Western headlines are screaming that Ukraine has “encircled” Kupyansk city… a glorified town, selling it as a nightmare for Moscow. But this is not a battlefield report. It is narrative management, timed precisely to negotiations in Berlin. Kupyansk is not Stalingrad. It is not Kursk. It is not even a decisive urban fight. It is a ruined settlement on the Oskol, a former logistics node reduced to rubble, where control is measured not in flags but in fire control, drone dominance, and whether men can be rotated without being killed.
And when even Reuters couches claims as “unverified,” you know what that means. When it hedges, pauses, and inserts distance between claims and confirmation, it is signaling that fog is being weaponised. What exists on the ground is block-by-block ruin fighting, contested neighbourhoods like Yubileynyy, clashes near Mirovoye and Radkovka, infiltration attempts, temporary interdictions. Battalion-scale collisions between exhausted units in a place that barely functions as a glorified town.
The unit scale tells the truth the headlines obscure. Kupyansk has never hosted a force capable of deciding a front. Within the urban core, the Russian presence has been limited and exposed, with little time to dig in deeper, the town’s ruins making sustained fortification difficult, relying on fire control rather than secured occupation. With thousands tied down protecting the flanks and barely a battalion inside the city itself, Ukrainian assaults are not sweeping counteroffensives but concentrated pushes by swarms of worn formations, often built from forcibly mobilised men with minimal training, starving and thin on ammunition, cannibalized from fronts like Sumy, and thrown into an urban graveyard to manufacture leverage.
This is not manoeuvre warfare. It is attritional contact deliberately framed as momentum to serve a media and political narrative rather operational gain. What matters is that the map is not the territory. In this war, a coloured overlay often marks a brief window of drone interdiction, hours, not control. Fire control can deny movement, but without sustainment it cannot secure ground. Fire control without sustainment does not produce breakthroughs. It produces graveyards. Ukraine has been forced by its Western patrons into too many of them already.
Kupyansk does not change the war unless it becomes part of a broader operational rollback and it won’t. Otherwise, it is a bad PR bargaining chip, paid for in blood.
While cameras fixate on Kupyansk, the real pressure story runs elsewhere, across a widening arc Western coverage fragments to prevent pattern recognition. West of Russian liberated Seversk, claims and denials continue, but the geometry is clear: Ukrainian forces are stretched thin, defending ground without strategic depth. Around encircled Lyman, the contest is about lines of communication and Ukranian reserve erosion, not symbolism.
Central to the Donbass arc, Pokrovsk and Mirnograd matter not because of names, but because they anchor logistics. Russian control here forces a stark contrast in how the war is being fought. Ukraine is expending irreplaceable manpower to manufacture moments, brief tactical actions designed to win optics for a day. Russia, by contrast, is trading space, fire control, and logistics denial for outcomes that compound over time. One side is managing headlines. The other is managing the war.
To the south, the picture is more dangerous still. Around Gulyaypole, pressure is persistent and cumulative, not theatrical. And beyond it lies the real anxiety Europe refuses to discuss openly, the slow, grinding push toward Zaporozhye city. This is not a sprint. It is a methodical march Westward. If current trends hold, Zaporozhye can be operationally threatened, even encircled in less than six months. That outcome would dwarf any skirmish in the small town of Kupyansk.
This is where time asymmetry becomes decisive. Russia is fighting a time-positive war: industrial scaling and real capacity that dwarfs the fiat, paper-tiger illusory capacity of NATO; deep manpower reserves; and a level of internal cohesion sufficient to sustain a long campaign. Ukraine, by contrast, is fighting a time-negative war, with catastrophic demographic collapse, mass emigration, forced conscription, and shrinking public consent. Every Ukrainian media counteroffensive now borrows against a future that no longer exists to replenish it.
This is one of the real reasons behind Trump’s push. Less sentiment. Not ideology. Geometry. Timelines. Arithmetic. Washington understands that delay only makes the endgame worse, militarily and politically for project Ukraine. Europe understands this too. But Europe cannot admit it without confessing its humiliation.
So Europe clings to suicidal optics. It inflates Kupyansk. It sells illusory leverage. And it sacrifices Ukrainians to buy time, not for victory, but for narrative survival.
Here is the truth Europe works hardest to bury beneath headlines and choreographed resolve: this war no longer reflects the will of the Ukrainian people, and, in truth, it only ever did through manufactured consent that has now collapsed. Not marginally. Not ambiguously. Overwhelmingly. Even after years of saturation messaging, censorship, emergency laws, and relentless narrative conditioning, roughly four-fifths of Ukrainians now demand peace. It is devastating precisely because it persists despite one of the most intensive information campaigns the modern West has ever mounted.
Instead, men are dragged from streets and their homes, beaten, bundled into vans, forced into uniforms, and sent to the front. Videos of violent conscription squads no longer shock because they are the tragic norm.
This is not mobilisation. It is cowardly and punitive coercion, the final refuge of elites who lack legitimacy but demand sacrifice. It is the politics of cowardice, where those who made the decisions never bear the cost, and those who pay the price were never given a choice. These wars are always fought with other people’s sons, for objectives that dissolve under scrutiny, while the architects retreat behind speeches, security details, and moral posturing.
When a state must kidnap its own citizens to sustain a war, it has crossed the final moral line: it is no longer defending a nation, because it never was, but cannibalising one, deliberately sacrificing its people as a tip of the spear against a stronger Russia, to shield the reputations, fortunes, and careers of elites who will never bleed, never fight, and never answer for the ruin they leave behind.
Washington shattered Europe’s strategic autonomy years ago and quietly handed the bill to the continent. NATO expansion without strategy. Economic warfare without insulation. Energy sabotage without a contingency secured. The result was inevitable… Accelerated deindustrialisation, inflation, social fracture, political fragility. Europe emerged poorer, weaker, and strategically irrelevant, yet still clinging to the language of moral authority.
Rather than confront this collapse, Europe chose the refuge of absolutism. Negotiation became heresy. Compromise became betrayal. Peace became appeasement. Diplomacy itself was criminalised, because diplomacy invites the most dangerous question of all. What was this for?
And that question cannot be answered without consequences. Because peace does something war cannot. War suspends politics. Peace resurrects accountability.
Europe does not fear losing the war as much as it fears surviving it with memory intact.
That is why the war must continue. Not to save Ukraine, but to postpone reckoning, at the hands of Europeans.
Which brings us back to Kupyansk.
Kupyansk is not a battlefield turning point. It is a tombstone. Not only for the men buried beneath its rubble, but for Europe’s moral credibility itself.
What will damn this war in the historical record is not how it began, but how long it continued after its flimsy justification collapsed. When even manufactured consent evaporated, when diplomacy was deliberately buried, when Russian defeat quietly gave way to arithmetic, the war did not stop. It hardened. Not because it could still be won, but because ending it would have forced admissions no ruling class was prepared to make.
Kupyansk is not remembered because it mattered militarily. It matters because it exposes the moment when the war ceased to be about territory at all. It marks the point where Europe chose blood over truth, coercion over consent, and narrative survival over human life. Not out of strength, but out of fear.
