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Judge finds Australian war hero to be a war criminal

By Graham Hryce | RT | June 2, 2023

Yesterday Justice Anthony Besanko handed down his ruling in Afghanistan war hero Ben Roberts-Smith’s defamation case in the Federal Court in Sydney.

Justice Besanko released a summary of the judgment, agreeing to delay releasing his full reasons until next week, so that it could be vetted by the federal government to ensure that it did not contain any sensitive national security material.

Justice Besanko dismissed Roberts-Smith’s case against Australian media – on the basis that the most serious defamatory allegations made by the press, namely that the soldier was a war criminal and murderer, were substantially true.

The trial – dubbed “the defamation case of the century” – ran for over 100 days, and the legal costs are thought to exceed $15 million for each side. Roberts-Smith will now have to pay the costs of both parties. This was an absolutely disastrous result for the war hero – or, perhaps more accurately, former war hero.

Roberts-Smith, an SAS soldier who won a Victoria Cross fighting in Afghanistan, sued The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Canberra Times, and three journalists, over articles published in 2018 alleging that he was a war criminal and complicit in the murder of six innocent Afghan civilians.

The newspapers and journalists raised a defense of truth, and Roberts-Smith and witnesses called by the defendants, including three Afghan villagers and some of Roberts-Smith’s fellow soldiers, gave conflicting evidence about what happened on various combat missions involving Roberts-Smith in Afghanistan. The trial judge disbelieved Roberts-Smith and accepted the evidence of the witnesses called by the newspapers, which will make it very difficult for any appeal that may be brought by Roberts-Smith to succeed.

Roberts-Smith’s comprehensive loss in his defamation action will have dire consequences for him personally, the Australian Defence Force (ADF), and the military top brass.

A judge, albeit in civil proceedings, has now effectively ruled that Roberts-Smith is a war criminal. Civil cases require a lower standard of proof than criminal ones, but in the circumstances, it appears inevitable that he will face criminal charges in respect to his conduct in Afghanistan and in accordance with the protracted inquiry process into Afghanistan war crimes established by the former Morrison government some years ago. Roberts-Smith will no doubt be stripped of his Victoria Cross and other medals.

Besanko’s branding of Roberts-Smith as a war criminal and murderer makes it virtually impossible now to credibly maintain that Australian soldiers did not commit war crimes in Afghanistan. After all, if Australia’s most decorated war hero in Afghanistan was murdering innocent civilians with impunity, it seems certain that other SAS soldiers were engaging in similar conduct.

The Roberts-Smith defamation case result can only exacerbate the severe damage done to the reputation of the ADF since allegations of Afghanistan war crimes first emerged publically almost five years ago.

As for the military top brass, the result of the Roberts-Smith defamation case confirms that either they knew what was going on in Afghanistan and permitted it to happen, in which case they were complicit in war crimes. Alternatively, they had no idea what was happening, in which case their negligence facilitated such war crimes. After all, those SAS soldiers who told the journalists who wrote the articles what was actually occurring in Afghanistan, only did so because they knew that the military top brass would do nothing to rein in such conduct.

The trial’s result also confirms that ADF leadership has mishandled the entire Afghanistan war crimes issue right from the beginning. No wonder ordinary Australian soldiers have lost all respect for their leaders.

Coincidentally, this week the Chief of the ADF, General Angus Campbell – who was the commander of Australian forces in Afghanistan in 2011 – appeared before a Senate Estimates Committee in the federal parliament. Campbell had a difficult time coping with being grilled by a few independent Senators.

Earlier this week, Campbell admitted that in March 2021 the United States defense attaché in Canberra had written to him, advising that the allegations of war crimes outlined in the 2020 Brereton Report, could prevent the US military from cooperating with Australian SAS forces in the future. The seriousness of this situation seemed lost on Campbell and he just shrugged the letter and warning off – as was the irony of the perpetrators of the My Lai massacre and Abu Ghraib atrocities lecturing him on the ethics of modern warfare.

Campbell also testified that he now intends to strip a few Australian military commanders in Afghanistan of their war medals, while keeping the medals that he was personally awarded for his own distinguished service during the Afghanistan war. This did not impress independent Senator Jacqui Lambie, who demanded that Campbell “lead by example and hand back his medals.” Campbell refused to do so.

Earlier in the week, the ADF announced that alcohol consumption by Australian soldiers would be banned in “warlike operations.” The ban is to be enforced via random breath testing, with soldiers who refuse to be tested being sent home.  This is a typically misguided Campbell policy initiative. The war crimes committed in Afghanistan were not committed because Australian soldiers had a few beers.

