In 2018, Europe swore it would shield the Iran deal from Trump. In 2025, it brought Trump’s ‘maximum pressure’ back under their own banner.
By Farhad Ibragimov | RT | September 8, 2025
Back in 2018, Europe blasted Donald Trump for pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal. Paris, Berlin, and London warned of a looming crisis in the Middle East and insisted the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was the only safeguard against another regional war. They even rolled out a special financial vehicle, Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges (INSTEX), to shield trade with Tehran from US sanctions. For a moment, it looked as if Europe was finally ready to assert its own strategic autonomy.
Seven years later, the picture couldn’t be more different. Britain, France, and Germany have triggered the snapback mechanism – a procedure written into UN Security Council Resolution 2231 back in 2015. On paper, snapback is a technical clause: if one of the deal’s signatories claims Iran is in breach, all the pre-2015 UN sanctions come rushing back. In practice, it’s a political bombshell. The very governments that once positioned themselves as defenders of the deal are now taking the first steps to dismantle it.
How snapback works
Snapback is a built-in device of Resolution 2231: once a party to the deal files a complaint, a thirty-day clock starts ticking. If the Security Council can’t agree to keep the sanctions lifted, the old restrictions automatically spring back into place – no new vote, no vetoes, just the force of the mechanism itself snapping shut.
And those sanctions aren’t symbolic. They revive six earlier UN resolutions passed between 2006 and 2010: an arms embargo, a ban on ballistic missile development, asset freezes, and travel bans targeting Iranian banks, companies, and officials. In other words, a full reset to the era of maximum pressure that Tehran endured more than a decade ago.
On paper, it reads like legalese. In practice, it carries weighty consequences. For Europe, it means slamming shut whatever limited doors were still open for trade and diplomacy with Tehran. For Iran, it’s a return to a familiar landscape of international isolation – one it has increasingly learned to navigate through ties with Russia, China, and regional partners.
Europe’s brief rebellion
When Donald Trump tore up the nuclear deal in 2018, Europe seemed almost defiant. Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel, and Theresa May openly criticized Washington’s unilateral move, warning it could ignite a new crisis in the Middle East and weaken the global nonproliferation regime. For a moment, it looked as if Europe was ready to chart its own course.
To prove it, Paris, Berlin, and London announced a special financial vehicle called INSTEX. On paper, it was meant to let European companies keep trading with Iran while bypassing US sanctions. In speeches, leaders cast it as a bold example of strategic autonomy – Europe standing by international law against American pressure.
In practice, it never delivered. Transactions were scarce, businesses stayed away, and INSTEX turned into little more than a symbol. What was meant to showcase Europe’s independence exposed instead its limits. Behind the rhetoric, the continent still lacked the muscle to stand up to Washington.
Even after the deal began to unravel, Tehran held on longer than many expected. For a time, Iran continued to observe key limits, signaling that it still wanted the agreement to survive. The steps it did take after 2019 – enriching uranium beyond agreed levels, reducing access for inspectors – were limited and largely declarative. They were less about racing toward a bomb than about sending a message: if Europe and the United States failed to keep their end of the bargain, Iran would not keep waiting forever.
Europe could have treated those moves as a call for dialogue. Instead, it chose to treat them as violations to be punished – leaning on legal mechanisms and pressure rather than genuine diplomacy. In practice, this meant not saving the deal but accelerating its collapse.
When Joe Biden took office in 2021, many in Europe breathed a sigh of relief. After four years of Trump’s “maximum pressure,” there was hope the US would return to the nuclear deal or at least give Europe more room to re-engage with Tehran. European diplomats saw Biden’s presidency as a reset button, a chance to salvage what was left of the JCPOA.
Talks resumed in 2022, bringing negotiators from Washington, the E3, and Tehran back to the table. But the optimism didn’t last. The West’s conditions went far beyond nuclear conditions: Iran was pressed to scale back its ties with Russia and cut off growing cooperation with China. To Tehran, those demands amounted to political disarmament – a direct threat to its sovereignty and security.
The negotiations collapsed. For Europe, it was a sobering moment: the Democratic administration they had counted on offered no breakthrough. For Iran, it confirmed what many suspected – that Washington’s return to the deal would come with strings too heavy to accept.
The US get what they want
The word snapback has already made waves in the halls of the UN back in August 2020. That summer, the Trump administration formally notified the Security Council that Iran was in breach of the nuclear deal and demanded that the old UN sanctions be reinstated. US lawyers pointed to Resolution 2231, which still listed Washington as a “participant” in the agreement – even though Trump had withdrawn the US two years earlier.
The reaction was swift and humiliating. Russia and China dismissed the move outright, and so did America’s closest allies in Europe. London, Paris, and Berlin all publicly declared that Washington had no standing to use the mechanism after quitting the deal. The snapback effort fizzled, and the sanctions remained suspended.
The irony is hard to miss. In 2020, Europe stood shoulder to shoulder with Moscow and Beijing to block Washington’s attempt. Five years later, the very same European capitals are the ones pulling the trigger.
When London, Paris, and Berlin announced they were triggering snapback, they wrapped the move in the language of diplomacy. In Paris, Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot stressed that France was still “open to a political solution.” In Berlin, Johann Wadephul urged Tehran to re-engage with the IAEA. Britain’s David Lammy said Iran had provided “no credible guarantees” about the peaceful nature of its program.
On the surface, it sounded like a routine chorus of diplomatic talking points. But behind the careful wording was a clear message: Europe was abandoning the posture of dialogue and embracing pressure. What the E3 once condemned in Washington, they were now carrying out themselves – only this time under their own flag.
In Tehran, the language was restrained but pointed. Officials called the European move “illegal and regrettable,” a formula that barely concealed deep frustration. For Iran, Europe’s decision confirmed once again that Brussels talks about strategic autonomy but falls in line the moment Washington sets the course.
Across the Atlantic, the response was the opposite: warm approval. Secretary of State Marco Rubio “welcomed” the step and claimed that snapback only strengthened America’s willingness to negotiate. Formally it sounded like an invitation to dialogue. But the memory of the spring talks – which ended not with compromise but with Israeli sabotage and US strikes on Iranian facilities – made the words ring hollow.
A world that has moved on
Europe’s wager on sanctions is a throwback to the early 2010s, when Tehran was isolated and the West could dictate terms. But that era is gone. Today Iran is not only a strategic partner for Moscow and Beijing but also a full member of BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization – platforms that carve out alternatives to the Western order.
