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IS YOUR SUNSCREEN CAUSING CANCER?

The HighWire with Del Bigtree | June 25, 2026

The FDA began reevaluating sunscreen chemical safety in 2019, yet millions are still told to apply these products every day. Jefferey looks at what happens when sunscreen chemicals enter the bloodstream, and why new research on sun exposure, vitamin D, and cancer is challenging old assumptions.

June 27, 2026 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | Comments Off on IS YOUR SUNSCREEN CAUSING CANCER?

When an Ancient Spice Puts Modern Psychiatry to Shame

How saffron challenges the antidepressants, the OCD drugs, and the stimulants — on efficacy, safety, accessibility, and price.

By Sayer Ji | June 25, 2026

For three thousand years, Crocus sativus — saffron — has been threaded into the food, ritual, and medicine of Persia, India, and the Mediterranean. What is new is not the plant. What is new is the clinical record: a growing body of randomized, controlled research showing that saffron can perform comparably to several conventional psychiatric medications for depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and ADHD — often with fewer adverse effects (GreenMedInfo overview; a 2024 systematic review).

This is not a claim that pharmaceuticals never help (indeed, the active placebo effect alone is to generate a perceived positive effect in the majority of treatments). It is something more uncomfortable: strong evidence that the dominant drug-centered model has quietly ignored a lower-risk botanical option with a far older record of human use — and called it folklore while doing so.

“If a patented molecule matched Prozac, fluvoxamine, or Ritalin with fewer side effects, it would be called a breakthrough. Because saffron is an ancient spice, it is treated like a footnote.”

It should also be noted that the adverse effects of psychiatric medications have been downplayed, especially their connection to violent episodes. We have explored this problem in greater depth in the article below.

The Serotonin Wars: Why 2025 Marks a Turning Point in the SSRI Violence Debate

I. Older Than Memory: The Spice at the First Chapter of Medicine

The truth is that we say three thousand years out of habit. The origin of saffron is far stranger, and far older. Pigments derived from saffron have been identified in cave paintings in what is now northwest Iran, dated to roughly fifty thousand years ago — meaning the human bond with this flower predates agriculture, predates writing, predates nearly everything we call civilization (documented at GreenMedInfo). The relationship is, as nearly as we can tell, as old as our species’ capacity for wonder.

By the Bronze Age the flower had become sacred. On the Aegean island of Thera, frescoes painted some 3,500 years ago show a goddess enthroned above attendants gathering saffron — presiding, the imagery suggests, over both the harvest and the medicinal use of the spice. When researchers finally decoded the scene, The New York Times reported that they had effectively rewritten the first chapter in the history of medicine (Honan, The New York Times, 2004). Long before the pharmacy, there was the crocus — and a goddess watching over it.

And it has never surrendered its mystery cheaply. Each Crocus sativus bloom offers only three crimson threads, and it takes roughly one hundred and fifty flowers to yield a single gram — every stigma drawn by hand, the plant having refused mechanization for the whole of its history. Ounce for ounce it has long rivaled gold. The world calls it red gold, and not as flattery.

The deeper mystery is biochemical. A single thread carries more than 150 aromatic compounds and acts on more than fifty biological pathways in the body — a symphony so layered that its medicinal power remains, in a real sense, refractory to the reductionist gaze of modern pharmacology. This is the paradox the rest of this essay lives inside: a medicine humanity has trusted since the Ice Age, whose biochemistry we are only now learning to read — and which, read at last, turns out to stand toe to toe with the patented drugs of the present day.

I. The Promise Psychiatry Keeps Failing to Keep

The public was sold a simple story: depression is a chemical imbalance (e.g. serotonin deficiency), OCD requires heavy serotonergic correction, and ADHD needs stimulants to normalize performance. But real-world outcomes are often mixed. Incomplete response, relapse, dose escalation, withdrawal difficulty, sexual side effects, sleep disruption, appetite suppression, and emotional blunting are all widely documented in the literature (depression meta-analysis; adult ADHD adjunctive trial).

This does not mean medication has no role, especially in emergency medicine. It means the standard model has often demanded a punishing trade: partial symptom control in exchange for physiological, emotional, and financial costs that patients are expected to normalize.

II. Saffron for Depression: The Ancient Spice That Stood Up to Antidepressants

Clinical trials and pooled analyses suggest saffron is significantly better than placebo for mild to moderate depression and may be comparable to standard antidepressants in symptom reduction (meta-analysis). GreenMedInfo’s summary of six saffron studies emphasizes trials in which saffron matched or exceeded common antidepressants while maintaining a cleaner tolerability profile (GreenMedInfo).

In one line of research, saffron at around 30 mg per day was comparable to fluoxetine (aka Prozac) for major depressive disorder over several weeks — similar improvement on standard depression scales, fewer problematic adverse effects in the study populations.

GreenMedInfo also highlights a postpartum depression study in which saffron outperformed escitalopram on response and remission measures — underscoring that this is not merely an adjunctive wellness story, but a direct challenge to antidepressant assumptions.

“Saffron does not merely suppress symptoms. The broader literature suggests it may support a healthier terrain: oxidative balance, neuroprotection, and inflammatory regulation.”

III. OCD: Where Saffron Matched a Front-Line Pharmaceutical

Obsessive-compulsive disorder is usually treated with SSRIs at substantial doses. Yet a randomized, double-blind study found saffron comparable to fluvoxamine in mild to moderate OCD, using standard symptom scoring over eight weeks (randomized clinical trial).

The significance is not only clinical parity, but the implication that a botanical intervention may achieve similar benefit without extending the same burden of side effects.

That matters because OCD patients are often told they must accept a harsh medication profile as the cost of functioning. Saffron’s performance here suggests the “no alternative” framing is far weaker than many patients have been led to believe.

IV. ADHD: A Challenge to the Stimulant Monopoly

Several studies and reviews suggest saffron may improve ADHD symptoms in children and adults, either alone or as an adjunct, with an acceptable safety profile (systematic review).

A pediatric trial found saffron performed comparably to methylphenidate — the molecule sold as Ritalin — for core ADHD symptoms over six weeks (pediatric trial).

An adult adjunctive randomized trial also reported benefits when saffron was added to existing treatment, suggesting value even within conventional care rather than only outside it (randomized trial).

This should force a bigger question: why is a controlled-substance framework treated as normal first-line thinking when a non-patented botanical with human-trial support has been relegated to the margins?

“When a flower can compete with a stimulant, the problem is no longer lack of evidence. The problem is what the system is willing to see.”

V. Why Saffron May Work Differently

The broader neuropsychiatric literature points to multiple active constituents in saffron — including crocin and safranal — with effects on serotonin, dopamine, oxidative stress, inflammation, and neuroprotection (mechanistic review; Frontiers review).

This multi-target profile may help explain why saffron appears to improve mood and attention without reproducing the full burden of conventional drug toxicity.

Unlike a single-target pharmaceutical narrative, saffron appears to work more like a systems-level intervention. That does not make it magical. It makes it biologically plausible in a way reductionist psychiatry often is not.

VI. Safety, Accessibility, and Price

One of the strongest arguments for saffron is not only efficacy but proportionality. At studied doses, saffron has generally shown good tolerability across trials — especially relative to medications associated with sexual dysfunction, insomnia, appetite suppression, cardiovascular concerns, or difficult discontinuation syndromes (depression meta-analysis; 2024 systematic review).

It is also accessible. Standardized saffron extracts are widely available without a prescription, and although high-quality saffron is not cheap by weight, the clinically studied extract doses are small enough that monthly use may compare favorably with branded psychiatric medications — and with the downstream cost of managing their side effects.

This does not prove saffron is always cheaper in every market. But it strengthens the case that a lower-tech option may deliver better value with less harm.

VII. A Balanced Position on Medication

Some people benefit meaningfully from antidepressants, from SSRIs for OCD, or from stimulant medications for ADHD. Abrupt discontinuation can be dangerous, and saffron should not be presented as a simplistic replacement for every patient in every context.

