Putin Announces Suspension of New START Treaty, Orders New Strategic Systems Be Put on Combat Duty
Sputnik – 21.02.2023
Russia will be suspending its participation in the New Strategic Arms Reduction (New START) Treaty, President Vladimir Putin has announced.
The Russian president made the announcement during the course of a major annual address to lawmakers on Tuesday that focused on the security crisis in Ukraine and the broader global tensions between the West and Russia.
“They [the West] seek to inflict a strategic defeat on us and to creep onto our nuclear sites. In connection with this, I am forced to announce today that Russia is suspending its participation in the New START Treaty. I repeat – not exiting from the treaty, but suspending its participation,” Putin said, speaking to gathered lawmakers in Moscow during his speech to the Federal Assembly.
Putin explained that “at the start of February, the North Atlantic Alliance made a statement factually demanding that Russia ‘return to the implementation of the strategic offensive arms treaty,’ including the admission of inspections to our nuclear and defense facilities.”
“I don’t even know what to call this – some kind of theater of the absurd. We know that the West is involved directly in attempts of the Kiev regime to strike the bases of our strategic aviation,” Putin said, pointing to recent Ukrainian drone attacks on Russia’s Engels Air Base, home to part of the airborne contingent of Russia’s nuclear triad.
The drones used in these attacks were “equipped and modernized with the assistance of NATO specialists,” Putin said. “And now they want to inspect our defense facilities. In the current conditions and today’s confrontation, this simply sounds like some kind of nonsense.”
“A week ago, I signed a decree putting new ground-based strategic weapons systems on combat duty. Are they going to stick their nose in there too?” Putin asked.
The Russian president suggested that NATO’s collective statement essentially amounted to an application to join the New START Treaty, and said Moscow would only welcome such a move.
“We agree, please go ahead. Furthermore, we think that such a formulation of the issue is long overdue. After all, NATO contains not just one nuclear power – the USA. Britain and France also have nuclear arsenals, which are being developed and improved, and which are also directed against us, against Russia,” Putin said.
Slamming the US and NATO over the “hypocrisy” of their demands, Putin recalled how the Western bloc has attempted to assure Moscow that “there is no connection between issues related to strategic offensive arms and, say, the conflict in Ukraine, or other hostile actions against our country,” while at the same time seeking to “defeat” Russia militarily.
“This is either the height of hypocrisy and cynicism, or the height of stupidity. You can’t call them idiots, they are not stupid people: they want to inflict a strategic defeat on us,” the president said.
What is New START and Why Is It Important?
The New START Treaty is the last major strategic arms limitation agreement between the nuclear superpowers – Russia and the United States. The agreement, drafted in 2009 and signed by then-Russian and US Presidents Dmitry Medvedev and Barack Obama in Prague, Czech Republic in 2010, limits the two countries’ deployed arsenals of strategic weapons and nuke stockpiles, and features a series of measures aimed at increased transparency and trust, including the broadcast of telemetry data, limits to missile testing activities, and the exchange of other information.
The Trump administration threatened to let the clock run out on New START in late 2020 after withdrawing from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty – a late Cold War-era pact which eliminated Soviet and US ground-based nuclear missiles in the 500-5,500 km range, in 2019. The Biden administration agreed to renew New START for five years in early 2021. Pentagon planners have repeatedly criticized the strategic treaty for its failure to account for the nuclear arsenal of China. Beijing has said that it would be happy to sign a nuclear agreement with Washington if the US reduced the size of its nuclear arsenal to China’s level.
The post-Cold War strategic security order began to be dismantled in late 2001, when the George W. Bush administration announced that it would scrap the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty – a landmark 1972 agreement designed to limit anti-missile defenses and thus reduce the danger of a global nuclear war. Washington quit the treaty despite proposals by Moscow at the time to establish a joint missile defense system in the Caucasus to eliminate any threats posed to the US or Europe.
Leaked files reveal Britain’s ambulances aided terrorists in war-torn Syria
By Kit Klarenberg | Press TV | February 20, 2023
On February 6, Syria and Turkey were rocked by devastating back-to-back earthquakes. Ever since, people in these countries and the region have been subjected to a particularly merciless – yet illuminating – crash course in Western double standards on humanitarian aid.
While aid and assistance have flowed into Istanbul and Damascus from all neighbors, initially many governments were reticent to dispatch anything at all to Syria, because US and EU sanctions made it illegal for planes to land in its airports.
It meant that those eager to provide humanitarian assistance could not dispatch it, for fear of dire repercussions. Such concerns were well-founded. Washington enforces sanctions with an iron fist, and any individual or state breaching them faces severe penalties.
Giving in to intense global public pressure, the US Treasury on February 10 enacted a 180-day waiver on certain sanctions imposed on Syria, to allow for vital earthquake relief to reach the country.
Still, neither Washington nor its constellation of international allies has provided any meaningful assistance to Damascus whatsoever, despite the death toll in the country grimly ratcheting daily.
Meanwhile, Israeli regime officials expressed the readiness to bomb Iranian aid deliveries arriving by land. And, in the end, they ended up bombing the people still recovering from the shock of a colossal human tragedy.
Complicating matters further, terrorist groups that still occupy portions of Syrian territories, such as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in the northwest, are blocking the government’s attempts to distribute provisions, a spokesperson for HTS in Idlib telling Reuters no shipments would be permitted to pass its checkpoints, on the basis, “we won’t allow the regime to take advantage of the situation to show they are helping.”
These pockets crisscross the country, an enduring and shameful legacy of the West’s failed decade-long dirty war against Damascus.
Almost never acknowledged by the mainstream media, their continued presence is particularly relevant to consider now, for they are relics of a time when the Western world was only too eager to invest vast sums to flood Syria with medical aid, albeit in service of “regime change”.
