Sheffield Newswire Archive

Wikipedia defines false or black flags as "covert operations designed to deceive the public in such a way that the operations appear as though they are being carried out by other entities."

They're "big lies," defined by Merriam-Webster as "deliberate gross distortion(s) of the truth used especially as a propaganda tactic."

America's decade from September 11, 2001 to May 1, 2011 was punctuated by the (big) lie of our time and (big) lie of the moment.

Put another way, the official stories are falsified, myths, widely believed fantasies contrary to reality.

Read more | 16 comments >>

Following the announcement of Osama Bin Ladin's assassination by the U.S. Special Forces; the British government and media have launched yet another propaganda campaign about the threat of a new terrorist attack in the UK.

Read more >>

Many users of the UK Indymedia site will have seen some strange changes over the past week and may be confused over what is going on on the site. This is an attempt to explain what is going on behind the scenes as briefly as possible. Of course, it is our own version of events and others may dispute it.

First of all, it is important to realise that the Nottingham site isn’t going to change at all. We will still be here and our feeds will still appear on the Be the Media site. They disappeared from the UK site for a few days but appear to be working again today.

When it was set up, the UK Indymedia site was the site of a London-based collective which later split up into a network of local collectives. Over time, political disagreements and interpersonal conflicts led to a total breakdown of that network as a body that could make decisions together. This was formalised in the final meeting of the network in Bradford last year. Two competing ideas for the site existed that were not mutually compatible. Because all attempts to come to an agreement over the future of the site had failed, a decision was made to ‘fork’ the site into two separate projects. In the minutes these are referred to as Group A and Group B and which have since become known as Mayday and Be the Media. The minutes note that ‘Everything has to be done by the first of May’. After this date, neither group would be permitted to use the domains indymedia.org.uk or uk.indymedia.org or call themselves UK Indymedia. In other words, the decision lay the groundwork for the closure of not just the UK network but also the UK Indymedia site:

We accept to archive www.indymdia.org.uk, indymedia.org.uk and uk.indymedia.org and indymedia.co.uk as static html with a banner on
top of each page that says along the gist of “this a archived version of the site For a active version of this page go to a.indymedia.org, there is also the aggregator at b.indymedia.org.”
There will be splash page at / that links to the archive site, site a.indymedia.org and b.indymedia.org
We agree that henceforth noone can call themselve Indymedia UK, UK network and UK collective anymore.

- Minutes of Bradford UK network meeting, Dec 2010

Nottingham Indymedia was broadly aligned with the Be The Media collective, but we agreed to support the Mayday collective’s new Indymedia application.

In April, the Mayday collective disputed that the 1st May deadline still applied because the Mayday collective’s New IMC application did not look like it would pass before that date. All prospective Indymedia collectives have to go through the New IMC Process in order to be accepted into the network. The minutes refer to a.indymedia.org and b.indymedia.org. Since Mayday did not have an Indymedia subdomain, they claimed that the Bradford agreement did not apply. A feature explaining the implications of the fork was blocked by members of the Mayday collective because they did not agree that it was accurate. No resolution to this disagreement seemed possible and 1st May approached with Mayday aiming to continue maintaining the UK site and Be the Media aiming to implement the fork.

On 1st May, the Mayday collective did not implement the fork. Be the Media claimed that they had broken the Bradford agreement and implemented some of the changes specified in the Bradford agreement (archiving UK Indymedia and putting up a splash page to link to Mayday and Be the Media sites). Mayday called this ‘an attempt to shutdown UK Indymedia’ and undid the changes. They have also blocked administrative access to UK Indymedia to all members of Be the Media.

Those who want to know more about the ongoing events surrounding this disagreement should look at the UK Process list archives.

We hope that the situation can be resolved and that both projects can continue in independence from one another.

Read more >>

Queen Elizabeth II is going to be called as a witness to a historic trial that is set to begin Monday, May 9th, 2011 in the Southwark Crown court at 10am.

This might postpone her scheduled and unprecedented trip to Ireland and should be of major interest to everyone in the U.K. and around the world.

Read more | 1 addition | 2 comments >>

The Obama administration and the corporate media are concocting an ever-more elaborate and spectacular theater around the “heroic” murder of the CIA intelligence myth/CIA asset Osama bin Laden. Not content to simply to exploit the 9/11 atrocity for political gain, the administration is heaping new layers of lie and cover-up to the original crime.

Read more >>

This sounds like a wind-up, but sadly it's true. Proving once and for all that they are fascist as well as thick as two short planks, the infernal idiots of the English Defence League are going to protest against comedian Russell Howard for daring to tell a joke against the EDL. Their hero Adolf Hitler burnt books, and yet the so-called "free-speech loving" EDLers want free reign to tweet vile racist jokes around the net, but when someone dares to put the boot on the other foot, the EDL show their true fascist censorship colours.

Read more | 19 comments >>

It was with great consternation that I followed the Indymedia UK saga on the Newswire – the split camps of BeTheMedia and Mayday, and the possible suspension of the site. While I am not a part of any IMC Kollective, and have not followed the in-depth discussions and meetings that have been had about IMC UK’s future, I would like to say a little on the importance of the site, both as a reader and contributor to IMC UK.

Read more | 3 comments >>

New look at public health risks of climate change, with Harvard's Paul Epstein, and Tim Tarako of Simon Fraser University. Malarial mosquitoes in Scandinavia & Canada by 2025? Interview with Andy Revkin, former environment reporter for The New York Times. Interview with Vermont teacher Katy Farber on "Service Learning" & Captain Charles Saylan on fixing environmental education.

