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German regional leader calls for repair of Nord Stream

RT | August 28, 2023

The leader of the German state of Saxony has argued that the Nord Stream 1 natural gas pipeline linking to Russia, which was ruptured in an underwater explosion last September, should be repaired. Minister-President Michael Kretschmer warned that unless action is taken soon, sea water will damage the conduit beyond repair.

In an interview with Germany’s WirtschaftsWoche magazine published on Monday, Kretschmer said: “It is important because this infrastructure can secure our energy supply in five or ten years.”

He insisted that it is the “most normal [thing] in the world that the pipeline is repaired, that is, the water is removed and it is sealed and thereby secured for starters.”

The Saxony leader stressed that no one knows what the situation will look like in a decade from now, and that “keeping as many options open for yourself as possible would be a sign of a smart politician.”

Back in June, Economy Minister Robert Habeck warned that Germany may have to scale back or even shut down some of its industrial capacity, should deliveries of Russian natural gas through Ukraine stop next year. He said authorities in Berlin should not disregard the economic risks from energy shortages.

Doubts remain as to whether Ukraine and Russia will renew a contract for gas transit to Europe, set to expire at the end of 2024, as the conflict continues.

Habeck explained that while Germany has mostly weaned itself off Russian energy, other EU member states, such as Austria, Slovakia, Italy, and Hungary are still very much dependent on Russian gas. Should supplies from Russia be discontinued, Berlin will be obliged to come to their rescue under the EU’s gas-sharing rules, creating problems for industrial consumers at home, the minister noted at the time.

The Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline and one leg of Nord Stream 2 were destroyed in a series of near-simultaneous blasts off the Danish island of Bornholm in the Baltic Sea in late September last year. In February this year, veteran US journalist Seymour Hersh claimed that the US was behind the sabotage.

Reports in the German media over the summer have suggested that authorities in Berlin suspect the possible involvement of the Ukrainian secret service in the pipelines’ destruction.

August 28, 2023 Posted by | Economics | , | 1 Comment

Pakistan court drops sedition case against ex-PM Khan: Lawyer

Press TV – August 28, 2023

A Pakistani court dismissed a sedition case lodged against Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Imran Khan on Monday, according to a court order and his lawyer.

Khan, 70, a former cricket player, was jailed on corruption charges earlier this month.

In March, he was charged with sedition on a complaint that alleged one of his speeches amounted to sedition. The case was registered in the southwestern city of Quetta, the capital of Balochistan province.

Following an appeal by the former prime minister, the Balochistan High Court said prosecutors had failed to obtain the required consent from the federal or provincial government to lodge the charges of sedition.

Hence the court ruled that the charges are “without lawful authority and are of no legal effect,” meaning that the authorities should quash the case.

Khan’s lawyer Naeem Panjutha also made this announcement in a post on the X platform, formerly known as Twitter.

“God be praised,” she wrote on X celebrating the dismissal of the case.

A US publication has obtained a classified document, suggesting Washington pushed for the removal of Imran Khan from office over his neutrality on the Ukraine war.
Khan, who lost power after being defeated in a parliamentary confidence vote in April 2022, is also currently serving a three-year jail term after being convicted of corruption.

He is expecting a high court in Islamabad to overturn his conviction and jail sentence.

He said the cases lodged against him were politically motivated to keep him out of power. He says the country’s powerful military is behind these cases.

The three-year jail sentence issued by a lower court disqualifies him from taking part in elections scheduled for November, though it is likely to be delayed until at least early next year.

Khan has been barred from holding political office for five years.

In past months, Pakistani authorities have made widespread arrests targeting Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party in an attempt to crush his grassroots support, causing nationwide anger against the country’s military for ordering the crackdown.

According to several independent surveys, the PTI will win a landslide victory in the next elections if the party is allowed to run a political campaign without restrictions.

August 28, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties | | Leave a comment

Elon Musk to Sue George Soros-Linked NGOs For Spreading ‘Misinformation’ to Stifle Free Speech

BY DR FREDERICK ATTENBOROUGH | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | AUGUST 28, 2023

Elon Musk has announced that his company, X (formerly Twitter), will sue partner organisations of George Soros’s Open Society Foundation (OSF) after the NGO network was accused of spreading ‘hate misinformation’ to justify an unprecedented crackdown on lawful free speech.

Musk made the statement in response to an article by journalist Ben Scallan, in which he claims that OSF-linked leftist NGOs are manipulating the statistics to show a steep rise in hate crimes across Ireland – despite the government’s own data indicating the opposite is true – and helping to usher in a new hate speech law that will restrict free speech and open up new pathways for political persecution.

