Ukraine Receives $1.25Bln in US Grant Funds for Paying Wages, Social Assistance
Sputnik – 31.07.2023
Ukraine has received a new grant from the United States worth $1.25 billion to reimburse state budget expenses, including wages for state employees and social benefits, the Ukrainian Finance Ministry said on Monday.
“The State Budget of Ukraine received a grant from the United States of America in the amount of USD 1.25 billion through the Multi-donor Trust Fund of the World Bank,” the ministry said in a statement.
The grant was provided as part of the fifth additional financing under the World Bank’s Public Expenditures for Administrative Capacity Endurance in Ukraine (PEACE in Ukraine) project, which seeks to partially cover state budget expenditures, including for social and humanitarian purposes.
“The involved grant funding will be aimed at reimbursing state budget expenditures, in particular, to pay wages for government employees and payments under certain state social assistance programs (IDPs [internally displaced persons], people with disabilities, low-income families and housing, utility subsidies) and other social payments,” the ministry said.
Ukraine has received $8.45 billion in US grants to support the state budget in 2023 alone, while as much as $20.4 billion has been disbursed since February 2022.
Last week, the chairwoman of the Ukrainian parliament’s budget committee, Roksolana Pidlasa, said the state budget received $25.3 billion from international partners in 2023, accounting for 49.1% of all state budget revenues.
Ukrainian Finance Minister Serhiy Marchenko said in May that the country’s budget has been running a deficit of about $5 billion a month since the military conflict began, with two-thirds of the money coming from foreign loans and grants and three-quarters spent on military needs.
An NIH patent coupled with a histrionic CDC publicity stunt about dangers of RSV yield a new $9 billion market
Fauci’s legacy lives on under new directors Hugh Auchincloss (NIAID) and Lawrence Tabak (NIH)
BY MERYL NASS | JULY 25, 2023
I previously revealed a 2021 CDC-authored study showing that, based on death certificates, only 25 US babies per year die from RSV. 97% of US babies have been exposed to RSV by age 2, providing partial immunity. This also tells us that RSV is and has been widespread in the environment and is not a NEW virus that is suddenly killing us and for which we must get armored up.
CDC says elders die from RSV, but CDC has no idea how many. For most of us elders, an RSV infection is probably a cold—or nothing at all.
I wasn’t kidding when I said armored up. There are vaccines for pregnant women (but they appear to cause premature labor) in order to protect the babies; monoclonal antibodies for the babies themselves because, I guess, those vaccines given to their mothers don’t work very well; and vaccines for elders.
All rolled out at (nearly) warp speed. All paying royalties to the NIAID. All have efficacy that wears off very quickly. Which is a win for the manufacturers but a loss for the vaccinees.
But a $9 billion market is projected, cause you can get doctors to recommend just about anything, it seems. After all, following the CDC is the “standard of care” and the best guarantee against a malpractice case.
UPDATE: Now the mfr of ONLY, an RSV shot for the elderly, predicts $9 billion alone in that market—and more for the pregnancy and baby market. Yee gads.
The Money Trails of the Pandemic Planning Racket
By Jeffrey A. Tucker | Brownstone Institute | July 30, 2023
The Justice Department has dismissed all charges related to campaign finance leveled against Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), the founder and CEO of the Bahamas-based crypto exchange FTX. The grounds were a bit unusual. Officials in the Bahamas said that such charges were not the basis of the extradition. “The Bahamas did not intend to extradite the defendant on the campaign contributions count,” said the Justice Department. “Accordingly, in keeping with its treaty obligations to the Bahamas, the Government does not intend to proceed to trial on the campaign contributions count.”
And just like that, charges are gone. What’s strange is that this claim jumps out in the financial trail of FTX. Indeed, it seems obvious. It was an impressive caper. FTX said it practiced “effective altruism” and so intended to give away $1 billion to charity. It raised venture funding from many sources that wanted to pay off politicians but were restricted from doing so by law. FTX classified this as investment and then altruistically gave money to many charities involved in “pandemic planning” but many were not real charities. They were 501c4s that fund political campaigns. With just a few hops in the money trail, this mechanism allowed vast funding of mostly Democratic political interests in advance of the 2020 election.
Once you have a look at the details and players (and we have done so in two articles here and here), it becomes clear that “effective altruism” was simply a cover for a politically driven money scheme. FTX was founded and then went into bankruptcy exactly in keeping with this purpose. It remains possible that SBF will face trouble over claims of wire fraud but that could be plea-bargained away. We shall see. What’s striking is that the most obvious issues have been swept away on a legal technicality.
Central to the charity of FTX was the issue of pandemic planning, or so they said. SBF’s brother ran a pandemic organization. Linda Fried, Sam’s aunt on his mother’s side, was Dean of the School of Public Health at Columbia University and on the board of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Aging. SBF’s girlfriend Caroline Ellison’s mother is a professor of economics at MIT with a research specialization in the pharmaceutical industry while her father has written at least four papers on epidemiological modeling.
The “Together Trial” was a trial of therapeutics that ended up inveighing against Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine and was generously funded by FTX together with the Koch Foundation. The head of Trump’s Operation Warp Speed, Moncef Slaoui, received $150,000 from FTX to write SBF’s autobiography. HelixNano, a vaccine company that claims to be developing mutation-resistant vaccines, received $10M in funding from FTX Future Fund. And Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security: This institution ran the Event 201 lockdown tabletop exercise in 2019, and received at least $175,000 for a single employee, from FTX coffers.
This barely scratches the surface and we would like to know more. It would be glorious if the New York Times or some other big media organ would assign 50 reporters to dig deeper, as they did with the supposed Trump-Russia connection that turned up nothing after years of high dudgeon. But nope: all we get is silence. In contrast, the national media mostly treats SBF as a confused genius who got in over his head because his wonderful company achieved too much too fast.
How the national media treats money trails entirely depends on the political drive behind the effort. In the second term of the Reagan administration, the executive branch became involved in an effort to fund the Mujahideen in Afghanistan and the Contras in Nicaragua in the name of fighting the spread of Soviet influence and winning the Cold War. Congress had specifically stopped these funding efforts so the Reaganites turned to the usual suite of shell companies, friendly governments, intelligence agencies, and secure money-movers to get the cash to those who wanted it.
