Patrik Baab: War Propaganda Destroyed Media & Freedom of Speech
Glenn Diesen | December 6, 2025
Patrik Baab is a German journalist and best-selling author who reported on both sides of the frontline in Ukraine. Baab argues that war propaganda has destroyed the credibility of the media and freedom of speech.
Follow Prof. Glenn Diesen:
Substack: https://glenndiesen.substack.com/
X/Twitter: https://x.com/Glenn_Diesen
Support the research by Prof. Glenn Diesen:
PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/glenn…
Buy me a Coffee: buymeacoffee.com/gdieseng
Go Fund Me: https://gofund.me/09ea012f
Books by Prof. Glenn Diesen: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/…
Vaccine injury lawyer delivers scathing rebuke of childhood vaccine schedule — Offit, Hotez decline to debate
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | December 5, 2025
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) vaccine advisory committee today heard from a vaccine injury lawyer who proposed the committee revisit the childhood vaccine schedule.
Attorney Aaron Siri told members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) that the vaccines were recommended without sufficient data and that the expansion of the schedule coincided with a rise in chronic illness among U.S. children.
Siri, a vaccine critic and author of “Vaccines, Amen: The Religion of Vaccines,” called for a reexamination of the childhood immunization schedule based on “robust” safety data.
Siri challenged claims that the childhood vaccination schedule has been tested in its entirety, that the vaccines are safe and that routine childhood vaccines have been proven to prevent transmission.
He also questioned claims that scientists have conducted the testing necessary to assert definitively that there is no possible link between vaccines and autism.
Siri recommended ACIP revisit childhood vaccine recommendations based on “robust” clinical trial and post-licensure safety data and called on the committee to respect the “right of informed consent.”
“Mandates make vaccines political” and also “impact those who most need to avoid” certain vaccines, he said. When people report vaccine injuries, members of the medical community “pretend that they don’t exist.”
Siri represents plaintiffs in vaccine-related lawsuits against federal agencies and pharmaceutical companies.
Children’s Health Defense CEO Mary Holland said Siri “accurately compared the pre-1986 Act vaccine schedule with the post-1986 schedule, when doctors and vaccine manufacturers have been absolved from all real responsibility for the vast vaccine injuries they have caused,” Holland said.
The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 granted vaccine makers immunity from liability for most injuries caused by their products.
ACIP didn’t vote on any aspect of the childhood vaccine schedule today. In June, ACIP formed a committee to study the cumulative effect of all vaccines given during childhood.
Key vaccine advocates declined ACIP’s invitation to deliver presentations
Siri’s presentation came shortly after ACIP voted to end the recommendation that all infants born in the U.S. receive the hepatitis B (Hep B) vaccine within 12-24 hours of birth.
The committee also voted to recommend that families determine whether to give their child the Hep B shot at birth through individual decision-making and consultation with their physician.
Siri cited the licensing of Hep B vaccines as an example of flawed studies leading to the licensing of a vaccine. He called those studies “underpowered” and “industry-funded.”
Siri’s presentation stirred controversy even before it began. In a post on X yesterday, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), chairman of the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions (HELP) Committee, dismissed Siri’s qualifications and said ACIP “is totally discredited.”
Siri responded that Cassidy’s post was “deeply ironic,” given that vaccine manufacturers are legally protected from lawsuits.
“Childhood vaccines are the only product in America where you cannot ever sue the company that killed or injured your child on the basis the company could’ve made the product safer. If vaccines are so safe, why do they need this protection?” Siri wrote on X.
ACIP member Dr. Cody Meissner called Siri’s presentation a “terrible distortion of all the facts” and said Siri shouldn’t have been invited. Earlier, Meissner voted against the proposal to end the universal Hep B vaccine recommendation for newborns.
ACIP also addressed controversy over Siri’s presentation and the lack of a pro-vaccine counterweight. Mina Zadeh, Ph.D., ACIP’s executive secretary, said the committee “invited several people to give us a broad perspective” on the childhood vaccination schedule.
Those invitees included two prominent and outspoken promoters of vaccines — Dr. Paul Offit and Peter Hotez, M.D., Ph.D. Both declined. Hotez told STAT that Siri “shouldn’t be there in the first place.”
Siri responded that the U.S. has “the worst health outcomes of all developed countries.”
Liability shield disincentivizes vaccine makers from performing proper safety testing
Siri used the opportunity today to criticize the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986. He said the liability shield provided by that law disincentivized vaccine manufacturers from focusing on the safety of their products.
“Companies, including pharmaceutical companies, are driven by economic self-interest,” Siri said. “With drugs and non-routine vaccines, they … remain liable for the injuries caused by those products after they come to market and hence, they have an economic self-interest in doing robust clinical trials beforehand.”
“When it comes to routine childhood vaccines … they don’t have those same concerns,” Siri said.
