The Western media will continue to spread “fake news” aimed at derailing a summit between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his US counterpart, Donald Trump, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto has warned.
Several outlets reported on Tuesday, citing unnamed White House officials, that plans for the meeting in the Hungarian capital had been put “on hold.”
Responding to the claims, Szijjarto took to X to warn that from the moment the meeting was announced following a phone call between Putin and Trump last week, “it was obvious that many would do everything possible to stop it from happening.”
“The pro-war political elite and their media always behave this way before events that could prove decisive between war and peace,” he added.
According to the foreign minister, it will be the same in the run-up to the talks in Budapest. “Until the summit actually takes place, expect a wave of leaks, fake news, and statements claiming that it will not happen,” Szijjarto said.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov had earlier called the claims “infodumps,” intended to disrupt diplomatic progress on settling the Ukraine conflict. “EU and NATO countries are seeking to torpedo everything,” he said.
EU officials have publicly claimed that they would welcome another Putin-Trump meeting. However, El Pais has reported that behind closed doors, Brussels – which continues to support Ukraine and urge increased pressure on Russia – views the summit as a “political nightmare.”
On Tuesday, the Financial Times cited an unnamed EU diplomat as saying “no one likes it,” and that “we are all grinning through our teeth whilst saying this is fine.”
In the same article, the FT claimed that the talks in the Hungarian capital have been “canceled,” and that a White House official has said there are no plans for a Putin-Trump summit “in the immediate future.”
Russian presidential aide Kirill Dmitriev rejected the report, accusing the FT of “twisting” the comments by its source. “Preparations continue” for the Budapest summit, he wrote on X.
October 22, 2025
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | European Union, Financial Times |
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Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has hit back at Poland’s Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski over his “baseless claims and meddlesome remarks” against the Islamic Republic.
Araghchi made the comments in Polish on X, one day after Sikorski alleged that Iran was selling drones to Russia for use in the Ukraine war.
The top Iranian diplomat said that in an earlier X post, he had invited Sikorski to a substantive dialogue and exchange of documents to clarify facts following the display of a drone in the British Parliament, falsely and maliciously attributed to Iran.
“Avoiding responses, repeating baseless claims, and making meddlesome remarks will not solve the problem,” he added.
Araghchi also referred to Iran’s hospitality towards the Poles during the hard times of World War II, with the country providing shelter to over 100,000 Polish people and helping them form their own army.
“The friendship between the people of Iran and Poland was proven in challenging times, and it is our duty to protect this historical and cultural heritage,” he said.
He said the Iranian nation traces its roots to a glorious and significant past and that it will build its future on the path of progress and prosperity.
On October 14, Sikorski participated in an anti-Iran presentation at the UK Parliament in cooperation with a US-Israeli-affiliated group, displaying the wreckage of what they claimed to be an Iranian-made drone used by Russia in its war in Ukraine.
Iran summoned Poland’s chargé d’affaires in Tehran to protest Sikorski’s involvement in the anti-Iran event.
Araghchi also took to X to say that the “pathetic show” was staged by the Israel lobby and its supporters.
He said certain actors opposed to friendly Iran-Europe relations are creating fabricated narratives inconsistent with the long-standing ties between the two sides, including between Tehran and Warsaw.
Both Iran and Russia have repeatedly rejected allegations that Tehran supplied Moscow with drones, ballistic missiles, and related technology for use in the military campaign in Ukraine.
Russia has repeatedly warned against the flow of Western weapons to Ukraine, saying it prolongs the conflict.
October 21, 2025
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Iran, Israel, Poland |
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In the article, “Climate change and pollution threaten Europe’s resources, EU warns,” Reuters asserts that climate change poses a “direct threat” to Europe’s natural resources, citing an EU environment agency report, and warns of worsening droughts and extreme weather. These claims are patently false. History shows far worse droughts in the past with no appreciable trend of other types of extreme weather events becoming more common or severe. Europe’s resource problems are caused by humans, stemming from overuse and poor management, just not from human-caused climate change.
The article declares that “Europe is the world’s fastest-warming continent and is experiencing worsening droughts and other extreme weather events.” It further states that more than 80 percent of protected habitats are in poor condition, blaming climate change and pollution.
“The window for meaningful action is narrowing, and the consequences of delay are becoming more tangible,” European Environment Agency executive director Leena Yla-Mononen told Reuters. “We are approaching tipping points – not only in ecosystems, but also in the social and economic systems that underpin our societies.”
The is political rhetoric couched in weak science.
The reality is far more mundane. The European Environment Agency’s own data show that water stress is primarily linked to intensive agriculture, industrial demand, and population growth. As the “Review of National Water Allocation Policies in Six European Countries” documents, many European countries continue to over-allocate water rights, creating artificial scarcity even in years with average rainfall. This is a governance problem, not a climate one. Similarly, biodiversity decline across Europe is overwhelmingly the result of land use change, habitat fragmentation, and invasive species—not a few tenths of a degree of warming over the last few decades.
When it comes to extreme weather, Reuters’ claims are directly contradicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) AR6 report which notes there is little to no attribution of many types of severe weather to climate change. As Climate at a Glance: Extreme Weather summarizes, data do not support claims that extreme weather events are becoming more frequent or severe worldwide.
Further, Europe’s worst droughts occurred long before today’s modest warming. The megadrought of 1540 lasted an entire year, with contemporaneous records describing riverbeds across central Europe running dry, widespread crop failure, and thousands of deaths. More recent severe droughts struck in the 1920s and 1940s, periods that cannot be blamed on modern greenhouse gas emissions. The paper “The 1921 European drought: impacts, reconstruction and drivers” describes the 1921 European drought as “the most severe and most widespread drought in Europe since the start of the 20th century.
In “A drought climatology for Europe,” decadal trends show “greater pan-European drought incidence in the 1940s, early 1950s … and lesser drought incidence in the 1910s, 1930s” over the 20th century.
And there are many more worse droughts even further back in the past, before climate change even had a name, as this graph from the 2021 paper Recent European drought extremes beyond Common Era background variability shows:
Compared to these historical drought episodes, recent intermittent summer dry spells are far from extraordinary.
Also, as detailed in multiple Climate Realism posts on the topics neither floods, here and here, for example, nor wildfires, here and here, are more frequent or severe now than they have been in the past.
Even heatwaves are neither more frequent nor deadly now than they have been historically, with deaths from temperatures declining.
Europe’s actual environmental challenges—such as nutrient pollution in rivers, overfishing, and urban sprawl—require pragmatic policy solutions, not grandiose climate pledges. By conflating resource depletion with climate change and exaggerating extreme weather risks, Reuters has misled its audience. The problems it describes are not new, not worsening because of climate change, and not solvable by CO₂ reductions. They are solvable by better governance, better planning, and better science. Once again, journalism has been sacrificed to climate alarmism.
October 13, 2025
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Environmentalism, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | European Union |
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Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has rejected rumors that former Syrian Bashar Assad has been poisoned, saying that Assad and his family are safe in Moscow and have been living there without any problems since being granted asylum.
Earlier this month, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) cited an anonymous source as claiming that Assad had been discharged from a hospital in Moscow Region after a supposed poisoning attempt in September. The rumor has since been widely circulated by both Western and Russian media outlets.
SOHR consists of a single individual – Rami Abdulrahman – who runs the organization from his home in Coventry, England, which also functions as a clothing shop. SOHR’s reports on the war in Syria have been cited by Western governments and media, although it has consistently faced accusations of anti-Assad bias and sympathy toward armed opposition groups.
Lavrov stressed that Assad “has no problem living in our capital” and that “no poisonings have occurred.” “If such rumors appear, I leave them to the conscience of those who spread them,” he said.
The minister added that Russia had provided asylum to Assad and his family “for purely humanitarian reasons,” noting that they had faced threats of physical harm after last year’s change of power in Damascus.
Lavrov drew parallels with the 2011 conflict in Libya, recalling Muammar Gaddafi’s public killing which was widely broadcast on television – an event that the Russian foreign minister said “delighted Hillary Clinton, who watched his physical annihilation live and clapped her hands.”
Assad, a longtime Russian ally, was overthrown last December when forces led by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) seized Damascus. The situation in Syria has remained unstable since, with clashes between Islamist factions and government units under the new leadership.
Russia has maintained its military presence at the Khmeimim Airbase and Tartus naval facility, and says it plans to repurpose them for humanitarian operations in coordination with the Syrian authorities.
