Category: Non-EU Countries

Archbishop allows freemason to be bishop

The Archbishop of Canterbury is at the centre of a row after it emerged he had appointed a Freemason to be a bishop.

Rev Jonathan Baker and The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams.

By Jonathan Wynne-Jones, Religious Affairs Correspondent

Dr Rowan Williams named the Rev Jonathan Baker as the next Bishop of Ebbsfleet despite knowing he was an active and senior mason.

The appointment, announced earlier this month, marked a significant U-turn by Dr Williams who had previously said that Freemasonry was “incompatible” with Christianity and had refused to promote Masons to senior posts.

Last week, as news of Fr Baker’s membership of the Masons began to circulate through the Church, it provoked growing concern and criticism from clergy and members of the General Synod.

When contacted by The Sunday Telegraph on Friday, Fr Baker defended his continued membership of the Masons and insisted it was compatible with his new role as a bishop.

Yet yesterday he said he had changed his mind was leaving the masons so he could concentrate on being a bishop, adding: “I wish nothing to distract from the inauguration of that ministry.”

Freemasonry, a secretive male-only organisation dating back 300 years, requires its members to declare a belief in a “supreme being” and to undergo elaborate rituals.

Fr Baker joined the Apollo University masonic lodge in Oxford while he was a student, in an initiation ceremony that involves promising to keep the “secrets of Freemasonry”.

This ritual is said to involve members being blindfolded, wearing a hangman’s noose, and being warned that those who break the oaths of allegiance will have their throat slit and their tongue torn out before being buried in the sand.

He remained a member of the lodge for more than 20 years until his resignation yesterday, rising in the organisation to serve a term as an assistant Grand Chaplain.

Fr Baker, who is currently principal at Pusey House in Oxford, said he had told Archbishop Williams he was a mason when they discussed his appointment to be the next Bishop of Ebbsfleet – one of the “flying bishops” who oversee clergy opposed to women priests. The post had fallen vacant when its previous holder quit to join the Roman Catholic Church.

He said on Friday: “For many years I have been an active member and I continue to be a member. This came up in discussion with Rowan, but it has not caused a problem for me at any stage of my ministry and it won’t cause a problem now.”

He argued that it would not interfere with his role of overseeing traditionalist parishes and said he saw no conflict in being a bishop and a Freemason.

“I’ve never found it to be anything other than an organisation that is wholly supportive of the Church.”

However, yesterday he said: “I have concluded that, because of the particular charism of episcopal ministry and the burden that ministry bears, I am resigning my membership of Freemasonry.”

He said that in his conversation with Dr Williams about taking up the Ebbsfleet post, the Archbishop had asked him to reconsider his membership of Freemasonry, but was happy for the appointment to go forward while he was still a Mason.

Yet Dr Williams has previously expressed serious concerns about clergy being involved with the organisation.

In 2002, shortly before he became the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Williams wrote in a letter to Hugh Sinclair, of the Movement for the Register of Freemasons: “I have real misgivings about the compatibility of Masonry and Christian profession … I have resisted the appointment of known Masons to certain senior posts.”

A year later he repeated this unease when he tried to apologise for upsetting Freemasons with his comments, saying: “Where anxieties exist they are in relation not to Freemasonry but to Christian ministers subscribing to what could be and often is understood [or misunderstood] as a private system of profession and initiation, involving the taking of oaths of loyalty.”

His senior advisers went even further at the time. “He questions whether it’s appropriate for Christian ministers to belong to secret organisations,” said The Rev Gregory Cameron, a close friend and former chaplain to Dr Williams. “He also has some anxiety about the spiritual content of Masonry.”

A spokesman for Dr Williams said at the time that he was “worried about the ritual elements in Freemasonry, which some have seen as possibly Satanically inspired and how that sits uneasily with Christian belief”.

He continued: “The other idea is that because they are a society, there could be a network that involves mutual back-scratching, which is something he would be greatly opposed to.”

Last night, Christina Rees, a member of the Archbishops’ Council, said: “The fact that Jonathan Baker has resigned as a Freemason suggests to me there is a serious incompatibility between the organisation and the Church. If it was only a matter of perception, surely he could have stuck it out.”

