Western media and politicians prefer to ignore the truth about civilians killed in Donetsk shelling
Remnants of the Uragan MLRS rocket which struck the Donetsk maternity hospital June 13. © Eva Bartlett / RT
By Eva Bartlett | Samizdat | June 16, 2022
Following intense Ukrainian shelling of Donetsk on June 13, some Western media sources, in tandem with outlets in Kiev, unsurprisingly claimed that the attack – which killed at least five civilians and struck a busy maternity hospital – was perpetrated by Russian forces.
Why Moscow would launch rockets at its own allies wasn’t explained, nor would it make much sense.
The Donetsk People’s Republic’s foreign ministry reported: “Such an unprecedented. in terms of power, density and duration of fire, raid on the DPR capital was not recorded during the entire period of the armed conflict [since 2014]. In two hours, almost 300 MLRS rockets and artillery shells were fired.”
The Ukrainian shelling began late morning, resumed in the afternoon, and continued for another two hours in the evening, a deafening series of blasts throughout the city, terrorizing residents and targeting apartment buildings, civilian infrastructure, the aforementioned hospital, and industrial buildings.
Locals say this was some of the heaviest bombing of Donetsk since 2014, when the eponymous region declared its independence from post-Maidan Kiev.
In the Budyonnovsky district in the south of the city, Ukrainian shelling of a market killed five civilians including one child. Just two months ago, Kiev’s forces hit another Donetsk market, leaving five civilians dead.
In the hard-hit Kievskiy district, to the north, the shelling caused fires at a water bottling plant and a warehouse for stationery, destroying it. The building was still in flames when journalist Roman Kosarev and I arrived about an hour after the attack. Apartment buildings in the area also came under firer, leaving doors and windows blown out and cars destroyed.
The destroyed gas station was on a street where I stayed in April, which is completely residential.
DPR head Denis Pushilin said, “The enemy literally crossed all the lines. Prohibited methods of warfare are being used, residential and central districts of Donetsk are being shelled, other cities and settlements of the DPR are also under fire now.”
Hypocritical silence after maternity hospital shelling
In a world where media reported honestly instead of manufacturing its own reality, there would be outrage over Ukraine’s attack on the Donetsk maternity hospital. But history shows that is not a world we live in.
As I wrote last year, Western media and talking heads also diligently avoided condemnation when terrorists attacked or destroyed Syrian hospitals, including the shelling of a maternity hospital in Aleppo, which killed three women.
At the damaged Donetsk hospital, I saw the gaping hole in the roof and remnants of the Uragan MLRS rocket which struck it. Most of the windows of both buildings were blown out.
Images shared on Twitter noted, “Both gynecology and intensive care have been bombed.” Other footage, taken by Donetsk war correspondent Dmitri Ashtrakhan, showed dozens of women, some heavily pregnant, taking shelter in the basement of the shelled maternity hospital.
Were these women and this hospital in Kiev, you can bet Western media would be loudly reporting it 24/7 for weeks. Instead, just as the West has steadfastly ignored Ukraine’s eight years of war on Donbass, they also omit reporting on the hospital.
Grotesquely, some Ukrainian and Western media instead disingenuously reported that it was a Russian attack, not Ukrainian, which terrorized, injured and killed civilians on June 13.
Just as Western media’s lack of reporting, or twisting of the narrative, on Ukraine’s shelling was to be expected, so too was the UN’s weak-worded condemnation, with the Spokesman for the Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, calling it “extremely troubling.” You can bet that were the situation reversed and Russia responsible for bombing a Ukrainian maternity hospital, his words would have been far stronger.
In fact, they already have been: Three months ago, when Kiev accused Russia of an attack on a maternity hospital, in Mariupol.
Back then, the Guterres emphatically tweeted, “Today’s attack on a hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine, where maternity & children’s wards are located, is horrific. Civilians are paying the highest price for a war that has nothing to do with them. This senseless violence must stop. End the bloodshed now.”
A strong reaction to what later emerged to be a hoax claim, when the UN itself even admitted it could not verify the story. But a mild reaction to a documented reality in Donetsk.
The UN did, at least, rightly note the attack on the Donetsk maternity hospital was, “an obvious breach of the international humanitarian law.” So there’s that.
The thing is, Ukraine has violated international law for its eight years of waging war on the Donbass republics, using prohibited heavy weapons and targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure. This is only the latest incident.
Tears flow for hoax hospital bombing
In March, Western corporate-owned media supported Kiev’s claim that Russia had launched air strikes on a Mariupol maternity hospital, claiming three civilians had been killed. At the time, as reported, “The White House condemned the ‘barbaric’ use of force against innocent civilians, and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson tweeted that ‘there are few things more depraved than targeting the vulnerable and defenceless’.”
As it turned out, witnesses reported there hadn’t been any air strike. There were explosions: just as terrorists bombed an Aleppo home in 2016 and used a mildly injured boy for their propaganda against Syria and Russia, so too did Ukrainian forces in Mariupol, setting the stage to incriminate Moscow.
Russia called the accusations “a completely staged provocation,” analyzing photos from the area and noting “evidence of two separate staged explosions near the hospital: An underground explosion and another of minor power, aimed at the hospital building,” and further noting that a “high-explosive aviation bomb would destroy the outer walls of the building.”
Russia also pointed out that the facility had stopped working when Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov Battalion expelled staff in late February and militarized the hospital, as Ukrainian forces did elsewhere in Donbass.
Marianna Vyshemirskaya, one of the women featured in the Western propaganda around the hospital, later spoke out and said there was no air strike, and that prior to the alleged event, Ukrainian soldiers expelled all the doctors and moved pregnant women to another building.
She also maintained that she and other women were filmed without warning by an Associated Press journalist dressed in a military uniform and wearing a helmet.
Even now, two days after Ukraine’s intense bombardment of Donetsk and targeting of the maternity hospital, when still more testimonies have emerged, Western media and politicians remain silent.
The suffering, and deaths, of the people of Donetsk doesn’t fit the Western narrative, so they misreport it or simply just don’t reference it at all, enabling Ukraine to continue to commit war crimes.
Eva Bartlett is a Canadian independent journalist. She has spent years on the ground covering conflict zones in the Middle East, especially in Syria and Palestine (where she lived for nearly four years).
Diplomat slams media silence on Ukrainian shelling of maternity hospital
Samizdat | June 14, 2022
Deputy head of Russia’s mission to the UN Dmitry Polyansky has criticized the Western media for its unwillingness to condemn the shelling of a maternity hospital in Donetsk by Ukraine.
“Where is Western media reaction?” Polyansky asked in a tweet on Tuesday. “All those BBC, Reuters, AFP, who were shouting about damage to [a] maternity hospital in Mariupol used by Ukrainian nationalists as a firing position?”
Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) officials reported that Kiev’s forces recently stepped up their indiscriminate shelling of Donetsk. On Monday, five people were killed and almost 40 others injured as several areas of the city, including a market, came under fire.
At least one of the shells hit a maternity hospital, damaging the building and shattering its windows. Fatalities and injuries were avoided due to the fact that patients and staff had taken shelter in the basement, according to DPR officials.
“Ukraine is deliberately targeting civilians. Will we hear a word of condemnation?” the Russian diplomat wrote.
He also shared a video of a reporter showing the damage done to the maternity hospital and patients hiding in the basement.
In an earlier tweet, Polyansky stressed that there were no military units in the areas that Ukraine shelled. “The West is fully responsible for these crimes” as Donetsk is being struck with NATO shells that were recently provided to Kiev by its foreign backers, he wrote.
Ukraine’s attack on the maternity hospital in Donetsk has been largely ignored by the Western media, but Reuters did dedicate a few lines to the incident in its report on Monday.
“Russian news agencies later reported that a shell had fallen on a maternity hospital in the city of Donetsk, triggering a fire and prompting staff to send patients into the basement. There was no independent confirmation of any of the attacks and Reuters could not ascertain whether they had taken place,” the agency wrote.
However, when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed that Russia struck a maternity hospital in Mariupol on March 9, the story made headlines in most major Western media outlets. Three people, including a child, were killed in the incident, local authorities said.
Russia’s Defense Ministry has denied targeting the medical facility at all, suggesting the whole thing had been staged by the Ukrainians, who detonated explosives on the ground. The authenticity of the photos presented by Kiev as proof of the claimed Russian attack has also been questioned by many online.
Marianna Vyshemirskaya, one of the pregnant women featured in the images that appeared on the front pages of many major outlets, later claimed that there had been no Russian airstrike on the hospital. She insisted that she told AP journalists about it, but they decided not to mention it in their reporting.
Vyshemirskaya, who was evacuated to the DPR from Mariupol and has since become a mother, also said her photos had been distributed without her consent.
The UK changed the definition of “case” to INCREASE Covid numbers. Again.
By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian | June 11, 2022
Yesterday Sky News and the Huffington Post and several other outlets all flared up near-identical headlines warning that …
Covid Infections Increase For First Time In Two Months
The HuffPo goes on to explain in more detail…
The jump is thought to have been caused by increases in cases compatible with the original Omicron variant BA.1 and the newer variants BA.4 and BA.5, according to the Office for National Statistics.
