Ding dong, the witch is dead.

Off to hang in heaven with her dear pal Sir Jimmy, who shared many Christmases with her, because they were both such lovely people.

OH WHAT A TERRIBLE DAY! I WEEP FAT TEARS OF DESPAIR! IT’S ALWAYS THE GOOD ONES THAT GO FIRST! BOO HOO!

“Evil On The Mike Like Margaret Thatcher”
Akira The Don, 2006

— By Akira The Don on Monday, April 8th, 2013

Rolf Harris was first questioned as part of Operation Yewtree last November . Curiously “the news” chose not to report on it, despite there being no legal reason not to.

I was reminded of a queer incident from 12 years ago, when I was writing for PlayLouder (RIP). A press officer friend of mine had told me about an old acquaintance of his who said he’d burgled Rolf Harris’ house and found a box of child porn. I included this anecdote, along with another about The Chuckle Brothers fondling each others’ balls beneath a cafe table, in my weekly column. Not long after the article went live (and remember this was before Google alerts) we were contacted by Rolf’s lawyers who threatened to go nuclear and destroy us unless we took it down immediately.

I was rapped on the knuckles, and the article was deaded. The Chuckle Brothers never got in touch.

From Bleeding Cool:

The Australian cartoonist Rolf Harris, who became one of Britain’s best known entertainers, has been reportedly arrested as part of the Operation Yewtree investigations on suspicion of sexual offenses.

Inspired as a result of hundreds of charges of paedophilia and sexual harassment being made against the late entertainer Jimmy Savile, a number of celebrities have been arrested, questioned or charged, including Max Clifford, Gary Glitter, Dave Lee Travis and Jim Davison.

Today the British press are reporting that an 82 year old man living in Berkshire was arrested, theAustralian press have named him as Australian and the Daily Star On Star journalist Tom Savage has named the individual as Harris.

He reports his sources;

And goes on to reiterate

Rumours were rife at the end of last year that Harris had been caught up in the investigation, andGuido Fawkes named him in January. He has also just reported the current news.

Rolf Harris is best known, to me at least, for his TV show Rolf Harris’ Cartoon Time and Rolf’s Cartoon Club that would teach a generation how to draw and appreciate cartoons and more. But many will know him for his music, songs such as Two Little Boys, Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport, Jake The Peg and a more recent cover of Stairway To Heaven.

Still vastly popular, the Times newspaper cited his paintings as being responsible for an massive uplift in attendance last year at the Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery. He was also recently commissioned to paint at portrait of the Queen.

— By Akira The Don on Saturday, March 30th, 2013

Amazing, amazing, amazing, could have been written today to any number of shill sellout suckfish fuckwits. Via Flavowire.

July 23, 1970

My Dear Mr. Truman Capote

This is not a fan letter in the usual sense — unless you refer to ceiling fans in Panama. Rather call this a letter from “the reader” — vital statistics are not in capital letters — a selection from marginal notes on material submitted as all “writing” is submitted to this department. I have followed your literary development from its inception, conducting on behalf of the department I represent a series of inquiries as exhaustive as your own recent investigations in the sun flower state. I have interviewed all your characters beginning with Miriam — in her case withholding sugar over a period of several days proved sufficient inducement to render her quite communicative — I prefer to have all the facts at my disposal before taking action. Needless to say, I have read the recent exchange of genialities between Mr Kenneth Tynan and yourself. I feel that he was much too lenient. Your recent appearance before a senatorial committee on which occasion you spoke in favor of continuing the present police practice of extracting confessions by denying the accused the right of consulting consul prior to making a statement also came to my attention. In effect you were speaking in approval of standard police procedure: obtaining statements through brutality and duress, whereas an intelligent police force would rely on evidence rather than enforced confessions. You further cheapened yourself by reiterating the banal argument that echoes through letters to the editor whenever the issue of capital punishment is raised: “Why all this sympathy for the murderer and none for his innocent victims?” I have in line of duty read all your published work. The early work was in some respects promising — I refer particularly to the short stories. You were granted an area for psychic development. It seemed for a while as if you would make good use of this grant. You choose instead to sell out a talent that is not yours to sell. You have written a dull unreadable book which could have been written by any staff writer on the New Yorker — (an undercover reactionary periodical dedicated to the interests of vested American wealth). You have placed your services at the disposal of interests who are turning America into a police state by the simple device of deliberately fostering the conditions that give rise to criminality and then demanding increased police powers and the retention of capital punishment to deal with the situation they have created. You have betrayed and sold out the talent that was granted you by this department. That talent is now officially withdrawn. Enjoy your dirty money. You will never have anything else. You will never write another sentence above the level of In Cold Blood. As a writer you are finished. Over and out. Are you tracking me? Know who I am? You know me, Truman. You have known me for a long time. This is my last visit.

