Rabat - The Altice Group, the parent company of French news channel BFMTV, has announced terminating the employment contract of French-Moroccan journalist Rachid M’Barki, they announced on Thursday.

“The BFMTV journalist had inserted information in his reporting without the approval of his hierarchy and without respecting the editorial rules,” the channel said in an official statement.

The channel added that it is also filing a legal complaint over “actions to which BFM TV fell victim,” although they did not specify who the complaint was against.

The channel said the investigations it conducted “made it possible to identify several occasions between 2021 and 2022 which were broadcast without respecting the validation process and editorial line.”

M’Barki was suspended in January, as the channel started conducting an investigation into the content broadcast by him. He was the most high-profile of the suspensions within the channel at the time.

M’Barki told Politico that while he used sources that did not “necessarily follow the usual editorial process,” he did not commit misconduct.

“They were all real and verified. I do my job,” he said. “I'm not ruling anything out, maybe I was tricked, I didn't feel like I was or that I was participating in an operation of I don't know what or I wouldn't have done it.”

One segment that was pointed to as a catalyst for the investigation was M’Barki reporting on the Morocco-Spain Investment Forum held in Dakhla. The journalist referred to the city as Moroccan and used the expression “Moroccan Sahara.”

The news comes as tensions between Rabat and Paris continue to simmer, with M’Barki, who is of Moroccan origin, also having maintained close ties to the country.

France has maintained an ambiguous position on the Western Sahara dispute over the years, fueling tensions during a time where Morocco seems set on gathering diplomatic support for the cause.

Source: Morocco World News.

Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz has introduced a War Powers Resolution seeking to end US military action in Syria, arguing Congress had never authorized the nearly decade-long occupation. 

Unveiled on Wednesday, the legislation would direct President Joe Biden to remove all US forces from Syria no later than 15 days after the bill is adopted. Gaetz, the resolution’s sponsor, cited a recent raid in Syria which left several servicemen wounded, questioning why American troops are still in the country. 

“Congress has never authorized the use of military force in Syria. The United States is currently not in a war with or against Syria, so why are we conducting dangerous military operations there?” he said in a press release. “President Biden must remove all US Armed Forces from Syria. America First means actually putting the people of our country first – not the interests of the military industrial complex.”

Gaetz went on to state that the 80-year-old Biden “does not have a cognitive grasp on the Syrian conflict,” pointing to an August 2021 interview with ABC News in which the president appeared to suggest there were no US troops in Syria. Washington has kept around 900 soldiers there for several years, including at the time of the interview. 

Because War Powers Resolutions are privileged legislation, Congress will be forced to vote on the new measure within 18 days of its introduction. 

The US military has been active in Syria since as early as 2014, flying countless airstrikes against select militant groups and, at times, the Syrian government. Intermittent ground deployments began the same year.

Under President Barack Obama, Washington doled out hundreds of millions of dollars in weapons to an array of jihadist rebel factions seeking to overthrow Syrian President Bashar Assad, though the effort later fizzled following Russian and Iranian military intervention at the request of Damascus. 

Source: rt.com

FBI agents caught committing a broad array of felonies have not only escaped going to prison for their crimes, but in many cases kept their jobs, according to internal reports from the agency’s Office of Professional Responsibility obtained by former special agent Steve Friend and published by Just the News on Thursday.

The disciplinary reports, dating from 2017 to the present, depict an increase in alcohol abuse and sexual misconduct, reflecting the“sense of entitlement that has seeped into the agency,” Friend, who resigned after blowing the whistle on civil liberties abuses in the FBI’s investigation of the January 6 Capitol riot, told the outlet. He believes today’s agents are coasting on the reputation of their predecessors.

According to his data, for failing to declare a romantic relationship with an incarcerated felon, an agent was suspended for just 15 days. Another agent arrested for stealing his girlfriend’s possessions after an acrimonious breakup got just 14 days. Numerous prohibited relationships between supervisors and underlings are mentioned, netting as little as one day of suspension as a penalty.

Source: rt.com

Almost two thirds of Brits believe that Brexit has been detrimental to the economy, with almost half saying it has diminished the country’s global clout, a new poll has found.

According to a Savanta survey commissioned by the Independent and released on Sunday, 61% of respondents think that since the UK left the EU in late 2020 following the results of the landmark 2016 referendum, its economy has deteriorated. Only 13% think Brexit has made it better.

In addition, 55% of respondents said leaving the EU has made various goods less available, with only 14% claiming the opposite.

A total of 47% of those surveyed think that their financial status has gone downhill due to Brexit, while 13% feel they are now better off.

Almost half – 47% – believe Brexit has reduced the UK’s global influence, with 16% arguing that the nation’s global standing has strengthened. Another 53% say Brexit has soured ties between the UK and the EU, while 13% believe the reverse.

Commenting on the survey’s results, Savanta director Chris Hopkins noted that “there’s a strong perception that Brexit has not gone particularly well,” suggesting that there seems to be “little evidence in the perceptions of both Remainers and Leavers that Brexit has left the UK in a better state.”

Last week, a study by Jonathan Haskel, an external member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee, found that the UK’s decision to leave the EU had cost it more than £29 billion ($34.9 billion) in lost business investment. Another analysis by Bloomberg earlier this month estimated that Britain’s economy was losing about £100 billion ($120 million) annually due to its split with the EU.

A January poll, also conducted by Savanta, found that 65% of Brits want to have another vote on Brexit, and potentially bring the UK back into the EU.

Source:rt.com

Türkiye was struck by two earthquakes on Monday evening, local media have reported, citing emergency services. The disaster struck just two weeks after Türkiye and Syria were devastated by another set of powerful earthquakes.

In his State of the Union address earlier this month, US President Joe Biden referenced Europe several times, and the underlying message was always the same: Captain America has swooped in to save his Western allies from a horrible fate. 

“Our nation is working for more freedom, more dignity, and more peace, not just in Europe, but everywhere,” Biden said. Woah, slow your roll there, big guy. The world can only handle so much “freedom” after recent debacles in Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, and elsewhere. Europe was actually a pretty chill place as far as conflicts went, right up until Washington decided that it wanted to set up a flophouse for itself in Ukraine to better keep tabs on Russia, then managing to convince its European NATO allies to come help it move in and provide some weapons as housewarming gifts. 

The result for Ukraine? “A murderous assault evoking images of the death and destruction Europe suffered in World War II,” Biden described, conveniently ignoring the fact that this time around, it was Washington’s NATO allies that trained the Nazis. “Canada’s Joint Task Force Ukraine even produced a briefing on the Azov Battalion, acknowledging its links to Nazi ideology,” according to the Ottawa Citizen. 

When Russia finally drew the line and the conflict went red hot, Biden was quick to hightail it over to Brussels to take that dirty authoritarian Russian gas off Europe’s hands and replace it with molecules of freedom. Captain America was going to save the day, and European bureaucrats ignored the fact that US-branded freedom has a price tag. For starters, it has ended up costing Europe an amount several times the typical domestic market price paid for US liquified natural gas. American gas exports to Europe have spiked148% year on year. 

Biden also pushed Europe to go green as yet another reason not to ever again turn back to Russian gas. “Today we’ve agreed on a joint game plan toward that goal while accelerating our progress toward a secure clean energy future. This initiative focuses on two core issues: One, helping Europe reduce its dependency on Russian gas as quickly as possible. And, secondly, reducing Europe’s demand for gas overall,” Biden said last March during his EU visit. However, now the US President has changed his tune. “We’re still going to need oil and gas for a while,” Biden declared, going off script to say the quiet part aloud in his State of the Union address. “We’re going to need oil for another decade. And beyond that.” 

Oh wow, in that case, maybe Europe should be turning the Nord Stream pipeline of cheap Russian gas back on so that European governments can stop shoveling cash out the door in an attempt to keep their industry and economy – not to mention consumers – from being crushed by exorbitant energy costs. Whoops, the pipelines were mysteriously blown up. “If Russia invades – that means tanks or troops crossing the border of Ukraine – then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it,” Biden said last February.

A new report by Pulitzer and Polk Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh now attributes the terrorist act to a covert American operation in cooperation with Norway, whose sales of gas to Europe have risen from $27 billion in 2021 to $109 billion last year, with Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki accusing Oslo of war profiteering. Both countries have denied the accusations. But even without cheap gas, as Biden sees it, Europe has a bright future. “Time and again, Democrats and Republicans came together…to defend a stronger and safer Europe,” he said in his annual address. Maybe share that with French and German economic ministers who were just in Washington to tell big bipartisan Team America to lay off Europe and to stop shutting out European imports under the new Inflation Reduction Act favoring “made in America” products – particularly green ones. Screwing over the EU because, hey, “business is business” is one of the very rare concepts on which both Democrats and Republicans seem to agree. 

Brussels could have at least stopped sanctioning its own natural resource supplies from Russia if it had realized, as Biden just admitted, that fossil fuels were here for the foreseeable future. But that would mean not being able to pretend to stick it to Russian President Vladimir Putin. If the EU’s commitment to its green energy fantasies to the detriment of its own economy has proven anything, it’s that blind ideology is the first and foremost criteria for decision making in the EU. So, the EU is staying the course while the US actively works to seduce its industry to relocate across the pond where energy is still plentiful because, unlike Europe, the US is not dumb enough to actually align reality with their lofty rhetoric if it’s going to be economically suicidal.  

There’s no doubt that Europe is doing better than ever as far as US interests are concerned. Washington planted the idea of a divorce from Russia in Brussel’s ear, and then rushed in to take Moscow’s place before the ink was even dry. Europe is hardly more free than it was when it at least had the option to play the field between the two geopolitical spheres. Now it’s totally dependent on Washington with European citizens subsidizing American greatness and freedom at the expense of their own.

Source: rt.com

US high-altitude balloons have violated Chinese airspace more than 10 times since January 2022 alone, a Chinese diplomat has claimed. Washington recently accused Beijing of spying on nations on five continents with its aircraft.

Wang Wenbin, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, made the allegations against the US during a daily briefing on Monday. He was asked by Western journalists about Washington’s accusation that China flew “spy balloons” over other nations, including the US.

A Chinese balloon shot down by the US Air Force earlier this month, had strayed off course due to force majeure, Wang stated. The spokesman described the use of force by the US as an “overreaction,” before accusing the US of abusing advanced technologies in its possession to conduct indiscriminate surveillance and espionage operations around the world, including against its own allies.

Wang recalled Obama-era revelations about the NSA’s mass electronic surveillance program and the tapping of phones used by leaders of European nations, such as Germany, to argue the US should be considered the world’s “biggest spy and surveillance empire.”

US National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson called the allegation “false”and reiterated Washington’s accusation that Beijing ran a system of global surveillance using high-altitude balloons.

Source: rt.com

The US has rejected allegations by the Chinese Foreign Ministry that it has flown surveillance craft in the country’s airspace on at least ten occasions since January of last year. The denial comes amid tensions over so-called ‘Chinese spy balloons’ being identified in US skies.

In its riposte to Beijing issued on Monday, Washington’s National Security Council (NSC) described the claim as “false” and said that it was an example of China attempting to pursue “damage control” after its own efforts to surveil US assets were discovered.

“It is China that has a high-altitude surveillance balloon program for intelligence collection that it has used to violate the sovereignty of the US and over 40 countries across five continents,” NSC spokesperson Adrienne Watson said on Twitter.

The first ‘spy balloon’ caught the attention of the media as it traveled over the continental US in early February. It was subsequently shot down by the US Air Force after drifting off the coast of South Carolina. At least three other objects flying at high altitude have since been downed by the US and Canada.

China admitted ownership of the initial balloon, but insisted that it was a civilian weather device that had been blown off course. Beijing slammed the US response to the incident, describing the decision to shoot the object out of the sky as an “overreaction.”

Speaking at a press briefing on Monday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin branded the US “the biggest spy and surveillance empire” in the world. He added that Washington should “first reflect on itself and change course, rather than smear and instigate a confrontation.”

Watson dismissed Wang’s comments as Beijing “scrambling to do damage control.” China has “repeatedly and wrongly claimed the surveillance balloon it sent over the US was a weather balloon and has failed to offer any credible explanations for its intrusion into our airspace, airspace of others,” she asserted.

