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Alberta Bill Would Fine Political Deepfakes $10,000 Without Satire Exemptions

By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | April 7, 2026

Alberta’s government wants the power to fine people $10,000 for creating a political deepfake. The bill makes no distinction between a fake video designed to suppress votes and a satirical meme poking fun at the premier.

Justice Minister Mickey Amery tabled Bill 23, the Justice Statutes Amendment Act, 2026, on March 30.

The legislation would prohibit individuals and entities from creating or distributing deepfakes that are likely to mislead voters about the conduct or statements of a party leader, minister, leadership or nomination contestant, MLA candidate, the chief electoral officer, the election commissioner, Elections Alberta employees or election officers.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

The ban’s reach is notable for what it doesn’t say. There is no carve-out for satire, no exemption for parody, no protection for political memes. A deepfake clearly labelled as humor could still be prosecuted if someone, somewhere, decided it was “likely to mislead voters” about a politician’s statements. Who decides what’s likely to mislead? The election commissioner, the same office empowered by the bill to issue directions to stop the creation, distribution, or publication of content it deems in violation.

Officials said the prohibition would apply at all times, not only during the election cycle. The ban operates year-round, every year, regardless of whether Albertans are anywhere near a ballot box. It applies to content about sitting politicians even when no one is voting.

“We know that deepfake technology is going to continue to improve, and the distinction between what is reality and what is fake is becoming more and more difficult to distinguish,” Amery said.

Alberta’s bill takes a different approach. Rather than relying on existing fraud and election interference laws to prosecute genuine bad actors, it creates a broad new category of banned speech and gives a government appointee the power to enforce it.

“Bill 23 ensures that our elections will remain fair and honest,” Amery said. “This is why Bill 23 will prohibit the creation and distribution of deepfakes that are likely to mislead voters about the statements or conduct of a candidate. Public confidence is essential to a healthy democracy.”

The phrase “likely to mislead” is where the real power sits. A deepfake of a premier singing a ridiculous song, obviously fake to any viewer, could technically be argued to mislead someone about the premier’s “conduct.” A satirical clip of a justice minister saying something absurd could be classified as a misleading depiction of their “statements.” The legislation provides no guidance on how to distinguish a genuine attempt at voter suppression from a political joke that happens to use AI-generated media.

Those who violate the rules face fines of up to $10,000, and entities up to $100,000. Additional fines could be imposed for each day of non-compliance. Those are serious penalties for speech that may well be constitutionally protected under the Canadian Charter. The chilling effect is predictable. An Alberta resident thinking about making a satirical AI video about their MLA now has a strong incentive to not bother. The government doesn’t need to prosecute anyone for the law to work exactly as a speech restriction always works, by making people think twice before they speak.

The bill also happens to be buried inside a much larger piece of legislation that quietly reshapes how Albertans can challenge their own government. Bill 23 would create a 12-month blackout period before and after provincial elections for starting or continuing a citizen initiative petition. It would also repeal deadlines for the government to call a referendum for any future successful policy or constitutional petition. A citizen petition that gathers enough signatures no longer comes with any deadline for the government to actually act on it. A petition delayed long enough is a petition that never matters.

Alberta already has laws against fraud and election interference. The question is whether a province needs a new law that bans a broad category of political expression, with vague definitions and no protections for satire or parody, enforced by fines that would bankrupt most individuals.

Opposition parties have indicated tentative support for the bill, which is unsurprising.

The deepfake provisions will probably pass. They’ll sit on the books alongside the citizen petition restrictions, the removed referendum deadlines, and the expanded government oversight of the signature verification process. Bill 23 gives the Alberta government more tools to control what citizens say about their politicians and fewer obligations to respond when citizens try to hold those politicians accountable.

April 8, 2026 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , | Comments Off on Alberta Bill Would Fine Political Deepfakes $10,000 Without Satire Exemptions

The US-Israeli War on Science is an Assault on our Future

The late Dr. Mortada Sorour (left) and Dr. Hussein Bazzi (right), professors at Lebanese University who were killed by Israel.
International Union of Scientists | April 1, 2026

The International Union of Scientists condemns the American-Israeli killings of scientists and bombing of universities.

On 12 March 2026, the Israeli military killed Dr. Hussein Bazzi, chemistry professor and Dean of the Faculty of Sciences, and Dr. Mortada Srour, Professor of Chemistry and Physics, two scientists at the Lebanese University’s Rafik Hariri Campus in Hadath. This killing of scientists occurred in the context of Israeli bombings and invasion that have displaced around one million Lebanese and killed over 1100, a crisis that has been compared to the Nakba of 1948 and the ongoing Gaza Genocide. Israel has been destroying housing, including the apartments of surgery professor Haytham Kaafarani and chemistry professor Bilal Kaafarani.

On 23 March, US-Israeli forces killed Dr. Saeed Shamghadri, a distinguished professor of engineering at the Iran University of Science and Technology (IUST), along with his two children and others in his building. Since then, the US and Israel have bombed at least 20 of  Iran’s universities, including the IUST in Tehran and the Isfahan University of Technology. This destruction is part of a larger pattern of US-Israeli scholasticide in Iran, including the massacre of more than 170 people, mostly schoolchildren, at an elementary school in Minab, and the targeting of more than 600 schools across Iran. The US military also tested a new weapon on a school in Lamerd, killing 21, mostly children.

Dr. Saeed Shamghadri, professor of engineering, killed in a US-Israeli bombing

Israel and the US have likewise attacked healthcare. Israel has bombed more than 60 healthcare facilities in Lebanon, while the US-Israel coalition has attacked at least 50 hospitals in Iran.

We recognize this violence as a continuation of the scholasticide perpetrated in Gaza, where US-backed Israel destroyed all of Gaza’s universities as part of their genocide. Scientists, universities, schools, and hospitals represent the future that humanity aims to build. By killing scientists, the US and Israel aim to destroy the futures of the people of Lebanon and Iran. Since the start of the Gaza Genocide in 2023, Israel and its backers have dismantled international law and the rules of war established in the era since 1945. These latest attacks confirm that the US and Israel have a vision of lawless destruction and slaughter.