October 13, 2025
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Hillary Clinton, SOHR |
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By Sam Carlen & Iain Carlos | Mint Press News | July 28, 2025
The Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran (GAMAAN), an influential Dutch polling group cited by the New York Times, U.S. State Department, and U.K. government, claims to capture the true views of everyday Iranians through unconventional online surveys.
GAMAAN calls itself an “independent” research foundation, a label echoed by news outlets and think tanks covering the group’s headline-grabbing findings, which portray the Iranian public as far more secular and anti-government than data from organizations such as Gallup and Pew Research suggest. But GAMAAN’s extensive links to U.S.-funded organizations, many of which advocate for regime change in Iran, and its flawed methodology, have raised serious questions about its credibility and impact on Western understanding of Iran.
“[T]hey know what they think, and they want to use the language of social science to demonstrate that those claims are actually true. And of course, that’s a problem,” said Daniel Tavana, an assistant professor of political science at Penn State who was a principal investigator for Princeton’s Iran Social Survey.
“[T]hey’re just ideological,” Tavana said.
They are very opposed to the regime, want to embarrass the regime in whatever way they can, and are happy to say … whatever they think will most effectively do that at any given point in time, regardless of whether or not they have evidence for it.”
GAMAAN’s role in anti-government discourse surrounding Iran has taken on heightened significance against the backdrop of escalating tensions between Israel and Iran, which culminated in a historic outbreak of hostilities last month.
Ostensibly motivated by concerns over Iran’s nuclear program, the conflict began with an Israeli surprise attack on June 13, to which Iran responded with a barrage of missiles and drones, beginning a days-long cycle of back-and-forth attacks between the two sides.
The U.S. entered the war on June 22, conducting airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, and Iran responded with attacks on U.S. military bases in Qatar. On June 24, a shaky U.S.-brokered ceasefire took hold, and despite initial violations by both Israel and Iran, active hostilities gradually came to a halt.
GAMAAN’s poll results, which portray the Iranian citizenry as far more hostile to their government than other surveys, are often cited by advocates for regime change. The question of Iranians’ support (or lack thereof) for the Islamic Republic was particularly relevant during the hostilities, when doubts arose about the government’s survival, and the prospect of installing the Shah’s son was granted legitimacy by some media outlets.
While Iranian state-owned media have discussed some of GAMAAN’s ties to Western-funded organizations and regime change proponents, as well as the limitations of its survey methods, Noir News is the first to report the full scope of GAMAAN’s numerous connections with U.S. government-funded regime change operatives and the severity of its methodological issues.
Given GAMAAN’s rapid rise to prominence, with its findings often cited by Western governments and prestigious news outlets, the group’s numerous ties to U.S. government-funded supporters of regime change in Iran, and the organization’s dubious survey methods, warrant scrutiny, especially given the anti-Islamic Republic trend of its survey results (with one survey finding 81% of respondents opposed the Islamic Republic), which are used by critics as a cudgel against Iran’s government.
GAMAAN founders Pooyan Tamimi Arab, an assistant professor of religious studies at Utrecht University, and Ammar Maleki, an assistant professor of comparative politics at Tilburg University, are themselves outspoken critics of the Iranian government. Maleki refers to himself as a “pro-democracy activist” and is a vociferous critic of the Islamic Republic and proponent of regime change. Neither responded to requests for comment.
Indeed, GAMAAN has relied on U.S. government-funded VPN and anti-censorship software providers like Psiphon to disseminate its surveys; collaborated with the USAID-funded, pro-regime change Tony Blair Institute; and collaborated with and received funding from historian Ladan Boroumand, co-founder of the Iranian regime-critical Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran, which is in turn supported by the U.S. government-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
Likewise, for a February 2023 report on Iranians’ attitudes toward the anti-government protests, GAMAAN enlisted the help of U.S. government-linked Iran International and U.S. government-funded Voice of America Persian in circulating survey questions.
Founded in 2019, the logic behind GAMAAN’s founding was that, in the context of state repression, traditional survey approaches based on random sampling and in-person or telephone interviews fail to capture the population’s true beliefs regarding sensitive religious and political topics, because “individuals often censor their true views or even actively alter them to avoid scrutiny by authorities,” according to GAMAAN.
Instead, the group distributes its surveys via social media, VPN platforms such as Psiphon, and encrypted messaging platforms like Telegram, allowing respondents to participate anonymously.
Unlike traditional polling based on probability sampling—random selection of respondents and persistent follow-up to minimize non-responsiveness—GAMAAN uses a voluntary, opt-in model. Respondents are not randomly selected from the broader target population of literate Iranians over the age of 19.
Instead, GAMAAN says respondents are reached “through random sampling via the popular Internet censorship circumvention provider Psiphon VPN, as well as ensuing sharing by respondents on social networks (Telegram, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Twitter).”
Prior to its use of VPN platforms like Psiphon for sampling, GAMAAN had exclusively relied on surveys being shared on social media, a method also referred to as “multiple chain-referral sampling,” also known as “snowball sampling.”
To account for methodological issues with non-random sampling inherent to opt-in surveys, GAMAAN tries to circulate its polls across a range of channels “representing radically diverse social layers of society and political perspectives,” and adjusts response data using statistical methods meant to render the final polling data more representative of the target population (literate Iranians 19 years and older with internet access).
At times, the circulation of GAMAAN’s surveys has been aided by social media virality.
Using this unorthodox methodology, GAMAAN’s survey results have often surprised observers and contradicted the findings of long-established pollsters, such as Pew Research and Gallup, which employ conventional face-to-face and telephone polling methods. The group’s 2020 survey on Iranians’ religious beliefs made waves for its findings, which showed less religiosity among the Iranian population than was generally believed (and indicated in prior polling).
Among other surprising results, GAMAAN’s survey found 22% of respondents did not belong to any religion, 9% identified as atheist, and 47% reported “having transitioned from being religious to non-religious.” In contrast, Pew Research reported in 2009 that 99.4% of Iranians are Muslim.
But according to polling experts, GAMAAN’s findings cannot be generalized to the broader Iranian public due to significant bias in who its surveys reach. GAMAAN relies chiefly on the Psiphon VPN platform to circulate its survey questionnaires, with about 66% of respondents in its latest poll participating through the platform, and the remainder reached through Telegram (13.1%), Instagram (8.5%), WhatsApp (4.6%), X (1.5%), and the remaining 6.7% through other undisclosed channels.
According to polling experts, these methods suffer from “coverage bias” in that they fail to reach large segments of the Iranian population, including Iranians who do not use the internet or do not use VPNs or encrypted messaging.
Nor do GAMAAN’s methods account for the fact that Iranians who use Psiphon or come across its surveys through social media are different in important ways from the Iranian population as a whole, to which GAMAAN claims its findings can be generalized.
Indeed, GAMAAN’s survey links are frequently shared by vocal critics of the Iranian government, and demographic data reported by GAMAAN shows respondents are disproportionately urban (93.6% of respondents in its latest survey, vs. about 80% of the total Iranian population), college-educated (70.9% of respondents, compared to 27.7% of literate Iranians 19 years and older, per labor force statistics cited by GAMAAN); and high-income (54% of respondents had a “household monthly income above 13 million Rials,” compared to 40% among the target population, per GAMAAN’s methodology section).
“[F]or that inference that GAMAAN is making to be true, that this sample represents the Iranian population, the adult age population, we would have to assume or believe that Psiphon users are reflective of the Iranian population as a whole, which … just could not possibly be true,” Tavana said.
GAMAAN’s surveys have a high rate of repeat participation (i.e., a large share of respondents to a given survey participated in previous GAMAAN polling), with 26% of respondents in its most recent poll having participated in previous GAMAAN surveys, which GAMAAN interpreted as “indicating that the random sampling method was effective in distributing the questionnaire among a wide range of demographic groups, reaching far beyond networks familiar with GAMAAN.”
“The authors’ claim that this number provides evidence that their methods reach a random sample is a vast misinterpretation,” according to Kevan Harris, an associate professor of sociology at UCLA who was a principal investigator for the Iran Social Survey along with Tavana. “Indeed, it is the opposite. This number, if true, is evidence of how this organization’s methods are reaching a relatively small, interconnected group of people who are predisposed to take their surveys.”
Harris highlighted that, per GAMAAN’s own methodology section in its most recent survey report, 5-11 million Iranians use Psiphon daily (the main source of survey participants), meaning the “refined sample” of 77,216 (which excludes “random or bot-entered responses,” per GAMAAN) constitutes approximately 0.7-1.5% of daily Psiphon users in Iran, yet GAMAAN reported that “26% of respondents had previously participated in GAMAAN’s surveys.”
