Police officers are monitoring social media, internet forums and BlackBerry messaging networks in the expectation that Margaret Thatcher's funeral procession next Wednesday will be targeted by protesters.

The possibility of demonstrations during the funeral has raised concerns that police may adopt the controversial tactic of making pre-emptive arrests.

Plans appear to be under way for different groups to demonstrate during the funeral, and to hold celebrations around the country on the same day.

Police concerns have been fuelled by the impromptu street parties which broke out on Monday evening in Leeds, Bristol, Brixton, Liverpool and Glasgow – some of which resulted in arrests after clashes with officers.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/disunited-in-mourning-police-fear-thatcher-funeral-may-turn-into-security-nightmare-8566452.html

FORMER prime minister John Howard has been named Australia's official representative at Margaret Thatcher's funeral.

Baroness Thatcher died on Monday at the age of 87, and will be buried next Wednesday at a ceremonial funeral with military honours.

Mr Howard had already been invited to attend the service at St Paul's Cathedral in London as one of 24 members of the Order of Merit (OM).

The former Liberal prime minister received the rare insignia at Buckingham Palace in May last year.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard on Friday confirmed Mr Howard would also be attending as Australia's official representative.

"I have invited the Honourable John Howard OM AC to represent the government and people of Australia at the funeral service," Ms Gillard said in a statement on Friday.

"Mr Howard has kindly agreed."

Mr Howard, who was opposition leader at the same time Baroness Thatcher was in government, said this week the former British PM transformed her country

Read more: http://www.news.com.au/breaking-news/national/howard-to-attend-thatcher-funeral-for-aust/story-e6frfku9-1226618733756#ixzz2QC3IcdDr

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Gus: I think Julia Gillard sense of humour is highly underestimated...

Labour MP Glenda Jackson criticises Margaret Thatcher's policies during a special debate in the Commons in tribute to the former prime minister who died on Monday. Jackson, MP for Hampstead and Kilburn, says that under Thatcher greed and selfishness were seen as virtues...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/video/2013/apr/11/glenda-jackson-margaret-thatcher-video

Thatcher’s bizarre idea, that rich boys ran things better than public servants, caused train crashes, plane crashes, fifteen per cent unemployment, and, in 2008, a meltdown of everything. Her idea that no new public housing need be built inflated the price of a home in Kent from ten thousand pounds to a million, exiling natives from their home towns. Her idea that coal mines should all be closed meant China buys coal now from us, and half a million strong young men unwillingly left their home towns and slept, sometimes, in cardboard cartons with their dogs on the Strand. It meant machines replaced men in the mines elsewhere, and Gina Rinehart earned two million dollars an hour and Larry Knight died at Beaconsfield and twenty-nine like him in the Pike River mine in New Zealand.

http://www.independentaustralia.net/2013/politics/ding-dong/

And our resident "misogynist" in Canberra, Tony Abbott, is praying to god he can do the same to Australia, as Thatcher did to the Poms... Wouldn't it be swell.?..

My eyes watered when I saw this article in "Le Monde" (Translation by Google):

At the funeral of the former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, which took place on Wednesday March 17 in London, all eyes were focused on her two children, Mark and Carol Thatcher, twins born in 1953. Alongside her husband Denis and her two children, Margaret Thatcher evoked a rather typical pattern of the life of a family of high bourgeoisie conservative of southern England. But this can be misleading.

The Thatchers was a dysfunctional clan. Tolstoy could have used the quartet to illustrate the famous preamble to his novel Anna Karenina: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way". On the death of his father, Denis, in 2003, Mark Thatcher duly inherited the baronetcy that "Maggie" had offered her husband leaving 10 Downing Street in 1990. The son was the favourite child of his mother, who believed that all ideas generated by her offspring deserved consideration. The Iron Lady wept in public - never seen before - when, in 1982, he got lost for six days during the Paris-Dakar Rallye...

In contact with all kinds of billionaires who swarmed around the Thatcher government, the troublemaker became interested in the secret and mysterious business of arms contracts in the Middle East. Following several scandals of bribes in which he was the beneficiary, Mark was forced into exile in the United States and South Africa. In 2005, he was sentenced to four years in prison, by the South African justice for participating in the financing of a failed coup by mercenaries in Equatorial Guinea, an oil-rich state of the African continent.

Since then, Sir Mark lives discreetly, bordering on self-effacement, in Spain and Gibraltar. After divorcing his first American wife, with whom he had two children, he married the sister of the British media magnate (4th Viscount?) Lord Rothermere.