In this new landscape, snapback may sting in Tehran, but it hits Europe too. Brussels loses credibility as a negotiator and opportunities as a trading partner. Each step in Washington’s shadow makes the European claim to “strategic autonomy” sound thinner.
The paradox is striking. On paper, Europe insists on its independence. In reality, its voice is fading in a multipolar world. While Brussels signs off on sanctions, Beijing and Moscow are busy sketching the architecture of a new order – one where Europe is no longer at the center.
Farhad Ibragimov – lecturer at the Faculty of Economics at RUDN University, visiting lecturer at the Institute of Social Sciences of the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration
@farhadibragim
A black man kills a white woman in an American city, and the mainstream media gives it zero coverage. Imagine if the races were reversed.
By Henry Johnston | RT | September 8, 2025
The US mainstream media tends to operate by encouraging a certain prefabricated outrage. Sensationalized narratives are cultivated along predictable tracks. But no less egregious is what the media chooses to ignore. Few events of late have better exposed the ideological underpinnings of the media – and of the elite whose narratives it plugs – than the recent brutal and shocking murder of a young Ukrainian woman on a train in Charlotte, North Carolina.
On August 22, a career criminal, Decarlos Brown Jr., casually walked up behind 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska, who was seated on a train minding her own business, and stabbed her three times in the neck in cold blood, killing her. He sauntered away, still clutching the knife dripping blood.
The mindless and savage attack was captured on surveillance footage, but Charlotte’s Democratic Mayor Vi Lyles pushed for it not to be released, ostensibly out of respect for the victim’s family. But the footage did eventually surface, and the story spread like wildfire. But this was a wildfire that couldn’t reach the impervious redoubt of the mainstream media – even after Elon Musk gave it the push into viral territory by chiming in on an End Wokeness thread pointing out the stunning media silence.
In fact, not a single major legacy outlet – the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, Reuters, CNN, Wall Street Journal, and others – picked it up. One would think that, by sheer chance, one of these esteemed outlets would have bucked the trend. But that didn’t happen because, as Matt Taibbi once brilliantly pointed out,
“Reporting is done in herds, no one wildebeest can break formation without screwing things up for the others. So, they’ll all hold the line, until they all stop holding the line.”
As of this writing, it seems the media herd is starting to reluctantly skate to where the puck is going. And that means that some version of the story, however sanitized, will soon appear everywhere.
So what exactly has given this story its irresistible momentum? Let’s start with the blatant double standard about reporting interracial crime. A white victim and a black perpetrator, as was the case in this instance, is usually a circumstance that tips the scales in favor of silence. When an instance of black-on-white crime cannot be avoided, the respective races of the individuals involved are not mentioned, and the tone is more along the lines of “aww shucks, what a tragedy.” When the racial roles are reversed, the media coverage is extensive and sensational, and the race angle is established immediately and runs throughout the ensuing coverage like an electric wire.
Given such highly distorted media coverage of interracial crime, one would be forgiven for assuming that it is blacks who are perpetually in mortal danger of racist attack by whites in the US. This view was a large part of the impetus behind the Black Lives Matter movement. However, the actual statistics on interracial crime, which are not easy to find, show otherwise. Buried inside this Department of Justice (DOJ) report from 2020 is a rather remarkable admission: “[In 2019], there were 5.3 times as many violent incidents committed by black offenders against white victims (472,570) as were committed by white offenders against black victims (89,980).” Such stark wording was not repeated in subsequent reports under the Biden DOJ, but there is no reason to believe anything has changed in the streets.
Zarutska’s murder certainly comes at a time of record-low American trust in the mainstream media. Instances of misreporting and factual disasters have become such a recurrent theme as to not require individual examples. The media’s efforts at narrative formation have also become so heavy-handed that identifying the establishment cause being promoted in almost any piece of reporting is now a parlor game.
But – and I venture into very risky terrain here – the uproar over this senseless killing also points to a deeply ensconced taboo slowly starting to unravel: Many white Americans are tired of being denied the right to display even the slightest and most tentative hint of the type of racial solidarity that other groups are extended so liberally. It is a story being played out on a different stage with different actors in Great Britain.
There’s another angle here, and it is one that has already been remarked upon in numerous places. The victim was a citizen of a country that the US has spent enormous treasure and effort ostensibly defending since 2022. The roughly $130 billion in aid that Washington has coughed up for Kiev comes out to some $3,500 per Ukrainian citizen. Certainly enough for a bodyguard on train rides.
And yet the silence from the pro-Ukraine crowd has mirrored that of the media at large. This certainly confirms what has been abundantly clear throughout the war and remains so today: Ukrainian deaths that don’t advance a Western elite media narrative are dismissed and ignored. But this lack of reaction also casts in sharp relief the reality that pro-Ukraine sentiment in the US is largely a cause bundled in with the rest of the progressive agenda, underpinned by the uniform mouthpiece of a jaded media. The Ukrainian flags one sees out and about rarely reflect a principled stance but rather deference to elite cues.
It will be said that all sides have merely assumed their positions on the barricades to score political points on this deeply human tragedy. We will all be accused of coming to praise Caesar rather than to bury him. This young woman’s death is indeed a human tragedy and a particularly painful one. But to see it as only a tragedy is to dismiss its larger context and to refuse to draw any conclusions. That is willful ignorance.
When a tragedy unveils such a confluence of two deep ideological biases, what it does is reveal the contours of the magnet moving underneath the pattern of American life.
Henry Johnston is a Moscow-based editor who worked in finance for over a decade.
By Manlio Dinucci | Global Research | September 8, 2025
The global dominance that the United States, the greatest power in the West, wants to maintain at all costs violates the most basic norms of international law: the Trump Administration revoked the visas of representatives of the State of Palestine, preventing them from attending the United Nations General Assembly in September.
This claim to dominance is provoking growing opposition from the Global South. This is confirmed by the warning issued by China with the largest military parade in Beijing.
The official statement from the State Department states that the Trump administration has revoked the visas of members of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Palestinian Authority (PA) ahead of the upcoming United Nations General Assembly, “in the interest of our national security” because “the PLO and PA are responsible for undermining the prospects for peace through their appeals to the UN International Court of Justice to obtain unilateral recognition of a hypothetical Palestinian state.”
In addition, the Trump Administration announced the suspension of visas for all Palestinian passport holders, preventing them from entering the United States for medical treatment, university attendance, visits to relatives, and business activities. At the same time, the Trump administration announced that it is studying “the post-war plan for Gaza”: it provides for the “voluntary transfer” of the entire Palestinian population to transform Gaza into a luxurious “Middle East Riviera.” In this way, while Israel continues its genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, the United States is dismantling the foundations of the State of Palestine.