“When you have a 26% repeat rate from what’s already less than 2% of your potential sample pool of Psiphon users (and less than 0.2% of all adult VPN users), that’s a major red flag about how representative your sample really is,” Harris wrote in an email to Noir.
[I]t shows they’re not really getting a random sample of all Iranians, just likely a small, enthusiastic subset who regularly take their surveys. Indeed, the 26% number, given this relatively large sample size, is telling.”
Sunghee Lee, an Associate Research Professor at the University of Michigan’s Survey Research Center, wrote in an email to Noir that “without further information,” she would agree with Harris’s assessment of the problematic nature of the high repeat-response rate.
“Based on my quick search, the adult population of Iran appears to be around 70 million. The sample of 77K from the June 2024 report accounts for 0.1% of the adult population. This means that, if a true probability sample is used for 77K, you are likely to be sampled 1 out of 1000 studies. The fact that 26% of the sample is a repeat group suggests that the sample is likely to represent a group much narrower in scope than the adult population.”
While GAMAAN purports to use “various balancing methods such as weighting and the sample matching method” to derive a representative sample from its raw survey data, survey experts interviewed by Noir said these methods can’t compensate for the unrepresentative nature of GAMAAN’s underlying data.
“[W]e use weights when we don’t know what the probability is that any given person will enter into a sample, and so we weight certain respondents in our sample more or less if we think that they were more or less likely to be chosen to be on our sample, we don’t have any way to assess that,” Tavana said.
“So what they call weights is actually just refining the sample so that on key demographics, the sample looks more like the Iranian [population]. But it’s not a probability sample to begin with.”
Stanford University social psychologist and survey methodologist Jon Krosnick concurred, writing in an email to Noir : “[T]he phrase ‘matching and weighting’ without disclosing the details also sounds like a snake oil salesman. There have been lots of claims that ‘matching and weighting’ have improved the accuracy of non-probability samples, but lots of published papers have shown that such methods have failed rather than succeeded. I don’t know of a single one showing improvement in accuracy.”
Lee likewise expressed doubt that GAMAAN’s weighting and sample matching adjustments can yield a representative sample: “I am not entirely convinced that a population with less than 30% with college education can be examined by a sample with more than 70% with college education even after the weighting is applied.”
Lee also noted that the Pew Research study GAMAAN links to in its June 2024 survey report when discussing the “raking” weighting method for adjusting online opt-in samples, which used over 30,000 online opt-in survey responses to evaluate weighting procedures and their ability to reduce bias, concluded that “[e]ven the most effective adjustment procedures were unable to remove most of the bias.”
Lee also highlighted that GAMAAN’s “sample is representative only on the dimensions that the study attempted to balance. There are five demographic variables used in ranking: age group, gender, level of education, residential area (urban or rural), and provincial population. Therefore, whether results on the study outcome variables (e.g., expected election turnout) are representative is debatable.”
“The bottom line for me is that abandoning random sampling in Iran or the U.S. leaves a researcher with no basis for generalizing the results of a survey to any population,” Krosnick wrote. “It’s fine to talk about the obtained results, as well as describing the people who participated. But not to generalize.”
According to the survey experts interviewed by Noir, a chief issue with GAMAAN’s approach is the inappropriate generalization of its survey results to the entire Iranian adult population, rather than the (likely meaningfully different) participants in its surveys.
“This doesn’t mean [GAMAAN’s] surveys are useless, but their results should be presented much more cautiously, with clear acknowledgment that they represent opinions of a specific, self-selected subset of internet-using, politically engaged people – not the general population,” Harris wrote in an email to Noir. “This is especially crucial when the surveys cover sensitive political topics that might influence US/European policy or public opinion.”
“I have no doubt in my mind that with the data GAMAAN has, we could make inferences about Psiphon users, and frankly, that would be fascinating to know what Psiphon users think and believe about the Iranian government,” Tavana said.
It’s an incredibly important constituency we could generalize their findings to, and make inferences about, the activist population, maybe even the online population, right? That would be fine, but to say that it’s representative of the whole country … we would have to believe [all] of these things that we know are false. We would have to believe that Psiphon users in particular, but also Twitter and Telegram users, are reflective of their population, and we already have substantial verified information that they are not.”
“GAMAAN tells us to believe that their findings are generalizable to the entire adult population, right? This is invalid,” Tavana said. “That conclusion does not follow from, even if we had their data, even if we knew what procedures they were following, how they were recruiting subjects, and so on, that scientifically does not logically follow from what they are doing.”
Even the central premise of GAMAAN’s approach—that citizens of a country with a repressive, authoritarian state will not give honest answers to questions pertaining to sensitive political or cultural issues when an interviewer is present—is dubious, Krosnick wrote.
“[M]any studies have surprisingly shown that removing interviewers rarely causes responses to change much,” Krosnick wrote. “In general, if a person is going to participate in answering questions, why bother if the person is going to lie – it’s obviously easier just to decline to participate at all from the start or to break off mid-interview.”
GAMAAN has also drawn criticism for a lack of transparency in its methods and, with one exception, a failure to subject its work to the rigor and scrutiny of publishing in peer-reviewed academic journals.
“Because they don’t document carefully enough for scientific standards what they do, none of what they produce is replicable,” Tavana said. “This is compounded by the fact that their data is not publicly available. I cannot go and download their data and analyze it for myself, right?”
The only article based on GAMAAN’s survey work that has been published in a peer-reviewed academic journal to date, “Survey Zoroastrians: Online Religious Identification in the Islamic Republic of Iran,” primarily focuses on a single finding from GAMAAN’s 2020 survey on Iranians’ religious beliefs (which was “financially supported by and carried out in cooperation with Dr. Ladan Boroumand” of the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center, an Islamic Republic-critical organization supported by the U.S. government-funded National Endowment for Democracy) – that 8% of respondents identified as Zoroastrian (a far higher share than reported in previous research).
The paper does not use GAMAAN’s more controversial findings (such as those concerning Iranians’ political beliefs). Moreover, a note appended to the journal article states “[t]he raw data used for this research can be shared with researchers under a confidentiality and collaborative agreement with GAMAAN,” which Tavana characterized as “unusual.”
“Typically, we do not require these kinds of agreements for access to this type of data,” Tavana wrote in an email to Noir. “I have seen it before when the data is proprietary or owned by a private company. But not data that an academic has collected on their own. This means that no one – not the reviewers, the editorial staff, or anyone else – has verified the claims made in the article.”
“[B]ecause we cannot replicate what they do, because their data are not available, we don’t know whether the inferences they are making on that data are valid, and so we have to take them at their word, and there are many reasons why we probably should not take them at their word,” Tavana said.
GAMAAN’s methodological shortcomings may account for substantial differences seen between its findings and those of long-established pollsters using traditional probability sampling.
For instance, in a 2022 survey on Iranians’ political beliefs, GAMAAN reported far lower approval ratings for then-president Ebrahim Raisi compared to those reported by Gallup in a 2021 survey. GAMAAN itself highlighted this divergence (illustrated in the graphic below), but wrote that “both surveys are substantially similar … if Gallup’s results are compared with only the Principlists and Reformists in GAMAAN’s sample” (meaning, responses from more conservative and incrementalist participants in GAMAAN’s survey align with Gallup’s findings across its entire sample).
Figure 13-1 — Maleki, Ammar. 2022. Iranians’ Attitudes Toward Political Systems: A 2022 Survey Report. Published online, gamaan.org: GAMAAN.
GAMAAN’s Ties To US-Funded Regime-Change Orgs
Chief among GAMAAN’s ties to U.S. government-funded groups is the organization’s recent “partnership” with the Tony Blair Institute. GAMAAN “exclusively provided” the U.K. nonprofit with detailed survey data gathered in June 2020 (regarding Iranians’ religious beliefs), and February & December 2022 (regarding political systems and the Mahsa Amini street protests, respectively).
The Tony Blair Institute used GAMAAN’s survey data for a series of articles depicting the Iranian populace as eager for regime change, with one article titled “The People of Iran Are Shouting for Regime Change – But Is the West Listening?”.
Founded by former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair, the Institute has received millions in grants from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), at least some of which were Cooperative Agreement grants “characterized by extended involvement between recipient and agency.”
The Tony Blair Institute is also funded by the U.K.’s Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office (akin to the U.S. State Department), as well as private entities such as the French consulting firm Altai Consulting. Altai boasts the European Commission, USAID, and the French Development Agency as clients.