Her comments were echoed by Alison Ruoff, a prominent member on the General Synod, who said she had been stunned to learn of Fr Baker’s involvement with the Masons.

“I’m pleased to hear he’s resigned as a Mason because it is clear that the gospel does not go with masonic beliefs,” she said.

“I think Rowan should have said he could not be a bishop if he continued to be a Mason.”

The Rev David Phillips, general secretary of the Church Society, a conservative evangelical group, said: “The Church has said that Freemasonry is not compatible with Christianity so appointing him as a bishop seems to contradict its own stance.”

Lambeth Palace declined to comment.

www.telegraph.co.uk, 14 May 2011

May 15, 2011
Unlawful Killing: Was Princess Diana Murdered?

‎”A friend of the late Princess testifies that Diana was warned by Conservative MP (and Winston Churchill’s grandson) Nicholas Soames to stop criticizing the royal family or “Accidents can happen.”’

A new documentary shown at the Cannes Film Festival makes some big allegations that have people asking: “Was Princess Diana murdered?”

by RICHARD CORLISS

Will they show the death photo? A week after that question dominated U.S. news in the wake of the Osama bin Laden killing, all of Cannes — or, rather, many in the British press reporting on the film festival — was breathlessly anticipating a documentary that would supposedly show a picture of Princess Diana in her death car just after the 1997 crash that killed the former Princess of Wales, her boy friend Dodi Fayed and their driver Henri Paul. Keith Allen’s Unlawful Killing, the Daily Mail reported, “will include a graphic black and white close-up of Diana taken moments after the Mercedes carrying the couple crashed in a Paris underpass.”

That “money shot,” and the renewed currency of the Diana legend in the light of her son William’s recent marriage, lured several hundred journalists to Unlawful Killing‘s world premiere screening this afternoon. (The film is not part of the official selection; the producers simply rented a hall and showed the movie.) Averring that he was “not a raving republican [antimonarchist] or Trotskyite,” Allen told the crowd of his intent to focus on irregularities in the British government’s 2007 Inquest into the crash; his film would be “an inquest of the inquest” that would challenge both its methods and the belief of the British public that Diana’s death was an accident caused by a reckless driver and the madly pursuing paparazzi.

In The Guardian last weekend, Allen wrote that he was premiering his film at Cannes because “British lawyers insisted on 87 cuts before any U.K. release could be contemplated. So rather than butcher the film, or risk legal action, we’re showing it in France, then the US, and everywhere except the U.K. Pity, because at a time when the mindless sugar rush of the royal wedding has been sending British republicans into a diabetic coma, it could act as a welcome antidote.”

Two professional movie watchers — the Corlisses — sat avidly through Unlawful Killing and found no lingering depiction of a gruesome Diana crash-scene photo. But any reasonably alert viewer can guess which comments a lawyer might find dicey under the severe British libel system. Clinical psychologist and TV pundit Oliver James compares Diana’s erstwhile father-in-law, Prince Philip, to the serial killer Fred West. Another talking head calls the Windsors “gangsters in tiaras.” A friend of the late Princess testifies that Diana was warned by Conservative MP (and Winston Churchill grandson) Nicholas Soames to stop criticizing the royal family or “Accidents can happen.” Mohamed al-Fayed, father of the dead Dodi, airs his frequent charge that the Windsors and the British Secret Service killed Diana because she was pregnant and about to announce her betrothal to an Egyptian Muslim. “It’s not a murder,” al-Fayed says, “it’s a slaughter by a bloody racist family.”

Considering that Allen indicts British jurists, law officers and the media for complicity in covering up the facts of Diana’s death because they are under the satanic sway of the royal family, it’s pertinent that the film doesn’t mention that Mohamed al-Fayed financed its £2.5 million ($4.1 million) budget, after Allen was turned down by Channel 4, his usual sponsor, and other TV networks. “He put money in because nobody else would,” Allen said at a press conference after today’s screening. “If I could have got it somewhere else I would have got it somewhere else. But I didn’t; I got it off him.” A mantra of those who make documentary exposés is to follow the money trail; it is unusual, if not compromising, that one of the most outspoken people in a controversial story should also pay for it.