He said the number of vaccines on the childhood schedule skyrocketed — from three to 72 — after Congress passed the 1986 act. Those initial three vaccines “were causing so much harm, all the manufacturers stopped making them or went out of business,” prompting the passage of the act.
“For every other product I’m aware of, the solution is to make a better, safer product. But when it came to these vaccines, Congress went a different way” by giving these companies “unprecedented broad immunity,” Siri said.
‘You can’t find what you’re not studying’
Siri also criticized the shortened clinical trial process for childhood vaccines, which results in recommendations being made on the basis of insufficient data and the inability to detect any long-term health impacts from the vaccines.
“Most recommendations for routine use by ACIP of a particular vaccine happened very shortly after its licensure, and hence the primary data often available for a specific vaccine would have been its clinical trial data,” Siri said.
He also criticized the lack of post-licensure safety monitoring.
“You can’t find what you’re not studying,” Siri said. “When you give a product to a baby or an infant in particular, you often won’t know what neurological, immunological or developmental issues that product can cause until you’ve tracked that child for at least a few years.”
Citing autism as the “injury claimed to be the most thoroughly studied,” Siri said the medical community has not conducted studies that would definitively eliminate a vaccine-autism link, even though the 1986 act listed autism as one of 11 conditions that warrant further study to determine a possible link with vaccination.
“It was a commonly claimed enough injury back in 1986 … to make it on this list of 11 conditions,” Siri said.
U.S. ‘an international outlier’ on childhood vaccination
Today’s meeting also included a presentation by Tracy Beth Høeg, M.D., Ph.D., who earlier this week was named the next leader of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research.
Høeg compared U.S. childhood vaccine requirements and health outcomes with those of her native Denmark. There are “eye-opening differences in the recommendations” between the two countries, she said.
While the U.S. requires 72 core childhood vaccine doses, Denmark requires 11 — in line with most other high-income countries. Høeg said this makes the U.S. “an international outlier” on childhood vaccination.
The higher vaccine load “results in an increased exposure to aluminum,” Høeg said, with U.S. children exposed to 5.9 milligrams (mg) of aluminum by age 2 and 8.0 mg by age 18. In Denmark, the corresponding figures are 1.4 and 2.9 mg, similar to other high-income countries.
While there isn’t “robust enough” data indicating “specific health concerns” resulting from this level of aluminum exposure, Høeg said there also is insufficient data to establish a safe level of exposure.
“We need to admit that we may not know what the side effects of doing this, especially all at once, could be,” she said.
Increased vaccination also hasn’t delivered better health outcomes for U.S. children, according to Høeg. She cited the examples of the Hep B and meningococcal vaccines, which Denmark does not recommend for children, unlike the U.S. Yet, levels of hepatitis B and meningitis among children in the two countries are similar.
Høeg said U.S. health agencies should “avoid overmedicalizing childhood” and owe American children recommendations that are “based on data and not politics.”
Potential risks of post-vaccine aluminum accumulation ‘a warranted concern’
Dr. Evelyn Griffin, an OB/GYN and member of three ACIP work groups called for more research into the safety of aluminum-based adjuvants used in vaccines.
Griffin said aluminum salts are the most widely used adjuvant. Yet, the mechanisms underlying the use of aluminum salts in vaccines “are not fully understood.” She said only one peer-reviewed study has examined the effects of aluminum in infants’ blood following vaccination — but that study used a small sample and didn’t collect long-term data.
According to Griffin, current FDA aluminum exposure limits are increasingly questioned, as “appropriate testing was not performed.” She said recent studies have suggested that aluminum accumulation is “a warranted concern” and called for studies on the long-term impact of aluminum exposure and who is most at risk.
Griffin called on ACIP to determine how it can assess the safety and effectiveness of adjuvants in currently recommended vaccines for all ages, including studies regarding whether multiple aluminum-containing vaccines should be administered on the same day during early infancy.
In October, ACIP announced the creation of a new work group that will study the safety of aluminum adjuvants. ACIP did not hold a vote relating to the aluminum content of vaccines at today’s meeting.
Watch the ACIP meeting here.
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.
WHO – Gates Blueprint for Global Digital ID, AI-Driven Surveillance, and Life-Long Vaccine Tracking for All
Automated, cradle-to-grave traceability for “identifying and targeting the unreached”
By Jon Fleetwood | December 2, 2025
In a document published in the October Bulletin of the World Health Organization and funded by the Gates Foundation, the World Health Organization (WHO) is proposing a globally interoperable digital-identity infrastructure that permanently tracks every individual’s vaccination status from birth.
The dystopian proposal raises far more than privacy and autonomy concerns: it establishes the architecture for government overreach, cross-domain profiling, AI-driven behavioral targeting, conditional access to services, and a globally interoperable surveillance grid tracking individuals.
It also creates unprecedented risks in data security, accountability, and mission creep, enabling a digital control system that reaches into every sector of life.
