Tag: media

Possible Plague Crisis in Siberia: Five Hospitals Placed Under Quarantine After Lab Tech Dies Following Test Tube Accident Containing Plague Bacteria

A 28-year-old technician at Russia’s Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute is dead, nearly 200 people are under medical observation, and five hospitals in the region have been reportedly slammed shut for quarantine, while the Kremlin’s health agency insists this is nothing but “pneumonia of unknown origin.”

The Moscow Times identified the dead woman as Darya Shipilova, a laboratory worker at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute of Siberia and the Far East.

She was hospitalized in Shelekhov on September 29 with severe pneumonia, placed on a ventilator, and died on October 1, overnight into October 2, by some accounts.

The account that set off the alarm: Shipilova told medical staff she had accidentally broken a test tube of live Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes plague, while handling samples on September 25. That is four days before she was admitted, DW reported.

Meduza, citing regional media, reported both that version and a competing claim that she fell ill after a trip. Neither has been officially confirmed.

Alexei Tsydenov, head of neighboring Buryatia, went further than Irkutsk officials were willing to go. He publicly said the woman had died of plague, then edited the post to say she “may have” died of it.

Irkutsk’s own governor, Igor Kobzev, would only call it a “particularly dangerous infection” and convene an emergency anti-epidemic commission.

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Joe Biden Shuffles Next to Jay Leno as He Shows Off His Gas-Guzzling 1967 Corvette at Car Show

Joe Biden brought his gas-guzzling 1967 Corvette Stingray to a Newport, Rhode Island, car show with Jay Leno.

This is the same Corvette that Joe Biden almost lost to a house fire, even though the small blaze was contained to the kitchen.

Joe Biden was in Rhode Island for the Audrain Auto Museum’s Concours D’ Elegance at Fort Adams State Park.

Biden enjoys his gas-powered Corvette after he forced American car companies to produce more electric vehicles that nobody wants.

The last time Joe Biden took his Corvette for a spin with Jay Leno, he bragged about shutting down American oil production.

“I made sure there could be no oil drilling off the East Coast, the West Coast, and 150 miles off the Gulf of Mexico,” Biden boasted as he raced down the road in his Corvette with Jay Leno.

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Egypt Arrests, Disappears Entire Newsroom Over ‘Fake News’ Allegations

Egyptian authorities have detained the entire newsroom of one of the country’s only independent media outlets in a move that rights groups have denounced as a “first” and an “alarming escalation” on free speech.

On September 28 and 29, security forces raided the homes of the six journalists – Mohamed Ashraf Abu Emeira, Abdallah Qadry, Islam Barakat, Omar Helal, Mohamed Mahmoud and Mohamed Adel – who constitute the entire team working for Matsada2sh (Arabic for “Don’t believe”). The arrests bring the number of journalists detained in Egypt to 24.

“It is a first in Egypt: an entire newsroom behind bars,” press freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said, criticising the authorities for failing to reveal the journalists’ whereabouts.

“It’s a violation of the Egyptian Constitution, even though this is common practice. Journalists detained in Egypt are often forcibly disappeared for several days before being officially charged and brought before a court,” the group added.

According to multiple accounts by rights groups, the officers confiscated the phones and laptops belonging to the journalists as well as those of their family members during the raids. They also did not present any arrest warrants and refused to disclose where the journalists would be held.

The interior ministry later published a statement confirming the arrests and accusing the journalists of running an unlicensed platform that is “run from abroad” and of spreading “fake news”.

It also accused its journalists of being affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, the country’s largest opposition group that has been outlawed under the government of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi since 2014.

One of the platform’s editors was previously detained in 2023 over similar allegations but was released two days later.

Matsada2sh was founded in 2018 as a fact-checking outlet that corrects misleading or inaccurate information by various sources, including those by official government sources or opposition media.

“Independent journalism is critical in any free society and Egyptian authorities’ failure to allow free exercises of expression to thrive flies in the face of a purported commitment to dialogue, transparency, anti-corruption, and regional leadership,” more than 80 rights groups and independent media outlets said in a statement.

“The crackdown on the Matsada2sh platform and these arrests are alarming escalations on independent media and freedom of expression that cannot be allowed to stand.”

