Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

Is Trump poised to restart the Iran war?

By Trita Parsi | May 17, 2026

The Middle East is once again teetering on the brink as Trump appears poised to reignite war with Iran. Press reports indicate he will convene military advisers on Tuesday, though my understanding is that both the meeting and the decision are likely to come sooner. Over the past several hours, Trump has flooded Truth Social with a barrage of incendiary threats. While some of this may be theatrical brinkmanship designed to force Tehran into submission, sources in the Iranian capital tell me they expect the United States to resume hostilities within the next 48 hours.

We should first recognize that restarting the war amounts to an admission that Trump’s previous escalatory gambit — the blockade of the blockade — has failed. That, in turn, was itself an admission that the war had failed. Which was an admission that the threats of war in January had failed. As I have argued before on my Substack, this relentless search for an escalatory silver bullet capable of bringing Iran to its knees is not unique to Trump; it has become a defining pathology of American Iran policy for decades.

Although negotiators have made meaningful progress on several fronts, talks have thus far failed to produce an agreement, largely because of irreconcilable differences over Tehran’s highly enriched uranium stockpile. And as Washington has come to realize that the blockade is backfiring, a new and dangerous dynamic has emerged: both sides now believe another round of fighting will strengthen their hand in the negotiations that follow.

As I argued in numerous interviews in January, Trump dramatically underestimated Iran’s strength, while hard-liners in Tehran believed war would strengthen Iran’s leverage by exposing the illusion of Iranian weakness. In their view, the outcome of the conflict vindicated that assessment, leaving them increasingly confident — even emboldened — about what a second round of war could yield. I am told the new Supreme Leader belongs to this camp.

Moreover, just as Tehran believes Trump intends to prosecute the next war with far greater ferocity, Iranian planners are preparing a far more expansive and punishing retaliatory campaign, complete with new strategic objectives and targets.

First, Iranian officials increasingly describe the next war as an opportunity to inflict maximum strategic damage on the United Arab Emirates, citing Abu Dhabi’s active role in the previous conflict, its deepening and increasingly overt partnership with Israel, and its role in urging Trump to resume hostilities.

Tehran is likely to target American data centers in the UAE, a move that serves multiple purposes. Iranian officials argue that these American technology firms have already become participants in the conflict through their support for the Pentagon. At the same time, Tehran sees an opportunity to cripple the UAE’s ambitions to become a global artificial intelligence hub — and, in doing so, potentially undermine Washington’s AI competition with China.

This points to a second defining feature of Iran’s strategy in a future war. Tehran believes Trump and his family hold financial stakes in many of these same technology ventures. Targeting Trump’s personal business interests is a lever Iran conspicuously avoided pulling during the first conflict but now appears increasingly willing to use. The logic is straightforward: Trump may tolerate damage to American strategic interests, but he is acutely sensitive to threats against his own financial empire. Raise the personal cost to Trump himself, the reasoning goes, and he may prove more willing to adopt a realistic negotiating position.

Third, Tehran is likely to show far less restraint if evidence emerges that other Gulf Cooperation Council states permit the United States or Israel to use their territory or airspace in a renewed conflict. The result would be broader and far more perilous horizontal escalation, with potentially catastrophic consequences for the global economy should critical energy infrastructure come under attack.

Fourth, the Red Sea is now in play. That would dramatically widen the geographic scope of the conflict while placing even greater upward pressure on already volatile oil prices.

Finally, Tehran is increasingly examining the possibility of severing the major submarine fiber-optic cable networks running beneath the Persian Gulf — arteries through which most GCC internet traffic flows, including billions of dollars in financial transactions. Iranian officials increasingly view this as a potential second Strait of Hormuz: a powerful new point of leverage capable of disrupting the global economy at enormous scale.

Renewed war is not inevitable. But when both sides convince themselves that another round of fighting will strengthen their negotiating position, the gravitational pull toward conflict becomes dangerously strong — however irrational the logic may ultimately be.

May 17, 2026 Posted by | Wars for Israel | , , , , , | Comments Off on Is Trump poised to restart the Iran war?

UAE fuelling African conflicts while evading accountability, SWP finds

Al Mayadeen | May 17, 2026

A newly published report by the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) has delivered a critical assessment of the United Arab Emirates’ role in African conflicts, describing Abu Dhabi as a systematic spoiler that arms proxy forces, manipulates diplomatic processes, and bears significant responsibility for some of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, all while facing virtually no political consequences from its Western partners.

The report, authored by researchers at one of Europe’s most influential foreign and security policy think tanks, which directly advises the German government and Bundestag, calls on Berlin and its European partners to fundamentally reassess their relationship with the UAE.

Sudan: The clearest case

The report presents Sudan as the most devastating example of Emirati interference. The UAE is identified as the most important military, logistical, and financial backer of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the paramilitary group whose war against the Sudanese Armed Forces has produced what the UN reports as the world’s largest humanitarian crisis, with 33.7 million people dependent on aid, over 15 million displaced, and widespread extreme hunger.

The RSF’s conduct has been particularly brutal. The report details targeted violence against non-Arab minorities, including sexual violence, mass killings, attacks on medical facilities, and hostage-taking, primarily directed at groups such as the Masalit and Zaghawa.

When the RSF captured El-Fasher in North Darfur in October 2025, a UN fact-finding mission described its actions against the civilian population as bearing the hallmarks of genocide.

Emirati support for the RSF continued even after Iranian strikes on the UAE, with numerous cargo flights departing from Emirates airports to Ethiopia, apparently to ferry supplies across the border to RSF positions.