Healthcare as psychological warfare
In August 2016, a remarkable and never-before-disclosed covert British intelligence operation began near Amman, Jordan.
At a secret training site operated by London and Washington, British Foreign Office contractor Torchlight – which this journalist has repeatedly exposed for assisting Britain’s infiltration of security and spying agencies across West Asia – extensively tutored violent groups funded and armed by the spy agencies CIA and MI6 in providing medical assistance to terrorists and mercenaries.
Dubbed “MAO CASEVAC” (Moderate Armed Opposition Casualty Evacuation), the program ran the gamut from practical training for paramedics to the provision of multiple ambulances purchased from Qatar, advanced medical technology, elaborate communications systems to ensure the safe and timely transfer of injured “rebels” from the frontline, and the creation and maintenance of dedicated facilities to treat the wounded, at a cost of millions.
Internal documents related to the effort note that at the time it was launched, injured fighters relied “on inadequately prepared and supported self-help at the point of injury, followed by ad hoc systems and capabilities to evacuate and treat them in a hostile and austere environment,” with an overwhelming reliance on civilian hospitals and healthcare infrastructure.
Moreover, CIA and MI6-supported terrorist groups lacked “dedicated doctors”, and medical professionals locally, while willing to treat anyone whatever their ailments, remained “keen to maintain their independence” lest they be accused of serving as in-house doctors for armed actors.
These practitioners even lacked high-tech equipment such as scanners for detecting internal bleeding, and access to resources such as blood products.
So it was Torchlight that set about training 200 opposition actors every year for three years in all conceivable medical disciplines and equipping them accordingly.
While London was careful not to publicize the initiative’s existence in any way, its results were intended to be broadcast widely locally and internationally – for MAO CASEVAC’s objectives were as practical as they were psychological.
It was hoped that on top of saving lives and protecting the welfare of terrorists, their “morale and motivation” would all “be enhanced”, while “purpose, ethos and culture” would be instilled in them:
“If the MAO is able to provide this support then fighters will have greater confidence that they can be provided for in case of injury. Consequently, this will improve motivation, a sense of welfare, and the credibility of MAO troops, as well as reduce battlefield losses. This will add credibility to the MAO.”
As such, MAO CASEVAC was but one component of Britain’s wide-ranging information warfare campaign throughout the Syrian dirty war, designed to destabilize the democratically-elected government of Bashar al-Assad, while rebranding the murderous militant groups rampaging across the country as a “moderate” alternative. Its founding documents make these objectives very clear.
Noting that the British government sought to “foster a negotiated political transition” in Syria, these papers openly state that MAO CASEVAC’s aim was to “generate pressure” on the Assad government.
This was predicated on the notion that “regime change” required “an empowered opposition on the ground,” capable of convincing locals, Western citizens and international bodies that they were courageous freedom fighters on a righteous mission, rather than a ragtag bunch of crazed fundamentalists complicit in countless hideous atrocities, wholly dependent on foreign backing to survive in every way.
Of course, if the opposition could demonstrate to the world they were highly skilled in saving lives, it would go some way to cementing the perception of a professional, humanitarian-orientated force.
This was precisely the rationale behind the creation of the White Helmets – a terrorist group masquerading as a civil defense force – by the British intelligence agency.
‘Risk of ricochet’
Another indication of MAO CASEVAC’s darker nature is provided in Torchlight documents on risks related to its operation.
The training area in Jordan, provided to the company by British intelligence “at no cost to the project,” offered “accommodation, ablution, dining, classrooms, driving tracks, outside rural environment areas, and open space for equipment storage.”
However, the milieu was far from idyllic – medics would be trained alongside opposition fighters learning the art of killing, including the use of AK47s and other weaponry. The proximity between the two programs was such, Torchlight repeatedly warned of the “physical security risk” posed to their students by the site’s dual purpose:
“Another training conducted on the site involves live firing. Consequently, third-party personnel are in possession of weapons and live ammunition on the camp in addition to the Jordanian Security Personnel on site. Risk of ricocheting from the live firing ranges onto the driving range and wider area behind. There is likely to be an overlap of live firing and driving courses [emphasis added].”
If that wasn’t enough, Torchlight also forecast the threat of a “disaffected student” or Jordanian security operative “in possession of a weapon and ammunition” carrying out an armed attack on its staff and trainees to be “high” risk.
Absent was any consideration of students joining the al-Nusra Front and Daesh Takfiri group, and equipment being one way or another appropriated by these terrorist groups, although such considerations are writ large in leaked Foreign Office risk assessments of the fighter training program, which was likewise overseen by British intelligence cutouts.
However, the UK Foreign Office, which funded the program to the tune of $21 million over the same timeframe as MAO CASEVAC, with up to 600 fighters trained annually as a result, was intensely relaxed about those prospects. Any loss of equipment was to be “tolerated” to “a reasonable degree.”
The same was true of AJACS, a controversial British intelligence “aid” project that created the Free Syrian Police, which was run in coordination with Nour al-Din al-Zinki, a CIA-backed entity linked to heinous crimes against humanity, including the videotaped beheading of a Palestinian teenager in 2016.
The implementing contractor of that effort, the notorious Adam Smith International, simply didn’t consider it “cost-effective” to prevent their participation.
All of this begs the question of whether the real objective behind MAO CASEVAC and other interrelated British intelligence operations was to insidiously bolster and equip the most violent, deranged elements on the ground in Syria.
At the very least, it’s evident that whatever anxieties London may harbor today about humanitarian aid making its way to earthquake-hit Syria, an enemy state in dire need of respite, hasn’t historically applied to terrorist groups that further its interests in the country.
