2026 September « Aletho News

Norway seizes Russian Arctic science vessel at Kiev’s request

RT | September 3, 2026

Norwegian authorities have seized a Russian research vessel in Svalbard at the request of Ukraine’s state-owned energy company Naftogaz, amid growing tensions between Moscow and NATO states over access to and control of the Arctic.

The Professor Molchanov was detained on Wednesday while docked in Barentsburg, a Russian settlement on the Norwegian-administered archipelago. The Governor of Svalbard said the move followed an August 31 order by the Nord-Troms and Senja District Court granting Naftogaz the right to seize the ship. The vessel has been barred from leaving Barentsburg until further notice.

The crew and passengers aboard the vessel learned about the seizure from media reports, a TASS correspondent traveling with the expedition said. Russian Far East and Arctic Development Minister Aleksey Chekunkov said on Thursday that “the crew is safe,” adding that lawyers for the Arktikugol trust would soon issue a legal response and intended to challenge the seizure order.

The Professor Molchanov is a Russian state-owned research vessel operated by the country’s hydrometeorological service, Roshydromet. Alongside scientific expeditions, it has served since last year as a regular passenger and cargo link between Murmansk and Barentsburg, transporting scientists, employees of the state-owned Arktikugol, contractors, their families and supplies to the Russian settlements on Svalbard.

Direct air links between Russia and Svalbard ceased in 2020, while direct maritime passenger service was restored in 2025. The Professor Molchanov is currently the only vessel operating the route, with ten round trips between Murmansk and Barentsburg planned for 2026.

Under the 1920 Svalbard Treaty, Norway exercises sovereignty over the archipelago, while signatory nations are granted equal rights to engage in commercial and scientific activities there. Russia has maintained a presence on Svalbard for decades, with Arktikugol serving as its principal economic operator on the islands.

Naftogaz said it sought the seizure as part of an international effort to enforce a Hague arbitration award over assets it lost in Crimea following the peninsula’s reunification with Russia in 2014.

Russia has rejected the arbitration tribunal’s jurisdiction over the dispute, arguing that the Crimean assets in question could not qualify as Ukrainian investments made on Russian territory under the relevant bilateral investment treaty.

Acting Naftogaz chief Sergey Fedorenko praised the move as “another important step toward restoring justice,” pledging to continue the hunt for Russian assets worldwide.

Naftogaz, which claims Moscow currently owes it approximately $4.22 billion, plus interest and legal costs, has previously pursued Russian state property elsewhere in Europe. Finnish authorities froze a number of Russian-owned properties in 2024 at the company’s request. The Kremlin vowed to challenge the measures, while the Russian Foreign Ministry denounced them as illegitimate and warned of possible retaliatory steps.

The latest seizure comes just weeks after Moscow issued unusually explicit warnings against Western attempts to detain Russian vessels.

President Vladimir Putin described plans to seize Russian ships and sell their property as “piracy and robbery,” warning that Moscow would respond in kind and could do so in whatever part of the world it considered appropriate. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov subsequently said Russia would choose its own targets, including vessels operating in the interests of countries that had made such seizures their policy.

Tensions have also been mounting in the Arctic itself. In an article published earlier this week, Lavrov accused NATO states of seeking to turn the region into a “new front” against Russia and its partners. He pointed to large-scale Western military exercises and expanding command infrastructure near Russia’s northern borders, warning that the buildup increased the risk of an armed confrontation with potentially disastrous consequences.

Lavrov maintained that Moscow wants the Arctic to remain an area of peace and cooperation, but warned that Russia would defend its interests “by all available means” if confronted with hostile actions.

September 3, 2026 Posted by aletho | Aletho News | Norway, Russia, Ukraine | Comments Off on Norway seizes Russian Arctic science vessel at Kiev’s request

What Detective Grus Found

An Essay on Silencing Detective Grus and the Investigation Canadian Policing Now Forbids

Lies are Unbekoming | August 31, 2026

The documentary Silencing Detective Grus, produced by the Grus Justice Project with Matador Films, concerns Detective Helen Grus of the Ottawa Police Service. Her case became the longest and most costly police disciplinary proceeding in Canadian history. The question at its center was whether a police officer is permitted to investigate a possible link between the COVID-19 injections and a cluster of infant deaths. The tribunal’s answer, delivered March 25, 2025, was no. This essay engages material that establishment institutions frame in their own vocabulary. Product designations, agency names, and documented adverse events appear in the language in which they were made and recorded, since those are the terms of the record. The analysis operates from a different register: injection harm, institutional capture, and the responsibility of agencies that knew and pushed the shots regardless. The occasion is the release of the film, and the reason it matters now.

The Keystroke

January 13, 2022. Detective Helen Grus, in her nineteenth year with the Ottawa Police Service, opens the Records Management System from her desk in the Sexual Assault and Child Abuse Section.¹ A colleague in her unit has mentioned at the water cooler that they have seen a doubling to tripling of sudden infant deaths over the previous year. Ottawa normally sees two or three a year. “I took it on myself,” Grus recalls, “on January the 13th, 2022, to look into the database to see if it was true.”²

It was.

She pulls one case that had been closed as non-suspicious. The investigator had never reviewed the autopsy results. The SUDI questionnaire, the multi-page document in which parents are asked what the child ate that day, what medications the household received, what vaccinations the child had, was not in the file. Grus follows up over the following days to see whether the autopsy report will appear. It never does.

The detective who signed off on that closure was, and is, the sister-in-law of the prosecutor who would lead the case against Grus at her disciplinary tribunal.³

That is the shape of the story. What follows is what happens to a Canadian police officer who runs a database query her employer did not expect her to run.

What She Found

The pattern was real. In one case, an infant had died in the parents’ arms. “To me, that is suspicious,” Grus says. “In twenty years of policing, I had never seen that happen.”⁴ Another death involved an enlarged heart, a presentation she describes as abnormal for an infant fatality.

The field around the Ottawa file was already noisy. Eighty-six stillbirths in the Waterloo region between January and July of that year, against a normal rate of roughly one every two months.⁵ A physician who appears in the film describes a patient who had received her second injection at eleven weeks of pregnancy. Two months later, at a routine October checkup, there was no fetal heart rate. Her three prior pregnancies had all been healthy.⁶

A bereaved mother in the film describes her own loss. She was thirty-two weeks pregnant. She woke feeling something wrong, went to the hospital, was told everything was fine, and was sent home. The next morning there was no heartbeat. Two prior pregnancies had been healthy and full-term. “Because then you look at her, and there’s nothing wrong with her. Like, nothing. She was a perfect little baby. She was big, and she was healthy.”⁷ She describes what happens next: the C-section for a baby who has already died, everything she had bought becoming “a memory that you put away, stick in a box,” the suggestion of antidepressants as a solution. “We will really never know. But that is the only thing in my life that was different, was putting the COVID vaccination in my body.”⁸

Grus had institutional context she could not have known she had. Pfizer’s own February 2021 adverse event review had already identified placental changes, increased fetal deaths, and one child born with severe dyspnea, or shortness of breath, all attributed by the manufacturer’s own reviewers to the injection itself.⁹ In the same month, the Canadian Medical Protective Society was writing to the federal Deputy Minister of Health asking about liability protection for doctors administering the shots.¹⁰ The public messaging was, and would remain for years, “safe and effective.”

None of that was in her mind when she opened the database. She was checking a colleague’s observation, the way an investigator checks any tip. What she saw when she looked was enough to keep looking.

Who She Was

Helen Grus is the third of ten children born to Czechoslovak immigrants who left the communist bloc in the 1960s and met in Canada.¹¹ Her father worked three full-time jobs and eventually bought a motel in St. Pete Beach, Florida. The family bounced between motels in the United States before returning to Canada and settling in Arthur, Ontario. Ten children in a small Ontario town in a Czech immigrant family formed a polka band, because that was what the father wanted.

Grus joined the Ottawa Police Service on August 14, 2003. She spent her early years on patrol, worked as a breath technician and a coach officer, and moved to West District Investigations in 2007.¹² She describes her work as puzzle-solving. “I love investigating. It’s like putting pieces of a puzzle together every day. So I love finding the truth.”¹³ In one Ontario Police Association nomination cycle, she was the most-nominated officer for the province’s Top Cop award. She did not receive a mention.¹⁴

She is not an activist. She is a career investigator from an immigrant family who liked her job and was good at it. When Canadian institutions moved to punish someone for asking about the deaths of infants, that is who they moved against.