However, the global dominance that the West’s greatest power wants to maintain at all costs, violating the most basic norms of international law, is provoking growing opposition from the Global South. This is confirmed by the meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, whose members include China, Russia, Belarus, Iran, India, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, with several other countries participating. At the meeting held in China, President Xi Jinping reiterated the basic principles:
“First, we must respect the principle of sovereign equality. We must uphold that all countries, regardless of their size, strength, and wealth, are equal participants, decision-makers, and beneficiaries in global governance. We must promote greater democracy in international relations and increase the representation and voice of developing countries.”
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This article was originally published in Italian on Grandangolo, Byoblu TV.
Manlio Dinucci, award-winning author, geopolitical analyst and geographer, Pisa, Italy. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
By Paul Connett, Ph.D. | The Defender | September 5, 2025
Paul Connett, Ph.D., co-author of “The Case Against Fluoride: How Hazardous Waste Ended Up in Our Drinking Water and the Bad Science and Powerful Politics That Keep It There,” responds to Thursday’s U.S. Senate hearing during which members of the Finance Committee accused U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. of “politicizing” science.
Yesterday, the world watched as you bayed and sneered at Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for disagreeing with your beliefs on vaccines.
Were you following a script forwarded to you by the PR hate machinery of the pharmaceutical industry?
Ironically, a similar complex of industry, CDC and pseudo-professional bodies has kept you silent on another public health practice for decades.
You have remained silent while they have dripped poison into our children’s bodies for 80 years.
Where were you between 2017 and 2020, when U.S. Government-funded mother-offspring and infant fluoride IQ studies were published?
Where were you in 2022, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention witnessed this science but failed to warn pregnant mums to avoid fluoridated water?
Where were you in 2024 when the National Toxicology Program reviewed these and many other IQ studies and concurred that fluoride was a neurotoxin?
Where were you on Sept. 24, 2024, when a federal judge concluded, after a seven-year Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) trial, that “U.S. Government-approved” fluoridated water posed an “unreasonable risk” to America’s children?
Did you read this science that you supposedly treasure? Did you put it above self-serving propaganda sources?
Are you following the science? Or following the money? On both issues?
Where was RFK Jr. during all this? He was reading the science.
And he watched the TSCA trial online. He knows that fluoridation must end.
Is he wrong on this? Are you?
Perhaps it’s time you stopped your baying and sneering and started actually reading the science?
Is it good to expose a baby’s brain to fluoride from day 1 of pregnancy?
Is it good to inject organic mercury into a baby’s bloodstream?
Is it good to inject aluminum into a baby’s bloodstream?
Should we be messing with messenger RNA?
Do we know what we are doing?
Paul Connett, Ph.D., is co-author of “The Case Against Fluoride: How Hazardous Waste Ended Up in Our Drinking Water and the Bad Science and Powerful Politics That Keep It There.”
By Paul Anthony Taylor | Dr. Rath Health Foundation | September 5, 2025
A leaked memo from one of the pharma cartel’s most powerful trade groups has revealed a desperate plan to push Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. out of his role as United States Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS). The document, apparently originating from a closed-door meeting of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO), shows that industry leaders are prepared to spend millions of dollars lobbying Congress and manipulating public opinion to force Kennedy from his job. At stake is not just U.S. government vaccine policy, but the deeper question of who actually runs public health in America – democratically elected officials, or the corporations that profit from disease.
The plan unveiled
The memo appears to come from BIO’s Vaccine Policy Steering Committee, a powerful body representing companies such as Pfizer, Merck, Novavax, and Vaxcyte. According to whistleblowers, the group met on April 3, 2025, to discuss the “threat” posed by Kennedy’s healthcare reform agenda. The summary leaves no doubt about its intentions. One line is especially blunt: “It is time to go to The Hill and lobby that it is time for RFK Jr. to go.”
The threat to the cartel is clear. Kennedy has insisted on long-term safety data for vaccines, full publication of trial results, and the restoration of manufacturer liability for injuries. These proposals would dramatically slow down the fast-track approvals and legal protections that have allowed vaccine makers to rake in billions while avoiding accountability. In the eyes of BIO, this is not just policy reform – it is a direct attack on its business model.
Fear of accountability
BIO’s real fear is not scientific debate but financial disruption. The memo quotes one executive from Vaxcyte warning that “investors have stated they are leaving until the next data read out,” citing uncertainty caused by Kennedy’s push for tighter regulation. Capital, in other words, is fleeing the vaccine sector. Instead of reassuring the public with stronger safety standards, BIO is working to reassure Wall Street by removing the man calling for reform.
This exposes the heart of the problem: the pharmaceutical industry has become so dependent on weak oversight and political protection that it views accountability itself as a threat. Rather than adapt to higher safety expectations, BIO would rather manipulate politics to preserve the old system.
Buying influence
The most revealing part of the plan is financial. BIO has committed $2 million to a new communications campaign titled ‘Why We Vaccinate.’ But this is no ordinary public health initiative. According to the memo, its goal is not education but “inspire and frighten” messaging designed to sway the “movable middle” of public opinion. Essentially, by tying vaccination to national security, economic productivity, and workforce resilience, the campaign seeks to use fear as a political weapon.
This is not science. It is psychology. Instead of engaging Kennedy’s arguments on their merits, BIO plans to drown out discussion with a flood of fear-based advertising and carefully managed surrogates. Among those mentioned as possible allies are Dr. Mehmet Oz and Senator Bill Cassidy. These figures are expected to provide a veneer of bipartisan legitimacy while avoiding any real debate about the substance of Kennedy’s proposals.
Controlling the narrative
Equally troubling is BIO’s strategy of redefining language itself. The leaked document reveals plans to replace words like “protect” and “defend” with softer-sounding terms such as “streamline,” “optimize,” and “enhance.” But behind the rebranding lies a cynical truth. As Robert W. Malone MD has pointed out, when BIO says “efficiency,” it means fewer safety checks. When it says “transparency,” it means PR-polished talking points, not the release of raw scientific data. When it says “resilience,” it means consumer obedience, not real safeguards.
This is not reform – it is narrative disingenuity that would not be out of place in George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. BIO is attempting to control the vocabulary while ensuring that nothing actually changes. It is a form of deception that goes beyond lobbying, seeking to manipulate the very terms of debate so the public never realizes reform has been hollowed out.