But balance cuts both ways. A fair reading of the literature no longer allows the claim that pharmaceuticals are the only serious evidence-based option. Saffron now belongs in the main conversation: as a first consideration in some mild to moderate cases, as an adjunct in others, and as a serious object of informed discussion between patients and clinicians.

VIII. The Real Scandal

The real scandal is not that saffron works. The scandal is that patients have been taught to regard an ancient, clinically validated spice as quaint — while accepting a cascade of pharmaceutical harms as modern medicine.

A model built on failed promises deserves scrutiny. A medicine with deep cultural roots, growing scientific support, broad accessibility, and a gentler risk profile deserves a place at the center of the discussion.

If the psychiatric model were judged by the standards imposed on natural medicine, it would have to explain far more than saffron ever did.

To learn more about saffron, visit the GreenMedInfo.com database on the subject.

For more information on natural approaches to depression, OCD, and ADHD, explore the over 10,000 topics on GreenMedInfo.com, and consider becoming a member to deepen your toolset and knowledge-base and support the health and growth of the project here.

IX. The Benevolent Superfluity: Why a Flower Heals

Chemistry tells us how saffron works. It does not tell us why a flower, of all things, should be the one to outperform the molecules built in the lab. For that we have to go underneath pharmacology — to the strangest fact about the plant we have been discussing: that before it is a medicine, it is a flower, and the flower is the most extravagant, least necessary, most beautiful gesture the living world makes.

A flower feeds nothing on its own. It shelters no one. By the cold logic of survival it is extravagant waste — energy poured into color, scent, symmetry, and form when sturdier roots would have been the rational investment. And yet every human culture on every continent has tended flowers for at least five thousand years, with, as one Rutgers study dryly noted, no known reward for this costly behavior. When the researchers measured what a flower actually does to a person, the result was without precedent in the literature of emotion: a gift of flowers produced the involuntary Duchenne smile — the true smile, the one that cannot be faked — in one hundred percent of recipients. No gift of candy or money had ever reached that number. In the elderly it lifted mood and sharpened memory; in a crowded elevator a single bloom dissolved the reflex of stranger-avoidance and made people speak (Haviland-Jones et al., Evolutionary Psychology, 2005).

I have argued elsewhere that this is no accident of neural wiring, but a disclosure about the nature of reality itself — what I have called the benevolent superfluity of the universe (A Benevolent Superfluity). The cosmos did not stop at hydrogen, or carbon, or the first living cell. It kept going, overshooting bare function and landing in beauty — the spiral of the nautilus, the lattice of the honeycomb, the five-fold symmetry of the wild rose. Beauty, in this reading, is not decoration laid over a grey and functional world. Beauty is the structure of reality expressing itself. The flower is that structure made flesh — made petal, made scent, made color. The superfluous turns out to be the sacred, and the sacred turns out to be exactly what the body recognizes in an instant, before thought, with a yes.

Now hold saffron against that backdrop. If the flower is the universe’s gratuitous beauty made incarnate, saffron is that gesture brought to its most concentrated pitch: the crimson heart of the crocus, three threads to a bloom, a hundred and fifty flowers spent for a single gram, more than a hundred and fifty aromatic compounds folded into each thread. It is the flower distilled to its most lavish and most superfluous expression — and it carries, in that concentration, the same healing ontology the Duchenne study caught on film.

This is why the contest with the synthetic drug was never quite fair to the drug. A laboratory molecule is a stranger to the body — a foreign key for which the body has no lock, which it must labor to detoxify, paying the tax in the gut, the liver, the nervous system. Saffron is not a stranger. It is kin — the flower, the oldest object of human tenderness, a form the body has been answering with a yes since before we had language for it. The drug subtracts as it acts. The flower, even as medicine, adds — because it is continuous with the beauty that makes a nervous system want to go on living at all. That continuity is not a metaphor laid over the pharmacology. It is the ground the pharmacology stands on.

A note on practice

This essay is a reading of what the clinical literature reveals, not medical advice. Do not stop a prescribed antidepressant, SSRI, or stimulant abruptly — discontinuation of these drugs can be dangerous, and some require careful, supervised tapering. If you are looking for support in withdrawing from psychiatric medicines, consult the Inner Compass initiative. Saffron is not a blanket substitute for every patient in every situation, and it is not free of interactions: it can have additive effects with serotonergic medications and acts on the same mood-regulating pathways, so it warrants the same respect as any active compound. Pregnancy, bipolar disorder, and combination with prescription psychiatric drugs all call for a knowledgeable practitioner’s oversight. Honor the power of this plant by respecting it — and make these decisions with a clinician who will actually read the evidence with you.

Sources & further reading

Saffron for depression

Saffron for OCD

Saffron for ADHD

How saffron works — constituents, mechanisms, neuroprotection

Overviews & reviews

June 27, 2026 Posted by | Timeless or most popular | , , , | Comments Off on When an Ancient Spice Puts Modern Psychiatry to Shame

What Is Really in Childhood Vaccines

Lies are Unbekoming | June 23, 2026

Forty-Three of Forty-Four

Lead was identified in five of the vaccines: Typhim Vi, Cervarix, Agrippal S1, Meningitec, and Gardasil. Tungsten appeared in eight more, distributed across products from GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, Wyeth, and Novartis. Twenty-five of the forty-four samples contained stainless steel. Across the full set, the elemental analysis cataloged bismuth, gold, silver, platinum, cerium, zirconium, hafnium, antimony, strontium, barium, copper, tin, and zinc in various alloy combinations. None of these materials appeared on any package insert. None had a declared role in the vaccines’ formulation.

The work was published in 2017 by Antonietta Gatti and Stefano Montanari, materials scientists at the Italian National Council of Research. They obtained the vaccines from pharmacies in Italy and France. The manufacturers included Sanofi, GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, Novartis, and Merck. They examined a twenty-microliter drop of each under a Field Emission Gun Environmental Scanning Electron Microscope. They identified the elemental composition of every particle they found using X-ray spectroscopy. They photographed each contaminant and compiled the catalog.¹

Forty-three of the forty-four vaccines were for human use. One was for cats. That single sample, Feligen CRP manufactured by Virbac, contained none of the heavy metals or industrial alloys cataloged in the human samples. The authors classified it as free from inorganic contamination.

The contamination is consistent across manufacturers, batches, countries, and years. The veterinary production line, examined by the same instruments at the same resolution, produced a clean vial. The human production lines did not.

This is not an argument about disease causation. It is not a contested mechanism. It is materials science applied to a drop of liquid pulled from a syringe. The instruments resolved what was there. None of it should have been in an injectable medical product. The system that produces and regulates these products has not addressed what the instruments showed.

One Particle in Agrippal

Figure 6 of the paper shows a single object, photographed at high magnification inside a drop of Agrippal S1, batch 147302A. This was Novartis’s flu vaccine for the 2014-2015 season. The object is a few microns across. It is wrapped in a darker, less atomically dense outline that Gatti and Montanari identify as organic material, a protein layer adhering to the particle’s surface. The metallic core, brighter under the backscattered-electron detector, registered four elements on the X-ray spectrum: cerium, iron, titanium, nickel.¹

Cerium is a rare earth metal. It has industrial applications in catalytic converters and glass polishing compounds. It has no medical use. It is not a declared ingredient in any flu vaccine. The four-element combination Gatti and Montanari documented does not match any recognized industrial alloy and appears in no materials engineering handbook. The authors describe it as the kind of debris produced when industrial waste is incinerated.

The protein layer around the metal was visible in the photograph. Within seconds of a metallic particle entering a protein-rich solution, the body’s serum proteins bind to the particle’s surface. The composite is no longer simply a foreign metal. It is a hybrid object: metal core, biological coat.

That vial was administered. So were the others in batch 147302A. So were the rest of the production batches Novartis manufactured that flu season. The doses are no longer in the pharmacy. They are no longer in any database. They are in people. Whoever received that batch received some quantity of cerium-iron-titanium-nickel debris, wrapped in their own unfolded proteins, deposited into deltoid muscle, and from there carried wherever the lymphatics and the blood took it.

