‘Drop the Charges,’ Says Amnesty Ahead of Key Julian Assange Hearing

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Original article by BRETT WILKINS republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Protesters demand freedom for jailed WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange in London on October 11, 2022.  (Photo: Alisdare Hickson/flickr/cc)

“The risk to publishers and investigative journalists around the world hangs in the balance. Should Julian Assange be sent to the U.S. and prosecuted there, global media freedoms will be on trial, too.”

Amnesty International on Tuesday renewed its call for the U.S. government to drop charges against jailed WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, whose final hearing before the United Kingdom’s High Court regarding his extradition to the United States is fast approaching.

Assange’s February 20-21 hearing before the High Court will determine whether the Australian journalist—who has been imprisoned in London’s Belmarsh Prison since April 2019—has exhausted all of his U.K. appeals and will be extradited to the United States, where he has been charged with violating the 1917 Espionage Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for publishing classified U.S. military documents and files on WikiLeaks over a decade ago.

“The risk to publishers and investigative journalists around the world hangs in the balance. Should Julian Assange be sent to the U.S. and prosecuted there, global media freedoms will be on trial, too,” said Julia Hall, Amnesty International’s expert on counterterrorism and criminal justice in Europe.

“Assange will suffer personally from these politically motivated charges and the worldwide media community will be on notice that they too are not safe,” Hall added. “The public’s right to information about what their governments are doing in their name will be profoundly undermined. The U.S. must drop the charges under the Espionage Act against Assange and bring an end to his arbitrary detention in the U.K.”

Among the materials published by WikiLeaks are the Afghanistan and Iraq war logs, which revealed U.S. and coalition war crimes, many of them leaked by American whistleblower Chelsea Manning. Perhaps the most infamous of the leaks is the so-called “Collateral Murder” video, which shows U.S. Army attack helicopter crews laughing as they gunned down a group of Iraqi civilians that included journalists and children.

While the soldiers and commanders implicated in the materials published by WikiLeaks have largely enjoyed impunity, Manning served seven years in prison before her sentence was commuted by outgoing U.S. President Barack Obama in 2017. Meanwhile, Assange faces up to 175 years behind bars if found guilty of all charges against him.

According to the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, Assange has been arbitrarily deprived of his freedom since he was arrested in December 2010. Since then he has been held under house arrest, confined for seven years in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London while he was protected by the administration of former Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa, and jailed in Belmarsh.

In 2019, Nils Melzer, then the U.N. special rapporteur on torture, said Assange was showing “all symptoms typical for prolonged exposure to psychological torture.”

In a development related to Assange’s case, a federal judge earlier this month sentenced Joshua Schulte of New York to 40 years in prison in part for giving WikiLeaks “Vault 7,” a series of documents detailing the CIA’s surveillance and cyberwarfare activities and capabilities.

On Monday, the CIA—which during the Trump administration mulled assassinating Assange—invoked its state secrets privilege in a bid to block a lawsuit by the publisher’s attorneys. The suit alleges that CIA operatives “blatantly violated” the rights of lawyers and journalists visiting Assange in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London by conducting unconstitutional searches and seizures of their electronic devices.

Acclaimed U.S. film director Oliver Stone released a video over the weekend to draw attention to protests on “Day X”—what Assange supporters are calling his upcoming hearing—and Assange’s continued “illegal detention.”

“The world needs to be reminded, and so does Julian,” said Stone. “He’s one of us. He’s more than that, he is the collective us. If he goes down a part of each one of us goes down.”

In New York City, activist and political satirist Randy Credico, host of “Julian Assange: Countdown to Freedom”on WBAI radio and the Progressive Radio Network, will be co-piloting billboard trucks with “Free Assange” messages until the London hearing, according toCounterPunch.

Meanwhile in France, Russian artist Andrei Molodkin is attracting global attention for threatening to destroy a collection of works by artists including Picasso, Rembrandt, and Andy Warhol that he has amassed if Assange—who suffers from a host of health issues—dies in prison.