The International Union of Scientists therefore condemns in the strongest possible terms the killing of scientists and the destruction of educational infrastructure by US and Israeli forces. We call upon the international scientific community to document these crimes against scientists and students, extend material support to displaced scholars, and demand accountability for the aggressors.

April 7, 2026 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, War Crimes, Wars for Israel | , , | Comments Off on The US-Israeli War on Science is an Assault on our Future

Germany seeks to restrict stays abroad for men of fighting age – Berliner Zeitung

RT | April 7, 2026

German men who remain abroad for more than three months without prior approval may start facing penalties under a military-related legal requirement, according to the Berliner Zeitung.

The rule obliges men of fighting age, between the ages of 17 and 45, to obtain permission before extended stays abroad. It came into force on January 1, 2026, but April is when the first three-month period expires and enforcement may begin, the outlet has said.

Germany is in the process of a massive military buildup, with plans to spend reportedly more than €500 billion (around $580 billion) on defense by 2029. German officials have set 2029 as the deadline for the armed forces to be “war-ready” for a potential conflict with Russia.

Moscow has repeatedly denied any plans to attack NATO as “nonsense” and ridiculed Western politicians over such claims. In February Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stated that Russia had “no reason” to attack the EU or NATO unless attacked first.

The new requirement, which was introduced under the Military Service Modernization Act and reportedly largely went unnoticed, previously applied only during a “state of tension” or a “state of defense,” defined as situations of heightened external threat or armed attack. Since the amendment took effect, it now applies at all times, including in peacetime. The Defense Ministry said the measure is intended to maintain a reliable registry of individuals eligible for military service.

Several EU states, including Germany, have recently moved to reintroduce conscription. The German government has said the armed forces should grow from around 180,000 active soldiers to more than 260,000 by 2035.

Students staged protests in late March in German cities against Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s plans to expand military service. Demonstrators accused the government of preparing forced mobilization, with some chanting that “Merz should go to the front himself and risk his own life.”

The new rules faced criticism from the MPs in the Bundestag, with the Green Party’s security policy spokeswoman, Sara Nanni, telling Die Welt on Sunday that “citizens have a right to know quickly whether they are required to report, and if so, what their reporting obligations are.”

When addressed about the backlash by Politico on Tuesday, a spokesman for the German Defense Ministry said that it “is currently developing detailed provisions to allow for exemptions from the approval requirement, also with a view to avoiding unnecessary bureaucracy.”

According to the ministry, approvals to leave the country are expected to be issued in all cases as long as military service remains voluntary in Germany.

April 7, 2026 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Militarism, Russophobia | , , , | Comments Off on Germany seeks to restrict stays abroad for men of fighting age – Berliner Zeitung

“Davos Can Really Replace the UN”

Inside the book that maps the architecture behind global governance — from the Epstein files to the Pact for the Future

Lies are Unbekoming | April 1, 2026

On June 13, 2019, the United Nations and the World Economic Forum signed a partnership deal to “accelerate the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.” That same evening, WEF president Börge Brende — Norway’s former Foreign Minister — had dinner with Jeffrey Epstein at Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse. The Epstein files, released January 2026, contain an exchange between the two from the previous year. Epstein to Brende: “Davos can really replace the UN. C21, cyber, crypto . genetics… intl coordination.” Brende back to Epstein: “Exactly — we need a new global architecture. World Economic Forum (Davos) is uniquely positioned — public private.”

The next day, the UN General Assembly adopted the framework for restructuring global governance.

That sequence — the partnership signing, the Epstein dinner, the candid admission about replacing the UN with a public-private architecture, and then the formal adoption — opens Jacob Nordangård’s The Digital World Brain. Pages two and three. Footnoted to the UN resolution number, the Epstein files, and the General Assembly record.

I keep coming back to it because it captures what this book does that almost nothing else in the independent research space manages. I’ve followed Jacob’s work for years now and interviewed him about his research. Each book peels back another layer of the same institutional architecture, and each time I think he’s reached the limit of what can be documented, the next one goes further. Nordangård doesn’t speculate. He doesn’t editorialize much. He lays institutional actions next to each other in chronological order and lets the pattern announce itself.

The Researcher

Nordangård has a PhD in Technology and Social Change from Linköping University. Master’s degrees in geography and in culture and media production. He’s taught at three Swedish universities. His doctoral work traced how institutional networks shape EU biofuels policy — mapping the actors, the funding flows, and the coordination mechanisms that produce outcomes which look spontaneous but aren’t.

He’s been applying that same method to global governance for over a decade now, across five books. Rockefeller: Controlling the Game followed the money behind the climate agenda from the 1950s forward — Rockefeller Foundation grants to climate scientists, Rockefeller Brothers Fund involvement in virtually every major environmental conference and agreement. The Global Coup d’Etat documented the pre-existing plans that the pandemic accelerated. The Digital World Brain, first published in Swedish in 2022 and now out in an expanded English edition, takes the UN Secretary-General’s 2021 report Our Common Agenda and its twelve commitments apart, chapter by chapter, tracing the institutional genealogy behind each one.

The man also fronts a doom metal band called Wardenclyffe whose lyrics are drawn from his research. Make of that what you will.

What the Documents Actually Say

Our Common Agenda proposes twelve commitments. Read casually, they sound like boilerplate — leave no one behind, protect the planet, build trust, upgrade digital cooperation. The kind of language that slides past without friction.

Nordangård slows down and traces where each commitment came from, who drafted it, who funded the drafting, and what it requires in practice. A “new social contract” that ties your individual obligations to planetary boundaries defined by a scientific council you didn’t elect. Digital identity for every person on earth, connected to monitoring infrastructure. A Futures Lab to collect and analyse data on citizens’ attitudes, opinions, and life choices using AI. A Climate Governance Council. A Special Envoy to speak on behalf of future generations — meaning, in practice, an unelected office with a mandate to override present democratic decisions in the name of people who don’t yet exist.