The vial contained 429 additional detected particles in the same twenty-microliter drop.

The Pattern Across the Catalog

The cerium particle in Agrippal is one finding among thousands. The particle counts vary by orders of magnitude across the forty-four vaccines tested. The anti-tetanus products produced the lowest counts: two particles in one Anatetall sample, four in Vivotif. The childhood vaccines produced the highest. Varilrix returned 2,723 particles per twenty-microliter drop. Infanrix hexa returned 1,821. Cervarix returned 1,569. Fluarix returned 1,317. These are counts per twenty microliters. A standard injection is half a milliliter, or twenty-five drops. The arithmetic is straightforward.¹

The composition is more difficult to absorb than the counts.

The alloy combinations Gatti and Montanari cataloged include gold-copper-zinc in Repevax, platinum-silver-bismuth-iron-chromium in M-M-R vaxPro, zirconium-aluminum-hafnium compounds in Vivotif, and the cerium-iron-titanium-nickel particle in Agrippal. The paper notes that these combinations “have no technical use, cannot be found in any material handbook and look like the result of the random formation occurring, for example, when waste is burnt.”

Three of the Meningitec batches in the table carry an additional notation: sequestered by Procura della Repubblica. Italian prosecutors had seized those batches before Gatti and Montanari obtained access. The samples were already evidence in a criminal investigation. The contamination Gatti and Montanari documented was present in the seized batches as well as the over-the-counter samples. Whatever the prosecutors were investigating, the physical evidence cooperated.

The pattern does not isolate to any single manufacturer or batch. It crosses Italian batches and French batches. It crosses production dates from 2004 to 2017. The pattern is structural to the industry, not anomalous to any one production run.

Feligen contained 92 particles in its twenty-microliter drop, but the elemental analysis identified only calcium and silicon-aluminum. This is the kind of low-toxicity material that could derive from saline or environmental dust. It did not contain the tungsten, lead, stainless steel, or rare earth metal compounds cataloged in the human samples. The veterinary production line, examined by the same instruments at the same resolution, produced a vial without industrial debris. The human production lines did not.

What the Instruments Show, and Why No One Looked

The instruments Gatti and Montanari used are not exotic. A Field Emission Gun Environmental Scanning Electron Microscope resolves features at the nanometer scale and accommodates wet or oily samples without the artifacts conventional electron microscopy introduces. The X-ray microprobe attached to it (Energy Dispersive Spectroscopy, or EDS) identifies the elemental composition of any particle the microscope can see. The combination produces two outputs for each foreign body: a photograph at high magnification and a spectrum showing which elements are present.¹

Sample preparation is routine. Twenty microliters of vaccine are released onto a 25-millimeter cellulose filter inside a clean cabinet. The filter is then dried, mounted on a carbon-adhesive disc, and placed into the microscope chamber. Observations are made under low vacuum at 10 to 30 kilovolts. The microscope’s two sensors distinguish organic from inorganic material by atomic density: metal cores appear bright, protein coatings appear dim. The EDS identifies what each bright region contains.

Any contract laboratory with the relevant instruments could replicate the protocol in an afternoon. The equipment cost is in the range of half a million dollars, a budget category that does not appear on any pharmaceutical manufacturer’s annual report under “material constraints.” Most major manufacturers already own instruments of this class for other purposes.

What pharmaceutical quality control for injectables actually examines is something different. Sterility testing checks for viable microorganisms. Endotoxin testing checks for bacterial cell wall fragments capable of producing fever. Potency assays confirm the declared active ingredient is present at the declared concentration. Visible particulate inspection involves a trained human holding the vial to a light and looking. Visible inspection cannot resolve particles below approximately fifty microns. Most of what Gatti and Montanari documented falls below that threshold.

The contamination went undocumented for a century because the question was not asked. The instruments existed. The samples were on the pharmacy shelf. The technique was routine in adjacent fields like materials science, semiconductor manufacturing, forensic analysis, and environmental toxicology. It had simply never been applied to vaccines. The first systematic survey produced the catalog above.

What Foreign Bodies Do in Tissue

A particle of cerium-iron-titanium-nickel is not a molecule. It is a crystal. Once injected into muscle, it does not dissolve or biodegrade in any meaningful timeframe. The body has no enzymatic machinery for breaking down rare earth metal alloys. There is no biochemical process that handles them.

The first event after injection is the protein corona. The surfaces of metallic particles bind serum proteins on contact. The proteins do not adhere in their natural folded configuration. The contact with the metal surface distorts them, exposing parts of the molecule that would normally remain tucked inside. The composite that results is a metal core wrapped in distorted protein. It is recognizable to the body’s repair networks as a problem but is not removable, because the metal at the center cannot be processed.

The body responds to the composite the way it responds to any persistent tissue injury. Inflammation builds at the site and does not resolve, because the source of the injury cannot be removed.

In the establishment’s framework, this is what gets labeled an autoimmune effect, with the body said to be “attacking itself.” Gatti and Montanari, working within that framework, note that the protein-corona composite is “capable of stimulating the immune system in an undesirable way.”¹ The accurate description does not require any framework about systems attacking themselves. The body is responding to documented tissue injury caused by an inserted foreign object it cannot remove. The inflammation is the response, not the disease. The damage is the foreign body’s biopersistence.

The acute response can be cleared if the irritant can be cleared. A splinter or a bee sting resolves once the offending material is processed. A foreign body that cannot be broken down provokes inflammation that does not resolve. Granulomas form at the injection site. Some particles remain there. Others travel. Gatti and Montanari note that blood circulation can carry them anywhere, “including the microbiota, in a fair quantity,” and that particles of the size observed in the vaccines can enter cell nuclei.¹

Charles Richet documented the underlying sensitization mechanism in 1901. Injection of foreign protein into an animal produced a measurable response. On second exposure, the response was more severe. On third exposure, more severe still. Richet named the phenomenon anaphylaxis and received the 1913 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the work.² The finding has not been refuted. In clinical medicine it has been displaced. The route of administration is no longer treated as a primary variable, despite Richet’s demonstration that it is the only variable that matters. Foreign proteins encountered through digestion are processed and do not sensitize. Foreign proteins encountered through injection sensitize predictably.

Gatti and Montanari supply the physical substrate Richet’s mechanism predicted. The “foreign protein” in a contemporary injection is not a single contaminant in a controlled formulation. It is a protein corona: the recipient’s own proteins, unfolded and presented in unfamiliar configuration on the surface of a tungsten particle, a lead particle, or a stainless steel fragment. The sensitization mechanism is identical to the one Richet described. The physical agent has now been photographed.

On “Trace Amounts”

The standard defense of contamination in injectable products is that the quantities are below any toxicological threshold of concern. The defense does not survive examination.

Toxicological thresholds for these materials in injected products have not been established. Standard toxicology threshold work is conducted on oral or dermal exposure, with the intestinal lining and the skin filtering the dose. Injection bypasses these barriers. The pharmacokinetics of injected particulate metal is a separate body of work that, for the contaminants Gatti and Montanari documented, has not been performed.

Even if such thresholds existed, they would not apply to crystals. The relevant comparison for a soluble toxin is dose in micrograms per kilogram of body weight. The relevant comparison for a tungsten particle in muscle tissue is not. It is a foreign body. The mechanism of injury is not chemical toxicity at low concentration. It is the mechanical and inflammatory response at the site where the body cannot clear it. Threshold arguments built on solubility do not apply to objects.

For some of the elements cataloged, no threshold defense was ever available. Lead has no established safe exposure level in pediatric populations. The EPA, the CDC, and the AAP all state this. An argument that a small amount of lead in an injection is acceptable would require a separate regulatory framework specific to injected lead in children. No such framework has been published.

What the manufacturers have in place of threshold defense is the assertion that the contamination is not there. The Gatti and Montanari work establishes that assertion as false.