The result was many years of intense investigation. Every center-left and left-wing outfit was all over the Iran-Contra money scandal, seeking receipts and subjecting the major players like Oliver North to sworn Congressional testimony. There was nothing wrong with this and everything right: in the American system, the executive branch cannot fund global projects without the approval of Congress. The search to ferret out the scandals seemed like part of the effort to clean up government.
Here we are nearly 40 years later and the Biden administration is embroiled in an astonishing version of something similar, with familial connections, shell companies, cash moving here and there, foreign governments like Ukraine, and intelligence agencies serving as essential tools of covering it all up. It was the Hunter Biden laptop that provided the clues and that led to more receipts of an amazing nature. This week I received a call from a man who was instrumental in discovering the laptop who explained many of the funding connections but after about 15 minutes of detail I could not keep up even though he went on for another 30 minutes. It was all mind-boggling. This one makes the Iran-Contra scandal seem like the age of innocence.
How deep does this rabbit hole go? Consider the attacks on Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and the attempt to close the primary such that only Biden can win it? The effort is primarily funded by Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder of Facebook which itself cooperated very closely with the federal government in suppressing contrary opinions on lockdowns and vaccines. Liam Sturgess explains:
The group behind the campaign is the Progressive Turnout Project, a political action committee (PAC) that has been described as “the largest voter contact organization in the country.” It has a series of sub-organizations operating under different names, two of which are also engaged in the BAN RFK petition: Stop Republicans and Progressive Takeover. … Using the most recent publicly-available data from OpenSecrets, we discovered that the single largest donation to the PTP came from Dustin Moskovitz.
Moskovitz also co-founded a project management application called Asana in 2008. Between these two massively profitable companies, Moskovitz generated so much wealth that he was identified by Forbes in 2011 as the world’s youngest self-made billionaire, even beating out Zuckerberg.
After earning his fortune in Big Tech, Moskovitz and his future wife, Cari Tuna, signed on to “The Giving Pledge,” committing to give away the vast majority of their money before the end of their lives. The Giving Pledge was the creation of mega-millionaires Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, with co-signatories including Elon Musk, Zuckerberg, George Lucas, David Rockefeller, and Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the recently-collapsed FTX cryptocurrency trading platform.
To accomplish their goal, Moskovitz and Tuna embraced a philosophy of “effective altruism.” According to its proponents, effective altruists seek to direct funding towards the people and organizations most likely to accomplish a given intended outcome for the betterment of humanity and the planet —often focusing on topics such as artificial intelligence, natural disasters, and combating “misinformation/disinformation.”
With effective altruism as their anchor, Moskovitz and Tuna started the Good Ventures Foundation in 2011. The focus of their philanthropy was to include biomedical research, pandemics and bioterrorism, education, food security, foreign aid, geoengineering, global health and development, immigration, nanotechnology and treatment of animals. Good Ventures also partnered with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to co-fund research related to infectious diseases in Africa.
In August 2014, Good Ventures partnered with a similar organization called GiveWell to launch the Open Philanthropy Project, which would recommend grants for Good Ventures to fulfill (paid for by Moskovitz).
In the years leading up to COVID-19, Moskovitz used Open Philanthropy and Good Ventures to provide significant funding toward pandemic preparedness and biosecurity. Open Philanthropy is also listed as the primary sponsor of a series of tabletop pandemic “war games,” during which world leaders practice how they might respond to various scenarios involving outbreaks of novel viruses, whether man-made or of natural origin. Some examples include Clade X (May 2018); A Spreading Plague (February 2019); and of course, the infamous Event 201 (October 2019).
If you have followed this article carefully, you see that we have come full circle, from the effort to silence and stop Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., back to Sam Bankman-Fried, the phony crypto exchange FTX, and the money trails through pandemic planning straight to political control of people by a single political party that tolerates no competition. One might suppose these connections would launch a thousand investigations and calls for reform. They should.
Instead, the charges were dismissed, by the very regime that stands to lose all credibility in light of all these strange money trails. And now we see major banks canceling accounts by major medical dissidents, as a warning to others.
Let there be no mystery as to why the public has lost trust in government, public health, media, and virtually every other official institution. Even as Americans have been pillaged and had their foundational rights violated by governments, the people on the inside have done very well for themselves within this tangled web of graft and corruption. They have every intention to forever block curious journalists from knowing more.
1,700+ demand retraction of influential COVID-19 origins paper after emails reveal authors doubted their own conclusions
By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D. | The Defender | July 26, 2023
More than 1,700 people have signed a petition calling for the retraction of the seminal scientific correspondence paper, “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2,” that claimed COVID-19 was “not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.”
The paper — sometimes referred to as the “Proximal Origins” paper or the “Nature Medicine paper” — was published March 17, 2020, in Nature Medicine journal.
It was used by former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci, former National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins, and other federal public health officials in 2020 and beyond to dismiss the possibility of a lab leak.
Biosafety Now — a nongovernmental organization that “advocates for reducing numbers of high-level biocontainment laboratories and for strengthening biosafety, biosecurity, and biorisk management for research on pathogens” — on July 19 launched the petition, stating, “It is imperative that this clearly fraudulent and clearly damaging paper be removed from the scientific literature.”
Biosafety’s leadership team includes 27 experts in biomedicine, mathematics, public health, public policy, public advocacy, law and social science.
Fraudulent paper ‘played an influential role’ in driving official narrative
Bryce Nickels, Ph.D., co-founder of Biosafety Now and professor of genetics at Rutgers University, said the petition seeks “to expose a clear case of scientific fraud and misconduct that has had a major impact on public opinion and policy.”
Nickels told The Defender :
“The removal of ‘Proximal Origins’ from the scientific literature is the first step in a long process needed to repair the damage this paper has caused to public trust in science.”
According to the petition, “This paper played an influential role — indeed, the central role — in communicating the false narrative that science established that SARS-CoV-2 entered humans through natural spillover, and not through research-related spillover.”