The Suppression Begins

The database was not Grus’s only move. She had also been briefing her command about what her unit was seeing. In late 2021 and early 2022, she twice briefed Chief Peter Sloly and other senior Ottawa Police officers on the cluster of infant deaths, Pfizer’s exclusion of pregnant women from its trials, the advisories on myocarditis in children, and her concern that harms were going unreported. Command took no action. In early February 2022, she was suspended.¹⁵

Within days of her suspension, Ottawa Police secretly wiretapped Grus and her family under the “urgent emergency” provisions of the Criminal Code, provisions written for abductions, hostage situations, and terrorism. The wiretap produced no evidence.¹⁶

The first charge was insubordination, on the theory that Grus should not have accessed the RMS at all. That charge collapsed once she was permitted to explain what she had been doing. It was replaced, in the same interview, with discreditable conduct.¹⁷

The stated rationale for the new charge was that the CBC had run a story on her database query, framing it as an unauthorized access for personal reasons. The story was false. Someone inside the Ottawa Police Service had leaked to the CBC. Grus asked for an investigation into the leak. Her request was declined. She was now to be held responsible for the reputational damage caused by a leak she did not authorize, about an investigation she had been running lawfully.¹⁸

The rumors introduced against her in the disciplinary process ranged from the strange to the trivial. That she believed the mRNA injections contained tracking nanobots. That she had lied to local hockey arenas to get her children ice time. Neither had any relationship to the substance of her investigation. Both traveled through her file.¹⁹

She was offered a plea. Thirteen bullet points, a small penalty. When she read the sheet, her badge number was wrong and eight of the thirteen bullets were inaccurate or misleading. “I’m not going to sign off on a document that is not accurate,” she said.²⁰ She took the matter to a hearing.

From March 2022, personnel from the Public Health Agency of Canada monitored the Grus file, communicated with Ottawa Police officials, and shaped the investigation. Two of those PHAC personnel were the mother and grandmother of one of the nine deceased infants Grus had been investigating. The grandmother was a senior PHAC scientific manager associated with the National Advisory Committee on Immunization, whose recommendations underwrote Canada’s mandatory-injection policy for employment and travel and its recommendation that pregnant and breastfeeding women receive the shots. The federal officials whose work had shaped the policy Grus was investigating were among those shaping the prosecution of the officer investigating it.²¹

The Tribunal Machinery

What followed became the longest and most costly police disciplinary proceeding in Canadian history. The Ottawa Police Service retained outside counsel to prosecute the matter, the firm of Linda Bordeleau, wife of the retired Ottawa Chief of Police Charles Bordeleau. Cost estimates to the Ottawa taxpayer run into the seven figures.²²

The hearing officer was retired Superintendent Christopher Renwick. Under the applicable rules, hearing officers who are not trained lawyers may seek independent legal advice for the proceeding. Renwick declined it and relied instead, when confused, on the arguments of the prosecution.²³

The prosecution’s conduct in the room is on the record. Constant objections before defense counsel could complete a sentence. Objections during defense closing submissions, which in ordinary legal practice are sacrosanct. During one exchange the prosecutor said “objection,” slammed her laptop shut, and walked out of the hearing.²⁴ In one line of questioning she compared Grus’s conduct to that of Colonel Russell Williams, the Canadian Forces officer convicted of murder and sexual assault.²⁵ To compare a detective’s database query about infant deaths to a serial rapist and murderer requires a particular quality of malice.

The expert witnesses Grus had prepared to call, whose function was to demonstrate that the medical basis for her investigation was sound, were not permitted to testify. Five witnesses in total, including three medical doctors, were barred.²⁶ The affidavit her defense filed contained federal correspondence showing that Canadian public health officials knew of injection-associated harm to pregnant women and infants and continued to promote the shots as safe. When Grus attempted, during her own testimony, to explain what the Pfizer trial records showed about infant outcomes, the hearing officer lurched forward and ordered her to stop.²⁷

Shortly before her scheduled testimony, Grus received an email from Inspector Hugh O’Toole, head of the Ottawa Police Professional Standards unit, ordering her not to use records in her affidavit that had already been filed and disclosed. Her defense counsel, Bath-Sheba van den Berg, described the email in one word. Intimidation.²⁸ No charges were laid against O’Toole. He resigned. During the same period, a different Ottawa officer facing criminal charges for sexual assault and forcible confinement was actively defended by his police association, while Grus, facing discipline for doing her job, was refused association support.²⁹

Of the witnesses who testified against Grus, all but one received promotions during or after the hearing.³⁰ Steve Bell, the acting chief during the initial charging period and the officer who designated Renwick as hearing officer, is now the Chief Operating Officer of the Ottawa Police Service.³¹

The evidence Renwick did allow into the record showed that three of the nine infants Grus had been investigating died from causes officially listed as known adverse effects of the COVID-19 injections.³² He convicted her anyway.

Grus’s own frame did not move. “For me,” she says, “the victims in this are those families that lost the babies.”³³

The Ruling

On March 25, 2025, Superintendent Renwick found Detective Grus guilty of discreditable conduct.³⁴

His written decision holds two propositions that Canadians should understand plainly.

The first is that a police officer facing a misconduct charge has, in effect, no defenses available. It does not matter whether the underlying investigation was warranted, whether the officer’s suspicion was reasonable, or whether what the officer found was later confirmed by evidence. What matters, per the ruling, is whether the officer crossed an administrative line. Substance is legally irrelevant.³⁵

The second is that a police officer cannot conduct an investigation into government officials without prior authorization. The Police Services Act, which had long granted officers the discretion to open an investigation on their own initiative, was amended in this period to require supervisor permission. The Grus ruling made explicit what the amendment had permitted implicitly. In Ontario, and by clear signal to every other Canadian jurisdiction, police may no longer look at the state without first asking the state.³⁶

Take those two propositions together and what you have is a specific legal architecture. A single office, the office of the chief of police, controls every institutional lever in the process by which an officer can be disciplined for asking about the state. The chief authorizes the charge and designates the hearing officer. The prosecuting counsel is retained on his authority. The officers who testify against her serve under his command. There is no independent institution anywhere in the process. This is not the failure of a system built to hold police accountable. It is the system working exactly as its recent redesign intended. The message to every constable in Ontario is precise.

What the Film Is For

A scholar interviewed in the opening minutes of the documentary makes a point about films of this kind that is easy to miss. He is asked whether the film should aim to open the minds of people who still believe the official narrative, to persuade the unpersuaded. His answer is that this is not what films do. Books and films of this kind, he says, do not convert. They consolidate the people who have already understood that something is wrong. They give shape to the sense that those people were right to be concerned. They create cohesion and rationality among those who are already drawn to being critical.³⁷

That framing is the essay’s answer to a question a promotional piece has to address. If the film does not convert, what is the point of watching it, sharing it, screening it?

The point is that in a country where a career detective can be destroyed for opening a database, where a ruling now strips an entire profession of the right to investigate its own government, the people who suspect that the official messaging on injection safety was wrong need a common reference. They need to see what a real Canadian tribunal looks like when its purpose is signaling rather than adjudication. They need to hear the parents of babies who died speak for themselves. The film shows them the career professional from an immigrant family who queried the database that day, and what happened to her when she did.

The film is that common reference. It is calmly made. Its subject describes her career and her investigation in her own words. Her lawyers walk through the tribunal they watched. Parents describe what they lost. A scholar addresses how compliance is maintained in institutions under pressure. The film neither editorializes over its own material nor pleads with the viewer. It records what happened, and the record is severe enough that it does not need help.

The Firing Squad and What to Do

The film closes on a story from the scholar’s childhood. He watched a World War Two film at the public library. In it, the German army lines a group of civilians against a wall. Every German soldier except one raises his rifle. The officer walks over and speaks with the soldier who did not. After a moment, the soldier lowers his rifle, walks to the wall, and joins the civilians. The command is given. Everyone against the wall is killed.

Most viewers think the point of that story is the soldier who chose principle. It is not. The significance of the story is that every other soldier raised his rifle.³⁸

Detective Helen Grus is the soldier who did not raise the rifle. The story the film tells is what the Canadian institutional structure did to her for it, and what that reveals about the readiness of every other soldier in the formation.

If any of this has landed for you, the film is where the record lives. Watch it. Twenty-four-hour rental at grusjusticeproject.org for twenty Canadian dollars.³⁹ That is the cost of seeing what happened to a career detective who queried a database about a cluster of infant deaths, told in her own words, in the voices of her lawyers, and in the voices of parents whose children died.

Trailer at Rumble

Once you have watched, send the link to people you know who have been asking their own questions. The Grus Justice Project offers a Host a Screening pathway for community groups who want to bring people together in a room. Contributions to the ongoing legal work go through the project’s donation page.⁴⁰ The costs of defending the case remain real: the March 2025 conviction stands, and sentencing continues into 2026.⁴¹

Which of those pathways is right for you is your decision. Canadian police in Ontario may no longer investigate the state without the state’s permission. Where you fit in what comes next is a question the film will not answer for you.

The ruling is not the end of the story. It is the precedent. Somewhere in Ontario a detective is about to notice something in a database, and the ruling was designed to determine what she does next. The film exists so that when she weighs the cost of asking, she knows the name of at least one person who paid it, and knows the kind of person that officer was before she asked.

The keystroke was on January 13, 2022. The verdict was on March 25, 2025. What comes between them is on record, and the record is on the screen.

