- “Increasing inheritance tax would be Reeve’s worst mistake yet” – If the Chancellor increases the hated ‘death tax’, she will be making a grave political and economic error, says Mark Littlewood in the Telegraph.
- “How the top 1% pay more than twice their ‘fair’ share of tax” – Britain’s wealthy, who already pay more than their ‘fair’ share of taxes, are at risk as Rachel Reeves tries to raise £40 billion ahead of her Budget, according to the Telegraph.
- “‘A very nice life for a lot less money’: why young people are fleeing high-tax Britain” – A demographic crisis is brewing as emigration from the U.K. among young people speeds up, according to the Telegraph.
- “Top Labour minister drops major Budget hint over tax increase” – The Health Secretary said that the party had not ruled out upping the NICs made by businesses before being elected, as Rachel Reeves faces accusations of ripping up a manifesto pledge, reports the Mail.
- “Tories blast Labour’s Budget ‘myth’ about £22 billion cash black hole” – Shadow Business Secretary Kevin Hollinrake has lashed out about the “myth” of the last Tory government’s £22 billion ‘black hole’ after it was revealed the Government is to plough billions more into the NHS, says the Mail.
- “The most dangerous female economist in the world” – In CapX, famous economist Deirdre McCloskey takes aim at Mariana Mazzucato, Labour’s favourite economist.
- “Investment summit to increase energy bills” – Over half of the announcements at Labour’s global investment summit are energy related and all will increase our energy bills through subsidies, says David Turver on his Eigen Values Substack.
- “Angela Rayner receives permanent seat on National Security Council after being sidelined by PM” – Sir Keir is trying to scotch rumours he’s fallen out with his Deputy by giving her a permanent seat on the U.K.’s National Security Council, reports the Telegraph.
- “Starmer sparks row after removing Shakespeare portrait from No. 10” – The Prime Minister has been accused of consigning the Bard “to the dustbin” after the 18th Century painting or Shakespeare by Louis Francois Roubiliac hanging in one of the state rooms at Downing Street was placed in storage, according to the Mail.
- “Pressure on PM to rethink Rwanda plan axe as EU talks offshore ‘hubs’” – Migration will dominate an EU leaders’ summit in Brussels today, after European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called for “innovative ways to counter” it, reports the Mail.
- “The EU is waking up to the same immigration catastrophe as Britain” – More countries are finally realising they can never solve migration under the current human rights framework, says columnist Nick Timothy in the Telegraph.
- “Coventry is buckling under strain of overseas arrivals” – More than one in four Coventry residents were born outside the U.K. and one in seven (almost 50,000 people) have arrived since 2011, says the Mail.
- “White Britons dying at higher rate than ethnic minorities” – So much for ‘White Privilege’ – new analysis from the Office for National Statistics suggests white Britons are more likely to die than non-white Britons, reports the Telegraph.
- “The Double Standards of Sadiq Khan” – In the New Conservative, Frank Haviland takes aim at the duplicitous London Mayor.
- “Kemi has shown she’s fearless. That’s exactly what our party needs” – Former Coservative leader Iain Duncan Smith argues in the Telegraph that Kemi has the right attributes to lead the party: integrity, courage, and the ability to grow in stature as opposition leader.
- “Kemi Badenoch’s no-nonsense approach can win back voters” – In the Mail, Nicholas Soames says the Conservative Party needs a leader who can not only unite the parliamentary party’s warring factions but re-invigorate the Tories through a shared sense of purpose. That person is Kemi Badenoch.
- “‘Parenting is a two-person job. Where are the dads?’” – In an interview in the Sunday Times, the Tory leadership contender credits her own supportive, two-parent family for her success.
- “J.K. Rowing reveals she has turned down a peerage twice” – The Harry Potter author, 59, has announced she’s twice turned down a peerage, reports the Mail, after Kemi Badenoch floated the idea because of her stance on gender issues.
- “What I told Nick Robinson” – Matt Goodwin recounts his recent interview with Nick Robinson on his Substack.
- “Mark Drakeford ‘exempt’ from second home tax on holiday chalet” – The former Welsh First Minister’s Pembrokeshire property has been spared from a council tax surcharge on second homes, reports the Telegraph. Well I never!
- “Top police chief demands ‘whole system reform’ to punish shoplifters” – Paul Sanford, Chief Constable of Norfolk Police, says any toleration of shoplifting leads to more serious criminal activity, according to the Mail.
- “Does the Lucy Letby case stack up? We covered it and can’t agree” – The BBC journalists behind a new book and two Panorama documentaries say the debate is missing crucial information that they spotted during her trial, reports the Sunday Times.
