22 July 2020 — GMWatch
MPs have defeated an attempt by Tory backbenchers to ensure parliament has a vote on any post-Brexit trade deal.
An amendment to the Trade Bill currently going through the Commons would have given MPs and peers a say on any new agreement signed by the government.
22 July 2020 — The Grocer
By Joanna Blythman, food journalist and author of Swallow This
Farmers’ popularity has shot up. The general public used to ignore them, or view them as subsidy junkies. Now, as the people who put food on our plates during the Covid-19 crisis, they are enjoying levels of gratitude unprecedented since the Second World War.
24 July 2020 — 21st Century Wire
Today the UK government instituted mandatory masks in all stores and indoor public spaces, supposedly to ‘stop the spread of COVID’ – even though the virus has all but disappeared from the scene. But is their latest decree really based on real science, or are they just making it up as they go along? Also, mask culture is becoming more and more obsessive, with people literally fighting each other in supermarket aisles, but to what end? All this and much more.
Co-hosts Mike Robinson and Patrick Henningsen with the end of week news round-up. Watch:
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24 July 2020 — Oriental Review
Binoy Kampmark
There is a delicious irony in the Russia Bounty scandal. The Russians, funding the very entity that was financed, at least in a previous incarnation, by the Central Intelligence Agency, to supposedly kill the warriors of a country that had funded them. The karmic wheel of boggled minds finds its turn, and US forces, it is said, became the target of a Russian bounty program funded via the Taliban. Cue some bewildered head scratching.
24 July 2020 — Novara Media
“When the figures first came out from the Office of National Statistics (ONS), I shared it on my Instagram and thought, ‘Oh this is definitely going to pick up and make all the major news outlets,’” says Nina Tame, a disability rights activist with 17,000 followers on Instagram.
The stats, however, didn’t make nearly the kind of impact Tame was expecting. “It’s just that feeling of, ‘Oh, well it doesn’t really matter,’” she says. “This pandemic has highlighted how disposable we’re seen as.”
30 May 2020 — Declassified UK
By Richard Norton-Taylor
The British government is pushing ahead with “espionage legislation” that could criminalise the release of public information and impose even stricter controls on the UK media as part of an “epidemic of secrecy”.
British journalists and their sources are facing an unprecedented assault on freedom of speech, including the prospect of criminal prosecution. Threats aimed at whistleblowers and journalists were evident before the coronavirus crisis struck, but went largely unnoticed.
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Pepe Escobar says revelations of major money laundering in Brazil give the former president an opening to go for broke.
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2015. (Valter Campanato, Agência Brasil, CC BY 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)
By Pepe Escobar
Decades after the fact, a political earthquake that should be rocking Brazil is being met with thunderous silence.
What is now described as the Banestado leaks and CC5gate is straight out of vintage WikiLeaks: a list, published for the first time in full, naming names and detailing what is one of the biggest corruption and money laundering cases in the world for the past three decades.
Johanna Ross, journalist based in Edinburgh, Scotland
The long-awaited UK ‘Russia Report’, whose publication was delayed by 10 months by Boris Johnson, was finally released this week by the Westminster Intelligence and Security Committee, much to the excitement of those keen to demonstrate alleged ‘Russian interference’ in the 2016 EU referendum. However Britain’s ‘Russiagate’ has been something of a damp squib compared to the detailed, long-drawn Muller report across the Atlantic. In fact, anyone who was expecting any detail regarding the allegations of Russian interference would be sorely disappointed.
24 July 2020 — The Good Law Project
On 11 July, we issued judicial review proceedings against Michael Gove for awarding an £840,000 contract to long-time associates of his and Mr Cummings’. You can read the documents relating to that claim here.
The New Dark Age 