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Swedish police arrest Iranian prisoner’s son: Daughter

Press TV – March 29, 2024

Sweden’s police have reportedly arrested the son of an Iranian prisoner, who has been sentenced to life in prison by Stockholm, based on complaints filed by notorious anti-Iran figures living in exile in the Nordic country.

“After [spending] hours with no information about my brother, who had gone to visit my father…, we realized that Majid has been apparently arrested by Sweden’s police,” Atieh Nouri, daughter of Hamid Nouri, said in a post on X on Friday.

“We still do not know anything about the details of the matter,” she added.

Nouri, a former Iranian judiciary official, was arrested in Sweden back in 2019.

He was put on trial on unfounded allegations levelled against him by elements representing the Mujahedin-e-Khalq Organization (MKO) terrorist cult that has openly boasted about carrying out deadly terrorist operations against thousands of Iranian officials and civilians.

Nouri was handed the life sentence three years later after being found guilty of murder and crimes against the international law over his alleged role in executions of criminals in Iran in 1988.

Sweden’s Appeal Court upheld the verdict in December 2023.

Earlier in March, Sweden’s Supreme Court also upheld the sentence, refusing to hear an appeal that had been submitted by the Iranian prisoner.

Iranian authorities say Nouri’s imprisonment and trial in Sweden is politically-motivated, noting that the case has been influenced by pressure and propaganda of anti-Iran groups and individuals living in the West.

Nouri, himself, has vehemently denied the charges brought against him in the case, calling them fabricated.

March 29, 2024 Posted by | Aletho News | , | Leave a comment

Fired Harvard Professor: ‘All the Basic Principles of Public Health Were Thrown Out the Window’

By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | March 21, 2024

Martin Kulldorff, Ph.D., co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration said Harvard University’s decision to fire him for non-compliance with the university’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate is just one example of the consequences faced by anyone who questioned the official COVID-19 narratives.

In an appearance on “The Defender In-Depth” podcast, Kulldorff, an epidemiologist, said his firing is part of a broader trend of censorship and intolerance toward people who express diverging views in the broader fields of science, medicine and academia.

Kulldorff is one of the five individual plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the Biden administration alleging key administration officials and government agencies coerced social media platforms to remove content, in violation of the First Amendment.

Kulldorff discussed the latest developments in the suit — Murthy et al. v. Missouri et al. — whose plaintiffs also include the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana.

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments on an injunction, previously granted by lower courts, barring the administration and certain federal agencies from communicating with social media platforms for the removal of content.

He also discussed the COVID-19 pandemic response of his native Sweden, which bucked the global trend by eschewing lockdowns, vaccine and mask mandates, making the country the target of global pressure and widespread media criticism. Yet, Sweden now demonstrates better public health outcomes than most other countries.

‘Never a consensus in the scientific community’ for lockdowns

Kulldorff said Harvard was “not happy” with him when he co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration in 2020. However, it was Kulldorff’s decision not to get a COVID-19 vaccine that ultimately led Harvard to fire him.

“We had a disagreement about infection-acquired immunity,” Kulldorff said. “I was fired because I didn’t want to take the vaccine because I didn’t need it. I had better immunity from having had [COVID-19] already, and so, there was no medical reason for me to do it. And there was certain risk, because with every vaccine and drug, there’s some risk.”

Yet, many of his colleagues at Harvard and other institutions “sort of kept quiet” and “went along with it,” Kulldorff said. He attributed their cooperation to the federal funding many scientists and researchers receive from agencies such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

“They sit on the biggest pile of medical research money in the world,” Kulldorff said. “So, it’s pretty scary for a scientist to speak up against their wishes, because you risk losing the resource funds that you depend on to support your family, and also to support the other people that work in your laboratory.”

Still, in personal contacts with fellow epidemiologists, Kulldorff said “The majority were arguing for focused protections over better protecting the older people, by letting kids go to school and so on. So, there was never a consensus in the scientific community, at least not in the epidemiological community, for these lockdown measures.”

Kulldorff said that during the pandemic, “all the basic principles of public health were thrown out the window.” His former institution, Harvard, was no exception, “going to online teaching before there was any government incentive or push to do so.”

This, Kulldorff said, “set the stage, and a lot of other colleges and even high schools and elementary schools sort of followed Harvard’s lead” in locking down.

Similarly, Harvard later imposed a COVID-19 vaccine mandate — which it finally ended on March 5. “There was no public health reason to mandate vaccines for students” in particular, Kulldorff said, because most of them “had COVID, so they have superior immunity. But even those few that haven’t [caught COVID-19] face minuscule risk from COVID.”

Children ‘will never fully recover’ from school closures

Kulldorff cited his native Sweden as an example of a country that bucked the trend and kept schools — and society more broadly — open during the pandemic.

“If you look at the elementary and high school students, we know that the test results went down” in countries that closed their schools, Kulldorff said. “The kids were hurt by this, and they will never fully recover from the damage that we did to them.”

Sweden was the only major Western country that kept schools open for ages 1-15, according to Kulldorff who said test results in Sweden have shown “no comparable drop — it’s just as normal, slightly going up.”

Among 1.8 million children who went to school in Sweden throughout the virus wave during the spring of 2020, “there were exactly zero COVID deaths and only a few hospitalizations,” he said.

Public health outcomes in Sweden also were positive for other population groups. “Sweden has low COVID mortality, less than the average in Europe [and] the lowest excess mortality in the Western world.”

Kulldorff said Swedish authorities were able to resist global pressure to impose lockdowns and mandates because they “had very strong support from other epidemiologists in Sweden” and “very strong support by the public” for their approach.

