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Gear

Is the global warming scare the greatest delusion in history?

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© Press AssociationThe plant at Dounreay, built when Britain was at the cutting edge of nuclear technology
The scare over man-made global warming is not only the scientific scandal of our generation, but a suicidal flight from reality.

To grasp the almost suicidal state of unreality our Government has been driven into by the obsession with global warming, it is necessary to put together the two sides to an overall picture - each vividly highlighted by events of recent days.

On one hand there is the utterly lamentable state of the science which underpins it all, illuminated yet again by "Climategate 2.0", the latest release of emails between the leading scientists who for years have been at the heart of the warming scare (which I return to below). On the other hand, we see the damage done by the political consequences of this scare, which will directly impinge, in various ways, on all our lives.

It is hard to know where to begin, after a week which opened with The Sunday Telegraph's exclusive on a blast of realism from Prince Philip over the folly of our Government's infatuation with useless windmills. Then came an excoriatory report from the House of Lords on how we have so run down our nuclear expertise that it is doubtful whether we can hope to run a new generation of nuclear power stations. Next, there was a report from a leading Swiss bank finding that the EU's "emissions trading scheme" has wasted $287 billion (£186billion) over six years - paid by all of us, to achieve nothing in terms of reducing "carbon emissions". There was also a front page story in another newspaper, warning that (as readers of this column have long been aware) within nine years we could all be paying nearly £300 a year to subsidise solar panels and those same useless windmills.

Gear

The BBC's hidden 'warmist' agenda is rapidly unravelling

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© GETTYPuffed by the BBC: a wind farm near nears completion in Scotland
Since 2006, the BBC has relentlessly promoted the global warming orthodoxy as a pressure group in its own right.

The story of the BBC's bias on global warming gets ever murkier. Last week there was quite a stir over a new report for the BBC Trust which criticised several programmes for having been improperly funded or sponsored by outside bodies. One, for instance, lauded the work of Envirotrade, a Mauritius-based firm cashing in on the global warming scare by selling "carbon offsets", which it turned out had given the BBC money to make the programme.

Just as this scandal broke, I was also completing a report, to be published next month by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, on the BBC's coverage of climate change. It ranges from the puffing of scare stories dreamed up by "climate activists", to BBC reporting on wind farms, often no more than shameless propaganda for the wind industry. Part of the story told in my report is the unhealthily close relationship that developed between the BBC and organisations professionally involved in the "warmist" cause.

Bad Guys

That Rocky Road to Damascus

syria protest
© unmultimedia.org
The trillion-dollar question in the "Arab Winter" is who will blink first in the West's screenplay of slouching towards Tehran via Damascus.

As they examine the regional chessboard and the formidable array of forces aligned against them, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the military dictatorship of the mullahtariat in Tehran must face, simultaneously, superpower Washington, bomb-happy North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) members, nuclear power Israel, all Sunni Arab absolute monarchies, and even Sunni-majority, secular Turkey.

Meanwhile, on their side, the Islamic Republic can only count on Moscow. Not as bad a hand as it may seem.

Syria is Iran's undisputed key ally in the Arab world - while Russia, alongside China, are the key geopolitical allies. China, for the moment, is making it clear that any solution for Syria must be negotiated.

Russia's one and only naval base in the Mediterranean is at the Syrian port of Tartus. Not by accident, Russia has installed its S-300 air defense system - one of the best all-altitude surface-to-air missile systems in the world, comparable to the American Patriot - in Tartus. The update to the even more sophisticated S-400 system is imminent.

Cut

Iran's Parliament Votes to Expel British Ambassador

Iran parliament
© Abedin Taherkenareh/EPAIran's MPs voted near-unanimously to expel Britain's ambassador to Tehran, Dominick Chilcott.
Iran's parliament has voted to expel the British ambassador in Tehran in retaliation against economic sanctions imposed by the west over the Islamic republic's disputed nuclear programme.

Iranian MPs on Sunday passed a bill that in effect gave President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's government two weeks to expel the ambassador, Dominick Chilcott.

The bill, which also requires Iran's economic and trade links with the UK to be reduced, has yet to be approved by the Guardian Council, the powerful body of clerics and lawyers that vets parliamentary activity.

If the bill comes into effect, diplomatic relations between Tehran and London will be downgraded from ambassadorial level to that of chargé d'affaires and Chilcott - who took up his post only a few weeks ago - will have to leave Tehran. Iran's embassy in London had been operating without an ambassador for several months.

Bad Guys

Palestinian Prime Minister: Israeli sanctions have 'devastating impact' on Palestinian economy

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© Associated PressPalestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad
Palestinian PM Salam Fayyad says he will be unable to pay the salaries of tens of thousands of civil servants due to Israel's withholding of tax revenues it collects on behalf of PA.

Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad says he will be unable to pay the the salaries of tens of thousands of civil servants, as Israeli economic sanctions start to bite.

Israel decided last month to suspend the monthly transfer of about $100 million in tax revenues it collects on behalf of Fayyad's Palestinian Authority. The transfers, along with foreign aid, are crucial for keeping Fayyad's government afloat.

Stop

Iran general threatens retaliation against Israel nuclear sites

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© Agence France-PresseNuclear research installation in Dimona, Israel.
General Yadollah Javano of the Revolutionary Guards says that Iran could attack any part of Israel in response to an Israeli strike on Iran.

An Iranian general on Saturday threatened retaliation against Israel if any of its nuclear or security sites are attacked.

"If Israeli missiles hit one of our nuclear facilities or other vital centers, then they should know that any part of Israeli territory would be target of our missiles, including their nuclear sites," General Yadollah Javani of the Revolutionary Guards told ISNA news agency.

