Pentagon Prepares ‘Options’ For Trump To Strike Iran Before Midterms; Tanker Attacked Off Qatar

The Atlantic is reporting Wednesday afternoon that the Pentagon is preparing strike options for the Commander-in-Chief to consider, and that Trump may actually pull the trigger before the midterm elections – though the report emphasizes that the decision is still being debated:

After months of on-again, off-again fighting, the United States hasn’t struck Iran in several weeks. The stretch of relative tranquility is coinciding with the final phase of the midterm-election campaign, and the assumption has been that President Trump will want to keep it going through November 3 so as not to remind voters of an unpopular war that is dragging Republican candidates down nationwide.

But that may not be what happens. The White House has asked the Pentagon to develop strike options against Iranian targets that could be exercised ahead of the midterms, according to two administration officials. The planning underscores just how much the president wants to reduce gas prices and demonstrate progress in the conflict before the vote, administration officials told us.

And yet a renewed outbreak of direct bombing would likely actually serve to do the opposite, given oil prices have tended to shoot up on headlines of major direct escalation.

Reports out of Iran confirmed earlier Wednesday that negotiations are ‘stalemated’ – also as the Iranians have ramped up targeting tankers with drones in the Strait of Hormuz over the last week.

One peculiar and notable line from The Atlantic report is that Trump and the Republicans are looking for “some sort of victory” in a war that they promised would be swift and decisive, but instead has drifted into a seven-month quagmire:

The plans are being developed by U.S. Central Command, which is coordinating the war effort, a U.S. official told us. Even the plans’ advocates acknowledge that limited strikes would not, by themselves, bring Iran to the negotiating table, restore safe travel through the Strait of Hormuz, or lower gas prices before Election Day. But those in favor believe that further action after months of uneasy peace could allow Trump to demonstrate strength and potentially declare some sort of victory, giving Republicans much-needed momentum heading into the election. 

Tehran has constantly signaled its military is at the ‘ready’ and that it is continuing to build up its ballistic missile arsenal, even as its exports have dropped dramatically due to the US naval blockade. Meanwhile…

Wednesay (10/7): A tanker was hit by “multiple projectiles” about 51 nautical miles north of Qatar.

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Maduro and His Wife to Face Additional Charges Over Torture of Americans

Former Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, are facing additional charges over the torture of Americans.

More than a dozen Americans held in Venezuelan prisons have been tortured.

Federal prosecutors have also weighed charging several more people over their role in the torture of American prisoners.

CNN reported:

Prosecutors in New York are expected to bring new charges against former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores over the alleged torture of Americans who were held in Venezuelan government custody in recent years, according to multiple people familiar with the investigation.

An announcement could come as soon as Thursday, the people said.

The new charges relate to what the US government has said was the wrongful detention of more than a dozen US citizens in Venezuelan prisons during the time Maduro led a repressive regime in Venezuela, the people briefed on the investigation said.

Investigators have also discussed charging several additional people for their alleged role in the torture of Americans, according to a source familiar with the matter.

Fox News also confirmed that Maduro and his wife will be facing additional charges.

President Trump ordered military strikes on Venezuela earlier this year as special operators captured Maduro.

Delta Force captured Maduro and dragged him out of his bedroom amid military strikes earlier this year.

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Researchers Develop AI ‘Mind-Reading’ Tool That Reconstructs What Your Eyes See

A cutting-edge new artificial intelligence (AI) tool can reconstruct images from a person’s vision simply by analyzing brain scans.

The technology recreates a person’s visual field with startling accuracy and can also predict brain activity by analyzing what a person is looking at in real time.

Professor Michal Irani of the Weizmann Institute of Science developed the “mind-reading” AI model Brain-IT, which interprets functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of participants’ brain activity as they view a series of images.

Irani and her team – which includes Roman Beliy, Amit Zalcher, Jonathan Kogman, and Navve Wasserman from Weizmann’s Computer Science and Applied Mathematics Department – released their research on Sept. 14.

While the current study used fixed images, Irani’s lab plans to test these so-called mind-reading methods on participants’ hearing and, eventually, on video.

“What remains especially challenging is decoding video – for example, during dreaming,” Irani said in a statement.

“Dozens of images change every second, while an fMRI scan takes about two seconds. If we overcome all these obstacles, it’s possible that in the future we may even be able to read dreams.”

The study reviewed fMRI scans of eight participants who had viewed thousands of images across 30 to 40 scanning sessions. Participants viewed around 40 images over roughly 10-minute sessions as researchers scanned their brains six times. This created roughly 73,000 image-fMRI pairs for the AI model to analyze.