He noted that Sweden’s then-prime minister, Stefan Löfven, had a working-class background, having begun his career as a welder. Noting that lockdowns favored “the upper class,” Kulldorff said Löfven’s background might have made a difference as he could “understand what the effect these lockdowns had on regular people.”

Science will ‘dwindle down’ without freedom of speech

Yet, in other countries, including the U.S., dissenting views were silenced, Kulldorff said.

“Those of us who tried to speak up were either silenced or, after they couldn’t silence us anymore, we were slandered,” he said, noting that after the Great Barrington Declaration was published, Francis Collins, M.D., Ph.D., then the director of the NIH, called for “a devastating published takedown” in response.

“With scientific or other logical arguments, they have two options: They can sort of silence it by ignoring it or censoring it, which was done, or they can attack it through slander and smears,” Kulldorff said. He said postings he made on Twitter and YouTube critical of mask mandates and school closures, were removed by those platforms.

“They didn’t want the science to be known, the true science, and the true principles of public health,” Kulldorff said.

That’s why Kulldorff joined the Missouri et al. v. Biden et al. (now known as Murthy et al. v. Missouri et al.) lawsuit. He said the central argument the plaintiffs are making in this case “is that the federal government should not be allowed to coerce social media to censor people like myself.”

“They actually censored accurate, correct scientific information from scientists at Harvard and other places. And to me that’s pretty astonishing,” Kulldorff said.

Kulldorff said that during Monday’s Supreme Court hearing, “There were clearly some justices who seemed to be very sympathetic” to the plaintiffs’ position, and “seemed very concerned about the First Amendment.”

But other justices argued that “the government should be allowed to coerce social media to censor” in some instances.

By June, the Supreme Court will issue a ruling on whether or not to uphold the injunctions lower courts previously granted in this case. Kulldorff said the case will then return to the lower courts and is expected to “take years” to resolve, proceeding “in tandem” with Kennedy et al. v. Biden et al. — a similar lawsuit in which Children’s Health Defense is a plaintiff. The two lawsuits were consolidated in July 2023.

“I thought we were in agreement, as a country, as a society, that freedom of speech is important, that it is the foundation for us,” Kulldorff said. “It saddens me greatly that that’s not the case.”

“If we don’t have this freedom of speech, then gradually, science is going to dwindle down … Academia would go there also and society as a whole.”

Watch ‘The Defender In-Depth’ here.

Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

March 24, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , , | Leave a comment

Hungary snubs US senators – ambassador

RT | February 19, 2024

Senior Hungarian officials have refused to meet four US senators who arrived in Budapest on Sunday, Washington’s envoy to the country has said. The American lawmakers are attempting to press Prime Minister Viktor Orban into speeding up approval of Sweden’s accession to NATO.

The delegation sought to meet a range of senior government officials and representatives from the ruling Fidesz party, US Ambassador David Pressman stated. The Hungarians declined, however, despite the group being “the most senior US bipartisan congressional delegation” to visit the country in recent years, the diplomat added.

The senators intend to submit a joint resolution to the US Congress that would condemn Hungary for alleged democratic backsliding, the Associated Press reported. Thom Tillis, one of the visiting lawmakers, urged Orban to speed up Sweden’s accession, claiming at a news conference that doing so would be “a great service to freedom-loving nations worldwide.”

Chris Murphy, another delegate, called the boycott “strange and concerning” and identified Orban as standing in the way of the ratification. Hungary is the only NATO country yet to approve Sweden’s membership of the US-led military bloc.

“We are wise enough about politics here to know that if Prime Minister Orban wants this to happen, then the parliament can move forward,” Murphy said.

Orban addressed the issue of NATO expansion during a rally on Saturday, saying Budapest and Stockholm were on a path to “rebuild trust.” A vote could happen during the parliamentary spring session, he suggested.

The prime minister previously cited Swedish criticism of his government and Hungary’s democratic credentials as the main reasons for skepticism among lawmakers in Budapest. NATO approved Sweden’s bid to join in June 2022.

The anti-Hungarian US resolution will criticize Orban for maintaining good relations with Russia and China, according to AP. Budapest has “resisted and diluted” the EU sanctions imposed on Moscow, the text reportedly states.

Orban is a vocal critic of the Western approach to the Ukraine crisis. He has argued that the arming of Kiev and the restrictions on Russia have failed to end the bloodshed and have caused major economic harm to the EU. He has also resisted Ukraine’s push to join NATO and the EU.

Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said it was “not worth trying to exert pressure on us, because we are a sovereign country,” as he expressed general approval of the American visit on Friday.

February 19, 2024 Posted by | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia | , , , | Leave a comment

Hersh: West’s Hesitance to Conclude Nord Stream Probe Implicates Culprits

By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 07.02.2024

Sweden’s decision to abruptly quit an investigation into the Nord Stream sabotage attack raises new questions about who the real culprits behind the blast are, and turns the spotlight on the German probe.

Almost a year ago, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published his bombshell story about the US’ and Norway’s participation in the September 26, 2022, sabotage attack on Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines.

To date, none of the Western countries involved in the subsequent investigation – Sweden, Denmark, and Germany – have presented explanations of what happened or named a culprit. Moreover, Sweden announced on February 7 that it would drop its investigation into explosions.

Sweden and Denmark announced they would conduct an inquiry within days of the attack, Hersh recalled in his Tuesday’s piece. Germany followed suit on October 2, 2022.

Remarkably, very soon, Sweden said it would not join any joint investigations because “it would involve the transfer of information related to Sweden’s national security,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist pointed out.

“Nothing more about the cause of the underwater bombings has been heard since from either Sweden or Denmark, although both nations knew, as I have written, that the US was practicing underwater diving in the Baltic Sea for months before the explosions,” Hersh wrote. “The failure of the two nations to complete their inquiry may have stemmed from the fact, as I was told, that some senior officials in both countries understood precisely what was going on.”

