Chinese Foreign Ministry Calls for Promptly Starting Talks on Space Arms Control
Sputnik – 13.04.2021
BEIJING – China is calling on the global community to urgently start the negotiations on the space arms control, which should be based on a document proposed by Beijing and Moscow, the foreign ministry’s spokesman, Zhao Lijian, said on Tuesday.
“We are calling on the international community to start negotiations and reach agreement on arms control in order to ensure space safety as soon as possible,” Zhao said at a briefing, noting that the talks should be based on the draft agreement proposed by the two countries.
“China has always been in favor of preventing an arms race in space, it has been actively promoting negotiations on a legally binding agreement on space arms control jointly with Russia,” the diplomat added.
Just on Monday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov called for launching negotiations aimed at creating an internationalist instrument that would ban the deployment of any kinds of weapons in space. Lavrov proposed taking the Russian-Chinese draft document, introduced at the 2014 disarmament conference in Geneva, as a basis.
To stabilize the situation during a period when a multilateral document on non-militarization of space is being developed, Lavrov invited countries to join a Russian-promoted multilateral initiative on making a political commitment not to be the first to place weapons in outer space.
‘Our focus was to get Trump out of office’: CNN technical director admits network is ‘PROPAGANDA’
RT | April 13, 2021
An undercover video released by Project Veritas shows CNN technical director Charlie Chester revealing how the network purposefully painted Joe Biden in a positive light to get Donald Trump out of office.
In a conversation with a Project Veritas journalist, Chester can be seen on video admitting CNN worked to make Trump look “unfit for office,” while simultaneously portraying Biden as healthy to combat fears the 78-year-old was not up to holding the presidency.
“Look what we did, we [CNN] got Trump out. I am 100% going to say it, and I 100% believe that if it wasn’t for CNN, I don’t know that Trump would have got voted out…I came to CNN because I wanted to be a part of that,” Chester says in the video.
He also detailed bringing in “medical people” to tell a story that was “all speculation” about Trump’s hand shaking.
“We were creating a story there that we didn’t know anything about. That’s what – I think that’s propaganda,” he said.
Chester revealed the opposite was done for Biden during the 2020 presidential race.
“We would always show shots of him [Biden] jogging and that [he’s] healthy, you know, and him in aviator shades. Like you paint him as a young geriatric,” he said, saying the strategy was a “deflection” of his age and numerous public gaffes.
CNN ran numerous stories about Trump’s health during the presidential race, including one from Brian Stelter with a headline reading: ‘It’s now up to journalists to get to the truth about Trump’s health’.
Another from outspoken Trump critic Jim Acosta in October read: ‘Trump’s doctors paint a rosy – but vague – picture of his health during Covid-19 treatment’.
The CNN employee also claimed his network’s strategy as it moves away from Covid-19 coverage is to shift to a focus on climate change.
“It’s going to be our [CNN’s] focus. Like our focus was to get Trump out of office, right? Without saying it, that’s what it was, right? So, our next thing is going to be climate change awareness,” he said.
Chester added he doesn’t specifically know what that coverage looks like, but it will likely include fear-mongering videos of “the effects it’s having on the economy,” as well as “decline in ice” and “weather warming.”
Chester revealed the person deciding all of this slanted coverage is CNN head Jeff Zucker.
The network had not reacted to the video at the time of this article’s publication. However, a source close to CNN told Mediaite Chester was targeted through the dating app Tinder, which included the detail that he worked for the channel.
Study Links Pesticides To Childhood Central Nervous System Tumors
Waking Times | April 9, 2021
A new study adds to the evidence that pesticides harm children’s health.
The study, published in Environmental Research last week, found that children were more likely to develop central nervous system (CNS) tumors if their mothers had lived within 2.5 miles of land where pesticides were being sprayed when they were born.
“This study is the first, to our knowledge, to estimate effects for a large number of specific pesticides in relation to CNS tumor subtypes,” Julia Heck, a study coauthor and the associate dean for research at the University of North Texas College of Health and Public Service said, as NBC Los Angeles reported.
