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Former CDC Scientist Whose Studies Were Used to Debunk Vaccine-Autism Link Will Plead Guilty

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poul thorsen and words "plea guilty"
by Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D.
August 24, 2026

A former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) scientist who played a crucial role in research rebutting any link between vaccines and autism is expected to plead guilty next week to wire fraud and money laundering.

Poul Thorsen, 65, is finalizing a plea deal with prosecutors relating to charges stemming from a 2011 federal indictment, Nathan Kitchens, assistant U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, told The Defender.

Thorsen, who began working for the CDC in the late 1990s, faces two counts of wire fraud and nine counts of money laundering related to over $1 million in CDC grant money. The funds were earmarked for autism and public health research, but Thorsen allegedly used them to buy a home, two cars and a motorcycle.

Kitchens declined to comment on whether Thorsen will plead guilty to all or some of the charges.

Thorsen has been held in federal custody without bail since his extradition from Germany to the U.S. in May. The case is being heard at a federal court in Georgia, where the CDC is headquartered.

Researcher James Grundvig, the parent of a child with autism who was vaccine-injured, called the expected guilty plea “a very big deal.”

Grundvig, who wrote “Master Manipulator: The Explosive True Story of Fraud, Embezzlement, and Government Betrayal at the CDC,” which focused on the Thorsen case, praised U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for extraditing Thorsen “in record speed.”

He said Thorsen likely understands that the FBI and U.S. Department of Justice have “all the goods” to prosecute him.

“I guess Thorsen’s realizing, since he’s in American jail already and has no chance for bail, he might as well make a plea deal,” Grundvig said.

Dr. Dave Weldon, a physician and Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives between 1994 and 2009 — and who President Donald Trump nominated to lead the CDC in late 2024 before retracting his nomination in March 2025 — welcomed the plea agreement but said it isn’t enough.

“It would be a miscarriage of justice if a plea deal failed to include a thorough investigation of allegations of scientific fraud,” Weldon said.

Danish independent vaccine safety researcher Vibeke Manniche, M.D., Ph.D., said some of the federal funds Thorsen is said to have misused may have been intended for vaccine-autism studies. Manniche said the guilty plea calls Thorsen’s research into question.

“An obvious question is whether he also has been cheating with data to achieve the results he sought,” Manniche said. “That we don’t know. A good rule in gold-standard science is replication, and it would be wise, for so many reasons, to replicate his work,” independently of the institutions Thorsen had been affiliated with.

Grundvig noted that the Thorsen indictment included unnamed co-conspirators, suggesting that the investigation may implicate more people — and also the controversial autism research that Thorsen helped publish in 2002 and 2003 that was cited as proof of no link between vaccines and autism.

“I think that’s going to be the second part of the story,” Grundvig said. “It could be an avalanche of bad news for both pharma and the CDC.”

Thorsen studies cited in dismissing over 5,000 vaccine injury claims

Despite questions around how those studies were conducted, the Madsen-Thorsen papers were used in 2011 to dismiss over 5,000 claims filed by the parents of autistic, vaccine-injured children. The claims were part of the Omnibus Autism Proceeding pending before the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.

In “Master Manipulator,” Grundvig — whose son’s case was one of the claims dismissed as a result of Thorsen’s research — described Thorsen as “a world-class villain whose manipulation of health data gave CDC and big pharma what they wanted: a report clearing thimerosal of any possible role in the autism crisis.”

According to Weldon:

“The real crime is not absconding with research dollars, but unresolved allegations around his research which served as the basis for the CDC and the U.S. government dismissing vaccine injury claims by thousands of injured children. These actions set back vaccine safety research by more than two decades.”

Grundvig suggested the Thorsen investigation and his guilty plea may call into question the dismissal of the omnibus cases, as it would “then make all of those vaccine omnibus proceedings completely fraudulent because it was based on a fraud, and that should reopen the cases.”

Hooker, whose omnibus claim for his son was also dismissed, said Thorsen likely didn’t act alone in misusing federal money or misrepresenting vaccine-autism research — and that the role of some of his key collaborators should be examined.

“There should be a separate investigation against Dr. Diana Schendel, who was Thorsen’s direct grant supervisor and lover and approved all of his invoices for expenditures from his CDC grant money. Dr. Schendel undoubtedly knew of Thorsen’s activities but did not report them to the authorities and could have spent some of the stolen grant money as well,” Hooker said.

Schendel maintained an inappropriate romantic relationship with Thorsen and later accepted a position at Denmark’s Aarhus University to lead autism research there. She remains employed at Aarhus University — and at Drexel University — today.

Thorsen continued to live in Denmark for years after the 2011 U.S. indictment. He worked there as a gynecologist despite an extradition treaty between the two countries and an INTERPOL warrant for his arrest.

Hooker added:

“Other co-conspirators who knew of the inappropriate relationship between Thorsen and Schendel over the seven-year grant history at CDC include Coleen Boyle, Ph.D., former director of the National Center for Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities), and Dr. Marshalyn Yeargin-Allsop, former branch chief of the Developmental Disabilities Branch at the CDC.

“These individuals at a minimum should be brought in for questioning. Both have also been implicated in the MMR-autism fraud from the DeStefano et al. 2004 paper, where data showing a strong relationship between MMR timing and autism in Black boys was illegally destroyed.”

Thorsen’s vaccine-autism studies full of ‘irregularities’

When he first joined the CDC as a visiting scientist, Thorsen’s research focused on birth defects and developmental disabilities.

However, by the early 2000s, Thorsen shifted his focus to autism research. His work in this area left a strong imprint, fueling future narratives that autism isn’t linked to vaccines.

According to a 2017 report by the World Mercury Project — predecessor to Children’s Health Defense (CHD) — Thorsen’s influence on U.S. vaccine projects and policies “is extensive” because his studies were used to dismiss a possible link between vaccines and autism.

One of the most influential studies became known as the “Madsen study,” a population-based study of the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism.

Published in 2002 in The New England Journal of Medicine and co-authored by Thorsen, the Madsen study concluded that there is “strong evidence against the hypothesis that MMR vaccination causes autism.”

However, according to the 2017 World Mercury Project report, the Madsen study was “flawed” from the outset because the researchers reviewed clinical records of only 40 of the 316 children who had autism in the study’s cohort.

A peer-reviewed analysis published last year cast further doubt on the study’s conclusions.

In 2003, Madsen and Thorsen co-authored another influential study, published in Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics. The study did “not support a correlation between thimerosal-containing vaccines and the incidence of autism.”

Thimerosal is a mercury-based adjuvant used in some vaccines, which some scientists and advocates for people with autism have suggested may trigger autism.

Brian Hooker, Ph.D., CHD’s chief scientific officer, said there are “numerous data irregularities” in the Thorsen studies.

In their critique of the 2002 paper, Hooker and Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., CHD senior research scientist, found significant errors in the paper. They concluded the study’s unadjusted results “do not support rejecting the causal link” between the MMR vaccine and autism.

In a critique of the 2003 Madsen-Thorsen study, Hooker and researcher Jeffrey Allen Trelka concluded that the study’s findings “may have been skewed by participant selection and changes in diagnostic groupings.”

Other critiques of the 2002 and 2003 studies raised concerns about ethical considerations. Both studies relied on Danish population data. According to the 2017 World Mercury Project report, the studies bypassed ethical reviews required for this category of research, as required by federal law.

When the CDC discovered Thorsen hadn’t obtained the required ethics approvals, the agency didn’t report the errors, and the studies weren’t retracted. Instead, CDC officials engaged in a cover-up, the 2017 report states.

“Given these irregularities, Thorsen should also be under investigation for data fraud as he clearly withheld data and could have altered data” from Danish official sources, Hooker told The Defender.

Manniche said that if it is proven Thorsen tampered with the data in his studies, it would be a “terrible tragedy,” because “parents were told that the MMR vaccine was safe and sound and that it couldn’t harm the child.”

