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OPCW Forced To Pay Damages To Whistleblower Who Found Evidence Of False Flag In Syria

The Dissident | April 30, 2026

After years of a continued cover-up, the OPCW (Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons) has been forced by the International Labour Organization to pay damages to Dr. Brendan Whelan, an OPCW scientist who found evidence that the alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma, Syria, that took place in 2018, was a false flag.

Evidence Of A False Flag Uncovered

For context, in April of 2018, the U.S., UK, and France bombed the Syrian government in response to allegations that the former Assad regime used chemical weapons on civilians in the town of Douma.

The bombing took place before inspectors from the OPCW were able to visit the scene in Douma, and the evidence for the chemical attack was based on videos and photos put out by rebel groups, which showed dead civilians foaming at the mouth and two cylinders “found” on a roof of an apartment and on a bed.

However, once the OPCW team was able to inspect Douma, they found a significant body of evidence suggesting the attack was a false flag used to trigger Western intervention.

Ian Henderson, one of the inspectors at the scene, found that the two chlorine cylinders found at the scene were “manually placed rather than being delivered by aircraft”.

Going into further detail on this assessment, Henderson explained in his book released last year that , the damage of the cylinder found at location two did not match up with the damage to the roof at the location, signalling that the cylinder was placed in an already existing crater.

Above: What the cylinder looks like at the location (picture one) vs. what it should have looked like compared to the damage to the roof (picture 2)

“The smooth unsullied nose of the Location 2 cylinder remains the contrary smoking gun” Henderson notes in his book.

Similarly, Brendan Whelan found further evidence that the attack was a false flag.

No evidence of Sarin was found at the scene, but trace amounts of Chlorine were found, leading the official narrative to be that there was a chlorine gas attack at the scene.

However, Whelan spoke to NATO state based experts who ruled out the possibility that chlorine was used at the scene based on the videos and images put out.

The minutes from the meeting with toxicology experts reads that “the experts were conclusive in their statement that there was no correlation between symptoms and chlorine exposure. In particular, they stated that the onset of excessive frothing, as a result of pulmonary edema, observed in the photos and reported by witnesses would not occur in the short time period between the reported occurrence of the alleged incident and the time the videos were recorded (approximately 3-4 hours)”.

“The key ‘take away message’ from the meeting was that the symptoms observed were inconsistent with exposure to chlorine”, the minutes from the meeting added.

Brendan Whelan wrote a final interim report on the Douma case, which incorporated these findings.

The report written by Whelan writes that “Some of the signs and symptoms described by witnesses and noted in photos and video recordings taken by witnesses, of the alleged chemical victims, are not consistent with exposure to choking agents such as chlorine or phosgene” and adds that, “The FFM team is unable to provide satisfactory explanations for the relatively moderate damage to the cylinders allegedly dropped from an unknown height, compared to the destruction caused to the rebar-reinforced concrete roofs”.

A Cover-Up Of The Evidence

The officially released OPCW interim report, however, made no mention of the above evidence and instead implied that a chlorine attack took place in Douma by the Assad regime.

Instead of addressing the concerns of Henderson and Whelan, or providing a scientific answer to the evidence they uncovered, the OPCW resorted to smears in an attempt to discredit them- a campaign that ramped up after the initial work of the OPCW investigation was leaked and released on WikiLeaks.

Ian Henderson has previously given his account of the cover-up in his aforementioned book, which I previously detailed in a summary .

But now, after a long legal battle, the OPCW has been forced to pay damages to Brendan Whelan and to reverse it decision to bar him from ever working at the OPCW again by the UN court, the International Labour Organisation.

The court ruled, in reference to disciplinary measures brought by the OPCW against Brendan Whelan, that, “There was a requirement to observe due process at the disciplinary state prior to the imposition of any sanction upon to the complainant. According to the OPCW staff regulations and interim staff rules, no disciplinary proceeding may be instituted against a staff members unless he or she had been notified of the allegations against him or her, as well as of the right to seek assistance in his or her defence and be given a responsible opportunity to respond to those allegations. These steps were not taken before the director general issues disciplinary measures against the complaint to the extent that the complainant was not provided with the charges. He was also not provided with a copy of the full investigation report. The complaint right to due process before those measures were imposed upon him was violated.”

The court ruled that “The OPCW should pay the complainant 20,000 euros in moral damages” and that “the OPCW shall also pay the complainant 2000 euros in other costs”.

Now- after this vindication- Whelan has written an article at the Substack of journalist Aaron Mate, detailing what he went through at the OPCW.

Whelan revealed that the OPCW accused him of being behind the leak of the above engineering assessment “despite having left the Organisation some eight months before the leak”.

He added that, “I asked, repeatedly, to be told the precise allegations against me; a right not only enshrined in law but in the Organisation’s protocols. They refused to elaborate or specify any charges. At that point, I ended any collaboration with an investigation that was contemptuous of the requirements for due process. The investigation proceeded regardless.”

Despite the fact that “The official investigation report, for lack of evidence, had formally exonerated Inspectors A and B [Whelan and Henderson] (as my colleague and I were referred to respectively) from leaking the sensitive document” the OPCW basely claimed the two had “deliberately and in premeditated’ fashion enabled the leak by failing to comply with the ‘specified procedures for the handling of confidential information so as to create a clear risk of unauthorised disclosure.’”

He noted that this attack was done by the OPCW in order to get out of responding to the above engineering and toxicology assessments, writing:

It was no coincidence that I and my colleague—the only individuals investigated for the leak—had protested against bias and malpractice in the conduct of the OPCW’s Douma investigation, and, in my case, had been sidelined from the investigation for doing so. The OPCW had refused to address our concerns, which had since become a public controversy. The aim of the leak inquiry, therefore, was to attack our credibility without having to refute our scientific arguments.

For this, Whelan was “issued with a letter of censure and a lifetime ban from future employment with the Organisation I had served diligently for seventeen years.”

