FM Sergey Lavrov’s interview with the BBC TV channel

🔹 We announced a special military operation after being left with no other means to make it clear to the West that it is engaging in criminal activity by dragging Ukraine into NATO, by coddling and doting on a neo-Nazi regime, whose president Vladimir Zelensky said in September 2021 (you didn’t tell your viewers about it, did you?) that, if someone in Ukraine feels Russian, they should leave for Russia.

🔹 Today, the Ukrainian regime is attacking civilians with your Western weapons just like they did in 2014 when the putschists came to power when the centre of Lugansk was bombed by aircraft and 50 people were burned alive in Odesa.

🔹 I think that NATO is a threat. We are told not to worry, that Ukraine’s accession to NATO wouldn’t pose a threat to the Russian Federation. With all due respect for our colleagues from the North Atlantic Alliance, I must say that Russia has the right to decide for itself what threatens its security and what does not.

An American mercenary called the situation in the Armed Forces of Ukraine “a circus” and “a madhouse”

Report by DPR

The Commander of the German Air Force called on NATO to be ready to use nuclear weapons against Russia because of Ukraine

“If we want to have a secure position, then we need the means of destruction and the political will to implement nuclear deterrence, if necessary,” Ingo Gerhartz said at a NATO maritime symposium in Kiel.

Also, the commander of the Luftwaffe of the Bundeswehr urged Putin “not to compete with Germany.”

Militiaman from the Pyatnashka Brigade, Ervan Castel: “To fire heavy artillery at Donetsk,

when it is not one or two shells, but 100, 200, 300 shells a day, is a war crime, state terrorism.”

“There are no military facilities in Donetsk, there are no hostilities here. When a military facility in a city is bombed, unfortunately there may be civilian casualties around that facility. But now we are not in such conditions.

There is not a single mitigating circumstance that could justify what Kyiv has been doing for the past eight years.”

The Ministry of Emergency Situations in the Rostov region reports a fire at the Novoshakhtinsk oil refinery

Meanwhile, the media are publishing footage of an alleged strike on an oil refinery in the Rostov region.

According to them, the attack on the plant was carried out with the help of a drone.

DONBAS REPORT

Donetsk is under shelling again since the very morning

From 5 a.m., the Nazis began shelling the Petrovsky and Kievsky districts of the city.

By 10 a.m., towards Donetsk Ukrainian side fired

✔️ 7 152-mm calibre shells

✔️ 14 120-mm calibre mines

✔️ 56 155-mm calibre shells

“We have our own national interests, economic challenges.

As the head of state, I have to think about the security of the people,” Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili stressed, speaking at the economic forum in Qatar.

The Prime Minister also added that Georgia is not the only country that refused to impose economic sanctions against Russia

German journalist on Nazism in Ukraine

‘Ukraine is clearly being ‘turned fascist.’ Mark Bartalmai is a German journalist whose opinion contradicts statements of the West. As a result, he is under investigation in Germany. This is what people like me are up against.

Trying to show that the Western media and governments are lying to you is hard and dangerous work which we do for free.

Watch his video below and see what this “ non-existent “ Naziism in Ukraine looks like. English subtitles.

The square of the Donetsk Republic appeared in Moscow

The corresponding decree was signed by Sobyanin today.

The square named after the DPR appeared in front of the US Embassy, on June 22 – the day the Great Patriotic War began.

The Commander of the German Air Force called on NATO to be ready to use nuclear weapons against Russia because of Ukraine

“If we want to have a secure position, then we need the means of destruction and the political will to implement nuclear deterrence, if necessary,” Ingo Gerhartz said at a NATO maritime symposium in Kiel.

Also, the commander of the Luftwaffe of the Bundeswehr urged Putin “not to compete with Germany.”

Turkish cargo ship leaves Ukraine’s Mariupol after grain talks with Moscow: Ankara

A Turkish cargo ship on Wednesday left Ukraine’s Russian-occupied port of Mariupol after a round of “constructive” grain talks with Moscow, the Turkish defence ministry said, without specifying if it was carrying wheat.

“The meeting in Moscow gave its first concrete result,” the Turkish ministry said in a statement.

“Just a few hours after the end of the long meeting, the Turkish dry cargo ship, which had been waiting for days, left the Ukrainian port.”