As of July 31, there were 1,931 reports claiming onset of autism or autism spectrum disorder following MMR vaccination contained within the federally run Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).

Will Thorsen sing?

Grundvig suggested that, as part of his plea agreement with prosecutors, Thorsen may have an incentive to provide testimony or information targeting other CDC figures.

“Thorsen’s 65 years old, born in 1961 … does he want to die in an American jail?” Grundvig asked. “I don’t think so. So, I think he wants to make, and will make, a plea deal. The only way he’s going to make a plea deal is with someone like Kennedy and maybe others in the Department of Justice that look at a bigger case,” Grundvig said.

Grundvig suggested this “bigger case” may involve the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act or RICO Act.

“There’s a bigger fraud involved than just stealing money, and I think it goes back to the vaccines, it goes back to the studies that the CDC cooked up,” potentially implicating Schendel and Madsen.

“Will he be used as a star witness against the CDC old guard and all of the shenanigans that went on massaging of science, of science papers, influence on Pediatrics and other journals, in order to get all of this done back in the early 2000s in order to exonerate vaccines and erase the autism signal?” Grundvig asked.

[…]

Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/poul-thorsen-former-cdc-scientist-studies-debunk-vaccine-autism-link-plead-guilty/?utm_id=20260830

Four Forms of Numericide

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Four Forms of Numericide

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August 26, 2026

A recent article in the New York Times on the increasing rates of heart disease in young women (Why Are More Young Women Developing Heart Disease?) was amusingly frivolous and about as fact-free as an article about health advice can be.

The key thrust of the article is that any woman who wants to preserve and improve her health should become informed of her “numbers.” Which is to say, she should know her blood pressure, cholesterol, BMI, and hemoglobin A1C (a measure of average blood glucose levels) which are claimed to be “important for assessing risk.”

The Times quotes Dr Priya Freaney, director of the Women’s Heart Care program at Northwestern Medicine: “Knowing your numbers is your most powerful tool,” [she said] “And it’s never too early to start.”

What numbers are we talking about? Well, apparently doctors recommend “all adults strive for these levels:”

  • BP (Blood Pressure) under 120 mm Hg / 80 mm Hg
  • LDL (Low-density lipoprotein) under 100 mg/dL
  • HbA1C (Hemoglobin A1C ) of 5.6 or lower
  • BMI (Body-mass index) under 25

Now the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol, and BMI, threatening to strike you down in your healthy middle age unless you submit to the testing, treating (ie: medications and lifestyle changes), and a retesting paradigm which can lead many to become obsessed by the numbers.

By the way, these four measures have one thing in common: They are typically treated with a prescribing pen that has been carefully guided in your doctor’s expert hands by the helpful people in the pharmaceutical industry. Just saying…

Let’s approach these four with a bit of basic epidemiology, examining the wisdom of telling people of “average risk” to aim for these targets. Obviously, people with pre-existing conditions or those with inherently much higher or multiple risks (such as levels that are in the red flashing light category) involve a different calculus.

But for the sake of evaluating the drive to push people toward these health targets, what do the highest quality studies ultimately say about the value in chasing these numeric targets in healthy people?

Numericide Number One: Blood Pressure at 120/80

I will always remember that old quip from an aging physician: “High blood pressure is better than no blood pressure at all.” But the question one should ask is this: If you lower your blood pressure does it lead to a reduction in your chance of a cardiovascular event or dying?

First off, despite what many guidelines and health care providers say about knowing your numbers, what they should have said was know your cardiovascular risk numbers (your percentage chance of having a heart attack or stroke over the next 10-30 years) not your numbers of cholesterol, blood pressure, or glucose numbers. Those are what we call ‘surrogate markers’ and the only reason to lower these numbers is to possibly reduce your risk of heart attacks and stroke. It’s not that these surrogate numbers are useless — rather they are the wrong numbers to worry about.

[…]

For starters, the target of 120 is not an evidence-based but an “expert-recommended” target, and in case you wondered, having a blood pressure of 130/80 or 140/90 is not the death sentence that your doctor might warn you about. Your blood pressure often jumps all over the map and how and when you measure it can significantly impact that number. It climbs as we get older, naturally. Like grey hair and wrinkles. Chasing this number is one of the biggest uses of a doctor’s time and causes considerable (and frequently unnecessary) worry in patients.

Me? I wish our doctors would have spent time learning more about evidence appraisal and how to properly do shared decision-making with their patients because the decision around the treatment of surrogate numbers is very dependent on a person’s values and preferences.

[…]

The magical “120” comes from the SPRINT trial, a particularly odious piece of work that tortured the data until it showed some benefit of a BP <120 comparted to divergent targets such as <140 in a high-risk population. What most physicians aren’t going to learn is that any apparent benefit evaporated once intensive treatment stopped.

The SPRINT team was behind the 2017 guidelines recommending the 120/80 BP target, but you need to know these guidelines have been discredited for good reason. For instance, the process to produce them was riven with documented conflicts of interest. Again, Big Pharma’s interests are more than well-represented on the guideline production team and their participation automatically broadens the category of people who should take their drug. No — surely that can’t be true? It is true, and to quote a refrain from the movie Airplane, stop calling me Shirley.

The AAFP, American Association of Family Practice— the largest primary care organization in the US — refused to endorse that target. Why? Because, in their words, there were “no significant benefit for all-cause mortality, cardiovascular mortality, myocardial infarction, or renal events.” Let me translate: People don’t live longer or better because you guilt-tripped and drug-equipped them into getting their blood pressure down to 120/80.

There’s also another reason and that has to do with how unsafe it can be to push people’s blood pressure to ridiculously low targets. Not only does this drive people crazy (because many of them have to take two or three or four medications to lower their BP numbers) but it can also lead to falls, fractures, kidney injury, and so on, especially in older adults.

One study in JAMA Internal Medicine found that taking antihypertensive medications was associated with an increased risk of serious fall injuries. SPRINT itself showed nearly double the rate of serious adverse events possibly or definitely related to the antihypertensive drugs.

[…]

Numericide’s Number Two: Low-Density Lipoprotein, or LDL, under 100 mg/dL

This is one of the most aggressively, and irrationally pursued targets: LDL cholesterol. I went back into the data to ask this question: Is there any substantive evidence that an otherwise healthy person with an LDL under 100 mg/dL lives any longer than a person who has an LDL above 100mg/dl?

Basically, should healthy people (what we call ‘primary prevention’) who don’t have a history of a heart attack or heart disease be pushed to get their LDL from, say, 120 to 80 mg/dL? Will this make them live longer?

Sorry to be the bad news bear here, but in a nutshell: No.

The evidence is weak and the absolute benefit is very small. When I mean very small, it’s way smaller than most people expect.

The most comprehensive recent review was published in JAMA in 2022. It was huge, pooling 18 trials of statins for primary prevention including over 85,000 people. The rate of all-cause mortality was statistically significant yet the absolute difference between those who drove their cholesterol that low and those who didn’t was a meagre 0.35%.

The NNT (number needed to treat to prevent one death) was 286.

Another way to say this is that your chance of a normal healthy person dying if they take a statin to drive their LDL below the 100mg/dl target is almost one in 300. Others have strongly contested this number, saying that driving cholesterol down to those levels makes absolutely no difference to the length and quality of a person’s life.

What about older people? You’re in for a surprise here—because in the elderly the situation reverses. A study published in the BMJ in 2016 identified LDL-related studies in the elderly. It found that in a total of over 68,000 elderly people, there was an “inverse association between all-cause mortality and LDL.” Translation: older people with higher LDL levels lived longer! This makes it even more egregious that much of the population taking cholesterol-lowering drugs are over 65 and in the category where they actually need higher cholesterol to stay healthy. 

And then there are the harms of cholesterol lowering drugs, like statins which we know cause muscle weakening, elevated liver enzymes, and diabetes, effects that are consistent across many studies.