- “Schools, police, country piles: nothing’s safe from performative grandstanding” – That’s the thing about ‘PGB’. It often rebounds, nastily, upon those who indulge in it, says columnist Rod Liddle in the Sunday Times.
- “Jeremy Clarkson on his heart scare: Was I days from death? Maybe” – Good news, I didn’t need a heart bypass. Just a Dyno-Rod up my arm, says Jeremy Clarkson in his Sunday Times column.
- “TikTok ‘anti-Zionists’ are no laughing matter” – TikTok is spreading a bone-chilling combination of lethal ignorance and ill-intent towards the Jewish state, says Zoe Strimpel in the Telegraph.
- “Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar’s wife appears holding $32,000 bag” – Watch a video on Mailonline showing Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar’s wife holding a $32,000 bag as she makes her way along a tunnel leading to her husband’s secret lair.
- “Israel’s plan to launch air attack on Iran leaked” – Leaked documents show that Israel is preparing munitions and drone activity for an attack on Iran, according to the Telegraph.
- “Ukrainian men hide in houses to avoid conscription to fight Russia” – Ukrainian men have been missing their daughters’ birth, avoiding public transport and not attending weddings – all to get out of being conscripted into the military, says the Mail.
- “Parents are in revolt against comprehensive school monopoly” – Governments have been raising the school leaving age for decades, but what has this actually achieved? If the time spent in class was a measure of how educated the country was, it would be marvellous, says Peter Hitchens in the Mail.
- “Michigan’s inflated voter rolls draw scrutiny as election looms” – Michigan has more than 8.4 million registered voters, but in some counties the number of registered voters exceeds the number of people who are of voting age, reports the Washington Examiner.
- “Oil boss’s tenth-floor fall is latest in strange Russian deaths” – Mikhail Rogachev, the former Vice-President of Yukos, a now-defunct oil and gas company, ‘fell’ out of a 10th floor window in Moscow, according to the Times.
- “Follow the Science” – A new book by Sharyl Attkisson shows how Big Pharma misleads, obscures and prevails, says the Naked Emperor on his Substack.
- “Steakhouse chain sounds out investors as meat makes a comeback” – ‘Chop house’, a steak house chain, is hoping to expand as veganism goes out of fashion, according to the Telegraph.
- “BBC boss fights plans for ‘suburban’ homes near his £4 million Oxfordshire farmhouse” – BBC Director General Tim Davie has objected to planning permission being sought for two new properties just yards from his family home, reports the Telegraph.
- “The middle-class women who are tripping balls” – In the Free Press, Kat Rosenfield writes about a new phenomenon whereby respectable, middle-class housewives in America’s affluent suburbs are getting high on MDMA and Magic Mushrooms.
- “SNP claims there are 24 genders” – In what must rank as a perfect Telegraph story, the SNP has announced there are 24 genders.
- “Drag bingo and pronoun badges: Taxpayers foot £650k bill for public sector Pride celebrations” – NHS trusts, councils and fire services are spending on “extravagant events” and “pointless gimmicks” to celebrate Pride rather than improving essential services, says the Telegraph.
- “You have to watch this!” – A police officer in the U.S. deals brilliantly with a driver who refuses to hand over his licence and claims to identify as a cat. Too good to be real!
You have to watch this..!
—pic.twitter.com/rO8m9RM7bj
Larry
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Oil boss’s tenth-floor fall is latest in strange Russian deaths
‘Mikhail Rogachev, the former Vice-President of Yukos, a now-defunct oil and gas company, ‘fell’ out of a 10th floor window in Moscow.’
The FSB ‘nudge’ department keeping itself busy.
You’d think these dudes would’ve learned by now to stay away from windows and tall buildings. And free drinks. And seemingly clear roadways. And small planes. And underpants, umbrellas, dolphins, sushi, cups of tea, scent bottles……..
Oh! No ground floor apartments currently available in Moscow.
Hmmm….
On how the problem is Islam, not ”Islamism”, and how it’s nonsensical to separate the two;
”My own family and their close friends are moderate Muslims by any measure. Yet they certainly believe in Islamic supremacy. As I grew up, they often told me that Islam would eventually spread across the whole world, and everyone would become Muslim. They didn’t say that they would help to make this happen themselves, nor did they try to convince my siblings and me to proselytise, let alone to take part in violent jihad. They just took it for granted that Islam would come to dominate the globe. If you call that belief “Islamism,” which you see as an extreme version of Islam, you will have little hope of understanding how Muslims like my family see the world.