I am reminded of Hicks’ famous thing about the Artistic Rollcall. “Another corporate shill, another whore at the capitalist gangbang… every word that comes out of your mouth is a turd falling into my fucking drink.”

— By Akira The Don on Monday, March 25th, 2013

FUNNY COS IT’S TRUE.

— By Akira The Don on Monday, January 21st, 2013

From Interpid Report

By Wayne Madsen
Posted on July 14, 2011by Wayne Madsen

A well-placed UK source has informed WMR that the suspicious death of Prime Minister David Cameron’s friend and political adviser, Christopher Shale, found dead in a portable toilet on June 25 at the Glastonbury Festival, was, in fact, a political assassination designed to silence an emerging critic of Conservative Party policies.

Shale was the chairman of the West Oxfordshire Conservative Association. Shale had written a memo containing a scathing attack on Tory policies under Cameron’s leadership. The memo was due to be published in The Mail on Sunday, the day after Shale’s body was found in the toilet.

Cameron later said he was “shocked” by the death of his friend. Shale’s death was alternately described as a “suicide” and heart attack.

However, WMR has been informed that Shale’s suspected disloyalty to the Tories resulted in worries at Number 10 Downing Street that the longtime friend of and adviser to Cameron might have decided talk about a Tory scandal dating from the late 1980s and early 1990s. Cameron visited South Africa in 1989 on a trip financed by the South African armaments company Armscor. It was the same year that South Africa began dismantling its nuclear weapons program.

As South Africa began to transition from apartheid to majority rule in the early 1990s, Shale, a British Army veteran, visited South Africa as part of a UKaid (Department of International Development) mission. After leaving the army, Shale established two companies, SGL Communications and Oxford Resources Ltd. Shale also visited Rwanda on numerous occasions as part of his work for UKaid. There is some evidence that Shale was involved with MI6 activities in Africa.

However, it was Shale’s work in South Africa, establishing links with the African National Congress and other black political parties in an attempt to undo some of the damage resulting from Margaret Thatcher’s support for the apartheid regime, that put him in contact with the British Ministry of Defense scientist charged with overseeing the transfer of South Africa’s nuclear weapons and other nuclear materials to Western hands from South African nuclear weapons stocks at the Pelindaba nuclear research center, near Pretoria. That scientist was Dr. David Kelly, Britain’s foremost authority on weapons of mass destruction, who was found dead from a reported “suicide” near his Oxfordshire home on July 17, 2003.

Kelly had questioned faulty intelligence on Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, intelligence that was used to justify Britain’s involvement in the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Kelly was said to have committed suicide with an old pocket knife and pain killers, an allegation rejected by a number of British experts and politicians, including Norman Baker, the Liberal Democratic MP for Lewes.

WMR has been informed that Shale became aware of Cameron’s role in trafficking on the international black market of South African nuclear weapons and technology that was entrusted to Britain and the United States by South Africa’s apartheid government, led by President F. W. DeKlerk.

Shale, we are told, was familiar with Cameron’s role in the re-selling of South Africa’s nuclear materials, with the proceeds going into the political coffers of the Conservative Party. Kelly and Shale were reportedly both aware that some of the South African nuclear weapons technology ended up, via an international arms smuggling network, in the hands of North Korea, which tested a nuclear bomb on May 25, 2009.

