Where did the Tory paedophile accusations come from?

On October 24th, Labour MP Tom Watson stood up during PMQs and asked the prime minister a question. "I want to ensure the Metropolitan police secure the evidence, re-examine it and investigate clear intelligence suggesting a powerful paedophile network linked to parliament and No 10," he said. It was met by a stunned silence in the Commons chamber.

A week earlier, Watson had received a call from a former child protection specialist who believed a wider investigation regarding the activities of convicted paedophile Peter Righton had not been fully investigated. Some of the evidence, Watson said, suggested a paedophile ring was operated in care homes in Wales during the 1970s and 80s involving senior members of the establishment, including an aide to Margaret Thatcher and several other household names.

Did the abuse take place?

Undoubtedly. During the 1970s and 80s children in care homes in the Gwynedd and Clwyd Council areas were sexually and physically abused. A police investigation in 1991 resulted in eight prosecutions and seven convictions. All were care workers. But it is widely believed the scale of the abuse was much greater. Much of it is thought to have taken place outside the homes. Steve Messham, a sex abuse victim, told Newsnight last Friday that children had been"sold" to men for sexual abuse at a nearby hotel.

While British Prime Minister Tony Blair is under criminal suspicion in the "honours-for-cash" scandal that has rocked his Labour government, we have been told that there is an even more explosive scandal that Blair, up to now, has managed to hide behind the draconian British policy of issuing "D-Notices," government orders that prohibit the British media from reporting on certain "national security" cases.

In 1999, an international investigation of child pornographers and paedophiles run by Britain's National Criminal Intelligence Service, code named Operation Ore, resulted in 7,250 suspects being identified in the United Kingdom alone. Some 1850 people were criminally charged in the case and there were 1451 convictions. Almost 500 people were interviewed "under caution" by police, meaning they were suspects. Some 900 individuals remain under investigation. In early 2003, British police began to close in on some top suspects in the Operation Ore investigation, including senior members of Blair's government.

However, Blair issued a D-Notice, resulting in a gag order on the press from publishing any details of the investigation. Blair cited the impending war in Iraq as a reason for the D-Notice. Police also discovered links between British Labour government paedophile suspects and the trafficking of children for purposes of prostitution from Belgium and Portugal (including young boys from the Casa Pia orphanage in Portugal).

Politicians normally don't like surprises, or having to answer tough questions off the cuff. Even Question Time is a staged routine where party leaders pretend bite back for the camera - pure Punch 'n Judy. But ITV's This Morning Show turned out to be an unlikely arena for this prime ministerial showdown...

PANIC STATIONS: PM David Cameron appeared to get the shock of life Thursday morning when a seemingly harmless character, host Philip Schofield, challenged the PM about the government's policy of denial regarding any paedophiles, past, present or future, in No.10, or anywhere else in Westminster for that matter.

Schofield is last guy you'd expect to go for the PM like this, but now thousands are Tweeting and Facebooking support for Schofield, and his 'street cred' index for 18-35′s has just shot into orbit.

The only line Schofield crossed, was to rightly challenge a public politician on a serious issue. It was a rare display of balls in the mainstream media - which has made him a sort of people's presenter. No doubt, and all too predictably, ITV will be pressured by Downing Street and Ofcom to sack Schofield for his challenge to the PM - let's see if ITV have got some of the family jewels that the BBC clearly lack. But if they cave in, ITV will have cut loose what appears to be its coolest asset in years.

Russia called for the immediate resumption of talks between Iran and the Group 5+1 (the five permanent UN Security Council members plus Germany).

Speaking to radio Voice of Russia on Thursday, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said there is no reason to postpone the talks.

Now that [we] have been cleared who has the final say in the US foreign policy, there is no reason to delay talks between the two sides, he said.

"We should take action to proceed with talks between the two sides as Tehran as well as other states know that who decides the US foreign policy," the Russian diplomat said.

Once again we invite all parties to come back to negotiating table, he said.

Late in October, EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, who represents the world powers in talks with Tehran, said she would soon have talks with Iran's lead negotiator Saeed Jalili.

Iran and the Group 5+1 have held several rounds of talks this year.

© REUTERS/AFP
Mr Netanyahu, Mr Ahmadinejad and Mr Obama

Iran has claimed that the Obama administration has "completely different" views on the Islamic Republic to Israel and the US Republican Party, according to an intelligence ministry report.

