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The UK is steaming towards a possible trade war with Turkey in defence of the country’s only manufacturer of ironing boards.

In a report published this week, the UK’s Trade Remedies Authority (TRA) said Turkish manufacturers had benefited from state subsidies, and UK ironing board prices had been kept unfairly low because of a surge in imports from Turkey.

It said it intended to recommend the imposition of a 4.44 percent tariff, to be paid by companies importing ironing boards from Turkey to the UK, in order to protect the British manufacturer.

Oliver Griffiths, chief executive of the TRA, said:

“Our provisional finding is that subsidies have kept prices of the imported goods unfairly low, causing injury to the British producer, and so we’re intending to recommend a new tariff on ironing boards from Turkey.”

The TRA is a public body set up in 2021, following the UK’s exit from the European Union, “to defend the UK against unfair international trade practices”.

It investigates complaints raised by British industries and advises the Department for Business and Trade on measures to redress unfair trade practices.

The investigation into Turkish ironing boards is the TRA’s first into foreign state subsidies affecting British industry since it was established. If a tariff is imposed, it would be the first new anti-subsidy measure to be applied since the UK left the EU.

A tariff on ironing board imports would be compatible with the free trade agreement signed by the UK and Turkey in 2020 because both sides agreed to adhere to World Trade Organization rules which allow action against subsidies which cause harm to a domestic industry.

The investigation was launched by the TRA following a complaint filed by the UK ironing board manufacturer in April 2022.

It found that Turkish ironing board manufacturers based in free zones, special areas set up within Turkey since the 1980s to promote export businesses, had benefited from corporation and income tax exemptions which amounted to government subsidies.

Manufacturers also benefited from loans provided by the state-owned Turk Eximbank, the Turkish government’s export credit agency, which investigators determined also amounted to subsidies.

In a response to questions from investigators, Turkey’s Ministry of Trade said there was “no government involvement in policy, economic regulation and decision-making activities related to the production of ironing boards”.

As part of the investigation, TRA inspectors visited the factory of one manufacturer, Milenyum Metal, based in a free zone in the central Anatolian city of Kayseri.

Milenyum Metal was the only Turkish company to submit evidence to the inquiry. Two other Turkish companies registered an interest in the case but did not respond to questions from the TRA.

A spokesperson for Milenyum Metal declined to comment because the TRA investigation is still ongoing.

Inspectors compared the physical and functional characteristics of ironing boards manufactured in the UK and Turkey as well as similarities in production methods.

They concluded that the items were “directly comparable and interchangeable”.

The report said:

“We found that the basic product type consists of steel legs, steel top, iron rest and textile cover. The primary use of all product types is the ironing of clothes.”

A page of a TRA investigation document comparing Turkish and British ironing boards (TRA)

The investigation found that imports of Turkish ironing boards to the UK increased sharply in 2019. But sales of ironing boards fell in 2020 because of “changes in consumer habits” linked to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The ironing board market had displayed “signs of recovery” in 2021 with approximately 1.4m sold in the UK, the report said.

The report said the British producer held a market share of between 30 and 40 percent, but Turkish manufacturers retained an increased share of the import market and accounted for between 15 and 25 percent of the total market.

This had resulted, it concluded, in “significant price undercutting”, driving down the price of British-made ironing boards and preventing the UK manufacturer from raising prices in line with increased production costs.

The report noted that consumers were especially sensitive to price changes because of the “durable nature of ironing boards” and the existence of substitutes such as “table ironing mats, hand-held garment steamers, non-steel ironing boards, dry cleaning, or even wrinkle-free clothing”.

“UK ironing boards compete directly with ironing boards produced abroad, as they share physical and technical characteristics. Consumers are therefore driven by prices and would be willing to switch between brands to avoid higher prices,” it said.

The report said the British manufacturer, which is not named in the report, told investigators that it could be forced to cease production of ironing boards if a duty was not imposed on Turkish imports.

It is identified as having production sites in Rochdale and Manchester, with about 110 employees – just over a third of its total workforce – involved in making ironing boards. The company had a turnover of £42m ($53m) and a net profit of £1.8m ($2.2m) in 2021, according to data it submitted to the investigation.

Rochdale is the home of Minky Homecare, which describes itself as “the UK’s number one brand in the laundry market, with Minky ironing boards and covers found in over 70 percent of UK homes”.

Ironing boards advertised on Minky’s website are described as “designed and manufactured in the UK”.

Minky had not responded to requests for comment at the time of publication.

Wednesday’s report was a preliminary summary of the findings and likely recommendations of the investigation. Parties to the case, who also include UK importers of ironing boards, now have until 29 May to make further submissions prior to the publication of the TRA’s “final determination”.

The UK’s tax office on Wednesday announced that a provisional tariff on Turkish ironing board imports set at 4.42 percent would be imposed from 26 May. 

The final decision on imposing a tariff rests with Business and Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch.

A spokesperson for the UK’s Department for Business and Trade declined to comment. Turkey’s Ministry of Trade did not respond to a request for comment.

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Featured image: Ironing boards made by Turkey’s Milenyum Metal at a Hong Kong trade fair in 2018 (Facebook)

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The newly elected president of the Czech Republic Petr Pavel is an unusual European politician. He is the second president in his country with a military background but the first without political experience. 

He never saw combat duty and is an arm chair military strategist but lionised as a “senior NATO leader” — whatever that may mean. The high noon of Pavel’s professional career in the military was reached in 1993 when while serving in the UN Protection Force in Bosnia, he led a team of 29 soldiers to evacuate a French military outpost under siege by Serbian soldiers, which he executed after overcoming obstacles that slowed down the operation such as fallen trees which his soldiers had to remove from the road. France decorated Pavel. 

At any rate, the 61-year old soldier-politician has hit the road running when barely 7 weeks into his new job as head of state, Pavel threw a curve ball claiming China cannot be a reliable mediator between Russia and Ukraine due to Beijing’s secret craving for “more war.”  

Pavel assessed that China gets cheap oil, gas, and other resources from Moscow in exchange for promises of “partnership” and its interest lies in prolonging the status quo “because it can push Russia to a number of concessions.” 

These remarks could have been dismissed as those of a greenhorn but for his fame as a “senior NATO leader” and the Czech Republic’s reputation as a chattel and cats-paw of Washington. Hence the big question: What is Biden administration up to? 

The obvious thing will be that Pavel’s remark on “cheap” oil and gas from Russia to China is a gross simplification of a complicated story. Europe was receiving Russian gas and oil for decades at low prices on the basis of long-term contracts until the EU, under American pressure, took the idiotic decision to sanction Russia.

Whereupon, Russia turned to other markets, principally Asian, China being one of them. The rest is history. What’s the point of sitting upon the ground and telling sad stories?

Europeans should feel worried that even after the war ends, once Russia diversifies its export markets, they may never again get “cheap” Russian gas. (By the way, China is not the only beneficiary, as Europeans who continue to buy Russian oil and petroleum products from Indian companies at much higher prices would know!) 

Pavel spoke in the context of the expected announcement by Joe Biden seeking the presidency once again in 2024. One hugely consequential part of Biden’s announcement on Tuesday is that the prospect of the Ukraine war ending between now and 2024 November elections in the US can now be deemed as practically nil. 

The only way it can happen otherwise is if the US outright wins the war and candidate Biden claims victory. But the reaction from Moscow shows that what is in the cards is an escalation in Ukraine that is fraught with great risk of a direct conflict between Russia and the US.

Top Kremlin officials came out on Tuesday with a spate of statements on an impending showdown with the Biden administration. The Russian media disclosed that Russia’s new state-of-the-art Armata T-14 main battle tank has been deployed on the Ukrainian front lines. 

Moscow anticipates large scale US interference in Russia’s internal politics to create conditions that would undermine the country’s stability, as part of a grand design to trigger a break-up of the Russian Federation, as had happened to the former Soviet Union. (here)

Moscow estimates that the Biden administration will try hard to bring about a regime change in the Kremlin. Above all, Moscow no longer rules out that the US escalation in Ukraine may aim to create conditions posing grave threat to the Russian state. ( here) 

The former president Dmitry Medvedev vividly spoke of such a scenario warning explicitly that Russia may be compelled to resort to first use of nuclear arms if its existence is threatened, underscoring that paragraph 19 of the country’s nuclear doctrine states that nuclear weapons “can be used when aggression is carried out against Russia with the use of other types of weapons that endanger the very existence of the state. It is essentially the use of nuclear weapons in response to such actions. Our potential adversaries should not underestimate this.” 

Specifically, with reference to Biden’s mental health and failing faculties, Medvedev also tweeted:

“Biden has made the decision, after all. A daring geezer. In place of the American military, I would immediately make a fake trunk with false nuclear codes in case he wins, so as to avoid fatal consequences.” 

On the other hand, the spectre that haunts the Biden administration is that Europe cannot easily extricate itself from its relationship with China and it is the interests of Old Europe’s economic heartlands that will ultimately determine EU policy.

Make no mistake, just 3 countries of Old Europe — France, Italy and Germany —  account for more than a half of EU’s GDP and they also happen to be China’s largest trading partners in the EU. Amidst the brouhaha over French President Emmanuel Macron’s recent endorsement of a close industrial relationship with China, what has gone unnoticed is that German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is on the same page as Macron. Equally so with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. The European industry is also loathe to lose China as a privileged trading partner, after having lost Britain and Russia. 

New Europeans like Pavel may have different priorities, being the strongest trans-atlanticists in the EU, but East Europe makes up just 10% of the EU’s GDP and does not speak for the EU, despite the media hype its leaders have lately enjoyed as “frontline states”, due to the Anglo-American patronage.         

Suffice to say, there is trepidation in the American mind as to whether the EU will follow the US into a confrontational position with China in the coming months, or would strive to become more independent of the US, with all the consequences that would ensue. Equally, from the viewpoint of Old Europe, the gnawing doubt is whether a future US administration would want to align with Europe even if Europe were to align with the US. 

On balance, it is difficult to visualise the EU fully aligning with the US in an all-out conflict with China over Taiwan, agree to freeze Chinese official reserves as it did last year with Russia, and stop investing in China.

The EU economy is simply not built for cold-war style relations, as it has become too dependent on global supply chains. All things taken into account, therefore, the strong likelihood is that the pro-China lobby in Germany will win this debate. In fact, in the process, the Franco-German alliance may be rekindled, too.  

Pavel’s demonisation of China as an evil spirit stalking Europe can be put in perspective. His is a surrogate voice mouthing Biden’s angst that as the Ukrainian military is comprehensively ground down in the battlefields by the Russian forces in the months ahead, Europe may join hands with China to bring the war to an end. 

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Featured image: Russia’s T-14 Armata Next Gen. Tank Deployed to Ukrainian Frontlines (Source: IP)

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The US will work alongside South Korea to develop a strategic nuclear policy and frequently station nuclear weapon-armed submarines on the peninsula, according to an agreement announced by the White House marking the first visit of the new South Korean president to the US.

Released on Wednesday, before the East Room was festooned with guests watching President Yoon Suk-yeol sing The Day the Music Died karaoke style, it marks the first time that US nuclear warheads will be present on the Korean Peninsula since they were removed in 1991, and the first outright departure from commitments to reduce the reliance on deterrence with nuclear weapons.

It also came, unlikely by chance, on the 5-year anniversary of the signing of the Panmunjom Declaration between former President Moon Jae-in and Chairman Kim Jung-un.

That was the closest the Korean Peninsula had come to peace since the Korean War was concluded with a ceasefire in 1953, and the closest to a denuclearized Korea since the North first got the bomb sometime between when it left the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 2003, and its first detonation in 2006.

“US officials said the nuclear-armed submarines will only ‘visit’ South Korea and that the US won’t permanently deploy nukes to the country,” reports Antiwar news editor Dave DeCamp. “But under the deal, the temporary deployment of US strategic assets to the peninsula will become much more frequent”.

The deal stipulates that South Korea will not seek to individually obtain nuclear weapons, something which President Yoon mused about earlier in his presidency, but which the Blue House walked back.

Atoms for survival

The North Korean state is often referred to as “rogue” vis-à-vis the international community. But they aren’t madmen or fools. They knew the only way their regime could survive Washington’s unipolar moment following the collapse of their Soviet benefactors was to harness the power of the atom bomb.

The easiest comparison to make to understand their thinking is looking at the current North Korean dictatorship, which got nukes and is still around, and compare it to the Libyan dictatorship, which had chemical weapons, got rid of them around the same time that North Korea left the NPT to pursue nukes, and was overthrown by America under Obama.

South Korea on the other hand has for some time polled strongly in favor of establishing independent nuclear capabilities, and the New York Times suggests that Yoon is looking to assuage those in favor with this cooperative strategy with the US – amounting to what is essentially a carbon-copy of the NATO nuclear weapons sharing agreement.

South Korea is part of the NPT, so in principle there’s no reason to think public pressure could change the status quo there. North Korea is the only country that‘s ever left the NPT having first ratified it.

The bigger concern should be, with nuclear weapons coming in and out of harbor in the South, to what degree does this agreement escalate tensions, reduce the future chances for better North-South cooperation, and increase the risk of a nuclear accident?

There’s always a risk when nuclear weapons are present in a geopolitical conflict zone, but with the existing conventional forces aimed at the North, the deterrence against a disarming nuclear first strike by Kim Jung-UN remains high.

Countering Trump

What is always the biggest risk, and what Daniel Ellsberg details so well in his 2021 book The Doomsday Machine, is the risk in these situations for a nuclear accident, or an unauthorized launch, particularly in the midst of other crises and communications disruptions.

On this front, the greater presence of nuclear weapons on the peninsula will do nothing to make the peninsula safer for the North and the South.

Much was made at the White House about the date being the 70th anniversary of the first alliance between the South Koreans and the US.

What the deal more likely represents is an attempt to rubber-stamp the military-industrial complex’s rejection of former President Trump’s notion, a notion that was realized five years ago today, that the way in which the peninsula could be made safer is through reduced sanctions, reduced military drills and buildup, and more cross-Korean dialogue.

With Donald Trump and Joe Biden having already announced their candidacies for the 2024 Presidential Election, making the American people’s latest memory of the stalemate in Korea be Yoon singing karaoke after agreeing to allow more US military involvement in the peninsula, is how the Biden team believes they can erase any memories of what was certainly one of the most significant events in the Trump presidency – that like Alexander the Great, he was almost able to cut the Gordian Knot of the Korean War.

The pictures of Trump, President Moon, and Chairman Kim shaking hands and crossing the turquoise border on the DMZ, and the later images of Kim clasping hands with Moon in the Blue House, having just signed an agreement to formally end the Korean War and begin talks on a stepwise disarmament effort, were exceptionally powerful images that sat on the front pages of every major news outlet on the planet for a week.

It’s a legacy that Biden hoped no doubt to erase with this recent agreement. More his part, Biden made a point in a statement on the meeting that he remains committed to negotiation with the North, and invites them back to the table. But that’s a lie, or at least foolish to say, because he’s “committed” absolutely nothing to the effort; not as president, nor as a senator.

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Andrew Corbley is founder and editor of World at Large, an independent news outlet. He is a loyal listener of Antiwar radio and of the Scott Horton Show. Reprinted with permission from World at Large.

Featured image: Trump and Kim meet Sunday before Trump became first US president to step on North Korean territory. (White House photo)

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Roger Helbig, a man with an unhealthy obsession: he believes that depleted uranium (DU) waste from the nuclear fuel cycle, which is used in munitions and bullets – is safe.

I received an unsolicited email from him, entitled ‘The Real Doug Rokke’ in response to an article I had written for The Brussels Tribunal. It read:

‘I see that you have been taken in by Doug Rokke, who really does not know much about anything, let alone depleted uranium. It is sad that a Phd has so little real knowledge. I also see you claim to be a journalist. What newspapers, radio stations or TV stations have you actually worked for, or are you like Bob Nichols, a self-described journalist with no actual journalistic experience?’

His tirade continued:

‘Rokke’s military records and part of his PhD thesis are attached. You will note he has no real expertise in depleted uranium and his claims about the Middle East are pure fantasy, yet you inflame the Arab street with them. You ought to learn more about what is before telling the world all about it.’

I had written in the article:

‘Depleted uranium from shells fired by British and American forces during the Balkan wars has found its way into the food chain and has been detected amongst the civilian populations of Kosovo and Bosnia. A study of the local population in three locations in the two Balkan regions has found samples of the highly radioactive particles in the urine of all those tested.’

Helbig had highlighted the excerpt, commenting:

‘This is pure bullshit and you know it. Where are the actual test results? I presume you don’t choose to read the United Nations Environmental Programme report – it is only about 300 pages, well documented instead of scientific myth!’

Lieutenant Colonel Roger Helbig, USAF, Rtd (it appears) is one of a small Pentagon-inspired group devoted to denigrating and undermining the efforts of those drawing attention to the dangers of DU, which three UN Sub-Committees have designated a weapon of mass destruction. Rokke is just the latest in a long line of Helbig targets. Journalist Bob Nichols, Project Censored award winner for his DU coverage, writes, ‘Individuals on web sites throughout the United States have complained about the abusive and aggressive actions of an Air Force Lieut. Colonel named Roger Helbig’.

David Lindorff, another award winner and the (UK) Observer’s David Rose, have also suffered a barage of abuse for stories exposing the dangers of DU, which poisons the environment, thus entire food chain regionally where used, for four-and-a-half billion years.

Nichols cites Helbig ‘attacking hundreds of sites and harrassing web moderators.’ Informative DU sites (such as [email protected] and www.notinkansas.us – the latter’s meticulously researched alerts included the chilling warning of US military in Iraq reagrding bathing in shower water taken from Tigris river: ‘GI’s Beware Radioactive Showers’) are also victims. Researcher, John Ervin, posted on www.apfn.net: ‘They’ve already sent Lt. Colonel Roger Helbig after me.’

Leuren Moret, President of Scientists for Indigenous Peoples and City of Berkeley (Ca) Environmental Commissioner states: ‘Helbig has been harassing me nonstop for two to three years.’ Moret travels the world warning on the dangers of DU, working with a group of independent scientists (www.radiation.org) and submitted a paper on DU to a UN Sub-Committee, one of the ones which led to DUs designation as a weapon of mass destruction.

The picture Helbig paints of his latest target Rokke is unrecognisable from the truth. Major (Dr) Doug Rokke, Former Director of the US Army Depleted Uranium Project (www.traprockpeace.org), principal author of the Pentagon regulations and procedural guidelines (US Army Regulation 700-48 And US Army PAM 700-48) on the dangers and handling of DU affected areas: tanks, structures, terrain, equipment and personnel, civilian and military.

Rokke, whose team led the (impossible) clean up in Kuwait in 1991 after the first Gulf War, was so horrified by what he found, he finally spoke out – at cost. Sick from DU poisoning himself, he has suffered ongoing ‘physical, psychological and economic threats’ from Helbig and other US government representatives since.

Rokke has crucial, credible, hands-on knowledge, thus, writes David Lindorff, the effort to discredit him, label him ‘a fraud’, demote him to ‘Lt.’ by Helbig, has been vicious and tenacious.

This is the same Doug Rokke whose Army evaluation report, dated July 30th 1994, cites the then Captain Rokke as being Project Director and primary technical expert and specialist adviser to US Army major commands, the US Army Chemical School and contractors during training, development and test implementation. In 1995 he was cited for a ‘meritorious service’ medal, for work on DU. He left the army when none of his health warning reached the troops.

Rokke and another former Pentagon advisor, Dr Asav Durakovic, whose CV and list of peer reviewed papers runs to 52 pages, Canadian expert Professor Hari Sharma (who wrote to NATO and world leaders of the dangers of DU), Dr Garth Nicholson and others have demanded appropriate testing and treatment of all affected – soldiers and civilians – and rigorous DU clean up, where used or tested ‘as already required by the US Department of Defence regulations…’, states Rokke. The polluter pays. But the cost would be stratospheric; so Helbig’s group stalk the internet to insult and intimidate.

‘The use of uranium munitions is an act of terror,’ Rokke says. In context, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority ‘selfinitiated’ a report for the British government on DU shortly after the 1991 war. If 50 tonnes of the residual DU dust remained, they estimated that there wiuld be in excess of half a million cancer deaths in the region by the year 2000. The Pentagon admits to 325 tonnes remaining and other estimates are as high as 900 tonnes. In 2003 a further two thousand tonne DU burden has been admitted to.

Iraq and the region’s cancers have become a tragedy equalling Chernobyl. Oddly, when the US/UK military allowed the looting of every Iraqi State building, all medical records of this unique war crime was destroyed.

Helbig is excercised by a memo from Los Alamos National Laboratories, New Mexico, from a Lt. Colonel Larson to a Major Ziehman. It is dated the day after the 1991 onslaught on Iraq ended (1st March 1991.) Headed ‘The Effectiveness of Depleted Uranium Penetrators’, it reads: ‘There is a relatively small amount of lethality data for uranium penetrators… The recent war has likely multiplied the DU rounds fired at targets by orders of magnitude…

‘There has been and continues to be a concern regarding the impact of DU on the environment. Therefore, if no one makes a case for the effectiveness of DU on the battlefield, DU rounds may become politically unacceptable and thus, be deleted from the arsenal.’ Thus, ‘we should assure their future existence’ otherwise may stand to lose them. He continues, ‘I believe we should keep this sensitive issue in mind, when, after action, reports are written.’

US tanks damaged by DU rounds in 1991 were taken to a nuclear decontamination plant at Barnwell, North Carolina, reportedly constructed the previous year solely for this purpose. Those beyond decontamination were buried in specially licensed landfill sites.

In June 1995 the US Army Environmental Policy Institute wrote of DU: ‘DU is a radioactive waste and therefore should be deposited in a licensed repository’. The poisoned chalice of breaking the news that Kuwait had been turned in to an unlicensed one, fell to the luckless British Ambassador.

Helbig’s email cites the United Nations Environment Agency Report. There were two UNEP Reports on Balkans contamination. The first was cut – under alleged US/UK pressure – from 72 pages, to two. An impeccable source on the second, to which Helbig refers, stated that in spite of considerable obstacles placed in their way, a list of the most contaminated sites to sample was compiled. On arrival, the multinational forces excluded visits to those sites. As Professor Malcolm Hooper, Emeritus Professor of Medicinal Chemistry at Sunderland University (UK) writes in his article ‘Most Toxic War in Western Military History’, regarding Iraq in 1991: ‘at every level, investigation into illness, birth defects, contamination has been blocked and bedevilled by … a pervasive myopia which sees lack of evidence as proof.’

Last September, Lieutenant Colonel Helbig, of Richardson, California, was in Court. Complex, inter-connected cases, heard also in June and July, due to resume in December, involve Helbig’s neighbour, Jamahl Feres, of Syrian origin and his Swiss wife Katherine. They allege suffering three years of harrasment including the last year, in which Helbig covered all windows in his house which faced theirs, with Israeli flags. Leuren Moret and Bob Nichol will be witnesses for the Feres’s.

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Veteran War Correspondent Felicity Arbuthnot is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization and Associate Editor of Global Research.

Le guerre divampano dal Sudan all’Ucraina. Cresce di conseguenza la spesa militare mondiale. L’Europa ha speso nel 2022 in armi e operazioni militari  il 13% in più rispetto al 2021, registrando il più forte aumento da 30 anni a questa parte. La spesa militare annua dell’Italia è salita a oltre 30 miliardi di euro, ossia a una media di oltre 80 milioni di euro al giorno.

Si continua allo stesso tempo a nascondere e mistificare le vere cause delle guerre. Il presidente Biden dichiara che “la tragica violenza in Sudan è inconcepibile e deve finire”. Cancella in tal modo il fatto che, quando era vicepresidente dell’Amministrazione Obama, è stato uno dei principali artefici della strategia statunitense che ha alimentato la guerra in Sudan per spaccare il paese in due parti. Nasceva così nel 2011 lo Stato artificiale del Sud Sudan, in possesso del 75% delle riserve petrolifere sudanesi. Ciò ha provocato l’ulteriore estensione dei conflitti interni e delle ingerenze esterne per il controllo della regione sudanese, importante sia perché è ricca di petrolio, gas naturale, oro e altre materie prime, sia perché  ha una posizione geostrategica  chiave nel continente africano.

In Ucraina Stati Uniti, NATO e Unione Europea continuano ad alimentare la guerra contro la Russia, fornendo al regime di Kiev crescenti quantità di armi e assistenza militare di ogni tipo. Allo stesso tempo fanno sì che il regime di Kiev cancelli tutto ciò che è russo dall’Ucraina e dalla sua storia. Dopo che Kiev ha decretato di mandare al rogo 100 milioni di libri russi a partire dai classici della letteratura – una pratica analoga a quella del nazismo hitleriano – Zelenski ha firmato una legge che vieta i nomi russi dei luoghi e altri simboli della fondamentale componente russa della storia ucraina. Il loro uso è considerato per legge un “atto criminale” e comporta gravi pene. Zelenski ha inoltre firmato una legge in base alla quale, per ottenere la cittadinanza ucraina, è necessario un esame non solo sulla lingua ma anche sulla “storia dell’Ucraina”. Questa è riscritta da “storici” che esaltano personaggi come Stepan Bandera, collaborazionista del nazismo hitleriano. Nello stesso quadro, la Corte Suprema Ucraina ha decretato nel 2022 che i simboli della Divisione SS Galizia – composta da nazisti ucraini che commisero crimini orrendi – non sono nazisti e possono quindi essere usati quali simboli politici anche nelle manifestazioni. Questa Ucraina il Governo italiano si impegna a “ricostruire” investendovi miliardi di euro sottratti ai cittadini italiani.

Manlio Dinucci

 

VIDEO :

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First published on April 18, 2023

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Electronic warfare (EW) is one of the most important aspects of modern military capabilities and is often the litmus test of how advanced the state and its armed forces are. It’s part of the “invisible” and yet extremely intense battle that we usually cannot see directly.

However, its impact is wholly undeniable. Russia is among the world leaders in EW and its warfighting capabilities in this regard are a source of pride for the Eurasian giant, but also fear for its adversaries.

Russian dominance in EW on the frontlines of Ukraine is so comprehensive and massive that it’s one of the few things the mainstream propaganda machine never dared to question or ridicule. Even Russian strategic thermonuclear capabilities were subjected to propaganda attacks at times, but its EW capabilities – never. And for good reason.

And yet, as with everything concerning the mainstream propaganda machine, we must tread carefully. This is especially true when it comes to the media citing the Pentagon “leaks” as their primary source of information. Needless to say, an actual leak would require an inadvertent release of classified information and most intelligence experts agree it’s extremely unlikely there was anything inadvertent about it. However, this is not to say that all information connected to the “leak” is false. On the contrary, its relatively elaborate nature implies that much of it is indeed true, but it can be difficult to discern what exactly. One of the few “leaked” facts we can surely believe concerns precisely Russian EW capabilities. Still, this begs the question – why?

To answer that, we should first dissect and specify the claims of the mainstream propaganda machine. The “leaks” include a massive amount of information, including the claim that US-made JDAM (Joint Direct Attack Munition) bombs are failing in Ukraine due to successful Russian EW measures. The “leak” documents not only review the use of Russian countermeasures to make JDAMs ineffective, but also indicate that in some cases this results in failure to even detonate. It seems this includes the JDAM-ER (Extended Range) bombs that the troubled Biden administration sent to the Kiev regime in order to provide certain battlefield advantages to its forces. A futile effort, it would seem now, although the documents suggest that at least a thousand JDAM kits have been sent so far.

Politico claims that “Russia is using GPS jamming to interfere with the weapons’ targeting process, according to the slide and a separate person familiar with the issue who’s not in the US government”. The report further states that “American officials believe Russian jamming is causing the JDAMs, and at times other American weapons such as guided rockets, to miss their mark”. Mick Mulroy, a former Pentagon official and retired CIA officer claims: “I do think there may be concern that the Russians may be jamming the signal used to direct the JDAMs, which would answer why these munitions are not performing in the manner expected and how they perform in other war zones.”

This was quite an unpleasant surprise for the Kiev regime as it expected the JDAMs to be a “game changer” providing key tactical advantages that Russia supposedly “couldn’t match”. However, it’s not just that this completely false sense of security fell apart as a result, but it turns out that the performance of other much-touted NATO-sourced weapons is little more than PR optics. The “leak” suggests that even the M270 and HIMARS rockets are being successfully countered by Russian GPS jamming tactics. Many documents consistently show that the Kiev regime forces are generally beset by chronic munitions and advanced weapons shortages, and having Russian EW capabilities preventing precision targeting is exacerbating this exponentially, despite countless billions in weapons provided by the political West.

This is where we come to the “solution” the American Military Industrial Complex (MIC) may come up with.

How does the world’s largest cartel of arms producers solve the issues with the precision of their weapons? Well, more weapons!

With the Kiev regime potentially acquiring thousands of additional JDAMs, obviously by using funds provided by the political West, since the Neo-Nazi junta itself is “financially dead”, as Hungarian President Viktor Orban accurately assessed, US MIC contractors get even more billions of American taxpayers’ dollars. The contract to alter and/or upgrade thousands of JDAMs and other munitions would provide long-term contracts to the likes of Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, BAE Systems, etc. This could be one of the few logical answers to the question of why the mainstream propaganda machine suddenly felt the urge to tell the truth for once.

However, we shouldn’t fall into the trap of thinking this has anything to do with altruistic motives or even the desire to make the Kiev regime a more effective fighting force. The main goal primarily revolves around causing as much death and destruction as possible, particularly to civilian infrastructure in the Donbass and other areas of former Ukraine. This has twofold advantages for the US. First, Russia is left with destroyed buildings and infrastructure that need to be renovated and second, the mainstream propaganda machine can portray the destruction as caused by Russia. This also explains why the Neo-Nazi junta continues using Western weapons that keep missing and hitting civilian areas. 

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Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.

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First published on March 22, 2023

***

Those who have been following events in Ukraine will know of the bloodshed and destruction taking place in that country, especially if they go beyond mainstream media reports. This is not to excuse Russia’s brutal military actions, but it was a wholly avoidable conflict that was largely engineered in Washington by a clique of neoconservatives who have been responsible for igniting situations that have led to hundreds of thousands if not millions of deaths this century, from Libya, Syria and Iraq to Afghanistan and beyond, aside from the displacement of many more.  

The NATO countries continue to ship arms and equipment to Ukraine, swelling the coffers of arms manufacturers like Raytheon. The UK has now decided to send weapons containing depleted uranium, provoking a firm response from Russia.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told Russian Television and Radio (VGTRK) that the UK’s depleted uranium supply violates international law.

Labrov said:

“They [the UK] have already lost their bearings in terms of their actions and how these actions undermine strategic stability around the world.”

He added that this will “end badly” for London.

On her Telegram account, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova explained:

“These shells not only kill but infect the environment and cause cancer in people living on these lands.”

It is clear that – and it has been clear for a very long time – that those who create policy care nothing for ordinary people who are regarded as expendable in the lust for power, profit and geopolitical gain.

Relatively few politicians have stood up to challenge the official narrative on Ukraine, let alone call out those responsible for adding fuel to a fire in danger of escalating out of control. MEP Clare Daly has been one politician (along with fellow MEP Mick Wallace) who has been fearless in her response to events, not only regarding Ukraine but also concerning US wars of aggression across the globe in that country’s ultimately doomed attempt to maintain global hegemony.

Her recent brief but powerful speech (with transcript) given to the European parliament on 15 March is worth listening to and is presented below.

“Listening to the cheerleading in here, safe and secure thousands of miles away from the frontlines, I think it would be a useful exercise for us to remind ourselves about what ordinary Ukrainians are experiencing.

“The Economist reports of forced recruitment across the country. Draftees with no experience or training are being sent to the front in what a UK minister calls First World War levels of attrition. Casualty figures are secret, but we know there are estimates of about 120,000 (dead). Battalion commanders tell the Washington Post of recruits fleeing positions on mass. Politico reports a crackdown on deserters.

“These are human beings and there is a shameful lack of empathy for ordinary people in the war rhetoric in here. The debate is about keeping the weapons flowing to keep the war going. Ukraine is burning through a generation of men. Sons, husbands, brothers who can never be replaced. This cannot go on indefinitely.

“And it’s sickening to watch generals who sit in here and will these men to their deaths. You make me sick!!

“We need peace. We need dialogue, however unpleasant that may be.”

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Renowned author Colin Todhunter specialises in development, food and agriculture. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) in Montreal.

Featured image is from Kurt Nimmo

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Read Colin Todhunter’s e-Book entitled

Food, Dispossession and Dependency. Resisting the New World Order

We are currently seeing an acceleration of the corporate consolidation of the entire global agri-food chain. The high-tech/big data conglomerates, including Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Google, have joined traditional agribusiness giants, such as Corteva, Bayer, Cargill and Syngenta, in a quest to impose their model of food and agriculture on the world.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is also involved (documented in ‘Gates to a Global Empire‘ by Navdanya International), whether through buying up huge tracts of farmland, promoting a much-heralded (but failed) ‘green revolution’ for Africa, pushing biosynthetic food and genetic engineering technologies or more generally facilitating the aims of the mega agri-food corporations.

Click here to read.

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*** 

Joe Biden with a dismal approval rating of 37% has announced that he is running for a second term. How can he possibly win? By again stealing the election.

Democrats control the large cities in swing states. In the past two elections, they have proven that they can easily steal the election. It is now impermissible to even report evidence of election theft. Experts who provided evidence were threatened with prosecution, and Fox News management rushed to pay more than three-quarters of a billion dollars of shareholders’ money in order to create the precedent that reporting evidence of stolen elections constitutes defamation. As Democrats control election procedures and vote counting in large cities, they, and not the voters, determine election outcomes. The last two American national elections prove the truth of Stalin’s dictum:  It matters not how people vote; it matters who counts the votes. 

The All-America Economic Survey found that 70% of Americans disfavor a Biden second term.This indicates that a large percentage of Democrats themselves do not want Biden. In America today, elections are nothing more than a veil behind which the elite rule.

The Democrats have a good candidate, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.  But RFK opposes Big Pharma’s control of US medicine and the agencies–FDA, NIH, CDC–that serve as Big Pharma’s protectors and marketing agents, and he opposes other aspects of the oligarchic system protected by official narratives upheld by the media. RFK will not be permitted to be president.  

Republican Trump has by far the largest number of voters, but the Democrats have weaponized law in an effort to stop him from running. Other possible and strong Republican candidates – Ron DeSantis and Tucker Carlson – are unacceptable to the ruling elite and to the Republican establishment. If DeSantis makes himself acceptable to the establishment, he will lose his luster with voters.

The long-term ongoing collapse of US education has produced a population many of whom are comfortable with censoring and suppressing information that they are programmed to regard as “offensive” or “misinformation.” These two categories of unwelcome information refer to truths that are inconvenient for the elite and their official narratives. The regard of truth as hurtful has gained a foothold and exercises peer pressure on parts of the population, which makes it difficult for the people to act in their own interest.

Essentially, democracy has ceased to exist in the US. Increasingly, “elected” representatives are appointees of the ruling elite, who control the selection of candidates by their allocations of campaign funds. Trump was the last elected  President (twice). It is unlikely the ruling elite will allow Trump to again enter the White House.

When agendas prevail over truth, tyranny is the consequence. When facts can’t matter, there is no science. Remember how easy it was for a crank to destroy Soviet genetics. Already in the US we have reached the point where mathematics is said to be a tool of white supremacy. Americans might think this is laughable, but the Soviet geneticists who were executed and imprisoned didn’t find it laughable.

In America today there is no remaining foundation for democracy. The media has been captured and turned into a propaganda ministry for the ruling elites. Truth is discredited as hurtful, offensive, and a danger to national security–remember Julian Assange has been in effect incarcerated for a decade without due process of law simply because he reported leaked facts inconvenient for the US government. Tucker Carlson has just been fired from Fox News for telling truths inconvenient for the ruling elite.

Formerly, the Democrats represented the working class, and Republicans represented the business class. Today both parties represent the ruling oligarchy. No party represents the people.  

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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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*** 

It’s not often that conservative lobbyists beat the drum for increased environmental oversight and regulation. But that’s what happened this month when the far-right Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), through its legal arm, filed a brief in federal court demanding that the Department of Homeland Security conduct an extensive environmental impact study examining, of all things, immigration policy.

In a press release, the group laid out its reasoning:

“Clearly, DHS desperately wants to avoid the impossible task of explaining, in detail, why adding millions of illegal aliens to our population does not harm the environment, or why the harm it does cause is somehow ‘worth it.’”

Ostensibly green rationales for ever harsher immigration policies are hardly a new phenomenon. U.S. and European anti-immigrant movements have long used the real need for environmental protection as an excuse for demanding ever harsher treatment of immigrants. Now, with drought, flooding, storms, and other manifestations of climate disruption swelling the ranks of people seeking refuge outside their home countries, far-rightists are dialing up their evocations of nature to push ever greater cruelty toward immigrants.

The pervasive theme in such circles is that, in an already overpopulated America, more millions of dark-skinned immigrants, having supposedly wreaked ecological destruction in their own countries in the Global South, are now crossing our borders in ever larger numbers. They will, so the thinking goes, despoil this country’s environment, too — and the only way to stop them is by using ever more violent means. The extremists peddling such propaganda are coming to be known these days as “ecofascists.” Above all else, they insist, the United States must maintain white control over “our” country — you know, the lands that our ancestors stole from Native peoples who actually knew how to live in harmony with nature.

In the process, such white supremacists are, without the slightest sense of irony, increasingly adopting the language of environmentalism to push both grotesque anti-immigrant bigotry and a broader, genuinely unnerving far-right agenda.

A Crueler Shade of Green

In the past few years, ecofascism has broken into the mainstream news cycle several times, most notably in connection with a grim set of mass shootings.

Nineteen-year-old Payton Gendron, who pled guilty to murdering 10 Blacks in a Buffalo grocery store last year, explicitly called himself an ecofascist. In the manifesto he left behind, he wrote,

“For too long we have allowed the left to co-opt the environmentalist movement to serve their own needs. The left has controlled all discussion regarding environmental preservation whilst simultaneously presiding over the continued destruction of the natural environment itself through mass immigration and uncontrolled urbanization.”

Urbanization, you see, because you know what kind of people live in cities. (Wink, wink.)

Patrick Crusius, who killed 23 people in an El Paso Walmart in 2019, left behind a manifesto raising false alarms about a “Hispanic invasion.” He wrote:

“The environment is getting worse by the year. Most of y’all are just too stubborn to change your lifestyle. So the next logical step is to decrease the number of people in America using resources. If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can become more sustainable.”

Both men drew inspiration from Brenton Tarrant, the white supremacist who, earlier in 2019, had murdered 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. Tarrant wrote a manifesto in which he declared,

“The invaders are the ones over-populating the world… Kill the invaders, kill the overpopulation and by doing so save the environment.”

Florid rhetoric notwithstanding, those mass killers did not actually have ecological sustainability at the top of their minds. They just put a green veneer on their hatred of immigrants, an increasingly familiar tactic of the racist right. Philip Santoro, in a rant for the white nationalist publication American Renaissance in 2017, slathered on an early and especially rancid coat of green:

“The Left’s ‘green politics,’ combined with support for mass immigration and opposition to nuclear power, would mean a future of overcrowding, poverty, and the displacement of whites. When the Left tackles climate change, it wants to ‘save the planet’ — but apparently for someone else’s babies. The population explosion in the global south combined with climate change and liberal attitudes towards migration are the single greatest external threat to Western civilization.”

