Israeli strikes on homes, tents, school kill dozens in Gaza
The Cradle | October 1, 2024
At least 25 civilians were massacred, and others injured early on 1 October after Israeli forces bombed homes in central Gaza’s Nuseirat camp, a school in the Tuffah neighborhood east of Gaza City, and a tent in Khan Yunis in the south.
WAFA news agency reported that according to local sources, Israeli bombs destroyed a three-story house in Nuseirat camp belonging to the Al-Durrah family, killing seven children and three women.
Two women were also killed in another Israeli airstrike on a home in Nuseirat belonging to the Abu Ataya family.
In Gaza City, an Israeli bombing killed seven civilians and injured others sheltering in the Shuja’iyya school.
Israeli forces also blew up residential buildings in the city of Rafah, while targeting the Zeitoun and Sabra neighborhoods in Gaza with artillery.
Reuters reports that in the city of Khan Yunis, in southern Gaza, an Israeli air strike on a tent housing displaced people killed six people, local medics said.
At the same time, the armed wings of Hamas, the Islamic Jihad, and other Palestinian resistance factions reported their fighters attacked Israeli forces operating in several areas of Gaza with anti-tank rockets, mortar fire, and explosive devices.
The ongoing Israel campaign to destroy Gaza, ethnically cleanse it of Palestinians, and make way for renewed Jewish settlement, has now lasted almost 12 months and killed at least 41,638 people, most of them children and women.
Thousands of victims are still under the rubble and on the roads, as Israeli forces regularly prevent ambulance and civil defense crews from reaching them.
Israel has continued to massacre Palestinians in Gaza even as it carries out a massive bombing campaign in Lebanon, including in the capital, Beirut.
“The eyes of the world now are on Lebanon while the occupation continues its killing in Gaza. We are afraid the war is going to go on for more months at least,” Samir Mohammed, 46, a father of five from Gaza City, told Reuters.
“It is all unclear now as Israel unleashes its force undeterred in Gaza, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, and God knows where else in the future,” he stated.
The weakness of Zionist air power
By Robert Daly | Al Mayadeen | October 1, 2024
What we have seen in the Zionist conduct of war since October 7, 2023, is a flashy, noisy exhibition but no seizure and holding of territory.
The murder of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah and the destruction of six high-rise apartment buildings with multiple airstrikes make Zionist air power appear triumphant over Hezbollah. But nothing could be further from the truth. It is not air power that defeats enemies in war. Rather, it is infantry—conquering, seizing, and holding territory that defeats an enemy. The Soviet Union defeated Nazi Germany not through air power but through the ground battles of Stalingrad and Kursk and then by pushing the Nazi troops back into Germany as the Soviets liberated one occupied state after another from Ukraine and Belarus to Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The West at the time bombed Dresden and other cities, but that effort had little effect in defeating the Nazis. So, Zionist bombings of Lebanon’s cities kill citizens and wreck their homes but do not occupy territory or defeat Hezbollah.
It is beyond the capability of air power to seize enemy territory and hold it. Air power is only a form of contemporary artillery. In the past 100 years, humankind has ‘progressed’ from mere cannons and tanks delivering artillery shells onto an enemy’s positions to warplanes dropping them from above. What we have seen in the Zionist conduct of war since October 7, 2023, is a flashy, noisy exhibition but no seizure and holding of territory. Today, Hamas has retaken all of Gaza and continues to manage the territory as the Zionists have admitted in press briefings though they attacked Gaza by air. The Zionists responded to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack by bombing and destroying civilian residential buildings, but that did not destroy Hamas, which took advantage of the situation and the changed terrain to prepare positions from behind wrecked buildings to attack Zionist tanks and armored personnel carriers, which they have destroyed by the dozen. In this way, we have seen the contrast between ground fighters and air power in Gaza, where the Zionists are effective at killing women and children from the sky above with bombs, but cannot occupy and hold the territory that that population lived in.
If air power is an effective way to defeat one’s enemy and win a war, why is Hamas still ruling Gaza? Yedioth Ahronoth, a leading ‘Israeli’ newspaper, citing Israeli security sources wrote this past week that:
○ Hamas is working to consolidate its authority again in the areas of Gaza that the IOF left.
○ No one in Gaza stands against Hamas, and no one challenges its rule.
This is not new. In June, after eight months of Zionist bombing, the Guardian wrote “Hamas still strong in areas ‘cleared’ by Israel in northern Gaza.” How is that possible? Zionist warplanes far above do not provide much competition with Palestinian freedom fighters on the ground. Zionist armored vehicles full of scared reservists are easy targets for Gazan patriots who destroy those vehicles one after another. The Guardian concludes, “Hamas’s ability to return to areas from which it was earlier forced to retreat threatens ‘forever war’.” The paper explains, “There may be more Hamas militants in the north of Gaza, supposedly cleared by Israeli forces months ago, than in Rafah, the southern city in the territory described by Israeli officials as the extremist Islamist organization’s “last stronghold”. “We do have to remember there are more Hamas armed people in the north of Gaza in the places that the IDF has already moved out of than … in Rafah … Those are the IDF’s numbers. This is why the IDF had to go back into Jabaliya and … Zeitoun. Hamas is controlling all those areas,” Eyal Hulata, the head of “Israel’s” “national security council” from 2021 to last year, told reporters last May. Zionist air power and fragile armor have failed to conquer Gaza. They only wrecked it.
One can expect an even better outcome for the domestic national liberation army in Lebanon, where Hezbollah has the advantage of better and more artillery and soldiers experienced in fighting ISIS and Al-Qaeda on the ground in Syria.
One of the most disgusting Zionist air war practices is their cowardly war by assassination. Zionists will swoop down in aircraft of various sorts to kill someone on a motorcycle, a family in a car, or a leader of the national liberation movement in a building. To do that, they do not hesitate to murder hundreds of others in the area, as when the fascists murdered Sayyed Hassan. For if the Nazi abandoned his air vehicle and fought a fair fight on the ground, he would surely lose.
Moreover, it is an embarrassment to an American with a memory to hear Hezbollah or Hamas referred to as “terrorists” for defending their own land from Zionist invaders. Does not anyone remember Washington’s crossing of the Delaware on Christmas 1776, when they and their makeshift army slaughtered British-hired Hessian mercenaries drunk from celebrating the holiday? If Hamas is “terrorist”, then why isn’t George Washington?
So, we have it: “Israel” has not won in Lebanon. Rather, “the enemy must wait for us by air, land, and sea. We repeat: If war is imposed on Lebanon, the Resistance will fight without rules, controls, or ceilings,” Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah once said. “Storming the Galilee is a possibility that remains present within the framework of any war that the occupation may launch against Lebanon,” he added, referencing his 12-year-old promise that Hezbollah will invade “Israel’s” north if Tel Aviv chooses to attack.
UN Report Reveals Nobody Held Accountable for Crimes Against Russian PoWs in Ukraine
Sputnik – 01.10.2024
GENEVA – A recent periodic report from the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) revealed that no one has been held accountable for crimes committed against Russian prisoners of war in Ukraine.