A UN panel of experts documented 458 flights involving heavy transport aircraft from Emirati military airports or the transhipment hub of Bosaso to eastern Libya between October 2024 and the end of 2025, 239 of them bound for Kufra, a key hub for RSF resupply, in likely violation of UN arms embargoes on both Libya and Darfur.

A proxy model built on plausible deniability

The UAE rarely deploys its own forces. Instead, it operates through a carefully constructed network of local proxies, private military contractors, and logistical intermediaries. Beyond the RSF in Sudan, its partners include Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan Arab Armed Forces, the Puntland Maritime Police Force in Somalia, and, in a departure from the pattern, the Ethiopian government during its war against the Tigray people.

The report details how the UAE recruited and deployed hundreds of Colombian mercenaries to Sudan via an Emirati security firm, with the US government noting in 2025 that these fighters had served as infantry, artillery personnel, drone pilots, and even trained children for combat.

Supplies to the RSF have been routed through LAAF-controlled Libya, Chad, Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda, with Abu Dhabi deploying financial leverage to secure cooperation, including a 1.5 billion dollar loan to Chadian President Idriss Déby in 2023.

The UAE also profits from gold smuggling networks in conflict zones, with members of the ruling family reported to have personal ties to both Haftar and RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo.

Why the UAE intervenes

SWP identifies several overlapping motives. Economic interests are central, as state-owned logistics giants DP World and AD Ports Group have port and infrastructure projects across the continent, and military interventions serve to protect access to trade routes and strategic resources.

But economics alone do not explain the pattern. The report points to the UAE’s drive to outcompete Saudi Arabia for regional influence, a rivalry that has only sharpened since Riyadh forced Abu Dhabi out of southern Yemen.

Ideological opposition to the Muslim Brotherhood also shapes policy, with the UAE consistently backing actors who suppress Islamist movements. Personal enrichment through resource networks and ruling family ties to conflict actors adds a further layer.

Diplomatic manipulation

The report scrutinises the UAE’s use of diplomatic engagement as cover, whereby Abu Dhabi participates in international peace processes while simultaneously intensifying support for belligerents.

In September 2025, the UAE joined the Sudan Quad format alongside Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United States, signing joint commitments to end external support for conflict parties. According to US intelligence reporting, however, the UAE was actively intensifying support for the RSF at the same time.

The UAE also pledged 200 million dollars at a February 2025 humanitarian conference and a further 500 million dollars at a US conference in 2026, while contributing only around 33 million dollars to the UN-coordinated humanitarian plan.

In November 2025, Emirati Minister of State Lana Nusseibeh spent four days meeting with Members of the European Parliament in Brussels. Nusseibeh’s endeavor was successful, as a Parliament resolution on Sudan adopted at the same time made no mention of the UAE’s support for the RSF, following opposition from the European People’s Party to amendments tabled by left-wing parliamentary groups.

The same pattern played out during the Berlin Libya Process in 2019-20, when the UAE pledged to halt arms transfers to Libyan conflict parties but continued them regardless. Transport aircraft flew from the Emirates to eastern Libya on the very day of the Berlin conference in January 2020.

European silence, eroded accountability

The report stresses that Western governments, including Germany, have consistently refused to name the UAE publicly in international forums, despite substantial documented evidence of its role in fuelling conflicts. No UN Security Council member has explicitly raised Emirati support for the RSF in formal meetings, either.

This reluctance, SWP argues, is not incidental but reflects a broader calculation in which trade ties, security cooperation, the UAE’s close relationship with “Israel,” and the strategic goal of preventing Abu Dhabi from drifting further toward China or Russia have consistently outweighed accountability concerns.

The UAE’s open disregard for the UN embargo on Libya from 2014 onward, the report notes, likely encouraged other states to adopt a similar approach, with the same dynamic now being repeated in Sudan.

Five recommendations

SWP outlines five concrete steps for Germany and its European partners:

  • First, Abu Dhabi should be named explicitly in international forums rather than referenced in vague language about “external actors.”
  • Second, EU financial sanctions should be expanded and applied more consistently where Emirati actors have documented embargo violations.
  • Third, German arms export policy toward the UAE requires a fundamental review, given the documented transfer of German-chassis military equipment to conflict zones.
  • Fourth, anti-money-laundering enforcement should be tightened, with greater focus on Emirati financial centres as hubs for conflict economies and sanctions evasion.
  • Fifth, the strategic partnership Germany has maintained with the UAE since 2004 should, at a minimum, be suspended unless Abu Dhabi demonstrably reorients its policy toward de-escalation.

The report concludes that the war on Iran, mounting tensions with Saudi Arabia, and growing reputational vulnerabilities have made the UAE more susceptible to European pressure than at any previous point, and that this window should not go unused.

May 17, 2026 Posted by | Economics, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism | , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on UAE fuelling African conflicts while evading accountability, SWP finds

Saudi Arabia is pulling Europe toward a “Gulf Helsinki” deal with Iran — because Washington failed

By Tamer Ajrami | MEMO | May 17, 2026

When military power fails to impose “deterrence,” oil becomes politics. And the Strait of Hormuz is now writing Gulf security rules instead of the Pentagon.

With Hormuz still closed and the emergency oil stock releases used to calm markets running down, prices are moving _ no matter how much some people deny it _ toward a new surge. The real problem is not the price as a number. It is the chain reaction: gasoline and diesel, shipping and insurance, raw materials, and then inflation that travels from Asia to the United States. And even if the strait opened tomorrow, the damage would not vanish. Supply chains do not reset overnight, and parts of the oil and petrochemicals flow would take time to recover.