The most recent downing of an object by American forces happened on Sunday. The US military said it was traveling at an altitude of 20,000ft and could have impacted the flight paths of commercial air traffic.

Source:rt.com

The US military observed a number of alleged Chinese surveillance balloons over the Middle East in recent years, Air Forces Central Command chief Lt. Gen Alexus Grynkewich said on Monday. Washington and Beijing have thrown accusations of espionage at each other since the US shot down several high-altitude objects in recent days.

“Even though we have seen high altitude balloons in the region before, they have not been a threat, they have not been something of concern for us.” Grynkewich said at an event hosted by the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), a think tank funded by the US military and the weapons industry.

Across the US military’s Central Command, which encompasses the Middle East and parts of Central Asia, one “main incident” involving a balloon took place last fall, while “one or two others” took place in previous years, the general continued. These balloons, which Grynkewich identified as Chinese, “have not hung out over American bases or been any threat to our forces whatsoever,” he added.

“The level of concern that I have about them is extremely low,” he said. “It’s not something I lose sleep over.”

US warplanes shot down a “Chinese surveillance balloon” off the coast of South Carolina over a week ago, after the aircraft had crossed much of the country. The Pentagon said that the balloon carried equipment used to survey “strategic sites,”while Beijing insisted that it was a “civilian airship” that strayed from its course.

Three similar objects have since been shot down by American fighters over the US and Canada, although none of these craft have been labeled as Chinese by US officials. Gen. Glen VanHerck, commander of US Northern Command, told reporters that the military is refusing to “categorize them as balloons,” and isn’t sure “how they stay aloft.”

Speaking at a press conference on Monday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said that “it is also common for US balloons to illegally enter the airspace of other countries.” Wang claimed that in the past year, “US high-altitude balloons have illegally flown over China’s airspace more than ten times.”

The White House denied Wang’s accusations, but Grynkewich said on Monday that balloon surveillance allows the user “to maintain your eye on a particular area of the planet for a while,” and that the US Air Force is “definitely interested in those technologies.”

Source: rt.com

Following the devastating earthquakes that rocked Türkiye, Syria and their neighboring countries on February 6, leaving more than 20,000 dead, Damascus is struggling to deal with this unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe as it remains under brutal Western sanctions that have brought the country to its knees. 

The West’s war on Syria that began in early 2011 failed to topple its elected president, but the subsequent years of increasingly cruel sanctions – all in the name of ‘helping the Syrian people’ – have succeeded in rendering life miserable and near impossible, with most unable to afford to properly feed their families, much less heat their homes.  

Now, in a time of crisis, the Syrian people cannot even receive donations or emergency support from abroad. One supporter set up a GoFundMe campaign, only to have it taken down due to the sanctions. Type the word “Ukraine” into the search field on PayPal or GoFundMe and you’ll see countless appeals for sending money to Ukraine. But for Syrians, Western platforms like these are off-limits, and have been for years.

Adding to the destruction left by war

On February 6, southern Türkiye and northern Syria were hit by a 7.8-magnitude earthquake, followed by dozens of aftershocks and then another earthquake. While the neighboring countries of Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Iraq and others were affected, the worst of the damage was in Türkiye and Syria.

As of February 9, the official death toll in Syria was 1,347, with more than 2,300 injured. Nearly 300,000 Syrians have been displaced due to the earthquakes. The scenes initially coming out of Türkiye and Syria were heartbreaking and catastrophic, with buildings collapsing in front of people, and piles of rubble with the dead and the maimed trapped below.

In Syria, the earthquakes added to already extensive damage from the war. Aleppo, the country’s second-largest city, was tragically prone to building collapses because of the terrorist occupation that had lasted until 2016. The militants had frequently tunneled under buildings, in many cases in order to lay explosives and destroy them, as they did with the Chamber of Industry in April 2014. With the Syrian population already struggling to just survive prior to the earthquakes, now Aleppo and the coastal regions of Syria affected by the earthquakes face even more death, injury and displacement.

Sanctions were already killing Syrians

Even without the earthquakes, Syrians struggled to get medication, hospitals struggled to get or maintain critical machinery and equipment, and the population as a whole suffocated as the country’s economy steadily worsened, all by design.

Western leaders are adamant that the only ones to blame for the Syrians’ suffering before the earthquake were President Bashar Assad and his government (or “regime,” as Washington calls any undesirable foreign government it hasn’t yet toppled), whose “dictatorship” caused the people to rise up and start a civil war (actually a US-led proxy war against Syria to overthrow said government). The sanctions, ostensibly aimed at the “regime,” are, by this logic, intended to helpand protect the general population. In reality, they are strangling Syrian civilians.

Here’s what life is like for many Syrians now, according to British journalist Vanessa Beeley: “The US and its proxy Kurdish separatist forces are occupying Syrian resources in the northeast which includes their oil, which means of course that the bulk of Syria is reliant upon Iranian oil to keep any kind of electricity running. At the moment, we have basically about two or three hours of electricity per day. There is no heating in the majority of homes across Syria.”

As Beeley notes, earthquake-displaced Syrians – unless they receive emergency aid – face freezing and wet conditions, “without any alternative shelter, without any electricity, without any heating.” And thanks to the sanctions, desperately needed humanitarian aid and fundraising is difficult. International cargo planes can’t land in Syria, and crowdfunding services and even credit cards are unavailable. The virtue-signaling Western nations – the main cause of suffering in Syria since 2011 – have not only persisted in keeping the sanctions in place; most of them haven’t offered any meaningful help since the earthquake, just hollow words.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry blamed the sanctions for amplifying the miserable situation, and likewise pointed out that the US’ illegal presence in Syria and theft of Syrian resources was also exacerbating the economic situation.

“Frequent [US] military strikes and harsh economic sanctions have caused huge civilian casualties and taken away the means to subsistence of the Syrians. As we speak, the US troops continue to occupy Syria’s principal oil-producing regions. They have plundered more than 80% of Syria’s oil production and smuggled and burned Syria’s grain stock. All this has made Syria’s humanitarian crisis even worse.” 

A friend in need is a neighbor on the sanctions list

All of the above has left Syrians to rely mostly on the country’s friends for help. Incidentally, many of those nations and groups are among the most vilified by the West.

Following the earthquake, Russia’s Ministry of Defense dispatched “over 300 personnel, and 60 military and special vehicles” for rescue and aid efforts in Syria. The Russian Emergencies Ministry sent more than 100 rescue workers to Türkiye and Syria, including an airmobile hospital with 40 medics.

Iran sent a plane with 45 tons of medical, food and sanitary aid to Syria, and has pledged to send more.

Even battered Libya, itself largely destroyed by another Western regime-change project, senta plane with 40 tons of medical and humanitarian aid, as well as an ambulance, to Aleppo International Airport.

Hezbollah, the Lebanese resistance movement, sent convoys of humanitarian aid to Syria. Lebanon’s army said it would send members of its Engineering Regiment to Syria, to contribute to the search and rescue operations.

Not everyone who offered their help to Syria are on Western sanctions list, of course. Algeria sent 115 tons of aid of food and medical supplies, tents and blankets, as well as 86 specialized civil protection personnel. The United Arab Emirates will apparently send $50 million to Syria for relief efforts, and Indian, Emirati and Jordanian planes carrying humanitarian and medical aid for Syrian victims arrived in the capital on Wednesday. Even New Zealand pledged to contribute NZ$500,000 “for the Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC) to meet humanitarian needs.”

Meanwhile, Western corporate media stuck to the narrative of blaming the Assad government, with a New York Times article on the issue apparently saying initially that Western sanctions had hampered relief efforts to Syria – before quickly changing the line to say the government “tightly controls what aid it allows into opposition-held areas.” This is in-keeping with the old trope that the Syrian government denies aid to civilians in areas occupied by terrorists, which in most Western media are dubbed “rebels” and “opposition fighters.” This is something I and other journalists on the ground have repeatedly debunked, visiting liberated areas and hearing time and again that locals had been starving because terrorists had been hoarding humanitarian aid, denying it to civilians or selling it at massively inflated prices.

Source: rt.com

Twenty years ago, former Secretary of State Colin Powell delivered his now-infamous address before the United Nations Security Council, making the case for war against Iraq.

The presentation would later be revealed as lies. Sadly, it would also turn out that no one seemed to care.On February 5, 2003, I watched it all with a sense of boiling anger. The day before, I had made the following prediction to Japanese media:

“He’s [Powell] going to present circumstantial evidence that packaged together and presented will make a compelling case that [UN weapons] inspections don’t work, inspections can’t work, that Iraq is actively conspiring against inspections, thereby, denigrating the efficacy of inspections, while the world waits for inspectors to do their job. The purpose of Colin Powell’s presentation tomorrow is to destroy international trust and confidence in weapons inspections and that is a darn shame.”

I was 100% correct in my assessment.

I was in Japan at the invitation of Japanese activists to generate political opposition to America’s looming war on Iraq. I addressed the Japanese parliament and spoke with several major Japanese media outlets. Shortly after Powell finished speaking, I gave an interview with Kyodo News, where I dismissed Powell’s assertions that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction as “unsubstantiated.”

“There’s nothing here that’s conclusive proof that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction,” I told Kyodo News. “Everything in here is circumstantial, everything in here mirrors the kind of allegations the US has made in the past in regard to Iraq’s weapons program,” I said. “He just hits you, hits you, hits you with circumstantial evidence, and he confuses people – and he lied, he lied to people, he misled people.”

Powell’s iconic moment was when he raised a vial of white powder – a proxy intended to simulate dry powder anthrax, a potent biological weapons agent, in an effort to link Iraq with the terrorist attacks in the US in October 2001 where dry powder anthrax was sent through the US postal system in envelopes. Ironically, the anthrax in question was actually produced by the US. Iraq is only known to have produced liquid bulk anthrax, which has a shelf life of only three years, and the last known batch of liquid bulk anthrax was produced in 1991 at a state-owned factory which was destroyed in 1996.

“Colin Powell holds up a vial of dry powder anthrax and he makes allusions to the attack in the United States through the letters. That was US government anthrax! It had nothing to do with Iraq,” I said. Powell, I explained, was engaging in “classic bait-and-switch” in his presentation. “Iraq, anthrax, vial, dry powder – what connection do they have? None!”

During my February 4 media event in Japan, I made the following prediction about the consequences of Powell’s UN presentation:

“The United States will seek to compel the Security Council into passing a new resolution, if the Security Council fails to do so the United States will go it alone with its narrow coalition and I see a massive aerial bombardment beginning by the end of February, I see ground troops in significant numbers crossing over into Iraq by early March, and I don’t see this war finishing anytime soon. While we may occupy Baghdad sometime in June, we’ll be occupying Iraq for months, if not years. It will be an occupation that will be carried out with the violent opposition of the Iraqi people, and I see an increase in the acts of anti-American terror abroad. I think an American invasion of Iraq is the best recruitment poster that Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda will ever have.”

I challenged Powell’s assertions until I was blue in the face, including at a public forum held at the University of Tokyo the day after Powell spoke, February 6.

It was to no avail.

“There can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more,” Powell toldthe Security Council, “and he has the ability to dispense these lethal poisons and diseases in ways that can cause massive death and destruction.”

All lies. But the US mainstream media repeated his words as gospel, and the American people ate it up as if it were Manna from heaven. My country went to war based upon a foundation of lies told by someone who, up until that moment, was seen as one of the most credible individuals in American public service ever.

The Powell presentation set a precedent of public lies which haunts the US and the world to this day. The United States, it seems, is incapable of telling the truth about anything, especially when it deals with national security and foreign policy.

The current manifestation of this precedent is playing out before the world when it comes to the Russia-Ukraine conflict. As was the case with Iraq and Anthrax, the US leads a coalition of compliant partners in spreading similar lies about Russia, whether to ignore history when labeling the Russian decision to intervene an “unprovoked act of aggression”, backing the Ukrainian version of the Bucha massacre, or misleading the Ukrainians and the world about the ability of US-led injections of military equipment to change the tide of battle against Russia – it won’t.

It is virtually impossible for Russia to even begin to contemplate negotiations when the party sitting at the other side of the table, the United States, incorporates lies into every aspect of its argument. The Powell Precedent is pure poison, and the world, especially Russia, would be foolish to accept any drink from a chalice offered by the United States.