The proposed system:
- integrates personally identifiable information with socioeconomic data such as “household income, ethnicity and religion,”
- deploys artificial intelligence for “identifying and targeting the unreached” and “combating misinformation,”
- and enables governments to use vaccination records as prerequisites for education, travel, and other services.
What the WHO Document Admits, in Their Own Words
To establish the framework, the authors define the program as nothing less than a restructuring of how governments govern:
“Digital transformation is the intentional, systematic implementation of integrated digital applications that change how governments plan, execute, measure and monitor programmes.”
They openly state the purpose:
“This transformation can accelerate progress towards the Immunization agenda 2030, which aims to ensure that everyone, everywhere, at every age, fully benefits from vaccines.”
This is the context for every policy recommendation that follows: a global vaccination compliance system, digitally enforced.
1. Birth-Registered Digital Identity & Life-Long Tracking
The document describes a system in which a newborn is automatically added to a national digital vaccine-tracking registry the moment their birth is recorded.
“When birth notification triggers the set-up of a personal digital immunization record, health workers know who to vaccinate before the child’s first contact with services.”
They specify that this digital identity contains personal identifiers:
“A newborn whose electronic immunization record is populated with personally identifiable information benefits because health workers can retrieve their records through unique identifiers or demographic details, generate lists of unvaccinated children and remind parents to bring them for vaccination.”
This is automated, cradle-to-grave traceability.
The system also enables surveillance across all locations:
“[W]ith a national electronic immunization record, a child can be followed up anywhere within the country and referred electronically from one health facility to another.”
This is mobility tracking tied to medical compliance.
2. Linking Vaccine Records to Income, Ethnicity, Religion, & Social Programs
The document explicitly endorses merging vaccine status with socioeconomic data.
“Registers that record household asset data for social protection programmes enable monitoring of vaccination coverage by socioeconomic status such as household income, ethnicity and religion.”
This is demographic stratification attached to a compliance database.
3. Conditioning Access to Schooling, Travel, & Services on Digital Vaccine Proof
The WHO acknowledges and encourages systems that require vaccine passes for core civil functions:
“Some countries require proof of vaccination for children to access daycare and education, and evidence of other vaccinations is often required for international travel.”
They then underline why digital formats are preferred:
“Digital records and certificates are traceable and shareable.”
Digital traceability means enforceability.
4. Using Digital Systems to Prevent ‘Wasting Vaccine on Already Immune Children’
The authors describe a key rationale:
“Children’s vaccination status is not checked during campaigns, a practice that wastes vaccine on already immune children and exposes them to the risk of adverse events.”
Their solution is automated verification to maximize vaccination throughput.
The digital system is positioned as both a logistical enhancer and a compliance enforcer:
“National electronic immunization records could transform how measles campaigns and supplementary immunization activities are conducted by enabling on-site confirmation of vaccination status.”
5. AI Systems to Target Individuals, Identify ‘Unreached,’ & Combat ‘Misinformation’
The WHO document openly promotes artificial intelligence to shape public behavior:
“AI… demonstrate[s] its utility in identifying and targeting the unreached, identifying critical service bottlenecks, combating misinformation and optimizing task management.”
They explain additional planned uses:
“Additional strategic applications include analysing population-level data, predicting service needs and spread of disease, identifying barriers to immunization, and enhancing nutrition and health status assessments via mobile technology.”
This is predictive analytics paired with influence operations.
6. Global Interoperability Standards for International Data Exchange
The authors call for a unified international data standard:
“Recognize fast healthcare interoperability resources… as the global standard for exchange of health data.”
Translated: vaccine-linked personal identity data must be globally shareable.
They describe the need for “digital public infrastructure”:
“Digital public infrastructure is a foundation and catalyst for the digital transformation of primary health care.”
This is the architecture of a global vaccination-compliance network.
7. Surveillance Expansion Into Everyday Interactions
The WHO outlines a surveillance model that activates whenever a child interacts with any health or community service:
“CHWs who identify children during home visits and other community activities can refer them for vaccination through an electronic immunization registry or electronic child health record.”
This means non-clinical community actors participating in vaccination-compliance identification.
The authors also describe cross-service integration:
“Under-vaccinated children can be reached when CHWs and facility-based providers providing other services collaborate and communicate around individual children in the same electronic child health records.”
Every point of contact becomes a checkpoint.
8. Behavior-Shaping Through Alerts, Reminders, & Social Monitoring
The WHO endorses using digital messaging to overcome “intention–action gaps”:
“Direct communication with parents in the form of alerts, reminders and information helps overcome the intention–action gap.”
They also prescribe digital surveillance of public sentiment:
“Active detection and response to misinformation in social media build trust and demand.”
This is official justification for monitoring and countering speech.
