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Russian Scientists Develop New Polymer Material to Trap Lead Ions in Water

Sputnik – 03.12.2025

A new material that traps lead ions in wastewater and natural waterways has been created and tested by researchers at Russia’s Tyumen State University.

Developed as part of an international team, the material makes it faster and easier to remove the ecotoxicant from aquatic environments.

The results were published in Polymer Bulletin. The main sources of heavy-metal pollution in the environment include the mining, metallurgical, electroplating and steel industries.

When filtration systems at industrial facilities fail, large quantities of lead and other metal ions — toxic to bacteria, plants and mammals — can enter wastewater or natural waters, the university specialists explained.

Researchers from the State University of Tyumen, together with colleagues from Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, India, China and Saudi Arabia, have developed and tested a material capable of “capturing” lead from water in reservoirs.

The material is based on humic acids extracted from coal.

“We obtained lead traps with specially designed pores that can hold exactly a lead ion,” said Gulnara Shigabaeva, head of the Department of Organic and Environmental Chemistry at the university.

“Tests of the absorption process showed that the new material works more efficiently than existing analogue,” she added, and “the lead can be easily removed from our sorbent.”

She explained that the sorbent selectively captures lead ions because it is engineered with a “memory” of their size and charge — a polymer-design technique known as molecular imprinting.

“In the humic-acid and acrylic-acid–based material, there are cavities — imprints of lead ions,” Shigabaeva said “Smaller particles, such as iron ions, simply pass through them, while larger particles cannot fit into the sorbent.”

The granulated sorbent can be placed directly into water and later filtered out after swelling and absorbing the lead ions.

Laboratory experiments showed that one gram of the sorbent can extract 50 milligrams of lead ions from water in one hour. In the future, the researchers plan to develop molecularly imprinted polymer sorbents for other ecotoxicants such as nickel, copper and zinc.

They also intend to assess the effectiveness of the new materials under real environmental conditions.

December 5, 2025 Posted by | Environmentalism | | Leave a comment

DR BOB SEARS DISCUSSES ‘VACCINES AND THE DISEASES THEY TARGET’

The HighWire with Del Bigtree | December 4, 2025

Pediatrician Dr. Bob Sears joins Del to unpack ACIP’s hepatitis B vaccine debate, the near-total absence of long-term safety data for newborn vaccination, and why the U.S. is an outlier in giving this shot on day one of life. He discusses the Physicians for Informed Consent’s new Silver Book “Vaccines and the Diseases They Target”, designed to give doctors and parents clear, side-by-side numbers on disease risk and vaccine risk so real informed consent can finally happen.

December 5, 2025 Posted by | Book Review, Science and Pseudo-Science, Video | | Leave a comment

Israel moves to extend army service to 36 months

The Cradle | December 5, 2025

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich announced on 5 December a plan to extend mandatory military service to 36 months.

The move raises the current service terms from 30–32 months to a full 36 months and marks a significant shift in how Tel Aviv intends to staff its army at a time of deep political rupture and growing pressure on its northern front.

The ministers said the extension would add “10,000 service days per year” and could delay the discharge of soldiers scheduled to complete their service in 2026.

Katz’s office said the government will cut roughly 30,000 reserve duty positions and rely instead on longer compulsory service to fill the gaps.

The move also comes as the government promotes legislation to exempt the ultra-Orthodox, known as the Haredim, from the draft, while expecting regular soldiers to make up for the shrinking reserve force.

Opposition leader Yair Lapid condemned the arrangement as “a budget of corruption and draft-dodging.”

The adjustment is included in a significantly expanded 2026 defense budget. According to the prime minister’s office and statements issued by Katz, the budget now stands at $34.72 billion, up from an earlier draft of $27.90 billion.

Katz said the government will “reinforce the IDF and … reduce the burden on reservists,” though the plan effectively shifts that burden onto conscripts who will now serve an extra year. Smotrich said the overall increase compared with 2023 reached $14.57 billion.

The manpower strain has sharpened in recent months. Israeli Brigadier General Shai Tayeb told lawmakers that the army is currently short 12,000 recruits, including 7,000 combat soldiers, and warned that troop levels are projected to decline even further by early 2027.

Tayeb told the Knesset that Israel “needs to expand the base of those serving” and is preparing for three-year service terms and 70 days of annual reserve duty within five years.

Israel has even begun turning to foreign mercenaries to fill its ranks, with losses from campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon, rising dropout rates, and growing reluctance among reservists to return to service, the army is left to face what officials describe as a “huge shortage” of capable fighters.

December 5, 2025 Posted by | Civil Liberties, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Final SIGAR report finds decades of US corruption, waste in Afghanistan

Press TV – December 5, 2025

The final audit from Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) paints a stark portrait of how tens of billions of dollars ostensibly earmarked for nation‑building were diverted, misused or wasted.

According to SIGAR’s report, from 2002 to 2021 the United States appropriated about $148.21 billion purportedly for Afghan reconstruction. Of that sum, roughly $88.8 billion went to security‑sector projects, while other enterprises disguised as development, humanitarian assistance, governance and institution‑building consumed the rest.

But the watchdog estimates that between $26 billion and $29.2 billion of those funds were lost to waste, fraud and abuse—red flags that preceded the Afghan government’s collapse and the rapid Taliban takeover in 2021.

The report logged 1,327 separate cases of misuse, mismanagement, or corruption tied directly to US‑funded programs.