The research looked at the California Cancer Registry to identify cases of certain cancers in children under six years old, the study explained. They focused on mothers who lived in rural areas and gave birth between 1998 and 2011 to identify 667 cases of childhood central nervous system tumors and 123,158 controls.
They then compared these cases to data from the California Department of Pesticide Regulation’s (CDPR) Pesticide Use Reporting (PUR) system to identify whether chemicals classed as possible carcinogens by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had been sprayed within 2.5 miles of the mothers’ homes at birth.
One important implication of the study is that the mothers did not have to be directly working in agriculture in order for their children to face dangerous exposure.
“California’s agricultural work force numbers more than 800,000, according to state estimates,” Dr. Christina Lombardi, study co-author and epidemiologist with the Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer Institute at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, told Beyond Pesticides. “In addition to the negative health effects of pesticides on workers there are large numbers of pregnant women and young children living adjacent to treated fields who may experience detrimental health effects as well.”
This risk is exacerbated by the fact that farmland and residential land is not always clearly delineated in the state.
“This transition from farmland to residential neighborhoods is abrupt across California, and, of course, constantly changing as farmland is developed,” study co-author Myles Cockburn of the University of Southern California told Beyond Pesticides.
The researchers found that some of the chemicals they studied increased tumor risk as much as 2.5 times. Overall, exposure to the pesticides chlorthalonil, bromacil, thiophanate-methyl, triforine, kresoxim-methyl, propiconazole, dimethoate and linuron all increased tumor risk.
This is far from the first study to show that pesticide exposure is a danger to pregnant mothers and children. In fact, researchers have been studying the link between pesticides and childhood cancer since the 1970s, according to NBC Los Angeles.
The report authors called for government action to better protect mothers and children.
“Policy interventions to reduce pesticide exposure in individuals residing near agricultural fields should be considered to protect the health of children,” coauthor and UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health epidemiology professor Beate Ritz told NBC Los Angeles.
FDA Says Stop the Johnson & Johnson Coronavirus Vaccine Shots
By Adam Dick | Ron Paul Institute | April 13, 2021
On Tuesday, the United States government’s Food and Drug Administration asked states to temporarily halt the giving of Johnson & Johnson’s experimental coronavirus vaccine shots, pointing to the developing of blood clots in people who have received the shots as the justification for halting.
For more information about the blood clots and other issues related to the Johnson & Johnson experimental vaccine, check out the Tuesday article “5 Reasons Johnson & Johnson Is Having A Very Bad Month” by Megan Redshaw at the Children’s Health Defense website.
One thing that is odd is that the Johnson & Johnson experimental vaccine shots have been subjected to this temporary halt, but shots of the experimental vaccines of Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech have not. Many reports of injury and death after Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech experimental vaccine shots, from the early days onward, have come in as well. Could the different regulatory outcomes be because the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech shots use mRNA technology and are not even vaccines under the normal meaning of the term while the Johnson & Johnson shot is more in line with the traditional vaccines approach? Are we seeing regulatory favoritism for the new mRNA shots?
Copyright © 2021 by RonPaul Institute
Israeli Supreme Court green lights Israel’s ‘Cyber Unit’ that works with social media giants to censor user content
Adalah Press Release | April 12, 2021
Court authorizes Cyber Unit to continue operating in the shadows, conducting quasi-judicial censorship without allowing social media users to defend their rights or even to know that the state has been involved in removing their online content.
The Israeli Supreme Court on Monday, 12 April 2021, rejected a petition filed by Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) giving a green light to the continued operations of the Israeli state attorney’s office Cyber Unit and its “alternative enforcement” model of censoring social media content.
Israel’s Cyber Unit uses an “alternative enforcement” mechanism to essentially censor social media platforms and muzzle users: it flags and submits social media posts – without legal proceedings and often without even the knowledge of the individual user – to social media giants and requests their removal.