9. Acknowledgment of Global Donor Control—Including Gates Foundation
At the very end of the article, the financial architect is stated plainly:
“This work was supported by the Gates Foundation [INV-016137].”
This confirms the alignment with Gates-backed global ID and vaccine-registry initiatives operating through Gavi, the World Bank, UNICEF, and WHO.
Bottom Line
In the WHO’s own words:
“Digital transformation is a unique opportunity to address many longstanding challenges in immunization… now is the time for bold, new approaches.”
And:
“Stakeholders… should embrace digital transformation as an enabler for achieving the ambitious Immunization agenda 2030 goals.”
This is a comprehensive proposal for a global digital-identity system, permanently linked to vaccine status, integrated with demographic and socioeconomic data, enforced through AI-driven surveillance, and designed for international interoperability.
It is not speculative, but written in plain language, funded by the Gates Foundation, and published in the World Health Organization’s own journal.
Putin’s India Visit Signals Folly of Western Pressure – Academic
Sputnik – 06.12.2025
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit to India may have sealed dozens of strategic partnerships, but its core purpose transcends trade: Moscow is using its Soviet-era ally to send a defiant message to the West that it will not be isolated over the conflict in Ukraine, US academic Ramesh Mohan says.
Putin left New Delhi on Friday after witnessing with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi the signing of over a dozen bilateral agreements on technology, agriculture, tourism and defense cooperation. The subject of Ukraine or the increasingly bellicose US and EU sanctions against Russian oil weren’t in any of the signed documents.
Yet, those in the room — or thousands of miles away in any of the Western capitals that had been plotting their next move against the Kremlin — could not have missed the true significance of Putin’s two-day visit, said Mohan.
“The core message here is that Russia still maintains strong global alliances despite the multitude of Western sanctions and attempts to isolate Moscow over the war in Ukraine,” Mohan, an economics professor at Bryant University in Smithfield, Rhode Island, told Sputnik.
Mohan, who also teaches about economics in international politics and regularly leads Bryant University study missions to Asia, said Modi was also sending a message to the world that US pressure will not dictate India’s policy.
“Modi is showing the West that India will not be cowed into abandoning its own national and strategic interests,” said Mohan. “The Russia-India alliance, particularly, is a long-standing, privileged partnership rooted in the Soviet era. I don’t ever see India forsaking that.”
The last time Putin met Modi was in the presence of Chinese President Xi Jinping when they attended the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Summit in the Chinese port city of Tianjin in September.
The visual display of camaraderie between the three leaders had sent a message to the world even then that the so-called Global South solidarity could not be broken in the face of Western pressure, said Mohan.
Trump files for divorce from NATO over Ukraine
By Larry Johnson | RT | December 6, 2025
It is one thing to produce a written national security strategy, but the real test is whether or not US President Donald Trump is serious about implementing it. The key takeaways are the rhetorical deescalation with China and putting the onus on Europe to keep Ukraine alive.
The 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) of the US, released by the White House on December 4, 2025, marks a potentially profound shift in US foreign policy under Trump’s second administration compared to his first term as president. This 33-page document explicitly embraces an ‘America First’ doctrine, rejecting global hegemony and ideological crusades in favor of pragmatic, transactional realism focused on protecting core national interests: Homeland security, economic prosperity, and regional dominance in the Western Hemisphere.
It critiques past US overreach as a failure that weakened America, positioning Trump’s approach as a “necessary correction” to usher in a “new golden age.” The strategy prioritizes reindustrialization (aiming to grow the US economy from $30 trillion to $40 trillion by the 2030s), border security, and dealmaking over multilateralism or democracy promotion. It accepts a multipolar world, downgrading China from a “pacing threat” to an “economic competitor,” and calling for selective engagement with adversaries. However, Trump’s actions during the first 11 months of his presidency have been inconsistent with, even contradictory of, the written strategy.
The document is unapologetically partisan, crediting Trump personally for brokering peace in eight conflicts (including the India-Pakistan ceasefire, the Gaza hostage return, the Rwanda-DRC agreement) and securing a verbal commitment at the 2025 Hague Summit for NATO members to boost their defense spending to 5% of GDP. It elevates immigration as a top security threat, advocating lethal force against cartels if needed, and dismisses climate change and ‘net zero’ policies as harmful to US interests.
The document organizes US strategy around three pillars: Homeland defense, the Western Hemisphere, and economic renewal. Secondary focuses include selective partnerships in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
Here are the major rhetorical shifts in strategy compared to the previous strategies released during the respective presidencies of Trump (2017) and Biden (2022):
- From global cop to regional hegemon: Unlike Biden’s 2022 NSS (which emphasized alliances and great-power competition) or Trump’s 2017 version (which named China and Russia as revisionists), this document ends America’s “forever burdens” abroad. It prioritizes the Americas over Eurasia, framing Europe and the Middle East as deprioritized theaters.
