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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with When I was optimistic, I used to mark the passing summers by the hit songs that were playing on the radio as I sweated away at jobs that paid me the money I badly needed.   “She loves you” was the summer of 1964 for me; “Summer in the City” was […]

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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with The President of Sri Lanka, Gotabaya Rajapaksa (lead image), was toppled from power in Colombo and forced to flee the country on July 13, leaving behind a prime minister he had appointed to succeed him, assuring his immunity from prosecution and delaying national elections for two years. A week earlier, on […]

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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with Never mind the bang and whimper with which the pietistical Anglo-American Harvard alumnus and Tory snob Tom Eliot ended his 1925 poem, “The Hollow Men”.  Whatever he could have known and didn’t then, can’t answer the question now: How will this war in Europe end? Last week the Russian Foreign Minister […]

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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with The British government’s scheme of secrecy surrounding the public inquiry into the alleged Novichok attacks against Sergei and Yulia Skripal and Dawn Sturgess in 2018 has been opposed by the BBC and the London Times.  “A requirement for confidentiality undertakings”, a BBC lawyer wrote to the inquiry chairman, Lord Anthony Hughes, […]

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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with It’s unlikely that when they were alive, Sergei Skripal (lead image, left) and his daughter Yulia Skripal (right) read Enid Blyton. The paratroop and military intelligence training which Sergei Skripal received prepared him for Afghanistan, Malta, and Spain.  By the time he reached England in 2010, he wasn’t undercover, and didn’t […]

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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with On Friday, July 15, in London, a session took place of the British government’s public inquiry into the story of the Novichok attacks of 2018. This followed the first public session on March 25 and a closed-door session on April 4. However, the sound and video recording system failed. The presiding […]

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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with The public inquiry by Lord Anthony Hughes into the British government’s narrative of Russian chemical warfare in the UK and the alleged Novichok death of Dawn Sturgess on July 8, 2018, collapsed into secrecy, mishap, and farce in a London courtroom on Friday. The sound system failed, leaving only one microphone […]

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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with When I was ten years old, I was tall for my age and had an unusually powerful first serve for a boy.    After observing me hit a few practice balls, a famous international tennis star turned coach told my mother that if she handed me over to him every day […]

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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with In wars like the present one, politics on the home front cannot be permitted to give aid and comfort to the enemy. In the US and NATO campaign, the Russian oligarchs and their businesses are targets and also weapons of the plan for regime change in the Kremlin. What role they […]

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By John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with Next year it will be four hundred years since the Amboyna Massacre of March 9, 1623. The British won’t be memorializing their countrymen’s killings by the Dutch, nor the Dutch celebrating one of the last gasps of their Asian empire. They are now allies in the fabrication of reasons for killing […]