This Israeli state practice is aimed at clamping down on social media dissent, and frequently even results in the suspension or removal of users. This censorship is conducted in collaboration and coordination with social media outlets, including U.S.-based giants Facebook and Twitter.
Similar units operating in countries around the world are known as Internet Referral Units (IRUs).
Adalah attorneys Fady Khoury and Rabea Eghbariah had filed the petition against the Cyber Unit to the Israeli Supreme Court on 26 November 2019. They stressed that the Cyber Unit’s “alternative enforcement” mechanism violates the constitutional rights of freedom of expression and due process, and that the unit is operating without any legal authority.
Israeli Supreme Court Justice Hanan Melcer announced the decision on Monday morning in Jerusalem, in his final ruling before retirement.
In its decision, the court granted unchecked and unauthorized power to the Israeli state, allowing it to govern online speech by using informal channels with social media corporations. The court essentially privatized the judicial process, allowing private corporations to decide upon censorship of social media content based on ostensibly unbinding requests from Israeli state authorities.
Adalah Attorney Rabea Eghbariah commented immediately following the Israeli Supreme Court ruling:
“The Israeli Supreme Court has just authorized the state to continue to use its Cyber Unit to conduct quasi-judicial censorship proceedings in cooperation with private corporations, without allowing social media users to defend their rights or even to know that the state has been involved in removing their online content. Israel’s Cyber Unit has operated in the shadows of the law to censor tens of thousands of social media posts every year. The Supreme Court has now, to our regret, given Israel a blank check to continue with this practice.”
The Magic of Israel
Now you see it, now you don’t
BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • APRIL 13, 2021
The popular narrative of plucky little Israel prevailing over hordes of bloodthirsty Arabs has captured the Western imagination even though it is manifestly false in almost every detail. But Israel’s greatest accomplishment might well be something else, it’s ability to make things disappear. It plausibly all began in June 1967 when Israel attacked the USS Liberty, a lightly armed but well identified US naval vessel cruising in international waters under a large American flag. Fighter bombers and torpedo boats sought to sink the ship, destroying the lifeboats so no one would escape. In the engagement, 34 American military personnel were killed and a further 171 wounded, before a heroic defense by the crew managed to save the vessel. President Lyndon Johnson, who said he would rather see the ship sink than embarrass his friend Israel, started a cover-up which has lasted to this day. There has been no legitimate court of inquiry into the attack and when the ship’s captain received a Medal of Honor for his heroism, it was awarded secretly in the Washington Navy Yard rather than openly at the White House. Israel and its legion of apologists certainly know how to make potential embarrassments disappear.
Last week on this site I posted an article that I thought would prove to be extremely interesting to those who have been expressing concern about foreign interference in our government. It included a link to a series of computer screen texts provided by a credible independent source demonstrating that an employee of the Israeli Consulate General was deeply involved in what appears to be extorting millions of dollars from the father of a congressman based on assisting that congressman through some legal difficulties. The scheme being concocted also included discussion of arrangements for a commando raid on Iran to free a prisoner. The information conveyed in the screenshots that were provided of the texts has not been disputed by anyone involved in the venture, but as I thought the accompanying article was timid in its willingness to draw any conclusions, I wrote my piece attempting to connect the dots.
The Congressman involved was, of course, Matt Gaetz of Florida, who is now facing the House Ethics Committee, surely an oxymoron if there ever was one, concerning his primarily sexual exploits. To my surprise, however, there has been hardly a word in the mainstream media about looking deeper into the possible Israeli connection. One would have thought the copied texts would be newsworthy due to the extortion angle but even more due to the fact that an armed attack on a nation with which the US is not at war was being funded and planned by a foreign government’s diplomatic mission in New York.
