Calling it a “tragic mistake,” the U.S. Department of Defense admitted Friday that it killed 10 people, including seven children, in a drone strike that wrongly targeted an aid group worker in Afghanistan late last month.
Background image is courtesy of ExibartStreet.com, modified by me.
Millions of people around the world suffer from the little-known ME/CFS. The pandemic has turned scientists’ attention to the condition – because its symptoms are similar to the long-term symptoms suffered by Covid-19 patients.
ME/CFS – myalgic encephalomyelitis or chronic fatigue syndrome – is a severe neuroimmunological condition that often leads to a high level of physical disability. Between 17 and 24 million people throughout the world suffer from ME/CFS. Women are affected more often than men. Despite its prevalence, neither the general public nor doctors know much about ME/CFS, even though the WHO included the condition in its international list of neurological disorders in 1969. Research is still very much in the early stages and there are neither drugs nor therapies to treat the disease.
Sufferers find themselves left on their own and are usually stigmatised as depressed or mentally ill. The new Sars-CoV-2 virus makes the condition especially significant. Some Covid-19 patients suffer from long-term effects of the virus weeks or even months after becoming infected – with similar symptoms to those of ME/CFS. We follow patients and their relatives as well as internationally renowned scientists and discuss that latest findings in research. They all bring home the gravity and severity of the condition and dispel the myths that for so many years have stood in the way of scientific progress.
Source: New Docs
Image is a screenshot from the film Living with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.
Internet giants cover-up for Big Pharma, suppress alternative medicine and bury inconvenient facts.
According to research done by We Are Social, the average internet user spends over 6 and half hours online every day.
The internet is both a blessing as a curse. On the one hand, it gives us access to knowledge and technology that improves our lives, but on the other hand, it’s an addictive and dangerous mind-control tool that can be exploited to influence your choices and manipulate your thinking.
The COVID pseudopandemic has seen internet censorship rise to an unprecedented level. The controllers and their minions are scrambling to silence anyone who dares to question the efficacy of vaccines or the existence of Sars-Cov-2.
Let’s recap: In the space of a few months, thousands of YouTube channels and millions of Facebook posts have been deleted. The former president of the United States’ Twitter account was removed, and, Greenmedinfo, a site that aggregates research on natural remedies, had both their Facebook and Instagram accounts deleted losing over half a million followers.
LinkedIn also joined in on the action by deleting the account of Dr. Robert Malone after he questioned the safety of the mRNA vaccines, the technology for which he himself played a huge part in creating.
Parler was removed from the internet and so was the website of America’s Frontline Doctors after they endorsed non-agenda-approved treatments to combat COVID-19. More recently, in a move that’s disturbing yet predictable, Facebook has begun sending users creepy messages relating to “extremist content”.
So content that goes against the mainstream agenda is either censored or outright deleted. We know that. But what about the content that goes against corporate interests but isn’t quite insidious enough to be removed? What does Google, the largest search engine in the world, processing over 40,000 search requests per second, do about such content?
The first thing to understand about Google is that it’s more than just a search engine. Google develops and maintains a network of applications that all work together to collect, analyze, and leverage your data. Each application feeds data into the next, forming a global chain of information exchange.
For example, Google’s driverless car initiative powers Google Maps, which in turn powers Google’s local listings. It is this network effect that has made Google such a powerful and unrivaled force in the search engine space.
As a search engine, Google decides what information you see and what information you don’t. It goes without saying, but any tool with such power needs to be responsibly managed and repeatedly scrutinized.
Anyone who chooses to use such a tool should also be aware that they are seeing the internet through a lens created by Google’s mysterious algorithms and the information they’re receiving doesn’t necessarily come from an objective or neutral source.
Read the full article at: OffGuardian
Background images are courtesy of Google and Wikipedia, modified by me.
The Ahmadi and Nejrabi families had packed all their belongings, waiting for word to be escorted to Kabul airport and eventually moved to the United States, but the message Washington sent instead was a rocket into their homes in a Kabul neighbourhood.
The Sunday afternoon drone attack, which the US claimed was conducted on an Islamic State in Khorasan Province (ISKP, or ISIS-K) target, killed 10 members of the families, ranging from two to 40 years old.
Neighbours said the house, where little boys and girls had been playing a few minutes prior, turned into a “horror scene”. They described human flesh stuck to the walls. Bones fallen into the bushes. Walls stained red with blood. Shattered glass everywhere.
Background image is courtesy of New York Times, modified by me.
With the humiliating defeat of Uncle Sam and the cowardly departure of the Afghan President, the Taliban is going to announce an interim government shortly. It has been a swift and relatively peaceful takeover of control by the Taliban and nobody needs to fear retaliation or revenge in this regard. No need to evacuate embassy staff or other foreigners from Afghanistan either. The Taliban spokesman has issued the following guaranty:
“We assure all diplomats, embassies, consulates, and charitable workers, whether they are international or national that not only no problem will be created for them on the part of IEA but a secure environment will be provided to them, Inshallah.”