This may explain why they remain active there so long after the dirty war theoretically ended.
JUDGE TELLS GUILTY JUST STOP OIL LOONS TO “FEEL PROUD” AND SAYS “YOU ARE ALL GOOD PEOPLE”
Gaia Fawkes | February 17, 2023
Seven Just Stop Oil eco-loons who were found guilty of raids on an Esso Fuel Terminal in Birmingham last year have been spared jail by a sympathetic judge in Wolverhampton Magistrates’ Court… and told by the very same judge they should “feel proud” that they “care” so much. “Thank you for opening my eyes”…
In his extraordinary closing statement at the trial, loony left Judge Wilkinson lavished the criminal activists with praise, claiming “it’s abundantly clear that [they] are all good people” and promising to go easy on them:
“It’s abundantly clear that you are all good people. You are intelligent, articulate and a pleasure to deal with. It’s unarguable that man-made global warming is real and we are facing a climate emergency. Your aims are admirable and it is accepted by me and the Crown Prosecution Service that your views are reasonable and genuinely held. Your fears are ably and genuinely articulated and are supported by the science.” […]
“No-one can criticise your motivations. You all gave evidence that was deeply moving. I certainly was moved. The tragedy is that good people have felt so much, without hope, that you feel you have to come into conflict with the criminal justice system. Thank you for opening my eyes to certain things. Most, I was acutely and depressingly aware of, but there were certain things.
“I say this and I mean this sadly, I have to convict you. You are good people and I will not issue a punitive sentence. Your arrests and loss of good character are sufficient. Good people doing the wrong thing cannot make the wrong thing right. I don’t say this, ever, but it has been a pleasure dealing with you.”
“You should feel guilty for nothing. You should feel proud that you care, have concern for the future. I urge you not to break the law again. Good luck to all of you.”
After hearing that glowing testimonial from the man expected to enforce the law on them, the seven protesters were eventually sentenced to a 12-month conditional discharge and made to pay a £22 surcharge each. Is it any wonder they’re not put off from making people’s lives miserable?
Scholz’s Judgement Under the Spotlight Now Over Nord Stream Bombs. But What About Bojo?

By Martin Jay | Strategic Culture Foundation | February 17, 2023
As the world holds its breath and gasps at the news that Germany has been egregiously used as America’s pawn in a sick power game which is filling the coffers of U.S. companies and making Joe Biden’s buddies in the military industry billionaires, many will reflect on the judgement of Olaf Scholz and ask whether he is fit to be the German chancellor. He may have known about Biden’s plan to blow up the Nord Stream pipelines which would guarantee that Germany would not only throw itself into the war against Russia, but stay at it in the long run, which is bad enough. Or he may not have known and was as shocked as anyone when it happened in June of last year during a NATO exercise.
In either case, Scholz’s judgement will be examined now for a very long time and a process of opprobrium has in fact already started in the same building where he announced that he would throw the lever on a 200 billion euro spending spree to ‘rearm’ the German army: the German parliament.
While the German press follows its lead from their masters in the coalition government which Scholz presides over by pretending that the Hersh piece doesn’t exist, MPs like Sevim Dağdelen regale the government in a bold speech. “Stop defaming the journalist & his sources! The German government must disclose its findings on the #terrorist attacks on #NordStream , considering that revelations by #SeymourHersh point to the responsibility of the #USA & #Norway” she summarizes in a tweet.
Scholz is of course in a quandary. Whichever way he turns he sees his career shot to shreds so the best course is to hope that the media will serve him admirably and help him with the ruse of simply closing one’s eyes and hoping the commotion will die down.
But the debate is actually gaining momentum in some strange places and this will only serve the purpose once again for social media to ask the critical questions for the incumbent journalists to write up, like stenographers.
In the UK, it is Boris Johnson who, despite no longer being PM, is still making the news for being an inept buffoon who can’t help getting entangled in sleaze and corruption scandals – some about him or others simply about bent MPs who he goes to some length to protect.
This time it is the appointment of the BBC chief, who, it turns out is a crony of Johnson’s who he owed a huge favour to. Richard Price, according to a parliamentary report, arranged for Bojo to have 800,000 pounds ‘loan’ from a Canadian businessman. After arranging such a kind gesture Price, who was an advisor of Johnson in Downing Street, made it be known that he wanted the top job. And he got it.
It’s this kind of ‘jobs for the boys’ corruption stories which most Brits wouldn’t be too bothered about as, apart from only expecting this from Johnson whose entire tenure in government is a trail of havoc of lies, deceit and sleaze, the UK public is getting used to the idea that Whitehall and Parliament are now fully-fledged US style centres of corruption.
The remarkable thing about the Richard Price story though is that it was not the fourth estate who broke it. Given the tawdry, unhealthy relationship between big media in the UK and the establishment most investigative journalists have taken up other professions as ‘graft’ as a subject isn’t an easy commodity to flog to those in the media who themselves are tacitly as corrupt as the elite they serve. Such journalists are in dwindling numbers in the UK.
And so it was Nicholas Wilson, an anti-corruption sleuth, who dug the dirt up and joined up the dots creating this latest sleaze story about a bent BBC boss, who, while a Johnson advisor managed to get 600,000 pounds from the government for one of his companies. This is how UK governments work these days. A little bit more sophisticated than brown envelopes or insider trading. But not much. Make yourself useful to a corrupt leader who has the morals of a sewer rat and then name your price in the form of a top job as payment.