The petition continues:
“Email messages and direct messages via the messaging program Slack among authors of the paper obtained under FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] or by the U.S. Congress and publicly released in full in July 2023 … show, incontrovertibly, that the authors did not believe the conclusions of the paper at the time the paper was written, at the time the paper was submitted for publication, and at the time the paper was published.”
The recently-released internal communications show the paper “was, and is, the product of scientific fraud and scientific misconduct,” the petition said.
Commenting on the petition, investigative journalist Paul Thacker said:
“The thing that’s really the most troubling, which is why it should be retracted … [is] the ghostwriting and the undue influence [of federal public health officials on the drafting of the paper], which we know from the emails by Francis Collins, by Anthony Fauci, and from Jeremy Farrar.”
Thacker — who noted that within only a few days the petition had already garnered more than 1,300 signatures and set the hashtag #RetractProximalOrigins trending on Twitter — told The Defender :
“These guys basically ordered up a piece of science — or some sort of publication — that they could then point to, which they all did afterwards, as definitive proof that this thing could not have come from the lab.
“The whole thing was orchestrated for political purposes. It has nothing to do with science.”
Little more than a ‘political piece of propaganda’
Thacker is a former fellow at the Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University whose investigative writing has appeared in The New York Times, The BMJ, the Journal of the American Medical Association and The Washington Post.
He explained that weeks prior to the paper’s publication, Kristian Andersen, Ph.D. — one of the co-authors of the “Proximal Origins” paper — emailed Fauci and Collins a draft of the manuscript, thanking them for their “advice and leadership” on the paper.
Andersen also invited Fauci and Collins to comment and offer suggestions about the paper — but neither are mentioned in the acknowledgments section of the final version published by Nature Medicine. According to Thacker:
“Both Collins and Fauci then promoted the Nature Medicine paper as evidence of ‘independent science’ pointing against a possible lab accident — Collins in a post for the NIH Director’s blog that alleged the study left ‘little room’ for argument in favor of a lab accident, and Anthony Fauci in a White House press briefing.
“In both cases, neither Collins nor Fauci disclosed their involvement in orchestrating Andersen’s study. This last March, Congress released further emails showing that Fauci helped to orchestrate the Nature Medicine paper.”
Thacker pointed out that the paper — which “has been called everything from ‘research paper’ to ‘analysis’ to ‘study’” — was “really just correspondence” that was later turned into a “political piece of propaganda that people could then reference, which they did.”
Describing the recent about-face regarding the paper’s importance, Thacker said:
“Now the editor-in-chief of Nature Medicine is saying, ‘Oh, well, it was just a viewpoint … like he’s trying to dismiss what it was when they [federal public officials] used it for completely different purposes. They used it as some definitive piece of scientific research that put to rest any idea this thing could have come from a lab.
“Then we find out internally that none of them who wrote it believed that in the first place. … Quite frankly, from the very beginning, none of the scientific evidence in any direction means anything about how this pandemic started. It’s always been the internal documents and the money that have mattered more.”
Thacker added, “This entire drama and discussion has nothing to do with science. It has everything to do with corruption and a coverup.”
On July 25 Thacker tweeted:
Writers Curtis Schube and Gary Lawkowski in a July 24 op-ed for The Hill pointed out that when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention responded to the FOIA request to release Fauci’s “explosive” email showing his involvement with the Nature Medicine paper, the agency completely redacted the email.
Moreover, Thacker alleged that Andersen submitted false testimony at the July 11 hearing of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, which is investigating the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Andersen’s allegation that Fauci and Collins were provided the paper only after it had been “accepted” and was in “proof” is false, Thacker said. “Emails impeach this portion of Andersen’s testimony,” he added.
Thacker also pointed out that The Intercept last week published newly revealed documents showing Andersen and his co-author — Tulane virologist Robert Garry, Ph.D. — both lied to Congress during the House hearing. The alleged lies covered the fact that both had pending federal grants controlled by Fauci — money that could have been used to influence their positions on the lab-leak theory.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s latest book, “The Wuhan Cover-up: How US Health Officials Conspired with the Chinese Military to Hide the Origins of COVID-19,” is due out in September. The book is available now for preorder. Kennedy is the founder and chairman on leave from Children’s Health Defense.
Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., is a reporter and researcher for The Defender based in Fairfield, Iowa. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin (2021), and a master’s degree in communication and leadership from Gonzaga University (2015). Her scholarship has been published in Health Communication. She has taught at various academic institutions in the United States and is fluent in Spanish.
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.
It’s Past Time to be Honest About Israel
The deliberate corruption of American politics by an irresponsible foreign state must end
BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • JULY 25, 2023
One might think that since Honest Joe Biden declared his latest war entitled the US National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism in May the media has certainly taken up the task of exposing evil in these United States by reporting every affront to Jewish groups or individuals and to the Jewish state, Israel. The purpose is to invent a narrative suggesting that the world’s richest and most powerful ethno-religious demographic is somehow a perpetual victim and that goes double for Israel, explaining and forgiving the apartheid state’s occupying army’s targeting and killing of 55 journalists and its murder of more than 150 Palestinian civilians so far this year, including the sniper shooting of a Palestinian two-year-old boy in the head. In spite of all that carnage, a wealthy Israel, which can afford to provide free health care and university education to its citizens, continues to receive nearly $4 billion in military aid plus billions more in trade and charitable benefits from the United States taxpayer annually, totaling more than $300 billion since the Jewish state was founded in 1948.
We have lately been treated to a massive propaganda campaign orchestrated by the likes of the notorious American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) hideous leader Jonathan Greenblatt. One wonders why organizations like that which work closely with the Israeli government are not required to register with the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), but to question that relationship got John F. Kennedy killed, so it is probably best to look the other way.
The role of organizations like ADL and AIPAC, dedicated to spreading lies about the Middle East and the world in general, is in part to convince the American public that Israel is really a wonderful place that is threatened by the Arab “terrorists,” as they choose to put it for obvious reasons. This grants Israel blanket immunity whenever its government exercises the “right to defend itself” doing whatever it takes, including blowing up schools and hospitals and attacking its neighbors. An astonishing bill being promoted by extremist National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir currently under consideration in Israel’s Knesset would grant complete immunity for soldiers and policemen who shoot dead Palestinians or foreigners, effectively granting “license to kill.” Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and Tony Blinken might consider that as “self-defense” if asked and, oh yeah, so might our self-declared Zionist president Honest Joe.