In my previous Middle East Monitor article, I said clearly that Gulf states “have nothing but to talk to Iran now”. That was not idealism or goodwill. It was hard security math: the old formula is eroding. Bases do not protect the way people assumed, and guarantees shrink the moment they face a real test. Today, this is no longer an argument. It is a reality driven by markets before politics.

Trump and China: A visit without a lifeline — and Time is against him

Trump’s attempt to turn to China produced no clear exit. Not because Beijing is powerless, but because it sees the issue in simple terms: open the strait through practical understandings, and negotiate with Iran on realistic terms.

The problem is that Washington still wants a “surrender” wrapped in diplomatic language. Iran sees no reason to give that for free as it holds leverage in a global energy shock.

This is the core of Trump’s trap: he can say whatever he wants, but he cannot cancel economics. Markets do not negotiate. They punish.

That is why countries are now moving on two tracks: a unilateral track to protect their own interests, and a collective track to design a new framework that prevents the next shock. Saudi Arabia is stepping forward to lead the collective track, not because it loves “mediation” as a headline, but because the cost of ongoing chaos has become higher than the cost of a deal.

A New “Helsinki Act” — But without the Human Rights Basket

According to Western reporting, Saudi Arabia is floating something close to a “Gulf Helsinki Act” arrangement with Iran—modeled on the Helsinki process of the mid-1970s during the Cold War. It would not be just a Saudi–Iran deal. It would extend to the Gulf and the European Union, aiming to lock in non-aggression, structured economic normalization, and monitoring and implementation mechanisms.

The original Helsinki process was built around four “baskets”: security and non-aggression; economic cooperation; human rights and self-determination; and follow-up mechanisms. In the Middle East, copying the third basket is unrealistic. The region’s unwritten rule is non-interference. Here, states do not use “human rights” language as a tool to destabilize each other internally. So, the Saudi approach seems to focus on three practical baskets: security and non-aggression, economic cooperation and stable energy flows, and verification/implementation.

It is a practical logic: if you want an agreement that can survive, you do not plant a delayed bomb inside it.

The Hard Question: Can a Deal work without the United States?

Here is the central dilemma. A Gulf–EU–Iran non-aggression arrangement without the United States creates a dangerous gap: the Gulf and Europe commit to non-aggression, Iran commits too, but Washington and Israel still retain the ability to strike Iran. What does the agreement do then? Does it become a nice document that collapses at the first air raid?

On the other hand, bringing Washington into the deal is not easy either. The US is struggling to produce a quick bilateral agreement with Iran to end the crisis, so why would it accept a broader framework that limits its freedom of action?

This opens a third, more sensitive option: Gulf states and Europe “bypass Washington” in practice. That would mean refusing the use of their airspace and territorial waters for any military or intelligence activity against Iran. And maybe refusing to enforce sanctions that destabilize the region and recreate the Hormuz shock. This is not a small move. It would be a strategic shift.

The UAE: A Different Vision — and a Dangerous Ceiling

The Gulf is not unified on strategy. Other reporting suggests Emirati efforts to push a coordinated Gulf military “response” against Iran. The problem is not the idea of response by itself. The problem is the ceiling of objectives.

If the goal is limited deterrence to reduce escalation, that is one thing. But if the goal mirrors Netanyahu and Washington _ regime change, dismantling Iran’s nuclear program, destroying its ballistic capabilities, and reshaping Iran from the inside _ that is a long war. And the Gulf does not have the luxury to absorb its costs.

Most importantly, the idea of “escaping Hormuz” through alternative pipelines is not a real solution. If peace collapses, fields, ports, and energy infrastructure across the region remain within range. And Bab al-Mandab can become another choke point. In the end, the issue is not a pipeline or a port. It is a sustainable peace that prevents the drone and the missile before it “manages” the price.

Whoever Ends the War Ends the Chaos

A way out starts from one point: ending the US–Israeli confrontation with Iran through a realistic understanding; then building a regional framework similar to “Helsinki” that locks in non-aggression, protects economies, and prevents a repeat of the strait crisis.

Saudi Arabia is trying to “hold the story together” because Washington entered, got stuck, and now wants to exit; while the Gulf cannot afford to sit between Iran’s leverage and America’s disorder.

The choice is clearer than ever: either a settlement that closes the door on choke-point warfare, or a longer crisis that bankrupts markets before it bankrupts armies. The Gulf; whether it likes it or not; no longer has the option to “wait”.

May 17, 2026 Posted by | Economics, Militarism, Wars for Israel | , , , , | Comments Off on Saudi Arabia is pulling Europe toward a “Gulf Helsinki” deal with Iran — because Washington failed

The Biggest Breast Cancer Advance in the Last Twenty Years

By Alan Cassels | Brownstone Institute | May 17, 2026

In medicine, we love a good heroic story. A patient suffers a serious disease. A drug company produces a brilliant new drug which proves to be beneficial. Lives are saved. Everyone is happy. Another battle won in the war on disease. Science marches triumphantly forward.

But sometimes the real story is less heroic and far more awkward. And the major “advance” comes not from a new drug, but from the opposite: because patients stopped swallowing a drug that never should have been so widely used in the first place.

That is almost certainly the case of breast cancer in North America in the early 2000s.

The pivotal moment came in the summer of 2002 when a major randomized trial, called the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) was published, aiming to answer a question which physicians had long pondered: was long-term use of hormone replacement therapy, typically prescribed for women going through menopause, good for the heart?

