Top FDA official admits she refused the Covid-19 vaccine while pregnant
A senior regulator’s admission reveals uncomfortable truths about silence, ethics and trust inside the FDA
By Maryanne Demasi, PhD | May 22, 2025
One of the most powerful figures at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has admitted she refused the Covid-19 mRNA vaccine while pregnant—even as her agency promoted it as “safe and effective” for all pregnant women.
Dr Sara Brenner’s explosive disclosure, made on 15 May 2025 at the MAHA Institute Round Table in Washington DC, is as revealing as it is troubling.
A preventive medicine physician, Brenner has worked at the FDA since 2019. As the FDA’s Principal Deputy Commissioner—and briefly its Acting Commissioner—Brenner was at the centre of decision-making.
Dr Sara Brenner on 15 May 2025 at the MAHA Institute
Prior to that she was Chief Medical Officer for diagnostics and was detailed to the White House to support the Biden administration’s Covid-19 response. She didn’t just participate in the pandemic response, she helped shape it from within.
“Knowing what I knew—not only about nanotechnology, about medicine, about the medical countermeasures—but also having a very strong and firm grounding in bioethics… there were many things that were not right,” she told the audience.
That someone with her seniority and access to internal data privately rejected the vaccine, while her agency promoted it to millions of pregnant women, presents a profound ethical dilemma.
Brenner’s concerns about mRNA safety
Brenner explained that her decision was driven by a lack of safety data, particularly around the biodistribution of the vaccine’s lipid nanoparticles (LNPs)—the tiny fat particles used to deliver the mRNA into cells.
“It was unknown at the time what the biodistribution patterns of those products were… That was my primary concern, and that exposure I was very concerned about,” said Brenner.
She had reason to be cautious.
As a nanomedicine expert who built an MD/PhD program in the field, Brenner had spent years researching the “biodistribution, excretion, metabolism and toxicities associated with engineered nanoparticles.”
“Materials that don’t exist in nature—there’s a lot of unknowns,” said Brenner.
She warned that unintended toxic effects—especially in vulnerable populations like pregnant women—could not be ignored.
“Regardless of the medical product or the intervention, there’s always going to be the need to evaluate both the intended outcomes… and the unintended consequences,” she cautioned.
Warnings ignored
Brenner’s concerns echoed those raised in 2021 by Canadian immunologist Dr Byram Bridle, who first exposed internal documents from Japan’s regulatory agency showing that LNPs didn’t remain at the injection site, but travelled throughout the body and accumulated in organs including the ovaries, liver, spleen and bone marrow.
At the time, Bridle’s warnings were aggressively dismissed. His reputation took a hit, and he faced institutional censure from the University of Guelph, where he was a professor, for speaking out against vaccine mandates.
Dr Byram Bridle, Canadian immunologist. Photo credit: Kenneth Armstrong
Now, Brenner’s comments confirm that these concerns were not only valid—they were quietly shared at the highest levels of the FDA.
During the event, Brenner also revealed that her worries extended to breastfeeding and potential exposure to her child after birth.
A 2022 study published in JAMA Pediatrics detected vaccine-derived mRNA in the breast milk of vaccinated mothers for at least 48 hours—the very scenario Brenner had feared.
Yet the FDA made little effort to publicly investigate or address the findings, dismissing them with the vague reassurance that there was “no evidence of harm.”
No mandate for Brenner?
It’s unclear how Brenner managed to avoid the vaccine mandate that applied to all federal employees at the time. She didn’t say. Perhaps she received a religious or medical exemption—but she left that part out.
What she did reveal was that she had concerns—deep enough not to take the vaccine during her pregnancy. Yet she said nothing publicly, while her agency told millions of other women it was safe.
For many, that silence is hard to accept and it has left many asking why she didn’t warn other women about a product with ‘zero’ clinical safety data in pregnancy.
No one but Brenner knows the full story. But the ethical contradiction is hard to ignore.
Silence inside the castle
Brenner acknowledged the immense pressure inside the FDA to stick to the official narrative.
“They don’t let you get very far out of the castle at FDA with your talking points,” she admitted nervously.
She described the period as a “dark night of the soul” for many civil servants, a time when even “very obvious things” took bravery to say.
She eventually found support through a group called Feds for Medical Freedom—federal workers advocating for informed consent, bodily autonomy, and pushing back against government overreach.
A culture change?
Today, under a new administration, Brenner says the culture inside the FDA is shifting. She praised Commissioner Dr Marty Makary and said transparency is finally becoming a priority.
“We’re moving very quickly to make it such that there will be more transparency… so that people can see and evaluate for themselves what the truths are.”
But Brenner’s remarks won’t undo what has already happened—especially to those who were vaccine injured or whose pregnancies were affected.
What her comments do offer is a rare glimpse into the internal dynamics of a government institution that issued sweeping public assurances while failing to acknowledge its own uncertainty.
“There was no acknowledgement of what was unknown. There were only statements and assertions that were really more like beliefs,” Brenner said of the FDA’s messaging during the pandemic.
That may be her most important admission.
This is more than a story about one woman’s personal decision. It is a story about institutional culture, regulatory failure, and the consequences of silence.
