Tag: sweden

Revealed: the undisclosed safety data emerging as weedkiller maker faces Parkinson’s lawsuits in US

Sweden started ringing the alarm bell more than 20 years ago, calling for a ban on the weedkilling chemical paraquat in 2004. One by one, dozens of other countries did the same as evidence of paraquat risks to human health mounted. Even the Chinese government, which owns the longtime paraquat maker Syngenta, halted domestic use of the pesticide a decade ago after conducting its own studies on paraquat safety and finding troubling results.

In the US, two states – Vermont and California – have recently also banned paraquat, citing risks that include an association between paraquat and Parkinson’s disease shown in years of scientific research. And California regulators announced in August that paraquat makers voluntarily agreed to stop selling the chemical after the state identified health concerns in connection with its use in new research. Several federal lawmakers have pushed for a nationwide ban.

Yet amid the global cloud of concern, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) continues to greenlight paraquat use on millions of acres, and has downplayed scientific findings linking paraquat to Parkinson’s, an incurable brain disease. The agency said in June it would hold a round table over the summer to re-examine the “safety challenges” associated with paraquat. But no such event has yet been held or scheduled.

Now, clues to how and why the US remains one of the world’s last large markets for widespread paraquat use are coming to light through troves of internal Syngenta records recently revealed through litigation.

The records show that as paraquat markets around the world started crumbling over concerns for public health, Syngenta, a Swiss-headquartered multinational, fought to keep a tight hold on the US market, where use of paraquat nearly tripled between 2000 and 2018, a time period when dozens of other countries were banning paraquat.

Internal corporate records, depositions and other records show that before and during this time frame, Syngenta did not share certain internal data and other information with the EPA regarding paraquat health effects and risks despite federal legal requirements for companies to report information about “unreasonable adverse effects” of their products.

Among the data not shared by Syngenta were analyses of how quickly the chemical could permeate untreated clothing; how fast it could absorb into an applicator’s skin and bloodstream. The company also did not share some information about how mixing paraquat with surfactants increases the chemical’s absorption. Surfactants are additives commonly used by farm workers to help herbicides overcome the waxy, water-repellent surface of their leaves. Certain information demonstrating dire risks to the brain from exposure was also not shared with the EPA.

In contrast, the company focused on developing and promoting science showing paraquat safety that it could share with regulators, including one published in 2016 that company insiders noted would be “invaluable in supporting our work”.

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The Enemy the Alliance Needs

On the morning of August 6, near the coastal town of Furuvik, a Russian couple named Semyon Rusanov and Tatyana Milenina were declared a threat to the security of the Swedish state. They had lived in Spain for five years. They opposed the war in Ukraine. They had not set foot in Russia since 2022. They had a tent, fishing rods, and two tourist walkie-talkies, and they had camped within sight of the summer cottage used by the chief executive of an arms company. For this they were interrogated for seven hours, locked in a migration detention center, and ordered deported.

No espionage charge was filed. No charge of any kind was filed. Säpo, the Swedish security service, never took the case. The couple’s lawyer said they were never notified of any suspected crime. The evidence, entire, was that they spoke Russian, carried radios sold to hikers, and could not explain their choice of campsite to the satisfaction of a policeman. On that foundation the state moved against them.

An American reader might file this under European strangeness and move on. That would be a mistake. What happened at Furuvik is a small, clear demonstration of the machinery that Washington has spent three years installing across Europe – the machinery of the necessary enemy – and the wreckage at the center of the story lies at the bottom of the Baltic Sea, where it points not at Moscow, and not really at Stockholm, but at home.

The pipeline Washington promised to destroy

Begin with the pipeline, because everything else hangs from it.

On February 7, 2022 – seventeen days before Russian tanks crossed into Ukraine – President Joe Biden stood beside the German chancellor and made a promise about Nord Stream 2, the pipeline built to carry Russian gas to Germany. “If Russia invades,” Biden said, “there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.” A reporter asked how, given the project lay under German control. “I promise you,” the president answered, “we will be able to do it.”

