Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

Washington’s Gaza ‘master plan’: A mere PowerPoint presentation

Trump allies are selling Gaza reconstruction as a futuristic AI-powered utopia that not even the Israeli army believes will happen

By Robert Inlakesh | The Cradle | February 10, 2026

“We have a master plan … There is no Plan B,” remarked Jared Kushner last month, during a Board of Peace (BoP) presentation about Gaza reconstruction at the World Economic Forum (WEF) at Davos. What has become apparent is that no coherent Plan A exists either.

Although Kushner’s father-in-law, US President Donald Trump, was granted the legitimacy to build what he calls the BoP on the back of pledges to implement his “20-point peace plan” and Gaza ceasefire, the BoP’s charter is notably absent of any reference to Gaza.

Furthermore, United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolution 2803, which legally authorized the BoP and was explicitly about the Gaza ceasefire, was deliberately vague on how any concepts proposed in the resolution would be implemented. It deliberately avoided outlining any mechanisms or obligations for reconstruction. Instead, two parallel schemes emerged.

The first was the Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation Trust (GREAT Trust) – a 38-page document proposing to pay Palestinians $5,000 each to leave the territory. Crafted by Israeli figures previously involved in the discredited Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), the plan, which envisions “AI-powered, smart cities,” was less a roadmap for peace than a blueprint for ethnic cleansing.

That same foundation, backed by US private military contractors (PMCs), had already drawn international condemnation for herding civilians into “aid zones” only to open fire. More than 2,000 Palestinians were killed in those operations.

PowerPoint colonialism 

Later, in December, the Wall Street Journal  (WSJ) exposed that another proposal was put into circulation among US-allied nations in the Arab and Muslim world. The 32-page PowerPoint presentation, titled “Project Sunrise,” was set forth by Kushner and US envoy Steve Witkoff.

Like the preceding proposal, the new vision outlined a similar AI-smart city model, but added even more elements, such as high-speed rail infrastructure. According to the PowerPoint slides, the total cost of this 10-year reconstruction endeavor would amount to $112.1 billion, for which the US would commit to footing 20 percent of the bill.

Back then, Steven Cook, a senior fellow for the Middle East Program at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank, told WSJ that “they can make all the slides they want,” adding that “no one in Israel thinks they will move beyond the current situation and everyone is okay with that.” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio had even expressed his concerns over how realistic the plan will be, especially when it comes to potential foreign investment.

Then came Kushner’s presentation at Davos, which instantly made headlines and was presented as a brand new proposal called the “master plan.” According to Kushner, the project for a “new Gaza” would now only cost $25 billion.

However, upon further investigation, it is clear that what Kushner was presenting was simply “Project Sunrise,” which was evident as the PowerPoint he used was filled with the same exact slides from December. In other words, nothing particularly new was being placed on the table that had not already been released over a month prior.

“New Gaza” is a lab rat colony

Speaking to The Cradle, Akram, a Gaza resident from Al-Bureij, states that the situation on the ground does not reflect any of the positivity that appears in the media. “The Israelis won’t let us even have mobile homes or proper structures to live in, they still bomb us every day, and then we see AI images of Gaza becoming richer than Israeli cities?” he says, with bitter sarcasm. He added:

“Listen, do you really think they carried out genocide for two years and destroyed all our homes, only to build us a paradise, and that this will all happen if the resistance gives up its weapons? No. They are trying to tease us, like they always did, by saying, ‘if you give up your weapons, you will become Singapore.’ Nobody believes it.”

Shortly after Akram spoke to The Cradle, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a speech to a special session of the Knesset, in which he made it clear that “the next stage is not reconstruction.” Instead, he asserted that disarmament would characterize Phase 2 of the ceasefire.

In his “master plan” presentation, Kushner claimed that the major task of clearing Gaza’s rubble would only take two to three years. Yet, according to UN figures, this task was estimated to take up to 15 years, with costs expected to exceed $650 million.

These figures are also dated, having been produced in July 2024, so they do not account for over a year of destruction. Israel has not stopped its round-the-clock demolition of Palestinian infrastructure since the so-called ceasefire took effect on 8 October 2025.

A humanitarian NGO official working in Gaza tells The Cradle that even the ceasefire’s Civil Military Coordination Center (CMCC), ostensibly set up to enforce humanitarian standards, now functions as a system of “intimidation” that “violates basic morality.”

On 21 January, Drop Site News reported on leaked documents that revealed plans to create an “Israeli Panopticon” city, to be constructed in territory remaining under its control in southern Gaza’s Rafah. The Guardian then reported that the UAE is seeking to bankroll the project. The leaked blueprints described a “case study” city where residents would be monitored around the clock, like lab rats, and forced to submit biometrics to enter.

Rafah as the prototype prison

The UAE has been accused of backing the five ISIS-linked militant groups Israel created to fight Hamas, which it previously intended to rule over a similar style concentration camp city in Rafah. In fact, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz had even ordered the construction of such a “community” during the 60-day ceasefire in early 2025. The Israelis have long intended to displace 600,000 Palestinians to such a gated facility.

The Emirati connection in this scheme goes beyond its recent offer to fund such a concentration camp city; it dates all the way back to January 2024, when it officially opened six water desalination plants along the Egyptian side of the Gaza border area, coincidentally capable of supplying 600,000 people with water.

Prior to the ceasefire and the collapse of the privatized aid scheme, the plot was to use the GHF PMCs in order to lure civilians into such a city area. Once they get there, the Palestinians who enter would be under the rule of Israel’s ISIS-linked proxy militias.

According to forensic architecture analysis, Israel is once again preparing land in order to implement such a project. Meanwhile, UG Solutions – the firm that hired the GHF’s PMCs – is again advertising job opportunities in the besieged territory.

Dispossession in disguise

Despite the dizzying array of slogans – BoP, GREAT, Sunrise, Panopticon – the outcome remains the same with no reconstruction, no sovereignty, and no end to occupation. The various schemes are less about peace and more about forcing Palestinians into containment zones policed by Tel Aviv and its regional clients.

From “Gaza Riviera” fantasies to proposals limiting reconstruction to areas under Israeli military control, what’s on offer amounts to PowerPoint projectionism. A revolving door of schemes and slogans has produced nothing substantive. Instead, the Israeli military continues its daily war of erasure on Gaza’s land, people, and future.

Even Kushner’s $25-billion fantasy is just that: a fantasy. In the three months since the UN resolution, all Washington has offered is AI-generated cityscapes and recycled decks. The only real plan on the table remains the one being implemented daily – the destruction of Gaza.

February 10, 2026 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Is Nixing Aid to Israel a Poison Chalice?

Ending the existing arrangement could result in even more extensive forms of involvement

By Kelley Beaucar Vlahos | The American Conservative | February 9, 2026

There is a lot of talk about getting rid of the massive agreement that guarantees Israel billions of dollars in military aid each year. And it’s not just critics of Israel: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Senator Lindsey Graham have even said they want to “taper off” the money because Israel is ready to stand on its own two feet.

But while a debate over the annual package would be a most welcome one given the enormous sums of American taxpayer money that has flowed to Israel’s wars in recent years, it is important to keep an eye on what might be a bait and switch: trading one guarantee for a set of others that might be less transparent and more expensive than what’s on the books today.

When President Bill Clinton announced the first Memorandum of Agreement, a 10-year, $26.7 billion military and economic aid package to Israel, he expressed hope that it would complement the advancement of the Oslo Accords, the peace process he had shepherded between the Israelis and Palestinians earlier in his term.

The peace process tied to Oslo pretty much fell apart after expected Israeli withdrawals from the West Bank as outlined in the Wye River Agreement in 1998 never happened; today Israeli settlements considered illegal under international law have exploded, with more than 700,000 settlers living there today and Israelis controlling security in most of the territory. But the 10-year MOU lived on.

Not only has it been renewed through the Bush and Obama administrations; the total outlays have increased. The current one, signed in 2016, pledged $38 billion over the decade, just under $4 billion a year and now all of it military aid. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, Israel is by far the biggest recipient of U.S. aid in history, some $300 billion since its founding, with the greatest proportion coming from those MOUs.

Supporters of the aid say it comes with military and strategic partnerships that are supposed to help keep the neighborhood safe for the U.S., Israel, and its “allies” (there are no treaty allies in the region), but the last 40 years have been pockmarked with wars and waves of human displacement and misery. Beyond financially and militarily supporting Israel’s wars, the U.S. has been bombing, regime-changing, occupying, and fending off terrorist insurgencies created by its own policies in Central Asia, the Horn of Africa, and the Middle East since 1999. Today, with Israel’s encouragement, President Donald Trump is poised to bomb Iran for the second time in his current term in office.

On February 3 the Congress passed the latest installment of the current MOU—$3.3 billion. It was a bipartisan affair, with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer assuring a group of Jewish leaders the previous weekend, that “I have many jobs as leader … and one is to fight for aid to Israel, all the aid that Israel needs.”

But not everyone is on board with the open spigot. And a spigot it is. According to CFR, the U.S. gave $16.3 billion (which included its annual $3.8 billion outlays) to Israel after the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks. Israel’s retaliation for those attacks, which killed 1,200 Israelis, has resulted in more than 71,000 recorded Palestinian deaths in Gaza so far, a blockade that has left the 2 million population there largely homeless, starving, sick, and unsafe. Americans have reacted by rejecting the prospects of further aid, with a plurality now—42 percent—saying they want to decrease if not stop aid altogether. That is up from the mid-20 percent range in October 2023.

Beyond Americans’ aversion to funding the slaughter of civilians in Gaza, a conservative fissure over continued, unconditional support for Israel has opened wide over the last year, exposing another rationale for discontinuing the aid: It is not “America First.” It not only siphons off aid from much needed renewal at home, but forces Washington to aid and abet another country’s foreign policy, which is increasingly counterproductive and contrary to our own politics and values.

The region is not safer, and moreover, it has not allowed for the United States to reduce its military footprint as guarantor of security there.

One then-congresswoman, Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), was vocal in her opposition to this aid. Israel, she pointed out, has nuclear weapons and is “quite capable of defending itself.” She has pointed out Israel’s universal health care and subsidized college tuition for its citizens, “yet here in America we’re 37 trillion dollars in debt.”

