Tag: united kingdom

The Empty Cockpit Mystery

In September 1970 Captain William Schaffner, a young USAF pilot serving with the RAF, took off in a Lightning fighter aircraft from RAF Binbrook in North Lincolnshire to intercept an unknown radar contact. He was never seen again. One month later his aircraft was recovered from the North Sea, but although the cockpit was closed and the ejector seat was in place, there was no sign of Captain Schaffner.

The RAF enquiry into the disappearance of Captain Schaffner was conducted in secret, leading some people to suppose that this was part of an attempt to cover up the fact that the radar contact he had been sent to intercept was a UFO and that this had somehow spirited him out of the cockpit. This speculation was given further impetus when in 1992 newspapers published articles which included a transcript of radio calls from Schaffner which seemed to confirm that he had approached a UFO before his disappearance.

Almost fifty years later, it’s much easier to separate fact from conjecture and downright hoax. Something certainly happened to Captain William Schaffner out in the darkness over the North Sea in 1970, but is it possible to deduce precisely what? Let’s have a try.

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In major victory for 9/11 family, UK attorney general withdraws decision to deny family’s application for new inquest

We at the International Center for 9/11 Justice are very happy to announce — on behalf of the family of Geoff Campbell — that the decision by the attorney general for England and Wales to refuse the family’s application for a new inquest into Geoff’s murder on September 11, 2001, has been withdrawn.

This development comes about two weeks after the Campbell family sent a “pre-action protocol letter” to the attorney general’s office announcing their intention to seek judicial review of the attorney general’s June 2023 decision.

The letter included a 21-page submission, to be made to the court, setting forth the family’s grounds for challenging the attorney general’s unlawful and irrational decision, which was issued nearly two years after the family first submitted their application.

The attorney general’s withdrawal of her decision one day before the Campbell family was to file for judicial review is a major victory for the family in their effort to open a new inquest into Geoff’s death.

The attorney general’s office has advised that a new decision will be made “in due course.” Given how much time has already gone into reviewing the application, the family expects a new decision no later than the end of the year.

In light of the attorney general’s implicit admission that the original decision was legally deficient, the Campbell family is confident that the decision will be reversed and is more hopeful than ever that they will have their day in the West London Coroner’s Court — where they will prove that Geoff was killed in the North Tower’s demolition.

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Revealed: UK Intelligence Officials Are Behind The Censorship Of Russell Brand

Allegations of sexual impropriety and abuse by comedian and podcaster Russell Brand by the British media prompted YouTube to demonetize the star’s popular channel on September 20.

The Grayzone can now reveal that YouTube’s financial censorship of Brand is the result of an effort waged by a former British government minister who was responsible for London’s crackdown on dissent during the Covid-19 pandemic. Her husband has also participated in that campaign of state repression as deputy commander of 77th Brigade, the British Army’s psychological warfare division.

YouTube justified its demonetization of Brand on the grounds that he violated its “creator responsibility policy.” This marks the first time a content creator has been financially punished by the company for reasons other than the videos published on the site. A spokesperson has claimed, “if a creator’s off-platform behaviour harms our users, employees or ecosystem, we take action.”

The allegations against Brand date from betwee 2006 and ’13, and have yet to be proven in court. There is no indication the charges are being investigated by law enforcement in Britain or the US, where the offenses allegedly occurred. Brand has vehemently denied accusations of abuse and rape.

Brand’s videos analyzing political developments and topics such as the Covid-19 pandemic, corporate media propaganda and the Ukraine proxy war have earned him an audience of millions, making him one of the world’s most influential alternative media personalities. For this, he appears to have been marked as a threat to the narratives spun out by Washington and London.

New developments suggest YouTube’s censorship of Brand was driven by direct British government decree. On September 19, the social media companies TikTok and Rumble received a pair of almost identical letters dispatched from Caroline Dinenage, the head of the UK parliament’s Culture, Media and Sport Committee. Dinenage informed the companies she was “concerned that [Brand] may be able to profit from his content” published on both platforms.

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Should Britain be taking UFOs more seriously? As NASA sets up a taskforce to study possible extraterrestrial visitors in the US, experts say it’s time for the UK to follow suit in the interests of ‘national security’

Britain should follow America’s lead and create its own UFO taskforce to investigate potential extraterrestrial sightings, experts have said.

They accused the UK Government of failing to take the issue seriously enough and warned that it could have serious implications for the country’s defence capabilities.