And ADL and AIPAC and all the other groups constantly bleat how there is also a broader threat of surging antisemitism and even the abomination of holocaust denial wherever one chooses to look. Conveniently, Israel, without being held accountable, can imprison, beat, torture, and kill as many Palestinians as it wishes while also stealing their land and other property, depriving them of their livelihoods and of their very right to spend their own lives in peace. The persistent drive to make Israel into an all-Jewish apartheid state that is illegally incorporating what was supposed to have been a Palestinian state is hardly hidden, and, as it includes shooting and making homeless those under occupation who in any way resist, it is actually both a genocide and a war crime.
Virtually every international organization that has looked into the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians, to include Israeli human rights groups, has denounced in the strongest terms the inhuman behavior that has become normal. So why don’t Congress and the American media get it since they are so ready to exploit the essentially bogus narratives of crimes against humanity that are being floated to justify going to war with Russia? If war crimes and crimes against humanity are the metric that one measures by in Biden’s “rules based international order” there is no country on earth that is more deserving of being invaded and sorted out than Israel, unless it is the warmongering United States itself.
Recently we Americans have been treated to several iterations of the “Israel is good” contrived narrative, a tale that includes how both the US and the Jewish state share an “unbreakable bond” because both nations were “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” And the two nations also are allegedly linked by the “shared values” nonsense, which does not apply if one is either a Red Indian, a black slave, or a Palestinian of either Christian or Muslim persuasion. Indeed, even observant Jews in Israel who are not practicing according to the Orthodox beliefs are subjected to various restrictions on their personal lives, including how they must conform to marry, and suffer from an inability to practice their religious choice openly.
We have recently experienced a visit to the White House and an address to a joint session of Congress by Israel’s head of state President Isaac Herzog which was preceded by a vote in Congress on a bill introduced by Republicans declaring that Israel “is not a racist or apartheid state” and adding that the United States “will always be a staunch partner and supporter of Israel.” The vote abjuring Israel of all misbehavior passed by an overwhelming 412-9-1 vote. The nine “no” votes and one abstention were from Progressive Caucus Democrats, which features Pramila Jayapal as the chairwoman: Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Jamaal Bowman, Summer Lee, Ilhan Omar, Cori Bush, Andre Carson, Delia Ramirez and Ayanna Pressley. Representative Betty McCollum of Minnesota, who has submitted a bill blocking US aid to Israel that is used to imprison Palestinian children, voted “present.”
Jayapal, who said recently accurately that “Israel is a racist state,” was rewarded with a torrent of criticism from her own party, to include a rare joint statement from House Democratic leadership rejecting her remarks plus also a separate statement signed by 43 Democratic Party colleagues who said they were “deeply concerned” about her “unacceptable” views. She consequently apologized effusively before flipping and supporting the resolution. And every other Democrat and all the Republicans voted “yes.” A day later, three House Republicans filed a censure motion against Jayapal for having the temerity to call Israel “racist.” That basically confirms the hypothesis that Israel could shit on the heads of the clowns in Congress and the recipients would applaud the act and beg for more. Jayapal is now focusing on more congenial issues like climate change.
Of course, the bill in Congress is a lie and a denial of reality. Israel is by self-definition legally a Jewish state which makes it both racist and apartheid in structure towards its non-Jewish citizens and also to the Palestinians who have the misfortune of living in areas under Israeli occupation. The recent atrocities against the Palestinian victims have not passed unnoticed even if the Jewish dominated US media has attempted to mitigate what is reported. In fact, many Democrats no longer buy into the Israel narrative. Mondoweiss reports how “A University of Maryland Critical Issues poll from earlier this year found that 44% of Democratic voters believe Israel is ‘a state with segregation similar to apartheid.’ That survey mirrors a number of public opinion studies that have been released recently… 49% of the Democratic voters polled said they sympathize with Palestinians, compared to just 38% who said they sympathize with Israelis.” Another recent poll indicated that 80% of Democrats and 64% of Republicans, in absence of a two-state solution to Israel-Palestine, “would choose a democratic Israel that’s no longer Jewish, over a Jewish Israel without full citizenship and equality for non-Jewish people living under its authority.”
Attempting to address the growing uneasiness of many Americans over the issue of Israel and Palestinian rights, Herzog basically told congress that criticism of Israel is a freedom of speech right but that it should not veer over into antisemitism. Unfortunately, his logic is a bit on the thin side as the definition of antisemitism used by the US government and the media coined by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) includes criticism of Israel, making attacking Israeli regarding its ghastly behavior ipso facto antisemitism.
Herzog also lied his way through his preferred analysis of what drives the bilateral relationship with Washington as well as civil liberties and other rights in his own country, saying “We are proud to be the United States’ closest partner and friend. When the United States is strong, Israel is stronger. And when Israel is strong, the United States is more secure.” How exactly the US is made more secure by Israeli destabilizing of the Middle East was not made clear, but Herzog went on with another series of lies explaining how Israel “takes pride in its vibrant democracy, its protection of minorities, human rights and civil liberties, as laid down by its parliament, the Knesset, and safeguarded by its strong Supreme Court and independent judiciary.”