Earlier this year, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine, established by the United Nations Human Rights Council, released a report indicating that Ukrainian soldiers committed war crimes by executing and torturing Russian prisoners of war. The UN mission documented 25 instances of reprisals against these prisoners by Ukrainian troops.
“The Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine reported that as of 16 August 2024, five pre-trial investigations were carried out into possible ill-treatment, as well as wilful killings of Russian prisoners of war, under articles 434 and 438 (“violations of rules and customs of war”) of the Criminal Code of Ukraine. However, no person received a notification of suspicion in relation to these investigations,” the report read.
More than half of the 205 Russian prisoners of war in Ukraine interviewed by the UN since March 2023 said they had been tortured and ill-treated, the report read, adding that 10 of them “reported being subjected to sexual violence, including inflicting violence to genitals and threats of rape.”
“The vast majority of incidents of torture or ill-treatment of Russian POWs (reported by 87 interviewees) occurred in unofficial or transit locations including garages, basements or private houses. OHCHR identified several such places. They were typically used by frontline units of the Ukrainian armed forces or by security forces and were located in Donetsk, Kharkov, Kherson, Kiev, Lugansk and Zaporozhye regions. Russian POWs were held in these places after evacuation from the battlefield and before entering official facilities,” the report read.
‘More afraid of democracy than for democracy’ – AfD ban moves forward in German parliament
Remix News | October 1, 2024
Germany is heading closer to outright fascism as the establishment parties move to completely ban the rival Alternative for Germany party (AfD), currently the second-strongest party in the country, according to polling. Now, 10 MPs from four parties, each, totaling 40 MPs from the Christian Democrats (CDU), the Left Party, the Greens, and the Social Democrats (SPD) will put forward a motion to ban the party because it is a “threat to democracy.”
The motion was drawn up by Saxon CDU MP Marco Wanderwitz, who personally lost his local election to an AfD politician but is only in parliament because he was also included on the CDU’s election list. As Remix News has reported, he has been working for at least a year to gather enough support from members of parliament to pass a ban on the AfD.
Although Wanderwitz has struggled to get the required 37 signatures to put forward the motion, now that many of the ruling establishment parties have lost by huge margins in the eastern state of Thuringia, Brandenburg, and Saxony, his work has been easier.
Not all parties have yet joined in, including the left-wing BSW and the Free Democrats (FDP). However, there are already politicians in the BSW who have come out and said they want a ban, including Brandenburg top candidate Robert Crumbach, who called for their banning during his campaign.
The question now is whether there is a majority of MPs who are willing to ban the party in the parliament. The ban motion indicates that the AfD wants to abolish the free democratic order with an “actively combative and aggressive attitude.” It is unclear if there is a majority of MPs who would pass the motion, but there are those who disagree with the motion.
FDP MP Katja Adler slammed the motion on X, writing: “One could get the impression that the supporters of the ban are more afraid of democracy than for democracy.”
Even within the SPD, there are politicians who doubt whether a ban is the right method, not necessarily because they believe in democracy, but because there are fears the Federal Constitutional Court could rule the banning is unconstitutional, which would only help fuel the AfD’s rise.
SPD General Secretary Kühnert, for example, said that he wants the party banned as well but does not think there is yet enough evidence to secure a ban.
Sahra Wagenknecht also expressed criticism of the ban, telling “T-Online” that instead of taking the legitimate concerns of AfD voters seriously, they wanted to get rid of the unwelcome competitor by banning it. Wagenknecht, however, may also be positioning her party to pick up AfD voters should a ban go through.
The CSU regional group in the Bundestag also rejected a motion to ban the AfD. Regional group leader Alexander Dobrindt told the Augsburger Allgemeine that he thought the motion was wrong and counterproductive.
Various AfD politicians have already responded to the ban proposal.
“I think that’s great. A ban motion against the AfD, supported by the CDU and SPD. We will request a roll call vote. That delegitimizes every single applicant and every yes-sayer and every abstention vote as anti-democrats. Not even Minister of the Interior Fraeser, who has had us monitored by her Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution for years, has enough evidence together after many years to classify us as extremist,” wrote AfD MP Beatrix von Storch.
There are also worries from the establishment that a ban procedure would last years, during which time, the ban procedure itself would only strengthen the AfD.
Far-left radical Anton Hofreiter, of the Green Party, said in an interview that if he thought an AfD ban procedure would be over quickly, he would support it, but since it would likely last years, he thinks it is risky at this point in time.
Those opposed to the AfD already have a plan B if their efforts to ban the party fail, which would be to cut state funding to the party, which would effectively mean the end of the party, as it would no longer be able to fund its activities or pay employees.
Germany is now the only Western country that is seriously attempting to enact a ban on a major opposition party. Although such actions are routine in non-democratic nations, it would mark a dark day in German history and point to the rise of fascism and a party oligarchy in the country once again.
Notably, with stabbings and terror attacks brought on by the immigration policies of all the major parties, the AfD continues to soar in popularity. Just last week, a Syrian migrant committed arson, attacked people with a machete, and ran over people with his van in a mass attack in Essen that saw the man injure 31 people, including small children. It follows a string of Jihadi attacks in Solingen, Mannheim, and Munich in recent months.
The AfD, which is calling for the strictest immigration controls of all the major parties, is also tremendously popular with the young. Increasingly, the major parties cannot win on the issues, so they are turning to outright bans against their democratic opposition.
Resources of Ukraine’s NATO allies will dwindle by 2025
By Ahmed Adel | October 1, 2024
NATO’s continued arms shipments to Ukraine next year are at risk due to a lack of resources among key backers of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, experts told Bloomberg on September 27. This is a far cry from the promises made in the first years of the war when the West promised to support Ukraine until victory was achieved, a victory that will not occur.
At stake is a controversial $50 billion loan deal, which came from the profits from the Russian Central Bank’s frozen assets in Western banks. Bloomberg reported that Washington fears that Hungary could block or reduce the deal. Even if the amount were released, it would only be enough to keep the Kiev regime supplied with weapons until the middle of next year.
This is without taking into account Ukraine’s economic situation, including a projected $35 billion gap in the 2025 budget, of which about $15 billion remains uncovered, even after applying subsidies from the International Monetary Fund and the European Union.
Bloomberg’s sources warned that the deficit could force the Kiev regime to enter peace talks with Russia “from a position of weakness.”
Kiev is also struggling to convince its backers to continue shelling out tens of billions of dollars of weapons for the conflict, as increased Russian production outpaces the combined output of the collective West.
According to the news agency, a November victory for US presidential candidate Donald Trump will likely increase pressure on Zelensky to end the war he intends to continue despite no hope of victory. It is recalled that in April, the Republican-controlled US House of Representatives approved a $48 billion security aid package for Ukraine only after a six-month standoff over the crisis on the US southern border.
In addition, Germany — Ukraine’s second-largest backer after the US — faces constitutional debt constraints that have already begun to affect its support for Kiev. With economic troubles spreading to France, Italy, and the United Kingdom, those countries may also cut back on aid. Keir Starmer’s government in London has vowed to continue vigorously supporting Kiev despite tough budget choices at home.
