The World on the Brink: For a New Peace of Westphalia!Register TodayPanel I: Europe after the European Elections (14:00-17:00 CET; 8 am ET)Moderator, Dennis SpeedHelga Zepp-LaRouche, Schiller Institute founder (Germany)Chas Freeman, U.S.-China scholar, and diplomat (ret.) U.S. Foreign Service (United States)Dr. Olga Lazorkina, Head Foreign Policy Department of Belarusian Institute of Strategic Research (BISR), (Belarus)Prof. Georgy Toloraya, Director, Center for Asian Strategy, Institute of Economics of the Russian Academy of SciencesCaroline Galactéros, political scientist (France)Lt. Col. (ret.) Ralph Bosshard, Swiss Armed Forces; consultant, military-strategic affairs (Switzerland)Volker Tschapke, founder and honorary president of the Prussian Society Berlin-Brandenburg e.V. (Germany)Col. (ret.) Alain Corvez, consultant in international affairs, former advisor to the French Ministry of the Interior (France) Register TodayPanel II: The Development Aspirations of the Global Majority (18.00-21.00 CET; 12 pm ET)Moderator, Dennis SpeedJacques Cheminade, President, Solidarité et Progrès, former French Presidential candidate (France)H.E. Donald Ramotar, former President of Guyana (Guyana)Michele Geraci, former Undersecretary of State, Italian Ministry of Economic Development (Italy)Folker Hellmeyer, Chief Economist of Netfonds AG (Germany)H.E. Ambassador Prof. Dr. Manuel Hassassian, Ambassador of the Palestinian Authority to Denmark (Palestine)Prof. Dr. László Ungvári, President (emeritus) of the Wildau University of Technology (Hungary)Three representatives of the Global South, to be announced SUNDAY, June 16Panel III: The Implications of the Scientific Revolution Underway (14:00-17:00 CET; 8 am ET)Moderator, Claudio CelaniFrancois Mellet, industrial engineer, Director of Operations at Stratek Global (South Africa)Prof. Sergey Pulinets, Principal Research Scientist, Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Russia)Prof. Gennady Aksenov, S.I. Vavilov Institute for the History of Science and Technology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Department of the History of Earth Sciences (Russia) Panel IV: The Richness of the Cultures of Humanity and the Coming Golden Renaissance (18.00-21.00 CET; 12 pm ET)Moderator, Megan Dobrodt Jacques Cheminade, President, Solidarité et Progrès, former French Presidential Candidate;  “The Culture of Peace” (France) Harley Schlanger, Vice Chairman of the Board of Directors, Schiller Institute-United States; “How Public Opinion Is Manipulated” (Germany)Sophie Tanapura, Maestra soprano, Founder of Metropolitan Opera of Bangkok (Thailand)Karel Vereycken, painter-engraver, art historian, Schiller Institute-France; “Cooperation for the World’s Cultural Heritage: an Important Key for World Peace” (France)Register Today

June 14—The Russian Northern Fleet task force, consisting of the frigate Admiral Gorshkov, the nuclear submarine Kazan, and two support vessels, arrived to much fanfare in Havana, Cuba June 12, with the Russian Defense Ministry even releasing video of their arrival. "In the coming days, the crews of warships and support vessels will take part in a number of protocol events, and] will have an opportunity to have some rest and visit local sightseeings," the Russian Defense Ministry reported in [a statement.“A few hours before entering the port of the capital of the Republic of Cuba, the tactical ship strike group comprising the frigate Admiral Gorshkov and the Project 885M nuclear-powered submarine missile cruiser Kazan completed an exercise in the use of high-precision missile weapons,” the statement added. “In the course of the exercise, the crews of the frigate and the nuclear submarine practiced the use of high-precision missile weapons by computer simulation against naval targets representing ship groups of the mock enemy and located at a distance of over 600 km. Operators at automated workstations entered the parameters of simulated surface targets and hit these targets without actually launching missiles.”U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, in remarks June 12 to reporters traveling with President Joe Biden to Italy for the G7 summit, dismissed the Russian deployment as “something we’ve seen before,” that is, Russian naval deployments going back to the George W. Bush Administration. The U.S. is so unconcerned about the Russian task force, in fact, that the U.S. Navy deployed three guided-missile destroyers, joined by a French Navy frigate and a Canadian warship, as well as U.S. and Canadian aircraft, to monitor the passage of the Russian ships to Havana, just 90 miles off the tip of Florida. “Air and maritime assets under U.S. Northern Command have conducted operations to ensure the defense of the United States and Canada,” the Pentagon said in a statement. 

