Tag: corruption

New Zealand’s “Disinformation Project” Shuts Down Amid Accusations of Silencing Opposition

The Disinformation Project, launched in early 2020 in New Zealand as a “disinformation research” group, but slammed by critics as seeking to usher in ideological censorship, is no more.

The project is the product of the Covid era, initially focused on what was at the time considered “disinformation” but then branching out to things like vaccine skepticism in general, climate change – and, apparently, even local politics.

The group, which coordinated with the New Zealand government, described its activities as research and analyses of all manner of “extreme conspiratorial beliefs” as well as their compatriots’ “descent” into those.

Critics, however, point out that silencing the opposition, including by supporting “hate speech” laws, was among the activities of the now-shut-down endeavor that was led by Kate Hannah.

These critics accuse the Disinformation Project of moving from being a handy tool for the New Zealand government to spread its narratives promoting COVID-19 measures (some of the most restrictive in the world), to becoming a political weapon promoting a certain agenda.

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CBS Hit With FCC Complaint Charging “Significant And Intentional News Distortion” Over Edited Kamala Interview 

CBS News has been formally issued with an FCC complaint regarding its surreptitious editing of Kamala Harris’ 60 Minutes interview.

The complaint charges that the network engaged in “significant and intentional news distortion.”

Edited and unedited portions of the interview were shared side by side as it became clear CBS was attempting to make Harris appear less incompetent.

Fox News reports that The Center for American Rights argues that the discrepancies “amount to deliberate news distortion — a violation of FCC rules governing broadcasters’ public interest obligations.”

The complaint seeks to force CBS to release an unedited transcript of the interview to set the record straight.

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‘Reckless Disregard for the Truth’: Shareholders Sue Moderna for Misleading Investors on RSV Shot Efficacy

A group of shareholders is suing Moderna alleging the company knowingly inflated claims about the efficacy of its RSV vaccine for older adults. When the drugmaker later lowered expectations for the vaccine’s efficacy the stock price dropped precipitously.

A class-action lawsuit accuses Moderna of making “materially false and misleading statements” about the efficacy of its respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) shot, leading to significant damages for investors.

The lawsuit, filed Aug. 9 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, covers investors who owned or purchased Moderna stock between Jan. 18, 2023 — the day that Moderna announced that mRNA-1345, its candidate RSV vaccine, met primary efficacy endpoints in Phase 3 clinical trials — and June 25, 2024.

According to the lawsuit, Moderna misled investors by failing to disclose that “mRNA-1345 was less effective than Defendants had led investors to believe” and that “mRNA-1345’s clinical and/or commercial prospects were overstated.”

“As a result, the Company’s public statements were materially false and misleading at all relevant times,” the lawsuit states.

The lawsuit names Moderna and its key executives, including its CEO Stéphane Bancel, Chief Financial Officer James M. Mock and President Stephen Hoge, as defendants.

“Defendants acted with reckless disregard for the truth in that they failed or refused to ascertain and disclose such facts as would reveal the materially false and misleading nature of the statements made, although such facts were readily available to Defendants,” the lawsuit states.

Brian Hooker, Ph.D., chief scientific officer for Children’s Health Defense (CHD), told The Defender he is not surprised by allegations of fraud concerning Moderna.

“It is unfortunate that Moderna lied about the efficacy of the vaccine and misled investors,” Hooker said. But Hooker said the “bigger tragedy here is the lack of safety testing for modified mRNA products such as their RSV shot.”

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Raytheon To Pay Over $950 Million In Settlement Over Fraud, Qatari Bribery, And Export Violations

Raytheon, a subsidiary of defense contractor RTX, has agreed to pay more than $950 million to resolve federal investigations into government contract fraud, as well as violations of anti-corruption and export control laws.

The settlement, announced by the Department of Justice (DOJ) on Oct. 16, addresses allegations involving defective pricing on military contracts with the U.S. government, as well as illegal bribes to a Qatari official, with the resolution involving both civil and criminal penalties.

An RTX spokesperson confirmed the settlement, telling The Epoch Times in an emailed statement that the company acknowledges responsibility for the misconduct and has cooperated with investigators. The company also emphasized its commitment to bolstering its compliance and ethics programs.

Raytheon has admitted to two major fraud schemes affecting Department of Defense (DoD) contracts, including the provision of PATRIOT missile systems and radar systems.

In the first case, Raytheon employees provided defective pricing information, leading the DoD to overpay on two contracts by roughly $111 million between 2012 and 2018.

In a separate scheme, Raytheon failed to provide accurate cost or pricing data for numerous DoD contracts, including a weapons maintenance agreement, leading to further inflated payments.

Under the terms of a three-year deferred prosecution agreement, Raytheon will pay a criminal monetary penalty of $146.8 million and $111.2 million in victim compensation and retain an independent compliance monitor for three years.

