By 2007, New Labour had presided over the longest period of economic growth in the post-war period. It was the goldilocks economy with low inflation, low unemployment and an impressive rise in spending on the NHS and education. But, the devastating global credit crunch caused a deep recession and higher unemployment.
1999, Enter Prince Andrew, as described in the book by Lownie:
On the morning of 9 February 1999 a small group gathered at Teterboro Airport, just outside New York, ready to catch a Gulfstream jet to Saint Thomas, second largest of the US Virgin Islands. One of the three waiting passengers was the glamorous socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, who had fled to New York in 1991 from the UK on a hundred-thousand-dollar annual allowance to support her father Robert Maxwell’s business activities. Shortly afterwards, the media baron with longstanding connections to British, Russian and Israeli intelligence had met a sudden and mysterious death whether from suicide, an accident or as his youngest daughter believed, murder. Her personal assistant, Emmy Taylor, waited with her. The third and final member of the group was Prince Andrew.
Entitled, by Andrew Lownie
Larry Ellison, who had begun growing his database software system, Oracle, in the US in 2000, met Tony Blair in 2002 and developed a long friendship with Tony Blair whilst Blair was PM in the UK, but also had said the UK stood with the US after the 9/11 terror attack.
The pair at No10 in 2003 to announce Mr Ellison’s company Oracle will supply software to schools
2001 – 3, Mandelson always attracted to making big money:
The prime minister earlier summoned Mandelson to Downing Street to “establish the facts” of his involvement in the passport application of controversial Indian billionaire Srichand Hunduja.
Mandelson had come under increasing pressure over the issue since the weekend following claims he pulled strings to help Hinduja secure a UK passport after he pledged 1 million pounds (1. 47 million U.S. dollars) in sponsorship for the Millennium Dome, while Mandelson was in charge of the project.
Mandelson was first forced to quit the cabinet in 1998 after failing to disclose that he had secretly received a 373,000 pound loan from his then fellow minister Geoffrey Robinson to buy a house in London.
Epstein paid for Mandelson’s travel in 2003, documents show
Image caption,Lord Mandelson was sacked as the UK’s ambassador to the US on Thursday
By Olivia Davies
Published 12 September 2025
Jeffrey Epstein paid for Lord Mandelson’s travel on two separate occasions in 2003 totalling more than $7,400 (£5,400), according to documents released by the US House of Representatives Oversight Committee.
Mandelson was sacked as the UK’s ambassador to the US on Thursday over his links to the late convicted paedophile.
The government said the “depth and extent” of Mandelson’s relationship with the financier had not been known when he was appointed last year.
This is the first time financial evidence of Epstein paying for Mandelson’s travel has come to light. The BBC has contacted Mandelson for a response.
May 18, 2023, 11:09am EDTMay 18, 2023, 02:44pm EDTShareSave
This article is more than 2 years old.
Topline
Deutsche Bank has paid at least $225 million to settle cases over keeping more than 40 accounts for the late, disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, who allegedly used the accounts to fund a sex trafficking ring—a legal snarl that could also cost JPMorgan Chase.
Key Facts
The German-based bank on Monday paid $75 million to settle a class-action lawsuit brought by a woman identified in court documents as Jane Doe, who alleges Epstein sexually abused and trafficked her from 2003 to 2018 and says Deutsche Bank ignored warning signs, including payments from the Deutsche accounts to multiple young women.
Doe claims Deutsche Bank played an “essential role” and “knowingly participated” in Epstein’s abuse of underage women by enabling him to pay the women from 2013 to 2018.
Epstein was a member of Deutsche Bank’s Key Client Partners group and kept an account at Deutsche for his nonprofit charity foundation, Gratitude America, which was used to accrue tax benefits and divert funds, and did not donate to all the charities it said it did, the Wall Street Journal found.
The bank was “laundering money for wealthy Russians and people connected to Putin and the Kremlin in a variety of ways for almost the exact time period that they were doing business with Donald Trump,” Enrich said. “And all of that money through Deutsche Bank was being channeled through the same exact legal entity in the U.S. that was handling the Donald Trump relationship in the U.S. And so there are a lot of coincidences here.”
Blair and Bush – Coalition attack on Iraq after ‘dodgy dossier’accepted as fact, yet it was a group of Saudis who hijacked the planes for the terrorist act
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leftvoice.org
Concept of ‘crusades’ revisited:
The Crusades were a series of military campaigns launched by the papacy between 1095 and 1291 against Muslim rulers for the recovery and defence of the Holy Land, encouraged by promises of spiritual reward. The First Crusade was proclaimed by Pope Urban II at the Council of Clermont on 27 November 1095 in response to a Byzantine appeal for aid against the advancing Seljuk Turks Continued in Wikipedia)
When we look back:
The Iraq Invasion 20 Years Later: It Was Indeed a Big Lie That Launched the Catastrophic War
Bush and Cheney were not misled by flawed intelligence; they were promoting false information.
2003, Making money out of inflicting death on innocents (Iraq population). Remembering this sad time by veteran Independent journalist, Donald MacIntyre:
Once the war was underway, of course, it was given daily extensive coverage. When I arrived in Baghdad in May 2003, I saw for myself how far US forces were from fulfilling President Bush’s February 2003 promise of building an “inspiring” Iraq when the hot war was over.