But judgement is also an issue here. If Johnson was happy to harangue close friends for money and put it out that he was looking for a large cash donation, then surely any third-rate hack would ask “what about the Ukraine war?”. Does Johnson have a financial stake in this war? Recently he was in Kiev and then Washington doing his bit for lobbying. Given this new role and the fact that he was the first western leader to send ammo to Ukraine, is it not fair to ask “Is he on the Zelensky payroll these days?”. Was he also in the loop on the pipeline bombing plan? All reasonable questions that UK journalists would no doubt like to examine. Be patient. They’re no doubt waiting for an out of work activist to get onto Twitter and do their jobs for them.
Logically Unsound
Taxpayer cash used to carry out Stasi-style Government Covert Ops
Health Advisory & Recovery Team | February 16, 2023
Two weeks ago civil liberties group Big Brother Watch released a damning report – entitled ‘Ministry of Truth’, a reference to George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 – revealing highly questionable present day behaviour by shadowy UK Government agencies. The charge sheet includes the setting up of opaque surveillance squads to
- monitor people who are “critical of the government”,
- “tackle a range of harmful narratives online” and
- outsource some of this dirty work – at taxpayer expense – to army units (the 77th brigade) and private (privateer?) companies such as Logically.ai (TheLogically Ltd), which claims to ‘intercept [misinformation and disinformation] threats before they become widespread’.

Picture credit: UK Column News
Reading this, you might be forgiven for thinking you had accidentally stumbled into the Science Fiction section of your local bookshop – despite the parallels, this is not a review of a rehashed version of Philip K Dick’s Minority Report.
No: this, unfortunately, is real. HART itself has been on the receiving end of some Logically’s shoddy – and shady – ‘threat interception’, and it is extremely disheartening to note that at the same time as carrying out its sinister actions, this entity was in receipt of more than £1 million of taxpayer cash to fund its operations.
HART’s experience with the disagreeable Logically.ai outfit came in the summer of 2021. Shortly after we had come together as a volunteer group to counter nonsensical government propaganda and policy, six months’ worth of our internal group messaging was leaked and made public. Logically.ai then gleefully dissected and publicised this ‘leak’, attempting to frame our activities as being somehow subversive by publishing out-of-context quotes from these informal chat logs. We reported this to the police, who agreed that this constituted an illegal hack. The police issued a URN number and one of the perpetrators was identified, but no prosecution ensued. We picked ourselves up, published this riposte to the mud-slingers, and carried on speaking out in the hope that balanced discourse might be resumed.
Though highly objectionable and disruptive to us – and very painful for a handful of our volunteer team who were subsequently targeted – ultimately these leaks only helped establish HART’s credentials – the worst any independent reader of the leaks could conclude is that (1) the grammar of our internal chat logs is not up the standard of our public output and (2) we were somewhat naïve in expressing our unadulterated views on some of the charlatans running the show.
Logically.ai pressed home their ‘threat interception’ mandate by smearing our work. Here are some extracts:
- Apart from claims that the government is controlling the media, HART believes that the government is using “covert ‘nudges,” and psychological strategies to “increase compliance” with measures, as well as with vaccinations. “Several interventions of this type have been woven into the intensive communication campaign,” a member writes, alleging that fear, shame and peer-pressure are being weaponized by the government.
- HART members are critical of policies such as lockdowns, mask-wearing, and vaccination.
- HART members frequently recommend alternative treatments such as ivermectin and vitamin D.
- The members [of HART] also repeatedly make claims about the media being controlled, social media censoring their views (a number of members have moved to Parler and Gab), often stating that journalists cannot be trusted.
Astute readers will notice that these statements have either been completely vindicated or can be deemed to have been a prudent assessment of the complex risk-reward profile of certain irreversible interventions. In summary, the UK Government used taxpayer money to pay a ‘threat interceptor’ to discredit HART’s correct statements and replace these with fictions of their own making.
It is therefore galling – to say the least – to note that Logically.ai, a government contractor, presented a Kafkaesque self-referenced submission to the House of Commons Joint Pre-legislative Scrutiny Committee on the Draft Online Safety Bill by stating that its “investigation into the HART Group is just one example of how those pushing misinformation target legitimate public figures and media outlets to amplify and endorse their content. Without thoughtful safeguards in place, there is a clear risk we could see more of this kind of activity, particularly around elections and political campaigns”.
Well quite. It is frustrating that they didn’t just quote Orwell:
“Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to BELIEVE that black is white, and more, to KNOW that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary”.
For a bit of Walter Mitty light relief, it is worth perusing some of Logically.ai’s so-called ‘fact-checks’. With about 98% of humanity having cottoned on by now, in January of 2023 the keyboard warriors at the UK Government’s favourite ‘threat interceptor’ were still bravely wading into battle in defence of virus-defeating shreds of damp cotton worn over one’s breathing orifices — Logically.ai’s efforts are extremely weak fodder compared to the recently updated Cochrane review of these ‘physical interventions to disrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses’.
All of this would be uproarious slapstick comedy if it wasn’t deadly serious. Logically.ai’s underhand disinformation campaigning has led to some of our voluntary senior clinician members who are full time nhs employees, facing long investigation processes, with threats to career and huge risk for their dependent families — this is nothing short of despicable, when these clinicians were doing nothing other than questioning dubious policies with no evidence base, thus aiming to protect their patients and the public and fulfil their oath to first do no harm.
Shortly after its action against HART, Logically.ai appointed Brian Murphy, a senior Department of Homeland Security and former FBI executive as ‘Vice President of Strategic Operations’. We do not need to ask why.