Original article by BRETT WILKINS republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Continue Reading‘Drop the Charges,’ Says Amnesty Ahead of Key Julian Assange Hearing

NHS to investigate Palantir after spy tech firm plotted influencer marketing campaign to counter critics

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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/nhs-investigate-palantir-spy-tech-firm-plotted-influencer-marketing-campaign

Health workers form a blockade in Soho Square during a protest outside the London headquarters of US tech giant Palantir, which was awarded a £330 million contract by NHS England last month to create a new data management system called the Federated Data Platform, December 21, 2023

THE NHS is set to probe potential contract breaches by US spy tech firm Palantir after the company plotted an influencer marketing campaign to shut down criticism from campaigners.

Palantir failed to seek prior approval from NHS England for a marketing campaign promoting its £330 million contract to run a data platform for the health service.

The contract sparked fierce criticism from campaigners who cited privacy concerns over sharing medical data with the secretive firm, which was first funded by the CIA.

According to leaked emails, Palantir hired PR agency Topham Guerin, which previously ran campaigns for the Conservative Party, and marketing agency Disrupt, to approach influencers.

The brief outlined a campaign to “clear up misinformation relating to some recent data privacy concerns that were shared in the UK press.”

It went on to accuse The Good Law Project, which flagged concerns over safeguarding data, of “spreading fear.”

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/nhs-investigate-palantir-spy-tech-firm-plotted-influencer-marketing-campaign

Continue ReadingNHS to investigate Palantir after spy tech firm plotted influencer marketing campaign to counter critics

KEIR STARMER JOINED SECRETIVE CIA-LINKED GROUP WHILE SERVING IN CORBYN’S SHADOW CABINET

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Labour leader Keir Starmer (centre) with then US secretary of state Mike Pompeo (R) and then US ambassador to Britain, Woody Johnson, in London, 21 July 2020.
Labour leader Keir Starmer (centre) with then US secretary of state Mike Pompeo (R) and then US ambassador to Britain, Woody Johnson, in London, 21 July 2020. Pompeo said in 2019 “we will do our level best” to stop Jeremy Corbyn getting elected. (Photo: US State Department)

Starmer served on the Trilateral Commission alongside two former heads of the CIA without telling Jeremy Corbyn—who would have blocked it, Declassified can reveal.

  • Declassified discovers Starmer joined the Trilateral Commission between 2017-18 while he was Corbyn’s shadow Brexit secretary
  • He is one of only two serving British MPs to have been a member, according to available records
  • Starmer spoke at group’s London event in 2017 alongside former heads of MI5 and GCHQ
  • Former CIA director said in 2019 “we will do our level best” to stop Corbyn getting elected
  • Corbyn’s former spokesman tells Declassified that Starmer’s membership “was plainly incompatible with Labour’s then-stated policies”

Keir Starmer joined an international grouping closely linked to US and UK intelligence while he was serving in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, Declassified has found. 

The Trilateral Commission describes itself as a “global membership organisation” which seeks “to discuss and propose solutions to some of the world’s toughest problems”. Its meetings are strictly off-the-record.

It was founded in 1973 by billionaire banker David Rockefeller as a networking group for elites from the US, Europe and Japan. Rockefeller was close to the leadership of the CIA at the time. 

Membership records seen by Declassified show Starmer joined the Trilateral Commission at some point between March 2017 and October 2018. He left at some point between April 2021 and June 2022.

Starmer was a member of the Trilateral Commission alongside two former heads of the CIA, and spoke at one of its London events alongside the former heads of MI5 and GCHQ. 

The current Labour leader served as Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow Brexit secretary from 2016-19. In this role, he was integral to the push for a second referendum on exiting the European Union, a position that many fault for Labour’s catastrophic performance in the 2019 election. 

Continue ReadingKEIR STARMER JOINED SECRETIVE CIA-LINKED GROUP WHILE SERVING IN CORBYN’S SHADOW CABINET

Why Palantir’s latest NHS land-grab is such bad news for patients

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Original article by Cori Crider republished from openDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

OPINION: Once Palantir is inside our health service, it will be hard to get rid of. The NHS should think carefully

NHS sign

This week I debated the future of the NHS with a cardboard cutout. This was, I confess, a bit of a let-down: Louis Mosley, the UK head of Palantir, looked very fine in 2D, watermelon cocktail in hand, but we’d hoped for the man himself. He’d agreed to debate Foxglove about the NHS’s massive new plans for our health data, only to pull out at the last minute, citing ‘commitments in eastern Europe’. I suspect the real reason is that the government leant on him – and the conference organisers – to scuttle the debate. So much for public engagement.