Those who spoke up were punished. Those who stayed silent kept their jobs and reputations. And those who were forced to comply were often left to deal with the collateral damage.
When asked whether she believed she had made the right decision in refusing the Covid-19 vaccine, Brenner replied simply, “I believe so.”
Now that she has spoken, the question remains — who else knew, and said nothing?
The Israel Embassy Shooter Manifesto
By Ken Klippenstein | May 22, 2025
I’ve obtained the alleged manifesto written by Elias Rodriguez, suspect in the killing of two Israeli Embassy staffers in Washington, DC on Wednesday.
I believe the document to be authentic for several reasons, including the fact that it is signed by Rodriguez and timestamped well before he was named by law enforcement or any media. I am publishing it here not to glorify the violence — which I find abhorrent and condemn — but so the public can better understand the truth of what happened.
Refusing to confront the content of these texts often creates an information vacuum that is quickly filled by hoax documents, conspiracy theories, or selective leaks from authorities that can distort the facts. I believe that sunlight is the best disinfectant, especially when politics is involved, as the document makes clear is the case here.
Metropolitan Police Chief Pamela A. Smith identified Rodriguez as a 30-year-old man from Chicago who she said shouted “Free Palestine!” at the scene. The manifesto echoes this message, citing the war in Gaza as its central grievance and framing the killings as an act of political protest.
Below is the document in full.
Explication
May 20, 2025
Halintar is a word that means something like thunder or lightning. In the wake of an act people look for a text to fix its meaning, so here’s an attempt. The atrocities committed by Israelis against Palestine defy description and defy quantification. Instead of reading descriptions mostly we watch them unfold on video, sometimes live. After a few months of rapidly mounting death tolls Israel had obliterated the capacity to even continue counting the dead, which has served its genocide well. At time of writing the Gaza health ministry records 53,000 killed by traumatic force, at least ten thousand lie under rubble, and who knows how many thousands more dead of preventable disease, hunger, with tens of thousands now at risk of imminent famine due to Israeli blockade, all enabled by Western and Arab government complicity. The Gaza information office includes the ten thousand under the rubble with the dead in their own count. In news reports there have been those “ten thousand” under the rubble for months now, despite the continual making of more rubble and repeated bombing of rubble again and again and the bombing of tents amid the rubble. Like the Yemen death toll which had been frozen at some few thousand for years under Saudi-UK-US bombardment before being belatedly revealed to stand at 500k dead, all of these figures are almost surely a criminal undercount. I have no trouble believing the estimates that put the toll at 100,000 or more. More have been murdered since March of this year than in “Protective Edge” and “Cast Lead” put together. What more at this point can one say about the proportion of mangled and burned and exploded human beings whom were children. We who let this happen will never deserve the Palestinians’ forgiveness. They’ve let us know as much.
An armed action is not necessarily a military action. It usually is not. Usually it is theater and spectacle, a quality it shares with many unarmed actions. Nonviolent protest in the opening weeks of the genocide seemed to signal some sort of turning point. Never before had so many tens of thousands joined the Palestinians in the streets across the West. Never before had so many American politicians been forced to concede that, rhetorically at least, the Palestinians were human beings, too. But thus far the rhetoric has not amounted to much. The Israelis themselves boast about their own shock at the free hand the Americans have given them to exterminate the Palestinians. Public opinion has shifted against the genocidal apartheid state, and the American government has simply shrugged, they’ll do without public opinion then, criminalize it where they can, suffocate it with bland reassurances that they’re doing all they can to restrain Israel where it cannot criminalize protest outright. Aaron Bushnell and others sacrificed themselves in the hopes of stopping the massacre and the state works to make us feel their sacrifice was made in vain, that there is no hope in escalating for Gaza and no point in bringing the war home. We can’t let them succeed. Their sacrifices were not made in vain.
The impunity that representatives of our government feel at abetting this slaughter should be revealed as an illusion, then. The impunity we see is the worst for those of us in immediate proximity to the genocidaires. A surgeon who treated victims of the Mayan genocide by the Guatemalan state recounts an instance in which he was operating on a patient who’d been critically injured during a massacre when, suddenly, armed gunmen entered the room and shot the patient to death on his operating table, laughing as they killed him. The physician said the worst part was seeing the killers, well known to him, openly swagger down local streets in the years after.
Elsewhere a man of conscience once attempted to throw Robert McNamara off a Martha’s Vineyard-bound ferry into the sea, incensed at the same impunity and arrogance he saw in that butcher of Vietnam as he sat in the ferry’s lounge laughing with friends. The man took issue with McNamara’s “very posture, telling you, ‘My history is fine, and I can be slumped over a bar like this with my good friend Ralph here and you’ll have to lump it.'” The man did not succeed in heaving McNamara off a catwalk into the water, the former secretary of state managed to cling to the railing and clamber back to his feet, but the assailant explicated the value of the attempt by saying “Well, I got him outside, just the two of us, and suddenly his history wasn’t so fine, was it?”
