Burnham tackles Britain’s poverty with aggression in Yemen
By Finian Cunningham | Strategic Culture Foundation | October 24, 2026
British Prime Minister Andy Burnham has found a novel way of solving Britain’s cost-of-living crisis. By bombing Yemen.
Yes, you read that correctly. This week, Burnham authorized the deployment of British Typhoon fighter jets to Saudi Arabia for its war with Yemen.
Downing Street assured the British public that the deployment was for “defensive” operations only. The BBC and other British media outlets indulged this fantasy by repeating over and over that the Royal Air Force was being deployed for “defensive actions”. The RAF would not be engaging in attacking Yemen, it was claimed, and the British fighter jets were being sent to “protect” Saudi Arabia from “escalating” Houthi aggression.
Britain’s Minister of Defense Wes Streeting (a former health minister, please note) framed the RAF mission as necessary to counter instability in the Middle East and soaring energy prices. As if Britain was not the cause of instability and higher fuel costs by backing Trump’s aggression on Iran.
The Guardian reported: “The [British] military intervention [in Yemen] was partly justified because instability in the Middle East was driving up energy prices and affecting the cost of living.”
This logic is as absurd as it is gross deception.
Recall that Burnham was ushered into Downing Street in July to replace the hapless Keir Starmer as Labour prime minister. Burnham, formerly the Mayor of Manchester and posing with his working-class credentials, made a big public pitch that he would prioritize easing the cost-of-living crisis ravaging Britain.
However, since entering office, his most notable forays have been in foreign policy. For example, he has received the Ukrainian dictator Vladimir Zelensky in Downing Street with promises of more military aid in addition to the $20 billion that Britain has already provided (the second largest source of aid in Europe after Germany). Burnham has pledged to provide Ukraine with British blueprints for manufacturing cruise missiles.
Last month, Burnham announced that Britain was deploying an RAF in-air refuelling plane to “help” Saudi Arabia’s air strikes on Yemen. To allay public concerns about that move, Downing Street and the British media assured that the deployment was “defensive only” and for a limited period.
Ironically, Burnham made that announcement while travelling to address the United Nations General Assembly in New York, where he hailed Britain for offering world leadership for peace and security.
Now, again this week, the RAF deployment is extended to sending Typhoon fighter jets to Saudi Arabia. London is also providing a RAF A400M transport plane for troops and up to 100 military advisers.
This sounds like classic mission creep. Downing Street is aware of the exposure to public criticism. The prime minister’s office denied Britain was being dragged into the conflict. It said: “Our support for Saudi Arabia is considered, proportionate and focused on helping them defend themselves from relentless Houthi attacks.”
The British government and media are distorting the conflict between Saudi Arabia and Yemen as one of “aggression” by the Yemeni forces of Ansar Allah, referred to as “the Iran-backed Houthis”. That description makes the Yemenis sound like crazy terrorists who are being directed by Iran.
Here’s the BBC’s creative reporting: “The UK will deploy RAF Typhoon jets to defend Saudi Arabia in response to escalating Houthi missile and drone attacks, the government has said.”
The BBC goes on: “The defensive mission will help defend Saudi cities and infrastructure – a move authorised by Prime Minister Andy Burnham – against aerial attacks by the Iran-backed group… Since September, Saudi Arabia has been struggling to defend its skies from Houthi attacks after a ceasefire of sorts in Yemen broke down.”
This is reality inversion by the British state-owned media outlet.
The ceasefire in Yemen was violated in mid-July when Saudi Arabia launched air strikes on the international airport in Sanaa, the Yemeni capital, to target a delegation attending the state funeral of Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei, who was murdered in a U.S.-Israeli air strike on his family home in Tehran on February 28.
That ceasefire was called in 2022 to end a seven-year war of aggression by Saudi Arabia against Yemen. The war began in 2015 to reinstate a Saudi puppet regime that the Ansar Allah-led Yemenis ousted in 2014. The Saudis bombed Yemen relentlessly for seven years with support of the United States, Britain, and France. An estimated 20,000 Yemenis were killed in air strikes, and around 300,000 died from a humanitarian blockade that the Western-backed Saudi coalition imposed on the country.
Britain’s military minister Wes Streeting referred to recent Yemeni strikes on Saudi Arabia as “despicable”. He mentioned a ballistic missile attack on October 10 on King Khalid international airport in the Saudi capital, Riyadh. At least 13 people were killed in the strike, and over 300 were injured.
The Ansar Allah-led Yemeni Armed Forces have also hit several other Saudi airports and key oil industry installations. The number of Saudi civilians killed in these attacks is relatively small, around 20, whereas Saudi warplanes have killed hundreds of Yemeni civilians since it broke the ceasefire in July. This week, eight Yemeni fishermen were killed in Saudi strikes. What Yemen is doing to Saudi Arabia is self-defense, not aggression.
London and its media propaganda are making out that Britain is “defending” Saudi Arabia. The reality is London is assisting Saudi aggression and war crimes.
Significantly, Streeting flew to Washington, DC, last week, where he met the war secretary, Pete Hegseth. Their agenda was about how to respond to “Houthi escalation.” Obviously, the junior partner got the memo: send warplanes to Yemen; we’re too busy with Iran.
Meanwhile, in Britain, an unprecedented social crisis is unfolding from poverty and a crippling cost of living. Charities report that four million families are having to go without adequate food or home heating because of soaring bills. Oxfam estimates that 13.5 million Britons, or a fifth of the population, are suffering from poverty. More than six million people rely on food charities for a modicum of sustenance.
It tells you everything about a state whose government does nothing about its own people’s dire needs but finds the resources to send warplanes to distant countries to bomb other poor people.
Andy Burnham is just another puppet who is assigned to put on a show in Downing Street for public appeasement. The imperial deep state has its hand up his rear. That’s mission creep in Downing Street.
US taxpayer money laundered back through Ukraine – Musk
RT | October 24, 2026
Billionaire Elon Musk has accused US politicians of putting Kiev’s interests ahead of their own country’s, alleging that American taxpayer money sent to Ukraine is being laundered back into political campaigns.
Writing on X on Friday, the SpaceX founder suggested that financial interests could explain why some American lawmakers remain staunch supporters of Kiev in its conflict with Russia.
“Some of that US taxpayer money comes back through multiple laundry machines to fund political campaigns in America, which is why you see some politicians caring more about Ukraine than America!” Musk wrote, without identifying the beneficiaries.
In March, US outlet Just the News cited a declassified intelligence summary describing a plan to divert hundreds of millions of dollars in American aid earmarked for clean-energy projects in Ukraine into then-President Joe Biden’s 2024 reelection campaign.
Trump shared the report on Truth Social, while then-US intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard reportedly asked officials at the US Agency for International Development (USAID) to investigate whether the alleged scheme had been carried out.
Musk also accused Ukrainian elites of profiting from Western assistance while ordinary Ukrainians bear the human cost.
“The former have grown very rich off the hundreds of billions flowing to Ukraine, while the latter’s children are conscripted to die in trenches,” he wrote.
Kiev’s increasingly coercive mobilization campaign has been marked by numerous documented cases of forced detentions and violent confrontations involving recruitment officers. Corruption investigations have also exposed schemes allowing wealthier Ukrainians to evade military service.
Ukraine has been rocked by major corruption scandals involving figures close to Vladimir Zelensky. One centered on his longtime associate Timur Mindich and an alleged $100 million bribery and money-laundering operation at state nuclear energy company Energoatom. The scandal forced senior officials from office, including former presidential chief of staff Andrey Yermak, while Mindich fled Ukraine.
Ukrainian investigators have also uncovered what they say is fraud to the tune of $5.6 million involving military drones purchased at prices up to 90% above market rates.
Even Kiev’s staunchest European backers have criticized its failure to deliver promised anti-corruption reforms, warning that billions of euros in assistance could be withheld.
Zelensky is seeking at least €70 billion ($81 billion) in additional foreign assistance for 2027, estimating Ukraine’s total conflict-related spending needs for next year at €155 billion.
European Council President Antonio Costa said on Friday that the EU expects to cover roughly two-thirds of the additional funding, or around €46.7 billion, with a decision potentially coming in November. That sum would come on top of the €45 billion already earmarked for Kiev next year.
Before COVID, an NIH lab chief proposed making a SARS-like bat virus more infectious
Vincent Munster and Michael Letko (photos from NIH and WSU)
By Lewis Kamb | U.S. Right to Know | October 15, 2026
On a Sunday morning in October 2019, the chief of the virus ecology unit at the National Institutes of Health’s Rocky Mountain Laboratories emailed a postdoctoral scientist in his lab with an idea.
Vincent Munster and his postdoc, Michael Letko, had spent that year building a system to rapidly test whether dozens of SARS-related bat coronaviruses could infect human cells.
That week, Munster read a new preprint from prominent virologists Vineet Menachery and Ralph Baric’s lab groups showing that the protease trypsin could unlock entry for certain coronaviruses that otherwise would not infect human cells.
Letko had forwarded him the paper two days earlier with the note, “Seems like more groups will be converging on this idea soon.”
“You should be able to make S with a more broader cleavage signature (like furin-like) to enhance infectivity,” Munster wrote back on Oct. 6, 2019. “You can include a motif like this R-X-[K/R]-R↓ Might be cool to get some synthesized.”
In virology parlance, “S” is the coronavirus spike protein, which allows the virus to latch onto the cells it infects, and R-X-[K/R]-R is a furin cleavage site motif, which can make viruses better able to infect cells and spread.
