______________________________
Editor:
Damn! Gotta go to work! I’ll be back online later today, with more goodies. God willing, the situation won’t go to hell.
BMD
******
As residents of the Crimea made their historic choice to reunite with Russia at Sunday’s referendum, Yahoo posted an article under a headline that suggested just the opposite. Originally published by Associated Press, covering the outcome of the referendum that drew a record high turnout of over 82 percent with more than 95 percent of those came to the polls supporting Crimea’s accession to Russia, the article was headlined stunningly, Crimeans Vote Overwhelmingly to Leave Russia. If it was AP’s fault, the agency moved swiftly to correct it because the same article on its website now has the proper headline, Crimeans Vote to Leave the Ukraine, Join Russia. As for Yahoo, hours after posting the article, it still hasn’t removed the misleading headline whether intentionally or unintentionally. For a globally known website priding itself on being a popular online source of international news, overlooking such an appalling error on such a crucial event is inexcusable.
******
The latest updates from the Republic of Crimea (RK) election authority show that 96.77 percent of those who cast ballots in Sunday’s referendum supported the RK’s reunification with Russia. Crimea’s chief election commissioner Mikhail Malyshev told reporters, summing up the outcome of Sunday’s vote, “The number of the votes cast in the all-Crimea referendum in favour of reunification with Russia as an entity of the Russian Federation was 1,233,002 or 96.77 percent. The turnout was 1.274,096 voters or 83.1 percent of eligible voters, but this figure didn’t include the city of Sevastopol”. Malyshev said that those who voted for the RK to enjoy a broader autonomy within the Ukraine totalled 31,997 (2.51 percent). Election commissioners declared 9,097 ballots (0.72 percent) invalid. The Central Elections Commission signed the final protocol at 06.50 local time (21.50 Sunday 16 March PDT. 00.50 EDT. 04.50 UTC. 08.50 MSK. 15.50 AEST) on 17 March. Malyshev said, “We received protocols from the 27 district commissions all night long. The last one came at around 06.00 (21.00 Sunday 16 March PDT. 00.00 EDT. 04.00 UTC. 08.00 MSK. 15.00 AEST). After that, our commission compiled the final protocol”.
******
Valery Medvedev, head of the city’s election commission, told the Sevastopol Gorsoviet in an emergency session on Monday that after the commission counted all ballots in Sevastopol, the number of those who voted for Crimea to rejoin Russia was 95.6 percent, saying, “The turnout in Sevastopol was 89.5 percent”. On Monday, the Sevastopol Gorsoviet unanimously passed a resolution on joining Russia as a separate entity. The lawmakers declared the results of Sunday’s referendum in Sevastopol valid and authorised Aleksei Chaly, the Chairman of the Municipal Coordination Committee, to sign the necessary treaty with Russia. All of the city’s polling stations operated normally; no violations of public order occurred during the vote.
******
Junta chieftain Aleksandr Turchinov ordered partial mobilization at a plenary session of the Rump Rada this morning, saying, “I’ve signed a decree on partial mobilisation”. Turchinov claimed that the pretext for it was the “aggravation of socio-political conditions in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea (sic)”. He submitted his decree to the lawmakers for approval.
Editor:
The junta has gone bananas. They’re issuing orders left n’ right… and no one obeys them. This is fucking surreal… reflect that the USA supports this, and that the Republican Party is even more strident than the Democrats are. I think that this presages the end of Zbig’s hold on the foreign policy apparat… at least, one hopes so, no? By the way, I believe that this “decree” will have the same amount of support as the last “mobilisation” did. Ukrainians have things that are more important on their minds… such as finding enough to eat in a country raped by oligarchs (the leading members of which are in the junta)…
BMD
******
The RK asked the UN and all world countries to recognise the independent country formed by the peoples of the Crimea in a resolution adopted earlier today by the Supreme Soviet of the RK (VS RK). According to the resolution, the RK wants to build relationships with other countries based on equality, peace, good-neighbourliness, and other universally recognised principles of political, economic, and cultural coöperation between nations
******
On Monday, the VS RK decreed that the RK would switch its time zone to MSK on 30 March, a day after Crimean residents of Crimea overwhelmingly voted to rejoin Russia, saying, “To establish across the RK a time standard in accordance with the third time zone, with a time change at 14.00 on 30 March 2014, by moving the clock two hours forward”.
