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French lawmakers agreed to a justice reform bill that includes a clause that gives police the power to obtain the geolocation of suspects through phones and other devices. This bill is being pushed at a time when much of France is mired in the controversy of a police officer receiving widespread support in the country, including financial, after a teenager of Algerian descent was killed when failing to stop at a traffic check.

French media highlighted that the spying permit was attacked by both the Left and the Right as an “authoritative letter from eavesdroppers. However, Justice Minister Éric Dupond-Moretti insisted that this would only affect “dozens of cases a year.”

According to Le Monde, lawmakers approved on July 5 for French police to spy on suspects under investigation by remotely activating the camera, microphone and GPS of their phones and other devices. The measure would also allow the geolocation of suspects of crimes punishable by at least five years in prison and would cover devices such as laptops, cars and other objects connected to the internet, such as phones.

A French group that works in favour of digital rights, La Quadrature du Net (LQDN), said in a statement that the provisions “raise serious concerns about violations of fundamental freedoms” such as the “right to security, right to private life and private correspondence” and “the right to come and go freely.”

During a debate on July 5, parliamentarians from President Emmanuel Macron’s base inserted an amendment limiting the use of remote spying “when justified by the nature and seriousness of the crime” and “for a strictly proportionate duration.” However, any use of the device must be approved by a judge, and the total duration of surveillance cannot exceed six months. Those in sensitive professions, including doctors, journalists, lawyers, judges, and parliamentarians, would not be legitimate targets.

“We’re far away from the totalitarianism of ‘1984’, George Orwell’s novel about a society under total surveillance,” Dupond-Moretti said. “People’s lives will be saved [by the law].”

France has been gripped by rioting, anarchy and near civil-war-like conditions since 17-year-old Nahel, of Algerian descent, was shot dead by a police officer after failing to stop at a traffic check in Paris on June 25. And rather than deal with the root causes of the violence that led to more than 3,000 people being detained since Nahel’s death, as well as hundreds of police and firefighters being injured in the violence, the Macron government has instead taken full advantage to impose draconian and liberty-threatening measures against French citizens.

Controversially, over €1 million has been raised for the family of the French police officer who shot dead Nahel. Chiming into the discussion, MP Eric Bothorel of Macron’s ruling party called the fundraiser “indecent and scandalous” and said its organiser “is playing with fire.” For his part, Dupond-Moretti said the fundraiser was “fuelling the fire” of unrest and lambasted it as a populist “instrumentalisation” of the teenager’s death.

The Macron government also uses the fundraiser controversy to hide recent news that weapons supplied by the West to Ukraine are being used by rioters in France. Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova described this phenomenon on July 6 as a “boomerang.”

“Weapons, supplied to Kiev, are in the hands of these demonstrators and are used against police in France,” Zakharova said. “The same weapons that the West, NATO and France provide, the same money that they pour in support of nationalists, Nazis and fascists in Ukraine boomerang and not only end up on their own territory, but are being fired at their own people.”

“Weapons, shipped to Kiev, end up in the hands of these protesters and are being used against the police back in France,” she added.

At the same time, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in an interview with the Jerusalem Post that some of the weapons Western countries have been supplying Ukraine are already on Israel’s borders, and Tel Aviv fears that any supplies of weapons systems to Ukraine could end up in enemy hands, such as Iran.

Again, this provides insight into how reckless Paris’ policy has been towards Ukraine. Not only has their obsession meant that they lost sight of the situation domestically, but now even the very weapons they sent to kill Russians are now being used to target French security personnel or are a source of concern for French allies, such as Israel.

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Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.

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June 14, 2023 – North Vancouver, BC – 42 year old paramedic Ryan Vena died in his sleep . “The cause of this death is still unknown.” (click here)

May 11, 2023 – Toronto, ON – 53 year old paramedic Marc Salmanovitch died suddenly on May 11, 2023 (click here).

May 8, 2023 – Davis, CA – 39 year old Dr.Shannon Callahan, PhD of psychology at Sonoma State University, died suddenly after a short, 5 week battle with turbo cancer. She was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer on March 31, 2023 in the abdomen, that was inoperable and too advanced.

May 6, 2023 – New York, NY – 29 year old Robert Little died in his sleep on May 6, 2023. Robert was a fire performer and graduated from Florida College of Natural Health. He had just bought a house with his fiancee.

April 25, 2023 – Boerne, TX – 34 yo Dr. Sheena Nageli, a pediatric chiropractor, delivered baby Juliette on April 20, 2023 & died suddenly on April 25, 2023 (click here).

April 18, 2023 – Chadron, NE – 35 yo healthcare worker (certified nursing assistant) Samantha McCoy died suddenly “we don’t know much, except it was sudden.”

April 12, 2023 – April 12, 2023 – 34 year old Saskatchewan healthcare worker Quinn Torgunrud died suddenly in her sleep. She just celebrated her birthday 2 weeks prior.

April 3, 2023 – Glen Cove, NY – 19 yo EMT Susan Giovanniello died after suffering an “unspecified medical emergency”. She collapsed at home after her shift (click).

April 2, 2023 – Antioch, TN – 39 yo psychologist and Program Manager at Vanderbilt University Medical Center Shana L Harrell died suddenly on April 2, 2023 after suffering a medical emergency on March 13, 2023.

March 31, 2023 – Alamogordo, NM – 22 year old dental assistant Nicole Marie Prieto died from a ruptured brain aneurysm “she was on life support 3 days before dying.”

March 22, 2023 – Phoenix, AZ – 39 yo Physician Assistant Jacqueline Sue Korbet died on March 22, 2023 due to “respiratory failure”. She was very athletic, certified white water rafting guide, certified avalanche rescue, wilderness search & rescue, pro ski patroller.

March 14, 2023 – Charlestown, MA – 27 year old Brandy Giugno (personal care aide at UMass Memorial Medical Center) died suddenly on March 14, 2023 “after being stricken ill at home” She was fully COVID-19 mRNA vaccinated and boosted. (click here)

March 11, 2023 – Clydebank, UK – 24 yo paramedic Meadhbh Cameron died on Mar. 11, 2023 She was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer in Sep. 2022, which was resistant to chemo (turbo cancer).

March 7, 2023 – 38 year old PhD Tiffany Lois Cummings “passed away unexpectedly” on March 7, 2023. Earned her Doctorate of Psychology from University of Florida and was a practicing provider at Wake Forest Baptist Hospital.

My Take…

It isn’t just doctors and nurses dying suddenly after being mandated to take COVID-19 mRNA vaccines.

Healthcare workers of every kind are now dying suddenly, many at a young age.

US insurance data presented by Ed Dowd on Steve Bannon’s WarRoom: those who accepted COVID-19 vaccine mandates now have 550% higher disability and 40% higher mortality, than those who quit their jobs to avoid the jabs. (click here)

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Dr. William Makis is a Canadian physician with expertise in Radiology, Oncology and Immunology. Governor General’s Medal, University of Toronto Scholar. Author of 100+ peer-reviewed medical publications.

Featured image is from COVID Intel

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The Wall Street Journal confirms my previous analysis from 15 April 2023 (see below):

SpaceX has created a US monopoly on transport to Space. See this.

Nobody in the World can match the American SpaceX.

Neither in the US, the EU, Russia, China, or India.

• SpaceX’ costs to Space are so low that nobody can compete
• SpaceX’ flexibility, regularity, and safety are unprecedented.

Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, United Launch Alliance, and NASA’s SLS rocket are made ridiculous by SpaceX.

The Falcon Heavy rocket costs $ 100 million to launch – and can bring 20-50 tons to low-earth-orbit.

Falcon Heavy’s closest competitor is the Delta IV Heavy from United Launch Alliance (ULA – Lockheed Martin and Boeing).

The Delta IV rocket costs $400-600 million to launch – and can bring 28 tons to low-earth-orbit.

Falcon Heavy saves $300-500 million per launch.

The key is to minimize the price in dollars per kg to orbit.

The comparison gives this:

A 10 kg satellite can get into orbit for $10,000 – 50,000 dollars!

We see that the Falcon Heavy gives a cost-reduction of between 60 % and 90%.

SpaceX will reduce launch costs far more from 2024 onwards with its fully reusable Starship, which aims to send 100 tons to orbit for as little as $1 million per launch. That is only $10 per kg.

China will mimic the Falcon Heavy within probably 5 years – that’s a lot of time. But China has no serious program even within 15 years for anything similar to SpaceX’ next vehicle, the Starship which will go commercial in 2024.

Russia has neither.

The US is has already created Space Dominance with SpaceX.

Technically, Russia, China, India, and the EU they can still send stuff to Space – but only at slow pace – and they spend far more money getting it up than building it.

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Karsten Riise is a Master of Science (Econ) from Copenhagen Business School and has a university degree in Spanish Culture and Languages from Copenhagen University. He is the former Senior Vice President Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Mercedes-Benz in Denmark and Sweden.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: US Space Domination – Karsten Riise and Brian Mcgowan, Unsplash CC0

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This year, the annual July 11 Srebrenica remembrance ceremonies will be more subdued than usual. There are good reasons for that. The “Ukraine fatigue” which is spreading to many countries has now been augmented by Srebrenica fatigue. Both phenomena are a natural reaction to cynical deceit, in particular when the lies had been camouflaged with lofty ideals and high-sounding phrases. Once the truth becomes known, the game is up and then woe to the deceivers.

In the genealogy of major political hoaxes, Srebrenica slightly over a quarter of a century ago was a remote precursor to Bucha. But unlike Bucha, a fraudulent massacre that fairly quickly was deconstructed, Srebrenica long remained for the collective West a propaganda gift that keeps on giving.

Few people are aware of one of Srebrenica’s major benefits, if that is the appropriate word. It is the nefarious doctrine of R2P, or “responsibility to protect.” NATO and subversive Western agencies have ruthlessly invoked it on numerous occasions to destroy disobedient countries and wreck their societies under the mendacious guise of preventing genocide.

Srebrenica is the root of it all. A narrative was soon shaped and weaponised after whatever happened in Srebrenica in July of 1995 about the failure of the “good guys” (the West) to act decisively and on time to prevent the “bad guys” (the Serbs) from committing genocide (wantonly murdering the memeified “8000 men and boys”). It was touted as an object lesson and future policy directive. The alleged failure to protect the “8000 Srebrenica men and boys” subsequently morphed into a moral obligation to go on a world-wide humanitarian intervention rampage. It imposed on the “good guys” the duty to act whenever they judged that a similar genocidal event was about to occur. As they bombed away, they could use their military might for plunder and geopolitical advantage while self-righteously crying “never again.”

Kosovo, Iraq, Libya, and Syria are some examples of how that alleged lesson was successfully absorbed and given practical effect in the form of unprovoked and illegal assaults on sovereign countries (in the case of Kosovo it was Yugoslavia). Whether the real goal of these interventions was to rescue populations allegedly threatened by genocide, or to take control of insubordinate states and plunder their natural resources might be debatable. But that was the official cover story, anyway.

As it turns out, the human cost of R2P genocide prevention activities ultimately originating with Srebrenica has been appalling. In Iraq alone authoritative estimates put it at around one million (and it was all “worth it,” in Madeleine Albright’s famous phrase), in Syria perhaps half as much, in Libya many thousands coupled with complete societal and governmental collapse, not to mention the reinstitution in some parts of the disintegrated country of slavery as an extra bonus.

In Kosovo, currently occupied by NATO troops and pretending to be “independent,” following ferocious bombing raids in 1999, including the generous use of depleted uranium munitions (a replay of that is now in the works in the similarly rescued Ukraine) mortality from cancer is massive and without precedent compared to the situation which preceded NATO bombing. Hideously deformed human babies and animals are being given birth in large numbers. Last but not least, it is ironic that, like the “8000 Srebrenica men and boys” whose memory these NATO humanitarian wars have been conducted to enshrine, the overwhelming majority of victims in Kosovo, Iraq, Syria, Libya and elsewhere obviously are also Muslims.

Like the sleazy humanitarian rationale for the collective West’s plunderous R2P wars, the original 8000 Srebrenica victim figure is utterly fraudulent. As George Pumphrey has conclusively shown it was not based on an actual body count but on a deceptive amalgamation of two separate missing persons’ figures being circulated in mid-July 1995 in the chaos following the enclave’s fall to Serbian forces. Subsequently assembled evidence lends no support whatsoever to that mathematical improvisation.

Between 1996 and 2001 forensic teams hired by the Office of the Prosecutor of the Hague Tribunal conducted exhumations of mass graves suspected to contain victims of Srebrenica executions. A careful analysis of the 3568 autopsy reports that the exhumations generated yielded findings incompatible with the initial assumptions. Contrary to the expectation that they would be more or less uniform, if the victims had been executed in a similar manner, the patterns of injury were very heterogeneous.

Even more importantly, it was found that a statistically significant number of the victims did not succumb to bullets, as would be expected in executions, but to injuries caused by mines, artillery projectiles and high velocity munitions causing burst out wounds. Such injuries are compatible with combat but atypical of executions. It was also determined that cause and manner of death as recorded in the autopsy reports could support an execution scenario at most for about 800 to 900 of the cases. As it happens, that roughly corresponds to the number of civilians in Serb villages surrounding Srebrenica who were killed by Bosniak military formations in raids conducted from inside the enclave over the three years preceding its fall. Finally, when the Srebrenica victims’ paired femur bones were counted in order to fix with relative precision the number of exhumed individuals, it turned out that the mass graves contained about 1920 persons who died of diverse causes, only one of which was execution. That was far short of the target figure of 8000.

That probably explains why in 2001 abruptly and without any cogent reason forensic exhumations were terminated. Exhumations were thenceforth replaced by DNA matching, a method far more susceptible to fudging, and predictably it did produce the desired number of about 8000 Srebrenica victims.

The autopsy reports and the interpretation of their results have been published and are within easy reach of anyone who might be interested. They are available but ignored. In murder cases, such forensic proof directly from the crime scene is regarded as prime evidence. Nonetheless, the Prosecution of the Hague Tribunal never submitted Srebrenica autopsy reports, with their inconvenient implications, into the evidence. But fortunately they are available to independent forensic experts and scholars.    

Besides the unfavourable forensic evidence, the other game-changing data which emerged in the aftermath of Srebrenica are contemporaneous statements by survivors from the enclave who managed to reach territory controlled by Sarajevo authorities after an armed breakout through Serb held territory. Upon their safe arrival in Tuzla in the second half of July 1995 the survivors were debriefed by the Red Cross, UN field personnel and representatives of the Sarajevo authorities, while impressions were still fresh in their minds. Their statements show that around July 11 1995 twelve to fifteen thousand Srebrenica males set out on a 60 kilometre trek out of the enclave once it became clear that it would fall to Serbian forces, that the column was mixed consisting of armed military personnel and civilians, and that in the ensuing fierce combat with Serbian forces the column sustained horrendous casualties. Since the column was mixed and contained armed elements which did engage in combat, from the standpoint of the laws and customs of war all the resulting casualties were legitimate.

That is the reason why Serbian officers and soldiers who fired at the column and caused death in its ranks were never charged by the Hague Tribunal. The column’s enormous combat death toll also explains casualties caused by munitions other than bullets, such as mines and artillery projectiles, of which ample evidence was found in the side-lined autopsy reports.

A sufficient quantity of these survivor witness statements also are easily accessible, but like the autopsy reports were not made readily available to the general public, nor were they ever presented in court. Evidence that in July of 1995 most Srebrenica related deaths were combat and not execution related would have undermined gravely the coherence of the official Srebrenica narrative. It was therefore judged, perhaps rightly, that this evidence as well should discretely be kept out of the public arena.

And in March of this year a new detail emerged from the seemingly endless catalogue of Srebrenica prevarications. Former ICTY prosecutor Geoffrey Nice, who had been in charge of several Srebrenica cases and gained most of his fame from prosecuting Milošević, revealed to a Bosnian television journalist that State Department documents he has reviewed show that on 28 May 1995 the decision was taken by the US, Great Britain, and France, and presumably communicated to the Serbs, that in the event of a Serbian attack on Srebrenica those powers would not respond with military means.

In light of the humanitarian “never again“ make believe by those very countries, this is extremely compromising information. Does the position taken by leading countries in the Western coalition and telegraphed to the Serbs six weeks before they began considering an attack on Srebrenica recall anything? Yes, it recalls a similar subterfuge once played successfully on Saddam Hussein, assuring him that Western powers had no stance should he decide to invade Kuwait. The situation described by Nice is strikingly analogical. In both cases, simulated expressions of restraint served to entrap their target. It would be a most logical interpretation that a virtual invitation was being sent out to the Serbs to take over Srebrenica and then hopefully proceed to take massive revenge for the killing of their own civilians over the preceding three years.

For the most part the Serbs did not take the bait, but some rogue elements within their ranks ultimately did act according to plan. The execution of several hundred prisoners, propagandistically inflated ten-fold, laid the groundwork for the Dayton peace agreement later that year, enabling a seemingly permanent Western protectorate over strategically important Bosnia and Herzegovina. It also provided propaganda cover for „Operation Storm“ the following month, the Western backed and assisted Croat attack on the Serb held Krajina region. That resulted in the expulsion of a quarter million Serbs from their ancestral homeland but this egregious act of ethnic cleansing was conveniently  overshadowed by Srebrenica. US ambassador in Zagreb Peter Galbright had a point when later he declared that „without Srebrenica, there would have been no Operation Storm.“

Nor could there have been the handy „humanitarian“ R2P rationale for Kosovo, Iraq, Syria, or Libya or the destruction and mayhem that were unleashed there under the duplicitous slogan „never again Srebrenica“.

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Stephen Karganovic is president of “Srebrenica Historical Project,” an NGO registered in the Netherlands to investigate the factual matrix and background of events that took place in Srebrenica in July of 1995. He is a regular contributor to Global Research. 

Featured image: Gravestones at the Potočari genocide memorial near Srebrenica (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

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“[S]ettlers in thrall to colonial ideology saw every unfenced meadow as waste land free for the taking, especially the most fertile land supporting native self-sufficiency.” — Tom Swanky, The Smallpox War against the Haida (p 67).

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.

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Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev condemned France for its neocolonial practices in his speech at the Non-Aligned Movement’s (NAM) Summit that was held in his country’s capital of Baku earlier this week. He said that

“France is trying to impose the same ill practice (of neocolonialism in Africa) in the region of South Caucasus by supporting Armenian separatism in Karabakh region of Azerbaijan and by means of geopolitical rivalry, foreign military presence and colonial policy of ‘Orientalism’.”

Those who aren’t all that familiar with the Karabakh Conflict probably don’t know that one of the world’s most powerful and hyper-nationalist Armenian diasporas resides in France, where it’s captured control of that Western European Great Power’s policy towards the South Caucasus. This influence network exploits Paris as their state-level proxy for pressuring Prime Minister Pashinyan against agreeing to a peace treaty with Azerbaijan while encouraging him to retain Yerevan’s informal claims to Karabakh.

On the one hand, he’s made to fear that this hyper-nationalist diaspora will provoke a Color Revolution against him on the pretext that he “sold out” should he finally resolve this three-decade-long issue, while he’s also being made to think that he has the French state’s support for holding out indefinitely. It’s within this context and amidst rumors that France is considering arming Armenia or has already secretly done so that President Aliyev publicly condemned Paris during this year’s NAM Summit.

There was no way that he could remain silent in the face of this Western European Great Power’s challenge to his rising Global South state’s sovereignty, especially since France is part of the OSCE Minsk Group that’s supposed to formally remain neutral in this conflict like Russia impressively has thus far. About that, Moscow refused to intervene in Yerevan’s support during the 2020 Continuation War over this territory, which later prompted Pashinyan to say that Armenia might consider leaving the CSTO.

The Kremlin’s stance was based on its obligation to remain neutral in this conflict per its role in the OSCE Minsk Group, respect for international law since Karabakh is universally recognized as Azerbaijani territory, and the pragmatism of not making an enemy out of friendly Azerbaijan. By contrast, the Elysee’s stance has been hijacked by the hyper-nationalist Armenian diaspora to be one of informal support for Yerevan, associated disrespect for international law, and thus partisanship over pragmatism.

Russia and France are already fiercely competing for influence in Africa, where the former’s “Democratic Security” policies help its partners fully complete their decolonization processes while the latter’s neocolonialism seeks to keep them subjugated as vassals. Their rivalry is now rapidly expanding to the South Caucasus as Paris takes a stronger position in support of indefinitely freezing the Karabakh Conflict while Moscow has increased its efforts to encourage a political solution as soon as possible.

This geostrategic region risks being destabilized by France’s attempt to replicate its neocolonial divide-and-rule policy there. The worst-case scenario is that its carrot-and-stick campaign against Pashinyan leads to the outbreak of another hot war, while the comparatively better but still negative scenario is that Paris “poaches” Armenia from Moscow’s “sphere of influence”. The first can occur by miscalculation while the second could be spun as “compensation for selling out Karabakh under Kremlin pressure”.

Both scenarios threaten Russia’s security interests since another hot war could lead to a multitude of unpredictable consequences that distract from its special operation in Eastern Europe while losing Armenia to NATO (whether officially or otherwise) could bring the New Cold War to the South Caucasus. The best-case scenario of convincing Pashinyan to agree to a peace treaty remains difficult to pull off so long as he’s placed under such intense pressure from the radical diaspora-captured French state.

There’s no simple solution either since that influence network’s sway over the Armenian government and society, whether directly expressed or indirectly pushed via their French proxy, isn’t going away. President Aliyev wouldn’t have used the attention given to him across the Global South during this week’s NAM Summit in Baku to condemn French neocolonialism in the South Caucasus if he thought that this problem will soon disappear on its own.

Azerbaijan is able to speak more candidly about this subject than Russia can due to the diplomatic sensitivities of the latter’s allied relationship with Armenia, which makes the Kremlin reluctant to present itself as competing with Paris there out of concern that its words might be manipulated by its rivals. Openly acknowledging this geopolitical reality could lead to hysterical claims of Russia losing influence there and/or harboring its own neocolonial intentions, both of which are against its soft power interests.

Nevertheless, President Aliyev’s words still align with Russian interests since they serve to rally the developing world against France by showing the scope of its neocolonialism, which is now threatening the former Soviet space just like it’s threatened the West-Central African one for decades already. Foreign pressure won’t get the hyper-nationalist diaspora that’s captured control of the French state to abandon their geopolitical project, but it can show truly neutral policymakers the costs of continuing it.

France shouldn’t allow its interests abroad to be dictated by any influence group since they should solely be decided after sober expert assessments from every angle. Kindling a foreign conflict just to please a particular lobbying group is irresponsible and discredits French policy, which had hitherto attempted to reset its engagement with the Global South after President Emmanuel Macron recently signaled his interest in attending this year’s BRICS Summit.

As was analyzed here, here, and here, that was always nothing but a ploy to pull the wool over developing countries’ eyes since France’s ongoing proxy wars against Russia in Africa and Eastern Europe proved that nothing has truly changed with respect to its neocolonial policy. That said, a lot of the Mainstream Media and even the Alt-Media Community hadn’t covered this perspective and instead speculated about the positive outcomes that could emerge from him potentially attending that event.

This wishful thinking was dispelled upon President Aliyev using the worldwide podium afforded to him by Azerbaijan hosting this year’s NAM Summit to raise maximum awareness of the threat that French neocolonialism poses to developing countries. Russia’s relations with Armenia are complicated so it can’t be expected to publicly endorse his assessment of France’s pernicious role in the South Caucasus, but it’s certainly sending a wink of approval in his direction since he candidly said what its diplomats couldn’t.

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This article was originally published on Andrew Korybko’s Newsletter.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from the author

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On June 2, Ajay Banga began a five-year term as the new head of the World Bank after his nomination by President Joe Biden and selection by the Bank’s 25 Executive Directors.

A member of the elite Trilateral Commission, Council on Foreign Relations and World Economic Forum, Banga is a former CEO of Mastercard and Citigroup Asia Pacific, a Vice Chairman of General Atlantic, a leading private equity firm, and has sat on the board of Dow Chemical, infamous for its manufacture of napalm and Agent Orange during the Vietnam War.

The son of an Indian army officer who began his professional career working for Nestlé, Banga has recently teamed with Vice President Kamala Harris to promote greater U.S. corporate investment in Central America—including by Cargill, Pepsico and Mastercard—as a strategy to try to solve the migration crisis spawning from there.

However, the low wages paid by U.S. corporations and their takeover of Central American economies along with the advancement of neo-liberal economic policies accompanied by U.S. covert military intervention is what spawned the migration crisis in the first place.

In an interview in Jacobin magazine, economist Milford Bateman emphasized that Banga was a terrible choice by the Biden administration to head the World Bank because as the long-time CEO of Mastercard, he was involved with efforts to abandon cash so that Mastercard could intermediate most of the tiny financial transactions made by the poor and extract a growing amount of money from them.

Bateman, who is the author of the book Why Doesn’t Microfinance Work? The Destructive Rise of Local Neoliberalism (New York: Bloomsbury, 2021), said that the abandonment of cash “is not about benefiting the poor in the Global South, as is typically claimed, but about benefiting Mastercard. The fact that many believe Mastercard, and Banga himself, ‘want to do right’ for the global poor is an outcome of a brilliant PR exercise carried out over many years. It is not the reality, sadly.”^[1]

From its founding at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference, the World Bank has served mostly U.S. government’s interests, attaching conditions to loans that forced foreign governments to privatize their economies and privilege foreign investors.

1944 Bretton Woods conference. [Source: share.america.gov]

The Biden administration favors Banga, according to Bateman, because the goal of the United States is to “repatriate as much value as possible from the Global South,” which Banga’s scheme to advance digital banking as Mastercard CEO helped to enable.^[2]

Bateman said that

“I don’t believe the choice of Banga is a coincidence given his experience at Mastercard and his personal, almost religious belief in the supposed power of financial inclusion [expansion of the digital marketplace]. His appointment by the current U.S. administration, I’m sure, was at least partly conditional upon him doing the right thing for the U.S. government over the longer term and opening markets in the Global South for U.S. corporations and investors. His immediate task will be to ensure markets are kept open, regulations are kept to a bare minimum, efforts to tax fintechs [financial tech companies] are smothered, and so on.”

Bateman added that

“The losers in all this, of course, are the global poor whose local financial systems will fall under the day-to-day control of foreign-owned financial intermediation systems, like Mastercard. Unlike selling furniture, clothes, household goods, and the like, which are irregular events and often require extensive advertising, control of the local financial system is the gift that keeps on giving—it means you simply quietly skim off your slice of every financial transaction every day forevermore.”^[3]

Tools of Empire

On June 12, the War Industry Resisters Network hosted a webinar on the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) as tools of empire.^[4]

Source: twitter.com

The first speaker, Elaine Zuckerman, President of Gender Action, an advocacy campaign that tries to hold international financial institutions accountable for harmful gender and climate impacts, emphasized the World Bank’s heavy investment in fossil fuel industries that ravage the environment.

Zuckerman also reiterated how the World Bank and IMF betrayed their mission of trying to fight poverty by attaching strings to loans that they provided that forced countries to adopt neo-liberal economic policies—privatization, tariff reductions and cutbacks in social services—which cause huge wealth disparities and poverty.

Highly indebted countries cannot resist the structural adjustment loans because they are often disbursed very quickly, and offer an attractive infusion of cash that usually only harms long-term economic health and fuels further indebtedness.

When discussing Banga, Zuckerman emphasized that he had personally benefited from a Trump-era tax cut to sell $45 million in Mastercard stock, and that he had worked for dominant corporations with a record of exploiting Third World nations.

The second speaker, Liza Maza, a long-time activist from the Philippines and convener of an anti-poverty commission under the Duterte administration from 2016 to 2018, detailed the ravaging economic effects of the IMF and World Bank in her country.

Maza started by noting that, this year, Filipinos commemorated the 125^th anniversary of their independence from Spain, but she said that this is a sham independence as the U.S. stole the victory of the Philippines revolution and has imposed colonial and neocolonial rule ever since.

According to Maza, the World Bank first began issuing loans to the Philippines in the 1950s and increased those loans significantly during the rule of Ferdinand Marcos (1965-1986).

Robert S. McNamara, the Vietnam War architect who was head of the World Bank during the 1970s, saw the Philippines as a key U.S. ally which provided military bases that were used for invading Vietnam.

Because of the stringent conditions attached to the World Bank’s loans and U.S. de facto control over the Philippines economy, the Philippines’ economic production declined by 15% from 1965-2010; manufacturing output declined by 5%; and agricultural production declined by 7%.

As the first foreign leader to receive structural adjustment loans, Marcos lowered tariffs and replaced import-substitution policies designed to protect local industry with a neo-colonial economic strategy emphasizing export-oriented production.

Marcos himself got a share of the loans and placed privatized businesses in the hands of family members and political cronies.

His regime opened the Philippines economy to takeover and plunder by U.S. corporations as external debt expanded dramatically. These disastrous economic policies were accompanied by growing political repression and the declaration of martial law.

When the Philippines privatized its water utilities in 1997, water rates for consumers went through the roof along with the profits of Manila Water and Maynilad.

Source: ibon.org

Because of liberalization policies, the Philippines is also no longer self-sufficient in rice production.

The country currently has a $111.3 billion debt, amounting to 27.5% of its GDP and the government has to spend 30% of its budget on debt servicing.

To add insult to injury, President Biden is now cozying up to Marcos’s son, Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. (aka Bongbong), and setting up new military bases designed to be a launching pad for a war with China.

The final speaker at the webinar, Ben Norton, emphasized how the World Bank was established at a time when much of the world was still living under colonialism.

He said that economist John Maynard Keynes had envisioned creation of an international reserve currency not in U.S. dollars and a more highly regulated framework for world trade that would have created a more equitable world economic order than that which came about.

According to Norton, a key figure in the rise of neo-liberalism was Paul Volcker, Undersecretary of the Treasury for International Monetary Affairs from 1969 to 1974 and Chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1979 to 1987, who raised interest rates on loans and helped to crush organized labor and bring wages down with the goal of bringing down inflation.

Volcker’s worldview continues to guide the World Bank and IMF, which adopt similar hostility to organized labor and advance conservative economic policies that have preserved essentially a colonial economic framework where Third World economies are structured in ways that benefit the West.

The World Bank and IMF are no longer monolithic, however, and are slowly being replaced by Chinese lending institutions that do not attach the same strings to their loans.

With more and more countries turning to China, the U.S. is growing desperate and threatening war in order to try to sustain its hegemonic power that has not benefited much of humanity.

*

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Jeremy Kuzmarov is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine. He is the author of four books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019) and The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018). He can be reached at: [email protected].

Notes

1. Bateman continued: “The process of driving cash out typically starts slowly, so as not to alarm ordinary people and governments, and to ensure that the process is not halted midway. But once cash has been largely abandoned, then the profiteering can start, as the poor cannot easily revert back to cash payments. That’s the goal: lure them in, then once they are in and effectively can’t back out, you can start to squeeze them hard to make money. It’s a tactic Americans call ‘bait and switch.’ The need to push the poor to abandon cash as quickly as possible also explains why Mastercard funds a number of its own supposedly philanthropic bodies, such as the Mastercard Foundation and the Mastercard Foundation Fund for Rural Prosperity. They operate under the seductive cover of ‘advancing financial inclusion’ or some other pro-poor-sounding term. In reality, they hasten the process whereby the global poor abandon cash and switch to using Mastercard-intermediated transactions, such as those involving mobile phones and debit cards. The value extracted by Mastercard from such transactions is already pretty large, but if cash could be removed entirely, then there is almost no limit to the value that Mastercard and other digital payment corporations can extract from the poor. For Mastercard and others like it, serving the financial transactions needs of the poor in the Global South is a new ‘gold rush.’” 
2. Another article in Jacobin by Linsey McGoey pointed out that Mastercard’s scheme to advance digital banking was financed considerably by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which had its own interests in mind. 
3. Asked whether Banga would support any public financial technology companies, Bateman said: “I doubt it. Banga will be expected to ensure that there will be no chance of any local publicly owned fintech projects. That would just be way too much like socialism—as is comically said in the U.S. government, World Bank, and IMF about even mildly pro-poor policies—but it would also deny foreign investors their ‘right’ to enter any market they chose, which is the fundamental right given to them under the current global economic order.” 
4. Like the World Bank, the IMF provides loans—including emergency loans—to member countries experiencing actual or potential balance of payments problems. It also monitors the international monetary system and global economic developments to identify risks and recommend policies for growth and financial stability, and provides technical assistance and training to governments, including central banks, finance ministries, revenue administrations, and financial sector supervisory agencies. 