He added that, “As the legacy media had been heavily invested in maintaining the Western line that Syrian forces had used chemical weapons in Douma, the OPCW’s ad hominem attacks on the two dissenting inspectors were treated as a vindication of the official narrative.”

This included articles in the Guardian, Reuters, and the Western government sponsored Bellingcat, which repeated the false line that Whelan and Henderson were somehow responsible for the leak.

Then, after Whelan took the issue to the International Labour Organisation, the OPCW changed it’s story, now claiming that Whelan made a “serious breach of confidentiality” because he sent a letter to the OPCW chief of cabinet expressing concern over “the suppression of the team’s Douma report and a secretive attempt to publish a doctored version”.

The new allegation from the OPCW against Whelan was now a claim that “The Appellant forwarded an email exchange between himself and the former Chief of Cabinet to Director-OSP which contained specific and detailed information about evidence gathered by the FFM [Fact-Finding mission] investigators in Douma”.

“The ‘specific and detailed information’ they were referring to was a statement in my email to the Chief of Cabinet protesting the fact that the doctored report made the unsupported claim that ‘the team had sufficient evidence to determine that chlorine was released from two cylinders.’ This statement, despite being without basis, was ‘highly protected’, they said, and shouldn’t have been shared with the senior director” Whelan added.

He added, “In other words, by informing the Director of the Office of Special Projects of a phoney claim that had been fraudulently inserted into the team’s Douma report, I was committing a ‘serious breach of confidentiality.’ It is worth noting that, because it was challenged, this unfounded assertion was omitted from the final Douma report.”

The OPCW, referring to a letter sent by Whelan to the director general of the OPCW, also claimed that it, “contained specific and detailed information gathered by FFM investigators from toxicology experts. In creating and disseminating this letter, he failed to comply with the specified procedures for the handling, protection, release, and dissemination of confidential information so as to create a clear risk of unauthorised disclosure”.

“What was also significant about this new allegation was that it was the first time management has officially acknowledged this meeting with the German toxicologists. Even mention of it was excluded from the inspection timelines in official reports. By extension, it was the first tacit admission that this crucial piece of evidence was censored from the Douma investigation,” Whelan added.

The OPCW also claimed that Whelan has “sowed discord within the Organisation”, “By sharing information ‘within the Secretariat [emphasis added] [I]caused a staff member to call into question the integrity of the Organisation’s findings in Douma.’”

In other words, the complaint from the OPCW against Whelan was that he raised his concerns that the OPCW investigation was compromised and by providing solid evidence that the toxicology report was censored, a senior OPCW director began to (correctly) believe that the investigation had been compromised.

Now that the International Labour Organization has ruled that the OPCW acted unlawfully against Whelan, it again shows that the OPCW refused to engage with Brendan Whelan and Ian Henderson’s scientific findings and instead engaged in a cover-up to forward the Western narrative about Syria.

May 1, 2026 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | Comments Off on OPCW Forced To Pay Damages To Whistleblower Who Found Evidence Of False Flag In Syria

Iran can thrive under blockade, the US and its allies cannot

By Robert Inlakesh | Al Mayadeen | May 1, 2026

While officials of the US Trump administration have repeatedly claimed that their blockade on Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz is a winning strategy, on the contrary, Tehran thrives. Instead of taking the temporary ceasefire as an opportunity to find a viable offramp, Washington has used mental gymnastics to sell the public on a non-existent get out of jail free card.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has claimed that Iran’s oil industry is creaking under the pressure of the blockade imposed upon its exports, even making rather outlandish comments about the inevitability of oil infrastructure blowing up as a result. While the US seizure of Iran-linked tankers and vessels does evidently have an impact, it is being enormously overblown by an American administration that is out of viable options.

The way US President Donald Trump and his senior officials are speaking, it would lead you to believe that the “uno reverse card,” as it has been mockingly referred to, was going to lead to the freefall of Tehran’s economy. Yet, the US is still adding more sanctions to Iran, attempting to seize and/or freeze more of its assets, while issuing round-the-clock threats. If the US-imposed blockade, which is failing to block all shipping to and from Iran, were so effective, then these other much lesser measures wouldn’t make sense.

Even the pro-war Zionist think tanks, like the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), have been agitating for more aggressive tactics and to escalate. For example, the Washington-based FDD recently published a Policy Brief article entitled ‘Trump Strikes at China’s Iranian Oil Trade, but It’s Not Enough’. In other words, nobody is convinced by Trump’s strategies, not even the biggest fans of the Iran war.

In the realm of reality, the Islamic Republic of Iran has survived under US sanctions for some 47 years now. Although the sanctions have had varying impacts at different phases of the ongoing conflict with the US, Iran has managed to adapt to its predicament. It survived through 8 years of brutal war with its neighbours, after former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein attacked it for the sake of the United States, and has endured the most brutal sanctions campaigns known to man.

What the US has done over the years is make Iran de facto sanctions-immune. This does not mean that they don’t work at all; clearly, the Iranian economy has taken enormous hits, and the civilian population has borne the brunt of the consequences. But the takeaway here is that the Islamic Republic is not going to buckle in a matter of weeks or months, just because the US is interdicting the passage of some Iranian vessels.

As a matter of record, back in 2018, when President Trump first imposed his maximum pressure campaign – following the decision to unilaterally pull out of the 2015 nuclear deal – the daily Iranian oil exports rapidly declined to 350,000 barrels per day. It remained this way for some 33 months, until Tehran managed to recover. The recovery led Iran back to exporting around 2.5 million barrels per day. Amidst the height of the first round of the current war, Iran even managed to break records for oil revenues generated, not seen since the triumph of the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

In addition to this, the Iranians have established a status quo under which they will not allow the Strait of Hormuz to be transited unless a toll is paid to them first; a move that has not only placed the key global chokepoint under their control, but will inevitably drive enormous profits in the long run.

Iran did not buckle under years of maximum pressure sanctions and the steep decline in their oil exports. Its Gulf neighbours will not fare so well. The damage done to US allies, like the United Arab Emirates (UAE), has already surpassed what is necessary to cause permanent damage. Emirati officials may have even doubled down on their support for the Zionist project and to see Iran destroyed, withdrawing from OPEC, and claiming they will use alternative export routes, but everyone knows those options simply do not exist.