The fact is that the Australian military is in a state of crisis as a result of the inept handling of the entire Afghanistan war crimes matter. Once the allegations surfaced, instead of dealing with them promptly, and court-martialling the offenders, the military top brass set up a protracted investigation, beginning with the Brereton Inquiry, that only focused on the alleged misconduct of ordinary soldiers.

This fundamentally flawed process has continued for more than five years, and now involves criminal charges being brought against alleged war criminals in the courts. One SAS soldier, Oliver Schulz, has already been charged and others, including Roberts-Smith, no doubt will be. These criminal cases, which will attract ongoing adverse publicity, will take years to conclude.

This endless demonstration of public self-flagellation, together with the random stripping of service medals from ordinary soldiers against whom no allegations of war crimes had been made, and the egregious and ongoing failure to provide proper support services for soldiers who served in Afghanistan, has reduced morale within the ADF to an all-time low. The Roberts-Smith defamation case will result in it plummeting even further.

Campbell and his top-brass colleagues should be sacked for presiding over this appalling state of affairs, and an inquiry should be established into what precisely the military top brass knew about war crimes committed in Afghanistan at the time. Answers need to be provided for why they did nothing to put an end to such conduct, why the ADF were sent to fight in Afghanistan in the first place, and what benefits generally accrue to the military from blindly following the US into utterly misguided wars of aggression that cannot be won.

That will not happen, of course, because, as the recent AUKUS agreement has shown, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s Labor government has wholeheartedly adopted the same Cold War worldview fervently adhered to by the military top brass.

Albanese will most likely leave Campbell and his mates in their current comfortable sinecures – where they will further demoralize and weaken the ADF, while at the same time maintaining that Australia should be ready to go to war with China over Taiwan at the drop of Uncle Sam’s top hat.

Defamation actions are strange and unpredictable things, but they sometimes provide instructive insights into the dysfunctional operations of powerful organizations that are in need of root and branch reform. Ben Roberts-Smith inadvertently did Australia a service by bringing defamation proceedings against those newspapers and journalists who dared to tell the truth about what was really happening in Afghanistan.

Graham Hryce is an Australian journalist and former media lawyer, whose work has been published in The Australian, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age, the Sunday Mail, the Spectator and Quadrant.

June 4, 2023 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

CHD Scientists Call for Investigation Into CDC, FDA for Suppressing Evidence Linking COVID Shots and Myocarditis

The Defender | June 2, 2023

In a letter to the editor published today in Medical Research Archives, two Children’s Health Defense (CHD) scientists called for an investigation into how U.S. public health officials suppressed evidence linking myocarditis and COVID-19 vaccines until after more than half the U.S. population had received at least one dose of the shots.

In their letter, Brian S. Hooker, Ph.D., and Karl David Jablonowski, Ph.D., outlined the timeline of events showing how the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) lied to the public.

The letter examines who knew what and when during the early days of the epidemic of vaccine-induced myocarditis from FDA-authorized and CDC-recommended COVID-19 shots.

Myocarditis is a debilitating and often fatal cardiac condition. COVID-19 vaccine-induced myocarditis primarily afflicts children, although the CDC and FDA did not reveal the vaccine’s risk until after the agencies had approved it for use in this age group.

According to Hooker and Jablonowski, well before May 27, 2021, when the CDC revealed its report, “Myocarditis and Pericarditis following mRNA COVID-19 Vaccination,” the CDC, FDA, U.S. Department of Defense, Pfizer and the Israel Ministry of Health had documented evidence of myocarditis shortly after vaccination, predominantly among 16- to 24-year-old males.

“The CDC and FDA willfully chose to hide this information from the U.S. public,” Hooker said. “The dereliction of duty to serve public health interests is clear. We are now calling for an interagency investigation of the CDC and FDA modeled on the external investigation of NASA in the wake of the Columbia Disaster.”

The CDC and FDA ignored warnings from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), a government-maintained database, during one of the most highly anticipated and consequential pharmaceutical rollouts in human history.

During the week of Feb. 19, while Americans were desperately waiting in line for the “safe and effective” cure to what government officials and the media portrayed as a global doomsday plague, VAERS received enough serious adverse event reports to show myocarditis is causally connected to the COVID-19 vaccine in young males, according to the letter.

The CDC and FDA continued to conceal the risk from the public, even after being directly asked by the Israel Ministry of Health about a link between myocarditis “in young individuals soon after Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine.”

On April 26, 2021, the CDC and FDA denied “safety signals” existed for myocarditis following COVID-19 jabs.