Colin Powell may no longer be with us, but his legacy lives on in the bodyguard of lies he helped build around everything the US has said and done since that fateful day 20 years ago.
Source: rt.com

Washington shouldn't expect the world to forget that it fabricated its justification for the 2003 Iraq invasion, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov told RIA Novosti on Saturday.

The Russian diplomat made the remark on the eve of the 20th anniversary of the now-infamous speech by then-US Secretary of State Colin Powell at the United Nations Security Council, during which he presented alleged evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, including biological ones.

To support his case, Powell exhibited a tiny vial of white powder, which was supposed to represent anthrax, and told the council that the US had no other choice but to go to war. However, no weapons of mass destruction were ever found in Iraq.

Powell’s UN stunt “has long become the epitome of hypocrisy and the conviction of the US ruling elite in its own entitlement and its unchallenged right to arrogantly teach the rest of the world,” Ryabkov stated. He added that it was also emblematic of Washington’s willingness to “use force against an obviously weaker opponent in order to preserve its own global hegemony.”

Source: rt.com

A powerful earthquake that hit Türkiye on Monday morning has killed more than 1,000 people and left over 7,000 injured, according to the latest figures released by the nation’s authorities.

Türkiye’s Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD) said that casualties had been reported in several provinces and that the death toll had reached 1,121.

The agency estimated the number of injured across the provinces at 7,634, adding that at least 2,834 buildings have been destroyed.

AFAD President Yunus Sezer also noted that, “there have been 105 aftershocks so far”.

Despite the powerful jolts, for now there is no tsunami threat that could affect Türkiye’s Eastern Mediterranean, the AFAD noted.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan stated earlier that local authorities “have mobilized all their means,” adding that the response efforts involved not only officials in the ten provinces hit by the disaster but in ten other provinces as well.

He said that priority had been given to search and rescue efforts to reach those still stuck under the rubble. In total, 9,000 people are involved in such efforts, a number that is constantly increasing, Erdogan added.

He described the quake as “the biggest disaster since the 1939 Erzincan earthquake”in eastern Türkiye, which killed an estimated 32,000 people and injured 100,000.

The calamity has also hit neighboring Syria, with the nation’s health ministry saying that the death toll has surpassed 300 people in several provinces, with over 1,000 injured.
Source: rt.com

Swiss chemical giant Syngenta and Chevron USA for decades covered up research showing long-term exposure to the weedkiller paraquat could cause the incurable brain ailment known as Parkinson’s disease, internal documents reveal.

“It’s jaw-dropping information because at the same time, the companies were saying publicly the opposite — that this chemical did not get into the brain,” investigative journalist Carey Gillam told Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., chairman and chief litigation counsel for Children’s Health Defense, during an episode of “RFK Jr. The Defender Podcast.”

Gillam, author of “The Monsanto Papers: Deadly Secrets, Corporate Corruption, and One Man’s Search for Justice,” has more than 30 years of experience reporting on corporate America and food and agricultural policies

Introduced in the 1960s, paraquat is a highly toxic herbicide that was banned in the EU in 2007 but is still widely used today by U.S. farmers.

Syngenta manufactures paraquat, Chevron USA distributes it in the U.S.

Since “almost day one,” Gillam said, the companies knew the chemical crossed the blood-brain barrier and entered the brain, and that it could have chronic effects on the central nervous system.

“And you see in the 1970s, how the evidence is continuing to mount and how the companies are discussing internally — their scientists and others are discussing amongst themselves — how worrisome it is that all of this evidence of an impact on the brain, a chronic long-term impact on the brain from Parkinson’s, is starting to get stronger and stronger,” Gillam said.

Despite “abundant evidence,” the companies adamantly claimed publicly that the chemical did not cross the blood-brain barrier and continued to sell it.

The use of paraquat has expanded “pretty dramatically” over the last 20 years, partly because glyphosate — the active ingredient in Monsanto’s weedkiller Roundup — has become less effective, so more farmers are using paraquat again to control weeds, Gillam said.

Meanwhile, the prevalence of Parkinson’s has more than doubled from 1990 to 2015, and is expected to continue to expand rapidly, she noted.

Nearly 90,000 Americans are diagnosed with Parkinson’s every year, according to the most recent count, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2017 ranked it among the top 15 causes of death in the U.S.

“It’s a terrible and tragic disease,” Gillam said.

Farmers who professionally apply paraquat — more than regular consumers — are the most vulnerable to the long-term health risks, Gillam said.

A familiar playbook

Kennedy and Gillam discussed the “playbook” of obfuscation tactics used by the chemical companies in the 1970s to “mislead the public and mislead regulators” about the evidence of paraquat’s effects on the brain.

Gillam said company toxicologists who knew in 1975 about the chemical’s possible chronic effects internally discussed how a “plan” could be made to conduct a study that would counter all the information that was coming out.

Kennedy said he had seen similar tactics by other chemical companies, including Monsanto. They “hire a class of scientists — we call them biostitutes — who will gin up or ghostwrite the studies and then pay legitimate scientists to sign them to give the imprimatur of legitimacy.”

In the case of Monsanto, Kennedy added, the scientific studies that ostensibly exonerated glyphosate were “ginned up by corrupted regulators.”

It’s the same playbook, said Gillam:

“You see them put up a website that puts out information that is contradictory to what they’re saying internally to each other.

“You see them talk about, ‘We need to enlist academics around the world. We can provide some funding for them. We can collaborate with them and they can carry out our positive message that our product doesn’t cause Parkinson’s disease.’”

“It’s really yet just another example of how frail our regulatory system is and how it misses these real dangers to human health,” Gillam said, “when they rely so heavily on companies to communicate the science to them.”

Source: the defender children health defense news and views 

Russia’s Defense Ministry on Monday laid out more evidence that US-funded laboratories were working in Ukraine. Documents and materials recovered by Russian troops showed that Western pharmaceutical companies operating in territory under Kiev’s control conducted HIV/AIDS research on Ukrainian military personnel.

The commander of Russia’s Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Defense Forces, Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, presented Ukrainian-language documents referring to HIV infection studies that began in 2019. The list of targeted groups shows service members alongside prisoners, drug addicts and other “patients at high risk of infection.”

According to Kirillov, the Russian military has recovered more than 20,000 documents and other materials related to the biological programs in Ukraine, while interviewing eyewitnesses and participants. The evidence “confirms the focus of the Pentagon on creating biological weapons components and testing them on the population of Ukraine and other states along [Russia’s] borders,” the general told reporters.

Based on documents originating with the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), the Russian military identified eight more individuals involved in the US-funded research in Ukraine. Among the names Kirillov singled out was Karen Saylors of Labyrinth Global Health, previously of Metabiota, a company linked to US President Joe Biden’s son Hunter. 

The latest trove of documents, belonging to the company Pharmbiotest, was unearthed in Lisichansk in the Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR) early in January, Kirillov noted. 

“Clinical samples and patient records with their personal data were buried, and not cremated or destroyed in a proper fashion. This suggests that the destruction of this evidence was carried out in extreme haste,” the lieutenant general said. 

In October 2022, Russia filed an official complaint over alleged US-backed biological activities in Ukraine and requested a UN probe into the matter. The UN Security Council rejected Moscow’s proposal after the US, UK, and France voted against it.  The US opposition “once again confirms that Washington has something to hide, and that ensuring the transparency of biological research is contrary to US interests,” Kirillov said. 

As evidence of the widespread threat posed by the Pentagon’s biological research conducted beyond America’s borders, Kirillov referred to the previously mentioned US involvement in coronavirus studies, including by funding the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance that contracted with the laboratory in Wuhan, China.

Kirillov also brought up the 1977 outbreak of Rift Valley Fever in Egypt, near a biological laboratory run by the US Navy. The disease previously known only south of the Sahara made a surprise appearance in Cairo a few months after the lab employees were vaccinated against it, the general said. Moreover, the Cairo strain was “highly pathogenic” compared to the disease’s normal flu-like symptoms, suggesting the involvement of gain-of-function experiments.
Source:rt.com

In fulfillment of his solemn, constitutionally-enshrined obligation, the 43rd President of the United States, George W. Bush, on January 28, 2003, stood before the rostrum in the chambers of the United States Congress and addressed the American people.

“Mr. Speaker,” the President began, “Vice President Cheney, members of Congress, distinguished citizens and fellow citizens, every year, by law and by custom, we meet here to consider the state of the union. This year,” he intoned gravely, “we gather in this chamber deeply aware of decisive days that lie ahead.” The “decisive days” Bush spoke of dealt with the decision he had already made to invade Iraq, in violation of international law, for the purpose of removing the Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, from power.

Regime change had been the cornerstone policy of the United States toward Iraq ever since Bush 43’s father, Bush 41 (George H. W. Bush) compared Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler and demanded Nuremberg-like justice for the crime of invading Kuwait. “Hitler revisited,” the elder Bush told a crowd at a Republican fundraiser in Dallas, Texas. “But remember: When Hitler’s war ended, there were the Nuremberg trials.”

American politicians, especially presidents seeking to take their country into war, cannot simply walk away from such statements. As such, even after driving the Iraqi Army out of Kuwait in February 1991, Bush could not rest so long as Saddam Hussein remained in power–the Middle East equivalent of Adolf Hitler had to go.

The Bush 41 administration put in place UN-backed sanctions on Iraq designed to strangle the nation’s economy and promote regime change from within. These sanctions were linked to Iraq’s obligation to be disarmed of its weapons of mass destruction capabilities, including long-range missiles and chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programs. Until Iraq was certified as being disarmed by UN weapons inspectors, the sanctions would remain in place. But as Bush’s Secretary of State, James Baker, made clear, these sanctions would never be lifted until Saddam Hussein was removed from power. “We are not interested,” Baker said on May 20, 1991, “in seeing a relaxation of sanctions as long as Saddam Hussein is in power.”

Despite the sanctions, Saddam Hussein outlasted the administration of Bush 41. Bush’s successor, Bill Clinton, continued the policy of sanctioning Iraq, combining them with UN weapons inspections to undermine Saddam Hussein. In June 1996, the Clinton administration used the UN weapons inspections process as a front to mount a coup against Saddam. The effort failed, but not the policy. In 1998, Clinton signed the Iraqi Liberation Act, making regime change in Iraq an official policy of the United States.

Saddam outlasted the Clinton administration as well. But, when it came to implementing US regime change plans in Iraq, the third time proved to be the charm–Saddam’s fate was sealed when Bush 41’s son, George W. Bush, was elected president in 2001. While Clinton had failed to remove Saddam Hussein from power, he did succeed in killing the UN inspection effort to oversee the disarmament of Iraq, allowing the US to continue to claim Iraq was not complying with its obligation to disarm, and therefore justify the continuation of economic sanctions.

This is where the issue becomes personal. From 1991 until 1998, I served as one of the senior UN weapons inspectors in Iraq, overseeing Iraq’s disarmament. It was my inspection team that the CIA tried to use, in June 1996, to help launch a coup against Saddam, and it was the continued interference of the US in the work of my inspections teams that prompted my resignation from the UN in August 1998. A few months after I departed, the Clinton administration ordered UN weapons inspectors out of Iraq before initiating a bombing campaign, Operation Desert Fox.

“Most of the targets bombed during Operation Desert Fox had nothing to do with weapons manufacturing,” I wrote in my book, Frontier Justice, published in 2003. “Ninety-seven ‘strategic’ targets were struck during the seventy-two hour campaign; eighty-six were solely related to the security of Saddam Hussein–palaces, military barracks, security installations, intelligence schools, and headquarters. Without exception, every one of these sites had been subjected to UNSCOM inspectors (most of these inspections had been led by me), and their activities were well-known and certified as not being related to UNSCOM.”

I concluded by noting that “The purpose of Operation Desert Fox was clear to all familiar with these sites: Saddam Hussein, not Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, was the target.” Following these air strikes, the Iraqis kicked the UN inspectors out for good.

This, of course, was the goal of the US all along. Now, with a new administration in power, the US was seeking to use the uncertainty about the status of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs as leverage with the American people, and the world, in order to justify an invasion of Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein from power once and for all. By the fall of 2002, it was clear we were a nation heading for war.

