In the first three minutes after the infant is delivered, if the umbilical cord is left intact, approximately one hundred milliliters of blood transfers from the placenta into the newborn.¹ That is roughly a third of the infant’s total blood volume. The transfer is not passive. The umbilical vessels contain their own smooth muscle. They close on their own schedule when the transfer is complete, usually within three to ten minutes. At that point the cord blanches, the pulsation stops, and the vessels seal.
In the United States, this process is interrupted, on average, within thirty to sixty seconds. The infant loses roughly thirty percent of the blood the physiology was constructed to deliver. The practice is defended on grounds that shift as the literature closes on it: it prevents jaundice (it does not, at any clinically meaningful rate), it reduces polycythemia (rarely, and asymptomatically), it is what the obstetrician was trained to do (this last is accurate). The iron the infant would have used for the next six months goes into a red plastic bag with the placenta.
This essay is about what happens in the first sixty minutes after birth in a standard American hospital, and about the biology of the first sixty minutes as it existed before the interventions displaced it. There are seven interventions in the standard sequence. Each one displaces a specific biological event. The essay traces the seven in the order they occur, and then examines the second casualty of the hour, which is the mother.
The argument is not that any single intervention is catastrophic in isolation. It is that the biology of the first hour was doing something, and hospital protocol displaces the entire sequence in favor of procedures whose cumulative effect has never been studied. What the interventions replace is a sequence humans arrived with. What replaced it was assembled between roughly 1930 and 1991, most of it introduced without controlled trial, and none of it evaluated as the sequence it now is.
The infant born in a Kansas farmhouse in 1890 received the first hour by default. The infant born in a Manhattan delivery room in 2026 receives the first hour only if the parents have prepared for months to protect it against interventions the hospital considers routine.
The Placental Transfer
The Cochrane review on the timing of umbilical cord clamping in term infants pools twenty-five trials involving more than three thousand mother-infant pairs. Delayed clamping (variously defined as one to three minutes, or until pulsation ceases) is associated with higher hemoglobin at birth, higher ferritin at three and six months, and lower rates of iron deficiency in infancy.² The World Health Organization recommends delaying cord clamping for at least one minute after birth.³ The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, in Committee Opinion Number 814 (January 2020), endorsed a delay of at least thirty to sixty seconds. Actual hospital practice in the United States has moved reluctantly, and inconsistently, toward the low end of that range.
Ola Andersson and colleagues at Uppsala University randomized four hundred term infants to early clamping (within ten seconds) or delayed clamping (at least three minutes) and followed them at four months and at four years. At four months, the delayed-clamping infants had ferritin levels forty-five percent higher than the early-clamping group.⁴ At four years, the delayed-clamping children scored higher on fine motor and social skills.⁵ The trial was published in the BMJ and in JAMA Pediatrics. It has not changed what happens in the room where the baby comes out.
The infant delivered at term arrives with approximately eighty milliliters of blood per kilogram in circulation. The placenta at the moment of birth contains roughly one third of the total fetal blood volume. That fraction is not surplus. The umbilical arteries and vein complete the redistribution while the infant’s lungs open and the ductus arteriosus and foramen ovale begin the transition from fetal to neonatal circulation. The iron load carried in the umbilical vessels at three minutes postpartum is approximately 70 milligrams. The daily iron requirement of the term infant during the first six months, met almost entirely from stores laid down before and during the third trimester, is approximately 0.27 milligrams. The math is not subtle. Three minutes of transfer delivers nine months of iron.
The American replacement is a plastic clamp on a still-pulsing cord, and a pair of scissors thirty seconds later. The consequences are measurable at four months (ferritin, hemoglobin), at six months (iron sufficiency), and at four years (fine motor and social scoring). The intervention has no informed consent process. The mother will rarely be told that the WHO and ACOG recommendations both call for a longer delay than the hospital in fact provides, and she will almost never be told what the delayed-clamping trials measured at four years.
The Approach to the Breast
The infant placed on the mother’s abdomen immediately after birth, undisturbed, dry but not washed, performs a sequence of movements that has been documented on video and named. Ann-Marie Widström and colleagues in Sweden videotaped twenty-eight undisturbed term newborns and identified nine sequential stages: birth cry, relaxation, awakening, activity, crawling, resting, familiarization, suckling, and sleeping.⁶ The sequence completes, on average, in the first sixty to ninety minutes after birth. The infant uses head-lifting movements, hand-mouth coordination with the mother’s nipple, and a slow crawl up the mother’s abdomen to the breast. The first latch, when the infant is left to accomplish it, typically occurs somewhere between sixty and ninety minutes after birth, with substantial variation between infants.
The Cochrane systematic review on early skin-to-skin contact between mother and healthy newborn pools forty-six trials with more than three thousand mother-infant pairs. Infants who received skin-to-skin contact in the first hour, without separation for measurement or procedure, breastfed earlier, breastfed longer, maintained more stable blood glucose, thermoregulated more efficiently, and cried less in the following twenty-four hours.⁷ Maternal outcomes included lower rates of breastfeeding cessation before six weeks and lower postpartum depression scores.
Standard American hospital practice moves the infant to a warmer within the first minute. There the infant is weighed, measured, footprinted, given an Apgar score, injected with the compound sold as vitamin K, and treated with erythromycin eye ointment. The infant is then wrapped in a receiving blanket and returned to the mother. The nine-stage sequence has been interrupted at stage three. The rest of the stages do not resume. The first latch, if it occurs in the first hour at all, occurs against the mother’s blanket-wrapped chest, with an infant whose hand-mouth coordination has been disrupted, whose skin has been rubbed with an absorbent towel, and whose eyes have been coated with antibiotic ointment.
What is displaced in the assessment ritual is the imprinting window. The infant returned to the mother wrapped, cleaned, and processed does not get the first hour. Neither does the mother.
The First Injection
The compound sold as vitamin K is administered to the American newborn by intramuscular injection, typically in the thigh, within the first fifteen minutes of life. The standard dose is one milligram. Endogenous plasma phylloquinone in the term newborn is approximately 0.05 nanograms per milliliter. The injection delivers a bolus at roughly twenty thousand times endogenous. The formulation includes polysorbate 80, benzyl alcohol, and propylene glycol.⁸ The active compound, phytonadione, is a synthetic form of phylloquinone.
The intervention has a real underlying observation. What mainstream pediatrics calls vitamin K-dependent bleeding, formerly labeled hemorrhagic disease of the newborn, occurs in a small fraction of untreated infants during the first week of life and, in a smaller fraction, between two weeks and six months. The late-onset form can produce intracranial hemorrhage and carries substantial mortality when it occurs. The bleeding phenomenon is not disputed. What is disputed is what to do about it.
The American Academy of Pediatrics adopted routine intramuscular prophylaxis in 1961.⁹ The route was chosen for the assurance of absorption, not because oral phytonadione does not work. Multiple oral regimens have been tested and are used in national protocols in the Netherlands, Denmark, Switzerland, and Germany. The Dutch protocol delivers 1 milligram at birth followed by 150 micrograms daily from day eight to week thirteen in breastfed infants. Rates of late-onset bleeding in the Dutch protocol are comparable to the American intramuscular protocol.¹⁰
Jean Golding and colleagues at Bristol published in the British Medical Journal in 1992 an analysis linking the intramuscular injection at birth to a doubling of childhood cancer, particularly leukemia, in the exposed cohort.¹¹ Subsequent studies were mixed. The mainstream position settled into “the balance of evidence does not support the association,” and the intramuscular protocol continued. The oral protocol, which delivers the same effect at physiologic dosing without the injection additives, was not adopted in the United States.
The additives merit examination on their own. Benzyl alcohol at neonatal doses has been associated with gasping syndrome in premature infants; the FDA issued a warning in 1982 restricting its use in that population.¹² The one-milligram vitamin K injection contains 9 milligrams of benzyl alcohol. Polysorbate 80 is a solubilizer with documented capacity to disrupt cellular membrane integrity and, in animal models, alter blood-brain barrier permeability. A prior essay developed the zeta-potential mechanism at length.¹³ The vitamin K injection is not the largest zeta-potential insult of the first hour. It is the first.
What the injection displaces is the intended pattern of vitamin K acquisition, which is neither zero nor bolus. The breastfed infant receives phylloquinone in milk at physiologic concentrations sustained across the first months. The intramuscular protocol delivers, in a single dose, an amount the physiology was constructed to receive across weeks.
For the reader wondering whether their own child received this injection: consent was almost certainly not obtained in any meaningful sense. A form signed on admission authorized the hospital’s standard newborn care. That form covered the injection.
The Ointment
Within the first thirty minutes, before the infant is returned to the mother, erythromycin ophthalmic ointment (0.5 percent) is applied to both eyes. The procedure is required by law in most states. The rationale, dating to Karl Credé’s 1881 protocol in Leipzig, was prevention of what mainstream medicine calls ophthalmia neonatorum, a neonatal eye inflammation the establishment attributes to gonococcal exposure during birth. Untreated, the condition was documented to progress to corneal ulceration and blindness in a subset of affected infants. Credé’s silver nitrate reduced the reported incidence in Leipzig from ten percent of newborns to less than one percent. The intervention reduced blindness. The intervention that replaced it, applied to a screened-negative population, does not.
Silver nitrate has since been replaced by erythromycin. The current protocol treats the infant of a screened mother not carrying the bacterium, in a population where gonorrhea prenatal screening is standard care.¹⁴ ACOG recommends screening at the first prenatal visit for all pregnant patients under twenty-five and for older patients with risk factors. A mother screened and treated presents what the establishment characterizes as no meaningful risk of transferring the bacterium. The ointment is applied anyway. The state mandate does not distinguish between screened-negative and unscreened mothers.