GAMAAN’s widely-discussed 2020 survey of Iranians’ religious beliefs was “financially supported by and carried out in cooperation with” Dr. Ladan Boroumand, co-founder and research director of the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center, a nonprofit focused on Iranian human rights abuses and critical of Iran’s Islamist government.
Named after her father Abdorrahman Boroumand, an Iranian lawyer and pro-democracy activist who was allegedly assassinated by Islamic Republic agents in 1991, the Center’s ‘Omid’ project documents cases of executions and assassinations in Iran in a searchable electronic database. The organization isn’t shy about supporting regime change, stating that its “goal is to prepare for a peaceful and democratic transition in Iran and build a more just future.”
The Boroumand Center has received substantial funding from the U.S. government-financed National Endowment for Democracy (NED), of which the Boroumand Center is a “partner.”
Ladan Boroumand has held multiple positions at the NED, including serving as a former Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow, researching “secularization in Iran,” a current member of the editorial board for the NED’s Journal of Democracy, as well as a current Research Council Member at the NED’s International Forum for Democratic Studies. She has also served on the Steering Committee of the World Movement for Democracy, of which the NED serves as the “secretariat.”
Ladan Boroumand is also on the advisory committee for the Atlantic Council’s Iran Strategy Project, which convened various experts and former officials “to develop a holistic US policy toward the Islamic Republic of Iran for the next four years.”
The Atlantic Council is an influential international relations think tank with extensive ties to U.S. lawmakers that receives large sums from the U.S. government (with FY 2023 grant obligations totaling over $6 million). The group’s October 2024 Iran Strategy Project report recommends a policy of continued pressure against the Islamic Republic, including through “enhanced support to the Iranian people” with the “long-term goal of supporting the Iranian people’s ability to change their system of government if they so desire.”
Ladan Boroumand was invited, along with her sister Roya Boroumand, to a July 2018 speech by former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at the Reagan Library, amid the Trump administration’s pivot to a hardline posture towards the Islamic Republic. The two sisters likewise joined 12 other Iranian diaspora women in signing an August 2019 open letter calling for a “transition from the Islamic Republic.”
GAMAAN has also consulted with Dr. Shirin Ebadi, an Iranian lawyer and Nobel Peace Prize recipient, who has long worked with the U.S. government and the NED-funded Tavaana, a project of the E-Collaborative for Civic Education (ECCE), founded by staunch opponents of the Islamic Republic, Mariam Memarsadeghi and Akbar Atri.
Tavaana, which describes itself as “Iran’s premier civic education and civil society capacity building initiative,” aimed at ushering in democratic governance. It creates and disseminates anti-government media and information on anti-censorship tools, and has an extensive social media following. Memarsadeghi was also a signatory to the August 2019 open letter calling for a “transition from the Islamic Republic.”
Memarsadeghi is also the founder and director of the Cyrus Forum, an organization that supports ousting the Islamic Republic and works to “reverse engineer an Iranian government that upholds security, the rule of law, and individual liberty.” Ladan Boroumand is one of only two advisors to the Cyrus Forum and was previously listed on Tavaana’s website as a teacher.
Ebadi also appears to have been invited to the U.S. State Department’s 2017 Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI) Implementers’ Conference, organized by the Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, Office of Assistance Coordination (NEA/AC).
Ebadi’s name and role as president of the Centre for Supporters of Human Rights—a U.K. NGO focused on human rights issues in Iran that Ebadi founded—appear on a guest list circulated by the State Department in September 2017.
GAMAAN has also relied on U.S. government-funded virtual private network (VPN) providers Psiphon and Lantern for assistance in disseminating their surveys and bypassing Iranian government internet censorship.
Since at least 2021, GAMAAN has collaborated with Psiphon, an open-source tool for circumventing internet censorship (using VPN and other technologies) that was developed at the University of Toronto and publicly released in 2006. Psiphon has received millions in funding from the Open Technology Fund, which “receives the majority of its funding from the U.S. government via the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM).”
Psiphon, the Tony Blair Institute, the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center, and Shirin Ebadi did not respond to requests for comment.
The Context
GAMAAN co-founder Ammar Maleki’s ire against the Islamic Republic is more than ideological; it’s personal. His father, Mohammad Maleki, who served as the first president of the University of Tehran, was a well-known critic of the country’s human rights abuses and use of the death penalty.
In 2019, the elder Maleki joined 13 other Iranian activists in signing a pair of open letters calling for Iran’s Supreme Leader to step down and a “complete and peaceful transition” away from the Islamic Republic. Ammar Maleki told Univers, the student newspaper of his employer, Tilburg University, “My father was imprisoned regularly until old age. Almost all the milestones in my life he missed.”
He makes his views on the Islamic Republic clear on X: “To understand/analyze the #Islamic_Republic of Iran, 3 golden rules should be kept in mind: 1- I.R. [Islamic Republic] cannot be reformed by dialogue but will surrender to pressure 2- I.R. officials lie unless proven otherwise 3- when I.R. officials/supporters say #Iran, they mean the I.R. only!”
Hardline politics are not unusual among academics. More unusual and concerning is Maleki’s willingness to accuse those who call into question GAMAAN’s findings and methodology of carrying water for the Islamic Republic. Daniel Tavana experienced this firsthand when he criticized GAMAAN’s methodology online.
“I understand that you have a hard time these days selling your data by the IRGC-initiated IranPoll, so you attack GAMAAN to get attention. I cannot waste my time answering nonsense on GAMAAN’s method for an apologist! Our results were corroborated by external checks & field evidence,” Maleki wrote, referring to Tavana and the Iran Social Survey’s use of IranPoll to conduct surveys within Iran.
Noir couldn’t find evidence of IranPoll having ties to the Islamic Republic, and Maleki did not respond when we asked him to elaborate on the allegation. Tavana likewise stated, “IranPoll has no connection to the government [of Iran].”
Nonetheless, Maleki seems to allege that IranPoll’s work is evidence that Western universities “are under the control of the regime’s thugs,” as he wrote on X.
If mainstream media citations of GAMAAN’s findings are any indication, Maleki’s tenacity seems to be paying off.
Whether you’ve seen it in reports published by the State Department, the American Foreign Policy Council, the government of the United Kingdom, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, FiveThirtyEight, The Guardian, The Economist, CBC, Al-Monitor, The Jerusalem Post, Voice of America, the Wilson Center, DW News, Tablet Magazine, The Hill, The Washington Times, or Christianity Today, there’s a good chance that if you live in the West, GAMAAN has helped shape what you think is happening in Iran.
GAMAAN’s rise shows no signs of slowing: the organization announced in January that Maleki had been “selected as the country representative for Iran (2025-2026) in the prestigious World Association for Public Opinion Research (WAPOR).” The Washington Post described WAPOR as “the leading professional association of pollsters working outside the United States.”
For Tavana, GAMAAN isn’t merely worsening academic and mainstream conversation around Iran—it’s potentially providing justification for the kind of military confrontation that actually materialized last month.
“It wasn’t a very long time ago where, you know, the U.S. invaded another country, largely on the assumption that people who lived in that country wanted the invasion and [welcomed] their liberation … And so I think that, like, trafficking in these half-baked ideas is actually quite dangerous, and it’s going [to], if unchecked, get a lot of people killed,” Tavana said.
Sam Carlen is an investigative journalist writing for Noir News, an independent newsletter covering foreign policy and U.S. soft power projection, policing and surveillance, and other topics.
Iain Carlos is an investigative journalist and the founder of Noir News, a newsletter covering foreign policy, policing, surveillance, and other topics.
October 5, 2025
Posted by aletho |
Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Iran, Israel, United States |
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By Drago Bosnic | September 18, 2025
The infamous mainstream propaganda machine has been directly engaged in the NATO-orchestrated Ukrainian conflict since before it even began. It’s quite clear that Western media are an integral part of the warmongering agenda, either by promoting and trying to justify wars before they start or covering up actual NATO war crimes after the hostilities commence. One major part of this process is dehumanizing the opponent. For instance, during the kinetic phase of NATO aggression on Yugoslavia/Serbia (1991-present), Serbs were presented in the worst possible light. This one-sided viewpoint was used to justify the political West’s crawling invasion of virtually the entire former Yugoslavia, ending in a total disaster for the vast majority of the population, irrespective of ethnic, religious, cultural or any other background.