History is unforgiving toward wars waged without consent and prolonged without purpose. It does not care about intentions, speeches, or moral language. It records only what was done, who benefited, and who paid. And when the record is written, it will show that Ukraine was not denied peace because peace was impossible, but because peace would have ended the lie.
The New York Times has a website claiming to show an increase in 90 degree days in US cities. In this short video I fact check their claims using app.visitech.ai
Readers of The Defender are familiar with the fact that the COVID-19 mRNA shots pose a risk of myocarditis, especially in children. But they may not know that myocarditis is usually permanently disabling, and in adults, it is often fatal within five years.
This has been a public relations setback for industry and governments that have been advocating, and sometimes mandating, that children as young as 6 months get the vaccines — even though COVID-19 is almost always mild or symptom-free in young people.
This month, 22 British scientists from prestigious universities published a study intended to ease parents’ minds about risks of the vaccine, and simultaneously scare them about the dangers of getting COVID-19.
The message is that yes, there are rare cases — they always use the word “rare” — in which children get myocarditis after vaccination, but hey, no product can be perfect. And it’s better to risk the vaccine than risk getting COVID-19. Also, they claim, kids are more likely to get myocarditis if they get the virus than they are to get myocarditis from the vaccine.
That’s the message — and the authors and publisher have the clout to widely broadcast that message in a press release and in news headlines in Britain and America.
But what does the study actually say? In short, it asks the wrong question — and even so, the answer they get must be buried in the appendix, because it’s inconsistent with the message they want to promote.
Article summary omitted evidence of vaccine risk
The study design is deeply compromised because the 22 authors constructed a complicated model to avoid doing a straightforward comparison (vaccine only versus disease only).
And even after they cooked the books, even after they took data from almost 14 million children and teens under age 18 in England, they got a result that is barely statistically significant, with overlapping error bars for the risk from COVID-19 and the risk from vaccination.
It gets worse.
The results, which marginally favored the vaccination, were trumpeted in a summary at the top of the paper and announced to the press.
But buried in the appendix, published separately online, is a table that shows a more relevant version of the comparison.
The version in the summary is from an early time frame when the vaccine was not available. The appendix shows comparable data for the time frame in which the vaccine was available, limited to the ages for which the vaccine was offered.
In the appendix, the risk of myocarditis from the disease is half that of the risk from the vaccine. This blatantly contradicts the summary and the headlines generated by the article — and this was a response to the deceptive version of the question, not the more straightforward one that the researchers chose not to answer.
Study authors asked the wrong question
The most pertinent question is the simple one: Did vaccinated children have a higher incidence of myocarditis than unvaccinated children?
This is an easy question to answer, given the data that these authors (but not the public) had access to. In a few minutes, they could have calculated a rate of myocarditis among vaccinated and unvaccinated children.
However, if they did the calculation, they didn’t report the results. My guess is that they did the calculation, didn’t like what they saw, so they didn’t include it in the published article.
As I stated above, I believe the study authors “asked the wrong question.” What I mean is that the article compares the risk of myocarditis from COVID to the risk from vaccination.
But this is not the most relevant question. Why?
Because many people got the vaccine and then got COVID anyway, so they were unnecessarily exposed to both risks.
Conversely, many children who didn’t get the vaccine, didn’t get COVID. Or, they get such a mild case that they don’t even notice it. These children avoided both risks.
This is why comparing the risk of myocarditis from COVID to the risk from the COVID vaccine is not really the pertinent question. It’s not a question of “either or.”
Authors ‘muddied the waters’ by analyzing myocarditis in kids who got vaccine and the virus
The message the authors wanted to imply was that, even though the vaccine increased the risk of myocarditis, it decreased the risk of COVID — and since COVID itself can cause myocarditis, the total risk is actually lower with vaccination than without.
If that is their claim, it’s easy to determine if it is true. The simplest calculation they could have done with the data available to them was also the calculation most pertinent to what parents want to know: Is my child better off with or without the vaccine?
The authors chose not to offer us the simple answer to that straightforward question.
But — given that they asked the wrong question — they might have derived a clean answer just by comparing the subset of children who were vaccinated but never got COVID to the subset who got COVID but were never vaccinated.
Because the study included data spanning two years from all over the U.K., there were hundreds of thousands of children in these subcategories — more than enough to do a clean statistical comparison.
But again, the authors chose not to do this. Or, my guess, they did the comparison and didn’t like the result, so they didn’t include it in the publication.
Instead, the authors analyzed myocarditis in the large group of children who got both the vaccine and the disease. This muddied the waters because there is no clear way to determine whether it was the disease or the vaccine that damaged the child’s heart.
Hence, the complicated model, based on timing.
The possibility that seems likely is that children who got COVID after the vaccination had the highest heart risk of all. Of course, there is the logical possibility that children who got COVID after vaccination had a milder case, with a lower risk of myocarditis.
However, if that had been the result, I would think the authors would not only have included that result, but also headlined it.
One more thing — the study looked only at the Pfizer vaccine. Myocarditis risk from the Moderna vaccine is estimated to be three times higher than Pfizer. They had the Moderna data and chose not to look at it.
Or they looked at it, decided they didn’t like what they saw, and decided not to report it.
‘This is public relations masquerading as science’
So, to summarize:
The authors asked a complicated question when a simple one was more relevant.
Given this wrong question, they did not do the most straightforward analysis to answer it.
Even so, they found that the vaccine held almost twice the risk of myocarditis compared to the disease. This result was only in Table S16 of the Supplementary Appendix — but mentioned nowhere in the body of the paper, let alone in the summary at the top.
And still they made prominent announcements to the public, claiming that their study confirms that children are better off with the vaccine than without.
This is public relations masquerading as science. For an article like this to be peer reviewed and featured prominently in Britain’s most prestigious medical journal tells us just how deeply the ecosystem of medical research has been corrupted.
And this is the “science” that our U.S. Food and Drug Administration relies on when they approve dangerous vaccines for healthy children who are at almost no risk from the disease itself.
In most statistical articles, the raw data used for a study are published online and linked in an appendix to the article. However, in this case, the U.K. National Health Service (NHS) granted access to the data exclusively to this prestigious group of scientists.
Personally, I would like to see the raw data and perform the analysis that the 22 scientists should have done from the beginning. Children’s Health Defense is in the process of requesting access from the NHS. Stay tuned …
Georgia has announced that it is suing the BBC “for spreading dirty, false accusations,” after the British state broadcaster alleged that the government in Tbilisi used chemical weapons against protesters last year.
The South Caucasus nation was rocked by violent pro-EU demonstrations in late 2024, which broke out after the government temporarily froze integration talks with the bloc, accusing it of weaponizing Tbilisi’s accession bid for political leverage.
In an article on Monday, the BBC claimed that the Georgian authorities used WWI-era chemical weapons during the protests – an allegation which the ruling Georgian Dream party said was based on “absurd and false information.”
According to the BBC investigation, authorities used an outdated riot-control agent mixed into the water fired from water cannons to disperse protesters.
