By Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D. | The Defender | October 23, 2026

An attorney for seven Dutch plaintiffs in a COVID-19 vaccine injury lawsuit against Bill Gates and Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla accused Gates and others of

orchestrating the pandemic to help usher in the “Great Reset,” a global economic, political and social system promoted by the World Economic Forum.

During oral arguments Thursday, attorney Peter Stassen told a packed courtroom that the COVID-19 vaccines were akin to a bioweapon, developed as part of a broader global effort to strip democratic and individual rights.

Speaking outside the courthouse in Leeuwarden, Netherlands, Stassen said Thursday’s hearing “was about publicly telling what is happening in this courtroom and what is the real case. The real case is that COVID-19 was not a disease but was a project.”

He accused Gates and Bourla of participating in that project, which he said was coordinated and undemocratic. He also accused the defendants of using censorship and propaganda to hide their intentions while promoting the COVID-19 vaccines as “safe and effective.”

COVID-19 vaccines were developed and procured as military countermeasures, bypassing the standard development and approval pipeline for such products. By developing the shots as military countermeasures, they bypassed traditional safety regulations, leading to widespread injury, Stassen said.

Stassen said that while this is a civil case, he believes the defendants’ actions constitute serious criminal offenses that violate global treaties and the Nuremberg Code.

For their part, attorneys for the defendants “claimed the shots saved millions of lives and that they were safe and effective,” said Joseph Sansone, Ph.D., a psychotherapist, critic of the mRNA shots and one of the expert witnesses for the plaintiffs.

“They basically said, like a parrot, that all of Stassen’s accusations were either conspiracy theory or based on medical reports that are from people who are not neutral in this case,” said Ido Dijkstra, a Dutch journalist and the editor-in-chief of De Andere Krant, who attended the hearing.

Dutch attorney Meike Terhorst said the defense did not respond to Stassen’s assertions that COVID-19 was a project. “There was no response to that at all, nothing.”

Journalist Penny Marie, who has reported on the case, told The Defender that Stassen’s arguments “mirror what so many people worldwide say and have experienced and investigated.”

The defendants’ legal team did acknowledge that they were “touched” by the suffering of the vaccine-injured plaintiffs. Terhorst said the five living plaintiffs face “immense problems” with their health.

Dijkstra said the presiding judge on the three-judge panel appeared to “support the mainstream narrative,” but “gave the impression that she wanted to understand Stassen’s reasoning.”

Thursday’s hearing stemmed from a lawsuit filed in 2023 by seven people injured by COVID-19 vaccines — including two who have since died — against Gates, Bourla and 15 other defendants, including former Dutch prime minister and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, the Dutch state, and several Dutch public health officials and journalists.

According to Dutch attorney Meike Terhorst, who is not connected to the case but attended the hearing, none of the defendants appeared in court.

A ruling is expected as early as December but may be delayed until February 2027.

Expert witnesses barred from testifying in person

During oral arguments, Stassen addressed the court’s refusal to allow his team’s expert witnesses to testify in person. Earlier this week, the court limited the witnesses to video statements presenting their arguments.

Defense attorneys attacked the credentials of some of the witnesses. For instance, they claimed that Sasha Latypova — a former pharmaceutical research and development executive — has only a bachelor’s degree and is unqualified to provide testimony on scientific and medical matters.

Latypova disputed the claims, telling those gathered outside the courthouse that she has a “graduate degree from Dartmouth College and 25 years of pharmaceutical R&D and regulatory experience” — including interacting with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, European Medicines Agency and Japanese regulators “on behalf of my clients.”

Catherine Austin Fitts, founder and publisher of the Solari Report and another of the expert witnesses for the plaintiffs, told The Defender that Bourla’s attorneys questioned the credentials of another witness — Mike Yeadon, Ph.D. Fitts said she was “surprised” by their claims.

“Yeadon served as vice-president of Pfizer’s allergy and respiratory research unit and worked for many years at Pfizer. Does Pfizer make it a practice to staff the company with unqualified people in senior positions? Does this explain why Pfizer appointed a veterinarian to be the CEO?” Fitts asked, referring to Bourla.

Terhorst said it is “very strange” for Dutch courts to not allow oral testimony by plaintiffs’ witnesses, as otherwise, “it is not easy to substantiate your claims.”

Despite the limitation, Terhorst said the witnesses bolstered the plaintiffs’ case. “The case is important based on the evidence provided by key witnesses,” she said.

“I think we [gave] a very clear sign to the court that there can be not justice if the court is not willing to look further at this expert evidence, because you can come to a judgment based on truth and a real discussion between the parties,” Stassen said during the press conference.

Vaccine-injured were ‘misled’ about safety of COVID shots

In an interview with journalist Fiona Rose Diamond earlier this week, Stassen said the plaintiffs “felt misled” by the Dutch government and by those who promoted the COVID-19 shots in the media.

“They felt misled by the whole system … And they were misled because they were told that this was a safe and effective vaccine, and in fact, the only way out of [the] crisis,” Stassen said.

At Thursday’s press conference, Stassen added that the plaintiffs sued not just because of their injuries, but because “they want the truth.”

Fitts highlighted the significance of the case, noting that under the Dutch legal system, the vaccine-injured can file lawsuits in response to their injuries — contrasting this with legal restrictions the injured face in the U.S.

“The PREP Act has made it impossible for such lawsuits to be brought in the United States,” Fitts said, referring to the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act of 2005. Under the PREP Act, anyone who produces or administers emergency countermeasures, such as the COVID-19 shots, is shielded from legal liability.

Terhorst noted that the vaccine-injured in the Netherlands face other obstacles.

“Vaccine injury is not even recognized in the Netherlands,” she said. She noted that some vaccine-injured people briefly received treatment under public health programs that the Dutch state earmarked for long COVID patients. However, this treatment was later “terminated.”

Terhorst said lawyers for the Dutch state “said nothing” during the hearing about offering compensation to these victims, including the plaintiffs and their families.

This is one of several obstacles the plaintiffs have faced as this case has progressed. Last year, another attorney for the plaintiffs, Arno van Kessel, was arrested “with considerable force,” as part of a nationwide sweep by Dutch police against alleged members of a “sovereign citizen” movement with a “potential intent to use violence” against the Dutch state.

Terhorst said van Kessel spent seven months imprisoned in a high-security prison, lost his license to practice law, is not allowed to leave the country and was fitted with an ankle monitor — which was removed Thursday, in parallel with the hearing.

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This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

RT | October 23, 2026

‘Cambridge Analytica’ is by now a byword for the social media Wild West of 2016, when regulations were non-existent and unscrupulous brokers sold personal user data to advertisers and political operatives. RT explores the scandal that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg still can’t dodge.

On October 22, Meta was ordered by a New Mexico judge to pay $25 billion in civil penalties over the collection of personal data from 44 million Facebook users by Cambridge Analytica more than a decade earlier.

The judge concluded that Meta’s misconduct warranted a penalty exceeding $219 billion under state law, but reduced the amount to $25 billion, making it one of the largest fines ever imposed on an American corporation.

Meta, operating at the time as Facebook, knowingly and systematically deceived users about how it managed their personal data and allowed its harvesting by third-party companies like Cambridge Analytica. The jury also found Meta’s senior executive team knew of, and lied about, deceiving users about how it planned to investigate data-harvesting companies after the Cambridge Analytica scandal became public.

To understand how Meta ended up owing an eighth of its annual revenue in just one judgment, it’s necessary to go back to 2013, when Cambridge Analytica emerged from Britain’s shadowy private intelligence sector.

What was Cambridge Analytica?

Cambridge Analytica was founded in 2013 as a subsidiary of SCL Group, a London-based private intelligence firm that has provided data analytics and “behavioural analysis” services to the British Defense Ministry and Foreign Office.

Cambridge Analytica CEO and SCL Group Director Alexander Nix has admitted under oath that his companies worked with American and British intelligence agencies, provided psychological warfare training to several Western militaries, employed multiple staff with security clearances in the UK and US, and hired former Israeli spies.

SCL Group’s work for NATO, Israel, Ukraine, and other governments and militaries was extensive, and Cambridge Analytica drew on its parent company’s experience in military psyops to become one of the world’s most effective election influence operations, according to whistleblower Christopher Wylie. On the other hand, SCL insists that its military and political wings were separate entities. Whichever account is true, Cambridge Analytica had been hired by political candidates in 200 elections by 2018, according to company documents. These included parliamentary elections in the Czech Republic, India, and Italy, the Brexit referendum in the UK, and most infamously, the 2016 presidential election in the US.

What did Cambridge Analytica do in 2016?

