Her Defiance Helped Change Race Relations Across The World

Rosa Parks.
It was 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, and Rosa, a 42 year-old African-American, was on the number 2857 bus home.
She was in an area reserved for black people but the bus filled up and custom meant she was expected to give up her seat as white passengers were having to stand.
She refused.
Rosa was arrested and convicted but her defiance helped change race relations across the world and she became a leading civil rights activist.
She died in 2005 at the age of 92.
( Beth Neil )

Study Finds 4.5 Million UK Children Living In Poverty.
More than 14 million people, including 4.5 million children, are living below the breadline, with more than half trapped in poverty for years, according to a new measure aimed at providing the most sophisticated analysis yet of material disadvantage in the UK.
The measure seeks to forge a fresh political consensus between left and right over how to define and track poverty, with the aim of encouraging better-targeted poverty interventions, and making it easier to hold politicians to account.
It finds poverty is especially prevalent in families with at least one disabled person, single-parent families, and households where no one works or that are dependent for income on irregular or zero-hours jobs.
( Patrick Butler, 16.09.2018 )  ..  theguardian.com

The Blood Countess, Elizabeth Bathory, 1560 – 1614.
There were no laws in medieval Hungary that could touch a noble countess, and depraved murderer Elizabeth Bathory abused her power and position for all it was worth.
Luring the prettiest local village girls to her huge castle with promises of paid work, the vain, capricious woman would torture and kill in some of the sickest, most sadistic ways.
There was also often a sexual element to her murders and she would sometimes force young women to lick the blood of other victims off her nude body.
Bathory’s obsession with blood –– she even enjoyed bathing in the fresh blood of her young victims straight after a murder, believing it would help keep her youthful and improve her complexion –– led to her being dubbed “The Blood Countess”.
Torturing and killing with impunity for decades, the evil countess managed to wipe out most of the peasant girls in her area and later moved on to those of higher birth.
She was finally arrested by special royal decree and accused of the murder of more than 650 girls and young women, making her history’s most prolific female serial killer by a distance.
However, she was neither tried nor convicted.
In 1610, she was sealed into her private apartment (with small slots left open for air and food) in Csejte Castle, now in Slovakia.
She died four years later.

White Helmets In Syria Linked To Terrorists.
Ninety-eight members of the White Helmets, and a few hundred of their families, were evacuated by Israel and allies to Jordan late in evening of July 21, 2018.
They will seemingly be shipped off to a few Western nations for resettlement: Canada, the UK, and Germany. So far, Canada has pledged to take 50 White Helmets and around 200 family members.
Wrongly dubbed the “Syrian Civil Defence” (the actual Syrian Civil Defence has existed since 1953), the White Helmets narrative is flawed in every conceivable manner.
Packaged as neutral, heroic, volunteer rescuers, who have “saved 115,000 lives”, according to White Helmets leader Raed Al Saleh, they are in reality a massively Western-funded organisation with salaried volunteers, and have no documentation of those 115,000 saved.
They contain numerous members who have participated in or supported criminal acts in Syria, including torture, assassinations, beheading, and kidnapping of civilians, as well as inciting Western military intervention in Syria.
James LeMesurier, a former member of the British military who founded the White Helmets, did so in countries neighbouring Syria: in Turkey and Jordan.
They have since worked solely in terrorist-held areas of Syria, and according to Syrian civilians in eastern Ghouta, they worked directly with, or were themselves, extremists of Jaysh al-Islam or other extremist groups.
Civilians in east Aleppo said that White Helmets worked with al-Qaeda in Syria (the Nusra Front).
The fact that White Helmets centres are frequently, if not always, found near or next to headquarters of al-Qaeda and other terrorist factions further supports the accusations that they collaborate with terrorists—even with ISIS, as noted by ISIS hostage John Cantlie.
He described the White helmets as an “ISIS fire brigade“.
White Helmets have also been at the scene of executions, filmed standing over dead Syrian soldiers, cheering on and cleaning up after an execution in Daraa Governorate, and disposing of the bodies of assassinated Syrian soldiers (including decapitated bodies) in Daraa Governorate.
Over sixty White Helmets members have clear ties to terrorist and extremist groups, as shown by their own social media accounts and videos.
In many of their own photos they hold weapons.
Some White Helmets members have called for the murders of Shia villagers in Idlib governorate, and were instrumental in the massacre and injury of over 300 villagers, including 116 children in April 2017.
( Eva Bartlett, 10.08.2018 )  ..  ingaza.wordpress.com

