Why is the current Labour leader in complete lock step with the ruling Tory party, with unfettered support for Israel’s war crimes in occupied Palestine?
The leader of the Labour Party is just as much a hostage as any of the Israelis held by Hamas. Only in his case he wasn’t kidnapped: he delivered himself, bound and gagged, to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Netanyahu.
Keir Starmer, basking in media acclaim just a week ago after yet another spectacular by-election win for his party, is now probably the most reviled politician in Britain, a pretty contested field.
This turnabout has come about because over the last three years Starmer has staked his all on extirpating from the Labour Party all traces of his allegedly anti-semitic Hamas-friendly predecessor Jeremy Corbyn and his barbaric followers (does this kind of operation sound familiar?). He has been largely successful in this endeavour and earned in consequence the favour of important elites well represented in the media. In so doing, however, he has made himself a hostage to fortune, or more specifically to the behaviour of Israel.
Starmer could not afford to let daylight over Israel emerge between himself and Rishi Sunak, otherwise all his good work shoring up his credentials as scourge of the Labour anti-semites could start to crumble. This was fine as long as even the Arabs seemed to be ditching the Palestinians by making their separate Abraham Accords with Israel.
But what if it all blew up in the faces of the architects of these Accords and Israel turned out to be behaving barbarically? Well, Starmer is now finding out. Following as he thought the Sunak line, in a notorious radio interview he stated as clearly as he ever states anything (that is, not very much) that Israel had the right to withhold food, water, electricity and fuel from starving Gazans. Desperate backtracking failed to stem the avalanche of protest that followed, mainly from representatives of the Muslim community. Labour councillors started resigning.
Starmer compounded his error by failing to support calls for a ceasefire, just as British TV screens were filling with horrific pictures of Palestinian children being pulled bloodied from rubble. The trickle of resignations at local level became a flood and panicking senior Labour figures started to distance themselves from him. That many of them depend on Muslim votes to get re-elected has of course nothing to do with this welcome if tardy appreciation that genocide is, well, overdoing it a bit.
Starmer is in a massive bind. If he caves in to pressure and starts to let daylight emerge between himself and Sunak he will immediately be assailed from all sides for being the treacherous, cynical, unprincipled flip flopper he is, if not as an actual anti-semite. And if he stands firm he will gain poisonous praise from the Right and not much else.
Meanwhile Sunak is having a ball at Starmer’s (and Gaza’s) expense. However outrageous Sunak’s pro-Israeli stance he knows Starmer can only distance himself at his peril and the longer this goes on the more Starmer impales himself on this hook of his own foolish making. At a stroke Starmer has lost millions of potential votes, even if he now zigzags, while Sunak’s fortunes, a moment ago worth less than Sam Bankman-Fried’s investments in crypto, rise correspondingly. And with Netanyahu promising that his Gaza campaign is going to be long, hard and painful (for Gazans) the hostages, including Starmer, look set for a lengthy ordeal.
Rarely will a comeuppance have been more richly deserved. By cynically sacrificing Palestinians to his own electoral calculus Starmer has brought the rubble from his crumbling edifice of a Middle East policy cascading down on his own head.
Eventually of course public opinion will force Sunak to change course. Even if Starmer beats him to it the shift will come too late to rescue his reputation. Whatever he does from now on Starmer will be remembered by many as the man who condoned the vilest Israeli war crimes.
His party if it has any sense will ditch him for someone with slightly less filthy hands before voters have a chance to express their revulsion at Tories and Labour both by not voting at all.
Of all the crass misappropriations of scientific principles during the pandemic, none did more harm than the corruption of the ‘precautionary principle’ — the notion that an action or an intervention is justified only once one is clear that the benefits exceed the harms and that, as one sociologist put it, “you have looked very hard for the harms”.
That principle came to be almost wholly inverted in the context of the pandemic: an intervention seemingly could be justified on the ‘precautionary’ basis that if it might have any beneficial effect in slowing the course of the pandemic, it would be worthwhile. This justified indiscriminate measures ranging from universal masking, mass testing (including of young children), 14-day isolated quarantines and even lockdown itself for entire healthy populations, on the basis that even though the evidence base was often weak or non-existent, the intervention just might achieve something, and opened the door to a slew of harms impacting almost all cohorts of the British population.
It was to be hoped that a core task for the Covid Inquiry in this key Module 2 would have been a dispassionate objective assessment of whether the costs (financial costs, direct harms, probable indirect harms, risk of unquantified future harms) of the Government’s population-wide interventions outweighed possible benefits. So, it was deeply disappointing last week to see not only key witnesses but the inquiry Chair herself repeat the same dangerous misconception of the precautionary principle.
In one of the most jaw-dropping interjections of the inquiry to date, Baroness Hallett revealed a prejudgement that if masking people could have had even the slightest of benefits, and seemingly without even contemplating that risks and known harms might need to be weighed too, she pressed Sir Peter Horby, an esteemed epidemiologist at Oxford University, who had indicated that he believed universal masking was not a straightforward decision: “I’m sorry, I’m not following, Sir Peter. If there’s a possible benefit, what’s the downside?”
Coming from the independent Chair of a public inquiry, this is an astonishing comment. It betrays a presumption, or at the very least a predisposition, to accept that it was better to act than not to act — the reverse of the precautionary principle. When a comment such as this, from the Chair of the Inquiry, goes unchallenged, it risks anchoring the entire frame of reference for the inquiry’s interrogation of this critical topic. In our view it was a surprising and serious error of judgement for an experienced Court of Appeal judge.
What made Baroness Hallett feel this to be an appropriate thing to think, let alone say out loud? We suggest the issue lies in the fact that the Chair and the official counsel to the inquiry seem already to have the storyline of the pandemic wrapped up.
The inquiry’s counsel has been at pains to paint a picture of the country facing an almost existential threat from the virus. From the outset, counsel has framed his questioning on the basis that it was indisputable a “highly dangerous fatal viral outbreak was surely coming”, and “by February this viral, severe pandemic, this viral pathogenic outbreak is coming, and it can’t be stopped”. Even hardened lawyers and epidemiologists, it has seemed, were bunkering down because “the virus was coming, it was a fatal pathogenic disease”.
And, with the precautionary principle inverted in the collective mind of this inquiry, almost anything the Government then did against that backdrop was justified.
With preference…
Worse still, it is now starkly evident that the witnesses whose opinions and perspectives support that proposition are being overtly praised and pedestaled, while those whose opinions and perspectives might cast doubt are treated with prejudice and hostility.
For those witnesses who were part of the ‘home team’ — Government-appointed advisers, and those who have already publicly ascribed to the inquiry’s apparently favoured storyline — impeccable credentials and impartiality have been assumed.
Sir Jeremy Farrar, for example, former Director of the Wellcome Trust, member of SAGE and currently Chief Scientist at the WHO gave oral evidence to the inquiry in June. One can almost picture counsel for the inquiry scattering rose petals as he sums up Farrar’s illustrious credentials:
You trained, I believe, in medicine, with postgraduate training in London, Chichester, Edinburgh, Melbourne, Oxford and San Francisco. You have a DPhil PhD from the University of Oxford. You were a director of the Oxford University Clinical Research Institute at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam from 1996 to 2013. From 2013 you were Director of the Wellcome Trust, and from May 2023 have you been the Chief Scientist at the World Health Organisation? Have you throughout your professional career served as a chair on a multitude of advisory bodies, for governments and global organisations? Have you received a plethora of honours from a number of governments, institutes and entities?
Farrar is then treated to counsel’s softest underarm bowls and allowed to give unchallenged testimony in favour of an intervention-heavy approach to pandemic management: “when you have the countermeasures you’re talking about, diagnostic tests, treatment and vaccines, together they create a Swiss cheese model of what our public health is”.
Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London, and chief architect of the dramatic scientific modelling on which the global lockdown response was predicated, was warmly welcomed to the witness box by counsel last week “as a world leading specialist in this field”, and was later thanked profusely for his hard work by Baroness Hallett: “Thank you very much for all the work that you did during the pandemic.”
Gushing perhaps, but nothing compared to the farewell given to SAGE modeller Professor John Edmunds, who had been affirmed upfront by counsel as, “a de facto expert in epidemiology”, and one of “a number of brilliant scientists and advisers who assisted the Government and the country in the remarkable way that you did”. At the end of his evidence, Baroness Hallett delivered the eulogy:
Thank you very much indeed. If I may say so, professor, I think you were unduly harsh on yourself this morning. You had a job, and you described it yourself, your job was to provide expert advice to the policy and decision-makers, and if the system is working properly that advice is relayed to them, then they consider advice coming from other quarters about economics and social consequences and the like. I’m not sure you could have done more than you did, consistent with your role at the time, but you obviously did as much as you felt was appropriate. So I’m really grateful to you, I’m sure we all are.
This is a far departure from the rigorous testing of credentials and potential conflicts that one could expect as an expert witness in any court proceedings, and of the studious impartiality of the presiding judge. It is certainly far short of what the public should rightly expect for an exercise set to spend over £55m on lawyers alone.
None of these witnesses were asked whether their senior positions within organisations that rely on very valuable relationships with global pharmaceutical groups and private pharma-focused organisations could have had any bearing on their advice at the time or their evidence to the inquiry now.
Farrar was director of the Wellcome Trust throughout the pandemic. The Wellcome Trust is one of the institutions behind CEPI, a global vaccine development fund created in 2015 which partners with vaccine manufacturers, including Moderna. During the pandemic Farrar frequently and vocally promoted his view that vaccines would be the means for us to exit the pandemic. He is plainly someone whose professional success and credibility has become indelibly attached to the pharmaceutical industry and in particular the use of pharmaceutical interventions in public health, yet counsel and the inquiry Chair seemed uninterested in that colouring of Farrar’s evidence.
Likewise, Ferguson, of Imperial College London was not asked a single question about potential conflicts or risk of bias. Again, the inquiry seemed unaware, or at least uninterested, that a month after Ferguson’s seismic March 2020 paper had concluded that “epidemic suppression is the only viable strategy at the current time” and that “the major challenge of suppression is that this type of intensive intervention package – or something equivalently effective at reducing transmission – will need to be maintained until a vaccine becomes available”, it was reported that Imperial College had received £22.5 million in funding from the U.K. Government for vaccine research and development; and that in that same year, 2020, Imperial received at least $108 million in funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF).
BMGF is a private philanthropic organisation which has been open about its ideological commitment to vaccine-based solutions for global health issues and which itself has very significant financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry.
… and with prejudice
For witnesses such as Professor Carl Heneghan, Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford University, but not a member of SAGE, and (unhelpfully for the inquiry) not an enthusiastic supporter of lockdowns, the inquiry appeared to have made somewhat less glowing presumptions:
You are a professor of evidence-based medicine at Oxford University. Could you explain what that discipline entails?
Heneghan’s explanation was swiftly followed with a presumptive conclusion as to the strength of his credentials:
As you know, because I think you have been following the inquiry, we have heard this week from a series of academics who have spent, in the main, their professional careers researching, analysing the spread of infectious diseases, developing models, to analyse how such diseases are spread and how they can be controlled, and considering large-scale public health issues relating to pandemic preparedness and so on. You don’t have a comparable type of expertise in this area, do you?
Not satisfied with having attempted his own disparagement of the man, counsel took the opportunity while having Heneghan in the witness box to ask for his perspective on two ‘home team’ scientists having described him in a private discussion as a “fuckwit” (Dame Angela McLean and Professor Edmunds) — to what ends, other than to rattle, rile or embarrass, was not clear. It was the cheapest shot of the inquiry so far.
During Heneghan’s evidence session, and having seemingly felt entirely comfortable to rely on the expert opinions of Farrar, Ferguson, Edmunds et al. — the ‘good guy’ home team scientists — Baroness Hallett gives short shrift to the notion that Professor Heneghan’s opinion might be relied upon. When talking about the broad scope of evidence-based medicine Heneghan explains that “even my opinion” amounts to evidence, Baroness Hallett retorted dismissively: “Not in my world it doesn’t, I’m afraid.”
Spoiler alert
Here’s what the inquiry is going to conclude, after three to seven years and perhaps £200 million: the Government and its official scientific advisers mostly did their best in the face of what they rightly and fairly believed to be the most devastating viral threat the world had ever seen; those scientists gave the best advice they could, and were entitled to assume that the Government was taking account of other factors; if it hadn’t been for Brexit, we would have been better prepared; the Government perhaps could have thought a bit more about the impact of lockdowns on the economy, but ultimately lockdowns were unavoidable; if it had all been done faster and harder, the U.K. might have come out in a better place, clinically and economically; the sacrifices imposed on children, the isolated and those who missed diagnoses and treatments, were regrettable but had to be done (the ‘precautionary principle’); if we could have saved one more person who died of Covid we should have done; the NHS did a superb job in difficult circumstances. Oh, and COVID-19 vaccines saved us so we should devote more public funds to partnerships with heroic pharmaceutical groups and irreproachable public scientists such as Jeremy Farrar at the WHO.
The inquiry is now hopelessly compromised by the partisan and presumptive words of its own Chair and leading lawyers which are setting us up for a doom-loop of catastrophic errors we cannot afford to repeat. It has become an embarrassment to the legal profession and is jeopardising the reputation of the English legal system. Its exorbitant costs already cannot be justified, and there is only worse to come. It should be abandoned.
Britain’s former prime minister Boris Johnson has been hired by the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), a Washington, DC think-tank notoriously bankrolled by the US government, NATO and Western military contractors.
Johnson will be a member of CEPA’s International Leadership Council, described as “a high-level advisory group,” the think-tank announced this week.
According to CEPA’s head Alina Polyakova, Johnson’s “commitment to Ukraine’s victory” makes him an “invaluable addition to this distinguished group of thought leaders,” at what she described as a “pivotal moment for the transatlantic alliance.”
Johnson himself issued a statement about the move, calling the “transatlantic bond” more important than ever, “not just for the freedom and independence of Ukraine but for freedom across the world.”
CEPA describes itself as a “nonprofit, nonpartisan, public policy institution” that is “focused on strengthening the transatlantic alliance.” Among its fellows and experts are former Economist editor and anti-RT crusader Edward Lucas; former US envoy for Ukraine Kurt Volker; and former Estonian president Toomas Hendrik Ilves.
The think-tank’s own website lists among its major supporters military-industrial complex companies such as BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin and Leonardo, as well as NATO, the US State Department and the US European Command.
Johnson has been one of the loudest champions of Kiev in the West, infamously torpedoing the peace talks between Ukraine and Russia in April 2022. According to Ukrainian media, Johnson made a surprise visit to Kiev and informed the government that it would lose all support from the West if it made peace with Moscow.
Just three months later, in July, Johnson faced a cabinet revolt over appointing a party official accused of sexual misconduct. He announced his resignation as prime minister and stepped down in September 2022. In June this year, Johnson also resigned as the member of Parliament for Uxbridge & South Ruislip, a post he’d held since 2015, citing the parliamentary investigation into the so-called Partygate scandal related to misconduct during the Covid-19 lockdowns. His next public appearance was a trip to Ukraine in September, where he was received by President Vladimir Zelensky and granted an honorary doctorate from the Lviv National University.
Industrial meat giant Tyson Foods is teaming up with Dutch insect ingredient producer Protix to construct an insect ingredient manufacturing facility in the U.S.
In an announcement last week, Tyson said it is acquiring an ownership stake in Protix, and forming a joint venture to construct “the first at-scale facility of its kind to upcycle food manufacturing byproducts into high-quality insect proteins and lipids which will primarily be used in the pet food, aquaculture, and livestock industries,” Tyson Foods stated.
