UK Column Radio
UK Column News Podcast 2nd October 2024
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We are going to get started with events in the Middle East, and with Keir Starmer, and there's probably health warning required. For this, if anybody is feeling in any way queasy, it's about to get worse. Let's have a listen. Good evening. In the last few hours, the Iranian regime has launched over 200 ballistic missiles that civilian targets in Israel. It's too soon to assess the impactfully, but I utterly condemn this attempt by the Iranian regime to harm innocent Israelis, to escalate this incredibly dangerous situation and push the region ever closer to the brink. So that was Starmer's comments. Everybody can make their own judgement about those, but let's have a look at John Haley then, our Secretary of State for War. And this is what he had to say. I completely condemn Iran's attack on Israel. British forces have this evening played their part in attempts to prevent further escalation in the Middle East. Now, this falls on from the Iranian attack in April when British jets were claimed to have shot down a number of drones. These were the UK military, the UK Air Force, the RAF shooting down these drones as part of what they were calling Operation Shader. And this is actually shooting the down in Syrian airspace, as it were, but Haley went on to say this. He said the UK stands fully behind Israel's right to defend its country and its people against threats. So this has already been unsurprisingly, perhaps framed as a matter of defence, but Vanessa, what's been the latest? Well, I mean, the extraordinary thing, I'll come on to the Iranian attack, but actually they only targeted military bases and installations. And as far as I know, to date, there were no civilians harmed, which of course is the exact opposite of any Israeli operation that has no regard whatsoever for civilian life. So this is our dear or your dear David Lamy. So initially, the first thing I heard about it was an IOF spokesperson saying that the US has informed Israel that Iran is intending to launch missiles. So this was last night, I think around five or six o'clock UK Foreign Minister has asked its Iranian counterparts for Iran to exercise restraint. And of course, that's the messaging that we've continuously been getting from the UK, the EU and the US. Then the next thing that I saw basically was this map of the alert sirens in the occupied territories of Palestine. And you can see that the map turned red before our eyes, and we all assumed at that point something was incoming. The next thing that I personally saw were the missiles passing overhead in the skies of Syria. So at that point, we definitely knew that the attack had begun. So I'm going to first of all just look at the responses today or yesterday. This was in political Israel vows consequences for Iran after the missile barrage. Netanyahu said Iran made a big mistake in attacking Israel and will pay for it. Then let's have another quick look at the article itself. So again, Iran will face the consequences. The promise of retaliation from Israel raises the danger of a heightened cycle of violence. And then speaking at a televised address several hours after the attack, Netanyahu said Iran has made a big mistake. Those who attack us, we attack them. Of course, no mention of the fact that Israel has been pounding Lebanon and carried out the assassination of Ishmael Hanir back in July in Tehran. And of course, the assassination of the secretary general of Hezbollah, Said Hassan Nasram a few days ago. This was in the US naval institute news, US warships fire a dozen interceptors against Iranian missile attack and then have a look again at the messaging within the text of the article. We condemn these reckless attacks by Iran and we call on Iran to halt any further attacks, including from its proxy forces. So we can see where the framing is heading on both sides of the Atlantic here. I just wanted to compare this to these claims that Israel has right to self-defense, that the US, the UK, the EU will stand behind whatever decision that Israel makes. But let's have a look at a video of Matthew D'Amila, the US. When he's challenged about the murder of said Hassan Nasrallah by £85, £2,000 bombs that were dropped in a densely populated civilian area in southern Beirut. Let's play that. What we have definitely not seen is restraints. And you talked about ceasefire involving two sides, but on this we have seen a very sharp escalation by the Israelis. It says your call for restraint has failed. So we continue to call for a diplomatic resolution, but at the same time, as I said, Hezbollah has continued to launch rockets that have kept Israeli civilians from returning to their home. And Israel absolutely, along with every country in the world, has a right to defend itself from terrorism. It also has a right to go after legitimate terrorist targets like Hassan Nasrallah, and we support them taking those steps. Just as we have brought terrorists who targeted American citizens to justice over time. But that said, we long term want to see a diplomatic resolution. That's what we're continuing to pursue. I'll let you draw your own conclusions. From that, these were two Zionist aligned, well, and Zionist actually. Commentators on X last night, Barack Ravi, who's, I think, foreign correspondent for Axios, the US official told me the Iranian attack was defeated. The Iranian attack was defeated by the US and Israel and was ineffective. It's a great success. Dr. Eli David, who actually deleted the post, claimed that one of the videos that was showing the missile strikes in central Palestine, or the occupied territories, claimed that the video was reversed and that these are Israel's interceptor missiles being launched, as you can see, was contested even by the community notes. There are claims that among the various targets that were hit, I'll come on to that. Sorry, I missed out the video. If we can now just play, bearing in mind that the West and Israel are claiming that 97% of those missiles were intercepted, I'll leave you again to draw your own conclusions. Iran is saying 80% hit their targets. We can aim for, let's say, something in between. But if you watch this compilation of a number of the videos that will be put out, mostly filmed by Palestinians, I have to say, you can draw your own conclusions as to how many actually hit their targets. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] Okay, okay guys, we got to get off the roof. These are coming down right next to us here. They're coming down, one just about. We got to go inside. [Music] [Music] [Music] So as I say, you can draw your own conclusions from that, but a huge number of do appear to have hit target and I'll come on to what the targets were. Shortly, there are claims on social media and various media reports from the region that the attacks reportedly destroyed a number of F-35 stealth fighter jets, and never team airbase, which is one of the bases hit, and F-15s and another base could be had Syrian. These reports are not confirmed yet, but those two bases definitely took a series of hits. They are also reports that the gas fields or gas platforms off the coast of the occupied territories were hit, and there was a video this morning of them burning, but I wasn't able to verify the video before I came on. But also just confirmation here in the next video from CNN of the fact that missiles did hit in the center of Tel Aviv actually targeting the Mossad headquarters there, so let's just have a look at this. The US intel view that among the targets were Israeli airfields, but also, and this is crucial, the headquarters of Mossad, the international intelligence service of Israel, which is inside Tel Aviv. It's in the northern part of Tel Aviv, but it's in the city. It's in a densely populated area. And of course the concern is if you're firing, even though Iran might consider that a military target, it is in a densely populated city with civilians around it. So of course that does mean that I've pointed out on many occasions that Israel installs its military and intelligence headquarters in the center of a civilian area in Tel Aviv. But as I've said, Iran did not target civilians and to date that has not been any civilians reported killed in the occupied territories. Now these are images of the control and command headquarters in Iran. The chief of staff of Iran's armed forces, among who's the guy on the left, or yes. Among our targets were Israel's three main air bases, Mossad's terror headquarters, radar sites and gathering sites of armoured vehicles around the Gaza Strip, responsible for the genocide in Gaza. Only military sites were targeted. And then this is from Al-Aqai English, which you can follow on Telegram, general staff of the Iranian armed forces. Iran does not abandon its legitimate right to self-defense in the face of any aggression and will make any vile aggressor regardless of their level regret their actions. If the aggressor entity Israel retaliates, it should expect widespread and comprehensive destruction of its infrastructure in the occupied Palestinian territories and the event of direct intervention by the country supporting the entity, which of course is the UK and the US, in its aggression against Iran. Their centers and interests across the region will be simultaneously targeted by a powerful attack from the Iranian armed forces. So here we have actually Iran directly challenging NATO member states in the region, quite extraordinary events. And there was a later video which showed one of the impacts next to the Mossad headquarters describing it as a crater 30 foot by 50 foot deep. The other information that I've received is that Iran was effectively using old stocks of ballistic missiles. There are reports of hypersonic that I think is entirely untrue. What they were basically using is fairly old technology, but they still managed to penetrate the Israeli air defense, so the Iron Dome, the David Slain, the Arrow 1 and 2. And the US attempts to intercept during the attack. So I think this has exposed the vulnerability of Israel to an attack of this kind. Thank you, Vanessa. I mean, just listening to that statement from the general staff, Iranian armed forces, everybody's claiming a legitimate right to self-defense. And it becomes perpetuating, doesn't it, under those circumstances? Just listening to Tom Tugendhat, who's of course in the running for the Tory party leadership this morning, talking about this, and he's talking about it in terms of language of needing an international coalition to deal with Iran. And we're heading right back to the beginning of the 21st century here, 2001 again, and pushing this narrative of regime change once again. Now, Iran, as we know, was on the target list for the United States and the UK for many, many years now, a few decades. And I just would like to get your comment on this, because countries like Iran and Russia as well, to some degree, are sort of in a really, in a hiding to nothing here, because if they exercise their right to self-defense, it will always be presented as being an aggressive act. And when in fact, if we look over the last lot of decades, we have mainly been the aggressors. Yeah, I mean, I did actually talk about this about an hour before the attack, which said, "Mohamud Marandi and Kivok and Masyan." And, you know, the fact is that Hezbollah and Iran have been trying to actually de-escalate, to restrict the backwards and forwards of attacks. But it reaches a point where when you're trying to deal from a basis of international law and integrity and morality, but the enemy isn't, the enemy is basically violating every single international law and Geneva Convention and is showing absolutely nothing but inhumanity towards civilians. At some point, you have to take a stand and say, "Well, okay, it's going to happen anyway, just as it did in Ukraine." We have to take a preemptive action, and that, I believe, is exactly what Iran has decided to do. Yes, okay, thank you. Well, let's move on then to the situation more broadly with respect to war, and let's bring the wonderful Jens Stoltenberg on screen. We've got to say bye-bye to Jens, because as of yesterday, he is no longer Secretary-General of NATO. So, bye-bye, Jens, and hello to Mark Ruta. So here's John Haley, our Secretary of State for War, saying thank you to Jens Stoltenberg for your decade about standing leadership at NATO. You've strengthened our alliance and our collective defence. UK commitment to NATO is unshakeable. We look forward to working with Secretary-General NATO, the new one, with ironclad support for Ukraine and for our allies. And of course, this was very much a feature of Mark Ruta. And here he is. He waves at everybody when he arrives on stage. He's clearly very happy to be in the job. He said thank you to Jens for the work that he's done, and so on. But we have a little bit of video here. So from this clip, let's just have a listen to a few seconds of what Mark Ruta had to say. But we must go further and faster to meet the enormous challenge ahead. We need more better equipped forces, a