By Ilya Tsukanov – Sputnik – 20.08.2024
After nearly a year of efforts to taunt, provoke and intimidate Iran into a full-on regional war in the Middle East amid the Gaza crisis, Iran hawks in Washington have turned to a new strategy, accusing Tehran of interfering in the upcoming US presidential election. A respected Middle Eastern affairs scholar explains what’s behind the new approach.
The FBI, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence formally accused Iran of attempting to hack the Trump and Biden-Harris presidential campaigns on Monday.
The new allegations, which came weeks after a series of reports in US media citing “anonymous intelligence sources” claiming that Iran was plotting to assassinate Donald Trump, or to hack his presidential campaign, were not accompanied with any evidence.
“As the lead for threat response, the FBI has been tracking this activity, has been in contact with the victims, and will continue to investigate and gather information in order to pursue and disrupt the threat actors responsible. We will not tolerate foreign efforts to influence or interfere with our elections, including the targeting of American political campaigns,” the US intel agencies said in a joint statement.
Iran calmly rejected the US’s “unsubstantiated” and evidence-free claims.
“Such allegations are unsubstantiated and devoid of any standing. As we have previously announced, the Islamic Republic of Iran harbors neither the intention nor the motive to interference with the US presidential election,” the country’s permanent mission to the United Nations said in a statement.
“Should the US government genuinely believe in the validity of its claims, it should furnish us with the pertinent evidence – if any, to which we will respond accordingly,” the mission added.
Dangerous Distraction Action
“There is little doubt that the rhetoric itself has more impact than the substantiation of these accusations,” Dr. Mehmet Rakipoglu, a political scientist and international affairs observer and assistant professor at Turkiye’s Mardin Artuklu University, told Sputnik.
“Creating artificial agendas such as [the Iran hacking claims] intensifies hostilities between the parties involved. This accusation seems to be aimed at diverting attention from Israel’s actions in Gaza and refocusing it on the US election process,” Rakipoglu added, pointing out that Tel Aviv has been bogged down by accusations of engaging in genocide against Gaza’s civilian population, while proving unable to defeat Hamas militarily.
“It is already clear that the American public is deeply divided, regardless of whether there is an alleged Iranian attack. It is not Iran or any other external actor that is responsible for these divisions, but rather the US administrations themselves,” the academic said.
Rakipoglu stressed that, conveniently for the accusers, there’s virtually no way to verify the US intelligence agencies’ allegations, or conversely, prove that or Iran, or any other country, has interfered in the US election.
In some sense, the claims against Iran this election cycle are reminiscent of similar allegations made against Russia ahead of, during and following the 2016 vote, Rakipoglu said.
“While the US propagated a narrative of Russian interference during the 2016 elections, it continued to lose influence over time. It seems that the current accusation against Iran serves the same purpose as the allegations against Russian interference in 2016,” the observer said.
If that’s the case, it could signal a dangerous turn for Iran, and the Middle East in general. The 2016 Russian meddling allegations sparked a deep downturn in Russia-US relations, with the Russiagate conspiracy hounding Donald Trump throughout his term in office, blocking his ability to restore any semblance of normal ties with Moscow, and ultimately manufacturing consent among a substantial portion of the US electorate for the NATO-Russia proxy conflict in Ukraine which began in 2022.
RT | August 18, 2024
Russia and Ukraine have not been involved in any “direct or indirect” talks that could have been derailed by Kiev’s cross-border incursion into Kursk Region, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told journalists on Sunday.
She was asked to comment on a Washington Post article which claimed, citing sources, that the Ukrainian attack thwarted secret indirect negotiations between Moscow and Kiev regarding a potential moratorium on striking energy infrastructure. The supposed talks were said to be mediated by Qatar, the outlet wrote on Saturday.
“No one has derailed anything,” Zakharova said, explaining that the two sides have not discussed any “security regimes” for critical infrastructure facilities.
She went on to say that threats to energy facilities such as the nuclear power stations in Zaporozhye and Kursk come from Kiev, not Moscow.
Earlier, a Russian journalist had reported that Kiev was plotting a “false flag” attack involving a dirty nuclear bomb either at the nuclear plant in Zaporozhye or Kursk. Commenting on the matter, the Russian Defense Ministry said it takes such reports seriously and vowed a swift and harsh response to any such attacks. Moscow has called on the UN to condemn the alleged plot, while Kiev has denied the claims.
According to Zakharova, Moscow and Kiev have not engaged in any talks since spring 2022, except for prisoner exchanges facilitated by third-party mediators. Peace talks held over the first months of the conflict collapsed after Kiev withdrew from them due to what Moscow claims was Western interference.
Ukraine had “all the chances” to resolve the conflict through negotiations, the spokeswoman said. Moscow repeatedly stated that it was ready to enter into negotiations at any moment as long as the situation on the ground was taken into account.
Kiev banned any talks with the current Russian leadership at the national level through a presidential decree signed in 2022. The move came after four former Ukrainian regions voted overwhelmingly to join Russia.
