By Yvonne Ridley | MEMO | April 18, 2023
Scotland is one of the smallest countries in the world but you would have to be deaf, dumb and blind not to know that last month Humza Yousaf became the first Muslim to be elected as a leader in Western Europe.
You’d also have to live somewhere very remote to be unaware his political party, the Scottish National Party (SNP), was plunged into chaos within hours of his appointment as Police Scotland conducted a raid on the home of his predecessor, former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, as well as the party’s headquarters in Edinburgh.
Her unexpected resignation as the leader of the Scottish Government was widely reported around the world but the speculation over her departure gave way to euphoria in large parts of Scotland’s vibrant Muslim community who support the country’s independence movement.
However, one of the most powerful Muslim political pressure groups in the UK reckons his appointment is not a cause for celebration. The Muslim Public Affairs Committee, MPACUK has accused Yousaf of wanting “to break Scotland away from England’s chains, yet denies the same right for Palestine”.
In a damning article on its website, MPACUK wrote: “As the new leader of the Scottish Nationalist Party, he is supposed to embody their mission objective, ‘a fair society where no-one is left behind’. But if Yousaf is not willing to call out an unjust society when he sees one, it calls into question either his integrity or his intelligence; whichever is found to be deficient, it spells poor leadership from the new First Minister.”
The unjust society referred to by the group is Israel which has also been called an “apartheid state” by US President Jimmy Carter as well as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and Israeli-run B’Tselem .
Researchers in the group unearthed media claims going back to May 2014 in which Yousaf publicly stated “Israel is not an apartheid state.” Two months later Israel massacred over 2,100 Palestinians in one of its many wars in the Gaza Strip. Thanks to the silent complicity of politicians like Humza Yousaf the story barely made headlines in Western media.
I should declare an interest at this stage as I was a member of the SNP back then and shared platforms with Yousaf and Sturgeon to promote the case for independence. Back in 2021 I left, disillusioned, to join the ALBA Party formed by another former First Minister Alex Salmond whose Palestinian supporting credentials have been well documented by the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign (SPSC).
And so, returning to Yousaf’s unseemly support for Israel, he is quoted as saying: “I can give you the Scottish Government’s vow that it is our policy not to boycott Israel…” and he went on to admit the SNP’s position on the Middle East “doesn’t vary much from the UK Government.”
I did write to him at the time and warned him that Palestinian supporters in the SPSC would never forgive or forget what they saw as a betrayal of the Palestinian people.
I do wonder if he has changed his position since then, and, if so, then he must tell us. The change could’ve been influenced by his second wife, Nadia El-Nakla, who is also an SNP politician and a local councillor, who just happens to be Palestinian. She is undoubtedly proud of her Palestinian roots and her family still resides in Gaza.
Humza certainly found his voice when the Zionist State launched a brutal bombardment on Palestinians in Ramadan of 2021. In newspaper articles he was critical of the violence which threatened the lives of his in-laws in Gaza and said he would “pray and hope they are alive in the morning” – that hope specifically being that “the international community intervenes and actually tackles the root of this conflict.”
This statement incurred the wrath of MPACUK which demanded: “Intervenes how, Yousaf? Tackle what root of the conflict? You have already indicated you will not hold Israel accountable. You refuse to stand for Palestine – can you really be trusted to stand for Scotland?”
Mick Napier, co-founder of SPSC, said: “As a first step, we urge the new First Minister to reaffirm the 2014 call from the Scottish Government, repeated in 2015, for an arms embargo on Israel.”
“He also needs to recognise that all major human rights groups have created a situation where sticking to his denial that Israel is an apartheid state will cut him off from progressive currents in Scotland. He will find that he can never placate the pro-Israel lobby except by praising Israeli crimes and condemning those who resist its barbarism against the Palestinian people. He can easily find out the depth of depravity of Israeli crimes but if he’s too busy he can just call his family in Gaza and get them to point their phones at the drones above, grey warships patrolling the shore, or the wall with robot machine guns keeping them under constant surveillance.”
Napier’s and MPACUK’s cutting observations will pile on more pressure on the under-fire First Minister who stands accused of supporting the oppressive state and, even worse, to the detriment of his own family. He won the leadership contest in a closely fought battle with female politicians Kate Forbes and Ash Regan under the ticket of being the “continuity candidate”.
But as critics have already pointed out, as long as Humza Yousaf is viewed as an ally to Israel, he cannot be a champion of independence.
Sputnik – 17.04.2023
WASHINGTON – US Congressman Matt Gaetz said in a statement that he has introduced a resolution to force the Biden administration to relay information about plans for US military assistance to Ukraine, as well as about the number of US servicemembers operating in the country.
“Today, US Congressman Matt Gaetz introduced a Privileged Resolution of Inquiry, forcing President Joe Biden to transmit to the House of Representatives copies of any and all documents outlining plans for military assistance to Ukraine. Additionally, the resolution directs Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to disclose the number of United States Armed Forces, including special operators, deployed to Ukraine without Congressional authority,” the statement said on Monday.
Biden and Austin would be required to provide the requested information within two weeks of the bill’s adoption, the statement said.
Documents leaked in recent months that appear to show classified US military information revealed that at least 14 members of the US special forces were deployed in Ukraine.
There is a small US military element in Ukraine, but no servicemembers engaged in combat operations, Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh said on Monday. However, US officials have declined to comment on the veracity of the seemingly leaked materials.
“The Biden Administration and other allied countries have been misleading the world on the state of the war in Ukraine. There must be total transparency from this administration to the American people when they are gambling war with a nuclear adversary by having special forces operating in Ukraine,” Gaetz’s statement said.
The resolution would better inform Congress and the country on the “true state” of the US military’s involvement in the Ukraine conflict, the statement added.
By Drago Bosnic | April 18, 2023
Electronic warfare (EW) is one of the most important aspects of modern military capabilities and is often the litmus test of how advanced the state and its armed forces are. It’s part of the “invisible” and yet extremely intense battle that we usually cannot see directly. However, its impact is wholly undeniable. Russia is among the world leaders in EW and its warfighting capabilities in this regard are a source of pride for the Eurasian giant, but also fear for its adversaries. Russian dominance in EW on the frontlines of Ukraine is so comprehensive and massive that it’s one of the few things the mainstream propaganda machine never dared to question or ridicule. Even Russian strategic thermonuclear capabilities were subjected to propaganda attacks at times, but its EW capabilities – never. And for good reason.