The plot is already underway
The memo points to this month (September 2025) as a critical deadline. Congress is back in full session, budget negotiations are getting underway, and the media cycle is returning to full speed after the summer lull. BIO’s campaign is timed to seize this moment, flooding the airwaves with its ‘Why We Vaccinate’ messaging before Kennedy’s reform agenda gains traction.
September also marks the reopening of schools, a time when vaccine debates are most prominent in the public eye. By striking early, BIO hopes to dominate the narrative and silence Kennedy before he can rally broader public support. For the pharma industry, this is not about science but survival.
Significantly, therefore, in the past couple of days, we have already seen nine former leaders of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) speaking out against Kennedy, publishing an open letter in The New York Times that criticizes his policies.
Separately, and simultaneously, more than 1,000 current and former HHS employees are said to be calling for Kennedy to either resign or be fired. Their letter – which does not name the signatories but mentions vaccines eight times – accuses him of endangering the nation’s health. It is difficult not to see the hand of BIO behind these moves.
A threat to democracy
The implications of this plot go far beyond health policy. If corporations can secretly conspire to spend millions lobbying for the removal of a sitting government official, then democracy itself is in danger. Whether one agrees with Kennedy’s policies or not, it should not be the pharmaceutical lobby that decides who serves in public office. That decision belongs to the people and their elected representatives, not to an industry that stands to profit from the outcome.
This is why the BIO leak matters so much. It shines a light on the machinery of influence that usually operates in the shadows – closed-door meetings, carefully managed talking points, and money flowing into Washington to buy outcomes that serve shareholders instead of citizens.
Who decides about global health?
The BIO plot also has international implications, as it aligns with broader efforts to centralize health policy through global treaties and the algorithmic censorship of dissenting medical views. If left unchecked, this could lead to a future where drug companies, aided by international bodies, dictate not only U.S. policy but all global health decisions as well. The Kennedy reforms represent a direct challenge to that vision.
Ultimately, therefore, this story is not just about Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. It is about whether public health will be guided by the principles of science, safety, and consent – or by the profit motives of an industry that sees accountability as a threat. Seen in this light, BIO’s efforts to remove Kennedy are not a sign of power. They are an admittance of weakness.
Kennedy’s reforms may be inconvenient for Wall Street, but they reflect the public’s increasing demands for safety, consent, and honesty in medicine. The real question now is whether corporations will continue to dictate the rules – or whether the American people can successfully reclaim health policy for the public good.
Paul Anthony Taylor
Executive Director of the Dr. Rath Health Foundation and one of the coauthors of our explosive book, “The Nazi Roots of the ‘Brussels EU’”, Paul is also our expert on the Codex Alimentarius Commission and has had eye-witness experience, as an official observer delegate, at its meetings.
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | September 4, 2025
In a contentious Senate hearing today, U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. engaged in fiery exchanges with senators on both sides of the aisle who questioned his record in office, the administration’s vaccine policies, and the ouster of top officials and advisers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
During the hearing held by the Senate Finance Committee, which has oversight over the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), many senators used their allotted five minutes to make impassioned speeches and air their grievances, often leaving Kennedy little or no time to respond.
The New York Times described Kennedy, who was visibly annoyed at times, as “remarkably salty and dismissive with senators at times today.”
“You don’t want to talk,” Kennedy told Sen. Elizabeth Smith (D-Minn.). “You want to harangue and have partisan politics. I want to solve these problems.”
Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) called for Kennedy to resign or be fired by President Donald Trump during the hearing. This morning, Democratic senators on the committee issued a statement calling for his resignation.
Kennedy clashed with senators over the administration’s recent firing of CDC Director Susan Monarez, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) narrowing of the COVID-19 vaccine approvals, the recent cancellation of $500 million in research funding for mRNA vaccines, Kennedy’s restructuring of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices) and the upcoming agenda for that committee, which will address the universal hepatitis B vaccine recommendations.
Several senators also pressed Kennedy on whether Operation Warp Speed was a great accomplishment, and raised concerns about cuts to Medicaid and funding for rural hospitals.
Kennedy shot back at his critics, promising to fix the “malpractice” within the public health agencies, and touting his agency’s many accomplishments since he took the helm.
He blasted the CDC, which he said, “is the most corrupt agency in HHS,” for its history of failing to protect Americans’ health, particularly during the COVID-19 crisis, during which the U.S. “did worse than any country in the world.”
“The people at CDC who oversaw that process, who put masks on our children, who closed our schools, are the people who will be leaving,” he said, adding, “That’s why we need bold, competent and creative new leadership at CDC. People who are able and willing to chart a new course.”
Wyden called Kennedy a liar, Kennedy accused Wyden of doing nothing to prevent chronic disease
After Committee Chair Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) kicked off what he predicted would be a “spirited debate,” ranking member Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) attacked Kennedy for the “costs, chaos and corruption” he allegedly brought to the agency.
That was also the title of a report Wyden co-authored with Sen. Angela Alsobrooks (D-Md.) and submitted to the record, summarizing their take on Kennedy’s tenure at HHS.
Wyden called Kennedy a liar and made what he called an “unprecedented” request that Kennedy be formally sworn in, presumably so the committee could later prove he lied under oath. Crapo refused the request, which isn’t customary in Senate hearings.
Wyden then launched a long attack on Kennedy’s “agenda,” which he said is “fundamentally cruel and defies common sense.”
Kennedy shot back:
“Senator, you’ve sat in that chair for how long? 20, 25 years? While the chronic disease in our children went up to 76%, and you said nothing. You never asked the question, why it’s happening. ‘Why is this happening?’ Today, for the first time in 20 years, we learned that infant mortality has increased in our country. It’s not because I came in here. It’s because of what happened during the Biden administration that we’re going to end.”
Kennedy says Monarez lied in WSJ Op-Ed
Several senators referred to an op-ed written by Monarez and published this morning in The Wall Street Journal. Monarez, who was fired last week by Trump, claimed Kennedy pressured her “to compromise science itself.”
“I was told to preapprove the recommendations of a vaccine advisory panel newly filled with people who have publicly expressed antivaccine rhetoric,” Monarez wrote.
When asked, Kennedy disputed Monarez’s account of her firing. “I told her that she had to resign because I asked her, ‘Are you a trustworthy person?’ And she said ‘no,’” he said.
Wyden quoted Monarez to Kennedy and asked whether he had pressured her to preapprove recommendations. “No, I did not say that to her,” Kennedy responded.
So she’s lying today to the American people in the Wall Street Journal ?” Wyden asked.
“Yes, sir,” Kennedy responded.