It was not until after the FDA granted Emergency Use Authorization and the CDC recommended the vaccination of children ages 12-15 that on May 27, 2021, the CDC revealed, “Since April 2021, there have been increased reports to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) of cases of inflammation of the heart…”.

“The CDC and FDA neglected to uphold public health interests and obstructed informed consent,” Hooker said.

“The erosion of trust runs so deep that the remedy must originate from an entity external to the CDC and FDA. We demand an immediate interagency investigation in order to fully inform and protect the American public.”

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

June 4, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Vaccinated Veterans MORE Likely to Die from COVID, VA Study Proves

It’s Even Worse to Be Boosted

BY IGOR CHUDOV | JUNE 2, 2023

The U.S. Veterans Administration oversees the medical care of the United States Armed Forces veterans. It has complete medical records of every veteran, including their hospitalizations, vaccinations, deaths, and more.

Therefore, studies of veterans that include sub-populations broken down by vaccination status provide accurate data about the effectiveness of COVID vaccines. I already reported on two such studies: one shows that COVID and flu vaccines are useless at preventing hospitalization due to COVID or flu, and another (posted on Feb 2022) proves that Covid vaccines cause myocarditis in veterans.

A new study was published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases and is worth a look.

The study is very straightforward: it looked at 1,459 veterans receiving Merck’s Molnupiravir and compared them with 63,281 veterans NOT receiving it. Its objective was to see if Molnupiravir was helpful (drumroll, it was not). The period covered was from Jan 1 to August 21, 2022.

The study has the breakdown of the Molnupiravir group and the standard-treatment group by vaccination status.

Such a breakdown allows us to check which veterans did better: the COVID-vaccinated or the unvaccinated.

Look at the “control group”: veterans who did NOT receive Molnupiravir and received standard care instead (circled above). Let’s make a nice table out of that:

Each category above contains only US veterans, mostly older males, so they are roughly the same age category. Therefore, age confounding can change the picture somewhat but should not change too much. They all have access to the same VA medical resources, so no medical disparities exist. The only difference between them is their vaccination status.

You would think that right in the midst of the deadly COVID pandemic, many lives of those older persons would be saved by safe, effective, science-backed COVID vaccines, right? Every TV program told us this last year, so it must be true! (note my sarcasm)

Guess what? It was the opposite! The category in the above table with the least hospitalizations and deaths is the veterans who refused COVID vaccines and remained unvaccinated. Those had only 15.86 veterans per 1,000 hospitalized or dead. The more vaccines the veterans received, the worse their outcome: double-dosed veterans had 24.90 hospitalizations/deaths per thousand and boosted veterans had 27 hospitalizations per thousand.

These ratios are derived from a population with precisely known vaccination status of each participant. They show that the Covid vaccine does not work – when vaccination statuses are known, and when outcomes are counted properly.

This finding is based on a plain reading of numbers provided (but not discussed) by the study authors. They only looked at the effectiveness of Molnupiravir. By the way, they found Monupiravir ineffective and harmful.

Had they looked, or were allowed to look at, the effectiveness of the COVID vaccines, based on their own data, their findings would be much more explosive.

If I may guess, had they tried to bring our attention to the ineffectiveness of COVID vaccines, the article would not have been published to maintain “scientific consensus,” nicely described by El Gato Malo. Despite all that, I am thankful to the authors who gave us the numbers we can properly interpret ourselves.

So, to recap, the unvaccinated veterans had the LOWEST rate of hospitalizations and deaths.

June 4, 2023 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Occurrence of Convulsions and Death After DTP Childhood Vaccination

Data Published Over 20 Years Ago Signaled Concern

By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH | Courageous Discourse | May 27, 2023

When the CDC ACIP Panel added the unsafe, ineffective, mRNA COVID-19 vaccines to the routine pediatric childhood schedule without full FDA licensure and with no assurances on long-term safety, the entire schedule was called into question from the perspectives of clinical indication, medical necessity, safety, and efficacy. Is it possible since the release of older vaccines that the medical community and CDC ACIP panel ignored solid data and safety concerns with established vaccines? I was participating in the Novel Coronavirus Southwestern Intergovernmental Committee deliberations in the Arizona Senate building, when a paper published over 20 years ago was presented on the diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis vaccines. The results were astonishing.

Geier and Geier published a massive study and one of the first of its kind at the time using the CDC Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System. The hypothesis was that febrile convulsions were more likely to occur with combined vaccine products that in some cases it would lead to death. Here is what they did: “The incidence rates calculated in this study are based on the estimates by the CDC of the number of doses administered during the study period: 121,954,137 doses of whole-cell DTP; 54,611,651 doses of acellular DTP (DTaP); and 9,335,142 doses of DT were administered. The background rate of development of convulsions by children is based on the estimates of the 1991 report by the Institute of Medicine of 0.2 per million children per day.”