In a statement, Protix said, “The strategic investment will support the growth of the emerging insect ingredient industry and expand the use of insect ingredient solutions to create more efficient sustainable proteins and lipids for use in the global food system.”
Tyson Foods, Protix and proponents of insect-based foods argue that the production of such food products is more sustainable than rearing conventional livestock.
But food safety experts who spoke with The Defender said companies like Tyson are motivated by financial and other incentives, not sustainability. Citing scientific studies to back their claims, they also questioned the safety of insect ingredients.
“This is not about public health or even environmental health,” Nina Teicholz, science journalist and founder of The Nutrition Coalition, said. “The food industry likes bugs, because producing them involves multiple, patent-protected steps that enable companies to make a profit and control our food sources.”
Dutch journalist Elza van Hamelen, who has investigated Protix, told The Defender, “The takeover and transformation of our food system — toward synthetic lab-grown meat, GMO [genetically modified organism] vertical farming and insect farms — is an attack from many fronts.”
“Venture capital is investing in this, even though there is not a clear business case,” she said. “Governments are setting up ‘ecosystems’ in which government representatives, NGOs [nongovernmental organizations], academia and business join hands to get ‘alternative proteins’ off the ground.”
Science communicator Dr. Kevin Stillwagon, a retired chiropractor and airline pilot who investigates health issues on his Substack page, said, “There are already efforts underway to convince us that the way we raise food for human consumption is harming the environment by using up too much land and water and emitting excess greenhouse gasses.” He added, “They will try to convince us that even by using insects as animal feed, the environmental problem is not going to get solved.”
Howard Vlieger, a member of the board of advisers of GMO/Toxin Free USA, told The Defender that Tyson could leverage its market power and its entry into the insect ingredient market to place further financial pressure on cattle suppliers.
“Tyson is one of just four large companies that livestock producers rely on to market their cattle,” he said. “Tyson could potentially leverage its alternative foods interests against cattle purchases, thus lowering the demand and price for the cattle they buy.”
Tyson’s deal with Protix move marks the latest instance in a recent trend that has seen several prominent food producers, including Cargill, invest in insect ingredient manufacturers.
‘Stomach contents of cattle’ to be used as ‘a viable feed source for insects’
John R. Tyson, chief financial officer of Tyson Foods, told Food Ingredients First his company will use its own “by-products,” including “the stomach contents of processed cattle,” to produce “a viable feed source for insects.”
In Tyson Foods’ press release, Kees Aarts, CEO of Protix, said, “Tyson Foods’ and Protix’s strategic partnership advances our joint work towards creating high-quality, more sustainable protein using innovative technology and solutions. Moreover, we can immediately use their existing byproducts as feedstock for our insects.”
According to CNN, “Byproducts like animal fats, hides and inedible proteins, if not used or reduced, can end up in landfills. In this case, Tyson can send what’s in the stomach of cattle it has processed to a Protix facility, where it’s fed to insects.”
“For the company, creating a larger market for this type of waste can not only reduce waste but offer a larger revenue stream,” CNN reported.
The Tyson Foods statement said, “Protix contributes to a circular food chain by using waste from the food industry as feed for the black soldier fly (BSF). In turn, the insects are processed into valuable nutrients such as proteins and lipids.”
“Protix’s customers use these proteins and lipids as high-quality ingredients for feed and food” while “residual streams from the insects are used as organic fertilizer,” it added.
Aarts told CNN the black soldier fly “can grow on almost every type of food waste and byproduct you can imagine,” while according to Food Ingredients First, the flies “can eat up to twice their body weight daily, which can be used to enable a closed-loop recycling system,” creating a reusable protein source while using less water and land.
When completed, the Tyson Foods-Protix facility will “centre on all aspects of production, from breeding and incubating to the hatching of insect larvae,” Just Food reported, quoting a Tyson Foods spokesperson as saying the two companies are currently looking to “identify” the location where their plant will be constructed.
The joint-venture facility is expected “to be ready for ramping up operations towards the end of 2025,” according to Feed Navigator, which also reported that “The facility’s capacity will be three to four times the output of [Protix’s] existing plant” in The Netherlands. It will be able to produce “up to 70,000 tons of live larvae equivalent annually.”
According to Just Food, the precise size and cost of the minority stake Tyson Foods acquired in Protix has not been disclosed, but according to Feed Navigator, “When asked to disclose how much the U.S. company has invested, a spokesperson for Protix [said] funding from existing backers along with Tyson Foods” totaled $58 million.
Tyson’s insects not headed for human food supply — yet
The companies claim that the insect-based products they will manufacture will not enter the human food supply — for now. Tyson told CNN “Today, we’re focused on more of [an] ingredient application with insect protein than we are a consumer application.”
But a Tyson Foods spokesperson told Just Food that “Human food compositions exist, and Protix is leading the development of high-quality proteins from animal and fish feeds to consumer-level products.”
“While consumer adoption is very low and human-food applications are not the focus of this joint venture, opportunities exist in the long term to create more sustainable protein products,” the Tyson Foods spokesperson added.
Tyson told Food Ingredients First that he views his company as a “catalyst” that can create a more sustainable and equitable food system, and that “Partnerships with those across industries are an important part of that journey, working together to advance our collective sustainability ambitions and transform the global food system.”
According to Stillwagon, inserting insects into the human food supply is the goal of major food producers.
“Livestock and fish that are fed with insect-based proteins and lipids will most definitely enter the human food supply. This may change the taste of these foods to some degree,” he said.
“Also, the fish and livestock may need to be genetically modified so they will grow to sizes necessary for harvesting since they would be consuming something that is not natural to them,” Stillwagon added.
Not ‘adequately tested for safety’
According to CNN, “The meat industry places a large burden on the planet, in part because of the land, water and energy it takes to grow crops that feed the animals we eat,” adding that “Some experts say that reducing the environmental footprint of animal feed can help make the system more sustainable.”
“Making food out of insects is one way to do that: Bugs take up less space and subsist on waste that would otherwise be discarded,” CNN reported.
According to Food Dive, “Insect protein has grown in prominence in recent years with companies debuting cricket-based snacks and powders,” citing claims by cricket ingredient brand Exo that crickets are 20 times more efficient to grow than cattle.
CNN quoted Reza Ovissipour, Ph.D., professor in sustainable food systems at Texas A&M University, who said that flies operate as “mini bioreactors” that can convert animal waste into “the protein or fat from the insects,” which can then be used as animal feed.
“And these mini bioreactors, they are very inexpensive,” he said. “You don’t need to apply that much energy. It’s very sustainable,” he said.
Experts who spoke with The Defender expressed a different view.
“Due to the insect exoskeletons, which humans are not adapted to eat, it’s not clear that this new ‘foodstuff’ is safe for humans — or pets,” Teicholz said. “Insects and bugs have not been adequately tested for safety.”
“We know that meat, eggs and fish are sources of complete, whole proteins that humans (and dogs) have evolved to eat over millions of years,” she added. “We should be trying to figure out how to make these natural proteins more sustainable rather than shift to new, potentially dangerous food sources.”
Along similar lines, Alexis Baden-Mayer, political director for the Organic Consumers Association, said, “We don’t need to replace meat, milk or eggs with anything, we just have to raise animals on pasture. This is incredibly beneficial to the environment, really productive and produces the most nutrient-dense food possible.”
Baden-Mayer also said there are several risks that insects, when consumed as food, pose for human health, noting that insects contain allergens known as chitins and toxins known as mycotoxins — which also cause mold to be toxic to humans.
Stillwagon said insects pose other risks to human health.
“Since allergies to insect proteins, known as entomophagy allergies, have been reported, food producers must label insect-based products accurately to provide allergen information,” he said.
“The second risk is the microbiome and virome of the insect itself,” Stillwagon said. “It is possible that in some people with weakened immune systems, the consumption of bacteria and viruses that are naturally part of the insect could become pathogenic,” he added.