"They (Israel) know that we have the capability to do so."

Javani, the former head of the military's political department, was referring to mounting speculation that Israel would strike Iran's nuclear facilities after the International Atomic Energy Agency said Iran had tested designs used to make nuclear warheads.

Stop

Iran threatens to target NATO missile shield in Turkey, if attacked

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© AFP/ Behrouz MehrIranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
Iran will target elements of NATO missile defense network in Turkey if attacked, Iran's Mehr News agency said citing a senior military commander.

"If we are threatened, initially we are prepared to target the NATO missile shields in Turkey and then we will target other places," Amir Ali Hajizadeh, commander of Iranian Revolutionary Guards' Aerospace Force, said on Saturday.

Turkey agreed in September to host a U.S. early warning radar in the southeast of the country as part of NATO's missile defense network. The radar is aimed at countering ballistic missile threats from Iran.

Vader

NATO Conceals Preparations for Military Action against Syria

NATO
© NATO
The United States has decided to disengage itself from certain obligations under the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty (CFE). In particular, the USA will no longer inform Russia about plans connected with the redeployment of its forces. Those restrictions are not touching upon any other country.

"Today the United States announced in Vienna, Austria, that it would cease carrying out certain obligations under the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty with regard to Russia. This announcement in the CFE Treaty's implementation group comes after the United States and NATO Allies have tried over the past 4 years to find a diplomatic solution following Russia's decision in 2007 to cease implementation with respect to all other 29 CFE States. Since then, Russia has refused to accept inspections and ceased to provide information to other CFE Treaty parties on its military forces as required by the Treaty," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said on Tuesday.


...

The remarks from the US diplomat look like another attempt to turn everything upside down again. It is worth mentioning here that the first version of the CFE Treaty was signed in 1990, during the existence of both NATO and the Warsaw Pact. The document stipulated a reduction of the number of tanks, armored vehicles, artillery (larger than 100 mm in caliber), combat planes and helicopters, as well as information exchange.

Question

What Really Happened to Strauss-Kahn?

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© Philippe Wojazer/Reuters Dominique Strauss-Kahn and his wife, Anne Sinclair, in the courtyard of their Paris residence, September 2011
May 14, 2011, was a horrendous day for Dominique Strauss-Kahn, then head of the International Monetary Fund and leading contender to unseat Nicolas Sarkozy as president of France in the April 2012 elections. Waking up in the presidential suite of the Sofitel New York hotel that morning, he was supposed to be soon enroute to Paris and then to Berlin where he had a meeting the following day with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. He could not have known that by late afternoon he would, instead, be imprisoned in New York on a charge of sexual assault. He would then be indicted by a grand jury on seven counts of attempted rape, sexual assault, and unlawful imprisonment, placed under house arrest for over a month, and, two weeks before all the charges were dismissed by the prosecutor on August 23, 2011, sued for sexual abuse by the alleged victim.

He knew he had a serious problem with one of his BlackBerry cell phones - which he called his IMF BlackBerry. This was the phone he used to send and receive texts and e-mails - including for both personal and IMF business. According to several sources who are close to DSK, he had received a text message that morning from Paris from a woman friend temporarily working as a researcher at the Paris offices of the UMP, Sarkozy's center-right political party. She warned DSK, who was then pulling ahead of Sarkozy in the polls, that at least one private e-mail he had recently sent from his BlackBerry to his wife, Anne Sinclair, had been read at the UMP offices in Paris.1 It is unclear how the UMP offices might have received this e-mail, but if it had come from his IMF BlackBerry, he had reason to suspect he might be under electronic surveillance in New York. He had already been warned by a friend in the French diplomatic corps that an effort would be made to embarrass him with a scandal. The warning that his BlackBerry might have been hacked was therefore all the more alarming.

At 10:07 AM he called his wife in Paris on his IMF BlackBerry, and in a conversation that lasted about six minutes told her he had a big problem. He asked her to contact a friend, Stéphane Fouks, who could come to his home on the Place des Vosges and who could arrange to have both his BlackBerry and iPad examined by an expert in such matters. He had no time to do anything about it that morning. He had scheduled an early lunch with his twenty-six-year-old daughter Camille, a graduate student at Columbia, who wanted to introduce him to her new boyfriend. After that, he had to get to JFK Airport in time to catch his 4:40 PM flight to Paris.

Dominoes

SOTT Focus: The State of the World: Three Lines of Force and a Wild Card

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I will assume that if you are taking a few minutes to read this article you are, like me, more or less a news addict. Every day you wake up and while fixing breakfast you turn on the radio and a laptop to check what is up with this world. As you eat you protest at the comments that come through the airwaves and correct every attempt at subtle propaganda, although sometimes you just have to laugh. Meanwhile you compare the radio broadcast with what is coming through the net in alternative news websites such as Sott.net. You also check out Facebook or some other social media site where you have a number of friends who are also into hunting interesting news items, so you want to see what they have spotted in the last twelve hours.

A week ago I had a surreal moment while reading headlines on Facebook. It was the clear impression that the world had indeed gone mad - and not in a harmless or amusing mad way, but in a cruel and soul-less way. Among the things that caught my eye: It is these sort of shocking items that make us feel that urge to understand how and why. What is the point of it all? What is the bigger picture? Horror moves us to seek knowledge, which is why I have been thinking lately about the main lines of force in the current state of global affairs. The way I see it, the major interrelated threads are the economic crisis, revolutions, imperialism and climate change. The first three are like standing lines of dominoes about to collapse. The last one can 'rain' down on us at any point - in fact it already has, but how strongly will it be when it does again?