A word about the morality of armed demonstration. Those of us against the genocide take satisfaction in arguing that the perpetrators and abettors have forfeited their humanity. I sympathize with this viewpoint and understand its value in soothing the psyche which cannot bear to accept the atrocities it witnesses, even mediated through the screen. But inhumanity has long since shown itself to be shockingly common, mundane, prosaically human. A perpetrator may then be a loving parent, a filial child, a generous and charitable friend, an amiable stranger, capable of moral strength at times when it suits him and sometimes even when it does not, and yet be a monster all the same. Humanity doesn’t exempt one from accountability. The action would have been morally justified taken 11 years ago during Protective Edge, around the time I personally became acutely aware of our brutal conduct in Palestine. But I think to most Americans such an action would have been illegible, would seem insane. I am glad that today at least there are many Americans for which the action will be highly legible and, in some funny way, the only sane thing to do.
I love you Mom, Dad, baby sis, the rest of my familia, including you, O*****
Free Palestine
– Elias Rodriguez
European Commission Accused of Orchestrating $735M Speech-Control Campaign
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | May 21, 2025
A new report has uncovered an expansive and quietly orchestrated campaign by the European Commission to shape public discourse through nearly €649 ($735M) million in taxpayer-funded projects aimed at regulating online speech.
Titled Manufacturing Misinformation: The EU-Funded Propaganda War Against Free Speech, the document was released by the think tank MCC Brussels and authored by Dr. Norman Lewis, a seasoned analyst of digital communication and regulatory policy.
Behind the EU’s frequent calls to combat “hate speech” and “disinformation” lies what the report describes as a vast ideological infrastructure designed to erode free expression under the guise of safety and civic empowerment.
The Commission, the report states, “has funded hundreds of unaccountable non-governmental organizations and universities to carry out 349 projects related to countering ‘hate speech’ and ‘disinformation’ to the tune of almost €650 million.”
That staggering figure surpasses what Brussels spends on transnational cancer research by over 30%, a discrepancy the report calls deliberate: “The EU Commission regards stemming the cancer of free speech as more of a priority than the estimated 4.5 million new cancer cases and almost two million cancer deaths in Europe in 2022, for example.”
While EU officials present these programs as public-interest research, the report argues they constitute a form of “soft authoritarianism,” enshrining speech codes and narrowing acceptable opinion through bureaucratic manipulation. “This is a top-down, authoritarian, curated consensus,” it states, “where expression is free only when it speaks the language of compliance established by the Commission.”
Many of these initiatives feature a distinct use of vague and euphemistic terminology, part of what the report calls “NEUspeak;” a deliberate linguistic strategy designed to obscure intent and preempt scrutiny. The project acronyms alone, such as FAST LISA and VIGILANT, are described as a form of branding deceit.
As Dr. Lewis writes: “These chirpy acronyms don’t just sound like digital voice assistants or wellness apps…they are deliberate, dishonest strategic terms chosen to disguise a real authoritarian purpose.”
Some of the projects don’t only aim to influence the debate, they aim to automate it. AI-powered initiatives are being trained to identify and suppress politically undesirable speech in real-time.
One such project, VIGILANT, is described by its designers as ethical and user-centric, but MCC Brussels challenges this narrative. “VIGILANT is an AI surveillance suite aimed at monitoring, classifying, and profiling speech, users, and networks, which takes the complexity out of controlling freedom of expression.”
The report highlights that the EU’s censorship framework is not only technical, it is pedagogical.
Programs targeting young people are presented as civic education but function more like behavioral grooming. “The ‘capacity building’ is, in fact, the indoctrination of young people to behave and act as speech police,” the report explains. “What appears to be bottom-up reform is, in fact, a pre-scripted system of narrative compliance.”
Another cornerstone of the report is its critique of how taxpayer money is being funneled into what it calls pre-validated “research” meant to affirm political orthodoxy rather than challenge it.
“Research that systematically ‘proves’ this assumption is not research; it is the manufacturing of propaganda used to legitimize the narrative, pre-empt criticism, and thus delegitimize any ideas or narratives that do not conform.”
Far from defending democracy, MCC Brussels contends that the European Commission is subverting it.
“Language is the EU Ministry for Narrative Control’s software infrastructure of control,” the report warns. “When the EU Commission defines hate speech, disinformation or extremism, it is not identifying problems – it is drawing the lines around what can be said, by whom, and with what consequences.”
For Dr. Lewis and MCC Brussels, the takeaway is clear: this is not about protecting society from dangerous ideas, but about insulating a ruling ideology from democratic challenge.
“The Commission rebrands inquiry as a confirmation ritual rather than any honest pursuit of truth,” the report concludes. “A society that redefines surveillance as ‘safety’ or censorship as ‘content moderation’ does not need to silence citizens outright; it simply changes the meaning of their silence.”
Ex-Adviser to Yanukovych Shot Dead in Madrid Suburbs
Sputnik – 21.05.2025
Spanish police confirmed to RIA Novosti that Andriy Portnov, ex-adviser to former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, was shot dead on Wednesday morning outside a school in the city of Pozuelo de Alarcon near Madrid.
“We did receive a report about his death. We have no information about the perpetrators yet,” the police said.