How to Explain It to a Six-Year-Old

Imagine a teacher who notices that more children than usual are getting hurt on the playground. Way more. Two or three times as many. That is her job to notice, because she is one of the grown-ups who watches out for the kids.

She looks a bit closer. She finds that the other teachers, the ones who were supposed to check what was going on when a child got hurt, had not filled in the forms properly. Some of them had not even asked the parents what happened. She wants to know why.

Before she does anything else, she goes to the principal and tells him. She tells him twice. She says: something is happening on the playground, and I think it might have something to do with the new shots that all the children have been given this year. She says: some of these injuries look like the ones that were already known to happen after the shots. The principal does not tell her she is wrong. He just does not do anything about it.

So she keeps asking, because that is what a good teacher does.

Then things get strange. Grown-ups start showing up in her file who should not be there at all. Some of them work in the office that decided all the children should get the shots in the first place. One of them is the grandmother of one of the children who died. She helps write the rules about the shots.

So the principal punishes the teacher. First he makes up a small reason. When the small reason falls apart, he makes up a bigger one. He sends people to sit outside her house and listen to her phone calls, as if she were a dangerous person. She was not. They found nothing.

Then he does something bigger still. He makes a new rule. From now on, no teacher in the whole school is allowed to ask questions about the playground without first asking his permission. Not one teacher. Not one question.

The film is about the teacher.

It is also about what happens to a school when the principal makes rules like that. And it is about the teachers who come after her, who will one day notice that more children are getting hurt, and will have to decide whether to say something.

References

Grus Justice Project. “Grus Case.” grusjusticeproject.org. Detective Grus is identified as a veteran investigator in the Sexual Assault and Child Abuse Unit.
Grus Justice Project. Silencing Detective Grus. Directed by Todd Harris. Produced with Matador Films. 2026. Available at grusjusticeproject.org. Detective Grus’s direct account of the January 13, 2022 database query.
Silencing Detective Grus. Detective Grus’s testimony regarding the closed case and the familial relationship of the investigating detective to the prosecutor who led the disciplinary case against her.
Silencing Detective Grus. Detective Grus’s testimony regarding the case in which an infant died in the parents’ arms.
Silencing Detective Grus. On-screen statement regarding Waterloo region stillbirth figures. The figures are as presented in the film and have not been independently verified in this essay.
Silencing Detective Grus. Physician’s on-screen account of the loss of a patient’s pregnancy following her second injection.
Silencing Detective Grus. Bereaved mother’s on-screen testimony regarding her thirty-two-week pregnancy loss.
Silencing Detective Grus. Continuation of the bereaved mother’s testimony regarding aftermath and the injection as the sole differentiating variable from her prior healthy pregnancies.
Silencing Detective Grus. On-screen commentary regarding Pfizer’s February 2021 knowledge of injection-related pregnancy outcomes, including placental changes, fetal deaths, and dyspnea in one child. See also Pfizer, “5.3.6 Cumulative Analysis of Post-Authorization Adverse Event Reports of PF-07302048 (BNT162B2) Received Through 28-Feb-2021,” released under U.S. court order following Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency v. FDA, for the underlying pharmacovigilance record.
Silencing Detective Grus. On-screen account of the February 2021 correspondence between the Canadian Medical Protective Society and the federal Deputy Minister of Health.
Silencing Detective Grus. Detective Grus’s biographical account.
Silencing Detective Grus. Detective Grus’s account of her policing career.
Silencing Detective Grus. Direct statement by Detective Grus regarding her investigative work.
Silencing Detective Grus. On-screen statement regarding the Ontario Police Association’s Top Cop nomination process.
Grus Justice Project. “Grus Case.” grusjusticeproject.org. Account of Detective Grus’s two late-2021 and early-2022 briefings to Chief Peter Sloly and senior Ottawa Police officers, and the subsequent February 2022 suspension.
Grus Justice Project. “Grus Case.” grusjusticeproject.org. Account of the Ottawa Police wiretap of Detective Grus and her family under the “urgent emergency” provisions of the Criminal Code, and the tribunal testimony that the wiretap produced no evidence.
Silencing Detective Grus. Detective Grus’s account of the sequence of charges.
Silencing Detective Grus; Grus Justice Project. “Grus Case.” grusjusticeproject.org. Accounts of the CBC leak and the declined internal investigation into it.
Silencing Detective Grus. Detective Grus’s account of the rumors introduced into the disciplinary file.
Silencing Detective Grus. Detective Grus’s direct statement in response to the plea offer.
Grus Justice Project. “Grus Case.” grusjusticeproject.org. Account of the Public Health Agency of Canada personnel monitoring and influencing the Grus file from March 2022, the familial relationship between two PHAC personnel and one of the nine deceased infants, and the grandmother’s senior scientific manager role at PHAC and association with the National Advisory Committee on Immunization.
Silencing Detective Grus. On-screen account of the outside counsel arrangement and the estimated cost to the Ottawa taxpayer.
Silencing Detective Grus. On-screen account of the hearing officer’s decision to forgo independent legal advice.
Silencing Detective Grus. On-screen account of the prosecutor’s conduct during hearing objections.
Silencing Detective Grus. Detective Grus’s account of the prosecutor’s line of questioning comparing her conduct to that of Colonel Russell Williams.
Silencing Detective Grus; Grus Justice Project. “Grus Case.” grusjusticeproject.org. Accounts of the exclusion of all five defense expert witnesses, including three medical doctors.
Silencing Detective Grus. Detective Grus’s account of being ordered to stop testifying about the Pfizer trial infant outcomes.
Silencing Detective Grus; Grus Justice Project. “Grus Case.” grusjusticeproject.org. Accounts of Inspector Hugh O’Toole’s email to Detective Grus shortly before her testimony, and defense counsel Bath-Sheba van den Berg’s characterization of the email as witness intimidation.
Silencing Detective Grus. On-screen account of the differential treatment between Detective Grus and Officer Eric Post by the police association.
Silencing Detective Grus. On-screen account of the promotions of witnesses who testified against Detective Grus.
Silencing Detective Grus. On-screen identification of Acting Chief Steve Bell and his current position as Chief Operating Officer of the Ottawa Police Service.
Grus Justice Project. “Grus Case.” grusjusticeproject.org. Account of the trial evidence showing that three of the nine deceased infants died from causes officially recognized as adverse reactions to the COVID-19 injections. See also Vincent Gircys, “For Police: A Message to Serving and Retired Officers,” grusjusticeproject.org.
Silencing Detective Grus. Direct statement by Detective Grus regarding the families of the deceased infants.
Grus Justice Project. “Grus Case.” grusjusticeproject.org. See also the on-screen date of verdict in Silencing Detective Grus.
Silencing Detective Grus. On-screen account of the ruling’s “no defenses” reasoning.
Silencing Detective Grus. On-screen account of the change to the Police Services Act requiring supervisor permission for investigations, and the ruling’s application of that framework to investigations into government officials.
Silencing Detective Grus. Statement by a scholar interviewed in the opening minutes of the film on the function of critical books and films.
Silencing Detective Grus. Scholar’s closing story on the firing squad and the significance of the soldiers who complied.
Grus Justice Project. “Silencing Detective Grus – 1 Day Access.” grusjusticeproject.org/buy/silencing-detective-grus-1-day-access/. Twenty-four-hour rental at CA$20 (regular CA$40).
Grus Justice Project. “Home.” grusjusticeproject.org. Host a Screening and donation pathways.
Donald Best, “Sentencing Update: September 5, 2025,” Grus Justice Project, grusjusticeproject.org. Report of the September 4, 2025 adjournment of the sentencing hearing to a date in 2026.

In Print

Ten of my books are now available as paperbacks, printed to order through Lulu and shipped worldwide. The Unvaccinated lays out the completely unvaccinated as a comparison group across twenty chapters and five appendices — as far as I know, the only book of its kind. Medicalized Motherhood follows a woman through 123 documented interventions from teenage pill to postpartum discharge. Drilling for Profit argues that cavities, gum disease, and crooked teeth are a dietary problem the dental profession treats surgically. What Your Vet Can’t Tell You applies the same critique to pets — food, vaccines, and a profession trained by the industries whose products cause the harm. Escape from Psychiatry documents the fabrication of the DSM, the collapse of the serotonin hypothesis, and the specific damage done by every major psychiatric drug class.

Three take on the remedies and paradigm questions mainstream medicine actively suppresses. The DMSO Book covers 100,000 studies, zero deaths, and one approval — the suppressed science of medicine’s most versatile compound. Chlorine Dioxide: The Forbidden Remedy collects the interviews, protocols, and evidence from the doctors and researchers they tried to silence. No Contagion, co-authored with Jamie Andrews, catalogues 258 failed contagion experiments and the case against germ theory itself — the paradigm question underneath the whole shelf.