Traced back through the commissions and think tanks that produced them, these twelve commitments form a three-layer governance structure. At the top, an upgraded United Nations with enforcement powers and a standing army. Beneath that, anticipatory governance — mass data collection feeding AI systems that predict behaviour and detect non-compliance. And at the base, multi-stakeholder governance: public-private partnerships implementing decisions at every level of society.

The preparatory work goes back to at least 2015, when the Albright-Gambari Commission — supported by the Stimson Center, a Washington think tank sitting at the intersection of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, and the major philanthropic foundations — recommended a World Conference on Global Institutions to coincide with the UN’s 75th anniversary in 2020.

Two months before that anniversary conference could take shape, COVID-19 shut down the world. The questions that had been prepared for member state discussions — “What are today’s most fundamental global challenges? How is the UN standing up to new challenges?” — suddenly had a very specific answer.

The New Material

This English edition adds two chapters covering events through early 2026, and they’re the reason even readers of the Swedish original need this book.

The Pact for the Future was signed at the UN Summit of the Future in September 2024. Nordangård documents the signing and the opposition — such as it was. Russia objected. But Russia’s complaint wasn’t about individual freedom or democratic accountability. It was about ensuring Russian participation as an equal partner in the new architecture. The BRICS nations voted against Russia’s procedural amendment. They didn’t want to stop the digital governance infrastructure. They just didn’t want to be junior partners in it.

The chapter called “The Great Disruptor” will unsettle people across the political spectrum, which is probably the point. Nordangård maps the network connections between the Trump administration and the very institutions Trump’s supporters believe he opposes. J.D. Vance came up through Peter Thiel’s venture capital world. Thiel sits on the Bilderberg Group’s steering committee — alongside WEF’s Börge Brende. His company Palantir was seed-funded by the CIA’s In-Q-Tel and is a partner of the WEF’s Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. ICE is now using Palantir’s AI surveillance to generate “confidence scores” for tracking immigrants. Elon Musk’s grandfather ran the Canadian branch of Technocracy Inc. Musk himself was named a WEF Young Global Leader in 2008. The book includes an appendix table of Young Global Leaders with ties to the Trump administration. It runs long.

Nordangård isn’t arguing that Trump is a puppet. He’s documenting that the institutional connections run in every direction, and that what looks like opposition may be accelerating the dissolution of the old order in ways that serve the same technocratic endpoint. The evidence is specific enough that readers can evaluate it themselves.

But the most unsettling material in the new edition is a May 2025 white paper from the WEF’s Global Government Technology Centre called The Agentic State. Nordangård catches something in the title that the authors may not have intended to advertise. In psychology, the “agentic state” is Stanley Milgram’s term for the mental condition in which a person stops seeing themselves as responsible for their own actions and becomes an instrument of authority. It’s the mechanism that made ordinary people administer what they believed were lethal electric shocks in Milgram’s obedience experiments.

The white paper’s meaning is the other one — a state governed by AI agents. But the resonance hangs in the air.

The paper proposes that laws can evolve from static rules into “a far more dynamic living system, continuously interpreted, tested, and refined by agents.” Human legislators would set “broad societal goals.” Everything else — specific rules, thresholds, requirements — gets “adjusted dynamically by agents with limited or no human intervention.” Compliance becomes continuous, monitored in real time by AI systems issuing yes/no attestations across health, safety, financial, environmental, and ethics domains. Citizen input comes through “emotion detection in digital interactions” feeding into the system’s self-adjustment loops.

The authors ask what safeguards would be needed if AI agents could “issue fines or trigger legal action in real time.” They don’t answer their own question. They move on.

This isn’t a leaked memo. It’s a public white paper from a WEF-affiliated centre whose founding strategic partners include IBM, Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, and Huawei. Its lead author is the Chief Information Officer of the Estonian government. Nordangård’s contribution is placing it in the context of everything else in the book. After 250 pages of institutional genealogy, the paper reads less like futurism and more like a product specification.

The book runs 283 pages with more than 250 footnotes, a multi-page bibliography, and appendix tables cross-referencing WEF Young Global Leaders to government positions, milestones in the digital ID agenda, and the full timeline of climate governance from a 1971 MIT study through the 2024 Pact for the Future. It’s dense, and it demands an engaged reader. This is a reference work — the kind of book you come back to six months later when something shows up in the news and you want to understand which institutional thread it connects to.

Where It Comes From

The concept of a “World Brain” was articulated by H.G. Wells in 1938. Oliver Reiser, a philosophy professor at the University of Pittsburgh, developed it further through the 1940s and 1970s into a vision he called the “World Sensorium” — all of humanity integrated into a collective technological organism, governed by a World Organisation, guided by what he termed “radio-eugenics.” His book Cosmic Humanism and World Unity was published posthumously by the World Institute, which operated from offices at the United Nations Plaza in New York.

This wasn’t fringe material that got ignored. It ran directly through the Club of Rome, the Club of Budapest, the World Future Society, and into the bodies that drafted Our Common Agenda. Nordangård traces the institutional lineage. That lineage is the book’s spine.

In 1968, Columbia University professor Zbigniew Brzezinski — later US National Security Advisor, co-founder of the Trilateral Commission with David Rockefeller — wrote that new technologies could make possible “extensive population control, including the monitoring of each citizen and maintaining up-to-date files on their health or personal behaviour.” Power, he wrote, would “gravitate into those who control information and can correlate it most rapidly,” encouraging “tendencies during the next several decades toward a technocratic dictatorship, leaving less and less room for political procedures as we now know them.” That was 1968. The technology now exists to do everything Brzezinski described. The institutional architecture to deploy it is what this book documents.

The Proportionality Problem

One detail from the conclusion stays with me. Human-generated CO2 represents roughly 4% of total atmospheric carbon dioxide, which itself makes up 0.04% of the atmosphere. That comes out to about 16 parts per million. To influence a fraction of those 16 parts per million, the plan requires digitising, monitoring, tokenising, and subjecting to real-time compliance enforcement essentially everything — food production, energy, transportation, land use, individual consumption. All overseen by unelected “Planetary Stewards.”