This June, Moscow put forward another peace initiative, Zakharova noted. At the time, President Vladimir Putin said Russia was ready to immediately open peace talks with Kiev if it withdrew its troops from the four regions that joined Russia in 2022 and committed to maintaining neutral status.
According to Zakharova, Kiev reacted to this “goodwill gesture” by launching an incursion into Kursk Region, where Ukrainian forces were “deliberately killing medics, rescuers, and volunteers, as well as attacking civilian transport.” In the wake of the attack, Putin said there can be no talks with those “who conduct indiscriminate strikes on civilians.”
The Mpox Emergency
By David Bell | Brownstone Institute | August 18, 2024
The World Health Organization (WHO) acted as expected this week and declared Mpox a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). So, a problem in a small number of African countries that has killed about the same number of people this year as die every four hours from tuberculosis has come to dominate international headlines. This is raising a lot of angst from some circles against the WHO.
While angst is warranted, it is mostly misdirected. The WHO and the IHR emergency committee they convened had little real power – they are simply following a script written by their sponsors. The African CDC, which declared an emergency a day earlier, is in a similar position. Mpox is a real disease and needs local and proportionate solutions. But the problem it is highlighting is much bigger than Mpox or the WHO, and understanding this is essential if we are to fix it.
Mpox, previously called Monkeypox, is caused by a virus thought to normally infect African rodents such as rats and squirrels. It fairly frequently passes to, and between, humans. In humans, its effects range from very mild illness to fever and muscle pains to severe illness with its characteristic skin rash, and sometimes death. Different variants, called ‘clades,’ produce slightly different symptoms. It is passed by close body contact including sexual activity, and the WHO declared a PHEIC two years ago for a clade that was mostly passed by men having sex with men.
The current outbreaks involve sexual transmission but also other close contact such as within households, expanding its potential for harm. Children are affected and suffer the most severe outcomes, perhaps due to issues of lower prior immunity and the effects of malnutrition and other illnesses.
Reality in DRC
The current PHEIC was mainly precipitated by the ongoing outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), though there are known outbreaks in nearby countries covering a number of clades. About 500 people have died from Mpox in DRC this year, over 80% of them under 15 years of age. In that same period, about 40,000 people in DRC, mostly children under 5 years, died from malaria. The malaria deaths were mainly due to lack of access to very basic commodities like diagnostic tests, antimalarial drugs, and insecticidal bed nets, as malaria control is chronically underfunded globally. Malaria is nearly always preventable or treatable if sufficiently resourced.
During this same period in which 500 people died from Mpox in DRC, hundreds of thousands also died in DRC and surrounding African countries from tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, and the impacts of malnutrition and unsafe water. Tuberculosis alone kills about 1.3 million people globally each year, which is a rate about 1,500 times higher than Mpox in 2024.
The population of DRC is also facing increasing instability characterized by mass rape and massacres, in part due to a scramble by warlords to service the appetite of richer countries for the components of batteries. These in turn are needed to support the Green Agenda of Europe and North America. This is the context in which the people of DRC and nearby populations, which obviously should be the primary decision-makers regarding the Mpox outbreak, currently live.
An Industry Produces What It Is Paid for
For the WHO and the international public health industry, Mpox presents a very different picture. They now work for a pandemic industrial complex, built by private and political interests on the ashes of international public health. Forty years ago, Mpox would have been viewed in context, proportional to the diseases that are shortening overall life expectancy and the poverty and civil disorder that allows them to continue. The media would barely have mentioned the disease, as they were basing much of their coverage on impact and attempting to offer independent analysis.
Now the public health industry is dependent on emergencies. They have spent the past 20 years building agencies such as CEPI, inaugurated at the 2017 World Economic Forum meeting and solely focused on developing vaccines for pandemic, and on expanding capacity to detect and distinguish ever more viruses and variants. This is supported by the recently passed amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR).
While improving nutrition, sanitation, and living conditions provided the path to longer lifespans in Western countries, such measures sit poorly with a colonial approach to world affairs in which the wealth and dominance of some countries are seen as being dependent on the continued poverty of others. This requires a paradigm in which decision-making is in the hands of distant bureaucratic and corporate masters. Public health has an unfortunate history of supporting this, with restriction of local decision-making and the pushing of commodities as key interventions.
Thus, we now have thousands of public health functionaries, from the WHO to research institutes to non-government organizations, commercial companies, and private foundations, primarily dedicated to finding targets for Pharma, purloining public funding, and then developing and selling the cure. The entire newly minted pandemic agenda, demonstrated successfully through the Covid-19 response, is based on this approach. Justification for the salaries involved requires detection of outbreaks, an exaggeration of their likely impact, and the institution of a commodity-heavy and usually vaccine-based response.
The sponsors of this entire process – countries with large Pharma industries, Pharma investors, and Pharma companies themselves – have established power through media and political sponsorship to ensure the approach works. Evidence of the intent of the model and the harms it is wreaking can be effectively hidden from public view by a subservient media and publishing industry. But in DRC, people who have long suffered the exploitation of war and the mineral extractors, who replaced a particularly brutal colonial regime, must now also deal with the wealth extractors of Pharma.
