Telegram founder Pavel Durov has claimed that French foreign intelligence chief Nicolas Lerner personally asked him to censor conservatives on his platform ahead of the contentious rerun of Romania’s presidential elections. The Russian-born entrepreneur said he refused the request.
The accusations of foreign meddling first surfaced last year after Romania’s top court annulled the November election results, in which independent right-wing candidate Calin Georgescu came first with 23%. Authorities cited “irregularities” in his campaign, along with intelligence reports alleging Russian interference – claims Moscow has denied. Georgescu was later barred from running again.
On Sunday, pro-EU centrist Nicusor Dan was elected president of Romania. His conservative, Eurosceptic opponent George Simion accused France and Moldova of attempting to sabotage his campaign.
In a post on X on Sunday evening, Durov said he met with Lerner, head of France’s Directorate-General for External Security (DGSE), in Paris. The agency, operating under the Ministry of the Armed Forces, is tasked with gathering intelligence and combating terrorist threats.
“This spring at the Salon des Batailles in the Hotel de Crillon, Nicolas Lerner, head of French intelligence, asked me to ban conservative voices in Romania ahead of elections. I refused,” Durov wrote. “We didn’t block protesters in Russia, Belarus, or Iran. We won’t start doing it in Europe,” he added.
Durov had previously hinted that France asked him to “silence” Romanian conservatives. The French Foreign Ministry rejected the allegations of election meddling as “completely unfounded.”
“France categorically rejects these allegations and calls on everyone to exercise responsibility and respect for Romanian democracy,” the ministry stated, labeling the accusations “a diversionary maneuver” aimed at distracting the public from “the real threats of interference targeting Romania.”
Last year, French authorities charged Durov with facilitating the distribution of child sexual exploitation material and drug trafficking due to alleged moderation failures on Telegram. He was arrested at Paris-Le Bourget Airport in August before being released on €5 million ($5.46 million) bail. Durov, who has denied any wrongdoing, was eventually allowed to leave France in March.
The arrest of a group reportedly consisting of Iranian nationals, accused of planning an attack on the Israeli embassy in London, has coincided with an aggressive lobbying campaign to classify Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organization in the UK. While details of the case remain sparse, previous such allegations suggest that linking this plot to Tehran without substantiated evidence is politically motivated.
On 7 May, The Telegraph claimed that five individuals were detained in what the UK Home Secretary described as one of the “biggest counter-terrorism operations in recent years.” According to the report, four of those arrested were Iranian nationals, apprehended under Section 5 of the Terrorism Act 2006, allegedly for plotting an assault on the Israeli embassy in London.
A confused arrest, a convenient campaign
Yet, contradictions in the report raised significant public skepticism. While The Telegraph asserted that “the suspected terror cell was hours from unleashing the attack when the men were arrested,” it also noted that the suspects were detained in cities across England – three of them located around a four-hour drive from London, and another an hour away. The disparity sparked a wave of theories and doubts among the British public.
As these logistical inconsistencies drew scrutiny, right-wing media outlets in Britain seized the moment to stir anti-immigrant sentiments. On Talk TV, Kevin O’Sullivan descended into hysteria, warning, “We are going to have a Southport 2 unless we are careful,” invoking a racially charged incident that had ignited riots. The immigration status of the suspects became the focal point for many conservative commentators.
Simultaneously, the pro-Israel lobby began exploiting the incident to reinvigorate its campaign for the IRGC’s designation as a terrorist organization. On 28 April, Progressive Britain—a group aligned with the Blairite wing of the Labour Party – published an article titled “Why the UK Should Proscribe the IRGC.” Its author, Jemima Shelley, is not only a non-resident fellow at Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) but also a senior analyst at United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI).
UANI has played a recurring role in previous efforts to influence British policy against the Islamic Republic. Masquerading as a neutral non-profit, the group is chaired by Jeb Bush and features an advisory board packed with pro-Israel operatives.
Former Mossad Director Meir Dagan was a member until his death, and the US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth currently sits on its Veterans Advisory Council.
Nigel Farage, leader of the far-right Reform UK Party, opportunistically called on the Labour government to proscribe the IRGC, bizarrely claiming that “friends of mine who live in the Middle East are astonished we haven’t done it.”
Terror claims as political leverage
On 8 October 2024, MI5 Director General Ken McCallum delivered a speech at London’s Counter Terrorism Operations Centre, stating:
“Since the killing of Mahsa Amini in 2022 we’ve seen plot after plot here in the UK, at an unprecedented pace and scale. Since January 2022, with police partners, we have responded to twenty Iran-backed plots presenting potentially lethal threats to British citizens and UK residents.”
Although McCallum insisted that the intelligence agency does not politicize terrorism cases, his speech disproportionately emphasized threats from Russia, China, and Iran – the UK’s designated strategic adversaries. Commentators quickly seized on his remarks to bolster narratives of Iranian culpability.
Despite referencing 20 “Iran-backed” plots, British authorities have failed to provide concrete evidence linking Tehran to any of them. Officials argue that such ambiguity is strategic, offering “plausible deniability.” But in most cases, their accusations rest on tenuous associations, such as Tehran’s political animosity toward the individuals in question.
Consider the highly publicized case of Austrian national Magomed Husejn Dovtaev, who was convicted in February 2023 after recording video footage of the offices of Iran International, a Saudi-funded Persian-language news outlet based in London.
Dovtaev claimed he had been defrauded of €20,000 and was seeking those responsible at the location. Despite denying any connection to Iran, he was convicted of collecting information likely to be useful for terrorism.