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***

While health policy makers need to be guided by careful evidence-based approach in all times, this need has increased all the more in recent times due to two important factors.

Firstly, of course there are the pandemic related factors.

Secondly, there is the rapid increase in the dominance of the profit motive and control motive in health sector.

It is in the health sector (which ideally should be the sector which is most free from the profit motive) that the maximum number of billionaires have emerged recently and that too mostly in pandemic times and its aftermath.

A billionaire (or the organization dominated by him) has emerged as a leading financier of the leading international health organization which has the biggest influence worldwide on health (and pandemic) policy.

This billionaire has been associated with highly unethical promotion of GM crops and foods, indicted by many scientists for their very harmful health impacts, and now we have this billionaire wielding excessive influence in leading health organizations as a leading funder of their work.

At the same time the profits of leading multinational companies engaged in pharmaceuticals and vaccines have increased as never before and they are now in an even stronger position to influence international and national decisions in their favor. In fact even more than super-profits, increase of control over the health sector may increasingly be the aim of some of the biggest health multinational companies and their controlling interests.

All this has resulted in a highly sensitive situation in which the responsibility of national public health policy makers and the caution they need to exercise have increased much more compared to earlier times. One of the ways of ensuring this is to look at the emerging evidence as widely as possible, including alternative views which are different from dominant views or critical of them.

While the official policy in several countries in recent times was to ‘boost’ the booster dose of Covid vaccine, research questioning this view was also published.

In this context attention may be drawn to an article published in The Wall Street Journal on January 1 2023 (article titled Are Vaccines Fueling New Covid Variants). Written by Allysia Finley, a member of the editorial board of this prestigious, solidly pro-establishment newspaper, this helped to draw attention to a lot of recent research which has raised concerns and voiced a lot of caution regarding an aggressive policy on booster doses.

Two days earlier, on December 30 2022, The Epoch Times, also a US publication, had highlighted the results of an investigation based on data of several states which, despite some limitations of data base, showed an overall tendency for booster receivers to be exposed to more risks.

Commenting on this and other data Dr. Robert Malone, inventor of the mRNA vaccine, commented,

“It is unassailable that a very large fraction of highly inoculated (people) are among those being hospitalized or dying. So at a minimum, the effectiveness of in preventing hospitalization or death does not appear to be aligned to the official policy position.”

Earlier in August 1921 Geert Vanden Bossche D.M.V. Ph.D., virologist and vaccine expert, had warned that vaccines could lead to new more, more infectious viral variants becoming increasingly dominant.

The most discussed book which presents alternative information and viewpoints on this issue has been written by Robert Kennedy, Jr., nephew of the late President John F. Kennedy, who has been taking up one child health and public health issue after another in recent times. Despite several efforts to block and obstruct this book and its views, this well-referenced book titled ‘The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health’, sold over a million copies in just a few months. This as well as some other recent books have done much to draw attention to several less known aspects of this debate.

It may prove to be very useful if policy makers also consider the viewpoints and facts emerging from these alternative viewpoints to take more balanced decision instead of merely following the dominant viewpoints. This may be particularly true of side-effects and safety aspects. Generally in the case of all vaccines adverse events recorded constitute an important part of discussion relating to them, and this is all the more so in the case of COVID-19 vaccines which were developed and distributed in unprecedented hurry.

Comparative Review

A comparative review of adverse impacts of COVID-19 vaccines is attempted here at two levels . Firstly in the case of a single country (USA) where comparable data over a time period of several years is available, the adverse events following all other vaccines are compared with adverse events following COVID-19 vaccine during 2020-21. Secondly the adverse events data for COVID vaccines is compared for various countries.

First, we can compare the official data for per month deaths following COVID vaccines with the longer-term data from the same comparable official source for per month deaths following all other vaccines in the context of the USA.

The source of all this data is VAERS ( Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System) which has been recording adverse events, serious injuries and deaths following vaccinations for several years in the USA. 

There have been criticisms, supported by studies, that what gets recorded in VAERS may be very substantial under-estimates but still it is the only officially recognized data base we have in the public domain. VAERS figures do not establish a cause and effect relationship. This data base only tells us that a certain number of adverse events including deaths were reported and recorded in this system within a certain specified number of days following vaccination. The same is also true of the data on adverse events of other countries later in this review.

The VAERS data inform  that for the roughly sixteen and a half year period ( 198 months) from July 1997 to December 2013, counting all the various vaccines that are administered in the USA, many adverse events were recorded which included 2149 deaths. This figure is available in a paper titled Deaths Reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System 1997-2013, United States, authored by Pedro L. Moro, Jorge Arana , Mario Cano and others. This paper,( Clin. Infect. Dis 2015 Sep.15; 61(6), reproduced by National Library of Medicine, National Center for Biotechnology Information is based on what was recorded in VAERS. This paper also says that these deaths showed a declining trend.

Dividing 2149 by 198 we find that on average per month 11 post-vaccine deaths were recorded, counting all the various vaccines administered in the USA.

Now let us look at the post-vaccine deaths recorded only for COVID-19 vaccine in the USA under the VAERS since this vaccination started in December 2020. During the roughly 11 months period from December 14 2020 to November 12 , 2021,a total of 8,664 deaths were recorded This works out to an average of about 788 deaths per month.

Thus we learn that the number of post-vaccine  deaths recorded per month for  COVID-19 vaccine up to November 12 2021 (788) is about 72 times of the deaths per month that were recorded earlier for all vaccines combined (11), as revealed in a longer-term study of VAERS records for 198 months, years 1997-2013.

While calculating this we have used the much lower VAERS estimate which excludes deaths following COVID vaccine attributed to ‘foreign reports’.

During the period of about 11 months December 14 2020 to November 12 2021 following COVID-19 vaccine, in the VAERS system of USA, after excluding foreign reports, a total of 654,413 adverse events and 54,962 serious injuries were recorded.

These statistics, as also the findings of important studies that VAERS data on adverse side effects should be treated as substantial under-estimates, should have clearly got more attention in official decisions, as also the hardly discussed possibility of adverse impacts that may manifest much later. People should be adequately informed for a proper democratic debate to take place.

Now in the second part of this review let us try to compare the USA data with the data for some other countries. The USA data is up to around mid-November when around 410 million vaccines had been administered. In India up to this time about 1100 million vaccines had been administered. However the adverse events following COVID-19 vaccines as reported officially are very, very less compared to what has been reported for the USA. As reported in leading newspaper the Hindu on November 29 the serious adverse events following COVD-19 vaccine till November are 2116. ( See report titled Vaccination adverse events less than 0.01%, Centre tells Supreme Court, written by Krishnadas Rajagopal).

As available data indicates adverse events data to be amazingly below that for the USA, there can be two interpretations. One interpretation can be that in terms of safety the COVID Vaccination in India has been enormously superior compared to the USA. This would appear to be all the more so keeping in view that VAERS estimates also involved substantial under-reporting. The second interpretation is that the data on this subject is a huge underestimate of the actual situation in India. Which interpretation appears more acceptable to readers?

In the case of China, as in the case of India, the real situation in this context is not clear and more transparency is needed. However a Bloomberg report dated May 28 which says it has about 0.01% adverse events from COVID vaccines may be mentioned here. This report mentions the figure of 31,434 adverse events from 265 million jabs administered till then. If we extrapolate the same figure for the nearly 2300 million jabs given till the last days of November, then we get a figure of about 280,000 adverse events (these are not described as serious adverse events, just adverse events in the Bloomberg report.). Comparing with the adverse events in the USA and other western countries, this again is a substantial underestimate.

In the case of nearly 27 countries of the European Union, an analysis of adverse events as reported in Health Impact News dated 28 November mentioned 31000 deaths, 2890,600 injuries including 1355,192 serious injuries.

Hence the trend appears to be of high reporting from developed countries and of low reporting from developing countries.

Children and Teenagers

Another important aspect relates to extension of COVID-19 vaccination to teenagers and children and voices of caution voiced by several senior scientists in this context. In fact In India almost as soon as the official announcement in this context was made, on December 6 2021 a senior epidemiologist of AIIMS Dr. Sanjay K. Rai,  President of Indian Public Health Association and involved in Covaxin trials in India in a very senior position, stated that this will not yield any additional benefits. At the world level Dr. Robert Malone, who has played a very important part in the debate, has warned against high risks involved in this. He has stated that thousands of scientists and doctors oppose this (Physicians Declaration II-Updated October 29 2021, Global COVID Summit, International Association of Physicians and Medical Scientists).

His views and those of several other senior scientists should not be ignored. In the interests of ensuring safety and avoiding any adverse impacts it is important to resolve these controversies in such a way that the health and safety concerns of all and particularly of children are well protected.

On December 24, three of the top Indian scientists and officials having a very high presence in the COVID vaccination drive made a statement that their decisions are guided by science and there isn’t scientific basis yet to necessitate paediatric vaccination.

Just a day later, On December 25,  at higher levels the government announced that COVID vaccination for teenagers in 15-18 age group will start from January 3 2022 as this will be very helpful for them.

Dr. Sanjay Rai made another important point in his statement. He stated that even among adults, COVID vaccination has helped to reduce severity and mortality, but has not helped significantly to reduce infection risk and even those fully vaccinated have been infected and such breakthrough infections have been increasing in some countries.

More specifically, he stated about COVID vaccination,

“But according to whatever knowledge we have about vaccines, they are unable to make a significant dent in the infection. In some countries people are getting infected even after taking booster shots.”

An additional reason he gave regarding the need to avoid COVID vaccination of children relates to the much lower risks from this disease to children. Combining all these factors together he made a strong case for avoiding COVID vaccine for children and teenagers.

He is certainly not alone in highlighting this as thousands of medical scientists, doctors and public health activists from around the world have already pointed this out. As mentioned earlier, we have the reference of the declaration in which thousands of scientists and doctors have endorsed the ‘Physicians Declaration II –Updated October 29 2021, –Global Covid Summit—International Alliance of Physicians and Medical Scientists. This statement has stated the following reasons against vaccination of children for COVID:

• Negligible clinical risks for SARS-CoV-2 infection ( COVID-19) infection exist for healthy children under 18.
• Long-term safety of the current COVID vaccines in children cannot be determined prior to instituting such policies. Without high-powered, reproducible, long-term safety data, risks to the long-term health status of children remains too high to support use in healthy children.
• Children risk severe adverse events from receiving the vaccine. Permanent physical damage to the brain, heart, immune and reproductive systems associated with SARS CoV-2 spike protein-based genetic vaccines have been demonstrated in children.

It is true, however, that very diverse views have been offered and published in prestigious journals by eminent doctors and scientists. What is important to policy makers is to find out which views best reflect concerns of protecting public health, and which views have the shadow of conflict of interest including influence of big multinational companies and billionaires. The scene has been darkened by the fact that the billionaires, their so-called philanthropic organizations and big multinational companies have managed to find influential allies not just in several decision-making agencies of several countries but in several international and UN organizations relating to health and child welfare. In fact one of the leading lessons of COVID-19 and its distorted responses should be to ensure that the WHO is completely freed of the influences of billionaires, their so-called philanthropic organizations and health and pharmaceutical multinational companies.

In the prevailing conditions of peddling of wrong influences at high levels it becomes all the more important to hear diverse views including dissenting views in matters concerning pandemics and vaccines related to them. In the context of COVID-19, unfortunately, we saw the very distressing situation of several highly reputed scientists and doctors being subjected to very unjust and even cruel victimization just because they challenged some of the dominant views. This is not science, this is not democracy. One can only hope and plead that in future there should not just be more tolerance but in addition there should also be more of a spirit of science, of being truly open to other viewpoints with the shared aim of making the best effort for drawing the right conclusions on various crucial issues to guide policy. In very important issues of vaccines and lockdowns, the COVID-19 response cannot be called evidence-based and the sufferings of many, many people caused due to this are still continuing.

*

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Bharat Dogra is Honorary Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now. His recent books include Man over Machine (Gandhian Ideas for Our Times), Planet in Peril, Protecting Earth for Children and A Day in 2071. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Mercola

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***

This insightful interview offers understanding about the current relations between South Africa and Russia, and BRICS. It focuses on bilateral economic cooperation between South Africa and Russia, and some aspects with the BRICS. With an estimated 58 million population, South Africa is the 25th largest country in the world. It has friendly relations dated from the Soviet times, and now with the Russian Federation. It joined BRICS, an organisation of five emerging economies, in December 2010 in line with the country’s foreign policy to strengthen South-South relations. 

Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Republic of South Africa to the Russian Federation and the Republic of Belarus, Mzuvukile Maqetuka, who has been in this current post since 2021, gave this interview to our Global Research’s Kester Kenn Klomegah in June 2023. Here are the interview excerpts.

*

Kester Kenn Klomegah (KKK): First, what are your Government’s position and your thoughts on the emerging world order? Do you think absolute neutral position by majority of African countries helps push the evolutionary process of this new world order?

Mzuvukile Maqetuka (MM): South Africa’s neutral position is consistent on all military conflicts around the world, that the international community needs to work together to bring peace.

South Africa is committed to the articles of the United Nations (UN) Charter, including the principle that all members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means. Since the dawn of democracy in South Africa almost 30 years ago, we have called for the reform of the United Nations and multilateral organisations to make such structures more representative, inclusive of African representation. 

South Africa is a sovereign state, governed by a democratic Constitution and committed to the consistent application of international law. We will continue to fulfil our obligations in terms of the various international agreements and treaties to which we are signatories.

On the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the international community needs to urgently achieve a cessation of hostilities and to prevent further loss of life and displacement of civilians in Ukraine.  It needs to support meaningful dialogue towards lasting peace, which ensures the security and stability of all nations. We support the principle that members should refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of other states. The South African position seeks to contribute to the creation of conditions that make the achievement of a durable resolution of the conflict possible.

KKK: What are the key results from the last June meeting of the Russia-South African Business Council at the Russian Chamber of Commerce and Industry? What challenges have been identified hindering economic cooperation between the two countries? 

Russia and South Africa are known to be closely cooperating in the mining and energy sectors. What efforts is your country making to diversify investment opportunities into other sectors for Russian business people?

In what areas do you think the Russia-South African bilateral relations could be improved and what do you suggest to be done, promoting relations both ways? 

MM: The South Africa–Russia Business Council submits the reports of their meetings to the Joint Intergovernmental Committee on Trade and Economic Cooperation (ITEC) which is chaired by the Minister of International Relations and Cooperation of South Africa and the Minister of Natural Resources and Environment of the Russian Federation. The last session of ITEC was held in Pretoria on 30 March 2023. 

Russia and South Africa are focusing on intensifying trade relations and economic development. Both countries aspire to strengthen cooperation within the Russian-South African business community.

One of the current priorities of the SA-Russia Business Council is to develop a joint programme of cooperation which would involve relevant authorities on both sides to facilitate business to business meetings in identified sectors. 

Some of the subcommittees in the Business Council continue to perform exceptionally well. For example, the Agricultural subcommittee has maintained high levels of agricultural exports to the Russian Federation. South African citrus fruit exports to Russia are of top quality and falls within the top 3 of citrus fruit exporter countries for the Russian market. 

Another example is South African wines exported to the Russian Federation, such as KWV wines which has recently achieved a spot in the top 50, and one of four South African wine brands, in the “World’s Most Admired Wine Brand in Africa & Middle East”. 

According to the South African Department of Trade and Competition (dtic) statistics, total trade (export + import) between South Africa and Russia in March 2023 was R638,945,978 South African Rand.

In March 2023 total exports from South Africa to Russia were R392,335,607.  In comparison to February 2023, the total exports increased by 38%.  In comparison to the same period of 2022 (March 2022), exports increased by 298%.

KKK: Now that you have arrived as the South African ambassador, what would you say are your Government’s priorities then? What are, generally, the investment opportunities for external countries and foreign investors in South Africa?

MM: South Africa has one of the biggest economies on the continent, and it is still rapidly developing. South Africa is the most diversified as well as the most industrialised economy on the continent.

The South African economy is essentially based on private enterprise, but the state participates in many ways. Economic policy has been aimed primarily at sustaining growth and achieving a measure of industrial self-sufficiency. Agriculture is of major importance to South Africa. It produces a significant portion of exports and contributes greatly to the domestic economy.

South Africa is rich in a variety of minerals. In addition to diamonds and gold, the country also contains reserves of iron ore, platinum, manganese, chromium, copper, uranium, silver, beryllium, and titanium. Not much deposits of petroleum have been found that may be commercially exploitable, but there are moderate quantities of natural gas located off the southern coast, and synthetic fuel is made from coal at two large plants in the provinces of Free State and Mpumalanga. South Africa is the world’s largest producer of platinum and chromium, which are mined at centres such as Rustenburg and Steelpoort in the northeast and are becoming increasingly significant economically.

The major manufacturing sectors are food processing and the production of textiles, metals, and chemicals. Agriculture and fisheries provide the basis for substantial activity in meat, fish, and fruit canning, sugar refining, and other processing; more than half these products are exported.

A large and complex chemical industry has developed from early beginnings in the manufacture of explosives for use in mining. A coal-based petrochemical industry produces a wide range of plastics, resins, and industrial chemicals.

South Africa has a well-developed financial system, centred on the South African Reserve Bank, which is the sole issuing authority for the rand, the national currency. There are many registered banking institutions, a number of which concentrate on commercial banking, as well as merchant, savings, investment, and discount banks. One such bank, the Development Bank of Southern Africa, is a quasi-governmental company created to promote development projects. Private pension and provident funds and more than two dozen insurance companies play significant roles in the financial sector.

Tourism is becoming increasingly important to South Africa’s economy and this sector, which is an economic driver, is finally making positive recovery post Covid-19. While the majority of tourists still come from African countries, an increasing number of arrivals are from Europe, the Americas and Russia. Since SA and Russia signed the visa waiver agreement in 2017, which allows for 90-day visa free travel between our two countries, we have seen a steady increase in Russian tourists visiting South Africa.

South Africa welcomed and fully supported the adoption by African nations of the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA) which we believe will contribute tremendously in pursuit of economic integration of our continent towards the attainment of our vision: Agenda 2063, the Africa We Want.

Through the implementation of AfCFTA, African states are determined to increase manufacturing and industrial capacity so that we trade in African goods and products, produced in Africa.

As the largest African investor in other African countries, South Africa hopes to build on this and mobilise resources for industrial investment.

KKK: How comparable is Russia to those external investors in South Africa? Why are China and India so popular with economic diplomacy there in your country?

MM: South Africa was the first member of an expanded BRICS in 2010 when the group of four (Brazil, Russia, India and China) was already holding its 3rd Summit in China that year. We considered it an honour to have been invited to form part of this partnership of leading emerging markets and developing countries.

Together, the Federative Republic of Brazil, the Russian Federation, the Republic of India, the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of South Africa represent over 42% of the global population, 30% of the world’s territory, 23% of GDP and 18% of global trade.

The BRICS partnership has grown in scope and depth with BRICS members exploring practical cooperation in a spirit of openness and solidarity to find mutual interests and common values. Around 150 meetings are held annually across the three pillars of BRICS cooperation: political and security cooperation, financial and economic cooperation, and cultural and people-to-people cooperation. Over 30 agreements and memoranda of understanding provide a legal foundation for cooperation in the areas as diverse as the Contingent Reserve Arrangement, customs, tax, interbank cooperation, culture, science, technology and innovation, agricultural research, energy efficiency, competition policy and diplomatic academies.

The South African Minister of International Relations and Cooperation, Dr Naledi Pandor, hosted the most recent Meeting of BRICS Ministers of Foreign Affairs and International Relations on 1 June 2023 in Cape Town. The mid-term meeting provided an opportunity for BRICS Foreign Ministers to reflect on regional and global developments. The ministerial meeting was preceded by the meeting of Sherpas and Sous-Sherpas from 29 – 30 May 2023 and the Russian delegation attended all these meetings in Cape Town, Minister Lavrov was leading the delegation.

As chair of BRICS, South Africa practices the policy of inclusive engagement and invited 15 Foreign Ministers from Africa and the global south to a “Friends of BRICS” meeting held on 2 June 2023.

From 22 to 24 August 2023, all BRICS Leaders are expected to attend the 15th BRICS Summit in South Africa at the Sandton Convention Centre (SCC) in Johannesburg, Gauteng.

BRICS Leaders will engage with business during the BRICS Business Forum and engage with the New Development Bank, BRICS Business Council and other mechanisms during the Summit. South Africa will also continue its Outreach to Leaders from Africa and the global South and hold a BRICS Outreach and BRICS Plus Dialogue during the 15th BRICS Summit.

KKK: Do you also think that Russia can engage in transfer of its science and technology in different sectors to Africa? What else do you have on the agenda in the Russian Federation?

MM: In May 2023, a delegation from South Africa’s Department of Science and Innovation (DSI) and the Technology Innovation Agency (TIA) travelled to Moscow to attend the annual Skolkovo Startup Village. During the delegation’s visit to Russia, Memoranda of Understanding were signed in the field of innovation and technology.

TIA is a national public entity in South Africa that serves as the key institutional intervention to bridge the innovation chasm between research and development from higher education institutions, science councils, public entities, and private sector,and commercialisation. The Organization’s focus is on technological development; from proof of concept to pre commercialisation.

The Russian Federation has identified the expansion of science and technology cooperation as spearheaded by the Russian Academy of Science as an important part of its renewed engagement with the African Continent, this is witnessed in the theme of the Economic and Humanitarian Forum that forms part of the 2nd Russia-Africa Summit scheduled for July 2023 i.e., Technology and Security for Sovereign Development that Benefits People.  

The Summit is scheduled to discuss very important themes including Infrastructure, Innovation, and Improvements to the Urban Environment; Nuclear Technologies for African Development; Building Independent Systems for Assessing and Promoting National Science Programmes in Russia and Africa: Opportunities for Mutual Support;  Achieving Technological Sovereignty Through Industrial Cooperation;  Improving the Reliability of Africa’s Energy Infrastructure with Low Emission Technologies;  How Russian Digital Technologies Can Boost Africa’s Industrial Potential;  Bringing Russian Prospecting and Development Technologies to Africa;  Effective Healthcare Cooperation: Technologies, Innovations, Human Capital;  Bringing Russian Shipbuilding to Africa: A Modern Fleet to Develop the Entire Continent;  An Emerging Global Order as Seen by African and Russian Researchers: Alternatives to Western Models

KKK: What is your assessment of the possibilities of a joint, coordinated foreign trade policy within the BRICS? What do you think about the proposal to introduce national currency trade settlement arrangements within the BRICS?

MM: The South African Reserve Bank will give consideration to possible national currency trade settlement arrangements amongst BRICS countries following extensive and detailed work on the matter.

Key questions will include its intended arrangement and consideration will be given to any related risk, including, though not limited to, any sanctions risk to South Africa.

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After WWII, there was a growing number of significant non-state actors in international relations (IR) like the UN or various specialist agencies connected to it. Nevertheless, two key developments stimulated the growth of such organizations after WWII: 

1. The realization that building cooperation and collective security was a much wider task than merely deterring aggressors in traditional attacks on fixed international order. It, therefore, involved finding ways of agreeing on international policy in a variety of practice areas.
2. The increasing coverage of international law includes new foci, including, human rights, social justice, natural environment, and regarding warfare – war crimes.

The final result of such post-WWII development in IR and global politics was that the application of the UN system took place within the context of the growth and expansion of international law which dealt as well with war crimes.

As a consequence, IR became less concerned with the state’s freedoms and independence alone but becoming more interested in general welfare with regards to including those affecting various non-state actors, such as pressure groups of different kinds, not least those demanding the investigation of war crimes including ethnic cleansing and genocide.

However, since the Cold War’s two nuclear Superpowers for geopolitical reasons, often been supporters of anti-democratic regimes that notoriously violated their own citizen’s rights, like the US support of the authoritarian regime of General Pinochet (1973−1990), in Chile than the removal of such structural conditions appeared favorable to a general improvement in those countries requiring the investigation of the violation of human rights in some cases of the civil wars connected with war crimes.

The phenomenon of war crimes is commonly understood as individual responsibility for violations of the internationally agreed-on laws and customs of warfare. The responsibility of such kind is covering both the commission of war crimes in a direct way and ordering or facilitating them. In principle, the rule violated must be part of the international customary law or part of an applicable treaty.

Chronologically, the first and unsuccessful attempts at the prosecution of war crimes have been after the Great War. The same problem of individual responsibility for war crimes became once again actual during and after WWII, with the declarations in 1942 and 1943 by the Allied coalition.

It was, basically, the expression of the determination to prosecute and punish at least major war criminals on the opposite side but, unfortunately, not on their own as well. Another practical purpose was to establish the tribunals for such cases to take place in Nuremberg in Germany (for the Nazi German war criminals) and Tokyo in Japan (for Japanese war criminals).

The war crimes committed in WWII had been covering the so-called “crimes against humanity” as defined by the Charter of the International Military Tribunal that was established in Nuremberg like killing, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhuman acts committed against civilian populations either before or during a war. In addition, the same category of war crimes was put persecution on political, racial, or religious foundations followed by the crime of aggression and crimes against peace like planning, preparation, initiation, or waging of a war of aggression.

Nuremberg Tribunal

War crimes are in general as well as understood in terms of all of those acts that are defined as the so-called “grave breaches” of the 1949 Geneva Conventions and Additional Protocol 1 of 1977.

Later, the acts of war crimes are defined in the 1993 Statute of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, by the 1994 Statute of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda followed by Article 8 of the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

Nevertheless, in the 1990s, it was on agenda a greater willingness by one part of states to establish the so-called “international” courts for the matter of prosecution of potentially committed war crimes with the first such tribunal established after WWII which was dealing with cases from the territory of ex-Yugoslavia followed by the similar court for Rwanda and successful negotiation of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

The conflicts which followed the brutal destruction of ex-Yugoslavia have been widely referred to as European bloodiest conflicts after 1945 partly because of the severity and intensity of the actual warfare and partly because of mass ethnic cleansings on all sides.

However, this war practice from the 1990s became infamous for the war crimes that have been alleged to be violent. Nevertheless, the case of the Yugoslav destruction in the 1990s became officially the first military conflict after WWII formally to be judged as genocidal by the Western international community.

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Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirović is a former university professor in Vilnius, Lithuania. He is a Research Fellow at the Center for Geostrategic Studies. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

In the middle of several increasing problems of food and farming sector, one reassuring aspect is that the various solutions do not conflict with each other and hence all the problems can be resolved simultaneously by adopting the right policies.

This becomes clearer by looking at the most desirable priorities and accompanying policies for the food and farm sector:

• production of healthy, nutritious and safe food on farms,
• its processing only in those ways which maintain health, safety and wholesome nutrition in natural ways without harmful additives,
• protection of soil, maintaining and improving its organic content and porosity to conserve water,
• conserving water, providing protective irrigation but at the same time avoiding excessive, wasteful irrigation and also avoiding commercial crops which are too water-intensive for any region,
• protecting earthworms and micro-organisms which improve soil and water conservation, protecting all friendly insects, bees, birds and pollinators and maintaining balance of nature in the local environment in which even spiders, owls and vultures play their useful roles,
• ensuring sustainable, healthy, creative and satisfactory livelihoods to all those who select food production and processing as their part-time or full time livelihood,
• maximizing the potential of local, village-based cottage and small-scale food processing,
• regulation of food trade in such a way that firstly farmers and secondly cottage and small food processors (the two activities can also be combined in the same farm family or farm unit) get the bulk of the retail price that is realized while traders get a smaller but fair share,
• farming technology should be made as self-reliant as possible in terms of using maximum of local resources while at the same time input costs for farmers should be minimized,
• the use of fossil fuels, whether in the form of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, diesel etc. should be minimized and no subsidy should be given specifically for this,
• all subsidies should be given directly to all small and medium farmers, and these should be the highest for those adopting the most ecologically protective policies and producing the most healthy, safe and wholesome nutritious food,
• all small and medium farmers who produce safe, healthy and nutritious food should be ensured a fair price for this, with a lot of this being purchased right within the village by government procurement agencies for supplying to local nutrition schemes and public distribution system of the village as well as of nearby towns as well as buffer stock storages,
• the concept of minimizing food miles should be carefully followed,
• as far as possible at least some farmland should be found for all landless rural families keen to cultivate it, and kitchen gardens for all should be promoted,
• those landless households who still cannot get some farmland in the village should be involved in community efforts, supported by the government, of using vacant land in or near the village for growing a mix of indigenous tree species providing fruits, dry fruits, fodder, medicines, oilseeds or edible oil etc. and they should get rights over this land ,
• Farm animals should be well provided for and enough healthy fodder and oilcakes should be produced at the village level for them, more attention should also be given to having better pastures,
• growing a wide diversity of crops and crop varieties in harmonious mixed farming systems ( including trees) and crop rotations, giving topmost priority to local food and nutrition needs while also protecting and conserving a wide diversity of indigenous seeds and varieties.

Such a listing can certainly be expanded but this gives a good idea of desirable priorities. Being more familiar with conditions of India, this writer has expressed a vision more in the context of India, but surely a lot of this would be relevant in several other countries too.

These priorities and policies taken together have two very remarkable features. Firstly, as pointed out earlier, all these policies and priorities are mutually consistent towards each other and can happily co-exist. Generally these are also supportive towards each other, and there is certainly no conflict or contradiction among them.

This is because these are integral parts of a comprehensive thinking which seeks to bring together concerns of justice, peace, health and nutrition of all people, sustainability, protection of environment and of all forms of life, when applied to the food and farming sector.

Secondly, a no less remarkable aspect is that while all these priorities and policies were very desirable before climate change became a big issue, exactly the same policies and priorities have become even more relevant in the context of the very pressing need for climate change mitigation and adaptation.

Whether in terms of reducing greatly the use of fossil fuels, or of absorbing of carbon dioxide, the comprehensive mix of policies and priorities (which can also be called heritage practices as a result of having evolved from the wisdom of several generations of farmers) which have been good for health and nutrition, for soil and water conservation, for justice and equality, are also found to be equally good for climate change mitigation and adaptation.

Hence what climate change mitigation and adaptation in the context of farming and food involves is what several generations of farmers had already known well but had been discarding in recent times under the increasing impact of big business interests.

Hence climate change mitigation and adaptation is very significantly also a process of getting rid of undesirable, imposed impacts and influences of big business interests whose main aim has been to advance their profits, control and domination of this sector while increasing fossil fuel use, pollution, monocultures, overexploitation of water and soils, loss of diversity of traditional seeds, uprooting of time honored mixed farming systems and crop rotations, indebtedness and land loss among small farmers.

Despite such a widely documented record, big business interests are now demanding that they should be given the leadership role in climate change mitigation and adaptation in the context of this sector, so that they can heavily distort the entire agenda to make it even more suitable for even higher levels of their profits and control.

This is the main threat that exists today in the food and farming sector– of the entire agenda of desirable changes getting distorted by big business interests armed with highly disruptive technologies like that of GM crops. This threat should be widely opposed.

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Bharat Dogra is Honorary Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now. His recent books include India’s Quest for Sustainable Farming and Healthy Food, Man over Machine and When the Two Streams Met. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

Like all indoctrinated economics PhDs, I used to teach students that the Federal Reserve was created as a central bank in order to provide cash to banks experiencing a run on deposits so that bank failures would not become general and collapse the money supply and, thereby, employment and output. It all sounds so reasonable and rational until you realize that finance least of all is idealistic.

