Bachelor Searching For Wife On Tube Billboard Ad Reading ‘Best Indian Takeaway’ Flooded With Offers
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on ITV.
This is my picture of the poster at Oxford Circus station.
I hope he gets value from his investment.
Ukraine Maternity Hospital ‘Destroyed’ By Russian Shelling
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on the BBC.
These are the first two paragraphs.
Russian forces surrounding the southern port city of Mariupol have destroyed a maternity hospital, Ukraine says.
President Volodymyr Zelensky said children were under the wreckage, and called on Western leaders to impose a no-fly zone.
This Wikipedia entry is entitled Russian–Syrian Hospital Bombing Campaign.
The campaign may have been started by the Syrians, but the Russians joined in later in 2015-2018, as this paragraph from Wikipedia describes.
After Russia began military operations in Syria, aerial bombardment intensified. In 2015, there were more than 300 attacks on medical facilities by Syrian and Russian forces. From May to December 2016, medical facilities were attacked about 200 times by Russian and Syrian forces.
It does look to me, that the Russians consider bombing hospitals to be a legitimate tactic. It is not, as it is a war crime.
From Belfast With Love
Ben Wallace has just announced in the House of Commons, that Ukraine has received over three and a half thousand NLAW missiles and more are on the way.
This has appeared in the last few minutes on the Wikipedia entry for the Starstreak missile.
On March 9, 2022, Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said that the United Kingdom was looking into delivering Starstreak missiles to Ukraine, to prevent Russian air supremacy amid the Russo-Ukrainian War.
Both NLAW and Starstreak missiles are made by Thales in Belfast.
This YouTube video shows NLAW missiles including during training with Ukrainian forces.
Read the comments, of which this is an example.
In Ukraine the instructions on how to use NLAW is top trending content on Facebook and Instagram. Amazingly you can fit a comprehensive instruction on how to shoot a tank with NLAW in like 10 pictures with arrows and subtitles.
These missiles will change the face of defensive warfare.
The Curious Tale Of The Queen, Putin And David Blunkett’s Guide Dog
This article on the Daily Mirror is entitled Putin Left The Queen Waiting For 14 Mins And She Broke Protocol To Make Snide Remark.
This is an extract.
According to David Blunkett, who was Home Secretary at the time, his guide dog reacted defensively towards Putin.
Mr Blunkett told the BBC : “The only time I met Vladimir Putin was back in 2003 on an official visit and my then dog barked very loudly.
“I did apologise to the Queen who was obviously hosting. I don’t think I am giving anything away when I said, ‘Sorry your Majesty about the dog barking.’
“She said, ‘Dogs have interesting instincts, don’t they?'”
Note that at the time, Putin had a black Labrador Retriever bitch called Konni.
Vlad’s Childhood
Out of curiosity, I looked up Vladimir Putin’s Wikipedia entry.
This is the first paragraph, in a section entitled Early Life.
Putin was born on 7 October 1952 in Leningrad, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union (now Saint Petersburg, Russia), the youngest of three children of Vladimir Spiridonovich Putin (1911–1999) and Maria Ivanovna Putina (née Shelomova; 1911–1998). His grandfather, Spiridon Putin, was a personal cook to Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin. Putin’s birth was preceded by the deaths of two brothers, Viktor and Albert, born in the mid-1930s. Albert died in infancy and Viktor died of diphtheria during the Siege of Leningrad by Nazi Germany’s forces in World War II.
In my life, I’ve known two people, who’ve had their childhood disrupted by death.
- With one, as with Putin two elder siblings died before they were born.
- With the other, their father died when they were about eight.
Both these people received therapy and now lead normal lives.
I’ve also heard many stories of similarly seriously disturbed children, from my late wife’s work as a barrister.
So I have to question, Vlad’s state of mind from his possibly disturbing childhood.
Putin’s Father
His grandfather too, probably had a similar status to say one of the Queen’s personal staff, but they would obviously have had different beliefs.
He would have probably made sure Putin’s father’s beliefs were spot-on.
This is the second paragraph in the Early Life section.
