Aug. 14—Hamas has accepted the outline of a new peace plan for Gaza that would release all remaining hostages—living and dead—at once, and within 60 days lead to a withdrawal of Israeli forces and a new civilian government that would not include Hamas, which would also be demilitarized. Sources close to discussions between Hamas and mediators in Cairo say that the agreement is provisional upon Israeli acceptance of the plan, which has yet to be fully presented to the Netanyahu government.
Ultimately, these sources say that any agreement would come out of a joint meeting between Hamas, Israel, and mediators from Egypt, Qatar, and the United States. If Israel agrees to the outline of the plan, which had been worked out with the Arab mediators and President Donald Trump's special envoy Steve Witkoff last week, such a meeting would be scheduled, depending on Witkoff's schedule. The Special Envoy is heavily involved in tomorrow's Alaska summit between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Pressure Mounts on Netanyahu
Hamas' agreement with the terms of the new plan, which will see the end of its rule in Gaza and its end as a military organization, puts pressure on the Butcher of Gaza, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu, whose announced plan for a new wave of slaughter and the full occupation of the Strip by the Israeli military has met with universal protest both inside Israel—where it is opposed by the leadership of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the families of the hostages, who say that it will kill all that remain alive—as well as in the rest of the world. Various European and other nations have used it as an impetus to announce their pending recognition of a Palestinian state.
Hamas' Diminishing Support
"Hamas has finally accepted the reality of its situation," said a source close to the negotiations. "It has no future, lacking support from both its former patrons, Bibi, who gave them guns and money to block the Palestinian Authority, and Iran, who totally lacks the means to supply its proxy. It has little or no support among Gazans who blame its stupid massacre and attack on Israel Oct. 7, 2023 for giving Netanyahu the pretext for unleashing his genocide against them. This deal can halt a new slaughter and get Hamas out of Gaza.
"And it backs Bibi into a corner," the source continued. "He has said that the only way to deal with Hamas is to exterminate them, perhaps freeing a handful of the hostages in the process. But the IDF leadership has said that the occupation of the rest of Gaza will kill all the hostages. This deal gets them home alive. If he refuses it, the families and the rest of Israel minus the insane Nazi Zionists represented by war criminals Bezalel Smotrich [Finance Minister] and Itamar Ben-Gvir [National Security Minister] will come for him."
Trump’s Role and Global Implications
"The key will be if Trump finally decides to turn up the pressure and demand sanity from Israel," said the source. "Trump wants the humanitarian disaster in Gaza to end. He knows that people are being starved to death by Bibi's denial of aid. This new deal will allow Trump and the United States to mobilize the world to put an end to this. It removes Israel from any role in determining how much humanitarian aid enters Gaza and who will distribute it. This provides the hammer needed to ram through such a deal.
"What has happened in Gaza is one of the most disgusting episodes in modern history, the worst genocide since the Nazis, done by an American ally, with America looking on," concluded the source. "Trump did not allow this to start, but ending the killing has eluded him. Until now. If the Arabs can bring Hamas on board, then the President must force Bibi to go along. If not, then what happens next is on Trump."
Aug. 13—Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov expressed hope that the upcoming meeting between the Presidents of Russia and the United States, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, will give an impetus to normalization of bilateral relations, TASS reported yesterday. “We hope that the forthcoming top-level meeting will give an impetus to normalization of bilateral relations, allowing [them] to facilitate resolution of certain issues,” he said in an interview with the Izvestia daily, speaking about resumption of direct air service. “Although, obviously, the leaders will focus on other subjects,” he added.
Trump, meanwhile, was reportedly dismissive of NATO's Ukrainian dictator Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whose demands to be included in the summit were refused by Trump. “I get along with Zelenskyy, but, you know, I disagree with what he’s done. Very, very severely disagree. This is a war that should have never happened,” Trump said, reported The Hill.
The Hill notes that Trump has said the meeting will touch on some territorial swapping for “the betterment of both” countries, a proposal Zelenskyy rejected on Saturday, Aug. 9. “Of course, we will not give Russia any awards for what it has done. The Ukrainian people deserve peace,” he said, adding that “all partners” must understand peace and that “Ukrainians will not give their land to an occupier.”
Trump said he was perturbed by the Ukrainian leader’s resistance. “I was a little bothered by the fact that Zelenskyy was saying, ‘Well, I have to get constitutional approval.’ I mean, he’s got approval to go into war and kill everybody, but he needs approval to do a land swap—because there’ll be some land swapping going on,” Trump said. He added that the land swap will be “for the good of Ukraine,” before adding that a possible deal will also involve “some bad stuff for both” Kyiv and Moscow.
In a recent poll of Ukrainians, Gallup found that 69% believe that Ukraine should seek negotiations to end the war as soon as possible, with only 24% saying that Ukraine should keep fighting until it wins the war. This is a dramatic change even from 2024, when 52% supported peace talks and 38% preferred to continue the fighting. Sources report that Gallup also asked Ukrainians if they believed that they could win the war. They did not publish the results of that question that showed over 90% believed that such a victory was impossible.
Aug. 13—Brazil intends to develop, whether the Trump administration likes it or not.
Finance Secretary Fernando Haddad reported on Aug. 11 that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had cancelled his scheduled Aug. 13 Zoom discussion with Haddad. It was to have been the first high-level meeting between the two trading partners, despite President Trump imposing 50% tariffs on a number of key Brazilian exports to the U.S., beef and coffee among them. The meeting was not cancelled for any economic reason, Haddad charged, but at the instigation of “extreme right forces,” who “acted together with some of President Trump’s advisors” to cancel it. Nor was the meeting rescheduled. “What is clear to us is that the trade issue is not the focus,” Haddad said.
The Trump administration’s intent with the tariffs is regime change. When he announced the punitive tariffs, President Trump said as much, demanding that the Brazilian government order the Supreme Court to shut down the ongoing trial of former President Jair Bolsonaro, charged with attempting to organize a military coup so he could continue in power after President Lula da Silva defeated him at the polls in 2022. Bolsonaro’s son, Eduardo took a “leave of absence” from Congress to move to the United States, where he is currently coordinating the campaign against the Supreme Court and the Lula government with Trump advisors.
Brazil is therefore developing more beneficial relations. On Aug. 11, Brazil’s Minister for Integration and Regional Development Waldez Góes signed an MOU in Beijing with the Vice Minister of China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) Wang Changlin for cooperation on regional development policies. The agreement specifically focuses on policies for reducing regional inequalities, a problem which China has been working on for some time, and which is quite important for Brazil, where poverty in parts of the Northeast is similar to the poorest parts of Africa, as compared to the southeast of the country, where there is much more industry and infrastructure and where living standards are far higher. Joint case studies, technical visits, training and science and technological innovation programs are on the agenda. The NDRC has already invited 24 high-level officials from Brazil’s Planning and Budget Ministry and the Executive Office of the President (Casa Civil) to participate in a seminar on economic development strategies.
The same day, Finance Minister Haddad signed both a memorandum with Chinese Finance Minister Lan Fo’an, updating plans “to expand joint projects, raise the level of economic cooperation and boost sustainable regional integration,” and a separate MOU with Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov on the creation of a bilateral “Economic and Financial Dialogue.” The aim of the latter is reportedly to guarantee stable communication between the ministries, on seven priority areas, which range from macroeconomic policies, to “confronting challenges and reforms;” tax cooperation; infrastructure financing; new bilateral opportunities; joint action in multilateral forums—and “other topics of mutual interest.”
Aug. 13—“BRICS may be on the verge of its most significant strategic convergence since its inception,” the Indian weekly, Indian Eye, suggests. “The coming weeks will test whether the current wave of U.S. tariffs becomes a catalyst for deeper BRICS integration or merely another irritant in already complex international relations. [Indian Prime Minister Neranda] Modi’s dual engagement with Russia and China,[Brazilian President and current head of BRICS] Lula’s outreach to India, and Beijing’s criticism of U.S. trade policy suggest a moment of rare alignment in the group’s political calendars.”
The Aug. 11 story is credited to the New Delhi, Moscow, and Beijing Bureaus of the weekly, which is published in India, the U.S.A., Brazil, and Canada, thus reaching the Indian diaspora. The article reviews the diplomatic contacts between the BRICS in recent weeks (which EIR News has covered), but offers more details on developing India-Brazil ties.
“The Lula-Modi conversation gains strategic weight,” it reports. “The two leaders are not only the political heads of their respective nations but also the voices of two continents within BRICS. Their call underscored a shared vision for South-South cooperation that blends trade expansion with technological exchange, defense coordination, and multilateral reform…. The agreement to expand the Mercosur-India trade pact and the plan for [Brazilian] Vice President Geraldo Alckmin to visit India in October, accompanied by ministers and business leaders, point to a practical follow-through. The agenda will cover trade, defense, energy, critical minerals, health, and digital inclusion—all sectors where both countries can gain by pooling resources and reducing dependence on Western market.”
President Donald Trump’s tariffs have created “a political opportunity. The bloc can present itself as a collective shield against what it sees as arbitrary economic measures, and as an advocate for reforming global trade rules to protect the sovereignty of emerging economies,” it argues.
“While it is premature to predict a formal BRICS response to Trump’s tariffs, the diplomatic choreography of the past week hints at a converging strategy. Modi’s talks with Lula, [Modi’s] upcoming visit to China, [Indian National Security Advisor Ajit] Doval’s discussions with [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, and the expected Putin visit to India are all part of a dense web of leader-level engagements that could culminate in a more united BRICS economic front.”
Indian Eye’s story adds the tantalizing suggestion that “joint infrastructure projects” are among the possibilities for a coordinated economic response. Coordination “might take the form of expanded intra-BRICS trade agreements, local currency settlements to bypass the dollar, joint infrastructure projects, and coordinated positions in the WTO and G20. Brazil and India’s interest in digital payment systems, as shown in the PIX-UPI exchange, also opens the door for fintech collaboration that reduces transaction costs and dependency on Western financial systems.” 
Aug. 13—Paulo Nogueira Batista, one of Brazil’s leading economists and a former Vice President of the BRICS New Development Bank (NDB) from its creation in 2015 until 2017, believes the BRICS summit held in Rio de Janeiro in early July 2025 “was a success, contrary to what many had feared (including me).” In an article published in the leading Brazilian daily Folha de São Paulo on July 7, right after the summit ended, Nogueira wrote:
“In the financial area, some important initiatives were reaffirmed…. In particular, it was interesting that President Lula reiterated that the BRICS needs to create an alternative currency for international transactions. This is a fearless statement, as he ignores—and he is right to ignore—Donald Trump’s repeated threats against the BRICS and against any country that acts to weaken the dollar as a currency.”
Nogueira explained that the proposal is not meant as an attack on the dollar. “BRICS does not intend to deliberately weaken the dollar, but rather to create alternatives to the international system dominated by the West, a system that is inefficient, politically manipulated and does not meet the needs of the Global South. That’s why we need to create alternative and independent mechanisms, while still participating in the Western system.”
He also praised the steps taken so far by the BRICS and the NDB: "Increasing use of national currencies in transactions between countries (bypassing the dollar), the construction of a new international payments platform, and the outlines of a multilateral guarantee scheme within the framework of the NDB.
Nogueira regretted that “there was no mention in the Leaders’ Declaration of the creation of a new reserve currency, which is supported by President Lula and other leaders. This is the most important step,” Nogueira insisted, because it is needed to facilitate both trade and investment that is outside the speculative framework of the Western financial system. But the idea “faces stiff resistance from India. And also from the group’s central banks, which get in the way a lot and grant themselves the right to interfere in geopolitical issues! Brazil’s Central Bank is one of the worst. Incredibly, it often behaves as if it were a separate country, an 11th BRICS nation. It needs to be brought to heel.”
In other writings, Nogueira has gone out of his way to praise the approach taken by former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, who is now the President of the NDB, who intervened when she was head of state of Brazil to stop the sabotage of the BRICS by Brazil’s Central Bank. Nogueira has urged current Brazilian President Lula da Silva, who is head of the BRICS for this term, to act similarly.
As for the political obstacles within the BRICS, which makes decision by unanimous consensus, Nogueira proposed that prompt action is required due to the gravity of the crisis, and that "the solution is to allow certain initiatives to be taken forward by a sub-group, on a voluntary basis, leaving the door open for those who don’t wish to participate from the outset, to come on board later.
The problem is, really, that the BRICS cannot exist as a subset of the existing totally broken and bankrupt global financial system. Anything that touches that system, which is dominated by the City of London and its Wall Street satrap, is corrupted and will eventually be destroyed. So, the efforts both collectively and independently by BRICS members to create new physical wealth through investments that are made for different purposes than making financial profit for investors or for establishing control of physical and resource assets that can be looted for financial profit must eventually be undermined and opposed by the central banks that are players for existing global system, and by agents and operatives of that old system.
Eventually, as Nogueira knows but does not say, the question must be called: either you are part of an old and collapsing monetarist system, and will be dragged down by its collapse or you are the embryo of what must be a totally new system, founded not for financial profits for the few, but for the expansion of physical wealth for the many, as part of a new just, world economic order that must replace the existing decadent order of London and Wall Street. It is a fools errand to think that the BRICS can become a pathway to escape the collapse of the old order, the which cannot be reformed or fixed. Whether the BRICS wants to pretend that it is not a threat to the old system, it is already recognized as such a threat and London and Wall Street will use whatever power they muster to destroy that threat. There ultimately can be no accommodation with the central banks. The BRICS must offer their new path to prosperity to the national powers of the old system, such as the United States of Donald Trump, to join with them in bringing a new system into being.