more robust, transatlantic defence industry, increased defence production capacity, greater investment in innovation, and secure supply chains. So secure supply chains, very important. We'll come on to that in a second. The main focus of his presentation was support for Ukraine and his determination to see Ukraine in NATO. Clearly no stepping back from that position. In fact, they're accelerating that process now, or at least they will be under his leadership. But on the supply chains front, everybody would be glad to know. Well, first of all, we'll mention this from March this year. UK chip plant could close following Apple order loss. So this is talking about reports in the daily telegraph, talking about a factory in the UK run by a company called Coherent, which runs its 29,000-square-meter fabrication, elaborate laboratory in Newton-Ecliff. And this is in Durham. That was at risk of going out of business because of the loss of a big order from Apple. But don't worry, because the UK government in order to protect supply chains has decided to buy that plant. And so now the UK is the owner of a semiconductor plant. This is the administrative defence jobs in crucial supply chain. The UK defence has been secured. After the acquisition of a semiconductor factory by the Ministry of Defence, John Healy was visiting there on Friday. This is the only secures facility in the UK with the skills and capability to manufacture gallium arsenide semiconductors. They're describing this as strategic investment, and it's going to ensure the facility is capable of producing gallium arsenide semiconductors as well. It's more powerful semiconductors in the future. They're used in a number of military platforms, including to boost fighter jet capabilities. But don't worry, this will underpin future technologies, such as artificial intelligence, quantum, and 6G. So they're very excited about that. But in order to keep ramping up the war narrative, we have Narad here, who were a bit upset with the Russians because they were stalking a Russian bomber a couple of days ago in the Alaska Arctic region. And we'll just show the little bit of video here, because unfortunately, something happened. So there they are. This is Neff 16 that the video was being taken from. And oh, dear, I don't know who was driving that, but it was a bit of a near miss, I would have said. Anyway, they were very upset that the Russians did this. The Russians would dare to bear in mind this was international airspace. And there was no reason at all why anybody should be stalking anybody. The Russians clearly are getting a bit annoyed with it or having fun with it anyway. I don't know what your thoughts are on that. Great flying. It was great flying. Yes. And well, let's move on from warfare then and come back to the UK. And well, we're starting off with farming, but this may be more about vaccinations. Well, it is. And we have the sort of the overlap between the way in which animal health is treated and human health, of course, becoming ever more closely aligned. But we start with a tweet put out by the NFU, and this will bring a few bells. Defra has issued a permit allowing the use of three unauthorized BTV three vaccines in the UK, where a license is in place. So this is against the the the ruminant illness described as blue tongue, like so many of them with rather indistinct symptoms said to be transmitted mainly by midges, but not completely, which, of course, is somewhat confusing. But it now has its own brand. So just like covid, it's ready for a serious ramping up. And just to reinforce the message there, that three unauthorized blue tongue vaccines have been licensed. So in effect, what this means is that the VMD, the veterinary medicines directorate. So the animal equivalent of the MHRA have said, yes, it's not authorized, but you can use it anyway. So let's look at their finances, around 80% of its income is from charges and levies paid for by the relevant sectors of industry, which include the pharmaceutical industry, abattoirs, veterinary surgeons, and importers. This is not unusual, of course, and with us, remember that without such apparent crises in animal health, the pharmaceutical industry that deals with this area would, of course, collapse. Let's look at a manufacturer of one of these vaccines, Boerunga Ingleheim, and they have a controversial history to say the least. I'm going to take an excerpt from a book by Robert Hutchinson called After Nuremberg, produced by Oxford University Press in 2022. And in particular Fritz Fisher, who was before the Nuremberg trials, and there were appeals effectively on the basis of good character. This book states that it summarizes by saying missing was any conception of what Fritz Fisher had actually done during the war as part of this service to his country. The purpose for injury and mutilation of concentration camp prisoners in order to test the efficacy of experimental medical treatments with deadly results. The reason I bring Fisher out to discuss is because he was convicted, but has his sentence reduced and was released after 15 years in 1955, and he subsequently found employment as a researcher for Boerunga Ingleheim, a pharmaceutical company. I know that there are many such people who went effectively from Nazi Germany into all sorts of industries that have shaped the west since. Now, Boerunga also denied strenuously that they had any hand in producing agent orange used to devastating effect as a defoliant herbicide in Vietnam. Do they protest too much on their website they pose the question to themselves did Boerunga Ingleheim directly or indirectly profit from the Vietnam War indirectly they admit through gritted teeth. The effects of the Vietnam War were noticeable in many sectors of the global economy, including the chemical industry. Boerunga Ingleheim filled supply gaps in the civilian crop protection market and thus indirectly benefited financially from the Vietnam War. But the Justia website, commenting on the case that was taken before the United States District Court of New York in 1983, goes quite a lot further, citing as evidence that in the 1950s, the then CH Boerunga Son Company of Germany had serious cases of chloracne among workers engaged in the production of TCP, the recursive chemical used into earlier to manufacture 245-T, which is what agent orange effectively came from or was derived from. By 1955, the Boerunga Company was forced to halt production at two plants, so one might say no smoke without fire, a checkered history and as I say a very controversial one, although elements of it