Two more take on the remedies already in your kitchen. Baking Soda locates sodium bicarbonate inside the terrain framework industrial medicine buried — the compound already in your cupboard, and what it does at the level of the blood, kidneys, lungs, digestion, and skin. The Castor Oil Book recovers four thousand years of documented practice on the medicine mainstream healthcare quietly stopped talking about — the kitchen bottle that doesn’t sit well in a system built on prescriptions and procedures.

A physical book reaches the person a Substack post never will — the sceptical relative, the friend who won’t click a link but might open a book, the visitor whose eye lands on a coffee table. The full shelf is at lulu.com/spotlight/unbekoming. Buy one to keep, and one to give away.

September 3, 2026 Posted by aletho | Film Review, Timeless or most popular, Video | Canada, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights | Comments Off on What Detective Grus Found

The Bishkek Declaration: What the SCO Signed, and Why India’s Name on It Matters

By Larry C. Johnson | SONAR21 | September 2, 2026

The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation closed its 26th heads-of-state summit in Bishkek on September 1 with a joint statement — the Bishkek Declaration — timed to the bloc’s 25th anniversary and signed by the leaders of all ten member states: Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Iran, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and the host, Kyrgyzstan. It is a long anniversary text, adopted alongside some 28 other outcome documents and amendments to the SCO Charter, and its language on the war in Iran is unambiguous. But the single most consequential fact about the declaration is not what it says. It is whose signature sits on it. Narendra Modi’s India — a Quad member, a US strategic partner, and a country the same declaration implicitly defends against Washington’s tariffs — put its name to a text condemning American and Israeli military action, mourning a dead Iranian supreme leader, and rejecting the sanctions architecture the United States has built. That signature is the story.

What the declaration says

On the war, the SCO condemned the military strikes on Iranian territory that it said caused numerous civilian casualties and significant damage to Iran’s economy, characterizing those strikes as violations of international law and the UN Charter that created serious risks to international peace and security. It expressed condolences on the death of Supreme Leader Seyyed Ali Khamenei — killed earlier in the war — reaffirmed support for Iran’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and called for the conflict to be resolved solely through political and diplomatic means. It extended the point to Gaza, calling a comprehensive and just settlement of the Palestinian question the only path to stability in the region.

On sanctions, without naming the United States, the members opposed “unilateral coercive measures” inconsistent with UN and WTO rules and damaging to the global economy — language that simultaneously covers US sanctions on Iran, Western sanctions on Russia, and the tariff pressure on India. On the nuclear question, they upheld Iran’s position directly, affirming every member’s “inalienable right” to peaceful nuclear energy and declaring that measures restricting that right are contrary to international law.

The rest is familiar SCO scaffolding, weightier for the anniversary: an open, non-discriminatory multilateral trading system; implementation of the SCO economic and energy cooperation strategies to 2030; a push to reform global governance toward a multipolar order that “excludes bloc-based and confrontational” methods; responsible use of artificial intelligence; and the ritual condemnation of the “three evils” of terrorism, separatism, and extremism, with a pointed line that “double standards” in counterterrorism are unacceptable. Pakistan takes the rotating chairmanship for 2026–27 and will host the 2027 summit in Islamabad.

From the Knesset to Bishkek: the anatomy of a reversal

To read India’s signature as simple hedging understates it. Six months earlier, Modi had planted India firmly in the opposite camp — and the Bishkek text reverses, almost line for line, the position he took in February.

On February 25–26, 2026, Modi made a state visit to Israel: the first Indian prime minister to address the Knesset, honored with the Speaker’s Medal as the first foreign leader to receive it, presiding over the elevation of the India–Israel relationship to a “special strategic partnership” with 27 bilateral outcomes and a defense co-production track. Two days after he left, on February 28, the US and Israel opened their war on Iran. India’s response was conspicuous silence: it did not condemn the strikes on Iranian sovereignty, and it did not condole the killing of Iran’s supreme leader. New Delhi zeroed out its Chabahar port funding in the 2026–27 budget under US pressure, let bilateral trade with Iran collapse, and offered only a muted, “humanitarian” reaction when an Iranian frigate returning from joint exercises with India was sunk near Sri Lanka. Commentators summarized the moment cleanly — Modi had put India firmly in the Israel–US camp — while critics at home called it a strategic surrender. Among India’s BRICS and SCO partners, Russia, China, and Iran above all, the tilt bred real distrust.

What turned India back was oil. India imports roughly 85 percent of its fuel and draws a large share of its crude and LNG through the Strait of Hormuz. Under the 50 percent US tariff wall — half of it levied explicitly to punish Russian-crude purchases — New Delhi had spent early 2026 trimming Russian imports and leaning on Gulf suppliers, a quiet alignment with Washington. The Iran war detonated that arrangement: Hormuz disruption tightened supply, prices surged, the rupee came under pressure, and Modi was reduced to urging citizens to conserve fuel. With Gulf barrels suddenly unreliable and Washington’s tariffs making the alignment costly anyway, India turned back to discounted Russian crude out of straightforward energy necessity. As one analysis put it, the energy shock reordered India’s alignments — the tilt toward Washington of a few weeks earlier giving way to a familiar, interest-driven return to Moscow.

Modi was working two constituencies at once, and they pulled opposite ways. The influential Indian-American diaspora he has assiduously courted aligns comfortably with a pro-US, pro-Israel posture; against it stood the roughly ten million Indians in the Gulf and a domestic opinion for whom the image of India embracing Israel mid-war became a live political liability the opposition worked hard. Energy security and the Gulf-and-domestic pull won.

Seen against that arc, the Bishkek signature is the visible completion of a U-turn. The declaration made India condemn the strikes it had refused to condemn in February and mourn the supreme leader it had refused to mourn. The signature therefore reads less as conversion than as correction — an interest-driven snap back to the multi-aligned center after a six-month experiment in the Israel–US camp proved too expensive.

This is where strategic autonomy, not alignment, becomes the only coherent description, and the distinction matters for anyone tempted to call the SCO a consolidated anti-US front. India will lean toward Washington and Jerusalem when the terms are right and swing back toward Moscow and the Global South when its energy and standing require it, bending each forum to its own positions rather than adopting anyone’s line. Modi spent the Bishkek summit proving the point even as he signed the consensus: he demanded an end to “double standards” on terrorism in language every observer read as aimed at Pakistan, then sitting at the same table and about to take the SCO chair; he insisted connectivity projects respect sovereignty and territorial integrity, India’s standing refusal to bless China’s Belt and Road and the corridor it runs through territory India claims; and he pressed Putin directly to move from endless war toward a cessation of hostilities in Ukraine rather than echo Moscow.

And the timing is not incidental. India hosts the 18th BRICS summit in New Delhi on September 12–13 — ten days after Bishkek — as BRICS chair for 2026, with Putin confirmed and Xi and Pezeshkian expected. A chair cannot antagonize the leaders it is about to receive, so part of the Bishkek signature is simply the housekeeping of a host keeping its room intact before its own showcase. Yet India deliberately themed its BRICS presidency around resilience and cooperation — a framing chosen to keep the focus on delivery rather than confrontation. The tell is in the gap: India signed a confrontational SCO text while steering its own BRICS summit deliberately away from confrontation. The New Delhi declaration on September 13 will be the better test of where India actually stands, and whether the correction that began at Bishkek holds.

The energy weight behind the declaration

A bloc’s communiqué is worth as much as the material power behind it, and on oil the SCO’s ten members carry more weight than the “regional talking shop” framing suggests. Taken together, and using the most recent 2026 figures, the member states produce on the order of 21 to 23 million barrels per day of crude and condensate — roughly a fifth of world output. Set against OPEC’s crude production of about 27 to 28 million barrels per day, the SCO membership produces somewhere near 80 percent of what the entire OPEC cartel pumps.

SCO member Crude + condensate (approx., 2026)

Russia ~10.9 million bbl/d

China ~4.3–5.0 million bbl/d

Iran ~3.3 million bbl/d (war-depressed)

Kazakhstan ~1.8 million bbl/d

India ~0.7 million bbl/d

Others (Uzbekistan, etc.) ~0.2 million bbl/d

SCO total ~21–23 million bbl/d

SCO member	Crude + condensate (approx., 2026)
Russia	~10.9 million bbl/d
China	~4.3–5.0 million bbl/d
Iran	~3.3 million bbl/d (war-depressed)
Kazakhstan	~1.8 million bbl/d
India	~0.7 million bbl/d
Others (Uzbekistan, etc.)	~0.2 million bbl/d
SCO total	~21–23 million bbl/d

Four caveats sharpen rather than soften the picture. First, Iran sits in both camps — it is the only country that is both an SCO member and an OPEC member — so the two blocs are not cleanly separable; strip Iran out to avoid double-counting and the SCO membership still produces roughly two-thirds of OPEC’s volume. Second, Russia alone, at nearly 11 million barrels per day, produces about 40 percent as much as all of OPEC combined and is the gravitational center of the SCO’s energy weight. Third, the figures are unusually soft this year because the war has curtailed Iranian output and repeatedly throttled Gulf flows through Hormuz — crude and liquids transiting the strait fell from about 21.6 million barrels per day before the conflict to under 5 million in the second quarter of 2026 — so actual regional production has swung well below capacity. Fourth, and most telling, several of OPEC’s Gulf heavyweights — Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait — are not SCO members but SCO dialogue partners, drawn into the organization’s orbit since 2023. The bloc that just defended Iran and condemned the US-Iran war is steadily accreting the very Gulf producers on whom OPEC depends.

