Food Prices Rise

http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/218966/Cost-of-the-weekly-shop-set-to-rocket-next-yearCost-of-the-weekly-shop-set-to-rocket-next-year#ixzz18vyMTnor


FOOD prices are set to spiral next year, hitting families struggling to pay higher petrol and energy bills.

The wholesale cost of bread, cereals, coffee and potatoes has rocketed by up to 70 per cent – and retailers say they will pass on the cost in 2011.

Economists have already warned that price rises and the January VAT hikes would dramatically increase the price of a weekly shop.

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The Office for National Statistics says the soaring cost of crops caused food prices to rise by 1.6 per cent last month. This equates to 19.2 per cent annually – the highest since the Seventies.

A combination of rising populations, growing affluence in China, Russia and Brazil, and crop failures has pushed up wheat, cotton, sugar and other staples.

While bread, cereals and clothing are already higher in the shops, the full effects of the rises have not yet filtered through.

Hovis owners Premier Foods, household products group Unilever, and cheese and coffee giant Kraft have warned they will not be able to avoid passing on rises in the coming months.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation said that prices would carry on rising.

Abdolreza Abbassian, of the Intergovernmental Group on Foodgrains, said “almost all commodities are in a tight supply-demand situation”, adding it was “unlikely” that production would increase.

Cotton has doubled in price. Orange juice is 70 per cent dearer. A litre of Princes brand is up from 92p to £1.42.

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Wholesale wheat prices are up 69 per cent, coffee has risen by 48 per cent, and potatoes by 47 per cent, with the cost set to be passed on to shoppers in the new year.

Gas prices are at their highest for two years, and petrol hit a record 122p a litre this month.

Clothing retailers Primark and Zara have also indicated that the era of low-cost fashion is over.


Read more: http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/218966/Cost-of-the-weekly-shop-set-to-rocket-next-yearCost-of-the-weekly-shop-set-to-rocket-next-yearCost-of-the-weekly-shop-set-to-rocket-next-year#ixzz18y31aoz9

Food Price Rises a GM Conspiracy

http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/12/leaked-cable-hike-food-prices-to-boost-gm-crop-approval-in-europe/

Leaked Cable: Hike Food Prices To Boost GM Crop Approval In Europe

by Rady Ananda / December 16th, 2010

In a January 2008 meeting, US and Spain trade officials strategized how to increase acceptance of genetically modified foods in Europe, including inflating food prices on the commodities market, according to a leaked US diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks.

During the meeting, Secretary of State for International Trade, Pedro Mejia, and Secretary General, Alfredo Bonet “noted that commodity price hikes might spur greater liberalization on biotech imports.”

It seems Wall Street traders got the word. By June 2008, food prices had spiked so severely that “The Economist announced that the real price of food had reached its highest level since 1845, the year the magazine first calculated the number,” reports Fred Kaufman in The Food Bubble: How Wall Street starved millions and got away with it.

The unprecedented high in food prices in 2008 caused an additional 250 million people to go hungry, pushing the global number to over a billion. 2008 is also the first year “since such statistics have been kept, that the proportion of the world’s population without enough to eat ratcheted upward,” said Kaufman.

All to boost acceptance of GM foods, and done via a trading scheme on which Wall Street speculators profited enormously.

Mass food riots in several nations ensued, as did an investigation by the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, resulting in a finding that, yes, unrestricted speculation in food commodities caused soaring prices.

In a comment at the end of the cable, the diplomat also revealed a level of pessimism about Spain’s willingness to help force GM foods on Europe:

This was a very good substantive discussion. However, it is clear that while Spain will continue sometimes to vote in favor of biotechnology liberalization proposals, the Spaniards will tread warily on this issue given their own domestic sensitivities and other equities Spain has in the EU.

That pessimism was largely unfounded, as “Spain planted 80 percent of all the Bt maize in the EU in 2009 and maintained its record adoption rate of 22 percent from the previous year,” noted a report by the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA).

The leaked cables, amounting to over 1,300 right now, reveal US obsession with expanding the biotech market:

* One leaked cable confirms US concern with promoting GM foods in Africa, which Richard Brenneman described as “a significant item on the State Department’s agenda.”

* In another leaked cable describing the potential to expand US interests in “isolationist” Austria, that nation’s ban on GM foods is highlighted.

* According to a leaked cable from 2007, of concern was French President Sarkozy’s desire to implement a ban on GM foods in line with populist sentiment. According to GM Free Regions, France maintains its opposition to GM foods today.

* In this leaked cable, the Pope openly blamed global hunger on commodity speculation and corrupt public officials, so far refusing to support the use of GM foods. (Also see my December 12 article, “Leaked cables confirm Pope’s distance from GMO debate and limited stance on bioethics.”)

More may be revealed in the remaining cables.

Profiteering Leaves World open to Future Price Manipulation

Food commodity speculation was enabled in 2000 by the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. Deregulation handyman Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX) introduced the bill, coauthored by financial industry lobbyists and cosponsored by Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN), the chairman of the Agriculture Committee.

Mother Jones describes the legislative climate when the bill passed:

As part of a decades-long anti-regulatory crusade, Gramm pulled a sly legislative maneuver that greased the way to the multibillion-dollar subprime meltdown….

Gramm’s most cunning coup on behalf of his friends in the financial services industry—friends who gave him millions over his 24-year congressional career—came on December 15, 2000. It was an especially tense time in Washington. Only two days earlier, the Supreme Court had issued its decision on Bush v. Gore. President Bill Clinton and the Republican-controlled Congress were locked in a budget showdown. It was the perfect moment for a wily senator to game the system. As Congress and the White House were hurriedly hammering out a $384-billion omnibus spending bill, Gramm slipped in a 262-page measure called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act.

Not only did that Act enable the subprime meltdown that crashed the economy and put tens of millions into foreclosure, it also enabled Wall Street investors to artificially spike the price of food.

“Bankers had taken control of the world’s food, money chased money, and a billion people went hungry,” Kaufman clarified.