Seven months later, someone did. On September 26, 2022, four explosions ruptured the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines beneath the Baltic. In February 2023, Seymour Hersh – the reporter who exposed the My Lai massacre and the CIA’s domestic spying — published an account, sourced to a person with direct knowledge of the planning, of how the United States did it: Navy divers from the Diving and Salvage Center in Panama City, Florida, planting remotely triggered charges under cover of the NATO exercise BALTOPS 22, detonated three months later by a sonar buoy dropped from a Norwegian aircraft. Hersh reported that the operation was routed through Navy divers precisely because, unlike Special Operations Command, they are not required to report to Congress – that when the national-security bureaucracy debated the plan, CIA director William Burns came back and said, “Do it.” The purpose, Hersh’s source told him, was to lock Europe into the war at a moment when allies were wavering: destroy the pipeline, and you destroy the temptation to make peace and buy Russian gas again.

The White House and Norway denied it. Hersh’s account rests on a single anonymous source and has not been independently confirmed. I set it beside you not as proven fact but as the account Washington has never had to answer under oath – because, as we will see, the one country positioned to force that answer chose instead to look away. And whatever one makes of Hersh’s source, the hard facts around it are not in dispute: the president publicly vowed to end the pipeline, the pipeline was destroyed, and the United States was, as even Russia’s critics conceded, the principal beneficiary of its destruction.

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Sweden: Proof that Socialism Works if a Country Stops Being Socialist

Democratic socialism is gaining favorability in the U.S., with 62% of Americans aged 18–29 now holding a favorable view of socialism. Conservatives find it hard to understand why anyone would vote for a system that has a consistent record of making everyone poor. Candidates and politicians from Zohran Mamdani to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Bernie Sanders, Chris Rabb, Aber Kawas, Jonathan Larkin, and Omar Fateh all run on a platform of free stuff for everybody without ever explaining where the money will come from.

Despite socialism and communism promising to make everyone equal, history demonstrates that they make everyone equally poor, a lot of people die, and everyone loses their basic freedoms. Political scientist R.J. Rummel calculated that the Soviet regime killed nearly 61 million of its own people between 1917 and 1987. In China, historian Frank Dikötter’s archival research puts the Great Leap Forward famine death toll at at least 45 million, after the state seized control of grain production and falsified harvest reports. Vietnam and Laos sent countless citizens to reeducation camps for the crime of having previously been a landlord or a professor, and in Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge killed everyone who knew how to read.

Liberals defend the system and live in denial, saying that any reports we have about North Korean work camps or widespread surveillance, torture, imprisonment, and starvation are just Western propaganda. But they never stop to ask why North Korea doesn’t allow anyone into the country to prove how well everyone is living.

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The Lockdown Disaster Must Not Be Forgiven: Massive European Study Vindicates Sweden’s Common-Sense Pandemic Response

We’re now rapidly approaching the six-year anniversary of “15 Days to Slow the Spread.”

That policy has to have been one of the most disastrous in world history, created by “experts” who took all established pre-pandemic planning documents and tossed them out the window at the first opportunity.

It was a policy based on inaccurate reports out of China, which claimed that their lockdowns effectively stamped out transmission of covid-19 within a matter of days.

It was a policy that ignored solid research – from established epidemiologists like Dr. Jay Bhattacharya – which found that the coronavirus had already spread much more widely than previously realised.

It must be noted forever that lockdowns and the associated mask mandates, vaccine passports and school closures continued in some places for several years. The ramifications of those wretched policies will be quite literally endless. It’s not an exaggeration to say that lockdowns, our policies and responses have quite literally changed the course of world history.

One would think that there would definitely be a concerted effort to understand whether such policies were effective or not. Whether approaching respiratory viruses with authoritarian crackdowns on businesses and schools was necessary to save lives.

Yet six years later, there’s unfortunately very little interest in examining those questions. And when you understand the data from Sweden, you will see exactly why.

Study on Swedish Approach to Covid Shows Lockdowns Didn’t Work

A study published in PubMed examined the Swedish approach to covid policy, relative to its European counterparts, primarily because Sweden did not rely on lockdowns in response to the pandemic, but instead used “voluntary and sustainable mitigation recommendations,” the study says.

Despite a “majority of Swedes” supporting those policies, “this approach faced rapid and continuous criticism.”