For its part, the Kremlin announced on September 28, 2022, that Russia was ready to consider applications from EU countries for a joint investigation into the Nord Stream incident. However, not only did the West reject Moscow’s request but also blamed Russia for destroying its own pipelines. On October 12, 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin qualified the incident as “an act of international terrorism”.

However, it was not only Sweden and Denmark that demonstrated little if any curiosity in digging to the bottom of the incident. The US also seemed uninterested, according to Hersh.

“After the explosions, which became an international sensation, it took four days for a White House correspondent to bring up the Nord Stream issue,” Hersh wrote.

He particularly cited the White House stating at the time that it would not make a “definitive determination” until its allies in the region concluded their work.

“There is no evidence that President Biden, in the sixteen months since the pipelines were destroyed, has tasked its experts to conduct an all-source investigation into the explosions,” Hersh wrote.

Moreover, “the US has since vetoed at least one attempt by Russia to get an independent United Nations investigation into the explosions,” he added.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist pointed out that despite Germany suffering the most from the blast (which deprived its industries of the source of relatively cheap and reliable energy flow from Russia), Chancellor Olaf Scholz or any other senior German leader didn’t make any significant push to determine who did what.

“A subsequent investigation sought by some members of the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, was undertaken but its conclusion has been withheld from the public for what are said to be security reasons,” Hersh pointed out.

The investigative journalist pointed out that the US and German mainstream media were circulating the story of “a 49-foot yacht said to be the vessel for the high-risk technical diving involved” instead.

In his previous articles, Hersh debunked the Andromeda yacht plot, suggesting that the CIA invented the story and fed it to the Western press to distract the public attention from his bombshell. Remarkably, some Western media soon found numerous gaps in the Andromeda story and called them out.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist believes that “the sabotage in the Baltic Sea was the result of a long-standing US policy of driving a wedge between Russia and Western Europe.”

He quoted Emmanuel Todd, a French demographer and political scientist, who said in his recent interview that “one of the great goals of American politics, and therefore of NATO, was to stop the inevitable reconciliation of Russia and Germany.” Therefore, according to Todd, Washington “blew up the Nord Stream pipeline.”

“At the time Biden ordered the destruction of the pipelines, the American fear was that [German] Chancellor Scholz, who at the request of Washington had shut off 750 miles of Russian gas in the new Nord Stream 2 pipeline that was ready in the fall of 2021 to be delivered to a port in Germany, might change his mind and let the gas flow, easing German economic worries and reinstating an important energy force for German industry. That would not be allowed to happen, and Germany has been in economic and political turmoil since,” Hersh concluded.

Having dropped the probe Sweden is expected to hand evidence uncovered in the probe over to Germany.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on February 7 that Russia would watch closely how German investigators proceed with the probe.

“Of course, now we need to see how Germany itself reacts to this, as a country that has lost a lot in relation to this terrorist attack,” Peskov said. “Taxpayers in Germany suffer, German firms and companies suffer, lose their competitiveness, lose their profitability without this gas. It will be interesting to see how scrupulously the German authorities will conduct this investigation.”

February 7, 2024 Posted by | False Flag Terrorism | , , | Leave a comment

Public panic in Sweden over war with Russia as Turkey ratifies Stockholm’s bid to join NATO

Press TV – January 24, 2024

Turkey’s parliament has passed a bill on ratification of Sweden’s NATO membership after months of blocking accession, putting the Scandinavian country a “step closer” to becoming a full member of the US-led Western military alliance.

“Today we are one step closer to becoming a full member of NATO,” Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, on Tuesday.

The Turkish parliament’s decision will come into force after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan signs a corresponding decree, which will be published in the government’s official journal.

Hungary, whose prime minister Viktor Orban has friendly relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin, remains the only NATO country that has not ratified Sweden’s bid to join.

Last week, the high levels of the Swedish government and defense forces issued a warning to prepare people for the possibility of a Russian attack on the country and asked citizens to be on alert for the possibility of a war, causing Swedes to panic and criticize the country’s leaders.

Taking notice of the call from officials, a multitude of people heeded this caution seriously, causing mass panic, and flocked their way to the market in order to procure fuel and bundles of indispensable and crucial provisions “crisis kit.”

Earlier, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Russia had no problems with Finland and Sweden and that their accession to NATO did not pose an immediate threat, but cautioned against the expansion of the Western military infrastructure in these territories.

“As for the expansion of the North Atlantic Alliance: yes, this is a problem that is being created, in my opinion, quite artificially in the foreign policy interests of the United States,” Putin was quoted as saying.

“Russia has no problems (with Sweden and Finland), but the expansion of military infrastructure on the territory of this region will certainly cause our response,” he said, stressing that the actions of the Scandinavian states could aggravate “an already difficult situation in the sphere of international security.”

January 24, 2024 Posted by | Militarism, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

Ukraine joins NATO’s Arctic projects against Russia

BY M. K. BHADRAKUMAR | INDIAN PUNCHLINE | DECEMBER 19, 2023 

In a plea earlier this month to Republicans not to block further military aid to Ukraine, US President Joe Biden warned that if Russia is victorious, then President Vladimir Putin will not stop and will attack a NATO country. Biden’s remark has drawn a sharp rebuke from Putin when he said, “This is absolutely absurd. I believe that President Biden is aware of this, this is merely a figure of speech to support his incorrect strategy against Russia.”

Putin added that Russia has no interest in fighting with NATO countries, as they “have no territorial claims against each other” and Russia does not want to “sour relations with them.” Moscow senses that a new US  narrative is struggling to be born out of the debris of the old narrative on Ukraine war. 