Funny cutouts aside, this is a serious matter. The NHS, as we can see from the strikes this week, is in a historic crisis. As well as 120,000 care vacancies, the NHS has over 3,000 vacant tech roles – which stops the service from evolving to meet future needs. But instead of gripping this crisis with a credible workforce plan, the government proposes to spend nearly half a billion pounds on a database.

This is what I was hoping to debate with Louis. The government wants to give his spy-tech firm, Palantir, the contract to manage a vast new ‘Federated Data Platform’. If it goes ahead as envisaged, the FDP will be the largest single point of access to patient data this country has ever seen. It’s a pity it was left to me and Dr Marcus Baw, a GP and health IT specialist, to debate this system – because there’s so much the government won’t say about it. Like exactly what shape it will take or what purposes it will eventually serve; what it will eventually cost; who will have access; or how patient choice and consent will be honoured.

The proposed system is vast. The aim is for it to sweep in hospital, GP, even social care records – and make all this patient data available to government planners and others.

Now, parts of this are all to the good. The NHS badly needs to make better and more efficient use of patient data for the good of the NHS and of patients; there are inefficiencies in the system that urgently need fixing. But we, and many experts within the NHS we speak to, have serious concerns about the design of this contract: about whether the procurement has been fair; whether the system will work as designed; and whether Palantir, which is mainly known for supporting CIA drone attacks, predictive policing and deportation raids, is a remotely appropriate partner for the NHS.

That’s why Foxglove (with openDemocracy) brought multiple legal cases seeking to shed light on this shadowy spy-tech firm’s beachhead in the NHS since their very first £1 no-bid pandemic contract. It’s also why 50 other groups have signed the ‘No Palantir’ pledge, saying a company whose values are so manifestly opposed to those of the NHS has no place handling so much sensitive patient data.

Having one supplier to join up data and analyse it risks creating a dangerous private monopoly over vital NHS infrastructure

But there are deeper issues with the FDP. It runs the risk of stealing oxygen – and funding – from other critical work already underway to help the NHS join up its patient data for good. For example, openSafely, a flagship national data platform for health research, was developed by Ben Goldacre and a team at Oxford and was used for vital Covid research. It’s completely open source, safe and lights a way forward for trustworthy health research. It also costs a fraction of what Palantir does.

What’s more, pushing so much access and control to the centre may not make sense. For some issues – vaccination, workforce planning – there is a clear case for a national solution. But ultimately, most care is delivered locally and planned regionally. There are already places, such as London, that have pioneered solutions to pool patient data to plan care better – at a fraction of the FDP’s cost. It is far from clear how this will interact with the FDP, or whether it can survive the new system.

Other competitors – like a UK consortium of universities and open-source firms that are apparently bidding for the deal – would have loved a fair crack at the FDP contract. But let’s be honest: they probably haven’t got a snowball’s chance at beating Palantir’s incumbent advantage, won through a mixture of insider influence and watermelon cocktail lobbying.

Once Palantir’s in, it will be hard to get it out. The technical architecture is proprietary – and other government agencies have struggled to get off Palantir when they’ve tried. Having a single supplier to help you join up data and analyse it also risks creating a dangerous private monopoly over vital NHS infrastructure.

Indeed, if you take Palantir chief executive Alex Karp at his word, that’s the plan. “We are working towards a future where all large institutions in the United States and its allies abroad are running significant segments of their operations, if not their operations as a whole, on Palantir,” he wrote. “Most other companies are targeting small segments of the market. We see and intend to capture the whole.” That reads like an express statement of an intention to seek monopoly power.