In the end, it was always going to boil down to the US buckling under the weight of an economic fallout, due to the total closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a pressure that only grew worse following Trump’s goofy decision to impose his own blockade.

Therefore, the embarrassing failure of the Trump administration was only ever going to lead to one of two outcomes: a full US backdown or the resumption of war.

May 1, 2026 Posted by | Deception, Economics, Wars for Israel | , , | Comments Off on Iran can thrive under blockade, the US and its allies cannot

Iran slams US leadership, debunking fabrications, false war costs

Al Mayadeen | May 1, 2026

Iranian officials criticized the United States over its leadership and its justification for the US-Israeli war on Iran, debunking Washington’s fabrications and scrutinizing its political coherence and legal rationale.

In reference to the reported cost of the US-Israeli war on Iran, estimated at 25 billion dollars by the US Department of War, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi maintained that “the Pentagon is lying.”

In a post on X, Araghchi asserted that “Netanyahu’s gamble cost America $100b so far, four times what is claimed.”

He further noted that “indirect costs for U.S. taxpayers are FAR higher. Monthly bill for each American household is $500 and rising fast.”

“Israel First always means America Last,” he assertively concluded.

Trump’s contradictions reveal US decision-making made elsewhere

Mohsen Rezaei, a member of Iran’s Expediency Discernment Council, said, also took a swing at the “America first” slogan, asserting that “the contradictory statements of Trump show that real decisions in US are being made somewhere else.”

In a post on X, he argued that key decisions in Washington were being shaped by “behind-the-scenes power networks” that do not align with the “America First” slogan associated with Trump and MAGA.

Rezaei added that this demonstrates “the kind of deadlock America is facing,” emphasizing that Americans “are the ones paying the price.”

‘Self-defense’ against what?: Baghaei

Separately, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmail Baghaei rejected US claims that the US-Israeli war on Iran was launched in “self-defense”.

In a post on X responding to a US claim that the war was launched “at the request of and in the collective self-defense of its Israeli ally,” he questioned the legal basis for such claims, asking, “Was there any ‘armed attack’ by Iran to justify ‘self defense’?”

Baghaei rejected the claim by Washington, emphasizing that the war was “an act of AGGRESSION against the nation of Iran.”

May 1, 2026 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Wars for Israel | , , , | Comments Off on Iran slams US leadership, debunking fabrications, false war costs

Here’s why Iran is sovereign and Germany is not

By Tarik Cyril Amar | RT | May 1, 2026

Sovereignty, as defined in international law, is both crucial and complex. In the real shark-pool world of geopolitics, it is not hard to spot: if you have the ability to rule at home and resist attack from outside (any outside), then you are sovereign. Otherwise not. No exceptions.

That’s why Iran has sovereignty, but Germany does not. Iran has withstood two months of a devious and brutal war of aggression waged by the US and Israel, which in turn is “merely” the culmination of decades of assaults levied via economic warfare, assassination campaigns, and subversion.

However, Iran has not only successfully foiled the current Israeli-American blitzkrieg-and-regime-change scenario, but also put the attackers on the backfoot. Tehran’s achievement is already historic. It has changed and will change the course of history.

Germany, by contrast, cannot even defend its own vital infrastructure, as the Nord Stream sabotage and its aftermath have demonstrated. What is even worse, its governments have had no will to do so. On the contrary, they have been rewarding the Ukrainian attackers with untold billions to feed Kiev’s ultra-corruption. Their backers – certainly including the US and Poland, and most likely Great Britain, too – need not worry about any trouble from Berlin either.

Case closed: Iran is sovereign, Germany is not. If you are German and find this uncomfortable, complain to Berlin.

Against this backdrop, it is oddly fitting that it is Iran which is now exerting a powerful influence on German politics despite not having any deliberate designs to do so, whereas German calls on Tehran (or, for that matter, Moscow or Beijing) to do this and leave that – as articulated by Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul with an almost comical lack of self-awareness – come across as embarrassing: sad spectacles of an impotence that doesn’t even know itself.

Iran, on the other hand, has now had a palpable impact on what unfortunately remains Germany’s single most important foreign-policy relationship. Indeed, as the current, post-1990 “unification” (really, expansion, and that’s still a polite term) Germany is really the old Cold War West Germany writ large (and going to seeds, too), the relationship with the US is more than just important. Historically, it was literally foundational.

And here we are: It is due to Iran’s resistance that this relationship has entered a deep crisis. Of course, other factors have played (or should have played) a role as well: for instance, Washington’s ferocious, bipartisan economic warfare against its old key client (polite term) in Europe, including at least complicity in destroying vital energy infrastructure and supply options (Biden, Democrats) via massive incentives for German industry to relocate to the US (Biden, Democrats) to devastation by tariffs (Trump, Republicans).

But it is over Iran that things have now come to a head: German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has openly criticized Washington’s conduct of the war, and US President Donald Trump has launched one of his social media rampages, going after Merz and Germany with, as Secretary of War (Crimes) Pete Hegseth would put it, “no quarter” given.

Trump has even threatened, in effect, to withdraw the almost 40,000 US troops from Germany. It would be stupid and self-damaging for the US to do so, but then, this is the Trump administration. Full disclosure: As a German, I hope they go ahead.

Trump has also told Merz off for wanting Iran to have a nuclear weapon (false on two counts: Iran isn’t building one, and Merz is a compliant client leader who would never dare dissent from the US and Israel) and for being bad at running Germany, which must rankle, because most Germans agree. Merz has just earned himself the worst poll ratings of any German chancellor ever.

He has made things even worse – yes, Merz can do that – by releasing an exceedingly masochistically timed interview to complain that, in essence, no one likes him. True, but saying so has only triggered a national tsunami of mockery: now he is not only vastly unpopular but derided as a wimp, who loves to dish out harsh admonishments and mean austerity but can’t take the response.

