The president will make a state visit to the UK on 3rd June. Despite his warmth and affection for the UK, which is in great contrast to the hostility of the Continentals, the usual suspects are already gearing up to embarrass us.

We expect nothing less from the green-haired brigade. However some MPs have signed a motion asking Downing Street to rescind the invite. These are the same geniuses who would welcome ISIS terrorists. Let that sink in.

None of them understand that a state visit has little to do with Donald Trump. In reality, a state visit honours the office of the president and the country. It’s much more about long term relations than whoever is in the president’s shoes currently. But the headbangers don’t know this, so they’ll protest what he stands for. That appears to be fewer wars in the Middle East, better relations with Russia and North Korea and record black employment.

The New IRA has admitted responsibility for the murder of journalist Lyra McKee, according to the Irish News.

In a statement given to the paper the group offered “full and sincere apologies” to her family and friends […]

The statement from the New IRA comes after the hard-left republican political party Saoradh – which has the support of the New IRA – had previously sought to justify the use of violence on Thursday.

We can do without these headbangers stinking up the place. In looking for the murderer and whoever helped him, I admit that I could be tempted to look the other way while gonads are attached to a generator. But the PSNI has to account for “community feelings”. More than the immediate case, we can really do the New IRA/Saoradh bums being dissuaded from carrying on. The security services will want to tiptoe around it all, but that was no good for Lyra McKee. They have to be stopped.

Easter Sunday is the most special day in the Christian calendar. It marks the day when Christians celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the fulfilment of the promise God made to his people.

Around the world, Christians gather in large numbers to worship and give thanks for the sacrifice made for them by Christ.

They gathered in Sri Lanka today – and news reports now confirm that at least 207 of them have been killed and 625 injured, some severely, in explosions at churches and hotels.

Eight blasts were reported, including at three churches in Negombo, Batticaloa and Colombo’s Kochchikade district during Easter services. The Shangri-La, Kingsbury and Cinnamon Grand luxury hotels, all in the capital, were also targeted.

The carnage is almost beyond words.

St Sebastian’s church in Negombo was severely damaged in one explosion, with dozens killed at the site. Images from inside showed blood on the pews and the building’s ceiling shattered.

(Credit @JBRBALA)

There were also heavy casualties at the site of the first blast in St Anthony’s, a hugely popular shrine in Kochchikade, a district of Colombo.

Whilst many of those slaughtered were Sri Lankan nationals, many other Nationalities are amongst the dead.

At least five British people – including two with joint US citizenship – are believed to be among the dead. The US State Department says “several” Americans have been killed. Three Danish citizens and two Turkish nationals were also killed, their governments have confirmed. Netherlands Foreign Minister Stef Blok said in a statement that one Dutch national has also died. Reports say three Indian nationals and one Portuguese citizen have also been killed, with more foreign nationals still to be identified.

The media seem curiously reluctant to name the culprits. Which group, we wonder, might single out this gathering of Christians for intended carnage? What sort of people HATE Christians with such maniacal and murderous intent?

Well, whilst the BBC and others remain tight-lipped, the facts are emerging pretty quickly.

It is reported in Sri Lanka that the terrorist behind at least one of the bombings was an Islamist Extremist Imam and preacher by the name of Moulvi Zahran Hashim

Hashim has been active on Youtube pushing hatred and intolerance and yet for some reason, whilst Youtube bans Tommy Robinson, it did not ban Hashim.

Another of the terrorists was identified as Abu Mohammed.

It is further reported that the problem of the Islamic State has been rampant in Sri Lanka since 2016. Back then, the Sri Lankan Parliament was told that 32 Muslims from elite families had joined ISIS. The following year, scores of Sri Lankan ISIS terrorists returned from Syria, following which there was a spike in Jihadi activity. This appears to have culminated in today’s atrocities. This was Jihad.

Further details will emerge in the time ahead but the fact is that militant Muslims chose this, the most sacred day in the Christian calendar, to slaughter Christian worshippers. Had this been the slaughter of Muslims in Mosques by Christians, the media and political class would have ablaze with fury and judgement. Yet today the same media and political class instinctively shy away from asking tough questions concerning why these Muslims want to kill Christians. The hypocrisy is almost as deafening as the killings have been barbaric.

There is no excuse for terrorism from any source. Killing innocent people as they go about their worship is obscene. Just as the killing of 50 Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand, was utterly repugnant, so is this mass co-ordinated slaughter in Sri Lanka. The difference, of course, is that the former was the result of one deranged individual whereas what we witness in Sri Lanka today are multiple attacks carried out by a global radical Islamist group

You cannot defeat the enemy unless you name it. That name is Radical Islam.

By Chris Morrison

It seems only appropriate that the recent BBC climate propaganda film featured not one but two fake Nobel prize laureates. As with almost all climate activism, science and a dedication to the truth has long departed the stage. Attenborough’s film mixed lies, half-truths unsupported statements and desperate emotion into something that passes for “settled” science in our increasingly uneducated times.

A gentle 270-year warming of about 1C from the little ice age lies behind all the climate tantrums and alarmism. From this one fact, the activist/scientists have gone on to invent over 100 climate models that forecast higher warming, sometimes as much as 6C. These models have been around for 30 years and not one has proved accurate. Frequent BBC contributor and Met Office head of climate monitoring Dr Peter Stott is always banging on about “extreme” temperatures and he did not disappoint this time out.

This would appear to be the same Peter Stott who claimed on his Met Office cv that he was a “co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize”. The claim was removed in February last year!