At the Global Network on Extremism and Technology, Frederike Wegener reported that, on social media, violent extremists increasingly “disguise racist and nativist ideas behind environmental concerns to lure in young people and environmental activists,” utilizing slogans like “Love Nature, Kill Non-Whites” and “Save Bees, Plant Trees, Shoot Refugees.” Creating an overwhelming sense of imminent ecological catastrophe, he wrote, can induce nonviolent, climate-conscious citizens to make common cause with violent nativists.

Deploying bees and trees as a cover for such right-wing policies has a long history in America. The growth of the anti-immigration movement over the past half-century in particular is widely credited to a Michigan ophthalmologist named John Tanton, who, as Paloma Quiroga wrote for Wellesley College’s Environmental Synthesis and Communications blog in 2021, “viewed overpopulation and immigration as a threat to the environment and to the future of white America — views that are explicitly ecofascist. In his efforts to thwart immigration, he ended up creating a vast loose-knit network of anti-immigration groups and lobbyists, now dubbed the Tanton network.” Since the 1980s, that network has managed to sabotage all attempts to develop humane federal immigration policies.

Today, the most powerful group in the network is the Federation for American Immigration Reform, the outfit pressuring the Department of Homeland Security on the supposed environmental impact of immigrants. On its website, FAIR dwells on the evils of population growth — and by that it means only the growth of “certain” populations:

“Currently, there are 326 million people residing in the U.S., so immigration alone will be responsible for an additional 78 million people over the course of just 40 years… Growth of the population at those levels are certain to impact both the quality of life for average Americans and the sustainability of the environment. The threat of overpopulation is not to our economic health, but also to the present and future quality of life and environmental sustainability… The progress the nation has made toward increased conservation and fuel and energy efficiency will continue to be eroded…”

Connecting anti-immigrant and racist ideas via population growth to environmental degradation is nothing new. The racism of the conservation movement’s founding fathers, including John Muir and John James Audubon, have been widely discussed in recent years. In the late 1990s, Tanton, at the time still a member of the Sierra Club, pushed for that venerable environmental organization to adopt an explicitly nativist position. That proposal was voted down, but only by a very narrow margin. In 2004, anti-immigrant members again tried to seize control of the organization — and once again they failed. In recent years, in fact, the Sierra Club has forcefully renounced its former toleration of nativist sentiment within its membership and has come to actively support immigrant rights.

Ecofascist arguments serve not only as an excuse for abusing immigrants, but are also being deployed by a broader, more violent range of far-right groups and movements on both sides of the Atlantic. Environmental and anti-industrial calls to action have been a staple of the leading U.S. neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer, along with several far-right groups, including The Base, the neo-Nazi Atomwaffen Division (rebooted as the National Socialist Order), and the Pine Tree Gang. Far-right political parties in France, Austria, and Germany have similarly espoused the merging of “ecological civilization” and “ecocentric nativism.”

Equal-Opportunity Collapse?

The ecofascists’ use of green rhetoric is, of course, wholly disingenuous. But frightening as well is the way similar impulses have crept into the edges of the actual environmental movement, most of which is still identified not just with the leftward reaches of American politics, but with nonviolence. Still, in a country filled to the brim with weaponry and displaying a growing urge for violence (of which ecofascism is such a painful example), even those genuinely encouraging the greening of the planet have, sadly enough, not proven completely immune to the urge to deploy such tactics.

Last October, I experienced this personally. I gave an online talk about the role that rationing could play in curbing ecological destruction. The audience, including members of several West Coast environmental groups, seemed quite receptive. So, I was shocked when, as the hour ended, the moderator wrapped by veering into distinctly weird territory. Resolving the ecological crisis, he suddenly suggested, might require us to consider the “value” of “authoritarianism,” or more specifically, of “green fascism, or maybe green ‘equitable’ fascism.” As the session had already spilled into overtime, there was no opportunity for me to consider, much less discuss, how such ideas might have infiltrated a green movement that had long been peaceable indeed.

Radical movements to achieve a green, equitable society have been around at least since the rise of groups like Earth First! in the 1980s. In more recent times, however, movements like the Earth Liberation Front advocated damaging or destroying industrial infrastructure as an essential step toward a more ecologically sound society. For the past decade, the Deep Green Resistance movement has gone even further, insisting that the goal of such sabotage should be the complete collapse of industrial society. Only a return to pre-industrial civilization, it maintains, will give the planet room to heal, while creating opportunities for us to develop autonomous, egalitarian societies that exploit neither our fellow humans, nor nature.

In the 2011 book Deep Green Resistance, movement authors Lierre Keith, Aric McBay, and Derrick Jensen similarly argued that civilization’s industrial foundation needed to be completely pulverized, sooner rather than later. Convinced that “the vast majority of the population will do nothing unless they are led, cajoled, or forced,” they urged that “those of us who care about the future of the planet have to dismantle the industrial energy infrastructure as rapidly as possible.”  Precipitous de-industrialization is necessary, they wrote, because so little time remains to prevent an ecological collapse complete enough to render the world unlivable for humanity. Therefore, “rapid collapse is ultimately good for humans — even if there is a die-off — because at least some people survive.” This is jarring stuff, to say the least, and it has rightly been subjected to withering criticism,

So far, the deep green resistance people have stuck to proselytizing and organizing, rather than any kind of real-world sabotage. On the political right, however, incidents of eco-infrastructure sabotage are indeed on the increase. Over the past year, for instance, there have been a rash of attacks on power grids nationwide by right-wing extremists, not environmentalists. A man and a woman arrested in February for planning to take down four power substations in the Baltimore area proved, not surprisingly, to espouse neo-Nazi views. And successful attacks on two North Carolina substations last December were also linked to neo-Nazism and white supremacy. In late 2022, the Department of Homeland Security warned that there had been a significant rise in online discussions among far-right elements focused on assaulting the power grid to trigger cascading blackouts across the country. That, they believed, could lead to a governmental collapse and so create openings for a fascist takeover. (In a country already featuring the Trumpublican Party, this should be unnerving, even if not exactly surprising.)

Hunter Walker, a reporter for Talking Points Memo, recently obtained a copy of an online magazine that advocated attacks on power substations and provided coaching to would-be saboteurs, while announcing, as if they were greens, “It is our belief that the techno-industrial system presents an absolute and urgent existential threat to all life on earth.”   

Walker managed to track down one of the authors who told him that their aim was indeed to motivate not the far right but “militant groups of educated anarchists.” As the author acknowledged, however, the far right is “far better armed” and better prepared for shooting out transformers “than the Left or post-Left.” That being the case, the manual’s author added, if the question was whether “I would accept assistance or ‘alliance’ with any far-right group, I would hesitate to say no. I would much rather turn the lights out and then fight them in the quiet dark afterwards.”

This raises a question: Might radical individuals or even groups at opposite ends of the political spectrum ever converge on the same violent direct-action tactics?

Brian Tokar is on the faculty and board of the Institute for Social Ecology in Plainfield, Vermont, which offers courses on ecofascism. I asked him how much overlap he and his colleagues had noticed between violent, racist, ecofascist movements and nonviolent, anti-racist, radical environmental movements. Tokar responded, “I don’t think there’s a lot of overlap, but there’s certainly enough that it’s deeply disturbing.”

“This goes back,” he said, “to the… eighties when Dave Foreman and Edward Abbey [of the Earth First! movement] were saying a lot of disturbing things, including a lot of anti-immigrant stuff — especially Abbey, who was all about protecting the borders against people who, he said, would spread pollution. It was just blatantly racist… but there were also a lot of people who vocally challenged it from the beginning.”

“Fast forward to more recent times,” Tokar continued, “and my colleagues have documented stories of people who started out in leftist ecological circles and drifted over into an overtly ecological neo-fascist or neo-Nazi anti-immigrant kind of politics.” In fact, the ecofascists’ strategy, he added, “seems to be that if they can skim off a few people, especially people who have a following, they can shift the discussion in their direction.”

A Future in Danger

I feel confident in predicting that the ecofascists won’t manage to seize power by taking down the national electric grid. Still, by fueling human-rights abuses, racial hatred, and deadly violence, their toxic propaganda has made the United States a more perilous place to live if you weren’t born white and within its borders. By hijacking the message of ecological renewal and using it to persecute the powerless, they could, at a minimum, make it far more difficult for this country to act boldly in the future when it comes to the climate crisis and environmental justice. That’s why the message of such ecofascists has to be verbally shredded wherever and whenever they try to spread it.

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Stan Cox, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of The Path to a Livable Future: A New Politics to Fight Climate Change, Racism, and the Next Pandemic, The Green New Deal and Beyond: Ending the Climate Emergency While We Still Can, and the current In Real Time climate series at City Lights Books. Find him on Twitter at @CoxStan.

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Italy — 38 year old bodybuilder Simone Venturini died suddenly in his home on April 24, 2023. An autopsy has been ordered (click here). 

Uruacu, Brazil — 24-year old personal trainer and bodybuilder Jhonatan Saraiva had a sudden medical emergency while swimming in a lake on March 25, 2023 and died (click here)

Turkish-Canadian bodybuilder Murat Gonul age 46, died suddenly on Jan. 10, 2023, cause of death not revealed (click here)

German Bodybuilder Andreas Frey, age 43 died in his sleep on Oct. 20, 2022 (click here)

Los Angeles, CA — COVID-19 Vaccinated Professional bodybuilder Doug Brignole, age 63, died on October 13, 2022. LA County Medical Examiner claims he died from “COVID-19”. Doubtful.

Argentine bodybuilder Johana Colla, age 30, was found dead in the hotel where she was staying after winning 2nd place in the South American Bodybuilding Championship in Sao Paulo, Brazil, on October 8, 2022 (click here)

Professional Polish bodybuilder Paul Poloczek, age 37, died suddenly hours after competing in tournament, May 28, 2022, cause of death unknown (click here)

Bodybuilding champion Cedric McMillan, age 44, died by having a heart attack while on a treadmill, on April 12, 2022 (click here)

Bodybuilder Bostin lloyd, age 29 died suddenly on Feb. 25, 2022 from an aortic dissection (click here)

Feb. 2022 – 34-year old Indian bodybuilder Jagdish Lad, and 40-year old Brazilian bodybuilder Roberto Gervasio both allegedly died of “COVID-19”. These may have been COVID-19 vaccine deaths instead. 

Mr. Olympia Shawn Rhoden, age 46, died of heart attack Nov. 6, 2021 (click here)

Professional bodybuilder Jennifer Hernandez died in Oct. 24, 2021 of unknown causes (click here)

Mr. Olympia contestant, fully vaccinated George Peterson, age 37, was found dead in his hotel room, possible brain aneurysm bleed?, died Oct. 6, 2021 (click here)

Hilton, NY — Bodybuilder 28 year old Jake Kazmarek died four days after getting seconnd Moderna COVID-19 mRNA vaccine on Oct. 2, 2021 (click here)

My Take…

Some people might be tempted to dismiss deaths of bodybuilders. Not me.

There are many deaths here that are highly suspicious, cardiac arrests, deaths in their sleep, and what I found particularly interesting, deaths with seemingly no explanation.

So many deaths that I had to remove the powerlifters and weightlifters and put them in a separate substack article.

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Image: George W. Bush’s Grandfather, Senator Prescott Bush

Of relevance to an understanding of America’s insidious role in supporting Nazi Germany.

This article was first published on GR in March 2016.

 

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“A  famous American family” made its fortune from the Nazis, according to John Loftus’ documented historical analysis.    

The Bush family links to Nazi Germany’s war economy were first brought to light at the Nuremberg trials in the testimony of Nazi Germany’s steel magnate Fritz Thyssen. Thyssen was a partner of George W. Bush’s grandfather Prescott Bush: 

From 1945 until 1949 in Nuremberg, one of the lengthiest and, it now appears, most futile interrogations of a Nazi war crimes suspect began in the American Zone of Occupied Germany.

Multibillionaire steel magnate Fritz Thyssen-the man whose steel combine was the cold heart of the Nazi war machine-talked and talked and talked to a joint US-UK interrogation team.

… What the Allied investigators never understood was that they were not asking Thyssen the right question. Thyssen did not need any foreign bank accounts because his family secretly owned an entire chain of banks.

He did not have to transfer his Nazi assets at the end of World War II, all he had to do was transfer the ownership documents – stocks, bonds, deeds and trusts–from his bank in Berlin through his bank in Holland to his American friends in New York City: Prescott Bush and Herbert Walker [father in law of Prescott Bush]. Thyssen’s partners in crime were the father and [grandfather] of a future President of the United States [George Herbert Walker Bush]. (John Loftus, How the Bush family made its fortune from the Nazis: The Dutch Connection, Global Research, February 2002, edit by GR)

The American public is not aware of the links of the Bush family to Nazi Germany because the historical record has been carefully withheld by the mainstream media.

In September 2004, however, The Guardian revealed that:

George Bush’s grandfather, the late US senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany.

The Guardian has obtained confirmation from newly discovered files in the US National Archives that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism.

His business dealings, which continued until his company’s assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, has led more than 60 years later to a civil action for damages being brought in Germany against the Bush family by two former slave labourers at Auschwitz and to a hum of pre-election controversy.

The evidence has also prompted one former US Nazi war crimes prosecutor to argue that the late senator’s action should have been grounds for prosecution for giving aid and comfort to the enemy. ( Ben Aris and Duncan Campbell, How the Bush’s Grandfather Helped Hitlers Rise to Power,   Guardian, September 25, 2004)

 

The more fundamental question is not whether Prescott Bush helped Adolph Hitler. From a historical perspective, what is important is how the rise to power of Adolph Hitler was supportive of  US business interests in Germany.

US  Presidential Elections

The Guardian article was published on September 25, 2004 at the height of the US election campaign which led to the reelection of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney on Tuesday November 2nd 2004.

Deafening silence. The US media provided no coverage of GWB’s family history. Had the American people known that the Bush family had links to Nazi Germany, John Kerry would have won the presidency in 2004 in a landslide.

Similarly, Michael Dukakis would have won the presidency in 1989 against George Herbert Walker Bush. In fact, had this been revealed to the American people in the wake of the Nuremberg trials (1945-1949), Bush Senior would never have entered politics and his father Prescott Bush would never have become Senator.

Is there a pattern?  Do you have to be a wealthy war criminal to accede to high office?

Prescott Bush had links to Nazi Germany, Bush Senior and George W. Bush had links to the Bin Laden Family…

What must be ensured  to “protect American democracy” is that none of these “awkward truths” which reveal the crimes committed by prominent politicians be the object of media coverage. Needless to say, propaganda is essential to uphold the legitimacy of presidential candidates in the eyes of public opinion.

War Crimes. Crimes against Humanity

Nazi war crimes with the complicity of Wall Street and the Bush family?

US war crimes committed by Bush Junior in Iraq (2003), Bush Senior (the Gulf War, 1991), Is there a relationship?

What was the role of the late senator Prescott Bush in his dealings with Nazi Germany:

Evidence of the Bush family’s  links to Nazism was available well before George Herbert Walker Bush (Senior)  and George W. Bush entered politics. According to John Buchanan (New Hampshire Gazette, 10 October 2003):

After 60 years of inattention and even denial by the U.S. media, newly-uncovered government documents in The National Archives and Library of Congress reveal that Prescott Bush, the grandfather of President George W. Bush, served as a business partner of and U.S. banking operative for the financial architect of the Nazi war machine from 1926 until 1942, when Congress took aggressive action against Bush and his “enemy national” partners.

The documents also show that Bush and his colleagues, according to reports from the U.S. Department of the Treasury, tried to conceal their financial alliance with German industrialist Fritz Thyssen, a steel and coal baron who, beginning in the mid-1920s, personally funded Adolf Hitler’s rise to power by the subversion of democratic principle and German law. Furthermore, the declassified records demonstrate that Bush and his associates, who included E. Roland Harriman, younger brother of American icon W. Averell Harriman, and George Herbert Walker, President Bush’s maternal great-grandfather, continued their dealings with the German industrial tycoon for nearly a year after the U.S. entered the war.

While Prescott Bush’s “company’s assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, George W. Bush’s grandfather was never prosecuted for his business dealings with  Nazi Germany.

“In 1952, Prescott Bush was elected to the U.S. Senate, with no press accounts about his well-concealed Nazi past. There is no record of any U.S. press coverage of the Bush-Nazi connection during any political campaigns conducted by George Herbert Walker Bush, Jeb Bush, or George W. Bush, with the exception of a brief mention in an unrelated story in the Sarasota Herald Tribune in November 2000 and a brief but inaccurate account in The Boston Globe in 2001.” (John Buchanan, op. cit)

Up until Pearl Harbor (December 1941), Wall Street was trading with the enemy. In the wake of Pearl Harbor, Standard Oil continued to sell oil to Nazi Germany through the intermediation of so-called “neutral countries” including Venezuela and Argentina.

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research March 6, 2016

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From the ashes of a world war that killed 80 million people and reduced great cities to smoking rubble, America rose like a Titan of Greek legend, unharmed and armed with extraordinary military and economic power, to govern the globe. During four years of combat against the Axis leaders in Berlin and Tokyo that raged across the planet, America’s wartime commanders — George Marshall in Washington, Dwight D. Eisenhower in Europe, and Chester Nimitz in the Pacific — knew that their main strategic objective was to gain control over the vast Eurasian landmass.

Whether you’re talking about desert warfare in North Africa, the D-Day landing at Normandy, bloody battles on the Burma-India border, or the island-hopping campaign across the Pacific, the Allied strategy in World War II involved constricting the reach of the Axis powers globally and then wresting that very continent from their grasp.

That past, though seemingly distant, is still shaping the world we live in. Those legendary generals and admirals are, of course, long gone, but the geopolitics they practiced at such a cost still has profound implications. For just as Washington encircled Eurasia to win a great war and global hegemony, so Beijing is now involved in a far less militarized reprise of that reach for global power.

And to be blunt, these days, China’s gain is America’s loss. Every step Beijing takes to consolidate its control over Eurasia simultaneously weakens Washington’s presence on that strategic continent and so erodes its once formidable global power.

A Cold War Strategy

After four embattled years imbibing lessons about geopolitics with their morning coffee and bourbon nightcaps, America’s wartime generation of generals and admirals understood, intuitively, how to respond to the future alliance of the two great communist powers in Moscow and Beijing.

In 1948, following his move from the Pentagon to Foggy Bottom, Secretary of State George Marshall launched the $13 billion Marshall Plan to rebuild a war-torn Western Europe, laying the economic foundations for the formation of the NATO alliance just a year later. After a similar move from the wartime Allied headquarters in London to the White House in 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower helped complete a chain of military bastions along Eurasia’s Pacific littoral by signing a series of mutual-security pacts — with South Korea in 1953, Taiwan in 1954, and Japan in 1960. For the next 70 years, that island chain would serve as the strategic hinge on Washington’s global power, critical for both the defense of North America and dominance over Eurasia.

After fighting to conquer much of that vast continent during World War II, America’s postwar leaders certainly knew how to defend their gains. For more than 40 years, their unrelenting efforts to dominate Eurasia assured Washington of an upper hand and, in the end, victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War. To constrain the communist powers inside that continent, the U.S. ringed its 6,000 miles with 800 military bases, thousands of jet fighters, and three massive naval armadas — the 6th Fleet in the Atlantic, the 7th Fleet in the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, and, somewhat later, the 5th Fleet in the Persian Gulf.

Thanks to diplomat George Kennan, that strategy gained the name “containment” and, with it, Washington could, in effect, sit back and wait while the Sino-Soviet bloc imploded through diplomatic blunder and military misadventure.

After the Beijing-Moscow split of 1962 and China’s subsequent collapse into the chaos of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, the Soviet Union tried repeatedly, if unsuccessfully, to break out of its geopolitical isolation — in the Congo, Cuba, Laos, Egypt, Ethiopia, Angola, and Afghanistan. In the last and most disastrous of those interventions, which Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev came to term “the bleeding wound,” the Red Army deployed 110,000 soldiers for nine years of brutal Afghan combat, hemorrhaging money and manpower in ways that would contribute to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

In that heady moment of seeming victory as the sole superpower left on planet Earth, a younger generation of Washington foreign-policy leaders, trained not on battlefields but in think tanks, took little more than a decade to let that unprecedented global power start to slip away. Toward the close of the Cold War era in 1989, Francis Fukuyama, an academic working in the State Department’s policy planning unit, won instant fame among Washington insiders with his seductive phrase “the end of history.” He argued that America’s liberal world order would soon sweep up all of humanity on an endless tide of capitalist democracy. As he put it in a much-cited essay: “The triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is evident… in the total exhaustion of viable systemic alternatives to Western liberalism… seen also in the ineluctable spread of consumerist Western culture.”

The Invisible Power of Geopolitics

Amid such triumphalist rhetoric, Zbigniew Brzezinski, another academic sobered by more worldly experience, reflected on what he had learned about geopolitics during the Cold War as an adviser to two presidents, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. In his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard, Brzezinski offered the first serious American study of geopolitics in more than half a century. In the process, he warned that the depth of U.S. global hegemony, even at this peak of unipolar power, was inherently “shallow.”

For the United States and, he added, every major power of the past 500 years, Eurasia, home to 75% of the world’s population and productivity, was always “the chief geopolitical prize.” To perpetuate its “preponderance on the Eurasian continent” and so preserve its global power, Washington would, he warned, have to counter three threats: “the expulsion of America from its offshore bases” along the Pacific littoral; ejection from its “perch on the western periphery” of the continent provided by NATO; and finally, the formation of “an assertive single entity” in the sprawling center of Eurasia.

Arguing for Eurasia’s continued post-Cold War centrality, Brzezinski drew heavily on the work of a long-forgotten British academic, Sir Halford Mackinder. In a 1904 essay that sparked the modern study of geopolitics, Mackinder observed that, for the past 500 years, European imperial powers had dominated Eurasia from the sea, but the construction of trans-continental railroads was shifting the locus of control to its vast interior “heartland.” In 1919, in the wake of World War I, he also argued that Eurasia, along with Africa, formed a massive “world island” and offered this bold geopolitical formula: “Who rules the Heartland commands the World Island; Who rules the World Island commands the World.” Clearly, Mackinder was about 100 years premature in his predictions.

But today, by combining Mackinder’s geopolitical theory with Brzezinski’s gloss on global politics, it’s possible to discern, in the confusion of this moment, some potential long-term trends. Imagine Mackinder-style geopolitics as a deep substrate that shapes more ephemeral political events, much the way the slow grinding of the planet’s tectonic plates becomes visible when volcanic eruptions break through the earth’s surface. Now, let’s try to imagine what all this means in terms of international geopolitics today.

China’s Geopolitical Gambit

In the decades since the Cold War’s close, China’s increasing control over Eurasia clearly represents a fundamental change in that continent’s geopolitics. Convinced that Beijing would play the global game by U.S. rules, Washington’s foreign policy establishment made a major strategic miscalculation in 2001 by admitting it to the World Trade Organization (WTO). “Across the ideological spectrum, we in the U.S. foreign policy community,” confessed two former members of the Obama administration, “shared the underlying belief that U.S. power and hegemony could readily mold China to the United States’ liking… All sides of the policy debate erred.” In little more than a decade after it joined the WTO, Beijing’s annual exports to the U.S. grew nearly five-fold and its foreign currency reserves soared from just $200 billion to an unprecedented $4 trillion by 2013.

In 2013, drawing on those vast cash reserves, China’s new president, Xi Jinping, launched a trillion-dollar infrastructure initiative to transform Eurasia into a unified market. As a steel grid of rails and petroleum pipelines began crisscrossing the continent, China ringed the tri-continental world island with a chain of 40 commercial ports — from Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean, around Africa’s coast, to Europe from Piraeus, Greece, to Hamburg, Germany. In launching what soon became history’s largest development project, 10 times the size of the Marshall Plan, Xi is consolidating Beijing’s geopolitical dominance over Eurasia, while fulfilling Brzezinski’s fear of the rise of “an assertive single entity” in Central Asia.

Unlike the U.S., China hasn’t spent significant effort establishing military bases. While Washington still maintains some 750 of them in 80 nations, Beijing has just one military base in Djibouti on the east African coast, a signals intercept post on Myanmar’s Coco Islands in the Bay of Bengal, a compact installation in eastern Tajikistan, and half a dozen small outposts in the South China Sea.

Moreover, while Beijing was focused on building Eurasian infrastructure, Washington was fighting two disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in a strategically inept bid to dominate the Middle East and its oil reserves (just as the world was beginning to transition away from petroleum to renewable energy). In contrast, Beijing has concentrated on the slow, stealthy accretion of investments and influence across Eurasia from the South China Sea to the North Sea. By changing the continent’s underlying geopolitics through this commercial integration, it’s winning a level of control not seen in the last thousand years, while unleashing powerful forces for political change.

Tectonic Shifts Shake U.S. Power

After a decade of Beijing’s relentless economic expansion across Eurasia, the tectonic shifts in that continent’s geopolitical substrate have begun to manifest themselves in a series of diplomatic eruptions, each erasing another aspect of U.S. influence. Four of the more recent ones might seem, at first glance, unrelated but are all driven by the relentless force of geopolitical change.

Image: Afghans stand in the sewage ditch outside Abbey Gate as they attempt to show documents to Marines processing evacuees on Aug. 25. Credit: Mirzahussain Sadid for Alive in Afghanistan

First came the sudden, unexpected collapse of the U.S. position in Afghanistan, forcing Washington to end its 20-year occupation in August 2021 with a humiliating withdrawal. In a slow, stealthy geopolitical squeeze play, Beijing had signed massive development deals with all the surrounding Central Asian nations, leaving American troops isolated there. To provide critical air support for its infantry, U.S. jet fighters were often forced to fly 2,000 miles from their nearest base in the Persian Gulf — an unsustainable long-term situation and unsafe for troops on the ground. As the U.S.-trained Afghan Army collapsed and Taliban guerrillas drove into Kabul atop captured Humvees, the chaotic U.S. retreat in defeat became unavoidable.

Just six months later in February 2022, President Vladimir Putin massed an armada of armored vehicles loaded with 200,000 troops on Ukraine’s border. If Putin is to be believed, his “special military operation” was to be a bid to undermine NATO’s influence and weaken the Western alliance — one of Brzezinski’s conditions for the U.S. eviction from Eurasia.

But first Putin visited Beijing to court President Xi’s support, a seemingly tall order given China’s decades of lucrative trade with the United States, worth a mind-boggling $500 billion in 2021. Yet Putin scored a joint declaration that the two nations’ relations were “superior to political and military alliances of the Cold War era” and a denunciation of “the further expansion of NATO.”

As it happened, Putin did so at a perilous price. Instead of attacking Ukraine in frozen February when his tanks could have maneuvered off-road on their way to the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, he had to wait out Beijing’s Winter Olympics. So, Russian troops invaded instead in muddy March, leaving his armored vehicles stuck in a 40-mile traffic jam on a single highway where the Ukrainians readily destroyed more than 1,000 tanks. Facing diplomatic isolation and European trade embargos as his defeated invasion degenerated into a set of vengeful massacres, Moscow shifted much of its exports to China. That quickly raised bilateral trade by 30% to an all-time high, while reducing Russia to but another piece on Beijing’s geopolitical chessboard.

Then, just last month, Washington found itself diplomatically marginalized by an utterly unexpected resolution of the sectarian divide that had long defined the politics of the Middle East. After signing a $400-billion infrastructure deal with Iran and making Saudi Arabia its top oil supplier, Beijing was well positioned to broker a major diplomatic rapprochement between those bitter regional rivals, Shia Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia. Within weeks, the foreign ministers of the two nations sealed the deal with a deeply symbolic voyage to Beijing — a bittersweet reminder of the days not long ago when Arab diplomats paid court in Washington.

Finally, the Biden administration was stunned this month when Europe’s preeminent leader, Emmanuel Macron of France, visited Beijing for a series of intimate tête-à-tête chats with China’s President Xi. At the close of that extraordinary journey, which won French companies billions in lucrative contracts, Macron announced “a global strategic partnership with China” and promised he would not “take our cue from the U.S. agenda” over Taiwan. A spokesman for the Élysée Palace quickly released a pro forma clarification that “the United States is our ally, with shared values.” Even so, Macron’s Beijing declaration reflected both his own long-term vision of the European Union as an independent strategic player and that bloc’s ever-closer economic ties to China

The Future of Geopolitical Power

Projecting such political trends a decade into the future, Taiwan’s fate would seem, at best, uncertain. Instead of the “shock and awe” of aerial bombardments, Washington’s default mode of diplomatic discourse in this century, Beijing prefers stealthy, sedulous geopolitical pressure. In building its island bases in the South China Sea, for example, it inched forward incrementally — first dredging, then building structures, next runways, and finally emplacing anti-aircraft missiles — in the process avoiding any confrontation over its functional capture of an entire sea.

Lest we forget, Beijing has built its formidable economic-political-military power in little more than a decade. If its strength continues to increase inside Eurasia’s geopolitical substrate at even a fraction of that head-spinning pace for another decade, it may be able to execute a deft geopolitical squeeze-play on Taiwan like the one that drove the U.S. out of Afghanistan. Whether from a customs embargo, incessant naval patrols, or some other form of pressure, Taiwan might just fall quietly into Beijing’s grasp.

Should such a geopolitical gambit prevail, the U.S. strategic frontier along the Pacific littoral would be broken, possibly pushing its Navy back to a “second island chain” from Japan to Guam — the last of Brzezinski’s criteria for the true waning of U.S. global power. In that event, Washington’s leaders could once again find themselves sitting on the proverbial diplomatic and economic sidelines, wondering how it all happened.

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Alfred W. McCoy, a TomDispatch regular, is the Harrington professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power. His newest book is To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change (Dispatch Books).

Featured image: Chinese Military, Forbidden City – Beijing, China by Patrick Rodwell is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 / Flickr

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Several reports have criticised aspects of Russia’s policy, further identified pitfalls, and highlighted challenges and approach toward Africa, even after its first symbolic summit held in October 2019. The latest report titled ‘Ways to Increase the Efficiency of Russia’s African Strategy under the Crisis of the Existing World Order’ (ISSN 1019-3316, Herald of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 2022), co-authored by Professors Irina O. Abramova and Leonid L. Fituni, both from the Institute for African Studies (IAS), Russian Academy of Sciences.

Access it here.

According to authoritative sources, aspects of this report were presented at the RAS Presidium on February 9, 2022. The report is dedicated to a new configuration of the world order and the place of Russia and Africa in the changing world.

The authors argued that it is time for Russia, which over the past 30 years has unsuccessfully sought to become part of the West, to abandon illusions and reconsider its foreign economic and foreign policy strategy, reorienting itself to states that are turning from outsiders into significant players in the international political and economic space and are willing to interact with our country on a mutually beneficial and equal basis. 

Certainly African countries are among such states. The strategies of old and new players on the African continent are analyzed, and the current areas of Russian-African cooperation in the short, medium, and long term are identified. The main mechanisms and tools necessary to intensify our interaction are revealed, including informational and financial-economic levers.

According to Professors Abramova and Fituni, the key area of Russia’s relations that could become attractive for African countries and contribute to the successful economic development of Russia may be the development of bilateral opportunities for technological partnerships. The modern world order is going through a stage of a very deep political, economic and humanitarian, and not yet global but already very dangerous local military crisis. The Russian special military operation in Ukraine has sharply accelerated the disintegration of the unipolar world led by the United States. Although the outlines of the emerging new world order are already visible, they are not quite definite to date. Multi-polarity, as a possible model of the new maturing world order, urgently needs a system of bilateral and multilateral geo-strategic checks and balances that could exclude or minimize the danger of a global armed conflict. 

At the same time, it seems to be the most acceptable option for rebuilding the world for most countries and people since it opens opportunities for establishing a more just world order that will account for the interests of the widest possible range of members of the world community. Against this background, the relative importance and role of the regions of the world as zones of conflicts of interest of the participants in the renewed rivalry are being reassessed. 

As is known, the global center of economic power is gradually shifting from the West to the East or, depending on the coordinate system, from the socalled North to the South. In the context of long-term global trends, the conditional West, perhaps for the first time in the last 500 (and certainly 300) years, is facing the prospect of a gradual transformation into a relative periphery. This means that even within the current market model, in the not-so-distant future the bulk of global production and the bulk of global consumption will shift from the northern Euro-Atlantic to the south and east-to Asia, Africa, and Latin America. 

In the market model, this means that the manufacturer will adapt not to the tastes and needs of the conditional European (including Americans, Canadians, and Australians) but to those of Asians and Africans, who are included because at present most representatives of the middle class, which supply the main demand for goods and services, live in the Asian region, but from around 2040, according to UN calculations, the growth of the middle class will occur not at the expense of Asia but at the expense of Africa, while the impoverishment of the middle class of Europe and the United States has already begun.

Of course, we do not mean a one-shot or instantaneous (in the historical sense) change. Yet these are real deep transformations that are already taking place in what, applying Marxist terminology to the modern globalized world, could be called the global base. These transformations will inevitably entail changes in the global superstructure, that is, in the Western-centric world order that dominates now. These are changes in politics, in culture, in the worldview, and in the system of values, which is manifested in the rejection of the unipolar world and the methods of colonial domination and subjugation that it imposes.

In real life, this is a slow and complex process, which proceeds with different speeds at different stages, often in zigzags. Today no one doubts that the modern East and South (and this is not only China or India but also many other countries, including African and Latin American ones) are the producers of the main part of resources and goods, especially basic ones, that is, those without which large-scale real production in any part of the world, including in developed countries, is impossible. Moreover, the real (not virtual) process of expanded reproduction is also extremely difficult without these resources and goods.

Yet the economic role of the West, especially in advanced areas, is far from exhausted. However, today it is not this role that determines the model of its behavior: the meaning of its efforts, including economic ones, is to prevent the loss of its influence and control over the flows of world wealth. The West is trying to preserve its positions and habitual lifestyle using superstructural elements, namely, those levers of influence that it still has military, financial, administrative, informational, cultural, and value based.

For the Euro-Atlantic bloc, Africa appears primarily from the point of view of the forecast prospects for global economic development and resource and military-geopolitical components. All three aspects are viewed through the prism of rivalry with the main competitors-China and Russia. At the same time, the West is closely monitoring the growing activity and influence in this region of second-tier rivals – India, Brazil, Turkey, Iran, the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, South Korea, and others, some of which it is trying to control by turning them, at least, into situational allies but strategically retained as an exploited periphery.

Under these conditions, the main task of the policy of the collective West in Africa is to maintain and strengthen its economic, political, and military influence using both traditional and new, post-neocolonialist, methods, as well as to avoid the challenges and threats associated with the African continent. Note that the strategy of the Western powers in Africa has certain specific traits. The US strategy on the African continent, announced in 2018 by the Trump administration and practically unchanged under J. Biden, has been based on opposition to China and Russia and their removal (in the case of China) or non-admittance (in the case of Russia) to the African region. 

In the context of Brexit and the implementation of the concept of Global Britain, the United Kingdom has seriously attended to the development of strategies for assimilating markets other than the EU ones and compensating for the falling part of state budget and private business revenues by activating the African vector of its policy. The shaken authority of France in African states, primarily in ensuring their security and combating terrorism, has prompted the French authorities to adapt to the new conditions, striving for maximum savings in the exploitation of African resources and actively using such instruments of influence as, albeit significantly weakened but still systemically significant, dominance in both zones of the African franc and cultural and linguistic influence on education, science and youth education within the framework of the Francophonie project.

In Germany’s Africa strategy, the main role is assigned to the private sector, especially medium-sized businesses, which generate consistently high profits for themselves on the continent and will have to provide the bulk of investment and create jobs for the local population (unlike China, which actively imported its labor to Africa). Note that the German state seeks to contribute to the creation of a favorable working environment for its entrepreneurs through investments in African education, health care, and infrastructure. Italy’s current foreign policy on the African continent is focused primarily on North Africa. The Italian government has been paying attention to sub-Saharan Africa only since 2013. The role of Italy in Africa has decreased compared to the 1980s in areas such as foreign trade, development assistance, and participation in peacekeeping activities. 

In recent years, however, Africa has somewhat grown in importance as a market for Italian weapons, as has the presence of Italian nongovernmental humanitarian aid organizations on the continent. In a number of countries, including those in Tropical Africa, Italian firms retain strong positions in the field of exploration and development of the continent’s hydrocarbon resources. As for new non-Western players, they build their cooperation on other principles, far from the domination-submission model.

India is developing cooperation with Africa along the South-South line, that is, strengthening economic and other ties with African states on mutually beneficial terms, which is fundamentally different from the North−South format that developed in the colonial era. In general, noteworthy is the high degree of geographical (mainly the east coast and southern Africa) and historical and cultural (English-speaking countries, former British possessions) concentration of Indian business activity.

Turkey politically focuses on joint defense of the national identity of both Turks and Africans, which is under threat due to the ideas of globalization promoted by the West and the imposition of values alien to the East and Africa. In the economic sphere, Turkey is actively expanding its exports to Africa, implementing many projects for small and medium-sized businesses, and rapidly developing air links with the continent. Turkey has become the main hub for the movement of passengers from Africa to Europe and the United States. Turkey is also intensifying military and technical cooperation with the countries of the continent, primarily the Mediterranean ones, and the countries of the large region of the Horn of Africa.

In addition, in recent years, there has been an active, albeit still pinpoint, search for opportunities to use the religious factor in the Muslim countries of Africa, in which Turkey did not previously show interest. Brazil, like India, is establishing South-South cooperation with Africa within the BRICS and IBSA formats (forum of India, Brazil, and South Africa). This largest Latin American country is currently moving from a policy of predominant interaction with the Portuguese-speaking countries of Africa to cooperation with all African states, primarily in the mining industry, agriculture, and the development of transport infrastructure.

In determining its strategy in the African direction, it is the experience of China that is especially interesting for Russia: after the collapse of the Soviet Union, China took and strengthened the positions that the Soviet Union had held in Africa and even significantly expanded them. Having intensified economic cooperation with Africa, turning African countries into a guaranteed market for its products with more than a billion consumers, China in the 1990-2000s raised its industry and mass production precisely at the expense of what the “foremen of perestroika” and the ideologists of the 1990 reforms declared as the main burden for the Soviet Union. In the 2010s, China became the main trade and economic partner of African states. That required a deliberate and consistent effort, retraining or removal of those who hindered the achievement of real success for bureaucratic, parochial, or corrupt reasons or simply could not work in the African direction.

At present, Beijing is consistently building global value chains, which offer African producers a significant role. Such a policy is built into the strategic plans for the socioeconomic development of China itself and the implementation of its global projects, which fundamentally distinguishes it from the strategies of other countries. The ultimate goal of the ongoing efforts should be the creation of a Chinese-African “community of common destiny” in the new era.