And yet, as with everything concerning the mainstream propaganda machine, we must tread carefully. This is especially true when it comes to the media citing the Pentagon “leaks” as their primary source of information. Needless to say, an actual leak would require an inadvertent release of classified information and most intelligence experts agree it’s extremely unlikely there was anything inadvertent about it. However, this is not to say that all information connected to the “leak” is false. On the contrary, its relatively elaborate nature implies that much of it is indeed true, but it can be difficult to discern what exactly. One of the few “leaked” facts we can surely believe concerns precisely Russian EW capabilities. Still, this begs the question – why?
To answer that, we should first dissect and specify the claims of the mainstream propaganda machine. The “leaks” include a massive amount of information, including the claim that US-made JDAM (Joint Direct Attack Munition) bombs are failing in Ukraine due to successful Russian EW measures. The “leak” documents not only review the use of Russian countermeasures to make JDAMs ineffective, but also indicate that in some cases this results in failure to even detonate. It seems this includes the JDAM-ER (Extended Range) bombs that the troubled Biden administration sent to the Kiev regime in order to provide certain battlefield advantages to its forces. A futile effort, it would seem now, although the documents suggest that at least a thousand JDAM kits have been sent so far.
Politico claims that “Russia is using GPS jamming to interfere with the weapons’ targeting process, according to the slide and a separate person familiar with the issue who’s not in the US government”. The report further states that “American officials believe Russian jamming is causing the JDAMs, and at times other American weapons such as guided rockets, to miss their mark”. Mick Mulroy, a former Pentagon official and retired CIA officer claims: “I do think there may be concern that the Russians may be jamming the signal used to direct the JDAMs, which would answer why these munitions are not performing in the manner expected and how they perform in other war zones.”
This was quite an unpleasant surprise for the Kiev regime as it expected the JDAMs to be a “game changer” providing key tactical advantages that Russia supposedly “couldn’t match”. However, it’s not just that this completely false sense of security fell apart as a result, but it turns out that the performance of other much-touted NATO-sourced weaponry is little more than PR optics. The “leak” suggests that even the M270 and HIMARS rockets are being successfully countered by Russian GPS jamming tactics. Many documents consistently show that the Kiev regime forces are generally beset by chronic munitions and advanced weapons shortages, and having Russian EW capabilities preventing precision targeting is exacerbating this exponentially, despite countless billions in weapons provided by the political West.
This is where we come to the “solution” the American Military Industrial Complex (MIC) may come up with. So, how does the world’s largest cartel of arms producers solve the issues with the precision of their weapons? Well, more weapons! With the Kiev regime potentially acquiring thousands of additional JDAMs, obviously by using funds provided by the political West, since the Neo-Nazi junta itself is “financially dead”, as Hungarian President Viktor Orban accurately assessed, US MIC contractors get even more billions of American taxpayers’ dollars. The contract to alter and/or upgrade thousands of JDAMs and other munitions would provide long-term contracts to the likes of Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, BAE Systems, etc. This could be one of the few logical answers to the question of why the mainstream propaganda machine suddenly felt the urge to tell the truth for once.
However, we shouldn’t fall into the trap of thinking this has anything to do with altruistic motives or even the desire to make the Kiev regime a more effective fighting force. The main goal primarily revolves around causing as much death and destruction as possible, particularly to civilian infrastructure in the Donbass and other areas of former Ukraine. This has twofold advantages for the US. First, Russia is left with destroyed buildings and infrastructure that need to be renovated and second, the mainstream propaganda machine can portray the destruction as caused by Russia. This also explains why the Neo-Nazi junta continues using Western weapons that keep missing and hitting civilian areas. Perhaps the only positive aspect in all this is that the sheer magnitude of corruption and cronyism in both the political West and Kiev may very well accelerate Russian victory.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
This is the third in our series about four well-known men whose purposeful social engineering over the years has undermined national democracies and economies, and created fertile ground for the final realisation of their post democracy dream of a global socialist/fascist world, controlled by supranational organisations such as the United Nations (UN), the World Health Organisation (WHO) and of course, themselves. They are George Soros (you can read Tuesday’s article here), Klaus Schwab (yesterday’s article is here), Bill Gates (today) and David Attenborough.
By Karen Harradine | TCW Defending Freedom | April 13, 2023
BILL Gates has a messiah complex. His obsession with ‘climate change’, vaccines and people control is proving dangerous for the world. Only a few weeks ago he gave voice to his latest megalomaniac plan for a global pandemic prison state. And as the past proves, what Gates wants he usually gets.
Together with his fellow Indoctrinators, George Soros and Klaus Schwab, 67-year-old Gates has not missed the opportunity provided by the Covid-19 crisis (which he helped to engineer) to further his revolutionist ‘global development’ green agenda. Following their precedent, he too created a foundation through which to impose his ghastly visions on an unfortunate world.
Since its inception in 2000, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), under its philanthropic guise, has found plenty of useful idiots across world governments willing to fund and support it. Successive witless British Prime Ministers, up to and including Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak, have fallen under his spell with Gates hugely benefiting from this priceless endorsement and publicity. Given his malign agenda, Western taxpayers have literally been paying for their own demise.
Gates is an enthusiastic partner of the World Economic Forum (WEF) and attendee at their gatherings in Davos, which he typically uses to announce his latest plans to drain the West of its resources to fund his vaccine and climate change lunacy. In 1999, he formed the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI), which he cleverly partnered with the United Nations (UN), BMGF, foreign aid agencies and pharmaceutical companies. It was to become, together with the BMGF, the second biggest source of funding to the World Health Organisation (WHO).
More than 80 per cent of the WHO’s budget comes from voluntary contributions by member states and donors. In 2021, the BMGF was the second largest contributor with $375million, and GAVI the fourth with $245million. Both have a long history of influencing the WHO (the BMGF’s first donation was in1998). Uniquely the BMGF became its official partner in 2017, further focusing the WHO’s public health priorities on to vaccines. An enabler of and publicist for the toxic Covid-19 vaccine, his close connection with the WHO has reaped him huge profits.
