Hamas politburo considers Qatar exit
The Cradle | April 20, 2024
The political leadership of Hamas is considering moving its headquarters outside Qatar amid increasing criticism from members of the US Congress for the Gulf nation’s support for the Palestinian resistance movement, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on 20 April.
The US financial newspaper quoted Arab officials as saying that Hamas had recently communicated with at least two countries in the region, including the Sultanate of Oman, about the possibility of its political leaders moving to their capitals.
The WSJ indicated that Hamas’s departure from Qatar could disrupt talks to reach a ceasefire and prisoner exchange agreement to release dozens of Israelis held captive in Gaza, and hundreds of the many thousands of Palestinians held captive in Israel. Such a departure may also make it difficult for Israel and the US to convey messages to Hamas, which Washington classifies as a terrorist organization, the WSJ added.
A well-informed Arab mediator told the newspaper: “The talks have already stopped again, with little sign or possibility of resuming them anytime soon, and the lack of trust is growing between Hamas and the negotiators.”
Another Arab mediator said: “The possibility of the ceasefire talks collapsing completely has become very possible.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the religious settler ministers in his coalition government have shown little interest in winning the release of the Israelis held captive by Hamas since 7 October.
Netanyahu has instead prioritized continuing the bombing of Gaza, which has killed not only over 33,000 Palestinians but also many of Hamas’ Israeli captives as well.
Israel says more than 130 captives remain in Hamas custody, and about a quarter of those are believed dead.
Qatar is under fire from US lawmakers for its support of Hamas, although this was fully coordinated with the US and Israel.
Prominent US Congressman from the Democratic Party, Steny Hoyer, said recently that Qatar should pressure Hamas to release its Israeli captives by cutting off funding to the group or kicking its political leaders out of Doha. “If Qatar fails to apply this pressure, the United States must re-evaluate its relationship with Qatar,” he said in a statement.
Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, Qatar’s prime minister and foreign minister, recently said the Gulf state was considering withdrawing as a mediator between Israel and Hamas in the face of what he says is unfair US and Israeli criticism.
“There are limits to this role and limits to the ability to which we can contribute to these negotiations in a constructive way,” the Qatari leader said at a news conference. “The state of Qatar will make the appropriate decision at the right time.”
Qatar is home to a large US air base and was named a “major non-NATO ally” by President Joe Biden in 2022.
A Qatari official told AFP that Hamas’s political office was opened in Qatar in 2012 in coordination with the US government “following a US request to open a communication channel.”
AFP added that West Asia analyst Andreas Krieg stated that US officials wanted to ensure “complete oversight and control over them.”
Qatar then provided financial aid to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip for years, which was also “fully coordinated with Israel, the UN, and the US.”
Qatar’s funding of Hamas enjoyed the specific blessing of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. As journalist Scott Horton detailed, Netanyahu boasted to members of his party in the Knesset that he could reliably control the potential blowback that might result from his strategy should Hamas decide to wage a war against Israel.
Netanyahu claimed, “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas … This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank … It’s impossible to reach an agreement with them [Hamas] … Everyone knows this, but we control the height of the flames.”
Informed Dissent
Medical Dissidents, Agency Capture, and Dr. Mary Talley Bowden’s Battle with the FDA over Ivermectin
BY M.C. ARMSTRONG | HONEST MEDIA | APRIL 18, 2024
Dr. Mary Talley Bowden recently sued the FDA for stepping beyond their charter, defaming Ivermectin prescribers, and, thereby, interfering with the doctor-patient relationship. Last month, Dr. Bowden resolved her suit, receiving a substantial undisclosed settlement from the government agency.
Dr. Pierre Kory has been an early and staunch defender of the use of Ivermectin to treat COVID-19 in humans. Kory believes the FDA settled this case with Bowden because they had likely hired the PR firm Weber Shandwick to create the now infamous “horse dewormer” campaign (detailed below) to smear Ivermectin and its proponents. If true, once Bowden’s lawsuit went into the phase of discovery then this information would have been revealed, but we will never know since the case is now settled. Weber Shandwick lists the CDC, Pfizer, and Moderna as their clients.
Honest Media covered Ivermectin and the “horse dewormer” controversy in a letter sent to the Associated Press documenting the lies the AP published about the drug. We have also recently received a trove of emails between Dr. Bowden and the Arizona Mirror, an outlet that smeared Dr. Bowden and her colleague, Dr. Peter McCullough. After reviewing them, we can say that these documents illustrate the media’s contempt for medical dissidents.
But why this fear of letting dissenting doctors speak? There has been virtually no coverage of Dr. Bowden’s case. Where there is documentation, like with Jen Christensen’s reporting for CNN, nobody gives voice to the victor and victim, Dr. Bowden. Why?
Dr. Bowden, a Stanford-trained ear, nose, and throat doctor from Houston, has treated more than 6,000 patients suffering from COVID. She is a strong and intelligent woman of science speaking truth to power. Here, in Dr. Bowden, is that “gutsy woman” who Americans were told to admire by leaders like Hillary Clinton. But there’s an implicit caveat in the cult of Clinton’s “gutsy woman:” Such women are to be ignored (and even pilloried and censored) if they challenge the orthodoxies of the Democratic Party or the DNC-aligned Big Pharma industry.
For prescribing Ivermectin and dissenting against the dominant COVID narratives, Dr. Bowden was forced to resign from Houston Methodist Hospital. And she wasn’t the only doctor to face such consequences. Dr. Robert Apter and Dr. Paul Marik, two other Ivermectin physician-advocates, joined Dr. Bowden in her suit against the FDA. Marik, for his part, was forced to resign from Eastern Virginia Medical School as well as Sentara Norfolk General.