Dealing with the Cause
While Mpox is concentrated in Africa, the effects of corrupted public health are global. Bird flu will likely follow the same course as Mpox in the near future. The army of researchers paid to find more outbreaks will do so. While the risk from pandemics is not significantly different than decades ago, there is an industry dependent on making you think otherwise.
As the Covid-19 playbook showed, this is about money and power on a scale only matched by similar fascist regimes of the past. Current efforts across Western countries to denigrate the concept of free speech, to criminalize dissent, and to institute health passports to control movement are not new and are in no way disconnected from the inevitability of the WHO declaring the Mpox PHEIC. We are not in the world we knew twenty years ago.
Poverty and the external forces that benefit from war, and the diseases these enable, will continue to hammer the people of DRC. If a mass vaccination campaign is instituted, which is highly likely, financial and human resources will be diverted from far greater threats. This is why decision-making must now be centralized far from the communities affected. Local priorities will never match those that expansion of the pandemic industry depends on.
In the West, we must move on from blaming the WHO and address the reality unfolding around us. Censorship is being promoted by journalists, courts are serving political agendas, and the very concept of nationhood, on which democracy depends, is being demonized. A fascist agenda is openly promoted by corporate clubs such as the World Economic Forum and echoed by the international institutions set up after the Second World War specifically to oppose it. If we cannot see this and if we do not refuse to participate, then we will have only ourselves to blame. We are voting for these governments and accepting obvious fraud, and we can choose not to do so.
For the people of DRC, children will continue to tragically die from Mpox, from malaria, and from all the diseases that ensure return on investment for distant companies making pharmaceuticals and batteries. They can ignore the pleading of the servants of the White Men of Davos who will wish to inject them, but they cannot ignore their poverty or the disinterest in their opinions. As with Covid-19, they will now become poorer because Google, the Guardian, and the WHO were bought a long time back, and now serve others.
The one real hope is that we ignore lies and empty pronouncements, refusing to bow to unfounded fear. In public health and in society, censorship protects falsehoods and dictates reflect greed for power. Once we refuse to accept either, we can begin to address the problems at the WHO and the inequity it is promoting. Until that time, we will live in this increasingly vicious circus.
David Bell, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is a public health physician and biotech consultant in global health. He is a former medical officer and scientist at the World Health Organization (WHO), Programme Head for malaria and febrile diseases at the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND) in Geneva, Switzerland, and Director of Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund in Bellevue, WA, USA.
I’m still on August hiatus, but here’s a two-hour lecture on the history of mass media to tide you over until September! This is Lesson One of my three lesson Mass Media: A History online course. Buy the complete course for audio and video downloads, a hyperlinked transcript of each lesson and a study guide with questions and reading recommendations. Enjoy!
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By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | August 15, 2024
Psychologist and author Jordan Peterson has announced that Canada’s Supreme Court refused his appeal against undergoing social media re-education (“remedial”) training.
The case stems from the demand of the Ontario College of Psychologists (which licenses practicing clinical psychologists) for Peterson to be subjected to media training. The ruling now means he is to pay court costs to the organization seeking to impose this measure on him.
According to Peterson, the demand was spurred by his negative stance regarding what’s known as “gender-affirming care,” the doomsday climate change narrative (that he spoke about on Joe Rogan’s podcast), and criticism of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
In a video posted on YouTube, Peterson said the court’s “terrible decision” not to consider his appeal was yet another “blow to free speech” in his country – and could well result in the revoking of his license to practice, while the ultimate goal of the social media re-education would be to get “something approximating a public apology” for his opinions and for expressing them.
Peterson previously mentioned his criticism of social service workers and police “threatening to apprehend the children of the Trucker Convoy protestors” as another reason for the Ontario College of Psychologists wanting to get him “reeducated” – though he did not speak about this in the YouTube video.
In a post on X, Peterson said that the Supreme Court ruling amounted to admitting that “mid-level bureaucrats who rule the professional colleges and regulatory boards” have more power than the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
In another post, he criticized Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s government which he said was “overseeing the commissars” standing in the way of conservatives’ free expression, including “perhaps” Ford himself.
Peterson is also critical of the way Canada’s CBC covers the case (including his remarks on the Rogan podcast), referring to the broadcaster as “paid lackeys.”
But Peterson has received support from other corners, including Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) International, who said they were willing to work with him “to see if he wants to take the case international” – which he seems to be open to.
And Canadian Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre lambasted the decision as an attempt to impose forced political reeducation, noting that this came after “another government bureaucracy threatened to ban a Canadian from practicing his profession because he expressed political opinions the state doesn’t like.”
By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 15.08.2024
Ukraine’s ill-fated Kursk terror attack could be part of the US Democratic establishment’s effort to prop up their candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, in the 2024 presidential election, according to Wall Street analyst Charles Ortel.