Whatever its hidden agenda, or the source of its budget, Unlimited Killing fills all the contours of a prime political-conspiracy film: the pugnacious tone, the dramatizing of events, the outrageous charges and, more pertinently, enough plausible evidence to raise questions of foul play. “I don’t believe that there is too much that is new,” Allen said of his film at the press conference. “There’s an old saying in our country which is the best kept secrets are on the bookshelves of the British Library. They’re all there if you care to go and look for them.” The strength of the movie — other than the lingering allure of Lady Di — is that Allen and his co-director and co-writer Victor Lewis-Smith tie the strands of conspiracy together in a zippy, brightly provocative package.

In the royal-wedding summer of 1981, Diana Spencer seemed the perfect young bride for Charles, the Queen’s heir. “All the Windsors wanted was a brood mare crossed with a clothes horse,” Allen says in the narration. “But the brood mare proved to be a kicker.” Bad enough that the marriage ended 12 years later; worse that the adored princess went public with her acrimony. Then she falls for Dodi Fayed and may be pregnant with a future king’s half-sibling, tainting the royal bloodline. What’s a monarchy to do? Allen charges that “It was chillingly convenient for the Windsors that she die when she did.”

The film quotes a letter Diana wrote to her butler Paul Burrell in 1993, just months after she and Charles separated. “This particular phase in my life is the most dangerous — my husband is planning ‘an accident’ in my car. brake failure & serious head injury…” (Diana suspected that Charles wanted to marry William and Harry’s nanny, Tiffy Legge-Bourke, not his longtime love Camilla Parker Bowles, whom he would wed in 2005.) If any other woman had written this, and then died in the manner she feared, would her husband not have been called to testify in her inquest?

The reenactment of the inquest often wanders into ham acting, and the bombastic al-Fayed is not the best witness for his own case. Allen makes overmuch of the laziness of the British reporters — from the monarchy, not the crime beat — and of his proposal that Diana’s crusading against land mines might have encouraged the worldwide armament industry to have her killed. He also speculates that some malefic force in a car approaching from the other direction could have shined a searing light into Paul’s eyes, causing the crash. (That hardly squares with Allen’s assertion that Paul “was working for the [British] Secret Service when he died.” Was he a suicide driver?)

But the real creepiness of the film is in its exposure of botched police work, intentional or simply incompetent, at the scene of the collision and after. Fully 81 minutes elapsed between the crash and the departure of the ambulance carrying Diana to a hospital. Blood tests of the driver, who was thought responsible because he was drunk at the time, were deemed “toxicologically inexplicable”; they’d been either switched or tampered with. No explanation was given for the jamming of Diana’s seat belt, which could have saved her life if she’d been able to buckle it. The Princess’s body was quickly embalmed, which obscured questions of her pregnancy; and a sanitation crew washed down the crime site before evidence could be taken. And what of the “white Fiat Uno” that some witnesses saw speeding from the scene? A paparazzo would owned a car matching that description was later found dead in it, with two bullets in his brain.

In the end, 15 months after the inquest began, the jury returned a verdict of “unlawful killing, grossly negligent driving of the following vehicles and of the Mercedes.” The movie insists that “the following vehicles” were not the photographers chasing Diana and Dodi but other unnamed agents; and Allen corrupts his case by omitting “and of the Mercedes,” the better to absolve Henri Paul and finger the vast monarcho-politico-judicial complex.

This climactic shrillness dilutes an engrossing case for the prosecution, and plays to the balcony of conspiracy freaks. That’s too bad, since anyone who comes to Unlawful Killing with no prejudices in the matter can find in the massing of evidence and conjecture plenty of food for thought — which, if more carefully prepared and served, could choke the royal family.

May 13, 2011

May 14, 2011
Bank warns of weaker growth in UK

Bank of England governor Mervyn King has slashed growth forecasts for the UK

The Bank of England has braced the country for weaker growth as rocketing energy bills and tough Government cuts continue to squeeze household spending.

