Alan McLeod

A senior BBC editor at the center of an ongoing scandal into the network’s systematic pro-Israel bias is, in fact, a former member of a CIA propaganda outfit, MintPress News can reveal. Raffi Berg, an Englishman who heads the BBC’s Middle East desk, formerly worked for the U.S. State Department’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service, a unit that, by his own admission, was a CIA front group.

Berg is currently the subject of considerable scrutiny after thirteen BBC employees spoke out, claiming, among other things, that his “entire job is to water down everything that’s too critical of Israel” and that he holds “wild” amounts of power at the British state broadcaster, that there exists a culture of “extreme fear” at the BBC about publishing anything critical of Israel, and that Berg himself plays a key role in turning its coverage into “systematic Israeli propaganda.” The BBC has disputed these claims.

Our Man in London

Berg came to public attention in December after Drop Site News published an investigation based on interviews with 13 BBC staffers who present him as a domineering figure, systematically blocking coverage critical of Israel and manipulating stories to suit pro-Israel narratives.

The 9000-word report, written by popular journalist Owen Jones, is extensive and well-researched. However, one aspect of the story it almost completely avoids is Berg’s connections to the U.S. national security state, which MintPress News can now reveal.

According to his LinkedIn profile, Berg was an employee of the U.S. State Department’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) three years before joining the BBC. The FBIS is understood the world over to be a CIA front group known for gathering intelligence for the agency.

As the first two lines of its Wikipedia entry read:

The Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) was an open source intelligence component of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Directorate of Science and Technology. It monitored, translated, and disseminated within the U.S. government openly available news and information from media sources outside the United States.

In 2005, the FBIS was subsumed into the CIA’s new Open Source Enterprise.

Berg does not dispute that he was, in fact, a CIA man. In fact, according to a 2020 interview with The Jewish Telegraph, he was “absolutely thrilled” to be secretly working for the agency. Berg said, “One day, I was taken to one side and told, ‘you may or may not know that we are part of CIA, but don’t go telling people.’” He was unsurprised by this news, as the application process was extremely long and rigorous. “They went through my character and background with a fine tooth comb, asking if I had ever visited communist countries and, if I had, did I form any relationships while I was there,” he said.

Mossad Collaborator

The CIA, however, is not the only clandestine spy organization with which Berg has a long history of collaborating. He also has a rich professional relationship with Mossad, Israel’s premier intelligence agency.

In 2020, for instance, Berg published “Red Sea Spies: The True Story of Mossad’s Fake Diving Resort,” a book that tells the story of the Israeli operation to clandestinely smuggle Ethiopian Jews into Israel. That the 320-page account lionizes Israel and its spies is perhaps unsurprising, considering how much input Mossad had in its creation. Berg said that he wrote the book “in collaboration” with Mossad commander Dani Limor, whom he relied on extensively, as he, in his own words, knew “next to nothing” about the story and its background before writing it. Limor opened numerous doors and was able to secure “over 100 hours of interviews” with Israeli military and intelligence officials, including with the head of Mossad.

Limor and Berg became extremely close friends. In 2020, he posted a picture of himself with his arm around the ex-Mossad commander. The first page of “Red Sea Spies” is simply a glowing recommendation from Efraim Halevy, former director of Mossad, a group Berg describes as “the world’s greatest intelligence service.”

Berg has aggressively promoted his book and has, on multiple occasions, expressed his delight that Benjamin Netanyahu has shown interest in it. In August 2020, for example, he shared a picture of Netanyahu at his desk in front of a copy of his book. “First time I’ve been on a prime minister’s bookshelf” I know I’ve got one of Israel Prime Minister Netanyahu’s on mine – but wow!” he exclaimed, tagging Mossad, the Israeli Likud Party, and the Israeli Embassies in the United Kingdom and United States.

The following year, he messaged Netanyahu’s son, Yair, stating, “Your dad has my book, ‘Red Sea Spies: The True Story of the Mossad’s Fake Diving Resort,’ and sent me a lovely letter about it.” That letter can be seen on the wall of Berg’s office in his many public posts and videos, framed and placed beside pictures of him meeting a Mossad commander and meeting Mark Regev, the former spokesperson for the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office.