- Ideological retreat: Democracy promotion is explicitly abandoned – “we seek peaceful commercial relations without imposing democratic change” (tell that to the Venezuelans). Authoritarians are not judged, and the EU is called “anti-democratic.”
- Confrontational ally relations: Europe faces scathing criticism for migration, free speech curbs, and risks of “civilizational erasure” (e.g., demographic shifts making nations “unrecognizable in 20 years”). The US vows to support the “patriotic” European parties resisting this, drawing Kremlin-like rhetoric accusations from EU leaders.
- China policy: Acknowledges failed engagement; seeks “mutually advantageous” ties but with deterrence (e.g., Taiwan as a priority). No full decoupling, but restrictions on tech/dependencies.
- Multipolar acceptance: Invites regional powers to manage their spheres (e.g., Japan in East Asia, Arab-Israeli bloc in the Gulf), signaling US restraint to avoid direct confrontations.
The NSS represents a seismic shift in America’s approach to NATO, emphasizing “burden-shifting” over unconditional alliance leadership. It frames NATO not as a values-based community but as a transactional partnership in which US commitments – troops, funding, and nuclear guarantees – are tied to European allies meeting steep new demands. This America First recalibration prioritizes US resources for the Indo-Pacific and Western Hemisphere, de-escalating in Europe to avoid “forever burdens.” Key changes include halting NATO expansion, demanding 5% GDP defense spending by 2035, and restoring “strategic stability” with Russia via a Ukraine ceasefire. While the US reaffirms Article 5 and its nuclear umbrella, it signals potential partial withdrawals by 2027 if Europe fails to step up, risking alliance cohesion amid demographic and ideological critiques of Europe. When Russia completes the defeat of Ukraine, the continued existence of NATO will be a genuine concern.
The strategy credits Trump’s diplomacy for NATO’s 5% pledge at the 2025 Hague Summit but warns of “civilizational erasure” in Europe due to migration and low birth rates, speculating that some members could become “majority non-European” within decades, potentially eroding their alignment with US interests.
Trump’s NSS signals a dramatic change in US policy toward the Ukraine conflict by essentially dumping the responsibility for keeping Ukraine afloat on the Europeans. The portion of the NSS dealing with Ukraine is delusional with regard to the military capabilities of the European states:
We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence, and to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation… This lack of self-confidence is most evident in Europe’s relationship with Russia. European allies enjoy a significant hard power advantage over Russia by almost every measure, save nuclear weapons.
As a result of Russia’s war in Ukraine, European relations with Russia are now deeply attenuated, and many Europeans regard Russia as an existential threat. Managing European relations with Russia will require significant US diplomatic engagement, both to reestablish conditions of strategic stability across the Eurasian landmass, and to mitigate the risk of conflict between Russia and European states.
It is a core interest of the United States to negotiate an expeditious cessation of hostilities in Ukraine, in order to stabilize European economies, prevent unintended escalation or expansion of the war, and reestablish strategic stability with Russia, as well as to enable the post-hostilities reconstruction of Ukraine to enable its survival as a viable state.
The Ukraine War has had the perverse effect of increasing Europe’s, especially Germany’s, external dependencies. Today, German chemical companies are building some of the world’s largest processing plants in China, using Russian gas that they cannot obtain at home. The Trump Administration finds itself at odds with European officials who hold unrealistic expectations for the war perched in unstable minority governments, many of which trample on basic principles of democracy to suppress opposition. A large European majority wants peace, yet that desire is not translated into policy, in large measure because of those governments’ subversion of democratic processes. This is strategically important to the United States precisely because European states cannot reform themselves if they are trapped in political crisis.
Not surprisingly, this section of Trump’s NSS has sparked a panicked outcry in Europe. European leaders, including former Swedish PM Carl Bildt, called it “to the right of the extreme right,” warning of alliance erosion. Analysts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) praise its pragmatism, but flag short-sightedness, predicting a “lonelier, weaker” US. China views reassurances on sovereignty positively, but remains wary of economic pressures. In the US, Democrats, such as Rep. Jason Crow, deem it “catastrophic” for alliances, i.e. NATO.
Overall, the strategy signals a US pivot inward, forcing NATO allies to self-fund security while risking fractured partnerships with Europe. It positions America as a wealthy hemispheric power in a multipolar order, betting on dealmaking and industrial revival to sustain global influence without overextension.
Larry Johnson is a political analyst and commentator, former CIA analyst and member of the US State Department’s Office for Counterterrorism.
The Real Story Behind Trump’s Pardon of Juan Orlando Hernández
José Niño Unfiltered | December 6, 2025
The news came in quietly from a federal prison in West Virginia. Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras once sentenced to spend most of the rest of his life behind bars, had walked out of Hazelton penitentiary a free man.