Aug. 13—Just three days before the summit between Presidents Putin and Trump in Alaska, the New York Times Aug. 12 drops what they hope will be a bombshell: Russia is suspected of hacking into the federal court filing system.
A cyber security specialist contacted about the report said there is absolutely no reason to believe that the information about the hack is true, "given what has now been proven to be false reports of Russian hacking during the 2016 election." The source says, as is well known, but the Timesneglects to report, the NSA has software that can mimic and falsely attribute to alleged foreign actors attempted and actual hacks into such systems, as has been exposed in leaks of materials reporting on such capabilities from Edward Snowden and others.
The source said that rather than assume that such reports of alleged Russian (or Chinese) hacks are true, it were better to assume that they are the work of sections of our own intelligence agencies, linked to NATO, that want to sabotage improved relations and cooperation between the United States and Russia and China, until proven otherwise. The timing of this leaked report, just days before the Alaska summit, gives a better clue as to who is behind this, the source said. "I don't think it is credible," he reported.
Federal officials are “scrambling” to figure out how deep this digital dumpster fire goes. While the coverage acknowledges that hackers have allegedly been in the system for years, this now “urgent matter” (as it is reportedly described by an internal memo). Another source reported that there has long been suspicion that hackers working for Dope, Inc, the international drug cartels, have attempted to hack the courts and justice system records.
While the hacking may be centered in New York, courts in places like South Dakota, Missouri, and even Arkansas have reportedly been affected. Judges, under instructions likely from the FBI, are taking measures like not uploading sealed docs to PACER (the software program/server that provides access to the documents).
Politico sniffed out that a “foreign actor” has been poking around courts since early July, although it were far more likely that such information was deliberately leaked to them, as they have no ability to check its veracity and are known to simply publish what leakers provide.. Rep. Jerrold Nadler (R-NY), a Zionist lobby asset, back in 2022 even claimed that three unnamed countries had breached the system starting in 2020.
Aug. 13—The Russian Ministry of Defense issued an alert that Kyiv is preparing a provocation to disrupt the Russian American summit negotiations scheduled for Aug. 15.
“For this purpose, a group of foreign media journalists were brought by SBU [Ukrainian Security Service] vehicles to the city of Chuguyev in the Kharkov Region on Monday, Aug. 11, under the cover of ‘preparing a series of reports about the residents of a city in the frontline zone,’” says the statement.
“Immediately before the summit on Friday, the Ukrainian Armed Forces have planned a provocative strike using UAVs and missiles against one of the densely populated residential areas or a hospital, with a large number of civilian casualties, which are to be immediately ‘documented’ by the Western journalists who were brought in.”
The Ministry of Defense concludes that the strike will be blamed on Russia, to create a negative media environment and the “conditions for the disruption of Russian-American cooperation on resolving the conflict in Ukraine” at the scheduled Friday summit between Presidents Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump.
Aug. 13—Sergei Gavrilov, a Communist Party member of the Russian State Duma, and the head of its Committee on Property, Land, and Property Relations, told RIA Novosti on Aug. 11, that the upcoming Alaska summit talks between Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump, could address significant Arctic economic projects. While the Ukrainian issue is the primary agenda, global economic cooperation in the Arctic is also expected to be discussed.
Gavrilov, a member of the National Financial Council of the Bank of Russia, highlighted that the talks could address long-term economic interests, such as joint mechanisms for Arctic route development, investment in port and transport infrastructure, and increasing cargo flow to boost trade between Russia and the U.S. Key projects include enhancing the Northern Sea Route and modernizing navigation infrastructure.
The legislator singled out one particular possible project: a transport corridor across the Bering Strait, which could facilitate resource development and economic growth.
A flagship infrastructure project, like a Russia-U.S. transport link, could symbolize broader international cooperation in the Arctic and Pacific regions.
Gavrilov suggested that the billions of dollars in frozen Russian assets in the U.S. could theoretically be used to co-finance infrastructure projects, stimulating economic ties and attracting private capital participation.
Aug. 12—Prof. Enzo Siviero, who together with Claudio Celani, wrote a call for Trump and Putin to build the Bering Strait Tunnel, has explained in a June 29 video interview what an infrastructure such as the Bridge over the Strait of Messina can bring to the local economy as a driver, during its construction phase. He also encouraged to have a broader vision, which includes exploring the feasibility of a Sicily-Tunisia connection, which he called TUNeIT.
The executive project, which the Italian government approved last week, "provides for diversification, that is, the bridge is one thing, all the complementary works are another thing, which are more than half of the overall project and are works that are normally semi-standard, so they are bridges, viaducts, railways tunnels, and junctions, and then there is the whole expropriation operation, which takes time. Not only that, but a construction site like this one, and when we talk about that construction site, we are actually talking about dozens of simultaneous construction sites because otherwise it cannot be done. It requires logistics, incredible support logistics. … If we think about logistics, we think simply about feeding tens of thousands of people, washing, ironing, supporting the whole operation, including security from the point of view of hospital health, equipping those that exist and probably implementing those who do not yet exist with field hospitals, because when you have tens of thousands of workers, it’s obvious that you have to take into account that there will be accidents or other things. Of course, it’s an environment that takes into account all possible and imaginable variables, so it’s likely that nothing will happen, but the human variable [must always be considered] … then there is all the construction site logistics: Think about transportation, concrete, the water supply—we will make desalination plants that will then remain, available to the community Where does the spoil from the tunnels go? There will be beach nourishment, in short, there is also a very accurate environmental study, let’s say that.
“I must also say, just to broaden the scope, how visionary engineering has shaped the world. Visionary engineering is what has been done for Suez as well as the Panama Canal, but also many other things, such as the Messina Bridge and this idea that I launched—which, however, is not mine because it is now about 20 years old and was launched by the Sicilian Region—for a permanent link between Mazara del Vallo and Capo Bon, that is, between Sicily and Tunisia, or between Europe and Africa.”
The project is feasible “even within the limits we find ourselves in, which are essentially craftmanship, but ideas are based on vision and the ability to invent something that did not exist before. … I believe that this can work. We have the room to make it happen because if we think that in this way, with this operation, Sicily could become the logistical hub of Europe towards Africa, in turn Tunisia could become the logistical hub of Africa towards Europe.”
Aug. 12—In an Aug. 10 interview with TASS, Prof. Peter Kuznick, Director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University proposed building a Bering Strait tunnel that would connect the United States with Russia through high-speed rail.
Kuznick, who is well-known as a collaborator with filmmaker Oliver Stone on several historical projects, urged building upon the upcoming Trump-Putin summit, by holding talks that would involve the leaders of Russia, Brazil, India, China, and the United States. “What I would like to see is a follow-up meeting between Trump, Putin, and [Chinese leader] Xi Jinping at the World War II commemoration [Sept. 3] in China. It would be even better if [Indian Prime Minister Narendra] Modi and [Brazilian President Luiz Inácio] Lula [da Silva] also join.”
He urged cooperation between Russia, the U.S., and perhaps other nations, on joint development projects in the Arctic “and perhaps a Bering Strait Tunnel connecting Russia and the U.S. with high-speed rails.” This sort of collaboration could “put the world back on the path toward peace and begin easing the tensions that have made our world so insanely dangerous of late,” he said.
EIR covered this idea on Aug. 8. On Aug. 11, Schiller Institute Founder Helga-Zepp LaRouche released an open letter to Presidents Trump and Putin, which said that as they meet August 15 at a summit in Alaska, “There is something even more elevated you can do, by not only fighting off the threats facing mankind, but by giving the whole world a beautiful vision for the future. You could agree to build a corridor across the Bering Strait, and with that rail and tunnel project unite the rail systems of Eurasia with those of the Americas.” This would produce physical development.
Zepp-LaRouche added, that as a result of such a project: “In the not so distant future, one could then travel by high-speed railroad around the world, from the most southern tips of Argentina and Chile in Ushuaia and Puerto Williams, all way through the Americas, then through the Bering Strait, across Eurasia, then with a tunnel under the Strait of Gibraltar, travel all the way through the African continent to the Cape of Good Hope.”
Aug. 12—The Sunday, Aug. 10 weekly magazine of the daily Calabria Live published an article by Claudio Celani, identified as co-editor of the EIR Strategic Alert and collaborator of Schiller Institute chair Helga Zepp-LaRouche, entitled “Messina, the Bridge of Records—Italy Challenged the World”. The magazine has several other articles dedicated to the Messina Bridge, including an interview with Italian Infrastructure Minister Matteo Salvini.
What follows is the translation of Celani’s feature:
The bridge that will break all records has already broken one, that of the opposition. Never before has there been, in the world, such procrastinated hostility against a project as bold as it is necessary to connect two territories of the same nation, a hostility that has at times turned into political sabotage and has postponed the work on a project that has been talked about for fifty years. Indeed, for 2,000 years, if the Romans were already thinking of a bridge, but, since at the time they were made of stone, they could not go beyond a pontoon bridge, not exactly destined to last. It is only thanks to the industrial revolution that today we possess the technology and materials that allow us to realize a 2,000-year-old dream.
Now that the construction of the Strait Bridge is a state law, its detractors will have to give up, even if there is reason to fear that organized minorities will continue to try to sabotage it. They do not realize that they are acting as useful idiots for interests that transcend national borders, and harken back to the times when colonial empires fought for supremacy in the Mediterranean. The times when France and England fought for control of Suez or Italian commercial ambitions in Tunisia were overridden by the French expeditionary force. Yes, the strategic function of the Mediterranean Bridge has not escaped those nostalgic for those times, if Anglo-American high-finance figures even write, without fear of ridicule, that the Strait Bridge will favor Putin, because it diverts resources from Defense (google: Brooks Sicily Bridge, to believe it). In reality, London, Wall Street, Brussels, and Paris understand well that the project will immeasurably increase our country’s political clout in the geographical area of reference.
We all understand that the Bridge, together with the high-speed train and highway connections, will bring Sicily closer to Italy and vice versa, but also Sicily and Southern Italy to Central and Northern Europe. If everything works north of the Alps, it will be possible to travel from Berlin to Palermo in eight hours. Furthermore, the Bridge will bring Italy and Europe closer to the African continent, whose development is Europe’s natural—and obligatory—mission. It is, in fact, inconceivable to stem the migratory phenomenon without intervening to create development, with a vision that goes beyond the Italian government’s Mattei Plan, laudable though its intentions are, but entirely insufficient.
In mid-July, I attended an international conference in Berlin that addressed precisely this topic, with the participation of European, Chinese, American, Russian, and African experts. One of the proposals that has gained support is to establish trilateral cooperation agreements between Europe, Africa, and China for major development projects capable of acting as “game changers,” that is, driving the agro-industrial development of large regions. The model has already been tested, for example in the construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, a project built by the Italian company Webuild, the French company Alstom, which supplied the turbines, and the Chinese company, which, in addition to building the power lines, co-financed the project. The same model can be applied to bring water to the Sahel, through the Italian-led Transaqua project, which would serve as a driving force for the whole of Central Africa.
The Bridge thus fits into the perspective of integrating the Euro-Afro-Asian continental economies, defined by the great American economist Lyndon LaRouche as the “Land-Bridge of Development.” It’s no coincidence that LaRouche, who was well acquainted with the Strait Bridge project and had discussed it with Italian interlocutors, is considered the forerunner of the New Silk Road, “a visionary,” according to Giulio Tremonti, who anticipated its lines well before it was launched by the Chinese leadership under the name Belt and Road Initiative. The benefits of the Bridge for the Sicilian and Southern Italian economies have been extensively described, and we won’t repeat them here. We’re keen to broaden the framework within which it fits: A global economy driven by the great growth coming from Asia, from which it would be foolish to isolate ourselves. To conclude, we can already look to the future, in the TUNeIT and GRALBeIT projects of our friend Enzo Siviero, the stable connection between Sicily and Tunisia, the first, and between Italy and Albania, the second. A dream? Perhaps today, but not in the near future, just as the Strait Bridge was in the past and is no longer.
Aug. 12—The following is a machine translation of an article, published on Aug. 11, by the Russian news service TASS, based on an interview with Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche, who was asked for her perspective on the upcoming August 15 Summit in Alaska between Presidents Putin and Trump.
Zepp-LaRouche Expert: Russia and the U.S. Could Build a Tunnel under the Bering Strait
The founder of the international Schiller Institute said that the August 15 summit “promises to be more than just an attempt to find a way to resolve the crisis in Ukraine.”
WASHINGTON, August 11. /TASS Corr. Sergei Yumatov/. The meeting of Russian and U.S. Presidents Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump on August 15 in Alaska could allow the two countries to resume work on promising joint projects, including the construction of a tunnel under the Bering Strait that would connect Chukotka and Alaska. Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder of the international Schiller Institute, expressed this opinion in an interview with a TASS correspondent.