Cambridge Analytica was paid nearly $6 million by then-candidate Donald Trump’s campaign in the runup to the 2016 election. The company used its unprecedented access to Facebook user data to identify persuadable voters and potential donors, select effective markets for television ads, and target certain Hillary Clinton supporters for “deterrence” – adverts discouraging them from going to the polls on election day.

How did this become a scandal?

Cambridge Analytica did not break any laws to obtain this data. It was scraped from tens of millions of Facebook users who had, unbeknownst to themselves, given a third-party Facebook quiz application access to their messages, their profile data, and that of their friends.

Cambridge Analytica hired a Cambridge University professor, Aleksandr Kogan, to develop a personality quiz app, named ‘This is Your Digital Life’. Between 250,000 and 270,000 American Facebook users took the quiz in 2015, and by accessing their data, but crucially, under Facebook terms, accessing the data of all of their friends on the platform, Cambridge Analytica was able to compile detailed psychological profiles on roughly 87 million users.

Cambridge Analytica employee Christopher Wylie revealed the workings of the scheme to The Observer in 2018, telling the British newspaper that “we exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles, and built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis the entire company was built on.”

Was Cambridge Analytica the only data-scraper doing this?

“Facebook never cared,” Kogan told NBC News in 2018, explaining that “tens of thousands” of developers created apps like his quiz, and sold user data to companies like Cambridge Analytica. Among the developers were CubeYou, which used a “one-click personality test” app to gather information for commercial use, and LocalBlox, which scraped data from 48 million users, which it then sold to marketers.

AggregateIQ, Global Science Research, and Eunoia Technologies all used data gleaned by Kogan for political ends. However, long before these companies existed, Blue State Digital, an American political consultancy, surreptitiously harvested Facebook data, including friends’ data, for use by Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign.

Cambridge Analytica, however, had its work for the Trump campaign exposed at the height of the ‘Russiagate’ hoax, at a time when Democrats and liberal media outlets were convinced that Russia intervened in the election on behalf of Trump. Cambridge Analytica’s data-scraping dovetailed neatly into a narrative of “Facebook bots” and “Russian military hackers” working with the Trump campaign, and the company became a whipping boy for an industry that transcended partisan lines.

US Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the Senate Intelligence Committee eventually investigated claims that Cambridge Analytica helped the Russian government target political ads at American voters, but both determined that these claims were untrue, and neither investigation found any proof of “collusion” between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.

Has Facebook been punished?

At the time that the information was collected, Facebook had stopped allowing third-party apps to access friends’ data. However, a loophole allowed apps active on the platform before this change to continue harvesting information through 2015. Within days of Wylie’s revelations hitting the headlines, SCL Group and Cambridge Analytica were suspended from Facebook. Two months later, both companies ceased operations, leaving Facebook to handle the fallout.

Facebook initially went into damage control mode, insisting that “People knowingly provided their information” to Kogan’s app, and that “everyone involved gave their consent.”

However, the US Federal Trade Commission determined that Facebook made its privacy settings deliberately opaque, spreading them out over 20 separate screens and opting users into sharing data with third-parties by default. Facebook settled with the FTC for $5 billion in 2019, setting the stage for a series of similar payouts in the following years.

In 2018, Zuckerberg told lawmakers on Capitol Hill that Facebook was aware that user data had been transferred from Kogan to Cambridge Analytica (this transfer was in breach of its policies) since 2015, but opted not to inform users. He said that Facebook asked Cambridge Analytica to delete the data, but never followed up and made sure the company did. “We considered it a closed case,” he told Congress.

The following year, the US Securities and Exchange Commission accused Facebook of misleading investors by presenting “the risk of misuse of user data as merely hypothetical,” when it knew since 2015 that “a third-party developer had actually misused Facebook user data.” Facebook settled the case with the SEC for $100 million.

In 2022, Meta settled a $725 million class-action lawsuit brought by a group of Facebook users, who alleged that the company violated privacy and consumer protection laws by misrepresenting its data-sharing laws and failing to protect their personal information.

Meta attempted to shut down further legal action over the Cambridge Analytica scandal this August, when it reached an $18 billion settlement with 51 attorneys general across US states, territories, and the District of Columbia. Although the cases concerned the addictive design of Meta’s platforms and their effect on children’s mental health, the settlement included a clause resolving a multistate investigation into Facebook’s sharing of user data with third parties “whether known or unknown,” including Cambridge Analytica.

Even if participating states were to discover new facts about the data sharing, they have now waived their right to sue Meta. New Mexico was one of two states that was not party to this agreement, hence the $25 billion penalty.

Did Cambridge Analytica get Trump elected?

Ten years after the fact, it remains unclear how prominent a role Cambridge Analytica played in Trump’s victory over Clinton. The Trump campaign’s use of Facebook and X (then called Twitter) is widely cited as instrumental in his win, but the campaign’s digital director, Brad Parscale, has since said that he stopped using the company’s data several months before election day, considering it inaccurate.

What about Brexit?

Cambridge Analytica worked with Nigel Farage’s Leave.EU organization in late 2015 and early 2016, and carried out some preliminary data analysis for the campaign. However, the data was never used, and the UK Information Commissioner’s (ICO) office concluded in 2020 that the company had no impact on the referendum. As in the US, the ICO found no links between Cambridge Analytica and Russia, and no evidence that Russia interfered in the vote.

Is Zuckerberg in the clear?

The $25 billion judgement handed down on October 22 may be the largest fine ever imposed on Meta, but it does not mark the end of Zuckerberg’s legal woes. In addition to a Washington DC lawsuit holding him personally responsible for the Cambridge Analytica debacle, Zuckerberg’s company is being sued by investors in California over Facebook’s alleged efforts to conceal the misuse of user data by the company.

Meta will likely settle the latter case, just as it did with the similar SEC case in 2019. However, should Zuckerberg fight the lawsuit, he could find himself in the dock, as the plaintiffs have sought recorded depositions from him, former COO Sheryl Sandberg, and former CFO David Wehner – all of whom could be forced to shed more light on just how much Facebook knew about the scandal, and when.

By Glenn Diesen | October 23, 2026

The very public execution of my professorship and reputation continues in Norway. Today’s media article about me makes three claims that are misleading and/or false.

1) The article dismisses my claim that my research is being criminalized as the journalists merely cite the dismissive comments from the university – no arguments are apparently required.

It is not possible for an academic anymore to analyse the policies of rival powers by assessing their security concerns, as it will be smeared by the government, the government’s NGOs and the media as “legitimizing” the enemy and supporting their narratives. The current Defence Minister singled me out with the accusation of spreading propaganda and criticised two podcasters for even speaking with me (as I have already been cancelled by the media in Norway). How was this accusation by the Defence Minister substantiated? I had argued that NATO expansion triggered the war in Ukraine, which the Defence Minister denounced as dangerous “Russian propaganda”, with no need to substantiate his vile accusation. I can cite a sea of evidence and also refer to statements by American and European political leaders, ambassadors, intelligence chiefs, and others to make my case. However, the purpose is not to engage in debate, but to smear, censor, and cancel. By going after an individual academic for challenging official truths, the government has already claimed a monopoly on the truth. Academics should have their arguments scrutinised and criticised, but these are severe personal attacks from the government without the possibility of even defending myself. How is this not criminalising the research of an academic?

I cannot even speak at any events in Norway without the event being cancelled. The last event I agreed to speak at was because I shared the stage with the former CIA officer John Kiriakou. A newspaper had the event at a church cancelled, and when the backup location did not also cancel, the journalist simply printed in the paper that it had been cancelled so people would not show up. Is this normal? I must use my allotted holiday days to attend conferences because any event I attend can be presented as “controversial,” and then the NGOs and journalists will go after the reputation of the university. Is this normal? Every newspaper article about me merely refers to me as “controversial” or “pro-Russian” without ever assigning meaning to these labels or presenting my argument.

I have argued, much like former CIA director Burns, that if the West attempts to pull Ukraine into the NATO orbit, then there would be war and Ukraine would be destroyed. This is considered a “pro-Russian” argument. Arguing that we should respect the will of most Ukrainians who want negotiations to end the war is also considered a “pro-Russian” argument, while in contrast, boycotting diplomacy, deporting Ukrainian refugees, and calling for the conscription of Ukrainian women is “pro-Ukrainian”.

2) To avoid addressing any of my arguments, the journalists go on to uncritically cite personal attacks against me, pointing out that I have been called a propagandist by the Norwegian Helsinki Committee. This is a “non-governmental organisation” financed by the government and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which was set up by Reagan and the CIA director in 1983 to manipulate the civil society of other states. The Norwegian Helsinki Committee has been relentless in its smears on social media to have me fired, writing hit pieces in the media, pushing to cancel my speaking events, writing a letter to my university, and even posting a picture of my house on social media. This is a governmental “human rights organisation” that cites human rights concerns to build the case for war.