“Chemicals that are used to kill bacteria and viruses during the processing of insects on a massive scale for food may be harmful to humans,” Stillwagon said. “Also, the plants that the insects feed on may have been treated with chemicals like glyphosate or pesticides that will be absorbed into the insects and be consumed by humans.”
A February 2017 article in eBioMedicine, published by The Lancet, states that “Infections with viruses, bacteria and parasites have been recognized for years to be associated with human carcinogenicity.”
And an article published in July in the Nutrients journal stated that “Insect protein is an adequate protein source with promising health benefits” but noted that “further research is needed to fully understand its potential and optimise its inclusion into the human diet.”
WEF, WHO, major banks and investment firms promoting insect-based food
Yet, CNN reports that “interest in insects as ingredients for animal food has been growing” even if it “hasn’t caught on in the mainstream.”
CNN cited a 2021 report by the Netherlands-based Rabobank, claiming that “the demand for insect protein, mainly as an animal feed and pet food ingredient, could reach half a million metric tons by 2030, up from today’s market of approximately 10,000 metric tons.” Rabobank and Rabo Investments are investors in Protix.
A report by Grand View Research says the global insect protein market is expected to expand by an annual compound growth rate of 27.4% by 2028.
Protix says it aims to increase its “global gross revenue to around €1bn [$1.06 billion] by 2035 through international partnerships.”
Tyson Foods has also invested in Future Meat Technologies, another company seeking to develop cultivated meat products.
According to Food Ingredients First, “Earlier this year, Tyson Foods felt the impact of high inflation and low meat demand, which plunged its stocks by 45.36% from a year ago,” leading the company to close two of its U.S. chicken plants in March.
Yet, last year, Tyson Foods invested $355 million in a bacon production facility in Kentucky, “to meet rising retail and foodservice demand for bacon products.”
Other “Big Food” players have also made significant investments in this space, including Cargill, which in 2022, expanded a partnership with Innovafeed for the production of “sustainable” insect-based fertilizer and animal food, from three to 10 years.
ADM (Archer-Daniels-Midland) has also partnered with Innovafeed to commercialize insect protein for pet food sold in the U.S. and for the construction and operation of an insect production facility in Illinois, adjacent to an ADM corn processing complex.
According to van Hamelen, “There is a lot of financial and policy support to get these ‘foods’ off the ground. Corporations are steered towards moving their portfolios into ‘novel foods’ as part of ESG investment rating criteria,” adding that “It may be interesting to review the ownership of these corporations and the agenda they pursue.”
Notably, Vanguard and BlackRock, the world’s two largest institutional investment firms, are also the two top institutional holders of Tyson Foods shares. BlackRock, and its CEO, Larry Fink, have been strong proponents of “sustainable” corporate practices.
Governments have also gotten into the act, van Hamelen told The Defender.
“The legislative framework is being prepared to approve these ‘foods’ as ‘novel food’ — in the EU, U.S. and also at the U.N. [United Nations] level under the Codex Alimentarius,” she said. “In addition, ‘behavioral government’ approaches, a.k.a. social engineering, used to steer people towards alternative protein choices, are part of government policy.”
For instance, in June, the EU authorized yellow mealworm powder to be used in bread, cakes, mashed potatoes, pasta and vegetables, following a novel food application French firm Nutriearth submitted in 2019. According to Food Ingredients First, “Final authorization on this is expected later this year or early 2024.”
In May, the U.K. Edible Insect Association declared that the house cricket was deemed “within the scope of novel foods regime and valid.”
The European Commission has found that consumers are already aware of insects as an ingredient in foods, and has called on food manufacturers to display the Latin names of the insects contained in the food on the packaging for the product.
Baden-Meyer said that companies like Tyson Foods are looking to the future — and to applications of insect-based products going beyond just food.
“As we saw with the COVID-19 vaccines, cells are the new factories. Maybe that’s the bacterial cells used in ‘precision fermentation,’ maybe it’s the cells living within our own bodies,” she said. “Vaccines are first, but I expect all drugs to be delivered via mRNA or DNA ‘gene therapy’ instructions for the cell to produce a protein.”
“Maybe that will be the way ‘food’ will eventually be ‘delivered’ too,” Baden-Meyer said, citing the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’s “Living Foundries” program, which seeks to program “the fundamental metabolic processes of biological systems to generate a vast number of complex molecules that are not otherwise accessible.”
Stillwagon identified a danger stemming from insects consuming byproducts of animals that had previously received mRNA vaccines. He said:
“Another danger is the potential use of mRNA encapsulated in lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) as ‘vaccines’ in the animals or insects to try to prevent diseases. The animals would most likely be injected. The insects and aquaculture would ingest them.
“The use of ingested mRNA encapsulated in LNPs has already been investigated in some insects, shrimp and fish. The possibility of these encapsulated mRNA particles entering the human food supply is very real.”
Last month, the U.S. House of Representatives passed an amendment ending government funding to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the USDA during fiscal year 2024 for the development of transgenic edible vaccines, that would deliver mRNA “vaccines” through foods such as lettuce.
“My guess is this is what the ‘Great Resetters’ plan to feed us with and make everything else out of, too,” Baden-Meter said, referring to the “Great Reset” promoted by the World Economic Forum (WEF). “Bacteria is the new petroleum, the ‘plastics’ of our generation, but it’s going to take a while to make this shift,” she added.
A 2019 paper by the WEF, “Alternative Proteins,” published as part of the “Meat: the Future” series, says such proteins can meet “the nutritional needs and food demands of a predicted mid‑century population of 10 billion, in a healthy and sustainable manner.”
“The benefits of these products is not sufficient for consumers to adopt them,” the report states. “A much wider set of interventions will be required to accelerate uptake,” including the development of “narratives.”
The report also notes that “it is unlikely that alternative proteins will achieve scale unless use is made of the production and marketing expertise of the traditional protein sector.”
The WEF stated “We need to fundamentally transform our food systems to provide all humanity with affordable, nutritious and healthy food within the limits of nature by 2030,” in accordance with the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Stillwagon said that organizations like the WEF and the World Health Organization (WHO) will seek to sway public opinion in favor of insect consumption.
“The possibility exists for the WHO to declare a climate emergency over this, and force countries to change food production. They will show that insects have been consumed by many cultures in various parts of the world for centuries, opening the door for cultural acceptance in the U.S.,” he said.
“Overcoming the ‘yuck’ factor is a significant challenge, which is why I think a declaration of a climate emergency and promoting the idea that ‘it’s for the common good” will be necessary,” Stillwagon added.
According to van Hamelen, Dutch state entities, including Dutch public investment fund Invest-NL, have invested in Protix, despite official denials from the Dutch government.
A 2021 memorandum of understanding between the Dutch government and the WEF, representative of close ties between the two, foresees the development of a “food innovation hub” in The Netherlands, with agrifood as one of its focus areas.
Last year, Dutch farmers protested government plans to “drastically” reduce nitrogen pollution from livestock farming by buying out or otherwise expropriating farmland.
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.”
Russia and China have prevented the passage of a US-drafted UN Security Council (UNSC) resolution that had said Israel, which has killed more than 6,500 people as part of its underway war on Gaza, has been acting in “self-defense.”
The draft was put to vote on Wednesday. The United Arab Emirates also voted no, while 10 members voted in favor and Brazil and Mozambique abstained.
Israel launched the devastating war on October 7 after the Gaza Strip-based Palestinian resistance groups staged Operation al-Aqsa Storm, a surprise attack on the occupied territories, in response to the Israeli regime’s intensified crimes against the Palestinian people. The war has killed 6,546 Palestinians, including 2,704 children, according to the Palestinian health ministry.
The Council then voted on a Russian-drafted resolution that had called for a humanitarian ceasefire and urged Tel Aviv to immediately cancel its orders on Palestinian civilians to head into southern Gaza.