Nick Pope, who investigated UFOs for the British military in the 1990s before the unit was disbanded, said it was ‘outrageous’ that ministers are not taking ‘meaningful action’ to probe unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs) — more commonly known as unidentified flying objects.

‘The Ministry of Defence (MoD) needs to restart UAP investigations, a task force of some sort needs to be set up, and the Defence Committee needs to start holding the MoD to account on UAP, as the Armed Services Committees are doing in the US Congress, in both the Senate and the House,’ he told MailOnline.

Mr Pope accused defence officials of ‘falling back on a lazy, closed-minded “it can’t be, so it isn’t” mindset’, meaning potential foreign threats to UK shores could be missed.

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Census ‘hugely overstated’ trans population

The Office for National Statistics “hugely overestimated” the number of transgender people in the UK, Whitehall sources have claimed, as the body admitted it could have carried out “additional probing” before releasing the controversial data.

An official inquiry by the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) into the census finding that 260,000 people identified as transgender has drawn up several “lessons learned” from the way the data was handled by the ONS. 

They include a conclusion the ONS should do more to communicate “uncertainty” about the data and should have sought external “quality assurance”.

The inquiry’s findings are likely to exacerbate tensions between ministers and the ONS after the body admitted earlier this month it had underestimated the size of the economy by nearly 2 per cent as of the end of 2021 – meaning Britain recovered to its pre-pandemic level almost two years ago. 

A Whitehall source suggested the ONS executive, led by Prof Sir Ian Diamond, may have lost its “credibility” to accurately record sex and gender, based on its handling of the trans issue together with its separate loss of a legal challenge over the wording of the 2021 census. 

The source said it was now clear the 2021 figures on gender, released in January, “hugely overestimated” the number of transgender people – a view they said was shared by multiple ministers.

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UK Quietly Passes “Online Safety Bill” Into Law

Buried behind the Brand-related headlines yesterday, the British House of Lords voted to pass the controversial “Online Safety Bill” into law. All that’s needed now is Royal assent, which Charles will obviously provide.

The bill’s (very catchy) long-form title is…

A Bill to make provision for and in connection with the regulation by OFCOM of certain internet services; for and in connection with communications offences; and for connected purposes.

…and that’s essentially it, it hands the duty of “regulating” certain online content to the UK’s Office of Communications (OfCom).

Ofcom Chief Executive Dame Melanie Dawes could barely contain her excitement in a statement to the press:

“Today is a major milestone in the mission to create a safer life online for children and adults in the UK. Everyone at Ofcom feels privileged to be entrusted with this important role, and we’re ready to start implementing these new laws.”

As always with these things, the bill’s text is a challenging and rather dull read, deliberately obscure in its language and difficult to navigate.

Of some note is the “information offenses” clause, which empowers OfCom to demand “information” from users, companies and employees, and makes it a crime to withhold it. The nature of this “information” is never specified, nor does it appear to be qualified. Meaning it could be anything, and will most likely be used to get private account information about users from social media platforms.

In one of the more worrying clauses, the Bill outlines what they call “communications offenses”. Section 10 details crimes of transmitting “Harmful, false and threatening communications”.

It should be noted that sending threats is already illegal in the UK, so the only new ground covered here is “harmful” and/or “false” information, and the fact they feel the need to differentiate between those two things should worry you.

After all, the truth can definitely be “harmful”…Especially to a power-hungry elite barely controlling an angry populace through dishonest propaganda.

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Actor who plunged to his death while partying with Pete Doherty in London flat was likely ‘pushed’ FBI expert says – as man’s heartbroken mother hits out at police investigation

An actor who fell from a balcony to his death at a London party after an argument with Libertines frontman Peter Doherty was likely ‘thrown’, an expert has claimed.

Mark Blanco, 30, died in 2006 after falling from a block of flats at an event attended by a number of friends and the then-Babyshambles singer-songwriter. 

Police investigated the case, and Doherty was implicated after an inquest into the actor’s death, but there have been no charges to date.

Doherty wrote in a blog post in 2011, now inaccessible, that neither he nor anybody else was with Blanco just before he died. 

‘When he fell or jumped he was alone,’ he wrote, according to NME.

But CCTV analyst and FBI instructor Grant Frederick has now alleged, based on fresh analysis of footage of the fall, that ‘there couldn’t be just one person on the balcony’.

He told The Mirror: ‘What I would see is that Mark has come out and somebody has taken Mark and is putting him over the balcony. 

