“It is a matter not so much of concealing as of withholding and what is withheld is not so much the truth as the facts.”
—cabinet secretary, Sir Burke Trend, 1963
The magazine Private Eye provoked panic in Whitehall when it identified C, the letter used to denote the head of MI6, hitherto secret papers released at the public record office yesterday [Wed 16 Feb 2000 01.44 GMT] reveal.
The
magazine broke existing media conventions by naming Sir Dick White as
C, standing for Chief, in a column by Claud Cockburn, in August 1963. In
a small paragraph headed "Note to foreign agents" he named Sir Dick as
the "head of what you so romantically term the British Secret Service".
...while the ills of our privatised water industry have many authors – from
Margaret Thatcher, who put it into private hands in 1989, to the
rapacious venture capitalists, who have stripped its assets and loaded
it with debt, to the company chiefs, who have been responsible for the despoilation of our rivers,
and to successive governments, who have been complicit in weakening
regulation – Sir James Bevan, one-time head of the Environment Agency,
is, in many eyes, seen as emblematic of the failures in oversight of
privatised water companies, the personification of a system that has
failed us all.
But it’s best to begin this shocking tale here.
There are 195 countries
in the world. Some are big, some small. Some are highly developed,
others not so much. Some are rich. Some poor.Now for the extraordinary
fact.Guess how many of those countries have put its water industry
fully into private hands.
Who broke Britain? Welcome to The i Paper’s opinion series in which experts and writers debate the issues that concern them about modern Britain.
“Keir Starmer may be resigning the office
of Prime Minister but his legacy of total
complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza
will follow him forever.
From political cover for war crimes and
the authoritarian suppression of peaceful
protest in Britain, to the countless
surveillance operations and arms exports
to Israel, despite clear evidence of the
mass murder of Palestinians, he has
aided and abetted one of the greatest
crimes in history."
"― Ned Boulting via King Lear; June 28, 2026 "
The BBC and CNN have rejected an invitation to visit the site of the deadly Ukrainian drone attack on a Russian college dorm
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has urged the participants of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) to begin every conversation with Western journalists with the word "Starobelsk."
Starobelsk is a town in Russia's Lugansk People's Republic where 21 people, mostly teenage girls, were killed and dozens more injured in a multi-wave Ukrainian drone attack on a college dorm on May 22.
Western politicians turned a blind eye to the atrocity, while the BBC and CNN rejected an invitation by the Russian authorities to visit the site of the attack.
Xi only mentioned one war - and that was the conflict in the Middle East.
He told Putin that a complete end to the war in Iran was of "utmost urgency"
Xi and Putin both called out
The steady decline of our right to protest is just one more indicator of a backsliding democracy.
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