$3,000 and a Toy: Novavax Dangles Incentives to Fill Clinical Trials on COVID Shots for Babies, Kids
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | August 29, 2024
Novavax is offering parents up to $3,000 to enroll their children in the vaccine maker’s Phase 2/3 COVID-19 vaccine trial for infants and children ages 6 months to 11 years. The offer also includes a stuffed animal for each child.
The “Hummingbird” trial is testing two primary shots and a booster shot of Novavax’s adjuvanted recombinant spike protein nanoparticle vaccine in children. The study, which began in 2022, is enrolling 3,600 children.
The study, which began in the U.S., is expected to run through 2025 and will be conducted in the U.S. and other countries.
The children will receive three injections and visit the clinic eight times. Parents will participate in three phone calls and keep an e-diary of the vaccine’s effects on their child. Some children will receive two additional injections, for a total of five shots.
The study website promises, “You will be compensated for your time and travel regardless of your immigration status. Transportation to the study site may also be provided, as available. No health insurance is required to participate.”
Recruitment materials from Be Well Clinical Studies, which is running one of the U.S. trials, state that compensation can be more than $3,000 over two years.
A 2023 video explaining the study also promises incentives for the children, including “a Covid stuffed animal.”
In the video, a pastor from Louisiana who has four children enrolled in the study said incentives like the stuffed animal made the kids even “more excited than the parents” to participate.
The video features Dr. Jibran Atwi who is running a Hummingbird trial in Lafayette, Louisiana. He encouraged people to participate in the study, because COVID-19 severely affected kids, particularly through lockdowns and lost schooling.
Atwi also said that COVID-19 can be “very disruptive” because if a child has to stay home from school, parents may not be able to go work and the child may have to be isolated from their grandparents.
“Prevention,” he said, “is the best medicine.” He added that there had been an “impressive response” from parents who wanted to participate.
Research shows that young children rarely get sick from COVID-19 and that the illness is typically mild in older kids.
Atwi received over $2 million in research funding in 2023 from Big Pharma, according to the Open Payments website.
Most of that funding came from Genzyme — a Sanofi subsidiary — and from Sanofi, which shares the co-exclusive licensing agreement with Novavax to commercialize its COVID-19 vaccine.
In 2022, Atwi received over $1 million, largely from AstraZeneca and Genzyme.
Last week, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted emergency use authorization to Pfizer and Moderna’s 2024-2025 mRNA COVID-19 shots, but Novavax’s 2024-2025 formula has not yet been authorized.
The FDA has authorized previous versions of the Novavax vaccine, but only for children ages 12 and up.
High payments place children ‘at risk of coercion’
Other pharmaceutical companies that have paid research subjects large sums of money have come under scrutiny. In the United Kingdom (U.K.), Moderna was criticized for initially offering children’s families 1,505 pounds ($1,984 dollars) to participate in its NextCOVE clinical trial, which is testing Moderna’s mRNA vaccine in children ages 12 and up.
The Children’s Covid Vaccine Advisory Council submitted a complaint to the U.K.’s Prescription Medicines Code of Practice Authority (PMCPA) — an industry trade group that regulates ethical practices — raising concerns about “inappropriate financial inducement” offered to children and their parents to participate in the trial.
The council cited concerns raised by the research ethics committee (REC) that approved the clinical study. Regarding the 1,500-pound payment they wrote:
“This amount seems much higher than what would be considered a reasonable reimbursement and therefore would contravene clinical trial regulations. The Medicines for Human Use (Clinical Trials) Regulations (2004) explicitly prohibit the giving of incentives or financial inducements to children… or their parents.”
The REC said the amount, “placed the children at risk of coercion,” and the organization required that Moderna reduce the offer before recruitment could begin. Moderna reduced the amount to 185 pounds ($244 dollars).
Yet, according to the complaint, at least one pediatrician continued to offer the high enrollment compensation.
The PMCPA sanctioned Moderna, and the case report on the issue is currently pending.
If the PMCPA determines a pharmaceutical company has breached the industry code, it can require the company to pay administrative charges or issue a corrective statement. Or, it may request a compulsory audit of the company.
In the U.S., Be Well is also advertising that it will pay parents $2,400 for enrolling their infants and toddlers, ages 5-23 months, in Moderna’s Rhyme Trial for an mRNA RSV and a human metapneumovirus (hMPV) vaccine.
According to the clinicaltrials.gov website, Be Well withdrew from the Moderna RSV study, but the website is still advertising to recruit participants.
Be Well is run by founder and director Dr. Mark Carlson, a geriatrician, who has taken nearly $3 million in research funding from Big Pharma, mostly from Moderna, since 2021.
Moderna did not respond to The Defender’s inquiry about compensation offered to children’s families to participate in these studies.
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.
Ukrainian cluster bomb attack on Belgorod kills five – governor
RT | August 30, 2024
Five civilians have been killed and 37 wounded, including six children, in a Ukrainian missile attack on Russia’s Belgorod Region, regional governor Vyacheslav Gladkov has said.
Belgorod is north of Kharkov. Russia’s second city. It has endured frequent attacks by long-range Ukrainian artillery, which often fire projectiles supplied by NATO.
“Our air defense system worked over Belgorod and several targets were shot down as they approached the city,” Gladkov said on Telegram on Friday evening. “To our great sorrow, one person died as a result of a direct hit on a passenger car.”
In addition to the vehicle, an apartment building and several commercial buildings were struck, Gladkov said.
The governor later updated the death toll to five.
“One woman and four men died on the spot from their injuries before the ambulances arrived,” he said. Among the injured, seven adults and three children are in serious condition.