All the articles cite the Office of National Statistics (ONS) talking about Omicron and seem to consider this an explanation.
None of them mentions the fact the UK’s Health Security Agency (UKHSA) literally changed the definition of a Covid “case” back in February, making it almost inevitable cases would go up.
It’s all detailed in this post from the UKHSA site, helpfully titled “Changing the COVID-19 Case Definition”.
The article explains that the UKHSA will be moving on from the traditional meaning of “cases”, and instead counting what they call “case episodes”.
Meaning that, up until now, one person repeatedly testing positive for “Covid” throughout the pandemic was considered one “case”:
Until now, COVID-19 cases have been reported at the individual level: every positive test taken and reported by one person has been considered part of a single case record, initiated by their first positive test.
But from now on different positive tests of the same person will be considered separate “cases” as long as they are 90 days apart:
Positive test results that are 90 days apart (regardless of negative tests in between) will be considered as a separate episode of infection, and therefore the person is counted as a case more than once.
The supposed justification for this decision is “waning immunity” and the Omicron variant causing spikes in “reinfections”:
Although reinfections were initially very rare, we have seen the number rising slowly over the last two years, as immunity from prior infection wanes and new variants emerge. During the Omicron variant wave, the number and proportion of people being reinfected with SARS-CoV-2 has increased.
However, the inevitable consequence of this decision will be to make the case numbers go up. The press not including this in their story about the rising case numbers is – at best – astonishing incompetence.
In fact, making case numbers go up is literally the only impact it will have.
The UKHSA goes out of its way to point this out, highlighting that the change will have no effect at all on how they monitor infections, since they already treat new positive tests as new cases for the purpose of contract tracing, and have been doing so all along:
contact tracing has undertaken a very safe practice of following all positive cases, regardless of whether they were possible reinfections or cases of prolonged infection.
So, in short, whether or not the change is scientifically justified, it is a purely aesthetic one that will have no impact on anything, except to make case numbers look bigger.
And, of course, it’s not scientifically justified.
They have already stretched the meaning of “cases” well past its breaking point by defining anyone who tests positive as a “Covid case” whether or not they have any symptoms.
Now every single person who, over the past two years, tested positive on the useless PCR tests and was declared a “case”, can test positive again on the same useless PCR and be declared a new case.
Of course, messing with language to inflate statistics has been the modus operandi since the beginning of the “pandemic”. “Fully vaccinated”, “herd immunity”, “cause of death”, “vaccine”, “case” all have been subject to “updated” definition.
Clearly, this further torturing of statistics is about maintaining the flagging “pandemic” narrative.
Allowing people to become more than one “case” means the ever-increasing numbers of people rejecting the vaccines, masks and hysteria can be countered by the steadily dwindling number of NPCs who still religiously take Covid at face value.
It’s a desperation move. One that, hopefully, people will see right through.
‘Institutionally alarmist’ BBC’s stream of fake news on climate change
By Paul Homewood | TCW Defending Freedom | June 13, 2022
THE BBC has been accused of institutional alarmism about climate change in a report published by Net Zero Watch. It reveals the BBC’s persistent exaggeration and false information when it comes to climate and weather-related news.
The study, written by me, reveals that the BBC has been forced to correct a dozen items of false claims and fake news in climate-related coverage after receiving complaints in recent years.
It shows that it has become common practice for BBC reporters to publicise exaggerated and often misleading weather-and climate-related stories in order to hype up the potential risks from global warming.
Persistent misrepresentation by BBC journalists in climate news coverage is fuelling the corporation’s institutional alarmism.
Institutional alarmism is a form of hyped and exaggerated news reporting that is deeply embedded in the BBC. It manifests itself as unbalanced, one-sided coverage of climate risks that go uncorrected by the BBC’s in-house fact checkers.
In 2020, the BBC’s director general warned that the problem posed by disinformation online was increasingly serious and that the BBC would need to work harder than ever to expose fake news and separate fact from fiction.
Since then the corporation has set up a team of fact checkers, a BBC-wide Anti-Disinformation Unit and a Climate Misinformation team. Yet none of these teams of fact checkers noticed or addressed the long list of false news stories that were corrected by the BBC only after lengthy and protracted complaint procedures.
The dossier includes the following examples of fake news:
• The three complaints upheld last year against the BBC’s Climate Editor, Justin Rowlatt, two of which concerned a Panorama episode devoted to global warming;
• Claims that the number of floods around the world has increased 15-fold since 2005;
• A BBC News report that the population of African penguins was declining rapidly because of climate change;
• Repeated claims that new onshore wind farms were ‘banned’ in the UK;
• False statements about ‘record’ temperatures;
• A BBC Two broadcast, which wrongly alleged that the reindeer population in Russia was declining because of climate change;
• Repeated claims that hurricanes were becoming more frequent and powerful;
• A World at One broadcast which asserted that sea levels in Miami were rising at ten times the global rate.
Most of the claims were so obviously and ridiculously false that it is hard to see how they made it through the BBC’s editorial process. This of course raises further questions. Is the BBC so entrenched in its own version of climate change that it believes its own propaganda, just as the Soviets did? Or do the editors and various layers of management simply not care whatever lies are published?
The above list is merely the tip of the iceberg. Many other falsehoods occur without being challenged, or where complaints are simply ignored, such as news items about how weather is getting more extreme, Victoria Falls drying up, droughts in California, starving polar bears and many more. One BBC News report baldly stated that the number of weather disasters had increased five-fold in the last 50 years – a patently absurd claim, which the organisation responsible for the database explains is actually due to better data reporting.
One of the most egregious examples of bias came in Sir David Attenborough’s documentary three years ago, Climate Change – The Facts. Despite the title, the hour-long programme had little to do with facts, more to do with propaganda. It made several highly questionable assertions, such as that ‘storms, floods, heatwaves and sea level rise are all getting rapidly worse as a result of climate change’. The documentary provided no data to back up these claims, nor did it offer the views of scientific experts who do not agree.
Often BBC reports are just outright propaganda, with the opinions of Greenpeace, WWF and the Green Party being given prominence but with very little mention of alternative views. Last year’s coverage of the proposed Cumbria coal mine by Roger Harrabin, the BBC’s Environmental Analyst, was a classic example of this.
At other times, the reporting is just silly. For instance, last summer the BBC gave prominent coverage to a report which claimed that the impact of global warming was likely to lead to ‘impaired’ performances at the Tokyo Olympics. This flew in the face of the fact that many Olympics in recent years have taken place in much hotter climes, such as Los Angeles, Atlanta and Athens.
The sheer weight of evidence presented in this paper suggests that bias is now endemic in the BBC’s climate reporting. All the factual errors noted could easily have been avoided with a bit of basic research. Is this carried out and the results ignored if they don’t agree with the BBC’s agenda? Or is the corporation’s output just made up and printed anyway without checks? Either way, this is journalism at its shoddy worst. Who is editing this fake reporting? Why are they not insisting on accurate reporting? Where are the highly paid executives who let all of this continue?
The topic of climate change, Net Zero and the total transformation of society which is demanded to achieve it is of crucial importance for the future of the country. The public deserve all the facts, not just the warped version offered by the BBC.
You can read the report, ‘Institutional alarmism – the BBC’s disastrous climate complaints’, here.
Monkeypox is following the Covid playbook step by step
By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian | June 8, 2022
Monkeypox is back in the headlines as of yesterday, back to work after a short break.
It burst onto the front pages, with concomitant BIG RED NUMBERS and daily case updates a couple of weeks ago, and then went quiet. The press pretty much stopped talking about it.
… until they started again.
Yesterday it was reported that the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) has “upgraded” monkeypox to a “notifiable disease”, meaning any positive test must be immediately reported to the government agency.
Ever one for subtlety, the Telegraph’s front page reports this as “monkeypox upgraded to same level as leprosy and the plague”
Across the pond, the US CDC has made the curiously synchronised decision to increase their travel alert on Monkeypox to level 2, which recommends people “practice enhanced precautions”.
Let’s be clear here – the “monkeypox outbreak” is a joke.
Anybody actually taking any of this seriously after the last two years of Covid hysteria needs a major reality check.
At this point you should be assuming any disease “outbreak” is a hoax until proven otherwise. Really proven, not “trust me, I’m an expert” proven.
For those who haven’t got to that stage yet, consider all the ways that monkeypox is following the exact same path as “Covid”…
- The monkeypox outbreak was “predicted” by an exercise a few months before it happened. Just like Covid.
- We’ve seen the narrative re-inforced by rumours that it’s a bio-weapon. These accusations have gone both ways, with the Western press saying Monkeypox is a Russian bio-weapon and Chinese rumours claiming it was deliberately released by the US. Just like Covid
- We’re seeing institutions revising history in order to inflate the potential threat of the disease. just like Covid.
- Monkeypox is being diagnosed via a PCR test. These tests are going to become more widely available as test-makers “seize the new market” and governments plan to “ramp up testing”. Increased testing (with an unreliable test) could artificially inflate “cases”, and feed the panic. Just like covid.