Carol Thatcher was the smarter of the duo, with brilliant university studies and a promising career as a television producer. But tourmented by a chaotic love life and a series of short-lived affairs, she turned to reality-TV and became a trashy commentator. In 2009, she caused a scandal with racist off-air in regard to the French tennis player Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, comparing him to a "negro rag doll." The BBC fired her on the spot.

and so on and on...

The French did not like La Thatcher... though they supported les Anglais win the war against Los Argentinos' Exocet missiles... That gave the French a first hand appraisal of the weapon's capability...

Meanwhile, respectfully, DW tells us that:

Gut eine Woche nach dem Tod der früheren britischen Premierministerin Margaret Thatcher findet in der Londoner St. Paul's Cathedral die Trauerfeier für die umstrittene "eiserne Lady" unter verstärkten Sicherheitsvorkehrungen statt.

Happy rusting, "controversial" Iron lady...

The French article ends up by mentioning that "Denis Thatcher was actually much further to the right than Margaret herself, which says a lot"...

For those who have iView at ABC go directly to http://www.abc.net.au/iview/#/view/32593

for those who don't have iView, simply download it from the ABC site then go to the link above...

It is hard for pretty much any other country to understand how the loss of greatness affects a national consciousness. Just ask Portugal or even Egypt.

We were the dominant superpower in the world pretty much without the use of electricity or the petrol engine. We are the grown-up always harking back to high school. Wouldn't it be great if we could go back to 1895?! We could send a gunboat into the IMF and shell it with impunity! That's a way to deal with economic ruin at home!

But we can't do that anymore. The most offensive thing we can send in is George Osborne or if it's really hopeless Tony Blair. (As Middle East Peace Envoy, it's a bit like sending a pyromaniac to put a fire out.)

And so this week there was another explosion of pomp, uniforms, old buildings, and drunken protesters playing Falstaff all adding up to a nice advert for tourists to come see "all that history" as a divisive prime minister "who made Britain great again" was laid to rest.

Enough electricity has been wasted arguing about her. But as her bouffon'd terminator pic is above here's my two pence. Thatcher was the first politician I ever knew. She was on the telly every night eliciting coos of admiration or spittle-flecked anger for the way she changed the country from 1979-1990.

I don't think she acted alone and who is to say that another prime minister would have changed Britain the way she did? Politicians are all victims or winners of circumstance. Although she did so relish some of the harsher policies.

The Falklands still seems faintly embarrassing. It was damned as a 'colonial adventure', but it smacked of one last chance to get the blankets and rifles out for a final hurrah against Argentina. At least the original colonial adventures had forward-looking purposes and incredible moustaches. But then Maradona did touch the ball with his hand in the 1986 World Cup, so we're even.

"In the 1950s when I was a kid every wealthy person was a philanthropist," Mr Smith said.

"That's all changed, it's the time of greed and selfishness now.

"You have people like Rupert Murdoch - some people say he does give money away, but he does it all secretly."

Mr Smith donated $1 million to the Lions Foundation this week, which will go towards people in need of disability support or crisis services.

He said he had written to Mr Murdoch in the past to express his views but in the latest string of letters Mr Murdoch expressed his desire to terminate all further communication.

"I shall quote directly from his letter, 'after your insulting remarks about our newspaper front pages I see no further need of reply'," Mr Smith said.

Mr Smith said philanthropy should not be an old-fashioned concept and implored Mr Murdoch to lead the way.

"Rupert Murdoch's newspapers described his mother Dame Elisabeth Murdoch as an old-fashioned philanthropist - well that was absolutely true, but why should it be old-fashioned?" Mr Smith said.

"What they were saying is that she publically helped others. Well, that was an obligation that shouldn't be secret.

"Rupert, despite your incredible success and wealth you are not known as a philanthropist."

Mr Murdoch recently donated $15,000 to a charity in memory of Margaret Thatcher.

He donated the money to the Chelsea Pensioners Appeal, and wrote that the late British prime minister "changed Britain and the world for the better".

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-04-27/dick-smith-takes-aim-at-rupert-murdochs-philanthropy-record/4655184

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I guess the "our newpapers front pages" of Mr Murdoch media insult our senses daily... he should be ashamed...