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY.) posted on X that he voted against the spending bill on February 3 in part to deny Israel the $3.3 billion in aid. He has said the aid takes money out of Americans’ pockets and proliferates human suffering in our name. “Nothing can justify the number of civilian casualties (tens of thousands of women and children) inflicted by Israel in Gaza in the last two years. We should end all U.S. military aid to Israel now,” he said in May of last year.

In an interview with The American Conservative last week, he said he is speaking for his Kentucky district and despite a retaliatory 2026 primary challenge driven largely by Trump and donors linked to the American Israel Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC), he will continue to raise the issue in Congress. He said he has asked his GOP constituents every year whether to maintain, increase, or cut Israel annual aid since 2012.

“I’ve polled that every election cycle in my congressional district among likely Republican voters, and this was the first year that a majority of people answered nothing [no aid] at all, or less,” said Massie. “It’s not a third rail back home. It’s a third rail inside of the Beltway.”

According to reports last month, Israel is “preparing for talks” with the Trump administration to renew the MOU for another 10 years. One might be flummoxed to hear, however, that Netanyahu is giving interviews in which he says he wants to “taper off” American aid in that decade “to zero.” Israel has “come of age” and “we’ve developed incredible capacities,” he said in January.

Immediately after, Graham, who seems to spend more time in Israel than Washington these days, said he heartily agreed and hoped to end the aid sooner. “I’m going to work on expediting the wind down of the aid and recommend we plow the money back into our own military,” he said. “As an American, you’re always appreciating allies that can be more self-sufficient.”

The idea of self-sufficiency and furthermore the concept of Israel releasing itself from any “ties” that might come from the aid is not a new one among supporters here and especially the hardline right in Israel. “Cut the US aid, and Israel becomes fully sovereign,” Laura Loomer charged on X in November. In March of last year, the Heritage Foundation called for gradually reducing the direct grants in the next MOUs starting in 2029 and transitioning gradually to more military cooperation and then finally arms transfers through the Foreign Military Sales by 2047.

Israel, the report concludes, should be “elevated to strategic partner for the benefit of Israel, the United States, and the Middle East. Transforming the U.S.–Israel relationship requires changing the regional paradigm, specifically advancing new security and commercial architectures.” The plan also leans heavily on future Abraham Accords ensuring trade and military pacts with Arab countries in the neighborhood.

Therein lies the fix, say critics. The reason these staunch advocates of Israel including Netanyahu, the most demanding of its leaders over the last 30 years by far, is willing to forgo MOU aid, is that they envision it will come from somewhere else, less politically charged.

“The emerging plan is to substitute formal military funding—known as Foreign Military Financing—with greater U.S. taxpayer-funded co-development and co-production of weapons with Israel,” says the Institute for Middle East Understanding, which adds that instead of extricating from Israel’s messes, the U.S. will be further “enmeshed” in them.

The think tank points out that the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), the most unreconstructed pro-Israel organ in the United States, came out with its own report on the aid, and surprise, also advocated phasing out the MOU. In addition to a commitment by Israel to spend more of its GDP on defense and other co-investments with the U.S. on research and development, the U.S. would “provide Israel $5 billion each year through what would be known as a Partnership Investment Incentive—or PII. This PII would provide funding via existing foreign military financing (FMF) mechanisms that Israel would use to procure American military hardware.” The difference would be that it would have to be spent entirely in U.S. industry and on cooperative partnerships in the region, all while maintaining Israel’s “Qualitative Military Edge.”

Geoff Aronson, longtime Middle East analyst and occasional TAC contributor, said the aid has been “an important if not vital component in ensuring American and Israeli hegemony in the region” and is linked intrinsically to balancing U.S. strategic relations and normative Israeli peace with Egypt and Jordan, which gets billions in military aid (not as much) from the U.S. too. None of this is going to go away, he surmised to TAC.

“The question that is being posed is how can we continue to support Israel’s ability to work its will in the region without committing ourself to X, Y, Z or committing to a new partnership, a new agreement,” he said. “Watch what you wish for, because it might come true.”

February 10, 2026 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Militarism | , , , , | Leave a comment

Kincora: British intelligence-run sex abuse brothel?

By Kit Klarenberg · The Grayzone · February 6, 2026

Half a century after the public learned that boys at a Belfast group home were sexually assaulted by senior staff, a key question remains unanswered: was British intelligence implicated in the abuse conspiracy, and did Kincora serve as a ‘honeypot’ to entrap and blackmail powerful figures?

A vast trove of declassified files on Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual, political, and intelligence escapades released by the US Department of Justice has once again thrust disgraced former Prince Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor into the spotlight. With British police reportedly reviewing Andrew’s past sexual activities and links to Epstein, questions are growing about whether Britain’s spy agencies were aware of Andrew’s alleged escapades with minors.

If the darkest rumors turn out to be true, it will not be the first time a British royal had been embroiled in a child rape conspiracy with spy agency involvement. Back in 1980, a scandal erupted when the Kincora Boys’ Home in occupied Ireland was exposed as a secret brothel run by powerful pedophiles. Chief among the alleged perpetrators was Lord Mountbatten — Andrew’s great-uncle.

From the very beginning, hints began to appear that MI5/MI6 knew of the child abuse taking place Kincora, and could have even been running the group home as part of a dastardly intelligence plot. With Britain’s domestic and foreign spies engaged in a savage dirty war in Ireland, and both services running operatives in Republican and Unionist paramilitaries, Kincora would have provided an ideal means of recruiting and compromising potential assets. Official investigations have strongly insinuated British intelligence chiefs had a close bond with many individuals who ran the Boys’ Home.

In May 2025, veteran BBC journalist Chris Moore published a forensic account of the case titled Kincora: Britain’s Shame. Featuring four and a half decades of firsthand research by the author, its groundbreaking contents have been met with general silence by British mainstream media.

In the book, Moore argues persuasively that the Boys’ Home was just one component of a more extensive child abuse network extending across British-occupied Ireland and beyond — in which London’s spying apparatus was not only aware, but likely complicit.

In 2023, Moore met personally with Kincora victim Arthur Smyth in Australia. Smyth’s stay at the Home was brief, but the horrors he endured there left him scarred forever.

“Having interviewed a number of Kincora survivors, I found Arthur’s story familiar. Sent to the Boys’ Home by a Belfast divorce court judge aged 11, he was continually preyed upon by the pedophiles who ran it, and intimidated into silence,” Moore told The Grayzone. “Arthur was also brutally abused repeatedly by a man he knew only as ‘Dickie’, who raped him while bending him over a desk.”

In August 1979, two years after Smyth escaped Kincora, he learned the true identity of ‘Dickie’ was none other than Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas Mountbatten, a member of the royal family and Queen Elizabeth II’s cousin. Mountbatten had just been murdered in an apparent IRA bombing attack on his fishing boat off the coast of Ireland. Though the British government appears to remain committed to concealing his crimes from the public, Mountbatten’s pedophilia was common knowledge among both British and US intelligence for decades.

As early as World War II, the FBI had identified Mountbatten as “a homosexual with a perversion for young boys.” A Bureau file detailing this was later identified by historian Andrew Lownie. After requesting other files the Bureau maintained on the royal, Lownie was informed by US authorities they had been destroyed.

Lownie says he was told by an FBI official that the files were only disposed of “after [he] asked for them” — indicating they were “clearly” shredded at the request of the British government.

Kincora conspiracy begins to unravel

Within months of Kincora’s opening in 1958, boys at the facility began coming forward to inform the adults around them that they were being routinely sexually abused. The Boys’ Home was repeatedly visited by police throughout the decades that followed in response to reports of rape and other mistreatment. Despite repeated investigations, time and time again, complaints were ultimately dismissed by the police.

Reports of sexual abuse spiked dramatically in 1971, when a prominent loyalist named William McGrath became the group home’s housefather, and was placed directly in charge of the boys’ day-to-to lives. Moore documented numerous harrowing accounts in which victims described being sadistically raped by McGrath to the point of internal bleeding, with the boys’ silence ensured by threats of violence.

Moore attributes police inaction to the “skillful manipulation” of Kincora’s director, Joe Mains, who successfully convinced officers that accusers were simply lying as revenge for perceived slights by the staff.

As an extremely well-networked figure in British-occupied Ireland, with deep links to prominent Unionist politicians and Protestant paramilitary groups, McGrath enjoyed virtual impunity. He also headed Tara, an armed Masonic loyalist faction covertly run by the British Army, which effectively functioned as an intelligence operation.

In conversations with colleagues, McGrath was known to boast about his work with British intelligence, and the regular trips to London which it entailed. A police source confirmed to Moore that MI6 had an interest in McGrath since the late 1950s, and that “everything McGrath did from this point on was known” to British intelligence. Small wonder campaigners firmly believe Kincora was exploited to compromise and control Unionists, who committed pedophilic offenses at the Home.

The horrifying abuse at Kincora finally surfaced in January 1980 when the Irish Times published an explosive report that triggered a police investigation, which was led by a veteran detective named George Caskey. According to Moore, it took Caskey just three days to decide that Kincora’s leadership were likely guilty.

Within weeks, Caskey’s team had identified dozens of victims of McGrath and others at Kincora, who each gave detailed statements about the abuse they suffered there. Based on their testimony, Mains, McGrath and fellow high-ranking staffer Raymond Semple were suspended from the group home, and arrested a month later. Curiously, Mains and Semple readily admitted their offenses to police, but McGrath aggressively protested his innocence. Resisting interrogation with such skill that investigating officers believed he had rehearsed for their questioning in advance, he made a number of bizarre, cryptic comments.

For one, McGrath declared he was the victim of political intrigue and the accusations against him were bogusly cooked up by the pro-British Ulster Volunteer Force paramilitary faction, among other people “out to destroy me.” He refused to elaborate on who they were, or why he believed he was being maliciously targeted in this manner. McGrath furthermore promised “other stories” and a “rebuttal to these allegations” would “come out in court,” but again declined to expand any further.

In December 1981, Mains, McGrath, Semple and three other individuals found to have abused young boys at two other state-run group homes in occupied Ireland finally stood trial. McGrath was the only defendant to plead not guilty. Present in court at the time, Moore recalls widespread anticipation McGrath’s testimony would “open a Pandora’s Box, laying bare the truth about Kincora and exposing an uncomfortable – some might say unholy – alliance between the British government and unionism, and perhaps even details of a secret MI5 operation.”