Tbilisi said the broadcaster provided no evidence to substantiate its claims.
Despite approaching the BBC for an explanation and giving exhaustive answers to its questions, the Georgian government “received a cornucopia of lies” and “serious accusations” in response, it said.
“We have decided to start a legal dispute against the false media in international courts. We will use all possible legal means to hold the so-called media that spread lies accountable for spreading dirty, false accusations.”
Georgian Dream claimed that the BBC “has no moral or professional inhibitions about carrying out dirty orders and spreading lies,” and referred to recent scandals which have damaged the broadcaster’s credibility.
Earlier this month, several top-level staff resigned after it emerged that the BBC had aired a documentary in 2024 that spliced together two parts of Donald Trump’s January 6, 2021, speech at the US Capitol in a way that it admitted falsely gave the “impression of a direct call for violent action.”
Trump has accused the broadcaster of meddling in US elections with the controversial 2024 documentary, and threatened to sue for “anywhere between $1 to $5 billion.”
The BBC is losing more than £1 billion ($1.3 billion) a year in mass cancellations and fee evasion, according to a recent UK parliamentary report.
In the shadowy world of U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America, few names inspire as much controversy as Otto Reich, a Jewish-Cuban exile whose career reads like a manual for regime change, complete with illegal propaganda operations, coup connections, and an unwavering commitment to toppling governments that defy Washington.
The story begins in Havana, where Otto Juan Reich was born on October 16, 1945, to an Austrian Jewish father who had fled National Socialist Germany in 1938 and a Cuban Catholic mother. His father’s escape from Germany became the foundational narrative of Reich’s worldview, a tale of authoritarian evil that he would later project onto Latin America’s leftist movements. Raised as a Catholic despite his Jewish heritage, young Otto attended the elite, American-run Ruston Academy, where he absorbed both Cuban culture and American influence in equal measure.
During Reich’s youth, Cuba was under the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, whose political repression was so severe that even Reich’s own family, as he told The New Yorker, was “pro-revolution, anti-Batista.” The lone exception was his father, whose experience fleeing one authoritarian regime had made him suspicious of revolutionary movements. When Fidel Castro seized power in 1959, that suspicion proved prophetic—or so Reich would claim for the rest of his life. Castro’s consolidation of power prompted Reich’s father to flee once more, this time taking his family to North Carolina in 1960, when Otto was just 15 years old, as the New York Times reported.
His father’s double exile—first from Germany, then from revolutionary Cuba—became the crucible that forged the younger Reich’s political identity. Where some might see tragedy, Reich saw opportunity. Where others might advocate reconciliation, Reich would pursue confrontation. The teenage refugee would grow into one of Washington’s most zealous operators against Latin American leftism, a man for whom the line between communism and democracy admitted no gray areas, no nuance, no possibility of coexistence.
From the Military to the Foreign Policy Blob
Reich’s trajectory toward influence was methodical. He earned a Bachelor’s degree in International Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1966, then immediately joined the U.S. Army, serving three years as an officer in the 3rd Civil Affairs Detachment stationed in the Panama Canal Zone. This posting provided Reich with more than military experience; it offered a frontline view of U.S. power projection in Latin America, where American military presence wasn’t just about defense but about maintaining influence over an entire hemisphere.
After his military service, Reich completed a Master’s degree in Latin American Studies from Georgetown University in 1973, assembling the credentials that would make him indispensable to conservative policymakers seeking expertise on the region.
When Ronald Reagan swept into the White House in 1981, Reich found his moment. The Reagan administration needed operatives willing to prosecute an aggressive anti-communist agenda in Latin America, and Reich eagerly volunteered. From 1981 to 1983, he served as Assistant Administrator at the U.S. Agency for International Development, managing American economic assistance to Latin America and the Caribbean during a period of revolutionary upheaval. But this posting was merely preparation for Reich’s true calling.
The Architect of the Contra Propaganda Machine
In 1983, Reich established and began directing the Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America and the Caribbean, an anodyne name for what would become one of the most controversial operations in modern American foreign policy. The OPD’s official mission was to promote the Contra guerrillas fighting Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. Its actual function, as would later be revealed, was to conduct what the Comptroller General characterized in 1987 as “prohibited, covert propaganda” to bolster the Contra’s image among the American public.
Under Reich’s management, the OPD became a factory for disinformation. The office planted false stories in U.S. media outlets, including unsubstantiated claims about the Nicaraguan government’s involvement in drug trafficking. It published opinion pieces in mainstream newspapers attributed to fictitious Nicaraguan rebel leaders. It coordinated with paid consultants who wrote pro-Contra articles while concealing their government connections—a practice congressional investigators would later identify as “white propaganda.”
Reich had effectively turned his office into a domestic propaganda operation aimed at manipulating American public opinion to support a covert war. A House Foreign Affairs Committee report didn’t mince words, characterizing the OPD as “a domestic political and propaganda operation.” For three years, Reich oversaw this machinery of deception, becoming what journalist Ann Bardach would later call the “chief spinner” of the Iran-Contra effort.
The scandal that eventually engulfed the Reagan administration would shut down Reich’s operation in 1987. Yet remarkably, Reich himself was not personally accused of illegal activity. He had operated in that gray zone where government officials claim plausible deniability—close enough to the crime to be indispensable, distant enough to avoid prosecution. It was a skill he would refine over decades.
The Lobbyist Years
When Reich left government service in 1989, following a stint as U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela from 1986 to 1989, he didn’t abandon his mission. He simply changed his methodology. For 12 years, Reich worked as a corporate lobbyist, first as a partner in the Brock Group and later as president of his own firm, RMA International. But these weren’t ordinary lobbying gigs; Reich selected clients whose interests aligned perfectly with his ideological agenda.
He represented Bacardi rum company in a campaign to nullify Cuba’s trademark protection for “Havana Club,” an effort that succeeded with the enactment of the Helms-Burton Act in 1996, which further fortified the Cuban embargo. He worked on behalf of Lockheed Martin to sell F-16 fighter jets to Chile. Where others saw business opportunities, Reich saw another front in his endless campaign to maintain American primacy in Latin America.
Return to Power
When George W. Bush captured the White House in 2001, Reich saw an opportunity to return to government service. Bush nominated him for Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, but the appointment immediately sparked controversy. The Senate, wary of Reich’s Iran-Contra record and his advocacy for Orlando Bosch—a Cuban exile militant suspected of organizing the bombing of Cubana de Aviación Flight 455, which killed 73 people—refused to hold confirmation hearings.
Bush’s solution revealed the depths of Reich’s value to Republican hardliners: He simply bypassed the Senate through a recess appointment, allowing Reich to serve for one year without confirmation before being appointed as Special Envoy to Latin America. Democracy be damned; Reich’s expertise in destabilization was too valuable to sacrifice to Senate oversight.