It’s also clear they’re in it to profit. Their chief technology officer, Shyam Shankar, recently wrote: “The problem with defen[c]e contracting is not the popular narrative that contractors make too much money. It is actually that they make too little money… Innovators will need outsized profits to motivate progress.” Monopoly and profiteering may be good for Palantir’s share price, but they sit uncomfortably with the ethos of a public health service.

Joining up the NHS’s disparate health data systems better will present stiff challenges, and the NHS will face trade-offs – buying in consultants may be easier in the short term, for example, but may prove more expensive in the long run. But at the moment the government is stonewalling legal letters asking even basic questions about the FDP. And they are also creating facts on the ground that could be seen to favour Palantir. The legal basis for all of this, now that the pandemic’s suspension of protections for patient data has lapsed, is unclear.

People care deeply about how their health data is used. We go to the doctor to share our worries, our fears, and our pain – and if we don’t trust that conversation to be private, we may not go at all. People want to feel safe to contribute their health data for the good of the NHS – but when the government runs out ahead of patient trust, overhauling patient data systems without explaining what it wants to do, who will see the data, and what safeguards there are, people baulk. In 2021 more than a million people in a month opted out of sharing their health data because they didn’t trust the government’s last plans to pool their GP records. The history of the NHS is a boneyard of such schemes: massive, expensive white elephants that all failed because the government didn’t take the time to get the governance or consent right.

It is past time for the government to learn from these mistakes. We can build a better future for our patient data – if we take the time to design carefully, honouring patient choice and thinking about what system will serve the NHS for the long haul. Anything less is likely to fail and set the cause of progress back another five years.

Original article by Cori Crider republished from openDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

Continue ReadingWhy Palantir’s latest NHS land-grab is such bad news for patients

NHS hospitals told to share patient data with US ‘spy-tech’ firm

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Original exclusive article by Lucas Amin and openDemocracy republished under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence

Palantir, whose owner claimed the NHS ‘makes people sick’, will ‘collect and process confidential patient information’

Hundreds of NHS hospitals have been ordered to share people’s confidential medical records with an American spy-tech company owned by a billionaire Trump donor, openDemocracy can reveal.

Palantir Technologies – the secretive Silicon Valley firm first funded by the CIA – will collect patient information from all hospitals in England, according to internal NHS documents.

In a letter sent last month, the health service finance chief Julian Kelly gave NHS trusts until the end of March to begin uploading patient information to a new central database that uses Palantir’s Foundry software.

The instruction came despite a government pledge, made after openDemocracy sued the Department of Health and Social Care in 2021, to consult the public before agreeing to work with Palantir again.

The new database, called ‘Faster Data Flows’, collects daily information about hospital patients – including their dates of birth, postcodes and detailed medical histories – that was previously held by individual trusts and shared less frequently.

NHS England told openDemocracy it would alter or remove identifiable personal information before it was passed to Palantir – a process referred to by the health service as “pseudonymisation”. Palantir also insisted that it does not have access to any “identifiable medical records”.

But an NHS document obtained by openDemocracy admits that the company will “collect and process confidential patient information”. It is not clear what, precisely, this processing entails.

Lawyers for three patient advocacy groups said that NHS England had not addressed vital legal and privacy concerns. “Slapping a sticker over your NHS number doesn’t suddenly mean your health record needs no protection,” said Cori Crider, a lawyer at Foxglove Legal. “People are very easy to re-identify from pseudonymised data.”

The news also raises fresh concerns that Palantir is being lined up to win a contentious £480m contract to process unprecedented amounts of NHS data without patient consent.

Palantir was originally funded by the CIA and has been heavily criticised for producing surveillance tech for police forces that allegedly creates “racist feedback loops” and has helped the US government to track and deport undocumented migrants.

The company’s founder, Peter Thiel, donated $1.25m to Donald Trump’s election campaign. Earlier this year he said the NHS “makes people sick” and claimed British affection for the health service was akin to “Stockholm syndrome”.

Tory MP David Davis told openDemocracy he was concerned “by the NHS appearing to be favouring an organisation with the provenance of Palantir”.

“NHS England should not be attempting to do this without explicit approval from Parliament,” he said, calling on the health secretary Steve Barclay to “explain himself” to MPs “before further action is taken”.