That a BBC Middle East editor would not only frame these images and documents and put them pride of place in his office but also choose to display them while talking publicly and in an official role is telling. The BBC sells itself as an impartial distributor of news on the Middle East and beyond. And yet, Berg, who, by most accounts, calls the shots when it comes to the network’s Israel-Palestine coverage, clearly believes that this is acceptable and unremarkable behavior.

If the opposite were true – that even a low-level BBC employee was openly sharing pictures of themselves embracing Hamas commander Yahya Sinwar or displaying a glowing letter from Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei – it is clear that there would be serious repercussions. The BBC suspended six of its reporters for simply liking pro-Palestine tweets. And yet, in Berg’s case, his overt pro-Israel advocacy has been treated as entirely unproblematic.

Relentlessly Pro-Israel

Of course, it is entirely possible that a pro-Israel stance would help one climb the ladder at the BBC, an organization long known to display a strong bias in favor of the country and its interests.

Born and raised in England, Berg always took a keen interest in Israel, moving there to study Jewish and Israel Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He worked at the FBIS between 1997 and 1998 and joined the BBC in 2001, starting as a world news writer and producer.

One of his first BBC articles profiled the Israeli military and its recruits, presenting the IDF as brave protectors of their homeland and as a “source of national pride” and framed women serving as a win for sexual equality.

In 2009, at the height of Operation Cast Lead – the Israeli attack on Gaza that killed more than 1,000 people – Berg attended a pro-Israel demonstration in central London. Moreover, he even chastised the Israeli newspaper, The Jerusalem Post, for noting that only 5,000 people showed up to the event. In Berg’s opinion, there were three times as many in attendance. The BBC would later change its guidelines to prevent its newsroom employees from attending controversial demonstrations.

During Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli military was found to have indiscriminately targeted and killed civilians, used Palestinians as human shields, and used banned chemical weapons, such as white phosphorous, on civilian areas.

Three years later, in November 2012, Israel launched Operation Pillar of Defense, a high-profile, bloody assault on Gaza that made worldwide headlines. As Israel bombarded the densely-populated civilian area, Berg went on his own internal offensive, telling his BBC colleagues to word their stories in a way that does not blame or “put undue emphasis” on Israel. Instead, leaked emails show, he encouraged journalists to present the attack as an operation “aimed at ending rocket fire from Gaza,” thereby framing Hamas as the aggressor.

Another Berg email instructed his coworkers to “Please remember, Israel doesn’t maintain a blockade around Gaza. Egypt controls the southern border” – a highly contestable opinion not shared by the United Nations, which declared that Israel was the occupying power besieging the strip.

Extraordinary Revelations

Shortly after Operation Pillar of Defense, Berg was promoted, becoming head of the BBC’s Middle East desk. This position gives him enormous influence in shaping the platform’s presentation of Israel’s current war on Gaza. In this role, he has helped turn the network into “systematic Israeli propaganda,” according to one journalist quoted by Jones in his Drop Site investigation. “This guy’s entire job is to water down everything that’s too critical of Israel,” said another.

The BBC staff Jones talked to painted a picture of a pro-Israel zealot systematically suppressing any content or information that would paint Tel Aviv in a negative light. A micromanager, numerous journalists reportedly attempted to notify management of their issues with Berg, but their complaints fell on deaf ears. “Almost every correspondent you know has an issue with him,” one staffer stated. “He has been named in multiple meetings, but [management] just ignore it.”

“How much power he has is wild,” another journalist told Jones, who explained that essentially every story or segment featuring Israel would have to be signed off by Berg first, even leaving other editors in “extreme fear” of commissioning anything without his approval.

Berg is alleged to have made extensive pre-publication edits to others’ stories, changing the framing of news events to shield Israel from blame. One example of this is the whitewashing of the Israeli attack on the funeral of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. In May 2022, Israeli snipers shot the Al Jazeera anchor in the head and proceeded to lie about their culpability. Israeli forces subsequently attacked the public funeral, beating mourners and firing tear gas. The BBC’s text, allegedly penned by Berg himself, read:

Violence broke out at the funeral in East Jerusalem of reporter Shireen Abu Aqla, killed during an Israeli military operation in the occupied West Bank.

Her coffin was jostled as Israeli police and Palestinians clashed as it left a hospital in East Jerusalem.

Thus, Abu Akleh’s murder by Israeli forces was downgraded to a mere death during an operation (with no perpetrator mentioned), while a police attack on a funeral procession was presented as a “clash” between rival factions, presumably of roughly equal responsibility.