The Federal Reserve was actually created in order to save the big New York banks from their greed-driven mistakes, and that is the Fed’s principal activity. 

In recent decades the Fed has gone beyond merely saving the big banks from their mistakes to helping the big ones concentrate more banking into their hands. 

The Fed causes banking crises and then provides funds for the big banks to absorb the troubled regional banks.  The Fed’s current policy of raising interest rates after a decade of negative interest rates has the entire banking system insolvent.

This resulted in runs on the banks, which the Fed did not save by expanding reserves, instead permitting failure and acquisition.  Obviously, what I had been trained to teach was false.

This is true of so much of what is taught in every subject.  

This bit of history is only a prologue to my expose of the Fed. 

The Federal  Reserve has the sole responsibility for all inflation, depression, and recession since its creation.  Until the Fed’s creation, the purchasing power of the US dollar was essentially constant over massive periods of time. 

Since the creation of the Federal Reserve (1913), today’s dollar is a small fraction of the value of a dollar in 1912.  I recently published a menu from 1914, around the time when my parents were born, showing restaurant prices ranging from 10 to 25 cents. Today you cannot purchase anything for 10-25 cents.

Milton Friedman and Anna Swartz in their Monetary History of the United States proved conclusively that the Federal Reserve caused the Great Depression of the 1930s by allowing the money supply to contract. 

So, it was the Fed that was responsible for the ability of President Franklin D. Rosevelt, a destroyer of American liberty, to use the Great Depression to coerce the US Supreme Court with threats of packing the court with his stooges  and to force the US Congress to delegate legislative authority to new executive branch regulatory agencies. 

Previously under the US Constitution, Congress wrote laws that also governed their implementation. But with Roosevelt’s new regulatory agencies, this power passed to the executive branch.  Today Congress is nothing but an authorizing agency for the executive branch to make the law.

Economists, unable or unwilling if they were existing on bank grants to point a finger at the Fed as the cause of the money supply shrinkage that caused the Great Depression, misread John Maynard Keynes and blamed the Great Depression on the inadequacy of consumer, investment, and government demand. 

The Keynesian solution was to increase demand.  Keynesians said the easiest way to do this was for the government to increase government demand by running a deficit in its budget.

Keynes himself said no such thing. Keynes said that the problem was caused by central banks causing the money supply to shrink. See this.

But this explanation did not fulfill the aspirations that liberal economists had for fiscal policy.  Insufficient demand gave them an excuse for expanding demand via government deficit spending for causes and agendas that they supported.

The consequence was the rise of one-dimensional macroeconomics. 

In Keynesian economics demand (consumer, investment, government) is the only operative principal.  Supply is passive. It only responds to demand.

Prior to Alfred Marshall, economists argued whether price was determined by what people were willing to pay–demand–or by the cost of production–supply.  Alfred Marshall resolved this controversy by saying it was like arguing over which blade of the scissors cut the paper.  Price, Marshall said, was determined by supply and demand, and there it has rested since.

But in Keynesian macroeconomics there is only demand. This one-dimensional model has caused massive economic hardship.

The Federal Reserve in the past and currently fights inflation by fighting employment and by reducing output.  This is because the Fed only has a demand model. The incompetent Fed is incapable of realizing that by fighting employment and output, the Fed is reducing supply, thus rising prices.

The current “inflation” is a supply-side inflation caused by Covid lockdown and Russian, Iranian, etc. sanctions that have without any doubt reduced supply. 

Simply observe the inflation in the UK and Europe. It cannot have anything whatsoever to do with “excess consumer demand” in the U.S.  Prices will fall as a result of disrupted and destroyed supply chains being reestablished, not because of the incompetent Fed’s high interest rates. The Fed’s high interest rate policy is interfering with the rebuilding of the damaged supply chains.

The Fed’s high interest rates only serve one purpose–bank insolvency, the result of which is more concentration in the hands of the Big Banks.  The Federal Reserve chairman recently said that inflation was caused by a strong labor market driving demand and that more interest rate hikes would be necessary.  The stupidity of this position is incomprehensible.  People working and earning money by providing goods and services is inflationary!  Amazing stupidity.  But stupidity is all that can be found in Washington.

What the Fed is doing is frustrating the lives of people who want to sell and buy homes, frustrating businesses who need loans to finance inventories, frustrating investors by driving down the value of their financial instruments.  

No good purpose is being served.  It is amazing that Americans tolerate an institution that seeks to make them unemployed, to prevent them from selling and buying homes, that drives up prices by driving up the cost of borrowing.

Listen to Jerome Powell and you will hear a harmful policy described as beneficial: click here. 

An alternative view to Jerome Powell’s view of a hot labor market: click here.

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Paul Craig Roberts is a renowned author and academic, chairman of The Institute for Political Economy where this article was originally published. Dr. Roberts was previously associate editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal. He was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy during the Reagan Administration. He is a regular contributor to Global Research. 

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***

A federal judge on Tuesday made the patriotic decision to block the Biden administration from meeting and communicating with social media companies over “protected speech.”

In an extraordinary preliminary injunction, Judge Terry A. Doughty, a Trump-appointee, in aimed at halting government influence over public discourse prior to issuing a final ruling in the case which was brought by Republican attorneys general in Missouri and Louisiana, who allege that the federal government overstepped their bounds in their efforts to censor online posts that they worried would contribute to vaccine hesitancy, or undermine US elections (with facts?).

Over the past seven months, Twitter owner Elon Musk revealed a large-scale, organized government effort to censor opinions which diverge from establishment-approved narratives, under the guise of protecting the public from ‘misinformation.’

Click on image to enlarge or click here to download

According to Stanford Law professor Evelyn Douek, “The injunction is strikingly broad and clearly intended to chill any kind of contact between government actors and social media platforms.“

In their lawsuit, the state attorneys general accused the Biden administration of enabling a “sprawling federal Censorship Enterprise” to compel social media giants to remove politically unfavorable viewpoints and voices, particularly conservatives who have accused the government of suppressing their speech, in what the plaintiffs described as “the most egregious violations of the First Amendment in the history of the United States of America.”

According to Judge Doughty, the AGs “have produced evidence of a massive effort by Defendants, from the White House to federal agencies, to suppress speech based on its content.”

His order did carve out a few exceptions – including warning of national security threats, criminal activity or voter suppression, according to the Washington Post.

The White House gave a lame, generic response, as expected.

“This Administration has promoted responsible actions to protect public health, safety, and security when confronted by challenges like a deadly pandemic and foreign attacks on our elections,” one official told the Post. “Our consistent view remains that social media platforms have a critical responsibility to take account of the effects their platforms are having on the American people, but make independent choices about the information they present.”

According to Missoury AG Andrew Bailey, “The deep state planted a seed of suppression of government censorship, but that seed was fertilized, germinated and grew rapidly once President Biden took office.”

“There are deep concerns here that the government’s unrepentant attitude demonstrates a willingness to continue to violate the First Amendment,” Bailey told the Post. “That’s why this wall of separation is so important, regardless of the steps that Big Tech is taking independent of our lawsuit.”

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In May, LinkedIn suspended the account of Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy after he posted several climate-related campaign messages.

In one message, Ramaswamy asserted that “fossil fuels are a requirement for human prosperity,” and in another, he wrote that if adherents of the “climate religion” really cared about the climate “they’d be worried about, say, shifting oil production to places like the U.S. and China.”

“Big Tech election interference has begun,” Ramaswamy said.

LinkedIn (owned by Microsoft) backtracked under pressure and reinstated his account. But the episode highlighted the ways in which social media companies are expanding their “content moderation” of “climate misinformation” — with potentially far-reaching consequences across the political spectrum.

In another incursion into the presidential race, YouTube attached a “Context” note to a June 5 interview of Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in which he discussed his views about climate change with Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson.

YouTube’s “Context” note included a definition of climate change from the United Nations (U.N.) and linked to a page on the U.N. website. The video is no longer available and now leads to a “Community Guidelines” warning.

In April, TikTok announced:

“We will begin to ramp up enforcement of a new climate change misinformation policy which removes climate change misinformation that undermines well-established scientific consensus, such as content denying the existence of climate change or the factors that contribute to it.”

TikTok’s policy is similar with Facebook’s, which over the last several years has censored prominent climate contrarians (often pejoratively referred to as “deniers”) Michael Shellenberger and Bjorn Lomborg.

Like Ramaswamy, Shellenberger and Lomborg disputed aspects of the “scientific consensus” on climate change and argued for the continued use of fossil fuels and the expansion of nuclear energy.

Lomborg has argued that “partisan ‘fact-checking’ pushes alarmist climate narratives.” Yet there are counterexamples of people being censored on social media because they are raising the alarm about climate change and environmental degradation more loudly than representatives of the “scientific consensus.”

Social media companies, under pressure from government authorities, have been applying their climate misinformation policies not only against people who express doubt about climate change itself but also against a wide range of people who question the climate “solutions” promoted by the government and its powerful corporate backers.

This includes many people who do not fall into the “denier” camp at all.

The large corporations, government entities and political interests that have claimed the power to censor social media are using this power to manipulate the climate debate toward their preferred “solutions” and to denigrate alternative perspectives and approaches.

From censoring ‘denial’ to censoring debate about ‘solutions’

“Now it’s not so much denying the problem,” President Biden’s first National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy said in an interview last year with Axios for its virtual event, “The Infodemic Age.” “What they [spreaders of alleged misinformation] are really targeting is our inability to accelerate the answers to climate. The technologies we need moving forward. That is equally dangerous to denial because we have to move fast.”

“We have answers, we have solutions,” McCarthy said, referring primarily to solar energy and wind energy. “The question is how quickly we can accelerate them. Clean energy is the solution.”

“We have to get tighter” with the enforcement of climate misinformation policy against people who cast doubt on these technologies and “solutions,” she said. “We need the tech companies to really jump in.”

To “get tighter,” the government has been working with tech companies and organizations in the “Censorship-Industrial Complex” that act as third-party “fact-checkers” for social media — TikTok calls them “Safety partners.”

Together, they have been shifting their focus from censorship of outright climate “denial” to censorship of debate and discussion about clean energy technologies and other climate “solutions,” as McCarthy described.

The U.N. climate webpage that YouTube attached to the Peterson-Kennedy interview in its “Community” note, for example, says, “We face a huge challenge but already know many solutions.”

The fact is, however, that many people from various points of view have problems with the mainstream “consensus” about clean energy and other touted climate “solutions.” There is a great deal of controversy about whether these “solutions” actually work — and who benefits from them and who bears the costs.

Although Big Oil has undoubtedly used its profits to shape the climate debate, it’s not just the fossil fuel companies and recipients of their “dark money” who are critical of mainstream climate “solutions,” as McCarthy and other proponents of censorship contend.

Censoring a wide range of critics, including environmentalists 

A wide range of people are now getting caught in the digital net of “climate misinformation” censorship, including some environmentalists.

The following groups are among those experiencing social media censorship due to their criticism of officially sanctioned climate “solutions” and because of their advocacy for alternative approaches to climate and environmental issues.

• Local citizens, conservationists and environmental activists opposed to ‘clean’ energy projects.

The massive $3 trillion dollar push for solar and wind energy across the U.S. is causing a backlash in some communities where local citizens are unhappy with the immediate environmental impacts.

The backlash against clean energy also is growing among some who say these giant industrial development projects are being built to the detriment of biodiversity, wildlife habitat and healthy ecosystems.

In December 2022, YouTube “permanently” deleted — without warning or notice of suspension — the channel of the group Protect Thacker Pass, which opposes the development of a large lithium mine in Nevada. Three days later YouTube restored the channel, without explanation.

Small conservation groups like Basin & Range Watch, a nonprofit that seeks to protect the deserts of Nevada and California from industrial development, including wind and solar, reported that they were accused of being spreaders of “misinformation” by proponents of these energy projects.

Citizens and local environmental activists who oppose offshore wind energy development in the New York-New Jersey area due to the potential impacts on whales and the ocean environment have been subjected to online censorship by Facebook and Instagram.

This censorship was coordinated by the third-party “fact-checker” PolitiFact, operated by The Poynter Institute — one of the “Top 50” members of the Censorship-Industrial Complex.

Media stories have used a broad brush to smear advocacy groups concerned about the effects of offshore wind development on whales and the marine environment, accusing them of being agents of fossil fuel “dark money.”

Although some local organizations do appear to have accepted funding from the fossil fuel industry, the broad grassroots movement to protect the coastal environment from industrial development cannot be accurately described as a product of oil-and-gas “dark money.”

The CEO of one offshore wind company, Atlantic Shores, wrote an op-ed accusing groups opposed to his projects of spreading “misinformation” about “the most viable solution we have” for climate change. He refrained from accusing his opponents of being funded by fossil fuel “dark money.” Atlantic Shores is 50% owned by oil giant Shell.

• ‘Doomers’ and environmentalists who advocate for systemic change.

A subset of climate activists believes that no officially sanctioned “solutions” are capable of stopping climate change or bringing an end to environmental degradation. These people are pejoratively referred to as “Doomers” (some of them prefer the tongue-in-cheek label, “Doomsters”).

In recent years, the press, climate scientists and mainstream climate activists have taken to bashing “Doomers” with the same gust they attack “Deniers.” A typical headline in The Washington Post reads, “Why climate ‘doomers’ are replacing climate ‘deniers.’”

In 2020, the Facebook group “Positive Deep Adaptation” received a warning about an article it shared, written by the award-winning novelist Jonathan Franzen in the New Yorker: “What if We Stopped Pretending? The climate apocalypse is coming. To prepare for it, we need to admit that we can’t prevent it.”

Facebook’s warning relied on a “fact-check” by the site, Climate Feedback.

And in April of this year, Facebook censored a post by Jem Bendell, a professor of sustainability at the University of Cumbria in Carlisle, England, who had attempted to share an interview British GQ conducted with him.

In the interview, Bendell discussed his view that mainstream climate policies are simply not working, and his belief that catastrophic disruptions to industrial consumer societies will occur due to climate change combined with other environmental, economic and social factors.

Facebook hid the post, with a message that said, “No one can see your post. We have these standards because we want everyone to feel safe.”

Similarly, in May, TikTok took down a video by “climate corruption” journalist Rachel Donald, labeling it “misinformation.” In the video, Donald, who writes the climate newsletter Planet Critical, said, “It’s the economy. It’s the economy driving the climate crisis. It’s how we’ve organized ourselves. It’s exploitation and extractivism and all this kind of stuff.”

TikTok did not offer a specific reason for labeling the video “misinformation.” But the video’s message — “It’s the economy driving the climate crisis” — conflicts with the U.S. government narratives about “green” growth.

Biden’s “climate solutions,” McCarthy said in her Axios interview, are “not just to save the planet, but to strengthen our economy. … Growing our economy today … that’s what our domestic climate action is all focused on.”

• Farmers.

When it comes to food and agriculture, the climate movement is dominated by “ecomodernists” who believe genetically modified plants, factory-made foods, synthetic meats and other industrial food technologies are “solutions” to climate change.

A smaller contingent of environmentalists believe we need small-scale farms using regenerative and agroecological methods, instead of more industrial food technologies. This contingent, and the populist small-farmer movement they are aligned with, have come under the scrutiny of the “climate misinformation” censors.

Protests by Dutch farmers galvanized worldwide opposition to onerous environmental policies that may end in the expropriation of thousands of farmers’ land. Dutch farmers received the support of some prominent ecological activists, like Dr. Vandana Shiva, who believe in the small-farm approach.

Yet the popular media, famous environmentalists like George Monbiot, and “fact-checking” organizations portray the Dutch farmer protests as a “far-right” movement that spreads conspiracy theories and misinformation.

Small farmers around the world who dispute the notion that their pasture-raised, grass-fed cattle are a significant cause of climate change have been censored by Facebook.

In one example, farmers posted memes stating that “cows are not the problem” compared to the private-jet lifestyles of billionaire elites like Bill Gates. Facebook attached a “fact-check” to these memes: “Debunked: Yes, cows are a ‘problem’ when it comes to cutting greenhouse-gas emissions.”

This example illustrates how the process of “fact-checking” a subjective political debate — are cows or private jets “the problem”? — benefits the elites who fund the “fact-checking” organizations.

“Fact-checkers” give credence to ecomodernist “solutions” pushed by billionaires like Gates, who funds several of the biggest organizations in the Censorship-Industrial Complex. Replacing cattle with synthetic beef and industrially produced “plant-based” foods — lines of business Gates is invested in — are treated as promising “solutions.”

Populist counter proposals — eliminating private jets or giving small farmers resources to transition to more ecologically friendly methods — are not taken seriously by the “fact-checkers.”

This is so, even though a compelling argument can be made that small farmers are better able than large industrial producers to feed the world using regenerative, agroecological methods.

The “fact-checkers” make no distinction between industrially raised cattle and those raised by small farmers using more holistic grazing methods. All are lumped together, even though this makes little ecological sense.

As Shiva observed:

“In order to erase the last remaining small farmers, corporate-sponsored narratives are now pushing for … dualistic narratives around plant versus animal, instead of addressing the larger crisis of how current industrial practices are destroying Earth’s ecosystems.”

Censorship of debate prevents alternative approaches from emerging

The power to censor, which was originally justified as being necessary to silence those who “denied” the existence of climate change, is increasingly being used to silence people who disagree with official climate “solutions.”

As long as disagreement is labeled “misinformation,” democratic debate is impossible.

Political debates are inherently subjective to a certain extent. Should we attempt to replace oil and gas with clean energy across the entire economy? Is “green growth” possible? How do we ensure that climate policies respect civil liberties? Is the future of food to be found on big industrial farms or small family farms? Which is a higher-priority problem — grass-fed cows or private jets?

These questions involve the weighing of pros and cons, the prioritizing of values and decisions about who will bear the costs and burdens. They are not simply questions of science or math.

Yet the social media “fact-checkers” step into these subjective debates with the pretense of objectivity, to steer the conversation toward “solutions” preferred by the big corporations and billionaires who fund them.

For every hot-button climate “solution,” the Censorship-Industrial Complex churns out “fact-checks” that are biased in favor of their funders. Biased claims can often be found on the other side of these debates, too.

The only way to make sense of these competing claims is through an open democratic process.

The censorship battle is not about “deniers” vs. “science, as many seem to believe. The conflict is primarily about who gets to decide on the “solutions”: citizens engaged in free and open discussion, or the political and economic forces that have claimed the power to censor.

In democratic societies, “solutions” are supposed to be up for debate — increasingly, they are not.

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W. Aaron Vandiver is a writer, former litigator and wildlife conservationist. He is the author of the novel, “Under a Poacher’s Moon.”

Featured image is from CHD

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***

A shocking document last September revealed that, during the 1948 Nakba, Zionist militias engaged in a wide-ranging chemical and biological warfare campaign to expel indigenous Palestinian communities from their lands, slow the advance of intervening Arab armies, and poison citizens of neighboring states.

This unconscionable use of biological weapons on civilian targets, which sought to infect the local Palestinian population with typhoid, dysentery, malaria, and other diseases by contaminating local water supplies, was subject to a concerted coverup at the time – one that was maintained by the Zionist state for decades thereafter.

Even after its exposure, the Israeli academics who helped break the story were at pains to diminish its significance, unconvincingly arguing it was a failed strategy promptly jettisoned and forgotten about as a result.

But newly declassified Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) files starkly underline this narrative to be an abject lie. Released by the Jewish Settlements Archival Project, an initiative of New York University’s Taub Center for Israel Studies, they amply show that the Israeli occupiers employed much the same tactics in order to purge Palestinian areas to make way for illegal settlements in the West Bank, and elsewhere.

Facts on the ground

In 1967, Tel Aviv emerged victorious in the Six Day War and effectively annexed significant swaths of surrounding territory from neighboring Arab states.

Israel’s occupation of these areas, and indeed the construction of settlements for Jewish colonists, was and remains absolutely illegal under international law and has been repeatedly condemned by the United Nations. Initially, successive Israeli governments claimed the settlements were the work of individual settlers and non-governmental entities such as the Jewish Agency and World Zionist Organization, and insisted that the state neither approved of nor could prevent their expansion.

Again, the newly-released papers starkly demonstrate this to be a deliberate deception. The trail begins in January 1971, when the cabinet of then-Israeli prime minister Golda Meir met to discuss the forthcoming construction of settlements. The need for unfailing public secrecy about what was about to happen was considered paramount. At the start of the summit, the premier requested:

“Before we move forward with our discussion, there’s something I’d like to ask. It was our habit that for anything that has to do with settlements, outposts, land expropriations, and so on, we simply do and do not talk [about it]…Lately, this … has broken down, and I’m asking ministers for the sake of our homeland to hold back, talk less, and do as much as possible. But the main thing, as much as possible, is to talk less.”

This extended to Meir demanding ministers not attend settlement opening ceremonies, and avoid being seen by the media anywhere near the sites. In April 1972, this oath of silence remained very much in force, with minister without portfolio Yisrael Galili reminding his cabinet confederates at a meeting to “refrain from dealing with the matter in the press, as it could cause damage.”

Around this time, the Israelis began constructing the first illegal Jewish settlement, Gitit, in the West Bank. Kickstarting the criminal enterprise required displacing Palestinians from the nearby village of Aqraba. This was first attempted by brute force, with IDF soldiers demanding they vacate the area to make way for a new military training zone.

The Palestinians ignored them, and continued cultivating the land, prompting Israeli forces to damage their tools. When they still refused to budge, the IDF was ordered to use vehicles to destroy crops, and dispossess the indigenous population. Soldiers struck upon a radical, bloodcurdling solution: a crop duster would rain down toxic chemicals, lethal to animals and dangerous for humans, to precipitate their departure.

Still, Aqraba’s population refused to budge, prompting the IDF to up its devilish campaign’s ante quite considerably. In April 1972, the military’s Central Command met with representatives of the Jewish Agency’s settlements department. They established “responsibility and schedule for the spraying,” at such a density that it would preclude humans from inhabiting the area for several days “for fear of stomach poisoning” and animals for a full week.

The Jewish Agency was given the job of obtaining the plane, which it did from Chemair, a local crop-dusting company. The explicit aim was to “destroy the harvest” of the Palestinians, and forcibly expel them from the area in perpetuity.

The next month, the destruction was so severe that Aqraba’s mayor wrote to Defense Minister Moshe Dayan. They stated the village had 4,000 residents, who until recently had cultivated “145,000 dunams of agricultural land.” Now, after “the authorities” had burned wheat and confiscated land, the Palestinians were left with just 25,000 dunams.

“The damage is unbearable … how will we be able to provide for ourselves?” the mayor despaired.

Israeli occupation forces finally took over the land in May 1973. Tel Aviv was asked for permission to “seize the land for the purpose of establishing a settlement,” which was granted. Three months later, construction commenced.

‘Get cover for it’

While Israeli governments covertly encouraged and facilitated the creation of illegal settlements, it is clear there was some internal dissent on the issue at various times.

In 1974, the head of the Israel Lands Administration began steps to establish another Jewish settlement in the West Bank, Ma’aleh Adumim, before the government had made a formal decision on the matter. Former IDF general turned Knesset representative Meir “Zarro” Zorea actively lobbied the Jewish Agency to allocate an appropriate budget for the effort, suggesting the organization “funnel money to settlement activity and get cover for it after a while, when I request budget approval.”

At a subsequent cabinet meeting however, then-Housing Minister Yehoshua Rabinovitz was dismayed, declaring, “this has no budget, and I don’t know how work is being started without sitting down with us.” Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin attempted to calm him, stating, “that’s what we’re meeting about right now.”

“There might be room for clarifying this issue, but I wouldn’t suggest going into it today. I know it may not be following the neatest definitions, but I’m in favor of them starting to carry out this infrastructure work,” he added.

Later on, the aforementioned Yisrael Galili pressed ministers to define Ma’aleh Adumim as “an A-class area,” thereby granting it and its Jewish settler population greater benefits from the government, despite the fact it would lie in illegally occupied territory. The Israeli government officially granting the settlement this classification would, by definition, amount to a de facto endorsement, in contradiction to its official public stance.

“I’m surprised that you don’t understand that this whole subject is one of the ingenious methods to alleviate a process that could be very dangerous internally in Israel,” Galili explained.

These shocking communications remained concealed for half a century before the Jewish Settlements Archival Project released them to the world. It is almost inevitable that a great many more incriminating documents remain sealed in the IDF’s vaults. The project’s archives end in summer of 1977, and as of January 2023, there are 144 illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank, including 12 in East Jerusalem, housing 450,000 colonizers.

Stealing that much land, and displacing so many people in the process, was a vast undertaking that frequently met bitter local resistance, which continues today. Given the efficacy of chemical and biological warfare in stealing Palestinian land over so many years, there is no reason to think this heinous approach wasn’t employed again and again over the years.

*

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***

Consider two quotes which are almost contemporaneous. The first is from Ameed Shahada, a Palestinian journalist who was in Jenin camp during the Israeli forces’ large-scale assault this week.

“The scenes in Jenin have been terrifying. There is live fire [from] every direction, and homes are being demolished. The sound of screams are hard to forget. They keep being replayed in my head. The biggest shock was when the Israeli forces came out of the jeeps and started firing bullets at us and our cameras when they saw us.”

The second quote came from Michael Gove, Tory politician and secretary of state for levelling up, housing and communities. As Israeli bulldozers were carving their way through Jenin camp on Tuesday, Gove got up in the UK Parliament to move the second reading of a bill that would outlaw the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS).

He ended his opening speech by saying that anyone who voted against the bill was “antisemitic”: “The question for every member of this House is whether they stand with us against antisemitism or not.”

The Economic Activity of Public Bodies (Overseas Matters) Bill seeks to ban public bodies including local councils from supporting boycotts targeting foreign governments based on moral or political grounds.

Gove launched his attack on the BDS movement on two counts – that it fostered antisemitism at home and that it contravened British policy on the conflict, which advocates for a two-state solution, because, he claimed, BDS was specifically “designed to erase Israel’s identity as a home for the Jewish people”.

In the words of Richard Burden, former shadow minister, the bill uniquely shields human rights abuses by Israel from scrutiny by UK public bodies and would drive a coach and horses through Britain’s compliance with the UN’s Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, to which the UK signed up over a decade ago.

The timing of this bill and this debate is not accidental.

It’s not a fluke of history that both sides of the House of Commons should be debating a law that would add yet another layer of impunity on Israel at a time when it is waging a murderous act of war against refugees in a very crowded camp. And when this war is over, its army concentrates its fire on the hospitals treating the wounded.

Israel’s playbook

The British debate is absolutely part of Israel’s playbook. It’s an essential part of the cover Israel uses to carry on with its project of annexation.

At the very moment when Israel is clearly – and indubitably – the aggressor, both sides in the debate in London seek to paint it and its supporters as victims.

It involves a fiction: that any British government of any political colour is remotely serious about enforcing the creation of a Palestinian state, which today would entail the expulsion of anywhere up to 700,000 settlers from the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.

It also erects a conveniently high screen of deception.

In this case from Israelis like settler Mordechai Cohen, who told the Israeli channel Kan that the aim of the unprecedented level of settler attacks on Palestinian villages and towns in the West Bank was to “push them to leave”. He added: “Palestinians should go to Jordan to live there if they are interested in a normal life.”

Cohen cheered the sight of 3,000 Palestinians fleeing their homes in the camp which was under aerial and ground assault from the Israeli army.

These Palestinians have had to flee their homes many times in the last 75 years. Their families are from Haifa, Yaffa and all parts of the territory occupied in 1948.

The obscenity of such a debate taking place in the House of Commons on the very night on which Israeli forces attacked a refugee camp with 15,000 people crammed into half a square mile, with drones, tanks, bulldozers and snipers, is plain for all to see.

The Labour Party under Keir Starmer is rapidly divesting itself of any resemblance to the party that campaigned against South African apartheid. Or any claim to be progressive.

The difference between Starmer and Gove is over phrasing, not intent.

Green light to extremism

For the second time in his career as leader of the opposition, Starmer turned to a KC for advice.

The first was Martin Forde QC who found that it was “entirely misleading” to assert that the former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn had actively intervened to stop antisemitism cases from being investigated.

This was not what Starmer, himself a human rights lawyer, wanted to hear. So he ignored Forde and binned his advice. Starmer fared little better with the second KC he turned to in Richard Hermer.

Hermer found the anti-BDS bill objectionable, irrespective of whether one considers the BDS movement to be thoroughly reprehensible or conversely a legitimate form of non-violent protest.

Hermer found the bill likely to have a detrimental impact on the UK’s ability to protect and promote human rights overseas, to be inconsistent with “our obligations under international law, and will stifle free speech at home”.

“Had legislation of this nature been in effect in the 1980s it would have rendered it unlawful to refuse to source goods from apartheid South Africa,” Hermer concluded.

Starmer ignored Hermer, and Labour abstained in voting on the second reading. 

Such an outcome is manna from heaven for the Israeli soldiers and settlers attacking Palestinian refugees in their camps, villagers and in their homes.

So, too, is the mildly worded statement from Prime Minister Rishi Sunak who urged Israel, which has so far killed 12 Palestinians and wounded more than 100 others, to “show restraint“.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the US Israel’s “irreplaceable and indispensable ally”.

The US backed Israel’s justification for the attack on Jenin refugee camp. State Department spokesman Ned Price said:

“Israel has the legitimate right to defend its people and its territory against all forms of aggression, including those from terrorist groups.”

Cumulatively, these statements are the brightest of green lights to the most extreme government in Israel’s history, which numbers fascists and terrorists as ministers, to carry on with their ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. 

Impunity is an intrinsic part of allowing Israel to flout the declared policy of its two principal backers, the UK and the US.  

And it is the reason why Israel has long passed the point of accepting a Palestinian state as its neighbour. It is now a one-state solution, with a Jewish minority trying with all the means at its disposal to force the Arab majority to leave. 

Pretending that a Palestinian state is still possible is one of the ugliest and most cynical fictions perpetrated by the British government. 

A one-state reality

Itamar Ben Gvir, Israel’s minister for national security, and the settlers make no bones about it.

Israel’s settler leaders see no problem in declaring their intentions. In fact they take pride in it. They want to force as many Palestinians to leave their homes in the West Bank as they can get away with, by terrorising them, burning them out of their homes and shooting them.

The settlers are protected by the soldiers who are conducting the same policy in Jenin, Nablus and throughout the West Bank.

Bezalel Smotrich, leader of the Religious Zionism Party, is equally clear about his intentions for the West Bank. In the “Decision Plan”, he wrote in 2017 that the Palestinians do not exist as a people.

“Basically, the ‘Palestinian people’ is nothing but a counter-movement to the Zionist movement, this is its essence and its right to exist. The Palestinian self-determination parties also know that such a ‘nation’ did not exist before the Zionist enterprise, and that ‘Palestine’ was the geographical name of this piece of land and nothing else.” 

This is the way Russian President Vladimir Putin talks about Ukraine and Ukrainians. 

Smotrich concludes:

“The continued existence of the two conflicting national aspirations in our small piece of land will guarantee us many more years of blood and life on the sword. Only when one of the parties gives up, willingly or by necessity, the realization of his national ambition in the Land of Israel, will the longed-for peace come, and it will be possible to live a life of civil coexistence here.”

It is another fiction to pretend that this, too, is not the policy of Israel, its settler movement, its army, and its courts. 

Another generation

Every word that Starmer or Lisa Nandy, shadow secretary of state for levelling up, utter in the support of the “Jewish homeland”, every time Labour abstains in such a vote, they send a very clear message to Israel that it can carry on doing what it wants. 

It spurs every part and expression of “the Jewish state”, which defines itself as the expression of self-determination for its Jewish citizens only, to finish the job it started in 1948 by mass expulsions of the Palestinians.

Israel does not see the suffering it causes, nor the humanity of its victims. It merely sees them as an obstacle to its national ambitions.

I don’t know who is more to blame – Smotrich, Ben-Gvir or Israel’s apologists in Britain.

At this point in history, they serve the same cause. At least Smotrich is open about his motives. Starmer is not.