The article was reposted on X by Twitter Files journalist Michael Shellenberger, who added: “The reason politicians and Soros-funded NGOs are spreading hate misinformation is to justify a draconian crackdown on freedom of speech.”

To this, Elon Musk simply replied, “Exactly. X will be filing legal action to stop this. Can’t wait for discovery to start!”

It’s unclear which OSF-linked groups Scallan is referring to exactly or which NGOs will be the target of Musk’s suit – although interestingly the self-styled “free-speech absolutist” has recently threatened to sue the Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), having accused the U.K.-registered NGO of using flawed methods to promote “misleading narratives” and of running a “scare campaign” that has driven away advertisers from the platform. Although the CCDH – which is listed in journalist Matt Taibbi’s report into the organisations comprising the “censorship-industrial complex” – doesn’t declare its funding on its site, Companies House information shows it received almost £1 million in 2022.

Despite an Ipsos survey commissioned by Ireland’s Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth showing that over eight in 10 Irish people feel “very comfortable” living next door to people with different nationalities, ethnicities, genders, sexual orientations, disabilities, religious beliefs (and non), or marital statuses, the most up-to-date Garda Síochána data suggests the country has actually seen a 29% increase in reported ‘hate crimes’ in 2022 compared to the previous year.

Of course, an increase in reporting is not necessarily the same thing as an increase in actual hate crimes or incidents. As Scallan points out, the discrepancy between these two data sets is partly if not entirely explained by the fact that Soros’s NGO network has for many years been running campaigns to lower the threshold for hate crime reporting in Ireland, while encouraging citizens to report hate crimes and hate incidents to the police.

In fairness, the Garda does at least acknowledge this, having conceded that a “very low threshold of perception” currently applies to hate crime reporting. Yet methodological sophistication of this kind has been curiously absent from proposals put forward by Ireland’s governing classes that argue for a new, allegedly desperately needed, hate crime law. In those proposals the distinction between perceived and actual hate crimes has all but collapsed: ‘increased reporting’ is breezily conflated with ‘increased crime’ such that for politicians like Justice Minister Helen McEntee and Senator Pauline O’Reilly the need for intensified state censorship of perfectly lawful speech that certain sub-sections of Irish society happen to regard as ‘hateful’ now seems entirely unproblematic.

This confusion isn’t just to be found in the debating chambers of the Dáil and Seanad Éireann. It constitutes the underlying philosophy of the country’s draft Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill, in which a hate crime is defined as an episode “perceived by the victim, or any other person, to have been motivated by prejudice, based on actual or perceived age, disability, race, colour, nationality, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation or gender”.

As Scallan points out, under this definition, you don’t even have to be the victim of an alleged crime to report it. “A random bystander who has nothing to do with the event can say, ‘I think it was based on prejudice,’ and it will be categorised as such.”

By and large, of course, it won’t be “random bystanders” with a priggish manner, flapping ears, and a little too much time on their hands that end up weaponising this definition of what constitutes a ‘hate crime’. The real damage will be done by activist groups and George Soros-funded NGOs bent on criminalising perfectly lawful views that they happen not to like for doctrinaire ideological reasons.

“Will mocking memes be tolerated?” asked independent senator Ronan Mullen during a debate on the proposed legislation in the Senate earlier this year. “Will carrying a placard stating, ‘Men cannot breastfeed’ warrant a hate-speech investigation or up to five years’ imprisonment, a lifelong label as a criminal hater, and all of the stigma and life limitation that goes with that? Nobody actually knows.”

Nobody actually knows, no. But each of Mr Mullen’s hypothetical scenarios could potentially lead to a reported ‘hate crime’, which would then feature in the Garda’s annual reporting dataset, which would then perpetuate the myth that Ireland is becoming less tolerant, which would then lead to calls for even more draconian hate speech laws, which would then… and so on and so forth, in an endless cycle of intensifying state censorship.

Perhaps the most shocking of all the authoritarian provisions in the Bill that flow from this vague, entirely subjective definition of ‘hate’, is one that will make it a criminal offense to possess material on one’s person or in one’s home likely to “incite hatred”.

With regard to the obvious question of how something saved on, say, a mobile phone could possibly “incite hatred”, the Bill simply reverses the usual burden of proof in criminal cases, presuming “that the material [is] not intended for personal use”, and that a suspect must be planning to disseminate it, unless they can prove otherwise.

If passed, this provision will allow police to raid homes and seize devices, with a potential penalty of a year in prison and a €5,000 fine just for refusing to give up your passwords. Possession of hateful material will carry a penalty of up to five years in prison.