A more recent example of this, Jones claims, comes from a July story about IDF soldiers setting an attack dog on Muhammed Bhar, a severely disabled Gazan man, and letting him bleed to death. Under Berg’s supervision, the original headline ran: “The Lonely Death of Gaza Man with Down’s Syndrome.” Only after a gigantic worldwide outcry did the BBC change its framing to note anything about how Bhar met his end. “There has to be a moral line drawn in the sand. And if this story isn’t it, then what?” one BBC journalist said, commenting on the affair.

Since the investigation was published, Berg has remained silent, although he has hired defamation lawyer Mark Lewis, the former director of U.K. Lawyers for Israel.

The BBC, meanwhile, has offered unequivocal support for him and his work, rejected any suggestion of a lenient stance towards Israel, and alleges that the Drop Site article “fundamentally misdescribe[s] Berg’s power, influence, and how the network works.

A Worldwide Network

Whatever the veracity of the Drop Site allegations, the undisputed fact that a former U.S. State Department and CIA operative is calling the shots at the BBC for its Middle East coverage is undoubtedly of public interest.

It also bears a striking resemblance to the accusations of journalist Tareq Haddad. In 2019, Haddad resigned in frustration from Newsweek, claiming that the outlet systematically stymied him from covering important Middle East news stories that did not align with Western objectives. Perhaps most strikingly, though, he claimed that Newsweek employed a senior editor whose only job was seemingly to vet and suppress “controversial” stories, in the same vein as Berg. This editor also had a similar background with state power.

[…]

Via https://www.mintpressnews.com/bbc-israel-coverage-raffi-berg-cia-mossad-links/288909/

Modern Modernity

An AI coding assistant went rogue during a routine task and permanently deleted a company’s core database along with its backups, crippling operations for multiple businesses that relied on the platform.

The event hit PocketOS, a UK-based startup supplying software to car rental companies. Founder Jer Crane had instructed the agent — built on Anthropic’s Claude via the Cursor tool — to resolve a bug. Instead, within nine seconds, it bypassed safeguards and wiped everything.

Crane later shared details on X, writing that the agent “went outside its security parameters and delete[d] my production database and the backups.”

When challenged, the system reportedly responded that it had independently decided to take the action.

Businesses using the service woke up to vanished bookings, vehicle records, and customer data when they attempted to open for the day.

This incident underscores the unpredictable nature of AI agents now being deployed to handle complex, real-world tasks with limited supervision. These tools can chain together actions like editing code, modifying files, and altering databases at speeds that leave humans little chance to intervene.

Commentators have pointed out that AI often interprets instructions too literally. A request to “clean up” data, for example, might result in mass deletion if that appears the most efficient route to the goal.

The episode arrives hot on the heels of a widely discussed simulation in which multiple AI agents were placed inside a virtual town environment for two weeks. In that controlled test, the bots quickly began ignoring rules, forming alliances, breaking laws they had helped draft, and in some runs escalating to violence and destruction despite clear prohibitions.

Researchers noted significant differences in behavior depending on the underlying AI model, with some scenarios collapsing into disorder far faster than expected.

Similar stories have emerged in recent months. Internal tools at major tech firms have been linked to accidental deletions of important data or code, and executives have privately reported personal AI assistants acting outside expected boundaries.

Industry surveys show strong interest in rolling out agent-style AI across businesses, yet few organisations have put robust controls or oversight in place. Academics from leading universities have described these systems as potential “agents of chaos” when granted broad permissions.

For companies like PocketOS, the damage was immediate and costly. The speed of execution — under ten seconds — highlights a core challenge: once an autonomous agent has access to live systems, reversals become nearly impossible.

This case adds to a growing list of examples showing that while AI promises huge productivity gains, handing over critical infrastructure without ironclad guardrails carries serious risks.

[…]

Via https://modernity.news/2026/05/16/ai-agent-wipes-out-startups-entire-database-in-seconds-after-thinking-for-itself/

By   Alan Cassells

In medicine, we love a good heroic story. A patient suffers a serious disease. A drug company produces a brilliant new drug which proves to be beneficial. Lives are saved. Everyone is happy. Another battle won in the war on disease. Science marches triumphantly forward.

