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Western Media Normalize Ethnic Cleansing of Lebanon by Viewing It Through Israel’s Eyes

In October 2024, one year into Israel’s genocidal war on the Gaza Strip and attendant assault on Lebanon, the Israeli army did a thing. It invited journalists from major Western corporate media outlets on an incursion into Lebanon’s ravaged south, accompanied by Israeli military personnel who would interpret the wreckage in Israel’s favor—not that the Western media have ever required much assistance in this regard.

Reporters from the New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press, Reuters, BBC, Fox News and a handful of other special guests signed up for the cross-border sortie. It was, as Habib Battah and Christina Cavalcanti note in an investigation for the Public Source (8/27/25), an “awkward hybrid between a traditional embed and the kind of all-expense-paid publicity trip that journalists refer to as junkets, freebies and dog-and-pony shows.”

Never mind that it is entirely illegal for journalists or anyone else to enter Lebanon from Israel—what’s one more illegal invasion from a country that has been invading Lebanon pretty much since its founding? As Battah and Cavalcanti emphasize, these media professionals were also embedding themselves “within a national project of extraordinary transnational violence,” hosted by an “extrajudicial occupying military power—a critical point that all of them would fail to mention in their coverage.”

The Israelis certainly hit the jackpot with the coverage, as reporters excitedly discovered boots and helmets allegedly belonging to Hezbollah—clear proof that the group had been plotting a nefarious attack on Israel. New York Times Jerusalem correspondent Isabel Kershner, an old pro at conducting preemptive journalistic strikes on Lebanon, did not disappoint with her dispatch (10/13/24), “Just Over the Border From Israel, a Hezbollah Cache of Explosives and Mines.”

And in report after embedded report, Israel’s chosen journalists faithfully transmitted the tiresome and counter-logical notion that Hezbollah was somehow the aggressor in the arrangement—as opposed to the army that was busily slaughtering thousands of people in Lebanon while implementing a scorched-earth strategy.

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After Killing Three Indian Mariners, US Bombs Another Tanker in the Gulf of Oman

US Central Command announced on Thursday that it bombed an oil tanker for the third time this week in the Gulf of Oman as part of its enforcement of the blockade of Iranian ports, which comes after India confirmed the previous US attack on a tanker killed three Indian crew members.

CENTCOM said its latest attack targeted the Guinea-Bissau-flagged tanker Jalveer. “A US aircraft fired two Hellfire missiles into the ship’s engine room after the crew repeatedly failed to comply with directions from US forces,” the command said.

Indian media on Thursday identified the three Indian mariners who were killed by the previous US attack on the Palau-flagged oil product tanker Settebello as Shivanand Chaurasiya, Patnala Suresh, and Aditya Sharma, a 23-year-old deck cadet who was on the ship for training to become an officer.

Aditya’s father, Rajesh Sharma, called the US attack a war crime and said his government should take a strong stance. “My last conversation with him was on Sunday. I request the government to take a strong stance against the US. I will say it is a war crime to attack a commercial ship with a missile,” Rajesh told NDTV.

“There are a lot of ways to control those cargo ships, you can send a military, you can arrest the crew members, you have no right to attack them with deadly missiles,” he added.

According to CENTCOM’s numbers, its forces have “disabled” nine civilian commercial ships while enforcing the blockade. “The blockade is being enforced impartially against vessels of all nations entering or departing Iranian ports and coastal areas, including all Iranian ports on the Arabian Gulf and Gulf of Oman,” the command said.

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Trump Says US Will Be ‘Taking’ Iran’s Kharg Island

President Trump on Thursday threatened Iran with a third straight night of bombing and said that the US would eventually be “taking” Iran’s Kharg Island, an island deep in the Persian Gulf that serves as a major oil export hub.

“The United States will be hitting Iran (Whose Navy, Air Force, Radar, Anti Aircraft, and all other forms of Defense, together with most of its offensive capability, are GONE!), VERY HARD TONIGHT,” the president wrote on Truth Social.

“At some point in the not too distant future, we will be taking Kharg Island, and other oil infrastructure points, and assume total control of their Oil and Gas Markets, much like we have with Venezuela, which is working out brilliantly for both Venezuela and the United States of America,” Trump added.

During the full-scale US-Israeli bombing campaign against Iran from February 28 to April 8, the US positioned Marines and US Army paratroopers in the region for potential ground operations to target Iranian islands and the country’s coast. A report from independent journalist Ken Klippenstein recently revealed that some members of the US Army’s 82nd Airborne were deployed to Israel.