A short video clip deep-faking Merz performing a satire of MC Hammer’s classic “You can’t touch this” by singing “No one likes me” is going viral. At a town hall-style meeting, the chancellor was openly laughed at. Major mainstream media are beginning to talk about a crisis deep enough to end the current government and, even worse for Merz, about rebellious murmurs inside his own CDU party.

All of this because Merz was making remarks about the Iran War. But make no mistake: Friedrich Merz, still infamous for applauding Israeli “dirty work” (“Drecksarbeit”) in Iran last summer, has not discovered a conscience. Listen attentively to his recent statements, made before a group of high school kids, and you realize, the chancellor’s real beef with America is that Washington hasn’t done its current “dirty work” quickly and, above all, successfully. No one loves a loser, not even, it turns out, Friedrich Merz, whose prior obsequiousness toward Trump had raised eyebrows even in Germany.

Yet whatever Merz’s sordid motives, take a step back and look at this picture from the point of view of history-in-the-making: Here is the German chancellor, who claims to be ready to make his country lead Europe (yes, not a great idea, but let that pass for now), whose government is presiding over the greatest German debt-and-armament splurge since World War Two (and that against a background of profound economic crisis), and he is stumbling over Iran. So much for the rise of multipolarity and the decline of Europe.

Not because that was Tehran’s aim. As a matter of fact, the Iranian leadership probably has very little time to think about Berlin – except noting for the future that, in practical terms, it is serving as a loyal accomplice in the American-Israeli war of aggression. No, the reason Iran now impacts and shakes the American-German relationship is that Tehran has been defeating the US, and so the client state Germany is registering the public “humiliation” of America (Merz’s term) by showing immediate signs of faltering compliance.

Who in this picture is reshaping things? And who is being shaped? Here’s another way to define sovereignty. And Germany still loses.

Tarik Cyril Amar is a historian from Germany working at Koç University, Istanbul, on Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe, the history of World War II, the cultural Cold War, and the politics of memory.

May 1, 2026 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , | Comments Off on Here’s why Iran is sovereign and Germany is not

Israel pours $730m into global propaganda machine as reputation collapses

The Cradle | May 1, 2026

Israeli lawmakers last month approved a sharp increase in the 2026 public diplomacy budget, allocating roughly $730 million to the global messaging apparatus, also known as “Hasbara,” according to a report by the Jerusalem Post on 29 April.

Surveys point to a deepening collapse in international support, as Israel’s genocide in Gaza and continued aggression toward its neighboring countries have sent the Tel Aviv’s reputation into freefall on the global stage.

The funding accounts for more than four times the previous year’s allocation, and forms part of a broader push led by Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar, who characterized the effort as a strategic imperative, saying it should be treated “like investing in jets, bombs, and missile interceptors” and calling it “an existential issue.”

The campaign spans large-scale digital outreach and political engagement aimed at bending perceptions and  influencing  narratives around Israel.

Around $50 million is being funneled into social media advertising, and roughly $40 million is going toward flying in foreign delegations such as politicians, clergy, and influencers as part of the outreach effort.

Officials insist the strategy improves perceptions abroad, with Israel’s consul general in Los Angeles, Israel Bachar, claiming that “Everyone who returns from the country understands better and is more supportive. But you have to fly out a lot of people.”

However, polling data cited in the reports shows a sharp collapse in public opinion towards Israel, particularly in the US.

A Pew Research Center survey found that 60 percent of US respondents now view Israel unfavorably, with declines cutting across political, religious, and demographic groups.

Analysts and researchers dismiss the spending outright, arguing it cannot offset the impact of Israel’s actions on the ground.

Communication scholar Nicholas Cull said, “Our conclusion was, it’s the policy, stupid,” referring to Israel’s policy of genocide and apartheid, and its broader military conduct as a central pillar of its expansionist agenda.

“Yes, you can do a lot with public diplomacy, and there are strategies that could help on the margins. But they’re only going to affect a small percentage, because the bulk of the impressions on issues that people care about are shaped by the actual policies, not how well you sell those policies.”

“The problem is that people don’t believe the state anymore,” said Ilan Manor, another expert cited in the report, warning that increased funding may expand reach but will not restore trust.

That push is reinforced by what Israeli officials describe as a parallel “Eighth Front” – a so-called “Digital Iron Dome” that combines mass reporting campaigns, AI-driven targeting, and coordinated influencer networks to suppress dissenting content and flood platforms with state-approved narratives in real time.

Israel had invested millions in coordinated digital influence campaigns, including a $6-million contract to shape AI outputs, targeted Gen Z messaging, and large-scale ad buys, in an effort to control online narratives and counter declining public support in the US.

The country’s propaganda arm had previously deployed a large network of at least hundreds of fake social media accounts and fabricated news sites to spread unverified claims linking UNRWA to Hamas’s 7 October Operation Al-Aqsa Flood in order to undermine its humanitarian mission in Palestine.

May 1, 2026 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Comments Off on Israel pours $730m into global propaganda machine as reputation collapses

Leaked audios reveal pro-Israel groups ‘paid’ for US pardon of convicted drug trafficker Juan Orlando Hernandez

The Cradle | April 30, 2026

WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram audio messages published by Canal RED and Hondurasgate on 29 April reveal pro-Israel groups “paid” for the release of former Honduran president and convicted drug trafficker Juan Orlando Hernandez (JOH) from US federal prison last year.

“The pardon money … came from a board of rabbis and people who supported Israel, and they had previously supported Yani Rosenthal,” JOH is heard saying in the leaked audios.

Yani Rosenthal is the former president of the right-wing Liberal Party of Honduras. He was convicted in December 2017 of laundering drug proceeds for a prominent Honduran drug cartel.

In 2024, JOH was convicted in a US federal court of three counts of drug trafficking and weapons conspiracy and received a 45-year prison sentence. He was also found guilty of receiving money from the former leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, Joaquin Archivaldo “El Chapo” Guzman, to finance electoral fraud.

