An explosive discussion with ex-CDC scientist Norman Pieniazek
BY MARTIN NEIL, JONATHAN ENGLER, AND JESSICA HOCKETT | OCTOBER 30, 2023
Dr Norman Pieniazek is a molecular biologist, geneticist, epidemiologist with 147 publications in virology and parasitology. Before he retired, he spent 24 years working at the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in the USA. He has also spent time abroad including time working in Spain and Poland.
We met up with Norman for what was planned to be a short meeting to introduce ourselves and informally discuss common interests around covid. However, this turned into a two-hour long, wide-ranging and fascinating discussion that touched on a huge number of topics.
Early on in the meeting Norman made the wise suggestion that we record and share the discussion. So, he hit the record button on Skype and we started again. The video, accessible below, is approximately two hours long. Be aware that, given it wasn’t planned as an ‘interview’ or for broadcast, it is largely unstructured. However, for those short of time here is a synopsis of the discussion with a focus on what Norman said1:
- The bacterial pneumonia hypothesis suggests that early treatment – hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin and antibiotics address bacterial infection. Norman confirmed bacteria are everywhere in our bodies including in the lungs, creating an ever-present potentially hazardous predisposition that, given the right circumstances, might cause a deadly bacterial pneumonia infection.
- Well-understood remedies such as the stockpile of antibiotics, as recommended by Fauci, were cast aside in 2020. Bacterial infection can cause sepsis hence we need antibiotics. A Cytokine storm is caused by bacterial infection in the lungs, filling them with fluid; this lowers the oxygen level in the blood because of poor lung function.
- In-person diagnosis by a physician based on physical symptoms was largely replaced by the PCR test, and with the rise in tele-health visits, social distancing etc physicians stopped using stethoscopes to listen to a patient’s chest. This is an essential diagnostic tool to enable a doctor to audibly tell whether a patient has crossed the line into a bacterial infection which will then require antibiotics.
- Norman knew Donald Henderson who co-authored a classic work on how to best respond to a flu epidemic. Henderson and colleagues did not recommend any of the NPIs that were followed during covid because of the obvious severe health, social and economic costs. (As an aside this work was co-authored by Prof. Thomas Inglesby at John Hopkins who attended Event 201 and, oddly, recommended NPIs be used for covid – the very same ones he had rejected previously).
- Orthodox immunology was ignored – herd immunity is a fiction given there is a ‘soup’ of constantly mutating coronaviruses.
- Why didn’t scientists at the CDC question things early in 2020? Work from home restrictions meant that people at CDC couldn’t communicate and coordinate to overturn the madness being imposed from the ‘sixth floor’ top brass. You could not isolate CDC from the HHS (Health and Human Services) and it was HHS that were calling the shots.
- The Wuhan scientists were on a routine ‘fishing expedition’ for coronaviruses and unusual pneumonias. Why was this work being done in Wuhan? It is easier to do in China because it is legal and because there are lots of hospitals, in a concentrated area, where the population is in relatively poor health. Also, it is easier to get permission to perform a painful bronchial lavage procedure on patients to obtain pathogens in China; this is much harder to do in the USA. This procedure is done in the lower respiratory tract and guarantees higher quality samples than can be obtained using swabs, which really just measure the quality of the air that has entered your upper respiratory tract.
- To determine what pathogen is causing lower respiratory tract symptoms you should not use swabs and PCR. Why not? CDC acknowledges the inability of swabs to collect causative agents as reported by the EPIC study in these 2015 NEJM articles (one done on adults and one on children). Hence a positive result gained from a sample taken from the upper throat or the nose does not mean an infection is caused by the detected pathogen.
- In 2002-2004 SARS-COV was not subject to mass PCR testing, yet SARS-COV-2 was. PCR was used for SARS-COV but only on samples taken using bronchial lavage, but NOT from swab samples taken from the nose or upper throat.2
- Wu et al discovered WH-Human-1 using samples collected by bronchial lavage, and next generation sequencing of the collected genetic samples, and ultimately reported it in GenBank.
- Before reporting on GenBank they published a preprint identifying the genetic sequences3, which was appropriated and found its way into the hands of Corman and Drosten, who then decided to exploit it for personal gain (via commercial PCR testing), fabricating a story about validating it against SARS-1. It was subsequently renamed SARS-COV-2. (For a proposed timeline of events see here).