Kennedy said the opposite was true. Monarez indicated she would refuse to endorse any CDC vaccine panel recommendations even before the committee met to make them, he said. He said he asked her to walk back that stance so she would hear the recommendations and their rationale before making any decision, but Monarez refused.
Taking away vaccines?
Several senators, including Smith and Warren, accused Kennedy of going back on his commitment and “taking away vaccines” from the American people.
Warren cited the FDA’s decision to end emergency use authorization of COVID-19 vaccines and limit approvals of the vaccines to people at high risk. However, HHS also confirmed the vaccines would be available for anyone who decided they wanted them anyway.
Defending the move, Kennedy told Warren, “We’re not going to recommend a product for which there’s no clinical data for that indication, is that what I should be doing?”
“I know you’ve taken $855,000 from pharmaceutical companies, Senator,” he later told Warren.
Operation Warp Speed — worthy of a Nobel Prize
Senators accused Kennedy of holding a contradictory position on Operation Warp Speed, which Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) said deserved a Nobel Prize, but few gave him time to respond to the accusations.
Several senators also lambasted Kennedy for not acknowledging that the COVID-19 vaccines saved millions of lives.
Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), a physician who supported Kennedy and spent much of his five minutes questioning why the hepatitis B vaccine is given to all babies, asked Kennedy to respond.
Kennedy said that when the COVID-19 vaccines were first rolled out, they were necessary because the virus was dangerous, but that the vaccines were significantly less necessary now.
“The virus has mutated, it’s much less dangerous, where there’s a lot of natural immunity and herd immunity, and so the calculus is different, and it’s complicated.”
Kennedy added:
“They think I’m being evasive because I won’t make a kind of a statement that’s almost religious in nature, ‘it saved a million lives.’ Well, there is no data to support that. There’s no study. There’s modeling studies. There’s faulty data.”
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who thanked Kennedy for “putting up with this abuse,” backed Kennedy’s statements on the dangers of the COVID-19 vaccines and said federal health agencies hid the early signals for myo and pericarditis.
At the end of the hearing, Crapo offered Kennedy the floor to make a statement if there were things he wanted to clarify.
“I think I’ll have mercy on everybody here,” Kennedy said. “Let’s adjourn.”
Watch the full hearing on CHD.TV
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.
By Anthony Watts | Climate Realism | September 2, 2025
A recent Associated Press (AP) story carried by WCVB-TV and many other news outlets, warned that “climate change is making it “dicier” to grow corn in the United States. This is false. Data clearly shows that amid modest climate change corn yields and production have increased steadily, regularly setting new records.
The AP writes:
Across major corn-growing states, climate change is fueling conditions that make watching the corn grow a nail-biter for farmers. Factors like consistently high summer overnight temperatures, droughts and heavier-than-usual rains at the wrong time can all disrupt the plants’ pollination — making each full ear of corn less of a guarantee and more of a gamble.
Overall, corn growers got lucky this year with late-season weather that contributed to what is now predicted to be a record bumper crop. But experts say bouts of extreme weather are intensifying the waiting game during a critical time of year between planting and harvest.
Human-caused climate change has worsened multiple U.S. extreme heat events this year and has steadily increased the likelihood of hotter overnight temperatures since 1970, according to Climate Central, an independent group of scientists who communicate climate science and data to the public.
The AP’s narrative is a pure lie, debunked within its own paragraphs. Corn growers didn’t get lucky this year with a bumper crop, rather bumper crops have been a trend during the recent period of modest warming, even with the normal annual ups and downs inherent to crop production. The USDA meteorologist, Brad Rippey, who the AP quoted described 2025’s production as a “monster U.S. corn crop.” But it’s not the first monster crop in the past few decades for U.S. corn farmers.
The numbers tell a clear and compelling story of rising corn production. The U.S. Department of Agriculture confirmed record national yields of 179.3 bushels per acre in 2024, breaking the previous record set only a year earlier in 2023. Long-term records from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization show U.S. corn yields have more than tripled since 1961, rising from around 3.5 tons per hectare to more than 11 tons today as seen in the figure below:
Economists at the University of Illinois calculate that yields have increased by nearly two bushels per acre every year since 1950. These are not the marks of a crop in decline — they are the hallmarks of long-term improvement from better farming practices, yield improved varieties, selective breeding practices to improve resiliency to weather factors, and boosted production due to carbon dioxide fertilization.
The significant gains in yields have also produced records for production with U.S. Department of Agriculture data showing each of the past ten years of production having been higher than any previous years or decades in history, with new records for production being set three times since 2016.
To tie corn growers concerns to climate change, the AP article relied on a small number of anecdotes about heat, corn tassel timing, and the fragility of pollination. Yes, these can matter for pollination in a particular field, but they have always been part of farming. Weather extremes are nothing new, and across hundreds of posts, Climate Realism has cited data across a range of stories showing extreme weather hasn’t become more frequent, severe, or inconsistent in recent years. What matters is the nationwide harvest, and it keeps breaking records. If the climate were truly making corn “dicier,” record-breaking yields would not keep piling up.
The real problem corn producers face at the moment is not crop decline, but instead just the opposite, crop abundance and farming success. Bumper crops have produced an oversupply to the market that is resulting in lower prices, even as ever more corn is being diverted from grocery shelves to gas tanks as ethanol requirements creep up.
Farmers are not watching their livelihoods wither under climate change. Instead, they are wrestling with the economic consequences of overproduction, as a variety of news outlets have reported recently. On the same day the AP was incorrectly bemoaning corn declines, a story titled, “Huge Crops in Corn Belt Hit Cash-Strapped Farmers With More Unease,” was published in the Wall Street Journal. Just a few days earlier, in a story, subtitled, “so much corn, so little profit, NewsNation reported that with the USDA projecting 16.7 billion bushels of corn in 2025, the largest in American history, the glut is pushing prices to multi-year lows, with Iowa producers estimating losses of $80 to $100 per acre at current bids. That is not a climate crisis, it is an economic one caused by success.
So contrary to the AP’s claims, the real problem facing corn farmers is not extreme, unpredictable weather and crop diseases hampering production, but rather oversupply of the market due to record setting production, the latter a regular occurrence across the first quarter of the 21st century as global temperatures have continued to rise modestly.
Climate Realism has repeatedly documented this pattern of media misrepresentation about crop yields and climate change, with over 100 articles on the subject. We note that when crop yields rise, the media ignores or downplays it. When a short-term weather challenge arises, it is cast as evidence of climate change driving it. The broader reality — backed by decades of USDA and FAO data — is that American agriculture continues to thrive even in a modestly warmer world. Corn is not alone, wheat and soybeans, for example, are also enjoying long-term gains in productivity, and 2025 will be remembered for surplus, not scarcity.