However, at the last minute, McGrath’s lawyer made a shock announcement – his client had changed his plea to guilty. McGrath’s volte face elicited a ripple of exasperated sighs across the courtroom, where over 30 Kincora victims had gathered, preparing to testify. Though all six men were convicted of sexual abuse of boys across three Belfast children’s homes, their relatively light sentences drew outrage. In the end, Mains was jailed for six years, while Semple received five years and McGrath, just four.

MI5 proposes creating ‘false files’ to sabotage investigations

For Moore, McGrath’s change of heart raises obvious suspicions that someone persuaded him to keep his mouth shut about “what had been said to him and by whom.” The police investigation established the six men knew each other and shared information about abused children in state-run boys’ homes, but did not explore the possibility they were part of a wider pedophile ring. The most significant official probe into Kincora since, the Northern Ireland Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry (HIA), initially raised hopes such information might emerge when it was launched in 2013.

That probe, which centered around allegations by British intelligence whistleblowers Colin Wallace and Fred Holroyd that the UK security state was complicit in systematic child rape at Kincora, appeared to leave MI5 extremely uneasy about the potential for British spies’ darkest secrets coming to light in occupied Ireland.

The HIA, however, appears to have been set up to fail. With no ability to compel MI5 or MI6 to produce records, the commission was forced to accept only whatever heavily redacted files the agencies voluntarily provided.

The decision to limit the scope of the HIA’s oversight came despite appeals by prominent figures including victims of sex abuse at Kincora, parliament’s home affairs committee, and former military officials, who claimed British intelligence was complicit in abuses at Kincora, and demanded the Inquiry be granted the ability to subpoena sensitive documents and witnesses.

As anonymous security and intelligence operatives spoke via videolink in the HIA hearings, Inquiry chair Judge Anthony Hart appeared to take their testimony at face value.

The Inquiry’s handling is all the more shocking given the contents of a June 1982 document provided by MI5 to the HIA showing how the agency’s higherups planned to counteract the inquiry itself.

Anxious to distance themselves from the horrors of Kincora, the British spy agency discussed creating “false files” to counteract “lines of enquiry which it was anticipated” that Caskey might pursue. In other words, MI5 was actively seeking to deceive police investigators through forgery.

But the HIA later declared it was “satisfied” that “the suggestion was not pursued,” concluding that the “false files” were not produced for the purposes of misdirecting the inquiry.

Kincora coverup continues

In 2020, it was revealed that extensive police records on investigations into Kincora from 1980 to 1983 had conveniently been destroyed roughly around the time the Inquiry was established.

The files which survived show the HIA received a number of tips suggesting MI5/6 were indeed entangled in pedophilic abuse at Kincora, only to consistently understate their significance.

For example, MI5 told HIA it had no records of William McGrath working for the agency. Conversely, documents produced by the intelligence service indicate how in April 1972, McGrath, who was “commanding officer of the Tara Brigade,” had not only been plausibly “accused of assaulting small boys,” but “could not account for any cash that had been handed to him over a period of a year.”

The HIA accepted MI5’s risible explanation that this information was not passed on to local police because it was unclear McGrath’s attacks on the boys were pedophilic in nature, rather than simply physical. “We ought not to assume that ‘assault’ would have been interpreted at the time by… [MI5] as being of a sexual type,” an internal document presented to the Inquiry declared.

Responding to a separate MI5 document from November 1973 noting McGrath was implicated in “assaulting small boys,” the HIA noted British intelligence was legally obligated to report such an “arrestable offence” to the police, and that by not doing so, it could be argued “the MI5 officers who had this information were in breach of that duty.” But the Inquiry concluded that “to take that view would be unjustified for several reasons,” primarily that “an unidentified member of Tara” was the source of this “unsubstantiated allegation.”

Similar mental gymnastics were employed to downplay the contents of an October 1989 MI6 file detailing “various allegations surrounding the Kincora Boys’ Home,” which revealed the spy agency “certainly ran at least one agent who was aware of sexual malpractice at the home and who may have mentioned this” to his handler. Judge Hart stultifyingly concluded, “it is quite possible the [MI6] officer misinterpreted what was discussed at the meeting.”

The HIA also insisted MI5 was unaware McGrath worked at Kincora until 1977. But that claim was effectively contradicted by the Inquiry itself, which unveiled MI5 documents from January 1976 clearly stating, “McGrath was reported in March 1975 to be warden of Kincora Boys’ Hostel.” A police memo from November 1973 dispatched to MI5’s director similarly noted McGrath was a “social worker” at Kincora.

Whitewash inquiry implicates MI6 chief in Kincora

As part of its probe, the HIA ordered “searches of documents and records” held by MI5, MI6, GCHQ, and the Metropolitan Police on allegations of child sex abuse by public figures and servants. In response, MI5 released files listing 10 powerful individuals, including diplomats, government ministers, and lawmakers, who Britain’s domestic spying agency had evidence to suggest may have been involved in pedophilic abuse.

Chief among them was veteran spy and dark arts specialist Maurice Oldfield, who oversaw MI6 operations in occupied Ireland throughout the 1970s, first as its deputy then chief. Shortly before his April 1981 death, Oldfield was outed as gay, which precluded him from serving with the agency under contemporary recruitment rules. Resultantly, “MI5 conducted a lengthy investigation to determine whether” Oldfield’s sexual proclivities “posed a risk to national security by making him vulnerable to blackmail or other pressure.”

Over the course of “many interviews,” he “provided information about homosexual encounters with male domestic staff, referred to as ‘houseboys’, whilst serving in the Middle East in the 1940s and hotel stewards in Asia in the 1950s.” Media reporting prior to Oldfield’s death suggested he was “a compulsive” user of “rent boys and young down-and-outs,” which was well-known to his security detail. However, the HIA repeatedly exonerated Oldfield of any wrongdoing, despite receiving bombshell evidence implicating him in the horrendous pedophilic acts perpetrated at Kincora.

Unbelievably, its report concluded “there is insufficient information in the records to deduce whether the term ‘houseboys’” was “used simply to describe domestic staff or to denote youth, leaving ambiguity over the ages of the other parties.” This is despite an anonymous MI6 officer telling the Inquiry the agency possessed four separate “ring binders” documenting Oldfield’s “relationship” with Kincora, his “friendship” with its chief Joe Mains, and potential personal connection to “alleged crimes at the boys’ home.”

Heavily redacted files published by the HIA also indicate MI5 was “aware of allegations” that occupied Ireland’s police knew Oldfield was intimately embroiled in the scandal. An internal agency telegram noted well-grounded suspicions the MI6 chief “was involved in the Kincora boys home affair in the course of occasional visits to Northern Ireland (associated with his job) between 1974 and 1979.” Still, the Inquiry dismissed this as proof of MI5/6 involvement in the child abuse conspiracy, on the grounds these excerpts referred purely to “allegations.”

The Kincora coverup continues today. In April 2021, the BBC announced “a new season of landmark documentaries… set to shine a new light on remarkable stories from Northern Ireland’s recent history.” Among the scheduled films was Lost Boys, which told the hideous tale of how numerous children inexplicably vanished in Belfast during the Troubles. It concluded the cases were all linked to pedophilic abuses at Kincora. Interviewees included several former police officers, who believed their inquiries into the disappearances had been systematically sabotaged by British intelligence.

On the eve of transmission, Lost Boys was pulled from broadcast. BBC managers were reportedly “shocked by its content, particularly evidence of MI5’s involvement in covering up the Kincora saga.” Moore, who consulted on the film, told The Grayzone there are strong insinuations British intelligence took a keen interest in the documentary’s producers, AlleyCats. “The home of one staffer involved in editing Lost Boys was burgled,” he says. “Another Alleycats member suspected a break-in, but could not be entirely certain.”

Having investigated Kincora since it first came to public attention, Moore concludes “MI5 and its cohorts in the police believe they can do what they want with little or no regard for the truth, the law or democracy,” noting British intelligence “somehow persuaded the government to bury Kincora files until 2065 and 2085.” The veteran muckraker also recently learned his private communications with journalists investigating other cases of criminal activity by MI5/6-sponsored loyalist paramilitaries – including murder – have been heavily surveilled.

“The British state has illegally spied on people trying to expose the truth in Northern Ireland for many years, in what they call a ‘defensive operation’. Senior local police chiefs have admitted surveillance tactics were deployed against 320 journalists and 500 lawyers over a decade, including me,” Moore concluded. “My telephone was monitored due to probing government-funded loyalist killers. Like many police officers who’ve looked into these matters, I’m all too aware of how authorities frustrate criminal investigations.”

February 10, 2026 Posted by | Book Review, Corruption, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Decades of broken promises, aggression, Israeli pressure leave Iran no reason to trust US: Analyst

By Press TV | February 9, 2026

Decades of broken promises, military aggression, and Israeli pressure have left Tehran with no reason to trust Washington, says a US-based analyst.

In an interview with the Press TV website, E. Michael Jones, author and editor of Culture Wars Magazine, said it would be “foolish” to put “trust in a regime which violates its own word repeatedly,” referring to the Donald Trump administration.

“Iranians have learned their lesson and will not put themselves in jeopardy again. The US cannot be trusted,” he noted.

Mistrust is not a tactical posture but the logical outcome of experience, Jones said, adding that the United States, particularly under Trump, has demonstrated “again and again” that it does not feel bound by its own international commitments.

That mistrust is sharpened by Trump’s record on international obligations, he remarked.

The US-based journalist and commentator pointed to the unilateral withdrawal of the US from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in May 2018.

“Trump has already torn up the JCPOA. He would not feel bound by any agreement,” he said, adding that this piece of history alone makes any future deal “inherently fragile.”

Jones also dismissed Israeli-backed demands to restrict Iran’s missile range, calling them knowingly unrealistic.

“A 300 km limitation on Iranian missiles is an impossible demand,” he stated, adding that Israel is fully aware Iran would never accept such terms.

According to the analyst, these conditions are not designed to advance negotiations but to manufacture justification for war.

“They are making the demand because it provides a pretext for war,” he told the Press TV website, as indirect Iran-US talks have recently resumed in Muscat under Omani mediation.