- Norman thinks SARS-COV-2 is simply a beta coronavirus (a cold), one of the many thousands of cold viruses that had remained undiscovered until 2020, but which have always been ever present in nature.
- SARS-COV-2 cannot be a novel virus created in a lab or by natural zoonotic mutation. It is simply novel to detection4. As soon as the EUA approved PCR tests started to be used the virus was simultaneously discovered in a number of disparate geographical regions. There was no evidence of sudden spread.
- In effect the results of any test are as much determined by the choice of test to apply as by the presence/absence of viruses. Norman says, “you will find whatever you want to find”. Hence people will be symptomless yet will have a lot of, whatever viruses happen to be around in their nose or throat.
- The established taxonomy of viruses is unusable simply because there are so many unknown viruses circulating in the wild.
- The mRNA vaccine technology ended in a ‘garbage heap’, because it is extremely toxic, and was rendered obsolete by protein subunit vaccines by 2019. So, the mRNA vaccines were doomed from the start. Subunit (protein-based) vaccines have been known since the late 1970s, but Moderna, Pfizer and BioNTech needed a way to realise a return on their vast investments in mRNA. Hence the pandemic.
- Novavax is a protein subunit vaccine, based on the spike protein, which was available in August 2020 but did not get approval from the FDA. Although it is protein based it will stay in the deltoid muscle injection site. It was however approved in Canada. It may not be very good for you (and ineffective against coronaviruses), but it is less dangerous than the mRNA vaccines.
- mRNA vaccines were found to be too dangerous for animals. Also, arguments that they are a safe basis for cancer drugs are based on lies. There is a competing technology called humanised monoclonal antibodies that cured President Carter from a melanoma that had migrated to his brain and there are now 500 versions of these drugs currently available.
- Norman was told that the patent on the flu vaccines, grown in eggs, expired in 2020. Hence there was little ROI in continuing with this technology.
- Viruses are in your respiratory tract and antibodies, responding to vaccines, are in your blood. These two things do not match well because the antibodies in the blood do not get into the lungs. The immune system ‘stays away’ from the complex respiratory system that deals with the thousands of pathogens we breathe in with every breath.
- Are serology studies a pointless exercise? Because of wide variation between individual’s antibody measurement only makes sense by studying change in any single individual over time.
- Testing for antibodies means nothing because antibodies in the blood cannot travel to the lungs to react.
- Testing for antigens is a cheaper and less sensitive version of the PCR test with the same limitation.
- Norman is very sceptical of a number of covid virus theories including those by Walter Chesnut and JJCoey’s infectious clone theory, though they weren’t discussed in any great detail and were probably not characterised fully (or maybe even fairly).
- The issue with ‘infectious clones’ is that ‘you do not know what to create’ because there are millions of sequences of coronavirus so there is no ‘clonality’ and each one has 30 thousand nucleotides and there are combinatorically infinite changes you could potentially need to consider when creating a coronavirus5. It therefore isn’t possible to know what to change, via Gain of Function (GoF), to make the virus behave in more dangerous ways.
- As part of the ‘partnership for peace’ programme in 1994 Norman hired two ex-Soviet bioweapons scientists and asked them ‘how come you worked for 20 years and didn’t create any new deadly viruses?’
- They can create thousands of virus combinations, but the problem is how to test these creations. There is no way to test the billions and billions of possible changes to a virus and identify which changes to the sequence are ‘bad’. You need the phenotype, and you cannot deduce the phenotype from the genotype. So how would GoF researchers – E.g., EcoHealth alliance – know exactly what to create?
- The claim that Saddam Hussian had biological weapons was groundless and this was confirmed to Norman by Donald Henderson who was involved at the time and who said it was not possible.
- Thus, GoF claims that changes to spike protein and furin cleavage sites make a virus more deadly are fiction. It isn’t possible and there is no proof they can produce deadly bioweapons. Those advocating this position and making these claims – EcoHealth alliance (Fauci, Baric and Duszak) should get fired by their bosses for producing “not a tiger but a kitty”.