By suppressing legitimate discourse, the reprehensible actions of Logically.ai and its shadowy handlers will undoubtedly have contributed to supporting vested interests and corporate greed. How else did an “adult-only vaccine, for people over 50” end up getting injected into young children? Setting aside the exorbitant cost of this exercise, every single death and adverse event in anyone up to the age of 49 could have been avoided but for these people and entities that executed these ‘black ops’ against legitimate and constructive dissent. Do not take our word for it: even those that were cheerleaders for so-called “extraordinary vaccine success” have come round to our point of view:
“The entire population was vaccinated or offered the vaccine, which now looks like a terrible idea when there were deaths among young people who really had no need to be vaccinated. They were not at risk from Covid. The mantra was it limited transmission. We hear less about that now. Parliament was shut down. Government colluded with social media giants to suppress legitimate questions about the origin of the virus and all manner of other policy debates”.
Neatly summarised. If only the checks and balances had been in place to allow rational and constructive discourse – and shadowy ‘black ops’ outfits hadn’t been paid by the UK Government to deploy guerrilla tactics as part of ‘threat interception’ – many lives could have been saved. Yet Logically.ai’s work will have helped frighten politicians and journalists off engaging with HART (and other professional groups) who were providing a much-needed critical voice and therefore slowed a return to common sense thinking. Furthermore, some of our members (all of whom are unpaid volunteers) faced long investigation processes with professional regulators or employers. Trying to silence professionals — who may have dependent families — by threatening their careers is nothing short of despicable. These clinicians were doing nothing other than questioning dubious policies with no evidence base. Their primary intention was to their oath to first do no harm, and protect their patients and the public.
For those minded to think of the UK civil service as a benign & mostly ‘good’ counterweight to a (perhaps corrupted and politicised) UK Government, Big Brother Watch’s Ministry of Truth report is a shocking read, covering appalling behaviour by various parts of the UK Government and the civil service. While it has been extensively covered in various alternative media outlets as well as Spectator and the Mail on Sunday (“Army spied on lockdown critics: Sceptics, including our own Peter Hitchens, long suspected they were under surveillance. Now we’ve obtained official records that prove they were right all along”), mainstream coverage has been relatively forgiving. Our experience tells us that much more is yet to come to light. The Ministry of Truth report quite correctly points out that “Whitehall officials are tasked to make a success of government policies – not to act as an authority on truth. These two roles clearly conflict”. These conflicts have not yet been resolved.
The key take-away for those who have hitherto believed that ‘the system’ might be acting in your best interests is a recognition that possibly – just possibly – historical precedent should encourage at least a modicum of scepticism when lapping up the Party Line from so-called ‘trusted’ sources. Statements from ‘saintly’ leaders along the lines of “We will continue to be your single source of truth… unless you hear it from us, it is not the truth” are giant red flags – why does the truth need to be controlled by government diktat? Why does Ofcom still prescribe what broadcasters can and cannot say on topics of critical importance such as these we are seeking to discuss?
For those who have been attempting to challenge the mainstream ‘official’ narrative since March 2020, the Ministry of Truth report is little more than confirmation of what is already well known – or at least suspected – and of course there is great suspicion that this is just a ‘Limited Hangout’ (a controlled minor admission before the ‘dead cat’ strategy is deployed to move the conversation on). On the plus side, it is heartening to see that this is an apolitical topic – it is noteworthy that people from the left and right of the political spectrum are voicing concerns.
The authorities – or actors within – have systematically neutered discourse and the freedom of speech that are so critically necessary for democracy to work properly. Subsequent non-denials and obfuscation – and lack of any sort of regret – give a clue that what Big Brother Watch has been able to publish is likely only the tip of the iceberg.
Let us hope that those controlling the mainstream narrative will find the growing cacophony of peaceful & rational protest harder and harder to ignore.
Call to action:
- Please share this article with friends, family and colleagues
- If you haven’t already done so, please sign up for HART’s free regular bulletin here.
- Please read the Big Brother Watch Ministry of Truth report;
- Get active:
- If you have been affected by any of the ‘black ops’ outfits listed above, consider complaining, e.g. to the International Fact-Checking Network: https://ifcncodeofprinciples.poynter.org/complaints-policy
- Consider complaining about Logically.ai’s activities to the Cabinet Office and the Department of Culture, Media and Sport
- Write to Logically.ai’s shareholders, which include
- Vitruvian Partners
- Amazon Alexa Fund
- XTX Ventures, the venture capital affiliate of XTC Markets, a leading global algorithmic trading firm, and the
- Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund (NPIF – Mercia Equity Finance), managed by Mercia Asset Management PLC.
- The British Business Bank.
These investors have ethical responsibilities, and are regulated by the FCA. The industry association, the British Venture Capital Association, might also be interested.
Media Ignores Evidence That West Opposed Ukraine Peace Deal
BY NOAH CARL | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | FEBRUARY 14, 2023
As I noted in a previous article, the former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett revealed in a recent interview that in March of last year Western leaders blocked a draft peace deal between Russia and Ukraine.
There seems to be some disagreement over exactly what he said, as the interview was in Hebrew. Based on the English subtitles on YouTube, I quoted him as saying, “They blocked it.” But others insist he said, “They broke off negotiations.” Either way, he clearly implied that the West stymied negotiations that might have led to a peace deal.
What’s more telling is the reason he gave as to why the West did so, namely “to keep smashing Putin”. This tallies closely with Roman Romanyuk’s account of why Western leaders opposed negotiations in April:
Behind this visit and Johnson’s words lies much more than a simple reluctance to engage in agreements with Russia. The collective West, which back in February suggested that Zelenskyi surrender and run away, now felt that Putin is actually not as all-powerful as they imagined him to be. Moreover, right now there was a chance to “press him”. And the West wants to use it.
As Caitlin Johnstone points out, it also lines up with what the Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on April 20th last year:
Following the NATO foreign ministers’ meeting, it was the impression that … there are those within the NATO member states that want the war to continue, let the war continue and Russia gets weaker. They don’t care much about the situation in Ukraine.