Doctors know this from real life experience: most patients (up to 75%) stop taking their statins within 2 years — whether it’s from the adverse effects, the costs or the hassle.

Numericide’s Number Three: HbA1C (Hemoglobin A1C ) of 5.6 or Lower

The crazy low levels at which they tell people to drive their HbA1C down to make me bonkers. What is most nutty is that this nefarious hunt for “prediabetes” which is the granddaddy of all disease-mongering tactics is sold under the logic of ”Why wait until you have full blown diabetes when you can find the ‘pre’ signs early?”

To be clear, the 5.6% is not a treatment target — it’s the “prediabetes diagnostic threshold.” In the ever-reductive world of diabetes “normal” keeps shifting. “Normal” is now considered below 5.7%, prediabetes is 5.7–6.4%, and diabetes is diagnosed at ≥6.5%.

The actual treatment target for most adults with diabetes is <7.0%, a level that sadly labels tens of millions of healthy people as diseased. If you have an HbA1C slightly over 7 and your doctor is pushing a metformin prescription at you, it’s time to push back!

Here’s the core point: the evidence does not support that driving HbA1C to 6.5% or lower extends life. The best available data from two big studies — the ACCORD trial and a meta-analysis from the BMJ — show two very surprising things: either no mortality benefit or actual harm from intensive glucose control.

[…]

Furthermore, there is the opposite thing that could harm you, hypoglycemia — which is often caused by aggressive drug treatment is, in itself, a potent killer.

Just remember that these thresholds are always changed in a uni-directional way, always made lower to expand the pool of patients who allegedly need to be on drugs. This is a process that takes place under the well-documented influence of pharma money, research, and experts, expanding the market for diabetes drugs at each step.

The major push to label people as “prediabetic” — a condition that, incidentally the WHO says shouldn’t be medicalized — is flat-out, brazen disease-mongering.

Having said that, extremely high blood sugar (HbA1C consistently above 9–10%) can cause real harm — kidney failure, blindness, neuropathy, infections. The point isn’t that glucose doesn’t matter at all; it’s that the marginal benefit of pushing from 7.0 to 6.5% or lower does not save lives, and the harm, both in terms of money, medical busy-ness of checking and rechecking your blood sugars, and the harms of the drugs are all real and quantifiable.

Eating a higher quality diet and getting sufficient exercise is the foundation for anyone worried about their blood sugars. Those who are told they have “pre-diabetes” should ignore that advice and refuse to be pasted with a sticky label that causes harm.

Numericide’s Number Four: BMI under 25

Body Mass Index (BMI) is a measure of body weight relative to height, often used to screen whether someone may be underweight, at a healthy weight, overweight, or obese. We need to screen because overweight people live shorter lives, right?

Not necessarily.

We are told that the aim for everyone, concerning this fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse, BMI, is 25. Not only is this absurdly low, but it is essentially meaningless as a measure of health on its own. Anyone with any good musculature whatsoever is going to have a BMI over 25. Why is that? Because muscle weighs more than fat.

It comes down to where the weight sits. A muscular person with BMI of 30 has a different risk profile than a guy with a BMI of 30 who is sedentary with a big beer gut — but the BMI treats them identically.

Where did this “25” come from?

The BMI 25 cutoff comes from a 1995 WHO technical report establishing four categories of body weight (underweight, normal, overweight, obese) and was loosely based on actuarial life insurance data. This threshold was not derived from outcome-based evidence and a BMI of 25 was not linked to any mortality inflection point.

What about someone who has, say, a BMI of 30. Should they get that lower? 

The claim that someone at BMI of 30 has a meaningfully shorter life expectancy than someone at BMI of 25 is not supported by the best available observational evidence.

The largest and most influential meta-analysis on this question was published in JAMA in 2013 and it pooled 97 studies with over 2.88 million participants and more than 270,000 deaths. The findings were mind-blowing: Being overweight was associated with significantly lower all-cause mortality than normal weight.

[…]

Via https://brownstone.org/articles/four-forms-of-numericide/

Why Democrats May Lose the November Elections Even Though Polls Now Say They Can Win

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[Source: Picture generated by AI]
By Steve Brown

Trump has already rigged the race to crush Democratic voters and ensure a Republican victory—but Democrats don’t want to hear it

The polls confirm a growing surge of voter enthusiasm for Democrats. Are they wrong? No. They may just not be relevant.

While Democrats deliriously high-five themselves at the release of each new favorable poll, Trump has been diligently rigging the electoral process to ensure that Republicans keep control of Congress (and incidentally keep him from being impeached, convicted and thrown in jail for tax evasion and the sexual abuse of minors).

So why may the pro-Democratic poll numbers be irrelevant? Because they only show how people intend to vote, not whether they will actually be able to vote. Or even if they do vote, whether it will make any difference.

Consider these 12 dirty tricks that Trump will use to crush Democratic voters flatter than in the illustration at the outset of this article.

1. Aggressively Partisan Gerrymandering:

Eight state legislatures have already redrawn congressional districts to lock in an artificial Republican House majority even before voting starts. This will dilute millions of Democratic votes across entire states so they will have little or no impact, regardless of overall turnout. Six more states will soon follow their example. And don’t look for the courts to strike down these biased electoral maps: The Supreme Court has already ruled in their favor.

How many House seats will gerrymandering steal for the Republicans in November?

According to redistricting analyses from the Brennan Center for Justice and the Princeton Gerrymandering Project, these new Republican electoral maps now provide a net structural baseline advantage of 14 to 20 House seats for Republicans over a neutral national map.

In a narrowly divided House, where majority rule often hinges on fewer than five seats, gerrymandering alone can determine control of the chamber, regardless of a national lead in the popular vote for Democrats. Having 14 to 20 more seats locked up can make Republican control of the House a slam-dunk, turning the predictive headline of this article into a reality.

2. Announcing “enhanced poll surveillance by ICE to preserve order and prevent illegal voting”:

This will have a chilling effect on Latinos, naturalized citizens, and people of color in general. Many will decide to stay home, because they know that ICE sweeps are fueled by racial profiling, so that even U.S. citizens can disappear into unmarked cars, wind up in detention camps for days or weeks, and even be deported to El Salvador before they are able to prove their citizenship.

Although federal statutes such as 18 U.S.C. § 592, forbid the government from stationing armed federal troops or civil officers at “any place where a general or special election is held,” that will not stop Trump. He will exploit jurisdictional gray areas that permit the staging of immigration or federal enforcement operations outside statutory boundary lines (e.g., 100 to 500 feet away from the polls).

Since many eligible voters live in mixed-status households, with U.S. citizens residing alongside undocumented relatives or green card holders, the threat of immigration sweeps at bus stations and roadways leading to the polls will significantly depress turnout.

Ironically, Trump does not even have to deploy ICE agents at the polls. His mere promise to do so will be enough to trigger the desired chilling effect.

Is there any remedy? Yes. Emergency injunctions can be issued by federal district judges on Election Day under the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, which bars conspiracies to intimidate or coerce voters by word or deed. But in the real world, injunctions issued hours into voting will come long after the narrative has already discouraged voter turnout among “suspiciously colored” voters..

[…]

Via https://covertactionmagazine.com/2026/09/11/why-democrats-may-lose-the-november-elections-even-though-polls-now-say-they-can-win/

Pfizer COVID-19 “Vaccine” Plasmid DNA Found Inside Lethal Turbo Cancer of the Heart

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By Nicolas Hulscher
September 10, 2026

We have just completed a new case report that presents one of the most striking findings yet in the debate over COVID-19 “vaccine” turbo cancers: vaccine spike-encoding plasmid DNA was recovered directly from an extremely rare, hyper-aggressive heart tumor.

The McCullough Foundation paper is titled, “Fatal Cardiac Intimal Sarcoma in a 35-Year-Old Male Following COVID-19 mRNA Vaccination: Plasmid DNA Fragments Encoding the S-Protein Detected in Tumor Tissue.”