According to an AP report, Hernández had received a presidential pardon from Donald Trump after a conviction that tied him to hundreds of tons of cocaine shipped into the United States. On paper, this was a spectacular reversal of fortune for a man whom federal prosecutors had branded the head of a Central American narco state. In practice, it looked like something else. It looked like a reward for loyalty to the one cause that towers above all others in Washington and in Trump world.
Hernández did not rise overnight. He entered Congress in the late 1990s, representing the rural department of Lempira, and spent more than a decade climbing inside the National Party machine. He then became president of the National Congress and finally president of Honduras from 2014 to 2022. While he projected the image of a tough conservative modernizer at home, another storyline unfolded in U.S. courtrooms.
Federal prosecutors charged him with a vast cocaine conspiracy involving the movement of multi-ton loads into the United States and with the possession of machine guns and other weapons in support of that network. The Justice Department later described his administration as a narco state fueled by millions in cartel bribes. Testimony and media investigations painted an even darker picture. According to Democracy Now, Hernández allegedly used Honduran security forces to protect drug shipments, partnered with major traffickers including the Sinaloa cartel, and used drug money to build his own political power. His brother Tony Hernández ended up with a life sentence in a U.S. prison on similar charges.
Court filings and investigative reports in outlets like CNN repeatedly tied the sitting Honduran president to drug traffickers. U.S. prosecutors said he took payoffs from drug networks as early as 2004. Hernández’s story also intersected with one of Honduras’s most prominent Jewish families. Prosecutors alleged that he received bribe payments and other favors from the Rosenthal family, a powerful clan of Romanian-Jewish origin led by Jaime Rosenthal, whose Grupo Continental controlled Banco Continental, a soccer club, and auto import businesses, as reported by Reuters.
The Rosenthal patriarch, a frequent Liberal Party presidential hopeful of Romanian Jewish extraction, stood near the top of the Honduran economic and political pyramid for decades. For his part, Hernández treated that network as another source of money and influence. A Univision investigation detailed allegations that he used drug money to finance political campaigns. After his arrest, Honduran authorities seized dozens of properties, vehicles, businesses, and other assets linked to his family.
The saga culminated in extradition to the United States in 2022. A New York jury convicted Hernández in March 2024, and a federal judge handed down a 45-year sentence plus supervised release in June of that year. By any normal standard, this was the end of the story. A disgraced former head of state, proven in court to have worked hand in glove with traffickers, destined to spend the rest of his days in prison.
However, Hernández did not bet his future on normal standards. For decades, he had invested in a different kind of protection. That protection wore a blue and white flag with a Star of David at the center.
His relationship with Israel began long before he held national office. As a young man in the early 1990s Hernández traveled to Israel under the auspices of Mashav, the Israeli Agency for International Development Cooperation. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency noted that he completed a Mashav enrichment course in 1992, at the beginning of his diplomatic career.
Three decades later, at the opening of the Honduran embassy in Jerusalem, Hernández stood before an audience and called that first visit to Israel a “life-changing” experience. He said the trip had shaped his view of security, agriculture, and innovation.
Once he entered the presidential palace, Hernández turned that personal link into state doctrine. In October 2015, he arrived in Jerusalem as head of state and told an audience convened by the Israel Council on Foreign Relations and the World Jewish Congress that “As long as I am president, Honduras will stand behind Israel.” The World Jewish Congress described the event in glowing terms and singled out his declaration that ties between the two countries had never been closer.
This was not idle rhetoric. Hernández set out to reposition Honduras as one of the most reliable pro-Israel governments in Latin America. Honduran and Israeli diplomats had initially signed formal relations in the 1950s, and Honduras had allowed Jewish immigration during the Second World War. Under Hernández, those historical connections became the foundation for a new foreign policy.
He adjusted the Honduran voting record at the United Nations so that his country would abstain from or oppose resolutions deemed hostile to Israeli interests. During the 2017 General Assembly vote that condemned the U.S. decision to move its embassy to Jerusalem, Honduras was one of only a tiny group of countries that sided with Washington and Israel against the overwhelming majority.
Hernández also opened a diplomatic and trade office in Jerusalem, signaling recognition of the city as Israel’s capital. He then promised to relocate the full Honduran embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, issuing joint statements with Israeli and U.S. officials that set public deadlines for that step. In June 2021, he completed the move. At the inauguration, Hernández proclaimed that he was “here today in the eternal capital of Israel” and vowed to work “against antisemitism, often presented as anti Zionism,” as quoted by Israel Hayom.
Israel rewarded this loyalty with gestures of its own. It agreed to reopen its embassy in Tegucigalpa and provided security cooperation, technical assistance and emergency relief after devastating hurricanes and during the early stages of the COVID era.
