1-Minute Junking: Emissions caused Hurricane Helene to intensify?
JunkScience.com | September 30, 2024
Facebook Gave CDC ‘Backdoor’ Access to Help Remove Millions of Social Media Posts
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | September 30, 2024
Facebook provided the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) “backdoor” access to its platform so the CDC could submit requests to remove COVID-19 “misinformation,” according to an internal Facebook document made public for the first time as part of an ongoing legal case.
America First Legal filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in 2021, after then-White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki revealed the Biden administration was flagging purported “disinformation” on social media platforms, including content posted by members of the so-called “Disinformation Dozen.”
When the Biden administration didn’t comply with the FOIA request, America First Legal sued, leading to the release of the documents as part of the discovery process.
According to Reclaim the Net, in 2021, Facebook developed a “Content Request System” (see pages 54-72) — also called a “Government Reporting System” — accessible to CDC staff. The documents show Facebook “was operating as the de facto enforcement arm of the US government’s thought control initiative.”
The Facebook-CDC partnership helped Facebook remove millions of posts, the documents show.
Gene Hamilton, executive director of America First Legal, told The Defender, “These documents show precisely how one of the social media platforms facilitated the federal government’s engagement in unconstitutional censorship activities.”
“The federal government cannot violate the First Amendment by outsourcing censorship to the private sector, yet these documents clearly show that Facebook and the Biden-Harris administration collaborated and colluded on removing speech that did not comport with the federal government’s preferences,” Hamilton said.
Tim Hinchliffe, editor of The Sociable, told The Defender that following the release of the “Twitter Files,” it should not come as a surprise “that the government has been actively trying to censor citizens through back doors and loopholes.”
“This censorship effort is yet another example of a public-private collaboration that fuses corporation and state,” Hinchliffe said. “Where the government can’t legally censor, it has the private sector to do its bidding. The question here is how much coercion was needed for Facebook to provide the backdoor?”
These latest revelations come as other entities ramp up their own efforts to target purported “misinformation” and “disinformation.”
On Thursday, the World Health Organization (WHO) and TikTok announced a new partnership to promote “science-based information.” Meanwhile, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), a Big Pharma lobbying group, this month urged the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to “expand drug manufacturers’ powers to correct misinformation about their products.”
‘Red-carpet treatment’ for government to ‘silence critics and manage dissent’
Calling it a “fast lane for speech suppression,” Reclaim the Net reported that Facebook “built a slick ‘end-to-end workflow’ tailored to the White House’s censorship needs,” which provided CDC staff with a four-step process to flag COVID-19 “misinformation” for removal.
“This was the red-carpet treatment for anyone in the Biden Administration looking to silence critics and manage dissent,” Reclaim the Net reported. “The system could handle up to twenty censorship requests simultaneously.”
The Facebook document stated, “We empower and safeguard users with policies that are: Principled, Operable, Explicable.” These policies were aligned with Facebook’s “community standards” and adopted “a multi-pronged approach to combating COVID-19 and vaccine misinformation.”
The policies — aimed at “bringing 50 million people a step closer to vaccinations” — included the removal of “false information that has been debunked by public health experts.”
Other types of content Facebook explicitly targeted include claims that COVID-19 is no more dangerous to people than the common flu or cold, and content discouraging “good health practices” — such as wearing a face mask, social distancing, getting tested for COVID-19 and getting vaccinated against COVID-19.
Claims about the COVID-19 vaccines’ safety, side effects and efficacy also were targeted for removal, as were “widely debunked vaccine hoaxes” — including claims that vaccines cause autism.
The document also revealed that as of 2021, Facebook and Instagram had removed “more than 16 million pieces of content … for violating our COVID-19 and vaccine policies.”
Repeat offenders faced restrictions, including (but not limited to) reduced distribution, removal from recommendations, or “removal from our site.”
The platform also allowed government officials to bypass federal transparency laws.
“By using this specialized portal, and not email, the government could skirt those pesky federal record-keeping laws. FOIA requests? Public oversight? Forget about it. The new system made sure government actions were neatly tucked away in proprietary software,” Reclaim the Net reported.
‘The closest thing to a Ministry of Truth’
According to Reclaim the Net, Robert Flaherty, then-White House director of Digital Strategy and now a member of Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign, was “barking orders at Facebook to tighten the leash.”
