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.

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

http://www.newsnow.co.uk/h/

Click on 'More' in the Russian Spy Incident section.

To me, the "poisonings" seem to be too clumsy for it to be "professional".

I doubt that the processes for making the "Novichok" group, (A member of a group of nerve agents developed in the 1970 and similarities with glyphosate weedkillers which are available.) are only known to the Russians.

But its use seems superficially clumsy and as dangerous to the perpetrators of the crime as the "intended" victims.

-=-=-=-=-=-=

I think substantiation of the case against Russia would be better than loud-mouthed diversionary tactics.

I understand JC caution and have a distaste of those spoiling for and rushing for a political fight

-=-=-=

Puts me off Italian food for the time being.

a very funny Matt cartoon on the front of today's telegraph
if someone could post/paste it up - perhaps fred would be happy to oblige - i think all will enjoy the humour

the caption is
"Temperatures have plummeted, but Jeremy Corbyn says it's too early to blame winds from Siberia"

Did you mean this one?

try answering the question!
try posting the one from the front of TODAY's telegraph

i'ld guess the one you have just posted is several weeks old

For god's sake shut up Fred you are like a child ,just like to be controversial for the sake of it.

Manuel,

At your age, you shouldn't need spoonfeeding.

DYOW.

Perhaps you meant this one.




For Trite please read tory's.

8-)