The WHO’s deeply disturbing proposed Pandemic Treaty effectively puts into action Gates’s planned grasp for global control as he detailed in his 2022 book, ‘How to Prevent the Next Pandemic’. It has been long in the planning.
In 2003, on a Davos panel called ‘Science for the Global Good’, Gates announced his foundation’s gift of $200million to the US National Institutes of Health to set up the Grand Challenges in Global Health, a vehicle for shifting US tax money into the developing world in pursuit of Gates’s own interests.
In 2010, Gates and his wife heralded a ‘decade of vaccines’ at Davos, pledging $10billion to fund vaccines in ‘poor countries’, a vaccine zealotry which has had some appalling outcomes for which Gates has expressed no remorse. In one example, nearly half a million children in India were paralysed after taking BMGF-funded polio vaccine. Despite such appalling consequences, Gates, with an honorary knighthood in the bag from the Queen, is still widely regarded as a benign philanthropist. There’s no doubt that money buys reputation.
Like Soros, Gates has a prominent platform on the WEF website to promote green investments worth billions of dollars. A devotee of the UN’s Agenda 2030, Gates is co-chair of the Global Commission on Adaptation.
Today, thanks to our unprincipled politicians, Gates has a hotline to Downing Street and Britain finds itself in the clutches of a megalomaniac. His tentacles reach far and wide, from shaping energy policies and dominating scientific organisations and academic research, to financing the mainstream media.
In 1997, Tony Blair invited him into Downing Street to sell his flawed computer system, going on to host him several times, implementing policies based on his dictates and in his financial interests. It was an association Blair was to prosper from, later getting $3.2million for his Global Africa initiative and more than $25.2million for his Institute of Global Change.
In 2010, Gates and his wife visited the Department for International Development (DFID) to hector ministers on supporting foreign aid while promoting his Living Proof project, funded also by Soros’s Open Society Foundations and the Rockefeller Foundation.
Billionaires persuading politicians to plunder public resources to fund their own megalomaniac ambitions is not just deeply distasteful but wrong. Yet between 2011 and 2019, Gates got DFID to give over £60million for BMGF development projects.
In 2016, George Osborne pledged £2.5billion to another BMGF association, the Ross Fund. Three years later, the BMGF and World Bank ‘partnered’ with DFID to shovel more taxpayers’ money to foreign despots in the name of ‘education systems’.
In November 2020, after Johnson played his part in the hysteria over Covid-19, Gates met him and pharmaceutical companies and plotted how to prevent ‘pandemics’. Johnson then gave £800million to the BMGF’s vaccine initiative, COVAX.
A year later, Johnson reunited with Gates and promised a further £400million to fund his green investments.
In Sunak Gates has a willing apprentice. In February, the pair met to discuss wasting more money on Gates’s terrifying ‘climate change’ goals.
The BMGF and its subsidiaries like the Global Fund, which promotes the ominous sounding ‘health security’, has, since its inception in 2002, managed to extract an astonishing £4.5billion from the UK government, with another £1billion earmarked for the next two years. When did British taxpayers vote for that?
Millions today in this country can no longer afford both food and energy costs, they are medically neglected and live in substandard housing. Questions must be asked why politicians are funding this Indoctrinator to dictate policies that are provenly detrimental to British citizens and are only to the benefit of one man. The multi- billionaire land owner, Bill Gates. If a vampire is invited into a home, best be prepared for a bloodbath.
The last in this series will focus on green evangelist Sir David Attenborough.
By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | April 14, 2023
A former staffer who worked in the Obama administration is blowing the whistle on the Bidens – and has accused President Biden of being involved in a “kickback scheme” directly related to his son Hunter’s overseas business dealings.
Mike McCormick, a stenographer in the White House for 15 years who worked with Biden from 2011 to 2017, told Fox & Friends First that the FBI has completely ignored him despite his willingness to testify under oath before the grand jury investigating Hunter.
“In February, I went to the FBI and filed one of their tips on their website. If you do that, and you’re lying to them, you go to jail. I’m not lying. I’m telling the truth, and I’m not going to jail,” McCormick said on Thursday. “Joe Biden is a criminal. He was conducting malfeasance in office to enrich his family. Jake Sullivan is a conspirator in that, and there’s more… Obama officials involved in it, I believe.”
McCormick specifically noted a key dialogue involving then-VP Biden, aide Jake Sullivan and the press on Air Force Two before an April 21, 2014 trip to Kyiv, Ukraine, in which Sullivan – now Biden’s national security adviser – outlined a US investment in the Ukrainian energy sector just days after Hunter joined the board of Burisma.
Months after the trip, Congress allocated $50 million to Ukraine’s energy market.
“I’m sitting back there with a tape recorder. Jake Sullivan comes back and somebody asks about fracking. His answer is, well, we’re bringing a lot of American assistance over for fracking. Burisma was the direct beneficiary of that fracking, and that’s what I recorded, and that’s in a White House transcript,” said McCormick, adding: “In the transcript, you don’t know who Jake Sullivan is. It’s a senior administration official. I’m the witness that says Jake Sullivan is the guy who said it and he should be investigated because at the time Hunter Biden was on the board of Burisma and Joe Biden is bringing American taxpayer money to enrich that company and himself and his family.”
Hunter joined the board of the Ukrainian natural gas firm on April 18, just three days before Biden and his team traveled to Kyiv. But that critical piece of the puzzle was not made public until May 12.
McCormick argued the timeline of the events suggests that Biden funneled American money overseas to “enrich” himself and his family, and used his own influence to aid his son’s rookie energy career.
The former stenographer made it clear he wants to present the information under oath before the grand jury in Delaware probing Hunter’s business dealings, which is led by U.S. Attorney David Weiss. –Fox News
A federal probe into Hunter Biden’s suspected tax and foreign lobbying violations began in 2018, after banks filed dozens of suspicious activity reports (SARs) regarding foreign transactions that were flagged. Some of the SARs involved money funneled from “China and other foreign nations,” sources close to the probe tell Fox.
“If David Weiss can’t have me in front of his grand jury explaining what I know as a witness, that’s a fraudulent grand jury,” said McCormick. “It’s a fraudulent use of the American judicial system to cover for Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s crimes in office.”
McCormick says the information he has incriminates Biden – and likely other officials, in connection with the alleged influence peddling scandal.