Despite the US State Department and Pentagon denying any involvement in the Kiev regime’s Kursk aggression, it has all the earmarks of US-NATO management and planning, according to Major General Apti Alaudinov, deputy head of the Russian Defense Ministry’s Military-Political Directorate and Alexander Bortnikov, director of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB).
“At this stage, nothing likely happens in Ukraine and vis-a-vis Russia unless approved in advance by someone in the US,” Wall Street analyst and investigative journalist Charles Ortel told Sputnik. “Relevant questions include: exactly who approved these offensive operations and what debate, if any, occurred in Congress before these raids happened?”
Ortel called the Kursk attack a “wag the dog 2.0” operation, saying that it “seems a reprise” of then-US President Bill Clinton’s assault on one of Sudan’s biggest pharmaceutical factories in Khartoum in 1998. The US attack based on faulty intelligence was presented as retaliation to Al-Qaeda bombings of the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
However, some analysts noted at the time that the US bombing came as investigations into Clinton’s lies about his affair with Monica Lewinsky intensified. Dubbing the case a “wag the dog” situation, they suggested that Clinton urgently authorized the strike as a distraction, with the backing of many Democratic lawmakers including then-Senator Joe Biden.
The Kursk aggression appears to be as dubious in terms of military planning and strategic value as the senseless bombing of the Al Shifa factory. US Congressman Paul Gosar called Ukraine’s border incursion “suicidal” in an interview with Sputnik, while retired US Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski wondered whether Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan had a hand in the Kursk aggression planning.
Earlier, on August 8, CNN quoted Ukrainian officials as saying that the Kursk attack was aimed at demoralizing Russian forces and diverting them away from other parts of the front. However, as of August 12, the Ukrainian military told the New York Times and Financial Times (FT) that the Russian Armed Forces’ advance in Donbass, including near strategically important Chasov Yar and Torestk, is continuing unabated.
To complicate matters further for Kiev, at least six Ukrainian brigades that previously fought near Kharkov, Sumy, Chasov Yar and Toretsk were redirected to participate in the Kursk aggression, according to FT. The newspaper cited Ukrainian soldiers’ worries about leaving positions in Donbass to take part in the Kursk gamble.
On August 15, Russia’s Tsentr Battlegroup destroyed a Ukrainian military stronghold in the Avdeyyevka direction in the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR). On August 12, the Russian military liberated the settlement of Lisichnoye; earlier, Timofeyevka and Veseloye were retaken from the enemy. Russia liberated a total of 19 settlements of the DPR in July, according to the Russian Ministry of Defense.
Harris and Walz’s ‘Illusionary’ Campaign Doomed to be Busted
One might ask why the US Democratic establishment would need any “prop-up” of their presidential candidate Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz, given that the two are currently enjoying a surge in the polls.
According to Ortel, the surge appears to be short-lived and most likely artificial and made-up by the US corporate press, especially given that Harris’ poll numbers as Biden’s veep had been disastrous. For instance, the Wall Street analyst referred to a recent survey published by the Hill that claimed that more voters trust Harris than Donald Trump on the economy as completely detached from reality.
“The corporate-owned press, including Fox, has lost all credibility which explains their financial losses and the rise of Twitter spaces, Tucker Carlson and alternative truth-tellers that thrive,” Ortel said. “Traditional actors are resolved to sell fiction as fact to promote a singularly unaccomplished airhead to lead America out of the messes she helped create.”
Indeed, US conservative commentators and pundits have recently thrown Harris’ poll numbers, campaign performance and unwillingness to make one-on-one interviews into question.
“[The media] are so in the tank for Harris that they are defending her decision not to talk to them,” remarked US investigative journalist and author Michael Shellenberg on X on August 14. Earlier, the journalist drew attention to the fact that, for some strange reason, Harris has not put a policy agenda on her website.
Former White House Political Director Matt Schlapp tweeted that there is nothing short of a “push by the national media and Democratic National Committee (DNC) to legitimize Kamala Harris,” adding that she is not giving interviews to evade criticism over her vice presidency.
Similarly, Fox News host Sean Hannity recently called Harris “an illusion, built on a mountain of lies” on X.
Rogan O’Handley, a former entertainment lawyer, claimed on X on August 7 that the Harris campaign was caught offering Instagram influencers money to post personal stories about how the Biden-Harris administration helped them.
Axios reported on August 13 that it found that Harris’ campaign was editing news headlines and descriptions within Google search ads to “make it appear as if the Guardian, Reuters, CBS News and other major publishers are on her side.” The news outlet noted that while such activity is in line with the Google rules, the tech giant admitted there was a “glitch” that removed a disclaimer “sponsored” near the news headlines touting Harris.
US conservative journalist Kyle Becker also alleged on X that pollsters are “oversampling” Democrats for no reason “except deceiving the voters.” Becker believes that the reports that Harris is leading her Republican competitor in key battleground states are made up to justify her future win. “It is all designed to try to keep Harris within the margin of cheating,” tweeted Becker. In 2020, Biden won the presidential election after outperforming Trump by a razor-thin margin in crucial swing states. Many Republicans believe voting procedures were rigged there.
