By Anthony Watts | ClimateRealism | June 23, 2026
A recent article in the online journal Futurism, titled, “Scientists Horrified as Huge Heatwave Hits Antarctica,” claims climate change caused a “huge heatwave” in Antarctica, bringing temperatures on the Antarctic Peninsula nearly 36°F above average and briefly pushing readings above freezing. This is highly misleading. A single weather event says nothing meaningful about long-term climate trends, and the article ignores both Antarctica’s enormous geographic variability and the exceptionally cold conditions simultaneously occurring elsewhere on the continent. The heatwave Futurism suggested wasn’t a continent-wide crisis, but was a localized, unalarming event.
The article is largely a rewrite of a Guardian story focused on temperatures measured on the Trinity Peninsula, the northernmost extension of Antarctica. Researchers reported temperatures reaching approximately 15.4°C (59.7°F) during a brief warm spell on June 6.
What readers are not told is that the Antarctic Peninsula is not representative of Antarctica as a whole.
In fact, the warmest part of Antarctica is the Antarctic Peninsula. Nicknamed the “banana belt,” it stretches northward toward South America and experiences milder maritime conditions. During the austral summer, temperatures can occasionally exceed 10°C (50°F). The peninsula extends northward toward South America and is heavily influenced by maritime weather patterns and ocean currents. It is by far the warmest part of Antarctica and has long experienced periodic warm-air intrusions, föhn wind events, rain episodes, and above-freezing temperatures. These events are unusual, but they are not unprecedented.
In fact, the article itself acknowledges that the warmth was associated with “extremely strong westerlies.” In other words, this was a weather event driven by warmer atmospheric circulation patterns, not a direct measurement of climate change.
What Futurism misses is the fact that weather is not climate.
Climate is measured over decades. A single day, a single week, or even a single season tells us very little about long-term temperature trends. If every unusually warm day is presented as proof of climate catastrophe, then intellectual consistency would require every unusually cold day to be presented as evidence against it. The media rarely applies that standard.
The timing of this story is especially revealing because while headlines were breathlessly reporting a temporary warm spell on the Antarctic Peninsula, much of the rest of Antarctica was experiencing brutally cold conditions.
According to observations highlighted by meteorologist Cap Allon, the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station recorded a temperature of -73.6°C (-100.5°F) on June 16, with a daily maximum of only -69.9°C (-93.8°F). That was the South Pole’s first sub–70°C reading since 2023.
One part of Antarctica briefly experiences an unusual warm episode, while another part of the continent drops below -100°F. That is how weather works on a continent larger than the United States and Mexico combined.
Yet only one of those events, specifically the anomalous high temperature one, generated international headlines.
The article further claims that the heatwave follows “decades of increasingly warm temperatures observed on the white continent.” That statement is false.
Antarctica is not warming uniformly. While portions of the Antarctic Peninsula experienced warming during parts of the late twentieth century, numerous studies have shown little warming or even cooling across large sections of East Antarctica, with East Antarctica making up the bulk of the continent. Antarctic sea ice has also exhibited substantial variability from year to year and decade to decade.
The continent is governed by complex interactions involving ocean currents, atmospheric circulation, volcanic influences (including subsurface heating under West Antarctica where the peninsula lies), sea ice dynamics, and natural climate oscillations. That complexity disappears in Futurism’s opinionated article.
Instead, readers are given the now-familiar formula: identify a dramatic weather event, attach it to climate change, mention the “Doomsday Glacier,” and imply catastrophe is around the corner. Climate Realism has debunked claims of the Thwaites Glacier’s imminent collapse repeatedly, previously. The article’s reference to Thwaites Glacier is a particularly misleading red herring, because it has nothing to do with the reported weather event. The mention serves one purpose: reinforcing a broader climate crisis narrative.
This is increasingly common in climate reporting. Any unusual weather event becomes an opportunity to recycle the same talking points about glaciers, sea level rise, tipping points, and future disasters, regardless of whether they are directly related to the event being discussed.
Concerning the Antarctic Peninsula, the facts are these: Antarctica has always been susceptible to periodic warm-air intrusions because of its geography and proximity to relatively warmer ocean waters; the Southern Ocean, atmospheric rivers, and strong westerly winds can occasionally transport substantial heat into the region. These processes existed long before climate change became a political issue.
Most importantly, a single warm event cannot establish a trend. Scientists understand this principle when analyzing climate data. Journalists should understand it as well.
A proper climate analysis requires decades of observations across the continent, careful examination of regional variability, and separation of weather noise from climate signals, not the slap dash presentation of misleading, sensational claims assembled by Futurism.
Antarctica remains the coldest continent on Earth. While the Antarctic Peninsula briefly experienced unusually mild conditions, the South Pole itself was simultaneously plunging near or below -100°F in multiple other locations.
That fact alone should remind readers that one weather event, no matter how dramatic the headline, is not evidence of a “climate emergency,” it’s simply weather. One warm spell on the Antarctic Peninsula becomes proof of climate catastrophe, while simultaneous temperatures below -100°F at the South Pole are ignored. That’s not objective journalism, that’s agenda-driven alarmism.
An Essay on Why You Only Hear From the People Who Lived
Lies are Unbekoming | June 18, 2026
Wald at the Statistical Research Group
In 1943, the U.S. military was about to armor its bombers in exactly the wrong places. The analysts had examined every bomber that came back from combat, mapped the bullet holes across the airframe, and proposed reinforcing the spots where the holes clustered. The data was right there. You could see it on the planes.