After a year long investigation, he confirmed that price hikes in food from 2005 through the peak in June 2008 had nothing to do with the supply chain, but instead occurred as a result of a Wall Street investment scheme known as Commodity Investment Funds. The first to develop the idea was Goldman Sachs, which took 18 different food sources, including cattle, coffee, cocoa, corn, hogs and wheat, and created an investment package. Kaufman explains:

They weighted the investment value of each element, blended and commingled the parts into sums, then reduced what had been a complicated collection of real things into a mathematical formula that could be expressed as a single manifestation, to be known thenceforward as the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index. Then they began to offer shares.

(Kaufman summarizes his report in this June 2010 interview by Thom Hartmann, and in this July Democracy Now interview.)

Kaufman points out that also in 2008, ConAgra Foods was able to sell its trading arm to a hedge fund for $2.8 billion. The world’s largest grain trader and GMO giant, Cargill, recorded an 86% jump in annual profits in the first quarter of 2008, attributed to commodity trading and an expanding biofuels market. The Star Tribune calculated that Cargill earned $471,611 an hour that quarter.

The investment bubble burst in June 2008 and “aggregate commodity prices fell about 60% by mid-November 2008,” notes Steve Suppan of the Institute for Agricultural and Trade Policy. Though the US House of Representatives introduced a regulatory bill, “legislative loopholes will exempt at least 40-45%” of such trades. Supporting the loopholes is Cargill, among other multinational corporations. Suppan concludes:

The outlook for a sustainable and transparent financial system to underwrite trade dependent food security is not good… [T]he budget for the just launched congressional Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, scheduled to report December 15, [2010] is just $8 million. The Wall Street lobbying budget for defeating financial reform legislation is thus far $344 million…

The final bill was signed into law in July 2010 (summarized by the New York Times), and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission continues to issue new rules purportedly aimed at regulating financial markets. “But big banks influence the rules governing derivatives through a variety of industry groups,” notes another New York Times piece.

Did the artificial price hike open EU doors to GM foods?

No, in fact, ISAAA noted that: “Six European countries planted 94,750 hectares of biotech crops in 2009, down from seven countries and 107,719 hectares in 2008, as Germany discontinued its planting.”

A closer look at EU member state actions on GM foods after June 2008 details some of the GM-free battle in Europe:

* In December 2008, after a ten-year hiatus, Italy agreed to open field tests of GM crops.

* The Czech Republic became the second largest grower of Bt corn in the EU in 2008, nearly doubling the acreage planted in 2007. The USDA characterized it as being an investment target not only in agriculture but also in vaccine development.

* At the EU level, “In an apparent U-turn in his attitude as one of EU executive’s most GM-wary commissioners, environment chief Stavros Dimas” wrote draft approvals for two more varieties of GM corn, reported Reuters in December 2008.

* However, by September 2008, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland had all become GM-free, and urged the UK to do likewise.

* Though pressured by the European Commission, in January 2009 Hungary refused to lift its ban on GM foods. Its sovereign right to reject GMOs, along with Austria’s, was later upheld by an EU vote with 20 member states supporting such bans.

* In March 2009, Luxembourg became the fifth EU nation to ban GM foods, following France, Hungary, Greece and Austria.

* In October 2009, Turkey banned the import of biotech products.

For updates and a more thorough history of EU actions on GM foods, see GMO-Free Europe. European states handle the issue differently than in the US, allowing regions within a nation to maintain GM-free zones. Each step a nation takes toward GM approval invariably draws regional resistance.

Biotech Crops Expand Globally in 2009

Though the strategy to hike food prices to spur European acceptance of GM foods failed, it worked elsewhere. Globally, biotech crops expanded by 7% in 2009 over 2008 figures, according to this chart by ISAAA:

In fact, ISAAA asserted GM expansion was due to the 2008 price hikes, as noted by chairman and founder Clive James: “With last year’s food crisis, price spikes, and hunger and malnutrition afflicting more than 1 billion people for the first time ever, there has been a global shift from efforts for just food security to food self-sufficiency.”

Poorer nations hardest hit by hunger — in Africa and South America — are more vulnerable to price hikes. But even after the geologically unusual earthquake in January, Haitian farmers rejected Monsanto’s “gift” of GM seeds. However, the big push remains in Africa and China.

A Wary Future

Although it is now widely accepted that Wall Street speculation caused the food bubble, starving hundreds of millions, regulators have so far failed to curb the practices that allow international banksters to manipulate food prices.

Meanwhile, the biotech industry continues to repeat its mantra that GM food can cure world hunger. This claim is not backed by the science and it seems to hold less sway in the GM food debate, especially with the Pope recognizing what many others assert: there is no shortage of food; hunger expanded because of price hikes.

A Christmas Tale

The storm began at midnight on the winter solstice, which had been an ominous portent indeed. Carried forth upon a howling North wind, the tempest turned the night white and cloaked everything in its path beneath a three foot deep crust of snow. After twenty four hours of continuous snow fall Grain village had been cut off from the outside world, as the only road in and out of the place, the A228, had been blocked by the drifting snow that had been blown by the wind across the fields and marshes.

An unearthly silence then descended upon the entire village in the absence of traffic. Local folk threw more coal on the fire, or turned up the gas and electric, and sought to keep warm as the temperature dropped to below minus ten degrees centigrade. The old ones knew that travel in and out of the village was now impossible for days or even weeks and they began to ration and conserve their food and fuel knowing that sooner or later both would begin to run out.

The only happy people in the whole village were the local school children who ran whooping and laughing into the streets to play. Snowball fights and duels broke out spontaneously in the streets whilst passing pedestrians sought to dodge the flying missiles as they tramped to the local shop in search of milk and bread.

Soon bored with bombarding each other with snow balls, the children then set to work building a whole host of snowmen on their gardens and on lawns, forming them from hand patted snow in a variety of shapes and sizes that ranged from dwarfish to gigantic.

It was after the children had grown bored with building the snow men that their simple fun turned into malevolence and spite.

Every village has its own oddball.

In Grain it was Mary O’Reilly, a spinster and purported witch who lived in the old wooden house down the lane that led to the marsh. Her family had lived on the peninsula for over four hundred years, and according to local legend she was a witch the same as her mother had been a witch.

In her late eighties and a spinster, Mary hated the local children as much as they hated her. Those children she found trespassing on her land were apt to find themselves being chased away by the five wolf hounds she kept as guard dogs in her dilapidated cottage.