According to Gladkov, the attack was carried out with cluster munitions launched by the Vampire multiple-launch rocket system. The same weapon, provided to Ukraine by the Czech Republic, was used in the Christmas market massacre last December, when 25 Russian civilians were killed and 100 more wounded by Ukrainian cluster munitions.
The attack also caused property damage to three apartment buildings in the city, as well as two commercial buildings. Two houses in the nearby village of Dubovoye were set on fire by the incoming missiles, but it was quickly extinguished by emergency services.
Masochistic Naivete: Another Great Danger
NewZealandDoc | August 28, 2024
Long covid may or not be a chimera, but the long reach of covid certainly isn’t, as I have learned from an unexpected situation that involved the gratuitous remarks of a covidian doctor here that created difficulties for me. I am hopeful, however, of a positive resolution to this unnecessary development.
This incident merely strengthened my belief that the enemy we are up against, large and small, local and global, is unprincipled, lawless, low, and, given the measures unleashed against the world in the name of protecting us from a danger they created in the first place — dangers heaped upon dangers! — murderous.
If ever I believed in the trustworthy authority of the major media, having grown up on Time, Life, Newsweek, ABC, CBS, NBC in my early youth, and, later, on The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books et al. in my later years, that belief has been smashed into a thousand pieces as I watched all of them drop the veneer and flash the biceps of complete and utter fraudulence in our faces, day in, day out, relentlessly. I now ignore them completely.
If ever I believed in fair play and the rule of law, the inconstant application of justice has shaken some sense into me. What kind of system inveigles a Reiner Fuellmich into an arrest and incarceration, or deceptively seduces the founder of Telegram into an apprehension? Need I mention the numerous illegitimate legal attacks against a former President of the United States, still ongoing? Need I mention the attempt to murder him in the cold light of day? Should I hark back yet again to New Zealand’s use of stormtroopers to invade and disperse the Parliament Protests of 2022?
Should I mention the UK arrests for social media expressions of free speech, or the many and multifarious ways that Big Social Media have censored those whose political inclinations or opinions had been targeted by the governments they had a right to criticize? It has become nearly comic to listen to and watch presenters on YouTube who resort to code words to evade algorithms that would punish their channels?
Dare I refer to the unnecessary wars and the horrific numbers of the dead in the Ukraine and the Middle East, promoted so enthusiastically by the ‘liberal’ so-called democratic Left in the United States, not to mention the openly authoritarian EU?
By the strange contorted logic of our ‘now’, universal inoculation, active armed conflict, and perpetual fear of pandemics mark the road to … to the well-regulated world ordained by some occult globalist racketeers for their own benefit.
Given all of the above, one would think that any vestiges of naivete would be gone as we figure out a way to save ourselves. It’s an interesting word, ‘naive’ — coming as it does from the Latin nativus, and meaning, essentially, being innocent or artless as a newborn babe in the corrupt and devious system devised by humankind to regulate itself. When we use the phrase ‘I wasn’t born yesterday’ we’re saying we’re not naive.
Yet I can’t count how many times so many friends have expressed astonishment at each new depredation and each miscarriage of justice, and how so many still have faith in a legal system that has been commandeered by our enemies. I can’t count how many times people will say, about the latest jab-implicated adverse event, ‘this will turn the tide!’ Or how many game-changers there have been that have only resulted in the game going on with even more ferocity against our cause.
While I believe that it is very important for us to continue to report truth, it is equally important for us to know what we are up against. To know that facts are hardly guaranteed to change the minds of the sleepwalkers around us.
It is destructively naive to believe that simply by being virtuous we will win the day, or that the courts will come to our rescue because of our well-prepared evidence, or that martyrdom will be glorious.
General Patton is reputed to have said that ‘no dumb bastard ever won a war by going out and dying for his country.’
As Irregulars against Established Power we must fight smart, and fight to live, and we by no means can count on the System to assist us. We must recognize the murderous intensity of our enemy, the rigged judicial system, the coopted media, and adjust our strategies.
Or else.
Emanuel E. Garcia, M.D.
August 2024
Why Doesn’t ‘Israel’ Allow Media to Inspect Glilot Intelligence Base after the Hezbollah Strike?: MP
Al-Manar | August 30, 2024
Member of Loyalty to Resistance parliamentary bloc, Dr. Hasan Fadlallah, affirmed that Operation Arbaeen Day is historical because it challenged all the threats made by the Israeli officials and the foreign envoys who had visited Lebanon to convey them.
Addressing a ceremony held to commemorate the two Islamic martyrs all the way to Al-Quds Khodr Moussa Sweid and Hamza Mohammad Zalghout in the southern town of Harees, MP Fadlallah wondered how the Zionist enemy claimed that he frustrated Hezbollah attack although it was carried out.
Hezbollah lawmaker indicated that the Islamic Resistance misled the enemy by making it think that it bombed sophisticated weaponry and carrying out the attack in response to the Zionist aggression on Beirut’s Dahiyeh on July 30, 2024.
The enemy’s premier Netanyahu then acknowledged that the Israeli airstrikes had targeted only short-range missiles, according MP Fadlallah, who pointed out that the Israelis always resort to media coverage in order to refute reports.
“Why has not Israel allow media to inspect Glilot Intelligence Base since Hezbollah Strike?”
MP Fadlallah stressed that the Israeli enemy is hiding its losses because it is unable to carry out its threats in response.
Six Hezbollah drones reached their targets in the Israeli Military Intelligence headquarters in Glilot near Tel Aviv, Lebanese daily Al-Akhbar reported on Friday, citing reliable sources in occupied Palestine.