- We discussed Gulf War syndrome. Norman said people imagine anthrax is dangerous, but the ex-Soviet bioweapons researchers said to attack New York with anthrax would need 20,000 Boeing 747s flying over the city, dropping millions of tons of anthrax spores from a low height then people spreading it with shovels. The only way to infect people with anthrax is by direct means via an oxygen line or a direct injection.
- Norman said the Tokyo gas attack was successful in Japan because the terrorist used sarin, a nerve agent. The biological agents used, botulinum and anthrax, fortunately failed.
- Within the CDC Fauci was called the ‘mean midget’ and during the AIDS epidemic he sunk Robert Gallo by inventing the story that Gallo had stolen the HIV virus from Luc Montagnier, thus destroying Gallo’s chances of being awarded the Nobel prize (he was also denied a patent).
- Fauci is “not stupid, he is mean”. Fauci wanted to get a Nobel prize, but he didn’t get a Nobel prize for AIDS, so he wanted it for the Wuhan virus. In January 2023 knowing that he wasn’t going to get the Nobel prize he “pulled the plug” and published this paper saying new types of vaccines are needed for respiratory infections, as an act of spite.
We learned a lot from Norman and are very grateful to him for giving us his valuable time. You will notice that we briefly discussed the vaccines, but you will be very pleased to hear that Norman has agreed to follow up with another meeting in early December to share his thoughts on this important topic (see here for a sneak peek)
You can access Norman’s other material on YouTube and Facebook (much of his material is in Polish and Norman speaks six languages!) His twitter handle is @normanpie.
1 Note that this synopsis is not a verbatim and true transcription of the conversation.
2 This document presents evidence PCR was used to collect samples, but no mass testing was undertaken.
3 Submitted (05-JAN-2020) Department of Zoonoses, National Institute of Communicable Disease Control and Prevention, Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention. The first submission to GenBank had two subsequent revisions.
4 The supposed ‘novel and deadly’ attributes of the virus are discussed extensively here.
5 See this paper. “Mammals are the reservoir hosts of the majority of emerging zoonoses (2, 3, 18). If we assume that all 5,486 described mammalian species (19) harbor an average of 58 viruses in the nine families of interest (as estimated here in P. giganteus) and that these viruses exhibit 100% host specificity, the total richness of mammalian viruses awaiting discovery exceeds ~320,000.”
“Shedding” of Covid mRNA Vaccine Components and Products From The Vaccinated to the Unvaccinated – Part 1
It’s happening. The manufacturers and regulators knew it was a risk, yet, like numerous aspects of the Covid vaccine mRNA technology, did not test for excretion potential of spike proteins or LNP’s.
Pierre Kory’s Medical Musings | November 1, 2023
Awareness of the Federal Regulators and Vaccine Manufacturers
The data showing the toxicity and lethality of the vaccines started within weeks of the roll-out with hundreds of thousands of adverse events and hundreds of deaths reported to VAERS in January of 2021, far exceeding previous stopping points of any new medical product or vaccine.
Although ignored (to this day), anyone paying unbiased attention could see a further mountain of evidence develop, including a skyrocketing number of newspaper and television reports of healthy athletes and young people arresting and dying while doing normal everyday activities or sports (countered by corporate/government controlled media with a plethora of fact checking articles using cherry picked data to inform the world that what they are seeing is not factually true).
Then life insurance industry data emerged showing historically unprecedented rises in death claims being paid out amongst the healthiest sectors of society temporally associated with the proliferation of Covid mRNA vaccine mandates within schools, corporations, universities, health care institutions, federal contractors etc. Most telling of the deathly impact of mandates was the fact that the largest increases among the sudden, rapid rises in excess deaths occurred among employed white collar workers.
The reality is that these data are still ignored by media and public health agencies across the world. Even more worrying are the more recent reports finding universal contamination of every studied vaccine vial with large magnitude, excess levels of DNA fragments and DNA plasmids. Then the discovery that the DNA plasmids used in the manufacturing process contained genetic sequences that both promote DNA integration into the human genome as well as promote the development of cancer.
It truly is unimaginable that we now must consider the risks (and reality) of “shedding” of the vaccine products from the vaccinated to the unvaccinated. This now has implications for nearly every human being walking the earth, vaccinated or unvaccinated (including me).