The patient was a 35-year-old man with no personal or family history of cancer and no identified hereditary cancer predisposition. He received Pfizer-BioNTech BNT162b2 on April 10 and May 4, 2021. Just 170 days after the first dose, doctors discovered a large tumor filling the left atrium of his heart along with multiple brain metastases.

 

Three days later, surgeons removed a 9.0 × 7.0 × 5.3 cm mass from his heart. Pathology confirmed a high-grade cardiac intimal sarcoma, an exceptionally rare and aggressive cancer. Molecular testing found the characteristic abnormalities MDM2 and KDR amplification, while whole-body PET/CT found no other primary tumor elsewhere in the body.

The cancer progressed at an extraordinary pace. Despite open-heart surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, gamma knife treatment, and four brain surgeries, new metastases continued to appear. He ultimately suffered bleeding into a brainstem tumor and died 675 days after diagnosis.

What makes this case especially important is that the growth rate could actually be measured. One brain metastasis grew from about 4 millimeters to 35 millimeters in only 94 days. That works out to a tumor volume doubling time of roughly 10 days.

Then came the most remarkable finding. Archived tissue from the original heart tumor was tested for vaccine components.

PCR detected three separate synthetic, codon-optimized vaccine spike-gene fragments along with the plasmid origin-of-replication sequence. The SV40 enhancer was not detected.

Put simply: vaccine-derived plasmid DNA fragments were found inside the malignant heart tissue itself.

A separate analysis found no intact spike protein and no SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid protein in the archived tissue, ruling out infection. One plausible accelerator of this malignancy is the persistence of synthetic vaccine-derived plasmid DNA within the tumor through effects on DNA repair, genomic stability, or tumor-cell proliferation.

This case represents an extremely rare cancer in a young man with no identified conventional cancer predisposition, a massive and already metastatic tumor within 170 days, directly measured explosive growth, and vaccine-derived plasmid DNA recovered from the tumor itself.

These findings directly fit the framework we recently developed in our paper titled, “Potential Oncogenicity of Synthetic mRNA Vaccines: Convergent Mechanistic, Clinical, and Population Evidence for a Concurrent-Hit Model of Accelerated Malignancy.”

In that paper, we identified 35 possible oncogenic mechanisms associated with the nucleoside-modified mRNA–lipid nanoparticle platform, converging on four major routes: proto-oncogene activation, increased mutation pressure, disruption of cellular protein networks, and acceleration of cancer stem-cell clones. The model specifically predicts that several of these hits occurring at the same time could compress a cancer process that normally unfolds over years into a much shorter period, particularly in people who already harbor dormant or microscopic disease.

In plain English, the model predicts the kind of pattern seen in the new case report: a hidden cancer clone that may have remained clinically silent can potentially be pushed into rapid growth, immune escape, and metastatic spread when multiple tumor-promoting pressures converge at once.

This cardiac sarcoma case therefore provides important real-world evidence consistent with that model. The patient’s tumor was already enormous and metastatic within months, its measured kinetics indicate extreme acceleration, and vaccine-derived plasmid DNA was recovered directly from the diseased tissue.

For years, turbo cancer has been dismissed as a “myth.” This report, along with the mountain of corroborating evidence, terminates that false claim.

mRNA technology is NOT SAFE FOR HUMAN USE and should be removed from global markets immediately.

[…]

Via https://www.globalresearch.ca/breaking-pfizer-covid-19-vaccine-plasmid-dna-inside-lethal-turbo-cancer-heart/5939892

The 19th century doctors recognized that cancer was caused by vaccines – William Tebb

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By Sasha Latypova, 9 September 2026

This is Part 2 of the Cancer Causation series. Part 1 is HERE.

In this post, I am republishing a booklet written in 1892. Mass vaccination, especially of children and women, and laws mandating vaccines had begun in earnest in the mid-1800s. By the end of the century, it was recognised, at least by some doctors, that vaccines induce cancer, which had already begun its unstoppable rise in “civilised” populations, in perfect correlation with increasing “access to modern medicine”. The booklet is as follows.

The Increase of Cancer

(Reprinted from The TOSCIN, of March 12th, 1892.)

By William Tebb, Printed By Wertheimer, Lea & Co., Circus Place, London Wall, I892

SIR,—As the medical journals are reluctant to give currency to suggestions which, throw discredit on certain dogmas of the orthodox medical church, I venture to ask permission, in the interest of the public health, to address your readers on a subject of admitted public importance, the causation of the remarkable and mysterious recrudescence of cancer during the past 30 years. And surely, sir, the study of the sources of any malady, particularly one of so grave and destructive a character, is as well deserving of consideration as the multitudinous but abortive attempts to effect a cure.

I may mention, as an inspiring motive for this communication to the impartial columns of THE TOSCIN, that several of my friends and acquaintances have, after acute and protracted suffering, succumbed to cancer, the origin of which their friends declare to be unaccountable except on the theory below, so that I hardly need an apology for bringing the matter before the attention of those of your readers who are interested in the public health. Cancer, like leprosy, is an incurable disease; and none of the vaunted remedies have stood the test of experience. It can be disseminated like leprosy, and is increasing at an alarming rate. The deaths from cancer in England and Wales are returned by the Registrar-General, thus :— Or per million living.

Cancer is reported to be increasing not only in England and the Continent, but in all parts of the world where vaccination is practised.

Dr. H. McAul Alston, Acting Resident Surgeon, Colonial Hospital, Port of Spain, Trinidad, in the Annual Report to the Surgeon General, dated 5th of April, 1887, says (p. 7):—

“A noticeable feature of the diseases of patients admitted is the increasing number of the cases of cancer.”

Sir James Paget observes:—

“The richest and poorest alike seem to be subject to it; so do the worst and best fed; those that are living in the best conditions of the atmosphere, and those that are immured in the worst; those that are cleanly, and those that are foul; those of all temperaments and of all occupations; those that appear healthy, and those that are diseased. We can hardly lay our hands upon any of the various circumstances of life in the various orders of society in this country, to which we can refer as rendering one more or less liable than another to the acquirement of the cancerous constitution.”

It is claimed that cancer is hereditary and is occasionally due to local injury, but is it not obvious that there must be some antecedent constitutional taint or diathesis to give rise to the development of the disease? To what, then, is this condition really due? Sir James Paget also says cancer is due to a morbid condition of the blood, and some of your readers will have little difficulty in pointing out one cause of the morbidity. It is allowed by physicians that cancer may be caused by impregnating the blood with impure matter.

Dr. Joseph Jones, President of the Louisiana Board of Health, a well-known pathologist, says that this disease is inoculable; that cancer may be propagated by inoculation, or by the injection of cancerous matter into the veins. He adds:

“We will have accomplished our purpose in recording these facts if we succeed in directing the attention of the profession to the necessity of greater attention to the condition of the subjects selected for the propagation of the vaccine disease.”

Drs. Von Bergman and E. Hahn have demonstrated this by the recent notoriously inhuman experiments at the Berlin Hospital. The Medical Press, December 5th, 1888, quotes Dr. Hahn as:

“Disposed to believe that, in many cases of recurrence, it is quite probable that the disease has developed anew, as the result of accidental inoculation.”

In The British Medical Journal, June 29th, 1889, Mr. Jonathan Hutchison, F.R.C.S., says that, with due care in the transplantation of a bit of living tissue, cancer may be transferred.

There is probably no method by which inoculation is practised on so large a scale as in vaccination and re-vaccination. It is not now denied by the medical profession that vaccination is an exciting cause of infantile syphilis, and, according to the Registrar-General’s returns, Vaccination Mortality, No. 433, dated 1877, and Infant Mortality, No. 392, dated 1880, the increase in Infantile Syphilis, since vaccination has been compulsory, is fourfold.