Irani said other models can translate brain activity into images with “impressive reconstructions,” but that they often make basic composition and color errors.

“The new model we developed outperforms them in reconstructing both the content of the image and its details,” she said.

“What’s more, while every other model requires dozens of hours of brain scans to learn to ‘read’ a new person, our model needs only one hour,” she said.

Scientists have been working on similar technology for years. A paper published in the Journal of Law and the Biosciences in 2017 discussed the possibility of reaching “brain-based mind reading” with neuroimaging techniques.

The paper described how these techniques could be used for lie detection to assess defendants, prisoners, and prospective jurors in court cases to improve the legal system. However, it also notes that brain-based mind reading could have potentially unethical coercive uses.

Improvements in the signal data produced by fMRI machines and in how humans analyze that data in recent years have made this technology possible, according to Kenneth Norman, a psychology and neuroscience professor at Princeton University.

In a discussion with the American Psychological Association in 2022, Norman said the technology could help people with depression or anxiety.

Therapists could use neurofeedback to make participants aware that their thinking has drifted toward negative thought loops and then give them direction to try to control those mental patterns, he said.

Some neuroscientists have heralded the capabilities of Brain-IT’s AI model, highlighting how it could therapeutically help people suffering from neurological conditions. But others have raised concerns about how the technology could be abused to coercively extract information from a person’s mind.

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Danish Population Register Breached, Leaking Data of Nearly Nine Million People

Hackers are suspected of having cracked the Danish government’s national database containing the personal information of nearly nine million people, potentially exposing them to fraud or identity theft.

Copenhagen’s Ministry of Research, Education and Digitalisation said on Monday that the Central Register of Persons (CPR), the national civil registration database containing personal information for millions of citizens, has been compromised.

In Denmark, all legal residents have a unique 10-digit civil registration number, used to access public services, healthcare, banking, and taxes, and to store information on each citizen, including name, date of birth, address, marital status, citizenship, religious affiliation, and parentage.

The government said on Monday that unidentified people used a Danish business’s access to the system to wrongfully obtain the CPR numbers, names, and addresses of around 8.8 million people, the public Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR) reported.

In a briefing on Monday, government minister Christina Egelund said that it was too early to tell whether it was a cyber attack or whether foreign state actors were involved in the leak.

“We are not ruling out any clues in the ongoing investigation. Nor that it may have an international character,” she said.

Egelund added that the government will review the entire CPR system and implement “adjustments and transformations” to re-establish security.

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More Ukrainian-Style One-Way Attack Drones Seized In Mexico

The emergence of fiber-optic one-way attack drones among Mexican cartels signals a troubling security threat just south of the US border.

Images published by local outlet Luz Noticias show that the Mexican Army seized Category 1 suicide drones with fiber-optic cable reels and improvised explosives. This is sparking ongoing concerns that low-cost attack drones associated with the Ukraine-Russia war and the US-Iran conflict are spreading to narco-terrorists in the Western Hemisphere.

Mexican troops found 15 drones and more than 40 improvised explosive devices in the municipality of El Rosario during security patrols on Monday. The municipality is situated in southern Sinaloa.

Here’s what the outlet said:

During the inspection , Mexican Army personnel located and seized drones , drone controllers , fiber optic cables, batteries, improvised explosive devices , chargers, cartridges, long guns , tactical vests, and ballistic plates.

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Debunking Myths Of October 7th And The Zionist War Against Palestine

Today, October 7th, 2026, will officially mark three years since the beginning of a non-stop genocide against the Palestinian enclave of Gaza.

Today, the airwaves will be full of relentless propaganda falsely asserting the victimhood of Israel and using every confounded twist of logic imaginable to paint the occupiers as the oppressed. Media will be rife with discourse that attempts to frame the slaughter of innocent people as righteous, with a collective amnesia that pretends to assert that all of this began only three years ago.

This disingenuous distortion of reality shouldn’t be allowed to stand. So allow us to counteract that narrative by comparing the myths with the actual facts.

Myth: October 7th was a surprise attack.

Fact: In the last three years copious amounts of information have come out conclusively proving that October 7th was, in fact, not only not a surprise, but it was an outright false flag attack.

An investigation from the Israeli news outlet Haaretz recently confirmed that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had foreknowledge of the impending attacks, deliberately doing nothing to prevent them. This corroborates previously revealed information that the Israeli Prime Minister was given express warning from neighboring intelligence agencies that, if acted upon, would have prevented the attacks from happening.

Myth: The casualties of October 7th were entirely inflicted by Hamas.