June 14—Demands to stop the State Department funding of deadly Ukrainian hit-lists that target American citizens, among others, have finally begun in the U.S. Congress. “Federal bureaucrats should not support or partner with foreign groups that attempt to intimidate and silence U.S. citizens and lawmakers,” Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) wrote in a June 11 letter to the chairs of the Appropriations Committee and its Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs. “I am urging the Appropriations Committee majority to support efforts in the Fiscal Year 2025 SFOPS bill to force the State Department and USAID to end all relations with foreign NGOs like TEXTY that seek to silence the speech of Americans they dislike and to sway U.S. policymakers to serve their own interests.” His letter pointed to the notorious Myrotvorets kill list, and the role of the Ukrainian government’s Center for Countering Disinformation (CCD), which “also maintains a list of individuals who also allegedly” promote narratives consistent with Russian propaganda."The detonator of this fight was the June 6 release of a new such list by Ukraine’s “Data Journalism Agency,” aka “Texty,” under the title “Roller Coaster: From Trumpists to Communists.” Targeted were 76 U.S. organizations and 388 prominent Americans, including Congressmen, political leaders, media figures, among others, accused of little more than “impeding aid to Ukraine.” Among them were LaRouche Independent U.S. Senate candidate in New York Diane Sare and The LaRouche Organization spokesman Harley Schlanger.Congressional action is long overdue. EIR  magazine has published two dossiers on the multiplying network of U.S. State Department- and USAID-funded Ukrainian agencies, that are openly deployed to draw up hit lists of opponents of NATO’s war on Russia, to be silenced as “Kremlin propagandists” and “information terrorists.” Political leaders such as Sare, Schlanger, Scott Ritter, Col. Richard Black (ret.), and others have written open letters to Congress demanding that it take action, as far back as August 2022.Representative Banks’ open letter to the House Appropriations Committee led that body to adopt a more limited amendment to the funding bill, to “prevent the targeting of conservative media through the Data Journalism Agency or Global Disinformation Index.”In addition, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) sent a joint letter to Secretary of State Tony Blinken on June 12, giving him until June 28 to provide answers on Texty’s ties to the State Department. Their letter specifies that “this is not the first time a U.S.-sponsored Ukrainian outfit has engaged in a hit piece targeting the U.S. media market,” naming the Center for Countering Disinformation of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council and its July 2022 “list of individuals, including American citizens and among those, including current and former members of Congress, as supporting ‘Russian narratives,’” while still receiving U.S. funding.“All Americans can agree that our tax dollars should not be supporting direct attacks on U.S. persons based upon reasonable political disagreement, and especially not direct attacks on U.S. legislators based solely upon their vote,” they wrote.Elon Musk, also on Texty’s list, endorsed Congressional action to defund Texty as “a good first step” in a reply on his X platform, which should be followed by adding them “to the list of sanctioned terrorist organizations.” 

June 14—NATO is clearly preparing a clash with Russia, including with nuclear weapons, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko told Izvestia published June 13, and summarized in English in a series of reports by TASS.“Everything NATO is doing in this area today, to put it bluntly, is the alliance’s preparation for a possible military clash with Russia,” he said. “And the exercises that are being conducted show how all concepts of cooperative security have now been discarded and NATO has returned to Cold War-era security schemes.”Referring to the hybrid warfare being waged against Russia, Grushko pointed to illegal sanctions, as well as the Russia-demonizing announcement “that if NATO is defeated in Ukraine, the next day Russia will definitely invade Poland and the Baltic states….”Speaking of NATO’s growing dependence on deploying nuclear weapons in Europe, Grushko said, “From the latest exercises and from the latest documents we can see that the role of nuclear weapons in NATO’s military strategy and military planning is only growing. There is talk about the use of nuclear weapons in Poland and other countries. And we should keep this in mind also from the point of view of working out neutralization measures, if such talks take the form of concrete plans.”Accusations against Russia as being a nuclear threat, Grushkov said, were “another move to turn things upside down.” He emphasized, “It is NATO that today is on the path of escalation, not to speak of nuclear weapons.”Pointing to the dangerous geopolitical game in Asia the United States is playing, he said that “if we talk about security trends in the Asian region, we see that they clearly lead to deterioration. The situation around Taiwan is escalating, there are very dangerous attempts to militarize the region by deploying new long-range weapons systems that can directly threaten China and not only China. Tensions are building up around North Korea.”