Despite many critics calling the law “Orwellian” and campaigning against it, the Irish parliament’s lower house adopted it by a vote of 160 against 14 earlier this year. The legislation now only needs the approval of the upper house in October to become law.

Dr. Frederick Attenborough is the Communications Officers of the Free Speech Union.

August 28, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | 2 Comments

A New Covid ‘Variant’… Just in Time for Election Season!

By Ron Paul | August 28, 2023

Just four and a half months since President Biden declared an end to the Covid “emergency,” the media is suddenly full of stories about the return of Covid. This time a new “variant” is being rolled out and the media, in collusion with big Pharma and the fear-industrial complex, are churning out stories about how forced masking is making a comeback.

Also, the “unvaccinated” are again to be denied basic human rights in the name of fighting a virus that the vaccine demonstrably does not protect against.

In short, they are desperately trying to revive the tyranny, insanity, and utter irrationality of the two-year Covid scare. And they are pretending none of us remembers how they destroyed society with their lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccine mandates. They are hoping that none of us will remember the suicides, lost jobs, broken marriages, increased alcoholism and drug abuse, and the rest of what went along with the world’s experiment with global lockdown.

Even Fauci himself is back – like a moth drawn to the light of publicity. Despite all the scientific evidence that the lockdowns were a disaster, that they did far more harm than good, Fauci has re-emerged with his trademark arrogance and claimed that they were the right thing to do and should be done again if that’s what it takes to force people to take the vaccine. A vaccine that does not work.

They won’t even allow us to mention the spike in all-around mortality or the millions who may have been vaccine-injured the first time around. They want us to think that 20-year-old world-class athletes have always just dropped dead of heart attacks out of the blue. It’s all normal! Don’t question it! What are you, some kind of conspiracy theorist? Are you a science-denier?

Yes, look for a renewal of all those old hollow phrases used to attack those of us who can see with our own eyes and hear with our own ears. Their slogans are meant to silence any debate. The same “experts” like Fauci who claimed “I am the science” are back and they shamelessly demand to silence us again.

The big question is… why? Why are they doing this and how do they think they can get away with it a second time? One reason they believe they can get away with it again is that no one has ever been punished for what they did the first time. The Federal Government made sure that the pharmaceutical companies would not be liable for vaccine damages.

The public figures who openly became monsters, demanding the unvaccinated be drummed out of society and maybe even off the face of the earth have not been shamed or shunned. Politicians who displayed cowardice and worse have not been voted out of office for their treachery.

Why are they coming back around for another round of Covid tyranny? Fear is a weapon to gain control. Last time around they generated fear to radically change how America voted. Suddenly everyone was mailed ballots. How closely were they checked? No one knew and no one dared ask. The people who did ask about the election are now facing jail terms.

They want us to shut up while they do it again. Will we?

Copyright © 2023 by RonPaul Institute

August 28, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , | 3 Comments

The Washington Post Calls For Reducing Free Speech To Improve Democracy

By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | August 28, 2023

In very post-2016 fashion, The Washington Post last week published an article implying democracy might require curbs on freedom of speech. This unsettling approach suggests concerns around “misinformation” on social networks supersede freedom of speech, a move that has elicited intense debate and, rightly so; criticism.

In what appears to be a shift in public discourse towards further censorship, the widely-read Washington Post article critiqued Elon Musk’s reinstatement of former President Donald Trump on the social media platform, X, previously known as Twitter.

The article suggested that the proliferation of what it calls “political misinformation” disturbs democracy, sparking concern amongst proponents of free speech.

The perspective is reflected in the reporting by The Washington Post journalists Naomi Nix and Sarah Ellison. However, their piece lacks critical analysis of the ambiguity surrounding the term “misinformation” and fails to address the consequential question of how to moderate content in situations where politicians’ statements are arguably false or misleading.

The article’s glaring omission of any mention of the First Amendment – a core pillar of American democracy fostering media freedoms – also raised eyebrows amidst media and legal circles.

The Washington Post reporters worryingly suggest the retreat of social media companies from combating online falsehoods could impact the 2024 presidential election. They fault Musk, along with Facebook and YouTube, for taking a step back from reining in what they call misleading claims and conspiracy theories.

Nix and Ellison also critique X for permitting Tucker Carlson’s President Trump interview, which they deem as a platform for Trump to reiterate his allegations about the 2020 election. They contend that social media should only host political content if its accuracy can be proven, posing an unrealistic expectation that conceals underlying issues of censorship under the pretext of curbing “misleading” or “hateful” speech.