“If I went in there, I would tell them to have Barack Obama called in as a witness because he’s part of the conspiracy. He’s an ex-president. He has to answer who was in charge of this, putting Joe Biden into this role? Did Barack Obama know about it?” he continued.
“There’s evidence I’ve seen and put in my Substack on April 16th, so two days before Hunter joins Joe Biden is with Hunter in the West Wing. They have a meeting, and then later that day in the evening, Joe Biden spends a day in the limousine in the back of Barack Obama’s limousine in western Pennsylvania.”
This is an important testimony to add to the historical record
Forgotten Side of Medicine | April 12, 2023
I am a physician who stood against the false narratives swirling around Covid and, for a time, it seemed like I lost.
Before Covid became a public reality, I was working as a successful trauma surgeon and surgical ICU physician in the hospital that had the first diagnosed Covid case in America. I was working as one of the more senior surgeons of a team of 12 surgeons. The hospital and medical community had already been struggling prior to Covid with various departures from reality with narratives including ‘racism everywhere’ and ‘diversity as long as it supports deviancy’, but it wasn’t appearing to dramatically affect patient care.
In 2018-2019, I stumbled onto a fraud scheme perpetrated by some of the administrative doctors in our hospital that did cause patient harm, so I reported our hospital administration for fraud. I similarly observed and discovered other connected issues that caused patient harm by various other providers that I tried to bring to light in our hospital. I was ‘rewarded’ with 12 complaints filed against me over a two week period, in retaliation. These complaints accused me of breaches of almost every aspect of professional behavior and ethics. They followed one of the administrators sending out an email asking her colleagues to “get rid of Dr. Miller”. None of these allegations stood (they were all false to begin with), and I continued to do my job to the best of my abilities in this hostile situation, but it became increasingly difficult. Eventually, every single complaint was dismissed as unsubstantiated.
Then, through February and March of 2020, our hospital had a large number of Covid patients including a real upsurge of many sick patients in early March. A couple of weeks later, it hit the news, but only after the virus had passed its inflection point in our hospital and after our healthcare system was not in any threat of having inadequate resources. Things then went completely mad with hype and fear – again, this was after the real infectious surge was passed.
Suddenly, our hospital outcomes and quality data became hidden and opaque to us. Prior to this, almost all data were openly shared and discussed in quality assurance meetings. The hospital forced upon us a narrative that was pure lunacy and contrary to all available observations and previously available data. A chilling example is the following.
I was working a shift in the ICU in late April 2020 and had basically nothing to do because greater than half our beds were empty. We were ‘low censusing’ any nurses willing to go home because there were so few sick patients. I was having a cup of coffee, chatting with the staff and another ICU physician, who was in leadership, when the daily newspaper was delivered. Prior to the paper being delivered, we were all relaxed, jocular and noting how little work we all had. The other ICU physician picked up the local paper where the main headline said, “Local ICU Overwhelmed”. The article was referencing our ICU, as we were the only hospital in the county. He looked at me, started sweating, panicked and said, “What are we going to do? We may not be able to handle this!” I replied with, “Pour another cup of coffee and laugh at the morons writing the paper.” He became visibly distressed and left to call the hospital administration about the situation, who confirmed they were complicit with the newspaper article. This colleague was one of the medical directors of our ICU. Our hospital and ICU were not overfull at the peak number of infections in March 2020. In fact, the ICU was never overfull, even after the horrible protocols that hurt so many patients were established. I knew we were in serious trouble as a medical community when clinical leaders started believing the words in a newspaper and hospital administrators more than their own eyes and experience.
Then, I watched as every policy, practice and quality metric that makes a trauma and surgical programme have good patient outcomes was undermined or abandoned by my colleagues and hospital administration. I filed countless complaints to our quality department for disgusting breaches of care that were now becoming commonplace. I could not turn my back on my oaths taken to advocate for patients. Between mid-2020 and 2021, following a leak of information from the opaque administration, I learned that our unanticipated morbidity and mortality numbers had more than doubled for indexed trauma patients. It was horribly demoralising to watch.
After the vaccine was rolled out in late 2020, it became a functional mandate in the broader community, and then definitively mandated by the late summer of 2021. The medical community in the county I was working in (Snohomish, Washington State) started refusing to care for unvaccinated patients except in the hospital setting. I couldn’t believe that patients were banned from accessing basic primary care at first, but then I spoke to a man at my church who was denied both refills of his diabetic medications and treatment for a sinus infection by his primary care provider, all because of his Covid vaccination status. This was so inconceivable that I still didn’t believe it. Even when patients did make it to the hospital, I learned that the physicians and staff in the emergency room were directed to provide a lower tier of medicine to this group of patients. It was less than acceptable, and worse, less dignified, than the care given to any other patients pre- and post- Covid. I had to verify with physician leaders that they approved of this inhumanity. I found out that all the major healthcare systems in the county had agreed to this action, and drove the creation of the policies that demanded physicians act in direct opposition to their oaths. After discovering this, I departed from the medical community in spirit.
Working with my pastor, we turned our church into a free clinic to care for those ostracised from society. I obtained independent malpractice insurance and we started seeing patients. People were desperate. We didn’t advertise, but there were so many people seeking basic healthcare that we struggled to see everyone. I did my best to see people in their time of need, but it was hard. I was still working in my full-time hospital position. I just didn’t have enough hours in the day. Most of the people I cared for were seen at the church – they were met with maskless smiles, prayer, support and free medical care. Sometimes, people would be waiting in my driveway for me when I arrived home in the early morning after a night shift or late at night after I finished a day shift. What became obvious as the most important thing about our clinic is that our patients needed to be treated as valuable people created in God’s image.
Prior to this experience, I was a seasoned (and hardened) subspecialist with the best reputation one could hope for in the hospitals I worked in. When other doctors, health executives, nurses and local politicians or their families had surgical problems, I was often the one asked to deliver their care even if I wasn’t scheduled to be working. After our health care system abandoned the oaths we took as physicians, I had an identity crisis and pivoted to putting more efforts into the free clinic, caring for the dispossessed patients.