In its quarterly inflation report, the Bank cut growth forecasts for the next two years and warned inflation will fall back later than previously expected in 2013.

The Bank warned energy bills could surge as much as 15% this year, far ahead of its previous expectations, piling pressure on the cost of living and dampening growth.

Despite the uncertain outlook, economists said the report suggested interest rates will increase from 0.5% to 1% by the end of the year.

Bank governor Mervyn King said the soft patch in growth will be temporary but the recovery will hinge on business investment and exports. He warned the squeeze on household budgets may have further to go.

It is the fourth time the Bank has downgraded its growth forecast in the year since the coalition Government was formed.

The report reopened the debate over the severity of Chancellor George Osborne’s austerity measures and the ability of the economy to withstand the cuts, with Shadow Treasury chief secretary Angela Eagle saying: “Cutting too deep and too fast, as this Conservative-led Government is doing, is a vicious circle.”

The Bank downgraded its expectations for gross domestic product in 2011 to around 1.7%, from about 2% in its February report. In 2012, GDP is expected to be around 2.2%, from just under 3%.

The rate of inflation, currently at 4%, is now expected to hit 5% this year and remain above the Government’s 2% target throughout 2012 before falling back – but only if interest rates rise in line with market expectations from the third quarter of 2011.

The gloomier outlook reflected the impact of surging energy prices – such as crude oil in the wake of political unrest in Libya – and the impact disappointing real wages will have on spending.

London Evening Standart

May 11, 2011
Jobcentre staff ‘sent guidelines on how to deal with claimants’ suicide threats’

Employees ‘receive six-point plan telling them to take each threat seriously’ as clamp on benefits takes effect

According to a senior Jobcentre employee, staff have been sent guidelines advising them on how to cope with clients who say will kill themselves. Photograph: David Sillitoe for the Guardian

Staff working for jobcentres and other Department for Work and Pensions contractors have been given guidelines on how to deal with suicide threats from claimants as the squeeze on benefits takes hold.

A document sent to jobcentre staff in April details what it calls a “new policy for all DWP businesses to help them manage suicide and self-harm declarations from customers”.

The guidelines include a “six-point plan” for staff to follow which says: “Some customers may say they intend to self-harm or kill themselves as a threat or a tactic to ‘persuade’, others will mean it. It is very hard to distinguish between the two … For this reason, all declarations must be taken seriously.”

The internal document was sent to the Guardian by a senior jobcentre employee who has worked for the DWP for more than 20 years. It was accompanied by a letter from the source that said: “Absolutely nobody has ever seen this guidance before, leading staff to believe it has been put together ahead of the incapacity benefit and disability living allowance cuts.”

The employee, who asked to remain anonymous, said: “We were a bit shocked. Are we preparing ourselves to be like the Samaritans? The fact that we’ve dealt with the public for so many years without such guidance has made people feel a bit fearful about what’s coming.”

The DWP said that the new guidelines were not related to any recent policy changes and had been in development since 2009. “This guidance is about supporting our staff and ensuring we can help our customers.

“It is right that a customer-facing organisation that serves over 20 million, including the most vulnerable in our society, has guidance such as this in place.”

The team leader said the guidance had alarmed people in their team: “We’ve suddenly got this new aspect to our job. The bigger picture is people here are wondering how savage these cuts are going to be. And we’re the frontline staff having to deal with the fallout from these changes. ”

Julie Tipping, an appeals officer for Disability Solutions, represents claimants who try to overturn decisions made following work capability assessment tests that they are fit for work.

She says that in the last year, two of her clients have made “real attempts” at suicide after a decision was made that they were fit for work. Both were taken to hospital and subsequently sectioned.

“It’s real and true. A lot of people think these people are crying wolf to get their money, but that’s not the case. They are suffering from real problems and can’t face it any more.”

Tipping said the pressure on vulnerable clients was “the cumulative effect of all these welfare changes. The test is simply not fit for purpose for assessing mental health problems. That’s on top of moving people on to jobseeker’s allowance, and all of the conditionality and risk of sanctions that goes with that.”