JOH was pardoned late last year by US President Donald Trump, who called the DEA investigation into Hernández a “Biden administration set up.” Trump announced the pardon hours before Honduras’s presidential elections.

In that same social media post, Trump endorsed the current President Nasry “Tito” Asfura and threatened to cut aid to Honduras if he was not elected.

“The Prime Minister of Israel is going to give us his support. They had everything to do with my departure and negotiations,” JOH says in one of the audios released on Wednesday.

According to Canal RED, the leaked audios show that Trump’s pardon for JOH “was secured through intense lobbying led by Roger Stone and the Republican caucus … with the support of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.”

The audios also suggest that Hernandez’s return to Honduras and his upcoming presidential run are being financed by Israel.

“Mr. President, I’m here asking about my case, if there’s any resolution, if you have anything to share with me to see if there’s been any progress with the Supreme Court. I want to believe that you won’t sideline me because, thanks to me, you’re sitting in that chair … And I hope for your support. Because that’s what we discussed with President Trump,” JOH tells President Asfura in one of the leaked audios.

According to the report, Trump and Netanyahu are “seeking millions in compensation” in exchange for securing Asfura’s election and JOH’s possible reelection.

“The negotiations at the Florida residence included the expansion of Zones for Employment and Economic Development (ZEDEs), the construction of a new military base, a free trade agreement, and a law to incentivize investment in AI, whose contracts would be awarded directly to private American companies such as General Electric,” Canal RED reports.

ZEDEs, or “private states”/’model cities,” permit autonomous courts and foreign legal systems in Honduras, which civil groups say surrender sovereignty.

Additionally, a second set of leaked audios released on Thursday involving JOH, Asfura, and Honduran Vice President Maria Antonieta Mejia indicates the formation of a news outlet funded with more than half a million dollars in Honduran public funds, along with contributions from Javier Milei’s government in Argentina, aimed at ‘attacking’ the left-wing governments of Gustavo Petro in Colombia and Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico.

May 1, 2026 Posted by | Corruption, Deception | , , , | Comments Off on Leaked audios reveal pro-Israel groups ‘paid’ for US pardon of convicted drug trafficker Juan Orlando Hernandez

Congress Extends Section 702 Spy Program 45 Days

By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | April 30, 2026

The surveillance program that scoops up Americans’ communications without warrants got another 45 days of life on Thursday, after Congress reauthorized a clean version of FISA Section 702 hours before it was set to expire.

The House voted 261-111 to push the program’s expiration to June 21, sending the legislation to President Trump’s desk before the midnight deadline.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune said, “This will allow additional time to do that,” referring to ongoing work on a longer-term reauthorization that the upper chamber has been drafting separately.

What the procedural language obscures is what Section 702 actually does. The statute lets the NSA harvest communications from foreign targets without warrants, then stores those communications in a database that intelligence agencies can later search for information about Americans.

The agency calls this incidental collection but it functions as a workaround for the Fourth Amendment, allowing the government to access Americans’ messages, calls, and emails by claiming the foreigner on the other end of the conversation was the real target.

The renewal arrived only after a messy week of legislative whiplash. The House had originally passed a three-year extension on April 29, attaching an unrelated provision to ban the Federal Reserve from issuing a central bank digital currency.

Senate leadership killed that version on arrival, then jammed the lower chamber with a stripped-down 45-day extension that contained no privacy reforms, no warrant requirement, and no concession to the lawmakers who have spent years documenting how the program gets misused.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court opinion at the heart of Thursday’s fight is the closest thing to a smoking gun the public has seen on Section 702 in years.

The ruling addresses searches of Americans’ communications inside the NSA’s foreign intelligence database, the same backdoor query practice that has been flagged repeatedly by oversight bodies.

The court found problems with how the government has been running these searches.

What problems, specifically, remain classified.

That is the document Senator Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat who has spent over a decade trying to force daylight onto NSA programs, wanted Americans to read before Congress voted on a multi-year extension.

Wyden initially refused consent for the 45-day deal, holding out until Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Tom Cotton and ranking Democrat Mark Warner agreed to send a letter asking the executive branch to declassify the opinion within 15 days.

On the floor, Wyden made the case for why the secrecy is the problem. “That ruling found serious violations of Americans’ constitutional rights and how the Trump administration has used Section 702,” he said. “Congress should not vote — should not vote — to renew Section 702 when Americans are left in the dark about these troubling abuses,” Wyden said.

Cotton, an unwavering supporter of the program, took the framing personally. “I am ducking nothing. I am pointing out the senator from Oregon’s long-standing practice of distorting highly classified material in public,” Cotton said. “One of these days there are going to be some consequences, and it may be while I’m the chairman of this committee.”

Cotton runs the committee that controls intelligence community oversight, and the speech or debate clause of the Constitution is the only thing protecting senators from prosecution for what they say on the floor.

Stripped of theatrics, the message from the chairman of the body that supposedly checks the surveillance state was that pointing out documented abuses is itself a punishable act.

The result of all this is also that a surveillance program with documented constitutional problems gets six additional weeks of operation while the ruling describing those problems stays buried.

Current law already requires the FISC opinion to be released to the public eventually. Wyden wants that timeline accelerated to before Congress votes on a multi-year reauthorization, on the reasonable theory that lawmakers should know what they are voting to renew.

“Congress must use a short-term extension to openly debate the critical issues in front of the American people. I am disappointed that, instead, it sure feels like the other side of the aisle is covering the abuses up,” Wyden said.

What happens next depends on whether the executive branch honors the declassification request, and whether the Senate’s three-year reauthorization includes anything resembling meaningful reform.

The version that has been moving through committee does not require warrants for searches of Americans’ communications. It does not narrow the categories of foreign intelligence that can justify surveillance or impose meaningful limits on how long the NSA can retain the communications it collects.

The program scheduled for renewal on June 21 is not the program Congress originally approved.