According to her, the upcoming summit “promises to be more than just an attempt to find a way to resolve the crisis in Ukraine.” “The presidents of the two countries may finally decide to build a 100-kilometer tunnel under the Bering Strait, which would connect Eurasia and America and facilitate the development of the vast resources of Siberia and the Far East, where the largest deposits of all the elements that can be found in the periodic table are located,” the expert noted. According to her, “the joint development of these resources could become an ideal conflict prevention program and a benefit for all of humanity.”
The idea of implementing a project within the framework of which a more than 100-kilometer tunnel would be built under the Bering Strait to connect the transport systems of Eurasia and America has been discussed for decades. As The Times newspaper noted in 2011, citing British experts, the transportation of goods along the Eurasia-U.S.A. highway, which would also connect resource-rich but sparsely populated areas of the planet with key overpasses, would be less expensive, faster and safer than by sea.
On August 8, Trump said that he expected to meet with Putin in Alaska on August 15. Then, plans for these talks were confirmed by Russian presidential aide Yury Ushakov. According to him, the leaders will focus on discussing options for achieving a long-term peaceful settlement of the Ukrainian crisis. The Kremlin expects the next meeting between Putin and Trump to take place on Russian territory, Ushakov said.
The Bering Strait is a strait between the easternmost point of Asia (Cape Dezhnev) and the westernmost point of North America (Cape Prince of Wales). The strait’s narrowest width is 86 km, and its shallowest fairway depth is 36 m. The strait connects the Arctic Ocean (Chukchi Sea) with the Pacific Ocean (Bering Sea). It is named after the Russian navigator Vitus Bering, who passed through this strait in 1728. The first of the known navigators to pass through there, in 1648, eighty years before Bering, was Semyon Dezhnev, after whom the cape in the strait was named.
Aug. 12—As the Netanyahu regime is preparing a bloody takeover of Gaza with the goal of ridding the Gaza Strip of Palestinians, Haaretz featured an interview on Aug. 9 with an attorney who warned of a coup plot underway by ultra-Orthodox Messianic Jews. According to Yair Littman Nehorai, the ultra-Orthodox see the wars in Gaza and Iran as “divine intervention,” which will “expedite the era of redemption,” when the world will embrace their view of one God. For the believers, the Jewish mission is “the struggle against global wickedness,” which is inspiring “an outburst of unfettered ecstatic fervor,” with talk of miracles and the belief in Netanyahu as a “messenger of God.”
Nehorai’s father was once a prominent member of the ultra-Orthodox movement headed by former Chief Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook. After spending World War I in England, Kook returned to Palestine, where he was named Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem, and later Mandatory Palestine. He founded Yeshiva Mercaz HaRav, which Nehorai identified as the training ground for the ultra-Orthodox movement, and the religious Zionist parties.
They believe in a two-stage process. First, the establishment of a Jewish state with an army, a secular state, while building an Messianic army. Nehorai says there are 5,000 to 6,000 graduates of the Yeshivas created by Kook’s followers, who are now in the army and the intelligence services. One example is Maj. Gen. David Zini, who has been chosen by Netanyahu to be the new head of Shin Bet. Another is the recent appointment of Brigadier General Eyal Krim as Chaplain General of the Army. Krim’s first act was to replace all members of the IDF rabbinate with followers of Kook.
Nehorai says they are now prepared to move to the second stage, which includes: taking over all the “promised land” (i.e., Greater Israel—Kook was behind the founding of the radical settler movement, Gush Emunim); rebuild the Temple; replace the secular state with a messianic ultra-Orthodox state. The judicial coup initiated by Netanyahu is part of the plan.
Their goal is to foment a religious revolution in Israel, moving their people into all institutions. Individuals like Fianced Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir are examples, racialists, who believe in “Jewish supremacy.” He characterized their outlook as follows: “The war in Gaza is a war of mitzvah [blessing]. That means you take what’s yours—and you’re allowed to kill them all. They succeeded in introducing the Amalek narrative … and thanks to it the idea that ‘No one in Gaza is innocent.’ We are in the midst of a religious war.”
Finally, he concluded with these two points: the loyalty of the Messianists is to the “land of Israel, not the state of Israel.” And all of Israel’s wars have been necessary stages toward redemption.
Aug. 12—With Israel facing political convulsions as a result of the Butcher of Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu's decision to go for the final kill in Gaza and totally occupy the territory—at the risk of letting all remaining living hostages be killed—the ability to force through a workable deal with Hamas depends on how "rough" President Donald Trump is willing to get with the Israeli leader.
Sources close to the White House say that Trump's Special Envoy Steve Witkoff has worked out, with Egyptian and Qatari mediators, a plan that would see the release of all hostages—living and dead—at once, in exchange for Palestinian prisoners and the withdrawal of all Israeli forces from Gaza within 60 days. That withdrawal would be supervised by the mediators, including the United States. As part of this deal, Hamas would be demilitarized under the supervision of the mediators, and its leaders sent into exile along with many of its so-called fighters.
A New Government and Humanitarian Relief for Gaza
Hamas would play no role in a new Gazan government, created under the supervision of the mediators, which would immediately begin working on plans for reconstruction and development of the land that has been reduced to an unlivable rubble heap by Israelis.
The agreement would begin with an immediate ceasefire, during which Israeli forces would cease blocking the influx of massive food and humanitarian aid for Gaza's starving and stricken population. That aid would be distributed by reputable international agencies, including the United Nations, coordinated under a plan soon to be announced by the United States. The role of the hated Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF)—an American-backed entity that has distributed food at limited sites that have become killing fields for starving Gazans, fired upon by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and private security hired by the GHF—remains unclear. The foundation’s operations have reportedly claimed thousands of lives.
Mounting Pressure on Netanyahu from Allies and the IDF
Netanyahu continues to reiterate his claim that there is no starvation in Gaza, saying on Aug. 10: "If we wanted starvation, two million Gazans would not be alive today. If we wanted to carry out genocide, it would have taken exactly one afternoon. There is no policy of starvation; there was a shortage that needed to be stopped. And that is exactly what we are doing." Such statements infuriate President Trump, sources report, who has told Bibi to stop denying the reality "I can see and people can see with their eyes."
Sources report that the plan is being presented to Hamas today in Cairo by Egyptian mediators, who have conveyed the message from Witkoff that it represents the only way to avoid further slaughter of Palestinians in the proposed Israeli occupation, which will start with an assault on Gaza City. The sources say that Hamas has come to realize that "they are over. They can have no political role in Gaza. They will either take this safe passage or be eliminated in bloody battle, that Bibi has proposed. If they take the deal, they will have done some for the people they have ruled over by force, and caused their slaughter with the murderous Oct. 7 attack on Israel, which led to more than 200,000 Palestinian casualties."
Hamas Loses Support as Israeli Opposition Grows
Important in this equation is that Hamas backers—the Iranians—have reportedly told the Hamas leadership that they can no longer supply them with weapons and funds. Their only other source of money and weapons had been Bibi, who had helped create Hamas as a buffer in Gaza against the Palestinian Authority. In order to push through the deal, the Israelis have been promised that the PA will not be part of the new Gazan government.
With the removal of Hamas as the governing authority in Gaza, it is thought that the IDF will play a role in policing the area until a Palestinian structure to do that job can be put in place. There is also the possibility that some Arab nations might assist in this in a transitional role, although none, as of yet, have agreed to do so.
Witkoff and the mediators believe that they have a chance to sell their plan now to the Israelis because of the explosion of opposition to Bibi's Gaza occupation plan, which is strenuously opposed by the leadership of the IDF—including its chief, Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir—who have given the mediators some important space and time by insisting that he will not have sufficient forces to carry out Bibi's plans for nearly two months. Zamir has further inflamed opposition by saying that he will need to conscript 200,000 recruits, since reservists are refusing Gaza duty.
Most importantly, Zamir has contradicted Netanyahu's claim that his action could rescue the remaining hostages. Zamir has said that it is likely such action would cause all of them to be killed.
Domestic Unrest and International Condemnation Intensify
"Netanyahu is having trouble selling his usual shtick. He's trying to market the security cabinet's decision to send ground forces into Gaza City as a new move that will finally defeat Hamas. But few are willing to buy this stale promise. Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir is convinced that his more limited plan is better. The far-right parties, which demanded the move, think it doesn't go far enough. And most Israelis would apparently prefer to end the war and sign a hostage deal, even at a high price," so wrote the respected Amos Harel in Haaretz yesterday.
Netanyahu's plan has sparked the largest antiwar demonstrations so far, bringing nearly a million people into the streets over the weekend to demand an end to the war and a peace deal to return the hostages. Polls have shown that the vast majority of Israelis want the war to end, and they are not interested in Bibi's plans to exterminate Hamas. Nor do they support announced plans from the lunatic wing of Bibi's coalition, led by Bezalel Smotrich (Finance Minister) and Itamar Ben-Gvir (National Security Minister), to populate parts of occupied Gaza with Israeli settlements.
Smotrich said he wants large parts of Gaza to remain under Israeli control and be settled, acknowledging that PM Netanyahu opposes the plan. "I don't think this is the right time to have that debate. I'm conducting it behind closed doors – I'm not blowing everything up over it," he told Israel's public broadcaster.
Smotrich and Ben-Gvir will never accept Witkoff's new plan and have denounced previous deals as delaying the moves to destroy Hamas. If Bibi accepts even parts of the plan, the two would leave the coalition and could collapse it. But if the war and protests continue—with the hostage families promising to lead a total shutdown of the Israeli economy—Bibi could lose a vote of confidence in the Knesset in the fall, which would force an election, likely next year.
Italian Defense Minister Guido Crosetto told the daily La Stampa on Aug. 11 that Israel's offensive in Gaza is not "a military operation with collateral damage, but the pure denial of the law and the founding values of our civilization ... beyond condemnation, we must now find a way to force Netanyahu to think clearly."
"Trump is going to have to force the issue and set the agenda here," said a source with 50 years of experience in the region. "He is going to have to tell Bibi that he is the President of the United States, and 'you will have to do what I say. You have made Israel into a pariah state, which does not have the support for your policies among most Jews in the world and in the U.S. We have worked a plan for get you out of the mess you created, and to end this slaughter of mostly innocent women and children. You will take this deal, or you will suffer the consequences.'
"Bibi can then say he was forced to do this," said the source. "If he gets the remaining hostages returned and he ends the war, then he just might win re-election—if he is not tossed into jail for corruption. This all depends on how committed Trump is to ending the war and returning the hostages. He says he is, but the test of that is coming soon. It is already here."
Aug. 11--Lt. Col. Anthony Aguilar (ret) was hired as a security contractor by UG Solutions, the company that was hired to provide security at the food distribution sites run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF)> But what this former Special Forces officer saw caused him to resign his position and speak out against the conduct of the GHF-security, and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), who committing genocide against starving peoples. We present his remarks to the Aug. 8 meeting of the International Peace Coalition> We have added subheads.
LT. COL. ANTHONY AGUILAR (ret.): Thank you, and thank you for having me on this platform. I think a lot of important discussion is happening today.
So, basically my experience was, I was hired as an independent security contractor for UG Solutions, which is a subcontract under a greater contract called Safe Reach Solutions, which is the for-profit contract mechanism under what many have heard of as the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. So, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is kind of the umbrella organization, but the organizations, the companies that are actually executing this humanitarian aid and assistance in Gaza are absolutely for-profit contract companies; they are there making money.
I’ve said it on many platforms in terms of what I’ve witnessed in terms of war crimes. I get a lot of pushback from people saying, “What you described aren’t war crimes.” Well, what I’ve described are exactly war crimes. I don’t prescribe to it being war crimes just because it’s on the news and you see someone beheading someone or somebody doing something grotesque. Those are certainly war crimes. But I call them war crimes based on what is prescribed and directed in the international humanitarian law, further codified therein by the protocols of the Geneva Convention, further codified in the laws of armed conflict. All of these are things that the United States is signatory to, along with Israel. I want to remind everybody that Israel is also a signatory to these things.
Within Gaza, is there a threat in Gaza? The threat of Hamas; the threat of an enemy? There absolutely is; I have never discredited or discounted that. However, there is also a very large, unarmed civilian population that is starving. They are on the brink of famine if they haven’t already crossed into what can be described as famine. That is a fact. And anybody who says that there isn’t mass starvation, or there aren’t starving people in Gaza, that is irresponsible rhetoric and that should be condemned. There is starvation. War crimes are being committed when you have Israel Defense Forces soldiers and UG Solutions American contractors—who, mind you, are in the country on a tourist visa—who are firing at the crowd to control their movements; or firing at the crowd to keep them back from a certain area. That’s just one example: Firing live ammunition, targeting at an unarmed population for the means of controlling them is a war crime.
A Campaign to Dehumanize the Population
So, what all this has shown me, having been there; having been on the ground in Gaza; is that it seems to me that there is an active effort, an active campaign if you will, to dehumanize the population. To label the entire population as the enemy, and then to further dehumanize the population through putting them in a position where they’re literally begging for food. We have set up these distribution sites in areas that, in order to reach them, the Palestinians have to travel many, many kilometers to get there. When they do get there, it is a mass free-for-all, fight for survival if you will, to get food at these locations. This further dehumanizes the population.