Fact: While it is true that Hamas did kill many Israelis during the attack, it is incorrect to say that they were solely responsible for Israeli casualties. Several investigative reports in the years since, as well as admissions from Israeli officials themselves, openly acknowledge that the Israeli military authorized the Hannibal directive during the attack — a protocol that authorizes the Israeli military to kill their own people.

The official stated purpose of the Hannibal directive is to prevent the capture of Israelis, operating under the supposition that it is better to be killed than captured. In practice, however, the Hannibal directive is utilized by Israel as a means of killing its own citizens to then falsely attribute the deaths to groups such as Hamas as a means to further justify violent actions against Palestinians.

Myth: Hamas committed mass rapes and the beheading of babies during the October 7th attack.

Fact: This is a classic example of atrocity propaganda. Numerous investigations, including by Israeli sources, have found no credible evidence of any such atrocities taking place during October 7th. Such claims were deliberately spread as a part of a mass propaganda campaign to manufacture justification for the Gaza genocide.

Myth: After taking several Israelis hostage, Hamas refused to let them go even when concessions were made during peace negotiations.

Fact: Another blatant example of disinformation. Reports indicate that Hamas leaders immediately offered several times to release all of their hostages so long as basic conditions were met by the Israelis to secure the safety of Palestinian civilians. It is on record that Israel refused to accept these terms.

Now that we’ve debunked some of the primary myths surrounding October 7th itself, allow us to focus on some of the historical context and myths that continue to circulate contributing to the spread of disinformation promoting the Zionist narrative.

Myth: Hamas is a terrorist organization started by Palestinians who hate Israel for the express purpose of committing violence against Israelis.

Fact: Hamas is a creation of Israeli intelligence. Similar to how other terrorist organizations the likes of Al Qaeda and ISIS exist as a creation of the Central Intelligence Agency in the US, the formation of Hamas was largely fomented by Israel’s Mossad.

It is a documented fact of historical record that Israeli intelligence deliberately empowered Hamas over more secular, less militant, Palestinian political organizations so that the Israeli government could use the political prominence of Hamas as a justification for enacting more violence against the Palestinian people.

Previous investigations by Haaretz have found that Benjamin Netanyahu himself personally oversaw the transfer of funds to Hamas to ensure they remained in power, including a recent investigation finding that a request was made by the Israeli government to increase funds to Hamas just a week before the October 7th attack.

Myth: Jews and Muslims have historically never been able to coexist peacefully, particularly in Palestine.

Fact: Hostilities between Palestinian and Israeli people are a relatively modern invention. For centuries Muslims, Jews, and Christians alike all lived relatively peacefully and cooperatively in the Palestinian territory.

It is a matter of historical record that during the reign of the Ottoman Empire, a Muslim caliphate, the Ottoman Turks willfully encouraged and embraced the immigration of Jews into Ottoman territory after the Jewish people experienced decades of discrimination from European countries.

Hostilities began shortly following the end of World War 1, after the Ottoman Empire dissolved and Great Britain seized control of the Palestinian territory.

British authorities had officially pledged to grant the Palestinian people their independence, but quickly betrayed this agreement in the favor of Zionist lobbying groups in Britain.

In 1917, at the behest of a Zionist campaign headed by Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild, the openly anti-Semitic British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour put forth what is known as the Balfour Declaration — an intentionally racist anti-jewish policy that supported the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine specifically to encourage the expulsion of Jews from Britain and other Western countries. Zionist groups, who have historically never cared about the safety or the security of the Jewish people, seized upon the opportunity.

Myth: The Israeli people have the right to occupy Palestine because it is their historic homeland.

Fact: The settlers who currently occupy Palestine under the Israeli colonial project are not ethnically ancestral semitic Jews, and have no rightful claim to the ownership of that territory.

History shows that the majority of Israeli settlers, particularly in the early days of Zionist colonialism, are of European descent, specifically from a group known as the Ashkenazi — a group of non-semitic ethnic eastern Europeans. While they may follow the Judaic religion, they are not ethnically Jewish semites.

Myth: All Jews are zionists, and all zionists are Jews.

Fact: This is a particularly pervasive piece of anti-jewish propaganda that is deliberately spread by zionists.

Numerous Jewish organizations outright reject the existence of Zionism as being incompatible with Judaism. Several Orthodox Jewish groups even go so far as to condemn the existence of Israel as a violation of Talmudic law, referring to the Zionist colonial project specifically as an abomination to God, since Jewish religious texts expressly specifies that a historic homeland for the Jewish people can only be granted upon the return of their Messiah.