Ukrainian Defence Minister Rustem Umerov admitted that his country is more than 80 percent dependent on military aid from Western partners, while the Ukrainian General Staff reports that the situation on the front line remains difficult due to the superiority of the Russian Armed Forces.
According to Umerov, the Western supply of military equipment is the basis of the assistance provided to Ukraine. The country receives resources from the US, the European Union, NATO, the Security Assistance Group Ukraine (SAG-U), the United States European Command (EUCOM) and “a dozen other countries in a bilateral format on a daily basis.”
“So far, international military assistance has been the backbone of our aid. […] We are more than 80 percent dependent on our partners,” he said in an interview with a Ukrainian publication.
On September 25, the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine stated that due to the Russian Army’s superiority in terms of the number of troops and equipment available, the situation along the entire front line remains difficult.
“The situation on the front line remains difficult. The enemy, using its superiority in personnel and equipment, is continuously attacking our positions,” the General Staff’s official Telegram channel said.
This difficult situation is not set to be alleviated because, as already mentioned, Ukraine’s allies are facing their own economic issues and political opposition.
Last week, The New York Times reported that the US-EU plan to finance Ukraine stalled due to legal issues, as the systems in Washington and Europe are making it difficult for the initiative to come to fruition. However, even with the plan implemented, the $50 billion will be insufficient to cover Kiev’s military needs for another year of conflict, and the allies will have to look further afield for funding, according to Bloomberg.
The outlet reported that Ukraine’s military is relying on its allies for artillery ammunition, missiles, and improved air defence capabilities. This has prompted US President Joe Biden to announce another $8 billion in funding for Kiev and appear to be coordinating additional support from NATO members before his term ends.
However, all this action has done is once again demonstrate the grand failure Biden’s adventure in Ukraine was, all for the sake of the vain attempt to weaken Russia. Rather, Russia has territorially expanded, diversified its economic partners, and taken great leaps in de-dollarising global trade, all the whilst Ukraine has been economically and demographically destroyed and completely dependent on Western aid, which is clearly running out, for survival.
Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.
American Atrocity: Remembering the Shenandoah Burning
By Jim Bovard | The Libertarian Institute | September 30, 2024
George Orwell wrote in 1945 that “the nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.” This week is the 160th anniversary of one of the worst atrocities of the American Civil War, a barbarous episode that vanished long ago from history books. Union General Philip Sheridan laid waste to a hundred mile swath of the Shenandoah Valley, leaving vast numbers of women and children on the edge of starvation.
Before the summer of 1864, the Civil War was primarily fought on battlefields. After failing to decisively vanquish Confederate forces in pitched clashes, the Union leadership widened the war, trying to destroy the South’s economy—with the civilian population increasingly a target. William Tecumseh Sherman, the commander of the Union forces menacing Atlanta in 1864, telegrammed Washington saying that in the South, “There is a class of people men, women, and children, who must be killed or banished before you can hope for peace and order.”
On July 15, 1864, supreme Union commander Ulysses S. Grant signed an order that the Shenandoah Valley should be made into a “desert” and “all provisions and stock should be removed, and the people notified to move out.” His troops would “eat out Virginia clear and clean as far as they go, so that crows flying over it for the balance of the season will have to carry their provender with them.” In August 1864, Grant ordered Sheridan to “do all the damage to railroads and crops you can. If the war is to last another year, we want the Shenandoah Valley to remain a barren waste.” Sheridan set to the task with vehemence, declaring that “the people must be left nothing but their eyes to weep with over the war” and promised that, when he was finished, the valley “from Winchester to Staunton will have but little in it for man or beast.”
Because people lived in a state that had seceded from the Union, Sheridan acted as if they had automatically forfeited their property, if not their lives. Many who lived in the Shenandoah Valley, such as Mennonites, had opposed secession and refused to join the Confederate Army, but their property was also looted and burned.
Stephen Starr, author of Union Cavalry in the Civil War, wrote, “The deliberate planned devastation of the Shenandoah Valley has deservedly ranked as one of the grimmest episodes of a sufficiently grim war. Unlike the haphazard destruction caused by Sherman’s bummers in Georgia, it was committed systematically, and by order.” Historian John Heatwole, author of The Burning: Sheridan’s Devastation of the Shenandoah Valley, recounted, “From a hill near Mt. Jackson Union cavalrymen counted 168 barns burning at one time. When it was all over Sheridan’s men had systematically destroyed around 1,400 barns, countless other farm structures, seventy mills, several factories, three iron furnaces, warehouses and railroad buildings, and hundreds of thousands of bushels of wheat, oats and corn, and crops standing in the fields. In Rockingham County alone, over 10,000 head of livestock were driven off.”
Some Union soldiers were aghast at their marching orders. A Pennsylvania cavalryman lamented at the end of the fiery spree, “We burnt some sixty houses and all most of the barns, hay, grain and corn in the shocks for fifty miles [south of] Strasburg. It was a hard-looking sight to see the women and children turned out of doors at this season of the year.” An Ohio major wrote in his diary that the burning “does not seem real soldierly work. We ought to enlist a force of scoundrels for such work.” A newspaper correspondent embedded with Sheridan’s army reported, “Hundreds of nearly starving people are going North not half the inhabitants of the valley can subsist on it in its present condition.” After one of Sheridan’s favorite aides was shot by Confederates, Sheridan ordered his troops to burn all houses within a five-mile radius. After many outlying houses had been torched, the small town at the center—Dayton—was spared after a federal officer disobeyed Sheridan’s order.
By the end of Sheridan’s campaign, the former “breadbasket of the Confederacy” could no longer even feed the women and children remaining there. An English traveler in 1865 “found the Valley standing empty as a moor.” Historian Walter Fleming, in his classic 1919 study The Sequel to Appomattox, quoted one bedeviled local farmer, “From Harpers Ferry to New Market, which is about eighty miles, the country was almost a desert…The barns were all burned; chimneys standing without houses, and houses standing without roof, or door, or window.” Historian Heatwole concluded, “The civilian population of the Valley was affected to a greater extent than was the populace of any other region during the war, including those in the path of Sherman’s infamous march to the sea in Georgia.” Unfortunately, given the chaos of the era at the end of the Civil War and in its immediate aftermath, there are no reliable statistics on the number of women, children, and other civilians who perished.
Some defenders of Union tactics insist there was no intent to harshly punish civilians. However, after three years of a bloody stalemate, the Lincoln administration had adapted a total-war mindset to scourge the South into submission. As Sheridan was finishing his fiery campaign, General Sherman wrote to Grant, “Until we can repopulate Georgia, it is useless to occupy it, but the utter destruction of its roads, houses and people will cripple their military resources.” President Abraham Lincoln congratulated both Sheridan and Sherman for campaigns that sowed devastation far and wide. But Lincoln’s cheerleading for collective punishment vanished from the history books thanks to his hypocritical call for “malice towards none” in his second inaugural address.