The HPV Cases

The paper’s discussion section opens with the HPV vaccines. Gardasil and Cervarix.

Cervarix contained 1,569 particles per twenty-microliter drop. The elemental analysis identified aluminum, silicon, magnesium, calcium, iron-chromium-nickel (stainless steel), zinc, copper-tin-lead bronze, and several additional combinations. Gardasil contained between 304 and 454 particles per drop, depending on the batch. The composition included calcium-aluminum-silicon, aluminum-copper-iron, lead, bismuth, titanium, and bismuth-barium-sulfur.¹ Both vaccines are administered to adolescents, predominantly girls and increasingly boys, between roughly ages eleven and fifteen, on the schedule recommended by national pediatric authorities and reinforced by school-entry requirements in many jurisdictions.

The adverse event patterns following HPV vaccination have been documented in the medical literature since shortly after global rollout. Brinth’s 2015 case series at Frederiksberg Hospital described fifty-three Danish girls presenting after Gardasil with severe headache, syncope, cognitive dysfunction, autonomic disturbance, episodic loss of consciousness, and impairment of gait.³ Kinoshita and colleagues at Shinshu University documented Japanese adolescent girls with peripheral sympathetic nerve dysfunction following Gardasil and Cervarix. Their symptoms included orthostatic intolerance, complex regional pain syndrome, severe headache, photophobia, cognitive impairment, and inability to maintain upright posture.⁴ Palmieri’s group at the University of Modena published a 2016 case series and literature review describing severe somatoform and dysautonomic syndromes after the same vaccines, including patients who had lost the ability to walk.⁵

The Japanese Ministry of Health suspended its proactive recommendation for HPV vaccination in 2013 following these cases. The Danish health authorities, after Brinth’s work, established specialty referral centers to handle girls presenting with the post-vaccination syndromes. The clinical labels the patients receive (POTS, CRPS, chronic fatigue syndrome, various dysautonomias) describe symptom clusters without explaining mechanism. They tell the patient she is sick. They do not tell her why.

Gatti and Montanari’s analysis supplies the missing piece. The Gardasil vials contained lead. The Cervarix vials contained stainless steel and copper-tin-lead bronze. The particles entered the deltoid. The particles do not biodegrade. The particles bind protein. The composite persists at the injection site or travels through circulation to lodge in distant tissue. The body responds to persistent tissue injury with sustained inflammation. Where the particles come to rest determines what the patient experiences. A particle lodging near the nerves that regulate heart rate and blood pressure produces orthostatic intolerance, the picture clinicians label POTS. A particle near a sensory nerve root produces regional pain syndromes. The clinical picture in any given patient maps to the anatomical distribution of damage.

This is not a single-source argument. The physical contamination has been documented by Gatti and Montanari. The sensitization produced by injected foreign protein was documented by Richet at the turn of the twentieth century and recognized in his 1913 Nobel Prize. The clinical syndromes following HPV vaccination are documented in patient registries across Denmark, Japan, and Italy. The lines converge on a single conclusion: injection of biopersistent foreign bodies into tissue causes sustained inflammatory injury, and the clinical picture depends on where the foreign bodies travel.

The girls did not get sick from a virus. They got sick from what was in the vial.

What “Unintentional” Requires

In the conclusion of their paper, Gatti and Montanari propose that the contamination is unintentional. “Our hypothesis is that this contamination is unintentional, since it is probably due to polluted components or procedures of industrial processes (e.g. filtrations) used to produce vaccines, not investigated and not detected by the Producers.”¹ They are scientists. They stayed within what their instruments could establish. They did not assert intent they could not prove from a microscope image.

The hypothesis deserves examination. It requires us to believe specific things.

It requires that GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi, Pfizer, Novartis, and Merck (corporations with annual revenues in the tens of billions of dollars, employing thousands of quality control personnel, with full access to the same materials science instruments Gatti and Montanari used) have not, as a matter of routine practice, examined their own injectable products at the resolution where contamination would be visible. The omission would persist despite the instruments being standard equipment in their other research operations. It would persist despite the cost of physical-evidence quality control being a rounding error against the revenue these products generate. It would persist despite the documented sequestration of Pfizer Meningitec batches by Italian prosecutors having already established that the contamination question was live.

It requires accepting that the regulatory bodies (the FDA, the European Medicines Agency, the various national medicines agencies) have not required physical contamination testing of injectable products at any resolution finer than visible particulate inspection. This is documented. The regulations require sterility testing, endotoxin testing, and visual examination. They do not require electron microscopy. They do not require X-ray spectroscopy. They do not require any examination capable of detecting tungsten, lead, or rare earth metal debris below the threshold of unaided human vision. Particles below approximately fifty microns fall below regulatory scrutiny. Most of what Gatti and Montanari documented falls below that threshold.

It requires accepting that the contamination has continued, in the same products from the same manufacturers, since the paper’s publication in 2017. The studies to determine where the particles travel after injection, what damage they cause over what timescale, and what cumulative effect they have on the recipient population have not been commissioned. The contamination has not been investigated by the producers. It has not been addressed by the regulators. It has not been examined in any follow-up by the same teams that produced the original work. Subsequent reporting indicates that the authors have themselves been the subject of administrative action by Italian authorities in the years since publication. The findings have not been refuted.

“Unintentional” is a word that requires consequent action to mean anything. An accidental fire that is left to burn ceases to be an accident. A contamination problem identified, published in peer-reviewed literature, and left unaddressed for nine years is no longer a quality control oversight. It is a settled equilibrium between what the manufacturers produce and what the regulators require.

The veterinary production line is clean. Feligen contains no industrial debris because Virbac’s manufacturing process for animal vaccines produces vials without it. The capability exists. The standard exists. It has been demonstrated by an adjacent product line owned by the same broad industry.

Whatever word is appropriate for the difference between the line that produces a clean injection for a cat and the lines that produce contaminated injections for children, “unintentional” is not it.

After 2017

The Gatti and Montanari paper was published before the rollout of the mRNA products. The contamination they documented was in conventional vaccines, manufactured by conventional methods. The pharmaceutical manufacturing system they examined was the system in place before 2020.

Subsequent work on the mRNA products has documented the same baseline. Sasha Latypova’s manufacturing analysis identifies undeclared contaminants in injected materials and regulatory frameworks that did not require the testing that would have caught them. What Gatti and Montanari cataloged in 2017 continues in new products under new labels. The 2017 findings and the post-2021 findings are not separate stories. They are the same story, told in different chemistries by an industry whose quality control standards are set by what the regulators require rather than what the instruments can detect.

The Particle Is in Someone

The cerium-iron-titanium-nickel particle photographed in Agrippal batch 147302A is in someone now.

We do not know whose arm received the dose. We do not know whether the particle remained at the injection site, traveled through lymph to regional nodes, entered circulation, or lodged in muscle, spleen, liver, brain, or microbiota. We do not know what damage it has done or is doing. The studies to determine these things have not been performed. They will not be commissioned by the entity that produced the vial.

The particle is a few microns across. It is composed of four elements, only some of which appear in any technical catalog of recognized industrial alloys. It is wrapped in protein. The protein was the recipient’s own, bound on contact, unfolded by the binding, presented in a configuration the body has no template for. The composite is biopersistent. It does not biodegrade. The response to it is the one Richet documented in 1901 and was awarded the Nobel for in 1913.

The vial it came from was administered in the 2014-2015 flu season. The batches manufactured this year are being administered now. The instruments Gatti and Montanari used are still available. The procedure they described is still routine. The contamination they documented has not been investigated by the producers, named by the regulators, or addressed in any meaningful way.

The particle is in someone now. The vial it came from is gone. The vials in production this week contain debris of similar composition in similar quantities, headed for arms that have not yet been chosen.

If You Were Six

Some scientists looked at the shots that doctors give to children. They looked very carefully, using a special microscope strong enough to see things much smaller than a speck of dust.

They found tiny pieces of metal in the liquid inside the shots. Some of the pieces were lead. Some were stainless steel. Some were other metals that nobody had told anyone were in the bottles. The pieces were too small for your eyes to see. You would need the special microscope to find them.