Oversupply is forcing farmers to store corn with little hope of profitable sales, while trade policy uncertainties in corn exports weigh on demand. These are the real stressors in agriculture today, none of which have anything to do with climate change. By fixating on climate change while admitting record abundance in the same breath, The AP obscures the actual challenges farmers face with regards to commodity markets, prices, and trade.
The conclusion is unavoidable: the claim that climate change is making corn yields more precarious is demonstrably false. Yields are rising, production is at record highs, and as a result, prices are low, driving down farm income. The Associated Press misled its affiliates and readers by suggesting a climate crisis where there is none, undermining trust in its reporting. Farmers and the public deserve better.
The unilateral measures were associated with more than 560,000 excess deaths annually from 1971 to 2021, a recent study suggests
RT | September 7, 2025
Western sanctions contributed to nearly 29 million excess deaths worldwide over five decades – a toll comparable to that of wars, according to a recent study.
The research, published last month in Lancet Global Health, has gained attention around the world.
Examining age-specific mortality in 152 countries from 1971 to 2021, using statistics from the Global Sanctions Database, researchers compared mortality rates before and after sanctions, tracking long-term trends to estimate their toll in excess deaths. They focused on three sanctioning authorities: The UN, the US, and the EU (and its predecessor).
“We estimate that unilateral sanctions over this period caused 564,258 deaths per year, similar to the global mortality burden associated with armed conflict,” the authors noted, with a total of 28.8 million deaths across the 51-year span.
We found the strongest effects for unilateral, economic, and US sanctions, whereas we found no statistical evidence of an effect for UN sanctions.
Most excess deaths occurred among the most vulnerable – the very young and the elderly.
“Our findings reveal that unilateral and economic sanctions, particularly those imposed by the USA, lead to substantial increases in mortality, disproportionately affecting children younger than 5 years,” the study said, noting that the age group accounted for 51% of the total death toll.
The report found that the sanctions undermine economic and food security, often causing hunger and health problems among the poorest. Additionally, the dominance of the dollar and euro in global transactions allowed the US and EU to amplify the impact of their sanctions.
At last year’s BRICS summit, member nations called for “unlawful unilateral coercive measures” to be eliminated, warning of their disproportionate impact on the most vulnerable. Members have increasingly avoided the dollar “to shield themselves from US arbitrariness,” Moscow has said.
At the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Tianjin this week, Chinese President Xi Jinping called for a fairer global governance system based on mutual respect and opposition to Western dominance. Russian President Vladimir Putin welcomed the proposal as especially relevant when “some countries still do not abandon their desire for dictatorship in international affairs.”
By Max Blumenthal | The Grayzone | September 6, 2025
AP’s Israel-Palestine news director, Josef Federman, has spun data to minimize the Gaza death count. Leaked documents show he appeared on a panel aimed at assisting “Israel’s ability to effectively portray its narrative” during a gov’t-sponsored propaganda conference chaired by an ex-IDF official who legitimized killing journalists.
The Israeli massacre of five journalists in broad daylight on August 24, 2025 at Nasser Hospital in Gaza’s Khan Younis city prompted a sternly worded statement to the Israeli government from the Associated Press and Reuters, which each employed a reporter murdered by the IDF. The AP subsequently published a detailed investigation demonstrating that the Israeli military knowingly attacked a civilian target, then carried out a double tap strike after a rescue team and journalists arrived on the scene.
While the AP’s statement of outrage about the killing of its photographer in Gaza, Miriam Dagga, has brought the leading wire agency’s tension with the Israeli government to its height, the relationship with Tel Aviv was not always so adversarial.
The Grayzone has reviewed leaked documents revealing that the AP’s news director for Israel-Palestine, Josef Federman, participated in a private 2018 panel discussion aimed at assisting “Israel’s ability to effectively portray its narrative.” His host was a secretive Israeli government outfit dedicated to combatting the global BDS campaign to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel. Called the Global Coalition For Israel (GC4I), the event was convened in Jerusalem on June 18, 2018 by Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Diplomacy – the de facto propaganda arm of the Israeli government.
The moderator of the panel in which Federman participated was Avital Leibovich, the former spokeswoman for the IDF who has ardently defended the Israeli policy of defining Palestinian journalists as terrorists in order to assassinate them.
Federman has presided over the AP’s coverage of Israel-Palestine since 2014. Throughout Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza began in October 2023, Federman has helped shape a narrative that has subtly but effectively advanced Tel Aviv’s objectives, regurgitating the baseless and comprehensively debunked claim that “Israelis were raped or sexually assaulted” on October 7; legitimizing Israel’s violent invasion and theft of Syrian land as a historical “shift,” and relying on bogus data from an Israel lobby-affiliated researcher to minimize the civilian death count in Gaza – a grim toll which now includes one of his colleagues at AP.
Federman’s penchant for uncritically quoting notoriously mendacious Israeli military officials has helped secure his reputation for biased coverage.
Federman’s participation in the 2018 Israeli government anti-BDS event appears to contradict clearly stated AP guidelines on conflicts of interest. According to the AP’s website, “We avoid addressing, or accepting fees or expenses from, governmental bodies; trade, lobbying or special interest groups; businesses, or labor groups; or any group that would pose a conflict of interest.”
In response to a detailed query from The Grayzone about Federman’s participation in the semi-covert conference, AP Vice President of Corporate Communications Lauren Easton stated, “Josef Federman is a professional journalist and a former chairman of Israel’s Foreign Press Association. It is not uncommon for journalists to speak about their work at conferences and other events. It remains AP policy to refrain from accepting honoraria, and that policy was followed here.”
The details of the GC41’s gathering were gleaned from a massive tranche of documents extracted by hackers from Israel’s Ministry of Justice in 2024. A full schedule and list of GC4I conference participants has never been seen before by the public.
View GC4I’s 2018 schedule here.
When GC4I gathered in 2018, it met at the Mamilla Hotel Conference Hall in Jerusalem for two days of discussions and briefings on the fight to crush the growing Palestine solidarity movement and its BDS campaign. The conference opened with an address by Sima Vaknin-Gil, then the Director-General of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs. A former Israeli intelligence official, Vakhnin-Gil had emerged as one of the most influential coordinators of the country’s propaganda efforts abroad, especially in the US, where she helps the Israeli government evade the Foreign Agent Registration Act law.