August 28, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | 4 Comments

Pfizer drip feeds data from its pregnancy trial of covid-19 vaccine

Analysis of the data so far shows the trial was underpowered, poorly designed and incomplete

BY MARYANNE DEMASI, PHD | AUGUST 24, 2023

In January 2021, in the absence of any human data in pregnancy, the CDC stated on its website that mRNA vaccines were “unlikely to pose a specific risk for people who are pregnant.”

Former CDC director Rochelle Walensky backed it up with a full-throated endorsement of covid-19 vaccination in pregnancy.

“There is no bad time to get vaccinated,” said Walensky.

“Get vaccinated while you’re thinking about having a baby, while you’re pregnant with your baby or after you’ve delivered your baby,” she added.

Behind the scenes however, Pfizer was scrambling to conduct a clinical trial of its vaccine in pregnant women.

By February 2022, Pfizer revealed it still did “not yet have a complete data set.” Its statement read:

“The environment changed during 2021 and by September 2021, COVID-19 vaccines were recommended by applicable recommending bodies (e.g., ACIP in the U.S.) for pregnant women in all participating/planned countries, and as a result the enrollment rate declined significantly.”

This month, Pfizer finally posted some trial results on clinicaltrials.gov.

The data do not appear in a peer-reviewed journal or a pre-print, nor has it been submitted to the FDA for evaluation.

I spoke with experts who have analysed the data with a fine-tooth comb and made some alarming observations.

Trial design

Pfizer originally planned to recruit 4000 healthy women aged 18 or older who were 24 to 34 weeks pregnant. Half would be randomised to the vaccine and the other half to a saline placebo.

The efficacy and safety of the vaccine would be determined by assessing covid-19 cases, antibody responses, and adverse events.

Peculiarly, Pfizer planned to vaccinate all the mothers in the placebo group, one month after giving birth to their babies.

Retsef Levi, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management said that vaccinating mothers in the placebo group during the assessment period would introduce a new variable into the experiment and “corrupt” the data.

“We now know that mRNA from the vaccine is detected in the breast milk, so those babies born from mothers who were all vaccinated after giving birth, are also potentially exposed to mRNA through breastfeeding,” explained Levi.

“This corrupts the comparison of the two groups of babies because you don’t have a true control group anymore,” he added.

Sample size too small

Less than 10% of the originally planned 4000 study participants ended up in the trial.

“Only 348 women were recruited – 174 in each arm – meaning that the trial was never going to have the statistical power, particularly when analysing potential harms,” said Levi.

Notably, study protocols indicate that Pfizer was given the green light as early as May 2021 by drug regulators to scale back the trial and reduce the sample size.

“To me, the wording in the protocol suggests that the FDA or another regulator basically gave Pfizer permission to do less,” remarked Levi.

“It’s not surprising though. The vaccine had already been recommended for pregnant women and many have taken it, so there is no upside to completing a trial that may detect signals of potential harms. It can only create problems for them, right?” he added.

Given that pregnant women were being vaccinated with a product that had not undergone rigorous safety testing in pregnancy, the FDA was asked if and why it allowed Pfizer to scale back the trial.

The FDA replied, “As a general matter, FDA does not comment on interactions it may or may not be having with sponsors about their clinical trials.”

Angela Spelsberg, an epidemiologist and medical director at the Comprehensive Cancer Center Aachen in Germany agreed that the integrity of the study had been compromised.

“There are just not enough babies in this trial to detect rare or very rare adverse events. We learned from studies in animals that lipid nanoparticles in the vaccine can deposit in many organs including the ovaries, so we must be extremely cautious about the potential negative impacts of the vaccine on reproductive health,” said Spelsberg.

“The scientific community urgently needs access to the pregnancy study data on the patient level for transparency and independent scrutiny of vaccine safety and efficacy because regulatory oversight is failing,” she added.

Exclusion criteria

The small sample size may have been the result of the strict selection process.

Pfizer recruited participants with an impeccable pregnancy history, and most were in their third trimester (27-34 weeks gestation), a stage when the baby’s major development has already occurred.

“It appears that they cherry picked the mothers to get the best results,” said Levi. “We have no idea what impact this vaccine has on the early stages of development of an embryo or foetus, because all the women had advanced pregnancies when they were recruited.”

Spelsberg agreed.

“The first trimester is particularly vulnerable to adverse reproductive health outcomes,” she said.

“Based on only weak observational evidence, regulators have reassured the public that the vaccines are safe throughout pregnancy. However, we don’t have reliable evidence on the vaccine’s impact on miscarriages, malformation, foetal deaths, and maternal health risks because they excluded pregnant women from pivotal trials,” added Spelsberg.