I took this personally and decided to take action to prevent it. I went to Congress and tried to get the Senate Intelligence and Foreign Relations Committees to hold genuine hearings about Iraq. They refused. The only way to prevent the invasion was to get the inspectors back in to Iraq so they could demonstrate that the country was not a threat worthy of war, but the Iraqis were putting up so many preconditions that it just wasn’t going to happen.

I then decided to intervene as a private citizen. I met with Tariq Aziz, Saddam’s advisor and former Foreign Minister, in South Africa, and told him I needed to speak to Iraq’s National Assembly publicly, without my words being edited or vetted. That was the only way to have them let the inspectors back in. At first, Aziz said I was crazy. After two days of discussion, he agreed.

I spoke to the Iraqi National Assembly. For that alone, people have accused me of treason, even though in that speech, I cut the Iraqis no slack and held them accountable for the crimes they had committed. I warned them that they were about to be invaded and that their only option was to let the inspectors back in.

Having broadcast that, the Iraqi government had to deal with me. I met with the vice president, the foreign minister, the oil minister, and the president’s science advisor. Five days later, they convinced Saddam Hussein to let weapons inspectors back into Iraq without preconditions. I count this as one of the highlights of my life.

Unfortunately, it was not to be. Yes, UN inspectors returned, but their work was undermined at every turn by the US, which sought to discredit their findings. Now, on that fateful evening on January 28, 2003, the President stepped forward to complete the mission–to make a case for war on the basis of the threat posed by Iraq and its unaccounted-for WMD.

This was not a new debate. In fact, I had been trying to debunk this sort of argument ever since the US ordered UN weapons inspectors out of Iraq in December 1998. In June 2000, at the behest of Senator John Kerry, D-Massachusetts, and a critical member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I had put my case down in writing, publishing a long article in Arms Control Today which was then distributed to every member of Congress. In 2001, I had made a documentary film, In Shifting Sands, in an effort to reach out to the American public about the truth regarding Iraqi WMD, the status of their disarmament, and the inadequacy of the US case for war.

Nonetheless, here was the President of the United States, taking advantage of his Constitutional obligation to inform Congress, promulgating a case for war built on a foundation of lies.

“Almost three months ago,” Bush declared, “the United Nations Security Council gave Saddam Hussein his final chance to disarm [note: this is after I helped convince Iraq to allow UN weapons inspectors to return without precondition]. He has shown instead utter contempt for the United Nations and for the opinion of the world.” Bush observed that Iraq had failed to cooperate with UN weapons inspectors, noting that “it was up to Iraq to show exactly where it is hiding its banned weapons, lay those weapons out for the world to see and destroy them as directed. Nothing like this has happened.”

Iraq had declared that it had no WMD left, and as such was in no position to show anyone where it was hiding non-existent weapons. In fact, the UN weapons inspectors, working in full cooperation with the Iraqi government, had debunked the intelligence provided by the US alleging Iraqi non-compliance. The US was operating on principles dating back to James Baker’s May 1991 declaration that sanctions would not be lifted until Saddam Hussein was removed from power.

The President went on to articulate specific claims about unaccounted-for anthrax and botulinum toxin biological agents. He made similar claims about Sarin, mustard and VX chemical weapons. “The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed in the 1990s that Saddam Hussein had an advanced nuclear weapons development program, had a design for a nuclear weapon and was working on five different methods of enriching uranium for a bomb,” the President said.

This was true – I was one of the inspectors at the center of tracking down Iraq’s nuclear weapons ambition. But then the President went on to utter 16 words that would go down in infamy: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

CIA Director George Tenet was later compelled to admit before Congress that “[t]hese 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the president.” As Tenet later noted, while the assertion regarding the existence of British intelligence was correct, the CIA itself did not have confidence in the report. “This [the existence of British intelligence] did not rise to the level of certainty which should be required for presidential speeches,” Tenet said, “and the CIA should have ensured that it was removed.”

FILE PHOTO: US President George W. Bush delivers his State of the Union address before a joint session of Congress 28 January 2003 at the US Capitol Building in Washington DC. ©  TIM SLOAN / AFP

The fact of the matter is that the entire case made by President Bush about Iraq was a lie, and the CIA was complicit in helping the President promulgate that lie. The sole purpose of this lie was to engender fear among Congress and the American people that Iraq, and especially its leader, Saddam Hussein, was a threat worthy of war.

“Year after year,” Bush intoned, “Saddam Hussein has gone to elaborate lengths, spent enormous sums, taken great risks to build and keep weapons of mass destruction. But why? The only possible explanation,” Bush said, answering his own question, “the only possible use he could have for those weapons, is to dominate, intimidate or attack.”

With nuclear arms or a full arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, Saddam Hussein could resume his ambitions of conquest in the Middle East and create deadly havoc in that region.

And this Congress and the American people must recognize another threat. Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications and statements by people now in custody reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of Al Qaeda. Secretly, and without fingerprints, he could provide one of his hidden weapons to terrorists, or help them develop their own.

Before September the 11th, many in the world believed that Saddam Hussein could be contained. But chemical agents, lethal viruses and shadowy terrorist networks are not easily contained.

Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons and other plans, this time armed by Saddam Hussein. It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known.

We will do everything in our power, to make sure that that day never comes.”

The President then got down to the crux of his presentation on Iraq. “The United States will ask the UN Security Council to convene on February the 5th [2003] to consider the facts of Iraq’s ongoing defiance of the world. Secretary of State [Colin] Powell will present information and intelligence about Iraq’s illegal weapons programs, its attempts to hide those weapons from inspectors and its links to terrorist groups.”

The President stared into the camera, addressing the American people directly. “We will consult,” he said, “but let there be no misunderstanding: If Saddam Hussein does not fully disarm for the safety of our people, and for the peace of the world, we will lead a coalition to disarm him.”

I stared back at the television screen, sick to my stomach. The President’s speech was composed of lies. All lies.

I had expended every ounce of my energy trying in vain to debunk these lies, but to no avail. My country was on the verge of going to war on the basis of words I knew to be false, and there was nothing more I could do to prevent it.

Source: rt.com

Interference in other countries' affairs via private contractors has long been a staple of US influence operations. Now, Washington is trying to accuse Russia of doing the same, and it's suddenly a bad thing.

First off the mark doesn’t always win the race. Does anyone remember when BlackBerry mobile devices were everywhere and barely anyone had heard of an iPhone, for example? Well, the US created the BlackBerry of private military/security contractors – Blackwater – after decades of outsourcing military and intelligence operations through various front companies. And now they’re so preoccupied with the new iPhone equivalent – Russia’s Wagner Group – that Washington is tracking its activities (including unconfirmed ops) in Ukraine, Syria, across Africa, and Serbia, according to cables obtained by POLITICO. 

“The US government is concerned about the extent to which Wagner is interfering in sovereign countries’ internal politics, violating human rights, and robbing them of their mineral wealth,” according to a “senior administration official” cited in the report. Leaving aside Washington’s newfound concern for developing countries’ sovereignty over their mineral wealth when that’s often the main underlying reason why they’re typically targeted by the US for some freedom and democracy through firepower in the first place, it’s hard to ignore that the presence of the Wagner Group seems to be concentrated in locations already known for being targeted by clandestine US and allied activities. 

Last year, for example, Mali chose the Wagner Group for a new partnership after kicking out French forces whose efforts to secure the country were so spectacular that there were two coups d’etat in as many years. Wagner Group’s possible presence in Serbia is now being widely discussed. The PMC has allegedly established itself in a “cultural center”in Belgrade, but these claims, initially sourced from a Telegram post, have been denied both by Wagner head Evgeny Prigozhin and Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, who also recently criticized Serbian-language Wagner recruitment ads that appeared on social media.

If these claims do turn out to be true down the line, it sounds like Serbia was looking for some hired help to prevent the country from becoming a flophouse for Western-backed regime-change chancers targeting Moscow and its top ally, Belgrade. And the presence of Western private military contractors in Ukraine has been well-established, with job offers reportedly popping up right from the outset of the conflict. “Wanted: multilingual former soldiers willing to covertly head into Ukraine for the handsome sum of up to $2,000 per day – plus bonus – to help rescue families from an increasingly grim conflict,” read one. Beyond this covert security role, one would have to be pretty naive to think that, under the cover of the fog of war, a little mission creep towards kinetic operations isn’t tempting. 

It was the US government that created the blueprint for modern day defense contracting when a certain Erik Prince – a son of the car vanity mirror inventor, Edgar Prince, one of the Republican Party’s top donors at the time and a pal of former US defense secretary (and later vice president) Dick Cheney – created Blackwater, which went on to obtain lucrative no-bid security contracts for the US government in Iraq and Afghanistan during Washington’s global war on terrorism. The company started to resemble a retirement home for officials and executives from the CIA and the Pentagon, who conveniently slid over to Blackwater to enjoy a lucrative payday. And despite the company developing a cowboy reputation from incidents like when Blackwater personnel opened fire and killed 14 civilians in Iraq’s Nisour Square in 2007, the US private security model has thrived under subsequent US administrations. 

Blackwater brought to light the kind of covert operations that had long been outsourced by Washington for reasons of plausible deniability. The firm itself “created a web of more than 30 shell companies or subsidiaries in part to obtain millions of dollars in American government contracts after the security company came under intense criticism for reckless conduct in Iraq,” according to the New York Times. The company worked for foreign governments like Jordan to trainhelicopter pilots with US government funding, trained Canadian special forces for two years, and worked directly with the CIA in what the New York Times has described as a “secret program to track and assassinate senior Al-Qaeda figures.”  So despite its rather benign-seeming official US government contracts for the protection of American personnel in conflict zones, it nonetheless served as a direct extension of Washington’s defense, intelligence, and foreign policy interests in the same way as others also funded by the CIA through aid programs.  

In one such program, dating back to 2010, private contractors were hired with USAID money to execute influence operations in Cuba through the creation of a Twitter-like social media network called ZunZuneo. The idea was to reel in unsuspecting Cubans through “non-controversial content,” only to ultimately usher the mob towards civil unrest.  

At the height of the Cold War, the CIA fundedjournalist and feminist activist Gloria Steinem’s work under the “Independent Research Service,” a front group that organizedinternational youth festivals with the objective of influencing youth from around the world presenting a more attractive alternative to Soviet revolutionism.  

Air America infamously provided a covert front for the CIA and Pentagon to provide critical support for US military and intelligence operations in theaters across the world, ranging from the war in Vietnam to the botched Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, before being disbanded in 1974. 

These examples that have made it out into the public domain are just the tip of the iceberg.

The real problem with the Wagner Group for the US and its allies is that it competes with Western counterparts and could serve to protect the interests of clients that depart from the Western agenda. If the US government has a problem with that now, they might do well to remember that they were the ones who set that particular ball rolling in the first place.

Source:rt.com

In a groundbreaking ruling, the New York State Supreme Court on Jan. 13 struck down the state’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for healthcare workers, declaring it “null, void, and of no effect” and holding that the New York State Department of Health (NYSDOH) lacked the authority to impose the mandate.

Moreover, the court ruled that the state’s mandate was “arbitrary and capricious” on the basis that COVID-19 vaccines do not stop transmission of the virus, thereby eliminating any rational basis for such a policy.

The lawsuit challenging the mandate was filed Oct. 20, 2022, by Medical Professionals for Informed Consent — a group of medical practitioners impacted by the mandate — and additional plaintiffs who were specifically named, including two doctors, a nurse, a radiologic technologist and a medical laboratory specialist.

Defendants named in the lawsuit included the NYSDOH, New York Gov. Kathleen C. Hochul and Mary T. Bassett, the state’s health commissioner.

The lawsuit alleged the plaintiffs had lost — or were at imminent risk of losing — their jobs, and that several of them had religious objections to receiving the vaccine, but the mandate did not recognize those exemptions.

Judge Gerard Neri of the New York State Supreme Court in Onondaga County heard oral arguments in the case on Jan. 5 in Syracuse, New York.

Children’s Health Defense (CHD) financed the lawsuit on behalf of the plaintiffs. In a press release issued after the ruling, lead attorney Sujata Gibson stated:

“This is a huge win for New York healthcare workers, who have been deprived of their livelihoods for more than a year.