Munster was suggesting that his postdoc engineer a furin site into a coronavirus spike protein to make it more infectious.
Eleven weeks later, a coronavirus carrying a similar furin cleavage site emerged in Wuhan, China, spawning the COVID-19 pandemic. It remains the only known sarbecovirus, the SARS-related group of coronaviruses that Munster and Letko were then screening, to have one.
The email exchange has never been made public before. It appears in a 270-page batch of records recently released by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to U.S. Right to Know in response to a request made under the Freedom of Information Act.
The request sought specific correspondence from Munster’s lab in Hamilton, Montana, from March 2019 through Jan. 22, 2020, the date when his group published one of the first papers showing that the new coronavirus used a human cell receptor called ACE2 as a doorway into cells.
Two new threads run through the records: Weeks before the pandemic began, a senior NIH virologist proposed in writing to build into a SARS-like spike protein the feature that would become the central argument for COVID-19’s laboratory origin: a furin cleavage site.
And, through the same year, his lab was asking virus hunters for unpublished bat coronavirus spike sequences, and getting them, including from researchers in the U.S.-funded consortium called PREDICT, whose New York-based lead partner, EcoHealth Alliance, had a long-standing collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) to collect and study SARS-related viruses.
Each goes to a different key point in the origins debate. The furin cleavage site is the single genetic feature most cited in the arguments that SARS-CoV-2 did not arise entirely in nature.
Unpublished sequences are the other: because the pandemic virus matches nothing in the published scientific literature, most laboratory-origin scenarios depend on some lab having held a virus the rest of the world had never seen.
Nothing in the records shows that Letko followed through on Munster’s suggestion to insert a furin cleavage site in a SARS spike protein, however. In fact, the furin cleavage site found in SARS-CoV-2 differs from the motif, or short sequence of amino acids, that Munster suggested.
Nor do the documents indicate that Rocky Mountain Labs possessed SARS-CoV-2 or a close relative, or that either Munster or Letko directly communicated with researchers in Wuhan while working on their project.
Their research also used synthetic gene fragments, not live viruses, employing particles that cannot replicate or spread. Such work generally poses lower biosafety risks.
The two then-unpublished bat virus spike sequences obtained from PREDICT, one from Malaysia and one from Uganda and Rwanda, are also too distantly related to SARS-CoV-2 to have given rise to it.
Letko, who is now an associate professor at Washington State University, declined to comment for this story, saying in an email “(y)ou will write what you write, regardless of the truth or what I have to say.”
Munster did not respond to requests for comment. He was indicted earlier this year for bringing mpox specimens into the U.S. without proper documentation and giving false statements to law enforcement officials as part of unrelated NIH research. He has pleaded not guilty.
The NIH press office also declined to answer questions about why the agency had not previously told the public that its scientists had solicited and obtained unpublished SARS-like coronavirus spike sequences, or proposed inserting a furin cleavage site into a SARS-like spike, before the pandemic.
Converging on the idea
Munster’s suggestion to add a furin cleavage site is the second known instance of scientists proposing to insert this distinguishing feature into a SARS or SARS-like spike within roughly two years before COVID-19 emerged.
In 2018, EcoHealth Alliance, Baric’s lab and researchers at the WIV had proposed the same kind of modification to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), in work that would have used live, replicating viruses. Their application, known as the DEFUSE proposal, was denied.
The concept is notable because the furin cleavage site that helped the virus cause the pandemic has become central to the debate over the pandemic’s origins.
Some proponents of a laboratory origin view DEFUSE as a blueprint for creating SARS-CoV-2, while prominent supporters of a natural origin have argued that deliberately engineering such a feature would have been unlikely and unnecessarily cumbersome. Munster’s email gives the lab-origin supporters another example of such a furin site proposal.
The revelation about Munster’s lab seeking unpublished sequences speaks to a different issue in the COVID-19 origins debate.
Because SARS-CoV-2 descends from no virus previously described in the scientific literature, any scenario in which it was engineered requires assuming that some laboratory held SARS-related sequences that had never been made public.
In a 2021 review of SARS-CoV-2 in Cell by 21 scientists called that implausible. “There is no rational experimental reason why a new genetic system would be developed using an unknown and unpublished virus,” they wrote.
But the records show a U.S. government laboratory doing just that two years earlier.
Letko’s platform was a new genetic system, and he sought unpublished sequences precisely because they were unpublished. Sharing them, he wrote in April 2019, “will surely increase the impact of our story by providing a proof of principle with unpublished sequences.”
Researchers in the U.S.-funded virus hunting program supplied two within eight weeks. One of the researchers, Simon Anthony, was also an author of the Cell review.
Alina Chan, a molecular biologist who has advocated for a thorough investigation of laboratory origin scenarios, recently reviewed the Munster-Letko email records at the request of U.S. Right To Know.
“What this shows is that different groups of virologists were converging on the idea of inserting cleavage sites in the spikes of potentially dangerous coronaviruses,” she said.
“Assuming a lab origin of COVID-19, if a lab in Wuhan hadn’t caused the pandemic, it’s plausible that a lab in the U.S. would’ve eventually followed the same path.”
Soliciting sequences
Munster’s emailed proposal didn’t come out of the blue. He and Letko were in the middle of a yearlong research project that the newly released records document from its start.
Seven months earlier, in March 2019, Munster and Letko set out to answer a question: of the hundreds of SARS-related coronaviruses in research databases worldwide, which ones could infect people?
Letko built a workaround that he and Munster described as a “rapid and scalable platform,” according to the records.
Rather than build each virus individually, they took only the receptor-binding domain — the fragment of the spike that grips onto the host cell’s receptor — and spliced it into a SARS-CoV spike backbone.
They then loaded these chimeric spikes onto harmless reporter particles and used them to infect cells expressing hACE2, the receptor SARS-CoV uses to enter the human airway.
A glow from the bioluminescent enzyme luciferase indicated successful cell entry. With Letko’s method, what typically had taken months to test now took about three weeks.
The limiting ingredient to test their method was the spike sequences. Letko had exhausted the SARS-like sequences already published. So, he and Munster started looking for others that hadn’t been, the records show.
On March 8, 2019, Munster emailed EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak, Vice President Kevin Olival and Columbia University virologist Simon Anthony, attaching a confidential abstract with a chart and figures illustrating their project.
“While we have now tested all of the variation(sic) currently published for lineage B beta-coronaviruses for their ability to enter primate cells, we are seeking additional, unpublished lineage B beta coronavirus sequences to test in our platform,” Munster wrote.
He asked them not to circulate the attachment, because the work was “still unpublished and quite competitive.”
Of the three recipients, only Anthony, then one of the core leaders on PREDICT, appears in the released correspondence. He replied later that evening: “Hey! Looks super cool.”
Two months of negotiation followed, the emails show. On April 5, Letko thanked Anthony “for agreeing to share betacoronavirus lineage B spike sequences with us,” adding that unpublished material “will surely increase the impact of our story.”
On May 2, Anthony reported back from a PREDICT meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia. His team had detected “around 5 or 6 novel 2b viruses,” he wrote, but had “only managed to get spikes for 2 of them so far.”
Because neither had been published, Letko’s paper “would be the first report of these viruses in the literature,” so long as he credited PREDICT and its partners as co-authors, Anthony said.
Letko agreed. Two days later, Anthony sent the sequences. He identified them as PREDICT_CoV-51, isolate PDF-0663, from Malaysia (which Anthony described as “SUPER divergent. Could be really interesting,”) and PREDICT_CoV-43, from Uganda and Rwanda.
“Absolutely stellar!” Munster replied. “Will keep you posted on the results!”
Anthony was generally correct. A small fragment of the Malaysian virus had been deposited in GenBank, the NIH’s public sequence database, in 2016, and referenced the following year in a survey paper Anthony co-authored with Daszak and others. But neither its full spike sequence nor its complete genome was public.
Nothing at all was public about the African virus. In neither case could anyone outside PREDICT obtain the spike sequence, the part that determines whether a virus can enter human cells and the only part Letko’s platform could use.
A step further
Five months later, after reading the new preprint about trypsin, Munster proposed taking Letko’s project a step further.
For a coronavirus to infect a host cell, binding the receptor is only the first step. The spike must then be cut open by one of the host’s own enzymes before the virus can fuse with the cell and get inside. These enzymes that cut protein apart are called proteases, and each one targets different spots.
The protease a spike is built for largely determines what tissues it can infect. SARS-CoV depends on proteases that are not available everywhere in the body. Furin, however, is expressed in the cells of most tissues.
The Menachery-Baric preprint that sparked Munster’s idea had shown that adding trypsin from the outside could unlock entry into human cells for coronaviruses that otherwise couldn’t infect them.
Trypsin is a far less selective protease, cutting a protein after common amino acids rather than requiring a particular short sequence, or motif. What Munster proposed to Letko — engineering a furin site into the spike itself — would let the virus cut itself open.
Instead of waiting for an outside enzyme to do the job, a furin site could clear the hurdle in one step to “enhance infectivity,” as Munster wrote.
The idea had been proposed before.
EcoHealth Alliance submitted the DEFUSE proposal to DARPA, under a program called PREventing EMerging Pathogenic Threats, or PREEMPT. Its key partners included Baric’s laboratory at the University of North Carolina (UNC) and Zhengli Shi, the leading coronavirologist at the Wuhan lab.
