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A leading Conservative Party figure has been found dead at the Glastonbury Festival, on the very day that this article appeared in the Mail on Sunday, based on documents he had written about the future direction of the party. Medawar thinks that Mr Shale's final thoughts deserve to be taken proper notice of, and not buried under a thick blanket of warm words from his increasingly heedless former protegé.

This article in the Daily Mail suggests that before Mr Williams was murdered, he was working on a method and software to enable the intelligence services to track money being moved to and through London, by the Russian mafia. To this article Medawar would add the following two observations: Firstly: any chain of money-laundering transactions with the Russian Mafia at one end, tends these days to have the Israeli Mafia at the other end. The Russian Mafia's cosy relationship with the FSB and "United Russia" is mirrored by the Israeli Mafia's relationship with Mossad and many prominent members of Likud . Secondly, and far more importantly: London is experiencing an ongoing property price boom in the middle of a global credit crunch, recession and debt crisis. This is driven by money coming from Russia. The experience of Dublin and Miami, both of which have experienced similar property bubbles, started by an influx of money from organized crime and sustained by invest...

Rather as Medawar expected, the Obama-led lynching of "British" Petroleum and its chief executive has not been lost on any of the very many countries around the world where all-American companies have caused far worse disasters and walked away, protected from repercussions by the US State Department. Thing is, in 1984, when the Bhopal disaster killed thousands of people directly and shortened the lives of tens of thousands more, India was not a superpower able to kick the US President's "ass" in the way he has made such a point of doing himself in the past several weeks. India is much, much more powerful now than it was then, and Mr Obama, and especially Mr Weiner, have, through their own high blown rhetoric, made it politically impossible for the Indian government not to press for the extradition of Union Carbide executives to face criminal trial. Perhaps American politicians will finally understand why British politicians made the Piper Alpha inquiry a rhetori...

The new Coalition Government of the UK (the "Lib Cons") has recently made several fairly controversial spending cuts, mostly focusing on items which the outgoing government decided to spend in the last few weeks of its existence. Some of these were indeed pure pork barrel or "scorched earth" items, but one or two were booby traps, in that something bad would genuinely happen if they were cut, as an incoming government (and Labour was expecting it to be pure Tory) could be predicted to do. One of these was a loan of £8 oM (not strictly spending, therefore) part of an overall £140M finance package to enable a company called Sheffield Forgemasters to build a 15,000 ton press capable of forging very large steel castings. (One cannot simply cast steel as if it were bronze: to have strength, the casting has to be heated up and walloped a bit.) Currently, the only firm that can cast and forge single steel components of the size required for the new generation of nuclear ...

This was the week when President Obama, having got tougher with "British" Petroleum every day for a month, got so tough that America now has no goal except getting tough with BP. This was the week when Exxon, Chevron, Royal Dutch Shell and Mobile all claimed that they never spilled any oil and even if they did, they had really brilliant plans for cleaning it up that were so much better than BPs. A weary congressional committee chairman, possibly the only sane man left in American politics, pointed out that they had, in fact, practically identical contingency plans to BP. (Probably all commissioned from the same consultancy firm, if the truth were known.) This was the week when an organised campaign to "seize BP's Assets" really took off, with millions signing up to it without asking if it was in fact organised by Transocean's publicists... This was the week when blaming people for an accident took precedence over fixing the problem. This was the week when a...

President Obama's jihad against BP , really got going when BP started to ask questions about how all four stages of a four-stage blowout preventer could fail. This was when they were accused of "pointing the finger" and have had fingers, not to mention the presidential boot, in their face every moment since then. The blowout preventer was supplied and installed by Transocean , but made by a separate American engineering company. Probably, elsewhere in the world Transocean would have a Briitsh , Dutch or Malayasian company make this item to a common specification. It weighs 140 tons and no-one wants to ship one too far if a competent manufacturer is close at hand. The competence of the manufacturer in this and other cases seems not to be at issue. However, despite having about half of the drilling contracts in the Gulf of Mexico over the last few years, Transocean account for around three quarters of the accidents, and more than one of those has involved the parti...

(This photograph, of Gruinard Island, is by Kevin Walsh , of Oxford, who is not responsible for any of the following text. Medawar hopes this attributes the photograph as required by the licence which Mr Walsh has kindly granted to the world to use it.) Today (9 th of June 2011), the Attorney General of England, Mr Dominic Grieve QC MP, has told Parliament that he sees no need for there to be any proper inquest into the death of Dr David Kelly, and that he finds the evidence that Dr Kelly committed suicide to be "very strong". At no time in the history of Coroner's courts in England, has the subjective perception by an official that the evidence made a particular verdict a likely outcome of an inquest, been accepted as a legally valid reason for not holding such an inquest. Nor is it all usual for anyone except the coroner to decide whether or not to hold an inquest. A coroner's court is different from any other court in two respects: inquest findings, in the form ...

After weeks of unrelenting efforts by President Obama to pretend that the "worst ecological disaster in American history" is a British plot against the American people. (He pronounces " British Petroleum" the way someone in a pointy white hood would pronounce a word meaning "member of the African-American community".) Some more facts emerge: There was a worse oil spill, Itxoc 1 on the Mexican side of the Gulf of Mexico in 1979, which American politicians, media and public appear to remain unaware of to this day. 150,000,000 barrels before it was capped, according to BBC Newsnight, which may have meant gallons, see comment below (they read off autocues: a BBC script would have the right thing written on it ) Other sources state something like 9,000,000 barrels over ten months. Flow rate estimated somewhere from the same as, to double that, of Deepwater Horizon, which has already been cut by more than half and should be sorted within another two months, s...