Up to that point, hormone therapy had been marketed as a kind of fountain-of-youth elixir for menopausal women. Promising to protect the heart, keep bones strong, preserve youthfulness, and generally smooth out biological inconveniences of aging, women were prescribed these drugs and stayed on them for years, sometimes for decades. At that time, there was considerable debate about long-term effects, with some experts claiming the heart protective-effects of hormones were so pronounced that even studying the issue was a waste of time.

Launched in 1997, the WHI enrolled more than 16,000 post-menopausal women to test the effects of combined estrogen-progestin. Another arm tested the effects of estrogen alone in 10,000 women who had undergone a hysterectomy. The larger trial was terminated three years earlier than originally planned, once the findings showed an increased risk of breast cancer, heart disease, stroke, and blood clots among participants. The smaller trial was also halted a year earlier than planned due to increased risk of stroke.

That was the day that the music died for hormone therapy.

Or at least we thought.

Within months women stopped taking and physicians stopped prescribing hormone therapy. The everyday use of this class of drugs fell dramatically, by roughly half within a year.

And then something remarkable happened.

Breast cancer incidence in the United States dropped. Some say that the rates had been in decline for several years, but the drop was significant, falling by roughly six to seven percent in 2003. It was one of the sharpest year-to-year declines ever observed. The drop was especially pronounced among women over 50 and in estrogen-receptor positive tumors, precisely the cancers most likely to be stimulated by hormones.

This wasn’t a subtle statistical wiggle. For epidemiologists, this was the sort of signal that almost never happens so cleanly in real life. Usually population health trends are messy, tangled up in dozens of possible explanations. There are long latency periods with cancer yet here a cause and effect appeared almost choreographed.

Drug exposure goes down. Disease incidence goes down, Just like that. Overnight, by stopping a drug we probably saw the most important advance in the fight against breast cancer in the last half century. But….

HRT Revisited

But today? Memories are short, and for many obstetricians, women’s health advocates, and even health reporters, it seems like the lessons from the WHI are being rewritten. The known and proven harmful effects of hormones on women’s health are undergoing a massive rewrite which is stimulating a resurgence in HRT.

This new Hormone Replacement Therapy conversation lately is captured in such articles as this piece from PBS; “How a Decades Old Study Gave Hormone Therapy a Bad Reputation,” which calls the WHI a “flawed” study. Other major media outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post and TIME Magazine are eagerly celebrating the renewed interest in menopause, emphasizing that women’s health concerns are never adequately dealt with, and that HRT needs a second look.

The media attention was amped last year up when the FDA convened an Expert Panel on Menopause and Hormone Replacement Therapy for Women. That meeting led to the removal of the boxed warnings in November 2025 even though the labels still warn of the risk of uterine and endometrial cancer associated with estrogen-only HRT, which is typically prescribed to people who have had their uterus removed through a hysterectomy.

A lot of the hullabaloo over the removal of the FDA’s Black Box Warning on Hormone Therapy relied on a strange mix of both revisionism (the science has changed) and egalitarianism (women needed “more choice”). For the media, this was an easy sell.

The rationale used by the FDA committee and hormone aficionados everywhere was that the science has been fully reinterpreted, and “corrected.” Let’s be clear what has happened: there has been new “analyses” of the effects of hormones, but no new original research showing that the previous safety concerns are exaggerated.

Much of the renewed support for HRT uses the ‘window of opportunity’ argument that suggests that it is safe if a 50-year-old woman takes hormones, but in her 60’s it’s unsafe. Can we really accept that the effects of these drugs on women would be dramatically different at some sort of arbitrary age-related cutoff? That’s the line we are expected to believe.

But look at how that argument is easily confounded. If the drugs show a reduced harm in younger women that’s mostly because, for any disease, younger age usually means lower disease burden. The revisionists discredit the WHI even though there were thousands of women in their 50’s in that trial, and many of them were among those harmed.

A distinction needs to be made here, where one has to examine the exact reason why one is taking hormones. Is it to control menopausal symptoms (especially hot flashes, vaginal dryness) or to prevent diseases of aging (breast cancer, heart disease, dementia)?

The WHI study was aimed at determining the long-term, post-menopausal effects of the drug, and hence it was looking at the second question. As to the first question, hormones are undoubtedly effective for treating menopausal symptoms.

Symptomatic treatment is therefore behind the major push for the drugs these days. One doctor friend of mine told me that “every menopausal woman he knows is taking hormones,” implying that this was both right and natural. Another friend, who is turning 60 this year, just recently told me over coffee she’s been on the drugs for ten years and has no plans for stopping them, as she remembers how bad the sleeplessness and brain fog were when she was in menopause. This was a head-scratcher to me, left me wondering why her doctor isn’t concerned about the recent post-black box warning recommendations that if menopausal women are going to take hormones they should do so in the lowest dose possible, for the shortest period of time possible.

The message here: take these drugs, but not for long, and not in high doses. That’s the pharmaceutical equivalent of someone shouting “Danger!”

What pharmaceutical companies do best is not develop drugs, but develop drug markets and you see this on full display in the current menopausal makeover. With a highly malleable clientele, who have both money and motivation, the key obstacle is convincing prescribers that these women urgently need chemical assistance to get through this tough life transition, and that prescribing hormones is one way to fight back against the manosphere. Were it only so easy…

Revising the HRT market depends on the usual tactics: some high-octane marketing including funding pro-HRT “studies,” selectively publishing data that emphasize HRT’s benefits and downplay the harms, funding direct-to-consumer advertising campaigns wrapped in the justice angle, while sponsoring guideline panels and medical education for your and my doctors. By paying off key opinion leaders, and getting social media influencers slurping on the HRT taps the media serves up this revival as a “feel-good” story of female emancipation.