Nordangård asks the obvious questions. How much energy will the Digital World Brain itself consume? Can the stated carbon targets be reached without measures indistinguishable from permanent authoritarian control? The white papers don’t address this.

Read the Documents

The Pact for the Future has been signed. The Global Digital Compact is annexed to it. The WHO Pandemic Agreement was adopted in May 2025. The Agentic State white paper is online for anyone to read. The UN-WEF partnership agreement is a matter of public record. The foundation funding behind the organisations that drafted all of this is disclosed in their own annual reports.

What Nordangård has done across 283 pages and more than 250 footnotes is demonstrate that these are not independent initiatives happening to converge. They are components of an architecture that has been under construction for decades, advanced by identifiable people through documented channels. He’s brought the receipts.

The book ends on a note of conviction — that this system, however carefully engineered, cannot ultimately prevail against what he calls humanity’s “natural intelligence.” Whether or not you share that faith, the institutional map he’s drawn demands a serious response. The documents are real. The signatures are dated. The timelines check out.

Read the book. Then read the documents it cites. Nordangård includes the URLs in his footnotes. You can verify every claim that matters without leaving your desk.

Then decide for yourself what a system designed to monitor every person, predict every behaviour, and enforce compliance in real time through AI agents actually is — regardless of what its architects choose to call it.

Jacob is an independent researcher doing work that no university department and no mainstream publisher would touch. He funds this through book sales and reader support. If what you’ve read here matters to you, buy the book. Give it to someone who’s starting to ask questions. This is the kind of research that deserves to find a wider audience, and that only happens when readers carry it forward.

The Digital World Brain: Our Common Agenda and The Pact for the Future by Jacob Nordangård, PhD. First English edition, 2026. Pharos Media Productions.

Get the book: pharosmedia.se

Follow Jacob’s research: drjacobnordangard.substack.com

April 6, 2026 Posted by | Book Review, Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Comments Off on “Davos Can Really Replace the UN”

Al Mayadeen voices solidarity with Dr. Marandi amid death threats

Al Mayadeen | April 5, 2026

Al Mayadeen Media Network has expressed full and unwavering solidarity with Professor Mohammad Marandi in response to online campaigns openly calling for his assassination.

Professor Mohammad Marandi, a distinguished Iranian academic with global recognition, has been targeted by pro-Israeli accounts on X, including a verified account that posted a $1 million bounty explicitly calling for his assassination.

Despite repeated requests for the post’s removal and the suspension of the account, the platform and its CEO, Elon Musk, have taken no action.

Al Mayadeen characterized the spread of such content on global media platforms as ‘blatant, intelligence-driven terrorism,’ expressing profound outrage and disbelief that US-owned media outlets would permit calls for the extrajudicial killing of academics and scientists.

The network condemned these assassination threats as a manifestation of ‘cowboy-era barbarism,’ underscoring that Professor Marandi wields only his voice and his commitment to independent thought.

Al Mayadeen further highlighted the stark hypocrisy in permitting such threats against a peaceful academic while systematically curtailing the voices of those associated with resistance movements.

Call for global solidarity

Al Mayadeen called on the global academic, scientific, and media communities to publicly support Dr. Marandi and condemn the policies of major digital platforms that tolerate incitement to violence while suppressing legitimate expression.

The network warned that such practices foster a perilous environment in which intimidation and assassination threats can flourish unchecked.

“The threats against Professor Marandi are a stark example of how media platforms enable terror under the guise of free expression, while silencing those who challenge the status quo”, Al Mayadeen stated.

Professor Mohammad Marandi continues to be a leading authority on Iranian and regional affairs, and Al Mayadeen reaffirmed its commitment to safeguarding his right to speak freely, free from threats of violence or state-orchestrated harassment.

April 5, 2026 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , | Comments Off on Al Mayadeen voices solidarity with Dr. Marandi amid death threats

Bahrain faces scrutiny for opposition crackdown after detainee killed

Al Mayadeen | April 3, 2026

A Bahraini man detained during last month’s missile strikes on the kingdom has died in custody under contested circumstances, sparking renewed scrutiny of the country’s security practices amid wartime tensions.

Mohammad al-Mousawi, a Bahraini national who was detained as Bahrain came under attack from Iran, disappeared for several days before his family was contacted and asked to retrieve his body from a military hospital, relatives said. They reported that his body bore multiple injuries, including slash marks, bruising, and wounds on the soles of his feet.

His death has quickly become a flashpoint in the country, with critics accusing authorities of reverting to tactics used to suppress protests during the 2011 uprising.

Bahrain, which hosts the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet, has detained dozens of individuals since the outbreak of the war, including people accused of:

  • filming strikes and demonstrations,
  • expressing support for Iran against US-Israeli aggression
  • alleged espionage.

“They want to make sure nobody challenges the state’s narrative and silence any voices not telling the story of the war how they want it to be told,” said Sayed Ahmed al-Wadaei of the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy, a London-based advocacy group.

Bahraini Interior Ministry dismisses clear evidence

The Interior Ministry claimed al-Mousawi had been arrested on suspicion of spying for Iran, an allegation his family denies. Authorities also dismissed circulating images of his injuries as “inaccurate and misleading,” while insisting that the country is acting to protect national security.

In a statement, the government rejected accusations of sectarian discrimination, saying all actions were carried out in accordance with the law and that independent bodies are responsible for investigating claims of abuse.

Al-Mousawi had previously spent around 11 years in prison as part of a 21-year sentence on charges widely regarded as false, including accusations of arson and alleged membership in a “terrorist cell”. His family and rights groups have clarified that these charges are false and fabricated.

Severe abuse evident on al-Mousawi, Bahrain denies the obvious

A relative and a close family friend said Mohammad al-Mousawi disappeared on March 19 after attending prayers with two companions who also remain missing. Both spoke to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity, citing fears of reprisals. Rights groups have long accused Bahraini authorities of carrying out enforced disappearances.

On March 27, the family said they were called to collect his body. A relative who viewed it at the morgue reported signs of severe abuse, including injuries consistent with whipping using cables, as well as apparent electrocution and cigarette burns.