The company received a 25 percent reduction in penalties for taking remedial actions, such as firing employees responsible for the misconduct and implementing new controls to prevent future fraud.

Additionally, Raytheon has agreed to pay $428 million to settle False Claims Act allegations related to providing false data during contract negotiations with the DoD. As part of the settlement, Raytheon admitted it misrepresented labor and material costs for weapon systems and double-billed on a radar station contract.

“The department is committed to holding accountable those contractors that knowingly misrepresent their cost and pricing data or otherwise violate their legal obligations when negotiating or performing contracts with the United States,” Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brian M. Boynton, head of the DOJ’s Civil Division, said in a statement.

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Federal Judge Sides with Biden-Harris DOJ, Blocks Attempt to Remove Ineligible Voters from Rolls Ahead of Election

A federal judge on Wednesday halted an Alabama effort to purge voter registration rolls of people who should not be able to vote in the state.

The Justice Department sued Alabama to stop Secretary of State Wes Allen from what he said were “strategic efforts” to “remove noncitizens registered to vote,” according to NBC.

Under the program, Allen sought to remove 3,251 voters and said they would be referred to the state attorney general’s office for possible prosecution.

U.S. District Court Judge Anna Manasco, who had been nominated by former President Donald Trump in 2020, said the program had to stop due to the timing.

“For decades, federal law has given states a hard deadline to complete systematic purges of ineligible persons from voter rolls: no later than ninety days before a federal election,” Manasco wrote. NBC referred to the rule as a “quiet period.”

“This year, Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen (1) blew the deadline when he announced a purge program to begin eighty-four days before the 2024 General Election, (2) later admitted that his purge list included thousands of United States citizens (in addition to far fewer noncitizens, who are ineligible to vote), and (3) in any event, referred everyone on the purge list to the Alabama Attorney General for criminal investigation,” Manasco wrote.

Manasco ordered the state to contact those who were targeted by the program to let them know they are able to vote this year.

The order said that Allen is not barred from removing voters who would be ineligble for other reasons — such as criminal offenses or death.

If Allen learns an individual on the rolls is not an American citizen by means other than the program to remove them en masse, he can remove such a person, the order said.

The injunction to stop Allen from removing voters only lasts until the day after the Nov. 5 election.

“Because this litigation is still ongoing, I am limited in my ability to comment,” Allen said in a statement, according to The Washington Post.

“Earlier today, the federal court issued a preliminary injunction order. I will comply with the order of the federal court.

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Hospitals willingly subjected patients to deadly protocols during the pandemic to generate financial incentives from government

Testimonials from nurses who worked at hospitals during the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic have revealed that these healthcare institutions willingly subjected patients to deadly protocols and punished whistleblowers who spoke out against hospital treatment protocols.

This is according to author Ken McCarthy, whose book “What the Nurses Saw” investigated what he called the “systemic medical murder” that was taking place in hospitals during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. He noted how government policymakers during COVID-19 “created one of the biggest terror campaigns in the history of mankind.” (Related: HOSPITAL HOMICIDE: New study points to evidence that some COVID-19 patients were euthanized by hospitals.)

McCarthy explained that these deadly protocols came from the National Institutes of Health. Hospital executives who were financially incentivized to implement these policies would then pass on the orders even though many hospital employees were aware of how dangerous and even deadly these policies were.

The biggest reason for many dangerous and deadly encounters at hospitals is the administering of what McCarthy called the “failed drug” remdesivir. He noted how the use of remdesivir was halted in the entire continent of Africa because it caused organ failure.

Among other factors that led to many hospital deaths include the denial of anti-inflammatory medications and inhalable steroids, the use of BiPAP masks – which often caused panic attacks that led to the administering of tranquilizers that further weakened the respiratory system – and the use of ventilators.

All of these factors along with other care policies for COVID-19 patients were a “recipe for disaster,” according to McCarthy.

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The Media Shouldn’t Overlook Kamala Harris’ Plagiarism

In 2009, Kamala Harris co-authored a book called Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer. Its purpose was to outline her criminal justice policies in advance of her campaign for California attorney general.

The book has attracted the attention of conservative writer and activist Christopher Rufo, who contends that Harris and co-author Joan O’C. Hamilton plagiarized several passages. Rufo’s analysis—which relies on the work of Stefan Weber, a noted exposer of plagiarism—finds that there are at least 12 sections of the book in which sentences or entire paragraphs were copied from another source without proper attribution.

“Taken in total, there is certainly a breach of standards here,” writes Rufo. “Harris and her co-author duplicated long passages nearly verbatim without proper citation and without quotation marks, which is the textbook definition of plagiarism. They not only lifted material from sources without proper attribution, but in at least one case, relied on a low-quality source, which potentially undermined the accuracy of their conclusion.”