The proposal aimed to introduce human-specific proteolytic cleavage sites, including furin sites, into SARS-related bat coronavirus spikes to evaluate and enhance their ability to infect human cells. DARPA declined to fund it, faulting the proposal over the risks of “gain-of-function” research.
Munster was not named on the proposal submitted to DARPA. But according to official congressional correspondence, he had been part of the DEFUSE team two months earlier.
In April 2024, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), then ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, wrote to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and DARPA saying he had obtained documents showing that “Vincent Munster of NIAID’s [National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases] Rocky Mountain Laboratory was listed as a partner in the DEFUSE proposal presented at the PREEMPT Proposers Day,” a January 2018 DARPA event at which Daszak pitched the project to representatives of at least 15 federal agencies.
Rocky Mountain Laboratories, Paul wrote, “was at one point listed as a partner” alongside the WIV, UNC, Columbia University’s Lipkin Lab and Duke-NUS, a disclosure Paul said appeared to contradict former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci’s testimony to Congress that NIH knew nothing of DEFUSE.
By the time the proposal reached DARPA that March, Munster and his lab were off it; the final list of partners included EcoHealth, the WIV, UNC, Duke-NUS, the USGS National Wildlife Health Center and Palo Alto Research Center.
Paul demanded from HHS records of “all communications between Vincent Munster and any individual from EcoHealth Alliance, WIV, University of North Carolina, Columbia University, or Duke-NUS.” Paul has not released his underlying documents, and neither HHS nor DARPA has publicly answered his requests.
The newly released NIH records show that about a year after DEFUSE was submitted, Munster asked EcoHealth for unpublished sarbecovirus sequences; that he received them from a virologist at Columbia’s Center for Infection and Immunity, the center Ian Lipkin directs; and that in October 2019 he proposed building a spike with a furin-like cleavage site to enhance infectivity.
Steven E. Massey, a professor of bioinformatics at the University of Puerto Rico and a researcher with DRASTIC, the independent group that first published the DEFUSE proposal, called Munster’s suggestion “significant,” saying it “shows the [furin site] idea was circulating outside the EHA-WIV-UNC group,” a reference to EcoHealth Alliance, the WIV and UNC.
Munster’s email does not mention DEFUSE. His idea appears instead as a reaction to the Menachery-Baric preprint, framed as a potential next experiment for his and Letko’s work.
And the motif he proposed is not the one found in the pandemic virus that emerged less than three months later. SARS-CoV-2’s site has alanine where Munster’s pattern called for lysine or arginine.
A suboptimal site
That difference is key. The furin site in SARS-CoV-2 substantially improves the virus’s ability to enter human airway cells and is widely regarded as a major contributor to its transmissibility. Its absence from every other sarbecovirus found in nature is also one of the observations lab-origin proponents cite most often.
The 2021 review in Cell also directly addressed whether the site could have been engineered. Its authors, including Kristian Andersen, Robert Garry and Simon, argued that the site’s own sequence weighs against a lab design.
SARS-CoV-2’s motif, RRAR, “does not match its canonical form (R-X-R/K-R),” they wrote, and is “suboptimal” compared with those of other human coronaviruses.
“There is no logical reason why an engineered virus would utilize such a suboptimal furin cleavage site, which would entail such an unusual and needlessly complex feat of genetic engineering,” the paper stated.
The only prior work inserting a furin site at that position in a SARS-CoV spike, they noted, had used an optimal sequence in a pseudotype system.
Massey disputes that framing. He said excessively efficient cleavage can destabilize the spike and reduce the virus’s ability to enter cells, so a site that looks suboptimal on paper may not be suboptimal for the virus.
The newly released records show Munster reasoning along the Cell authors’ lines nearly two years before their review appeared. The motif he proposed matches the canonical form they describe, not the one the pandemic virus carries, and his lab ran a pseudotype system of the kind they cite.
Read one way, the email corroborates their logic: that a scientist contemplating a furin-like site reached for the textbook motif, and SARS-CoV-2 does not have it.
Read another way, it establishes something the review did not address: by October 2019 the idea of adding such a furin cleavage site to a SARS-related spike to enhance infectivity was circulating not only in an unfunded DARPA proposal but also inside an NIH laboratory.
What was published
When Chinese scientists ultimately posted the genetic sequence of the novel coronavirus spreading in Wuhan on Jan. 10, 2020, Letko and Munster had everything they needed to test it in their system.
The platform did not require a live virus, only the sequence of the small piece of the spike that latches onto a human cell. Within hours of the sequence going up, Neeltje van Doremalen, another scientist in Munster’s lab, pasted it into an email to Letko and Munster.
Letko expected results by Jan. 26 or 27. They came back ahead of schedule. On Jan. 21, Munster decided where to send the final manuscript showing their research. “Nature it is,” he wrote to Letko. “Lets(sic) do 2 authors and speed this up.”
The paper went out that afternoon, to Nature and to the preprint server bioRxiv. Only 12 days had passed since the sequence appeared online.
The lab made the new method’s speed its selling point. Their method “reduces the time from the sequence being published to having real in vitro data to under 12 days,” the cover letter told Nature’s editors, “allowing the scientific community to gain critical information on virus tropism in almost real-time with the outbreak.”
The work drew notice at the top of NIAID.
“First data from my lab confirming ACE2 as the receptor for 2019-NCoV,” Munster emailed an NIAID coronavirus response list that afternoon.
Greg Folkers, then chief of staff to then-NIAID Director Anthony Fauci, replied: “When this hits bioRxiv might be worth a tweet.”
The paper that was submitted gives no sign that Letko took up Munster’s suggestion to engineer a cleavage site into a spike. But it does show that the scientists used the protease trypsin rather than the furin Munster had proposed.
The paper’s second figure is titled, “Trypsin enhances lineage B entry in various cell lines.” It reports that bat coronavirus spikes that could not get into human, primate or pig cells on their own did get in once the particles were bathed in the enzyme.
The trypsin experiments appear nowhere in the project before Munster and Letko’s October exchange about the Menachery-Baric preprint. They are also absent from the abstract that Munster previously circulated in the spring. The published paper cites the Menachery-Baric preprint that sparked their exchange conversation.
Neither of the sequences that Anthony sent in May 2019 appears in the paper, and neither he nor PREDICT are acknowledged. The only trace of PREDICT in the 18-page manuscript is a footnote citation.
The panel of viruses the paper did report testing consisted of 29 receptor-binding domains obtained from a public database administered by the NIH.
One of the two viruses resurfaced a year later, when Columbia’s Center for Infection and Immunity deposited its complete genome in GenBank on July 6, 2020, five and a half months after the preprint that was to have carried it.
In February 2021, the bat coronavirus from Uganda and Rwanda also appeared in the journal Virus Evolution, in a study of how SARS-related viruses acquired the ability to use the human ACE2 receptor.
Letko was second author, Munster was listed near the end, Anthony was the senior author and the Ugandan and Rwandan field scientists and PREDICT leadership were included as co-authors, as Anthony had said in 2019 would be required. Run through Letko’s platform, the virus could not enter human cells through ACE2 at all.
The Malaysian virus, which Anthony had called the more interesting of the two, has never appeared in a published study. Nothing in the records says why. Anthony, now a professor at the University of California, Davis, did not respond to requests for comment.
On May 24, 2021, two years after he emailed the virus’s spike sequence to the Montana lab, Columbia deposited its complete genome in GenBank on behalf of the PREDICT consortium, crediting Malaysia’s Sabah Wildlife Department and EcoHealth Alliance.
Lewis Kamb is an investigative reporter who specializes in using freedom of information laws and public records to uncover wrongdoing and hold the powerful accountable.
How the Cambridge Analytica scandal still haunts Mark Zuckerberg
RT | October 23, 2026
‘Cambridge Analytica’ is by now a byword for the social media Wild West of 2016, when regulations were non-existent and unscrupulous brokers sold personal user data to advertisers and political operatives. RT explores the scandal that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg still can’t dodge.
On October 22, Meta was ordered by a New Mexico judge to pay $25 billion in civil penalties over the collection of personal data from 44 million Facebook users by Cambridge Analytica more than a decade earlier.
The judge concluded that Meta’s misconduct warranted a penalty exceeding $219 billion under state law, but reduced the amount to $25 billion, making it one of the largest fines ever imposed on an American corporation.
Meta, operating at the time as Facebook, knowingly and systematically deceived users about how it managed their personal data and allowed its harvesting by third-party companies like Cambridge Analytica. The jury also found Meta’s senior executive team knew of, and lied about, deceiving users about how it planned to investigate data-harvesting companies after the Cambridge Analytica scandal became public.
To understand how Meta ended up owing an eighth of its annual revenue in just one judgment, it’s necessary to go back to 2013, when Cambridge Analytica emerged from Britain’s shadowy private intelligence sector.
What was Cambridge Analytica?
Cambridge Analytica was founded in 2013 as a subsidiary of SCL Group, a London-based private intelligence firm that has provided data analytics and “behavioural analysis” services to the British Defense Ministry and Foreign Office.
Cambridge Analytica CEO and SCL Group Director Alexander Nix has admitted under oath that his companies worked with American and British intelligence agencies, provided psychological warfare training to several Western militaries, employed multiple staff with security clearances in the UK and US, and hired former Israeli spies.