Let’s face it, menopause in 2026 is the sort of uplifting health story that the mainstream media has leaped on with uncommon gusto. In Canada, our public broadcaster, CBC, finds the subject so compelling it runs its own series (Small Achievable Goals) about menopause, organizes noontime Menopause Month call-in shows to dive into the many ‘equity’ issues related to menopause (like why are Canadian women paying out of pocket for menopause care from private practitioners?) and produces a litany of programs that are mostly repetitive recitations over the need to counter the “stigma” caused by menopause. We get it. Menopause is clearly not fun for many women and employers who don’t make concessions for suffering women need to be brought into the 21st century.

The punchline, however, always seems the same: Women are not being taken seriously when it comes to menopause and they’re mad as hell. And no one should stand in their way of getting full access to menopausal treatments, especially those prescribed medications produced by the biggest drug companies in the world. We have a term for this: Pinkwashing. In other words, taking corporate business objectives and painting them in a feminine way in order to show how much you care.

You don’t have to do a systematic review of the mainstream media’s menopause mongering, but even a quick global survey of the main English language outlets can identify some dominant themes. Even though millions of women stopped HRT in 2002, and breast-cancer incidence dropped significantly, not a single story in 2026, as far as I can tell, mentions this fact. It’s curious. Even though most epidemiologists who have examined these data say that all the evidence points towards HRT promoting breast-tumor growth.

The remake of HRT has certainly paid off. Overall HRT demand in North America has grown, driven by what the experts call “increased menopause awareness, guideline updates, and reduced stigma.” Data from insurance claims and health systems show hormone therapy use is steadily rising again after years of decline. Its use among women aged 45–65 increased about 20% between 2020 and 2023. This pink trend is occurring alongside a surge in menopause clinics, telehealth menopause services, and the growing pervasiveness of influencer physicians and social-media menopause advocates.

The HRT market in North America has grown steadily too, worth about $5 billion per year, dominated by drugs like Premarin (branded conjugated estrogens) made by Pfizer. Without any generic competition in the US until late 2025 Pfizer has been able to dominate the market, selling more than $100 million worth of Premarin in 2022 alone. Prempro (conjugated estrogens + medroxyprogesterone,) has been generically available since 2006 or so and has many other generic companies dominating the market due to much lower pricing.

Let’s recap.

Medicine has a long history of embracing interventions that appear beneficial at first glance, only to discover later that the harms outweigh the benefits. Hormone therapy for menopause became a textbook example. The dramatic changes in practice left us with one of the clearest natural experiments in modern epidemiology.

The Women’s Health Initiative revealed a risk.

Millions of women stopped taking the drug.

Breast cancer rates fell.

If you were designing a demonstration of how pharmaceutical exposure can shape population health, you could hardly script it better.

The lesson is not that all drugs are bad or that medical progress is an illusion. It’s that sometimes the most powerful intervention in medicine is restraint.

Before we celebrate the next pharmaceutical breakthrough it might be worth remembering that one of the biggest declines in a major, frequently fatal disease in modern history happened for a very simple reason: Millions of women stopped taking a pill.

Some clinicians and public-health researchers (myself among them) would argue that the media narrative minimizes known and proven downsides of these drugs, often trivializing or ignoring serious harms, including risks of stroke, blood clots, gallbladder disease, and increased breast cancer risk.

The swinging pendulum is now carving its frightful arc from fear and danger towards promotional enthusiasm, and women who are supposed to be beneficiaries of these changes will only suffer further.

Alan Cassels is a Brownstone Fellow and a drug policy researcher and author who has written extensively about disease mongering. He is the author of four books, including The ABCs of Disease Mongering: An Epidemic in 26 Letters.

May 17, 2026 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Comments Off on The Biggest Breast Cancer Advance in the Last Twenty Years

Raffi Berg: BBC Middle East Editor Exposed as CIA, Mossad Collaborator

By Alan Macleod | MintPress News | January 3, 2025

A senior BBC editor at the center of an ongoing scandal into the network’s systematic pro-Israel bias is, in fact, a former member of a CIA propaganda outfit, MintPress News can reveal. Raffi Berg, an Englishman who heads the BBC’s Middle East desk, formerly worked for the U.S. State Department’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service, a unit that, by his own admission, was a CIA front group.

Berg is currently the subject of considerable scrutiny after thirteen BBC employees spoke out, claiming, among other things, that his “entire job is to water down everything that’s too critical of Israel” and that he holds “wild” amounts of power at the British state broadcaster, that there exists a culture of “extreme fear” at the BBC about publishing anything critical of Israel, and that Berg himself plays a key role in turning its coverage into “systematic Israeli propaganda.” The BBC has disputed these claims.

Our Man in London

Berg came to public attention in December after Drop Site News published an investigation based on interviews with 13 BBC staffers who present him as a domineering figure, systematically blocking coverage critical of Israel and manipulating stories to suit pro-Israel narratives.

The 9000-word report, written by popular journalist Owen Jones, is extensive and well-researched. However, one aspect of the story it almost completely avoids is Berg’s connections to the U.S. national security state, which MintPress News can now reveal.

According to his LinkedIn profile, Berg was an employee of the U.S. State Department’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) three years before joining the BBC. The FBIS is understood the world over to be a CIA front group known for gathering intelligence for the agency.

