Fair enough.
Russia's at it again
- Thread starter Pogue Mahone
- Start date
At Site of U.K. Poisoning, Doubts About Case Creep In.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/16/world/europe/uk-skripal-russia-salisbury-propaganda.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/16/world/europe/uk-skripal-russia-salisbury-propaganda.html
Have you read the shit you just linked there. How do you expect to be treated seriously if you are going to paraphrase that unbelieveable crap you just just posted as " doubts creep in ".
Here is the highlight for me
"Others fret about the ducks that used to gather on the Avon River near where the Skripals collapsed, saying they must have been quietly culled."
OMG the shells fall from my eyes, the ducks have gone Russia is innocent.
FFS you are embarrassing yourself.
That's the NYT headline.
Mrs Carey, 45 said..
Yeah but justify it, go on I dare you, find the new source, new information or new logic in this report. Have you read it? Are you going on record as supporting the headline?
I've used up my free NYT articles for this month unfortunately...
Yeah but justify it, go on I dare you, find the new source, new information or new logic in this report. Have you read it? Are you going on record as supporting the headline?
"
- June 16, 2018
SALISBURY, ENGLAND — After Sergei V. Skripal, her Russian neighbor, was poisoned by a military-grade nerve agent, Lisa Carey pricked her ears for any information about this bizarre series of events.
Three and a half months later, Ms. Carey, 45, a resident of Salisbury, England, where the attack on the former Russian spy occurred, has come to a firm conclusion: Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, whom Britain holds responsible for the poisoning, would never have ordered an assassination on the eve of a national election or the World Cup.
Mr. Putin is “not a silly man,” she says. If he wants someone dead, she added, they end up dead. “Someone stitched him up,” she wrote recently. “Whoever did this made it look like Putin did it.”
Though Ms. Carey’s opinion is not a common one in Salisbury, she’s not alone, either."
If that is not an expert opinion I don't know what is.
Well if Lisa Carey, 45 thinks so
"
- June 16, 2018
SALISBURY, ENGLAND — After Sergei V. Skripal, her Russian neighbor, was poisoned by a military-grade nerve agent, Lisa Carey pricked her ears for any information about this bizarre series of events.
Three and a half months later, Ms. Carey, 45, a resident of Salisbury, England, where the attack on the former Russian spy occurred, has come to a firm conclusion: Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, whom Britain holds responsible for the poisoning, would never have ordered an assassination on the eve of a national election or the World Cup.
Mr. Putin is “not a silly man,” she says. If he wants someone dead, she added, they end up dead. “Someone stitched him up,” she wrote recently. “Whoever did this made it look like Putin did it.”
Though Ms. Carey’s opinion is not a common one in Salisbury, she’s not alone, either."
If that is not an expert opinion I don't know what is.
Fair enough!Don't underestimate the power Trump's theatrics have on similar small minded people in other English speaking countries.
Are you out of your meds and need your prescription renewed or something? All I did was post a link to the NY Times article with the headline from that very same article, nothing more.Have you read the shit you just linked there. How do you expect to be treated seriously if you are going to paraphrase that unbelieveable crap you just just posted as " doubts creep in ".
Here is the highlight for me
"Others fret about the ducks that used to gather on the Avon River near where the Skripals collapsed, saying they must have been quietly culled."
OMG the shells fall from my eyes, the ducks have gone Russia is innocent.
FFS you are embarrassing yourself.
@2cents here's the text.
SALISBURY, ENGLAND — After Sergei V. Skripal, her Russian neighbor, was poisoned by a military-grade nerve agent, Lisa Carey pricked her ears for any information about this bizarre series of events.
Three and a half months later, Ms. Carey, 45, a resident of Salisbury, England, where the attack on the former Russian spy occurred, has come to a firm conclusion: Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, whom Britain holds responsible for the poisoning, would never have ordered an assassination on the eve of a national election or the World Cup.
Mr. Putin is “not a silly man,” she says. If he wants someone dead, she added, they end up dead. “Someone stitched him up,” she wrote recently. “Whoever did this made it look like Putin did it.”