To jog memory, on 24 February, during a White House press conference on the first day of Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine, Biden said western sanctions were designed not to prevent invasion but to punish Russia after invading “so the people of Russia know what he (Putin) has brought on them. That is what this is all about.”

A month later, on 26 March Biden, speaking in Warsaw, blurted out, “For God’s sake, this man (Putin) cannot remain in power.” These and similar remarks that followed, especially from Britain, reflected a US strategy for regime change in Moscow, with Ukraine as the pivot. 

This strategy dates back to the 1990s and was actually at the core of the expansion of NATO along Russia’s borders, from the Baltics to Bulgaria. The Syrian conflict and covert activities of US NGOs to foment unrest in Russia were offshoots of the strategy. At least since 2015 after the coup in Kiev, CIA was overseeing a secret intensive training programme for elite Ukrainian special operations forces and other intelligence personnel. Succinctly put, the US set a trap for Russia to get it bogged down in a long insurgency, the presumption being the longer the Ukrainians can sustain the insurgency and keep Russian military bogged down, the more likely is the end of the Putin regime.

The crux of the matter today is that Russia defeated the US strategy and not only seized the initiative in the war but also rubbished the sanctions regime. The dilemma in the Beltway narrows down to how to keep Russia as an external enemy so that the West’s often fractious member states will continue to rally under US leadership. 

What comes to mind is a sardonic remark by Soviet Academician Georgy Arbatov who was advisor to Mikhail Gorbachev, to an elite group of senior US officials even as the curtain was coming down on the Cold War in 1987: “We are going to do a terrible thing to you -– we are going to deprive you of an enemy.”

Unless black humour in this cardinal truth is properly understood, the entire US strategy since the 1990s to rebuff the efforts of Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, and early Putin to establish non-adversarial relations with the West cannot be grasped. 

Put differently, if the US’ post-cold war Russia strategy has not worked, it is because of a fundamental contradiction: on the one hand, Washington needs Russia as an enemy to provide internal unity within the western alliance, while on the other hand, it also needs Russia as a cooperative, subservient junior partner in the struggle against China.

The US hopes to draw down in Ukraine and stave off defeat by leaving behind a “frozen conflict” which it’s free to revisit later at a time of its choice, but in the meanwhile, is increasingly eyeing the Arctic lately as the new theatre to entrap Russia in a quagmire. The induction of Finland into NATO (and Sweden to follow) means that the unfinished business of Ukraine’s membership, which Russia thwarted, can be fulfilled by other means.

After meeting Biden at the White House last Tuesday, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky headed for Oslo on October 13 on a fateful visit to forge his country’s partnership in NATO projects to counter Russia in the Arctic. In Oslo, Zelensky participated in a summit of the 5 Nordic countries to discuss “issues of cooperation in the field of defence and security.” The summit took place against the backdrop of the US reaching agreements with Finland and Sweden on the use of their military infrastructure by the Pentagon.

The big picture is that the US is encouraging Nordic countries to get Ukraine to participate in strengthening NATO’s Arctic borders. One may  wonder what is the “additionality” that a decrepit military like Ukraine’s can bring into NATO. Herein hangs a tale. Simply put, although Ukraine has no direct access to the Arctic, it can potentially bring in an impressive capability to undertake subversive activities inside Russian territory in a hybrid war against Russia. 

In a strange coincidence, the Pentagon recently prepared the Starlink satellite system for use in the Arctic, which was used by Ukrainian military for staging attacks on the Crimean Bridge, Russia’s Black Sea Fleet and strategic assets on Russian territory. The US’ agreement with Finland and Sweden would give the Pentagon access to a string of naval and air bases and airfields as well as training and testing grounds along the Russian border. 

Several hundred thousand Ukrainian citizens are presently domiciled in the Nordic countries who are open to recruitment for “an entire army of saboteurs like the one that Germany collected during the war between Finland and the USSR in 1939-1940 on the islands of Lake Ladoga,” as a Russian military expert told Nezavisimaya Gazeta recently. 

Russia’s naval chief Admiral Nikolai Evmenov also pointed out recently that “the strengthening of the military presence of the united NATO armed forces in the Arctic is already an established fact, which indicates the bloc’s transition to practical actions to form military force instruments to deter Russia in the region.” In fact, Russia’s Northern Fleet is forming a marine brigade tasked with the fight against saboteurs to ensure the safety of the new Northern Sea Route, coastal military and industrial infrastructure in the Arctic. 

Suffice to say, no matter Ukraine’s defeat in the US’ proxy war with Russia, Zelensky’s use for the US’ geo-strategy remains. From Oslo, Zelensky made an unannounced visit on December 14 to a US Army base in Germany. Analysts who see Zelensky as a spent force had better revise their opinion — that is, unless the power struggle in Kiev exacerbates and Zelensky gets overthrown in a coup or a colour revolution, which seems improbable so long as Biden is in the White House and Hunter Biden is on trial.

The bottom line is that Biden’s new narrative demonising Russia for planning an attack on NATO can be seen from multiple angles. At the most obvious level, it aims to hustle the Congress on the pending bill for $61 billion military aid to Ukraine. Of course, it also distracts attention from the defeat in the war. But, most important, the new narrative is intended to rally the US’ transatlantic allies who are increasingly disillusioned with the outcome of the war and nervous that US involvement in Europe may dwindle as it turns to Indo-Pacific.

When Putin reacts harshly that Biden’s new narrative is “absurd”, he is absolutely right insofar as Russia’s focus is on things far more important than waging a senseless continental war in Europe. After all, it was one of the founding fathers of the USA, James Monroe who said that a king without power is an absurdity. 