The discussions, facilitated by Omani Foreign Minister Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi, allowed the two sides to exchange views indirectly almost eight months after the previous round of talks was suspended due to Israeli-American military aggression against Iran.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi described the latest round of talks as a “good start,” saying Iran’s positions and concerns were clearly conveyed.

More than a week into the June war, the United States bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities. Between June 13 and 27, 2025, at least 1,064 people were killed in Iran, including military commanders, nuclear scientists, and ordinary civilians.

Against this backdrop, claims that talks could once again serve as cover for military action resonate strongly. Jones believes Iranians “learned their lesson” there.

This distrust is further reinforced by Washington’s expanding military footprint and repeated threats. Despite Trump’s campaign rhetoric about ending US wars, his administration has bombed several countries and repeatedly edged toward confrontation with Iran.

In his assessment, Trump’s preferred military option remains limited and performative. “Trump’s preferred option at this point is a symbolic strike at targets pre-arranged with the Iranian government,” Jones says, claiming that this approach was already used in June.

Such strikes, he explained, are designed to create the illusion of victory. Trump can declare success, “satisfying the Israelis, who ordered him to attack Iran, and the Iranians, who lose nothing in the attack.”

But the analyst argued that this balancing act is collapsing. “Unfortunately, neither Iran nor Israel is willing to accept Trump’s solution,” he noted.

Israeli pressure, Jones added, is now the central driver of escalation. With Trump set to meet Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday, the analyst expects an ultimatum by the latter: “if you don’t attack Iran, we will.”

“If Trump is smart, he will let Israel attack Iran on its own, hoping that the Iranian response will obliterate Israel once and for all, releasing him from Netanyahu’s constant pressure,” Jones remarked.

Still, he believes Netanyahu’s threats mask a deeper constraint. “Netanyahu is bluffing. He knows he can’t attack Iran by itself,” he said, adding that “many here speculate that Netanyahu is blackmailing Trump with the Epstein files.”

Despite the rhetoric, the analyst insists the US is fully aware of the risks of war with Iran.

Iranian officials have warned that any attack would be met with an immediate response, and Iran’s missile capabilities have already demonstrated their ability to penetrate layered defenses. According to the author, this reality is well understood within the US military.

“The American military has always claimed that the US cannot win a war with Iran,” he noted.

Yet, he hastened to add, such assessments rarely determine policy. “Their verdict invariably gets overturned by Israeli pressure,” Jones stressed, explaining why Trump continues to favor prearranged and symbolic strikes rather than full-scale war.

“American forces are now operating according to Israeli rules,” he stated, noting that the US power in the region no longer operates according to international norms.

He cited the assassination of top anti-terror commander General Qassem Soleimani, carried out while he was on a peace mission in Iraq, as a defining moment.

For Jones, it marked Washington’s abandonment of its own claims to a “rules-based order,” as well as its disregard for institutions such as the United Nations.

He recalled Trump’s own words when questioned by the New York Times. Asked whether he followed international law, Trump said no. Asked what he did follow, Trump replied, “My morality, my mind.”

The analyst described this as a direct reference to John Milton’s Paradise Lost, when Satan said, “The mind is its own place.”

The symbolism, he noted, is unmistakable, adding that it confirms that Imam Khomeini—the founder of the Islamic Revolution—was right when he referred to America as the “Great Satan.”

February 9, 2026 Posted by | Deception, Wars for Israel | , , , | Leave a comment

Epstein’s Ukrainian nexus: modeling agencies, trafficking, and elite connections

By Uriel Araujo | February 9, 2026

The Epstein files are still rocking Western and European elite. While much is being made by Western press about Russian women victims, one should also take a look at Ukraine: the files include documents belonging to women from many countries, but Ukraine is mentioned a lot. This imbalance in coverage is itself telling.

In a previous piece, I examined how the Epstein files point to experimental research of an ethically extreme nature, tied to Jeffrey Epstein’s long-documented obsessions with eugenics, genetics, and human engineering. One may recall the allegations about the “baby ranch” in New Mexico. Some of the (underreported) released emails include references to “mouse testing” in a Ukraine lab and even to plans for a “designer baby” or a human clone within five years (files EFTA01003966 and EFTA02625486). The implications are disturbing enough.

Ukraine’s connections to Epstein’s world, however, do not end with potentially clandestine laboratories and futuristic plans about human cloning. The human trafficking dimension is equally strong. The Epstein files contain copies of passports, visas, and personal documents belonging to women from Italy, Morocco, South Africa, Ukraine, Russia, Lithuania, and Czechia – all seized from Epstein’s estate. Ukraine stands out repeatedly. The correspondence highlights at least two Kyiv-based modeling agencies, Linea 12 Models and L-Models, singled out by Epstein himself as “the best.”

The Linea 12 Models agency, repeatedly cited in the Epstein files, also appears in correspondence linked to Jean-Luc Brunel (file EFTA00753670), the French model agent and convicted sexual abuser long associated with Epstein. In 2022 Brunel was found dead in his cell (in Paris) just like Epstein was in 2019.

Bridal agencies and even the Hyatt Regency Kyiv are also mentioned in this context. In the exchanges, Epstein is provided with the contact of Yulia Kyselova, described as someone who “has about 400 girls for modeling and bridal agencies in Kyiv.”

In 2012 the billionaire’s longtime assistant Lesley Groff coordinated room bookings via Thomas Pritzker, owner of Hyatt, allegedly for individuals connected to the modeling industry. Another curious conversation concerns the purchase of an old house at 24 Borys Romanetsky Street in Lviv, Ukraine, supposedly to be repurposed as a “Pilates studio.”

Ukraine has consistently ranked among Europe’s most corrupt countries, a context that matters. It is also a major source and transit hub for human trafficking: an IOM-commissioned report estimates over 120,000 Ukrainians have been trafficked since 1991, making Ukraine one of the largest sources of trafficked labor in Europe – with earlier figures pointing to hundreds of thousands of women trafficked abroad for sexual exploitation. US State Department reports repeatedly cite allegations of official complicity, including orphanage staff accused of involvement or negligence (2015–2016) and police and judicial officials covering up brothels for bribes (2020–2021). More recent assessments note investigations but few convictions, indicating persistent impunity.

Add to this Ukraine’s role as a CIA hub, documented even by the New York Times. One may recall that US intelligence agencies, in their clandestine endeavors, have historically intersected with organized crime in various theaters, including human trafficking. We now know that Jeffrey Epstein himself was CIA-connected. In such an ecosystem, it is no wonder Ukraine would attract Epstein’s interests, whether in illicit modeling pipelines, trafficking networks, or even illegal human cloning.

The political connections should not be missing from this picture. The files reveal Davos “networking” and “private dealings” with Ukrainian elite figures. In an email dated June 10, 2019, a redacted sender casually states, “I will be with Zelensky this Thursday.” In the same period, Epstein discussed Ukraine with former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, remarking that “Zelensky [is] seeking help” (file FTA00517525). Former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko is also mentioned in the wider correspondence. These are not trivial name-drops; they situate Epstein within elite political circles at a decisive moment in Ukraine’s post-Maidan trajectory.

This should surprise no one. Back in March 2014, amid the chaos of the Maidan upheaval, Epstein wrote to Swiss banking executive Ariane de Rothschild that the US-supported coup in Ukraine would provide “many opportunities”, a point I discussed elsewhere. Opportunities for whom, exactly? Later correspondence sheds light.

In May 2019, Epstein advised a redacted interlocutor, presumably a Ukrainian woman, to start following Ukrainian politics, including Zelensky, parliament, and corruption, implying this would contribute to her future “success”. She answers: “Now it will be so interesting to watch the politics in Ukraine: all politics as a comedy”, to which Epstein says: “Yes, it is funny, but sophisticated corruption. Huge amounts of money will be made. Huge. I’d like to see you as a female oligarch.”

To sum it up, Ukraine was an important hub in the Epstein network, financially, politically, and as a source of human “assets” (women and girls potentially recruitable and exploitable). And there is no reason to assume it has ceased to be, considering that Epstein did not operate alone and his ring was not the only one. There is an ongoing narrative war; but the question is whether Western journalists are willing to follow the evidence wherever it leads, or whether geopolitical loyalties will continue to dictate what is seen, and what remains conveniently unseen in the New Cold War.

Uriel Araujo, Anthropology PhD, is a social scientist specializing in ethnic and religious conflicts, with extensive research on geopolitical dynamics and cultural interactions.

February 9, 2026 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

Bad Science, Big Consequences

How the influential 2006 Stern Review conjured up escalating future disaster losses

By Roger Pielke Jr. | The Honest Broker | February 2, 2026

For those who haven’t observed climate debates over the long term, today it might be hard to imagine the incredible influence of the 2006 Stern Review on The Economics of Climate.1

The Stern Review was far more than just another nerdy report of climate economics. It was a keystone document that reshaped how climate change was framed in policy, media, and advocacy, with reverberations still echoing today.

The Review was commissioned in 2005 by the UK Treasury under Chancellor Gordon Brown and published in 2006, with the aim of assessing climate change through the lens of economic risk and cost–benefit analysis. The review was led by Sir Nicholas Stern, then Head of the UK Government Economic Service and a former Chief Economist of the World Bank, from the outset giving the effort unusual stature for a policy report.

As the climate issue gained momentum in the 2000s, the Review’s conclusions that climate change was a looming emergency and that virtually any cost was worth bearing in response were widely treated as authoritative. The Review shaped climate discourse far beyond the United Kingdom and well beyond the confines of economics.

One key aspect of the Stern Review overlaps significantly with my expertise — The economic impacts of extreme weather. In fact, that overlap has a very surprising connection which I’ll detail below, and explains why back in 2006 I was able to identify the report’s fatal flaws on the economics of extreme weather in real time, and publish my arguments in the peer-reviewed literature soon thereafter.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I have just updated through 2025 the figure below that compares the Stern Review’s prediction of post-2005 increases in disaster losses as a percentage of global GDP with what has actually transpired.

Specifically, the figure shows in light grey the Stern Review’s prediction for increasing global disaster losses, as a percentage of GDP, from 2006 through 2050.2 These values in grey represent annual average losses, meaning that over time for the prediction to verify, about half of annual losses would lie above the grey bars and about half below.

