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History of Freedom of Speech in the UK


John Simkin

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FAITH UNDER FIRE

Judge convicts Christian for voicing Bible verse Says OK to preach from Leviticus 18, but not Leviticus 20

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A Christian street preacher convicted and fined by a U.K. judge, who also serves with an Islamic Shariah court, is guilty of having breached the public order by his choice of Bible verses.

Michael Overd, a former British paratrooper who has been street preaching for five years, was convicted this week of delivering “homophobic sermons” over a loudspeaker in Taunton, Somerset, last summer.

Overd faced two charges relating to claims by homosexuals he had offended them and another of causing “racially aggravated” harassment targeted at Muslims, the BBC reported. He was found guilty of only one of the “homophobic” charges.

Overd, 50, was fined $300 and ordered to pay compensation and costs totaling $1,800 at Bristol Crown Court.

“I have been ordered to pay compensation for causing ‘emotional pain’ to someone who approached me aggressively demanding to debate the issue,” said Overd. “There was no harm, injury or theft, just a simple disagreement over theology which I have now been fined for.”

District Judge Shamim Ahmed Qureshi told Overd he should not have referenced Leviticus chapter 20 in explaining the biblical view on homosexuality, but “clearly indicated that he could have used chapter 18 of the book,” reported Christian Concern.

Qureshi, who according to a 2009 article in “The Brief,” chronicling the rise of Shariah law in Britain, serves with the Muslim Arbitration Tribunal, the overseer of the nation’s Shariah courts.

Qureshi found no problem with Overd’s use of Leviticus 18:22 which describes homosexual activity as an “abomination,” but a reference to Leviticus 20:13 was impermissible because it prescribed the death penalty.

Overd agreed he used Leviticus 20 in his comments but never referenced the death penalty.

“I am being punished for words that never passed my lips,” he said.

Overd, who initially told the judge he would not pay the fine but relented when threatened with 45 days in jail, took particular issue with Qureshi dictating which passages from the Bible were lawful for him to use.

“I am amazed that the judge sees it as his role to dictate which parts of the Bible can and can’t be preached,” he said.

“I did not quote the full text of Leviticus 20 or make reference to the death penalty, but the judge is telling me that I should use other parts of the Bible. This is not free speech but censorship. The judge is redacting the Bible.

During sentencing, Qureshi criticized Overd’s speaking style and his training as a preacher.

“In my view he enjoys coaxing people into asking him questions so that he can reply loudly into the microphone to answer them. The only semblance of civilized conversation is when they commend him, if they disagree he shouts them down.”

Accusing Overd of “double standards,” Qureshi said the street preacher believed he was right and everyone else was wrong.

Qureshi continued: Overd “does not display any scholarly approach to the topics but merely preaches whatever little he had learned, regardless of being rude or bullying to others. He happily shouts out the negative points in any other religion.”

Andrea Williams, chief executive of the Christian Legal Center – Overd’s attorney – disagrees.

“Mike is clear that he is motivated by love, not hate. Indeed, this is in line with the message of the Bible,” she said in defense of her client.

“It’s clear from the evidence that he has consistently dealt with people’s objections in a balanced and reasonable way. He has explained his beliefs. He hasn’t been aggressive or targeted anybody in particular. The evidence bears all this out.

“Mike’s boldness and his witness to Jesus is remarkably similar to that of the apostles in the early years of the church.

“They were also hauled before the courts to defend themselves for preaching a message of love and truth. They also faced trumped up accusations in an attempt to portray them as ‘disruptive.’

“Now, as then, the disruptive ones appear to be the people who bring accusations, on the flimsiest of evidence, against a man who loves Jesus and loves people. This is why Mike gets up and preaches in Taunton town center.

“There will always be those who disagree with the Bible’s teaching. But we should defend to the hilt the freedom to proclaim it in a loving way, which is what Mike Overd always seeks to do.”

As for Overd, he said he has no intention of allowing the court to dictate his street preaching.

“I follow my Lord and leader, so I won’t tone down,” said


Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2015/03/judge-convicts-christian-for-using-bible-verse/#s3i2HC2F5aEUwv1s.99
Edited by Steven Gaal
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Britain Used Spy Team to Shape Latin American Public Opinion on Falklands

Faced with mounting international pressure over the Falkland Islands territorial dispute, the British government enlisted its spy service, including a highly secretive unit known for using “dirty tricks,” to covertly launch offensive cyberoperations to prevent Argentina from taking the islands. A shadowy unit of the British spy agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) had been preparing a bold, covert plan called “Operation QUITO” since at least 2009. Documents provided to The Intercept by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, published in partnership with Argentine news site Todo Notícias, refer to the mission as a “long-running, large scale, pioneering effects operation.”

