Tag: Britain

Significant oil discovery in England

There could be up to 100 billion barrels of oil onshore beneath the South of England, says exploration firm UK Oil & Gas Investments (UKOG).

Last year, the firm drilled a well at Horse Hill, near Gatwick airport, and analysis of that well suggests the local area could hold 158 million barrels of oil per square mile.

But only a fraction of the 100 billion total would be recovered, UKOG admits.

The North Sea has produced about 45 billion barrels in 40 years.

“We think we’ve found a very significant discovery here, probably the largest [onshore in the UK] in the last 30 years, and we think it has national significance,” Stephen Sanderson, UKOG’s chief executive told the BBC.

UKOG says that the majority of the oil lies within the Upper Jurassic Kimmeridge formation at a depth of between 2,500ft (762m) and 3,000ft (914m).

Most experts believe fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, will be needed to get commercial quantities of oil from the region.

Concerns over fracking led to large-scale protests when Cuadrilla drilled at Balcombe, West Sussex, in 2013.

Source: BBC

Tensions mount over Falklands

Tensions over the Falklands/Malvinas were ratcheted up last night when Argentina and Britain summoned each other’s ambassadors. Argentina said it would sue UK oil firms, while Britain is boosting its defenses on the contested islands.

The UK’s ambassador to Buenos Aires was summoned Thursday and less than 24 hours later Alicia Castro, Argentine ambassador to Britain, was called in for a meeting at the Foreign Office.

The latest spat comes against a background of heightened tension fueled by oil, military buildups and colonial history.

As the UK general election approaches, Britain has very publicly reinforced its garrison in the contested South Atlantic archipelago over which the two countries fought a short but vicious war 33 years ago this month.

The redeployment last month of two Chinook helicopters, withdrawn in 2006, and a pledge by Defense Secretary Michael Fallon to spend £180 million over the next 10 years on upgrading the Falklands’ defenses, both come at a time when advancing UK oil exploration has become a central component of the 182-year-old colonial dispute.

The litigation centers on three UK oil exploration firms: Premier Oil, Falkland Oil and Gas and Rockhopper.

Earlier this month the firms involved reported they had discovered 27.9 meters of net-oil bearing reservoir and 18.5 meters of net gas-bearing reservoir.

The license area being explored – which lies to the north of the Falklands – is 40 percent owned by Falklands Oil and Gas, 36 percent by Premiere Oil and 24 percent by Rockhopper Exploration.

“This is a fantastic start to the 2015 Falklands drilling campaign and provides early proof of the significant remaining potential of the North Falklands Basin,” said Samuel Moody, CEO at Rockhopper, in a statement.

Tensions between the countries have waxed and waned in the three decades since Argentine forces were driven out by a British task force, but recent leaks by whistleblower Edward Snowden indicate a secret intelligence war has been waged throughout the intervening period.

The intelligence data released by Snowden suggests Britain spied on the Argentine authorities since at least 2009, preparing offensive cyber operations to change public opinion regarding the Falklands, according to the Intercept.

British spy agency GCHQ had allegedly been preparing a bold, covert plan called “Operation QUITO.” It involved the Joint Threat Research and Intelligence Group (JTRIG), a classified unit that spread misinformation.

The leaks describe the mission as a “long-running, large scale, pioneering effects operation,” with surveillance on several platforms a “high priority” task.

The rise of nationalism in Britain

As the eurozone crisis continues, anti-establishment insurgencies like the Scottish National Party, SNP’s, are surfacing all over Europe: nationalist, populist, separatist, left or right.

As the British empire was gradually dissolved after the second world war and its industrial base attacked by younger, nimbler economies, the cohesion of the British state weakened.

There was an impulse towards supra-nationalism in the shape of membership in the European Union, but Britain joined late, in 1973.

English people – steeped in Britain’s maritime, imperial traditions – felt hostile towards the EU.

At the same time, long-smothered regional nationalism was reviving on Britain’s Celtic fringes. In divided Ireland, it was violent; in Scotland, political, emboldened by newly discovered North Sea oil; in Wales, initially, cultural, based around the preservation of the Welsh language.