According to Ortel, the Harris-Walz campaign “honeymoon” may end as abruptly as it started.
“The true mud-slinging will start after Labor Day [September 2] and continue thereafter. No one yet has vetted Harris or Walz and I suspect their reputations will be gutted, fairly, well before November 5, 2024. Moreover, neither are effective, battle-hardened debaters, campaigners or leaders,” Ortel said.
Looming Crises Won’t Allow Harris-Walz to Fool Voters
While the Harris-Walz campaign needs good news, be it record-high poll numbers, Federal Reserve interest rate cuts, or their proxy Zelensky claiming victories, the problem is that the “looming crises and worsening economic prospects” won’t let “conflicted grifters” in the US establishment fool American voters again, according to Ortel.
As Ukrainian forces continue to lose ground on the battlefield, the Biden administration is still struggling to reach a ceasefire agreement amid Israel’s war in Gaza, fuelling discontent with the Democratic Party among Palestine supporters. According to the New York Post, an August 14 rally supporting Vice President Harris in the New York City descended into chaos after pro-Palestinian protesters infiltrated the gathering and later started to clash with the police.
Meanwhile, Bloomberg experts warn the US economy is expected to slow down under the Biden-Harris administration, casting an additional shadow on the Harris-Walz campaign.
Commenting on the Democratic administration’s chaotic domestic and foreign policies, Ortel noted:
“The period 1991 to present stands already as a rare epoch during which too many leaders combined arrogance and ignorance into a toxic cocktail, gulling voters with effective lies into bullied serfs, grateful for gruel as the donor class and their paid stooges seemingly prospered,” the pundit said. “‘What could have been’ from 1991 forward unburdened by Harris, Walz and other incompetent, conflicted has-beens is truly a marvel to contemplate! Let’s see whether the American election is free and fair and let’s see who actually wins.”
RT | August 14, 2024
A military base in the German city of Cologne was placed on lockdown on Wednesday over fears of a potential act of sabotage, Der Spiegel has reported. A spokesperson for the German Defense Ministry has confirmed that security services have launched an investigation.
In recent months, several Western media outlets as well as officials have alleged that Russia has been stepping up efforts to conduct acts of sabotage on European soil. Moscow’s presumed endgame is to disrupt the delivery of Western weapons to Ukraine and the training of Kiev’s troops abroad.
Moscow has consistently dismissed the allegations as “not serious” and “unfounded.”
In its article on Wednesday, Der Spiegel reported that the Bundeswehr barracks had been completely sealed off, with police and military counter-intelligence services looking into a potential case of unauthorized entry.
According to the media outlet, it is suspected that saboteurs might have contaminated water supply at the military facility. The outlet cited presumed internal instructions disseminated among the personnel warning against using water from the base’s utility system.
The article alleged that military personnel at the base had also been instructed to be on the lookout for any unknown individuals and to report “suspicious behavior” on the grounds. Der Spiegel speculated that security services may be searching the base for potential saboteurs, with a suspicious individual allegedly sighted near the fence that encloses the complex. The individual is understood to have fled after being detected.
The media outlet also reported that, on closer inspection by military police, an opening in the fence had been uncovered.
According to the article, cases of gastrointestinal disease have been reported at the base of late, though it is not clear whether these had anything to do with water supply at the installation.
The barracks in Cologne is where several Bundeswehr command units are stationed. On top of that, the installation houses the German Air Force, with Cologne Airport immediately adjacent to the base, Der Spiegel noted. According to its estimates, a total of 5,500 military and civilian personnel work at the military facility.
The base is also said to be a key hub for Ukrainian service members returning home after receiving military training in Europe.
Back in April, the German Prosecutor General’s Office reported that two German-Russian dual nationals had been arrested on suspicion of planning to sabotage local military infrastructure.
Around the same time, the head of German domestic intelligence, Thomas Haldenwang, warned that the risk of acts of sabotage had “significantly increased” in the country.
By Liu Xuanzun | Global Times | August 13, 2024
Chinese experts on Tuesday slammed a recent report by the Chinese language version of the Voice of America (VOA) on India’s newly debuted light tank, saying that the US media is seeking to sow discord between China and India amid a recent recovery in relations by hyping the threat of military confrontation which has been subsiding for years.
VOA reported on Monday that India’s Zorawar light tank, designed for high altitude operations, will be deployed along the China-India borders “amid continued tensions.”
Calling it a game changer, the report hyped India’s new tank and its capabilities, and how it can rival its Chinese counterpart, the Type 15.
The first reports on the debut of the Zorawar light tank were published by Indian media in early July, which, although mentioning China as well, noted that the new Indian tank will not be ready before 2027, a key detail that was ignored by VOA.
Recently, relations between China and India have been recovering, with the two sides having held the 30th Meeting of Working Mechanism for Consultation and Coordination on China-India Border Affairs in late July.