Putin’s mother was a factory worker and his father was a conscript in the Soviet Navy, serving in the submarine fleet in the early 1930s. Early in World War II, his father served in the destruction battalion of the NKVD. Later, he was transferred to the regular army and was severely wounded in 1942. Putin’s maternal grandmother was killed by the German occupiers of Tver region in 1941, and his maternal uncles disappeared on the Eastern Front during World War II.
The NKVD were the secret police and run by Beria.
This is an extract from Beria’s Wikipedia entry.
Beria was the longest-lived and most influential of Stalin’s secret police chiefs, wielding his most substantial influence during and after World War II. Following the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, he was responsible for organizing purges such as the Katyn massacre of 22,000 Polish officers and officials. Beria would later also orchestrate the forced upheaval of minorities from the Caucasus as head of NKVD, an act that was declared as genocidal by various scholars and, as concerning Chechens, in 2004 by the European parliament. He simultaneously administered vast sections of the Soviet state, and acted as the de facto Marshal of the Soviet Union in command of NKVD field units responsible for barrier troops and Soviet partisan intelligence and sabotage operations on the Eastern Front during World War II. Beria administered the expansion of the Gulag labour camps, and was primarily responsible for overseeing the secret detention facilities for scientists and engineers known as sharashkas.
Note.
- Like Stalin, he was another Georgian.
- The Katyn massacre took place near Kharkiv in Ukraine.
I don’t think he would be my type of friend.
Did Putin’s father relate the stories of the NKVD into his son?
Conclusion
I’m no psychologist, but I hope that NATO and other nations lined up against Russia behind Ukraine are analysing the character of the dangerous Vladimir Putin.
In My Fathers Footsteps
This article on the BBC is entitled Hundreds Gather In Trafalgar Square To Protest Ukraine Invasion.
My father, who was born on the first of January in 1904, described himself as a left-wing Tory.
- His great-great-grandfather had been a Jewish tailor, who possibly had been born in Konigsberg in East Prussia.
- In his politically-active years before World War Two, he had been an opponent of both extremes of the political spectrum.
- He had possibly been involved at the League of Nations in Geneva, which is something I aim to prove or disprove.
- A couple of times he talked about the horrors of the famines in Russia in 1931-33, but he never expanded on what he knew.
- He was mixed up in the stopping of a member of the British Union of Fascists getting elected in the 1935 Norwood By-Election.
- He was proud to have been at the Battle of Cable Street, when as he said, the whole of the East End, stopped Mosley and his blackshirts from marching through.
I heard him say a couple of times, that Stalin could have been worse than Hitler.
He would have approved that I went to the protest today, where I took these pictures.
It was all peaceful, as no supporters of Vlad the Mad turned up.
Earth Friendly Concrete
I was alerted to this product by this article on New Civil Engineer, which is entitled Keltbray Saves Carbon And Money With Earth Friendly Concrete On East London Job.
The article gave enough clues to find the Earth Friendly Concrete home page.
This is the introduction on the page.
We want to have a positive impact on the environment and supply our customers with an excellent product, that is why we created Earth Friendly Concrete ® by Wagners. It is a concrete that uses no ordinary Portland cement, instead using a geopolymer binder system made from the chemical activation of two industrial waste by-products – blast furnace slag (waste from iron production) and fly ash (waste from coal fired power generation). Our product has ZERO Portland cement and it has a much lower embodied energy compared to ordinary concrete, saving 250kg of CO2 for every cubic metre poured. Importantly, the engineering and construction properties of this environmentally friendly concrete is, in some areas, better than normal concrete. EFC has some significant performance advantages over normal Portland cement concrete, including improved durability, lower shrinkage, earlier strength gain, higher flexural tensile strength and increased fire resistance.
On this page, which is entitled About EFC, this said about the products Environmental Excellence.
EFC is a new class of concrete that contains NO ordinary Cement. Globally, the production of 1 tonne of Portland Cement produces 1 tonne of CO₂ emissions and is responsible for 5 to 8% of manmade greenhouse gas emissions. Instead of cement, EFC has a geopolymer binder that is made from the chemical activation of two recycled industrial wastes, flyash and slag. This recycled binder reduces the CO₂ emissions associated with Portland cement by 80 to 90%.
Every m3 of 40 MPa EFC saves 220kg CO₂ emissions.