The carnage inflicted by Sheridan, Sherman, and other northern commanders made the South’s post-war recovery far slower and multiplied the misery of both white and black survivors. At the end of the war, four million ex-slaves were largely left to fend for themselves. The horrific suffering of the former slaves was swept under the rug by historians for much of the twentieth century. However, as Professor Jim Downs noted in his 2012 book, Sick from Freedom, roughly 25% of freed slaves died or became gravely ill in the first years after the war. Ex-slaves suffered violence from the Ku Klux Klan, but even more suffered because they were liberated into an economic landscape that had been desolated by four years of increasingly destructive war. Sherman’s devastating march through Georgia and the Carolinas, for instance, resulted in “a large contraction in agricultural investment, farming asset prices, and manufacturing activity. Elements of the decline in agriculture persisted through 1920,” according to a 2018 National Bureau of Economic Research analysis. Harvests collapsed in the south during and after the Civil War; cotton output fell by half between 1860 and 1870. A 1997 analysis in theJournal of Economic History concluded that “the legacy of the Civil War was far more severe and long lasting than what has been previously supposed” for both blacks and whites, especially regarding illnesses such as hookworm spread in part by poverty.
After the Civil War, politicians and many historians consecrated the conflict as a moral crusade and its sometimes-grisly tactics were consigned to oblivion. The habit of sweeping abusive policies under the rug also permeated post-Civil War policy toward the Indians (Sheridan famously declared, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian”) and the suppression of Filipino insurgents after the Spanish-American War. Later, historians would often ignore U.S. military tactics in World War II, Vietnam, and Iraq that resulted in massive civilian casualties.
The U.S. government’s targeting of civilians in the final campaigns of the Civil War signified a radical change in the relation between citizens and government that endured long after the South’s surrender at Appomattox. An 1875 article in the American Law Review noted, “The late war left the average American politician with a powerful desire to acquire property from other people without paying for it.” Ironically, a war that stemmed in large part from the blunders and follies of politicians on both sides of the Potomac resulted in a vast expansion of the political class’s presumption of power.
In the post-war era in the late 1800s, Republican politicians were notorious for invoking the “bloody shirt” of wounded veterans to demonize political opponents who did not tow the GOP line. After the September 11 terrorist attacks, America saw the same political vilification of anyone who dissented from the Bush administration’s wars. Will the same groveling reflex occur from any wars launched by the next president?
Since 1864, no prudent American should have expected this nation’s wars to have happy or uplifting endings. Unfortunately, as long as people rarely if ever hear of the atrocities their government commits, citizens will underestimate the odds that wars will spawn debacles and injustices that return to haunt us.
US universities losing hundreds of billions as top Chinese scientists and researchers go home
Inside China Business | September 29, 2024
Research and Development (R&D) is a major profit center for the top universities in the United States. Besides the nearly $100 billion they earn in grants from the US government and private sources, university-based researchers create patents and inventions that generate many more billions annually.
China is the largest foreign source of scientists and researchers, and they are concentrated in the hard sciences and in engineering, where over 95% of R&D spending takes place. But since 2018, Chinese scientists are increasingly deciding to return to China to set up new research departments. Of those who are still in the US, over 60% admit they are strongly considering moving, and over half now refuse to work on projects that involve funding by US government sources.
To American universities, the loss of these scientists, along with future contributions to scientific research and commercial applications and market value, are incalculable. But losses probably already exceed a trillion dollars, given the departures of so many top scientists in Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, medicine, biochemistry, materials science, nanotechnology, and quantum computing.
Resources and links:
More Chinese Students Are Staying in China to Study https://erudera.com/news/more-chinese…
Surge in Chinese Scientists Leaving US for Home Institutions https://erudera.com/news/surge-in-chi…
Caught in the crossfire: Fears of Chinese–American scientists https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas…
Scientists of Chinese descent leaving the US at an accelerating pace https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/s…
Reverse Brain Drain? Exploring Trends among Chinese Scientists in the U.S. https://sccei.fsi.stanford.edu/china-…
Resources on the Patent Revenue Budget Model https://financeandbusiness.ucdavis.ed…
R&D Expenditures at U.S. Universities Increased by $8 Billion in FY 2022 https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf24307
South China Morning Post, Nanotech pioneer Wang Zhonglin leaves US to work in China ‘full time’ https://www.scmp.com/news/china/scien…
SCMP, The Chinese scientists leaving top US universities to take up high-profile roles in China, boosting Beijing in its race for global talent https://www.scmp.com/news/china/scien…
Closing scene, Suzhou, Jiangsu
Germany Should Pursue Charges for Nord Stream Blasts & Point Out US Role – Bundestag MP
Sputnik – 30.09.2024
The German federal government should immediately bring charges for the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines and point out the violation of anti-terrorism treaties by the United States or other countries involved, Bundestag member Steffen Kotre told Sputnik.
In a conversation on the sidelines of Russian Energy Week, he suggested that Washington had probably been involved in the destruction of the gas pipelines. Kotre does not know to what extent Kiev was involved, but, from his point of view, it is difficult to believe that Ukraine could have carried out such an action without outside help. Kotre also believes that the German authorities know who is guilty of what happened, and if not, then the information will certainly be found in the Swedish, Norwegian or US intelligence services.
“That is why the federal government must immediately press charges and, of course, point out that the United States or other countries have violated international treaties, namely agreements aimed at preventing terrorism. And anyone who helps and encourages this violates these international agreements aimed at preventing the spread of terrorism. And all this must be said. And, of course, claims for damages in international courts and much more,” the lawmaker emphasized.
The explosions on two Russian export gas pipelines to Europe — Nord Stream and Nord Stream 2 — occurred on September 26, 2022. Germany, Denmark and Sweden have not ruled out deliberate sabotage. Nord Stream AG, the operator of Nord Stream, said that the destruction of the gas pipelines was unprecedented, and it was impossible to estimate the repair time. The Russian Prosecutor General’s Office initiated a case on an act of international terrorism. Russia has repeatedly requested data on the explosions on Nord Stream, but has never received it, according to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.
The Russian Energy Week was held in Moscow from September 26 to 28. Sputnik acted as the forum’s media partner.
30 Lawmakers Sponsor Bill to End Liability Protection for Vaccine Makers
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | September 30, 2024
A bill introduced late last week in the U.S. House of Representatives would end the liability protections Congress gave vaccine makers under the 1986 Childhood Vaccine Injury Act.
Thirty Republican lawmakers signed on as co-sponsors to House Bill 9828, End the Vaccine Carveout Act. The proposed legislation would end the broad protection from liability for injuries resulting from vaccines listed on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Childhood Immunization Schedule.
“The … vaccine makers are criminal enterprises that have paid tens of billions in criminal penalties over the past decade,” Children’s Health Defense (CHD) founder and chairman on leave Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a statement on the bill.
Kennedy, who has long advocated for eliminating liability protection for vaccine manufacturers, added, “By freeing them from liability for negligence, the 1986 statute removed any incentive for these companies to make safe products. If we want safe and effective vaccines we need to end the liability shield.”
CHD, React19 and The American Family Project also supported the development of the bill, the press release said.
REACT19 founder Brianne Dressen, who experienced a debilitating COVID-19 vaccine injury as a volunteer in AstraZeneca’s clinical trial, announced the bill and its co-sponsors in a post on X, formerly Twitter.