Among the failures major investments in the Afghan security forces were undermined by inflated troop rolls, ghost‑salary schemes, and an inability to maintain complex gear.

As SIGAR’s acting inspector general put it, “the government we helped build… was essentially a white collar criminal enterprise.”

SIGAR’s acting inspector general, Gene Aloise, told reporters that the project was undermined by “early and ongoing US decisions to ally with corrupt, human-rights-abusing power brokers.”

This strategy, he continued, strengthened insurgent networks and eroded hopes for stable governance in Afghanistan.

Large‑scale hardware and infrastructure also went to waste. The United States funded planes, bases, and military assets, many never used or deteriorating rapidly post‑contract.

One instance involved transport aircraft bought for tens or hundreds of millions of dollars that were later scrapped or abandoned when maintenance systems collapsed.

Despite almost $90 billion spent on training and equipping army and police forces, Afghan troops disintegrated quickly when US support ended, added the report.

Moreover, even broader cost estimates for the war paint an even more sobering picture.

Estimates put the total US cost — including military operations, veteran care, interest on borrowed funds and other long-term liabilities — at more than $2.3 trillion over the two decades, according to the Costs of War project at Brown University.

Based on the SIGAR’s final judgement, the much-hyped mission to purportedly build a stable, democratic Afghanistan delivered neither stability nor democracy.

In September, President Donald Trump sparked a fresh geopolitical firestorm with his calls to reclaim Afghanistan’s Bagram Air Base, signaling a willingness to re-establish a US military presence in a country that has warned against any return of foreign troops.

Trump said the United States was “trying to get [Bagram] back” and described it as “one of the biggest air bases in the world,” highlighting its strategic runway and location to contain China.

Two days later, he posted on social media that if Afghanistan does not return the base, “BAD THINGS ARE GOING TO HAPPEN.”

US military officials warn that retaking Bagram would require “tens of thousands” of troops along with massive logistical and air-defense support to hold the facility, a scenario that could mirror the pitfalls of the long Afghan war.

The United States had invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 in response to the September 11 attacks, even though not a single Afghan national was among the hijackers.

Over the course of the 20-year US occupation of the Asian nation, hundreds of thousands of Afghans lost their lives.

When Washington and its allies deployed troops in 2001, they claimed their mission was to dismantle al-Qaeda under what became known as the US “war on terror.” Yet two decades later, in August 2021, the Taliban quickly retook multiple provincial capitals and then entered Kabul with virtually no resistance.

The rapid collapse of the US-backed government forced Washington into a rushed and chaotic evacuation of diplomats, citizens, and Afghan partners — a scene that drew intense criticism for the US government’s mismanagement of its own exit.

December 5, 2025 Posted by | Corruption, False Flag Terrorism, Militarism | , | Leave a comment

POLITICO’s Delusion Cracks: Belgium Isn’t Helping Russia — It’s Trying to Save Europe From Itself

By Gerry Nolan | The Islander | December 5, 2025

The great farce of late-imperial Europe is that every time Brussels stumbles into another historic blunder of its own making, it immediately searches for a foreign hand to blame. And so the EU’s court chronicler, Politico, delivers its latest fever dream: that Belgium, the most indecisive, over-medicated country in the bloc, has somehow transformed into “Russia’s most valuable asset.” In reality, the only asset Russia needed was the EU’s own arrogance.

Belgium merely did the unthinkable, it told the truth.

What Politico dresses up as geopolitical intrigue is actually a confession of EU derangement. The EU are trying to engineer the largest state-sanctioned theft of sovereign wealth in modern history, a direct raid on the Russian Central Bank’s reserves and expected applause, unity, and moral ecstasy. Instead, Belgium asked the only sane question left in Europe: “Are you all completely out of your minds?” For this, Politico paints De Wever as eccentric, impulsive, unstable, the same labels always deployed when someone refuses to bow to the imperial autopilot. But the deeper scandal is that Brussels expected him to sign off on detonating the post-war financial order for the sake of one more photo-op with Zelensky.

Politico can hide behind metaphors of summit dinners and langoustines, but the legal reality is brutal: raiding another nation’s central bank is not a policy disagreement. It is a declaration of financial war on the entire world. It would obliterate sovereign immunity, destroy the neutrality of reserve holdings, and instantly signal to the global South that their assets in EU banks are hostage to EU’s emotional spasms. One act, one reckless stroke of a pen, and the euro collapses as a safe currency, capital flees to Asia, and the West loses its last functional pillar of power. Belgium saw the cliff’s edge, Brussels mistook it for a (perverse) moral leap of faith.

Politico’s narrative stumbles further when it pretends the only danger lies in Moscow’s retaliation. It does not. Russia’s symmetric countermeasures are well-known, lawful, and devastating: nationalization of Western corporate assets, seizure of industrial infrastructure, liquidation of bond holdings, and the dismantling of Western financial footprints inside Russia. The value of Western assets exposed inside the Russian Federation rivals what sits in Euroclear. Brussels knows this. Euroclear knows this. Investors know this. Only the EU pretends the ledger is irrelevant. But the real threat is not Russia’s response , it is the irreversible collapse of trust in Western custodianship. Once the EU steals central bank reserves, no nation with self-respect will ever again store wealth in Europe. The theft of Russian reserves would be remembered not as an isolated act, but as the day the West proved it cannot be trusted with global money, let alone soverign assets.