They referred the question to the Statistical Research Group at Columbia University, a small team of mathematicians assembled for the war effort. The Hungarian-born statistician Abraham Wald examined the bullet-hole maps and gave the opposite recommendation. Armor the engines and the cockpit. The places where the returning planes had no bullet holes.
The military analysts had committed a logical error so simple they could not see it. They were studying the planes that came back. The planes shot through the engines and the cockpit did not come back. They had gone down across two oceans and the territory between them. The returning planes did not reveal where bombers were vulnerable. They revealed where bombers could be hit and still fly home.
The bullet holes on the survivors mapped survivable damage, not dangerous damage. Armoring where the holes were meant armoring the places that did not need armoring. The damage that mattered was on the planes you could not examine because they were destroyed.
Wald’s memorandum was classified. Decades later, when his work was declassified and republished, the principle he had identified came to be called survivorship bias.¹ ² It is the most pervasive and least understood logical error in any field that draws conclusions from a visible population of survivors.
The same error sits at the center of the modern screening-and-treatment industry.
The Error Generalized
Survivorship bias operates wherever a process selects what gets seen. The destroyed do not file reports, and the audience reads only what made it through.
Mutual fund performance averages exclude funds that closed. Hedge fund return statistics quietly drop the funds that liquidated. The historical returns of “the market” routinely omit bankruptcies, delistings, and total losses. Funds that lived publish their numbers; funds that died publish nothing. The retail investor reads the winners.
The literature on entrepreneurship was built the same way. CEOs who succeeded wrote memoirs about their habits and their early-morning routines. The thousands of equally disciplined founders who failed wrote nothing because their companies went under. The “success habits” identified by reading the survivors are, in many cases, just habits, shared by the dead and the living alike, with no causal relationship to outcomes.
In architecture, the buildings that survive are studied for their construction methods. The buildings that collapsed in storms, earthquakes, or fires are no longer there to be examined. Old buildings appear well-built because the badly-built ones are gone.
In each case, the visible sample is selected by the very property you are trying to measure. You cannot learn about plane vulnerability from intact planes. You cannot learn about cancer survival from cancer survivors.
Survivorship Bias in Medicine
A woman undergoes mammography in her early fifties. The scan finds a small lesion. She receives a biopsy, a lumpectomy, six weeks of radiation, and five years of tamoxifen. She is alive ten years later. She becomes an advocate, walking in Race for the Cure and telling her sister, her daughter, and the women in her neighborhood that screening saved her life. Get the test.
Her experience is real, her gratitude genuine. The conclusion she draws does not follow from either.
What she does not know, what she cannot know, is what would have happened to her without the screening, the biopsy, the surgery, the radiation, and the years of medication. She cannot run the counterfactual on herself. The version of her that did not get the treatment does not exist, and she has no way to consult it.
The institutions that promoted her screening have access to data she does not. Population-level data, accumulated across decades of randomized and observational studies, is consistent with four overlapping forms of survivorship bias, each of which inflates the apparent success of the system. Together they are sufficient to explain most of what the industry presents as the triumph of “early detection.”
Survivorship Bias Proper
The most direct form: only the living testify.
Eight months after her mastectomy, a woman dies of chemotherapy-induced sepsis. She does not appear at the October fundraiser. Six weeks after his prostatectomy, a man dies of cardiac complications. He writes no op-eds about prostate health. The radiation that “cured” the first cancer induces a second one five years later, and the patient’s family attends a funeral, not a marathon. The chemotherapy regimen that ostensibly drove the tumor into remission also drove the patient’s bone marrow into failure, and she dies of sepsis a year later, recorded by quiet bureaucratic convention as a “cancer death.”
When the public hears about cancer treatment, it hears from the patients who survived. Those who did not survive are statistically invisible. They are counted in mortality columns nobody reads, while their grateful surviving counterparts address the television cameras. The audience for screening campaigns sees a heavily filtered population, filtered by the treatments themselves.
The filtering goes further than visibility. It reaches into the mortality data itself. When a patient on chemotherapy dies of cardiotoxic heart failure, the death is typically coded as a cancer death. When a patient with treatment-induced bone marrow failure dies of sepsis, it is coded as a cancer death. When the surgical complication kills the patient on the operating table, it is generally coded as a cancer death. When the second cancer induced by radiation given for the first cancer kills the patient ten years later, the second cancer is frequently recorded as primary, the radiation that caused it noted in passing if at all. The coding conventions tilt systematically in one direction: failures of treatment are folded back into the column labeled “disease.” The treatment is shielded from blame. The cancer absorbs it. The mortality statistics that institutions cite to justify aggressive treatment are themselves an artifact of how treatment failures are recorded.
Lead-Time Bias
Finding a cancer earlier does not mean treating it earlier extends life. It means knowing about it longer.
Two women with identical lesions, identical biology, and identical eventual outcomes. Both die at age seventy. Woman A is screened at fifty, her cancer is detected, and she is “treated” for the next twenty years. Woman B is unscreened. She develops symptoms at sixty-five, is diagnosed, and dies at seventy.
The standard reporting metric is five-year survival from diagnosis. By that measure, Woman A counts at 100% survival. Woman B counts at 0%. The treatment looks miraculous. Nothing has actually changed. Both women died at seventy. Woman A simply spent twenty years as a patient.
The five-year survival statistic is the standard currency of cancer reporting. In the presence of widespread screening, it is also a metric that can rise to 100% without saving a single life. Between 1950 and 1995, the five-year survival rate for prostate cancer in the United States rose from 43% to 93%. The age-adjusted mortality rate from prostate cancer over the same period barely moved.³ The screened population learned about their cancer earlier. They did not die later.