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YOU WERE TO NEVER KNOW THIS AND "SPEECH" ABOUT IT > public figures, including prominent politicians.

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VIP paedophile murders: Police didn't tell family about quizzing suspects in killing of boy aged eight

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http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/vip-paedophile-murders-police-didnt-5460371#ICID=sharebar_twitter

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63 police inquiries, 2,100 victims... the child abuse dossier that shames Britain after horrific explosion of historic sex cases since Savile (LINK)


The unprecedented scale of current police investigations into historic child abuse can be revealed for the first time today, as senior officers warn of the challenge of investigating alleged crimes that go back decades.

An investigation by The Mail on Sunday has revealed that:

Forces around Britain are carrying out more than 60 major investigations into sex attacks and beatings in schools, children’s homes and churches dating back to the 1950s.

More than 2,000 people have come forward in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal to say they were abused at institutions or by public figures, including prominent politicians.

A staggering 1,200 of the alleged victims were inmates of just one institution, a northern borstal once visited by the late Home Secretary Leon Brittan and praised for its ‘short, sharp shock’ regime. He himself is now at the centre of a number of abuse claims.

Edited by Steven Gaal
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Countering The Lies Of The Mainstream Media

Apr 7, 2015

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The site you are reading this article on is part of the ‘alternative’ or ‘independent’ media. Many of these sites do not take advertising and are run on the basis of donations from readers. Many of the authors whose articles appear on these sites write for no or little financial remuneration.

Contrast this situation with the so-called ‘mainstream’ print and TV media.

The corporate mainstream media with its well-paid journalists and increasing concentration of ownership bows to the concerns of advertisers. It tends to be privately owned and its owners have a vested interest in maintaining an economic system based on private ownership and in manufacturing consent for it. Moreover, such outlets these days are increasingly part of major conglomerates, which may include armaments manufacturers, banking or industrial concerns, and will not therefore adopt stances or report on stories that are harmful to the interests of the wider organisation.

The public is thus given access to a world view that is distorted in favour of state-corporate interests. Such interests have succeeded in getting across the message that, for example, the ‘free market’ is the best way to deliver goods and services to people, state provided welfare is bad and ‘individual responsibility’ is good, ‘austerity’ is necessary, privatisation increases efficiency, an endless ‘war on terror’ must be waged on designated enemies, well-being is measured in terms of a never-ending quest for GDP growth, the US and NATO are the ‘world’s policemen’, giant agribusiness must displace peasant farmers to secure food security and gross inequalities and unregulated corporate power are both necessary and legitimate.

Over the past 15 years, numerous ‘alternative’ news websites have sprung up that challenge these assumptions and the belief that ordinary citizens should be passive consumers of a predetermined news agenda. There are now dozens of popular news sites that inform people of issues the mainstream media has deliberately failed to tell people the truth about. There are also many more sites with global reach that exist to scrutinise specific sectors, hold practices to account and counter corporate propaganda (for example, GMWatch, Corporate Europe Observatory, Food & Water Watch, Campaign Against the Arms Trade, etc.).

The existence of ‘alternative’ independent sites has led the European Union to express concerns about the ‘damaging’ effects of people having access to these sources of information. The EU argues that societal consensus is being eroded as people are being ‘led astray’ by dissenting voices on the internet. In the report ‘A free and pluralistic media to sustain European democracy’, the EU feels there is a danger that people are being misguidedly radicalised. It advocates EU funding for ‘responsible’ journalism, getting the EU’s viewpoint across regularly and prominently in the media and placing controls on the net. The EU perceives this to be ‘pluralism’.

What is ‘responsible journalism’?

An article by Annie Day indicates that as a result of its destabilisations, coups, mass bombings and death squads, the US military and the CIA have been responsible for a figure of an estimated ten million deaths since 1945. Yet the corporate media never describes any of this as constituting a form of mass terror. Through the cynical hijacking of the concept of ‘terror’, the US now attempts to justify its ongoing tyranny through a ‘war on terror’, which goes unquestioned on a daily basis by the mainstream media.