“This is also a huge win for all New Yorkers, who are facing dangerous and unprecedented healthcare worker shortages throughout New York State.”

In the same press release, Mary Holland, president and general counsel of CHD, said:

“We are thrilled by this critical win against a COVID vaccine mandate, correctly finding that any such mandate at this stage, given current knowledge, is arbitrary.

“We hope that this decision will continue the trend towards lifting these dangerous and unwarranted vaccine mandates throughout the country.”

Holland told The Defender:

“I think there was never a time when an experimental, under the Nuremberg Codeand under state and federal law, mandate should have been permissible.

“And so, I’m really glad that Judge Neri really socked it to the NYSDOH and said not only do they not have the competence, but what they’re talking about is just Orwellian, it’s completely arbitrary and capricious.”

Ruling doesn’t restore health workers’ jobs, but could influence mandate decisions nationwide

Gibson noted that while the decision represents a significant victory against the vaccine mandates, it does not, on its own, restore the positions of healthcare workers who lost their jobs as a result of the mandate — but they can now reapply for those positions.

“Individuals will have to reapply to their old jobs or new jobs at other facilities,” said Gibson. “What this decision does do, however, is take away the barrier of the state’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate.”

She added:

“The damage done to New York’s healthcare workers and to all New York residents is irreparable. Thousands of people lost their jobs. Countless had to cash out their retirement accounts to feed their families, many lost their homes. Far too many left the state. Meanwhile, thousands of patients were deprived of critical care due to the staffing shortages this mandate caused.

“This lawsuit doesn’t fix those serious harms, but it does allow healthcare workers to go back to work without compromising their religious beliefs, and it does mean that we have protection from similar unauthorized administrative overreach next time.”

Moreover, the ruling may impact other similar cases nationwide, according to Gibson:

“The judge struck down the mandate for two reasons. The first basis, that the NYSDOH lacks authority to issue any vaccine mandates under the state constitution and state public health law, is precedential mostly in New York State.

“The second basis, however, is applicable nationwide. That is, that it is irrational, arbitrary and capricious to mandate a vaccine that cannot stop people from getting infected and spreading COVID-19.”

In an interview today on “Good Morning CHD,” Gibson said the ruling shows that the “tide is turning.” She reiterated that there is “no credible basis to say that mandates are legally justified. No credible basis to argue that they can meaningfully stop the spread of COVID … if they can’t stop the spread of COVID, then it’s just arbitrary and irrational.”

Gibson also told The Defender the state said it is “exploring its options” following the ruling. She said she can’t predict what the state will do, but it would be a poor decision to file an appeal:

“It would be highly irresponsible to try to drag this out. We are in the middle of an unprecedented staffing crisis in New York’s healthcare facilities.

“Meanwhile, we have thousands of doctors, nurses and other experienced and dedicated healthcare workers ready and willing to come back to work without this senseless mandate.”

Holland agreed. “They really don’t have good grounds,” she said, as four sections of state law hold that only the legislature can enact vaccine mandates. With “a big freshman class of legislators,” state lawmakers “would be asking for trouble” if they attempted to introduce such mandates.

Holland noted that the ruling came just as a three-day strike by thousands of nurses at two New York City hospitals ended Jan. 12. One of their demands was more staffing.

Gov. Hochul greeted nurses returning to work before dawn that morning. It would be difficult for her to justify an appeal after she supported the striking nurses, Holland said.

Lawsuit questioned mandate’s legality, referenced healthcare worker shortage

The lawsuit questioned several aspects of the legality of New York’s vaccine mandate for healthcare workers and illustrated the harm caused by the mandate in the context of an ongoing shortage of healthcare workers in the state.

The plaintiffs argued, “There is no rational basis for the Mandate when Respondent DOH acknowledges the mandated vaccine fails to accomplish its stated goal, i.e., prevent the spread of COVID-19.”

The lawsuit also pointed out that the governor’s emergency powers were rescinded on June 24, 2021, but the state’s health commissioner, on June 22, 2022, nevertheless made the mandate a permanent regulation, in violation of sections 206, 613, 2164 and 2165of New York’s Public Health Law.

Section 206 states that the state’s health commissioner may:

“(l) establish and operate such adult and child immunization programs are as necessary to prevent or minimize the spread of disease and to protect the public health. …

“Nothing in this paragraph shall authorize mandatory immunization of adults or children [except in limited circumstances outlined in sections 2164 and 2165].”

The plaintiffs argued that by enacting the mandate, the NYSDOH violated the separation of power doctrine, by usurping the authority of the New York State Assembly.

Moreover, by accommodating only medical exemptions but not religious exemptions, the mandate violated the state’s Human Rights Law, the lawsuit claimed.

The lawsuit also referenced the acute healthcare worker shortage in New York, stating:

“Because of the Mandate, thousands of healthcare professionals, including Petitioners, are unable to work in their field anywhere in New York State.

“The decision to take thousands of frontline workers out of the field at a time when there was already a labor shortage in the healthcare field has caused tremendous public outcry, even among very pro-vaccine leaders in the healthcare industry.”

According to the lawsuit, Gov. Hochul recognized the mandate was exacerbating the healthcare worker shortage:

“Governor Hochul admitted that her Mandate was causing a crisis, preemptively declaring a ‘state of emergency’ (and with that invoking emergency powers) the night before it took effect due to the healthcare worker shortage that she and the other Respondents caused.

“Despite calling in the National Guard, the crisis has only deepened since last year, and the Governor has continuously renewed these ‘state of emergency’ declarations on the grounds that the state faces a staffing crisis in healthcare.”

The lawsuit referenced news articles from as early as September 2021, wherein even pro-vaccine healthcare executives went on record questioning the mandate in light of the ongoing healthcare worker shortage.

Tom Quatroche, president of the Erie County Medical Center, on Sept. 24, 2021, told The New York Times the mandate had caused an “unprecedented crisis” and that even though “for all the right reasons, the vaccine mandate was put in place … the reality is it is creating a public health crisis in hospitals, with nobody to care for our patients.”

The lawsuit cited the state’s Syracuse region, where the healthcare worker shortageresulted in a 20% decline in available hospital beds, leading in some cases to patients being sent to hospitals hundreds of miles away.

In the midst of the mandate, a similar percentage (17%) of doctor and registered nurse positions throughout upstate New York were vacant, according to September 2022 statistics from the Iroquois Healthcare Association.

One Sept. 10, 2021, news story referenced in the lawsuit reported that some hospitals stopped delivering babies as maternity workers resigned due to the vaccine mandate.

In letters sent to Gov. Hochul and other state officials in late 2021 and early 2022, state lawmakers raised concerns about the usurpation of the State Assembly’s authority and the contribution of the vaccine mandate to the healthcare worker shortage.

The court generally agreed with the plaintiffs’ arguments, finding the defendants “acted outside of their legislative grant of authority” and “are clearly prohibited from mandating any vaccination outside of those specifically authorized by the Legislature.”

As a result, wrote the court, “The Mandate … is beyond the scope of Respondents’ authority and is therefore null, void, and of no effect, and Respondents, their agents, officers, and employees are prohibited from implementing or enforcing the Mandate.”

Significantly, the court noted the mandate did not draw upon “special expertise in the field,” finding that “it is clear such expertise was not utilized as the COVID-19 shots do not prevent transmission,” while the term “fully vaccinated” within the mandate, was “defined at the whim” of the state and was therefore “arbitrary and capricious.”

Source: the defender children health defense news and views 

“This war has dealt a huge reputational blow to the United States. All their opponents now use this as an example of how it’s possible to bypass international law to carry out interventions in other countries without reason or pretext. It has also complicated the United States’ relations with its European allies and damaged Washington’s reputation in many non-Western countries around the world,” Malek Dudakov,a political scientist specializing in the US, said, explaining the consequences of the decision taken in March of 2003.

My Enemy’s Enemy is My Friend

America’s accusations against Hussein fell on fertile ground – and by the beginning of 2003, the Iraqi leader’s reputation had already been hopelessly damaged by his behavior in previous conflicts. During the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-1988, a gas attack carried out by the Iraqi army in the city of Halabja killed up to 5,000 people, mainly Kurds. During the eight years of the war, Iran’s direct losses from chemical weapons alone amounted to at least 20,000 people. That number increased significantly after the hostilities ended, as the long-term effects of the chemical reagent took their toll.

However, at that time, the United States turned a blind eye to Hussein’s atrocities, to put it mildly, since Washington recognized Iran, where the Islamic Revolution had taken place in 1979, as a much more dangerous enemy. Therefore, fully aware that the attack had been carried out by Iraq, the United States chose to lay blame on the Iranians for the tragedy in Halabja, as Joost Hilterman pointed out in anarticle for the New York Times.

FILE PHOTO: Saddam Hussein welcomes his people In Baghdad, Iraq On October 17, 1983. ©  Pierre PERRIN / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

In the early years of that war, Washington generally acted as a full-fledged ally of Baghdad. Citing intelligence officials and the State Department, the New York Timesreported that Ronald Reagan’s administration had secretly provided Iraq with highly classified intelligence data in the spring of 1982, and had also allowed US allies to sell American weapons to help Hussein.

Washington’s attitude towards the Iraqi dictator changed because of the Gulf War, which began with Iraq’s invasion of oil-rich Kuwait in August of 1990. On November 29 of that year, after numerous attempts failed to persuade Baghdad to settle the crisis peacefully, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution No. 678, which gave Hussein’s government a month and a half to end the occupation. When he refused to do so, the US-led Multinational Forces Coalition (MNF) conducted Operation Desert Storm, which liberated Kuwait after a long air offensive. It is noteworthy that this conflict was the first after the end of the Cold War in which the Soviet Union diplomatically supported the United States.

Interestingly, in 1991, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell, argued with the head of the Pentagon, Dick Cheney, whose associates were already calling for the overthrow of Hussein. However, President George H.W. Bush did not dare embark on such an adventure at that time.

After the conclusion of Desert Storm, the UN demanded that Iraq destroy its stocks of weapons of mass destruction, as well as their production programs, and provide proof that it had done so to its inspectors. Though Baghdad accepted these resolutions, it did not fulfill all of their requirements in practice. In 1998, Saddam Hussein completely closed inspectors’ access to the country, accusing them of ‘espionage’.

However, in 2002, under pressure from the UN and Western countries, the President of Iraq unexpectedly agreed to an inspection. The report from the head of the IAEA, Mohammed ElBaradei, concluded that no signs of prohibited activities or any evidence of Baghdad’s resumption of a nuclear weapons program had been found during inspections at Iraqi facilities. The head of the commission, Hans Blix, expressed less confidence in this findings, but could provide no proof to contradict it. In fact, the only infraction was noted in a document on the Iraqi Air Force, which stated that Iraq had failed to destroy about 6,000 chemical rockets.

The conclusions of international inspections did not matter much to the United States, led by President George W. Bush.

FILE PHOTO: US President George W. Bush poses for photographers after addressing the nation on the military and political situation in Iraq from the White House September 13, 2007 in Washington, DC. ©  Aude Guerrucci-Pool / Getty Images

The US Operates According to Its Own Agenda

The first alarm bell sounded for Iraq in the state of the union address to Congress on January 28, 2002, when the American president branded it as part of an “axis of evil,” along with Iran and North Korea. However, at that time, the American leader devoted only one paragraph to Iraq.

“Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror.  The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax, and nerve gas, and nuclear weapons for over a decade. This is a regime that has already used poison gas to murder thousands of its own citizens – leaving the bodies of mothers huddled over their dead children. This is a regime that agreed to international inspections – then kicked out the inspectors,” Bush said.

In October of 2002, Congress gave the president the green light to use armed forces in Iraq. Here, in addition to arguments concerning biological weapons, accounts of the Iraqi regime’s crackdowns came in very handy. Allegations that Hussein allegedly maintained close ties with Al-Qaeda also came into play, though the latest data from US authorities found no proof of this.

As Malek Dudakov noted in a conversation with RT, by that time, the American establishment viewed Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi government as an absolute evil. The Iraqi leader was repeatedly compared to Hitler, and there were multiple leaks to the press alleging that he had weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons.