The deeper asymmetry is that OPEC is a supply cartel, while the SCO spans both ends of the oil market. Its members include not only Russia, Iran, and Kazakhstan on the production side but China and India — the world’s largest and third-largest crude importers — on the demand side. No other grouping contains both the sellers and the biggest buyers of oil under one roof, and the declaration’s commitments to an SCO energy cooperation strategy to 2030, a proposed SCO Energy Consortium, and expanded settlement in national currencies are early scaffolding for exactly that: a producer-consumer bloc that could, over time, price and clear a meaningful share of Eurasian energy trade outside the dollar and outside OPEC’s writ. That ambition is nowhere near realized. But it is the material fact that gives an anniversary communiqué more heft than its boilerplate would suggest.

The Bishkek Declaration is, on its face, a predictable statement of Eurasian grievance: condemn the strikes on Iran, defend Iran’s nuclear rights, reject Western sanctions, call for a multipolar order. What lifts it above boilerplate is the combination of the signatory and the substance behind it. India signed a text that condemns the very strikes on Iran it pointedly declined to condemn in February, when Modi was in the Knesset — not because it has changed sides, but because a six-month tilt toward Israel and Washington collided with an energy shock and a tariff wall, and snapping back to the multi-aligned center became the rational course. The anti-coercion language now shields India too, and a BRICS summit India must host in ten days makes keeping the room intact its own necessity. And the bloc doing the signing controls something close to four-fifths of OPEC’s oil output, both of Asia’s giant import markets, and a growing roster of Gulf dialogue partners. The declaration’s rhetoric is cheap. The energy and demographic weight standing behind it is not.

September 3, 2026 Posted by aletho | Economics | India, Iran, Israel, Russia, SCO, United States | Comments Off on The Bishkek Declaration: What the SCO Signed, and Why India’s Name on It Matters

Iran Pledges to “Shatter US Foundations”

Daniel Davis / Deep Dive – September 2, 2026

September 2, 2026 Posted by aletho | Militarism, Video, Wars for Israel | Iran, Middle East, United States | Comments Off on Iran Pledges to “Shatter US Foundations”

US Navy stretched thin in West Asia as supply routes collapse: NYT

Al Mayadeen| September 2, 2026

A New York Times investigation reveals that the US Navy’s problem in West Asia is no longer just about remaining missile stockpiles or the threat of Iranian strikes, but rather its ability to keep about 20 ships and 20,000 sailors and Marines in the region without a nearby and secure supply network.

According to the NYT, Iranian strikes have dismantled the Navy’s regional supply chain, putting pressure on the aircraft carriers, destroyers, and amphibious ships Washington has kept in the region indefinitely since launching its war on Iran.

Two carriers, the USS George HW Bush and the USS George Washington, are currently stationed in the region alongside 12 destroyers carrying about 3,700 personnel, together enforcing a blockade on Iranian ports. An amphibious ready group of three additional warships, carrying 5,000 Marines, rounds out the force to roughly 20 ships and 20,000 sailors and Marines total.

Feeding and fueling that many ships is a demanding task on its own, the NYT reports. The fleet needs more than 420,000 meals and around eight million gallons of fuel every week. A single carrier carries 5,000 crew members who eat up to four times a day, and although the carriers run on nuclear power, the aircraft and helicopters launching from them burn through millions of gallons of fuel weekly.

Bahrain strike broke the supply chain

The Navy built a network of regional supply depots over several decades to support this scale of operation. That network stopped functioning on February 28, the first day of the war, when Iran struck and destroyed a major Navy logistics base in Bahrain.

Every other regional port capable of servicing a carrier or supply ship now sits within range of Iranian missiles and drones, cutting the Navy off from them as well.

Diego Garcia, Singapore, and resupply at sea

With regional bases out of reach, supply ships must now sail to Diego Garcia, a small island in the Indian Ocean about 2,200 miles from where the fleet operates in the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea. Singapore is the only other option, a 3,700-mile trip that routes ships through the crowded Strait of Malacca.

Those distances mean warships depend on resupply missions at sea roughly every five to six days, a process the NYT describes as dangerous for both vessels involved. A receiving ship and a supply ship must sail side by side for hours, matching course and speed to stay within about 150 feet of each other through shifting wind, waves, and current. Crews fire lines between the ships by rifle to rig steel cables, then send fuel and pallets of goods across on those lines while helicopters carry additional supplies, parts, and mail between the ships in nets.

Why the Navy can’t keep this up indefinitely

These deployments have no fixed end date. Ships stay in the region until the US president and war secretary order otherwise. But the NYT’s reporting shows that the fleet is running out of room to sustain that.

The Navy has 11 aircraft carriers total, four of which are already committed to the war on Iran, while several others sit in shipyards for repairs that will keep them out of service for years.

The USS Abraham Lincoln shows what that toll looks like in practice. It spent nearly its entire nine-month deployment at sea without a single port call, well beyond the roughly monthly stops carriers normally make so crews can rest.

The USS George Washington relieved the Lincoln on August 20, and the carrier docked in Thailand this week, where its crew will get a short break before the ship continues home to San Diego.

September 2, 2026 Posted by aletho | Militarism, Wars for Israel | Iran, Middle East, United States | Comments Off on US Navy stretched thin in West Asia as supply routes collapse: NYT

Hezbollah denies ties to alleged Syria-Lebanon ‘destabilization cell’

Al Mayadeen| September 2, 2026

Hezbollah’s Media Relations Office has categorically denied any connection to a security cell reportedly arrested on suspicion of seeking to destabilize Lebanon and Syria, dismissing the accusations as entirely baseless.

In a statement released Wednesday, the office stressed that Hezbollah has no connection whatsoever, direct or indirect, to any such cell or group. It said certain media outlets, which it accused of a pattern of leveling false accusations against the Resistance, had circulated the claims linking Hezbollah to the alleged cell.

The office said attempts by these outlets to implicate Hezbollah in security-related cases, relying on unnamed sources, are part of a disinformation campaign aimed at tarnishing the group’s image, sowing discord, and undermining security and stability in Lebanon.

It asserted that the reports are part of a broader effort to malign the Resistance through unverified claims attributed to anonymous sources.

A recurring pattern

The denial follows months of similar accusations against Hezbollah from Syrian officials since the fall of the al-Assad government.

In July, Hezbollah rejected claims tying it to an attempt to smuggle weapons and missiles across the Syrian-Iraqi border, after Syrian authorities said they had intercepted a shipment concealed inside a fuel tanker arriving from Iraq. Also in April and May, the group denied allegations linking it to a cell accused of plotting to assassinate a religious figure.

Hezbollah has affirmed on each occasion that it maintains no activity, connection, or presence inside Syrian territory. The group has said the repetition of such claims raises serious questions and points to parties seeking to inflame tension between the Syrian and Lebanese peoples.

Hezbollah has also pointed to similar fabricated allegations emerging from Bahrain and Kuwait, warning of a foreign plot aimed at stoking tensions between Arab nations and the Axis of Resistance and destabilizing the wider region.

The group has consistently framed the recurring accusations as a coordinated effort tied to the broader Zionist-American agenda in the region, arguing that the timing and pattern of the claims serve to isolate the Resistance and strain relations between Lebanon and Syria at a sensitive political juncture.

September 2, 2026 Posted by aletho | Deception, Wars for Israel | Hezbollah, Lebanon, Middle East, Syria | Comments Off on Hezbollah denies ties to alleged Syria-Lebanon ‘destabilization cell’

Blair directed PA to eliminate mention of ‘Palestine’ from textbooks, former UK envoy reveals

Press TV – September 2, 2026

Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair has been tasked by a body set up by US President Donald Trump to approach the Palestinian Authority (PA) and propose removing the term “Palestine” from school textbooks, replacing it with the Jewish name “Samaria.”

Jeremy Greenstock, who served as Britain’s ambassador to the UN from 1998 to 2003, said on Wednesday that Blair sought to influence the Palestinian Authority.

He stated that if the PA wished to be recognized by the so-called Board of Peace as a legitimate partner capable of negotiating a resolution with Israel to conclude the genocidal war in Gaza, the term “Palestine” should be removed from educational materials.

Greenstock said in an extensive interview on the David Hearst Podcast that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas rejected the request.

Greenstock further noted that his former superior was facing “challenges” in his new position managing the postwar administration of Gaza for the board.

“He recently, I understand, was asked by the Board of Peace to go to Ramallah and ask to remove from the Palestinian curriculum any mention of the word Palestine if they were to be treated by the Board of Peace as capable of coming to an agreement with Israel to end the current conflict that had stemmed from October 7 onwards,” Greenstock said, adding that the information was obtained from a source at the ministerial level.