Only Russia, China, the UAE, and Gabon voted in favor of the draft, while nine members abstained and the United States and Britain voted no.
A resolution needs at least nine votes and no vetoes by the US, France, Britain, Russia or China to be adopted.
Also on Wednesday, Russia’s foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said the death of thousands of children in the Gaza Strip had not been enough to get the West behind a resolution demanding a ceasefire in the besieged coastal territory.
“This is the most obvious and rather simple thing to do in this situation: Simply to produce a statement, a resolution, a document with a unified call for a ceasefire, settling the situation and so on,” she said in an interview with Sputnik Radio.
“Even these numbers (the fatality count among the Palestinian minors) cannot compel certain political forces in the West to come to their senses and realize what is going on,” Zakharova regretted.
Just Stop Oil funder Dale Vince is pressing ahead with plans to flood British primary schools with environmental and Net Zero societal propaganda. Children aged 11 and under are being taught that they face an unprecedented global climate emergency, with the possibility that the planet is entering a sixth mass extinction. The solution of course is “sustainability” and green energy, a matter that is dear to the heart of multi-millionaire Vince. His ageing onshore wind farm company Ecotricity has collected £110 million in green taxpayer subsidies over the last 20 years, at a time when he has pocketed at least £43 million in various corporate payments.
The Ministry of Eco Education (MEE) was started by Vince in 2021 with the stated aim of “greening up the curriculum”. From an initial base of 15 ‘pioneer’ schools, it is working to scale this up to 1,000. MEE operates by inserting its messaging into all aspects of primary learning including transport, energy, food, nature and society. It aims to “save teachers time”, and it claims to have “rearranged the national curriculum” around what it describes as big questions. MEE also claims to be working with secondary schools to adapt its primary approach to Key Stage 3.
Although few lesson examples are available on the MEE website, it is easy to piece together some of the ideas being taught. A lesson on veganism notes that industrial farming has negative impacts on the planet, but apparently “isn’t just about food”. Most of the sources quoted are little more than promotions for veganism with a link to a Guardian article explaining why vegans don’t eat honey. There does not appear to be any discussion about the wisdom of removing all types of animal protein from the diets of very young children, something that many scientists think should be done only under strict nutritional supervision.
The education leader of MEE is Paul Turner and a video is supplied of him talking to a group of young children in the Ecotricity tent at the Womad festival. Bouncing around a giant globe, he explains that the correct level of carbon dioxide in the planet is the ‘magic’ number of 360 parts per million (ppm). Quite how he is able to point to such a precise – if magical – figure to stop the climate changing is not explained. There are many eminent scientists who think it is a little on the low side for animal and plant life to prosper. Certainly, the children are not told the dinosaurs lived in a world of plant plenty at a time when CO2 levels were much higher. Turner, who is described by MEE as a “radical geographer”, tells the children that we need to “hoover” up all the gas, and on this front Dale is making a contribution.
In fact the current level of CO2 is around 420 ppm and recent increases are believed to have led to a dramatic 14% greening of the planet. Hoover up all this extra CO2 and veganism starts to seem an ‘unsustainable’ option. Remove nitrogen fertiliser from agriculture as many eco-extremists want and the consequent massive reduction in crop yields starts to look like mass famine.
But then it isn’t just about the planet is it? In a paper published by MEE titled ‘Foundations for an Eco Curriculum’, it is said that “we are increasingly recognising that any efforts to tackle climate and ecological emergency must also respond to the structural inequalities inherent in society”. Furthermore, “any eco school curriculum must explore ideas of social structures and processes as much as they do the natural environment, as well as exploring the intersection of ideas such as gender, race and inequality. From a young age, children are aware of injustice and can apply ideas of fairness and the environment.”
In other words, children can be caught young and brainwashed with horrific, largely unsubstantiated tales of climate and ecological collapse – a process they have no intellectual ability to question – and be marched towards a collectivist society where ruling elites remove many personal freedoms and lifestyle choices. Oh, and energy can be provided by useless windmills requiring enormous public subsidies by enlightened philanthropists such as Mr. D. Vince.
Needless to say, MEE is not the only green educational propogandist operating in the U.K. As the Daily Sceptic reported earlier this year, other elite money is pouring into British schools. London-based Climate Science aims to supply free teaching materials, with children encouraged to plot implausible temperatures rises of 11°C, taught that alkaline oceans are ‘acidic’ and write letters to policymakers claiming “our house is on fire” in the style of Greta Thunberg. Among the billionaire backers are Schmidt Futures – the family foundation of former Google boss Eric Schmidt – and the Grantham Institute at Imperial, partly funded by green billionaire investor Jeremy Grantham.
MEE is also involved with the Young Green Briton Challenge, which has also attracted the ambassadorial support of TV activist Chris Packham. The new scheme operates on a Dragons’s Den format with 16 schools competing to win a £1,000 stake for a green project. Recently, Packham gave his backing to eco-protesters breaking the law and suggested that a “radical flank” could attempt to blow up oil refineries. For his part, Vince has given hundreds of thousands of pounds to Just Stop Oil, a group that engages in civil disobedience and criminal damage.
A new campaign to shut down weapons companies in the US and UK over providing arms to the Israeli regime has gained further momentum, expanding across northern America, Europe and Australia.
The campaign, titled Palestine Action, was launched days after Israel waged a large-scale war on Gaza on October 7, which has claimed the lives of thousands of innocent Palestinians, including women and children.
On October 12, the organizers of Palestine Action US took direct action against Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer, Elbit Systems at its so-called “Innovation Center” in the US city of Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Activists blockaded Elbit’s main entrance and defaced the building with red paint and graffiti, rebuking Elbit for profiteering from Israeli war crimes against Palestinians.
“Elbit Systems will not conduct business as usual in our city, while their weapons are mass murdering the Palestinian people right now,” the activists said. “What Israel is doing to Palestine is nothing short of a genocide and Elbit has blood on their hands.”
Elbit’s Cambridge office has since then been targeted multiple times, with activists spraying the building with upper-case slogans that read, “ELBIT PROFITS FROM GENOCIDE,” and “WAR CRIMINALS WORK HERE.”
Data in media reports show Elbit supplies 85% of Israel’s military drone fleet, along with bullets, tear gas, land-based equipment, and internationally banned weapons.
“A child is being murdered every 15 minutes in Palestine,” Palestine Action US said on its website. “These bombing attacks not only serve to ethnically cleanse Gaza but will be used by Elbit to market their arms to repressive regimes around the world. By striking Elbit, we disrupt a crucial link in the military apparatus of Western imperialism.”
In a new development on Wednesday, Palestine Action US said the activists protested against Elbit Systems at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston and disrupted the Israeli firm’s recruitment process.
“Elbit Systems, you will not find peace ANYWHERE in Boston. We will keep confronting you wherever you show up. Genocide profiteers are not welcome in our city. We will shut you down,” Palestine Action US said in a post on its X social media account.
Palestine Action US also announced in other posts the expansion of the anti-Israel campaign in other countries.
Palestine Action US has called on the international community to recognize the profound terror and grief Palestinians have been experiencing for generations, and move to put an end to the 75-year-long Israeli genocide “still unfolding before our eyes.”
“As long as we allow Elbit to operate in our communities, every one of us has blood on our hands,” it added.
Israel waged war on Gaza on October 7 after Palestinian resistance groups launched Operation Al-Aqsa Storm, a surprise attack into the occupied territories in response to the occupying regime’s intensified crimes against the Palestinian people.
The Israeli attacks on Gaza have targeted places of gathering, including hospitals, schools, mosques and churches, displacing more than one million in the densely-populated region, which is home to more than 2 million people.
According to the Palestinian health ministry, the Israeli aggression against the Gaza Strip has so far killed more than 6,000 people and left over 18,000 others wounded.