On 4 March, Britain’s Security Minister Dan Jarvis repeated the claim of 20 terror plots and that “the Iranian regime is targeting dissidents.” He also told parliament that “The Iranian Intelligence Services, which include the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the IRGC, and the Ministry of Intelligence and Security, or MOIS, direct this damaging activity.”
However, Jarvis clarifies that “rather than working directly on UK shores, they use criminal proxies to do their bidding. This helps to obfuscate their involvement, while they sit safely ensconced in Tehran.”
While the existence of Iranian intelligence operations abroad cannot be ruled out, the recurring claims tying Tehran to every suspicious activity lack transparency and verification.
A precedent of manipulation
The current frenzy echoes the Israeli embassy bombing in London in 1994. Initially blamed on “pro-Iranian extremists” allegedly tied to Lebanon’s Hezbollah, the attack resulted in the arrest of five Palestinians. Two of them, Jawad Botmeh and Samar Alami, were convicted of conspiracy despite no direct evidence or allegation that they planted the bomb.
At the time, human rights group Amnesty International issued a statement raising concerns that neither Botmeh nor Alami had been granted “their right to a fair trial because they have been denied full disclosure – both during and after the trial – of all information.”
“There was no direct evidence connecting either of them to the attacks and both had alibis. The appeal was based on the grounds that the convictions were unsafe, including due to the failure of the prosecution to disclose evidence to the defence, and on the length of the sentences.”
When the late veteran journalist and long-time West Asia correspondent Robert Fisk wrote on the case for the Independent in 1998, he described it as follows:
“The trial was, to put it mildly, a very puzzling affair. Even before it began, the case developed unusually. First of all, the police charged Nadia Zekra, a very middle-class Palestinian lady, with planting the bomb outside the embassy. Explosive traces had supposedly been found on a table in her home. Then, once the trial began, all charges against Zekra were dropped. Another Palestinian, Mahmoud Abu-Wardeh, was charged, but the jury acquitted him on all charges. And in the pre-trial period, the judge allowed both Alami and Botmeh to go free on bail.”
Fisk noted that Alami and Botmeh had expressed their belief that a shady figure known as Reda Moghrabi was an Israeli agent and had set them up. Yet, following the bombing, Moghrabi disappeared. The claim of responsibility for the attack was also strange, anonymously submitted by the “Jaffa Team” of the “Palestinian resistance,” a group that never existed prior to, nor since, the attack.
On top of this, the pair were released early. Botmeh was set free in August of 2008, and Alami was released in April 2009 and deported to Lebanon. Their early release, combined with the fact that the two were allowed to walk the streets of London on bail until their conviction, raised even more questions about the nature of the bombing incident.
Even more damning were later revelations by former MI5 agents. David Shayler disclosed that British intelligence “hid” documents related to the bombing. Annie Machon, another ex-MI5 officer, revealed that an internal assessment concluded that Mossad itself had staged the explosion to justify demands for increased security at its embassy. The sophisticated device caused no fatalities, and the real perpetrators were never apprehended.
Keeping all of this information in mind, there is currently not enough evidence to draw any conclusions regarding the arrests of Iranian nationals and the alleged plot to attack the Israeli embassy. However, British media outlets and several members of parliament were quick to seize on the incident, using it to push the agenda of designating the IRGC as a terrorist organization.
Politics trumps evidence
With all this context in mind, the latest arrests of Iranian nationals – and the unsubstantiated claim of a planned embassy attack – must be scrutinized. Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has categorically denied involvement, asserting that “Iran stands ready to engage to shed light on what has truly transpired, and we reiterate that UK authorities should afford our citizens due process.”
Meanwhile, The Guardian has spun the case to highlight fears among Iranian dissidents in the UK, presenting the arrests as validation of threats from Tehran.
By rushing to implicate the IRGC, British media and officials are once again politicizing an unverified security incident. This tactic mirrors accusations they often level at Iran: weaponizing arrests for political ends. Regardless of who was truly behind the supposed plot, its timing conveniently serves those advocating for the IRGC’s proscription.
What is clear is that claims of Iranian-linked terrorism continue to surface whenever Tel Aviv or its allies seek to ramp up pressure on the Islamic Republic.
“For posterity’s sake.” Those words from President Joe Biden sum up the crushing impact of the leaked audiotapes from the interview between then-President Joe Biden and Special Counsel Robert Hur. Not only did they remove any serious doubt over Biden committing the federal crimes charged against President Donald Trump, but they also constituted what is akin to a political racketeering indictment against much of the Washington establishment.
The interview from Oct. 8-9, 2023, has long been sought by Congress, but was kept under wraps by the government even as Biden campaigned for a second term.
Many of us balked at Hur’s conclusion that no charges were appropriate despite the fact that the President removed classified material for decades, stored it in grossly negligent ways, and moved it around to unsecure locations, including his garage in Delaware.
Given President Donald Trump’s indictment for the same offenses, it was hard to imagine how the Special Counsel could not recommend the same criminal charges (presumably after he left office).
Instead, Hur declared it would have been hard to get a jury to convict Biden because he was “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
It appears that Trump, on the other hand, was presumptively not sympathetic or well-meaning and possessed a good memory for prosecution.
The contrast was glaring and only reinforced the view of many citizens that there are two tracks for justice in Washington.
Soon after the report’s release, President Biden gave an irate press conference in which he lied about the findings of his culpability and lashed out at any suggestion that he had gapped or stumbled in the interview.
For example, when reporters raised how Biden forgot when his son Beau died, Biden angrily responded, “How in the hell dare he raise that?” Frankly, when I was asked the question I thought to myself it wasn’t any of their damn business.
However, it was not Hur but Biden himself who raised the death of his son, and he forgot a wide array of dates, including when he served in office.