In 2010, at a 47-nation nuclear security summit in Washington, President Obama praised South African President Jacob Zuma and South Africa for successfully abandoning the nation’s nuclear arsenal. What Obama did not mention was that part of the arsenal was successfully abandoned to the international arms black market, a fact known by the CIA’s counter-proliferation division, which was also aware that Obama was aware of the temporary storage of the South African weapons in Chicago and the involvement of Argonne National Laboratory in their disposal during the early 1990s, while Obama was working at the Hopkins & Sutter law firm and later as a visiting fellow at the University of Chicago Law School.

Obama was awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,” in particular his promotion of nuclear non-proliferation. In 2005, then-Senator Obama, along with Senator Richard Lugar, visited a Russian nuclear facility at Perm. There have been reports that Obama was detained briefly by Russian officials on the suspicion that he was engaged in espionage activities at the facility. Obama’s long-time work for the CIA may have extended into his term as a U.S. senator from Illinois and, quite possibly, into the White House. During the 2008 presidential campaign, a CIA source who worked on the agency’s nuclear non-proliferation activities, told WMR: “You have no idea what the fuck you’re getting with this guy [Obama]!

With Shale “going wobbly” on the Conservatives, it was feared that he might reveal the dark past of Tory involvement in nuclear weapons smuggling, something that helped seal his fate. The Tory connection to nuclear weapons smuggling is so sensitive, British intelligence insiders believe that, if revealed, Cameron will be forced to resign and his deputy prime minister, Liberal Democrat Nick Clegg, will move into Number 10.

On February 28, 2008, WMR reported:

“[Dr. David Kelly, the British Defense Ministry scientist] knew of nuclear weapons proliferation involving three South African nuclear bombs assembled with the help of Israeli nuclear scientists at the covert South African nuclear weapons facility at Pelindaba nuclear research facility, near Pretoria. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors who visited Pelindaba and the state-owned Armaments Corporation of South Africa (ARMSCOR) Advena nuclear facility near Pretoria in 1990 and 1991 were tricked into believing that South Africa’s nuclear weapons had all been dismantled by the outgoing apartheid regime. However, three South African nuclear weapons were reportedly sold to ‘private investors’ with the up-front money coming from British government coffers.

Note: In 2007, speaking to a Conservative Friends of Israel meeting, Cameron referred to himself as a “Zionist.”

Reimbursement for the ARMSCOR nuclear weapons was made to Britain only after the three weapons, spirited out of South Africa in three 20’ ISO standard containers, arrived at a private storage facility in Oman for safekeeping. The containers had a special seal on the lock of the rear door of each container along with a temperature gauge in the front of the containers that was connected to the core of the bombs to indicate that the bomb was not overheating inside the containers.

Note: According to more recent information provided to WMR, the three weapons were to be shipped with an additional three nuclear bombs to Chicago for covert storage at a furniture warehouse, a CIA front activity. The fissile material from three South African bombs that made it to Chicago was later extracted at the Argonne National Laboratory, 25 miles southwest of Chicago. However, the three other bombs in Oman ”disappeared” en route to Chicago. The British official who was in charge of the warehousing of the weapons in Oman was David Kelly.

There are indications that one of the bombs was eventually sold to North Korea.

WMR has also learned that the nuclear smuggling operations involved top members of the British Conservative Party, including individuals close to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The Tory party soon received a mystery donation of £17.8 million. The donation was filed with the Tory party’s Fiscal Year 1992 Annual Accounts filed with Companies House. An insider at the Tory party’s Central Office tipped off a Labor Party Member of Parliament, Doug Hoyle, about the mystery donations to Tory MPs. It turned out that one of the Tory MPs in question was Tim Smith. [Smith resigned after he was discovered to have accepted cash payments from Mohamed Al-Fayad, the former owner of Harrod’s and the ex-brother-in-law of international arms trafficker and Iran-contra principal Adnan Khashoggi.] Smith had been an MP for Beaconsfield since 1982 when he defeated a little-known Labor candidate named Tony Blair.”

— By Akira The Don on Thursday, January 17th, 2013

This reminds me, what happened about that 15 trillion they laundered in the UK last year? I’ll repost that video at the bottom for you.