Best years of their lives, or society-induced teenage trauma? In the second decade of this century, mainstream media gave much attention to a ‘mental health crisis’ in young people. Children and adolescents were a huge growth area for psychology, psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry. This campaign was interrupted by Covid-19, when concern for the impact of lockdown, social distancing and school closure was overridden by the priority of pandemic control.
Until the turn of the millennium, youth had been a vast untapped potential for Big Pharma. A child starting on antidepressants is a customer for life.
My research at King’s College London showed that the ‘mental health crisis’ was mostly contrived: despite the constant barrage of fearful messages in the mass media, there was no sharp rise in psychiatric admissions or suicides. This was an application of the problem-reaction-solution strategy: people are persuaded of a pressing problem (mental health crisis), provoking a reaction (clamour for something to be done) leading to a solution (expanded surveillance and treatment).
This strategy was blatant with Covid-19. Experimental mRNA vaccines were pumped into arms, with only a steadfast minority refusing the injections which proved neither safe nor effective. The entire industry of vaccination is based on deception. The official story is that deadly diseases of the past, such as poliomyelitis, were eradicated by vaccines. The truth is that the contagious killers which ravaged industrialised society had faded by the mid-twentieth century thanks to sanitation and smaller broods of healthier kids. Mortality plummeted.
The same dubious causality was used in psychiatry. In the 1950s the resident population of mental institutions reached its peak. Although asylums had been renamed hospitals earlier in the century, there was no effective treatment for insanity, and conditions in antiquated and overcrowded wards were shameful. In the 1930s an onslaught of physical interventions (insulin coma therapy, shock treatment and frontal lobotomy) failed to fulfil the promise of heroic medicine.
In the mid-1950s antipsychotic drugs were discovered and for the first time the delusional and behavioural symptoms of schizophrenia could be effectively controlled.
Chlorpromazine (brand name Largactil) had profound impact: wards were calmer, rehabilitation units were created and rows of beds were removed as patients were discharged. The drug revolution led to legislative reform: in England and Wales, the Mental Health Act 1959 required review of all certified patients, and within five years, fewer than a quarter were detained. The signs were so promising that the minister for health Enoch Powell declared in 1961 that the mental hospitals would become obsolete, replaced by care in the community.
Yet the major tranquillisers of chlorpromazine, haloperidol and thioridazine, while transformational, were not the only impetus for the decline in the mental hospital population. It began to fall in 1954, before the brown syrup appeared. As with the vaccination myth, the ‘wonder drugs’ of psychiatry went down in history as a sudden turning point, overlooking the social conditions for change after the Second World War. The anti-psychotic drugs caused problems of their own in debilitating side-effects.
In the 1960s mental health was declared a new frontier for medicine. The message was that mental illness was no different from physical health problems, and deserved the same level of resources. The pharmaceutical industry was keen to destigmatise mental health and change attitudes so that people perceived nervous disorders as common and curable. The drug companies worked with the psychiatric profession to revise and expand the classification of diseases, defining illnesses on the basis of emerging treatment, rather than the other way round.
With the growth of therapy in the US, the drug companies focused on middle-class neuroses and in 1961 Merck distributed 50,000 copies of a book Recognizing the Depressed Patient. As the early classes of antidepressant drugs had toxic effects, doctors prescribed anxiolytics such as Valium, which was doled out in great quantity for neurotic disorders (one of the first was thalidomide, but that’s another story). Valium was notorious for addiction.
In 1987 a new antidepressant entered the market. Prozac was an instant success, heralding the era of mass antidepressant therapy. With direct consumer advertising in the USA, Prozac was described by psychiatrist Peter Kramer as ‘a feminist drug – liberating and empowering’. Kramer hosted a popular health programme on National Public Radio, funded by Eli Lilly, featuring numerous ‘key opinion leaders’ promoting antidepressants as a panacea for life’s ills.
In my experience as a psychiatric nurse, these drugs did not deserve the promise given to patients. I cringe on remembering colleagues spouting the line that the tablets will ‘kick in after about ten days’. Gradually I discovered that treatment was not really evidence-based, but an enterprise controlled by the pharmaceutical industry. I worked for a health informatics company, dealing in pharmacovigilance. It found drug company researchers buying data from a licensed primary care database to show that reported adverse effects of new products such as statins were caused not by the pills but by the disease. Seroxat, an antidepressant, was thus excused blame for suicides: it was their depressive symptoms rather than the drug.
Although naïve at the time, I found the Andrew Wakefield controversy troubling. Much effort went into allaying public concerns about the MMR jab, introduction of which Wakefield and 16 fellow researchers had found correlated with autism and inflammatory bowel disease. If Wakefield was wrong in his assertions, surely science would correct his error with refuting evidence? But he was made a pariah, and booted out by the General Medical Council. A charismatic figure, Wakefield was a danger to Big Pharma because he threatened the lucrative vaccine business.
Years later, I wrote a critical appraisal of antidepressants, drugs now taken by about one in eight adults in the UK and an increasing proportion of teenagers. I submitted a carefully researched review to the only journal likely to consider it. The new British Journal of Mental Health Nursing was edited by Professor Peter Nolan, an Irishman who had worked as a personal aide to the Libyan leader Gaddafi after the revolution. Peter was a true radical, a rarity these days. He agreed with my concern about Big Pharma, but had been forced to take drug company advertising. My article was published but with a lengthy retort by another mental health scholar, who poured scorn on my objective analysis.
What is to be done? The problem-reaction-solution structure of mental health care must be dismantled. Instead of increasingly relying on technology which feeds corporate profits on a false curative premise, care must return to human endeavour.
If they are really antidepressants, why are people taking them for months, years or decades?
I never thought I’d live to see a British prime minister warmly embracing a war criminal and genocidal thug like Netanyahu, go swanning around a hotel (the King David) which was used as the Jerusalem headquarters of the British Mandate aúthority and blown up by Jewish terrorists in 1946, killing 91 and wounding 45, then tell Netanyahu: “We want you to win.”
Win what, exactly? And who’s “we”? Certainly not the man-in-the-street in Britain. No, it’ll be that band of brainwashed Ziofreaks in Westminster who have shamed us for over a century.
And they (the Ziofreaks, not “we”) want Israel to win its dirty 75-year campaign of terror, illegal military occupation, dispossession, annexation, ethnic cleansing and extreme cruelty against the harshly oppressed Palestinians who are trying to defend their homeland.
I was even more infuriated to see queues of lorries carrying desperately needed aid held up for days at Gaza’s Rafah crossing into Egypt by the Israelis’ refusal to let them enter the mangled hell-hole they’ve created in the packed enclave. I hear they even bombed the crossing to make sure nothing could move.
Bypass Israel if necessary and deliver aid by sea
If the UN and the high and mighty powers wanted to, they could bypass Israeli and Egyptian cruelty and bring aid to Gaza by sea. They should have done so as soon as Israel slapped its illegal blockade on Gaza in 2006 following Hamas’s inconvenient election win. As it is, unarmed privateers have been left to try to break the siege.
In February 2003 British surgeon David Halpin chartered a small Danish cargo vessel, MV Barbara, filled her with important humanitarian items and sailed from Torquay to Ashdod, a port on the Israeli coast close to Gaza where the cargo was transferred by road into Gaza without too much trouble.
In 2008 two humanitarian vessels actually got through to Gaza. Their success in breaking the siege, and their safe arrival and departure, was due to the intervention of the British Foreign Office. Before the peace activists set sail, they asked the British government “to ensure the freedom boats’ safe and uninterrupted passage to Gaza considering these are international waters and Palestinian territorial waters”. Any attempt to stop the boats would surely infringe the right to freedom of movement to and from Gaza, and seriously breach the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, to which Israel is a party.
The minister in charge of Middle East affairs Kim Howells later admitted that “FCO officials spoke to Israeli officials in advance of the trip and Israel allowed the boats peacefully into Gaza.”