Read more >>

On November 30th 1999 thousands of anti-capitalist/globalisation activists gathered in Seattle, USA to protest against and successfully shut down a meeting of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). A large part of their grievance was that the WTO was effectively operating in secret with no reporting of the decisions it was making and the effect those decisions were having across the world. So by way of a solution a group of activists set up the Independent Media Centre or "Indymedia" for short. The idea was create a network of un-moderated, open publishing websites so people from all over the world could share news about the decisions being made in the name of globalisation and the actions that were being taken to protest against them. The Independent Media Centre was probably one of the most successful ideas to come out of the Seattle protests and there are now 180 Indymedia sites across the world in places as diverse as Japan, Israel, Kenya and Burma making Indymedia the blueprint for the sort of "Citizen Journalism" that's become so fashionable recently.

Read more | 4 comments >>

Disability activists, claimant groups and anti-cuts campaigners have called a week of action against poverty pimps Atos Origin beginning on Monday 9th May with a picnic and party in Triton Square*, home of their head office, at 2pm.

Both announced and unannounced protests are set to take place around the UK outside the offices and testing centres operated by Atos Origin.

Read more >>

Calling Osama Bin Laden "the mastermind of the most devastating attack on American soil in modern times and the most hunted man in the world," President Obama announced his death Sunday night, declaring "justice has been done."

Highlighting 9/11, he painstakingly discussed everything but the truth. America's media repeated it. Celebratory crowds in front of the White House, in Times Square, and at "ground zero" cheered it past midnight, mindlessly believing a lie.

Clear evidence showed bin Laden died years ago, likely in December 2001. However, reporting it was concealed to pursue America's "war on terror."

As a result, "Enemy Number One" was used to stoke fear as pretext for imperial wars on Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, perhaps others now planned, and numerous proxy ones in Somalia, Yemen, Bahrain, Palestine, Central Africa, Colombia, and elsewhere.

Read more | 3 comments >>

New Photographic Evidence Shows that Icelandic Police Lied about their Dealings with Mark Kennedy

Read more | 2 comments >>

As part of our activities for Mayday 2011, Leeds Anarchist Black Cross have launched a new dedicated website.

Read more | 1 comment >>

Obama has pronounced Osama bin Laden to be dead. But according to historical facts and extensive documented evidence, he may never have been alive in the way that the official propaganda has portrayed him. Or alive at all.

Osama bin Laden has been a CIA asset in reality, and a propaganda boogeyman in official fiction. The official Osama bin Laden narrative, along with “Islamic terrorism” and Al-Qaeda, is a CIA military-intelligence fabrication designed to provide a pretext for an eternal global war agenda, and to provide an ongoing propaganda pretext for the “war on terrorism”. The “Militant Islamic Network”, including bin Laden himself, has been, since the Cold War a intelligence network that has been “run” on behalf of Anglo-American interests.

The attack of 9/11 was a false flag operation, planned and carried out by Anglo-American intelligence assets, blamed on “Al-Qaeda”, despite no credible supporting evidence.

Read more | 45 comments >>

Britain, France, Germany and Portugal circulated a draft for a Resolution 1973-type initiative against Syria earlier in the week, failing which Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Spain later on the 27th demanded the Syrian ambassadors to their countries condemn their government's actions at home.

Synchronized with the U.S. action on the 29th, the European Union announced it plans to impose a wide range of sanctions against Syria including the now typical portfolio of travel bans, the freezing of assets and an arms embargo.

What is underway currently is the realization of the former George W. Bush administration's project for "regime change" in Syria of six years ago following the assassination of former prime minister Rafik Hariri in Lebanon and the subsequent Cedar Revolution - a term coined by then-U.S. Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs Paula Dobriansky - the withdrawal of Syrian troops from the country and the recall of the American ambassador from Damascus.

Read more >>

The Bradford consensus decision is invalid on two counts if it was the intention, deliberate or otherwise, to expel Group A from the global network.

Read more | 26 comments >>

The Fargate Speaker invited Sheffield to a "Bollox to the Royal Wedding! BBQ",  https://thefargatespeaker.wordpress.com/2011/04/06/you-are-cordially-invited/ on 29th April 2011 and around 90 people turned out, there was lots of nice food, some theatre and some football and some great converstations and meetings of old friends and new ones, and no police to be seen.

Read more | 1 comment >>

Below is a compilation of articles published by Robert Fisk between March 31 and April 29 in The Independent.

Read more | 2 comments >>

The British public – grinding under massive austerity budget cuts, unemployment, poverty wages, social deprivations and crumbling services – are thrown scraps of feelgood comfort from the much-hyped wedding between Prince William and his girlfriend Kate Middleton.

Meanwhile, the spectacles of gore and bloodlust – admittedly despite much public opposition – are located thousands of kilometers away in the Middle East, Iraq, Central Asia, Afghanistan, where over a million civilians have been killed in British-backed “wars against terror” that have yet to be sated even after eight and 10 years of butchery, respectively; and now the latest spectacle opens in North Africa, Libya, where over the past six weeks Royal Air Force warplanes have been bombing and killing civilians in the name of “peace” and “humanitarian concern”

Read more | 1 comment >>

Can we believe the Japanese on Fukushima dangers? Could another big wave of radiation hit North America, Europe? A reactor by reactor report. What happened to spent fuel pool #3? Will pool #4 collapse? Why is reactor #1 out of control right now? Plus geopolitics and your own preparation. The under-reported stories from Radio Ecoshock - 110429 Show 1 hour.

Read more >>