This series will explore the regulatory, scientific, epidemiological, and clinical data indicating that shedding is occurring. The health of who knows how many is now being threatened, with the extent of the risks likely both highly variable and difficult to predict, both in the short term and long term. That is unless we start to seriously study the phenomenon further. So, let’s review what is known.
Within 3 months of the rollout of the global Covid mRNA vaccination campaign, I was consulted by two different unvaccinated women in their late 30’s and early 40’s respectively, who reported that they were suffering acute menstrual abnormalities in the days following close exposure to a recently vaccinated practitioner (one visited a massage therapist and another an acupuncturist). Both had a history of highly regular, uncomplicated menstrual cycles over decades.
Since that time, at least twenty other unvaccinated and vaccinated people, both men and women, have reported to me compelling histories of typical post-mRNA vaccine adverse effects subsequent to close exposure to vaccinated family members, contacts, or friends.
Further, my partner Scott Marsland at our Leading Edge Clinic, who also specializes in treating Long Covid/Long Vax syndromes, has a growing series of detailed case histories of similar “shedding” events occurring. I will revisit this in a later post in this series, but I will briefly say here that our clinical observations conclude that symptomatic shedding events do occur. However, we have little idea of exactly how common it is occurring among the general population.
This is further complicated by the fact that even if it were occurring frequently, the vast majority of people suddenly developing typical vaccine side effects symptoms after exposure to a vaccinated person would never think to relate it to exposure to shed vaccine products. It is my belief that very few people in the general public are aware of the possibility it could occur. You know, because the regulators have assured the country that mRNA technology is “safe and effective.”
However, my general sense is that it occurs largely in people who have increased physiologic sensitivity to environmental exposures, toxins, or pharmaceuticals and that it is generally transmitted by someone recently vaccinated or someone who is producing a lot of spike protein. Note that is my “general sense.” More studies are required to fully understand both the frequency of and physiologic impacts from such events.
My ignorance as to the frequency of symptomatic shedding events is due to the fact that the concept of transmitting spike proteins (or lipid nanoparticles) from a Covid mRNA vaccinated person to another is one of the least studied and published-on aspect of the mRNA vaccine technology.
What is so shocking about that lack of research (actually nothing is shocking anymore) is that shedding has major global implications. Apparently it is not just me who thinks this because, as an expert on several aspects of Covid, I have been lecturing across the U.S, Europe, and South America in conferences, Parliamentary hearings, or invited lectures. Questions about shedding appear everywhere (in the dozens of Q & A’s that I have participated in, it is nearly always the first question. It is also a very common topic in the chat of our FLCCC weekly webinar.
Know that in this tonight’s FLCCC webinar, I will present a 15-20 minute overview of this series along with my private practice partner Scott Marsland. We expect to be deluged with questions after.
Anyway, I believe that by the end of this series on the science, epidemiology, and clinical observations of shedding, you will be convinced that it can and does occur.
From our Federal government, in this FDA document, the term “shedding” is defined as:
“The release of viral or bacterial gene therapy products from the patient by any or all of the following routes: feces (feces); secretions (urine, saliva, nasopharyngeal fluids, etc.); or through the skin (pustules, lesions, sores).”
They forgot to mention “exhaled breath.” More on that later. The “products” they refer to that can be transmitted from a Covid vaccinated person to another include not only the genetically programmed spike protein product, but also the lipid nanoparticle (LNP) containing the mRNA that is in the injections as well as naked mRNA that can be released from the LNP. Even more worrying is the recent shocking discovery that every single Moderna and Pfizer vaccine vial is contaminated with high levels of DNA plasmids potentially capable of integrating into the human genome. Contemplating that last one is disturbing, the implications of which we will not know for some time.
First off, let’s be clear that the Covid mRNA and DNA vaccines are gene therapy medicinal products (GMTPs or GTP’s) as stated in the FDA’s 2015 document on Gene Product Shedding Studies.
“Gene therapy products are all products that mediate their effects by transcription and/or translation of transferred genetic material and/or by integrating into the host genome and that are administered as nucleic acids, viruses, or genetically engineered microorganisms.