NBC reports:

A “pervasively polluted” culture at HSBC allowed the bank to act as financier to clients moving shadowy funds from the world’s most dangerous and secretive corners, including Mexico, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria, according to a scathing U.S. Senate report issued on Monday.

The report [link to PDF here] which comes ahead of a Senate hearing on Tuesday, said large amounts of Mexican drug money likely passed through the bank.

HSBC’s U.S. division provided money and banking services to some banks in Saudi Arabia and Bangladesh believed to have helped fund al-Qaida and other terrorist groups, according to an Al-Jazeera story on the report.

While the big British bank’s problems have been known for nearly a decade, the Senate probe detailed just how sweeping the problems have been, both at the bank and at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, a top U.S. bank regulator which the report said failed to properly monitor HSBC.

“The culture at HSBC was pervasively polluted for a long time,” said Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, a Congressional watchdog panel.

The report comes at a troubling time for a banking industry reeling from a multi-country probe into the manipulation of global benchmark rates. Last month, rival British bank Barclays agreed to pay a $453 million fine to settle a U.S.-British probe into the rigging of the benchmark interest rate known as the London interbank offered rate, or Libor.

Lax controls

The report caps a year-long inquiry that included a review of 1.4 million documents and interviews with 75 HSBC officials and bank regulators. It will be the focus of a hearing on Tuesday at which HSBC and OCC officials are scheduled to testify.

Banks pulling out of rate-setting panels in wake of Libor scandal

In a statement emailed to NBCNews.com, the bank said:

We will apologize, acknowledge these mistakes, answer for our actions and give our absolute commitment to fixing what went wrong. We believe that this case history will provide important lessons for the whole industry in seeking to prevent illicit actors entering the global financial system.

The report also contained strong criticism of the OCC, saying the regulator failed to crack down on the bank despite multiple red flags, allowing money laundering issues “to accumulate into a massive problem”.

The failings and lax controls inside HSBC included an inability to properly monitor $15 billion in bulk cash transactions between mid-2006 and mid-2009, inadequate staffing and high turnover in the bank’s compliance units, the report said.

HSBC ignored risks in doing business in countries such as Mexico, a country rife with drug trafficking, it said.

Between 2007 and 2008, HSBC’s Mexican operations moved $7 billion into the bank’s U.S. operations. According to the report, both Mexican and U.S. authorities warned HSBC that the amount of money could only have reached such a level if it was tied to illegal narcotics proceeds.

The focus of the Senate probe was HSBC’s U.S. operations, which has its main office in New York. HSBC used the U.S. unit as a selling point to clients outside the United States, touting its ability to handle U.S. dollar transactions.

Red flags

The report described that among HSBC’s problems was the bank’s compliance division being unable to battle the suspect money. High turnover of top compliance officials made it difficult for reform to take hold, the report said. Employees were “overwhelmed” by a mounting number of suspect transactions that needed review.

HSBC, according to the report, helped move money for a Mexican foreign-exchange dealer called Casa de Cambio Puebla that served as a hub for laundered proceeds, according to the report.

Banks’ bad behavior may be scaring away investors

Between 2005 and 2007, there was a “growing flood” of U.S. dollars moving between the exchange house and HSBC, setting off red flags inside HSBC. Some bankers said the transfers were legal. One said the money came from Mexican landscapers working in the United States and routing money back home to their families.

HSBC ultimately closed the account in November 2007 after it received a seizure warrant from the Mexican attorney general seeking money tied to the exchange dealer, the Senate report said.

Some of the money that moved through HSBC was tied to Iran, the report said, which would violate U.S. prohibitions on transactions linked to it and other sanctioned countries.

Between 2001 and 2007, more than 28,000 transactions were identified by an outside auditor for HSBC that potentially could have run afoul of laws that prohibit transactions with sanctioned countries. Of those, 25,000 involved Iran. A smaller number required additional analysis to determine if violations of U.S. regulations had occurred, the report said.

In 2010, Wachovia agreed to pay $160 million as part of a Justice Department probe that examined Mexican transactions, according to a BBC report, which also said ING last month agreed to pay $619 million to settle U.S. government allegations that it violated U.S. sanctions against Cuba and Iran.

— By Akira The Don on Saturday, December 15th, 2012