The black bars in the figure show what has actually occurred (with details provided in this post last week). You don’t need fancy statistics to see that the real world has consistently undershot the Stern Review’s predictions over the past two decades.

The Stern Review forecast rapidly escalating losses to 2050, when losses were projected to be about $1.7 trillion in 2025 dollars. The Review’s prediction for 2025 was more than $500 billion in losses (average annual). In actuality losses totaled about $200 billion in 2025.

The forecast miss is not subtle.

How did the Stern Review get things so wrong?

The answer is also not subtle and can be summarized in two words: Bad science.

Let’s take a look at the details. The screenshot below comes from Chapter 5 of the Review and explains its source for developing its prediction, cited to footnote 26.

As fate would have it, footnote 26 goes to a white paper that I commissioned for a workshop that I co-organized with Munich Re in 2006 on disasters and climate change.

That white paper — by Muir-Wood et al. — is the same paper that soon after was played the starring role in a fraudulent graph inserted into the 2007 IPCC report (yes, fraudulent). You can listen to me recounting that incredible story, with rare archival audio.

But I digress . . . back to The Stern Review, which argued:

If temperatures continued to rise over the second half of the century, costs could reach several percent of GDP each year, particularly because the damages increase disproportionately at higher temperatures . . .

The report presented its prediction methodology in the footnote 27, shown in full below, which says: “These values are likely underestimates.”

Where do these escalating numbers come from? Who knows.

They appear to be just made up out of thin air. The predictive numbers do not come from Muir-Wood et al., who do not engage in any form of projection.

The 2% starting point for increasing losses — asserted in the blue highlighted passage in the image above — also does not appear in Muir-Wood et al. which in fact says:

When analyzed over the full survey period (1950 – 2005) the year is not statistically significant for global normalized losses. . . For the more complete 1970-2005 survey period, the year is significant with a positive coefficient for (i.e. increase in) global losses at 1% . . .

The Stern Review seems to have turned 1% into 2% and failed to acknowledge that over the longer-period 1950 to 2005, there was no increasing trend in losses as a proportion of GDP. The escalating increase in annual losses from 2% to 3%, 4%, 5%, 6% every decade is not supported in any way in the Stern Review, nor is it referenced to any source.

When the Stern Review first came out, I noticed this curiosity right away, and did what I thought we scholars were expected to do when encountering bad science with big implications — I wrote a paper for peer review.

My paper was published in 2007 and clearly explained the Muir-Wood et al. and other significant and seemingly undeniable errors in the Stern Review.

Pielke Jr, R. (2007). Mistreatment of the economic impacts of extreme events in the Stern Review Report on the Economics of Climate Change. Global Environmental Change, 17(3-4), 302-310.

I explained in that paper:

This brief critique of a small part of the Stern Review finds that the report has dramatically misrepresented literature and understandings on the relationship of projected climate changes and future losses from extreme events in developed countries, and indeed globally. In one case this appears to be the result of the misrepresentation of a single study. This cherry picking damages the credibility of the Stern Review because it not only ignores other relevant literature with different conclusions, but it misrepresents the very study that it has used to buttress its conclusions.

Over my career in research, I’ve had some hits and some misses, but I’m happy to report that I got this one right at the time and it has held up ever since. Of course, perhaps a more significant outcome of this episode, and a key part of my own education in climate science, is that my paper was resoundingly ignored.

One reason that science works is that scientists share a commitment to correct errors when they are found in research, bringing forward reliable knowledge and leaving behind that which doesn’t stand the test of time.

I learned decades ago that in areas where I published, self-correction was often slow to work, if not just broken. Over the decades that pathological characteristic of key areas of climate science has not much improved (e.g., see this egregious example).

The Stern Review helped to launch climate change into top levels of policy making around the world. Further, we can draw a straight line from the Review to the emergence of (often scientifically questionable) “climate risk” in global finance a decade later. It still rests on a foundation of bad science.

1 My ongoing THB series on insurance and “climate risk” in finance prompted me to revisit the 2006 Stern Review, hence this post.

2 Note that the Review explicitly referenced the tabulation of global economic losses from extreme weather events as tabulation by Munich Re, which is the same dataset that I often use, such as in last week’s THB post on global disaster losses. The comparison here is thus apples to apples.

February 8, 2026 Posted by | Deception, Economics, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

When Threats Replace Evidence

What an Australian Newspaper Article Reveals About the Vaccine Compliance Machine

Lies are Unbekoming | February 5, 2026

The Sydney Morning Herald wants you to know the penalties. Doctors and nurses who falsify vaccination records face suspension, deregistration, and jail. Parents who seek them out face fraud investigations through Services Australia. The article names specific dollar amounts ($2,500 per child), quotes the Health Minister expressing shock and outrage, and reminds readers that AHPRA—the regulatory body that controls whether medical professionals can earn a living—is watching.

The article reads less as journalism than as a warning to anyone considering dissent.

The Herald is one of Australia’s oldest and most influential newspapers, the rough equivalent of the New York Times in reach and establishment credibility. When it publishes a piece like this, it speaks with institutional authority. The January 2026 article, “Parents are paying $2500 to falsify vaccine records,” arrives at a particular moment in Australian public health: vaccine uptake has “stalled below national targets,” mandate enforcement is creating a black market for exemptions, and parents are organising in Facebook groups 40,000 members strong.

To understand the context, American readers need to know what Australia built. Between 2014 and 2019, five Australian states—New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, and Western Australia—rolled out “no jab, no play” laws, which bar unvaccinated children from childcare and preschool enrollment entirely. The only exemptions are medical, and these require documented life-threatening allergic reactions or severe immunocompromise—conditions so narrow that most families cannot qualify no matter their concerns.

The coercion is not subtle—and it violates the government’s own rules. Australia’s Immunisation Handbook states that valid consent must be given “voluntarily in the absence of undue pressure, coercion or manipulation.” Denying a child access to childcare unless the parents comply is textbook duress. The government has built an enforcement apparatus that fails its own stated ethical standards.

The system was designed to make non-compliance economically devastating and socially impossible. And for years, it worked. But now that system is encountering mass resistance, and the Herald article’s purpose is to make examples—to signal what happens to doctors who help parents escape a coercive system, and to parents who refuse to comply.

Buried beneath the threats is a dead baby. Riley Hughes, 32 days old, is the emotional payload. His story opens the piece, provides the moral frame, and transforms regulatory enforcement into righteous protection of the innocent. Without Riley, this article is just an inventory of punishments. With Riley, non-compliance becomes child murder.

The story requires examination.

Riley developed “mild cold symptoms” at three weeks old. His mother took him to a doctor, who said he appeared “perfectly fine.” When he stopped feeding, she took him to the children’s hospital. By day three, doctors “suspected” whooping cough. By day four, he had pneumonia. By day five, he was on life support. He died at 32 days old. Riley died in February 2015—eleven years before this article was published. The Herald reached back over a decade to find its dead baby.

The article states that “The Bordetella pertussis bug had overwhelmed his tiny body.” This is presented as fact. But reading carefully, the diagnosis was never confirmed—doctors “suspected” whooping cough. The journalist’s assertion that pertussis killed Riley is not attributed to any medical source. It is simply declared.

More striking is what the article omits entirely: what happened during those five days of hospitalisation. What interventions were administered to a three-week-old infant? What antibiotics? What was the “life support” that preceded his death? The hospital’s role in Riley’s deterioration is invisible. The medical system appears only as the place where heroic efforts were made to save him from the disease that (we are told) the unvaccinated community gave him.

The article describes Riley as “too young” to be vaccinated against whooping cough, which is given at six to eight weeks in Australia. But it does not mention that under Australian guidelines, Riley would have received the Hepatitis B vaccine within 24 hours of birth. He was not an unvaccinated child. He was a vaccinated child who had not yet received this particular vaccine.

If Riley had been completely unvaccinated, that would be the story. “Unvaccinated baby dies of preventable disease” writes itself. Instead, the article performs a subtle shift: a vaccinated infant dies after five days of hospital intervention, and an entire class of people—parents who refused to vaccinate—are scapegoated to protect the system that failed him.

None of this can be stated with certainty. We do not have Riley’s medical records. We do not know what drugs were administered, what procedures were performed, what his body endured in those five days. But that is precisely the point: neither does the Herald, and neither do its readers. The article presents a story with a hole at its centre and fills that hole with a villain—the unvaccinated community—while the institution that actually had custody of Riley during his decline remains unexamined.

What we do know: Riley was vaccinated. He received the Hepatitis B vaccine at birth, as per Australian protocol. He then spent five days in hospital care before he died. This is a vaccinated child who died after days of medical intervention—and the article repurposes his death as a case against vaccine refusal.

The mother, Catherine Hughes, is quoted: “My son would likely be alive today if everyone in my community had been fully vaccinated against whooping cough.”

This is a grieving mother’s belief, given to her by a medical system that needed someone to blame. She has since founded the Immunisation Foundation of Australia and become a professional advocate for vaccination mandates. What the Herald does not disclose: as journalist Alison Bevege has documented, her foundation received $170,000 from Sanofi in 2023 and $100,000 from GSK in 2025. Hughes herself appears in GSK press releases promoting their products. The article presents her as a spontaneous voice of bereaved motherhood. She is a paid pharmaceutical spokesperson.

The article’s foundational premise—that unvaccinated children endanger the community—is not merely unexamined. Even within the mainstream framework of germ theory and disease transmission, the published science contradicts it.

In 2014, researchers at the FDA published a study using baboons to examine how the acellular pertussis vaccine actually works. The results, within the germ theory framework the researchers operated in, were unambiguous: vaccinated baboons exposed to Bordetella pertussis showed few symptoms but became colonised with the bacteria. They were then placed in cages with unvaccinated baboons—and by the researchers’ own account, the vaccinated animals passed the bacteria to the unvaccinated ones. The study’s conclusion: “acellular pertussis vaccines protect against disease but fail to prevent infection and transmission.”