Denmark offers fourth Covid vaccine dose to over-50s

Denmark’s government said Wednesday the country will begin offering a fourth dose of the Covid-19 vaccine to risk groups next week and all over-50s after the summer, amid the emergence of a new variant.

“Authorities believe the new variant is more infectious than the previous one, which is why we are acting now… to protect the most vulnerable and the elderly”, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen told reporters.

She said those most at risk would be able to receive a fourth dose starting next week.

The Omicron subvariant BA.5 now accounts for 59 per cent of new cases in Denmark, which has registered more than 3.1 million infections since the beginning of the pandemic in a country of 5.8 million people.

Denmark, which paused its vaccination campaign at the end of April, said the campaign would scale up after the summer.

“Health authorities have recommended a revaccination of 2.5 million Danes in the autumn”, Fredriksen said.

The fourth dose will be offered to all over-50s as of October 1. Around 62 per cent of Danes have already received the third dose.

The Scandinavian country lifted all of its corona restrictions in February and has no plans to reintroduce them.

“Our strategy is a society without restrictions, that is why we need to prevent the illness” more than the spread of the infection, the head of Denmark’s National Board of Health, Soren Brostrom, told reporters at the same press conference.

He urged people with symptoms to test themselves and isolate if their test is positive.

This will be an endless Cash cow for the pharmaceutical companies.

Why monkeypox may soon get a new name

Monkeypox may soon have a new name after scientists called for a change to dispel stereotypes of Africa is seen as a crucible of disease.

The World Health Organization announced last week that it is “working with partners and experts from around the world on changing the name of monkeypox virus, its clades and the disease it causes.”

Monkeypox’s clades, which are different branches of the virus’ family tree, have been particularly controversial because they are named after African regions.

Last year the WHO officially named Covid-19 variants after Greek letters to avoid stigmatising the places where they were first detected.

Just days before the WHO announced it would change monkeypox’s name, a group of 29 scientists wrote a letter saying there is an “urgent need for a non-discriminatory and non-stigmatising nomenclature” for the virus.

The letter, signed by several prominent African scientists, called for the names of the “West African” and the “Central African” or “Congo Basin” monkeypox clades to be changed.

Until a few months ago, monkeypox had largely been confined to West and Central Africa.

But since May, a new version has spread across much of the world. The letter’s signatories suggested naming this version as a new clade, giving it “the placeholder label hMPXV” — for human monkeypox virus.

Out of the more than 2,100 monkeypox cases recorded globally this year, 84 per cent were in Europe, 12 per cent in the Americas and just three per cent in Africa, according to the WHO’s latest update last week.

‘Not a monkey disease’

Oyewale Tomori, a virologist at Redeemer’s University in Nigeria, said he supported changing the name of monkeypox’s clades.

“But even the name monkeypox is aberrant. It is not the right name,” he told AFP.

“If I were a monkey, I would protest because it’s not a monkey disease.”

The virus was named after it was first discovered among monkeys in a Danish lab in 1958, but humans have mostly contracted the virus from rodents.

The letter pointed out that “nearly all” outbreaks in Africa were sparked by people catching the virus from animals — not from other people.

But the current outbreak “is unusual in that it is purely spreading through human to human transmission,” said Olivier Restif, an epidemiologist at the University of Cambridge.

“So, it is fair to say that the current outbreak has very little to do with Africa, in the same way, that the Covid-19 waves and variants we’re still being battered by have little to do with the Asian bats from which the virus originally came a few years ago.”

– ‘Stigmatisation of Africa’ –

Moses John Bockarie of Sierra Leone’s Njala University said he agreed with the call to change monkeypox’s name.

“Monkeys are usually associated with the global south, especially Africa,” he wrote in The Conversation.

“In addition, there is a long dark history of black people being compared to monkeys. No disease nomenclature should provide a trigger for this.”

Restif said it was “important to highlight that this debate is part of a larger issue with the stigmatisation of Africa as a source of disease.”

“We’ve seen it most strikingly with HIV in the 1980s, with Ebola during the 2013 outbreak and again with Covid-19 and the reactions to the so-called ‘South African variants’,” he told AFP.