That criticism came primarily from public health figures such as, surprise, surprise, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who criticised Sweden repeatedly for going against the herd.

“You’ve compared us to Sweden, and there are a lot of differences,” he said during a Senate Committee hearing in September 2020. “But compare Sweden’s death rate to other comparable Scandinavian countries. It’s worse. So, I don’t think it’s appropriate to compare Sweden with us.”

“If you look at Sweden, they are in some trouble,” Fauci claimed on Good Morning America in late 2020. “They are starting to see that their death rate is much higher than the surrounding countries of Norway, Denmark, and Finland … They’re starting to see now that they’re having to rethink some of the things they did.”

This was, of course, not true. They did not “rethink” their strategy of light-touch recommendations over lockdowns. And comparing Sweden exclusively to its neighbours is an absurd misdirection that no other country was subjected to. But Fauci, obviously never one for honesty or intellectual integrity, represented many public health figures who were anxious to see Sweden fail.

Yet as this research shows, reality was precisely the opposite.

The study explains that Sweden received criticism for “not legally enforcing mask-wearing in public spaces,” as well as keeping schools open and “being too permissive” with its policies. All the things that we were told were necessary to stop covid and save lives. The researchers tested these statements using excess mortality data and stringency indices to compare Sweden across the whole of Europe, not just its neighbours.

They chose excess mortality because, unlike covid-specific measurements, it’s less subject to bias, differences in testing, and counting, and individual definitions of covid-caused outcomes. It also accounts for deaths that “could potentially be indirectly attributed to the negative effects of strict lockdown measures and the overall strain on healthcare systems, leading to reduced access to healthcare for other diseases, among other factors.”

Turns out that what they discovered was that Sweden vastly outperformed the rest of Europe from 2020-2022, with outcomes that were remarkably similar to the other Nordic countries.

“Among 42 European countries, the cumulative excess all-cause mortality from January 2020 to December 2022 ranged from 46 (Luxembourg) to 1,080 (Bulgaria) deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, with a median of 351/100,000,” they write. “In Sweden, the excess mortality rate of 158/100,000 was among the lowest, ranked 37th among 42 countries, and not very different from other Nordic countries: Norway (129), Denmark (97), and Finland (228).”Björkman A, Gisslén M, Gullberg M, Ludvigsson J. The Swedish COVID-19 approach: a scientific dialogue on mitigation policies. Front Public Health. 2023 Jul 20;11:1206732. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2023.1206732. PMID: 37546333; PMCID: PMC10399217.

So why did Sweden underperform in 2020 relative to its neighbours? Likely due, as the study explains, to “mortality displacement due to low all-cause mortality in 2019,” as well as “poorly organised older adult care structures.”

What does this mean? Essentially, there were significantly fewer deaths from all causes in Sweden in 2019, meaning there were more extremely elderly people alive in 2020 who were susceptible to severe outcomes from covid. This is reflected in the massive age gradient with covid-associated deaths. In Sweden, “~40% of the covid-19-associated deaths were among patients in nursing homes,” the study says, “and 67% of all covid-19 deaths were among individuals above 80 years of age, representing 10% of all deaths in that age group.”

For younger age groups, covid was mostly a non-issue. “covid-19 deaths below 50 years of age represented only 1.2% of all covid deaths, including 21 individuals below 20 years of age, mostly with underlying co-morbidities, representing 1% of all deaths in that age group.”

Effectively, covid ravaged extremely elderly people, while those under 50, despite the lack of mask mandates and lockdowns, saw very limited impact.

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Sweden Approves ‘Good Behaviour’ Law, Will Kick Out Migrants Acting Improperly

Behave, or be gone.

Out of all the countries affected by the suicidal Globalist policies allowing for unchecked mass migration, former liberal paradise Sweden may have been the society that changed most drastically.

And now, there is an understanding that the avalanche of robbery, murder, and rape – as catastrophic as it is – is not the only problem assailing their culture.

The basic bad behavior of migrants and the unwillingness to assimilate are fraying the Swedish social fabric just as much.

So, yesterday (15), the Swedish parliament approved a law allowing authorities to revoke immigrants’ residency permits based on bad behavior.