This is not the first time parts of Jenin camp have been flattened by bulldozers.

Ariel Sharon thought he had dealt with the problem after the Battle of Jenin at the height of the Second Intifada in 2002, in which 52 Palestinians were killed, around half of whom were civilians.

Tony Blair, then Middle East envoy, also thought he had cleared up the problem with his plans for an economic zone.

And yet exactly 21 years later, Jenin is a hotbed of resistance with a generation of fighters who were not born in 2002. Jenin will not just lie down and take being occupied. It did not do so against British occupation. It will not against Israeli occupation. 

If Netanyahu thinks a book has been closed by this operation, he is profoundly mistaken.

Another chapter has been started which will spur another generation of fighters to take up the cause of liberation of their homeland.

From all occupiers.

*

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David Hearst is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Middle East Eye. He is a commentator and speaker on the region and analyst on Saudi Arabia. He was the Guardian’s foreign leader writer, and was correspondent in Russia, Europe, and Belfast. He joined the Guardian from The Scotsman, where he was education correspondent.

Featured image: An elderly woman reacts as she stands by the rubble of broken pavement along an alley in Jenin in the occupied West Bank on 5 July 2023 (AFP)

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***

“In the village where we lived, there were nine bombs dropped by NATO in the space of two minutes,” Dzafer Buzoli recalls, as we discuss his traumatic childhood in Yugoslavia. A leading member of Kosovo’s Roma, his community went from pillar to post. 

Many were dragooned into Slobodan Milosevic’s Serb-dominated Yugoslav army or targeted by Albanian rebels as suspected collaborators, before Bill Clinton and Tony Blair launched their ‘humanitarian intervention’ in 1999.

“When the first bomb fell, we were just confused and wondered what was happening,” he reflects. “But after the second bomb I felt the hot air and fell down from the pressure of the blast.

“Ever since then I’ve had a heightened sense of hearing. When there’s a loud noise or people yelling I have to really back up, because it’s too much for me.”

Buzoli was lucky to survive the airstrike. Two soldiers and a five year old boy were killed in the attack on his village of Laplje Selo, which was hit with controversial cluster munitions.

These scatter a blizzard of ball-shaped bomblets over target areas, like a minefield falling from the sky. Human Rights Watch said NATO killed between 90 and 150 civilians with this weapon across Serbia and Kosovo.

Thousands of bomblets failed to detonate on impact, posing a hazard to children who mistook their little yellow parachutes for toys. In the decade after the war, these remnants claimed another 178 casualties in Kosovo.

Buzoli (left) visits an area NATO bombed with cluster munitions and depleted uranium. (Photo: Phil Miller / Declassified UK)

While this war might seem like a distant memory for those beyond the Balkans, it offers a cautionary tale to Western states now assisting Ukraine’s fight against Russia.

US officials are said to be seriously considering supplying Kyiv with cluster bombs, possibly as soon as next month.

That’s despite the weapon being banned by more than 120 countries including the UK, following a UN treaty in 2008. 

The US refused to sign up to the ban and there are suspicions it uses a loophole to store them at its air bases in Britain.

Both Russia and Ukraine, fellow non-signatories, have already fired cluster bombs in their current conflict and supplies from America could further complicate the situation.

Lessons from Kosovo 

Unexploded cluster munitions remain a hazard in Kosovo long after NATO’s 11 week air war ended in 1999.

Goran, a Kosovo Serb, recalls how the weapon almost killed a farmer in a vineyard near Gracacina’s orthodox monastery, a world heritage site.

“He drove his tractor straight over the bomb,” Goran tells me. “He was lucky not to get killed.”

Goran, who likes to hunt wild boars in the forest, says he found a cluster munition – which locals call ‘cassette bombs’ – back in 2013.

His dates tally with a British demining charity – the Halo Trust – which said it was “still finding hundreds of cluster bombs” in Kosovo that same year.

At one site near Junik in western Kosovo they cleared 171 cluster bombs dropped by NATO, which stubbornly refuses to provide aid workers with access to its official database of airstrikes.

Instead the charity relies on old maps from the Yugoslav army (who preferred to plant landmines), which lack details of where NATO fired cluster bombs, what type they used, the direction of the strike, release altitude and fuze settings – all details that could assist clearance operations.

Partly as a result of these difficulties, 44 hazardous sites were yet to be fully demined by the end of 2021. 

While the Atlantic alliance justifies its wartime conduct by saying the targets were Serb soldiers, the people now living in the liberated areas are often ethnic Albanians – the very people NATO set out to save.

Responsibility to protect

The UK was a particularly prolific user of cluster bombs in Kosovo, where they accounted for over half the bombs dropped by the Royal Air Force. British pilots fired 531 of the devices, each containing 147 bomblets with over 2,000 pieces of shrapnel.

Up to 12% of the bomblets failed to detonate on impact, according to a report by parliament’s defence committee. The cross-party group of MPs said: “That means the RAF left between 4,000 and 10,000 unexploded bomblets on the ground in Kosovo”.

The type of cluster bomb used by Britain – the BL755 – was designed in the late sixties and entered service in 1972 despite manufacturing challenges. A year later, a Treasury official noted dryly: “This weapon has had a long and chequered history. We note with some relief that it has now successfully completed its trials”.

Over the next decade, the RAF acquired a stockpile of 18,000 cluster bombs. Another 26,000 were sold abroad on the lucrative export market, mostly to Germany but even future enemies like Iran and Yugoslavia. 

Margaret Thatcher’s government exported them to Robert Mugabe’s regime in Zimbabwe, where the British High Commission was anxious to prevent “offering the French an opening into the armament market”. 

Exports to Saudi Arabia would follow and ultimately the BL755 earned the dubious distinction of being fired in such bloody conflicts as the Iran-Iraq war, Congo and Yemen.

Britain’s military marketed its cluster bomb to other countries. (Photo: Phil Miller / DCUK)

‘Overkill weapon’

Some in the Foreign Office were less impressed and tried to resist exporting the weapon. 

One diplomat, Ivor Lucas, commented: “There is no doubt that Cluster Bomb [sic] is generally considered ‘an overkill weapon’ affecting wide areas with consequent danger to civilians and causing particularly unpleasant multiple wounding.”

Its greatest selling point however, was the ability to destroy tanks from the sky. But by 1982, even that was already in question. 

In a formerly secret file seen by Declassified, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) admitted: “The penetration capability of current BL755 against the frontal armour of current Soviet tanks (T-64/T-72) is poor and there are relatively few regions where full penetration, and hence kills, could be expected.”

If the RAF attacked a column of ten T-64s, pilots were only expected to destroy one tank per sortie – even with an improved variant of the weapon. Military officials lamented: “Effectiveness has been degraded by introduction of modern Soviet tanks”.

Their performance in the Balkans was woeful. An operational analysis by the MoD reportedly found only 31% of sorties hit their targets, despite pilots flying directly overhead.

‘Regrettable collateral damage’

Since Britain banned the bomb in 2008, Conservative and coalition governments have blocked the disclosure of six files about trials of the weapon in the 1970-80s – perhaps fearful that further embarrassing details of its deficiencies might emerge.

More recent Cabinet papers from Tony Blair’s handling of the Kosovo conflict are publicly available. 

These show his deputy prime minister John Prescott told colleagues on 1 April 1999 – a week into the war – that: “Public opinion in the West should be prepared for more extensive collateral damage.”

Labour’s defence secretary George Robertson (who went on to lead NATO), noted at the end of that month: “The air campaign needed to be intensified, despite the unintended and regrettable collateral damage which might be inevitable.”

By mid-May the foreign secretary, Robin Cook, grew frustrated at how “the international media tended to be diverted by rare incidents of NATO errors in conducting the campaign, away from the positive news of its successes.”

Cook, renowned for his ‘ethical foreign policy’, was probably referring to the cluster bombing of Nis, a city in southern Serbia where Dutch-NATO jets killed 15 civilians in a botched airstrike that hit a hospital and crowded market.

The tragedy led the US to pause its own use of cluster bombs, but the RAF pressed on. Years later, a Serbian lawyer from Nis is trying to sue Nato over the killings.

Activists from the city played an important role in passing the international ban on cluster bombs, but Serbia’s president is yet to endorse it. 

That impasse allows Belgrade to keep any remaining BL755s that Britain sold to communist-era Yugoslavia. 

Clearing the remnants of these weapons from Kosovo is not expected to finish until 2024 – a quarter century after the war ended. 

That marathon process, coupled with dubious performance on the battlefield, might give Joe Biden pause for thought about sending cluster bombs to Ukraine.

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Phil Miller is Declassified UK’s chief reporter. He is the author of Keenie Meenie: The British Mercenaries Who Got Away With War Crimes. Follow him on Twitter at @pmillerinfo

Featured image: US personnel load a cluster bomb to a jet during the bombing of Yugoslavia. (Photo: Richard Rosser / US Navy)

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June 21, 2023 – Bayville, NJ – 34 year old firefighter Brian Letrent died suddenly from a heart attack. The day before he participated in mandatory full scale training/drill. He collapsed the following day while returning home from work with a cardiac emergency and died in Bayshore Medical Center.

June 15, 2023 – St. Paul, MN – 48 yo Firefighter Chris Parsons died suddenly on June 15, 2023 He died 6 days after collapsing on his way home from running a 5K race in Minneapolis. He was a “guy who ran twice a day, who ran marathons.”

June 10, 2023 – Vermilion, OH – 50 year old firefighter William John McCale died suddenly of an apparent heart attack. He had undergone stress testing 4 days earlier.

June 10, 2023 – Bayfield, ON – 46 year old volunteer firefighter John Vanderhaar died unexpectedly on June 10, 2023.

June 5, 2023 – Dublin, GA – 26 year old firefighter Shaun Luke Daniel collapsed while walking a firebreak, CPR was provided but he died in hospital of apparent heart attack.

May 4, 2023 – London, ON – 56 year old firefighter Jan Paul Henry Joosten died suddenly on May 4, 2023.

April 20, 2023 – Knoxville, TN – 44 year old firefighter Erik Nelson Collier died suddenly from a cardiac arrest on April 20, 2023. He leaves behind two children.

April 10, 2023 – Burnaby, BC – 38 year old Ray Sawada, former NHL Player and firefighter for City of Burnaby, died suddenly while playing hockey.

Feb. 11, 2023 – Edmonton, AB – 41 year old firefighter Chris Kinsella died suddenly, off duty from a “medical event”. He was quadruple vaccinated (double boosted), and died suddenly from a cardiac arrest while he was participating in a cross-country ski race.

Feb. 3, 2023 – Oregon – 41 year old former Navy Seal and Firefighter Brandon Norbury went into cardiac arrest right after training and died (click here)(click here).

Jan. 22, 2023 – Vernon, BC – 50 year old firefighter David Hentschel died suddenly and unexpectedly.

Jan. 12, 2023 – Sequim, WA – 46 yo firefighter Capt. Charles “Chad” Cate died in his sleep on Jan. 12, 2023. He was found dead in his bunk by his crew at 7am.

Dec. 14, 2022 – Lakewood, WA – 45 year old firefighter and US Army Veteran John Martin Garner died suddenly on Dec. 14, 2022 He died from “heart issues after intensive water rescue training. “

Dec. 9, 2022 – 20 year old Quinn Grooms was found dead at home, his parents believe the “COVID-19 shot killed him.”

Two Florida Firefighter paramedics committed suicide. Trip Wooten on Jan. 9, 2023 and Allen Singleton on Jan. 28, 2023 (click here)

My Take…

Former Blackrock Hedge Fund Manager Ed Dowd looked at US insurance data and made the following findings: (click here starting at 8:25)

• Since Jan.2021, disability rate of those who remained in the workforce during COVID-19 vaccine mandates versus those who dropped out of the workforce (and didn’t get COVID-19 vaccines) is 550% higher in the vaccinated group.
• Excess mortality is up 40% among those ages 25-64 who remained in the workforce in 2021 and took COVID-19 vaccines. (click here starting 3:33)

What were the most vaccinated professions?

• Doctors, nurses, pilots, police officers, firefighters, military, city workers (bus drivers, etc), teachers.

These are the groups seeing the most sudden deaths right now.

Due to spike protein accumulation in the brain, suicide risk is also increased in the COVID-19 vaccinated.

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Dr. William Makis is a Canadian physician with expertise in Radiology, Oncology and Immunology. Governor General’s Medal, University of Toronto Scholar. Author of 100+ peer-reviewed medical publications.

Featured image is from Shutterstock

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Dr. Denis Rancourt’s research has shown that the vaccination campaign in India caused the deaths of 3.7 million fragile residents.  And, “in Western countries, we quantified the average all-ages rate of death to be 1 death for every 2,000 injections, to increase exponentially with age … We estimated that the vaccines had killed 13 million worldwide,” he said.

Denis Rancourt has a PhD in physics. He held post-doctoral research positions at prestigious institutions in France and The Netherlands, before being a physics professor and lead scientist at the University of Ottawa for 23 years. He has written over 30 scientific reports relevant to covid, starting 18 April  2020 for the Ontario Civil Liberties Association and for a new non-profit organisation called Correlation. Presently, all his work and interviews about covid are documented on his website which he created to circumvent the barrage of censorship.  You can follow Dr. Rancourt on Twitter HERE.

On 17 May, Dr. Rancourt testified at the National Citizens Inquiry (“NCI”) held in Ontario, Canada.  NCI is a citizen-led inquiry into Canada’s covid-19 response.

In a Twitter thread with video clips attached, citizen researcher and journalist Ben M., who is maintaining data through projects such as Mortality Watch,  highlighted the following statements made by Dr. Rancourt during his testimony.

“There’s a strong correlation to poverty, which is one of the pieces of evidence that allows you to say that this is not a virus. [..] No matter how you slice it, there’s absolutely no correlation with age, which is definitive proof that this cannot be covid.”

Ben M. on Twitter

“During the covid period, all western countries cut antibiotics prescriptions by 50%, so they were not treating bacterial pneumonia.”

“The age structure of the excess mortality has changed as you move into the vaccination period.”

“These peaks occur in very specific hotspots, but synchronously around the world [..] that from an epidemiological standpoint is strictly impossible, because the time from seeding of an infection to the sudden rise of mortality is completely uncertain.”

“The virus absolutely refused to cross these borders, of course, this is absurd, a viral respiratory disease is believed to spread, and it does not need a passport, and it does not respect borders, so that’s yet another proof, that this is not a viral respiratory pandemic.”

“You see, as a consequence of the vaccine rollout, there’s a higher regime of mortality.”

“Same thing for each of the states in Australia.”

“The large peak [in the southern US] coincides with [the] vaccine equity [program].”

“You are injecting people, that are at high risk of dying when you inject the elderly”

“Young adults, are above the exponential [risk]. There’s a plateau of risk of dying for young adults.”

Dr. Rancourt concluded his testimony by stating that from his detailed studies of all-cause mortality in the covid period, in combination with socio-economic and vaccine-rollout data:

• If there had been no pandemic propaganda or coercion, and governments and the medical establishment had simply gone on with business as usual, then there would not have been any excess mortality.
• There was no pandemic causing excess mortality.
• Measures caused excess mortality.
• Covid vaccination caused excess mortality.

Last week, Dr. Rancourt published an essay titled ‘There Was No Pandemic’ which is based on his testimony for the NCI (see video below), his 894-page book of exhibits in support of that testimony and his continued research.  In his essay, he wrote:

Regarding the vaccines, we quantified many instances in which a rapid rollout of a dose in the imposed vaccine schedule was synchronous with an otherwise unexpected peak in all-cause mortality, at times in the seasonal cycle and of magnitudes that have not previously been seen in the historic record of mortality.

In this way, we showed that the vaccination campaign in India caused the deaths of 3.7 million fragile residents.  In Western countries, we quantified the average all-ages rate of death to be 1 death for every 2,000 injections, to increase exponentially with age … We estimated that the vaccines had killed 13 million worldwide.

There Was No Pandemic, Denis G. Rancourt, PhD, 22 June 2023

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Without historical context, buried by corporate media, it’s impossible to understand Ukraine. Historians will tell the story. But the Establishment hits back at journalists, like at CN, who try to tell it now. 

The way to prevent understanding of the Ukraine war is to suppress its history.

A cartoon version says the conflict began in February 2022 when Vladimir Putin woke up one morning and decided to invade Ukraine.

There was no other cause, according to this version, other than unprovoked, Russian aggression against an innocent country.

Please use this short, historical guide to share with people who still flip through the funny pages trying to figure out what’s going on in Ukraine.  

The mainstream account is like opening a novel in the middle of the book to read a random chapter as though it’s the beginning of the story.

Thirty years from now historians will write of the context of the Ukraine war: the coup, the attack on Donbass, NATO expansion, rejection of Russian treaty proposals — without being called Putin puppets. It will be the same way historians write of the Versailles Treaty as a cause of Nazism and WWII, but aren’t called Nazi-sympathizers.

Providing context is taboo while the war continues in Ukraine, as it would have been during WWII. Journalists have to get with the program of war propaganda while the war continues. Long after the war, historians are free to sift through the facts. 

Journalists are clearly not afforded the same liberties as historians.

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On June 5th, 2023 the unelected officials at the World Health Organization (WHO) in partnership with the unelected officials at the European Commission (EC), part of the governing body of the European Union (EU), unveiled plans for a digital health certificate program. 

The press release declares,

“WHO will take up the European Union (EU) system of digital COVID-19 certification to establish a global system that will help facilitate global mobility and protect citizens across the world from on-going and future health threats, including pandemics.” 

The report goes on to state,

“This is the first building block of the WHO Global Digital Health Certification Network (GDHCN) that will develop a wide range of digital products to deliver better health for all.”

The initial platform of the global WHO digital surveillance system is set to become operational in June 2023, based on the EU’s already existing Digital Covid Certificate, which was sold under the pretense of, “mak[ing] it easier for you to travel safely through the EU by showing that you have been vaccinated, had a negative test result or recovered from COVID-19.”

The plan is for this digitized vaccine passport system to be rolled into the GDHCN, run by the WHO, and amplified to include, “a wide range of digital products to deliver better health for all.” 

The WHO’s global vaccine passport system is ultimately positioned to penetrate into the domain of all vaccinations, “a staged approach to cover additional use cases,” including the “digitisation of the International Certificate of Vaccination or Prophylaxis.”

Placed in the context of the recently proposed Pandemic Treaty and the WHO’s pursuit of changes to International Health Regulation (IHR) amendments, each of which strengthens the WHO’s authority, this latest development can only be seen as another power grab to set up the WHO as global enforcer and sole arbiter of public health.

While early warnings about vaccine passports associated with the Covid Crisis were dismissed as crackpot theories, we are witnessing, with the introduction of the WHO digital health certificate, how these predictions are being forged into reality.

Given who finances (here, here, and here and manages) the World Health Organization it would be illogical to conclude that these digitized “health certificates” are genuinely designed to ‘make our lives easier.’

A reasoned analysis could conclude that the introduction of this digitized “health passport” would allow the WHO to essentially erect a global biosafety governance system that would track private data and behavior and eliminate health privacy – and freedom – for all people.

Make no mistake, beneath the noble sounding verbiage this is another attempt by unelected, unaccountable technocrats and health bureaucrats to implement their dystopian global biosecurity state, in other words, an open air digital prison for those who do not accede to public health dictates.

The implications of this global vaccine certification and digitized control system cannot be ignored.This represents an attack on everyone’s bodily autonomy while erasing national sovereignty and human rights.

This must be stopped.

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a

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“She said in this conversation, “Yats is the guy!” And imagine that this was not a leaked conversation between Ms. Nuland and Mr. Pyatt, but that this was a conversation that was conducted in 2016 during the Trump-Clinton electoral contest…and in the course of that conversation, Mr Lavrov says, “Trump is the guy!” And then Trump becomes the President of the United States. Would anybody in Congress deny for one second that there had been a coup?” – Dimitri Lascaris, from this week’s interview.

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In the last few days, we are hearing about the prospect of Russia blowing up the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant which they secured early in the war, similarly to the way they supposedly blew up the  Kakhovka Dam in southern Ukraine in mid-June. Russia, of course denies the charges and counters that the culprit in both instances is Ukraine itself. However, the narrative should the explosion happen by either side would cause radioactive damage to the surrounding area.

As writer Joachim Hagopian explains in a recent article:

“The westward wind could potentially carry the lethal radioactive fallout straight into NATO countries Poland, the Baltic States and Germany. At this point, Article 5 of NATO would then immediately go into effect, and Zelensky will have successfully pulled the trigger giving NATO/US/West excuse to enter a nuclear world war against Russia.” [1]

Even with the most significant nuclear scare in history off the table, the casualties are piling up, both Russian and Ukrainian.

But mainstream media seems to speak about the conflict, not in brutal and honest relayers of the war in all its contradictions and complexities, and more one-sided and up-lifting for “our” friends and allies on the ground fighting. Much like the coach in a movie where the boxer is losing and needs an uplifting speech by his coach (cue Rocky music!)

The readers of Global Research, and listeners of Global Research News Hour definitely want the truth in all its brutality ahead of comforting fictional narratives and we have done our best to bring some of those dissident thinkers to the attention of audiences around the world.

But what of the efforts by individuals who go the extra length to actually visit the Russian State and strike up dialogues in everyone’s common interest? This was indeed the task of sitting diplomats. Prime Minister Trudeau is suspiciously, to cite a saying frequently alleged to originating from Winston Churchill, too pre-occupied in shouting “War! War!” to engage in “Jaw! Jaw!”[2][3]

But alternative voices in Canada would take up the challenge of de-escalating tensions through such mechanisms, which is why today, we will be spending the entire hour listening to the latest individual seeking to see the conflict through the eyes of our “enemy.” His name is Dimitri Lascaris.

Dimitri Lascaris is a lawyer who has been practicing for about three decades. He is also a journalist and an activist. He felt obligated to do whatever he could to replace what he saw as known falsehoods in the mainstream media outlets with the more accurate depictions he came to after nearly a year of researching. What’s more, he would use his abilities to connect the people of Russia with the people in Canada and work toward preventing the battle in Ukraine to escalate into the long-dreaded nuclear extinction moment.

Dimitri toured Russia and Crimea for 4 weeks in April. He was completely self financed not having received a dime (or ruble) from the State coffers. When he returned to Canada, he went speaking across 12 cities in Canada to raise in awareness about what he saw and where the path to peace might lie. The Global Research News Hour was delighted to record his speech in Winnipeg, delivered on the 22nd of June.

He has become a bit of a target throughout the campaign, although in large part, he still managed to meet Canadians.

Dimitri Lascaris is a lawyer, a journalist and an activist. From 2004 to 2016 he was a member of Canada’s leading class action law firm Siskinds LLP. He now works pro-bono legal cases. In 2020, he ran for the leadership of the Green Party of Canada and placed second with  45.5% of the membership.

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The Global Research News Hour airs every Friday at 1pm CT on CKUW 95.9FM out of the University of Winnipeg. The programme is also podcast at globalresearch.ca .

Other stations airing the show:

CIXX 106.9 FM, broadcasting from Fanshawe College in London, Ontario. It airs Sundays at 6am.

WZBC 90.3 FM in Newton Massachusetts is Boston College Radio and broadcasts to the greater Boston area. The Global Research News Hour airs during Truth and Justice Radio which starts Sunday at 6am.

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Caper Radio CJBU 107.3FM in Sydney, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia airs the Global Research News Hour starting Wednesday afternoon from 3-4pm.

Cowichan Valley Community Radio CICV 98.7 FM serving the Cowichan Lake area of Vancouver Island, BC airs the program Thursdays at 9am pacific time.

Notes:

1. https://jameshfetzer.org/2023/07/joachim-hagopian-happy-july-fourth-it-could-be-the-last/
2. Allan Woods (Feb. 19, 2022), ‘Canada supports Ukraine, but why aren’t we talking to Russia?’, The Toronto Star; https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2022/02/19/canada-supports-ukraine-but-why-arent-we-talking-to-russia.html
3. Richard Norton-Taylor (Sept 10, 2015), ‘Jaw-jaw is better than war-war’, The Guardian; https://www.theguardian.com/news/defence-and-security-blog/2015/sep/10/jaw-jaw-is-better-than-war-war

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Climate change negotiations and debates are characterised by some curious features. For one, there are interminable stretches of discussion that never seem to feature the agents of cause. Chatter about horrendous fires, toxic smoke, and environmental degradation often skirts around the culprit of anthropogenic change, so ably aided by fossil fuels.

With the fossil fuel industries of so many countries buried in the treaty back cover and the subtext, their existence continues to thrive. Oil, coal and gas projects are being approved in an almost schizoid manner even as the trendily minded cosy up to the message of renewable energy. As the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative notes,

“While the Paris Agreement set a crucial global climate target, many governments – including self-proclaimed climate leaders – have continued to approve new coal, oil, and gas projects even though burning the world’s current fossil fuel reserves would result in seven times more emissions than what is compatible with keeping warming below 1.5°C.”

Emblematic of this are such projects as the expansion of Canada’s Trans Mountain Pipeline, which has seen government money poured into a project private investment simply would not back. In 2018, when the private company Kinder Morgan sought to cancel the initiative due to prohibitive costs, the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau acquired the pipeline for C$4.5 billion.

Continued opposition from the indigenous Secwepemc and environmental activists has been rebuffed, even as Trudeau boasts of his green credentials on the world stage. To quote Angela V. Carter, a political scientist based at the University of Waterloo, “There’s two versions of reality here, and they’re not aligned.” In her view, “one of two things is going to happen. We’re either blowing well past 1.5 degrees or we’re aligning actions to meet [climate targets]. We can’t have it both ways.”

In a peculiar twist of policy, one deservedly seen as ironic, moronic and ghoulish, governments are aiding – dare one even say cuddling? – the fossil fuel industry through massive subsidies and funding. In this exercise of offering a pillow and tea-party for the environmental assassin, The Economist, not exactly a leftwing bomb thrower, came to a staggering figure: the industry, according to 2019 figures, was receiving annual subsidies to the tune of to $427 billion. In Australia alone, both state and federal governments underwrote fossil fuels to the value of A$11.6 billion in 2021/22.

Much like Canada, Australia faces the expansive power of a fossil fuel lobby which sees no interest in surrendering its influence. It is no exaggeration to say that this lobby has destroyed the careers of several prime ministers, with the hope of doing away with a few more.

The Commonwealth Department of Industry, Science and Resources 2022 report from the Office of the Chief Economist avoids mentioning climate change altogether. Emissions are only mentioned from the perspective of projected reductions, be they in terms of steel production or the iron ore supply chain. And in a curious twist, “new energy metals” such as nickel, cobalt and lithium are praised in the reduction effort, focused as they are on the production of battery cathode precursors and such conserving devices.

Despite the Albanese government being, on paper, a more ecologically sound one than its predecessor, little seems to have changed in the stunted Federal Environment portfolio. From that office, coal mine approvals or expansions have been issued like the enthusiastic emissions they will cause. The Australia Institute has found, much to its horror, that there are 26 additional proposals for new or expanded coal mines on the books pending federal government approval. To these can already be added two approvals since May 2022. “Approving 28 new coal mines,” warns the thinktank, “and the 12.6 billion tonnes of emissions they would cause, is incompatible with limiting dangerous climate change.”

In March, the Australia Institute’s chief economist, Richard Denniss, noted no fewer than 116 new coal, oil and gas projects awaiting in the approvals pipeline. Were these to go ahead, an extra 1.4 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases would make their way into the atmosphere on an annual basis by 2030. This would be almost three times Australia’s domestic emissions in 2021-2, which came to 490 million tonnes. “That’s the equivalent,” writes Denniss, “of starting up 215 new coal power stations, based on the average emissions of Australia’s current existing coal power stations.”

This is further complicated by the accounting regime for such production. The emissions framework as it stands tends to consider onshore emissions, not what happens at the export destination. Most of Australia’s oil, coal and gas will find their way into foreign markets, making something of a nonsense of the containment thesis on fossil fuels.

Any number of wise words issuing from such bodies as Australia’s Climate Change Council only serve to highlight the chasm between sagacious warnings and the ruthless continuation of the status quo. Initiatives such as free rooftop solar, pumped hydro, storage batteries and electric vehicle charging stations will mean little till the deep-seated influence of the fossil fuel lobby is wound back in the corridors of government power.

For any genuine change to take place, such initiatives as nailing down a non-proliferating fossil fuels regime, would have to take place. Till that happens, hope will have to rest in the hands of eager child litigants, the legal instincts of First Nations peoples, and an assortment of brief-wielding allies concerned about the genuine risks of harm that will arise from catastrophic climate change.  To the courts they have gone, as many others will go. But as this takes place, fossil fuel proliferation continues.

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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He currently lectures at RMIT University. He is a regular contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]

Featured image is from Greenpeace

Despite Warnings, IAEA Approves Japan Release Plan for Contaminated Fukushima Water

By Jon Queally, July 06, 2023

Despite years of protest and warnings from environmentalists, the United Nation’s nuclear watchdog on Tuesday approved a plan by Japan to release tens of millions of gallons of water from the destroyed Fukushima nuclear power plant into the ocean.

Blood Clots: Major Problem with Pfizer & Moderna COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines. Some Are Lucky to Survive Like NFL Hall of Famer Deion Sanders

By Dr. William Makis, July 06, 2023

WHO’s VigiAccess database lists 5.1 million adverse reactions to COVID-19 vaccines, including: 29751 Pulmonary Embolism, 20251 thrombosis, 20017 DVT, 18077 cerebrovascular accident, 9695 MI, 5308 Ischemic stroke, 4807 cerebral infarction, 3255 SVT, 2495 cerebral venous sinus thrombosis, 2204 venous thrombosis limb.

Circle the Wagons: The Government Is on the Warpath

By John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead, July 06, 2023

Compare the following list of “don’ts” the government is prohibited from doing with the growing list of abuses to which “we the people” are subjected on a daily basis, and you will find that we have reached a state of crisis wherein the government is routinely breaking the law and violating its contractual obligations. 

Washington-based Think Tank: Russia Unlikely to Ever Run Out of Missiles

By Drago Bosnic, July 05, 2023

After Moscow’s long-range and tactical aviation, as well as naval and ground-based units, spent the entire special military operation (SMO) launching high-precision strikes by using advanced PGMs that quite literally nobody else has (the United States included), the mainstream propaganda machine simply had to admit something was seriously off with their assessment of Russia’s technological and industrial capacity.

Like Halliburton in Iraq, BlackRock to Rake in a Trillion, “Rebuilding the Destruction” Which They Financed in Ukraine

By Matt Agorist, July 05, 2023

In the midst of a brutal conflict in Ukraine, two of the world’s financial titans, BlackRock and JPMorgan Chase, are seemingly leading the charge in an ostensible humanitarian effort. They are helping to establish the Ukraine Development Fund, a reconstruction bank designed to steer public seed capital into projects that can attract hundreds of billions of dollars in private investment.

Beyond Insanity: White House Wants to Block Sunlight to Save Planet From ‘Global Warming’

By Zero Hedge, July 05, 2023

Despite the European Commission’s recent warning that large-scale interventions such as solar engineering to reverse ‘climate change’ could have “unintended consequences,” the White House published a new report Friday indicating that the Biden administration wants to manipulate planetary systems to block the sunlight to save the planet.

Could China Strike First?

By Eric Margolis, July 05, 2023

Ellsberg revealed that in the event of war, the US government intended to hit all of China’s major cities and ports with nuclear weapons. This plan has particular resonance today as Communist China and the United States edge ever closer to a major war over Taiwan and the South China Sea.

‘The gravity of the situation cannot be understated’: An Eyewitness Account From the Israeli Assault on Jenin

By Mustafa Sheta, July 05, 2023

I stand before you to share my personal account of the events that unfolded in Jenin refugee camp early this morning. The Israeli military operation commenced with an aggressive assault on sites believed to be affiliated with the Palestinian resistance. They claimed these locations as their targets, launching three missiles that resulted in the loss of innocent lives and left many wounded.