The 2002 Venezuelan Coup
Reich’s tenure coincided with one of the most controversial episodes in recent Latin American history: the brief coup d’état in Venezuela on April 11, 2002, that temporarily removed President Hugo Chávez from power. During the coup, Reich communicated with coup leader Pedro Carmona Estanga and contacted ambassadors from other Latin American countries. Cuban sources would characterize Reich as the “mastermind of the April 2002 coup plot against Hugo Chávez,” though Reich has denied direct involvement in the coup planning.
The pattern was familiar: A left-leaning, democratically elected leader who defied Washington’s preferences; a sudden coup involving military and business elites; and Otto Reich in communication with the coup leaders. Whether Reich masterminded the operation or simply provided encouragement and diplomatic cover, his presence at the center of events spoke volumes about his role in Bush administration policy.
The Ideological Entrepreneur
After leaving government service in 2004, Reich established Otto Reich Associates, a Washington consulting firm providing international government relations advice. But he remained far more than a mere consultant. Reich positioned himself as an ideological entrepreneur, shaping policy from outside government through media appearances, congressional testimony, and advisory roles to Republican presidential candidates, including John McCain in 2008 and Jeb Bush in 2016.
During Donald Trump’s first term, Reich played a significant behind-the-scenes role in shaping Latin American policy. In August 2018, he was credited with recommending Mauricio Claver-Carone to National Security Advisor John Bolton for the position of top official for Latin America policy at the National Security Council. Bolton later acknowledged: “I wouldn’t have known [Claver-Carone’s] name if Otto hadn’t recommended him. I trusted Otto’s judgment.”
Reich praised the appointment of Cuban-American hawks to key Trump administration positions, stating: “We have people who understand the cause, and not just the symptoms, of the problems in Latin America—not all the problems—and that is Cuba.” He argued that “the United States has been a fire brigade in Latin America for the last 60 years and we have ignored, to a large degree, the arsonist,” referring to Cuba’s role in supporting leftist movements throughout the region.
The Unending Campaign to Preserve U.S. Hegemony
Reich’s crusade against Latin American leftism never wavered, never softened. He characterized Venezuela as a “branch” and “subsidiary” of Cuba, accusing President Chávez of “having put a lot of his country’s money at the service of Fidel Castro” and “giving away” petroleum to the Caribbean island. This close alliance, Reich claimed, fueled what he called the “disgusting and gloomy process of Cubanization” unfolding in the petroleum-rich nation.
Then-Vice President José Vicente Rangel defended Venezuela’s sovereignty in July 2005, claiming that Reich “permanently attacks the Venezuelan government, because all of the petroleum business that [the US] has with Venezuela frustrates him.” Rangel rhetorically asked Reich to clarify “exactly which process of Cubanization is he talking about,” arguing that “the true Cubanization of Venezuela occurred years ago with the infiltration of anti-Castro Cubans into Venezuela’s police bodies.”
In a February 2015 panel discussion at the University of Miami titled “Venezuela: A Deepening Political and Economic Quagmire?”, Reich compared the Venezuelan government to National Socialist Germany, stating that officials there could claim they were “simply obeying the laws of the land” just as German officials did, warning “we have to be careful what the laws of the land are.” The comparison was as hyperbolic as it was revealing—for Reich, every leftist government in Latin America was potentially the next Third Reich.
By January 2024, Reich’s criticism had intensified following the Biden administration’s temporary sanctions relief on Venezuela. In an interview with PanAm Post, Reich declared that Biden’s policy toward Venezuela “has been a failure since the beginning of his administration” and characterized it as “not just a failure but a humiliation.” He warned that “not only the ideological pressure groups of the left but now also the commercial groups, the American oil companies that are doing business with Maduro, are going to put pressure on the Biden government not to restore the sanctions.”
Expanding the Enemy List
For Reich, the list of adversaries extended far beyond Cuba and Venezuela. He grouped Nicaragua and Bolivia together with Venezuela and Cuba as what he called “21st Century Socialist States,” arguing they represented a coordinated Cuban-Venezuelan effort to undermine democracy throughout Latin America. In March 2014 testimony before Congress titled “U.S. Disengagement from Latin America,” Reich warned that these governments constituted “organized crime states” where “top politicians and high-ranking military officers have been implicated in drug trafficking, support of terrorism and other illicit activities.”
Reich’s recent writings reveal an expansion of his ideological enemies to include Middle Eastern actors. In a November 2023 article for the Jewish Policy Center, Reich argued that “for more than one year, Iran secretly provided the weapons and training that Hamas needed for planning the October 7th attack against Israel.” He specifically accused Cuba of being “a key Iran-Hamas ally” in diplomatic efforts supporting the Palestinian militant organization.
Reich documented three high-level meetings that he claimed demonstrated Cuba’s complicity in the attack: a February 5, 2023 visit by Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian to meet with Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel; a February 25, 2023 Hamas delegation visit to Jorge León Cruz, the Cuban Ambassador in Lebanon, where Cruz recognized “the legitimate right of the Palestinians to defend their land,” stating that Palestinians “are fighting for a just cause”; and a June 15, 2023 meeting between Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and Díaz-Canel in Havana.
Reich asserted that these meetings, coupled with Cuba’s “long history of both antisemitism and support of extremist terrorist organizations in the Middle East,” proved that Cuba operated “terrorist training camps in secret locations” and allowed Hezbollah to establish “an operational base in Cuba, designed to support terrorist attacks throughout Latin America.”
Regime Change Villain
Throughout his career, Reich’s targets have consistently accused him of the very interference he claims to oppose. The Cuban government has consistently accused Reich of supporting terrorism and interfering in Cuban affairs. In 2002, Cuba’s Foreign Relations Ministry categorically denied Reich’s claims that four Cuban airplanes landed at Venezuela’s airport during the 2002 coup attempt, calling Reich’s assertion “an absolute lie.” The ministry stated that “if it had been necessary to land a Cuban civilian airplane to collect Cuban diplomatic personnel who were besieged by Mr. Reich’s friends, or for any other humanitarian and peaceful objective, we would have done it and we would have no reason to hide it.”
During a diplomatic visit to South America in July 2002, Reich drew criticism for instructing the Argentine government to commit to an austerity program demanded by the International Monetary Fund–one of the most notable vehicles of Judeo-American power. His aggressive approach to diplomacy was so abrasive that Senator Lincoln Chafee, a Republican member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, reported getting first-hand experience of Latin American hostility toward Reich during travels in the region. The term “hemispheric security mechanism” that Reich promoted stirred “unpleasant interventionist memories” throughout Latin America, according to a report by Toby Eglund.
Venezuelan officials have been particularly vocal about Reich’s skullduggery, even in the Obama era. In March 2013, Venezuela’s then-interim president Nicolás Maduro accused “factors in the Pentagon and the CIA” of conspiring against Venezuela, specifically naming Reich and Roger Noriega, who directly succeeded Reich as Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs. Maduro stated: “We want to say to President Barack Obama, stop this madness,” claiming to have “testimonies and direct, first-hand information” about U.S. plots. Both Reich and Noriega rejected the claims of orchestrating a plot to assassinate Maduro’s rival Henrique Capriles as “untrue, outrageous and defamatory.”