- The monkeypox narrative is being pushed by countries on both sides of the “New Cold War”. Just like covid.
They’re already resorting to the “new variant” headline, that wasn’t a thing for Covid for almost a year. Is this due to desperation or impatience? Who can say, but there must be some reason for the accelerated timeline.
They’re even trying to bring masks back into style by claiming monkeypox may have become airborne.
And, of course, the biggest similarity is in the solution: “vaccines”.
It has already been decided that vaccines originally designed for smallpox work for monkeypox too, and that they are best way to stop the spread of the disease.
Meanwhile, the monkeypox story over at Science tells us…
As monkeypox threat grows, scientists debate best vaccine strategy”
It seems the “experts” can’t decide between “ring vaccination” – where you vaccinate every close contact of a confirmed monkeypox case – or “broader vaccination campaigns”.
Note, they don’t debate if we need a vaccine strategy at all.
The US government is already set to spend at least 180 million dollars on smallpox vaccines.
In Europe, pharmaceutical company Bavarian Nordic is seeing a huge up-tick in its contracts as EU nations treat monkeypox as a “wake-up call”.
So, vaccine manufacturers are set to make a tidy profit… Just like covid.
Whatever eventually comes of this story, it certainly seems that Covid has put a “pandemic” playbook in place, one that each new scare-disease will follow.
It’s all so predictable… and yet the people in charge actually expect us to believe it. Worst of all, some people actually will.
I started by calling monkeypox a joke, and that might be literally true. It’s hard not to feel like they’re making fun of us.
And if that’s the case then, just like at school, the best thing we can do is simply ignore it.
Ukraine: The Disinformation War
By Declan Hayes | Strategic Culture Foundation | June 4, 2022
Ukraine: The Disinformation War was the title of the latest piece of disinformation the state funded British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) showcased to support Britain’s Ukrainian war and to suppress dissent on its home front.
Radio 4’s hit piece was a personalized attack on a number of British-based academics, who had been recently named and shamed in the British House of Commons for not being sufficiently Russophobic; the House of Commons is the lower house of the British Parliament; it is where Wee Joe Devlin, a member for Belfast, was beaten within an inch of his life by his fellow MPs for denouncing British war crimes in Ireland as more of his fellow MPs called for him to be summarily murdered. As several MPs have recently been convicted of child sex rape charges and more are facing trial for sexually assaulting their fellow MPs, its pronouncements should be discounted accordingly.
As, of course should those of the BBC for reasons adumbrated below and for others which Justin Schlosberg, Piers Robinson and Tim Hayward outlined in their tweets following this further attack on them by the BBC and its dark allies.
In its pretenses to impartiality, the BBC claim that these academics are so “driven by a conviction that Western governments are responsible for many of the world’s ills” that they “have shared misinformation in their attempts to raise questions about the official narrative of the war” leading “their detractors [to] say they are useful to Vladimir Putin” and for the academics to counter claim “there’s a McCarthyist witch hunt against them”.
Within that pre-cut British imperialist box, a few carefully edited soundbites from Schlosberg and their other targets, as well as a deluge of disinformation from their targets’ students and critics comprise this BBC kangaroo court by radio.
J’accuse
Hayward’s primary crime seems to be he mentioned a contentious 2018 chemical gas attack in Syria to opine that there are at least two versions to what actually happened. For the record and for reasons I address below, I believe all such attacks were orchestrated by the Syrian rebels, aided and abetted by the BBC and MI5. Hayward, importantly, is not that forthright. He believes, on the evidence in front of his nose, and as one who writes academic articles on disinformation, that further inquiries are needed to fully unmask the real culprits, whoever they may be, of the 2018 Douma and 2022 Bucha attacks. Hayward is, in essence, agnostic as, perhaps, academics and the BBC should be.
With regards to the Bucha atrocities, which I addressed in an earlier article, and which the BBC is using to attack Hayward et al, though a full investigation is likewise needed into unmasking those culprits, the British regime have vetoed such a call in the UN. But, as such an investigation must be impartial to be worthwhile, that would, of course, exclude the BBC and those they use to fatten out hit pieces like this.
Round Up the Usual Suspects
In their efforts to discredit Hayward et al, the BBC interviews James Roscoe, Britain’s UN Ambassador, who dutifully trots out the British government’s line on Bucha.
Nader Hashemi, an American itinerant academic with no Syrian connections, is wheeled out to say how horrified he is that Hayward can mention the Douma attack, “a border line genocide”, in passing and how concerned he is that Hayward’s fleeting mention of the Douma war crime might be putting young minds at risk.
Kvitka Perehinets, one of Hayward’s Ukrainian students, is wheeled out to tell the BBC’s worldwide audience, as she has already told Hayward’s academic bosses, that Hayward should be silenced. Although Perehinets’ family are currently fighting Russian speakers in Ukraine’s East, Perehinets does not make it clear if Hayward should be dispatched with a bullet to his head or simply disgraced by being strapped to a lamp post as he undoubtedly would be in government held Ukraine.
Pride of place in the written version of the BBC’s hit piece went to Hayward critic Mariangela Alejandro, a young, purple haired Mexican student with a nose ring, a baby’s dummy around her neck and a cute purple amethyst ring on her marriage finger. Mariangela informs us that she had heard Hayward was a good lecturer but that, shortly into his course. things started to get “weird” as “he goes from talking about global financial markets [and] poverty, into this realm of conspiracy theories about [Syrian President Bashar al] Assad and Russia.”
Although one of my earlier articles debunked the conspiracy theory canard specifically for instances like this, the very short clip the Radio 4’s hit piece played suggests mentioning it may have been germane to Hayward’s lecture. If, as Mariangela alleges, Hayward’s lectures were the disjointed ramblings of a conspiracy theorist (sic), then that would have been picked up by the student evaluation forms and conveyed to the university’s top brass through the students’ class rep and the Students’ Union. Even if, as I doubt, Mariangela was the class rep, it was not her place to broadcast her criticisms to the BBC and thence to the world.
Send In the Clowns
Hayward is a member of the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media, whose affiliates include a number of mercenary fringe thinkers, as well as the afore mentioned Piers Robinson, who has now gone on to greater things. I mention Robinson here as the BBC made no effort to discover what has become of him, even though a 60 second Internet trawl would have solved that conundrum, to Robinson’s credit.
Because there is war is afoot, all sides will have their mercenaries and their idiots, useful or otherwise. That NATO, in President Putin’s own words, is infinitely better resourced than is Russia, it stands to reason that NATO has more brown envelopes to push the BBC’s way than do opposing or neutral outlets. That is not to say that every NATO journalist or blogger is a media whore. Far from it.
Justin Schlosberg, one of those the BBC hatcheted, was attacked for citing Patrick Lancaster, an American citizen journalist embedded on the Russian side of Ukraine’s lines. But, as Schlosberg’s tweets as well as my earlier article on citizen journalists, which explicitly mentioned Lancaster, make plain, Lancaster’s work only helps us to ascertain if there is anything to be seen that warrants further investigation if, in those immortal words, anyone had been raped and speaks English. Beyond that, Lancaster is irrelevant.
Though Lancaster is not the hill academics like Schlosberg should be crucified on, it is crucial to note that the BBC and other NATO outlets repeatedly used the work of the White Helmets and related terror groups in Syria. Because the BBC, as Robert Stuart’s sterling work clearly shows, not only used their footage but were deeply embedded with the White Helmets, ISIS and other terrorists, they are in no position to cast vitriol at Lancaster or at Schlosberg for mentioning Lancaster, almost in passing.
NATO, in any case, has its own cast of clowns, amongst the most elevated of whom is Scott Lucas, who was an American professor of American Studies at Birmingham University in England, with ties to the Toran Research Center, which has major links with Turkish Intelligence and with supposedly demobbed Syrian terrorists. Lucas regularly appears on the mainstream media, holding forth on Syria and other issues he has no expertise on.
Prominent journalist Peter Hitchens noted that, when he phoned up Lucas to discuss Lucas’ uninformed comments on the White Helmets’ murder gang, Lucas hung up on him. Though Lucas is a NATO lightweight, Hitchens is noteworthy as the BBC were forced to apologize to him over their coverage of NATO’s 2018 Douma chemical gas attack and to confess that Chloe Hadjimatheou, who ran that piece and who also did the Hayward/Schlosberg hit piece we are now discussing “failed to meet the Corporation’s editorial standards for accuracy by reporting false claims”. Hadjimatheou, in other words, has long been guilty of the same misinformation offenses she tries to concoct against Hayward et al. This, remember, is the same NATO media that swore black and blue that Tom Mac Master, a bearded American academic in Scotland, was a Syrian lesbian being oppressed by “Assad” in Damascus where, like Lucas and Hashemi, MacMaster had never been in his life.