SCL Group’s work for NATO, Israel, Ukraine, and other governments and militaries was extensive, and Cambridge Analytica drew on its parent company’s experience in military psyops to become one of the world’s most effective election influence operations, according to whistleblower Christopher Wylie. On the other hand, SCL insists that its military and political wings were separate entities. Whichever account is true, Cambridge Analytica had been hired by political candidates in 200 elections by 2018, according to company documents. These included parliamentary elections in the Czech Republic, India, and Italy, the Brexit referendum in the UK, and most infamously, the 2016 presidential election in the US.
What did Cambridge Analytica do in 2016?
Cambridge Analytica was paid nearly $6 million by then-candidate Donald Trump’s campaign in the runup to the 2016 election. The company used its unprecedented access to Facebook user data to identify persuadable voters and potential donors, select effective markets for television ads, and target certain Hillary Clinton supporters for “deterrence” – adverts discouraging them from going to the polls on election day.
How did this become a scandal?
Cambridge Analytica did not break any laws to obtain this data. It was scraped from tens of millions of Facebook users who had, unbeknownst to themselves, given a third-party Facebook quiz application access to their messages, their profile data, and that of their friends.
Cambridge Analytica hired a Cambridge University professor, Aleksandr Kogan, to develop a personality quiz app, named ‘This is Your Digital Life’. Between 250,000 and 270,000 American Facebook users took the quiz in 2015, and by accessing their data, but crucially, under Facebook terms, accessing the data of all of their friends on the platform, Cambridge Analytica was able to compile detailed psychological profiles on roughly 87 million users.
Cambridge Analytica employee Christopher Wylie revealed the workings of the scheme to The Observer in 2018, telling the British newspaper that “we exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles, and built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis the entire company was built on.”
Was Cambridge Analytica the only data-scraper doing this?
“Facebook never cared,” Kogan told NBC News in 2018, explaining that “tens of thousands” of developers created apps like his quiz, and sold user data to companies like Cambridge Analytica. Among the developers were CubeYou, which used a “one-click personality test” app to gather information for commercial use, and LocalBlox, which scraped data from 48 million users, which it then sold to marketers.
AggregateIQ, Global Science Research, and Eunoia Technologies all used data gleaned by Kogan for political ends. However, long before these companies existed, Blue State Digital, an American political consultancy, surreptitiously harvested Facebook data, including friends’ data, for use by Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign.
Cambridge Analytica, however, had its work for the Trump campaign exposed at the height of the ‘Russiagate’ hoax, at a time when Democrats and liberal media outlets were convinced that Russia intervened in the election on behalf of Trump. Cambridge Analytica’s data-scraping dovetailed neatly into a narrative of “Facebook bots” and “Russian military hackers” working with the Trump campaign, and the company became a whipping boy for an industry that transcended partisan lines.
US Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the Senate Intelligence Committee eventually investigated claims that Cambridge Analytica helped the Russian government target political ads at American voters, but both determined that these claims were untrue, and neither investigation found any proof of “collusion” between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.
Has Facebook been punished?
At the time that the information was collected, Facebook had stopped allowing third-party apps to access friends’ data. However, a loophole allowed apps active on the platform before this change to continue harvesting information through 2015. Within days of Wylie’s revelations hitting the headlines, SCL Group and Cambridge Analytica were suspended from Facebook. Two months later, both companies ceased operations, leaving Facebook to handle the fallout.
Facebook initially went into damage control mode, insisting that “People knowingly provided their information” to Kogan’s app, and that “everyone involved gave their consent.”
However, the US Federal Trade Commission determined that Facebook made its privacy settings deliberately opaque, spreading them out over 20 separate screens and opting users into sharing data with third-parties by default. Facebook settled with the FTC for $5 billion in 2019, setting the stage for a series of similar payouts in the following years.
In 2018, Zuckerberg told lawmakers on Capitol Hill that Facebook was aware that user data had been transferred from Kogan to Cambridge Analytica (this transfer was in breach of its policies) since 2015, but opted not to inform users. He said that Facebook asked Cambridge Analytica to delete the data, but never followed up and made sure the company did. “We considered it a closed case,” he told Congress.
The following year, the US Securities and Exchange Commission accused Facebook of misleading investors by presenting “the risk of misuse of user data as merely hypothetical,” when it knew since 2015 that “a third-party developer had actually misused Facebook user data.” Facebook settled the case with the SEC for $100 million.
In 2022, Meta settled a $725 million class-action lawsuit brought by a group of Facebook users, who alleged that the company violated privacy and consumer protection laws by misrepresenting its data-sharing laws and failing to protect their personal information.
Meta attempted to shut down further legal action over the Cambridge Analytica scandal this August, when it reached an $18 billion settlement with 51 attorneys general across US states, territories, and the District of Columbia. Although the cases concerned the addictive design of Meta’s platforms and their effect on children’s mental health, the settlement included a clause resolving a multistate investigation into Facebook’s sharing of user data with third parties “whether known or unknown,” including Cambridge Analytica.
Even if participating states were to discover new facts about the data sharing, they have now waived their right to sue Meta. New Mexico was one of two states that was not party to this agreement, hence the $25 billion penalty.
Did Cambridge Analytica get Trump elected?
Ten years after the fact, it remains unclear how prominent a role Cambridge Analytica played in Trump’s victory over Clinton. The Trump campaign’s use of Facebook and X (then called Twitter) is widely cited as instrumental in his win, but the campaign’s digital director, Brad Parscale, has since said that he stopped using the company’s data several months before election day, considering it inaccurate.
What about Brexit?
Cambridge Analytica worked with Nigel Farage’s Leave.EU organization in late 2015 and early 2016, and carried out some preliminary data analysis for the campaign. However, the data was never used, and the UK Information Commissioner’s (ICO) office concluded in 2020 that the company had no impact on the referendum. As in the US, the ICO found no links between Cambridge Analytica and Russia, and no evidence that Russia interfered in the vote.
Is Zuckerberg in the clear?
The $25 billion judgement handed down on October 22 may be the largest fine ever imposed on Meta, but it does not mark the end of Zuckerberg’s legal woes. In addition to a Washington DC lawsuit holding him personally responsible for the Cambridge Analytica debacle, Zuckerberg’s company is being sued by investors in California over Facebook’s alleged efforts to conceal the misuse of user data by the company.
Meta will likely settle the latter case, just as it did with the similar SEC case in 2019. However, should Zuckerberg fight the lawsuit, he could find himself in the dock, as the plaintiffs have sought recorded depositions from him, former COO Sheryl Sandberg, and former CFO David Wehner – all of whom could be forced to shed more light on just how much Facebook knew about the scandal, and when.
The Ongoing Cancellation Campaign Against a Dissenting Academic in Norway
By Glenn Diesen | October 23, 2026
The very public execution of my professorship and reputation continues in Norway. Today’s media article about me makes three claims that are misleading and/or false.
1) The article dismisses my claim that my research is being criminalized as the journalists merely cite the dismissive comments from the university – no arguments are apparently required.
It is not possible for an academic anymore to analyse the policies of rival powers by assessing their security concerns, as it will be smeared by the government, the government’s NGOs and the media as “legitimizing” the enemy and supporting their narratives. The current Defence Minister singled me out with the accusation of spreading propaganda and criticised two podcasters for even speaking with me (as I have already been cancelled by the media in Norway). How was this accusation by the Defence Minister substantiated? I had argued that NATO expansion triggered the war in Ukraine, which the Defence Minister denounced as dangerous “Russian propaganda”, with no need to substantiate his vile accusation. I can cite a sea of evidence and also refer to statements by American and European political leaders, ambassadors, intelligence chiefs, and others to make my case. However, the purpose is not to engage in debate, but to smear, censor, and cancel. By going after an individual academic for challenging official truths, the government has already claimed a monopoly on the truth. Academics should have their arguments scrutinised and criticised, but these are severe personal attacks from the government without the possibility of even defending myself. How is this not criminalising the research of an academic?
I cannot even speak at any events in Norway without the event being cancelled. The last event I agreed to speak at was because I shared the stage with the former CIA officer John Kiriakou. A newspaper had the event at a church cancelled, and when the backup location did not also cancel, the journalist simply printed in the paper that it had been cancelled so people would not show up. Is this normal? I must use my allotted holiday days to attend conferences because any event I attend can be presented as “controversial,” and then the NGOs and journalists will go after the reputation of the university. Is this normal? Every newspaper article about me merely refers to me as “controversial” or “pro-Russian” without ever assigning meaning to these labels or presenting my argument.
I have argued, much like former CIA director Burns, that if the West attempts to pull Ukraine into the NATO orbit, then there would be war and Ukraine would be destroyed. This is considered a “pro-Russian” argument. Arguing that we should respect the will of most Ukrainians who want negotiations to end the war is also considered a “pro-Russian” argument, while in contrast, boycotting diplomacy, deporting Ukrainian refugees, and calling for the conscription of Ukrainian women is “pro-Ukrainian”.
2) To avoid addressing any of my arguments, the journalists go on to uncritically cite personal attacks against me, pointing out that I have been called a propagandist by the Norwegian Helsinki Committee. This is a “non-governmental organisation” financed by the government and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which was set up by Reagan and the CIA director in 1983 to manipulate the civil society of other states. The Norwegian Helsinki Committee has been relentless in its smears on social media to have me fired, writing hit pieces in the media, pushing to cancel my speaking events, writing a letter to my university, and even posting a picture of my house on social media. This is a governmental “human rights organisation” that cites human rights concerns to build the case for war.