Ukraine is the latest example of a US-backed terror campaign, which the corporate media has consistently failed to question. As the world edges ever closer to nuclear war, the mainstream media merely parrots the official lie coming from Washington that the situation is all due to ‘Russian aggression’.

You can also add to that ten million, countless others whose lives have been sacrificed on the altar of corporate profit, which did not rely on the military to bomb peoples and countries into submission but on the IMF, World Bank and WTO. It begs the question how many lives have been cut short across the world because of the inherent structural violence or silent killing of the everyday functioning of predatory capitalism?

The appropriation of wealth through a system that funnels it from bottom to top via a process of accumulation by dispossession is celebrated by the corporate media as growth, prosperity, and freedom of choice, despite evidence that, from Greece to Spain and beyond, the reality for the majority has been falling wages, increasing poverty, the stripping away of choice and misery.

So where is the ‘responsible journalism’ that the EU calls for?

Does it lie with those journalists in the corporate media whose claim to respectability is their rigid professionalism, their accountability, their objectivity?

If you can call professionalism, accountability and objectivity being in the pay of and not wishing to offend advertising interests, officialdom and powerful corporate interests then they are paragons of absolute responsibility.

Peddling their high salaried deceptions, they have failed and continue to fail the public and genuinely hold power to account. By shining their ‘investigative’ light on ‘parliamentary procedures’, personalities, the rubber stamping of policies and the inane machinations of party politics, they merely serve to maintain and perpetuate the status quo and keep the public in the dark as to the unaccountable self-serving nature of power broking and the unity ofinterests that enable Big Oil, Big Finance, Big Pharma, Big Agra and the rest of them via their secretive think tanks and policy initiatives to keep bleeding us all dry.

But that’s the role of the media: to help reinforce and reproduce the material conditions of a divisive social system on a daily basis. It’s called having a compliant, toothless media. It’s what the corporate media itself calls part of ‘liberal democracy’. And in this type of ‘liberal democracy’, it is people like Edward Snowden or Julian Assange who expose the wrongdoings of the political-corporate elites that are hounded.

It was George Orwell who said that journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed and everything else is public relations. Orwell was correct. Former CIA boss General Petraeus stated in 2006 that his strategy was to wage a war of perceptions conducted continuously through the news media, while John Pilger observes that the role of respectable journalism in western state crimes – from Iraq to Iran, Afghanistan to Libya – remains taboo. Its role has been to serve as first-choice cheerleader for illegal wars.

Intelligence agencies secure media compliance

There are of course some good journalists working in the corporate mainstream media. But if you think this article mounts to little more than a one-sided attack on the ‘mainstream’ media, you may need to think again.

Many readers will be aware of a recent story about the former editor of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of Germany’s largest newspapers, who claimed that he accepted news stories written and given to him by the CIA and published them under his own name.

This revelation came as a shock to many. But it should not have because in the UK, for example, the British intelligence agencies along with the CIA has for decades strived to ensure that the mainstream press and TV complied with the interests of the Establishment. In addition to making sure that the British left was subverted, infiltrated and made toothless, the mainstream media was molded by the intelligence agencies to parrot the Establishment’s viewpoints and aims.

How this was achieved is described in the article ‘The Psyops War: British Intelligence and the Covert Propaganda Front and the CIA’s Interference in British Politics.’

The article reveals the tight-knit relationship between senior journalists and MI5:

MI5 targeted labour correspondents in both newspapers and broadcasting right up to the 80s; they were recruited in droves for their contacts with a wide range of trade union officials and with each other. According to Peter Wright, MI5 always had about twenty senior journalists working for it in the national press. “They were not employed directly by us, but we regarded them as agents because they were happy to be associated with us.”

As the national public service broadcaster funded by the state, special attention was paid to the BBC:

At the BBC, Brigadier Ronald Stonham liaised with MI5 and Special Branch and advised the corporation on whether or not to employ people. Names of applicants for editorial posts in the BBC were similarly ‘vetted’ by MI5.