When you read that “early detection” has improved five-year survival rates for breast, prostate, or thyroid cancer, you are reading a statistic structurally biased toward the appearance of benefit even when no benefit exists.³ ⁴
Length-Time Bias
Screening preferentially detects slow-growing lesions. Aggressive cancers grow rapidly between screening intervals and present symptomatically, not through the scan. Indolent lesions sit for years, available to be detected at the next mammogram or PSA test.
The population of cancers caught by screening is therefore enriched for slow biology, for lesions that were less likely to kill in the first place. Patients with these lesions tend to do well, not because the screening saved them but because their cancers were not going to kill them on any rapid timescale. The aggressive cancers, the ones that genuinely threaten life, frequently arise and progress in the gaps between scans.
Screening catches the cancers least in need of catching. The system then takes credit for the favorable outcomes of patients who would have done well regardless.
Overdiagnosis
The fourth and most powerful form. Many of the lesions detected by screening are not, in any meaningful sense, going to harm the patient. They are stable, non-progressive anatomical findings that medicine has chosen to label as cancer.
Bleyer and Welch, examining three decades of U.S. mammography data, estimated that 31% of breast cancers detected by screening represented overdiagnosis: disease that would never have produced symptoms or shortened life.⁵ The Cochrane systematic review of mammography trials concluded that for every life potentially saved by screening, ten women receive treatment for a cancer that would not have harmed them. The same review found no reduction in all-cause mortality from screening.⁶
In South Korea, the introduction of widespread thyroid ultrasound produced a fifteen-fold increase in thyroid cancer diagnoses over two decades. Mortality from thyroid cancer did not change. The country had not experienced a thyroid cancer epidemic. It had begun finding microscopic lesions that had always existed in the population, at autopsy in people who died of other causes, and that had never killed anyone before they were found and treated.⁷
Autopsy studies of men who died of unrelated causes have found prostate cancer cells in roughly a third of those in their forties, rising to two-thirds by their late sixties.¹⁵ The lifetime mortality from prostate cancer is approximately 3%. Most older men carry the disease into a natural death from something else; they die with prostate cancer, not from it. The PSA test cannot distinguish between the cancer that would have killed and the cancer that would have been silently carried into the grave. It detects both. It produces a diagnosis in both. The men with non-threatening lesions, who vastly outnumber the rest, are subjected to surgery, radiation, and hormonal therapy for a condition that was never going to harm them. They survive what was never threatening. They credit the system. They tell other men to get tested.
The ERSPC trial, the largest prostate cancer screening trial ever conducted, found that PSA screening reduced prostate cancer mortality by a small absolute amount over thirteen years. To prevent one death, approximately twenty-seven men had to be diagnosed and treated, most of whom would not have died from their disease and many of whom were rendered incontinent, impotent, or both by the intervention.⁸
Every overdiagnosed patient is, by definition, a successful “treatment outcome.” She survived a treatment for a condition that was never going to harm her. The system takes credit. She testifies on its behalf.
Why the System Selects for Evangelism
The four biases would matter less if the visible patients were a representative sample. They are not. The system that produces them also amplifies them.
Hospitals run survivor outreach programs. Pharmaceutical companies fund patient advocacy organizations. The pink ribbon ecology, Susan G. Komen, the National Breast Cancer Foundation, the dozens of subsidiary charities, operates almost entirely on survivor testimony. October fills American mailboxes with pink-ribboned testimonials. The American Cancer Society’s national publicity is built on survivor stories. The patient who survived is the asset.
The corporate machinery built around the survivor is substantial. Estée Lauder co-founded the pink ribbon symbol with Self magazine in 1992 and now sells pink-ribbon cosmetics each October. The National Football League runs an annual “Crucial Catch” campaign with players wearing pink cleats and accessories. Major League Baseball stages pink-bat games on Mother’s Day. Yoplait produced pink-lidded yogurt for two decades under the “Save Lids to Save Lives” campaign. Ford sold pink-ribbon merchandise through “Warriors in Pink.” General Mills, KitchenAid, the National Hockey League, the airlines, the cosmetics counters at every major department store all participate. The advertising spend on these campaigns runs into hundreds of millions of dollars annually, dwarfing the portion of the proceeds that ever reaches research and dwarfing many times over the portion of research funding that addresses environmental causes of breast cancer rather than treatment. The campaigns sell screening. The screening produces patients. Most patients survive, because most of what is found in screening was not going to kill them, and they testify. The testimony funds the next round of campaigns.
The patient who died is, from a marketing perspective, a problem. Her death cannot be celebrated. Her family is often grieving and angry. Her doctors generally do not call the local newspaper. She becomes a statistic in a column nobody reads, while the surviving patient in the next room becomes the face of the cause.
This selection is not a conspiracy. It is a structural feature of how the industry communicates. Living patients can be photographed; dead patients cannot. The living speak at events; the dead are credited, by quiet convention, to “the disease.”
The grateful survivor is also psychologically necessary for the treatment to continue being offered in its current form. The patient who has undergone radical mastectomy, six rounds of chemotherapy, weeks of radiation, and years of endocrine therapy must believe, on pain of intolerable cognitive dissonance, that this was necessary and life-saving. To accept that she may have been treated for a lesion that would not have harmed her, that she lost her breast, her hair, her fertility, her cardiac reserve, perhaps her marriage, to a system that misjudged the threat, is psychologically devastating. The mind protects itself. She becomes an advocate.
The advocate then promotes the system to other women, who undergo screening, get diagnosed, get treated, and become advocates in turn. Each cycle generates more survivors, each of whom credits the system that produced them. The dead and the harmed are silent by definition.