Earlier in the day, the Cadena Ser radio station reported, citing police and emergency services, that Portnov was shot dead at the entrance to a school in Pozuelo de Alarcon.
Portnov was included in the Ukrainian database Myrotvorets (Peacemaker) as a “traitor to the motherland” in April 2015, according to the information on the Peacemaker website. He is accused of allegedly calling for murdering Ukrainian citizens and encroaching on the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine.
The Ukrainian website Peacemaker is known for its scandalous posts, in which it reveals personal data of journalists and other citizens, labeling them “traitors to their homelands.”
Later in the day, Russian Foreign Ministry Ambassador-at-Large on the Kiev Regime’s War Crimes Rodion Miroshnik assumed that Portnov could have some information that was dangerous for Volodymyr Zelensky or someone from his entourage.
“Portnov was an influential official in the Yanukovych era. He could well have had information from the ‘forgotten past’ that could ruin the ‘impeccable reputation’ of certain individuals in the current government. Or he could have had other information that was dangerous for someone from Zelenskyy’s circle or for himself,” Miroshnik said on Telegram.
The assassination looks very much like an “extrajudicial execution,” he added.
“It is hard to believe in the random nature of a murder with a control shot to the head, as well as the lack of connection with the Zelensky regime,” Miroshnik added.
Meanwhile, Spanish newspaper 20minutos reported that Spanish investigators did not rule out a connection between Portnov’s murder and the conflict in Ukraine. There is, however, another line of enquiry, which links the murder to organized crime, the report said.
‘EU sanctions against me a signal to all Europeans’ – German journalist
RT | May 20, 2025
The European Union’s decision to sanction two German nationals could set a dangerous precedent, where Brussels could severely limit the rights of any critic, journalist and blogger Thomas Roeper told RT.
Roeper, who has also collaborated with RT’s German-speaking service, has been accused by the bloc of “destabilizing activities” and slapped with an EU entry ban, as well as an asset freeze.
The European Council, comprising the leaders of EU member states, approved the bloc’s 17th round of sanctions against Russia on Tuesday.
Roeper and German blogger Alina Lipp, both of whom currently reside in Russia, are among the individuals the bloc has targeted for being “involved in activities aimed at undermining the democratic political process in… Germany.”
Speaking to RT later on Tuesday, Roeper said the EU had introduced personal sanctions against him because he has large audiences in Germany.
Brussels’ latest decision to sanction EU nationals should be of great concern to all German citizens, the blogger believes. He noted that the punitive measure against him was adopted despite there being “no court [decision], nobody said which law I have violated.”
“Without any court decision, some bureaucracy decided to freeze my money, to forbid working,” he told RT.
According to the author, the move “is a signal for all people in the European Union, because if they do it to us, and this goes through, tomorrow they will start doing the same… against any critics.”
He described the EU’s allegations against him as ludicrous. “I’m just a blogger sitting here in my kitchen and writing articles and I’m ‘destabilizing’ the EU which has a billion-euro budget for media work,” he quipped.
But what’s “not funny,” he noted, is that while he lives in Russia, people in Germany would have a hard time meeting their basic needs if their rights were curbed in a similar manner.
The EU’s latest round of sanctions primarily targeted Russia’s so-called ‘shadow fleet’ of oil tankers, which operate outside Western insurance systems. According to Brussels, Moscow has allegedly been using it to circumvent G7-led efforts to enforce a price cap on its crude oil exports.
Israel Continues to Destroy Water Sources: Civilians Targeted While Digging Well in North Gaza
Palestinian Centre for Human Rights | May 19, 2025
The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) condemns in the strongest terms the killing of a group of Palestinian volunteers and activists by the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) on Sunday, 18 May 2025, in al-Saftawi area in northern Gaza Strip, while they were digging a water well to serve the residents amid the inability of Gaza’s municipalities and local bodies to supply them with water.
Footages capturing the incident revealed the IOF’s horrific crime, as they directly and unjustifiably targeted civilians in blatant disregard for the principle of distinction, which ensures protection of civilians and their property. This crime reflects the IOF’s deliberate destruction of water sources, with the aim of turning Gaza into an unlivable zone and forcibly displacing northern Gaza Strip’s residents.
According to our staff’s monitoring, at approximately 18:15 on Sunday, Israeli warplanes fired at least one missile at a group of activists, who were digging a water well near al-Waleed Petrol Station in a-Saftawi area, north of the Gaza Strip. As a result, seven people were killed, and they were identified as: ‘Awni Mohammed ‘Awni Abu al-Nour (18), Ibrahim Mohammed Isma’il Khela (27), Isma’il Mohammed Isma’il Khela (29), Anas Ramadan ‘Abed al-Razeq Shanan (29), Fawzi Nafiz Mohammed al-Dadad (36), Hasan Mohammed Abu Warda (30), and Tareq Ziyad Mohammed Tanboura (24). Additionally, 5 others sustained various injuries. It is worth noting that the targeted activists were digging the well due to water scarcity in the area and the inability of Gaza’s municipality to pump water into residents’ houses.