In September 2013, Maduro cancelled his planned trip to speak at the United Nations, citing “serious provocations that could threaten his life.” He specifically accused “the clan, the mafia of Roger Noriega and Otto Reich” of conspiring against him, stating that “the US government knows exactly that these people were behind a dangerous activity being plotted in New York.”
A Legacy of Fire-Starting
In January 2018 testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Reich called President Obama’s rapprochement with Cuba “a foreign policy failure.” He argued that it “consisted of a series of unrequited unilateral concessions to the Castro regime that had negative consequences for US national security, foreign policy interests and traditional values, and which brought increased repression to the Cuban people while filling the coffers of the Cuban military, the Communist Party, and the Castro family.”
Reich emphasized that “unlike previous, successful American initiatives, Obama’s rapprochement with the Castro dictatorship identified the US with a nation’s oppressor instead of the oppressed.” This framing revealed his consistent position: U.S. policy should align with opposition movements rather than incumbent leftist governments—in other words, perpetual regime change over diplomatic engagement.
In March 2023, following the International Criminal Court’s issuance of arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin for war crimes in Ukraine, Reich called for scrutiny of Cuba’s support for Russia’s “criminal and illegal war.” He stated that “the Cuban government has been actively using its diplomatic and propaganda services to support the illegal and criminal invasion of Ukraine by Putin’s Russia,” while “Cuban strongman Raúl Castro, his hand-picked president Miguel Diaz-Canel, and the rest of the ruling class, are profiting from Putin’s criminal war of aggression by receiving deliveries of Russian contraband oil, and wheat stolen from Ukraine.”
As of 2025, Reich continues his work through Otto Reich Associates and serves on the Advisory Board of United Against Nuclear Iran, an organization dedicated to preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.
As Washington’s confrontation with Venezuela intensifies, observers should recognize that this escalation did not materialize out of nowhere. They are the predictable outcome of decades of work by regime change specialists such as Otto Reich, figures who helped design a long-term interventionist blueprint for Latin America. Today, that blueprint is being dutifully executed by hawks like Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a close ally of Reich and a committed interventionist in his own right.
Just as Reich’s kinfolk in Israel labor tirelessly to secure regional supremacy for the Jewish state, Reich has devoted his career to making the Western Hemisphere safe for world Jewry by safeguarding Washington’s full-spectrum dominance in Latin America.
In this transnational criminal enterprise, the roles are clearly defined. And Reich’s role is to ensure that Empire Judaica’s strategic footholds in Latin America remain firmly intact.
A recent article in The Guardian, “Change course now: humanity has missed 1.5C climate target, says UN head,” claims that the planet is in grave danger of passing climate “tipping points,” as it is now inevitable that 1.5°C warming will be breached. Although 1.5℃ of warming may be locked in if not already surpassed, the claim that it signifies a dangerous milestone is false. Not only is the tipping points narrative bunk, but there is no evidence that 1.5°C warming is any particular threat. The purported temperature threshhold was chosen arbitrarily and for political reasons rather than scientific ones.
The Guardian’s story focuses on comments made by United Nations Secretary General António Guterres, who in advance of the COP30 climate summit in Brazil, warned that it is “inevitable” that 1.5°C of warming will be breached, and it will result in “devastating consequences” for the planet. The Guardian says Guterres “urged the leaders who will gather in the Brazilian rainforest city of Belém to realize that the longer they delay cutting emissions, the greater the danger of passing catastrophic “tipping points” in the Amazon, the Arctic, and the oceans.”
There is no scientific basis for any so-called tipping points, and claiming otherwise is just fearmongering for political gain.
Beginning with the Amazon rainforest, the location of the next climate summit in November, Guterres reportedly warned that it could become a “savannah,” or a dry grassland. There is no evidence for this absurd claim. Like Guterres’ previous “boiling oceans” comment, it is purely fanciful hyperbole lacking any basis in fact. Guterres is referencing a period of drought suffered by parts of the Amazon basin in recent years, but that drought has not been historically unusual, and the recent localized areas of drought have not been more severe than previous drought periods. As discussed in the Climate Realism post “Media Outlets Continue Spreading False Amazon “Record Drought” Claims,” the Amazon has experienced periods of heavy rain and extended drought in the past that were worse than those we see now. Historic records do not show any worsening of drought in the Amazon. The threat that impacts tree cover is deforestation and clear cutting, not climate change.
The Arctic is also not approaching any dangerous tipping point. Should warming continue, ice extent will likely shrink, but it has not been happening at nearly as fast a rate as alarmists claim. Arctic sea ice extent has been stable since about 2010, indicating a new ice extent regime, and there is no telling how long that will last. If the past is any guide, sea ice might begin expanding again, as it has waxed and waned historically.
Finally, the ocean tipping point Guterres is referring to is the claim that coral reefs will die out as a result of ocean pH changes and higher temperatures, but again, science and paleo-history shows that corals are resilient to changes that are much more extreme than the modest warming of recent decades. As discussed repeatedly at Climate Realism, the world’s oceans are not at risk of becoming acidic and coral reefs are expanding their range and setting records for growth.
It is true that the “1.5°C threshold” is likely to be passed. But that does not mean anything, certainly nothing catastrophic. The 1.5°C warming limit was already passed in 2024 because of the El Niño conditions—with no cataclysm. This should not be of concern to anyone, because that limit is not a scientifically established value. The Guardian fearmongered about it in the past, which Climate Realism addressed here, and seems to have learned nothing. The 1.5°C number was arbitrary; established by an 11 member German political advisory board containing only one meteorologist. It is not a hard scientific threshold the way the boiling point of water is, though alarmists inappropriately treat it that way.
Guterres’ comments are not based on science, data, or even history. He is simply attempting to worry the public, with The Guardian’s complicity, in order to gain political leverage for negotiations at COP 30 even as a growing number of countries are downplaying climate concerns in the realistic assessment that other issues are more pressing and fossil fuels, for now, remain vital to prosperity.
There is much of significance happening in Ukraine right now that is being reported either lightly or not at all by the mainstream Western media in an apparent attempt to harmonize their reporting with Kiev’s narrative in order to keep hopes high and economic and military support flowing.
Though the mainstream media has begun to report on the Russian encirclement of the Donetsk city of Pokrovsk, it is failing to report on how dire and how ominous the situation is. The reporting suggests that the battlefield situation is being stabilized, that the Russian losses are enormous, and that the loss of Pokrovsk would be strategically insignificant. None of those claims are true.
Russia’s chief of staff, General Valery Gerasimov, reported to Russian President Vladimir Putin that the Russian armed forces are “advancing along converging axes” and “have completed the encirclement of the enemy” in Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad.” His Ukrainian counterpart, Oleksandr Syrskii, said the report does “not correspond to reality.” Ukrainian officials “insist,” The New York Timesreports, “that special units are clearing Russians out of the city.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky boasted that “in Pokrovsk, we continue to destroy the occupier.”