Another big contributor to the BBC eco party was an old friend Michael Mann – the chap who abolished the Medieval warming period and produced the fanciful hockey stick graph. Reviewing the BBC programme, the tenacious blogger Paul Homewood suggested that Mann’s comments about more bad weather were “maybe one of the most dishonest parts of the programme”.

This is the same Michael Mann who has also made false claims about being awarded a Nobel Prize. In the course of an American libel action against Mark Steyn, Mann suggested that it was one thing to engage in discussion about debatable topics but it was “quite another to attempt to discredit consistently validated scientific research through the professional and personal defamation of a Nobel Prize recipient”.

Where did Stott and Mann’s delusions arise from? – the Nobel, I mean, not climate science. And where did Mann get the idea that appropriating a Nobel made him immune to scientific questioning?

The “I’m a Nobel prize winner” scam started in 2007 when the United Nation’s IPCC was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Suddenly the CVs of numerous climate activists were padded with references to winning a Nobel (often minus the Peace bit) on the grounds that they had contributed to the IPCC climate reports.

At this stage, it should be noted that the Nobel Peace Prize is a political award decided by a Norwegian parliamentary committee. When the Cold War ended in 1990, the prize was awarded to Mikhail Gorbachev, not Ronald Reagan. Enough said.

Still, a Nobel is a Nobel – plus or minus the Peace tag – and by 2012 it seems the IPCC had had enough, deafened maybe by the thunderous laughter that greets every false claim. It noted:

“..the prize was awarded to the IPCC as an organisation, and not to any individual associated with the IPCC. Thus it is incorrect to refer to any IPCC official or scientists who worked on IPCC reports, as a Nobel laureate or Nobel prize winner”.

It’s all rather pathetic to see scientists who claim to work in an unbiased, apolitical profession running around claiming a political prize doled out by Norwegian lefties.

But while we can laugh at these antics, there is a very serious side to who is in and who is out in modern-day climate science. The BBC film made a remarkable claim that in the last three years, over a third of the world’s coral has first bleached then died. This ridiculous claim might have had something to do with a report by Professor Terry Hughes, the director of the “ARV Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies” at James Cooke University. Coral bleaching did occur during this period due to a very strong El Nino effect, a fact not mentioned in the programme.

Professor Peter Ridd, also of James Cooke University, has spent 40 years studying coral reefs and notes that coral bleaching is a regular event in nature. He observes that coral thrives in waters between 24C and 32C but bleaches when the water temperature rises suddenly. Spoiler alert – gentle global warming has little effect on coral reefs.

Time for a quiz.

Who recently got fired from James Cook University for public statements surrounding his coral reef views – Professor Ridd, the physics professor, or Professor Hughes, the chap with a PhD in “ecology”?

You guessed it – Peter Ridd, who has since won a historic court victory with the recent finding that he was wrongly dismissed by the Queensland University.

And finally a tale of two Davids.

David Attenborough, a BBC apparatchik to his fingertips, has taken to climate change as fast as a walrus falling off a cliff. And David Bellamy, a once popular figure on BBC with his entertaining and infectious programmes about habitat and wildlife. One day Bellamy, a botanist by trade, suggested that the preservation of habitat was far more important than the controversial theory of man-made climate change.

Car for David B, never to be seen again – and the award goes to …

I learned to look up when I lived in Rome. We tend to look ahead or down, but many of the most fascinating architectural details are placed above us. Looking up is like revealing another dimension. I’ll have to start doing that in forests too, which I love to be in –

the way forest looks from the sky pic.twitter.com/jLPWqKIua6

— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) April 21, 2019

I learn from the comments that this is crown shyness: “Crown shyness is a phenomenon observed in some tree species, in which the crowns of fully stocked trees do not touch each other, forming a canopy with channel-like gaps. The phenomenon is most prevalent among trees of the same species, but also occurs between trees of different species. There exist many hypotheses as to why crown shyness is an adaptive behavior, and research suggests that it might inhibit spread of leaf-eating insect larvae.”

It’s wonderful to discover that more than 880,000 television licences were cancelled last year. Amazon and Netflix are just the first out of the blocks in an unfolding broadcast revolution. The BBC’s archaic business model cannot possibly survive the onslaught.

The BBC is the propaganda HQ of the enemy class, so its demise cannot happen soon enough.

“My best financial decision? Marrying a man with a police pension”

Rosemary Squires reflects on her financial life in The Telegraph. Says it all really. Despite the years of bleating about cuts and austerity, government hasn’t even begun to take a knife to the unbelievably bloated state (parasite) sector.

State pensions are a solid gold time bomb. They’ll one day bankrupt the Treasury. Of course those who preach in favour of the bloated state will be the first to complain when so much tax income is dedicated to pensions that real cuts will have to be made into the police, the NHS and other government monopolies. They’ll have a bloody good moan then.

We are often reminded that the world is not a safe place. News reports from Sri Lanka indicate a coordinated attack on Christians and others this Easter weekend with well over 100 dead. No doubt some lunatic evil group will attempt to justify their terror. I leave it to better Christians than myself to forgive the assailants.

Phew, it’s thirsty work watching all this rugby in the garden. The PC is perched on a box, I’m perched in a deckchair, the beers are cold and all is good in the world. I hope your weekend is less hectic than mine. Have yourselves an Open Thread then. This one is decorated with a view of Antwerp Central Railway Station.

Tell us what you know –