The ointment blurs the infant’s vision during the imprinting window. The newborn is optically calibrated to focus at eight to twelve inches, the distance from breast to mother’s face during nursing. Ointment-coated eyes cannot fix on that face. The ointment is also an antibiotic administered to the ocular surface at the moment the ocular microbiome is being established. No trial has ever measured what the ointment does to that colonization. The absence of the trial is the finding.
The eye ointment is one of the interventions parents can decline in most jurisdictions with a signed refusal form. It is rarely offered as an option. The nurse arriving with the tube does not typically pause to ask.
The Vaccination
At some point in the first twenty-four hours, and in some hospital protocols within the first hour or two, the newborn receives the first injection on the American vaccination schedule. The vaccine is the recombinant hepatitis B vaccine, marketed as Recombivax HB or Engerix-B, containing 5 to 10 micrograms of hepatitis B surface antigen and 250 micrograms of aluminum, as amorphous aluminum hydroxyphosphate sulfate (Recombivax) or aluminum hydroxide (Engerix-B).¹⁵
The rationale for administering this injection on the day of birth was established by the ACIP in 1991 as part of a strategy to eliminate what mainstream medicine calls hepatitis B transmission through universal infant vaccination.¹⁶ In the establishment framework, the condition is associated with blood-to-blood contact and sexual activity. The pediatric concern the ACIP named was vertical transfer from a mother carrying the surface antigen. Screening for that surface antigen has been standard prenatal care since 1988. The mother screened and confirmed negative delivers an infant whose risk of what the establishment calls hepatitis B in the first year of life, absent blood contact and sexual activity, approaches zero on the establishment’s own terms. The rationale for injecting that infant on the day of birth reduces to catching the infants of unscreened mothers, and to protecting against later transfer from a household member sharing razors. Both are surrogate arguments for injecting a screened-negative population.
The infant on day one receives 250 micrograms of aluminum in a single bolus. The FDA has identified 4 to 5 micrograms per kilogram per day as the exposure level at which parenteral aluminum accumulates to concentrations associated with central nervous system and bone toxicity in patients with impaired renal function.¹⁷ Applied to a 3.5-kilogram newborn, the FDA’s accumulation threshold works out to roughly 17 micrograms per day. The day-one injection delivers about fifteen times that amount, in a single bolus, into an infant whose kidneys are not yet fully working and whose blood-brain barrier will never again be this porous.
The aluminum-adjuvant literature, developed most extensively by Christopher Exley at Keele and Romain Gherardi at Créteil, documents that injected aluminum does not remain at the site. Macrophages carry it to lymph nodes, spleen, bone marrow, and, in Gherardi’s macrophagic myofasciitis series, to distant tissue including brain.¹⁸ ¹⁹ Clearance from tissue, once deposited, is measured in years. Zeta potential collapse in the neonatal blood following aluminum-adjuvant injection is the mechanism a separate essay in this series developed. The injection arrives when the infant is least prepared to receive it. The schedule is calibrated to that moment on purpose.
The 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act removed vaccine manufacturer liability for injuries arising from the recommended pediatric schedule.²⁰ A prior essay in this series traced the consequences of that legal structure. The injection administered to the newborn is the first of the schedule the Act protects. Consent is bundled into admission paperwork. The parent who declines is required to sign a separate refusal form. The counseling does not mention the aluminum load, the biodistribution literature, or the mother’s own negative screening.
The Vernix
The white coating on the newborn’s skin is not residue. It is a substance the infant made, for the infant, starting in the second trimester of gestation, composed of eighty percent water, ten percent protein, and ten percent lipid. The protein fraction contains at least forty-one distinct proteins identified in the Tollin proteomic analysis, of which roughly a third have direct antimicrobial activity.²¹ The active components include lysozyme, lactoferrin, cathelicidin LL-37, and a range of defensins active against gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria, fungi, and some enveloped particles. The lipid fraction, in composition and quantity, closely tracks the composition of the stratum corneum (the outermost skin layer) of the term infant. It is not a coincidence.
The vernix serves at least four documented functions. In utero it prevents maceration of the fetal skin by amniotic fluid across the third trimester. At delivery it eases passage through the birth canal. Post-delivery it retains warmth and moisture at the skin surface, providing thermoregulation and preventing transepidermal water loss. And it colonizes the infant’s skin with an antimicrobial coating whose peptides continue functioning during the hours in which the skin microbiome is being established.
The World Health Organization recommends delaying the first bath by at least twenty-four hours after birth.²² American hospital practice varies. Many hospitals wash the infant within the first several hours, sometimes with soap. The vernix is rubbed off with towels during drying and the residue is washed away in the bath.
What the vernix does that no substitute is offered for is the seeding of the infant’s skin surface with the mother’s microbiome combined with the fetal-secretion antimicrobial peptides. The infant delivered vaginally, placed on the mother’s chest unwashed, receives the mother’s flora onto skin coated with the vernix, which selects for the flora the peptides tolerate and against the flora the peptides suppress. The infant washed, wrapped in hospital linen, and handled by gloved hands receives hospital flora onto skin whose antimicrobial coating has been removed.
Maria Dominguez-Bello and colleagues have documented that the microbiome of the cesarean infant at one month differs measurably from the vaginally-delivered infant at one month, with the cesarean infant’s early flora more closely resembling adult skin flora than the mother’s vaginal flora.³⁰ Subsequent work has shown that at least some of the differences persist through infancy.
The vernix is not a candidate for pharmaceutical replacement. There is no product to sell in its place. It was produced by the infant, for the infant, and it functions in a window that closes within hours. What replaces the vernix in the hospital protocol is nothing. What is added is the antibiotic ointment, the alcohol wipe at the injection site, and the hospital-laundered blanket. The infant is now less colonized than it would be, and more colonized with what the hospital carries.
The First Meal
Some hospitals, at some times, supplement breastfed infants with formula in the nursery during the first hours after birth. The practice varies. It is more common when the mother is exhausted, when the infant is separated for observation, when the mother’s supply is judged inadequate, and when the hospital does not carry Baby-Friendly certification. The World Health Organization / UNICEF Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative, launched in 1991, established ten steps designed to protect exclusive breastfeeding in the first days.²³ Step six is that no food or drink other than breast milk should be given to newborns unless medically indicated. Compliance is voluntary. A minority of American births occur in Baby-Friendly-designated hospitals.
The infant’s first meal is not decorative. Colostrum, produced by the mother’s breasts in the first hours to days after birth, is not milk in the mature sense. It is a thick, yellow-orange secretion containing at least twenty times the concentration of the protective proteins mainstream biochemistry classifies as secretory immunoglobulin A, compared to mature breast milk, plus lactoferrin, lysozyme, growth factors, and oligosaccharides that seed the infant’s gut microbiome selectively.²⁴ The newborn stomach at day one has a capacity of approximately five to seven milliliters. Colostrum production tracks this capacity. Formula, at the volume infants are commonly supplemented, does not.
The gut lining of the newborn is highly permeable in the first days. The tight junctions between epithelial cells have not yet closed. This permeability is a feature. It permits the passage of the intact protective proteins and growth factors in colostrum into the infant’s circulation. It also permits the passage of intact proteins from formula, including bovine milk proteins whose structure differs from human milk proteins and which the infant’s still-closing gut does not process the way it processes what it was constructed to receive.
The oligosaccharides in colostrum are indigestible to the infant. That is the point. They are metabolized by the Bifidobacterium species the mother’s flora deposited, feeding the microbes that will occupy the gut in the coming weeks. Formula lacks these oligosaccharides. Formula lacks the mother’s flora. The formula-supplemented infant, over the coming days and weeks, develops a gut microbiome that differs measurably from the exclusively-breastfed infant, and the difference persists.
The first meal is the culminating displacement of the first hour. It arrives to an infant who has been separated from the mother, injected, coated, and washed, and it delivers to that infant a substitute for the substance the biology laid down as the first food. The mother, watching this happen or unable to intervene because she has been medicated or exhausted, has already lost the imprinting window that was hers.
If you are a mother reading this, you were also in that room. Depending on what you were given for pain, you may remember very little. You were told the nurses knew what they were doing. You were not told that the sequence being performed on your infant was displacing a hormonal cascade that was also happening in you. Nobody said it aloud because the sequence has a name only in the physiology literature, and the physiology literature is not what the nurses were trained on.
The Mother’s Cascade
The mother’s biology in the first hour after birth is not incidental. It is a second event running in parallel to the infant’s, requiring the infant’s presence to sustain, and it is displaced by the same interventions.
Oxytocin production in the mother peaks in the minutes after delivery. The surge is triggered by uterine stretch during labor, by the ferguson reflex during crowning, and by direct skin-to-skin contact with the newborn in the minutes that follow.²⁵ The pulse at delivery is the highest circulating concentration of oxytocin a woman will produce in her lifetime. The hormone contracts the uterus, delivering the placenta and closing the vessels that fed it. It also acts centrally, producing a state that has been variously called maternal responsiveness, the imprinting state, or, in the phrasing of Michel Odent, the “cocktail of love hormones.”²⁶ Odent ran the maternity unit at the Pithiviers state hospital in France from 1962 to 1985 and documented what happened when the interventions were removed. Prolactin rises in the same window and initiates the transition from colostrum production to mature milk. The initiation depends on the infant’s suckling within the first hours. Delayed suckling delays the prolactin response and, in a subset of women, the milk-transition does not occur normally.