3) Lastly, to further avoid addressing my actual arguments, they simply cite the fact that arguments I made at a debate last year have been “wholly or partially debunked” by a fact-check. The state-run media (NRK) invited the state-run military defence institute (FFI) to fact-check three of my claims. What claims did they “debunk”?
My first claim was that only 20% of Ukrainians wanted NATO membership between 1991 and the regime change in February 2014. The fact-checker argued that the number went up by the middle of 2014 (after Russia responded by seizing Crimea), which is a completely meaningless comment intended to muddy the waters, as my argument was about the previous era.
My second claim was that Zelensky had argued in an interview with The Economist in March 2022 that there were some Western countries that would like a long war with Russia to weaken a strategic rival, even if it would result in the destruction of Ukraine. The fact-checker argued that not all Western countries wanted a long war and that it was not an official policy. I never claimed it was an official policy, as it was primarily the US and UK pushing for a long war.
My third claim was that the US and UK sabotaged the Istanbul peace agreement in April 2022. The fact-checker claimed this was incorrect and suggested that it could only be based on one statement by David Arakhamia. The fact-checker did not want to mention that both mediators also confirmed it: Turkey’s foreign minister and the former Israeli prime minister both said that Russia and Ukraine were close to a deal, but the US and UK saw an opportunity to weaken Russia by fighting with Ukrainians. Zelensky’s former adviser Arestovych confirmed it, and the Ukrainian ambassador Chaly, who participated in the negotiations, confirmed that Putin was willing to do almost anything to end the war. The former head of the German armed forces confirmed that Boris Johnson sabotaged it, and Boris Johnson himself wrote articles warning about a “bad peace” and arguing for “strategic patience.” I am being fact-checked by war propagandists.
Unfortunately, none of my arguments matter because in Norway there is no debate and no interest in any arguments. Reality means nothing anymore as war narratives must be defended against inconvenient truths. I used to be naïve and think that the endless smears were caused by misunderstanding, as I had simply not been able to convey my arguments properly. However, the endless articles with smears and labels are deliberate lies and deceptions.
EU sending ‘biased’ observers to interfere in Serbian election – president
RT | October 20, 2026
Acting Serbian President Ana Brnabic has accused the European Parliament of breaking its own ethics rules and sending a team of political operators to Serbia “with already formed conclusions” about how they want this weekend’s election to end.
Former Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic is running in parliamentary elections this Sunday, after vacating the presidency last month. Vucic’s coalition, led by his SNS party, is competing against the Student List – an electoral faction put together by the organizers of anti-government protests raging in Serbia since 2024.
European Parliament elections observers are due to arrive in Belgrade on Thursday. However, in a letter to Parliament President Roberta Metsola on Tuesday, Brnabic accused the team of political bias, pointing out that some of its members have openly expressed “extremely negative judgments about the authorities in Serbia [and] expectations for their removal.”
Lead EU observer Andreas Schieder monitored parliamentary elections in Serbia in 2023, and signed off on the official result, before accusing Vucic’s party of fraud and vote-buying. Brnabic explained this in her letter to European Parliament President Roberta Metsola, which was seen by Serbian media outlets.
The appointment of Schieder, an Austrian Social Democrat, violates the UN’s Declaration of Principles for International Election Observation, she continued. This document, to which all EU delegations are beholden, states that observers must be “free from any political, economic or other conflicts of interest.”
In June, Schieder publicly backed the student protest movement and accused Vucic of leading Serbia into an “authoritarian downward spiral.”
Speaking to Austria’s APA news agency on Tuesday, Schieder described Brnabic’s letter as “unprecedented attack on the European Parliament’s election-observation mission.”
The observation team also includes liberal MEP Helmut Branstetter, who has described Vucic as “not the person to lead Serbia to the European Union,” and promised to “do everything” to cut Serbia off from EU funds and accession talks over his refusal to ban the funeral of former Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic in September.
Two Croatian MEPs are members of the mission. Gordan Bosanac has met with protesters at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, while Suncana Glavak has signed a letter to EU Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos calling for talks with Serbia to be suspended.
“All of the above indicates that the European Parliament sent an observation mission to Serbia that already has predetermined political positions, and that the goal of such an assessment of the elections and electoral conditions is to directly help one of the participants in the elections,” Brnabic wrote in her letter. “It is clear that their goal is not to impartially observe the elections, but to participate politically in them.”
Recurring protests have dogged Vucic since 2024, when the deaths of 16 people in a railway station disaster in Novi Sad sparked nationwide discontent. More than two decades earlier, the US successfully fomented mass protests that forced Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic out of power, and Vucic has accused the EU and Western NGOs of attempting to run the same playbook against his government.
Last month, Vucic described MEPs who traveled to Novi Sad to support the protests as “scum that cannot rule even in their own countries,” who have “come to demolish Serbia from the outside.”
British Government Employees Were Fact-Checking the News at the BBC. Nobody Told You.
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | October 19, 2026
In the UK, the BBC has been taking in public employees from government departments, and letting them work on news content, specifically “fact-checking” and drafting material for BBC News and its “fact-checking” arm, BBC Verify.
The secondments came from the Government Statistical Service, and took place over the past eight years, with 39 civil servants spending three or six months at the BBC, while their salaries were still paid by their own departments.
The Government Statistical Service is now advertising more of these secondments for 2027.
This was first reported by The Telegraph on October 17.
Meanwhile, the BBC is the same public service broadcaster that the government wants to give more money by introducing a “YouTube tax” – a plan to extend the license fee to streaming services.
And the same BBC is the one the government wants to push up people’s feeds on YouTube and other platforms, by making those platforms give it prominence in their algorithms. A green paper, “Watch this space: a new strategic direction for UK media,” is proposing this.
In the past, Reclaim The Net has reported about this plan, and how the US government said that this would mean “mandating that platforms algorithmically amplify government-preferred media.”
So, to sum it up: the government wants people to fund the BBC, wants the algorithm to favor the BBC, and has its own staff inside the BBC writing the fact-checks.
The subjects they worked on were “small boat” crossings of migrants, Covid, crime, migration, and life expectancy. The work of these civil servants, whose salaries were still paid by their respective government departments, was published under the bylines “BBC News” and “BBC Verify.”
This is how some of the secondees described their work on the Government Statistical Service blog.
One from the Home Office said she worked as “BBC Verify’s consultant statistician, fact-checking claims in heated election debates, ‘filing copy’ on interesting stories, and advising journalists.”
She also worked on “small boat arrivals and visa applications” and did “quality assurance on copies and charts before they were published to the online live page.”
Another from the Department for Business and Trade said, “One of my first tasks was drafting ‘copy'” on annual population statistics, “This was because they related to migration, which was always a topic of interest.” And: “My lines were then quickly pulled into a full article on the main site.”
That post, however, “was taken down after The Telegraph contacted the BBC” – and the BBC “has since insisted that those on secondment do not write copy.”
But the civil servant had just said that he did.
This secondee also worked on “fact-checking claims about crime rates among different nationalities that were dominating news cycles.”
Another civil servant seconded to the BBC analyzed data on “small boat migration” to see if the weather in 2022 meant fewer crossings: “In probably my proudest moment, this made it into an article on the front page and a TV piece.”
The job advert says that “Your salary for this professional development opportunity will continue to be paid by your parent department.”
The person they are looking for should have “the ability to influence decision making, working with credibility and proactively with customers to share knowledge and information.” They will also “be representing their department and the Government Statistical Service.”
The BBC’s own rules, however, say that “Our audiences must be able to trust the BBC and be confident that our editorial decisions are not influenced by outside interests, political or commercial pressures, or any personal interests.”
And: “External activities of individuals working for the BBC must not undermine the public’s perception of the impartiality, integrity, independence and objectivity of the BBC.”
A spokesman for the BBC said that “All BBC journalism and editorial decisions are made by BBC journalists and editors, in line with the BBC’s editorial guidelines, so these statisticians never make editorial decisions.”
But the corporation has also said it will now amend the bylines of the articles written by the civil servants to show their true jobs – something it will do only now, after The Telegraph asked.
Opposition politicians and others have been scathing in their criticism of the scheme, with Mike Wood, shadow Cabinet Office minister, saying that the BBC “must never allow a political agenda to influence BBC coverage via the back door.”
Danny Kruger, of Reform UK, was even more direct: “This is scandalous and looks dangerously as though the BBC has breached its own rules on impartiality.”
Oxford professor Carl Heneghan said, “If you have people writing for you with competing interests, it won’t be impartial. It is the government organisation you will be partial to. You will want to toe the line.”
The arrangement is so absurd that people would probably laugh at it if they heard it was happening in North Korea.
But it’s happening in the UK, and it’s not funny. The “journalists” in question were never identified as government employees to the readers, and the change of heart in that regard comes only now, after a newspaper investigated and reported about it.
Vice President J.D. Vance’s Deceptive ‘Antiwar’ Campaign Speech
By Adam Dick | Ron Paul Institute | October 17, 2026
J.D. Vance is approaching the halfway point of his term as vice president in an administration that has committed the United States to wars in locations from Ukraine to Venezuela to Somalia to Iran and beyond. All the while, the administration has threatened sending the military into other places across the world including Mexico, Greenland, and Cuba. In short, this presidential administration is fully committed to a warmongering agenda.
Over his 14 years as a United States House of Representatives member, Mike Rogers similarly established his reputation as a committed advocate for US warmongering across the world. This Michigan Republican and the presidential administration are two peas in a pod when it comes to supporting an aggressive empire.
President Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential campaign portrayed himself as the peace candidate in the race, a tactic that may have brought him the votes needed to obtain a close electoral victory. But, once elected, Trump turned on a dime, becoming the war president who delivers turmoil, destruction, and death. Through this, Vance has stood by Trump in support.
Given this context, it seems almost unimaginable that Vance would stump in Michigan for electing Rogers to the US Senate by asserting that Vance and Rogers are supporters of peace. Yet, that is what Vance did in a Monroe, Michigan speech on Thursday. With the “peace candidate” ploy having worked for Trump in the 2024 presidential election, Vance audaciously gave it a try in the Michigan speech despite it being divorced from reality.
Vance, in his speech, framed the race between Rogers and Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed as a battle “between politicians obsessed with foreign causes and leaders who remember that their first duty is to fight for the people right here at home.” Vance’s claim is that he and Rogers are among the good “leaders” instead of the bad “politicians” in this comparison. But, it is Rogers, who relentlessly supported US intervention abroad as a House member and in his chairmanship of the House Intelligence Committee is the quintessential politician obsessed with foreign causes. And it is crystal clear that over the last two years the Trump administration has, in its obsessive pursuit of foreign causes, sacrificed the interests of the American people, including by substantially increasing the national debt and driving the cost of fuel sky-high.
Vance proceeded in his speech to declare that the Democratic opponent Rogers faces in the race is “absolutely obsessed with conflicts occurring thousands of miles away in the Middle East.” “He is obsessed,” continued Vance, “with the state of Israel and with Gaza.” This, of course, is an obsession of the Trump administration that started the Iran War jointly with Israel and has been giving Israel enormous financial, military equipment, and intelligence aid to support Israel’s attacks on not just Gaza but also other places including Iran and Lebanon.
Meanwhile, Rogers, a staunch supporter of the US aiding Israel, has asked the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) — the most prominent organization in the “Israel Lobby” in America — to not directly fund advertisements for his campaign while he travels the country to attend AIPAC organized fundraisers. Rogers is trying to keep under wraps that he is what Vance says his opponent is. Will voters understand the reality or be tricked by the subterfuge?
Why did Vance go through with making claims regarding US foreign policy in his speech that fly in the face of reality? The answer may be found in a comment by Rogers’s Democratic opponent in a Senate election debate held the week before. In that debate, El-Sayed stated in regard to Rogers: “So, it’s just inconsistent to me to be running for Senate from Michigan when you’re more focused on what’s happening to a foreign government than you are focused on what’s happening to folks right here in Michigan.” The foreign government referenced in El-Sayed’s comment is Israel. Instead of trying to give a nuanced counterargument to this charge from the debate, Vance went in his speech with the old standby of “I’m rubber and you’re glue; whatever you say bounces off of me and sticks to you.” In the process, Vance ended up looking ridiculous to anyone with basic knowledge of the foreign policy records of Rogers and the Trump administration.
Ongoing tales of Syrian chemical weapons
OPCW Inspector Ian Henderson responds regarding alleged newly-found, un-declared chemical weapons.
By Ian HENDERSON | Consortium News | October 11, 2026
If Douma, one of the highest-profile “proven” chemical attacks attributed to Syria’s former Bashar Assad government, has been shown to be fake, what does it say about new, undeclared Syrian chemical weapons that have supposedly been found?
It says we should be extremely skeptical about news of such discoveries.
I spent years compiling an insider’s analysis of the evolving Western narrative of Syrian chemical attacks while I was at the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) as well as afterwards.
My conclusion was it is nigh impossible to prove a negative in this situation; to say there had never been a chemical attack by the Syrian government forces.
However, when it came to high-profile allegations of such attacks in the Syrian towns of East Ghouta, Khan Sheykhoun, Ltamenah, Saraqib and Douma, there were fatal flaws in the official narratives.
There were unmistakable signs, clear to us on the inside, of fabrication.
The Douma attack eight years ago appeared to be the last of a series of chemical allegations against the regime.
Yet the saga continues. The OPCW sent a new mission to Syria this May to try to find alleged, undeclared chemical weapons from the government of Bashar al-Assad, who was ousted in 2024.
Before examining the intentions and results of this mission, it is useful to review how the Western-backed OPCW handled its investigation into the 2018 chemical weapons attack in Douma, a suburb of Damascus.
I was an OPCW inspector on that mission and this is why I blew the whistle.
The Establishment Narrative
Just how much of the establishment narrative that blamed Assad for using chemical weapons be believed ?
Devised during the early part of the Western and Gulf-backed jihadist war to overthrow Assad a decade and a half ago – and built upon steadily by Western belligerents throughout the crisis – the story that Assad had “gassed his own people” was widely believed with mainstream media fully on board.
Doubters were glibly dismissed, including “official” dissenters such as some senior inspectors at the OPCW. I was among them.
The chemical allegations followed a well-oiled procedure. Armed opposition groups – who were seeking direct Western military intervention to support their effort to overthrow Assad – would raise the alarm online by posting slick images and videos of an alleged chemical attack.
These opposition groups, sometimes assisted by Western NGOs, would then bring supposed witnesses of these alleged attacks to Gaziantep in Turkey, where the OPCW would send fact-finding missions to interview them.
The OPCW would generally believe the opposition groups and their witnesses and accept items of supposed “evidence” handed over to them, sometimes months after the alleged attack. Until the Douma allegation in 2018, the fact-finding mission never got to the scene of any Syrian chemical attack after an initial attempt in 2014 went awry.
The fact-finding report would be secretly drafted under the direct control of OPCW top management, bypassing any procedural or technical oversight, and would conclude that it was “reasonable to believe” that a chemical attack had indeed taken place.
The follow-up investigations by the heavily politicized Joint Investigative Mechanism (J.I.M.), or by the later Investigation and Identification Team (I.I.T.), would suggest that “a reasonable person would believe” that the Syrian Armed Forces were responsible for the attack.
OPCW inspectors are not fools. Many of us saw what was going on, seeing the tight political control that the U.S. and to a lesser degree the U.K. exerted over anything to do with the Syrian file. But the draconian confidentiality regime in the OPCW kept everyone subdued.
The breakthrough came after the April 2018 Douma allegation.
For the first time, an OPCW team actually got to the scene of an alleged chemical attack, at the town of Douma, in southwestern Syria, about 10 kilometers (6 miles) northeast of Damascus.
We did our job thoroughly, and in doing so we identified serious flaws in the allegation.
OPCW Extreme Measures
The OPCW resorted to ever-escalating measures to bring things back on track. After trying to secretly modify the interim report by withdrawing it from publication and sneaking in the preordained conclusions that were required by influential delegations, senior OPCW officials went to extremes.
They removed all the team members who had gone to Douma and produced a flawed Fact Finding Mission report written by persons unknown, none of whom had much knowledge of what the Douma team had done.
The fact-finding report predictably found that “it was reasonable to believe” there had been an attack with chlorine in Douma. This was followed much later by the OPCW’s inevitable I.I.T. report that blamed the Syrian regime for the attack.
In reaching its conclusions, the drafters claimed, as usual, to have been informed by anonymous experts. The context in the reports was usually along the lines of the fact-finding mission (F.F.M.) “asked an expert about this and the expert said it was possible.” Many qualified experts and commentators, including me, consider this laughable.
The OPCW were going too far, and ultimately this led to the ongoing dispute where the two most senior and experienced inspectors in the F.F.M. team objected.
The drafter of the team’s interim report, Dr. Brendan Whelan (“Inspector B”), was one. I was the other. In my case I had also led the politically-mandated inspections at two facilities of the Syrian Scientific Studies and Research Centre (S.S.R.C.) suspected of harbouring illicit chemical weapons activities.
Here again, we did our work thoroughly and in drafting the S.S.R.C. inspection reports I made clear that there was nothing amiss in either of the facilities.
This didn’t stop the U.S., U.K. and France from conducting punitive missile strikes on Barzah S.S.R.C., on the basis of social media postings on the Douma allegation, even before the OPCW team had arrived at the incident scene.
Rather than another detailed analysis of the Douma scandal, suffice it to say, the official Douma narrative has been clearly and scientifically picked apart by many credible observers, including by Dr. Whelan and myself.
This has been widely reported, although predictably not much in the mainstream media.
The OPCW and Western delegations have been in crisis management mode ever since the first leak, that of an internal engineering summary that cast doubt on the allegation that chlorine cylinders had been dropped from aircraft, raising the possibility that militants had placed the cylinders to stage the scene of a chemical attack.
I was the author of that report.
Nose of chlorine cylinder alleged to have smashed through a steel-reinforced concrete roof, April. 21, 2018. (OPCW, courtesy former Syrian government)
Worse still for the prevailing Douma narrative, Dr. Whelan recently won a legal case against the OPCW for their charges against him of confidentiality breaches.
In their submissions, the OPCW inadvertently admitted to suppressing the key toxicology assessment (incidentally by NATO specialists) that dismissed chlorine as the likely cause of death of deceased victims shown in images posted from the scene.
[See: OPCW Inadvertently Admitted Burying Critical Evidence on Syria Chemical Weapons Investigation]
The OPCW has refused to engage in any discussion on the facts and scientific substance of the case, ever since concerns were first raised by Dr. Whelan and myself.