At the latest ministerial conference, held in December 2021 in Senegal’s capital Dakar, Chinese President Xi Jinping made four proposals to African participants: to show solidarity against the pandemic, to deepen pragmatic cooperation, to promote “green development,” and to uphold honesty and justice in the international arena. The Chinese leader recalled that, prior to this meeting, a joint document, The 2035 Vision for China-Africa Cooperation, had been adopted and had announced Beijing’s plans for the first three years. China plans to implement nine programs in the following areas: health care (in particular, China will provide one billion doses of vaccines, implement ten medical projects, and send 1500 medical specialists to Africa); poverty alleviation and agricultural development (ten projects); trade (China plans to increase the imports from Africa to $300 billion, open a green corridor for African agricultural exports to China, and allocate $10 billion to support African exports to China); investment (it is planned to increase direct investment in Africa by $10 billion over three years, create a China-Africa platform for encouraging private investment, allocate $10 billion to support African financial institutions, create a China-Africa center for cross-border operations in yuan, write off part of the debt of the poorest African countries, and transfer to African countries an additional amount of special drawing rights (SDR) of the IMF in an amount of $10 billion); digital innovation (ten projects); green development (ten projects: support for the Great Green Wall of Africa project, etc.); human potential (funding projects in the field of education and training, the creation by Chinese companies of at least 800 000 jobs for the local population); cultural and humanitarian contacts (including the creation of new centers for culture and the study of the Chinese language); and peace and security (ten projects: providing military assistance to the African Union, training military specialists, etc.)

Even a brief listing of all these programs indicates the seriousness and depth of China’s strategic vision of its cooperation with the African continent in the coming years. A general analysis of the above-mentioned strategies in the African direction leads to the conclusion that it will not be easy for Russia to compete in the geo-strategic battle for Africa with other players, both old and new. Many may even wonder if we have any chance at all in this fight. In the report authors’ opinion, to answer this question, it is necessary to analyze Russian-African relations in recent years, identify the main problems and the mistakes that have been made while interacting with African partners, and determine those areas of cooperation that are of mutual interest and in which Russia has clear competitive advantage. 

In addition, it is necessary to ask ourselves: Do we, in the current conditions, have the right not to take advantage of the opportunities that Africa opens for our economy and security and ignore them only because obtaining these advantages requires responsibility and expenditure of effort and resources, as well as initiative?

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had viewed interaction with the African continent as a major component of its foreign policy, Russia, despite the colossal efforts and funds invested in the development of Africa, practically curtailed relations with African states. This was done clearly purposefully by the people who headed our foreign policy and foreign economic departments at that time and were mainly oriented towards the West. Under the slogan “Stop feeding Africa!” they, in fact, did not allow our country not only to take advantage of real dividends on Russian investments (about 300 industrial enterprises; more than 1000 infrastructure facilities; hundreds of educational, scientific, and cultural centers built in Africa by the Soviet Union; the friendly Russian-speaking African political and economic elite trained in Soviet universities; etc.) but also agreed, under pressure from the Americans and their satellites, the former colonial metropoles, to write off more than $20 billion of African debt to our country on extremely unfavorable terms for Russia.

In addition, informal cultural centers and coteries of the Russian language used to appear at almost all significant objects of Soviet−African cooperation) and bureaus of the Russian media. The number of African students studying at Russian universities also drastically decreased. Thus, according to the Ministry of Education and Science, in the 2018–2019 academic year, only 2066 candidates from 52 African countries were enrolled. The new African elite is being trained today in Western European, American, and Chinese universities and is becoming a conductor of interests that are by no means Russian. 

In other words, in the 1990s, not only were the economic foundations destroyed but so was the entire infrastructure of our cooperation with Africa, including the humanitarian sphere – science, education, culture, and the system of values. It is no secret that, in the modern world, information has begun to play an increasingly important role. Virtual reality, in fact, practically forms a living reality; in any case, it has a colossal impact on the latter.

Under these conditions, the role of the media in building our relations with Africa is of paramount importance. We have already said that Russia practically curtailed its information network in Africa. Fragmentally, our news agencies are present there, for example, TASS and Sputnik (TASS has only five representative offices in Africa – in Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Kenya, and South Africa, while Sputnik and Russia Today have none), but, as a rule, they are both understaffed and underequipped; they cannot withstand competition from the Western and Chinese media and do not broadcast in African languages. In addition, we do not work at all on African social networks, which are very popular among young Africans. Hence, Africans draw information about Russia, often distorted or even false, from Western sources. Africa is practically absent in the Russian information space, and news about the continent is predominantly negative, sensational, or ironic, in most cases demonstrating a low level of general education and erudition of Russian authors, not to mention their understanding of African realities.

We analyzed news stories on the African agenda for one week (January 18−24, 2022) and obtained the following disappointing results. Today the Russian media demonstrate an extremely low level of coverage of key events taking place in Africa. This indicator reached 0.7% of the total feed of the leading Russian media (Interfax, RIA Novosti, TASS) in the period under study. For comparison, news related to the United States, on average, occupied 14.6% of the entire news feed and news related to China, 1.4%. At the same time, during the week-long period of the study, events took place in the countries of the African continent that are of particular importance for both Russia and the whole world, including a military coup in Burkina Faso; contacts of the current leadership of Mali with private military companies created by Russian citizens, as mentioned by Foreign Minister S.V. Lavrov, and the conflict between the Malian authorities and partners in military cooperation from the EU countries; disagreements between the Church of Alexandria and the Russian Orthodox Church due to the decision of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church to form the Patriarchal Exarchate of Africa; hosting the African Cup of Nations football et cetera.

For example, the Russian media discussed the political events in 43 news articles in various editions and another nine publications presented the position of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs on this issue. For comparison, the story about the evacuation of British diplomats from Ukraine was men2 For the calculations, statistical data of the Yandex.News service was used, where 7685 information partners send their materials (including all the main federal and regional domestic media).

It is especially noteworthy that, in the Russian media, on average, more than 75% of the news about Africa is negative. The countries of the continent often appear in the news in the context of military and religious conflicts, serious economic problems, poverty, the spread of dangerous diseases, etc. Therefore, the African agenda is on the periphery of the domestic information space. Even though the key news of the continent fragmentarily falls into the feeds of the Russian media, as a rule, they do not constitute news stories or rubrics (consisting of several articles) that could help to form a comprehensive, dynamic public opinion about the situation in that macro-region. Information about Africa is often not only insufficient and pointwise but also has a onesided negative connotation. That is why even events of significance for the Russian Federation that take place in Africa quickly fall out of the domestic information space. As a result, the Russian public and even the professional community, which includes the political, economic, and scientific elites, are forming an utterly wrong idea about modern Africa, which is associated with concepts such as poverty, under-development, hunger, illiteracy, coups d’état, dictators in power, terrorism, armed conflicts and wars, piracy and hostage-taking, illegal migration and refugees, corruption, etc.

In addition, the Russian elite demonstrates a somewhat arrogant attitude towards Africa. We have often heard the phrase “We (that is, Russia) are not Africa” from high-ranking officials. Meanwhile, for the purpose of so-called deterrence, colonial methods are being very successfully applied to Russia today, which were once applied to African states. We mean such tools as dependence on Western goods and technologies; sanctions; bribery and corruption of political, economic, and intellectual elites; attempts to change objectionable authorities through mechanisms of internal social protests, primarily relying on young people and even children; encouragement of brain drain; the imposition of the Western value system and the erosion of national identity, including the narrowing of the use of the national language; the formation of a colonial type of thinking; and so on and so forth. 

In this sense, the study of the African experience can significantly help us in overcoming our own mistakes and solving the problems of accelerated development of the economy and the social sphere. Despite the thoughtless imposition of the idea of Africa as the most backward and problematic region of the world in Russian public opinion, qualified Africanists, including Western experts, call Africa the continent of the 21st century, attributing this to the stable growth rates of the African economy over the past 20 years and the colossal resource and human potential of the African region. It makes no sense to argue that African countries and their inhabitants are on average (but by no means all!) poorer than many countries in the world. However, in terms of profitability, prospects, and security for Russian business since March 2022, they are preferable compared to Western countries. 

The Africa’s average annual GDP growth rate over the past 20 years has been higher than that of the world as a whole, which has allowed the continent to increase its share in world GDP, although it remains quite low. Recently, however, experts have begun to form the opinion that the very methodology for calculating GDP is based on indicators that do not reflect the actual situation in the world economy in terms of owning real wealth and producing real values. Based on these indicators, the role of Africa in the world economy is growing significantly. Thus, among other regions of the world, Africa ranks first in the reserves of manganese, chromites, bauxites, gold, platinoids, cobalt, vanadium, coltan, diamonds, phosphorites, and fluorite; second in reserves of copper, asbestos, uranium, antimony, beryllium, and graphite; and third in the reserves of oil, gas, mercury, and iron ore. There are also significant reserves of titanium, nickel, bismuth, lithium, tantalum, niobium, tin, tungsten, and precious stones. 

Most of the minerals listed are necessary to produce modern high-tech goods for a wide range of purposes, which makes the strategic dependence of many participants in the world economy on their regular supplies very significant. For example, dependence on chromium supplies from Africa reaches 97% in the United States, 62% in the EU countries, and 84% in China. For cobalt, these figures are 71, 82, and 100%, respectively. The share of the African continent in manganese imports is 79% for the United States, 68% for the EU countries, and 67% for China. China also receives 86% of its copper needs from Africa. The EU countries import from Africa 63% of their aluminum raw materials and 58% of titanium, while China imports 49% and 50%, respectively. The share of African uranium supplies is 27% for the United States, 35% for the European Union, and 36% for China. More than half of all EU imports of metals such as niobium, tantalum, vanadium, and zirconium come from Africa. In the United States and China, the corresponding indicators are 43 and 49%. Thus, a significant number of Western and Chinese industrial enterprises producing modern hightech goods, including those related to military production, simply cannot function without the supply of African raw materials. 

As for Russia, according to RAS Academician N.S. Bortnikov, a prominent Russian mineralogist, it is experiencing an acute shortage in metals such as uranium, manganese, chromium, aluminum, zirconium, beryllium, lithium, rhenium, and rare earth metals of the yttrium group. In ten years, it will be short of lead, antimony, gold, silver, diamonds, and zinc as well. Most of these minerals are present in Africa, the cost of their extraction being rather low, which will allow us to consider the development of African resources (if it is economically viable compared to the development of our own deposits, if available) as one of the important ways to overcome the shortage of critical strategic raw materials. 

Modern Africa is gradually becoming both a significant consumer market and a supplier of labor for the global economy. Africa’s population already exceeds 1.2 billion and is growing at the fastest rate in the world. According to UN forecasts, in 2050 more than a quarter of the world’s population will live in Africa. Today, 60% of this population are young people under the age of 25, and it is young people who provide the demand for modern goods and services. According to the United Nations, from 2040, two-thirds of the growth in global labor will come from the African continent. The consumer market in Africa doubles every five years, and the growth rate of the middle class, which forms the basis of demand for modern goods and services, already exceeds the corresponding indicators of Asian states.  

In addition, over the past 30 years, Africa has managed to halve illiteracy to 34%, while some developed countries (for example, the United States) demonstrate the opposite trend. Thus, according to some data, 43 million Americans cannot read and write. Of great importance for the successful development of the African economy is the development and deepening of integration processes, which can unite the material and human resources of African states that were once separated by borders artificially drawn by the colonial authorities. A landmark event in the development of the African continent, comparable only to the creation of the WTO, was the signing of an agreement on the establishment of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) on March 21, 2018 (at the emergency summit of the AU heads of government in Kigali, Rwanda). If successfully implemented, this project will lead to the emergence of the largest free trade zone in the world in terms of the number of participants, with a market uniting the population of 55 member countries of the African Union. 

Africa has the highest digitalization rates in the world. Few people know that the world’s first online payment was made in Kenya. Today, online payments predominate in most African countries. Rwanda has announced the rejection of the use of cash. In Nigeria, the largest African country in terms of population, payments are already being made in electronic naira. Cryptocurrencies are rapidly spreading on the continent. A recent report from the blockchain data platform Chainalysis showed that between July 2020 and June 2021, Africans received $105.6 billion worth of cryptocurrency payments, which was 1200% more than in the previous year.  

It is noteworthy that, according to the Chainalysis rating, Kenya, South Africa, and Nigeria are in the top ten countries for the use of cryptocurrency. DeFi (decentralized finance) technologies are becoming more and more popular in Africa. At the African Technology Forum in Nairobi, which took place in February 2022, the issue of decentralized finance was one of the three main topics for discussion, along with African startups and mobile networks. Africa sets an example for the world in increasing the role of women in all spheres of public life. Women have twice held the presidential positions – in Liberia and Mauritius, and today Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, an ethnical Nigerian, heads the WTO. African women are actively involved in legislative activities, including as chairs of the lower and upper houses of parliaments, and in Rwanda, for example, 63% of all parliamentarians are women. Women also lead in the number of start-ups launched in Africa. The number of women who are politicians, entrepreneurs, and scientists is also growing. 

All this once again confirms the fact that our ideas about Africa as a territory of backwardness, including in the social sphere, to put it mildly, do not correspond to reality. Today, in the context of a sharp aggravation of relations with the United States and the European Union, Russia can and should use the African vector of foreign policy to solve the problems of its own development and strengthen its positions in the international arena, forming, in the national interests and, where necessary, in opposition to aggressive geopolitical rivals, its own strategic alliances and associations. 

As was shown by the first Russia-Africa Summit, held in October 2019 in Sochi, the authority of the Russian Federation in most African states is extremely high. Africans view our country as the legal successor of the Soviet Union, which is actively defending its political and economic sovereignty and can provide security guarantees to other states. The countries of the continent also see Russia as a reliable economic partner interacting with African public and private businesses on a mutually beneficial basis. Note, however, that the hopes of Africans to intensify cooperation with the Russian Federation should be supported by real steps in the economic and political spheres and not be limited to verbal declarations about the “return of Russia to Africa,” especially because almost three years after Sochi, it was very modest. Recall that in the conditions of the reorganization of the world order and increased competition for African resources, the time allotted for such a return with maximum benefit for our country is very limited.

Today we find ourselves in the same boat with Africans, and not only in terms of Western pressure on our political and economic agency and the desire to free ourselves from old and new forms of colonialism. Today we have common goals and objectives. We are mutually interested in the formation of a just multipolar world, where every country and people can find a worthy place. Both we and the Africans have unique natural resources that have a powerful impact on the development of the world economy, and we need to act not as competitors in this area, as is happening today in the oil and gas sector, but as partners.  

Both Russia and Africa are at the crossroads of the most important trade routes connecting countries and continents. Most importantly, Russia’s economic development strategies are focused on the development of its domestic markets and on the transfer of our countries from raw materials to industrial and high-tech areas, largely relying on our own resources and capabilities. It is noteworthy that Africans were the first to understand the need to intensify Russian−African cooperation in the new conditions. Despite colossal pressure from the collective West, most African states, even those that voted for the anti-Russian resolution at the UN General Assembly (there were 28 of 54 such countries), did not support economic sanctions against Russia.  

Moreover, many African countries are ready to increase the supply of their goods to Russia, including products of agriculture and light industry, pharmaceuticals, and necessary types of raw materials. They are also ready to build new logistics chains with our country, providing the Russian side with the opportunity to use their transport infrastructure facilities. In turn, they expect that Russia in 2022 will supply to Africa grain and fertilizers – the goods most in demand today; they also hope for the development of technological partnerships with our country in areas where the Russian Federation has significant competitive advantages. 

Accounting for the growing competition of old and new players on the African continent, Russia, when formulating its strategy, should consider the interests of African states formulated in the strategic document of the African Union – Agenda 2063, according to which Africa should turn into a prosperous continent with advanced infrastructure and industry and qualitatively new human potential. At the same time, it is necessary to understand clearly how interaction with Africa will contribute to the solution of Russia’s own development tasks, its economic and technological breakthrough, and ensuring national security against the backdrop of aggravated confrontation with the West.  

In the context of the most severe sanctions and attempts to exclude Russia from the global political and economic space, the search for new partners capable of both supporting Russia on various international platforms and opening new opportunities for economic cooperation takes on a special role. The growing tension in relations with Europe and the United States, the growth of China’s economic and political power and influence in the Asian direction, and the swaying situation in the Middle East determine the importance of the African vector of Russia’s foreign policy. 

In political terms, the support of African countries, which make up more than a quarter of all UN voters, is extremely important for us. Now, when the expulsion of Russian diplomats from most Western states is becoming increasingly practiced, there is a real opportunity to strengthen diplomatic work in the African direction without additional financial costs, open previously closed Russian embassies and trade missions, and expand the size of qualified diplomatic personnel in African states. Economically, Africa is not only a supplier of raw materials for Russia but also the most important market to sell Russian industrial products and use Russian technologies, including the localization of Russian production facilities on the continent, training of personnel, and transfer of knowledge and skills.  

Therefore, the second Russia-Africa summit should become a qualitatively new step in the development of Russian-African relations. It is necessary to move from formulating the goals and objectives of Russian policy in the African direction to the implementation of specific projects and the development of a mechanism and tools for mutually beneficial cooperation. In political terms, the expectations of African countries from Russia in the context of the formation of a multipolar world are related to supporting their political sovereignty and countering color revolutions organized by the United States and the European Union, as well as solving security problems, including military, antiterrorist, and informational components. 

Africans are waiting for Russia to increase mutual trade, primarily through an increase in the supply of African products to the Russian Federation. At the summit in Sochi, President of the Russian Federation Vladimir V. Putin set the goal of at least doubling the volume of trade in the coming years. For the 2019 pre-Covid year, data on Russian-African trade were very modest compared to other partners, although over the past ten years they have tended to grow. The share of Russia in Africa’s foreign trade turnover increased over this period from 0.8 to 1.6%, which was not only incomparable with the EU and China (28 and 16%, respectively) but also significantly behind individual European and Asian countries. 

To increase the volume of Russian-African trade under the economic war unleashed against Russia, it will be necessary, first of all, to solve logistics issues related to the transportation of goods in both directions, building new logistics chains and organizing logistics centers (seaports, airports, warehouses, etc.) to deliver Russian products to African markets. Of great importance are the creation of new mechanisms of paying for goods to reduce the role of settlements in dollars and euros, including countertrade (barter); the development of a mechanism of accounting for concessions for natural resources in export transactions; the use of national, including electronic, currencies et cetera. Using foreign experience, it is also necessary to consider the possibility of granting special powers to one of the Russian state-owned banks to carry out targeted financing of export transactions and investment projects on the African continent.

However, in our opinion, it is not trade that should become the link through which we can raise the entire system of Russian-African relations to a new level. The key direction in the near future, which will become attractive for African countries and will contribute to the successful economic development of the Russian Federation, may be Russian investments in those areas of the African economy that are of interest to both the Russian Federation and African states. We primarily mean the development of bilateral opportunities for technological partnership. 

In the conditions of the post-Covid world, the demand for Russian technologies in Africa could grow significantly since Russia has high competencies in the areas that are most in demand today on the African continent. The most pressing problem facing Africans today is energy. About half of Africans do not have access to electricity. A promising solution to the problem of providing energy could be the construction of nuclear and hydroelectric power plants, for which the main contractor would be the Russian Federation, which has a great wealth of experience in this area. Russia is already implementing a project to build a powerful nuclear power plant in Egypt and is preparing similar projects in a number of other African states. We can also manufacture equipment for the oil and gas industry, ferrous metallurgy, mining, small aviation, and agriculture. Africans are interested in building factories to produce copper cable, fiber optics, and fertilizers from local raw materials and mini-factories for processing agricultural products, as well as in programs for the digitalization of the economy, including digital transformation programs – from a “smart city” and taxation control to creating a cybersecurity system. 

There are also great prospects for cooperation in the space sector, including the creation of joint satellites for remote sensing of the earth (optical, radar, and spectroscopic), ground equipment for receiving and processing data from satellites, as well as in the construction industry, including in the construction of roads, bridges, tunnels, airports, river harbors, and seaports. It is necessary to develop cooperation in the field of medicine, including both the joint fight against dangerous infectious diseases and the pharmaceutical industry. Water purification technologies play a special role since the problem of clean drinking water is very topical for a number of African states.  

In all the above areas, Russia has high competences and capabilities, including the training of respective staff and local personnel. Cooperation in the scientific sphere should become an important area. The priorities of scientific cooperation with Africa should be specific and different from the tasks of cooperation with the United States or EU countries. Most important is not to learn something or adopt scientific experience but to use the special conditions and opportunities inherent in the African continent to increase the scientific and technical potential of our country and science.  

In the first place, we mean cooperation in biosafety, medicine, biodiversity, geology, processing of minerals, ecology, climate, the “blue economy,” agriculture, space, information technology and the humanities. The first concrete step in this direction could be the creation a joint Russian-Ethiopian biological center in Africa on the basis of the only Joint Soviet-Ethiopian (later Russian-Ethiopian) biological expedition, which has been working since 1987. The transfer of Russian technologies, as well as cooperation in the scientific field, is beneficial to Russia not just in terms of its international image as a country that contributes to the advanced development of Africa and the strengthening of its economic sovereignty. Such a transfer makes it possible to form an army of supporters in the countries of the continent by solving the problem of overcoming technological backwardness and training qualified personnel who will master and promote Russian technological solutions. 

In addition, Russia gets the opportunity, on the one hand, to develop and improve its technologies, which are in demand by the rapidly growing young African population, and, on the other hand, a huge market for Russian high-tech goods and services, which is so necessary for many domestic manufacturers. In Professors Abramova and Fituni opinion, it is the topic of the transfer of Russian technologies to Africa, along with political and information issues, that should become the most important for discussion at the second Russia−Africa summit. This is in the interests of both Russia and all African states.

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The current crisis in Georgia has been news on media outlets around the world. However, few analysts have paid attention to the real reason why so much instability is being fomented in the country. Indeed, Tbilisi seems to be the new focus for western warmongers. NATO plans to bring Georgia into a conflict with Russia. This will allow the West to open a new flank and distract Moscow by forcing it to send troops to yet another battlefield.

While the wave of violent protests has decreased its strength the crisis in Georgia appears far from over. Destabilizing forces are boosting the social and institutional chaos in order for the government to make decisions in favor of foreign interests. This is becoming increasingly clear as domestic players are formally calling on Western countries to impose sanctions on Georgia to advance pro-NATO and anti-Russian agendas.

In April, former Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili formally requested that the Collective West sanction his own country. According to Saakashvili, currently imprisoned on serious charges of abuse of power and other crimes, with Western coercive measures, Georgia would be forced to release him and thus increase civil and political freedoms. On the occasion, he emphasized that the US and Europe would be the global defenders of democracy, decency and justice, and should therefore react to the supposedly “pro-Russian” tendencies of the current Georgian government – which he accuses of complying with “orders” from Moscow.

The case is particularly curious as it echoes the current Georgian domestic political situation. The opposition to the government uses as its main rhetoric a supposed connection of the Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili with Russia. No evidence of his alleged connection with Moscow is presented, other than his resistance to being actively involved in the Ukrainian conflict – in addition to his wise attitude to avoid fomenting new security crises in the separatist regions on the border with Russia.

When anti-government protests began in March, the signs of foreign interference to promote anti-Russian policies were already obvious. In the streets of Tbilisi, protesters held Ukrainian flags and sang the Ukrainian national anthem, as well as war songs of the neo-Nazi regime. President Vladimir Zelensky himself went public to thank the protesters for their support and said that “there is no Ukrainian who would not want the success of our friendly Georgia”, in addition to calling the demonstrations a “democratic success. European success”.

It is important to remember that at the height of the protests, these pro-instability actions were supported by the country’s own president, the native Frenchwoman Salome Zurabishvili, who expressed strong opposition to the government and parliament for the approval of a law against foreign espionage. Being a foreign agent on Georgian soil herself, Zurabishvili echoed Western rhetoric that demanding special registration for NGOs funded by international groups would be a kind of abusive or dictatorial attitude.

In fact, these attitudes on the part of the opposition to the current Prime Minister are not by chance – these moves indicate a coordinated action to pressure Georgia to act incisively in favor of Western interests. Zurabishvili, before becoming the country’s president, had served as foreign minister, standing out for her extremely pro-NATO work. In the same vein, former President Saakashvili, who is now demanding Western sanctions to pressure the government to release him, was recognizably a US-backed head of state, largely responsible for provocations against pro-Russian border regions during the 2008 conflict. He also gained asylum in post-Maidan Ukraine, even being governor of Odessa during the Poroshenko era.

The fact that politicians like Zurabishvili and Saakashvili are acting incisively to foment polarization and protests within Georgia, in addition to sanctions and external pressure at the international level, shows that there is indeed a Western plan for Tbilisi to take an openly anti-Russian position in the current NATO’s proxy war with Moscow. This scenario reflects the current strategy of the Atlantic alliance, which seems focused on the multiplication of battlefields. The more conflict zones, the better for the Western powers, which want to harm Russia as much as possible, causing it to lose troops and weapons.

Many analysts believe that the West is currently about to “admit” its failure in Ukraine, which is why, in order to safeguard its global hegemony, NATO’s new focus would be to fight against China, which is seen by the US as a weaker adversary and against which there are more chances of victory in direct military confrontation. But for a war against China to be viable, it would be necessary to prevent Moscow from helping Beijing on the battlefield, which would explain the attempt to distract the Russians with multiple conflicts in the Eurasian space.

In this military context, forcing Georgia to assume a fully pro-NATO and anti-Russian foreign policy would be a great victory for the West. As long as the Georgian government continues to avoid involvement in the conflict, international pressure and the foment of internal color revolution will remain. Certainly, chaos in the country will continue to be stimulated by foreign agents until the government agrees to send troops to provoke the Russians in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, opening a new front in NATO’s war of aggression.

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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.

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With each passing day, the Ukrainian Army is being carved up and decimated in Bakhmut. To use a cinematic metaphor, this is a preview of the coming attraction, with Ukraine facing intense pressure to launch a counter-offensive that will push the Russians out of Ukraine. Ain’t going to happen.

Take a look at the following video. Yes, it is but one isolated anecdotal account of the slaughter in Bakhmut, but it rings true and provides a chilling picture of the desperate state of Ukrainian forces in that battle.

Even If Ukraine is able to scrounge up troops and vehicles that surpass anything the Russians have in place on the front-lines in the Donbass (a dubious assumption), it still lacks the artillery, air support, logistics and ammunition to sustain such an attack.

How do I know? Very simple. Just look at how Ukraine currently is performing in Bakhmut, Ugledar, and Avdevka. In every case, Ukrainian forces are retreating, albeit slowly, rather than blunting the Russian offensive. The following image (taken from liveuamap.com, a pro-Ukrainian site) shows the harrowing situation the Ukrainian troops confront.

Ukraine, which in theory should have an advantage by fighting from defensive positions, has failed to stop the slow but steady advance of Russian troops all along the line of contact. Instead of attacking and destroying Russian lines of communications that supply the Russian forces, Ukraine is launching artillery and HIMARS missile strikes on civilian targets. Those attacks do nothing to weaken Russia’s tactical and strategic situation.

The seven blue circles visible on the map signify locations where air raid warnings are sounding on April 25. This means the Russians hitting these sites with fixed wing aircraft to deliver 500 kg glide bombs and explosive laden drones. The effect is devastating for the Ukrainians on the receiving end.

These strikes also confirm the assessment contained in one of the leaked pieces of U.S. intelligence that Ukraine’s air defense system (ADS) has been destroyed and Ukraine lacks a layered ADS to fend off Russian attacks. Russian military sources claim they are inflicting an average of 500 fatalities on the Ukrainian troops. In other words, in the last 60 days the Ukrainians have suffered at least 30,000 KIA across the 950 km front. Ukraine does not have a limitless supply of manpower. 

No amount of happy talk in Washington or the capitals of other NATO countries alters the dire tactical situation confronting Ukraine. If you look at the changes on the liveuamap during the last six months, it is Russia, not Ukraine, that is relentlessly attacking all along the line of contact. Russia is conducting a brutal war of attrition and Ukraine is willingly sending irreplaceable forces into the maw of destruction. How is Ukraine going to mount a credible counter offensive without adequate air support, an exhausted air defense system, a weakened tank force, shortages of artillery and missiles that cannot be readily replaced and a chaotic logistics system that is failing to keep front-line troops fully supplied with ammunition, fuel and food?

Ukraine’s prospects are made more grim by the realization that Russia, during the last six months, has built layered defense systems along likely avenues of attack, stepped up its use of fixed wing aerial attacks on Ukrainian mobilization positions and kept massive trained reserves off the front lines. Russia is not behaving like an overly confident number 1 seed in the NCAA Basketball tournament. The Russian General Staff realize they are in an existential fight with NATO and are not engaging in premature victory celebrations. Russia is prepared for the long haul. However, Ukraine is not.

The leaders in Kiev are behaving like depraved junkies, totally dependent on the willingness of the West to keep sending money and weapons. But there is a problem. The United States and NATO have exhausted their stocks of weapons and ammunition and do not have the industrial base in place to quickly produce replacements. Ukrainian confidence in victory is no substitute for a fully supplied and trained army. Lack of supplies and raw recruits with minimal basic training is a recipe for catastrophe.

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In a shocking development, the government has announced it will be sending depleted uranium (DU) rounds to Ukraine along with Challenger 2 tanks.

As we know from several wars in the past few decades, the health consequences for Ukrainian civilians will be high. DU is a chemically toxic and radioactive heavy metal and it’s a by-product of the enrichment process used to make reactor-grade uranium.

Its chemical and physical properties have made it popular for a range of military and commercial uses: its density and its ability to self-sharpen attracted the attention of the US Department of Defence (DoD) in the late 1950s. The military was looking to increase the armour-piercing capacity of munitions and to strengthen the armour of tanks.

DU seemed to fit the bill. But its use has had a devastating impact on the populations caught up in numerous conflicts, with the terrible type of health consequences that we associate with radiation impacts.

DU is used for armour-piercing tank rounds and bullets as it is so heavy, meaning it can easily penetrate steel. Because of its heaviness, DU has also been used as ballast in aeroplanes, notably in hundreds of Boeing 747s — the early jumbo jets — that were built before 1981.

The practice became particularly controversial after an El Al cargo jet crashed into an apartment block in Amsterdam in 1992. Forty-three people were killed and the cargo, which included 10 tons of chemicals, as well as flammable liquids, gases, and caustic substances, burst into flames, along with hundreds of kilos of DU carried as weighting.

Although residents were assured that no health risk was posed, it was apparent that much of the DU had been released as dust particles into the atmosphere.

The risk is not that DU munitions will cause a nuclear explosion. It’s that the impact of their use causes toxic or radioactive dust to be released and if this is subsequently inhaled or ingested in other ways, it has very significant negative health consequences.

After the first Gulf war, the DoD Office of the Special Assistant for Gulf war Illnesses (OSAGWI) identified several DU exposure scenarios including through wounds caused by DU fragments, inhalation of airborne DU particles, ingestion of DU residues, or wound contamination by DU residues.

DU munitions were used on a large scale by the US and Britain in the Gulf war in 1991 and in Iraq in 2003. Their use has caused a sharp increase in the incidence rates of some cancers, such as breast cancer and lymphoma, in the areas where it has been used.

It has also been implicated in a rise in birth defects from areas adjacent to the main Gulf war battlefields. Other health problems associated with DU include kidney failure, nervous system disorders, lung disease and reproductive problems.

A report funded by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2013 showed that more than 400 tonnes of DU ammunition were estimated to have been used in 1991 and 2003, the vast majority by US forces.

The report showed that the Iraqi government’s Radiation Protection Centre had identified between 300 and 365 contaminated sites by 2006, mostly in the Basra region in southern Iraq.

As well as warning of contamination being spread by poorly regulated scrap metal dealers, including children, it also shared evidence that DU munitions were fired at light vehicles, buildings and other civilian infrastructure including the Iraqi Ministry of Planning in Baghdad — despite official assurances of military-only armoured targets.

Its use in the former Yugoslavia by Nato forces in 1995 and 1999 led to the same type of consequences. It was also used by the US in Syria in 2015. The impacts have not been confined to local populations — they have also affected the troops involved in or close to their use, and also military clean-up teams sent to deal with the impact of the DU.

The severe health consequences have led to the terms “Gulf war syndrome” and “Balkan syndrome” entering our vocabulary. The Ministry of Defence disputes the risks of DU, yet it recommends “ongoing surveillance” for veterans with embedded DU fragments.

No treaty explicitly banning the use of DU is yet in force, but it is clear that its use runs counter to the basic rules and principles of international humanitarian law. In 2006, the European Parliament strengthened its previous calls for a moratorium by calling for an introduction of a total ban, classifying the use of DU, along with white phosphorus, as inhumane.

Since 2007, repeated UN general assembly resolutions have highlighted serious concerns over the use of DU weapons. Britain, together with the US, France and Israel, are the only states that have consistently voted against the resolutions.

The British government must put an immediate end to its use of DU — inflicting it on the people of Ukraine is the last thing they need.

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Kate Hudson is general secretary of CND (cnduk.org).

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Pfizer, the manufacturer of one of the most widely used COVID-19 vaccines in the country, silently funded groups advocating for vaccine mandates and passports, according to a report by Lee Fang (paywalled).

In August 2021, the president of the Chicago Urban League, Karen Freeman-Wilson, in an interview on TV, argued that vaccine mandates would not disproportionately harm the black community.

“The health and safety factor here far outweighs the concern about shutting people out or creating a barrier,” Freeman-Wilson said at the time.

Earlier that year, the Chicago Urban League had received $100,000 from Pfizer for a project on promoting “vaccine safety and effectiveness.” The organization did not list Pfizer as a donor or partner on its website and Freeman-Wilson did not mention the funding during the interview.

The Chicago Urban League grant is one of many Pfizer-awarded groups to promote and encourage vaccine mandates. The pharmaceutical giant awarded grants to public health organizations, civil rights groups, as well as consumer, medical, and doctors’ groups. Most of these groups did not disclose the funding from Pfizer.

Corporate watchdog group the National Consumers League announced support for “government and employer mandates” requiring Covid vaccination in August 2021. The announcement came at around the same time the organization received a $75,000 grant from Pfizer for “vaccine policy efforts.”

Houston-based public health organization the Immunization Partnership publicly lobbied against bills introduced in Texas aimed at banning vaccine passports and vaccine mandates. The organization did not disclose that Pfizer gave it $35,000 earlier that year for “legislative advocacy.”

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On April 26, 1986, the explosion of a reactor at the Chernobyl plant produced a nuclear spill whose radiation contaminated 150 thousand square meters of what today are Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. Considered the worst nuclear accident in history, it was in many ways a slow-motion mishap. In addition to the 30 workers and rescuers who perished in the hours and days immediately after the explosion, hundreds of thousands of people were exposed to dangerous levels of radiation. Land, water, agriculture and livestock were contaminated. The number of deaths in subsequent decades remains in dispute. The lowest estimates are 4,000; others 90,000 and up to 200,000.

Several countries contributed resources, personnel and assistance to the recovery; the overwhelming majority went to contain and seal the reactor. In 1990, when the horror of the tragedy had ceased to be news, Cuba sent a medical team to evaluate the health consequences of the radiation. They found a situation in which cancer levels in children had increased 90 percent. The island would soon undertake medical assistance that is still difficult to measure: from 1990 to 2011, it cared for 26,000 people – 22,000 children – from the affected area, covering medical, food, housing and recreational expenses for the minors and their companions.

The first 139 children from Chernobyl arrived on March 29, 1990 and were received by Fidel Castro. The images are touching, the President looks and greets the parents with attention and tenderly caresses the little ones. He promises them the best medical care.

The little ones from Chernobyl continued to arrive for more than two decades. Tarará, a city 20 kilometers from Havana, was selected to take care of them. Located on the seashore, before the revolution it was a vacation destination for the upper middle class. The revolutionary government transformed it into a youth summer camp. In 1990 it was adapted to care for the children of Chernobyl. In addition to having two hospitals and a clinic, the camp had a dining hall, recreational and cultural spaces, school, theater and parks.

“It wasn’t like being in a hospital,” recalls Roman Gerus who was in Tarara as a child, “even the sickest children had a good time.” Khrystyna Kostenetska, who was also treated there, describes, “I remember an incredible sea, waves, sunsets, nature and ice cream; I also remember children with serious health problems.”

Upon arrival in Cuba, the children were evaluated by doctors organized into four categories: the most serious ones with oncohematological problems that required specialized therapies; those suffering from chronic pathologies; children who could be treated on an outpatient basis; and the relatively healthy ones who required medical follow-up because they had lived in the contaminated area. All were treated under the comprehensive logic of the Cuban medical system, whose teams included pediatricians, oncologists, psychiatrists and dentists. Sometimes ailments unrelated to the spill were detected and treated as well.

This Cuban initiative, which has been characterized as the longest humanitarian program in history, took place during one of the most difficult times for Cuba. The disintegration of the USSR in the early 1990s had eliminated its main trading partner and the island’s economy suffered a brutal contraction. Everything was in short supply except solidarity.

When historian John Kirk – whose book Public Health Without Borders provides a detailed account of the island’s care for the Chernobyl children – asked the director of the medical program in Tarará how Cuba could offer such help in such difficult times, he replied, “These are children, very sick children. How could we not treat them?”

Several of the children who arrived were orphans and many others were poor. The disintegration of the Soviet Union meant the end of its social care infrastructure. The incipient capitalist system put a price tag on treatment that many could not afford. In addition to suffering from physical ailments, many lived with the trauma of having been evacuated from their homes. And the question remained as to what ailments would develop in the future and in other generations.

Xenia Laurenti, deputy director of the Chernobyl Children’s Health Care Program, states bluntly: “If you ask a Ukrainian child what he or she would like, the answer is not ‘toys’, but ‘health’. This is psychologically built in. And part of the program is aimed precisely at psychological rehabilitation, at not rejecting any kind of pathologies. Our goal is to cure.

No price can be put on this effort to heal. In 2010, a Ukrainian NGO tried to do so, calculating it at more than 300 million dollars for Cuba’s medical expenses alone. The testimonies of parents who, years later, between tears and smiles, express their gratitude to the Cuban people for the care they gave children, best capture the human dimension. “This is not just medical help – expressed one mother – it is a very great moral help for my people”.

It was, like so many other initiatives of the Cuban revolutionary government, an unparalleled globalization of solidarity.

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Tanalís Padilla is a professor-researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Author of the book Unintended Lessons of Revolution, a history of the rural teacher training colleges.

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The House committee dedicated to countering China is preparing bipartisan proposals for the fiscal 2024 defense authorization bill that would accelerate U.S. munitions production and arms transfers to Taiwan, its chairman told Defense News in an exclusive interview.

The committee is drawing on lessons learned from the Taiwan tabletop wargame it held last week as it drafts its proposals, which aim to ramp up production of high-priority munitions, help clear the $19 billion arms sale backlog to Taipei and bolster Pentagon cybersecurity cooperation with the island nation.

“We’re hoping to get consensus on a series of proposals that the committee can endorse that would be tailor-made for insertion into this year’s [National Defense Authorization Act],” Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., said Thursday.

He’s also using his position as a subcommittee chairman on the Armed Services Committee to introduce those Taiwan recommendations as amendments when the House marks up the FY24 NDAA in early June.

Gallagher discussed lessons from the wargame on Wednesday with members of three external groups: retired Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Stacie Pettyjohn from the Center for a New American Security and Jimmy Goodrich from the Semiconductor Industry Association. In addition to shattering the global economy and potentially killing many people, the wargame found that a U.S.-China conflict over Taiwan would rapidly deplete long-range missile stockpiles.

