Aftermath

Two days after the Thursday [11-April-2019] arrest of Julian Assange at Ecuador's London embassy, several government websites were hacked; including Ecuador's official website, the Central Bank of Ecuador, the Ministry of the Interior and the Ecuadorian Assembly in the UK, according to Gateway Pundit's Cassandra Fairbanks, who was in London last week and documented the run-up to Assange's arrest.

Following Assange's arrest, more than 70 MPs and peers signed a letter urging the UK home secretary to ensure that the WikiLeaks founder is extradited to Sweden if Swedish authorities request it.

Sweden is considering whether to open a previously-dropped investigation into allegations of rape and sexual assault against Assange.

The United States, meanwhile, wants to try Assange for the largest-ever leak of government secrets in 2010. On Thursday, the Justice Department hit him with an indictment that claims the WikiLeaks founder helped former US Army intelligence analyst crack DoD password using Linux.

"The indictment alleges that in March 2010, Assange engaged in a conspiracy with Chelsea Manning, a former intelligence analyst in the U.S. Army, to assist Manning in cracking a password stored on U.S. Department of Defence computers connected to the Secret Internet Protocol Network (SIPRNet), a U.S. government network used for classified documents and communications," reads a DOJ press release.

Materials Manning released included videos of various US airstrikes in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the "Iraq War Logs" and "Afghan War Diary."

Assange faces five years in prison if convicted in the Manning case.

Small political parties

In the upcoming elections there are people who have to vote. They consider they have been given this chance to speak and do not want to waste it, however, who do they vote for?

The party they have always voted for, but they are disgruntled and no longer want to support them or more importantly want to register a complaint or protest by not voting for them. They do not want to vote for the opposite side as it goes against what they fundamentally believe, so how do they use their vote on the day.

They vote for one of the smaller parties.

Now in this position they do not consider left or right as a major factor in decision making here except they would not be prepared to go to either extreme, the far right or far left, so it has to be centre. Who is thinking of making a new party with the current crisis in mind? Yes, Nigel Farage and the new Brexit Party. They will see this as an answer to their current problems, the vote they made in 2016 can now be realised at the expense of the major parties who have prevaricated for the last two years in parliament.

Now will it be possible for enough people to move from the conservatives and labour to give the Brexit party a majority? I wonder.

An Extension

After doing nothing for the last two years, the British PM Theresa May is traveling across Europe to ask for another extension. Will it receive a favourable view or be rejected outright.

Actually she has not really done nothing, she has done everything she can to stop Brexit, that might seem a bit harsh but, however, it appears to me that she has actually prevaricated over Brexit for the last two years.

Up to today it also appears that more than half of conservatives have failed to support the PM with Article 50 requests by either voting against or abstaining, more than half, that is ridiculous.

One of the people that could throw a spanner in the works is the French President Emmanuel Macron might reject the idea of an extension with a veto then we would have to leave on 12th April, however, we cannot as the commons have passed a law saying we cannot leave without a deal, so what then? Theresa May would have to revoke Article 50!

If that happens, the PM will resign, a new leader will be found and we start all over again with another referendum.

Two years of prevarication.

29 March 2017
Theresa May sends Article 50 notification letter

18 April 2017
Theresa May calls a general election for 8 June

8 June 2017
General election results in hung parliament

19 June 2017
The first round of Brexit negotiations takes place

8 December 2017
Joint report published by the UK & EU

15 December 2017
European Council concludes sufficient progress has been made to move on to the second phase of the talks

28 February 2018
The European Commission publishes a draft of the Withdrawal Agreement

26 June 2018
European Union Withdrawal Bill becomes an act

6 July 2018
Chequers meeting

8 July 2018
David Davis resigns as Brexit secretary, replaced by Dominic Raab

9 July 2018
Boris Johnson resigns as Foreign secretary

20 September 2018
An informal EU summit is held in Salzburg

14 November 2018
The UK & EU reach an agreement 'in principle' on the Withdrawal Agreement

15 November 2018
Dominic Raab resigns as Brexit secretary along with Esther McVey, Suella Braverman, Rehman Chisti and Shailesh Vara

16 November 2018
Stephen Barclay is appointed Brexit secretary

10 December 2018
The ECJ rules that a member state can unilaterally revoke Article 50
The prime minister postpones the first meaningful vote

12 December 2018
Conservative MP's trigger a no confidence vote in Theresa May, which she wins

15 January 2019
The government loses the first meaningful vote by 220 votes

16 January 2019
The government wins a no confidence vote in the commons

11 March 2019
Theresa Many travels to Strasbourg to finalise additional texts to the Withdrawal Agreement

12 March 2019
Theresa May's deal is defeated a second time by 149 votes

13 March 2019
MP's vote to reject the UK leaving the EU without a deal

14 March 2019
MP's vote to request an extension of the Article 50 period

20 March 2019
Theresa May requests an extension of Article 50 to the end of June

21 March 2019
EU agrees Article 50 extension to 12 April

27 March 2019
indicative votes held in the commons to find a Brexit consensus


12 April 2019
Current deadline for the end of Article 50

My return

I have decided to come back to the blog.

Naturally the first thing I did was to see if I could login with the previous details, the answer was no.

It appears Blogspot has been taken over by Google, just like everything else, so now I have more accounts with exactly the same details, and this from the people who tell us to safeguard our information and not use the same password for every account.


OMGLOL ~ what a joke...

Mixed Messages

Household debt may be soaring but Britons are finding it easier to pay the bills. In the second half of last year, 63 percent said they are keeping up with their credit commitments without any difficulties compared with 59 percent in the previous two years, according to the latest Wealth and Assets Survey from the Office for National Statistics.

The figures may do little to ease concerns at the Bank of England though, which said yesterday that it plans to increase capital requirements for U.K. lenders to tackle the risks posed by consumer-credit growth.

Twitter and the President

President Donald Trump cannot be stopped from tweeting and otherwise talking about the Russia investigation. But by continuing to expostulate, he risks not only incriminating himself but irritating the prosecutor overseeing the probe.

Some observers speculated that the arrival of Trump’s personal lawyer, Marc Kasowitz, would spell the end of the president’s off-the-cuff comments. Not so. Whatever Kasowitz has told his long time client, the president is still running his mouth.

On Sunday morning, the president tweeted: “I believe the James Comey leaks will be far more prevalent than anyone ever thought possible. Totally illegal? Very ‘cowardly!’”

Two days earlier, during a testy Rose Garden press conference, he accused Comey of perjury during his testimony last Thursday before the Senate Intelligence Committee. In addition, Trump declared that the hearing failed to establish that he’d colluded with the Russians to manipulate the 2016 election or tried to stop the federal probe of whether Trump aides helped the Russians with their hacking. “No collusion. No obstruction. He is a leaker,” Trump said, the last part referring again to Comey, whom Trump fired as FBI director in May. Asked if he would testify under oath, Trump answered, “100 percent.”

So, why does this matter?

First, there’s the attorney’s rule of thumb that a client anywhere in the vicinity of a criminal investigation ought to keep his trap shut. “It is 100 percent clear that the rule in the normal criminal case is not a word from the client,” says Harry Litman, a former federal prosecutor who teaches at UCLA Law School and practices with the firm Constantine Cannon.

Trying to stop the President Donald Trump from tweeting will be the bigger challenge.