May 1, 2026 Posted by | Civil Liberties | | Comments Off on Congress Extends Section 702 Spy Program 45 Days

Zionists Are Gunning for Your Freedom of Speech

By Jack Hunter | The Libertarian Institute | May 1, 2026

The First Amendment of the Bill of Rights in the Constitution of the United States guarantees the right to free speech. This right has long differentiated the United States from other Western nations like the United Kingdom and Canada where laws against so-called “hate speech” laws exist and are enforced.

Thankfully, America is different. In our country, even alleged hate speech is protected speech to ensure democratic principles and debate.

In a 1929 dissenting opinion, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said that the Constitution secured “freedom for the thought that we hate.” In 2011, Chief Justice John Roberts said in a ruling that the First Amendment serves “to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate.”

This constitutional protection has been increasingly threatened recently, particularly by pro-Israeli forces that have tried to frame any criticism of that government as “anti-Semitism” and thus hate speech punishable by law. This has included everything from arrests, to squashing campus debate to buying TikTok to an attempt to cover up human rights absuses in Gaza. President Donald Trump has even issued executive orders that use vague definitions of what constitutes “anti-Semitism” that comes with criminal penalties.

Mark Levin is an American-born Zionist radio host who is an outspoken advocate for Israel’s government, regularly calling anyone who criticizes the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran and conflict in Gaza “Nazis.”

Toward this agenda, Levin recently appeared to not agree with his own country’s free speech rights. On his latest Sunday Fox News program, unironically called Life, Liberty and Levin, the neoconservative pundit explained why free speech liberties in the U.S. have gone too far.

Seemingly worried that certain speech is protected in the United States, Levin said in the wake of the Secret Service taking down a shooter at the White House Correspondents Dinner on Friday, “First time things like this have happened, but it really is problematic because so much of it is protected.”

“And you hear people say, don’t you believe in the First Amendment?” Levin said. “They don’t even know what the First Amendment believes.”

Certain “speech” is “problematic” because “so much of it is protected.” You could see where this was headed.

Levin then explained what he believes “the First Amendment believes.” “Do you want to de-platform people?” he ranted. “You know, the libs do that. I don’t have any problem with de-platforming Nazis or jihadis.”

“Nazis,” Levin says. Levin uses this term loosely, all the time, and that’s putting it mildly.

Prominent libertarian personality Josie Glabach, known most popularly as “The Libertarian Redhead,” made a telling list of the many people and groups Levin has called Nazis since 2024:

  • The Democrats
  • The Democrat media
  • An Australian bakery
  • The Pakistani defense minister
  • Libertarian Institute Director Scott Horton
  • The entire Libertarian Party
  • College students
  • MMA fighter Jake Shields
  • Nick Fuentes
  • Putin’s buddies
  • Influencer Dan Bilzarian
  • The Houthis
  • Comedian and libertarian personality Dave Smith
  • Anyone who associates with Dave Smith
  • Tucker Carlson
  • Beirut
  • Hezbollah
  • A veteran who asked Mark to be more tolerant
  • Influencer Myron Gaines
  • The city of London
  • Hamas
  • The New York Times
  • New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman
  • A New York Times correspondent
  • Terrorists;
  • The “woke reich”
  • Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner
  • The United Nations
  • Harvard University
  • The city of Amsterdam
  • Columbia University students
  • Iterations of the “Iranian Nazi regime,” the “Islamic Nazi regime,” the “Islamo Nazi regime,” the “Islamist Nazi regime,” and “All of Iran (the new Nazis)”
  • The Ayatollah (presumably of Iran)
  • Former Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi
  • A protestor on a subway
  • Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D-MI)
  • President Joe Biden’s entire State Department
  • Turkish Preisdent Recep Erdoğan
  • College basketball analyst Bruce Pearl
  • Certain Arab, liberals and journalists
  • Reporter Lulu Garcia-Navarro
  • ISIS
  • Seventeen random Twitter users

This eclectic group of entities great and small, many of whom are regular critics of Israel’s government, are “Nazis” in Levin’s view. As Libertarian Institute Senior Fellow Tom Woods succinctly put it, “Nazis’ includes everyone who mocks Levin.”

Levin continued his Sunday rant against “Nazis”:

“I don’t have any problem with de-platforming them. What does that mean, de-platforming them? A government law? No. It means that X or Twitter or Facebook or Amazon with Twitch and someone says you know what? You’re a low life we’re not paying, you know, get off our platform. What’s wrong with that?”

The neocon pundit appeared to say that private platforms should police speech according to the political views of Mark Levin. He is right that this is no violation of the First Amendment. Private companies can allow or restrict speech as they please. “It’s called private enterprise,” he said. “I got no problem with that.”

Then Levin basically said such speech was no different than pornography, which is not protected under the First Amendment. Levin continued, “I mean, what if they have this horrific pornography on? Is that okay? No, it’s not okay.”

“Because our kids have access to it,” he said. “People who are impressionable have access to it. “What if they had people screaming at the top of the lungs saying, assassinate this guy and assassinate that guy? Well, they shouldn’t do that.”

“Why? What’s the standard?” Levin went on. “You need to have a standard. What should the law be? What does the Constitution say?”

The Constitution says that all speech is protected, but “true threats” and obscenity are not.

But political opinions about Israel that go against Levin’s views are protected, whether he likes it or not.

That’s when Levin basically outright said that speech that criticizes Israel should be forbidden just like pornography. “I just think we’ve taken this too far because we’re not even talking about political speech, which is the most protected of all speech,” Levin said.

“We do limit speech,” he insisted. “We limit speech, pornography. We limit speech.”

What Levin, like so many other Zionists, truly want is for the First Amendment to be amended itself. They believe, whether they say it forthright or not (and Levin appears to be doing just that), that this legal provision designed by the Founders precisely to protect political speech should no longer protect speech that is critical of Israel’s government.

Americans have historically valued their free speech. American Zionists like Levin now want a carve out.

But the free speech guarantee enshrined in the United States’s governing charter is so integral to the American experience, to gut it for any reason would be to drastically alter the DNA of the soon to be 250-year-old country.

As an American, Mark Levin doesn’t seem to have a problem with doing just that—all in the service of a foreign country.