Meanwhile, Israeli media outlets started unveiling certain aspects of the Hezbollah attack on Glilot, describing it as unprecedented.
MP Fadlallah maintained that the Israeli enemy cannot impose its terms on Lebanon and will fail to gain in politics what it has lost in the battlefield, reiterating that the main goal of Hezbollah border battle is supporting Gaza till the end of the Israeli war.
“We told Israel, ‘Look, if you guys have to go, we’re behind you all the way’”
By Alastair Crooke | Strategic Culture Foundation | August 30, 2024
“The successful thwarting of Hizbullah’s attack on Sunday, symbolized Israel’s intelligence and operational edge”: According to the IDF spokesman, the Hezbollah attack was thwarted for the most part – thanks to 100 Israel aircraft carrying out around the clock – pre-emptive strikes that destroyed “thousands of missile launchers”.
“The group [Hizbullah], did manage to fire hundreds of rockets at northern Israel, but the damage they caused was quite limited”, the Israeli spokespersons disdainfully suggested (amidst a complete blackout on publication, under full censorship, in Israel of any reporting on damage caused to strategic Israeli infrastructure or to military sites).
In effect, it was ‘theatre’ mounted by both sides: By limiting their 20 minute strike to within 5 kms of the border – and by Hizbullah staying within the ‘equations’ of war – both sides signalled plainly to each other they were not looking for all-out war.
The ‘winner narrative’ from Israel was to be expected in today’s psy-war atmosphere. Yet it comes at a cost: Amos Harel in Haaretz suggests that “there’s a tendency in Israel [as a result] to view the success in foiling Sunday’s attack as renewed evidence of the consolidation of regional deterrence and [of western] strategic supremacy. But such an assessment” he concedes, “appears to be far from accurate”.
Indeed it is (far from accurate). The Sunday theatre concluded with no change to the strategic situation in the north of Israel: Daily attrition continues from across the frontier of Lebanon, down to the new 40 km border defining the extent of Israel’s loss of territory to the Hizbullah no-go zone.
The strategic point is not that this narrative of a successful thwarting of Hizbullah’s capabilities is highly misleading. Rather, it sets up expectations of available military success from which wrong conclusions will be drawn. We have been here before. It didn’t go well …
Seymour Hersh, doyen of U.S. investigative journalism, this week re-posted a piece that he wrote in August 2006 about U.S. thinking in the context of an Israeli war on Hizbullah – and on its intended role as a pathfinder-project for a subsequent U.S. strike on Iran.
What Hersh wrote then represents a striking déjà vu of today’s situation. It remains to the point because U.S. neocon thinking rarely evolves, but remains constant.
“The big question for our [U.S.] Air Force”, Hersh noted in 2006, “was how to hit a series of hard targets in Iran successfully”, the former senior intelligence official said. “Who is the closest ally of the U.S. Air Force in its planning? It’s not Congo—it’s Israel”. The official continued:
“Everybody knows that Iranian engineers have been advising Hezbollah on tunnels and underground missile emplacements. And so the USAF went to the Israelis with some new tactics and said to them: ‘Let’s concentrate on the bombing and share what we have on Iran – and what you have on Lebanon.’”.
“The Israelis told us [that Hesballah] would be a cheap war with many benefits,” a U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel said: “Why oppose it? We’ll be able to hunt down and bomb missiles, tunnels, and bunkers from the air. It would be a demo for Iran”.
“I was told by the consultant that the Israelis repeatedly pointed to the war in Kosovo as an example of what Israel would try to achieve. “The NATO forces … methodically bombed and strafed not only military targets but tunnels, bridges, and roads, in Kosovo and elsewhere in Serbia, for seventy-eight days …“Israel studied the Kosovo war as its role model … The Israelis told Condi Rice: You did it in about seventy days, but we need half of that—thirty-five days’ [to finish off Hizbullah]””.
“The Bush White House”, a Pentagon consultant said, “has been agitating for some time to find a reason for a preëmptive blow against Hizbullah”; adding, “It was our intent to have Hezbollah diminished, and now we have someone else doing it … According to a Middle East expert, with knowledge of the current thinking of both the Israeli and the U.S. governments: Israel had devised a plan for attacking Hezbollah—and shared it with Bush Administration officials—well before the July 12th [2006] kidnappings: “It’s not that the Israelis had a trap that Hezbollah walked into,” he said, “but there was a strong feeling in the White House that sooner or later the Israelis were going to do it”, Hersh wrote.
“The White House was more focussed on stripping Hezbollah of its missiles, because – if there were to be a military option against Iran’s nuclear facilities – it had to get rid of the weapons that Hezbollah could use in a potential retaliation at Israel. Bush wanted both”, Hersh was told”.
“The Bush Administration was closely involved in the planning of Israel’s retaliatory attacks. President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney were convinced … that a successful Israeli Air Force bombing campaign against Hezbollah’s heavily fortified underground-missile and command-and-control complexes in Lebanon could ease Israel’s security concerns and also serve as a prelude to a potential American preëmptive attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations – some of which are also buried deep underground”. (Emphasis added.)
A former intelligence officer said, “We told Israel, ‘Look, if you guys have to go, we’re behind you all the way”.
“Nonetheless, some officers serving with the Joint Chiefs of Staff were deeply concerned that the Administration will have a far more positive assessment of the air campaign than they should – the former senior intelligence official said. “There is no way that Rumsfeld and Cheney will draw the right conclusion about this,” he said. “When the smoke clears, they’ll say it was a success, and they’ll draw reinforcement for their plan to attack Iran”.