“The presidential administration actively promoted all these fears, trying to maintain Bush’s approval ratings, as well as the patriotic fervor that had been prevalent since September 11. After those terrorist attacks, America needed some obvious opponent, as the concept of “international terrorism” seemed somehow abstract and incomprehensible. Plus, the early successes in the Afghan operation may have gone to the White House’s head. It seemed to them that they could quickly and bloodlessly carry out the Iraqi campaign, overthrow Hussein, and reformat the Middle East for themselves. This would weaken Iran’s position, while simultaneously giving them control over oil reserves that were of no small importance to the United States. Taken together, all these reasons compelled Washington to get involved in this adventure,” Dudakov says.

The aforementioned Dick Cheney, who served as vice president in the administration of President G.W. Bush, is believed to have been one of the main shadow architects of the war in Iraq. In between working in government positions, he had served as Chief Executive Officer of the Halliburton oilfield services company, which later received the first contract for restoring and developing oil fields in occupied Iraq.

FILE PHOTO: US President George W. Bush (R) and Vice President Dick Cheney (L) talk as they make their way to the Rose Garden at the White House December 14, 2007 in Washington, DC. ©  Win McNamee / Getty Images

He’s Got Something to Hide

In January 2003, the US President made it clear in an address to Congress that he was going to use the power it had granted to him to invade:

“We will consult, but let there be no misunderstanding: If Saddam Hussein does not fully disarm for the safety of our people, and for the peace of the world, we will lead a coalition to disarm him.”

The White House probably still expected to receive UN approval at that time, since one of its arguments was that Hussein had demonstrated “utter contempt for the United Nations and for the opinion of the world,” and therefore must answer for that.

Bush claimed that Saddam Hussein was engaged in developing chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, even as international inspectors were working in his country. Allusions to the UN were spun to fit the American administration’s agenda – the emphasis was put on the doubts that Blix had voiced, and, in essence, Hussein was already presumed guilty. “He has given no evidence that he has destroyed it [weapons of mass destruction],” Bush said several times.

The president cited US intelligence data, according to which Saddam Hussein had up to 30,000 munitions capable of using chemical reagents. Shortly before that, experts had only discovered 16, and Bush claimed, Iraq “has not accounted for the remaining 29,984 of these prohibited munitions.”

In making his accusations, the American leader also referred to the British government, according to which Iraq was searching for uranium in Africa, as well as three Iraqi defectors who alleged that the government had several mobile biological weapons in the late 1990s.

Bush also referred to UN Security Council Resolution 1441 of 2002, which he said had provided Iraq with “the last opportunity to fulfill its disarmament obligations.” Though this document specified no automatic consequences for its non-fulfillment, the White House nevertheless had high hopes for the UN Security Council meeting that Bush announced, at which Secretary of State Colin Powell was set to speak. Subsequently, it was learned that, five days earlier, Bush had held a meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, where he said that the US was ready to “twist the UN’s arm” to get a resolution approved to launch an invasion.

FILE PHOTO: Tony Blair and George W Bush in Rome, Italy on May 28th, 2002. ©  Eric VANDEVILLE / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

Powell’s Test Tube

At a special meeting of the UN Security Council on February 5, Secretary of State Powell spent an hour and a half presenting “irrefutable evidence” of the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Baghdad. This included satellite images, as well as information from radio intercepts and interrogations of Iraqi defectors. However, the main thing Powell focused on was not the current situation, but namely Hussein’s bad reputation.

The US Secretary of State pointed out that Iraq had acknowledged that it had biological weapons only four years after the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) had begun to carry out inspections. And, according to Powell, the 8,500 liters of anthrax that Baghdad had admitted to possessing in 1995 was a gross underestimate.

To hammer home the danger posed by Hussein’s regime, Powell showed his colleagues a test tube containing a white powder. While he didn’t claim that this substance was dangerous, he said that he wanted to show the quantity of anthrax spores mailed to two senators in 2001, which had been enough to shut down Congress.

“The Iraqis have never accounted for all of the biological weapons they admitted they had, and we know they had... In fact, they can produce enough dry biological agent in a single month to kill thousands upon thousands of people. And dry agent of this type is the most lethal form for human beings,” the head of the State Department stated, trying his best to scare all those present.

As it turned out after the invasion, the CIA’s intelligence on the presence of mobile manufacturing labs for biological weapons in pre-war Iraq was false. After this was made public, Powell said several times that he regretted that speech, but did not feel guilty.

I was secretary of state, not the director of intelligence,” he explained in an interview in 2005, a few months after he was asked to leave the administration of George W. Bush.

Yuri Rogulev, director of the Franklin Roosevelt Foundation for the Study of the USA at Moscow State University, noted in a comment to RT that the false assurances given by Americans regarding the state of affairs in Iraq was far from the first such case in history.

FILE PHOTO: US Secretary of State Colin Powell holds up a vial that he said was the size that could be used to hold anthrax as he addresses the United Nations Security Council 05 February, 2003 at the UN in New York. ©  Timothy A. CLARY / AFP

“I wouldn’t consider this speech a milestone moment. For example, there was the invented second incident in the Gulf of Tonkin, after which the Vietnam War began, and the United States has invaded Panama, Grenada, and other countries under various pretexts. The only thing that was unique in the run up to the invasion of Iraq was the accusations about weapons of mass destruction. The fact that the US made a unilateral decision on Iraq was hugely significant for the world order in many respects. Although Congress gave its permission, there was strong opposition even inside the United States. The UN had not granted the US permission to invade Iraq. Even America’s closest NATO allies, Germany and France, opposed. But the United States took this step anyway, openly demonstrating that they were ready to do as they saw fit, regardless of other opinions,” Rogulev concluded.

In a live television appearance today on the BBC, cardiologist Dr. Aseem Malhotra took the network by surprise when he made the “unprompted” suggestion that mRNA vaccines, such as the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines, pose a cardiovascular risk.

Malhotra later tweeted the video from his BBC appearance, accompanied by the celebratory message, “We broke mainstream broadcast media,” generating instant controversy in the Twittersphere and elsewhere — ranging from triumphant tweets by those skeptical of mRNA vaccines, to calls for Malhotra to be “canceled” and questioning his claims.

Malhotra’s father, Dr. Kailash Chand — a prominent general practitioner who was formerly deputy chair of the British Medical Association — died in July 2021.

In an October 2022 interview with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., chairman and chief litigation counsel for Children’s Health Defense (CHD), Malhotra shared how he was one of the first to take the Pfizer vaccine and how he publicly promoted the vaccines on TV. But that was before he thoroughly reviewed the scientific safety data, which convinced him the vaccines pose unprecedented harm.

Malhotra told Kennedy he was prompted to look into the safety data on the COVID-19vaccine when his father — “a very eminent doctor in the U.K., considered one of the most prolific advocates for the National Health Service” — suffered an unexplained sudden cardiac death in July after getting an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine.

Malhotra has since publicly suggested that mRNA vaccines were a contributing factor in his death.

According to his online biography, Malhotra is a cardiologist and Visiting Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine at the Bahiana School of Medicine and Public Health in Brazil. He is also an honorary council member of the Stanford University School of Medicine’s Metabolic Psychiatry Clinic and cardiology examiner at the U.K.’s University of Hertfordshire.

Malhotra: ‘mRNA vaccines carry a cardiovascular link’

Malhotra appeared on the BBC today to discuss a recent change in policy by the U.K.’s National Health Service (NHS) that loosened restrictions on prescribing statins — medications that reduce cholesterol in the blood — allowing general practitioners to prescribe them to anyone who wants them.

However, several minutes into his live appearance, in the context of a discussion of cardiovascular risk, he pivoted and addressed his views on mRNA vaccines. He said:

“What is almost certain — if I can just say this — my own research has found, and this is something that is probably a likely contributing factor, is that the COVID mRNA vaccines do carry a cardiovascular risk.

“And I’ve actually called for the suspension of this pending an inquiry, because there’s a lot of uncertainty at the moment over what’s causing the excess deaths.”

Malhotra’s remarks caught the network — and presenter Lukwesa Burak — off guard. Visibly uncomfortable, Burak followed up by stating, “So what you’re saying in terms of the mRNA link to cardiovascular risk is that that’s been proven medically, scientifically?”

According to the U.K.’s Press Gazette, a BBC spokesperson later issued a response to the incident, stating:

“Dr Aseem Malhotra was invited on to the BBC News Channel to talk about the latest NICE [National Institute for Health and Care Excellence] recommendations on statins. During the discussion he made unprompted claims about the COVID mRNA vaccine.

“We then asked Professor Peter Openshaw, who represents the overwhelming scientific consensus on the vaccine, to be interviewed on air on this topic and he challenged and rebutted the claims that had been made.”

Openshaw is a professor of experimental medicine at Imperial College London, the same institution that developed “models” predicting large numbers of infections and deaths if severe COVID-19 countermeasures, such as lockdowns and social distancing, were not imposed.

Many people responded positively to Malhotra’s tweet and video.

Emma Kenny, a British psychologist and television presenter, tweeted:

A tweet stated “WOW! Truthbombing on the BBC! Well done Sir.”

Another tweet read:

“Good job Aseem!! The interviewer was completely thrown and tried to challenge your statement regarding MRNA [vaccine] by suggesting your assertions unproven— but as soon as she realized she couldn’t, she quickly changed the subject. Doubt you’ll be invited back on the BBC anytime soon!”

Another Twitter user noticed that a copy of Kennedy’s “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health,” was visible behind Malhotra:

Another tweeted:

“Excellent. You came across very well and put the point about the vax link in a balanced and reasonable way.”

Some other Twitter users were less pleased. One user openly asked Ofcom, Britain’s telecommunications regulator, why the “disgraced, lying fraud” Malhotra was “allowed to do this” on the BBC.

Deborah Elaine tweeted a message about the BBC broadcast to Timothy Caulfield, a professor of law at the University of Alberta in Canada and host of a television program known as “A User’s Guide for Cheating Death.”

Caulfield later followed this up with an enraged tweet asking:

“What the HELL is the @BBCNews doing giving a notorious & discredited anti-vaxxer THIS platform???

“NO evidence to support his claims. He published his ‘analysis’ in a vanity journal that he edits. Etc.

“Pls, get it together, @BBCBreaking @BBChealth! So much damage with this BS!”

Some establishment media also criticized Malhotra. One Yahoo! News headline, for instance, reads “BBC Gives Unchallenged Platform to Anti-Vaxxer.”

The Press Gazette claimed “the overwhelming bulk of peer-reviewed literature suggests that mRNA vaccines are safe.”

Notably, the article was written by Bron Maher, whose Press Gazette bio states he previously worked for NewsGuard, a “fact-checking” firm that closely collaborates with the WHO and social media platforms, as previously reported by The Defender.

Malhotra previously published a peer-reviewed article in the Journal of Insulin Resistance, “Curing the pandemic of misinformation on COVID-19 mRNA vaccines through real evidence-based medicine.”

In July 2021, when his father died, Malhotra tweeted:

Malhotra said delays in an ambulance being dispatched by the U.K.’s beleaguered NHS to transport his father after suffering cardiac arrest also appears to have contributed to his death.

More and more studies demonstrating link between mRNA vaccines, cardiac problems

In a recent video, New Orleans-based emergency medicine physician Dr. Joseph Fraiman also called for the immediate suspension of the administration of mRNA vaccines.

Fraiman co-authored a peer-reviewed article, “Serious adverse events of special interest following mRNA COVID-19 vaccination in randomized trials in adults,” published in August 2022 in Vaccine.

In his video, Fraiman stated:

“I was the lead author of a peer-reviewed study that reanalyzed the original Pfizer and the Moderna clinical trials for the messenger RNA COVID-19 vaccines. We found the vaccine increased serious adverse events at a rate of one in 800.

“At the time of publication, my co-authors and I did not believe our single study warranted the withdrawal of the messenger RNA vaccines from the market. However, since its publication, multiple new pieces of evidence have come to light, and this has caused me to reevaluate my position.

“An article published in The BMJ regarding the FDA’s [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] own observational surveillance data found the messenger RNAs were associated with multiple of the exact same serious adverse events identified in our original study. But the FDA had failed to inform the public of these findings.