Missing data

Levi also noticed that “only partial data” were published.

“It doesn’t include any important metrics such as covid infections or antibody levels and its says we must wait until July 2024 for those results. It’s disturbing to say the least,” said Levi.

Also missing from the dataset was a full account of birth outcomes. Of the 348 women in the trial, Pfizer only reported on the birth of 335 live babies.

Of the 13 pregnancies unaccounted for, Pfizer reported one foetal death (stillbirth) in the vaccine group and the outcome of the other 12 pregnancies remains unknown.

“This is unacceptable,” said Levi. “Failing to report the outcome of 12 pregnancies could mask a potentially concerning signal of the vaccine in pregnancy. What happened to the babies, did they all die? Were their mothers vaccinated or unvaccinated?”

Trial dropouts

Finally, there were quite a few babies that were lost to follow-up in the trial.

“Twenty-nine babies in the placebo arm didn’t get to the end of the 6-month surveillance period, versus 15 babies in the vaccine arm. That’s almost double. Again, this is concerning and requires a detailed and transparent explanation,” said Levi.

Overall, both Levi and Spelsberg say the delays and failure to disclose vital data are unacceptable.

“Pfizer took a year to publish the data. When they finally did, it is incomplete. And we are expected to wait until July 2024 for the next batch of results, while authorities continue to recommend the vaccine in pregnant women,” said Levi.

“We still don’t have solid scientific evidence whether this vaccine is safe for pregnant women and their babies,” said Spelsberg. “It’s a tragedy and a scandal that vaccine use has been recommended, even mandated to women before, during and after pregnancy.”

Questions were put to Pfizer, but the company did not respond by the deadline.

Moderna is also conducting a clinical trial of its mRNA vaccine in pregnancy, but no data are available.

August 28, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Will This Man Prevent World War Three?

By Patrick MacFarlane | What They’re Not Tellin’ You | August 28, 2023

In April, Tucker Carlson, the most popular show host in American news media, was unceremoniously fired from Fox News.

He has since taken to the platform “X,” formerly Twitter, to continue publishing his own program.

Last week, during the first Republican primary debates, Tucker posted an exclusive (softball) interview with former President Donald Trump.

The episode received 260 million “impressions” within the first day.

Although an “impression” on Twitter only counts as an appearance in someone’s feed, if only one-tenth of those impressions equated to one view, the viewership would still be 23 million people. In comparison, Tucker’s Fox News program, Tucker Carlson Tonight, averaged 3.25 million viewers in March 2023.

The exclusive interview with Trump was a master stroke by both figures. It allowed Donald Trump to get his message across in a long format without actually muddying himself on the debate stage. Meanwhile, Vivek Ramaswamy played, in effect, the role of Trump’s stand-in, but still won the debate in his own right.

Tucker walked away with incredible numbers, even if not as spectacular as the 230 million impressions would suggest.

Yesterday, RT reported that Tucker Carlson has “strongly” requested a meeting with Vladimir Putin, ostensibly to publish as an episode of his new program.

With all these developments, an attempt to decode the former Fox News host’s real role in the media landscape is akin to cracking a modern-day enigma.

Many laud Tucker as a rogue voice, fighting the establishment, using a microphone as a holy scepter.

It cannot be denied that on some critical issues like opposing escalation over Ukraine, Tucker Carlson’s voice is vitally important. But, Tucker Carlson has his own interests, and a background that does not suggest he is some populist hero, or an antiwar dove (of critical importance, he certainly is not on China).

That said, it would be immensely valuable for the West to see an intimate and honest one-on-one interview between Vladimir Putin and Western news media—one that was not intent on painting Putin as the new Hitler.

Maybe Tucker Carlson, though imperfect, is the figure best positioned to do it?

When America’s Commander-in-Chief, Joe Biden, still has not spoken with Putin since the February 2022 invasion, its puzzling that the job defaults to the United States’ most popular current events news host.

Exactly what does that mean—and what will come of it?

August 28, 2023 Posted by | Militarism | , , | 1 Comment

Vivek Caves on Plan to Cut Aid to Israel: ‘We Would Never Cut Off Aid to Israel Until Israel Told Us They Were Ready’

By Chris Menahan | Information Liberation | August 27, 2023

GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy ran away from his proposal to cut aid to Israel by 2028 on Saturday, instead promising that he would provide endless US aid to Israel “until Israel told us they were ready for it” to be cut off.

“To be clear, we would never cut off aid to Israel unless Israel told us they were ready for it,” Ramaswamy told an Israeli news outlet in an interview he shared to his own Twitter page.