“Twitter Files” documents have shown that Flaherty pressured social media platforms to censor the accounts of public figures such Robert F. Kennedy Jr., then-chairman and chief litigation counsel of Children’s Health Defense (now chairman on leave). Kennedy was one of the figures named in “The Disinformation Dozen” report.
“The bureaucratic whims of entrenched CDC personnel and leadership determined what Americans could and could not say — the closest thing to a Ministry of Truth you can imagine in the United States,” Hamilton said.
Author Naomi Wolf, Ph.D., co-founder and CEO of DailyClout, told The Defender, “This shocking new revelation of still more unlawful pressure by the U.S. government on social media companies to strip Americans of First Amendment rights, also fails to shock as it is evidence added to a mountain of documentation of such collusion.”
According to Hamilton, these and other documents may affect several ongoing lawsuits against the Biden administration on First Amendment grounds.
“As more records are uncovered through our lawsuit and other open records requests, as well as discovery in litigation, we are confident that courts will have the definitive links necessary to show the government’s facilitation of an unconstitutional censorship enterprise,” Hamilton said.
The latest revelations came just a month after Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta — parent company of Facebook and Instagram — admitted that Biden administration officials pressured Meta to censor content related to COVID-19 during the pandemic.
“If the government can exert that much pressure on one of the largest platforms and its CEO, then it can do it to anybody,” Hinchliffe said.
In an interview earlier this month on “The Kim Iversen Show,” former U.S. State Department official Mike Benz, founder and executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, said the U.S. government coerced social media platforms to use “weapons of mass deletion” to censor content and as a workaround to the First Amendment.
According to Benz, this includes government coercion obliging these platforms to adopt automated censorship tools which employ artificial intelligence to sweep platforms for specific keywords or narratives. Benz said many of these tools were initially developed a decade ago for the fight against ISIS.
Benz said the U.S. government urged authorities in the United Kingdom and European Union (EU) to pass censorship laws, in order to then sidestep the First Amendment at home by obliging social media platforms to comply with more restrictive foreign laws.
Dutch attorney Meike Terhorst told The Defender the EU uses legislation such as the Digital Services Act (DSA) “to stop free speech outside EU borders.”
“According to the EU, the DSA prevents illegal and harmful activities online and protects fundamental rights,” Terhorst said. This means that the EU Commission can decide what is right and what is wrong, including ‘harmful disinformation.’”
TikTok ‘a propaganda arm’ of the United Nations?
TikTok and the WHO on Sept. 26 announced a new collaboration targeting health-related “misinformation.” The year-long partnership is “aimed at providing people with reliable, science-based health information.”
According to the WHO, the new collaboration will promote “evidence-based content and encourage positive health dialogues.”
The WHO quoted Chief Scientist Jeremy Farrar, who said, “This collaboration can prove to be an inflection point in how platforms can be more socially-responsible.”
Farrar collaborated with Dr. Anthony Fauci and key virologists to draft “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2,” published March 2020 in Nature Medicine. The paper has been used by media and the U.S. government to debunk the lab-leak theory of the COVID-19 outbreak and accuse its proponents of being “conspiracy theorists.”
According to public health physician Dr. David Bell, partnerships like the one between the WHO and TikTok are inappropriate. He told The Defender :
“WHO, as an organization subject to member states and with no direct standing over their citizens, should not be involved in such direct messaging. This is a clear infringement of the rights, role and sovereignty of the states themselves.
“WHO acts increasingly like a tool of colonialist corporate interests as it pushes their messages over the top of legitimate authorities and interferes in the running of health systems within countries.”
According to Hinchliffe, this is not the first TikTok partnership with the United Nations (U.N.). As part of a previous project, Team Halo, “the U.N. trained scientists and doctors on TikTok and worked with TikTok to boost their profiles in an effort to combat ‘misinformation’ while promoting ‘authoritative sources’ during the pandemic.”
“This latest partnership shows that TikTok is honored to once again be a propaganda arm for the U.N.,” Hinchliffe said.
The WHO previously established similar partnerships with other social media platforms, including YouTube, which last year revised its “medical misinformation” policy to allow for the deletion of content that contradicts WHO guidance.
The announcement of the TikTok partnership with the WHO — a U.N. agency — comes just days after U.N. member states passed the Pact for the Future.
The pact’s “Information Integrity on Digital Platforms” policy brief addresses “threats to information integrity,” such as so-called “misinformation” and “disinformation,” calling for the promotion of “empirically-backed consensus around facts, science and knowledge” — without clarifying how this “consensus” would be determined.