Footballs that bounced into her garden were punctured with a pitch fork, local cats vanished if they dared defile her rose beds and door to door salesmen were chased away with her walking stick if they dared disturb her. She was a woman who enjoyed being spiteful and petty, and as such entire generations of the village had come to despise her.

Waking to find the world outside covered in fresh snow, Mary threw on her heavy winter jacket, pulled on her wellingtoon boots and set off for the local shops to buy some food for her dogs.

As she walked along the main road, she had the misfortune to encounter a group of the local children in one of the temporary lulls between their snow ball fights.

One of the children had held a grudge against Mary since the summer, when he had been chased down the lane by Mary and hit with her walking stick for intruding onto her property in order to try and scrump some apples from the trees in her garden. He had fallen over, torn his trousers and scraped his knees and had been punished for doing so by his mother. Now he had the opportunity for revenge.

Mary was walking slowly down the street, probing the snow on the ground with her stick so as to ensure she did not fall over on the ice, when a volley of snow balls flew through the air and landed heavily on the back of her head.

With a scream Mary fell forwards and cracked her head hard on the pavement. As she lay still on the ground blood began to well from a wound on her forehead and freeze upon her face. The children scattered and ran when they saw what they had done.

Slowly she got to her knees and stood up, and turned back towards her cottage. She felt dizzy with shock and knew she would not be able to make it to the shops, so she turned back and walked slowly back to where she had came from, leaving a trail of blood spots on the snow, each frozen drop as red as a ruby.

Mary staggered up her garden path and went back inside her cottage, slamming the door shut behind her. Once inside she collapsed unconscious on the floor. She died alone within the hour.

The storm returned again that evening and dumped another three feet of snow on the village. The only way in and out of the village now was by helicopter, and the village store had been stripped clean of all supplies as panic buying began. In the middle of the night, the power went out as the weight of the snow brought down the pylons that carried the electricity into the village.

For three days and nights the storm stayed and dumped its cargo of snow on the village. Drifts ten feet high now gathered around cars and hedges, as the village disappeared totally into the snow.

The only place of refuge was the village pub which was run on fuel oil and it became a haven for those whose electricity and heat had failed. They gathered in the bar beside the log fire in the hearth at opening time and counted down the hours until closing time when they would be forced to return to their heatless frozen abodes.

It was just before midnight and the pub was preparing to close. The customers were buttoning their jackets and pulling on the hats and gloves to leave, when the main door to the pub burst open and someone threw themselves into the bar.

The stranger wore a balaclava and as he entered the bar he banged the door behind him and then bolted it shut. Then he collapsed unconscious on the floor. The landlord, Jim Clutterbuck, ran around the bar and knelt beside the man. He was unconscious but breathing. As he unbuttoned his coat and sought to take the mans jacket off so as to warm him by the fire, he noticed that the back of the mans jacket was shredded and torn open as if slashed open with a knife.

Then he noticed the blood pouring from the mans right leg and as he tried to move the man, a gush of warm blood sprayed across the carpet and wall.

“ Jesus Christ”, Jim shouted as the blood sprayed across his face, “ someone get me a tourniquet”.

One of the people in the bar slid a belt from his trousers, leant down beside Jim and tied the belt around the mans upper leg in order to stop the bleeding. The man whimpered but remained unconscious.

“ Someone call an ambulance “ Jim shouted, but he knew it was no good. The storm had blocked the roads and the falling snow and wind would make any helicopter landing impossible. The land line phone lines had been brought down by the snow and atmospheric conditions due to the storm meant mobile phone screens kept displaying the same ’No Network. Please Redial’.

They were on their own.

One of the regulars in the bar, a nurse in the local doctors surgery had grabbed the pub first aid kit that was on the bar and was busy pulling out bandages from the box.

“Its okay Jim“, she said reassuringly, “Let me have a look” and knelt down beside the stranger.

“ Oh my god”, she said as she pulled the balaclava up over the mans face , “ its Bill Wilson “ and the people in the bar, about a dozen or so, gasped and then moved forward to see the man they all knew as the local grocery shop owner.

“He must have been heading home from the shop “ someone said.

“ What the hell happened to him” someone else said, “He looks like he been stabbed or something” one of the drinkers ventured to suggest.

The nurse was busy wrapping the bandages around his leg when he started to come too.

As he awoke he screamed and pushed her away and tried to get to his feet, his arms flailing wildly in the air as he fought off some assailant in his delirium and shock caused by blood loss. Then as quick as he had awoken, he lapsed into unconsciousness again.

Suddenly something threw itself against the front door of the pub with a huge crash and began to bang against the locked door.

Outside they could hear a blood curdling howling, that was soon joined by others.

One of the regulars ran to the window and looked out into the car park.

Outside in the snow could be seen five huge dogs pacing to and fro.

“Oh my god”, the man said as he gazed out of the window, “Its marys dogs “.

Just as he said this the window exploded inwards and a huge dogs head burst through the broken glass, gripped him around the throat and dragged him through the window and out into the darkness.

Out in the car park the dogs pounced on the still struggling man and started to bite chunks from his flesh. He tried to struggle and raised his hands to ward the beasts off, until one of them lunged forweard and with a single snap of its jaws bit off all the fingers from his right hand leaving just a ragged stump that squirted blood onto the snow.

Everyone in the bar began to scream except for Jim the landlord, who ran forward and threw one of the heavy oak tables in the bar onto its side in order to cover the hole in the glass of the window. He did this just in time as a massive snout probed through the glass and tried to snap and bite at his hands.

Others also ran forward and began piling up chairs and tables in front of the window to seal the gap caused by the dog dragging the man through the window.

Jim then ran behind the bar and grabbed a bottle from the range of alcoholic drinks on the optics and ran upstairs. His footsteps could be heard banging up the stairs above the bar and then a moment later a ball of flame exploded outside the window. He had taken a bottle of brandy and with a wick torn from a bed sheet made a small incendiary bomb and then thrown it from the open upstairs window to drive the prowling beasts away.

As the red flames flickered and bloomed, the beasts backed away from the window and vanished into the night.