The scientists looked at forty-four different shots. Forty-three of them had the metal pieces inside. One shot did not. That clean shot was the one made for cats.

Once a tiny piece of metal goes into your arm, your body cannot get rid of it. Your body knows how to clean up many things, like old skin or the food you eat or the cut on your finger from yesterday. It does not know how to clean up metal. So the metal stays. It sits where it landed in your arm. Sometimes your blood carries it to other parts of your body.

When the body cannot clean something up, the place around it gets red and sore. If the metal does not leave, the redness does not leave either. Some of the children who got these shots got sick afterward and stayed sick for a long time. Some of them stopped being able to walk properly.

The companies that make the shots have special microscopes too. They could have looked inside their own bottles. They did not. The people whose job is to keep the shots safe never asked them to look. The cat company looked at the cat shots, and the cat shots are clean. The companies that make shots for children did not look, and the shots are not clean.

That is what the essay is about.

References

  1. Gatti AM, Montanari S. New quality-control investigations on vaccines: micro- and nanocontamination. International Journal of Vaccines and Vaccination. 2017;4(1):7–14.
  2. Richet C. Anaphylaxis. Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1913. Nobelprize.org, The Nobel Foundation.
  3. Brinth L, Pors K, Theibel AC, Mehlsen J. Suspected side effects to the quadrivalent human papilloma vaccine. Danish Medical Journal. 2015;62(4):A5064.
  4. Kinoshita T, Abe RT, Hineno A, Tsunekawa K, Nakane S, Ikeda S. Peripheral sympathetic nerve dysfunction in adolescent Japanese girls following immunization with the human papillomavirus vaccine. Internal Medicine. 2014;53(19):2185–2200.
  5. Palmieri B, Poddighe D, Vadalà M, Laurino C, Carnovale C, Clementi E. Severe somatoform and dysautonomic syndromes after HPV vaccination: case series and review of literature. Immunologic Research. 2017;65(1):106–116.

June 27, 2026 Posted by | Deception, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Comments Off on What Is Really in Childhood Vaccines

Vaccines are not a panacea

The shingles vaccine has not cured dementia

By Dr Clare Craig | Health Ethics Advocacy and Resarch Team | June 25, 2026

Over the past month, four studies have been read as showing that the shingles vaccine prevents, or even reverses, dementia. A national newspaper has turned that reading into advice. The advice is to go and get the vaccine now. The evidence tells a different story.

Vinay Prasad has already gone through the four papers and laid the timings side by side, and I will not improve on that account.

●       The Annals paper has a 5% absolute reduction in dementia by three years, with benefit appearing within a year of a nursing-home admission.

●       The JAMA paper has it working by a hundred days.

●       The Welsh study in Nature is a natural experiment, not a simple cohort, and reports a fifth fewer dementia diagnoses over seven years. It declines to publish a time-to-event plot at all.

●       The American paper, in Nature Medicine, includes a hazard function whose curves separate almost immediately.

●       And a meta-analysis concludes that it is not the shingles vaccine alone but every adult vaccine that appears to protect against dementia.

What a dementia diagnosis actually is

A dementia code in a health record is the end of a chain of soft decisions:

●       someone has to notice a change,

●       the patient has to present to the system,

●       a threshold has to be applied,

●       and a clinician has to enter the code.

For each of these steps there is wide variation in the timing between patients. The noticing depends on who is being watched closely and who is not. The same forgetful elderly person can be coded, or not coded, according to how hard anyone happens to be looking. Look harder and you might diagnose more.

Now ask who receives an elective shingles vaccine. It is, overwhelmingly, the people well enough to go and get one. The housebound, the frail, and above all those whose memory is already failing, the people nearest to a diagnosis, are the least likely to present for a non-urgent injection. So the unvaccinated group is enriched, at the very outset and before anyone is followed up, with exactly the people who will later be coded with dementia. This is the “healthy vaccinee effect”, and in this setting it is large enough to produce the whole of the apparent benefit on its own.

Why four studies agreeing is not reassurance

The natural objection is that four datasets agree, and agreement is supposed to be reassuring. But when the cohort studies make the same methodological error it is not reassuring. Every one of them carries the same confounding structure: in each, vaccination marks underlying health, healthcare contact and the simple capacity to turn up, and in each that marker is correlated with the outcome being measured. The errors are not independent results that happen to coincide. They are the same error made several times, because the same bias is built into each design. A biased estimate does not become unbiased by being repeated. These confounded studies in agreement tell you that the confounder is stable, not that the result is real.

Prasad puts this as the earth looking flat whichever way you turn, which is exactly right as an image of the confounded cohorts. The formal version is that replication adds evidence only when the replications are capable of failing in different ways. When they share their confounders, consistency is not corroboration, it is the same confounder doing the same job in each dataset in turn. To break the symmetry you do not add a fifth observational cohort, another flat horizon. You change the design to one whose errors are structured differently. That test already exists.

A regression-discontinuity study exploits the age cut-off for eligibility: people just below and just above the threshold are, for practical purposes, exchangeable, so the baseline-health gap that drives the observational studies is largely removed. The Welsh study is exactly this design, which is why it is the strongest evidence on the table; they claimed dementia was prevented in Wales and in Australia and Ontario. But would an independent team running a study with an identical design find the same thing? George Davey Smith and colleagues have now carried out such a study in England, across some 6.3 million people, roughly twenty times the Welsh sample; the work was presented in June 2026 at a conference and is not yet published. The design worked, in that eligibility produced the expected fall in shingles (although it is not clear what happened in the ‘grace period’ immediately after vaccination) but on dementia it found nothing. The fact that the finding was null in the far larger study should mean the smaller one has been overruled.

The speed matters

Speed is being sold as a measure of how powerful the vaccine is. It is better understood as evidence that the vaccine is doing nothing at all. Dementia is slow. The neuropathology accumulates over years, usually decades, and by the time anyone is coded with the disease the process is long established. Nothing done to a brain can produce a measurable difference in dementia incidence within a hundred days, because the disease does not move on that timescale. So when the curves separate almost immediately, the separation cannot be the vaccine acting. It can only be that the two groups already differed at the moment the vaccine was given.

It is a signature of selection. The rapidity that is being offered as the headline result is the clearest single indicator that what is on the page is the “healthy vaccinee” artefact and not a treatment effect.

From the literature to the newsstand

On 10 June the Daily Telegraph published an interview with John Todd, professor of precision medicine at Oxford, in which he told readers over fifty to get the shingles vaccine now. Jonathan Engler has lodged a complaint with the MHRA about that article.

Professor Todd is, on his own declaration, a paid consultant for GSK, which manufactures Shingrix, and the study he relies on is one he co-authored. When the paper was published, given the issues described above about selection bias the authors wrote that the dementia results “provide a rationale for conducting a randomized control trial aiming to confirm the findings”. Shingrix is not licensed for the prevention of dementia. The advice to buy it for that purpose rests on a paper whose findings, in its authors’ own words, have not been confirmed.

In the United Kingdom, the advertising of prescription-only medicines is governed by Part 14 of the Human Medicines Regulations 2012. Regulation 284 provides that a person may not publish an advertisement likely to lead to the use of a prescription-only medicine. There is proper latitude for journalism, and the MHRA’s guidance for journalists asks only that coverage be balanced, that it not exaggerate benefit, and that it not steer readers towards a named product. It does not require proof of a commercial arrangement before a breach is made out. Engler’s point, which is the right one, is that a piece does not stop being promotional by declining to call itself promotional, and that the absence of the label is itself the difficulty. Where a consultant to the manufacturer urges the purchase of that manufacturer’s unlicensed product, on the strength of his own unconfirmed research, with the consultancy unmentioned, the ordinary description of the result is advertising, whatever else it is also called.