“The US-Israel relationship will be stronger by the end of my first term than it has ever been in US history and than it ever will be under any of those other administrations if anybody else is elected,” he said.

The idea Israel would ever ask the US to stop giving them billions of US taxpayer dollars for free is just comical. As I noted earlier this week, Israel regularly uses the billions we give them to buy US treasuries — effectively lending us back our own aid money and charging us interest. The US Treasury’s latest numbers showed Israel is currently holding $46 billion in US treasuries.

Ramaswamy also pledged that he wants to expand the Abraham Accords — a scam worked out by the Israel lobby which consists of bribing Arab kings to normalize relations with Israel by offering them billions of US taxpayer dollars and high-tech weaponry which can be used to oppress their own populations — with the “Abraham Accords 2.0.”

He said his “2.0” plan would bring “Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar [and] Indonesia” into the pact (aka bribery scheme).

“The other area where I think the US-Israel partnership is critical is staying strong with respect to making sure Iran never ever ever becomes a nuclear power — even has basic nuclear capabilities — we will never allow that to happen on our watch,” Ramaswamy said.

Fellow GOP presidential contender Nimrata “Nikki Haley” Randhawa called Ramaswamy out during the debate on Wednesday for wanting “to go and defund Israel.”

“You want to cut the aid off!” Randhawa said. “Let me tell you, it’s not that Israel needs America, America needs Israel!”

It only took Ramaswamy three days to not only abandon but completely reverse his “America First” policy.

August 28, 2023 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Video, Wars for Israel | , , , | 9 Comments

3M to pay billions to settle lawsuits over US military earplugs

RT | August 28, 2023

American multinational conglomerate 3M has agreed to pay more than $5.5 billion to settle hundreds of thousands of lawsuits, claiming that it supplied defective combat earplugs to the US military, people familiar with the deal told Bloomberg.

According to the agreement, the company will be paying the money out over a five-year period, the agency reported on Sunday. 3M’s board is yet to sign off on the settlement, it added.

When approached on the issue by Bloomberg, a representative of 3M said the company does not comment on rumors or speculation.

3M faces more than 300,000 lawsuits from US troops, consolidated in a multi-district litigation, claiming that the earplugs that the company’s subsidiary Aearo Technologies provided to the military between 2003 and 2015 were defective, and failed to protect their users from hearing loss and tinnitus.

Current and former servicemen alleged that the company knew its earplugs were faulty, but did not inform the military about the problem, while making no steps to fix the product.

The earplugs, designed to protect the hearing of troops during training and combat, were standard issue for US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

3M failed 10 out of 16 early trials over the plugs, and has been told to pay over $250 million in damages to more than a dozen plaintiffs.

Bloomberg noted that the reported settlement would allow the company to avoid a much larger liability, which it estimated at up to $9.5 billion.

“Sounds like 3M negotiated a pretty good deal for itself, given this litigation has been weighing on them for the better part of a decade,” University of Richmond law professor Carl Tobias told the agency.

3M had earlier sought bankruptcy for Aearo Technologies in an attempt to shield itself from the lawsuits over earplugs. However, this June, a judge ruled that the firm’s financial troubles were not harsh enough to initiate the procedure.

The same month, 3M announced that it had reached a $10.3 billion settlement with a host of US public water systems to resolve water pollution claims tied to so-called “forever chemicals” or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) used in the company’s products.

August 28, 2023 Posted by | Deception, Environmentalism | | Leave a comment

Nikki Haley, the Most Reckless Candidate for President

Des Moines, Iowa, USA – August 12, 2023: Former South Carolina Governor and Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley greets supporters at the Iowa State Fair political soapbox in Des Moines, Iowa.

By Ted Galen Carpenter | The Libertarian Institute | August 28, 2023

After the initial debate among GOP presidential aspirants, former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley is clearly the darling of the hawks who have given us debacles in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine. Indeed, the laudatory assessments of her debate performance among conservatives in the pro-war news media seemed to be a sophisticated, highly coordinated propaganda campaign.

The key feature that Haley and her cheerleaders have in common is an unwillingness to consider any alternatives to the policies that have brought America and the world so much grief. Congenitally hawkish New York Times columnist David Brooks stated that he had previously considered Senator Tim Scott (R-SC), but that he now had concluded that Haley was the best candidate to thwart not only Donald Trump but broader undesirable trends in the Republican Party.