So we now have a NATO Foreign Minister, a journalist with sources “close to Zelensky” and a former Israeli PM all saying that Western leaders opposed a peace deal because they wanted to “weaken”, “press” or “smash” Putin.
These seem like newsworthy revelations, don’t they? Not according to the mainstream media.
I checked whether the revelations have been mentioned by any of the following outlets: the BBC, CNN, the Times, the Guardian, the Telegraph, the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Wall Street Journal. With the exception of one op-ed in the New York Times which quoted Cavusoglu’s statement, they’ve been completely ignored.
The point here isn’t that there definitely would have been a peace deal if not for the actions of Western leaders. We can’t know that. The point is: there’s credible evidence that Western leaders stymied negotiations which might have led to a peace deal because they wanted to weaken Russia.
With the exception of Tucker Carlson and a few lesser-known outlets, why hasn’t the media covered this? One of the current headlines on the BBC News homepage is ‘Rihanna reveals pregnancy at Super Bowl show’. Which is more newsworthy: Rihanna’s personal life, or the revelation that Western leaders may have sabotaged peace? I’m reminded of this meme:

A few days ago, in fact, a BBC Ukraine journalist got up and hugged Zelensky at a press conference. However much you support a particular cause, as a journalist you’re supposed to show a modicum of impartiality. Based on this incident, I wouldn’t expect any dramatic shifts in coverage.
From the Peak of Fitness to Wanting to Die — How the COVID Vaccine Ruined One Man’s Life

By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | February 14, 2023
Adam Rowland had a promising career, working with professional athletes on the PGA Tour and Premiership Rugby, splitting his time between the U.S. and the U.K.
He also was the fittest he’d ever been, Rowland told The Defender — until early 2021, when he received the two-dose primary series of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine.
Today, Rowland, 48, cannot work, cannot lie down, and experiences several conditions affecting everything from his heart health to his vision, including pericarditis, pulmonary embolisms, severe thrombotic vasculitis and vascular neuropathy.
He is now separated from his wife, misses most family events and was repeatedly told by doctors that his severe injuries were “all in his head” — bringing him to the brink of suicide.
He said his discovery of online support groups for the vaccine-injured afforded him a new lease on life.
Rowland, who provided extensive documentation supporting his claims, shared his story with The Defender in an exclusive interview.
‘I was the fittest I’d ever been in my life’
Rowland had worked as a medical sports physiotherapist and stroke consultant for professional golfers for the previous 16-17 years.
“I was absolutely at the top of my career in professional sport,” he said, having worked on the PGA Tour with Jason Day and other high-profile golfers.
“I was working in America when COVID kicked off,” said Rowland, “and living quite a luxury lifestyle. And then, I decided to come back to the U.K. because obviously, I didn’t know when I’d be able to get back to the U.K. if I didn’t go then.”
The U.S. government gave Rowland special permission to return to the country and resume his employment. However, “Once the vaccination program kicked in, you had to be double vaccinated.”
It was during this time — before he got the vaccine — that Rowland said he was “even fitter than when I was 18,” because “any workout program I gave an athlete, I would try it myself” to determine firsthand how physically strenuous it was.
He said:
“So, because of that, I exercised six or seven days a week … I was just so fit, I could row on the rowing machine 18 minutes, something around five kilometers. I could ride a bike 20K in under 30 minutes. At one stage I was running 5K in 21 minutes.”
Multiple injuries and conditions brushed off as ‘anxiety’
Rowland received two doses of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine in February and May 2021. That’s when everything changed.
“Very quickly after being vaccinated, I started to get quite ill,” said Rowland. “I never got back to the U.S.” He continued working for six months after his first dose, but had to take a lot of time off from work because he was in the hospital.
“I’ve never worked since,” he said. “I’ve lost my job and I’m disabled as we speak.”
Rowland’s symptoms began with a “fever like I’d never had before in my life,” he said. “I was in bed for four days.” The fever eventually subsided, he said, “but I felt very virally ill for a number of weeks. I started to notice horrendous pains down my left arm and my left leg. And my wife noticed I started to have fits in bed … they were basically non-epileptic fits.”
The symptoms appeared within a week of his first dose.
Rowland couldn’t get a face-to-face appointment with his doctor because of the pandemic, so he had to settle for a phone appointment. The doctor diagnosed him with “anxiety” and “said it was a panic attack” — not unlike what happened to other vaccine-injury victims, whose conditions also were chalked up to “anxiety.”
Rowland’s condition continued to worsen. “I couldn’t sleep for five days because [the fits] were happening 15 or 20 times a night,” he said. “It got horrendous. I just couldn’t lie down.”
Rowland took six weeks off from work. However, when he spoke to his doctor again, “He said it’s anxiety and depression and put me on antidepressant medication. So, I tried this medication, and it made me even worse.”
Rowland’s doctor then prescribed “three or four” additional antidepressants, but none of them helped. Ultimately, his doctor said, “I don’t know what to do for you, I’m going to send you to a psychiatrist because I believe this is like a mental health [issue].”
“He didn’t think it was anything physical,” said Rowland, “and neither of us … I didn’t think it was a vaccine, because I had vaccines all my life. I didn’t figure it was the vaccine … no one put it down to the vaccine.”
Rowland eventually returned to work.
‘I just got sicker and sicker’
Whatever sense of normalcy Rowland reattained was short-lived. After receiving the second dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine, “That’s when all hell broke loose in my life.”
Rowland told The Defender :
“Immediately after having the second vaccine … I passed out once at work. I passed out at home … I developed chest pain immediately after the vaccine. I developed such chest pain and dizziness, and I was sweating. The pain was horrendous. I couldn’t breathe. I thought I was having a heart attack.”