This was made possible thanks to the nearly universal dominance of the mainstream propaganda machine. They liked the results so much that they simply had to try it out during dozens of other, truly unprovoked and illegal Western invasions, particularly in the Middle East. By the early 2000s, the “evil Serbs” were replaced by “evil Arabs” and “evil Iranians” (or other predominantly Muslim ethnic groups and nations). After killing millions and destroying the lives of tens of millions, particularly across the Middle East, the political West decided it was time to “rekindle” its rivalry with Russia. Thus, after 2014, the previously implicit Russophobia became much more apparent. However, after 2022, it degenerated into mindless, pathological hatred. Suddenly, even Russian trees and cats were banned in Western countries, their vassals and satellite states.
In the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, Australia, etc., Russia was the “pariah” and simply had to be “cut off from the rest of the world”. Obviously, this failed because the multipolar bloc comprises more than 70% of the global population (in other words, the actual world). However, within the confines of Western geopolitical space, Moscow remains the “root of all evil”, particularly thanks to constant media coverage that aims to perpetuate Russophobia. As previously mentioned, this sort of hatred is reaching truly pathological levels. Nowadays, institutionalized Russophobia has gone so far that it could easily be considered a serious mental condition (perhaps even a medical emergency). This was particularly evident in the opening months of the special military operation (SMO) in NATO-occupied Ukraine.
For instance, the claims about alleged “Russian war crimes”, including supposedly “against children”, turned out to be blatant lies, with even the Kiev regime firing its children’s rights commissioner Lyudmila Denisova for spreading fakes about “Russian soldiers raping preschool kids”. However, while the mainstream propaganda machine widely published these blatant lies on front covers, they refused to apologize for this after it became clear these were all fakes. In other words, just like in the case of Serbs during the 1990s, it doesn’t matter whether the stories are true, as long as the majority of the population hears about this. For the warmongers, war criminals, plutocrats and kleptocrats in Washington DC, London and Brussels, dehumanizing the current opponent (whoever that may be) and fomenting mindless hatred is all that really matters.
Then came the role of the so-called “international justice institutions” of the “rules-based world order”. On March 17, 2023, the so-called “International Criminal Court”, no more than a glorified NGO financed by the EU/NATO, issued an arrest warrant for President Vladimir Putin and Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova, Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights. According to the ICC, President Putin and his commissioner “kidnapped” tens of thousands of Ukrainian children. Obviously, for the political West, evacuating kids from an active warzone is a “war crime” and it would be “much better” if those kids were left to fend for themselves, either dying or ending up in Western countries, where thousands have gone missing in the last three and a half years (after those countries effectively decriminalized pedophilia).
However, that’s not the end of Russophobic propaganda. On the contrary, it needs to continue, at all costs. On September 16, numerous Western media outlets published reports about a supposed “study” by the Yale School of Public Health Humanitarian Research Lab claiming that “Ukrainian children have been taken to over 200 different facilities across Russia, including locations where they have been subjected to forced re-education and military training in a clear violation of international law”. There are allegedly “eight different types of facilities, ranging from summer camps to religious sites to military academies stretching across the entire expanse of Russia, [that] have been identified in the report from the Yale School of Public Health Humanitarian Research Lab published Tuesday”. However, as noted, the ludicrous propaganda doesn’t end there.
Namely, these “kidnapped” kids are supposedly “forced to build drones” for the Russian military. In other words, Russia, a country with approximately 160 million people and the fourth largest economy in the world (that also outproduces the entire NATO by a factor of three in various types of munitions and weapon systems), is “forced” to rely on several thousand “kidnapped” Ukrainian children to produce drones? That makes perfect sense, right? Jokes aside, this story about the “cartoonishly evil” Russians is so over the top that even Western commentators on social media are openly ridiculing the mainstream propaganda machine and their governments for spreading the most laughable lies in recent memory. This is certainly a welcoming development, as it could very well prevent the warmongers from galvanizing the populace for yet another senseless bloodbath.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
September 18, 2025
Posted by aletho |
Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | European Union, NATO, UK, United States |
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The BBC report remains uncorrected – evidence of a culture of intimidation, fear and political control
The BBC ignored an internal request to correct reporting that smeared a high-profile Palestinian journalist killed by Israel as a Hamas operative, in what a whistleblower has described as a “grave editorial breach”.
According to a leaked email seen by Novara Media, Global Journalism – part of the BBC Global News team, which is run by BBC deputy director Jonathan Munro – sent an “essential amendment and correction” request regarding BBC News reporting which claimed that Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif “did some work with a Hamas media team in Gaza before the current war”.
Al-Sharif was killed on 10 August in a targeted Israeli airstrike on a tent marked “PRESS” outside the entrance of the al-Shifa hospital in Gaza. Five other media workers were also assassinated in the strike: Al Jazeera correspondent Mohammed Qreiqeh and photographers Ibrahim Thaher and Mohamed Nofal, freelance photojournalist Mohammed al-Khalidi and cameraman Momen Aliwa.
In a statement posted on X/Twitter, Israel said: “Al-Sharif was the head of a Hamas terrorist cell and advanced rocket attacks on Israeli civilians and IDF troops. Intelligence and documents from Gaza, including rosters, terrorist training lists and salary records, prove he was a Hamas operative integrated into Al Jazeera.” Accompanying the post were unverified screenshots from spreadsheets. The IDF provided no justification for the killing of al-Sharif’s five colleagues in the same airstrike.
Al Jazeera has categorically denied that al-Sharif was in any way Hamas affiliated.
The leaked email, dated 18 August, was sent by Global Journalism to hundreds of BBC journalists via two distribution addresses. It singled out a line in a BBC News article for correction: “The BBC understands Sharif did some work with a Hamas media team in Gaza before the current war”.
Screenshots seen by Novara Media show the email was sent to a significant number of senior journalists, including World Service Languages controller Fiona Crack, senior news editors Kate Forbes and Abigail Mobbs, director of audience growth Jamie Wakefield, and head of digital content for World Service, Claire Williams.
The email said the sentence “should be amended” to: “A source has told the BBC that Sharif had worked for a Hamas media team in Gaza before the current conflict, but Al Jazeera has denied this and the BBC News Arabic correspondent also says that he has seen no evidence.”
The email is signed by Global Journalism, part of BBC Global News which is led by Munro, who currently serves as BBC News’ senior controller of news content and the deputy CEO of BBC News and Current Affairs.
One BBC employee told Novara Media that the email went out to at least 1,200 journalists. The BBC disputed this and says the number is closer to 400. However, a screenshot seen by Novara Media confirms that just one of the two distribution email addresses goes to over 1,200 accounts.
At the time of reporting, the line in question remains uncorrected on the BBC News article, last updated 13 August. The same claim was also presented as fact on the BBC News liveblog on 11 August in reporting by Jon Donnison from Jerusalem, as well as cropping up in BBC Verify reporting on TikTok.
A BBC employee told Novara Media: “This leaked email […] exposes from the inside the culture of intimidation, fear and political control that journalists are subjected to within the corporation.
“The email admits a reported line that should never have made it onto the BBC’s front page was published without evidence, yet the error remains uncorrected and no one has been held accountable.
“In any other newsroom, such a grave editorial breach on a matter of major public interest, the targeted killing of a fellow journalist, would have led to senior resignations.”
A BBC spokesperson said: “We stand by our reporting in the BBC News article you reference from 13 August and liveblog from 11 August, and can assure audiences that we scrupulously fact check and verify all information we obtain. This internal email was sent to a specific team about a different article and contained a suggested amendment that was incorrect. We are updating our copy to remove the amendment where it has been applied.”
Munro became global director of BBC News in September 2024. The role includes leading the BBC World Service, overseeing BBC Monitoring, and continuing as deputy CEO of BBC News and Current Affairs
In the months leading up to al-Sharif’s death, Israeli officials repeatedly claimed the reporter was a Hamas operative, including in a ‘kill list’ graphic with the names and pictures of six Al Jazeera journalists.
Two weeks before al-Sharif was killed, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CJP) called on the international community to protect him due to “repeated threats” from IDF spokesperson Avichay Adraee. The CJP said accusations of al-Sharif being a Hamas operative “represent an effort to manufacture consent to kill al-Sharif”.
In August, it was revealed that Israel has a secret military unit specifically tasked with linking Palestinian journalists to Hamas and Islamic Jihad as part of a drive to tamp down on global condemnation for the murder of journalists in Gaza.
This isn’t the first time the BBC has been criticised for biased reporting on Israel’s genocide in Gaza. A blistering report from the Centre for Media Monitoring in June showed that Israeli deaths were given 33 times more coverage per fatality by the corporation, that both broadcast segments and articles included clear double standards, and that content consistently shut down allegations of genocide.