‘Faster data’

The pilot to trial Faster Data Flows to “support decision making” by doctors was launched in June 2022, with 21 “early adopters” joining.

The information it captured – including “admission, inpatient, discharge and outpatient activity” as well as personal details – was uploaded daily to a central portal built by Palantir. Palantir itself was described in pilot documents as a “sub-processor” of the data, which is a legal term given to a third party that has permission to process information gathered by others.

NHS execs knew their work with Palantir carried a “reputational risk”. The pilot documents state: “The use of Palantir to collect and process data… is likely to be perceived by some privacy campaigners as contentious and therefore there is a relatively high risk of media coverage and adverse comment about this”.

In November, lawyers working for Foxglove wrote to NHS England on behalf of the National Pensioners’ Convention, Just Treatment and the Doctors Association UK, to raise concerns about the sharing of pseudonymised data.

The lawyers questioned whether consent requirements – which are needed to process pseudonymised data – had been violated, and what safeguards, if any, had been put in place to protect patient privacy.

NHS England has still not sent a substantive reply after more than three months but has now instructed all trusts to implement Faster Data Flows.

‘Rigged’

Palantir is considered a “strong frontrunner” for a controversial new IT contract worth £480m to build a database that is expected to include all health information currently held by the NHS, including GP and social care records.

There are concerns that the rollout of Palantir’s Foundry to hospitals now – during the tendering process – may provide the tech firm with an incumbent advantage.

“Every trust in England will be forced to integrate Foundry into their workflows,” said GP IT consultant and clinical informatics expert Marcus Baw. “This means there has already been significant taxpayer investment in using Foundry.

“Trusts are busy, with limited IT team capacity, so they cannot afford to redo work. To me this means that the system will already have significant momentum towards Palantir and Foundry.”

A Department for Health and Social Care minister stated last month that whoever wins the contract will need to migrate data from Foundry into the new FDP system.

Labour MP Clive Lewis told openDemocracy that “the bid looks rigged… politicians of all parties should be screaming to the rafters about this”.

Revolving door

Palantir was first given an NHS contract in 2020 – without tender – to help manage the Covid-19 vaccine rollout while Matt Hancock was health secretary. Hancock used special ministerial powers to bypass patient confidentiality rules and allow the company to process patient data.

It won a further contract that was neither published nor tendered for – leading openDemocracy to sue the DHSC. After this legal action, the government released its contracts with Palantir and promised to consult the public before making further deals.

But our leaked documents reveal that NHS bosses have now ordered a rollout of Palantir software to hospitals across England, in a seeming breach of that promise.

The firm has also exploited a weakly regulated ‘revolving door’ in the NHS – poaching at least three former NHS data experts – as it chases the “must-win” contract. One of its recent hires, Indra Joshi, served as head of artificial intelligence for the NHS and helped launch the Covid-19 datastore – the first NHS project to use Foundry – before quitting the health service and joining Palantir in April 2022.

Harjeet Dhaliwal, who was previously deputy director of data services at NHS England, joined the firm later that same year.

The two ex-NHS staffers joined Paul Howells at Palantir, the company’s “health and care director”, who previously led a national data programme for NHS Wales.

Palantir did not respond to questions about whether the trio now work on NHS-related projects.

Palantir has lobbied the government extensively, famously entertaining the NHS executive Lord Prior with watermelon cocktails. The company also considered a contentious strategy described as ‘Buying Our Way In’. Emails sent by Louis Mosley, Palantir’s UK chief, said the company would try “hoovering up” smaller businesses with NHS contracts to “take a lot of ground and take down a lot of political resistance”, according to Bloomberg News.

NHS England did not respond to openDemocracy’s questions about whether the processing of patient data on Palantir’s Foundry platform was lawful.

A spokesperson said: “By collecting data in a more streamlined way, the NHS is better able to plan and allocate resources to maximise outcomes for patients, while ensuring that their personal data remains protected and within the NHS at all times.

“Ultimately, it will help all NHS organisations to better understand their waiting lists and pressures in near real time, work as systems, and significantly reduce the burden of manual reporting on staff.”