The TikTok partnership with the WHO also comes before the January 2025 legislative deadline for TikTok to divest its U.S. operations or face shutdown in the U.S.
Pharma wants expanded powers to ‘correct misinformation’
In another related development lobbyists for Big Pharma earlier this month asked the FDA “to expand drug manufacturers’ powers to correct misinformation about their products, including by allowing them to respond to opinions, value judgments or personal experiences and communications made offline,” Fierce Pharma reported.
The call was a response to the FDA’s draft guidance on “Addressing Misinformation About Medical Devices and Prescription Drugs.” Released in July and now open for public comment, the guidance would allow pharmaceutical companies to issue “tailored” responses to internet-based posts about their products, and “general medical product communications” that would address “misinformation.”
According to Fierce Pharma, “The FDA proposed prohibiting companies from posting tailored responsive communications in response to misinformation spread offline and in response to an individual’s posts about their own experience, opinion and value judgments. PhRMA wants the FDA to lift those restrictions.”
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Reporters Without Borders’ Attack on Sputnik and RT Highlights NGO’s Status as ‘Media Wing of NATO’
By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 30.09.2024
Reporters Without Borders has published a sensationalist report on Russian media’s work in the Balkans as part of a new project known as ‘The Propaganda Monitor’, accusing Sputnik and RT of spreading “disinformation” and demanding a crackdown by the EU. Balkan affairs expert Stevan Gajic tells Sputnik why such fearmongering doesn’t work on Serbs.
Reporters Without Borders’ (French acronym RSF) new ‘Propaganda Monitoring’ multimedia minisite promises to “promote reliable journalism” by exposing “the many faces and tactics behind propaganda worldwide, bolstering the public’s understanding of the information space and helping them navigate it more safely.”
Russian media, including Sputnik and RT, have become the self-anointed Paris-headquartered media watchdog’s first target, with RSF rolling out a series of articles on Russian media’s ability to find evade censorship, custom-tailor content, and in Serbia’s case, transmit so-called “Kremlin propaganda in the Balkans despite EU sanctions.”
RSF wants the European Union and its members to “hold Serbia accountable for hosting Vladimir Putin’s factory of lies,” spending much of its investigation complaining about Russian media’s refusal to answer its loaded questions, whining about its successes captivating local audiences, and crying about Serbia’s receptiveness to hosting Russian outlets.
“Reporters Without Borders cannot be regarded as a reliable source because every line in this report is soaked with biased language,” Belgrade-based Balkan affairs expert and Institute of European Studies research associate Stevan Gajic told Sputnik, commenting on RSF’s report.
“The motivation” behind RSF’s demands for a crackdown comes down to its status as “a media wing of NATO, a media wing of the collective West. This is a pure Freudian projection. They are accusing others of what they are doing themselves,” Gajic stressed.
“Where were Reporters Without Borders when Radio Television of Serbia was bombed in 1999 and when 16 TV staff were murdered in cold blood?” the observer asked, referencing the 78-day NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999. There is no credibility from people like this who did not act when they should have,” the observer recalled.
Narratives by RSF and others about Sputnik and RT being threats that need to be silenced have a clear end goal: “to nullify any kind of information coming from the other side to hush, to silence everybody who is not playing along NATO’s narrative. And this is especially a problem for NATO and for these puppet organizations, such as journalists with Reporters Without Borders, during times of war,” Gajic said.
As for RSF claims about RT’s spreading of “Kremlin narratives” in Serbia, Gajic emphasized that “pro-Russian sentiment amongst the Serbs has nothing to with the Kremlin, and everything to do with Washington and NATO.”
“Serbs are now more militantly pro-Russian because we were in a war against NATO and actually NATO was conducting and still is conducting hybrid aggression against us. I think that this speaks volumes about the falsehood of the presumptions and of the conclusions [made by RSF, ed.]. You can see how unrealistic and completely detached these people are from the reality, and how they are not really conducting deep research to see what is going on and how come,” Gajic said.
RSF’s conclusions are patently ridiculous, the observer suggested, highlighting the absurdity of “the presumption… that if it weren’t for RT and Sputnik, everybody, I guess in the Balkans and in Serbia and amongst the Serbs especially would be thrilled with the EU and NATO and so forth.”