Nothing Herzog said was actually true and he forgot to mention the political donations from Jewish sources and the friendly Jewish media coverage that binds most American politicians to Israel. In recent electoral cycles, Jewish donations dominated in both parties and candidates were rightfully fearful of not saying and doing enough when it comes to Israel. But to really appreciate the deep hole of corruption that the United States is in with Israel and its friends in The Lobby calling the shots even when the narrative is so transparently false, it is best to quote the New York Times account of the revelry in the House of Representatives Chamber as Herzog spoke: “The reception for Mr. Herzog in the packed House chamber was staunchly supportive, with frequent standing ovations by the assembled lawmakers, including when he decried Palestinians for destroying the prospects for peace by supporting terror attacks against Israel.” Another big lie and the inevitable standing ovations from the Congress critters. We are in deep trouble when our Solons on Capitol Hill cannot appear to discern a series of self- serving lies by a foreign leader which do nothing but impoverish and do damage to the United States and its people. Indeed, the clowns applaud what they are hearing. It is the tragedy of our times, perhaps the final tragedy.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
Ukraine and the pitfalls of foreign aid
By Paul Robinson | Canadian Dimension | July 24, 2023
Few people came out of America’s 20-year war in Afghanistan looking good. A rare exception was John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). Sopko was the Cassandra of the American war effort, repeatedly revealing unwelcome truths only to be equally repeatedly ignored. In charge of auditing the vast sums of money that the US government spent on economic aid and reconstruction in Afghanistan, SIGAR’s office issued regular reports detailing waste, incompetence, and corruption on a scale that boggles the mind. Among other things, SIGAR published stories of how the US spent $6 million airlifting nine Italian goats to Afghanistan; spent $486 million buying aircraft for the Afghan airforce which were so dangerous to fly that they were never used and were turned into $32,000 of scrap metal; and spent $150 million building luxury villas to lodge staff of its economic development office. All this was just the tip of a very large iceberg.
The basic lesson of SIGAR’s many reports was that throwing vast sums of money into poor countries doesn’t promote economic development. Instead, it encourages corruption and inefficient economic practices. Formal institutions (laws, governments) depend upon informal ones, such as local customs and social structures, that foreigners do not understand, leading to misguided policies and misdirection of funds. Efforts to impose Western formal institutions on top of these very different informal ones, and then flooding the country with Western advisors and money, ends up being counterproductive. None of this, of course, is particularly revelatory. Critics of foreign aid programs have been saying much the same for years. Still, it is an important message.
Although the United States has left Afghanistan, Sopko is continuing his work. Last week, he published a letter written in response to a request from various US Senators. In this, he discussed how lessons from rebuilding Afghanistan could be applied to Ukraine. All wars come to an end. When that in Ukraine does so, there will no doubt be huge pressure on Western governments to flood that country with development assistance. SIGAR’s letter provides a dose of caution that is well worth listening to.
SIGAR notes that “many of the challenges US agencies faced in Afghanistan—coordinating efforts, dealing with corruption, and effectively monitoring and evaluating projects and programs—will be the same as the ones they will face in Ukraine.” He identifies seven particular lessons. These are:
- “The US government struggled to develop a coherent strategy for what it hoped to achieve in Afghanistan and imposed unrealistic timelines that led to wasteful and counterproductive programs.”
- “Lack of effective coordination—both within the US government and across the international coalition—was a major obstacle to success in Afghanistan and resulted in a disjointed patchwork of ineffective efforts, rather than a united and coherent approach.”
- “Though viewed as our greatest strength, the level of financial assistance in Afghanistan was often our greatest weakness.”
- “Corruption was an existential threat to the reconstruction mission in Afghanistan.”
- “Building and reforming the Afghan security forces was hindered by their corruption, predation, and chronic dependency on the United States.”
- “Tracking equipment provided to Afghan security forces proved challenging well before the government collapsed.” And:
- “Monitoring and evaluation efforts in Afghanistan were weak and often measured simple inputs and outputs rather than actual program effectiveness.”
Sopko makes a number of important points under these headings. One that is, “In Afghanistan, the US government spent too much money, too quickly, in a country that was unable to absorb it.” Yet estimates of how much money will be required to rebuild Ukraine far surpass what was spent in Afghanistan. The US (and by implication other Western states also) must take care not to provide more than Ukraine is able to effectively absorb or more than the donor states are able to effectively monitor. More is not necessarily better.
SIGAR also notes that “Under pressure to produce results quickly, agencies bypassed Afghan institutions and government channels when they encountered corruption, rather than slog through efforts at reform. When aid did flow through Afghan budgets and institutions, the United States prioritized the survival and short-term stability of the Afghan government over following through on anti-corruption efforts.” This is a problem that is likely to be repeated in Ukraine, where corruption is “likely to be a significant obstacle to the country’s recovery” given the country’s status as “the most corrupt country in Europe.”
Strangely, SIGAR misses a key fact, which is that this point and the previous one are connected—corruption feeds off excessive foreign aid. So does poor governance more generally. It is no coincidence that so-called “rentier” states (states that derive their income not from taxes on citizens but from what economists call “rents,” such as revenues from natural resource production or from foreign aid) tend to be corrupt, undemocratic, and generally unresponsive to citizens’ needs. When your revenues come from your citizens, you have to pay attention to what they want. When they don’t, you can afford to ignore them. A post-war Ukrainian government that is dependent on foreign assistance, maintains a huge military and security apparatus that is beyond its means, and has few sources of finance of its own, will have few incentives to listen to its own people or to act in an honest way.
A final point made by SIGAR is that in Afghanistan US agencies “often failed to measure programs and projects against the ultimate outcomes and impacts they sought to achieve. Instead, how much money was spent, and how quickly, became the measure of success, regardless of the actual result. This poured money into a fragile environment with no concept of whether projects achieved their intended goal, or even necessarily where all the money was going.” This is a perpetual problem in aid and development projects. Post-war, Western governments will no doubt feel a strong need to be seen to be “doing something” to help Ukraine. They will therefore be likely to throw money at the problem, publicizing their “success” in terms of funds expended and projects begun, but ignoring the actual outcomes.
SIGAR sees part of the solution as lying in better monitoring and evaluation. The problem with this is that there are generally few incentives to carry out such monitoring, because if one does there is a high possibility that one will come to the conclusion that one’s aid is failing, a conclusion that one cannot politically admit. In addition, the recipient of the aid is very possibly aware of this, and thus lacks incentives to use the aid appropriately. Confident that the donor is politically committed to supporting him come what may, he is free to act as irresponsibly as he wishes.
Simply put, giving money away in large quantities tends to produce perverse incentives that cause people to behave in ways that engender negative results. This isn’t a problem that can be fixed by better monitoring, anti-corruption efforts, and the like. It’s inherent in aid itself. If there is a weakness in Sopko’s reporting, it is that, as an auditor, it’s not his job to say whether aid should be given, just to point out whether it is being used effectively. Consequently, his reports end up consisting of lists of how things could be done better without ever challenging whether they should be done in the first place.