Dangerous Crossroads: The Zaporozhiya Nuclear Plant, Zelenskiy’s Next Simulacra? Impending “False Flag”

By Dr. Gordon M. Hahn, July 05, 2023

It appears almost certain that Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskiy and his generals, rather than Russian President Vladimir Putin and his, are considering and preparing a false flag nuclear provocation at the Zaporozhiya nuclear power plant (ZNPP) set for July 7-9 to frame NATO summit and perhaps also to provide political cover for a Polish-Baltic republic move of forces into western Ukraine.

West Frustrated by Ukrainian Military Advancing Only “in Metres, Rather Than Kilometres”

By Ahmed Adel, July 05, 2023

Admiral Rob Bauer, head of the NATO Military Committee, said deliveries of F-16 fighter jets to Kiev were postponed until the counteroffensive was completed. This represents a major blow to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who has been pleading with NATO members to provide fighter jets, including F-16s, and all while his military advances, supposedly, in only metres instead of kilometres.

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Blood clots have been a major problem with all COVID-19 vaccines, including Pfizer and Moderna.

I have written several substack articles about those who have died from clots:

• April 30, 2023 – Blood clots – pulmonary emboli in young women – 14 cases
• April 11, 2023 – Strokes are skyrocketing in young people
• March 6, 2023 – Blood clots – young people having amputations

Those who have survived blood clots after COVID-19 vaccines are lucky to be alive but most have had a very difficult course.

June 23, 2023 – 55 year old NFL Hall of Famer and Colorado Buffaloes head coach Deion Sanders has struggled with blood clots in legs that resulted in 2 toes amputated. He recently had surgery to remove clots and avoid further amputation (click here)

July 1, 2023 – 45 yo actor Tyler Labine is recovering from a stomach ache that “turns out to be a potentially fatal blood clot in your intestines and liver and you have to spend the next 3 days in the hospital trying not to die” (he was fully COVID-19 vaccinated)

June 6, 2023 – Elizabethton, Tennessee – Larry Bowers (works at James H. Quillen VA Medical Center) had clots removed from his leg. He is fully COVID-19 vaccinated and believes they were caused by COVID-19, not the vaccines.

May 25, 2023 – Hartford, CT – Kristen Ann Mallinson, a business major, had Pfizer COVID-19 mRNA vaccines with 3 boosters. She was hospitalized 11 days with blood clots in lungs and heart, with a 6” blood clot in the heart (picture below). She regrets getting vaccines (click here)

May 21, 2022 – Brisbane, Australia – 26 yo Dani Duchatel died suddenly in front of her family while playing cards after dinner. Doctors believe a blood clot from a recent operation on her leg travelled to her lung causing a pulmonary embolism. Nonsense. (click here)

Feb. 1, 2023 – Willington, UK – 20 year old footballer Levi Dewey went to hospital with flu symptoms, then suffered severe sepsis and had to have both legs amputated after suffering multiple organ failure (click here)

Jan. 1, 2023 – UK Piano Teacher Julianna Bransden suffered catastrophic injuries after COVID-19 vaccines (click here)

Julianna was fully COVID-19 vaccinated. On Dec. 23, 2022 she developed flu like symptoms and on Jan. 1, 2023 she had two cardiac arrests, went into septic shock, multiple systemic organ failure, needing full life support.

She was diagnosed with sepsis resulting from an aggressive form of pneumonia. After weeks of fighting, she had to undergo surgery to amputate both of her legs below the knee and will lose most of her fingers.

Oct. 24, 2022 – 29 year old Krystina Pacheco suffered toxic shock syndrome after giving birth to her daughter on Oct. 24, 2022, resulting in the amputation of her hands and feet days later.

Dec. 2021 – 40 year old Twitter user regrets getting COVID-19 vaccines (click here)

Nov. 2021 – Bryant, AR – Brandy Byrd-Brazeale, a 5th grade teacher took two Pfizer mRNA vaccines hesitantly and 2 months later developed DVT in her right leg which ultimately led to a pulmonary embolism in her right lung (click here)

April 2021 – Sherri Whiting is a licensed realtor. A friend of hers got a Moderna shot and 2 weeks later they thought she was having a stroke. It was a blood clot that went from her elbow to her shoulder (click here)

My Take…

All COVID-19 vaccines are thrombogenic (cause blood clots): Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, J&J. The latter two were taken off the market for causing blood clots.

WHO’s VigiAccess database lists 5.1 million adverse reactions to COVID-19 vaccines, including: 29751 Pulmonary Embolism, 20251 thrombosis, 20017 DVT, 18077 cerebrovascular accident, 9695 MI, 5308 Ischemic stroke, 4807 cerebral infarction, 3255 SVT, 2495 cerebral venous sinus thrombosis, 2204 venous thrombosis limb

That’s over 100,000 reported blood clot events in one adverse event reporting system. Apply an under-reporting factor of 10x or 100x and that means there are between 1 million and 10 million COVID-19 vaccinated people with blood clots.

Some of them fatal.

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Dr. William Makis is a Canadian physician with expertise in Radiology, Oncology and Immunology. Governor General’s Medal, University of Toronto Scholar. Author of 100+ peer-reviewed medical publications.

Featured image is from COVID Intel

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***

“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.”—Harry S. Truman

How many Americans have actually bothered to read the Constitution, let alone the first ten amendments to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights (a quick read at 462 words)?

Take a few minutes and read those words for yourself—rather than having some court or politician translate them for you—and you will be under no illusion about where to draw the line when it comes to speaking your mind, criticizing your government, defending what is yours, doing whatever you want on your own property, and keeping the government’s nose out of your private affairs.

In an age of overcriminalization, where the average citizen unknowingly commits three crimes a day, and even the most mundane activities such as fishing and gardening are regulated, government officials are constantly telling Americans what not to do.

Yet it was not always this way.

It used to be “we the people” giving the orders, telling the government what it could and could not do. Indeed, the three words used most frequently throughout the Bill of Rights in regards to the government are “no,” “not” and “nor.”

Compare the following list of “don’ts” the government is prohibited from doing with the growing list of abuses to which “we the people” are subjected on a daily basis, and you will find that we have reached a state of crisis wherein the government is routinely breaking the law and violating its contractual obligations. 

For instance, the government is NOT allowed to restrict free speech, press, assembly or the citizenry’s ability to protest and correct government wrongdoing. Nevertheless, the government continues to prosecute whistleblowers, persecute journalists, criminalize expressive activities, crack down on large gatherings of citizens mobilizing to voice their discontent with government policies, and insulate itself and its agents from any charges of wrongdoing (or what the courts refer to as “qualified immunity”).

The government may NOT infringe on a citizen’s right to defend himself. Nevertheless, in many states, it’s against the law to carry a concealed weapon (gun, knife or even pepper spray), and the average citizen is permitted little self-defense against militarized police officers who shoot first and ask questions later.

The government may NOT enter or occupy a citizen’s house without his consent (the quartering of soldiers). Nevertheless, government soldiers (i.e., militarized police) carry out more than 80,000 no-knock raids on private homes every year, while maiming children, killing dogs and shooting citizens.

The government may NOT carry out unreasonable searches and seizures on the citizenry or their possessions, NOR can government officials issue warrants without some evidence of wrongdoing (probable cause). Unfortunately, what is unreasonable to the average American is completely reasonable to a government agent, for whom the ends justify the means. In such a climate, we have no protection against roadside strip searches, blood draws, DNA collection, SWAT team raids, surveillance or any other privacy-stripping indignity to which the government chooses to subject us.

The government is NOT to deprive anyone of life, liberty or property without due process. Nevertheless, the government continues to incarcerate tens of thousands of Americans whose greatest crime is being poor and not white. The same goes for those who are put to death, some erroneously, by a system weighted in favor of class and wealth.

The government may NOT take private property for public use without just compensation. Nevertheless, under the guise of the “greater public interest,” the government often hides behind eminent domain laws in order to allow megacorporations to tear down homes occupied by less prosperous citizens in order to build high-priced resorts and shopping malls.

Government agents may NOT force a citizen to testify against himself. Yet what is the government’s extensive surveillance network that spies on all of our communications but a thinly veiled attempt at using our own words against us?

The government is NOT permitted to claim any powers that are not expressly granted to them by the Constitution. This prohibition has become downright laughable as the government continues to claim for itself every authority that serves to swell its coffers, cement its dominion, and expand its reach.

Despite what some special interest groups have suggested to the contrary, the problems we’re experiencing today did not arise because the Constitution has outlived its usefulness or become irrelevant, nor will they be solved by a convention of states or a ratification of the Constitution.

No, the problem goes far deeper.

It can be traced back to the point at which “we the people” were overthrown as the center of the government. As a result, our supremacy has been undone, our authority undermined, and our experiment in democratic self-governance left in ruins.

No longer are we the rulers of this land. We have long since been deposed and dethroned, replaced by corporate figureheads with no regard for our sovereignty, no thought for our happiness, and no respect for our rights.

In other words, without our say-so and lacking any mandate, the point of view of the Constitution has been shifted from “we the people” to “we the government.” Our taxpayer-funded employees—our appointed servants—have stopped looking upon us as their superiors and started viewing as their inferiors.

Unfortunately, we’ve gotten so used to being dictated to by government agents, bureaucrats and militarized police alike that we’ve forgotten that WE are supposed to be the ones calling the shots and determining what is just, reasonable and necessary.

Then again, we’re not the only ones guilty of forgetting that the government was established to serve us as well as obey us. Every branch of government, from the Executive to the Judicial and Legislative, seems to be suffering this same form of amnesia. Certainly, when government programs are interpreted from the government’s point of view (i.e., the courts and legislatures), there is little the government CANNOT do in its quest for power and control.

We’ve been so brainwashed and indoctrinated into believing that the government is actually looking out for our best interests, when in fact the only compelling interesting driving government programs is maintain power and control by taking away our money and control. This vital truth, that the government exists for our benefit and operates at our behest, seems to have been lost in translation over two centuries dominated by government expansion, endless wars and centralized federal power.

Have you ever wondered why the Constitution begins with those three words “we the people”? It was intended to be a powerful reminder that everything flows from the citizenry. We the people are the center of the government and the source of its power. That “we” is crucial because it reminds us that there is power and safety in numbers, provided we stand united. We can accomplish nothing alone.

This is the underlying lesson of the Constitution, which outlines the duties and responsibilities of government. It was a mutual agreement formed by early Americans in order to ensure that when problems arose, they could address them together.

It’s like the wagon trains of the Old West, comprised of individual groups of pioneers. They rarely ventured out alone but instead traveled as convoys. And when faced with a threat, these early Americans formed their wagons into a tight circle in order to defend against invaders. In doing so, they presented a unified front and provided protection against an outside attack.

In much the same way, the Constitution was intended to work as an institutionalized version of the wagon circle, serving as a communal shield against those who would harm us.

Unfortunately, we have been ousted from that protected circle, left to fend for ourselves in the wilderness that is the American frontier today. Those who did the ousting—the courts, the politicians, and the corporations—have since replaced us with yes-men, shills who dance to the tune of an elite ruling class. In doing so, they have set themselves as the central source of power and the arbiters of what is just and reasonable.

Once again, we’re forced to navigate hostile terrain, unsure of how to protect ourselves and our loved ones from militarized police, weaponized drones, fusion centers, Stingray devices, SWAT team raids, the ongoing military drills on American soil, the government stockpiling of ammunition, the erection of mass detention centers across the country, and all other manner of abuses.

Read the smoke signals, and the warning is clear: the government is on the warpath.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if we are to have any hope of surviving whatever is coming at us, it’s time to circle the wagons, folks.

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This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at [email protected].

Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

They are regular contributors to Global Research.

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Introductory Note

Below is the Financial Times article which documents how BlackRock JPMorgan are “helping” Ukraine.

What is really at stake is the economic stranglehold of an entire country.

BlackRock, which is the World’s largest portfolio investment company together with JPMorgan have  come to the rescue of Ukraine. They are slated to set up the Ukraine Reconstruction Bank.

The stated objective is “to attract billions of dollars in private investment to assist rebuilding projects in a war-torn country”. (FT, June 19, 2023, see text below)

According to Colin Todhunter:

“… BlackRock, JP Morgan and private investors, aim to profit from the country’s reconstruction along with 400 global companies, including Citi, Sanofi and Philips. … JP Morgan’s Stefan Weiler sees a “tremendous opportunity” for private investors. (Colin Todhunter, Global Research June 28, 2023)

The Kiev Neo-Nazi regime is a partner in this endeavour. War is Good for Business. The greater the destruction, the greater the stranglehold on Ukraine by “private investors”. 

For a critical analysis see: 

How Blackrock Investment Fund Triggered the Global Energy Crisis

By F. William Engdahl, July 02, 2023

The NeoCons’ Proxy War “Against Ukraine”: Nuclear War is On the Table. The Privatization of Ukraine

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, July 03, 2023

A Hard-Edged Rock: Waging Economic Warfare on Humanity

By Colin Todhunter, March 12, 2023

Like Halliburton in Iraq, BlackRock to Rake in a Trillion, “Rebuilding the Destruction” which They Financed in Ukraine

By Matt Agorist, July 03, 2023

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, July 5, 2023

 

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BlackRock and JPMorgan Chase are helping the Ukrainian government set up a reconstruction bank to steer public seed capital into rebuilding projects that can attract hundreds of billions of dollars in private investment.

The Ukraine Development Fund remains in the planning stages and is not expected to fully launch until the end of hostilities with Russia. But investors will have a preview this week at a London conference co-hosted by the British and Ukrainian governments.

“So many of today’s long-term challenges are best addressed through blended finance and this is one. You need these vehicles to mobilise capital at scale,” said BlackRock vice-chair Philipp Hildebrand, who will be discussing the work on Wednesday.

The World Bank estimated in March(opens a new window) that Ukraine would need $411bn to rebuild after the war, and recent Russian attacks have driven that figure higher.

The Kyiv government engaged BlackRock’s consulting arm in November to determine how best to attract that kind of capital, and then added JPMorgan in February. Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced last month that the country was working with the two financial groups and consultants at McKinsey.

No formal fundraising target has been set but people familiar with the discussions say the fund is seeking to raise low-cost capital from governments, donors and international financial institutions and leverage it to attract between five and 10 times as much private investment.

BlackRock and JPMorgan are donating their services, although the work will give them an early look at possible investments in the country. The assignment also deepens JPMorgan’s relationship with a longstanding client. The bank has helped Ukraine raise more than $25bn in sovereign debt since 2010 and led the country’s $20bn debt restructuring last year.

Click here to read the full article.

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***

For approximately a year and a half, we have been listening to tall tales about Russia running out of munitions of various kinds due to its supposed “inability” to produce advanced weapons, particularly long-range missiles and other sorts of PGMs (precision-guided munitions). According to mainstream propaganda, Moscow is allegedly “so desperate” that it had to “arm” its soldiers with shovels and resort to the expropriation of washing machines, smartphones, laptops and other devices that contain microchips in order to maintain production. Such ludicrous claims would never be accepted by anyone remotely familiar with how advanced military technologies work.

However, they are an important segment of the rabidly Russophobic infowar that aims to present the Eurasian giant as supposedly “technologically backward”. And yet,  after Moscow’s long-range and tactical aviation, as well as naval and ground-based units, spent the entire special military operation (SMO) launching high-precision strikes by using advanced PGMs that quite literally nobody else has (the United States included), the mainstream propaganda machine simply had to admit something was seriously off with their assessment of Russia’s technological and industrial capacity. The latter should have been destroyed by Western sanctions close to a year and a half ago.

And yet, it’s still standing. The answer as to why this is the case was recently given by CSIS (Center for Strategic and International Studies), a Washington DC-based think tank that is among the most prominent ones in the US. According to their assessment, Moscow is extremely unlikely to run out of PGMs and other long-range high-precision weapons, either for itself or its numerous export customers. Somewhat surprisingly, with no ambiguity or sugarcoating, Ian Williams, a Fellow of the International Security Program and Deputy Director of the Missile Defense Project at CSIS, has made it perfectly clear that it would be “unrealistic to expect Russia to ever run out of missiles”.

The author further notes that Moscow will be able to continue building long-range PGMs, which will enable it to sustain constant long-range strike capability, “despite sanctions and export restrictions”. And while the CSIS report parroted the usual propaganda narratives about Russia, such as that its military supposedly “regularly attacked a range of military and civilian targets throughout Ukraine with costly, long-range missiles”, its findings should certainly not be dismissed. It admitted that numerous weapons experts found conclusive evidence of recently manufactured Russian cruise missiles and other PGMs that have been used in the SMO.

Still, once again, the US think tank obviously didn’t want to let another opportunity to fight the infowar go to waste, so it claims that this supposedly “indicates that Russia’s arsenal has become so depleted that weapons are being used in the conflict just a few months after manufacturing”. And while most US and other Western high-ranking officials insisted that “rebuilding the Russian stockpile will be a lot harder” due to sanctions, particularly when it comes to acquiring microchips, the latest CSIS report disproves such claims, with the author complaining that export restrictions didn’t have the desired effect on Russian missile production.

“There is no one-off fix for this problem. At most, sanctions and export controls can limit the quantity and quality of strike assets Russia can acquire,” the report admits while simultaneously parroting the regular propaganda narrative. The author then continues with the mental gymnastics by trying to “rationalize” the said propaganda narrative in line with the actual situation on the battlefield, claiming that “it’s likely Russia swiftly used up the portion of the long-range missiles that it had originally designated for the SMO”. However, he admits that “despite this, Russia continued to launch missiles against Ukraine, perhaps by withdrawing munitions from other theaters of operation”, without specifying which ones.

The report concedes that Russia continued to produce missiles during the SMO and that the evidence suggests that the majority (or maybe even all) of cruise missiles in its current arsenal were made after the SMO started. Still, the author once again insists that the supposed “depletion” of pre-SMO stocks “has altered the composition of modern Russian strike salvos” and that “Russian missile attacks have shifted from high-end missile systems like cruise missiles towards less effective, less expensive low-end systems like ‘Shahed-136/Geranium 2’ kamikaze drones”.

However, the author fails to accept the fact that these systems are simply much more cost-effective, which is why they’re being used in the first place. The report admits that despite export restrictions, particularly on crucial microelectronic components, Russia has continued manufacturing advanced long-range missiles and PGMs. Still, the author insists this is because Russia is supposedly “acquiring these Western-produced components via friendly third parties”. According to the report, the result is that “Russia will continue having the capacity to build missiles and drones and will continue to use them” and that “this reality will not change until the war ends”.

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Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.

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***

Kiev continues to promote terrorist maneuvers against civilian targets in the undisputed territory of the Russian Federation. On July 4, Moscow was the target of a new Ukrainian incursion with military drones hitting a major local airport. Russian forces were able to neutralize the terrorist threat in time to avoid disaster, however, there is evidence that Kiev received Western support to carry out the operation, which seriously increases the chances of escalation in the conflict.

On July 4, Ukraine launched an attack with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) against Vnukovo International Airport in Moscow. Five Ukrainian drones reached the area of the airport but were neutralized without causing damage. Four UAVs were shot down by Russian anti-aircraft defense and one was diverted by techniques of electronic warfare.

The airport’s activities were suspended for a few hours in the morning due to security restrictions, but they were quickly resumed after the destruction of enemy UAVs, having virtually no impact in the flights’ schedule. It was reported by the authorities that the downed drones would have dropped in the regions of Kubinka, Valuyevo and Krivosheevo.

The raid was considered a terrorist action by Russian officials. Spokesmen for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs also pointed out that the complex nature of the operation makes clear the existence of Western aid. The US and other NATO members have not only provided Kiev with UAVs, but also extensive training in the use of these equipment, as well as intelligence information about the targets of the attacks and satellite images, which have facilitated the regime’s terrorist plans. For this reason, Russia considered NATO “complicit” in the July 4 attack.

Kiev, however, denied having any role in the incident. Indeed, denying responsibility in terrorist attacks has already become a common practice of the regime. Kiev’s modus operandi is to deny involvement immediately after cases and sometime later to make public statements that suggest responsibility. This was what happened, for example, in the case of the murder of Daria Dugina, in August 2022. At the time, Kiev denied involvement in the death, but months later the Ukrainian military intelligence chief General Kirill Budanov stated that his units would “keep killing Russians anywhere on the face of this world”, suggesting that Kiev was behind cases like the one of Daria.

This strategy of “postponing” and “suggesting without confirming” responsibility for the attacks helps the Kiev regime to maintain its image among Western public opinion. The mainstream media also play an important role in this game, as they work in strong disinformation campaigns, accusing Moscow of launching “false flags” to blame Ukraine. As citizens of western countries do not have access to Russian and pro-Russian media due to censorship, the tendency is for them to believe what is said by the big outlets, which leads them to endorse the support that their countries give to Ukraine.

However, the recent history of Kiev’s terrorist operations makes it very clear that there is Ukrainian responsibility for these assaults. The July 4 drones were just the latest in a huge wave of Ukrainian terrorist incursions into the undisputed territory of the Russian Federation. In recent months, neo-Nazi forces have launched several strikes against demilitarized civilian areas both in border oblasts and in the capital Moscow.

The most serious cases of these incursions in Moscow were the assassination attempt on President Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin in May, and the attack on residential buildings in the city later in the same month. Both incidents made clear the terrorist nature of the maneuvers that Kiev has been promoting in its alleged “counteroffensive”.

In fact, given their absolute inability to reverse the military scenario of the conflict, the Ukrainian forces have been betting on terrorism as a combat tool to keep active their propaganda that a “counteroffensive” is taking place. The regime has not enough strength to promote a large mobilization of troops on the ground and expel Russian soldiers from the liberated zones. Then, attacks are made against demilitarized areas and Russian civilian infrastructure.

Terrorism, from a technical point of view in military sciences, is the most primitive and poorest form of combat, used by armies in severe crisis and organizations without great military potential. Ukraine has become exactly that: an exhausted army, with no real fighting strength, but which is also forced to keep fighting in order to attend the interests of its Western sponsors. With no chance of victory in the regular war, it adopts terrorism as a combat method.

The Moscow airport attack shows how the so-called Ukrainian “counteroffensive” has been just a prolonged wave of terrorist attacks. This tends to lead to an escalation in the conflict, since the Russian State already has enough arguments to consider the Ukrainian State a terrorist organization and all NATO countries as state sponsors of terror.

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Lucas Leiroz is a journalist, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, geopolitical consultant. You can follow Lucas on Twitter and Telegram.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.

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***

What are the English other than their excruciatingly worn class, kitted out with a code of manners revocable at an instant? A streak of traditional Englishness, as A. A. Gill wrote, stresses bullying. It made them great in the hope of making others small. A towering creature like Charles James Fox may well have added his worth to the abolition of slavery, but he was an inveterate, stinking bully. And there was much of this recently in the normally staid atmosphere at the so-called home of cricket, a game invented to preserve an Englishman’s sense of providence and eternity.

The occasion was the Second Test Match between the oldest of cricket rivals – England and Australia. As is customary, both teams make their way through what is known as the Long Room, an antiquated structure featuring portraits of the various flannel dressed figures that matter to the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC). Importantly, the teams doing combat go through the room, to be witnessed like dressed gladiators before battle. And close do these figures come to the members, who clap, encourage and tease as well as they might. Drinks, as usual, flow as the performance takes place.

But something happened on the field that was supposedly not to take place. In the final day’s session, with England making an ultimately doomed assault in an otherwise glorious run chase, Johnny Bairstow was stumped by Australia’s wicket keeper Alex Carey. The stumping did not breach any of the game’s rules; in truth, it was very much within them.

The English expressed lofty, even outraged disagreement. Bairstow, believing the ball dead and the over concluded (for those unfamiliar with this most eccentric, at sometimes soporific of games, an over is a phase of play featuring six deliveries). An opportunistic Carey thought otherwise, throwing the ball at the stumps. The regulation in question, Law 20.1.2, reads as follows: “The ball shall be considered to be dead when it is clear to the bowler’s end umpire that the fielding side and both batters at the wicket have ceased to regard it as in play.” (Read on reader, read on.)

The English team captain, Ben Stokes, every bit the Celtic, bat savaging berserker, whose own performance should be immortalised, got distracted. He moralised about what could only have been described as Bairstow’s lack of awareness, like a dodo caught off-guard: he would not have wanted to achieve victory “in that manner”. The English coach, Brendon McCullum, spoke on Bairstow’s befuddled behalf by insisting that, in his view, the umpires had declared the over finished. (They had not.) In the famed Long Room, the Australian team faced braying and baying and jostling from the gin-filled MCC members, leading to the suspension of a mere three members.

Far from the oxidised memories of these good members, who spend decades hoping to be admitted to the club, was the sharp, unforgiving conduct of England’s own hero, WG Grace, who ran out Australia’s Sammy Jones in the 1882 Oval Test match for straying from his crease. Like Bairstow, Jones had acted under a mistaken belief that the ball was dead. “I taught the lad a lesson,” Grace duly boasted. For these English, history happened to another version of themselves.

Things came to a pretty pass, however, when the British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, a multimillionaire merchant banker with an even wealthier wife, a rule breaker himself when Chancellor of the Exchequer regarding pandemic regulations, and a keen proponent of turning back boats and repelling asylum seekers, weighed in. “The prime minister agrees with Ben Stokes,” stated his spokesman. “He said he simply wouldn’t want to win a game in the manner Australia did.”

Such magnificently discordant conduct did not pass unnoticed in The Guardian. Here was a man, Marina Hyde caustically chided, “whose wife’s tax affairs were for so long within the letter of the law, but certainly not the spirit of it”. Nor had Sunak bothered to turn up to a vote on the standards committee’s report on former Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Partygate deceptions on holding gatherings that breached both the spirit and the letter of pandemic restrictions. “Is true leadership having a view on a stumping but not on whether it’s actually bad to lie to parliament? It is now.”

The broader reaction to the Bairstow stumping, from the sozzled, liver cured MCC members to the opportunistic, politically beleaguered Sunak, was also astonishing given the England and Wales Cricket Board own savage report instancing cases of racism, sexism, elitism and class prejudices.

Hardly cricket, you might say, made even starker by the treatment offered Australia’s own Pakistan-born batsman, Usman Khawaja. For his part, Khawaja took to a stoic mode, one that would have made many a cricketing Oxbridge figure proud. “The [Lord’s] crowd is great,” he told the Nine channel, “particularly the members are great, (but) some of the stuff coming out of the members’ mouths was really disappointing.”

The Australian reaction should not have surprised, and some of it came from well cured terrain, encyclopedically trained to England’s cricketing deficiencies. “If there’s a certain percentage of yahoos around then there’s a certain percentage of yahoos at Lord’s,” growled former Australian cricket captain, Ian Chappell. “Have they forgotten this is the same mob who had a fight during my brother’s centenary Test at Lord’s?”

Chappell has always been one of the game’s great cutting distillers, filtering the clogging cloaca to give us that most glorious clear image about the sporting figures he admires or detests. “I understand where Jonny Bairstow is coming from and I applaud what he’s trying to do, he’s trying to live up to the etiquette of the game which is when the bowler is ready to bowl, you’ve got to be ready to face up.” On this occasion, silly Bairstow did not do things “sensibly”.

In Australia, the conduct of the MCC members, and the English supporters more broadly, became a source of interest for the government. Might this ignite the impetus for Australia to become a republic? Maybe. But for just that rarest of moments, the Australian men’s cricket team, not always famed for their sportsmanlike disposition, could gaze at England’s runny complaints from the summit, and chortle about having a better understanding of the laws set by, of all bodies, the MCC itself.

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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He currently lectures at RMIT University. He is a regular contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]

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***

In the midst of a brutal conflict in Ukraine, two of the world’s financial titans, BlackRock and JPMorgan Chase, are seemingly leading the charge in an ostensible humanitarian effort. They are helping to establish the Ukraine Development Fund, a reconstruction bank designed to steer public seed capital into projects that can attract hundreds of billions of dollars in private investment. However, as those who are familiar with the words of Gen. Smedley Butler might ask, is this really an altruistic endeavor, or just another face of the long-standing war racket?

The echoes of Halliburton’s billion-dollar contracts during the Iraq war are deafening. These corporations, the backbone of the military-industrial complex, have found a golden opportunity in mass murder. The strategy is as lucrative as it is grotesque: profiteering from death, destruction, and then the subsequent taxpayer-funded reconstruction of the rubble they helped to create — all while maintaining a veneer of benevolence.

When we delve into the intricacies of the Ukraine Development Fund, the disturbing reality begins to surface. The World Bank estimates that Ukraine would need a whopping $411 billion to rebuild after the war. Here, BlackRock and JPMorgan Chase see a bountiful harvest. The roles they will play in leveraging taxpayer funds provide them with the potential for astronomical profits that would easily dwarf any of their alleged “donated” services.

The chilling parallels between Ukraine and the Iraq war are impossible to ignore. Halliburton reaped billions from no-bid contracts to rebuild what had been shattered by war. Tens of thousands of lives were lost, and a nation grappled with the fallout of a foreign intervention, while Halliburton and others cashed in on the chaos.

The more the dust of devastation settles over Ukraine, the clearer the profit margins become for BlackRock and their ilk. War and its aftermath create an ideal breeding ground for opportunistic corporate parasites. The brutal dance of destruction and reconstruction is a double-edged sword, inflicting deep wounds on humanity while filling the coffers of these corporations.

The financial giants’ noble facade of assisting Ukraine overlooks the brutal truth: the longer the war rages, the more they stand to gain. This harsh reality epitomizes Butler’s assertion that “war is a racket,” with the likes of BlackRock, JPMorgan, and the broader military-industrial complex reaping significant profits from the suffering and despair of millions.

What we witness here is not just war profiteering but the transformation of war itself into a highly profitable venture for corporations. These entities have a vested interest in prolonging conflict. The more extensive the destruction, the higher the potential for profit during the reconstruction phase. This dynamic serves to reinforce a system that feeds off conflict, creating an environment that incentivizes the perpetuation of war, despite its catastrophic human cost.

This perverse reality reveals the essence of Butler’s statement that “war is a racket.” The very entities that profit from war also stand to gain from the peace that follows. Until we break this destructive cycle, the suffering, the loss, and the injustice will continue to proliferate under the guise of reconstruction and recovery.

It is crucial to scrutinize the underlying motives of those who claim to assist in rebuilding war-torn nations. Are they truly benevolent benefactors committed to helping countries rise from the ashes, or are they shrewd racketeers capitalizing on the chaos of war? The answer, as history has shown us time and time again, is as evident as the grim aftermath of any battlefield — and it will never be found under a Ukraine flag emoji in your Twitter profile.

War is indeed a racket, and it is one that BlackRock, JPMorgan, and the like play with chilling efficiency. As Ukraine braces for a period of rebuilding, it is not just the physical scars that need attention but the underlying, systemic rot that feeds off such conflict.

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“Apparently the White House does not realize that every plant, every tree, every living thing including human beings need the sun to survive.” — Felicity Arbuthnot, Global Research, July 5, 2023

***

Despite the European Commission’s recent warning that large-scale interventions such as solar engineering to reverse ‘climate change’ could have “unintended consequences,” the White House published a new report Friday indicating that the Biden administration wants to manipulate planetary systems to block the sunlight to save the planet.

The congressionally mandated report released by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy shows the Biden administration is very eager to explore “geoengineering” methods to block sunlight because they allege the planet is burning and there’s an imminent climate crisis that will destroy the world.

“A program of research into the scientific and societal implications of solar radiation modification (SRM) would enable better-informed decisions about the potential risks and benefits of SRM as a component of climate policy, alongside the foundational elements of greenhouse gas emissions mitigation and adaptation,” the White House report said. 

The report continued, “SRM offers the possibility of cooling the planet significantly on a timescale of a few years.”  

In a statement, the White House said, “There are no plans underway to establish a comprehensive research program focused on solar radiation modification.”

There is no official government policy that was attached to the report. The administration noted Congress ordered the report.

The report was released one day after the European Commission outlined the potential risks and “unintended consequences” of manipulating planetary systems to fight global warming.