The report, posted on the ministry's newly launched website vaja.ir, claimed that the Democrats had "pinned their" hopes on a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear threat, and that there was "open confrontation between President Barack Obama and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the issue.

It was apparently prepared before Mr Obama's re-election victory on Tuesday over Mitt Romney.

"The Republican party has a more severe confrontational approach towards Iran ... and its proposed policies are close to those of the Zionist (Israel) regime," it said according to an AFP report.

Mr Obama's "Democratic party's position is completely different" on Iran, it added.

California's Proposition 37, which would have required labeling of GMO foods, died a painful death last night. Despite polling in mid-September showing an overwhelming lead, the measure lost by 53 to 47 percent, which is relatively close considering the No side's tactics.

As I've been writing about, the opposition has waged a deceptive and ugly campaign, fueled by more than $45 million, mostly from the leading biotech, pesticide, and junk food companies. Meanwhile, the Yes side raised almost $9 million, which is not bad, but being outspent by a factor of five is tough to overcome.

While we can always expect industry to spend more, the various groups fighting GMOs for years probably could have been better coordinated. I was dismayed and confused by all the fundraising emails I received from different nonprofits on Prop 37 and wondered why they weren't pooling their resources.

But would more money and better strategy have made a difference? Given the opposition's tactics, it seems unlikely. I am not easily shocked by corporate shenanigans but the No on 37 campaign is my new poster child for propaganda and dirty tricks. It's worth recapping the most egregious examples.

Not even a full day had passed before newly reelected President Obama ordered another drone strike in Yemen. Huffington Post:

On Wednesday morning, as many Americans sifted through the voter data and exit poll numbers of President Barack Obama's reelection the night before, the Twitter feeds of close watchers of Yemen lit up with reports of another sort of presidential event: an apparent U.S. drone strike had killed several individuals in that country.

There was no way of being certain if the strike was indeed American, or for that matter if it was a drone strike at all, although it had all the markings of one.

"All signs (after dark, suspicions of locals, target) point to Sanhan strike being a US drone," Yemen-based freelance journalist Adam Baron wrote on Twitter.

Several other analysts concurred.

A White House spokesman did not respond to a request for comment. If it were a American strike, of course, it would have to have been authorized by Obama.

The same party wins every time. Duopoly power rules. America is a one party state with two wings. Each replicates the other. On major issues mattering most, not a dime's worth of difference separates them.

The late Gore Vidal explained it as well as anyone. Some of his best comments included:

"Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates."

"Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically by definition be disqualified from ever doing so."

"By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he's been bought ten times over."

"Every four years the naive half who vote are encouraged to believe that if we can elect a really nice man or woman President everything will be all right. But it won't be."

"The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return."

"We should stop going around babbling about how we're the greatest democracy on earth."

The amount of fraud in America has reached astounding levels. On the CBS Evening News on 9-10-2001 Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld admitted that neither he nor his Comptroller Rabbi Dov Zakheim could trace the whereabouts of 2.3 trillion dollars missing from the DOD. Also on that same night persons unknown backed up a few trucks to World Trade Center Towers 4 and 5 and took about a billion dollars in gold and silver bullion from the Canadian Nova Scotia bank vault and from the COMEX metals exchange vault next door. Also on 911 all ENRON documents in the SEC offices at WTC 7 were destroyed which saved Wall Street a few billion dollars in lawsuits. Also on 911 Dr Jim Willie says Cantor Fitzgerald offices in the North Tower which had all of the documentation on the sale of 3.5 trillion dollars in fraudulent Treasury bonds was destroyed when the North Tower collapsed. He compared the deficit announced by the Treasury to the monthly sale of US Treasury bonds and found that 3.5 trillion dollars more had been sold than the Treasury needed to fund the deficit. Fortunately for the men who participated in these frauds no pesky reporters from the mainstream press have bothered to ask anyone in Washington about any of the above criminal acts.

You might remember Jim Willie as the man who said 40,000 tons of gold allocated in customer accounts had been stolen. We know that NATO also stole 144 toms of Libyan gold and 98 billion dollars in cash and securities. Now Germany and the Netherlands have been asking the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England if their gold is still there.

But we are now entering a whole new era of extreme fraud where the amounts involved have become staggering. The total Gross Domestic Product of the world is a mere 50 trillion dollars. The total level of fraud is even greater than that. That means that the bankers are going to steal everything and leave you with nothing if your assets are either pieces of paper or credit entries in a computer.