The financial scale of this ecosystem is not small. The United States spends roughly two hundred billion dollars annually on cancer-related medical care. Mammography alone is a multi-billion-dollar industry. The PSA test, despite repeated expert task force recommendations against routine screening, generates billions in downstream procedures. The pink ribbon charities raise hundreds of millions per year, much of which goes to “awareness,” that is, to producing more screening, more diagnoses, more treatment, and more survivors. The asset class, the patient, is manufactured by the process that then takes credit for her survival.
In 2018, a Goldman Sachs equity research report posed the question explicitly to its biotechnology clients: “Is curing patients a sustainable business model?”⁹ The analysts noted that one-time cures undermine recurring revenue streams. The pharmaceutical industry’s most profitable customers are chronic patients, not cured ones. The screening-and-treatment cancer model is, from a financial perspective, an excellent business. It produces patients. It treats them for years. Many of them survive, which is what the model needs them to do, because survivors testify and dead patients do not.
Inside the Testimonial
The cancer survivor has four pieces of information. She was screened. Something was found. She received treatment. She is alive years later. From these facts, she draws a single conclusion: the screening and treatment saved her life.
The inference is intuitive but unsupported. The same four facts admit at least three other explanations.
The screening detected a lesion that would never have harmed her. She survived not because of the treatment but in spite of it. The treatment did damage that she absorbed because the rest of her body was healthy enough to recover.
The lesion was real but slow-growing. She would have lived equally long, with less suffering, by doing nothing.
The lesion was real and biologically active, but her body’s repair mechanisms, what the establishment calls her constitution and what terrain medicine recognizes as her terrain, would have managed it. The treatment was incidental to her survival.
She cannot distinguish between these explanations from her own experience. None of them is available to her introspectively. The only way to determine which is correct, at the level of a population, is the randomized controlled trial, the kind of trial that, in most screening contexts, has either not been done with adequate follow-up or has produced equivocal results that the institutions promoting screening do not publicize.
Her testimonial is sincere. It is also, with respect to the question of whether the treatment worked, evidence of nothing in particular. The dead woman two beds down the hall, who received identical screening and identical treatment and died of cardiotoxic chemotherapy, would have a different testimonial if she could give one. The system that asks the survivor to speak does not ask the dead woman’s family to speak. The asymmetry produces the appearance of a treatment success rate the underlying data does not support.
What Survives the Error
Once you see survivorship bias, you cannot unsee it. What remains is not paranoia but a discipline: asking, in every medical context, which population you are looking at and which population is missing.
When a screening campaign reports that “five-year survival rates have improved,” ask whether overall mortality has changed. Five-year survival can rise to 100% without saving a single life if all the increase comes from earlier detection of lesions that were going to be survived anyway. Overall mortality, deaths per hundred thousand population per year, is much harder to manipulate. It is also the only figure that answers the question the survival rate appears to answer.
A cancer survivor telling you her treatment saved her life can be sincere and still wrong about causation. The conviction is real. The causal claim it carries is not derived from anything she has direct access to. You can be glad she is alive without accepting her account of why.
An oncology center’s published survivor outcomes report a filtered population. Ask about the patients who did not complete treatment. Ask about the patients who died of treatment-related complications and were classified as cancer deaths. Ask about the patients whose follow-up was lost because they moved into hospice care or stopped responding to calls. The shape of the population that gets reported is the shape of the population that survived long enough to be counted.
Facing a screening recommendation yourself, the question to ask is the one the military analysts in 1943 did not ask: what does this examination fail to show me? The bullet holes on the surviving bombers concealed the bullet holes on the destroyed ones. The success stories of the screening industry conceal the women treated for lesions they did not have, the men rendered impotent by surgery for cancers that would never have grown, the second cancers induced by the radiation, and the patients whose treatments killed them and who are now counted, by quiet bureaucratic convention, as having died from their disease.
The full investigative case on these screenings, what they detect, what they miss, what they manufacture, and what they cost, has been documented at length in earlier work.¹⁰ ¹¹ ¹² ¹³ ¹⁴
What the Trials Actually Show
Defenders of mammography routinely cite two trials. The Health Insurance Plan of New York trial, begun in 1963, and the Swedish Two-County Trial, conducted between 1977 and 1985, both reported reductions in breast cancer mortality among screened women. Both have been criticized on methodological grounds. The HIP trial’s randomization was uneven, with baseline differences between arms and exclusion rules applied asymmetrically. The Two-County Trial used cluster randomization that did not consistently balance comparison groups and lacked blinded cause-of-death assessment. Its mortality estimates shifted across successive reanalyses. The Cochrane systematic review of mammography trials classified both as carrying significant risk of bias.⁶
The most rigorously conducted breast cancer screening trial, the Canadian National Breast Screening Study, followed nearly ninety thousand women for twenty-five years. It found no reduction in breast cancer mortality from mammography screening, and no reduction in all-cause mortality.¹⁶
All-cause mortality is the figure that resists the gaming. When a study reports that breast cancer deaths fell among screened women but all-cause deaths did not, the women who avoided a death coded as breast cancer died of something else within the same window: heart failure from chemotherapy-induced cardiotoxicity, second cancers induced by the radiation given for the first, complications from the surgery, strokes after years of endocrine therapy. The Cochrane review and meta-analyses across multiple cancers have repeatedly found that all-cause mortality is essentially identical in screened and unscreened populations. The treatment that prevents one death produces another. The cancer-specific column improves; the death column does not. Survivorship bias gives the illusion of a saved life. All-cause mortality data shows that the life, where treatment did anything at all, was traded rather than added.