Grace Darling, 1815 – 1842.
A Victorian heroine, Grace Darling lived in a lighthouse on the Farne Islands, off the Northumberland coast, with her father.
In the autumn of 1838, looking out of her window she spotted the wreck and survivors of the SS Forfarshire on a nearby rocky island.
Despite the terrible weather, she and her father rowed out and rescued 13 survivors.
That part of the North Sea can be incredibly rough and stormy, and you have to admire the courage of this brave young woman.
Tragically, she died of tuberculosis just a few years later at 27. In a way, she was the first ‘common woman’ to achieve fame for a great deed.
The courage she displayed was a very visible display of female capabilities, which arguably helped change the way women were perceived in the 19th century.

The Tory Promise Of The Northern Powerhouse Project Has Been Halted.
Five years after the government launched its northern powerhouse concept, 200,000 more children in the north of England are in poverty, foreign investment has plummeted and the number of late or cancelled trains in the region has more than doubled, new analysis shows.
Research by the think-tank IPPR North also found there had been a £3.6billion cut in public spending in the north since 2010, compared to a £4billion rise in the south.
In interviews to mark five years since George Osborne, then chancellor, unveiled his plan to rebalance the UK’s economy, the north’s political leaders said the project had “halted” with little sign of it being revived.
( Josh Halliday and Helen Pidd, 21.06.2019 )  ..  theguardian.com

Frances Buss, 1827 – 1894.
A pioneer of female education, Frances Buss helped change the way that women were taught.
Until her time, most girls were lucky to receive any schooling at all, and when they did they were usually only taught things like needlework.
The daughter of a painter and etcher, she just thought that it was a terrible waste.
When she became the first headmistress of the North London Collegiate School in 1850 (which had been founded by her mother five years earlier), Buss argued that the world would be a better place if women were educated, and under her headship it became a model school.
A lifelong suffragist (rather than suffragette), Buss helped kick-start a revolution in female education from which all women have benefited.

A Gross Distortion Of Belsen Concentration Camp’s True History.
April 15, 1945, after mutual negotiations with German Officers, British troops apparently “liberated” (by occupation) the Bergen-Belsen transit and sick camp.
The British troops who took over administration of the Belsen camp, three weeks before the official end of the war, were shocked by the many unburied corpses and dying inmates they encountered.
Horrific photos and films of the camp’s emaciated corpses and mortally sick inmates, were quickly circulated around the western nations.
Within weeks, the British military occupation newspaper proclaimed to the world:
“The story of that greatest of all exhibitions of ‘man’s inhumanity to man’ which was Belsen Concentration Camp is known throughout the world.”
The narrative that accompanied the horrid imagery, was, as it is today, a gross distortion of the camp’s true history.

The world was aghast with the propaganda narration of the Glorious Allies, which accompanied the imagery expounded around the world.
The first repeated imagery drilled into the eyes of naive westerners in their quiet, war-free lands, were initially from only two camps; Bergen-Belsen and Nordhausen – the latter a hospital camp, purely for the sick and, predominantly, did not accommodate Jews.
Unlike Bergen-Belsen, 100% of the deaths at Nordhausen, in fact, died as a direct result of Allied aerial warfare; bombing the hospital camp and adjacent town full of innocent civilians, into rubble – 3/4 of the town was flattened, killing 8,800 people and up to 4,000 sick inmates in the hospital camp – April 3rd & 4th, 1945.
Whereas, the Bergen-Belsen deaths were an indirect result of the same allied aerial warfare.
However, the deaths at both camps (and all others), have been blamed on evil Germans and their alleged systematic extermination policy, via allied war propaganda – the victors version of events.
Any atrocity propaganda disseminated by the allies thereafter, was accepted without question, as the stage of horror and German guilt had already been set in the minds of the unsuspecting public, by the misrepresentation of Belsen and Nordhausen. This also misdirected any attention away from questioning the war crimes, crimes against humanity and sadistic conduct of the allies, or, it colloquially justified it when discovered.