To use “Islamist” to mean simply someone who wants to spread Islam—by any means, peaceful or otherwise—is to equate Hamas and ISIS with CAIR. Whatever you feel about CAIR’s ideological leanings, it is a political group, not a terrorist one.
In many Islamic countries, girls as young as nine can be married to men decades older than them. This is not “Islamism”; it is Islam. Muhammad married Aisha when she was six and consummated the marriage when she was nine. The governments of Iran, Yemen, and a host of other countries use the reasoning that if The Prophet, the most perfect of humans, married his bride when she was six, it must be acceptable for Muslim men to marry pre-pubescent girls. Pretending that this practice is peripheral to Islam will not help us to solve the problem.
Hijab and veiling are Islamic practices—not signs of “creeping Islamism.” While some Muslim countries have banned the face veil due to security concerns, none have banned the hijab, and several countries enforce the hijab by law. To argue that mandatory hijab is an Islamist practice is to obfuscate the issue. Hijab is part of Islam itself and we need to deal with it on those terms. Ordinary Muslims who do want to spread sharia may also impose the hijab on the women in their families.
Islam is a totalitarian religion; it aspires to control every aspect of Muslims’ lives. There are rules about which foot you should use to walk into your home and to enter every room. There are rules about how to drink water. Many of these rules come from the Hadiths and show how to emulate Muhammad. Given that Islam controls life down to this level of minutia, it is mistaken to believe that the mandates from the Quran that Islam should be supreme are somehow not Islam itself but something else called “Islamism.” To describe the more pernicious aspects of Islam as “Islamism” is not to treat Islam as seriously as we should.”
https://quillette.com/blog/2024/08/23/its-islam-not-islamism/
Christopher Hitchens wrote, and you need not think he was only referring to Islam:
Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children: organized religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience.
Furthermore:
There is one more charge to be added to the bill of indictment. With a necessary part of its collective mind, religion looks forward to the destruction of the world. By this I do not mean it “looks forward” in the purely eschatological sense of anticipating the end. I mean, rather, that it openly or covertly wishes that end to occur … religion has never ceased to acclaim the Apocalypse and the day of judgment.
And this is the hope of the current extremist Israeli government: there has already been talk of discovering red calves or some such nonsense.
Yes, the Israelis, or at least their leadership, are quite happy for the judgement day to come when their God, or his son or whatever (pardon my ignorance), will reappear on the Earth. Unfortunately, especially if they continue stoking their war in the Middle East and get the USA to join them in throwing nuclear bombs around, we will not be here to welcome the guy.
There is little difference between the Quran and the Bible: it is just a question of how much one takes seriously or not.
There are plenty of Muslim countries in the world and they are all happy to live their lives in peace, and lucky if the West allows them to do so.
I am totally against unlimited and/or illegal immigration but our governments are unfortunately not. Therein lies the problem, not whether one religion is better than the other. (They are all just as bad, in my opinion.)
“SNP claims there are 24 genders”
I never had them down as transphobic. Everybody knows there are 112 genders.
https://x.com/wartranslated/status/1848334639502377309?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet
“I’m not aware of anywhere else where we’ve seen such a brazen and open attempt to corrupt an election,” Moldova’s chief anti-corruption prosecutor, Veronica Dragalin, told me this week in her office in Chisinau.
Born in Moldova, she spent most of her life in the US – most recently as a prosecutor in Los Angeles – before returning to the country and a job in a small office on the fifth floor of a Soviet-era block with a broken lift.
What her team say they have uncovered, working with police, is a pyramid payments scheme openly run from Russia by Ilan Shor and his group.
“We’re talking about a foreign country sending money in an attempt to influence the election,” Ms Dragalin spells it out. She details evidence gained through wiretaps, police infiltrators and witnesses – some of which her office has made public.
“At the start they tried to make it look legitimate. Now it’s almost like they’re flagrantly flaunting all the laws… [and] openly influencing the decision to vote,” the prosecutor says.
“The primary goal is to have the referendum fail.”
According to her team, once the cash couriers were detected at the airport and that route made more difficult, payments began to be channelled via a sanctioned Russian bank, PSB.
By early October as many as 130,000 voters had received payment through this scheme – about 10% of the active electorate, according to Viorel Cernauteanu, the chief of police.
“In September alone, $15m (£12m) was transferred,” he told me, explaining how they could trace funds and recipients because they gave personal data to open a bank account.’
Unlucky! :
‘According to the latest preliminary result, with 99.5% of votes counted, the two camps remain firmly divided, with 50.3% of voters in favour and 49.7% against, but the count shows the referendum has passed.’
Your link showed one person stating somebody offered her money if she voted for a certain party, but he had not returned.
