Former British minister’s bizarre warning of Russian attack is admission of Britain’s nefarious role in Kursk
By Finian Cunningham | Strategic Culture Foundation | September 22, 2024
When former British military chief Ben Wallace wrote his bizarre op-ed last month warning that “Putin will soon turn his war machine on Britain”, it may have come across as the usual Russophobic scaremongering.
The ex-minister of defense wrote in the Daily Telegraph that “Britain’s in Putin’s crosshairs… Make no mistake Putin is coming for us.”
He painted the Russian leader and its top generals as unhinged madmen who were driven by revenge for old scores like the Crimean War in the 1850s.
Wallace, who served as a British army captain and was the minister of defense under three Conservative prime ministers between 2019 and 2023, is known for his hawkish anti-Russia views. He previously told the Times newspaper that Britain must be prepared to fight wars alone without the help of the U.S. He has compared Putin to Hitler, and he once claimed that the Scots Guards – the regiment in which he served – “kicked Russian asses” in the Crimean War and could do so again.
But, in hindsight, his Telegraph op-ed was not so much the usual belligerent rant to whip up Russophobia. This was not a mere paranoid warning of Russia’s alleged malign intent, but rather it was more an admission of British guilt in recklessly escalating the proxy war in Ukraine.
Wallace claimed, somewhat curiously, that Britain would be the primary target for any Russian military attack, not the United States. What made him say that? After all, the U.S. is by far the biggest military backer of the Kiev regime.
Pointedly, Wallace emphatically denied in his article published on August 26 that Britain had played any role in Ukraine’s offensive on Russia’s Kursk region. That offensive was launched on August 6. The incursion appears now to have been a military disaster for the Kiev regime with nearly 15,000 of its troops killed and hundreds of NATO-supplied armored vehicles destroyed.
As the offensive in Kursk flounders and Russia pushes on with rapid gains in the Donbass region of formerly eastern Ukraine, it is becoming more clear that Britain took a leading role among the NATO sponsors of the Kiev regime in promoting the Kursk offensive.
Captured Ukrainian troops have told how British marines trained and directed them to take on audacious missions. The military purpose of the missions was not precise or pragmatic. Their main objective was to create propaganda victories by raising Ukrainian flags on Russian territory.
This week, another British military insider, Sean Bell, who was the former air vice marshall of the RAF, urged the NATO-backed Ukrainian regime to “inflict maximum pain” on Russia. The former RAF commander was referring to the Kursk offensive and an expansion of air strikes on Russian territory.
This comes as Britain’s new Labour prime minister Keir Starmer is consulting with U.S. president Joe Biden on granting Ukraine permission to use long-range missiles to hit deep inside Russia. Starmer and his new defense minister John Healey have been keen to demonstrate that their government is every bit as gung-ho as the Conservative predecessors in supporting Ukraine militarily.
It also comes as the Russian state security service, FSB, claims that leaked documents it has obtained show that Britain is taking a leading role among Western adversaries in ramping up military and political tensions with Moscow.
When the Kursk offensive kicked off last month, NATO leaders were adamant that they were not involved in the planning. By contrast, the Kiev regime hinted that NATO was.
Despite the official denials, sections of the British media couldn’t contain their excitement in what appeared in the initial stage to be a lightning punch in the nose for Putin.
It was reported that Ukrainian troops had been trained in Britain prior to the incursion. While the Daily Mail blared that British Challenger tanks were “leading Ukraine’s advance into Russia’s Kursk and Belgorod regions”.
The Times reported smugly that “British equipment, including drones, has played a central role in Ukraine’s new offensive and British personnel have been closely advising the Ukrainian military.”
Since the NATO proxy war against Russia erupted in Ukraine in February 2022, the British have been intensely involved in training commandos to carry out raids on Russian territory, according to Britain’s Royal Navy publicity.
Despite Ben Wallace’s assertion that Britain had no planning involvement in the Kursk offensive, it seems clear that his denial is a lie. Britain was and presumably still is heavily involved. It is known that mercenaries from other NATO states are on the ground in Kursk. But the British role is prominent in leading the charge (from behind, that is).
That charge has now run into a dead-end with heavy losses among Ukrainian troops. For the British planners, however, the military losses are of little importance. The Ukrainians were merely cannon fodder in a PR stunt to embarrass Putin and to whip up another round of military aid.
Britain has a sordid historical role in starting wars in Europe. Ben Wallace in his Telegraph op-ed mocked Putin for blaming Britain for being behind the Crimean War and the rise of Nazi Germany. On both counts, it is accurate to condemn Britain. What was it doing anyway sending troops to Crimea in the 1850s? And the covert role of Britain in financing, arming, and giving Hitler a free hand to attack the Soviet Union during the 1930s was a major contributor to fomenting World War Two, a war in which up to 30 million Soviet people were killed.
Today, Perfidious Albion is stoking the proxy war against Russia, which could lead to a nuclear Third World War. Its sinister fingerprints are all over the Kursk provocation. The has-been empire is trying to inflate its geopolitical importance among Western partners through machinations and manipulation. Even at the risk of inciting an all-out world war.
Ben Wallace’s bizarre op-ed about Russia “coming for us” can be better understood as an admission of Britain’s guilt and not simply another absurd Russophobic rant. The old Tory warmonger was projecting the reality of Britain’s nefarious role in escalating the proxy war. The British establishment knows that if Russia goes on to take reprisal, it has it coming. Its pretense of innocence is classic British dissembling.
The more definitive the proof of Israeli atrocities, the less they get reported
By Jonathan Cook | September 20, 2024
The coverage of Israeli soldiers pushing three Palestinians off a roof in the West Bank town of Qabatiya – it’s unclear whether the men are dead or near-dead – is being barely reported by the western media, even though it was videoed from at least three different angles and a reporter from the main US news agency Associated Press witnessed it.
AP reported on this incident some nine hours ago. Its news feed is accessed by all western establishment media, so they all know.