Still, they are vital reading for anybody who wants to think about how to reconstruct war-torn societies. What is clear is that if Western states want to produce better results in Ukraine than they did in Afghanistan, they will have to think a lot more intelligently about what sorts of aid they give and how they deliver it. But it’s not as if they weren’t previously aware of the problems mentioned above. SIGAR warned them repeatedly. Nobody listened. One must wonder if they are listening now.
Paul Robinson is a professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy. He is the author of numerous works on Russian and Soviet history, including Russian Conservatism, published by Northern Illinois University Press in 2019.
FDA Approves New Anthrax Vaccine for Adults Despite Lack of Publicly Available Information on Testing, Ingredients
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | July 21, 2023
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Thursday approved an anthrax vaccine for adults ages 18-65, according to Emergent BioSolutions, the vaccine’s maker.
The vaccine, Cyfendus, is approved for use after suspected or confirmed exposure to Bacillus anthracis, also known as anthrax, but must be administered together with other antibacterial drugs, Reuters reported.
Emergent said it had been delivering Cyfendus to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) since 2019, under pre-emergency use authorization status.
The efficacy of Cyfendus for post-exposure prophylaxis was tested only on animals.
Dr. Meryl Nass, bioterrorism and anthrax expert, told The Defender she is skeptical about whether the vaccine offers any new substantive health benefit.
“Given the history of the company’s many failures, and the lack of proper safety or efficacy testing of prior anthrax vaccines, one can only expect problems,” Nass said.
“The fact that there is no label available, there is no information on how it was tested, what placebo was used, et cetera — that all adds to the consternation and concern people should have about the value of this product,” Nass added.
Emergent said the drug has been in development for 20 years in collaboration with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), formerly headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Paul Williams, senior vice president at Emergent, said anthrax “remains a high-priority national security threat.”
Cyfendus is comprised of Emergent’s anthrax vaccine adsorbed (AVA), marketed as Biothrax, plus an additional adjuvant, the name of which the company did not disclose.
Cyfendus is administered in two doses over 14 days to elicit an immune response that the company said: “can be especially important in response to a large-scale public health emergency involving anthrax.”
Nass said that during the 2001 anthrax scare, where politicians and media organizations across the country received anthrax in the mail, five people died — but “everyone who got antibiotics early did not come down with anthrax and none of them died.”
“So,” Nass said, “antibiotics worked.” Nass emphasized that after exposure to anthrax, one needs treatment immediately — not over the longer period of time it takes for a vaccine to work.
“The fact that it’s required to be given with antibiotics,” Nass said, “which is what you should have when exposed to anthrax, raises the question: What additional benefit are you gonna get from this vaccine? I don’t know.”
Emergent’s stock shares gained 16.2% in pre-market trading after it announced the FDA approval.
Benchmark analyst Robert Wasserman said the approval provides “greater assurance” the company will reach its projected 2023 earnings of $260-$280 million, Bloomberg Law reported.
The price spike comes on the heels of “a difficult few years,” financially for the company, FiercePharma reported.
The company, founded in 1998 as government contractor BioPort to distribute and produce the anthrax vaccine for the U.S. military, reached its financial zenith early in the pandemic after earning lucrative contracts to produce Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines.
But a congressional report in 2021 revealed the company hid likely contamination problems at the plant from FDA inspectors and eventually had to destroy 400 million vaccine doses — which led its share price to fall from $133 to $7.
History of the anthrax vaccine
The anthrax vaccine was developed and in limited use in the military since 1970.
Biothrax has been produced by Emergent since 2002. Prior to Thursday’s announcement, it was the only anthrax vaccine licensed for humans in the U.S.
Nass explained that in 1997, the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) made the vaccine compulsory as part of the Anthrax Vaccine Immunization Program (AVIP) for all 2.5 million military service members — including active duty and reserve personnel and civilian contractors.
The DOD implemented the mass vaccination program in 1998.
Reports of adverse reactions and dissent on the part of service members led to congressional hearings and in early 2000, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform recommended halting the mandatory program, although it was not officially halted.
As of 2000, more than 500,000 service members had received at least one dose of the vaccine, which was designed to be administered in six doses.
The plant where the government produced the anthrax vaccine faced a series of regulatory issues and was closed in 1997, according to Nass.
BioPort acquired it from the state-owned Michigan Biologic Products Institute in 1998 and rebuilt it, but was not FDA-authorized to produce the vaccine. So for a period, the vaccines were unavailable.
Then, starting on Sept. 18, 2001 — a week after the 9/11 attacks — when Americans were in a state of fear or heightened concern, media outlets began reporting that a sophisticated, weaponized and fatal form of anthrax had been sent via mail to numerous news outlets and American politicians.
New letters continued to appear over the next six weeks and the media and the government implied they were somehow linked to the 9/11 attacks.
Later, the media and figures such as John McCain linked the anthrax to Saddam Hussein in Iraq. In 2008, the FBI accused U.S. Army scientist Bruce Ivins of being responsible for the attacks, although Ivins took his own life before he could be prosecuted and the FBI’s claims are widely doubted.
ProPublica, McClatchy and PBS Frontline, which did their own investigation, questioned the FBI’s evidence.
The Government Office of Accountability (GAO) and the National Academies of Science both also found that the FBI lacked data to back its claims.
But the hype created by the anthrax letters primed the American public to support draconian legislation such as the Patriot Act, Dr. Joseph Mercola argued.
It also became the primary justification for continuing to produce the vaccine and administer it to service people, Pam Long wrote in The Defender.
In 2002, shortly after the FDA approved BioPort’s new vaccine plant, the GAO issued a report to Congress on the AVIP.
The report enumerated a significant number of adverse reactions to the vaccine — more than double the rate reported by the manufacturer — along with the mass exodus of military pilots and other valuable military personnel who refused the mandate.
It also noted that anthrax adverse reactions were very similar to Gulf War syndrome symptoms and that many veterans reported the vaccine as the cause of this illness, which they also reported in congressional hearings, according to Nass.