Geier DA, Geier MR. An analysis of the occurrence of convulsions and death after childhood vaccination. Toxicol Mech Methods. 2002;12(1):71-8. doi: 10.1080/15376510209167937. PMID: 20597817.

They found more cases (occurrence/million) of febrile seizures and death after whole-cell DTP, DTaP, DT alone, in a descending, nonlinear graded fashion, and the risks were in a tight temporal relationship. This is concerning because of the associations between post-vaccine febrile seizures and childhood/adult epilepsy requiring medications and with the development of neuropsychiatric conditions including autism.

In summary, no vaccine is perfectly safe. Combining multiple products into single shots increases the reactogenicity and the risk of a catastrophic outcome. As parents and doctors begin to make more discerning choices they may consider going to less complex products, spreading them out, and giving them at later ages.

Alternatively, some parents and doctors may choose for a child to “go natural” or completely unvaccinated, which has the best overall outcomes in contemporary studies at this time. Diphtheria and pertussis are easily treated with antibiotics, so prompt recognition and treatment if such a rare infection occurs is always an option for parents. Tetanus is avoided with good wound care and antibiotics for deep tissue lacerations and puncture wounds.

Geier DA, Geier MR. An analysis of the occurrence of convulsions and death after childhood vaccination. Toxicol Mech Methods. 2002;12(1):71-8. doi: 10.1080/15376510209167937. PMID: 20597817.

McCullough PA. Analysis of health outcomes in vaccinated and unvaccinated children: Developmental delays, asthma, ear infections and gastrointestinal disorders “Going Natural” in First Year of Life Resulted in Better Health Outcomes, 2023

June 4, 2023 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

THE DURHAM REPORT, THE SPYGATE AND THE INEXTRICABLE TIE WITH THE ITALIAN DEEP STATE

By Cesare Sacchetti | The Eye Of The Needle | June 2, 2023

Fraud and treason. These are the first two words that come up to our mind when we read the Durham report.

In the report written by the special prosecutor appointed in 2019 by the then AG William Barr is narrated the plot to overthrow the Trump presidency.

When President Trump claims that this was the most subversive plot in the history of America, he’s certainly right.

An institution like the FBI, which was supposed to guard the regularity of the election, was the one who instead conspired to frame one of the candidates.

After the publication of the Durham report, the image of the FBI is definitely tainted.

And the most outrageous thing that shows how the FBI is a politicized institution is the fact that the latter acted on the orders of Hillary Clinton.

At page 98 of the report, we find the beginning of this conspiracy against Donald Trump.

Everything dates back to April 2016 when a legal firm that was working for the Clinton campaign was assigned a specific task.

Find, or better cook up, dirt to discredit Donald Trump. The legal firm hired Perkins Coie, a Washington based investigative agency.

Perkins Coie was tasked to find compromising information about Donald Trump in order to show that the Republican candidate was a sort of “Putin’s agent”.

This is the birth of the infamous Steele’s dossier named after his creator, Christopher Steele. Christopher Steele was a former agent of the British secret services, which apparently did not want to do anything with him.

Steel wrote a bogus dossier where he claims that Trump had intercourse in a Moscow hotel with Russian prostitutes whom were asked also to pee on the bed where Obama had supposedly slept years before.

This is the kind of outlandish garbage that was put into the dossier and this shows us, once again, the stunning proportions of this farce.

However, this “material” was the basis that allowed the FBI to launch the infamous Crossfire Hurricane probe.

Crossfire Hurricane is the beginning of the investigation where Trump was suspected of “Russian collusion”.

After the probe started, the FBI illegally wiretapped Carter Page, Trump’s former foreign consultant, and Paul Manafort, former director of Trump’s campaign.

And the Special Prosecutor is very clear in pointing out how their surveillance would have not been authorized without the Steele report.

The FBI and the intelligence community failed to do the proper due diligence of this information and the report, at page 96 of his report, points out this as well.

Durham writes that “neither U.S. law enforcement nor the Intelligence Community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.”

Evidence against Trump could not be founded because it was simply not there. And the institutions that were supposed to check Steele’s claims basically took his allegations at face value.

However, Crossfire Hurricane was launched also through the involvement of a foreign actor, which is Italy in this case.

In May 2016, George Papadopoulos, a former Trump consultant made some incautious revelations to Alexander Downer, an Australian diplomat close to the Clintons.