He left little doubt that those trends mainly involved foreign policy. “Haley dismantled [Vivek] Ramaswamy on foreign policy. It was not only her contemptuous put-down: ‘You have no foreign policy experience and it shows.’” Brooks was especially pleased because, “She took on the whole America First ethos that sounds good as a one-liner but that doesn’t work when you’re governing a superpower. Gesturing to Ramaswamy, she said, ‘He wants to hand Ukraine to Russia, he wants to let China eat Taiwan, he wants to go and stop funding Israel. You don’t do that to friends.’” In other words, Haley loyally mouthed the interventionist cliches that Brooks and other neocons refuse to question.

Brooks’ colleague at the Times, David French, was even more enthusiastic about Haley’s debate performance and at least as vitriolic toward Ramaswamy. “When Nikki Haley mustered all her experience and knowledge as America’s former ambassador to the U.N. and all the moral clarity of traditional American resistance to Russian tyranny, she decimated Vivek Ramaswamy’s populist isolationism. She won on style and substance and reminded voters why she was once considered a Republican rising star.”

The always reliable pro-war Wall Street Journal editorial board tried to embrace Haley and former Vice President Mike Pence with roughly equal fervor. “Pence often seemed like the adult in the room, especially on foreign policy. He and Nikki Haley pounded Mr. Ramaswamy for his willingness to withdraw support for Ukraine.” Ms. Haley “made the moral case against Vladimir Putin’s depredations.” Being an “adult” in the Journal’s view apparently requires ignoring evidence of Ukraine’s corruption and authoritarianism as well as dismissing the risks of confronting a major power having 6,000 nuclear weapons over a country with minimal strategic or economic importance to the United States.

Haley’s actual level of foreign policy maturity can be judged by another of her simplistic comments about the Ukraine conflict. “The American president needs to have more clarity, they [presidential candidates] need to know the difference between right and wrong. They need to know the difference between good and evil.” She criticized Ramaswamy and another skeptic of continued U.S. military aid to Ukraine, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, for lack of such moral clarity and then added a cheap shot; “This guy [Putin] is a murderer and you are choosing a murderer.”

Fox News highlighted Clinton administration adviser Mark Penn’s favorable assessment of Haley. Penn contended that Haley’s debate performance was impressive and that she was clearly the best choice to be Secretary of State in an incoming Republican administration. Penn’s comment highlighted the continuing bipartisan nature of the pro-interventionist foreign policy blob.

Haley would be a reliable front woman for the war machine in nearly every respect. She favors a rabidly hostile policy toward Russia along with an equally unthinking posture of support for Ukraine. Indeed, she criticizes President Joe Biden for being “far too slow and weak in helping Ukraine.” That is a strange and troubling comment, given that the United States has given Kiev more than $130 billion in assistance.

But that is not the only arena in which Haley’s virulent hawkish orientation emerges. In a speech to the American Enterprise Institute, she even criticized Donald Trump for being insufficiently hostile to China. “We must act now to keep the peace and prevent war,” she said. “And we need a leader that will rally our people to meet this threat on every single front… Communist China is an enemy. It is the most dangerous foreign threat we’ve faced since the Second World War.”

As if simultaneously pursuing confrontational military policies against Russia and China were not enough, she also embraces utterly uncompromising policies toward both Iran and North Korea. Haley even favors putting U.S. Special Forces into Mexico to battle the drug cartels. “When it comes to the cartels, the Mexican president said yesterday we don’t want the U.S. to do anything. Well, you know what? You tell the Mexican president, either you do it or we do it. But we are not going to let all of this lawlessness continue to happen.”

What comes through clearly from both her rhetoric and policy positions is that Nikki Haley has no sense of the limits of U.S. power or the dangers inherent in America’s strategic overextension. A lengthy list of conflicts and tensions around the world all seem to be existential moral struggles requiring maximum U.S. engagement in her world view. Her approach invokes images from World War II and the worst years of the Cold War. It is a thoroughly obsolete and ahistorical approach.

Haley and her pro-war fan club epitomize a dangerously faulty perspective regarding U.S. foreign policy. Moreover, it is apparent that they have learned nothing from the spectacular failure of their recommendations in the post-Cold War era. Instead, they insist on doubling down on that blundering strategy, and dismissing any alternatives with the silly allegation that they amount to isolationism. To her hawkish supporters, Nikki Haley is a thoughtful, mature leader, but her casual recklessness likely would be a catastrophe for America and the world.