“People harmed are long overdue for a compensation process that actually works, and it’s time for the drug companies to pick up the tab,” she said.
‘Complex sham compensation program’ in place since 1986 act
Congress passed the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act to address the risks of vaccines — which Congress and vaccine makers acknowledged had “unavoidable” side effects.
The act set up a “no-fault” system whereby instead of suing the manufacturers, people injured by vaccines can file a claim with the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), which adjudicates the claims.
The VICP was meant to insulate vaccine makers from lawsuits that could bankrupt them while ensuring that injury victims had a straightforward, non-adversarial and fair path to compensation.
The program is funded by a 75-cent-per-dose tax, paid by vaccine makers, for every vaccine included in the program.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services administers the VICP, also known as the “vaccine court.” Court-appointed “special masters” — typically lawyers who previously represented the U.S. government — manage and decide the individual claims.
The proceedings are more informal than a typical courtroom. There is no judge or jury, and the rules of evidence, civil procedure and discovery do not apply.
In practice, getting compensation through the VICP has been notoriously difficult. Critics say the program has devolved to protect government agencies and corporations rather than the health of vaccinated children.
CHD CEO Mary Holland said the 1986 Childhood Vaccine Injury Act effectively left parents and children injured by vaccines with no substantive way to get any compensation while giving vaccine makers a free pass.
“For over 35 years, parents of children injured and killed by government-recommended vaccines have been left with no meaningful redress — only a complex, sham compensation program that pits grieving families against the government, while Big Pharma enjoys no liability,” she said.
“During that same time, chronic health conditions in children — autism, ADHD [attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder], severe allergies, asthma — have skyrocketed,” Holland said.
In some cases, people who are dissatisfied with the outcome of their case in the VICP, or who don’t get a timely decision, can sue the manufacturer for limited causes of action, such as fraud — as is the case in many of the over 200 gardasil injury lawsuits currently being argued against Merck in federal court.
Special protections for COVID drugmakers
Vaccines administered under emergency use authorization (EUA), such as the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines, aren’t covered by the VICP.
Instead, COVID-19 vaccine makers are protected from all liability by the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act, which grants producers of vaccines, medications and medical devices total freedom from liability for any injuries arising from “countermeasures” used to address a public health or national security threat.
The PREP Act directs such “countermeasures” to be covered by the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP).
While the FDA fully licensed versions of the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines for people ages 12 and up, it’s unclear if the fully licensed formulations are being administered, or if some people are still receiving EUA formulations.
COVID-19 vaccines for infants and children ages 6 months through age 11 have not yet been fully licensed — however, they were added to the childhood schedule.
Still, all COVID-19 vaccine injuries — whether from a fully licensed or EUA formulation — remain covered only through the CICP.
However, for the tens of thousands of people injured by the COVID-19 vaccine, compensation through this program has proven nearly impossible.
To date, the CICP has paid only 16 claims for COVID-19 vaccine injuries, totaling $425,301.55. Except for one payment, all of the claims resulted in compensation of $8,962 or less.
The Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines were fully approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for people ages 12 and up, however those vaccines continue , and added to the childhood schedule, they are still not even included in the VICP process.
During the pandemic, Pfizer and Moderna generated the largest profits in history for a drug from their COVID-19 mRNA vaccines. Pfizer made $37 billion in 2021, and slightly more in 2023 from the COVID-19 vaccine alone. Moderna generated over $18 billion in profits in 2021 and $19 billion in 2022.
The most current data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) show that between Dec. 14, 2020, and Aug. 30, 2024, a total of 1,602,516 total adverse events related to the COVID-19 vaccine were reported to VAERS, including 37,390 deaths. There were 311,544 serious injuries reported.
Research also shows that VAERS tends to provide an underestimation of vaccine injuries. Most people don’t report their vaccine injuries to VAERS. Research also has shown that many VAERS reports are delayed or deleted from public view for reasons that are not transparent.
Several lawsuits are currently challenging the constitutionality of the PREP Act, and others have made legal arguments that the PREP Act doesn’t apply in particular cases. However, recently many of these cases have been dismissed in state and federal courts.
Last week, after the Nevada Supreme Court dismissed a case against a man injured by remdesivir, a drug covered by the Prep Act, Kim Mack Rosenberg, general counsel for CHD, told The Defender the decision highlighted “that we need legislative action to undo the damage created by acts such as PREP and the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act.”
What the ‘urgently needed’ legislation will do
Holland said the End the Vaccine Carveout Act is “urgently needed”:
“This legislation will help end Big Pharma’s reign over government. The corrupt public-private partnership of the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act has suppressed science, stacked the deck against families, subverted the democratic marketplace of checks and balances, and removed citizens’ rights to a trial by jury.
“Americans deserve better.”
The bill proposes to remove the requirement for vaccine-injured people to pursue compensation in the vaccine court. Under the law, someone injured by a vaccine would be able to pursue civil action against a vaccine maker, and to seek compensation through the VICP or both.
However, once a person is awarded compensation in civil court, they will no longer be eligible for compensation through the VICP.
The 1986 law also set a short statute of limitations for seeking injury compensation to two or three years of the death or injury, respectively. However, it often takes longer than that for people to realize that a vaccine caused their injury or illness.
The proposed law would allow anyone injured since the program became effective in 1988 to file a lawsuit.
Finally, the bill would end the protection from liability for the COVID-19 vaccines, allowing people injured by the vaccine to sue the vaccine makers in court.
“COVID-19 vaccines must be redefined as vaccines and not ‘countermeasures,’ so that the PREP Act’s liability carveout can no longer apply,” according to a white paper that provided justification for the bill.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Another letter to the four Chief Medical Officers of the UK
Is it acceptable that 60% of young people with vaccine-induced myocarditis have cardiac damage?
Health Advisory & Recovery Team | September 30, 2024
Open letter to the Chief Medical Officers of the 4 nations of the UK
Professor Chris Whitty – CMO England: Email [email protected]
Sir Michael McBride – CMO Northern Ireland: [email protected]
Dr Gregor Smith – CMO Scotland: [email protected]
Dr Frank Atherton – CMO Wales: [email protected]
30th September 2024
Dear Professor Whitty, Dr McBride, Dr Smith and Dr Atherton,
Sixty doctors and scientists wrote to you on 6th September 2021 urging you against rolling out Covid-19 vaccines to healthy children. We had written previously to Professor Whitty in May and again in June of that year to flag up our concerns. As you know, the JCVI in their statement on 3rd September 2021, had decided against recommending these products for children’s direct benefit in view of the mild nature of SARS-CoV-2 infection for their age range coupled with concerns about the known and as yet unknown adverse effects.
They had held a conference call with cardiologists from the USA and also Israel, both countries which had started vaccinating children ahead of the UK. These groups had both reported on vaccine-induced-myocarditis, with the US group having studied a case series of 63 children and finding 89% of affected children showing Late Gadolinium Enhancement (LGE) on cardiac MRI scanning. This finding is known to be indicative of cardiac scarring and to be a predictor of deaths in the 5-years following. The group were planning a follow-up study and members of the JCVI specifically requested a delay of 6 months to await this data before making a decision.