Klippenstein cited a military source who told him that the deployment to Israel was part of a US-Israeli joint contingency plan completed since February to seize Kharg Island and carve out coastal territory inside Iran.

Later on Thursday, Trump told Fox News that his “preference” would be to take Kharg Island but that he doesn’t know if “America would have the stomach for it.” Any US ground operation to take the island would almost certainly result in major US casualties since the invading troops would face significant drone and missile attacks.

Trump again compared the potential operation to take over Iranian oil infrastructure to his attack on Venezuela to abduct Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Since then, the US has taken control of Venezuela’s oil exports, though the US war with Iran is much different since the US has faced much stiffer resistance, and the entire country is mobilized for war.

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ACLU Sues After Facial Recognition Falsely Identifies Florida Man as a Child Abductor

Police arrested a man in Florida for attempted child abduction in a town he had never visited, and the only evidence linking him to the crime was an AI facial recognition hit. Represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), he is now suing the officers and agencies who put him through it.

In November 2023, police in Jacksonville Beach, Florida, responded to a call about an attempted child abduction at a McDonald’s. Witnesses said an adult man allegedly tried to get the child, identified as a girl under 12 years old, to leave the restaurant with him. According to a police report, facial recognition software concluded with 93 percent confidence that the suspect was Robert Dillon.

In August 2024, Deputies arrested Dillon at his home in Fort Myers, Florida—hundreds of miles away, at the opposite end of the state. “Are you shitting me, man?” Dillon asked the arresting deputy. “I haven’t been out of Fort Myers in two years.” Further, he also said he had never been to Jacksonville Beach.

Dillon posted bail and pleaded not guilty to enticing or luring a child—a third-degree felony, punishable by up to five years in prison. More than two months later, prosecutors dropped the charges after his attorney provided evidence that he was at work on the day in question.

But that doesn’t excuse the fact that he was only arrested in the first place, and threatened with prosecution for a particularly heinous offense, because of shoddy police work.

The ACLU is now suing the city of Jacksonville Beach, as well as the individual police officers and officials involved in the case. According to the lawsuit, the responding officer viewed security camera footage of the suspect but didn’t take a copy; instead, he took pictures of the screen with his cell phone. “In the photos, the suspect image is low resolution, and the suspect’s face is partially shadowed and off-axis,” the lawsuit claims.

When an investigator queried the facial recognition system, it was with the officer’s grainy secondhand cell phone photos.

But there were other leads that police could have followed, to either bolster their case or point in another direction. For example, when he approached the girl, the suspect was picking up food that had been ordered ahead; this implies he had an online account, with contact information and a form of payment attached.

“These records could have been used to identify the actual person who placed the suspect’s order,” the lawsuit notes. “Upon information and belief, Jacksonville Beach PD personnel never requested or obtained mobile ordering records, payment data, or online account information from McDonald’s.”

Further, the McDonald’s manager recognized the assailant as a “regular customer”—likely precluding Dillon, who lived and worked on the other side of the state and did not frequently travel. Besides, at no point did investigators search footage for the suspect’s previous visits, either for higher quality images or transaction records. And once they settled on Dillon as a suspect, investigators could have gotten a warrant for his cell phone’s GPS data, showing whether or not he was at a fast food restaurant 300 miles away from his home on the night in question.

The lawsuit notes that when Dillon’s name came up, investigating officer Scott O’Connell queried the police database of license plate readers, which did not detect Dillon’s vehicles in Jacksonville Beach within the 48 hours surrounding the attempted abduction.

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DNA study of nearly 200 Indigenous genomes reveals unknown Asian ‘ghost’ population contributed to American ancestry

Humans migrated to South America in three distinct waves over the course of thousands of years, a new large-scale analysis of Indigenous Americans’ DNA reveals. The investigation also found that genes related to fertility, metabolism and the immune response helped people adapt to their unique environment in the “final frontier” of human migration, the researchers said.

In a study published Wednesday (April 22) in the journal Nature, an international team of scientists detailed findings from the Indigenous American Genomic Diversity Project, which analyzed 128 genomes from people living in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay and Peru — an investigation that included 45 populations and 28 language families. The researchers’ goal was to better understand how and when people arrived on the continent and the factors that shaped these populations’ genetics.