A few moments later the sound of breaking glass and screams drifted through the darkness. The dogs had attacked one of the houses adjacent to the pub and were killing its occupants.

“ Oh my god “, one of the men muttered “ they must have run out of food and started hunting people in the snow”.

The nurse stood up, dropped the bandages in her hands on the floor then looked at Jim and shook her head, “He’s gone”, she said, “ he had lost much blood” and walked back to the bar and sat down her hands trembling as she knocked back a glass of rum offered to her by one of the men behind the bar.

For three days and nights the dogs went from house to house in the village, hunting down and killing the occupants.

Finally on New Years Day the road was opened. At dawn a snow plough that had cut a lonely furrow through the drifts and into the village, trundled out of the gloom.

As the driver entered the village, some of the survivors came staggering from their houses waving at him to stop.

The driver then noticed the strange shapes that were laying in the road and which he was bulldozing out of the way, vaguely human in shape and frozen solid. Then he noticed that some of the houses had burnt to the ground and then been cloaked in fresh snow, the black charred roof joints protruding like burnt bones from the eviscerated remnants of the houses. Others had pools of what looked like blood on their paths and in their driveways.

He pulled the door open of the snow plough and stepped out of the vehicle to take a closer look. Then he noticed that people that he thought were waving at him were in fact screaming at him to stay in his cab.

As he turned around and walked back to the snow plough from out of the bushes beside his vehicle a wolf hound threw itself forward, clamped its massive jaws around his throat and dragged him to the ground.

As he tried to scream its fangs tore through his windpipe and ripped his throat out.

The last thing he saw were the other dogs running forward to share their prize as the people in the street ran back indoors.

The snow had begun to fall again, and as the wind began to stiffen the dogs renewed their hunt.

The Tyranny of Holocaust Museum's

A very interesting article in The Guardian about the refusal of the EU to pass laws that criminalise the Communist Holocaust, that reveals a lot more than they expected.

Note that the EU will only seek to pass laws that criminalise the extermination and murder of ethnic minorities, whilst the extermination and murder of ETHNIC MAJORITIES is not regarded as a crime or worthy of attention.

That suggests that not only are the people that run the EU mentally ill, they are also morally warped.

Evil is evil and should be regarded as such.

The fact that the EU refuses to criminalise crimes against ethnic majority groups means the EU is a threat to all of us, for by refusing to classify such crimes as crimes we are all at risk from the EU.

Secondly the article reveals the twisted morality and mental sickness of people like
Efraim Zuroff, the Nazi-hunter and director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's Israel office. Note what he says here "For all the terrible crimes of the USSR, you can't compare the people who built Auschwitz with the people who liberated it. Nazi Germany would probably not have been defeated if it weren't for Russia."

So because the murderous, criminal Communist regime saved the Jews by defeating the Nazis who were persecuting Jews, that means the world should not commemorate the murders of hundreds of millions of people by Communism says Efraim Zuroff who is Jewish.

That is about as perverted and cynical as any human being can get.

To measure evil solely in relation to the suffering of ones own people, and then to seek to define the law in that context, is about as perverted as one can get.

The rise in fascism in Eastern Europe is being caused by the failure to equate Communism as an evil alongside Nazism.

The Eastern European people see the whole world in the grip of a global 'Holocaust Industry' where the plight of Jews is used by the left, liberals and Zionists to accrue wealth, power and privileges for themselves. Yet at the same time as Nazism is excoriated, Communism is rehabilitated.

They suffered under both Nazism and Communism, though a hell of a lot longer under Communism and far worse than under Nazism - yet their plight is forgotten and the plight of the Jews under Nazism promoted all the time.

This has caused the reaction we see today.

The Holocaust Industry does not care about defeating or commemorating evil, it is all about empowering a new elite - politically and economically.

The Holocaust Industry is a tool for the repression of heretical ideas, heretical belief and heretical speech.

It used to intimidate and undermine the rights of ethnic majorities in the west and to promote ethnic minorities.

The proliferation of Holocaust Museums all over the world is a sign of the conquest of those nations by a cynical, perverted ideology that sees the suffering of ethnic minorities as a crime against humanity, but the murder of hundreds of millions of ethnic majorities as irrelevant.

The Holocaust Museums are not there to commemorate the past, they are there to control the future.

The aim of Holocaust Museums is not to ensure evil is never able to repeat itself, it is to ensure evil is targeted at ethnic majorities and not ethnic minorities.

They are POLITICAL institutions designed to intimidate, coerce and undermine the cohesion of societies in order for minority groups to profit.

Every nation that opens a Holocaust Museum declares it is corrupted.

Until the Communist Holocaust is commemorated alongside the Jewish extermination of the Canaanites, the Armenian genocide, the Rwandan genocide, the Indian and Pakistan genocides during partition, the racist murders of British soldiers by the Japanese in WW2 prison camps and the ethnic murders of Palestinians by Zionists in every Holocaust Museum that shows how all human beings of all races and religions have been capable of genocide, racism and mass murder throughout history - then every Holocaust Museum should be regarded as a sinful, evil, perverted places predicated on the abuse of history for political and economic means.






http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/21/european-commission-communist-crimes-nazism

EU rejects eastern states' call to outlaw denial of crimes by communist regimes

Eastern European states wanted Soviet crimes 'treated according to the same standards' as those of Nazi regimes

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* Leigh Phillips in Brussels
* guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 21 December 2010 18.15 GMT
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Soviet soldiers are seen with some of the prisoners they liberated in Auschwitz Soviet soldiers with some of the prisoners they freed at Auschwitz in January 1945. 'For all the terrible crimes of the USSR, you can't compare the people who built Auschwitz with the people who liberated it,' said Nazi-hunter Efraim Zuroff. Photograph: Reuters

The European commission has rejected calls from eastern Europe to introduce a so-called double genocide law that would criminalise the denial of crimes perpetrated by communist regimes, in the same way many EU countries ban the denial of the Holocaust.

Last week six countries wrote to Viviane Reding, the European justice commissioner, calling for the "public condoning, denial and gross trivialisation of totalitarian crimes" to be punished.