“The new wave of the pro-Russian sentiment in Serbia was primarily created by the West. It was created by the West systematically targeting the Serbs for the last 30 years, since the moment of the breakdown of the bipolar global system” in place during the Cold War. Serbs became “the prime target,” a “Voodoo doll” for the West to “sting the Serbs in order for the Russians to feel pain,” according to Gajic.
“They were always demonstrating on us what they would like to do with Russia. That’s why many Serbs in the past said that all the wars we had with NATO and their proxies in the Balkans were actually just a preparation for a war that we are now seeing against Russia. That’s why I think the conclusion [of the RSF’s report, ed.] is false, because it comes from the presumption that if there were no ‘Russian propaganda’, quote-unquote, somehow people would feel different toward NATO.”
“under the Intermediate Scenario”
Tony Heller | September 24, 2024
NOAA has launched a new sea level website which is based on unsupportable claims and appeals to authority.
Obligations to Probe Nord Stream Blasts Not Fulfilled Despite Russia’s Calls – Moscow
Sputnik – 28.09.2024
MOSCOW – Obligations to investigate the terrorist attacks on Nord Streams in accordance with international treaties are not being fulfilled, despite Russia’s constant calls, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told Sputnik.
“The bombing of the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 gas pipelines is a flagrant act of international terrorism which falls under a number of international treaties establishing obligations to prevent such acts, suppress them, investigate them, bring those responsible to justice and cooperate with other states to achieve these goals. Unfortunately, we see that these obligations are not being fulfilled, despite constant calls from Russia,” Zakharova said.
Switzerland, where the Nord Stream operator-company is registered, has made no attempt to investigate the incidents, the diplomat said, adding that Germany, which is a final destination of the pipelines, had not presented any positive results of its probe.
“The West is not interested in conducting an effective investigation into the terrorist act, despite the colossal damage caused to the European economy and ecology by blowing up the gas pipelines,” Zakharova said.
Moscow has officially filed pre-trial claims against Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Switzerland in connection to the investigation of the Nord Steam blasts, based on a number of conventions on terrorism, Maria Zakharova said, adding that other states, which might have part in these acts, are next in line.
“Russia has officially filed pre-trial claims against Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Switzerland on the basis of the 1997 International Convention for the Suppression of Terrorist Bombings and the 1999 International Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism … Next in line are other states that might be involved in the attacks on the Nord Streams,” Zakharova said.
If the issue with the pre-trial claims is not resolved, Moscow will appeal to the UN International Court of Justice in connection with the violation by the countries in question of their conventional obligations, the diplomat added.
“Russia is firmly determined to identify and strictly hold accountable all perpetrators, organizers and accomplices of the terrorist act,” Zakharova added.
The Nord Stream pipelines, built to deliver gas under the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany, were hit by explosions on September 26, 2022. Denmark, Germany and Norway have left Russia out of their investigations into the attack, prompting Moscow to launch its own probe on charges of international terrorism.
Russia has repeatedly requested data on the explosions from the European countries, but has never received it, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.
Americans queueing to assassinate Trump, yet Iran is blamed
By Finian Cunningham | Strategic Culture Foundation | September 27, 2024
The United States does not have an impressive history of truth-telling when it comes to finding the culprits of presidential assassinations.
Indeed, the opposite. Cover-up and scapegoating are par for the course. So, bear that in mind about hyped reports this week about Iran allegedly trying to assassinate Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.
In 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald, a former U.S. Marine, was officially blamed for killing John F Kennedy. It was also mooted at the time that Oswald was working as a sympathizer for Communist Cuba or the Soviet Union.
Despite decades of the U.S. mainstream media and academia sticking to the preposterous narrative of Oswald as the lone shooter in Dallas, there is cogent evidence that JFK was assassinated by the American deep state of CIA and corporate power because of the president’s opposition to Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union.
For more than six decades, the official narrative of JFK’s assassination has not changed despite the absurdities of the official account. Three fatal bullets in quick succession from a notoriously poor shot (Oswald) and the third to the front of the president’s head, supposedly from Oswald perched in a high-rise building hundreds of feet to the rear. Give us a break.
Fast forward to the summer of 2024. Two attempts have been made on the life of Republican candidate Donald Trump. On both occasions, the attacks were carried out by American citizens. On July 13, Thomas Matthew Crooks was shot dead by Secret Service agents after he fired his assault rifle at Trump during a rally in Pennsylvania. On September 15, Ryan Routh was arrested for trying to kill Trump at his golf course in Florida. It’s not clear what the shooters’ motives were. But both incidents involve American citizens as would-be assassins.