“President Mahmoud Abbas said he would do no such thing,” he said.

“But the very fact that the Board of Peace could ask for that to be done in the Palestinian educational curriculum makes me wonder what principles the Board of Peace is working on, and what understanding they have of justice, of the sense of fairness, of the history of all of this,” Greenstock added.

A spokesperson for Blair refuted the claim that the former UK prime minister made such a request. “This is not true and a complete fabrication.”

Blair is known to have travelled to the Israeli-occupied territories in mid-August alongside Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, and Nickolay Mladenov, the high representative for the so-called Board of Peace.

The trio engaged in intense discussions with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has dismissed the proposed roadmap for Gaza. They then proceeded to Cairo, where they met with a Palestinian technocratic group expected to assume control of Gaza, along with representatives from the Hamas resistance movement.

During the interview, Greenstock was critical of Blair’s current role in the Board of Peace, saying he did not think Blair could engage with both sides with the same level of respect.

“Because of his record on Iraq and on Palestine since he left government, he will be seen as prejudiced. So I think he will have, and is having, difficulties.”

Greenstock, who left government service in March 2004, called the Board of Peace an “abstract and arbitrary committee” whose composition would not have any real effect on the ground with either Israel or the Arab side to the question of Palestine.

“I don’t think the Board of Peace is a strong enough construct to bear the weight of the difficult decisions that are going to have to be made about the future of the Palestinian territories.”

As part of an international campaign, Israel and its allies have been amplifying their endeavors to remove the word Palestine from educational materials and museums.

On Tuesday, Israeli authorities began imposing their curriculum on more than 45,000 Palestinian students in state-run schools in East al-Quds, as part of a wider crackdown on education in the occupied territory.

A revised curriculum is reported to be circulating privately for consultation in the occupied Palestinian territories.

September 2, 2026 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | Human rights, Israel, Palestine, Zionism | Comments Off on Blair directed PA to eliminate mention of ‘Palestine’ from textbooks, former UK envoy reveals

Is Israel paving streets with Gaza rubble containing bodies – and is the Board of Peace funding it?

By Kathryn Shihadah | If Americans Knew | September 2, 2026

Muhammad Shehada (@muhammadshehad2) – the journalist at the center of this story – is an accomplished reporter and political analyst, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations and contributing writer to the London Review of Books, Newsweek, Al Jazeera English, Zeteo, The New Arab, Israeli media 972Mag and Ha’aretz, and others.

Shehada tweeted on August 26 and 27:

EU diplomats told me last week Israel has been quietly moving hundreds of thousands of tons of rubble mixed with dead bodies out of Gaza to bury evidence of its genocide.

When the EU asked Israel why or whether they filter human remains out of the rubble, no answer ever came!

I’ve been informed Trump’s Board of Peace is paying the expenses of the IDF’s covert transfer of rubble (mixed with dead bodies) out of Gaza. The money is taken from Gaza’s reconstruction funds!

The Board of Peace official X account replied on August 28:

This is categorically farcical and unfounded — total fake news. At a minimum, we would expect such an “intrepid” reporter to reach out to us for comment or clarification before recklessly spreading lies based on anonymous sources who have erroneously “informed” you.

Shehada responded the same day:

Dear Board of Peace,

1- I have a tender issued under your name on 20 May 2026 that includes “leveling & compacting” work in occupied Gaza, do you deny that document?

2- Is the Israeli company Terra Firma NOT doing “rubble clearance” in Gaza allegedly with machines that take rubble & spit out dust while the IDF is doing road-paving work (specifically near Erez)?

3- Are you NOT in any way paying, compensating, subsidizing or aiding Israeli companies, contractors, individuals, the Israeli army or government for rubble removal & road paving in Gaza?

4- If you are involved, can you explain whether any effort is being made to separate human remains from rubble or detect potential mass graves under the roads being paved? The Israeli government is silent on this.

5- I have satellite images that show clear & significant rubble removal work in East Gaza in the months of May & June. Do you deny any involvement in this?

6- Do you have anything to say on Israel killing over 1,200 Palestinians under your watch since your ceasefire started?

How about Israel restricting humanitarian aid and preventing prosthetic limbs from going to largest cohort of child amputees in modern history?

How about Israel preventing repairs of basic infrastructure (water, electricity, sewage, hospitals, bakeries), or releasing all children & women still in detention without trial or charges?

All of those unfulfilled commitments were part of phase one of President Trump’s 20-point plan!

Remarkable how none of Israel’s violations of your ceasefire ever caught your attention once in 323 days, but my sole tweet did in mere hours.

The Board of Peace account has yet to reply.

Excavation equipment for me, but not for thee

United Nations figures indicate that about 200,000 buildings – 82% of the structures in Gaza – are damaged or destroyed. Buried beneath these buildings, thousands of Palestinians await retrieval and dignified burial.

Israel has hundreds of pieces of heavy engineering machinery, and is spending a fortune demolishing what is left in the roughly 70% of Gaza under its control. Ha’aretz reports that a single piece of equipment may be rented for $1,500 a day; the operator may collect $400 a day. Nearly $1 million a day is spent on fuel.

But while part of Gaza is being demolished with massive quantities of equipment, at unprecedented speed and cost, the rest is moving slowly with primitive tools. Only a handful of excavators in Gaza are working at all – the rest were targeted by Israel, or in some cases simply wore out – Israel has blocked the entrance of spare parts. Fuel costs are prohibitive anyway.

Palestinians work long hours with shovels, wheelbarrows, and their hands to dig out the remains of their loved ones, or clear debris from what is left of the roads or their homes as legions of bulldozers demolish neighborhoods nearby.

(The IDF said, in response to the Ha’aretz report cited above, “According to army orders, property destruction is only carried out when there is an operational basis that requires it, and the IDF has never had a policy that allows for the deliberate destruction of civilian property.” It added, “The IDF is taking various measures to minimize damage to civilian structures as much as possible.” The reader can decide whether the IDF’s statement rings true.)

The Wall Street Journal placed the quantity of rubble in Gaza at 68 million tons, and the number of dead bodies buried beneath the rubble at 10,000.

EuroMed Human Rights Monitor estimates that Israeli civilian companies are operating “400 heavy pieces of excavation, demolition, crushing, and transport machinery” to demolish remaining structures, crush the rubble, and load the debris onto trucks.

The rubble is reportedly taken to “undisclosed sites” in Israel and the West Bank. Israeli authorities have neither revealed details nor permitted independent groups to observe the procedure. This lack of transparency does not imply innocence.

If the Israeli company Terra Firma is indeed doing “rubble clearance” in Gaza as Muhammad Shehada alleges, in the same areas where the IDF is paving roads, the similarity to accusations against the Nazis is eerie, to say the least.

If the Board of Peace is indeed bankrolling an effort to hide incriminating evidence about genocide, it would be no exaggeration to say Trump and the rest of the board are covering up a genocide.

What do we know about the Board of Peace?

The so-called Board of Peace is a pay-to-play group of wealthy and powerful Israel supporters, dictators, and authoritarians, as well as Israeli prime minister and war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu and two Israeli real estate tycoons – but no Palestinians. In fact, the organization’s charter makes no reference to Gaza.

The lower-tier technocratic committee, made up of Palestinians, will do the grunt work in Gaza – if and when Israel allows the group to enter the Strip.

BoP is problematic in multiple ways, not the least of which is its tendency to view the world through a real estate lens, rather than human rights, justice, or humanitarianism.

September 2, 2026 Posted by aletho | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, War Crimes | Human rights, Israel, Palestine, Zionism | Comments Off on Is Israel paving streets with Gaza rubble containing bodies – and is the Board of Peace funding it?

Palestinian Resistance and the Politics of Disarmament: A Historical Perspective

By Robert Inlakesh | Palestine Chronicle | August 30, 2026

Gaza’s resistance factions recently agreed to a US-backed disarmament roadmap. Despite having consistently demanded this step be taken over the course of nearly three years, as a prerequisite to ending its invasion, Israel flatly rejected the proposal. In order to properly understand this renewed disarmament campaign, it is essential to consider the historic context that makes true disarmament impossible.

“If Hamas just gave up its weapons…” and “Hamas cannot control Gaza after their attacks on Israel…” have been popular arguments featured in the English-language media, not only since the beginning of the Gaza genocide, but for decades now. On July 6, Hamas declared that it had agreed to hand over control of Gaza’s civil administration to a technocratic governing committee and by July 30 the movement had pledged to implement a disarmament plan. Both of these agreements, reached through the US’s Board of Peace (BoP), provoked nothing more than pledges of further violence from the Israeli authorities.

The reason for this is that Israel will accept only a disarmament process that leaves the Palestinian people completely defenseless and at the full mercy of their occupying army. Therefore, the Hamas movement and its armed allies, such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), have stressed that a disarmament plan must be sequential, not a surrender agreement as the Israelis are demanding.