Though Ms. Carey’s opinion is not a common one in Salisbury, she’s not alone, either.
“We are force-fed the answer that it was the Russians, no two ways about it,” read a letter to the editor in a recent edition of The Salisbury Journal. Many more express a shrugging sense of resignation, that the facts of the case may never be clear.
During the days after Mr. Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, were found unconscious, the British government seemed to be winning the public relations war, mobilizing its allies in a united front against Russia.
Prime Minister Theresa May’s government presented its case for Russia’s guilt, and by the end of March 25, countries had lined up in support, expelling more than 100 Russian diplomats. In a YouGov poll released on April 3, three-quarters of Britons were relatively confident that Russia was responsible.
In the weeks that followed, though, Britain’s control over the narrative slipped away.
As the British authorities went silent on the progress of their investigation, English-language Russian outlets flooded social media with more than a dozen alternative theories: The United States had poisoned Mr. Skripal to deflect attention from Russia’s geopolitical successes; Britain did it to deflect attention from Brexit; the nerve agent had been accidentally released from a chemical weapons laboratory nearby; a drone did it; Yulia Skripal’s future mother-in-law did it.
This blitz of skepticism came to dominate social media conversations. In early April, the Atlantic Council found that four of the six most-shared English-language articles on the case came from Kremlin media outlets. The theories are seeding doubt, even in Salisbury.
“It’s really peculiar the Russian government is going out and saying all this stuff, and, generally speaking, there is no response from the British government,” said Matthew Dean, the leader of Salisbury’s City Council and the owner of the Duke of York, a local pub.
Though the vast majority of people in Salisbury say they are satisfied with Britain’s explanation, Mr. Dean said, there are also “huge numbers of people who say, ‘My goodness, there are a lot of unanswered questions.’ ”
Salisbury, known affectionately by some residents as “Smallsbury,” is a conservative English town, sprinkled with 500-year-old pubs and bisected by the Avon River. Its 45,000 residents — older and whiter than the national average — include a large number of former military officers.
They are, as a community, accustomed to living in proximity to secrets. Seven miles away is Porton Down, a laboratory that carries out classified experiments with chemical and biological weapons. Its employees abide by strict confidentiality agreements, but like Area 51, the mysterious Air Force base in Nevada, Porton Down breeds folklore: A government web page written to debunk them contains the sentence “No aliens, either alive or dead, have ever been taken to Porton Down.”
After the jarring news that a nerve agent had been brought to Salisbury, its community leaders hewed to that most English of strategies: Keep calm and carry on. Ceri Hurford-Jones, the managing director of Spire FM, a local radio station, said he had been keen to wind down daily coverage of the Skripal investigation, in part because the reporting was hurting Salisbury’s tourist business.
“Here on the ground there is no motivation for us to go out and ask questions because we want to get on with our lives,” he said, adding that most everyone he knew accepted the government’s explanation.
“We are quite a parochial town,” he said. “There is an innately trusting side of us. I think that is a good thing about us, that we trust our government. We don’t look for conspiracies around the corner; it’s just not our way.”
But along Salisbury’s shopping streets, residents and businesspeople compare notes on the questions that remain unanswered.
Many express bafflement about the condition and whereabouts of Detective Sgt. Nick Bailey, who was exposed to the nerve agent while trying to help the Skripals. Mr. Bailey has remained out of sight since he was released from a two-and-a-half-week hospitalization in late March.
Others fret about the ducks that used to gather on the Avon River near where the Skripals collapsed, saying they must have been quietly culled. (Mr. Dean, the City Council head, says they simply migrated downstream.) Others wonder why some places the Skripals went on the day of the poisoning, but not others, were cordoned off for safety reasons.
“It’s almost like this part that’s missing between what we’re being told and what happened,” said Richard Coleman, 45, the owner of Greengages Cafe. He added that he remains confident that Russia “or some disreputable organization” was behind the attack. In its approach to transparency, he added, Salisbury is “a very typical English town.”
“They will only open up when they’re really forced to do it by a superior power,” he said. “It’s kind of the British reserve. We never ask questions. We just accept what we’re told.”