Moreover, there are disturbing questions about the lax conduct of the state security services and bigger forces who might want Trump dead. The first assassination attempt in Pennsylvania saw gaping lapses that allowed the shooter to breach the security perimeter. In the second case, the suspect had active ties with recruiting foreign mercenaries for the NATO-backed Ukrainian regime and presumably U.S. intelligence networks.
Yet this week, the U.S. intelligence services accuse Iran of plotting to kill Trump. The story has been doing the rounds in the U.S. media for weeks, having first been reported by CNN shortly after the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania. The unsubstantiated Iranian connection smacks of a blatant distraction from possibly more homegrown culprits.
Gullibly, Trump this week appeared to buy the accusations against Iran. He threatened to blow Iran to “smithereens” if he were president.
This is while Trump has previously blamed his Democrat rivals for responsibility, pointing out how they have labelled him as a “threat to American democracy”.
There is no evidence from the U.S. spooks to substantiate their high-flown claims against Iran. The accusations come at an extremely tense time when Israel is threatening to drag the Middle East into an all-out war with Lebanon and Iran. The latest U.S. intel accusations against Iran serve to give Israel a cover for its regional aggression.
Trump’s unquestioning reaction to blame Iran is no doubt driven by his desire to act tough for electioneering gain. Threatening to blow a country to smithereens might play well with some voters.
No doubt, too, Trump is living out his own fears of Iranian revenge. He ordered the assassination in 2020 of Iran’s top military commander Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad.
Tehran has never officially declared its intention to kill Trump out of revenge for Soleimani. This week at the United Nations General Assembly, Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian spoke of Iran not wanting war and of seeking diplomatic negotiations with the US to avoid further conflict in the Middle East. It would, therefore, be irrational for Tehran to jeopardize the region by engaging in a vendetta against a presidential candidate.
The fingering of Iran with allegations of plotting to assassinate Trump comes at a suspicious time.
The U.S. presidential race is heading to a tight finish, with the Democrat candidate Kamala Harris receiving endorsements from the Washington establishment, including former Republican administration officials. Harris is the deep-state favorite to ensure the continuation of foreign policy goals of confronting Russia and China. Trump is too much of a maverick and unreliable for the powers-that-be. The stakes are high to make sure he does not get back to the White House, as far as the interests of the U.S. imperial planners are concerned. His talk about cutting military aid to the Ukrainian regime and calls for a peace settlement are not what the military-intel-imperialist deep state wants.
What if a third assassination attempt on Trump succeeds? There are plenty of grounds to suspect that he could be taken out by “executive action” sanctioned by enemies within the U.S. power nexus because of the high stakes of this election. The deep state needs to pursue confrontation with Russia and China to prop up waning American global power. The stakes could not be higher.
Against all the evidence of Trump being threatened by Americans who have nothing to do with Iran, there now emerges a false flag of an Iranian threat.
One has to wonder if Iran is being set up as a patsy for eliminating an American presidential candidate.
Nord Stream Pipelines Must Be Restored – German Lawmaker
Sputnik – 26.09.2024
Nord Stream gas pipelines were blown up by enemies of German energy sovereignty, and the pipelines must be rebuilt and secured, the co-leader of the right-wing Alternative for Germany party, Tino Chrupalla, said on Thursday.
“Today marks two years since the enemies of German energy sovereignty blew up Nord Stream. An artery of German industry was cut. Our faction in the Bundestag demands an investigation and punishment for all those responsible. Nord Stream must be repaired, launched and secured!” Chrupalla said on his social media.
The Nord Stream and Nord Stream 2 gas pipelines, built to deliver gas under the Baltic Sea from Russia to Europe, were rocked by explosions in September 2022.
The Russian Prosecutor General’s Office opened an investigation into the blasts as an act of international terrorism. Russia has repeatedly requested information about the explosions but has received nothing, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said.
Iran slams US ‘absurd scenarios’ to implicate it in alleged assassinations
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kan’ani
Press TV – September 26, 2024
Iran says US claims of Iranian threats to senior American officials are “ridiculous scenarios” fabricated by Washington.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Wednesday said the US was “intensely tracking an ongoing threat by Iran against a number of senior officials, including former government officials like president [Donald] Trump, and some people who are currently serving the administration.”