Telegraph readers thinking of taking his advice to rush off and buy a private Shingrix vaccine, might want to take note that (a) Professor Todd has no medical qualification (his FRCP is honorary and his primary qualification is in biochemistry) and (b) the department he heads in Oxford was funded by GSK to the tune of £30 million.

What honest curiosity would do next

The editors of the observational papers could be asked to publish the all-cause mortality curves alongside the dementia curves: if the vaccinated are simply healthier people, their mortality will diverge in the same direction, and the confounding will be visible on the page. This is a control test. Every child at school is taught the importance of using a control group in scientific research but all too often they are left out by actual scientists. The randomised trial that the NIH is said to be considering might need to be run simply to put to bed the excitement around this issue that has been fuelled by media speculation.

The truth is that the studies that kept producing the same answer did so because they shared the same bias, while the largest independent test found nothing and a national newspaper has printed a paid consultant’s promotion of a drug when he will benefit from the sales. Perhaps neither of those stories will sell as many newspapers as the ones that do get printed or clicked on.

June 27, 2026 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Comments Off on Vaccines are not a panacea

Google’s New reCAPTCHA Wants Your Camera Access and 21 Points of Your Hand

The same company that monetizes everything you do online would like to switch on your camera

By Ken Macon | Reclaim The Net | June 27, 2026

Google wants a look at your hands before it lets you through. The company’s newest reCAPTCHA check, rolling out now as a test, asks you to switch on your camera and wave at it so an algorithm can decide whether you’re a human or a bot.

That wave is less casual than it looks. The system records a short video of your hand and pulls 21 hand-landmark coordinates from it, mapping your finger joints, your palm geometry, and the way you move in real time.

Google describes the purpose as liveness detection, a way for websites to fend off automated account creation, credential-stuffing, and other fraud. But this is still a biometric scan, collected so you can prove you’re a person and still involves turning on your cameras for Google.

Google has lined up the promises you would expect. The company says the footage is deleted once verification finishes, no audio is recorded, and the video is never tied to your identity. Its documentation adds that nothing goes to third parties and the data serves security alone, then points to the Google Privacy Policy for how everything is used and stored, a policy elastic enough to cover almost anything.

For now the feature seems optional. People who cannot perform the gestures still get the older puzzles, with Google saying reCAPTCHA “continues to provide visual and audio challenges” while it develops alternatives.

However, we all know that optional today is rarely optional forever and the older challenges survive partly because the gesture check is still being tested.

The reassurances rest on trust and Google has spent years giving people reasons to hold it back. This is a company whose business runs on gathering and monetizing personal data, now asking to switch on your camera and read your hand.

June 27, 2026 Posted by | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | | Comments Off on Google’s New reCAPTCHA Wants Your Camera Access and 21 Points of Your Hand

Wired for War: Pax Silica is AI slavery disguised as strength

RT | June 27, 2026

The EU has signed on to ‘Pax Silica’, a US initiative seemingly designed to shut China and others out of the global AI supply chain and extract resources from Europe for the benefit of Washington’s military-industrial complex.

“America and Europe belong together; our histories are braided, our destiny intertwined,” US Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs Jacob Helberg declared at a summit in Washington on Tuesday. “But we share more than a past. We share a purpose – to build a future that answers to our values and is worthy of our inheritance.”

What is Pax Silica?

Representatives from the EU, Germany, and Greece signed the pact at Tuesday’s summit, bringing the total number of ‘Pax Silica’ signatories to 19. They are:

  • Argentina
  • Australia
  • Chile
  • European Union
  • Finland
  • Germany
  • Greece
  • India
  • Israel
  • Japan
  • The Netherlands
  • Norway
  • Qatar
  • Republic of Korea
  • Singapore
  • Sweden
  • The Philippines
  • United Arab Emirates
  • United Kingdom

‘Pax Silica’ evokes imperial Rome in both name and practice. Its signatories agree to “partner on strategic stacks of the global technology supply chain,” including raw materials, energy, logistics, semiconductor manufacturing, computing, software, and models. They pledge to reduce “excessive dependencies” on nations that “undermine innovation and fair competition,” – an implicit reference to China – and “protect sensitive technologies and critical infrastructure from undue access, influence, or control,” – again, a reference to China – in exchange for access to this “full stack of technological advancements that are shaping the AI economy.”

The pact is largely the creation of Helberg, a China hawk and former adviser to Palantir CEO Alex Karp, whose growing power RT has already covered in our ‘Wired for War’ series.

Jacob Helberg and Palantir Technologies CEO Alex Karp attend the Hill & Valley Forum 2025 in Washington DC, April 30, 2025 ©  Getty Images;  Jemal Countess

Who is in Pax Silica and who is against it?

Notably absent from the list of signatories is France, where President Emmanuel Macron has spent years pushing for “digital sovereignty.” France, and Europe more broadly, he argues, need to end their reliance on American technology and develop homegrown alternatives. To that end, the French government has ditched US-made videoconferencing software, swapped Microsoft Windows for Linux, traded Palantir’s data analytics software for the French-developed ChapsVision, and invested public funds in Mistral AI – one of the continent’s few promising AI companies.

Does Pax Silica undermine national digital sovereignty?

Pax Silica is explicitly opposed to the notion of digital sovereignty. In a blog post published immediately after Tuesday’s summit, Helberg declared the concept “backward and counterproductive.” A world of sovereign nations building their own AI ecosystems, he wrote, would be “a planet of subscale clones, each heroically reconstructing last year’s breakthrough while the breakthrough itself moves on without them.”

Instead, Pax Silica members can pool their resources, with each nation playing to its own strengths. “One partner’s compute meets another’s minerals, a third’s talent, a fourth’s capital, and the result is not a sum but a multiplication,” he wrote.

On the surface, Helberg’s sales pitch makes sense. The Netherlands is the home of ASML, which manufactures 100% of the world’s most advanced EUV semiconductor lithography machines; Israel is a chip design and military tech superpower; Australia has the world’s fourth largest rare earth mineral reserves. By bringing these countries into a formal pact, the US denies China access to these spoils and shares them among its allies instead.

Who does Pax Silica empower most?

In reality, Pax Silica is less of a partnership and more of an imperialist resource grab. Washington’s partners provide raw materials, logistics, knowledge, and labor, but the US currently controls 75% of the world’s compute – the processing power necessary to build, train, and run large-scale AI workloads. Ultimately, the American companies that control this raw power will decide how it is used.

While this compute will be theoretically made available to Pax Silica signatories, the treaty is carefully worded to remind them that full access is not guaranteed. The US, it states “will endeavor to provide access to trusted partners to the full stack of technological advancements that are shaping the AI economy.” Washington is obligated only to try, not to do.

Chained by the pact to Washington’s new Cold War against China, the Europeans cannot look to Beijing if they end up shut out of US computing infrastructure. Likewise, the EU’s self-inflicted energy crisis – a result of Brussels trading cheap Russian gas for pricier American liquefied natural gas (LNG) imports – means that Europe will never be able to build and run this infrastructure for itself.

How does Palantir stand to benefit from Pax Silica?

Pax Silica undoubtedly serves the US geopolitical aim of isolating China – and possibly Russia – and strangling its technological growth, but it also serves the interests of Palantir and its fellow defense-tech behemoths, some of whom have admitted that their growth model depends on military confrontation with Beijing and a potential world war in the Indo- Pacific.

Palantir needs all the computational horsepower and raw materials it can get to power its autonomous weapons and AI operating systems, and if relations between the West and China deteriorate to the point of military conflict, the company stands ready to supply the weapons that will be used by the US military.

Karp has recently called on the US to prepare for a three-front war against China, Russia, and Iran; Palantir’s marketing material includes images of its ‘Gotham’ operating system tracking the movements of Chinese warships in the South China Sea. A representative of America’s Frontier Fund – which invests in Palantir – told a panel in 2023 that in the event of a “kinetic event in the Pacific…some of our investments will 10x, like overnight.”

“Great power competition with China remains top of mind as we continue to invest in moving more of Palantir’s mass west of the international date line,” the company’s operations chief, Shyam Sanka, said during a 2024 earnings call.