Last week, Novara Media revealed that BBC reps for the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) discouraged colleagues from attending a vigil in London – organised by the NUJ – for their murdered colleagues in Gaza.
Gaza is currently the most dangerous place in the world to be a journalist. Since October 2023, Israel has killed more media workers in Gaza than in both world wars, the US civil war, the Korean war, the Vietnam war, the wars in former Yugoslavia and the war in Afghanistan combined.
Harriet Williamson is a commissioning editor and reporter for Novara Media.
September 13, 2025
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, War Crimes | BBC, Gaza, Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
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By Linnea Lueken | Climate Realism | September 3, 2025
The Associated Press (AP), via ABC News, claims that climate change is responsible for the intensity of European wildfires in a story titled “Climate change made deadly wildfires in Turkey, Greece and Cyprus more fierce, study finds.” This is false. Data show no long-term trend of increasing wildfires in any of the countries listed, and overall global wildfire data shows declining fire extent.
The AP cites a non-peer reviewed report by World Weather Attribution (WWA) to claim that climate change was responsible for necessary conditions, specifically, hot and dry weather, which drove the widespread wildfire outbreaks in Turkey, Greece, and Cyprus, and made them “burn much more fiercely.”
The story and the report it relies upon are suspect from the start. First, as discussed by Climate Realism previously, as a matter of geography the climate of the Mediterranean region is naturally arid, prone to drought, extreme heat, and associated wildfires. Fire helped shape the ecology of the entire region. Some past fires have been huge. For instance, more than 112 years of global warming ago, when global average temperatures were cooler and humans weren’t contributing significantly to atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, the great Thessaloniki fire burned for 13 days. It left more than 70,000 people homeless, and destroyed two-thirds of Greece’s second largest city. So hot and dry weather is the norm for the Turkey, Greece, and Cyprus, especially during the summer, rather than being unusual weather conditions.
The AP ignores this fact about the region’s climate. It also did not critically assess WWA. The AP portrays WWA an unbiased “group of researchers that examines whether and to what extent extreme weather events are linked to climate change.” But this is false. The entire reason for WWA’s existence is specifically to “attribute” extreme weather events to human-caused climate change, in part to provide material that can be used in lawsuits filed against governments and the fossil fuel industry. The WWA believes the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s data driven approach to understating the causes of extreme weather is far too cautious when it comes to attribution. WWA produces studies on the assumption that climate change caused or contributed to an extreme event, the only real question being how much more likely was the event to occur, or how much more severe was the event, than it would have been absent human fossil fuel use. That is the fallacy of affirming the consequent or assuming what you are attempting to prove.
In this case, WWA claimed the fires were “22% more intense in 2025, Europe’s worst recorded year of wildfires.” This claim is unverified and misleading, at best. The Mediterranean region the AP discusses is not all of Europe, and it was not that regions worst year of wildfires.
It is worth noting that WWA seems to only attribute extreme weather to climate change, never mild or good weather. WWA specifically identifies its goal as increasing the “immediacy of climate change, thereby increasing support for mitigation.” Climate Realism has explained at length why single event attribution is scientifically misleading and unreliable at best in past articles, and we’ve specifically refuted flawed WWA reports previously dozens of times, here, here, and here, for example.
This year may well be a record fire year for parts of Europe and Asia, but only a sustained trend of worsening fires would prove that they were driven by climate change. No such trend exists, globally or in the individual countries mentioned.
Looking at the most recent available data from the joint collaborative project between NASA and the European Space Agency, Copernicus, for each country we can see the wildfire trends are far from consistent.
First we have Turkey:
If anything, this trend shows that wildfires have been trending down since 2009’s peak over Copernicus’ period of record.
Next, Greece:
Again, no real long term consistent trend.
Finally Cyprus:
Again, particularly in the case of yearly burned area, there is no consistent trend in wildfire data for Cypress, and a possible overall decline in the yearly number of fires.
Downward or flat trends can’t honestly be portrayed as increasing trends.
Although global wildfire data also is spotty for long-term trends, what data exists consistently suggest a declining global trend. NASA data shows a global decline in acreage lost to wildfire since 2003.
Extreme weather event attribution studies, produced rapidly in hours after a natural disaster strikes, aren’t vetted science. Still, they are eagerly accepted as evidence of climate impacts by the alarmist media. This is absurd when any credible fact checker, editor, or investigative journalist could easily access publicly available data that devastates the climate change linkage at the core of the story. One would hope that the Associated Press’ writers are gullible or naïve, but even taking that charitable view, the lack of basic research is inexcusable for any journalistic outlet. One reason to doubt the charitable belief in how so many false climate tales are spun out of the AP is that the stories are all biased in the same direction of climate alarm – climate change is never not to blame – and that the AP’s climate coverage is specifically funded by foundations and non-profit organizations who have long pushed climate alarm.
September 7, 2025
Posted by aletho |
Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | Associated Press, Cyprus, Greece, Turkey, World Weather Attribution |
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A recent Associated Press (AP) story carried by WCVB-TV and many other news outlets, warned that “climate change is making it “dicier” to grow corn in the United States. This is false. Data clearly shows that amid modest climate change corn yields and production have increased steadily, regularly setting new records.
The AP writes:
Across major corn-growing states, climate change is fueling conditions that make watching the corn grow a nail-biter for farmers. Factors like consistently high summer overnight temperatures, droughts and heavier-than-usual rains at the wrong time can all disrupt the plants’ pollination — making each full ear of corn less of a guarantee and more of a gamble.
Overall, corn growers got lucky this year with late-season weather that contributed to what is now predicted to be a record bumper crop. But experts say bouts of extreme weather are intensifying the waiting game during a critical time of year between planting and harvest.
Human-caused climate change has worsened multiple U.S. extreme heat events this year and has steadily increased the likelihood of hotter overnight temperatures since 1970, according to Climate Central, an independent group of scientists who communicate climate science and data to the public.
The AP’s narrative is a pure lie, debunked within its own paragraphs. Corn growers didn’t get lucky this year with a bumper crop, rather bumper crops have been a trend during the recent period of modest warming, even with the normal annual ups and downs inherent to crop production. The USDA meteorologist, Brad Rippey, who the AP quoted described 2025’s production as a “monster U.S. corn crop.” But it’s not the first monster crop in the past few decades for U.S. corn farmers.
The numbers tell a clear and compelling story of rising corn production. The U.S. Department of Agriculture confirmed record national yields of 179.3 bushels per acre in 2024, breaking the previous record set only a year earlier in 2023. Long-term records from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization show U.S. corn yields have more than tripled since 1961, rising from around 3.5 tons per hectare to more than 11 tons today as seen in the figure below:
Economists at the University of Illinois calculate that yields have increased by nearly two bushels per acre every year since 1950. These are not the marks of a crop in decline — they are the hallmarks of long-term improvement from better farming practices, yield improved varieties, selective breeding practices to improve resiliency to weather factors, and boosted production due to carbon dioxide fertilization.
The significant gains in yields have also produced records for production with U.S. Department of Agriculture data showing each of the past ten years of production having been higher than any previous years or decades in history, with new records for production being set three times since 2016.
To tie corn growers concerns to climate change, the AP article relied on a small number of anecdotes about heat, corn tassel timing, and the fragility of pollination. Yes, these can matter for pollination in a particular field, but they have always been part of farming. Weather extremes are nothing new, and across hundreds of posts, Climate Realism has cited data across a range of stories showing extreme weather hasn’t become more frequent, severe, or inconsistent in recent years. What matters is the nationwide harvest, and it keeps breaking records. If the climate were truly making corn “dicier,” record-breaking yields would not keep piling up.
The real problem corn producers face at the moment is not crop decline, but instead just the opposite, crop abundance and farming success. Bumper crops have produced an oversupply to the market that is resulting in lower prices, even as ever more corn is being diverted from grocery shelves to gas tanks as ethanol requirements creep up.
Farmers are not watching their livelihoods wither under climate change. Instead, they are wrestling with the economic consequences of overproduction, as a variety of news outlets have reported recently. On the same day the AP was incorrectly bemoaning corn declines, a story titled, “Huge Crops in Corn Belt Hit Cash-Strapped Farmers With More Unease,” was published in the Wall Street Journal. Just a few days earlier, in a story, subtitled, “so much corn, so little profit, NewsNation reported that with the USDA projecting 16.7 billion bushels of corn in 2025, the largest in American history, the glut is pushing prices to multi-year lows, with Iowa producers estimating losses of $80 to $100 per acre at current bids. That is not a climate crisis, it is an economic one caused by success.