The interview shows that in 2023 it was clear that Biden was mentally diminished despite claims from many allies and former aides that there was a sudden loss of capacity just before the disastrous debate in 2024. It is now undeniable that the White House staff actively hid the president’s incompetence from the American public. That includes the White House press secretary Jen Psaki (who left her post in May 2022) and Karine Jean-Pierre who insisted that Biden was sharp and “running circles” around the staff.
Of course, the media is now covering the story after the public saw the truth in the debate. Figures like CNN’s Jake Tapper have even written books that belatedly pursue the question despite previously insisting that there was no evidence of a diminishment in Biden’s mental state.
Tapper repeatedly dismissed the claim and even mocked Lara Trump for raising it. In one interview, he pushed a White House talking point that such suggestions were mocking Biden for a childhood stutter:
“It’s so amazing to me- a ‘cognitive decline.’ I think you were mocking his stutter. Yeah. I think you were mocking his stutter and I think you have absolutely no standing to diagnose somebody’s cognitive decline. I would think somebody in the Trump family would be more sensitive to people who do not have medical licenses diagnosing politicians from afar.”
When Lara Trump insisted that this was clearly evidence of a “very concerning” cognitive decline, Tapper dismissed her statement by saying “Thank you, Lara. I’m sure it’s from a place of concern. We all believe that.”
Keep in mind that others beyond Lara Trump were raising this issue and there were tapes showing physical and mental diminishment. The media simply refused to seriously pursue the story until the cover-up no longer mattered after the debate.
Over on MSNBC, Joe Scarborough was equally apoplectic at those raising the issue and stated
start your tape right now because I’m about to tell you the truth. And F— you if you can’t handle the truth. This version of Biden intellectually, analytically, is the best Biden ever. Not a close second. And I have known him for years… If it weren’t the truth I wouldn’t say it
This media effort continued all the way up to the debate itself. On CNN, Oliver Darcy wrote, “Right-wing media figures are desperately pushing conspiracy theories about Biden ahead of the debate.”
Once the public found out, the media was ready to tell the story when there was no longer any advance or ability to deny it. Articles began to appear with the same realization of “Oh you meant THAT mental decline. Well sure.”
It was the same belated acknowledgment that came, after the election, with Hunter Biden’s laptop. The media just moved on with a shrug and a collective “our bad” concession.
As for the President himself, the one moment of clarity in the interview may have been his most incriminating line. When asked why he removed classified material on Afghanistan, Biden admitted “I guess I wanted to hang on to it for posterity’s sake.”
That is precisely what critics on CNN and MSNBC accused Trump of doing: removing material as types of keepsakes or trophies.
One president was indicted for that and one was sent along his way to a second term in office.
The real indictment that comes out of these tapes is a type of political racketeering enterprise by the Washington establishment. It took a total team effort from Democratic politicians to the White House staff to the media to hide the fact that the President of the United States was mentally diminished. If there were a political RICO crime, half of Washington would be frog-marched to the nearest federal courthouse.
Of course, none of this complicity in the cover-up is an actual crime. It is part of the Washington racket.
After all, this is Washington, where such duplicity results not in plea deals but book deals.
Newly released records show Canada’s top doctor and federal managers signed confidentiality pledges during the COVID crisis to avoid disclosures that could damage government credibility.
Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer, Dr. Theresa Tam, and nearly 30 senior federal health officials signed a confidential oath during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, pledging not to release information that could “embarrass” the Trudeau cabinet, according to internal records obtained through Access to Information requests.
The oath, revealed by Blacklock’s Reporter, was part of a broader secrecy policy within the Public Health Agency and other government departments including Health, Industry, Foreign Affairs, and National Defence. Internal communications from 2020 show that vaccine supply manager Alan Thom voiced concern about the widespread requirement for federal managers to sign non-disclosure agreements, noting, “at a certain point the Department of Public Works determined individual non-disclosure agreements were no longer needed… as we are all covered through our responsibilities as public servants.”
The confidentiality agreement emphasized that any “unauthorized disclosure of confidential information… may result in embarrassment, criticism or claims against Canada and may jeopardize Canada’s supplier relations and procurement processes.” Managers acknowledged their ongoing obligations under the Values And Ethics Code For The Public Sector, according to the documents.
The oaths were signed shortly after the Trudeau administration secured billions in COVID-19 vaccine contracts with companies including Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, Novavax, Johnson & Johnson, Medicago, and Sanofi. Dr. Tam, a longtime proponent of mass vaccination, oversaw public messaging during the rollout.
The first mRNA vaccine to be approved in Canada was Pfizer’s BioNTech shot, authorized on December 9, 2020, followed closely by Moderna’s vaccine. The approvals came after the Trudeau government granted vaccine manufacturers legal immunity from liability for adverse effects. Parliamentarians requesting to review those contracts were denied access.
In response to growing reports of vaccine-related injuries, Canada launched its Vaccine Injury Support Program (VISP) in late 2020. As reported by LifeSiteNews, the program was created after legal protections were granted to pharmaceutical companies. A memo from Canada’s Department of Health now warns that VISP payouts are set to exceed the program’s original $75 million budget, prompting the federal government to allocate an additional $36 million.
Despite dwindling public demand, the government continues to purchase new doses, even as its own statistics show widespread rejection of booster injections by Canadians. Compounding concerns, an inhalable mRNA vaccine—developed using fetal cell lines and funded by Ottawa—has now entered Phase 2 clinical trials.
Data from Statistics Canada also indicates that post-vaccine rollout, deaths attributed to COVID-19 and “unspecified causes” significantly increased, raising further questions about the long-term safety and effectiveness of the vaccine campaign.