Her speech was followed by a discussion moderated by celebrity Republican pollster Frank Luntz on the feasibility of defining the BDS movement as a “hate group.” Further panels focused on “developing relations in the corridors of power” and “how… legislation in Europe and the United States can be used to reduce funding for organizations delegitimizing Israel.”
On the second day of the GC41 conference, Federman joined a panel aimed at “discuss[ing] the difficulties of reporting fairly and accurately on Israel, while dealing with issues such as BDS, delegitimization, and the Israel-Palestinian conflict.”
The panel was explicitly aimed at helping the Zionist operatives gathered at the GC4I “understand the shortcomings in Israel’s ability to effectively portray its narrative, what reporters are looking for when writing an article and why the anti-Israel camp’s narrative resonates in the Western world.”
Avital Leibovich, a former IDF spokeswoman who moved on to the American Jewish Committee, chaired the panel. During her stint at the IDF, Leibovich played a leading role in justifying Israel’s deliberate killing of journalists in the Gaza Strip. In 2012, for example, she fired off a letter to the New York Times which smeared Palestinian journalists slain at the hands of the Israeli military: “Such terrorists who hold cameras and notebooks in their hands, are no different from their colleagues who fire rockets aimed at Israeli cities and cannot enjoy the rights and protection afforded to legitimate journalists,” she wrote.
In 2016, Leibovich appeared at Washington DC’s Newseum amid protests – including by this reporter– and condemnation from the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate, which urged the institution in a May 31 letter “not to provide a platform to someone who has justified, on record and to a world audience, Israel’s grave violations of international law and war crimes, and in particular attacks against journalists and press freedoms.”
Chaired by Leibovich, the 2018 GC4I panel featured featured the Jerusalem Bureau Chief of RT, Paula Slier, and Laurent Lozano, who held the same position at Agence France Press, alongside the AP’s Federman. Slier has since left RT, while Lozano is currently AFP’s bureau chief in Dakar, Senegal.
Reached by The Grayzone, Slier described the gathering as “a very pleasant experience.”
She said she considered her participation in a semi-covert Israeli government conference as a normal part of her duties as a correspondent in Jerusalem. “It was a chance for them to hear how foreign channels worked in Israel,” Slier commented. “I used to participate and attend all conferences – whether they were pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian – I thought it important to engage with everyone, and it was also an opportunity to talk about RT.”
GC4I launched at “secret conference” with “closed sessions” on criminalizing BDS
GC4I’s first gathering took place in 2010, at a time of heightened Zionist anxiety about the rising global grassroots movement to boycott Israel. A who’s who of Israeli lobbyists from the US, UK and Australia were on hand, alongside Israeli officials from the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the newly created Ministry of Strategic Affairs.
“The aim was to end the perceived lack of co-ordination within the pro-Israel movement, a concern frequently voiced by Israel-advocates,” wrote researcher Hil Aked.
Marcus Dysch of the Jewish Chronicle gained access to a 2014 GC4I meeting in London, England. He described it as a “secret conference… held in closed sessions amid heavy security.”
“We have the resources. We have the intelligence. Most important, we have unbounded determination,” Ronald Lauder, the billionaire Zionist financier and Netanyahu confidant, told the crowd of Jewish communal leaders and Israeli officials in London.
Lauder pledged to leverage his fortune to criminalize the BDS movement: “We will draft and lobby for legislation that will withhold government funding from academic institutions that boycott Israel.”
Reporting back to Jewish Federation at home, minimizing deaths in Gaza
Well before he emerged in the Middle East as a reporter, Josef Federman enrolled as a graduate student at Israel’s Hebrew University.
He grew up in Westborough, Massachusetts, where his parents helped found the B’nai Shalom Congregation, a Reform Jewish synagogue. Federman has returned on two occasions to deliver lectures at the synagogue, once in 2021 to discuss the Abraham Accords alongside an Israeli academic, and again in March 2024, during the height of Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, for an event titled, “Reporting from Israel.” That speech was co-sponsored by the Jewish Federations of Central Massachusetts, a top sponsor of pro-Israel lobbying inside the US.
Two months later, the Israeli government seized camera equipment from the AP to prevent it from live-streaming video from the Israeli side of the northern Gaza frontier. While Israel announced that it would return the equipment and allow the broadcasts to continue, the event eerily foreshadowed the Israeli military’s double tap strike on the Reuters live position at the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis this August 24.
The following month, Federman published a piece of “AP data analysis” that relied on dubious statistics to advance one of Israel’s most important propaganda objectives in Gaza. According to the headline of Federman’s piece, “Women and children are killed less frequently as war’s toll rises.” The article therefore implied that all men in Gaza between the ages of 18 and 59 were possible militants. Throughout the piece, Federman referred to Gaza’s Health Ministry as “Hamas-run,” casting doubt on its casualty counts.
To legitimize his conclusions, Federman turned to Gabriel Epstein, a researcher at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, or WINEP, the most prolific think tank of the Israel lobby in Washington DC. WINEP director Robert Satloff, a veteran Israel lobbyist, praised the AP’s Federman for “tak[ing] a big step toward setting the record straight.”
Another researcher cited in the article, Michael Spagat, defended the quality of death counts by Gaza’s Health Ministry. Months later, in September 2024, Spagat revised his view of the death toll, declaring, “I now believe that the true death toll almost certainly exceeds the official total.”
This August, a review of an internal Israeli intelligence database further discredited Federman’s analysis, revealing that 83% of those killed by the Israeli military in Gaza were civilians.
Today, Federman’s “data analysis” on the Gaza death has been discredited by virtually every expert outside the Israel lobby, and by the gruesome reality on the ground. However, a revealing post remains on his personal LinkedIn page which shows him liking a rant by Idit Shamir, consul general of Israel in Toronto, mocking the official death count in Gaza:
“Isn’t it curious?” wrote the Israeli official. “Hamas is clueless about Israeli hostages’ status but has a crystal-clear count of Palestinian casualties before Israeli strikes even occur!”
Now that a fellow AP reporter, Miriam Dagga, has joined the tens of thousands of civilians murdered by Israel in Gaza over the past two years, Federman’s agency has been forced to release a rare expression of outrage at Tel Aviv. The indignation offers a stark contrast from the comity Federman displayed when he bantered at an Israeli government conference with the former IDF official who legitimized the policy that would claim Dagga’s life.
By Ivan Kesic | Press TV | September 6, 2025
In yet another glaring example of shielding the Israeli regime from accountability, the United States has imposed sanctions on three Palestinian human rights organizations, including Al-Haq, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, and the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights.