This version of events, was a successful attempt at ensuring that public opinion (published opinion) would naively accept that the sacrifice of their own sons and daughters, was worthy for a noble cause in the pursuit of world peace for humanity, a peace the war-mongering victors are still yet to find ever since, as they seek out and bomb one alleged evil enemy after another, in a whirl-wind of consecutive geopolitical aims.

The notorious Bergen-Belsen camp where, according to Court Historians, purportedly 50,000 to 100,000 inmates (although a maximum of 60,000 ever passed through) were supposedly murdered.
It was actually about 7,000 inmates who died during the period when the camp existed under German administration, from 1943 to 1945.
However, they died in the final months of the war as a result of disease and malnutrition.
Consequences of the allied carpet bombings and fighter planes shooting up everything that moved on road or rail, which had completely disrupted normal deliveries of medical supplies and food, not to mention creating the very conditions where the killer diseases thrived and exploded into epidemic proportions.
This was an expected catastrophe the Allies would have been quite well aware of.

Despite the highly organised attempt at combating the disease, almost 14,000 internees died at Bergen-Belsen in the months following the British Occupation.
Twice as many than under German Administration.
( Historical Tribune )  ..  historicaltribune.wordpress.com

After The War, Belsen Concentration Camp Was A Major European Black Market Centre And A Place For Organising Training For The Jewish-Insurgency In Palestine.
From 1945 until 1950, when it was finally shut down, the British maintained Belsen as a camp for ‘Displaced Persons’.
It mostly continued as a sick and transitional camp for emigrants, no differently than it had under German administration, but now, they were mostly directed to Palestine.
During this period it achieved new notoriety as a major European black market centre.
Many Jewish-Partisans who made their way to Belsen, used it as a place for organising training for the Jewish-insurgency in Palestine, the illegal smuggling to Palestine and, using much of the unlimited U.S. Occupation Marks (courtesy of U.S. tax payers) and $3.7billion UNRRA funding for Zionist purposes.
The “Uncrowned King” of Belsen’s 10,000 Jews was Yossl (Josef) Rosensaft, who amassed tremendous profits from the illegal trading in arms, art and diamonds, looted from the Germans and from Jewish sponsors.
Rosensaft had been interned in various camps, including Auschwitz (more miraculous survival stories no doubt) before arriving at Belsen in early April 1945.
He now turned his attention to demonising the British, who not only “Liberated” the camp he conducted his criminal business from, but who were the Mandate Government of Palestine, the very land the Jews sought to usurp for a ‘Jewish State’ without British oversight and, agitated against a restricted ‘Reservation’ as proferred by some NSDAP members.
With all his opining and rousing for a Jewish State in Palestine, Rosensaft decided to not live in Occupied Palestine himself, but lived and traveled between Switzerland, America and London, dying at the latter, leaving great debts for the ‘acquisition’ of the art and other unearned lavishness.
Just as the Germans had finished the same losing battle against Jewish-guerrilla warfare predominantly in the east, the English then had to turn their attention to British-Mandate Palestine and, fight a  terrorist war there, against Jews themselves, which they also lost and, so too, are the Palestinians.
( Historical Tribune )  ..  historicaltribune.wordpress.com

Emily Davison.
One of the most prominent Suffragettes, Emily lived and died for the cause.
She was appalled at the way women were treated – particularly being denied the right to vote – and joined Emmeline Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political Union in 1906.
Her protests would often lead to imprisonment but she would continue campaigning in jail and she went on hunger strike in Strangeways.
Emily was killed aged 40 in 1913 at the Epsom Derby after throwing herself in front of the King’s horse, Anmer.
Some believe that she had been planning to attach the WSPU flag to the animal.
( Beth Neil )