Sarah Buckley, in Hormonal Physiology of Childbearing, catalogs the full cascade.²⁷ Endorphins, elevated during labor, remain elevated postpartum and cross into breast milk. Catecholamines drop in the presence of the infant and rise again if the infant is separated. Vasopressin mediates maternal attention. The literature is not fringe. Klaus and Kennell developed it in the 1970s. Odent and Uvnäs-Moberg extended it. Buckley formally reviewed it for the National Partnership for Women and Families in 2015. The birth hormones are a system whose components require each other to complete. Interrupt any of them and the system does not deliver what it was constructed to deliver.
What displaces the mother’s cascade in the hospital delivery is the familiar sequence. The infant is taken to a warmer within the first minute. The mother loses skin-to-skin contact at the moment the oxytocin sustaining stimulus was constructed to arrive. She may receive synthetic oxytocin by intravenous drip for uterine contraction, which acts on peripheral receptors but does not cross the blood-brain barrier and does not reproduce the central effects of the endogenous surge. The synthetic drip contracts the uterus. It does not produce the maternal-responsiveness state. Meanwhile, her epidural has not fully worn off. She has received four to six liters of intravenous fluids. She is exhausted. She is being handed paperwork. When the infant is returned to her, wrapped and processed, the window has closed.
The consequences are measurable. Breastfeeding initiation rates track skin-to-skin contact in the first hour.²⁸ Postpartum depression rates track breastfeeding duration and, independently, track the interventions during labor and the first hour.²⁹ The mother who did not receive the first hour her physiology laid down is more likely to experience difficulty with breastfeeding at two weeks, with mood at six weeks, and with maternal attachment at six months.
None of this appears in standard prenatal care. The literature exists. It is not read. The mother arriving at the hospital in labor believes she is arriving to receive expert care for a medical event. She is not told that the event proceeds along a hormonal pathway hospital protocol is not calibrated to protect.
The second casualty of the first hour is the mother. She experiences the same interventions from a different position. Each act of separation displaces her cascade at the same moment it displaces the infant’s. The two biologies were constructed to complete together.
What the First Hour Was, Before
Humans lived and reproduced for the entire pre-industrial history of the species without the seven interventions this essay has cataloged. Cord clamping, in the form the American delivery room now practices it, is not a traditional intervention. The vitamin K injection was introduced in 1961. The universal newborn hepatitis B injection was recommended in 1991. Erythromycin eye ointment for gonococcal prophylaxis dates to the 1980s in its current formulation, replacing the silver nitrate protocol that began in 1881. Formula supplementation as routine hospital practice dates to the mid-twentieth century. Immediate bathing dates to the era when hospital birth replaced home birth, roughly the 1940s.
The first hour, before all of this, was not chaotic. It was structured, and the structure was biological. The infant arrived, was placed against the mother’s body, received the placental blood transfer over three to ten minutes, initiated the pulmonary transition with adequate volume, warmed against the mother’s skin, was colonized by the mother’s flora onto vernix-coated skin, self-attached to the breast within the first hour, and received colostrum. The mother, during those minutes, delivered the placenta by uterine contraction driven by the endogenous oxytocin surge, produced the imprinting state that oriented her to the infant, transitioned into prolactin-mediated lactation initiation, and completed the physiologic postpartum sequence.
This is what the first hour was. It is what the modern delivery room has displaced.
What the First Hour Is, When Nothing Interrupts
The infant emerges. Passage through the birth canal has compressed the thoracic cavity and cleared amniotic fluid from the lungs. The cord remains attached. The infant is placed directly on the mother’s abdomen, chest, or breast, skin to skin. The infant is not dried aggressively. The vernix remains on the skin. A warm blanket may be placed over both mother and infant. The room is quiet.
The infant emits the birth cry, which opens the lungs. The cry subsides. The infant enters a period of quiet alertness, eyes open, and fixes on the mother’s face at the eight-to-twelve-inch distance. This state persists for roughly sixty to ninety minutes and does not recur with the same intensity for weeks. The mother, in the same window, has completed uterine contraction and delivered the placenta, and the endogenous oxytocin surge has produced a state of focused attention on the infant that she will remember, if she experiences it, for the rest of her life.
The cord transfers blood from placenta to infant. The pulmonary circulation opens. Between three and ten minutes, the cord pulsation slows and stops. The umbilical vessels close. The cord blanches. Only now is the cord cut, and it can be cut without a clamp if it has fully closed.
The infant, in the following thirty to sixty minutes, moves through the nine stages Widström documented. The head lifts. The hand-mouth coordination emerges. The infant crawls, sometimes visibly, up the mother’s abdomen. Somewhere between sixty and ninety minutes, the infant self-attaches to the breast. The latch is deep. Colostrum flows. The infant receives the first meal.
The mother’s flora colonizes the vernix. The mother’s oxytocin surge sustains. Body temperature stabilizes. Blood glucose stabilizes. The infant enters the first sleep. The mother enters her own recovery.
This is the first hour when it is not interrupted. Every event described is in the literature. Nothing here is romantic. This is what the biology does when it is left alone.
What to Refuse, and What Requires More
The mother planning a hospital birth in the United States who wants the first hour her physiology can deliver has options. Not all seven interventions can be refused in every hospital, but most can be refused in most.
Delayed cord clamping is available for the asking in most American hospitals in 2026. The written birth plan should specify “delay cord clamping until pulsation ceases, or a minimum of three minutes.” Some hospitals will interpret this as thirty seconds. The plan should specify the minimum. The obstetrician’s agreement should be secured in advance at a prenatal appointment, and documented in the chart. Skin-to-skin contact within the first minute, uninterrupted for the first hour, is available in Baby-Friendly-designated hospitals and increasingly in non-designated hospitals for the asking. The birth plan should specify that weighing, measuring, Apgar assessment, and all non-emergency procedures be deferred to after the first hour. Apgar assessment can be done visually while the infant is on the mother’s chest.
The vitamin K injection, the erythromycin eye ointment, and the day-one hepatitis B vaccine can each be declined in every American state with a signed refusal form. In some states an oral vitamin K protocol is available on request. Delayed bathing, by at least twenty-four hours and preferably until the mother is home, is increasingly available for the asking. Exclusive breastfeeding, with no formula supplementation in the nursery, requires the parents to state the preference explicitly on the birth plan and repeatedly in person, and to keep the infant in the mother’s room rather than the nursery.
The mother who wants the fuller first hour, without the intrusions the American hospital continues to make available on request, has options beyond the hospital. Birthing centers, in states that license them, deliver a substantially undisturbed first hour as their default. Midwife-attended home birth, for the low-risk mother, delivers the first hour without the interventions being present as options at all. The refusal is not required. The interventions are not there to refuse.
The mother who cannot deliver at home, and whose hospital does not offer a birthing-center option, can still preserve most of what the physiology needs. The birth plan matters. The advocate at the birth matters. The prenatal conversation with the obstetrician matters. The seven interventions, one by one, can be reduced or declined. What cannot be done, in the standard American hospital, is arrive without a plan and receive the first hour intact. What the hospital delivers by default is what this essay described.
No cumulative safety study of the seven interventions as a sequence has ever been conducted. None was required, because each intervention was introduced separately, defended separately, and evaluated (when it was evaluated at all) against no comparator except the intervention it replaced. The regulatory capture the reader can name in other domains (pharmaceutical, agricultural, financial) operates here at the level of the individual body, and at the level of the sixty minutes that were once the least medicalized in the human life course.
The infant born in a Kansas farmhouse in 1890 received the first hour by default. The infant born in a Manhattan delivery room in 2026 receives the first hour only if the parents have prepared for months to protect it against interventions the hospital considers routine. The first hour was displaced within roughly a century. It has not disappeared. It is still there, in the physiology, waiting.
How to Explain This to a Six-Year-Old
Imagine a brand new baby, just coming out.
For all the time before hospitals, this is what happened next.
The little tube that connected the baby to the mommy on the inside kept working for a while, like a garden hose finishing a watering. It sent all the rest of the baby’s blood back into the baby’s body. When it was done, the tube stopped on its own. The baby stayed on the mommy’s chest, warm and quiet. In about an hour, the baby crawled up to the mommy’s breast all by itself and started to drink.
That was the first hour. That is what it was.
Now, in most American hospitals, this is what happens instead.
As soon as the baby comes out, a doctor cuts the little tube right away. That means the baby loses about a third of the blood that was supposed to be inside the baby’s body. The blood goes in the trash with the tube.
Then a nurse takes the baby to a table with a bright lamp. She weighs the baby. She measures the baby. She puts a needle in the baby’s leg and gives the baby a shot. She puts sticky medicine in the baby’s eyes so the baby can’t see the mommy’s face clearly. Later, another shot goes in, and that one has a metal called aluminum inside it. After a while, a nurse gives the baby a bath. That washes off a special white coating the baby was born with. The coating was made to keep the baby safe from germs. The bath takes it away.
While all of that is going on, the mommy is on the table by herself. Her body is trying to make a special feeling that helps her fall deeply in love with the baby. But the baby is way over on the warm table, being weighed and measured and stuck with needles. When the baby finally comes back, the baby is wrapped up in a blanket and can’t feel the mommy’s skin very well.
Nobody in the delivery room is trying to be mean. The nurses are doing what they were taught. The doctor is doing what the doctor was taught. But what they were taught to do is not what a baby is made for.
A baby is made for a quiet room, the mommy’s skin, and time. The little tube finishes on its own. The baby finds the mommy’s breast on its own. Everything a baby needs in the first hour is already there. No shots. No goo. No bright lamp. Just the mommy.