So contrary to the AP’s claims, the real problem facing corn farmers is not extreme, unpredictable weather and crop diseases hampering production, but rather oversupply of the market due to record setting production, the latter a regular occurrence across the first quarter of the 21st century as global temperatures have continued to rise modestly.
Climate Realism has repeatedly documented this pattern of media misrepresentation about crop yields and climate change, with over 100 articles on the subject. We note that when crop yields rise, the media ignores or downplays it. When a short-term weather challenge arises, it is cast as evidence of climate change driving it. The broader reality — backed by decades of USDA and FAO data — is that American agriculture continues to thrive even in a modestly warmer world. Corn is not alone, wheat and soybeans, for example, are also enjoying long-term gains in productivity, and 2025 will be remembered for surplus, not scarcity.
Oversupply is forcing farmers to store corn with little hope of profitable sales, while trade policy uncertainties in corn exports weigh on demand. These are the real stressors in agriculture today, none of which have anything to do with climate change. By fixating on climate change while admitting record abundance in the same breath, The AP obscures the actual challenges farmers face with regards to commodity markets, prices, and trade.
The conclusion is unavoidable: the claim that climate change is making corn yields more precarious is demonstrably false. Yields are rising, production is at record highs, and as a result, prices are low, driving down farm income. The Associated Press misled its affiliates and readers by suggesting a climate crisis where there is none, undermining trust in its reporting. Farmers and the public deserve better.
September 7, 2025
Posted by aletho |
Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Associated Press, United States |
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AP’s Israel-Palestine news director, Josef Federman, has spun data to minimize the Gaza death count. Leaked documents show he appeared on a panel aimed at assisting “Israel’s ability to effectively portray its narrative” during a gov’t-sponsored propaganda conference chaired by an ex-IDF official who legitimized killing journalists.
The Israeli massacre of five journalists in broad daylight on August 24, 2025 at Nasser Hospital in Gaza’s Khan Younis city prompted a sternly worded statement to the Israeli government from the Associated Press and Reuters, which each employed a reporter murdered by the IDF. The AP subsequently published a detailed investigation demonstrating that the Israeli military knowingly attacked a civilian target, then carried out a double tap strike after a rescue team and journalists arrived on the scene.
While the AP’s statement of outrage about the killing of its photographer in Gaza, Miriam Dagga, has brought the leading wire agency’s tension with the Israeli government to its height, the relationship with Tel Aviv was not always so adversarial.
The Grayzone has reviewed leaked documents revealing that the AP’s news director for Israel-Palestine, Josef Federman, participated in a private 2018 panel discussion aimed at assisting “Israel’s ability to effectively portray its narrative.” His host was a secretive Israeli government outfit dedicated to combatting the global BDS campaign to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel. Called the Global Coalition For Israel (GC4I), the event was convened in Jerusalem on June 18, 2018 by Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Diplomacy – the de facto propaganda arm of the Israeli government.
The moderator of the panel in which Federman participated was Avital Leibovich, the former spokeswoman for the IDF who has ardently defended the Israeli policy of defining Palestinian journalists as terrorists in order to assassinate them.
Federman has presided over the AP’s coverage of Israel-Palestine since 2014. Throughout Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza began in October 2023, Federman has helped shape a narrative that has subtly but effectively advanced Tel Aviv’s objectives, regurgitating the baseless and comprehensively debunked claim that “Israelis were raped or sexually assaulted” on October 7; legitimizing Israel’s violent invasion and theft of Syrian land as a historical “shift,” and relying on bogus data from an Israel lobby-affiliated researcher to minimize the civilian death count in Gaza – a grim toll which now includes one of his colleagues at AP.
Federman’s penchant for uncritically quoting notoriously mendacious Israeli military officials has helped secure his reputation for biased coverage.
Federman’s participation in the 2018 Israeli government anti-BDS event appears to contradict clearly stated AP guidelines on conflicts of interest. According to the AP’s website, “We avoid addressing, or accepting fees or expenses from, governmental bodies; trade, lobbying or special interest groups; businesses, or labor groups; or any group that would pose a conflict of interest.”
In response to a detailed query from The Grayzone about Federman’s participation in the semi-covert conference, AP Vice President of Corporate Communications Lauren Easton stated, “Josef Federman is a professional journalist and a former chairman of Israel’s Foreign Press Association. It is not uncommon for journalists to speak about their work at conferences and other events. It remains AP policy to refrain from accepting honoraria, and that policy was followed here.”
The details of the GC41’s gathering were gleaned from a massive tranche of documents extracted by hackers from Israel’s Ministry of Justice in 2024. A full schedule and list of GC4I conference participants has never been seen before by the public.
View GC4I’s 2018 schedule here.
AP, other agencies join semi-secret Israeli gov’t event chaired by ex-IDF official who justified killing journalists
When GC4I gathered in 2018, it met at the Mamilla Hotel Conference Hall in Jerusalem for two days of discussions and briefings on the fight to crush the growing Palestine solidarity movement and its BDS campaign. The conference opened with an address by Sima Vaknin-Gil, then the Director-General of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs. A former Israeli intelligence official, Vakhnin-Gil had emerged as one of the most influential coordinators of the country’s propaganda efforts abroad, especially in the US, where she helps the Israeli government evade the Foreign Agent Registration Act law.
Her speech was followed by a discussion moderated by celebrity Republican pollster Frank Luntz on the feasibility of defining the BDS movement as a “hate group.” Further panels focused on “developing relations in the corridors of power” and “how… legislation in Europe and the United States can be used to reduce funding for organizations delegitimizing Israel.”
On the second day of the GC41 conference, Federman joined a panel aimed at “discuss[ing] the difficulties of reporting fairly and accurately on Israel, while dealing with issues such as BDS, delegitimization, and the Israel-Palestinian conflict.”
The panel was explicitly aimed at helping the Zionist operatives gathered at the GC4I “understand the shortcomings in Israel’s ability to effectively portray its narrative, what reporters are looking for when writing an article and why the anti-Israel camp’s narrative resonates in the Western world.”
Avital Leibovich, a former IDF spokeswoman who moved on to the American Jewish Committee, chaired the panel. During her stint at the IDF, Leibovich played a leading role in justifying Israel’s deliberate killing of journalists in the Gaza Strip. In 2012, for example, she fired off a letter to the New York Times which smeared Palestinian journalists slain at the hands of the Israeli military: “Such terrorists who hold cameras and notebooks in their hands, are no different from their colleagues who fire rockets aimed at Israeli cities and cannot enjoy the rights and protection afforded to legitimate journalists,” she wrote.
In 2016, Leibovich appeared at Washington DC’s Newseum amid protests – including by this reporter– and condemnation from the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate, which urged the institution in a May 31 letter “not to provide a platform to someone who has justified, on record and to a world audience, Israel’s grave violations of international law and war crimes, and in particular attacks against journalists and press freedoms.”
Chaired by Leibovich, the 2018 GC4I panel featured featured the Jerusalem Bureau Chief of RT, Paula Slier, and Laurent Lozano, who held the same position at Agence France Press, alongside the AP’s Federman. Slier has since left RT, while Lozano is currently AFP’s bureau chief in Dakar, Senegal.
Reached by The Grayzone, Slier described the gathering as “a very pleasant experience.”
She said she considered her participation in a semi-covert Israeli government conference as a normal part of her duties as a correspondent in Jerusalem. “It was a chance for them to hear how foreign channels worked in Israel,” Slier commented. “I used to participate and attend all conferences – whether they were pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian – I thought it important to engage with everyone, and it was also an opportunity to talk about RT.”
GC4I launched at “secret conference” with “closed sessions” on criminalizing BDS
GC4I’s first gathering took place in 2010, at a time of heightened Zionist anxiety about the rising global grassroots movement to boycott Israel. A who’s who of Israeli lobbyists from the US, UK and Australia were on hand, alongside Israeli officials from the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the newly created Ministry of Strategic Affairs.
“The aim was to end the perceived lack of co-ordination within the pro-Israel movement, a concern frequently voiced by Israel-advocates,” wrote researcher Hil Aked.
Marcus Dysch of the Jewish Chronicle gained access to a 2014 GC4I meeting in London, England. He described it as a “secret conference… held in closed sessions amid heavy security.”
“We have the resources. We have the intelligence. Most important, we have unbounded determination,” Ronald Lauder, the billionaire Zionist financier and Netanyahu confidant, told the crowd of Jewish communal leaders and Israeli officials in London.