Britons’ trust in their institutions is already declining, in some cases as a result of other events such as Britain’s support of flawed intelligence ahead of the war in Iraq or last year’s devastating fire at Grenfell Tower.
Russia’s campaign in the Skripal case aims to further undermine trust in the authorities, said Ben Nimmo, a fellow in the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.
Just as it did after the shooting down of a Malaysian airliner in eastern Ukraine in 2014, the Kremlin targeted aggrieved social groups — not difficult to find in the years since the 2008 financial crisis — and capitalized on the disciplined silence of the Western investigators, filling the vacuum with alternative theories.
“It doesn’t have to follow the dictates of the news cycle; it follows the dictates of the Kremlin,” Mr. Nimmo said. “If nobody else is talking about it and the Kremlin is, there will be this drip-feed effect; it will gradually erode public confidence in whatever the target is.”
Ms. Carey says that she is a “little person,” suspicious of the government on many issues, and that she has never once looked at a Kremlin-produced news outlet.
Her skepticism is shared by many of Salisbury’s cabdrivers, many of whom are immigrants from Eastern Europe and South Asia. Boris Kanev, a Bulgarian, said he had become convinced of the Russian case during a visit home in April, when he watched Russian-language television coverage.
When he returned home, he said, he found many in Salisbury who shared his doubts
“The English people believe it’s the Russians,” he said, but “all those other British people, the Scottish, the Irish, the Welsh,” were more skeptical. “To be honest with you, they don’t trust England,” he said.
Another driver, Steve Odendaal, who is native to Zimbabwe, said the attack could not have been a Russian government operation because it was “too clumsy and too careless.”
Even among those with full confidence in the government case, the episode has left a residue of confusion and mistrust.
Back in March, Mr. Dean, the City Council head, angrily confronted Mr. Hurford-Jones, the director of the radio station, over his decision to follow up on a tip by a Russian journalist questioning whether Salisbury’s CCTV system had been fully operational at the time of the attack. Mr. Dean called the allegation “totally untrue.”
“That would be an example of sources from the Russian administration sowing disinformation in the U.K.,” Mr. Dean said.
Mr. Hurford-Jones bristled at the accusation, saying his journalists had documented problems with CCTV in the past and were justified in following up on the question suggested by Russian colleagues. “We live here, too, you know,” he said. “It doesn’t stop us asking questions.”
Three and a half months later, Ms. Carey, 45, a resident of Salisbury, England, where the attack on the former Russian spy occurred, has come to a firm conclusion: Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, whom Britain holds responsible for the poisoning, would never have ordered an assassination on the eve of a national election or the World Cup.
Mr. Putin is “not a silly man,” she says. If he wants someone dead, she added, they end up dead. “Someone stitched him up,” she wrote recently. “Whoever did this made it look like Putin did it.”
Though Ms. Carey’s opinion is not a common one in Salisbury, she’s not alone, either.
“We are force-fed the answer that it was the Russians, no two ways about it,” read a letter to the editor in a recent edition of The Salisbury Journal. Many more express a shrugging sense of resignation, that the facts of the case may never be clear.
During the days after Mr. Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, were found unconscious, the British government seemed to be winning the public relations war, mobilizing its allies in a united front against Russia.
Prime Minister Theresa May’s government presented its case for Russia’s guilt, and by the end of March 25, countries had lined up in support, expelling more than 100 Russian diplomats. In a YouGov poll released on April 3, three-quarters of Britons were relatively confident that Russia was responsible.
In the weeks that followed, though, Britain’s control over the narrative slipped away.
As the British authorities went silent on the progress of their investigation, English-language Russian outlets flooded social media with more than a dozen alternative theories: The United States had poisoned Mr. Skripal to deflect attention from Russia’s geopolitical successes; Britain did it to deflect attention from Brexit; the nerve agent had been accidentally released from a chemical weapons laboratory nearby; a drone did it; Yulia Skripal’s future mother-in-law did it.
This blitz of skepticism came to dominate social media conversations. In early April, the Atlantic Council found that four of the six most-shared English-language articles on the case came from Kremlin media outlets. The theories are seeding doubt, even in Salisbury.