(This is where we are today: When the smoke clears from Sunday’s ‘exemplary pre-emptive attack in Lebanon’, Netanyahu will be using it with Washington to draw reinforcement for his aspiration to engage the U.S. for a strike on Iran.)
“Strategic bombing has been a failed military concept for ninety years, and yet air forces all over the world keep on doing it,” John Arquilla, a defense analyst at the Naval Postgraduate School, told [Hersh] … Rumsfeld [too, shared this expert’s jaded view]: “Air power and the use of a few Special Forces had worked in Afghanistan, and he [Rumsfeld] had tried to do it again in Iraq. It was the same idea, but it didn’t work. He thought that Hezbollah was too dug in – and the Israeli attack plan would not work, and the last thing he wanted was another war on his shift that would put the American forces in Iraq in greater jeopardy”.
“The 2006 Israeli plan, according to the former senior intelligence official, was “the mirror image of what the United States had been planning for Iran””. (The initial U.S. Air Force proposals for an air attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear capacity, which included the option of intense bombing of civilian infrastructure targets inside Iran) were being resisted by the top leadership of the Army, the Navy, and the Marine Corps – according to current and former officials. They argued that the Air Force plan will not work and will inevitably lead, as in the Israeli war with Hezbollah, to the insertion of troops on the ground.
David Siegel, the then Israeli spokesman, said that his country’s leadership believed, as of early August 2006, that the air war had been successful, and had destroyed more than seventy per cent of Hizbullah’s medium-and long-range-missile launching capacity.
Israel however had not destroyed 70% of Hizbullah’s missile inventory in 2006. It was deceived by Hizbullah’s intelligence decoy operation. The Israelis bombed empty sites.
Today, we hear the same exultatory narrative coming from IDF Spokesman Rear Admiral Hagari – parading how successful Israel’s strikes on Sunday had been.
Likely some in Israel and U.S. again will be deeply concerned that the Biden team may fall for a far more positive assessment of the Israeli air campaign than they should.
Many commentators across the West are making the same mistake. As Haaretz’ military correspondent noted in respect to this Sunday’s air strikes: “there’s a tendency in Israel to view the success in foiling Sunday’s attack as renewed evidence for the consolidation of regional deterrence – and strategic supremacy”.
Or, in other words, Iran has been deterred from carrying out its ‘commitment’ to retaliate for Ismail Haniyah’s assassination in Tehran by the amassing of fire-power by the U.S. in the waters of the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf and the fear of overwhelming U.S. firepower.
Anyone seeing the video glimpses of Iran’s automated and deep ‘missile cities’ deployed throughout the depth of Iran (and which it has allowed to be exposed to momentary view), should understand that carpet bombing Iranian civilian structure will not prevent the Iranian ability to respond lethally. Iran could unleash Regional Armageddon, nothing less.
So, for clarity’s sake: Who exactly is it that is deterred and backing down? Is it Iran or Washington?
Yet, “If it’s true that the Israeli campaign is based on the American approach in Kosovo, then it missed the point”, General Wesley Clark, the U.S. commander told Hersh. Killing civilians was not the objective: “In my experience, air campaigns have to be backed, ultimately, by the will and capability to finish the job on the ground”.
And that – simply – for the U.S. to contemplate for Iran is impossible.
“We face a dilemma”, an Israeli official told Hersh in 2006. Effectively, to decide whether to go for a local response (which is ineffective), or go for a comprehensive response—to really take on Hezbollah [and Iran] once and for all”.
Plus ça change: The dilemma may not have changed, but Israel has altered radically. A majority in Israel today is messianic in its support for Jabotinsky’s followers to do what they had always wanted and promised to do: To expel the Palestinians from the Land of Israel.
It is understood by many in Washington that the Revisionist Zionists (who represent maybe about 2 million Israelis) intend cynically to impose their will on the ‘Anglo-Saxons’, by plunging the U.S. into a wide regional war, should the White House try to undercut their neo-Nakba project of Palestinian forcible expulsion.
Benjamin Netanyahu has provoked Iran once (with the assassination in the Damascus Consulate of a top IRGC general); twice with killing of Haniyeh in Tehran; and a possible third would be were Israel to launch a so-called ‘pre-emptive’ strike against Iran, believing that the U.S. would be trapped and politically unable to stand aloof as Iran retaliated against Israel.
However, should the U.S. veto a strike on Iran before the U.S. elections (and Iran not retaliate for the death of Haniyeh before then), the Naqba ‘project’ can be moved forward via extending the existing Gaza military offensive to the West Bank, or through a grave provocation on the Haram al-Sharif (such as a fire at the al-Aqsa Mosque).
The Revisionist Zionists have been clear over recent years that some crisis or the confusion of war would be required to implement their neo-Naqba project fully.
America particularly is trapped by its ‘ironclad’, unqualified military support for Israel – which offers Netanyahu ample room for manoeuvre.
Manoeuvre, that is, towards the conflict that is Netanyahu’s only escape hatch ‘upwards’ as the ‘walls of attrition’ close-in on Israel. Iran and Hizbullah seem to have chosen too, for now, to preserve their escalatory dominance through a return to imposed calibrated attrition on Israel.
The U.S. will not be able to keep such a huge deployment of naval vessels in the region for long; but equally, Netanyahu will not be able to politically prevaricate at home for long, either.
Why the US is failing in the Red Sea: Responsible Statecraft
Al Mayadeen | August 30, 2024
When Yemen’s Ansar Allah declared the Red Sea as part of the support fronts backing the Palestinian people and their Resistance, the United States announced that it would try to subvert its operations to protect Israeli ships and shipments, trapping itself in an indefinite and congressionally uncertified military conflict in the region.