To be sure my article did very well both on Unz and even Facebook, though I had to cut and paste it in the latter site due to its blocking of Unz. I did a bit more checking and noted something that has been occurring for some time: the piece, like others relating to Israel, was not coming up on search engines like Google, which means it was not getting the exposure that it merited. I search daily by my name assuming that my pieces if replayed elsewhere will be displayed. In the past I would sometimes get scores of hits on a popular article, but during the past year hardly anything has been appearing. I have to assume that deliberate and widespread censorship of articles critical of Israel is taking place, which was no surprise as friends of Israel are not exactly rare in the social media. Facebook’s censorship board, for example, includes a former Israeli government minister.
It all comes down to the power of the Israeli/Jewish lobby and its ability to make things that it does not like go away. And sometimes it can make things happen that are manifestly not in the interest of the United States. Jonathan Pollard, the most damaging spy ever in the history of the United States, was recently allowed to return to Israel. In an interview on March 26th he said that any American Jews working for US intelligence agencies must do their duty and spy for Israel because one’s real loyalty is to the Jewish state and one’s co-religionists.
Clearly Pollard is not alone and it was shocking to learn that outgoing president Donald Trump pardoned the Israeli agent who recruited and presumably helped “run” Pollard when he was stealing US secrets. Aviem Sella received a full pardon from Trump as part of hundreds of last minute pardons, many of which had been arranged through two Orthodox Jewish agencies favored by presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner.
Sella was a retired Israeli air force officer doing graduate studies and living in the US when he enlisted Pollard to spy for Israel. He fled the country after Pollard was arrested in 1985 and was charged in absentia on three espionage counts but Israel refused to extradite him to the US to stand trial. A White House statement noted that Sella’s request for clemency received support from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli ambassador in Washington Ron Dermer, the American ambassador to Israel David Friedman, and Miriam Adelson, the widow of the Republican Party’s top donor and Trump supporter Sheldon Adelson. Would anyone expect otherwise?
The Sella pardon should be seen for what it is. It was a gift to the corrupt Netanyahu, who was at the time facing another national election. It served no US national interest at all and in fact sent the message to those who might be tempted a la Pollard that spying for Israel might be regarded as consequence free, in fact desirable and the right thing to do. Of course, the special “exemption” when dealing with Israel should also be regarded as a tribute to Jewish power in the United States, which relies on the corruption of those in leadership positions, using financial inducements or even blackmail backed up by smears of anti-Semitism and holocaust denial for those who cannot be bought.
And the power to corrupt governments and media is not limited to the United States. Nearly everyone in public office or who relies on the media for an income understands one does not cross the Israel Lobby. In Britain, former Foreign Office Minister Sir Alan Duncan has written a memoir that accuses pro-Israel lobbyists of “the most disgusting interference” in British politics while also distorting the country’s foreign policy in the Middle East to favor the Jewish state.
Duncan also claimed that Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI) went “ballistic” and blocked him from becoming the Middle East minister at the Foreign Office. Duncan has long been a major target for the Israel lobby. In 2017, an Al Jazeera documentary exposed the maneuvering of pro-Israel groups working together with the Israeli Embassy in London to “take down” Duncan and also Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn.
Per Duncan, Conservative Friends of Israel, which openly promotes the interests of a foreign country, had successfully promoted a “Netanyahu-type view of Israeli politics into our foreign policy.” In one chapter Duncan criticized Conservative MPs’ fawning over Benjamin Netanyahu during his visit to Britain, a performance apparently similar to the time when Bibi addressed the US Congress and received 27 standing ovations.
The Duncan book appeared when another story broke about how a group called “UK Lawyers for Israel” acting on behalf of the Israeli government has been altering the material included in secondary school text books. Per a statement issued by Pearson, the largest publisher of school books in the UK, the company has suspended publication of two textbooks responding to “an eight-page report, by Middle East specialists Professors John Chalcraft and James Dickins, which found hundreds of changes to the textbooks overwhelmingly favoring an Israeli narrative and removing or replacing passages that support Palestinian narratives.”