From 2000 to 2018, the military anthrax mandate was challenged several times in court for lacking FDA approval and licensure, and for lacking proven potency against fatal inhalation of anthrax.
During this time, the DOD restricted the anthrax vaccine to a smaller group of “at-risk troops” and halted and resumed the program several times.
Prior to 2001, the DOD concluded that biological agents such as anthrax were not a threat for mass casualties due to the limited number of countries with the expertise and sophistication required to weaponize and disseminate anthrax.
According to an investigation by investigative journalist Whitney Webb, the 2001 anthrax attacks also rescued Emergent Biosolutions, then BioPort, from certain financial ruin.
Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.
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.
Republicans Demand Biden Impeachment Over Bombshell FBI Doc Claiming POTUS Bribery
By Oleg Burunov – Sputnik – 21.07.2023
The POTUS and his son are investigated by the Republican-controlled House panel over allegations that they ran an illegal “pay-to-play” corruption scheme involving cash payments to Hunter Biden in exchange for access to his father while Biden was vice president.
Republicans have gone on Twitter to react to the release of an unclassified Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) document related to President Joe Biden’s alleged involvement in an international bribery scheme, with some GOP members calling for his impeachment.
They included Marjorie Taylor Greene, who called the 46th US president “a criminal, […] leading us into WW3.”
“Republicans can no longer delay, but we need 218 Republican votes to do it. I’ve been there since day one and so are the American people. IMPEACH BIDEN!!!” she added.
Greene was echoed by Anna Paulina Luna, who argued that Biden “needs to be impeached” because of the “evidence and testimony” that she had seen as a member of the House Oversight Committee investigating the Biden family finances. “He is compromised and his son is selling access to him,” Luna tweeted.
The same tone was struck by Lauren Boebert as she wrote that it’s necessary to “Read and understand just how deep the corruption goes,” and that “Biden should be thrown out of office. Impeach!”
Similar messages were shared by Jim Banks, who described the Bidens as the “Most corrupt family to ever live in the White House,” also urging for Joe Biden’s impeachment.
The reaction comes after Republican Senator Chuck Grassley released the FBI’s FD-1023 form on Thursday, which focused on how Biden, along with his son Hunter Biden, ostensibly “coerced” chief executive of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma Nikolai Zlochevsky to pay them $5 million each in exchange for their help in getting a Ukrainian prosecutor investigating the firm fired.
The document pertains to the FBI’s interview with a “highly credible” confidential source who detailed multiple meetings and conversations he or she had with Zlochevsky over the course of several years starting in 2015. During those gatherings, the Burisma CEO at one point reportedly said that Joe Biden’s son “was stupid”, and that “his [Zlochevsky’s] dog was smarter.”
Hunter sat on the board of Burisma at the time while his father served as Barack Obama’s vice president.
Grassley, for his part, stressed that he released the document so that Americans can read it “for themselves without the filter of politicians or bureaucrats.” The senator acquired the form via legally protected disclosures by Justice Department whistleblowers, according to the senator’s office.
The FBI responded with a sharply worded statement, slamming GOP lawmakers for ignoring the bureau’s “significant concerns” about the dangers of releasing the material.
“We have repeatedly explained to Congress, in correspondence and in briefings, how critical it is to keep this source information confidential. […] Today’s release of the 1023 – at a minimum – unnecessarily risks the safety of a confidential source,” the FBI statement said.
The developments follow US Internal Revenue Service investigator Joseph Ziegler telling lawmakers he discovered Hunter Biden and his business associates received $17 million from foreign sources, including $7.3 million from Burisma, during a probe he described as hindered by senior Justice Department officials.
Ziegler had remained anonymous until his appearance at a House oversight committee hearing on Wednesday that was convened over Republican allegations that President Biden and his son Hunter were involved in a bribery scheme with Burisma.
Hunter Biden’s attorneys and the US Justice Department announced last month an agreement under which he will plead guilty to misdemeanor tax charges and enter a pretrial diversionary agreement on a felony firearms offense in an effort to resolve the criminal probe against him and avoid prison time.
Since 2018, the First Son has been under a series of investigations into tax-related crimes, drug use, money laundering and illegal business dealings in foreign countries, including Ukraine and China. Investigators are specifically looking into the content of Hunter Biden’s so-called “laptop from Hell”, which purportedly included naked photos and graphic videos of the 46th president’s son.
US pledges nearly $120 million to Arab normalization initiatives for Israel
The Cradle – July 22, 2023
The US Senate Foreign Relations Committee proposed new legislation on 21 July to bolster normalization efforts between Israel and Arab countries, pledging nearly $120 million in funding and naming Saudi Arabia as a key candidate.
The Regional Integration and Normalization Act seeks to encourage the Arab world to solidify diplomatic ties with Israel.
US Senator Bob Menendez remarked that “this bill capitalizes on the dynamics that are profoundly reshaping the Middle East and North Africa,” adding, “Further integration in this region, one marked by conflict and disunity, must be a pillar of US foreign policy moving forward. It will remain a region that is critical to US strategic interests, and we should support efforts that increase stability and prosperity for our partners and the region’s citizens.”
This bill will create an ambassador-level official for the Abraham Accords, expand normalization and “integration, ”support the development of an Abraham Accords and Negev Forum Economic Partnership, and support joint cybersecurity training.
This development comes a few days after US President Joe Biden hosted Israeli President Isaac Herzog at the White House.
Since Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took power last year, Biden has avoided meeting with the Israeli Prime Minister due to a controversial judicial overhaul.
Ireland’s public broadcaster – undeclared earnings bad, endorsing The Great Reset good?
By Gavin O’Reilly | OffGuardian | July 17, 2023
Over the past several weeks, Ireland has been rocked by a scandal related to the significant undeclared earnings of Ryan Tubridy, the most prominent presenter on the public broadcaster of the 26-County State, RTÉ, and the long-time host of its flagship talk show, The Late Late Show, until his departure earlier this year – prior to the revelations related to his salary becoming public knowledge.