My fear is that, based on the current information that is available, the proposal that Netanyahu is putting forth to go and re-occupy or occupy the entirety of Gaza once again, is one, for the interests of the United States. We are complicit in that; they are using American weapons, they are using American bombs. Taxpayers’ dollars are going into an American contract entity, an American contract mechanism that is making money. U.S. tax dollars going into a company that is making money to be a part of this forced displacement if you will; putting Palestinians in danger. Regardless of the politics, beliefs and opinions aside, it is a fact that the distribution sites, the secured distribution sites where humanitarian aid is delivered and distributed in Gaza are built in the engagement areas of active combat zones. That’s a fact; I’ve been there and I’ve seen them. This, in and of itself, inherently puts a civilian population at great risk; just that piece alone should be condemned. The United States is absolutely complicit in that.
If Israel goes into a full occupation of Gaza, it will not be in Israel’s best interests, it will not be in the world’s best interests to occupy Gaza. To try to achieve a military defeat of Hamas is a fool’s errand. Hamas will not be militarily defeated. They have been militarily weakened, their leadership has been devastated. Now is the time for political and diplomatic actions, not military means. We have learned these lessons as a country in Afghanistan, Iraq, the southern Philippines. I’ve been deployed to the southern Philippines in the fight against the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. We’ve been there since the 1950s, since the days of General Pershing. We’ve learned that a military defeat of an organization of this nature is not going to achieve success. The full occupation of Gaza is only going to lead to much, much more death of a civilian population. It’s going to pull Israel into a quagmire of a conflict that will have no end. It is going to drag its allies into it with it—of which the United States is one.
I Am Committed to Spreading the Truth
So, I look at it through three different things, if you will. Humanitarian rights, humanitarian law; humanitarian law, Geneva Convention, international laws and treaties that the United States agrees to, that we hold as our values. We are violating those in Gaza every day. It’s like the tail wagging the dog, if you will, in terms of going along with whatever our ally says that we should do, rather than standing up to … Not standing up to our ally, but standing with our ally to hold them accountable for what is right. Because in the end, this is only going to severely damage Israel’s position and credibility on the world stage.
Two, the aspect of perception; that U.S. citizens are in Gaza, armed with fully automatic weapons, stun grenades, shotguns, machine guns, tear gas, used against an unarmed civilian population, mind you, that is starving. They come to these sites to get food. The unarmed population isn’t coming to these sites to protest or coming to these sites to try and incite an attack; they’re coming to these sites because we’re inviting them to come to these sites with food that they need to survive. And then, in return, they’re getting treated as if they were animals; as if they were sub-human. So, there is the aspect of the United States presence on the world stage and our American values. My message in spreading the truth of what I’ve seen in Gaza is not to shame or belittle or criticize or blame. That’s on the world community. My position in this is to bring forth the truth so that the American people and the world have an honest assessment of what’s going on.
I think anyone can agree that with the amount of secrecy in Gaza—no foreign press, no press can go in. No foreign entity or anybody who may speak out against the IDF or Israel. When I think about the secrecy and the hiding of the truth and the doublespeak and the language of “Oh, no one’s being shot, and no one’s starving.” Then when you show ample evidence to the contrary, then the narrative turns to “OK, well some people are starving, and some people are being shot, but Hamas is bad.” You create these red herring arguments. So when you think secrecy, red herring arguments deflecting blame, there are other countries in the world that do that. North Korea. Is that the line-up that we want to be with in terms of how we engage in the world and how we prosecute conflicts and wars? I don’t think so.
The third piece I look to is Israel, an ally, and their position in the world. If they continue down this path to where it is now evident to the world that there is starvation; it is evident to the world that it is seemingly systematic and that it’s done intentionally. If Israel does not change their approach of what they’re doing to include not going forth with a full-scale invasion of Gaza; if they continue on this path, this trajectory, they’re only going to harm their position on the world stage. They will lose allies and supporters, and they will make themselves more of a target and isolate themselves to the point where they will not have support in the future. Again, I always make an attempt to take in all perspectives, everyone’s view, why someone thinks the way they do. I did not lose a close family member or a fellow citizen on October 7th. So, it would be unfair of me to say, “This is how an Israeli or the IDF should feel.” That would be unfair of me to say that.
However, regardless of the justification of a war, regardless of the justification of the reasoning to take action against a perceived enemy, there are values and guidelines and rules and laws and treaties that dictate and establish how that should be done. These maintain responsibility and accountability in our world; that’s what we’ve been doing for hundreds of years. From what I have witnessed, just looking at the facts as they are, there are war crimes being committed in Gaza. There are crimes against humanity being committed in Gaza. If that’s being done intentionally, or just through the mission creep and the fog and friction of war, I don’t know. But I invite the world to investigate and to look at that.
A Day of Reckoning Is Coming
I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again in ending here: A day of atonement, a day of judgment, a day of reckoning is coming. More and more of the world are waking up to what’s going on in Gaza; it cannot be ignored. The months and months and months of “Oh, there’s no starvation. Oh, there’s no mass killing; women and children aren’t dying. That’s all made up.” That rhetoric has been exposed. And a day of reckoning is coming when the world is starting to take a hard, hard look. It’s like a box; and when that box is opened, and we look in there and see what’s truly going on, the world is going to demand accountability. Now is the time—not next week, not next year, not after; now is the time for the United States to stand and hold our ally accountable. Because if we do not, the world is going to hold us accountable right alongside of them; right alongside Israel. It will not be to the benefit of Israel, the United States, and quite frankly the world. The thing is, we know this; we can see it. There’s ample evidence; not just from me, not just from one American who was there. I share these stories with you not as someone who read the newspaper or read an article and applied some kind of opinion to it. I was there on the ground, seeing it with my own eyes, witnessing it firsthand.
But even beyond that, if you can’t take my word for it, the evidence includes Israeli Defense Force soldiers, IDF soldiers who in the last week have come forth to confirm many of the things that I have said. So, what I would ask is, let’s look at the truth and let’s take an honest assessment of our position in the world right now, and choose the right path. Because if we do not, we will be on the wrong side of history as a nation. That’s something that I don’t want, and I’m sure that’s something no one here wants….
The dehumanization aspect is something that I think is something I have seen time and time again. I remember as a young lieutenant, as we were going into Iraq, the post-invasion counterinsurgency world was new to America in terms of conventional war transitioning into a counterinsurgency type war with a long duration of staying in that nation. It’s something the United States as an Army was not prepared for; I’m not saying the United States hadn’t experienced it in other places before—Vietnam, Moro Philippines, other places, etc. But at this scale in terms of a conventional fight transitioning into a counterinsurgency fight to where the conventional army was a player in it. The dehumanization aspect [screen freeze] soldiers. The names and things we give to our enemy, or to just the population. We’ve all heard these horrible things. I’ll say them, not that they’re my beliefs, but they’re things that have been said. In Iraq, we called them ragheads, or in the Philippines just calling the Filipinos [screen blip] and things like that that you hear. This dehumanization not only comes through in how we act, but in our language and what we call people and how that conveys it. The same thing in Gaza; the UG Solutions personnel on the ground, who, by the way, the contract leader, the guy in charge of the contract, is a high-ranking officer in the Infidels Motorcycle Club that claimed to have the downfall of all Arabs and all Muslims. He’s the guy in charge of the security contracts; the guy who wears a tattoo that says “Infidel.” They call the Palestinians the “zombies”; they call them the “shit heads”; they call them just horrible names. All of that is part of the dehumanization. You don’t refer to them as human beings; you refer to them as some name that dehumanizes them. Then it’s easier to not see them as a human. Then when they’re crawling around on the ground, trying to pick up food to survive, they’re subservient to you, and you have all the power. That’s another step of dehumanization. When you lie about their plight, when you lie about their struggle—“Oh, they’re not starving. They’re fine.”—you dehumanize them further.
What’s really sad and striking to me is that dehumanization is not just coming from the uneducated and the ignorant. That dehumanization is coming from the likes of Ambassador Huckabee. “There’s no starvation.” Come on; the American people aren’t dumb; we can see it. Or, what was striking was that Ambassador Huckabee and Mr. Witkoff went to go visit one of the sites in Gaza recently. Parts that were cut out of the mainstream media that I saw, the video that was shot was that they’re saying, “Oh, the IDF aren’t shooting at the civilians.” During their visit, just outside the site, you can hear constant machine gun fire. OK, somebody is shooting somebody. It’s just the blatant lies in the face of the truth that to me is concerning. What changes that is the American people speaking up and saying, “We won’t tolerate that.” But the dehumanization aspect, yes, you and I sir [referring to peace activist and former CIA intelligence officer Ray MacGovern], we’ve seen that. We’ve seen that in conflict; we’ve seen that in places around the world. That is often an approach by one enemy to another to dehumanize the population, because then it makes it more palatable to oppress them.
Aug. 11—According to a New York Times report on Aug. 8, President Donald Trump has secretly signed a directive to the Pentagon authorizing the use of military force against certain Latin American drug cartels that his administration has deemed are terrorist organizations. The order provides an official basis for the possibility of direct military operations at sea and on foreign soil against drug cartels. U.S. military officials have started drawing up options for how the military could go after the groups, according to “people familiar with the conversations.”
But the bulk of the New York Times story focuses on the complex and apparently unresolved host of legal issues that could arise if the U.S. military is used to target drug traffickers in other countries, especially if operations are conducted without Congressional authorization or without the cooperation of the countries involved. It is unclear, the Times says, what White House, Pentagon and State Department lawyers have said about the new directive or whether the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel has produced an authoritative opinion assessing the legal issues.
Mexico has rejected the prospect of U.S. military operations on its territory. “There will be no invasion of Mexico,” Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said yesterday after the Times story appeared, reported AFP. “We were informed that this executive order was coming and that it had nothing to do with the participation of any military personnel or any institution in our territory,” Sheinbaum told her regular morning press conference. The Mexican Foreign Ministry said later that Mexico “would not accept the participation of U.S. military forces on our territory.”
Sheinbaum’s remarks followed a statement released by the U.S. Embassy in Mexico, which said both countries would use “every tool at our disposal to protect our peoples” from drug-trafficking groups. U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Ronald Johnson said on X that the countries “face a common enemy: the violent criminal cartels.”
Sources close to the White House report that Trump is struggling with finding a way to take on the cartels, and that he is being pushed by some advisors "to bring in the Marines," said one source. "Direct military action is not necessarily the most effective way to fight these people. Some advisors, close to Director of National Intelligence (DNI) say the best way to fight is to bust up the protection racket that the international banking system runs for the cartel, which pass trillions of dollars through banks, and provide them with both liquidity and profits. If you can block these cash flows, both the cartels and the corrupt banks that service and use them would be put out of business. Then, it is not a very complex law enforcement operation to mop them up, in which the government of Mexico, with some logistical and other support provided by the U.S., can handle the job."
But the banks are going to fight to keep control of the massive money flows of "Dope, Inc.", which they launder on a daily basis for the cartels. "Maybe we should do as FDR and his friend and ally, former Marine commandant Gen. Smedley Darlington Butler proposed—send the Marines into Wall Street to take on the real enemy of our republic."
This and other sources also reported that there are people in the Southern Command who would like to have a military base in Mexico. Trump is reportedly opposed to this, which would make Mexico feel like a colony, and which they would strenuously resist. The idea of the base or bases was being pushed as part of the plans to control the border, which has proven to be unnecessary, in part, thanks to cooperation from the Mexican government.
Aug. 11—Chinese rail engineers have given thought since at least 2014 to the construction requirements for the Bering Strait tunnel required to build a “China-Russia-Alaska-Canada-U.S. high-speed railroad.” In May of that year, one of China’s most famous tunnel and rail engineers, Wang Mengshu, outlined China’s overall ambitious plans for building transcontinental high-speed railroads globally in an interview with Beijing Times.
The fourth of the transcontinental trunklines he identified caught international attention: the idea of linking Eurasia to Canada and the United States. Wang reported that planning was beginning on an estimated 13,000 km route, “starting from the northeast and heading north, through Siberia to the Bering Strait, crossing the Pacific Ocean by building a tunnel to Alaska, then going from Alaska to Canada, and finally to the United States.” He estimated that crossing the Bering Strait would require approximately 200 km of tunnels, “a technology used in the high-speed rail tunnel from Fujian to Taiwan, and the necessary technology is already in place.”
“If it is completed, people from China to the United States will no longer need to take a plane. They can take the high-speed rail to see the scenery of many countries along the way. According to the design speed of 350 km per hour, passengers can reach the United States in less than two days by high-speed rail,” he told Beijing Times.
Hearing of Wang’s interview, U.S. rail expert Hal Cooper, a champion for the Bering Strait tunnel for decades together with the Schiller Institute, told Russia’s RIA Novosti that while the political obstacles to Chinese, Russian, American cooperation may remain, “after this announcement by the Chinese, [the project] will never be suppressed. It’s never going to be swept back under the rug again.”
Seven months later, Wang told the New York Times in a December 18 interview, that the Bering Strait crossing "is a wish and a dream of not only China’s railway experts but also railway engineers in Russia, Canada and the U.S. whom I have spoken to. The technology developments in recent years in high-speed railway and underwater tunnels make it possible. It is a dream, but one that is within reach.
