Meredith Kercher: Evading the Obvious Explanation

Now that there's nothing about the Meredith Kercher case which would be defined as sub judice under English Law (no-one facing an unresolved criminal charge) it may last be safe to point out a painfully obvious probability, and pose the one question which Italian Police and Prosecutors notably failed to ask:

In the two or three months before Miss Kercher was murdered in the cottage she shared with Miss Knox, did anyone in Northern Italy (not necessarily Perugia itself), systematically research the financial means of families of foreign students studying or due to study in Perugia? The Knox family in particular, but it wouldn't be confined to them, at least not in the early phases. Someone would have found out the names of foreign students, found out where they came from, then narrowed their sights a bit onto those who seemed to come from prosperous communities. These would have been researched a bit more deeply, until a shortlist was drawn up, of students with caring families who could afford a ransom, but could not afford (and would not know how to hire) a small army of ruthless mercenaries instead.

The Kerchers are from Surrey, which might excite interest, but there's a bit of a financial gulf between St George's Hill and Coulsden, and once the list-maker discovered the Kerchers came from the latter, Meredith might have been struck from the list.

Eventually, such lists have one name on it, and, with hindsight, Amanda Knox probably struck the ideal balance between wealth and vulnerability, so the name would have been hers. The name would be passed to someone more local, who'd played no part in researching the list, and who was definitively expendable -and they would have to be known to organized crime. The expendable local would have cased the joint, more competently or less, and when he observed a window of opportunity, he would have summoned a small group of specialists, whom he would have led to, and into, the property.

Both Meredith and Amanda have the same general description: English-speaking ,young, female, long brown hair. Miss Knox protests that until she was arrested, she'd never been in the same place as Rudy Guede before, and this would imply that Mr Guede would not have been a reliable authority on the crucial matter of which English-speaking young woman with long brown hair was which.

Fairly quickly, the specialists and their expendable local would have realized that something wasn't stacking up. Almost certainly, the specialists would have realized this long before the expendable local was prepared to admit it. Faced with a choice between total disaster and trying to get a ransom for a different young woman, they would have chosen the latter, and tried, in a few minutes, to establish equivalent information to everything which the researcher had supplied for Amanda after a month's work. That would account for the huge number of injuries on Meredith's body: sexual assault and torture at first, giving way to frustrated psychopathic rage when her answers, or the lack of them, signalled the end of their perceived opportunity for gain. This would have also served to impress Mr Guede with the urgent need not to implicate or identify the specialists in any way. Which he's managed not to do.

A bloody handprint links Mr Guede to the murder scene, but there are also fingerprints for several other persons, none of whom Italian Police have been able to (have tried to?) identify.
Tne unambiguous bloody hand-print emphasizes Mr Guede's expandability.

The above is not a flight of fancy, but a well-informed description of one of the most famous and lucrative industries of Northern Italy, one which every level of Italian officialdom, politics and the judiciary, has always preferred to pretend doesn't exist. Kidnap for ransom.

Amanda Knox is not lucky to get out of jail: she is lucky not have to have spent a few terrified weeks in a cellar or cave, having peripheral parts of herself sliced off and sent to her family through the post, before being found, almost certainly dead, in a car boot somewhere on payment of a ransom. Meredith Kercher was very unlucky, but also possibly, and we will never know for sure, brave enough not to cooperate with Amanda's would-be kidnappers.

A further observation might be that a young member of an important organized crime family, might have felt the need to pull off a major crime to prove his worth. If this was it, it couldn't have gone more wrong. As Medawar has observed elsewhere, "clogs to clogs in three generations" applies to organized crime families as well as industrialists.


Update:
The Appeal Court has published its reasoning over Miss Knox's acquittal.
There has been some deabte over whether Miss Knox might have been convicted on the evidence produced by the Italian prosecution, in a "UK" or US Court.

There is no such thing as a "UK Court"; an English Court is presumably what is meant, as the victim came from a long way South of Hadrian's Wall.

But the question really ought to be , what repercussions would there have been for the chief prosecutor and the detectives involved? Because they are the only ones who might be convicted of anything in an English Crown Court on the basis of the case they presented against Miss Knox and her boyfriend! What they did may be legal in Italy, but as the Appeal Court Judge has made very clear, it's definitely not acceptable in Italy and it's certainly not a way to solve a murder.