Also note that in this European Medicines Agency (EMA) document, the mRNA vaccines also meet their definition of gene therapy medicinal products (GMTP’s).
Ok, now that we know what a gene therapy product is and that the Covid mRNA injection is actually a form of gene therapy (marketed to the public as a “vaccine”), what does that have to do with “shedding?” Again from the FDA document regarding the evaluation of the safety of gene therapy products, they emphasize the importance of studying shedding:
Shedding is distinct from biodistribution because the latter describes how a product is spread within the patient’s body from the site of administration while the former describes how it is excreted or released from the patient’s body. Shedding raises the possibility of transmission of virus or bacteria based gene therapy products (VBGT) from treated to untreated individuals (e.g., close contacts and health care professionals).
This guidance represents FDA’s current thinking on how and when shedding data should be collected for VBGT and oncolytic products during preclinical and clinical development and how shedding data can be used to assess the potential for transmission to untreated individuals.
So, with these findings in mind, it may be no wonder why the FDA insists on shedding studies:
Further on in the document, the FDA again emphasizes the importance of shedding studies:
Note that the FDA emphasizes the importance of doing human shedding studies and not just relying on animal studies:
To inform the design of human shedding studies, shedding data may be collected in animals following administration of the VBGT or oncolytic product. These data can help estimate the likelihood and potential shedding profile in humans, particularly when there is concern about transmission to untreated individuals. However, such data cannot substitute for human shedding studies for several reasons.
But again, no studies testing whether excretion of mRNA-containing LNPs, modified spike-encoding mRNA, or spike produced by vaccinated people have been done. Well, I shouldn’t say none, because in this paper the author cites a Pfizer document obtained by FOIA which apparently revealed that shedding was studied in the urine and feces of intra-muscular injected rats. Unfortunately, that document is no longer at the website referenced.
To summarize from the above, the FDA’s position is that:
- the mRNA vaccines are gene therapy products
- Gene therapy products require shedding studies in both animals and humans
- Gene therapy product shedding raises the possibility of transmission from treated to untreated individuals
Note that much of the rest of this series of posts on shedding is guided by a masterful comprehensive review of the topic of gene therapy product shedding by independent researcher (by definition) Helene Banoun in Infectious Diseases Research. Hers is one of the only papers I could find that attempted to meticulously explore what is known about shedding of the mRNA gene therapy vaccines.
As already stated, an important point Banoun makes is:
There was no regulation of mRNA clinical trials prior to RNA vaccines, yet there is strict regulation of gene therapy products. It is difficult to justify that mRNA vaccines are not considered in the same way as gene therapies regarding this regulation; indeed the only difference is that they are (historically) supposed to protect against a disease and not cure it. Gene therapies are intended for a small number of people in poor health, whereas vaccines are used on a large scale on healthy people: it would therefore be wise to apply stricter rules to them.
She further points out another omission of the regulatory process:
Any experiment involving the deliberate transfer of a nucleic acid to a human must be preceded by Institutional Biosafety Committee approval (document on the regulatory standards is here), but approval was not given because of the emergency clearance given to mRNA vaccines.
Therefore, according to both the American and European agencies, mRNA vaccines are gene therapy products and should have been subjected to excretion studies of all secreted fluids (urine, exhaled droplets, saliva, sputum, nasopharyngeal fluids, semen, breast milk, feces, and sweat). Again, these studies were not done for mRNA vaccines nor for the DNA adenovirus vaccine (J&J).
So, where are the clinical human shedding studies? Well, I just learned of one that is about to be published (next ten days?) where the research team exposed a population of unvaccinated women to vaccinated individuals and their assessment outcome was the development of menstrual abnormalities. I know the results but want to respect the research teams right to present their original work. They have promised to share their manuscript with me and Paul Marik as soon as the peer-review and acceptance process is complete. I have no idea what journal they submitted to but I can be highly confident it is not the New England Journal of Medicine.
The entire reason why I did a “deep dive” into shedding science is because shedding was not studied when it absolutely should have been and I believe with near certainty that it occurs. Note my use of “near certain” is only to seem objective but it really is too late for that – both my partner Scott and I have diagnosed and successfully treated a number of shedding “victims.”