Finally, almost 3 years later, this study has been published and it does not make for happy reading, especially if you are a parent of a child or young person who was affected. Of the 333 children and young adults enrolled, and despite an apparently mild clinical course, 82% showed LGE on their initial cardiac MRI scans, and in 60% these changes were still present at the 6 months follow-up scan. Long-term data is still awaited and risk of cardiac failure sudden death is still unquantified. A new systematic review has confirmed that LGE is a risk factor for all cause mortality, cardiac deaths, arrhythmias and heart failure.
This letter is to put on record the failure of due diligence which you, as a group of chief medical officers, showed when recommending these products for use in healthy children. “The view of the UK CMOs is that the additional likely benefits of reducing educational disruption, and the consequent reduction in public health harm from educational disruption, on balance provide sufficient extra advantage in addition to the marginal advantage at an individual level identified by the JCVI to recommend in favour of vaccinating this group.” The argument that vaccinating children would reduce school disruption seemed to ignore the fact that most of the disruption was arising from the combined policy of (a) routine testing of asymptomatic children and (b) the quarantining of whole classes or in some cases even whole year groups if one child tested positive. In England, this policy had been discontinued on 19 July 2021 just 2 days before the end of the summer term and with no time to assess the likely improvement in school attendance. It was also admitted that the calculations of possible school time saved were not balanced against any potential for school time lost, even for the vaccination process itself, let alone any possible adverse events.
When you advised the rollout of the vaccines to children, did you also advise a prospective study of cardiac health to be carried out in any of the four nations?
If the answer is yes, we would be very grateful to see the results.
If the answer is no, this surely should be organised as a matter of urgency.
Yours sincerely,
Dr Rosamond Jones, MBBS, MD, FRCPCH, retired consultant paediatrician, convenor of CCVAC
-Professor Anthony J Brookes, Department of Genetics & Genome Biology, University of Leicester
-Professor Richard Ennos, MA, PhD. Honorary Professorial Fellow, University of Edinburgh
-Professor Karol Sikora, MA, MBBChir, PhD, FRCR, FRCP, FFPM, Dean of Medicine, Buckingham University, Professor of Oncology
–Professor David Livermore, BSc, PhD, Professor of Medical Microbiology, University of East Anglia
-Professor Keith Willison, PhD, Professor of Chemical Biology, Imperial, London
–Professor Angus Dalgleish, MD, FRCP, FRACP, FRCPath, FMed Sci, Emeritus Professor of Oncology, University of London, Principal, Institute for Cancer Vaccines & Immunotherapy
–Professor John Fairclough FRCS FFSEM retired Honorary Consultant Surgeon
-Professor Norman Fenton, CEng, CMath, PhD, FBCS, MIET, Professor of Risk Information Management, Queen Mary University of London
-Professor John Watkins, Consultant Epidemiologist Cardiff University
–Lord Moonie, MBChB, MRCPsych, MFCM, MSc, House of Lords, former parliamentary under-secretary of state 2001-2003, former consultant in Public Health Medicine
-Dr Theresa Lawrie, MBBCh, PhD, Director, Evidence-Based Medicine Consultancy Ltd, Bath
-Dr Roland Salmon, MB BS, MRCGP, FFPH, Consultant Epidemiologist (retired), former Director, Communicable Disease Surveillance Centre (Wales)
-Dr Alan Mordue, MBChB, FFPH. Retired Consultant in Public Health Medicine & Epidemiology
-Dr John Flack, BPharm, PhD. Retired Director of Safety Evaluation,Beecham Pharmaceuticals 1980-1989 and Senior Vice-president for Drug Discovery 1990-92 SmithKline Beecham
-Dr Gerry Quinn, PhD. Postdoctoral researcher in microbiology and immunology
-Dr Karen Horridge, MBChB(Hons), MSc, MRCP, FRCPCH, Consultant Paediatrician (Disability)
-Mr Anthony Hinton, MBChB, FRCS, Consultant ENT surgeon, London
-Dr Geoffrey Maidment, MBBS, MD, FRCP, retired consultant physician
-Mr Malcolm Loudon, MBChB, MD, FRCSEd, FRCS(Gen Surg), MIHM,VR, Consultant Surgeon
-Dr Christina Peers, MBBS,DRCOG,DFSRH,FFSRH, Consultant in Reproductive Health
-Dr Noel Thomas, MA, MBChB, DCH, DObsRCOG, DTM&H, MFHom, retired doctor
-Dr Elizabeth Evans MA(Cantab), MBBS, DRCOG, Retired Doctor
-Katherine MacGilchrist, BSc (Hons), MSc, CEO/Systematic Review Director, Epidemica Ltd.
-Dr Greta Mushet, MBChB, MRCPsych, retired Consultant Psychiatrist in Psychotherapy
-Mr James Royle, MBChB, FRCS, MMedEd, Colorectal surgeon
–Mr Ian F Comaish, MA, BM BCh, FRCOphth, FRANZCO, Consultant ophthalmologist
-Dr Helen Westwood MBChB MRCGP DCH DRCOG, General Practitioner
-Dr Jonathan Engler, MBChB, LlB (hons), DipPharmMed
-Dr Renée Hoenderkamp, General Practitioner
-Mr Colin Natali, BSc(hons) MBBS, FRCS (orth) ,Consultant Spinal Surgeon
–Dr Alan Black, MBBS, MSc, DipPharmMed, retired pharmaceutical physician
–Dr Mark A Bell, MBChB, MRCP(UK), FRCEM, Consultant in Emergency Medicine
-Dr Livia Tossici-Bolt, PhD, NHS Clinical Scientist
-Dr Zac Cox, BDS, LCPH, Holistic Dentist, Homeopath
-Dr Samuel McBride, BSc(Hons) Medical Microbiology & Immunobiology, MBBCh BAO, MSc in Clinical Gerontology, MRCP(UK), FRCEM, FRCP(Edinburgh), NHS Emergency Medicine & geriatrics
-Dr Branko Latinkic, BSc, PhD, Reader in Biosciences
-Dr Kulvinder Singh Manik, MBBS, General Practitioner
-Dr Michael D Bell, MBChB, MRCGP, retired General Practitioner
-Dr Jason Lester, MRCP, FRCR, Consultant Clinical Oncologist, Rutherford Cancer Centre, Newport
-Dr Clare Craig, BMBCh, FRCPath, Pathologist
-Dr Scott McLachan, FAIDH, MCSE, MCT, DSysEng, LLM, MPhil, Postdoctoral researcher, Risk & Information Group
-Dr Franziska Meuschel, MD, ND, PhD, LFHom, BSEM, Nutritional, Environmental and Integrated Medicine
-Dr Emma Brierly, MRCGP, General Practitioner
-Dr Sarah Myhill, MBBS, Dip NM, Retired GP, Independent Naturopathic Physician
-Michael Cockayne, MSc, PGDip, SCPHNOH, BA, RN, Occupational health practitioner
–Dr Christopher Exley, PhD, FRSB, retired professor in Bioinorganic Chemistry
-Julie Annakin, RN, Immunisation specialist nurse
-Dr Charles Forsyth, MBBS, BSEM, Independent Medical Practitioner
-Dr Marco Chiesa, MD, FRCPsych, Consultant Psychiatrist & Visiting Professor, UCL
-Dr Paul Cuddon, PhD, Pharmaceutical Equity Research Analyst, Head of Healthcare and Life Sciences
-Margaret Moss, MA (Cantab), CBiol, MRSB, Director, The Nutrition and Allergy Clinic, Cheshire
-Prof Anthony Fryer, PhD, FRCPath, Professor of Clinical Biochemistry, Keele University
-Dr David Critchley, BSc, PhD, 32 years in pharmaceutical R&D as a clinical research scientist.