In a statement on Thursday, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kan’ani dismissed Blinken’s “accusations as absurd and completely baseless.”
“It is clear that the formulation of such claims is merely part of the electoral atmosphere in the US and is driven by specific political goals, to the extent that they do not even warrant a response,” Kan’ani noted.
“The formulation of such false attributions and political accusations in the current tense conditions of the region cannot in any way diminish the international responsibility of the US government in aiding and participating in various international crimes against Palestine and Lebanon by the Zionist regime.”
Kan’ani said public opinion worldwide holds “the US regime” and its officials accountable for such humanitarian atrocities.
“The absurd and baseless stunts and scenarios created by the US government against the Islamic Republic of Iran will not hinder Iran’s determination to pursue legal and international accountability for the perpetrators and instigators of crimes committed against the Iranian people,” he said.
“The passage of time will not protect these criminals from trial and punishment.”
Anglo-Americans attacked ally with Nord Stream sabotage – Russian intelligence
RT | September 26, 2024
The US and UK masterminded the 2022 sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines in an act of economic warfare against their EU allies, Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence service has claimed.
The assessment released on Thursday, on the second anniversary of the undersea bombing, detailed an alleged effort by Washington and London to interfere in the investigation and blame another party.
The intelligence “definitively points to the pipeline attack being an act of international terrorism and an act of economic war [by the US and UK] against European allies, primarily the Federal Republic of Germany,” the statement said.
The SVR claimed that Washington and London have been conducting a sustained campaign to “remove the issue of the Nord Stream sabotage from international agenda,” ramping up their efforts in August.
“Media answering to Washington and London are promoting the narrative that the attack was conducted exclusively by Ukrainian extremists, who acted independently,” it said, adding that the scenario “does not hold water”. German investigators are being pressured to accept this version as the main one, and “wrap up the probe before the year ends,” the statement alleged.
Berlin has been issued with an ultimatum, demanding that it name “Russia-hating Ukrainian desperados” as the culprits and “deflect a blow to trans-Atlantic cooperation,” the SVR stated.
The Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines were built under the Baltic Sea to deliver Russian natural gas directly to Germany. The attack in September 2022 was blamed by Western media on a privately funded group of Ukrainian divers, who supposedly acted on orders from General Valery Zaluzhny, who was later dismissed and became Kiev’s ambassador to the UK.
Prior to the attack, senior US officials, including President Joe Biden and veteran diplomat Victoria Nuland, had issued threats against Russian energy infrastructure, particularly the Nord Stream 2 project, which was completed in September 2021, a decade after Nord Stream 1 went on stream.
Nord Stream 2 significantly expanded the capacity of the network, but was never used due to Germany’s refusal to license it amid tensions with Russia over Ukraine.
Biden behind Nord Stream sabotage – Russia’s top MP
RT | September 26, 2024
US President Joe Biden “was behind” the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines, and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz helped him tank his country’s economy in the aftermath, Vyacheslav Volodin, the head of the Russian State Duma, has claimed.
The senior legislator commented on Thursday on the second anniversary of the explosions, which disabled the undersea connectors built to deliver Russian natural gas directly to Germany, noting the failure of European investigators to name the culprit. There have been accounts in the media suggesting possible scenarios, “which were occasionally laughable,” he said.
“Washington and Biden personally were behind the Nord Stream bombing. His interest was to cut Western Europe off from cheap Russian gas and force it to buy it from America at a price three times higher,” he said.
The German economy took a hit and is now in recession due to a loss of competitiveness, Volodin added, “which means that the people of Germany were punished instead of Washington, as Biden and Scholz took money out of their pockets.”
“You cannot pin this one on some ‘pro-Ukrainian group’ and civilian divers,” Volodin stressed.
On Tuesday, the German news outlet Der Spiegel published its latest retelling of the events of September 2022. It mostly repeats the story that a privately-funded operation masterminded by a now-disgraced Ukrainian intelligence officer conducted the sabotage with the blessing of former General Valery Zaluzhny. The Western press has been repeating similar versions of this story for months.
Spiegel claimed to have identified the divers, saying that most were civilians, but the group was led by a commando. The operation was first contemplated years before the outbreak of hostilities between Russia and Ukraine in February 2022, it stated.
Pulitzer Prize-winning US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh alleged that Biden had ordered the sabotage of Nord Stream in a February 2023 article. He said US military divers had secretly planted explosives to destroy the pipelines at a significant depth, using a NATO exercise in the Baltic Sea as a cover. The White House has denied the accusations, but Russian officials have called the story plausible.