Last month, Dr. Bowden traveled to the Supreme Court to stand in solidarity with activists as SCOTUS listened to Murthy v. Missouri. The Murthy case concerns the suppression of medical dissidents, specifically, and online censorship, more broadly. Dr. Bowden addressed the crowd of protesters about her four-year battle with the captured government agency:
How many COVID patients did they examine? How many histories did they take? How many prescriptions did they write? Zero. None of them have cared for a single COVID patient, but because they had the full support of Big Pharma, the government, and, most importantly, the media, they became the scientific authority on a novel disease they had zero first-hand experience in treating.
Bowden has a point. The FDA’s campaign against doctors such as herself gained purchase with the public, in part, because the agency’s claims were amplified by a mainstream media that is shaped and funded – captured – by Big Pharma. Due to the massive influx of advertising dollars and the perfect storm of misinformation and disinformation summoned by Russiagate, the 2020 election, and the COVID-19 pandemic, the American public’s trust in the mainstream media has reached record lows. Bowden’s case reveals another example of why the public is justified in its skepticism.
Let the Doctors Speak
I recently spoke with Dr. Bowden about her fight with the government.
“This was a war on Ivermectin,” she said. “But it was also a war on the doctor-patient relationship.”
I asked her what precipitated the suit against the FDA. Dr. Bowden told me that never before in her career had she witnessed interference with the doctor-patient relationship from the FDA or her local pharmacies. When I asked about prescribing a drug that wasn’t FDA-approved, she told me that she’d often prescribed off-label in the past, with no problems, and that she approached Ivermectin, initially, with hesitancy and skepticism. She said she preferred prescribing monoclonal antibodies at the beginning of the pandemic, but sought new options when access to these treatments became restricted.
“I was nervous to start using it,” she said. “Before I started, I looked at the FDA’s website and the toxicity data. Once I was assured that it worked (maybe not as quickly as monoclonal antibodies), I started offering it to patients.”
Not only did Dr. Bowden prescribe Ivermectin to her patients and witness positive results, but she used it herself. She’s had COVID three times. And in every instance of Ivermectin treatment, both with herself and her patients, she observed either efficacy or minimal side effects.
“I haven’t lost one patient due to Ivermectin,” she said.
In 2015, the Nobel Committee for Physiology honored the discovery of Ivermectin with a Nobel Prize. The NIH lauded this “multifaceted drug,” which was largely unknown in American public discourse prior to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Then, suddenly everyone and their grandmother was an expert on the dangers of Ivermectin. Seemingly overnight, the American people absorbed a viral propaganda campaign from the very government agency (the FDA) that they supported with tax dollars. And if you were a doctor or patient seeking this low-cost, award-winning therapeutic treatment, you were suddenly in the crosshairs of the “war on Ivermectin.” This policing of the poor and the independent all started, according to Dr. Bowden, “with the horse tweet.”
On August 8, 2021, the FDA weaponized its social media account to stigmatize physicians like Dr. Bowden and skeptical and underprivileged patients seeking affordable alternative care. The agency issued a tweet with two images: a veterinarian outdoors caring for a horse, coupled with a physician in an office caring for a masked human. The text for the tweet reads: “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.” This tweet, with its careful use of the colloquial and the second person, supplemented with a juvenile binary logic, became the most popular tweet in FDA history.
Hate wins clicks. Fear creates fog. Shortly after the tweet’s publication and viral propagation, Dr. Bowden’s life came undone.
“I never had a pharmacy deny a prescription before,” she said.
Dr. Bowden’s struggle with the pharmacy was just the tip of the iceberg, revealing the stranglehold Big Pharma now has on health care in America. Dr. Bowden suffered (and still suffers) from vicious attacks online, as well as alienation from her peers. She was forced to resign from her workplace, Houston Methodist Hospital. She explained to me that the “war on Ivermectin” was more vitriolic than anything she’d ever seen before in the discourse on public health. And whereas most doctors bent the knee, stayed silent, and complied with government mandates, Dr. Bowden (and others) fought back. Her case represents what one might call a scientific profile in courage.
What does fighting back look like? Well, for starters, perhaps it begins with telling the truth in public and revealing the whole story of Dr. Bowden’s struggle, along with that of fellow medical dissidents like Dr. Kory, Dr. Robert Malone, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration), and Dr. Peter McCullough.
In Dr. Bowden’s and Dr. McCullough’s recent email exchanges with the Arizona Mirror, one can see, firsthand, a publication that ignores the opportunity to correct factual errors. The Mirror instead willfully litters its reporting on Dr. Bowden and Dr. McCullough with misinformation, ad hominem attacks, bizarre references to Qanon, constant allusions to shadowy conspiracy theories, and the slanderous insinuation that Dr. McCullough is antisemitic.
The Association Fallacy
One of the most recurrent disinformation patterns we have witnessed in studying the defamation of populist voices, broadly, and Dr. Bowden’s case, specifically, is what scholars of rhetoric call the association fallacy. In short, the association fallacy describes claims where even oblique social connection to a stigmatized individual or organization (like QAnon) is used to poison the claims of the targeted speaker. Simply associating the terrifying name of the poisonous organization with the speaker scares the reader and creates an irrational – fallacious – connection.
What’s troubling, in the case of the Arizona Mirror reporting, is that Dr. Bowden and Dr. McCullough have no ties to QAnon. Furthermore, Dr. Bowden and Dr. McCullough both reached out to Jim Small, the paper’s editor, and politely asked that these fallacies be removed from the Mirror’s articles.