It took about a hundred years for hospitals to forget this.
It only takes one baby being born to remember.
In Print
Seven of my books are now available as paperbacks, printed to order through Lulu and shipped worldwide. The Unvaccinated lays out the completely unvaccinated as a comparison group across twenty chapters and five appendices — as far as I know, the only book of its kind. Medicalized Motherhood follows a woman through 123 documented interventions from teenage pill to postpartum discharge. Drilling for Profit argues that cavities, gum disease, and crooked teeth are a dietary problem the dental profession treats surgically. What Your Vet Can’t Tell You applies the same critique to pets — food, vaccines, and a profession trained by the industries whose products cause the harm. Escape from Psychiatry documents the fabrication of the DSM, the collapse of the serotonin hypothesis, and the specific damage done by every major psychiatric drug class.
Two more take up what the first five leave out — the remedies the first five explain why you need. The DMSO Book covers 100,000 studies, zero deaths, and one approval — the suppressed science of medicine’s most versatile compound. Chlorine Dioxide: The Forbidden Remedy collects the interviews, protocols, and evidence from the doctors and researchers they tried to silence.
A physical book reaches the person a Substack post never will — the sceptical relative, the friend who won’t click a link but might open a book, the visitor whose eye lands on a coffee table. Buy one to keep, and one to give away.
References
Yao, A.C., Moinian, M., and Lind, J. “Distribution of blood between infant and placenta after birth.” Lancet 2, no. 7626 (1969): 871–873. The three-minute placental transfusion volume in term infants was established in this landmark measurement study and has been replicated in subsequent literature.
McDonald, S.J., Middleton, P., Dowswell, T., and Morris, P.S. “Effect of timing of umbilical cord clamping of term infants on maternal and neonatal outcomes.” Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 7 (2013): CD004074.
World Health Organization. Guideline: Delayed umbilical cord clamping for improved maternal and infant health and nutrition outcomes. Geneva: WHO, 2014.
Andersson, O., Hellström-Westas, L., Andersson, D., and Domellöf, M. “Effect of delayed versus early umbilical cord clamping on neonatal outcomes and iron status at 4 months: a randomised controlled trial.” BMJ 343 (2011): d7157.
Andersson, O., Lindquist, B., Lindgren, M., Stjernqvist, K., Domellöf, M., and Hellström-Westas, L. “Effect of Delayed Cord Clamping on Neurodevelopment at 4 Years of Age: A Randomized Clinical Trial.” JAMA Pediatrics 169, no. 7 (2015): 631–638.
Widström, A.M., Lilja, G., Aaltomaa-Michalias, P., Dahllöf, A., Lintula, M., and Nissen, E. “Newborn behaviour to locate the breast when skin-to-skin: a possible method for enabling early self-regulation.” Acta Paediatrica 100, no. 1 (2011): 79–85. The nine-stage sequence was documented from videotape observation of twenty-eight full-term infants and elaborated further in Widström, A.M., Brimdyr, K., Svensson, K., Cadwell, K., and Nissen, E. “Skin-to-skin contact the first hour after birth, underlying implications and clinical practice.” Acta Paediatrica 108, no. 7 (2019): 1192–1204.
Moore, E.R., Bergman, N., Anderson, G.C., and Medley, N. “Early skin-to-skin contact for mothers and their healthy newborn infants.” Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 11 (2016): CD003519.
Konakion (phytonadione) injectable, product monograph. Hoffmann-La Roche. Formulation includes polysorbate 80, benzyl alcohol (9 mg per 1 mg dose), and propylene glycol. Alternative formulations by Hospira and Amphastar carry comparable excipients.
American Academy of Pediatrics, Committee on Nutrition. “Vitamin K compounds and the water-soluble analogues.” Pediatrics 28 (1961): 501–507. The AAP policy adopting routine intramuscular vitamin K prophylaxis at birth dates to this statement.
Cornelissen, M., von Kries, R., Loughnan, P., and Schubiger, G. “Prevention of vitamin K deficiency bleeding: efficacy of different multiple oral dose schedules of vitamin K.” European Journal of Pediatrics 156, no. 2 (1997): 126–130. The Dutch, Danish, and Swiss oral protocols are compared in this systematic analysis.
Golding, J., Paterson, M., and Kinlen, L.J. “Factors associated with childhood cancer in a national cohort study.” British Journal of Cancer 62, no. 2 (1990): 304–308. Golding, J., Greenwood, R., Birmingham, K., and Mott, M. “Childhood cancer, intramuscular vitamin K, and pethidine given during labour.” British Medical Journal 305, no. 6849 (1992): 341–346. The original findings.
FDA. “Benzyl alcohol may be toxic to newborns.” FDA Drug Bulletin 12, no. 2 (1982): 10–11. The gasping-syndrome warning restricting benzyl alcohol use in neonates dates to this bulletin.
Unbekoming. “What Is Zeta Potential?” Lies are Unbekoming Substack. The mechanism by which surface-active additives collapse blood-cell surface charge is developed at length in this prior essay.
American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. “Practice Bulletin No. 189: Nausea and Vomiting of Pregnancy,” and associated guidance on prenatal STI screening. ACOG recommends universal prenatal screening for gonorrhea in all pregnant patients under 25 and for older patients with risk factors, at the first prenatal visit and again in the third trimester when indicated.
Recombivax HB (Merck) and Engerix-B (GlaxoSmithKline), pediatric formulation package inserts. Aluminum content per 0.5 mL pediatric dose: 250 micrograms as amorphous aluminum hydroxyphosphate sulfate (Recombivax) or aluminum hydroxide (Engerix-B).
Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. “Hepatitis B virus: a comprehensive strategy for eliminating transmission in the United States through universal childhood vaccination.” MMWR Recommendations and Reports 40, no. RR-13 (November 22, 1991): 1–25.
FDA. “Aluminum in Large and Small Volume Parenterals Used in Total Parenteral Nutrition.” 21 CFR 201.323. The FDA-required labeling states that aluminum accumulates at levels associated with central nervous system and bone toxicity in patients with impaired renal function receiving parenteral aluminum greater than 4 to 5 micrograms per kilogram per day. No corresponding regulatory limit exists for aluminum delivered by injectable vaccines in infants.
Exley, C. “The toxicity of aluminium in humans.” Morphologie 100, no. 329 (2016): 51–55. Exley, C., Siesjö, P., and Eriksson, H. “The immunobiology of aluminium adjuvants: how do they really work?” Trends in Immunology 31, no. 3 (2010): 103–109.
Gherardi, R.K., Eidi, H., Crépeaux, G., Authier, F.J., and Cadusseau, J. “Biopersistence and brain translocation of aluminum adjuvants of vaccines.” Frontiers in Neurology 6 (2015): 4. Gherardi’s macrophagic myofasciitis series traces aluminum from injection site to distant tissue including brain.
National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, Public Law 99-660. Unbekoming. “The Diagnosis That Ends the Investigation” (on the 1986 NCVIA and the Audrey Edmunds case). Lies are Unbekoming Substack.
Tollin, M., Bergsson, G., Kai-Larsen, Y., Lengqvist, J., Sjövall, J., Griffiths, W., Skúladóttir, G.V., Haraldsson, A., Jörnvall, H., Gudmundsson, G.H., and Agerberth, B. “Vernix caseosa as a multi-component defence system based on polypeptides, lipids and their interactions.” Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences 62, no. 19-20 (2005): 2390–2399.
World Health Organization. “WHO Recommendations on Newborn Health.” Geneva: WHO, 2018. Delay of the first bath by at least 24 hours after birth is recommended.
World Health Organization / UNICEF. “The Ten Steps to Successful Breastfeeding.” Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative, revised 2018. Step 6: “Give infants no food or drink other than breast-milk, unless medically indicated.”
Ballard, O., and Morrow, A.L. “Human milk composition: nutrients and bioactive factors.” Pediatric Clinics of North America 60, no. 1 (2013): 49–74. Colostrum composition, secretory IgA concentration, and oligosaccharide profile are cataloged in this review.
Uvnäs-Moberg, K. The Oxytocin Factor: Tapping the Hormone of Calm, Love, and Healing. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2003.
Odent, M. The Scientification of Love. London: Free Association Books, 1999.
Buckley, S.J. Hormonal Physiology of Childbearing: Evidence and Implications for Women, Babies, and Maternity Care. Washington, DC: National Partnership for Women and Families, 2015.
Bramson, L., Lee, J.W., Moore, E., Montgomery, S., Neish, C., Bahjri, K., and Melcher, C.L. “Effect of early skin-to-skin mother-infant contact during the first 3 hours following birth on exclusive breastfeeding during the maternity hospital stay.” Journal of Human Lactation 26, no. 2 (2010): 130–137.
Bell, A.F., Erickson, E.N., and Carter, C.S. “Beyond labor: the role of natural and synthetic oxytocin in the transition to motherhood.” Journal of Midwifery & Women’s Health 59, no. 1 (2014): 35–42.
Dominguez-Bello, M.G., Costello, E.K., Contreras, M., Magris, M., Hidalgo, G., Fierer, N., and Knight, R. “Delivery mode shapes the acquisition and structure of the initial microbiota across multiple body habitats in newborns.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107, no. 26 (2010): 11971–11975.
David Miller is a British sociologist whose research and publications focus on Islamophobia and propaganda. Miller was Professor of Political Sociology at the University of Bristol, where he was dismissed by the university because it was deemed he had not met the standards of behavior expected from staff. The dismissal related to allegations from students that Miller engaged in antisemitism during one of his lectures.