This can mean ‘having unpaid debts, doing undeclared work, or ‌links to extremist organizations.’

Reuters reported:

“The law, which covers pending permits but also retroactively already granted permits, is part of a wider tightening of immigration ​rules by the right-wing government and its support party, ​the nationalist Sweden Democrats, ahead of a parliamentary election ⁠in September.

The law has been criticized by the opposition and ​human rights advocacy groups as arbitrary because decisions would be taken ​on behavior that has not been deemed criminal.

‘The good behavior law leaves people in uncertainty about what actions or expressions can be used against ​them’, Stockholm-based group Civil Rights Defenders said in a statement. It ​undermines the rule of law and the principle of equality before the ‌law.”

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Sweden Plans to Lower Criminal Age to 14 Amid Rise in Violent Crime by Children

The Swedish government ‌has announced plans to reduce the age of criminal ‌responsibility to 14 after dropping plans to lock up violent offenders as young as 13 in special prison units.

Earlier this month, Swedish Justice Minister Gunnar Strommer announced plans to cut the age from 15 to 13, but on June 11, he said there was not enough support in parliament for that and that he had agreed to compromise at 14.

“We are going to propose that the age of criminal responsibility should be cut to 14 instead of 13 years old,” Strommer told reporters.

Currently, anyone under 15 who is suspected of having committed a serious crime is sent to a youth home, run by social services, and cannot be sentenced to a custodial sentence in prison.

Strommer said in 2025 that more than 50 children under ⁠15 were suspected of murder or attempted murder.

There has been a ⁠surge in gang crime and drug-related violence in Sweden over the past 20 years, and it now has one of the highest rates of shootings and bombings in Europe, dozens of which were carried out by minors.

Thousands of Gang Members

Swedish police estimate there are ​17,500 active gang members and around 50,000 who are loosely associated with them.

Magnus Lindgren, a former police chief in Uppsala County and current secretary-general of the Safer Sweden Foundation, told The Epoch Times last year that there were about 15,000 “very dangerous criminals” in Sweden, who were divided evenly into biker gangs, football hooligans, and criminals from around 60 high-crime neighborhoods.

Organized crime gangs, such as the Foxtrot Network, use social media to recruit teenagers and children as young as 11 to ⁠commit acts of violence, including bombings and murders.

The recruiters, who operate anonymously, post adverts in special groups on social media apps and offer money through banking apps.

The EU’s law enforcement agency, Europol, launched Operational Taskforce GRIMM in April 2025 to target so-called “violence-as-a-service,” which it said often used “young perpetrators.”

After the 2022 elections, Ulf Kristersson, the leader of the center-right Moderates, formed a government that includes the Christian Democrats and Liberals, but has the crucial support of the right-wing Sweden Democrats, who campaigned against immigration and in favor of tougher criminal justice measures.

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Norwegian Teenager Allegedly Recruited by Swedish Gang Linked to Iran – Gets Arrested and Prosecuted in the UK for Attempting to Carry Out a Murder for Hire

Another aspect of the migrant invasion in Northern Europe.

We have been reporting here on TGP about the rising criminality in the Scandinavian countries, with migrant gangs in Sweden and Norway taking the law enforcement challenges to unprecedented levels.

One of the commons features of these gangs is their use of minors for criminal acts. Usually, we see teens from migrant backgrounds – but now, it appears their reach has widened.

News arose today of a court session in which a white, middle-class looking Norwegian teenager is being charged with travelling to Britain to carry out a murder for hire.

The defendant was allegedly recruited by a ​Swedish organized crime group with ties to the Iranian government, prosecutors told a London court.

Reuters reported:

“Johannes Natland, now 19, was arrested in a hotel room in Huddersfield in northern England in March last year ​in possession of two firearms and ammunition, prosecutor Alistair Richardson ​told London’s Old Bailey Court.

‘He had been recruited by an ⁠organization called the Foxtrot Network to an agreement that in ​return for money he would travel here and undertake a hit’, Richardson ​said. ‘The group that had recruited him, the Foxtrot Network, is a Swedish organized crime group used by the Iranian regime’.”