Then we have bottom feeder Eliot “Suck my Bellingcat Balls” Higgins, whom the Atlantic Council, the BBC and affiliated NATO front groups built into a citizen expert on all things military to justify their predetermined anti Syrian and anti Russian NATO narratives. Given that Eliot Higgins, Bellingcat’s founder, could not even hack the easiest course at Britain’s easiest university, the only explanation as to why MI6 and allied media outlets and intelligence agencies push Bellingcat, Bana and others to prominence is to dumb down debate to the level of babbling infants so that no one worth their salt would bother getting involved in trying to stop NATO’s war crimes. The BBC hit piece on Hayward et al is a part of that process.
This link fillets Higgins’ foolish pronouncements on the Ghouta false flag chemical attack. Dr Neal Krawetz has slammed Higgins’ et al’s use of his image identifying software, and he has called them idiots not worth spending time on. But Profs Postol and Krawetz are, like Hayward et al, forced to waste their very valuable time clinically ticking off these useless idiots, who have no relevant experience or knowledge to promote or defend the White Helmets terror gang, but who are widely cited in the BBC and similar pro-war Western mainstream media to do just that.
Nader Hashemi, the American itinerant academic, who speaks about a Syrian “border line genocide” falls into the same useful NATO idiot camp. And so too does the odious Oliver Kamm, who took a day off from running his years-long clandestine vendetta against Neil Clark and getting Philip Cross to edit Wikipedia pages he disapproves of to weigh in on this latest BBC smear piece.
Muslim Brotherhood Royalty
Tim Hayward could do worse than to get his students to survey Robert Stuart’s sterling work, which is a damning indictment of the BBC’s misinformation. Central to Stuart’s work is Dr Rola Hallam who, as a member of the Muslim Brotherhood’s al Kurdi family ,was the BBC’s fixer in ISIS controlled Syria.
Dr Rola Hallam is the daughter of Mousa al Kurdi, one of the head honchos in the supposedly moderate wing of Syria’s Murder Inc who was finding evidence of chemical gas attacks wherever this clown chanced to look. During BBC Panorama’s farcical show, Rola, her BBC crew and her Hand in Hand for Syria stooges (who threatened to sue me and much more) sailed unimpeded through ISIS checkpoints. Hallam/Kurdi landed the lead role in that state controlled BBC farce. The BBC’s collusion with ISIS, as evidenced by their ability to sail through ISIS checkpoints and to work in ISIS strongholds, may be a further indication that the moderate and less moderate wings of Syria’s Murder Inc, just like the moderate and Nazi contingents of Zelensky’s junta, are in bed together and that the BBC should not pretend otherwise. Something there for Hayward and his purple haired students to chew over.
Ukraine to UK Universities
Although the attacks on Hayward et al could be viewed as a BBC storm in an academic tea cup, it is part of a much wider MI5 orchestrated campaign to kill the Western mind. Olexsandra Koval, the director of the Ukrainian Book Institute has declared that 100 million books, including all Russian classics, must be removed from circulation. These would come from “various genres, including children’s books, and love novels, and detective stories”. Although Mariangela Alejandro, the young, purple haired Mexican student with the nose ring, the baby’s dummy around her neck and the cute purple amethyst ring would perchance call me a conspiracy theorist (sic) for my past defense of Masha and Mishka, there is much to learn in those lovely tales, just as there was in Soviet film, at least according to Hollywood’s own Martin Scorcese, who acknowledged Hollywood’s debt to Soviet director, montage inventor and pioneer film theorist Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein, who is best known for his seminal 1925 silent film, Battleship Potemkin.
But Zelensky’s Nazis will have none of that and nor apparently will their compromized BBC apologists, whose warped minds think that there is something unclean about Masha and Mishka for no other reason than they are the creations of Russian geniuses. If Mariangela Alejandro, the young, purple haired Mexican student with the nose ring, the baby’s dummy around her neck and the cute purple amethyst ring wishes to understand what drives war crimes in Chiapas, as much as in Douma or Donbas, she might begin by looking at how everything Syrian and Russian is being marginalized, just as Mexico’s elite marginalized and murdered the Tzeltals, Tzotzils, Ch’ols, Tojolabals, Zoques, Lacandons, Mochós and Mams of Chapas.
As for Kvitka Perehinets, the young Ukrainian student, whose family are fighting Russian speakers in Eastern Ukraine, as she is at a university, she might like to read some of the 100 million books Olexsandra Koval wants to torch. She could, of course, try talking to a Russian student but Russian students now, being Russian, are haram. As for the rest of us, though we must continue to call hate groups like NATO and their BBC mouthpieces to account for the sake not only of academics like Hayward who try to call them to account but even more so for the sake of young minds like those of Alejandro and Perehinets they warp and even much more so because of those unsung youngsters who die in Douma, Damascus and Donbas as a result of the BBC’s misinformation toxins.
Fake Meat, Fake Breastmilk and Food Shortages
By Dr. Joseph Mercola | June 2, 2022
Fake food is being poised as a panacea to end world hunger and food shortages, but there’s nothing miraculous about synthetic, lab-made food. It can’t compare to food that comes from nature in terms of nutrition or environmental protection, and as we’re seeing with the mysterious infant formula shortages, when you’re dependent on fake food, your very survival is also dependent on the handful of companies that manufacture them.
With parents getting desperate in the search for infant formula, it’s eye-opening that campaigns haven’t been started to encourage new mothers to breastfeed — the best food for infants and one that also happens to be free and readily available in most cases. If you haven’t read my article on the best workaround for infant formula for those that are unable to breast feed, it is on Substack.
In the video above, you can watch a concerning timeline about why this may be, as Bill Gates appears to be behind the push to stop breastfeeding and encourage uptake of BIOMILQ, a cell-cultured “human milk” made in a lab,1 along with other varieties of fake food.
Bill Gates’ Formula for Disaster
In June 2020, Bill Gates announced startup company BIOMILQ, which is using biotechnology to create lab-made human milk for babies. Using mammary epithelial cells placed in flasks with cell culture media, the cells grow and are placed in a bioreactor that the company says “recreates conditions similar to in the breast.”2
This synthetic lab-made breast milk replacement raised $3.5 million in funding from Gates’ investment firm Breakthrough Energy Ventures.3 Gates has also contributed at least $319 million to the media,4 including The Guardian, allowing him to control and dictate what they print. The day after the Gates Foundation paid The Guardian its annual funding in May 2022, it released a hit piece on breastfeeding titled, “Turns out breastfeeding really does hurt — why does no one tell you?”5
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) offers also seized 588 cases of infant formula from Europe in April 2021 because it lacked appropriate nutritional labeling. In February 2021, CBP officers said they inspected 17 separate shipments of infant formula from Germany and The Netherlands, leading to a warning against buying infant formula online from overseas.
At the time, Keith Fleming, CBP’s acting director of field operations in Baltimore, Maryland, said in a news release:6
“Consumers should be very careful when contemplating the purchase of items over the internet from an international source, because they may not get what they expect. People expect that the products they purchase comply with existing U.S. health and safety laws and regulations and they’ll be safe for them or their family. That’s not always the case.”
While warning Americans against purchasing infant formula from overseas, in February 2022 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced bacterial contamination at the Abbott Nutrition’s Sturgis, Michigan facility,7 which is behind the current infant formula shortages. While Gates is clearly behind the push to stop breastfeeding and encourage BIOMILQ in lieu of breastmilk or formula, the formula shortages highlight the risks of consolidated food production.
Abbott Enriched Shareholders While Formula Sickened Babies
Corporate consolidation is rampant in the U.S. baby formula market, of which 90% is controlled by four companies. Abbot is among them, responsible for 43% of baby formula production in the U.S.8 Yet, according to a whistleblower filing from October 2021, equipment at the company’s Sturgis facility was “failing and in need of repair.”
Pitting and pinholes reportedly existed in a number of pipes, allowing bacterial contamination. Leadership was aware of the failing equipment for up to seven years before the February 2022 outbreak, according to the whistleblower’s report.9
With equipment in need of repair, and a bacteria outbreak in their formula sickening babies, Abbott used its massive profits from 2019 to 2021 to announce a lucrative stock buyback program.10 According to The Guardian :11
“Abbott detected bacteria eight times as its net profits soared by 94% between 2019 and 2021. And just as its tainted formula allegedly began sickening a number of babies, with two deaths reported, the company increased dividends to shareholders by over 25% while announcing a stock buyback program worth $5bn.”
Speaking with The Guardian, Rakeen Mabud, chief economist for the Groundwork Collaborative, added, “Abbott chose to prioritize shareholders by issuing billions of dollars in stock buybacks instead of making productive investments.”12
Big Meat and Dairy Companies Dominate Fake Meat Industry
The increasing number of plant-based fake foods and lab-grown meat companies give the illusion that consumers are getting more choices and the food industry is becoming less consolidated. However, there are still relatively few firms that are controlling the global grab for “protein” markets.
In a research article published in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, Philip Howard, a faculty member in the department of community sustainability at Michigan State University, and colleagues explain how this “protein” industry convergence is further jeopardizing the resilience of the food system and reducing genetic diversity of livestock and crops:13
“Recent years have seen the convergence of industries that focus on higher protein foods, such as meat processing firms expanding into plant-based substitutes and/or cellular meat production, and fisheries firms expanding into aquaculture. A driving force behind these changes is dominant firms seeking to increase their power relative to close competitors, including by extending beyond boundaries that pose constraints to growth.