“The Chinese central government is not seriously considering it, not yet,” he reported. “But why not? We have the technology, and it is a good thing to do. It would benefit generations to come, and the environment. As railway engineers, we think it would be a great legacy to leave for future generations. It would connect continents. It would be a grand structure of human engineering.”
The New York Times wanted to know what the chances are that this grand idea would ever be built. Wang answered:
“That depends entirely on politics, because we have the technology. It depends on whether governments of the four countries can work together, make this dream come true and leave this amazing legacy for our children…. Some governments like to spend their resources on fighting wars. I think building a railway is far more meaningful than fighting wars.”
Aug. 11—Writing on his X page Aug. 9, Russian Direct Investment Fund CEO and special presidential envoy for investment and economic cooperation Kirill Dmitriev said that Russian President Vladimir Putin and American President Donald Trump, who will be meeting in Alaska on Aug. 15, should commit their countries to developing cooperation in the Arctic and beyond.
“Born as Russian America—Orthodox roots, forts, fur trade—Alaska echoes those ties and makes the U.S. an Arctic nation. Let’s partner on the environment, infrastructure, and energy in the Arctic and beyond,” Dmitriev wrote. Dmitriev included with his post a picture of railroad tracks extending in the direction of Alaska’s high mountains.
Also posted in the comments section of Dmitriev’s X account is a simple post by the Schiller Institute’s Daniel Burke, “Time for the Bering Strait Tunnel,” to which Dmitriev responded: “Possibly yes.”
On his Telegram channel, Dmitriev warned that there would be efforts to derail the Trump-Putin summit. “A number of countries that are interested in continuing the conflict, will make enormous efforts (involving provocations and disinformation) to disrupt the upcoming meeting between President Putin and President Trump,” he wrote, according to TASS.
It was Dmitriev who greeted Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff, when his plane landed in Moscow earlier this week for his meeting with President Putin. At that time Witkoff commented: “We see vast potential for mutually beneficial collaboration, including with U.S. investors in Arctic projects, rare earth metals and infrastructure development,” he said.
Aug. 11—There is no starvation in Gaza, repeated Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu, the Butcher of Gaza, at an Aug. 10 news conference. When asked about the matter, he lied that, while there was “deprivation” in Gaza, “no one in Gaza would have survived after two years of war” if Israel was implementing a “starvation policy.” He sidestepped the question about people starving to death, to passively deny there was a “starvation policy” being implemented to effectively kill everyone that won’t “leave voluntarily.” He was also never asked whether there is a “starvation policy” whose primary aim might be, not to directly kill everyone, but to drive everyone out of Gaza. There are historical examples in 1940s Poland and in Nazi Germany, where similar policies were carried out. In World War II’s concentration camps, the mission was to work the inmates (including the Reich’s political enemies) to death and to gas the ones that were deemed no longer worthy to be worked to death.
Netanyahu lied, as he has been doing repeatedly, since being warned by President Donald Trump last week to stop claiming that people are not starving, when everyone can see that they are. "If his mouth is moving, then he is lying<' said one source close to the White House. "President Trump, for one, does not believe his lies, believing hsi own eyes instead." This and other sources say that Trump will be announcing a comprehensive U.S. to halt the starvation and ease the humanitarian crisis in Gaza last this week, perhaps before his Aug. 15 summit in Alaska with President Vladimir Putin of Russia.
What follows is a brief summary overview of the policy of the Netanyahu government using food in Gaza as a weapon:
The UN and related agencies had no logistical blockages to getting 600 trucks/day into Gaza during the February ceasefire. That was completely stopped in March and April. From May through July, a total of 5,100 trucks have gotten in, not quite 57/day—or 8 days worth of aid over 91 days. And that figure included the late July “upsurge” response by Israel. Yet July averaged only 72/day. As of Aug. 10, the daily figure for people starved to death and for people shot dead trying to get aid was at 11 apiece. There are still more people in the latter category (around 900 at or around the GHF sites) than the former (around 150 known cases).
The so-called Gaza Humanitarian Fund claimed that they distributed 7.6 million “meals” last week. While that is certainly a record high for them, they don’t actually distribute meals. (The World Food Program, e.g., used to distribute meals.) The GHF figure has devised the amount of 40-lb boxes employed as the prize in a bizarre pre-dawn, 8-minute scramble—what have been called by its critics “hunger games.” The figure of 7.6 million “meals” translates into 19,000 boxes/day for the more than 1 million Gazans in southern Gaza.
What happens in this real-life “hunger game” is that about 8,000-10,000 people walk some 5 miles in the dark to line up, under gunfire, at each of four sites. Some 4,000-5,000 boxes are distributed at each site. Those lucky ones who get a 40-lb box try to walk the 5 miles back, and the other 4-5,000 are supposed to take it in stride and leave the winners alone. And to get the boxes back to their families, they have to avoid criminal gangs—some armed and financed by the Israelis—who can avoid the 10-mile trek.
Do those boxes translate into 57 meals per box? That would require access to water and cooking fuel. Normal aid, last February and pre-October 7, included water and cooking fuel. However, since February, no water has been delivered, and two (that is, 2) trucks of cooking gas have been delivered. Normal deliveries of cooking gas were 8 truckloads/day, so Gaza has received in the last 5 months one quarter of one day’s cooking gas. Brackish water, with salt and waste, has been used, creating widespread diseases.
No nation that imposes this mass death on others can remain fit to survive for long, nor can nations who choose to look the other way at what is going on.
Aug. 11—The prominent Ukrainian journalist Diana Panchenko, a critic of both the 2014 coup in Kiev, and the war policy of NATO dictator Volodymyr Zelenskyy, had, as of July 2025, over 2 million subscribers to her YouTube account. However, as of Aug. 8, YouTube has now shut it down.
A former Journalist of the Year, Panchenko was a presenter on a Kiyv TV channel beginning in 2010 and on “NewsOne” TV in 2015. The latter was associated with Victor Medvedchuk, head of the “For Life” party. She’s hosted several shows since then, and was very well-known in Ukraine. Zelenskyy then imposed sanctions on Taras Kozak, the owner of NewsOne, and other media outlets. Panchenko then co-founded the Journalists’ Protection Club movement. In 2022, she interviewed people in Mariupol and a captured Azov defender Mykhailo Shvets, for her video “From Kyiv to Donbass.” In late 2022, she left Kiev for Donetsk.
She is listed on the infamous Myrotvorets list as an “Anti-Ukrainian propagandist.” They note that: “Comprehensive measures are underway to bring the defendant to justice for crimes against Ukraine” and that her “Liquidation date” has not been filled in. Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council placed her under sanctions in January 2023. The NSDC’s “Center for Countering Disinformation” listed her on its March 2024 report for the crime of “spreading hostile disinformation on TikTok.”
YouTube’s action, shutting out her 2 million subscribers, can only raise concerns regarding Panchenko’s security.
Aug. 11—Following up on criminal referrals that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard submitted to Attorney General Pam Bondi, on the manufacture of the “Russiagate” narrative, Vice President J.D. Vance told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo Aug. 10 that indictments were coming for “defrauding the American people, defrauding the intelligence agencies, lying about what the intel said…. That’s a violation of the people’s trust, that’s a violation of what our intelligence services should be doing, and I absolutely think they broke the law. You’re going to see a lot of people get indicted for that.”
Aug. 11-- Schiller Institute Founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche released today the following open letter to President Donald Trump and President Vladimir Putin. The letter is copied to Chinese President Xi Jinping.
The letter is accompanied by three articles from EIR magazine on May 4, 2007, on constructing a Bering Strait tunnel, through which would pass a rail line that unites the rail systems of Eurasia with those of the Americas. The addresses for three of the EIR articles that would accompany Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche’s letter are presented immediately below: “Russian-American Team: World Needs Bering Strait Tunnel!”; “Mendeleyev Would Have Agreed;” “Origins of the Bering Strait Project.”
To President Donald Trump and President Vladimir Putin:
When you are meeting in Alaska on August 15, the fate of humanity lies in your hands. Against all the attempts by the opponents of peace, you can not only bring the war in Ukraine to an end, and with it eliminate the Sword of Damocles of the nuclear extinction of the human species at least over this conflict, but you can also reintroduce diplomacy into the relation of the two most powerful nuclear nations on the planet.
But there is something even more elevated you can do, by not only fighting off the threats facing mankind, but by giving the whole world a beautiful vision for the future. You could agree to build a corridor across the Bering Strait, and with that rail and tunnel project unite the rail systems of Eurasia with those of the Americas. This project would open up for development the vast untapped resources of Siberia, as well as the U.S. Arctic resources of oil, gas, precious metals of all kinds, as well as fresh water. Siberia and the Russian Far East hold the largest deposits of raw materials of all the elements which one can find in Mendeleyev’s Periodic Table, and the joint development of these resources, to which many other resource-poor countries could be invited, could become the perfect war-avoidance program and greatly enhance the prosperity of the world.
In the not so distant future, one could then travel by high-speed railroad around the world, from the most southern tips of Argentina and Chile in Ushuaia and Puerto Williams, all way through the Americas, then through the Bering Strait, across Eurasia, then with a tunnel under the Strait of Gibraltar, travel all the way through the African continent to the Cape of Good Hope.
The Bering Strait Tunnel project has been studied and promoted over decades by leading scientific and political figures in the United States, Russia and China, as is documented in the attached set of articles from EIR magazine, dating back to 2007, as well as an 8-minute video prepared by Dr. Victor Razbegin, deputy chairman of the SOPS, Russia’s Council for the Study of Productive Forces, which won the Grand Prize for Innovation at the Shanghai World Expo 2010.
The Bering Strait Tunnel and related great infrastructure projects could also serve as the basis for further in-depth discussions among Presidents Trump, Putin and China’s Xi Jinping, should President Trump be invited and agree to attend the 80th anniversary celebration of the end of World War II, to be held in China on Sept. 3—as I have earlier proposed.
This project for integrated infrastructure of the whole world as the basis for development will lay the basis for ending war as a means of conflict resolution forever. The hope of humanity rests on you!
Respectfully Yours,
Helga Zepp-LaRouche
Founder, Schiller Institute
Aug. 11, 2025
cc.: President Xi Jinping
Aug. 11—Israel’s escalated attack on Gaza City Aug. 10 targeted and hit a tent housing journalists, outside the main gate of the Al-Shifa Hospital, killing five journalists and two others. Al Jazeera reported that their well-known journalist Anas al-Sharif was among the dead. The other four deceased are Al Jazeera correspondent Mohammed Qreiqeh, and its camera operators Ibrahim Zaher, Mohammed Noufal, and Moamen Aliwa.
The Al Jazeera Media Network condemned the killings as “yet another blatant and premeditated attack on press freedom…. This attack comes amid the catastrophic consequences of the ongoing Israeli assault on Gaza, which has seen the relentless slaughter of civilians, forced starvation, and the obliteration of entire communities. The order to assassinate Anas al-Sharif, one of Gaza’s bravest journalists, and his colleagues, is a desperate attempt to silence the voices exposing the impending seizure and occupation of Gaza.”
Shortly before his death, al-Sharif posted on X that Israel had launched intense, concentrated bombardment—also known as “fire belts”—on the eastern and southern parts of Gaza City. His last video showed flashes of orange light with loud bombs of missile bombing. He commented, translated to English: “Nonstop bombing…. For the past two hours, the Israeli aggression on Gaza City has intensified.”
An Isreal Defense Force (IDF) statement claimed that al-Sharif headed a Hamas cell and “advancing rocket attacks against Israeli civilians and troops.” It claimed documents, not revealed, proved his involvement with Hamas. Muhammed Shehada, an analyst at the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, said there was “zero evidence” that al-Sharif took part in any hostilities. “His entire daily routine was standing in front of a camera from morning to evening.”
Lethal targeting of the journalist was in evidence last month, when IDF spokesman Avichai Adraee shared a video on social media that accused al-Sharif of being a member of Hamas’s military wing. Irene Khan, the United Nations special rapporteur on freedom of expression, said that she was “deeply alarmed by repeated threats and accusations of the Israeli army” against al-Sharif. “Fears for al-Sharif’s safety are well-founded as there is growing evidence that journalists in Gaza have been targeted and killed by the Israeli army on the basis of unsubstantiated claims that they were Hamas terrorists.” The IDF has killed more than 200 reporters and media workers since Oct. 7, 2023.
Al Jazeera released a statement from al-Sharif, written on April 6, in the event of his death. He said that he “lived the pain in all its details” and “tasted grief and loss repeatedly. Despite that, I never hesitated to convey the truth as it is, without distortion or misrepresentation, hoping that God would witness those who remained silent, those who accepted our killing, and those who suffocated our very breaths. Not even the mangled bodies of our children and women moved their hearts or stopped the massacre that our people have been subjected to for over a year and a half.”
He also expressed sorrow for having to leave behind his wife, Bayan, and for not seeing his son, Salah, and daughter, Sham, grow up.
Aug. 11—Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, reflecting on the combined but uneven evolving state of U.S.-Russian relations, said in an interview with Rossiya-1 Aug. 10, “some sprouts of common sense are appearing in the dialogue with the U.S., which have been sorely lacking in recent months and years.”