Beijing considers the island a rogue province, and has threatened to take it back by force.

“Whatever we do to deter the war has to happen before the war,” Gallagher told Defense News. “We need to jump-start industry now if we want to actually stockpile munitions that give us a chance of preserving the peace, which means in my opinion that you need multiyear appropriations for critical munitions like the long-range anti-ship missile.”

“We need about 1,000 to 1,200 [long-range anti-ship missiles] if you believe the unclassified wargames,” he added. “Our inventory is less than 250, and we’re just not producing them at a rapid rate. I believe we can get up to above 200 a year.”

Other high-priority munitions Gallagher identified are the Naval Strike Missiles, which U.S. Marines are fielding in Japan and the Philippines as part of an expeditionary ship interdiction system; Joint Strike Missiles; Joint Direct Attack Munitions; and SM-6 missiles.

A U.S. Navy ship launches an SM-6 during a live-fire test of the Aegis weapons system. (U.S. Navy)

“We need multiyear appropriations to make that happen,” he said. “We’re talking about a relatively small amount of money compared to the overall defense budget.”

Multiyear procurement authorities historically have been used for big-ticket items like ships and aircraft, but the Pentagon and some lawmakers have recently expressed interest in using them for munitions acquisition to encourage defense companies to ramp up production amid concern about insufficient U.S. stockpiles.

The FY23 NDAA sought to jump-start high-priority U.S. munitions production by authorizing multiyear procurement contracts for thousands of critical munitions. That includes 950 long-range anti-ship missiles, 1,250 Naval Strike Missiles and 1,500 SM-6 weapons, as well as thousands of other munitions — some of which the U.S. is backfilling after sending some of its stocks to Ukraine.

But appropriators did not fully fund the critical munitions authorization in the FY23 government funding bill. The spending bill allocated $687 million for the Army for two years to accelerate production “of critical munitions to replace defense articles” provided to Ukraine and its backers.

Gallagher said that this funding level in the appropriations bill “fell far short of what was authorized” and that he’s talking to appropriators “to get to some sort of compromise.”

“I understand why they usually resist multiyear authority and why they are skeptical about the way [the Defense Department] spends money,” he said. “Sometimes [the department] spends money in a stupid fashion.”

The Pentagon requested multiyear procurement authorities for munitions for the first time in March as part of its FY24 budget request, which asks Congress for $30.6 billion in missile and munition procurement. That includes the long-range anti-ship missile, the Naval Strike Missile and the SM-6.

Arming Taiwan

The FY23 NDAA also authorized up to $2 billion in annual Foreign Military Financing grants for arms to Taiwan and another $1 billion in presidential drawdown authority to give it weapons from existing U.S. stockpiles — the same authority President Joe Biden has used to arm Ukraine. But like multiyear procurement authorities, the FY23 appropriations bill did not fund either Taiwan aid authorization.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told the Senate in March that the Pentagon is preparing a weapons drawdown package from U.S. stocks for Taiwan, but that he’ll need lawmakers to follow through with appropriations to backfill those munitions.

Additionally, industrial capacity issues have contributed to a $19 billion arms sale backlog to Taiwan — something Gallagher also hopes to ameliorate. That will also require reforms to the Foreign Military Sales process. Montgomery, the retired Navy officer, told the House’s China committee that it can take more than 30 months from the announcement of a Taiwan arms sale until the Defense Department inks a contract for the weapon system.

“Once the sale is approved, there’s nobody in [the Defense Department] that then rides herd on the contract to actually get it done,” said Gallagher, noting that the Foreign Military Sales process “exists in this weird no-man’sland” between the Pentagon and State Department.

The chairman also wants to move Taiwan to the front of the line for certain arms sales, including Harpoon missiles. Saudi Arabia stands ahead of Taiwan in the queue for those anti-ship weapons, which Gallagher said “makes no sense.”

An initial draft of last year’s Taiwan aid legislation in the Senate would have required defense manufacturers to “prioritize and expedite” weapons for Taiwan in their queues, but lawmakers dropped that provision when they added parts of the bill to the FY23 NDAA due to concerns it would violate U.S. contracting law.

Lastly, Gallagher — who chairs the Armed Services Committee’s cyber panel — hopes to enhance the U.S.-Taiwan cybersecurity partnership to improve the island’s “resiliency and critical infrastructure.” He has introduced a bill, the Taiwan Cybersecurity Resilience Act, which would require the Pentagon to work with the Asian nation to improve cooperation on military cyber operations.

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Bryant Harris is the Congress reporter for Defense News. He has covered U.S. foreign policy, national security, international affairs and politics in Washington since 2014. He has also written for Foreign Policy, Al-Monitor, Al Jazeera English and IPS News.

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I knew things were bad in my world, but the truth turned out to be much worse than I could have imagined.

My name is Andrew Lowenthal. I am a progressive-minded Australian who for almost 18 years was the Executive Director of EngageMedia, an Asia-based NGO focused on human rights online, freedom of expression, and open technology. My resume also includes fellowships at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center and MIT’s Open Documentary Lab. For most of my career, I believed strongly in the work I was doing, which I believed was about protecting and expanding digital rights and freedoms. 

In recent years, however, I watched in despair as a dramatic change swept through my field. As if all at once, organizations and colleagues with whom I’d worked for years began de-emphasizing freedom of speech and expression, and shifted focus to a new arena: fighting “disinformation.”

Long before the #TwitterFiles, and certainly before responding to a Racket call for freelancers to help “Knock Out the Mainstream Propaganda Machine,” I’d been raising concerns about the weaponization of “anti-disinformation” as a tool for censorship. For EngageMedia team members in Myanmar, Indonesia, India, or the Philippines, the new elite Western consensus of giving governments greater power to decide what could be said online was the opposite of the work we were doing.

When Malaysian and Singaporean governments introduced “fake news” laws, EngageMedia supported networks of activists campaigning against it. We ran digital security workshops for journalists and human rights advocates under threat from government attack, both virtual and physical. We developed an independent video platform to route around Big Tech censorship and supported campaigners in Thailand fighting government attempts to suppress free expression. In Asia, government interference in speech and expression was the norm. Progressive activists in search of more political freedom often looked to the West for moral and financial support. Now the West is turning against the core value of free expression, in the name of fighting disinformation.

Before being put in charge of tracking anti-disinformation groups and their funders for this Racket project, I thought I had a strong idea of just how big this industry was. I’d been swimming in the broader digital rights field for two decades and saw the rapid growth of anti-disinformation initiatives up close. I knew many of the key organizations and their leaders, and EngageMedia had itself been part of anti-disinformation projects.

After gaining access to #TwitterFiles records, I learned the ecosystem was far bigger and had much more influence than I imagined. As of now we’ve compiled close to 400 organisations globally, and we are just getting started. Some organisations are legitimate. There is disinformation. But there are a great many wolves among the sheep.

I underestimated just how much money is being pumped into think tanks, academia and NGOs under the anti-disinformation front, both from the government and private philanthropy. We’re still calculating, but I had estimated it at hundreds of millions of dollars annually and I’m probably still being naive – Peraton received a $1 billion contract from the Pentagon. 

In particular, I was unaware of the scope and scale of the work of groups like the Atlantic Council, the Aspen Institute, the Center for European Policy Analysis, and consultancies such as Public Good Projects, Newsguard, Graphika, Clemson’s Media Forensics Hub, and others.

Even more alarming was just how much military and intelligence funding is involved, how closely aligned the groups are, how much they mix in civil society. Graphika for example received a $3 million Department of Defense grant, as well as funds from the US Navy and Air Force. The Atlantic Council (of Digital Forensics Lab infamy) receives funds from the US Army and Navy, Blackstone, Raytheon, Lockheed, the NATO STRATCOM Center of Excellence, and more. 

We have for a long time made distinctions between “civilian” and “military.” Here in “civil society” are a slew of military-funded groups that mix and merge and become one with those advocating for human rights and civil liberties. Graphika also does work for Amnesty International and other human rights campaigners. How are these things compatible? What is this moral drift?

Twitter emails show consistent collaboration between military and intelligence officials and elite “progressives” from NGOs and academia. “They/them” signatures mingle with .mil, @westpoint, @fbi and others. How did the FBI and the Pentagon, once the avowed enemies of progressives for their attacks on the Black Panthers and the peace movement, their war-mongering and gross overfunding, begin to fuse and collude? They join together in election tabletop exercises and share hors d’oeuvres at conferences put on by oligarch philanthropists. That cultural and political shift was once a heavy lift, but now it is as simple as cc’ing each other.

Worse still, representatives of the military-industrial complex are lauded in the digital rights field. In 2022, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken featured prominently at RightsCon, the digital rights field’s biggest conference (an event EngageMedia co-organised in 2015 in the Philippines — Blinken did not appear then). Blinken oversees the Global Engagement Center (GEC), one of the most important US Government anti-disinformation initiatives (see #TwitterFiles 17), and is now alleged to have initiated his own disinformation campaign related to the Hunter Biden laptop – that of the “Russian information operation” letter signed by 51 former US intelligence officials.

Former adversaries are brought together via a strong through-line tracing from counter-terrorism, to countering violent extremism, to Minority Report-style policing of everyday speech and political difference.

I also underestimated just how explicit many organizations were regarding narrative policing, at times blatantly drifting from anti-disinformation to monitoring wrongthink. Stanford’s Virality Project recommended that Twitter classify “true stories of vaccine side effects” as “standard misinformation on your platform,” while the Algorithmic Transparency Institute spoke of “civic listening” and “automated collection of data” from “closed messaging apps” in order to combat “problematic content,” i.e. spying on everyday citizens. In some cases the problem was in the title of the NGO itself – Automated Controversy Monitoring for instance does “toxicity monitoring” to combat “unwanted content that triggers you.” Nothing about truth or untruth, it’s all narrative control.

Government and philanthropic oligarchs have colonized civil society and proxied this censorship through think-tanks, academia, and NGOs. Tell this to the sector, however, and they close ranks around their government, military, intelligence, Big Tech, and billionaire patrons. The field has been bought. It is compromised. Pointing that out is not welcome. Do so, and into the “basket of deplorables” for you.

The Twitter Files also show just how much the NGO and academic set had been absorbed into the inner Big Tech elite, upon whom they pushed their new anti-free-expression values. It accounts for some of the antagonism toward Elon Musk, who kicked them out of the club, to say nothing of all the “townies” he let back on the platform. (Musk’s disruption, whilst an improvement, is clearly inconsistent and brings its own problems).

Despite members of the Saudi royal family being large shareholders of both Old and New Twitter, NGOs and academia never had much to say about Twitter’s ownership pre-Musk. It’s the same Saudi regime that murders journalists, oversees a system of gender apartheid, executes gays, and is responsible for more CO2 emissions than anyone can imagine. These should be bread-and-butter issues for progressives, who have looked the other way.

In days gone by the digital rights field would have paid close attention to the #TwitterFiles, as we did with the Wikileaks or Snowden revelations. Much of the same field that once lauded Wikileaks and Snowden are now the ones who have become compromised. The Files make plain that egregious acts of censorship were enabled or ignored by NGOs and academia, often not because they were wrong, but because the ideas came from the wrong people.

The Old Normal

Trump and Brexit are often cited as the turning point, a great political realignment that saw cultural elites shift to the left, and the working class move to the right. The NGO and academic class (elites despite their internal narratives) reacted by aligning their causes ever more tightly with corporate and government power, and vice-versa.

Brexit and Trump seriously dented the authority and status of the expert/professional managerial class. These events were explained away as being the result of bad actors (racists, misogynists, Russians), stupidity, or “misinformation.” The usual leftist class/materialist analysis was thrown out for a simple story of good and evil.

COVID-19 made things weirder. Big Media and Big Tech fell completely out of sync with material reality, smearing criticism that had previously been normal, and explicitly banning topics from social media such as discussion of a possible lab leak, or vaccines not stopping viral transmission. Polite society agreed with such bans, stayed silent, or even, as in the case of the Virality Project and its partners, led the censoring.

A cadre of North American and European anti-disinformation elites meanwhile had been slowly convincing NGOs in Asia, Africa, and Latin America that their biggest problem was not too little but too much online freedom, the solution to which was more corporate and government control in order to protect human rights and democracy.

Given that almost all the funding for such civil society initiatives comes from the US and Europe, those in the rest of the world had the option of losing funding or following suit. So much for “decolonizing” philanthropy.

Of course there had always been philanthropic control, but until 2017, my experience of this had been marginal. Top down direction and conformity crept in, post-Trump, and exploded during COVID-19. There was no doubt in my mind that failure to conform to official pandemic narratives would see you defunded. At EngageMedia, we tried to sound the alarm about the new authoritarianism in our Pandemic of Control series, writing:

The “approved” pandemic response was defended at all costs. News media ridiculed alternative viewpoints as fake news and misinformation, and social media platforms took down contradictory views from their feeds, silencing voices that questioned vaccine passports, lockdowns, and other controls.

And while restrictions continue to be eased in most countries, in others they are not. In addition, much of the infrastructure remains at the ready, and the population itself is now well-groomed for the new sets of demands, from digital IDs to central bank digital currencies and beyond.

Such concern about rights and overreach was unfortunately rare in the field. Control of funds under a philanthropic sector operating largely in lockstep with government accounts for much of the increasing conformity in the sector. More concerning, however, is that many, if not most of the educated activists and intellectuals in these organizations agree with the recent turn against freedom of expression. Writing this, I’m reminded of a media literacy/disinformation event I attended in 2021 at an Australian university – a participant bemoaned that the cause of our ills was too much free speech; all four panelists, one after the other, agreed. All the money aside, many elite hearts and minds have already been won.

At the same time, many are afraid to have a different opinion and only whisper their dissent in the hallways between sessions. The axe of cancellation hangs above the necks of those who step away from the consensus, and the triggered are trigger-happy. A sadistic happiness ensues when any deplorable gets a comeuppance.

By legitimizing wide-ranging government intervention in the speech of everyday citizens, the anti-disinformation field and its ideological allies including Canada’s Justin Trudeau, America’s Joe Biden, and former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, have given authoritarian regimes much greater license to do the same to their own citizens.

Disinformation does of course exist and does need to be addressed. However, the biggest source of disinformation are governments, corporations, and increasingly anti-disinformation experts themselves, who have through COVID-19 and many other issues gotten the facts wrong.

Weaponizing anti-disinformation to censor and smear their opponents is resulting in exactly what the expert class feared: diminished trust in authority. The moral depravity of the Virality Project protecting Big Pharma by advocating for the censorship of true vaccine side effects is beyond astounding. Imagine doing this for a car company whose airbags were unsafe, because it might cause people to stop buying cars.

It wasn’t always like this. Over the past century the primary advocates of free speech have been liberals and progressives like myself, who frequently defended the rights of people whose values they sometimes differed from and were highly unpopular with mainstream American society at the time, such as the over-policing of the Muslim community during the War on Terror.

At the most basic level, the idea that one day the shoe might be on the other foot seems beyond the comprehension of most. The result is a court of clowns. Feedback is not being taken in, pivots are not made, epistemological entropy ensues.

While progressives might believe they are in charge, I think it’s much more the case that we are being used. Under the cover of social justice, the corporate machine rolls on. The US government and its allies, realizing that information was the future of conflict, slowly but surely engineered a takeover of the independent, adversarial organisations that should be holding them to account.

Some say this shift began under the “humanitarian intervention” rubric built for the Balkan conflicts. This was stepped up further when Condoleezza Rice provided a feminist cover for invading Afghanistan. The elites grab the ideas that serve their purposes, hollow them out, and get to work. Wealth inequality became much worse under COVID-19, even as the halls of power became more diverse. “Progressives” hardly said a word.

The cultural shift is only partly organic. The Virality Project shows how powerful people cynically harnessed well-intentioned ideas about protecting people’s health, when in reality, they were protecting and advancing the interests of Big Pharma and expanding the infrastructure for future information control projects.

In February 2021 I met with a leading anti-disinformation organization, FirstDraft — now called the Information Futures Lab at Brown University — to discuss collaborating. The meeting became awkward when they claimed the Philippine #Kickvax campaign was anti-vaccination. Nearly half of EngageMedia’s staff and most of the leadership team were Filipino. The campaign had come up in conversations with them, so I knew it was actually an anti-corruption drive focusing on the Chinese vaccine, hence the name: SinoVac + kickbacks = #Kickvax.

The campaign was making serious allegations regarding the SinoVac procurement process. In 2021 Transparency International ranked the Philippines 117th for corruption out of 180 countries surveyed. Left-wing activism in the Philippines has long taken aim at corruption among elites.

Despite this, FirstDraft staff told me very firmly again that #Kickvax was spreading anti-vaccine misinformation. I was given an “Are you from outer-space and/or a potential menace?” -type look before the meeting wrapped up. No collaborations were pursued. 

From the #TwitterFiles I’ve since seen just how deeply involved FirstDraft were in trying to squash valid questions around the vaccine. It was a core focus. FirstDraft were also part of the Trusted News Initiative, a kind of Virality Project for the legacy media. The Information Futures Lab runs a project to “increase vaccine demand.” Co-founder Stefanie Friedhoff is also part of the White House COVID-19 Response Team.

Beyond reaction, a new vision

Removing government funding for the Censorship-Industrial Complex is a critical first step toward getting free speech back on track. The Complex’s key leaders also need to be called to testify before Congress.

Western oligarchs too fund a huge amount of censorship work and wield far too much power over politics and civil society. Changing how tax breaks work for philanthropy is also needed. It’s not that all such money is to be removed, but it should be a supplement, not the main course.

Civil society needs to stop cozying up to Big Tech and taking huge amounts of its money. This too has resulted in capture and the faltering of proper watchdog roles. 

Of course, new financial models will need to be developed to break from all this cash, which will be a huge task in its own right. As a sizable amount of the anti-disinformation field is essentially censorship work, halving the funds available alone will immediately make a big difference.

Clearer boundaries need to be drawn. I’m not generally for deplatforming, but anyone taking military, defense contractor, or intelligence agency money should not be part of civil society and human rights events. That includes the Atlantic Council (including DRFlabs), Graphika, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the Center for European Policy Analysis and many others — the list is long. As the database of “anti-disinformation” groups and their funders develops there will be more to add.

More decentralized, open-source and secure platforms are needed to resist corporate, philanthropic, and government capture. There are only so many people with $44 billion on hand. The challenge is generating the wide audiences that drive so many users to large platforms. Bitcoin demonstrated that such decentralized network effects are possible, but this needs to be made real in the social media field. Nostr appears to have some potential.

The even bigger problem is a culture that supports widespread censorship, particularly among its previous guardians, progressives, liberals and the left. Free speech has become a dirty word for the very people who once led the free speech movement. Changing that is a long-term project that requires demonstrating how free speech is primarily there to protect the powerless, not the powerful. For example, the Virality Project’s censorship of true stories of vaccine injury left us to the predation of Big Pharma, making us less safe. More free speech would have resulted in a better informed and better protected society.

Most important is to return to strong principles of free expression, including for ideas we dislike. The shoe will one day again be on the other foot. When that day comes free speech will not be the enemy of liberals and progressives, it will be the best possible protection against the abuse of power.

Rough edges are the price we pay for a free society.

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Andrew Lowenthal is co-founder and former executive director of EngageMedia, an Asia-Pacific digital rights, open and secure technology, and documentary non-profit, and a former fellow of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and MIT’s Open Documentary Lab.

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“Right now there are changes – the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years – and we are the ones driving these changes together.” — Xi Jinping to Vladimir Putin, March 22, 2023

President Lula da Silva of Brazil recently visited China’s President Xi Jinping. French President Emmanuel Macron, Belarus President Aleksandr Lukashenko, Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi and Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez have all made the journey in recent months. Even Germany’s amateurish Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock went, but her goal was to make sure that double talking Macron didn’t stray far from the EU’s pro-U.S. orthodoxy.

The frequency of high level meetings is interesting when one considers Joe Biden‘s bizarre rant in his State of the Union Speech. He blurted out, “Name me a world leader who would trade places with Xi Jinping! Name me one!” Apparently the answer is all of them because they are making a collective beeline to Beijing. Because of his odd screed and shooting down a weather balloon, Biden can’t get Xi to take his phone call. Nor can Secretary of State Blinken schedule a meeting with his Chinese counterparts that was planned before the balloon fiasco. China is “ghosting” the U.S., which responds in typical fashion.

Like every small child does when frustrated about not getting their way, the U.S. ups the ante with a brand new tantrum.  Balloons are so two months ago, as are demented questions about Tik Tok. Now the courts are tools of the futile effort to subjugate China. In New York City prosecutors charged two Chinese-Americans with failing to register as agents of a foreign government by setting up a “police station” under the control of China’s government.

The trope of the Chinese police station has gone from a laughable war propaganda theory to war by other means. Federal prosecutors are charging the two men with obstruction, not espionage, and it appears they may not have been charged at all had they exercised their right not to talk to the FBI.

The charges are a prosecutor’s dream complete with press conferences where they can make outrageous claims against defendants. U.S. Attorney Breon Peace waxed particularly eloquently,

“Today’s charges are a crystal clear response to the P.R.C. that we are onto you, we know what you’re doing and we will stop it from happening in the United States of America. We don’t need or want a secret police station in our great city.”

Of course the office was not a secret as it had been opened publicly. Nor is it anything resembling a police station. The term is a fiction, a creation of the state and their friends in the media meant to incite fear and hatred of China and to normalize the idea of armed conflict. These offices where Chinese citizens can get licenses renewed don’t have lock-ups or armed officers and are definitely not police stations.

The charges filed against the two men are purely political and will not lead to any advantage for the United States. While camera-loving prosecutors make nonsensical statements, China’s Defense Minister was in Moscow meeting with Vladimir Putin. China and Russia are now inextricably linked and are preparing to face the U.S. in whatever way it may choose to confront them.

In addition to the two New York men, the Justice Department indicted 34 people in China and charged them with conspiracy to transmit foreign threats but the complaint is a rehash of the old Russian troll farm stories. What was their crime? Among other things, “…an account controlled by the Group made numerous posts about George Floyd’s death and accusing U.S. law enforcement institutions of racism.” Any accusation of racism in law enforcement is a fact and not a reason for an indictment of any kind, but facts are never the issue when the U.S. declares another nation an enemy.

In attempting to diminish China’s economic prowess the U.S. has elevated its stature around the world. The ceasefire between Yemen and Saudi Arabia is the result of Chinese diplomacy as is the recent rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia. The Ukraine obsession and failure to harm Russia with sanctions has instead demonstrated the need to minimize relations with the U.S. and move away from the use of the dollar as the world reserve currency. China is leading in this regard and the more the U.S. amateurishly tries to isolate Beijing, the more it isolates itself.

China’s diplomatic success proves that the U.S. cannot be a peacemaker in the world. Its system depends upon domination and making what passes for friends through threats of force and interference. When another nation was able to bring persuasion to bear, the U.S. role as a hegemon and international aggressor was exposed for all to see.

The U.S. can call names, create hysteria about Tik Tok, claim that China uses “spy balloons” and “police stations” or make up anything else it wants. One quote in the Department of Justice press release is particularly revealing. “This case serves as a powerful reminder that the People’s Republic of China will stop at nothing to bend people to their will and silence messages they don’t want anyone to hear.” That statement is more accurately directed at the U.S.

The people of this country are the ultimate losers. Thanks to the corporate media repeating state talking points, they have no idea that China is moving up in the world and the U.S. is more and more isolated. They don’t know that the long predicted process of dedollarization is beginning to take shape.

The U.S. should be engaging in peaceful co-existence with the rest of the world. But that isn’t what the oligarchs and plutocrats here want. There would be no need for a military industrial complex if the U.S. wasn’t constantly creating new enemies and undermining other countries. All it has is aggression and the spectacle of name calling and incompetent diplomacy. The descent is obvious to anyone paying attention.

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Margaret Kimberley is the author of Prejudential: Black America and the Presidents. You can support her work on Patreon and also find it on the Twitter and Telegram platforms. She can be reached via email at margaret.kimberley(at)blackagendareport.com.

Featured image: U.S. Attorney Breon Peace (Source: US DOJ)

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In March 2017, ISNA Islamic Services of Canada, a Muslim charity that operated in Ontario, was sent a notice that its charitable status was being revoked and that in 30 days it would be shut down without any other recourse.

The Notice of Intention to Revoke (NITR) was the result of a years-long audit, in which the CRA said the organisation failed to meet the necessary requirements to be constituted for charitable purposes, including failing to devote resources to charitable activities and maintain adequate books and records. The CRA also accused the organisation of possibly funding a Pakistani militant group.

By May of that year, it ceased to be a charity operating in Canada. But while the news coverage at the time largely focused on alleged terror links, experts in the charity sector say charities like this one have been a part of a decades-long clampdown on Muslim charitable organisations, in which they were unfairly targeted due to Islamophobic bias and then given an unequal appeals process.

Middle East Eye looked through the audits of dozens of charities over the last decade, and while most were given ample time and space to object to being shut down, none of the Muslim charities seen by MEE were given the same opportunities to object to and delay the revocation of their charitable status.

The Canadian government’s conduct highlights the discrepancy between how some charities are treated during and after being audited and how the Canadian government treats Muslim charities, researchers, and practitioners in the charity sector have told Middle East Eye.

“This isn’t fair because it’s not the same way other faith groups or other sectors operate,” said Mahmuda Khan, executive director of the charity, Human Concern International, a Muslim charity that was not shut down but was suspended.

“The fear that we have, the extra cautiousness that we have, the levels of due diligence and compliance that we’re thinking of doing. [In] having forums and dialogues with others in the sector, I don’t see that fear in others.”

‘Where’s the fairness?’

Middle East Eye looked at 63 Notices of Intention to Revoke (NITRs) that were sent to Canadian charities between 2015 and 2019. Of those charities, 38 were allowed the opportunity to object and delay their revocation by submitting a response, while 25 were not given the same chance and would have had to obtain an order from the federal appeals court.

However, MEE also viewed NITRs that were sent during that same period to five Muslim charities, all of which were told that regardless of whether they filed an objection, their charitable status would be revoked unless they received an order from the appeals court.

“It seems unfair. If you’re giving this notice of intent, and then basically saying, well we’re going to revoke whatever you do anyway, where’s the fairness? I mean, there should be some process,” said Faisal Kutty, a lawyer and associate professor at Southwestern Law School who has advised dozens of Muslim charities and groups trying to apply for charitable status in Canada.

In 2014, two charities operating under the umbrella of the Jewish organisation, B’nai Brith – B’nai B’rith Foundation District No 22 (BBFD) and The League for Human Rights of B’nai B’rith (LHR), received a NITR letter from the CRA stating their intention to revoke the groups’ charitable status.

And several years later in 2021, the original two charities were finally shut down.

The CRA told Middle East Eye it could not provide further details on the timeline of the revocation of B’nai B’rith Foundation District No 22 and The League for Human Rights of B’nai B’rith, but said the agency followed “normal administrative procedures”.

The CRA also confirmed that charities are allowed to continue operating until their status is officially revoked.

MEE also reached out to B’nai Brith with several questions regarding this, but the organisation did not respond.

In a similar scenario, another charity, the Ark Angel fund, was sent a NITR in 2015 and was told it would be shut down in 90 days unless it received an objection from the charity. It was not fully revoked of its charitable status until February 2021.

Kutty told MEE that even though Muslim charities are given some type of option to oppose being shut down, the actual reality of fighting back is incredibly difficult.

“The theory is you can oppose these things, you can fight these things. But the practical reality is that once this is out, people are not going to even give you money to do a legal challenge to fight it,” Kutty told MEE.

“The challenge is not like you just stand up and challenge. You’re going to end up mounting a legal challenge, a PR challenge. So where do you get money for that now? We’ve had cases where the funds are frozen.”

Feeling ‘targeted’

The CRA told MEE that as a “general rule”, charities can file an objection to the agency’s appeal branch within 90 days of receiving a letter saying they intended to revoke their status.

But charities like the Ottawa Islamic Centre and Assalam Mosque, ISNA Islamic Services of Canada, The Canada Islamic Trust Foundation, the Islamic Shia Assembly, and the Anatolia Cultural Foundation all received letters saying that their statuses would be revoked after 30 days, regardless of whether they objected to it or not.

“The Muslim charities who were faced with audits and revocations were never granted the opportunity to delay the revocation of their status,” Tim McSorley, national coordinator of the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group (ICLMG), told MEE.

“It was kind of a final notice that they received.”

Middle East Eye asked the CRA why during the years between 2015 and 2019 there appeared to be an inconsistency in how Muslim charities were treated versus other organisations.

The CRA told MEE it can’t discuss specific cases, but added that it has two types of revocations, a 90-day revocation and a 30-day one.

“Consideration is always given to proceeding with a 90-day Notice of intention to revoke, unless an organization has demonstrated egregious non-compliance,” the CRA said.

But in the cases where a 30-day notice is given, the CRA will “not hold the revocation in abeyance given the seriousness of the non-compliance”, unless it receives an order staying publication of the notice of revocation from the Federal Court of Appeal within 30 days.

Yet in four of the NITRs seen by MEE that were sent to Muslim charities, the option to obtain a court order to prevent revocation was not outlined in the letters.

Even prior to the 2015-2019 period that MEE reviewed, Muslim organisations in Canada have been calling on the government to look into what they say is an unfair targeting of Muslim charities by the government.

The ICLMG reported that from 2008 to 2015, 75 percent of organisations whose charitable status was revoked following audits were Muslim charities.

The CRA said that it does not discriminate against any charities based on their religious affiliation.

“Under no circumstances are registered charities selected for audit by the CRA based on a particular faith or denomination, nor would such factors impact the outcome of an audit,” the agency told MEE.

“The CRA assess all concerns about registered charities against a clear regulatory and risk-based framework designed to prevent bias in its decision-making process.”

Terrorism allegations

Many audits against Muslim charities were also conducted by a special agency within the CRA called the Review and Analysis Division (RAD), a secretive arm of the CRA that works with national security agencies and is tasked with investigating allegations of terrorist financing in the charity sector.

In the years following the 9/11 attacks, RAD was tasked by the government of former Prime Minister Stephen Harper to root out any type of terror financing among Canadian charities, and experts say it tended to have an acute focus on Muslim charities.

“Essentially what we’ve seen and what we’ve documented in pursuit of countering terrorism financing in the charity sector, is that they’ve exclusively looked at mostly Muslim charities, but exclusively charities within racialised communities,” McSorley said.

“That has been guided by internal government policy that there’s an inherent risk to terrorist financing in the charitable sector, and they identify that risk as being linked to mostly so-called Islamic terrorist organisations.”

The report from ICLMG said the CRA worked with national security agencies to carry out audits that unfairly target Muslim charities, with little accountability.

And despite the revocations, some of which took place during the successive liberal governments led by current Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the report said that none of the Muslim charitable organisations or associated individuals were ever charged with a terrorist-financing crime, according to ICLMG.

For charities like Human Concern International (HCI) – a Muslim-Canadian relief organisation – which did not get their status revoked but received a suspension that it has tried to appeal, the experience of being audited was “intense and intimidating”.

“There’s one thing where there’s open dialogue, friendly dialogue, but it felt very intimidating to the members who were being interviewed,” said Khan of HCI, who was not present at the time of the audit but shared the experiences of her colleagues.

“The reason we felt it was not like any other audit and it felt sort of targeted was because we were audited by the Review and Analysis Division.”

And when organisations lose their charitable status, donors can no longer claim the funds as a tax deduction, causing a drop in contributions.

“The CRA targeting Muslim charities definitely has a chilling effect on the Canadian Muslim community,” Khan said.

“It was very hard to explain from our point of view that this audit in no way means the charity is doing anything wrong.”

And on top of that, a recent study conducted by law professors Faisal Kutty and Faisal Bhaba found that the sources of many of the CRA’s claims against these charities came from known Islamophobic and far-right experts that perpetuate anti-Muslim sentiment.

In a recent court hearing, in which the Muslim Association of Canada (MAC) is challenging the CRA’s targeting of Muslim charities, Kutty noted that the lawyer for MAC laid out the issue well.

“I liked the lawyer for MAC when he concluded, he basically said, the CRA’s position is they have 300 some odd sources they rely on, and only 30 of them or 32 of them are discredited or unreliable or problematic,” Kutty said.

“Then the lawyer concludes: ‘Your Honour, that’s like saying that when you’re trying to target a Black charity and you say only 10 percent of our materials come from the KKK’.”

Who gets audited?

In the past few years, the Trudeau government has made attempts to look into complaints of Islamophobia in the CRA, and in March, the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency (NSIRA), an independent government watchdog, announced its intention to probe the CRA’s review and analysis division.

This came after Canada’s Taxpayers’ Ombudsperson was tasked with looking into the issue, but ultimately came up with what he said was an inconclusive report, noting that CRA would not hand over key documents.

The double standards applied to different charities, however, are demonstrative of a larger problem within Canada, according to Anver Emon, director of the University of Toronto’s Institute of Islamic Studies and co-author of a report on tax audits on Muslim charities.

“We’d like to think in the Canadian context that we’re a very sophisticated government with a very transparent rule of law orientation, but at a certain point, there’s still sort of an old boys club element to some of the ways in which it seems to me that we’re governed, that’s my impression,” Emon said.

The CRA has around 40,000 employees and is responsible for overseeing the 80,000 registered charities in Canada worth more than $300bn. However, for the past several years, it has audited less than 300 charities a year.

And while the CRA says it remains independent, Emon says there are questions surrounding how it picks and chooses which charities get audited.

“What happens politically if they’re auditing a politically connected charity? We don’t know what that’s gonna look like,” Emon said.

“You may be independent politically, but what happens when the Ministry of National Revenue starts getting calls from big donors around why are you auditing this charity?”

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The top American diplomat in Hungary attacked Budapest for insufficient commitment to the NATO proxy war against Russia, with the ambassador claiming that support for a ceasefire in Ukraine was “cynical.”

US Ambassador to Hungary David Pressman made the remarks during the opening of the Hungary-Ukraine Relations Panel on Wednesday.

“It is cynical to call for a ceasefire when it is not your country that is almost 20 percent occupied by a foreign invading army,” he said. “The United States wants peace, one that is just and lasting. And that is precisely why we are standing shoulder to shoulder with the victims, with Ukraine.”

In February, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban called for a truce.

“[Russia] cannot win because the entire Western world has lined up behind [Ukraine],” he tweeted, “At the same time, [Russia] is a nuclear power and a nuclear power cannot be cornered because they may trigger a nuclear war. We need a ceasefire and peace talks. The sooner the better.”

“[Ukraine] is fighting valiantly and they have our full sympathy. But the only thing that can save lives in the [Ukraine War] is a ceasefire,” the PM added.   

🇷🇺 cannot win because the entire western world has lined up behind 🇺🇦. At the same time, 🇷🇺 is a nuclear power, and a nuclear power cannot be cornered because they may trigger a nuclear war. We need a ceasefire and peace talks. The sooner the better. #RussiaUkraineWar pic.twitter.com/PU5X5h4kkH

— Orbán Viktor (@PM_ViktorOrban) February 23, 2023

Pressman went on to accuse Budapest of hindering dialogue between the North Atlantic alliance and Kiev.

“Amidst a land war in Europe, consultations with our partner Ukraine are vitally important to our shared security as Allies, and Hungary’s policy of standing alone in an effort to block high-level meetings of the NATO-Ukraine Commission is untenable,” he said in his speech on Wednesday, adding that this “will no longer be accepted.”

Hungary has taken issue with Ukrainian language laws which impact the 150,000 Hungarians living in the country, even vowing to block Kiev’s bid to join NATO over the legislation. The NATO-Ukraine Commission has not met since 2019 because of Budapest’s objections.

Last month, NATO civilian head Jens Stoltenberg declared that the alliance would go through with another meeting despite Hungary’s protests.

“This is an established framework. I have the mandate to convene it,” he said. “In respect for the issues that Hungary has raised I have not convened that for some time, but now I will continue to convene the meetings of the NATO-Ukraine Commission.”

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Kyle Anzalone is news editor of the Libertarian Institute, opinion editor of Antiwar.com and co-host of Conflicts of Interest with Will Porter and Connor Freeman.

Featured image: Ambassador David Pressman’s Introductory Remarks at the Hungary-Ukraine Relations Panel Discussion

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In the name of “protecting future generations from potentially devastating consequences,” a bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers on Wednesday introduced legislation meant to prevent artificial intelligence from launching nuclear weapons without meaningful human control.

The Block Nuclear Launch by Autonomous Artificial Intelligence Act—introduced by Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Reps. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), Don Beyer (D-Va.), and Ken Buck (R-Colo.)—asserts that “any decision to launch a nuclear weapon should not be made” by AI.

The proposed legislation acknowledges that the Pentagon’s 2022 Nuclear Posture Review states that current U.S. policy is to “maintain a human ‘in the loop’ for all actions critical to informing and executing decisions by the president to initiate and terminate nuclear weapon employment.”

The bill would codify that policy so that no federal funds could be used “to launch a nuclear weapon [or] select or engage targets for the purposes of launching” nukes.

“As we live in an increasingly digital age, we need to ensure that humans hold the power alone to command, control, and launch nuclear weapons—not robots,” Markey asserted in a statement. “We need to keep humans in the loop on making life-or-death decisions to use deadly force, especially for our most dangerous weapons.”

AI is amazing and has made our lives better. It can also kill us. No matter how smart AI becomes, it can never have control over nuclear weapons.

I introduced bipartisan legislation with @RepKenBuck @RepDonBeyer and Sen @EdMarkey to require a human to launch any nuclear weapon. https://t.co/GWFtldq21N

— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) April 26, 2023

Buck argued that “while U.S. military use of AI can be appropriate for enhancing national security purposes, use of AI for deploying nuclear weapons without a human chain of command and control is reckless, dangerous, and should be prohibited.”

According to the 2023 AI Index Report—an annual assessment published earlier this month by the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence—36% of surveyed AI experts worry about the possibility that automated systems “could cause nuclear-level catastrophe.”

The report followed a February assessment by the Arms Control Association, an advocacy group, that AI and other emerging technologies including lethal autonomous weapons systems and hypersonic missiles pose a potentially existential threat that underscores the need for measures to slow the pace of weaponization.

“While we all try to grapple with the pace at which AI is accelerating, the future of AI and its role in society remains unclear,” Lieu said in a statement introducing the new bill.

“It is our job as members of Congress to have responsible foresight when it comes to protecting future generations from potentially devastating consequences,” he continued. “That’s why I’m pleased to introduce the bipartisan, bicameral Block Nuclear Launch by Autonomous AI Act, which will ensure that no matter what happens in the future, a human being has control over the employment of a nuclear weapon—not a robot.”

“AI can never be a substitute for human judgment when it comes to launching nuclear weapons,” Lieu added.

While dozens of countries support the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, none of the world’s nine nuclear powers, including the United States, have signed on, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has reawakened fears of nuclear conflict that were largely dormant since the Cold War.

From Common Dreams: Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

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Brett Wilkins is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

Featured image: U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Jacob Puente of the 912th Aircraft Mainenance Squadron secures an AGM-183A air-launched rapid-response hypersonic air-to-ground missile to a B-52 Stratofortress bomber at Edwards Air Force Base in Kern County, California on August 6, 2020. (Photo: Giancarlo Casem/USAF)

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UK diplomats will not declassify their assessment of who killed pro-Somalia activists at a demonstration in the bitterly contested city of Las Anod over the New Year.