The broad banner of “protein” offers a promising space to achieve this goal, despite its nutritionally reductionist focus on a single macronutrient. Protein firm strategies to increase their dominance are likely to further diminish equity in food systems by exacerbating power asymmetries.”
Tyson and Cargill, two of the largest meat processors in the world, for instance, have invested in fake meat company Memphis Meats, which also has backing from Bill Gates and Richard Branson. Other billionaires invested in fake foods include Sergey Brin (Mosa Meat), Peter Thiel (Modern Meadow) and Marc Benioff (Eat Just).
“These companies wouldn’t be making these investments if they didn’t expect that the intellectual properties held by these start-ups will lead to monopoly profits,” Howard notes.14 In “The Politics of Protein,” a report from the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food), Howard explains:15
“Nearly every large meat and dairy processor/manufacturer has also acquired or developed plant-based meat and dairy substitutes, establishing footholds in a market that is growing approximately 20% per year.
More than a dozen of these firms have also invested in start-ups that are attempting to commercialize lab-grown meat and fish. Meanwhile, Vanguard and BlackRock — two of the world’s biggest asset management firms — have investments in almost all the largest meat, dairy, and animal feed companies.”
It is important to understand why all of these fake meat products are an absolute metabolic disaster relates to the fact that they are using vegetable fats to replace animal fats. Not only are they devoid of important vitamins like vitamin A and vitamin K2, but they are loaded with the dangerous omega-6 fat linoleic acid LA.
In some cases they contain up to 10 to 20 times the amount found in meats, which will radically contribute to diseases like diabetes, obesity, cancer and heart disease.
Lab-Grown Food Is an Environmental Catastrophe
The push for fake food is being made on the platform that it will somehow save the environment from the ravages of factory farming, which has devastated the environment with its concentrated animal feeding operations and monocultures. But this, too, is misleading.
In February 2021, the Good Food Institute (GFI), a nonprofit group behind the alternative protein industry, released a techno-economic analysis of cultivated meat, which was prepared by consulting firm CE Delft.16 In it, they developed a model to reduce the current costs of cultured meat production down to a point that would make it economically feasible in full-scale plants by 2030, a model they said is “feasible.”
In attempting to create cultured meat on the scale that would be necessary to feed the world, logistical problems are numerous and, possibly, insurmountable. There are waste products — catabolites — to deal with, as even cultured cells excrete waste that is toxic.
And, the oxygen and nutrients available must be adequately distributed to all the cells — something that’s difficult in a large reactor. Stirring the cells faster or adding more oxygen may help, but this can cause fatal stress to the cells.17
The environmental “benefits” are also on shaky ground when you factor in soy production as well as the use of conventional energy sources. When this is factored in, GFI’s life-cycle analysis found that cultured meat may be worse for the environment than conventionally produced chicken and pork.18,19
Farmer and historian John Lewis-Stempel also points out that the world’s farmers already produce enough food for the global population: “[A]ny discussion of global food policy needs to begin with one plain fact: there is … no actual food shortage. Already, the planet’s farmers produce enough food to cater for the projected 10 billion humans of 2050. The problem is waste and distribution.”20
Yet, the push for the creation of fake protein sources continues. In the foreword to Navdanya International’s report “False Solutions That Endanger Our Health and Damage the Planet,” Vandana Shiva also details how lab-grown foods are catastrophic for human health and the environment, as they are repeating the mistakes already made with industrial agriculture:21
“In response to the crises in our food system, we are witnessing the rise of technological solutions that aim to replace animal products and other food staples with lab-grown alternatives. Artificial food advocates are reiterating the old and failed rhetoric that industrial agriculture is essential to feed the world.
Real, nutrient-rich food is gradually disappearing, while the dominant industrial agricultural model is causing an increase in chronic diseases and exacerbating climate change. The notion that high-tech, “farm free” lab food is a viable solution to the food crisis is simply a continuation of the same mechanistic mindset which has brought us to where we are today — the idea that we are separate from and outside of nature.
Industrial food systems have reduced food to a commodity, to “stuff” that can then be constituted in the lab. In the process, both the planet’s health and our health have been nearly destroyed.”
Signs the Fake Meat Industry Is Stalling
For all of its fanfare, there are signs that the fake meat industry may be failing before it ever gets off the ground. Shares of Beyond Meat, for one example, lost $6 billion since March 2020 due to weak sales growth and has resorted to partnering with PepsiCo to release a plant-based jerky product.
“My analysis is the launch will do very little to increase the company’s fortunes,” writes business development consultant Victor Martino in Just Food.22 He argues that the “plant-based meat revolution” is just a PR stunt, a narrative that’s set to implode:23
“The fact is, despite increased product availability in terms of brand choices and added retail outlets, plant-based meat sales stalled in 2021, recording zero growth, according to recent research from SPINS, data commissioned and released by The Plant-Based Foods Association and The Good Food Institute.
According to the research, the total annual sales of plant-based meat in the US remained stable at $1.4 billion. That’s a continuation of the 1.4% share of total meat category sales.”
Shares of Beyond Meat and Oatly, a plant-based milk substitute, have lost more than half their value in 2022,24 but this isn’t to say that their executives are suffering. Beyond Meat’s former chief growth officer Chuck Muth sold shares valued at more than $62 million from 2019 to 2021, while Biz Stone, a current board member and Twitter co-founder, has made millions on Beyond Meat stock.25
The fact remains that when private companies control the food supply, they will also ultimately control countries and entire populations. Biotech will eventually push farmers and ranchers out of the equation and will threaten food security and human health. In other words, the work being done in the name of sustainability and saving the planet will give greater control to private corporations while weakening the population.
To save the planet and support your health, skip all the fake meat alternatives and opt for real food that’s being raised the right way instead. When you shop for food, know your farmer and look for regenerative, biodynamic and/or grass fed farming methods, which are bringing you truly sustainable food for a healthy population and planet.
Sources and References
- 1, 3 Rumble May 17, 2022
- 2 BIOMILQ, Our Science
- 4 MintPress News November 15, 2021
- 5 The Guardian May 9, 2022
- 6 U.S. Customs and Border Protection April 5, 2021
- 7 U.S. FDA May 17, 2022
- 8, 9, 10 Children’s Health Defense May 23, 2022
- 11, 12 The Guardian May 20, 2022
- 13 Front. Sustain. Food Syst., 16 August 2021
- 14 Civil Eats September 22, 2021
- 15 IPES-Food, The Politics of Protein, Executive Summary, Page 3
- 16 Techno-Economic Analysis for the production of cultivated meat February 2021
- 17, 19 The Counter September 22, 2021
- 18 LCA of cultivated meat – February 2021, Page 3
- 20 Unherd May 17, 2022
- 21 Children’s Health Defense April 5, 2022
- 22, 23 Just Food March 30, 2022
- 24 CNBC May 14, 2022
- 25 Michele Simon March 1, 2022
BBC joins crusade against dissenting academics via propaganda documentaries
Press TV – June 1, 2022
It seems the nefarious Inquisition in Europe, which brutally sought to rid the world of heresy and political rivalry for centuries, has reignited as its new protagonists in the British national broadcaster BBC strive to silence and delegitimize any dissenting viewpoints held by academics.
In a new documentary on BBC Radio 4’s Facts on File, and also in a report based on the documentary by the BBC News, two academics, namely Tim Hayward and Justin Schlosberg, have been falsely accused of supporting and spreading “Russian propaganda” and “misinformation” about Moscow’s military operation in Ukraine that began on February 24, either through their lectures or on Twitter.
Hayward, a professor of environmental political theory at the University of Edinburgh, had re-tweeted a representative of Russia to the United Nations, who stated that the Russian attack on a maternity hospital in Mariupol on March 9 was “fake news.”
“As long as we’re still able to hear two sides of the story we should continue striving to do so,” Hayward said.
While the West condemned Russia for targeting the hospital several times with airstrikes, the Russian foreign ministry strongly rejected the allegation, branding it as “information terrorism” against Moscow.
A few days later and in the House of Commons, legislator Robert Halfon from the Conservative Party denounced Hayward and also Dr. Tara McCormack, a lecturer in international politics at the University of Leicester, who had spoken about “ludicrous disinformation” of both Kiev and Moscow.
Halfon also urged the parliament to “contact these universities directly to stop them acting as useful idiots for” Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi at the same session of the House of Commons described the said academics and the like as people who are “buying” Moscow’s “false narrative” about the war in Ukraine.
“It is a false and dangerous narrative and we will crack down on it hard,” Zahawi said.
The BBC quotes 21-year-old history and politics student Mariangela Alejandro as saying that things in Hayward’s class got “weird” when the professor stepped in the “realm of conspiracy theories about [Syrian President Bashar al] Assad and Russia.”
