Landlords in the UK are offering young women rooms free of rent in return for sex, a trend that has been growing amid record-high homelessness in Britain.

Renting rooms for sexual favors is seen as a growing risk by homeless charities and campaigners, and a consequence of a housing crisis where young people are unable to find somewhere affordable to live.

The Ministry of Justice says offering accommodation in exchange for sex is illegal and even placing an advert is breaking the law and could result in a seven year jail term.

The problem has become particularly marked in university towns, where young women are targeted by rogue landlords.

Two landlords in Bristol were filmed by hidden cameras in September offering free rent in return for sex, in a sting aimed at exposing the dangers faced by female tenants.

UK Justice Secretary David Lidington last year said such offers may breach the Sexual Offences Act, but there is frustration that more is not being done.

"Since last year, there has not been a single arrest, let alone a conviction, let alone anybody actually going to jail for it,"Peter Kyle, Labour MP for Hove, told the Guardian.

Kyle has called for landlords who offer accommodation in exchange for sex to be prosecuted.

The offending adverts typically offer free room or bed share in exchange for "intimacy", "benefits" or "fwb" - friends with benefits.

While many appear in London, room shares in exchange for sex are advertised around the country through sites such as Craigslist. "Room available for homeless woman (North London/Essex)", reads one of a selection from Craigslist.

Campaigners for fair housing have said the "sex for rent" ads have come about as a result of a dysfunctional housing market.

"Some people are desperate for housing. Others have the power to exploit that," says Kate Webb, head of policy at Shelter, the homeless charity.

Homelessness in Britain has reached a record-high, with more than 170,000 families and individuals experiencing rough sleeping during Christmas, according to a study by the Crisis charity.

The charity released the results of a study on homelessness last week, showing the number of rough sleepers in the country doubled in the past five years.

Homelessness is at its highest rates in central London, with as many as one in 25 without a home in Westminster and one in 27 with nowhere to live in Newham, according to a recent analysis by Shelter.

The German edition Die Welt reported that the Russian complex Avangard caused "panic" in the United States. Military analyst Andrei Koshkin commented on the situation, expressing hope that this could force Washington to continue negotiations.

According to the German newspaper, the Avangard complex, equipped with a hypersonic glider block, is a "New Year gift for the Russians", and the development of this hypersonic missile system caused a certain nervousness in the USA. The paper emphasizes that Americans will now be forced to "act under pressure."

In early November, the Pentagon launched a project to create a hypersonic weapons interception system, the Glide-Breaker Program, and announced an urgent tender for defense companies. Companies should present their ideas for an "air defense system to intercept missiles with gliding hypersonic block in the upper layers of the atmosphere."

According to the publication, what really causes this restlessness in the US is the "invisibility" of the new Russian system before the American radar, and not the speed or maneuverability of the new missiles.

Political scientist Andrei Koshkin:

"Of course, today, not only US and Western European military experts, but also political leaders who are shocked by the mistakes they made, underestimating Russia's capabilities. President Vladimir Putin warned that we would create weapons with such characteristics that they would probably overtake all anti-missile defenses, they probably did not believe in us."

Koshkin believes that Washington could deploy its new radar units in Europe, disregarding the views of European countries.

"That's why Pentagon interim chief Patrick Shanahan, who has been involved in the creation of missiles, will now invest in a medium-range missile, for which Congress has already allocated funds. Of course, Europe is concerned about the US, without considering the opinion of the European countries, to flood Europe with new missile launchers, to somehow balance their omissions. I think a successful test of the Avangard missile complex will cause the international community to put pressure on the US to sit down at the negotiating table."

On December 26, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the completion of tests of the hypersonic missile system Avangard, which will enter service of the Russian Army in 2019.

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed

¬ Leonard Cohen, 'Everybody Knows'

French media reported yesterday that a police officer has been held in custody since December 23rd after he was chased and arrested in a busy Paris train station in possession of 'military-grade explosives and weapons'. The 29-year-old gendarme, stationed locally in Paris, was 'off-duty' at the time, but despite interrogating him for four days, investigators won't or can't say what he was doing passing through Gare de Lyon train station in central Paris with a sack full of terrorist goodies at the height of Christmas rush-hour. What they do know however, is that this particular cop was formerly in the military and is an expert in handling explosives.

Three days ago, coincidentally, or not, Strasbourg train station was temporarily evacuated after someone called in a bomb threat. This confluence of 'terror by train' reminds me of the unusual derailing of a high-speed train on the Paris-Strasbourg line - France's first fatal crash in 30 years of TGV travel - the day after the multi-site terror attacks in Paris in mid-November 2015. Despite the protestations of the train driver in that 'accident', and eyewitness reports of an explosion before the train derailed, the authorities immediately discounted sabotage and blamed the driver for 'speeding' (which he denied). Joe Quinn wrote about it at the time:

One possible reason for this irrational approach to the disaster that killed 11 people and injured 42 is that any reference to a terrorist attack as the cause of the derailment would immediately recall the worst terrorist atrocity in France prior to the Paris attacks last weekend.

On June 18th, 1961, at 3.10pm, a French train on the Paris-Strasbourg line derailed, killing 28 people and injuring 170. Several days before, a stationmaster near the crash site received a letter threatening an attack on the line. The letter was apparently ignored by police and the truth about the attack - that it was caused by a bomb on the line - was kept secret for 20 years.

The reason for the cover-up appears to have centered on the fact that the perpetrators were members of a NATO covert paramilitary force tasked with carrying out terrorist attacks on French civilians and politicians in an effort to influence French public and political opinion on the question of Algerian independence, and ensure the continued allegiance of European countries to NATO's ideology of thwarting closer Soviet-European ties. At one point the group, known as the Organisation of the Secret Army (OSA), attempted acoup d'etat against the government of Charles de Gaulle.