Mr. Hibbert, formerly Secretary to the Local Government Board, said in July, 1880, that this terrible increase was one of the most unsatisfactory features of the Vaccination Acts, and a reason why further legislation was needed. Dr. William Forbes Laurie, late medical director of a metropolitan cancer hospital, was thoroughly convinced that the increase of cancer was due to vaccination, and he wrote to Members of Parliament, inviting them to visit the hospital, and witness the terrible result of the vaccine operation. He says this increase of cancer is attributed by some medical men to the large amount of syphilitic disease with which vaccine lymph is impregnated, and by others to the direct impregnation “of healthy persons with lymph imbued with scrofulous and cancerous matter.”

And the late Dr. Dennis Turnbull, who made cancer his particular study for thirty years, declared in the public press his conviction that vaccination and re-vaccination is the most prolific cause of this disease. Mr. Keuchenius, late Colonial Secretary to the Holland Government, called the attention of the Second Chamber to the alarming spread of cancer in the Netherlands, which was coincident with the spread of vaccination, and (as he believed) due to poison conveyed in the vaccine virus.

The British Medical Journal for May 19th, 1885, in a leading article on the increasing fatality of cancer, says:—

“Our negligence in dealing effectually with other diseases may also favour its dissemination, for if syphilitic inflammation. may become cancerous, it is clear that the spread of syphilis has scattered throughout the population innumerable possible seeds of cancerous degeneration.”

Some time ago the Hospital Gazelle reported that fifty infants had been admitted into one hospital suffering from syphilitic disease, and that from some of these infants vaccine lymph had been taken. Assuming that the theory of the British Medical Journal is correct, this is an indication how the cancer spreading virus may be distributed.

In his recent work on cancer (Churchill, 1891), Dr. Herbert Snow calls attention to the fact that cancer is:

“Almost absent in the savage, while rapidly increasing in prevalence among the civilised.”

The savage it may be noted will not allow his blood to be poisoned with vaccine virus, hence he escapes that morbidity under which cancerous tumours find nutriment. Where the system has become thoroughly infected with this morbid tendency, cure by extirpation or otherwise is admitted to be impossible, and the suffering caused by the apprehension of being the victim of so dreadful an affliction may well engage the attention of your benevolent and thoughtful readers. Dr. Aitken says:

“The normal course of cancerous tumours we now know to be that of steady increase, a steady and certain progress towards death.”

It would, however, be unbecoming in me to dogmatise upon a subject which is admitted to be a puzzle to the medical profession, but I venture to hope that medical practitioners who have had the opportunity which clinical observation affords will no longer keep silence, but in the interests of the public health say whether the suggestion I have ventured to make is borne out by facts within their own experience.

Yours faithfully,

WILLIAM TEBB. Devonshire Club, St. James’, London.vaccine lymph had been taken. Assuming that the theory of the British Medical Journal is correct, this is an indication how the cancer spreading virus may be distributed.

In his recent work on cancer (Churchill, 1891), Dr. Herbert Snow calls attention to the fact that cancer is:

“Almost absent in the savage, while rapidly increasing in prevalence among the civilised.”

The savage it may be noted will not allow his blood to be poisoned with vaccine virus, hence he escapes that morbidity under which cancerous tumours find nutriment. Where the system has become thoroughly infected with this morbid tendency, cure by extirpation or otherwise is admitted to be impossible, and the suffering caused by the apprehension of being the victim of so dreadful an affliction may well engage the attention of your benevolent and thoughtful readers. Dr. Aitken says:

“The normal course of cancerous tumours we now know to be that of steady increase, a steady and certain progress towards death.”

It would, however, be unbecoming in me to dogmatise upon a subject which is admitted to be a puzzle to the medical profession, but I venture to hope that medical practitioners who have had the opportunity which clinical observation affords will no longer keep silence, but in the interests of the public health say whether the suggestion I have ventured to make is borne out by facts within their own experience.

Yours faithfully,

WILLIAM TEBB. Devonshire Club, St. James’, London.

[…]

Via https://sashalatypova.substack.com/p/vaccines-all-injected-biologics-are

Most Kids Can Fight Measles Naturally — and Having the Virus May Even Make Them Stronger

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ben edwards and word "measles"

by Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D.
September 10, 2026

Dr. Ben Edwards, an integrative medicine family practitioner in Lubbock, Texas, who runs a private practice serving roughly 2,000 patients, shared tips for families who choose not to vaccinate on how to recover effectively from a measles infection. Edwards pushed back against the narrative that children must avoid getting measles at all costs. “We can all just overcome these illnesses and go on about our lives and be stronger for it.”

Children can overcome measles — and in some cases, even become stronger for having fought it off, according to Dr. Ben Edwards, an integrative medicine family practitioner in Lubbock, Texas, who runs a private practice serving roughly 2,000 patients.

In 2025, Edwards successfully treated roughly 300 children in Gaines County, Texas, who had the measles.

In an exclusive interview this week with The Defender, Edwards shared why he believes recent media reports spreading fear about measles are misguided — and how parents can help their children if they become infected with the virus.

“It’s unfortunate when the fear-mongering starts up instead of just some informed consent and truth-telling, which is what needs to happen,” Edwards said.

Edwards acknowledged that measles is a highly infectious virus, so prevention may not always be realistic once measles starts circulating in a person’s community.

For example, he said he got measles last year from being in close contact with the many children he treated — even though he was fully vaccinated against measles. The latest research shows that vaccinated people can and do spread measles.

“It’s just a pretty contagious thing,” Edwards said. “So from a preventative standpoint, for those who choose not to vaccinate, I think the best bet is just trying to bolster your own ‘terrain,’ is how I would term that — your immune system.”

The stronger a person’s immune system, the more likely it will be able to identify and deal with the measles virus, he said. Someone who has a strong immune system may even be able to handle the measles virus without showing symptoms of illness, he added.

Edwards also mentioned general prevention methods to mitigate the spread of any illness, such as frequent hand-washing and avoiding sharing saliva or airspace with someone who is sick.

However, given how easily measles spreads once it’s in a community, Edwards recommended focusing on how to treat it.

Vitamin A, C and getting the fever down are important

Although there is no antiviral treatment for measles, there are several well-researched treatments that can reduce symptoms and lower the risk of complications and death, according to the Mayo Clinic.

Vitamins A and C, hydration and good nutrition are key for maintaining a healthy immune system and supporting the immune system while it’s handling a measles infection, Edwards said.

Some studies, including one published in 1990 in The New England Journal of Medicine involving a randomized controlled trial of vitamin A in kids with severe measles, have shown that vitamin A reduces measles morbidity and mortality.

Edwards called vitamin A “absolutely essential” for fighting all viral illnesses and respiratory illnesses, especially measles.

“Measles has a particular tendency to deplete the body of vitamin A, which is called retinol,” he said.

Edwards recommends taking cod liver oil prophylactically. “It’s the best food-based source of vitamin A.”

He also recommended Vitamin C:

“Vitamin C historically has been known to decrease the severity of these illnesses — anything from intravenous vitamin C, intramuscular vitamin C, but obviously you can just eat your vitamin C with your fruits and veggies.

“You can take supplemental vitamin C. I tend to recommend every one to two hours to bowel tolerance when you’re in an active infectious state.”

Parents don’t need to be afraid of the measles, but they do need to know how to care for their child during a measles infection.

The child may have a very high fever, which can be dangerous — especially in babies — because of the risk of dehydration.

“A 101, 102 [degree] fever, the literature shows it’s actually beneficial to not treat that. But if you get into that 103 and above, it is helpful to bring that down,” he said.

Parents can bring down their child’s fever by running a lukewarm bath, applying cold packs under the arms or peppermint oil on the feet, and having the child be naked, rather than clothed and wrapped in blankets.

It’s possible to overcome the measles — and be stronger for it

Edwards pushed back against the narrative that children must avoid getting measles at all costs. “We can all just overcome these illnesses and go on about our lives and be stronger for it,” he said.