With growing scrutiny over vaccine safety and government transparency, the revelation that Canada’s top public health officials signed agreements to avoid reputational harm to federal leadership adds another layer of controversy to the country’s pandemic response.
Well, this is awkward. How many times has Ursula von der Leyen, European Commission president and unelected de facto ruler of the EU, delivered sermons about transparency like she’s the high priestess of some kind of parallel Brussels Vatican? And now the EU’s own top court has called her out in a ruling for neglecting to practice what she preaches.
Back in 2023, during her State of the European Union address, doing her finest impression of someone elected by the actual public, von der Leyen declared the need to douse any and all sketchiness in sunlight in order to “not allow any autocracy’s Trojan horses to attack our democracies from within.”
“Transparency should characterize the work of all the members of the Commission and of their cabinets,” she said as far back as 2019. “I have asked commissioners…to engage more and be more transparent,” she proclaimed in a speech to EU parliamentarians last year. Transparency and accountability also figured prominently in her bid for reappointment by the EU’s ruling elites last year.
Great news! She can now finally embark on this noble mission, and begin her journey with little more than a simple glance in the mirror. Because the European Court of Justice – the body that rules on whether EU institutions have actually crossed into illegality, not just occupying their usual territory of elite-grade idiocy – has just decided that Queen Ursula’s Commission can’t just wave away a pile of her own Covid-era text messages by going, “Whoops! They disappeared. Oh well, what do you do?” Which is basically what the Commission’s response was to the New York Times when it asked to see those messages.
And how did the Times know that these texts even existed? Because Ursula literally told them, bragging in an interview about how she scored so many vaxxes because she’s super tight with Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla. All this was for a piece spotlighting her Covid efforts, published in April 2021: “How Europe sealed a Pfizer vaccine deal with texts and calls.”
The article featured the same kind of glamour photography reminiscent of the good ol’ days when Ursula was Germany’s defense minister from 2013 to 2019, under former Chancellor Angela Merkel, and doing photo shoots in front of military hardware while accusations swirled that she had bungled the budget with shady defense contracts, even as the Bundeswehr was stuck using brooms for guns during a NATO exercise, as the Atlantic Council reported in 2015.
“For a month, Ms von der Leyen had been exchanging texts and calls with Bourla, the chief executive of Pfizer… Pfizer might have more doses it could offer the bloc – many more,” the NYT piece reads, referring to the “personal diplomacy” that “played a big role in a deal” for 1.8 billion Pfizer anti-Covid doses.
So the Times hears about these text messages and was like, “Oh, cool. Let’s see!”
Suddenly Queen Ursula became a lot less chatty. So the Times took the matter to the EU’s own top court to get the disclosure. And now this court has said, in legal terms, that Ursula can’t just ghost the Times – and the public by extension – without giving a real reason. That there has to be a “plausible explanation to justify the non possession” of the texts. And also, the court says that “the Commission has failed to explain in a plausible manner” why it thought that these messages were so trivial that they could be vaporized like they were just her Eurovision contest text voting and not a matter of public record which, by definition, should be maintained.
Out of these little chats came €71 billion in Covid jab contracts with Big Pharma’s Pfizer and AstraZeneca – 11 of them to be precise, totaling 4.6 billion doses, paid for with cash taken straight from EU taxpayers. Enough for ten doses for every EU citizen.
Turns out that freewheeling it may have resulted in some consequences that could have been avoided had a diverse group of minds been engaged on the issue, as protocol normally dictates, and not just Ursula’s. It’s not like there hasn’t been a costly fallout from all this. A big chunk of the EU, including Germany, Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, Lithuania, Estonia, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic, is shouting about surplus doses for which they’re on the hook, urging Brussels to renegotiate the contractual terms with Big Pharma. Germany alone has reportedly trashed 200 million of them. Tricky to negotiate, though, when no one’s even sure what the terms were, as the second-highest European court pointed out last year. “The Commission did not give the public sufficiently wide access to the purchase agreements for COVID-19 vaccines… The Commission did not demonstrate that wider access to those clauses would actually undermine the commercial interests of those undertakings,” it ruled.
The details of these contracts – how they were made, what they say, and how anyone’s supposed to back out of them if citizens politely decline to max out their ten-jab punch card – remain a mystery.
Back in 2024, Brussels more or less shrugged and suggested that it could really only be as transparent as the courts forced it to be. So hey, what can you do? “In general, the Commission grants the widest possible public access to documents, in line with the principles of openness and transparency,” the EU said, underscoring that the lower court ruling “confirmed that the Commission was entitled to provide only partial access.”
Well, good news, guys! Your very own top court just ruled that you can now be a lot more transparent! So go crazy. Be the change that you keep saying you want to be in the world. Nothing is holding you back now. If transparency were a vaccine, this court just gave Ursula a booster. So we’ll see if it takes. I won’t hold my breath.
MOSCOW – Russia remains open to contacts with the United States on the military biological program in Ukraine and hopes to remove concerns on this account, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Thursday.
“We have repeatedly noted and repeat again that we remain open to bilateral contacts with the American side on this topic [military biological program in Ukraine] in order to eliminate relevant irritants. We expect Washington to take the necessary steps to address Russia’s concerns about US military biological activity,” Zakharova told a briefing.
Moscow considers US efforts to strengthen control over biological activities as a step in the right direction, Zakharova said, adding that the measures announced by Washington are not enough to address Russia’s concerns about the US military biological activities abroad.
The German domestic spy service, the Office of the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), has released a 1,100-page report on the Alternative for Germany (AfD), which it used to label the party a “confirmed” right-wing extremist party. The report is huge and reads like it was written by Antifa, but that was to be expected. However, one interesting point is that it contains only public statements, including quotes made by AfD politicians and a lot of memes.