The Bombers and the Patients
Abraham Wald died in 1950 in a plane crash in the Nilgiri mountains of southern India. The principle he identified outlived him by three-quarters of a century and now sits, unrecognized by the institutions that depend on it, at the center of the modern medical industry.
The bombers that came back showed where a bomber could be shot and still come back. They did not show where a bomber was vulnerable. The cancer survivors who give interviews, walk in fundraisers, and tell their friends to get screened show where the modern oncology machine is not lethal. They do not show where it works.
The patients who died of their treatments are not at the marathon. The patients treated for lesions that would never have killed them have no way to know they were never in danger. The patients whose cancers were going to be survived regardless have no way to credit their own bodies rather than the chemicals introduced into them. They are the bullet holes on the wings: survivable damage, mapped and celebrated, while the damage that mattered remains invisible because the people who suffered it are no longer in the room.
Wald told the military to armor the engines and the cockpit, the places the surviving planes were not hit. The same instruction applies to medicine: look at what the survivors do not show you. The damage that matters is on the planes that did not come back, and on the patients who can no longer testify.
How to Explain This to a Six-Year-Old
Imagine all your friends drink a magic potion that’s supposed to keep them safe. Half of them disappear. The other half come back and tell you the potion worked great.
If you only listen to the friends who came back, you’ll be sure the potion is wonderful. You’ll tell other kids to drink it too.
But the other half are gone. They can’t tell you whether the potion hurt them. You don’t know whether the potion saved the friends who came back, or whether those friends would have been fine without ever drinking it.
When a cancer survivor tells you the treatment saved her life, listen to her kindly. But remember the friends who disappeared. They are part of the story too.
Quick Reference: The Four Biases
Survivorship bias. Only the living testify. Cancer patients who died of their treatments do not give interviews. The visible patient population is filtered by the treatments themselves.
Lead-time bias. Finding a cancer earlier does not extend life. It extends the time you know about it. Five-year survival rates can rise to 100% without saving a single life.
Length-time bias. Screening preferentially catches slow-growing lesions that were less likely to kill in the first place. Aggressive cancers arise and progress between scans, often undetected until they present symptomatically.
Overdiagnosis. Many screen-detected lesions would never have caused harm. The patient is treated for something that was not a threat, survives easily, and credits the treatment.
References
International Solidarity Movement | July 5, 2026
A family – displaced from Khirbet Samra in July 2025 after years of constant harassment by occupation forces and violent settler Uri Cohen – moved to Atouf, where they purchased a plot of land, determined to defy the occupation’s efforts to destroy their livelihood.
Having to leave their home of more than 20 years was both deeply traumatic and hugely expensive. The 40 dunams in Atouf cost half a million shekels (about 160,000 USD) and transportation costs for all their livestock and belongings were high. Atouf is a primarily agricultural area and there is little grazing land; the family is therefore forced to feed their animals grain and hay. They have also had to spend 150,000 shekels (50,000 USD) on building pens spacious enough to protect their sheep from the heat. The costs of maintaining their flock of 800 sheep have proved unsustainable, and the family has had no choice but to sell 300 of them.
In early December 2025, less than six months after their arrival in Atouf, the family received a demolition order: their property is situated on the path of “Crimson Thread”, a Zionist project that entails the construction of a 22 km long military road with an apartheid fence and a 20m wide “buffer zone” running along eitherside. Stretching from Ein Shibli to Tayasir, the barrier will cut through — and off from one another — the communities of Atouf, Tammoun and Yarza.
On the occupation’s plans, the road cuts almost exactly through the middle of the family property; 36 dunums have already been confiscated, and in January 2026 demolition orders were issued for the remaining 4 dunums, which include the family’s house and the sheep pens.
The family, together with other families and the Tubas municipality appealed the demolition orders, submitting the landowners’ deeds, and the barrier project was temporarily suspended. But then, on June 7, the Israeli court ruled that in 5 of the 7 areas impacted by the project the excavation work could continue (the two sections in which the suspension order still applies are those in the vicinity of Khirbet Yarza). Building demolitions (32 across five sections, 9 of which are residential structures) are still under discussion in court.
Since June 13, the family have had to endure the constant presence of soldiers and bulldozers on their property. The military have installed caravans and tents and dug a trench between the 36 confiscated dunums and the family’s home and pens. Now, the bulldozers are at work preparing for the construction of the barrier; the digging has destroyed the pipes that transport water to the family’s crops and livestock. When a family member went to get water from a well that is situated on the family’s land he was accused by the occupation forces of stealing water.
The family, together with the whole community of Atouf and all the Palestinian villages threatened by “Crimson Thread” are calling for international media and institutional attention in order to expose the brutality of this project which is intended to bisect the Jordan Valley, further isolating Palestinian communities from one another and dramatically worsening their conditions of life.
“during the day they carry out cutting, bulldozing, and destruction works, while at night they fire burning illumination flares over the area. These are dropped near the livestock shelters, creating constant fear, as we worry they might fall onto animal fodder or plastic greenhouses and set everything on fire.” – a family member
By Rachel Marsden | RT | July 5, 2026
It’s not every day that an EU member state has the opportunity to push back in favor of freedom. At least not without elections. But a German court did have that chance – and promptly blew it on behalf of European citizens everywhere.
Back in 2022 when the Ukraine war was ramping up, the European Commission made an executive order banning Russian media broadcasting in the EU. Meaning that you couldn’t – and still can’t – access RT from within the EU, either on TV or on the web, without a VPN.
So some folks running a website in Saarbrucken, Germany, near the French border, started including some RT videos in their live feed. They reportedly did this exactly four times, back in 2023. Whoop-dee-do, right?
Wrong. This is the EUSSR we’re talking about, remember?