A 2015 study by Althouse and Scarpino went further. Using epidemiological, genetic, and mathematical modelling data, they argued that asymptomatic spread from vaccinated individuals “provides the most parsimonious explanation for the observed resurgence of B. pertussis in the US and UK.” Vaccinated individuals who show no symptoms carry and spread the bacteria—according to the very framework the public health establishment operates within. The authors noted that this also explains the documented failure of “cocooning”—the strategy of vaccinating family members to protect newborns. By their own logic, it doesn’t work because the vaccinated family members become silent carriers.

Even by the establishment’s own standards, the pertussis vaccine does not prevent colonisation. It does not prevent spread. What it does, according to their own researchers, is suppress symptoms in the vaccinated individual while allowing them to pass the bacterium to others, including infants too young to be vaccinated.

These are peer-reviewed studies published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and BMC Medicine. The FDA conducted the baboon study.

Meanwhile, within this same framework, the bacterium has apparently evolved under vaccine pressure. A 2014 Australian study found that between 30% and 80% of circulating pertussis strains during a major outbreak were “pertactin-deficient”—lacking the protein the vaccine targets. The authors observed that “pertussis vaccine selection pressure, or vaccine-driven adaptation, induced the evolution of B. pertussis.”

The pertussis vaccine suppresses symptoms. Whether it also creates asymptomatic carriers who spread an apparently evolving pathogen, as the establishment’s own researchers claim, remains their narrative to defend. But even within that narrative, the unvaccinated are not the problem—the vaccine is.

When the Herald article quotes a professor warning about “one of the kids there has whooping cough or measles, and it spreads through the childcare, putting your child at risk,” the establishment’s own science suggests the spreader is more likely to be a vaccinated child with no visible symptoms than an unvaccinated child who would be home sick.

Even within the establishment’s own framework, if Riley had pertussis, the most likely source—according to their own research on asymptomatic carriage—would be a vaccinated person, perhaps someone in his own family who had been “cocooned” as the health authorities recommend. The article does not explore this possibility. It cannot, because the entire enforcement apparatus rests on the premise that the unvaccinated are the danger.

The article is not confused about the science. It is not interested in the science. Its function is compliance enforcement, and its vectors are specific.

The first vector targets medical professionals. The article names a Perth nurse charged with fraudulently recording vaccines—though the case was dropped for lack of evidence. It names a Victorian doctor whose registration was suspended. It quotes AHPRA warning that practitioners found acting fraudulently face suspension or deregistration. The message to any doctor or nurse who might help parents escape the system: we are watching, and we will destroy your career.

This is not new. In December 2020, Dr. Paul Thomas, a Portland paediatrician who had practiced for 35 years, published a peer-reviewed study comparing health outcomes in vaccinated versus unvaccinated children in his practice. The data showed unvaccinated children were significantly healthier across multiple metrics. Within days of publication, the Oregon Medical Board issued an “emergency order” suspending his licence, claiming his “continued practice constitutes an immediate danger to the public.”

The Board’s letter accused Thomas of “fraudulently” asserting that his vaccine-friendly protocol improved health outcomes—the very thing his peer-reviewed data demonstrated. His paper was later retracted under circumstances its authors describe as dubious. Thomas eventually surrendered his licence rather than continue fighting the Board’s conditions, which prohibited him from consulting with parents about vaccines or conducting further research.

The pattern is consistent. Produce evidence that challenges the orthodoxy, lose your ability to practice medicine. The threat in the Herald article is not abstract. Medical professionals in Australia have seen what happens to dissenters.

The second vector targets parents. The article reminds readers that Services Australia investigates Medicare and Centrelink fraud. Parents who pay for falsified records are not just endangering children (according to the article’s framing)—they are committing crimes against the Commonwealth. The article implies that seeking workarounds exposes parents to criminal liability, transforming a decision about their child’s medical care into a prosecutable offence.

The third vector is reputational. The article quotes the Health Minister: “I am shocked and appalled that any doctor or nurse would falsify vaccination records.” Parents in the Facebook groups are framed as reckless conspirators, their concerns about vaccine safety transmuted into selfish endangerment of babies like Riley. The 2025 study cited in the article notes that 47.9% of parents with unvaccinated children “did not believe vaccines are safe” and 46.7% “would not feel guilty if their unvaccinated child got a vaccine-preventable disease.” These statistics are presented as moral indictments.

What the article does not mention: the same study found that nearly 40% of these parents “did not believe vaccinating children helps protect others in the community.” Given the published science on pertussis—even within the establishment’s own framework—these parents have a point.

In 2004, Glen Nowak, the CDC’s director of media relations, gave a presentation to the National Influenza Vaccine Summit titled “Increasing Awareness and Uptake of Influenza Immunization.” His slides explained that vaccine demand requires “concern, anxiety, and worry” among the public. “The belief that you can inform and warn people, and get them to take appropriate actions or precautions with respect to a health threat or risk without actually making them anxious or concerned,” Nowak explained, “is not possible.”

His recipe for demand creation included medical experts stating “concern and alarm” and predicting “dire outcomes” if people don’t vaccinate. References to “very severe” and “deadly” diseases help motivate behaviour. Pandemic framing is useful.

The Herald article follows this template precisely. It opens with a dead baby. It features a professor warning about diseases “spreading through childcare.” The Health Minister invokes “serious complications, hospitalisation, and in some cases, death.” The 14 measles cases since December are presented ominously, without context about how many of those cases involved vaccinated individuals or resulted in any serious illness.

The article also quotes Dr. Niroshini Kennedy, president of the paediatrics and child health division at the Royal Australasian College of Physicians, warning about “vaccine hesitancy.” What the article does not mention: the RACP has a foundation that partners with GSK, a major pertussis vaccine manufacturer. The expert voice warning about hesitancy has institutional financial ties to a company that profits from vaccination.

The financial stakes are not abstract. GSK’s pertussis products Boostrix and Infanrix generated $2.3 billion in 2023. Sanofi’s pertussis vaccine revenue hit $1 billion in 2024, up 10.8% on the previous year, driven by booster demand. When the Herald runs a story demonising vaccine refusers, it serves an industry measured in billions.

The article acknowledges, briefly, that public health experts warned in 2019 that “vaccine mandates can backfire, and simply induce parents to seek loopholes, and, worse, fuel negative attitudes towards vaccination.” This warning has proven accurate. Australia’s escalating mandate regime has not produced the desired compliance. It has produced a $2,500 black market and Facebook groups with 40,000 members sharing strategies for resistance.

The system’s response is not to reconsider the mandates. It is to escalate enforcement and amplify fear. The article is part of that escalation.

The escalation itself is diagnostic. Systems that can defend their policies on evidence do not need to inventory punishments in the newspaper. They do not need to reach back eleven years for a dead baby. They do not need AHPRA warnings and Health Minister quotes and reminders about criminal prosecution. They make their case and let the data persuade.

What the Herald article reveals, beneath its institutional authority, is a system that has run out of persuasive tools. The sequence tells the story: first came the information campaigns, which did not produce sufficient uptake. Then came the mandates—no jab, no play—which produced compliance but also resistance. Then came enforcement against the resisters, which produced a black market. Now comes the threat display in the national press, designed to frighten the black market into submission. Each escalation is a concession that the previous level of coercion failed. Each one is more desperate than the last.

A system confident in its science would welcome questions. A system confident in its products would publish the safety data that parents are asking for. A system confident in its outcomes would point to the evidence and let parents decide. This system prosecutes nurses, deregisters doctors, denies children access to childcare, and runs articles designed to make examples of anyone who dissents. That is not the behaviour of an institution operating from strength. It is the behaviour of an institution that knows it cannot survive scrutiny—and is scrambling to ensure that scrutiny never arrives.

What parents are waking up to, slowly and in growing numbers, is that the fundamental promise—vaccinate your children and they will be protected, vaccinate enough children and the community will be protected—is not supported by the evidence, even within the framework that public health authorities operate in. What they are discovering is that asking questions produces hostility rather than answers. What they are learning is that doctors who support informed consent are being systematically removed from practice, leaving parents with no one in the medical system willing to have honest conversations.

The 40,000 parents in that Facebook group are not there because they read misinformation. They are there because they asked questions their doctors couldn’t answer, or because their child had a reaction that was dismissed, or because they did the research the system told them not to do and found that the confident assurances didn’t match the published science.

The Herald article treats these parents as a problem to be solved through enforcement. It does not entertain the possibility that they might be responding rationally to real information. It cannot, because that would require examining the science—and the science does not support the policy.

Australia has constructed a system where parents lose childcare access if they do not vaccinate, where doctors lose their licences if they support parental choice, where asking questions about vaccine safety is framed as “misinformation,” and where a dead baby is deployed to transform regulatory non-compliance into moral monstrosity.

The article calls this public health. A more accurate description: this is what happens when a policy built on faulty premises meets a population that is beginning to see through it. Unable to defend the science, the system defends itself through threats, fear, and the weaponisation of grief.

Riley Hughes deserved better than to become a propaganda tool for the companies that fund his mother’s foundation. The parents seeking exemptions deserve honest information about what vaccines can and cannot do. The doctors trying to practice informed consent deserve to keep their licences.

None of them are served by an article whose purpose is to frighten dissenters into silence.

The system is telling parents: comply or be punished, and don’t ask questions. The parents are responding: we have questions, and your threats are not answers.

That tension will not be resolved by more enforcement. It will be resolved when someone in authority has the courage to address the questions honestly—or it will continue to escalate until the system’s credibility collapses entirely.

Forty thousand parents in one Facebook group suggest which direction this is heading.

References

The Article Under Discussion:

Olaya, K. (2026, January 31). Parents are paying $2500 to falsify vaccine records. It’s endangering babies like Riley. The Sydney Morning Herald. https://www.smh.com.au/national/parents-are-paying-2500-to-falsify-vaccine-records-it-s-endangering-babies-like-riley-20260127-p5nxah.html

Catherine Hughes Financial Disclosures:

Bevege, A. (2026, February 4). ‘Baby-Killers’ – Nine Newspapers falsely claim unvaccinated people killed a baby by spreading whooping cough. Letters from Australia. https://alisonbevege.substack.com/

RACP-GSK Partnership:

GSK Australia. RACP Foundation partnership announcement. Referenced in Bevege (2026).

Vaccine Revenue Figures:

GSK. (2024). Annual Report 2023. Boostrix and Infanrix/Pediarix revenue figures.