3) Lastly, to further avoid addressing my actual arguments, they simply cite the fact that arguments I made at a debate last year have been “wholly or partially debunked” by a fact-check. The state-run media (NRK) invited the state-run military defence institute (FFI) to fact-check three of my claims. What claims did they “debunk”?

My first claim was that only 20% of Ukrainians wanted NATO membership between 1991 and the regime change in February 2014. The fact-checker argued that the number went up by the middle of 2014 (after Russia responded by seizing Crimea), which is a completely meaningless comment intended to muddy the waters, as my argument was about the previous era.

My second claim was that Zelensky had argued in an interview with The Economist in March 2022 that there were some Western countries that would like a long war with Russia to weaken a strategic rival, even if it would result in the destruction of Ukraine. The fact-checker argued that not all Western countries wanted a long war and that it was not an official policy. I never claimed it was an official policy, as it was primarily the US and UK pushing for a long war.

My third claim was that the US and UK sabotaged the Istanbul peace agreement in April 2022. The fact-checker claimed this was incorrect and suggested that it could only be based on one statement by David Arakhamia. The fact-checker did not want to mention that both mediators also confirmed it: Turkey’s foreign minister and the former Israeli prime minister both said that Russia and Ukraine were close to a deal, but the US and UK saw an opportunity to weaken Russia by fighting with Ukrainians. Zelensky’s former adviser Arestovych confirmed it, and the Ukrainian ambassador Chaly, who participated in the negotiations, confirmed that Putin was willing to do almost anything to end the war. The former head of the German armed forces confirmed that Boris Johnson sabotaged it, and Boris Johnson himself wrote articles warning about a “bad peace” and arguing for “strategic patience.” I am being fact-checked by war propagandists.

Unfortunately, none of my arguments matter because in Norway there is no debate and no interest in any arguments. Reality means nothing anymore as war narratives must be defended against inconvenient truths. I used to be naïve and think that the endless smears were caused by misunderstanding, as I had simply not been able to convey my arguments properly. However, the endless articles with smears and labels are deliberate lies and deceptions.

Sputnik – 17.10.2026

BEIRUT – The number of books destroyed by Israeli bombings of libraries, as well as religious and cultural institutions since October 2023, has exceeded 3 million copies, founder and coordinator of the National Network for the Protection of Libraries, Archives, and Cultural Heritage in Lebanon Hadi Bekdash told Sputnik on Saturday.

“There are reports of the burning of more than 700,000 books belonging to Lebanese and Arab publishers, as well as more than 3 million books from homes, libraries, religious centers, family collections, researchers’ libraries, and universities, publishers, cultural institutions, and private collections since 2023,” Bekdash said.

In 2026, practically confirmed information appeared about the destruction of dozens of public and hundreds of private libraries during the conflict with Israel, he added.

These data do not reflect the full scale of losses, since Lebanon still does not have a unified national database of destroyed libraries, archives, and book collections, the coordinator said.

Bekdash added that it will be possible to finally assess the damage only after conducting a nationwide inventory of lost and damaged collections.

A national campaign, A Million Books for Lebanon, is currently underway in the country, aimed at restoring destroyed and damaged libraries.

RT | October 17, 2026

Russia’s Foreign Ministry has warned citizens to exercise caution when traveling abroad “amid a worldwide hunt for Russians.”

The statement follows the detention of Russian military blogger Mikhail Zvinchuk in Montenegro, a NATO member state in the Balkans, on October 9.

After nine hours in custody, Zvinchuk, founder of the Rybar Telegram channel, his wife and three associates were expelled from the country on the grounds of what Montenegro’s leading daily, Vijesti, described as “criminal, operational and intelligence processing.”

“We are compelled to once again remind people of the need to remain vigilant when traveling abroad, even if there is the slightest suspicion of any kind of claims by US law enforcement agencies, amid a worldwide hunt for Russians,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Friday.

Montenegro, where the blogger was detained, is not on Russia’s list of unfriendly states, Zakharova said, adding that similar situations were unfolding in countries not considered unfriendly to Russia.

The arrest was described as targeting alleged “hybrid activity” by the Rybar network, but no specific evidence supporting the accusation has been presented.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov declined to comment on the details of the arrest but warned Russian citizens that visiting Europe is “currently dangerous.”

The Rybar channel, which has around 1.3 million subscribers, had previously also faced US and British accusations of spreading Russian propaganda and conducting information operations abroad. The US State Department had even issued a $10 million bounty in 2024 for any information about the individuals behind the channel.

Russians who have been targeted include basketball player Daniil Kasatkin, a point guard playing for the national team, who was arrested at Paris airport in June 2025 at the behest of the US, which accused him of being a member of a ransomware gang. He denied the allegations and was released in January 2026 as part of a Russia-France prisoner exchange.

By Justin K.P. | The Dissident | October 15, 2026  

Canada’s Bill C-22, has passed the Canadian House of Commons and is currently being debated in the Canadian Senate, and Civil Liberties Organizations are raising the alarm bells over the unprecedented surveillance powers the bill gives to the Canadian security state.

The bill, as Kate Robertson, senior research associate at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, noted, “would empower the government to require surveillance capabilities be built into any communications technology in Canada that could be accessed by law enforcement, and to force the stockpiling of all Canadians’ sensitive metadata,” adding that “The law would apply to everything from smartphones to smartwatches, banking to health apps, video game platforms, and public WiFi or CCTV networks.”

The bill similarly “includes mandating that companies store user data for at least a year – even if the data isn’t something they would otherwise be keeping on hand for the purposes of their business”, “including location and transmission data”.

President of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, John Carpay, noted that the bill not only forces these companies to gather mass data on Canadian civilians, but lowers the standard of proof needed to obtain them, noting that the bill “lowers the threshold for obtaining judicial approval for law enforcement to demand users’ subscriber information (name, address, email, IP address, account details, etc.) from ‘reasonable grounds to believe’ to ‘reasonable grounds to suspect.’”

The bill may even give the Canadian government the ability to turn on Microphones and Cameras in order to surveil citizens.

Leah West, an expert in national security law based at Carleton University, told a meeting of the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security that “C-22 would order companies to ‘provide the capabilities to turn on a remote microphone,’” adding that “So you could potentially have an order that would require that capability, and as long as it didn’t create a system vulnerability, then yes it could be implemented”.

Unsurprisingly, the bill has raised major alarm bells with Canadian civil liberties organizations.

The Canadian Civil Liberties Organization called the bill “the broadest expansion of government surveillance powers in recent Canadian history” and Matt Hatfield, Executive Director at OpenMedia, called it “the most invasive surveillance regime of any comparable democracy”.

Some of the alarm bells rung by the Canadian Civil Liberties Organization included the possibilities that the bill would:

– Pave the way for expanded information-sharing with the United States and numerous other governments including those with a history of abuse. Expansion of information-sharing with foreign governments in the absence of effective safeguards is particularly reckless at a time when cross-border persecution of diaspora communities—including through abuse of cross-border police cooperation tools—is on the rise.

– Give the government the power to force any electronic mechanism to build new surveillance tools and embed these at the core of their service, potentially transforming anything with a digital component into spyware. The mandated surveillance capability need not have anything to do with the actual functionality of the service in question. Backdoors like these also cannot be effectively limited to law enforcement access—Cybercriminals and foreign adversaries have repeatedly and successfully targeted the mass surveillance capabilities created by similar regimes. Overall, the proposal creates untenable privacy and cybersecurity risks.

– Lower the threshold for sensitive subscriber data, allowing government agencies to cast a wide net when conducting investigations; and

– the government the power to force any digital entity to keep highly sensitive information on every single person in Canada or abroad for up to one year. Information could include every single person’s location at any time over the course of the year, a complete record of everyone you interacted with online, and more. Bill C-22 includes no mechanism to place limits on who can access these data troves or for what purpose, making it potentially fair game for any and all criminal and civil investigations as well as for commercial exploitation by the private company being compelled to retain the data.

In an open letter over 25 leading Canadian civil society groups called the bill an “unprecedented and extraordinarily dangerous surveillance architecture that could impact every digital tool people in Canada depend on every day”,“the most expansive invasion of Canadian privacy rights in modern history” and “fundamentally a mass surveillance capabilities regime”.

It warned that under part 2 of the bill “the government could force the creation and installation of privacy-compromising surveillance tools and backdoors in an enormous and ill-defined set of ‘electronic service providers’, including telecom providers, social media and cloud service providers, AI tools, and any ‘smart’ device” adding that “The law could even be used to force Canadian companies to build backdoors into their products before they export them abroad” and that “The result creates an untenable threat to privacy and cybersecurity” even noting that it “far exceeds powers available to police and security agencies in the United States.”