The case against Miss Knox and her boyfriend looks, for all the world, like an attempt to fill in the obvious two-person gap in the case against Rudy Guede, which is very incomplete despite, in some ways because of, his guilty plea. We'd be a lot nearer the truth if he'd fought the case and forced the prosecution to produce more of their evidence against him.

But that might have cast a spotlight on names and faces which the world still hasn't seen or heard about. Given a choice between that, and a sixteen year prison stretch, Mr Guede willingly takes the porridge. Which implies that the obvious two-person gap is in reality filled by much more frightening and resourceful personalities than those of Miss Knox and her boyfriend.

Forced Labour in Skane

This link is to an article reporting that human rights researchers in Sweden have found that at least seven Irish organized crime gangs are using forced labour on construction contracts in Sweden, with the slaves receiving little help or concern from Swedish authorities and, even more shamefully, no detectable concern from the UK's Foreign and Commonwealth Office at all. It is apparently being left to the Serious and Organized Crime Agency and local (English) police forces to do all the work, and they obviously have no diplomatic power to pressure the Swedish government into living up to one of the most basic responsibilities of a government in the civilized world: to stop slavery happening and to punish the slavers.

Whilst the Daily Mail concentrates on those slaves who may be British subjects, it appears that practically all of them have been trafficked through the UK, which makes their welfare a British responsibility regardless of where the gangsters involved originally kidnapped them from. The current British Prime Minister is an appeaser at heart, and nothing would pain him more than to embarrass a fellow European politician on behalf of down and outs who don't own a single top-end Rangerover between them, but using the very considerable power of his office to protect the weak against the venal and ruthless is one of the duties that goes with all the power and privilege. The Swedish Prime Minister should not feel humiliated by being taken to task for this: the dishonour and humiliation lies in allowing it to happen, and that would appear to cover several successive British Home Secretaries from the early nineties to the present day, as well.

Stalkers in Central Texas

The unlovely pair on the left are stalkers, active in Fredericksburg. Readers with names, addresses and other useful details about them are welcome to post anonymous comments here. Medawar would also be interested to hear victims of this pair other than the lady who took this phonetrait. It would be interesting to know how far out of Fredericksburg their writ (if they are literate) runs. It would be helpful if anyone suggesting names states red or blue so we know which is which.

Markrepcarinabking

The above "follower" has been blocked on suspicion of being some form of spam follower.
Unless Medawar receives an intelligent communication which convinces him that something other than spam was intended, that follower will remain blocked.

Fresh Slavery Arrests

Three more people have been arrested in connection with slavery adn servitude offences at Green Acre caravan park in South West Bedfordshire. See Link.
So far, everyone ever arrested in England under the "Slavery and Servitude" Section 71 of the Coroner's and Justice Act, has been a member of the same, Connors, family.

However, it is becoming apparent from the testimony of liberated slaves, that some of them were traded, and had originally been abducted by persons unconnected with the Connors family. It isn't clear how effectively the new laws deal with the trading of persons for forced labour. The basic techniques employed, seem remarkably consistent regardless of who the slave-holders and traders are, and this would seem to indicate that the practice has been going on for long enough for "best" practice to be established and disseminated, albeit within a narrow community.

Medawar hopes that the Proceeds of Crime Act will be applied in all of these cases, because Section 71 appears to set a maximum prison term of 14-15 years, and some of the slaves have been held for longer than that. If there cannot be complete justice, there must be reparation.

Cocaine, Cartels and Vermin

The people who committed this atrocity are apparently concerned that their good names will be sullied by allegations made by public-spirited bloggers.

Recently, Ms Cherie Booth QC, sitting as a Crown Court Recorder, came to the startling conclusion that a cocaine smuggler did not deserve a custodial sentence. (Fortunately, the court of appeal begged to differ.)

Quite apart from the fact that any Recorder whose son earns a living as a football agent really ought to declare a conflict of interest and decline to hear cases related to the supply of class A drugs, there's a whole raft of liberal opinion that seems completely oblivious to the nature of the trade which supplies them with a brief, sordid and never entirely satisfactory thrill. That, in fact, is the effect of the drug they take and not the fact that it's illegal: cocaine damages the parts of the brain associated with empathy. Shocking and awful as this picture is, no cokehead can look on it and feel anything but anger at the fact that someone finds fault with him and his habit.

It's psychosis in powder form: a way of leaving the human race.