Furthermore, Hernández pushed Honduras into the orbit of Christian Zionist networks. The Friends of Zion Museum in Jerusalem, an institution that promotes Christian support for Israel and campaigns against antisemitism and BDS, gave him its Friends of Zion Award in 2019 for recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and for his diplomatic support. The Friends of Zion Museum and the Jerusalem Post emphasized that he now shared an honor roll with figures like Donald Trump and other leaders celebrated for their pro-Israel policies.
In the security arena, Hernández took positions that aligned perfectly with Washington and Tel Aviv. His government designated Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, a move welcomed by major American Jewish groups. This decision mirrored similar steps by other U.S.-aligned governments in the region–such as Argentina under Mauricio Macri–and confirmed that Tegucigalpa had no intention of straying from the Judeo-American consensus on Middle East security.
Even when the walls began to close in, Hernández treated Israel as his ultimate safety net. As his legal exposure increased and the prospect of extradition grew more likely, he reportedly turned to Israeli officials to ask for help in delaying or preventing his transfer to U.S. authorities. The Times of Israel reported that plea and underscored Hernández’s assumption that his years of unwavering support had earned him political capital in Jerusalem.
That calculation looked naïve when he arrived in New York in chains. It looks far more rational now that Donald Trump has delivered a pardon.
Trump himself cultivated a brand as perhaps the most pro-Israel president in U.S. history. He recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, moved the U.S embassy there, backed the annexation of the Golan Heights, and surrounded himself with advisers and donors who made support for Israel a central test of loyalty. The Friends of Zion Museum honored him with the same award it later gave Hernández, presenting both men as partners in a shared historic mission.
So when Trump announced in late 2025 that he would pardon Hernández, it was natural for mainstream outlets to emphasize the legal controversy and the scale of the drug conspiracy. But there is another thread that runs from the Mashav classroom in the early 1990s to the Jerusalem embassy ribbon cutting to the moment the gates opened at Hazelton. That thread is the politics of Zionism in the Americas and the unwritten rule that governs advancement and protection in that world.
Hernández spent his adult life proving that he would stand behind Israel. He did it in the United Nations chamber, in ceremonial torch lighting invitations, in embassy relocations, in his fights against BDS and in his designation of Hezbollah. He did it in speeches where he promised that “as long as I am president, Honduras will stand behind Israel” and in the moment when he described Jerusalem as the “eternal capital of Israel.”
Trump saw that record and recognized a fellow shabbos goy traveler. He understood that this was not just a corrupt Central American politician but a loyal member of a global pro-Israel camp who had delivered meaningful victories in a region where Israel has long worked to secure dependable allies. In a political universe where servility to world jewry carries more weight than any anti-corruption sermon, Hernández did not just have a lawyer. He had a patron.
The pardon of Juan Orlando Hernández is therefore more than a quirky case of presidential clemency. It is a message about the real hierarchy of values in U.S. foreign policy in the Trump era. Flooding American streets with cocaine will not necessarily erase your credit if you have spent years moving embassies to Jerusalem, voting the right way at the United Nations, and branding your small Central American country as an extension of Israel’s diplomatic network.
In that world, a man who helped turn his own nation into a narco playground can still find a way out of a 45-year sentence, as long as his record on Zionism is pure and his friendship with the most pro-Zionist president in modern U.S. history remains intact. For Juan Orlando Hernández, that friendship did not simply buy influence. It bought his freedom.
EU targets platforms that refuse to censor free speech – Telegram founder
RT | December 6, 2025
The EU is unfairly targeting social media platforms that allow dissenting or critical speech, Telegram founder Pavel Durov has said.
He was responding to a 2024 post by Elon Musk, the owner of X, who claimed that the European Commission had offered the platform a secret deal to avoid fines in return for censoring certain statements. The EU fined X €120 million ($140 million) the day before.
According to Durov, the EU imposes strict and unrealistic rules on tech companies as a way to punish those that do not comply with quiet censorship demands.
“The EU imposes impossible rules so it can punish tech firms that refuse to silently censor free speech,” Durov wrote on X on Saturday.
He also referred to his detention in France last year, which he called politically motivated. He claimed that during that time, the head of France’s DGSE asked him to “ban conservative voices in Romania” ahead of an election, an allegation French officials denied. He also said intelligence agents offered help with his case if Telegram quietly removed channels tied to Moldova’s election.
Durov repeated both claims in his recent post, describing the case as “a baseless criminal investigation” followed by pressure to censor speech in Romania and Moldova.
Later on Saturday, Durov wrote: “The EU exclusively targets platforms that host inconvenient or dissenting speech (Telegram, X, TikTok…). Platforms that algorithmically silence people are left largely untouched, despite far more serious illegal content issues.”
Last year Elon Musk said the European Commission offered X “an illegal secret deal” to quietly censor content. “If we quietly censored speech without telling anyone, they would not fine us. The other platforms accepted that deal. X did not,” he wrote.