Papadopoulos said to Downer that he had received some compromising information about Hillary Clinton from Joseph Mifsud when he had met him in Italy two months before.

Joseph Mifsud is an enigmatic character. He is a Maltese professor at the Link Campus University in Rome, which is a university known to be quite close to the Anglosphere environment.

Actually, Papadopoulos took the bait of Mifsud who is close to the American Democratic party as well.

The Maltese professor has disappeared ever since. Some sources claim that the Italian secret service are hiding him because of his crucial role in the conspiracy against Trump.

However, we will come back later on the role played by the Italian deep state.

Now we must go back to Crossfire Hurricane.

Obama green lighted Spygate

Once the investigation against Trump was launched, President Obama was immediately informed about it.

In the summer of 2016 the word was spread in the intelligence community about the “Clinton Intelligence plan”.

Obama was briefed by then CIA director, Joseph Brennan, who said to the President how the Clinton campaign was working to frame Trump by falsely associating him with the Russian government.

Obama did not stop the plot nor he tried to halt the illegal FBI investigation. On the contrary, he gave a green light to it.

The conspiracy against Donald Trump had the blessing of Barack Obama who chose to help Hillary Clinton in her plan.

Some months later after this summit, in October, former Italian PM, Matteo Renzi, paid a visit to Obama in the White House.

In that period, Renzi was busy in supporting his failed Yes referendum campaign to reform the Italian constitution and he was also seeking endorsements from international relevant figures, like Obama.

Obama backed Renzi’s constitutional reform with a public statement that it clearly looked a meddling into Italy’s political affairs.

However, according to Papadopoulos, when Obama hosted Renzi at the White House asked him to play a part in the conspiracy against Donald Trump.

And here we have to meet new characters, who are the Occhioneros siblings, Giulio and Francesca Maria.

In that period, the Occhioneros were accused of illegal espionage against Italian institutional figures. The probe launched by the DA of Rome is called “EyePyramid” and it floods the pages of the Italian media.

The two were arrested and they later started denouncing a plot against them.

Giulio Occhionero is a nuclear engineer with advanced IT skills. He wrote to the then US Ambassador, Lewis Eisenberg, and to the US Congress.

Mr. Occhionero in his letters reveals the plot of the Italian authorities against him. According to him, his servers were hacked by the Italian postal police along with their respective IT division, the CNPAIC.

The goal of this operation was to plant some of Clinton’s email on the servers of his firm in the United States and then trying to associate these emails to Trump because of Occhionero’s relations with the Republican party.

So Occhionero in this story played the role of the classical patsy, chosen to frame someone else.

If his version is correct, the plot against Trump proceeded on two parallel ways: on the one hand, there was the American side of the FBI that was illegally spying on Trump campaign; on the other, there were the Italian authorities that were acting jointly with the US institutions to associate Trump with the Russian government.

In the first months of the conspiracy, we find tangible trace of this collaboration between the US and Italian authorities.

In April 2016, Kieran Ramsey, former legal attaché of the US embassy, wrote a letter to Nunzia Ciardi, director of the Italian postal police.

Ramsey’s letter to the Italian postal police

Ciardi is an interesting character because her name surfaced in the Italian mainstream media in 2021 when she was interviewed about the surveillance of the “no vax” activists.

It is still not clear to this day what was the extent of this surveillance and who authorized it considering the fact that the “no vax” activists were not committing any crime.

However, Ramsey wrote to Ciardi and he thanked her for the collaboration of her office in identifying the location of Occhionero’s emails.

It was April and Occhionero was still not investigated by the DA of Rome. Nevertheless, his name was in an official letter signed by the legal attaché of the American embassy and addressed to the Italian authorities.

The Italian engineer thinks that the kind of cybernetic attack that was enforced against his servers could not be operated without an ISP, Internet Service Provider, TIM, in this case.

And only a government could force to participate an ISP in this kind of hacking operation.

This also explains the visit paid by William Barr in Rome. Barr came to Italy to investigate Italy’s role in the Spygate case.

And here we can see once again the deep tie between the American and the Italian deep state. A “special relationship” that dates back to 1945 when after the loss of WW2, Italy has been living in a condition of limited sovereignity.

Italy has not been enjoying an autonomous foreign policy like the other countries who joined NATO. Italy’s foreign policy was mostly dictated by Washington and when Rome did not want to comply was threatened and harassed like what happened to former Italy’s PM, Aldo Moro, who was warned by Henry Kissinger to halt his policy.

Therefore, the Italian deep state finds itself in a condition of subordination to Washington. US governments used Italy as a strategic platform to keep up the old unipolar order of the past century.