From the article, it becomes clear were the elite thinks journalism’s loyalty should ultimately lie:

“There should be times when the journalist, when he’s examined all the facts and tested all his sources, should come down on the side of the government of the day, the established order and the Establishment as a whole.” – Chairman of the Radio Authority

And the working class in particular should certainly know its place (Toxteth is an urban district and is used here to signify the social unrest that gripped a number of British cities in the early eighties):

“We are in a period of considerable social change. There may be social unrest, but we can cope with the Toxteths… but if we have a highly-educated and idle population, we may possibly anticipate more serious conflict. People must be educated to once more know their place.” – from a secret Department of Education Report.

The article makes clear who the British Establishment regards as the ‘enemy within’ and what it perceives the role of the much-heralded ‘free press’ (much heralded by people belonging to this ‘free press’) to be.

With massive decreases in readership, however, the print media seems to be in terminal decline. The Establishment’s grip on the control of information has been in danger of slipping as the internet has become a major vehicle for the dissemination of information.

The state-corporate-financial elite has presided over a bought and paid for mainstream media for some time. Now it is engaged in an ongoing strategy of global mass surveillance and a clamp down on internet freedom. The goal is to eventually have a fully controlled internet that mirrors the shackled ‘free press’ that the Establishment has for so long cherished.

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Colin Todhunter is an independent writer and former social policy researcher

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UK Gov pays big money to ‘Demonize Russian politicians’

written by Doug Salzmann
demonize-russians.jpg?w=747
This extract from a form describing a project to be funded by the United Kingdom’s inter-agency “Conflict Pool” indicates one of the ways HMG is spending British tax money. In the wake of the latest of the endless outcries about “Russian trolls” in Western media, this should be of interest to all who may be interested in the truth of the matter — or as close as we can come to that, at least.

Documents posted on the web reveal a high-level anti-Russian propaganda war being waged in south and eastern Ukraine by the US, the UK and NATO on behalf of the Kiev Government, using non-governmental organisations (NGOs) as agents.

According to the Drakula blog, the West is raising its game in its campaign against Russian President Vladimir Putin. While it is — on the one hand — pumping up the military volume by moving NATO and US hardware nearer to the Ukraine and Russian borders, it is also playing a hybrid war by pumping funds into an anti-Russian propaganda war.

NATO documents show that a “co-ordination meeting on StratCom training for Ukraine” was held in Riga, Latvia on February 19, 2015 as part of its “on-going capacity building programme”.

StratCom stands for Strategic Communication, which means dealing with the “inability of Ukrainian media to provide sufficient reach for the south/east of the country; vast reach of media originating from Russia; lack of strong Public Broadcaster; lack of success stories; [and] lack of trust of the population of the south/eastern regions in the central government”.

The NATO document reveals the Kiev Government has a “weak Public Affairs capacity” and sets out proposals to counter Russian influence and tackling what it describes as a lack of cross-government work and co-ordination as well as a lack of understanding of the importance of “national narrative”.

“Decreasing the Russian Information Influence”

all-troubles-on-putin2.jpg?w=840&h=495Further documents reveal a project run by the UK Foreign Office, the Department for International Development and the Ministry of Defence worth $360,500 with the purpose of: “National reconciliation in Ukraine through effective communication for restoring public trust and empowering of the participatory democracy mechanisms using regional media coverage, counteraction to Russian information influence”.

It outlines a pro-Kiev propaganda battle using Ukrainian agencies including the Ukrainian Institute for International Politics (UIIP); the Analytical Center for Geopolitical Studies ‘Borysfen Intel’ (BI); and the Department of the civil-military cooperation, HQ of the armed forces.

Sputnik News has independently gained confirmation of the existence of the Conflict Pool project through the UK Department for International Development and the British Embassy in Kiev.

Read more at Sputnik News

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WikiLeaks Docs: Sony Chiefs Met With Cameron Ahead of Scottish Referendum (link)

British Prime Minister David Cameron met with representatives from Sony Pictures just ten weeks before the Scottish independence referendum to discuss the release of a TV show based on Scotland's repression under British rule, documents released by WikiLeaks have revealed.

The release of the 'Outlander' TV series, which depicts among other things, 18th century life in Scotland under British rule, was delayed in the UK, heightening suggestions it was done amid concerns over any nationalistic sentiment it may have generated in the lead up to the independence referendum.

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EXPRESS YOURSELF WITH THE VOTE ????

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Millions of voters are missing: It’s another #GovtDigiShambles

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/03/23/voters_are_missing_its_another_govtdigishambles/

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This is the first General Election to use “Individual Voter Registration” (IVR), which requires each voter to register to vote individually.