For example, Dr. Bowden and Dr. McCullough called attention to the Mirror’s repeated use of the ad hominem “anti-vaxxer” to label Dr. McCullough and associate the doctor with the world of “anti-vaxxers.” In their email exchange, Dr. McCullough confides in Small that he has “accepted dozens of vaccines during the course of my life.”
But the Mirror refused to mirror the truth and remove the slur. The Mirror refused to interview these doctors, refused to correct their reporter’s mistakes when alerted by the victims, and, furthermore, sought to defame the doctors through ad hominem attacks and the association fallacy.
To witness how the association fallacy works, consider the following sentence about Dr. Bowden’s colleague, Dr. McCullough, from the Arizona Mirror’s Jerod Macdonald-Evoy: “McCullough has become a darling to those in both Qanon and the broader conspiracy world, appearing regularly on shows like the one hosted by antisemite Stew Peters, who said the COVID vaccine is a bioweapon.”
In one sentence, the reporter has accused the doctor (without directly accusing him) of antisemitism and conspiracy theory simply by virtue of association with other human beings, mostly unnamed, who populate “the broader conspiracy world.”
What is happening to people like Dr. McCullough and Dr. Bowden rarely happens to those in power. It happens to those who challenge power.
The Arizona Mirror and CNN should be ashamed. They punished informed dissent. They refused to contextualize Dr. Bowden’s struggle as part of a subculture of dignified scientists and physicians. They erased and defamed Dr. Bowden and her colleagues. They published fear porn and called it journalism. They left out this gutsy woman’s voice. Honest Media has chosen a different path. We let the doctor speak.
US house speaker announces ‘new axis of evil’
RT | April 19, 2024
In a dramatic break from his party’s hardline conservative base, US House Speaker MIke Johnson this week praised the country’s deep state, named Russia, China, and Iran as an “axis of evil,” and vowed to put his job on the line to funnel more than $60 billion to Kiev.
For months, Johnson has resisted bringing a $95 billion foreign aid bill to a vote, arguing that neither he nor his fellow Republicans could support such a bill – which would give $14 billion in military aid to Israel and $60 billion to Ukraine – without it being tied to an overhaul of US border security.
However, after a series of recent meetings with US intelligence chiefs, Johnson has changed his tune.
“This is a critical time right now, a critical time on the world stage,” Johnson told reporters on Wednesday. “I think providing lethal aid to Ukraine right now is critically important. I really do. I really do believe the intel and the briefings that we’ve gotten.”
“I believe [Chinese President] Xi [Jinping] and [Russian President] Vladimir Putin and Iran really are an axis of evil,” he continued. “I think they’re in coordination on this. I think that Vladimir Putin would continue to march through Europe if he were allowed.”
Johnson’s comments represented a break with the Republican Party’s pro-Trump wing. These supporters of the former president – most prominent among them Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz – view the country’s intelligence agencies as arms of the anti-Trump “deep state,” and have called for the flow of money to Kiev to be halted.
“Fighting a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine, which is a non-NATO member nation, is not protecting America’s national security interests, it doesn’t protect the United States of America, as a matter of fact, it pushes us closer and closer to world war three,” Greene told journalist Tucker Carlson earlier this month.
Johnson’s reference to an “axis of evil,” however, invokes the more interventionist GOP of the past. Coined by speechwriter David Frum, the phrase was first used by George W. Bush to refer to Iran, Iraq, and North Korea in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq. Former National Security Adviser John Bolton later added Cuba, Libya and Syria to the list.
Despite resistance from some of its Republican members, the House Rules Committee agreed on Thursday to split the foreign aid bill into three separate bills – one each for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. The house voted in favor of this move on Friday, leaving Johnson free to schedule a vote on each bill for Saturday, even as Greene filed a motion to remove him from the speakership.
Johnson said on Wednesday that he anticipated such a move, telling reporters that he was willing to “take personal risk” to pass the bills.
‘Tacit Admission of Guilt’: Two Top Journal Editors Decline to Testify Before Congress on Scientific Censorship
By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | April 17, 2024
Only 1 of 3 science journal editors invited to testify before Congress on government interference in the peer-reviewed publication process accepted the invitation this week.
Holden Thorp, Ph.D., editor-in-chief of the Science family of journals, on Tuesday testified before the U.S. House of Representatives Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.
Magdalena Skipper, Ph.D., editor-in-chief of Nature, and Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of The Lancet, “declined to participate,” according to the subcommittee’s website.
“We invited the editors-in-chief of The Lancet, Nature and Science. Only the editor of Science had the courage to come and help us be better,” Subcommittee Chair Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) said.
In his opening remarks Tuesday, Wenstrup said, “This subcommittee was established so we can collectively take a look back on the pandemic and see what we can do better for the next time.”
But experts who spoke with The Defender said they were disappointed with the editors who declined to testify — but also with the members of the subcommittee, who they argued failed to address key issues during the hearing.
Cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough told The Defender, “The committee and Thorp disappointed academic researchers and the public alike.”
McCullough, author of more than 1,000 science journal articles, added:
“Thorp was silent on harmful retractions of fully published papers … This has happened repeatedly for manuscripts describing early treatment(s) and protocols for ambulatory acute SARS-CoV-2 infection and for reports of COVID-19 vaccine injuries, disabilities and deaths.
“Who is behind these retractions? Why are they working to suppress early therapeutic options for patients and scrub any concerns over vaccine safety?”
Epidemiologist and public health research scientist M. Nathaniel Mead told The Defender, “It seems very telling” that Skipper and Horton skipped Tuesday’s hearing.
“In the context of SARS-CoV-2 origins, these two journals have been accused of being unduly influenced by the pharmaceutical industry and government agencies,” Mead said. “Such conflicts can impede unbiased scientific reporting and commentaries.”