Benazir Bhutto.
The twice prime minister of Pakistan had followed her dad into politics – and, like him, lost her life because of it.
She vehemently denied allegations of corruption but relocated to Dubai before returning in 2007 after being granted amnesty from the charges.
She became leader of the opposition Pakistan Peoples Party but was shot at a political rally in December 2007 before a suicide bomb went off moments later.
Benazir was 54.
( Beth Neil )

The First Lady Of The Suffragettes.
Born in 1869, Lady Constance Lytton was painfully shy and educated for nothing but marriage.
She only ever had one love affair – a tepid attachment to an impecunious soldier – and when it fizzled out she became a full-time companion to her widowed mother, a lady-in-waiting to Queen Victoria.
In 1908, her life underwent an extraordinary transformation.
Seeking a good cause on which to spend a legacy from her great-aunt, Constance was invited to help a charity that encouraged working-class girls to take up morris dancing.
There she met Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence and her husband, Fred, supporters of the women’s suffrage movement, and heard the stories of women who had gone to prison for their activism.
Among the suffragettes she found an irresistible combination of excitement, martyrdom and friendship.
After publishing a pamphlet in support of the cause, she rapidly moved on to direct action.
Sentenced to a month in prison, her photograph all over the papers, she was shocked when her working-class comrades were confined in ordinary cells, while she and Emmeline were sent to the relative comfort of the prison hospital.
In a defiant act of self-mutilation, she began to scratch ‘Votes for Women’ into her flesh with a needle, threatening to incise the words into her face unless she was moved to the cells.
The authorities gave in.
Renaming herself ‘Jane Warton’, she cut and dyed her hair, put on a pair of pence-nez, a shapeless tweed coat and a hat so dowdy that small boys jeered at her in the street.
At a demonstration in Liverpool, ‘Jane’ got herself arrested, and when she refused food, her jaw was forced open with a steel gag, a rubber tube was pushed down her throat and a mixture of milk, gruel, eggs, brandy sugar and beef tea poured in.
When she vomited, the doctor slapped her.
The process was repeated six times before her identity was discovered and she was released.
The public scandal was tremendous.
Constance, almost 6ft tall, left prison weighing just 7st 7lb.
She gave a speech at a packed Queen’s Hall, where many in the audience wept to hear her description of being force-fed.
Calls were made for a public inquiry.
The Home Office refused – insisting that force-feeding was no more than mildly unpleasant – but behind the scenes the Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, introduced a number of concessions, including medical examinations of all prisoners before they were force-fed.
‘She has indeed gained a victory over the Government’, wrote Christabel Pankhurst.
But the victory was hard won.
Constance’s health was broken, and two years later, in 1912, she suffered a stroke.
She died in 1923, five years before women were granted the vote on the same terms as men.
( Jane Shilling )

Anne Frank.
Anne’s Jewish family fled Nazi Germany and settled in Amsterdam but Hitler invaded the Netherlands in 1940.
The Franks began hiding in an annexe above her dad’s office and friends provided them with food and drink.
Teenager Anne recorded her feelings in her diary until August 1944, three days before Germans stormed the building.
She died aged 15 at the Bergen-Belsen death camp but her diary has become one of the most treasured books ever.
( Beth Neil )

The First Woman To Be Awarded The Military Cross.
Michelle Norris showed outstanding bravery in Iraq in 2006 when she saved the life of a colleague who had been shot in the mouth.
Aged 19, the then private, from Stourbridge, West Midlands, leapt out of her patrol vehicle and dodged sniper fire to give treatment for three minutes before helping drag him to safety.
One bullet hit her rucksack.
( Beth Neil )

Boris Johnson.
Born in New York in 1964, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson has always been ambitious.
His sister Rachel said he wanted as a child to be “king of the world”.
Boris married his first wife, Allegra Mostyn-Owen, in 1987 after they met at Oxford, but split after allegedly having an affair with author and lawyer Marina Wheeler, whom he married in 1993.
Johnson then met fellow journalist Petronella Wyatt when he was the editor of The Spectator and she was one of his columnists.
The two began an affair shortly before he was elected Conservative MP for Henley in 2001.
The Sun newspaper reported news of their relationship in 2004, along with claims that Wyatt had fallen pregnant and had an abortion.