of course are continually denied by the company. But I do think this is relevant because it does suggest the way in which malpractice, malfeasance and anything effectively untoward that's gone before is just swept right under the carpet, but what we'll do is have a look at what we might describe as being the direction of travel for this business, which surprise surprise is a unique initiative for AI and what's called bio-medicine, and this Institute, this Bespoke Institute set up for this says that researchers from AI and bio-medicine will collaborate in an unprecedented partnership to develop novel research approaches for bio-medicine. That I think suggests really the removal of thought and humanity from the process with the result that in effect responsibility doesn't need to be taken for decisions that are made by computers, and it's specifically with the area of bio-med and it's yet another example of a condition being taken in order to medicate against rather than looking at overall health, which takes us right back to the beginning of issuing an unauthorized vaccine in the first place, and of course, as I say, the close parallel with human health. So this is just a theme that we will continue to follow, of course, as human health and animal health become more closely interrelated. Thanks, Charles. Okay. If you like what the UK column does, you would like to support us. We do need your support. You can make a donation on the website or you could join as a member, the website to go for, to find out all the options, the support.uk column.org, various memberships available, and of course, you could pick something up at the UK column shop or from cloud.com. We have an affiliate relationship there. Now, if you want to share our material, we do need you to do that as well, because we are increasingly centered as you, as everybody will be aware that share buttons are there. Or if you want to have a look at the comments on the various articles and videos, you can click on the link there. Okay. Now, tomorrow, we've an interview with you. Yes, a fantastically interesting interview with an academic one, you enjoy who's the scholar and residence at the Mises Institute in Alabama. And she effectively has stop point is that all government intervention results in a bad outcome for the people of that government or of that country. And we have a short clip of her talking about her for her that the very close similarity between what's called equity and apartheid. So they reason the same way in relation to equity. They say, well, it's true that equity is just like apartheid, but we are now doing it from good motives. So it doesn't matter if we're being hypocritical. And I'm saying, yes, it does matter. It's your society that's founded on hypocrisy is volatile, because first of all, people don't like hypocrisy, they become resentful. They become angry. They'll be out on the streets rioting, and you can't fix that by just throwing them all in jail. People don't like to be taken for fools. That's why it matters if we're running a hypocritical system and that's why it's wrong. I'm against it. You can probably tell the way I got fired up. A fascinating interview, getting out at one o'clock tomorrow afternoon. So definitely tune into one jury. Okay. Thank you, Charles. On Sunday morning, Brian will be premiering episode six of Walking the Dog. He's got some sad news at the beginning of that, but we'll quickly move on to discussion with you from a few couple of months ago. Yeah, absolutely. Really enjoyable conversation with Brian about an awful lot of effectively sort of countryside rural farming matters and plenty else besides. So please do tune in on Sunday at 11 o'clock. On his YouTube channel? Yes. Okay. Rapidly running out of tickets now for the Bristol event on the 19th of October. So thank you very, very much to everybody that's coming to that. We're really looking forward to it. You can see the list of people on screen there that will be speaking. So hopefully the last few tickets will go very soon. If you are looking forward to coming to that yourselves, get hold of one because it won't last very much longer. Now, a couple of months ago, when was it, sort of 6th of September, a few weeks ago, sorry, I was speaking about the new proposed health restrictions in Northern Ireland. This is a new public health bill. If you haven't seen that, that was from the 6th of September, 2024. Do have a look at it. And if you want to find that, click on the news archive link on the main menu of the UK column website. The reason I'm mentioning this now is because tonight at 7 p.m. Together is hosting a discussion with Paul through MLA who's a Northern Irish politician about the Northern Ireland public health bill and they're asking what's going on. So that's on the Together YouTube channel. If you want to go and have a look at that. And then we've got a debate coming up on Friday the 4th of October. Capitalism versus climate change debate featuring Andrew Bridget and Colin Jones. To get tickets for that, go to Fixer.co. Fixer spelled F-I-X-R.co and search for capitalism versus climate. Okay, thanks, Charles. Right. Let's move on then. And if you remember a couple of years ago, we were talking about this piece of legislation, the genetic technology brackets precision breeding bill. That's now an act. Charles has mentioned it on a number of occasions more recently. But of course, as we were mentioning last week or the week before, although this act has passed, it is not yet sort of enabled because it requires secondary legislation in order to enable it. Now, at the time that the act was passed, Joe Churchill, who was Minister for Agri Innovation said this is in January 2022, new genetic technologies could help us tackle some of the biggest challenges over age, run food security, climate change and biodiversity loss. And of course, what she means by that is that because the UK government is busy shutting down the farming industry at the moment and converting productive land to wildflower meadow and so on. We are in a food security dangerous possession with respect to food security. So they need to industrialize food production. And they're using this genetic gene editing, this genetic technology in order to do that. So let's just remind ourselves what this was about. Removing plants and animals produced through precision breeding technologies from regulatory requirements to take them out of the regulation regime. Introduced two notification systems. They haven't done that yet. As we've mentioned before, established proportioned regulatory system