“In addition, now we have multipleautopsy studies that find essentially conclusive evidence that the vaccines are inducing sudden cardiac deaths. Yet the rate of these vaccine-induced deaths remains unknown.

“I believe, given the information, the messenger RNA vaccines need to be withdrawn from the market until new randomized controlled trials can clearly demonstrate the benefits of the vaccine outweigh the serious harm now we know the vaccines are causing.”

Malhotra re-tweeted Fraiman’s video, remarking “This is huge.”

Earlier this week, Andrew Bridgen, a member of Parliament with the U.K.’s ruling Conservative Party, had his whip removed — meaning he was suspended by his party pending “formal investigation” — for tweetingthat COVID-19 vaccines are “causing serious harms” and repeating a quote from a cardiologist who told ZeroHedge the COVID-19 vaccination campaign is “the biggest crime against humanity since the Holocaust.”

Numerous U.K. politicians, including Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, quickly condemned Bridgen’s remarks. Bridgen is known for being outspoken regarding his views on COVID-19 and the COVID-19 vaccines, including during parliamentary speeches.

On Jan. 10, Kennedy, CHD and others sued the BBC, the Associated Press, Reuters and The Washington Post, which are all members of the Trusted News Initiative (TNI), a partnership spearheaded by the BBC.

The plaintiffs allege TNI members colluded with Big Tech to censor and de-platform voices questioning official COVID-19 and 2020 U.S. presidential election narratives.

Source: the defender children health defense news and views 

Story at a glance:

• The notion that the COVID-19 shots are a form of gene therapy is so risky for Big Pharma’s bottom line, they’re going to great lengths to make sure people don’t think of them that way.
• The Associated Press (AP) published a “fact check” in which they argued that COVID-19 shots are not gene therapy because they do not alter your genes.
• The AP misled readers by focusing on just one part of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) definition of gene therapy — the part about modifying the expression of a gene. But the full definition also includes the words “or to alter the biological properties of living cells,” which is precisely what the COVID-19 shots do.
• When the mRNA shots were rolled out in 2021, they did not meet the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) definition of a vaccine. They only met the FDA’s definition of gene therapy.
• The only reason COVID-19 shots meet the CDC’s definition of a vaccine now is because they changed the definition to prevent “COVID-19 deniers” from saying that “COVID-19 vaccines are not vaccines per CDC’s own definition.”

While the COVID-19 shots are referred to as “vaccines,” they do not meet the classical definition of a vaccine. Health authorities actually had to change the definition to accommodate the COVID-19 shots and shut down the argument that, as experimental gene therapies, they may be riskier than traditional vaccines.

Meanwhile, based on the FDA’s definition of “gene therapy” they’re clearly gene therapies, and both Moderna and BioNTech acknowledge this.

Despite that, the notion that the COVID-19shots are a form of gene therapy is so risky for Big Pharma‘s bottom line, they’re going to great lengths to make sure people don’t think of them that way.

Most recently, the AP tried to debunk the idea that COVID-19 shots are gene therapy, but as you’ll see, it’s either lying to protect the industry or has gotten so inept it doesn’t know how to do investigative journalism anymore.

Either way, it doesn’t reflect well on its credibility.

AP lies about COVID shots not being gene therapy

The AP, at the end of December 2022, published a “fact check” titled “No, COVID-19 Vaccines Aren’t Gene Therapy,” in which they argued:

“The COVID-19 vaccines do not change a person’s genes, as gene therapy does … The shots from Pfizer and Moderna use messenger RNA, or mRNA, to instruct the body to create a protein from the coronavirus. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine, meanwhile, uses a modified adenovirus to trigger an immune response. …

“In recent days, social media posts have shared a claim that the vaccines are ‘gene therapy‘ — which involves modifying a person’s genes to treat or cure a disease, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.”

The definition of gene therapy

The FDA defined gene therapy in July 2018 and has not changed it since. Per the FDA’s website as of this writing:

“Human gene therapy seeks to modify or manipulate the expression of a gene or to alter the biological properties of living cells for therapeutic use. Gene therapy is a technique that modifies a person’s genes to treat or cure disease.”

Here’s where the AP went wrong. They only used ONE part of the FDA’s definition of gene therapy — the part about modifying the expression of a gene — in its debunking attempt. But the full definition also includes the words “or to alter the biological properties of living cells,” which is precisely what the COVID-19 shots do.

The mRNA in the COVID-19 jab are molecules that contain genetic instructions for making various proteins. mRNA COVID-19 shots deliver synthetic mRNA with a genetic code that instructs your cells to produce a modified form of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein.

In other words, they “alter the biological properties of living cells for therapeutic use.” Whether they modify your DNA is irrelevant. Note the word “or” in the FDA’s definition. It means it can be one OR the other. They don’t have to alter gene expression in order to still qualify as gene therapy, at least not per the FDA’s definition.

Yes, the COVID jabs are gene therapies per definition

Moderna’s November 2018 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) registration statement also confirms that its mRNA injections are defined as gene therapy, clearly stating that “mRNA is considered a gene therapy product by the FDA.”

The September 2019 SEC filing for BioNTech(its mRNA technology is used in the Pfizer vaccine) is equally clear, stating on page 21:

“In the United States, and in the European Union, mRNA therapies have been classified as gene therapy medicinal products.”

So, in the U.S. and Europe, mRNA therapies, as a group, are classified as “gene therapy medicinal products.” There’s simply no way around this. Yet to this day, mainstream media tries to “debunk” the reality of the COVID-19 jab.

Definition of vaccine was changed to fool you

In 2018, Moderna acknowledged that mRNA technology was of a “novel and unprecedented nature,” yet for the past three years, we’ve been told that it’s just a newer, faster way to make vaccines.

The fact of the matter is that when the mRNA shots were rolled out in early 2021, they didn’t meet the CDC’s definition of a vaccine. They only met the FDA’s definition of gene therapy. And the only reason they meet the CDC’s definition of a vaccine now is because the CDC changed its definition.

All the way up until the end of October 2021, the CDC defined a vaccine as “a product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease, protecting the person from that disease.”

Immunity, in turn, was defined as “Protection from an infectious disease,” meaning that “If you are immune to a disease, you can be exposed to it without becoming infected.”

The new definition of “vaccine” is:

“A preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases.”

So, a “vaccine” went from being something that produces protective immunity to simply stimulating an immune response. The key words “to produce immunity” were eliminated from the equation.

This makes the COVID-19 shots fit the description, as they do not make you immune against COVID-19 and weren’t designed to prevent infection in the first place.

Internal CDC correspondence obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests also conclusively prove the reason for the change was simply to shut down arguments by “right-wing COVID-19 deniers” that “COVID-19 vaccines are not vaccines per CDC’s own definition.”

FDA knew COVID jabs were risky territory

The FDA’s guidance for the human gene therapy products industry, published in January 2020, also classified mRNA injections as gene therapy.

Importantly, in this document the FDA stressed that gene therapy products that carry microRNA or cytokines can have “unknown pleotropic effects, including altered expression of host (human) genes that could result in unpredictable and undesirable outcomes.”

While the COVID-19 jab certainly produces undesirable outcomes, negative consequences were not unpredicted.

Early on, a number of scientists who had looked into the shots’ mechanisms of action warned about the possibility of severe adverse outcomes, including impairment of the immune system, neurological dysfunction and cancer. Today, a wide array of data and statistics prove those early concerns were valid.

Risk-benefit analysis decimates safety claims

For example, a risk-benefit analysis looking at the impact of booster mandates for university students concluded that between 22,000 and 30,000 previously uninfected adults (aged 18 to 29) must be boosted to prevent one COVID-19 hospitalization.

Meanwhile, for each hospitalization prevented, the jab will cause 18 to 98 serious adverse events, including 1.7 to 3 “booster-associated myocarditis cases in males, and 1,373 to 3,234 cases of grade ≥3 reactogenicity which interferes with daily activities.”

According to the authors, mandating a third COVID-19 shot for university students will result in “a net expected harm.”

The authors also stress that “Given the high prevalence of post-infection immunity, this risk-benefit profile is even less favorable.” They go on to state that “University booster mandates are unethical because”:

1) no formal risk-benefit assessment exists for this age group;

2) vaccine mandates may result in a net expected harm to individual young people;

3) mandates are not proportionate: expected harms are not outweighed by public health benefits given the modest and transient effectiveness of vaccines against transmission;

4) U.S. mandates violate the reciprocity principle because rare serious vaccine-related harms will not be reliably compensated due to gaps in current vaccine injury schemes; and

5) mandates create wider social harms. We consider counter-arguments such as a desire for socialization and safety and show that such arguments lack scientific and/or ethical support.

Government study also highlights COVID jab problems

A small observational study led by neurology researchers at the National Institutes of Health(NIH) brought equally bad news, as they found “a variety of neuropathic symptoms” occurring within three to four weeks of COVID-19 injection:

“We studied 23 patients (92% female; median age 40 years) reporting new neuropathic symptoms beginning within 1 month after SARS-CoV-2 vaccination. 100% reported sensory symptoms comprising severe face and/or limb paresthesias, and 61% had orthostasis, heat intolerance and palpitations. …

“Together, 52% (12/23) of patients had objective evidence of small-fiber peripheral neuropathy. … This observational study suggests that a variety of neuropathic symptoms may manifest after SARS-CoV-2 vaccinations and in some patients might be an immune-mediated process.”

FDA and CDC refuse to release key safety analyses

Isn’t it curious that the FDA, CDC, NIH and mainstream media refuse to admit there are risks, even though the NIH’s own research shows it? In all likelihood, the FDA and CDC’s data collection on the shots also reveal there are significant problems, as both agencies are stonewalling attempts to get key safety analyses released.

As reported by The Epoch Times back in the summer of 2022:

“According to operating procedures laid out by the agency and its partner in January 2021 and February 2022, the FDA would perform data mining ‘at least biweekly’ to identify adverse events ‘reported more frequently than expected following vaccination with COVID-19 vaccines.’

“The agency would perform the mining on data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).

“In a recent response, the FDA records office told The Epoch Times that it would not provide any of the analyses, even in redacted form.

“The agency cited an exemption to the Freedom of Information Act that lets the government withhold inter-agency and intra-agency memorandums and letters ‘that would not be available by law to a party other than an agency in litigation with the agency.’

“The agency also pointed to the Code of Federal Regulations, which says that ‘all communications within the Executive Branch of the Federal government which are in written form or which are subsequently reduced to writing may be withheld from public disclosure except that factual information which is reasonably segregable …’

“It’s not clear why the FDA could not produce copies of the analyses with non-factual information redacted.”

According to the VAERS standard operating procedures cited above, the CDC is also required to perform data mining analyses using Proportional Reporting Ratio (PRR) data mining. PRR measures how common an adverse event is for a specific drug compared to all the other drugs in the database.

When The Epoch Times asked the CDC to release its results, it too refused. According to The Epoch Times, the CDC “has also twice provided false information when responding to questions.” First, they claimed that no PRR analyses were done and that data mining was outside its purview.

Sometime later, they admitted the agency did perform PRRs starting in February 2021, only to later backtrack, saying they only started doing PRRs in March 2022. The Epoch Times cites several papers in which the FDA and/or CDC claim their data mining efforts have come up empty-handed.

But if that’s true, why the reluctance to release the data? Don’t they want us to be reassured that these shots are as safe as they claim them to be? Why sit on exculpatory evidence? Unless, of course, the data proves the FDA and CDC are lying.

Was no-test drug approval the plan all along?

While I cannot prove it, I suspect Operation Warp Speed — devised in the spring of 2020 by a dozen top officials from then-President Trump’s health and defense departments to expedite the development of a COVID-19 vaccine — may have been intended to normalize the approval of gene therapy drugs without the proper testing.

Before the COVID-19 shots were given emergency use authorization, no mRNA gene therapy had ever made it to market, despite more than 20 years’ worth of research and development. That tells you something about how difficult it is to get these products right, to make sure they work and are safe.

With the FDA’s implementation of a “Future Framework” scheme in June 2022 to speed up the delivery of COVID-19 boosters, the regulatory obstacles for gene therapies, especially the stringent safety requirements, were brushed aside. Now, the FDA can and will authorize reformulated COVID-19 shotswithout human trials.