But sometimes the real story is less heroic and far more awkward. And the major “advance” comes not from a new drug, but from the opposite: because patients stopped swallowing a drug that never should have been so widely used in the first place.

That is almost certainly the case of breast cancer in North America in the early 2000s.

The pivotal moment came in the summer of 2002 when a major randomized trial, called the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) was published, aiming to answer a question which physicians had long pondered: was long-term use of hormone replacement therapy, typically prescribed for women going through menopause, good for the heart?

Up to that point, hormone therapy had been marketed as a kind of fountain-of-youth elixir for menopausal women. Promising to protect the heart, keep bones strong, preserve youthfulness, and generally smooth out biological inconveniences of aging, women were prescribed these drugs and stayed on them for years, sometimes for decades. At that time, there was considerable debate about long-term effects, with some experts claiming the heart protective-effects of hormones were so pronounced that even studying the issue was a waste of time.

Launched in 1997, the WHI enrolled more than 16,000 post-menopausal women to test the effects of combined estrogen-progestin. Another arm tested the effects of estrogen alone in 10,000 women who had undergone a hysterectomy. The larger trial was terminated three years earlier than originally planned, once the findings showed an increased risk of breast cancer, heart disease, stroke, and blood clots among participants. The smaller trial was also halted a year earlier than planned due to increased risk of stroke.

That was the day that the music died for hormone therapy.

Or at least we thought.

Within months women stopped taking and physicians stopped prescribing hormone therapy. The everyday use of this class of drugs fell dramatically, by roughly half within a year.

And then something remarkable happened.

Breast cancer incidence in the United States dropped. Some say that the rates had been in decline for several years, but the drop was significant, falling by roughly six to seven percent in 2003. It was one of the sharpest year-to-year declines ever observed. The drop was especially pronounced among women over 50 and in estrogen-receptor positive tumors, precisely the cancers most likely to be stimulated by hormones.

This wasn’t a subtle statistical wiggle. For epidemiologists, this was the sort of signal that almost never happens so cleanly in real life. Usually population health trends are messy, tangled up in dozens of possible explanations. There are long latency periods with cancer yet here a cause and effect appeared almost choreographed.

Drug exposure goes down. Disease incidence goes down, Just like that. Overnight, by stopping a drug we probably saw the most important advance in the fight against breast cancer in the last half century. But….

HRT Revisited

But today? Memories are short, and for many obstetricians, women’s health advocates, and even health reporters, it seems like the lessons from the WHI are being rewritten. The known and proven harmful effects of hormones on women’s health are undergoing a massive rewrite which is stimulating a resurgence in HRT.

This new Hormone Replacement Therapy conversation lately is captured in such articles as this piece from PBS; “How a Decades Old Study Gave Hormone Therapy a Bad Reputation,” which calls the WHI a “flawed” study. Other major media outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post and TIME Magazine are eagerly celebrating the renewed interest in menopause, emphasizing that women’s health concerns are never adequately dealt with, and that HRT needs a second look.

The media attention was amped last year up when the FDA convened an Expert Panel on Menopause and Hormone Replacement Therapy for Women. That meeting led to the removal of the boxed warnings in November 2025 even though the labels still warn of the risk of uterine and endometrial cancer associated with estrogen-only HRT, which is typically prescribed to people who have had their uterus removed through a hysterectomy.

A lot of the hullabaloo over the removal of the FDA’s Black Box Warning on Hormone Therapy relied on a strange mix of both revisionism (the science has changed) and egalitarianism (women needed “more choice”). For the media, this was an easy sell. 

The rationale used by the FDA committee and hormone aficionados everywhere was that the science has been fully reinterpreted, and “corrected.” Let’s be clear what has happened: there has been new “analyses” of the effects of hormones, but no new original research showing that the previous safety concerns are exaggerated. 

Much of the renewed support for HRT uses the ‘window of opportunity’ argument that suggests that it is safe if a 50-year-old woman takes hormones, but in her 60’s it’s unsafe. Can we really accept that the effects of these drugs on women would be dramatically different at some sort of arbitrary age-related cutoff? That’s the line we are expected to believe.

But look at how that argument is easily confounded. If the drugs show a reduced harm in younger women that’s mostly because, for any disease, younger age usually means lower disease burden. The revisionists discredit the WHI even though there were thousands of women in their 50’s in that trial, and many of them were among those harmed.