Coined “the most intense running sea battle” the US has seen since World War II, Washington’s decision to enter the Red Sea rapidly transpired into “the epitome of strategic malpractice“, an op-ed published by Responsible Statecraft said.
According to authors Jonathan Hoffman and Benjamin Giltner, the US military conquest in the Red Sea is not only failing but also exposing US military personnel in the region to extreme danger to protect foreign vessels, as well as risking escalation and the destabilization of not only Yemen but the entire region.
Hoffman and Giltner expand on the reasons for the US failure in the Red Sea and explain that they stem primarily from Washington’s willful ignorance and refusal to acknowledge the main motive behind Ansar Allah’s operations [that being the Israeli genocide in Gaza], clearing all hopes it has for triumphing in the region.
A vain costly conquest
The United States deployed its forces in the Red Sea, firstly to counter the Yemeni ban on Israeli-affiliated or Israeli ships under Operation Prosperity Guardian, and secondly to launch its joint aggression with the United Kingdom against Yemen under Operation Poseidon Archer. The goal, allegedly, is to restore its deterrence in the region.
However, the US has now spent millions in American taxpayer funds and over a billion dollars to shoot down homegrown Yemeni drones, only to fail in deterring the Yemenis. In detail, the US has claimed that its forces shot down 150 Yemeni drones, each costing $2,000 at most, using missiles and weapon systems that cost more than one billion dollars.
The authors also note that Yemen escalated its operations only after the US and its partners launched their aggression to “restore deterrence”, further proving that their mission in the Red Sea failed.
This is due to the Yemeni military niche as a result of a decade-long conflict with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which enabled the country to develop its “shoot and scoot” guerrilla tactic. The Yemenis have proven to be skilled in producing highly versatile drones that carry out their attacks and retreat rapidly, at relatively extremely low costs.
Ironically, the US acknowledges the detachment between the US military campaign and its goals in the Red Sea, as well as its ineffectiveness in either deterring Yemen or restoring the maritime supply chain, but still expresses its determination to maintain its presence in the region and prolong the conflict further.
On the contrary, the US, according to the authors, has worsened the situation in the Red Sea.
US presence could destabilize Yemen
The second reason why the American strategy continues failing is because it risks destabilizing a war-torn Yemen following a decade of war against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
The Saudi war against Yemen has not only left almost 400,000 casualties, but also created one of the worst modern-day humanitarian crises the world has seen. Despite the disastrous consequences of the war, Yemen’s Ansar Allah still emerged victorious.
The UN was able to mediate and establish a two-month ceasefire back in April 2022, which has extended to the current day. Saudi Arabia has been trying to pull out from the war it lost, while Ansar Allah maintained and fortified their positions in Yemen.
In the aftermath of October 7, Yemen emerged as a support front to back the Palestinian Resistance and the people of Gaza, further synthesizing Ansar Allah’s resistive front with the Yemeni government, in the face of any aggression that targets the country or its affiliations.
However, the escalating US-led aggression risks fracturing the UN-established ceasefire, further risking the destabilization of Yemen.
Risk of regional war
Lastly, the ongoing conflict between the United States and Ansar Allah risks escalating already mounting regional tensions, potentially pushing the Middle East closer to an all-out war. In the nearly 11 months since “Israel’s” war in Gaza began, military escalations have increased throughout the region, with the current clashes between Ansar Allah and the US military emerging as a result.
In a sequence of successes for the Axis of Resistance, the “deterrence” the US sought to impose against Yemen was further asserted as a failure when Ansar Allah successfully struck a site located near the US embassy in Tel Aviv.
“Israel”, backed by the United States, then bombed Hodeidah, killing six civilians and injuring dozens more.
With no resolution in sight for the war in Gaza and increasing concerns of a regional conflict, Yemen could become a key flashpoint, the authors wrote. If the US aims to prevent further Yemeni attacks and avoid being drawn into a larger regional war, military force is unlikely to accomplish these goals.
There are no critical US national interests in Yemen that warrant the current level of American military involvement or the waste of billions in taxpayer dollars. Rather than continuing its tit-for-tat conflict with Ansar Allah, Washington should acknowledge that its unwavering support for “Israel’s” war in Gaza is destabilizing the region and harming US interests.
The authors called for a ceasefire in Gaza, which would offer the most promising opportunity to halt, or at least significantly reduce Yemeni attacks, and ease growing tensions across the Middle East.
Iran urges elimination of atomic weapons, end to nuclear tests
Press TV | August 30, 2024
Iran’s ambassador and permanent representative to the United Nations Office in Geneva has called on the international community to work towards ending nuclear tests and eliminating atomic weapons.
Ali Bahreini made the remarks in an X post on Thursday, on the occasion of the International Day against Nuclear Tests.
“Nuclear testing is a threat to our planet and future generations,” he said.
“On the International Day against Nuclear Tests, let’s pledge to protect our world by advocating for a complete end to nuclear tests and total elimination of NWs,” he added, referring to nuclear weapons.
“Each nuclear explosion is a step backward in the journey towards a world free of nuclear weapons. Today, more than ever, we need a global commitment to the complete elimination of nuclear weapons,” Bahreini wrote in a separate post on X in Persian.
In 2009, the UN General Assembly declared August 29 the International Day against Nuclear Tests by unanimously adopting Resolution 64/35.
The document calls for increasing awareness and education “about the effects of nuclear weapon test explosions or any other nuclear explosions and the need for their cessation as one of the means of achieving the goal of a nuclear-weapon-free world.”