That was in the 70s. Forty years on, these rival strands are much stronger, and testing the concept of “Britishness” to destruction.

The Scottish national party has barely paused for breath since losing last September’s referendum on independence for Scotland – immediately declaring itself the moral victor and demanding greater powers for Edinburgh.

Since the referendum result – 55% no, 45% yes – disaffected working-class Labour voters have flocked to the SNP. Polls suggest the Scottish nationalists, now led by Scotland’s new first minister, the formidable Nicola Sturgeon, will slaughter Labour north of the border, winning dozens of Scotland’s 59 seats and perhaps holding the balance of power in London. If she finds herself in that position, Sturgeon promises to block Cameron and prop up a minority Miliband administration.

Britain’s Tory newspapers are busy denouncing Sturgeon as “the most dangerous woman” in the country. Cameron – whose Tories have only one seat in Scotland – warns of a Scottish veto from the people who want to break up Britain. Miliband is embarrassed.

Meanwhile, in England, the populist anti-European right, in the form of the UK independence party (Ukip), has evolved under the skilful leadership of Nigel Farage.

Ukip’s proven ability to win protest votes at four-yearly elections to the 28-nation European parliament is now threatening the status quo at Westminster. It has two MPs (both defectors from the Tories) and hopes to win more on 7 May.

If that sounds familiar, it should. Though Ukip portrays itself as free market and libertarian, it is also deeply nostalgic, socially conservative, and suspicious of immigrants and big-government bureaucracy, especially from the EU’s Brussels headquarters.

Racist, homophobic and authoritarian? Certainly not, says Farage. We just want to be a self-governing sovereign state again. But Ukip’s “little guy” rank-and-file is not always quite so on-message. This is disruptive Tea Party Republicanism with added potency.

Ukip’s threat to the status quo is twofold. It may take enough votes away from Cameron’s Tories to deny the prime minister his slim hopes of a Commons majority on May 7, or even to stop him being the largest party, which would make it hard for him to form another coalition.

In a tight race, with both main parties polling at around 34%, Ukip’s rise may also hurt Miliband’s prospects by peeling off Labour’s equivalent of blue-collar Democrats, working-class voters fed up with stagnant wages and gay marriage, underfunded public services and “unpatriotic” liberals.

Source: The Guardian

Britain’s secret history: The Irish Holocaust

The Great Famine of Ireland is widely believed to be due to a failed potato crop which led to starvation for two-fifths of the population between 1845-1852 – with around 1 million people dead and another million emigrating from Ireland – causing Ireland’s population to drop by 25%.

However, it wasn’t due to the failed potato crop that led to the deaths of so many people, but the imposed English rules placed on the Irish that saw them being treated like slaves by English rulers, and prevented them from accessing other forms of food that would have prevented their deaths. The English were responsible for an Irish holocaust.

Uprootedpalestinians Blog reports:

It was not blighted potatoes that caused the Irish genocide of 150 years ago. Yes, there was potato blight at the time. It struck harvests in the autumn of 1845, and had begun in North Carolina, then spread throughout the Northern Hemisphere for several years – yet it did not cause famine or mass death anywhere, except in Ireland. Why was that?

Nor were potatoes the only major produce of Irish agriculture at the time; they were just the only produce which the Irish – 75 percent of whom were feudal tenants of mostly tyrannical British landlords, fanatical preachers of ‘free trade’ – were allowed to eat or to feed to their livestock! As the historian Arthur Young wrote, the Irish tenant farmers were, like so many others, effectively slaves.

“A landlord in Ireland can scarcely invent an order which a laborer, servant, or cottier [tenant farmer] dares to refuse… He may punish with his cane or his horsewhip with the most perfect security. A poor man would have his bones broken if he offered to lift a hand in his own defense.”

‘Free trade’ decreed that no government surplus food – no ‘welfare’ – be given to the starving, in order to leave the market for food undisturbed. “We do not propose,” Prime Minister Lord John Russell told the House of Commons, “to interfere with the regular mode by which Indian corn and other kinds of grain may be brought into Ireland.”