‘If the measurements and the distance are correct, then Mark was thrown over the balcony, Mark was murdered.’

Frederick claimed he had asked the Metropolitan Police to perform his analysis ten years ago, but they had failed to.

Blanco’s mother has continued to seek answers to the unresolved questions around her son’s death, reportedly spending £100,000 on her own investigation.

Sheila Blanco believes the Met made mistakes in the investigation, including missing key evidence, and will feature in a new Channel 4 documentary, ‘Pete Doherty, Who Killed My Son?’, on September 25.

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UK Parliament sends letters to social media platforms demanding demonetization of Russell Brand

The UK Parliament has sent letters to TikTok and Rumble expressing concerns that comedian Russel Brand could be profiting off the platforms.

“I am writing concerning the serious allegations regarding Russell Brand, in the context as a user of TikTok with more than 2.2 million followers on the platform,” the letter to Theo Bertram, TikTok Director of Government Relations, Europe, began.

The following day after TikTok was sent the letter, Rumble received a similar letter from Dinenage, noting Brand’s 1.4 million followers on the platform, and asking whether Rumble “intends to join YouTube in suspending Mr. Brand’s ability to earn money on the platform.”

“The Culture, Media and Sport [Committee] is raising questions with the broadcasters who previously employed Mr. Brand or production companies who employed him, to examine both the culture of the industry in the past and whether that culture still prevails today,” Committee chair Dame Caroline Dinenage MP wrote.

Dinenage noted that while Brand no longer appears on television, he has amassed a following on various social media platforms, “including on TikTok where this weekend he republished his pre-emptive response to the accusations made against him by The Sunday Times and Channel 4’s Dispatches.”

“While we recognize that TikTok is not the creator of the content published by Mr. Brand, and his content may be within the Community Guidelines set out by the platform, we are concerned that he may be able to profit from his content on the platform.”

Dinenage requested that TikTok confirm whether Brand is able to monetize his content on the platform, and tell “what the platform is doing to ensure that creators are not able to use the platform to undermine the welfare of victims of inappropriate or potentially illegal behavior.”

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The UK passes massive online safety bill

The UK’s Online Safety Bill is ready to become law. The bill, which aims to make the UK “the safest place in the world to be online,” passed through the Houses of Parliament on Tuesday and imposes strict requirements on large social platforms to remove illegal content. It will be enforced by UK telecom regulatory agency Ofcom.

Additionally, the Online Safety Bill mandates new age-checking measures to prevent underage children from seeing harmful content. It also pushes large social media platforms to become more transparent about the dangers they pose to children, while also giving parents and kids the ability to report issues online. Potential penalties are also harsh: up to 10 percent of a company’s global annual revenue. The bill has been reworked several times in a multiyear journey through Parliament.

But not only does online age verification raise serious privacy concerns — the bill could also put encrypted messaging services, like WhatsApp, at risk. Under the terms of the bill, encrypted messaging apps would be obligated to check users’ messages for child sexual abuse material.

Depending on how the rule is enforced, this could essentially break apps’ end-to-end encryption promise, which prevents third parties — including the app itself — from viewing users’ messages. In March, WhatsApp refused to comply with the bill and threatened to leave the UK rather than change its encryption policies. It joined Signal and other encrypted messaging services in protesting the bill, leading UK regulators to attempt to assuage their concerns by promising to only require “technically feasible” measures.

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The Mass-Media Memory Hole – Blair, Ukraine and Libya

A key function of state-corporate media is to keep the public pacified, ignorant and ill-equipped to disrupt establishment power.

Knowledge that sheds light on how the world operates politically and economically is kept to a minimum by the ‘mainstream’ media. George Orwell’s famous ‘memory hole’ from ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ signifies the phenomenon brilliantly. Winston Smith’s work for the Ministry of Truth requires that he destroys documents that contradict state propaganda:

‘When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building’.

(Orwell, ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, 1949, Penguin edition, 1982, p. 34)

The interests of power, hinging on the domination of an ignorant population, are robustly maintained:

‘In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct, nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place.’

(Ibid., p. 36)

As the Party slogan puts it:

‘Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’

(Ibid., p. 31)

In today’s fictional ‘democracies’, the workings of propaganda are more subtle. Notably, there is a yawning chasm between the rhetoric of leaders’ professed concern for human rights, peace and democracy, and the realpolitik of empire, exploitation and control.

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