Background image is courtesy of AP, modified by me (click to enlarge).
Two iconic images taken 46 years apart. The US Embassy staff fleeing from Saigon and Kabul respectively. After 20 years of useless fighting, the defeat and humiliation is now complete!
Images via Twitter, modified by me (click to enlarge).
The decision not to extradite Julian Assange to the US is unlikely to be the end of his struggle. For the past 10 years, a team of reporters has followed Assange and the WikiLeaks network.
In their first film in 2011, they portrayed Julian Assange and his team as transparency activists, fighting for a new, open relationship between citizens and information. Since then, Wikileaks has come under constant pressure from the US government. But the site nevertheless continued to publish secret and explosive information that has both illuminated and shaped our world.
In 2013, the team met Julian Assange again, interviewing him in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. At the time, Assange had no idea that he was going to spend the next seven years in these rooms, observed by surveillance cameras.
In 2016, Wikileaks played a crucial role in the election of US President Donald Trump. In 2017, it tried to similarly influence the French election. Throughout the years, the reporters have kept filming, talking to Julian Assange’s father, who regularly visits him in London’s Belmarsh prison, as well as to his lawyers.
Today, Julian Assange and WikiLeaks are at a turning point in their history. To his detractors, Assange is a spy and a traitor, and deserves his fate. His supporters say the US extradition request is a serious and unprecedented attack on the freedom of information, protected by the US constitution. And who’s to say that the news outlets that have collaborated with WikiLeaks won’t be prosecuted, as well?
Former U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld will be remembered as being the architect of the war in Iraq (nicknamed ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’), for his introduction of an advanced torture program (known as ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’), and the killing of more than a million Iraqi civilians. Sadly, Rumsfeld never had to go on trial for his blatant crimes against humanity.
Background images are courtesy of Politico.com and AmericasLastDays.com, modified by me (click image to enlarge).
For the fourth time in 13 years, Israel has launched a major military offensive on the Gaza Strip. In its latest assault that began on May 10, at least 220 Palestinians, including 63 children, have been killed in Gaza. At least 12 people have died in Israel, including two children.
In the following series of graphics Al Jazeera describes why Israel’s military occupation of Palestine remains at the core of this decades-long conflict and how Israeli colonialism shapes every part of Palestinians’ lives.
Map is courtesy of Al Jazeera — click to enlarge.
Two weeks ago, Jerusalem was rocked by violence as bands of Jewish Israeli extremists rampaged through Palestinian neighborhoods of East Jerusalem chanting “death to Arabs.” Making their way through the city, mobs hurled rocks at Palestinian homes and assaulted passersby suspected of being Arabs or leftists, even stopping cars along the main north-south road that divides Israeli West Jerusalem from occupied East Jerusalem to check whether drivers were Jews or Arabs, usually subjecting the latter to an impromptu beating.
The unrest began on April 13—around the start of Ramadan—when Israeli authorities blocked off the steps to the Old City’s iconic Damascus Gate in Palestinian East Jerusalem. The seemingly arbitrary move sparked several days of clashes between Palestinian protesters and Israeli security forces. The closure had struck a particular nerve with Palestinians in East Jerusalem, who have been subjected to years of marginalization and denationalization at the hands of Israel’s government and have few spaces left in a city where systematic eradication of Palestinian national, civic, and cultural institutions has become government policy.
The police crackdown was, unsurprisingly, one-sided—resulting in the arrests and beatings of numerous Palestinian youths while Jewish attackers went largely unpunished. Israeli Minister of Public Security Amir Ohana—a member of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party—condemned attacks by Palestinians on Jews but made no mention of Jewish Israeli extremists attacking Palestinians in Jerusalem. The scenes were reminiscent of the wave of attacks earlier this year by extremist Jewish Israeli settlers on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, during which Israeli soldiers often stood idly by.
Washington’s response to the violence was notably muted. As Jewish Israeli extremists attacked Palestinians in Jerusalem, the U.S. State Department issued a generic statement that smacked of both sides-ism, rejecting the “rhetoric of extremist protestors chanting hateful and violent slogans” and calling for calm—but failing to identify the extremists or their targets. It was equally striking that hardly a single member of Congress could muster even a generic condemnation of violence perpetrated by Jewish Israeli extremists, particularly given how traditionally vocal they are whenever violence emanates from Palestinians. But none of it was surprising. Indeed, Washington remains firmly in denial about the growing trend of extremism in Israeli politics and society—a reality that has both enabled and fueled it. (Source: Foreign Policy)
“The IDF will continue to strike and bring complete silence for the long term.” (Quote by Israeli Defence Minister Benny Gantz)
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Against the Grain 