It also noted that, “Part 2 of Bill C-22 will now also empower the government to require any digital service provider to record and retain detailed metadata on every single person in Canada or abroad, damaging the privacy of millions who are not suspected of committing any crime or posing any security threat,” adding that “companies will be forced to develop the capacity to track information that was never before available to them and is not necessary for their business purposes, then to collect and retain that information for up to one year.”

Al Mayadeen| October 16, 2026

A study by University of Maryland researcher Shibley Telhami points to a major shift in US public opinion, with sympathy for Palestinians surpassing support for “Israel” and growing numbers of Americans viewing the occupation as responsible for genocide.

Drawing on Gallup data, Telhami noted that sympathy for “Israel” among the US public has fallen from around 50% to 36%, while sympathy for Palestinians has risen to 41%.

Among Democrats, support for “Israel” has plunged from more than 50% in 2001 to just 17% today, while sympathy for Palestinians has climbed to 65%, according to the researcher.

Telhami’s Critical Issues Poll at the University of Maryland also found that more than 60% of respondents believe US military and diplomatic support enables “Israel” to carry out its actions.

Generational shift extends across political lines

Citing data from the Pew Research Center, Telhami pointed to a narrowing generational gap among Democrats in negative views of “Israel.” The figures showed that 71% of younger Democrats and 66% of older Democrats held negative views of the occupation.

One of the most significant changes, however, has emerged among young Republicans under the age of 35. According to the cited polling, the share of young Republicans expressing negative views of “Israel” rose from 35% to 57%.

Only 22% of young Republicans agreed that “Israel’s” actions in Gaza were “justified as self-defense,” compared with 52% of their older counterparts.

Self-censorship over criticism of ‘Israel’

The shift in public opinion comes alongside concerns over the freedom to criticize “Israel” and discuss its actions in Palestine.

Telhami highlighted findings indicating that 80% of academics since October 7, 2023, and 42% of the general US public feel they must exercise self-censorship or caution when discussing the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, fearing accusations linked to their criticism.

The findings point to growing public criticism of “Israel” and US support for it, alongside continued concerns about the social and professional consequences of expressing such views.

Al Mayadeen| October 15, 2026

Irish novelist Sally Rooney has agreed to the withdrawal of her books from the UK market after her support for Palestine Action created legal obstacles to the payment of royalties under British terrorism legislation.

Rooney, the bestselling author of “Normal People” and “Conversations With Friends”, said her publisher, Faber, had concluded that continuing to distribute her work in the UK could expose those involved to criminal liability. The decision was made with her agreement following consultations over the legal implications.

Palestine Action was designated a “terrorist organization” by the UK government in July 2025. The following month, Rooney publicly declared that she intended to continue supporting the group and direct proceeds from her book sales towards it. The organization remains legal in the Republic of Ireland, where Rooney is based.

Rooney was prepared to accept the consequences

In a statement to The Guardian, Rooney explained that her position had placed the publication of her work in Britain at risk.

She said that after expressing her intention to support Palestine Action, fulfilling contracts to publish her books in the UK could constitute a serious criminal offence. Rooney added that she had been transparent about her convictions and was prepared to accept the consequences.

The novelist had previously cancelled a planned UK visit to collect an award over concerns that she could face arrest because of her stated support for the banned group.

Terrorism legislation threatens publishing arrangements

Rooney warned in a statement supporting the legal challenge against the ban that the proscription could prevent her existing books from remaining available in British shops and block the publication of future titles in the country. Her submission to the High Court raised concerns about the consequences for freedom of expression.

The restrictions also extend to royalties from television adaptations of her work. Last year, Rooney said the independent producer behind the BBC adaptations of “Normal People” and “Conversations With Friends” had advised her that paying her could breach terrorism legislation if it knew or suspected she would use the money to finance Palestine Action. Both series aired before the group was banned.

Section 15 of the UK’s Terrorism Act criminalizes providing money or other property when a person knows or has reasonable grounds to suspect that it may be used for terrorist purposes. A conviction can carry a maximum prison sentence of 14 years.

Faber, which publishes Rooney in the UK and Ireland, said the legislation had left it unable to transfer earnings from British sales to the author.

The publisher said selling a writer’s work without being able to pay them was unacceptable. It confirmed that, with Rooney’s full agreement, it would stop supplying her books in Britain in every format, while continuing to publish and sell her work in other markets.

Bestselling novels face uncertain future in Britain

Rooney’s novels have received widespread critical acclaim and achieved substantial commercial success. She has been hailed as a voice of her generation.

“Normal People” has sold more than one million copies in the UK, while “Conversations With Friends” and “Beautiful World, Where Are You” have each exceeded 500,000 sales.

The BBC adaptations also attracted large audiences. “Normal People” accumulated 62.7 million views, making it the broadcaster’s most-streamed series of 2020.

Demand was likely to continue

Despite the withdrawal decision, copies of Rooney’s books remained available in central London on Wednesday afternoon. Waterstones said retailers could continue selling copies already in stock.

Booksellers also indicated that they intended to keep offering the novels while existing supplies lasted.

Gian Carlo, a bookseller at Henry Pordes Books, said the shop could sell its copies without generating royalties for Rooney. He added that he understood her position.

At London Review Bookshop, bookseller John Clegg said he had ordered additional copies after learning of the development. He said demand was likely to continue, although the shop would no longer be able to replenish its stock through Faber. Clegg also criticized the legislation and said he hoped the case would encourage the Home Office to reconsider it.

Thousands arrested following Palestine Action ban

The dispute comes amid a wider legal battle over the government’s decision to proscribe Palestine Action.

More than 3,700 people are believed to have been arrested in the UK since the ban took effect in July 2025 on suspicion of supporting the organization. Many arrests involved people holding placards bearing the message: “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action.”

Approximately 2,500 people have been charged. However, trials have not proceeded while the legal challenge to the proscription remains unresolved. The case is scheduled to reach the Supreme Court next month.

Effect of the ban on freedom of expression

Most arrests and charges have involved Section 13 of the Terrorism Act, which carries a maximum prison sentence of six months.

Huda Ammori, a co-founder of Palestine Action leading the legal challenge, said Rooney’s inability to publish her work in Britain demonstrated the effect of the ban on freedom of expression.

Ammori said Rooney had maintained her position despite the personal and professional consequences. She argued that the author’s books should remain widely available rather than disappear from British shelves because of her refusal to abandon her support for Palestinians.

She added that writers should not have to choose between their political convictions and their ability to publish their work.

The Cradle | October 15, 2026

An Israeli digital advertising agency helped run an espionage campaign using a vast network of online ads to track targets and hack their devices, Reuters reported on 15 October, citing two research groups.

Reports from Canadian cyber watchdog group Citizen Lab and New York advertising security firm Confiant document how the Israeli advertising agency Discover-Tech placed millions of ads online each day for ordinary products such as phones or earpods.

Discover-Tech placed the ads using the advertising services of Google, Comcast, Yandex, and other search engines.

The Israeli ad agency could identify and track internet users who visited websites or used apps with the malicious ads, and at times obtained phone numbers from smartphone users.

Clicking on the ads was not required to allow users to be tracked.

Some ads were used to plant spyware from another Israeli firm, Candiru, ​on users’ devices.

Jerome Dangu of Confiant said Discover-Tech placed at least 10 million online ads per day, affecting more than 120,000 websites and 75,000 apps.

“Very likely hundreds of millions of people would have been touched by Discover-Tech,” Dangu said.

Citizen Lab said Candiru spyware delivered through Discover-Tech’s ads had been used to compromise devices of journalists and executives at the Qatari news outlet Al Jazeera.

Unidentified media organizations in Mexico, Israel, and Europe were also targeted.

Dangu of Confiant said that the malicious Israeli ads targeted officials at the Pentagon, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Discover-Tech ads also helped to surveil the populations of entire regions, most notably the Israeli-occupied Palestinian West Bank and Gaza.

“You go to almost any site in Palestine – any site – you find a Discover-Tech ad. It gives them a very complete visibility on the digital activities of an entire country,” Dangu said.

Citizen Lab also said the malicious ads were directed at officials in the UN, NATO, the European ⁠Commission, as well as more than a dozen governments.

The ads also helped to track employees and executives of chip-related firms such as Nvidia, SanDisk, Broadcom, and Micron.

As a result of the Confiant and Citizen Lab investigations, Google said it has removed Discover-Tech from its ad platforms “for systematically violating our policies.”

IAB Europe, an association for digital marketing and advertising on the continent, has now suspended Discover-Tech from ​its list of globally approved vendors.