What is easier than saying I voted for party X so you should pay me the promised amount, whether actually voting for X or not?
What is easier than promising someone you will pay them a sum of money if they vote for party X and then not turning up?
All rather uninteresting stuff.
Apparently Moldova held a referendum on whether to join the EU or not. You are reporting that someone who spent most of her life in USA has determined that Russians are offering people money to vote against joining the EU.
Good for the Russians! If you are trying to tell me that the EU is a wonderful, corruption-free and democratic institution then forget it!
‘While the 9th Directorate of the FSB’s Fifth Service Department for Operational Information prepared for the occupation of Ukraine from July 2021, the 11th Unit of the Department for Operational Information, responsible for Moldova, was assessing plans for the next round of operations under the direction of Major General Dmitry Milyutin. In November 2020, the FSB’s strategic objective in Moldova was to bring about ‘The full restoration of the strategic partnership between Moldova and the Russian Federation’.’
FSB Outline of Operational Aims and Means, 21 November 2021.
‘The Presidential Directorate for Cross-Border Cooperation, a subdivision of Putin’s Presidential Administration….was established five years ago.
The rather innocuously named directorate’s actual task is to exert control over neighboring countries that Russia sees as in its sphere of influence: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova.’
‘Veronica Dragalin, a former US federal prosecutor who heads Moldova’s Anti-Corruption Prosecution Office, has uncovered an international criminal organization with links to people from Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine suspected of undermining an Interpol system for identifying fugitives.
They allegedly received bribes worth millions of dollars to block or erase “red notices” issued by Interpol, which signal internationally wanted criminals.’
Moldovan authorities have also raised alarms about large-scale vote-buying, with the General Police Inspectorate documenting cases of bribery involving at least 130,000 citizens and more than fifteen million dollars in illicit transfers from Russia in September alone. In reality, the scale might be significantly bigger, with some officials estimating it at around $100 million for the entire campaign.
Funds are being funneled into schemes designed to establish a national vote-buying network, resembling financial pyramids with intricate layers of transactions aimed at evading scrutiny. These funds range from “social” allowances for Moldovan pensioners to salary “bonuses” for employees of local government structures in the autonomous territory of Gagauzia.
The money is now also, according to police and independent reporting, finding its way into the hands of so-called local “coordinators” and “supporters” of the “Victory” electoral bloc, a political entity created in and reportedly controlled from Moscow.
But it’s not just money that’s flowing into Moldova; disinformation is also playing a pivotal role in this election.
The Digital Forensic Research Lab is tracking the spread of fake letters purportedly from public institutions and the incitement of hate speech and media attacks.’
And now list all the US funded NGOs working and exerting their influence in Moldova. Then list all the EU organizations doing the same.
Apparently, with more than 92% of the ballots counted yesterday, 52% voted ‘no’ to joining the EU against 47% voting ‘yes’. Then, after receiving votes from Moldovans living outside the country, the ‘yes’ vote increased to 50.39% against 49.61% for ‘no’, with 99.41% of votes counted.
Poor Moldovans!
And their Digital Forensic Research Lab is tracking the spread of fake letters and the incitement of hate speech and media attacks? Then they must already be under the influence of the EU!
Please see this latest terrible news. Only yesterday Tommy Robinson warned in a video that the families of recently jailed British Patriots had told him they were being “terrorized” in prison. Now one 61-year-old patriot has committed suicide, after being jailed for “violent disorder”, when he did nothing violent at all, just held up placards and shouted at police.
Rioter dies in prison after being jailed for two years
“A grandfather jailed for violent disorder and abusing police at an anti-immigration riot this summer has become the first rioter to die in prison.
Peter Lynch, 61, described as a conspiracy theorist at his court hearing, is believed to have taken his own life on Saturday night at HMP Moorland near Doncaster in south Yorkshire, according to prison service sources.”
One public comment:
“Peter Lynch (RIP) was NOT a rioter
He stood at the protest with a PLACARD calling MPs and others CORRUPT
He called the Police NAMES
That is all that happened
He NEVER told anybody, or asked for anybody, to comit violence
The Media have nothing to attack this man on
So they make up stuff
“Rioter”
“Far Right Activist”
“Conspiracy Theorist”
EVERYBODY has a RIGHT to attend Protests
That is called a Democracy
And since when was being a Conspiracy Theorist a crime punishable by Jailtime
IF that is the case, there are not enough Prisons ON THE PLANET to hold them all
Peter Lynch’s (RIP) blood is on the Gov’ts hands
They released ACTUAL Criminals to make room for people saying hurty words”