New Tories: Corruption

A further link from the Daily Telegraph for those who wonder why the New Tories are intent on destroying the country.

"My Subjects, Like Any Other"

The words of Charles the Second, when asked about the legal status of slaves, former slaves and coloured people on St Helena and other colonies. Although Parliament likes to date the abolition of slavery from when it finally took action, a couple of centuries later, (and only after the High Court had, in 1773, made essentially the same ruling as Charles,) it was only the post civil war vanity of Parliament which prevented slavery being made illegal on the spot when Charles spoke, as he was being asked for his formal opinion on the law.

So how, then, do we react to the news that Bedfordshire Police have rescued two dozen men from forced labour and being detained against their will, for up to fifteen years, on a Traveller's Site in South West Bedfordshire, near the Buckinghamshire border?

See link
and indeed, link as the police now have their side of the story online.

Medawar thinks that any reaction other than cold fury is probably wrong.
If it hadn't been for Margaret Thatcher and Kenneth Baker suspending the old laws on slavery for some ill-defined European and UN action, which never amounted to anything except a green light to restart the slave trade, those arrested today would have been facing the death penalty if convicted.

For whatever reason, when the UN and European Commission first asked Great Britain to do away with the death penalty for aggravated trafficking, Jim Callaghan refused. (It is said that his words were "I am against the death penalty in principle, but I'm not silly enough to abolish it for pirates and slave-traffickers." Whether he used those exact words or not, this is undoubtedly a fair reflection of his thinking. Thatcher and Baker did not think at all: they merely gave into pressure from people who thought progress would be effected by "modernising" this brutal but effective part of English law.)

The death penalty is off the table, but this case already shows every sign of being at the most extreme end of the possible offenses under the more recent, 2010, anti-slavery laws. There must be no half-measures: if fairly convicted, the harshest possible sentence must be passed. It would be a terrible mistake for judges to hold a little bit back in case there is a worse offence sometime in the future, because that would invite just such an offence.

Britain was free of this scourge for more than a century precisely because the first few slavers to be sentenced, suffered the most brutal punishments the State could mete out. Slavery is a crime for calculating men, not sociopaths compelled by some internal disorder, and brutal deterrents demonstrably work with this crime. And, yes, it is worse than murder.

And it will be interesting to see if those guilty of this abomination, are part of the Traveller's groups who have been playing the victim to such perfection recently, aided by certain journalists, Bishops and actresses who seem to have, not rose-tinted glasses, but rose-tinted corneal grafts.

Most importantly, this link is to the official register of plot-owners at the site. The relevant entries are under Little Billington, Greenacres, Gypsy Lane. This is a document of public record and you are fully entitled to download and keep a copy.

Update:
Four men, all from the Connors family, have been charged. See link.
It is likely that more charges will materialize against these four, and against others higher up the food chain, in due course.

New Tories: The Enemies of England

In the past few weeks, the Prime Minister, David Cameron, the Chancellor, George Osborne, and a junior minister who, frankly, deserves nothing but complete anonymity so that his brief political career can vanish from the memory of men, have been orchestrating a determined effort to so drastically redraft planning law, that elected local councils will be obliged, either by government inspectors or the courts, to approve practically any planning application which the applicant claims is of economic value. To this end, planning guidelines which are currently more than a thousand pages long, will be cut to an entirely arbitrary fifty pages.

Medawar is all in favour of "cutting out red tape", but there's a difference between concise legislation, which states Parliament's intent in a few words of clear and unmistakable meaning allowing no room for misinterpretation, and truncated legislation, which leaves everything important unstated or undefined and allows almost any self-serving interpretation to be placed on a document which no longer has a clear meaning or, indeed, any useful purpose other than the feeding of lawyers.

Because arbitrarily-truncated planning guidelines cannot clearly guide, any obviously destructive proposed developments which government planning inspectors actually reject, will invariably be reinstated through the courts, because the guidelines don't support any grounds for rejection clearly enough for a judge to over-ride the stated preference for development to take place. The guidelines may indeed contain the comforting suggestion that planning applications might be denied, in exceptional circumstances, but the fiddly definitions which would allow a judge to actually identify those circumstances are in the thousand pages being disposed of.

The existing planning guidelines run to more than a thousand pages, primarily because in the eighty odd years since the Greenbelt was devised, crooked property developers have been so inventive in their attempts to run rings around legislation meant for the long-term public good. If Property Developers as a class had tried nothing on, the guidelines would be no longer now than they were in 1927.