Miller was ultimately cleared of any unlawful behavior. In 2026, the Employment Appeal Tribunal upheld the 2024 Employment Tribunal finding that Miller’s anti-Zionist beliefs constituted a protected philosophical belief under section 10 of the Equality Act 2010.
In this interview Miller discusses his victory over Zionism, Pax Judaica, and Jewish Supremacy. Miller describes how the United States and its powerful armed forces have become a proxy for the Jewish state’s imperial interests.
Iran is closely monitoring the commercial and maritime network supporting US military offensives against the Islamic Republic, with the companies and service providers knowingly involved standing to face various consequences, a report says.
Iran’s Nournews agency carried the report on Monday, citing a military official with knowledge of the matter.
The official said Iran’s Armed Forces were collecting and verifying information on commercial companies, privately owned vessels, and maritime service providers involved in supplying US forces in the region.
The source cited US documents concerning the Military Sealift Command’s use of commercial vessels to transport fuel, ammunition, equipment, food, and other supplies. According to the official, such activities cannot be treated solely as commercial because the logistics chain contributes significantly to the United States military operational capacity.
Iran, the official said, will assess entities according to their actual role rather than their nationality or a vessel’s flag or registration.
“Any company, vessel owner, operator, ship manager, maritime services firm or commercial intermediary” knowingly involved in transporting essential supplies for US military operations against Iran could be identified as a logistical supporter and subjected to “appropriate sanctions as well as economic, legal, and retaliatory countermeasures.”
The official warned that third-country registration, commercial intermediaries, or private-sector designations would not necessarily shield entities from scrutiny. Companies and maritime service providers, the source noted, cannot knowingly participate in military logistics during wartime, while claiming to be merely commercial actors.
Iran has examined the involvement of companies, including Maersk, Schuyler Line Navigation, Crowley Government Services, Overseas Shipholding Group, Seabulk Tankers, and Patriot Contract Services, in connection with contracts, missions or logistical capabilities. It has also collected information on vessels, including SLNC Corsica, SLNC Goodwill, SL Hawaii, SLNC Severn, Liberty Power, TORM Timothy, Overseas Mykonos, Stena Polaris, SLNC Pax, Stena Impeccable, Stena Imperative, TORM Thor, TORM Thunder, and Maersk Peary.
However, the official stressed that being named does not imply equal responsibility. The extent and nature of each entity’s involvement will be determined after Iran completes its documented investigations and cross-checking.
According to the source, the investigation is ongoing and is not limited to the companies and vessels already identified. Any additional entity found to have links to the logistical support of US military operations against Iran will be added to the case file.
The official concluded that “war does not come at a cost only on the battlefield,” warning that those who knowingly provide commercial and logistical infrastructure for military operations against the Islamic Republic should not expect their involvement to remain hidden.
A decades-old regional system built around US military supremacy, support for “Israel”, and the containment of Iran has reached a breaking point following Washington and Tel Aviv’s war on Tehran, political scientist Marc Lynch argued in Foreign Affairs.
In an extensive analysis titled “The End of the American Middle East”, Lynch said the war has exposed fundamental weaknesses in the security architecture Washington constructed after the 1991 Gulf War, particularly its ability to protect allies, impose military outcomes, and guarantee access to strategic waterways.
“The American Middle East is finished,” Lynch wrote, arguing that the regional order prevailing since 1991 has become “one of the many casualties of the US-Israeli war with Iran”.
According to Lynch, Washington spent more than three decades attempting to build a regional bloc centered on protecting “Israel” while containing Iran, Iraq, and later Tehran’s regional allies. President Donald Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran, he argued, was not a break with that strategy but its culmination.
Trump’s administration sought to eliminate the Iranian challenge through overwhelming military force, but the campaign failed to remove the government in Tehran or prevent Iran from retaliating throughout the region.
“The American and Israeli failure to dislodge the regime in Tehran has proved the bankruptcy of decades of sanctions and violence,” Lynch wrote.
Gulf security bargain shaken
At the center of Lynch’s argument is the erosion of confidence among Washington’s Gulf partners.
The US military presence in the region has long been justified by Washington’s ability to deter attacks, defend allied governments, secure energy infrastructure, and ensure navigation through strategic waterways, particularly the Strait of Hormuz.
The war with Iran put those guarantees under unprecedented pressure.
Gulf governments opposed the war and were angered that Washington and “Israel” launched military operations while Oman was mediating negotiations with Tehran, Lynch noted. Those states then found themselves exposed to Iranian retaliation despite having little influence over the decision to begin the confrontation.
US missile defenses intercepted part of Iran’s retaliation, but enough strikes penetrated defensive systems to cause significant damage and disrupt Gulf states’ sense of security.
Iran also demonstrated that it could severely restrict maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, threatening a key artery for global energy exports and the economies of Washington’s Gulf allies.
Lynch argued that the experience raised a fundamental question for regional governments: whether hosting US military infrastructure continues to provide security or increasingly exposes them to wars initiated by Washington.
“What the Gulf took away from all this was that American security guarantees, the heart of the regional bargain, were no longer reliable,” he wrote.
Gaza and Iran deliver ‘death blow’
Lynch identified two developments as particularly damaging to Washington’s position: US support for the Israeli war on Gaza and the subsequent war against Iran.
The devastation of Gaza, he argued, eliminated much of the remaining credibility Washington claimed among Arab populations, while the Iran conflict challenged assumptions about overwhelming US military superiority.
“The dual crisis of Israel’s destruction of Gaza and the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran may seem like just another episode in this cycle,” Lynch wrote. “But in truth, these events together have dealt a death blow to the American Middle East.”
Washington’s attempts to build closer cooperation between Arab governments and “Israel” were already under strain because of Gaza, particularly as successive US administrations pursued normalization without resolving the Palestinian issue.
Lynch argued that US policymakers misjudged the continued importance of Palestine to Arab public opinion and underestimated opposition to normalization. At the same time, unconditional US support enabled “Israel” to act with increasing military freedom across the region, including in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran.
According to Lynch, Washington is consequently confronting a contradiction of its own making: a regional order partly designed to guarantee Israeli security has helped produce an increasingly interventionist “Israel” that US governments struggle to restrain.
Iran adapted to decades of pressure
The strategy of isolating Tehran also produced unintended consequences, according to the analysis.
Cut off from Western military technology and subjected to sanctions, Iran invested heavily in comparatively inexpensive drones, ballistic missiles, and asymmetric warfare capabilities capable of imposing substantial costs on technologically superior adversaries.
Tehran also developed relationships with armed movements across the region, allowing it to expand its influence in environments destabilized by US, Israeli, and regional wars.
Although Iran suffered major damage during the latest fighting, Lynch argued that its leadership survived and demonstrated that the country could withstand direct military confrontation with the United States and “Israel”. It also proved capable of striking US partners and challenging Washington’s ability to guarantee uninterrupted passage through Hormuz.
The outcome, Lynch suggested, weakened decades of arguments that a large-scale attack could decisively eliminate the Iranian threat.
Washington’s ‘Suez moment’
Lynch compared the Iran war to the 1956 Suez Crisis, when Britain, France, and “Israel” attacked Egypt in an unsuccessful effort to regain control over the Suez Canal and weaken Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser.
Although Britain and France maintained significant regional influence for years afterward, Suez came to symbolize the irreversible decline of their imperial dominance. The same process could now be underway for Washington, Lynch argued. “The full effects of the US disaster in Iran will similarly take time to materialize”, he wrote.
American forces, military bases, arms sales, and alliances are unlikely to disappear immediately. Gulf governments could even seek additional US weapons or security guarantees in response to growing uncertainty. But Lynch warned that such developments should not be interpreted as a restoration of the previous system.
Instead, regional states are likely to exercise greater independence, pursuing arrangements with Iran while expanding political and economic relations with China and Russia when doing so serves their interests.
Gulf states could seek accommodation with Tehran
Rather than maintaining the anti-Iran coalition envisioned by Washington, Lynch expects regional alignments to become more fluid.
Gulf states seeking to avoid becoming targets in another confrontation could negotiate bilateral understandings with Tehran rather than depend exclusively on US protection.
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates could also increasingly compete for regional influence, further complicating Washington’s attempts to maintain a unified bloc.
Before the latest war, Lynch noted, Riyadh had already begun strengthening relations with Egypt, Pakistan, Qatar, and Turkey, while Abu Dhabi maintained close ties with “Israel”. Those rival alignments could become increasingly important as US primacy weakens.
The emerging Middle East, in Lynch’s assessment, would therefore be less centered around a single external hegemon and more defined by shifting coalitions, regional competition, and countries pursuing multiple partnerships simultaneously.
Lynch urges shift from domination to diplomacy
The decline of the old order does not necessarily mean the United States will disappear from the region, Lynch argued, but Washington would have to abandon the assumption that regional stability depends on American domination. He called for a policy based on diplomacy and collective defense rather than regime change, military intervention, and permanent containment.
That would include reducing dependence on large Gulf military bases, concentrating on missile defense and intelligence cooperation, securing freedom of navigation, and eventually incorporating Iran into a broader regional security framework. “The United States must pursue stability in the Middle East through diplomacy and collective defense, not militarized containment”, Lynch wrote.
He also called for Washington to place greater pressure on “Israel” over the occupied Palestinian territories and its military interventions in Lebanon and Syria, while reconsidering unconditional support for authoritarian allies throughout the region.