He pointed to studies showing that kids who overcome measles naturally have a decreased risk of cardiovascular disease and certain cancers, including leukaemia. “So there is actually some benefit,” he said.

The measles vaccine was first licensed for use in the U.S. in 1963, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Some people attribute the decline in measles mortality to the vaccine. However, historical mortality data suggest there was a roughly 99% drop in measles mortality before the vaccine was introduced, Edwards said.

In 2010, researchers from Johns Hopkins and the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics published a report in Pediatrics showing that nearly 90% of the decline in infectious disease mortality in U.S. children occurred before 1940.

The researchers attributed the major declines in child mortality to several non-vaccine factors, including improved sanitation, food safety and public education about hygienic practices.

“It was a cesspool in the big cities in the Industrial Revolution —  late 1800s/early 1900s — and these kids were malnourished, and they were living in filth,” Edwards said. “And in that environment, the immune system is very depressed, and these germs are just going rampant.”

In other words, cleaning up the environment — including the children’s internal environment with better nutrition — led to the drastic decline in infectious disease deaths, Edwards said.

Fear can suppress the immune system

Edwards encouraged parents to avoid falling into fear around measles.

“It’s really, really important,” he said. “In fact, I found this to be probably one of the most important things in Gaines County last year when we were treating the measles — just to deal with the fear.”

He added:

“When you go into fear — fight-or-flight mode — that actually shuts down your white blood cell production. Your white blood cells are your troops. That’s your Marines, that’s your frontline guys going out there to gobble up these viruses.”

Edwards said he wanted to encourage parents. “Continue to be informed and continue to trust the amazing design in the body. The immune system’s incredible. It will overcome [illnesses] if you steward it — and you need to steward it.”

Parents need to nourish their kids with “real food and get them outside in the sun, get them off these tablets, encourage community and play,” he said. “We’re designed to overcome these illnesses. Your kids will be fine. Nurture them, love on them, and don’t let the spirit of fear come into your home.”

Watch for a secondary bacterial infection

Parents also need to be aware that a measles infection can sometimes quickly be followed by a bacterial infection, including certain types of pneumonia.

He described what that can look like. “The rash is clearing up, the fever’s waning, their appetite’s back, they’re on the downhill side of things, doing pretty good, almost normal, and then boom — fever comes back, cough starts, oxygen levels drop, respiratory distress starts to set in. That’s the bacterial pneumonia. That has to be treated.”

Appropriate treatment typically involves specific antibiotics, he said. “Doctors know this. They know how to treat pneumonias — or they should. I think doctors can get a little swept up with the media frenzy too, unfortunately, and that can bias our judgment sometimes.”

Edwards discussed how the Texas 6-year-old whose Feb. 26, 2025, death was reported by mainstream media as having been caused by measles actually died of a bacterial pneumonia that was inappropriately treated by hospital staff.

“I’m not saying this was on purpose. I’m sure it wasn’t, but a medical mistake was made. She was given the wrong antibiotic,” he said.

“So she died from a very, very treatable bacterial pneumonia in her lungs that would’ve actually been cleared with azithromycin — your basic Z-Pak that everybody probably knows about.”

Just months later, staff at a nearby hospital made a similar error. In April 2025, 8-year-old Daisy Hildebrand died from a bacterial pneumonia that was inappropriately treated after she was hospitalized following measles complications.

On April 6, the Texas Department of State Health Services issued a news release calling Daisy’s death the “second death in [the West Texas] measles outbreak,” attributing the death to “measles pulmonary failure.”

However, Dr. Pierre Kory — who analyzed the child’s medical records and has extensive experience in pulmonary and critical care medicine — told The Defender in an earlier interview that the child’s medical records showed she died from acute respiratory distress syndrome due to hospital-acquired pneumonia, which she likely developed during a previous hospital stay.

Kory said:

“The causative organism was a highly antibiotic-resistant E. coli (‘superbug’), which she contracted during the first hospital ICU [intensive care unit] stay.

“This went largely unrecognized and poorly treated during the second hospital stay because they began to ‘tunnel in’ by blaming measles for her worsening pneumonia and repeatedly writing in the chart that she was unvaccinated.”

What’s the real risk-benefit ratio for MMR vaccine vs. measles?

Edwards said that mainstream media tends to report only on the benefits of the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine while failing to mention the vaccine’s risks.

He agreed that it is “pretty well established” that the MMR vaccine decreases a person’s likelihood of acquiring measles. “But at what cost? There’s benefit, and there’s risk,” he said.

“So all we hear is the benefit, benefit, and no one wants to talk about the risk. Well, not nobody. Actually, there were 12 vaccine-injured Mennonite families in Gaines County who wanted to talk about that.”

To compare the risk of death from measles to the risk of death from the MMR vaccine, Edwards looked at deaths reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) following MMR vaccination.

“When you look back over the past 30 years, which I did this morning, 1995 to 2025, on average, if you average out every year, it’s anywhere from some years it’s one or two deaths, some years it’s up to 10. The average is six and a half, roughly, or 6.43,” he said.

However, VAERS has historically been shown to report less than 1% of all adverse events.

“That means a 99% unreported rate. So that 6.43 deaths per year would be 643 deaths per year from the MMR vaccine,” he said.

‘We’re not taught to correlate that at all’

Edwards, who was conventionally trained and formerly board-certified before pivoting to integrative medicine, said doctors aren’t trained to recognize vaccine adverse reactions or report them.

Doctors need to think critically when their pediatric patients start reporting symptoms, to correctly identify whether the symptom might be vaccine-related.

He shared a story to illustrate his point:

“I was just casually overhearing a conversation at a restaurant this past week. A sweet little old lady was saying that her granddaughter just quit speaking. She was talking, and she just quit talking all of a sudden.

“And I overheard the conversation when someone said, ‘Well, when did this happen?’ ‘Well, about a year and a half, so that’s 18 months.’”

A doctor “automatically” should wonder whether the girl received vaccinations at her 18-month wellness visit, Edwards said.

“Get the timeline on when that little girl was in the clinic and [received] her injection — but we’re not taught to correlate that at all,” he said.

[…]

Via https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/exclusive-most-kids-fight-measles-naturally-having-virus-may-make-them-stronger/

How September 11 accelerated the end of American hegemony

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How September 11 accelerated the end of American hegemony
©  Robert Giroux/Getty Images

Fyodor Lukyanov

11 Sep, 2026 

Twenty-five years after 9/11, its deepest legacy lies in the wars, surveillance and strategic overreach that hastened the end of US hegemony

So much has happened since the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, that the events now seem both very distant and perhaps less consequential than they appeared at the time. However, both impressions are misleading.

Twenty-five years is a considerable period in a human life, but little more than a moment in history, and however turbulent the past quarter-century has been, the significance of September 11 is only now becoming fully apparent.

Looking back, and setting aside the emotions of the time, what did the attacks actually mean for the international system?

Above all, they brought an end to a decade of virtually unchallenged US hegemony in world affairs.

The significance was partly symbolic in that the attackers struck at the two most obvious centers of American power, the World Trade Center represented its financial might, while the Pentagon represented its military strength. The post-Cold War period, during which the United States had come to believe that no fundamental threat remained to its security or interests, was over.

From Washington’s perspective, the decade had begun with the almost miraculous disappearance of its principal geopolitical adversary, the Soviet Union, yet it ended with the realization that danger could emerge suddenly from almost anywhere.

The fact that most Americans had previously known little about those who attacked them only deepened the shock and contributed to the impulsiveness of the response.

The End of History, proclaimed by Francis Fukuyama as the Cold War was drawing to a close, was followed barely a decade later by history’s turbulent and violent return

Washington’s reaction set in motion a global realignment whose consequences are now much easier to see. Whether Osama bin Laden possessed some ingenious long-term strategy for undermining American power is impossible to know, but the result was obvious as the United States embarked upon a course that gradually weakened its ability to manage international affairs.