Comcast ad tech subsidiary Beeswax also removed Discover-Tech ​from its platform.

Yandex did not respond to Reuters’‘ requests for comment.

Israel has a well-documented history of using private technology companies for surveillance, intelligence gathering, and cyberespionage.

Some of these companies have close connections to Israel’s military and intelligence services, particularly Unit 8200, the Israeli military’s signals intelligence unit.

Truths about Israel

ILANA MERCER’S FPV Resistance | October 13, 2026

What Israel has done, is doing, to Gaza has not sprung ex nihilo from October 7.

Genocide is not a situational counter-response to aggression. It’s a coming-out event of sorts.

Differently put: There are no legitimate antecedents to genocide. Genocide is not a “war crime” to which a set of mitigating or exculpating legal defenses can attach.

Genocide is a stand-alone indefensible crime—“the blackest of all crimes”—for which there are no extenuating circumstances and to which no traditional legal defenses attach.

Ethnocide, depopulation, domicide and daily mass murder can never be explained away or exculpated using argument from law, ethics or history.

In essence, talk to the hand about October 7, 2023; because the face isn’t listening. Just as there are no legal or moral extenuating circumstances for genocide, so it is that there are no historical defenses for this “blackest of all crimes,” for genocide.

To assert that you are just, justified or even coherent as you carry out that which cannot be just or justified—this is to embody a most grotesque incoherence and contradiction.

At minimum, Israel deserves—and has yet to receive—the unanimous revulsion and isolation reserved for entities whose existence is a confidence trick and a fraud upon us all.

Reality is truth, past and present. The reality of genocide gives rise to irrefutable truths. From the facts of this Twenty-First Century Genocide; certain truths immemorial and irrefutable that traverse time have emerged. Truths about Israel.

Through Gaza, the world has come to know Israel’s ways with the Palestinians, with their lands and homesteads—down to what Israeli terrorists habitually do to the intimate bits-and-bobs that make up a household.

Through Gaza, we have come to know Israel’s ways across the Levant and beyond. They unground and salt the earth forever. They uproot ancient communities and their olive groves. For fun. They deform babies and the baby faces of children for life.

The reality on the ground is of genocide ongoing, of daily extermination. In aggregate, a “child has been killed in Gaza every 71 minutes for three years.” This extermination campaign is not only of children—the one segment of Palestinian society which American conservatives are comfortable defending—but of adults, young and old: admirable, valuable adults. Adult lives matter, yes?

Hasbara and official myth-history aside, because of Gaza and the Ghazzawi you don’t have to know much history at all to arrive at the truth about Israel.

Because of the Palestinians of Gaza, the living, the martyred and those who still resist; the truth about Israel is now ahistoric.

To arrive at that truth about Israel, you don’t have to know much about the genesis of the so-called “conflict” between Israelis and Palestinians in historic Palestine. I hazard that you need to know hardly a thing about this history to arrive at the truth about the lived reality of Palestinians.

You are what you do.

We know the Real Israel through the actions of real Israelis in Gaza. We know how Israel operates and how a preponderance of its people thinks. These realizations came out of the Gaza genocide, which has shown the world in cruel relief how Israel acts and, by extension, what Israel is.

Since October of 2023, the world knows in detail what the untouchable Israel—state and civil society—has done and continues to do to the Strip, to the West Bank and in South Lebanon.

But what have the Ghazzawi, the living and the martyred, accomplished? A great deal. In a manner, Palestine and the Palestinians have won.

Gaza has exposed Israel for the morally and militarily corrupt force that it is. The Genocide of Gaza has, very plainly, invalidated Israel and validated the Palestinian cause.

When you are in the writhing coils of a boa constrictor; it is small comfort to know, as Palestinians have always known, that, while outwardly captive, they are, nevertheless, truly liberated from the illiberal political propaganda that grips the West.

So, they need to know, too, that they have shown good people around the world the way. For once and for all, Israel’s televised genocide had corroborated the lived reality of the Palestinians; their reasons for rage and their rights to resistance and recompense.

Palestinians had been telling us for decades that they have been set upon by murderers and thieves. Palestinians have told us they are being killed and robbed as a matter of course. Their lived reality has been irrefutably affirmed, and universally so.

“It’s complicated,” Israel’s supporters keep countering. “Study up before you open your mouth.” The opposite is true. It’s absurdly simple.

A moral, sentient human being need know nothing much about the history of the region to arrive at this conclusion.

Israel has had the nerve to play its genocide of the Palestinians of Gaza to a packed house: to the world.

Most galling of all: In the course of this very public genocide, Israel has engaged in the mother of all performative contradictions: denying genocide, while publicly committing genocide, effectively asserting a birthright to commit genocide.

Think about it:

To deny ongoing, prime-time livestreamed genocidal action at the very same time that you are committing these actions, and then to hound and hurt anyone who dares notice: This is a performative contradiction in a category all of its own, like no other.

Caught in the protracted act of genocide, the guilty party, Israel, has continued to cavalierly claim for itself and be granted the right to keep killing and deceiving without being considered and treated as a killer and con-artist.

In essence, Israel exists among nations us as a privileged, protected, well-funded aberration, carrying out unspeakable evil with universal blessings and absolution.

I belabor the most galling reality, as it really gets me: At the same time that Israel and its cringing Western admirers have killed and deceived; they have instructed The World to deny Israel’s genocide, then deny Israel’s deception about its genocide, and finally to justify both or fear defenestration, cancellation, banishment, arrest and worse.

To no avail. Human action is the undeniable key to man-made reality. Israel and the US have acted; they’ve revealed themselves. They’ve been exposed.

“Just as you can identify a tree by its fruit, so you can identify people by their actions,” said Jesus (New Living Translation). As Matthew 7:20 reads, “Therefore by their fruits you will know them.”

With the exception of the flint-hearted ruling political elites—the wholesale slaughter carried out by Israel in Gaza has stirred the hearts of ordinary people across the world. A collective conscience developed around Palestine. Minds not AI became engaged. They said, “We see you, Israel. We revile you. We reject you.”

This is what October 7 will forever mark and signify: The triumph of the Palestinians over the alternate reality mass-marketed to the World by Israel and our ruling elites.

©2026 ILANA MERCER
The Unz Review, October 12
LewRockwell.com, October 13

*******

Ilana Mercer, a widely published paleolibertarian author, essayist and theorist, has been writing up an anti-war, anti-woke storm since 1998, starting in Canada. On arriving in the US, in 2002, her weekly column was right away syndicated. Mercer’s national syndication fell through shortly after due to writing in strident opposition to the war in Iraq. ILANA is described as “a system-builder. Distilled, her modus operandi has been to methodically apply first principles to the day’s events.” She’s Jewish, grew up in Israel ages five to nineteen, and left, at 19, decades back, never to return. She had refused to serve in the IDF, Israel’s compulsory military. Ilana’s focus since October of 2023 has been the genocide.

International Center for 9/11 Justice – October 9, 2026

One year after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, independent journalist James Lee takes the stage to ask a difficult question: Are there still unanswered questions about what happened—and who gets to investigate them?

Speaking at the 9/11: 25 Years Later conference, Lee examines what he considers inconsistencies and unresolved issues in the case, including the handling of potential evidence, the rapid clearing of the crime scene, questions about the investigation, and the media’s portrayal of the events.

Lee also explores Charlie Kirk’s relationship with Turning Point USA, the organization’s reported shift in funding and political messaging, and Kirk’s publicly expressed frustrations over Israel and its influence on American politics. He raises allegations of possible foreign involvement, which remain unproven in this presentation, and calls for further scrutiny rather than unquestioning acceptance of any single narrative.

The speech expands into a broader argument about free speech, the First Amendment, citizen journalism, and the responsibility of independent researchers to scrutinize institutions and challenge powerful interests. Drawing parallels with the JFK assassination and 9/11, Lee urges audiences to keep asking questions and examining evidence.

Watch the full presentation and decide for yourself which questions deserve further investigation. The allegations and interpretations discussed are those of the speaker and should not be taken as independently verified findings.

Subscribe for more talks, investigative journalism, and presentations from the 9/11: 25 Years Later conference.

Palestinian Information Center – October 6, 2026

RAMALLAH – The Palestinian Prisoner Society (PPS) has warned that Israel is expanding its use of the charge of “incitement” into a tool for controlling education, expression and collective memory in Palestinian institutions.

The warning followed the recent arrest of a school principal in al-Eizariya and the demolition of a martyrs’ memorial at Birzeit University on Monday. The PPS said both incidents reflect a wider policy targeting spaces where Palestinian awareness is shaped and where the memory of prisoners, martyrs and national symbols is preserved and passed to new generations.