Eventually, my work at the free clinic treating unvaccinated patients became known, and the hospital administration learned of it. Subsequently, the real pressure against me started. The hospital responded by opening an investigation of me on synthesised charges of ‘micro-aggression’. There ended up being two separate and independent investigations (one by the hospital, one by my physician group leadership who were working in tandem with the hospital) into my conduct. My colleagues, who months earlier asked for my help and guidance about both professional and personal matters, would no longer return my calls, text messages or emails, or speak to me in public, for fear of being labelled as affiliated with me while in my state of political disfavour. The investigations themselves and the repercussions to my reputation were the punishment. I was treated as guilty, even when proven innocent, by the hospital administration and my colleagues. The investigations eventually exonerated me, my behaviour and my healthcare delivery, but left open the possibility for immediate suspension or termination if I committed a ‘micro-aggression’ in the future. Obviously, this was a no-win scenario for me since micro-aggressions are subjective, undefinable, unprovable and therefore indefensible. I refused to continue working without an independent mediator, so the hospital gladly paid out my contract instead of mediation and restoration.
Separately during this time I was reported to the State Medical Board by an outpatient pharmacist for prescribing a two-week course of fluvoxamine (an anti-depressant) to help a patient recovering after Covid. This prescription had been banned by the Washington State Medical Association as a treatment for Covid or its repercussions. Incidentally, the patient had a positive response and near complete recovery from her illness, but the pharmacist and WSMA didn’t seem to care about that data point and were apparently just offended that I violated their protocol.
By March and April of 2022, multiple other clinics in the county began to accept care for most patients, regardless of vaccination status, and so we wound down the free clinic at my church, transitioning people’s care to physicians in established practices who would now agree to deliver appropriate care. As I had been reported to the state (although no formal charges were brought) and I was being pushed out of hospital medicine for practising ethical medicine, I knew it was time to leave Washington State. The message to me was clear: if I stayed, I would have formal investigations that would prohibit me from obtaining a medical licence in another state. My livelihood would be stripped away. So, we sold our homes and boats, liquidated our assets and moved to South Florida in May 2022. I was, and am, bitter at the medical establishment that committed these crimes, so I planned to retire at age 50 with the move and have nothing further to do with the establishment.
However, after the hurricane came through Florida in the fall of 2022, I started doing volunteer work for hurricane victims. This included some medical relief work. I realised there is still good that can be done in medicine, that people need healthcare providers, and that by nature, I am a healer.
So, in February of 2023, I returned to practising medicine and started working as a primary care physician at a holistic clinic where no patient is turned away. I discovered that I enjoy being a family physician, too. I lost my prestigious career and my social position, but I did not lose my ethics or integrity. I did not violate my oaths of practice. So, ultimately, I have won. And I’m happy.
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | April 123, 2023
The U.S. government will spend $5 billion on a program to accelerate the development of new coronavirus vaccines and therapeutics, White House officials announced this week in an interview with The Washington Post.
Dubbed “Project NextGen,” the new initiative will serve as the successor to the Trump administration’s “Operation Warp Speed,” launched in March 2020 to expedite the development of COVID-19 vaccines.
Similar to Operation Warp Speed, Project NextGen — with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation — will encourage public-private partnerships.
According to Reuters, the project will be managed out of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which will coordinate across various government agencies and private-sector actors, covering “all phases of development from lab research and clinical trials to delivery.”
“Scientists, public heath [sic] experts and politicians have called for the initiative, warning that existing therapies have steadily lost their effectiveness and that new ones are needed,” the Post reported.
The new initiative is based on a “roadmap” for the development of new coronavirus vaccines, formulated by the University of Minnesota and led by a former Biden administration official.
A ‘roadmap’ for ‘better’ coronavirus vaccines
Operation Warp Speed invested approximately $30 billion in the development, manufacturing and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, according to USA Today, with six drugmakers each receiving more than $1 billion, along with a promise of a “guaranteed market” if they successfully developed a vaccine.
Project NextGen was originally to be named “Project COVID Shield,” after some Republican lawmakers called for the launch of an “Operation Warp Speed 2.0” to build on the Trump administration’s legacy.
However, “White House officials wanted some distance from the Trump effort as well as from COVID-focused branding, when much of the country had moved on from the pandemic,” the Post reported, quoting two anonymous Biden administration officials.
The new initiative also will be “more modest,” and have a “more open-ended mission,” unlike Operation Warp Speed, which focused exclusively on COVID-19.
According to USA Today, the initial $5 billion in funding “will be financed through money saved from contracts costing less than originally estimated.”
Ashish Jha, White House coronavirus coordinator, said the new initiative has three primary goals: creating longer-lasting vaccines, accelerating the development of nasal vaccines and bolstering efforts to create “broader” pan-coronavirus vaccines.
The project also includes funding for more durable monoclonal antibodies.
The name “Project NextGen,” made more sense, Jha said, as it is “a different time” with “a different set of goals.” The new name “much more accurately captures what it is that we are trying to do,” he said.
Michael Osterholm, Ph.D., M.P.H., director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) at the University of Minnesota, is helping lead the effort.
In February, CIDRAP developed a “roadmap” for the development of “better” coronavirus vaccines. This “roadmap” serves as the basis for Project NextGen.
Osterholm was a member of the COVID-19 advisory board convened by then-president-elect Joe Biden’s transition team. The board was dissolved when Biden took office in January 2021.
Jha told the Post, “It’s been very clear to us that the market on this is moving very slowly. There’s a lot that government can do, the administration can do, to speed up those tools … for the American people.”
Previously, during a July 2022 White House coronavirus vaccine summit, Jha said:
“We need vaccines that are more durable. Vaccines that offer broader and longer-lasting protection. Vaccines that can stand up to multiple variants. Vaccines that can handle whatever Mother Nature throws at us.”
Osterholm characterized existing COVID-19 vaccines as “really good” but “not great.”
“There is a substantial amount of work [to be done] to take these good vaccines and hopefully achieve better vaccines,” Osterholm said.
Osterholm noted that SARS-CoV-2 is the third new coronavirus to appear in the past two decades — Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome (MERS) and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) were the other two. According to Osterholm, it would be “great” to be prepared for a fourth new coronavirus when and if it appears.
Reuters quoted an unnamed HHS spokesperson, who stated:
“While our vaccines are still very effective at preventing serious illness and death, they are less capable of reducing infections and transmission over time. New variants and loss of immunity over time could continue to challenge our healthcare systems in the coming years.