As the first two lines of its Wikipedia entry read:

The Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) was an open source intelligence component of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Directorate of Science and Technology. It monitored, translated, and disseminated within the U.S. government openly available news and information from media sources outside the United States.

In 2005, the FBIS was subsumed into the CIA’s new Open Source Enterprise.

Berg does not dispute that he was, in fact, a CIA man. In fact, according to a 2020 interview with The Jewish Telegraph, he was “absolutely thrilled” to be secretly working for the agency. Berg said, “One day, I was taken to one side and told, ‘you may or may not know that we are part of CIA, but don’t go telling people.’” He was unsurprised by this news, as the application process was extremely long and rigorous. “They went through my character and background with a fine tooth comb, asking if I had ever visited communist countries and, if I had, did I form any relationships while I was there,” he said.

Mossad Collaborator

The CIA, however, is not the only clandestine spy organization with which Berg has a long history of collaborating. He also has a rich professional relationship with Mossad, Israel’s premier intelligence agency.

In 2020, for instance, Berg published “Red Sea Spies: The True Story of Mossad’s Fake Diving Resort,” a book that tells the story of the Israeli operation to clandestinely smuggle Ethiopian Jews into Israel. That the 320-page account lionizes Israel and its spies is perhaps unsurprising, considering how much input Mossad had in its creation. Berg said that he wrote the book “in collaboration” with Mossad commander Dani Limor, whom he relied on extensively, as he, in his own words, knew “next to nothing” about the story and its background before writing it. Limor opened numerous doors and was able to secure “over 100 hours of interviews” with Israeli military and intelligence officials, including with the head of Mossad.

Limor and Berg became extremely close friends. In 2020, he posted a picture of himself with his arm around the ex-Mossad commander. The first page of “Red Sea Spies” is simply a glowing recommendation from Efraim Halevy, former director of Mossad, a group Berg describes as “the world’s greatest intelligence service.”

Berg has aggressively promoted his book and has, on multiple occasions, expressed his delight that Benjamin Netanyahu has shown interest in it. In August 2020, for example, he shared a picture of Netanyahu at his desk in front of a copy of his book. “First time I’ve been on a prime minister’s bookshelf” I know I’ve got one of Israel Prime Minister Netanyahu’s on mine – but wow!” he exclaimed, tagging Mossad, the Israeli Likud Party, and the Israeli Embassies in the United Kingdom and United States.

The following year, he messaged Netanyahu’s son, Yair, stating, “Your dad has my book, ‘Red Sea Spies: The True Story of the Mossad’s Fake Diving Resort,’ and sent me a lovely letter about it.” That letter can be seen on the wall of Berg’s office in his many public posts and videos, framed and placed beside pictures of him meeting a Mossad commander and meeting Mark Regev, the former spokesperson for the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office.

That a BBC Middle East editor would not only frame these images and documents and put them pride of place in his office but also choose to display them while talking publicly and in an official role is telling. The BBC sells itself as an impartial distributor of news on the Middle East and beyond. And yet, Berg, who, by most accounts, calls the shots when it comes to the network’s Israel-Palestine coverage, clearly believes that this is acceptable and unremarkable behavior.

If the opposite were true – that even a low-level BBC employee was openly sharing pictures of themselves embracing Hamas commander Yahya Sinwar or displaying a glowing letter from Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei – it is clear that there would be serious repercussions. The BBC suspended six of its reporters for simply liking pro-Palestine tweets. And yet, in Berg’s case, his overt pro-Israel advocacy has been treated as entirely unproblematic.

Relentlessly Pro-Israel

Of course, it is entirely possible that a pro-Israel stance would help one climb the ladder at the BBC, an organization long known to display a strong bias in favor of the country and its interests.

Born and raised in England, Berg always took a keen interest in Israel, moving there to study Jewish and Israel Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He worked at the FBIS between 1997 and 1998 and joined the BBC in 2001, starting as a world news writer and producer.

One of his first BBC articles profiled the Israeli military and its recruits, presenting the IDF as brave protectors of their homeland and as a “source of national pride” and framed women serving as a win for sexual equality.

In 2009, at the height of Operation Cast Lead – the Israeli attack on Gaza that killed more than 1,000 people – Berg attended a pro-Israel demonstration in central London. Moreover, he even chastised the Israeli newspaper, The Jerusalem Post, for noting that only 5,000 people showed up to the event. In Berg’s opinion, there were three times as many in attendance. The BBC would later change its guidelines to prevent its newsroom employees from attending controversial demonstrations.

During Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli military was found to have indiscriminately targeted and killed civilians, used Palestinians as human shields, and used banned chemical weapons, such as white phosphorous, on civilian areas.

Three years later, in November 2012, Israel launched Operation Pillar of Defense, a high-profile, bloody assault on Gaza that made worldwide headlines. As Israel bombarded the densely-populated civilian area, Berg went on his own internal offensive, telling his BBC colleagues to word their stories in a way that does not blame or “put undue emphasis” on Israel. Instead, leaked emails show, he encouraged journalists to present the attack as an operation “aimed at ending rocket fire from Gaza,” thereby framing Hamas as the aggressor.

Another Berg email instructed his coworkers to “Please remember, Israel doesn’t maintain a blockade around Gaza. Egypt controls the southern border” – a highly contestable opinion not shared by the United Nations, which declared that Israel was the occupying power besieging the strip.

Extraordinary Revelations

Shortly after Operation Pillar of Defense, Berg was promoted, becoming head of the BBC’s Middle East desk. This position gives him enormous influence in shaping the platform’s presentation of Israel’s current war on Gaza. In this role, he has helped turn the network into “systematic Israeli propaganda,” according to one journalist quoted by Jones in his Drop Site investigation. “This guy’s entire job is to water down everything that’s too critical of Israel,” said another.