Censorship of course materials as well as textbooks by Jewish groups to depict Israel in a certain way has certainly been going on in the United States for many years. And the corruption of our institutions to favor Israel and protect it from criticism is incessant. It will be interesting to see if the Gaetz story in all its aspects will ever be allowed to surface or whether the congressman will be offered some inducement to allow him to quietly resign. Somehow, it reminds one of the still unresolved Jeffrey Epstein case in which Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell obtained blackmail material relating to world leaders and celebrities having sex with young girls, somewhat similar to the claims regarding Gaetz.
Many including myself believe that Epstein was part of an Israeli intelligence operation, similar in scale to what was being run on 9/11, which sought to “influence” key figures on issues regarded as important by the Jewish state. Clearly, the game goes on with no one in Washington caring much about the damage being done. Do corrupted and intimidated Congressmen over their morning coffee ponder whether certain activities are “Good for Israel” and therefore not subject to further scrutiny? Judging from Epstein and Gaetz, one would have to believe that to be the case.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org
Iran Starts 60% Enrichment in Reaction to Natanz Sabotage
Mehr News Agency – April 13, 2021
Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister for Political Affairs Sayyed Abbas Araqchi announced the beginning of 60% enrichment in the Natanz Enrichment Facility.
Araqchi who is in Vienna to participate in a new round of talks with the P4+1 and the EU representative within the framework of the JCPOA Joint Commission announced the start of 60% enrichment on Tuesday afternoon.
Iran has announced today in a letter to the Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency that it would begin 60% enrichment, he said.
Another 1,000 centrifuges with 50% more capacity will be added to the machines in Natanz, in addition to replacing the damaged ones, he added.
Earlier, after the recent sabotage of the Natanz enrichment facility, Iran’s permanent representative to Vienna-based international organizations Kazem Gharibabadi announced that a new generation of machines will be installed in Natanz and several other technical measures will be announced this week.
The spokesman for the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) Behrouz Kamalvandi said on Sunday that an incident took place in a part of the electricity distribution network of Shahid Ahmadi Roshan facility in Natanz.
Following the incident, AEOI Chief Ali-Akbar Salehi slammed the “act of sabotage”, noting that the international community, as well as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), must deal with such “nuclear terrorism” that targets Iran’s facilities.
CNN Raises Eyebrows After Using Images of Ukrainian Tanks While Bashing Russia’s ‘War Preparations’
By Andrei Dergalin – Sputnik – 13.04.2021
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has delivered a sharp rebuke to CNN after the media outlet used a picture of Ukrainian tanks to illustrate an article about Russia’s purported war preparations.
“Dear CNN TV channel and its staff. We realize that you have no time for fact-checking, since you’re so immersed in ideological struggle for the triumph of liberalism,” she wrote in a Facebook post. “But to present Ukrainian tanks at a Ukrainian train station, with Ukrainian train carriages in the background, as Russia’s preparations for war is a bit too much.”
She also snarkily suggested that perhaps CNN correspondents in Moscow should devote more time to their professional duties rather than focus on participating in public life in Russia.
The CNN’s article in question was related to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s recent visit to Donbass, and featured a video depicting Ukrainian tanks on train carriages while the narrator speaks about a “dramatic buildup of Russian forces near the Ukrainian border” and about the emergence of cellphone footage of “military hardware being transported by rail”.
The video fragment with the tanks appeared strikingly similar to a video that emerged on social media earlier this month, which a number of uploaders described as Ukrainian tanks being shipped to Donbass.
The situation in Ukraine’s restive eastern Donbass region has deteriorated in the past few weeks, with Donetsk and Lugansk regional authorities and militia forces reporting an escalation of shelling attacks, bombings and sniper fire by Ukrainian forces.
Meanwhile, the US blamed Russia for allegedly stoking tensions in the region, and threatened to to respond to Russian “aggression”.
The armed conflict in eastern Ukraine broke out in 2014, shortly after the triumph of the Euromaidan coup in Kiev, when residents of the Donbass region refused to submit to the new authorities.
Aletho News 