He, at the same time, discussed Russia’s recent decision to lift its self-imposed ban on deploying intermediate range missiles, ascribing the Russian change in policy to the need to respond to what “the Americans and their allies, especially the European warmongers, are undertaking.” In his interview with Rossiya-1, Ryabkov made it clear that besides the now-famous Oreshnik missile, Russia has developed other advanced missile technologies.
“Oreshnik—yes, but we have other [weapons]. We did not waste time…. I cannot dwell on what I am not supposed to, but, we have such weapons.” TASS news agency reported: “Commenting on the potential deployment of Russian weapons to new regions, Ryabkov noted, ‘It would be absolutely wrong, irresponsible of me to disclose concrete geographical locations.’ ‘We always have a lot of options on the table and we never exclude anything for us,’ he added.”
TASS then reminded some, and recounted for the first time for others, the wildly dangerous days of the Biden Administration and NATO’s deployment, via Ukraine, of long-range missile attacks on Russia last fall. “Russian President Vladimir Putin said on November 21 [2024] that the United States and its NATO allies had announced their approval of the use of long-range precision weapons. Following this announcement, Russian military sites in the Kursk and Bryansk regions were attacked with American and British missiles. In response, Russia used its newest intermediate-range ballistic missile, the Oreshnik, in a non-nuclear strike targeting Ukraine’s Yuzhmash defense plant in Dnepr (formerly known as Dnepropetrovsk). The Russian President warned that the West could bring upon itself heavy consequences, should its inflammatory policies prompt further escalation of the conflict.”
This—both the potential for sanity, and the present reality of a reckless escalation that could prove unstoppable past a certain point—is the true, “nuanced” circumstance of the Friday Aug. 15 Trump-Putin summit in Alaska.
Aug. 14—Hamas has accepted the outline of a new peace plan for Gaza that would release all remaining hostages—living and dead—at once, and within 60 days lead to a withdrawal of Israeli forces and a new civilian government that would not include Hamas, which would also be demilitarized. Sources close to discussions between Hamas and mediators in Cairo say that the agreement is provisional upon Israeli acceptance of the plan, which has yet to be fully presented to the Netanyahu government.
Ultimately, these sources say that any agreement would come out of a joint meeting between Hamas, Israel, and mediators from Egypt, Qatar, and the United States. If Israel agrees to the outline of the plan, which had been worked out with the Arab mediators and President Donald Trump's special envoy Steve Witkoff last week, such a meeting would be scheduled, depending on Witkoff's schedule. The Special Envoy is heavily involved in tomorrow's Alaska summit between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Pressure Mounts on Netanyahu
Hamas' agreement with the terms of the new plan, which will see the end of its rule in Gaza and its end as a military organization, puts pressure on the Butcher of Gaza, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu, whose announced plan for a new wave of slaughter and the full occupation of the Strip by the Israeli military has met with universal protest both inside Israel—where it is opposed by the leadership of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the families of the hostages, who say that it will kill all that remain alive—as well as in the rest of the world. Various European and other nations have used it as an impetus to announce their pending recognition of a Palestinian state.
Hamas' Diminishing Support
"Hamas has finally accepted the reality of its situation," said a source close to the negotiations. "It has no future, lacking support from both its former patrons, Bibi, who gave them guns and money to block the Palestinian Authority, and Iran, who totally lacks the means to supply its proxy. It has little or no support among Gazans who blame its stupid massacre and attack on Israel Oct. 7, 2023 for giving Netanyahu the pretext for unleashing his genocide against them. This deal can halt a new slaughter and get Hamas out of Gaza.
"And it backs Bibi into a corner," the source continued. "He has said that the only way to deal with Hamas is to exterminate them, perhaps freeing a handful of the hostages in the process. But the IDF leadership has said that the occupation of the rest of Gaza will kill all the hostages. This deal gets them home alive. If he refuses it, the families and the rest of Israel minus the insane Nazi Zionists represented by war criminals Bezalel Smotrich [Finance Minister] and Itamar Ben-Gvir [National Security Minister] will come for him."
Trump’s Role and Global Implications
"The key will be if Trump finally decides to turn up the pressure and demand sanity from Israel," said the source. "Trump wants the humanitarian disaster in Gaza to end. He knows that people are being starved to death by Bibi's denial of aid. This new deal will allow Trump and the United States to mobilize the world to put an end to this. It removes Israel from any role in determining how much humanitarian aid enters Gaza and who will distribute it. This provides the hammer needed to ram through such a deal.
"What has happened in Gaza is one of the most disgusting episodes in modern history, the worst genocide since the Nazis, done by an American ally, with America looking on," concluded the source. "Trump did not allow this to start, but ending the killing has eluded him. Until now. If the Arabs can bring Hamas on board, then the President must force Bibi to go along. If not, then what happens next is on Trump."
Aug. 13—Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov expressed hope that the upcoming meeting between the Presidents of Russia and the United States, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, will give an impetus to normalization of bilateral relations, TASS reported yesterday. “We hope that the forthcoming top-level meeting will give an impetus to normalization of bilateral relations, allowing [them] to facilitate resolution of certain issues,” he said in an interview with the Izvestia daily, speaking about resumption of direct air service. “Although, obviously, the leaders will focus on other subjects,” he added.
Trump, meanwhile, was reportedly dismissive of NATO's Ukrainian dictator Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whose demands to be included in the summit were refused by Trump. “I get along with Zelenskyy, but, you know, I disagree with what he’s done. Very, very severely disagree. This is a war that should have never happened,” Trump said, reported The Hill.
The Hill notes that Trump has said the meeting will touch on some territorial swapping for “the betterment of both” countries, a proposal Zelenskyy rejected on Saturday, Aug. 9. “Of course, we will not give Russia any awards for what it has done. The Ukrainian people deserve peace,” he said, adding that “all partners” must understand peace and that “Ukrainians will not give their land to an occupier.”
Trump said he was perturbed by the Ukrainian leader’s resistance. “I was a little bothered by the fact that Zelenskyy was saying, ‘Well, I have to get constitutional approval.’ I mean, he’s got approval to go into war and kill everybody, but he needs approval to do a land swap—because there’ll be some land swapping going on,” Trump said. He added that the land swap will be “for the good of Ukraine,” before adding that a possible deal will also involve “some bad stuff for both” Kyiv and Moscow.
In a recent poll of Ukrainians, Gallup found that 69% believe that Ukraine should seek negotiations to end the war as soon as possible, with only 24% saying that Ukraine should keep fighting until it wins the war. This is a dramatic change even from 2024, when 52% supported peace talks and 38% preferred to continue the fighting. Sources report that Gallup also asked Ukrainians if they believed that they could win the war. They did not publish the results of that question that showed over 90% believed that such a victory was impossible.
Aug. 13—Brazil intends to develop, whether the Trump administration likes it or not.
Finance Secretary Fernando Haddad reported on Aug. 11 that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had cancelled his scheduled Aug. 13 Zoom discussion with Haddad. It was to have been the first high-level meeting between the two trading partners, despite President Trump imposing 50% tariffs on a number of key Brazilian exports to the U.S., beef and coffee among them. The meeting was not cancelled for any economic reason, Haddad charged, but at the instigation of “extreme right forces,” who “acted together with some of President Trump’s advisors” to cancel it. Nor was the meeting rescheduled. “What is clear to us is that the trade issue is not the focus,” Haddad said.
The Trump administration’s intent with the tariffs is regime change. When he announced the punitive tariffs, President Trump said as much, demanding that the Brazilian government order the Supreme Court to shut down the ongoing trial of former President Jair Bolsonaro, charged with attempting to organize a military coup so he could continue in power after President Lula da Silva defeated him at the polls in 2022. Bolsonaro’s son, Eduardo took a “leave of absence” from Congress to move to the United States, where he is currently coordinating the campaign against the Supreme Court and the Lula government with Trump advisors.
Brazil is therefore developing more beneficial relations. On Aug. 11, Brazil’s Minister for Integration and Regional Development Waldez Góes signed an MOU in Beijing with the Vice Minister of China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) Wang Changlin for cooperation on regional development policies. The agreement specifically focuses on policies for reducing regional inequalities, a problem which China has been working on for some time, and which is quite important for Brazil, where poverty in parts of the Northeast is similar to the poorest parts of Africa, as compared to the southeast of the country, where there is much more industry and infrastructure and where living standards are far higher. Joint case studies, technical visits, training and science and technological innovation programs are on the agenda. The NDRC has already invited 24 high-level officials from Brazil’s Planning and Budget Ministry and the Executive Office of the President (Casa Civil) to participate in a seminar on economic development strategies.
The same day, Finance Minister Haddad signed both a memorandum with Chinese Finance Minister Lan Fo’an, updating plans “to expand joint projects, raise the level of economic cooperation and boost sustainable regional integration,” and a separate MOU with Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov on the creation of a bilateral “Economic and Financial Dialogue.” The aim of the latter is reportedly to guarantee stable communication between the ministries, on seven priority areas, which range from macroeconomic policies, to “confronting challenges and reforms;” tax cooperation; infrastructure financing; new bilateral opportunities; joint action in multilateral forums—and “other topics of mutual interest.”
Aug. 13—“BRICS may be on the verge of its most significant strategic convergence since its inception,” the Indian weekly, Indian Eye, suggests. “The coming weeks will test whether the current wave of U.S. tariffs becomes a catalyst for deeper BRICS integration or merely another irritant in already complex international relations. [Indian Prime Minister Neranda] Modi’s dual engagement with Russia and China,[Brazilian President and current head of BRICS] Lula’s outreach to India, and Beijing’s criticism of U.S. trade policy suggest a moment of rare alignment in the group’s political calendars.”
The Aug. 11 story is credited to the New Delhi, Moscow, and Beijing Bureaus of the weekly, which is published in India, the U.S.A., Brazil, and Canada, thus reaching the Indian diaspora. The article reviews the diplomatic contacts between the BRICS in recent weeks (which EIR News has covered), but offers more details on developing India-Brazil ties.
“The Lula-Modi conversation gains strategic weight,” it reports. “The two leaders are not only the political heads of their respective nations but also the voices of two continents within BRICS. Their call underscored a shared vision for South-South cooperation that blends trade expansion with technological exchange, defense coordination, and multilateral reform…. The agreement to expand the Mercosur-India trade pact and the plan for [Brazilian] Vice President Geraldo Alckmin to visit India in October, accompanied by ministers and business leaders, point to a practical follow-through. The agenda will cover trade, defense, energy, critical minerals, health, and digital inclusion—all sectors where both countries can gain by pooling resources and reducing dependence on Western market.”
President Donald Trump’s tariffs have created “a political opportunity. The bloc can present itself as a collective shield against what it sees as arbitrary economic measures, and as an advocate for reforming global trade rules to protect the sovereignty of emerging economies,” it argues.
“While it is premature to predict a formal BRICS response to Trump’s tariffs, the diplomatic choreography of the past week hints at a converging strategy. Modi’s talks with Lula, [Modi’s] upcoming visit to China, [Indian National Security Advisor Ajit] Doval’s discussions with [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, and the expected Putin visit to India are all part of a dense web of leader-level engagements that could culminate in a more united BRICS economic front.”
Indian Eye’s story adds the tantalizing suggestion that “joint infrastructure projects” are among the possibilities for a coordinated economic response. Coordination “might take the form of expanded intra-BRICS trade agreements, local currency settlements to bypass the dollar, joint infrastructure projects, and coordinated positions in the WTO and G20. Brazil and India’s interest in digital payment systems, as shown in the PIX-UPI exchange, also opens the door for fintech collaboration that reduces transaction costs and dependency on Western financial systems.”
Aug. 13—Paulo Nogueira Batista, one of Brazil’s leading economists and a former Vice President of the BRICS New Development Bank (NDB) from its creation in 2015 until 2017, believes the BRICS summit held in Rio de Janeiro in early July 2025 “was a success, contrary to what many had feared (including me).” In an article published in the leading Brazilian daily Folha de São Paulo on July 7, right after the summit ended, Nogueira wrote:
“In the financial area, some important initiatives were reaffirmed…. In particular, it was interesting that President Lula reiterated that the BRICS needs to create an alternative currency for international transactions. This is a fearless statement, as he ignores—and he is right to ignore—Donald Trump’s repeated threats against the BRICS and against any country that acts to weaken the dollar as a currency.”
Nogueira explained that the proposal is not meant as an attack on the dollar. “BRICS does not intend to deliberately weaken the dollar, but rather to create alternatives to the international system dominated by the West, a system that is inefficient, politically manipulated and does not meet the needs of the Global South. That’s why we need to create alternative and independent mechanisms, while still participating in the Western system.”
He also praised the steps taken so far by the BRICS and the NDB: "Increasing use of national currencies in transactions between countries (bypassing the dollar), the construction of a new international payments platform, and the outlines of a multilateral guarantee scheme within the framework of the NDB.
Nogueira regretted that “there was no mention in the Leaders’ Declaration of the creation of a new reserve currency, which is supported by President Lula and other leaders. This is the most important step,” Nogueira insisted, because it is needed to facilitate both trade and investment that is outside the speculative framework of the Western financial system. But the idea “faces stiff resistance from India. And also from the group’s central banks, which get in the way a lot and grant themselves the right to interfere in geopolitical issues! Brazil’s Central Bank is one of the worst. Incredibly, it often behaves as if it were a separate country, an 11th BRICS nation. It needs to be brought to heel.”