A prominent Irish author and journalist, Tim Pat Coogan, explores this shameful chapter in Ireland’s rich history in his book The Famine Plot:

England’s Role in Ireland’s Greatest Tragedy. In the final chapter, he recalls the xenophobic images and words commonly used to caricature the Irish in Victorian England. Colonial Administrator (and obvious psychopath) Charles Trevelyan, and other architects of the ‘famine response’, had a direct hand in filling the newspapers with the “oft-repeated theme that the famine was the result of a flaw in the Irish character.” And Punch, an English ‘satirical’ magazine, regularly portrayed “‘Paddy’ as a simian in a tailcoat and a derby, engaged in plotting murder, battening on the labour of the English workingman, and generally living a life of indolent treason,” explains Mr Coogan. The result of such dehumanising propaganda was to make unreasonable policy seem reasonable and just – historical revisionism in action!

Essentially, ‘free trade’ gave Irish farm families three choices when the potato crops failed:

– starve on their farms, while selling their grain crops to pay their rent
– report to the Public Works or the Poor Law workhouses to be worked/starved to death (as the Nazis did to the inmates of Auschwitz)
– emigrate and take the 50/50 chance of surviving the passage across the Atlantic.

According to the definitions of the Geneva Convention, what happened in Ireland between 1845-50 was Genocide. During those ‘potato famine years’ – food was systematically removed from the shores of Ireland, a policy conducted in full awareness that it was starving the population.

The result was a million deaths, with two million more emigrating.

Read more:

Source: yournewswire.com

Boerehaat book on Man Booker list

The 10 finalists for a prestigious literary award were announced at the University of Cape Town yesterday.

Boerehaat author and British darling Marlene van Niekerk’s “uncompromising look” at poor Afrikaans communities has netted her a place in the finals of the Man Booker International Prize.

The award is a complement to the Man Booker Prize, recognising an author’s body of work rather than a single book of fiction. It is the first time the finalists have been announced in Africa.

The international award takes place every second year and the winner – who takes home £60000 (about R1-million) – will be announced on May 19 in London.

“Marlene van Niekerk is the author of two immense masterpieces, Triomf and Agaat, which chart in evocative, sometimes disturbing detail the aches and aggravations of political transition in South Africa for those who saw themselves as on the losing side, in particular impoverished Afrikaners,” the judges exalted.

“Van Niekerk’s vision is ambitious, uncompromising and irrefutable. The bold experimentalism of her Afrikaans takes the reader deep inside the contortions of the apartheid psyche and asks whether some historical hurts and hatreds can ever be entirely erased.”

Van Niekerk “explores” Afrikaner “in-breeding”, a well-known British insult often directed towards the Irish, and other competing groups, but in this case with no foundation in reality as even poor Afrikaners generally shun anti-family values. The novel Triomf offers more of an awkward look into wishful English stereotypes and real denial.

Oxford University English professor Elleke Boehmer, who is one of the judges in the awards, also heaped exaggerated praise on Van Niekerk’s anti-Afrikaner drivel. Boehmer, also a lesbian, lauded the “richness and pungency of language, and an extraordinary demotic range”.

Most readers hated the book steeped in the author’s alarming lack of self-awareness. The film version of Triomf was a resounding flop.

Mugabe defends Rhodes

Zimbabwean youths were stopped yesterday from digging up the remains of Cecil Rhodes from his grave in the Matopos Hills, just outside Bulawayo.

The Zanu-PF youths assembled at the party’s Bulawayo offices, from which they intended to go to the hills. They apparently planned to exhume Rhodes’s remains so they could be repatriated to Britain.

But a directive from Zanu-PF headquarters in Harare put an end to their plan.

Zweli Malinga, a Zanu-PF youth activist from Masotsha Ndlovu district, where Rhodes is buried, reportedly told NewZimbabwe online: ”We cannot stand seeing whites coming from abroad every day to honour and conduct rituals before their ancestor who is here buried on our own land. The sooner they take [Rhodes] to their own land the better. If they do not we will do it ourselves.”

Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe in 2012 blocked attempts by “war veterans” to exhume Rhodes’ remains.

A member of the Zanu-PF politburo, Sikhanyiso Ndlovu, said: “We decided to preserve it after independence for historical [reasons].”

The deputy head of communication at the British High Commission in Pretoria, Isabel Potgieter, said it was up to South Africans and Zimbabweans how they handled the Rhodes saga.

“It is not for us to comment. It is for stakeholders in the countries to decide,” she said.

The Rhodes Must Fall campaign has spread from UCT to Kimberley, with calls for a statue of him there to be removed.

Comment boards placed next to the Rhodes statue at UCT were removed after being covered in racist remarks prompting vice-chancellor Max Price to whine about “hate speech”, something he somehow finds perfectly in order when directed against Afrikaners.

US attacks London’s ‘constant accomodation’ of China

The Obama administration accused the UK of a “constant accommodation” of China after Britain decided to join a new China-led financial institution that could rival the World Bank.

The rare rebuke of one of the US’s closest allies came as Britain prepared to announce that it will become a founding member of the $50bn Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, making it the first country in the G7 group of leading economies to join an institution launched by China last October.

Thursday’s reprimand was a rare breach in the “special relationship” that has been a backbone of western policy for decades. It also underlined US concerns over China’s efforts to establish a new generation of international development banks that could challenge Washington-based global institutions. The US has been lobbying other allies not to join the AIIB.

Relations between Washington and David Cameron’s government have become strained, with senior US officials criticising Britain over falling defence spending, which could soon go below the Nato target of 2 per cent of gross domestic product.

A senior US administration official told the Financial Times that the British decision was taken after “virtually no consultation with the US” and at a time when the G7 had been discussing how to approach the new bank.

“We are wary about a trend toward constant accommodation of China, which is not the best way to engage a rising power,” the US official said.

British officials were publicly restrained in criticising China over its handling of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests while Mr Cameron has made it clear he has no further plans to meet the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader — after a 2012 meeting that prompted a furious response from Beijing.

While Beijing has long been suspicious about US influence over the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, China also believes that the US and Japan have too much control over the Manila-based Asian Development Bank. In addition to the AIIB, China is the driving force behind last year’s creation of a Brics development bank and is promoting a $40bn Silk Road Fund to finance economic integration with Central Asia.

The Obama administration has said it is not opposed to the AIIB but US officials fear it could become an instrument of Chinese foreign policy if Beijing ends up having veto power over the bank’s decisions.

The UK Treasury denied that Britain had acted out of the blue, saying there had been “at least a month of extensive consultation” at a G7 level, including with Jack Lew, US Treasury secretary.

George Osborne, UK chancellor of the exchequer, was unrepentant, arguing that Britain should be in at the start of the new bank, ensuring that it operates in a transparent way. He believes it fills an important gap in providing finance for infrastructure for Asia.

“Joining the AIIB at the founding stage will create an unrivalled opportunity for the UK and Asia to invest and grow together,” Mr Osborne said. He expects other western countries, which have been making positive noises privately about the new bank, to become involved.

Beijing launched the AIIB in October with the backing of 20 other countries but Japan, South Korea and Australia —US allies in the region — did not become founding members. There has been a strong debate within the Australian cabinet about whether to join, after US pressure to stay on the sidelines.

Mr Osborne’s decision reflects London’s desire to pursue commercial relations with China aggressively, even at the expense of antagonising Washington.

The UK has been keen to establish the City of London as a platform for overseas business in the Chinese currency as it starts to play a bigger role in the global economy.

Source: FT

Covering Cecil John Rhodes in black poo

Chumani Maxwele threw human faeces at the statue of Cecil John Rhodes at the University of Cape Town on Monday in order to eradicate the white liberal scourge he says.

“It is not about me; it is about change. We as black students do not feel at home at UCT,” he said.

Maxwele says blacks want to end the divide between black and white students at UCT since the whites who come to black protests do not “ask us back to their big mansions”.

It appears that the ultra left-wing Max Price is not the most progressive vice chancellor UCT has ever had after all.