for precision bread animals. So we need to make the point. This is not just about crops. This is also about animals and establishing a new science based authorization process for food and feed products derived from using precision bread plants and animals. Now, they keep talking about precision breeding. And they've always said that gene editing is about precision breeding. It's about taking what happens naturally, or at least maybe not naturally, but through the selective breeding that process that maybe in the past has taken months, if not years, if not decades, to produce significant changes in an organism and accelerating that through genetic modification. But they're very careful to say that this is not genetic modification because the no foreign genes are end up in the result of resulting organism. They can use foreign genes from other organisms to encourage the genetic mutations. But those foreign genes, or that foreign genetic material has to be removed. Again, that's their claim, at least. So why are we mentioning this again? Well, over the last few days, the World Agrotech Conference has been taking place. It finished yesterday. And well, our minister responsible for food security was speaking at it and was saying that today we are introducing legislation to unlock precision breeding to boost Britain's food security support. Nature's Recovery and Protect Farmers from Climate Shocks. I believe that's almost the same words that his Tory party predecessor used. But nonetheless, they are now introducing this secondary legislation, which will enable this act, and will enable companies that are involved in messing about with organisms in this way to start marketing the final product to you and me. So whether you think this is a good idea or not, you might want to contact your MPs and maybe make them aware of how you feel about whether this legislation should pass. I mean, clearly, there's very limited restriction on it passing with such a majority in the House of Commons at the moment. But it seems madness or dangerous. A whole lot of epithets have been applied to that. Well, I think the main thing is that it's an unknown. And it is another instance of the precautionary principle just being abandoned at will. So it's held on to when it suits the government or indeed any power that seeks to change things. But it's discarded when convenient. And of course, the speeding up of the altering of genetic sequence or however it exactly is conducted. No one knows what the outcome is going to be. And yet that's the bit that's never allowed to be debated. So, yes, I mean, quite, quite potential, a lot of potential for catastrophic outcomes, I would have said. Absolutely. And unrelated, sorry, not unrelated because it's largely climate change, which is driving all this. Of course, we've seen this move for energy UK. What's happening there? Yes. Well, this effectively is an extension from a segment that Ben was dealing with on Monday, talking about the ending of coal power as part of the composition of the UK's power energy grid, electrical energy grid. And I reported on this back in March using a headline from the energy system operator, which I'll come on to in a minute, but saying that the government has set a clear deadline for coal-fired power station to cease production by October. So they did actually hit that target. But what are the implications going to be? This goes back a little bit further before the National Grid was effectively sort of pushed to one side. And they asked the question back in 2022, how will our electricity supply change in the future? And the answer is that the global ambition to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050 means we'll likely be using more electricity than ever before in the coming years. So we'll see how this circle gets squared. They go on to say that in 2020 fossil fuels made up 84% of the global energy mix, but this will need to fall to less than 20% by 2050 in order to reach net zero. Testimated the electricity consumption in the UK and the US will increase by approximately 50% by 2036 and more than double by 2050. So in order to meet that goal, apparently, we now have the National Grid ESO so that the effectively what's now called the National Energy System Operator. They have a new smart website and they've also put out a short video to explain a little bit about what it is that they are up to. Right across the business, there's a team of really capable, innovative people who are hugely excited about the opportunity that ESO presents at this inflection point in tackling climate change, which truly is the challenge of the generation. Fundamental to ESO is the ability to bring an impartial, independent voice into the mix that can really take a whole systems view on the transition, the challenges, the trade-offs that need to be made and ultimately how do we get an optimal outcome for consumers. So looking at the whole system together will create the opportunity for us to have an efficient transition and a speedy transition. That's why ESO is so important. The local environment will be cleaner with less air pollution, it'll mean jobs and the opportunity for people to see the benefits of a decarbonised energy system in their locality. Now what's going to be important is that industry and government and other stakeholders collaborate really closely as we move down these paths because the answer today won't necessarily be the answer tomorrow. It's about ensuring that whole ecosystem comes together to deliver for the country. Sounds brilliant Charles. Well it does, and there's a lot to put out from that video. If you either couldn't quite see the screen closely enough or indeed you were only listening, the lady speaking towards the end was called Jane too good to be true, which it does seem to be there was very little talk about how they were going to produce the requisite amount of electricity and phrases like the answer today might not necessarily be the answer tomorrow is slightly alarming. But of course suggests that the renewable energy because of course this is all about net zero and the spectre of climate change rather than in actual fact producing the energy that could or should be required. So it's a very muddled approach from NISO and of course the other thing that's worth pointing out at this stage is that the demand or the increase for electricity is in large part going to be to satisfy the increase, the enormous increase of the use of artificial intelligence and indeed the data centers that are supposed to be sustaining all life as we know it. But we'll go