George W. Bush’s administration, strongly influenced by neoconservative thinking, was caught off guard by September 11, so its response rested on two broad assumptions.

The first was that threats to America could originate anywhere, not merely from hostile states but from non-state groups newly capable of inflicting enormous damage, therefore such threats had to be confronted wherever they emerged, primarily through the overwhelming military power available to the United States.

The second assumption was ideological, given liberal theory held that democracies didn’t wage war against one another, meaning if that were true, then the more democracies there were, the safer the United States would become.

From this emerged the increasingly assertive promotion of democracy abroad, which at times it became openly aggressive.

Its methods ranged from military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq to political and financial support for democratic movements in the former Soviet Union and pressure for liberal political reforms across the Middle East and Libya later became another example of Western military intervention producing consequences far beyond those originally anticipated.

Some episodes from that period are now half-forgotten, such as when Washington strongly encouraged elections in the Palestinian territories despite warnings from regional actors about the likely consequences. Naturally, Hamas subsequently won the 2006 Palestinian legislative election, dramatically altering Palestinian politics.

The same confidence in political transformation characterized the American response to the Arab Spring as existing political balances across the Middle East were overturned, often without anything stable emerging to replace them.

The consequences of the 2003 invasion of Iraq were greater still. The overthrow of Saddam Hussein destroyed a major component of the regional balance that had developed during the 20th century and unleashed forces that proved extremely difficult to contain.

America became trapped in what its own politicians would eventually call endless wars and these conflicts contributed to polarization inside the United States while attempts to export democracy damaged the reputation of democracy itself.

In Iraq, this was compounded by the widespread belief that American strategic and economic interests, including oil, were inseparable from the intervention.

The broader results were remarkable with prolonged wars, a destabilized Middle East and the expansion of radical Islamist movements. The architects of September 11 could scarcely have hoped for more when they planned their attack given relations between the West and much of the Muslim world also deteriorated.

President Bush’s early reference to a crusade against terrorism was probably an unfortunate choice of words rather than a deliberate provocation, but Islamist movements eagerly seized upon it as confirmation of their argument that Western hostility towards the Muslim world had changed little since the Crusades.

Washington subsequently tried to repair those relations, but the direction had already been set.

The destruction of Iraq’s complicated internal and regional balance created opportunities for radical movements while contributing to an image of the United States as an enormously powerful but unpredictable force in Middle Eastern affairs. As a result, for governments in the region, maintaining some distance from Washington increasingly appeared prudent.

September 11 also transformed the United States itself.

The War on Terror was conceived as a global campaign to protect American national security, but its domestic consequences were profound as surveillance and state control expanded dramatically, whether in personal communications or financial transactions.

Although the original justification was terrorism, over the following quarter-century, new reasons for expanding these mechanisms appeared while technologies changed and political priorities shifted, but the general direction towards greater monitoring and control remained.

Nor did the old problem of double standards disappear because, despite declarations of zero tolerance for terrorism, the familiar distinction between one side’s terrorist and another’s freedom fighter survived. This ambiguity becomes particularly apparent when the interests of major powers collide, whether those powers are the United States, Russia or China.

A quarter-century after September 11, the world bears remarkably little resemblance to the one that existed on its eve, but, of course, much of what followed would probably have happened anyway. International systems change because of forces far larger than any single event and China’s rise, Russia’s reassertion of its interests, technological transformation and the relative decline of Western economic predominance cannot simply be attributed to the attacks of 2001.

But September 11 was nevertheless a turning point as the attacks ended the extraordinary post-Cold War interlude in which American predominance appeared almost uncontested, and, more importantly, Washington’s response accelerated the processes that brought that period to a close.

The movement away from the unipolar order didn’t happen overnight, but began gradually, gathered momentum through wars, crises and the emergence of alternative centers of power, and continues today.

What will replace it remains unclear, given the formation of another stable international order may take many years and whether that system proves preferable to the bipolar confrontation of the second half of the 20th century, or to the brief period of American hegemony that followed it, is impossible to know.

But one thing now seems clearer than it did on September 11, 2001 in that the attacks didn’t merely interrupt the post-Cold War order, but marked the beginning of its end.

Cracks in Washington as Vance Challenges US War Claims

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US Vice President JD Vance meets members of the National Guard, at Union Station in Washington, D.C., US, August 20, 2025. (Photo by Reuters)

Press TV UK

US Vice President J. D. Vance is secretly questioning the Pentagon’s optimistic narrative of the war on Iran, senior American officials say, as evidence mounts that weapons stockpiles of the United States are dwindling while the Islamic Republic’s military capabilities remain largely intact.

In private meetings, Vance has repeatedly challenged the US Defense Department’s portrayal of the war of aggression against Iran, raising concerns that the Pentagon is in fact downplaying the severe depletion of US missile reserves, The Atlantic, a Washington-based news outlet, reported on Monday, citing two senior American officials.

Vance, the sources said, has already questioned the accuracy of briefings, warning US President Donald Trump about shortages in critical weapons systems.

According to the report, the implications of the acute shortages are far-reaching as depleted arsenals could undermine Washington’s ability to sustain conflicts elsewhere, including in East Asia and Europe.fd continued aggression against Iran, which is draining Washington’s arsenal.

While War Secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs Chairman General Dan Caine publicly insist that stockpiles remain strong and allege that Iran has suffered devastating losses, Vance has cautiously voiced his doubts.

Furthermore, despite official optimism, internal intelligence paints a very different picture, with sources familiar with classified assessments indicating that Iran still retains roughly two-thirds of its air force, most of its missile-launching infrastructure, and a significant fleet of fast naval vessels capable of conducting operations in the strategic Strait of Hormuz.

Although Hegseth once boasted of “complete control” over Iranian skies, Iranian forces shot down several US fighter jets and dozens of US and Israeli drones, exposing Washington’s vulnerabilities. Moreover, Tehran has steadily restored its missile launchers, with about half now operational again after an extended two-week ceasefire mediated by Pakistan.

The war, initiated on February 28 in close collaboration with Israel, has also imposed a heavy toll on US military resources as extensive use of advanced interceptors and long-range strike weapons such as Tomahawk and Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff missiles has caused serious shortages, weakening the US’s preparedness for potential future conflicts.

Analysts warn that more than half of certain key munitions may already be depleted, exacerbating preexisting shortages caused by arms transfers to Ukraine and Israel as well as sluggish production.

Even Pentagon officials have acknowledged that these deficits could jeopardize US performance in potential wars against major powers like Russia or China. This is while the Pentagon continues to claim that officials provide Trump with a “complete, unvarnished picture,” while praising their assessments as “precise, exact, and comprehensive.”

Trump has echoed the Pentagon’s upbeat messaging, declaring the all-out military campaign a victory, and claiming that US weapons supplies are “virtually unlimited”, but critics inside the administration suspect that such portrayals are tailored only to please the president.

“Pete’s TV experience has made him really skilled at knowing how to talk to Trump, how Trump thinks,” a former official told The Atlantic.

“Hegseth strives to tell the president exactly what he wants to hear. I think that’s dangerous,” the report cited another official as saying.

Meanwhile, Vance, who once argued “we were lied to” about past wars and insisted “this is not our war”, now faces pressure to balance his earlier anti-war stance with political ambitions tied to the conflict’s outcome, the report stressed.

Hegseth and Vance both served as low-ranking service members in Iraq at around the same time.

Hegseth was a National Guard lieutenant attached to the 101st Airborne Division while Vance was an enlisted Marine Corps journalist.

Far from Hegseth’s predictions of a quick, decisive win, the war on Iran has now drifted into a costly, indeterminate muddle. While the Islamic Republic remains a formidable power, the US faces mounting military strain and deepening divisions at the highest levels of government.