In other writings, Nogueira has gone out of his way to praise the approach taken by former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, who is now the President of the NDB, who intervened when she was head of state of Brazil to stop the sabotage of the BRICS by Brazil’s Central Bank. Nogueira has urged current Brazilian President Lula da Silva, who is head of the BRICS for this term, to act similarly.
As for the political obstacles within the BRICS, which makes decision by unanimous consensus, Nogueira proposed that prompt action is required due to the gravity of the crisis, and that "the solution is to allow certain initiatives to be taken forward by a sub-group, on a voluntary basis, leaving the door open for those who don’t wish to participate from the outset, to come on board later.
The problem is, really, that the BRICS cannot exist as a subset of the existing totally broken and bankrupt global financial system. Anything that touches that system, which is dominated by the City of London and its Wall Street satrap, is corrupted and will eventually be destroyed. So, the efforts both collectively and independently by BRICS members to create new physical wealth through investments that are made for different purposes than making financial profit for investors or for establishing control of physical and resource assets that can be looted for financial profit must eventually be undermined and opposed by the central banks that are players for existing global system, and by agents and operatives of that old system.
Eventually, as Nogueira knows but does not say, the question must be called: either you are part of an old and collapsing monetarist system, and will be dragged down by its collapse or you are the embryo of what must be a totally new system, founded not for financial profits for the few, but for the expansion of physical wealth for the many, as part of a new just, world economic order that must replace the existing decadent order of London and Wall Street. It is a fools errand to think that the BRICS can become a pathway to escape the collapse of the old order, the which cannot be reformed or fixed. Whether the BRICS wants to pretend that it is not a threat to the old system, it is already recognized as such a threat and London and Wall Street will use whatever power they muster to destroy that threat. There ultimately can be no accommodation with the central banks. The BRICS must offer their new path to prosperity to the national powers of the old system, such as the United States of Donald Trump, to join with them in bringing a new system into being.
Aug. 13—Just three days before the summit between Presidents Putin and Trump in Alaska, the New York Times Aug. 12 drops what they hope will be a bombshell: Russia is suspected of hacking into the federal court filing system.
A cyber security specialist contacted about the report said there is absolutely no reason to believe that the information about the hack is true, "given what has now been proven to be false reports of Russian hacking during the 2016 election." The source says, as is well known, but the Timesneglects to report, the NSA has software that can mimic and falsely attribute to alleged foreign actors attempted and actual hacks into such systems, as has been exposed in leaks of materials reporting on such capabilities from Edward Snowden and others.
The source said that rather than assume that such reports of alleged Russian (or Chinese) hacks are true, it were better to assume that they are the work of sections of our own intelligence agencies, linked to NATO, that want to sabotage improved relations and cooperation between the United States and Russia and China, until proven otherwise. The timing of this leaked report, just days before the Alaska summit, gives a better clue as to who is behind this, the source said. "I don't think it is credible," he reported.
Federal officials are “scrambling” to figure out how deep this digital dumpster fire goes. While the coverage acknowledges that hackers have allegedly been in the system for years, this now “urgent matter” (as it is reportedly described by an internal memo). Another source reported that there has long been suspicion that hackers working for Dope, Inc, the international drug cartels, have attempted to hack the courts and justice system records.
While the hacking may be centered in New York, courts in places like South Dakota, Missouri, and even Arkansas have reportedly been affected. Judges, under instructions likely from the FBI, are taking measures like not uploading sealed docs to PACER (the software program/server that provides access to the documents).
Politico sniffed out that a “foreign actor” has been poking around courts since early July, although it were far more likely that such information was deliberately leaked to them, as they have no ability to check its veracity and are known to simply publish what leakers provide.. Rep. Jerrold Nadler (R-NY), a Zionist lobby asset, back in 2022 even claimed that three unnamed countries had breached the system starting in 2020.
Aug. 13—The Russian Ministry of Defense issued an alert that Kyiv is preparing a provocation to disrupt the Russian American summit negotiations scheduled for Aug. 15.
“For this purpose, a group of foreign media journalists were brought by SBU [Ukrainian Security Service] vehicles to the city of Chuguyev in the Kharkov Region on Monday, Aug. 11, under the cover of ‘preparing a series of reports about the residents of a city in the frontline zone,’” says the statement.
“Immediately before the summit on Friday, the Ukrainian Armed Forces have planned a provocative strike using UAVs and missiles against one of the densely populated residential areas or a hospital, with a large number of civilian casualties, which are to be immediately ‘documented’ by the Western journalists who were brought in.”
The Ministry of Defense concludes that the strike will be blamed on Russia, to create a negative media environment and the “conditions for the disruption of Russian-American cooperation on resolving the conflict in Ukraine” at the scheduled Friday summit between Presidents Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump.
Aug. 13—Sergei Gavrilov, a Communist Party member of the Russian State Duma, and the head of its Committee on Property, Land, and Property Relations, told RIA Novosti on Aug. 11, that the upcoming Alaska summit talks between Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump, could address significant Arctic economic projects. While the Ukrainian issue is the primary agenda, global economic cooperation in the Arctic is also expected to be discussed.
Gavrilov, a member of the National Financial Council of the Bank of Russia, highlighted that the talks could address long-term economic interests, such as joint mechanisms for Arctic route development, investment in port and transport infrastructure, and increasing cargo flow to boost trade between Russia and the U.S. Key projects include enhancing the Northern Sea Route and modernizing navigation infrastructure.
The legislator singled out one particular possible project: a transport corridor across the Bering Strait, which could facilitate resource development and economic growth.
A flagship infrastructure project, like a Russia-U.S. transport link, could symbolize broader international cooperation in the Arctic and Pacific regions.
Gavrilov suggested that the billions of dollars in frozen Russian assets in the U.S. could theoretically be used to co-finance infrastructure projects, stimulating economic ties and attracting private capital participation.
Aug. 12—Prof. Enzo Siviero, who together with Claudio Celani, wrote a call for Trump and Putin to build the Bering Strait Tunnel, has explained in a June 29 video interview what an infrastructure such as the Bridge over the Strait of Messina can bring to the local economy as a driver, during its construction phase. He also encouraged to have a broader vision, which includes exploring the feasibility of a Sicily-Tunisia connection, which he called TUNeIT.
The executive project, which the Italian government approved last week, "provides for diversification, that is, the bridge is one thing, all the complementary works are another thing, which are more than half of the overall project and are works that are normally semi-standard, so they are bridges, viaducts, railways tunnels, and junctions, and then there is the whole expropriation operation, which takes time. Not only that, but a construction site like this one, and when we talk about that construction site, we are actually talking about dozens of simultaneous construction sites because otherwise it cannot be done. It requires logistics, incredible support logistics. … If we think about logistics, we think simply about feeding tens of thousands of people, washing, ironing, supporting the whole operation, including security from the point of view of hospital health, equipping those that exist and probably implementing those who do not yet exist with field hospitals, because when you have tens of thousands of workers, it’s obvious that you have to take into account that there will be accidents or other things. Of course, it’s an environment that takes into account all possible and imaginable variables, so it’s likely that nothing will happen, but the human variable [must always be considered] … then there is all the construction site logistics: Think about transportation, concrete, the water supply—we will make desalination plants that will then remain, available to the community Where does the spoil from the tunnels go? There will be beach nourishment, in short, there is also a very accurate environmental study, let’s say that.
“I must also say, just to broaden the scope, how visionary engineering has shaped the world. Visionary engineering is what has been done for Suez as well as the Panama Canal, but also many other things, such as the Messina Bridge and this idea that I launched—which, however, is not mine because it is now about 20 years old and was launched by the Sicilian Region—for a permanent link between Mazara del Vallo and Capo Bon, that is, between Sicily and Tunisia, or between Europe and Africa.”
The project is feasible “even within the limits we find ourselves in, which are essentially craftmanship, but ideas are based on vision and the ability to invent something that did not exist before. … I believe that this can work. We have the room to make it happen because if we think that in this way, with this operation, Sicily could become the logistical hub of Europe towards Africa, in turn Tunisia could become the logistical hub of Africa towards Europe.”
Aug. 12—In an Aug. 10 interview with TASS, Prof. Peter Kuznick, Director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University proposed building a Bering Strait tunnel that would connect the United States with Russia through high-speed rail.
Kuznick, who is well-known as a collaborator with filmmaker Oliver Stone on several historical projects, urged building upon the upcoming Trump-Putin summit, by holding talks that would involve the leaders of Russia, Brazil, India, China, and the United States. “What I would like to see is a follow-up meeting between Trump, Putin, and [Chinese leader] Xi Jinping at the World War II commemoration [Sept. 3] in China. It would be even better if [Indian Prime Minister Narendra] Modi and [Brazilian President Luiz Inácio] Lula [da Silva] also join.”
He urged cooperation between Russia, the U.S., and perhaps other nations, on joint development projects in the Arctic “and perhaps a Bering Strait Tunnel connecting Russia and the U.S. with high-speed rails.” This sort of collaboration could “put the world back on the path toward peace and begin easing the tensions that have made our world so insanely dangerous of late,” he said.
EIR covered this idea on Aug. 8. On Aug. 11, Schiller Institute Founder Helga-Zepp LaRouche released an open letter to Presidents Trump and Putin, which said that as they meet August 15 at a summit in Alaska, “There is something even more elevated you can do, by not only fighting off the threats facing mankind, but by giving the whole world a beautiful vision for the future. You could agree to build a corridor across the Bering Strait, and with that rail and tunnel project unite the rail systems of Eurasia with those of the Americas.” This would produce physical development.
Zepp-LaRouche added, that as a result of such a project: “In the not so distant future, one could then travel by high-speed railroad around the world, from the most southern tips of Argentina and Chile in Ushuaia and Puerto Williams, all way through the Americas, then through the Bering Strait, across Eurasia, then with a tunnel under the Strait of Gibraltar, travel all the way through the African continent to the Cape of Good Hope.”
Aug. 12—The Sunday, Aug. 10 weekly magazine of the daily Calabria Live published an article by Claudio Celani, identified as co-editor of the EIR Strategic Alert and collaborator of Schiller Institute chair Helga Zepp-LaRouche, entitled “Messina, the Bridge of Records—Italy Challenged the World”. The magazine has several other articles dedicated to the Messina Bridge, including an interview with Italian Infrastructure Minister Matteo Salvini.
What follows is the translation of Celani’s feature:
The bridge that will break all records has already broken one, that of the opposition. Never before has there been, in the world, such procrastinated hostility against a project as bold as it is necessary to connect two territories of the same nation, a hostility that has at times turned into political sabotage and has postponed the work on a project that has been talked about for fifty years. Indeed, for 2,000 years, if the Romans were already thinking of a bridge, but, since at the time they were made of stone, they could not go beyond a pontoon bridge, not exactly destined to last. It is only thanks to the industrial revolution that today we possess the technology and materials that allow us to realize a 2,000-year-old dream.
Now that the construction of the Strait Bridge is a state law, its detractors will have to give up, even if there is reason to fear that organized minorities will continue to try to sabotage it. They do not realize that they are acting as useful idiots for interests that transcend national borders, and harken back to the times when colonial empires fought for supremacy in the Mediterranean. The times when France and England fought for control of Suez or Italian commercial ambitions in Tunisia were overridden by the French expeditionary force. Yes, the strategic function of the Mediterranean Bridge has not escaped those nostalgic for those times, if Anglo-American high-finance figures even write, without fear of ridicule, that the Strait Bridge will favor Putin, because it diverts resources from Defense (google: Brooks Sicily Bridge, to believe it). In reality, London, Wall Street, Brussels, and Paris understand well that the project will immeasurably increase our country’s political clout in the geographical area of reference.
We all understand that the Bridge, together with the high-speed train and highway connections, will bring Sicily closer to Italy and vice versa, but also Sicily and Southern Italy to Central and Northern Europe. If everything works north of the Alps, it will be possible to travel from Berlin to Palermo in eight hours. Furthermore, the Bridge will bring Italy and Europe closer to the African continent, whose development is Europe’s natural—and obligatory—mission. It is, in fact, inconceivable to stem the migratory phenomenon without intervening to create development, with a vision that goes beyond the Italian government’s Mattei Plan, laudable though its intentions are, but entirely insufficient.
In mid-July, I attended an international conference in Berlin that addressed precisely this topic, with the participation of European, Chinese, American, Russian, and African experts. One of the proposals that has gained support is to establish trilateral cooperation agreements between Europe, Africa, and China for major development projects capable of acting as “game changers,” that is, driving the agro-industrial development of large regions. The model has already been tested, for example in the construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, a project built by the Italian company Webuild, the French company Alstom, which supplied the turbines, and the Chinese company, which, in addition to building the power lines, co-financed the project. The same model can be applied to bring water to the Sahel, through the Italian-led Transaqua project, which would serve as a driving force for the whole of Central Africa.