This is the part Politico is terrified to articulate. Belgium wasn’t protecting Russia. Belgium is trying to protect the very system the EU purports to defend. Yet instead of portraying De Wever as the only adult in the room, Politico stages a melodrama about a Flemish nationalist gone rogue, supposedly spoiling the EU’s grandiose plan to hurl another €140 billion onto the Ukrainian funeral pyre. The reality is simpler, Belgium refused to mortgage its own future so Europe could continue its cosplay as a geopolitical superpower utterly detached from material reality. The EU elite wanted to play empire with someone else’s risk. Belgium refused to be the guarantor of their delusion.

What makes Politico’s narrative even more absurd is that it accidentally reveals the deeper rot, Europe’s elite caste are incapable of unity, incapable of strategic thought, incapable of honesty. Merz shoots from the hip. Von der Leyen improvises legal fantasies. Orbán holds a veto the size of a continental fault line. Trump instinctively knows he needs an offramp via peace talks and is happy to download project Ukraine’s corpse along with the humiliation onto Western Europe. Zelensky arrives in Brussels begging for cash while European governments fight over whether the money should be spent on their own weapons factories. This is not a union. This is a collective suicide pact.

And through all this chaos, Politico clings to the illusion that Russia must somehow be “laughing.” But Russia isn’t laughing. Russia is watching. Watching as Europe destroys its own energy security, its own industrial base, its own strategic autonomy, its own diplomatic credibility, its own financial reputation, and finally — with this proposed asset raid — the very legal foundations of the Western economic system. If Moscow appears calm, it is because it doesn’t need to act. Europe is demolishing itself at a pace Russia could never have engineered.

Belgium’s “no” was not an act of betrayal. It was the last flicker of European rationality. The EU’s hysteria and psychosis, not Russia, created the crisis. Europe is trying to violate international law, sabotage its own financial institutions, and torch what remains of the bygone postwar order to salvage the illusion of a war it has already lost. Belgium simply refused to join the ritual suicide.

So let us rewrite Politico’s headline as history will record it: “How the EU Became Russia’s Greatest Strategic Gift.” Not because Russia manipulated Europe, but because Europe manipulated itself, into hysteria, into decay, into legal nihilism, into economic ruin. Belgium didn’t hand Russia an asset. It denied the EU the final act of self-destruction… for now.

The tragic irony of the entire Politico piece is that its authors still cling to the fantasy that Europe can recover simply by shaming Belgium into compliance. But history will not be kind to this moment. When future scholars study the collapse of the Western financial empire, this attempted seizure of Russian assets and Belgium’s lonely refusal, will stand as the point where the veil fell, revealing a Europe that could no longer distinguish faux moral posturing from strategic insanity.

Belgium didn’t break with Europe, it broke with Europe’s delusions. The EU convinced itself that tearing down the last pillars of the post-war order was an act of courage. Belgium saw it for what it was, a death rite dressed as morality. And when this era ends, when capitals move eastward, when trust evaporates, when the euro cracks under the weight of its own blind arrogance, historians will look back on this moment. They will not ask why Belgium said no. They will ask why Europe said yes.

December 5, 2025 Posted by | Economics, Russophobia | , , | Leave a comment

US warns Europe of ‘civilizational erasure’

RT | December 5, 2025

Europe is facing potential “civilizational erasure” as the continent’s policymakers encourage censorship, crack down on political opponents, and turn a blind eye to mass immigration, the new National Security Strategy released by the administration of US President Donald Trump warns.

The landmark and strongly worded document released on Friday says that while the EU is showing worrying signs of economic decline, its cultural and political unraveling poses an even greater threat.

The strategy cites EU-backed immigration policies, suppression of political opposition, curbs on speech, collapsing birthrates, and “loss of national identities and self-confidence,” warning that Europe could become “unrecognizable in 20 years or less.”

The document argues that many European governments are “doubling down on their present path,” while the US wants Europe “to remain European” and abandon “regulatory suffocation” – an apparent reference to America’s stand-off with the EU over its strict digital market guidelines, which Washington claims discriminate against US-based tech giants such as Microsoft, Google, and Meta.

One of Washington’s key goals is “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations,” the paper adds.

Trump’s strategy notes that the rise of “patriotic European parties” offers “cause for great optimism,” in a reference to growing bloc-wide support for right-wing Euroskeptic parties calling for strict immigration limits.

The document proclaims that “the era of mass migration is over.” It argues that large inflows have strained resources, increased violence, and weakened social cohesion, adding that Washington is seeking a world in which sovereign states “work together to stop rather than manage” migration flows.

The strategy also comes amid Trump’s push to convince European NATO members to spend more on defense. At one point, he threatened not to defend “delinquent” countries in an attack if they fail to meet his demands. At a summit earlier this year, the bloc endorsed a new plan to move toward combined defense-related spending of up to 5% of GDP, far above NATO’s longstanding 2% benchmark.

December 5, 2025 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Russophobia | , , | 2 Comments

US puts normalizing relations with Russia among ‘core interests’

RT | December 5, 2025

The US has placed the restoration of normal ties with Russia and a rapid end to the Ukraine conflict at the center of its newly released National Security Strategy, presenting both aims as among America’s core interests.

The 33-page report outlining President Donald Trump’s foreign-policy vision was released by the White House on Friday.