The censorship decision was made in response to a freedom of information request by Declassified UK.

Las Anod, which is home to around a quarter of a million people, is claimed by both Somalia’s federal government and the breakaway northern administration of Somaliland.

Britain does not officially recognise Somaliland as an independent state but it has funded its security forces, including a unit suspected of carrying out the massacre.

The Foreign Office said last week that releasing its records from the incident “could potentially damage the relationships between the UK and Somaliland” and even jeopardise national security.

Around 20 people died from the shootings, according to a municipal doctor interviewed by Reuters.

The killings sparked months of open warfare, in which the local Dhulbahante clan – who generally favour union with Somalia – took up arms in a bid to stop Somaliland’s army controlling the city.

148 civilians have died in the ensuing conflict since February, research by the charity Action on Armed Violence has found.

Its executive director, Dr Iain Overton, told Declassified the Foreign Office’s censorship was “deeply concerning” and said British diplomats were withholding “vital information about the violence against civilian protesters in Las Anod”.

Overton added: “The refusal to engage undermines the transparency that is essential for public trust. As casualties continue to rise, it is crucial that all parties prioritise the protection of civilians and work towards a peaceful resolution.”

‘Soaked in blood’

Amnesty International said more than 600 people have been injured in the recent fighting, according to a new report released last week. Up to 200,000 others have fled.

The human rights group said international humanitarian law had been violated, claiming: “Somaliland security forces indiscriminately shelled the town, damaging hospitals, schools and mosques” by firing from military bases outside the city.

Amnesty added: “Among the civilians killed were women, children, older people with health conditions, and healthcare workers. They were mostly killed during indiscriminate attacks involving rockets, mortars, and other explosive weapons with wide area effects, which should never be used in populated areas.”

A seven-year-old girl was among the first to die in the fighting, when a shell hit her aunt’s house and shrapnel struck her head. Other casualties included a mother of seven children and a Red Crescent nurse. 

An eyewitness who lost a niece in the shelling said: “We were engulfed with dust and smoke; we could not see each other. I heard Saynab scream. When we cleared our eyes, I found Saynab soaked in blood. She was already dead.”

But Michael Rubin, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, rubbished Amnesty’s report and suggested “perhaps…the United States and its European partners should arm Somaliland with more precise weaponry as it stands on the frontlines of a fight against insurgents and terrorists?”

Rapid Response Unit

The ongoing violence in Las Anod is a setback for UK policy in the region, which has seen Britain forge closer ties to Somaliland’s de facto authorities than most other Western powers.

In censoring the documents, UK diplomats controversially relied on an exemption in the freedom of information act that is meant to protect international relations between states – even though the British government does not officially recognise Somaliland as a state.

It comes as substantial UK aid has gone towards strengthening Somaliland’s security forces, including the Rapid Response Unit (RRU), an elite police team implicated in the Las Anod killings.

The RRU was funded by British taxpayers for almost a decade until 2020, despite long-running concerns over its human rights record. 

Overseas development minister Andrew Mitchell has said: “Exact figures for the amount of funding allocated to Somaliland’s police RRU are not available, as support was provided as part of wider projects.”

The UK now funds a police “Counter Terrorism Unit” instead of the RRU. Britain’s defence ministry has previously paid Adam Smith International, a security consultancy, to train Somaliland’s military intelligence.

Conservative backers

Somaliland has caught the attention of senior Conservatives. Mitchell, when he was a backbencher, supported calls for the UK to recognise its independence.

His colleague, Gavin Williamson MP, visited Somaliland in 2019 when he was defence secretary and met its top army general. He was accompanied by Sir Mark Carleton-Smith, the then head of the British army and former commander of UK special forces.

Williamson has since returned on a private visit – sponsored by Somaliland’s Chamber of Commerce – and holds honorary citizenship.

Another ex-defence secretary, Michael Fallon, has his eyes on Somaliland. Fallon is deputy chairman of Genel Energy, an Anglo-Turkish firm exploring for two billion barrels of oil in the breakaway region – against the wishes of Somalia’s government. 

Their hydro-carbon prospects lie close to the geo-strategic Gulf of Aden, a major international shipping lane. Liz Truss, when she was foreign secretary, ploughed up to £232m into Somaliland’s largest port, Berbera. The investment was made through British Investment International, the old Colonial Development Corporation.

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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: British Foreign Office Minister Henry Bellingham addressing the Somaliland Parliament, July 2011 (Licensed under OGL v1.0)

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*** 

In a breathtaking moment of unbridled honesty and defiance, activist Jose Vega confronted the mainstream media powerhouses for their warmongering narratives and blatant disregard for the truth. Vega attended a panel discussion at the Columbia Journalism Review, which featured editors from The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Reuters. The panel was titled “Fault Lines – a Panel on Building a Democratic Press,” but it quickly turned into a moment of reckoning for these media giants.

During the discussion, Vega seized the microphone and challenged the editors on their lack of coverage and misreporting on critical issues like the Nord Stream pipeline destruction. He called out their hypocrisy in trying to silence investigative journalist Seymour Hersh and questioned if their publications had any remaining credibility.

Vega’s impassioned speech highlighted the failures of these esteemed publications in the last two decades. He pointed out their inaccuracies in reporting on Iraq, Syria, and Russiagate, asking if they had managed to get anything right during that time. He urged the editors to at least acknowledge the leaked information that revealed Ukrainian President Zelensky’s plan to bomb Moscow on the anniversary of the war, which brought the world to the brink of World War Three.

How to shame the warmongers in mainstream media into embarrassing silence in under 4 minutes….pic.twitter.com/QTkVeLSgDQ

— Matt Agorist (@MattAgorist) April 26, 2023

As Vega continued to criticize the mainstream media for their incompetence and bias, he reminded everyone that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is still in prison for doing the job that these editors should have been doing – seeking and reporting the truth. This statement ultimately led to Vega’s forceful removal from the event by the police.

Vega’s confrontation is a sobering reminder that the mainstream media has strayed far from its once-honorable role as the watchdog of democracy. His words expose the double standards and deceitful practices of these powerful publications, as well as the need for courageous whistleblowers and independent journalists to stand up for truth and transparency.

The response from the panelists and the subsequent removal of Vega from the event only serve to underscore the lack of accountability and willingness to engage in constructive dialogue within the mainstream media. As the world grapples with complex challenges and the need for honest reporting has never been greater, it’s crucial that we support and amplify the voices of those who, like Vega, are unafraid to challenge the status quo and demand better from those who claim to represent the fourth estate.

“Is this the lecture hall with Seymour Hersh? I just I’m looking for the one with Seymour Hersh because it’s a policy and press hall event. So shouldn’t we be talking about the Nordstream since that’s the biggest story of the century? And you guys, I mean, you have the executive editor of The New York Times there who came out with a phony story to try and block Seymour Hersh. It’s just kind of funny how that happened, you know? I mean, did you even acknowledge Seymour Hersh? All of you are executive editors of papers that broke the Pentagon papers, My Lai, Watergate. Are these the same papers or not? I mean, is there anything you’ve gotten right in the last 20 years? Or am I mistaken about that? I mean, it’s just kind of funny because Iraq – wrong, Syria – wrong, Russiagate – really wrong. Okay? I mean, the list goes on and on. So the last thing you could do to try and actually fix your reputation is acknowledge that through leaks we had to find out that Zelensky was going to bomb Moscow on the anniversary of the war. I mean, if you’re so impartial, shouldn’t you at least say that Zelensky was going to bring us on the verge of World War Three?”

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*** 

What is urgently required is a ceasefire to save lives coupled with a peace initiative.

 

***

While NATO is preparing the Armed Forces of Ukraine for the decisive offensive on the Donbass front, the Wagner PMC is grinding reserves of the Ukrainian army in Bakhmut, allowing the units of the Russian Defense Ministry to gain time and prepare for the upcoming escalation.

Wagner fighters have already secured their positions near the railway station and took control of the high-rise apartment buildings along Pushkin Street, as well as of the jail building. They continue their assault on the territorial military unit in the western part of the city.

Heavy battle is ongoing at entrance to the city on the south-western outskirts, where Wagner assault units are storming Ukrainian strongholds near the Mig-17 monument. Russians are close to take control of the crossroad on Yubileinaya and Chaikovskoho streets.

Wagner fighters are advancing along the streets of Pavel Novgoredtsev and Second Lesnaya. If they succeed, the Ukrainian garrison risks being surrounded.

The Ukrainian military is in control of only about 10 % of Bakhmut. At the same time, they continue to repel Russian attacks on the city outskirts. Russian servicemen are close to cut the main road used for supply of the Ukrainian grouping near Khromovo but no Russian success in the area has been confirmed so far.

Ukrainian forces can still send some military reinforcement to Bakhmut through the field roads on the south-western outskirts of the city. However, such maneuvers are complicated by bad weather and Russian artillery fire. As a result, Ukrainian losses are growing.

The Ukrainian military command explains that defending Bakhmut is necessary to prevent Russian forces from breaking to the flank and rear of the Ukrainian garrisons in the Lisichansk and Donetsk regions. Ukrainian retreat from Bakhmut would reportedly pose a great threat for the entire Ukrainian defense in the Donbass. Despite the fact that about 80 thousand Ukrainian servicemen are deployed in the Bakhmut region, ready to fight the exhausted Russian units.

Such claims cause no public surprise, since the Kiev regime is hiding the truth about the state of its garrison in the city. In fact, thousands of Ukrainian servicemen are dying in Bakhmut in order to cause at least some damage to the most professional Russian infantry, the Wagner PMC. The Ukrainian side is suffering more losses then well-trained Russian fighters despite the fact that the Russian Defense Ministry is yet to provide the PMC with necessary ammunition and descent support on the flanks.

The persistence of the Ukrainian military, pushed by its NATO patrons, allows Wagner fighters to destroy the Ukrainian reserves necessary for the upcoming offensive. On the other hand, Russian success is only possible if the Russian Army takes all necessary measures to repel the attacks, which is yet to happen.

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*** 

Last Monday, I attended an event at which the Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, spoke on “Digital Authoritarianism: A Growing Threat”.[1] While bemoaning the infringements on press freedom by “authoritarian” regimes like the one in Russia, Ms. Haines reminded us how lucky we are to live in a country where our democratic institutions prevent the government from acting in such an authoritarian manner (With all the censorship taking place in this country—from persecuting nonconforming investigative journalists like Julian Assange to limiting our access to alternative points of view by, for instance, banning the Russian TV channel RT from our airwaves,[2] you can’t help but feel Ms. Haines needs to get out more).

Ironically, and contradictorily, Director Haines spoke on the same day we learned that Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson had been dumped by his employer. Different explanations have been offered as to why Carlson lost his job, but I had always been amazed that Carlson could say such critical things about our foreign policy and provide a platform for fellow critics you would never see on CNN (like ex-congresswomen Tulsi Gabbardi, Edward Snowden-collaborator Glen Greenwald, and The Gray Zone’s Anya Parampil) without being quashed by the Deep State.[3] I figured his days were numbered despite being Fox News’s most popular commentator, and, sure enough, they were.

One of the last guest’s Carlson had on his show was Matt Taibbi, the journalist to whom Elon Musk gave a bundle of internal emails he discovered consequent to his purchase of Twitter. Based on these, Taibbi used Musk’s platform to publicize what the emails revealed; namely, that operatives of US government agencies, including the FBI, had colluded with Twitter executives to thwart Donald Trump’s reelection bid in 2020.[4] Not surprisingly, Taibbi became a marked man, suddenly becoming subject of an IRS audit and being threatened with jail time, as  he revealed on Carlson’s show. In feigned bewilderment, Tucker asked why no self-declared defenders of press freedom had come to Taibbi’s defense. 

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Notes

[1] The event was hosted by the Carnegie Institute for International Peace, which, for an organization with a name like that, provides a platform for an unseemly number of apparatchiks working for “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today“ (MLK).

[2] Fearful of suffering the same fate as RT, the Chinese government channel, CGTN, has been as patriotic as CNN in cheering on the US side in the Ukraine conflict, its correspondents parading a constant stream of Ukrainian refuges before their cameras and often quoting the rabidly warmongering Institute for the Study of War on claimed Russian atrocities. If it weren’t so sad and disappointing, it would be comical.

[3] Thanks to DVR technology, I would tape Carlson’s show, then fast-forward over the segments that didn’t interest me (Biden-bashing, chaos at the border, LBGTQXYZ-phobia, etc.) and restrict my viewing to foreign policy-related pieces, on which I thought he did as good a job as most antiwar sites—or better, while reaching an audience the size of which alt sites could only dream.

[4] One of the government mucky-mucks pressuring Twitter was Antony Blinken, then a top advisor to the Biden campaign, now Secretary of State. You won’t want to miss the Reporters Without Borders’ release of their annual World Press Freedom Index on May 3^rd, an event hosted by The Washington Post—that irrepressible darkener of any light shining on our democracy—which features Secretary Blinken (look forward to Blinken confessing about his checkered past… NOT).  

Featured image: A US government propaganda poster from the 1940s (Source: Multipolarista)

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*** 

It was never easy to question the election machines or the electronic systems that tally our votes, but now it has become much harder. Dominion Voting Machines has sued Fox News Network on the grounds that they were not sufficiently skeptical of Rudolph Giuliani and Sidney Powell when the latter claimed they had evidence that the 2020 election had been stolen from their client, Donald Trump. A judge handed down a partial summary judgment for the plaintiff, and Fox has settled for more than ¾ of a billion dollars — an amount far greater than the total dollar value of Dominion’s sales over its entire history. 

From this time forward, the derisive moniker “Trumpster” is attached to anyone who questions computerized voting, added to the time-worn moniker, “conspiracy theorist”. Worse, there is a risk of financial ruin to any mainstream outlet that publishes on the subject.

I first became involved in the Election Integrity movement in November, 2004. A handful of activists online exchanged evidence that the Presidential election had been rigged, in Ohio and elsewhere, for G. W. Bush over John Kerry. I was teaching a statistics course at the time, and proud to crunch numbers for the group. We all thought this was big news, and the New York Times would gobble it up.

The Times didn’t gobble. The Times didn’t ignore us. They created a hit piece and dismissed our concerns without ever talking to me (as statistician) or to the lawyers, scientists, and professors who spoke for our nascent movement.

Gradually, over the ensuing years, we came to realize that the press wouldn’t come near our issue, that the DNC didn’t want to talk to us, and the Democratic think tanks inside the Beltway were taking their cues from the party. We watched as one election after another showed surprising departures from exit polls, almost always Republicans doing better than expected.

2016 followed a pattern we knew well. It seemed that operators on behalf of Trump stole just enough votes to squeak by Hillary Clinton in the electoral college.

But 2020 was a surprise to all of us. We learned that Trump was not an ordinary Republican. He was not a team player, and the usual oligarchs and plutocrats couldn’t count on him to stay in line. They wanted him out.

Was the 2020 election stolen from Trump? Our movement doesn’t have an answer. Our forensic methods rely on exit polls, but exit polls were worthless in 2020 because more than half the voters voted by mail, and the election day voters were skewed toward Republicans, because Democrats tended to be more spooked by COVID, more likely to vote in advance. Telephone polls did not indicate a consistent disparity, but they are less reliable than exit polls. Also because of COVID, the tabulation process was even more hidden from public supervision than previously. Widespread use of mail-in ballots created new opportunities for corruption, while delayed scanning of mail-in ballots aroused suspicions.  

When elections were stolen from Gore (2000) and Kerry (2004), they sat down and kept their mouths shut. But shutting up was never Trump’s strong suit. So, after 2020, we had loud claims of a stolen election. During all those years when the Democrats had strong claims that they had been cheated, they chose silence, but with far weaker evidence, Trump was not shy about crying foul.

My movement — a few hundred people around the country who follow Election Integrity and make a study of it — my movement was deeply split over the 2020 election. I was with the minority, who welcomed the call from Giuliani and Powell to examine the election process more closely. We, the minority, feel that opening the black box is necessary if we are ever to have honest elections. We’re willing to take the short-term risk that Trump may benefit from the process in this case in order to have more transparency in the long term. The majority of our members are staying silent about the 2020 election, or even citing evidence to refute Giuliani and Powell. I think they believe that the weakness of Trump’s case creates a bad precedent if Giuliani argues for close scrutiny and then the scrutiny turns up no foul play. But some are also open about not wanting to offer their influence and reputations in a cause that might potentially benefit Trump. 

Dominion vs Fox

This is the context for Dominion’s defamation lawsuit against Fox News. In the weeks after the 2020 election, Fox gave Giuliani a platform to make his charges that he had evidence in his back pocket that would overturn the election. Some of his complaints were about the software company, Dominion. In March, 2021, Dominion sued Fox for defamation.

Dominion is a relatively new name in the field of voting machines. Perhaps you are familiar with the three giants from previous years, Diebold, Sequoia, and ES&S. Diebold and Sequoia were swallowed by Dominion, and ES&S remains an independent competitor, though Dominion acquired some of their intellectual property. Dominion was taken private in 2018. 

Defamation lawsuits are hard to win. The plaintiff has to prove (#1) that the defendant made false statements, (#2) that defendant knew they were false, and (#3) that plaintiff lost money because of defendant’s statements. 

The case against Fox was unusual in that almost all the objectionable statements were made not by Fox broadcasters but by Giuliani and Powell, who were interviewed on air. If you care about my opinion, my opinion is that a news network has a right, probably an obligation, to give the President’s lawyer an airing, whether or not the President’s lawyer is telling the truth. Sometimes the Fox interviewers challenged Giuliani and Powell to produce evidence, sometimes they seemed swept away by the audacity of their charges.

Dominion’s case against Fox is based largely on their claim that Fox “omitted a context for the content”, and thereby left viewers with the impression that Giuliani’s claims were more credible than they really were.

Personally, I find it mystifying that Giuliani and Powell puffed so boldly about all the affidavits and the physical evidence that they had in their back pocket. They folded their tent completely a few days later. Was it all bluff and bluster? Or did they actually have some evidence and they were reined in, one way or another, by the powers that really control our elections?

January 6, I think, is no parenthesis

In my opinion, the reporting on January 6 has been part of the propaganda campaign to discredit anyone who questions America’s election machinery. The word “insurrection” is absurdly inappropriate. People who were invited as speakers and journalists filming the event have been jailed and intimidated. Habeas corpus has been denied to hundreds of people who were guilty, at worst, of a misdemeanor.

I know people who were in the Capitol on January 6, and based on what I’ve heard and read, I believe that January 6 was a mostly peaceful demonstration, and the disorderly behavior was instigated by agents provocateurs from the FBI.

For years, my people in the Election Integrity movement have been asking, when will the public get out in the street and demand an honest vote count? On January 6, we got what we wished for, but most of my colleagues in Election Integrity wanted nothing to do with the protestors.

The summary judgment order

Before a trial begins, it is customary for both sides to ask the judge to rule in their favor — no trial necessary. This is called a “summary judgment motion” and the threshold for summary judgments is a high bar. The judge will rule summarily for the defendant if he finds that, even if everything the plaintiff claims is true, there is still no case that can be made against the defendant. Much more rarely, the judge will rule summarily for the plaintiff if he finds that there are no relevant facts in dispute and all the claims made in defendant’s pleadings are judged to be an insufficient defense.

The judge is not permitted to base his summary decision on disputed facts; if facts are in dispute, then the case must go to trial. Either side has a right to ask for a jury. 

In this case, the judge made a partial summary judgment ruling in favor of the plaintiff. He ruled that plaintiff’s burden of proof #1 had been satisfied — that Fox had indeed made false statements. How could he presume to know this? In the decision, he seems to have conflated #1 with #2. #1 means that the claims were false; #2 means that the defendant believed them to be false. The judge cites internal memos in which Fox expresses doubts about what Giuliani and Powell are saying. Logically, it is possible that the claims were true but that the defendant believed them to be false. The judge did not seem to consider this possibility. Nor did he account for the obvious: that reporters and different managers within Fox had different opinions about the veracity of Giuliani’s claims. I dare say that the decision to give Giuliani a platform was based on a combination of factors, including his inherent newsworthiness as the President’s lawyer and the red meat that draws viewers to Fox News. 

The settlement

Last week’s news was that Fox settled Dominion’s claim without a court hearing. I can understand that Fox was shy about going to trial after the judge’s Summary Judgment order signaled that he was sympathetic to the plaintiff’s case. But in court, Dominion’s first burden of proof would be that the election was not stolen — something I claim is impossible to know, given the lack of paper trails and statistical evidence. Dominion would also have to prove that Fox knew at the time that the election was not stolen. And then Dominion would have to establish the amount of their damages. 

How much revenue did Fox’s broadcasts cost Dominion? This is a question that a jury would be asked to decide. The amount of the settlement, $787 million, represents 45 times the revenue in their peak year. Dominion would have to prove not just lost revenue, but lost profit. Because Dominion is privately held, its profit figures are not public knowledge, but even if their profit margin is as high as 50%, it means that Dominion would have to prove that they lost 90 years’ worth of profit because of Fox’s broadcasts.

It doesn’t make sense to me that Fox was afraid that if they didn’t settle for $787 million, then a jury might find damages greater than this. Something else is going on. Does Fox have secrets that they did not want to come out in a court proceeding? Did they fear adverse publicity that would affect their ratings? Or were they being pressured by the same forces that have stifled the Election Integrity movement over the years?

This week, Fox News fired Tucker Carlson, who had attracted their biggest audiences, and was still growing in his reach. Carlson is quoted in the Summary Judgment Order as having broadcast on the subject of the putatively stolen election, but he was far less involved than Lou Dobbs and Maria Bartiromo. Dobbs and Bartiromo were not fired. My guess is that Carlson has stepped out of the party line once too often, interviewing Democrats RFK Jr and Tulsi Gabbard, COVID dissidents Dr Peter McCullough and Dr Simone Gold, and Pfizer-slayer Ed Dowd.

The Future

My reading is that this is the final nail in the coffin of the Election Integrity movement. No matter how unexpected the results, no matter how opaque the vote tallying process, no one will ever again dare to question the reported results of an American election.

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*** 

Australian Amateur boxer, 28 year old Charlie James Bradley, died suddenly in Bali on April 16, 2023, he was found dead outside of a medical clinic in the middle of the road (click here).

British boxer – 19 year old 2-time National Champion boxer Jude Moore died suddenly from “unknown cause” on March 17, 2023 (click here).

Nottingham, UK – Amateur boxer and student from Abu Dhabi Jubal Reji Kurian died in Ultra White Collar Boxing Charity Event on March 25, 2023 (click here)

Teenage European Boxing Champion, 16 year old Vassilis Topalos of Greece, died suddenly on Dec. 16, 2022 after fainting and collapsing in bathroom of his gym (click here)

Medical examiner found very severe brain injury that led to brain necrosis. According to forensic sources, the injuries to the brain were so severe that they are similar injuries to found in traffic accidents after violent collisions.

Undefeated Colombian Boxer Luis Quinones, 25 years old, died after a knockout loss in the final round of a fight in Barranquilla, Colombia, on Sep. 30, 2022 (click here)

Undefeated Teenage Boxer, 18 years old Miracle Amaeze died during a sparring session in Lagos, Nigeria on July 24, 2022 (click here)

Indian Kickboxer Nikhil Suresh died after being knocked out at a kickboxing event in Bangalore, India, on July 13, 2022 (click here)

South African Boxer Simiso Buthelezi, 24 years old, collapsed during a fight on June 5, 2022 and died suddenly in the hospital due to a brain bleed (click here)

In this shocking video, he is seen disoriented and punching air:

Undefeated German boxer, 38 year old Musa Yamak collapsed and died of a heart attack in the third round of a fight on May 14, 2022 (click here)

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*** 

In late March 2020, the U.S. Congress passed the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act. Within this $2 trillion stimulus package, $100 billion was earmarked for hospitals and local health centers that treated COVID patients

Hospitals were reimbursed an extra 20% for each Medicare patient hospitalized with COVID, and the only criteria to receive that bonus was a COVID-positive PCR test

The federal COVID-19 Treatments Add-On Payment program also paid hospitals bonuses for every COVID-19 patient treated with emergency-authorized COVID medications (Remdesivir, convalescent plasma, Baricitinib, Molnupiravir and Nirmatrelvir)

Hospitals also received a 300% upcharge for COVID patients placed on ventilators, even after it became apparent that this was a death sentence. Somewhere between 50% and 86% of all ventilated COVID patients died, yet government never dropped the incentive to use ventilators. Why?

Throughout 2020, evidence mounted showing the PCR test is incredibly unreliable above 35 cycles, and health agencies instructed labs to use 40 to 45 cycles. In essence, we had an epidemic of false positives, and financial incentives then drove hospitals to mistreat and kill countless patients, many of whom may not even have had COVID

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As detailed in “How COVID Patients Died for Profit,” hospitals were financially incentivized to diagnose patients with COVID and treat them with protocols known to be lethal, in part to “protect” the staff from infection.

As if that weren’t bad enough, primary care providers across the U.S. were also bribed to coerce patients into getting the toxic COVID shot. The following document was posted to Twitter in mid-April 2023 by Rep. Thomas Massie, an award-winning scientist and Republican Congressman for Kentucky.¹

“Ethically, shouldn’t doctors disclose when they’re profiting by recommending a drug or treatment — especially a drug or treatment for which there is no medical malpractice liability?” Massie said.²

Doctors Were Incentivized to Jab Babies Too

Once the U.S. Food and Drug Administration authorized the COVID shot for children, similar vaccination incentives were extended to them as well. As detailed in an Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield Medicaid provider bulletin³ dated July 2022, doctors received $50 for each Medicaid patient aged 6 months and older, who got the experimental shot.

Hospitals Received at Least $100 Billion From Taxpayers 

In late March 2020, the U.S. Congress passed the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act.⁴ Within this $2 trillion stimulus package, $100 billion was earmarked for hospitals and local health centers that treated COVID patients.⁵

And, rather than simply agreeing to pay COVID patients’ bills, the government decided to pay hospitals extra — a lot extra — over and above the standard bill, provided they treated patients in a certain way. By the end of October 2020, $96 billion had already been disbursed.⁶

Ostensibly, the additional bonuses for COVID patients were supposed to help hospitals recoup revenue that was lost due to the cancelation of elective procedures. But hospitals were supposedly filled to the brim with COVID patients, so just how much revenue was lost?

The bonuses were also supposed to cover additional costs associated with caring for COVID patients, such as additional personal protective equipment (PPE) and sanitation, but that could have just as easily been covered as an extra line item, rather than a flat double-digit percentage over and above the actual cost of the treatment.

COVID-Positive Medicare Patients Worth 20% More

As reported by KGNS.TV, a local Nebraska news station, in late March 2022:⁷

“According to the state, since COVID hit Webb County in March of 2020, about 85,000 people have contracted the virus, with roughly half of them serious enough to be admitted into the hospital. Almost immediately, the federal government stepped in to help pay for their care with millions of dollars.

KGNS took a deeper look into this to answer the question, ‘Is there a difference in how much hospitals get paid back by the government when caring for a positive COVID patient versus a non-COVID patient?’ The answer to that is ‘yes.’ People on government programs, such as Medicare, are worth more.

According to section 3710 of the Cares Act, hospitals are reimbursed by the government an extra 20% for each hospitalized Medicare patient. The only criteria for that extra money? A positive COVID test.^8,9,10

For instance, hospital Medicare patient with pneumonia — without COVID — is worth about $7,700 to the hospital. But with COVID, that reimbursement jumps to over $9,200.

A Medicare patient with Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome requiring a ventilator? Without COVID, the bill is around $34,000. But with COVID, that Medicare patient now worth almost $40,000. And the list goes on.”

On top of those incentives, the federal COVID-19 Treatments Add-On Payment program also paid hospitals bonuses for every COVID-19 patient treated with emergency authorized COVID medications (Remdesivir, convalescent plasma, Baricitinib, Molnupiravir and Nirmatrelvir) and mechanical ventilation.¹¹

It doesn’t seem like decisionmakers considered the possibility that incentivizing hospitals to diagnose patients as having COVID might impact patient care, outcomes and/or COVID statistics, but it most certainly did. To presume hospitals would think twice about treating patients with a particular drug or put them on a ventilator when they get reimbursed top dollar for it is naïve in the extreme. Especially when all they needed was a positive PCR test to justify it.

Throughout 2020, evidence mounted showing the PCR test is incredibly unreliable above 35 cycles, and health agencies instructed labs to use 40 to 45 cycles. In essence, we had an epidemic of false positives, and financial incentives then drove hospitals to mistreat and kill countless patients, many of whom may not even have had COVID.

Former CDC director Robert Redfield and Brett Giroir, assistant secretary for health in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, have both stated they believe financial incentives drove up the COVID-19 death rate in the U.S.¹²

Vented COVID Patients Earned Hospitals 300% Upcharge

I strongly suspect the reason why so many COVID patients died was because they were forced onto mechanical ventilation, and the reason for that was because hospitals received a 300% bonus for patients requiring ventilation! That’s no minor incentive. As reported by USA Today back in April 2020:¹³

“Sen. Scott Jensen, R-Minn., a physician in Minnesota, was interviewed by ‘The Ingraham Angle’ host Laura Ingraham on April 8 on Fox News and claimed hospitals get paid more if Medicare patients are listed as having COVID-19 and get three times as much money if they need a ventilator …

Jensen took it to his own Facebook page April 15, saying, in part ‘How can anyone not believe that increasing the number of COVID-19 deaths may create an avenue for states to receive a larger portion of federal dollars? Already some states are complaining that they are not getting enough of the CARES Act dollars because they are having significantly more proportional COVID-19 deaths.’

On April 19, he doubled down on his assertion via video on his Facebook page. Jensen said, ‘Hospital administrators might well want to see COVID-19 attached to a discharge summary or a death certificate. Why?

Because if it’s a straightforward, garden-variety pneumonia that a person is admitted to the hospital for — if they’re Medicare — typically, the diagnosis-related group lump sum payment would be $5,000. But if it’s COVID-19 pneumonia, then it’s $13,000, and if that COVID-19 pneumonia patient ends up on a ventilator, it goes up to $39,000.’

Jensen clarified … that he doesn’t think physicians are ‘gaming the system’ so much as other ‘players,’ such as hospital administrators, who he said may pressure physicians to cite all diagnoses, including ‘probable’ COVID-19, on discharge papers or death certificates to get the higher Medicare allocation allowed under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act …

USA TODAY reached out to Marty Makary, a surgeon and professor of health policy and management at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, about the claim. Makary said in an email April 21 that ‘what Scott Jensen said sounds right to me.’”

Why Did Government Continue Paying for Deadly Protocol?

Why wasn’t the 300% bonus payment eliminated once it became apparent that putting COVID patients on ventilators was a death sentence? As early as April 9, 2020, Business Insider reported¹⁴that 80% of COVID-19 patients in New York City who were placed on ventilators died, which caused a number of doctors to question their use.

The Associated Press¹⁵ also publicized similar reports from China and the U.K. A U.K. report put the figure at 66%, while a small study from Wuhan, China, put the ratio of deaths at 86%. Data presented by attorney Thomas Renz in 2021 showed that in Texas hospitals, 84.9% of patients died after more than 96 hours on a ventilator.¹⁶

The lowest figure I’ve seen is 50%.¹⁷ So, somewhere between 50% and 86% of all ventilated COVID patients died, yet government never dropped the financial incentive to use ventilators. Why?

Incentives Put Nursing Home Patients at Risk Too

Nursing homes in some states also received incentive payments if they accepted hospital discharges. For example, in Wisconsin, the Department of Health Services (DHS) paid out $2,900 for every admission a nursing home received directly from a hospital.¹⁸

This, even though by then, it was well-known that more than 80% of deaths occurred in nursing homes, assisted living facilities and live-in rehab centers. More than 90% of residents of these centers have at least one chronic disease and more than 70% have two conditions, which in turn can weaken their immune systems.¹⁹

They also live in close quarters and share staff, which facilitates the spread of pathogens. But rather than protecting the elderly by NOT admitting potentially infected patients, the DHS paid these facilities to take them in.

Incompetence or Malice?

In the final analysis, it’s quite clear that the COVID pandemic was grossly mishandled. Either U.S. health agencies and political decisionmakers were inept and unqualified for the job at hand, or they acted with malice, and the outcomes of their financial incentivization of bad medicine were intended ones.

Either way, their strategies were ill-conceived and resulted in needless death and suffering. Adding insult to injury, billions of taxpayer dollars were used to pay for it all. Financially incentivizing doctors and pediatricians to inject an experimental gene therapy into babies is, in my view, completely unconscionable, and should never have happened, but the same can be said for the continued use of ventilators.

It seems medicine during the COVID pandemic became all about maximizing profits, without regard for health outcomes, and that is something that our health agencies must be held to account for.

*

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Notes

^1, 2 Twitter Thomas Massie April 13, 2023

³ Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield Medicaid Provider Bulletin July 2022

⁴ Revcycle Intelligence March 26, 2020

⁵ Fierce Health Care March 25, 2020

⁶ PGPF.org November 5, 2020

^7, 11 KGNS.TV March 28, 2022

⁸ Healthcare Finance News August 18, 2020

⁹ HFMA April 21, 2020

¹⁰ AHA.org Guidance for CARES Act Provisions April 16, 2020

¹² Organic Lifestyle Magazine August 25, 2020

¹³ USA Today April 24, 2020, Updated April 27, 2020

¹⁴ Business Insider April 9, 2020

¹⁵ The Associated Press April 8, 2020

¹⁶ Citizens Journal December 20, 2021

¹⁷ Wall Street Journal December 20, 2020

¹⁸ WHA November 12, 2020

¹⁹ Newswise May 15, 2020

Featured image is from Pandemic.news

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***

“So the problem is that the 2009 crisis wasn’t a systemic crisis, but now, the rising interest rates have created a systemic crisis because the Federal Reserve, by saving the banks’ balance sheets by inflating the prices for capital assets, by saving the wealthiest 10% of the economy from losing any of their money — by solving that problem they’ve boxed themselves into a corner.

“They cannot let interest rates rise without making the entire economy look like Silicon Valley Bank. Because that’s the problem. The assets the banks hold are stuck.”

– Michael Hudson (March 15, 2023) [1]

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Click to download the audio (MP3 format)

As Silvergate Capital and Silicon Valley Bank were beginning to recede in the rear view mirror, the second shoe has finally dropped in the continuing financial bank crisis.

First Republican Bank has now seen its stock decline by 60% this past week following news that in the past month, depositors had withdrawn more than $100 billion. The bleed was shored up partially following the deposits of $30 billion in uninsured deposits by the big banks. [2]

The San Francisco banks intend to sell off unprofitable assets and has just laid of 25% of its workforce, roughly 7,200 employees by the end of the year. [3]

This is a signal that the failures that resulted in early March are not over. And that this latest catastrophe is probably not the last.

The banks typically have less money in their reserves than they lend out at any given time. This worked adequately except in the early thirties when financial times were so devastating that people began run-on-banks, quickly harvesting their own reserves before reserves were withdrawn by other depositors leaving the people behind penniless. Five thousand bank failures resulted then, persuading the Roosevelt administration to bring in the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 bringing in regulation to thwart the corruption and insider trading permitting such processes. [4][5]

Of course, Glass-Steagall was repealed in 1999 under President Clinton, and other initiatives like Dodd-Frank have since been advanced leaving the board more or less back in 1930s shape again! [6]

But, what if there is more to this than ’30s style greed? What if this is setting the stage for continuing down the path of engineering the destruction of the financial systems in Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe to the benefit of the key players within Wall Street? What if it’s continuing even within the United States itself as part of the “phase two” of the pivotal “post-COVID” 2020-2023 Great Reset? These are some of the questions we will attempt to get answers to in the latest chapter of the Global Research News Hour. [7]

In the first half hour of the program, we talk with geopolitical activist Peter Koenig about his own review of the World Economic Forum (WEF), their plans to revise the entire world in over 200 different areas through the “Great Reset,” and of a WEF insider boasting about setting the bank failures in motion. He also mentions the “systemic bank” Credit Suisse in Switzerland and how it is linked with the American banks. This is followed by our second half hour featuring economic teacher and journalist Dr. Jack Rasmus providing the fundamentals behind what has happened to the major banks and what is bound to transgress in the months ahead.

Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he worked for over 30 years around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020).

Peter is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is also a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.

Dr. Jack Rasmus is author of the books, ‘Central Bankers at the End of Their Ropes’, Clarity Press, 2017 and ‘Alexander Hamilton and the Origins of the Fed’, Lexington Books, 2020. Follow his commentary on the emerging banking crisis on his blog, https://jackrasmus.com; on twitter daily @drjackrasmus; and his weekly radio show, Alternative Visions on the Progressive Radio Network every Friday at 2pm eastern and at https://alternativevisions.podbean.com.

(Global Research News Hour Episode 389)

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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.

Campus and community radio CFMH 107.3fm in  Saint John, N.B. airs the Global Research News Hour Fridays at 7pm.

CJMP 90.1 FM, Powell River Community Radio, airs the Global Research News Hour every Saturday at 8am. 

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://www.globalresearch.ca/why-3-us-banks-collapsed-1-week-economist-michael-hudson-explains/5812286
2. Michelle Chapman (April 26, 2023), ‘First Republic shares sink again, down nearly 60% in week’, Associated Press; https://nationalpost.com/pmn/news-pmn/shares-of-first-republic-bank-continue-to-slide
3. ibid;
4. https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/banking-crisis-1933#:~:text=A%20nationwide%20panic%20ensued%20in%201933%20when%20bank,worsened%2C%20businesses%20failed%2C%20and%20workers%20lost%20their%20jobs.
5. https://www.globalresearch.ca/global-financial-meltdown-sweeping-deregulation-of-the-us-banking-system/10588
6. https://www.globalresearch.ca/warning-silicon-valley-bank-collapse-prelude-much-worse-come/5812171
7. https://www.globalresearch.ca/global-financial-meltdown-sweeping-deregulation-of-the-us-banking-system/10588

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*** 

Less than one year ago, the people of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka were up in arms over the worsening economic situation prompting hundreds of thousands of people to take to the streets demanding relief from the impending bankruptcy.

At present the parliament of the South Asian state located in the Indian Ocean is expected to accept an International Monetary Fund (IMF) package which would provide $3 Billion in much-needed liquidity to the national economy.

President Ranil Wickremesinghe inherited the crisis from his predecessor Gotabaya Rajapaksa and has now appealed to the parliament to immediately authorize the IMF package. He accepts that there have been 16 other IMF agreements involving the country, yet the president is attempting to present a positive spin on the economic projections for the future.

Since the crisis unfolded during the early months of 2022, there has been much speculation as to how the economy could be stabilized. Inflation rates were in excess of 70% while the incapacity to pay debts to foreign financial institutions and governments hampered the ability of Sri Lanka to conduct trade with other countries.

Consequently, shortages of consumer goods became a major social problem. Price hikes placed food, fuel and other services beyond the means of many people to purchase. A plan to introduce synthetic fertilizer as an import substitution failed resulting in a decline in the production of rice and tea, two main cash crops.

Mass demonstrations erupted which demanded that the then government resign. Later people would occupy the presidential palace and parliament leading to violent clashes with the security forces. Severe property damage was done to the residence of the president.