Although Helberg left Palantir last year to take his position at the US State Department, he spent the previous year working for Palantir and the American government at the same time. While still advising Karp, Helberg served on the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, from 2022 to 2024. In this role, he lobbied for increased tariffs on Beijing, a ban on TikTok, and the exclusion of China from the global AI supply chain.

How have China and Russia responded to Pax Silica?

Beijing has not directly addressed Pax Silica, with the Chinese Foreign Ministry instead calling on the US and its partners to “adhere to the principles of a market economy and fair competition and work together to maintain the stability of the global supply chain.” The ministry has directly condemned previous efforts by the US to lock China out of the tech supply chain, including the US-Japan-South Korea-Taiwan ‘Chip 4 Alliance’. Beijing has referred to this coalition of chipmaking nations as a brazen attempt by Washington to “dominate the global semiconductor production and supply chain.”

The Russian government has not commented on Pax Silica, but Moscow likely views any moves that increase the West’s power vis-a-vis its main trading partner with concern. Russia’s own access to rare earths and energy is not imperiled by the pact, with Russian mining CEO Andrey Trenin writing last year that Russia’s “path to a sovereign integrated AI industry must begin with [its] unique Arctic rare-earth metal deposits” and the creation of investment zones in the country’s frozen north.

Pax Silica: Membership is a security risk

By signing the pact, the Pax Silica states are signing up for great power competition and all of the risks it carries. In some cases, signatories are risking more than economic sovereignty. In the Philippines, which signed the pact in April, work has already begun on a 4,000-acre ‘Economic Security Zone’ on the island of Luzon where a number of key AI-related industries will be based.

The US initially wanted sovereignty over the zone and diplomatic immunity, but Manila rejected Washington’s demands. Negotiations over the zone’s status are still ongoing, but even if the Philippines retains full sovereignty over the area, Filipino nationalists fear that its role as a node in the US military’s AI supply chain could open the Philippines up to retaliation from China.

Helberg has written off these worries as “disinformation,” claiming that concerns over sovereignty risk delaying the Pax Silica project. However, they must be widespread if Helberg felt compelled to pen a 1,200-word blog post writing the concept of digital sovereignty off as a “trap.”

A warning from Middle Earth

Palantir derives its name from the obsidian seeing stones in JRR Tolkien’s ‘The Lord of the Rings’, through which the dark lord Sauron communicates with his vassals and spies on his enemies. In their dealings with the company, and with Washington, European proponents of Pax Silica would do well to remember how, in the film adaptation of the novel, the wizard Gandalf responds to Saruman’s use of a Palantir: “there is only one Lord of the Ring… And he does not share power!”

June 27, 2026 Posted by | Sinophobia | , , | Comments Off on Wired for War: Pax Silica is AI slavery disguised as strength

US-backed deal with Israel has ‘no legitimacy’, top Lebanese cleric warns

Press TV – June 27, 2026

Lebanon’s Grand Ja’afari Mufti Sheikh Ahmad Qabalan has taken a swipe at the US-sponsored framework agreement between the Beirut government and the Tel Aviv regime, saying that the deal is not legitimate.

“There is no legitimacy for the agreement between the incumbent Lebanese government and the occupying regime,” Sheikh Qabalan said.

He added, “The dangerous point is that the framework (agreement) gives the Zionist army practical guardianship over the activities of the Lebanese army and the occupied Lebanese territories.”

The prominent Lebanese Shia cleric noted that the agreement means tacit recognition of the Israeli military’s dominance over the occupied territories of Lebanon.

“What was agreed upon between the current Lebanese government and the terrorist Israeli regime under the supervision of the evil America is the worst national disaster that Lebanon has ever witnessed,” he noted.

Sheikh Qabalan further argued that “with such an approach, the current Lebanese government only represents itself and not the Lebanese people.”

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on Friday that a framework agreement had been established between Lebanon and Israel, characterizing the deal as an initial step in what he referred to as a “challenging journey.”

Rubio said that the agreement would create a legal basis for negotiations between the two parties, adding that “this is merely the beginning of the beginning,” and that “there remains a lengthy path ahead for Lebanon and Israel.”

Yechiel Leiter, the Israeli envoy to the United States, said the framework signifies that “the pathway to peace between Israel and Lebanon is open.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised the agreement as a significant accomplishment for the occupying regime.

Netanyahu stated that Israel would prevent Lebanese citizens or Hezbollah resistance fighters from returning to the security belt area under Israeli control, insisting that Israel would continue to occupy regions of southern Lebanon until “Hezbollah is disarmed.”

Israeli Hebrew-language Channel 12 reported that a senior Israeli official referred to the agreement with the Lebanese government as a “remarkable achievement for Israel.”

The Lebanese Embassy in the United States also asserted that the execution of the framework agreement with Israel will commence with the withdrawal of Israeli troops from two designated pilot areas in southern Lebanon, followed by the deployment of the Lebanese army in those regions.

In a statement released after the signing ceremony held in Washington, which marked the conclusion of the fifth round of discussions between Beirut and Tel Aviv, the embassy clarified that the agreement “stipulates the implementation of arrangements in two pilot areas, which include an Israeli withdrawal, the deployment of the Lebanese army, and the disarmament of non-state armed groups.”

It added that these preliminary actions represent “the initial step towards a gradual and comprehensive withdrawal from all Lebanese territory, ensuring complete respect for Lebanon’s sovereignty.”

The embassy also said that the agreement was reached “under the leadership of President Joseph Aoun, in collaboration with Prime Minister Nawaf Salam, and through the coordinated efforts of Lebanon’s constitutional institutions.”

Thus, Lebanon has embarked on “a sovereign path founded on dialogue rather than conflict,” the statement concluded.

June 27, 2026 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation | , , | Comments Off on US-backed deal with Israel has ‘no legitimacy’, top Lebanese cleric warns

Israeli occupation forces advance in southern Lebanese towns after truce deal with Beirut

Press TV – June 27, 2026 

Israeli forces have carried out new attacks on several towns in southern Lebanon, in a new escalation immediately after a US-brokered peace agreement was reached between Beirut and Tel Aviv.

Israeli occupation forces advanced toward the outskirts of the southern Lebanese town of Kfar Shuba under the cover of heavy machine-gun fire on Saturday, according to local reports.

Earlier, Israeli forces detonated a stun grenade near the town of Kfar Tebnit, causing alarm among residents.

The occupying regime’s warplanes also struck a location in the border town of Markaba overnight, according to Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency (NNA).

The attacks follow an announcement by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio saying a 14-point agreement had been reached between Lebanon and Israel.

Israel’s ambassador to Washington, Yechiel Leiter, welcomed the agreement, claiming that under its terms, “Hezbollah is out.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also praised the deal, describing it as a major achievement and a significant step toward advancing Israel’s objectives in Lebanon.

Netanyahu further stated that Israel would not allow Lebanese residents to return to areas within the so-called security belt under Israeli control and insisted that Israeli forces would remain in the occupied parts of southern Lebanon.

Lebanese lawmaker Hassan Fadlallah strongly criticized the framework, warning that Lebanese authorities would not be able to implement it without dragging the country toward “civil war.”

Since 2 March, when Israel launched its latest round of aggression against Lebanon, at least 3,600 people have been killed and more than 11,000 wounded, according to Lebanese authorities.

In response, the Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah has continued military operations against Israeli forces, saying resistance remains necessary as long as attacks and occupation persist.

The Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), signed by Iran and the United States in June, includes provisions calling for an end to Israeli attacks on Lebanon and respect for the country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.

June 27, 2026 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation | , , , , | Comments Off on Israeli occupation forces advance in southern Lebanese towns after truce deal with Beirut

Abelardo De la Espriella’s Victory Renews Pressure on Venezuela

José Niño Unfiltered | June 26, 2026

Colombia elected Abelardo de la Espriella as its next president on June 21, 2026, delivering the country’s leadership to a man who spent nearly a decade publicly calling for the violent overthrow of Venezuela’s socialist government. His victory over leftist Senator Iván Cepeda by fewer than 250,000 votes marks a dramatic rightward shift for a nation that shares a porous 1,400-mile border with Venezuela and hosts millions of Venezuelan refugees.