December 19, 2023 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Hungarian parliament refuses new vote on Sweden’s NATO accession

Hungary will make a sovereign decision on Sweden’s application without pressure from abroad, Turkish ratification will ‘change nothing’

MANDINER | October 25, 2023

Tensions over Sweden’s membership of NATO have been reignited after Turkish President Erdogan on Monday submitted a protocol to the Turkish parliament approving the country’s accession to NATO, bringing the Scandinavian country a step closer to joining the military alliance.

Following Erdogan’s move, international attention has again turned to Hungary.

In order for Sweden to join, it needs the support of all 31 allied countries. That is why many were caught off guard by the decision of the Hungarian parliament on Tuesday to once again refuse to vote on Sweden’s application for membership.

One reason why Hungary is dragging its feet on ratification is the fact that lawmakers from Hungary’s governing Fidesz party believe that Swedish politicians have spread “preposterous lies” about the state of Hungarian democracy, accusing the country of democratic backsliding, reported the Associated Press.

The Hungarian position has long been clear

Speaking from New York ahead of Tuesday’s U.N. Security Council meeting, Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó said that the ratification process in the Turkish parliament “does not change anything” and that Hungarian lawmakers “will make a sovereign decision on this issue.”

Prime Minister Viktor Orbán also confirmed last month that Hungary was “in no hurry” to ratify Sweden’s accession to the EU, saying in response to a question from journalists that a senior Fidesz lawmaker saw “little chance” of parliament voting on the issue this year.

The Swedish application was submitted to the agenda by opposition MP Ágnes Vadai, a member of the liberal Democratic Coalition (DK). Vadai said that Hungary’s opposition and Sweden were in constant dialogue.

“I believe that the two countries (Turkey and Hungary) will ratify it, if not at the same time, then very close together,” Vadai added.

October 25, 2023 Posted by | Militarism, Russophobia | , , | Leave a comment

Sweden says undersea cable to Estonia ‘damaged’

RT | October 17, 2023

An undersea telecommunications cable connecting Sweden and Estonia in the Baltic Sea has been ‘damaged,’ the Scandinavian country’s Civil Defense Minister said at a news conference on Tuesday, in what is the second such occurrence in the region in the past month.

“We are currently unable to assess what has caused this damage,” government minister Carl-Oskar Bohlin told reporters in Gothenburg, adding that it is “not a total cable break but it is a partial damage to the cable” and that it remains operational. The Swedish minister said that the damage sustained to the cable was sustained outside of the country’s territorial waters and its exclusive economic zone.

The damage, Bohlin explained, appears to have occurred at around the same time as when the Balticconnector gas pipeline and a telecommunications cable between Estonia and Finland were damaged, on October 8. NATO, the US-led military bloc that Helsinki joined earlier this year, has vowed “a united and determined response” if an investigation determines that saboteurs were responsible.

Finland has said that it cannot rule out a “state actor” being behind the October 8 incident, and that it is reviewing vessel traffic in the area at the time of the suspected attack.

The Prime Minister of Sweden Ulf Kristersson warned last week of potential vulnerabilities to the “spaghetti of cables, wires, infrastructure on the seabed” that connects countries, transfers data and supplies energy in the region. “It is absolutely fundamental for data traffic, so the vulnerabilities today are much, much greater,” he said.

Adequately policing waters in the area is a “very intense” challenge, the head of Sweden’s navy, Rear Admiral Ewa Ann-Sofi Skoog Haslum said on Tuesday. “The challenge for us is to monitor this volume of water,” she said. “Everything that happens under the surface is deniable.”

Last September, the Nord Stream pipelines supplying oil and natural gas from Russia to Germany were ruptured, in incidents widely believed to have been sabotage. A culprit has yet to be identified.

Seymour Hersh, the Pulitzer-winning American journalist, published a report earlier this year in which he claimed, citing intelligence sources, that the United States executed a covert CIA operation to destroy the pipelines in collaboration with the Norwegian government. Washington has strongly denied the claims.

A competing theory, reported by Western outlets, has suggested that a team of Ukrainian commandos used a rented yacht to transport explosives to the blast sites, but that the CIA told the Ukrainians to abort the plan.

October 17, 2023 Posted by | Aletho News | , | Leave a comment

Denmark is the latest European country turning away from transgender mutilation of children

By Jonathon Van Maren | Life Site News | September 15, 2023

The news that Denmark is moving away from the so-called “affirmative model of care” approach to youth struggling with gender dysphoria exposes, once again, how utterly radical and out of step with the rest of the world Canada and blue America are on the issue of “sex changes” for minors. Predictably, mainstream media outlets have ignored this development entirely — there is no press coverage that I can find. This may be due to the fact that this shift was published in the major medical journal Ugeskrift for Læger, the Journal of the Danish Medical Association, in Danish.  

Fortunately, the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine (SEGM) has published a synopsis, noting that most “youth referred to the centralized gender clinic no longer get a prescription for puberty blockers, hormones, or surgery—instead they receive therapeutic counseling and support.” SEGM published a summary of the shift:  

In the last several weeks, health journalists have reported that change may be afoot in Denmark. The article in Denmark’s Medical Association journal Ugeskrift for Læger leaves very little doubt that Denmark too has made a course correction in youth gender transitions, restricting this option to very few cases, while prioritizing counseling for the vast majority of the currently presenting youths. The article is an excellent summary of the rise-and-fall-of the “gender affirmation” model of care in Denmark. It describes how in 2016, following the influence of other northern European countries, Denmark chose to offer “a treatment approach with few barriers to hormone treatment for children and young people with gender dysphoria.” The treatment was justified by the foundational Dutch studies, “which indicated better well-being and body satisfaction after hormone treatment, a low degree of regret and few side effects.” However, the increasing number of referrals, changes in the presentation in gender dysphoria, and growing reports of regret—combined with a lack of long-term outcomes of the one and only sample of youth (n=55) on which the entire practice of gender transition rests—led the Danish clinicians to reverse course.