It might be better for Americans to instead wish other nations well, yet solely concentrate on our own affairs at home, and perhaps just as important, to stop listening to American pundits whose primary allegiance seems to be countries other than their own.

May 1, 2026 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Wars for Israel | , , , | Comments Off on Zionists Are Gunning for Your Freedom of Speech

Larry Johnson: U.S. Desperation Grows as Iran Is Winning

Glenn Diesen | April 30, 2026

Trump and Putin speak for 90 minutes as Russia offers its support to Iran, while the US is growing desperate as the war and economic war fail. Johnson is a former CIA intelligence analyst who also worked at the U.S. State Department’s Office of Counterterrorism.

Read Larry Johnson’s Sonar21: https://sonar21.com/

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April 30, 2026 Posted by | Militarism, Video, Wars for Israel | , | Comments Off on Larry Johnson: U.S. Desperation Grows as Iran Is Winning

Why don’t UK media mention the Israel lobby?

By Mark Curtis | Declassified UK | April 27, 2026

Britain’s national media fails to recognise the influence – and even the existence – of an Israel lobby, our new media analysis shows.

Declassified researched two years of reporting by seven British media outlets and found only 16 mentions of the phrase Israel lobby without speech marks.

Nearly all those mentions are in comment articles rather than news pieces and none we found expound on what influence such an Israel lobby might have.

The phrase “Israel lobby” – used with speech marks – is slightly more common in these outlets, with 26 mentions in two years, and tends to be used to quote others in a disparaging way or to suggest such a lobby does not exist.

For example, one Guardian article refers to “the trope of the ‘Israel lobby’”. The Daily Mail reported in May 2024 of hecklers at a speech by then foreign secretary secretary David Lammy “accusing the MP of having taken ‘shady money’ from the ‘pro-Israel lobby’ on the grounds that he once lawfully accepted £30,000 from a Zionist lobbyist named Trevor Chinn.”

In fact, British businessman Trevor Chinn has funded Keir Starmer and several senior Labour ministers and was awarded the Israeli medal of honour for his “dedication” to and “love” for Israel.

Of the seven media outlets analysed – BBC articles, Express, Guardian, Independent, Mail, Telegraph and Times –  the BBC and the Express are the most extreme, and no mentions of the phrase Israel lobby, used without speech marks, could be found at all in their publications.

The BBC is failing to mention the Israel lobby while having regular meetings with it. As Declassified recently revealed, the BBC held nine meetings with Jewish groups strongly sympathetic to Israel in the first year of the Gaza genocide.

The Guardian was found to have made only five mentions of an Israel lobby without speech marks, three of which are in comment pieces by columnist Owen Jones.

By contrast, independent Scottish newspaper The National, which has consistently criticised UK policy towards Israel, has mentioned the Israel lobby 23 times in the two year sample period, never in speech marks.

The Israel lobby in Britain is extensive. Declassified has revealed that a quarter of MPs have been funded by pro-Israel individuals and groups, as have one half of Keir Starmer’s Cabinet.

Neither of these findings have been reported in the mainstream media, as far as Declassified is aware.

British ministers and officials are known to hold off-the-books meetings with pro-Israel lobbyists, and under Keir Starmer’s government, the Foreign Office has held numerous meetings with pro-Israel advocacy groups such as Board of Deputies of British Jews and the European Leadership Network (ELNET).

The UK government’s total proscription of the Lebanese movement Hezbollah in 2019 was the work of pro-Israel lobbyists while lobby group We Believe in Israel has taken credit for the UK government’s proscription of Palestine Action last year.

As long ago as 2009, a landmark Channel Four documentary, Inside Britain’s Israel Lobby, which was presented by journalist Peter Oborne, revealed the close relationship between the Israel lobby and the Conservative and Labour parties, and its attempts to curb criticism of Israel in the media.

The Israel lobby’s influence over UK politics is likely to be greater than any other state except perhaps the US, and certainly far more than Russia which has received decidedly more media attention.

Friends of Israel

The British media’s failure to explicitly acknowledge an Israel lobby comes alongside nearly 300 articles in these seven outlets during the two years mentioning either Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) or Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI), of which dozens of MPs are supporters.

These lobby groups are invariably mentioned in the media without any analysis of their influence or even that they are explicitly part of a lobby that advocates for goals which benefit a foreign country, such as opposing an arms embargo on Israel.

The Independent has mentioned the phrase “influential Labour Friends of Israel” group three times, and the Times once, without mentioning how it is influential.

Yet CFI has been the largest donor of free overseas trips for MPs in recent years, and both CFI and LFI refuse to provide a list of their funders. LFI says its work is funded by “the generosity of members of the Jewish community and those who share our commitment to the State of Israel”. It adds that it “does not receive any money from the Israeli government or the Israeli Embassy”.

The Times has mentioned the phrase Israel lobby, without speech marks, on only four occasions in the two years, but has mentioned Labour Friends of Israel in over 50 articles. That LFI might be a part of a broader Israel lobby has apparently not been spelled out by the Times to its readers.

These omissions might be because the seven media outlets we analysed often function as part of the Israel lobby that they refuse to sufficiently recognise. The most extreme is the Telegraph, which routinely publishes articles supportive of Israel during its genocide in Gaza, illegal war on Iran and brutal attacks on Lebanon.

The paper has recently called to restore UK military ties to Israel, headlined with “Israel condemns ‘hateful and racist’ Greens”, and published an article by pro-Israel writer Jake Wallis Simons headlined “The case for Trump attacking Iran”, among many similar articles.

Some articles in these outlets suggest that recognition of an Israel lobby is anti-semitic. One opinion piece in the Telegraph runs: “Anti-Semitism is a conspiracy theory about how the world works. You think you live in a democracy, it runs, but actually there is this secret invisible system of Jewish power that rules the world through the banking system, the media and the Israel lobby.”

Similarly, the Guardian reported on Labour MP Diane Abbott in May 2024 stating: “She apologised for liking tweets about the influence of the Israel lobby, which she admitted could be interpreted as an antisemitic trope.”