“It’s really peculiar the Russian government is going out and saying all this stuff, and, generally speaking, there is no response from the British government,” said Matthew Dean, the leader of Salisbury’s City Council and the owner of the Duke of York, a local pub.
Though the vast majority of people in Salisbury say they are satisfied with Britain’s explanation, Mr. Dean said, there are also “huge numbers of people who say, ‘My goodness, there are a lot of unanswered questions.’ ”
Salisbury, known affectionately by some residents as “Smallsbury,” is a conservative English town, sprinkled with 500-year-old pubs and bisected by the Avon River. Its 45,000 residents — older and whiter than the national average — include a large number of former military officers.
They are, as a community, accustomed to living in proximity to secrets. Seven miles away is Porton Down, a laboratory that carries out classified experiments with chemical and biological weapons. Its employees abide by strict confidentiality agreements, but like Area 51, the mysterious Air Force base in Nevada, Porton Down breeds folklore: A government web page written to debunk them contains the sentence “No aliens, either alive or dead, have ever been taken to Porton Down.”
After the jarring news that a nerve agent had been brought to Salisbury, its community leaders hewed to that most English of strategies: Keep calm and carry on. Ceri Hurford-Jones, the managing director of Spire FM, a local radio station, said he had been keen to wind down daily coverage of the Skripal investigation, in part because the reporting was hurting Salisbury’s tourist business.
“Here on the ground there is no motivation for us to go out and ask questions because we want to get on with our lives,” he said, adding that most everyone he knew accepted the government’s explanation.
“We are quite a parochial town,” he said. “There is an innately trusting side of us. I think that is a good thing about us, that we trust our government. We don’t look for conspiracies around the corner; it’s just not our way.”
But along Salisbury’s shopping streets, residents and businesspeople compare notes on the questions that remain unanswered.
Many express bafflement about the condition and whereabouts of Detective Sgt. Nick Bailey, who was exposed to the nerve agent while trying to help the Skripals. Mr. Bailey has remained out of sight since he was released from a two-and-a-half-week hospitalization in late March.
Others fret about the ducks that used to gather on the Avon River near where the Skripals collapsed, saying they must have been quietly culled. (Mr. Dean, the City Council head, says they simply migrated downstream.) Others wonder why some places the Skripals went on the day of the poisoning, but not others, were cordoned off for safety reasons.
“It’s almost like this part that’s missing between what we’re being told and what happened,” said Richard Coleman, 45, the owner of Greengages Cafe. He added that he remains confident that Russia “or some disreputable organization” was behind the attack. In its approach to transparency, he added, Salisbury is “a very typical English town.”
“They will only open up when they’re really forced to do it by a superior power,” he said. “It’s kind of the British reserve. We never ask questions. We just accept what we’re told.”
Britons’ trust in their institutions is already declining, in some cases as a result of other events such as Britain’s support of flawed intelligence ahead of the war in Iraq or last year’s devastating fire at Grenfell Tower.
Russia’s campaign in the Skripal case aims to further undermine trust in the authorities, said Ben Nimmo, a fellow in the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.
Just as it did after the shooting down of a Malaysian airliner in eastern Ukraine in 2014, the Kremlin targeted aggrieved social groups — not difficult to find in the years since the 2008 financial crisis — and capitalized on the disciplined silence of the Western investigators, filling the vacuum with alternative theories.
“It doesn’t have to follow the dictates of the news cycle; it follows the dictates of the Kremlin,” Mr. Nimmo said. “If nobody else is talking about it and the Kremlin is, there will be this drip-feed effect; it will gradually erode public confidence in whatever the target is.”
Ms. Carey says that she is a “little person,” suspicious of the government on many issues, and that she has never once looked at a Kremlin-produced news outlet.
Her skepticism is shared by many of Salisbury’s cabdrivers, many of whom are immigrants from Eastern Europe and South Asia. Boris Kanev, a Bulgarian, said he had become convinced of the Russian case during a visit home in April, when he watched Russian-language television coverage.
