US de facto financing persecution of Christians in Ukraine – Tucker Carlson
RT | May 25, 2025
The US is essentially facilitating the persecution of Christians in Ukraine by supporting the Kiev government, which has been waging a purge campaign against the nation’s canonical Orthodox church, American journalist Tucker Carlson has said.
Carlson made the statement during an interview with a former Ukrainian MP, Vadim Novinsky, released on Friday.
“Every day, churches and temples are seized by soldiers with machine guns who come in, throw out priests, beat believers, children, old people, women…” the former lawmaker stated, adding that “it is happening all over Ukraine.”
“I think very few Americans understand the degree to which the Ukrainian government under [Vladimir] Zelensky has persecuted the Ukrainian Orthodox Church,” Carlson said.
The former Fox News host then asked Novinsky what he would like to say to the American lawmakers who have nevertheless approved financial aid to Kiev. “The Speaker of the House of the United States Congress is a man who describes himself as a Christian and he has been paying for this,” the journalist said, referring to Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican.
The former Ukrainian MP replied that he would like to see the US aid going directly to ordinary Ukrainians and not the authorities, who “live in parallel realities.”
US government agencies appropriated a total of $182.8 billion on various forms of assistance to Kiev between 2022 and the end of 2024, according to Ukraine Oversight, an official portal that tracks such expenditures.
Last week, US President Donald Trump stated he was concerned that billions of dollars were being wasted on aid to Ukraine. He said Congress was “very upset about it” and that lawmakers were asking where all the money was going.
Kiev has accused the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) of maintaining ties to Russia even though it declared independence from the Moscow Patriarchate in May 2022. The crackdown has included numerous arrests of clergymen and church raids, one of the most notorious of which took place in the catacombs of the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra, where holy relics are kept.
Last year, Zelensky signed legislation allowing the state to ban religious organizations affiliated with governments that Kiev deems “aggressors,” effectively targeting the UOC.
Earlier this week, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that Moscow would not abandon the Orthodox believers in Ukraine and vowed to make sure that “their lawful rights are respected.”
Ireland Clashes with EU Over Hate Speech Laws as MEP Michael McNamara Denounces Brussels’ Legal Threats
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | May 23, 2025
Ireland’s refusal to fully adopt the European Union’s “hate speech” directives has ignited tensions in Brussels, with Independent MEP Michael McNamara voicing staunch opposition to what he calls a misguided and authoritarian push to punish noncompliance. He dismissed the EU’s legal threats as deeply flawed, asserting that there is no evidence” that these laws accomplish their stated goals of reducing discord or promoting unity.
According to McNamara, attempts to legislate acceptable speech do little more than sow fear and resentment. “People resent the fact that they’re threatened with prosecution for expressing their views,” he said, highlighting a growing unease across Europe as more individuals feel unable to voice opinions, whether popular or not. He warned that such policies do not alter underlying beliefs, they simply force them underground.
Instead of fostering a more harmonious society, McNamara argued that these measures build resentment. “It doesn’t affect how people think in any way, it just affects what they are afraid to say and what they resent,” he said. He drew a parallel to the United Kingdom, where, he noted, citizens are witnessing elderly individuals facing prosecution for speech offenses, while police resources are increasingly diverted from public safety to policing online expression.
“Hate speech laws are counter-productive. They are also profoundly illiberal. They’ve damaged the UK and we don’t want the same,” he wrote in a message on X, calling on the European Commission to abandon any proceedings against Ireland related to speech legislation.
The EU’s position, outlined in a recent notice from the Commission, faults Ireland and Finland for not yet implementing legal measures to criminalize specific categories of speech, including statements denying historical atrocities or inciting hatred against protected groups. While Ireland has made partial moves, Brussels remains unsatisfied and has issued formal opinions giving the two nations two months to comply before potential escalation to the European Court of Justice.
Despite an earlier attempt to introduce hate speech legislation, one that passed easily through the Dáil, the lower house of the Irish parliament, the Irish government eventually shelved the bill.
Resistance from the Seanad and significant public discontent led to its demise, with many viewing the proposal as a direct threat to civil liberties.
That backlash is widely believed to have influenced the outcome of the March 2024 referendums, where voters rejected two constitutional amendments by wide margins.
McNamara reiterated his stance before the European Parliament, stating plainly that pressing charges against Ireland over its refusal to implement these rules would be “misguided.” He urged the Commission to reconsider, framing the issue as one of national integrity and democratic principles rather than regulatory compliance.