The FDA basically rewrote the rules on the fly, deciding that mRNA gene therapies are equivalent to conventional influenza vaccines and can be updated and released without testing.

The idea is that the safety of the mRNA COVID-19 shots has already been proven by the original shots, which they claim have harmed or killed no one. Hence, safety is a given, and the effectiveness of reformulated boosters can be assessed simply by checking the antibody levels in a few mice, which is what Pfizer and Moderna did.

In reality, however, millions of people around the world have been harmed and killed by the original shots, the human trials for those shotswere riddled with fraud, antibody levels tell us nothing about the jab’s ability to protect against infection and the two technologies (conventional flu vaccines and mRNA gene therapy) have no common ground.

Beware of future mRNA injections

I have no doubt this “Future Framework” will also, over time, be widened to include other vaccines and drugs that drugmakers may want to tinker with.

Already, there are mRNA shots in the pipeline against herpes, malaria, influenza, respiratory syncytial virus, sickle cell disease, HIV, Epstein-Barr and cancer, and vaccine makers have received fast-track approval designation for at least some of these shots.

Eventually, this fast-tracking trend may even lower standards for drug trials in general, which historically have required at least 10 years of multiphase testing. The dangers of this trend really cannot be overstated — especially when we’re talking about gene-based products.

So, to circle back to where we started, hopefully, you can now see how the AP and other media are misleading you in their “fact checks” by focusing on just one aspect of the FDA’s gene therapy definition (the DNA-altering part) while ignoring the fact that COVID-19 shots DO meet the complete definition, and ARE classified as gene therapy, as acknowledged by BioNTech and Moderna in their SEC filings.

Source: the defender children health defense news and views 

As the World Economic Forum (WEF) today wrapped up its weeklong annual meeting of nearly 3,000 political, business, media and academic elites, mainstream media largely continued to sing the meeting’s praises, while independent media outlets took aim at the WEF’s agenda and its promoters.

The Associated Press (AP) described the meetings in Davos, Switzerland, as taking on the “pressing global issues” while simultaneously being the “target of bizarre claims from a growing chorus who believe it involves a group of elites manipulating events for their own benefit.”

Among those critics was Twitter owner and CEO Elon Musk, who responded to a tweet: “WEF is increasingly becoming an unelected world government that the people never asked for and don’t want.”

Musk posted an online poll — that generated 2.42 million votes — where he asked whether “The World Economic Forum should control the world.” Eighty-six percent of respondents said “no.”

The Defender on Wednesday reported on the first few days of meetings. This article lists eight key takeaways from Davos — and why they matter.

Global elites really want vaccine passports

One of the proposals that generated the most attention at this year’s WEF meeting came from embattled former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair, now executive chairman of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change.

Blair proposed the development of a “national digital infrastructure,” stating, “We should be helping countries to develop a national digital infrastructure which they will need with these new vaccines” — a statement that strongly suggested “new vaccines” are coming and we will “need” them.

Blair also said:

“You need to know who’s been vaccinated and who hasn’t been. Some of the vaccines that will come down the line, there will be multiple shots.

“So [for vaccines] you’ve got to have — for reasons to do with healthcare more generally but certainly for pandemics — a proper digital infrastructure and most countries don’t have that.”

As previously reported by The Defender, Blair endorsed the “Good Health Pass,” a digital vaccine passport launched by ID2020, a collaborative effort between Mastercard, the International Chamber of Commerce and the WEF.

Members of the Good Health Pass Collaborative include Accenture, Deloitte and IBM, while general partners of ID2020 include Facebook and Mastercard.

ID2020’s founding partners include Microsoft, the Rockefeller Foundation, Accenture, GAVI, The Vaccine Alliance (a core partner of the World Health Organization, or WHO), UNICEF, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Bank.

Global ‘leaders’ appear to be clairvoyant

On the disease front, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned that “a resurgence of tuberculosis may be coming … sooner or later.”

Statements like Tedros’ appear to belie a knowledge of future developments. This has been the norm at previous WEF meetings — and it was the case again this year.

Investigative journalist Jordan Schachtelpointed out that “Event 201, the pre-pandemic coronavirus simulation, was announced at a Davos WEF conference in 2019.”

Similarly, this year, Lawrence “Larry” Summers, who served as U.S. secretary of the treasury between 1999 and 2001 and director of the National Economic Council from 2009 to 2010, said “the odds in my view are better than 50-50” that “there will be a COVID-scale problem within the next 15 years.”

Summers made these remarks as part of a panel, “Global Economic Outlook: Is this the End of an Era?” whose panelists included International Monetary Fund (IMF) Director Kristalina Georgieva and former IMF managing director and current president of the European Central Bank Christine Lagarde.

During a press conference, officials presented the WEF’s “Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2023” report, predicting a “catastrophic cyber event” said to be “likely in the next two years.”

These are people who think very highly of themselves

Statements by WEF’s Founder and Executive Chair Klaus Schwab and WEF meeting participants also revealed how the “elite” meeting participants appear to believe they are the self-anointed saviors — or rulers — of the world.

In an interview with India Today, which sent two attendees to this year’s WEF meeting, Schwab said the world will soon no longer be run by superpowers such as the U.S., but instead by WEF “stakeholders,” such as BlackRock and Bill Gates.

During another session, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, foreign affairs minister of Pakistan whose mother, Benazir Bhutto, was formerly the country’s prime minister, talked about a “new world order” that is being stymied by “hyper-partisan[ship].”

Also during the same panel, Slovenian Foreign Minister Tanja Falon, said, “We have countries that are respecting their national interest going beyond the rules,” referring to “global rules,” adding that “we have to take into consideration The World Order.”

And Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry told meeting attendees, “We are a select group of human beings” who “sit in a room and come together and actually talk about saving the planet.”

WEF Participants make decisions in ‘lock step’ — no debate, please

Schachtel noted that at the WEF meetings, “conformity is required and debate is a cancel-worthy sin.”

He elaborated on this point in a recent blog post, describing the WEF meetings as “a reinforced echo chamber in which there is one problem, one objective, and only one solution,” instead of being “a place for a healthy, robust debate.”

Schachtel wrote:

“Regardless of who populates these panels and speeches, whether it’s invited corporate media, governmental officials, and/or business executives, there’s never any apparent dissent or difference of opinion expressed.

“The truth of the matter is that the WEF and its leaders prefer conformity to debate. In fact, debate is actively discouraged, and stepping out of line — via a narrative violation — is grounds for permanent removal from Club Davos.”

Journalist and author Walter Kirn tweeted similar sentiments:

Journalist Jack Pobosiec said the “WEF/WHO and the Davos mindsets are essential to understand [because] this is the mindset that governs our world here in the West. Vast amounts of our leaders, even down to lower levels, ascribe to the globally homogenized and technocratic vision of the world. Do not overlook this.”

They want you to believe there’s a digital solution for (almost) every problem

The annual WEF meetings are renowned for their promotion of technocracy, and this year’s meeting continued that trend.

An example of this was a session titled “Improving Livelihoods with Digital ID,” which promoted “an international ID policy to realize financial, social and health equity through digital identification.”

According to journalist Andrew Lawton, this panel “was not streamed and was not open to the press.” The panel included participants from the Global Digital Policy Incubator, Hedera, the Dubai Future Foundation and DataKind.

During another session, panelists predicted “humans will soon embrace implanted brain technology so they ‘can decode complex thought,’” adding that “neurosignals can be used for biometrics” and that the more widely adopted neurotechnology becomes, the more data can be gathered on humans.

Saudi Arabia’s Minister of Communications and Information Technology Abdulla Al-Swahatold attendees in Davos his country is “embracing metaverse technology [which] has already shown its environmental benefits with the planning and development of some of the Kingdom’s biggest projects.”

The WEF is a proponent of the metaverse, as previously reported by The Defender.

They want to change what you think, and how you live

Many of the proposals presented this week will necessarily involve large-scale changes to people’s livelihoods and habits.

In an example of the behavioral psychology concept of “nudging,” Cepsa CEO Maarten Wetselaar advocated in favor of “much higher carbon prices,” in order to “make what you try to avoid expensive and subsidize the thing that you try to build.” He called this a “very capitalist intervention.”

Lawton noted that while it may seem odd for an oil and gas executive “to be so enthusiastic about transitioning away from oil and gas,” Cepsa “is also involved in green hydrogen and clearly sees the writing on the wall and wants some of those subsidies Wetselaar is calling for.”

Australian mining executive Andrew Forrestspoke in favor of “zero emissions, not just net-zero emissions,” saying this can be done using existing technology: “solar, wind, batteries, green hydrogen.”

The “15-minute city” concept, where people will be car-less, was also touted, while a member of Switzerland’s Green Party called for “punishing businesses that don’t adhere to climate agreements.” Indeed, a “5-minute city” proposal was also put forth, that would be “100% solar and wind-powered.”

Meat — or discouraging its consumption — was also on the agenda. Jim Hagemann Snabe, chairman of Siemens, said, “If a billion people stop eating meat, I tell you, it has a big impact. Not only does it have a big impact on the current food system, but it will also inspire innovation of food systems.” Snabe also advocated for synthetic meat.

A mass shooting occurred during Lunar New Year celebrations in Monterey Park in California on Saturday night. Local authorities said that ten people had been killed, with at least ten others injured.

Speaking to reporters, Captain Andrew Meyer of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department said local emergency services pronounced ten victims dead at the scene. “There are at least ten additional victims transported to local hospitals,” he said, adding that their condition varies from stable to critical.

He also said that the suspect, who carried a firearm, had fled the scene and remained at large, and that it was too early to guess the shooter’s motivation.

In an earlier statement on Sunday, Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department Information Bureau said that the tragedy took place after 10:00 pm at 100 West Garvey Avenue. It also identified the shooter as a male, without providing any further detail.

Several witnesses claimed that the shooting took place at a dance studio on Garvey Avenue, according to The Los Angeles Times.

Video on social media shows first responders rushing to the area as well as several people being taken to hospitals.

One local business owner told The Los Angeles Times that after the gunfire erupted, three people rushed into his restaurant and told him to lock the doors. They said the suspect was a man with what looked like a semi-automatic weapon.

A local resident also told LA Times that a friend of his was in the club’s bathroom when the suspect opened fire. According to his friend, the shooter was armed with a long gun and there were at least three bodies lying on the ground, one of whom apparently was the boss of the club.

The tragedy took place as tens of thousands of people gathered in the afternoon for a two day festival to mark Chinese New Year.

Source: rt.com

The US has been reaching out to armed groups that oppose the Taliban and secretly giving money to Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS), Zamir Kabulov, Russia’s presidential envoy for Afghanistan, has said.

When asked if the US is in contact with the Afghan opposition in an interview with Russia 24 TV on Friday, Kabulov said, “Yes, there is such data.”

The Americans have been acting this way“because they really want to avenge their shameful military-political defeat in Afghanistan, and in retaliation they do everything so that peace isn’t established in this troubled land,” he claimed.

“But worst of all is that, in addition to contacts with the armed opposition in Afghanistan, the Anglo-Saxons are covertly sponsoring Islamic State, who are aimed at undermining not only the stability of our Central Asian partners… but also the security of Russia,” Kabulov added.

The US and its allies pulled out of Afghanistan in August 2021 after a two-decade intervention. The chaotic withdrawal, which saw billions of dollars’ worth of American military equipment left behind, was carried out after the Taliban swept through the country and captured the capital, Kabul in a matter of weeks, facing little resistance from the Afghan military – which US forces had trained to resist the militants.

The sanctions and the withdrawal of US and other foreign aid to Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover have further deepened the humanitarian crisis in the country. Under previous US-backed administrations, this aid accounted for around 75% of the Afghan budget. According to the UN, around 24.4 million people, or more than half of the country’s population, are currently in need of humanitarian assistance.

In December, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken defended the Biden administration’s decision to leave Afghanistan, saying that if the American forces remained there, “it would have, I think, made much more complicated the support that we’ve been able to give and that others have been able to give Ukraine”amid the conflict with Russia.

The US-based Brown University estimated that the invasion of Afghanistan cost Washington more than $2.1 trillion overall. The US Department of Defense said on Thursday that military aid provided to Kiev since the start of the conflict with Moscow last February has surpassed $26.7 billion.

Source: rt.com