This crime was not a separate incident but came as part of a vicious campaign to kill civilians without deterrence and destroy Gaza’s roads, water and health infrastructure over the past 19 months. The Israeli war machine has destroyed more than 330,000 linear meters of water networks and 655,000 linear meters of sewage networks, in addition to approximately 2,850,000 linear meters of roads and streets. Furthermore, 719 water wells have been targeted,1 and complete or partial damage was inflicted on 89% of the water and sanitation sector’s assets. This has resulted in water insecurity for more than 91% of the Gaza population, with 65% of them receiving less than six liters per person per day,2 constituting a deliberate violation of the right to life and human dignity.
According to UN reports, the destruction of Gaza’s water facilities has reached catastrophic and unprecedented levels, as 71% of municipal seawater desalination plants have been destroyed (100% in northern Gaza and Gaza City), along with 69% of water production wells (up to 88% in some areas), and 66% of water tanks. Additionally, the main seawater desalination plant in northern Gaza, which produced 10,000 cubic meters per day,3 was destroyed. Oxfam reported that due to this destruction and fuel shortages, water production has decreased by 84%, worsening the population’s suffering and deepening the crisis of access to safe drinking and domestic water amid the near collapse of the infrastructure.4
PCHR affirms that in this compound crime, the IOF killed innocent civilians struggling to secure their right to water, amid an IOF’s deliberate strategy that violates all international laws and conventions by depriving the Gaza Strip’s population of water and food sources. This materialized through systematic starvation and dehydration, using them as weapons of war aimed at subjugation and displacement of residents, thereby imposing harsh living conditions that align with the elements of genocide, as outlined in Article II of the 1948 Genocide Convention. The intent of this strategy is to deliberately inflict conditions of life on Gaza Strip residents calculated to bring about their physical destruction in whole or in part. The seriousness of these actions lies not only in their transformation of water resources into tools of oppression but also in reflecting a form of ecocide,5 which severely undermines Palestinians’ rights to life, food, land, and dignity, as stipulated in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
In light of the above, PCHR stresses the urgent need for the international community to condemn these crimes and immediately halt them. PCHR also calls on the member states of the Security Council to awaken their collective conscience and work on issuing a binding and immediate resolution to stop the war, ensure the protection of civilians in the Gaza Strip, and enhance their access to water and essential food supplies by activating Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter against Israel. PCHR also calls on the High Contracting Parties to the four Geneva Conventions to pressure and obligate Israel to open safe humanitarian corridors for the delivery of water, fuel, and aid relief, and to allocate urgent resources to repair the damaged water and sewage networks, ensuring the restoration of the bare necessities of life for Gaza’s population.
- Gaza’s Government Media Office, Press Release No. (817), an update of the most important statistics of the genocide war on Gaza. ↩︎
- Report: Humanitarian response by the UN and humanitarian partners during phase one of the ceasefire. link: https://www.un.org/unispal/document/report-humanitarian-response-by-the-un-and-humanitarian-partners-during-phase-one-of-the-ceasefire/ ↩︎
- “Gaza Strip: WASH Infrastructure Damage Assessment”, Analysis of data presented in WASH Cluster Meeting note (12 June 2024) based on finding of UNOSAT (3 June 2024). ↩︎
- Oxfam, Report: How Israel has weaponized water in its military campaign in Gaza, June 2024, link: https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10546/621609/bp-water-war-crimes-180724-en.pdf;jsessionid=70739990D729E028EB247E737686F0FD?sequence=1 ↩︎
- [1] Laurent Lambert, “Ecocide as Genocide: A Human Security Approach to ‘Utter Annihilation’ in Gaza”, October 06, 2024 Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies:
chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.dohainstitute.org/en/Lists/ACRPS-PDFDocumentLibrary/ecocide-as-genocide-a-human-security-approach-to-utter-annihilation-in-gaza.pdf ↩︎
Montana Becomes First State to Ban Warrantless Data Purchases by Law Enforcement
By Ken Macon | Reclaim The Net | May 18, 2025
Montana has taken a decisive leap where others have faltered, becoming the first state in the US to officially outlaw a widespread government surveillance tactic: buying up private data without a warrant.
With the passage of Senate Bill 282 (SB 282), lawmakers have directly confronted what has become a backdoor into people’s lives, commercial data brokers selling sensitive digital information to law enforcement agencies, sidestepping the need for judicial authorization.
This so-called “data broker loophole” has allowed government agencies across the country to acquire personal details they’d otherwise need a warrant to access.
Instead of presenting probable cause to a judge, agencies could simply purchase location histories and other metadata from third-party brokers who gather it from mobile apps.
These apps often track users’ movements down to the minute, creating comprehensive logs of their daily routines. Until now, that information was effectively up for grabs, and no warrant has been required.
Montana’s new law puts a clear end to that practice. Under SB 282, state and local government entities are now barred from purchasing several categories of digital data, including but not limited to: electronic communications and their contents, geolocation data, financial transaction records, pseudonymous identifiers, and other forms of sensitive personal information such as religious beliefs, health status, and biometric details.
Importantly, the legislation doesn’t eliminate access altogether, it restricts how that access is obtained.