Nearly three years later, as Gaza Freedom Flotilla II prepared to sail, Israel was determined not to let the boats reach their destination because safe arrival would drive a coach and horses through Israel’s control-freakery. This prompted the following statement by flotilla organizers to the UN Human Rights Council:
“We are determined to sail to Gaza. Our cause is just and our means are transparent. To underline the fact that we do not present an imminent threat to Israel nor do we aim to contribute to a war effort against Israel, thus eliminating any claim by Israel to self-defense, we invite the HRC or any other UN or international agency to come on board and inspect our vessels at their point of departure, on the high seas, or on their arrival in the Gaza port. We will – and must – continue to sail until the illegal siege of Gaza is ended and Palestinians have the same human and national rights those of us sailing enjoy.” – Steering Committee of the International Coalition for Gaza Freedom Flotilla II.
In the end Flotilla II didn’t sail. In all, five shipments were reportedly allowed access prior to the 2008–09 Gaza War, but after that everything was blocked by Israel.
In May 2010 the Mavi Marmara took part in a flotilla of ships operated by activist groups from 37 countries with the intention of directly confronting the Israeli blockade. While en route and in international waters Israeli Naval Forces communicated to them that a naval blockade around the Gaza area was in force and ordered the ships to follow them to Ashdod port or be boarded. The ships declined and were boarded in international waters.
Reports from journalists on the Mavi Marmara and from the UN claimed that Israeli gunboats opened fire with live rounds before boarding the ship. Passengers tried to repell the boarding parties of Israeli commandos, and in the violent clash that followed nine were killed and a tenth died four years later of his wounds. Several dozen more were injured, some seriously. Israel claimed 10 of its troops were injured, one seriously.
The UN’s official report found Israel’s blockade of Gaza to be legal, but other UN experts, reporting to the Human Rights Council, disagreed and found it was a violation of international law.
A UN fact-finding mission, investigating the assault on the Mavi Marmara, declared that “no case can be made for the legality of the interception” and they therefore found that the interception was illegal and constituted collective punishment of the people living in the Gaza Strip and thus to be illegal and contrary to Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. It could not even be justified even under Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations [the right of self-defence].
The Centre for Constitutional Rights also concluded that the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip was illegal under international law and amounted to collective punishment. “The flotilla did not seek to travel to Israel, let alone ‘attack’ Israel. Furthermore, the flotilla did not constitute an act which required an ‘urgent’ response, such that Israel had to launch a middle-of-the-night armed boarding… Israel could also have diplomatically engaged Turkey, arranged for a third party to verify there were no weapons onboard and then peacefully guided the vessel to Gaza.”
Craig Murray, an internationally recognized authority on these matters, was Head of the Maritime Section of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and responsible for giving political and legal clearance to Royal Navy boarding operations in the Persian Gulf following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. He said that Israel had tried to justify previous fatal attacks on neutral civilian vessels on the High Seas in terms of enforcing an embargo under the legal cover given by the San Remo Manual of International Law Applicable to Armed Conflicts at Sea. “San Remo only applies to blockade in times of armed conflict. Israel is not currently engaged in an armed conflict, and presumably does not wish to be. San Remo does not confer any right to impose a permanent blockade outwith times of armed conflict, and in fact specifically excludes as illegal a general blockade on an entire population.”
At the same time UN Security Council resolution 1860 (2009) emphasised “the need to ensure sustained and regular flow of goods and people through the Gaza crossings” and called for “the unimpeded provision and distribution throughout Gaza of humanitarian assistance, including of food, fuel and medical treatment”.
But when MEP Kyriacos Triantaphyllides put a question to the EU Commission this was their reply:
After the organisation of a flotilla heading to Gaza in May 2010, the Quartet, of which the EU is a member, stated that all those wishing to deliver goods to Gaza should do so through established channels, so that their cargo can be inspected and transferred via land crossings into Gaza. It also stated that there was no need for unnecessary confrontations and that all parties should act responsibly in meeting the needs of the people of Gaza….
The Commission stands by this line. A flotilla is not the appropriate response to the humanitarian situation in Gaza. At the same time, Israel must abide by international law when dealing with a possible flotilla. The EU continues to request the lifting of the blockade on Gaza, including the naval blockade.
It might have been scripted in Tel Aviv and not by anyone with Christian principles. The “established channel” for delivering goods to Gaza is of course the time-honoured route by sea, which is protected by maritime and international law and therefore entirely appropriate.
There’s nothing “provocative” about unarmed vessels with humanitarian cargoes using it. The organizers had offered their cargoes for inspection and verification by a trusted third party to allay Israel’s fears about weapon supplies. They should not have to deal with a belligerent regime that was (and still is) cruelly waging a starvation war on women and children. Anyone suggesting they must do so seeks to legitimize the blockade, which we all know to be illegal and a crime against humanity.
And where are the UN when a rogue nation – also a UN member – shows contempt for their maritime Convention?
By 2018 Her Majesty’s Government had abandoned all pretence of upholding the Law of the Seas or even pursuing its 2008 policy of intervening to obtain advance clearance from the Israeli authorities. The Foreign Office appeared to have joined the Zionist conspiracy to legitimise the Gaza blockade and support Israel’s control-freakery.
Lord Ahmad for the Government, answering a written question in the House of Lords, said: “Embassy officials discussed the travelling flotilla with the Israeli authorities on 6 June… the Foreign and Commonwealth Office advises against all travel to Gaza including the waters off Gaza.”
The waters off Gaza are international waters where neutral civilian vessels are entitled to free passage under the UN Conventional on the Law of the Seas. Why shouldn’t unarmed aid boats be able sail there unmolested? Is the Law of the Seas now dead? Is Britain no longer committed to keeping the sea lanes open to innocent shipping? And why is the UN not upholdings its own Convention?
In particular, what happened to the diplomacy of 2008? Why didn’t our Government arrange advance clearance as before? Or were they, by any chance, colluding to thwart this mercy mission?
In reply to a question from myself, Alister Burt, minister for the Middle East at that time, said: “Delivery of aid should be co-ordinated with the UN and Israeli and Egyptian Governments. We expect Israel to show restraint and fully respect international law. If wrongdoing has taken place we expect those responsible to be held to account…. We remain deeply concerned about restrictions on movement and access in Gaza, and the impact that this is having on the humanitarian situation. We have frequent discussions with the Israeli Government about the need to ease restrictions on Gaza. We call on Israel, the Palestinian Authority and Egypt to work together to ensure a durable solution for Gaza.”
As if Israel ever respected international law or had ever been held to account.
So here we have a horrific humanitarian crisis where the population of Gaza (nearly half of whom are children) are badly injured, starving and bombed out of their homes, with few if any public services still functioning and with aid waiting outside and prevented from entering by Israel.
This is an acid test for the United Nations and the international community who need to show their real worth and recover the respect they have carelessly lost over the years.
They are drinking in the Last Chance saloon and this is possibly their final opportunity to prove that the world has, after all, developed moral sensibilities and emerged from the caveman era. All it takes is a mercy flotilla of ships belonging to few UN member states, not privateers, to bring the Middle East issue to a head so the root causes can finally be dealt with in accordance with international law.
In short, the lives of 2.3 million innocent, incarcerated Gazan cannot be left in the hands of a psychopath like Netanyahu. Nor can the Israelis be allowed to dictate the wider future of the Holy Land they have defiled.
A startling revelation indicates that the UK government has substantially amplified its surveillance of the online activity of educators. Ranging from leading education experts to teaching assistants and librarians earning modest salaries, the magnifying glass of surveillance closely monitors posts critiquing education policies. The discovery was made by The Observer, revealing that the Department for Education is keeping extensive records of such posts, something that we’ve previously covered.
This revelation highlights the burning issues of free speech and censorship, causing widespread disquiet among the educational community. The surveillance of educators’ online activity portrays a scenario where dissent or criticism of government policy is not only surveilled but also cataloged, potentially affecting the educators’ professional careers.