The change was made in the 2013 Electoral Registration and Administration Act. Previously, the “head of the household” was responsible for ensuring voters were registered to vote.

In October, the Electoral Commission reported that 5.5m voters were missing from the Electoral Register. But this shouldn’t be a surprise to the Cabinet Office, who knew of the problems two years ago.

Edited by Steven Gaal
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The Slow Death of Free Speech in Britain (America, You're Next!)

From the Internet to the press to the public square, Brits' speech is being policed and punished

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Brendan O'Neill | April 26, 2015

Freedom of speech no longer exists in Britain. The land that gave the world the Magna Carta, the Levellers, and John Stuart Mill—three of the key foundation stones of the modern conception of liberty—is now arresting and even jailing people simply for speaking their minds.

A man has been investigated by the police for a hashtag he used on Twitter. Seriously. Never mind speechcrime, or even tweetcrime—now we have hashtagcrime, the criminalisation even of those snarky, ironic asides people pepper the internet with. The man in question, Stephen Dodds, committed the sin of taking a photograph of two Muslims praying at Anfield, the home ground of Liverpool Football Club, and posting it on Twitter alongside the tweet: "Muslims praying at half-time at the match yesterday. #DISGRACE." That hashtag saw him become the victim of a furious Twitterstorm, the modern version of a tomato-wielding mob, and he was eventually reported to the cops. They investigated the matter for two weeks—two weeks!—before finally instructing Liverpool FC to take appropriate action against the evil hashtagger. Liverpool this week said it is deciding how to punish this man who dared to type the word "DISGRACE" on the internet.

Aggravated Meanness

2. A journalist, Katie Hopkins, has been reported to the police, and, bizarrely, to the International Criminal Court (ICC), for writing a column for the Sun in which she referred to the African migrants trying to get into Europe as "cockroaches." Hopkins is known for her outré views. She's been reported to the police before, for "hate crimes against fat people"! She said "fat people are just lazy," which is apparently a police matter now. The police didn't charge her over her fat-shaming, but they might well interrogate her over her migrant-bashing. Her cockroaches column caused the Twittersphere to go into meltdown; 285,000 people have signed a petition calling on the Sun to sack her (my preferred solution to Europe's migrant crisis is to swap these 285,000 intolerant Brits who fancy they have the right to shut down writers they don't like for 285,000 Africans who want to live in this country); and now the Society of Black Lawyers has reported Hopkins both to the UK cops and also to the ICC, demanding it investigate her comments "under the provisions of incitement to commit crimes against humanity." Am I allowed to call this a DISGRACE?

Shameful Bodies

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has launched an investigation into the appropriateness of an advert for protein supplements which features a sexy woman in a bikini next to the words: "Are you beach-body ready yet?" The ads, which appear on the London Underground, have been vandalized by SJW feminists who claim they "body shame" the plump. More than 30,000 people have signed an online petition—again with the petitions—demanding the ads be removed because they make women "feel physically inferior to… the bronzed model." And now the ASA, overlord of advertising in Britain, which has the power to expunge from the public sphere any ad it judges to be offensive, is heeding the feminist vandalizers and subjecting the ad to one of its stiff-lipped investigations. We wait with bated breath to see if this unelected institution will graciously allow the rest of us, the 64 million people of Britain, to keep seeing this actually quite pleasant ad.

These three cases of the past week encapsulate the crisis of free-speaking in 21st century Britain. They show that no zone of British life is free from the peering eyes and always primed red pen of the new censorious set that longs to scribble out or shut down anything dodgy, eccentric, hateful, or upsetting (to some.)

The cases confirm that everywhere from the new virtual terrain of the Internet (that hashtag guy), to the old-fashioned printed press (the Katie Hopkins case), to the public square itself (that bikini ad), speech is under threat from an unholy marriage of intolerant virtual mobs, censorious Social Justice Warriors (SJWs), and state institutions keen to censor stuff in order to protect the allegedly fragile public.

And these cases aren't one-offs. In relation to the Internet, numerous people have been arrested for tweetcrimes. In 2010, a man was found guilty of being "grossly offensive" after he joked on Twitter about blowing up an airport in Nottingham that was experiencing severe delays. He was fined £385 and lost his job. His conviction was finally quashed on the third appeal. In 2012, a student was imprisoned for 56 days for making racist comments on Twitter. Also in 2012, a 20-year-old man was sentenced to 240 hours' community service for writing on his Facebook page: "All [british] soldiers should die and go to hell."