The commission warned:

In the context of accelerated global warming, deliberate large-scale intervention in the Earth’s natural systems (referred to as “geoengineering”), such as solar radiation modification, is attracting more attention. However, the risks, impacts and unintended consequences that these technologies pose are poorly understood, and necessary rules, procedures and institutions have not been developed. 

Some of these risks include:

These technologies introduce new risks to people and ecosystems, while they could also increase power imbalances between nations, spark conflicts and raises a myriad of ethical, legal, governance and political issues. 

Blocking the sun’s rays globally with artificial particles in the name of ‘climate change’ is gaining traction. However, there’s too much risk involved that could possibly harm biodiversity and agriculture on a global scale. The fact that this technology could alter global weather patterns and the Biden administration wants to explore it — is frightening.

… and Mr. Burns from the animated television series The Simpsons tried this.

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The Hague, the seat of the ruling class in the Netherlands, has declared a state of emergency to prevent farmers from driving their tractors into the city to protest the government’s mandatory fertilizer reduction targets. Farmers say that their rights and freedom are being trampled on by a totalitarian system of rule we all know as “democracy.”

Democracy worldwide is, even if run perfectly, nothing more than mob rule and nothing less than slavery. All freedom is an illusion as long as governments exist, people will be deluded into being their slaves.

The organizers of Thursday’s protest are the Farmers Defence Force. They said the state of emergency was a way to squash their democratic rights and freedom of assembly.  Of course, their government, like all governments, sees them only as slaves meant to obey, so they don’t care about rights or freedom. The rulers think they own their slaves. It would be like believing your cow has a right to vote to keep it from being eaten. The notion of government gets more absurd by the day and yet, slaves still hold the system that’s oppressing them up.

Subtitled!!
This is Jolanda Nooijers a Dutch Farmer.
She tells what is happening today and what they have planned in back rooms and pushed laws through against any consent

They are planning on doing this all over the world , so this is a heads up to those abroad to stay… pic.twitter.com/oQCqBHqgWg

— The Keystone Channel (@TKCrecovered) June 26, 2023

The Dutch farmers have decided to disobey and make their way to The Hague to protest regardless of the state of emergency. Although, if they intend to disobey the state of emergency, why not just disobey the unjust law they are protesting? Begging the master for longer chains never works, and if it does, it’s only temporary. The way to end it is to remove the system that’s putting chains on people.

Netherlands 🇳🇱 Anti Nitrogen Cuts, Anti Govt Lies 🔥 Here they come again.. The Farmers En Route to The Hague in solidarity against proposed restrictions that threaten their industry….𝘿𝙤 𝙒𝙝𝙖𝙩𝙚𝙫𝙚𝙧 𝙔𝙤𝙪 𝘾𝙖𝙣 𝙏𝙤 𝘿𝙞𝙨𝙧𝙪𝙥𝙩 𝙏𝙝𝙚𝙞𝙧 𝙋𝙡𝙖𝙣𝙨….🔥 pic.twitter.com/Kl2jNWTwCT

— 𝙍𝙄𝙎𝙀𝙈𝙀𝙇𝘽𝙊𝙐𝙍𝙉𝙀 (@Risemelbourne) June 30, 2023

The Netherlands 🇳🇱 is the world’s 2nd biggest exporter of farm produce, yet the Dutch government are sabotaging their own farmers. Dutch government proposals for tackling nitrogen emissions mean an estimated 11,000 farms will close.#NoFarmsNoFood

pic.twitter.com/0gHBklZhoC

— James Melville (@JamesMelville) June 30, 2023

“The Netherlands has for years missed its climate goals. Now it’s time for a great leap forward,” Jetten said, calling the package “ambitious.” He presented 120 different measures which he said would make sure CO₂ emissions in the Netherlands will be 55 percent lower than in 1990 by 2030.

The Dutch government can reportedly spend 28 billion euros to reduce the temperature on Earth by 0.000036 degrees. This would mean that each resident would have to contribute about 1,647 euros and a family of four about 6,588 euros., News Facts reported. -The Daily Exposé

Greenpeace co-founder Dr. Patrick Moore explained how globalist rulers, including Klaus Schwab and the United Nations, are using the climate scam as an excuse to cut off fossil fuels and nitrogen fertilizer, to deliberately depopulate the planet.

In a broad-ranging discussion including whether the earth is headed for another ice age, the maximum number of people the globe can handle, what would happen if the population were to double in size, whether our masters care about the future or just their time lording power over others and the importance of sustainable energy, Dr. Moore said:

“Carbon dioxide [and] temperature [ ] are actually slightly negatively correlated in the long historical record. In other words, it is not a cause-effect relationship … There is no historical relationship between the level of CO₂ in the atmosphere and the temperature of the earth … The climate has changed long before humans could have been any factor in it.  It’s been changing all through the history of the earth.”

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***

When I lived in New York City my favorite pizzeria was Arturo’s, on Houston Street. Coal–fired ovens made for a charred crust you could use to sop up sauce from an order of mussels. But joints like that are at risk as the city’s environmental regulators propose mandatory 75 percent reductions in emissions by restaurants that use traditional fuels in their cooking and baking—a goal many restaurant owners consider unachievable. The rule isn’t finalized, and it contains caveats that savvy business owners could use as a lifeline. But it’s the latest sign that environmental activists expect us to modify our lifestyles to meet their green priorities.

“The Department of Environmental Protection (DEP or the Department) is promulgating rules that would establish requirements for control devices to reduce emissions from cook stoves at restaurants in existence prior to May 6, 2016,” reads the city regulatory agency’s announcement of a July 27 public hearing. “The proposed rule provides that the operators of cook stoves that were installed prior to May 6, 2016 must hire a professional engineer or registered architect to assess the feasibility of installing emission controls on the cook stove to achieve a 75% reduction in particulate emissions. If this assessment concludes that a reduction of 75% or more cannot be achieved, or that no emissions controls can be installed, the assessment must identify any emission controls that could provide a reduction of at least 25% or an explanation for why no emission controls can be installed.”

The rule also specifies that “Cook stove means any wood fired or anthracite coal fired appliance used [primarily for cooking food for onsite consumption at a food service establishment…] for the preparation of food intended for onsite consumption or retail purchase.”

War on Pizza

To most people, this sounds annoying and intrusive if very particular to old-school cookery. To New Yorkers in particular, though, it’s a declaration of war against pizza.

“If you fuck around with the temperature in the oven you change the taste. That pipe, that chimney, it’s that size to create the perfect updraft, keeps the temp perfect, it’s an art as much as a science. You take away the char, the thing that makes the pizza taste great, you kill it,” an anonymous restaurant owner who relies on a coal–fired oven told the New York Post.

The allowance in the proposed rule for feasibility assessments means that existing restaurants might escape enforcement. That’s a potential lifesaver, since $20,000 plus ongoing maintenance costs is the price tag for compliance cited by at least two restaurateurs. Businesses will have to shoulder all expenses for meeting the requirements of the proposed rule.

“You know how many pizzas I have to sell to pay for that $20,000 oven?” pizzeria owner Joe Calcagno complained to CBS News.

Ovens installed since 2016 are already subject to restrictive rules, meaning that you’re unlikely to see traditional fuels used in new installations. That means existing restaurants with wood– and coal–fired ovens will be it, dwindling in number as the years pass with inevitable attrition.

If this sounds familiar, that’s because demands that we all change the way we live our lives, our preferences be damned, have become increasingly common.

Your Gas Stove is Next

“In May, the Democrat-controlled New York State Legislature and Gov. Kathy Hochul inked a $229 billion state budget agreement that included a ban on residential gas stoves. By 2029, only electric ranges will be allowed in new residences,” Reason‘s Christian Britschgi reports in the August/September issue. “The policy is similar to bans imposed by local governments in places such as New York City and California. Advocates say those laws help curtail climate change by reducing natural gas consumption and protect people’s health by reducing in-home emissions.”

This comes after huffy initial denials that anybody wanted to ban popular gas stoves, which are preferred by many chefs as well as home cooks for their quick and reliable heat. Sixty-nine percent of respondents to a recent Harvard CAPS Harris poll opposed “governmental rules that would virtually eliminate gas stoves from kitchens.” Then there’s the bypassed discussion about the wisdom of eliminating alternatives to electric appliances and expanding reliance on a power grid that’s already overburdened and rickety.

“The U.S. power system is faltering just as millions of Americans are becoming more dependent on it—not just to light their homes, but increasingly to work remotely, charge their phones and cars, and cook their food—as more modern conveniences become electrified,” The Wall Street Journal warned last year.

But politicians pretty quickly went from denying that gas bans were in the works to embracing them and insisting that they’re a great idea.

“There are clean energy alternatives,” New York Governor Kathy Hochul said in May after her state banned natural gas in new buildings starting in 2026. “It’s going to take time and I want to make sure that New Yorkers don’t get hit hard for the costs, so we’re going to roll this out. But new buildings that are going up, they can go electric, they can do heat pumps.”

Take a Vacation While You Can

By the same token, travelers enjoying flights to tourist destinations after the disruptions of the pandemic might want to enjoy their trips while they can. “Sustainability” is the hot topic at this year’s Paris Air Show, which means non-stop discussions about reducing the environmental impact of travel. That means conversations about increased efficiency and new fuels, but that’s not enough for everybody.

“In the end, the decarbonisation of air travel will only happen through a reduction in air travel overall,” Jérôme Du Boucher, aviation specialist for the NGO Transport & Environment, told France24.

That’s not just the musings of a lone activist; it’s a serious proposal in certain circles and a recommendation by France’s Agency for Ecological Transition. That government body proposes hiking ticket prices with taxes or capping flights to reduce air travel. Never mind that “flying has gotten considerably cheaper, safer, faster and even greener, over the last 60 years,” according to a 2017 article by the University of Texas at Austin. “Today’s aircraft use roughly 80 percent less fuel per passenger-mile than the first jets of the 1950s.” Further innovation seems more promising than reserving air travel for the wealthy and well-connected, but that’s not the world in which we live.

No, the world in which we live is one in which governments polish their green credentials by banning decent stoves even as they close nuclear power plants that could really reduce emissions. It’s one in which choice and personal preferences matter less than top-down dictates. It’s one in which you should enjoy pizza made in a coal– or wood–fired oven now, because it may soon be a thing of the past.

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J.D. Tuccille is a contributing editor at Reason.

Featured image is from Lightpoet/Newscom

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***

Russia and Ukraine on Tuesday (4 July) accused each other of plotting to stage an attack on the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station, long the subject of mutual recriminations and suspicions.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he told his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, about Russian “dangerous provocations” at the plant in southeastern Ukraine.

Russian troops seized the station, Europe’s largest nuclear facility with six reactors, in the days following the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Each side has since regularly accused the other of shelling around the plant and risking a major nuclear mishap.

Renat Karchaa, an adviser to the head of Rosenergoatom, which operates Russia’s nuclear network, said Ukraine planned to drop ammunition laced with nuclear waste transported from another of the country’s five nuclear stations on the plant.

“Under cover of darkness overnight on 5th July, the Ukrainian military will try to attack the Zaporizhzhia station using long-range precision equipment and kamikaze attack drones,” Russian news agencies quoted Karchaa as telling Russian television. He offered no evidence in support of his allegation.

Zelenskyy tweeted that he had told Macron in a telephone conversation that “the occupation troops are preparing dangerous provocations at the Zaporizhzhia (nuclear plant).”

He said he and Macron had “agreed keep the situation under maximum control together with the IAEA”, the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency.

A statement issued by the Ukrainian armed forces quoted “operational data” as saying that “explosive devices” had been placed on the roof of the station’s third and fourth reactors on Tuesday. An attack was possible “in the near future”.

“If detonated, they would not damage the reactors but would create an image of shelling from the Ukrainian side,” the statement on Telegram said. It said the Ukrainian army stood “ready to act under any circumstances”.

Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian military also provided no evidence for their assertions.

None of the reactors at the plant is producing electricity.

In his nightly video message, Zelenskyy said Russia was planning to “simulate an attack on the plant. Or they could have some other kind of scenario.

“But in any case, the world sees – and cannot fail to see – that the only source of danger to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant is Russia. And no one else.”

IAEA wants plant demilitarised

The IAEA, the UN’s nuclear watchdog, has been trying for more than a year to clinch a deal to ensure the plant is demilitarised and reduce the risks of any nuclear accident.

IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi has visited the plant three times since the Russian takeover but failed to reach any agreement to keep the facility safe from shelling.

Zelenskyy adviser Mykhailo Podolyak told Ukrainian television that Grossi had proved ineffective in trying to uphold safety at the plant.

“Any disaster at Zaporizhzhia could have been prevented if (Grossi had been) clear straight away,” Podolyak said, accusing the IAEA of flipflopping in its approach to the problem.

“That is, instead of this clowning around that this man is doing. And when there is a disaster, he will say they had nothing to do with it and warned about the dangers.”

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Featured image: A picture taken during a visit to Enerhodar organised by the Russian Defence ministry shows a general view of the administrative building of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in Enerhodar, southeastern Ukraine, 15 June 2023. [EPA-EFE/SERGEI ILNITSKY]

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One of the greatest influences on both my personal philosophy and the strategy of how to promote it was Leonard Read, the founder of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE). Read founded FEE in 1946, just as WWII was ending and the US government was about to embark upon a cold war with the Soviet Union. Read must have foreseen the expansion of government that was coming – both at home and overseas – and he started FEE to spread the message of non-interventionism and freedom. You could say that FEE was the first modern libertarian organization.

Leonard Read was so effective in his role as leader of FEE because of his demeanor. He was kind and gentle in his approach, but he never compromised the freedom message. People should be able to do whatever it is they want without any interference, he believed, as long as they weren’t hurting anybody else.

In our age where everybody is an “activist,” Leonard Read’s approach may seem unfamiliar or even quaint. Read believed that instead of trying to “save the world” it was important to first educate oneself. Read, study, understand the message so you can accurately and convincingly pass it on to others.

Perhaps one of the most important ways Leonard Read believed to convey the message of freedom was for like-minded people to get together. Getting together – especially at his legendary events at the FEE headquarters in Irvington, New York – was the best way to educate ourselves, educate others, and share ideas on how to spread the message. When we come together with like-minded people, we learn from the speakers but we also help each other perfect the message. And we also make important contacts that help us create our network.

When I founded my Institute for Peace and Prosperity ten years ago this year, I did my best to incorporate Leonard Read’s approach. In order to best promote civil liberties at home and non-interventionism overseas, we need to understand the issues to the best of our abilities, and one of the best ways to do that is to come together with others of like mind.

Our Institute started holding conferences in 2016, with our first big event in Washington, DC. to a sold-out audience. Since then we have expanded our conferences to include Houston, Charleston, SC, and even here in Lake Jackson! While it is true that we have a loyal core who attend many of our events, we were pleased that at our recent Houston conference a show of hands revealed that about half of the attendees were at their first Ron Paul Institute event!

We have featured important speakers like Julian Assange, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Col. Douglas Macgregor, and so many others. We have learned from their insights and experience. But just as importantly, we have developed and expanded the network of people who understand the message of peace and are ready to spread it further beyond our circles. That is what this is all about.

We will be holding our 7th annual Washington DC Conference on Sept. 2nd. As we increasingly face the possibility of a nuclear conflict with Russia the importance of getting together cannot be emphasized too much. These are critical times and I hope everyone will join us in DC in September. Go to RonPaulInstitute.org for more details.

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On July 4th the Wall Street Journal headlined “My Plan to Preserve Peace Between China and Taiwan”, and Taiwan’s Presidential candidate from the leading Party, Taiwan’s current Vice President, Mr. Lai Ching-te, promised Taiwan’s voters that if they elect him President, he will beef up military spending to buy enough weapons from the U.S. so that if Taiwan declares independence from China, then China will be too afraid of Taiwans’ military to invade Taiwan and to take forceful control over that island province of China.

V.P. Lai presented China as being Taiwan’s enemy, and said

“President Xi Jinping has quashed dissent in Hong Kong, established ‘re-education’ centers in Xinjiang, fomented conflict in the South China Sea, and stepped up military adventurism across the Taiwan Strait.”

His plan to scare China’s Government to accept a breakaway of the Chinese province of Taiwan from the Chinese mainland is:

First, we must build up Taiwan’s deterrence. Defense is the bedrock of our national security. Under President Tsai Ing-wen, we have increased defense budgets, reformed conscription and the reserve system, and supported new practices and capabilities within our military. These measures reduce the risk of armed conflict by raising the stakes and costs for Beijing. I will also expedite our transition into an asymmetric fighting force, focusing on cost-effective and mobile capabilities. I will seek greater cooperation with partners and allies, particularly in training, force restructuring, civil defense and information sharing.

Second, economic security is national security. In the years since democratization, Taiwan has become a high-tech powerhouse. As a former mayor of Tainan, I am proud to see semiconductors made both in the city and around Taiwan driving the next generation of technology. As premier, I spearheaded efforts to increase salaries, cut taxes and attract new investment. …

The third pillar is based on forming partnerships with democracies around the world. This year Taiwan sent the first medical team from Asia to Ukraine, assisting war-wounded personnel and residents. Record numbers of parliamentarians, nongovernmental organizations, think tanks and official delegations have visited Taiwan, showing that despite Communist Party pressure, we do not stand alone.

China’s Government has consistently maintained that if Taiwan tries to break away from China and to become a separate and independent nation, then China will forcibly reverse that, and will try to do it without destroying Taiwan. However, if Taiwan arms itself sufficiently so as to become difficult to conquer militarily, then there will obviously be little left of Taiwan at the end of that conflict. No military analysts — not even in the U.S., which is trying to break Taiwan off from China so as to make it yet another U.S. ‘ally’ against China — doubts that, regardless of how much the U.S. arms Taiwan, China would win that war.

For China, this is simply an existential matter, and China has never wavered that Taiwan is and will remain a part of China, and that China won’t tolerate any breakaway of Taiwan from China.

Consequently, it the U.S. stooge candidate for Taiwan’s Presidency becomes elected, then there will be war between Taiwan’s self-proclaimed government versus China, regardless of whether or not that will also entail war between China and the United States. However, if it would be war between China and the United States, then that will likely be, or quickly become, a nuclear war.

In any case, Mr. Lai’s promise to Taiwan’s voters, that he is the ‘peace’ candidate in the election, might indicate that he despises the intelligence of Taiwan’s voters. In that sense, it might be something of a very practical intelligence-test of the residents of Taiwan. Consequently, its results will be interesting even to some people who might not otherwise be particularly interested in Taiwanese affairs.

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This article was originally published on The Duran.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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The former Pentagon and Rand Corp official Daniel Ellsberg, who died earlier this month, created two big bombshells. Hated by the right, lauded by the left and libertarians, Ellsberg, in our view, was a genuine American hero.

The first bombshell was his revelation of a series of secret Pentagon studies of the Vietnam War that showed the 1970’s war was based on a farrago of lies and false premises and doomed to failure. I was in the US Army at the time and most of us knew the war was a giant screw-up propelled by billions of dollars and big-time lies.

The Pentagon papers pulled the rug out from under the Vietnam War and exposed its military and civilian backers as liars and fools. President Lyndon Johnson wisely decided not to run for a second term because of the Vietnam disaster.

Nuclear war planner Ellsberg did it again in his fascinating 2017 book ‘the Doomsday Machine.’ In this study of nuclear warfare, Ellsberg made his second bombshell revelation that was hardly noticed by the media and public.

Ellsberg revealed that in the event of war, the US government intended to hit all of China’s major cities and ports with nuclear weapons. This plan has particular resonance today as Communist China and the United States edge ever closer to a major war over Taiwan and the South China Sea.

According to Ellsberg, the Pentagon planned to first cripple Russia, then devastate its ally, China. Both would be bombed back to the Stone Age by massive nuclear attack.

Ellsberg also revealed the alarming fact that the White House had delegated senior military regional commanders to authorize the use of nuclear weapons without preliminary presidential approval.

Ellsberg’s courageous act was later mirrored by American patriots Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden, who exposed the war crimes and the administration’s lies about Afghanistan. Telling the truth about America’s addiction to wars and out of control militarism was deemed a major crime under the absurd 1917 Espionage Act of World War One era.

China, which is on the verge of accidental war with the US, has reacted to the targeting of Chinese cities by putting its nuclear weapons program into high gear. Chairman Mao used to jest that his nation could easily afford to lose 100 million in a nuclear exchange with the US and barely notice the loss. But now that most of China appears to be under US nuclear targeting the mood of levity in Beijing has been replaced by war fever and grim determination.

Such is not the case in the US where the powerful war party keeps beating the drums and pretending its 1945 all over again. In the event of war, it’s likely North Korea will also be involved. Such crazed behavior recalls the sheer idiocy of the days before World War I in which small groups of fanatics ignited the Great War that wrecked Europe and undid the British and Russian empires.

Now, extreme right-wing Democrats are driving the US into a potentially nuclear confrontation with Russia. They are so giddy with hubris over the thought of finishing off Putin’s Russia that they have no concept of the manifest dangers that a disintegrating Russia will bring.

China must be asking itself if it should launch nuclear attacks on the US before Washington decides to attack China. Germany faced the same dilemma in two world wars. In nuclear warfare, the side that strikes first wins. China knows it’s on the knives edge. Most Americans and Canadians, besotted by anti-Putin propaganda, do not.

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Today, Monday, July 3, 2023, I stand before you to share my personal account of the events that unfolded in Jenin refugee camp early this morning. The Israeli military operation commenced with an aggressive assault on sites believed to be affiliated with the Palestinian resistance. They claimed these locations as their targets, launching three missiles that resulted in the loss of innocent lives and left many wounded.

Soon after, a full-scale invasion ensued, with an overwhelming presence of military forces. Jeeps, armoured vehicles, and military bulldozers stormed into Jenin, asserting their dominance over the ground. The skies above were not spared either, as a multitude of drones hovered ominously.

During this tumultuous time, it was impossible for the inhabitants of Jenin to sleep, young and old alike. My daughter, Salma, was terrified by the blaring warning sirens that announced the army’s incursion, her tears flowing uncontrollably. Meanwhile, my son, Adam, displayed a mix of fear and curiosity, trying to comprehend the gravity of the situation.

Isra Awartani, The Freedom Theatre’s accountant, hastily created a safe space within her home to shield her three daughters from harm. Ahmed Tobasi, artistic director of The Freedom Theatre, found himself face-to-face with an armoured vehicle stationed right outside his house, its barrel aimed at his window. Rania Wasfi, TFT former colleague, frantically tried to reach her mother and sister after news that their house was bombed.

The morning brought news of a devastating attack on The Freedom Theatre, where a group of families sought refuge amidst the turmoil. The occupying forces callously targeted them with missiles, shattering their hopes for safety. Adnan, who lives next door to The Freedom Theatre, huddled together with his family in one room, struggling to find comfort in the midst of chaos. Adnan’s niece Sadeel, 14 was murdered by an Israeli sniper less than two weeks ago. Her family lives in the same neighbourhood.

Update From Mustafa Sheta: The yard of The Freedom Theatre has been bombed, dozens of residents in Jenin camp live all around. They are trying to flee their homes because of the bombing that is targeting anything living in the camp. At least 7 people have been killed so far pic.twitter.com/jf9ragKl3f

— The Freedom Theatre (@freedom_theatre) July 3, 2023

The gravity of the situation cannot be understated. The occupation relentlessly tightens its grip on the refugee camp, decimating its infrastructure and obliterating the main roads in the camp. The message is crystal clear – punish the stronghold of popular resistance in Jenin, and project an image of invincibility to Israeli society regarding their military prowess.

What lies ahead? For me, the answer is nothing. The occupation’s attempts to eradicate the resistance in Jenin will not succeed, just as their predecessors failed in 2002. Buildings may crumble, cars may be reduced to wreckage, and countless individuals may be detained, wounded and even martyred. However, these actions will only serve to breed a new generation that will carry the torch of resistance passed down by those who came before them, as we do today, and as our children will do in the future. It is a relentless pursuit, driven by the aspiration to reclaim our land and restore the dignity of every human being.

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Mustafa Sheta is an ex-political prisoner and has been the General Manager of The Freedom Theatre in the Jenin refugee camp since 2016. He has extensive experience in the Palestinian civil sector as a researcher, journalist and coordinator. He has a BA degree in Journalism and Political Science from Birzeit University and an MA degree in Conflict Resolution and Development from the Arab American University in Jenin.

Featured image: An Israeli military bulldozer seen leveling roads and destroying the center of the Jenin refugee camp during a raid on the camp near the West Bank City of Jenin, july 3, 2023. (Photo: Nasser Ishtayeh/SOPA images via ZUMA Press Wire/APA Images)

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***

Admiral Rob Bauer, head of the NATO Military Committee, said deliveries of F-16 fighter jets to Kiev were postponed until the counteroffensive was completed. This represents a major blow to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who has been pleading with NATO members to provide fighter jets, including F-16s, and all while his military advances, supposedly, in only metres instead of kilometres.

“The discussion on the fighters is an important one, but it will not be solved in the short term for this counter-offensive,” explained Bauer in an interview with the LBC radio station. “Training those pilots, training the technicians, making sure there is a logistic organisation that can actually sustain these aircraft will not be available before this counter-offensive.”

“We shouldn’t mix the two discussions – I think it’s important and understandable that Ukraine asks for these fighter aircraft – but we should not mix it with the counter offensive discussion now,” he added.

In Bauer’s opinion, it is now difficult for Ukrainian soldiers on the front lines to advance. Several lines of defence, minefields and vehicle movement obstacles prevent the units’ redeployment.

For its part, Kiev expected to receive Western fighter jets last year, but the aircraft’s delivery will probably not occur before the beginning of next year.

Bauer’s statements come as US House of Representatives member Marjorie Taylor Greene introduced an amendment to ban any funding for Ukraine until a diplomatic solution to the current conflict is found.

“We should be pushing for peace, not funding war. I filed amendments to the NDAA that strip out all funding for Ukraine and prohibit providing them with F-16 fighter jets and long-range missiles. The death and destruction must stop, so in order to achieve peace, I also filed an amendment to prohibit any and all funding to Ukraine until a diplomatic solution to the war is reached,” Greene said on her Twitter page on June 30.

On the same day as her tweet, US Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley stated that he is unaware of any decision regarding deploying the Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) to Ukraine but noted: “it’s a constant review process.”

It is recalled that Russia sent a note to NATO members on the supply of arms to Ukraine. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov noted that any cargo containing weapons for Ukraine would become a legitimate target for Russia, with F-16s and ATACMS being no exceptions. The Russian Foreign Ministry warned that NATO countries “are playing with fire” by supplying Ukraine with arms. 

Many US lawmakers are becoming increasingly desperate because the Ukrainian military is being obliterated. With F-16s unlikely in the short term, the new hope is to deliver ATACMS to Ukraine as soon as possible.

Earlier in June, a bipartisan group of lawmakers urged US President Joe Biden to send the weapons system. Representative Michael McCaul of Texas described it as “extremely disappointing” that the administration had not sent them yet.

As Bloomberg noted, “Part of that frustration centres around the fact that a Ukrainian counteroffensive against Russian forces has proceeded slowly and without major gains.”

According to Milley, Ukrainian forces were “advancing steadily,” even boasting about taking as little as 500 metres a day, if these reports are even to be believed to begin with.

However, this pace is not satisfactory, and CNN noted: “Ukraine’s Western allies are getting nervous about the fact that the progress of Kiev’s long-awaited counteroffensive is being measured in metres, rather than kilometres. Kiev’s allies are well aware that Ukraine cannot defeat Russia without their help. But the slower than expected pace of the counteroffensive means their support could become increasingly unsustainable if the conflict drags on.”

Milley can attempt to put a positive spin on the Ukrainian counteroffensive, alluding that progress is being made, but he himself knows, as do even the most casual military observers, that it has been a catastrophic failure. Rather than admit that Ukraine cannot win the war, he continues with a narrative that victory can be achieved after a “very long” and “very, very bloody” struggle.

“It’s going to be very long, and it’s going to be very, very bloody, and no one should have any illusions about any of that,” Milley said. “So yes, sure, it goes a little slow, but that is part of the nature of war.”

The reality is that neither F-16s, ATACMS or any other conventional means, despite bravado from Milley, will reverse the course of the war – the complete collapse of the Ukrainian military and further loss of life and territory – and all because the Kiev regime refuses to negotiate with Moscow.

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Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.

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***

It appears almost certain that Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskiy and his generals, rather than Russian President Vladimir Putin and his, are considering and preparing a false flag nuclear provocation at the Zaporozhiya nuclear power plant (ZNPP) set for July 7-9 to frame NATO summit and perhaps also to provide political cover for a Polish-Baltic republic move of forces into western Ukraine. Such a nuclear event will not be on a scale even approaching the Chernobyl accident, but it will be sufficient so that it can be framed as grave ‘Russian crime against humanity’ and used by Kiev to gain certain advantages via the West.

The incident likely will occur as a result of a Ukrainian attempt to seize the Zaporozhiya NPP in response to which Russian troops will be accused of detonating explosives creating a dirty bomb effect on a small scale. Ukrainian troops will cross the dried-up Dnepr, seize the ZNPP, detonate explosives there themselves. This will allow Kiev and the West to accuse Moscow of ‘nuclear terrorism’.

The signs of an impending false flag operation have been flashing for weeks, with numerous Ukrainian commentaries to the effect that the Russians were planning a nuclear terrorist operation at the Energodar ZNPP. The most recent make things pretty clear. IAEA inspections have never endorsed Ukrainian claims – ongoing for over a year now – that it is Russian forces that fire on the ZNPP. Indeed, Russian forces have occupied all of Energodar and the ZNPP and have for well over a year, and IAEA has a team permanently stationed at the plant along with Russian RosAtom personnel, who now run the plant.

More recently, on June 23rd Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate chief Kyrylo Budanov reported that Russia had completed preparations for carrying out a nuclear terrorist attack at the ZPNN.

Ukrainian Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) Head Kyrylo #Budanov warned on June 23 that #Russia has finished preparations for an attack on the #Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP). https://t.co/u7JxMJbvRW pic.twitter.com/0x5jzcWshd

— ISW (@TheStudyofWar) June 26, 2023

On June 29-30, Ukraine held nuclear accident civilian defense exercises in Zaporozhiya and the neighboring region of Kherson simulating the effects of an attack on the Zaporizhiya plant. Hazmat-clad troops spray fall-out victim stand-ins among other emergency simulations conducted, prompting fear in the local population and further reporting worldwide on the imminent Russian terrorist attack (see this). On July 1^st, citing Ukrainian intelligence sources, Zelenskiy claimed alongside visiting Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez:

“There is a serious threat because Russia is technically ready to provoke a local explosion at the station, which could lead to a (radiation) release.”

He also noted:

“We know for sure that this was considered by the Russian Federation as one of the plans, so that later, when the station is handed over to us, to detonate it remotely for the release, and this is also very dangerous.”

IAEA inspector recently refuted Zelenskiy’s claims that Russia had moved explosives into the plant in preparation for its terrorist attack, noting “found “no visible indications of mines or other explosives” at the Zaporizhiya plant (see this). 

Zelenskiy then held a meeting of the military top command as well as nuclear power officials at northwest Ukraine’s Rivne (Rovne) nuclear power plant, one of Ukraine’s five nuclear plants. He explained the meeting’s purpose this way in his nightly video address to the Ukrainian people: “The key issues discussed were the security of our northern regions and our measures to strengthen them.” (See this). One wonders why this location was chosen and whether something else was being pursued.

On July 1st, Danilov expressed confidence Russia would undertake such a nuclear “terrorist attack” at the ZNPP, which Ukraine would regard as a nuclear attack (see this). The same a Ukrainian Telegram channel claimed its source inside the Office of the President of Ukraine reported that visiting former US VP Mike Pence conducted “negotiations” with Zelenskiy and told him that NATO would not introduce troops into Ukraine in response to any nuclear event at the ZNPP (see this).