It is possible, therefore, that the reason French authorities were so quick to discount terrorism as the cause of the TGV crash one day after the Paris terror attacks was to avoid establishing a link, if only circumstantial, between previous home-grown terrorism of the NATO variety, and the current Muslim terror threat. Two threats which, in the final analysis, may be revealed as having the same origin.

2018 was actually a remarkably quiet year for mass casualty 'Islamist terror attacks' in Europe and the West as a whole, especially compared to the previous 3 years. Before the incident at the Christmas Market in Strasbourg, France, on December 11th, I can think of only two other mass casualty 'Islamist terror attacks' taking place anywhere in the West in 2018: one that took place in Carcassone and nearby Trebes, in southern France, in March this year, and which left 4 people dead (excluding the perpetrator). A second took place in Liege, eastern Belgium, in May this year, and left 3 people dead (also excluding the perpetrator).

Coincidentally, or not, French security services on December 11th arrested three more people in connection with that March attack.

You can check this datamap provided by the Environmental Systems Research Institute for terrorist attacks around the world in 2018. (Note that their very broad definition of 'terrorist attacks' includes knife stabbings and incidents with zero fatalities. We're not concerned with stabbings or failed/foiled terrorist attempts here, but high-profile mass casualty events caused by one or more perpetrators using explosives and/or heavy gunfire.)
The relative quiet on the terror front - due in part, I think, to Russian and Syrian military successes in Syria, and the geostrategic imperative of limiting the extent to which Westerners' outrage over terrorist atrocities is converted into support for Russia's anti-terror operations - makes the December 11th Strasbourg mass shooting stand out. And that's over and above its specifically coincidental timing - occurring as it did a mere 24 hours after French president Emmanuel Macron issued his first formal response to the Gilets Jaunes movement in a televised address to the nation.

As the news broke that people had been shot in Strasbourg, French media widely reported the claim that a gunman had been heard shouting Allahu ackbar during the bloodshed. People who were actually there have since said they heard no such thing, but nevertheless this initial report, along with the authorities' rapid identification of the perpetrator as 29-year-old local man Chérif Chekatt, a French national (with ethnic Arab origins), obviously and immediately put the attack in the frame for being another 'Islamist atrocity'.
One would then naturally assume, given the 17-year narrative history of the War on Terror, that this was an al-Qaeda/ISIS terrorist attack, supported by - if not actually planned and carried out by - the 'largest terror network on Earth', and an official enemy of France. It is strange then that ISIS - an organization that has in recent years specifically "encouraged extremists to use violence to destabilize France to allow for its eventual conquest" - would intervene at such a politically delicate moment in France and gift the French state temporary reprieve from the very real threat of destabilization posed by 80+% popular support for fundamental constitutional change, including the cessation of French participation in foreign wars.

This conflict of interest naturally led people in France to immediately and widely voice skepticism about the official story of the Strasbourg shooting - and right from the moment the news broke. Within hours, French media was attacking complotists('conspiracy theorists') for pointing out the jarring coincidence, and within a day the public's disbelief was so palpable that a French government minister explicitly denied state involvement in the attack. Another minister meanwhile explained that, although 'ISIS' claimed it had carried out this attack, the truth was that this young man acted alone and was motivated to massacre people at a Christmas market simply because he was, "consumed by evil."
Above is the model of WW1 era gun (that uses relatively ineffective 8mm ammunition) with which the alleged Strasbourg solo shooter Chérif Chekatt - who was being watched in a "relatively serious manner" for over one year, according to the French interior ministry - is supposed to have shot four people dead and injured 13 others, 4 seriously. The 'jihadist' is also supposed to have fended off two patrols of heavily-armed Operation Sentinel soldiers, wounding one of them during a shootout before fleeing across the river in a taxi, and then engaging in another shootout one hour later near his home in the suburb of Neudorf, before disappearing without a trace for 36 hours despite 700 police, soldiers and special forces looking for him.

The media reported after the shooting that the police had actually raided his apartment about 12 hours before the attack to arrest him in connection with a separate robbery-homicide case. They didn't find him there, but there they did 'find' a rifle and grenades. Then, on December 14th, Chekatt was 'found' walking near his apartment block. In the intervening days, his home had been searched several more times, so it was under heavy surveillance. He was somehow identified from behind, in the dark, in a neighborhood with a high percentage of people of North African extraction. The story goes that the police 'called out his name', at which point Chekatt turned around and opened fire, again with his vintage pistol, at the officers, who responded by shooting him dead.

All we really know about this latest terror attack then, is that someone walked into the Strasbourg Christmas market and shot dead 4 people and injured 9 others, including a French soldier. One hour later, someone engaged in a shootout with police and then fled the scene. 36 hours later, a young man named Chérif Chekatt was shot dead on the street by police and identified, on that basis alone, as the shooter.
In the weeks since then, the French state has done its level best to put out the fires of a popular uprising against the regime though a combination of tactics: appeasement in the form of fiscal measures (including end-of-year payments to workers), security forces violently breaking up protests, and the media running 24/7 propaganda characterizing the movement as 'putsch-ist, anti-Semitic and racist'.

Should we add terrorism to that list of state tactics?

At this point, everybody knows where terror comes from. 'Everybody' isn't literally everybody of course, but it's certainly significant majorities of people. In France, the Gilets Jaunes and their supporters - four fifths of a population of 67 million - knows, or suspects, that the state terrorizes people to instill dread and conformity.

Everybody knows 'ISIS' is a Western creature. And everybody now knows 'ISIS' is enlisted in the globalists' war against popular movements for national revival.

2019 is going to be a doozy.