Ultimately, Lynch argued, the Iran war did not itself create the crisis facing US regional leadership. Rather, it revealed the consequences of weaknesses that had accumulated over decades. “Washington struggles to conceive of a Middle East it does not dominate,” he concluded.
The question now, according to Lynch, is whether US policymakers accept that transformation and seek a different relationship with the region or continue attempting to preserve a system whose foundations have already eroded.
If you had trusted the settled science of the day, here is how it would have gone.
1890s: you dose the baby with Bayer’s new cough syrup, the non-addictive alternative to morphine, marketed for children. It was heroin. They named it after the German for heroic.
1900s: you rub calomel teething powder on your infant’s gums. It is a mercury compound, and it leaves a generation with pink disease. Swollen, peeling hands and feet, screaming for months, and some of them died.
1910s: you cook in Crisco, launched by a soap and candle company, because cottonseed oil is modern and lard is what your mother used. The process that made it solid produced trans fat, banned outright a century later.
1920s: you drink Radithor, certified radioactive water, on prescription. Eben Byers took fourteen hundred bottles for his vitality. His jaw was removed in pieces and he was buried in a lead coffin.
1930s: a chemist dissolves a new sulfa drug in diethylene glycol, which is antifreeze. It kills 107 people, mostly children, and only then does America give the FDA power to demand safety testing.
1940s: your doctor lights a Camel in the surgery. More doctors smoke them than any other brand, and the advert runs in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which sold him the page.
1950s: DDT is sprayed over your kitchen, your garden and your children at school. The man who found its insecticidal properties has already been given a Nobel Prize.
1960s: your wife takes thalidomide for morning sickness because it is remarkably safe. More than ten thousand children are born with missing and shortened limbs.
1970s: the country puts down the butter and picks up the margarine, on the instruction of the American Heart Association. The fat everybody switched to was banned in 2015 as unsafe at any level.
1980s: the fat comes out of everything and sugar goes back in to make it edible. Obesity begins a climb it has never come off.
1990s: your father is prescribed OxyContin, because fewer than one per cent get addicted. The company later pleads guilty to criminal misbranding, and the overdose count runs into hundreds of thousands.
2000s: you take Vioxx for your knee. It is pulled in 2004, and the FDA’s own safety officer estimates tens of thousands of excess heart attacks.
Not one of those was fringe. Every one had a professional body, a literature and a man in a white coat standing behind it.
Nobody who followed that advice was stupid. They were obedient, to the most qualified people available.
Settled is a word about money. It means the questions stopped being funded, so they stopped being asked.
So which of today’s instructions will your grandchildren read out in disbelief.
The oil washed in hexane and built into every cell you own. The statin that blocks the pathway making your hormones, to prevent one heart attack per hundred people. The injection where a third of the loss is muscle. The infant formula built out of vegetable oil.
The UK is deliberately escalating the Ukraine conflict and acting as an accomplice to Kiev’s terrorist attacks, Russia’s embassy in London has said, warning that Britain will be held accountable for its actions.
The statement comes after a Sunday Times report claiming that Ukrainian forces have used drones supplied by two British manufacturers for long-range attacks inside Russia over the past six months.
Multiple Ukrainian military sources told the newspaper that British UAVs had been deployed against industrial and military targets, including oil refineries in Volgograd and Yaroslavl.
The Russian Embassy responded on Monday, saying that the report confirms that “London is deliberately opting for an escalation of the Ukraine crisis, while hypocritically professing a desire for peace.”
“In doing so, the United Kingdom is acting as an accomplice and co-perpetrator of the bloody crimes and terrorist attacks committed by Ukrainian neo-Nazis, seeking to contain Russia and inflict maximum damage on it by proxy,” the embassy wrote, warning that “London’s actions will inevitably carry consequences for which it will have to answer.”
“The deeper its involvement in the conflict and the greater its support for Kiev’s terrorist machinery, the higher the price it will pay,” the statement concluded.
Britain has been one of Kiev’s most active military backers since the escalation of the conflict in 2022. In June, London pledged to provide Ukraine with 150,000 drones by the end of the year and has already supplied long-range Storm Shadow cruise missiles, which have also been used for attacks inside Russia. Several Ukraine-linked drone production facilities are also operating on British soil.
Kiev has sharply intensified its long-range attacks in recent months, launching hundreds of UAVs at a time against Russian territory. Moscow says the strikes have increasingly hit energy infrastructure, residential areas and other civilian sites, killing and wounding dozens of civilians, including children.
Russia has responded by stepping up its own missile and drone strikes against Ukraine’s military-industrial facilities, logistics centers and infrastructure supporting its armed forces.
Moscow has repeatedly argued that Western weapons deliveries, intelligence sharing and targeting assistance make NATO countries direct participants in the conflict. Last week, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov warned that Russia would continue to adopt “much harsher methods to destroy everything that enables the West to fuel Kiev’s war machine.”
Russian officials have also warned that Ukraine-linked weapons manufacturing facilities scattered across Europe could be regarded as legitimate military targets.
Israeli American Safra Catz is Oracle’s executive vice chair. She was Oracle CEO from 2014 to 2025, succeeding Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison. Ellison, the largest single donor to Friends of the IDF, and his son David are currently buying up US media on behalf of Israel
Catz was speaking at the 2024 Israeli-American Council (IAC) National Summit. The IAC is a nonprofit organization composed of Israeli Americans. Its slogan is “A strong and resilient bond between Israel and the United States starts with a united, passionate, and engaged community.” It has assets of over $32 million.
The commitment to Israel by Oracle and IAC has not diminished despite numerous reports that Israel is committing mass murder, torture, and genocide against Palestinians.
Forbesreports that Catz’ net worth is $2.9 billion.
She joined Oracle in 1999 and is credited with spearheading Oracle’s aggressive acquisition strategy, helping close more than 130 acquisitions.
Catz, who was born in Israel, earned a law degree at the University of Pennsylvania and worked on Wall Street for 14 years covering the software industry.
Catz and her husband Gal Tirosh gave $250,000 to President Trump’s fundraising committee in June 2020.
In February, Wired Magazinelisted what the family would control if the WBD deal goes through:
CBS and CBS News
Besides its news division, which includes 60 Minutes, CBS is also home to hits like Tracker and Matlock, along with reality stalwarts Survivor and Big Brother.
HBO and HBO Max
Among the most Emmy-winningest networks to exist, HBO’s library includes classics like Game of Thrones, The Wire, and Veep, as well as newer hits like The Pitt, The Gilded Age, and Thrones spin-off A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. (Outside of Canada, HBO Max is also a key distributor of the hockey smut drama Heated Rivalry.)
CNN
While CNN’s ratings dipped last year, it remains a news juggernaut and a top 5 cable network, featuring household names like John King, Kaitlan Collins, and Anderson Cooper (who recently announced he will be leaving 60 Minutes at the end of the current season).
DC Comics
The merger would put Paramount Skydance in control of storied comic book franchises like Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman.
Harry Potter
The wizarding world of Harry Potter, including all eight fantasy films and the upcoming HBO television series slated to premiere in 2027 would also be under the Ellisons’ purview.
TikTok
As of a deal finalized in January, Oracle now holds a 15 percent stake in TikTok’s US operations.
Star Trek
All 13 Star Trek movies and television shows are owned by Paramount Skydance. At a press event last year, Dana Goldberg, cochair of Paramount Pictures and chair of Paramount Television, said the franchise would be a “priority across the company.”
Warner Bros. Studios
Home to blockbusters like Barbie, The Dark Knight, and more recently, One Battle After Another and Sinners.
Comedy Central
South Park announced a five-year, $1.5 billion deal with Paramount last July, just prior to the merger with Skydance. The show has since skewered Donald Trump and those in his administration regularly.
Avatar Studios
In December, Paramount+ announced it would be the exclusive streamer of Avatar Studios content, including animated film The Legend of Aang: The Last Airbender and series Avatar: Seven Havens.
A Bunch of Cable Channels and Networks
The Food Network, HGTV, Discovery, TLC, OWN, Adult Swim, Showtime, TNT, and TBS are all part of WBD.
Other Key Franchises
Other notable titles that are or would be controlled by the Ellisons, pending the WBD takeover, include: The Lord of the Rings franchise, the Mission Impossible franchise, and the distribution rights to Dune: Part Three.
Annapurna Pictures
In addition, Megan Ellison (Larry’s daughter, David’s sister) is the founder of Annapurna.
The very highest levels of the British government secretly exerted pressure on the BBC to censor a film about the army killing an unarmed child in 1972.
Official documents, recently discovered by the Pat Finucane Centre, also show the British Army was aware, shortly after the killing in Derry, that the boy had been killed at “point blank” range by an immensely powerful machine-gun.
However, the Ministry of Defence falsely informed an inquest into his death that he was shot from 25 meters away by a soldier who thought the boy was armed.
The case revolves around the shooting dead of 15-year-old Danny Hegarty during “Operation Motorman” in the early hours of July 31, 1972, as the British Army moved in to clear barricades and retake “no go” areas in the city that had previously been under IRA control.
A BBC Panorama reporter, Alan Hart (now deceased), had filmed people in Derry questioning the British Army’s account of how Hegarty was shot twice in the head and how his cousin accompanying him, Christopher, was wounded (another cousin, Thomas, was unscathed).
Pressure had begun mounting on the BBC after Hart had asked the British Army in Derry for an official response.
Hart had told the army how “everybody that he spoke to emphasised that it was impossible that the lad or his cousin…were carrying arms or explosives.”