The Guardian revealed last month that some jobcentres were setting targets for advisers to stop people’s benefits for not meeting conditions attached to their jobseeker’s allowance.

A whistleblower said that the pressure on staff was leading to vulnerable claimants being targeted for sanctions. The targets have since been removed. But thousands of claimants of incapacity benefit and employment support allowance are being reassessed to see if they should be considered fit for work and moved on to jobseeker’s allowance.

Another jobcentre adviser said: “People have been coming off sickness benefits and thrown onto jobseeker’s allowance. It’s problematic because some customers are clearly not fit to work, and they are clearly very distressed. When you sense this you feel really upset because the system is allowing them to get like this and you feel part of the processing machine.”Eleanor Lisney, of Disabled People Against Cuts, said that the thought of being moved on to jobseeker’s allowance was like a sword hanging over the heads of disabled groups and she feared an increase in related suicides.

www.guardian.co.uk, 8 May 2011

May 11, 2011
Wasn’t Bin Laden the reason we went to war?

Patrick Cockburn: Wasn’t Bin Laden the reason we went to war?

The killing of the al-Qa’ida leader offers an opportunity to make long overdue progress on Afghanistan

Does the death of Osama bin Laden open the door for the US and UK to escape from the trap into which they have fallen in Afghanistan? At first sight, the presumed weakening of al-Qa’ida ought to strength the case for an American and British withdrawal. When President Obama ordered the dispatch of an extra 30,000 troops to Afghanistan in 2009, he declared that the goal was “to deny safe-haven to al-Qa’ida and to deny the Taliban the ability to overthrow the Afghan government”.

This justification for stationing 100,000 US troops in Afghanistan and for Washington spending $113bn (£69bn) a year always looked thin. By the US army’s own estimate there are about 100 members of al-Qa’ida in Afghanistan compared with an estimated 25,000 Taliban. Even on the Pakistan side of the border, al-Qa’ida probably only has a few hundred fighters.

A problem for the US and Britain is how to dump this convenient but highly misleading explanation as to why it was essential for the safety of their own countries to fight a war in Afghanistan. This has required pretending that al-Qa’ida was in the country in significant force and that a vast US and UK military deployment was necessary to defend the streets of London or the little house on the prairie.

The death of Bin Laden reduces this highly exaggerated perception of al-Qa’ida as a threat. People, not unreasonably, ask what we are doing in Afghanistan, and why soldiers are still being killed. One spurious argument has been to conflate al-Qa’ida and the Afghan Taliban, and say they are much the same thing. But it is difficult to think of a single Afghan involved in bomb attacks against targets in the US and Britain before and after 9/11. Al-Qa’ida’s leadership was mainly Egyptian and Saudi as were all the 9/11 bombers.

The problem for Washington and London is that they have got so many people killed in Afghanistan and spent so much money that it is difficult for them to withdraw without something that can be dressed up as a victory. Could the death of Bin Laden be the sort of success that would allow Obama to claim that America’s main objective has been achieved? For the moment, at least, it will be more difficult for the Republicans to claim that a disengagement is a betrayal of US national security. Could not this be the moment for the US, with Britain tagging along behind, to cut a deal and get out?

Unfortunately, it probably isn’t going to happen. It will not be Obama’s decision alone. In 2009, he was dubious about what a temporary surge in US troop numbers would achieve and keen not to be sucked into a quagmire in Afghanistan just as the US was getting out of one in Iraq. Endless discussions took place in the offices of the White House about whether or not to send reinforcements.

But the outcome of these repeated meetings was predictable given the balance of power between different institutions in Washington. Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA and the next US Secretary for Defence, said that the decision to send more troops should have been made in a week, because the political reality is that “no Democratic president can go against military advice, especially if he has asked for it. So just do it. Do what they [the generals] said.”

The US military is not going to eat its optimistic words of late last year when they were claiming that it was finally making headway against the Taliban. Insurgent mid-level commanders were being assassinated in night raids by US Special Forces, and survivors were fleeing to Pakistan. If the Taliban were increasing their strength in northern Afghanistan, they were losing their grip on their old strongholds in Helmand and Kandahar.