Prior to the destruction of Nord Stream 1 and 2, senior US officials, including Biden, had issued threats to destroy the Russian-German pipelines.
USAID memo exposes Blinken’s involvement in starving Palestinians
Al Mayadeen | September 25, 2024
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration have said that “Israel” is blocking humanitarian aid heading to the Gaza Strip.
In a 17-page memo sent to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in April, USAID told top US diplomats that US law requires the administration to cut off weapons shipments to governments that prevent the delivery of US-backed humanitarian aid. The refugees bureau also delivered a similar evaluation.
If acted upon, the assessment would cause tremulous changes to the Israeli regime’s supply of weapons, as the US delivers the majority of weapons through which the regime carries out its aggression.
According to ProPublica, both Blinken and the administration of President Joe Biden refused to accept the conclusions reached by the two US agencies.
“We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of US humanitarian assistance,” Blinken said on May 10 to Congress, after receiving the reports.
Crimes, recommendations ignored
USAID’s memo also highlighted a series of grave actions by the Israeli regime, including the killing of aid workers, the destruction of agricultural infrastructure, the bombing of ambulances and hospitals, the occupation of supply depots, and the frequent rejection of trucks carrying vital food and medical supplies.
Moreover, the head of the State Department’s refugees bureau determined that the Israeli regime was blocking humanitarian aid and that the Foreign Assistance Act should be triggered to stop nearly $830 million in taxpayer dollars allocated for military aid to the Israeli occupation, according to ProPublica, which cited emails it had obtained.
Stacy Gilbert, a former senior civil-military advisor in the Refugees Bureau, resigned in protest over the wording of Blinken’s report to Congress, which she had been helping to draft. In a statement released shortly after her departure, and reported by The Washington Post and other outlets, she wrote, “There is abundant evidence showing Israel is responsible for blocking aid. To deny this is absurd and shameful.”
Hamas: Blinken, Biden’s actions are shameful
Islamic Resistance Movement – Hamas released a statement, commenting on ProPublica‘s report on Wednesday.
Hamas condemned Bliken and Biden’s deliberate concealment of evidence of “Israel’s” non-compliance with US aid missions during his addresses to Congress.
The movement said that Blinken did so, in complicity with Biden, “Out of fear that it would impact weapons supplies to the occupation’s military.”
It said that the revelations serve as evidence of Washington’s involvement in the genocide of the Palestinian people.
“This criminal conduct by Blinken demands that honorable members of the US Congress and American judicial bodies investigate his actions, which have led to the deaths of thousands of our people,” Hamas underlined.
“We call on international judicial institutions, foremost among them the International Criminal Court, to take these reports seriously and take the necessary legal action against Blinken,” the movement urged.
Hamas stressed that Blinken had participated in the deliberate starvation and the genocide of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip through his actions.
Germany’s BfV intelligence agency includes Remix News on list of websites tied to Russian propaganda campaign
Remix News | September 25, 2024
Remix News has been included on a list of websites accused of being used in a Russian propaganda operations, according to a controversial report from the powerful Office of the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), although Remix News has no ties to Russia.
The report, labeled “Doppelgänger,” made headlines across Germany due to its claims that certain media outlets were pushing Russian narratives or producing news reports that the Russians could use to promote propaganda campaigns. As a result, many of these media outlets, including Der Freitag, Junge Freiheit, and Berliner Zeitung successfully sued the BfV concerning a passage in the report which stated that “from the perspective of the actor, the content in question supports the Russian narrative.” The Bavarian BfV further wrote, “For this purpose, some of the articles were deliberately taken out of context.”
The report describes how Russia was allegedly using a number of news websites to promote its own narrative on social media platforms, and even in some cases, created duplicate news websites that appeared to be authentic to end users.
The lawsuit was successful and the secret service was forced to change part of the report, which then was updated to read: The BayLfV does not explicitly assume that those responsible for the websites listed here are spreading Russian propaganda or are aware of it or approve of their content being disseminated as part of the ‘doppelgänger’ campaign. Furthermore, the BayLfV does not make any assessment of the content of the websites in question.”
While Remix News is not among the websites mentioned in the actual main body of the report, it is instead included in a table at the end of the report along with about 350 news websites. Many of the news website are smaller, but Reuters, Zerohedge, Newsweek, and top German news outlets, such as Welt, Berliner Zeitung, and Junge Freiheit, are also included.