Readers may disagree about the severity of some aspects of the plagiarism: Harris borrowing from her own work or not paraphrasing sufficiently. But there are more striking examples of entire passages being lifted from other sources without citation. This is definitely a no-no, and meets the standard definition of plagiarism.

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Grant Cardone Calculates Nancy Pelosi Would Have To Be ‘1500 Years Old’ To Earn Her $120 Million Net Worth On Current Salary

Grant Cardone recently gave his take on Nancy Pelosi’s impressive $120 million net worth during a DJ Vlad interview and as usual, it came with his signature bluntness.

Cardone, a well-known real estate investor, didn’t hold back when he questioned how someone making a public servant’s salary of $179,000 could amass such a fortune. “Can’t do the math on it,” he said, calculating that Pelosi would have to be over 3,300 years old to build up that wealth if she lived solely on her paycheck.

But then he did the actual math using a calculator. After deducting taxes in California, he divided Pelosi’s net worth by her salary and determined she’d have to be 1500 years old to earn $120 million.

Now, Cardone’s tongue-in-cheek comment about Pelosi needing to be “1500 years old if she never spent one penny” may have raised eyebrows. Still, it highlights something people have been curious about for a while: how does a person in a position like hers achieve such financial success? It’s not a secret that Pelosi has a substantial stock portfolio and her trades are closely watched. Some even claim she’s one of the savviest investors in Congress.

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FBI Fudges Violent Crime Stats To Hide 55 Percent Rise Under Biden-Harris Administration

When the FBI originally released the “final” crime data for 2022 in September 2023, it reported that the nation’s violent crime rate fell by 2.1 percent. This quickly became, and remains, a Democratic Party talking point to counter Donald Trump’s claims of soaring crime.

But the FBI has quietly revised those numbers, releasing new data that shows violent crime increased in 2022 by 4.5 percent. The new data includes thousands more murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults.

The Bureau — which has been at the center of partisan storms — made no mention of these revisions in its September 2024 press release. 

RCI discovered the change through a cryptic reference on the FBI website that states: “The 2022 violent crime rate has been updated for inclusion in CIUS, 2023.” But there is no mention that the numbers increased. One only sees the change by downloading the FBI’s new crime data and comparing it to the file released last year.

After the FBI released its new crime data in September, a USA Today headline read: “Violent crime dropped for third straight year in 2023, including murder and rape.” 

It’s been over three weeks since the FBI released the revised data. The Bureau’s lack of acknowledgment or explanation about the significant change concerns researchers.

“I have checked the data on total violent crime from 2004 to 2022,” Carl Moody, a professor at the College of William and Mary who specializes in studying crime, told RealClearInvestigations. “There were no revisions from 2004 to 2015, and from 2016 to 2020, there were small changes of less than one percentage point. The huge changes in 2021 and 2022, especially without an explanation, make it difficult to trust the FBI data.”

“It is up to the FBI to explain what they have done, and they haven’t explained these large changes,” Dr. Thomas Marvell, the president of Justec Research, a criminal justice statistical research organization, told RCI.

The FBI did not respond to RCI’s repeated requests for comment.

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CBS Faces ‘News Distortion’ Complaint Amid ’60 Minutes’ Harris Interview Edit Scandal

The “disinformation” police are the real criminals this election, guilty of massaging, distorting, and mangling facts to fit their true agenda — stopping Donald Trump and electing Kamala Harris. 

As Election Day looms, more and more Americans understand that the media outlets once trusted as objective news sources have fractured that faith with routine acts of journalistic malpractice. 

Case in point, the slick editing work CBS News did in a “60 Minutes” interview earlier this month with the vice president, the Democratic Party’s replacement presidential nominee.  

The Oct. 6 episode of the network’s “Face the Nation” used a clip to promote that evening’s “60 Minutes” interview with Harris in which the vice president offered her standard word salad answer to correspondent Bill Whitaker’s question about U.S. policy on Israel and the war in Gaza.  

“We supply Israel with billions of dollars in military aid and yet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seems to be charting his own course,” Whitaker said. “The Biden-Harris administration has pressed him to agree to a ceasefire; he’s resisted. You urged him not to go into Lebanon; he went in anyway. He has promised to make Iran pay for the missile attack, and that has the potential of expanding the war. Does the U.S. have no sway over Prime Minister Netanyahu?”

“Well, Bill, the work that we have done has resulted in a number of movements in that region by Israel that were very much prompted by, or a result of, many things, including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region,” the Democrats’ presidential candidate responded in classic Kamala nonsense.

But that butchered bit of syntax didn’t show up in the “60 Minutes” interview that night. Instead, the segment featured a much clearer, coherent answer to the same question — what appeared to be a refined edit of a longer, meandering  response.

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