“Project NextGen will accelerate and streamline the rapid development of the next generation of vaccines and treatments through public-private collaborations. The infusion of a $5 billion investment, at minimum, will help catalyze scientific advancement in areas that have large public health benefits for the American people, with the goal of developing safe and effective tools for the American people.”
The Post noted, however, that while the outbreak of new coronaviruses in recent decades has “spurred worries about the potential for future health crises,” it might take years to develop a universal coronavirus vaccine, noting that such efforts have been unsuccessful for influenza despite decades of efforts.
Speaking to USA Today, Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, expressed skepticism about Project NextGen’s goals, noting that similar efforts to develop flu and HIV vaccines have been in progress for more than 40 years, without result.
Offit said that the effectiveness of nasal vaccines remains unclear, as they remain in the clinical trial stage at this time. Dr. John Moore, an immunologist at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, expressed a similar view, saying “it’s seriously naïve to believe that it will be easy to make [a nasal vaccine].”
He added that the emphasis on improving existing COVID-19 vaccines, which he described as “amazing,” would likely undermine public trust in those vaccines.
Moore told USA Today that “an initiative like this is much needed and should have been put in place much sooner,” adding that “Anyone familiar with vaccine development knows that translation into a practical product is a much harder and more expensive process” than the creation of a basic vaccine.
“A lot of designs that look good in the early stages fizzle out because they cannot be manufactured efficiently under the conditions required for human trials,” Moore said.
According to Jha though, the new project and its investment in a new generation of coronavirus vaccines “will have very large benefits for other respiratory pathogens we deal with all the time, like flu and RSV.”
Gates, Rockefeller Foundations behind Project NextGen
On Feb. 21, CIDRAP published its “roadmap for advancing better coronavirus vaccines” — with $1 million in support from the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations, “To help jump-start the search for better vaccines [and] develop broadly protective vaccines.”
According to the project description, the funding was used to assemble “an international collaboration of 50 scientists who mapped out a strategy to make the new vaccines a reality.”
Osterholm stated at the time, “If we wait for the next event to happen before we act, it will be too late.”
Bruce Gellin, M.D., M.P.H., chief of Global Public Health Strategy at The Rockefeller Foundation, said that there is an “urgency” to take the next steps, calling for an “equivalent” to Operation Warp Speed.
According to CIDRAP, Gellin “has led several federal vaccine initiatives and has been a technical advisor for groups including Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, COVAX, and the World Health Organization.”
The Gates Foundation is a partner of Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance, which, in turn, closely collaborates with the ID2020 Alliance, which promoted the development of digital ID. Microsoft is a founding member of the ID2020 Alliance, as well as Gavi, the BMGF, the World Bank, Accenture and the Rockefeller Foundation.
CIDRAP received the $1 million grant in April 2022, and by October 2022, had developed a draft version of its “roadmap.” According to Osterholm, it draws on a similar “roadmap strategy” employed by CIDRAP for previous projects, including the improvement of seasonal flu vaccines and the development of a universal flu vaccine.
For the new “roadmap,” these efforts culminated in a 92-page report, and accompanying summary, published in Vaccine journal. The project is divided into five core areas: virology, immunology, vaccinology, animal and human models for vaccine research, and policy and funding.
In an accompanying commentary published in the same issue of Vaccine, Dr. Margaret Hamburg, a former FDA commissioner who is co-president of the InterAcademy Partnership, and Dr. Greg Poland, director of the Mayo Clinic’s Vaccine Research Group, said that COVID-19 vaccines have been effective in preventing serious disease.
Hamburg was a participant in the Nuclear Threat Initiative’s (NTI) monkeypox pandemic simulation in March 2021, based on a remarkably prescient “fictional” monkeypox outbreak in May 2022. She is a board member of the Nature Conservancy and vice president of NTI’s Global Biological Policy and Programs and is on the board of Gavi.
However, according to Hamburg and Poland, there are some problems with the current vaccines, including “notable reactogenicity” in certain individuals, a short duration of protection, and technical requirements that make them difficult to store and administer in remote locations and areas with low resources.
They said the next-generation vaccines may offer additional benefits such as “new methods of delivery — transdermal patches, oral or intranasal vaccines — which are easy to distribute and apply, stimulate mucosal immunity, and potentially block transmission,” adding that this is superior to the current strategy of “chasing” new variants and developing boosters.
Hamburg and Poland said that a universal coronavirus would be easy to stockpile, but the road to the development of such a vaccine could take a “tiered approach,” starting with the creation of a “variant-proof” COVID-19 vaccine, followed by developing vaccines that offer broader protection against various coronavirus families.
Members of CIDRAP said in February that funding would be a challenge for the initiatives set forth in their “roadmap,” due to “shrinking support for large-scale vaccine investments, now that the emergency phase of the COVID-19 pandemic has mainly passed.”
The federal funding earmarked for Project NextGen would, however, appear to address this issue.
Other challenges the CIDRAP team identified included the “lack of corporate incentives, uncertainty around public demand for a broadly protective vaccine, and the feasibility of expanding vaccine production capacity.”
Gellin, however, said in a Feb. 21 University of Minnesota press release that: “Time and time again, we have seen that investment in science brings solutions. The COVID-19 pandemic galvanized the research community and advanced vaccine R&D efficiently and through broad collaborations,” essentially previewing Project NextGen.
On April 20, CIDRAP will hold a one-hour “scientific webinar,” open to the public, presenting their “roadmap.”
Republican lawmakers, Fauci pressed for ‘Warp Speed 2.0’
Political wrangling delayed the funding of Project NextGen, according to the Post, which reported that Republicans insisted that funds were left over from prior COVID-19 aid packages.
Ultimately, HHS “shifted funds intended for coronavirus testing and other priorities” into the new initiative.
Dr. Anthony Fauci was one of the voices who “spent months pressing Congress for billions of dollars that could be used to develop next-generation vaccines and treatments,” the Post reported, adding that these arguments “largely fell flat” in the face of Republican opposition.
However, according to the Post, “Even some of the Republicans who blocked the White House’s coronavirus funding requests last year said they wanted a ‘Warp Speed 2.0’ to rush updated vaccines and treatments that would better fight the virus.”