This intransigence to re-open the file is likely dictated by the needs of the three belligerent governments that subjected Syria to punitive missile strikes in retaliation for the supposed Syrian chemical attack even before the Douma F.F.M. had started work.
Any updated or corrected findings on Douma would be inconvenient.
The New OPCW Mission
Still apparently seeking to prove its case, the OPCW formed a new Syria mission in May aimed at “finding” alleged missing, un-declared chemical weapons.
At the end of May the mission reported finding 42 empty chemical weapons munitions; a launcher; bomb-mixing units; precursor-type containers; a facility whose contents were not revealed and thousands of pages of documents that are still being reviewed.
The mission also found 650 kg of “a chemical compound known to have been used by the former government for the production of nerve agents,” which the report does not name. It says an unknown quantity of hexamine, a legal chemical with wide industrial use, was found but it is not clear if this is the same compound as in the 650 kg.
In September, the Syrian government, now under the leadership of a former al-Qaeda and ISIS leader, began destroying the empty bombs, but not any of the chemicals that were found, presumably meaning none were banned.
Despite all the fanfare of these results being presented at a U.N. Security Council meeting last month, it appears that the new OPCW mission came up as empty as those bombs.
None of these discoveries does anything to prove that Assad ever used a chemical weapon, in other words, nothing to prove that I, along with other OPCW officials and countless observers and commentators who challenged the Assad chemical weapons narrative were wrong.
Presumably after all the effort in creating that narrative, Western governments and mainstream media that promoted the Iraq war and then the Syrian conflict to achieve regime change in that country, require a tidier ending than the mess they made of the Iraqi WMD story.
An early press release from the OPCW is telling. It shows what they were attempting to prove with this May mission, in particular two rather flimsy suggestions.
They report the discovery of some of the empty munitions,
“including the same type of aerial bombs that were used in chemical attacks in Ltamenah in March 2017 and Khan Shaykhun in April 2017.”
This refers to empty M4000 aerial bombs, declared by the Syrians as part of their stockpile.
Aside from the questionable Douma-like irregularities surrounding “evidence” used by the OPCW to conclude that sarin-filled M4000 bombs were used in those attacks, it’s important to mention something else.
The Syrians had clearly explained to us that 2,000 of these bombs, never filled, had been set aside to be “repurposed,” in other words to be filled with high explosive to turn them into conventional munitions. These could turn up anywhere.
A second questionable statement in the press release is,
“Rockets were also found, of the same type as those that were used in the Ghouta chemical weapons attack in August 2013.”
This relates to artillery rockets crudely modified with a large cylindrical payload container added at the front.
For a start, the U.N./OPCW report of Ghouta did not attempt to identify the perpetrators of that sarin attack, since it was not part of their mandate. The accusations against the regime have always been political, something the mainstream media happily took up.
The Most Credible Analysis So Far
The Ghouta sarin attack took place on Aug. 21, 2013 and according to Western sources killed more than 1,000 people in the Damascus suburb.
The most serious investigation of the Ghouta incident to date points to the attack being launched from opposition-occupied positions, and remains the most credible analysis of the attack.
The opposition forces allegedly responsible were from the al-Nusra Front, which conducted joint operations in 2013 in the Damascus area with the Liwa Al Islam opposition group. Al-Nusra were known to be in possession of sarin, according to reporting by Seymour Hersh, who wrote:
“In the months before the [Aug. 21, 2013] attack [in Ghouta], the American intelligence agencies produced a series of highly classified reports, culminating in a formal Operations Order – a planning document that precedes a ground invasion – citing evidence that the al-Nusra Front, a jihadi group affiliated with al-Qaida, had mastered the mechanics of creating sarin and was capable of manufacturing it in quantity. When the attack occurred al-Nusra should have been a suspect, but the administration cherry-picked intelligence to justify a strike against Assad.”
Indeed the U.N./OPCW team was in Damascus at the time of the attack in Ghouta because it was responding to an earlier request from the Syrian government to investigate chemical attacks against their forces.
The OPCW release also mentions a typical catch-all referring to “quantities of separately stored chemicals and related equipment, the nature of which is currently under technical analysis.”
There will always be suggestions of vague bits and pieces, rusty remnants that “may have been a part of” alleged undeclared elements of a chemical weapons program.
And, keep in mind, it’s been 22 months since the Assad government was ousted and their enemies in the opposition group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) have been running the country.
So far as I can see, the OPCW hasn’t found anything remotely close to the desired smoking gun. Anything real, I should say.
Partners in the Anti-Assad Chemical Narrative
Syrian President Ahmaad Al Shaara, former Al Nusra/HTS fighter, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio in New York City, September 2025. (State Department Photo, Wikimedia)
We need to keep in mind how this is working. There are three partners in this latest endeavour on the anti-Assad chemical narrative.
First, we have the Western governments, belligerents in the Syrian conflict, which worked hard on building the chemical narrative to delegitimise the regime.
The U.K. government offered specialists to check out suspected sites in Syria to prepare them for the May mission in order to “assist” the current government in finding evidence of hidden chemical weapons.
That leads us to the second group, the government in Syria, reportedly eager to please their Western sponsors in return for economic favours. They are the Al-Nusra/HTS extremists who, in the case of Douma, fabricated the scene to raise a chemical false flag allegation against the Assad.
The third partner is the OPCW.
That means the various groups who have been on this mission are a) those who staged scenes of chemical attacks; b) those who directed them to do so (including Western intelligence agents who allegedly coached and assisted them); and c) the organisation that went along with the narrative and dutifully produced reports damning the Assad regime.
It may appear to the reader that I’m suggesting that the OPCW reports on Syrian chemical weapons will continue to be little more than propaganda, the usual sexed-up nonsense. Perhaps so. In disputing this, these assertions will be dismissed as conspiracy theories.
However, this argument is weakened because the source of the alternative narrative is the scientists and senior inspectors (many “Western”) from within the OPCW teams, including the Douma fact-finding mission and Scientific Studies and Research Centre inspections.
This is why Douma remains a key element in the debate. If they did it once (and doggedly stuck to their guns), they probably did it before.
Many serious and eminent observers are imploring the OPCW to conduct a review of the Douma case, including by the OPCW’s own Scientific Advisory Board.
I see this being done by credible, independent and neutral experts in the fields of chemistry, toxicology, metallurgy and engineering, overseen by the relevant professional institutes.
These experts would report their findings transparently, putting their names and reputations behind their analysis. This will clear up the Douma controversy, either demonstrating that it could have actually happened as alleged, or demonstrating the flaws in the OPCW reports.
Exposing a clear and deliberate fraud would seriously weaken the Western narrative on alleged Syrian chemical attacks. Therefore, in my view, it is not going to happen under the purview of the OPCW.
Ever.
I don’t mean to suggest that those calling for a review are unrealistically hopeful. But the risks of such a review are perhaps too high for it ever to be envisaged by the Western group that was aligned with the efforts on regime change in Syria — chiefly the U.S., the U.K. and France.
This does not mean it can’t happen. There is more than enough open-source material, as well as now-unclassified facts, images, analysis results and information available from the OPCW itself, from former OPCW officials and inspectors, and held by Member States, that would support a credible in-depth review.
The basis for expert analysis would be the material used in the fact-finding mission and I.I.T. reports themselves.
By now we know there isn’t any “smoking gun” evidence. If there had been, it would have been cited in the mission and I.I.T. reports.
Trust me, this study will bear clear results. My hope is that someone sufficiently curious and responsible will commission and fund it.
Ian Henderson served as an OPCW inspector from the establishment of the Chemical Weapons Convention in 1997, and was appointed as one of the first Inspection Team Leaders. An experienced chemical engineer with military experience, he led many of the more complex missions to more than 55 countries. After returning to a career in the chemical industry for 10 years he rejoined the OPCW in 2016 as part of the “rehire” scheme aimed at bringing back experienced inspectors. It was during this time that he became involved in the Syrian chemical weapons operations and, along with others, objected to the apparent influences of political control in the organization. He was suspended from the OPCW in May 2019 after the leak (by unknown others) of his dissenting engineering report on the Douma cylinders.
Pharma- and Gates-Funded GAVI Seeks to Assure Parents
By Aaron Siri | October 16, 2026
GAVI, a vaccine alliance that includes the WHO, health agencies, pharma, and the Gates foundation, recently posted that studies reflect that giving multiple vaccines to a baby does not risk increased side effects and chronic disease.
Ironically, the studies it cites do not support that vaccines do not cause increased risk of side effects and chronic disease. Anyone who actually reads what is cited would conclude as much and may very well decide to no longer trust GAVI, the medical establishment it represents, or the products it promotes. That is called “thinking” or “informed consent”—which these same organizations would then label as “vaccine hesitancy” or “anti-vax.”
Israeli Spy Pollard stole the files, today’s it’s delivered through official channels
By Jamal Kanj | MEMO | October 15, 2026
Espionage novels portray the spy as a person in a trench coat carrying stolen documents and disappearing into a dark alley. Israeli spy, Jonathan Pollard, certainly fit that picture. A Navy analyst who stole American secrets including the complete ten-volume manual of the National Security Agency exposing how the US gathers its signal intelligence and the names of thousands of foreign individuals who worked for US spy agencies. Intelligence officials believe Israel shared stolen documents with the Soviet Union. According to several intelligence assessments, Pollard was one of the most damaging spies in US history.
Pollard received a life sentence in 1987 and was released in 2015. At first, Israel claimed he was a rogue, apologised and did not admit he had been its agent until 1998. In 2007, Israel named a square in Jerusalem after him, honouring him for his services.