Though the Ukrainian armed forces may have temporarily pushed the Russian forces partially back, the Russian forces have retaken a large part of Pokrovsk and now control about 80% of it. The pincers that are steadily closing around Pokrovsk are now just a kilometer apart, a gap that is difficult and dangerous for Ukraine’s best paratroopers to escape through. Though Ukraine continues to deny the encroaching encirclement, admitting only that the situation is “difficult,” the narrative won’t change the reality on the battlefield. Ukraine’s Euromaidan Presssays that Pokrovsk now “risks becoming a graveyard for Ukraine’s finest.” The Kyiv Independentassesses that “saving the city from falling in the short term looks to be a daunting, and likely impossible task.”
The Western media also reports that Russia’s gains are coming at a greater loss. The Times reports that “Russia’s incremental advances have come at an immense cost. While Ukraine wants to hold on to Pokrovsk, military commanders argue that the large losses it is inflicting on the Kremlin’s troops there will hurt the Russian war effort more broadly.”
But the Times exaggerates Russia’s losses in the war more broadly by at least three times and shrinks Ukraine’s losses by the same amount. As far as Pokrovsk goes, analysts have noted that the attrition of Ukraine’s forces in the war have led to a situation in Pokrovsk where Russia’s forces are taking the fortified city without huge losses in troops or equipment.
And, according to the Times, “the military significance of losing Pokrovsk may be relatively small for Ukraine.” But the loss of Pokrovsk means not only the loss of a critical strategic hub for supplying Ukrainian forces in the east, but also the possible loss of control of Ukraine’s defensive line of linked fortification in Donetsk.
Perhaps even more lacking in Western reporting of the battlefield is that a number of military analysts have pointed out that singular focus on Pokrovsk misses the larger picture that that the Russian armed forces have entered or partially encircled several cities in Donetsk, threatening a larger encirclement of the area, and that for the first year in the war, the Ukrainian armed forces have been unable to launch any kind of offensive in 2025. Those two battlefield realities combine to create a larger context that is more ominous still. It suggests that Russia’s war of attrition has depleted Ukrainian troops to the point that they are no longer able to attack Russia or to defend themselves.
Ukraine’s desperate situation on the battlefield has led to two more underreported events. The first was the simultaneous explosions at oil refineries in Hungary and Romania. The fact that both refineries process Russian crude oil and that Ukraine and Europe seem to have shifted their strategy from defeating Russia on the battlefield to cutting off Russia’s oil revenue to drive them to the negotiating table, have led to speculation that Ukraine was behind the two acts of sabotage.
Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said recently that the explosion at Hungary’s oil refinery could have been caused by an “external attack.” The external actor is unlikely to be Russia. They lack the motivation to sabotage their own customers at a time when U.S. sanctions are attempting to strangle its exports of oil. That seems to leave, as a consensus among analysts suggests, Ukraine or its partners. Ukraine has offered no comment on the explosions, and the silence of the Western media adds to the suspicion. It is alarming that the mainstream media has not a word to say about seemingly coordinated attacks on two European countries that could have enormous consequences in the post Ukraine war world.
Ukraine’s desperation has also led to an underreported crisis at home. Ukraine is losing troops, not only to Russian attacks on the battlefield, but to desertion. As part of the solution, Ukraine has turned to forced mobilization in which men are abducted, often aggressively, against their will and bussed off to recruitment centers. From there, they find themselves on the battlefield with very little training.
Once on the front, troops have deserted in the thousands. Though little reported in the mainstream media, in the first months of 2025 alone, more than 110,000 Ukrainian soldiers deserted. As many as 20% of Ukraine’s armed forces have deserted. Since the war began, the number of desertions may be as high as 200,000, and it is getting worse by the month.
The Western media seems to be complicit in harmonizing with Kiev’s misleading message in order to keep Western morale up and Western arms flowing. But, though the narrative may be strong enough to mislead a public that trusts its newspapers, it will not be strong enough to alter reality. Ukraine is turning to more desperate measures in an attempt to address a dire situation on the battlefield in which they no longer have the manpower to go on the offensive nor to defend themselves and in which troops are deserting as fast as they are being killed.
On Monday, November 3, a group of Israeli soldiers stood outside the Supreme Court in West Jerusalem wearing black masks. They weren’t there to apologize; they were there to defend themselves.
The soldiers, accused of torturing and raping a Palestinian detainee at the notorious Sde Teiman prison, demanded “gratitude” for their actions.
“Instead of appreciation, we received accusations,” one said defiantly. Israeli media covered the scene while Western outlets mostly ignored it.
The same soldiers are part of a criminal case that Israeli prosecutors reluctantly opened in 2024 after video evidence surfaced showing Palestinian detainees stripped, beaten, and sexually assaulted at Sde Teiman.
One Palestinian man was hospitalized with seven broken ribs and a rectal tear, injuries consistent with violent sexual abuse.
The Times of Israelreported the indictment of five reservists for “severe abuse,” while other sources cited evidence of sodomy inside the facility.
Yet, in Western coverage, the word rape almost never appeared. Headlines spoke of “abuse” or “mistreatment,” as though sexual torture were a matter of workplace misconduct.
Contrast this silence with the wall-to-wall coverage of October 7, when Israel accused Hamas fighters of “mass rape.” Those claims, still unproven, became the moral foundation of Israel’s campaign of annihilation in Gaza.
In his latest interview with American journalist Candace Owens, political scientist Norman Finkelstein called the Israeli allegations “genocidal atrocity propaganda.”
After examining more than 5,000 photographs and fifty hours of footage from that day, Finkelstein said he found “not a single shred of evidence of even one rape.” Yet those unverified stories, repeated endlessly by Western outlets, were enough to cast an entire population as subhuman and to legitimize the killing of more than 68,000 Palestinians.
In December 2023, the New York Times published a sprawling investigation titled “Screams Without Words: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.”
The article claimed Hamas fighters had systematically raped Israeli women during the attack. Its pages were filled with graphic descriptions and lurid imagery. The story relied on anonymous witnesses, unverified videos, and second-hand testimony, yet it was presented as conclusive evidence of mass rape.
Within days, it shaped international discourse. Then US President Joe Biden, European leaders, and prominent feminists invoked the Times’ story to condemn Hamas and morally justify Israel’s “retaliation”.
But when journalists and scholars began checking the evidence, the story fell apart. Forensic experts found no physical proof of rape. Several of the supposed witnesses cited by the Times contradicted one another or were later discredited.
In April 2024, more than 50 journalism professors sent a public letter demanding an independent review of the article’s sourcing and editorial process. The Washington Postreported internal dissent within the Times newsroom itself, where reporters said the piece had been “rushed” to meet political expectations.
Meanwhile, the Sde Teiman scandal, an Israeli atrocity supported by video evidence, medical reports, and judicial proceedings, has never received a fraction of the attention that the Times story did. This imbalance is not merely linguistic. It is structural, reflecting the hierarchy of human worth built into Western coverage of the war.
This is how “atrocity propaganda” works. It does not require lies to function, only selective truth. By repeating unverified claims of Hamas rape while downplaying verified Israeli sexual crimes, Western media transformed journalism into a weapon of war.