Why is that?
We already know that the BfV is secretly surveilling AfD members in certain German states, mostly in the east, where the party is “confirmed right-wing extremist” already. This designation allows for the BfV in those states to partake in extraordinary surveillance powers over AfD members, including reading their chats and emails. Presumably, they can also track their browsing history, and perhaps they are even listening in on their conversations at home.
What this means is that the BfV has plenty of statements, memes and content to use based on private statements, but it is purposefully choosing not to use them. After all, a certain number of those AfD members, in private moments, probably also express opinions, post memes, or share thoughts that the BfV would love to include in a secret report on the party, which many hope will eventually justify an outright ban.
Again, why is the BfV not using these private statements?
There are multiple reasons. For one, a big part of the apparatus of spy agencies is to obtain information, but not release it to the public. The public may not be able to stomach such personal and private information and the means that were used to obtain it. Since the Edward Snowden revelations, and even before then, we have become acutely aware that we have accepted devices into our lives and homes that can be used to spy on us on a scale never seen before in history. However, even now — even after all this information has been revealed — I believe nearly all of us still cannot quite grasp what this means — nor do we want to.
Yes, we know that AfD members are being spied on across Germany. Their emails are read, their phone calls are recorded. AI is being used to sort out keywords of interest to the security services. However, nobody really knows how this information is being processed and what it is being used for, or even who is reading it. The spies who control this information have extraordinary power. As a significant portion of them are now far left, at least in Germany, they believe they are acting as a bulwark against the rise of Nazism, and the ends justify the means when it comes to the AfD. There are other psychological motives at work, of course, as spy agencies are on the whole very good at keeping their secrets, not even necessarily because of internal controls, but because the spies are dedicated to their mission. There is, also, the sense of power that comes with being the watcher, and for many spies, this is a powerful intoxicant. They know, while you are in the dark.
In practice, these spies know which AfD members are having affairs, their personal struggles, their health issues, their financial situation, and even their personal browsing history. In other words, they know their targets better in many cases than even their close friends and family. The spies of the world, not just in Germany, are now in many ways gods and mind readers, seeing through the walls people build up around themselves and accessing their darkest fears and secrets — all due to rapid advances in technology and the rise of smartphones.
Earlier this month, commentator Eva Vlaardingerbroek, the famed Dutch activist reported that she was alerted that her phone was being breached with Pegasus-like spyware, mainly produced in Israel, which can unlock essentially every aspect of her personal life, including chats, location data, photos, contacts, and so on. With this software, they can even record her in real time, including personal conversations in her home, as well as turn on her camera to record her in her most personal moments.
After having been alerted that the deep state is spying on me through mercenary spyware, I've been feeling like there is someone standing in the room with me at all times.
Now, I'm not naive: exposing the wicked ways of the establishment is quite literally at the core of my… pic.twitter.com/16dXkeJMAq
This software, and software like it, has been used on thousands of people, including journalists, politicians, and activists, sometimes with deadly results. It is not just the right, but far-left activists have also been targeted, including human rights activists. It is also unclear how long Vlaardingerbroek may have been targeted in such a manner. Previous versions of Apple iOS may have not been able to detect this software on her phone. In short, much of her personal life may already be in a database somewhere waiting to be used by intelligence.
Vlaardingerbroek is not in the AfD or even German, but she has backed the party, and she and people like her are most certainly the target of intelligence operatives in countries across Europe.
The point is that this software and the means for surveilling people are very unsettling. In a privacy-minded country like Germany, revealing the scale of surveillance being used against the AfD may be a scandal within itself, and could taint the entire report, which at the end of the day, should be used to justify a ban of the AfD.
There may have been voices in the BfV who were calling to use secretly recorded data in the report as well, but the agency also knew this report would eventually be leaked and made public. The agency does not appear to want to divulge who they are surveilling, what information they have about them, and how they obtained this information.
Another important consideration is also to be taken into account. The BfV decided it did not need to include this secret information in the report because it is likely confident that it can get what it wants using public statements alone. It can still keep the scale of its surveillance secret and get the ban it desires — at least that is the gamble the agency is making.
Surveillance is everywhere, it is being practiced by the left, the right, and many foreign governments are also active in the West, collecting data on targets. So, this is not a uniquely German issue by any means. However, if the establishment in Germany becomes truly desperate, there is probably a secret report waiting that includes far more information and personal details than many Germans want to believe is possible.
A federal jury in California has ordered Israeli surveillance firm NSO Group to pay Meta $167 million in punitive damages, marking the first time a court has imposed financial liability on a spyware vendor for abuses linked to its software.
The ruling sends a strong signal that private firms profiting from invasive surveillance technology will not be shielded by their association with government clients. After a single day of deliberation, jurors found that NSO had acted with “malice, oppression or fraud” in deploying its Pegasus spyware against 1,400 WhatsApp users.
Pegasus, which grants near-total access to a target’s device, including microphones, cameras and encrypted messages, was used not against criminals, but journalists, human rights defenders and political dissidents. Meta, which owns WhatsApp, described the hacking as “despicable” and a clear violation of privacy rights.
NSO has long claimed that its spyware is sold only to vetted state clients for national security purposes. However, investigations have shown Pegasus being deployed to facilitate transnational repression by authoritarian regimes.
The previous US administration blacklisted NSO over its role in such abuses, making it the first company added to the US entity list for enabling state surveillance. The jury’s decision is expected to add pressure on Washington to further regulate the commercial spyware sector.
While the financial penalty may prove difficult to collect, the judgement itself sets a precedent: spyware firms can be held directly accountable in US courts, regardless of the state affiliations of their customers.