Sanofi. (2025). Fourth Quarter 2024 Earnings Report. Polio/pertussis/HiB vaccine sales.

Pertussis Vaccine and Asymptomatic Carriage:

Warfel, J. M., Zimmerman, L. I., & Merkel, T. J. (2014). Acellular pertussis vaccines protect against disease but fail to prevent infection and transmission in a nonhuman primate model. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(2), 787-92. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1314688110

Althouse, B. M., & Scarpino, S. V. (2015). Asymptomatic transmission and the resurgence of Bordetella pertussis. BMC Medicine, 13(1), 146. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12916-015-0382-8

Pertussis Vaccine Evolution and Waning Immunity:

Lam, C., Octavia, S., et al. (2014). Rapid increase in pertactin-deficient Bordetella pertussis isolates, Australia. Emerging Infectious Diseases, 20(4), 626-33. https://doi.org/10.3201/eid2004.131478

Tartof, S. Y., Lewis, M., et al. (2013). Waning immunity to pertussis following 5 doses of DTaP. Pediatrics, 131(4), e1047-52. https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2012-1928

van Boven, M., Mooi, F. R., et al. (2005). Pathogen adaptation under imperfect vaccination: implications for pertussis. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 272(1572), 1617-24. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2005.3108

Dr. Paul Thomas Case:

Oregon Medical Board. (2020). In the Matter of: Paul Norman Thomas, MD. License Number MD15689: Order of Emergency Suspension. https://omb.oregon.gov/Clients/ORMB/OrderDocuments/e579dd35-7e1b-471f-a69a-3a800317ed4c.pdf

Lyons-Weiler, J., & Thomas, P. (2020). Relative Incidence of Office Visits and Cumulative Rates of Billed Diagnoses Along the Axis of Vaccination. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 17(22), 8674. [Retracted 2021]

Hammond, J. R. (2021). The War on Informed Consent: The Persecution of Dr. Paul Thomas by the Oregon Medical Board. Skyhorse Publishing.

CDC Fear-Based Messaging:

Nowak, G. (2004). Increasing Awareness and Uptake of Influenza Immunization. Presentation at the National Influenza Vaccine Summit, Atlanta, GA.

Vaccine Mandates and Backfire Effects:

Ward, J. K., et al. (2019). France’s citizen consultation on vaccination and the challenges of participatory democracy in health. Social Science & Medicine, 220, 73-80.

Suppression of Vaccine Dissent:

Martin, B. (2015). On the Suppression of Vaccination Dissent. Science and Engineering Ethics, 21(1), 143-57. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-014-9530-3

Australia’s No Jab, No Play Laws:

Australian state governments. No Jab, No Play legislation (2014-2019). New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia.

Australian Immunisation Handbook — Consent Requirements:

Australian Government Department of Health. Australian Immunisation Handbook. Section: Valid Consent. https://immunisationhandbook.health.gov.au/

February 8, 2026 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

The Gaza Ceasefire Has No Phase Two, Only a Permanent Limbo

By Robert Inlakesh | The Palestine Chronicle | February 7, 2026

Since the Gaza ceasefire took effect on October 10, 2025, repeated announcements about an imminent ‘Phase Two’ have created the impression of diplomatic progress. In reality, the agreement has not advanced beyond its initial stage, while shifting proposals and ongoing violations suggest the process was never designed to reach a definitive end to the war.

Key Takeaways

  • The ceasefire remains trapped in Phase 1 because Phase 2 has never been clearly defined or operationalized.
  • Monitoring mechanisms, particularly the CMCC, have failed to enforce the agreement despite thousands of violations.
  • Successive reconstruction proposals replace political resolution with speculative planning detached from realities on the ground.
  • Israel’s refusal to withdraw and demand for disarmament make any transition to Phase 2 structurally impossible.
  • The ceasefire functions as a controlled pause in large-scale war rather than a genuine path to ending it.

A Ceasefire without a Second Phase

Since the initiation of the Gaza Ceasefire agreement on October 10, 2025, month after month, the media has speculated about the beginning of the second phase of the deal. However, despite small amendments to the situation on the ground, nothing substantive has emerged. This is all by design.

The original text of US President Donald Trump’s “Comprehensive End of Gaza War” proposal, as well as his corresponding “20-Point-Plan,” assert that the Gaza ceasefire’s first phase will begin immediately and that within a 72-hour-window all of the elements included within it are to be concluded.

Soon after the ceasefire was announced, there then emerged a different plan, one that stated there would be a five-day window in which a limited number of aid trucks could enter the Gaza Strip. Israel did not adhere to this agreement. From there, it took weeks for the minimum required aid to reach the civilian population.

There was also the formation of the Civil-Military Coordination Center (CMCC), which attracted over 20 countries and dozens of humanitarian aid organizations. The CMCC’s purpose was supposed to be the coordination of aid transfers, alongside monitoring efforts to stop ceasefire violations and maintain the stability of the agreement.

Instead, the CMCC became a command and control center led by the United States military, with the Israelis being the second in charge, before a range of Arab and international armed forces. The CMCC has watched on and done nothing to stop Israel’s daily ceasefire violations, which are around 3,000 in total at this point, including the murder of around 560 Palestinians.

Contrary to its stated mission, the CMCC made every nation involved fully complicit in Israeli war crimes, including round-the-clock home demolitions, the deliberate slaughter of children, and the propping up of five ISIS-linked militias in the territory.

Plans for Gaza without Ending the War

Ever since the ceasefire began, there has been a nearly weekly pivot in terms of what the future plans for Gaza are to be; all of these “plans”, “visions,” and “proposals” contradict the last.

For example, a proposal for “post-war Gaza”, exposed by the Washington Post in September, before the ceasefire was even implemented, was still reportedly being floated following the agreement that came into effect a month later. This was called the “Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation Trust”, or GREAT Trust, fully drawn up by an Israeli. A 38-page document was even produced as a means of laying the groundwork for a model of AI-powered smart cities.

However, the GREAT Trust plan contradicted Donald Trump’s “20-point-plan” as it proposed paying Gaza’s civilian population 5,000 USD each to leave the territory. Under the Trump plan, the population was said to be allowed to stay in Gaza.

Enter Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and suddenly there’s a “new plan” for post-war construction, presented on a slideshow called “Project Sunrise”, which was revealed in December of last year by the Wall Street Journal. This PowerPoint presentation, which is vague and consists of AI-generated images similar to the US President’s infamous “Trump Gaza” AI video, was published at the start of 2025.

The month prior to this, Kushner, along with US envoy Steve Witkoff, was floating countless vague proposals, appearing to only be offering reconstruction in the Israeli-controlled portion of Gaza, which was supposed to be 53% of the territory, but due to Israeli violations and seizure of more land is closer to 60%.

What also happened in mid-November was the passing of the United Nations’ de facto death certificate – UN Security Council resolution 2803 – which granted the US its legitimacy in creating the “Board of Peace” and “International Stabilization Force”.

UNSC resolution 2803 was supposed to help usher in the alleged Phase 2 of the ceasefire deal, something that still hadn’t been clearly defined. Then, in December, there were reports, citing US officials, that Phase 2 would start in January. Instead, all that happened was Jared Kushner delivered a speech and showed a PowerPoint presentation, depicted in the media as “the master plan”.

Yet, the slideshow was the same as the old one that had been floating around since December, except this time, Kushner was arguing his AI-powered super city model would cost 90 billion less than it was supposed to late last year.

The Managed Stalemate

Now the Israelis have allowed a partial opening of Rafah, which they decide to close whenever they choose and impose extreme restrictions on who leaves and enters. Contrary to the agreement, the Israelis are not withdrawing from Gaza at all and have publicly expressed their opposition to such a move.

Instead, Israel demands that the Palestinian resistance disarm, which they will not do. Therefore, the only option for the Israelis is to ramp up their genocide again and collapse the ceasefire if they want to achieve disarmament, something it hasn’t yet chosen to do.

In other words, there is no Phase 2. We don’t even have a definition of what Phase 2 actually is. There are no real plans for anything, just AI slop and unrealistic “visions”. Although it may seem as if there are attempts to bring about a change on the ground, which to some is the “start of Phase 2”, this is simply wishful thinking.

What is happening is precisely what I have predicted since October 8, 2025, when both sides signaled they had agreed to the ceasefire: the situation is stuck in limbo between “Phase 1” and “Phase 2”. Israel doesn’t stop killing civilians, and there is no real effort to develop meaningful plans that would actually result in the ceasefire’s ultimate success.

The genocide is not over; there is simply a glorified pause in place, one that allows the Israelis to focus on other fronts while the media pretends “the war is over”.

– Robert Inlakesh is a journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. He focuses on the Middle East, specializing in Palestine.

February 7, 2026 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , | Leave a comment

Is Canada Really Warming?

By Tom Harris | American Thinker | January 30, 2026

Is Canada really warming at double the global average rate, as the Canadian government says it is? A new report says no, because the data Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) uses are apparently corrupted by fundamental mistakes, mistakes so severe that when corrected, all the supposed warming of the past six or seven decades vanishes.

Given that Canada represents a large fraction of global land surface area, one naturally wonders if the world is warming at anything like we are told it is.

This discovery should have generated mainstream media headlines across Canada. After all, the mistakes in the Canadian temperature data were discovered over four years ago by Dr. Joseph Hickey, a highly qualified Canadian data scientist, and the group I lead, the International Climate Science Coalition – Canada, has been publicizing the story for the past month.

But don’t expect mainstream media in the Great White North to say anything about this. Most of Canada’s press are heavily subsidized by the federal and provincial governments, which would probably not appreciate the story being covered. Dr. Dave Snow, Associate professor in political science at the University of Guelph, writes:

“Canada has created a bevy of policies, ranging from subsidies to tax breaks to mandated contributions from foreign tech companies, that undoubtedly constitute a major portion of news outlets’ revenue and journalists’ salaries — potentially upwards of 50 percent.”

Publicly questioning government narratives on something as significant as climate change is a risky proposition for any editor when doing so leaves their paymasters with egg on their faces.

Here’s what governments in Canada — and the media outlets reliant on their largess — would rather you never heard. On December 23, the report “Artificial stepwise increases in homogenized surface air temperature data invalidate published climate warming claims for Canada” was released by Dr. Joseph Hickey, a data scientist with a PhD in Physics. The report was published by CORRELATION Research in the Public Interest regarding a significant error in Canada’s temperature data.