One of the founders of Matsada2sh, Abdelrahman Mansour, who is not based in Egypt, told the Associated Press on Thursday that the families do not know where the journalists are.

“Everyone on this team knew the risks when they went to work every day, but it’s unacceptable for the government to make false accusations and forcibly disappear journalists just because they’re afraid of a free press,” AP quoted Mansour as saying. “Their families are worried, we’re worried, we just want them released unharmed.”

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Corporate Media Don’t Understand the Houthis—and Don’t Want You to, Either

It’s that time of year again: The Houthis are making the news—and so is the Western corporate media narrative that surrounds them.

The Houthis—formally Ansar Allah, “Supporters of God”—are from the Zaydi Shia minority in Yemen, and have governed the most populous sections of the country, including the capital Sanaa, since the start of Yemen’s civil war in 2014.

Like many a “civil” war, the conflict has plenty of outside participants—most notably Saudi Arabia, which led a coalition of Arab states (with the backing of the United States) in an effort to bomb and starve Yemen away from Houthi control.

In 2022, a tenuous truce took hold between the Houthis and the Saudi-backed Yemeni government, but the Saudi blockade of the country was never lifted.

This July, the Houthis declared their own naval blockade of Saudi Arabia, in response to the Saudi siege and resumed bombing of Yemen. In a rapid September offensive, the group completed its takeover of Yemen’s Red Sea Coast and the strategic Bab al-Mandeb strait, putting Saudi oil shipping operations in a decisive bind. The Houthis have also launched missiles at Saudi Arabia in response to Saudi attacks on the country.

The offensive has prompted a slew of media interventions to ostensibly explain to everyone who the Houthis are. The New York Times (9/23/26), for instance, ran the headline “Who Are the Houthis, and What Do They Want?”; the BBC (9/24/26) ran the very same title, minus the comma.

The Washington Post (9/15/26) asked: “Who Are the Houthis, the Iran-Backed Rebels Threatening a Key Maritime Passage?” Its headline characterization revealed what corporate media see as the primary thing anyone needs to know about the Houthis: that they are simply proxies of Iran, the West’s current favorite enemy.

In a typical example, a recent CNN dispatch (9/21/26) identified the Houthis as “Iran-backed” in both the headline and the first sentence, with a reference to “Tehran’s proxies” appearing further down.

For its part, an Associated Press exclusive (9/23/26) on how “Iranian Advisers Helped Houthis Seize Yemen’s Red Sea Coast in Less Than 48 Hours” sounded the alarm that “Iranian Revolutionary Guard advisers were in the field helping direct the battle,” in a show of “how Iran has built the Houthis into a major regional partner able to open a new front in the wider war with the US.”

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REALLY? MSNOW Guest Suggests the Second Amendment Was About ‘Slave Patrols’

Left wing author Malcolm Gladwell recently appeared on MSNOW’s ‘Morning Joe’ and suggested that the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees American citizens the right to bear arms, was really written about slave patrols.

He spends much of the segment complaining about the Supreme Court, which he says has been ‘a significant impediment’ in the left’s pursuit of gun control.

The most amazing thing is that what he is saying here is treated as completely normal by the hosts, who do not interrupt or correct him in any way.

Transcript via NewsBusters:

MIKE BARNICLE, MS NOW CONTRIBUTOR: What do you say about a culture, American culture, that when a disease is identified and it’s threatening and it’s killing people, you can talk about from the inception of polio vaccines through AIDS, we — we react, we find — we find a cure almost immediately. People feel relieved. Guns have been killing Americans on the streets for decades — decades. And there’s nothing we can do.

GLADWELL: Yeah. I mean, here I have two chapters in the book on the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court has been a significant impediment here. They have — the last two major gun rulings — in the Bruen case and the Heller case — are abominations. And I had — I actually have fun with them because in both of those cases, the court plays historian and plays linguist, because in the Heller case, of course, Scalia famously.

And the — and the fellow justices try to make sense of the grammatical convolution that is the Second Amendment, which, if you read, makes — no one would ever write that sentence today. It makes no sense whatsoever. It’s commas everywhere. There’s this weird initial what’s called an initial being clause. Does it modify the main clause? And all of these linguists lined up and told the court, “Okay, here’s how people in the 18th century used an initial being clause — here’s how James Madison used that clause. Here’s what James Madison meant.” What he meant was, we’re talking about militias here, and by militias he meant slave patrols, right? And the court had no interest.