Romana Rubeo is an Italian writer and the managing editor of The Palestine Chronicle. Her articles appeared in many online newspapers and academic journals. She holds a Master’s Degree in Foreign Languages and Literature and specializes in audio-visual and journalism translation.
Multiple mainstream media outlets published stories this week uncritically publicizing the claims of a climate change interest group, Climate Central (CC). According to CC, climate change has caused higher weather disaster costs in the United States this year than ever in history – or at least since 1980, which is as far as the records CC uses go back. These claims are false. While the costs of extreme weather events and wildfires were high in early 2025, there are no trends that indicate climate change is responsible. Rather, higher populations, increased development in disaster prone areas, poor water management, and human evil in the form of arson, were the cause of the abnormally high disaster costs.
The tenor of The Guardian, NBC, and other outlets covering CC’s disaster cost report was nearly universal. Climate change resulted in worse weather disasters and higher costs in early 2025 than ever before, a fact that would have been missed absent CC’s work since President Donald Trump cut funding for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration program, which has previously monitored such costs.
Per The Guardian :
The first half of 2025 was the costliest on record for major disasters in the US, driven by huge wildfires in Los Angeles and storms that battered much of the rest of the country, according to a climate non-profit that has resurrected work axed by Donald Trump’s administration that tracked the biggest disasters.
In the first six months of this year, 14 separate weather-related disasters that each caused at least $1bn in damage hit the US, the Climate Central group has calculated. In total, these events cost $101bn in damages – lost homes, businesses, highways and other infrastructure – a toll higher than any other first half of a year since records on this began in 1980.
As NBC News wrote:
The first half of this year was the costliest ever recorded for weather and climate disasters in the United States, according to an analysis published Wednesday by the nonprofit organization Climate Central.
It is information that the public might never have learned: This spring, the Trump administration cut the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration program that had tracked weather events that caused at least $1 billion in damage. The researcher who led that work, Adam Smith, left NOAA over the decision.
To be clear, Climate Central is not an objective authority on the causes and consequences of climate change, or a neutral party regarding proposed solutions. Rather, it was created and exists solely to produce and promote material blaming human activities for causing climate change resulting in catastrophic consequences that threaten human life, and to promote government enforced solutions that limit fossil fuel use.
Leaving aside the motives of the organization that produced the report, the news coverage of the report was inaccurate from the start. The stories ignore the history of natural disasters in the regions that have been impacted this year, the demographic changes that have resulted in the higher costs, and, most importantly, the lack of any long-term discernable changes in weather patterns and the incidences and severity of extreme weather events for the areas affected.
Looking at where the disasters occurred in the first half of this year, from CC’s own tracking we find the weather events were tornadoes that occurred during typical tornado season stretching from Texas through the plains to the upper mid-west. This area of the country is commonly referred to as “tornado alley” because such events are so common there during the spring and early summer. So, nothing unusual there. What critically undermines the CC report and the media’s suggestion that the rising cost of tornadoes is due to climate change is the fact, as explored in Climate Realism, here, here, and here, for example, that neither the number, frequency, nor severity of tornadoes has increased as the Earth has slightly warmed.
Other events include flooding in areas of the country historically known for spring flooding as a result of snowmelt and severe spring snowstorms – many of the areas are popular riverfront towns or communities. Climate Realism has repeatedly debunked media claims that flooding is getting worse – data show it isn’t. If flooding is not becoming more frequent or severe, climate change can’t be causing higher costs related to flooding.
Finally, more than 60 percent of the $101 billion disaster costs that CC says resulted from climate change altered weather events are attributable to just a single event: the January 2025 wildfires that decimated a large swath of Los Angeles. The Los Angeles fires were horrific, of a kind not experienced there in recent history, but not unusual historically. The huge damage was a result of a combination of factors, good seasonal rainfall in recent years creating lush natural growth combined with and regular lawn and tree watering in wealthy enclaves, followed by a severe drought, creating conditions for a wildfire, and strong Santa Anna winds to drive a fire quickly across the landscape once started (once again a natural feature of the area). With these conditions, all that was needed was a spark, which a perverse arsonist provided. Once the fire started, winds drove it quickly across a tinder dry landscape and firefighters found a shortage of water in reservoirs as a result of political decisions made by the state government.
Los Angeles is not warmer than is was in the 1950s and precipitation has actually increased slightly in the region since 1895. Despite climate alarmists and advantage seeking, virtue signaling Democratic politicians attempting to blame climate change for the fire and its severity, the evidence indicates it had nothing to do with it.
If climate conditions haven’t change appreciably across the United States, in the sense that the more extreme weather patterns are emerging, the question is, why have costs related to weather disasters gone up so much in nominal dollars? Keep in mind that in inflation adjusted dollars as a percentage of GDP, the costs of natural disasters have fallen over time. (see the figure, below)
As should be obvious to any honest observer exercising the least bit of common sense, the reason for rising disaster costs is clear, the expanding bullseye effect. As Climate Realism has explored in dozens of articles previously, with more people moving into ecologically/climatically desirable locations, locations prone to natural disasters, erecting more homes, businesses, and related structures and infrastructure, property has gone up dramatically in value overtime. When a disaster like a wildfire (in this case an arson started wildfire) strikes, more people and property is impacted and related costs are higher. Climate Realism discussed this very point in articles linked, here, here, and here, to take but a few examples. Quite simply, when a hurricane hits Miami or Galveston now, there are more buildings and structures to destroy at those locations than there was 100 years ago.
One can acknowledge that CC is right, natural disasters are imposing higher costs in nominal dollars now than they did in the past, without jumping to the completely unfounded claim that climate change is the cause. Legitimate journalists and honest news outlets, as NBC News and The Guardian purport to be, should check their facts before parroting the false rantings of a climate lobbing group as the truth. Misleading, false alarm stories like these are perhaps why trust in the media is low and falling.
A leading British “PR consultancy” working for the Israeli regime’s top arms producer has been found culpable of fabricating and planting a false media narrative linking Palestine Action to Iran, in what appears to be a coordinated effort to justify the group’s eventual proscription.
According to British news magazine Private Eye, a “trusted witness” said Georgia Pickering, head of the London-based PR firm CMS Strategic, which represents Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems, boasted about planting a story in The Times alleging that the Islamic Republic was bankrolling the direct-action network.
The story appeared just days before the UK government moved to outlaw Palestine Action under its “terrorism” legislation in July.
The fabricated report, which claimed that the Home Office was probing Tehran’s alleged financial ties to the group, was later recycled by The Daily Mail and the GB News channel, amplifying suspicions and pressure against the movement.
However, when Private Eye reached out to the Home Office, officials said they did not recognize the claims, effectively disowning the narrative that had dominated headlines.
A spokesperson for Palestine Action dismissed the entire affair as “baseless” and “ridiculous”, while CMS Strategic publicly denied involvement in the article, despite Pickering’s private admission.
Further revelations highlighted that the smear campaign did not emerge in isolation.
Just two days before the story broke, the pro-Israeli lobby group We Believe in Israel claimed on social media that Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) was the “darker puppeteer” behind Palestine Action, despite offering no proof beyond vague references to “similar slogans.”