Foreign ministers from Lithuania, Latvia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and the Czech Republic said communist crimes "should be treated according to the same standards" as those of Nazi regimes, notably in those countries with Holocaust denial laws.

But the EU executive will say in a report due tomorrow that opinion is too divided on the matter and that there is no legal basis allowing Brussels to act.

"There is no consensus on it. The different member states have wildly differing approaches," EU justice spokesman Matthew Newman told the Guardian. He said the commission takes the issue "very seriously", but: "At this stage, the conditions to make a legislative proposal have not been met. The commission will continue to keep this matter under review."

The east European countries point to the EU's ability to make laws relating to "particularly serious" cross-border crimes and a separate EU decision permitting the crafting of rules targeting racism and xenophobia.

But the commission says neither legal instrument mentions totalitarianism and rejects the idea of double genocide. "The bottom line is, obviously, what they did was horrendous, but communist regimes did not target ethnic minorities," said Newman.

According to Lithuania, whose foreign minister leads the campaign to create a new law, the EU's understanding of genocide should be extended to include crimes against groups defined by "social status or political convictions".

Andrius Grikienis, a spokesman for Lithuania's mission to the EU, said: "During the first years of Soviet occupation, Lithuania lost more than 780,000 of its residents. 444,000 fled Lithuania or were repatriated, 275,697 were deported to the gulag or exile, 21,556 resistance fighters and their supporters were killed and 25,000 died on the front."

By comparison, he said: "More than 200,000 citizens of Jewish origin were killed by Nazis and their collaborators."

The commission is also uneasy about wading into a highly controversial area. A number of western EU countries oppose the proposal, suggesting that it is a thinly-veiled attempt at rehabilitation of domestic collaborators while antisemitism remains a live issue on the streets and in the media in the east.

On 25 November, the ambassadors to the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, of seven EU states including the UK sent a letter to the country's president complaining about a newspaper article by an interior ministry historian, Petras Stankeras, that described the Holocaust as a "legend".

In the letter, they complained about how a court in May had ruled that the swastika is a "traditional Lithuanian symbol" while "spurious attempts are made to equate the uniquely evil genocide of the Jews with Soviet crimes against Lithuania, which, though great in magnitude, cannot be regarded as equivalent in either their intention or result".

Efraim Zuroff, the Nazi-hunter and director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's Israel office, describes the effort by the six eastern states as a "false symmetry".

"We have no problem with a day of commemoration for communist crimes, and indeed, something should be done, but the Holocaust was a unique tragedy in history," he said.

"For all the terrible crimes of the USSR, you can't compare the people who built Auschwitz with the people who liberated it. Nazi Germany would probably not have been defeated if it weren't for Russia."

The Final Peice in the Race Jigsaw Puzzle

With the announcement of the discovery of the Denisovans the final piece in the jigsaw puzzle of the origins of race is in place.

Race is a product of mixture of Homo Sapiens DNA and archaic human DNA.

The Out of Africa Model and the Regional Development Theory are both correct, in that modern human racial groups are mixtures of both Homo Sapiens and archaic human DNA.

The mystery was the origins of the people of Melanesians.

Now the discovery of the Denisovan DNA strains in modern people from Papua New Guinea proves my theory of the origins of race is 100 % correct.

What we define as race is the percentage of archaic DNA in modern human populations.









There were THREE types of ancient humans: 30,000-year-old fossils prove Neanderthals and modern humans were not the only species on Earth


By David Derbyshire
Last updated at 6:00 PM on 22nd December 2010

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A mysterious new species of human being who lived alongside our ancestors 30,000 years ago has been discovered by scientists.
The cavemen, called Denisovans, was identified from DNA taken from a tooth and finger bone found in a cave in Siberia.
They walked the Earth during the last Ice Age when modern humans were developing sophisticated stone tools, jewellery and art.
The finding means there were at least three distinct members of the human family tree alive at the time - modern humans, Denisovans and Neanderthals.
DNA taken from this belonging to a young girl was found to be neither from early human nor Neanderthal, and was from a previously unknown species
The bone belonged to a young girl nicknamed the X-Woman.
Provisional tests published earlier this year suggested she belonged to an entirely new species. Now a fully DNA analysis has confirmed her place on the increasingly muddled human family tree.
The discovery follows the controversial discovery of another 'new' species of 3 ft tall human called the Hobbit on an Indonesian island in 2004.
However, many researchers have dismissed the Hobbit, claiming the bones came from a modern human with a growth disorder.
The little finger belonged to a girl aged around five to seven and was found in the Denisova cave in the Altai Mountains in southern Siberia in 2008 alongside ornaments and jewellery.
The Denisovans were physically different from the thickset Neanderthals and modern humans although they also walked upright two legs.
The tooth resembles much older human ancestors - such as Homo erectus - which died out one million years ago.
The Denisovans were similar in looks to homo erectus, pictured, a species which dies out more than one million years ago
The Denisovans lived at a time when our ancestors, and the Neanderthals, were fishing and hunting, wearing jewellery, painting caves and making animal carvings.
The DNA test show that the tooth and finger bone came from different people, the researchers report in the journal Nature.
It is only in the last decade that scientists have been able to retrieve DNA from fossils. Before that they could only identify bones from their shape and size.
The study found extracts of Denisovan DNA in modern day inhabitants of Melanesia - the islands to the north and east of Australia which include New Guinea. That suggests the Denisovans interbred with the ancestors of Melanesians and may have been widespread in Asia.
'This is an incredibly well-preserved sample, so it was a joy to work with data this nice.

'We don't know all the reasons why, but it is almost miraculous how well-preserved the DNA is,' said Dr Richard Green from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
The new species appears to have been a 'sister group' to the Neanderthals and its discovery paints a complicated picture of human evolution and migration out of Africa - the cradle of mankind.
Dr Green believes one group of early human ancestors left Africa between 300,000 and 400,000 years ago and quickly split up.
One branch evolved into the Neanderthals who spread into Europe, while the other moved east and became Denisovans.
Both the Neanderthals and the Denisovans started in Africa but, around the same time, the Neanderthals moved out to the west and into Europe, while the Denisovans headed East
Archaeologists excavate remains Denisova Cave in Siberia. Scientists have discovered a third type of ancient human in the caves
Around 70,000 years there was another wave of migration when modern humans quit Africa.
These were our ancestors and they first encountered and interbred with Neanderthals - leaving traces of Neanderthal DNA in the genetic code of all non-Africans alive today.
One group of modern humans later came into contact with Denisovans, leaving traces of Denisovan DNA in the humans who settled in Melanesia.
'This study fills in some of the details, but we would like to know much more about the Denisovans and their interactions with human populations,' Dr Green said.
'And you have to wonder if there were other populations that remain to be discovered. Is there a fourth player in this story?'