“We want whites to be more accommodating of us, to try to understand us,” Maxwele declared.

Maxwele, a 30-year-old political science student, said he threw faeces at the statue to highlight “our shame”.

“We want white people to know how we live – we live in poo.

“I am from a very poor family; we are using portaloos. Are you happy about that? In order for me to bring evidence, I have to give Cecil John Rhodes a poo shower and whites will have to see it.”

“Whose land was it in the first place? I have no problem with the history of Rhodes but it can stay in the books or in a museum.

“I don’t want him at UCT and I don’t want to sit in a hall named after [Leander] Starr Jameson, a brutal racist.”

Britain warns it will expose Putin’s financial secrets

Britain may broadcast the financial secrets of Russia’s ruling elite as part of the information war against the Putin regime, the Foreign Secretary has indicated.

Philip Hammond said he was interested by the idea of publicising the wealth of the Russian president’s inner circle in order to embarrass them in front of their people, as part of the response to the ongoing incursion into eastern Ukraine.

The Foreign Secretary warned that Putin is rapidly modernising his armed forces, and warned Russia’s bid to destabilise eastern Europe poses “the greatest single threat” to British national security.

Mr Hammond said that Britain must now “accept” that efforts to offer Russia its “rightful place” in the post-Cold War order had been “rebuffed”.

It marks a change in tone from the British government: David Cameron has repeated said that the door is open to Russia to normalise relations.

He warned that Russia’s rapid rearmament is a “significant cause for concern,” and confirmed that British intelligence agencies are now recruiting Russian speakers.

The wealth of Putin’s court is opaque, but undoubtedly runs into tens of billions of dollars held in offshore accounts and property in London and New York.

Official statements of Putin’s wealth – a £96,000 a year salary, a flat and three cars – are frequently met with derision.

Asked if there was a case for the “interesting” financial arrangements of members of Putin’s inner circle to be published by the British government, Mr Hammond replied: “There might be.”

“When we talk about having further steps that we can take, increasing the pressure on Russia, one the headings that we regularly review is strategic communication.

“It is an interesting thought and I will make sure the Strat Comms people are thinking precisely about that.”

Mr Cameron has suggested the BBC budget should be increased to help its Russian and Ukrainian language services counter Russian television propaganda.

Source: The Telegraph

France will not send military, arms to Kiev

France has no plans of sending military instructors or delivering equipment to Ukraine as opposed to Great Britain, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said Wednesday.

On Tuesday, British Prime Minister David Cameron announced that Britain would send instructors to Ukraine to train the country’s military, Sputniknews reported.

“Great Britain has taken a hardline to the situation and is considering a number of measures that you have said [sending military instructors], which Prime Minister David Cameron announced. We have also taken a firm position, but are still pushing for the de-escalation of the conflict,” Fabius said on France Info radio station.

France is party to the Normandy format talks on Ukrainian reconciliation, which also includes Russia, Germany and Ukraine. The most recent Normandy-quartet meeting between foreign ministers took place in Paris on Tuesday.

Kiev authorities repeatedly asked foreign partners for lethal assistance. On Tuesday, Ukrainian Interior Minister Anton Gerashchenko said that the United Arab Emirates had agreed to send weapons and military hardware to Ukraine.

A number of European states, including Germany, refused to arm Kiev. The United States, where according to a recent poll by Pew Research Center more than half of the respondents oppose sending weapons to Ukraine, is yet to make a decision on the matter.

War does not love British PM back

UK Prime Minister David Cameron certainly loves war.

But events in Iran, Libya, Syria and now Ukraine, show that war does not love Cameron back, making him look rather like a dull schoolyard bully, oblivious to how he has actively contributed to global chaos.

Cameron actively supported the 2011 military operation in Libya. Back in 2011, Cameron visited Tripoli with France’s then-President Nicolas Sarkozy to declare victory over Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in what turned out to be premature celebrations with the “rebels”, now known as ISIS.

In a recent interview however, he declared that Libya shouldn’t become a “safe haven for terrorists”, something that Libya clearly has now achieved with Britain’s meddling.