Law enforcement in Montana must now secure a judge’s approval via a search warrant or meet other legal standards such as investigative subpoenas. Consent from the device’s owner is also still a permissible route.
What SB 282 achieves is a ban on the government using cash instead of cause to gather what should be protected digital traces.
This isn’t Montana’s first move to prioritize digital civil liberties.
The state has already passed a range of privacy-forward policies in recent years, including strong limitations on facial recognition, protections for genetic information, and a state constitutional amendment that explicitly shields digital data from unreasonable searches and seizures. SB 282 continues that trend, bolstering Montana’s reputation as a leader in privacy rights.
The structure of the new law aligns with the spirit of a federal bill, the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, introduced by Senator Ron Wyden.
In the vacuum left by federal inaction, states have begun crafting their own responses. Montana, despite its modest population, is now at the forefront of that movement.
Montana becomes first state to close the “data broker loophole” that allows law enforcement to purchase data without a warrant by enacting SB 282 which prohibits the government from using money to access certain types of sensitive digital information
Nayib Bukele’s El Salvador dictatorship: Made in Israel
By Alan MACLOED | MintPress News | May 14, 2025
Nayib Bukele may be Palestinian, but the dictatorship he has built in El Salvador is very much made in Israel. From arming his security forces to supplying him with weapons and high-tech surveillance tools, MintPress explores the Israeli influence helping to prop up the man who calls himself “the world’s coolest dictator.”
Arming a Dictatorship
Since Bukele’s ascension to the presidency in 2019, Israeli exports to El Salvador have been rapidly advancing, growing at an annual rate of more than 21%. This increase consists primarily of weapons. Salvadoran forces are well supplied with Israeli hardware. The military and police use the Israeli-made Galil and ARAD 5 rifles, the Uzi submachine gun, numerous Israeli pistols, and ride in AIL Storm and Plasan Yagu armored vehicles.
Some equipment Salvadoran forces use comes free, courtesy of Israeli sources. In 2019, an Israeli NGO, the Jerusalem Foundation (a group that builds illegal settlements on Palestinian land), announced that it would donate $3 million worth of supplies to the Salvadoran police and military.
For others, however, the Bukele administration is paying top dollar, meaning that this relationship is extremely profitable for the high-tech Israeli defense sector.
In 2020, the Salvadoran police paid around $3.4 million for one year’s use of three Israeli spyware products. These tools include GEOLOC, a program that intercepts calls and texts from targeted phones, and Web Tangles, which uses individuals’ social media accounts to build up files on people, including using their photos for facial recognition. A third, Wave Guard Tracer (marketed in some regions as Guardian), tracks users’ movements through the GPS on their phone.
Perhaps the most notorious piece of spyware used, however, is Pegasus, developed by the NSO Group, an outgrowth of the Israeli Defense Forces’ Unit 8200. The app hit the headlines in 2022, when it was revealed that repressive governments the world over had used it to surveil thousands of public figures, including kings, presidents, politicians, activists, and reporters. El Salvador was one of the most heavily penetrated nations. A report from Citizen Lab found that the Bukele administration was using it to secretly monitor dozens of public figures critical of the president, including 22 journalists from the independent outlet El Faro.
Incarceration Nation
Bukele has used these Israeli tools and weapons to crack down on dissent and opposition to his rule. Since 2022, when he declared a State of Exception, suspending rights and civil liberties, he has imprisoned at least 85,000 people, a staggering figure for such a small country. Today, around 2% of the adult population — along with over 3,000 children — languish behind bars in dangerously overcrowded jails.
The most well-known of these is the Terrorism Confinement Center (Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT), which is by far and away the largest prison in world history. Built to incarcerate over 40,000 people, it is to this center that the Trump administration has been sending migrants rounded up by ICE. In a meeting with Bukele in the Oval Office, President Trump stated that U.S. nationals would be sent there next.
El Salvador holds vastly more people in prisons per capita than any other country, and conditions are among the worst in the world. Food is sparse, lights are kept on 24 hours a day, and cells are frequently packed with more than 100 occupants. Those incarcerated at CECOT are allowed no contact with the outside world, not even with their families or lawyers.
Often, the first thing a Salvadoran family hears about their disappeared relative is news that he died while incarcerated. Torture is commonplace. Osiris Luna, the director of El Salvador’s prison system, has even been sanctioned by the U.S. government for his role in “gross human rights abuses.”
Bukele has justified the mass imprisonment of his countrymen as a necessary step to break the power of organized gangs and drug cartels. Yet a significant portion of those held are his political opponents. Among those detained are union leaders, politicians, and human rights defenders.
Facing the threat of imprisonment or other punishment, El Faro has moved its operations to neighboring Costa Rica.
A Palestinian Who Loves Israel
Amid the chaos, Bukele has fired tens of thousands of public service workers and reduced taxes on the business community. He has also reoriented El Salvador’s foreign policy from a progressive, anti-imperialist stance to allying itself with right-wing governments around the world, including Israel.
Despite coming from a prominent Palestinian family that emigrated from Jerusalem in the early 20th century, throughout his political career, he has made a point of vocally supporting Israel, its culture, and its foreign policy. As far back as 2015, when he was Mayor of San Salvador, the Israeli Embassy had identified him as a “partner for cooperation.”