It has been more than four years since the Galwan Valley clash of 2020, and since then the two countries have held multiple rounds of border talks on different levels in both military and diplomatic channels, having seen de-escalation and disengagement in multiple points of contact, a Beijing-based military expert who requested not to be named told the Global Times on Tuesday.
The US media’s hype on military confrontation along the China-India border is unprofessional, and it exposes the US’ mentality of wanting to sow discord amid improving China-India ties, the expert added.
From a military point of view, China has commissioned and actually deployed the Type 15 light tank since 2019, while India’s new tank will have to wait until at least 2027, the expert said, noting that India’s defense industry has a history of issues such as delays, cost rises and technical problems.
An elected official alleged an antisemitic break-in. Police say it didn’t happen.
By Arvind Dilawar | Drop Site News | August 8, 2024
As a freelance journalist, I contributed to a New York Times article earlier this year about an anti-Zionist demonstration in Teaneck, New Jersey, a township just outside of New York City. Hundreds of demonstrators had gathered to protest an event organized by Israeli realtors marketing properties in the occupied Palestinian territory of the West Bank—Israeli settlements widely regarded as illegal under international law. Amid Israel’s ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip, the Times article described the protest as contributing to escalating fear and tension in otherwise peaceable Teaneck. As a pivotal example of alleged antisemitic activity in the area, my co-author John Leland, a Times staff reporter, quoted township councilmember Hillary Goldberg, who claimed that her home had been “broken into” as part of a string of abuse in response to her vocal support of Israel and her Jewish background.
“I have been threatened; I had a box truck with my picture on it and the words ‘liar liar’ driven around town; my house has been broken into; I have received antisemitic messages,” Goldberg told Leland, adding: “I have never felt so afraid to be Jewish as now.”
It was an explosive allegation—a racially motivated break-in at the home of an elected official—and also a brand new one. Prior to the Times coverage, Goldberg was featured in an article from The Intercept about anti-Zionist organizing at Teaneck High School being suppressed by local politicians, including the councilmember. According to The Intercept, Goldberg appears to have collaborated with U.S. Representative Josh Gottheimer to have the entire Teaneck school district investigated by the U.S. Department of Education for alleged antisemitism in retaliation for students organizing for a ceasefire in Gaza last November.
There is no mention of a break-in at Goldberg’s home in The Intercept article—nor coverage of it elsewhere, either in the news or social media. Goldberg’s comments to the Times were the first, and thus far only, mention of the incident anywhere.
The way the reporting and editing process unfolded next was a window into how politically convenient claims make their way into the paper of record without corroboration—and stay in despite contradictory evidence.
When I shared my concerns regarding Goldberg’s apparent political motivations as laid out in the Intercept article, as well as the lack of coverage of this otherwise extremely newsworthy allegation, Leland assured me that the councilmember had filed a police report, meaning her story checked out. But when I requested the report, he told me he hadn’t actually seen it, only been assured by Goldberg that she had filed it. The story went to press without further verification of her claim.
I was eventually able to obtain the police reports myself via an Open Public Records Act request, and they revealed that the police had determined no break-in, nor any other crime, had been committed. According to the first police report, dated February 10, six officers responded to a call at Goldberg’s publicly listed address because, according to the complainant, “Lights basement were on // were not on when left // back door was locked when got home unlocked.” The half-dozen officers checked the property but found no sign of forced entry nor anything else amiss. Two subsequent checks of the area found nothing further, and a follow-up investigation by a sergeant two days later ended the same.
“The sergeant did respond to the residence a couple days after the initial incident was reported and spoke with the complainant,” Seth Kriegel, deputy chief of the Teaneck Police Department, reiterated to me. “And based on speaking with her and his investigation, he determined that there was no burglary that had occurred—or attempted burglary.”
Teaneck police determined that no crime had been committed at Goldberg’s property, according to Kriegel. He also noted that subsequent checks were requested by the complainant, a dozen of which were conducted before the publication of the Times article, and none found anything to report.
Believing a correction to the Times story was in order—or at least an update, to give readers a fuller picture—I shared the police reports with Leland—who told me that he had already gotten them and, despite the explicit contradictions, no correction would be issued. When presented with the police reports, management at the Times also declined to reconcile them with its coverage. Instead, managing director of external communications, Charlie Stadtlander, said in a statement that the article was “thoroughly reported, fact-checked and edited, and we stand behind its publication.” Goldberg did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
The Times has come under fire in recent months for refusing to issue corrections to several other articles about Israel and Palestine.
Perhaps most significantly, the Times continues to defend an article accusing Palestinian militants of committing “systematic” sexual violence against Israelis on October 7, despite criticism from professors of journalism, cited by The Washington Post, and others regarding significant issues with the story and its reporting. The Times was forced to issue an “update” (rather than a correction, as would be stipulated by standard journalistic practice) to address contradictory evidence that later emerged.