Then, on July 2^nd, Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces general Staff Viktor Zalyuzhnyi also visited the Rovne (Rivne) nuclear power plant far from the front and having nothing to do with a ground-based military offensive. This and the earlier Zelenskiy-high command meeting could have been information-gathering exercises aimed at understanding the layout of and key points at such plants, where and how much radiation leakage could ‘occur’ in an attack, and how such a radiation release could be minimized or maximized (see this). On the same day, the pro-Ukrainian Institute for the Study of War concluded it is unlikely that Russia would undertake such a nuclear gambit, casting doubt on Kiev’s propaganda campaign. At the same time, it warned that Russia would use the threat of such an attack in order to restrain Ukrainian counteroffensive operations and weaken Western support for military aid to Ukraine (see this). The latter is an odd assertion, since it is Ukraine that is playing up the threat. Moreover, could not a radiation release or media reports of one be used in the hope of freezing panicked Russian forces and cover a major Ukrainian attack across Dnepr on the Russian-held south of Zaporozhiya? (see this)

On July 4th, Moscow claimed that Ukraine cut off one source of electricity to the ZPNN (see this).

It must be kept firmly in mind that Ukraine is desperate. Desperate men do desperate things. Kiev badly needs additional arms supplies from the West, and it was hoped significant gains of territory in the first month of Kiev’s counteroffensive would be sufficient to market Ukraine’s military as worthy of greater support to the July 11 NATO summit, as Zelenskiy himself has acknowledged (see this). But such success has not materialized and could not have. Russian forces have overpowering advantages in air, artillery, drone, heavy ground equipment (tanks, APCs) and are attritting Western supplied Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles rapidly. Ukrainian forces are now increasingly implementing their counteroffensive without air cover, tanks, and artillery, suffering massive casualties for minimal gains in territory, which are most often quickly lost again. In a recent Washington Post interview Zalyuzhniy recently berated the West for its unrealistic expectations regarding the counteroffensive, particularly in light of Western failure to supply Kiev with F-16s and sufficient numbers of tanks, APCs, artillery, and ammunition. He pointed out that NATO and Russian military doctrine stipulates one should possess air superiority before launching ground-based, in-depth offensive operations: “And Ukraine, moving to offensive operations, should follow which doctrine?” “NATO’s? The Russian Federation’s? Or is that none of your business? ‘You have your own doctrine. You have tanks, you have some cannons, you have some [fighting vehicles]. You can do it.’ What is that?, he exclaimed.” “Without being fully supplied, these plans are not feasible at all.” (see this; see this also). That is putting things mildly. In fact, so far Ukraine’s counteroffensive has won back around 50 sq. km. at the cost of 15-20,000 dead Ukrainian soldiers, several times more wounded, hundreds of tanks, and hundreds of APCs and fighting vehicles including the greater part of the Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles furnished by the West. Ukrainian Defense and Security Council Chairman Oleksiy Danilov has just announced that the counteroffensive is switching from the goal of seizing territory to that of attritting Russian forces (see this). This is a direct consequence of the offensive’s failure to reach the first of three defense lines staggered in a depth of some 40 miles, despite the massive losses. It may be that the statements above and others indicate that both Zelenskiy and Zalyuzhniy now understand that its was a mistake to undertake the counteroffensive, perhaps best called ‘operation meat-grinder’ (see this). One Ukrainian Telegram channel claims a source it has in the Office of the President reports that Zalyuzhniy wants Zelenskiy to suspend the counteroffensive until the arrival of F-16s (see this and this). But, as Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba has complained, the training for pilots did not begin in June as promised, meaning the schedule for delivery of over a year would remain (see this).

Kiev is approaching a time when having proven incapable of making any appreciable ground gains and having depleted its troops, it will be facing a major Russian counter-offensive timed at the precise moment when Ukrainian forces are most exhausted—a classic Russian military strategy of defensive attrition followed by a major counteroffensive. On this background, something must be done to prompt more Western supplies and/or push Western powers to intervene militarily directly under the NATO flag or not. Even without the nuclear provocation, Western powers such as Poland and the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia seem to be poised to send forces into western Ukraine. Poland recently reinforced its military presence in eastern Poland near both the Belarusian and Ukrainian borders ostensibly as a reponse to the deployment of what appears to be some 10,000 Wagner forces to Belarus.

It is important to remember that: the ZNPP located in Energodar is currently Russian-occupied territory, Moscow considers it to be part and parcel of the state territory of the Russian Federation, the local population consists of those Moscow considers Russian citizens and many ethnic Russians and Russian-speakers, and Russian troops are at and many more are closer to the plant and would be greater effected by radiation in the event of a release than the more distant Ukrainian troops. Indeed, one source reports that discussion of the possible nuclear incident was sowing panic among the Russian troops in and around Energodar (see this).

The Maidan regime and Zelenskiy have from the start been wedded to false flag operations. The Maidan regime was born in the blood of the 20 February 2014 terrorist snipers’ massacre in which more than a hundred demonstrators and police were killed. The West and the Maidan regime blamed its on an order from President Viktor Yanukovych, overthrown as a result of the rage sparked by the killings, but findings from the beginning have proven that the attack was carried out precisely as a false flag operation carried out by the radical ultra-nationalist and neo-fascist elements on the Maidan.[1] When he was a presidential candidate, Zelenskiy himself alluded to this fact (see this).

Since becoming president, however, Zelenskiy has become a serial ‘simulacran’, staging ‘Russian attacks and atrocities’ from Snake Island to Bucha to the Mariupol maternity ward to the Kakhovskii dam to, most recently, the Kramatorsk ‘pizzeria’ attack that killed tens of Ukrainian and Western officers, who were most certainly not eating pizza. The pizzeria victims were, but they also were located, unfortunately, next to a legitimate military target. Is Zelenskiy preparing another signature false flag? Although Zelenskiy has backed off some special operations in the past (recall the Wagner arrest op a few years ago), It looks like the answer this time may be ‘Yes’.

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Gordon M. Hahn, Ph.D., is an Expert Analyst at Corr Analytics, www.canalyt.com. Websites: Russian and Eurasian Politics, gordonhahn.com and gordonhahn.academia.edu

Note

[1] https://gordonhahn.com/2016/03/09/the-real-snipers-massacre-ukraine-february-2014-updatedrevised-working-paper/;

https://www.academia.edu/8776021/The_Snipers_Massacre_on_the_Maidan_in_Ukraine?fbclid=IwAR2e4nJT7JXbryV6H-IAq7LOORjC8mP83K8eHzwnWbgo2GW8TUswfS7IGOU;

https://strana.ua/news/280175-zhvanija-razoblachaet-poroshenko-analiz-otkrovenij-byvsheho-deputata.html?fbclid=IwAR34oxBbb5LG645K15ffQhMRGjccec9n0tR1FzwpQbXMNUtSSReSOPY1K0s;

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/356691143_The_Maidan_Massacre_in_Ukraine_Revelations_from_Trials_and_Investigation; www.youtube.com/watch?v=JChtKpaulOs&feature=emb_title&fbclid=IwAR1KEQC0Uw7TC0zM61UWrpSypm5GiwzTLweXzK7RixEZA4cCeEU7nATfGEA;

and

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TF_-nrSjFNk&fbclid=IwAR0u78fFV8N9IDYWSzHdiyWaBkvHrzZZcnEZOQ9AX61CdebpBGMCTjx5Jr4; https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=3115651265131405&id=100000596862745

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***

UN Security Council Resolution 2334 passed by a Vote of 14-0, including the UK, France & China in 2016

1. Reaffirms that the establishment by Israel of settlements in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, has no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation under international law and a major obstacle to the achievement of the two-State solution and a just, lasting and comprehensive peace;

2. Reiterates its demand that Israel immediately and completely cease all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, and that it fully respect all of its legal obligations in this regard;

3. Underlines that it will not recognize any changes to the 4 June 1967 lines, including with regard to Jerusalem, other than those agreed by the parties through negotiations;

4. Stresses that the cessation of all Israeli settlement activities is essential for salvaging the two-State solution, and calls for affirmative steps to be taken immediately to reverse the negative trends on the ground that are imperilling the two-State solution;

5. Calls upon all States, bearing in mind paragraph 1 of this resolution, to distinguish, in their relevant dealings, between the territory of the State of Israel and the territories occupied since 1967;

6. Calls for immediate steps to prevent all acts of violence against civilians, including acts of terror, as well as all acts of provocation and destruction, calls for accountability in this regard, and calls for compliance with obligations under international law for the strengthening of ongoing efforts to combat terrorism, including through existing security coordination, and to clearly condemn all acts of terrorism;

7. Calls upon both parties to act on the basis of international law, including international humanitarian law, and their previous agreements and obligations, to observe calm and restraint, and to refrain from provocative actions, incitement and inflammatory rhetoric, with the aim, inter alia, of de-escalating the situation on the ground, rebuilding trust and confidence, demonstrating through policies and actions a genuine commitment to the two-State solution, and creating the conditions necessary for promoting peace.

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Hans Stehling (a pen name) is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: Israel has occupied the West Bank since 1967 [Nurphoto]

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***

30 yo Jo Lindner died suddenly on June 30, 2023, allegedly from a brain aneurysm (click here).

The German fitness guru had built an impressive Instagram following of 8.4 million by posting often about his gym workouts and training regimen.

He was on a podcast a couple of weeks ago on June 6, 2023 (video here – Bradley Martin’s Raw Talk) where he admitted that he was pressured into taking four COVID-19 vaccines and then had an abnormal D-dimer (indicating blood clots) and other abnormalities in the blood.

His girlfriend, Nicha, known as @immapeaches online, shared a bittersweet tribute to the late bodybuilder Saturday on Instagram, reporting an aneurysm caused his death.

Jo is believed to have died from a suspected brain aneurysm, however, this has not been officially confirmed. (click here)

Nicha, his partner wrote: “Yesterday he passed away by aneurysm .. I was there with him in the room.. he put on the necklace in my neck that he made for me ..”

What COVID-19 vaccine injury therapy was Jo Lindner talking about? 

In Bradley Martin’s Raw Talk podcast he did on June 6, 2023, he talked about doctors doing an experimental blood cleansing on him.

Jo lived in Thailand, so it is possible he would find doctors who were open minded and willing to try treatments on him.

What he describes is plasmapheresis, a procedure where plasma is removed from the blood, filtered and then returned. He claims he had this done and it removed “heavy metals” and “particles” from his blood.

He also claims his D-Dimer returned back to normal after doing this procedure, which is not available to people in the US or Canada.

I have not seen any evidence that plasmapheresis helps the COVID-19 vaccine injured.

California Instagram influencer 35 yo Jackie Miller James, 39 weeks pregnant, collapsed on May 18, 2023 with a ruptured brain aneurysm, was in 5 week coma (click here)

Jackie was found by her husband, Austin, on May 18, 2023, and was rushed to the emergency room and into an operation where they performed an emergency C-section and brain surgery simultaneously.

“Twelve days after this incident, Jackie remains in a medically induced coma and has undergone five separate brain procedures.”

She awoke from her 5-week coma on July 2, 2023:

“Jackie is awake and was transferred to one of the best neurological rehabilitation hospitals in the country,” the post says.

The baby was hospitalized in a neonatal intensive care unit for 12 days and was doing well. (click here)

A GoFundMe campaign has raised $330,000 so far. “This GoFundMe campaign was started to provide a way for family and friends to help Jackie secure the highest level of care,” the campaign added. Her sisters shared that her medical costs will include speech and physical therapy and “home modifications” when she is eventually released.

May 24, 2023 – San Francisco, CA – Scott Coker Free is an actor living in SF (click here). He had a heart attack on May 24, 2023

Scott has admitted to being 4x COVID-19 vaccinated: “I didn’t get vaccinated 4 times to sit at home!” (Feb.24, 2022, Instagram)

He claims he had a cardiac infarction on May 24, 2023. “unfortunately, my hands were permanently affected, and now sadly must be removed. So I have to move forward in life without the use of my hands or feet.”

A GoFundme goes on to describe he also had an aortic aneurysm: (click here)

“After an Aortic Aneurysm and a three week stint in the ICU, Scott has lost all functional use of his hands and feet, along with other complications.”

My Take…

I have written several related substacks on bodybuilders dying suddenly as well as on fatal aneurysms in the COVID-19 vaccinated:

• March 20, 2023 – Brain Aneurysms – Part 1
• April 21, 2023 – Brain Aneurysms – Part 2 (including Jamie Foxx)
• April 28, 2023 – Bodybuilders collapsing and dying suddenly

Jo Lindner had four COVID-19 vaccines. He had abnormal blood work including an elevated D-dimer which indicates presence of blood clots.

He describes doing plasmapheresis to “filter his blood” and claims that his D-dimer levels returned to normal after the procedure. Such a procedure would not be available in the US or Canada.

He claimed there were “heavy metals” in his blood. Those who are concerned about heavy metals in the COVID-19 vaccine vials should consider EDTA therapy or NAC (N-acetyl cysteine).

In the end, he allegedly died of a ruptured brain aneurysm. It is possible the 4 COVID-19 vaccines he took damaged his blood vessels and caused an aneurysm.

Doing a plasmapheresis would have had no impact on blood vessels that were already damaged by the spike protein.

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Jackie Miller James had a ruptured brain aneurysm in 39th week of pregnancy.

I have written about COVID-19 vaccine complications suffered by pregnant women:

• May 25, 2023 – COVID-19 vaccinated pregnant women are dying suddenly
• April 4, 2023 – Pregnant women having heart attacks, strokes, and dying

As a California Instagram influencer, she would almost certainly have been fully COVID-19 vaccinated.

It is possible COVID-19 vaccines damaged her brain blood vessels, caused her brain aneurysm which then ruptured when she was 39 weeks pregnant, resulting in a 5 month coma and probably life-long disability.

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Scott Coker Free had an aortic aneurysm and cardiac arrest. It is very possible that his 4 COVID-19 vaccines damaged his blood vessels, creating the aortic aneurysm that caused all sorts of complications.

Qatar World Cup Journalist Grant Wahl also died of an aortic aneurysm at age 48, on Dec. 10, 2022, which ruptured during the Argentina-Netherlands game.

*

I have to note for the record that big pharma and the media have already come after me for exposing the link between COVID-19 vaccines and fatal aneurysms.

I was hit with a “fact check” from “Politifact”:

“The CDC does not list brain aneurysms as a common side effect after COVID-19 vaccination in any age group.” I bet it doesn’t.

“The text in this Instagram post appears to have come from an April 21 Substack article by William Makis, a Canadian physician who has spread misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines.”

“We rate this claim False.” (sponsored by Pfizer)

To be honest, I’m not going to lose any sleep over this “fact check”.

But whenever you see a fact check about COVID-19 vaccines, you can bet it is a topic that the COVID-19 big pharma cartel is very concerned about.

*

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Dr. William Makis is a Canadian physician with expertise in Radiology, Oncology and Immunology. Governor General’s Medal, University of Toronto Scholar. Author of 100+ peer-reviewed medical publications.

Featured image is from COVID Intel

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Millions of Children Are Abducted and Trafficked Each Year. “The Sound of Freedom” Movie

By Dan Fournier, July 04, 2023

Recently, a lot is being written and said on the subject of human trafficking and modern-day slavery, particularly due to the upcoming release of the highly anticipated film The Sound of Freedom which is set to be officially released on July 4, Independence Day.

BRICS Will Almost Certainly Formalize a Relationship with Ethiopia During Its Next Summit

By Andrew Korybko, July 05, 2023

BRICS countries understand that formally expanding the number of equal members could change the dynamics of the entire organization, which is why it’s treading very carefully and considering pragmatic compromises between the zero-sum choice of membership or non-membership. For this reason, while Ethiopia likely won’t join as a formal member, it’ll almost certainly formalize a relationship via BRICS+.

Christianity’s Survival in Israel Is Under Attack

By Philip Giraldi, July 05, 2023

Israel’s new government is still taking shape, but some of the policy changes being promoted are so Jewish-centric that they will inevitably impact disproportionately on minority disadvantaged communities like the Palestinian Christians and Muslims.

Russia’s “Success”. US-NATO’s Unspoken Military Failures, “Western Stupidity Is Everywhere”

By Karsten Riise, July 04, 2023

It is astounding how stupidly (sorry) the West has expected that it could just “roll-over” Russia in the planned Ukrainian “biggest counteroffensive” in the south of Ukraine. The Western stupidity (sorry) has been everywhere, from Biden to Stoltenberg, to US media, and down to every single Ukrainian foot soldier – as witnessed here by the New York Times.

Post-American Society and the War on Human Sentience. “The Weaponization of Education”

By David Penner, July 04, 2023

Everyone has had encounters with Americans who have advanced degrees and yet have a kindergartner’s understanding of politics and the world in which we live. How did this happen? How did the United States become such a wasteland of mindlessness, irrationality, and intellectual bankruptcy?

On Launching the New International War Crimes Tribunal

By Stephen Karganovic, July 04, 2023

Rudyard Kipling was basically right. That being said, as they complete their task, the countries which are setting up the urgently needed international Tribunal to look into the war crimes committed in the Ukraine and the environs by the Kiev neo-Nazi regime and its foreign sponsors should make sure not to prove Kipling right once again. In this case, that would work to the immense detriment of justice.

80 Years Ago: The 1943 Battle of Kursk: Largest Tank Battle in History

By Dr. Leon Tressell, July 04, 2023

German Leopard tanks have been destroyed in Ukraine’s ongoing summer offensive in combat with Russia forces. There is a  sense of irony that this is happening on the 80^th anniversary of the largest tank battle in history at Kursk in July 1943. Just as in 1943 these much hyped ‘wunderwaffe’ have failed to break Russian defences much to the chagrin of the collective West.

Video: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: The Harmful Effects of Glyphosate, the Most Common Agrochemical

By Robert F. Kennedy Jr and Dr. Mark Hyman, July 04, 2023

We’re living in an age where it’s increasingly hard to avoid exposure to toxins. Some of the most ubiquitous are right on our food, on some of the most commonly eaten items in the American diet. It’s no wonder that illnesses related to toxicity, like cancer, infertility, and neurological diseases, are on the rise.

Happy July Fourth, Formally Known as Independence Day

By Emanuel Pastreich, July 04, 2023

Today is a glorious day that will give you a chance to consume processed foods supplied by multinational corporations using GMO plants and animals that were shipped to supermarket chains owned by the House of Saud, or even directly by the House of Walton, by container ships controlled by monopolistic trade, supply chain, and logistic networks.

“Climate Crime” No End. Famines, Population Reduction, Lockdowns, Vaccines

By Peter Koenig, July 04, 2023

For those who haven’t heard yet or only read / listen to mainstream media, the climate crime – and there is no other term for it – has taken a new turn for the worse. On June 30, the Finnish Minister for Economic Affairs, Mr. Vilhelm Junnila, had to resign over his “climate abortion” speech.

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***

BRICS countries understand that formally expanding the number of equal members could change the dynamics of the entire organization, which is why it’s treading very carefully and considering pragmatic compromises between the zero-sum choice of membership or non-membership. For this reason, while Ethiopia likely won’t join as a formal member, it’ll almost certainly formalize a relationship via BRICS+.

Ethiopia is Africa’s second most populous country, it used to have one of the world’s highest growth rates prior to the pandemic, and is the continent’s historical cradle of Pan-Africanism, which is why the announcement last week that it wants to join BRICS generated so much media attention. This civilization-state and its envisaged organizational partners, especially that group’s Russia-India-China (RIC) core with whom it’s already very close, would mutually benefit by working together through that format.

The challenge is that formal membership is difficult for Ethiopia to obtain at present absent the bloc’s existing members fundamentally reconceptualizing their organization’s role due to the widespread devastation caused by that country’s two-year-long conflict. This means that Ethiopia cannot meaningfully contribute to accelerating financial multipolarity processes and could even become a burden just like Venezuela might be if it too is allowed to officially join during the next summit.

Valdai Club program director Timofei Bordachev responsibly tempered expectations about BRICS’ possible expansion in remarks that he shared with TASS on Monday. According to this widely respected expert,

“The issue of possible expansion is quite topical, since many countries across the globe are attracted by BRICS, viewing it as an alternative to Western institutions. But the countries of the organization take this matter very seriously and are in no hurry or a chase after records.”

With so many countries applying to join BRICS, many of which have economies that are similarly troubled but equally promising as Ethiopia’s and Venezuela’s, it also wouldn’t be wise for the bloc to reject their requests without formalizing a relationship for them to build upon in the future. Therein lies the importance of the BRICS+ model devised by Russian geo-economic guru Yaroslav Lissovolik, which represents a compromise between the zero-sum choice of membership or non-membership.

In brief, this envisages BRICS using its existing members as “anchors” for expanding within their respective regions through three levels of cooperation. At its most basic, the “anchor state” prioritizes the comprehensive expansion of economic-financial ties with a nearby country in order for them to indirectly reap the benefits of the first’s BRICS membership, while the next level involves BRICS as a whole doing the same with that said country.

The final level concerns the establishment of relations between BRICS and the “anchor state’s” respective regional integration organization or between BRICS and other related organizations that don’t yet formally fall within that group’s ambit. No formula has been agreed upon for deciding the criteria for each BRICS+ level, but it wouldn’t be a good idea to standardize this anyhow since the preceding possibilities are already flexible enough to account for every country that’s interested in joining.

As applied to Ethiopia in the order that each level was described, this could take the form of: 1) South Africa comprehensively strengthening the economic-financial dimension of their existing partnership; 2) BRICS – and especially its RICs core – doing the same; or 3) BRICS establishing relations with the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) of which Ethiopia is a part. The first is too narrow given Ethiopia’s potential while the third is too broad and premature, hence why the second is likely.

After all, Ethiopia applied to join BRICS and already has strategic ties with its RICS core so settling for the comprehensive strengthening of economic-financial ties with that bloc’s South African member wouldn’t satisfy its interests, neither at present nor in the future. Furthermore, there exist deep economic differences between IGAD’s members as well as between the AU’s, which is why partnering with either right now might be more about show than substance since meaningful coordination would be difficult.

Formalizing Ethiopia’s bilateral relationship with BRICS is therefore the most pragmatic option. It expands the scope of cooperation beyond the first’s narrow focus on that group’s South African member while still keeping it concentrated enough on Ethiopia instead of prematurely broadening it to the regional or continental levels before other countries are ready to participate to the same extent. Additionally, this option positions Ethiopia as the regional “anchor state” for helping to bring IGAD to BRICS’ standards.  

As that regional organization’s largest member and the one with the most promising economic potential, Ethiopia is already informally leading that group as it is, so it therefore follows that the next natural step is for it to lead IGAD’s economic rise to the point where it can one day partner with BRICS too. The proposal of BRICS bilaterally partnering with “anchor states” in Africa’s most important regional organizations could thus speed up the AU’s rise as a whole by empowering local leaders to this end.

As Bordachev assessed, BRICS isn’t in a hurry to formally expand nor is it interested in breaking records. Its countries understand that formally expanding the number of equal members could change the dynamics of the entire organization, which is why it’s treading very carefully and considering pragmatic compromises between the zero-sum choice of membership or non-membership. For this reason, while Ethiopia likely won’t join as a formal member, it’ll almost certainly formalize a relationship via BRICS+.

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This article was originally published on Andrew Korybko’s Newsletter.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

Israel’s new government is still taking shape, but some of the policy changes being promoted are so Jewish-centric that they will inevitably impact disproportionately on minority disadvantaged communities like the Palestinian Christians and Muslims. The government itself is already being described in the press as the “most extremist or right wing in Israel’s history,” though what exactly that means is left to the perception of the reader. Several government ministers have even at times been excoriated for some of their extreme views inclusive of encouraging homicidal genocide or even the complete removal of all non-Jews by force from the country and occupied territories.

The Joe Biden Administration, in which nearly half of all senior appointments are Jews, as well as nearly everyone who deals with foreign policy, is doing its part to comply with traditional White House submission to Israel’s perceived interests. Israel is in the driving seat, and Biden knows it, declaring himself to be personally a Zionist. Much has been made of the fact that Biden has not invited Netanyahu to the White House to congratulate him on his latest electoral victory over concerns relating to the proposed judiciary changes and increasing settlement expansion, but it is clear that Israel and America’s Jewish Lobby are fully in control of both the White House and Congress.

Israel has certainly morphed into a nice place if one likes to feel racially and morally superior while shooting Arab children. This move of the Israeli government rightwards is reflected in a shift in popular sentiment. A recent poll by Israel Democracy Institute revealed that a record-high 62% of Israeli Jews place themselves on the right wing of the political map. The shift is best appreciated by examining the profiles of several of Netanyahu’s new ministers. The one most often cited is Itamar Ben-Gvir of the Jewish Power party. Ben-Gvir, who calls for deporting Arabs, has been charged with crimes 50 times, and convicted on eight occasions, including once for involvement in a Jewish terrorist group. Ben-Gvir is notorious for his provocations directed against Palestinian Muslims and Christians, which have included marches of armed settlers flaunting Israeli flags through Arab quarters of cities and towns. To cap the irony, though he is a persistent law violator he has been since November 2022 been the National Security Minister, which gives him authority over the police. He is currently seeking to have the Knesset pass legislation explicitly conferring legal immunity on all Israeli soldiers for any and all killings of Palestinians and also pressed the parliament to institute a formal, judicially administered death penalty for “terrorists”, which would mean any Palestinian who physically resists the Israeli occupation.

Another extremist politician who has obtained a major ministry in the Netanyahu government is Bezalel Yoel Smotrich who has served as the Minister of Finance since 2022. He has recently completed a controversial trip to the United States where he met with American Zionist leaders. Smotrich is the leader of the Religious Zionist Party, and lives in an illegal settlement in a house within the Israeli occupied West Bank that was also built doubly illegally outside the settlement proper. Smotrich supports expanding Israeli settlements in the West Bank, opposes any form of Palestinian statehood, and even denies the existence of the Palestinian people. He has now been granted authority over settlement development and support on the West Bank.

Though Israel’s internal enemies, such as they are, are frequently characterized as Muslims, the dwindling ancient Christian community in Israel and what remains of Palestine has also been under increasing pressure as Israel becomes less multi-cultural and more a state designed only to accommodate Jews. Increasing illegal settlement growth in largely Christian areas has also threatened the survival of many Christian villages and towns. Nevertheless, Israel remains a home to 185,000 Christian Palestinians, most of whom reside in Nazareth, Haifa and Jerusalem. Tens of thousands of people of partial or full Christian ancestry, some of whom are married to Jews, live in Israel as well. Beyond that, there are many Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant churches, institutions, holy places and cemeteries in Israel.

Several months ago, the head of the Roman Catholic church in Israel, Pierbattista Pizzaballa, said that Christians have faced difficult challenges since the formation of Netanyahu’s far right-wing government last December. According to Pizzaballa, his government has emboldened ultra-nationalist religious activists, many of whom are armed settlers, and some of whom have harassed male and female members of the clergy and vandalized religious property. Pizzaballa observed how “The frequency of these attacks, the aggressions, has become something new. These people feel they are protected …the cultural and political atmosphere can now justify, or tolerate, actions against Christians.” A colleague, Francesco Patton, the Custodian of the Holy Land, elaborated how “We are horrified and hurt in the wake of the many incidents of violence and hatred that have taken place recently against the Catholic community in Israel.” He described the desecration of a Lutheran cemetery, the vandalizing of a Maronite prayer room, urination on holy sites, destruction of sacred images and the spraying of “death to Christians” on church property, all taking place shortly after the new government was installed. He also noted “the responsibility of the leaders, of those who have power,” adding that the Israeli police routinely failed to investigate such incidents after the churches reported them.

To determine if the claims of increased violence and hate crimes directed against Christians were true, on June 26^th the liberal leaning Israeli newspaper Haaretz sent one of its journalists dressed as a priest into downtown Jerusalem. Within five minutes, the journalist Yossi Eli “was derided and spat at, including by a child and a soldier… A bit later a man mocked [him] in Hebrew, saying, ‘Forgive me father for I have sinned.’ Then an 8-year-old spat at [him], as did [another] soldier when a group of troops passed by later.”

Given what is going on on-the-ground, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) has called for an investigation into the role that Israeli-US dual national settlers are currently playing in the recent wave of violence directed against both Christian and Muslim Palestinian towns and villages. ADC Executive Director Abed Ayoub has said that “We have strong reason to believe that American citizens are among the key perpetrators of the most recent brutal and violent attacks.” Since June 21^st, armed Israeli settler mobs have been terrorizing Palestinian villages in the West Bank on a nearly daily basis. They have destroyed homes, burned vehicles, and killed at least one Palestinian. For decades US Citizens have moved to Israeli settlements, which they use as bases for regularly engaging in violence against Palestinians, all with impunity, as the Israeli police and army provide the Arabs with no protection and instead often protect the settlers. Many of these US Citizens also take advantage of American charitable and non-profit tax laws to fund illegal settlements and initiate violence against Palestinians.

In another major incident, five weeks ago dozens of Israeli extremists, primarily Orthodox Jews, disrupted a Christian prayer event for pilgrims near the Western Wall. The deputy mayor of Jerusalem, Aryeh King and leading Rabbi Avi Thau led the protesters. Denouncing the Christians as “missionaries” trying to convert Jews, the extremists spat at and cursed the pilgrims, many of whom were ironically normally strongly pro-Israel evangelical Christians from the US. Deputy Mayor King said that Christians should enjoy freedom of worship “only inside their churches.”

According to Protecting Holy Land Christians, an organization established by Christian groups to raise awareness of threats their religion, 2022 was “one of the worst years for Christians in Jerusalem to date.” The organization reported spitting attacks, vandalism, and property theft as mechanisms of erasure. And there are other accounts of how Christians have been subjected to increasing persecution. A recent report details how Palestinians have been targeted what it calls settler-colonialism, which is a series of measures intended to destroy their communities and drive them from their land. It identifies seven policies that Israel uses against Palestinians throughout the whole of Mandatory Palestine (1948 Palestine, Gaza, the West Bank including East Jerusalem) and also to punish those in exile: “denial of residency; land confiscation and denial of use; discriminatory planning; denial of access to natural resources and services; imposition of a permit regime; fragmentation, segregation and isolation; denial of reparations; and suppression of resistance.” The report concludes “Whether these policies are considered separately or taken together, they amount to forced population transfer, a grave breach of international humanitarian law (IHL).”

To cite only one example of how it works, the venerable Armenian Christian community has been the victim of a controversial land sale in the heart of Jerusalem’s Old City Armenian Quarter that is being developed as a luxury resort which will effectively destroy a neighborhood that has existed for seven hundred years. The Australian-Israeli developer who obtained the land apparently did so through a shady deal with a bribed community official that circumvented local zoning and property sale regulations. The religious leadership of the Armenian community, which numbers less than 1,000, fears that the resort will force many families, already suffering under Israel’s rule, to depart.

Recently, these essentially genocidal measures have included the outright theft of their historic buildings and land by the government, and denial of other rights, including refusal to permit gatherings of the faithful at the existing churches on major holidays like Christmas and Easter. There have also been many physical attacks on individual Christians carried out by extremist Jews as well as desecration of Christian religious sites and destruction or defacement of Christian relics and statuary. A conference in Jerusalem held last Friday to address the issue of increased violence against Christians attracted a number of diplomats, scholars and representatives of religious groups, but it was boycotted by the Israeli Foreign Ministry. The US Embassy also did not send a representative or observer, indicating clearly that it was not interested in the plight of Christians in Israel, or rather that it did not even want to admit that there was a problem.

So there you have it. The new Israeli government is not very interested in human rights for anyone who is not a Conservative or Orthodox Jew. It is, in fact, essentially hostile to all Palestinians and foreigners, be they Muslim, Christian or even irreligious. They denigrate such people as what Germans in the 1930s would have referred to as “untermenschen” meaning subhumans, a word then used to describe Jews, ironically enough. That the United States ignores all of Israel’s war crimes and human rights violations is disgraceful, but par for the course as American Jews who are advocates for Israel have corrupted and taken firm control of the political process. And do not think for a second that Israel’s leaders give one damn about the United States and its people. Recall for a moment how former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon referred to Americans in a discussion with Foreign Minister Shimon Peres: “Every time we do something you tell me Americans will do this and will do that. I want to tell you something very clear, don’t worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it.” And more recently Netanyahu said “America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction.” That is what they really think of us.