This is consistent with developments in the U.K., where the Tavistock gender clinic has been shut down and the NHS is changing course on “sex change” surgeries, and Sweden, which halted “hormone therapy” for minors in February 2022.  

The Finns are following a similar path. In fact, Finnish medical guidelines distinguish between early-onset child gender dysphoria and adolescent-onset gender, stating that some gender confusion or exploration can be a natural part of growing up and almost entirely forbidding medical intervention until “identity and personality development appear to be stable.” In the meantime, psychotherapy is recommended for gender dysphoria, and surgical interventions are forbidden for those under the age of 18. Puberty blocking is also considered explicitly experimental, and if utilized in severe circumstances, the patients are sent to a research clinic and medical professionals ensure that they are “able to understand the significance of irreversible treatments and benefits and disadvantages associated with lifelong hormone therapy, and that no contraindications are present.”  

Meanwhile, in Canada the National Post is reporting that Canadian surgeons are performing double mastectomies of healthy breasts on girls as young as age 14. The lawsuits have already begun as horrified young women realize they were ushered on the path to “transition” and “gender affirming care” before they could truly understand what they were doing — most recently, 21-year-old Luka Hein of Minnesota filed a lawsuit against the doctors who surgically removed her breasts at the age of 16, when she was going through a difficult time and struggled with gender dysphoria.  

“I was going through the darkest and most chaotic time in my life, and instead of being given the help I needed, these doctors affirmed that chaos into reality,” she told the Daily Mail. “I don’t think kids can ever consent to having full bodily functions taken away at a young age before they even know what that means.” She’s right. The Swedes, the Finns, and now the Danes are coming to the same conclusion.   

September 17, 2023 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , , | Leave a comment

Hungary may still reject Sweden’s NATO membership: top Fidesz politician

Sweden and Finland’s NATO membership would have merited a wider social debate

By Laura Szalai | Mandiner | September 7, 2023

Sweden’s NATO membership is supposed to be imminent, but there are now signs that Hungary is balking at the possibility of Sweden in NATO, with the Hungarian speaker of the house, László Kövér, stating in an interview that his Fidesz party has a number of security concerns about Sweden and even Finland’s membership.

Kövér said that contrary to claims of the mainstream liberal media, Hungary is not waiting for Turkey in order to ratify Sweden’s NATO membership, and this will be a sovereign decision of the country.

“Fidesz-KDNP is a living political community, so its members may have different opinions. And many of us in the parliamentary group think it would be worth waiting for a decision. After all, a new member would be joining the military alliance with which we would need to have a fundamental relationship of trust if we are to entrust our defense to each other,” Kövér said during an interview with Mandiner while kicking off the autumn parliamentary season.

If Hungary steps back from approving Sweden’s membership, it could mark a major blow to Sweden’s NATO aspirations. Kövér said that while both the Hungarian government and Hungarian President Katalin Novak have made clear their support for Sweden’s yet-to-be-ratified NATO membership, many MPs in the ruling Fidesz coalition have reservations.

“There has been absolutely no basis for this trust in Swedish politics, especially on the left, in recent years. On the contrary, it has been in the vanguard when it comes to attacking Hungary, and I have not seen any gestures since then to show that, if they were to join NATO with our approval, they would indeed regard us as an equal ally and not as a lackey,” said the ruling party’s politician.

Kövér also said that the profound geopolitical impact of Sweden and Finland’s NATO membership should have merited a deeper debate.

“Two traditionally neutral countries, Finland and Sweden, are giving up their positions, the latter as a NATO hopeful, and stepping straight into Russia’s front line. This in itself is a development worthy of a wider, deeper debate in Hungary and in Europe. In my opinion, the accession of these two countries to the North Atlantic military alliance will in fact weaken, not strengthen, Europe’s security,” Kövér said.

Asked to expand on that thought, Kövér added:

“Because it increases the literal and metaphorical interface between Russia and NATO, which I think is not even in the interests of the Swedish and Finnish people. I would also point out that there was a referendum on accession in Hungary, whereas in Finland and Sweden, which are always trying to teach us about democracy, the people were not even consulted.

“There are subtle signs that the remaining neutral countries, Austria and even Switzerland, are under some diplomatic pressure from overseas and the EU center to rethink their position on the outside. It is therefore about something more than the security situation of two northern countries or even of Europe as a whole.”

September 7, 2023 Posted by | Militarism | , , , , | Leave a comment

Doubt in Denmark

Another progressive country is having second thoughts about paediatric gender transition

BY BERNARD LANE | GENDER CLINIC NEWS | AUGUST 13, 2023

Denmark has taken a step towards caution in gender care by offering a form of counselling rather than medical treatments to the main patient group of teenagers with no childhood history of distress in their birth sex.

Official acknowledgment of a change in treatment policy was given on May 31 by the Liberal Party Health Minister Sophie Løhde during parliamentary debate of an unsuccessful resolution seeking a total ban on medical transition of minors.

Ms Løhde said that medical treatment at the Danish central gender clinic in Copenhagen—the Sexology Clinic—would only be offered “if the child or young person has had gender dysphoria since childhood.”

“If the gender dysphoria has started in connection with puberty, the young person may, among other things, be referred to a process of reflection or clarification,” she said.

“This process is often finalised without medical treatment, as the indication for treatment is not considered present.”

The dominant patient profile internationally is adolescent-onset dysphoria, chiefly affecting females, but the (limited and contested) evidence base for puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for minors mostly derives from past studies of classic early childhood-onset dysphoria typically among males.