The lack of shedding studies prior to the mRNA rollout was, in my opinion, an insanely reckless and irresponsible omission (or willfully criminal, take your pick). As an evolving expert in the evaluation and treatment of Covid mRNA vaccine injury syndromes, I and others have identified the spike protein as the main component responsible for not only the pathogenicity of Covid but also of the vaccines, with this review paper proposing a new field named “spikeopathy” (study of the disease processes triggered by the spike protein).
If vaccine transcribed spike protein can be transmitted in sufficient quantity from vaccinated folks to unvaccinated ones, it stands to reason that adverse effects of the vaccine can develop in some unvaccinated people who came into contact (or close proximity) with vaccinated people. How did they get away with not studying this possibility?
An easy answer is they were doing science at “warp speed.” The more uncomfortable answer is that the “vaccines”, although meeting the definition of a gene therapy product, were actually not even legally considered a medical product at all and thus did not require a diverse range of safety studies (like on genotoxicity, reproductive risks, excretion potential etc). What? Why? How?
The reality is that the Covid vaccines, as a result of successive federal legislative actions which evolved over decades, was legally categorized as a “countermeasure” under a “public health emergency.” Such “countermeasures” require no specific regulatory approval process prior to dissemination. All a countermeasure needs is the recommendation of the Secretary of Health and Human Services that “it may be effective.”
This is the conclusion derived from the legal investigatory work of various independent and legal experts and researchers like Catherine Watts, Todd Callender, and Sasha Latypova. If interested in learning more, I would watch this lecture by Sasha Latypova (scroll down the page to find her lecture). As they have uncovered, “countermeasures” (even gene therapy ones) do not legally require studies of excretion potential, bio-distribution, pharmacokinetics, genotoxicity, insertional mutagenesis etc.
They don’t even require FDA regulated clinical trials of efficacy or safety.
So why did Pfizer and Moderna even do the efficacy trials? Latypova maintains that they did this not only to satisfy the public’s confidence to increase vaccine uptake, but also to “fool” the public into thinking these vaccines were medical products subject to standard (albeit accelerated) pharmaceutical product regulatory processes.
This obscured the reality that they were instead classified as military “countermeasures” against a perceived (if not actual) bioweapon. To wit, the COO of Operation Warp Speed was a General from the Department of Defense (DOD) and the vaccine manufacturers were under contract with the DOD to produce the countermeasure, sometimes referred to as a “demonstration (demo)” and/or a “prototype” in numerous legal documents they uncovered.
Anyway, as a result of this lack of a legal requirement to fully study these products in a public health emergency, the list and types of studies that should have been conducted (but were not) is long. Researchers and clinicians have been screaming about this since they were rolled out. These cries were met with a deafening silence by governmental health agencies across the world.
I know, it is a lot to take in.
But the latest “word on the street” is that the finance and insurance industries may finally be waking up to this fraud and its devastating impacts on U.S disability and death rates. Knowledge of these society-wide impacts largely results from the work of two different research teams led by former Blackrock portfolio manager Ed Dowd and insurance industry consultant Josh Stirling).
This article describes the reasons why Pfizer and Moderna stock are crashing of late. Put more succinctly, from what I hear it is due to the hedge fund guys shorting their stock. I believe Pfizer is in even deeper trouble now that this “forensic” paper just got published finding that they hid vaccine trial deaths which obscured a 3.7 fold increased risk of cardiac death in the vaccinated arm of their trial.
“Shedding” Part 1– Shedding of Covid mRNA Vaccine Components and Products From The Vaccinated to the Unvaccinated – Part 1
“Shedding” Part 2 – The Bio-Distribution and Excretion Potential of Covid mRNA Vaccine Products
“Shedding” Part 3 – Can You Absorb Lipid Nanoparticles From Being Exposed To a Vaccinated Person?
“Shedding” Part 4 – Evidence of Placental and Breast Milk Transmission of Covid mRNA Vaccine Components
“Shedding” Part 5 – Evidence of Shedding Causing Illness In Others
“Shedding Part 6– Clinical Case Notes Describing Shedding Phenomena Among Leading Edge Clinic Patients
“Shedding” Part 7 – Shedding Via Sexual Intercourse – Clinical Reports
Ukrainian border guards using drones to catch ‘fleeing’ citizens – UNIAN
RT | October 31, 2023
Ukraine’s border-guard service (DPSU) has released several videos showing surveillance drones helping officers catch people trying to leave the country illegally. National media have described those who’ve been caught as nationals “fleeing” Ukraine, amid an armed-forces mobilization as Kiev’s conflict with Russia continues.