All this is being justified by invoking the current economic crisis, with the suggestion that dissenters are madmen threatening the economic recovery.

The Greenbelt's predecessor (urban development boundaries, determined locally by Urban District Councils) and other basic planning tools were introduced after the British General Strike and just before the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression. They were not abandoned in those extremely hard economic times, because the Statesmen of the time saw that planning law would ensure that the country remained habitable for the long term, whilst they were trying to encourage short-term economic growth. Planning law was the safety net under the high wire that Chancellors Baldwin and Chamberlain were performing on. Planning law takes care of the long term while Statesmen and Captains of Industry deal with any crisis.

We do not have Statesmen and Captains of Industry these days: we have career politicians, property developers and oligarchs, and there is no comparison.

The greenbelt was partly a conscious rebuff on the part of Thomas Sharp, to the "Garden City Movement" which believed that if developments were made leafy enough, destroyed countryside wouldn't be missed. The recent vogue for "eco-towns" and "sustainable development" suggests that this error has not entirely died yet. Sharp saw that the countryside was something distinct from the town, that it had a unique value of its own, and that it was in the interests of both town and countryside for the distinction to remain. One of the important differences between the two is the timescale: the English countryside has been shaped by the activities of man as surely as any new town, such as Milton Keynes, but that process has taken thousands of years and in most of the British Isles, it is perfectly possible for an informed and caring eye perceive the entire progression from the copper age to the early twenty-first century. Towns can keep an identity for centuries, or they can be transformed beyond recognition in a couple of decades, but the countryside is where thousands of years of gradual change can be seen. The importance of this to human life and understanding transcends all immediate and political argument, or ought to. The Statesmen who saw the United Kingdom out of the Great Depression were prepared to accept this, the career politicians who are dabbing ineffectually at the current financial crisis (which they largely made for themselves), show no such wisdom.

As with the Cameron government's attempts to do away with the Forestry Commission, (from which they were forced to retreat, still protesting that their inane policy was somehow right but "misunderstood" by us, the little people,) the current policy is the product of "advice" from highly partial sources which deliberately excludes any counter-argument, sound advice or even dissenting opinion, from any other source. The genesis of the new planning laws may be close to that forestry policy in more than one way, in that the same very narrow interests might profit from it. A recent article in the Daily Telegraph offers a potential mechanism whereby a bad idea which benefits only a handful of extremely wealthy property developers, might be the only one that actually reaches the ears of ministers. Lobbyists don't just pay political parties and ministerial advisers to put their client's views to the minister: they pay for the minister not to hear any others.

Another article, in The Guardian, will give Medawar's readers a shrewd idea of why the Liberal Democrats, the Conservative Party's idealistic and "green" coalition partners, have sabotaged almost every Conservative policy goal, except this one.

Quite apart from issues of the Greenbelt and the countryside, the truncated planning guidelines will basically leave it up to market forces to prevent a property developer building houses on sites which will inevitably endanger anyone who lives there. This is based on a complete misunderstanding of how market forces work: they do not require developers to refrain from building houses which will kill their customers, market forces merely require the developer to get the customer's bank draft into his first account, and then transferred overseas, before it rains.

Medawar would like to close with his own observation, which is different from, but not in opposition to, the theories of Thomas Sharp. Landscapes are not always valuable because they have an immediate and striking beauty on the large scale, which would gain them the status of "Area Of Outstanding Natural Beauty" which the Prime Minister is claiming will lead to protection even under the new laws. (The Slad Valley is a designated AONB, the setting of Laurie Lee's iconic novel, Cider with Rosie, and it's now going to be built on by one of the developers which has given the Prime Minister's party money.)

Sometimes, the value of a landscape lies in all the information about ourselves, going back thousands of years, that it contains. Sometimes, the value of a landscape is in the way it inspired brave men to sacrifice their lives for something greater, especially in the fight against Nazism. And most of all, the value of a landscape is sometimes in the very small things it contains and gives a home to, which developers and the new breed of "conservative" politicians simply pay no heed to. As was said when John Major's government slid into an abyss of sleaze and incompetence: these are conservatives who will not conserve anything!

Ted Williams Tunnel

This is one of three large and hugely expensive road tunnels under Boston harbour, and, indeed, under a lot of buildings and other transport infrastructure on shore, too. See link.