Cameron was left rather red-faced after ISIS attacks killed Coptic Christians in Libya last week.

In Syria, Cameron also supported arming “rebels” in order to attempt to oust President Bashar Assad.

Cameron, while advocating British attacks against the Syrian government, admitted he was not “100 percent certain” that Assad was behind a recent chemical attack, but that it was “highly likely.”

“This is not like Iraq, what we are seeing in Syria is fundamentally different … We are not invading a country,” he insisted. No weapons of mass destruction were ever found in Iraq.

Cameron had been calling for an international rubberstamp from the UN to aid the Syrian “rebels” – aka ISIS – from the early stages of the conflict.

“Every effort should be made to secure a [UN] Security Council Resolution backing military action before any such action is taken,” Cameron said in the speech to the House of Commons in 2013.

But his attempts proved futile, as British MPs effectively ruled out direct involvement in a military campaign in Syria. The Libyan fiasco was apparently still fresh in everyone’s mind.

“Throughout this coalition government, the Conservatives have adopted a less forthright approach to the Middle East conflict, in a way which I believe risks decreasing British influence in the region,” Liberal-Dem coalition partner Nick Clegg then lamented.

Back in 2010, Cameron stated that Iran has a “nuclear weapon,” when asked about why he was backing Turkey’s bid to join the EU. The Mossad, no less, has publicly denied intelligence proving the existence of such a weapon.

Cameron then attempted to pressure the American Congress over sanctions on Iran right ahead of his visit to the US, but Republicans called it an unproductive move.

He responded that Turkey’s accession could “help solve the world’s problems, like the Middle East peace process, like the fact that Iran has got a nuclear weapon.” Perhaps no one had sent him the memo.

With an ugly conflict brewing in Ukraine, Cameron has announced that UK troops will support Kiev with tactical intelligence, training and logistics. The UK will also “be developing infantry program with Ukraine to improve the pure ability of the forces.”

The PM’s most recent warmongering comments come after the Minsk peace talks, in which a ceasefire was agreed upon by the leaders of France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine.

On top of that, Cameron hawkishly called for more sanctions against Russia, in addition to those implemented during the past year.

He is said to be upset by French and German leaders Francois Hollande and Angela Merkel, who are trying to push for a peaceful and diplomatic solution to the conflict.

“We should keep up the pressure [on Russia],” Cameron said, noting that “in this respect the interests of the United Kingdom and democracy do go together.” Vladimir Putin, the most popular president Russia has had in more than a century, was democratically elected, but perhaps Cameron believes “democracy” has several meanings not included in most dictionaries.

NATO and Europe on diplomatic collision course

The fraught relationship between Russia and the West, which was supposed to improve following an agreement over Ukraine, has descended instead into renewed acrimony after a series of tense military and diplomatic confrontations.

France and Germany, which had brokered the Minsk accord last week, were yesterday trying to hold together the increasingly fragile ceasefire in Ukraine amid reports that fighting was spreading once again.

Kremlin-backed separatists and Cossack fighters triumphantly paraded through Debaltseve, a strategic point they had captured in the past 48 hours, leaving the Atlanticist project to expand NATO into Ukraine in tatters.

Britain, which along with the EU will be strongly criticised by a House of Lords committee today for “sleep-walking into this crisis”, was drawn towards centre-stage after two Russian Bear bombers off the coast of Cornwall – but just outside UK airspace – were met by RAF jets scrambled from their base in Coningsby, Lincolnshire.

The apparent probe of British readiness came soon after the Defence Secretary, Michael Fallon, accused President Vladimir Putin of a “campaign of destabilisation to the Baltic countries”. The Russian leader, he said, presented “as much of a threat to Europe as ISIS”.

Russian deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Lukashevich declared that Fallon’s war-mongering comments were “already beyond diplomatic ethics”, adding: “The characterisation of Russia is completely intolerable. We will find a way to respond to the comments.”

In London, Rory Stewart, the chairman of the Commons Defence Committee, said the West was on a “political razor-edge”. He urged all British political parties to write into their manifestoes a commitment to spend two per cent of GDP on defence – as required by Nato. He also asked them to prepare to deal with threats such as cyber-attacks, irregular troops, and propaganda.