Educators across the UK have demonstrated a wave of shock and anger in response to the discovery. Many have submitted Subject Access Requests [SARs], a Right to Access provision within the General Data Protection Regulation, requiring the Department of Education to disclose the information it holds under their names. These educators found file lengths spanning up to 60 pages, documenting their tweets and comments opposing the government’s policies and criticizing the schools inspectorate, Ofsted.
Nikki Cleveland, a higher-level teaching assistant and primary school librarian, was astounded to find that even her tweets concerning issues such as inadequate funding for school libraries and criticisms of Ofsted had been flagged and stored by the Department. Her discovery has only raised her cynicism towards the government and the Department of Education, questioning their apathy towards the challenges schools face daily.
This disturbing surveillance operation extends to more than just educators. Jon Biddle, a primary school teacher and English lead, reported that “dozens of other teachers” he knew had also discovered their accounts were under scrutiny. The scope and depth of this surveillance has led to growing skepticism about the Department’s priorities and resource allocation.
Cases have also surfaced of the Department attempting to silence voices critical of government policy. Early years specialists Ruth Swailes and Aaron Bradbury have previously faced attempts from the Department to cancel their conference due to their earlier critiques. Similarly, Dr. Mine Conkbayir, a renowned early childhood author, was allegedly threatened with funding withdrawal for a conference she was scheduled to keynote, due to her criticisms. As she recounts, the Department also attempted to curtail her talk duration and verify her speech contents, pulling the strings of academic dialogue.
In response to these revelations, the Department has chosen to remain largely opaque, stating that it would not be appropriate to comment on individual cases.
Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Reclaim)
“We have experienced more excess deaths since July 2021 than in the whole of 2020.
Number of excess deaths according to Office for Health Improvements and Disparities
Mar-Dec 2020 (there were fewer deaths than expected in Jan and Feb 2020 according to ONS)
69,293
Jul 2021 – Sept 2023
76,554
Unlike during the pandemic, however, those deaths are not disproportionately of the old. In other words, the excess deaths are striking down people in the prime of life… Full text with graphs
Ambulance calls for life-threatening emergencies ranged from a steady 2,000 calls per day until the vaccine rollout, from then it rose to 2,500 daily and calls have stayed at this level since.
The surveillance systems designed to spot a safety problem have all flashed red, but no one’s looking.
Payments for Personal Independent Payments (PIP) for people who have developed a disability and cannot work, have rocketed with the vaccine rollout and have continued to rise ever since.
The trial data showed that one in eight hundred injected people had a serious adverse event, meaning the risk of this was twice as high than the chance of preventing a Covid hospitalisation.
There were just over 14,000 excess deaths in the under 65-year-olds before vaccination, from April 2020 to the end of March 2021. However, since that time there have been over 21,000 excess deaths in this age group alone.
There were nearly two extra deaths a day in the second half of 2021 among 15 – 19-year-old males, but potentially even more if those referred to the coroner were fully included.
The contrast between the evidence sessions of Prof. John Edmunds (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, SAGE modeller) and Prof. Carl Heneghan at the Covid Inquiry yesterday was absolutely shocking and raises huge questions about the professionalism of the Inquiry.
The King’s Counsel in the morning spent hours questioning Edmunds in a friendly, at times obsequious manner, as he explained how misunderstood the modelling was, how it wasn’t needed to justify lockdowns – as the indicative Basic reproduction number (R0) and Indicative Fatality Rate (IFR) were enough – to justify earlier and harder lockdown measures. Yet, according to Edmunds, the modelling would still be needed in the future. Truly an “all things to all men modelling” – useful when needed to justify future lockdowns, yet hides in the corner when retrospectively scrutinised and compared with real-world data. Three key flaws in the Covid modelling have been highlighted:
These aren’t flaws that can be explained away by saying the scenarios changed with the reality of lockdowns. For example, ICU rates are unaffected by shelter-in-place orders and school closures.
The dangerous implication here is that the Covid Inquiry is lining us up for future restrictions based on indicative RO and IFR, a lockdown hair-trigger switch that gives more authority to the modellers.
The soft-ball questioning and praise from the Inquiry continued as the discussion moved to Summer 2020, circuit breakers and the elision from “flatten the curve” to “zero Covid”.
Then the Inquiry moved on to the Downing Street Summit, where other voices – counsel highlighting as the ‘let it rip’ brigade – were invited at short notice. The big reveal was that Angela McLean, who has replaced Sir Patrick Vallance as Chief Scientific Officer, referred to Carl Heneghan as a “f*ckwit” in a contemporaneous WhatsApp chat, while Edmunds challenged Heneghan’s epidemiological knowledge. In my view, the Inquiry raising the point in this way is indicative of a lack of professionalism.
The Inquiry was also keen to include another pet villain – Doctor Death – the sobriquet applied by McLean to refer to Rishi Sunak, for the perceived crime of pushing for Eat Out to Help Out to reinvigorate the pub and restaurant industry, and providing a much needed moral boost to the nation.
The questioning continued for hours, covering the narrative classics of Long Covid, why the Vaccine rollout should have been broader, etc., all carried out in a cosy relationship included Baroness Hallett’s freely-given praise for Edmund, Ferguson and the whole modelling team.
By contrast, the interrogation of Carl Heneghan started out with a blatant attempt to undermine his credentials, strongly re-buffed by Carl, setting a tone for the only adversarial evidence session I have seen at this Inquiry so far. Any discussion that strayed from the narrative was met with aggressive and hostile demands for ‘yes/no’ answers.
Counsel objected to Carl’s answer rightly pointing out the danger of lockdowns to care homes, as he wanted to concentrate on focused protection and the misrepresentation of it by Counsel as hermetically sealing up the old and vulnerable. The minimum of critical thinking could have told Counsel that it was about reducing risk where it was highest, rather than across the board.
Carl was challenged on his views on the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) – he broadly agreed with it, he explained, but didn’t sign at the time as he needed more evidence on the details as you would expect, before Counsel dived into the Downing Street conference call.
Carl was challenged on his definition of ‘Endemicity’ on that call (presumably Edmunds’ gotcha epidemiological point), with Counsel demanding that the spread of infection be “broad and predictable” for it to qualify as endemic, when seasonal spikes shown on a graph means it wasn’t. This was rebuffed in a strong response from Prof. Heneghan, emphasising the seasonal pattern of endemic respiratory viruses and the variability of testing data and evidence on the ground.
Carl’s response to being challenged on the “f*ckwit” comment was dignified and professional, indicating it signified a lack of professionalism from the author as well as a lack of willingness to engage in debate, and an assumption of certainty where there was great uncertainty. He further pointed out that the entire lockdown response was driven by modelling and failed to take into account empirical data or the reality on the ground. Counsel scuttled along to that favourite fallback of the lockdown zealots – Long Covid – where Carl educated the Inquiry by telling it there was no greater risk of lingering disease from Covid than from any other seasonal respiratory disease.
At this point, Counsel decided to end the very short proceedings, presumably to shield the carefully constructed narrative to live another day.
It was hard not to notice the stark contrast in the attitude and approach to the two witnesses and it raises further serious questions on the ability of this long and expensive public inquiry to professionally and impartially challenge the decision making that led to lockdowns.
By Kit Klarenberg and Wyatt Reed | The Grayzone | October 5, 2025
A roving reporter who covered Italy’s top politicians explains to The Grayzone how his country was reduced to a joint US-Israeli “aircraft carrier,” and raises troubling questions about an Israeli role in the killing of Prime Minister Aldo Moro.
For years, Israel’s Mossad monitored and secretly influenced a violent communist faction that carried out the March 16, 1978 kidnapping and murder of Italian statesman Aldo Moro, veteran investigative journalist Eric Salerno has documented.
Having worked closely alongside multiple Italian heads of state during his 30-year career as a correspondent, Salerno published an expose of their secret relationship with Israeli intelligence in 2010 called Mossad Base Italy. … continue
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