on and have a look back at the NISO website because I think it bears scrutiny and you'll see highlighted on the right hand side they have a tab entitled energy outages which seems a slightly pessimistic thing to put on the front page of your website when you're meant to be producing the electricity, but we might have an insight as to why they would put such a thing they're also advertising what's called a carbon intensity API which is an application programming interface effectively allowing other agencies to take data off their website they say the goal of this API service is to allow developers to produce applications that will enable consumers and or smart devices to optimize their behavior to minimize CO2 emissions so that the stand out word there is behavior this is to do with changing people's behavior they then go on to say that the WWF which in this case is the World Wildlife Fund have implemented the API into a reusable widget that can help people plan their energy use switching devices on when energy is green and off when it's not this really is about behavioral change and just to reinforce the point they put a graphic up on the website which shows here again if you can't see it it's a table thankfully a timetable for your day showing that how intense the carbon is and at between 6pm and 8pm in the evening they are encouraging you to unplug your electricity now another phrase used during that video was impartial and independent it is no such thing. Another influence behind the scenes or at least actually referred to as the environmental defense fund of the European Union offshoot in some ways shown here to be supported by the Bezos earth fund one of many donors to the value of well over $100,000 in the year so of course there are many many external influences and then the other thing that we go back to this is again from the UK on news back on 13th of March was the article that the then Prime Minister Rishis Sunak had put in the daily telegraph in which he points out but when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing this is how we will keep your lights on and your bills down it is the insurance policy Britain needs to protect our energy security while we deliver our net zero transition it then goes on of course to try and explain why these things are so challenging so you can't protect national security without delivering energy security the war in Ukraine reminded us all of that a nation that is dependent on the whims of dictators for its energy supply can never be truly safe but just how genuine is all of this especially when we're considering enormous price hikes in the value of electricity so we'll just have a look at the most recent graph from trading economics saying the wholesale price of electricity clearly massive spikes seen across 2022 and 2023 but in actual fact the price listed at the moment just over 83 not enormously much higher than that of 2020 or 2021 and yet of course we are being primed not just for huge increases in the price of electricity but also for either outages or behavioral conditioning to make sure that we're not going to use electricity and we're certainly not going to use it if it's not so-called green or clean and it okay let's go back to the Middle East and Vanessa a bit of context maybe from what's been happening yeah I think just for people to fully understand the elements that led to Iran's retaliation against Israel last night so first of all of course we had the assassination of side has sent us rather the Secretary General of Hezbollah in the center of south of Beirut in a civilian area 85 to 1000 pound bombs were dropped in order to destroy the underground sort of tunnels and offices where he was alongside of course an Iranian commander also but on the 29th of September Israel attacked four countries in 24 hours so let's just have a quick look at a video summarizing that the (dramatic music) And of course, all of these attacks killed civilians, including in Damascus when three people were killed, including a colleague, a journalist, and nine were injured. And of course, not only these attacks, Israel has been attacking Syria, trying to destroy air defense, radar, and systems to clear a pathway for future air regression against Syria clearly. Then, U.S. officials quietly backed Israel's military push against Hezbollah, which included the assassination of the Secretary General. Remembering Hezbollah is a political entity. It's a political party in Lebanon and it's part of the interim government. Senior White House figures privately told Israel that the U.S. would support its decision to ramp up the military pressure against Hezbollah, even as the Biden administration publicly urged the Israeli government in recent weeks to curtail its strikes according to American and Israeli officials, as I've mentioned, as it also mentions, whenever you have American officials in Lebanon or anywhere in the region, though it is generally followed by an escalation. And then if we look at the actual damage from the Israeli attacks in Lebanon, the red dots are obviously the areas that Israel is targeting. And as you can see, it's not only contained to the South, it's along the whole border areas. Of course, we believe the attempt will be to close the borders between Lebanon and Syria to isolate Lebanon and isolate Syria. 1,208 dead. I think that is now much higher. Unfortunately, we're now at around 2,104 children, 194 women, one million displaced people, many of whom have come into Syria and are being resettled in various governors here and also being provided with medical care and so on in the already over-taxed Syrian hospitals. And then let's have a look at the speech that Netanyahu gave at the UN regarding the curse and the blasting maps. Let's just have a look at this quite extraordinary. It's a map of a curse. It's a map of an arc of terror that Iran has created and imposed from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean. Iran's malignant arc has shut down international waterways. It cuts off trade. It destroys millions, destroys nations from within and inflicts misery on millions. It's a map of a blessing. It shows Israel, Israel and its Arab partners forming a land bridge connecting Asia and Europe between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. Of course, I remind people of Kennedy's statement, Robert F. Cantagenia, when he basically pointed out Israel's role for the United States in this region. And of course, part of that is to prevent the rise of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative, of Russia, of Iran. And of