Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe has said former British prime minister Tony Blair was to blame for his country’s problems on the eve of a crucial general election. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Fox World News
Bernie Ecclestone started out as a simple second-hand car salesman and went on to transform Formula One motor-racing into one of the most profitable sports the world.
German prosecutors on Wednesday indicted the British magnate on a bribery charge, but the 82-year-old has refused to resign as Formula One boss, despite facing a trial and a possible prison sentence.
However, the prospect of having to find a replacement for Ecclestone, on whose F1 decisions hang billion of dollars, sent shivers through the motor racing fraternity.
“F1 is what it is thanks to Bernie Ecclestone, to the way he has built this sport over the past 35 years,” said his compatriot Christian Horner, team principal at world champions Red Bull, when asked about a possible succession.
“Everything we see here is based on what he did and succeeded in doing. I think that without him we would have big problems.”
Despite his age, Ecclestone has brushed off suggestions that he is soon to retire and has insisted that his legal woes will not lead him to resign.
“I don’t see why I should do that, I will do what I have always done: keep working and do my job,” Ecclestone told German newspaper Bild.
Ecclestone has been charged by Munich prosecutors in relation to a $44 million (33.6 million euro) payment he made to German banker Gerhard Gribkowsky which was linked to the sale of the Formula One rights in 2006.
Dubbed “Napoleon” due to his 1.63-metre (five foot, four inch) stature and firm control over Formula One, Ecclestone was valued by Forbes magazine at $3.8 billion in March 2013, making him one of the richest 500 people in the world.
He is no stranger to controversy.
He was in the spotlight in late 1997 owing to a donation of 1.5 million pounds ($2.3 million, 1.75 million euros) to the Labour Party of then prime minister Tony Blair, which subsequently authorised the continued use of tobacco advertising by the sport.
Holder of a degree from Woolwich Polytechnic in southeast London, Ecclestone, known for his trademark white shirt and black trousers, began his career selling cars and motorcycles in the capital, and also briefly drove race cars himself.
However, his career was cut short by an accident.
In the early 1970s, Ecclestone set up the Brabham team.
Then, with competitors, he established the Formula One Constructors Association, gathering around him the other chiefs of motor racing stables to defend their interests against what became the International Automobile Federation (FIA).
One of the first to recognise the potential in sponsorship, he became the exclusive manager of F1 rights, taking the helm of Formula One Management, negotiating with circuits, advertisers and television stations.
“The contracts he negotiated, the circuits and the countries to which he brought F1, are remarkable. As long as he has the passion and enthusiasm to continue it is in our interests that he does it as long as possible,” Horner said.
“The day he is no longer there our sport will go much less well,” said the man some see as a potential successor to Ecclestone.
Ecclestone’s fortune …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Fox World News
The British government says former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s funeral will be held April 17.
Undertakers on Tuesday removed the ex-leader’s body from London’s Ritz Hotel, where she died Monday, amid preparations for a ceremonial funeral with full military honors.
A van carrying Thatcher’s casket left the hotel for an undisclosed location.
Officials say Thatcher’s funeral will be held with full military honors at St. Paul’s Cathedral. It is not technically a state funeral, which requires a vote in Parliament, but is the same level of honor given Princess Diana and the Queen Mother Elizabeth.
Thatcher’s coffin will lie overnight at the Houses of Parliament before the funeral, and then travel on a horse-drawn gun carriage to the cathedral along a route lined by military personnel.
“The Iron Lady” died at 87 after suffering a stroke.
“It is with great sadness that Mark and Carol Thatcher announced that their mother Baroness Thatcher died peacefully following a stroke this morning,” Thatcher spokesperson Lord Bell said Monday in a statement.
Thatcher led Britain’s Conservatives to three election victories from 1979 to 1990, the longest continuous period in office by a British prime minister since the early 19th century. Alongside former U.S. President Ronald Reagan, Thatcher battled against communism and saw the Berlin Wall get torn down in 1989.
“We have lost a great leader, a great prime minister and a great Briton,” British Prime Minister David Cameron said in a statement.
Tony Blair, a former British prime minister, said Thatcher had a vast impact on the world.
“Very few leaders get to change not only the political landscape of their country but of the world,” he said. “Margaret was such a leader.”
President Barack Obama said with Thatcher’s death, America has lost a “true friend,” while former President George W. Bush echoed Blair’s sentiment, calling Thatcher an “inspirational leader.”
“Prime Minister Thatcher is a great example of strength and character, and a great ally who strengthened the special relationship between the United Kingdom and the United States,” Bush said in a statement.
Buckingham Palace said Queen Elizabeth II was sad to hear the news of Thatcher’s passing, adding that she would be sending a private message of sympathy to the family.
It said the funeral will be attended by a “wide and diverse range of people,” and the service will be followed by a private cremation.
During 11 bruising years as prime minister, Thatcher transformed her country by a ruthless dedication to free markets and infuriated European allies. She transferred large chunks of the economy from the state hands to private ownership.
“The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money,” she once said, according to Reuters.
To her fervent admirers, battling Maggie was an icon, a national savior who ended Britain’s post-World War II cycle of confrontation and decline — eclipsed as a 20th-century British leader only by Winston Churchill.
Her vehement critics, however, saw her as a bellicose figure at home and abroad, a destroyer of industries and, with it, a way of life.
She was a sharply divisive figure even within her Conservative …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Fox World News
By Kris Zane
Most of us fell out of our chairs while watching the mega-hit TV miniseries The Bible when the character portrayed as Satan looked almost exactly like Barack Hussein Obama.