The British Government, which is one of the guarantors of the territorial integrity of Ukraine in return for it giving up a nuclear arsenal, is worried that Germany and France may have already recognised separate regions.

“It [the committee] believes that the EU, and by implication the UK, was guilty of sleep-walking into this crisis,” said the committee chairman, Lord Tugendhat. “The lack of robust analytical capacity, in both the UK and the EU, effectively led to a catastrophic misreading of the mood in the run-up to the crisis.”

An inspection by Dutch military specialists revealed no military activities on the part of Russia in the Rostov region bordering Ukraine, the head of the Russian Defense Ministry’s International Treaties Implementation Department told RIA Novosti on Friday.

Dutch military experts inspected 13,000 square kilometers (5,000 square miles) in Russia’s Rostov Region bordering Ukraine, Sergei Ryzhkov added.

“The inspection took place in accordance with the Vienna Document and was carried out not only on the ground, but also with the help of helicopters,” Sergei Ryzhkov said.

Dutch military inspected the same area in the Rostov Region bordering Ukraine that Ukrainian specialists chose for inspection earlier.

Kiev authorities and Atlanticists have accused Russia of providing military aid and troops to Donbas militias. Moscow has dismissed the allegations and denied any involvement in the armed conflict in Ukraine.

English football fans push black off train

A recent video shows a black man in Paris forcefully pushed off a subway train by rowdy British Chelsea fans headed for a match with Paris Saint-Germain. An investigation into their identities is underway.

“We’re racist, we’re racist and that’s the way we like it” – this is the phrase they chanted during the incident, seen here in amateur video footage taken at the Richelieu-Drouot station and obtained exclusively by the Guardian.

The black man tried to squeeze past them several times, before being given a hard shove.

It is somewhat ironic that Chelsea is “a Jewish-owned football team where the majority of players are black and foreign,” as the club fan magazine’s editor David Johnstone pointed out, expressing his shock at the incident. He added that “I think the majority of Chelsea supporters are as disgusted by what’s happened.”

French police had to use tear gas on British supporters on the day, shortly before the game, local reports indicate.

Zuma invites struggle heroes to very colonial affair

President Jacob Zuma met with special guests for a regal and lofty “high tea”, a British meal, ahead of Thursday’s state-of-the-nation address (Sona), the presidency said on Wednesday.

The choice of the meal highlighted South Africa’s return to the Commonwealth, subservience to colonial power Great Britain – despite being a Republic – and the latest fancy of the “classless”, “non-racial”, “non-sexist” society.

“We believe the opening of Parliament and the state-of-the-nation address is an event for all South Africans because Parliament is an institution of the people and we therefore want people to visit Parliament to feel part of it,” Zuma told the illustrious guests without irony.

“That’s why every year we invite special guests of the president on the strength of the good work that they do in the development and promotion of our country and the sacrifices each has made for South Africa.”

He said those who were representing the country internationally were invited, as well as the families of struggle heroes.

Here are some pointers to tea etiquette, if you happen to be a struggle hero with an invitation:

Do not stir your tea, with your teaspoon, in sweeping circular motions.

Place your tea spoon at the six o’clock position and softly fold the liquid towards the twelve o’clock position two or three times.

Never leave the spoon in the cup especially when actually drinking your tea.

Milk is served with tea, not cream. Cream is too heavy and masks the taste of the tea.

When serving lemon with tea, lemon slices are preferable, not wedges. Either provide a small fork or lemon fork for your guests, or have the butler neatly place a slice in the tea cup after the tea has been poured. Be sure never to add lemon with milk since the lemon’s citric acid will cause the proteins in the milk to curdle.

Do not use your tea to wash down food. Sip, don’t slurp, your tea and swallow before eating.

There is only one correct placement for a napkin, to the left side of the place setting. The napkin, when placed to the left of the place setting, should be folded with the closed edge to the left and the open edge to the right. There are no exceptions! This rule applies for rectangular, triangular, and square shape folds.