The Sri Lankan government responded with harsh measures declaring a state of emergency which suspended the right to assemble and banned social media. These repressive policies only further angered the people of the country.

Image: Sri Lanka President Ranil Wickremesinghe in parliament

By July the Rajapaksa administration was in disarray. A cabinet reshuffle proved inadequate to calm the discontent. Later Rajapaksa fled the country eventually leading to the ascendancy of then Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe who was voted into the presidency by the parliament. Since the coming to power of Wickremesinghe he has sought to negotiate with the IMF, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank for assistance in reducing the foreign debt.

In his address before the Sri Lankan parliament on April 26, Wickremesinghe said that:

“Today, we received the financing assurance from foreign creditors, with the Paris Club and India working together to grant it. India was the first to publish it, and we are grateful for that. China is expected to deal with it separately, so we will discuss with the Paris Club and India on one hand and negotiate with China on the other. After these discussions, we will have talks with private creditors. This agreement will enable us to receive approximately $3 billion from the International Monetary Fund over the next four years, with the potential to obtain about $7 billion from other institutions. This money is crucial for us. Additionally, we have regained the trust of foreign banks and financial institutions, with economic stability already being established in the country. Social Security is receiving more funding, and investors are showing a keen interest in Sri Lanka…. One of the points to address is debt restructuring talks with our bilateral countries and private creditors. We want to restructure these loans, as failure to do so will result in a loss of liquidity. In order for the government to move forward, the restructuring must be done in rupees or dollars. The government wants to obtain funds for this service. Therefore, we must first negotiate with foreign creditors. We hope to initiate these discussions soon, with domestic debt restructuring also being considered. A final decision has not yet been made, but it is important to discuss this issue. Negotiations cannot be held with terms and conditions already in place. It is easier for us to join negotiations without conditions.” 

A Left Program is Needed to Counter the IMF and World Bank Policies

Yet this statement by President Wickremesinghe ignores the persistent draconian conditionalities which are imposed by the IMF and the World Bank in regard to developing states. There are more than five decades of examples of the socially destructive impact of the IMF and World Bank.

Both institutions are a by-product of the Bretton Woods monetary system which arose towards the conclusion of the Second World War. Initially these programs were designed for the economic and industrial reconstruction of Europe after the antifascist wars of the 1930s and 1940s. However, by the mid-1960s, the IMF and World Bank were being utilized by imperialism to stifle the emergence of genuine independent governments in the post-colonial period.

During the mass demonstrations and rebellions of 2022, the general thrust of the protests was anti-capitalist in their orientation. Although the actions largely led by youth were spontaneous, the organized Left did play an important role by drawing from the legacy of the movements which created the political atmosphere for national liberation from British colonialism in the aftermath of World War II. Sri Lanka gained its independence in 1948 and underwent significant political developments from the 1950s through the 1980s.

In an article written by Smruti S. Pattanaik of the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses in New Delhi, India, the author explains:

“In Sri Lanka, Left political organizations—the Janatha Vimukti Peramuna (JVP) and its breakaway faction, the Frontline Socialist Party (FSP), Peratugami Samajavadi Pakshaya in Sinhala—have been trying to carve a niche for themselves in the light of the socio-economic turmoil that the country has witnessed in the recent past. Youth fronts of the JVP—Socialist Youth Union and Socialist Students Union of JVP and FSP—Youth for Change and Revolutionary Students Union, were at the forefront motivating and mobilizing the masses to fight against the corrupt regime. These trade unions, students’ organizations and other Left-oriented artists, women organizations participated in large numbers in the protest movement.” 

Any neoliberal economic restructuring scheme cannot effectively address the problems of mounting poverty and underdevelopment in Sri Lanka along with other developing states of the Global South. Even if legislation by the Sri Lanka parliament to accept the IMF package is adopted, this approach cannot provide a sustainable path towards stability.

Left parties, coalitions and trade unions can continue to make a monumental contribution to the political education and mobilization of the workers, farmers and youth. Every encroachment upon the living standards of the masses could be addressed through opposition efforts within and outside of the legislative structures. Alternative proposals for the funding of social programs and the economic empowerment of the people will inevitably become fierce terrains for political and mass struggles.

The crisis in Sri Lanka is not taking place within a historical vacuum. In Africa, three states: Egypt, Ghana and Zambia are facing a similar plight as they seek to negotiate loans from the IMF and other western-based financial institutions. The tightening of credit by the banks is occurring in the aftermath of the economic shocks induced by the pandemic which emerged in the early months of 2020.

In addition, the Russian special military operation in Ukraine provided a rationale for the imperialist states to enact unprecedented sanctions against the Russian Federation. The war and the subsequent embargo of Moscow has created food and agricultural inputs shortages on an international scale. The lack of affordable food and energy resources has compounded the humanitarian crises in various geopolitical regions of the world.

Human Rights Watch addressed the potential for further repression in Egypt emphasizing:

“The International Monetary Fund’s new US$3 billion loan agreement with Egypt largely continues an economic approach that leaves the economic rights of millions unprotected, Human Rights Watch and Democracy in the Arab World Now (DAWN) said today. The agreement includes improved efforts to address deep-seated structural problems such as the opaque role of the military in the economy and inadequate social protection. But other provisions, such as austerity and the sale of state assets, risk harming rights. This is the fourth loan that Egypt has received from the IMF since 2016.” 

The Financial Times in a report published in September of 2022 documents that the number of states seeking financial assistance has reached levels never witnessed before:

“The IMF’s lending to economically troubled countries has hit a record high as the world’s lender of last resort battles simultaneous crises that have pushed at least five countries into default, with more expected to follow. The pandemic, Russia’s attack on Ukraine and a sharp rise in global interest rates have forced dozens of countries to seek IMF assistance. A Financial Times analysis of IMF data shows that at the end of August (2022) the volume of loans disbursed by the fund amounted to $140bn in 44 separate programs. The figure, which is expected to grow further in the coming months as borrowing costs soar, is already higher than the amount of credit outstanding at the end of 2020 and 2021, when levels reached record annual highs.” 

It has become apparent that the burgeoning international debt crisis cannot be resolved under the existing capitalist framework. A new monetary system is needed based upon socialist production and distribution of wealth.

*

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Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of the Pan-African News Wire. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

All images in this article are from the author

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Donald Trump: The Left-Right Punch to Corporatist Fascism

By Rodney Atkinson, April 27, 2023

Corporatism, with its offspring Fascism and Nazism, is supported by totalitarians of the left and the right and its libertarian opponents also spring from the left and the right. On “the left” both “communists” and “welfare socialists” oppose corporatism and on “the right” democratic enterprise capitalists and small businesses fight corporatism.

Secret Team: The Nord Stream Pipeline Sabotage Revisited

By Freddie Ponton, April 27, 2023

Following the very damning report entitled, “How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline,” published on February 8th by the legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, the US authorities are still not budging from their official denial, and refuse to admit any form of involvement with the explosion which damaged the Nord Stream pipelines on Sept 26th of last year.

Possible Motives for the Daily Russian Missile Attacks in Ukraine

By Don Hank, April 27, 2023

Ever since the Russians started targeting Ukrainian sites with standoff missiles on October 10, 2022, I have been chronicling the strikes and sending the daily strike reports in translation, including the struck cities or oblasts, to my email group. I can confirm that the strikes have occurred daily, with no dates omitted, and have all been multiple.

Why Is a Large Dam Important for Ethiopia? Experiences from the Danube River

By Silabat Manaye, April 27, 2023

In the case of Ethiopia, about 90% of the available water is received mainly in three months. Hence, dams could effectively store water during heavy rain seasons between June to September and some extent during the short rainy seasons.

Facebook Censors Journalist Seymour Hersh’s Report on Nord Stream Pipeline Attack

By Ben Norton, April 27, 2023

Facebook has censored a report by the world’s most famous investigative journalist, Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh, on the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines between Russia and Germany. While discouraging its users from posting Hersh’s article, Facebook instead recommends a website that is funded and partially owned by the government of NATO member Norway.

The World Is Changing, But Is Washington Finally Noticing?

By Ted Snider, April 27, 2023

On April 11, CIA Director William Burns spoke at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. In a somewhat stunning statement that has, perhaps, not been so clearly and publicly articulated before, Burns said that we are in one of “those times of transition that come along a couple of times a century. Today the United States still has a better hand to play than any of our rivals, but it is no longer the only big kid on the geopolitical bloc. And our position at the head of the table isn’t guaranteed.”

British Radioactive Weapons Arrive in Ukraine

By Lucas Leiroz de Almeida, April 27, 2023

Ignoring all Russian advises, the British government confirmed on April 26th that its depleted uranium weapons are already on Ukrainian soil. Moscow’s officials, anti-war activists and experts have repeatedly warned that such an escalation in the conflict should be avoided, but London has not observed the advice and has further violated a red line by sending radioactive weapons to the Kiev regime.

Video: Monopoly — Who Owns the World? The Great Reset. “The Ripple Effect of the COVID Crisis”

By Tim Gielen, April 27, 2023

This brilliant documentary by Tim Gielen reveals how a small group of super rich criminals have been buying virtually everything on earth, until they own it all. From media, health care, travel, food industry, governments… That allows them to control the whole world. Because of this they are trying to impose the New World Order.

Ukraine Plans for World War III

By Bradley Devlin, April 27, 2023

Earlier revelations from the Discord leak suggested Ukraine is a cornered animal. The latest shows it might lash out like one. The Washington Post reported Monday that documents in the leak claimed that the United States had to force Ukraine to back down from a direct attack on Moscow.

Pivotal Moment in India-Russia Relations

By M. K. Bhadrakumar, April 27, 2023

Most relationships undergo transition with the passage of time from appreciation of each other to a “state of having,” a desire to possess or even to control the other. But the present pivotal moment in the Russian-Indian relationship shows that an equal relationship does not fall into that trap.

Epidemic of 15-19 Year Olds Dropping Dead in Schools and Dorms Across USA and Canada in April 2023

Dr. William Makis, April 24, 2023

WHO’s Worldwide Power Grab: Beware of the New International Health Regulation and Pandemic Treaty, a Health Tyranny Never Heard of Before in Human History

Peter Koenig, April 23, 2023

The COVID Trojan Horse: It’s Time to Move Beyond this Diabolical Deception to Understand the Real Agenda!

Howard Bertram, April 24, 2023

Died Suddenly: Military Cadets, Mandated to be Fully COVID-19 Vaccinated, Are Dying Suddenly Recently

Dr. William Makis, April 26, 2023

Madame Von der Leyen – McKinsey and Pfizer

Peter Koenig, April 18, 2023

A Letter to the Vaccinated

Dr. Angela Durante, April 22, 2023

Canadian Doctors Sudden Deaths Have Reached 150 Since COVID-19 Vaccines Roll-Out.

Dr. William Makis, April 23, 2023

The CO2 Hoax, ChatGPT, and God

Mark Keenan, April 20, 2023

Who Exactly Is Ukraine’s Commander-In-Chief? “Is Zelensky being set-up as a scapegoat?”

William Walter Kay, April 21, 2023

Brain Aneurysms as a Serious and Common COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine Injury in Young People

Dr. William Makis, April 23, 2023

Video: RFK Jr. (And Others) Expose the CIA’s Involvement in the COVID Plandemic

Robert F. Kennedy Jr, April 25, 2023

The COVID “Killer Vaccine”. People Are Dying All Over the World. It’s a Criminal Undertaking

Prof Michel Chossudovsky, April 20, 2023

Grim Outlook for Ukraine

Karsten Riise, April 24, 2023

Video: Kary Mullis, Nobel Prize Winning Inventor of PCR “Test”. Died in August 2019

Kary B. Mullis, April 24, 2023

Pfizer Killed Your Friends & Family for Profit – 92% of COVID Deaths Were Among the Triple+ Vaccinated in 2022 According to UK Gov.

The Expose, April 24, 2023

BRICS De-dollarization Hype — But Will Reality Begin to Dawn, that Nothing New Is on the Table, Really?

Prof. Patrick Bond, April 20, 2023

Anti-Meat Propaganda Roundup: Drinking Milk Is ‘Unsettling’ and Racist

Ben Bartee, April 20, 2023

Young Chefs Are Dying Suddenly and Unexpectedly. 28 Sudden Deaths, COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates?

Dr. William Makis, April 20, 2023

Environmental Activism as a Capitalist Trojan Horse, and “The Bill Gates Factor”

Dr. Vandana Shiva, April 22, 2023

Video: Tucker Carlson: It Is Hard to Believe This Is Happening

Tucker Carlson, April 26, 2023

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*** 

Corporatism, with its offspring Fascism and Nazism, is supported by totalitarians of the left and the right and its libertarian opponents also spring from the left and the right. On “the left” both “communists” and “welfare socialists” oppose corporatism and on “the right” democratic enterprise capitalists and small businesses fight corporatism.

The almost total irrelevance of the notions of “left” and “right” I set out in my 1988 book The Emancipated Society, advocating in place of the “horizontal” left right paradigm the “vertical” authoritarian-libertarian axis.

We now have in the USA two Presidential candidates who cut across the corrupted party system which – in all so called “democratic” western countries – have combined in a corporatist conspiracy against their peoples, giving them a vote but no choice.

The US Presidential system gives the people a better chance of voting for a complete philosophical change – or at least openly challenge the status quo. And at last we now have on both the traditional “left” (Democrat Party) and the traditional “right” (the Republican Party) individuals who threaten the corporatist Establishment – Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Donald Trump.

In his recent presidential candidacy launch speech in Boston Kennedy lambasted:

• the partnerships of corporations and governments to swindle and gaslight the public;
• the reckless military adventurism-for-profit campaign that has bankrupted the USA, now culminating in the Ukraine fiasco;
• the botched response to Covid-19 and the corporate chicanery that induced it;
• the financial corruption that is driving America into inflation and bankruptcy.

He recognises the State corporate axis which is increasingly unchallengeable democratically and the politicised media which silence dissent and alternatives in policy, science, intellectual life and medicine.

Like Donald Trump, who was banned from Twitter, Kennedy was banned from Youtube and Instagram. Trump was a reluctant COVID “Lockdowner’ and Kennedy points to the terrible consequences for health – lockdowns were:

“a war on American children,” citing a Brown University study that found toddlers lost 22 IQ points. “Children all over the country have missed their milestones” because of the lockdowns. “What is the CDC’s response? The CDC five months ago revised its milestones so that now a child no longer is expected to walk at 1 year … they walk at 18 months. And a child now does not have to have 50 words in 24 months, it’s 30 months. So instead of fixing the problem, they are trying to cover it up.”

Just as Donald Trump has been the victim of provenly fallacious deep state and msm scams like the Steele dossier, the Russian interference lie and “the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation” lie (as Mike Morell a former CIA director has just admitted) so Kennedy is accused of being an “anti vaxxer” and peddler of “misinformation”.

Kennedy reminded his audience of his father’s and his uncle’s treatment by the Deep state which they both sought to oppose and bring under democratic control – and both paying with their lives. John F. Kennedy had threatened “to shred the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter them to the four winds”.

The hatred of some Establishment Republicans for Donald Trump, the disruptor on the “right”, mirrors Kennedy’s unpopularity among “the Left”.

Who said this?

“We are transferring power from Washington, D.C. and giving it back to you, the American People.”

“For too long, a small group in our nation’s Capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost.

“Washington flourished – but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered – but the jobs left, and the factories closed. The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country.

While they celebrated in our nation’s Capital, there was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land”

Well those words could have been said by either Kennedy or Trump because they both identify the centralised, unchallengeable corporate State, run to the benefit of both left and right establishments as the enemy of the people in a country where democratic accountability has given way to corporatist fascism, both in domestic and international affairs. Both Trump and Kennedy oppose reckless foreign interventions and their enormous cost. Both would be peacemakers.

In fact the above words are from President Donald Trump’s Inauguration address.

*

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And Into The Fire

Fascist elements in post war Europe and the development of the European Union

By Rodney Atkinson

With contributions from William Dorich and Edward Spalton

Publisher: ‎ GM Books; 1st edition (July 25, 2013)
Publication date: ‎ July 25, 2013
Print length: ‎ 164 pages

Click here to view this and other titles by Rodney Atkinson.

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*** 

Following the very damning report entitled, “How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline,” published on February 8th by the legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, the US authorities are still not budging from their official denial, and refuse to admit any form of involvement with the explosion which damaged the Nord Stream pipelines on Sept 26th of last year.

As a result, Nord Stream sabotage theories deepen as shreds of evidence and intelligence leaks surrounding the sabotage of the pipelines have provided more questions than answers, with the New York Times even admitting, “It may be in no one’s interest to reveal more.”

Contrary to the mainstream media consensus of the ‘unsolved mystery’ hinting towards the tenuous official conspiracy theory that Russia is somehow guilty of sabotaging its own pipeline project, we believe it’s very much in the public interest to expand on Hersh’s story by revealing more important details surrounding this top secret military operation carried out on the ocean floor of the Baltic Sea. 

Despite their proximity to the event question, and being a primary stakeholder in the Nord Stream pipeline project, the German government has done little if anything in terms of a serious investigation into the unprecedented attack, with the German officials serving us a remake of the 9/11 story, albeit with a James Bond feel to it, involving fake Bulgarian passports and some trace of explosives on a 50-foot pleasure craft called ‘The Andromeda’.

In his follow-up piece entitled, “The Cover-up,“ published on March 22nd, Hersh maintains this was a desperate cover story conjured by US intelligence in order to deflect from his bombshell revelations.

According to the Germans, six men are believed to have planted C4 explosives on the seabed at a depth of 262 feet who, and when detonated, this triggered a blast registering 2.5 on the Richter scale. I am confident Hollywood will take full advantage of this compelling plot in combination with the even more spectacular claim from a US intelligence report suggesting that a ‘rogue’ pro-Ukrainian group carried out the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines. A blockbuster in the making, for sure.

Moreover, when the issue was raised at the UN Security Council in late March by the representative of the Russian Federation, both the US and UK voted against an investigation into the Nordstream bombing.

It’s now time to fill-in the remaining gaps of Hersh’s bombshell story, and reveal the ‘secret team’ who carried out this historic attack on a vital piece of European energy infrastructure. In this article, we will show you which state actors had the means, the motive and the opportunity to carry out this crime. We will also show you the actual demolition diving team that participated in BALTOPS-22, a 13-day naval exercise which featured some 47 ships, 89 aircraft, and 7,000 personnel in the Baltic Sea, under the command of NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe’s (SACEUR). We will also break down some of the equipment – minisubs and multi-role support vessels – used by these elite deep sea divers, whilst also identifying the various factions involved in the planning and the execution of what was a well-rehearsed and successful CIA-backed covert operation.

Seymour Hersh has stated that under the cover of BALTOPS-22, C4 explosives were attached to the pipelines, which would later be triggered by a sonar buoy dropped by a military plane. Hersh explains what happened next:

“Once in place, the delayed timing devices attached to any of the four pipelines could be accidentally triggered by the complex mix of ocean background noises throughout the heavily trafficked Baltic Sea—from near and distant ships, underwater drilling, seismic events, waves and even sea creatures. To avoid this, the sonar buoy, once in place, would emit a sequence of unique low frequency tonal sounds—much like those emitted by a flute or a piano—that would be recognized by the timing device and, after a pre-set hours of delay, trigger the explosives.”

The explosions occurred on Sept 26th, and subsequent underwater gas leaks occurred which visibly bubbled to the ocean surface (image, below).

The initial story published by Seymour Hersh did open the door to a plausible explanation as to what had taken place in the Baltic Sea last autumn, but it has also left a number of unanswered questions as to the specifics of the operation. As per his confidential source, Hersh stated that US Navy divers, operating under the cover of the annual NATO exercise known as BALTOPS-22, had planted triggered explosives which were then detonated three months later, destroying three of the four pipelines in the Nord Stream 1 and 2 transit network which carries Russian natural gas to Germany.

His source also replayed how this operation planning was led by Biden’s National Security advisor, Jake Sullivan, receiving input from men and women from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, CIA, State and Treasury departments. The initial meetings took place in “a secure room on a top floor of the Old Executive Office Building, adjacent to the White House, that was also the home of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB).”

Soon afterwards, “[CIA director] Burns quickly authorized an Agency working group whose ad hoc members included—by chance—someone who was familiar with the capabilities of the Navy’s deep-sea divers in Panama City. Over the next few weeks, members of the CIA’s working group began to craft a plan for a covert operation that would use deep-sea divers to trigger an explosion along the pipeline.” Regarding the special diving operation, Hersh states:

“The divers were Navy only, and not members of America’s Special Operations Command, whose covert operations must be reported to Congress and briefed in advance to the Senate and House leadership—the so-called Gang of Eight. The Biden Administration was doing everything possible to avoid leaks as the planning took place late in 2021 and into the first months of 2022.”

Hersh notes that the idea of a CIA-led special operations using US Navy divers to intervene with Russia infrastructure has solid pedigree. In 1971, Operation Ivy Bells was a joint US Navy and CIA covert mission, which successfully located and wire-tapped an undersea communications cable in 400 feet of water off the coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula located some 2,300 km northeast of Vladivostok in the Russian far east region.

In terms of the political evidence, we have the admission by President Joe Biden on February 7, 2022 during a joint news conference with the newly crowned German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, with Biden issuing categorical threat:

“If Russia invades, that means tanks and troops crossing the border of Ukraine again, then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2,” said Biden, before pausing. “We will bring an end to it.”

Prior to this in late January 2022, Biden’s Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Victoria Nuland, issued a similar threat stating, “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.”

Finally, just days after the attack, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that the sabotage of Russian Nord Stream gas pipeline was seen in Washington as a “tremendous opportunity” to reduce European energy imports from Russia. Of course, that’s exactly what happened, with the US and NOrway moving in the control the gas import market into northern Europe. Later, in Part 2 of this series, we will also analyse the overarching geostrategic energy play which is now underway, as evidenced by Norway’s renewed interest in the Barents Sea Pipeline gas project as part of Europe’s new Green Deal industrial plan, with its multi-pronged strategy, including long-term ambitions to create a European Hydrogen Energy market, initially involving ‘blue hydrogen’ at first, followed by ‘green hydrogen’ in the long-run. Not surprisingly, the two main partners for this project are Norway and Germany.

The Mission: Nordstream Sabotage

We believe there is value in being more precise regarding the accusation of that US Navy deep sea divers were used from The Naval Diving and Salvage Training Center (NDSTC) which operates out of the Naval Support Activity base in Panama City (NSA Panama City), often referred to as one of the largest diving facility in the world. Our interest in the subject is not new and those who follow reports on the 21st Century Wire might recall our previous article, “QUI BONO? From 9/11 to Nord Stream – A New Geopolitical Game Changer.” Our curiosity took us to the heart of the US Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA), and its U.S. Navy research and warfare centers (NSWC PCD) in Panama City, including its Navy Experimental Diving Unit (NEDU).

This underwater demolition mission used NATO’s BALTOPS-22 as cover for this act of war, and rapidly our investigation’s attention turned towards the Norwegian Armed Forces and their close ties with NATO Joint Force Command in Norfolk Virginia (NATO JFC-NF), looking into the NATO Wargame Center there, and NATO’s Joint Logistics Support Group (JLSG) based out of Norway – to see if they too played a role in this logistically complex mission. Our findings are more than compelling.

We must first familiarise ourselves with the overarching command structures that this operation was conducted. Let us start with the NAVSEA, currently operates eight Surface Warfare Centers:

1. NSWC Carderock, Maryland.
2. NSWC Corona, California.
3. NSWC Crane, Indiana.
4. NSWC Dahlgren, Virginia.
5. NSWC Indian Head, Maryland.
6. NSWC Panama City, Florida.
7. NSWC Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
8. NSWC Port Hueneme, California.

NAVSEA has also seven affiliated Program Executive Offices (PEOs) including a PEO for Undersea Warfare Systems which enables the delivery of enhanced combat capability, with improved cybersecurity and resiliency, to all submarine platforms.

The primary mission of NSA Panama City is to provide, operate and maintain facilities, providing defence and physical security of critical infrastructures. Major tenants include Naval Surface Warfare Center-Panama City Division (NSWC PCD), Naval Diving and Salvage Training Center (NDSTC), Navy Experimental Diving Unit (NEDU) and U.S. Coast Guard Station Panama City. In a few words, the Naval Surface Warfare Center-Panama City Division is the perfect location to assemble a highly skilled special force diving team and the equipment needed to plan and conduct an underwater high-risk covert military operation.

The NDSTC in Panama City is where the U.S. Navy trains some of its best deep-sea and saturation divers – regarded as among the elites in this category of specialised military operations. These ‘One Team Warfare Centers’ provide also training facilities for the Seabee underwater construction divers (Naval Construction Force – NCF) as well as for the joint service diving officers, including explosive ordnance disposal officers (EOD). It is truly a One Team Warfare Center.

More information of the Naval Surface Warfare Center- Panama City Division (NSWC PCD):

Click here to view the document.

NDSTC in Panama City houses 23 certified diver life support systems, which include 6 hyperbaric recompression chambers, 2 diving simulation facilities capable of 300 feet (91 m), an aquatics training facility which is the second-largest pool in the U.S., a submarine lock-out trunk and two 133 feet (41 m) Yard Diving Tenders (YDT) for open ocean diving support (with recompression chambers and mixed gas diving capabilities). The NDSTC reports to the Center for EOD and Diving (CENEODDIVE).

The Naval Diving and Salvage Training Center (NDSTC):

The Navy’s Explosive Ordnance Disposal Divers (EOD Units) train at the Center for Explosive Ordnance Disposal and Diving (CENEODDIVE), located at the Naval Support Activity (NSA) in Panama City, Florida. Navy Expeditionary Combat Command (NECC) and U.S. Fleet Forces (USFF) and Command Individual Augmentee (IA) global force management team are responsible for sustaining the Navy Expeditionary Combat Force (NECF) to execute combat, combat support, and combat service support missions across the full spectrum of naval, joint, and combined operations. It looks like we are at the right place.

EOD Units such as EODMU 6 have been reported to operate out of Panama City, this unit is assigned to Explosive Ordnance Disposal Group Two (EODGRU TWO), a critical part of the Navy Expeditionary Combat Force (NECF) that conducts “improvised explosive devices” (IED) operations, renders safe explosive hazards and disarms underwater explosives such as sea mines. EOD specialists can handle everything from chemical, biological and radiological threats and are the only military EOD force that can both, parachute from the air to reach distant targets or dive under the sea to disarm weapons. EOD’s Mobile Diving and Salvage Units clear harbours of navigation hazards, and engage in underwater search and recovery operations. EOD technicians handle foreign, domestic, and homemade explosives.

According to the U.S. Naval Forces Europe and Africa/U.S. Sixth Fleet, Explosive Ordnance Disposal Mobile Unit 8 (EODMU 8) which works under the Navy Expeditionary Combat Task Force Europe-Africa/Task Force 68 (NECFEURAF/TF 68 or CTF 68), they are responsible for assembling demolition operations, providing explosive ordnance disposal operations, naval construction, expeditionary security and theatre security efforts to Naval Forces Europe-Africa and U.S. 6th Fleet (source).

EOD Mobile Unit 8 ( EODMU 8) and attached EOD platoons like EOD Units (EODMU6) provide critical and unique EOD, diving, mine countermeasures, and mobility capabilities that render safe conventional munitions, improvised explosive devices (IED), and weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

Lt. j.g. Chris Bianchi, assigned to Explosive Ordnance Disposal Mobile Unit EODMU 8, prepares mock explosives for a pier-side training event during exercise BALTOPS 22 (source)

Explosive Ordnance Disposal Group Two (EODGRU TWO) routinely work with the U.S. Secret Service, CIA and the U.S. State Department, helping to protect the President, Vice President and other state and foreign officials and dignitaries. They support the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Customs Office, and the FBI as well as state and local police bomb squads. EOD technicians also assist in security at large international events. They are on-call and always at the ready for any mission.

It’s important to note that EOD Group Two is headquartered at Naval Amphibious Base Little Creek, Norfolk, Virginia around the corner (2.5 mil) from NATO Joint Force Allied Command Transformation (ACT), headquarters in Norfolk Virginia (JFC-NF), the very facility which also supervises and lead Trans Atlantic joint forces warfare centres and other NATO logistics hubs and missions in northern Europe and the Baltic/Arctic, which would include BALTOPS exercises.

Strangely (or not), the Commander of NATO’s Joint Warfare Centre in Europe is a two-star General, based in Stavanger, Norway, falling under the pillar of the three-star DCOS Joint Force Trainer based at Allied Command Transformation (ACT) in Virginia, Norfolk, United States.

The list of military special operation units harboring top experts divers with special training in underwater demolition is rather short, and therefore the only place left to look into is the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) which commands and controls the Special Mission Units (SMU) of U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM). These units perform highly classified operations and accomplish high-risk, politically-sensitive missions with a low signature and small footprint. The Group for Specialized Tactics, also known as the “Ghosts” are an elite Special Mission Units within JSOC, with a chain of command stretching right up to the President of the United States.

Not all of these units are known to the public due to the classified nature of their missions, however, the SEAL Team Six from The United States Naval Special Warfare Development Group (NSWDG) previously known as DEVGRU, is a U.S. Navy component of Joint Special Operations Command and are known to be recruited for special operation for the CIA, including advanced underwater demolition missions and they would certainly qualify as relevant for a Nord Stream pipeline sabotage mission in the Baltic Sea. More on the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, SEAL Team 6 in this article by The Intercept.

JSOC has a close relationship with the CIA’s elite Special Activities Division (SAD) and the two forces often operate together. The SAD’s Special Operations Group often selects their recruits from the JSOC. This is important to note in conjunction with Seymour Hersh’s reporting that the Nord Stream sabotage was a CIA-led operation.

The joint statement made by General Richard D. Clarke commander of USSOCOM before the 117th Congress Senate Armed Services Committee on April 5, 2022, refers extensively to the Ukraine -Russian conflict. In his statement, General Clarke refers to his Special Operations Forces (SOF) as “The Problem-Solvers”. How prescient.

Furthermore, the U.S. Special Operations Command is very keen on bringing under its umbrella, the latest underwater technology and systems which they procure for their Navy SEAL teams. It is with this special class of equipment that the Nord Stream mission could be carried out with absolute precision.

One of their most interesting recent acquisitions is the ‘S351 “Nemesis‘ designed by USSOCOM and MSUBS, a British company operating out of Plymouth, UK. MSUBS is wholly owned by Submergence Group LLC, a Texas-based company which provides the linkages into the United States DOD and is responsible for contract support, most notably operator training. The ‘Nemesis’ sub is a Dry Combat Submersible (DCS) with extraordinary capacities that can take a team of divers to a depth of 330 feet (100 Meters), transporting a crew made of a pilot and a co-pilot/navigator, and eight fully-equipped SEALs and/or other payloads items up to 1.1 tonnes in weight. The mission endurance of this unique DCS is greater than 24 hours, and likely more. Indeed, Lockheed Martin has partnered with Submergence Group to build, integrate and test three undersea transport vehicles from MSUBS for USSOCOM.

Because of the above-mentioned links, we strongly believe that the divers Seymour Hersh mentioned in his report could have been using the S351 Nemisis for their Mission off the coast of Denmark Bornholm island. See more info here.

USSOCOM Dry Combat Submersible S351 Nemisis, by the Submergence Group/MSUBS.

This is what the Special Forces Navy SEALs were using before Dry Combat Submersible came into play.

Underwater Infiltration: SEAL Delivery Vehicle (SDV) video:

Undercover of BALTOPS: Nordstream Mission Support Ship

In the following PDF document, we resume some of the key details regarding the British Royal Navy’s involvement in BALTOPS-22 as well as the ‘Joint Viking‘ March 2023 large-scale land and sea exercise which took place in Norway. We have isolated two major contenders for sea vessels which tactically and technically qualify for the transportation of a Dry Combat Submersible for theNavy SEALS to carry out a covert underwater diving and demolition expedition in the Baltic Sea. Enter these two British Royal Navy multi-role ships:

• HMS Defender (confirmed Baltops 22 participant)
• HMS Albion

Will also look into the Future Autonomous at Sea Technologies FAST Cluster run out of Plymouth, southwest of England, that could provide all the required facilities to train and test MSUBS DCSahead of BALTOPS-22.

The British Ministry of Defence has confirmed that the HMS Defender was present during BALTOPS-22 in June (see more details in the PDF below).

Click here to view the document.

Perfidious Albion?

Many have already forgotten UK former Prime Minister Liz Truss’s infamous “It’s Done” SMS to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken just minutes after the Nord Stream blasts, and yet, this very revealing SMS indicates a UK awareness and very likely co-involvement in what Hersh describes as a CIA covert operation that led to the Nord Stream Pipeline sabotage. As members of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, and as NATO members, British and the US, along with its foreign intelligence arms MI6 and CIA, are known to have been working together for years on numerous covert operations in the Middle East and numerous other locations, and so this shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. Despite the many calls for a UK government investigation on the matter, no official explanation was ever provided. This is unbelievable considering the international ramifications of this incident.

Diving Deep into the World of Manned or Unmanned Underwater Vehicles

It’s important to cover all of the likely participants in this kind of undersea operation. This also brings us to Huntington Ingalls Industries, a world leader in Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUV), who in April 2016 announced that PROTEUS, the dual-mode undersea vehicle developed by the company’s subsidiary and Battelle, had successfully completed endurance testing that month.

The 30-day simulated unmanned mission was performed in a test tank at Undersea Solutions Group (USG) at the Panama City, Florida facility, to demonstrate the Unmanned Underwater Vehicle’s reliability and ability to perform long-duration missions with the US Navy’s future Dual-mode underwater vehicles (source). The mission capabilities of the PROTEUS underwater vehicle include inspection of undersea infrastructure, integration and testing of payload systems, installation of equipment on the ocean floor, autonomy development, and long-range and duration trials.

Proteus UUV tested with Divers in Panama City Florida (source)

HII’s technical solutions division and Battelle/Bluefin jointly developed PROTEUS.

PROTEUS Dual-mode underwater vehicle (DMUV) taken out for a test in Florida’s Saint Andrews Bay – USG Vice President Ross Lindman as the pilot is preparing to crew and drive the Proteus dual-mode underwater vehicle. Photo by Joe Colamaria/HII (source).

HII’s Pharos prototype platform being towed behind a small craft in the Pascagoula River while recovering HII’s Proteus LDUUV.

Again, we should note that the Undersea Solutions Group operating out of Panama City has developed the dual-mode undersea vehicle with US Department of Defense contractor Battelle-Bluefin.

The follow are Battelle’s technical specs for the PROTEUS:

Click here to view the document.

About Undersea Solutions Group

Undersea Solutions Group (USG) develops and builds specialised manned and unmanned undersea vehicles for military customers around the world. USG has built or converted specialised craft for a variety of purposes – including support of submersibles and submarines, special warfare, testing of mine warfare systems, torpedo countermeasures and more. Originally established in 1972, USG operates in Panama City Beach, Florida, and reports to HII’s Newport News Shipbuilding division.

About HUNTINGTON INGALLS INDUSTRIES (HII) and HYDROID INC.

In March 2020, Huntington Ingalls Industries (HII) announced they had closed on the acquisition ($80 million) of Hydroid Inc, a subsidiary of Kongsberg Maritime a division of the Kongsberg Gruppen, the famous Norwegian global defense contractor and provider of advanced marine robotics and systems to the defense and maritime markets.

Hydroid Inc Unmanned Underwater Vehicles REMUS.

In conjunction with the transaction, HII and Norwegian defense contractor Kongsberg Maritimehave established a strategic alliance to jointly market naval and maritime products and services to the U.S. and global market .

It’s important to highlight that during BALTOPS-22, current and future programs for mine-hunting UUVs such as the Navy Mk18 and Lionfish systems program where these UUVs have emerged from, were tested and used over 10 days of mine-hunting operations, collecting over 200 hours of undersea data.

HII UUV product lines and equipment include:

• REMUS (Hydroid)
• Seaglider
• Proteus (USG)
• UUV Auxiliary Equipment
• Launch and Recovery Systems
• Subsea Docking and Infrastructure

In Seymour Hersh’s report, we learned that divers would have had to dive as deep as 260 feet, possibly from a Norwegian Alta class mine hunter ship, placed just a few miles off Denmark’s Bornholm Island coast. The Alta are mine sweepers were, as far as we are aware, not officially listed as participants in BALTOPS-22, which opens the possibility that it might have been the Oksøy-Class mine hunter, or another NATO member multi-role support ship – both of which could invalidate Hersh’s source information, an important detail that still needs to be resolved.

Norwegian М314 Alta Class Minesweeper, Oslo (source), developed in the fifties in the United States under the US military assistance program to European partners in NATO.

Let us also take a brief look at some of the other NATO naval vessels active in the area, which will demonstrate the wide array of capabilities present during BALTOPS-22.

Oksøy-Class mine hunter Hinnøy who participated in BALTOPS-22 (source)

The nature of the Nord Stream mission implies that the divers chosen would have had to be experienced deep sea divers, or perhaps even saturation divers also known as “Sat Divers” who uses HeO2 (Heliox) mix. It also implies a decompression time averaging 3 hours. This could also mean that the United States Navy Experimental Diving Unit (NEDU or NAVXDIVINGU), the primary source of diving and hyperbaric operational guidance for the US Navy, located within the Naval Support Activity Panama City in Panama City Beach, Bay County, Florida – could have been involved from a consulting if not from an operational support point of view too.

BALTOPS-22: Covert operations under the cover of research and testing new technology

Exercise Baltic Operations (BALTOPS) 22, is NATO’s ‘premier maritime-focused exercise in the Baltic region’ and it began on June 5, 2022, in the Baltic Sea. With a significant focus of BALTOPS every year being the demonstration of NATO mine-hunting capabilities, the U.S. Navy has traditionally use the exercise to field-test its new technology. In support of BALTOPS 22, the U.S. Navy Sixth Fleet and Naval Striking and Support Forces NATO (STRIKFORNATO) under the command of Royal British Navy Rear Adm. James Morley, partnered with U.S. Navy Research and Warfare Centers (NSWC) from Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) – whose center happens to be located in Panama City in Florida – exactly where according to Seymour Hersh, the divers  for the Nord Stream Pipelines sabotage were coming from.

Again, NAVSEA will use BALTOPS to showcase all the latest  advancements in Unmanned Underwater Vehicle (UUV) mine-hunting gear in the Baltic Sea and demonstrate the vehicle’s effectiveness in operational scenarios.

Note how NATO reported the Royal Norwegian Navy Skjold-Class Corvette HNoMS Glimt (P964) was sailing in formation in the Baltic Sea on June 6, 2022, during exercise BALTOPS-22, which confirms unequivocally that Norway was participating in BALTOPS-22.

Royal Norwegian Navy Skjold-Class Corvette HNoMS Glimt (P964)

Norway takes the lead on NATO logistics in the Nordic areas

Like in any military operation, logistics play a key role in the success of a mission with a predetermined point of entry and a well-thought exit strategy. Understanding Norway and NATO logistical partnership in relation to BALTOPS-22 is essential and the first step was for us to determine if any joint partnership agreements between these two organisations were put in place and signed.