“Until now, only two Amazonian Indigenous populations had been genetically characterized, and due to the particularity of their environment and their isolation, they were not very representative,” study first author Marcos Araújo Castro e Silva, a researcher at the Spanish National Research Council’s Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE) and Pompeu Fabra University in Spain, said in a translated statement. The research team worked in collaboration with Indigenous communities to develop the study and integrate the findings into Indigenous history, study co-author Tábita Hünemeier, head of the Human Population Genomics Lab at IBE, said in the statement.

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US Jewish leaders throw support behind bipartisan House antisemitism bill

New York Reps. Dan Goldman and Mike Lawler introduced bipartisan legislation Wednesday aimed at expanding federal support for securing Jewish institutions and combating antisemitism.

The bill, a House companion to the Jewish American Security Act in the Senate, would increase funding for the Nonprofit Security Grant Program, which helps secure religious institutions,  to $1 billion, extend funding to Jewish organizations, and allow additional funds to be directed toward law enforcement.

It would also mandate that the Department of Education appoint a dedicated antisemitism coordinator and force social media platforms to explain their handling of online antisemitism.

The bill received support from major national Jewish groups. On Wednesday, during a press conference in Washington, DC, Lawler and Goldman were joined by a host of Jewish leaders, including representatives from the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and the American Jewish Committee, as well as organizations affiliated with the Reform and Orthodox movements.

“Jewish communities across the United States are facing a real and growing security crisis, and the federal government has a responsibility to ensure that all Americans can gather, worship, and live openly and safely as who they are,” Eric Fingerhut, the CEO and president of the Jewish Federations of North America, which has promoted the bill, said in a statement.

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Drug Testing Industry And Pharmaceutical Company Ask Court To Pause Trump’s Marijuana Rescheduling Move

An industry association that represents drug testing companies and a cannabis-focused biopharmaceutical corporation are asking a federal appeals court to block the Trump administration from moving forward with federal marijuana rescheduling while ongoing litigation challenging the reform is considered—claiming that cannabis is a “dangerous drug that destroys lives.”

The National Drug and Alcohol Screening Association (NDASA), along with MMJ International Holdings and its subsidiaries, argue in the new filing on Tuesday that the cannabis rescheduling move is “a brazen agency overreach in which the Acting Attorney General ignored restrictions on his authority set by Congress—and a binding decision of this Court—to carry out one of the most sweeping reductions in restrictions on a dangerous narcotic in the history of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA).”

“Nearly fifty years ago, this Court held that the Attorney General lacks authority to unilaterally decide how marijuana ought to be restricted—that is, which Schedule it should be placed under—pursuant to the CSA. The Court explained that Congress constrained the Attorney General’s authority by requiring him both to secure recommendations from the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) and to make detailed findings through a formal rulemaking on the record. While the CSA contains a limited bypass of those procedures to allow the Attorney General to ensure that the U.S. complies with certain treaties…this Court made clear that the bypass cannot be invoked when the Attorney General is simply deciding to move a drug between two Schedules under the CSA, either of which would comply with treaty obligations.”

“The Department of Justice complied with this Court’s construction of the CSA for over four decades—until now,” the joint motion for a stay pending review that was filed before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit argues.

While HHS had issued a recommendation to reschedule marijuana during the Biden administration, the recent move by the Trump Department of Justice canceled ongoing proceedings related to that proposal and issued a new final rule.

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Report: Personal Crimes in Gun-Controlled Australia Triple that of Gun-Friendly USA

Personal crimes such as rape and sexual assault are three times higher in gun-controlled Australia than in the USA, a report in the Spectator/Australia on Wednesday details.

Written by Malcolm Roberts and John Lott, Jr., the report begins by explaining that the establishment media’s approach to coverage and the method of compiling crime stats leads many to believe Australia’s “crime rate is low compared with the countries like the United States.”

The media “reinforces the myth” of lower crime while less than 20 percent of rapes and sexual assaults are reported to Australian police. However, in the U.S.,  45 percent of such personal crimes are reported to police. This difference in the level of personal crime reporting skews the figures seen by the populations of both countries and feeds into the establishment media’s low-crime narrative.

After a hard look at the real numbers, Roberts and Lott wrote: “Australia’s rape and sexual assault rate is roughly three times higher than that of the United States. Australia’s assault rate is about twice as high, and its burglary rate is about 2.5 times higher. Robbery is the only category where the two countries report similar rates.”

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Under Pressure, Michigan Makes It Easier to Opt Out of Vaccine Tracking

Michigan health freedom and privacy advocates scored a win this month when the state’s health department stopped using a vaccine information handout that failed to explain to parents how they can opt out of the state’s vaccine tracking program, and didn’t include an opt-out form.

It’s the latest development in health freedom and privacy advocates’ efforts to get the state health department to stop adding a thick layer of bureaucratic red tape — which isn’t even required under state law — that makes it difficult for families to opt out of vaccines and vaccination tracking.

“While this is definitely a win, there is still a long way to go,” said journalist and Michigan resident Jeremy R. Hammond, who has a 13-year-old unvaccinated son.

Until now, the Michigan Department of Health & Human Services (MDHHS) largely avoided telling parents what the tracking system is and how they can opt out of it, Hammond said.

This matters because the state’s vaccination tracking system, Michigan Care Improvement Registry (MCIR), causes “pressure and coercion” for families who prefer not to vaccinate, according to Dr. Remington Nevin, medical director for the St. Clair County Health Department in rural eastern Michigan.

Dubbed “Michigan’s ‘RFK Jr.’” by Bridge Michigan, Nevin is an epidemiologist with multiple degrees from Johns Hopkins University. He is also a former U.S. Army major and preventive medicine officer.

Nevin spoke with The Defender about why it’s crucial for parents to be able to opt out of MCIR — and how he submitted Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests that likely led the state health department to stop using the old form and start making it easier for parents to opt out.

State health department violated Michigan law

The MCIR system sends reminders to medical staff to encourage them to keep their pediatric patients up to date with the American Academy of Pediatrics or the American Academy of Family Physicians childhood vaccine schedule.

When a child visits a clinic, front desk staff and nurses may tell parents their child is due for a particular vaccine, even though “the parent and the child’s physician may have decided together through shared clinical decision-making to not give that shot until later on in the child’s life,” Nevin said.

Michigan law requires the state health department to give parents a form — before vaccinating a child — notifying parents that they can object to having their child automatically enrolled in MCIR.

But for years, MDHHS failed to give parents any such form.

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White British Children Set to Become Minority in England’s Schools, Department of Education Data Reveals

England’s latest school census has revealed a historic demographic turning point, with White British pupils having fallen below 60 percent of the school population for the first time, confirming what critics of mass immigration have warned for years—the country is being transformed, potentially irreversibly, at breathtaking speed.

According to Department for Education data for the 2025–2026 school year, pupils identified as White British now make up just 59.7 percent of schoolchildren in England. Pupils from minority ethnic backgrounds have reached nearly 39 percent, a record high.

Only a decade ago, White British pupils made up roughly 70 percent of all schoolchildren. In just ten years, the share of White British children in England’s classrooms has fallen by around ten percentage points.

The data, for opponents of mass immigration, are not just school statistics, but evidence of a national transformation that has advanced without clear public consent, serious parliamentary debate, or honest warnings from the political class.

British academic and commentator Matt Goodwin has pointed to the figures as proof that demographic change is accelerating. He argues that classrooms offer the clearest preview of Britain’s future because today’s pupils will become tomorrow’s voters, workers, parents, and citizens.

The trend is visible across the education system. In state-funded secondary schools, the White British share has dropped from 71 percent to 59 percent over the past decade.

Primary schools show the same pattern. White British pupils have fallen from 68 percent to just under 60 percent.

But the nursery figures are the most striking. White British children now make up only 47 percent of nursery pupils, down from 69 percent in 2016–2017.

That means White British children are already a minority among England’s youngest pupils. This, for a growing number of critics of globalist imposed demographic change at a rate never before seen, is the real warning sign—not a distant forecast, but the demographic future arriving in real time.

London has already passed the point completely. White British pupils are now a minority in every one of the capital’s 33 local authorities.

The same transformation is spreading far beyond London. In Milton Keynes, White British pupils account for 41.5 percent of schoolchildren.

In Blackburn, the figure stands at 38.4 percent. Bradford records 37.3 percent, while Wolverhampton is at 34.5 percent.

The numbers are lower in some of England’s largest urban centers. Manchester stands at 28.7 percent, while Birmingham is listed at 23.6 percent in one section of the source material.

Leicester records 19.5 percent. Barking and Dagenham stands at 14.9 percent, Luton at 13.7 percent, and Slough at just 9.2 percent.

One section of the source material lists Birmingham even lower, underscoring how dramatically some areas have changed. But the precise local figure matters less than the national reality: the White British share of England’s school-age population is falling fast.

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