Several Jewish organizations, most of which overlap in their opposition to Zionism, have also openly taken a stance against Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the decades of apartheid committed against Palestinians.

In regards to the existence of zionism, it is also an incorrect assertion that all zionists are Jews, since Zionism is a political ideology rather than a religious one. In the United States, the majority of zionists are actually Christian nationalists — a sect of religious extremists that promote a narrow interpretation of fundamentalist Christianity, which in part promotes a Judeo-Christian covenant that materializes as support for Zionism.

Ironically, Zionist settlers in the occupied Palestinian territory have a history of attacking Palestinian Christians as well, including destroying ancient churches and Christian holy sites.

The biggest myth of all: This is not a genocide.

Irrefutable fact: Every relevant human rights organization on the planet has characterized what Israel’s Zionist regime has done in Gaza for the last three years as a genocide, exacerbated by numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Prior to the outset of the genocide three years ago, human rights organizations declared conclusively again and again and again and again over the years that Israel’s brutal occupation of the Palestinian people constituted the crime of apartheid.

In October of 2023, shortly after the launch of the genocide, The Free Thought Project provided an extensive historical synopsis elaborating upon the facts of the Israel-Palestine conflict with distinct clarification of the history of Zionist brutalization against the Palestinian peoples.

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NY Times Suggests Babies Are Not Conscious

The New York Times has decided the open question in science this week is whether a baby is conscious. Not a cluster of cells. Not a theoretical model. An actual newborn baby.

Carl Zimmer’s 5 October piece, “Are Babies Conscious?” (yes that’s a real headline) walks readers through a lab test and then informs them that a “squirming, gurgling infant” does not seem conscious, “at least not in the way adults are.”

Zimmer’s setup is the oddball-sound test. A subject hears three low tones and a high one, over and over, then a run of four low tones. Adult brains throw a brief, distinctive blip at the break. People in a coma do not. People who are asleep do not. The Times then puts a newborn in the same frame and asks whether the blip will be there.

Are Babies Conscious? As scientists map the birth of consciousness, they hope to gain a better understanding of how it evolved in humans in the first place. https://t.co/g1D5A4wRtF— Patrick Emerton (@egregiousknave) October 5, 2026

Er what? https://t.co/ZqhoAq4dJk— m o d e r n i t y (@ModernityNews) October 6, 2026

The paper calls it an active scientific debate. Dr Topun Austin, a neonatologist at the University of Cambridge, is quoted defining the thing under study: “Consciousness is a process of being receptive to the outside world and mixing that with our own internal world, to create the feeling of who we are and where we are.“

A caption under the piece states that there was a time when our brains were too rudimentary to support consciousness. Zimmer’s own promo line said he had found scientists “on a mission to find out when consciousness begins in babies.”

The reaction online was immediate, and it was not about neuroscience. It was about where the line moves next.

@ModernityNews Ever get the feeling we’re living inside a cautionary tale?

Like we’re all just trapped in a dystopian ’70s sci-fi movie, while Charlton Heston screams about the sanctity of human life? pic.twitter.com/oxA1EaZhXJ— Alpha Of The Betas (@AlphaOfTheBetas) October 6, 2026

“Are Babies Conscious?”

Give this a few more years and they’ll claim consciousness doesn’t begin until the baby is one years old, so abortion should be legal up to that point. pic.twitter.com/hLxMdTzZzC— Arthur in California (@ArthurReturnss) October 5, 2026

@JackPosobiec This is setting to push for post-birth abortion down the line.— Emmanuel Gonzalez (@Emm_Gonzalez38) October 6, 2026

@JackPosobiec They want abortion legality to extend into early childhood— Paul Joseph Tinkle (@PTinkleIndy) October 5, 2026

@JackPosobiec Anyone who has had a child knows that babies are conscious. Only the childless hacks at the NYT are confused.— Andrew McCann (@andymccann) October 5, 2026

All this is going on while we’re debating whether ‘machines can be conscious’, a disturbing irony.

Incredible that we’re debating whether “machines can be conscious” while Democrats still haven’t acknowledged that babies in a mother’s womb have consciousness.— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) October 3, 2026

Of course, there are countless studies that indicate infants, even unborn infants have consciousness as we understand it.

In January, neonatologist Carlo Bellieni of the University of Siena published “A Rudimentary Consciousness Appears in the Late Fetal Period” in EC Gynaecology, reviewing 31 clinical trials from the last decade on fetal anatomy, perception and memory. His conclusion: the early appearance of memory is a sign of rudimental consciousness, and it does not depend on whether the fetus is inside or outside the womb, only on the grade of brain development.