June 14—The Schiller Institute’s Wednesday, June 12 Washington, D.C., National Press Club Emergency Press Conference, “The Danger of Nuclear War Is Real, and Must be Stopped,” was, in several ways, highly successful. Panelists Scott Ritter, Col. Richard Black (ret.), Col. Larry Wilkerson (ret.), and Schiller Institute founder and chairwoman Helga Zepp-LaRouche were heard by nearly 2,000 people live, and more than 30,000 over the subsequent 24 hours. Diplomatic embassies and news agencies from around the world attended in person and via social media.At the same time, the war danger which required the emergency press availability to be so hastily organized, is escalating each day, almost by the hour. As the press conference was taking place on June 12, the United States imposed even more sanctions against Russia. Russia later responded by ending transactions at its financial exchanges in United States dollars, euros, or Hong Kong dollars—something that was coming, but has now, thanks to these recent actions taken by the United States, been accelerated. Meanwhile, Russian nuclear-capable (but unarmed) ships, (four in all), including the Russian frigate Admiral Gorshkov and the nuclear-powered submarine missile cruiser Kazan, visited the nation of Cuba, on what was referred to by United States National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan as “something we’ve seen before.”Was Sullivan referring to October 1962 {Cuban Missiles Crisis]? And more importantly, would Sullivan actually know what he meant, if he were? As Executive Intelligence Review’s military analyst Carl Osgood reported, “The U.S. is so 'unconcerned' about the Russian task force, in fact, that the U.S. Navy deployed three guided-missile destroyers, joined by a French Navy frigate and a Canadian warship, as well as U.S. and Canadian aircraft, to monitor the passage of the Russian ships to Havana, just 90 miles off the tip of Florida. ‘Air and maritime assets under U.S. Northern Command have conducted operations to ensure the defense of the United States and Canada,’ the Pentagon said….”These are not, and will no longer be, normal days. We are, perhaps, no longer living in anything that will ever again resemble “normal times.” Our physical space-time has been permanently shifted, and “it is very possible,” as the late Dr. Fred Wills, former foreign minister of Guyana and close friend of Helga and Lyndon LaRouche, used to say, “to be caught below the level of historical events.” That is how nations, civilizations, and empires disappear. What each citizen must do, to not only survive, but also to grow and develop, is a “voluntaristic” approach to improving life by changing history.A former member of the United States National Security Agency (NSA) who viewed the June 12 event observed that Helga Zepp-LaRouche “tied it all together at the end. You need that, because, though I agree that it is necessary for people to be scared of the danger of an inevitable nuclear war, so that they will face it, it’s necessary to know what the world is that we are fighting for, if we are going to have the drive to win.” The Zepp-LaRouche Ten Principles of a New International Security and Development Architecture document may be the major reason why she has appeared on so many “hit lists” and “kill lists” issued by forces in Ukraine, and by extension, NATO. Her principles are revolutionary in their simplicity, and should be read and consulted as a short, intelligible declaration of “why we fight.” Speaking of “hit lists,” the U.S. Congress is now threatening to defund the Ukrainian “Data Journalism Agency” also known as “Texty,” a platform and non-governmental organization which had recently published a list with nearly 400 American citizens, including Harley Schlanger and Diane Sare and 76 organizations to be “hit.”Zepp-LaRouche’s evaluation of what the press conference accomplished, and what now needs to be done, is partially reproduced here, and is otherwise available in the transcript of her weekly webcast June 13, “The ‘Sole Superpower’ Heads Towards Bankruptcy and Irrelevance.” She was asked what her response was to the success of the Washington, D.C.-based panel with Ritter, Colonel Black, and Colonel Wilkerson:Zepp-LaRouche: "Well, I think it was an important first step. I think that the competence of the speakers, who all have military or intelligence backgrounds: Colonel Wilkerson was the chief of staff for Colin Powell, very outspoken and eloquently insightful. Naturally, Richard Black has a huge international following. People have enormous respect for his integrity as an American patriot. And Scott Ritter is maybe at this point the most outspoken critic of the U.S. policy of confrontation against Russia, in particular, but also against China. So, I think the combination of these speakers, together with me, was important to get across the urgency. Scott Ritter said it repeatedly: He said that when people tell him he shouldn’t scare people, he said that is exactly what we have to do, because only if people are waking up—I’m now using my own words—in the middle of the night full of sweat, being afraid that they will die soon if the policy is not changed, this is much better than sleepwalking into a catastrophe from which nobody may be left if it occurs.“So, I think this was very, very important. Immediately after we concluded this press conference, I turned on the German TV to watch the news. It was really like a completely different universe. Where people in our press conference were warning of what will happen if it comes to nuclear war and how real it is, the lack of reality in the German public debate, at least as it is transmitted by the mainstream media, is just mind boggling. Here you have Pistorius, the Defense Minister, calling for militarization of the German state, calling for a new draft army, which is fallen out of times completely; this is supposedly not the Cold War. "So, I would really urge you, our viewers, the most important thing you can do is please watch this press conference if you haven’t done so yet, and then send it around as widely as possible to all possible people; elected officials, social media contacts, institutions. I think that that is a very important warning message. “Is this enough already now to stop the train which, according to many military experts and leaders of Europe, East European states, has left the station already? I don’t think so. Because just today it was reported that the Deputy Foreign Minister of Russia Alexander Grushko, basically warned that there are very clear signs that NATO is preparing for a clash with Russia, including the option of involving nuclear weapons, and that the situation is completely dangerous. Therefore, I don’t think we have derailed this policy. I think we have given the people of good will a tool with which they can warn elected officials and their friends and associates, but a lot more has to be done.”