In the months leading up to the group’s ban, the same lobby orchestrated a “multi-front” campaign pushing for Palestine Action’s proscription, issuing two reports whose language was later echoed almost verbatim by Yvette Cooper, the then–home secretary, in her official statement outlawing the movement.
For years, Palestine Action has led a relentless grassroots campaign against Elbit Systems, targeting its factories and offices for producing weapons used by the Israeli regime in its assaults on Palestinians, including its war of genocide on the Gaza Strip that began in October 2023.
A recent article in The Hill, “Climate change is not a ‘con job’,” claims that catastrophic, human-caused climate change is killing reefs via ocean heatwaves. This claim is false. In reality, corals have existed for millions of years, through warmer and colder periods, and in the recent past, coral reefs have recovered from bleaching events and even die-offs, proving to species to be adaptive and resilient in the face of climate change.
The Hill article, from Rebecca Vega Thurber, the director of the UC Santa Barbara Marine Science Institute, is framed by Thurber’s annoyance that President Donald Trump says climate change is a “con job.” She claims her personal research experience refutes his comment.
Thurber explains that pollution from fertilizer runoff can kill corals, which is true, but goes on to assert that “every result we have collected, in every one of these well intentioned and carefully designed experiments, was waylaid by the increasingly frequent and severe heat waves that have arisen in the last decades.” She says their efforts to mitigate pollution were “overwhelmed by high water temperatures driven by climate change or worse, climate change killed our whole experiment.”
Thurber claims marine heatwaves in the French South Pacific hampered her work by “transform[ing] these normally bountiful reefs from habitats where there was once 60 percent of the seafloor covered with healthy corals to barren plains with less than 1 percent live coral.”
In point of fact, one long-term study from 2019 showed that rather than a “barren plain” French Polynesian reefs have an “outstanding rate of coral recovery, with a systematic return to pre-disturbance state within only 5 to 10 years.”
A second study from 2024, published in Nature, sought to understand why reefs bounced back so readily after major heat waves, concluding that:
Over the past three decades, there have been five main warming events that have caused mass bleaching around Moorea and Tahiti, in 1994, 2002, 2007, 2016, and 2019. Despite bleaching levels up to 100% for some coral species, reefs experienced as high as ~76% recovery following each event. […]
It is currently unknown what controls the ability of coral coverage to recover quickly at these locations. It has been suggested that reefs may develop an increased tolerance to higher SSTs following each bleaching event, and that the increased resilience would allow for a shorter recovery period with less die-off under subsequent SST extremes.
In short, the scientific literature does not support Thurber’s contention in The Hill that coral reefs are dying off in vast numbers. Interestingly, just a few years ago The Hillpublished an article with a different tone, discussing the fact that coral reefs were thriving “despite warming seas,” but the outlet seems to have forgotten this.
What Thurber and The Hill also neglected to mention was that recent mass die offs did not just coincide with heatwaves alone. Rather a spate of tropical cyclones and crown of thorns starfish outbreaks occurred over the same period resulting in multiple coral colony declines. Multiple stressors are harder on a species than any of those dangers would be alone.
Thurber mentions that Australian reefs are another part of her area of research, but she does not mention that 2024 was the third year in a row where the Great Barrier Reef had record breaking coral coverage.
Unfortunately, close study of reef die backs barely existed in the early parts of the 20th century and before, so short term records like single-event tied die-offs do not stretch into the pre-industrial period for comparison. As a result it is all too easy for alarmists to assert, for example, that marine heatwaves are unprecedented when there are only a few decades of satellite data to work from. Longer term studies, and a knowledge of how coral reefs around the world are built over time, show, in fact, that coral death is part of the reef construction process.
Coral reefs have survived much hotter periods than today, like the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum which was 5-8°C hotter, as well as much colder glacial periods. One reason for this is that coral organisms are not immobile. Even if particular regions became too hot, which is highly unlikely in our lifetimes, corals could just migrate poleward, as research suggests they did in the past. Change like that might be uncomfortable for narrowly-focused researchers, but it is part of the Earth’s history.
The Hill did a disservice to its readers by publishing this article which served no other purpose than to frighten readers into ignoring Trump’s important point, that bad actors (particularly at the United Nations, where he made the comments) are using climate alarm to promote harmful leftist-favoring policies and enrich themselves. I am sure that Thurber is a “true believer” in the catastrophic warming narrative, but it does not help her case when essential facts are left out of the argument and when the multiple sources of data that do exist contradict her claims.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz is misleading the public about a drone threat allegedly posed by Russia, Sahra Wagenknecht, the leader of the left-wing BSW party, has said. The chancellor did not hesitate to link recent unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) sightings across Germany to Moscow even though he had no evidence, she told the broadcaster ZDF on Thursday.
According to Wagenknecht, Merz was blowing the issue out of proportion, with the German media unquestioningly adopting his point of view, even though evidence pointed in the other direction.
“Mr. Merz goes on TV… and lies,” she said, adding that the chancellor made his statements after some of the incidents had either been proven to have no connection to Russia or turned out to have never happened at all. “It’s simply a vague suspicion, which has been largely refuted, and then discussed by the chancellor on public television.”
She was referring to the chancellor’s interview with the German broadcaster ARD earlier this month, when he said that “our suspicion is that Russia is behind most of these drone launches” and called the UAVs a “serious threat to our security.”
The interview came just days after the German police said that a drone incident at Frankfurt airport was caused by a local UAV enthusiast. Claims of drone sightings near a military base in northern Germany in early October were also refuted by the Bundeswehr, which stated that “there were no registered drone overflights” in the area, “contrary to the media reports.”
Several drone sightings were reported over critical German infrastructure earlier this month. One such incident led to dozens of canceled flights at Munich airport. The developments prompted some officials, including Merz, to claim the drone flights had been orchestrated by Moscow.
Moscow has repeatedly denied any connection to the incidents. Berlin has “no reasons” to blame Moscow for the recent drone sightings, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in early October, commenting on Merz’s interview with ARD. “Europe is full of politicians who tend to blame Russia for everything,” he said at the time, calling the accusations “baseless.”
In retrospect it can be seen that the 1967 war, the Six Days War, was the turning point in the relationship between the Zionist state of Israel and the Jews of the world (the majority of Jews who prefer to live not in Israel but as citizens of many other nations). Until the 1967 war, and with the exception of a minority of who were politically active, most non-Israeli Jews did not have – how can I put it? – a great empathy with Zionism’s child. Israel was there and, in the sub-consciousness, a refuge of last resort; but the Jewish nationalism it represented had not generated the overtly enthusiastic support of the Jews of the world. The Jews of Israel were in their chosen place and the Jews of the world were in their chosen places. There was not, so to speak, a great feeling of togetherness. At a point David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding father and first prime minister, was so disillusioned by the indifference of world Jewry that he went public with his criticism – not enough Jews were coming to live in Israel.
So how and why did the 1967 war transform the relationship between the Jews of the world and Israel? … continue
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