The United States is the only country on Earth that has used nuclear weapons in wartime.
On August 6, 1945, the US dropped the world’s first atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, killing thousands instantly and about 140,000 by the end of the year. Three days later, it dropped a second bomb on Nagasaki, killing another 70,000.
Sullivan-Xi Meeting Won’t Improve US-China Relations
By Ian DeMartino – Sputnik – 29.08.2024
On Wednesday, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan visited China, meeting with President Xi Jinping and other high-ranking Chinese officials. The meeting is expected to be followed up with a call between Xi and US President Joe Biden in the coming weeks.
The meeting was reported as an attempt to improve relations between the world’s two largest economies and militaries, but is unlikely to move the needle in any perceptible way, scholar, journalist and geopolitical analyst specializing in the Asia-Pacific KJ Noh told Sputnik’s Political Misfits.
“I don’t think it’s really in the cards. If you look at the Chinese readouts [of the meeting], they essentially focus on the Chinese desire to get along with the United States. Their point is [that] we can’t be enemies and cooperate. [The US has] to make a decision,” Noh began. “They always come back to the Bali agreements, even the ‘Five Nos’ – no Cold War, no hot war, no regime change, no block forming, no support of secession… They want the US to affirm that. And the Chinese explicitly mentioned that in their readout. The US [readout] does not mention that.”
Despite occasional public overtures by the United States, its actions have been consistently aimed at limiting China’s growth and influence. The United States saw itself fit to insert itself in territorial disputes in the South China Sea. It has also supported Chinese separatists in Taiwan, held military drills in the region, flown spy planes right on China’s borders, and stationed troops just a mile off of China’s coast.
Then there is the economic warfare. “If you recall, when they initially rolled out these [micro]chip sanctions, [influential think tanks] crowed that they had essentially destroyed China’s economy. They said they had China in a four-point chokehold and they were strangling with intent to kill, that this was a declaration of war. They never walked back those statements,” explained Koh. “Jake Sullivan emphasized in the readout that the US will continue to take necessary actions to prevent advanced US technology from being used to undermine national security, that means they’re going to continue the tech war against China.”
Despite the United States’ hand-wringing about national security and election interference, Koh suspects the real reason for the tech war, particularly on Chinese tech giants Huawei and ByteDance, is to maintain the US “monopoly control over the backbone of the internet and social media companies for geostrategic reasons.”
Huawei is the world’s largest supplier of telecommunication equipment that makes up the backbone of the internet, like routers and servers. ByteDance owns TikTok, one of the most popular and fastest-growing social media platforms, boasting 170 million users in the United States and more than a billion worldwide.
The upcoming call between Xi and Biden will be to let China know that if Harris wins in November, the Harris administration is “essentially going to keep our policies as is.”
“I think they want to position themselves as a better alternative than [former US President Donald] Trump who the Chinese are weary about because he’s so unpredictable despite his kind of transactional neo-mercantile approach to China,” explained Koh. “But what we do have to note is anything that Trump did in terms of escalating against China, the Biden administration has maintained and then took it up several notches. All you have to do is look at the tariffs [and] you’ll see that the Biden administration has been much, much, much worse.”
Koh speculated that Sullivan wanted to stabilize relations between the countries before the election but afterward “the escalation against China will continue.”
“Right before this meeting, there was a massive high-level delegation of DPP Taiwan separatist officials who came to the United States. Right after this meeting is over, there will be further meetings with high-level separatists. And so, there’s always this doubled-edged message that the US is sending.”
So from a Chinese perspective, there are no good choices in November, Noh contended. “I don’t think they’re making plans for either administration. The Chinese outlook is just literally the long term. They believe that if they can avoid war, and if they can avoid nuclear war, then eventually, things will stabilize and the United States will hopefully find a modus vivendi.”
Ukrainians torching empty homes in Kursk Region – senior Russian official
RT | August 30, 2024
Ukrainian troops are seemingly trying to inflict maximum damage on civilian property in the parts of Russia under their control, a senior Foreign Ministry official has said.
The Russian Foreign Ministry has tasked Rodion Miroshnik with collecting evidence of Ukrainian war crimes in the conflict. Last week, he visited Kursk Region, which Kiev targeted with a massive cross-border incursion earlier this month.
Evidence on the ground and interviews with dozens of eyewitnesses indicate that Ukrainian forces are deliberately trying to devastate settlements within their grasp, the official told RIA Novosti on Friday.
”There are a huge number of reports of burned out and looted private properties, of auxiliary buildings being destroyed with a purpose. I visited some of such homes literally hours after they got attacked. People were evacuated, but their homes were shot at and burned with a kind of malice,” he claimed.
In some instances Ukrainian troops used incendiary munitions, Miroshnik said. Local residents told him that they saw soldiers firing at homes point-blank from armored personnel carriers and cheering when they went up in flames.
Some properties were apparently hit with shrapnel rockets, the diplomat said. Some munitions are armed with thousands of BB pellet-sized metal balls designed to hit enemy manpower in the field with an airburst.
”I visited someone’s place, which was hit by such a rocket. There seemed to be not a thing that was not pierced by those balls,” the diplomat said. Such an attack “leaves not a single windowpane. A car was turned into a sieve. Walls around were all in holes, and even a gas pipeline forty meters away had 40 holes in it.”
Kiev has deployed thousands of troops into Kursk Region, seizing some border areas but failing to advance deeper into Russian territory. The Ukrainian leader, Vladimir Zelensky, has claimed that the operation was highly successful, citing the capture of Russian border guards, who could be exchanged for Ukrainian troops in Russian custody. His aide, Mikhail Podoliak, has claimed that the attack benefited Kiev by instilling fear into the Russian population and putting pressure on Moscow.