This probably explains why Washington chose Italy to carry out its subversive plans against Trump. The Italian deep state is a sort of rogue agent, or just muscle for the US side to use in these kinds of “tricky” situations.

This also explains why Italy, once again, played a fundamental role in another subversive plot against Trump whose name is “Italygate”, which we exposed in this blog in December 2020.

After all, the Italian establishment can rule Italy only with the protection of the Washington guarantor and it must execute the orders of the latter.

When Trump stepped into the political arena, both sides saw a lethal treat. Trump had no interest in pursuing that relationship with the Italian establishment.

His mission was to free America from the rule of the Washington lobbies, which had been controlling Italy for decades.

Trump ended this axis. He severed the umbilical cord that tied the Italian deep state to the American one.

This is why the Durham report closed a cycle. A cycle where the walls were closed in on those who committed treason against the President of the United States.

Although the report does not explicitly mention Italy’s role, Trump has probably the proof about the involvement of everyone in this coup d’état. And this not only haunts the nights of the several people in Washington.

It haunts the nights of several people in Rome too.

June 4, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception | , , , , | Leave a comment

Europe’s Digital Services Act Puts Free Speech at the Mercy of Eurocrats

BY DAVID THUNDER | THE FREEDOM BLOG | JUNE 3, 2023

The European Union’s Internal Market Commissioner, Thierry Breton, was apparently miffed that Elon Musk withdrew Twitter from the EU’s “voluntary code of practice against disinformation.” He was sufficiently put out by Twitter’s withdrawal from the “voluntary code” that he felt the need to publicly reprimand Twitter for not gratefully submitting to the European Union’s expert guidance: “You can run but you can’t hide… Beyond voluntary commitments, fighting disinformation will be legal obligation under Digital Services Act as of August 25th.”

The declared aim of the new Digital Service Act is “to contribute to the proper functioning of the internal market for intermediary services by setting out harmonised rules for a safe, predictable and trusted online environment that facilitates innovation and in which fundamental rights enshrined in the Charter, including the principle of consumer protection, are effectively protected.”

Who can argue against a “safe, predictable and trusted online environment”? Who would argue against “consumer protection”? And who would argue against Mr Breton’s commitment to the fight against “disinformation”? I certainly would, because when a person or institution in a position of great power endorses values like “predictability,” rails against “disinformation,” and promises to keep us all “safe” on the internet, you can be sure that it will be “safety,” “predictability,” and “disinformation,” as viewed from their self-serving ideological and political perspective.

I am just as worried as Mr Breton about “disinformation,” but my chief concern is with disinformation coming from official sources, which can do an extraordinary amount of harm due to the extraordinary reach and prestige of official organisations. It is these same organisations that Mr Breton would like to put in charge of policing “disinformation”: organisations like national governments, that have been among the most frequent perpetrators of false and misleading information, on matters of no small moment, from the efficacy and safety of Covid vaccines, masks and lockdowns to the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the true standing of climate “science,” and the potential harms to the economy and food supply chain of aggressive climate interventions such as the expropriation of farmland.

The Digital Services Act is an endless maze of complicated regulations worthy of a team of lawyers. Seeing as I don’t have a budget to hire a team of lawyers, I decided to skim through the Act for myself. It does not make for pleasant bedtime reading, not only because it is a morass of complicated legalese, but also, because what hides behind this legalese is an attempt by EU politicians to get social media platforms under their thumb, through

  • the obligation on the part of social media companies to periodically submit content moderation and “risk mitigation” reports to EU bureacrats
  • EU supervision of social media platforms’ policing of “harmful” information, which could potentially include health misinformation as well as “illegal hate speech”
  • the creation of new emergency powers in the European Commission to “require” social media platforms to take actions to “prevent, eliminate or limit” any use of their services that might “contribute” to a “threat” to public security or public health

… and all backed up by crippling fines of up to 6% of a company’s worldwide turnover for non-compliance. Yes, you heard that right: up to six percent of a company’s worldwide turnover.

At bottom, the Digital Services Act is an attempt to ramp up the level of control that EU bureacrats have over the flow of information on social media platforms. You would have to have a very short historical memory to think that broad powers of censorship will generally be used to advance the cause of truth and justice. Whether Mr Thierry Breton and his colleagues will be successful in forcing social media companies to do their bidding, this much is clear: the Digital Services Act creates a European legal environment that is increasingly hostile to free speech.