“Skipper and Horton’s absence would seem to be a tacit admission of guilt on the part of the two journals they represent,” said Mead, who wrote a peer-reviewed paper that was retracted by the journal Cureus after publication.
McCullough said two papers for which he was senior author were retracted. “In both instances, the public and the practicing community were harmed by the intentional omission of critical side effects from the knowledge base on these products.”
Independent journalist Paul D. Thacker has investigated scientific censorship for The Disinformation Chronicle. He told The Defender, “The science and medical journals did not publish the best research available during the pandemic. They just served as gatekeepers to protect people, institutions and corporations in power.”
Thacker added:
“Holden Thorp should resign. He oversaw a news section that ran several fake stories about the pandemic to misinform the scientific community. And Science published studies that have been noted in the peer-reviewed literature for poor statistics to deny a possible lab accident. It’s a historical low point for this publication.
“Nothing will change from these hearings. My only hope is that some researchers will understand how corrupt the scientific process has become and this hearing will spur them to make change.”
‘No place for politics’ or government influence over journals
During his opening remarks, Wenstrup said the hearing was not intended “to see how the government can be more involved in the journal editorial process, but to make sure that the government does not involve itself or influence this process.”
“There’s no denying the awesome power these periodicals as well as their editors hold over the medical and scientific communities,” Wenstrup said. As a result, “there can be no place for politics or inappropriate government influence of journals.”
But Wenstrup accused the journals and their editors of not always being “arbiters of truth.” Instead, he said, they “provide a forum where scientific claims are made, defended, and debated by peer review.” Wenstrup added, “We saw a breakdown of that during the pandemic.”
“Rather than the journals being a wealth of information and opinions about this novel virus of which we knew so little, they helped establish a party line that literally put a chilling effect on scientific research regarding the origins of COVID-19,” Wenstrup said.
Wenstrup cited the “Proximal Origin” paper — published by Nature in March 2020 — as an example, saying that it helped “set a precedent … that the natural origin of COVID-19 was the only plausible theory.”
“Anyone else who had even the inkling of another plausible scientific thought was immediately labeled a conspiracy theorist … How is that acceptable in the scientific community when the entire crux of the field is open for debate?” Wenstrup said.
During his opening remarks, Ranking Member Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-Calif.) contradicted Wenstrup’s statements, claiming the subcommittee has not proven that top government public health officials such as Drs. Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins orchestrated the publication of the “Proximal Origin” paper.
‘Clear evidence of malfeasance and dishonesty’
Thorp told members of the subcommittee that he is “extraordinarily proud of the Science journals’ work” and “of the role that the scientific enterprise plays in society.”
He said the Science journals “abide by a rigorous multi-step peer-review process” and “a careful process to ensure that the reviewers do not have a conflict of interest.” This “well-established process,” he said, “was applied consistently to the nearly 9,000 research papers submitted to the Science family of journals related to SARS-CoV-2.”
Thorp referred to a May 2021 letter by virologist Jesse D. Bloom that Science published in its commentary section. “This letter called for a thorough investigation of a lab origin of COVID-19,” Thorp said, citing the commentary as evidence the journal did not conduct viewpoint censorship.
“Publication of this letter turned the tide in the discussion of COVID origins toward considering the possibility of a lab origin,” Thorp said.
Thorp also referred to two papers, by virologists Michael Worobey and Jonathan E. Pekar, published in Science’s research section 2022 that supported but “[did] not conclusively prove the theory of natural origin.” He said the government did not influence the publication of these papers.
“To be clear and to state upfront, no government officials from the White House or the NIH [National Institutes of Health] prompted or participated in the review or editing of [these] papers by us,” Thorp said.
Upon questioning by Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) and Rep. Deborah Ross (D-N.C.) about communications between Fauci, Collins and Thorp in May 2021, Thorp said they supported an investigation into the origins of COVID-19 at the time and did not dissuade Science from publishing the Bloom letter.
Responding to Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-Iowa), Thorp acknowledged that opinion pieces “go to 8,000 reporters four days before they’re published.” Because some of these pieces mention government figures, he “from time to time let[s] them know ahead of time that there’s an opinion piece coming that they might get asked about.”
“Scientists are not and never will be perfect,” Thorp said. “We are human, but the scientific method enables us to reach beyond our individual limitations by requiring evidence and constant self-correction. It helped us end the pandemic.”
Referring to the Worobey and Pekar papers, Wenstrup said, “It seems that these studies, much like ‘Proximal Origin’ … were used to stifle debate.”
Similarly, Mead told The Defender that, in recent years, “It seems clear that prestigious high-impact journals like Nature and The Lancet were inclined to prioritize certain narratives or findings that align with the interests of their influential stakeholders.”
“The result has been a suppression of alternative theories or evidence that diverges from these interests, undermining the integrity and objectivity of scientific inquiry,” Mead said, adding that this obstructed the “open exchange of information critical for understanding how this pandemic got created in the first place.”
“The more insidious fundamental issue concerns the biases of the editors themselves and the behind-the-scenes communications they receive from industry and government sources that want them to uphold a specific narrative,” Mead said.
Noting that Democrat members of the subcommittee appeared to defend former government officials like Fauci and Collins during the hearing, Mead said, “It seems fairly clear … that the mega financial relationships between biopharmaceutical companies and the Democratic Party have tainted the conversation around the politicization of science.”
“Why are Fauci and Collins being so assiduously protected by the Democrats when there is clear evidence of malfeasance and dishonesty on their parts?” Mead asked. “This seems to be yet another attempt to whitewash what happened during the pandemic.”