NATO has several commands in Europe, including one in Brunssum in the Netherlands (NATO JFC Brunssum), but also one in Naples, Italy (NATO JLSG). Both of these commands have their own logistics management, the so-called Joint Logistics Support Group (JLSG), so it was important to understand if Norway, which already cooperates with both above-mentioned command’s establishment, was working with NATO JFC in Norfolk Virginia, USA, toward creating a Norwegian Joint Logistics Support Group – and indeed they were.

Interestingly enough, by digging a little bit further, we were able to confirm that since 2020, the Norwegian Armed Forces have been working together with NATO Joint Forces Command Norfolk (JFC NF, USA) towards establishing a Norwegian Joint Logistic Support Group which became known as “NOR JLSG.”

Chief of the Norwegian Armed Forces’ logistics organisation, Major General Lars Christian Aamodt (tv) signing the agreement with NATO JFC in Norfolk via video link. Right: project manager for NOR JLSG, Commander Remi Jakobsen (source)

Here is the NOR JLSG meeting with Joint Logistics Support Group Brunssum in the Netherlands:

JLSGBS HQ welcomes the visitors of the Norwegian JLSG HQ!
Brigadier-General Anders Jernberg and Captain Remi Jakobsen met and spoke with many of the JLSGBS staff members. A great opportunity to share knowledge, experiences and other information, and to strengthen the cooperation. pic.twitter.com/Xd28YyQCTz

— Joint Logistics Support Group Brunssum (@JBrunssum) February 21, 2022

NATO JFC Norfolk serves as NATO’s operational bridge between Europe and North America.

The Norwegian Armed Forces logistics organisation also known as NDLO started small before gradually building up its operation and competence skills to become both a National Logistics Operations Center (NLOGS) in Norway but also one of NATO Joint Logistics Support Group (JLSG) headquarters for NATO Joint Force Command Norfolk, USA (JFC NF). Four months prior to the BALTOPS-22 naval exercise, NATO Joint Force Command Norfolk (NATO JFC-NF Virginia, USA) signed a technical agreement (source) in February 2022 with the Norwegian Armed Forces’ logistics organisation (NDLO).

The signing of this Technical Agreement was all about solidifying NATO JFC Norfolk’s ambition to establish a Joint Logistic Support Network (JLSN) in Norway. Clearly, the NOR JLSG fusion operation was created to strengthen the logistics required to execute NATO activity in the High North. This Joint Logistic Support Network (JLSN) consist of but is not limited to points of debarkation, lines of communication, logistic bases, convoy support centres, staging areas and forward logistics sites. All of this is required to successfully execute the Nord Stream mission.

Furthermore, the Norwegian Armed Forces benefit from a state-of-the-art Joint Headquarters in Bodø, northern Norway, which operates 24–7 and has the overall command and control of all military activity in Norway. It also commands the Norwegian military personnel abroad. However, it would appear that communications during international live exercises such as BALTOPS-22, which would have involved the Norwegian Armed Forces participating in the NATO exercise, were coordinated not only via this Joint Headquarters, but by a smaller NATO NCI Agency CSU support unit in Stavanger, Norway where the NATO Joint Warfare Center (JWC) in Norway is located.

This CSU Support unit was created to ensure NATO Allied Command Transformation (ACT), NATO headquarter in the United States remains connected to its oversea counterparts at all time, especially during large-scale exercises. NATO NCI Agency CSU support unit in Stavanger, Norway provides constant commutation during exercises including extensive support to the US Navy fleet during training and exercise such as BALTOPS-22 (source: P19).

NATO NCI Agency CSU support unit in Stavanger, Norway at NATO Joint Warfare Center (JWC) in Stavanger, Norway.

NATO Joint Warfare Centre (JWC) in Stavanger, Norway is also very much involved in the development and conceptualisation of wargame through various capability development initiatives as presented here below by Commander, Rear Admiral Jan C. Kaack, who was opening the execution phase for NATO Joint Warfare Centre (JWC) in Norway, new Wargame capability development initiative back in June 2020.

What these details reveal, is that Norway is now Washington’s key NATO partner in northern Europe, and would be intimately involved in a crucial operation such as the Nord Stream mission. However, it is also essential to establish if Norway could have supported an Under Water Demolition mission and for that, the obvious place to look to was the Norwegian DOD contractor and world leader in manned and unmanned UnderWater systems, Kongsberg Maritime.

Coincidentally, Kongsberg Maritime sold its Under Water vehicle division Hydroid Inc for USD $350 million to Huntington Ingalls Industries (HII), whilst forging an alliance to provide future solutions to the US Navy. For reference, Kongsberg Maritime was contracted to deliver four complete Hugin autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) systems to the Norwegian Armed Force through the Norwegian Defence Materiel Agency (NDMA) back in March 2017.

Norwegian Armed Forces testing their new Hugin Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) from Kongsberg Maritime (source). The Oksøy class M341 Karmøy below was reported to have been scrapped prior to 23 July 2022.

It seems many of those investigating the Norwegian Navy and their potential involvement in the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage operation have come to a dead end, and often arrive at a conclusion in direct contradiction with Seymour Hersh’s report. Why is that?

Although it would make sense to have the Norwegian Navy putting some sweat into this covert underwater operation, since together with their Polish counterparts, they have directly benefitted from this act of sabotage, and were not shy to announce the day after the Nord Stream blasts, on Sept. 27, 2022, the opening of their new Norway-Poland Baltic gas pipeline, a key move to cut energy dependency on Russia, or rather, corning the EU gas market along with the United States. Hence, it forces us to look at Norway as a stakeholder partner in this clandestine affair, and a key enabler – providing logistics support to the secret mission. Just as the entire western mainstream media and political class have played dumb in pointing the finger at the United States for this act of international terrorism, it would also be a mistake to ignore the motive, means and opportunity of Norway in this crime scene.

Conclusion

This ongoing investigation seems to lead us towards a joint covert operation between NATO allies the US, Norway and UK, and in Part 2 we will provide more details about the likely behind the scenes planning and execution of the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage.

The wider geopolitical and energy context is also important. In October 2022, in the wake of the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage, EU President Ursula Von der Leyen presented her new 5-point plan for “resilient critical infrastructure”, known as the CER Guidelines which replaced the European Critical Infrastructure Directive of 2008. The key elements of these CER Guidelines were: ‘enhancing preparedness; working with Member States with a view to stress test their critical infrastructure, starting with the energy sector and then followed by other high-risk sectors; increasing the response capacity in particular, through the Union Civil Protection Mechanism; making good use of satellite capacity to detect potential threats; and strengthening cooperation with NATO and key partners on the resilience of critical infrastructure.’ These new rules are meant to strengthen the resilience of critical infrastructure against a range of threats, including natural hazards, terrorist attacks, insider threats, or sabotage. A total of 11 sectors will be covered: energy, transport, banking, financial market infrastructures, health, drinking water, wastewater, digital infrastructure, public administration, space and food. Member States will need to adopt a national strategy and carry out regular risk assessments to identify entities that are considered critical or vital for society and the economy. Member states have 21 months to transpose both directives into national law.

Is all of this, timed with the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline, a coincidence?

Never let a good crisis go to waste, right? Brussels certainly didn’t.

All they had to do was to plan a crisis with their NATO partners, blame the country who actually suffered from their actions, and later on offer the solution to the problem, all the while with Germany looking the other way, and with US/UK/Norway axis believing they actually got away with it.

NOTE: Keep your eyes peeled for Part 2 where we will demonstrate why Norway and Germany are staying silent about the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage. We will also reveal more details about the military flight which dropped the sonar buoy triggering the detonation, and the at-sea presence of the various actors who covertly planned and executed this terrorist attack on one of Europe’s most vital pieces of infrastructure for energy stability.

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*** 

World Is Many Things – at the Same Time

The world is in a superposition of two states:

On the one hand, the World has become Multipolar.

At the same time, the World is also US dominated Unipolar.

My point is that this is not either or.

The World is both Multipolar and Unipolar at the same time. If you find this difficult to comprehend, just think about all the factors that point in one direction, and all the factors that point at the opposite direction. At the same time.

Measured in Purchase Power Parity, China has since long ago overtaken the US, and India has overtaken Germany, France, and Italy combined.

But measured in GDP and in US-dollar military expenditure, the US looks supreme.

Then back again, in spite of its heavy military expenditure, the US is losing its proxy-war in Ukraine and will lose any war on Taiwan, if it should break out.

On the other hand, even if the US Navy cannot save Taiwan, the US Navy dominates all the distant sea routes which China needs for transportation.

To continue this back and forth, the US has made NATO bigger than ever. On the other hand, BRICS with 19 official and unofficial applicants is also becoming bigger than ever.

Measured in votes at the UN General Assembly against Russia, the World follows the US. But counting abstentions and non-participation in sanctions into the picture, the World majority has abandoned “US leadership”.

You can go on like this for a long time, piling arguments up for Unipolarity, and other arguments for Multipolarity. It is contradictory, but contradictory facts and situations can still be true in some sense – in the world of physics, as well as in the ambiguous world of humans.

We see that both elements of Unipolarity and Multipolarity exist – at the same time.

I call this state of World affairs duality – inspired by quantum physics, which proves that two contradictory situations can exist simultaneously.

Foreign Affairs — Challenge

o the official seat of the US foreign policy élite, brings a very interesting article, “The Myth of Multipolarity”. In their article, Foreign Affairs argues very well as for the one side of the picture, as for Unipolarity dominated by the USA. And following my argument above, yes, Unipolarity still exists. But that is only half the picture. Multipolarity exists as well !

I do not agree with everything Foreign Affairs writes – far from. Foreign Affairs omits all the arguments for a Multipolar World. Foreign Affairs also politically chooses to believe that the West is winning in Ukraine, while Russia is actually beating Ukraine flat – something which is going to influence the World order profoundly. But Foreign Affairs makes so to speak the best argument possible for Unipolarity. And that is somehow also a kind of achievement, even if it is leading the USA itself into the woods of its own hubris and delusions.

Take the article by Foreign Affairs as a challenge.

US Hegemony still reigns ! – or does it ?

Debate

Dear Readers – I hope you will join this debate.

Is Foreign Affairs right to assert, that Unipolarity under the US still dominates the globe?

Or has Multipolarity overtaken the World order, and if so why? Or do you agree with my point, that Unipolarity or Multipolarity today exist at the same time.

And to bring this one point further: Where is the World heading? Even if Unipolarity still exists, is it sustainable for much longer? Or can Unipolarity even be reinforced by the USA?

Or referring again to quantum physics, will you say like I do, that the duality of the two simultaneous superpositions of Unipolarity and Multipolarity may collapse – and only one of the two states will remain.

Multipolarity.

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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.

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*** 

The leak of classified documents on the gaming and chat platform Discord continues to be a treasure trove of information about America’s proxy war with Russia in Ukraine.

Earlier revelations from the Discord leak suggested Ukraine is a cornered animal. The latest shows it might lash out like one. The Washington Post reported Monday that documents in the leak claimed that the United States had to force Ukraine to back down from a direct attack on Moscow. Time and time again, the United States has had to rein in or express serious concern internally about Ukraine’s plans to fight Russia, not just in Ukraine or even within Russia’s borders, but in the Middle East and North Africa as well.  

A classified report from the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) claimed that Maj. Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, who heads the Main Directorate of Intelligence (HUR) for Ukraine’s defense ministry, instructed one of his officers on February 13 “to get ready for mass strikes on 24 February.” Ukraine was to strike “with everything the HUR had.” The NSA report also said Ukrainian officials joked about using TNT to strike Novorossiysk, a Black Sea port city east of the Crimean Peninsula. The Post asserted such an operation would be “largely symbolic,” but “would nevertheless demonstrate Ukraine’s ability to hit deep inside enemy territory.”

Budanov has a reputation for being a loose cannon. Previously, he claimed that Russian President Vladimir Putin was terminally ill and employed body doubles for public appearances. He is apparently convinced that Ukraine will overwhelm and repel the Russian invasion, including Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014, sometime this summer. Which is why it appears the U.S. intelligence apparatus has taken up monitoring Budanov’s moves and communications. And Budanov appears to know it. The Post added that, when it has interviewed Budanov on occasion since the outbreak of the war, reporters have heard white noise or music in the background of the major general’s office.

This time, however, it appears the United States prevented the loose cannon from going off. On February 22, the CIA internally circulated a classified report that the HUR “had agreed, at Washington’s request, to postpone strikes” on Moscow. Nevertheless, the CIA also said “there is no indication” that the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) had “agreed to postpone its own plans to attack Moscow around the same date.”

The SBU also apparently held off any plans it may have had for striking deep into Russian territory on the one-year anniversary of the Russian invasion. The United States’s efforts to discourage Ukrainian attacks on Russian territory only lasted so long, however. About a week after the anniversary of the Russian invasion, the Kremlin accused Ukrainian drones of striking infrastructure relatively close to Moscow.

Such drone attacks are par for the course in Ukraine’s recent military operations inside Russian territory. Last October, Russia accused Ukraine of drone strikes against its Black Sea fleet in Crimea. Though the authenticity has not been confirmed, video footage shows a drone heading towards a ship as what appears to be gunfire hits the water around the Russian vessel. The Kremlin claimed a minesweeper was damaged in the attack. Then in December, Ukrainian drones reportedly struck Engels-2, a military air-base about 400 miles inside Russian territory. Drones also struck two other military airfields and an oil facility in the Kursk province.

Ukraine appears to now be reaching further into Russian territory and is less ambiguous about its involvement in these attacks. Earlier on in the conflict, Ukraine often denied playing a role in attacks on Russian installations and infrastructure within its borders, such as the car-bombing incident in August 2022 that killed Daria Dugina, the daughter of Aleksandr Dugin, a Russian nationalist and staunch supporter of Russia’s invasion. Despite repeated Ukrainian denials, the U.S. intelligence community believes Ukraine was behind the attack.

In an interview with the Post in January, however, Budanov simultaneously denied Ukraine’s involvement in many of these attacks and claimed that they would continue. Such attacks “shattered their illusions of safety,” Budanov reportedly claimed.

“There are people who plant explosives. There are drones. Until the territorial integrity of Ukraine is restored, there will be problems inside Russia.”

Other revelations from the Discord-leaked documents: Ukraine wants to expand the scope of the conflict beyond that of continental Europe and take the Russians to task in the Middle East and North Africa. The NSA report claimed that Budanov’s HUR planned to attack the Wagner Group—a Russian military contractor with a reputation for brutality whose members have assisted in the Ukraine offensive—in the African country of Mali. The Wagner Group’s services are retained by the government of Mali for security and training their own military forces. 

The NSA document said, “It is unknown what stage the operations [in Mali] were currently in and whether the HUR has received approval to execute its plans,” according to the Post.

At the same time, the HUR was developing plans to strike Russian forces in Syria by partnering with the Kurds. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky reportedly put the kibosh on the special operations offensive in the Middle East, but at least one of the documents reviewed by the Post claimed that efforts to attack Russian assets in Syria that avoid Ukrainian culpability may still be on the table for the Ukrainian government.

Are these not plans for a world war? Would the United States not be responsible if the Ukrainian government, which both militarily and financially would be defunct without nearly $100 billion in U.S. aid, decided to go forward with such plans?

The Biden administration would deny any culpability in starting World War III, of course. It would point to the fact that the U.S. prohibits using the military aid it gives Ukraine to strike Russia. Thus, the United States retains much say over Ukraine’s battle plans and has successfully thwarted grand Ukrainian plans to strike Moscow and several other core Russian targets on separate occasions.

Ukrainian officials have admitted this in private, too. Oftentimes, if Ukraine wants to use a rocket system provided by the United States to strike a target, U.S. military personnel in Europe either have to confirm the coordinates or provide the coordinates themselves. 

The Biden administration and the foreign policy blob that supports the United States involvement in Ukraine might think this makes our involvement sound all the better. It doesn’t. It reveals who is really waging this war against Russia. Ukraine, which has been a money-laundering operation for the well-connected in the West for the last decade (see Hunter Biden), continues to be just that. Ukraine is the American liberal empire’s proxy in the truest sense.

The weapons systems, ammunition, and military equipment the United States provides Ukraine maintains a certain level of fungibility—and aid dollars more so than the physical equipment. Providing military aid, even with the current strings attached, expands Ukraine’s pool of resources, meaning they can devote what is “theirs” to operations and theaters that suit their fancy. 

Restraining Ukraine is becoming increasingly difficult, and funding Ukraine’s military efforts increasingly risky. That much is clear from America’s own assessment of Ukraine’s war plans revealed in the Discord leak. Heads should roll at the Pentagon, the State Department, and the White House for blindly walking into a conflict that Ukraine wants to go global.

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Bradley Devlin is a Staff Reporter for The American Conservative. Previously, he was an Analysis Reporter for the Daily Caller, and has been published in the Daily Wire and the Daily Signal, among other publications that don’t include the word “Daily.” He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a degree in Political Economy. You can follow Bradley on Twitter @bradleydevlin.

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*** 

Ever since the Russians started targeting Ukrainian sites with standoff missiles on October 10, 2022, I have been chronicling the strikes and sending the daily strike reports in translation, including the struck cities or oblasts, to my email group. I can confirm that the strikes have occurred daily, with no dates omitted, and have all been multiple. Part of my reason for doing this was to prove that the rash of media statements, starting in March of 2022, that Russia was “running out of missiles” was disinformation. 

Indeed, that makes almost 7 months of daily multiple strikes. Russia has never run out of missiles, not even close.

Strategic Targets

To make some sense out of the locations of Russian missile strikes on strategic targets, we can imagine several kinds of motives on the part of Russian forces.

First, a map of the Ukraine oblasts is shown below (the Ukrainian names are shown, which are very similar to the Russian names).

I will be referring to this article each time I post a report on Russian missiles strikes on this platform.

1—Russian commentators suggest that at some point, Russia will be attacking Kiev. As you examine the geographic pattern of the struck oblasts (large political divisions analogous to a US state or Canadian province, for example), you will see that many are located along hypothetical routes that could be taken in launching this offensive from Lugansk or Donetsk. The missile strikes targeting strategically important targets would of course weaken the Ukrainian forces and supply routes in these oblasts, making it safer for the Russian attackers to pass.

Assuming the Russian forces start at the Lugansk or Donetsk oblast, there are essentially two possible routes for a hypothetical offensive on Kiev, along the sequence of oblasts appearing below (BTW, the names of oblasts also generally coincide with the names of the capital cities of said oblasts, in analogy to New York City as the capital of New York State. Please remember this to avoid confusion).

A northern route along the following sequence of oblasts:

→ Kharkov → Sumy or Poltava → Chernigov → Kiev (here Kiev refers to the Kiev oblast, where the capital city of Kiev is located), and

A southern route along the following sequence of oblasts and along the right bank of the Dniepr:

→ Dniepropetrovsk → Kirovograd → Cherkasy → Kiev Oblast

Russian observers also widely maintain that Odessa will likely be another target for a Russian offensive. Therefore, when the oblast of Nikolaev is struck, one can imagine this is because this oblast is on the way to Odessa and must be softened up to protect Russian troops.

2—Kharkov, Sumy and Chernigov are located at the border with Russia, and saboteurs or official Ukrainian troops launch attacks from these oblasts, targeting Russian civilians. Thus retribution and deterrence would be likely motives for hitting these areas. Another likely motive would be weakening the military located there in preparation for a future invasion and subsequent occupation of any of these oblasts.

Note that the Russian Federation takes very seriously any and all attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure. In fact, the daily missile strikes since Oct 10, 2022 were initially intended as retribution for the terroristic attack on the Crimean (Kerch) bridge on Oct 8, 2022 and as a deterrent to further such attacks.

3—Some of the oblasts struck by Russian standoff missiles are or will be the sites of future ongoing hostilities between the forces of Ukraine and Russia.

In the case of the Kiev-controlled parts of Zaporozhye and Kharkov, there is active fighting going on in these oblasts as of today’s date (April 25, 2023) and one can imagine the Russians targeting military bases, munitions depots, supply routes and accumulations of weapons there. Russia once held Kharkov, for example, and is keen on getting it back (the people there are persecuted – eg, shelled, used as human shields, their homes and businesses damaged or destroyed – by Kiev for their Russian identity. It’s pure racism, which has long been a feature of US foreign policy. Zaporozhye is home to the biggest nuclear power plant in Europe, a juicy target for Ukraine, which shells the plant regularly in hopes of causing a false-flag disaster that can be blamed on Russia.

4—In the case of strikes in Western Ukraine, one can imagine 2 kinds of motives. Remember that weapons sent by NATO powers and the US often arrive first in countries that border Ukraine.

In the case of Poland, the border oblasts that might receive the weapons first are Volyn and Lvov.

In the case of Slovakia, the arms shipments could pass through Zakarpatia.

From Romania, they would first arrive in Zakarpatia, Ivano-Frankovsk or Chernovtsy.

From Moldova, they could pass through Chernovtsy, Vinnytsia or Odessa.

Actually, Russian missiles target these oblasts rather rarely but commentators have long been mentioning the possibility of striking railroad hubs and the electric grids that power them in these Western regions to prevent the transit of reinforcements, munitions, materiel and supplies to the front lines and also to stop the trains carrying weapons shipments from the West.

The other motive might be a strike on training camps or bunkers where NATO personnel, including top brass, would meet, as in the case of the reported attack by hypersonic Kinzhal missiles on an underground bunker near Lvov (Lviv in UKR) in Western Ukraine (NATO officials feel safer in Western Ukraine than in Kiev, which is struck relatively often by standoff missiles). I reported on this bunker attack to the aforementioned email group, initially calling it unconfirmed. Indeed, the corporate news is reporting it as a fake, but I have read enough about it at different sites (eg, see this) since then to now consider it 99% confirmed, especially since the Ministry of Defense now admits to having launched this attack.

Even CNN has admitted that there was a massive missile attack all over Ukraine that same night but, not surprisingly, they do not mention the attack on the underground bunker (of course, the West cannot admit to the public that Russia is so advanced that its missiles can bore 80 meters into the ground. After all, if the West knew the power of the Russian forces and their weapons, there would no longer be a war).

Finally, note that Russian reports on battlefield status and standoff missile strikes will contain a mixture of Ukrainian and Russian names, which are, however, quite similar.

Often a Russian place name will contain a g while its Ukrainian equivalent will contain an h instead, Example: Chernihiv in UKR and Chernigov in RU.

A name with an o in RU may be written with an i instead in UKR. Thus, Kharkov in Russian vs Kharkiv in UKR.

I try to stick to the Russian names in these reports, which in most cases were the original historic names changed later by the Russophobic nationalists under the influence of the US since 2014 when the US took over the reins of power in Kiev pursuant to the violent Maidan coup under Obama-Biden.

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*** 

In the case of Ethiopia, about 90% of the available water is received mainly in three months. Hence, dams could effectively store water during heavy rain seasons between June to September and some extent during the short rainy seasons.

Large water storages are therefore essential. In addition, we can expect the following advantages could be expected from building big dams in the Blue Nile basin: The flood waters are wasted unless large major dams are constructed, Large dams are eminently suited for carrying over storage and thus impart greater reliability and stability to the system, Large dams generate cheap and clean hydropower, Dams provide the most effective way of flood regulation and control.

Large dams are most reliable during drought periods as small storages are fast depleted and suffer excessive evaporation. In drought years, small dams are scarcely reliable. Longevity as large silt pockets, per unit areas stored with large dams, is much less as compared to small dams.

Diversion and transfer of surplus water to water-scarce basins can be an option only through big dams. Employment potential is higher in large dams throughout the year. In the case of small dams, there is little employment potential as seasonal rains affect only small local areas.

The imperatives for large water storage were supported by the former President of the World Water Forum Council who stated that “some 8,000,000 dams (of which 45 000 are major, higher than 15 meters in height) exist around the world delivering energy, flood protection and water for household, industrial and agricultural use”

He further stated that “despite the drawbacks, the world’s growing population and their need for greater economic development call for more water, in which demand will exceed availability. More and larger storage will be necessary to meet the challenges of development and socio-cultural fabric and make sure that those people affected by the development of dams will be better off than the alternative.

While giving special attention to the environmental and displacement aspects, Ethiopia should construct large-scale dams that: increase economic and social productivity and hence increase consumption of goods and services, irrigate 2.2 million hectares identified in the basin, distribute benefits to millions of inhabitants through employment in mechanized agriculture in the basin, provide better settlement, equipped with socially, economically and technically sound services in the basin for millions and change their life; producing complex hydroelectric power for trade with the trans-boundary countries.

Therefore, Ethiopia needs urgent action on matters concerning the building of major dam structures in the Abbay, Baro-Akobo, and Tekezze catchments and other River basin areas in accordance with some detailed studies and engineering designs.

Ethiopia has made many valuable studies and design works without much chance of putting them into action mainly because of lack of funds.  To date, Ethiopia is the most minor user of the Blue Nile run-off in the Eastern Nile Basin, compared to Sudan and Egypt. At the national level, economic and institutional capacities are also limited. Despite many hindrances, Ethiopia should concentrate on the modern agricultural development options, focused on the rivers so that these resources could be utilized to realize meaningful irrigation programs.

The Nile Basin (Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)

Climate Change should concern the Nile Nations

A holistic approach to conservation, protection and utilization of the Nile River basin was sparsely implemented. The long-standing dispute over the Nile River was primarily on the utilization of the waters. But without arriving at a comprehensive governance scheme to address the environmental problems posed against the basin an equitable and reasonable share of the Nile waters would not be secured.

The blame must go to the downstream countries for their reluctant approach to a basin-wide agreement to address the governance challenges including the climate change impacts. Benefit-sharing should come after sharing of burdens on the costs of conservation and protection of the Nile environment.

Climate change has become a global threat to the environment including watercourses. The globe has launched several international mechanisms to deal with climate change.

The 2015 Paris climate accord was the latest of all initiatives. There is a nationally determined emission reduction to withhold the global warming rate below 2 Degree Celsius. The Nile riparian states are duty-bound to mitigate the environmental problems threatening the water flows of the Nile River.

Their mitigation should be expressed through their cooperation in afforestation programs on the headwaters and tributaries of the Nile River.  Those headwaters are located in Ethiopian highlands. Ethiopia has embarked on the planting mission of twenty billion trees within a four-year period.

The downstream countries should participate in this green legacy mission and should cover the conservation and protection costs of the Nile basin. To that end, Ethiopia should offer a call for participation in the green legacy mission to the downstream nations.

For the downstream nations, participating in the greening of Ethiopian highlands would be a mitigation strategy for the millennial damages caused to the Nile River. They have depleted the Nile surrounding area with over-exploitation and mismanagement of the river. With that said, long-term cooperation on the conservation and protection of the Nile River Basin should be governed through basin-wide legal and institutional frameworks. Such a basin-wide arrangement could establish a permanent river basin commission to administer and facilitate cooperation among the riparian nations in the fight against climate change and its adverse impacts on the Nile ecosystem.

Lessons on Governance for Nile Nations from the Danube River

The Danube River Basin Cooperation provides a laudable lesson and example to the nations of the Nile Basin, as there are striking similarities between the two basins. The anticipated lesson to be learned by the Nile Nations from the Danube River Basin Cooperation is the harmonization and integrated management that brought tangible results and ensured peaceful co-existence within that region. Some of the outstanding achievements of integrative development and management approach of the communities of the Danube River Basin and their experiences are summarized below to illustrate the power of harmony and spirit of the shared responsibilities of the ordinary inhabitants of large river basins to the Nile families.

The Danube basin (Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)

As mentioned in the study made by Oregan, Sullivan, and Bromley, the Danube is a large river that covers approximately 800,000 square kilometers in the territories of 18 states, with over 80 million inhabitants and 60 large and growing urban centers. The Danube is a slow-moving river with well-developed alluvial plains in its course. The Danube River covers an area of 675,000 ha and is internationally recognized as one of the most important watersheds in Europe.

The basin area covers all of Hungary, most of Austria, Romania, Slovakia, Serbia, and Montenegro; significant parts of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech and Moldovan republics, as well as a smaller area of Germany and Ukraine. Albania, Italy, Macedonia, Poland, and Switzerland also have small geographical areas within the basin. The Danube River Basin is spread across countries with very different levels of economic development and social and environmental diversities. Germany and Austria, highly developed nations, are located in the upper basin with longstanding membership of the European Union. In the middle basin Czech Republic, Slovakia and  Hungarian are experiencing an appreciable degree of economic growth. Further downstream Romania, Bulgaria, and Ukraine are less developed states in Europe but they are experiencing political and economic transition. Also, within the basin are the Former Yugoslav republics and northeast Moldova, the least developed country in Europe, heavily dependent on agriculture.

Institutional Framework Experience

The development of the Danube River Basin is coordinated through several institutions formed by all member states and policies directed by these bodies. The most important of the European-level policies is the European Water Framework Directive (WFD), which seeks to introduce comprehensive river basin management and environmental protection initiatives across Europe. The Danube River Protection Convention forms the overall legal instrument for cooperation on transboundary water management in the Danube River Basin. The Convention was signed on June 29, 1994, in Sofia (Bulgaria) and came into force in 1998. Based on this document, the International Commission for the Protection of the Danube River (ICPDR), with 13 cooperating states and the European Union, was established in practice. The ICPDR makes recommendations for improving water quality, developing mechanisms for flood and industrial accident control, agreeing on standards for emissions, and ensuring that these measures are reflected in the cooperating states’ national legislations and applied in their policies.

To meet the needs of this single basin-wide management plan, each country is in the process of preparing national reports (roof reports) which give an overview of WFD issues such as the pressures on the surface and groundwater resources and related environmental impacts that will form the basis of the river basin management plan. In the 1990s, countries of the DRB took significant steps to improve the management of the Danube with recognition of the growing regional and transboundary character of water management issues and related environmental issues. In 1991, the Environmental Program for the Danube River Basin (EPDRB) was established in Sofia, Bulgaria by the countries of the DRB, together with international institutions and NGOs, to start an initiative to support and enhance actions required for the restoration and protection of the basin. This was followed by the Convention on Cooperation for the Protection and Sustainable Use of the Danube River Basins signed in June 1994. It was signed by 11 states and the European Union and provided the legal basis for the protection and use of water resources in the basin.

Water Use Practices

The Danube plays an important role in the development of the region, as its communities rely on it for water supply (domestic, agricultural and industrial), power generation, navigation, waste disposal, and recreation. The Danube waters have also been intensively harnessed for hydroelectricity (particularly in Austria and Germany) and irrigation schemes for agricultural developments (especially in the middle and lower basins).

The need for water storage in the face of seasonal variations and to generate hydropower have led to dam building across the basin. Between 1950 and 1980,69 dams with a total volume exceeding 7.3-billion-meter cube were constructed on the Danube River. Groundwater resources represent as much as 30 percent of the total internal renewable water resources of some DRB countries. Aquifers are the main resources of drinking water while some have permeable aquifers, which are highly vulnerable to pollution from point and nonpoint resources. The extent of hydro-morphological changes for navigation environmental has had a major impact on natural floodplains and their ecosystems. In many places along the river floodplains, meanders have been cut off from the river system. However, as a result, 80 percent of the historical floodplain of the larger rivers of the basin has been lost over the last 150 years. The loss of this area has led to a reduction of flood retention capacity and floodplain habitat. Some of the remaining areas have either received protection status under different national or European legislation or international conventions, while other areas remain vulnerable.

Civil societies and Private Institutions Environmental Experiences

The Regional Environmental For Central and Eastern Europe (REC), and the Danube Environmental Forum (DEF) represent nearly 200 NGOs across the region. The aim is to protect the Danube River and its tributaries, their biodiversity, and resources, through enhancing cooperation among governments, non-governmental organizations, local people, and all kinds of stakeholders towards sustainable use of natural ecosystems. Many of these institutions are participants in the annual Danube Day festivities marking the signing of the Danube Convention and celebrating the river, its ecology, and its people. Festive events, festivals, public meetings, and educational events take place along the river and Danube Day is described as a powerful tool for enhancing the “Danubian identity of people living in the basin, demonstrating that despite their different cultures and histories they have a shared responsibility to protect their precious resource.”

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Silabat Manaye is international relations professional based in Addis Ababa. His research interests include water politics, geopolitics in the Horn of Africa, and War Journalism. He authored two books on Nile geopolitics.

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*** 

Facebook has censored a report by the world’s most famous investigative journalist, Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh, on the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines between Russia and Germany.

While discouraging its users from posting Hersh’s article, Facebook instead recommends a website that is funded and partially owned by the government of NATO member Norway.

Facebook has millions of dollars worth of contracts with the US government, including with the Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security.

The Nord Stream system consisted of two sets of two pipelines each (known as Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2) that delivered natural gas from Russia, through the Baltic Sea, to Germany.

Nord Stream AG, the Switzerland-based international consortium that built and oversees the pipelines, is owned by five European companies. Russia’s state gas giant Gazprom has 51% of the shares, but the other 49% belong to two German companies, a Dutch firm, and a French company.

In September 2022, the Nord Stream pipelines were sabotaged in a suspicious explosion, in what amounted to a terror attack on the energy infrastructure of Europe.

World-renowned investigative journalist Seymour Hersh reported that the pipelines were blown up by the US government, in an operation overseen by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, and Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland.

All three officials are hard-line anti-Russia hawks. Nuland was a key architect of the violent coup d’etat that overthrew Ukraine’s democratically elected, geopolitically neutral government in 2014 and installed a pro-Western regime.

Hersh published the bombshell story at his personal blog at the website Substack in February.

If a Facebook user posts a link to this report by Hersh, a notice pops up that says:

“Before you share this content, you might want to know there’s additional reporting from Faktisk. Pages and websites that repeatedly publish or share false news will see their overall distribution reduced and be restricted in other ways”.

The page Facebook links to, Faktisk, is a fact-checking website from Norway, which is funded and partially owned by the government of that NATO member state.

Faktisk discloses that one of its owners and main funders is NRK: the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, a state-owned media outlet.

NRK states clearly on its website, “NRK is Norway’s biggest media house. The broadcaster is state-owned and the Parliament (Stortinget) has given the mandate and the ownership role to the Ministry of Culture”. It notes that “NRK is publicly financed (97%) by a individual tax everybody in Norway has to pay”.

The editor-in-chief of Faktisk, Kristoffer Egeberg, discloses in his biography on the website that he served in the Norwegian Armed Forces as a soldier and officer, participating in NATO and UN operations in Lebanon, Bosnia, and Kosovo.

What this means it that Facebook is censoring a report by the world’s most famous investigative journalist and instead promoting a website partially owned and funded by a NATO member state, Norway, which is edited by a former Norwegian military officer who participated in NATO operations.

Facebook censored a report by Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh on the Nord Stream pipeline attack, forcing users to instead read a website funded/owned by NATO member Norway

Press freedom: a casualty of the West's information war on Russia

Full video: https://t.co/9j7jHE5Ujb pic.twitter.com/td0Te4zwwZ

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) April 25, 2023

Despite attacks on Hersh, US government and media fail to provide alternative explanation

The US government publicly denied Hersh’s report on the Nord Stream attacks, but Washington has always rejected the investigative journalist’s stories, which have consistently proven to be true.

Hersh won his Pulitzer Prize for exposing the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam, in which the US military killed hundreds of civilians. The US government had denied this massacre, although it was later proven to have happened.

Similarly, Washington initially denied Hersh’s blockbuster 2004 report exposing the US military’s use of torture at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, which was similarly proven to be correct.

In response to Hersh’s report on the Nord Stream attacks, anonymous US government officials used the New York Times to undermine the reporter, instead blaming an unidentified “pro-Ukrainian group”, which they claimed was not linked to the Ukrainian government or any other NATO member state.

Washington and its allies in the corporate media have been desperate to smear Hersh, nitpicking over very minor details he may have mistakenly reported, but they have utterly failed to provide any tangible evidence or compelling alternative explanation of how the Nord Stream pipelines were destroyed.

The massive pipelines were built out of steel, surrounded with thick concrete, and located 50 to 100 meters underwater.

It would be extremely difficult for a small ragtag “pro-Ukrainian group” to sabotage these pipelines. The attack clearly involved a lot of planning and resources, which suggests that a state was very likely involved.

A worker testing part of the Nord Stream pipelines

Western governments censor Russian (and Iranian) media outlets

Facebook is by no means the only US social media giant that has censored dissident voices over the war in Ukraine.

YouTube, which is owned by Google, blocked the channels of Russia’s state media outlet RT everywhere on the planet.

Like Facebook, Google has millions of dollars of US government contracts, with the CIA, Pentagon, FBI, and various police departments.

Furthermore, the European Union banned RT and Sputnik, another Russian state media outlet.

If someone in the EU tries to access the Twitter profiles of RT or Sputnik, a message appears stating, “Account Withheld”.

The US government even went so far as to seize the domain name of Iran’s state media outlet Press TV.

“The domain presstv.com has been seized by the United States Government”, reads a notice on the website, published jointly by the Departments of Justice and Commerce.

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January 27th of this year marked fifty years since the draft was officially suspended in the United States. And while young American men are still forced to register with the Selective Service, we have been fortunate to go without a draft for half a century, despite Washington’s hyper-aggressive foreign policy.

That amount of time can make things feel distant. And even though the program is all set to fire right back up with a word from the president, there’s a sense that the draft is an issue from a different era.

But the war in Ukraine offers a window into what conscription looks like in today’s day and age. Both sides have resorted to forcing a part of the population to put their lives on the line to serve the interests of the regimes in Kyiv and Moscow. And the lack of condemnation, or even interest, from our fellow Americans should concern all advocates of self-ownership.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, both Ukraine and Russia continued to require male citizens to serve time in the military, though the term was gradually reduced from two years to one.

In 2013, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych abolished conscription. Less than a year later, the new Western-backed Ukrainian government reinstated the draft and forced men to fight the people of eastern Ukraine who didn’t want to live under the new government in Kyiv.

After serving their time as active duty soldiers, Ukrainian conscripts remained in a reserve status, eligible to be recalled until the age of 55.

Within hours of the first Russian airstrikes that signaled the beginning of the February 2022 invasion, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky declared martial law, called up men in the reserves, conscripted new soldiers, and prohibited men between the ages of 18 and 60 from leaving the country.

Zelensky also authorized the “release” of convicts with combat experience to bolster Kyiv’s forces. At the same time, conscription appears to have been implemented as a new form of punishment. Men caught breaking curfew and getting into street fights have received conscription notices after being detained by police.

Russian conscription followed a similar trajectory to Ukraine’s after the fall of the USSR. The mandatory term of military service for Russian men was rolled back to one year in 2008. And as recently as 2019, Russian President Vladimir Putin voiced support for abolishing conscription.

But, genuine or not, those sentiments disappeared as the region descended into war. Shortly after the February invasion, Russia held its spring draft and conscripted 134,500 people. 120,000 were conscripted last Fall. The Russian government has claimed conscripted soldiers are only being sent to replace volunteer soldiers in their posts, with the volunteer soldiers then sent to the front in Ukraine, but some have disputed this.

Today, over a year into the invasion, Ukraine is relying more on conscripts as their losses mount. Until recently, officials could only deliver draft notices to someone’s home address. Some found they could avoid the summons by staying away from their official addresses.

New rules allow officials to track down new conscripts wherever they may be. Men are being stopped in the street and questioned about their draft status. With few eligibility exceptions available and a brutal front line, the stricter rules have many Ukrainian men fearing for their safety. The conscripts have so far received worse equipment and inferior training than the volunteer forces before being sent into battle.