Medawar is concerned that recent intelligence about three potential truck bombers having entered the United States, is being too readily interpreted as meaning that an attack on Washington or New York is imminent. It might be, but the late Osama bin Laden was a civil engineer, from a family of civil engineers, and if he had a hand in selecting the target, one with a spectacular payoff that would be linked directly to his own engineering expertise, would seem more likely. There are also three bombers, three tunnels. This is the way Osama's mind worked until the lumps of lead intruded into it.

One hopes that the high level of alert in new York and Washington does not leave Boston undefended, or that city might suddenly and painfully discover what it feels like to be on the receiving end of terrorism after so many years of allowing numbskulls to put fifty dollar bills in the NORAID bucket to knowingly fund similar atrocities across the Atlantic.

Hopefully, a modicum of alertness might spare Boston from ever having to find out what it was like in Woolwich, Birmingham, Manchester, Docklands, The Baltic Exchange, Omargh....

Judit Nadal, Inquest Findings

This link is to the Daily Mail report on the inquest into the death of Judit Nadal, a researcher at Imperial College, London.
It seems that she did make a mistake of some kind, shortly before her electric car was hit by a much heavier Skoda. The Gee Whiz Electric car was turning across the path of the Skoda and the broadside impact tore the Gee Whiz in half. Which makes argument as to whether Judit Nadal was wearing a seat-belt or not a little academic.

The Coronor and Investigating Officer make some comments as to the lightness of the Gee Whiz.
Actually, it's more to do with strength and weight distribution. The cockpit of a Formula One racing car weighs less than a Gee Whiz, but if a driver stays in it, he can survive enormous impacts which send the cockpit safety cell spinning through the air.

The Gee Whiz is very light, but within that light weight, is a very heavy battery pack, which concentrates nearly all of the vehicle's mass under the back seat behind the driver. The photograph of the wreckage clearly shows that the structure failed, almost neatly, along the front of the battery. Had the light structure not contained the battery, the heavier Skoda might simply have knocked it spinning across the junction. This wouldn't necessarily be survivable; that would depend on the nature of subsequent impacts, especially if this involved a still larger vehicle which might ride over the Gee Whiz. But still, surviving the first impact would in most cases leave the occupant facing smaller second and subsequent impacts, so it would be a worthwhile improvement of the odds. Especially as a structure which survives the initial massive impact, can also be made to shed kinetic energy in s series of glancing impacts as it bounces around. This is why the crash of a modern Formula One car looks terrible, but is survivable. It's meant to spin around the landscape, so that it loses energy, with glancing impacts on a different bit of structure each time.

There is not just a need for the structure of lightweight electric vehicles to be made stronger and "smarter" (more thought given to where the strength is), but also for the mass of the power source to be spread over the vehicle. It appears the Nadal's car was hit at a position and angle which ideally exploited the mass and strength of the battery to shear the vehicle in half. If the front of the Gee Whiz had shared more of the mass, it might not have been cut in half.

This is an argument for electric vehicle development to centre on super-capacitors rather than environmentally questionable lithium batteries, let along nickel-based batteries which are proven environmental disasters.

Super capacitors are more efficient, in that pretty well all the electricity put in can be got out, and they can absorb massive surges of power, allowing much more effective use of regenerative braking. They are also much lighter for any given amount of energy stored, which would allow more of the car's weight to be structure than battery. And they do not suffer from such a rapid loss of storage capacity as chemical batteries.

But the prime virtue of super-capacitors is that they are made of carbon nano-fibres and they are themselves very strong structural components. This, coupled with the fact that they can last the economic life of the car, means that they can be used throughout the structure, making everything stronger and avoiding any single concentration of weight that concentrates the force of an impact on what becomes a line of failure.

David Kelly: Application for Judicial Review

This link is to a site soliciting donations towards the costs of legal action, by a group of concerned medical professionals, to secure a formal inquest (scandalously denied by devious and wicked machinations of the Blair government and apathetic connivance of the Cameron government) into the death, on Harrowdown Hill or quite possibly elsewhere, of Dr David Kelly.

As before, the photograph is of Gruinard Island, as a reminder that Dr Kelly was a public servant of very great value, who did far more for his country than any of his detractors and persecutors within Downing Street.