Yet again, the media has chosen to ignore Israeli war crimes, even when there is definitive proof that they occurred. (Or perhaps more accurately: even more so when there is definitive proof they occurred.)
Remember, that same media never fails to highlight – or simply makes up – any crime Palestinians are accused of, such as those non-existent “beheaded babies”.
AP itself treats this latest atrocity in the West Bank as no big deal. It reports simply that it may be part of a “pattern of excessive force” by Israeli soldiers towards Palestinians.
That comment, without quote marks and ascribed to a human rights group, is almost certainly AP’s preferred characterisation of the group’s reference to a pattern not of “excessive force” but of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.
AP makes sure to give Israel’s pretext for why it is committing war crimes: “Israel says the raids are necessary to stamp out militancy.”
But it forgets yet again to mention why that “militancy” exists: because Israel has been violently enforcing an illegal military occupation of the Palestinian territories for many decades, in which it – once again illegally – has drafted in an army of settler militias to drive out the native Palestinian population.
AP also forgets to mention that, under international law, the Palestinians have every right to resist Israel’s occupying soldiers, including “militantly”.
Western governments might characterise Palestinians shooting at Israeli soldiers as “terrorism”, but that’s not how it is seen in the international law codes that western states drafted decades ago and that they claim to uphold.
It’s also worth noting that the local Palestinian reporter who witnessed this crime had his report rewritten by “Julia Frankel, an Associated Press reporter in Jerusalem”.
As is true with many other western outlets, AP copy is editorially overseen from Jerusalem, where its office is staffed mostly with Israeli Jews.
Western news outlets doubtless privately rationalise this to themselves as a wise precaution, making sure copy is “sensitive” to Israel’s perspective and less likely to incur the wrath of the Israeli government and Israel lobby.
Which is precisely the problem. The bias in western reporting is baked in. It is designed not to upset Israel – in the midst of a “plausible genocide”, according to the World Court – which means it’s entirely skewed and completely untrustworthy.
It makes our media utterly complicit in Israel’s war crimes, including when Israeli soldiers throw Palestinians off a roof.
UPDATE:
Very belatedly, the BBC has reported this on one of its news channels. Note, it adds an entirely unnecessary disclaimer that the footage hasn’t been “independently verified” – whatever that means. There are now at least three separate videos, all taken from different angles, showing the same war crime. Even the Israeli military has confirmed the incident happened.
The BBC also assumes the three Palestinians are dead. There is absolutely no reason to make that assumption: it violates the most basic rules of reporting.
And the anchor, clearly nervous about how she should refer to the men being pushed off a roof, ends by observing that the footage is “another example of the tensions and the many fronts on which we see Israel fighting”. No, it’s another example of Israeli soldiers committing war crimes, and the media trying to deflect attention from that fact.
The Second Trump Shooter Believed Exactly What the Establishment Media Wanted Him to Believe

By Connor O’Keeffe | Mises Institute | September 18, 2024
On Sunday, for the second time this election cycle, a man was able to get close to Donald Trump with a rifle. The former president was golfing when Secret Service agents spotted a rifle barrel poking out of some bushes just off the course, near a hole Trump would soon play. Agents fired on the suspect, causing him to flee as Trump was rushed off the course. Shortly after, the man was apprehended by police.
A scoped rifle, two backpacks, and a video camera were recovered from the woods where the suspect was hiding. The FBI said it was investigating the incident as an attempted assassination. The suspect, Ryan Routh, has so far been charged with two gun-related crimes.
While there are clearly some major differences between this incident and the first assassination attempt in July—when Trump was shot in the ear during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania—the fact that an armed man was able to get so close to the former president and remain undetected until the last moment for the second time in two months is a big deal.
Yet the reaction from the political establishment and the establishment media has been notably different. Back in July, there was broad agreement within the establishment that they needed to “lower the temperature.” This week, the rhetoric has changed. While most go through the motion of denouncing political violence, establishment figures and outlets have downplayed the assassination attempt, obscured the attempted shooter’s political ideology, and even blamed Trump himself for provoking people into trying to kill him.
It’s not surprising that the political establishment and their friends in the media want to dismiss or play down what happened on Sunday. Because Ryan Routh, the suspect, appears to have been motivated by the exact narrative of the war in Ukraine and the prospect of a second Trump term that the establishment is trying so hard to get the American public to accept.
In early 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine, the American establishment went into overdrive to whitewash all the developments that had led to the invasion. They instead defined Vladamir Putin as an expansionist tyrant bent on conquering all of Europe simply because he hates freedom and democracy.
Because of unearthed social media posts, numerous interviews with major outlets like The New York Times, and a self-published book, we can clearly see that Routh was completely convinced by the establishment’s characterization of the war. So much so that in the months after the war broke out, Routh traveled to Ukraine to try and join the fight. He was turned away, apparently due to his age, but stuck around to try and recruit other foreigners to join Ukraine’s ranks.
In one interview with Newsweek, Routh laid out how he views the war:
To me, a lot of the other conflicts are gray, but this conflict is definitely black-and-white. This is about good versus evil. This is a storybook— you know, any movie we’ve ever watched, this is definitely evil against good. … It seems asinine that we have a leader and a country that does not understand the concept of being unselfish, and being generous, and being kind, and just the basic moral values that are required by human beings these days. It blows my mind.
That is exactly how the pundits and politicians who make up the American political establishment want us thinking about this war. Not as an unnecessary geopolitical conflict that escalated for decades before erupting into the conventional war we see today, but simply as a black-and-white showdown with an evil country.
Importantly, as can be seen in the opening to Biden’s State of the Union address from earlier this year, the establishment has explicitly conflated this threat abroad with what they call the threat at home—meaning Trump and the MAGA movement. So if a disturbed person like Ryan Routh was convinced that he would be a hero if he went and fought the evil Russians in Ukraine only to be turned away because of his age, it’s not much of a jump to expect that he concluded he could still be a hero if he set his sights on, what he was told, is the same threat at home.