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1340830/There-THREE-types-ancient-humans-30-000-year-old-finger-fossil-new-species.html#ixzz18rrYBJrL

There is no such thing as Islam

There is no such thing as Islam.

Islam is not a monolithic religious entity with one defined set of rules, there is in fact many Islam's.

To say there is an single 'Islam' is like saying there is a single 'christianity' which includes protestantism, Jehovahs Witnesses, Seventh Day Adventists and Catholics as they are all the same.

They are not. Go and ask the people in Northern Ireland if Catholicism and Protestantism are the same.

They each use the Bible as the basis of their faith, but each have massive doctrinal differences.

This is why each will kill the other in the name of some minor doctrinal differences.

The same is with the Islamic religions.

They each use the Koran but each are fundamentally different.

A Muslim can reject Sharia Law just as a Christian can reject Christian Fundamentalism.

One can be a Muslim and a Christian without being a fundamentalist nutter.

The problem is always the extremists - the Sharia law nutters, the Christian Fundamentalist rapture nutters, the Zionists and the Islamists etc etc.

This is why the enemy is not Islam, but Islamism.

This is why the problem is fundamentalists not Muslims.

To say the problem is Islam or Muslims is simply wrong.

One can be a decent human being and a Muslim just as one can be a decent Catholic priest and condemn the pederasts in the Church.

The problem is when people conflate Islamists with Muslims or pederasts with the Church and try and say the problem is Islam or the Catholic Church - it isnt.

The problem is fundamentalism and evil individuals.

Why Nothing on the Website ?

Nick is the boss, therefore the buck stops at the top.

Another 80 grand wasted by Griffin.




England and Wales High Court (Chancery Division) Decisions
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URL: http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Ch/2010/3414.html
Cite as: [2010] EWHC 3414 (Ch)

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Neutral Citation Number: [2010] EWHC 3414 (Ch)
Case No: 8LV 30015

IN THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE
CHANCERY DIVISION
NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE
DISTRICT REGISTRY

Royal Courts of Justice
Strand, London, WC2A 2LL
21/12/2010

B e f o r e :

MR JUSTICE DAVID RICHARDS
____________________
Between:
NICHOLAS JOHN GRIFFIN (1)
SIMON DARBY (2)
Claimants
- and -

KENNETH SMITH (1) NICHOLLA SMITH (2)
SADIE GRAHAM (3)
STEPHEN BLAKE (4)
MATTHEW SINGLE (5)
IAN DAWSON (6)
Defendants

____________________

Mr Christopher Coney (instructed by Charles Henry & Co Solicitors) for the Claimants
Mr Adrian Davies (instructed by Frank & Co. Solicitors) for the Defendants
Hearing date: 29 November 2010
____________________

HTML VERSION OF JUDGMENT
____________________

Crown Copyright ©

MR JUSTICE DAVID RICHARDS :

Introduction
1. The claimants in this action apply to discontinue the action with no order as to costs. The general rule under CPR 38.6 is that a claimant who discontinues an action must pay the defendants' costs unless the court orders otherwise. The claimants accept that the burden lies on them to demonstrate why a different order should be made. Permission to discontinue is itself required because an interim injunction was granted at an early stage of the proceedings: CPR 38.2(2) The defendants consent to discontinuance but they, or some of them, submit that it should be on the normal terms that the claimants pay their costs.

2. The action arose out of a dispute within the British National Party (the BNP). The first claimant, Nicholas Griffin, is the national chairman of the BNP, a post he has held for some years. The second claimant, Simon Darby, was the vice-chairman when the proceedings were issued but he has since resigned from that post and as a member of the BNP. They sue on behalf of themselves and the other members of the BNP, which is an unincorporated association.

3. The defendants were all members of the BNP, and held offices or positions within it. The first to fourth defendants were paid remuneration by the BNP, until their dismissal in December 2007, either as employees or, as the BNP asserts, as self-employed persons for the period after December 2006. All the defendants were expelled, or purportedly expelled, as members in or about December 2007. Mr Griffin's explanation of the background in a witness statement made on 23 February 2008 was as follows:

"I have been aware for some time of a dissenting faction within the Party. At first it appeared to involve a clash of personalities but it became apparent that a group which included the Defendants, had been meeting or talking together for the purpose of formulating their plans in respect of the Party and that their objectives were inconsistent with the Constitution. Accordingly I decided to exercise my powers under the Constitution firstly to revoke the appointment to administrative posts of the First, Second and Third Defendants and secondly, so far as I was able, to determine the Defendants' membership of the Party. "

4. In December 2007 and January 2008, two documents attacking Mr Griffin's leadership and calling for the reinstatement of the first to fifth defendants, were distributed to the members of the BNP, by email or by post to their home or other addresses held on the membership list. The claimants suspected that these documents were prepared and distributed by the defendants, in view of photographs of them and references to them in the documents (although in fact there were no references to the sixth defendant), and that they must have retained a copy of the BNP membership list.

5. Legal proceedings were not commenced until 26 February 2008, when, without a letter before action, the claim form was issued. Relief was sought in respect of a number of matters, which may be summarised as follows, taking account of amendments made in April 2008. First, an order was sought against all defendants, except the fifth, for delivery up of chattels listed in a schedule and of all membership lists held by them. Secondly, an order was sought against the first to fourth defendants to delete all membership lists held by them in electronic form. Thirdly, an order was sought that each defendant, except the fifth, deliver an affidavit stating whether they had communicated details of membership of the BNP and, if so, providing particulars, and confirming that they had delivered up or deleted all membership lists, and giving details. Fourthly, an order was sought against the first defendant for repayment of a sum of £4,500 alleged to have been withdrawn from BNP bank accounts, and an inquiry and accounts were sought against the first to fourth defendants as to all cash held by them or accounts operated by them on behalf of the BNP. Fifthly, an injunction was sought against all defendants restraining them from distributing or circulating any communication to any member of the BNP using for that purpose a list of members of the BNP save with its authority. Sixthly, there was a claim for damages against all the defendants.

