Last week in a Moscow court, Michael Bloomberg’s (lead image, right) organisation of New York City did something it has never done before. It admitted it has been publishing lies about Russia. It also paid a penalty of Rb12,600 ($170.25).
Bloomberg even promised that in future its reporting on Russia will “be guided in its work by recognised editorial standards of truthfulness, accuracy and objectivity of published information in accordance with its internal code of journalistic standards and ethics [and] best practices in the news industry.”
What Bloomberg was promising not to do was to print fabrications about Russia fed in secret to its reporters by agents of the US Government.
The Moscow bureau of Bloomberg said it had nothing to do with the court proceeding and refused to comment. The spokesman for Bloomberg’s European division in London also refused to answer questions.
Victor Kharitonin (lead image, left), Alexei Repik, Kirill Syrov, and Vikram Punia aren’t household names in Russia. What they do for a living is. This is because they control the largest pharmaceutical producers in the country. So profitable are their companies that each of them has become a dollar billionaire with whom President Vladimir Putin likes to deal directly and personally.
Last November Putin presided by video link at the opening of the new pharmaceutical raw materials plant in Bratsk of the Pharmasyntez Group owned by Punia. The new plant, said Putin, would increase “the capabilities of the national pharmaceutical industry, to which we have always given serious priority”, multiplying the availability of antiviral medications required for Covid-19 treatment fivefold. “This”, said, Putin, “is of vital significance for the country and the people, especially at this time, as we are all aware. Therefore, first of all I would like to thank all those who were involved in the implementation of this large-scale project”.
Punia replied: “Synthesising raw materials is a much more complicated job than producing finished medications. In our case, it was an immensely difficult job indeed, because the company only produced finished medications before and did not have the synthesis competencies: we did not have the necessary technology or personnel to do this. In fact, we had to create a new culture, the culture of producing high-tech pharmaceutical substances.” He thanked Putin for state subsidies and a low-interest loan. He promised to build a new plant with ten times the production capacity of the Bratsk plant.
“Your company,” said Putin, “is greatly contributing to the replacement of imported medications and increasing their affordability for people.”
A month later, on December 26, the President again presided (also virtually) at a ceremony for an international agreement on co-production and marketing of the Russian Sputnik V vaccine against Covid-19. “In Russia,” said the chief executive of AstraZeneca, “we have a long-lasting partnership with R-Pharm, and we are good friends with Alexei [Repik] and the R-Pharm team. We decided to transfer the technology to R-Pharm because of the advanced technology core and biopharmaceutical capabilities in Russia. They have developed these capabilities over a number of years, and more recently, importantly, with the support of the Russian Direct Investment Fund. This is another good example of collaboration between organisations and companies. I would like to congratulate the Russian scientists at the Gamaleya Institute and also the Russian Direct Investment Fund for developing the world’s first registered COVID-19 vaccine.”
Putin’s ceremonies with Punia and Repik were intended to make a public show that he understands the combination of price increases for imported and domestic medicines, shortage of supplies, and lack of pharmaceutical quality control are causing a national grievance.
The mystery of what the Berlin doctors treating Alexei Navalny discovered in his bloodstream and urine tests in Germany has deepened after the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov publicly referred last week to the clinical findings of a Swiss-based neurologist, Vitaly Kozak. Kozak has been reporting for several weeks that the biomedical data tables published in The Lancet in December reveal evidence of cholinesterase inhibition effects of poisoning by the drug lithium which Navalny was taking himself before his collapse on August 20.
That’s pathological self-medication – an overdose, not a Kremlin poison plot.
What then can be the reason the editors of The Lancet, Richard Horton (lead image, 1st left) and Astrid James (2nd left), have refused to publish a clinical commentary in the form of questions from Kozak?
There’s more to the mystery than that. Horton and James also refuse to answer questions about the circumstances of their publication of Navalny’s data records separately from the case report authored by Navalny’s chief treating doctors in Berlin, Kai-Uwe Eckardt (right) and David Steindl.