When he returned home, he said, he found many in Salisbury who shared his doubts
“The English people believe it’s the Russians,” he said, but “all those other British people, the Scottish, the Irish, the Welsh,” were more skeptical. “To be honest with you, they don’t trust England,” he said.
Another driver, Steve Odendaal, who is native to Zimbabwe, said the attack could not have been a Russian government operation because it was “too clumsy and too careless.”
Even among those with full confidence in the government case, the episode has left a residue of confusion and mistrust.
Back in March, Mr. Dean, the City Council head, angrily confronted Mr. Hurford-Jones, the director of the radio station, over his decision to follow up on a tip by a Russian journalist questioning whether Salisbury’s CCTV system had been fully operational at the time of the attack. Mr. Dean called the allegation “totally untrue.”
“That would be an example of sources from the Russian administration sowing disinformation in the U.K.,” Mr. Dean said.
Mr. Hurford-Jones bristled at the accusation, saying his journalists had documented problems with CCTV in the past and were justified in following up on the question suggested by Russian colleagues. “We live here, too, you know,” he said. “It doesn’t stop us asking questions.”
Grasping at straws a bit with that article.
Whether the residents of Salisbury are a bunch of morons who know nothing or speak nonsense is irrelevant. Nobody in this forum has any insight into what's really going on and it doesn't stop anyone from voicing their opinion, sitting on their own sofas thousands of miles away from the crime scene. The point of this article is that when you keep people in the dark and don't give answers for months now to any legitimate questions that arise in the aftermath of what happened, it creates a vacuum that can be filled with either the opposing side propaganda or any sort of hare brained conspiracy theories that start floating around whenever the government fails to come up with anything remotely believable to back up their claims.
So basically your article confirms Russian social media & news outlets are spreading fake news about the incident. What a scoop
There have been plenty of fake news from the British media about the case as well from the moment the incident took place, doesn't mean much, since propaganda is spread from both sides. And not every article is supposed to be a scoop, genius. Sometimes it's just food for thought, for everyone to draw their own conclusions.So basically your article confirms Russian social media & news outlets are spreading fake news about the incident. What a scoop
What fake news would that be then? Most of the UK news I've read on this seems, to me at least, based on what little knowledge we publicly know about this incident.
If you think that article is food for thought then maybe you ought to eat healthier It offers nothing except for a laughable anecdotal account from Ms Carey who sounds like yer typical Facebook mouth breather and confirms the typical tactic of spreading disinformation is in play with "over a dozen alternative theories" these "Russian outlets" have plucked from their arses in an attempt to muddy the waters and undermine . When the Russian social media antics start up over some incident it only adds to the suspicion.
It’s a criminal investigation and a pretty serious one at that. The government aren’t likely to give a running commentary on their findings even if people have questions that “they” want answering. They don’t give confidential information away just to humour the general public. That’s the way investigations work in most countries.
Tweet
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It's a joke, Raoul. You really need to stop posting about stuff you have no slightest understanding about. Slutsky was commenting the game and his co-commentator used the phrase "navalny football' to describe what was going on on the pitch. In Russian the word 'navalny' means something like "attack in mass", "pile up" and it's also coincindentally the last name of the Russian blogger/opposition leader Alexey Navalny. So when Slutsky heard the word he replied jokingly:"Navalny's playing football? That's interesting". Slutsky is a new manager of Vitesse and he's starting a preseason with the club on June 24th. The fact that he's not going to comment any more of the WC games has nothing to do with this innocent comment and everything to do with his new job. No need to look for conspiracy where there's none.
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Yulia Skripal to Return to Russia When Her Father Gets Better, Cousin Says.
https://sputniknews.com/europe/201807271066724512-skripal-return-russia/
https://sputniknews.com/europe/201807271066724512-skripal-return-russia/
Good for her
I'm sure she won't be obliged to go on any TV shows & criticise the UK at all...
I'm sure she won't be obliged to go on any TV shows & criticise the UK at all...
Safe from the dangerous Salisbury.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...ichok-amersbury-russia-politics-a8433881.html
Viktoria now admitting that she doesn’t get on with Julia. Unsurprising really.