The Associated Press reviewed images of the body that showed marks consistent with accounts from five witnesses who said they saw it in person, all speaking anonymously. Bahrain’s Interior Ministry said al-Mousawi had been held by the National Security Agency, whose arrest powers were restored in 2017 after being revoked following the 2011 unrest.

The Ministry dismissed the images as “inaccurate and misleading,” while a military hospital attributed the death to a heart attack. His family said he had no known preexisting conditions. Ahmed Banasr of Physicians for Human Rights said the injuries were consistent with blunt force trauma, noting that wounds on the soles of the feet suggested abuse rather than a fall or fight.

Bahrain’s long record of repression, violence seeps into al-Mousawi’s case

Human rights organizations say the detention and death of Mohammad al-Mousawi mark a new phase in Bahrain’s long-running crackdown on opposition, which peaked during the 2011 protests. That year, the ruling Al Khalifa family suppressed mass demonstrations with support from Saudi and Emirati forces.

“It remains to be seen how far the government will go in its crackdown on people,” said exiled Bahraini activist Maryam al-Khawaja, whose father is imprisoned in Bahrain. “What we are witnessing now is certainly far more severe than in recent years,” she added.

Since the start of the war on Iran, at least 41 people, including migrant workers, have been arrested on accusations of publishing images of Iranian strikes. Some face charges of “treason”, which can carry penalties ranging from life imprisonment to the death penalty. In one case, 21-year-old Hussein Futeil and a friend were detained after posting videos of themselves waving a portrait of Iranian leader Sayyed Ali Khamenei during a protest outside the US Embassy.

According to his father, Naji Futeil, the two briefly reappeared after hours of questioning before Hussein later informed his family he faced five charges, including misuse of social media, incitement of hatred, and treason. Rights advocates say the cases reflect a broader effort to silence opposition, with Sayyed Ahmed al-Wadaei stating authorities aim to ensure no one challenges the state’s narrative.

April 3, 2026 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Comments Off on Bahrain faces scrutiny for opposition crackdown after detainee killed

The Most Important Bet You’ve Never Heard Of

Corbett | March 31, 2026 

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Have you heard of the bet between Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon. You know, the bet about whether commodity prices would rise or fall in the 1980s? If you’re like most of the population, you haven’t. That’s because this wasn’t some mere wager about economics, this was a contest between the forces of good and the forces of evil. Spoiler: the forces of good won. And that’s why we’re not taught about this bet in the public indoctrination system. Let’s fix that. Today on The Corbett Report, James fills in the missing pieces about the most important bet you’ve never heard of and what it tells us about the value of human life.

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TRANSCRIPT AND SOURCES

April 2, 2026 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Timeless or most popular, Video | , | Comments Off on The Most Important Bet You’ve Never Heard Of

Iran To Target Military Industrial-Tech Complex That Facilitated Gaza Genocide

The Dissident | March 31, 2026

The Iranian IRCG has put out a statement threatening to target the facilities of companies in the Middle East which are part of America’s war profiteering machine, primarily the tech companies.

In a statement, the IRCG said, “Our repeated warnings about the necessity to stop terrorist operations were ignored, and today, following your terrorist attacks and those of your Israeli allies, several Iranian citizens were martyred” adding, “Since the main element in designing and tracking assassination targets are American ICT and AI companies, in response to these crimes, from now on the main and effective institutions involved in terrorist operations will be our legitimate targets” and “We advise the employees of these institutions to immediately leave their workplaces to preserve their lives. Also, residents of areas around these terrorist companies in all countries of the region, within a one-kilometre radius, should leave their homes and workplaces and seek safe places”.

The list of targeted companies included:

Cisco
HP
Intel
Oracle
Microsoft
Apple
Google
Meta
IBM
Dell
Palantir
Nvidia
J.P. Morgan
Tesla
GE (General Electric)
Spire Solutions
G42
Boeing

All of these companies play an integral role in the U.S./Israeli war machine in the Middle East and have been needed to facilitate not only the war in Iran but the genocide in Gaza.

The United Nations’ Special Rapporteur for Palestine, Francesca Albanese, meticulously documented many of these companies’ crucial role in facilitating the U.S.-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza.

The following is the role each of these companies played in the genocide in Gaza as documented by Albanese.

HP

Albanese documented that, “Hewlett Packard Enterprises (HPE) maintained the database and its Israeli subsidiary is still providing servers. Hewlett Packard (HP) has long enabled the apartheid systems of Israel, supplying technology to the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), the prison service and police.Since the 2015 split of the company into Hewlett Packard Enterprises and HP Inc., opaque business structures have obscured the roles of their seven remaining Israeli subsidiaries”.

Microsoft

Albanese documented that, “Microsoft has been active in Israel since 1991, developing its largest centre outside the United States. Its technologies are embedded in the prison service, police, universities and schools – including in colonies. Microsoft has been integrating its systems and civilian tech across the Israeli military since 2003, while acquiring Israeli cybersecurity and surveillance start-ups.”

She added that Microsoft, “grant Israel virtually government-wide access to their cloud and artificial intelligence technologies, enhancing data processing, decision-making and surveillance and analysis capacities” adding that, “Microsoft, with its Azure platform, and the Project Nimbus consortium stepped in with critical cloud and artificial intelligence infrastructure. Their Israel-located servers ensure data sovereignty and a shield from accountability, under favourable contracts offering minimal restrictions or oversight. In July 2024, an Israeli colonel described cloud tech as a weapon in every sense of the word”

Google

Albanese documented that, “As Israeli apartheid, military and population-control systems generate increasing volumes of data, its reliance on cloud storage and computing has grown. In 2021, Israel awarded Alphabet Inc. (Google) … a $1.2 billion contract (Project Nimbus) largely funded through Ministry of Defense expenditure to provide core tech infrastructure.”

IBM

Albanese documented that, “IBM has operated in Israel since 1972, training military and intelligence personnel – especially from Unit 8200 – for the technology sector and start-up scene. Since 2019, IBM Israel has operated and upgraded the central database of the Population and Immigration Authority, enabling collection, storage and governmental use of biometric data on Palestinians, and supporting the discriminatory permit regime of Israel.”