That’s not to say that the establishment voices pushing the simplistic narratives that captured Routh directly incited his assassination attempt—although it would under the standard they apply to Trump and January 6. Only that the establishment is using misleading and sometimes wholly fictional narratives about the war in Ukraine and the populist anger directed toward them to try to scare us into voting in ways that support their interests. It shouldn’t surprise anyone when these contrived, simplistic, overly dramatic narratives lead some people to decide voting isn’t enough.
They Think We Are Stupid, Volume 11
Everything you need to know about our ruling class’s opinion of you
By Aaron Kheriaty, MD | Human Flourishing | September 19, 2024








Kim Jong Un ordered the execution of 30 officials? Yet another fake news about North Korea
By Eduardo Vasco | Strategic Culture Foundation | September 17, 2024
Do you remember the terrible death of Kim Jong Un’s ex-girlfriend?
In 2013, the international press reported the story of Hyon Song Wol, singer of the Pochonbo band, who had reportedly met Kim ten years earlier and continued a secret relationship despite being married and having a baby. Then, one day, Hyon and 11 other performers were arrested, accused of recording pornographic videos amongst themselves and selling them. Despite this sin, some of them were carrying Bibles, which, of course, is an even greater sin in the “North Korean dictatorship.” Three days later, all were executed by a firing squad. To make matters worse, their closest relatives were forced to watch the executions, as well as members of other prominent bands. Moreover, the “regime” deemed those who witnessed the executions guilty by association with the sinners and sent them to concentration camps! What a monstrous dictatorship!
The tragic and insane story took a twist the following year when Hyon was interviewed on North Korean TV—and, behold, she was alive! The British newspaper The Independent called Hyon’s appearance “miraculous” (perhaps the singer’s resurrection was linked to the Bible found amid the bacchanalia!).
The explanation for the singer’s miraculous resurrection, however, is not supernatural. The first to report the tragic story of the performers was the South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo. The sources cited in the newspaper’s report were all anonymous. The South Korean disinformation service also had a hand in fabricating the story: shortly after the lie was spread, the head of South Korean intelligence, Nam Jae Joon, claimed he was also aware of the execution.
Chosun Ilbo is a major ultraconservative newspaper that acted as a propagandist for the Japanese Empire during the occupation of Korea, as well as for the military dictatorship that ruled the country until the end of the last century. It is distinctly anti-DPRK. But that’s not all: it is known for spreading fake news about Pyongyang. In 2019, both Chosun Ilbo and Chosun TV (owned by the same business group) reported that Kim Hyok Chol had been executed and Kim Yong Chol had been sentenced to hard labor. Both were nuclear negotiators for the DPRK in relations with the United States and were allegedly punished because the rapprochement process between the DPRK and the U.S. had not been successful. The sources cited by South Korean journalists were, again, anonymous. A few days later, however, Kim Yong Chol appeared alongside Kim Jong Un at an event broadcast by state television, a clear demonstration of Yong Chol’s prestige. CNN’s Taipei correspondent, Will Ripley, who had traveled to the DPRK around 20 times, also reported that Kim Hyok Chol was alive.
Despite its history of sensationalism and false news, the Chosun group continues to be a trusted source for major international media outlets. Earlier this month, the group reported that between 20 and 30 government officials had been executed for failing to prevent the deaths of 4,000 people in floods that hit the north of the country during the summer. As always, the Brazilian and international press eagerly spread the news, and O Globo even stated that Chosun TV was a “local broadcaster” from the DPRK. And, as always, the source of the information disseminated by Chosun was anonymous, as The Independent noted—even though it still endorsed the hoax with statements from “experts” on the subject, all of them South Korean and American.
What actually happened was quite different from the internationally orchestrated hoax. In early August, in a speech before flood victims in North Phyongan Province, Kim Jong Un took responsibility, as every leader should be conscious of doing, and announced the measures the government would take.
I felt uneasy because I could not help you much, despite my strong desire to do something. Although the entire country has sincerely mobilized to help, at this moment, I can only feel anxious and impatient because I have been unable to remove all the inconveniences you are experiencing in tents and poorly furnished public facilities.
In the same speech, the Korean leader announced that 130,000 young people and soldiers from the People’s Army were already being mobilized to rebuild infrastructure in North Phyongan. He also assured that all students and children from the areas affected by the heavy rains in North Phyongan, Jagang, and Ryanggang Provinces, which led to the Amnok River overflowing, would be transferred to Pyongyang during the reconstruction to stay safe and continue their studies, all at the expense of the State. In total, he announced that 15,400 people would be temporarily relocated to the country’s capital.
Nursing, edification, and education of students and other children are the most important of all state affairs, never to be abandoned even if the sky may fall in. Therefore, the State will take full responsibility for this work during the rehabilitation campaign. And state-backed care benefits will be offered in Pyongyang to the elderly and sick, honored disabled ex-soldiers, and nursing mothers before new houses are built in the flood-stricken areas.
Kim Jong Un also assured that those who remained in the affected cities during the reconstruction of their homes, in addition to the tents where they were already sheltered, could store their furniture and other belongings in safe places. Moreover, public restrooms with shower stalls and waste disposal systems would be provided to eliminate any possibility of contagious disease outbreaks. He also emphasized the issue of collective voluntary work, a historic characteristic of the Korean Revolution, as a means to solve the problem: “The assistance work must be conducted strictly under voluntary principles, never in a forced or organized manner.”
And so it happened. As the water was receding, the Paektusan Heroic Youth Shock Brigade— which received nearly 300,000 volunteer applications—was dispatched by the Workers’ Party to evacuate people from risky areas and begin the reconstruction process. One of the first measures was restoring water and electricity supplies. The metallurgical, steel, and mining industries increased production to meet the needs of the affected northern regions. Factories in all provinces focused their production on consumer goods for those affected. A special transportation scheme was set up on the railways to supply those regions with consumer and construction materials. Regional regiments of the WPK militias were sent to the affected provinces. Every sector of society was mobilized to aid in reconstruction. In addition to volunteers, who were joined by workers and soldiers to repair and rebuild buildings, roads, and bridges, professionals from various fields, such as doctors, scientists from the Academy of Sciences, and artistic ensembles, were also sent to the affected areas.