The US has already suspended its arms deliveries to NATO ally Estonia as the war has been a major drain on Washington’s arsenal.

The shortages have even pushed the Pentagon to use civilian factories for producing munitions.

Citing some unnamed military sources, The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month that senior US military officials had already held talks with top executives of major automakers, including General Motors (GM.N), and Ford Motor (F.N), to produce weapons and other military supplies.

In retaliation for the US-Israeli all-out aggression which soon turned into a regional conflict, Iranian Armed Forces responded with over 100 waves of retaliatory strikes, codenamed Operation True Promise 4, launching hundreds of ballistic and hypersonic missiles as well as drone attacks against sensitive and strategic American and Israeli targets throughout the region.

[…]

Via https://www.presstv.co.uk/Detail/2026/04/28/767684/Cracks-in-Washington-as-Vice-President-JD-Vance-challenges-US-war-claims–Report

Yemen’s Houthis take over strait vital to global shipping

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The Houthis launched a major offensive against Saudi-backed government forces

The Houthis launched a major offensive against Saudi-backed government forces © Mohammed HUWAIS / AFP

Sanaa (AFP) – Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthis seized a strategic Red Sea island on Friday after capturing territory along the coast, sealing their takeover of a vital shipping corridor linking Europe and Asia.

The development is likely to deepen the Middle East war’s impact on international commerce, months after the strategic Strait of Hormuz was blockaded by Iran, which hailed its Yemeni allies’ advance on Friday.

After a week-long offensive that has left hundreds dead, the Houthis appeared to be in control of territory along the Yemeni side of the Bab al-Mandab Strait, the southern gateway to the Red Sea and, in turn, the Suez Canal.

A local official with Yemen’s Saudi-backed government said on Friday that the Houthis had “completed their takeover of the Bab al-Mandab area and Mayyun Island”, while a witness said gunmen were “deploying along the Bab al-Mandab shore and are driving around in military vehicles”.

The capture of Mayyun island, in the middle of the narrow waterway, heightens the fighters’ ability to attack Saudi tankers, which they have been targeting since July.

Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil exporter, has relied on the Red Sea ever since Iran’s Hormuz blockade choked off its shipments via the Gulf.

Mohammad Mokhber, an adviser to Iranian supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei, congratulated the Houthis on their “resounding victory” on Friday.

“Now the Iranians don’t only control Hormuz and the Strait of Hormuz, but they control the other most strategic chokepoint in the Middle East,” Farea Al-Muslimi, research fellow at the Chatham House think-tank, told AFP.

Oil prices have soared past $100 a barrel this week, while average US diesel prices topped $6 for the first time on Friday — a potential headache for President Donald Trump ahead of midterm elections.

A member of the Houthis’ politburo had sought to allay fears for global shipping in an interview released on Friday, insisting “there is no cause for international concern”.

“Freedom of navigation and international trade in the Red Sea and Bab al-Mandab are safe and orderly,” Hazem al-Assad told the Al-Araby al-Jadeed news outlet.

‘Apocalyptic’ atmosphere

The Houthi offensive has cost more than 500 lives, and has displaced about 46,000 people, the UN migration agency said on Friday.

It is part of renewed hostilities in divided Yemen’s brutal civil war that began with the group’s takeover of the capital Sanaa in 2014.

The Houthis carried out their heaviest missile and drone attack in years this week against Saudi Arabia — Yemen’s northern neighbour — setting oil sites ablaze and wounding 73.

Satellite images from Copernicus Sentinel Data taken on Thursday showed black smoke billowing near Medina, along the general route of the East-West pipeline that carries Saudi oil to its Red Sea coast.

Before the Red Sea offensive, the Houthis already controlled a large part of Yemen’s north.

They have recently attacked government-held areas in Hodeida and Taiz provinces and swept down the coast, seizing the port city of Mocha and Zuqar island, north of the Bab al-Mandab, on Thursday.

Mohamed, 46, who fled Mocha in the middle of the night, told AFP there was an “apocalyptic” atmosphere in the historic city.

While Saudi Arabia has hit back with airstrikes and ordered troop reinforcements from Aden, where the internationally recognised government is based, it has failed to stop the Houthis’ lightning advance.

Houthi media said two Saudi strikes hit Mocha’s airport on Friday, while a local official there said the city’s seaport was also hit by six missiles of unknown origin.

“I think the Saudis have tried everything they can to avoid this war, but I don’t think they have any more choice,” said Al-Muslimi.

‘Dangerous conflict’

The local Yemeni official said the number of fighters on Mayyun island, just 13 square kilometres (five square miles) was “not large”, adding that they would probably deploy on hills overlooking the Bab al-Mandab.

The strait has four strategic islands: Zuqar and Mayyun, both in Houthi control, and the two Hanish islands. Government military sources told AFP that the Houthis have besieged government troops on the Hanish islands.

The UN Security Council met Thursday to discuss the conflict with Yemen envoy Hans Grundberg, who called for “the active investment of every member of this body to contain” what could become a more dangerous conflict.

The ongoing exchanges risk reviving a war that killed hundreds of thousands of Yemenis and sparked one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.

The Houthis, after seizing Sanaa and forcing out the government, fought a Saudi-led coalition from 2015 until a United Nations-brokered ceasefire in 2022.

[…]

Via https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20260911-yemen-s-houthis-complete-takeover-of-bab-al-mandab-area-govt-official-to-afp

EU foreign policy chief backs trade ban on illegal Israeli settlements

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(Photo credit: Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

The Cradle

SEP 11, 2026

Kaja Kallas says the measure needs only a qualified majority, bypassing the unanimity rule that has shielded Israel from EU action

EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs Kaja Kallas has thrown her weight behind a bloc-wide ban on trade with illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories, calling such a step a “principled stance” in an interview with the Irish Times published on 10 September.

Kallas drew a direct parallel with the EU’s response to Russia’s seizure of Crimea, telling the paper that the bloc had no difficulty naming that occupation for what it was.

“When Crimea was occupied, then it was very clear – it’s illegal, we don’t recognize this,” she said. “We should have the same principled stance – you know this is illegal, everybody agrees, so we should stop trading with Occupied [Palestinian] Territories.”

A settlement import ban, she said, would not be held hostage to the unanimity rule that has repeatedly sunk EU efforts to penalize Israel’s continuous crimes against the Palestinian people.

The ban can be advanced as a trade measure rather than a foreign policy decision and would therefore clear the bar with a qualified majority, meaning at least 15 of the 27 governments, representing roughly two-thirds of the bloc’s population.

Kallas said EU foreign ministers broadly accept that the settlements, which continue to expand across the occupied West Bank, are illegal under international law.

Germany, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovenia have each previously blocked EU measures on Israel that required the consent of all 27 capitals.

Most of that group would likely vote against a settlement trade ban as well, though Kallas said some governments that refused to touch the wider EU–Israel free-trade agreement are willing to sever trade with the illegal settlements.

The European Commission is under “very clear” pressure from national governments to put the proposal forward, Kallas said, and foreign ministers are awaiting the move.

She pointed to “pros and cons” in acting before the Knesset elections at the end of October, saying one argument for delay is avoiding any boost to “radical” figures in Israeli politics.

The remarks follow a series of sanctions announced by the UK on 8 September targeting illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, including a ban on imports of settlement goods and measures against companies and individuals driving settlement growth. France and Canada are set to impose comparable bans.

British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband condemned the occupation as unlawful and said London accepts that Palestinians in the occupied West Bank are being subjected to ethnic cleansing at the hands of settlers, backed by the Israeli military, with the Israeli government looking the other way or actively backing forced displacement.

Twelve states, among them Denmark, Spain, and Finland, issued a joint statement demanding a halt to settlement expansion and rejecting any move toward annexation of Palestinian land or the expulsion of its population.

[…]

Via https://thecradle.co/articles/eu-foreign-policy-chief-backs-trade-ban-on-illegal-israeli-settlements