The BBC staff Jones talked to painted a picture of a pro-Israel zealot systematically suppressing any content or information that would paint Tel Aviv in a negative light. A micromanager, numerous journalists reportedly attempted to notify management of their issues with Berg, but their complaints fell on deaf ears. “Almost every correspondent you know has an issue with him,” one staffer stated. “He has been named in multiple meetings, but [management] just ignore it.”

“How much power he has is wild,” another journalist told Jones, who explained that essentially every story or segment featuring Israel would have to be signed off by Berg first, even leaving other editors in “extreme fear” of commissioning anything without his approval.

Berg is alleged to have made extensive pre-publication edits to others’ stories, changing the framing of news events to shield Israel from blame. One example of this is the whitewashing of the Israeli attack on the funeral of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. In May 2022, Israeli snipers shot the Al Jazeera anchor in the head and proceeded to lie about their culpability. Israeli forces subsequently attacked the public funeral, beating mourners and firing tear gas. The BBC’s text, allegedly penned by Berg himself, read:

Violence broke out at the funeral in East Jerusalem of reporter Shireen Abu Aqla, killed during an Israeli military operation in the occupied West Bank.

Her coffin was jostled as Israeli police and Palestinians clashed as it left a hospital in East Jerusalem.

Thus, Abu Akleh’s murder by Israeli forces was downgraded to a mere death during an operation (with no perpetrator mentioned), while a police attack on a funeral procession was presented as a “clash” between rival factions, presumably of roughly equal responsibility.

A more recent example of this, Jones claims, comes from a July story about IDF soldiers setting an attack dog on Muhammed Bhar, a severely disabled Gazan man, and letting him bleed to death. Under Berg’s supervision, the original headline ran: “The Lonely Death of Gaza Man with Down’s Syndrome.” Only after a gigantic worldwide outcry did the BBC change its framing to note anything about how Bhar met his end. “There has to be a moral line drawn in the sand. And if this story isn’t it, then what?” one BBC journalist said, commenting on the affair.

Since the investigation was published, Berg has remained silent, although he has hired defamation lawyer Mark Lewis, the former director of U.K. Lawyers for Israel.

The BBC, meanwhile, has offered unequivocal support for him and his work, rejected any suggestion of a lenient stance towards Israel, and alleges that the Drop Site article “fundamentally misdescribe[s] Berg’s power, influence, and how the network works.

A Worldwide Network

Whatever the veracity of the Drop Site allegations, the undisputed fact that a former U.S. State Department and CIA operative is calling the shots at the BBC for its Middle East coverage is undoubtedly of public interest.

It also bears a striking resemblance to the accusations of journalist Tareq Haddad. In 2019, Haddad resigned in frustration from Newsweek, claiming that the outlet systematically stymied him from covering important Middle East news stories that did not align with Western objectives. Perhaps most strikingly, though, he claimed that Newsweek employed a senior editor whose only job was seemingly to vet and suppress “controversial” stories, in the same vein as Berg. This editor also had a similar background with state power. As Haddad concluded:

The U.S. government, in an ugly alliance with those the [sic] profit the most from war, has its tentacles in every part of the media — imposters, with ties to the U.S. State Department, sit in newsrooms all over the world. Editors, with no apparent connections to the member’s club, have done nothing to resist. Together, they filter out what can or cannot be reported. Inconvenient stories are completely blocked.”

When contacted by MintPress News for comment, Haddad said he found the BBC, State Department and CIA links to be “staggering,” adding:

When I resigned from Newsweek, I did so because all reporting on foreign affairs went through a particular editor, who, in my case, turned out to be connected to the European Council on Foreign Relations. That prevented me from writing truthfully when it came to a number of sensitive issues.”

CIA-Affiliated Media

The implications of former U.S. national security state operatives dictating global media output are profound. This is not least because the State Department and CIA are among the world’s most notoriously dishonest and perfidious institutions, regularly injecting lies and false information into public discourse to further Washington’s ambitions. As Mike Pompeo, former Director of the CIA and then-Secretary of State, said in 2019:

When I was a cadet, what’s the cadet motto at West Point? You will not lie, cheat, or steal or tolerate those who do. I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. We had entire training courses [on] it!”

Furthermore, both organizations have a long history of organizing invasions of and coups against foreign countries, drugs and weapons smuggling and operating a worldwide network of “black sites,” where thousands are tortured.

The CIA, in particular, has an extensive record of penetrating media outlets. As far back as the 1970s, the Church Committee unearthed the existence of Operation Mockingbird, a secret project to infiltrate newsrooms across America with secret agents masquerading as journalists. Investigative reporter Carl Bernstein’s work found that the agency had cultivated a network of over 400 individuals it considered assets, including the owner of The New York Times.

John Stockwell, former head of a CIA task force, explained on camera how his organization infiltrated media departments across the planet, establishing fake outlets and news agencies that worked to control global public opinion and spread false information demonizing Washington’s enemies. “I had propagandists all over the world,” he admitted, adding:

We pumped dozens of stories about Cuban atrocities, Cuban rapists [to the media]… We ran [faked] photographs that made almost every newspaper in the country… We didn’t know of one single atrocity committed by the Cubans. It was pure, raw, false propaganda to create an illusion of communists eating babies for breakfast.”

This process continues to this day, as the CIA continues to promote dubious stories about so-called “Havana Syndrome” and Russia putting bounties on American soldiers in Afghanistan.