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The Lancet Jumps the Shark

The Lancet’s latest review of mRNA vaccines, by Blakney and colleagues, presents itself as an authoritative synthesis of the evidence.

Titled “Safety and efficacy of mRNA vaccines: a mechanistic and public health perspective,” it promises to examine the mRNA platform from mechanistic, preclinical, clinical, and public health perspectives.

Instead, it delivers a remarkably confident account that gives little attention to many of the scientific and regulatory questions that have shaped debate over the past five years.

What makes the review effective as messaging is not that it ignores controversy, but that it appears to engage with it.

It names difficult issues — residual DNA, biodistribution, frameshifting, and IgG4 class switching — only to swiftly minimise them with reassuring language.

The effect is to create the appearance of critical scrutiny while reassuring readers that these concerns are either resolved or insignificant.

The review describes mRNA vaccines as a “transformative advance” characterised by “rapid clearance,” “lack of genomic integration,” and a “favourable safety profile.” It concludes that the accumulated evidence “affirms” the platform as safe, effective, and adaptable.

Ironically, the review sits behind a paywall. Most journalists will never read it, many doctors will see only the abstract, and policymakers are likely to rely on its conclusions without examining the evidence in detail.

Having spent more than five years examining regulatory decisions, FOI documents, advisory committee meetings, and independent laboratory findings on mRNA vaccines, I expected the review to grapple with the questions that repeatedly emerged during those investigations. But it didn’t.

The authors note that after injection, mRNA lipid nanoparticles “remain largely localised to the injection site” with “limited distribution” to secondary organs. The review also notes that vaccine mRNA has been detected in human plasma for up to 14 days in some recipients, and that mRNA and spike antigen have been found in draining lymph nodes for up to 60 days.

But these findings are quickly reframed as evidence of “rapid clearance” and “short-lived antigen expression” — a conclusion presented with far greater confidence than the underlying evidence appears to warrant.

Only last year, members of the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee questioned the manufacturers after discovering that biodistribution studies had never been conducted using the commercial vaccine administered to millions of people.

When asked directly whether those studies had been performed, company representatives struggled to answer, exposing important gaps in the evidence base. Yet those gaps receive little attention in the review.

Residual DNA is treated similarly.

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Why Are PFAS Still Used in Drugs When Alternatives Exist?

When you hear “PFAS,” you probably think of nonstick cookware, waterproof jackets, or contaminated drinking water. You probably don’t think of the prescription sitting in your medicine cabinet. Yet fluorinated compounds classified as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are built into a surprisingly wide range of approved pharmaceuticals, often not because they’re essential to how those medicines treat disease, but because they make the drug easier to formulate.

If fluorine serves the manufacturer’s design goals more than the patient’s therapeutic needs, then every PFAS-containing medicine that passes through your body and into the water supply deserves a harder look, particularly now that researchers have mapped out whether effective alternatives already exist. An analysis published in Sustainable Chemistry and Pharmacy took on exactly that question, and the answer should change how we think about drug design going forward.1

PFAS-Free Drug Alternatives Already Exist Across Nearly Every Medical Category

For the study, researchers investigated whether PFAS-containing medicines are truly necessary or whether practical alternatives already exist.2 They reviewed approved active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), the part of a medicine that produces its therapeutic effect, and identified 111 PFAS-containing medicines used in humans and 28 used in veterinary medicine.3

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Warnings of Chinese WHO Takeover Strengthen the Case for US Withdrawal

Warnings that America’s withdrawal from the World Health Organization will expand China’s influence raise a question for European governments: Why must American taxpayers finance the resistance to Beijing? Washington was the WHO’s largest donor, yet its contributions failed to resolve the administration’s concerns about Chinese influence. If European governments believe remaining in the organization can restrain China, they must explain how they intend to accomplish what they expected the United States to do.

The Trump administration refused on September 25, 2026, to back a UN political declaration on pandemic preparedness. By then, President Donald Trump had taken the United States out of the WHO, ended talks on the WHO Pandemic Agreement, and turned down changes to the International Health Regulations. To justify those moves, the administration pointed repeatedly to China’s sway over the organization.

At the September UN meeting, the U.S. representative opposed language in the declaration tied to pathogen access and benefit sharing, a framework still under negotiation, among other concerns. China’s delegate called for progress on the pandemic agreement and urged developed countries to provide financial and technological support to developing nations. The objections prevented adoption by consensus that day, leaving the declaration for further consideration by the General Assembly.

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