6. The claimants applied for interim relief. Evidence was filed by each defendant. The first and second defendants, who are domiciled in Scotland, applied to dismiss the claims against them on the grounds that they should be brought in the Scottish Courts in accordance with Art. XIX of the Union with Scotland Act 1706 and, more prosaically but more pertinently, Schedule 4 to the Civil Jurisdiction and Judgments Act 1982.

7. By an order dated 10 April 2008, HHJ Pelling QC dealt with the application for interim relief and the first and second defendants' challenge to the jurisdiction of the English court. He held that the challenge was well-founded as regards the claims for the delivery up of chattels and the recovery of £4,500 which he accordingly dismissed. Agreement was reached for the delivery up of chattels by those defendants who had any in their possession including the first and second defendants. By consent, it was ordered that the first to third defendants swear affidavits dealing with the communication of details of the membership list and confirming delivery up or deletion of all membership lists. The claimants sought no similar order against the fifth and sixth defendants. An interim injunction was made by consent against all the defendants restraining them from using a membership list to communicate with members.

8. The position at that stage was therefore that the claims for delivery up of chattels, the making of affidavits and the repayment of £4,500 had been finally dealt with.

9. On the present hearing, counsel for the claimants accepted that the pleaded claim for damages was never quantified and that no more than nominal damages would ever be recoverable. He accepted also that the purpose of continuing with the action after April 2008 was to obtain a permanent injunction to restrain use of membership lists.

10. In their witness statements, and subsequently in their defences, the second, fifth and sixth defendants denied any involvement in the distribution of the documents circulated to members in December 2007 and January 2008. In his defence, the fourth defendant denied involvement in the preparation and distribution of the documents. In her witness statement, the third defendant admitted and asserted that she was involved in their production and distribution. While all the defendants admitted that the membership list constituted confidential information, they denied that use of the list to distribute documents to the persons named on the list constituted a breach of confidence or of any other legal duty.

11. On 17 September 2008 the fifth defendant was made bankrupt. On 18 November 2008 he published the BNP's membership list on-line. It therefore became publicly available and generated a good deal of media comment. He and his wife, the third defendant, were both charged with offences under data protection legislation. He pleaded guilty to one charge at Nottingham Magistrates Court on 1 September 2009 but no evidence was offered against his wife who was accordingly acquitted.

12. The claimants accept that with the membership list publicly available, they no longer had any prospect of obtaining a permanent injunction against any of the defendants to restrain use of the list. Nonetheless, the claimants continued the proceedings. Each of the defendants served a defence and counterclaim on dates between March and June 2009, for which extensions of time were retrospectively given on 27 October 2009. By the same order, directions were given for the service of replies and defences to counterclaim, disclosure, evidence and other matters leading to trial. The directions hearing had been fixed by the court on its own initiative and in a "Brief Statement of Issues" filed before the hearing, the claimants' solicitors confirmed that "the claimants wish to continue with the case". Further directions were given on 26 January 2010, extending time limits and giving directions for listing. The trial was subsequently listed for five days starting on 29 November 2010.

13. In February 2010 the claimants issued an application to re-amend the particulars of claim, to include a claim for damages against the third and fifth defendants in respect of the publication by the fifth defendant of the membership list. The hearing of the application was adjourned on three occasions at the claimants' request and was overtaken by their application to discontinue. On 19 November 2010 it was dismissed with an order that the claimants pay the defendants' costs of the application.

14. On 15 March 2010 the third defendant was made bankrupt.

15. Following a change of solicitors towards the end of September 2010, the claimants intimated an intention to discontinue the proceedings. The application for permission to discontinue with no order as to costs was issued on 16 November 2010. In a witness statement in support of the application, Mr Griffin stated as follows:

"3.The reasons that we seek to discontinue are that (1) there has been a material change since proceedings were issued in that the Fifth Defendant frustrated the purpose of the litigation by publishing the entire membership list of the BNP online (2) in so far as orders for delivery up of chattels are concerned, the First to Fourth Defendants have since the issue of proceedings effected such delivery up either as a result of being served with proceedings or pursuant to the Order of this honourable Court made on the 10 April 2008.

4.In those circumstances there is no point proceeding with the claim since I am of the view that pursuing claims for damages would be wholly disproportionate to the costs involved. I should say that the Second Claimant has since the issue of these proceedings resigned both from the party and his position with it. I confirm, however, that he consents to the application.

..

7.The claim was brought mainly to restrain use of the Membership List of the BNP. The actions of the Fifth Defendant have rendered the issue academic.

..

8.The result of his publication of the list was that it was copied on to a number of sites other than the one he used, such Wikileaks, and it is still available online at various sites. Clearly, the Court would no longer grant an injunction in respect of the list against any of the Defendants. In any event, the damage has already been done."

16. He referred also to the bankruptcies of the third and fifth defendants.

17. The leading authorities on the approach to be adopted by the court to an application such as the present are two decisions of the Court of Appeal, Re Walker Wingsail Systems plc [2006] 1 WLR 2194 and Messih v McMillan Williams [2010] EWCA Civ 844. The latter decision was in proceedings brought for damages for professional negligence against two firms of solicitors. One firm settled on terms which provided the claimant with full recovery and costs. It was a term of the settlement that he discontinue as against the other firm of solicitors. He did so, and the issue was whether he should pay their costs.

18. The judge at first instance ordered that he need not pay their costs, relying on the settlement offer as a material change of circumstances and on the saving of costs and court time resulting from the early termination of the proceedings. He held that these factors outweighed the desire of the solicitors to defend the claim so as to vindicate their position and protect their professional reputation, as well as to recover their costs.