”It is a core interest of the United States to negotiate an expeditious cessation of hostilities in Ukraine,” the paper states, “in order to stabilize European economies, prevent unintended escalation or expansion of the war, and reestablish strategic stability with Russia.”

It notes that the Ukraine conflict has left “European relations with Russia… deeply attenuated,” destabilizing the region.

The report criticizes European leaders for “unrealistic expectations” regarding the outcome of the conflict, arguing that “a large European majority wants peace, yet that desire is not translated into policy.”

America, it says, is ready for “significant diplomatic engagement” to “help Europe correct its current trajectory,” reestablish stability, and “mitigate the risk of conflict between Russia and European states.”

In contrast with the US national strategy during Trump’s first term, which emphasized competition with Russia and China, the new strategy shifts the focus to the Western Hemisphere and to protecting the homeland, the borders, and regional interests. It calls for resources to be redirected from distant theaters to challenges closer to home and urges NATO and European states to shoulder primary responsibility for their own defense.

The document also calls for an end to NATO expansion – a demand that Russia has repeatedly made, calling it a root cause of the Ukraine conflict, which Moscow views as a Western proxy war.

Overall, the new strategy signals a shift away from global interventionism toward a more transactional foreign policy, arguing that the US should act abroad only when its interests are directly at stake.

The strategy is the first of several major defense and foreign-policy documents the Trump administration is expected to release. These include an updated National Defense Strategy, the Missile Defense Review, and Nuclear Posture Review, which are expected to echo the strategy’s direction.

December 5, 2025 Posted by | Russophobia | , , , | Leave a comment

Scott Ritter: New US National Security Strategy Marks Death Blow to NATO Expansion

Sputnik – December 5, 2025

The Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy has sent shockwaves across the globe, dropping ‘Russian threat’ language completely and crossing out the vision of NATO “as a perpetually expanding alliance.” Sputnik asked prolific geopolitical analyst Scott Ritter to break down the document and its implications.

The new US National Security Strategy is based on “the reality that Russia is not a threat to Europe or the United States, recognition that Russia has been artificially cast as such a threat now for decades, and [that] the consequences of this miscasting” have been an unmitigated “disaster for Europe and a threat to the national security of the United States,” the former Marine Corps intelligence officer told Sputnik.

The document signals that the White House has been “able to free itself… from the legacy of post-Cold War-era Russophobia” seeking to weaken and “strategically defeat” Russia, Ritter said.

“The Trump administration recognizes that this is an inherently destabilizing policy,” not to mention “extraordinarily dangerous,” since confrontation with Russia “ultimately means nuclear war,” the observer stressed.

In this new geopolitical calculus, Europe in its current trajectory is far more of a threat to itself, the US, and international peace and security than Russia, Ritter argues, reiterating that European Russia hawks’ policy is “incompatible” with US national security objectives.

No More NATO Expansion

The new NSS also “puts an end and drives a stake through the heart of the beast of Ukraine’s unrealistic expectations regarding NATO membership, and Europe’s equally unrealistic expectations that at some point in time, Ukraine could become a member of NATO,” Ritter says, commenting on the NSS’s prioritization of “ending” NATO’s status “as a perpetually expanding alliance.”

The document effectively signals “the end of the European enterprise” and the idea that Europe is a geopolitical equal of the US, and one able to “dictate” policy outcomes to Washington, Ritter says. “That’s over. The United States says no, you’re done. Moreover, we say the trajectory that you’re on is incompatible with the national security of the United States.”

Behind the scenes, things get even more interesting, Ritter believes, pointing to “whispers from people who are knowledgeable” about the intent behind the document to the effect that the US will not bail out Europe if it starts a war with Russia.

“This is an extraordinarily important document because it literally represents a divorce of decades of legacy policy that postured the United States and Russia as opponents who should be preparing to fight each other,” Ritter emphasized.

Beyond that, the NSS’s point on ‘no NATO expansion’ and lack of positioning Russia as a threat effectively means “there’s no legitimate reason for NATO to exist,” unless it can transform into a genuinely defensive alliance.

“NATO, as it currently exists, will no longer exist. If [it] is to continue to survive, it must re-identify itself as a defensive alliance focused on securing a reasonable and rational Europe, and not this alliance capable of standing toe-to-toe with Russia, expanding… ever eastward towards confrontation with Russia, and a NATO that embraces a strategy of the strategic defeat of Russia. That NATO is dead. That NATO will never be resurrected,” Ritter summed up.

December 5, 2025 Posted by | Militarism, Russophobia | , , , | Leave a comment

EU Fines X $140 Million Amid Free Speech Clash

By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | December 5, 2025

The European Union pulled the trigger on Elon Musk’s social media platform X. On Friday, Brussels fined X a massive $140 million for what it described as “transparency failures” under its censorship law, the Digital Services Act. In plain terms, the EU is angry that X is not policing speech the way it wants.

Of course, officials insist the penalty is not about censorship. It is about “accountability.” Yet every part of the fine print points to the same thing: a government demanding more control over what people say and see online.

The European Commission called X’s blue check system “deceptive” because Musk turned what used to be a verification badge into a paid feature anyone can buy. In the eyes of Brussels, that is chaos, a marketplace where speech is treated like a right, not a licensed activity.

Henna Virkkunen, the Commission’s executive vice president for tech sovereignty, summed up the mood. “Deceiving users with blue check marks, obscuring information on ads, and shutting out researchers have no place online in the E.U.,” she said. “We are holding X responsible for undermining users’ rights and evading accountability.”