For this, the accused ended up facing criminal prosecution in Germany for promoting some EU-sanctioned RT Germany content. But it turns out that even the German court in Saarbrucken considering this case had doubts as to whether these guys and their website actually fit the definition of an “operator” under the EU sanction’s language that “prohibits any operator from broadcasting, enabling, facilitating or otherwise contributing to broadcast, any” Russian media content. So the German court referred the question to the European Court of Justice tasked with interpreting and clarifying EU regulations and laws.
Wrong question, guys. Why didn’t you start with asking the ECJ whether the regulation itself, made unilaterally by the EU’s unelected and unaccountable executive branch, is even valid at all under the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and its Article 11 protecting freedom of expression? The fact that the question wasn’t put to the European court by the German one has spawned a judgment that’s stunning in its failure to interpret the application of any free speech restrictions narrowly enough to avoid the disproportionate limiting of free expression.
The German court missed the forest for the trees and got down into the weeds and all hung up on the comparatively minor issue of whether the website could be considered an “operator” without being a commercial entity. Which the European court then used as a prelude to launch a sweeping McCarthyist “reds under the bed”-style tirade.
“The term ‘disinformation’ is a translation of the Russian word ‘дезинформация’ (dezinformatsiya), coined in the early 1920s by the Soviet intelligence services. Joseph Stalin is credited as being the originator of that term, deliberately making it sound French in order to make it seem Western in origin and thereby enhance its credibility,” wrote the EU court, self-identifying as a history professor. How about if I take that as an open invitation to self-identify as a judge in my capacity as a final-year law student?
The ECJ ultimately ruled that commercialism is irrelevant when the website solicits donations, and had raised over €60,000 within a period of a year. It basically said, look, any commercial nature of the platform risks being a false dichotomy, because who’s to say that the sanctioned entities themselves wouldn’t be paying these independent outlets through donations to promote their banned content: ”Even though, for the purposes of classification as an ‘operator’, no economic activity or income generation is necessary, the context of an appeal for donations enabling such sums to be collected warrants some comment. The fact that some websites are financed by donations rather than by a registered commercial activity justifies increased vigilance as to their possible use as a tool for propaganda purposes, in particular in the case of State-sponsored disinformation campaigns,” the European court ruled. “That lack of clarity makes it more difficult to identify financial flows and, therefore, the actors likely to influence editorial policy or content. It thus creates an environment conducive to interference by external interests, including by third countries, which may intervene directly or indirectly in the production or broadcasting of content.”
Isn’t it the prosecution’s job to present actual evidence and proof of influence through the powerful state-backed legal instruments at its disposal? Shouldn’t the ECJ’s definition of “operator,” if it leans so heavily on the risk of foreign corruption, therefore hinge on whether actual collusion has first been established beyond any reasonable doubt? The ECJ sounds shockingly blasé here about the basic burden of proof for criminal conviction.
This court case had been stayed, or suspended, in Germany pending the ruling by this European Court of Justice. But now it’s free to convict these guys of promoting banned Russian content, under the pretext that just maybe they’re not-so-independent media that schemed on the down-low to distribute Russian media content – something that a lot of people have been doing all over social media of their own volition.
Ultimately, what the buzz around this case effectively does is put a chilling effect on that sharing, and it also risks making people self-censor out of fear of being dragged into court for a judicial proctology exam and having their lives potentially ruined in the press over accusations of Russian collusion. What if these guys (and others) just happen to agree with some of the views expressed on banned Russian media? Who’s going to protect their honestly-held views from establishment authoritarianism?
Hang on, here’s a volunteer for the task.
“Freedom of the press is one of the cornerstones of democracy. And the EU protects what matters, including the right to receive independent, reliable information. The European Media Freedom Act helps keep journalists and sources safe, strengthens editorial independence and protects media organizations from undue interference or legal intimidation. Today, on World Press Freedom Day, we reaffirm our duty to support and protect journalists so they can do their work free from pressure, intimidation, or harm,” says unelected European Commission President and de facto Queen Ursula von der Leyen.
Oh, great. So the same people who censor speech are also its self-appointed defenders. Like an arsonist who goes running around setting fires but also works as a firefighter as their day job.
What’s clear from all this is that EU regulation may look precise on paper, but enforcement isn’t so straightforward. When even member state courts require an official interpretation, then how is the average person supposed to avoid running afoul of the law? The result ends up being less about what’s actually banned and more about what merely feels safe to touch. Not exactly the kind of vibe that one tends to aim for in a democracy.
Rachel Marsden is a columnist, political strategist, and host of independently produced talk-shows in French and English.
MEMO | July 3, 2026
Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger have officially begun a one-year process to withdraw from the International Criminal Court (ICC), the court has announced.
The three West African countries previously said they would leave the ICC, describing it as “a tool of new colonial oppression,” according to Reuters.
The presidency of the ICC’s governing body confirmed that Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger had submitted formal notices of withdrawal, triggering a one-year process to leave the Rome Statute, the treaty that established the court.
In a statement, the presidency said the move could weaken global efforts to end impunity and undermine the pursuit of justice. It urged the three countries to remain committed to the Rome Statute.
The statement also stressed that withdrawal does not release a state from any obligations arising during its membership of the Rome Statute.
Al Mayadeen | July 4, 2026
Mali’s army announced on Saturday that insurgents launched attacks before dawn against its positions in Aguelhok, Anefis, Gao, Sévaré, and Kenieroba, spanning the country’s north and center. Fighting in the different locations began around 5 am local time.
The army says the assaults were attempted strikes on its positions, according to a statement carried on state television.