Wagners, the company behind the development, are based in Queensland. Australia.
So it’s a case of Well Done The Aussies!
They have appointed Capital Concrete, to deliver Earth Friendly Concrete in the London area.
Conclusion
Does High Speed Two and other large projects that will need large amounts of concrete, know about this development?
‘Game-Changing’ Drones Helping Ukraine In Battle For The Skies
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article in The Times.
This is the introductory paragraph.
The Ukrainian military has been using “Punisher” stealth drones that can target fuel storage, ammunition supplies and electronic warfare stations up to 30 miles behind enemy lines.
Some other points from the article.
- They are a Ukrainian-built drone with a 7.5 foot wingspan an electric propulsion.
- They are from a company called UA-Dynamics.
- They have completed sixty successful mission.
- They can fly for hours at 1,300ft
This paragraph describes a mission.
He said the drone, which can carry 3kg of explosives, needs the co-ordinates of its target and then carries out its mission automatically. Onboard cameras record the impact of the blast to check the accuracy of the mission.
It can also work in combination with a reconnaissance drone.
Could this be the reason the Russians have held back the convoy?
It may not be a big enough warhead to knock out a tank, but it would do a lot of damage to a supply truck or a tanker full of diesel.
There is also this paragraph, which describes a dog-fight between Russian and Ukranian fighters.
The Ukrainian military said today that a “fierce air battle” took place overnight in the Kyiv region between a pair of MiG-29 fighters and a pair of Russian Su-35s. Both Russian jets were destroyed and one MiG-29 survived.
Note.
- The Mig-29 first flew in 1977.
- Mig-29s are a very common fighter aircraft.
- Ukraine inherited hundreds of Mig-29s after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
- The USAF has a few Mig-29s
The Su-35 first flew in 1988.
In addition to the Russians, they are flown by China and Egypt.
This is a paragraph from the Wikipedia entry for the Mig-29.
On 29 May 2020, Ukrainian MiG-29s took part in the Bomber Task Force in Europe with American B-1B bombers for the first time in the Black Sea region. In September 2020, B-52 bombers from the 5th Bomb Wing conducted vital integration training with Ukrainian MiG-29s and Su-27s inside Ukraine’s airspace.
Have the Ukrainian pilots been doing some combat training?
Is The Truth Getting Through To The Man Or Woman On The Moscow Tram?
I ask this question, as it appears that Russian TV is parroting, the Kremlin’s lies.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, I used to work for ICI.
A couple of times, I came across fellow engineers, who had worked on the Polyspinners project.
In this Wikipedia entry for September 1964, this is said about Polyspinners.
Edward du Cann of the British Board of Trade announced the signing of the largest trade deal in the history of British relations with the Soviet Union, with the Soviet purchasing agency Techmashimport and the British conglomerate Polyspinners, Ltd. agreeing for the supply of British textile machinery to a polyester fiber plant being constructed in Krasnoyarsk in Siberia. In all, the United Kingdom agreed to advanced $67 million of credit over a 15-year period.
It was a large project and ICI did well out of it.
My colleagues at ICI generally spoke well of the project and friends they had made in Russia and in those pre-mobile phone and internet days, they regularly sent each other cards and letters.
That was nearly sixty years ago, but human beings generally want to be friends with each other, so how many links are there between people living in Western Europe, North America, Australia and other countries and those living in Russia, which started as family, business or historic links or even casual meetings on say a holiday in the Mediterranean?
I should say that two of my best British friends in the UK, I met on holiday in St. Kitts and Moscow.
There must be millions of these links and they will surely allow the truth to get through to the man or woman on the Moscow tram.
Worried For Clive
On a bus on Saturday, I sat next to a lady of about my age and we got talking about Russia’s illegal attack on Ukraine.
We then started talking about BBC’s news correspondent in Ukraine; Clive Myrie.
We were both worried about Clive.
This article on the BBC is entitled Racism In Russia: Stories Of Prejudice and it details a stories of a black student and others in the country. I also remember, when I went to see Ipswich play in Moscow, that a black fan told me he had been abused on the Moscow Metro.
I do wonder that if Kyiv falls, that Clive will not have an easy time.
Let’s hope Clive was born lucky!