Eckardt and Steindl have now been asked to clarify the circumstances of the publication of their case report on Navalny and the separate biomedical data. They do not answer. Because of the contradiction between the evidence in their data records and the intepretation widely given to their case report in the press and by NATO officials, Eckardt and Steindl were asked to say if the title of the report they wrote, “Novichok nerve agent poisoning”, was their choice of title, or The Lancet’s in London. Eckardt and Steindl will not say.
When medical doctors allow their science and their clinical practice to become part of a political scheme, based on fabrication of evidence and falsification of diagnosis, they violate several terms of the 2,500-year old Hippocratic Oath. They are intending to do harm; cause injustice; ignore one deadly drug; fabricate evidence of another; and as the ancient Greek text declared, “keep far from all voluntary wrongdoing and other corrupting behaviour”. Horton, James, Eckardt, and Steindl have all sworn the Hippocratic Oath when they qualified as practising physicians. When asked to confirm that now, they won’t respond.
The alternative media have done as much to reinforce the lawlessness of state officials, corporations and courts as the mainstream media. How they have done this, and why, are topics in discussion in this interview with Canada’s leading broadcaster for brains which haven’t been immunocompromised by fear and faking.
The last unanswered question about Alexei Navalny was answered this week in a Moscow courtroom by Navalny himself. For the first time he didn’t have production back-up from his MI6 helper, Maria Pevchikh of London, or his CIA and BND teams in the Black Forest of Baden-Württemberg.
The question is a medico-psychiatric one. It was first made public by Navalny’s treating doctors at the Charité clinic in Berlin. These doctors, it was, who revealed that Navalny was a heavy user of lithium and benzodiazepine drugs. They published this in a set of four data tables they attached as appendices to their case report on Navalny. Their data raised the question — what would happen if Navalny was forced to withdraw from his drugs quickly.
After eighteen days in remand prison in Moscow, Navalny answered this question himself in the Babushkinsky district court on February 5.
The disclosure that in his Tomsk hotel on August 19, hours before he collapsed and the Anglo-German OPERATION NOVI-NOVICHOK commenced, Navalny had taken a large dose of lithium, diazepam, nordazepam, oxazepam, and temazepam, was first published on December 22 in The Lancet. Read the report and the analysis here.
The medico-psychiatric literature is clear on what happens to a habitual user of these drugs if rapid withdrawal is attempted: for lithium, read this; for the benzodiazepines, click to open.
RIA Novosti, a state news agency, has published this report by Irina Alksnis, of what Navalny said and did in court last Friday. Since then, on Monday, Navalny’s staff announced they have suspended their demonstration plans until the spring. The next day they were overruled and announced a smartphone flashlight and drone show for next weekend. For Navalny, though, the light is going out – and his Berlin doctors have revealed why.
In the courtroom report to follow in English translation, the direct quotes have not been reported in any newspaper or broadcaster in the west. Alksnis reported what she saw and heard. She appears not to have read Navalny’s German medical reports.
In the history of how English law evolved towards the individual rights most state constitutions and the UN’s declaration of human rights proclaim today, the Star Chamber was a nasty piece of work. Over the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the Star Chamber was a court in London which received indictments prepared by the king; whose judges were picked and paid for by the king; whose evidence was decided by the king; whose witnesses were tortured by the king; and whose proceedings were held in the king’s meeting-room behind his armed guards. The Star Chamber was abolished by parliament after its army had defeated the king’s army and then executed the king himself.
The Dutch state is still in the fifteenth century stage. It is running the trial of charges against Russian Army officers for shooting down Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 as a Star Chamber process. The Dutch lawyers who are paid by the Russian state to defend the accused are also paid agents of the Dutch state; they comply; they don’t protest. The mainstream Dutch press, even the Dutch bloggers and alt-media, refuse to report the Star Chamber’s secrets. When The Hague District Court judge Hendrik Steenhuis revealed on Monday two of these secrets, no one in The Netherlands reported noticing.
The reason for rising discontent among Russians is obvious – except to the Anglo-American and German press and the governments prompting them. All Russians know this except for the young living at home, dependent on their family’s income.