In the first clip published by DPSU on Saturday, a drone operator uses the aircraft’s thermal camera to guide a patrol towards a group of people hiding in bushes. The service claims the technique helped it catch 14 trespassers in four separate interceptions near the village of Okny near the border with Moldova.
The next day the border guards released footage of a short chase, as seen from a drone via a night camera. The DPSU said the four would-be violators in this instance wanted to go to Moldova but were intercepted as they made their attempt.
Another video published by the service on Monday includes drone footage of a car moving down a battered road. Guards then stop the vehicle and apprehend the driver, who the DPSU claimed to be a people-smuggler.
The suspect allegedly used his transport to sneak his clients to a part of the border with Moldova from where they would then cross illegally. Would-be violators in the first two cases reported by the DPSU had also used services of smugglers, who ask as much as $2,000 for help crossing the border, according to the service.
The footage doesn’t go into what motivates people to embark their law-breaking trips. UNIAN, a major Ukrainian news outlet, described the official action as guards “keeping catching nationals fleeing across the border.”
Kiev has banned men who are eligible to serve in the military from leaving the country unless they get a waiver. It’s now reportedly ramping up efforts to draft additional troops, after suffering heavy casualties in attempts to breach Russian defensive lines over the months of the so-called summer counteroffensive.
Ukrainian MP Sergey Rakhmanin, who sits on the parliamentary Committee for Security, Defense, and Intelligence, said in an interview last week that the country had long exhausted the reserve of persons who’d volunteered to go the front.
Moscow has accused Kiev’s Western sponsors of using Ukrainians as “cannon fodder” in a proxy war against Russia. In a speech at a security forum in Beijing on Monday, Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu estimated Ukrainian casualties during the counteroffensive at over 90,000.
Israel targets journalists, kills their families as Big Tech & Biden admin silence Palestinians
BY WYATT REED · THE GRAYZONE · OCTOBER 27, 2023
With Israeli airstrikes on Gaza killing at least twenty Palestinian journalists—and the Biden administration working to muzzle others—Big Tech is quietly coordinating with Tel Aviv to muzzle Palestinian media outfits.
Israeli strikes on the Gaza Strip killed three Palestinian journalists on October 25 in one of the deadliest days for local reporters since the military’s bombing campaign began nearly three weeks before. As the hours passed, footage appeared showing the moment Ramallah-based journalist Mohammed Farra learned that his wife and children were all killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza’s Khan Younes neighborhood.
Similarly heart-rending scenes would play out more than once over the course of the day. Elsewhere in the besieged coastal enclave, an Israeli airstrike killed the wife, son, daughter and infant grandson of Al Jazeera Arabic’s Gaza bureau chief, Wael Dahdouh.
Israel’s attacks on Palestinian journalists came hours after US Secretary of State Antony Blinken assured “American Jewish community leaders” that he urged Qatar’s government “to tone down Al Jazeera’s rhetoric about the war in Gaza” during a recent trip to Doha.
Suspicions that Israeli forces deliberately targeted Dahdouh’s family were quickly bolstered by comments from News 13 journalist Zvi Yehezkeli.
“Generally we know the target,” Yehezkeli told audiences within hours of the strike, adding, “for example, today there was a target: the family of an Al Jazeera reporter.”
“In general, we know,” he concluded.
If true, it wouldn’t be the first time the Dahdouh’s outlet found itself in Israeli crosshairs. In 2021, the Israeli military leveled the Gaza tower that housed the officers of both the Associated Press and Al Jazeera. The following year, Israeli forces assassinated renowned Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu-Akleh, a veteran Jerusalem-based correspondent for Al Jazeera, in a shooting that drew international condemnation but was largely ignored by the US government, which echoes the Israeli government’s position that her killing was “unintentional.” Under Blinken, the State Department has distanced itself from its initial expressions of outrage and no longer calls for either an independent investigation or criminal charges for the perpetrators.