The Guardian has been found to cave in to pro-Israel pressure, to amplify Israeli propaganda, and to be responsible for the same “systemic bias, deliberate distortion and deceptive underreporting” on Israeli crimes as the rest of the British media.

When the vice chair of LFI, Damian Egan, was forced to pull out of a school visit in January this year due to pressure from a pro-Palestinian group, both the Independent and the Times chose to focus on Egan simply being Jewish, headlining: “Jewish MP’s visit to local school cancelled after pro-Palestine campaign”.

Over 100,000 people have recently signed a petition calling for a public inquiry into pro-Israel influence on politics and democracy.

Note – our media analysis covered the period 7 April 2024 to 7 April 2026, using the Nexis media database and conducting website searches of the seven media outlets.

Mark Curtis is the co-director of Declassified UK, and the author of five books and many articles on UK foreign policy.

April 30, 2026 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | Comments Off on Why don’t UK media mention the Israel lobby?

New US shipment of 6,500 tons of military aid arrives in Israel

MEMO | April 30, 2026

Israel said Thursday it received a new shipment of 6,500 tons of ammunition and military equipment from the US in 24 hours, Anadolu reports.

“Two cargo ships carrying thousands of air and ground munitions, military trucks, Joint Light Tactical Vehicles (JLTVs), and additional military equipment were offloaded at the ports in Ashdod and Haifa,” the Defense Ministry said in a statement.

The daily Maariv said the shipments are part of a “central effort to enhance Israel’s readiness for developments in the war.”

According to the paper, more than 115,600 pieces of military equipment have arrived in Israel via 403 airlifts and 10 maritime shipments since the start of the war with Iran in February.

Israel has been engaged in ongoing military offensives in Gaza since October 2023 with US backing, alongside escalating hostilities involving Lebanon and tensions with Iran.

April 30, 2026 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism | , , | Comments Off on New US shipment of 6,500 tons of military aid arrives in Israel

Military aid to Ukraine vital for ‘US hegemony’ – Republican senator

By Lucas Leiroz | April 30, 2026

Despite initial attempts by Donald Trump to establish diplomatic dialogue with Russia on the Ukrainian issue, there are still many politicians in the US interested in taking the conflict to its ultimate consequences. Even among Republicans themselves, there are several “hawkish” figures trying to boycott the peace process and promoting the escalation of the conflict.

In a recent statement, Republican senator Mitch McConnell asserted that the US urgently needs to increase its military assistance to Ukraine. He justified his claims by stating that supporting Kiev is necessary for the US to preserve its status as a global superpower. He believes it is vital for the US to maintain this status, and that intervention in Ukraine is necessary to prevent the US from losing its recognition as a “world leader”.

McConnell harshly criticized the way Trump and the American military are conducting the policy of support for Ukraine. He believes that current US efforts are insufficient, and that the country needs to invest more heavily in assisting the fascist regime. He also stated that it is a mistake to transfer responsibility for this assistance to Europe, since it is up to the US, as a “world leader,” to promote this type of initiative.

The senator also advocated for a massive presence of American military instructors on the battlefield. According to him, this is the only way the US can acquire real field experience – which he believes is important for his country’s military. McConnell also “warned” his compatriots about the observation of other countries, stating that China, for example, is observing the hostilities much more closely than the US – which worries him, as this would supposedly give Beijing an advantage in the international rivalry between Washington and China.

“[Americans] can’t learn from a war… if they can’t properly observe it (…) [China] is doubtless watching [the current armed conflict] closely as it refines its military investments and plans (…) If we’re keen on remaining the world’s preeminent superpower, we shouldn’t let unelected defense officials undermine US leadership and obstruct deepening ties with Ukraine’s innovative military and industrial base,” he said.

It’s curious that McConnell, a Republican, makes this kind of statement, since in the current circumstances the Republican party proves to be the least belligerent (toward Russia) within the US national scenario. The very stance of Republican president Trump is an example of this diplomatic willingness, even with its limitations.

Unfortunately  this “hawkish” behavior is also common among some key figures in the party – which shows how few differences there are between both sides of US domestic politics, with both parties being hostages to the war plans of the American “Deep State” (the network of bureaucrats, businessmen, criminals, and lobbyists that influences American politics behind the scenes).

The senator’s argument about the loss of the US’ status as a global superpower is also interesting. Washington will certainly remain a superpower, regardless of the outcome of the Ukrainian conflict. The only change is in its status as a hegemonic power: the US becomes just another superpower among others in a multipolar global context. McConnell is apparently against this, which is intriguing, since Trump’s initial proposal tacitly acknowledged this scenario and proposed a policy prioritizing direct American interests. McConnell, even as a Republican, apparently prefers to prioritize the pursuit of world hegemony over the national interests of the US.

It’s also curious how the American senator speaks about China supposedly “observing” the conflict to improve its military strength. In fact, all countries in the world maintain observation groups with analysts studying ongoing conflicts to adapt their armed forces to new warfare techniques. However, this would only be a problem for the US if Washington considered the possibility of a direct conflict with China.

Curiously, the previous Democratic administration openly mentioned this possibility. Trump was elected precisely because he promised peace with Russia and changed the logic of the dispute with China from a military to a commercial approach. Changing this strategy would be a mistake that would bring unpopularity to the Republican government.

Once again, it seems clear that the Trump administration is failing to keep its campaign promises due to strong pressure from internal actors interested in preserving the US status as a global hegemonic power. Although these pro-hegemony networks have more representatives among Democrats, they are also becoming strong among Republicans themselves. Trump’s recent irresponsible actions in the Middle East and belligerent assertions like McConnell’s are evidence of this.

Lucas Leiroz, member of the BRICS Journalists Association, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, military expert.

You can follow Lucas on X (formerly Twitter) and Telegram.

April 30, 2026 Posted by | Militarism, Russophobia, Sinophobia | , | Comments Off on Military aid to Ukraine vital for ‘US hegemony’ – Republican senator

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