A Palantir Spokesperson said: “Any claim that Palantir has access to identifiable medical records through the Faster Data Flow programme is false – not a single Palantir employee does.

“We have simply built software that is being used to make a programme that already existed work faster – much like our software has been used during Covid to deliver the vaccine rollout and, subsequently, to cut waiting lists and speed up cancer diagnosis.”

Original exclusive article by Lucas Amin and openDemocracy republished under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence

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Boris Johnson insults gays and bisexuals with onanism and porn remarks

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Bullingdon Tory idiot Boris JohnsonThis article considers Boris Johnson’s remarks about terrorist onanism and proposes two alternative terrorist profiles – one of terrorists and one of their agents.

Privilidged Mayor of London Boris ‘Bullingdon idiot’ Johnson claims that ‘If you look at all the psychological profiling about bombers, they typically will look at porn. They are literally w***ers.’ Johnson’s comments – like Johnson himself – don’t contribute much of anything to anything.

Firstly, a[ed:o}nonists and watchers of porn are accepting of and uninhibited in their sexuality. The most accepting of and uninhibited in their sexuality are gays and bisexuals. The intended slur is actually an insult to gay and bisexual sexuality.

Secondly, this issue of psychological profiles is equally BS. Psyschological profiles are of little use and little used because terrorists are so diverse. Later media stories cited psychological profiles by MI5 after I did some searches. That’s useful for rich ass Boris because researchers don’t have access to mythical psychological profiles by MI5.

Terrorism follows patterns. For example, there’s usually an exercise ongoing, it occurs at politically salient times and employs number symbolism. It is also often facilitated by local authorities – lucky there wasn’t any traffic, cops with radios or cars or motorcycles or helicopters in Paris, eh? We have police cars with lights and sirens and full of technology in the UK and they keep big guns in the back.

Once you accept that the actual terrorists are state actors and that terrorism serves political purposes for the rich elite, you can understand that MI5 itself serves these interests and that any profiles are profiles of political opponents labelled as terrorists.

To help, I’ve prepared two simple profiles – one of the terrorists and one of their servants, assistants or foot-soldiers.

Terrorist profile

  • Priviledged wealth. I mean in the top 1% of the wealthy. Born into it.
  • Privilidged position e.g. Mayor or former Mayor of London or New York, Prime Minister, former President, Home Secretary, Minister of Defence, etc.
  • Priviledged education. Notice that I’m not saying well-educated. public school, Cambridge, Oxford, Yale, etc
  • Neo-Con political orientation. I’m coming to realise that Neo-Con is not at all distant from Fascist or Neo-Fascist. Neo-Cons are using the same methods of terrorism, misdirection and victimisation as the Nazis that they financed.
  • Member of a privilidged fraternal organisation e.g. Bullingdon Club, Skull & Bones (formerly the Brotherhood of Death), Bavaria Grove, etc
  • Temporally and spatially local to Benjemin Netenyahu or Rudolph Giuliani.

 

Terrorist foot-soldiers profile

  • Employeed by a three-letter acronym e.g. CIA, FBI, MI5, MI6, SAS, FIU, SRR, MPS, Sad, Bet. (and the exception QinetiQ on 7/7, QiQ?).
  • Promoted for failure e.g. Ian Blair, Cressida Dick, Tony Blair?
  • Temporally and spatially local to Benjemin Netenyahu or Rudolph Giuliani.

 

With thanks to Webster Tarpley for the promoted for failure item. He discusses Hurricane Katrina and the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center facilitated by the FBI here.

I’ve had a book by Webster Tarpley infiltrated and confiscated by terrorist agents just recently. I guess – though I’ll admit that I’m uncertain – that it would be my local police. I ordered 911 SYNTHETIC TERROR through amazon.uk two weeks ago on 19 January. The terrorists don’t want me to read it.

8/8/15: I did intend to clarify that Johnson’s remarks are regarded as an attack on alt soc. but then that should be clear.

Continue ReadingBoris Johnson insults gays and bisexuals with onanism and porn remarks