In response, Director General of RTÉ Dee Forbes tendered her resignation, and both Tubridy and his agent Noel Kelly have been brought before a government tribunal to account for the undeclared earnings, something that has received significant media coverage across Ireland, including OJ Simpson-style live television coverage of the proceedings.
What has been noticeable however is how this extensive media attention lies in stark contrast to the virtually non-existent mainstream media coverage of RTÉ’s endorsement of the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset initiative over the past three years, intended to usher in a totalitarian global corporate dictatorship, where technology is used to stifle and censor debate.
From the outset of the ‘Covid Pandemic’ in March 2020, Ireland, like numerous other countries, introduced stringent lockdowns under the guise of preventing the spread of an alleged virus. In reality, the forced closure of vast swathes of society served the purpose of making it virtually impossible for smaller businesses to operate, thus creating a greater dependence on corporate outlets such as Amazon.
As a result, the global lockdowns saw the greatest upwards transfer of wealth from the working and middle-classes in history, with corporate elements receiving upwards of $1tn in profit.
With Taoiseach Leo Varadkar being a WEF ‘Young Global Leader’, RTÉ was fully complicit in endorsing the ‘Pandemic’ narrative, WEF-linked scientist Luke O’Neill being a regular guest on The Late Late Show under Ryan Tubridy in order to further its promotion.
The public broadcaster would also condemn Irish anti-lockdown protests as being ‘organised by the far-right’ in lock-step with similar mainstream media descriptions being ascribed to protests in New Zealand, France and Canada – each country also being under the respective rule of WEF ‘Young Global Leaders’, Jacinda Ardern, Emmanuel Macron and Justin Trudeau.
What would be perhaps the most sinister aspect of RTÉ’s two-year promotion of the ‘Pandemic’ narrative however, was the use of children to promote uptake of the ‘Covid’ Vaccine during the 2020 edition of The Late Late Toy Show, a seasonal edition of the programme used to showcase that Christmas’s latest toy selection, one that is traditionally very popular amongst families with young children.
Indeed, Ryan Tubridy himself would later double down on his promotion of the vaccine by infamously using his radio platform to encourage listeners to disinvite guests from weddings who had not been vaccinated, his incendiary remarks coming amidst a time when access to bars, restaurants, hairdressers and gyms in the southern Irish state, was forbidden to those who had not yet received a ‘Covid’ jab and the resulting digital QR code that would subsequently be placed on their smartphone.
This enforced segregation, in Ireland and further afield, served as a dry-run for the introduction of mandatory digital ID, a key part of the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ that the WEF envisages will come about as a result of the Great Reset, with the ultimate goal being a cashless society. One where the corporate-government alliance has full control over its citizen’s financial transactions, and can easily impose sanctions against those it deems to be dissidents.
Indeed, this very situation would play out during last year’s Freedom Convoy in Canada, when Justin Trudeau would use emergency legislation to freeze the bank accounts of Truckers protesting against his decision to mandate that truck drivers re-entering Canada from the US had to be vaccinated. A truly dystopian move, and one that could be far more easily implemented in a society with no physical cash.
RTÉ’s two-year endorsement of the introduction of such a totalitarian society has come in for little criticism since the sudden collapse of the ‘Pandemic’ narrative last January however, the undeclared earnings of its chief propagandist being a far more newsworthy item it would seem.
Gavin O’Reilly is an Irish Republican activist from Dublin, Ireland, with a strong interest in the effects of British and US Imperialism; he was a writer for the American Herald Tribune from January 2018 up until their seizure by the FBI in 2021, with his work also appearing on The Duran, Al-Masdar, MintPress News, Global Research and SouthFront. He can be reached through Twitter and Facebook and supported on Patreon.
Swiss aim to classify details of bank collapse for 50 years
RT | July 18, 2023
A parliamentary investigation into the collapse of Switzerland’s banking giant Credit Suisse will keep its files confidential for half a century, Reuters reported on Sunday, citing a parliamentary committee document.
According to the report, the investigating commission will hand over its files to the Swiss Federal Archives after longer than the usual 30 years to ensure confidentiality in the case, which focuses on the activities of the Swiss government, financial regulator, and central bank in the run up to the emergency takeover of Credit Suisse.
The announcement has raised concerns in the Swiss Society for History, with its president Sacha Zala reportedly writing to the commission that “Should researchers want to scientifically investigate the 2023 banking crisis, access to the CS files would be invaluable.”
At its first regular meeting in Bern last week, the committee was quoted by Reuters as saying that “all persons participating in the meetings and the questioning are subject to the duty of secrecy, not only the members of the commission, but also the interviewees themselves.”
It warned that “indiscretions complicate the work or damage the credibility of the commission and can have negative consequences for the Swiss financial center.”
Credit Suisse, the second-largest bank in Switzerland, faced a string of scandals, legal issues, and customer outflows in recent years. In 2022 the bank reported a net loss of 7.3 billion francs ($8.5 billion). This March, its biggest investor, Saudi National Bank, announced that it would not be able to provide financial assistance due to regulatory and statutory limits.
Later in the month, Credit Suisse’s rival UBS agreed to buy the struggling institution for the equivalent of $3.25 billion in a government-brokered deal. The merger, the biggest banking tie-up since the 2008 financial crisis, came amid growing fears of a broader contagion after several regional banks collapsed in the US. The acquisition ended Credit Suisse’s 167-year history while the whole affair has dealt a blow to Switzerland’s reputation as a stable global financial center.
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Breast Cancer: Before You Consent
A new Unbekoming paperback
Lies are Unbekoming | September 18, 2026
Peter Gøtzsche reviewed every randomised mammography screening trial ever conducted for the Cochrane Collaboration. Cochrane’s headline is that, assuming a 15% mortality reduction, one woman in 2000 avoids dying of breast cancer over ten years. Ten are overdiagnosed and treated. Two hundred experience false alarms.
But that headline assumes the reduction. When Gøtzsche looked only at the trials with adequate randomisation — the higher-quality ones — the reduction disappeared. No effect on breast cancer mortality. No effect on all-cause mortality.
This is the Cochrane finding, published in the establishment’s own database of systematic reviews.
No woman being asked to consent to a mammogram this week knows it.
That is why the new Unbekoming paperback exists. … continue
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