In Pyongyang, children and adults temporarily relocated from the northern areas at risk were offered visits to tourist and leisure sites such as circuses, theaters, museums, zoos, water parks, Mangyongdae Children’s Palace and Hill, and the Science and Technology Complex. Collective birthday parties are also being held for these people. The entire process is being closely monitored and reported daily by the Korean press.
The DPRK government estimated that the reconstruction would be completed within three months. Given the incredible mobilization of human and material resources, it is highly likely that this short deadline will indeed be met. Meanwhile, the vile propaganda of the DPRK’s enemies (and of the whole world) continues to spread its lowly lies. The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.
Canadian journalist outs himself as Canadian, Ukrainian intelligence collaborator

By Wyatt Reed · The Grayzone · September 3, 2024
Canada’s National Post is refusing to comment after one of its columnists revealed himself to be a collaborator with Western-aligned intelligence agencies. A Canadian activist is now threatening to sue the paper after the confessed spy smeared him in a front page article.
Adam Zivo, a columnist who covered the war in Ukraine for Canada’s National Post newspaper, has outed himself as an operative of Canadian and Ukrainian intelligence. The admission came as Zivo publicly leapt to the defense of Canada’s Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), in response to a wave of online mockery directed towards a post by the spy agency which asked readers, “Has a stranger ever tried to inflate your ego?,” before warning them that such flattery “could be elicitation.”
“People are dunking on this tweet but this actually happened to me in Odesa in early 2023 with a guy who seemed to be a Chinese spy,” Zivo volunteered. “I ended up organizing a small sting operation with two Ukrainian intelligence officers to figure out what his deal was,” he declared.
In a subsequent post, Zivo expanded on his repeated attempts to entrap a man he had encountered in Odessa, and whom he claimed was a Chinese intelligence agent. “I met the Chinese man and his wife at a restaurant while wearing a wire,” while “SBU officers watched us from a car parked outside, which had tinted windows,” Zivo stated.
He told Canada’s PressProgress that following his meeting with the supposed Chinese agent, “I drafted a detailed report which I quickly provided to the National Post, CSIS [Canadian Security Intelligence Service] and the Ukrainian government. After the recorded dinner, I produced transcripts and a follow-up report which was also shared with these stakeholders.”
The National Post has so far refused to comment on the revelation. As PressProgress reported, “National Post Editor-in-Chief Rob Roberts and Managing Editor Carson Jerema did not respond to several requests for comment.”
In response to questions to that publication, Zivo insisted he kept his bosses at the National Post updated about his intelligence activities.
“I informed them of what was occurring and that I was working with local authorities to address my safety concerns,” Zivo said, though he reportedly insisted later that he “did not run this by my editors for a sign off,” because, since he was a “freelancer, not a staff writer,” he did not “need permission.”
According to Zivo, his working relationship with Canadian and Ukrainian intelligence services began in late 2022. None of his articles published in the National Post have disclosed his ties to foreign or domestic spy agencies.
Since then, Zivo has zealously advocated for rapid deliveries of heavy weapons to Ukraine. He has also used his column as a platform for denigrating those he deemed an impediment to the war effort – including both the Canadian military and the nation of Germany, which he accused of “reckless greed and a callous disregard for eastern European lives” for initially declining to send tanks to Ukraine.
Among Zivo’s targets was Dimitri Lascaris, a Canadian lawyer who narrowly lost the Canadian Green Party’s 2020 leadership election. In early 2023, Zivo made Lascaris the subject of a front-page report entitled, “Former Green party leadership candidate goes to Moscow to whitewash war.” In the column, Zivo accused Lascaris of “pro-Putin sympathies,” “seemingly endorsing pro-Kremlin propaganda,” and “uncritically and reflexively taking Russia’s side.”
Zivo also rang up the co-leader of Canada’s Green Party, Jonathan Pednault, to solicit criticism of Lascaris. In a parenthetical, Zivo stated that he had helped facilitate a solidarity tour of Kiev for Pednault, and “introduced him to some contacts for his trip, such as local Jewish and LGBTQ leaders.”
While hinting at his ties to the Ukrainian government, Zivo neglected once again to disclose his role as an intelligence collaborator.
“No corporate media outlet in Canada has taken an interest in this story”
Following Zivo’s unmasking as a Ukrainian intelligence collaborator, Lascaris took to social media to argue the reporter-turned-spook “perpetrated a fraud by concealing from me and the public his spying activities,” then proceeded to write an “article about me [which] falsely insinuated that I was working in the service of the Russian government.”
“The supreme irony here is that it was Zivo – not me – who was acting as a government agent,” Lascaris explained.
In comments to The Grayzone, Lascaris remarked that “Zivo has also violated the journalistic values of transparency and integrity because he secured an interview with me on false pretences, and when the National Post published Zivo’s many articles about the Ukraine war, neither Zivo nor the Post disclosed to the public that Zivo was a spy.”
Zivo has previously described himself as a “journalist,” “content vendor,” “filmmaker,” “activist” and – apparently ironically – as a “geopolitical analyst via an ecosystem of NATO-affiliated NGOs.”
Lascaris dismissed these labels as window dressing. “There’s now little doubt that Zivo wears only one hat: he is a shill for the Western military industrial complex,” he said.
“There are probably many more ‘journalists’ like Zivo in the Western corporate media. What is unusual about Zivo is that he bragged publicly about being a spy for Western intelligence agencies,” Lascaris added.
It is unknown whether other intelligence operatives are employed by the National Post, or its parent company, Postmedia News, which is owned by a pro-Trump hedge fund in the US known as Chatham Asset Management.
Describing Postmedia as “fanatically pro-Israel,” Lascaris accused the company’s newspapers of “attacking me for the past eight years,” noting that the hit pieces “started around the time that I became a prominent advocate for Palestinian human rights in Canada.”