Deleted Thorp tweet contradicts his congressional testimony
Wenstrup questioned Thorp about a now-deleted March 2023 tweet referring to the origins of COVID-19, in which Thorp said, “One side has scientific evidence, the other has a mediocre episode of Homeland,” noting that “the tweet appears to contradict your testimony today.”
“I was not as careful expressing my personal opinions on my personal Twitter page as I should have,” Thorp said. “That does happen on social media. From time to time, I’ve gotten off Twitter and I highly recommend that.”
Wenstrup also asked Thorp about a November 2021 editorial in which he claimed that research allegedly conducted by the University of North Carolina, the EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology on inserting furin cleavage sites into novel coronaviruses did not occur.
Thorp said he is under pressure to write a 720-word editorial “every two weeks” and, at the time, he “was going from what was reported in news stories” about the issue.
Mead told The Defender that Thorp’s admission that he was basing his editorials on information reported in news stories “is quite alarming.”
“Relying solely on mainstream news reports rather than direct investigation through primary sources and interviews with Ralph Baric and other researchers risks perpetuating misinformation and totally undermines the integrity of scientific inquiry,” Mead said.
‘Redactions were never mentioned’ during the hearing
“The government will never earn the trust back from the Americans by deeming all information that it doesn’t like as misinformation, nor will it deserve that trust if that’s what our government is doing,” Wenstrup said in his closing remarks.
But experts told The Defender that there was much that Wenstrup and other members of the subcommittee left out of Tuesday’s hearing.
“Congress needs to explore ways to cut off taxpayer funding for journals that do not want to be accountable to taxpayers,” Thacker said.
“The behavior of Nature has been atrocious, both in terms of the biased news they ran during the pandemic and the corrupt studies they published, such as the ‘Proximal Origin’ paper, which has all the hallmarks of ghostwriting that I looked into while leading congressional investigations,” Thacker added.
Mead said the relationships of key virologists with Fauci and the Wuhan Institute of Virology “should have been discussed openly” during the hearing.
“Retractions were never mentioned in the context of scientific journals and censorship by those journals,” Mead added. “Problems with the peer review process need to be more fully fleshed out, such as how to avoid overly biased reviewers being skewed in a particular direction to suit the editors’ own biases.”
“It would be interesting to find out how much of Science’s revenue depends on pharmaceutical advertising,” he added.
Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
US to Allocate $40Mln in Defense Aid to Argentina Wishing to Be NATO’s Partner – Embassy
Sputnik – 19.04.2024
The United States will allocate $40 million to support defense modernization of Argentina, which has declared its intention to become NATO’s global partner, the US Embassy in Buenos Aires said.
On Thursday, Argentine Defense Minister Luis Alfonso Petri said that Buenos Aires wanted to become NATO’s global partner and had already submitted a corresponding request. NATO Deputy Secretary General Mircea Geoana welcomed the request, saying that closer political and practical cooperation could benefit both parties.
“The United States is proud to announce that it is providing $40 million in Foreign Military Financing (FMF) to support Argentina’s defense modernization,” the embassy said in a statement released on Thursday.
The diplomatic mission noted that such support is provided only to the US’s important partners.
Argentina will be able to purchase defense products, training services, and improve interaction thanks to US military aid. The funds will also contribute to Argentina’s purchase of F-16 fighter jets, the statement read.
In November 2023, Javier Milei won the runoff presidential election in Argentina. During the presidential campaign, Milei spoke against joining BRICS and cooperating with China, Brazil and Russia, and advocated a foreign policy oriented toward Israel and the United States.
From the river to the sea – a call for rightful decolonisation
By Ramona Wadi | MEMO | April 19, 2024
Israeli media is celebrating another win for its narrative, as the US Congress passed a resolution condemning the Palestinian resistance chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, as anti-Semitic. The resolution’s text reads like a series of snippets that supposedly justify the anti-Semitic nature of the slogan but, instead, comes across as Israel’s exhausting propaganda that shields it from accountability for colonialism, war crimes and even genocide.
The text is typical of the usual conflation between Jews and Israel, purporting that the slogan promotes violence “against the state of Israel and the Jewish community globally”. It also partially states, “Whereas the slogan ‘‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’’ is an anti-Semitic call to arms with the goal of the eradication of the State of Israel, which is located between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.” In political terms, this would mean decolonisation – the dissolution of a colonial structure which the international community legitimised and recognised, despite it being built upon the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. There is no anti-Semitism in decolonisation – only a political right.
To allegedly prove a point, the resolution brings in Iraq’s former President, Saddam Hussein, Al-Qaeda’s Osama Bin Laden, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, Hezbollah’s Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah and several Hamas members, besides peddling several allegations that have since been proven false, such as Hamas beheading babies on 7 October. The resolution would only be taken seriously by Israel’s allies, who do not question the Zionist manipulation of anti-Semitism to suit its expansionist agenda. Even with the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
How come a slogan – a resistance call that is not backed up with any tangible resistance support for Palestine – prove to be dangerous in the bigger scheme of things, when Israel is eliminating the Palestinian people from Gaza?
“Hateful rhetoric obstructs peace efforts”, the resolution partly states. And genocide does not? Or is US Congress now advocating for genocide for peace, in much the same way Israel would prefer peace – without Palestinians?
The slogan has been used by allegedly “violent protestors” – where is the proof? Or is the Zionist construction of violence one where the colonised and their supporters are calling upon political rights to be recognised? The resolution claims that the slogan “perpetuates hatred against the state of Israel and the Jewish people”. Another false claim – Israel has perpetuated hatred against itself and any hate spilling over for Jewish people is a result of Israel equating Judaism and Zionism together, despite the difference. To put it simply, Jews are objects in the eyes of Israel – tools for colonial expansion to be used and exploited. Jews who are not Zionist recognise this fact, just as Christians who are Zionist do not, for example.