He said Hegarty was from a “deeply religious Catholic family [who] have been actively preaching the Fifth Commandment — ‘Thou shalt not kill’ — and their peace overtures were well known.”
Hart’s request was referred to Donald Maitland, press secretary to the then prime minister, Edward Heath.
Maitland responded by telling a Northern Ireland Office (NIO) press spokesman, one R.J.Seaman, to “seek to persuade Panorama not to include this tragic incident in the projected programme.”
The NIO, said Maitland, was responsible for dealing with the BBC request as it was the secretary of state for Northern Ireland, William Whitelaw, who had asked people in Derry to stay at home during “Operation Motorman.”
The Panorama programme went ahead on Aug. 7, 1972, without Hart’s evidence from Derry.
‘Major Effort’
Seaman’s memo of the following day told the Ministry of Defence: “After a major effort, the NIO managed to get the item removed from Monday’s programme.”
The Aug. 8th memo also stated that the Royal Scots soldier (known only by the cypher “Soldier B”) had shot Hegarty with his “General Purpose Machine-Gun” at point-blank range (between “6-9 feet”).
This flatly contradicts statements given by the military authorities in 1973, at the first inquest into Hegarty’s killing, when they claimed (supported by a map of the area) that he had been shot from further away — 25 meters — and from the opposite side of the street.
The 18-year-old soldier who fired the fatal bullets (now deceased) said in evidence to the October 1973 inquest: “I cocked the weapon and when the youths were about 25 metres away I aimed at the leading man and fired a quick burst of 3 x 7.62 rounds.”
The inquest recorded an open verdict but a later, highly critical, report from the Historical Enquiries Team (HET) led to a second inquest in 2011. After a five-day hearing, the jury found:
There were no shouted warnings to the three cousins
The boys were unarmed and posed no risk to the soldiers
The soldiers failed to give medical assistance or conduct a search for alleged weapons.
Further, the HET found that the police had failed to carry out any forensic tests on the oldest boy, Thomas, who survived unscathed.
“Given,” said the HET report, “that the reason advanced for the shooting was that the youths were perceived to be a threat… this seems to have been an extraordinary omission.”
There was no attempt by the police, says the HET report, to interview the soldiers involved.
The police investigation, it said, failed to obtain clothing and forensic swabs from Thomas Hegarty, failed to take samples from the staining on the pavement, failed to recover bullet cases reportedly found at the scene, failed to obtain a timely photographic record and failed to examine the weapon used to shoot Daniel and Christopher.
Taken together, the HET said it showed the authorities unquestioningly accepted the soldier’s accounts.
‘Serious Questions’
In 2007, the British government apologised to the Hegarty family for describing Daniel as a terrorist and a Ministry of Defence document, assessing the Army’s role in Northern Ireland (“Operation Banner), also corrected its claim that the 15-year-old was armed.
Paul O’Connor, of the Pat Finucane Centre, said: “There was complicity between the MoD, police, NIO, Prime Minister’s office and the Attorney General who were all aware of the disputed circumstances of the shooting.
“The BBC itself has serious questions to answer since it self-censored an item that should have rung alarm bells. The admission that the NIO ‘managed to get the item removed’ is clear evidence of a concerted effort to hide the truth.”
Ironically, there was never any question locally of Danny Hegarty being one of the large group of young rioters in Derry at the time.
His father, Alexander, explained to the HET that Daniel had often helped him and the police in informal early morning patrols of the Creggan estate to head off trouble before it erupted.
Further, Alexander Hegarty told the HET that , two years before he was shot, Daniel had assisted police in the recovery of stolen arms.
By killing his son and giving a false account of the circumstances of the shooting, the British Army seems to have alienated the rapidly dwindling number of Derry citizens willing to give them a fair wind.
Anne Cadwallader has been a journalist in Ireland, North and South, for the last 40 years, working for the BBC, RTE, The Irish Press, and Reuters. She was previously an advocacy case worker at the Pat Finucane Centre, a non-party political, anti-sectarian human rights group advocating a non-violent resolution of the conflict in Ireland.
Throughout these various appearances, Hunter Biden has been accurately taking on Benjamin Netanyahu for the genocide in Gaza.
“If it’s anti-semitic to point out that Bibi Netanyahu is evil incarnate, then I don’t know what to say to people anymore,” Hunter Biden correctly said on the Tucker Carlson podcast, adding, “open your eyes. Open your heart for one minute.”
In his interview with Wajahat Ali referring to the genocide in Gaza, Hunter Biden said, “I will call it a genocide. I don’t know any other definition that fits when one group of people, their stated goal is the extermination of another group of people. I think it’s ridiculous that we continue to debate whether or not it’s a genocide. I think Bibi Netanyahu is evil incarnate,” adding that the Gaza genocide is “unforgivable forever and throughout time”.
While these statements are correct, it is hard not to see this as a way to put the entirety of the burden for the genocide on Benjamin Netanyahu, whitewashing the fact that it could not have been carried out without support from Joe Biden.
This is bolstered by the fact that in his interview with Wajahat Ali, Hunter Biden claimed that his father “believes all the things that I just said” and pretended that Joe Biden put pressure on Netanyahu, adding that Joe Biden “did his best to curtail and to curb the most awful instincts of Netanyahu”.
Hunter Biden’s comments in this context seem more to be part of an effort to whitewash the Democratic Party and Joe Biden’s direct complicity in the Gaza genocide.
The reality is, Joe Biden and his administration hold just as much responsibility for the slaughter in Gaza as Benjamin Netanyahu does.
Brown University’s Cost of war project has calculated that during the first year of the genocide in Gaza, the Biden administration spent $17.9 billion in military funding for Israel and another $3.8 billion in the second year, with an additional $9.65 – $12.07 Billion spent on military campaigns to protect Israel, including the Biden administration’s bombing of Ansar Allah in Yemen for it’s blockade on the Red Sea in an attempt to pressure an end to the Genocide.
While financing the military equipment used to carry out the Genocide in Gaza and bombing resistance groups attempting to stop the genocide, the Biden administration never once pressured Israel to accept a ceasefire.
This was outright admitted by multiple U.S. and Israeli officials on Israeli TV on a special aired on Israel’s Channel 13.
The former Israeli ambassador to the U.S., Michael Herzog, in the special admitted, “God did the State of Israel a favor that Biden was the president during this period, because it could have been much worse. We fought for over a year, and the administration never came to us and said, ‘ceasefire now.’ It never did. And that’s not to be taken for granted”.
The former U.S. ambassador to Israel, Thomas Nides, similarly admitted, “At the most significant political peril of Joe Biden’s political career, the easiest thing for Joe Biden would have been, if he was worried about the votes in Michigan, is to basically be a little soft; he refused to do it. There was enormous pressure within the White House on him to change his position. When I hear comments about ‘he wasn’t good enough, or he didn’t have Israel’s back,’ am I disgusted by it? One hundred percent. Is it true? 100 percent no”.
When Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that “soldiers were killed during the war in Gaza from a lack of ammunition due to a partial embargo that was imposed by the Biden administration”, multiple Biden administration officials came out to clarify that they gave unconditional support to Israel’s Holocaust in Gaza.
Amos Hochstein, a top Biden advisor admitted in response, “After more than $20 Billion military support, largest in Israel history, 2 aircraft carriers rushed to the region, deterring a massive regional war, defeating Iran missile/drone attack x2, defending israel at most vulnerable moments, after SAVING countless lives of Israelis – only acceptable response to POTUS Biden and American people is THANK YOU.”
Similarly, the Assistant to the President and National Security Advisor to the Vice President of the United States, Philip H. Gordon, admitted in response, “Hard to overstate the damage to US-Israel relations done by the sense of entitlement and ingratitude reflected in comments like these and Netanyahu’s own recent statements. Baseless misdirection to suggest that Israeli soldiers’ deaths in Gaza were caused by some phantom US ‘embargo’ (when in fact Biden resisted enormous pressure to condition aid, as required by U.S. law, even as Israel rebuffed calls to facilitate more humanitarian assistance and reduce civilian casualties)”.
The reality is that Joe Biden’s backing of the genocide in Gaza is also “unforgivable forever and throughout time” despite his son’s attempts to whitewash these facts.
The makers of our Constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness. … They conferred against the Government the right to be let alone — most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.”
— Justice Louis D. Brandeis (1856-1941)
The rapid spread of public surveillance cameras represents something far more consequential than a new piece of police technology. It represents a fundamental change in the relationship between the individual and the state.
These cameras allow government agents to record, identify, catalog and retroactively track the movements of people who have committed no crime, are suspected of no wrongdoing and have done nothing to invite government scrutiny. That’s not public safety. It’s an assault upon individual privacy.
Privacy is not a privilege granted by government. It is an aspect of personal liberty that government exists to protect. It is a natural human right protected from the government in the Bill of Rights. The fact that a person leaves his home and travels upon a public road does not mean that he has surrendered that right.
There is an enormous moral and constitutional difference between a police officer who happens to observe a person in public and government surveillance that automatically and systematically records that person’s vehicle, location and movements; and stores that information for future use.
A free society doesn’t just protect people from crime; it protects them from arbitrary government. The presumption is liberty. Government is the negation of liberty. A person should not have to establish his innocence before the government leaves him alone. The burden always belongs to the government to justify all intrusions into personal liberty. Police cameras reverse that principle. They collect information about everyone the camera views and leave it to individuals to challenge the collections afterward.
The Constitution requires articulable suspicion connecting the person being surveilled to a legitimate law-enforcement objective to justify public surveillance. A vague assertion that the technology might someday help solve a crime or enhance public safety does not meet that standard.