Big Tech censorship targets Palestinian journalists after Israel targets their homes
As the US and Israel rush to censor the voice of Palestinian journalists, Big Tech censorship has proven indispensable to Israel’s propaganda war. In the aftermath of October 7, multiple social media platforms have suspended or deactivated profiles belonging to numerous prominent journalists, human rights advocates, and Palestinian activists. The crackdown follows years of complaints alleging double standards when it comes to anti-Zionist content on social media.
Accounts operated by Eye On Palestine disappeared from Instagram, Facebook, and X on October 25, leaving more than 6 million followers unable to access one of the most popular resources providing firsthand footage of destruction in Gaza. A spokesman for Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, insisted the suspensions were not politically motivated, asserting “We did not disable these accounts because of any content they were sharing.”
Despite Meta’s denial, it is worth recalling the company’s record of complying with Israeli government censorship requests. Following the approval of a so-called “Facebook Bill” aimed at clamping down on digital “incitement” in 2016, fanatical former Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked bragged that Facebook, Twitter and Google were complying with 70 percent of their takedown orders.
Tamer Al Mishal, a Palestinian journalist who has served as a crucial Gaza-based news source for many years, put a face to that statistic. In September, Al Mishal made waves when he published an exposé on Al Jazeera illustrating how Meta coordinated with Israeli intelligence to stifle pro-Palestinian content. When he attempted to access his social media profile days later, the reporter made an alarming discovery: his Facebook page had completely ceased to exist.
He wasn’t the only one. The week before, Meta suspended the Instagram account of Palestinian influencer and photojournalist Motaz Azaiza after he shared footage of the remnants of his apartment building, where 15 of his family members were killed in an Israeli airstrikes.
“Palestinian journalists in Gaza are not just facing the Israeli occupation,” Shadi Abdelrahman, a local reporter with years of experience covering events in Gaza from the ground, explained to The Grayzone. “They also have to overcome a lot of censorship by Facebook, YouTube,” he told The Grayzone, adding: “anything on social media, they need to be very careful because they will get their accounts banned.”
“Working as a journalist in Gaza is not an easy job,” he says, not only “because you are being censored by social media, [but] also it can cause problems with Israeli authorities, especially if you’d like to leave through any crossing which is controlled by Israel.”
If you’re outspoken in your coverage, Abdelrahman says, Israeli authorities “will consider you as an enemy.”
During 2021’s Great March of Return, “those journalists who were attending the weekly marches and covering it were targeted deliberately by Israel.”
“Some of them were shot in the knees, some of them were shot in the legs. Some of them got killed,” Abdelrahman recalled.
On Instagram, meanwhile, users noted an apparent ‘glitch’ temporarily translated the Arabic word for “Palestinian” into “Palestinian terrorist.”
During an October 26 raid in Jenin, the Israeli army destroyed the memorial to Shireen Abu Akleh, the renowned Al Jazeera correspondent it killed there a year before.
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Does Kevin Barrett Seek to “Absolve Islam of a Terrible Crime”?
The Kevin Barrett-Chomsky Dispute in Historical Perspective – Last part of the series titled “9/11 and the Zionist Question”
By Prof. Tony Hall | American Herald Tribune | August 28, 2016
Amidst his litany of condemnations, Jonathan Kay reserves some of his most vicious and vitriolic attacks for Kevin Barrett. For instance Kay harshly criticizes Dr. Barrett’s published E-Mail exchange in 2008 with Prof. Chomsky. In that exchange Barrett castigates Chomsky for not going to the roots of the event that “doubled the military budget overnight, stripped Americans of their liberties and destroyed their Constitution.” The original misrepresentations of 9/11, argues Barrett, led to further “false flag attacks to trigger wars, authoritarianism and genocide.”
In Among The Truthers Kay tries to defend Chomsky against Barrett’s alleged “personal obsession” with “vilifying” the MIT academic. Kay objects particularly to Barrett’s “final salvo” in the published exchange where the Wisconsin public intellectual accuses Prof. Chomsky of having “done more to keep the 9/11 blood libel alive, and cause the murder of more than a million Muslims than any other single person.” … continue
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