course, that means including the blasting, which is the Middle East economic corridor, which goes from India through the Gulf States, Israel to Europe. Then this image has been circulating of when Netanyahu gave the approval for the assassination of Nasrallah. Now, some have reported it was in his hotel room, some have said it was at the UNGA, it doesn't matter. It was when he was at the UN. So that says something about the role of the UN and all of this also. And then let's go on to what was actually used, remembering, of course, the claim that Iran put civilian lives in danger when it attacks the occupied territories of Palestine last night. What are the bunker bustabombs? This is from the press TV. Also known as grand penetration munitions, each bomb weighs between 900 and 1,800 kilograms with the ability to penetrate up to 30 meters of Earth or six meters of concrete upon detonation. Bunker busters generate powerful shockwaves that can collapse heavily fortified structures like civilian apartments. And then if we have a look at the next image, we can actually see the extent to which these bombs did penetrate the foundations of the multiple residential blocks that were around the area where they killed Nasrallah and on the right is an image of the actual explosion. And then finally, might you refer to whether or not Iran feels under threat? And that might be one of the reasons alongside all of the other elements that of course have led to this retaliation, including this assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas's leader in Tehran in July. But let's just have a listen to Netanyahu speaking. Again, remember when he spoke to the Lebanese people? Now he's speaking to the Iranian people. I speak a lot about the leaders of Iran. Yet at this pivotal moment, I want to address you, the people of Iran. I want to do so directly without filters, without middlemen. Every day, you see a regime that subjugates you, make fiery speeches about defending Lebanon, defending Gaza. Yet every day, that regime plunges our region deeper into darkness and deeper into war. Every day, their puppets are eliminated. Ask Muhammad Dev, ask Nasrallah. There is nowhere in the Middle East, Israel cannot reach. There's nowhere we will not go to protect our people and protect our country. With every passing moment, the regime is bringing you the noble Persian people closer to the abyss. The vast majority of Iranians know their regime doesn't care a wit about them. If it did care, if it cared about you, it will stop wasting billions of dollars on futile wars across the Middle East. It would start improving your lives. Imagine if all the vast money the regime wasted on nuclear weapons and foreign wars were invested in your children's education and improving your health care, and building your nation's infrastructure, water, sewage, all the other things that you need. Imagine that. Extraordinary projection there. I think you could apply that to the UK, the US, the EU, and Israel. Yes, indeed. Thank you, Vanessa. Thank you, and let's come back now to the UK. Yes, we will. With an announcement from the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, that sounds, I would say, somewhat ominous, that tech experts to shape government, digital vision to drive innovation and boost public services. So the government set up yet another new body, and it's going to be referred to as a digital centre. They say the group will help a 10-year vision for a digital centre of government to drive innovation, transform services, improve lives, and unlock the full potential of digital and data. I'd say the two questions that drop out of that are improve the lives of whom and exactly what sort of potential they're going to be unlocking with regard to digital and data. And to give us something of a steer on that, we should look at the words of Poppy Gustafson, who's just stepped down as the chief executive of Dark Trace, but remains on the board. She says, "I'm excited by the ambition of the government's plans "on digital transformation and delighted to be supporting them "in these efforts, as well as she might be." And we'll come on to explain perhaps why. Dark Trace itself announced her resignation in the last couple of weeks. She used to be replaced by Jill Popelka, who's come from outside, and that's taken immediate effect. There was absolutely no warning at all. Jill will assume the role of Chief Executive and will be appointed to the Dark Trace Board of Directors with the fact from today. So just as a reminder, this is the company that was brought into the news in recent weeks due to the extraordinarily coincidental deaths of Mike Lynch, the founder, and Stephen Chamberlain, the co-founder who died within three days of one another on almost, well, not exactly opposite sides well, but Chamberlain in Cambridge and Lynch in Italy, or, sorry, Sicily, to be more exact. So Dark Trace, of course, now turns out to have a lot of fingers in a lot of pies, particularly within the infrastructure of the United Kingdom, the state, and also it is the subject of a sale, which despite all these things going on in the background, has gone ahead, and just yesterday, first of October, the sale of Dark Trace for $5.3 billion has been bought by Tom Abravo under a new company. Luke Bidko, so the piece to announce that Court Order has been delivered to the registrar of companies, and that the entire issue, Check After the Dark Trace, is now owned by Bidko. The reason for making reference to that, of course, is because of what happened when Mike Lynch sold autonomy to Hewlett-Packard, resulting in a fraud case that he subsequently won and then died immediately after winning. Dark Trace also here, showing that it has terrifically close links to the intelligence services. Poppy Gustafson, shown with Anki's bottle of GCHQ. This was back in July of this year, and the Dark Trace website, giving an insight as to exactly what government might be expecting from having Gustafson, sorry, on the board. Its enterprise immune system technology detects previously unidentified threats in real time, powered by machine learning and mathematics, which analyze the behavior of every device, user and network within an organization. And they go on to say that some of the world's largest corporations rely on Dark Trace's self-learning appliance and sectors, including energy and utilities, financial services, telecommunications, healthcare, manufacturing, retail and transportation. So it looks rather like this new digital centre is going to be used for a huge uplift in surveillance and monitoring