Enacted on September 4, 2025, under the pretext of Executive Order 14203, these measures explicitly target the human rights groups for their legitimate engagement with the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate Israeli war crimes amid the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
This move, watchdogs argue, represents a direct attack on the core principles of international law and human rights defense, strategically designed to criminalize truth-telling and protect Israeli impunity.
They say it forms a sinister pattern of obstruction, following earlier sanctions against the Palestinian prisoner rights group Addameer, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, and the ICC itself.
It comes amid the ongoing genocide in Gaza that has claimed nearly 65,000 Palestinian lives, most of them children and women, since October 2023.
Al-Haq
Established in 1979 in Ramallah, the occupied West Bank, Al-Haq stands as one of the oldest and most respected Palestinian human rights organizations, dedicated to protecting human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory under the strict frameworks of international law.
The organization has consultative status at the UN Economic and Social Council and is a member of international federations like FIDH for its meticulous documentation of Israeli crimes, including extrajudicial killings, torture, and the institutionalized practices of apartheid and settler colonialism.
Al-Haq’s advocacy work has been instrumental in providing critical evidence to the ICC, directly supporting the court’s 2024 arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former military affairs minister Yoav Gallant for horrendous war crimes.
The organization’s reaction to the US sanctions was one of defiant condemnation, issuing a statement that labeled the measures an “internationally wrongful act” aimed at shielding the Israeli “Zionist settler-colonial apartheid regime.”
Al-Haq’s director, Shawan Jabarin, emphasized that the sanctions, which freeze assets and criminalize essential transactions, pose a direct threat to operational capacity and staff safety, but the official vowed unwavering resilience, stating: “We will not be silenced.”
This reprisal mirrors a previous Israeli designation of Al-Haq as a “terrorist organization” in 2021, which was widely condemned by major human rights watchdogs at the time.
The Palestinian Center for Human Rights
Founded in 1995 in Gaza City by prominent lawyers and activists, including Raji Sourani, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) has built a formidable reputation for its grassroots advocacy and legal action against human rights violations in the besieged Gaza Strip.
PCHR holds consultative status with the UN and has been a vital source of documentation throughout the devastating Gaza genocidal war, reporting on Israeli airstrikes, extrajudicial killings, and the crippling blockade that violates international humanitarian law.
Its advocacy work has relentlessly focused on providing legal aid to victims and submitting detailed evidence of war crimes to the ICC, making it a key partner in the international pursuit of justice.
PCHR reacted to the sanctions by directly naming US complicity, stating on its X account, “Yesterday, the US government, Israel’s partner in the ongoing genocide, shamefully sanctioned Palestinian human rights organisations.”
The organization highlighted the chilling effect these sanctions will have, threatening its ability to operate amid a dire humanitarian crisis where its work documenting atrocities and offering legal services is most critically needed.
PCHR framed the US action as a deliberate attempt to criminalize their truth-telling mission and protect Israeli impunity, vowing to continue its advocacy despite the immense risks and calling for global solidarity to counter this blatant intimidation.
The Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights
The Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights, established in 1999 in Gaza, has dedicated its mission to monitoring and documenting human rights violations with a specific focus on the devastating impact of Israeli gencoidal war and siege on the civilian population.
As a member of international networks like FIDH and the OMCT, Al-Mezan has built a reputation for credible reporting on the ground, detailing the destruction of infrastructure, civilian deaths, and the famine-like conditions exacerbated by the ongoing conflict.
Its advocacy work has been pivotal in supporting the ICC’s investigation, providing crucial evidence that contributed to the case against Israeli leaders for atrocity crimes.
Al-Mezan connected the sanctions to the ongoing genocide, stating, “As the genocide in Gaza continues, the US has sanctioned us, @alhaq_org, and @pchrgaza, citing our support & involvement with the ICC’s efforts.”
The organization warned that the US measures constitute a direct attack on their ability to document atrocities and provide essential legal and psychological support to victims, thereby further endangering staff safety and isolating them from international partners.
Al-Mezan urgently called on the European Union and other international actors to invoke blocking statutes to neutralize the sanctions’ impact, framing the US move as an extension of its complicity in the Israeli campaign to eradicate Palestinian resistance and silence any witness to its crimes.
International outrage
The sanctions against these three organizations have been met with universal condemnation from the international human rights community, with leading global NGOs labeling the measures a “blatant attack on human rights” and a “cruel and vindictive effort to punish those advocating for victims.”
UN High Commissioner Volker Türk deemed the measures “completely unacceptable,” arguing they serve only to deepen impunity and silence victims.
This concerted effort to dismantle Palestinian civil society exposes a US foreign policy that has wholly abandoned any pretense of supporting a rules-based international order, choosing instead to act as the legal shield for a Zionist project of dispossession and genocide.
By weaponizing its financial power to sanction human rights defenders, the United States is not merely observing but actively participating in the suppression of the Palestinian people, revealing a profound moral bankruptcy that history will judge with severity.
Al-Manar | September 6, 2025
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi rapped what he called the “deafening Western silence” on the expansion of the Israeli nuclear weapons.
“Iran has long warned that the Western hysteria over nuclear proliferation in our region is all fluff. The issue, in their view, is not the existence—or expansion—of atomic weapon arsenals. It is about who gets to advance scientifically, even with peaceful nuclear programs,” Araqchi wrote in a post on his X account on Friday.
“It is therefore not a surprise that there is deafening Western silence over the apparent expansion of the only nuclear weapons arsenal in our region—the nukes in the hands of their genocidal ally. The E3 and the US may be in denial, but their silence is eliminating any credibility to utter anything about non-proliferation,” the Iranian foreign minister said.
The remarks by the top Iranian diplomat came as new revelations point to intensified construction at the Dimona nuclear site, long suspected of housing the Israeli regime’s undeclared nuclear arsenal.
According to a report published by the Associated Press on September 3, satellite images show intensified construction at the Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Center near the city of Dimona, a facility long linked to the Zionist regime’s secret nuclear weapons program.
Experts who analyzed the images suggested the work could either be a new heavy water reactor —capable of producing plutonium for atomic bombs— or a facility for assembling nuclear weapons. They highlighted that the Zionist entity’s current heavy water reactor, which dates back to the 1960s, may soon require replacement.
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By Lisa Pease | Consortium News | September 16, 2013
More than a half century ago, just after midnight on Sept. 18, 1961, the plane carrying UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld and 15 others went down in a plane crash over Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). All 16 died, but the facts of the crash were provocatively mysterious. … continue
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