Russia has also had an issue tracking down new conscripts. The Kremlin’s approach has been to transition to a digital platform. All eligible men are required to register through an online government portal. Draft notices are sent out electronically and are considered “delivered” immediately, meaning the man is instantly on the clock for reporting to his local recruitment office.

In the enduring words of William Norman Grigg, “conscription indisputably rests on the assumption that each individual is the State’s property, to be sacrificed when those controlling the State deem it necessary for their protection.”

The draft may lie dormant in the U.S., but that assumption remains. The war in Ukraine serves as a reminder that conscription is not extinct. It remains a clear and present threat to liberty. 

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Most relationships undergo transition with the passage of time from appreciation of each other to a “state of having,” a desire to possess or even to control the other. But the present pivotal moment in the Russian-Indian relationship shows that an equal relationship does not fall into that trap.

External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar drew attention to this salience while addressing a Russian-Indian business forum last week in Delhi, when he called the relationship among the “steadiest” in global relations, and pointed out that the partnership is drawing so much attention today not because it has changed but because it has not.  

The “liberal internationalist” camp in the Indian media and think tank circuit and ill-informed sections of opinion who launched an assault on the Indian stance on Ukraine crisis are lately grasping the raison d’être of the government’s handling of the fraught situation that carried risks of a potential confrontation between the West and Russia.

All signs are that Washington, from where Indian lobbyists usually draw encouragement, too has decided to reconcile itself to the Modi Government’s unambiguous message to the West that India will pursue a relationship with Russia in its self-interest and will go in whichever directions its interests lie. 

Thus, a commentary by the Voice of America took note on Sunday against the backdrop of a 50-member Indian business delegation setting out for Russia in an initiative to deepen economic ties: “India and Russia are also in talks for a free trade deal… Moscow has become India’s largest supplier of crude oil… New Delhi has not joined U.S-led Western sanctions on Moscow or condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine outright but has been calling for a negotiated resolution of the conflict. It is also continuing to step up its economic engagement with Russia despite Western calls to gradually distance itself from Moscow. 

“Even though New Delhi has strengthened strategic partnerships with the United States and other Western countries in the last two decades, it maintains close ties with Moscow… While Western countries want India to decrease its reliance on Russian imports to isolate Moscow over the Ukraine war, New Delhi has remained firm in maintaining its economic engagement with Russia.” 

The above excerpts acknowledge that on its part, India is also signalling that this paradigm need not necessarily be construed as a zero-sum game and Washington is accepting, even if grudgingly, that it cannot bully India into submission. Arguably, President Biden’s invitation to Prime Minister Modi for a state visit to the White House in June and his subsequent decision to take part in the G20 Summit in New Delhi in September testify to the US’ creative response to the robustness of Indian diplomacy to sequester ties with Russia from predators. 

The real challenge facing the Biden administration, though, is to take the US-Indian relationship out of the rut of a quintessentially transactional relationship and create a genuine partnership of mutual benefit, which, from the Indian perspective, fits into Modi’s road map to “transform India into a developed country” though the coming quarter century, as he put it in a public speech in Kochi on Monday.

To be sure, the Indian expectations are riding high on development and Delhi will not be content with a mere subaltern role in the US’ global strategy. The US and its allies see India as a “balancer” in the Indo-Pacific, but quite obviously, New Delhi has bigger plans. 

The Russian proposal to make use of its vast export earnings out of oil sales to India by investing the funds in manufacturing industry in India for export to Russia; the deal on adopting the Russian financial messaging system for cross-border payments; the acceptance of Indian Ru-Pay cards and UPI in Russia and Russia’s MIR cards and Fast Payments System in India; the operationalisation of the Maritime Corridor connecting Vladivostok and Chennai — these testify to the keenness of both countries to put in place the necessary underpinnings for a massive expansion of the Russian-Indian trade and economic ties in the very near future.

Jaishankar’s speech at the business forum last week stressed the imperative need to boost India’s exports to Russia while his Russian counterpart in the inter-governmental joint economic commission Russian Deputy Prime Minister Denis Manturev called for intensifying negotiations on a free trade agreement with India and working on an investment protection pact. 

Bilateral trade has crossed $45 billion — something unthinkable until Russia turned its back on the West and began pressing the pedal on alternative partnerships in Asia to replace the European partners. On its part, the Modi government has been quick to seize the new opportunity, especially at a time of post-pandemic recovery and the inflation-ridden European and US economies sliding into recession.

This is a golden opportunity for India to gain special privileged access to the vast mineral resources of Siberia and the Russian Far East and the contemporary El Dorado of the Russian Arctic. There is great complementarity here insofar as India with its growth trajectory, presents itself as a long-term market for Russia’s resource-based industry across the board. 

There are no contradictions really in the Russian-Indian relationship. Some Indian analysts keep parroting the US propaganda that Russia is becoming China’s “junior partner” and that is eroding the Russian-Indian mutual trust. This calumny stems out of either a flawed understanding or, more likely, a deliberate, contrived distortion that does not take into account the reality that Russia and China are “civilisation states,” each in its own right — and they are neighbours with a troubled history — which simply does not allow them to opt for a relationship in a hierarchical order that a formal alliance entails. 

The heart of the matter is that Indian ingenuity lies in creating synergy out of the dynamic Russian-Indian-Chinese [RIC] triangle that could create an optimal external environment for its foreign policies to operate regionally and globally. The entrenched narrative on Sino-Indian relationship, which successive Indian governments have fostered, poses an impediment. That said, it is not a legacy of the Modi government. 

Russia is well-placed to create verve in the RIC triangle as its bilateral ties expand and deepen with both China and India. Modi government pursues a “de-ideologised” foreign policy riveted on national interests. This is only to be expected as the world order changes, since India is looking to maximise its interests and embrace a larger strategic and security role for itself.

However, fundamentally, India remains a stakeholder in a democratised multipolar international order. Russia appreciates this nuance and has never been prescriptive.    

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Featured image: External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar (L) and Russian Deputy Prime Minister Denis Manturov at a Russian-Indian business forum organised jointly by the Ministry of External Affairs & Federation of Indian Chamber of Commerce & Industry, New Delhi, April 17, 2023 (Source: Indian Punchline)

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Thanks to Al Jazeera for bringing this important article to our attention.

Copyright Al Jazeera (April 2023)

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UN officials have said that one side in the Sudan conflict has seized control of a national health lab in the capital of Khartoum that holds biological material, calling it an “extremely dangerous” development.

The announcement on Tuesday came as officials warned that more refugees could flee Sudan despite a ceasefire between rival forces.

The fighting has plunged Sudan into chaos, pushing the already heavily aid-dependent African nation to the brink of collapse. Before the clashes, the UN estimated that a third of Sudan’s population – or about 16 million people – needed assistance, a figure that is likely to increase.

Dr Nima Saeed Abid, the World Health Organization’s representative in Sudan, expressed concerns that “one of the fighting parties” – he did not identify which one – had seized control of the central public health laboratory in Khartoum and “kicked out all of the technicians”.

“That is extremely, extremely dangerous because we have polio isolates in the lab. We have measles isolates in the lab. We have cholera isolates in the lab,” he told a UN briefing in Geneva by video call from Port Sudan. “There is a huge biological risk associated with the occupation of the central public health lab in Khartoum by one of the fighting parties.”

The expulsion of technicians and power cuts in Khartoum mean that “it is not possible to properly manage the biological materials that are stored in the lab for medical purposes,” WHO said.

The lab is located in central Khartoum, close to flashpoints of the fighting that have pitted Sudan’s military against the Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary group that grew out of the government-backed Popular Defence Forces – called “Janjaweed” by the rebels – implicated in atrocities in the Darfur conflict.

Dozens of hospitals have shuttered in Khartoum and elsewhere across the country due to the fighting and dwindling medical and fuel supplies, according to the Sudanese Doctors’ Syndicate.

“If the violence does not stop, there is a danger that the health system will collapse,” the UN agency warned Friday.

Drive-by video shows destruction in Sudan’s capital (Click here to view the video)

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Featured image: A staff member works at National Public Health Laboratory in Khartoum, Sudan in this undated image posted to social media on December 31, 2020. [File: National Public Health Laboratory – Sudan/Handout via Reuters]

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Recent statements by two Biden administration officials hint that the United States is finally noticing that the world around them is changing.

On April 11, CIA Director William Burns spoke at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. In a somewhat stunning statement that has, perhaps, not been so clearly and publicly articulated before, Burns said that we are in one of “those times of transition that come along a couple of times a century. Today the United States still has a better hand to play than any of our rivals, but it is no longer the only big kid on the geopolitical bloc. And our position at the head of the table isn’t guaranteed.”

Burns’s classifying the transition that is now taking place as a “transition that come along a couple of times a century” echoes Chinese President Xi Jinping’s comment to Russian President Vladimir Putin last month that, “Together, we should push forward these changes that have not happened for 100 years” and recognizes the significance of the tectonic geopolitical shift that is occurring. The unipolar world is extinct and has been replaced by an evolving multipolar world in which the United States “is no longer the only big kid on the geopolitical bloc.” China’s diplomatic role in brokering an agreement between Saudi Arabia and Iran demonstrated America’s “position at the head of the table isn’t guaranteed.”

The ever strengthening partnership between Russia and China has tilted the weight of the world toward a multipolar one. In March, Xi visited Putin in Moscow where they not only “reaffirm[ed] the special nature of the Russia-China partnership,” but “signed a statement on deepening the strategic partnership and bilateral ties which are entering a new era.”

But the Sino-Russian relationship in the new multipolar world isn’t just bilateral. Countries are lining up to join Chinese and Russian-led multipolar organizations like BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. From the call for multipolarity among the many African nations attending the Russia-Africa in a Multipolar World conference in Moscow in March, to Saudi Arabia’s assertion that “We do not believe in polarization or selecting between one partner and another,” to India’s continued diplomatic and economic cooperation with Russia and China, to Brazil’s promise to uphold and strengthen multilateralism, to France’s surprising call for Europe to become a “third pole,” countries around the world are leaving the U.S.-led unipolar world for neutrality in a multipolar world.

One of the mechanisms for multipolarity is emancipation from the monopoly of the U.S. dollar. Most international trade is conducted in dollars, and most foreign exchange reserves are held in dollars. As the United States has recently demonstrated in Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, and Russia, the position of the dollar allows it to be very powerfully and quickly weaponized.

Sanctions have not only accelerated the evolution of the multipolar world by creating a community of sanctioned countries that turn to each other, forming a second pole, but they have also weakened the U.S.-led unipolar world by weakening willingness to depend on the dollar.

In the second stunning statement by a U.S. official, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said on April 16,

“There is a risk when we use financial sanctions that are linked to the role of the dollar that over time it could undermine the hegemony of the dollar.” She explained, “Of course, it does create a desire on the part of China, of Russia, of Iran to find an alternative.”

And find an alternative they have. Yellen’s statement suggests that the United States is beginning to recognize that escaping the monopoly of the U.S. dollar is gaining momentum as a mechanism for ending, not only the “hegemony of the dollar,” but of the United States itself.

Recent demonstrations of the American ability to cut off countries that challenge it has awoken opposition. Several countries and regions, including Russia, China, India, Iran, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, France, Latin America, BRICS, and the Eurasian Economic Union, have all expressed interest in and even made moves towards partially escaping the U.S. dollar.

Russia and China are now conducting 65% of their trade in their own currencies. China and Brazil are now conducting bilateral trade in their own currencies, as are China and Pakistan. Iran and Russia are now settling trade in rials and rubles instead of dollars and recently announced that they have circumvented the U.S. financial system by linking their banking systems as an alternative to SWIFT for trading with each other. Saudi Arabia has  said that it sees “no issues” in trading oil in currencies other than the U.S. dollar. The Eurasian Economic Union has agreed on “a phased transition” from settling trade in “foreign currency” to “settlements in rubles.” Robert Rabil, Professor of political science at Florida Atlantic University, says that the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Israel have all made some movement away from the U.S. dollar.

Brazil has raised the idea of a Latin American currency. And Brazilian President Lula da Silva recently asked, “Why should every country have to be tied to the dollar for trade? Who decided the dollar would be the [world’s] currency?” “Why,” he suggested, “can’t a bank like the BRICS bank have a currency to finance trade between…BRICS countries?” BRICS and the SCO are both considering abandoning the dollar in favor of trade in the currencies of member states.

While American activity suggests a foreign policy that drives on, unaware of the new terrain its entered, the recent statements by Burns and Yellen suggest that at least some in the Biden administration are beginning to notice that the world is changing. U.S. hegemony, its “position at the head of the table,” is no longer “guaranteed.”

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Ted Snider is a regular columnist on U.S. foreign policy and history at Antiwar.com and The Libertarian Institute. He is also a frequent contributor to Responsible Statecraft and The American Conservative as well as other outlets.

Featured image is from TLI

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Ignoring all Russian advises, the British government confirmed on April 26th that its depleted uranium weapons are already on Ukrainian soil. Moscow’s officials, anti-war activists and experts have repeatedly warned that such an escalation in the conflict should be avoided, but London has not observed the advice and has further violated a red line by sending radioactive weapons to the Kiev regime. It remains to be seen what the consequences of this dangerous measure will be.

The confirmation of the delivery of weapons was made by the Minister of Armed Forces of the United Kingdom, James Heappey, during a speech to the British Parliament. According to Heappey, depleted uranium ammunitions were sent to Ukraine along with other projectiles suitable for use in Challenger 2 tanks. The minister also added that British officials will not try to track where these weapons will be used.

“We have sent thousands of rounds of Challenger 2 ammunition to Ukraine, including depleted uranium armour-piercing rounds (…) [These weapons] re now under the control of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) (…) [UK’s Ministry of Defense] does not monitor the locations from where DU rounds are fired by the AFU in Ukraine”, the Minsiter said during the statement.

When asked by some parliamentarians about the health dangers posed by these weapons, Heappey claimed that this threat would be “low”. Interestingly, he even mentioned that the risk assessment is based on monitoring UK veterans who have already used them on the battlefield. In fact, the minister seems to completely ignore that a series of recent studies point to the opposite, showing serious health problems both in the soldiers who manipulated this equipment and in the victims of the ammunition. The problems include several risks commonly attributed to radioactive substances, such as cancer, fetal deformity, deficiency of fertility, among others.

Commenting on the case with journalists, Doug Weir, an expert linked to the Conflict and Environment Observatory, stated that when DU penetrators strike a target “they fragment and burn, generating chemically toxic and radioactive DU particulate that poses an inhalational risk to people”. Several other scientists have expressed similar views after analyzing the results of these munitions in Iraq and other countries where NATO troops have used them. However, London and Washington continue to deny evidence of these dangers.

It must be remembered that Moscow has repeatedly asked London to reconsider its plan to send these munitions to Kiev. In a recent statement, spokespersons for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia stated that the British measure would be an absolute “imprudence, irresponsibility”. Furthermore, in March, the Russian Ministry of Defense warned that the use of such projectiles could “cause irreparable harm” to the health of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians as well as inflict “tremendous economic damage to the agro-industrial complex” in the region, citing the weapon’s impact during the previous experience in Iraq.

However, despite the warnings, the shipment of these weapons was already expected. In March, US and British troops held a training program with Ukrainian soldiers to teach them how to properly handle depleted uranium munitions. The plan was very well prepared and echoes NATO’s interest in taking the proxy war with Russia to the most dangerous levels of military escalation, ignoring any humanitarian, environmental or social concerns.

Legally, depleted uranium weapons are a complex issue. There is no international convention banning them as there is no consensus among specialists on how to define these weapons. These munitions are really radioactive, which is why some experts believe they should be considered nuclear weapons under the legal principle of analogy. However, its radiation is lower than that of natural uranium, which leads other specialists to reject this classification.

Some other experts believe that a viable solution to the problem of these projectiles would be to consider them chemical weapons, since they contain toxic substances, regardless of the level of radioactivity. But this creates a problem for the western powers that have them, since the US and the UK are signatories to the Chemical Weapons Convention, which would oblige them to destroy their depleted uranium stocks. Not by chance, both countries reject any initiative in this sense and prefer that these weapons remain without specific legislation, so that they can continue using them with impunity.

Indeed, given the absence of specific regulation, Moscow could consider the use of depleted uranium against its troops as a true nuclear attack, which would allow the Russians to react with their arsenal of mass destruction. This is unlikely to happen, as Moscow has repeatedly shown its interest in seeking the most peaceful and humanitarian solutions possible to the conflict, sometimes even ignoring violations against red lines just to avoid escalation.

However, regardless of what the Russian response will be, it is certain that damage to Ukrainian soldiers and the civilian population in the combat zone are inevitable. And the responsibility for that lies with NATO.

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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.

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British Armed Forces Minister James Heappey has confirmed that Ukraine received controversial depleted uranium from the UK for use with British-made Challenger 2 tanks.

“We have sent thousands of rounds of Challenger 2 ammunition to Ukraine, including depleted uranium armor-piercing rounds,” Heappey said in response to a question from Scottish MP Kenny MacAskill.

MacAskill asked if the UK was keeping track of how many depleted uranium rounds Kyiv was using, but Heappey declined to say.

“For operational security reasons, we will not comment on Ukrainian usage rates for the rounds provided,” he said.

Heappey also said the depleted uranium rounds are now “under the control” of Ukraine’s armed forces and that the British Defense Ministry was not monitoring where the radioactive rounds were being used.

“The Ministry of Defence does not monitor the locations from where DU rounds are fired by the AFU in Ukraine,” he said.

Depleted uranium is typically created as a byproduct of producing enriched uranium and is extremely dense, making it an effective metal to pierce tank armor. Since the munitions are radioactive, they are linked to cancer and birth defects, especially in Iraq, where US forces used an enormous number of the controversial munitions during the Gulf War and the 2003 invasion.

Russia previously warned it would treat the use of depleted uranium in Ukraine the same as a dirty bomb. The UK ignored the Russian warning and first confirmed in March it was sending the munitions. In response, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced he would deploy tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus.

The US could have also sent depleted uranium munitions to Ukraine as The Bradley Fighting Vehicles the US provided Kyiv can be equipped with the munitions. But the White House has refused to say if the Bradleys that have arrived in Ukraine came with depleted uranium ammunition.

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Dave DeCamp is the news editor of Antiwar.com, follow him on Twitter @decampdave.

Featured image: Challenger 2 battle tank

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This was first published on GR in December 2021.

This brilliant documentary by Tim Gielen reveals how a small group of super rich criminals have been buying virtually everything on earth, until they own it all.

From media, health care, travel, food industry, governments… That allows them to control the whole world. Because of this they are trying to impose the New World Order.

 

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Featured image is a screenshot from the video

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Rumours and streaks of hysteria are running rife about what such artificial intelligence (AI) systems as ChatGPT are meant to do.  Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy recently showed himself to be ignorant with terror about the search bot created by OpenAI.  “ChatGPT taught itself to do advanced chemistry. It wasn’t built into the model. Nobody programmed it to learn complicated chemistry. It decided to teach itself, then made its knowledge available to anyone who asked. Something is coming. We aren’t ready.”

Melanie Mitchell, an academic who knows a thing or two about the field, was bemused and tweeted as much.  “Senator, I’m an AI researcher.  Your description of ChatGPT is dangerously misinformed.  Every sentence is incorrect.  I hope you will learn more about how this system actually works, how it was trained, and what its limitations are.”

Senator, I'm an AI researcher. Your description of ChatGPT is dangerously misinformed. Every sentence is incorrect. I hope you will learn more about how this system actually works, how it was trained, and what it's limitations are.

— Melanie Mitchell (@MelMitchell1) March 27, 2023

Murphy retorted indignantly that he had not meant what he said. “Of course I know that AI doesn’t ‘learn’ or ‘teach itself’ like a human. I’m using shorthand.” Those criticisms, he argued, had the intention of bullying “policymakers away from regulating new technology by ridiculing us when we don’t use the terms the industry uses.”

Like birds of a feather, Murphy’s intervention came along with the Future of Life Institute’s own contribution in the form of an open letter (the Letter). The document makes a number of assertions expected from an institute that has warned about the risks of supremely intelligent AI systems. Literally thousands digitally flocked to lend their names to it, including tech luminaries such as Elon Musk (a warning there), and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. (Currently, the number of signatures lies at 27,567.)

The letter makes the plea that a six-month moratorium is necessary for humanity to take stock about the implications of AI.  “Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization. Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders.” Emphatically, it continues: “Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable.”

The Letter is unimpressive, clumsy, and clear in its effort to manufacture anxiety. While there is much to be said about having considered debates on the way AI is developing, one must ask where this plea is coming from. When billionaires demand a halt in technological practice, scepticism should start tickling the conscience. Suddenly, such voices demand transparency, accountability and openness, the very things they have shunned through their money-making endeavours. And who are the unelected tech leaders in any case?

As for the level of anxiety, the powerful and wealthy will always have bundles of it. If there is one commodity they truly want to share with the rest of us – call it anxiety as socialism – it’s their own fears writ large and disseminated as our fears. AI is that perfect conduit, a case of both promise and terror, therefore needing strict control. “The only things that can oppress US billionaires,” muses the Indian journalist and writer Manu Joseph, “are disease, insurrection, aliens and paranormal machines, the reason they tend to develop exaggeration [sic] notions of their dangers.”

For Mitchell, the authors and backers had embraced an all too gloomy predicament of humanity in the face of AI. “Humans,” she wrote earlier this month, “are continually at risk of over-anthropomorphizing over-trusting these systems, attributing agency to them when none is there.”

The useful premise for the unnerved fearmongers yields two corollaries: the attempt to try to halt the changing nature of such systems in the face of innovation; and the selling factor. “Public fear of AI is actually useful for the tech companies selling it, since the flip-side of the fear is the belief that these systems are truly powerful and big companies would be foolish not to adopt them.”

Moratoria in the field of technology tend to be doomed ventures. The human desire to invent even the most cataclysmically foolish of devices, is the stuff of Promethean legend. Consider, for instance, the debate on whether the US should develop a weapon even more destructive than the atomic bomb. The fear, then, was that the godless Soviets might acquire a superbomb, a muscular monster based on fusion, rather than fission.

In the seminal document received by US President Harry Truman on April 14, 1950, fears of such a discovery are rife. Written by Paul Nitze of the US State Department’s Policy Planning Office, it warned “that the probable fission bomb capability and the possible thermonuclear bomb capability of the Soviet Union have greatly intensified the Soviet threat to the security of the United States.” The result of such a fear became the hydrogen bomb.

The more level headed pragmatists in the field acknowledge, as do the listed authors of Stochastic Parrots (they include Mitchell) published on the website of the DAIR Institute, that there are “real and present dangers” associated with harms arising from AI, but this is qualified by the “acts of people and corporations deploying automated systems. Regulatory efforts should focus on transparency, accountability and preventing exploitative labor practices.”

Perhaps, suggests Mitchell, we should aim for something akin to a “Manhattan Project of intense research” that would cover “AI’s abilities, limitations, trustworthiness, and interpretability, where the investigation and results are open to anyone.” A far from insensible suggestion, bar the fact that the original Manhattan Project, dedicated to creating the first atomic bomb during the Second World War, was itself a competition to ensure that Nazi Germany did not get there first.

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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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The long-term crisis in the relations between the Russian Federation and Ukraine entered its final – war phase on February 24^th, 2022. The official reactions to the latest dramatic events in East Europe, which come from the Westerners, including the most important overseas Western political address, are usually dominated by two phrases: “flagrant violation of international public law” and “violation of the territorial integrity of an internationally recognized state“. The perpetrator of the acts is, of course, Russia, and, as it is claimed, the innocent victim is neighboring Ukraine. However, the same Westerners do not want to see either flagrant violations by the Kiev regime of human rights in the Donbass Region since 2014 onward or flagrant violations of international public law and territorial integrity of the internationally recognized state in the case of the Balkans (Yugoslavia) in the 1990s.

From the author

The ignorant attitude towards the provisions of international public law relevant to the Balkan case resulted, therefore, in the break-up of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the long wars in its two former federal units (Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina) that took about 150,000 lives, produced more than two million displaced people and left behind a region to this day, almost three decades later, it has not politically stabilized and consolidated.

The West demonstrated an identical attitude towards the branch of law that it is ardently calling for these days concerning Ukraine, several years after the end of those wars, when it decided to actively engage in “protecting the endangered human rights of Kosovo Albanians” and “stopping the humanitarian catastrophe to which they were exposed”, as the official Western narrative was, explaining 78 days of the barbaric campaign of bombing Serbia and Montenegro in the spring of 1999. As we know, it ended with the complete physical destruction of the country and the de facto exclusion of Kosovo from its constitutional and legal framework of the Republic of Serbia.

The self-proclaimed independence of Kosovo in February 2008 was, as well as the aggression against Serbia and Montenegro in 1999 contrary to all relevant customs of international public law. However, Western countries that today are leading in condemning similar Russian acts in Ukraine, were among the first to recognize the self-proclaimed independence of Kosovo. 

From the author

The policy of “double standards” in international relations and global politics used by great powers is not unknown and unrecorded in history. However, after the Cold War 1.0 (1949−1989) up today, the absence of any Western standards in the practice of generally accepted and binding rules of the international “game”, however, is one of the focal dimensions of the international relations in the world politics. The well-known dictum that sums up that insight – “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they have to” – came from the pen of the famous ancient Greek historian and military leader from Athens – Thucydides (c. 460−c. 400 BC). Thus, almost two and a half millennia ago, the great historian taught that justice and rights, as its codified forms, exist in international relations and can only be among equals (inter pares). Major disagreements in this regard, which are the basis of what is happening today in Ukraine with potentially catastrophic consequences, occur when this “equal”, in this case, the great and powerful Russia, is not recognized as such and is not as such respected. Today, the Western policymakers made a crucial mistake with Russia as thinking this is the same state as it was in the 1990s during the wars of the Yugoslav succession. Unfortunately for them, today’s Russian Federation is not a Western puppet state from the Yeltzin’s period – it is today at least equal with the Western great powers including NATO as well. Those Western actors in global politics who would continue to overlook this “hard” fact concerning Russia and her role in the politics of the contemporary world, would lead the world to the dangerous edge of the abyss and push the world into it very quickly with their indolence and old policy of gangsterism in international relations.

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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 summer of 2006, at the newly formed Journal of 9/11 Studies, we received a submission from a Canadian professor named Graeme MacQueen. The paper was entitled “118 Witnesses: The Firefighter’s Testimony to Explosions in the Twin Towers.” After peer-review comments were addressed, it was published and has become one of the most important articles in the 9/11 literature.

For the next seventeen years, Graeme went on to lead the 9/11 truth movement through his outstanding scholarship, his thoughtful approach, and his ability to instill trust in colleagues. Along with his remarkable intelligence and wide-ranging analytical skills, MacQueen’s dedication to peace and justice made him a force to be reckoned with. Although he became the leading expert on testimonies related to 9/11, including those from firefighters, first responders, and media sources, he contributed much more to the cause and his contributions will continue to light the way forward.

Our shared interests in 9/11 truth and Buddhism led us to become good friends. Graeme was an internationally recognized Buddhist scholar as I learned when reading random books on the subject at my local library. The text of a talk he gave at the University of Michigan in 1988, which he allowed me to publish on my blog years later, helped me to understand how he was different from other Buddhist leaders. He was the “unsmiling bodhisattva,” who did not act only with words—he put his whole life on the line for living beings.

In 2008, Graeme arrived in Bloomington, Indiana to give a presentation along with Canadian psychologist Laurie Manwell at the sold out Buskirk-Chumley Theater. His presentation, called “The Fictional Basis for the War on Terror,” was well-received and our discussions with Laurie in Bloomington initiated planning for a larger event to take place on the tenth anniversary of 9/11. That later event became the Toronto Hearings, which the three of us organized together with Adnan Zuberi and James Gourley.

Graeme and I went on to work together at other events to raise awareness, but also at the Journal of 9/11 Studies, where he authored several more groundbreaking papers including two focused on physical evidence. These were “The Missing Jolt: A Simple Refutation of the NIST-Bazant Collapse Hypothesis,” with engineer Tony Szamboti, and “Did the Earth Shake Before the South Tower Hit the Ground?”

A few years later Graeme became my co-editor at the Journal and served in that capacity for about five years. The deep respect people had for Graeme’s scholarship and his collaborative personality led to the submission of numerous excellent articles on various subjects.  Due to his influence, we received submissions from esteemed philosopher John McMurtry, sociologist Edward Curtin, political scientist Peter Dale Scott, and attorney Stephen J. Looney, among others.  

Graeme became recognized as a leading expert on 9/11 and, during this time, he published his highly influential book, The 2001 Anthrax Deception: The Case for a Domestic Conspiracy. The book establishes through careful analysis that the anthrax attacks were crimes committed by a group of people associated with the U.S. executive branch who were linked to, or identical with, those who committed the 9/11 crimes.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Graeme, from my perspective, is that he worked for peace and justice until his dying day. As with David Ray Griffin, who thought very highly of Graeme, he was diligent and very productive throughout the illness that took his life. He authored yet another book, this time in free, digital format that pulls together many of his most compelling writings. He completed interviews for an upcoming film that brings to light his tremendous contributions and undying commitment to peace. And he helped found a new organization that will lead research into the 9/11 crimes for many years to come.   

Dr. Graeme MacQueen was a distinguished scholar and an exceptional human being long before I ever met him. Others who know more about his past will undoubtedly recount many remarkable aspects of his life. His founding of the Centre for Peace Studies at McMaster University is often cited as an accomplishment that represented his nature. I know that he authored or edited books on religion and non-violence and led peace initiatives in the war zones of Afghanistan, Croatia, Gaza, and Sri Lanka. He was also a dedicated husband and father and he often spoke of his wife and daughter.

Everyone who knew Graeme will miss him dearly. I’ll be forever grateful for his friendship and his leadership.

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Video: BlackRock – The Company That Owns the World?

By Investigate Europe, April 26, 2023

BlackRock — there’s a good chance you have never heard of them. In less than 30 years, this American financial firm has grown from nothing to becoming the world’s largest and most trusted manager of other people’s money. The assets left in their care are worth a staggering 6.3 trillion US dollars – a figure with 12 zeroes.

No More Foreign Interference in Haiti. The United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti (BINUH) and the Core Group Do Not Represent Haitian People!

By Black Alliance for Peace, April 27, 2023

Today, the United Nations Security Council is holding consultations on the future of Haiti. No Haitian individuals or organizations will be present at the meeting. Instead, Haiti will be represented by its occupying entities: The Core Group and the United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti (BINUH), the mandate of which is set to expire on July 23.

Sudan Crisis Risks Engulfing North Africa

By Uriel Araujo, April 27, 2023

Following intense negotiations since April 22, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a powerful paramilitary organization, and the  Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) have agreed to a 72 hours ceasefire which started April 24 at midnight.

Coming Soon — mRNA Cancer and Flu ‘Vaccines’

By Dr. Joseph Mercola, April 26, 2023

Even though the mRNA COVID jabs are the most dangerous medical products ever to hit the market, vaccine makers and U.S. health agencies are steamrolling ahead with a long list of mRNA-based shots, including combination shots to cover multiple viral infections at the same time.

Fox News Decision to Settle Dominion Lawsuit for More Than Three-quarters of a Billion Dollars Makes No Sense

By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, April 26, 2023

A possible explanation is that Fox News, voluntarily or involuntarily, participated in an orchestration that established the precedent that reporting news different from the narrative, or news that is unfavorable to a person, company, or government institution, is defamation.

If the War in Yemen Stops, the US Will be the Loser: Interview with Hamid Rizk

By Hamid Rizk and Steven Sahiounie, April 26, 2023

China played the pivotal role in building the bridge of peace between Iran and Saudi Arabia.  Now, China is turning its efforts to negotiating an end to the war in Yemen, which has been a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia.

France Remains Tense After Pension Reform Bill Is Signed Into Law

By Abayomi Azikiwe, April 26, 2023

The rightward shift in domestic policy in France is reflective of the worsening economic conditions for workers within the European Union (EU) states. In many capitalist countries the living standards of the majority of people have declined precipitously in the last decade.

All Roads Are Leading Toward an International CBDC in a Cashless World

By Prof. Bill Willers, April 26, 2023

You might argue that physical money continues to be in great supply, so where is the danger of a global CBDC when society is awash with cash? Well, training a culture to use electronic money is requiring expanded time, even generations, for normalization to become established. However, cash can be made scarce — and then to dry up — relatively quickly.

International Banking “Crisis” – It’s Only the Beginning

By Peter Koenig and Michael Welch, April 26, 2023

Let me begin by saying everything is connected. And I don’t mean just banking collapses around the world, but COVID, energy shortages, food shortages, the Ukraine War, the economic suicide currently being committed by the European Union, also called wanton deindustrialization, the desperate attempt to introduce all controlling Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC), and also the ongoing, just started orchestrated international banking collapse.

Against the War from the Left and the Right. London Peace Actions Week

By Konrad Rękas, April 26, 2023

London, the Euro-Atlantic capital of war and imperialism, has at least partly become one of the centres of the movement for peace, disarmament and a multipolar world based on respect for the right of nations to self-determination and their civilisational autonomy.

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Today, the United Nations Security Council is holding consultations on the future of Haiti. No Haitian individuals or organizations will be present at the meeting. Instead, Haiti will be represented by its occupying entities: The Core Group and the United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti (BINUH), the mandate of which is set to expire on July 23.

The Haiti/Americas Team of the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) and BAP member organization in Haiti, MOLEGHAF (Mouvement National pour la Liberté et L’égalité des Haïtiens pour la Fraternité or National Movement for Liberty and Equality of Haitians for Fraternity), denounce the Core Group’s and BINUH’s continued occupation of Haiti as well as their ongoing actions to undermine Haiti’s democracy and sovereignty.

Over the past year, we have witnessed massive popular protests that have been part of a broader struggle for a Haiti free from suffocating foreign interference. That includes manufactured “gang violence” and the illegitimate government installed by the United States and the Core Group. Yet, those speaking on behalf of Haiti refuse to recognize the core demands of the people for democracy, sovereignty and a just life.

BINUH and the Core Group do not represent Haitian people. Haitian people consider these entities occupation forces. BAP and MOLEGHAF have consistently demanded the Core Group and the so-called “International Community” acknowledge and atone for their role in the continuing deterioration of the situation in Haiti today.

As we have continually stated, the “crisis” in Haiti is a crisis of imperialism, a crisis initiated in 2004 by the United States, France and Canada, and consecrated by the United Nations. No decision about Haiti should be made by those who not only do not represent the people, but have also consistently harmed them.

Once again, we demand the disbanding of the Core Group, the removal of the BINUH office from Haiti, respect for the sovereign rights of the Haitian people, and NO MORE FOREIGN INTERFERENCE IN HAITI!

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Featured image copyright Juvenal Balán

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Following intense negotiations since April 22, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a powerful paramilitary organization, and the  Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) have agreed to a 72 hours ceasefire which started April 24 at midnight.

Washington has announced it will assist in the creation of a committee to oversee talks. It remains to be seen whether the deal will be implemented, though. At least two other ceasefires were announced since the violence started on April 15 and none of them have been held. About 400 people have already died. Israel has also offered to host the warring parties for talks.  In February, Sudan joined a number of other states which have normalized their ties with the Jewish state – this being a divisive issue in the region. United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres has warned that the violence in the Sahel country risks “engulfing” the whole region and beyond.

The UN has been implementing evacuation measures in Sudan and the German military this week flew over 300 people out of the country, mostly German citizens. Several other states, such as the US, China, Sweden and so on are carrying out similar operations.

Violent conflict between rival military factions fighting for the control of the country erupted in the capital city Khartoum this month. Forces loyal to army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan are facing those of the RSF, led by Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, who is al-Burhan’s former deputy. RSF personnel come mostly from the Janjaweed, that is, the militia groups which former leader Omar al-Bashir sent to the Darfur region, where these militiamen took part in the massacre of Darfuri ethnic groups. Their plight is known as the first genocide of the 21st century.

Going back in time, Omar al-Bashir was the head of state of Sudan from 1989 until 2019, when he was deposed in a  military coup d’état which has never brought back civil rule. He was accused of directing the aforementioned vicious campaign of mass killings in Darfur. Before the overthrow of al-Bashir, then US President Barack Obama, in one of his last acts in office, lifted a number of sanctions against the regime, supposedly due to progress in human rights issues. One of the key reasons for that policy shift was actually the CIA’s office in Khartoum, due to the regime’s cooperation with the Americans in fighting jihadist groups which were a problem to Washington. In September 2017 the US had already removed Sudan from a travel ban.

In the final years of al-Bashir, European leaders also saw him as a key ally in European struggles to restrict the number of Africans crossing the Mediterranean towards Europe. The “Khartoum Process” was part of such endeavors, as well as the 2015 Valletta Summit on Migration. European authorities described it thusly: “the number of migrants arriving to the European Union is unprecedented, and this increased flow is likely to continue. The EU, together with the member states, is taking a wide range of measures to address the challenges (…) The Valletta Summit on Migration is part of this effort, bringing the EU and African countries together to work in a spirit of partnership and find common solutions.”

In that context,  the Regional Operational Centre (ROCK)  was established in Khartoum, aiming at halting refugee flows and human smuggling. It marked an advancement in European-Sudanese cooperation, including the latter’s feared secret police.

The RSF forces currently involved in the ongoing conflict are a legacy from the late al-Bashir years, when, before the coup, he enjoyed some international support even while the disgraceful Darfour situation went on and on.

Even after having lost much of its territory in 2011, to the new Republic of Southern Sudan, the Republic of Sudan is still the third largest African country, and due to its strategic location, plays an important role for stability in the whole Sahel and Horn of Africa. To its north, it is connected to neighboring Egypt, by border as well as by the Nile River, whose two tributaries merge at Khartoum. To its northeast, Sudan is at the Red Sea, thus linking the North African region to Europe. This is why many international actors have their eyes on the country.

Since the November 2021 coup, which appears to have been backed by the UAE, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, a military council of generals had been running the nation. The African Union back then suspended the country’s participation in all of its activities until civil-led authority was restored – which has never taken place. The World Bank in turn freezed the nation’s aid.

Tensions between Sudan and Ethiopia over water and the disputed land of al-Fashqa have also been high for over a year. The GERD project (the Great Renaissance Dam of Ethiopia) threatens agriculture in both Egypt and Sudan, according to authorities in these two countries – that makes both Ethiopia and Egypt interested parties in Sudan, although on opposing sides.

Morocco and Algeria are also hot issues in the region. Former US President Donald Trump’s recognition of Morocco’s claim over the Western Sahara region, which is in turn controlled by the Algerian-backed Polisario Front, was  a kind of “quid pro quo” after the Moroccan authorities normalized the country’s relations with American ally Israel. This US diplomatic decision however significantly increased tensions in the region, with potential bad outcomes for Europe, also, who has had its eyes in Morocco for energy and migration management reasons.

North Africa has been a ticking bomb for a while, engulfed, as it is, in a number of proxy conflicts. The current crisis in Sudan, which has the potential to greatly impact the continent and beyond,  also reflects the failures of Western foreign policies.

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Uriel Araujo is a researcher with a focus on international and ethnic conflicts.

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