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25 Years After 9/11, NYT Continues to Rationalize Catastrophic Wars

The 25th anniversary of September 11, 2001, occasioned retrospectives on both the attacks carried out against the US that day and on the wars that the US prosecuted in their aftermath.Ft In its editorial remembrance, the New York Times (9/11/26)—which played a critical role in dampening skepticism of the “Global War on Terror”—rationalized the cataclysmic violence the US unleashed after 9/11, and assigned greater value to American lives over those of other people.

Under the headline “How a Heroic Response Went Awry,” the editorial board asserted:

The war against the Taliban and the Qaeda forces there was a justified and necessary response to the attacks. Within months, the US military destroyed Al Qaeda’s camps (even if killing Osama bin Laden would take nearly a decade) and drove the Taliban from power.

To say that a policy is “necessary” is to say that there is no alternative. But there was an alternative—namely, reaching an agreement with the Taliban for bin Laden to be extradited from Afghanistan, a possibility that existed before and immediately after 9/11.

The US, however, did not pursue this option as seriously as it could have. As the Washington Post reported on October 29, 2001:

Over three years and on as many continents, US officials met in public and secret at least 20 times with Taliban representatives to discuss ways the regime could bring suspected terrorist Osama bin Laden to justice.

Talks continued until just days before the September 11 attacks, and Taliban representatives repeatedly suggested they would hand over bin Laden if their conditions were met, sources close to the discussions said.

Throughout the years, however, State Department officials refused to soften their demand that bin Laden face trial in the US justice system.

A CIA administrator was quoted in the report: “I have no doubts [the Taliban] wanted to get rid of [bin Laden]. He was a pain in the neck.”

In addition, a former head of Saudi intelligence said that, in 1998, the Taliban agreed to hand over bin Laden to Saudi Arabia, a close US ally; the source said that the Taliban changed course after the US fired cruise missiles at an apparent bin Laden camp in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, following attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania attributed to Al Qaeda (LA Times, 11/4/01).

Then, just a week after the US invaded Afghanistan, the Taliban offered to discuss handing over bin Laden if the US stopped bombing Afghanistan and provided evidence that bin Laden was involved in 9/11 (Guardian, 10/14/01).

In other words, far from being “necessary,” the Afghan War was a choice the US made when diplomacy appeared to be a viable option. And we now know that those 20 years of war had disastrous effects on Afghans (Jacobin, 9/11/21; Al Jazeera, 9/11/21), and resulted in the Taliban returning to power.

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Reporting of the RAF Fairford Arrests Blows the Idea of a ‘Free Press’ Out of the Water

It’s easy to forget that the western media – the so-called “free press” – likes to distinguish itself from media in authoritarian regimes on the basis that, unlike them, it asks critical questions of the powerful, reports facts objectively, and formulates its analyses dispassionately.

They do propaganda, we do news – or so the western media argues.

The feverish coverage since five men were arrested in the early hours of Sunday morning close to RAF Fairford in the UK is blowing that claim all too obviously out of the water.

Here are the known facts so far.

Three white vans, bearing the logo of a genuine fuel transit company, were spotted by a local farmer on the road outside her property as she returned from a party. Police arrived promptly and arrested the men, who were all British nationals in their twenties.

On Tuesday, it emerged that one of the arrested men actually called the police earlier – seemingly the reason officers were on the scene so quickly.

Although the men were initially arrested on explosives charges, no “viable” explosives were found. Although they were arrested on terrorism charges, which allow for 14 days of detention, they were released on bail under normal criminal laws in less than two days.

It has also emerged that the men had several empty “barrels” in their vans, plus one that contained what police described disturbingly as an “accelerant”.

Actually, that was simply a reference to petrol. The stuff that goes into vehicles to make them accelerate.

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BBC removes article claiming bare nails trend perpetuates ‘White supremacist’ beauty standards

The BBC removed an article that suggested the trend of leaving fingernails unpainted could perpetuate “White supremacist” beauty standards after it drew backlash Saturday.