The view that personal privacy and public safety are in equipoise — that they are merely two competing interests of equal moral and legal weight from which government officials are entitled to choose subjectively their preferred balance — is the core of authoritarianism.
Safety is one of the legitimate purposes for which government exists. Privacy is among the personal liberties that government exists to protect. It cannot be taken away without judicial approval. Government cannot justify violating a natural right merely by asserting that doing so might make people safer. If that were so, there would be no meaningful boundary on any governmental power.
There is a profound difference between investigating a specific crime through constitutionally authorized surveillance and constructing a permanent infrastructure of suspicionless surveillance. The former begins with evidence and seeks information relevant to a particular governmental purpose. The latter begins with everyone and waits for the evidence.
When 7,000 American police departments have these systems with no legislative approvals, we have the police making policy judgments. They are deciding that the government should possess a new capacity to observe innocent people, what information should be collected, how long it should be retained, who should have access to it and what purposes may justify searches; all this irrespective of the Constitution.
Those are not merely administrative questions. They are questions about personal liberty.
If elected legislators believe that such surveillance is necessary, they should publicly debate it, enact specific legislation mandating warrants, establish meaningful limitations and accept responsibility before the voters. The decision should not be buried in a police procurement process or treated as an ordinary equipment purchase.
Liberty cannot depend upon the benevolence, restraint or good intentions of government employees. The premise of the Constitution is that government power must be limited, checked and divided because government officials are human beings who possess power and will inevitably have incentives to abuse it.
The answer is not better government surveillance. The answer is what the Fourth Amendment requires: No government surveillance without search warrants.
The constitutional question cannot be reduced to whether someone was physically standing in a public place. A police officer seeing a car pass by is one thing. A government database capable of reconstructing months of a person’s movements is something fundamentally different.
The difference is the difference between observation and surveillance.
A free people should be profoundly suspicious of any governmental system that makes surveillance the default position. No person should have to fear that every trip down the street is being permanently recorded, whether his movements can later be reconstructed or whether a government official can search his history without individualized suspicion.
The Constitution mandates that government leave people alone unless it has a legitimate, articulable reason to interfere with their liberty. That principle is not an obstacle to public safety. It is one of the defining characteristics of a free society.
Police cameras embody the opposite philosophy: Collect first, investigate later; monitor everyone, suspect someone later; expand governmental capacity and trust officials to exercise restraint afterward. That’s not the philosophy of a constitutional republic. It’s the philosophy of a surveillance state.
The constitutional objection is not that fighting crime is unimportant. It is that government must fight crime chained down by the Constitution, to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson. Safety cannot become the magic word that dissolves every constitutional limitation. Privacy cannot be treated as a luxury available only when government determines that it is convenient. And police departments cannot be permitted to acquire, deploy and normalize technologies that fundamentally alter the balance of power between individuals and the state.
If the police could track all movements, stop anyone on a whim, search and photo as they pleased, would we have less crime? Perhaps. But who would protect us from the criminals in uniform? And who would want to live in such an authoritarian state?
To learn more about Judge Andrew Napolitano, visit https://JudgeNap.com.
COPYRIGHT 2026 ANDREW P. NAPOLITANO
DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM
The Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has denounced the latest claims by Israeli officials over the occupied Golan Heights, emphasizing that the strategic region is an “inseparable” part of Syria.
The ministry, in a statement released on Thursday, vehemently condemned the rhetoric of criminal Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the Golan Heights, occupied by the Tel Aviv regime for almost 60 years, will remain part of Israel “for eternity”, and his fierce opposition to the establishment of a Palestinian state.
“Basically, the leader of the criminal gang and mafia ruling over the occupied Palestinian territories is not in a position to comment on the formation of an independent Palestinian state, because the Palestinian land belongs to the Palestinian people, and the racist illusions of the genocidal Zionist regime cannot change this reality,” the statement added.
It added that “the Golan Heights are an inseparable part of the territory of Syria, and the colonial ambitions of a usurping and occupying entity cannot change its legal and historical realities.”
The Iranian foreign ministry also condemned Colombia’s recent recognition of the Israeli regime’s sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights, calling it a violation of the UN Charter and international law.
“Within this framework, the Colombian government’s recent decision to recognize the sovereignty of the Zionist regime over the occupied Golan Heights is completely rejected and condemned, and constitutes a clear violation of the fundamental principles of the Charter of the United Nations and international law concerning respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of states,” the statement also read.
It noted that such an action also conflicts with the recognized principle of international law prohibiting recognition of the effects of unlawful acts and entails international responsibility of the Colombian government.
While emphasizing the legal, moral and humanitarian obligation of all governments, particularly Muslim countries, to help Palestinians achieve their right to self-determination and freedom from the Zionist regime’s occupation, apartheid and colonialism, the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs recalled the responsibility of the UN Security Council to stop the occupation and relentless aggression of the Zionist regime against occupied Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and other countries in the region.
The statement went on to note that the Palestinian issue remains the most important humanitarian and moral subject of the contemporary world, which began in 1948 with the creation of a fabricated entity in the historic land of Palestine and, through its cancerous expansion, has made the entire West Asia region and the world insecure.
“There is no doubt that the comprehensive support of the United States and certain Western countries, including Britain, France, Germany and Canada, for the genocidal Zionist regime has been the main factor behind its impunity and has led to the continuation and intensification of its expansionism and crimes in the region,” the statement pointed out.
The Islamic Republic of Iran, while reiterating its principled position in support of the legitimate struggle of the Palestinian people to liberate their land from occupation, strongly condemns any attempt to marginalize the Palestinian issue, the Iranian foreign ministry concluded.
Seven US Navy personnel have reportedly been killed and several others wounded in a violent clash aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, as growing unrest among the carrier’s crew has exposed mounting pressure inside the US military amid a prolonged deployment.
The incident erupted after an adviser to US Central Command (CENTCOM) chief Brad Cooper boarded the carrier to address mounting complaints from crew members following protests by their families over the ship’s prolonged deployment, according to Tasnim News Agency, citing an informed military source.
The adviser was reportedly met with boos and had water bottles thrown at him while addressing a gathering of personnel.
The confrontation subsequently escalated into a fight among crew members involving knives and other bladed weapons, leaving seven personnel dead and several others wounded, according to the source.
The atmosphere aboard the carrier remains tense and unsettled, Tasnim reported.
The Abraham Lincoln has been deployed for 263 days and is currently operating in the Indian Ocean, where its primary mission is to enforce an illegal naval blockade against Iran.
The carrier has spent 208 consecutive days at sea, the longest continuous deployment of any US aircraft carrier in the modern era, apart from a brief stop in Oman in July.
The reported violence comes amid growing concerns over the living and working conditions facing the roughly 5,000 sailors and Marines aboard the carrier.
Personnel have reportedly protested inadequate food supplies, with meals reduced to as little as half a cup of rice and two pieces of meat. The carrier’s laundry facilities have also been out of service for two weeks, while mold in shower areas has caused fungal infections among crew members.
Military families have raised concerns about exhaustion, mental health and the impact of the prolonged operational tempo on the crew’s ability to safely perform their duties.
At a meeting in San Diego on Thursday, around 200 relatives confronted acting US Navy Secretary Hung Cao over conditions aboard the carrier and the lack of a clear date for the crew’s return home.
The reported deaths aboard the Abraham Lincoln follow another serious incident involving the USS Gerald R. Ford. On March 12, 2026, a fire broke out in living quarters housing around 600 crew members, leaving 200 personnel injured.
The Gerald R. Ford subsequently took the injured to a naval facility on the Greek island of Crete before being forced to return to the United States.
When the House of Commons was debating how much to increase the time limit for detention without trial the question of torture came up. Officially this was limited to the nice considerations of whether it was all right to send people to places where torture is used and whether Britain can use information collected by the use of torture in other countries. This discussion gave an impression of democratic Britain as the home of civilised behaviour where the very idea of torture is repugnant to our legislators – unlike, say, the US with its secret CIA jails… In reality, the British state has a long history of using and developing a whole range of torture techniques. … continue
This site is provided as a research and reference tool. Although we make every reasonable effort to ensure that the information and data provided at this site are useful, accurate, and current, we cannot guarantee that the information and data provided here will be error-free. By using this site, you assume all responsibility for and risk arising from your use of and reliance upon the contents of this site.
This site and the information available through it do not, and are not intended to constitute legal advice. Should you require legal advice, you should consult your own attorney.
Nothing within this site or linked to by this site constitutes investment advice or medical advice.
Materials accessible from or added to this site by third parties, such as comments posted, are strictly the responsibility of the third party who added such materials or made them accessible and we neither endorse nor undertake to control, monitor, edit or assume responsibility for any such third-party material.
The posting of stories, commentaries, reports, documents and links (embedded or otherwise) on this site does not in any way, shape or form, implied or otherwise, necessarily express or suggest endorsement or support of any of such posted material or parts therein.
The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
Fair Use
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more info go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
DMCA Contact
This is information for anyone that wishes to challenge our “fair use” of copyrighted material.
If you are a legal copyright holder or a designated agent for such and you believe that content residing on or accessible through our website infringes a copyright and falls outside the boundaries of “Fair Use”, please send a notice of infringement by contacting atheonews@gmail.com.
We will respond and take necessary action immediately.
If notice is given of an alleged copyright violation we will act expeditiously to remove or disable access to the material(s) in question.
All 3rd party material posted on this website is copyright the respective owners / authors. Aletho News makes no claim of copyright on such material.
• David Miller CRUSHES Zionists in Court 
Aletho News
Aletho News 