The first step towards securing an inquest, is an application for judicial review of the Attorney General's perverse decision not to ask the Oxfordshire Coroner to hold one, as has been the normal practice in practically every other sudden or unexplained death in England for many centuries. It is expected that the judicial review will incur legal costs around £50,000, although if the review is granted and the Attorney General does not expend huge sums of public money defending the indefensible and merely delaying the inevitable, the judicial review may be the only adversarial legal action that is necessary.

It has been hinted that there are delicate matters of national security involved. Medawar does not believe that there is anything in this, other than a desire to conceal possible illegal actions by agents of foreign states, in order that the government may appease those states. "National Security" is in all cases better served by standing up to murder and blackmail rather than by giving in to it in craven fashion. States which are allowed get away with murder come to believe that they will be allowed to get away with military intimidation and even conquest.

The medical professionals involved are tackling only the medical evidence, from a medical standpoint, and Medawar has always sought to give them the elbow-room needed to do this. However, whereas Lord Hutton's inquiry was presented with partial, incomplete and possibly highly unreliable medical evidence, the evidence of a very expert forensic botanist who made detailed investigations at the scene and on the body, was not heard or even referred to, at all. Either by the Hutton inquiry or any other official investigation.

In many cases of unlawful killing in recent years, the forensic botanists have produced by far the most important and most reliable evidence of all, and it is now normal practice to give them the highest priority access to crime scenes and the body of any deceased person. Medawar's view is that, especially where the medical experts question whether Dr Kelly died where his body was discovered, or even anywhere near, the forensic botany evidence will be the most important.

It is also important to note that the Hutton inquiry did not hear any evidence under oath, therefore there is no legal sanction whatever for any person who deliberately lied to the inquiry, or omitted evidence. Several incidences of false evidence are now known, including a police officer who admits to having lied to conceal the presence of a third party who attended the scene with the officer and his partner. This was supposedly to "protect" a trainee officer, but since there is no reason why a trainee officer should not have accompanied his experienced mentors to a crime scene, to observe proper procedure, it is ridiculous to conceal the trainee's presence if this explanation is really true. The officer's actions make sense only if the third party's presence would seem to the general public (and possibly the courts) to be inappropriate, and that would only be the case if they were not an officer at all, but some other category of person.

Only a proper coroner's court can examine these witnesses under oath, and therefore under strict legal sanction for lies and omissions, and therefore, in a case where it is already established that people are lying, only a coroner's court has the tools to access the truth.

There must be a full inquest, with a jury, where the liars are made to tell the truth (and all of it!) and the coroner calls the most competent witness with the professional tools to answer the most pertinent questions, and that would be the forensic botanist.

And as for Iraq and all the conspiracy theories surrounding Iraq:

All of the most important tasks of Dr Kelly's career, concerned not the WMD programmes of Iraq, Syria and Libya, but the much larger and better-resourced WMD programmes of the Soviet Union and more latterly, the former Soviet states which inherited these programmes, sites, hardware, software and bacterial and viral cultures. If it does transpire that Dr Kelly was unlawfully killed, the murderer will most likely be found in connection with the most important matters of his career and not the least or necessarily the most recent.

Update:
Solicitors have been formally instructed to apply for judicial review, and the appeal for funds had, last time Medawar checked, raised £33,000 of an estimated £40,000 cost. Seven grand more, please!

There is going to be an inquest into the death of Gareth Williams, too, but some "senior police source" is still briefing the press with absurdities to try and prevent any objective and rational inquiry. However, only the Daily Express is still willing to print this person's dissembling and the Daily Mail and even the Sun have ceased to even acknowledge that the "death by his own perversion" line is still being peddled. The officer involved may soon find that no journalists at all are willing to pay for his lunches and dinners in return for being told improbable and grossly defamatory lies. The reason for this is simple: the officer's conduct is likely to pervert the course of justice, assisting him by reproducing his falsehoods in print could make the journalist and his publisher co-conspirators in that perversion of justice, this can carry any penalty up to and including life imprisonment. It isn't at all surprising that journalists don't appreciate being used as mouthpieces for this kind of campaign!

However, there is still no sign of any progress whatsoever towards an honest and open-minded investigation into the suspicious death of Dr Kelly's former research student, Dr Timothy Hampton, in Vienna. Medawar suspects that this may prove to be at least as important as Dr Kelly's death. A link to former Soviet WMD programmes can't be ruled out there, either.