But for Lascaris, deploying an actual spy to imply he was acting as a Kremlin asset was a step too far. He now says he is considering legal action against the National Post and its parent company, Postmedia News, which is Canada’s largest newspaper publisher.
“Because Zivo misled me… I sent a letter to the National Post’s editor-in-chief in which I threatened to sue the Post for fraud,” Lascaris explained, adding: “I’m awaiting the editor’s response.”
A handful of Canadian journalists have condemned Zivo on an individual basis, with the President of the Canadian Association of Journalists, Brent Jolly, describing Zivo’s intelligence activities as “problematic” and “ethically murky.” Jolly told PressProgress : “I don’t think we can go around and just have people one minute working for CSIS and the next writing a story about what an amazing job CSIS is doing.”
Sonya Fatah, the Associate Chair of Toronto Metropolitan University’s School of Journalism, described Zivo’s actions as a major breach of journalistic ethics, stating: “I imagine most newsrooms would be horrified.”
But so far, Canadian mainstream media has done its best to ignore Zivo’s disturbing double game.
“As far as I know, no corporate media outlet in Canada has taken an interest in this story,” Lascaris said. “Although I am well known to the corporate media, no Canadian corporate media outlet has sought comment from me about this scandal.”
But outside the Western media bubble, Lascaris said he suspects that Zivo’s activities will have dangerous repercussions.
“It’s almost certain that Zivo’s admission will heighten Russian suspicions about Western corporate journalists. And it’s not just Russia. China and other states targeted by Western government belligerence are sure to take these revelations into account in their dealings with Western journalists,” according to Lascaris.
“Zivo said that his employer knew about his activities. As far as I know, Postmedia has not denied this, nor has it taken any action against Zivo. The logical inference to draw is that Canada’s largest newspaper publisher believes that Zivo did nothing wrong.”
Zivo’s admission that he worked with intelligence services “will only heighten the belief in Russia, China and elsewhere that Western media have been coopted by, and have become tools of, hostile Western governments” Lascaris emphasized.
“In essence, the National Post’s response to this scandal will inevitably make it harder for Western journalists to do their jobs in the non-Western world.”
Would Be Assassin is a Media Darling
Ryan Wesley Routh, former roofer from N. Carolina and implacable foe of Trump and Putin, has often been approvingly quoted by MSM
By John Leake | Courageous Discourse | September 16, 2024
While we often hear that middle-aged southern white men pose a grave threat to American democracy and public safety, Ryan Wesley Routh—a former roofer from North Carolina who looks and sounds like a dumb cracker —has, in recent years, been a model of anti-Trump and anti-Putin sentiment. Also notable is the fact that in 2002, he was charged with the felony possession of a fully automatic firearm.
The following is a collection of statements he has made to various MSM outlets over the last couple of years.
“It’s a pretty big yard, but the front bank is completely full,” Ryan Routh, an American volunteer who started the memorial last year, said. “There may be 10,000 at this point. ‘Flags of the fallen’ is what I’ve been calling it.”
Routh, a former construction worker who lives in Hawaii, is one of the thousands of foreigners who, after seeing news reports about the invasion, travelled into Ukraine in early 2022 to volunteer as fighters or medics.
“Most of the Ukrainian authorities do not want these soldiers,” said Ryan Routh, head of the International Volunteer Center in Ukraine, a private organization which helps foreigners seeking to assist the war effort connect with military units and aid groups. “I have had partners meeting with [Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense] every week and still have not been able to get them to agree to issue one single visa.”
The New York Times article backs up the Russian Defense Ministry’s information regarding the countries which are actively trying to recruit mercenaries to join the fight in Ukraine. It wrote about Ryan Routh, a former construction worker from North Carolina who spent several months in Ukraine last year and is now seeking recruits among Afghan soldiers who fled the Taliban. He plans to move them to Ukraine from Pakistan and Iran – in some cases, illegally. Nevertheless, dozens of people have apparently expressed an interest.
With Legion growth stalling, Ryan Routh, a former construction worker from Greensboro, N.C., is seeking recruits from among Afghan soldiers who fled the Taliban. Mr. Routh, who spent several months in Ukraine last year, said he planned to move them, in some cases illegally, from Pakistan and Iran to Ukraine. He said dozens had expressed interest. “We can probably purchase some passports through Pakistan, since it’s such a corrupt country,” he said in an interview from Washington.
The man behind the wall of banners, Ryan Routh, told CNA that he posted the flags to pay tribute to the nations that have citizens fighting in Ukraine’s foreign legion, the International Legion of Territorial Defense of Ukraine. Routh said there have been no protests about the presence of the Taiwan flag so far, but even if China is dissatisfied, “I can order another 1,000, they can’t touch my flags.”
Routh, 56, originally hails from Hawaii, but most recently worked in the construction industry in North Carolina and has no military background. He came to Kyiv more than two months ago to show his support for Ukraine and wanted to join the foreign legion.
However, due to his age, he was unable to do so, and he is instead currently assisting the legion in recruiting volunteers for the Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie units in Kharkiv. Thus far, Routh has assisted in recruiting 70 volunteers to join the fight against Russia.
Routh began posting flags on the wall of a sandbagged monument in Kyiv’s Independence Square. He told the news agency that he included Taiwan’s flag because he had met at least five Taiwanese volunteers serving in the legion over the past two months and learned about Taiwan’s contribution to Ukraine’s war effort.
According to Routh, he has yet to receive any protests from China about the presence of the Taiwan flag. He said that any pressure that would come from China would be “nothing” compared to the daily assault by Russian forces on every soldier who supports Ukraine.
He said that he will continue to stay in Kyiv and encourage more people to fight against Russia. European countries deliver truckloads of food, medical supplies, and military equipment, but Ukraine may need three to four times more support, estimated Routh.
The volunteer pointed out that there are only 50 national flags on the stone wall, meaning that there are over 100 countries that do not have a single soldier that has volunteered to fight for Ukraine, “This is unacceptable.” He emphasized the war between Russia and Ukraine is a battle of good versus evil.