An African press group has also expressed “its displeasure against media outlets using images of black people alongside stories of the monkeypox outbreak in North America and the United Kingdom.

“We condemn the perpetuation of this negative stereotype that assigns calamity to the African race and privilege or immunity to other races,” The Foreign Press Association, Africa tweeted last month.

Restif pointed out that the “old stock photographs of African patients” used by Western media usually depict severe symptoms.

But the monkeypox spreading around the world “is much milder, which partly explains how easily it gets transmitted,” he said.

The WHO will announce the new monkeypox names “as soon as possible”, its chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.

The UN agency is also holding an emergency committee meeting on Thursday to assess whether the outbreak represents a public health emergency of international concern — the highest alarm it can sound.

Don’t call him Boris – he’s not your pal, he’s a cult

I WASN’T particularly interested in ‘Partygate’, save as a symptom of the more pernicious evil of lockdown.

Nor am I anything other than amused by the typical and everyday Westminster self-indulgences, examples of which have recently included confidence votes, expense accounts, leg-crossing, the resignation of an ‘ethics adviser’ (which is sort of an oxymoron) and leadership speculation.

It’s all the usual political navel-gazing in which the protagonists don’t seem to appreciate that they are not political leaders, but bad actors in a particularly tedious soap opera. Albeit one which they force the rest of us to watch.

The last two years have seen the Establishment sew a patchwork of trivia. The UK political to-and-fro has confirmed a disengagement from a wider global agenda. From the globalist perspective, the obsessions of the UK political classes amount to little more than a concatenation of useful, localised distractions. Some of us see that as obvious; many are inhaling the sand.

The Field Generals and puppeteers of the World Economic Forum and the World Health Organisation smirk with condescension at the Captain Mainwaring manoeuvres of Johnson and his cohort of Cabinet mediocrity.

But there is one question – a significant one – which has been a constant throughout the miserable tyranny of the last two years: By what dark alchemy has Prime Minister Johnson suckered the country into calling him ‘Boris’? How has he managed to generate this expedient and fake familiarity with the UK public?

It’s all in the name.

Names – in particular Christian names – have an intrinsic philosophical resonance and etiquette which governs (or is used to govern) their application.

In the second chapter of his beautiful intellectual autobiography Gentle Regrets, Roger Scruton writes about ‘how I found my name, which he recounts as a genuine voyage of intellectual discovery.

He notices that your name doesn’t just allow you to be picked out in the world, but can shape both your response to that world and the world’s response to you. To change your name, to write under a pseudonym, to anonymise yourself – all of these involve subtle manipulations of how you wish the world to see you. Your name is a matter of constant review, he suggests.

To fiddle with your name verges on pride. It’s a form of manipulation. Manipulations seldom come without moral and ethical consequences.

You need look no further than the cesspool of social media to see this. People who can be perfectly engaging in ‘real life’ become proficient in the construction of alternative selves. The Clark Kent who sits benignly at the breakfast table consults, making sure the kids have completed the homework, his Twitter feed and is transformed into a malign online Superman.

Your name is precious because it is a gift.

And like all jewels, it requires constant protection. We now inhabit a world in which strangers feel free to help themselves to that gift. How many times have you met the following? A stranger, often in a position of some authority, reaches into your private life and plucks out your Christian name. Uninvited.

A civil society is one based on civility. Civility is a complicated thing. It involves varieties of intangible attachments. It requires manners. These are not matters easily defined, but because they are beyond the scope of language it does not mean that they are unimportant.

The point about manners is that they are felt, not codified.

The casual appropriation of the forename by a stranger is an act of aggression. It serves to unpick the settled order. Not because your name is private, but because it is personal. And it’s up to me to offer it, not you to grab it.

Johnson has reversed the etiquette and has made of the entire country a vulgar familiarity. That we call him ‘Boris’ (not that I do) has allowed him to develop a cult of personality, one which masks what I suspect is a deeper dysfunctionality. It suits him that you pretend you know him.

But you don’t know him. And every time you call him ‘Boris’, you distance yourself from the real Johnson and facilitate his slow-motion coup against the rest of us.

So next time you find yourself calling him that, I urge you, as we Irish say, to ‘catch yourself on’.

Our politicians should never be familiars. They need holding at arm’s length.

Dave Begley