Other tweeters have been arrested and interrogated by police for making off-colour comments. In December last year, a 19-year-old man was arrested for making a joke about the truck disaster in Glasgow, when an out-of-control truck hit Christmas shoppers and killed six. The tweeter said: "So a bin lorry has apparently driven into 100 people in Glasgow eh, probably the most trash it's picked up in one day." For that, for doing what people have been doing for generations—making up stinging jokes in the wake of a tragedy—he was arrested. He was let off, but the police sent a chilling warning to us all: anyone who makes horrible jokes on Twitter we will be visited and given "strong words of advice," they said.

Various laws enable this police invasion of the online world: the Public Order Act of 1986, which criminalizes "racially aggravated" speech; the Malicious Communications Act of 2003, which criminalizes "offensive, indecent or menacing" speech in electronic media: these are the statutes the cops have used to colonise the internet.

The war on Katie Hopkins isn't a one-off, either. It follows hot on the heels of the Leveson Inquiry's creation of a chilling, choking climate in relation to the British press.

Launched by David Cameron in 2011 ostensibly to investigate phone-hacking at the News of the World, but actually having the vastly expanded remit of looking into the whole "culture, practice, and ethics of the press," the Leveson Inquiry has created a situation where Britain might soon have a press regulator set up by Royal Charter—which would be the first system of state-backed regulation of the press in Britain since 1695.

Even before that Royal Charter has been signed, Leveson has already, predictably, emboldened the petty censors in our midst who have long desired to silence offensive columnists, especially tabloid ones. As one agitator against Katie Hopkins admitted. "Leveson was a smack in the teeth" of newspapers like the Sun, he said, which should now feel less able to publish Hopkins' and others' "vicious… right-wing opinioneering." In short: A state-decreed, judge-led inquiry is leading to the castration of the press, and we should be happy about that.

As to the ASA's investigation of the bikini ad—such topdown regulation of the words and images of the public sphere has become commonplace in recent years.

The ASA has banned ads for hair products that were offensive to Christians (they featured nuns in suspenders); ads for an airline that had a woman dressed as a schoolgirl, on the basis that they could cause "widespread offence" (in fact, only 13 people complained about them); and even an ad for a supermarket that showed a girl taking the salad out of her hamburger on the grounds that it "condoned poor nutritional habits." Censorship in the UK has become so psycho that even the presentation of hamburgers is now strictly policed.

http://reason.com/archives/2015/04/26/the-slow-death-of-free-speech-in-britain for page 2

Edited by Steven Gaal
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NO INFORMATION == NO SPEECH
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The rape of justice: Damning new evidence of Labour peer Lord Janner’s child sex abuse covered up by police and social workers for over 20 years

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The most damning evidence yet of how the Establishment hid Lord Janner’s alleged child abuse can be revealed today.

Police and social workers were told more than 20 years ago that the peer took a vulnerable boy to Labour Party offices and Parliament before molesting him in his marital bed.

A ten-page witness statement details the alleged victim’s harrowing ordeal at the hands of Janner. But all references to the politician were removed from the child’s social services file, according to legal papers obtained by the Mail.

A children’s home manager told bosses she feared he was having sex with the child but her concerns were ‘swept under the carpet’.

The scale of the cover-up helps explains how the former Labour MP repeatedly escaped justice.

The Director of Public Prosecutions says there was sufficient evidence to charge Janner with 22 offences of paedophilia against nine children. But Alison Saunders outraged campaigners by ruling the 86-year-old should not face court because he has dementia. The latest proof of the Establishment’s strenuous efforts to protect one of its own came as it emerged that:
•Janner hosted at least four private banquets as well as dinners and afternoon teas at the House of Lords after being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s;
•A dossier about the peer is among 114 files on child sex abuse that have gone missing from the Home Office;
•Mrs Saunders has admitted that having dementia is ‘not a bar’ to being prosecuted.

The newly-uncovered documents from the early 1990s outlining Janner’s alleged abuse will pile fresh pressure on the authorities.

In a detailed ten-page witness statement, a married father accused the politician of sexually abusing him for nearly two years when he was a teenager at a Leicestershire children’s home in the 1970s. He alleged that the former Leicester MP took him to party headquarters, to his constituency surgeries and to the Houses of Parliament. Janner is accused of sexually assaulting the then 14-year-old at his London house in December 1974 while his wife and children were away.

