Category: Middle East
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Ex-Defence Minister threatens to tell all
As noted in previous despatches, Greece’s vast over-spending on arms was one of the compelling reasons for its debt crisis as well as the corrosive spread of corruption among the political classes. We have been receiving a daily diet of reports on the impending trial of former Defence Minister Akis Tsochalzopoulos, a senior member of…
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A tale of two cities
In London, Baron Green of Hurstpierpoint is the British Government’s Minister for Trade and Investment. Between 2003 and 2010 he was CEO and chairman of HSBC, the bank that laundered billions of dollars for drug cartels, terrorists and pariah states. He is also an ordained minister of the Church of England who wrote the 1996…
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Children in custody
A high-powered delegation of UK lawyers backed by Britain’s Foreign Office today released a report, “Children in Military Custody”, detailing violations by Israel of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in its treatment of Palestinian detainees. Led by retired high court judge Sir Stephen Sedley, who is Jewish, the delegation, which…
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Strange case of the PM and the comedian
Jimmy Carr is a hugely popular comedian, one of the smartest of the new generation of British entertainers. Like thousands of the rich here, he’s been using an offshore account, legally enough, to minimise his tax bill. This week the Murdoch-owned Times ran a report on his tax affairs and those of pro-Tory entertainer Gary…
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Children on the breadline
British children on the breadline Here’s the reality of today’s Britain: 2.2m children are living in households on the brink of extreme poverty, and four out of five teachers see children arriving at school hungry. The figures emerge this week from The Guardian’s “Breadline Britain” project, an investigation into the human impact of the…
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Press junket to Israel
Greg Sheridan, the pro-American and pro-Zionist appropriately named foreign editor of The Australian, is just back from Israel on a privately sponsored trip.Sheridan writes in the second column of his article: “I have been spending a week in Israel, and visiting some of the Palestinian territories, under the auspices of the Australia Israel United Kingdom…
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Libya, the new failed state?
The wire story about the “arrest” of Seif al-Islam Gaddafy doesn’t stack up. It looks more like he has been abducted for ransome.Why? Well, he’s been captured by a Berba military unit and taken to the Berba mountain capital, Zintan.They played a leading role in the fighting to overthrow Gaddafy and they want a slice…
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Netanyahu is a liar – so what’s new?
Don’t be alarmed by the hue and cry over the remark by French President Nicholas Sarkozy to President Barack Obama that Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu is a liar. That scathing description of “Bibi” Netanyahu is widespread in the corridors of world power. Among the Israeli elite and its commentariat the contempt for the…