-Dr David Morris, MBChB, MRCP(UK), General Practitioner
-Dr Scott Mitchell, MBChB, MRCS, Associate Specialist in Emergency Medicine
-Dr Pauline Jones, MB BS, retired General Practitioner
-Sarah Waters, BA (Hons), MBACP, Psychotherapist, Therapeutic Parenting Practitioner
-Dr. Eashwarran Kohilathas, BMBS, GP Trainee
-Dr Rohaan Seth, Bsc (hons), MBChB (hons), MRCGP General Practitioner
-Dr Jessica Robinson, BSc(Hons), MBBS, MRCPsych, MFHom, Psychiatrist & Integrative Medicine
-Dr Dee Marshall, MBBS, MFHom, Nutritional Medicine
-Dr Jenny Goodman, MA, MB ChB, Ecological Medicine
-Dr Elizabeth Burton, MBChB, retired general practitioner
-Dr Sam White, MBChB, MRCGP, General Practitioner, Functional medicine practitioner
-Dr Rachel Nicoll, PhD, Medical researcher
-Dr Ruth Wilde, MB BCh, MRCEM, AFMCP, Integrative & Functional Medicine Doctor
-Dr Damien Downing, MBBS, MRSB, private physician
-Dr Andrew Isaac, MB BCh, Physician, retired
-Jemma Dale, BSc (Hons), Biomedical Scientist
-Angela Chamberlain, Bsc (Hons), Midwife
-Alex Hicks, MEng, MCIPS, Compliance Director (Supply Chain)
-Sophie Gidet, RM, Midwife
-Helen Auburn, Dip ION, MBANT, CNHC, Registered Nutritional Therapist
-Dr Ali Haggett, PhD, Mental health community work, former lecturer in the history of medicine
Facebook Gave CDC ‘Backdoor’ Access to Help Remove Millions of Social Media Posts
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | September 30, 2024
Facebook provided the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) “backdoor” access to its platform so the CDC could submit requests to remove COVID-19 “misinformation,” according to an internal Facebook document made public for the first time as part of an ongoing legal case.
America First Legal filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in 2021, after then-White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki revealed the Biden administration was flagging purported “disinformation” on social media platforms, including content posted by members of the so-called “Disinformation Dozen.”
When the Biden administration didn’t comply with the FOIA request, America First Legal sued, leading to the release of the documents as part of the discovery process.
According to Reclaim the Net, in 2021, Facebook developed a “Content Request System” (see pages 54-72) — also called a “Government Reporting System” — accessible to CDC staff. The documents show Facebook “was operating as the de facto enforcement arm of the US government’s thought control initiative.”
The Facebook-CDC partnership helped Facebook remove millions of posts, the documents show.
Gene Hamilton, executive director of America First Legal, told The Defender, “These documents show precisely how one of the social media platforms facilitated the federal government’s engagement in unconstitutional censorship activities.”
“The federal government cannot violate the First Amendment by outsourcing censorship to the private sector, yet these documents clearly show that Facebook and the Biden-Harris administration collaborated and colluded on removing speech that did not comport with the federal government’s preferences,” Hamilton said.
Tim Hinchliffe, editor of The Sociable, told The Defender that following the release of the “Twitter Files,” it should not come as a surprise “that the government has been actively trying to censor citizens through back doors and loopholes.”
“This censorship effort is yet another example of a public-private collaboration that fuses corporation and state,” Hinchliffe said. “Where the government can’t legally censor, it has the private sector to do its bidding. The question here is how much coercion was needed for Facebook to provide the backdoor?”
These latest revelations come as other entities ramp up their own efforts to target purported “misinformation” and “disinformation.”
On Thursday, the World Health Organization (WHO) and TikTok announced a new partnership to promote “science-based information.” Meanwhile, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), a Big Pharma lobbying group, this month urged the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to “expand drug manufacturers’ powers to correct misinformation about their products.”
‘Red-carpet treatment’ for government to ‘silence critics and manage dissent’
Calling it a “fast lane for speech suppression,” Reclaim the Net reported that Facebook “built a slick ‘end-to-end workflow’ tailored to the White House’s censorship needs,” which provided CDC staff with a four-step process to flag COVID-19 “misinformation” for removal.
“This was the red-carpet treatment for anyone in the Biden Administration looking to silence critics and manage dissent,” Reclaim the Net reported. “The system could handle up to twenty censorship requests simultaneously.”
The Facebook document stated, “We empower and safeguard users with policies that are: Principled, Operable, Explicable.” These policies were aligned with Facebook’s “community standards” and adopted “a multi-pronged approach to combating COVID-19 and vaccine misinformation.”
The policies — aimed at “bringing 50 million people a step closer to vaccinations” — included the removal of “false information that has been debunked by public health experts.”
Other types of content Facebook explicitly targeted include claims that COVID-19 is no more dangerous to people than the common flu or cold, and content discouraging “good health practices” — such as wearing a face mask, social distancing, getting tested for COVID-19 and getting vaccinated against COVID-19.
Claims about the COVID-19 vaccines’ safety, side effects and efficacy also were targeted for removal, as were “widely debunked vaccine hoaxes” — including claims that vaccines cause autism.
The document also revealed that as of 2021, Facebook and Instagram had removed “more than 16 million pieces of content … for violating our COVID-19 and vaccine policies.”
Repeat offenders faced restrictions, including (but not limited to) reduced distribution, removal from recommendations, or “removal from our site.”
The platform also allowed government officials to bypass federal transparency laws.
“By using this specialized portal, and not email, the government could skirt those pesky federal record-keeping laws. FOIA requests? Public oversight? Forget about it. The new system made sure government actions were neatly tucked away in proprietary software,” Reclaim the Net reported.
‘The closest thing to a Ministry of Truth’
According to Reclaim the Net, Robert Flaherty, then-White House director of Digital Strategy and now a member of Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign, was “barking orders at Facebook to tighten the leash.”
“Twitter Files” documents have shown that Flaherty pressured social media platforms to censor the accounts of public figures such Robert F. Kennedy Jr., then-chairman and chief litigation counsel of Children’s Health Defense (now chairman on leave). Kennedy was one of the figures named in “The Disinformation Dozen” report.
“The bureaucratic whims of entrenched CDC personnel and leadership determined what Americans could and could not say — the closest thing to a Ministry of Truth you can imagine in the United States,” Hamilton said.