De la Espriella takes office on August 7, 2026. If Brazil’s November presidential election delivers Flávio Bolsonaro to the Planalto Palace, the two largest nations bordering Venezuela will be governed by leaders who have explicitly endorsed forceful regime change in Caracas. Combined with the apparent willingness of acting Venezuelan President Delcy Rodríguez to cooperate with Washington, the conditions may finally exist for completing what the Trump administration attempted and failed to accomplish in 2019.

De la Espriella’s hostility toward Caracas is neither recent nor cautious. He first articulated his position on Venezuela during a 2018 appearance on Peruvian TV personality Jaime Bayly’s Miami television program. According to to his own subsequent writings, he urged Venezuelans to commit tyrannicide against Nicolás Maduro. Days later he published a column titled “Death to the Tyrant” in Barranquilla’s El Heraldo, writing that “the death of Nicolás Maduro becomes necessary to guarantee the survival of the Republic.”

When U.S. forces captured Maduro in January 2026, de la Espriella publicly celebrated, claiming he had predicted it years earlier. He sold the American operation not as an “invasion” but as “the arrest of an international criminal and head of the Cartel de los Soles,” arguing that Washington acted according to the law due to Venezuela’s alleged lack of institutional legitimacy.

His campaign platform explicitly called for a renewed military alliance with Washington. In February, De la Espriella announced that he would immediately begin “bombing the camps of the narco-terrorists and spraying drug crops,” adding that “this cannot be done without a strategic alliance with the United States and the State of Israel.” He marketed this as a 90-day security plan modeled on Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s approach, promising to retake national territory through joint task forces, aerial bombardment of criminal camps, fumigation of 330,000 hectares of coca, and the construction of 10 mega-prisons in remote jungle locations. He has also promised to establish American military bases on Colombian territory as part of a comprehensive security restructuring.

Colombia may soon find a partner in this posture across its longest border. Five months after de la Espriella’s inauguration, Brazilians will decide their own presidential election. Flávio Bolsonaro, son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, has made Venezuela the centerpiece of his campaign against incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

When Maduro was kidnapped in January, Flávio immediately seized on the moment. He posted that “Venezuela has become one of the most extreme examples of how an authoritarian regime can destroy a nation,” calling Maduro a “narcoterrorist.” At the time, his brother Eduardo texted him saying “you are elected president, because we know that a lot of things will come out of Maduro,” predicting that Maduro’s capture would expose Lula’s ties to the Venezuelan regime.

At CPAC in March 2026, Flávio displayed a photograph of Lula embracing Maduro to a crowd that booed loudly. He accused Lula of maintaining ties with leftist dictatorships through the São Paulo Forum, which he described as a network linking Lula, Cuban communism, and drug cartels. Brazil’s Supreme Court opened an investigation into Flávio for defamation, which he denounced as political censorship.

Flávio took Lula to task for “publicly criticizing President Trump’s actions on Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, and the fight against drug trafficking.” He pledged that under his presidency, Brazil would serve as a reliable U.S. partner rather than an opponent on these issues. Reuters polling in late October shows Flávio and Lula locked in a statistical tie heading into the October first round.

What these leaders propose is not new. Washington reached for it in 2019. The Trump administration’s first attempt to topple Maduro collapsed in spectacular fashion. National Security Adviser John Bolton appeared at a January 28, 2019 press conference at the White House with a notepad reading “5,000 troops to Colombia,” held visibly in front of cameras while announcing new oil sanctions against Venezuela’s state company PDVSA—signaling Washington’s interest in using Colombian territory as a staging ground for military pressure on Caracas. Colombia’s Foreign Minister Carlos Holmes Trujillo Garcia said his government had no knowledge of what the note meant.

On February 23, 2019, a U.S.-backed humanitarian aid plot from Cúcuta ended in violence when Venezuelan security forces blocked the convoy with tear gas and rubber bullets. According to a USAID Office of Inspector General report, only 8 of 368 metric tons of aid actually reached Venezuela—the rest was distributed inside Colombia or shipped to Somalia.

The failure at Cúcuta had a quieter companion in Brazil. The Brazilian military establishment proved decisive in blocking regional intervention. Vice President Hamilton Mourão, a retired general, stated flatly that “under no circumstances” would Brazil allow the U.S. to use its territory for military action against Venezuela. He emphasized that “nobody is betting on a military solution.”

Brazil’s Vice President Hamilton Mourão stated firmly that the United States could not use Brazilian territory to invade Venezuela. Senior Brazilian military figures similarly warned against being drawn into a conflict that could make their forces a buffer between American and Venezuelan troops. The military’s resistance held even as President Jair Bolsonaro gave ambiguous public signals, while gesturing toward all options, he acknowledged that the possibility of intervention was “near-zero.”

That said, what failed in 2019 may succeed in 2027 because Venezuela’s current leadership appears willing to cooperate with Washington in ways Maduro never would. A CIA authored classified assessment, reported by the Wall Street Journal, identified Delcy Rodríguez as the best suited candidate to lead a transitional government. Days after Maduro’s capture, Rodríguez was sworn in as acting president on January 5, 2026. On January 15, CIA Director John Ratcliffe traveled to Caracas for a two-hour meeting with Rodríguez—the highest-ranking Trump administration official to visit Venezuela since Maduro’s removal—to deliver the message that “the United States looks forward to an improved working relationship.” The meeting came at the personal urging of President Donald Trump, who had spoken with Rodríguez by phone the previous day and called her “a terrific person,” writing on Truth Social that “we are making tremendous progress, as we help Venezuela stabilize and recover.”

The optics devastated hardline Chavistas. Mario Silva, host of the flagship pro-government propaganda program La Hojilla on state television VTV, accused Rodríguez of treason. In a May 2026 broadcast, he accused her inner circle of negotiating Venezuela’s future with Washington “behind the movement’s back.” He reportedly went further in a YouTube video, suggesting that Rodríguez was the only figure in the Venezuela government in touch with the CIA prior to January 3.

If such allegations prove to be true, smart money suggests Rodríguez would fold under sustained pressure from a multinational coalition. Trump has already removed her from DEA and OFAC sanctions lists despite the DEA having classified her as a “priority target” for drug trafficking as recently as 2022. She oversaw the deportation of diplomat Alex Saab directly to the United States after the Maduro government had fought for years to free him.

The Latin American Right has been ascendant for half a decade. Javier Milei in Argentina. Daniel Noboa in Ecuardo. José Antonio Kast in Chile. Now Abelardo de la Espriella in Colombia. If Flávio Bolsonaro wins Brazil’s November election, the two largest economies bordering Venezuela will both be governed by leaders who have explicitly endorsed American pressure campaigns against Caracas.

De la Espriella’s campaign pledged to restore the cooperative relationship with Washington that existed before Gustavo Petro. Flávio Bolsonaro has promised to align Brazil with U.S. pressure campaigns. With Rodríguez already meeting CIA directors in Caracas and following Washington’s orders on matters like Saab’s deportation, the path toward a final resolution of Venezuela’s political crisis may be shorter than anyone anticipated.

What Brazil’s generals blocked in 2019 may prove irrelevant in 2027 if Flávio Bolsonaro controls the presidency and appoints loyalists to military commands. What Colombia’s Ivan Duque hesitated to support may become explicit policy under de la Espriella. And what Maduro would never accept, Rodríguez appears willing to negotiate.

The question is no longer whether a multinational coalition will pressure Venezuela toward elections. The question is whether Rodríguez will call those elections voluntarily or wait until Colombian and Brazilian forces mass on her borders with American backing.

One thing is clear: the political crisis in Venezuela is far from over.

June 27, 2026 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , , , , | Comments Off on Abelardo De la Espriella’s Victory Renews Pressure on Venezuela