Glenn Beck immediately tweeted out the resemblance, and Rush Limbaugh jumped on the bandwagon the next day.
It was creepy to say the least; and it was reported the Obama administration was in hysterics, with something like fifty million people seeing that particular episode.
Of course, no one honestly thinks Obama is Satan; but the apple does not fall far from the tree.
Last week, the hacker known as Guccifer released a March 21, 2012 email hacked from the account of Colin Powell, an email sent from Andrew Knight, former director of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire News Corp and now working for the Rothchild banking conglomerate. In the email, Knight urges Powell to encourage Tony Blair, the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, to attend the playground of the elite, the Bohemian Grove—long known to take part in an occult ceremony called the Cremation of Care, where members wearing red-hooded robes cremate a coffin effigy at the base of an idol they call Moloch. Conspiracy theorist giant Alex Jones infiltrated the Bohemian Grove in 2000 and videotaped the ceremony, where a mock human sacrifice was offered to a god known as Moloch.
Of course, this is the exact kind of ceremony that Satanists take part in, substituting Moloch for Satan himself.
The Bohemian Grove has been called the American version of the Bilderberg Group, a secret gathering of the rich and powerful to decide how the world will be run. The June 2008 Bilderberg meeting at the Westfields Marriott hotel in Chantilly, Virginia was secretly attended by Democratic rivals Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Mysteriously—or not so mysteriously—Clinton shortly thereafter dropped out of the race, obviously Barack Obama being the candidate of the globalists. And if you look very carefully at the mainstream media coverage shortly after the Bilderberg meeting that began on June 6, almost to the day, the mainstream media switched from supporting Clinton to Obama. For example, Politifact, the go-to source for hit jobs on political opponents, ran a smear piece June 3 comparing Obama to Bush. On June 12, Obama released his so-called short-form birth certificate, which was immediately deemed a fraud. But who do you think began defending Obama almost to the day after the Bilderberg meeting? Politifact. For example, on June 13, Politifact began running articles backing Obama’s phony birth certificate and continued to belch out a stream of articles defending Obama on every front.
The Bohemian Grove is a much different breed than its Bilderberg cousin, held in Monte Rio, California a month after the Bilderberg soirée. Only males are admitted, with reports of male prostitutes that “service” the attendees.
The Cremation of Care ritual always takes place—and guess who was rumored to be there? Barack Hussein Obama—although the black hood portrayed in The Bible …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Western Journalism
By Evann Gastaldo 
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Newser – Home
Pop Quiz: When is a Neocon Not A Neocon? Answer. When he’s wrong. Which is most of the time. And that irks Charles Krauthammer.
Dr. Krauthammer is an interesting character. For some thirty years he’s been a Washington fixture. Trained as a psychiatrist, he became a speechwriter for Vice President Walter Mondale. He then began to write for the Washington Post, feeling right at home, since, at the Post, all abnormal behaviors are deemed normal.
Mondale. The Post. Those two credits are similar to those of many other “former” liberals who have become neoconservatives over the years. But these days the Doctor Is In, and he’s pouting. Why? Well, just two years ago he was bragging: “Today, everyone and his cousin supports the ‘freedom agenda’. Of course, yesterday it was just George W. Bush, Tony Blair and a band of neocons with unusual hypnotic powers.”
Hypnotic? Well, remember, the Doc is a shrink, and a proud one at that. But he also believes in mandatory amnesia, because today his celebrated “freedom agenda” has once more blown up in his face, so he now gripes that people are calling him names.
Neoconservative? He’s not a “neoconservative” at all, not any more, he tells National Review’s Rich Lowry. Better not argue (and Rich, shame on him, didn’t), because Dr. K. is on a roll: “Neoconservative is an ‘epithet’ [sic]. Today [he continues] it’s usually meant as a silent synonym for ‘Jewish conservative.’ And when it is meant otherwise, I would ask you whenever you hear the word [to] challenge the person to describe and explain to you what a neocon is.”
Yes, the good Doctor is in, but he’s totally out of it. Frankly, I don’t blame him for ducking the neocon label — it’s as closely identified with failure as “Bush” is. Mr. Lowry’s magazine quietly admitted as much in the run-up to the 2012 elections. Moreover, Dr. Krauthammer’s “challenge” comes off as somewhat insincere, considering how, ten years ago, he had no time for rational discussion, brushing off Bush’s conservative critics as “navel gazers” because they insisted on a debate that would apply constitutional principles to Bush’s wars — which, like Bush, were failures (John McCain, another failure, to the contrary).
On brief inspection, the doctor’s tendentious tantrum borders on hilarity. Many neocons wear the label proudly. After Obama’s illegal war on Libya (another disastrous failure, but I digress), Bill Kristol cheered, and proudly baptized Obama as a “born again neocon.” Did Mr. Kristol’s use of that sly “epithet” intend to brand Obama as a “Jewish conservative,” I wonder? Mr. Kristol is often off the wall, and even more often wrong, but even he has his standards.
Mr. Kristol’s father, Irving, proudly referred to himself as the “godfather of all those neocons” just ten years ago, in his son’s magazine. Neoconservatism, wrote Kristol, is “forward-looking” conservatism. Moreover, “neoconservative policies have helped make the very idea of political conservatism more acceptable to a majority of American voters,” he insisted.
“Forward-looking.” Well, as Charles Burton Marshall once observed, …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Western Journalism