In August 2022, former Sens. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and James Inhofe (R-Okla.) wrote to President Biden, stating “Operation Warp Speed was the most successful public health program since small pox. It saved millions of lives, and it should be resurrected as soon as possible.”
Dawn O’Connell, assistant secretary for Preparedness and Response at HHS, told the Post that the Biden administration learned lessons from Operation Warp Speed, including how to speed up vaccine development, and that these lessons would be applied to Project NextGen.
“We’ve learned a lot in these three years,” O’Connell said. She added that some of the lab work related to Project NextGen has begun, and that the government has launched efforts to identify potential partners in the private sector.
“We’ve begun surveying the landscape out there — assessing what vaccine candidates are available, [and] moving through what exciting technologies are there,” she said.
According to the Post, O’Connell and her team informed companies working on the development of monoclonal antibodies that the government may soon make new investments in the technology.
Jha, however, refused to set a timetable for when new products developed under the aegis of Project NextGen would be available to the public, the Post reported.
“The timelines are really going to be predicated on how quickly the scientific advancements continue, and how quickly we can study and measure the efficacy and safety of these products,” Jha said.
Project NextGen is also still without a leader, with the White House “still considering candidates,” according to the Post, which noted that the process is slowed down by “Democrats’ desire to avoid questions of conflicts of interest that dogged Operation Warp Speed, after Trump officials selected Moncef Slaoui, a pharmaceutical industry executive with significant stock holdings, to lead that program.”
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”
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.
RT | April 12, 2023
Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky and his senior officials are skimming American taxpayer dollars by the hundreds of millions, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh claimed on Wednesday. The alleged grift even includes schemes involving trade with Russia itself.
Zelensky and his entourage embezzled at least $400 million from US funds meant for diesel procurement last year, Hersh claimed in a new article on Substack, citing a CIA estimate.
Meanwhile, Kiev has allegedly been buying diesel fuel, which is essential for the war effort, from Russia itself – and in the process skimming large sums of US funds earmarked for diesel payments.
Reports had earlier surfaced about how oil products originating in Russia had made their way to Ukraine through Bulgaria and Latvia. The scheme involving the Baltic state, which was reported in detail by the Latvian television program Neka Personiga, may have violated the EU’s anti-Russian sanctions.
An expert cited by Hersh compared the level of corruption in Ukrainian procurement to what was seen in Afghanistan, when a US-backed government was in charge in Kabul. According to his sources, ministries in Kiev compete to set up front firms in order to export weapons and ammunition, with the relevant officials profiting from kickbacks. The US government , meanwhile, has stated that it has seen no evidence of Western-supplied weapons in Ukraine being diverted elsewhere.
Hersh cited an intelligence source who referred to the January meeting between Zelensky and CIA Director William Burns. The US official allegedly presented a list of 35 generals and ministers known to the CIA to be corrupt. Senior Ukrainian officials also complained that Zelensky “was taking a larger share of the skim money than was going to the generals,” the source explained, comparing the meeting to a scene from a 1950s mob movie.
Hersh contends that the Ukrainian leader’s response was to fire staff from the Cabinet of Ministers, regional administrations, and other parts of the Ukrainian government. Kiev claimed the move was part of its anti-corruption strategy. Defense Minister Aleksey Reznikov, who became mired in a scandal over purchases of overpriced food for troops, was widely expected to be sacked at the time, but he survived the purge.
Hersh’s sources blamed Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan for the ongoing crisis in the US government, which allegedly suffers from discord between the White House and intelligence community. The two top foreign policy officials have shown “strident ideology and lack of political skill” over the Ukraine conflict, according to the sources.
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | April 11, 2023
The federal government and insurers incentivized healthcare providers in Kentucky and California to vaccinate Medicaid patients against COVID-19 by offering bonuses based on the percentage of patients successfully vaccinated.
“[This is] truly sickening and I am embarrassed for my profession by this,” Dr. Meryl Nass, an internist and biological warfare epidemiologist, wrote on her Substack, where she posted several documents relating to the COVID-19 vaccine provider incentive programs.
The documents help to draw a picture of the broader effort at the federal, state and local levels to unleash a range of strategies targeting low-income and people-of-color communities, which tended to have lower vaccination rates.
The strategies included providing hundreds of millions of dollars for the creation of “culturally tailored” pro-vaccine materials and for training “trusted” and “influential messengers” to promote COVID-19 and flu vaccines to communities of color in every state.
Nass’ revelations showed these efforts went beyond advertising, fear campaigns, payments to patients and payments to trusted community actors and included, in some cases, direct financial incentives to healthcare providers.
Kentucky: Medicaid paid doctors up to $250 per vaccinated Medicaid patient
Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield Medicaid in Kentucky told physicians in 2021 it would “recognize your hard work by offering incentives for helping patients make the choice to become vaccinated.”
The more people vaccinated, the higher the per-person incentive.
For physicians who treated an Anthem Medicaid cohort with a minimum of 25 patients in their practice, Anthem Medicaid offered incentives for vaccination by Sept. 1, 2021, that ranged from a $20 bonus per vaccinated person for physicians who vaccinated 30% of the cohort, to $125 per vaccinated person for those who vaccinated 75% of the cohort, with several incremental steps in between.
As time went on, the rates increased.
Between Sept. 1 to Dec. 31, 2021, physicians received payments ranging from $100 per newly vaccinated person for those who vaccinated 30% of their patient cohort, to $250 per newly vaccinated person for those who vaccinated 75% of their patient cohort.
In 2022, the Anthem provider incentive program changed to a flat rate. Providers received $50 per newly vaccinated Medicaid patient. This included children ages 6 months to 4 years and kids 12 and older vaccinated between Jan. 1 and Dec. 31, 2022, and children ages 5 to 11 vaccinated between June 1 and Dec. 31, 2022.
Medi-Cal: $350 million in incentives to vaccinate low-income children, people of color
The California Department of Health Care Services (DHCS) on Aug. 6, 2021, announced $350 million in incentive payments — $250 million to providers and $100 million for direct non-monetary payments, such as gift cards, to vaccine recipients — to encourage vaccination among Medi-Cal’s 14 million beneficiaries.
Of the $350 million, $175 million came from state general funds and $175 million from federal funding. The funding period lasted from Sept. 2, 2021, through Feb. 29, 2022.