According to the society, prosecutions under the label of “incitement” are no longer limited to social media posts or personal statements. They now extend to educational content and symbols inside institutions, placing schools and universities under direct threat of surveillance and punishment.

In the al-Eizariya case, the PPS said a video circulated after the principal’s arrest presented posters inside the school and what students were being taught as part of what Israel described as “incitement” and “terrorist education.”

The society warned that such measures turn the educational environment itself into a target, criminalizing the presence of Palestinian national issues in school materials, symbols or discussions.

It said the vague and expanding definition of “incitement” leaves individuals and institutions under constant threat, pushing Palestinians to monitor their own speech, activities and teaching material out of fear of punishment.

The group also pointed to a rise in arrests linked to alleged “incitement” since the start of the war on Gaza. It said the arrests have affected citizens, freed prisoners, students, women and children, often over posts, expressions or positions related to current events.

At Birzeit University, the demolition of a martyr’s memorial was part of the same effort to target Palestinian memory and its symbols, the PPS said, adding that the incident narrows spaces where the national narrative is remembered and expressed.

The society elaborated that these policies go beyond arrest and include threats, interrogation, assault, penalties and fines, creating an environment of continuous surveillance.

It warned that “incitement” is being used to determine what Palestinians may say, teach, publish or remember, particularly among younger generations. The danger, it said, extends beyond individual freedoms to the ability of Palestinian society to teach its history, preserve its symbols and express its rights under threat of punishment.

By Freddie Ponton | 21st Century Wire | October 6, 2026

“Muslims will not relinquish Jerusalem.” The sentence appeared in a Saudi schoolbook’s Arabic language exercise, then disappeared from later editions. An Israeli organisation monitoring the books described the removal as deleting a “politically charged reference.” In Jordan, the same organisation recorded another disappearance. Maps bearing the name “Palestine” were replaced with versions leaving the territory unnamed.

These classroom changes open a larger story about who shapes what Arab children learn about their region. A new Arabic Post investigation follows three decades of scrutiny across 17 Arab countries, tracing how assessments of schoolbooks reach Western governments, parliaments and donors with the power to demand changes.

REPORT: Arabic Post traces how Israeli scrutiny of schoolbooks across 17 Arab countries became a network of political and financial pressure. Click on the image to read the report. (Source: Arabic Post)

Drawing on government records, parliamentary documents and research publications, the investigation follows a process that begins with collecting books, translating passages and classifying their contents. American and European organisations then help carry the findings into political discussions, where they become demands for revisions, official reviews and conditions on educational funding.

The scrutiny extends beyond individual expressions to maps of historic Palestine, accounts of Jerusalem, descriptions of Zionism, lessons about resistance and religious teachings. The investigation shows how Israel’s pursuit of acceptance reaches into the way neighbouring societies teach their children to understand history.

From schoolbooks to government offices

Arabic Post identifies 10 Israeli research centres and institutions involved in examining Arab educational materials. It also identifies 20 American and seven European organisations and projects, with some branches counted separately. Official Israeli bodies participate too, including the Ministry of Education, the Civil Administration in the West Bank and Knesset committees.

One of the most prominent organisations is IMPACT-se, which describes itself as a non-governmental research and policy institute. Arabic Post found that former founders and current members had worked in Israeli ministries and government. Another participant, the Meir Amit Center, was established within Israel’s intelligence heritage centre and places curriculum analysis within its mission of assessing threats facing Israel.

The investigation traces how several organisations helped produce and circulate a 2017 study of 201 Palestinian textbooks. Commissioned by the Center for Near East Policy Research, with contributions from the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the American Middle East Forum, it was published through BESA, an Israeli research centre. The Meir Amit Center then presented its findings, which included a call for funding countries to demand corrections to textbook content.

Britain provides a documented example of how such findings enter government discussions. According to the investigation, an IMPACT-se report on Palestinian textbooks passed through the Israeli government to British officials. In December 2018, Britain’s Department for International Development (DFID) said the report had raised concerns and that officials had presented specific examples to the Palestinian education minister. In March 2019, Britain announced that it had helped secure an independent textbook review.

In Europe, changes to Palestinian schoolbooks became part of the discussion over financial support. A 2024 agreement between the European Commission and the Palestinian Authority placed curriculum updates among the reforms tied to that support. IMPACT-se, NGO Monitor and the German-Israeli Society sought a more explicit condition. In a June 2024 paper cited by Arabic Post, they urged Germany to make educational funding depend on textbook changes and to check that those changes were carried out.

Through these arrangements and proposals, the content of a schoolbook becomes a question for those who control financial assistance. Education ministries face demands backed by influence over the resources their schools depend on.

The history children inherit

In East Jerusalem, the intervention reaches directly into the books children read. The investigation cites researcher Samira Alayan’s study of textbook censorship. Her analysis of 28 social studies textbooks, supported by interviews, documented the removal of references to Palestinian history, heritage and national narrative from Israeli-modified editions. Material through which children learn about their own society is altered to exclude parts of its history and identity.

A Jordanian history textbook presented the 1994 peace treaty with Israel as a means of establishing borders, recovering land and water rights, and curbing Israeli ambitions. IMPACT-se criticised that account because it portrayed peace as a defensive necessity rather than reconciliation. The objection was not that the textbook omitted the treaty, but that it explained it through Jordan’s national interests.

In Saudi Arabia, IMPACT-se tracked not only the removal of the sentence about Jerusalem but also the replacement of “the Zionist enemy” with “the Israeli occupation” in a history textbook. It described the change as a softening of hostility towards Israel, treating the words children encounter in class as a measure of how they are taught to understand the conflict.

The ambition behind this scrutiny becomes clearer in a July 2024 study cited by Arabic Post, in which IMPACT-se researchers Yonatan Negev and Eldad Pardo argued that portraying Israel as a colonial state reinforces its image as a pariah and challenges its legitimacy. In August, the same researchers proposed regional education based on shared Abrahamic heritage, intended to establish Israel as an authentic, accepted part of the Middle East and move beyond a “cold peace.”

Those studies envisage acceptance reaching beyond government agreements and taking root among future generations. Arabic Post follows the reports, government interventions and funding demands through which that ambition is pursued. Its investigation reveals how foreign political and financial power enters the classroom, seeking to shape how children understand Palestine and the region’s history.

The question is who gets to decide how a society teaches its own history. When financial support becomes leverage over schoolbooks, the power to shape that history moves away from the people whose lives it describes. Palestinian memory then becomes something to negotiate with donors, while acceptance of Israel becomes a measure by which lessons are judged. That is the deeper significance of this investigation. The pressure reaches beyond what governments agree to today and into what children will understand about their past tomorrow.

MEMO | October 6, 2026

Paris police chief Patrice Faure on Tuesday banned a pro-Palestinian demonstration planned for Wednesday, the third anniversary of Oct. 7, 2023 attacks in Israel, over “risks of public disorder,” Anadolu reports.

“At the request of Interior Minister Laurent Nunez, I issued an order banning a demonstration ‘against the genocide in Gaza and for respect for the ceasefire’ in Paris on Wednesday,” Faure said on US social media platform X.

He noted that such a demonstration could pose “significant risks of public disorder,” citing a “high terrorist threat” and antisemitic acts that “remain at historically high levels” across France.

“In light of this, and in view of all the risks identified, it is my responsibility to ensure everyone’s safety. I have therefore decided to ban this demonstration,” Faure added.

Israel’s genocidal war launched three years ago in Gaza has killed more than 74,000 people, injured many more and destroyed most of the enclave’s infrastructure.

By Martin Jay | Strategic Culture Foundation | October 6, 2026

Ian Proud’s arrest by secret police at a London airport marks a new low in how far the deep state can go to control a false narrative. But it also shows a new level of fear.

As mad as it sounds, it does appear that Western European nations at least are preparing themselves to go to war with Russia at some point in the not-too-distant future. What is particularly worrying is there seems to be a distinct vacuum in all areas of what we could broadly call ‘media’ in questioning this narrative. Thirty years ago it was considered normal for journalists to be the source of vexing questions towards state actors and to generally be a pain in the arse as they questioned every decision made and every idea presented. It was our job to be anti-establishment and to take a very cynical view of “policy”. There was nothing remarkable about this. It was what we did. Being despised by the greater powers was part of the job; working anti-social hours and having few friends also came with it.

Today there are no journalists in what we call ‘mainstream’ media doing this. They have been replaced by younger, more social-media-savvy ‘content creators’ who believe that journalism is more or less a grammatical role, where the raw material is handed to you with all the information therein, and the role of the journalist is simply to refine it to the style of the day for mass consumption.