Gender distress that appears at or after the onset of puberty, often following online immersion and transgender identity declarations among school friends, is commonly referred to as Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD) following the 2018 preliminary study of American public health researcher Dr. Lisa Littman.

Dr. Littman’s work is well known in Nordic countries. Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare last year referenced her 2021 detransitioners study and declared that the very low rate of treatment regret claimed by youth gender clinics “no longer stands unchallenged”.

Sweden and Finland are the most advanced in the post-2019 Nordic shift to caution, while health authorities in Norway are under pressure after the country’s independent healthcare investigation agency declared in March that medicalised gender change for young people was “experimental” and should be confined to clinical trials.

Systematic reviews of the evidence base undertaken in Finland and Sweden showed it to be weak (as did reviews in the United Kingdom).

“[Although in Denmark’s parliament] the issue of gender reassignment for children and other identity policy topics seems strongly divided into blocs, we feel that this is by no means the case in the general population, when the seriousness of the matter finally dawns on people. Many simply did not know that this was happening”—Danish Rainbow Council post, 2 March 2023

Denmark’s point of difference is that the call for an end to medical transition of minors is being spearheaded by a mainstream LGBT group, the Danish Rainbow Council, launched in 2022 under the leadership of transsexual Marcus Dib Jensen. The organisation is pledged to child safeguarding and recognition of gender dysphoria as a mental disorder, while opposing the extremes of gender ideology.

In May’s parliamentary debate, Minister Løhde faced pointed questions on gender medicine from politicians Mette Thiesen and Mikkel Bjørn, both members of the populist Danish People’s Party.

The minister presented the treatment policy change as an evolution influenced by developments in the field and clinical judgment. She was not specific about which medical treatment was being withheld from patients with adolescent-onset dysphoria (or ROGD), nor the timing of the policy change.

She noted that the Sexology Clinic had “become more reluctant to offer hormone treatment” to young people.

“This reluctance manifests itself particularly regarding young people with gender dysphoria that arises in connection with puberty.

“I think it is a positive thing that there is [such] a response to research and experience… both in Denmark, but also abroad, which we must follow closely. And this knowledge and experience lead to adjustments in the current treatment options.”

The group LGBT+ Danmark, whose slogan is “Global Queer Solidarity” and which campaigns for “better gender-confirming treatment”, told GCN that the minister’s remarks referred not to a change in general treatment guidelines but to “an adjustment in the practice” of the Sexology Clinic last year.

GCN put questions to the clinic and to Denmark’s health ministry.

Video: “You can be uncomfortable with reality, but it doesn’t change reality”—Marcus Dib Jensen, chairman of the Danish Rainbow Council

Big change

A recent commentary article on the minister’s remarks posted by the Danish Rainbow Council’s deputy chairman Jesper W. Rasmussen said:

“It is important to understand how significant it is that as many as 80 per cent of the children who previously underwent gender reassignment surgery will now, in the minister’s own words, no longer be able to undergo this controversial, irreversible treatment.

“Since [the minister’s comments], we have received several emails from relieved parents of ROGD children, and in the coming months we will keep a close eye on whether these children continue to be free from hormonal sex reassignment.

“We will do this by regularly requesting access to the treatment statistics from the Sexology Clinic [at the specialist hospital Rigshospitalet].”

The resolution for a total ban, put up in March by the populist New Right party after all other members of parliament had ignored apolitical appeals from the rainbow council, was not expected to pass in the government-controlled chamber.

But the council argued that the result was significant because public debate had been unleashed and the authorities were put under pressure.

The council suspected that the de-medicalisation of adolescent-onset (or ROGD) cases had been enacted without formal announcement in 2022, thereby explaining a sharp decline that year in the number of minors undergoing hormonal treatment.

Roughly 80 per cent of the 341 minors who had undergone medicalised gender change from 2015 to 2022 were believed to be in the ROGD category, the council said.

Since 2015, when Ms Løhde was also health minister, minors have been able to undergo irreversible medical gender reassignment without parental consent from the age of 15.

“A top [American] pediatric psychiatry organization has nixed at least three panels with leading European psychologists about Europe’s move away from chemical interventions for children with gender dysphoria, raising questions about the politicization of American medicine and underscoring a clinical divide between the United States and much of the world”—Aaron Sibarium, news report, The Washington Free Beacon, 11 August 2023

Future unknown

In 2021, Sexology Clinic consultant Dr. Mette Ewers Haahr gave an interview to the Dagbladet Information media outlet in which she acknowledged “a lack of research” relevant to today’s mostly teenage female patients and her concerns about why these girls wanted to change gender.

“We see that treatment helps young people in the short term. But we lack knowledge about what happens in ten and 20 years. Or when they want to have children. What happens when they fall in love and start to have an active sex life?” Dr. Haahr said.

“Transgender young people assigned female have, for the most part, no active sex life. Not even with themselves. How will their sex life develop and does this affect their perception of their gender? We have sometimes seen in young people that gender and sex life interact and change together.”

Dr. Haahr’s comments about the weak evidence base prompted the rainbow council to ask why the authorities had allowed such a confident regimen of paediatric transition to begin in 2015.

“As adults, we must dare to step up and say stop this madness. We castrate and sterilise children and physically destroy their otherwise healthy bodies to alleviate a psychological discomfort that is usually temporary and, if not, can be treated with a sex change on the other side of puberty,” the council’s June 2 comment said.

No surgery on minors

In May’s parliamentary debate, Minister Løhde also said that under new referral guidelines, it would no longer be permissible to offer transgender surgery such as mastectomy to children under age 18—“an option that, by the way, has never been used in Denmark.”