The prices for the food in the family grocery basket have been rising sharply since last September. From the start of January, however, Russians have had less income, and they have been forced to spend significantly less on their consumption needs. In the last week of January, their spending was 20% less than the week before; 14% less than the same week a year ago. On current forecasts for food prices and income to the start of spring, the pinch is going to get worse. Everyone in Russia understands this, except the young sitting in front of computer screens and smartphones studying virtually; messaging on the well-known platforms; playing internet games.
The level of influence of Alexei Navalny’s campaign since he began the Novichok operation in August, which he has now transformed into his imprisonment campaign, has had no significant impact to his benefit among Russians – except among a minority of the young. Overall, the measured change in public approval for Navalny over this period – from 4% to 5% in five months — is within the margin for statistical error. He is an internet game, a statistical blip.
The last survivors of Australian journalism have succumbed to complications of Covid-19 infection.
Following the publication in the US at the beginning of this week of the first book to investigate the pandemic lawlessness which has taken hold in Melbourne, the second city of Australia, reporters for the mainstream Australian media and the alternative media have suffocated after opening the first pages of the book, but before they were able to report its contents.
The fatalities are not considered suspicious, although in December a state-appointed commission of inquiry reported that officials of the Victorian state government had been negligent in their administration of pandemic emergency powers. Three resignations were forced; no corruption charges have been prosecuted. State MPs are trying to open a parliamentary debate on more than $200 million in unaccounted-for state spending on police, hospitals, hotels, lawyers, medical research units, and university think-tanks.
An investigation was opened this week by the Judicial Commission of Victoria into the disappearance, loss, or possibly destruction of hearing records for the only case in the Australian courts to challenge the legality of the ban on Australians returning home from abroad, and the closure of Melbourne’s international airport.
Here is the list of the reporters who were diagnosed before they could report on the book; also the infection hotspots which readers are recommended to avoid. Genomic testing is still under way to determine which mutation has proved fatal to Australian reporters, half of whom are employed by Rupert Murdoch; they were immunocompromised before the pandemic started.
This is the first book to be published worldwide revealing how a group of government officials can exploit the corona virus pandemic to wield emergency powers illegally; destroy parliament; deceive the press; manipulate the law courts; spend vast amounts of state money to enrich themselves; and spread false science and public terror to cover their tracks.
Right now this is a story with urgent parallels in the UK, US, Canada, Germany, Spain, and France – in every country where democratic resistance to abuse of power in the pandemic has run into identical tactics of state lawlessness, and suffered the same fate.
The book tells the story of how, locked into Melbourne, the second city of Australia, I waged a bitter court case against the authorities to stop their illegal ban on my leaving the country and prohibit my wife joining me from Moscow.
No government or country in the world has adopted such a policy towards its own citizens during the Covid-19 pandemic. The only precedent for such a policy towards innocent, non-criminal citizens in recent European history was that of Nazi Germany towards the German Jews.
The book exposes undocumented government spending of almost half a billion dollars treating suspected Covid-19 victims as criminals. It uncovers the schemes of Daniel Andrews, premier of the state of Victoria, whose unbridled ambition to take power over all of Australia produced the very first Covid-19 vaccine. This vaccine was a room-temperature, multiple-dose jab in the brain.
This book is the only antidote for the brain damage which governments are inflicting with their abuse of Covid-19 powers. Learn from it because, wherever you are locked down now, your protection from being locked up depends on it.
The Russian potato is a hot potato politically for President Vladimir Putin. Much hotter than Alexei Navalny, and for a genuine, homegrown reason.
The Russian potato harvest suffered its worst fall last year since 2010. And the political chips will fall just as they did before – the public approval rating for the president, as well for government ministers, is falling. The outcome in the State Duma election of 2011 was a swing against United Russia, the government party, of 15%; the swings in favour of the Communist Party and the Liberal Democratic Party were 8% and 12% apiece. That was the worst electoral rebuff Putin has suffered since he started in the year 2000.
Russian voters are like everyone else the world over. They blame hoarders and speculators when the price of staples starts to jump, and then government corruption for failing to stop them. In January, compared to a year ago, the wholesale price of potatoes was up 75%. And it is getting worse. By April, the wholesale price is expected to grow by another 20%. Between now and next September, when the parliamentary election will be held, Putin must solve the potato problem.