The danger of this transition is that nearly all of what we are being presented with as news is actually fake, or at best heavily redacted to keep the masses where the elite want them to be: restrained, prepped and misinformed.

The Ukraine war is an excellent example. The main reason why people in the U.S. and UK are so fabulously biased against Russia and are so sympathetic towards the corrupt elite in Kiev is that for years they have been brainwashed with ‘news’ about Russia which has been negative and which cunningly feeds a racist bias – a prejudice which has been cultivated over at least a decade, if not more. The result is that now a number of lies have become established in newsrooms where journalists, even those who know, simply navigate around nuance and present a fairy-tale story, designed to be understood by the masses who have no other sources of information to even question it.

Just recently, Western news outlets reported a “plague” in Russia, with stories about a “lockdown”, following a case of a worker in a laboratory dying of pneumonia in circumstances which are still not certain. Western media, as part of their role to keep Russia-phobia at its peak, are so locked and loaded that their ‘hair-trigger’ reactions to bad news stories from Russia are understandable. They are also hungry for clickbait, and such stories feed a starved audience which has already had its first fix of such COVID hysteria stories and wants more. The truth is entirely immaterial. Hysteria and lies are what’s being fed at a feverish rate by ‘content creators’ red in tooth and claw, foaming at the mouth with their desire to serve the deep state and the elites who have invested so much in an agenda.

The contrast between Russia and the West is interesting, though, when we look at media. In Russia just recently, the BBC correspondent based in Moscow made the internet buzz on social media with his short interview with Russia’s foreign minister, who was kind enough to answer his loaded question about Russia’s war ideology with Ukraine. What absolutely no one noted was how Russia is happy to accommodate foreign journalists who have such a distinct agenda to feed the Russia-phobia back home, while Russian journalists have been banned in those EU capitals for years. Old Europe, which once held such values as a free press so dearly, has adopted the Soviet model, while Russia is actually more advanced when it comes to such tenets of what we expect in a democracy. Russia has no fear of the awkward questions, unlike the West.

We should be asking ourselves who really benefits from a war with Russia.

Is it too sceptical and ‘conspiracy theorising’ to assume that the industrial military complex has been successfully lobbying for such a war for AT LEAST a decade, and critically, it succeeded in convincing the intelligence and military establishment in the UK to use its leverage with media to provide journalists with the raw material which enhances a prejudice against Russia?

Normally such an idea could be dismissed as pure nonsense. But just consider how far the UK, for example, has gone to eradicate all media coverage which could be deemed as at least leaning towards Russia – or even simply just holding the UK government to account by asking the questions that British journalists have stopped asking. If the elite in the UK who control the loss-making newspapers (think about that) are so sure of their rationale that Russia is the enemy whom we must go to war with, why are they so terrified of journalists – or anyone, for that matter – simply holding a view which questions the narrative?

I can’t be the only Western pundit who believes that double agents Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were not poisoned with nerve agent Novichok in Salisbury in 2018, which was reported at the time as “sparking a huge diplomatic crisis between Britain and Russia”. Isn’t the real story that British security chiefs decided, upon discovering that Sergei Skripal was actually a triple agent who was feeding information back to Moscow, that he was dispensable? And what better way to supposedly teach the Russians a lesson, while blaming Moscow for his death, than to murder him and his daughter using a nerve agent which either was Novichok – which a British lab just down the road from where the Skripals lived had conveniently sitting in a fridge – or a similar poison? What’s important to note about Novichok is that the victims usually die instantly upon contact with it. What is likely is that the Skripals were not poisoned by the Russian drug but a British version of another nerve agent. It is a shocking example of how poor British journalism is that hacks in the UK simply report the Skripal incident of Novichok poisoning without a single shred of evidence to back it up. They don’t even add a note of scepticism in their reporting about the drug and who is “claiming” that it is Novichok.

We see the same shocking level of atrocious, biased reporting about the Ukraine war, which the British public were simply told through the media narrative was an “invasion” by Putin’s army. No background, no nuance, no glimpse of Russia’s perspective, as no one can cope, it would seem, with the story being clouded by facts.

And it’s the same with the Russia “plague” story, as it was with the RAF base “attack” story recently, which was probably just local thieves buying contraband gasoline from corrupt U.S./UK soldiers looking to make a quick buck at the UK base. Notice how quickly Trump used the story as a basis to move all U.S. bombers off the base and back to U.S. soil, where they are completely useless in his so-called Middle East war. For Trump it was an opportunity for another media stunt which keeps him on the front pages and everyone guessing. He was probably grateful to the British for being offered the raw material. Another problem of this new generation of journalists is how compliant they are to report “news” which isn’t news at all, but just material used as a distraction, one day at a time. Trump is a master at manipulating media with this game, usually saying something so stupid and so controversial, which draws journalists away from doing real journalism. If you can occupy journalists with writing up stories about the latest idiotic comment or statement by Trump, then you control them as you control their time.

Just look at how the Epstein story is not being reported and investigated. How Trump got off scot-free, as since February 28th journalists’ attention was diverted to the war with Iran – which is one of the reasons why Trump keeps this story alive with constant troop movements and talk of a massive attack after midterms. People have not made the link with the Epstein material being leaked and the war with Iran kicking off practically on the same day.

For the British, the “Russians are coming” story has no cynical write-up by journalists who are 100 percent compliant with its erroneous narrative. The fear of elites in London is palpable, though, that it will always be questioned by fringe actors taking up bandwidth on social media. In the past this was the RT correspondent in London, who was able to ask difficult questions and generally be a thorn in the side of the Westminster village which controlled journalists like rats held in a basket. The main reason why RT was kicked out of the UK was that it offered a style of reporting on UK politics which had since left us thirty years ago – such is the murky world of the deep state and how it saw how in Brussels journalists could be manipulated until they become stenographers for it.

Yet even with this new Stalinist style of media control in the UK, the state is wobbly. Even with the impressive set-up it has now of total media dominance, where journalists pump out total garbage about the Ukraine war or what they are told to write about the Middle East, still the fear is there.

The example of video blogger Ian Proud, a former UK diplomat once based in Moscow, is worrying but poignant. Simply going to Moscow to attend a conference where Putin was speaking was enough to have him get the full Stasi treatment at Heathrow airport – detained and all digital content seized.

Proud’s YouTube interviews, with his dowdy style of presenting, are proving to be popular as he simply offers a more sober view of both Russia and the UK Foreign Office, his former employer. These interviews are getting the attention of UK spooks, who are so nervous about the truth getting out about Russia and the shameful lies which are being packaged now for the British public, that they had to give Proud the American prison ‘shake down’ routine. Britain, a country which once was a beacon for the world with its view of liberty and in particular its passion for free speech, has fallen to a level which we can only compare to a West African country which has just had a new dictator installed, complete with black aviators and epaulettes. What the Proud Heathrow airport case shows is that this new regime in power will stop at nothing to control a narrative, and that the last bastion of free speech – YouTube podcasts – is the next target. The more successful Proud’s channel becomes, the more inevitable it is that he will be forced to leave the UK and settle in Russia to continue practising free speech. The shoulder tassels of Britain’s deep state will not sleep well until the country has a media narrative which would make Joe Stalin blush – and British journalists are helping them with this goal.

BND chief Martin Jaeger’s claim comes as his agency pushes for more funding and expanded powers

RT | October 5, 2026

Martin Jaeger arrives to speak in the annual open hearing of Germany’s three intelligence services at the Bundestag in Berlin, Germany, October 5, 2026 © Getty Images ; Sean Gallup

Germany could become “embroiled in a violent conflict with Russia,” the country’s foreign intelligence chief has warned, claiming that a mysterious drone incident at Leipzig airport is an example of the “real and imminent” threat posed by Moscow.

Speaking to lawmakers at a parliamentary hearing on Monday, Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) head Martin Jaeger declared that “the confrontation we are facing with Russia has taken on a new, more dangerous dimension.”

“Germany is in danger ​of becoming embroiled in a violent conflict with Russia – the attempted attack in Leipzig ⁠is just one example,” he continued, referring to the discovery of an explosive-laden drone next to a Ukrainian transport plane at the city’s airport in August.

German authorities have not released any evidence linking the incident to Russia, and Moscow has described the episode as a “hastily cobbled-together provocation” serving “exclusively the aims of Kiev and the militaristic wing of the European political class.” It is “obvious that Germany is pursuing a further course of escalation,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said last month.

Nevertheless, Jaeger claimed that Russia is “waging a shadow war,” and that there is a “real and imminent” threat of attacks against targets in Germany. “No other country currently poses such a direct, comprehensive, and concrete threat to Germany,” he added.