******
The Huffington Post, a popular news website, and one of USA’s biggest platforms for journalists, bloggers, and columnists, marked the crucial decision of the RK to rejoin Russia with a single-word headline reading “VICTORY!” in Russian, with a photo of a clapping President Putin beneath it. The Huff Post screamer, printed in large type, sought to draw attention to a report from Crimea’s capital of Simferopol where a huge jubilant crowd gathered in the heart of the city on Sunday evening to celebrate the early results of the historic vote on the peninsula’s ascension to Russia. A great number of Russian and Crimean flags streamed above the throng and fireworks were going off all over the place and elsewhere in Crimea, whilst some unfurled a handwritten banner reading, “We’re Russian and proud of it”. However, although it was undoubtedly a tongue-in-cheek credit to the success of a referendum where the majority-Russian population was reasonably expected to vote pro-independence, the headline… either willingly or unwillingly… showed a grudging acceptance of the vote outcome. Despite this, the language of the coverage was unmistakably anti-Moscow. Although the Huffington Post long claimed that it isn’t “positioned ideologically”, a number of Republican representatives have, on several occasions, accused contributors working for this news aggregator of being hostile to their views and often spinning headlines to target GOP candidates.
17 March 2014
Voice of Russia World Service
http://voiceofrussia.com/news/2014_03_17/Yahoo-turns-Crimea-referendums-outcome-upside-down-5898/
http://voiceofrussia.com/news/2014_03_17/Crimea-to-switch-to-Moscow-Time-as-of-March-30-8334/
Voices from Russia 
Freedom No More
Tags: Conservative Party (UK), Corporate Media, Election, elections, England, EU, European Union, free speech, freedom, Great Britain, Huffington Post, HuffPost, Labour Party, mass media, media, Media bias, media spin, political commentary, politics, UKIP, United Kingdom
_________________________
As I write, with over 75 percent of all yesterday’s English local election results in, Labour has a net gain of 55 councillors compared to the high water mark of the 2014 result in these wards, while the Tories have a net gain of one seat against a 2014 result which was regarded at the time as disastrous for them, and led the Daily Telegraph to editorialise “David Cameron Must Now Assuage the Voters’ Rage”. Yet both the BBC and Sky News have, all night and this morning, treated these results, in which the Labour Party increased by 3 percent an already record number of councillors in this election cycle, as a disaster. What’s more, they used that false analysis to plug again and again the “anti-Semitism in the Labour Party” witch-hunt. Of course, it was the continuous exacerbation of this mostly false accusation by Blairite MP’s that… deliberately on their part… stopped the Labour Party doing still better. The Blairites are all over the airwaves plugging this meme again today. What’s more, Labour achieved this result despite the complete collapse of the UKIP vote, which collapse pundits expected to boost the Tory Party. In fact, the net loss of over 100 UKIP seats hasn’t resulted in overall net gains for the Tory Party, even though those ex-UKIP voters demonstrably did mostly split to Tory. The very substantial UKIP voter reinforcements simply saved the Tories from doing still worse. The Liberal Democrats are showing some signs of life.
Yesterday was World Press Freedom Day, and the tendentious media misrepresentation of the election results reminds me why I couldn’t get excited about it. A media with the extremely concentrated ownership we see in the UK can never be free, and certainly does not represent a wide spread of political opinions. Even the views of the official Leader of the Opposition are almost entirely outside the Overton window. In Scotland, the Scottish government is subject to unreasoning media attack, day in and day out, which contrasts strikingly with the treatment of Westminster ministers and issues.
There’s a seriously worrying example from Leeds of the decline of free speech, where Leeds City Council disgracefully banned a meeting discussing the bias of the corporate and state media because of its content. We aren’t allowed even to get together to discuss media bias. Retired Ambassador Peter Ford, Professors Piers Robinson and Tim Hayward, Vanessa Beeley, and Robert Stuart were to address the meeting at Leeds City Museum entitled “Media on Trial”. I can’t sufficiently express my outrage that Leeds City Council feels it’s right to ban a meeting with very distinguished speakers because it questions the government and Establishment line on Syria. Freedom of speech really is dead.
Truly, British society has changed fundamentally if a former British Ambassador to Syria is banned from speaking in public premises on his area of expertise. What’s still worse is the tone of this sneering report from Huffington Post, now firmly a part of corporate media, in which Chris York libels the speakers as “Assad supporters”, interviews none of the speakers and nobody to make the argument for free speech, but does manage to interview the “founder” of the jihadist “White Helmets”. In terms of banning dissent whilst simultaneously ramping up the official narrative, York has won himself top Establishment brownie points. The man… and I use the term loosely… is unfit for polite company.
4 May 2018
Craig Murray
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2018/05/37463/