Pollard was neither the first nor the last Israeli asset. Lawrence Franklin, a Pentagon analyst, pleaded guilty in 2005 to passing classified information to an Israeli embassy official and two AIPAC staffers. Ben-Ami Kadish, a former Army engineer, pleaded guilty in 2008 to passing secret documents to an Israeli consulate official, and served no prison time. Stewart Nozette from NASA was charged with attempted espionage following an FBI sting operation. In 1970, Richard Perle was caught in an FBI wiretap discussing classified information with an Israeli embassy official.
In 2001, the same Perle chaired the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, while two other Israel-firsters, Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz held senior posts in the same building. Franklin had worked in Feith’s policy office when he was indicted for espionage. In 1996, a study group led by Perle, and Feith, prepared a policy paper for incoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu titled “A Clean Break.” It urged Israel to abandon the Oslo Accords and the peace process with the Palestinians, and it proposed removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq as part of a broader Israeli strategy to reshape the region. Five years later, as leaders in the Pentagon, they delivered America’s first made-for-Israel war in Iraq.
The above is in no way intended to insinuate or allege that anyone, least of all these Zionist Americans, has dual loyalties. No. It is so profound, there is only one way to describe it: Israel-first loyalty.
Fast forward to 2026. David Milstein, stepson of Israeli propagandist Mark Levin and a senior aide to Ambassador Mike Huckabee, effectively the ambassador’s chief of staff. An unabashed Israel-first American Zionist, Milstein oversees the embassy’s West Bank and Gaza portfolio, placing the fox in charge of the henhouse. According to The New York Times, citing a dozen people who have worked with him, Milstein has repeatedly quashed or rewritten embassy reports to the U.S. State Department to favour Netanyahu’s government.
When the Israeli government accelerated the approval of building more Jewish-only colonies in occupied West Bank, embassy staff drafted an urgent memo warning that the move might cross President Trump’s own red line against annexation. According to The Times, the memo never left Jerusalem.
In response to the surge in attacks by Israeli Jewish mobs on Palestinian homes and farms, embassy staff prepared a report documenting Israel’s failure to rein in violence by Zionist youth. Milstein rewrote it and sent an embassy cable to Washington titled “Government Cracks Down on Escalating West Bank Violence.” When US diplomats pointed out that the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s distribution sites were chaotic and deadly, Milstein concluded the operation was a success.
Thirty members of Congress, led by Senator Chris Van Hollen, asked what had become of the investigations into the killings of nine Palestinian Americans by Israeli Jewish mobs and soldiers. Embassy staff compiled a report showing little progress and no charges. According to The Times, the report was set aside in favor of a letter saying Israel was handling the cases properly.
Cable traffic from the section covering Palestinian affairs fell from several a week to a few a month, because American embassy staff feared their work would be blocked, rewritten or impact their diplomatic career. Milstein would question embassy staff if they were “pro-Israel” or “pro-Hamas,” not if they were loyal Americans. A diplomatic mission that polices loyalty with questions like that ceases to function as an American embassy.
I once shared a lunch table with an American ambassador serving abroad. He recounted how, during George Shultz’s tenure as Secretary of State, Shultz would meet newly appointed ambassadors, point to a world map in his office, and ask the appointee to identify their country. Most would point to the country where they had been assigned. Shultz would correct them: “No, your country is the United States. Your duty is to serve your own country’s interests, not those of the country to which you are assigned.”
Ambassador Huckabee and Milstein either never heard that lesson, or serving Israel was their priority.
Rather than representing American interests in Jerusalem, the embassy operates as Israel’s envoy within the US government. Turning the US embassy into a Zionist mission run by the evangelical church, and an indoctrinated Zionist whose stepfather is referred to as “Tel Aviv Levin.”
Here again, no one is accusing Huckabee or Milstein of being foreign agents. Frankly, Israel does not need them to be. It need not recruit them or pay them like Pollard. Officials ideologically devoted to Israel can do the same work from within the U.S. government, under legitimate titles and without risking arrest.
No country receives more American financial and military aid than Israel. Yet US counterintelligence assessments have identified Israel as one of the most aggressive intelligence-gathering threats to the American homeland. Jonathan Pollard and others may have been the quintessential trench-coat spies. But the more dangerous risk is not someone stealing classified files; it is Americans whose loyalty to Israel overrides their duty to the U.S., operating in the halls of the White House and the Pentagon with one focus: serve Israel.
Consider David Frum, who coined President George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” phrase, helping lay the rhetorical roadmap for America’s longest foreign war.
Frum also wrote speeches for Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, making Israel’s case before the international body. The same writer, serving an Israel-first agenda from two different platforms: first helping sell America a war in the Middle East, then making Israel’s case before the world.
In the 21st century, with Zionist control of mainstream corporate media, and these implants inside America’s halls of power, Israel does not require trench coats, or stolen documents. It operates through officials who occupy positions of power deciding what American policymakers read by shaping diplomatic reporting, suppressing information and steering American decisions in ways that advances Israel’s strategic interests over America’s own. And whenever Israel’s interests and Washington’s information needs diverge, the information bends, delivered in plain sight, through official channels, under official titles, and on the American taxpayer’s payroll.
Israeli ad agency conducted vast global espionage campaign using online ads: Report
The Cradle | October 15, 2026
An Israeli digital advertising agency helped run an espionage campaign using a vast network of online ads to track targets and hack their devices, Reuters reported on 15 October, citing two research groups.
Reports from Canadian cyber watchdog group Citizen Lab and New York advertising security firm Confiant document how the Israeli advertising agency Discover-Tech placed millions of ads online each day for ordinary products such as phones or earpods.
Discover-Tech placed the ads using the advertising services of Google, Comcast, Yandex, and other search engines.
The Israeli ad agency could identify and track internet users who visited websites or used apps with the malicious ads, and at times obtained phone numbers from smartphone users.
Clicking on the ads was not required to allow users to be tracked.
Some ads were used to plant spyware from another Israeli firm, Candiru, on users’ devices.
Jerome Dangu of Confiant said Discover-Tech placed at least 10 million online ads per day, affecting more than 120,000 websites and 75,000 apps.
“Very likely hundreds of millions of people would have been touched by Discover-Tech,” Dangu said.
Citizen Lab said Candiru spyware delivered through Discover-Tech’s ads had been used to compromise devices of journalists and executives at the Qatari news outlet Al Jazeera.
Unidentified media organizations in Mexico, Israel, and Europe were also targeted.
Dangu of Confiant said that the malicious Israeli ads targeted officials at the Pentagon, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Discover-Tech ads also helped to surveil the populations of entire regions, most notably the Israeli-occupied Palestinian West Bank and Gaza.
“You go to almost any site in Palestine – any site – you find a Discover-Tech ad. It gives them a very complete visibility on the digital activities of an entire country,” Dangu said.
Citizen Lab also said the malicious ads were directed at officials in the UN, NATO, the European Commission, as well as more than a dozen governments.
The ads also helped to track employees and executives of chip-related firms such as Nvidia, SanDisk, Broadcom, and Micron.
As a result of the Confiant and Citizen Lab investigations, Google said it has removed Discover-Tech from its ad platforms “for systematically violating our policies.”
IAB Europe, an association for digital marketing and advertising on the continent, has now suspended Discover-Tech from its list of globally approved vendors.
Comcast ad tech subsidiary Beeswax also removed Discover-Tech from its platform.
Yandex did not respond to Reuters’‘ requests for comment.
Israel has a well-documented history of using private technology companies for surveillance, intelligence gathering, and cyberespionage.
Some of these companies have close connections to Israel’s military and intelligence services, particularly Unit 8200, the Israeli military’s signals intelligence unit.
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TV Drama Review
Japanese drama projects Japan’s wartime atrocities onto Chinese characters
Global Times | October 25, 2026
By portraying Chinese characters as perpetrators of ruthless violence while casting Japanese Self-Defense Forces (SDF) intelligence operatives as defenders, the season 2 of the Japanese drama Vivant has recently drawn criticism from Chinese netizens, who argue that its depiction turns historical reality on its head while ignoring Japan’s wartime atrocities.
The TBS drama series – a spy suspense story in which an alleged unofficial intelligence unit of the SDF operates across the globe — has attracted a passionate fanbase. Its currently airing season 2 opened with a household rating of 18.8 percent, the highest for a TV drama this year, according toa commentary article by Japanese media Toyo Keizai.
What draws attention is the portrayal of the enemies in the series, the article noted. Scenes in which the Chinese organization subjects kidnapped members of the SDF unit to brutal torture are repeated with unrelenting intensity.
It is rare for Japanese TV dramas to explicitly portray a real-life country as the enemy, the article noted.
Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi also made a reference to the drama, saying that she has been recording Vivant and hopes to binge-watch it over the year-end and New Year holidays, according to Japanese media outlets.
China’s CCTV News report on Sunday revealed that the drama features scenes in which Chinese personnel cut off the fingers of and stab Japanese intelligence operatives in the abdomen. Such acts bear striking similarities to the torture inflicted on Chinese nationals by invading Japanese troops during the World War II.
The drama distorts the truth by attributing these atrocities to modern Chinese characters. Beneath the surface, it subtly glorifies Japan’s cross-border overseas operations, blurs the functional boundaries of the SDF and implicitly promotes an expansionist narrative, per CCTV News. … continue
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