She said the country’s “entire guidance on health care for individuals with gender identity issues” was being reviewed.

GCN asked the Danish Health Authority if a systematic review of the evidence base would be undertaken.

A spokeswoman for the authority said: “We are in the process of updating the existing guideline and we will consult leading experts in that revision.”

In a post on a Danish study dealing with trans identity and suicide attempts, the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine (SEGM) said:

“It remains to be seen whether the Danish Health Authority will take a cautious approach to the treatment of gender-dysphoric youth like the growing number of their European counterparts, or whether Denmark will choose to align with the current direction supported by a number of U.S. medical societies that assert that medical gender transition should be widely available for all youths who desire it.”

Copenhagen psychotherapist and former teacher Lotte Ingerslev, who writes the blog Transgender: the Fine Print and is a member of SEGM, told GCN that the Danish health minister’s May 31 remarks were “very, very important.”

She said the minister had represented this policy shift “as simply a result of the doctors ‘following the evidence’, and not a complete and utter break with their previous approach.”

Ms Ingerslev said this appeared to be a government tactic for “evading responsibility for the utter disregard for children’s bodies and lives.”

Nonetheless, she said the policy change meant “that teenagers will no longer be able to expect to get hormones as a quick fix for their loneliness, autism or inner homophobia.”

But she said these concessions to caution by the government and the Sexology Clinic were not enough and “the transing of children needs to be stopped completely.”

“Otherwise, the general public, schools, day-care centres and parents of gender-non-conforming children get a message from the state saying that gender-non-conformity is a sign that a child is ‘trans’, which goes against all evidence,” she said.

Opt-out females

In her 2021 media interview, the Sexology Clinic’s Dr. Haahr wondered aloud about why female patients are disproportionately represented in gender clinic caseloads.

She worried that for some girls, transition was more about “opting out of the feminine than opting into the masculine”, and more to do with physical discomfort than a different gender identity.

“When the birth-assigned girls reach puberty and their bodies change, some of them start to have these thoughts. Maybe the outside world has started to react differently to them because their bodies are suddenly sexualised,” Dr. Haahr said.

“They may not get as much speaking time, they’re belittled if they take up too much space, and certain girl things are expected of them that they can’t identify with. And then they feel really, really bad about their feminine bodies.

“Unlike the children [with early-onset dysphoria], who have experienced themselves as a different gender for as long as they can remember, we see that some of the [teenage] girls… have only had these thoughts for six months and are determined that they need body modification treatment. And then it becomes really difficult to figure out what it’s all about and what the right thing to do is.”

She said she paid particular attention to whether these girls had suffered traumatic experiences such as bullying, assault or sexual abuse.

“Abuse during adolescence and childhood can lead to alienation from one’s body. That’s where we need to be extra vigilant.”

She said today’s teenage female patients sometimes used formulaic language seemingly not their own when explaining why they wished to transition—it was like “listening to them read from a Facebook manual”.

She defended Dr. Littman’s 2018 ROGD study, which generated an international backlash from “gender-affirming” clinicians and trans activists, as well as pressure for the journal to issue a “correction” which in fact left the Littman hypothesis unchanged.

Dr. Haahr’s gender clinic colleague, chief physician Astrid Højgaard dismissed the ROGD hypothesis and objected that right-wing groups were enthusiastic about the idea of trans social contagion.

But Dr Haahr said:

“It is not my impression that Littman has done the research to appease the right wing or because she is transphobic, but because she thought the phenomenon should be studied.

“I think that if we can’t talk about this very large increase in the number of birth-assigned girls seeking to change their bodies during puberty, then it’s going to be a problem for all transgender people in the future.”

August 16, 2023 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Video | , , | Leave a comment

Sweden’s “Psychological Defense Agency” is Using Cold War Strategies to Combat “Disinformation”

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | August 14, 2023

Sweden is blaming Russia for the backlash it faces in the Islamic world because of incidents, such as the burning of copies of Quran, that have occurred in that country.

Apparently, Muslims around the world, and in Sweden, would not be outraged by this if there weren’t for Russia’s alleged campaign on social media to spread this information. That is defined as “amplifying global reaction.”

At least, that is being cited as the reason – or an excuse that few will dare criticize – for yet another government devising and putting in motion plans to “combat misinformation.”

Sweden seems very eager to join that club, even if it doesn’t look like it’s brimming with innovative ideas: namely, the Scandinavian country is going all the way back to the Cold War playbook.

With the stage set like this, enter the Ministry of Defense’s Psychological Defense Agency, set up last year, but according to reports, modeled after Sweden’s Cold War-era “solutions” in case of a hot war.

Just like elsewhere around the world when (mis)information is “fought” by introducing new agencies and increasing government intervention in the realm of free speech, that often ends up in censorship – and often looks like it was actually designed to promote censorship – the justification is that such fundamental things like national security and democracy are under fire from “misinformation.”

The Psychological Defense Agency, which currently numbers 55 employees, is explained as a necessity for a country which believes it is currently facing the most serious security “situation” since WW2. At least that’s according to Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson.

Whether or not Kristersson exaggerates the situation, thus creating a “misinformation campaign” of his own aside, the Defense Ministry outfit’s existence has produced some protestations.

Speaking of threats to democracy – Hanna Linderstal of Earhart Business Protection Agency noted that, “The government can’t control the truth if it’s going to be a democracy.”

Meanwhile Magnus Hjort, who heads the Psychological Defense Agency, and others under his “command” have not publicly presented what evidence they have of Russia being behind harmful to Sweden information “amplification.”

But he did reveal the agency is “regularly in touch” with social media companies – denying, however, that they have demanded that accounts or content be taken down.

August 14, 2023 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia | | Leave a comment

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