In Gao, a local official told Reuters that gunfire and rocket fire had targeted a military camp since before dawn. Explosions were also reported in Sévaré, with aircraft later spotted flying over the area, a security source told AFP.
In Kenieroba, roughly 74 kilometers from Bamako, a major prison complex holding extremist prisoners came under attack. There were no immediate reports of casualties.
FLA claims gains in Anefis
The Azawad Liberation Front (FLA), a Tuareg-led separatist movement, confirmed it carried out the assault on Anefis, in the northeastern Kidal region.
For his part, spokesperson Mohamed Elmaouloud Ramadane told Reuters that several army positions in the town had fallen and that clashes were ongoing inside it.
A resident reached by AFP said armed fighters had entered the town but that the army camp had not yet fallen, and government forces were still resisting.
JNIM, the al-Qaeda-linked coalition that has also operated alongside the FLA, had not issued a claim as of Saturday.
Anefis and Aguelhok are the only locations in the Kidal region where Malian troops have maintained a presence since the collapse of government control there in late April, when FLA and JNIM fighters seized the city of Kidal itself.
Russian forces, deployed to Anefis after that offensive, are also stationed in the area, making it a focal point for both Bamako and Moscow’s regional military presence.
Part of a broader pattern since April
Saturday’s attacks come just over two months after JNIM and the FLA carried out a coordinated wave of strikes on military and administrative targets across Mali, including in Bamako, Kati, Gao, Sévaré, and Kidal.
That offensive killed Defense Minister Sadio Camara, whose responsibilities were temporarily transferred to President Assimi Goïta, and led to the withdrawal of Malian and Russian forces from Kidal and other northern towns.
Russia’s Defense Ministry described the April events as a foiled coup attempt involving roughly 12,000 fighters, it said were trained with Western support.
Press TV – July 4, 2026
The funeral ceremony for the martyred Leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, brought together one of the largest gatherings of foreign dignitaries in Iran in recent decades, with representatives from across Asia, Africa, Europe, the Americas, and major international organizations attending the event in Tehran.
The delegations included presidents, prime ministers, parliamentary speakers, foreign ministers, senior government officials, political leaders, and representatives of religious organizations and resistance movements, underscoring the broad international participation in the ceremony.
Asia
Asia accounted for the largest share of official delegations.
From West Asia, Iraq sent one of the largest delegations, including Kurdistan Region President Nechirvan Barzani, Parliament Speaker Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, senior officials, and representatives of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF).
Saudi Arabia was represented by Deputy Foreign Minister Waleed Al-Khuraiji, while Oman sent the chairman of its State Council and Qatar was represented by Parliament Speaker Hassan bin Abdullah Al Ghanim.
Shia community representatives also attended from Bahrain and several other Persian Gulf countries.
Lebanon dispatched Defense Minister Michel Menassa alongside senior delegations from Hezbollah and the Amal Movement.
Yemen was represented by Vice President Mahmoud al-Junaid and an Ansarullah delegation.
Palestinian groups also attended, including senior Hamas leaders and Islamic Jihad Secretary-General Ziyad al-Nakhalah.
From the wider Asian region, Pakistan sent one of the highest-level foreign delegations, headed by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Army Chief Field Marshal Syed Asim Munir. The delegation also included the Senate speaker, senior government officials, and religious leaders.
Afghanistan was represented by delegations from the Taliban administration and the Afghan resistance.
India sent a special government envoy at the deputy foreign minister level.
China was represented by He Wei, Vice Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress.
Tajik President Emomali Rahmon attended the ceremony in person, while Armenia was represented by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan. Georgia sent President Mikheil Kavelashvili along with a Muslim delegation.
Türkiye dispatched Vice President Cevdet Yılmaz, together with political and party representatives.
Turkmenistan was represented by Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow, Chairman of the People’s Council and National Leader.
Among other participants were Azerbaijan’s parliament speaker, Kazakhstan’s foreign minister; the parliamentary speakers of Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka; Thailand’s deputy prime minister; Malaysia’s agriculture minister; Myanmar’s special envoy; and official delegations from South Korea and North Korea.
Africa
Several African governments were represented by ministerial- or cabinet-level delegations.
Egypt sent its Senate speaker.
South Africa, Burkina Faso, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Namibia, Tanzania, and Tunisia all sent official representatives.
Nigeria and Senegal also dispatched delegations to participate in the funeral ceremonies.
Europe and the Americas
Russia sent Dmitry Medvedev, Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council, as President Vladimir Putin’s special representative.
Belarus was represented by its parliament speaker, while Serbia sent its communications minister. Bulgaria also dispatched parliamentary and political representatives.
Germany was represented by members of the country’s Shia community.
From Latin America, Cuba sent its higher education minister as a special representative, while Nicaragua was represented by Foreign Minister Valdrack Jaentschke.
International organizations
The ceremony also drew senior representatives of several international organizations.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) was represented by Secretary-General Nurlan Yermekbayev, while the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) sent Deputy Secretary-General Tariq Ali Bakheet.
The D-8 Organization for Economic Cooperation and the Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO) were represented by their respective secretaries-general.
Press TV – July 4, 2026
Protesters gathered outside the General Medical Council’s headquarters in London to slam the council’s attempt to silence those speaking out about the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
Protesters describe the surgeon as one of the world’s leading war doctors and argue that the regulator’s actions amount to an attempt to silence those who speak publicly about the realities of war,
So we are demonstrating in front of the GMC, because the GMC has decided to appeal against the rulings of two of its own tribunals, so that the High Court would allow it to try me for a third time, in order to get the right political result that it wants.