The British broadcaster even criticized, though implicitly, Hayward for a lecture in which he outlined an argument that the West-backed White Helmets group might have helped fake a chemical attack in Syria years ago. Russia and the Syrian government have stressed that the attack was “staged.”
The White Helmets group, which claims to be a humanitarian NGO, is known for its coordination with terror outfits in Syria to carry out staged chemical attacks in order to falsely incriminate Syrian government forces and fabricate pretexts for military strikes by a US-led military coalition present in Syria since 2014.
On April 14, 2018, the US, Britain, and France carried out a string of airstrikes against Syria over a suspected chemical weapons attack on the city of Douma, located about 10 kilometers northeast of the capital Damascus.
That alleged attack was reported by the White Helmets group, which published videos showing them purportedly treating survivors. Washington and its allies blamed Damascus for the Douma attack, an allegation strongly rejected by the Syrian government.
Hayward used an argument put forward by members of a collective of academics and bloggers he is a member of, known as the Working Group on Syria Propaganda and the Media (WGSPM).
“One narrative says the White Helmets helped rescue victims, provided evidence and gave witness statements about the chemical attack on Douma on 7 April 2018,” Hayward said during the lecture.
However, he added that “the critics say the White Helmets were responsible for staging a false flag event to spur the West to attack the Syrian government. In fact, dispute about this case is still current.”
Hayward told the BBC that he does not teach about Syria, but simply used an example in his class that he was familiar with.
The BBC, however, seems to be eager to lash out at Hayward when it quoted Dr Nader Hashemi, director of the Centre for Middle East Studies at the University of Denver and a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge, as describing Hayward’s argument about the White Helmets and the staged chemical attack as “a deeply distorted set of teachings.”
Regarding Hayward’s stance on the purported Russian airstrikes against a maternity hospital in Mariupol that says “we should strive to hear both sides”, the BBC drew in Kvitka Perehinets, a Ukrainian student at the University of Edinburgh, who said “there are no two sides” to the conflict and that “The oppressor – in this case, Russia – should not be given the same kind of platform as those who are being oppressed.”
Although the University of Edinburgh claims that its programs are approved by a board of studies, emphasizing its commitment to “academic freedom”, it also stresses that it takes “a strong view… against the spread of misinformation” and encourages students to report concerns.
The university should be notified that one of the primary jobs of “academic freedom” is paving the way for academic research to distinguish true information from “misinformation” and “disinformation.”
However, the UK’s Department for Education (DfE), which is responsible for education in England, inquisitively controls the flow of research in universities, saying it expected “universities’ due diligence processes to consider the reputational, ethical and security risks of false and dangerous narratives, and ensure that students are not misled by views that are clearly false.”
When the academics’ tweets were raised in the Commons, Zahawi said the minister for Higher and Further Education, Michelle Donelan, was “contacting those universities”, a means of pressure on Hayward and the like who think differently from the mainstream in the West.
Another academic pressured by the BBC and the Education system in the UK is professor Schlosberg, who specializes in media and journalism at Birkbeck, University of London.
He has been lambasted for re-tweeting Russian state media questioning what occurred in the Ukrainian city of Bucha, 37 kilometers northwest of the capital Kiev.
Back on April 2, the mayor of Bucha in a video message claimed that 300 people had been killed by the Russian army with some appearing to have been bound by their hands and feet before being shot.
He also presented footage and photographs showing the dead bodies of those allegedly killed or executed by Russian troops, claiming that 280 bodies had been buried in mass graves while nearly 10 others were either unburied or only partially covered by earth. Later on, Kiev claimed a death toll of more than 1000 in the city.
A day later, the Ukrainian government urged major Western powers, including the United States, to impose crippling fresh sanctions on Moscow over what it called a “massacre” in Bucha, a newly liberated town at the time.
The Kremlin strongly rejected any involvement of Russian troops in the so-called massacre, with Russian President Sergei Lavrov stressing that the killings did not occur while Russian soldiers were in the city.
He added that the so-called dead bodies in footage circulating the internet were “staged” and the images of them plus Ukraine’s false version of events had been spread on social media by Kiev and Western countries.
On April 4, Schlosberg tweeted that “Russian troops left on 30th March. No mention of any ‘massacre’ or bodies lining the streets for 4 days.” He also re-tweeted a video of Bucha’s mayor speaking without mentioning a massacre.
The BBC, however, hurriedly stressed in its report that Russian media has been using the video to bolster the idea that the bodies appeared after the Russians had left the city.
It quoted the academic as saying that he had “no idea” regarding what really happened there.
“My only understanding is that I think no-one else really knows what happened. I think there is a very strong likelihood that there were very serious atrocities, almost certainly the vast majority of which were committed by Russia,” Schlosberg further told the BBC.
However, in a string of tweets on Wednesday, he denounced the broadcaster’s “grossly defamatory allegation.”
“Rather than engage with the actual meaning of my tweets, the BBC chose to uncritically endorse obvious manipulation by people who have been actively trying to silence and delegitimize any dissenting viewpoints since the start of” the current operation by Russia in Ukraine, Schlosberg said.
“The manner in which the program achieved this was so cynical and unguarded it beggars belief, even for those of us increasingly skeptical about the BBC’s commitment to basic journalistic standards, let alone its own lofty public service values,” he stressed.
Was the Maidan Massacre a False Flag?
By Noah Carl | The Daily Sceptic | May 30, 2022
To understand the war in Ukraine, you have understand the events that led up to it. And no preceding event is more important than the toppling of Viktor Yanukovych’s government in February of 2014.
Officially known as the ‘Revolution of Dignity’, it was denounced by Vladimir Putin as an “unconstitutional coup”. And while most Western media stick to the official nomenclature, some prominent voices dissent. John Mearsheimer has referred to “the illegal overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected and pro-Russian president”, while George Friedman has described what happened as “the most blatant coup in history”.
A recap of the basic facts is in order.
In November of 2013, Yanukovych’s government suspended plans for signing an Association Agreement with the EU, and decided to renew talks with Russia. This decision sparked protests in Ukraine’s capital city, Kiev. By December, the number of protestors had reached the tens of thousands, and a permanent encampment had been established on Maidan square. Although most of the protesters were ordinary Ukrainians, far-right groups were also present.
Beginning in December, there were violent clashes between protesters and the police. On 23rd January, protestors succeeded in occupying various buildings around Maidan square. The situation came to a head on 18–20th February when protestors were fired upon by snipers, leaving scores dead and hundreds wounded. A dozen police offers were also killed in the clashes. From November 2013 to February 2014, 112 protestors and 18 police officers lost their lives; though most of the killings happened on 20th February.
On 21st February, Yanukovych signed an agreement with the parliamentary opposition calling for reforms and new elections. But the next day, he was impeached by the Ukrainian parliament. This impeachment process was in several respects unconstitutional, and Yanukovych declared he was still “the legitimate head of the Ukrainian state elected in a free vote by Ukrainian citizens”. However, he subsequently fled to Russia and a new government was formed.
The ‘Revolution of Dignity’ led immediately to Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and the outbreak of civil war in Donbas – so its geopolitical importance can hardly be overstated. Yet despite huge international attention, one question remains shrouded in mystery: who ordered snipers to fire at protestors on 18–20th February?
The ‘official’ narrative is that the snipers were from the Berkut – a special police unit loyal to Yanukovych. On the other hand, Russia has long maintained they were deployed by the Ukrainian far-right as part of a false flag operation to bring down Yanukovych’s government.
What is true is that more than eight years after the massacre – which took place amid a giant demonstration at the centre of Ukraine’s capital in front of dozens of television cameras – not a single person has been convicted. The perpetrators of one of the deadliest mass shootings in European history remain at large.
Why don’t we have an answer? Well, perhaps we do.
Away from the limelight, one Canadian academic has been poring over the evidence for the last eight years. And he’s convinced the ‘official’ narrative is wrong. Ivan Katchanovski (a political scientist at the University of Ottawa) believes the Maidan massacre was a false flag operation carried out by the Ukrainian far-right.
Professor Katchanovski cannot be dismissed as some fringe commenter or stooge of the Kremlin. He has published his arguments in scholarly books and journals, and has presented them at academic conferences. His latest article, which can be accessed for free, reviews all the evidence he’s collected to date – including witness testimonies, weapon ballistics and medical forensics. It’s based on hundreds of hours of footage of the Maidan massacre trials, as well as synchronised video segments of the massacre itself.
As Katchanovski explains, the ‘false flag theory’ first gained credence in March of 2014, when a phone call between two European officials was leaked online. During the call, the Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet tells the EU’s Catherine Ashton about a conversation he’d had with someone called Olga:
What was quite disturbing, the same Olga told, all the evidence shows that people who were killed by snipers from both sides among policemen and then people from the streets – that they were the same snipers, killing people from both sides. She also showed me some photos. She said that as medical doctor, she can, you know, say that it is the same handwriting, same type of bullets. And it’s really disturbing that now the new coalition, that they don’t want to investigate what exactly happened. So that there is now stronger and stronger understanding that behind snipers it was not Yanukovych but it was somebody from the new coalition.