In doing so, the case reframes digital privacy not merely as a user expectation, but as a civil right and signals that the impunity long enjoyed by private surveillance actors is coming to an end.
The General Court of the European Union on Wednesday annulled the European Commission’s refusal to grant a New York Times journalist access to text messages exchanged between Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla.
According to a communication published on Wednesday, the judgment concluded that the Commission failed to provide a credible explanation for its claim that it no longer holds the requested messages, which were allegedly sent during Covid-19 vaccine procurement negotiations.
The ruling comes in response to a 2022 request by Matina Stevi, a Brussels-based journalist with The New York Times, who sought access to all text messages exchanged between von der Leyen and Bourla between Jan. 1, 2021, and May 11, 2022. The Commission denied the request, stating that it possessed no such documents. Stevi and The New York Times challenged that decision before the EU’s General Court.
On May 11, 2022, Stevi submitted a formal request to the European Commission seeking access to the text messages. The request was registered by the Commission the following day, on May 12. When the Commission failed to respond within the time frame set by EU transparency rules, Stevi’s legal representative filed an initial confirmatory application on June 28, 2022, reiterating the request for access.
On July 20, 2022, the Commission responded to the initial application, stating that it did not possess any documents corresponding to the request. In response, Stevi’s representative submitted a second confirmatory application on Aug. 9, 2022, which was formally registered the same day. Later that month, on Aug. 31, the Commission notified Stevi that the deadline for its response would be extended by 15 working days, setting a new target date of Sept. 21.
On Sept. 21, the Commission informed Stevi that the assessment of her application had been completed but that the draft decision still required approval from its Legal Service. Nearly two months later, on Nov. 16, 2022, the Commission issued its final decision, reiterating that it did not hold any of the requested text messages and therefore could not grant access.
The Court found that the Commission’s justification was insufficient and that Stevi and The New York Times had provided “relevant and consistent evidence” showing that such messages had existed. The Commission, it said, failed to meet its obligations under the Access to Documents Regulation and the principle of good administration as enshrined in the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights.
The judgment scrutinized the Commission’s procedural conduct, noting that it relied on assumptions and imprecise information throughout the request process. It also emphasized that public institutions must document and retain information related to their activities in a “non-arbitrary and predictable manner.”
In its decision, the Court stated that “despite those imprecisions, [the Commission] maintains that it does not possess the requested documents, with the result that it is for the applicants to produce relevant and consistent evidence capable of rebutting the presumption of non-possession of those documents.”
That presumption was indeed rebutted, the Court held, by a New York Times article and transcripts of interviews conducted by Stevi with both von der Leyen and Bourla in April 2021. The article reported that for a month during vaccine talks, von der Leyen and Bourla “had been exchanging texts and telephone calls.” In the interview transcript, Bourla said that “[the Commission President and I] exchanged text messages, if there was something that we needed to discuss,” and that von der Leyen had “sent me her phone [number].” These statements provided sufficient grounds for the Court to determine that the text messages likely existed at some point.
The Commission, by contrast, was found to have offered no credible detail about the searches it had conducted for the messages or about their fate. “It remains impossible to know with certainty,” the Court wrote, “whether the requested text messages still exist or whether they have been deleted and, if so, whether such a deletion took place deliberately or automatically.” The Commission also failed to clarify whether von der Leyen’s mobile phone had been replaced, and if so, what happened to the previous device and its data.
“The Commission did not provide in the contested decision any plausible explanation as to why it had not been able to find the requested documents,” the Court held.
Furthermore, the Court rejected the Commission’s argument that the messages did not constitute official documents because they were allegedly short-lived or lacked policy significance. Even if the messages were not registered in its document system, the Commission was still obligated to retain and account for them under EU transparency rules. “Institutions cannot deprive of all substance the right of access to documents which they hold by failing to register the documentation relating to their activities,” the Court held.
The Commission’s handling of the request, the Court concluded, “breached the principle of good administration laid down in Article 41 of the Charter.”
As a result, it annulled the Commission’s decision and ordered the institution to pay the applicants’ legal costs.
The judgment has led to calls for greater transparency within EU institutions and among the bloc’s leaders.
Rob Roos, a former Dutch MEP who was vice-president of the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group in the European Parliament during the now-dubbed “Pfizergate scandal,” wrote how his legal challenge against the Commission was dismissed at the time.
“My case as an MEP was ruled inadmissible, while a foreign newspaper was accepted. Transparency isn’t optional. Democracy demands it. Back to court,” he wrote on X.
Hungarian MEP András László slammed the corruption scandals at the highest level in Brussels, which he claimed keep piling up. “Europeans want change in Brussels. We deserve better leadership! Qatargate, Pfizergate, Hololei, Reynders and money laundering, Green Deal and Timmermans, fake NGOs… The interests of Europeans are being sold out. Enough is enough!”
Several other European lawmakers demanded that the text messages now finally be released to see what agreements were reached over Covid-19 vaccines between von der Leyen and Bourla.
“She should have made her text messages in the Pfizergate affair public,” said Dutch MEP Marieke Ehlers. “This proves the need for the parliamentary commission of inquiry into transparency proposed by the Patriots for Europe [parliamentary group].”
Anna Bryłka, Polish MEP for the right-wing Confederation, and Spanish MEP Hermann Tertsch of Vox, went further, calling on von der Leyen to resign following the judgment.
The European Commission is yet to formally respond to the judgment.
Last year the UK Met Office was shown to be inventing long-term temperature data at 103 non-existent weather stations. It was claimed in a later risible ‘fact check’ that the data were estimated from nearby well-correlated neighbouring stations. Citizen super sleuth Ray Sanders issued a number of Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to learn the identity of these correlating sites but has been told that the information is not held by the Met Office. So the invented figures for the non-existent sites are supposedly provided by stations that the Met Office claims it cannot identify and are presumably not recorded in its copious computer storage and archive.