She also gives us this little gem.
Viktoria now admitting that she doesn’t get on with Julia. Unsurprising really.
She also gives us this little gem.
Viktoria’s films and chemistry lessons sound very different from those in the rest of the world.
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— Twitter API (@user) date
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-45122723
Breaking : Russia faces US sanctions over Skripal incident.
Breaking : Russia faces US sanctions over Skripal incident.
If the OPCW determine that the 2 other people in Salisbury were poisoned by Novichok from the same batch then it will be determined that they also used it against foreign nationals too.
https://mobile.twitter.com/Schuldensuehner?ref_src=twsrc^google|twcamp^serp|twgr^author
Can’t seem to paste tweets but Russian rouble just dropped >3%
Can’t seem to paste tweets but Russian rouble just dropped >3%
Tweet
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Just done it accidentally but don’t remember how. Best I try to remember your bit about the mobile in future. Thanks.
Does this mean what I think it means or is it just a co-incidence?Tweet
— Twitter API (@user) date
But the daughter is potentially going back to Russia, right? How can Russia be behind the poisoning then?
I'm sure its possible for her to want to return home and at the same time her government were responsible for the poisoning.
Poor attempt at sarcasm in my part, stuck in I-4 traffic & typing left handed.
Mystery Russian satellite's behaviour raises alarm in US
- 15 August 2018
The US says it does not know what the satellite is or why it is behaving strangely
A mysterious Russian satellite displaying "very abnormal behaviour" has raised alarm in the US, according to a State Department official.
"We don't know for certain what it is and there is no way to verify it," said assistant secretary Yleem Poblete at a conference in Switzerland on 14 August.
She voiced fears that it was impossible to say if the object may be a weapon.
Russia has dismissed the comments as "unfounded, slanderous accusations based on suspicions".
The satellite in question was launched in October last year.
"[The satellite's] behaviour on-orbit was inconsistent with anything seen before from on-orbit inspection or space situational awareness capabilities, including other Russian inspection satellite activities," Ms Poblete told the conference on disarmament in Switzerland.
"Russian intentions with respect to this satellite are unclear and are obviously a very troubling development," she added, citing recent comments made by the commander of Russia's Space Forces, who said adopting "new prototypes of weapons" was a key objective for the force.
Ms Poblete said that the US had "serious concerns" that Russia was developing anti-satellite weapons.
Alexander Deyneko, a senior Russian diplomat, told the Reuters news agency that the comments were "the same unfounded, slanderous accusations based on suspicions, on suppositions and so on".
He called on the US to contribute to a Russian-Chinese treaty that seeks to prevent an arms race in space.
'Lasers or microwaves'
Space weapons may be designed to cause damage in more subtle ways than traditional weapons like guns, which could cause a lot of debris in orbit, explained Alexandra Stickings, a research analyst at the Royal United Services Institute.
"[Such weapons may include] lasers or microwave frequencies that could just stop [a satellite] working for a time, either disable it permanently without destroying it or disrupt it via jamming," she said.
But it was difficult to know what technology is available because so much information on space-based capabilities is classified, she added.
She also said it would be very difficult to prove that any event causing interference in space was an intentional, hostile action by a specific nation state.
Ms Poblete's comments were particularly interesting in light of President Donald Trump's decision to launch a sixth branch of the US armed forces named Space Force, added Ms Stickings.
"The narrative coming from the US is, 'space was really peaceful, now look at what the Russians and Chinese are doing' - ignoring the fact that the US has developed its own capabilities."
A spokesman for the UK's Ministry of Defence said he could neither confirm nor deny any tracking of Russian satellites.
"There are a range of threats and hazards to all space capabilities in what is an increasingly contested domain," he said.
"These include the development of counter-space weapons by a number of nations.
"The UK is working closely with international allies, including the US, to re-enforce responsible and safe behaviours in space and to build knowledge, understanding and resilience."
Three Russian journalists investigating a Russian private military contractor, working for the Kremlin, shot dead in Central African Republic.
This happened some time ago didn't it ?
Yes, a few weeks ago. I'm just hearing about it on CNN.