August 28, 2023 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Russophobia, Zionism | | 10 Comments

Rabid Russophobia now mandatory in the political West

By Drago Bosnic | August 28, 2023

From the “Ghost of Kiev” and “the last stand of the Snake Island defenders” to pickle jar air defenses and the “Goat of Kiev”, there have been many mindless anti-Russian tropes aiming to present the Russians as supposedly “inferior” or at the very least “incompetent”. And yet, such claims were just laughably obvious propaganda that serves as an IQ test of sorts. In terms of actual impact, it was all largely inconsequential. However, the real issue is when these tropes become anything but a laughing matter. For instance, on August 5, Michael John Cirillo (now pretending to be a “woman” named Sarah Ashton-Cirillo), an American-born spokesperson for the Neo-Nazi junta forces, boastfully proclaimed that the Russians are “most definitely not human”.

Ever since this glorified crossdresser characterized an entire nation as “subhuman” (although it’s unclear who exactly mandated “her” to issue such proclamations), it seems this has effectively become the state policy of some Western countries. It now seems that disagreeing with Cirillo’s racist rant is a “crime” of sorts and that the witch-hunt for the “perpetrator” is a must. Namely, Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier, one of the most prominent European directors, “dared” to publicly state that “Russian lives matter also!” in an Instagram post. However, he didn’t stop there. To add “insult to injury”, he also criticized the Danish government for the delivery of US-made F-16 fighter jets to the Kiev regime forces.

Von Trier made the post almost a week ago, on August 22, but the “backlash” persists. The mainstream propaganda machine is engaged in an unrelenting witch-hunt, while the Neo-Nazi junta is “demanding” a retraction of the statement and most likely an official “apology”. Von Trier addressed his post to “Mr Zelensky and Mr Putin, and not least Mrs Frederiksen (who yesterday, like someone head over heels in love, posed in the cockpit of one of the scariest killing machines of our time, grinning from ear to ear)”. Although F-16 fighter jets are hardly “one of the scariest killing machines of our time”, they certainly have killed a lot of people in countless US/NATO illegal invasions around the world, making Von Trier’s statement rather adequate.

Still, as the pressure isn’t subsiding in the slightest, Lars von Trier was forced to “clarify” his reasoning in a follow-up post, where he stated that he supports the Kiev regime “with every beat of [his] heart”. He further added that “[he] was just stating the obvious: that all lives in this world matter! A forgotten phrase it seems, from a time when pacifism was a virtue”. Von Trier obviously didn’t get the memo that pacifism is “only a virtue” when you’re fighting “humans”. And since Russians have been “disqualified” as such, hatred and hostility towards them is “perfectly fine”. Still, the Danish filmmaker stood his ground, so he’s now accused of “hatred” (!?) and for somehow being “sympathetic to the Russian side” in the Ukrainian conflict.

Von Trier’s example is very telling. Not only is it acceptable to spew poisonous hatred at an entire nation, but it’s even “desirable” at this point. Worse yet, any attempt to present the Russian people as human is simply unacceptable in the political West. According to this “logic”, the Russians are “disqualified from life” for the sole reason of being Russian. For well over a year and a half, both individual Russians and whole teams have been banned from various sports, including paralympic competitors. This mindless hatred also extends to Russian restaurants, tea rooms, churches, trees, cats, etc. In addition, Russia’s world-class culture (including its music, operas, literature, etc.) is still being banned in Western countries.

Von Trier should probably be sent to a reeducation camp, preferably run by former high-ranking NATO general and the current Czech President Petr Pavel. He’s (in)famous for his intention to place the Russians currently living in Western countries in “Japanese-style camps”. Had Von Trier stated something like that, he would’ve received no backlash. On the contrary, he would’ve been hailed as the “hero of pacifism”. The more absurd and hateful one is towards the Russian people, the more popular and “humane” he or she is in the political West. It’s the new “chic” that “should” be followed by everyone else. Unfortunately for the belligerent power pole, the (actual) world is doing exactly the opposite. Perhaps this is the main reason why Josep Borrell characterized it as “the jungle”.

It would seem the (actual) world simply doesn’t understand this highly peculiar form of “pacifism” that applies only to those who unequivocally adhere to the “rules-based world order“. The so-called “fence sitters” are just not “civilized enough” to understand it. However, fortunately for the rest of us who are “not blessed” with living in “the garden”, our “jungle” is expanding, so we get to live our “not human” lives together.

Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.

August 28, 2023 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | , , | 2 Comments

The COVID Lie That Started It All

Matt Orfalea | August 23, 2023

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Bonus video:

2 Minutes of “Experts” Being WRONG About the COVID Vaccine

To those who still repeat the Big Pharma lie that “Nobody Ever Said The Vaccine Would Stop The Transmission Of Covid Virus”

Here are many people saying it!

August 28, 2023 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | Leave a comment