While the Fatah Party is the only major Palestinian political Party that is not currently a proscribed terrorist organization in the US, UK and most EU nations, it was once considered to be one of the leading global terrorist organizations by the Israelis and their allies. In order to destroy the Fatah-led Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Israel launched an invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

Besieging Beirut, where the PLO had established itself in exile, the Israelis killed around 20,000 Palestinians and Lebanese before eventually offering the Palestinians an ultimatum: continue fighting until the last drop of blood, or the organization give up their resistance and flee. PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat chose to flee to Tunisia and accepted defeat.

Yet, Israel did not live up to its word. Following this agreement, horrifying massacres would be inflicted against the Palestinian refugee population in Lebanon. On September 16, 1982, with no resistance to even attempt to aid them, the infamous Sabra and Shatila massacre occurred. Israeli forces watched on as their fascist Lebanese allied militia force, Kataeb, mass murdered up to 3,500 civilians over a 43-hour period. Almost all of the victims were women and children, because many of the men previously living there were involved in the resistance and had fled as part of the agreement.

Israel also refused to leave southern Lebanon, establishing an illegal occupation of the south of the country despite signing a withdrawal agreement, formally securing its role as an occupier in 1985. This ended up triggering the founding of the Party Israel today blames for its current war against Lebanon, Hezbollah.

The lessons of 1982 have never been forgotten. In fact, the aftershocks of the PLO’s retreat are still being felt today, as the trauma of the setback triggered a chain of events that resulted in a major ideological sea change.

Although it has often been argued that the developments that emerged off the back of the Post World War II global order – oriented around the United Nations system, concepts of Human Rights and International Law – had ushered in changes that rendered old models of armed struggle null and void, the predicament of Palestine today has largely discredited this argument.

Under the model of a “rules-based order” and “Western liberal democracy”, nations are supposed to behave rationally. Under this understanding, Israel, which is assumed to live up to the definition of a modern State, is therefore argued to behave rationally.

Prior to October 7, 2023, the Palestinian resistance factions argued that their armed struggle was necessary and that they were not fighting a rational enemy. Nearly three years later, they have been vindicated. The former leader of Hamas in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, challenged this concept of Israel’s assumed rational nature, arguing that through armed struggle the reaction of his people’s occupiers would lead them to two options: An all-out regional war or a negotiated Two-state settlement.

The Algerian revolutionary philosopher Frantz Fanon wrote that “Colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence.”

Although written with Algeria’s struggle against the French as its key reference point, this exact reasoning can be seen to have heavily inspired the Fatah Party’s foundational doctrine, which argued the necessity of armed struggle as a means of national liberation. The expulsion of between 800,000 to 900,000 Pieds-noirs settlers, along with France’s occupying forces, from Algeria in 1962, long served as a major inspiration for the Palestinian resistance, in particular the Fatah Party.

In the immediate aftermath of Operation al-Aqsa Flood, the abovementioned quote from Fanon’s seminal work ‘The Wretched of the Earth ’ was once again popularised as a defense of the October 7, 2023, attack, masterminded by the Qassam Brigades of Hamas. A popular critique of this line of thinking was that the violence witnessed that day could not overcome Israel’s violence and that Israel’s occupation of Palestine is too different to that of the French occupation of Algeria for the analogy to work.

As is the case with analogies, they are not perfect, nor are they meant to be. What Yahya Sinwar, the head of the Qassam Brigades, Mohammed al-Deif, and others who engineered the October 7 offensive were doing was challenging the occupier in an unprecedented manner. Whether they understood the full extent to which Israel was willing to go in response is somewhat irrelevant to the conversation at hand; instead, what is important is the way things have played out.

With modern weapons and technology, Israel has put on display the colonial mindset. There is no argument to present that the genocide in Gaza is rational; it is indiscriminate, it has been an extermination, and as we have seen, there has been no carefully calibrated plan. Instead, the Zionists have lashed out on every conceivable front, and as a result, the global public has rallied against them. As Sinwar predicted, Tel Aviv’s totally irrational behavior has led to regional confrontation, and before it is his ultimatum.

‘Greater Violence’ and Abandoning Resistance

For those who have familiarised themselves with Frantz Fanon’s work, another concept he introduces is the concept of the native wrestling back his humanity through the use of armed struggle. In the Palestinian experience, this certainly applies.

The origin of the modern Palestinian liberation movement is often traced back to around 1918. The Urban Palestinian population evidently contributed in the early stages of the national movement to its concepts and demands, with the likes of the Muslim-Christian Associations that were established as political clubs contributing towards this. As influential Palestinian journalist, writer, and PFLP official Ghassan Kanafani discussed, the semi-feudal and religious nature of Palestine’s leadership had its various fallbacks, but would eventually contribute to encouraging a series of revolts.

Palestine’s masses, during the formative days of its national movement under the British Mandate, were not the urban communities; instead, they were the Fellaheen (farmers and agricultural workers). These workers would form the backbone of each revolt against the British and Zionists between 1921 and 1933.

During the early 1930s, one of the central figures in the history of Palestinian resistance, Sheikh Izz ad-Deen al-Qassam, would begin training workers he recruited in Haifa and carrying out armed attacks against British-Zionist targets. “It is a Jihad of victory of martyrdom” was the slogan that the Sheikh developed, one that the spokesperson for Hamas’ armed wing, Abu Obeida, would repeat in every televised speech following October 7, 2023.

The most iconic artwork, literature and songs representing Palestinian national identity have long been centered around the Fellaheen, the people of the countryside, taking specific pride in those who resisted with whatever means were available. A gun, hand grenade, or stone- whatever tools were available- it didn’t matter; the theme was struggle.

In the Palestinian experience, an entire culture of resistance was forged through generations of armed revolt and accompanying forms of struggle, shaping an identity, centering the concept of standing up for oneself against all odds. Palestine’s movement for national liberation has been predominantly led, post-1948, by the refugee population, whether they be the internally displaced in Gaza, the people of the camps in the occupied West Bank, or the diaspora who live in exile in neighboring nations.

Whether we look to the Arab Revolt between 1936-39, the resistance to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine 1947-49, the historic battle of Karameh in 1968 or even the 1982 war, none of these represented victories and yet each ended up representing a means to an end. Palestinian resistance fighters have employed a large range of tactics throughout different eras of their struggle, some in order to raise awareness for their cause, some to achieve tactical victories and oftentimes as a means of reacting to the violence inflicted against themselves.

Israel’s obsession with disarmament, which currently fits into a larger regional push from Washington and Tel Aviv, is not about conflict resolution; it is about domination and submission. The idea is to remove the means of the Palestinians to fight back, so that they are totally at the mercy of the occupying regime.

Hamas, along with almost a dozen other resistance factions in Gaza, seeks to achieve a resolution through a phased disarmament scheme, where their weapons will be stored and only obtained by a future Palestinian State. They will not accept Israel’s demands that they surrender.

There is no nation on earth that is disarmed and is forbidden from having its own military. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has explicitly stated that his government’s intent is to prevent a Palestinian State at all costs, while his opposition also opposes any deal that will lead to a State of Palestine. Disarmament is a means to destroy the national struggle of the land’s indigenous inhabitants, which the people understand well.

“Your steadfastness, despite abandonment. Your patience, your sacrifice, and your defiance of oppression and deprivation are what enrages your enemy the most. The night will inevitably come to an end. Victory comes with patience, and relief with hardship. And with every hardship there is ease.” – Huthaifa Samir al-Kahlout (Abu Obeida), the former spokesperson for the Qassam Brigades, addressing the people of Gaza in a final speech prior to his assassination.

– Robert Inlakesh is a journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. He focuses on the Middle East, specializing in Palestine.

September 2, 2026 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Human rights, Israel, Lebanon, Palestine, Zionism | Comments Off on Palestinian Resistance and the Politics of Disarmament: A Historical Perspective

Belgium blocks latest EU push to seize Russian assets

RT | September 2, 2026

Belgium has rejected an attempt by Sweden, Poland, Spain, and the Netherlands to resurrect the EU’s plan to seize frozen Russian assets to finance Ukraine.

“This is non-negotiable,” Defense Minister Theo Francken told VRT on the weekend. “That door is closed.”

Kiev’s Western backers froze around $300 billion in Russian central bank assets following the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in 2022, around $240 billion of which is held at Belgium-based Euroclear. The EU has already redirected profits generated by the funds to Kiev but has stopped short of confiscating the underlying assets.

Ukraine has warned of a €30 billion hole in its defense budget, despite receiving the first tranche of a €90 billion loan from Brussels.

Sweden, Poland, Spain, and the Netherlands urged the European Commission last week to once again explore ways of using the frozen Russian assets for Ukraine, while spreading the legal and financial risks among EU member states.

Belgium, which would bear much of the fallout because Euroclear holds the bulk of the assets, opposes confiscation. Francken said Prime Minister Bart De Wever will not change course and warned other EU members, particularly the Baltic states, against repeatedly putting Belgium “in a corner.”