Palantir

Albanese documented that, “The Israeli military has developed artificial intelligence systems, such as ‘Lavender’, ‘Gospel’ and ‘Where’s Daddy?’ to process data and generate lists of targets, reshaping modern warfare and illustrating the dual-use nature of artificial intelligence. Palantir Technologies Inc., whose tech collaboration with Israel long predates October 2023, expanded its support to the Israeli military post-October 2023. There are reasonable grounds to believe Palantir has provided automatic predictive policing technology, core defence infrastructure for rapid and scaled-up construction and deployment of military software, and its Artificial Intelligence Platform, which allows real-time battlefield data integration for automated decision-making. In January 2024, Palantir announced a new strategic partnership with Israel and held a board meeting in Tel Aviv ‘in solidarity’; in April 2025, Palantir’s Chief Executive Officer responded to accusations that Palantir had killed Palestinians in Gaza by saying, ‘mostly terrorists, that’s true’. Both incidents are indicative of executive-level knowledge and purpose vis-à-vis the unlawful use of force by Israel, and failure to prevent such acts or withdraw involvement.”

The biography “The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State” of Palantir’s co-founder Alex Karp revealed that “The company’s technology was deployed by the Israelis during military operations in Lebanon in 2024 that decimated Hezbollah’s top leadership” as well as “Operation Grim Beeper, in which hundreds of Hezbollah fighters were injured and maimed when their pagers and walkie-talkies exploded” adding that, “Its software was used by the Israeli military in several raids in Gaza”.

Other Companies Role In The Genocide

Other companies on Iran’s target list played an integral war in the Gaza genocide as well.

  • Journalist Alan Macleod reported that , “While Oracle has signed multiple lucrative contracts with the Israeli national security state” its owner, Larry “Ellison himself has personally bankrolled the Israeli Defense Forces, giving tens of millions of dollars to the Friends of the IDF, an organization that purchases equipment for the Israeli military. This included a $16.6 million pledge (the largest single donation the group has received) to build a new training facility for soldiers defending what he called ‘our home.’” He added that, “Oracle sees itself as an activist organization, one whose goal is the advancement of the Israeli colonization project. Safra Catz, the company’s Israeli-American CEO, bluntly explained that any employees uncomfortable with supporting a genocide should simply quit.”
  • Analyst Murad Jandali documented that , “Apple has close relations with ‘Israel’ and supports it on several levels, as Apple has its own research and development institution in the occupied Palestinian territories, specifically in northern Tel Aviv” adding, “It is noteworthy that last October, Google, Apple, and Waze had disabled live traffic updates for the areas of ‘Israel’ and the Gaza Strip at the request of the Israeli army, prior to the start of the military operation in the Strip, according to Bloomberg.”
  • The Netherlands-based financial research group Profundo uncovered that “a small number of investment banks have played a crucial role in helping Israel meet the ‘significant funding needs’ arising from its war on Gaza by providing significant underwriting services to the Israeli state” and that “The research finds that Israel issued sovereign bonds between October 7th, 2023 and January 2025 with a total value of $19.4 billion and reveals the seven banks that underwrote these bonds for the Israeli state” one of which was JP Morgan Chase.
  • Leaked documents from the Zionist Tony Blair Institute included plans to turn Gaza into an “‘Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing Zone’ on the Gaza-Israel border where US electric vehicle companies (like Tesla) would build cars for export to Europe” after the end of the Gaza genocide.
  • In December of last year , “the U.S. government awarded Boeing a contract with a ceiling of $8.58 Billion for what the Pentagon describes as the ‘F-15 Israel Program.’ The contract covers the design, integration, instrumentation, test, production, and delivery of 25 new F-15IA aircraft for the Israeli Air Force, with an option for an additional 25 aircraft.”
  • The BDS movement has noted that “Cisco’s complicity in Israel’s crimes of apartheid and genocide is well documented through its illegal operations in illegal settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), discriminatory policies, long-standing partnership with the Israeli military, and serial acquisitions of Israeli companies complicit in human rights violations. Cisco knowingly provides Israel with technology that is deployed in its grave human rights violations, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.”

The tech companies have also been integral in the U.S. war on Iran. As Responsible Statecraft noted , “the U.S. military has employed Palantir’s Maven, which uses AI to classify targets and recommend weapons systems for strikes. Anthropic’s Claude is embedded in Maven’s system, helping prioritise targets and draft automated legal justifications for each strike.”

Through targeting the U.S. military industrial tech complex, Iran is not only responding against the infrastructure that fuels the Iran war, but the infrastructure fuelling the Israeli genocide in Gaza and repression of Palestinians across Gaza and the West Bank.

March 31, 2026 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Iran To Target Military Industrial-Tech Complex That Facilitated Gaza Genocide

UK’s New Pandemic Plan Would Turn Big Tech Into a Mass Location Tracking Network

By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | March 30, 2026

Britain’s new £1 billion ($1.3m) pandemic strategy treats a future outbreak as a “certainty” and proposes building a contact tracing system that would feed on real-time location data harvested with the help of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies.

The plan, published by the Department of Health and Social Care, also calls for PPE stockpiles, new emergency legislation, and a biosecurity research hub in Essex.

But the centerpiece that deserves the most scrutiny is the contact tracing proposal, which would create a surveillance architecture designed to track the movements of millions of people, ready to switch on at a moment’s notice.

The UKHSA will run the new system, which the strategy document says will use “live location data” and artificial intelligence to provide “a more rapid, large-scale detection and alert system during pandemics.”

The agency plans to “explore options to work with ‘big tech’” to build it, with deployment targeted for 2030. The government is pre-building a location surveillance system in partnership with companies whose entire business model depends on harvesting as much personal data as possible.

The strategy doesn’t name which companies, what data-sharing agreements would look like, or what happens to your location history once the pandemic ends.