As of Friday, the Russian Defense Ministry estimated Ukrainian military losses in the Kursk operation at up to 7,800. Moscow has ruled out peace talks with Kiev following the attack, citing its targeting of Russian civilians.
Kamala and the Deadly Perils of Sham Idealism
By Jim Bovard | The Libertarian Institute | August 26, 2024
As the presidential race enters the final stretch, politicians are recycling the usual cons to make people believe this election will be different. At last week’s Democratic National Convention, sham idealism had a starring role, accompanied by ritual denunciations of cynicism.
But idealism has a worse record in Washington than a New Jersey senator. “Idealism is going to save the world,” President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed shortly after World War I left much of Europe in ruins and paved the way for communist and Nazi takeovers. Wilson’s blather provoked H.L. Mencken to declare that Americans were tired “of a steady diet of white protestations and black acts… they sicken of an idealism that is oblique, confusing, dishonest, and ferocious.”
The same verdict could characterize today’s political rogues. On the closing night of the convention, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg promised that “we will choose a better politics, a politics that calls us to our better selves.” And how can Americans know they are fulfilling their “better selves”? By swallowing without caviling any hogwash proclaimed by their rulers in Washington.
Kamala Harris is being touted for bringing idealism back into fashion after the supposedly tawdry Trump era. But we heard the same song-and-dance with Barack Obama.
Obama declared that America’s “ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience sake” in his first inaugural address. But one of Obama’s most shocking legacies was his claim of a prerogative to kill U.S. citizens labeled as terrorist suspects without trial, without notice, and without any chance for the marked individuals to legally object. Obama’s lawyers even refused to disclose the standards used for designating Americans for death. Drone strikes increased tenfold under Obama, and he personally chose who would be killed at weekly “Terror Tuesday” White House meetings which featured PowerPoint parades of potential targets.
Year by year, Obama’s lies and abuses of power corroded the idealism that helped him capture the presidency. As a presidential candidate, he promised “no more illegal wiretaps”; as president, he vastly expanded the National Security Agency’s illegal seizures of Americans’ emails and other records. He promised transparency but gutted the Freedom of Information Act and prosecuted twice as many Americans for Espionage Act violations than all the presidents combined since Woodrow Wilson. He perennially denounced “extremism” at the same time his administration partnered with Saudi Arabia to send weapons to terrorist groups that were slaughtering Syrian civilians in a failed attempt to topple the regime of Bashar Assad. Obama helped establish an impunity democracy in which rulers pay no price for their misdeeds. As The New York Times noted after the 2016 election, the Obama administration fought in court to preserve the legality of defunct Bush administration practices such as torture and detaining Americans arrested at home as “enemy combatants.”
When Donald Trump won the 2016 election, idealism was temporarily roadkill along the political highway. After Trump was defeated in November 2020, the media scrambled to portray Joe Biden as a born-again idealist and to put the federal government and Washington back on a pedestal. A Washington Post headline proclaimed, “Washington’s aristocracy hopes a Biden presidency will make schmoozing great again.” The Post quickly changed its initial headline to “Washington’s Establishment” but “aristocracy” remained in the body of the article, which assured readers that “the classic friendly-rivals dinner party will be back, likely bigger than ever.” That same aristocracy hoped that idealism would provide the magic words to make the peasantry again defer to their superiors.
But Biden’s idealism was difficult to distinguish from his rage at anyone who resisted his power. Rather than a new Camelot, Biden’s reign vindicated historian Henry Adams’ assertion that politics “has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.”
Regardless, the same media outlets that slapped a halo over Biden’s head are now hustling to saint Kamala Harris. Amazingly, the prime evidence of her idealism is the fact that she was a prosecutor. And since prosecutors claim to work “for the people,” her record of wrongful prosecutions, tormenting parents of truant children, and detaining convicts after their sentence ended (California needed extra firefighters) is automatically expunged.
Idealism long since surpassed patriotism as the last refuge of a scoundrel. Idealistic appeals were used by Presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon to vindicate the Vietnam War, by President Bill Clinton to sanctify the bombing of Serbia, and by President George W. Bush to dignify the devastation of Iraq. The mainstream media is almost always willing to help presidents shroud foreign carnage with pompous claptrap. Washington Post columnist David Ignatius declared in late 2003 that Bush’s war on Iraq “may be the most idealistic war fought in modern times.”
Idealism encourages citizens to view politics as a faith-based activity, transforming politicians from hucksters to saviors. The issue is not what government did in the past—the issue is how we must do better in the future. Politicians’ pious piffle is supposed to radically reduce the risk of subsequent perfidy.
Soviet Union dictator Vladimir Lenin used the term “useful idiots” to describe foreign sympathizers who dutifully repeated Soviet propaganda. Nowadays, we have “useful idealists”—pundits and others who mindlessly praise politicians as if they were more trustworthy than other serial perjurers.
The more deference that idealists receive, the more deceitful idealism becomes. Ideals become character witnesses for the politician who tout them. No matter how often a politician has been caught trashing facts, he is still credible on idealism. One freshly-flourished ideal expunges a decade of perfidy. The media exalts: “He has seen the light! He invoked an ideal!”
In Washington, idealism is an incantation that expunges all past warnings about political power. Nowadays, idealism is often positive thinking about growing servitude. Americans cannot afford to venerate any more Idealists-in-Chief hungry to seize new power or start new wars. Any doctrine that begins by idealizing government will end by idealizing subjugation.