Mr Sanders is understandably unimpressed with the explanation that this vital identifying information is not retained, writing: “Is the general public just supposed to ‘believe’ the Met Office without any workings out evident. To me, and every single scientist who has ever lived, it is imperative to show the data used – ANYTHING LESS IS NOT VALID. No Verifiable Data Source = No Credibility = no better than Fiction.”
Until recently, the Met Office showed weather averages including temperature for over 300 stations stretching back at least 30 years. The data identified individual stations and single location coordinates, but when 103 were found not to exist the Met Office hastily rewrote the title of the database to suggest that the figures arose from a wider local area.
Following the change, Sanders sought FOI guidance about Scole, a temperature weather station in Norfolk that operated for only nine years between 1971 to 1980. Type in Scole on the new ‘location’ database and it is identified as one of five sites that are the “nearest climate stations to Scole”. Sixty years of average data are given including 10 years before Scole was actually established. This itself is odd since the Met Office justifies ‘estimating’ data for closed stations to preserve long usability of the data. It would appear a stretch to use this explanation to justify preserving 1960s data from a station that did not open until 1971. Sanders made a simple request and asked the Met Office to reveal the names of the weather stations used in compiling the climate average data for Scole from 1990 to 2020. If the Met Office was unable to supply the full list, he made it as easy as possible and asked for the name of the last station supplying data.
The astonishing claim that the Met Office was unable to help because the information was not held was followed by an explanation that “the specific stations used in regressive analysis each month are not an output from the process”. The unimpressed Sanders observes that the Met Office archives billions of numbers and data items but does not seem to keep a record of its workings out. “So they have no proof whatsoever of how their climate averages were compiled,” he observes.
Sanders also sought similar details about another ‘zombie’ site, namely, Manby in Lincolnshire. This actually closed for temperature readings in 1974 but again 60-year averages are currently available. Sanders was intrigued by this site since the CEDA archive that collects Met Office data showed it was still open, a claim also made in an earlier FOI disclosure by the state meteorologist. Again Manby is identified as the nearest climate station when its name is searched on the climate averages site. But the Met Office’s Weather Observations Website shows it is closed and Sanders notes the Met Office has since confirmed that to him. It has been 50 years since an actual temperature reading was taken at Manby but as with Scole the Met Office under a FOI request is unable to name any of the ‘well-correlated’ sites supposed providing data.
It is difficult to understand why the Met Office cannot answer a simple question seeking guidance on where temperature readings were taken. Presumably they would be obtained from the five nearest ‘stations’ identified when a location is entered into the climate averages database. But as the Daily Sceptic has reported in the past, there might be problems with this approach. Cawood in the West Riding of Yorkshire is a pristine class 1 site designated by the World Meteorological Organisation as providing an uncorrupted air temperature reading over a large surrounding area (nearly 80% of Met Office sites are in junk classes 4 and 5 with ‘uncertainties’ of 2C and 5C respectively). Cawood has good temperature recordings going back to 1959. But no rolling 30-year average for Cawood is provided. Instead, the Met Office flags data from five other sites, four of which don’t exist, with the fifth located 27 miles away at a 163 metres higher elevation. Even worse, the location of Norwich brings up five nearby stations, including Scole, none of which exist.
As the Daily Sceptic has noted in the past, the Met Office has only itself to blame for the often trenchant criticism it receives on social media about its temperature collecting operations. It does a fine job of forecasting weather, but activist elements in its operation have weaponised inaccurate temperature recordings to promote the politicised Net Zero fantasy.
Recently, the chief scientist at the Met Office, Professor Stephen Belcher, called for Net Zero “to stabilise the climate” claiming he saw “more extreme weather” in the Met Office’s observations. In the UK, he suggested that between 2014-2023 the number of days recording 28C had doubled, while those over 30C had tripled compared to 1961-1990. A more extreme weather trend is not something that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has seen, while observations about more recent hot days might ring truer if they were not based on the increasingly urban heat-ravaged Met Office databases.
And Ray Sanders’s take? “We are regularly told in the mainstream media, particularly the BBC, that we are entering an existential ‘climate emergency’, so how is it nobody wants to discuss the obviously fictional data that is being manipulated to support this ‘argument’?”
It was about a month into lockdowns, April 2020, and my phone rang with an unusual number. I picked up and the caller identified himself as Rajeev Venkayya, a name I knew from my writings on the 2005 pandemic scare. Now the head of a vaccine company, he once served as Special Assistant to the President for Biodefense, and claimed to be the inventor of pandemic planning.
Venkayya was a primary author of “A National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza” as issued by the George W. Bush administration in 2005. It was the first document that mapped out a nascent version of lockdowns, designed for global deployment. “A flu pandemic would have global consequences,” said Bush, “so no nation can afford to ignore this threat, and every nation has responsibilities to detect and stop its spread.”
It was always a strange document because it stood in constant contradiction to public health orthodoxies dating back decades and even a century. With it, there were two alternative paths in place in the event of a new virus: the normal path that everyone is taught in medical school (therapeutics for the sick, caution with social disturbances, calm and reason, quarantines only in extreme cases) and a biosecurity path that invoked totalitarian measures.
Those two paths existed side-by-side for a decade and a half before the lockdowns.
Now I found myself speaking with the guy who claims credit for having mapped out the biosecurity approach, which contradicted all public health wisdom and experience. His plan was finally being implemented. Not too many voices dissented, partially due to fear but also due to censorship, which was already very tight. He told me to stop objecting to the lockdowns because they have everything under control.
