping for "friendly" support.

How many bullets does it take?

Edited with thanks to Exec.

for slightly strange reasons, the two are not comparable

clearly fred would have been even more of a limp lettuce than his hero JC

In his 'stuff' on here, Fred is a master of 'divergence' tactics.

He never addresses any issues and 99% of the time uses 'divergence'.

eg. from 80367 above: Fred doesn't comment directly on anything the Russians have clearly done wrong. He uses:

1. hypocrisy of the tory government.
2. party condemning the Russian for "poisoning"
3. and other horrendous crimes while
4. flogging arms to and other trades with Saudi Arabia and others for pieces of silver.
5. I admire the tow (two?) faced approach when offered a cheque
6. Also, I admire a government who is damning the EU for "corruption" but asking for and hoping for "friendly" support.
7. How many bullets does it take?

....each one as "a divergence".

IMHO, if each and every time Fred is always going to be evasive and divergent, then it is an utter waste of time having any written liaison with him on here. He will never come back straight and will always go off on yet another tangent.

Corbyn used exactly the same technique when responding to the PM yesterday in PMQs.

Thanks to goodness it is TM who is the PM and not Corbyn!

No wonder so many of us have 'Squelched' Fred. He could well make a bloody good Russian ambassador.

as i have observed many times, fred has never answered a straight question with a straight answer, if indeed he has answered the question at all

No Fred could never make a good Russian Ambassador, because unlike most he actually believes everything that Putin or JC would tell him.

I am mimicking your tory "administration" constantly not supplying information and diverting attention from their Brexit negotiations and failures.

At least I don't try to falsify information.

By the way how many has Saudi Arabia Leadership killed in Yemen?

How many of its own population killed has its present "leadership" killed?

What contracts has the UK government signed on your behalf?


(Mind they are far distant lands.)


T May at the present moment would shake hands with any country for a buck and a deal to bolster herself from tory's EU calamity.

-=-=-=-=

Manuel,

As you like to appear to be a genius and appear omniscient you can answer your own questions with a bit of an effort.

Mind I don't think you would accept your own arguments!

Manuel.

Your straight questions often appear to me to be a little bent, perhaps a little like the originator sometimes appears to be.

Questions are easy to ask but are often time-consuming to answer.

Open your own eyes and DYOH.

Fred the country has to encourage someone to try out all these weapons that the West designs to kill, and to keep jobs. More important, it seems that the thought process is, that if we encourage them to fight among themselves, it will keep them away from us, while we are able to learn from the use of the weapons we supply and design even better ones to keep the whole business rolling.

Peace never lasts long and never works in the same way as your Labour Party is never at peace or is sustainable.

News from the Beano.

“Shripal’s daughter was a double agent like her father.

Popping backwards and forwards to Russia and England.

Was trying to smuggle Novichok for investigating and development at Defence CBRN Centre.

The problem was the lid of the jar wasn’t screwed on tight enough.”

If it were not so serious Fred it would leave one LOL.

The only reason the governments tell everyone to stay indoors in case of germ warfare etc. is to avoid having rotting bodies on the streets, it is nothing to do with being safe, lock yourself in a small room and let the vermin eat you so the smell is not to pungent.

We do not want left wingers holding rallies and littering the streets with banners lying on the ground saying "stop the killing", as they become victims of experimentation.

COUNCIL TAX
i have just received my latest assessment and am amazed to see that the highest band starts at only £320,000

given this area (wycombe), i would have thought there would be nothing wrong in having further and higher bands
the council could then, if it so chose, reduce or even eliminate some of the lower bands - they start at £40,000 - or just increase revenue to allow it to be used prudently in other necessary areas

Hmmm? I'll mention that suggestion to Northampton. They need a bit of help and are in deep doodoo.

So much so, that the government has just stepped in and appointed an Inspector to check up on how things have been run in the past. His report is just out and says, "Dig it up and start again. Split Northants into two areas and have two new councils, being one for each."

I am embarrassed to say, it's all down to terribly bad Tory financial mismanagement.

The CT band for my property is £80k-£120k. Need I mention, that it is well out of date? These old valuations are now meaningless and the whole Council Tax thing needs a complete review. But that would cost a lot of money to do so doing a review is simply not viable at the present time. Will it ever be? Probably not.

My 2018/19 demand for CT bangs it up by about £100pa on last year. However, the increase in my State Pension more than takes care of it. So that's nice.

The mismanagement of lots of local things, which really ought not be 'political' is based on only that. And so it goes on, year after year. I fear, that the amount of corruption about the place just has to be diabolically massive.

Hmmm? Could Jeremy Corbyn be right and everyone else wrong?

Ex-Soviet Intel Officers Reveal Why Skripal Was Poisoned by 'Non-Professionals'
From Sputnik
11:35 16.03.2018(updated 11:36 16.03.2018)

Topic: Alleged Poisoning Attack on Russian Ex-Spy Skripal in UK

On March 4, ex-Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were found unconscious on a bench at a shopping mall in Salisbury, British police suspect they had been exposed to a nerve agent.