Routh asserted that at this critical moment, all countries should give their soldiers unpaid leave and provide air tickets to fly to Ukraine to participate in the war to prevent Russia from starting another war. “We should be united and share success and failure, which is what these flags stand for,” said Routh.
Thus, Routh has become a seemingly improbable face and voice of prevailing Democrat Party sentiment and foreign policy orthodoxy.
British Labour’s raw deal for working people
By Finian Cunningham | Strategic Culture Foundation | September 12, 2024
Keir Starmer’s Labour Party won a landslide election in July with the slogan “a new deal for working people”.
Already the electioneering can be seen as a sham. This week, the Labour government won a majority vote in the House of Commons to cut winter fuel payments for pensioners. Around 10 million senior citizens will no longer receive a financial grant to help them pay soaring energy bills and keep their houses warm this winter.
The energy crisis for households in Britain and across Europe is a result of the NATO proxy war in Ukraine and the cutting off of Russia’s abundant gas and oil supplies to the continent. The Biden administration ordered the blowing up of the Nord Stream gas pipelines under the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany. That was in September 2022. The best way to end the energy crisis for European households would be to stop the war, make peace, and return to normal relations. But the new Labour government is having none of that common sense. It is eagerly fueling the proxy war as much as the Conservatives before it, and what’s more now making the poor of Britain pay for the warmongering.
Prime Minister Starmer told angry unions and workers that he would make no apology for the winter fuel payment cut. His ministers are claiming they have “no choice” but to repair a “£22 billion blackhole” in public finances gutted by the predecessor Conservatives.
Starmer’s Labour is warning that more “tough choices” are coming in the coming weeks, meaning that working people and low-income families are going to face more economic austerity. So much for a democratic change from the hated Tories and the supposed “new deal for workers”.
The warped priorities of this government (as with the previous one) can be seen from the promises to boost spending on Britain’s military. Starmer has vowed to uphold a commitment to increase Britain’s “defense” budget from £54.2 bn (€64 bn, $74.7 bn) a year to £57.1 bn. That represents a 4.5 percent increase.
Under Starmer, Britain will continue to donate billions of public money to the Kiev regime.
This week, while the Labour government was voting to cut winter welfare for pensioners, the British foreign minister David Lammy traveled to Kiev alongside the U.S. secretary of state Antony Blinken, where they assured the Ukrainian regime that they would deliver more weapons, hinting at ending restrictions on long-range missiles to hit deep inside Russia.
Meanwhile, Britain’s defense minister John Healey will be in Ramstein, Germany, this week to meet with other military chiefs of the so-called Ukraine Contact Group. Healey, who calls himself “Mr Ukraine”, is to unveil another British military aid package of multi-role missiles worth £162 million. Healey is very much a deep-state figure inside the Labour government. This means a continuity in foreign policy despite the name change in Downing Street.
To date, since the eruption of the conflict in Ukraine in February 2022, Britain has doled out £12.5 bn (€14.7 bn) in military aid to the Kiev regime, including the training of up to 45,000 Ukrainian soldiers.
Britain is the third-biggest military aid donor to Ukraine after the United States and Germany.
Starmer’s new Labour government is showing itself every bit as committed to funding the proxy war against Russia as its Conservative predecessor was.
Just three days after the general election on July 4, the new defense minister, John Healey, made his first overseas visit to Ukraine on July 7. Healey vowed to continue Britain’s support.
So while the Labour government claims that it has “no choice” but to slash public spending at home, it unquestioningly keeps spending on militarism at home and abroad.
This is a matter of political choice. If a Labour government were to genuinely prioritize the needs of working people, it could find the finances easily by cutting Britain’s excessive military budget and the largesse it bestows on a NeoNazi regime and the reckless proxy war against Russia that could escalate into a nuclear conflagration.
The insulting deception of Labour’s “new deal” means that Starmer’s government will require close shepherding, just in case it wobbles from the inevitable public backlash.
The vote this week to axe winter fuel payments to elderly citizens has sparked fury among the wider population. The anger will grow as more austerity measures against citizens kick in and while the proxy war in Ukraine continues to receive endless support with British public money.
It seems no coincidence that this week Britain’s Starmer is to visit the White House. The visit by Blinken to London and thence to Kiev alongside his British counterpart, as well as the Ramstein meeting for UK defense chief Healey, all suggest that a close eye is being kept on Downing Street to ensure that it does not get any notions about “serving the people”.
To that end too, it seems significant that the former Conservative defense minister Ben Wallace has taken to whipping up public fears of Russia.
Wallace wrote a recent oped in the Daily Telegraph in which he claimed that Russian leader Vladimir Putin “will soon turn his war machine on Britain”.
The article was reported in several other British media outlets. The same fear-mongering has been echoed by the new head of Britain’s armed forces, General Sir Roly Walker, who warned that the United Kingdom could be in an all-out war with Russia in the next three years.
Wallace, who is a cipher for Britain’s deep state, claimed that “Britain is in Putin’s cross-hairs”. He added: “Make no mistake, Putin is coming for us… we must be prepared for the inevitable.”
The hysteria from Britain’s ruling class is of course cringe-making. These claims about Russia’s malign intent and comparing Putin with Hitler are completely bereft of any historical facts, such as NATO expansionism and the weaponizing of a Nazi-adulating regime in Ukraine to provoke Russia.
Russian leaders have repeatedly said they have no intention of attacking any NATO nations. They say their involvement in Ukraine is a special operation to neutralize NATO threats to Russia’s national security.
Sooner or later, the British and Western public are going to demand accountability from their governments on why such huge finances are being ladled into promoting a highly dangerous conflict with Russia.
Britain’s Labour government is vulnerable to a public backlash because of its blatant duplicity.
That would explain the close attention from Washington to London’s policy, ensuring Starmer keeps toeing the line of NATO’s hostility to Moscow. British deep state assets like Ben Wallace also need to keep writing scare stories to frighten the public away from common sense criticism of London’s deranged warmongering and betrayal of working people.