Much like in the case of the current caliph, the identity of the overarching leader of the General Directorate of Provinces remains unknown. Nevertheless, as of the time of writing, UN sources have named Abdallah Makki Mosleh al-Rafi’i (alias Abu Khadija al-Iraqi), an Iraqi national born in 1991 and one of the main known leaders of the Islamic State, as the possible Head of the Directorate and the Delegated Committee. His listing as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist was announced by the US State Department on 8 June 2023.
Israel’s enemies were to be picked off by North African countries destruction by the ‘Christians vs Muslims’ in Iraq and Libya. Tony Blair converted to Catholicism in 2010, saying his wife persuaded him.
The former Prime Minister, who now runs The Tony Blair Faith Foundation, switched from the Church of England to Roman Catholicism two years ago
The 2007 implosion of two Bear Stearns hedge funds that invested in risky mortgage bonds led to the wider crash of the financial system, and as it turns out years later, a fairly sizable and eyebrow raising settlement paid by mega bank JPMorgan to the convicted pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein.
The hedge funds went belly-up in the summer of 2007, the first public casualty of the smoldering financial crisis that would take down Bear, then Lehman Brothers, and were it not for a government bailout, the entire financial system in 2008.
After Bear’s collapse, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, at the insistence of the government, took over the firm, its assets and many of its liabilities, including claims by investors that they were misled about the financial condition of the hedge funds before their collapse.
Epstein invested over $57 million of his cash into something called the “Bear Stearns High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Enhanced Leverage hedge fund,” On the Money has learned.
Blair accused of taking blood money over £1m job with US bank profiting from Iraq war
13 April 2012
Tony Blair has taken a lucrative job with an American bank
JPMorgan is expected to pay him £1million a year as a part-time adviser.
It is the first of a series of posts that could see the former prime minister rake in a staggering £40million.
The move brought fierce criticism last night. Reg Keys, whose soldier son Tom was killed in Iraq in 2003, said it was “almost akin to taking blood money”.
Documents obtained by i and Liberty Investigates show Palantir Technologies has partnered with police forces in the East of England to establish a “real-time data-sharing network” that includes the personal details of vulnerable victims, children and witnesses alongside suspects.
Trade union membership, sexual orientation and race are among the other types of personal information being processed.
The project has sparked alarm from campaigners who fear it will trample over Britons’ human rights and “facilitate dystopian predictive policing” and indiscriminate mass surveillance.
Numerous police forces have previously refused to confirm or deny their links with Palantir, citing risks to law enforcement and national security. However, forces in Bedfordshire and Leicestershire have recently confirmed working with the firm
Larry Ellison, as I have written in a previous blog, runs Oracle, a portal to Palantir
Jeffrey Epstein had a long-standing relationship with JPMorgan Chase, where he was a client from 1998 to 2013. The bank has faced scrutiny and legal challenges over allegations that it facilitated Epstein’s sex trafficking activities, leading to significant settlements, including a $75 million payment to the U.S. Virgin Islands. Axios BBC
Tony Blair and Israel:
Blair patron of charity that shows Gaza and West Bank as part of Israel
Jewish National Fund’s UK branch also includes Golan Heights in map of Israel on website
Former British prime minister Tony Blair speaks during a ceremony marking one year since the death of the late Israeli President Shimon Peres on September 14, 2017 at the Mt. Herzel cemetery in Jerusalem (Gali Tibbon / AFP)
Published date: 22 November 2024 16:16 GMT|Last update: 12 months 2 hours ago
A British charity associated with former prime minister Tony Blair displays a map on its website including the occupied Golan Heights, West Bank and Gaza Strip as part of Israel.
Now the British organisation, which has charitable status, risks being drawn into a fresh scandal over a map on its official website.
As of 3pm on Friday, the website, viewed by Middle East Eye, displays a donation campaign for JNF UK’s activities in the Negev, a desert region in southern Israel.
The website reads: “Israel’s centre is prosperous but crowded. Its peripheries have enough space for millions of new homes, but the infrastructure is lacking.”
Israel moved to seize about 450 acres of the historic Sebastia site in the West Bank while settlers established a new unauthorized outpost, amid rising settler violence, the detention of a Palestinian activist, and a Human Rights Watch report accusing Israel of committing war crimes through mass expulsions from refugee camps.
Aaron Parnas, Substack
And no official body is preventing this theft of Palestinian land. Attacking Iraq gave us ISIS, when the Ba’ath Sunnis fled to Syria, and ISIS has grown as a violent militia, often becoming mercenaries to fight Hamas, funded even by Israel to do that.
Retired, living in the Scottish Borders after living most of my life in cities in England. I can now indulge my interest in all aspects of living close to nature in a wild landscape. I live on what was once the Iapetus Ocean which took millions of years to travel from the Southern Hemisphere to here in the Northern Hemisphere. That set me thinking and questioning and seeking answers.
In 1998 I co-wrote Millennium Countdown (US)/ A Business Guide to the Year 2000 (UK) see https://www.abebooks.co.uk/products/isbn/9780749427917
borderslynn 
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