“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” speaks of Palestine without Zionism, of Palestine with roots in a history that Israel is frantically trying to eradicate. There is no violence in Palestinians remembering their land. No incitement but an assertion of what rightfully belongs to Palestinians. Colonialism breeds the need for anti-colonial struggle, and that is where the focus should shift – on the anomaly of a European colonial ideology thieving land that is not theirs, and committing genocide to retain it.
ISIS kills Palestinian fighters in Syrian desert
The Cradle | April 19, 2024
At least 20 fighters from Liwa al-Quds, a Palestinian armed group supporting the Syrian army, were killed when their bus was ambushed by unknown militants in the eastern countryside of Homs Governorate in Syria, Sputnik reported on 19 April.
Sputnik’s correspondent added that the ambush was carried out by militants likely affiliated with ISIS. The militants attacked the bus with heavy machine guns and B7 artillery shells while it was traveling between the village of Al-Koum and the city of Al-Sukhnah in the eastern Badia desert near Palmyra.
Several Liwa al-Quds members were also seriously injured, suggesting the death toll may rise.
The Syrian army sent reinforcements to the area and began extensive combing operations in search of ISIS cells.
The Badia desert near Al-Suknah lies north of the 55-kilometer “protected” area surrounding the illegal US military base at Al-Tanf on the Syria–Iraq–Jordan border.
Pro-Syrian forces are not allowed to enter the protected zone and are bombed by US warplanes if attempting to do so.
The Syrian and Russian governments have accused the US of training militants from ISIS and other mercenary armed groups in the protected zone and allowing them to use it as a base for attacks on Syrian forces elsewhere in the Badia desert region.
The Russian military has supported the Syrian army’s effort to defeat ISIS since 2015. On Thursday, Russian Major General Yuri Popov confirmed that the Russian Air Force destroyed three militant bases in remote areas in Homs Governorate.
During a press conference, Popov said, “The Russian Air Force destroyed three bases for militants who left the Al-Tanf area and were hiding in inaccessible areas in the Al-Amur mountain range in Homs Governorate.”
In recent months, ISIS has escalated its operations, targeting civilians, soldiers, and forces supporting the Syrian army.
ISIS attacks on Syrian forces have coincided with Israel’s ongoing shadow war with Iran, including in Syria. On 1 April, Israel bombed the Iranian consulate in Damascus, killing a prominent Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) general.
Iran responded last week by launching hundreds of drones and missiles at Israel, damaging the Nevatim airbase and an intelligence collection center on Jabal al-Sheikh mountain on the Lebanon border.
Syria is part of the Axis of Resistance forces, along with Iran, Hezbollah, Ansarallah, and the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, that have sought to resist Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
US Shows True Attitude to Palestinians by Casting Veto on State’s Membership in UN – Russian Envoy
Sputnik – 18.04.2024
UNITED NATIONS – The United States has shown its true attitude towards the Palestinians by blocking the recommendation to admit the country to the UN. For Washington, the Palestinian people have no right to their own state, Russian Permanent Representative Vasily Nebenzia said at a meeting of the United Nations Security Council.
“In essence it was a simple question: whether the Palestinians deserve to be part of the world family, to fully participate in all decisions of international life,” Nebenzia said.
“By using the veto for the fifth time since the beginning of the escalation in Gaza, they have again demonstrated their true attitude towards the Palestinians. For Washington, they do not deserve to have a state of their own. They are only an obstacle on the way to the realization of Israel’s interests,” the representative added.
The United States veto cast against the proposed resolution on Palestine’s full membership in the United Nations is a hopeless attempt to change the course of history, the envoy stressed.
“Today’s use of the veto by the US delegation is a hopeless attempt to stop the inevitable course of history. The results of the vote, where Washington was practically in complete isolation, speak for themselves,” Nebenzia emphasized.
However, history will not forgive the United States for its actions, the diplomat added.
Earlier on Thursday, the UN Security Council convened and discussed the proposed resolution on Palestine’s full membership in the United Nations. The United States, which is a permanent member of the UN Security Council, cast a veto against adopting the proposed resolution.
Wheels Within Wheels: Complexity is Real in War
By Bill Buppert | The Libertarian Institute | April 18, 2024
Sober observers may find another reason for the Iranian attack against Israel this month in retaliation for the Israeli bombing of the Iranian consulate annex building adjacent to the Iranian embassy in Damascus, Syria on April Fools Day.
May I suggest it is more important in this case to exhaust the kinetic Israeli/US air defense assets and accuracy doesn’t matter as long as exquisite munitions are exhausted; whether shoot/shoot/look or shoot/look/shoot which is a slight permutation on dynamic retasking, controlled pairs or more of air defense munitions are launched as a matter of course to service incoming ordnance. If the object here is to empty the western magazine cupboards by sending your older and less effective munitions aloft (Iran), mission accomplished and you have a very sufficient intelligence mapping of Israeli Anti-Access Air Defense (A2AD) dispositions and tactics, techniques and procedures (TTP) for follow-on responses.
Nations and regions do stumble into war precipitously but there are conflicts in history where the weaker opponents plan and shape the conditions to prevail before the conflict is started; Vietnam is the best example in recent history of reading the tea leaves and setting the stage for success against superior forces.
The west has a manufacturing crisis right now that is existential in restocking and reconstituting the emptying stocks of war materiel. One can either favor or oppose doing that but the fact remains the manufacturing base and capability is an open question for America and its allies.The chaos avalanche of the competency crisis, the reproducibility problems in STEM research & application and the very real infrastructure failures increasing in frequency year by year doesn’t bode well for those wishing to replenish the diminished war stocks potentially reconstituting with stuff that simply doesn’t work.