Three years later, in February 2018, he visited Israel on a trip organized by Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs, Tzipi Hotovely, and American Jewish Congress President, Jack Rosen. There, he participated in a security conference attended by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Reuven Rivlin, and made a public appearance at the Western Wall.
El Salvador is home to a large Palestinian population; some 100,000 live in the small country. And yet, the Central American nation is far from a stronghold of support for anti-colonial struggles. Palestinians in El Salvador have generally done very well and entered society’s upper echelons. Bukele is actually the third Palestinian to become president.
Historically, the Latin American business community has sided with conservative or reactionary forces, and the Palestinian diaspora has shied away from supporting resistance movements in the Middle East.
“Bukele’s culture is not so much Palestinian as it is neo-fascist. That’s his culture. So he is going to identify with repressive governments around the world,” Roberto Lovato, a Salvadoran-American writer and professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, told MintPress News.
The country is also home to a large and active evangelical Christian community, for whom Israel’s rise is a key issue. Despite being the son of the country’s most notable imam — one who claimed his son is a practicing Muslim — Bukele has positioned himself as a Christian conservative, and his evangelical supporters say he was chosen by God to rid the nation of gang violence. “I believe in God, in Jesus Christ. I believe in His word, I believe in His word revealed in the Holy Bible,” he said.
Dirty Wars and Dirty Politics
The connections between Israel and El Salvador, however, predate Bukele by decades. During the 1970s and 1980s, the country was a hotspot in the Cold War, and U.S.-backed death squads battled the leftist FMLN rebels. The military regime killed around 75,000 civilians in a dirty war that scars the region to this day. The violence was so extreme and so well-publicized that even the United States sought to distance itself from it. Into that void stepped Israel, providing 83% of El Salvador’s military needs from 1975 to 1979, including napalm. In return, El Salvador moved its embassy to Jerusalem, legitimizing Israel’s claim to the city.
Lovato, a former member of the FMLN, told MintPress that the country was turned into a “laboratory for repression.”
During the Civil War, the U.S. government aligned a whole panoply of different practitioners of torture and mass murder. You had trainers from Taiwan, Israel, and other countries going to El Salvador to train the Salvadoran government to do what they had learned how to do.”
One of the most notable individuals who received Israeli training was Major Roberto D’Aubuisson, leader of a far-right death squad. D’Aubuisson is known to have ordered the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero. Nicknamed “Blowtorch Bob” for his penchant for using the tool on his opponents’ genitals, his death squad is thought to have killed some 30,000 people, many of whom were tortured to death. Thus, it is no stretch to say that El Salvador’s repressive state apparatus has long been sustained by Israeli money, tech, and know-how.
But this is far from an isolated example. Indeed, Israel has supplied weapons and training to repressive governments around the world, honing the skills acquired suppressing the Palestinian population and taking them global.
In Guatemala, Israel sold planes, armored personnel carriers and rifles to the military, and even built them a domestic ammunition factory. General Efraín Ríos Montt thanked Israel for its participation in a coup that brought him to power in 1982, stating that it went so smoothly “because many of our soldiers were trained by Israelis.” Around 300 Israeli advisors worked to train Ríos Montt’s forces into genocidal death squads who systematically killed over 200,000 Mayans. A sign of the deep connections between the two groups is that Ríos Montt’s men began referring to the indigenous Mayans as “Palestinians” during their attacks.
It is a similar story in Colombia, where the country’s most notorious death squads were trained by Israeli operatives, such as General Rafael Eitan. To this day, Colombian police and military make extensive use of Israeli weaponry. So normalized has the Israeli influence become in Colombian society that, in 2011, sitting President Juan Manuel Santos appeared in an advertisement for Israeli mercenary firm Global CST. “They are people with a lot of experience. They have been helping us to work better,” he stated.
Israel also armed and supported the military dictatorships of Chile and Argentina in the 1970s and 1980s, even as the latter explicitly targeted over 1,000 Jews in the largest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.
In Nicaragua, Israel supplied the Somoza dictatorship, helping it carry out a dirty war. In Rwanda, it sold weapons to the Hutu government as it was carrying out a genocide against the Tutsi population. Israeli weapons were used by Serbia during the Yugoslav civil war in the 1990s. And successive administrations in Tel Aviv also helped sustain the Apartheid government of South Africa, sending it weapons and sharing intelligence with it.
Therefore, it should come as little surprise that Bukele’s administration has sought and established such close ties to the Israeli government. These weapons and techniques, honed on the Palestinian population, are going global, helping a government thousands of miles away crack down on civil liberties. While Bukele — a Palestinian — is very much in charge of El Salvador, it is clear that his dictatorship has a distinct Israeli flavor.
Telegram’s Durov names French official he accused of censorship request
RT | May 19, 2025
Telegram founder Pavel Durov has claimed that French foreign intelligence chief Nicolas Lerner personally asked him to censor conservatives on his platform ahead of the contentious rerun of Romania’s presidential elections. The Russian-born entrepreneur said he refused the request.