EU Rejects Legitimacy of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro – Foreign Policy Chief Borrell
Sputnik – 30.08.2024
The European Union rejects the legitimacy of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said.
“We cannot accept the legitimacy of Maduro as the elected president. He will remain president de facto, but we deny democratic legitimacy based on results that cannot be verified,” Euronews quoted Borrell as saying after an informal foreign ministerial meeting in Brussels.
Presidential elections in Venezuela were held on July 28. The next day the National Electoral Council declared Nicolas Maduro president-elect for 2025-2031. On July 29, protests started in Venezuela, protesters clashing with the police. Over 2,000 people were detained. Violent unrest in Venezuela lasted one day after the elections, after which the government restored control over the situation on the streets.
US and European lawmakers in charge of foreign affairs matters issued a joint statement claiming opposition leader Edmundo Gonzalez won Venezuela’s presidential election and vowing to hold Maduro accountable if he refuses to relinquish power. Moscow said the Venezuelan opposition must admit defeat in the elections. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov warned third countries against supporting attempts to destabilize the situation inside Venezuela.
Featured Video
The Black Dress: Unveiling the Truth about Rape, Sexual Assault on October 7
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
Book Review
The myth of the ‘Arabs versus Jews’ narrative
By Roqayah Chamseddine | Al-Akhbar | July 31, 2014
The transformation of Zionism as a political ideology to Zionism as a religious ideology begins, in part, with Theodor Herzl’s “infatuation with British imperialism,” as noted by literary scholar and cultural historian Eitan Bar-Yosef in his book A Villa In The Jungle: Herzl, Zionist Culture, And The Great African Adventure. “Herzl’s phrase – a ‘miniature England in reverse’ – preserves the imperfect colonial mimicry that stood at the heart of Herzl’s Zionist project, and which was exposed so explicitly… in his decision to align himself with the British Empire.” Herzl would form the Zionist Organization (now The World Zionist Congress) in 1897 and promote the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, while continuing to identify with British colonialism and those who facilitated colonialism – the colonialists themselves. While Herzl, in his book The Jewish State, published in 1895, argued that the ‘Jewish question’ was not social or religious but political, the historical account of the rise of religious Zionism shows that it began to take hold not long before the passing of Herzl in 1904. … continue
Blog Roll
Recent Comments
Richard Ong on NATO to deploy 800,000 troops… coinherence on America’s ‘Ceausescu Moment’ John Edward Kendrick on Erasing evidence: Over 700 vid… Bill Francis on The enigma of Tusk and Nord St… John Edward Kendrick on On to the Next Front: Israel T… loongtip on Palestine Genocide loongtip on “Stunning!” Apollo… loongtip on Kupyansk and Krasnoarmeysk Enc… ekain3 on Imran Khan wasn’t overthrown —… loongtip on US planning war with Venezuela… John Edward Kendrick on Kyiv wants land, not people: f… oldbrew on Lithium-Ion Batteries in Cars:…
Aletho News- How Cyprus became first European partner in ‘Israel’s’ gas theft crime
- Iran–Russia railway pact sets keystone in North–South Corridor
- Iran’s oil exports hit new post-sanctions record
- NATO to deploy 800,000 troops in case of war with Russia – German general
- US went after Bangladesh government over reluctance to condemn Russia – ex-minister
- Finnish Politician Warns NATO Chief: Stop Arming Ukraine or Risk Nuclear War
- Lots of ‘mess’ to clear up in Russia-US ties – Lavrov
- US Informs Russia Extension of New START Restrictions Under Consideration – Lavrov
- EU economies will suffer without tapping Russia’s assets, Brussels warns – FT
- Irish football body votes to seek Israel’s ban from European competition
- If Americans Knew
- No food, poisonous water in Gaza – Not a Ceasefire Day 29
- Every person in Gaza experiencing high levels of food insecurity – Not a Ceasefire Day 28
- ‘The Silence after the Screams’: How Western Media Helped Justify the Rape of Palestinians
- The AI Drones Used In Gaza Now Surveilling American Cities
- With 10,000+ buried in rubble, Gaza is “world’s largest mass grave” – Not a Ceasefire Day 27
- Lawsuit Charges That California Law Illegally Muzzles Students and Teachers on Palestine
- Outrage over video leak of Israeli soldiers’ gang rape of Palestinian exposes rot in Israeli society
- Youtube Quietly Erased More Than 700 Videos Documenting Israeli Human Rights Violations
- They Tortured Lambs In The West Bank
- In Israel, raping Palestinian prisoners is justified. Leaking the footage is betrayal
- No Tricks Zone
- Germany’s EIKE Institute Calls “Global Tipping Points Report” Overly Fixated On CO2
- 2025 Hurricane Forecast Was Overly Alarmist (Again)…Atlantic Season Ending Near Normal
- Greenland Continues To Defy Alarmist Warming And Ice Melt Narratives
- Bill Gates, 893 Companies Ditch Climate Initiative…Call For “Return to Economic Rationality”
- The Antarctic Peninsula Has Cooled By Over 2°C Since 2003
- World Getting Fed Up With Europe’s Unsustainable Climate Sustainability Act
- New Study: Great Barrier Reef Coral Cover ‘At Its Highest Since Monitoring Began In 1985’
- Recent Global Warming Mostly Due To Natural Factors, New Study Finds
- Antarctic Amundsen-Scott Station Sees Coldest October in 44 Years…Mainstream Media Silent!
- New Study Determines It Is ‘Impossible’ For CO2 To Be The Driving Mechanism In Global Warming
Aletho News 