June 4, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

The climate scaremongers: BBC Verify should investigate the BBC

By Paul Homewood | TCW Defending Freedom | June 2, 2023

The BBC has set up a new ‘disinformation unit’, BBC Verify. Marianna Spring, the BBC’s Disinformation Correspondent, says she is currently studying ‘the UK’s conspiracy theory movement’ which she claims has ‘evolved and intensified’ since the Chinese coronavirus outbreak. Spring identified ‘alternative media’ as a source of so-called conspiracy theories.

‘I’m looking at the way alternative media is funded, I’m looking at its impact on local communities, I’m looking at its connections with far-right figures and also its foreign links,’ she said.

The millennial journalist’s reference to ‘far right’ rather gives the game away. Evidently disinformation from the left wing or globalists is OK then! And what she means by far right is not neo-Nazi, but ordinary conservative, Christian views, once regarded as mainstream and still held by most of the British public.

The whole thing is laughable anyway, because the BBC itself is one of the biggest sources of disinformation, certainly where climate change is concerned. So I suggest BBC Verify begin by looking into the BBC’s own coverage.

Here are a few examples of the factual errors, omission of relevant information and sheer bias which have featured in BBC climate reporting just in the last year or so:

•       The BBC reported that the 2021 Atlantic hurricane season was ‘the third most active on record’. It was not; there have been 32 years with a higher count.

•       The BBC claimed last summer that ‘hurricanes are among the most violent storms on Earth and there’s evidence they’re getting more powerful’. But according to the hurricane experts at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, there has been no increase in the frequency or intensity of Atlantic hurricanes since the late 1800s.

•       A claim that ‘punishing weather conditions linked to climate change have eroded so much of the coast at Happisburgh, Norfolk’. The BBC have been unable to provide evidence for this, and the British Geological Society say that the coastline has been eroding at the same rate as now for the past 5,000 years.

•       In October 2021, the BBC claimed that heat pumps are much cheaper to run than gas boilers. The opposite is the case, as the BBC eventually admitted.

•       In October 2022, the BBC reported that the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard had warmed by 4C in the last 50 years. They failed to report that temperatures there plunged by almost as much between 1950 and 1970.

•       The BBC reported at the time of last summer’s Pakistan floods that one third of the country had been submerged. The real figure, as evidenced by NASA satellites, was less than 10 per cent.

•       Last year Sri Lanka experienced a catastrophic collapse in farming output, following a ban on imported fertiliser, which was designed purely to reduce GHG emissions. The BBC has been extremely reluctant to publicise the real reason, instead first blaming the food shortages on Putin, and then claiming that the ban was an attempt to ‘protect dwindling foreign currency reserves’.

•       A classic example of BBC deception appeared in a recent report on solar power, when they published a graph showing solar power now accounted for more than 10 per cent of the world’s generating capacity. They omitted the fact that, because solar power is so intermittent, it only accounts for 3 per cent of the world’s actual electricity.

•       The BBC often regurgitates propaganda from official bodies without any attempt to challenge or fact check. Last year they uncritically reported the World Meteorological Organisation’s claims that ‘extreme weather events are the new normal’. There is no evidence that extreme weather is getting worse, something which even the IPCC has been forced to admit.

•       According to the BBC, a sighting of European bee-eaters in England last year was ‘a worrying sign of how our climate is changing’. British bird books are full of details of past sightings as far back as the 18th century.

•       One particularly silly study found willingsupport from the BBC last year, claiming that British trees are at risk from ‘drier weather under climate change’, even though the country has been getting wetter!

•       In July 2022, the BBC reported that England had its driest start to the year since 1976. In fact it had only been the driest since 2010.

•       It was very hot in Delhi last May. The BBC was quick to blame it on climate change, with claims of a new record high temperature in Delhi. In fact none of the long-running weather stations showed a record, with data at the Indian Meteorological Dept’s base station in Delhi proving that it was more than a degree hotter in May 1944.

•       It was dry in February this year, but the BBC’s claims of water shortages were simply not credible. So they included in their report a photo of a near-empty reservoir, which was quickly proved to have been taken two summers previously.

•       The BBC was eager to report that the UK heatwave last July had killed more than 3,000 people. However the Office for National Statistics analysis, on which the BBC’s claims were based, actually said no such thing. They also pointed out that excess deaths had been running at high levels throughout the spring, summer and autumn of last year.

•       The BBC’s green bias is on display all the time, exemplified by its choice of interviewees and experts. In March 2022, Radio 4 broadcast a half-hour programme considering whether Shell should develop the massive Cambo oil field off the Shetland Islands. All three interviewees were ardent lobbyists for renewable energy, so unsurprisingly they argued against Cambo, something for which the BBC was forced to apologise for.