Rowland was taken to the hospital, where he was told, “We can’t find anything wrong with you. We think it’s just a panic attack,” and he was sent home.
Not satisfied with the diagnosis, Rowland spoke to a cardiologist at his workplace and asked for an electrocardiogram (EKG or ECG). “So, he did a 24-hour ECG … and it basically showed my heart was going into ventricular tachycardia (VT), when I was getting all dizzy. It’s very dangerous and could cause sudden death.”
The cardiologist instructed Rowland to show the results of this exam to the hospital in the event he was to go back.
“Another week went by,” said Rowland, “I was getting tremendous pain and dizziness and I had another episode where I nearly collapsed again.” He showed paramedics the results of his ECG and was taken to the hospital.
But Rowland’s difficulties with doctors didn’t end there.
“I had a high D-dimer, so they started to look for blood clots on my lungs and kept me in hospital, wouldn’t let me move out of the bed.”
He added:
“They still didn’t think it was the vaccine when they couldn’t find blood clots … they sent my ECG to a specialist heart hospital … and got them to look at the ECG. Nobody thought it was the vaccine.”
As a result, Rowland was discharged and told he would be administered an MRI “in a couple of weeks,” with the expectation of finding cardiomyopathy. But the MRI didn’t find anything.
“Doctors were very, very confused about what was causing this VT,” he said. “They thought it was an adrenal problem and then referred me to an endocrinologist, and that’s when my horrible gaslighting and traumatic story really started. Because, again, they couldn’t find the cause of it, so they kept blaming things on anxiety.”
Rowland described what happened next:
“And then … I just got sicker and sicker. I developed blurred vision, face rashes, jaundice and tinnitus in my head. I started to develop neuropathy in my hands … some of my fingers don’t straighten anymore.
“I developed horrendous pain below both my knees … I can’t feel temperature in my lower legs. My toenails have died … I have no pulse in my feet.”
He was discharged from the hospital but returned monthly. Each time, doctors told him, “We can’t find what’s wrong with you.”
In June 2022, Rowland “collapsed with three pulmonary embolisms” in his lungs — but when he went to the hospital, they again told him it was just anxiety.
“So I said, ‘look at my eyes. I’ve lost two stone [one stone = 6.35 kilograms] in weight … I’m not leaving this hospital until you do some more scans and tests. This is definitely not anxiety.’”
So they scanned his lungs, and that’s when they found the three pulmonary embolisms and “a hundred tiny embolisms on my lungs.”
Rowland ended up in the hospital for a month, where he was diagnosed with pericarditis and told he would have died if they hadn’t found the embolisms.
Since then, Rowland said, “I’ve spent four more months in hospital on separate occasions. And I’ve been diagnosed now with severe thrombolytic vasculitis of my blood vessels.”
But that’s not all that’s wrong with his health. Rowland told The Defender :
“My diaphragm doesn’t work properly. Some of my eye muscles and my facial muscles aren’t working properly, and my leg muscles aren’t working properly … They did something called a CPET [cardiopulmonary exercise] test and … found that my cells in my muscles aren’t getting enough oxygen and nutrients.
“I’m waiting to see a vascular surgeon for the blood — it’s not getting to my legs and my muscles. I’m also waiting to see an immunologist and another hematologist because I’m on three blood-thinning medications and they don’t think it’s stopping my blood clotting properly.
“They think my blood is still clotting. They want me to have a special test where they take my blood out, spin it and take the platelets out and then look how my blood is responding to the three blood thinners I’m on, because for some reason it’s not doing its job.”
Rowland hasn’t been able to get that test because under the U.K. healthcare system, “the government won’t pay for it.”
He’s been trying to get the test through private healthcare. Meanwhile, his doctors tell him they can see that he’s really ill, “but we don’t know how to make it better” because they don’t know what’s in the vaccines. They suggested he travel to Germany to receive specialist treatment.
‘You’re the 239th person we have seen with similar symptoms from the vaccines’
Rowland described how he finally got a diagnosis that definitively linked the vaccine to his injuries:
“After I collapsed with the blood clots and they tried to send me home and I said ‘no, I’m not going anywhere, you scammed me, there’s something wrong,’ they finally admitted it was probably the vaccine.
“I was needing a wheelchair and they just discharged me and said, ‘Take this morphine, we’ll see you in four or five months’ time.’ And I was like, ‘I can’t even walk, you know?’ And they were like, ‘well, we can’t help you.’”
Rowland did his own research, locating a specialist hospital and private lung consultant, whom he visited in London, bringing with him the scans from the exams administered at his local hospital.
He said:
“I just said to him, ‘I feel like I’m dying, can you look at my scans and tell me, am I going to die, you know, imminently? I want you to be honest with me so I can tell my children.’ He looked at my scans and he said, ‘I don’t think you’re going to die imminently from your lungs’ … but he said to me, ‘it is 100% vaccine injury.’
“He said ‘you’re the 239th person we have seen with similar symptoms from the vaccines.’ And that was at one hospital in London … He said, ‘I’m more worried that you’re going to die with your heart and I need you to see one of my colleagues urgently.”
So Rowland saw a cardiologist who told him, it’s “completely vaccine injury. You don’t get VT like you developed for no reason. It’s definitely the vaccine with everything that’s happened to you since.’”
The doctor urged him to go to London immediately for treatment. “So they took me down to London for a month and then they diagnosed me … they realized it was in all my organs. So it’s in my heart, my lungs … so they diagnosed me with multisystem inflammatory syndrome.”
“So, at this moment in time, I’m on steroids for the pericarditis in my heart,” he said. “I’m on two different heart medications, another one for pericarditis [and] one for microvascular angina … and I’m on three blood thinners from my clotting, and various painkillers and things like that.”