Using the data from ECCC for hundreds of stations across the country, scientists had previously calculated that the surface air temperature has increased 1-2 degrees Celsius over the past six to seven decades in Canada. Yet in 1998, the exact year in which 72 Canadian reference climatological stations were first added to the Global Climate Observing System, a sudden stepwise increase of approximately 1 degree Celsius occurred at most stations across the country.

Numerous studies in scientific literature assert that sudden temperature jumps like this are not due to real climactic change but instead are caused by temperature measurement artifacts corrupting the data. They contend that this data should therefore be removed from the record. Even though one of the studies explaining this was authored by Dr. Lucie A. Vincent, the senior Environment Canada Research Climatologist, the temperature jump was left in ECCC’s data and is still there to this day. Hickey concludes, “The reported climate warming of Canada appears to be entirely from a temperature measurement artifact.”

Hickey first discovered this in 2021 when he was as an analyst for the Bank of Canada and so was barred from sharing his findings with the public. After leaving the bank, he secured his communications with Environment Canada via an access to information, which is why we know what happened next.

In that year Hickey alerted Environment Canada to the problem and explained in detail to Vincent that the sharpness of the temperature increase, and its magnitude, indicate that it is not due to real climactic change. He also laid out a thorough analysis of potential sources of the artifact, which could include land use changes and instrumentation changes. Both of these could easily cause a one-degree shift in the temperature data. Moreover, he explained, “there are no other similar large and geographically widespread discontinuities in the AHCCD dataset [Environment Canada’s flagship temperature dataset] at other years.” This increase could be responsible for almost all the claimed warming calculated for Canada over the past six or seven decades.

Vincent essentially brushed him off, did not provide an explanation for the step increase, and said that the shift “is probably due to climate variability only.”

So, Canada is spending hundreds of billions of dollars to fight climate change largely based on data that the government scientist most involved in its generation can only say is “probably” indicative of warming.

Hickey was not the only Bank of Canada employee to find fault with ECCC’s temperature data. In his December report, he writes:

“On December 7, 2020, Bank of Canada Economist Julien McDonald-Guimond sent an email to Environment Canada researchers with an inquiry about the … daily temperature records, noting he had found some cases in which the daily minimum temperature was greater than the daily maximum temperature for the same day and for the same AHCCD station.”

In fact, there were more than 10,000 instances of days for which the daily minimum temperature was greater than the daily maximum temperature.

Environment Canada Climate Data Analyst Megan Hartwell replied to McDonald-Guimon, saying that “We were quite surprised by the frequency of the issue you reported, and have taken some time to go through the data carefully.”

That ECCC were surprised by McDonald-Guimond’s finding is cause enough to worry. But the fact that they now “have taken some time to go through the data carefully” begs the question: didn’t they go through the data carefully before releasing it the first time?

Environment and Climate Change Canada have yet to respond to Hickey’s December report. They have some explaining to do.

Tom Harris is Executive Director of International Climate Science Coalition – Canada.

February 7, 2026 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

‘Fact-checking’ as a disinformation scheme: The Brazilian case of Agência Lupa

By Raphael Machado | Strategic Culture Foundation | February 7, 2026

Since the term “fake news” emerged in the world of political journalism, we have been confronted with a new angle through which the establishment attempts to reinforce its hegemony in the intellectual and informational sphere: by simulating ideology as science, data, or fact.

A fundamental aspect of hegemonic liberalism in the “rival-less” post-Cold War world is the transition of ideology into the diffuse realm of pure facticity. What decades earlier was clearly identified as belief comes to be taken as “data,” that is, as indisputable, not open for debate. This is the case, for example, with the myth of “democracy,” the myth of “human rights,” the myth of “progress,” and the myth of the “free market.” And today, we could extend this to the dictates of “gender ideology” and a series of other beliefs of ideological foundation, which are nevertheless taken as scientific facts.

“Fact-checking” has thus become one of the many mechanisms used by the establishment to reinforce systemic “consensus” in the face of the emergence of alternative perspectives following the popularization of the internet and independent journalism. The “authoritative” distinction made by a self-declared “independent” and “respectable” agency between what would be “fact” and what would be “fake news” has become a new source of truth.

Some liberal-democratic governments, like the USA, have gone so far as to create special departments dedicated to “combating fake news,” thus acting as authentic “Ministries of Truth” of Orwellian memory.

However, even within the “independent” sphere, we rarely encounter genuine independence. On the contrary, in fact, Western “fact-checking agencies” tend to be well-integrated into the constellation of NGOs, foundations, and associations of the non-profit industrial complex, which, in turn, is permeated by the money of large corporations and the interests of liberal-democratic governments. Even their staff tend to be revolving doors for figures coming from the NGO world, mainstream journalism, and state bureaucracy.

Although the phenomenon is of Western origin, Brazil is not exempt from it. “Fact-checking agencies” also operate here — most of them engaged in the same types of disinformation operations as the governments, newspapers, and NGOs that sponsor them.

A typical example is Agência Lupa.

Founded in 2015, its founder Cristina Tardáguila previously worked for another disinformation apparatus disguised as “fact-checking,” Preto no Branco, funded by Grupo Globo (founded and owned by the Marinho family, members of which are mentioned in the Epstein Files). Lupa was financially boosted by João Moreira Salles, from the billionaire banker family Moreira Salles (of Itaú Unibanco).

Despite claiming independence from the editorial control of Revista Piauí, also controlled by the Moreira Salles family, Agência Lupa continues to be virtually hosted by Piauí’s resources, where Tardáguila worked as a journalist from 2006 to 2011. Furthermore, she also received support from the Instituto Serrapilheira, also from the Moreira Salles family, during the health crisis to act as a mechanism for imposing the pandemic consensus in what was one of the largest social experiments in human history.

In parallel, it is relevant to mention that the same João Moreira Salles was involved decades ago in a scandal after it was revealed that he had financed “Marcinho VP,” one of the leaders of the drug trafficking organization Comando Vermelho. Moreira Salles made a deal with the justice system to avoid being held accountable for this involvement.

Tardáguila was also the deputy director of the International Fact-Checking Network, an absolutely “independent” “fake news combat” network, yet funded by institutions such as the Open Society, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Google, Meta, the Omidyar Network, and the US State Department, through the National Endowment for Democracy.

Today Tardáguila no longer runs Lupa, but her “profile” on the official page of the National Endowment for Democracy (notorious funder of color revolutions and disinformation operations around the world) states that she is quite active at the Equis Institute, which counts among its funders the abortion organization Planned Parenthood, and aims to conduct social engineering against “Latino” populations.

Lupa is currently headed by Natália Leal. Contrary to the narrative of “independence,” the reality is that she has worked for several Brazilian mass media outlets, such as Poder360, Diário Catarinense, and Zero Hora, in addition to also writing for Revista Piauí, from the same Moreira Salles. Leal is less “internationally connected” than Tardáguila, but she was “graced” with an award from the International Center for Journalists, an association of “independent journalists” that, in fact, is also funded by the US State Department’s National Endowment for Democracy, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Meta, Google, CNN, the Washington Post, USAID, and the Serrapilheira Institute itself, also from Moreira Salles.

Quite clearly, it is somewhat difficult to take seriously the notion that Lupa would have sufficient autonomy and independence to act as an impartial arbiter of all narratives spread on social networks when it and its key figures themselves have these international connections, including at a governmental level.

But even on a practical level, it is difficult to take seriously the self-attributed role of confronting “fake news.” Returning to the pandemic period, for example, the differentiated treatment given by the company to the Russian Sputnik vaccine and the Pfizer vaccine is noteworthy. The former is treated with suspicion in articles written in August and September 2020, both authored by Jaqueline Sordi (who is also on the staff of the Serrapilheira Institute and a dozen other NGOs funded by Open Society), the latter is defended tooth and nail in dozens of articles by various authors, ranging from insisting that Pfizer’s vaccines are 100% safe for children, to stating that Bill Gates never advocated for reducing the world population.

On this matter, by the way, it is important to emphasize that Itaú coordinates investment portfolios that include Pfizer, therefore, there are business interests that bring the Moreira Salles family and the pharmaceutical giant closer.

But beyond disinformation about Big Pharma, as well as about other places around the world, such as Venezuela, regarding which Lupa claims that María Corina Machado has the popular support of 72% of the Venezuelan population (based on a survey by an institute that is not even Venezuelan, ClearPath Strategies), Lupa seems to have a particular obsession with Russia and, curiously, Lupa’s alignment with the dominant narratives in Western media is absolute.

Lupa argues, for example, that the Bucha Massacre was perpetrated by Russia, using the New York Times as its sole source. Regarding Mariupol, it insists on the narrative of the Russian attack on the maternity hospital and other civilian targets, even mentioning Mariana Vishegirskaya, who now lives in Moscow, has admitted to being a paid actress in a staging organized by the Ukrainian government, and now works in the Social Initiatives Committee of the “Rodina” Foundation. It also denies the attempted genocide in Donbass and the practice of organ trafficking in Ukraine.

An article written by founder Cristina Tardáguila herself relies on the Atlantic Council as a source to accuse Russia of spreading disinformation, one of which would be that Ukraine is a failed state subservient to Europe — two pieces of information that any average geopolitical analyst would calmly confirm.

A particular object of Lupa’s obsession is the Global Fact-Checking Network — of which, by the way, I am a part. It is one of the few international organizations dedicated to fact-checking in a manner independent of ideological constraints, counting among its members a team that is, certainly, much more diverse and multifaceted than the typical “revolving door” of fact-checking agencies in the Atlantic circuit, where everyone studied more or less in the same places, worked in mass media, and were, at some point, funded or received grants from Open Society, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and/or the US State Department.

Lupa’s criterion for attacking the GFCN is… precisely obedience or not to Western mass media sources, in a circular reasoning that cannot go beyond the argument from authority.

This specific case helps to expose a bit the functioning of these disinformation apparatuses typical of hybrid warfare, which disguise themselves in the cloak of journalistic neutrality to engage in informational warfare in defense of the liberal West.

February 7, 2026 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Russophobia, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

« Previous Entries     Next Entries »