The program offered incentives to managed care plans in the name of “health equity.” In the press release, DHCS Director Will Lightborne said that raising rates among Medi-Cal beneficiaries was essential because “California will only be safe when everyone is safe.”
Nass noted that this program was rolled out one day after Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky told CNN the vaccines don’t prevent virus transmission. “That’s clearly a contradiction,” Nass told The Defender.
The funding targeted Medicaid recipients with low vaccine uptake — the homebound, communities of color, youth ages 12 to 25 and people ages 50 to 64 with multiple chronic conditions — and incentivized outreach and vaccination activities for providers and pharmacies.
At the time of the announcement, only 45.6% of Medi-Cal beneficiaries age 12 and over had received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, compared to over 76% of Californians overall.
The DHCS funding included payments to community-based organizations, food banks, advocacy groups and faith-based organizations. This key strategy of funding grassroots leaders to act as “grassroots” proxies spreading the federal government’s vaccine message was widespread throughout the pandemic.
Providers could also couple this grant with a CAIRVaxGrant, which offered providers up to $10,000 to enter all of their historical electronic health record immunizations into the California Immunization Registry (CAIR).
The grant stipulated that after startup costs, payments would be directly tied to “meeting specific vaccination goals,” similar to the Kentucky program.
The incentive payment structure under the California plan was complex, paying a financial reward to healthcare providers who met particular benchmarks that varied by county and demographic but overall increased the percentage of vaccinated patients among their Medicare beneficiaries.
Under this incentive structure, providers had to meet particular vaccination targets in order to get paid. Those who were especially successful in increasing vaccination rates in the target groups would be entered into a “high performance pool,” receiving extra money for substantially moving the vaccination rates for Medicaid recipients 75% higher than baseline or within 10% of a given county’s general rate.
In the equation that determined the incentive payment structure, different demographic groups were weighted differently. For example, vaccine recipients ages 12 to 25 were weighted more highly than older recipients and those in the two racial/ethnic groups with the lowest uptake were also given greater weight.
By Jan. 21 of this year, despite this $250 million push, Medi-Cal vaccination had only increased to 52.9%.
Medicaid pays doctors more to administer COVID vaccines than other shots
As part of the American Rescue Plan Act, the Biden administration fully funded the COVID-19 vaccination program, making vaccines free regardless of health insurance status.
To cover the costs of the uninsured and underinsured, the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) paid provider costs of vaccine administration through an Uninsured Program and a COVID-19 Coverage Assistance Fund.
Reimbursements were based on national Medicare rates, but the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), which sets those rates, increased the reimbursement rate over time. Through March 14, 2021, HRSA paid $28.93 for a single-dose vaccine or for the second dose in a series of 2, and $16.94 for the first dose in a series of two.
On March 15, 2021, those rates increased to $40 per dose and $75.50 for an “in-home” dose of the vaccine.
Nass said the initial payments were in line with Medicaid payments for other vaccines, but the increased payment marked a departure from the usual reimbursement structure.
Usually, all CMS changes to Medicare payments for specific services must go through notice and comment rulemaking, but “to save time during the COVID-19 pandemic, the agency bypassed that route before increasing payments for administering the vaccines,” JAMA reported.
CMS said the higher payments were meant to help expand COVID-19 vaccination, supporting “actions taken by providers, such as growing existing vaccination sites, conducting patient outreach and education, and hiring additional staff,” Healthcare Finance News reported.
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.
RT | April 10, 2023
Twitter CEO Elon Musk has ignited a feud with the BBC by labeling the British broadcaster a “government funded media” organization. The BBC denies taking state money and its defenders claim that being funded by the British government differs from being funded by the British public.
Twitter applied the label to the BBC’s main account earlier this week, after slapping US broadcaster NPR with a similar tag describing it as “US state-affiliated media.” While Twitter previously reserved such labels for foreign media outlets – like RT and China’s CGTN, Musk said that applying it to NPR “seems accurate.”
NPR’s tag was changed to read “government-funded media” after an outcry from US liberals.
The BBC bristled at receiving the tag. “We are speaking to Twitter to resolve this issue as soon as possible,” the broadcaster said in a statement on Sunday. “The BBC is, and always has been, independent. We are funded by the British public through the licence fee.”
On Twitter, the BBC’s defenders pointed to the license fee as proof of the network’s independence. The BBC, Deadline reporter Jake Kanter argued, “is funded by the British public through a system known as the licence fee. The BBC’s operations and editorial decision-making are entirely independent of the government.”
However, commenters pointed out that the license fee “is a government tax in all but name.”
Set by the government, the fee is an annual payment of £159 ($197) owed by any household with a television or device capable of receiving television broadcasts. The BBC hires contractors to visit the homes of suspected evaders, and those who refuse to pay can be prosecuted by the broadcaster. Around 45,000 people per year are prosecuted for failing to pay the license, the Telegraph reported last month.
The UK’s Office for National Statistics classifies the fee as a tax, and the BBC as part of the “central government sector” of the UK economy.
Additionally, the broadcaster does actually receive direct government funding for BBC World Service. The TV license covers 75% of the service’s operational costs while the rest is directly paid for by the UK government to the tune of some £90 million ($111 million) per year. Last month, the service was also awarded a £20 million ($24 million) one-time payment to help “fight against the spread of disinformation around the world.” BBC World Service is predominantly aimed at non-UK audiences and broadcasts in over 40 languages.
The UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office is also the biggest funder of the BBC’s Media Action service, which additionally receives funding from the governments of the US, Canada, Norway, Sweden, the EU, the UN, as well as donors like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The service supplies two dozen developing countries with “information they can trust,” per the BBC’s own website.
While the BBC stated that it is editorially independent, internal communications published by the Guardian last month showed that its editors asked reporters to avoid using the term “lockdown” when talking about the government’s response to the Coviid-19 pandemic, under direct order from the government. Furthermore, journalists were instructed to be more critical of the opposition Labour Party due to complaints from the government.
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By Lisa Pease | Consortium News | September 16, 2013
More than a half century ago, just after midnight on Sept. 18, 1961, the plane carrying UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld and 15 others went down in a plane crash over Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). All 16 died, but the facts of the crash were provocatively mysterious. … continue
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