“Our prime minister will stand firm,” he said.

De Wever has argued that outright confiscation would cross a dangerous legal and political line. “You cannot simply take someone else’s money. We are not at war with Russia. Europe is not at war with Russia,” he said earlier this year, adding that “immobilized money, even during WWII, was never confiscated.”

The Belgian prime minister warned that seizing the funds would amount to a declaration of war against Russia, and urged the EU to pursue negotiations instead.

De Wever was also instrumental in blocking an earlier proposal to use the assets as backing for a ‘reparations loan’ to Ukraine. EU members ultimately agreed on a €90 billion loan financed through joint borrowing.

Euroclear also opposes confiscation and warned that it could sue the EU if it attempts to seize the assets. Other EU officials have raised concerns that the move could undermine international law and damage the bloc’s reputation among global investors.

Moscow has denounced any attempt to appropriate its sovereign assets, calling it “theft” and warning that confiscation would trigger retaliation, potentially including measures against Western assets held in Russia.

September 2, 2026 Posted by aletho | Economics | European Union, Russia, Ukraine | Comments Off on Belgium blocks latest EU push to seize Russian assets

Cuba: Negotiations With the US at a Standstill

By Kyle Anzalone | The Libertarian Institute | September 1, 2026

A Cuban official said that there are no ongoing negotiations with the US. President Donald Trump has threatened to conduct a regime change in Havana after the US concludes its war against Iran.

“The channel for dialogue is at a complete standstill,” Lianys Torres Rivera, Cuba’s Ambassador to the US, said in an interview with Bloomberg on Tuesday. The two sides are unable to even settle on a basic agenda, she added. “There are no negotiations.”

Since returning to the White House, President Donald Trump has stepped up economic warfare on Cuba and threatened the government in Havana. The tightening of the US embargo on Cuba has resulted in repeated blackouts, but has not resulted in an uprising against the government.

Last month, Washington announced a new round of sanctions against Havana and deployed additional intelligence assets to Cuba. A source told Politico that the White House had recently sent additional spies and intelligence assets to Cuba. The outlet notes, “Such intelligence moves could portend actions ranging from a US military operation in Cuba to stepped up efforts to turn Cuban officials or ordinary citizens against the regime.”

Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Marco Rubio is a long-time advocate of replacing the government in Havana with one chosen by Washington. One source told the outlet Cuba is a “huge priority of Rubio’s.”

Trump has posted images on Truth Social naming himself and Rubio as the leaders of Cuba.

September 2, 2026 Posted by aletho | Aletho News | Cuba, Latin America, United States | Comments Off on Cuba: Negotiations With the US at a Standstill

Folic acid dangers

Dr. John Campbell | June 4, 2026

Consider signing petition from Dr. Craig, https://petition.parliament.uk/petiti…

And this one https://petition.parliament.uk/petiti…

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/bi…https://www.food.gov.uk/safety-hygien…

Detailed scientific paper from Dr. Clare Craig and Dr. Tim Kelly, https://www.researchgate.net/publicat…

Excellent books relating to covid by Dr. Craig, Spiked:

UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Spiked-shot-…

USA: https://www.amazon.com/Spiked-shot-da…

Canada: https://www.amazon.ca/Spiked-shot-dar…

Australia: https://www.amazon.com.au/Spiked-shot…

Netherlands: https://www.amazon.com.be/Spiked-shot…

Expired: UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Expired-unto…

USA: https://www.amazon.com/Expired-untold…

Canada: https://www.amazon.ca/Expired-untold-…

Australia: https://www.amazon.com.au/Expired-unt…

Netherlands: https://www.amazon.com.be/Expired-unt…

September 2, 2026 Posted by aletho | Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | Australia, Canada, Netherlands, UK, United States | Comments Off on Folic acid dangers

« Previous Entries Next Entries »

Seyed M. Marandi: Toward Total War in the Middle East

Aletho News Videos

or go to

Aletho News Archives – Video-Images

From the Archives

The Geopolitics behind the War in Yemen (I)

By Mahdi Darius NAZEMROAYA | Strategic Culture Foundation | 30.03.2015

The United States and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia became very uneasy when the Yemenese or Yemenite movement of the Houthi or Ansarallah (meaning the supporters of God in Arabic) gained control of Yemen’s capital, Sanaa/Sana, in September 2014. The US-supported Yemenite President Abd-Rabbuh Manṣour Al-Hadi was humiliatingly forced to share power with the Houthis and the coalition of northern Yemenese tribes that had helped them enter Sana. Al-Hadi declared that negotiations for a Yemeni national unity government would take place and his allies the US and Saudi Arabia tried to use a new national dialogue and mediated talks to co-opt and pacify the Houthis.

The truth has been turned on its head about the war in Yemen. The war and ousting of President Abd-Rabbuh Manṣour Al-Hadi in Yemen are not the results of «Houthi coup» in Yemen. It is the opposite. Al-Hadi was ousted, because with Saudi and US support he tried to backtrack on the power sharing agreements he had made and return Yemen to authoritarian rule. The ousting of President Al-Hadi by the Houthis and their political allies was an unexpected reaction to the takeover Al-Hadi was planning with Washington and the House of Saudi. … continue

Blog Roll

Subscribe to Aletho News

Enter your email address to receive new posts by email.

Email Address:

Join 2,352 other subscribers
Visits Since December 2009
- 7,723,292 hits
Looking for something?

Search for:
Archives
Archives
Calendar

September 2026

M T W T F S S

1 2 3 4 5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30

« Aug
Categories

Aletho News Civil Liberties Corruption Deception Economics Environmentalism Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism Fake News False Flag Terrorism Full Spectrum Dominance Illegal Occupation Mainstream Media, Warmongering Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity Militarism Progressive Hypocrite Russophobia Science and Pseudo-Science Solidarity and Activism Subjugation - Torture Supremacism, Social Darwinism Timeless or most popular Video War Crimes Wars for Israel
Tags
Afghanistan Africa AIPAC al-Qaeda Australia BBC Benjamin Netanyahu Brazil Canada CDC Central Intelligence Agency China CIA CNN Covid-19 COVID-19 Vaccine Donald Trump Egypt European Union Facebook FBI FDA France Gaza Germany Google Hamas Hebron Hezbollah Hillary Clinton Human rights Hungary India Iran Iraq ISIS Israel Israeli settlement Japan Jerusalem Joe Biden Korea Latin America Lebanon Libya Middle East National Security Agency NATO New York Times North Korea NSA Obama Pakistan Palestine Poland Qatar Russia Sanctions against Iran Saudi Arabia Syria The Guardian Turkiye Twitter UAE UK Ukraine United Nations United States USA Venezuela Washington Post West Bank WHO Yemen Zionism

September 2026
M	T	W	T	F	S	S
	1	2	3	4	5	6
7	8	9	10	11	12	13
14	15	16	17	18	19	20
21	22	23	24	25	26	27
28	29	30

Aletho News
If Americans Knew
No Tricks Zone
Contact:

atheonews (at) gmail.com
Disclaimer

This site is provided as a research and reference tool. Although we make every reasonable effort to ensure that the information and data provided at this site are useful, accurate, and current, we cannot guarantee that the information and data provided here will be error-free. By using this site, you assume all responsibility for and risk arising from your use of and reliance upon the contents of this site.

This site and the information available through it do not, and are not intended to constitute legal advice. Should you require legal advice, you should consult your own attorney.

Nothing within this site or linked to by this site constitutes investment advice or medical advice.

Materials accessible from or added to this site by third parties, such as comments posted, are strictly the responsibility of the third party who added such materials or made them accessible and we neither endorse nor undertake to control, monitor, edit or assume responsibility for any such third-party material.

The posting of stories, commentaries, reports, documents and links (embedded or otherwise) on this site does not in any way, shape or form, implied or otherwise, necessarily express or suggest endorsement or support of any of such posted material or parts therein.

The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.

Fair Use

This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more info go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

DMCA Contact

This is information for anyone that wishes to challenge our “fair use” of copyrighted material.

If you are a legal copyright holder or a designated agent for such and you believe that content residing on or accessible through our website infringes a copyright and falls outside the boundaries of “Fair Use”, please send a notice of infringement by contacting atheonews@gmail.com.

We will respond and take necessary action immediately.

If notice is given of an alleged copyright violation we will act expeditiously to remove or disable access to the material(s) in question.

All 3rd party material posted on this website is copyright the respective owners / authors. Aletho News makes no claim of copyright on such material.

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

Daniel Davis / Deep Dive – September 2, 2026

Dr. John Campbell | June 4, 2026

Featured Video

From the Archives

By Mahdi Darius NAZEMROAYA | Strategic Culture Foundation | 30.03.2015

Blog Roll

Subscribe to Aletho News

Visits Since December 2009

Looking for something?

Archives

Calendar

Categories

Tags

Contact:

Disclaimer

Site info