Many of these websites may not even be aware they are included in this report, as they are too large to be concerned about what a German intelligence agency operating from a single German state is publishing. However, the inclusion of Remix News on this list is problematic. For one, malicious journalists or activists may attempt to smear Remix News for being included on such a list from the German intelligence services, as the list tangentially ties our site to so-called Russian propaganda efforts. Without the proper context, such a list could be deemed extremely harmful to Remix News.
Second, there are no examples given of how Remix News was used by the Russians in their campaign. We are simply left to speculate how our website may have been allegedly used by these “Russian actors.”
For the record, Remix News has no ties to Russia in any form whatsoever.
The entire report appears to be somewhat of a debacle for the German intelligence services and has been heaped with criticism.
Speaking to the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Vice President of the Bundestag and FDP politician Wolfgang Kubicki said it was a good thing that the Bavarian Office for the Protection of the Constitution had been forced to correct its report.
“This correction should also give food for thought to all those who believe that the Office for the Protection of the Constitution’s assessments are sacrosanct per se. We must continue to be careful that authorities do not restrict the right to freedom of expression for political reasons — not just in Bavaria, but throughout Germany,” he stated.
Media lawyer Joachim Steinhöfel criticized the Bavarian BfV’s failure to act without the threat of a lawsuit, which he said was “certainly one of the most blatant examples of how state bodies try to disparage the media.”
Notably, many of the media outlets listed in the report are seen as critical of the German government. It is unclear how Remix News landed on this list, but it is concerning that we were included with no context whatsoever. Our publication does not have the resources at this time to take legal action against the BfV, and the report remains part of the public record, albeit with an updated correction thanks to the legal battle waged by German media outlets.
Some commentary pieces Remix has published from Poland are strongly critical of Russia and the war in Ukraine. Meanwhile, some content we have published that conveys arguments from a Hungarian perspective, simply state the official position, which has never condoned Russia’s invasion. These pieces have simply stated Hungary will not send weapons to Ukraine and has consistently called for a ceasefire. However, in both media markets, there is a broad range of opinions, and Remix News has endeavored to publish a wide range of perspectives on this complex issue.
The report is also concerning due to the fact that Remix News has reported a number of times in a critical manner in relation to the BfV. As Remix News has previously reported, the BfV is a highly politicized agency, with a special focus on targeting critics of the government, perhaps most notably the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. The BfV is focused on Germany’s domestic sphere and is tasked with ensuring Germany’s constitution is protected. This role has increasingly morphed into fighting parties deemed outside the mainstream, with many analysts viewing the agency as a growing threat to democracy.
It features incredible spying powers, which enable it to monitor political activists and even people who have done nothing wrong besides being members of political parties deemed a threat by the ruling class. The AfD, for instance, is labeled in some states as a “suspected threat” to democracy and a “confirmed right-wing extremist” party, which enables security forces in the BfV to monitor all communications, including email, phone and text messages of all its members.
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Iran UN ambassador calls for destruction of all nuclear weapons
Iran’s ambassador to the UN Gholamali Khoshroo
Press TV – March 29, 2017
Iran’s ambassador to the UN Gholamali Khoshroo has called for the total eradication of nuclear weapons.
Khoshroo reiterated Iran’s call during a UN conference aimed at creating a nuclear weapons ban treaty in New York on Tuesday.
“Iran, as a victim of chemical weapons, strongly feels the danger posed by the existence of weapons of mass destruction and is determined to engage actively in international diplomatic efforts to save humanity from the menace of nuclear weapons,” he said.
Khoshroo stressed that Iran is committed to its Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) obligations, which include negotiations based on effective nuclear disarmament measures.
He added that several countries continue to ignore international calls and treaties for nuclear disarmament and even continue to increase their nuclear stockpiles. “They do not have political determination to abandon doctrines of nuclear deterrence and nuclear terror,” he went on to say.
Iran’s UN ambassador noted that boycotting the talks by many countries, including the US, shows that the world’s nuclear powers are by no means committed to the eradication of nuclear arms. Britain and France were also among the some 40 countries that did not join the talks.
“We note that prohibition of nuclear weapons must be accompanied by the elimination of such weapons. There can be no doubt that without complete abolition of nuclear weapons, there will be no absolute guarantee against the danger of nuclear war and the use of such weapons,” Khoshroo added.
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