‘Olga’ was later identified as Olga Bohomolets, a doctor who had treated wounded protestors on Maidan square. When quizzed by the press, she said she had not told Paet that somebody from the new coalition was behind the snipers. Likewise, the Estonian Foreign Ministry said, “We reject the claim that Paet was giving an assessment of the opposition’s involvement in the violence” (though they acknowledged the recording was authentic). It is still unclear why Paet would divulge such shocking revelations if he did not believe they had some basis in fact.
Aside from TV recordings and media reports, much of Katchanovski’s evidence comes from the trials of five Berkut police officers, who were charged with the murder of protestors on 20th February, 2014. Various other state actors, including Yanukovych himself, were also charged, but they were not brought to trial as they had already fled the country. (Recall that none of those put on trial were convicted.)
What, then, is Katchanovski’s evidence?
The majority of wounded protestors who testified at the trail said they were shot by snipers from Maidan-controlled buildings. Remarkably, even many witnesses for the prosecution said this. Their testimony is consistent with video footage of journalists and protestors pointing to snipers in buildings like the Hotel Ukraine, which were under Maidan control at the time.
Police snipers testified that they had been ordered to locate and neutralise snipers firing from Maidan-controlled buildings. And Yanukovych himself, who appeared at the trial via video-link, testified that he had received reports of snipers firing from those buildings.
Several Georgian ex-military personnel who testified at the trail actually confessed they were among the snipers, and had been given orders by specific Maidan leaders to fire upon the protestors. They also testified that they had witnessed other snipers shooting from Maidan-controlled buildings. By contrast, no police officers or other state actors confessed to having fired upon protestors.
In the majority of cases where wounded protestors testified that they had been shot by snipers from police-controlled areas, other evidence contradicted their testimony. For example, synchronized video segments showed the exact times they were hit did not coincide with the exact times police officers were discharging their weapons. Other videos showed that several protesters were killed before police officers had even taken up their positions.
Forensic examinations by government experts revealed that the majority of protestors were shot from the side or back, and from top to bottom, strongly suggesting they had been hit by snipers from Maidan-controlled buildings. Only one protestor had a horizontal entry wound. Experts also determined that several protestors were killed by bullets that did not match those used by the police.
An American architecture company created a 3D model of the killing of three protestors, which was used as evidence that those protestors were in fact killed by the police. (This 3D model was covered in a 2018 New York Times article.) However, the wound locations in the model did not match the wound locations from forensic medical examinations.
A screenshot from the video appendix to Katchanovski’s latest paper.
Aside from what Katchanovski calls “overwhelming evidence” that protestors were shot from Maidan-controlled buildings, he believes there was a cover-up by the post-Maidan authorities.
On 21st February, the Ukrainian parliament passed an amnesty law granting blanket immunity to Maidan protestors for serious crimes that had taken place during the protests. This law also prohibited investigation of the protestors for such crimes, and ordered that existing evidence be destroyed.
Two of the Berkut police officers who had been charged with murdering protestors were released by trial judges due to lack of evidence, suggesting the charges against them were trumped up. And all remaining defendants were released in a prisoner exchange within several months of the expected verdict.
Public statements made by various Maidan participants concerning the far-right’s involvement in the massacre were never investigated. One politician said she saw Maidan leaders bringing snipers into a building and then saw snipers firing from that building. Several activists said they witnessed snipers being evacuated by Maidan leaders. And another politician said that Maidan leaders had “arranged” the massacre.
There were unexplained reversals of testimony on the part of wounded Maidan protestors. Key pieces of evidence went missing or were destroyed. Several trees with bullet holes in them were cut down; all helmets and shields used by those who were shot disappeared, as did security camera footage from Maidan-controlled buildings.
Finally, two far-right politicians stated in separate interviews that a Western government official told them killings of a few protestors would not be enough for Western governments to stop recognising Yanukovych, and for that to happen the number of victims would need to be 100. The protesters who lost their lives subsequently became known as the “Heavenly Hundred”, even though some of those ‘hundred’ were not killed in the massacre itself (and in fact simply died of illness.)
On the basis of all the evidence he’s gathered, Katchanovski concludes that the Maidan massacre was “a false flag operation” which involved “elements of the Maidan leadership”.
If true, the implications are immense. It would mean the event that marked the turning point of Euromaidan – that set in motion Yanukovych’s removal from power – was in fact orchestrated by his political opponents. And aside from implicating those individuals in a brutal act of mass murder, it would remove any doubt that the that the ‘Revolution of Dignity’ was illegitimate.
Is it true?
I have been unable to track down any serious criticism of Katchanovski’s work, and when I reached out to him, he told me “there is no other scholarly study” that disputes his findings. What’s more, the political scientist Gordon Hahn reached similar conclusions in his book Ukraine Over the Edge: Russia, the West and the “New Cold War”.
So why haven’t Western governments shown more interest in investigating the massacre? I put this question to Katchanovski. He said that such an investigation would be “politically inconvenient” because it would “upend the narrative that the Western backed overthrow of the Ukrainian government in 2014 by the pro-Western Maidan opposition was peaceful and democratic”. He added that a definitive answer could be obtained by consulting relevant documents once they are declassified.
As I mentioned above, Katchanovski has published his arguments concerning the ‘false flag theory’ in scholarly books and journals, and has presented them at academic conferences. All the germane papers are available for free online. You might therefore expect for his work to have received significant media attention – particularly in the last few months.
Yet with the exception of a few ‘non-mainstream’ outlets, it hasn’t. Major Western media have ignored his studies “for political reasons”, he told me. This is despite the fact that Katchanovski’s other work on Ukraine (unrelated to the massacre) has received ample media attention, including from the Associated Press, Reuters and the Washington Post.
Katchanovski knows that certain media outlets are aware of his work because he’s brought it to their attention. Following the New York Times article on the 3D model of killings at Maidan, he sent a letter to the editor pointing out they had “misrepresented the wound locations”. But his letter wasn’t published. In another case, “Open Democracy accepted a popular version of my Maidan massacre study, but then did not publish it.” Katchanovski said he gave “long interviews concerning the Maidan massacre to several major TV and Radio networks” but “none of them were broadcast”. In every single case “there was no reason given”.
The only time Katchanovski’s work on the massacre has been put under the spotlight was in Oliver Stone’s 2019 documentary Revealing Ukraine. This film is available on Rumble, and the relevant segment begins at 20:00.
What about everything that’s happened since? In our email exchange, Katchanovski clarified that the Maidan massacre “does not justify the Russian invasion and other actions in Ukraine”. Equally, however, Russia’s invasion does not justify ignoring – in his words – “overwhelming and undeniable evidence” of Maidan snipers.
If others believe that Katchanovski is mistaken, they must come forward and present their arguments. In the meantime, I would strongly recommend reading his papers: they make a compelling case that what’s been labelled a “conspiracy theory” is, in fact, true.
Scientists blame space chemicals for rise in heart attacks
The Counter Signal | May 30, 2022
Far, far away in the distant reaches of Earth’s atmosphere, scientists have finally homed in on a possible cause of the sudden rise in heart attacks around the world: space chemicals.
According to an article from Daily Mail, scientists have identified an entirely new class of chemical compounds that form in Earth’s atmosphere called hydrotrioxides.
Even though scientists believe that the chemical compounds needed to form hydrotrioxides have always existed in the atmosphere, they say that the compound may be able to penetrate aerosols, which can lead to respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, including heart attacks.
“They will most likely enter aerosols, where they will form new compounds with new effects,” said Professor Henrik Kjærgaard.
“It is easy to imagine that new substances are formed in the aerosols that are harmful if inhaled. But further investigation is required to address these potential health effects.”
“These compounds have always been around — we just didn’t know about them. But the fact that we now have evidence that the compounds are formed and live for a certain amount of time means that it is possible to study their effect more targeted and respond if they turn out to be dangerous,” added Prof. Kjærgaard.
PhD student and co-author Jing Chen concurred, adding that the compounds are “surprisingly stable.”
“It’s quite significant that we can now show, through direct observation, that these compounds actually form in the atmosphere, that they are surprisingly stable and that they are formed from almost all chemical compounds. All speculation must now be put to rest,” said Chen.
Even more frightening, not only do scientists believe the newly discovered compound could be responsible for causing respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, but it may also be spurring climate change!
“As sunlight is both reflected and absorbed by aerosols, this affects the Earth’s heat balance – that is, the ratio of sunlight that Earth absorbs and sends back into space,” said PhD student and co-author Eva Kjærgaard.
“When aerosols absorb substances, they grow and contribute to cloud formation, which affects Earth’s climate as well.”
FDA announces updated schedule for the June meetings regarding five pivotal vaccine decisions
Who needs data when you’ve got regulatory capture?
By Toby Rogers | May 29, 2022
I. The June FDA meetings
This week the Washington Post copied and pasted from a Pfizer press release to announce yet another scientific miracle(TM) that will completely fail in practice. In the process WaPo also got some quotes from the FDA who have now nailed down the schedule for the 4 meetings in June in which they intend to assemble the final pieces for Pharma’s permanent dominance over the American people.