Anti-Zionist groups such as Writers Against the War on Gaza and publications such as Mondoweiss have also criticized the Times for minimizing Israel’s role in the ongoing famine in the Gaza Strip, casting the Israeli genocide as a feminist endeavor and largely ignoring the killings of more than a hundred fellow journalists in Gaza.
Such apparent contradictions in the Times’ coverage of Israel and Palestine led to significant internal dissent at the publication. A planned podcast episode on the aforementioned story about sexual violence had to be scrapped after producers raised questions about its reliability. At least four other contributors have also resigned or severed relationships with the Times for similar reasons, according to the outlet Them.
Unfortunately the Times is not alone in breaking with standard journalistic ethics when it comes to covering Israel and Palestine. In a decade of being a full-time freelance journalist, I have personally never come up against the kind of opposition I’ve experienced trying to cover the reverberations of the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza.
In December, an editor at The Smart Set, an arts and culture magazine that I contributed to for five years without issue, accepted a pitch of mine on decolonization—only to have a higher-up summarily reject the draft, without edits, notes, or payment.
In April, Times Union, the regional affiliate of Hearst Newspapers in Upstate New York, published an article that I had written about local businesses being harassed for supporting a ceasefire in Gaza. It was online for less than 24 hours before the editor-in-chief interrupted his own travel plans to force the newsroom to take it down. There were no factual errors in the article nor procedural errors in its reporting. Rather, it was Times Union that ran afoul of standard practice by refusing to issue a retraction acknowledging, much less justifying, their decision.
These experiences, as well as mine at The Times, could individually be written off as little more than professional setbacks, especially when compared to the unimaginable suffering in Gaza, where Israeli forces have killed more than 39,000 Palestinians, including at least 15,000 children, according to Al Jazeera at the time of this writing. These otherwise minor journalistic malpractices, however, should be understood as coming together to form a web, like the Kevlar-tough strands of spider’s silk, with the fates of those Palestinians caught in the middle.
Press TV – August 9, 2024
Iran’s permanent mission to the United Nations says the country has no goal or interest in “cyber activities” to influence the 2024 US presidential election.
“Iran does not have any goal or a plan for a cyber attack and it does not interfere in the US elections which is an internal issue of this country,” the mission said on Friday.
It vehemently rejected a report released on Friday claiming that Microsoft has identified a series of actions by Iranian cyber actors aimed at influencing the upcoming US election. These include email phishing attacks, fake news sites, and impersonating activists.
“Iran has been a victim of various cyber offensive operations against the country’s infrastructures, public service centers and industries,” the mission said.
It emphasized that Iran’s cyber power is defensive and proportionate to the threats posed against the country.
Late in July, Iran’s mission to the UN dismissed allegations that Tehran intended to disrupt the election and negatively affect it in favor of Donald Trump, the Republican Party candidate.
The mission described a major part of such accusations as psychological operations to give false momentum to election campaigns.
Under the facile pretext of preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, the US and Mossad have been carrying out a campaign of sabotage and cyber attacks on Iran’s civilian nuclear program for quite some time.
One of the most well known cyber attacks utilized the notoriously malicious Stuxnet worm.
In 2011, Tehran announced that an investigation had concluded that both the United States and Israel were behind the Stuxnet attack.
Israeli sabotage attempts against Iran’s nuclear program have miserably failed despite the regime’s assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists through unrelenting US support.
Mossad has assassinated Iranian nuclear scientists using methods ranging from magnetic mines attached to their cars and allegedly the use of a remote controlled robotic assassin.
MEMO | August 8, 2024
Italian newspaper Il Corriere Della Sera has been ordered to pay €15,000 in damages to Shawan Jabarin, the general director of Palestinian rights group Al-Haq, for falsely accusing him in 2021 of being a terrorist and murderer.
In a press release published this week, Al-Haq said the paper had published the claims days after Jabarin was invited to join a hearing at the Chamber of Deputies in the Italian Parliament on 20 December 2021 following Israel’s designation of Palestinian NGOs as ‘terrorist organisations’.
Two days after the hearing, Il Corriere della Sera published an article “containing false and defamatory statements” labelling Jabarin a “terrorist”. Additionally, “the newspapers omitted essential contextual information around Israel’s targeted designation of six Palestinian civil society organisations as ‘terror organisations’, thereby infringing on the readers’ right to access free and impartial information.”
After being summoned to court, the paper accepted a settlement agreement, which included compensating Jabarin for “reputational” damage suffered and publishing an article retracting the defamatory claims. However it failed to admit, in its article, that it was among those who had defamed the Palestinian rights advocate.
By Maryanne Demasi, PhD | August 5, 2024
Recently, The Conversation ran an article which claimed to “debunk” a range of myths about antidepressants such as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs).
Natalina Salmaso, a clinical psychologist at Carleton University in Canada, highlighted five common myths that make people hesitant to take antidepressants.
Salmaso said hesitancy is often “unfounded” and “may not be grounded in science” and that “debunking the myths surrounding antidepressants is critical to permitting educated treatment decisions for those who suffer.”