June 14—A nationally prominent German newspaper has put a spotlight on the role of Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation (CCD) in seeking to restrict free speech in Germany. The June 8 issue of Berliner Zeitung has a lengthy exposé of the role of Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation’s (CCD) in recruiting German journalists in attacking other journalists alleging they are supporting Russia. The CCD is a U.S. State Department-supported agency in the Ukraine President’s office which generates lists of what it calls “information terrorists,” and recommending “action” be taken against them, as EIR has documented for example, in the attempted assassination of Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico. The case of Armin Coerper, the head of the Moscow office of Germany’s ZDF state-run TV channel, is at the center of the Berliner Zeitung exposé.On Jan. 29, ZDF broadcast an on-the-ground report by Coerper on the situation in the war-torn city of Mariupol. Right at the beginning, the ZDF reporter said that he wanted to “make it very clear” that his report does not mean “that we recognize this occupation by Russia,” adding that it is important, however, to “get a picture on the ground.” He believes it is “personally important to report on a war from both sides.” Coerper goes on to explain that Mariupol is “not a ghost town,” but rather, there is electricity, hot water and internet access. Reconstruction is in full swing, workers from Russia and from Central Asia can be seen on the construction sites, and even the destroyed theater is being rebuilt. Coerper says that Russia is planning to resettle Russian citizens in Mariupol.Even that much reality was too much to be permitted. “In Germany, a storm of indignation breaks over Coerper and ZDF shortly afterwards,” Berliner Zeitung writes. Numerous journalists, including from Stern magazine, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Bild, denounced Coerper as an alleged “Russian propagandist” in the wildest terms. Interestingly, Stern provides ostensible evidence in the form of a tweet by Sergej Sumlenny, the long-standing head of the Heinrich Böll Foundation’s office in Kiev, now working at the European Resilience Initiative Center which closely cooperates with Ukraine’s CCD.“Practically no one takes Coerper’s side,” Berliner Zeitung notes. “Only the Austrian section of Reporters Without Borders writes on X that ‘the role of journalists is to present the reality on the ground objectively and impartially.’ Coerper had tried to get a ‘comprehensive picture’ of the situation.”The CCD’s hand behind this witch-hunt against Coerper—which included his name being added to the Myrotvorets kill list—became public later, when the CCD, backed up by the Ukrainian Ambassador to Germany, sent a delegation to Berlin in April for meetings with the government-owned Federal Center of Civic Education (Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, BPB). According to the CCD itself, the trip was financed by the European Union.Berliner Zeitung wrote: “The meeting apparently also served the purpose of presenting the dissatisfaction of Ukrainians with German media to the representatives of the Federal government. The Center’s analysis, in which ZDF and Berliner Zeitung are accused of Russian propaganda, ‘was presented to German government officials.’”(As EIR magazine has reported, Helga Zepp-LaRouche and the Schiller Institute which she founded and chairs were included in the CCD’s dossier against German institutions and prominent individuals.)A spokesperson for the BPB told Berliner Zeitung: “The Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation took part in all-day talks with the Federal Ministry of the Interior and Homeland (BMI) on April 9 and in the morning of April 10. The BPB took part in a meeting on the afternoon of April 9, specifically employees from the Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe project group.”The Federal Foreign Office also confirmed a meeting with the Ukrainian disinformation “experts.” When asked by the Berliner Zeitung, the office said: “We are in contact with the Ukrainian government and civil society to combat disinformation. In this context, a meeting took place with the Ukrainian ‘Center to Counter Disinformation’ (sic) and the Ukrainian embassy in Berlin.”The Interior Ministry spokesperson told Berliner Zeitung that “The BMI clearly pointed out that ZDF is a public broadcaster and a reputable medium and that journalistically sound reporting on Ukraine—including possible criticism of Ukraine—is not to be described as disinformation in the opinion of the BMI.”The BPB states: “The conversation with the BPB was not about ZDF. The subject of this conversation was an exchange about political education programs. Media in general were just as little the subject of discussion as ZDF.”Asked by Berliner Zeitung what the character of the Foreign Ministry’s cooperation with the CCD is, the ministry replied evasively, just stating that it gathers information about disinformation. It did not state whether it shares the CCD’s claim that ZDF and Berliner Zeitung were “Russian disinformation” channels.