The GMC is conducting a political campaign against, not just myself, but every doctor who’s spoken up against the genocide, in order to silence us, in the service of the genocidal project. – Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah, British-Palestinian Surgeon
Doctors, campaigners, and members of the public traveled to attend the demonstration, asserting that the proceedings are about more than one individual, warning that they could have a chilling effect on healthcare professionals speaking about humanitarian crises.
Actually, there probably were a group of lawyers set up by the Israelis again to pursue highly charged politicized campaigns against professionals and workers in this country who stand against genocide.
So, really, it’s the action of how the British government and the Israelis who are trying to persecute and outlaw speech in support of Palestine in the heartland of Britain.
Actually, from, we know where our government, you know, the British government, the Labour government, and the Tory government before it have been complicit in genocide from bases like RAF Akrotiri, where Keir Starmer went and complimented the troops.
They run the genocide, they send the planes over Gaza, they stream that information live to the Israelis as they’re committing that genocide.
So our government is complicit, and what they’re doing with their complaints is they’re making it illegal for us to oppose it. – Ranjeet Brar, NHS Surgeon
Speakers at the rally urged the GMC to withdraw the appeal; assisting medical professionals should not face professional consequences for raising concerns over civilian suffering in conflict zones.
There’s a clear example here with Dr. Ghassan, where UK law is for Israel, that it is essentially standing up for the rights of a foreign entity, have been pressuring patients, pressuring people to make complaints against Dr. Abu-Sittah, and this is just one example of many other institutions, medical institutions like the Royal Colleges, and even the journals, the medical journals that we publish in, where they’ve been pressured from UK pro-Israel lobby groups to censor and to shut down any form of pro-Palestine activism.
So, I think we’re seeing this now very clearly with Dr. Ghassan, but the reality is it’s much more widespread than any of us think. – Dr Omar Abdel-Mannan, British-Egyptian Pediatric Neurologist
Organizers say they will continue campaigning until the proceedings against Dr. Abu-Sittah come to an end, maintaining that doctors must be free to speak about humanitarian consequences of war without fear or professional repercussions.
Supporters gathered outside the General Medical Council in London to stand behind British Palestinian surgeon Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah, accusing the regulators of attempting to silence one of the world’s most prominent war doctors.
Demonstrators say the case is not simply about one medic, but the right of healthcare professionals to speak out on the atrocities of Gaza without professional retaliation.
Mario Nawfal | July 3, 2026
Dialogue Works | July 2, 2026
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MEMO | July 3, 2026
Israeli spyware was used to hack the phone of a former Greek member of the European Parliament while he was serving on a committee investigating spyware abuses in Europe, according to a report by Citizen Lab published on Friday, Anadolu reports.
The University of Toronto-based research group said that forensic analysis found Stelios Kouloglou’s iPhone was successfully infected with Pegasus spyware, developed by Israeli company NSO Group, in October 2022 and again the next March.
Kouloglou, a journalist and former MEP, was at the time a substitute member of the European Parliament’s PEGA committee, which was established to investigate the use of Pegasus and equivalent surveillance spyware in EU member states.
Citizen Lab said the infections took place during key periods of PEGA committee activity and could have exposed non-public information, confidential documents, and internal committee deliberations.
“The spyware would have likely captured non-public information about committee activities, possibly breaching EU parliamentary confidentiality and privilege frameworks,” the report said.
The first infection occurred as the committee was preparing hearings on spyware, working on its draft report, and planning fact-finding visits to Greece and the Greek Cypriot Administration. Citizen Lab said Kouloglou’s phone was hacked 10 days before those visits began.
The second infection took place while the committee was engaged in intense discussions over the final drafting process of its report. Kouloglou was in Brussels on March 6-7, 2023, during the period of the infection.
Kouloglou said he was shocked by the findings, describing it as “inconceivable” that a member of the parliamentary committee investigating spyware abuses had himself become a surveillance target, according to Greek news outlet Dnews.
He said he plans to pursue legal action against NSO Group and those responsible for infecting his device, while also raising the issue again through contacts in the European Parliament.
Citizen Lab said the attacks used a “zero-click” exploit, meaning the phone could be compromised without the user opening a link or taking any action.
The group said it was not attributing the attacks to any specific government and found no indication that the Greek government was responsible.
However, it said the first infection overlapped with a previously identified Pegasus campaign targeting Russian and Belarusian-speaking exiled journalists and activists in Europe, suggesting that a Pegasus customer authorized to operate in multiple European countries may have been behind the attack.
Citizen Lab warned that the case posed a serious threat to democratic institutions, saying the hacking could have exposed confidential exchanges among lawmakers and staff, including to parties under investigation by the committee itself.
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RT | February 18, 2024
The drug-induced nipple secretions of trans women are as good as mothers’ breast milk for babies, the University of Sussex Hospitals NHS Trust claimed in a letter to campaigners made public in a report by British think tank the Policy Exchange on Sunday.
The healthcare trust’s medical director, Rachel James, argued that the off-label prescription drug cocktail men transitioning to female take in order to produce milk was “similar to the natural hormones which encourage lactation to develop when the baby is newly born.”
“The evidence which is available demonstrates that the milk is comparable to that produced following the birth of a baby,” James wrote in the letter, sent to Children of Transitioners last August.
Biological men who wish to lactate must first take hormones to grow milk glands and then take high doses of either domperidone or metoclopramide to stimulate milk production. Neither drug is approved for this use, though they are occasionally prescribed off-label to biological women who have trouble lactating.
However, domperidone’s own manufacturer, Janssen, warns patients the drug “may cause unwanted side effects affecting the heart in a breastfed baby” and “should be used during breastfeeding only if your physician considers this clearly necessary.” … continue
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