Lauder pledged to leverage his fortune to criminalize the BDS movement: “We will draft and lobby for legislation that will withhold government funding from academic institutions that boycott Israel.”
Reporting back to Jewish Federation at home, minimizing deaths in Gaza
Well before he emerged in the Middle East as a reporter, Josef Federman enrolled as a graduate student at Israel’s Hebrew University.
He grew up in Westborough, Massachusetts, where his parents helped found the B’nai Shalom Congregation, a Reform Jewish synagogue. Federman has returned on two occasions to deliver lectures at the synagogue, once in 2021 to discuss the Abraham Accords alongside an Israeli academic, and again in March 2024, during the height of Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, for an event titled, “Reporting from Israel.” That speech was co-sponsored by the Jewish Federations of Central Massachusetts, a top sponsor of pro-Israel lobbying inside the US.
Two months later, the Israeli government seized camera equipment from the AP to prevent it from live-streaming video from the Israeli side of the northern Gaza frontier. While Israel announced that it would return the equipment and allow the broadcasts to continue, the event eerily foreshadowed the Israeli military’s double tap strike on the Reuters live position at the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis this August 24.
The following month, Federman published a piece of “AP data analysis” that relied on dubious statistics to advance one of Israel’s most important propaganda objectives in Gaza. According to the headline of Federman’s piece, “Women and children are killed less frequently as war’s toll rises.” The article therefore implied that all men in Gaza between the ages of 18 and 59 were possible militants. Throughout the piece, Federman referred to Gaza’s Health Ministry as “Hamas-run,” casting doubt on its casualty counts.
To legitimize his conclusions, Federman turned to Gabriel Epstein, a researcher at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, or WINEP, the most prolific think tank of the Israel lobby in Washington DC. WINEP director Robert Satloff, a veteran Israel lobbyist, praised the AP’s Federman for “tak[ing] a big step toward setting the record straight.”
Another researcher cited in the article, Michael Spagat, defended the quality of death counts by Gaza’s Health Ministry. Months later, in September 2024, Spagat revised his view of the death toll, declaring, “I now believe that the true death toll almost certainly exceeds the official total.”
This August, a review of an internal Israeli intelligence database further discredited Federman’s analysis, revealing that 83% of those killed by the Israeli military in Gaza were civilians.
Today, Federman’s “data analysis” on the Gaza death has been discredited by virtually every expert outside the Israel lobby, and by the gruesome reality on the ground. However, a revealing post remains on his personal LinkedIn page which shows him liking a rant by Idit Shamir, consul general of Israel in Toronto, mocking the official death count in Gaza:
“Isn’t it curious?” wrote the Israeli official. “Hamas is clueless about Israeli hostages’ status but has a crystal-clear count of Palestinian casualties before Israeli strikes even occur!”
Now that a fellow AP reporter, Miriam Dagga, has joined the tens of thousands of civilians murdered by Israel in Gaza over the past two years, Federman’s agency has been forced to release a rare expression of outrage at Tel Aviv. The indignation offers a stark contrast from the comity Federman displayed when he bantered at an Israeli government conference with the former IDF official who legitimized the policy that would claim Dagga’s life.
September 7, 2025
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Israel, Palestine, United States, Zionism |
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Last week, the New York Times published a bizarre “Guest Essay” on autism by Jessica Steier, a Pharma mercenary who has at least ten financial conflicts of interest and no background in autism research. I submitted a reply to the article to correct her disinformation and the NY Times refused to publish it.
Here are the facts for anyone who wants to read them:
Jessica Steier runs a science-for-hire company, “Unbiased Science.” She uses a number of pass-through organizations to launder contributions from large pharmaceutical and chemical companies. However, one can still figure out a lot of her funders (see article on “Unbiased Science Podcast” in SourceWatch). Steier advises an infant formula company and is an affiliate for a company that makes monosodium glutamate (MSG). Her podcast has taken money from 3M, Procter & Gamble, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Novartis, Moderna, and CSL Seqirus (a flu vaccine manufacturer).
Steier is cartoonishly evil. From SourceWatch:
Steier’s Unbiased Science Podcast:
• Described the herbicide glyphosate as “safe for use”
• Declared polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) in Teflon to be “non-toxic to humans”
• Called the Environmental Working Group Dirty Dozen list of produce with the most and least pesticide residues “a fear-based marketing ploy”
• Claimed GMOs are “safe,” “nutritious,” and “beneficial to consumers, producers, and the environment” and
• Called hydrogenated oil “a safe dietary fat.”
The Unbiased Science Podcast recorded two episodes on organic food and farming in December 2022 and January 2023 in which they argued that organic pesticides are more harmful than synthetic pesticides used in chemical farming…
Andrea C. Love [Steier’s co-host] defended the artificial sweetener aspartame as “safe,” said in an interview that she has “at least one diet soda a day,” and the Podcast posted on Instagram that “aspartame does not pose a health risk to humans, cancer or otherwise, especially at levels we would consume.”
Love and Steier were critical of the International Agency for Research on Cancer’s ranking of the chemicals considered possibly carcinogenic to humans in 2023.
SourceWatch provides even more evidence of Steier’s toxic sophistry here.
For those who are new to these topics, mountains of evidence from The Defender, Beyond Pesticides, and Moms Across America, among others, show why all of Steier’s claims listed above are junk science.
Nearly everything Steier writes in her “Guest Essay” on autism is demonstrably false. For example, Steier:
- Thinks mercury and aluminum in vaccines are fine even though they are known neurotoxicants (see Grandjean and Landrigan, 2014, Supplementary appendix).
- Omits the fact that Mark, Anne, and David Geier sued the Maryland Board of Physicians and won (and then a higher court retroactively granted “absolute immunity” to this private board even though the Maryland legislature never gave it that right).
- Has apparently not read any of the 55 autism prevalence studies in the U.S. since 1970, so she is oblivious to the fact that autism rates have increased 32,158% over that time period.
- Seems unaware that a Danish study she cited favorably recently issued a correction after they discovered, post-publication, 136% more neurodevelopmental events, including autism and ADHD, that changed their research findings.
- Has never read, or just plain ignores, the six vaccinated vs. unvaccinated studies that show that vaccines significantly increase autism risk (see summaries in Rogers, 2025).
Science-for-hire companies will say or do anything for money. Steier’s company, “Unbiased Science,” is relatively new. However, it uses the same playbook developed by other notorious science-for-hire firms, including Gradient, Exponent, and Ramboll. They are often referred to as “rented white coats” (see discussion in Rogers, 2019). Anyone citing Steier as a “public health expert” has no idea what they are talking about.
The NY Times devoted considerable resources, including two graphic designers and prominent placement online and in the Sunday print edition, in the attempt to make this trashy hit piece look presentable to its readers. The NY Times’ failure to disclose Steier’s extensive conflicts of interest and its refusal to publish critical comments in connection with this “Guest Essay” make me wonder if this was a paid advertorial at the behest of a pharmaceutical company.
The autism epidemic is a matter of enormous national importance. Yet everything that the NY Times publishes on autism is an attempt to cover up the causes and protect the powerful industries that are culpable. Unfortunately, in the midst of this crisis, the NY Times has abandoned its role as “the newspaper of record” and is now a criminal syndicate that is endangering the health of all Americans.
Toby Rogers has a Ph.D. in political economy from the University of Sydney in Australia and a Master of Public Policy degree from the University of California, Berkeley. His research focus is on regulatory capture and corruption in the pharmaceutical industry. Dr. Rogers does grassroots political organizing with medical freedom groups across the country working to stop the epidemic of chronic illness in children. He writes about the political economy of public health on Substack.
September 6, 2025
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | New York Times, United States |
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There is no evidence Russia interfered with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s airplane during her recent flight to Bulgaria, the country’s authorities have said. The European Commission earlier claimed Bulgarian authorities had confirmed the incident.
On Sunday, upon landing in Plovdiv, von der Leyen’s pilots allegedly reported issues with their navigation systems. Brussels later told the Financial Times that her flight was “forced to circle for an hour” and claimed that Moscow had “blatantly interfered” with the aircraft, supposedly trying to jam its GPS signal.
However, Bulgarian Prime Minister Rosen Zhelyazkov has outright contradicted Brussels’ claim, telling parliament on Thursday that no evidence of a Russian attack had been found and that von der Leyen’s plane did not suffer any serious issues, only short-term signal degradation which is common in densely populated areas.
September 4, 2025
Posted by aletho |
Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | European Union |
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