I asked a basic question. Let’s say we all hunker down, hide under the sofa, eschew physical meetings with family and friends, stop all gatherings of all kinds, and keep businesses and schools closed. What, I asked, happens to the virus itself? Does it jump in a hole in the ground or head to Mars for fear of another press conference by Andrew Cuomo or Anthony Fauci?
After some fallacy-filled banter about the R-naught, I could tell he was getting exasperated with me, and finally, with some hesitation, he told me the plan. There would be a vaccine. I balked and said that no vaccine can sterilize against a fast-mutating respiratory pathogen with a zoonotic reservoir. Even if such a thing did appear, it would take 10 years of trials and testing before it was safe to release to the general population. Are we going to stay locked down for a decade?
“It will come much faster,” he said. “You watch. You will be surprised.”
Hanging up, I recall dismissing him as a crank, a has-been with nothing better to do than call up poor writers and bug them.
I had entirely misread the meaning, simply because I was not prepared to understand the sheer depth and vastness of the operation now in play. All that was taking place struck me as obviously destructive and fundamentally flawed but rooted in a kind of intellectual error: a loss of understanding of virology basics.
Around the same time, the New York Times posted without fanfare a new document called PanCAP-A: Pandemic Crisis Action Plan – Adapted. It was Venkayya’s plan, only intensified, as released on March 13, 2020, three days before President Trump’s press conference announcing the lockdowns. I read through it, reposted it, but had no idea what it meant. I hoped someone could come along to explain it, interpret it, and tease out its implications, all in the interest of getting to the bottom of the who, what, and why of this fundamental attack on civilization itself.
That person did come along. She is Debbie Lerman, intrepid author of this wonderful book that so beautifully presents the best thoughts on all the questions that had eluded me. She took the document apart and discovered a fundamental truth therein. The rule-making authority for the pandemic response was not vested in public-health agencies but the National Security Council.
This was stated as plain as day in the document; I had somehow missed that. This was not public health. It was national security. The antidote under development with the label vaccine was really a military countermeasure. In other words, this was Venkayya’s plan times ten, and the idea was precisely to override all tradition and public health concerns and replace them with national security measures.
Realizing this fundamentally changes the structure of the story of the last five years. This is not a story of a world that mysteriously forgot about natural immunity and made some intellectual error in thinking that governments could shut down economies and turn them back on again, scaring a pathogen back to where it came from. What we experienced in a very real sense was quasi-martial law, a deep-state coup not only on a national but on an international level.
These are terrifying thoughts and hardly anyone is prepared to discuss them, which is why Lerman’s book is so crucial. In terms of public debate about what happened to us, we are barely at the beginning. There is now a willingness to admit that the lockdowns did more overall harm than good. Even the legacy media has started venturing out to grant permission for such thoughts. But the role of the pharmaceuticals in driving the policy and the role of the national-security state in backing this grand industrial project is still taboo.
In 21st-century journalism and advocacy designed to influence the public mind, the overwhelming concern of all writers and institutions is professional survival. That means fitting into an approved ethos or paradigm regardless of the facts. This is why Lerman’s thesis is not debated; it is hardly spoken of at all in polite society. That said, my work at Brownstone Institute has put me in close contact with many thinkers in high places. This much I can say: what Lerman has written in this book is not disputed but admitted in private.
Strange isn’t it? We saw during the Covid years how professional aspiration incentivized silence even in the face of egregious violations of human rights, including mandatory school closures that robbed children of education, followed by face-covering requirements and forced injections for the whole population. The near-silence was deafening even if anyone with a brain and a conscience knew that all of this was wrong. Not even the excuse that “We didn’t know” works anymore because we did know.
This same dynamic of social and cultural control is fully in operation now that we are through that stage and onto another one, which is precisely why Lerman’s findings have not yet made their way to polite society, to say nothing of mainstream media. Will we get there? Maybe. This book can help; at least it is now available for everyone brave enough to confront the facts. You will find herein the most well-documented and coherent presentation of answers to the core questions (what, how, why) that all of us have been asking since this hell was first visited upon us.
Del celebrates the launch of ICAN’s “Secret Recordings: The Real Peter Marks”, a comprehensive timeline featuring documents obtained through FOIA and recorded Zoom calls with Peter Marks, M.D., former Director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research. Many of the videos show victims of severe COVID-19 vaccine injuries, as well as physicians who witnessed these injuries firsthand, pleading with the FDA to take action and inform the public of the potential risks. Get a glimpse of the press conference held in Washington, D.C., and learn how to access the full timeline—including complete video recordings and a comparison of what Marks was privately acknowledging versus what he was publicly saying about the safety of these products.
The Omission of Israeli Terrorism in the Occupied Palestinian Territories
By Karin Brothers | Global Research | December 6, 2014
… The Israeli settlements — all of which are illegal – have been identified as a major impediment to peace. The refusal of a major “global” terrorism report to name the Israeli settlers as one of the groups most responsible for terrorism not only misrepresents a major source of regional violence but exposes the Global Terrorism Index as a propaganda tool that supports a U.S. agenda.
In recent years, governments have been attempting to thwart terrorism by blocking supportive fund-raising. When it comes to Israeli settlements, however, the US and Canada actually encourage fund-raising by giving organizations (such as Christian Friends of Israeli Communities (CFOIC) and the Jewish National Fund) financial support in the form of donor tax-deductions.
Charities which provide funds for the Israeli settlements should be regarded as terror-financing organizations. They should not only lose their tax-deductible status, but they should be banned because they support the violation of international humanitarian law. The terror-financing laws that are being strictly enforced for Muslim charities should be applied to Christian and Jewish charities as well. … Read full article
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