The UK government has already tracked its own citizens through their phones without telling them. A 2021 report by the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviors (SPI-B) revealed that government-funded researchers tracked one in ten people in Britain via their mobile phones in February of that year, without the users’ knowledge or permission.

Researchers used cell phone mobility data to select over 4,200 vaccinated individuals, then monitored them through 40 call data records with corresponding location observations. The data was used for behavioral analysis, tracking radius of movement on vaccination day, whether people visited businesses during opening hours, and whether they went straight home afterwards. None of this was made public at the time.

When the tracking came to light, a spokesperson for Big Brother Watch said citizens would be “disturbed to discover they were unwittingly tracked and subjected to behavioral analysis via their phones.”

“No one expects that by going to get a vaccine they will be tracked and monitored by their own Government,” the spokesperson said. “This is deeply chilling and could be extremely damaging to public trust in medical confidentiality. Between looming Covid passports and vaccine phone surveillance, this Government is turning Britain into a Big Brother state under the cover of Covid. This should be a wake up call to us all.”

The government’s defense was that the data was collected at cell tower level, not the individual level, and that it was “GDPR-compliant” data provided by a company that “collected, cleaned, and anonymized” it.

A government spokesperson said “the mobile phone location data used is GDPR-compliant and has been provided from a company that collected, cleaned, and anonymized the data” and that “the data is at cell tower rather than individual level and the researchers were granted access to the dataset under a research contract with ethical approval provided to the researchers from the University of Oxford, working on behalf of SPI-B.”

That defense tells you everything about how the government thinks about location surveillance. It tracked millions of people and called it ethical because a private company “anonymized” the data first. It monitored the movements of vaccinated individuals and called it acceptable because the tracking happened at cell tower resolution rather than GPS precision. The distinction between “cell tower level” and “individual surveillance” is thinner than the government wants you to believe.

Cell tower data can still reveal where you live, where you work, and what you do on a given day, especially when cross-referenced with other datasets. The fact that a private company sat between the government and the raw data doesn’t change what happened: people went to get vaccinated, and their government secretly tracked where they went afterwards.

That history makes the new strategy’s contact tracing plans look less like pandemic preparedness and more like the next step in normalizing population-level location surveillance.

The 2021 tracking was done covertly, without legislation, using data purchased from a private company. The new strategy proposes formalizing this kind of capability, building it into permanent government systems, and enlisting “big tech” to run it at scale. What was done secretly during Covid is now being written into official policy.

During the pandemic, the UK’s first attempt at a centralized contact tracing app collapsed under its own privacy problems. The government’s original NHSX app tried to store user data on a central server, a design so invasive that Apple and Google refused to let it run properly on their operating systems.

March 31, 2026 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Comments Off on UK’s New Pandemic Plan Would Turn Big Tech Into a Mass Location Tracking Network

Can we please stop calling Israel the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’ now?

By Martin Jay | Strategic Culture Foundation | March 30, 2026

The murder of three Lebanese journalists brings the U.S./Israel war with Iran to a new level of depravity and desperation. But journalists are to blame for this.

It’s hard to fathom what is more shocking about the news of three Lebanese journalists being targeted by Israel’s IDF and killed while working: the actual murder of the journalists or the lack of hue and cry by western media who are partisan to both the practice of murdering journalists and to how the stories of them being killed are framed.

Israel for a long time has had an extraordinary hold on western media which largely operates like a PR platform for its objectives. Journalists are not allowed to enter Gaza and so have to resort to the Stockholm Syndrome working relationship with the IDF’s press office which gives them distorted ’facts’ about what’s happening on the ground, omits critical information and in some cases actually feeds them fake news, lock, stock and barrel. We are told journalists cannot enter Gaza for their own safety, which is as preposterous as it is comical, as Israel has an impressive track record by now of targeting and assassinating journalists.

The murder of three Lebanese journalists though has raised the stakes of Israel’s war with Iran and shown us how desperate the government is, as it struggles to cope with the country being slowly reduced to rubble by Iran’s missiles pounding it every day. The war now seems to be less about the scoresheet of who hit what and more about forcing journalists at gunpoint to write up false ’news’ or, in the case of many major western outlets like the BBC, simply not report on Iran’s strikes on the ground. In this environment, of course, public opinion cannot be allowed to go rogue and hold both the U.S. and Israel to account, as what we are seeing on our TV screens is entirely distorted and bears little or no resemblance to reality.

The murder of the three Lebanese journalists will be seen as a great victory by the IDF as it will send a chilling reminder to all journalists in Lebanon that they have to follow the script, or they will be targeted. But it also marks itself as a milestone in war reporting in general, in that now there is no more ambiguity about journalists being seen as legitimate targets on the battlefield, and this will have a knock-on effect around the world as journalists fail to detach themselves sufficiently from armies, governments and regimes, and when they put on a flak jacket marked ’press’ they present themselves as partisan and therefore a regular target just like the soldiers they are with.

Corruption also is at the heart of this sad story. Both Netanyahu and Trump are either being investigated for corruption or will certainly be on a grand scale when they leave office. They simply cannot leave office, and their only way of staying in power is to create mayhem and chaos for media to feast on while the spotlight is turned off them temporarily. New footage has been recently released of Netanyahu being interviewed by police officers who are investigating him on graft allegations surrounding expensive gifts that are given to him by those who seek favours from his office. This is believed to be the tip of the iceberg, though, and when police officers dig deeper they will find larger, more significant examples of corruption. Bibi will certainly serve a prison term if investigators are allowed to work freely and the judiciary system is allowed time to process the case. But in this period of war, it is expected that his case will be stalled. The invasion of Lebanon, which has provoked Hezbollah to hit targets within Israel, served its purpose perfectly to take the state of emergency in Israel to a new level where such proceedings are expected to be left to settle as dust. Trump on the other hand seems to have distracted U.S. media away from reporting on the thousands of pages of details about him having relations with children which, one would have thought, would have affected his support from his own base.