Author Naomi Wolf, Ph.D., co-founder and CEO of DailyClout, told The Defender, “This shocking new revelation of still more unlawful pressure by the U.S. government on social media companies to strip Americans of First Amendment rights, also fails to shock as it is evidence added to a mountain of documentation of such collusion.”
According to Hamilton, these and other documents may affect several ongoing lawsuits against the Biden administration on First Amendment grounds.
“As more records are uncovered through our lawsuit and other open records requests, as well as discovery in litigation, we are confident that courts will have the definitive links necessary to show the government’s facilitation of an unconstitutional censorship enterprise,” Hamilton said.
The latest revelations came just a month after Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta — parent company of Facebook and Instagram — admitted that Biden administration officials pressured Meta to censor content related to COVID-19 during the pandemic.
“If the government can exert that much pressure on one of the largest platforms and its CEO, then it can do it to anybody,” Hinchliffe said.
In an interview earlier this month on “The Kim Iversen Show,” former U.S. State Department official Mike Benz, founder and executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, said the U.S. government coerced social media platforms to use “weapons of mass deletion” to censor content and as a workaround to the First Amendment.
According to Benz, this includes government coercion obliging these platforms to adopt automated censorship tools which employ artificial intelligence to sweep platforms for specific keywords or narratives. Benz said many of these tools were initially developed a decade ago for the fight against ISIS.
Benz said the U.S. government urged authorities in the United Kingdom and European Union (EU) to pass censorship laws, in order to then sidestep the First Amendment at home by obliging social media platforms to comply with more restrictive foreign laws.
Dutch attorney Meike Terhorst told The Defender the EU uses legislation such as the Digital Services Act (DSA) “to stop free speech outside EU borders.”
“According to the EU, the DSA prevents illegal and harmful activities online and protects fundamental rights,” Terhorst said. This means that the EU Commission can decide what is right and what is wrong, including ‘harmful disinformation.’”
TikTok ‘a propaganda arm’ of the United Nations?
TikTok and the WHO on Sept. 26 announced a new collaboration targeting health-related “misinformation.” The year-long partnership is “aimed at providing people with reliable, science-based health information.”
According to the WHO, the new collaboration will promote “evidence-based content and encourage positive health dialogues.”
The WHO quoted Chief Scientist Jeremy Farrar, who said, “This collaboration can prove to be an inflection point in how platforms can be more socially-responsible.”
Farrar collaborated with Dr. Anthony Fauci and key virologists to draft “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2,” published March 2020 in Nature Medicine. The paper has been used by media and the U.S. government to debunk the lab-leak theory of the COVID-19 outbreak and accuse its proponents of being “conspiracy theorists.”
According to public health physician Dr. David Bell, partnerships like the one between the WHO and TikTok are inappropriate. He told The Defender :
“WHO, as an organization subject to member states and with no direct standing over their citizens, should not be involved in such direct messaging. This is a clear infringement of the rights, role and sovereignty of the states themselves.
“WHO acts increasingly like a tool of colonialist corporate interests as it pushes their messages over the top of legitimate authorities and interferes in the running of health systems within countries.”
According to Hinchliffe, this is not the first TikTok partnership with the United Nations (U.N.). As part of a previous project, Team Halo, “the U.N. trained scientists and doctors on TikTok and worked with TikTok to boost their profiles in an effort to combat ‘misinformation’ while promoting ‘authoritative sources’ during the pandemic.”
“This latest partnership shows that TikTok is honored to once again be a propaganda arm for the U.N.,” Hinchliffe said.
The WHO previously established similar partnerships with other social media platforms, including YouTube, which last year revised its “medical misinformation” policy to allow for the deletion of content that contradicts WHO guidance.
The announcement of the TikTok partnership with the WHO — a U.N. agency — comes just days after U.N. member states passed the Pact for the Future.
The pact’s “Information Integrity on Digital Platforms” policy brief addresses “threats to information integrity,” such as so-called “misinformation” and “disinformation,” calling for the promotion of “empirically-backed consensus around facts, science and knowledge” — without clarifying how this “consensus” would be determined.
The TikTok partnership with the WHO also comes before the January 2025 legislative deadline for TikTok to divest its U.S. operations or face shutdown in the U.S.
Pharma wants expanded powers to ‘correct misinformation’
In another related development lobbyists for Big Pharma earlier this month asked the FDA “to expand drug manufacturers’ powers to correct misinformation about their products, including by allowing them to respond to opinions, value judgments or personal experiences and communications made offline,” Fierce Pharma reported.
The call was a response to the FDA’s draft guidance on “Addressing Misinformation About Medical Devices and Prescription Drugs.” Released in July and now open for public comment, the guidance would allow pharmaceutical companies to issue “tailored” responses to internet-based posts about their products, and “general medical product communications” that would address “misinformation.”
According to Fierce Pharma, “The FDA proposed prohibiting companies from posting tailored responsive communications in response to misinformation spread offline and in response to an individual’s posts about their own experience, opinion and value judgments. PhRMA wants the FDA to lift those restrictions.”
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
UN Official’s Battle With “Toxic Information” Raises Censorship Fears Ahead of US Election
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | September 30, 2024
United Nations (UN) Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications Melissa Fleming’s focus is “disinformation” and “toxic information systems” – and she presents those as standing in the way of the UN’s sustainable development goals (SDGs).
SDGs are the UN’s plan that opponents say is “toxic” in itself since it seeks to promote such controversial things as censorship and digital ID and, to make matters worse, that’s supported by major countries.
Now, Fleming seems to be keen to add to the avalanche of pressure on Big Tech – even though the term she no doubt carefully uses instead is “domination of public discourse” in places where this alleged disinformation is most present.
Coincidentally or not this is coming right before a US presidential election, but Fleming is framing her parroting of the “disinformation” narrative in terms of the social platforms, as purely an “SDGs and UN” issue.
She is even trying to link this with the UN’s purpose, which is (rather, should be) peacekeeping and humanitarian missions, but from which the world organization has been disconnecting for a while.
Responding to a question lumping disinformation, climate change, and conflict resolution into one, Fleming asserted that disinformation and “toxic information systems” are damaging humanitarian and peacekeeping efforts, not to mention SDGs (she doesn’t quite explain this assertion).
Fleming’s official UN bio says one of her roles is “far-reaching efforts to address mis- and disinformation, and hate speech,” while supposedly simultaneously promoting “free and independent media.”
However, she started her career with an outlet that’s anything but free and independent: Fleming used to work for “Radio Free Europe,” funded by the US authorities (originally through the CIA).
Now, no doubt thanks to Fleming, the UN has something called DG Media Zone and it is there and during this year’s UN General Assembly that Fleming sounded her alarm bells, going as far as to say that “every single one” of UN’s priorities is these days under threat due to disinformation. (“Climate change” is now proudly listed among those priorities, in case you missed that.)
Fleming’s solution: collusion. This time (and publicly) “merely” with “civil society and people” who need to “work on our information ecosystems together.”
A word of warning about “civil society,” though: it’s often a moniker behind which groups implementing censorship through “fact-checking” etc, like to hide.
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