The new schedule is as follows:
June 7, Novavax
June 14, Moderna in kids 6 to 17 years old
June 15, Moderna in kids 6 months to 5 years AND Pfizer in kids 6 months to 4 years
June 28, “Future Framework” (the plan to skip clinical trials in perpetuity)
There is a lot to parse in the WaPo’s brief article.
Contrary to the breathless headline, they still don’t have any data.
Pfizer and BioNTech said the 80 percent efficacy finding was preliminary and based on 10 cases of Covid-19 in the study population as of the end of April. Once 21 cases have occurred, the companies will conduct a more formal analysis of efficacy… Pfizer and BioNTech said they plan to finish filing data with the FDA this week — and warned that the efficacy number was fluid because results are still arriving.
Let’s recap how we got here:
🚩 The Pfizer clinical trial in kids under 5 failed in December 2021.
🚩 So Pfizer added a third dose and that trial also apparently failed in February (which is why Pfizer was forced to withdraw its application on February 10).
🚩 Now Pfizer is describing a jerry-rigged trial of a third dose in 1,678 kids ages 6 months to four years old. Pfizer did not disclose how the kids were divided between the treatment and control group so it is impossible to run our own calculations on efficacy. Out of that sample, 10 developed Covid — although it is not clear how the 10 were distributed between the treatment and control group. (I suppose some quant on Twitter will figure out how to work backwards from Pfizer’s claims to calculate the numbers in each of these categories but needless to say, this is not the proper way to do science.) Of course Pfizer also failed to describe the contents of the “placebo.”
How exactly will Pfizer double the number of Covid-19 cases in the clinical trial in the next month given that 74.2% of kids already had natural immunity in February which means that nearly 100% of children likely have natural immunity by now?
Also, is the FDA seriously considering basing national policy, that impacts 18 million children, by relying a study with only 10 cases? It appears that the FDA is not even pretending to care about science anymore.
What little data they have will be based on antibodies in the blood, not health outcomes in the real world. That’s strange because the members of the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee unanimously acknowledged on April 6 that there are “no correlates of protection” in connection with Covid-19 shots (this means that there are no valid proxy measures, such as antibody counts, that can determine whether someone who has received this shot is immune to the virus or not.)
WaPo continues:
While the adult trials recruited tens of thousands of volunteers and waited to see if vaccinated people were better protected, the children’s vaccine trials were primarily designed to measure immune responses using blood tests.
No they were not “primarily designed to measure immune responses using blood tests.” The studies were intentionally undersized to hide harms from the shots in addition to other tricks that they use to skew the results (such as kicking you out of the trial if you call 911 or go the the emergency room). But when one shrinks the sample size, surprise! it becomes impossible to detect actual health benefits from the shots (the signal would have been tiny if at all, but when one uses a sample that small then any positive signal can also disappear into statistical insignificance.)
II. The bigger picture
Tony Fauci and the NIAID funded the creation of a chimera virus that escaped a bioweapons lab and killed 6.3 million people worldwide.
Public health authorities have blocked access to safe and effective prophylaxis and early treatment throughout the pandemic in order to create the market for Covid-19 vaccines.
Covid-19 shots skipped essential safety steps (e.g. challenge trials in animals) and were rushed to market with no long term data.
In practice the mRNA shots suppress immune function for 6 weeks after the first shot, provide about two months worth of protection against coronavirus, then efficacy wanes quickly and becomes negative after six months. Meanwhile, these shots cause more side effects than any vaccine ever invented.
Popular support for the current regime has collapsed. More people have died of Covid under Mr. I Believe the Science(TM) than under Orange Man Bad. Only hypochondriacs in blue states seek out additional doses. Meanwhile Sudden Adult Death Syndrome stalks the true believers. In the past 48 hours alone actor Ray Liotta, Andy Fletcher of Depeche Mode, British drummer Alan White (from the band YES), and comedian Phil Butler were all likely killed by Covid-19 shots. It’s impossible to hide all of the bodies at this point.
The FDA seems to know that their window is closing to implement the Final Solution. So they are rushing to put the finishing touches on their plans to inject this toxic junk into the littlest kids in America. The FDA knows that these shots cannot pass proper regulatory review so they’ve developed a plan to rig the process in favor of Pharma in perpetuity. On June 28, the FDA’s “expert advisory committee” will vote on a “Future Framework” whereby all future (reformulated) Covid-19 shots will automatically be deemed “safe and effective(TM)” without any additional clinical trials, on the theory that they are “biologically similar” to existing Covid-19 shots.
What this means is that by fall, the Covid-19 shots that they will be injecting into Americans of all ages will have a new formula that skipped clinical trials altogether.
Injecting people with genetically modified mRNA that skipped clinical trials is genocide. It’s slower than the Nazi Final Solution. But it’s genocide all the same. Indeed the slower pace of the FDA Final Solution (5% to 15% increase in all cause mortality every year) might be even more lethal in the long run. It’s sinister in that they are intentionally building in plausible deniability (‘the FDA said it was safe’) to help the medical establishment feel virtuous while participating in genocide.
I’ll just conclude by saying: be careful what you wish for FDA. The tide has already turned. The American people know exactly what you are doing. We have the receipts. It will be relatively easy to secure a conviction at Nuremberg 2.0 — we literally have you on video committing crimes against humanity. As a reminder, the courts have determined that “I was just following orders” is not a valid defense.
Featured Video
Douglas Macgregor: No Peace – U.S. Prepares for ‘Total War’ Against Iran
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
Book Review
Palantir CEO Calls for Draft to Fight the Empire’s Wars
Involuntary servitude is good for business
By Kurt Nimmo | Another Day in the Empire | April 20, 2026
In 2025, Alex Karp, the CEO of government and military tech contractor Palantir, published The New York Times best-seller, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West. The Wall Street Journal praised the book as a cri de coeur, a passionate appeal “that takes aim at the tech industry for abandoning its history of helping America and its allies,” while Wired praised the book as a “readable polemic that skewers Silicon Valley for insufficient patriotism.”
On April 18, 2026, Palantir posted twenty-two points to social media summarizing the book. In addition to taking Silicon Valley to task for insufficient patriotism, advocating a role for AI in forever war, and denouncing the “psychologization of modern politics,” the Palantir post on X declares: “National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.”
National conscription, a form of involuntary servitude, and the wars it portends, is good for business, especially for corporations within the orbit of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the national security state. Palantir fits comfortably within this amalgamation. … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Douglas Macgregor: No Peace – U.S. Prepares for ‘Total War’ Against Iran
- How A Fake Iranian Terror Group Was Invented To Proscribe IRGC in Europe
- Iran’s judiciary rejects Trump’s claim on ‘planned execution’ of 8 women
- Israeli army blows up school in southern Lebanon in violation of ceasefire
- The desalination front: Water as Israel’s Achilles heel
- Washington cuts flow of US dollars to Iraqi central bank until ‘acceptable’ government formed
- China blames US for diplomatic impasse with Iran, urges it to show ‘sincerity’ in talks
- Iran announces new Hormuz restrictions after US ceasefire violations
- After Islamabad: How the Global South Is Reshaping Eurasian Geopolitics
- Is Trump Going for Armageddon?
- If Americans Knew
- Israeli soldiers using sexual assault to force Palestinians out of West Bank, report says
- Top Biden Official Supports Trump Iran Attack, Says Biden May Have Done The Same
- A history of Israel’s invasions of Lebanon
- How the powerful pro-Israel lobby keeps controlling Democrats in the US
- Replay: Israel’s slow ethnic cleansing of Christians from the Holy Land
- 5 times Israelis desecrated Christian sites in the past two years
- US running out of weaponry for Israel’s war; Iran has plenty – Daily Update
- Israel is (still) killing aid workers in Gaza
- Catholics finally splitting with Trump over Iran war and Israel
- Israel’s “Black Wednesday” Massacre Leaves Lebanese Families Giving DNA To ID Loved One’s Remains
- No Tricks Zone
- New Study: The Climate May Be 5 Times More Sensitive To Solar Forcing Than Commonly Assumed
- EV Industry Reached $70 Billion In Losses In 2024 Due To Delusional Green Ideologies
- Reality Check: Maldives Have Actually Grown In Size Or Remained Stable Over Recent Decades
- Abrupt Climate Change Also Occurred NATURALLY In The Past …25 Times During Last Ice Age
- Cave Discovery Reveals Today’s Desert Climates Were Recently Far Warmer, Wetter, Teeming With Life
- German Expert: Heat Dome Led To Record Temps In Western USA…Warmer In 1934, 1936
- New Study: No Linear Warming Or Glacier Retreat Along Northern Antarctic Peninsula Since 1980s
- An Inconvenient Tree: Uncovered In Alps… Europe Much Warmer Than Today 6000 Years Ago
- New Study Reports A 60% Slowdown In Greenland’s Ice Loss Rate In The Last Decade
- Low Intensity Tornado Wrecks Major Solar Farm, Creating A Potential Toxic Dump
Aletho News 