Both men desperately need to control the media narrative, and so murdering journalists and telling other media that those who were killed were working for Hezbollah and using the press as a front is straight out of the Donald Trump Art of the Lie handbook. Trump is telling so many lies at the moment on an hourly basis about what is happening in Iran that journalists cannot complain about being targeted for reporting on facts if the vast majority of them simply replicate everything that comes out of his mouth as fact, more or less. This is where the war is. If we don’t ask difficult questions and report what Trump and Netanyahu are saying or claiming as false, it’s easy to understand just how much power they think they can wield over journalists who largely play along with the false reporting simply due to fear of being targeted. Literally.

The losses, just as one example, of U.S. military hardware is pure fiction. According to Trump, warships are out of action due to poor maintenance and fighter jets just keep falling out of the sky due to friendly fire. It’s a Hollywood movie script which a lot of journalists are helping him to develop each day. But the fact is that there are no U.S. journalists who are reporting the plain facts. The Straits of Hormuz has been taken over by Iran, the U.S. has almost no missiles left, its two aircraft carriers are limping home due to strikes, oil prices have risen which has given both Iran and Russia huge amounts of money to spend on their own wars, and Iran has emerged stronger, richer and a bolder new nuclear power which it wasn’t before. As a cherry on top of that spectacular failure by Trump and Israel, the U.S. has lost both its influence in the region and soon its petrodollars. I once wrote a week before the war that fake news will play a huge role in any war that Israel carries out with Iran and we should expect more journalists to be murdered, especially if the land invasion goes ahead and Trump will have to lie about the numbers of dead American soldiers. What I predict is that a second invasion somewhere will be staged just for the cameras which will be fed to journalists as ’handout’ video while the real battle surges forward with record casualties. Trump’s experience in reality TV and Israel’s already remarkable track record of video manipulation will play an empirical role, with the Lebanese journalists’ murder just encouraging them that anything is possible now with journalists.

March 30, 2026 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, War Crimes, Wars for Israel | , , , | Comments Off on Can we please stop calling Israel the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’ now?

FTC Warns Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, Stripe Over Political Debanking

By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | March 29, 2026

Four companies that collectively control how most Americans buy and sell things received warning letters this week from FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson, threatening enforcement action if they deny customers access to financial services based on political or religious beliefs. The targets are Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, and Stripe.

The letters didn’t name a single specific violation, and they didn’t need to. The track record is already public. PayPal has frozen accounts of several political commentators.

Stripe cut off payment processing for President Trump’s campaign website after January 6, 2021. Both companies have spent years making unilateral decisions about who deserves access to the financial system, hiding behind vague terms of service that give compliance teams almost unlimited discretion.

“Full participation in commerce and public life necessarily requires that law-abiding individuals can access, and freely participate in, our financial system,” Chairman Ferguson wrote.

“It is inconsistent with American values to deny law-abiding individuals the ability to run their legitimate businesses and feed their families because they attracted the ire of rogue American officials, overzealous activists, or, more worryingly, foreign governments seeking to control public discourse,” he continued.

“That is why President Trump’s August 7, 2025, Executive Order on debanking makes clear that it is unacceptable to debank law-abiding citizens due to ‘political affiliations, religious beliefs, or lawful business activities.’”

Ferguson’s letters lean on Section 5 of the FTC Act, which prohibits “unfair or deceptive acts or practices.”

The logic is that if your terms promise equal access and you cut someone off for their politics, that’s deceptive. “As an American citizen, I abhor and condemn any efforts to debank or otherwise deny law-abiding consumers access,” Ferguson wrote, citing Trump’s August 2025 executive order on debanking.

He told Visa and Mastercard they’re responsible not just for their own conduct but for member banks on their networks. “Equally concerning is the conduct of payments providers and payment networks that turn a blind eye when their financial institution members debank consumers for these reasons,” he wrote.

PayPal declined to comment. Visa and Mastercard didn’t respond. Only Stripe pushed back: “At Stripe, we do not restrict access to our services based on political viewpoints or affiliation.”

Ferguson’s letters describe payment services as “essential for Americans’ participation in everyday commerce, and, directly or indirectly, for the exercise of core rights and freedoms.” It treats access to payment infrastructure not as a privilege companies can revoke at will, but as something closer to a necessity.

The real question is whether letters become action. The FTC opened no investigations and announced no penalties.

March 30, 2026 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Comments Off on FTC Warns Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, Stripe Over Political Debanking

Pro-Palestinian French member of European Parliament denied entry to Canada

MEMO | March 29, 2026

Rima Hassan, a French member of the European Parliament of Palestinian origin, said late Saturday she was denied entry to Canada hours before her scheduled flight, Anadolu reports.

“I was prevented from traveling to Canada: a troubling obstruction to parliamentary work and freedom of expression,” Hassan wrote on X.

Hassan is affiliated with France’s left-wing party La France Insoumise (LFI).

The party said Hassan had been invited to speak at two conferences in Montreal and that her initial electronic travel authorization had been approved by Canadian authorities.

However, she was informed by email late Friday, on the eve of her departure, that her application was under review, the party said.

Hassan said Canadian authorities requested extensive personal records just hours before her flight to reassess her travel authorization, describing the move as a “disproportionate request” unrelated to the stated grounds.

According to LFI, the review cited an alleged failure to disclose a prior visa refusal or denial of entry to another country, as well as an alleged failure to report a criminal offense, arrest, formal investigation or conviction.

The party said these issues relate to matters “directly linked to her political engagement in support of the Palestinian people.”

It added that the concerns stem from a 2025 denial of entry to Israel involving an EU delegation that included Hassan, as well as complaints for “apology for terrorism” that did not result in charges.

LFI also claimed that pro-Israel lobbying organizations had been working in recent weeks to prevent Hassan’s visit to Canada.

“The revocation of her travel authorization is part of a concerning trend of restricting the freedom of expression and movement of political representatives, as well as part of a broader pattern of censorship targeting democratic debate,” the party said.

The statement added that representatives of LFI and Canada’s New Democratic Party strongly condemned the decision, calling it “a serious infringement on the exercise of a parliamentary mandate and on freedom of expression.”

March 29, 2026 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , | Comments Off on Pro-Palestinian French member of European Parliament denied entry to Canada

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