Britain was offering to sell arms to the Argentinian dictatorship just three days before the invasion of the Falkland Islands, newly released documents in the National Archive show. The British ambassador in Buenos Aires sent a telegram to the Ministry of Defence in London on 29 March 1982 saying that the Argentine air force had an "interest in acquiring extra squadron bombers". Ambassador Anthony Williams planned to meet the head of the Argentine air force the "next week" to discuss the sale.

The subject of that meeting – obviously cancelled when Argentina invaded the islands on 2 April – was the sale of Canberra jet bombers and the refurbishment of other bombers that Britain had previously sold to the regime. "BAe [British Aerospace] is committed to making a proposal [to refurbish the planes] … if all goes well here BAe could move further up the class in time," Ambassador Williams wrote.

The documents show that British arms sales to Argentina's junta, notorious for its abuses of human rights, jumped after Margaret Thatcher came to power. Arms sales rose from £4.9m in 1978 to £66.6m in 1979; £62.6m in 1980 and £12.5m in 1981. Margaret Thatcher's government oversaw the delivery of two Lynx helicopters in 1979 and a Type-42 destroyer in 1980, contracts that had been agreed by the previous Labour government. Both the helicopters and the destroyer were used in the invasion of the Falklands

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/uk-ready-to-sell-aircraft-to-junta-just-days-before-falklands-attack-8604088.html

From Chris Floyd

Here's a video of a heinous "material supporter" of violent Islamist extremism, brazenly pledging to give millions of dollars to armed "holy warriors" fighting to overthrow a secular government. This shocking footage shows us some of the deepest roots of the sectarian violence raging across the globe today -- untold mountains of cash and arms shovelled to some of the most violent, retrograde religious gangs in the world by the leaders and war profiteers of the Western world and their economic cronies in Saudi Arabia. And this destructive dynamic is still going strong, still spreading death, destruction and hatred, most notably in Libya, Syria and Iraq. (Via the Angry Arab)

Or as Khurram Zaki, who posted the video, puts it:

Watch how the "free world" supported the same group of people (the "mujahideen") along with notorious dictators they are fighting with right now to "free the world". That is how they imposed the extremist ideology upon us in the name of "Jihad" only to later confront it with the name of war against "terror". Check how a so-called "secular", "liberal" state invoked the name of God and religion again and again only to further their strategic interests in the region.

"You left a godless country because you refused to live under a godless communist system which is trying to destroy your religion,; [know that] the hearts of the Free World are with you." -Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, on a visit to the border with Afghanistan, during a state visit to Pakistan, 1981

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UPDATE: Meanwhile, the beat goes on. On Monday, the Peace Prize Laureate launched his third drone strike in Yemen in as many days. (It is of course superfluous to point out that the United States is not at war with Yemen.) The latest strike followed one on Easter Sunday, when Barack Obama celebrated the Resurrection of his Lord and Saviour by killing 30 people in Yemen, by the usual courageous method of having an underling in a padded chair somewhere thousands of miles away courageously push a button while courageously viewing a video screen.

This heroic action was preceded by a strike on Saturday, in which 13 people were killed, including at least three civilians. This was purportedly a "signature strike," a common practice in which the courageous Americans actually have no earthly idea who they are courageously killing from thousands of mile away -- they just push the button because a bunch of people they are tracking seem to be "acting like" terrorists in some way or another. For all we know, all 13 people killed that day were civilians, like the 15 people on their way to a wedding whom the Peace Laurate killed last December.

In fact, we have no way of knowing if any of the dozens of people killed by the Peace Laureate during his busy Easter holiday were civilians or militants. Or what "civilian" and "militant" even mean in the context of the Peace Laureate's never-ending violation of other nation's sovereignty to kill people, many if not most of whom are completely unknown to him and his assassins. 

Read more: http://chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/1-latest-news/2386-maggies-farm-shocking-film-of-extremist-training.html

A recorded conversation between an apologetic Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher over the invasion of Grenada has been published for the first time.

"We regret very much the embarrassment that's been caused to you," the US leader said during the call.

Baroness Thatcher was angered that she was not consulted before the Americans invaded a Commonwealth state.

United States troops were sent to Grenada in 1983 to topple the Caribbean island's Marxist regime.

While US forces were still in action, the president phoned Lady Thatcher to explain the action he had taken.

"If I were there, Margaret," he said, "I'd throw my hat in the door before I came in."

The saying refers to an Civil War-era practice in which a visitor might throw his hat in to a room before entering - if he was unwelcome, it might be thrown out again or even shot at.

read more: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-29986729