19. The Court of Appeal allowed the defendant solicitors' appeal and ordered the claimant to pay their costs of the action. Giving the only reasoned judgment, Patten LJ said that the correct approach is for the court to consider all the matters relied on as justifying the making of some alternative order for costs and then to decide whether they are sufficient to support such an order. The avoidance of the costs and time of continued proceedings could not of itself justify a departure from the usual order, as it was the result of any discontinuance. Something more was needed, and Patten LJ said at para 31:

"In this case there was nothing more. As already mentioned, the claimant knew what MW's position was and that it wished to contest its liability for the claim. The claimant made his decision to discontinue notwithstanding this and in the knowledge that the settlement with LMA made no provision for the payment of MW's costs against the claimant as opposed to those of the third party proceedings. By doing so Mr Messih removed the ability of MW to establish its defence and left the court in the position of being unable to determine what the outcome of the trial is likely to have been. The circumstances were therefore the quite usual consequences of a decision to discontinue and I can see nothing in them to justify the order which the Recorder made."

20. Likewise, in Re Walker Wingsail Systems plc, the defendant wished to have the claims for misfeasance and fraudulent trading made against him decided and was prepared to continue to defend the claim against him. It was the applicant liquidator who wished to discontinue having come to realise what should always have been apparent to him, that the claims lacked commercial purpose.

21. I turn therefore to the grounds on which the claimants in this case rely for a departure from the usual requirement that they pay the defendants' costs. I have earlier set out the grounds relied on by Mr Griffin, as expressed in his witness statement.

22. The principal ground is that by publishing the membership list on the internet, the fifth defendant frustrated the purpose of the litigation, making it impossible for the claimants to obtain the injunction which they sought. This was a wrongful act by the fifth defendant, as his conviction shows, and it did frustrate the purpose of the action. But leaving aside the position of the fifth defendant, it cannot in my judgment justify a departure from the usual consequence in costs. First, the publication occurred in November 2008, but the action was continued for a further two years, with a view to a trial fixed to start on 29 November 2010. Secondly, it is not suggested that the first, second, fourth or sixth defendants were in any way involved in that publication and, while the claimants' proposed re-amendment to the particulars of claim would have alleged the involvement of the third defendant, the Crown offered no evidence against her in the criminal proceedings and her involvement has not been established in other proceedings. Thirdly, the defendants had pleaded defences to the claim for an injunction based on the facts and/or legal principles, which they were entitled to advance. With the exception of the third and fifth defendants, they were prepared to proceed to trial to establish their defences and to obtain orders for costs in their favour.

23. The second ground put forward is that, as regards the claim for delivery up of chattels, the first to fourth defendants delivered them up either as a result of being served with the proceedings or in accordance with the agreement scheduled to the order made on 10 April 2008. This too provides no cogent basis for an order relieving the claimants of liability for costs. First, it could not do so in respect of costs incurred after 10 April 2008. Secondly, the proceedings were issued and the application for interim relief was made without any warning to the defendants. The speed with which delivery up occurred shows that, if a letter before action had been sent, there would most probably have been no need for proceedings as regards this head of claim.

24. Mr Griffin fails to explain in his witness statement why the action was continued for two years after the publication of the membership list, and fails to explain why the proceedings are now being discontinued.

25. No grounds are advanced by the claimants which in my judgment could justify a departure from the usual consequence in costs of discontinuance, as regards the costs of the first, second, fourth and sixth defendants.

26. There are different considerations as regards the third and fifth defendants. The fifth defendant's unlawful publication of the membership list has frustrated the action and in addition he was bankrupt for a year from September 2008. The third defendant was declared bankrupt in March 2010 and therefore remains an undischarged bankrupt. Her right to costs under CPR 38.6 vests in the Official Receiver. He has taken no part in the proceedings. He has moreover provided the court with a letter from the third defendant stating that she and the fifth defendant "no longer wish to be a part of the civil case and neither of us want to pursue any part of our Counterclaim or defence. We would like the matter to be completely discontinued."

27. In these circumstances, I consider it appropriate to make an order that the claimants do not pay the costs of the third and fifth defendants, insofar as they may be additional to those incurred on behalf of the other defendants. For the avoidance of doubt, I shall order that the claimants pay the costs of the other defendants, to be assessed on the standard basis if not agreed.

28. There is a final and separate point to deal with. By his order dated 19 November 2010, HHJ Langan QC directed that the claimants' solicitors should show cause at the hearing of the present application why a wasted costs order should not be made against them in respect of the costs thrown away by the adjournment of the pre-trial review on 17 November 2010 as a result of their failure to arrange a telephone case management conference, prepare a case summary, prepare a draft order or prepare a bundle for the pre-trial review in accordance with an order dated 9 November 2010.

29. A witness statement has been made by Jane Stanley Phillips, whose firm replaced the claimants' previous solicitors towards the end of September 2010 and who acts as a consultant to Charles Henry & Co who went on the record on or around 19 October 2010. She explains that the first notice of the pre-trial review fixed for 17 November 2010 received by her or Charles Henry & Co was an email from the defendants' solicitors, Frank & Co, sent at 5.17 pm on 15 November but not seen until the following morning. Notice of the hearing from the court was dated 9 November but not received until the morning of 16 November 2010. From enquiries made by Ms Phillips with the court in Leeds, it appears that Frank & Co requested a listing of a PTR, first by telephone on 29 October and then in writing a day or so later. Frank & Co did not inform Charles Henry & Co or Ms Phillips of these steps.

30. On 16 November 2010 Charles Henry & Co issued the application for permission to discontinue, which had been intimated at an earlier stage, and in the course of that day a consent order was agreed with Frank & Co. HHJ Langan QC required the hearing to go ahead, because the proposed consent order provided for him to hear the application to discontinue in Leeds on 29 November 2010, which was not possible. The terms of the order made was the same as the consent order, save for the venue and identity of judge and the provision as regards wasted costs.

31. There was fault on the part of the claimants or their solicitors in not either issuing the discontinuance application at an earlier stage or fixing and preparing for a pre-trial review as required by an order made on 27 January 2010. However, I am satisfied from Ms Phillips' witness statement that the circumstances do not indicate either that Charles Henry & Co acted improperly, unreasonably or (save as just indicated) negligently or that it would be just to make a wasted costs order against them.