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected]. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

As if the situation for the Kiev regime forces wasn’t bad already, the political West has now increased its already massive pressure on Kiev to “perform better” during the much-touted counteroffensive against the Russian military. Considering the disastrous losses and no actual gains, this will be a virtually impossible task for the already battered Neo-Nazi junta troops. The political “leadership” (aka NATO puppets) in Kiev, including its frontman Volodymyr Zelensky, are now publicly showing signs of desperation and pleading with the Kiev regime forces to “show results” mere days ahead of the major NATO summit that is due to start in Lithuania on July 11.

The pressure comes amid stepped-up blackmail by Washington DC which is now threatening that it will slow down or ever cut so-called “military aid” to the Neo-Nazi junta in case its forces don’t demonstrate they’re capable of advancing, taking and holding Russian position. Zelensky held talks with several journalists and mainstream propaganda machine outlets over the weekend in an attempt to “quell rumors about the failure of the counteroffensive”. Indeed, even Western propaganda couldn’t ignore the disastrous way these counteroffensive operations have been conducted, as ample evidence of horrendous losses on alternative platforms (particularly Telegram) simply cannot be ignored.

Still, Zelensky effectively accused the mainstream propaganda machine (the same one that has been lionizing him for about a year and a half now) of spreading “Russian disinformation” about the results of the counteroffensive. Yet, it’s not really clear where the supposed “disinformation” comes from, considering the actual state of the Kiev regime forces, particularly in the past several days. Indeed, numerous headlines in nearly all countries of the political West have relayed the increasingly gloomy prospects of the counteroffensive, with many now “suggesting it might be failing”. This is a major hurdle for the Neo-Nazi junta’s attempts to hide its massive losses.

As the political West’s favorite puppets are trying to keep their unsustainable narrative alive, Zelensky is doing anything he can to help with this increasingly futile effort. He now even claims that “torrential rains had slowed down some processes quite a bit”, but admits that “the reality still is that every kilometer of liberated territory and gains costs lives”. Despite close to $170 billion in so-called “aid”, Zelensky also urged NATO and the political West as a whole to send ever more weapons. He also blamed the losses specifically on the lack of or the late arrival of artillery systems and munitions, claiming that “the lost battles would have been won had there been more of both”.

“We stopped because we couldn’t advance. Advancing meant losing people and we had no artillery. We are very cautious in this aspect. Fast things are not always safe,” Zelensky complained in one of the press briefings. He then emphasized that “[he has] a duty to his troops” and to “not take risks that are unnecessary” (although that’s exactly what they’ve been doing for over a year now). “If they tell me that two months will pass and thousands of people will die, or three months and fewer people will die, of course, I will choose the latter. Between time and people, the most important thing is people,” Zelensky said with a straight face.

In regards to the growing urgency of constant (and, if possible, increased) flow of military supplies from NATO members, particularly the US, Zelensky specifically took aim at the Republican-dominated Congress, which lately had many calls for audits on the massive amount of funds earmarked for the Kiev regime. Worse yet, this comes amid “rumors and concerns over the waning enthusiasm for the war effort in Washington DC” and the political West as a whole that might be demonstrated more openly at the “sensitive moment” of NATO’s annual summit. In other words, the deeply corrupt Neo-Nazi junta henchmen are extremely concerned that the constant flow of billions of dollars will suddenly be cut.

While Kiev regime’s top generals parroted their usual complaints about the sore lack of air support for their counteroffensive operations, specifically mentioning the much-touted F-16 fighter jets that are now being delayed to late 2023 or even the next year, Zelensky didn’t miss the opportunity to criticize the “dangerous messages coming from some Republicans” (probably referring to the aforementioned audits). Still, he praised the sudden June 29th visit by former Trump administration Vice President Mike Pence, stressing that “maintaining bipartisan support is the most important thing for Ukraine, regardless of who wins the 2024 US presidential election”.

“Mike Pence has visited us, and he supports Ukraine. First of all, as an American, and then as a Republican. We have bipartisan support. However, there are different messages in their circles regarding support for Ukraine. There are messages coming from some Republicans, sometimes dangerous messages, that there may be less support,” Zelensky insisted.

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Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.

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Author’s Update: Was Western Intelligence Involved?

While Yevgeny Prigozhin had flown from Rostov to Minsk in his Legacy 600 Embraer  Jet (in a deal allegedly negotiated between Putin and Belarus President Lukashenko), his whereabouts are currently unknown. Contradictory press reports point  to Prigozhin‘s intent to build a new Wagner mercenary base in Belarus for the 8,000 soldiers who accompanied him to Minsk. The evidence is scanty. 

Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin confirmed that the finances of Prigozhin’s mercenary company would be the object of an investigation. In all likelihood, the net proceeds of the $2 billion dollars received by Wagner from the Russian government have already been deposited in one or more offshore bank accounts.

The latest report states that “he vanished” eight days after the so-called “mutiny”. This is a nonsensical statement. Prigorzhin’s private jet has standard tracking codes. No doubt both Russian and Western Intelligence know where he is.

On Monday July 3, Prigozhin is reported to have made an online audio presentation from an unknown location. Has Prigozhin travelled in his private jet from Minsk to an unnamed foreign country? 

The Western media have intimated (with the usual innuendos) that Prigozhin had contacted Western intelligence: 

“It is evident that he tipped off US and British intelligence that he was about to pull Wagner fighters back from Ukraine into Russia. It was as if he wanted to know how the allies and Ukraine might react, and how it would change the war.” 

This suggests that the Wagner chief has good contacts in the West — though there is no sign that Western nations helped him. (Evening Standard, June 30, 2023, emphasis added)

Joe Biden: “The US is Not Involved with Wagner Revolt”

CIA Director William J. Burns was in touch by phone with Russia’s SVR intelligence counterpart Sergei Naryshkin  “to convey to Moscow that the U.S. had no role in the uprising”. 

President Biden had previously stated with hesitation (June 26, 2023) that the U.S. had taken this initiative to: 

“make sure we gave Putin no excuse – let me emphasize – we gave Putin no excuse to blame this on the West or to blame this on NATO.”  

 

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, July 4, 2023

***

There was a hype in propaganda and US political statements against President Putin. 

Putin knew about it before it happened. He was briefed by Russia’s Ministry of Defense and the SVR. 

US intel had advanced knowledge of Prigozhin’s intent.

“U.S. spy agencies had indications days earlier that Mr. Prigozhin was planning something and worked to refine that material into a finished assessment, officials said.” (NYT, June 24, 2023)

It is worth noting that on June 21 (2 days prior to Prigozhin’s “Mutiny”), US Intel. had already briefed senior military and government officials. 

There is no evidence, however, that it was a US intelligence op. 

There is Something very Fishy

The Wagner Group was founded in 2014. Wagner PMC soldiers had been fighting courageously on behalf of Luhansk and Donesk since 2014-2015, coming to the rescue of civilians. 

In his June 23 video, Prigozhin casually denied his commitment to the people of Donbass, emphatically stating that the “war in Ukraine had been unleashed under false pretenses”.

Who wrote his script? 

It is worth noting that the Wagner PMC  was founded in 2014 by a former Ukrainian-born GRU officer Dmitry Utkin together with Prigozhin. Allegedly, Utkin had Nazi leanings. The PMC mercenary group was named by Utkin in honor of German Composer Richard Wagner. 

Prigozhin is an oligarch. His net worth is in excess of 1 billion dollars (according to Forbes). Was he co-opted and bribed to trigger an alleged “coup” against president Putin? 

There Never Was A Plan to Carry Out a Coup d’Etat

Since June 22-23, I have reviewed countless articles from mainstream and independent media sources. Many Global Research authors are renowned military and intelligence experts familiar with the logic and parameters of regime change and coups d’état.

There is an issue which visibly no one has addressed, specifically the numerous pundits and “authoritative sources” who claim that it was an “attempted” or “failed” coup d’Etat”:

 

The Rostov-Moscow M-4 Highway 

Beneath the complexities of the crisis, there never was a real plan to wage a coup d’Etat, i.e. a so-called “Moscow Maidan”. Why? Use your common sense.

You do not plan and announce a coup d’Etat in Rostov on the Don which is at the tip of the Sea of Azov and then drive North on Russia’s busy M-4 highway with a clumsy convoy of Wagner tanks and armoured vehicles.

From Rostov to Moscow’s Red Square, it’s a tiring trip of more than 1000 kilometers.

The Answer should have been obvious from the start. Have a look at the map. (See below).

Russia’s state of the Art T-tanks can travel at a speed of 50-80 km an hour. In other words, it would take (with possible stop overs) 15 to 20 hours (not to mention traffic before reaching the Red Square).

(Jokingly, it’s like planning a military op. on Miami Beach, driving up from Florida on U.S. Interstate 95 to Washington DC, and waging a coup against the White House). 

 

 

Global Research has over the years published numerous articles and reports on the history and strategies of military coups and regime change in different regions of the World. We have never come across anything comparable to Prigozhin’s alleged “coup”. 

I look forward to watching Hollywood’s future movie on Prigozhin’s “failed coup d’Etat” against Putin. It will be a “blockbuster” (possibly funded by the Pentagon)? 

Geography, location, distance are key concepts –combined of course with an understanding of  the political, social and military dimensions of a coup d’Etat. 

Prigozhin is not ignorant. He had no intent on planning a coup d’état against Putin as perceived in chorus by the mainstream media. That was not his game. 

On a personal note, I gained an understanding of US sponsored military coups while teaching in Latin America. I lived the coup d’état in Santiago de Chile on September 11, 1973 which instated the Pinochet dictatorship. It destroyed democracy. It led to the impoverishment of an entire country. Kissinger was behind the military coup. 

Image Right: General Augusto Pinochet welcomes U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

A couple of years later, I was in Argentina at the outset of General Jorge Videla’s military rule (1976) which was supported by the Rockefellers.

It was “The Dirty War”, “La guerra sucia”. A history of  U.S. sponsored killings of civilians under “Operation Condor”.

Image Left: General Jorge Videla, the late David Rockefeller and Wall Street’s appointed Finance Minister Martinez de Hoz. 

A Moscow Coup d’Etat planned in Donbass? 

And then you travel up to Moscow to confront president Putin. This is nonsensical.

It was at best “an act of mutiny” led by Prigozhin. He is a billionaire. He’s interested in money. Was he paid to do it? This is a matter for further investigation. According to Scott Ritter (June 23):

“…a concerted effort between Wagner, the Ukrainian intelligence service, and their Western sponsors … Prigozhin is working on behalf of foreign intelligence Services carrying out their tasks. That task is to collapse the government of Vladimir Putin. I personally believe that he won’t succeed. But that’s what’s happening this morning”

There were Two Possible “Scenarios”

First Scenario: Had the Russian Airforce been instructed by the Kremlin, it could have destroyed the Wagner convoy on the Rostov-Moscow M-4 highway (“a piece of cake”) in a couple of hours. 

But that did not happen. Is that what US-NATO thought might have happened? 

The Second scenario was applied.

The Russian Government advised by the MOD and FSB took the decision not to intervene militarily. An agreement was reached with Prigorzhin. Wagner troops split up, most of them joining Russia’s regular Armed Forces.

There was no “real convoy” en route to Moscow. 

 

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Bill-278: An Act to prevent the imposition by the Trudeau government of imposing Covid vaccination mandates pertaining to employment and travel.

The initiative is intent upon Upholding Freedom and Civil Liberties in Canada:

https://www.ourcommons.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/house/sitting-217/hansard

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https://www.parl.ca/LegisInfo/en/bill/44-1/c-278

 

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Introduction

Recently, a lot is being written and said on the subject of human trafficking and modern-day slavery, particularly due to the upcoming release of the highly anticipated film The Sound of Freedom which is set to be officially released on July 4, Independence Day.

This article examines the subject, the film, and all the dark details that surround its foundations, claims, and worries.

It is arguably the most important topic that concerns us humans, for it has to do with our most precious of all, our children.

This article is structured as follows:

1. What is Human & Child Trafficking?
2. Human Trafficking and Forced Labour is a multi-billion-dollar business
3. Child Sex Trafficking
4. Children trafficked en masse at the U.S. Border; 85,000 kids go missing
5. The Sound of Freedom movie, officially released on July 4, 2023, Independence Day
6. Hollywood’s Darkest Corners
7. The Corporate Media’s attack on claims made against Hollywood, Pedophiles and Adrenochrome
8. The CYM Corporation Leaks
9. Tim Ballard’s Operation Underground Railroad
10. Don’t be part of the Problem, but rather part of the Solution

1. What is Human & Child Trafficking?

On a broader global scale, Human Trafficking Search (HTS) notes:

“Human trafficking, trafficking in persons, and modern-day slavery are umbrella terms – often used interchangeably – that refer to the exploitation of individuals through threat or use of force, coercion, abduction, fraud, and/or deception.”

HTS lists 6 main types of human trafficking:

1. SEX TRAFFICKING & CHILD SEX TRAFFICKING
2. FORCED LABOR
3. DEBT BONDAGE
4. FORCED CHILD LABOR
5. INVOLUNTARY DOMESTIC SERVITUDE
6. UNLAWFUL RECRUITMENT & USE OF CHILD SOLDIERS

The International Labour Organization estimates that there are 40.3 million victims of human trafficking globally (49.6 million people were living in modern slavery in 2021, of which 27.6 million were in forced labour and 22 million in forced marriage).

According to UNODC’s 2020 Global Report on Trafficking in Persons which is compiled using official figures from over 148 countries, one in every three victims detected is a child. Girls are mainly trafficked for sexual exploitation, while boys are used for forced labour [source].

According to the National Human Trafficking Hotline based in the United States,

Human trafficking occurs when a trafficker uses force, fraud or coercion to control another person for the purpose of engaging in commercial sex acts or soliciting labor or services against his/her will.

There are many myths about human trafficking such as it exclusively involves transporting victims across state/provincial or national borders – which is really human smuggling.

In reality, the crime of human trafficking does not necessarily require movement. Victims can be recruited and trafficked in their own home towns, or even their own homes.

Children are trafficked for various reasons.

According to Save the Children based in Connecticut, child trafficking refers to the exploitation of girls and boys, primarily for forced labor and sexual exploitation.

Children account for 27% of all the human trafficking victims worldwide, and two out of every three child victims are girls.

Children are often trafficked for commercial sexual exploitation or for labor, such as domestic servitude, agricultural work, factory work and mining, or they’re forced to fight in conflicts.

The most vulnerable children, particularly refugees and migrants, are often preyed upon and their hopes for an education, a better job or a better life in a new country. [source]

Save the Children provides a lot of valuable information on child trafficking    , including Myths vs Facts.

Apart from sexual exploitation, trafficked children are often used for forced marriages and for forced labour (modern day slavery) with India and the Asia-Pacific region as a whole being prime locations.

War zones such as the Ukraine, areas of conflict and natural disasters also represent places where children are particularly vulnerable to abduction, sexual abuse and trafficking.

Children are also often lured and deceived online via major social networking platforms such as Facebook or TikTok, or through gaming apps which contain chat platforms [source).

2. Human Trafficking and Forced Labour is a multi-billion-dollar business 

Based on research from the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), human trafficking is listed as the fastest growing criminal industry in the world today, surpassing in value the illegal arms industry and only second to the drug trade [source].

The International Labour Organization (ILO)’s estimates profits from forced labour at US$150 billion (annually) according to the latest 2021 figures.

Sex tourism, a worldwide illicit activity that is prevalent in Southeast Asia, accounts for about $35 billion per year.

And as reporter Clayton Morris from Redacted recently noted, child sex trafficking brings in $34 billion a year in revenue. Morris emphasised that as a frame of reference, for 2023 the entire airline industry is poised to make $22 billion in worldwide revenue.

3. Child Sex Trafficking 

“Sex trafficking is when an individual engages in a commercial sex act as a result of force, fraud, or coercion. If the individual is under the age of eighteen, any commercial sex act is considered trafficking even if there is no force, fraud, or coercion. Sexual exploitation occurs in various settings, including (but not limited to) brothels, strip clubs, massage parlors, on the street (sometimes coined “track”), or in private homes. Individuals can be trafficked domestically and across international borders. ” – Human Trafficking Search (HTS)

According to the ILO, 6.3 million individuals are exploited for sex.

HTS also notes that over half of all children in forced labour are in commercial sexual exploitation.

Women and children are the most common victims found to be trafficked for sex, but men and boys are also trafficked for sex. LGBT identifying individuals, especially transgender individuals, have increasingly been found to be victims of sexual exploitation.

4. Children trafficked en masse at the U.S. Border; 85,000 kids go missing

A U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) whistleblower, Tara Lee Rodas told Congress’s House Judiciary Committee on Apr 26, 2023 (watch from around 01:26:13 to 01:32:00) that the United States federal government has become the “middleman” in a multi-billion dollar human trafficking operation targeting unaccompanied minors at the southern border.

Tara Lee Rodas testifying before the Congress’s House Judiciary Committee on Apr 26, 2023. Photo source: The Main Wire.

The damning testimony by Rodas who had volunteered to help with Operation Artemis, a plan by the Biden Administration to get control of the humanitarian disaster on the U.S.-Mexico border in 2021, provided some damaging statements about the outcomes for children in the border crisis mess.

Watch the five-minute 45-second clip from her testimony here (alternate video link here).

Migrant children from Central America take refuge from the rain in the back of a U.S. Border Patrol vehicle in Penitas, Texas, March 14, 2021, as they await to be transported after crossing the Rio Grande River into the United States. Photo source CNS photo/Adrees Latif, Reuters via CatholicPhilly.com.

According to an Article from ZeroHedge, ‘Modern-Day Slave Traders’: Hawley Demands Probe Into 85,000 ‘Lost’ Migrant Children from last April, Mrs. Rodas said she had been deployed to help HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) reunite Unaccompanied Children (UACs) with adult sponsors in the United States, stating:

“I thought I was going to help place children in loving homes. Instead, I discovered that children are being trafficked through a sophisticated network that begins with recruiting in home country, smuggling to the U.S. border, and ends when ORR delivers a child to a sponsor—some sponsors are criminals and traffickers and members of transnational criminal organizations, some sponsors view children as commodities and assets to be used for earning income.”

The article also noted that according to data from US Customs and Border Protection, approximately 345,000 minors have crossed into the United States unaccompanied since President Joe Biden took office, while a report from the NY Times suggests that the Department of Health and Human Services has lost contact with 85,000 of these minors. Hawley expounded [emphasis added]:

“The Biden Administration is morally responsible for their fate. The President lifted Title 42 restrictions on unaccompanied children in early 2021,” wrote Hawley in a Friday letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray. “Reporting reveals that HHS loosened vetting processes for sponsors and retaliated against whistleblowers who raised these concerns. As a result, thousands of children have been handed over to modern-day slave traders.”

The article further noted that in some cases, Rodas says she witnessed adult sponsors who were allowed to take in “10, 20, 30 and 40 children” without any concerns from HHS.

5. The Sound of Freedom movie, officially released on July 4, 2023, Independence Day 

The Sound of Freedom is a movie based on the incredible true story of a former government agent, Tim Ballard, who embarks on a dangerous mission to rescue hundreds of children from sex traffickers.

It stars Jim Caviezel who is famous for his portrayal of Jesus Christ in Mel Gibson’s 2004 movie The Passion of the Christ. The film was directed by Alejandro Monteverde.

The Sound of Freedom is schedule for its official release on July 4 of this year, on the very fitting Independence Day.

The theatrical trailer for the film can be viewed hereunder:

“Not enough people know this problem exists.” – Jim Caviezel

Actor Jim Caviezel (left) who portrays Tim Ballard (right) in The Sound of Freedom speaking during an interview in Washington on June 21, 2023. Image source: Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times via ZeroHedge.

Though The Sound of Freedom film was completed nearly four years ago in 2019, it is only now being released, most likely due to the dark and pervasive nature of child abuse in the Hollywood movie industry.

Disney, who purchased and owns 20^th Century Fox shelved the movie for two years, and both Netflix and Amazon passed on distributing it. The film is now distributed by Angel Studios.

Since filming Sound of Freedom, Jim Caviezel has become very outspoken and very involved in the cause of bringing light on the darkness of child sex trafficking.

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“The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.” — Hannah Arendt (1966), The Origins of Totalitarianism

Everyone has had encounters with Americans who have advanced degrees and yet have a kindergartner’s understanding of politics and the world in which we live.

How did this happen? How did the United States become such a wasteland of mindlessness, irrationality, and intellectual bankruptcy?

The answer lies in understanding the role played by four foundational pillars that are integral to 21st century post-America society:

• the mass media and its echo chambers,
• the weaponization of education,
• the cult of careerism; and
• a cultural, political, and moral disorientation that is inextricably linked with the multicultural society.

As readers of both the left independent media and conservative independent media are well aware, the legacy media is a huge problem, and with Fox’s dismissal of Tucker Carlson a lone sentient voice has been expunged from the mass media whose minions increasingly march in lockstep on virtually every major issue. 

The mass media exists to spin false narratives and to terrify Americans with bogeymen while distracting them from the things they should really be concerned about.

So instead of worrying about the threat of programmable Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) which would irrevocably end democracy, student loan debt and medical bankruptcies, increasingly psychopathic and potentially omnicidal wars of aggression, the destruction of the middle class, the erosion of the rule of law, the dismantling of the informed consent ethic, and the collapse of public education, we should be concerned about Russians, Nazis (imaginary Nazis, that is, not the real Nazis Washington is giving billions of dollars to in Kiev), anti-vaxxers (people who believe in informed consent), conspiracy theorists (dissidents who exercise their First Amendment rights), sexism and “the patriarchy” (men who have concerns about Feminisis and the threat it poses to the presumption of innocence and due process), and racism in education (Americans who object to the burning of American letters and classics of Western civilization).

The neocon and neoliberal establishment media outlets seek to perpetuate the illusion that there are significant differences between them, when in actuality both insist that FDA, CDC, and the WHO must be obeyed unquestioningly; both are in thrall to the military industrial complex, the CIA, and the drug companies; and both institutions are equally enamored with unfettered capitalism. (For foreign readers that are skeptical of just how bad the inequality is in the US, you should visit the YouTube channel Hoods N Hollers). 

Granted, sometimes the arguments made to justify these policies differ: while the neoliberal media will argue in favor of uncontrolled immigration to cultivate “diversity,” the neocon media will support the same policy to depress wages and abet the looting of state assets by rapacious corporate entities. Neocons favor white oppressors while neoliberals prefer oppressors of color. In this way, white nationalism and anti-white jihad are perpetually pitted against one another in a macabre dance of anarchy, fear, and unrelenting violence.

The dubious claims regularly touted by the legacy media (and especially its neoliberal wing) are parroted ad nauseam by the presstitutes themselves, but also by social media, academia, the literary reviews, and the publishing of contemporary fiction and highly publicized memoirs. This traps malleable minds in a perverse maze of deceitful memes and shibboleths while giving millions of Americans a dangerously distorted sense of reality. Naturally, one of the mass media’s most important duties is to incessantly reiterate humanitarian intervention talking points so as to sell the latest bloodbath for the warmongers in Washington.

The belief that the legacy media zombies have in the inerrancy of the mass media is intertwined with the myth of the meritocracy. Indeed, if one is bewitched by this spell it can only result in blindly following the omniscient ones at The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The New Yorker Magazine, The Guardian, the BBC, etc.

The myth of the meritocracy has likewise played a huge role in the rise of the Branch Covidians, who believe with every fiber of their sullied souls that the legacy media, the three letter agencies, and the elite medical journals are irreproachable and free from corporate meddling.

The weaponization of education has likewise played a critical role in the rise of the nonsentient human, as American education presently exists to generate student loan debt, incite as much sectarianism and tribalism as possible, deny poor and working class Americans a humanities education, support the burgeoning health dictatorship, use international students to cultivate biochemical automation, foment overspecialization and servility, and facilitate the dismantling of the rule of law through the jettisoning of civics and constitutional history.

The most indoctrinated Americans are not the ones who defend the latest US foreign policy debacle or the latest biofascist atrocity because this was what they were told by the talking heads on television or read in The Washington Post or on Facebook. The most delusional, intransigent, hubristic and fanatical legacy media cultists are the ones who insist that the Ministry of Truth is correct because their professors said so. 

Ultimately, academia’s raison d’être is to generate Adolf Eichmanns who have lost the ability to distinguish between fantasy and reality, and the more prestigious the university the shorter the ideological leash the professoriate will be on. Consider all the physicians that still defend lockdowns, mask mandates, mRNA vaccine mandates, the demonization of the unvaccinated, and the demonization of Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin.

That these policies have egregiously violated foundational principles of medical ethics, have been terribly murderous and destructive, were not science based, and were utterly devoid of any rational risk-benefit analysis fails to trigger even the faintest trace of skepticism amongst the vast majority of American physicians and biomedical researchers.

Like the military academy, medical schools demand absolute subservience and are designed to train their soldiers to conflate legality with morality and to blindly execute the dark machinations of the medical industrial complex. 

In what can be described as an intellectual battered wife syndrome, even the VAERS data, the World Council for Health’s pharmacovigilance report, the 750 scientific papers compiled by Doctors for Covid Ethics that warn of the dangers of the mRNA injections, and organizations that represent the Covid vaccine injured such as React 19 and Real Not Rare invariably fail to inculcate the majority of American doctors and biomedical academics with any misgivings regarding the lies they were fed by “the experts.” As Orwell presciently wrote in 1984, “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

Should a pre-med student write a personal statement in conjunction with their medical school application denouncing the corporatization of medicine, the Church of Vaccinology, the Cult of Psychiatry, the Branch Covidians, or the trans cult their application would be met with instantaneous rejection. (In actuality, these biofascist cults are domestic humanitarian interventions. Instead of imposing democracy and freedom at gunpoint, health and “the science” are imposed at gunpoint). To get the coveted jobs that follow these degrees requires even more blind obedience; and to hold onto these jobs, yet more still. Indeed, the more subservience displayed by the ruthless careerist, the more they will be subsumed by a shroud of unscrupulousness and spiritual destruction. 

I’m not suggesting that everyone with an elite PhD, law degree, or medical degree is an unthinking automaton. I’m merely stating that the system is specifically designed to separate the wheat from the chaff and to jettison young Americans with critical thinking skills and a strong sense of morality. Like Pavlov’s dogs, American students are increasingly raised in a multiple choice world. This paves the way for the avaricious and ruthless to rise to the top. 

To contradict the official Ukraine narrative and state that the Ukrainian military is suffering catastrophic losses in men and materiel (see here, here, here and here) while employed as an officer in the military or as an agent in the intelligence services will bring about the immediate cessation of one’s career. To publicly question the Branch Covidian putsch as a physician will put the offender’s license at risk; and to do so as an academic will, provided the professor isn’t tenured, result in the academic’s termination for “promoting conspiracy theories” and “spreading misinformation.”

Overspecialization, the deplorable state of the humanities, relentless competition for increasingly scarce jobs that offer good wages and benefits, and the multicultural society which debases national consciousness and the collective memory all play a role in fomenting vocational tribalism and the Cult of Careerism. 

Hyper careerists seldom care about what is happening outside their field which inevitably leads to a disintegration of one’s moral compass.

For instance, an American classical musician, astronomer, or basketball player will often feel that they have more in common with foreigners that share their profession than they do with their fellow Americans. For those who have prestigious jobs, this may all seem well and good, but what are the socio-economic ramifications when what remains of the middle class is a gaggle of technocratic automatons who reside within the confines of their specialty and are largely indifferent to what happens outside of their field? In many ways, their occupation has become their country, and going from an orchestra in Stockholm to an orchestra in Copenhagen to an orchestra in Tel Aviv to an orchestra in Hong Kong can feel like moving from one city to another within the same country.

As transpired in ancient Rome multiculturalism has spawned an epidemic of unreason causing a vast swath of the population to become divorced from reality and to be enveloped by a pall of amorality. In addition to obliterating the middle class, following the end of the Cold War everything the American ruling establishment has done domestically has been geared towards creating the most ignorant, ghettoized, atomized, and dehumanized population; a population that is not only terribly ill- informed, but which is increasingly bereft of even a national identity. 

There is nothing wrong with being proud to have grown up in Bedford–Stuyvesant, South Central Los Angeles, Harlan County, or Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. And yet it can only bode ill when the children that grow up in these neighborhoods have an increasingly tenuous connection to the greater national identity and an even weaker connection to Western civilization itself.

The foundational basis of education is the humanities, and the erasure of American letters and British literature from most public school curricula has left a void which is being filled by specialized job training and the woke indoctrination as embodied by the multicultural curriculum and identity studies. Should this anti-humanities curriculum persist for many years and be coupled with uncontrolled immigration, the cultural fabric of society will inevitably begin to unravel. (American multiculturalism should not be confused with Russian multiculturalism where people that hail from different religions, languages, and ethnicities remain bound together through the Russian language and through a shared Russian history and Soviet heritage).

An education system that attempts to teach children to become literate and articulate in dozens of different languages so as to become “citizens of the world” is doomed to failure, decay, and decrepitude. No such education system has ever existed, and no such education system will ever exist. If Americans of color and immigrant youth are denied a proper grounding in the humanities – a policy zealously promoted by those who love to rant about “racism” – this can only pave the way for more illiteracy, fragmentation, and authoritarianism.

Americans cannot defend their rights if they don’t even know what those rights are, and increasingly the younger generation is taught nothing of the warnings and ideals of American and British literature, the role played by diplomacy in peacefully resolving the Cuban Missile Crisis, the sacrifice made by hundreds of thousands of white Union soldiers who gave their lives to defeat the Slave Power, the New Deal, the civil rights movement (antithetical to identity politics, as it promoted solidarity as opposed to segregation), the Great Depression, the Nuremberg Code, and the anti-war activists of the ‘60s who fought for a just and humane foreign policy. As Beatty, the chief book burner in Fahrenheit 451 says, “If you don’t want a house built, hide the nails and wood.”

Relentlessly berated, deracinated, and deliberately given an atrocious education, Americans increasingly know nothing of their own past. Consequently, they do not possess the intellectual tools needed to understand the biosecurity agenda, the war in Ukraine (along with the growing threat of a direct NATO-Russia clash); and the dangers of living in a Neronian chaos devoid of checks and balances. A younger generation that cannot place current events in their appropriate historical context and whose indoctrination (euphemistically referred to as “education”) revolves around a pathological contempt for bodily autonomy and all things Western and American is doomed to fall into a morass of nihilism and profound moral degradation. 

The demons that surround us are both manifold and formidable. And yet the biggest obstacles are ignorance, a dissolution of rational thought, and even a common language with which to discuss these things. Let us reflect on the opening stanzas of Blake’s immortal “London:”

“I wander thro’ each charter’d street,

Near where the charter’d Thames does flow. 

And mark in every face I meet

Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,

In every Infants cry of fear,

In every voice: in every ban,

The mind-forg’d manacles I hear” 

Breaking up the corporate mass media monopolies, prohibiting the executive branch from using the tech companies to censor American speech, restoring the American canon and sound public education for all American children, ending institutionalized bribery and regulatory capture, and implementing policies designed to foster integration would all go a long way towards helping to restore reason, compassion, and American society itself. The alternative is to sit on our hands and wait, either for a third world war, or for things to degenerate to the point where all dissent is criminalized.

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David Penner’s articles on politics and health care have appeared in Dissident Voice, CounterPunch, Global Research, The Saker blog, OffGuardian and KevinMD; while his poetry has been published with Dissident Voice and Mad in America. Also a photographer, he is the author of three books of portraiture: Faces of The New Economy, Faces of Manhattan Island, and Manhattan Pairs. He can be reached at [email protected]. 

Featured image is from TruePublica