On Friday, European Commission spokesperson Tom Rainier said the EU fined X €120 million for violating the Digital Services Act. He claimed the fine was unrelated to censorship and was the first enforcement under the law. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio criticized the move on X, calling it “an attack on all American tech platforms and the American people by foreign governments.”
Durov and Musk have both faced pressure from EU regulators under the Digital Services Act (DSA), which came into force in 2023. The law requires platforms to remove illegal content quickly, though critics say it can be used to suppress lawful expression.
New law lets Berlin police install spyware in private homes
Critics warn the new rules could be misused, enabling overreach and deep intrusion into personal privacy

FILE PHOTO. © Getty Images
RT | December 6, 2025
Berlin officers will be allowed to secretly enter private homes to install spyware, after the German House of Representatives approved a sweeping change to the city’s police law.
Backed by the governing CDU-SPD coalition and opposition AfD, the law gives police broad new powers over both physical and digital surveillance.
The new law allows authorities to secretly enter a suspect’s home to install spyware if remote access isn’t possible. This marks the first time Berlin’s law enforcement can legally carry out such physical break-ins for digital surveillance. The updated rules also permit hacking phones and computers to monitor communication. Police can now turn on bodycams inside private homes if they believe someone is in serious danger.
Passed on Thursday, the law also expands surveillance in public areas. Authorities can now collect phone data from everyone in a location, scan license plates, and counter drones. They may use facial and voice recognition to identify people from surveillance images. Real police data can also be used to train AI. Critics say this risks misuse and intrudes on private life.
Interior Senator Iris Spranger (SPD) has defended the move. “With the biggest reform of the Berlin Police Law in decades, we are creating a significant plus for the protection of Berliners,” she said. “We are giving law enforcement better tools to fight terrorism and organized crime,” she added.
Berlin has seen a rise in crime. In 2024, police recorded over 539,000 offences — more than the year before. Violent crimes like assault and domestic violence also increased. Officials say there is a growing problem with crimes involving young people and migrants, especially in large cities. More than half of all crimes still go unsolved.
Opposition to the law has grown since its passage. During the debate, Green Party MP Vasili Franco said the law felt like a wish list for a state with excessive control over its citizens. Civil rights groups called the expanded use of AI and facial recognition “a massive attack on civil liberties.”
The campaign alliance NoASOG also strongly criticized the reform, stating, “What is being sold as security policy is in reality the establishment of an authoritarian surveillance state.”
Australia’s Top Censor Warns of Surveillance While Hypocritically Expanding It
By Christina Maas | Reclaim The Net | December 3, 2025
At a press conference that could have been a comedy sketch idea, Australia’s “eSafety” Commissioner Julie Inman Grant and Social Services Minister Tanya Plibersek stood before the cameras and solemnly warned the nation about the perils of surveillance. Not from government programs or sweeping digital mandates, but from smart cars and connected devices.
The irony was not lost on anyone paying attention.
Both Grant and Plibersek are enthusiastic backers of the country’s new online age verification law, the so-called Social Media Minimum Age Bill 2024, a law that has done more to expand digital surveillance than any gadget in a Toyota.
The legislation bans under-16s from social media and requires users to prove their age through “assurance” systems that often involve facial scans, ID uploads, and data analysis so invasive it would make a marketing executive blush.
But on the same day she cautioned the public about the dangers of “connected” cars sharing sensitive information with third parties, Grant’s agency was publishing rules that literally require social media platforms to share sensitive data with third parties.
During the press conference, Grant complained that “it’s disappointing” YouTube and other platforms hadn’t yet released their guidance on how they’ll implement verification.
She announced that eSafety will begin issuing “gathering information notices” on December 10, demanding details from companies about how they plan to comply once her expanded powers take effect.
She also warned that some of the smaller apps users are migrating to may soon “become age-restricted social media platforms.”
The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) explains that compliance under this law can involve “age estimation” using facial analysis, “age inference” through data modeling of user activity, or “age verification” with government ID.
All three options amount to building a surveillance apparatus around everyday users. Facial recognition, voice modeling, behavioral tracking; pick your poison.
Most platforms outsource this work to private firms, which means that the same sensitive data the law claims to protect is immediately handed to a commercial intermediary.
Meta, for example, relies on Yoti, a third-party ID verification company. Others use firms like Au10tix, which famously left troves of ID scans exposed online for over a year.
The law includes what politicians like to call “strong privacy safeguards.” Platforms must only collect the data necessary for verification, must destroy it once it’s used, and must never reuse it for other purposes.
It’s the same promise every company makes before it gets hacked or “inadvertently” leaks user data.
Even small dating apps that claimed to delete verification selfies “immediately after completion” managed to leak those same selfies. In every case, the breach followed the same pattern: grand assurances, then exposure.
Julie Inman Grant calls it protecting the public. Tanya Plibersek calls it social responsibility. The rest of us might call it what it actually is: institutionalized data collection, dressed in the language of child safety.