European regulators also accuse X of not sharing advertising data and refusing to give researchers access to its user information. The law says platforms must open up to “independent research.” In reality, that means academics and NGOs, often with pro-censorship political affiliations, getting privileged access to social data, exactly the kind of surveillance the DSA claims to prevent.

Officials call this “transparency.” It is a transparency that flows one way, upward, toward the state. Musk’s decision not to hand over user data now counts as a punishable offense.

When asked to explain how they calculated the €120 million penalty, the Commission offered a masterpiece of vagueness about “proportionality” and “the nature of the infringements.” The only clear metric seems to be how defiant a company is about following orders.

From Washington, the outrage came fast. “The EU should be supporting free speech, not attacking American companies over garbage,” said Vice President JD Vance. Musk responded with his usual brevity: “Much appreciated.”

In the same breath that Brussels punished X, it closed an investigation into TikTok without a fine. TikTok, after all, promised to “cooperate” and adjust its design. “If you comply with our rules, you don’t get a fine,” Virkkunen told reporters.

That sentence could serve as the EU’s motto. Compliance equals peace. Free speech costs money.

The European Union has moved beyond suggesting rules for online speech and is now issuing orders. American social media platforms are facing a steady increase in censorship demands from Brussels, framed as “transparency” and “safety” obligations.

Each new regulation adds another layer of political oversight, turning what used to be private platforms into instruments of European policy.

The DSA sits at the center of this system. The law forces companies like Meta, Google, and X to remove “harmful” content, grant access to internal data, and submit regular reports on how they handle information deemed risky by regulators.

None of these terms have clear definitions, which gives officials the freedom to decide what speech is acceptable after the fact. In effect, the EU has built a structure that allows censorship by procedure rather than decree.

US companies are learning that “transparency” now means constant surveillance from European regulators and activist groups. The enforcement process rewards compliance, not innovation. Platforms that fail to align with the EU’s preferred moderation standards face public scolding and multi-million-dollar fines. Those who comply end up filtering speech to avoid further punishment.

This has turned into a quiet export of European political culture. The EU’s rhetoric about “accountability” and “responsibility” conceals a growing ambition to shape global online discourse.

December 5, 2025 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Leave a comment

Revealing Information on 2016 Election May Help Restore US-Russia Ties: Ex-Trump Advisor

By Lenka White – Sputnik – 05.12.2025

Once the full investigation records on Russia’s alleged 2016 election interference are declassified, Americans will stop viewing Russia as an enemy — potentially opening the door to restoring bilateral ties, George Papadopoulos, former Trump campaign adviser, told Sputnik.

Papadopoulos was one of the central figures in the investigation into alleged Russian interference in the US presidential election of 2016. In 2018, the ex-adviser was sentenced to 14 days in prison and a fine of $9,500 for allegedly giving false statements to the FBI. In 2020, US President Donald Trump granted Papadopoulos full pardon.

“I think as long as all information is declassified, people speak about the truth, and the judges and the court system abide by the law, then people will finally understand what really happened. People in America will not see Russia as an enemy, hopefully, anymore, and this will foster a new era for both peoples and the globe, which I think is desperately needed in today’s very unstable world,” he said.

Papadopoulos expressed belief that there is a lot more sensitive information that has to come out, including regarding the involvement of other foreign governments that were working with the Democrats in the Obama administration.

“But as of right now, I think it is a very good first step. We have seen indictments, and credibility in the justice system is being restored, and this is a very big boost, I think, to people like myself, President Trump, and others who were involved in this fake scandal,” Papadopoulos added.

A CIA review concluded in July that the 2016 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) on the alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election campaign was conducted with anomalies, such as excessive involvement of agency heads.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in August that the ICA was based on false information, including the Steele Dossier, as part of a smear campaign against Trump. The claims led to politicized investigations, arrests, and heightened tensions between the US and Russia.

December 5, 2025 Posted by | Deception, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

Macron’s Proposed Seal of Truth Meets a Wall of Criticism

Macron’s seal of reliability may prove less about journalism and more about obedience

By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | December 4, 2025

Emmanuel Macron thinks the Republic needs a quality seal for reality. The French president recently proposed creating an official “reliability label” for news outlets, modeled on Reporters Without Borders’ Journalism Trust Initiative. He insists it is not censorship. It is a “democratic duty.”

“It is about making our young people understand, encouraging them, motivating them to turn toward press outlets, whether in physical, printed form or digital,” Macron said, as though the French youth were a flock that had wandered into the dangerous fields of the internet and needed shepherding back to Le Monde.

The proposal, presented during a discussion with readers of the Ebra press group, called for a label for outlets that follow ethical standards, validated by “peers and third-party experts.”

The government, he said, would not decide who qualifies. It would only “encourage” such standards. But in France, the words “encourage” and “government” often mean something closer to “mandatory, eventually.”

The model is RSF’s Journalism Trust Initiative, which already certifies media that meet certain requirements. Certified outlets supposedly even get algorithmic advantages on platforms like Bing.

Macron wants a French version, claiming it would bring “international recognition of the professionalism of our journalists and the rigour of our editorial teams.”

Translated from technocrat to plain French: good media will rise to the top, bad media will sink to the digital basement.

This, Macron says, will help fight “disinformation.” The country has heard that promise before. Each new attempt to fight misinformation seems to end up tightening control over information itself.

The idea landed with the subtlety of a brick through a newsroom window.

On BFMTV, Parliamentary Party Leader of the National Rally, Marine Le Pen called it “unworthy,” said the proposal was “extremely dangerous,” accusing Macron of wanting “to master information.”

Bruno Retailleau, leader of Les Républicains, said “no government has the right to filter the media or dictate the truth.”

The Mayor of Cannes, David Lisnard, said the president had “crossed a fundamental line.” Even some journalists balked at being graded by a system endorsed by the state.

Macron denied everything. “There is not going to be a state label, and even less a ‘ministry of truth,’” said government spokeswoman Maud Bregeon after the cabinet meeting.

Macron repeated that “it is not the state that should verify” the truth, since “otherwise it becomes a dictatorship.”

So far, the reassurance has not worked. The term “Ministry of Truth” is now glued to the project in every headline, thanks in part to a viral editorial by Pascal Praud on CNews, who accused the president of “wanting to impose a single narrative.”

In a remarkable act of irony, the Élysée responded to critics on X by posting a video labeled “warning, false information.”

The president’s communications team, while denying the existence of a Ministry of Truth, had just produced something that looked exactly like one.

The post set off another round of outrage.

Jordan Bardella, President of the National Rally, said Macron’s proposal was “the reflex of a man who has lost power and seeks to maintain it by controlling information.”

The label plan is part of Macron’s wider campaign against disinformation. He has floated legal changes to allow “false information” to be blocked online more quickly and has repeatedly called for tighter regulation of social media, describing the current state of the internet as “the Wild West.”

It is not hard to see why the issue obsesses him. Macron and his wife have been the targets of online rumors for years.

For a president who sees himself as a technocratic reformer, the swamp of digital conspiracy has become both a personal irritant and a political threat.

Macron insists that only a system of certified journalism can protect the public from manipulation. The trouble is, the public does not want the government or anyone tied to it certifying which journalists to trust.

Reporters Without Borders may be an NGO, but any system announced by the president and promoted as a matter of “democratic duty” will carry the scent of state authority.

Once the government endorses a “trust” label, those without it become, by definition, untrustworthy.

December 5, 2025 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Pro-Israel Forces Intensify Effort To Control American Discourse

Stark Realities with Brian McGlinchey | December 4, 2025

Across the American political spectrum, support for the State of Israel is steadily eroding. With the long-running, staggeringly expensive redistribution of American wealth and weapons to one of the world’s most prosperous countries under unprecedented threat, Israel’s advocates inside the United States are growing increasingly desperate to suppress the facts, opinions, questions and imagery that are causing this sea change.

Pro-Israel forces have long worked to limit and shape US discourse to Israel’s advantage. However, the intensity and novelty of what’s taking place in 2025 — from the government-coerced transfer of a social media platform to pro-Israel billionaires, to the jailing and attempted deportation of a student for writing an opinion piece, and more — deserves the attention of every American who values free expression, an enlightened electorate, and independence from foreign influence.

Many Americans know that Congress and President Biden teamed up in 2024 to force the Chinese company ByteDance to divest its US operation of the popular video-sharing app TikTok, yet few realize this unusual intervention was motivated in large part by a desire to serve the interests of Israel.

Though politicians pointed to the supposed Chinese menace lurking inside the app — while revealing their lack of sincerity by continuing to use it themselves — the catalyst for the extraordinary legislation’s passage was a sea of viral content illuminating Israel’s rampage in Gaza, casting Palestinians in empathetic light, and questioning the legitimacy of the political philosophy that is Zionism.

The idea that passage of the ban was largely about Israel is no conspiracy theory. American politicians who supported the compelled divestiture of TikTok have candidly said so themselves. Sharing a stage with Biden Secretary of State Antony Blinken in 2024, then-Senator Mitt Romney said:

“Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down, potentially, TikTok or other entities of that nature. You look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media sites — it’s overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts, so I’d note that’s of real interest to the president, who will get the chance to take action in that regard.”

Similarly, Rep. Mike Lawler of New York told a webinar that pro-Palestinian student protests were “exactly why we included the TikTok bill… because you’re seeing how these kids are being manipulated by certain groups or entities or countries to foment hate on their behalf and really create a hostile environment here in the US.”

Of course, mere divestiture wouldn’t guarantee that TikTok would start suppressing anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian content in the United States. To have the desired effect, the buyer — who required White House approval — would have to be an ardent supporter of Israel. That’s just how things played out. In September, President Trump approved the sale of TikTok’s US operations to a joint venture led by Larry Ellison, the founder of tech-titan Oracle and the fourth-richest man in the world.

Ellison has expressed his “deep emotional connection to the State of Israel” and has been a major benefactor of the Israeli Defense Forces, via donations to IDF-supporting organizations. He spent at least $3 million on Marco Rubio’s failed 2016 presidential campaign, after being assured by Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations that Rubio would “be a great friend to Israel.” There are other Israel-favoring billionaires in the consortium now controlling TikTok’s American presence, among them NewsCorp head Rupert Murdoch and investment trader Jeff Yass.

Americans were propagandized into fearing Chinese control of TikTok users’ data. Now that data will be controlled by Oracle, a firm whose founder has described Israel as his own nation, said “there is no greater honor” than supporting the IDF, and invited Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to take a seat on the board. It’s also a firm with strong business ties to the Israel government, and a firm whose Israel-born executive vice chair and former CEO last year declared, “For [Oracle] employees, it’s clear: If you’re not for America or Israel, don’t work here.”

A few months before the TikTok divestiture was finalized, the company installed former IDF soldier and self-described “passionate” Zionist Erica Mindel as TikTok’s hate speech manager in July. Weeks later, and just days before the transfer of TikTok’s US operation was approved, the platform posted new guidelines on Sept 13 about what’s allowed on the platform.

Soon after the change, users and content creators began sharing examples of content being deleted by TikTok, with the platform exploiting its vague new rules about “conspiracy theories” and “protected groups” to reject negative content about Israel — wielding the threat of demonetization of repeat offenders. In a recent appearance on the Breaking Points podcast, Guy Christensen, who has 3.4 million TikTok followers, shared his experience:

“What all these videos have in common that have been removed since Sept 13 are that I am talking about Israel, I’m talking about AIPAC’s influence, I’m talking about Larry Ellison and the attempt to put TikTok under Zionist control — I’m criticizing Israel in some way. It’s the same thing I’ve heard from my audience, my friends who are creators. Ever since Sept 13, they’ve had the same exact experience. Videos that are more informational and critical of Israel get removed.”

In a late-September meeting with pro-Israel social media “influencers,” Netanyahu hailed the transfer of TikTok’s US ownership. “We have to fight with the weapons that apply to the battlefield with which we’re engaged, and the most important ones are in social media. And the most important purchase that is going on right now is TikTok. Number one.” Expressing hope that, by “talking” with Elon Musk, his X platform could be reshaped to be more Israel-protective too, Netanyahu added, “If we can get those two things, we can get a lot.”

Ellison’s TikTok takeover is troubling enough, but that wasn’t his only media move this year. He also financed his son David’s takeover of Paramount Skydance, the media company that controls many movie and television properties, including CBS. David Ellison quickly installed as head of CBS News Bari Weiss — a self-described “Zionist fanatic” who took a gap year before college to live on an Israeli kibbutz.

Weiss’s history of wrangling over the bounds of acceptable speech vis-a-vis Israel goes back to her sophomore year at Columbia University, when she was part of a group of students who claimed they were subjected to intimidation by Middle East Studies professors over the students’ Zionist views. A university panel found only one of the supposed incidents represented unacceptable conduct.

Both outside observers and network insiders are braced for Weiss to nudge the outlet’s reporting to Israel’s benefit, and there are early indications validating worries about her bias. Citing executive sources inside CBS, the Wall Street Journal reported that foreign correspondent Chris Livesay, who was set to be laid off as part of a downsizing move that preceded Weiss’s arrival, sent Weiss an email expressing his affinity for Israel and claiming he was “bullied” for his beliefs. Weiss intervened and saved Livesay from the layoff. Other correspondents told the Journal that Livesay’s claim about bullying was bogus.

Compounding the expectations that CBS News is about to become a de facto Israel PR outlet, the network’s new ombudsman — the arbiter of editorial concerns — also has strong Zionist credentials. The New York Times describes Kenneth Weinstein as a “firm and vocal champion of Israel.” On X, Grayzone editor-in-chief Max Blumenthal noted that, “during a 2021… event with Mike Pence, Weinstein touted his Israel lobbyist creds, describing how he’d been groomed by the Tikvah Fund, the Likudnik training network which will award Bari Weiss its Herzl Award this November.” (The Likud Party is the Israeli party led by Netanyahu.)

Summing up the TikTok and CBS moves, Glenn Greenwald wrote, “The minute the American public starts turning against Israel and the US financing of that country, the world’s richest and most fanatical pro-Israel billionaires start buying up large media outlets and TikTok, then install Bari Weiss and an ex-IDF soldier to control content.”

The transfer of TikTok into Israel-friendly hands isn’t the only example of intensified US government intervention in America’s public square on behalf of the tiny Middle Eastern country.

Much of the Trump administration’s war against anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian speech has focused on college campuses. In the most alarming such move in 2025, the Trump administration has arrested, jailed and attempted to deport foreign students for merely voicing their support for Palestinians or opposition to the Israeli government.

The most atrocious example — which Stark Realities examined in depth earlier this year — centers on a 30-year-old, Turkish Tufts University PhD candidate who was arrested on a Boston street and whisked away to a dismal Louisiana prison, just for co-authoring a calmly-written Tufts Daily op-ed urging the university to formally characterize Israel’s conduct in Gaza as genocide, and to sell the school’s Israel-associated investments.

This cruelly despotic tactic is the brainchild of the Heritage Foundation. In a policy paper, the think tank urged pro-Israel groups and the US government to characterize pro-Palestinian activists as “effectively members of a terrorist support network,” and then use that characterization to target activists for deportations, expulsions from colleges, lawsuits, terminations by employers, and exclusion from “open society.”

Supporters of Israel have long attempted to stifle critics of the Israeli government by smearing them as antisemites. In 2016, that kind of mislabelling was codified in a definition of antisemitism that’s now being embraced by governments, universities and other institutions in the United States and around the world: the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s “working definition of antisemitism.”