The second 155mm artillery shell manufacturing plant in the west just went up in flames in the UK in less than a week. One in Scranton Army Ammunition Plant in PA and the BAE Systems Glascoed Plant in Monmouthshire, UK.
In war, there is a lot to be said for how to leverage shaping the conflict left of bang.
I’m fond of saying that many people are in charge but no one is in control.
Ukraine strikes hospital in Donbass, injuring eight – authorities
RT | April 18, 2024
Ukrainian troops have struck a hospital and blood donation center in the Donbass town of Gorlovka, the head of Russia’s Donetsk People’s Republic, Denis Pushilin, has said. Eight civilians including a child were injured in the attack.
The victims sustained non-life-threatening injuries in the strike, Pushilin wrote on Telegram on Thursday.
The Ukrainian forces “deliberately” targeted the town center where healthcare facilities are located, he claimed. Both the hospital and the donation center were damaged in the strike.
Gorlovka Mayor Ivan Prikhodko published photos and videos from the scene showing damaged buildings, including the hospital and the blood donor center. The images show smashed windows and the area nearby littered with debris. One clip also showed destroyed and damaged furniture in a room at the healthcare facility.
Kiev’s troops used the US-supplied High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) in the attack, according to preliminary data gathered by the Russian authorities.
Washington has sent dozens of these multiple rocket launchers to Ukraine since mid-2022. The systems provided to Kiev have a range of up to 160km (100 miles) when equipped with longer-range ATACMS missiles. Other projectiles launched by HIMARS and available to the Ukrainian military have a range of around 70km.
According to Pushilin, Kiev’s forces carried out a total of 12 attacks on Thursday – missile and drone strikes – targeting Gorlovka as well as Donetsk and some other Donbass settlements. Cluster munitions were used in some of these attacks, the official said.
Last week, Ukrainian forces conducted a missile strike targeting a machinery plant in the city of Lugansk. Nine people were injured, including seven machinery plant workers and two local residents, the leader of the Lugansk People’s Republic, Leonid Pasechnik, said at that time. UK-supplied long-range Storm Shadow missiles were used in that assault, according to Russian law enforcement.
The collapse of the concept of a rules-based international order
By Veniamin Popov – New Eastern Outlook – 18.04.2024
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States believed that a unipolar world would last forever: year after year, day after day, it became increasingly blatant in its disregard for the interests of others and the opinions of the rest of the world.
Then the concept of an international “rules-based order” was born: a group of American scholars, former and future officials, presented a paper at Princeton in 2006 entitled “A World of Freedom Under Law”. They framed this as a response to the weaknesses of international law, suggesting that when international institutions fail to produce the outcomes preferred by the “world of freedom”, there is “an alternative forum for liberal democracies to authorise collective action”. In practice, this forum has most often been the White House.
During the Libyan crisis of 2011, the United States and its allies used Security Council authorisation for a no-fly zone to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi.
American troops have now been operating in eastern Syria for more than eight years – yet there is no justification in international law for their presence.
Even American political scientists describe this concept as a kind of asterisk placed over international law. The “rules-based order” absolves the US and its allies of responsibility and fundamentally undermines the concept of international law. US policymakers use this theory to entrench US advantages as a global power. When the prerogatives and rules of international law coincide with the canons they establish, Washington calls them synonymous. Thus, on the eve of February 2022, i.e. the start of a special military operation in Ukraine, Secretary Blinken warned of a moment of danger for “the foundations of the United Nations Charter and the rules-based international order that preserves stability around the world”, but when US prerogatives diverge from international law, the concept of a “rules-based order” comes into play, which “should ultimately benefit global stability”.
A prime example is the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, which the George W. Bush administration cynically justified as a means of enforcing UN disarmament mandates. Iraq was declared an invader, it survived the military occupation, the death toll of Iraqis is approaching 1 million, and the country is still reeling from America’s brazen attack.
Washington’s military and economic might at the time ensured that America would face few consequences for invading without UN authorisation.
The very concept of a “rules-based order” set America at odds with the rest of the world, which recognised that international relations were becoming multipolar. Many leaders of developing countries, especially Russia, China, India and Brazil, talked about the same thing. Even American allies tried to show the flaws in the concept. Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder warned of the “undeniable danger of US unilateralism”, and former French Minister Hubert Védrine once said that “France’s entire foreign policy … is aimed at making tomorrow’s world consist of several poles, not just one”.
According to Harvard University professor Stephen Walt, the US was carried away by a show of force, disregarding the opinions of even its allies and international organisations, and then went off on its own to gain the advantage.
The Gaza war drew a final line under the concept of the “rules-based order”: on 25 March, 14 members of the UN Security Council adopted a resolution demanding an immediate end to the war in Gaza, with the US abstaining. The resolution became a legally enforceable document, but Israel, unwilling to accept UN mandates, continued to bomb the southern town of Rafah and besiege Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. Shortly after the vote, a spokesman for the Biden administration called Resolution No. 2728 “non-binding”, in a clear attempt to deny its status as international law. At a State Department press briefing, the spokesman said the measure would not lead to an immediate ceasefire or affect the complex hostage negotiations.
International law is clearly against what Israel is doing in Gaza. 2 months before Resolution No. 2728 was adopted, the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel’s ongoing campaign could plausibly be considered genocide and called on Israel to take measures to prevent genocide.
On the eve of the passage of Bill 2728, the Canadian Parliament passed a motion to halt new arms transfers to Israel. On the day the Security Council adopted the resolution, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, recommended that member states “immediately” impose an arms embargo on Israel for failing to comply with mandatory measures ordered by the International Court of Justice.