•       Only two weeks ago, the wretched BBC claimed that the recent tragic floods in Italy were due to climate change, even though such floods have been only too common in the past.

Roger Harrabin, the BBC’s former Energy and Environment Analyst, let the cat out of the bag last year when he tweeted that the BBC has long been trying to ‘knit climate change into the fabric of the daily news’. In other words, try to link every bit of bad weather, famine or other disaster to global warming, in the most surreptitious way possible. Little wonder that only 44 per cent of Brits trust the BBC’s journalists to be truthful.

The above examples are only the tip of the iceberg. It would be a full-time job for Marianna Spring and her team to monitor all the disinformation the BBC spews out.

June 4, 2023 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | 1 Comment

EU’s Green Deal to have dire implications for East African farmers — study

North Africa Post | June 1, 2023

As the EU executive is adopting intermediate proposals in its international climate policy as outlined in the European Green Deal, this will have serious and multifaceted implications for Africa, according to a recent study by Eastern Africa Farmers Federation (EAFF).

The Green Deal provides a road map for a socioecological transition to a low-carbon future and the building blocks for a green economic growth strategy to address climate change, energy, and biodiversity.

According to Stephen Muchiri, CEO of the Nairobi-based EAFF, the stringent policies outlined in the Farm to Fork (F2F) and Chemical Sustainability Strategies will greatly affect global trade in agricultural inputs and outputs and, by extension, also the economies of African countries that greatly depend on agriculture. Muchiri also warns that the new additional requirements, as set by the European Commission, threaten the livelihoods of many small producers and may significantly reduce the export earnings of East African countries such as Uganda, which is the second largest horticulture exporter in the region.

Horticultural exports from East Africa to the European Union are valued at more than $2.3 billion, with smallholder farmers contributing up to 70% of the export volumes. The study revealed that farmers would be overburdened by the new regulations because substantial costs will be introduced with the new specifications on standards, certifications, logistics, and carbon border adjustment mechanisms (CBAM).

This prompts Muchiri to warn that the implementation of the Green Deal in its current form falls short in support of progressive and sustainable export-oriented farming for most East African smallholder farmers as it will introduce additional constraints that will impact the region’s competitiveness, sustainability, and livelihoods negatively, so whereas the EU will achieve its goals, the countries of export will be reeling from significant production and compliance challenges.

June 4, 2023 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | , | Leave a comment

US Companies Knew ‘Forever Chemicals’ Health Risks From the Start – Report

By Sergey Lebedev – Sputnik – 02.06.2023

Forever Chemicals is an unofficial name for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) – dubbed so for their resistance to breaking down.

American chemical companies were aware of the health and environmental risk of PFAS but intentionally failed to disclose them, new research published in Annals of Global Health journal has shown.

Scientists examined documents from the companies DuPont and 3M and are sure that these corporations knew they were selling poisonous or highly-toxic substances.

‘Forever Chemicals’ began in 1946, when DuPont introduced Teflon nonstick cookware and promoted it as a revolution in cooking. Teflon is one of th best-known ‘Forever Chemicals’ used almost everywhere along with other PFAS. These substances are widely used in clothing, household goods and even packages of food products. PFAS are extremely resistant to breaking down, and after five decades of market expansion, it became obvious that they are slowly killing people and environment.

However, the recent research has shown that chemical giants falsely pretended they knew nothing. Just like tobacco companies hid information about lung cancer, DuPont and 3M suppressed the publication of data that cast ‘Forever Chemicals’ as dangerous substances, according to the research.

In 1961, corporate researchers discovered that Teflon leads to an increase in the liver size of rats. In 1979, a company discovered that dogs that ingested small doses of C8 – another ‘Forever Chemical’ – died in two days. Meanwhile, in 1980, companies learned that 25% of pregnant women who worked in their labs with C8 gave birth to children with birth defects. Companies never warned their female employees about the risks, nor made this information public.

As one of the paper’s authors, Nadia Gaber, MD, PhD: “Having access to these documents allows us to see what the manufacturers knew and when, but also how polluting industries keep critical public health information private.”

The authors dubbed their research “The Devil They Knew,” stressing the fact that corporations deliberately misled consumers.

In the 2000s, the American environmental watchdog fined DuPont $16.45 million – the largest civil penalty in the ecology domain at that time. However, this was nothing compared with the billions of dollars in revenues the company received from selling ‘Forever Chemicals’.

Allegedly, nearly every US citizen now has PFAS in their blood, including newborn babies, while DuPont and 3M enjoy their positions in Forbes and Fortune lists.

June 4, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Environmentalism, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment