Media Blackout: Black Curtains Go Up In Lahaina Blocking View of Ground Zero Investigation, Clean Up

Footage out of fire-ravaged Lahaina, Hawaii, shows crews have erected an extensive line of black curtains blocking citizens from seeing what’s going on as hundreds of people are still reported missing.

Video courtesy of citizen journalist Geoff Cygnus on TikTok depicts miles of fencing and curtains have been put up alongside Front Street, one of Lahaina’s main highways, obstructing the view of ongoing activities.

“There seems to be a huge emphasis on ensuring that the media and anyone else can’t see what’s going on,” Cygnus reported in a recent video.

Keep reading

How the Victorian Education Department’s historical child sexual abuse scandal was hidden for decades

On June 27, 2019, the viewing areas of Melbourne’s County Court were a hive of nervous energy as Justice Gabriele Cannon arrived to deliver a sentence that would publicly account for the private sorrows of dozens of people in the room.

Slumped beside his defence counsel, a 78-year-old former primary school teacher who’d once sneered at his victims that they’d never be believed was now a diminished and defeated figure.

But it was not just the reputation of Vincent Henry Reynolds on trial that day.

Warning: This story contains details of child sexual abuse

The story presented of Reynolds’s career would soon be understood as a microcosm of the unravelling crisis of historical sexual abuse in the Victorian education system. It would reveal in granular detail the methods by which the Victorian Education Department had covered up the sexual abuse of children — methods that lawyers for survivors say have been identified in dozens of other cases. 

The catchwords for Cannon’s sentencing remarks were succinct and compelling: “historical sexual offending”; “42 charges”; “38 child complainants”; “period of offending about 31 years”; “abuse of power”; “gross breach of trust”; “brazen and prolonged offending”; “systemic failures in duty of care”.

Yet as disturbing as the raw numbers were, they sold short the devastation wrought by Reynolds’s decades of rampant abuse of children placed in his care at government-run schools, reflecting only the reported cases of those who’d both survived their ordeals and mustered the strength to endure the justice system’s lengthy and often dispiriting delays.

One after the other, survivors stepped forward to read victim impact statements to the court.

“The Education Department knew he was a sick child abuser, knew that he preyed on kids, but they turned him loose on me and my classmates, and on lots of other kids in country Victoria,” one of them would later say.

Survivors who’d spent decades negotiating their traumas alone now gathered as a collective, participating in the unfortunately rare experience of personally witnessing the comeuppance of their abuser.

Keep reading

BBC Publishes Pedo Report, Then EDITS to Remove Pride, Drag History.

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has been caught repeatedly doctoring a report about a man convicted for attempting to have sex with a 14-year-old boy, scrubbing it of references to the fact the suspect is a Pride organizer and drag queen.

Sixty-one-year-old Andrew Way of Clwyd Wen in Wrexham, Wales, was described as an “ex-drag queen” in the original post from the publicly-funded broadcaster. The National Pulse confirmed, however, that when readers clicked through to the article, the headline changed from ‘Ex-drag queen caught in paedophile hunters’ sting operation’ to ‘Man caught in paedophile hunters’ sting operation’.

The text of the article also no longer contained any reference to Way being a drag queen, although it did confirm the pedophile “had also been organising the first-ever gay Pride event for Welshpool, Powys.” Hours later, The National Pulse observed that this, too, had been “stealth-edited” out of the article, with no editor’s notes informing readers of the changes.

The BBC press office has been asked who ordered the article to be doctored to remove these details, and why, but had issued no response as of the time of publication.

Keep reading

Hawaiian Electric may have compromised evidence for fire investigation

There is suspicion that the utility company in Hawaii could have compromised evidence as part of the ongoing investigation to the cause of the fires, the Washington Post reported.

Hawaiian Electric is being blamed for an alleged role in starting the fire on the island of Maui in Lahaina and the center of the island. A video emerged of downed powerlines that could have sparked the fire.

A class-action lawsuit was filed less than a week after the fires, ABC News reported. According to the lawsuit, the utility company had documents showing that they were aware that preemptive power shutoffs like the ones used in California could help stop fires, but they refused to do it.

The Post cited documents showing that under the guise of restoring power, Hawaiian Electric removed “fallen poles, power lines, transformers, conductors and other equipment from near a Lahaina substation starting around Aug. 12.”

Investigators from he Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) arrived on the scene for their investigation after the objects had been removed.

“If a lot of equipment is already moved or gone by the time investigators show up, that’s problematic because you want to observe where the equipment was relative to the ignition site,” said Stanford’s director of Climate and Energy Policy Program, Michael Wara. “Maybe there was a homeless encampment, kids, or a power line down on the ground where the ignition occurred. But once you move these things it’s much harder to understand what happened.”

Hawaiian Electric spokesman Darren Pai released a statement saying that their company has been “in regular communication with ATF and local authorities and are cooperating to provide them, as well as attorneys representing people affected by the wildfires, with inventories and access to the removed equipment, which we have carefully photographed, documented and stored.”

Keep reading

Satellite Images of Maui Fire Taken Down “At the Request of Responding Organizations in Hawai’i”

Actions by officials on Maui have contributed to an air of suspicion about the handling of the Lahaina fire that killed over 100 and left around 1000 people unaccounted for, including many children. Media access is tightly controlled, drones are grounded for getting too close to the suspected origin site of the fire and now satellite images from the fire have been taken down from a news site. The censorship incident appears to be isolated but troubling just the same. The photos were widely published and remain online elsewhere.

A Gateway Pundit reader sent in a tip (thank you) that an interactive satellite map APP comparing before and after photos of Lahaina has been taken down. The map was featured in a news article by Scooty Nickerson with the Bay Area News Group headlined: Interactive Maui wildfire map: Before and after images of Lahaina show scale of devastation

A message where the images once were reads: “At the request of responding organizations in Hawai’i and out of respect for the ongoing situation, the imagery and data in this app have been removed.” The before picture is still available by clicking the “close” button in the display.

Keep reading

Look How Google Shoos You Away From The Biden Family Biz And Other Big News

While fact-checking a Federalist article early Monday morning, I did a quick Google search for “hunter biden joe biden ‘an absolute wall.’”

It’s the language now-President Joe Biden used during the 2020 campaign to allege a separation between his vice-presidential duties and his son’s overseas work for the family business. It’s back in the news after the House Oversight Committee on Thursday asked the National Archives and Records Administration for unredacted communications containing three of Joe Biden’s vice presidential pseudonyms: Robert Peters, Robin Ware, and JRB Ware.

Google, however, apparently didn’t want me to find too much information — at least not from certain sources.

“It looks like the results below are changing quickly. If this topic is new, it can sometimes take time for reliable sources to publish information,” Google alerted me, prompting me to make sure the source is “trusted on this topic” and maybe just to “come back later.”

Keep reading

A monumental UFO scandal is looming

The decades-long saga of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) is barreling headlong toward one of two stunning conclusions.

Either the U.S. government has mounted an extraordinary, decades-long coverup of UFO retrieval and reverse-engineering activities, or elements of the defense and intelligence establishment are engaging in a staggeringly brazen psychological disinformation campaign.

Either possibility would have profound implications for democracy, the role of government and perhaps also humanity’s place in the cosmos.

For these reasons, it is imperative that Congress and federal law enforcement agencies devote significant resources to investigating a series of remarkable UFO-related developments.

Importantly, a third explanation for recent events — that dozens of high-level, highly-cleared officials have come to believe enduring UFO myths, rumors and speculation as fact — appears increasingly unlikely.

In June, U.S. Air Force veteran and former intelligence official David Grusch alleged that elements of the U.S. government have secretly and illegally overseen a decades-long UFO retrieval and reverse-engineering effort. Two defense officials corroborated the broad contours of Grusch’s stunning claims.

Grusch has stated that he provided a wealth of highly classified evidence to the powerful internal investigative agencies overseeing the Department of Defense and the U.S intelligence community, but he has not presented any such evidence publicly.

However, the officials and lawmakers who have reviewed Grusch’s classified evidence are taking his extraordinary allegations seriously.

Keep reading

Washington Post Still Covers Up U.S. War Crimes And Use Of Biological Weapons

The Washington Post is still covering up U.S. war crimes.

Seiichi Morimura, who exposed Japanese atrocities in WWII, dies at 90
His book about Unit 731, a secret biological warfare branch of the Imperial Army, helped force Japan to confront its wartime past

The obituary says:

Seiichi Morimura, a Japanese writer who helped force a reckoning upon his country with his 1981 exposé of Unit 731, a secret biological warfare branch of the Imperial Army that subjected thousands of people in occupied China to sadistic medical experiments during World War II, died July 24 at a hospital in Tokyo. He was 90.

Morimura’s book sold astonishingly well even when it was unusual to confronted people in Japan with the imperial crimes of their nation.

Unit 731 was at its time only comparable to some Nazi doctors who widely experimented on humans:

At a time when Japanese textbooks often minimized atrocities committed by Japan during the war, Mr. Morimura interviewed dozens of veterans of Unit 731 and documented in harrowing detail the conduct of the operation, which was established in 1938 near the Chinese city of Harbin by Japanese medical officer Shiro Ishii.

Disguised as an epidemic prevention and water purification department, the unit functioned through the end of the war as a testing ground for agents of biological warfare. Mr. Morimura’s work helped prompt more investigations in the 1980s and 1990s, which in turn led to a court case that further revealed the extent of the atrocities.

The perpetrators included many respected Japanese physicians. Thousands of people — mainly Chinese, but also Koreans, Russians and prisoners of eight total nationalities, according to Mr. Morimura — endured medical experiments that have been compared to those of Nazi doctor Josef Mengele.

Victims, referred to in Japanese as “marutas,” or wooden logs, were infected with typhus, typhoid, cholera, anthrax and the plague with the goal of perfecting biological weapons. Some prisoners were then vivisected without anesthetic so that researchers could observe the effects of the disease on the human body.

“I cut him open from the chest to the stomach, and he screamed terribly, and his face was all twisted in agony. He made this unimaginable sound, he was screaming so horribly. But then finally he stopped,” one unnamed member of the unit told the New York Times in 1995, recalling a victim who had been infected with the plague. “This was all in a day’s work for the surgeons, but it really left an impression on me because it was my first time.”

Several thousand people, and maybe many more, were experimented to death by the unit.

When the second world war was over Unit 731 members were supposed to be put on trial for the war crimes they had committed. The U.S. military stopped that as it had planned to use what Unit 731 had learned for its own wars:

The same year that Mr. Morimura’s book was released, an American journalist, John W. Powell, wrote in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that the U.S. government had granted immunity to members of Unit 731 in exchange for the laboratory records from their research. Mr. Morimura alleged the same. For years, the United States dismissed reports of the unit’s experiments as Cold War propaganda.

There is no further mentioning of this in the rest of the Washington Post obit.

The reader is left hanging without learning if those U.S. government claims of ‘Cold War propaganda’ were true or false.

The U.S. did of course do what had been alleged. Documents were released that proved it. The U.S. had done much more.

The Post also repeats false U.S. claims that the Japanese government had hindered war crime trials against the units members:

However, according to U.S. officials, the Japanese government continued to decline to assist American efforts to place perpetrators on a list of war criminals prohibited from entering the United States. Ishii lived in freedom until he died of throat cancer in 1959. The Times reported that other Unit 731 veterans became governor of Tokyo, president of the Japan Medical Association and chief of the Japanese Olympic Committee.

It was the U.S. government, not the Japanese one, which gave immunity to Unit 731 members. It even paid them high amounts for their knowledge:

The US government offered full political immunity to high-ranking officials who were instrumental in perpetrating crimes against humanity, in exchange of the data about their experiments. Among those was Shiro Ishii, the commander of Unit 731. During the cover-up operation, the U.S. government paid money to obtain data on human experiments conducted in China, according to two declassified U.S. government documents.

The total amount paid to unnamed former members of the infamous unit was somewhere between 150,000 yen to 200,000 yen. An amount of 200,000 yen at that time is the equivalent of 20 million yen to 40 million yen today.

40 million yen today are the equivalent of $284,000. Nicer to have than not to have …

Keep reading

‘We’re Going To Uncover the Cover Up’: House Probes Government Handling of UFOs

“The American public has a right to learn” about UFOs, lawmaker says. A House Oversight subcommittee hearing on Wednesday examined what the government knows about unidentified flying objects, or UFOs.

The hourslong hearing “oscillated between statements of concern about the potential national security threat posed by unknown objects flying close to U.S. military aircraft and more extreme allusions to government conspiracies to hide the existence of alien lifeforms,” reports The Washington Post. More:

“We’re not bringing little green men or flying saucers into the hearing — sorry to disappoint about half y’all,” Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) said. “We’re just going to get to the facts. We’re going to uncover the cover up.”

In response to reported encounters by Navy pilots, the U.S. military and the intelligence community have sought to more closely analyze such incidents. The sightings, including some that are believed to be drones or unmanned craft — like the Chinese surveillance airship shot down in U.S. airspace earlier this year — have fueled concerns that American adversaries could have developed new technologies that pose a threat to U.S. security.

Subcommittee members yesterday called for more transparency from the Department of Defense and intelligence agencies about their findings regarding UFOs—or “unidentified anomalous phenomena” (UAP), the new preferred term.

“The American public has a right to learn about technologies of unknown origins, nonhuman intelligence and unexplainable phenomena,” said Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.).

One of the witnesses yesterday was David Grusch, a former Pentagon employee who worked on the UAP task force and now claims the government is secretly storing downed alien vessels.

“I was informed in the course of my official duties of a multidecade UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering program to which I was denied access,” Grusch claimed again yesterday. He also agreed when asked whether he had “personal knowledge of people who’ve been harmed or injured in efforts to cover up or conceal these extraterrestrial technology.”

Keep reading

Whistleblower testifies that US government is ‘absolutely’ in possession of non-human craft

A former Pentagon intelligence official testified Wednesday that he was “absolutely” certain the government had possession of nonhuman craft.

David Grusch, a former Air Force officer, said during a House Oversight Committee hearing that his information was based on interviews with 40 witnesses and that he knew where the material was being held. Grusch added that nonhuman “biologics” were recovered along with the craft.

Grusch initially made the claims last month before adding the information about pilots in a NewsNation interview.

He was an intelligence officer for the Air Force and eventually joined the task force looking into unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAP, the military’s preferred term for UFOs.

He said he became a whistleblower in May 2022 after he received a number of concerning reports that the government was acting with secrecy and without congressional oversight with regard to UAP.

A Pentagon spokesperson strenuously denied Grusch’s initial claims, saying they have “not discovered any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently.”

Grusch said he feared for his life and had faced professional and personal consequences from the government for speaking out, noting there was an ongoing whistleblower retaliation investigation into his treatment.

He said he believed that the government first became aware of nonhuman technology in the 1930s and that there had been a “multi-decade campaign to disenfranchise public interest.”

Keep reading