Britain’s Special Relationship With Israel.
Britain has a special relationship with Israel that is little recognised in the mainstream media but unmissable in light of the killings in Gaza.
With more than 110 protesters dead, Britain is in effect defending Israeli actions.
The British government has not, as far as I have seen, actually condemned Israel for the killings.
Rather, it has simply ‘urged Israel to show restraint’ while recognising its ‘right to secure itself’ and also blaming Hamas for the violence.
When British Prime Minister Theresa May phoned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on May 10, 2018, by which date 40 Palestinian protesters in Gaza had already been shot, it appears she did not even raise the issue.
Meanwhile, the government infers it will not even review UK arms exports to Israel after the Gaza massacres which have only been discussed once in the British cabinet.
That Britain is supporting Israel over the Gaza killings is true to form.
The UK’s relationship with Israel is special in at least nine areas, including arms sales, air force, nuclear deployment, navy, intelligence and trade, to name but a few.
Britain abstained on the recent UN vote to authorise an investigation into the Gaza killings because it would not also investigate Hamas.
Instead, the UK supports Israel carrying out its own inquiry.
Last year, the Foreign Office refused to sign a joint statement at the Paris peace conference on Palestine, accusing it of ‘taking place against the wishes of the Israelis’.
( Mark Curtis, 05.06.2018 )

Boris Johnson’s Whirl-Winding Hypocrisy.
In April 2016, Boris Johnson penned a column for the Daily Telegraph outlining the benefits of the EU, claiming that “the membership fee seems rather small for all that market access”.
Later that day, he defeated his own points by coming out for Brexit as one of the leaders of the Leave campaign – judging that it would better serve his career prospects than back remain.
Boris Johnson’s whirl-winding hypocrisy knows no bounds.
He backed single market membership during the campaign, only to later claim that single market is “not Brexit”, and he voted both for and against Theresa May’s Brexit deal on various occasions.
What’s more, he has written to Theresa May saying that ensuring “no border” between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland should not be priority, just months after telling the House of Commons that “there can be no hard border”.
He is a man whose inflated ego far outstrips his judgement and principles, and his long history of flip-flopping deprives him of any credentials for leadership.
( Olaf Stando, 10.06.2019 )

Indira Gandhi.
India’s only female prime minister remains a highly-revered stateswoman 35 years after she was assassinated.
She became involved with the Indian Independence movement before she led her country for the first time in 1966.
She was at the helm during the victorious war with Pakistan in 1971 that resulted in the liberation of Bangladesh.
She lost the 1977 election but regained power in 1980.
She was 66 and serving her fourth term when she was killed in 1984.

Nuclear Weapons In The Middle East.
Israel is believed to possess 80 to 100 nuclear warheads, some of which are deployed on its submarines.
The UK is effectively aiding this nuclear deployment by supplying submarine components to Israel.
According to the commander of Haifa naval base, General David Salamah, Israel’s submarines regularly operate “deep within enemy territory”.
Britain has a long history of helping Israel to develop nuclear weapons.
In the 1950s and 1960s Conservative and Labour governments made hundreds of sales of nuclear materials to Israel, including plutonium and uranium.
The contrast with British policy towards Iran is striking.
Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson states that the UK is “adamant that a nuclear-armed Iran would never be acceptable” and thus maintains sanctions against Iran.
At the same time Britain refuses to adopt any sanctions against Israel, an actual nuclear state.
In 1995, the UK and other states agreed to a UN resolution to establish a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East.
It is not known whether Britain has ever seriously pressed Israel on this.
( Mark Curtis, 05.06.2018 )