20 Years On: Princess Diana’s Death

OffGuardian

Today marks the twentieth anniversary of the death of Princess Diana. For the past week or so Diana (The Peoples’ Princess TM) has been in every paper, on every channel. The BBC has a saccharine fluff piece, shallow as a puddle. The Daily Mail goes one step further into the absurd, publicising a “what if” novel, offering a version of reality where Diana survived. In the Guardian, Jonathan Freedland descends into self-parody by somehow contriving to use Diana’s anniversary to whine about Brexit (again), whilst Matthew D’Ancona makes the argument that maybe public emotion is bad and should be ignored. Hillary Mantel writes thousands of words about a person that never really existed, none of them really mean anything.

Nobody, anywhere in the press, comes close to saying anything important. Nobody tries to tell the truth.

I don’t know what happened the night Princess Diana died…

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Lawlessness in Ukraine

OffGuardian

by the Collective of Investigative Journalists, August 20, 2017

The Russians treated Nadiya Savchenko like a lady; the Ukrainians beat up women.

August 13-14th,2017: Darya Mastikasheva the civil partner of our colleague the famous Russian investigative reporter Sergey Sokolov is visiting her mother and son at their dacha outside the city of Dnepro, Ukraine.

She receives a call from Alexander, a friend, asking her to meet him that evening, they agreed on a venue in Dnepro. Darya drove to the venue, whilst parking her car she was suddenly blocked in by two black cars, four armed and masked men jumped out and ordered her out of her vehicle. They took hold of her, put a bag over her head, handcuffed her and bundled her into a car. She had been kidnapped.

She was driven to what appeared to be an empty building and thrown into a locked basement room. Some…

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Russiatosis

OffGuardian

by James Howard Kunstler, via Clusterfuck Nation, August 4, 2017

Russia hysteria has become a full-blown national psychosis at a moment in history when a separate array of troubles poses the real threat to America’s well-being. Most of these have to do with the country’s swan dive into bankruptcy, but meeting them honestly would force uncomfortable choices on the grifters and caitiffs in congress. Meanwhile, the Treasury Dept is burning through its dwindling cash reserves, and all government activities will face a shutdown at the end of the summer unless congress votes to raise the debt ceiling — which may be way harder than passing the stupid Russia sanctions bill.

That bill, vaingloriously called The Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act will only blow up in America’s face. This country’s actual trade with Russia is negligible, but the bill aims to interrupt and punish Europe’s trade, centering on…

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America Declares Economic War Against Europe

OffGuardian

Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org

On Friday night, July 28th, U.S. President Donald Trump said that he would sign into law the increased economic sanctions(passed by 98-2 in the Senate and 419-3 in the House) against any business that is declared to have “knowingly provided goods or services … for construction, modernisation, or repair of Russia’s energy export pipelines.”

Russia is the largest energy-supplier to the world’s largest energy-market, which is Europe, or the EU. The biggest proportion of that trade is in Europe’s main source of energy, which is gas, which is pipelined into Europe from Russia. So: those pipelines are vitally important not only to Russia’s economy but to Europe’s.

President Trump had gotten Congress to agree to limit the application of this provision only to “The President, in coordination with allies of the United States, may impose five or more of the sanctions…

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