‘Israel’s’ Bloody Negotiations Strategy in Gaza

By Jamal Kanj | Al Mayadeen | September 12, 2024
Fifty-two years ago, almost to the day, on September 8, 1972, I survived the first of many air and sea raids on my refugee camp in northern Lebanon. I was less than two hundred yards from the area across the river where a group of us young kids met every day, between 4 and 5 p.m., to play in the large field, swim in the river, or the Mediterranean Sea.
At first, I heard what sounded like a humming plane. Before I could even turn my head to look up at the sky, I was startled by the booming sound of low-flying fighter jets passing overhead, dropping massive rockets onto the open field. The first bomb exploded in the northwest area of the field, creating a massive fireball—a black column of smoke intertwined with a glowing red blaze. The shockwave threw me off my bike. Soot filled the air and fragments rained down like strafing bullets all around me.
In less than 15 minutes, the once grassy green play area of approximately 20 acres was transformed into a lunar landscape, pocked with craters. One pit was so large and deep that groundwater filled the hole.
If the Israeli air raid had occurred just five or ten minutes later, I would have been in the middle of the field, playing with other 14-year-old kids. My friend Barakat, who was already there and likely had been eagerly anticipating my arrival, was killed. The raid left many unexploded devices and time-delayed bombs, making it difficult to recover his body until the next day. Our neighbor Mahdi was also killed, buried under the plowed soil. Years later, his skeleton was discovered when the area was being graded.
I’m reminded of this today, September 10, 2024, as I watch footage of the huge crater left behind by an American-made 2,000-pound MK-84 bomb. The bombs were dropped in the middle of the night on 20 tents housing displaced civilians in an Israeli-designated “safe area” in al-Mawasi, southern Gaza.
Early in the morning, the Israeli army issued its disinformation boilerplate communiqué, declaring the raid was a “precise strike” on senior resistance members. But videos from the crater, where tents lay buried under the sand, suggest that “Israel” targeted civilians in a supposed safe area.
Reading about the “precise strike” on a BBC site took me back 52 years. Almost three hours after the raid on my camp, I remember my father and our neighbors gathering around the radio to listen to the 7 p.m. BBC Arabic news. I still recall how they stopped breathing, their eyes wide, mouths agape, as the BBC quoted an Israeli army spokesman claiming “Israel” had targeted a military base in Nahr el-Bared refugee camp in northern Lebanon.
While I don’t remember the exact number of the killed and injured that afternoon, I know for certain that 100 percent were civilians—mostly young boys and girls, with at least one elderly man among them. I felt then as helpless as many of those who were sleeping on September 10 in their “safe” tents, unable to tell their story to the world. The photos left behind by the US-manufactured 2,000-pound bombs, however, expose “Israel’s” lies and the complicity of the managed Western media.
It is utterly despicable that the lecterns at the White House and the State Department have become platforms to market such lies, emboldening “Israel’s” intransigence and whitewashing its genocide. Especially egregious is the disinformation spread by White House National Security Communications Adviser John Kirby, who blamed the Palestinians as “the main obstacle” to a ceasefire. This brazen lie comes less than a week after the leak of a document pointing to new conditions that were added in late July by Benjamin Netanyahu to Joe Biden’s proposal from May 27, which torpedoed the ceasefire agreement.
After the Palestinians rejected Netanyahu’s new conditions in late July, “Israel” intensified its systematic campaign of bombing displaced civilians in safe areas, including 16 UN schools converted into mass shelters. Unable to compel a ceasefire on its terms, “Israel” is using these attacks on designated safe areas as part of its bloody negotiation strategy to exert pressure by inflicting maximum suffering on civilians through murder and starvation.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration continues to supply “Israel” with the means to commit these war crimes, while using the White House platform to spread disinformation, making “Israel’s” “lies sound truthful and murder respectable.”
No, New York Times, Climate Change Isn’t Destroying Bridges
By Anthony Watts | Climate Realism | September 6, 2024
The New York Times (NYT) recently published an article titled “Climate Change Can Cause Bridges to ‘Fall Apart Like Tinkertoys,’ Experts Say,” written by Coral Davenport. Multiple lines of evidence and examples not only refute this claim as false but expose the sheer absurdity of the claim.
These sorts of absurdly false claims have been tried before, for instance, when the I-35W bridge collapsed in Minneapolis, MN in 2007. An article in 2007 by Noel Sheppard at NewsBusters exposed the claim as false:
A former member of the Clinton administration, and current Senior Fellow at the virtual Clinton think tank the Center for American Progress, claimed Monday that global warming might have played a factor in the collapse of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis last week.
I kid you not.
Writing at Climate Progress, the global warming blog of CAP, Joseph Romm – who served as Acting Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy in 1997 and as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary from 1995 though 1998 – stated in a piece amazingly entitled “Did Climate Change Contribute To The Minneapolis Bridge Collapse?“
Unsurprisingly, the actual cause had nothing to do with climate change at all but rather an engineering failure that used undersized gusset plates that were too thin for the load of the bridge:
The investigation revealed that photos from a June 2003 inspection of the bridge showed gusset-plate bowing. On November 13, 2008, the NTSB released the findings of its investigation. The primary cause of the collapse was the undersized gusset plates, at 0.5 inches (13 mm) thick. Contributing to that design or construction error was the fact that 2 inches (51 mm) of concrete had been added to the road surface over the years, increasing the static load by 20%. Another factor was the extraordinary weight of construction equipment and material resting on the bridge just above its weakest point at the time of the collapse. That load was estimated at 578,000 pounds (262 tonnes), consisting of sand, water, and vehicles.
So, human error and extra weight, not climate change, was determined to be the cause of the bridge’s failure.
Fast forward to the present. The NYT’s article makes similar claims:
Bridges designed and built decades ago with materials not intended to withstand sharp temperature swings are now rapidly swelling and contracting, leaving them weakened.
“It’s getting so hot that the pieces that hold the concrete and steel, those bridges can literally fall apart like Tinkertoys,” Dr. Chinowsky said.
