A picture tells 1,000 words

This old saying saves people like me trying to explain it and getting dragged into a snake pit of debate.

(credit: Banksy Art)

Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now. “How I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”

Putin foreign minister Sergei Lavrov arriving for Ukraine talks in a Soviet era sweat shirt. CCCP is the Russian language abbreviation of USSR. Russian drone and missile attacks on Kyiv continue.

A mugshot doesn’t tell 1,000 words unless you recognise the person.

Ari ben Menashe, Zimbabwe knows the Iranian-born Israeli-Canadian former Mossad intelligence agent for his role in faking an assassination plot against Robert Mugabe by the opposition Movement for Democratic Change leader Morgan Tsvangirai. After a lengthy treason trial in 2009 Tsvangirai was acquitted, discrediting ben Menashe who had already sold weapons to Iran in breach of the US embargo.

His biography is a litany of dangerous and dodgy deals. Now he has gone to Western media outlets with claims Jeffrey Epstein was an Israeli agent all along who used his sex trafficking enterprise to blackmail world leaders not to sympathise with the Palestinian cause. This comes during the current paranoia over the so-called Epstein files. He claims the newspaper tycoon Robert Maxwell,  father of Ghislaine, was also an Israeli agent with the same purpose. I once worked at Maxwell’s Daily Mirror but I never saw him in a tie quite  like this.

Ghislaine, Epstein’s procurer and fixer, has been moved to a low security prison in Texas in an apparent deal to keep her quiet.

Such are the words pictures alone don’t tell.