Cable networks routinely employ a wide range of former State Department or CIA officials as personalities and trusted experts. Former CIA director John Brennan is employed by NBC News and MSNBC, while his predecessor, Michael Hayden, can be seen on CNN. Top anchors such as Anderson Cooper and Tucker Carlson have their own connections to the agency.

Meanwhile, in 2015, Dawn Scalici, a 33-year CIA veteran, left her job as national intelligence manager for the Western hemisphere at the Director of National Intelligence to become the global business director of the international news conglomerate Reuters. That this was a political hire was barely hidden; in Scalici’s official announcement, the company declared her primary responsibility would be “advancing Thomson Reuters’ ability to meet the disparate needs of the U.S. government.”

Social media, too, is full of former U.S. national security state agents. A previous MintPress News investigation uncovered a network of dozens of ex-CIA officials working at Google. Most of these individuals work in highly politically sensitive roles such as security and, trust and safety, effectively giving them control over the algorithms that decide what content gets seen and what is suppressed worldwide. Some were even directly recruited from the CIA, leaving the agency to join the Silicon Valley giant.

Competing with Google for the crown of employing most former CIA agents is Facebook. The company’s senior product policy manager for misinformation, Aaron Berman, the man most responsible for deciding what the world sees (and does not see) in its news feeds, was directly parachuted in from Langley, Virginia. Berman was one of the agency’s highest-ranking officers, writing the president’s daily brief for both Obama and Trump until July 2019, when he made the switch from big government to big tech.

And since it became a target of Washington’s ire, TikTok has been on a hiring spree, recruiting large numbers of U.S. State Department officials to run its internal affairs. The company’s head of data public policy for Europe, for example, is Jade Nester, who was previously the State Department’s director of internet public policy. These connections were explored in a MintPress investigation entitled, “TikTok: Chinese “Trojan Horse” Is Run by State Department Officials.”

Cheering on a Genocide

In recent years, Washington has shown considerable interest in influencing the British press. The National Endowment for Democracy—another unofficial branch of the CIA—has spent millions of dollars funding a wide range of media outlets in the U.K. The NED’s sister organization, USAID, is the third-largest funder of BBC Media Action, the company’s charitable arm, donating over $2 million annually.

The BBC itself has faced repeated accusations of pro-Israel bias, not only from the public but also internally. Their headquarters are a common start or end point for numerous pro-Palestine marches, including an upcoming national rally in London on January 18. In November, over 100 BBC staff signed an open letter to the corporation’s director-general, Tim Davie and Chief Executive Officer Deborah Turness. The letter admonishes the company for consistently providing “favorable coverage to Israel,” failing to uphold even “basic journalistic tenet[s]” when covering its war on Gaza, and aiding in “systematically dehumanizing Palestinians.”

Haddad agreed that much of the network’s coverage had been subpar, telling MintPress :

The BBC, of course, like many institutions, has fallen way short of their coverage in documenting what Israel has done in a densely populated strip of land we know as Gaza over the last 14 months and prior.”

Partially as a result, public confidence in the broadcaster has fallen to an all-time low. By July 2023, just 38% of Britons said they trusted the BBC to tell the truth – down from 81% 20 years previously. Since October 7, its biases have been put under even more scrutiny.

Israel’s actions, Haddad said, are “growing harder to ignore.” Officially, the death toll from the Israeli attack on Gaza stands at almost 50,000, although credible estimates put the likely figure at many times that. International organizations, such as the United Nations and Amnesty International, have described the onslaught as “genocidal.”

Israel could not sustain its attack without vital military, logistical, economic, and political support from Western powers. It is, therefore, vital for Washington, London and the E.U. that public opinion does not turn too far in favor of Palestine to the point where widespread public rebellion forces a change in policy. The BBC, with its deeply misleading and one-sided coverage of the events, therefore, plays an important role in the perpetuation of crimes against humanity. That this is being driven from the top down by overtly pro-Israel editors, including one with a history in both the State Department and CIA, is perhaps unsurprising but no less shocking, nonetheless.

To be clear, this article does not claim that Berg or anyone at the BBC is a plant. Nor is it accusing him of any specific wrongdoing beyond working at a distinctly biased network. What it is stating is that it is telling that the person in charge of its Middle East reporting has framed pictures and letters of Mossad commanders and high Israeli officials on the wall, as if they are rock stars and he is a teenage fan. That someone such as this rose the ranks is a clear indication of the kind of culture that exists at the BBC – one that has systematically demonized Palestinians and manufactured consent for genocide.

May 17, 2026 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , , , | Comments Off on Raffi Berg: BBC Middle East Editor Exposed as CIA, Mossad Collaborator

Seyed M. Marandi: Iran Ready With Overwhelming Retaliation

Glenn Diesen | May 16, 2026

Prof. Seyed Mohammad Marandi is a former advisor to Iran’s nuclear negotiation team. Prof. Marandi argues that the U.S. is preparing another attack on Iran after Trump’s failed meeting with Xi in Beijing. Iran has prepared an overwhelming retaliation.

Follow Prof. Glenn Diesen:

Support the research by Prof. Glenn Diesen:

Books by Prof. Glenn Diesen

Bombs Away or Walk Away in Iran /Lt Col Daniel Davis

Daniel Davis / Deep Dive – May 16, 2026

May 17, 2026 Posted by | Militarism, Video, Wars for Israel | , , , , | Comments Off on Seyed M. Marandi: Iran Ready With Overwhelming Retaliation