Such reports of progress appear to have been largely propaganda or wishful thinking. At the start of this year’s fighting season the Taliban have been able to launch as many attacks as last year and replace its casualties. In Kandahar last month, they were able to free 500 prisoners from the city jail by digging a tunnel 1,000 feet long over five months without anybody finding out about it. An organisation that can do this is scarcely on its last legs. The message of the last few months is that the “surge” in Afghanistan, of which so much was expected, has not worked.

The Americans and British are meant to be training Afghan military and police units to take the place of foreign forces. It is never quite explained how Taliban fighters, without any formal military training, are able to battle the best-equipped armies in the world, while Afghan government troops require months of training before they can carry out the simplest military task.

One escaped Taliban prisoner in Kandahar has said that their plan was helped by the fact in the evening the prison guards always fell into a drug-induced stupor.

Official bromides about building up the strength of the Afghan government ignore an ominous trend: the governing class is detested by the rest of the population as a gang of thieves and racketeers. I was struck in a recent visit to Kabul by the venom with which well-educated professional people and businessmen, who are not doing badly, condemn Hamid Karzai’s government. This does not mean that they support the Taliban, but it does show that Karzai’s support, aside from cronies busily engaged in robbing the state, is very small.

When negotiations do start they should be between the four main players: the US, the Afghan government, the Taliban, and Pakistan. For all the rude things being said about the Pakistan military after Bin Laden was discovered so close to their main military academy in Abbottabad, nothing is going to be decided without their say-so.

Only the Pakistani army can deliver the Taliban whose great strategic advantage in the war is that under pressure they can always withdraw across the border into Pakistan. It is the highly permeable border, as long as the distance from London to Moscow, which prevented the Soviet Union from defeating Afghan rebels in the 1980s. Pakistan is not going to try to close this border and could not do so even if it wanted to.

It would not be difficult for the Taliban to renounce al-Qa’ida and other jihadi groups. The killing of Bin Laden as the icon of evil should make this easier for the US to accept.

Obviously there is going to be no military solution to the Afghan conflict, and negotiations with the Taliban will have to begin sooner or later, so why not now?

www.independent.co.uk, 8 May 2011

Showing 10 comments
Sort by Subscribe by email Subscribe by RSS anna 21 minutes ago afghanistan has untold mineral wealth and the Unicla pipeline goes through it – that’s why they are thereGetit? the Taliban can’t get hold of that, right?

May 8, 2011
Netanyahu’s Military Adviser Skips Visit to U.K. Over Fears He’d Be Arrested on “War Crimes” Charges…

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s military secretary, Maj.-Gen. Yohanan Locker, did not accompany Netanyahu on his trip to London last week, out of concern he might be arrested there, Channel 1 reported.

Locker is a permanent member of Netanyahu’s entourage, but he was warned that since the British law on universal jurisdiction had not yet been changed, he might be detained upon landing in the UK over alleged war crimes that human rights groups have accused Israel of committing during Operation Cast Lead.

Locker – who accompanies Netanyahu everywhere he goes, inside Israel and out – opted out of the Prime Minister’s entourage after he received a recommendation to do so. Locker was the chief of staff of the Israel Air Force in operation Cast Lead and would therefore be a prime target for anti-Israeli “lawfare” abroad.

In 2009, Tzipi Livni reportedly canceled a trip to England out of similar concerns. Livni was foreign minister during Cast Lead.

British law allows private citizens to secure arrest warrants for visiting foreign officials whom they accuse of war crimes or crimes against humanity. Pro-Hamas activists have been trying to use this law to harass Israeli officials who travel to London.

The British government under Prime Minister David Cameron has begun to enact legislation to curb British magistrates’ powers of “universal jurisdiction,” making it impossible for a private British citizen to have a foreign official arrested without government cooperation. An amendment to this effect was approved by the House of Commons in April and has been sent to the House of Lords for final approval.
(IsraelNationalNews.com)

May 8, 2011