As temperatures reached the hottest in recorded history this year, much of the nation’s infrastructure, from highways to runways, has suffered. But bridges face particular risks.
Really? The bridges in question weren’t engineered to handle daily temperature swings? A natural event that happens daily across seasons? That sounds like poor planning. Besides the absurdity of that claim, there are two further contradictory points to consider.
First, in the United States, we’ve seen far worse sustained heatwaves before, such as in the 1930s when the July 1936 heatwave hit America’s Midwest, where some places experienced up to 14 days of above 100°F temperatures. This is evidenced by the graph in Figure 1, provided by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Figure 1. This figure shows the annual values of the U.S. Heat Wave Index, from 1895 to 2020 contiguous 48 states. Environmental Protection Agency.
In the many reports of the heatwaves in the 1930’s, there is no mention of bridge collapse, which suggests that the linkage to “extreme heat aided by climate change” claim is false. Otherwise, such temperatures in the 1930s would have resulted in collapsed bridges. However, there simply are none from that period reportedly linked to heat.
Secondly, the article says “As temperatures reached the hottest in recorded history this year, much of the nation’s infrastructure, from highways to runways, has suffered.” But this isn’t true either. The claim NYT uses is about the global temperature, not the U.S. temperature. As seen in Figure 2 below showing data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), from the U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN), widely considered to be the most accurate source of surface temperature data, July 2024 was not “the hottest in recorded history.” For example, maximum U.S. temperature was higher in 2012 and 2005 than in July 2024.

Figure 2: NOAA – USCRN Maximum Temperature
Diving deeper into the NYT article, the Times attributes the failure of a railroad bridge connecting Iowa and South Dakota during floods to climate change. Flooding in the rivers and streams across and bordering Iowa and South Dakota have been common for as long as records of such event have been kept back into the mid-1800s. And railroad bridge collapses have happened repeatedly in the United States and around the world, well before climate change ever became an issue. Since data show no increase in the number or severity of flood events across the United States, in general, or in Iowa and South Dakota, in particular, there is no evidence climate change played any role in that particular railroad bridge collapse.
The next claim is that the concrete buckled and broke on a bridge in Lewiston, Maine which NYT blamed on “recent fluctuation in temperature and rain.”
Looking at the weather in Lewiston, ME when the event occurred shows that although high and low temperatures were higher than the normal average for late June, the fluctuations the NYT was so concerned about were less extreme than normal, about a 15 degree change from high to low in June 2024 rather than the historic daily average of about 20 degrees. (See figure 3, below).

Figure 3: Normal average daily fluctuations in temperatures throughout the year for Lewiston Maine. Source: Google
The high temperature for the third week of June was 95℉, above the normal maximum for the date, but it was well below the historic high temperature for the city of 99℉ recorded in 1911, 113 years of global warming ago. Lewiston’s 2024 June high was also 10 degrees lower than the high temperature record for the state as a whole of 105℉ set in North Bridgton, ME, just thirty miles away from Lewiston, also from 1911, when that temperature was hit twice.
Because temperatures in Lewiston didn’t fluctuate wildly and were also not record setting, it is implausible for the bridge’s concrete cracking and buckling to have anything at all to do with climate change. It was likely a result of poor construction or, even more likely, poor maintenance, a problem for many bridges and overpasses in Maine and the U.S. as a whole, combined with increased traffic and load, due to significant population growth in the city and the region, using the bridge.
Literally, it takes two minutes of work on Google search to find this data. Apparently, NYT reporter Coral Davenport couldn’t be troubled to seek out the facts. Or perhaps, she just doesn’t know how. This sort of slapdash reporting containing speculative claims rather than simple facts seems like something out of the old TV series The Twilight Zone.
If such an episode aired today, my suggested title would be “Bogus Maximus.” This story was pure science fiction.
Trump’s Grand-Jury Indictments Don’t Mean Squat
By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | September 10, 2024
A recent Los Angeles Times column by Times’s columnist Jackie Calmes entitled “Should a Five-Time Loser with Grand Juries Be President?” displays a woeful lack of understanding regarding grand-jury indictments.
Calmes’s article, of course, is about Donald Trump and argues that the five grand-jury indictments against Trump are a good reason for rejecting his candidacy for president. Adding authority to her argument, Calmes quotes former Justice Department official and MSNBC legal analyst Andrew Weissmann: “For those counting, FIVE separate grand juries (scores of citizens) have now found probable cause that Trump committed multiple felonies.”
As a former prosecutor, Weissmann should know that grand juries are usually nothing more than rubber stamps for whatever prosecutors want. As Sol Wachtler, chief justice of New York’s Supreme Court, put it, “Any good prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich.”
Grand juries are normally composed of good, little, patriotic, deferential citizens who look upon prosecutors and judges, especially at the federal level, as gods. When a federal prosecutor enters the grand-jury room armed with a bit of evidence and an indictment, the grand jurors are going to do what he wants them to do.
Keep in mind, after all, that there is no judge in the grand-jury room. There is also no defense attorney representing the person they want indicted. There is no one to challenge or rule out incompetent evidence. The prosecutor can use hearsay evidence, illegally acquired evidence, or even evidence acquired by torture. The grand jury is not going to challenge him on the evidence he is presenting to them. They are simply going to grant his request for an indictment.
Calmes makes a big deal over the fact that a grand-jury indictment is based on “probable cause.” Big deal. What she apparently doesn’t realize is that “probable cause” can be based on hearsay or other evidence that is not admissible at a trial. That makes the indictment worthless in terms of whether the accused is actually guilty of what the indictment charges him with.
The fact is that a grand-jury indictment is nothing more than an accusation. In a court of law, it doesn’t constitute any evidence whatsoever. In terms of determining whether a person is guilty of a crime, an indictment is worthless.
Whatever reasons people might have for rejecting Trump’s quest to be president again, those grand-jury indictments against him are a ludicrous one. Calmes, Weissmann, and the Los Angeles Times should know better than to make such a ridiculous argument for rejecting Donald Trump’s candidacy.



