by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with Grief for his loss has prevented me from writing about Krissy (Kris, Kriska, Krisichka, Kiryusha from КРЫСА meaning “rat”). He is the cat to whom I belonged who died at our home in Moscow nine years ago, on December 9, 2011. The efforts of a Russian oligarch to kill me, and then, […]

by Editor - Sunday, November 29th, 2020
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by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with There’s an invariable rule of politics the world over. “It was worthwhile making sure of your potential friends,” the English novelist C.P. Snow put into the mouth of a rising cabinet minister in London a half-century ago. “As a rule you couldn’t win over your enemies, but you could lose your […]

by Editor - Sunday, July 19th, 2020
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by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) isn’t likely to have heard the old Australian working-class expression that a man is too crooked to lie straight in bed. It meant that lying and  cheating are in the nature of a deformity, and can’t be operated on or cured.  “The Salisbury Poisonings”, the three-part, […]

by Editor - Tuesday, June 16th, 2020
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by John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with Just over a year ago, five New York Times reporters published lies about the dead ducks they were told had been killed by Russian assassins running amok in the English town of Salisbury with a poison they called Novichok. This was a lie which came from the deputy director of the […]

by Editor - Sunday, May 31st, 2020
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by John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with Pandemic or no pandemic, misery always and everywhere craves company.    After he had been running a high fever with diarrhoea and other symptoms, scribbling notes on the progression of his illness —  London’s  typhus plague of 1623 —  John Donne not only wrote, famously,   “no man is an island,  entire […]

by Editor - Sunday, May 24th, 2020
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by John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with A coordinated attempt by the Australian and US governments to blame China for the corona virus, and to attack the World Health Organisation (WHO) for covering this up at China’s behest,  failed when the World Health Assembly (WHA) voted on Tuesday afternoon. The terms of the Covid-19 resolution adopted by the […]

by Editor - Tuesday, May 19th, 2020
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by John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with Roula Khalaf (lead image, right) is the only editor of a major London newspaper about whom next to nothing important is obvious, not even her name. She was appointed last year by Tsuneo Kita (left), chairman of Nikkei, the Japanese media group and owner of the paper, to succeed Lionel Barber […]

by Editor - Sunday, May 10th, 2020
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by John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with If Pontius Pilate, Judas Iscariot and Joshua Barabbas had combined to produce the eye-witness book on the life and death of Jesus Christ, whose anniversary falls this month, it wasn’t heard of when it was newsworthy, in the first years of the first century AD; readers have been deterred from looking […]

by Editor - Thursday, April 16th, 2020
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by John Helmer, Moscow  @bears_with The truth is that Consortium News trusted a Russian entity named the Strategic Culture Foundation and a Ukrainian reporter called Arina Tsukanova for a story published on February 27, 2017, about Chrystia Freeland’s grandfather Mikhail Chomiak, a propagandist and spy for the German Army who advocated and assisted in the murder […]

by Editor - Sunday, January 26th, 2020
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By John Helmer, Moscow   @bears_with Dominic Cummings, presently a powerful and wealthy 47-year old special advisor to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, was hard at work in Moscow and Samara for three years, between 1994 and 1997. He has acknowledged himself that “I worked in Russia 1994-7 on various projects.” This was no news to […]

by Editor - Monday, October 14th, 2019
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