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Source and full story: Daily Mail, 24 April 2015

Edited by Steven Gaal
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THE SPEECH YOU MAY HEAR .......long live Big Brother !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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British police spend £36 million per year on propaganda

May 1st, 2015 


Police forces spend tens of millions on public relations each year, with the Met alone employing over 100 ‘communications’ staff and an operating budget of over £10 million, documents released under Freedom of Information (FoI) show.

The investigation, carried out by the Press Gazette, has revealed there are 775 PR staff working across 38 national police forces.Besides the 38 forces that responded, a further four ignored the request, two claimed to be exempt from answering and one did not address the question.

The overall figures involved are calculated to be in the region of £36 million per year.

The Met’s head of media Ed Steams told Press Gazette the London force’s substantial budget was used for many activities beyond routine PR, such as recruiting and internal communications.

Some critics claim the rising number of PR staff and press officers throws up a barrier between public and police, and stops journalists exploring the inner workings of law enforcement.

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Former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie told Press Gazette: “ My sense is that the police hire more and more people in their comms area in order to stop journalists from finding out what is going on.

Assault rifle used by UK counter-terror police ‘doesn’t shoot straight’ (DONT WANT THAT OUT GAAL)

“ The senior officers hate what appears in papers as they are in the unusual position of having no control. They also hate the public knowing what is going on because it may reveal the police haven’t done or aren’t doing their job properly.”

“ Further, they dislike the argument that they have to answer through the journalists to their ultimate paymasters – the public. How are the public supposed to find out what is happening crime wise in their local area without the media? ”

The FoI covered the period from 2009/10 and 2014/15, and showed that budgets had actually grown despite simultaneous fiscal austerity.

On seeing the figures, senior political figures expressed disappointment that the PR budget had swollen.

Green Party London Assembly Member Jenny Jones told Press Gazette: “ I’m sympathetic to the idea that the Met needs a press budget to report good news stories, as well as try to rebut the bad, but at a time of savage cuts it’s disappointing to see growth. ”

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This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.

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Internet 'rationing' needed as UK cannot keep up with demand

The Internet is already consuming at least 8 per cent of Britain's power output, equivalent to the output of three nuclear power stations, and demand is soaring, says one academic.

By Ben Farmer

Internet access may soon need to be rationed or restricted because the UK’s power supply and communications network cannot cope with consumers’ appetite for online video, the Royal Society will hear this week.

The Internet is already consuming at least 8 per cent of Britain’s power output, with the energy demand from data transmission and storage as well as smartphones, laptops and televisions. Demand doubles every four years, according to one estimate.

At the same time optical cables and switches are set to reach their capacity to carry data by the end of the decade.

The Royal Society will hear this week that the country’s communications networks face a “potentially disastrous capacity crunch”, as academics meet to discuss the problem.

"The Internet is already consuming at least 8 per cent of Britain's power output, equivalent to the output of three nuclear power stations, and demand is soaring," Andrew Ellis, professor of optical communications at Aston University, told the Sunday Times.

“It's the first time we have had to worry about optical fibres actually filling up."

He said: "It is growing so fast, currently at an exponential rate, that, in theory, it could be using all the UK power generation by 2035.

“We cannot make all that extra power, so we will have to restrict or reduce access, perhaps by metering consumers so they pay for what they use."

Laying extra cables to take more data is likely to lead to sharp rises in Internet access costs and also the amount of power needed, he said. New cables could quickly reach their limit too, at the current rate of demand.

Prof Ellis said the public had to begin deciding whether they were prepared to pay more for Internet access.

Technical advances have already greatly multiplied the amount of data that can be sent down optical fibres, but scientists now fear they are reaching the physical limit of what the cables can take without distorting the signal.

Andrew Lord, head of optical access at BT, said: “It's the first time we have had to worry about optical fibres actually filling up.

“We could expand the network by laying more cables but the economics of that do not work and it would increase power consumption."

He said one solution would be rationing, where Internet users including businesses and housholds would be charged for data usage. "New cables laid now could fill in a year or two of being installed, which is far too short," he said. "If we don't fix this then in 10 years time the Internet could have to cost more."

Edited by Steven Gaal
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