After the above resolution was passed, White House national security spokesman John Kirby clarified that American arms shipments and sales to Israel would not be affected, while the State Department stated, and the White House later confirmed, that “there are no incidents where the Israelis have violated international humanitarian law.
All of this comes after Israel has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, most of them women and children, and displaced and permanently starved two million people in Gaza. In addition, the Israeli military bombed a convoy of aid workers from the World Central Kitchen.
The crux of the matter is that Washington is arming a country that has been ordered by the Security Council to cease hostilities. Washington’s actions are at odds with reality: the massacre in Gaza has made many foreign figures and organisations reluctant to listen to American officials on other issues. According to US press reports, Annelle Sheline, a State Department human rights official who recently resigned, said that some activist groups in North Africa have simply stopped meeting with her and her colleagues: “Trying to defend human rights has simply become impossible as long as the US is helping Israel,” she said.
Two years ago, US diplomats seeking support for Ukraine faced “a very clear negative reaction to America’s penchant for defining the global order and forcing countries to take sides”. In this regard, the New York Times concluded on 10 April this year that “Resolution No. 2728, which passed without result, may well be remembered as a watershed moment in the decline of the ‘rules-based international order’ – that is, the world the United States seeks to build and preserve… Gaza is a chilling reminder that in a world of exceptions to international law, it is the least powerful who suffer the most.
All these developments were accurately characterised by China’s Permanent Representative to the UN, who described the US statements and actions as incompatible with the status of a permanent member of the UN Security Council, and said that Washington was undermining the authority of the Security Council.
Featured Video
Revive Iran’s MOU Deal or Face a Forever War
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
New Book
The Garlic Book — 2026
Lies are Unbekoming | November 5, 2026
What The Garlic Book shows
The book is in four parts.
Part One, The Record, treats the history of garlic as evidence. From the clay garlic bulb placed in an Egyptian grave nearly six thousand years ago, through the Ebers Papyrus, through Hippocrates, Dioscorides, Pliny and Galen, the Arab physicians under Avicenna, the medieval herbals, Culpeper, and the plague years, to the last era in which Western physicians prescribed garlic as a matter of course, which ran from 1850 to 1945. It closes with the living traditions that never stopped using it, and with the folklore of charms, vampires and the evil eye.
Part Two, The Chemistry and the Evidence, sets out what is known about why a clove has no smell until it is cut, and why the order of crush, rest and heat changes the medicine. It then reads the clinical evidence against the historical record — bacteria, blood and vessels, cancer epidemiology, metals and fatigue — and names the trials that went against garlic as directly as the trials that went for it, including the 2007 Stanford trial funded by the US National Institutes of Health which found that raw garlic, garlic powder and aged garlic extract moved LDL cholesterol no more than placebo did. It then turns to onion, garlic’s closest relative, and reads the newer evidence published since 2015, before closing with the whole of the record through the terrain lens.
Part Three, Why Medicine Set It Aside, asks the question directly. One chapter contrasts the pharmaceutical model of isolating a single active compound with the folk model of combining whole plants, and reports what the garlic evidence says about which model works better. One chapter examines the economics of research on a plant that cannot be patented. One chapter — Fire Cider — tells the story of a folk preparation whose name was taken into a United States trademark by a Massachusetts company in 2012, and won back by three herbalists in 2014 who documented forty years of prior use through Rosemary Gladstar and her students into the older tradition.
Part Four, Garlic in Practice, is the working manual — the kitchen pharmacy, traditional uses by body system, a full chapter on safety and interactions, and a complaint-by-complaint practical guide. The book closes with The Trial That Was Never Run — a one-chapter reading of the whole evidential architecture.
At the back: two appendices (a traditional list of uses, and a preparation quick-reference), a full bibliography, and a live index.
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Irish ‘fake news’ expert exposed as fake
- China expresses strong opposition to Dutch report alleging Chinese cyberattacks
- Coup d’état in Poland
- The Endgame: When the CIA Proxy War Runs Out of Ukrainians!
- Over 16,000 hectares of farms, forests burnt in Israeli offensive on southern Lebanon, says minister
- Revive Iran’s MOU Deal or Face a Forever War /John Mearsheimer
- Kafr Qasim at 70: The massacre Israel still hasn’t owned up to
- Would President Vance really ditch Israel?
- LAPD Pilot Will Track Vehicles In San Fernando Valley
- Britain’s Online Censorship Law Now Comes With a Crisis Plan for Your Posts
- If Americans Knew
- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
- No Tricks Zone
- Zonal Asymmetry of Temperature Change in the Antarctic Circumpolar Current
- New Study: The Net Fossil Fuel Contribution To Rising Atmospheric CO2 Has Been Zero For 500 Years
- Germany’s Green Energy Transition Becoming Increasingly Expensive…Another 6 Trillion Euros!
- Sudden Stratospheric Warming, Powerful El Niño Combination May Lead To Extreme Europe Cold, Energy Crisis!
- Two New Studies Find Thwaites Glacier Melt Cannot Be Driven By Human Activity Or A Warming Ocean
- E-Cars Reduce CO2 Emissions By Only 41% Compared To Internal Combustion Engine Vehicles
- Predictions Made By Renowned Climate Professor Over Past Decades Have Been Proven To Be Poor
- New Study Suggests Large Regions Of The Pacific Ocean Have Been Cooling For The Last 80 Years
- Germany’s Green Energy Debacle: High Energy Costs Force Kahla Porzellan to Close After 182 Years!
- New Study: 50 Years Of The Most Aggressive ‘Net Zero’ Policies Can Only Affect The Global Climate By 0.03°C