The original article, “How the bare nails trend became a class issue,” explored the beauty trend of women preferring clear and polished “naked” nails over the more stylish nail designs over the past few years. 

The BBC reported that while some consider this trend part of the ever-shifting standards in fashion, critics suggested the image said “something about class” and could potentially stigmatize Black, Latino and Asian communities that popularized heavily designed nails.

“That trend really promotes blankness and this kind of sameness and erasure of culture and identity that is so important to [B]lack and [B]rown communities,” beauty journalist Kristina Rodulfo told the BBC.

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UNBELIEVABLE: Fox News Hires Disgraced Cuomo Aide Who Covered Up COVID Nursing Home Deaths to Co-Host New Podcast

Fox News just handed a contributor contract and a co-host chair on a brand-new podcast to the woman who sat at Andrew Cuomo’s right hand while New York shoved COVID-positive patients into nursing homes and then hid the body count.

According to a Fox News Media press release, Melissa DeRosa is now a “newly named FOX News contributor.” She will appear on the premiere of the network’s new all-female roundtable podcast, the Girls, which debuts October 1.

The first episode features Rachel Campos-Duffy, Harris Faulkner, Kat Timpf, former ESPN host Samantha Ponder, and DeRosa.

Fox’s own announcement describes her as a “veteran democratic strategist” who “previously held several senior roles in former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s administration, becoming the first woman to serve as secretary to the governor.” That is a very polite way of saying she was Cuomo’s gatekeeper during the deadliest nursing-home policy in America.

In February 2021, The Gateway Pundit reported the leak that blew the cover off the operation. In a piece titled “BOMBSHELL: Top NY Official Admits Cuomo Hid Nursing Home Data So Feds Wouldn’t Find Out,” we detailed DeRosa’s remarks on a private conference call with New York Democratic lawmakers.

According to the New York Post, which first published the audio, DeRosa apologized to those Democrats for withholding the state’s nursing-home death tally. She said the administration “froze” after then-President Donald Trump “turns this into a giant political football.”

Her words, as reported by the Post:

“He starts tweeting that we killed everyone in nursing homes. He starts going after [New Jersey Gov. Phil] Murphy, starts going after [California Gov. Gavin] Newsom, starts going after [Michigan Gov.] Gretchen Whitmer.”

Then came the part that should have ended her media career:

“And basically, we froze. Because then we were in a position where we weren’t sure if what we were going to give to the Department of Justice, or what we give to you guys, what we start saying, was going to be used against us while we weren’t sure if there was going to be an investigation.”

That is not a “reporting lag.” That is a senior state official admitting, on tape, that the Cuomo shop sat on the death numbers because they were afraid the Trump Justice Department would use the truth against them.

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Delaware Judge Orders Fox Corp. to Dump Hundreds of Files on Murdoch, Deleted Texts, Phone Hacking, and the Dominion Settlement In Massive Shareholder Lawsuit

A Delaware judge has just ordered Fox Corporation to hand over a mountain of internal records in a long-running shareholder lawsuit aimed at Rupert Murdoch, his son Lachlan, and other Fox directors. The files cover phone hacking, board minutes, emails, and the deletion of Rupert Murdoch’s text messages.

The order landed last week from Vice Chancellor Bonnie David. Fox fought to keep the material sealed. The judge sided with the plaintiffs across the board.

According to NPR, the haul includes roughly 700 documents that mention “phone hacking,” years of Fox board meeting minutes, emails from former Ford CEO and longtime Fox director Jacques Nasser’s Ford accounts, and a list of every email address ever used by Nasser or Rupert Murdoch.

Shareholders’ lawyers will also get sealed records from the still-pending Smartmatic case that deal with what the court calls Murdoch’s “spoliation” of records, legal speak for wiping texts.

The case was filed about three years ago by five New York City public-employee pension funds and Oregon’s public employee retirement system.

Those are Democrat-run, taxpayer-backed institutions using Delaware corporate law to try to pin Fox’s legal bills on the Murdochs personally.

The Associated Press reported earlier that the same funds accuse Murdoch and other Fox leaders of ignoring “red flags” after 2020.

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