Commenting on Skripal’s case, Lieutenant General William Rooda, who used to work in the intelligence services, said that he probably had many personal enemies, who could want him dead, as he had disclosed the identities of dozens of fellow agents to Britain’s MI-6. Although, according to the retired spy, many questions arise regarding the time and place of the attempted murder, as well as the weapon.

Rooda proceeded to say that the alleged attack on Skripal was “obviously” carried out by non-professionals or by professionals whose aim was not to murder him but to cause an international scandal. At the same time, he noted that military intelligence never used any extraordinary poison or toxic substances to secretly eliminate its enemies.

The Lieutenant General elaborated that Skripal had already passed all sensitive information he had known to the UK’s intelligence and was no longer a threat to Moscow, therefore Rooda excluded the version of a Russia-sponsored attack on him, saying that the incident was intended as a “political provocation.”

A retired Russian intelligence agent, Colonel Mikhail Lyubimov, denounced accusations of Russia’s involvement in the alleged attack as “nonsense” and said that the allegations that Russian agents had used the Novichok nerve agent to kill Skripal were groundless.

“I’m a colonel from the KGB’s foreign intelligence and I do not remember us killing anyone. There was a direct ban, we did not have such a unit [to accomplish tasks like that], it was dismissed after Stalin. It’s nonsense, made up by the Brits. I’m surprised that people still believe in those things,” he told Sputnik.

On March 4, former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter collapsed with signs of poisoning; later British law enforcement officials identified the substance as the nerve agent Novichok. In an official response to the alleged attack, UK Prime Minister Theresa May stated that “Russia was culpable of an attempted murder,” and ordered the expulsion of Russian diplomats from the country.

Moscow, for its part, has repeatedly denied the allegations of state involvement in the incident, with Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov voicing Russia’s readiness to cooperate on the investigation, provided the UK granted access to the case materials, including samples of the substance in question. As a reciprocal measure, Moscow has drawn up a list of British diplomats it shall expel from the country.

And from The Spectator:

Jeremy Corbyn is right about Russia
Melanie McDonagh
16 March 2018
10:29 AM

It’s not every day you find yourself thinking that, well, Jeremy Corbyn has a point, but that’s just how I felt when he wrote in yesterday’s Guardian and reiterated later that the Government was ‘rushing way ahead of the evidence’ in condemning Russia for the attack on Sergei Skripal. Yesterday he observed that ‘this horrific event demands..painstaking criminal investigation…to rush way ahead of the evidence being gathered by the police in a fevered parliamentary atmosphere, serves neither justice nor our national security.’ I don’t think he was being treasonous in suggesting that Russia should have been given more time to respond, and possibly a sample of the toxin to analyse. He didn’t say the Government was wrong; he simply said it was precipitate.

It’s difficult, in fact, to gainsay his analysis, that ‘either this was a crime authored by the Russian state; or that state has allowed these deadly toxins to slip out of the control it has an obligation to exercise. If the latter, a connection to Russian mafia-like groups…cannot be excluded’. Well, quite so. And if, as the Daily Telegraph reports today, the nerve agent was given to Yulia Skripal on a visit to Moscow – a nice present in a box for her father, perhaps – then the best chance of establishing who was to blame is if this poor woman does not die but survives, to tell the police who she met with, who had access to her belongings, who gave her stuff before she returned.

Of course I think that the Government has a duty of care towards its agents, especially those like Sergei Skripal, who were double agents. For one thing, if you don’t look after them, you won’t continue to recruit them. It’s also the case that the Russian government had the maximum access to the nerve toxin used to try to kill Mr Skripal, though security at chemical weapons sites appears to have been hair-raisingly negligent – culpably negligent.

But really, in this as in so much else the question is, cui bono? Who gains from this blatant attempted murder? It’s by no means certain that the Russian state gains a great deal. The probable result of attempted murder of a British agent on British soil (even if the toxin was transported from Moscow) was exactly what has happened: the expulsion of Russian diplomats, ratcheting up of sanctions and a general sense that Russia’s in the global dog house. I don’t think that’s a gain in the Russian elections; it’ll probably be discounted, but it’s not particularly an electoral asset. The argument that cuts most ice in favour of Russian involvement is that this would send a message to other would-be spies that defecting to the UK isn’t good for your health – but killing a man who has been traded years ago in an orderly exchange of agents is a breach of the rules that doesn’t make much sense.

Those who do stand to benefit from this attempted murder are opponents of the Russian regime; either organised criminals, Mr Corbyn’s ‘Russia mafia-style groups’ or other states – I dunno, maybe Ukraine? – which gain rather than lose if the Putin regime is even further discredited. If it were indeed a hostile state that carried out this attack, then it has worked better than they could ever have imagined. If it was the Putin regime, then a clumsy, terrifying murder bid has had precisely the predictable effect.

Either way, I can’t help thinking that Jeremy Corbyn cuts a more convincing figure in this awful affair than either Mrs May or poor Gavin Williamson who told the Russians they should ‘just shut up’. Show how it’s done, Gavin; show how it’s done.

the rest of the world backs TM to the hilt

as posted before, the investigation has been forensic and there'll be much other supporting evidence that has not and should not be divulged