However, Salmaso’s article was full of omissions and falsehoods, so we decided to debunk the debunker.
Myth 1 – I am stronger if I do this without meds
Salmaso says that a person with depression is like an athlete with a broken leg.
An athlete cannot compete effectively with a broken leg, in the same way a person with depression cannot function effectively, because their brain “is no longer responding to everyday life.”
She adds that a person’s brain needs to “heal” before they can expect it to function like they did pre-depression and implied antidepressants can help.
This is grossly misguided. This feeds into the false narrative that depression is a brain disease that can be cured by antidepressants.
Antidepressants don’t cure people with depression and their symptomatic effects are so small that they lack clinical relevance.
Studies show that patients actually do better with psychotherapy, which has enduring effects. Further, psychotherapy halves the risk of suicide whereas antidepressants double this risk, in people of all ages.
Myth 2 – I will be dependent on antidepressants to be happy
Salmaso says that antidepressants won’t make people ‘happy’ per se, but they “allow people to experience all emotions in an appropriate and balanced way.”
However, this is not what patients report. SSRIs tend to make people feel “numb” and unable to experience emotions. Some describe it as an inability to feel love, attachment or sexual excitement.
Some experience sexual dysfunction, which can continue long after the drug is discontinued.
Salmaso says that antidepressants “are a long-term (typically at a minimum for a year) and (hopefully) curative treatment, much like chemotherapy for certain types of cancer.”
This is also misguided. Most people become depressed because they have stressful or depressing circumstances, which no drug can cure.
People have been misled to believe that antidepressants can “correct” a chemical imbalance in the brain. A systematic review in 2022 thoroughly debunked the hypothesis that depression is caused a serotonin imbalance.
Salmaso even says that “most studies show that if you take antidepressant medications for a year before coming off of them, the majority of people will not relapse.”
This is also incorrect. The majority of studies on relapse are flawed because they involve subjects already on antidepressants and when they suddenly stop them for the trial they experience withdrawals, which interferes with the assessment of relapse.
Also, the longer someone takes an antidepressant, the higher the probability of that person experiencing withdrawal effects.
Myth 3 – Meds will change who I am, I will be different or feel high
Salmaso says that antidepressants won’t change you, but rather “allow you to view things from a more balanced perspective.”
However, Danish psychiatrists have reported that half of the patients on antidepressants agreed that the treatment could alter their personality and that they had less control over their thoughts and feelings.
Far from rebalancing the brain, antidepressants alter the normal functioning of the brain and disrupt biological processes with potentially devastating consequences.
As far as “changing who you are,” there have been ample reports of out-of-body experiences (including akathisia) where people became suicidal or homicidal on antidepressants, even in people with no history of this behaviour.
A systematic review found that taking antidepressants increased aggression three times more than taking a placebo, in children and adolescents.
Myth 4: I will become addicted
Salmaso says that antidepressants “are generally not addictive and have a low potential for misuse.”
This is not correct. Antidepressants can lead to dependency. Many people experience withdrawal symptoms, which are very similar to those that people experience when they try to come off benzodiazepines.
Salmaso claims that some patients get headaches and other withdrawal symptoms when the stop taking antidepressants “suddenly” but says they are “generally short-lived and can be minimised by tapering off treatment slowly.”
However, it is well-documented that about half of patients on antidepressants cannot stop them without experiencing withdrawals symptoms, which for some, can persist for many years. These symptoms are very difficult to “minimise” even with slow tapering.
Myth 5: Meds should only be used as a last resort
Salmaso disagrees that antidepressants should be used as a last resort.
She says that reserving antidepressants only for extreme cases “doesn’t make sense” because depression can reduce “work productivity and has immense societal consequences.”
“The financial repercussions that can be attributed to depression in terms of the number of workdays missed, jobs lost, accidents caused, etc. are enormous,” she added.
However, studies examining the efficacy of antidepressants have not shown any meaningful effects, such as improvements in quality of life, and they make it more difficult for people to function.
In all countries where this relationship has been examined, the increased use of antidepressants has been accompanied by an increase in disability pensions for mental health reasons.
Salmaso argues that, “Depression significantly increases risk of cardiovascular disease, gastrointestinal disease, respiratory disease and Parkinson’s disease, to name a few. It also seems to worsen the outcomes for cancer.”
Antidepressants do not improve these conditions either. Overall, it is our view that Salmaso’s evidence and arguments are flawed and misguided.
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By Khalid Amayreh, in occupied East Jerusalem | The People’s Voice | October 18, 2010
A major Jewish religious figure in Israel has likened non-Jews to donkeys and beasts of burden, saying the main reason for their very existence is to serve Jews.
Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, spiritual mentor of the religious fundamentalist party, Shas, which represents Middle Eastern Jews, reportedly said during a Sabbath homily earlier this week that “the sole purpose of non-Jews is to serve Jews.”
Yosef is considered a major religious leader in Israel who enjoys the allegiance of hundreds of thousands of followers. … continue
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