The accusations of foreign meddling first surfaced last year after Romania’s top court annulled the November election results, in which independent right-wing candidate Calin Georgescu came first with 23%. Authorities cited “irregularities” in his campaign, along with intelligence reports alleging Russian interference – claims Moscow has denied. Georgescu was later barred from running again.
On Sunday, pro-EU centrist Nicusor Dan was elected president of Romania. His conservative, Eurosceptic opponent George Simion accused France and Moldova of attempting to sabotage his campaign.
In a post on X on Sunday evening, Durov said he met with Lerner, head of France’s Directorate-General for External Security (DGSE), in Paris. The agency, operating under the Ministry of the Armed Forces, is tasked with gathering intelligence and combating terrorist threats.
“This spring at the Salon des Batailles in the Hotel de Crillon, Nicolas Lerner, head of French intelligence, asked me to ban conservative voices in Romania ahead of elections. I refused,” Durov wrote. “We didn’t block protesters in Russia, Belarus, or Iran. We won’t start doing it in Europe,” he added.
Durov had previously hinted that France asked him to “silence” Romanian conservatives. The French Foreign Ministry rejected the allegations of election meddling as “completely unfounded.”
“France categorically rejects these allegations and calls on everyone to exercise responsibility and respect for Romanian democracy,” the ministry stated, labeling the accusations “a diversionary maneuver” aimed at distracting the public from “the real threats of interference targeting Romania.”
Last year, French authorities charged Durov with facilitating the distribution of child sexual exploitation material and drug trafficking due to alleged moderation failures on Telegram. He was arrested at Paris-Le Bourget Airport in August before being released on €5 million ($5.46 million) bail. Durov, who has denied any wrongdoing, was eventually allowed to leave France in March.
Five more Palestinian journalists killed in Israeli strikes in Gaza; death toll rises to 222
Deceased Palestinian photojournalist Aziz al-Hajjar
Press TV | May 18, 2025
Five more Palestinian journalists have been killed in separate Israeli strikes in the Gaza Strip, bringing the death toll to 222 since the start of the Israeli genocidal war against the besieged coastal territory in early October of 2023, according to local authorities.
Photojournalist Aziz al-Hajjar, his wife, and their children were killed on Sunday when Israeli warplanes bombed a house in the Saftawi neighborhood in the northern Gaza Strip.
The family of Abdul Rahman Tawfiq al-Abadleh also confirmed that the Palestinian journalist was killed in an Israeli bombardment in the town of al-Qarara, located north of Khan Yunis. They said they had lost contact with Abadleh two days earlier.
Deceased Palestinian journalist Abdul Rahman Tawfiq al-Abadleh
Gaza’s government media office also said Palestinian journalists Nour Qandil and Khaled Abu Seif lost their lives alongside their young daughter in the Israeli strike that targeted their home in Deir el-Balah in the central Gaza Strip.
Deceased Palestinian journalist Nour Qandil and her husband Khaled Abu Seif
Furthermore, Palestinian journalist Ahmad al-Zinati was killed alongside his wife, Nour al-Madhoun, and their children, Muhammad and Khaled, on Saturday night when their tent was bombed in Khan Yunis.
Deceased Palestinian journalist Ahmad al-Zinati alongside his family
The deaths came only two days after Ahmed al-Halou, a reporter for the local al-Quds News Network, was killed in an Israeli attack in the Gaza Strip.
The Israeli military resumed bombardment of Gaza on March 18, killing thousands of Palestinians, and injuring many others, after it shattered the 2-month ceasefire agreement with the Palestinian group Hamas and the deal on the exchange of Israeli captives with Palestinian abductees.
At least 53,272 Palestinians have been killed, mostly women and children, and another 120,673 individuals injured in the brutal Israeli military onslaught on Gaza since October 7, 2023.
The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants last November for Netanyahu and former Israeli minister of military affairs Yoav Gallant, citing war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.
Israel also faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice for its war on the besieged coastal territory.
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Woolsey Fire started at Santa Susana Field Lab — where “radioactive materials released were never accurately measured”
By John Laforge | CounterPunch | November 30, 2018
In my Nov. 16 column, I reported on potential radiation risks posed by California’s Woolsey wildfire having burned over parts or all of the Santa Susana Field Laboratory—south of Simi Valley, Calif., 30 miles outside Los Angeles—site of at least four partial or total nuclear reactor meltdowns.
The field laboratory operated 10 experimental reactors and conducted rocket engine tests. In his 2014 book Atomic Accidents, researcher James Mahaffey writes, “The cores in four experimental reactors on site … melted.” Reactor core melts always result in the release of large amounts of radioactive gases and particles. Clean up of the deeply contaminated site has not been conducted in spite of a 2010 agreement.
Los Angeles’s KABC-7 TV reported Nov. 13 that the Santa Susana lab site “appears to be the origin of the Woolsey Fire” which has torched over 96,000 acres. Southern Calif. Public Radio said, “According to Cal Fire, the Woolsey Fire started on the afternoon of Thursday, Nov. 8 … on the Santa Susana site.” … continue
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