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Sweden Breach Shows the Security Risks of National Digital ID Systems

A hacker group calling itself ByteToBreach has posted what it claims is source code stolen from CGI’s Swedish division, among the allegedly compromised systems: the codebase powering BankID logins for the Swedish Tax Agency.

It’s a ransacked filing cabinet inside the architecture of a country that digitized itself completely, then discovered the cost of doing so.

BankID is the single authentication layer Swedes use for nearly everything; government services, banking, digital signatures, and tax filings.

Over 8.6 million people in a country of just over 10 million run their digital lives through it. That’s a national dependency, a single point of failure dressed up as infrastructure modernization.

The dump appeared on Breached.

Journalists at Dagens Nyheter reviewed portions of the leaked material and reported finding source code, passwords, and encryption keys. Breached was taken offline over the weekend as part of a cybersecurity operation, limiting independent verification.

Also reportedly being sold separately: databases containing Swedish citizens’ personal data and electronic signature documents. The breach exposes a layered vulnerability.

CGI confirms it, but frames it narrowly

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Stockholm Politicians Call For Review Of SLAUGHTER TO PREVAIL Concert Over Propaganda Concerns

Stockholm politicians have raised concerns over an upcoming concert by hard rock band Slaughter To Prevail, following accusations that the group has spread Russian propaganda.

According to the Nordic Ukraine Forum, the band has engaged in messaging aligned with Russian propaganda narratives. In response, representatives from both the Moderate Party (M) and the Social Democrats (S) have reacted ahead of the band’s scheduled performance in Stockholm on Friday, January 30.

Opposition city councilor Christofer Fjellner (M) said he believes it would be inappropriate for the band to perform under the current circumstances. “I think it’s quite inappropriate. I don’t think a band that lends itself to Russian propaganda should be playing in Stockholm right now,” Fjellner told SVT Kulturnyheterna.

Stockholm’s Finance City Councilor Karin Wanngård (S) also commented on the situation, stating in a written response that the City of Stockholm is currently in dialogue with the concert organizer. According to Wanngård, the aim is to ensure that anti-democratic messages are not conveyed during the event.

Slaughter To Prevail previously performed in Gothenburg on Tuesday. Concert promoter Live Nation, which is organizing the Stockholm show, has declined to comment on SVT’s inquiries regarding the allegations. At the time of publication, the concert remains scheduled to proceed as planned.

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Sweden: Iraqi Migrant Convicted of Raping 100-year-old Woman Won’t Be Deported

A 38-year-old Iraqi home care worker, Shakir Mahmoud Shakir, was sentenced to four years in prison for raping a vulnerable 100-year-old woman in Stockholm, Sweden.

Although Shakir was convicted of this rape, he was acquitted of a separate rape charge involving a 94-year-old woman and thus avoided deportation.

RMX News reports:

The incident occurred in October when the 100-year-old victim was suffering from chest pains. Instead of receiving an ambulance, she was visited by Shakir, who was employed in the home service sector. According to the woman’s interrogation testimony, Shakir told her, “They have said that you should be anointed.”

He proceeded to use an ointment and an unknown object to assault her. Despite her yelling at him to stop, he continued the abuse for approximately 10 minutes without responding to her.

“Then I was ready to cry. And I thought, you work here. And then you do this to people. And against women,” the 100-year-old woman recounted in her statement.

The prosecutor requested his expulsion from the country because Shakir is a citizen of Iraq but was rejected.

Judge Mohamed Ali, who was appointed in June 2025, refused to issue the deportation order.

Swedish news outlet Expressen reported that the judge said that Shakir is “established” in Sweden and “has good contact with his daughter, who is a Swedish citizen.

The court further found that there were no ‘humiliating or degrading elements’ when Shakir raped the woman.

Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson shared on X, “I believe many people, like me, have reacted to the horrific news about a 100-year-old woman who was raped in a place where she should have been safe and cared for. Instead, it became a site for a terrible assault. It makes me angry and strengthens my conviction that we must bring about change.”

“If you’re not a Swedish citizen and commit such horrific acts, you’ve forfeited your right to be in Sweden.”

“Anything else is offensive and deeply disrespectful to the crime victim.”

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