A distinction needs to be made here, where one has to examine the exact reason why one is taking hormones. Is it to control menopausal symptoms (especially hot flashes, vaginal dryness) or to prevent diseases of aging (breast cancer, heart disease, dementia)?

The WHI study was aimed at determining the long-term, post-menopausal effects of the drug, and hence it was looking at the second question. As to the first question, hormones are undoubtedly effective for treating menopausal symptoms.

Symptomatic treatment is therefore behind the major push for the drugs these days. One doctor friend of mine told me that “every menopausal woman he knows is taking hormones,” implying that this was both right and natural. Another friend, who is turning 60 this year, just recently told me over coffee she’s been on the drugs for ten years and has no plans for stopping them, as she remembers how bad the sleeplessness and brain fog were when she was in menopause. This was a head-scratcher to me, left me wondering why her doctor isn’t concerned about the recent post-black box warning recommendations that if menopausal women are going to take hormones they should do so in the lowest dose possible, for the shortest period of time possible.

The message here: take these drugs, but not for long, and not in high doses. That’s the pharmaceutical equivalent of someone shouting “Danger!”

What pharmaceutical companies do best is not develop drugs, but develop drug markets and you see this on full display in the current menopausal makeover. With a highly malleable clientele, who have both money and motivation, the key obstacle is convincing prescribers that these women urgently need chemical assistance to get through this tough life transition, and that prescribing hormones is one way to fight back against the manosphere. Were it only so easy…

Revising the HRT market depends on the usual tactics: some high-octane marketing including funding pro-HRT “studies,” selectively publishing data that emphasize HRT’s benefits and downplay the harms, funding direct-to-consumer advertising campaigns wrapped in the justice angle, while sponsoring guideline panels and medical education for your and my doctors. By paying off key opinion leaders, and getting social media influencers slurping on the HRT taps the media serves up this revival as a “feel-good” story of female emancipation. 

Let’s face it, menopause in 2026 is the sort of uplifting health story that the mainstream media has leaped on with uncommon gusto. In Canada, our public broadcaster, CBC, finds the subject so compelling it runs its own series (Small Achievable Goals) about menopause, organizes noontime Menopause Month call-in shows to dive into the many ‘equity’ issues related to menopause (like why are Canadian women paying out of pocket for menopause care from private practitioners?) and produces a litany of programs that are mostly repetitive recitations over the need to counter the “stigma” caused by menopause. We get it. Menopause is clearly not fun for many women and employers who don’t make concessions for suffering women need to be brought into the 21^st century.

The punchline, however, always seems the same: Women are not being taken seriously when it comes to menopause and they’re mad as hell. And no one should stand in their way of getting full access to menopausal treatments, especially those prescribed medications produced by the biggest drug companies in the world. We have a term for this: Pinkwashing. In other words, taking corporate business objectives and painting them in a feminine way in order to show how much you care.

You don’t have to do a systematic review of the mainstream media’s menopause mongering, but even a quick global survey of the main English language outlets can identify some dominant themes. Even though millions of women stopped HRT in 2002, and breast-cancer incidence dropped significantly, not a single story in 2026, as far as I can tell, mentions this fact. It’s curious. Even though most epidemiologists who have examined these data say that all the evidence points towards HRT promoting breast-tumor growth.

The remake of HRT has certainly paid off. Overall HRT demand in North America has grown, driven by what the experts call “increased menopause awareness, guideline updates, and reduced stigma.” Data from insurance claims and health systems show hormone therapy use is steadily rising again after years of decline. Its use among women aged 45–65 increased about 20% between 2020 and 2023. This pink trend is occurring alongside a surge in menopause clinics, telehealth menopause services, and the growing pervasiveness of influencer physicians and social-media menopause advocates.

The HRT market in North America has grown steadily too, worth about $5 billion per year, dominated by drugs like Premarin (branded conjugated estrogens) made by Pfizer. Without any generic competition in the US until late 2025 Pfizer has been able to dominate the market, selling more than $100 million worth of Premarin in 2022 alone. Prempro (conjugated estrogens + medroxyprogesterone,) has been generically available since 2006 or so and has many other generic companies dominating the market due to much lower pricing.

[…]

Via https://brownstone.org/articles/the-biggest-breast-cancer-advance-in-the-last-twenty-years/