Jaeger is one of dozens of Western political, military, and media figures to accuse Russia of waging a “hybrid war” or “shadow war” against Europe in recent weeks. The accusations are, by their nature, impossible to verify, and Moscow has written them off as pretexts to deepen Western involvement in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, justify military spending hikes, and expand surveillance and persecution of domestic opponents.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has explicitly and without evidence described the country’s most popular political party, the right-wing AfD, as “Russia-backed.” Martina Rosenberg, the head of Germany’s Military Counterintelligence Service (MAD), alluded to this claim during Monday’s briefing, telling lawmakers that the country is “threatened by diverse dangers from both outside and within.”

Jaeger, Rosenberg, and domestic intelligence (BfV) chief Sinan Selen all praised Merz’s recent efforts to grant the BND greater offensive powers, and called for further strengthening of the MAD and BfV’s capabilities.

Despite their allegations of “hybrid war,” European leaders have repeatedly stressed that they do not believe Russia to be planning any actual attacks on NATO territory. The BND has seen “no indication of an imminent large-scale Russian attack on NATO territory,” Jaeger added on Monday.

Amid an unprecedented escalation in the West’s rhetoric toward Russia, RT is tracking the statements, accusations, and threats in our ongoing ‘Escalation Watch’ special. Keep an eye on it here as we sort the facts from the propaganda and debunk the psyops in real time.

By Cam Wakefield | Reclaim The Net | October 3, 2026

So what does it take for a police force to stop using a “trial” deployment of live facial recognition (LFR) technology? Apparently, scanning the faces of more than half a million people and catching nobody is not it.

In fact, it gets you an extension of four months and an expanded area to “hunt” in.

The British Transport Police (BTP) has now revealed that its initial six-month LFR deployment at London railway stations produced one alert – that was false.

The trial cost £320,786 ($425k) to carry out. That was just the cost of equipment hire and police officers’ time, and the figure comes from a freedom of information document obtained by Liberty Investigates.

It ran from February to July across 18 deployments, which the BTP’s own register says resulted in 537,697 people having their faces scanned.

The single alert was raised on February 24 at Kings Cross, against a watchlist of 455 people. The alert was false, and the false alert rate was 0.00517 percent.

The story doesn’t end there, because the BTP’s own register doesn’t stop at the end of July. It goes on to September 24, and now includes 27 deployments – and a total of 926,912 people who have had their faces scanned.

This extension has produced alerts. On August 20 at Kings Cross St Pancras Underground, there was one true alert, unconfirmed. On September 4 at Waterloo, there was one true alert, confirmed, and the outcome was no action. And on September 24 at London Bridge, there were two true alerts, both confirmed, with the outcome again being no action.

The arrest column in the register still reads zero.

In other words, the machine has now correctly identified three people – but the police have not found any reason to arrest any of them.

The register also shows that the number of people on the watchlist has grown. On February 11, it was 381, and by September 14 at Victoria Underground, it had more than doubled, to 862.

This is where things get even better. The expansion was “welcomed” by Transport for London (TfL), who said the technology “will target and identify people on police watchlist at key stations chosen for maximum impact.”

TfL also justified the move by saying it would “specifically tackle violence against women and girls, whose travel behaviours are shaped by experiences of sexual harassment and sexual offences.”

Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy is not impressed. “Tackling violence against women and girls on public transport must be an urgent priority, but that means investing in what actually works; not spending more than £320,000 on a measure, which when piloted, resulted in zero arrests and a single false alert,” she said.

“Live facial recognition technologies are a serious invasion of our privacy. The government should be suspending their rollout until there are stronger safeguards in place, including a proper legal framework,” the MP added.

This is not one force experimenting on its own. We have reported London Mayor Sadiq Khan approving live facial recognition for Oxford Street, London police using it at a protest for the first time, the High Court clearing the way for police use of it, and Greater Manchester Police joining the rollout. Liberty Investigates found that more than half of police forces in England and Wales have now deployed it.

Meanwhile, biometric images that do not match those on the watchlist are deleted immediately, while those that do match are deleted within 24 hours, as is the watchlist itself, once a deployment is finished.

BTP’s own policy makes clear that the surveillance is not limited to the cameras that are part of the LFR system. Footage from the LFR camera masts will be kept for up to 31 days, “in line with general police retention periods for CCTV.”

It seems that no matter how many times these deployments are extended, and how many people are scanned, the watchlist will just keep growing.

The police will keep getting more money to throw at this tech, that has not yet proven itself as useful for anything but wasting public money.

By Ken Macon | Reclaim The Net | October 3, 2026

A new US bill, Ban Flock Act, has been introduced, with the aim of stopping the federal government from using automated license plate readers (ALPRs).

“Flock is eviscerating the very notion of privacy by installing tens of thousands of cameras in communities across America without their consent,” said Senator Bernie Sanders, who is planning a Senate version.

“Going to the doctor? Flock knows. Dropping your kid off at school? Flock is tracking you. Flock is always watching,” he continued.

According to the text of the House bill, H.R. 10691, federal agencies and officials are to be banned from acquiring, possessing, accessing or using ALPRs, or data collected by these devices, without an Act of Congress that explicitly authorizes it.

This would include data collected by private security networks, homeowners’ associations, commercial parking operators, and data brokers.

Any such authorization must set data retention at no more than 48 hours, and “rigorous protections for due process, privacy, free speech and association.”

State and local governments that have ALPRs would not be eligible for grants from the Justice, Transportation, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, and Homeland Security departments.

The bill, whose sponsors in the House are Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and in the Senate Jeff Merkley, also seeks to make sure that no federal money is used to buy, lease, or operate ALPRs, while evidence obtained in violation of the proposed legislation would be inadmissible in federal court.

Individuals would be able to sue for actual and punitive damages, while state attorneys general would be able to sue to enforce the ban.

Toll systems would be exempt from the ban, but the data collected would have to be deleted within 48 hours of payment, and could not be checked against a law enforcement hot list.

“AI-powered cameras are keeping track of our every move and weaponizing this data against working people to make record profits,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

Merkley noted that the right to privacy includes the freedom to move around the community without every move being monitored.

The Ban Flock Act is not the first attempt of its kind – in early September, Republicans Thomas Massie and Eric Burlison introduced the Flock-Off Act, H.R. 10221, that also seeks to cut federal funding to state and local governments that use ALPRs, as well as biometric surveillance cameras.

In August, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis ordered Flock cameras to be removed from state highways within 30 days, a year after the state approved $4.6 million for 440 of these devices.

Earlier in the summer, Senator Josh Hawley launched an investigation into Flock, and later expanded it to include Axon, Motorola Solutions, and Verkada.

“Flock does not stand alone in this industry; you and others are building large camera networks, assisted by artificial intelligence, that intrude on the privacy of all Americans,” Hawley said at the time.

Hawley has his own anti-Flock bill that has been announced but the text of the bill has yet to be filed.

Republicans and Democrats are now going after the same cameras, and the bill cuts off the federal money and the data trade, not just the cameras.

Daniel Davis / Deep Dive – October 3, 2026

By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | October 2, 2026

If you are a British citizen and you criticize a government program online, that criticism can be collected and stored by a government-linked body.

At least that seems to be the upshot of the actions of the Prevent Standards and Compliance Unit (StaCU), “a body linked to the Home Office,” that has been keeping “observations” of those who speak against the government’s Prevent counter-extremism program on the internet.

The “evidence” of this comes from documents the group Rights & Security International (RSI) obtained under freedom of information law.

The group has now revealed that in the year from March 2024 to February 2025, StaCU made 77 “observations” of people who were critical of the program online – and that most of these “observations” came from X, with some from Reddit. Mainstream media articles were also included, as were posts from or about several organizations, including Hope Not Hate, Maslaha, and the Open Rights Group.

The “observations” are filed as “open-source complaints” and stored internally by StaCU. RSI is unsure what happens to this data next, and who the government may be sharing it with. What is known is that the process involves “attempting to independently verify claims.”

As RSI’s Freedom of Expression and Belief Team Leader Jacob Smith put it, “You should be able to criticize government policy without getting put on a list.”

Smith also noted that the fact that the government “has been trawling X and Reddit to find out who has been critiquing Prevent” should serve as “a stark reminder that, in the government’s eyes, anything you share online is fair game and could go into a file forever.”

The Home Office tried to keep this secret and refused to hand over the documents at first, but RSI won an appeal to the Information Commissioner’s Office, and the documents were released.

As RSI noted, it is unclear if any automated tools were used to find the posts, and if not, how the unit “found” them, or what it does with the data it collects.

The case is not the first time Prevent has been in the news for its controversial nature and the way it is implemented, but it is a stark reminder that the British government has no problem treating criticism of its policies as potentially dangerous.