Some elements of the IHRA definition are reasonable, but others irrationally conflate criticism of the State of Israel with hatred of all Jews. For example, the IHRA definition says it’s antisemitic to “claim that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” or to merely “draw comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”

Other, vague elements of the definition are open to creative interpretations, facilitating bogus accusations of bigotry against Israel’s critics. For example, the IHRA says it’s antisemitic to “apply double standards by requiring of [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.” The IHRA also says it’s antisemitic to make statements about the “power of Jews as [a] collective,” which can put someone who talks about the enormous influence of the pro-Israel lobby squarely in the crosshairs.

Similarly, the IHRA says it’s antisemitic to “deny the Jewish people their right to self-determination,” a definition that could ensnare people who — right or wrong — advocate for the State of Israel to be replaced by a new governing arrangement for the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Indeed, those who want speech to be policed on Israel’s behalf frequently point to the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” as inherently antisemitic.

As I wrote in another Stark Realities essay, “No Country Has a Right To Exist”:

Those who support the State of Israel are free to present a case that it’s a just arrangement for the 7.5 million Jews and 7.5 million Palestinians “between the river and the sea.” However, painting those who demand a new arrangement as inherently immoral, genocidal or antisemitic is ignorant at best and maliciously misleading at worst.

Doing its part to vilify Israel’s critics and mislead the public and policymakers, the Anti-Defamation League has employed expansive definitions in its numerical tracking of antisemitic incidents — statistics that are unquestioningly quoted by journalists and cited by pro-Israel politicians.

For example, in early 2024, the ADL claimed that, in the first three months after the Oct. 7 Hamas invasion of Israel and the IDF’s brutal assault on Gaza, antisemitic incidents skyrocketed 360%. ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said Jews faced a threat “unprecedented in modern history.” However, the ADL admitted that it was counting as antisemitic incidents all protests that included “anti-Zionist chants and slogans”

Of course, exaggerating the scale of antisemitism does more than facilitate efforts to suppress criticism of Israel: It also helps the ADL justify its existence and boost its fundraising. The ADL’s over-counting is nothing new. In 2017, the ADL claimed antisemitic incidents in the United States had soared by 86% in the first quarter of the year, and major media outlets ran with the story. However, much of the increase springs from the ADL’s decision to include a huge number of bomb threats phoned into US synagogues and schools by a Jew living in Israel.

The IHRA definition is at the forefront of a broad campaign to suppress candid discourse about Israel and Palestine on college campuses, with multiple state governments ordering public schools to use it to determine what can and can’t be said.

Bard College’s Kenneth Stern, a lead drafter of a 2004 antisemitism definition that was subsequently adopted by the IHRA, has spoken out against the weaponization of the definition to stifle discourse at universities. “The history of the abuse of the IHRA definition demonstrates the desire is largely political—it is not so much a desire to identify antisemitism, but rather to label certain speech about Israel as antisemitic,” Stern wrote at the Knight First Amendment Institute.

Even at schools that haven’t adopted the IHRA definition, activists and scholars who are critical of Israel and empathetic to the Palestinians are being subjected to countless false accusations of antisemitism, and universities are being sued by pro-Israel students who claim the schools tolerate antisemitism.

A Stark Realities analysis of an 84-page complaint filed against the University of Pennsylvania found nearly every alleged “antisemitic incident” was merely an instance in which Penn students, professors and guest speakers engaged in political expression that proponents of the State of Israel strongly disagree with. Eighteen months later, a federal judge agreed. “At worst, Plaintiffs accuse Penn of tolerating and permitting the expression of viewpoints which differ from their own,” Judge Mitchell Goldberg wrote as he dismissed the case.

Courtroom victories, however, can only do so much to counter the chilling effect of campaigns that vilify students, professors and institutions as antisemitic. That’s especially true when university cash flows are threatened.

Major pro-Israel donors have withdrawn or threatened to suspend donations to various schools, and those threats have been credited with forcing out university presidents like Penn’s Liz Magill. Donor pressure has also led schools to adopt the problematic IHRA antisemitism definition, shut down chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine, and strip Israel-critical professors of chair positions.

The greatest financial pressure being exerted on universities, however, is coming from the Trump administration, which has not only suspended billions of dollars in funding from various universities that are supposed hives of antisemitism, but has also filed lawsuits and hammered schools with fines. Many of them are surrendering, paying the government large sums and making policy and staffing changes. Last week, Northwestern agreed to pay $75 million to the federal government for its alleged failure to fight “antisemitism.” Earlier, Columbia agreed to a $200 million fine payable over three years, and Brown will surrender $50 million.

There are other avenues by which government force is being tapped to squelch criticism of Israel and advocacy for Palestinians. Dozens of states have passed legislation that bar individuals and businesses from contracting with the state if they boycott or divest from Israel. That led to a bizarre spectacle in which hurricane-battered Texans applying for emergency benefits were asked to verify that they do not and will not boycott Israel. Comparable federal measures have been introduced, but not yet enacted.

Another proposed federal bill is the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which would require the Department of Education to use the IHRA definition when evaluating accusations that colleges tolerate antisemitism — essentially codifying a Trump executive order. It sailed through the House in 2024 by a 320-91 vote, but stalled in the Senate this year amid bipartisan concerns about the definition. Seven amendments had been attached in committee, including one clarifying that criticism of the Israeli government isn’t antisemitism.

Tellingly, champions of the bill said amendments like that were poison pills that would render it un-passable.

December 5, 2025 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Sinophobia | , , , | Leave a comment

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