of all those that are going to be forced into using yet more digital platforms to conduct their daily business. And of course, we have to ask with the involvement of Dark Trace, who exactly is the threat perceived to be? Is it us or is it them? - Good question now. I've been following the UK column for a number of years. You will know that we covered both and Novichok incidences in the UK. The first, of course, was the poisoning alleged of Sergei and Julius Skripal. And the second was the poisoning alleged of Charlie Rowley and Don Sturgis. And Don Sturgis sadly passed away. The inquiry into the death of Don Sturgis has been launched, if we put that on screen. And so this is an independent inquiry to the circumstances of Don Sturgis death in Salisbury in the 8th of July, 2018. Now it has held a preliminary hearing that was held on the 21st of June this year at the Royal Court of Justice. And the transcript of that preliminary hearing is available on the inquiry website at the moment, but the inquiry, the main inquiry itself begins on the 14th of October, 2024. So this is not too far away now, but the news is out as a few days ago that Sergei and Julius Skripal will not be attending it. So we still have to ask where they are. So as I say, the inquiry, due to starting a few days' time, and they are, this is the end of the death of Don Sturgis, but the Skripals apparently have been advised by the judge that their protection could not be guaranteed and therefore they should not turn up. So there we go, we still get to ask why. But if we look back at what happened at the time, this was the BBC reporting, MSB poisoning experts confirm substance was Novichalk, this is from the 4th of September, 2018. And a quote from this saying, "The substance that killed a woman in MSB "was the same Novichalk nerve agent that poisoned Sergei "and Julius Skripal experts have confirmed." So which experts are they talking about? Well, they're talking about the OPCW, of course, the Organization for Prohibition and Chemical Weapons. And in the statement that they gave at the time, they said the team was able to collect blood samples from Mr. Charles Rollie for transport to the OPCW laboratory. And subsequent analysis by OPCW designated laboratories, Mr. Rollie was able to give informed consent himself. Watch the words, the team was able to collect. Then, it followed up by saying the team attended and observed the postmortem of Ms. Don Sturgis. The team was able to collect a number of biomedical samples, mainly tissue samples for transport to the OPCW laboratory and subsequent analysis by OPCW designated laboratories. But then they go on to say, consent for this procedure was obtained from the next kin as per the United Kingdom Human-Tissue Act. But the team was briefed on the identity of the toxic chemical identified by the United Kingdom as it was able to review analytical results and data from the chemical analysis of biomedical samples collected from the affected individuals by the British authorities. So we initially have them saying that the team collected these, but actually it was the British authorities that collected the samples and then handed them over to the team and my question then would be, was it an opportunity for a bit of bit and switch going on? So we put that back up again. They concluded by saying the results of the analysis of this environmental sample conducted by OPCW designated laboratories show that the sample consists of the toxic chemical at a concentration of 97 to 98%. The sample is there considered a neat agent of high purity, the OPCW designated laboratories also identified a number of impurities, constituting the remaining 2 to 3% of the sample. We need to remember that this is the same OPCW that still has questions to answer over the OPCW Duma Deception. And I would just refer everybody to the articles on the UK column website on this. And I'd just like to mention in passing, by the way, that Piers Robinson's most recent article on this has been chosen by NewsGuard and their most recent annual communication with us as being one which they highlight as being full of misinformation and disinformation. They're, I'll, we'll talk more about that in the future, but in the meantime, go and have a look at Piers' coverage of this because this is extremely important. Now, at the time, or the UN Department of Representatives to the OPCW, John Roper said this week also marks the sixth anniversary of the Novichok nerve agent. Sorry, this was in March, I think this year, five people were injured in Dawn Sturgis, poisoned in the nearby Amesbury, tragically died. Only the Russian state had the technical means, operational experience and motive to carry out the attack. We would just remind everybody to go back and have a look at Alex Thompson's article, Scripal, a Russian web or a Rusey web, where he makes the point that the Russians were not the only people with the capability to do this. If it was, genuinely a Novichok attack, which I would very much argue that it wasn't, HM government has a dedicated facility, DSDL, hard-coded, important down, in Wiltshire seven-rate miles from the scene of the discovery of the Scripals. And if anybody's in any doubt about the veracity of the whole Scripal story, again, remind everybody to have a look at this article, The Day of the Scripal by Tim Norman, where he has created a timeline of all the official narrative stories, all the mainstream press stories, as they happened. And when you read this and you get to the end of it, and it is a long article, but it is worth the effort. When you get to the end of it, you will discover the major anomalies and strangeness of this whole case. And we also cannot forget the comments of the earlier chief medical officer talking about the use of wet wipes, if you felt that you had come into contact with Novichok. I mean, this story is so full of holes, it's unbelievable. And any chance that the Don Sturgis' family have of getting to the truth are effectively gone by the fact that the Scripals themselves will not be attending this inquiry. So we'll keep you posted on this as it goes. We're gonna leave it there for today. We will be back in a few minutes for some extra. We'll have Wilsi from Resistance GB joining us for that as well. Please join the severe UK column member. And otherwise, we will see you on Friday, 1pm as usual. Bye-bye. - Bye-bye. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - We wear our work day by day, stitch by stitch. At Dickies, we believe work is what we're made of. 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