Canada’s PM Mark Carney Revives Online Censorship Agenda
By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | May 23, 2025
Steven Guilbeault, once Canada’s Environment Minister is now poised to spearhead a different kind of oversight, this time, over what Canadians can see and share online.
In his new post as Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture, Guilbeault has been entrusted with executing Bill C-11, a contentious piece of legislation passed in 2023 that gives the federal government unprecedented power over online streaming platforms.
Celebrating the appointment, Guilbeault publicly thanked newly elected Prime Minister Mark Carney, expressing his intent to “build a stronger country, based on the values of Canadians.”
This shift in leadership places Guilbeault at the center of an ongoing battle over internet regulation. Bill C-11, which was rushed into law during Justin Trudeau’s final term as Prime Minister, obligates major tech companies to fund and prioritize Canadian content, particularly that of the mainstream media, regardless of whether users are seeking it.
While the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) was initially expected to enforce the new requirements, it recently admitted that the regulatory framework won’t be ready until late 2025. That leaves platforms, creators, and consumers in limbo, uncertain about how deeply the government’s hand will extend into digital media.
Carney, seen as a political continuation of Trudeau’s legacy, appears ready to go even further. Before the most recent election, the Liberal Party was already moving to introduce Bill C-63, a so-called Online Harms Act.
While framed as a tool to protect minors from exploitation, the bill also includes expansive measures to monitor and penalize what it terms “hate speech.” This vague language has prompted concern from legal scholars and civil liberties organizations about the law’s potential to suppress legitimate expression.
With Guilbeault now steering Canada’s cultural and digital policies, free speech advocates worry the government is tightening its grip not only on environmental and economic life but on the very flow of information and dialogue in the digital sphere. What began as a push for national content promotion may ultimately serve as a model for broader censorship under the guise of cultural stewardship.
‘Sadistic pattern’ of genocide: UN condemns Israeli killing of Gaza doctor’s nine children
Press TV – May 24, 2025
UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese has condemned Israel’s Friday airstrike on the home of Palestinian doctors Alaa and Hamdi Al-Najjar, which killed nine of their ten children.
Alaa Al-Najjar, a paediatrician at Nasser Hospital in Gaza, was on duty treating young patients when she learned nine of her children—aged 2 to 16—had been killed in an Israeli bombardment of their Khan Yunis home.
Rescue teams later retrieved the children’s bodies, eight of which were mutilated beyond recognition by the blast.
Commenting on a video published by Mads Gilbert, a Norwegian physician who volunteers in Palestine, Albanese said the attack represented a “distinguishable sadistic pattern of the new phase of the genocide”.
The attack reduced the family’s residence to rubble and ignited fires across the surrounding area.
Alaa’s husband and one surviving child sustained injuries in the attack.
Israeli military forces systematically target civilian families, medical facilities, and healthcare personnel as part of its ongoing Genocide in Gaza.
Muneer Alboursh, director general of the Palestinian health ministry in Gaza, says Israel has killed 12 health workers in the past week, many of them in targeted attacks on their homes.
He said Israel is “systematically” targeting medical staff and facilities, especially in the northern areas of Gaza, to destroy the health care system there and push people further south.
His remarks come days after Israel’s finance minister declared that the regime is now “finally” targeting what he called the “civilian structure of Hamas.”
Israel launched the campaign of genocide in Gaza on October 7, 2023. It has killed at least 53,800 Palestinians there so far, according to the health ministry of Gaza.
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 ↩︎
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From the Archives
Politicians lie
By Mazin Qumsiyeh | Popular Resistance | August 18, 2013
There is no way to say this truth nicely: Politicians lie. That includes Japanese, American, Egyptian, Israeli, and Palestinian politicians! Is there something more common sense than that? Yet, so many citizens around the world believe their own politicians or wistfully acknowledge lies but think it is part of the job needed to run things. They believe even when politicians contradict themselves blatantly. This phenomenon is rather remarkable. It is a dissonance and disconnect from reality that many seem oblivious to. It is very dangerous because it can lead to accepting rationales for going to war. These can be deadly wars that lead to millions of lives lost as happened in what was called World War 1 and WW2. Even when incredible and declassified evidence abound, politicians continue to lie and old mythologies refuse to die. Here are just a few of the countless lies told to us over the past few decades… continue
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