‘It’s like living in hell’
As for what his life is like today, Rowland said:
“I don’t say these words slightly, but it’s like living in hell. It’s like torture, and I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.”
He said he’s pretty much housebound and struggles to walk because of his breathing issues and chest pain.
Rowland added:
“Because I have fits trying to lie down, I can’t sleep in a regular bed … my bed’s adapted, so it’s at 45 degrees, so it’s like sitting up in a chair because the fits get triggered when I lie down.
“I don’t sleep. I just get these fits. So, every single day, I dread going to bed because the fits are so scary. And my heart sometimes misses a few beats and stops for a split second. And when I get that, it feels like I’m going to die.”
Rowland’s waking hours are not much better. He told The Defender :
“Because of my pain and my vulnerability, I can’t stand up for very long on some days. I struggle to make food. I can make breakfast and maybe lunch if I’m lucky, but I can’t cook myself an evening meal. When I go to the hospital, I never know whether I’m going to be able to walk from the car park to the hospital …
“Some days I can walk very short distances, 50 meters, maybe 100 meters. I’m really, really breathless … the chest pain is so bad that I can’t walk any further. And it does crazy things in my heart, it gives me the heart arrhythmia.”
Rowland also experiences blurred vision and struggles to type and write because of the neuropathy in his hands and because he can’t straighten some of his fingers.
Most days, he has to “live within the four walls of the house,” he said. “And then occasionally, when I’m on a good day, a friend might come and pick me up and take me for a drive to a nearby coffee shop and have a coffee. That’s about the most pleasure I’m getting in my life. I can’t walk my dog anymore. I can’t take my grandson to the park to push him on the swing.”
Rowland said he lost his wife and family because of the strain. “They couldn’t look after me,” he said. “I’ve not had a Christmas dinner with the family in two years because I’ve been too ill.”
As for his prognosis, Rowland said his doctors “don’t know how much I’ll heal or whether I’m just going to slowly die, because since I got injured, I’ve just gotten worse gradually on a linear projection.”
“I haven’t gotten any better,” he said, “so we don’t know what the future’s going to hold.”
‘I got to a point where I was suicidal’
The gaslighting Rowland experienced from multiple doctors, the lack of definitive answers, and the questioning of his mental health, drove him to the brink of suicide.
“Because they didn’t believe me … I felt like I was going crazy,” he said. “And I got to a point where I was suicidal.”
Rowland said many of the doctors he saw wanted him to be “on lots of pain medications: morphine, oxycontin, pregabalin.” He said his local hospital is “quite happy to give me morphine and all these other medications and leave me like that for the rest of my life.”
He doesn’t want to go back to taking lots of medications, he said, noting that morphine “doesn’t work … it takes a bit of the edge off the pain, but it doesn’t get rid of it.”
Rowland told The Defender he “wasn’t someone who watched TV or used social media.” But taking to social media ultimately helped provide Rowland with a new lease on life.
He said:
“I went on Twitter one evening. I don’t know what drew me to do that. This was when I was suicidal. I found a guy called Alex Mitchell in the U.K. who lost a leg [due to vaccine injury]. I started chatting to him and he was like, ‘it sounds like you might have a vaccine injury.’
“He pointed me to a support group, UK COVID Vaccine Family. I couldn’t believe it, that there was — I think at the time in the U.K. there were 600-odd people in this group — and I was like, ‘there’s all these people [with] all the same symptoms as me’ … It just completely opened my eyes.”
“From that moment,” said Rowland, while “it was nice to get the support, I still realized that the doctors didn’t have a clue what they were doing. I think what it did was, it took me from a place of being suicidal [to] where I wanted to fight for my life now.”
Rowland said he started to seek out specialists who were seeing patients with vaccine injuries and “knew it wasn’t all in their heads and knew what sort of tests to do.”
He also “went on Twitter and decided that I needed to speak out, because I thought, ‘well, if I’m going to die’ — and I didn’t realize how bad my story was — I thought, ‘well, I didn’t want anyone else to go through what I’m going through.’”
“I just wanted to warn people that if they do inject you and it goes wrong,” he said, “they tell you it’s safe and effective but there’s nobody there for you to help you.”
He said he’s met some wonderful people “who’ve reached out to me and offered me support.”
“I just take pleasure from speaking to those people and the people who are trying to help me,” said Rowland.
At the same time, Rowland told The Defender he is also “going down a legal route.”
“I want to know … what’s keeping my blood clotting and giving me vasculitis. [Doctors] don’t seem prepared to do that. So that’s the battle I’m on … I want to prove it’s negligence because then the [U.K.] government will have to pay for private treatment for me, even if it’s abroad. So, it’s about keeping me alive,” he said.
He had some words of advice for other vaccine-injured individuals:
“I think the first thing they need to do is, don’t suffer in silence alone … trust your own body and your intuition. So, if people are saying that to you, don’t just accept that if your intuition says otherwise.
“Try a two-pronged approach. Find a support group and question people in that support group. Even reach out and contact me online. That’s what I’m there for. And then also, if your doctor is gaslighting you … print off a lot of evidence. If your doctor is not helping you, you need to find another doctor, which I know is not as easy as that, but do not accept a doctor that’s telling you it’s in your head.”
Rowland encouraged vaccine injury victims to “come out publicly if you’ve got the strength to do that because there’s hundreds of thousands and probably millions of us around the world.”
“We were part of the worst experiment that I believe has probably ever taken place,” said Rowland. “And I think it’s going to be like a dam that’s going to burst by the back end of 2023 … I don’t think they can keep it covered up much longer.”
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.