The Bridge thus fits into the perspective of integrating the Euro-Afro-Asian continental economies, defined by the great American economist Lyndon LaRouche as the “Land-Bridge of Development.” It’s no coincidence that LaRouche, who was well acquainted with the Strait Bridge project and had discussed it with Italian interlocutors, is considered the forerunner of the New Silk Road, “a visionary,” according to Giulio Tremonti, who anticipated its lines well before it was launched by the Chinese leadership under the name Belt and Road Initiative. The benefits of the Bridge for the Sicilian and Southern Italian economies have been extensively described, and we won’t repeat them here. We’re keen to broaden the framework within which it fits: A global economy driven by the great growth coming from Asia, from which it would be foolish to isolate ourselves. To conclude, we can already look to the future, in the TUNeIT and GRALBeIT projects of our friend Enzo Siviero, the stable connection between Sicily and Tunisia, the first, and between Italy and Albania, the second. A dream? Perhaps today, but not in the near future, just as the Strait Bridge was in the past and is no longer.
Aug. 12—The following is a machine translation of an article, published on Aug. 11, by the Russian news service TASS, based on an interview with Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche, who was asked for her perspective on the upcoming August 15 Summit in Alaska between Presidents Putin and Trump.
Zepp-LaRouche Expert: Russia and the U.S. Could Build a Tunnel under the Bering Strait
The founder of the international Schiller Institute said that the August 15 summit “promises to be more than just an attempt to find a way to resolve the crisis in Ukraine.”
WASHINGTON, August 11. /TASS Corr. Sergei Yumatov/. The meeting of Russian and U.S. Presidents Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump on August 15 in Alaska could allow the two countries to resume work on promising joint projects, including the construction of a tunnel under the Bering Strait that would connect Chukotka and Alaska. Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder of the international Schiller Institute, expressed this opinion in an interview with a TASS correspondent.
According to her, the upcoming summit “promises to be more than just an attempt to find a way to resolve the crisis in Ukraine.” “The presidents of the two countries may finally decide to build a 100-kilometer tunnel under the Bering Strait, which would connect Eurasia and America and facilitate the development of the vast resources of Siberia and the Far East, where the largest deposits of all the elements that can be found in the periodic table are located,” the expert noted. According to her, “the joint development of these resources could become an ideal conflict prevention program and a benefit for all of humanity.”
The idea of implementing a project within the framework of which a more than 100-kilometer tunnel would be built under the Bering Strait to connect the transport systems of Eurasia and America has been discussed for decades. As The Times newspaper noted in 2011, citing British experts, the transportation of goods along the Eurasia-U.S.A. highway, which would also connect resource-rich but sparsely populated areas of the planet with key overpasses, would be less expensive, faster and safer than by sea.
On August 8, Trump said that he expected to meet with Putin in Alaska on August 15. Then, plans for these talks were confirmed by Russian presidential aide Yury Ushakov. According to him, the leaders will focus on discussing options for achieving a long-term peaceful settlement of the Ukrainian crisis. The Kremlin expects the next meeting between Putin and Trump to take place on Russian territory, Ushakov said.
The Bering Strait is a strait between the easternmost point of Asia (Cape Dezhnev) and the westernmost point of North America (Cape Prince of Wales). The strait’s narrowest width is 86 km, and its shallowest fairway depth is 36 m. The strait connects the Arctic Ocean (Chukchi Sea) with the Pacific Ocean (Bering Sea). It is named after the Russian navigator Vitus Bering, who passed through this strait in 1728. The first of the known navigators to pass through there, in 1648, eighty years before Bering, was Semyon Dezhnev, after whom the cape in the strait was named.
Aug. 12—As the Netanyahu regime is preparing a bloody takeover of Gaza with the goal of ridding the Gaza Strip of Palestinians, Haaretz featured an interview on Aug. 9 with an attorney who warned of a coup plot underway by ultra-Orthodox Messianic Jews. According to Yair Littman Nehorai, the ultra-Orthodox see the wars in Gaza and Iran as “divine intervention,” which will “expedite the era of redemption,” when the world will embrace their view of one God. For the believers, the Jewish mission is “the struggle against global wickedness,” which is inspiring “an outburst of unfettered ecstatic fervor,” with talk of miracles and the belief in Netanyahu as a “messenger of God.”
Nehorai’s father was once a prominent member of the ultra-Orthodox movement headed by former Chief Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook. After spending World War I in England, Kook returned to Palestine, where he was named Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem, and later Mandatory Palestine. He founded Yeshiva Mercaz HaRav, which Nehorai identified as the training ground for the ultra-Orthodox movement, and the religious Zionist parties.
They believe in a two-stage process. First, the establishment of a Jewish state with an army, a secular state, while building an Messianic army. Nehorai says there are 5,000 to 6,000 graduates of the Yeshivas created by Kook’s followers, who are now in the army and the intelligence services. One example is Maj. Gen. David Zini, who has been chosen by Netanyahu to be the new head of Shin Bet. Another is the recent appointment of Brigadier General Eyal Krim as Chaplain General of the Army. Krim’s first act was to replace all members of the IDF rabbinate with followers of Kook.
Nehorai says they are now prepared to move to the second stage, which includes: taking over all the “promised land” (i.e., Greater Israel—Kook was behind the founding of the radical settler movement, Gush Emunim); rebuild the Temple; replace the secular state with a messianic ultra-Orthodox state. The judicial coup initiated by Netanyahu is part of the plan.
Their goal is to foment a religious revolution in Israel, moving their people into all institutions. Individuals like Fianced Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir are examples, racialists, who believe in “Jewish supremacy.” He characterized their outlook as follows: “The war in Gaza is a war of mitzvah [blessing]. That means you take what’s yours—and you’re allowed to kill them all. They succeeded in introducing the Amalek narrative … and thanks to it the idea that ‘No one in Gaza is innocent.’ We are in the midst of a religious war.”
Finally, he concluded with these two points: the loyalty of the Messianists is to the “land of Israel, not the state of Israel.” And all of Israel’s wars have been necessary stages toward redemption.
Aug. 12—With Israel facing political convulsions as a result of the Butcher of Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu's decision to go for the final kill in Gaza and totally occupy the territory—at the risk of letting all remaining living hostages be killed—the ability to force through a workable deal with Hamas depends on how "rough" President Donald Trump is willing to get with the Israeli leader.
Sources close to the White House say that Trump's Special Envoy Steve Witkoff has worked out, with Egyptian and Qatari mediators, a plan that would see the release of all hostages—living and dead—at once, in exchange for Palestinian prisoners and the withdrawal of all Israeli forces from Gaza within 60 days. That withdrawal would be supervised by the mediators, including the United States. As part of this deal, Hamas would be demilitarized under the supervision of the mediators, and its leaders sent into exile along with many of its so-called fighters.
A New Government and Humanitarian Relief for Gaza
Hamas would play no role in a new Gazan government, created under the supervision of the mediators, which would immediately begin working on plans for reconstruction and development of the land that has been reduced to an unlivable rubble heap by Israelis.
The agreement would begin with an immediate ceasefire, during which Israeli forces would cease blocking the influx of massive food and humanitarian aid for Gaza's starving and stricken population. That aid would be distributed by reputable international agencies, including the United Nations, coordinated under a plan soon to be announced by the United States. The role of the hated Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF)—an American-backed entity that has distributed food at limited sites that have become killing fields for starving Gazans, fired upon by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and private security hired by the GHF—remains unclear. The foundation’s operations have reportedly claimed thousands of lives.
Mounting Pressure on Netanyahu from Allies and the IDF
Netanyahu continues to reiterate his claim that there is no starvation in Gaza, saying on Aug. 10: "If we wanted starvation, two million Gazans would not be alive today. If we wanted to carry out genocide, it would have taken exactly one afternoon. There is no policy of starvation; there was a shortage that needed to be stopped. And that is exactly what we are doing." Such statements infuriate President Trump, sources report, who has told Bibi to stop denying the reality "I can see and people can see with their eyes."
Sources report that the plan is being presented to Hamas today in Cairo by Egyptian mediators, who have conveyed the message from Witkoff that it represents the only way to avoid further slaughter of Palestinians in the proposed Israeli occupation, which will start with an assault on Gaza City. The sources say that Hamas has come to realize that "they are over. They can have no political role in Gaza. They will either take this safe passage or be eliminated in bloody battle, that Bibi has proposed. If they take the deal, they will have done some for the people they have ruled over by force, and caused their slaughter with the murderous Oct. 7 attack on Israel, which led to more than 200,000 Palestinian casualties."
Hamas Loses Support as Israeli Opposition Grows
Important in this equation is that Hamas backers—the Iranians—have reportedly told the Hamas leadership that they can no longer supply them with weapons and funds. Their only other source of money and weapons had been Bibi, who had helped create Hamas as a buffer in Gaza against the Palestinian Authority. In order to push through the deal, the Israelis have been promised that the PA will not be part of the new Gazan government.
With the removal of Hamas as the governing authority in Gaza, it is thought that the IDF will play a role in policing the area until a Palestinian structure to do that job can be put in place. There is also the possibility that some Arab nations might assist in this in a transitional role, although none, as of yet, have agreed to do so.
Witkoff and the mediators believe that they have a chance to sell their plan now to the Israelis because of the explosion of opposition to Bibi's Gaza occupation plan, which is strenuously opposed by the leadership of the IDF—including its chief, Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir—who have given the mediators some important space and time by insisting that he will not have sufficient forces to carry out Bibi's plans for nearly two months. Zamir has further inflamed opposition by saying that he will need to conscript 200,000 recruits, since reservists are refusing Gaza duty.
Most importantly, Zamir has contradicted Netanyahu's claim that his action could rescue the remaining hostages. Zamir has said that it is likely such action would cause all of them to be killed.
Domestic Unrest and International Condemnation Intensify
"Netanyahu is having trouble selling his usual shtick. He's trying to market the security cabinet's decision to send ground forces into Gaza City as a new move that will finally defeat Hamas. But few are willing to buy this stale promise. Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir is convinced that his more limited plan is better. The far-right parties, which demanded the move, think it doesn't go far enough. And most Israelis would apparently prefer to end the war and sign a hostage deal, even at a high price," so wrote the respected Amos Harel in Haaretz yesterday.
Netanyahu's plan has sparked the largest antiwar demonstrations so far, bringing nearly a million people into the streets over the weekend to demand an end to the war and a peace deal to return the hostages. Polls have shown that the vast majority of Israelis want the war to end, and they are not interested in Bibi's plans to exterminate Hamas. Nor do they support announced plans from the lunatic wing of Bibi's coalition, led by Bezalel Smotrich (Finance Minister) and Itamar Ben-Gvir (National Security Minister), to populate parts of occupied Gaza with Israeli settlements.
Smotrich said he wants large parts of Gaza to remain under Israeli control and be settled, acknowledging that PM Netanyahu opposes the plan. "I don't think this is the right time to have that debate. I'm conducting it behind closed doors – I'm not blowing everything up over it," he told Israel's public broadcaster.
Smotrich and Ben-Gvir will never accept Witkoff's new plan and have denounced previous deals as delaying the moves to destroy Hamas. If Bibi accepts even parts of the plan, the two would leave the coalition and could collapse it. But if the war and protests continue—with the hostage families promising to lead a total shutdown of the Israeli economy—Bibi could lose a vote of confidence in the Knesset in the fall, which would force an election, likely next year.
Italian Defense Minister Guido Crosetto told the daily La Stampa on Aug. 11 that Israel's offensive in Gaza is not "a military operation with collateral damage, but the pure denial of the law and the founding values of our civilization ... beyond condemnation, we must now find a way to force Netanyahu to think clearly."
"Trump is going to have to force the issue and set the agenda here," said a source with 50 years of experience in the region. "He is going to have to tell Bibi that he is the President of the United States, and 'you will have to do what I say. You have made Israel into a pariah state, which does not have the support for your policies among most Jews in the world and in the U.S. We have worked a plan for get you out of the mess you created, and to end this slaughter of mostly innocent women and children. You will take this deal, or you will suffer the consequences.'
"Bibi can then say he was forced to do this," said the source. "If he gets the remaining hostages returned and he ends the war, then he just might win re-election—if he is not tossed into jail for corruption. This all depends on how committed Trump is to ending the war and returning the hostages. He says he is, but the test of that is coming soon. It is already here."
Aug. 11--Lt. Col. Anthony Aguilar (ret) was hired as a security contractor by UG Solutions, the company that was hired to provide security at the food distribution sites run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF)> But what this former Special Forces officer saw caused him to resign his position and speak out against the conduct of the GHF-security, and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), who committing genocide against starving peoples. We present his remarks to the Aug. 8 meeting of the International Peace Coalition> We have added subheads.
LT. COL. ANTHONY AGUILAR (ret.): Thank you, and thank you for having me on this platform. I think a lot of important discussion is happening today.
So, basically my experience was, I was hired as an independent security contractor for UG Solutions, which is a subcontract under a greater contract called Safe Reach Solutions, which is the for-profit contract mechanism under what many have heard of as the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. So, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is kind of the umbrella organization, but the organizations, the companies that are actually executing this humanitarian aid and assistance in Gaza are absolutely for-profit contract companies; they are there making money.
I’ve said it on many platforms in terms of what I’ve witnessed in terms of war crimes. I get a lot of pushback from people saying, “What you described aren’t war crimes.” Well, what I’ve described are exactly war crimes. I don’t prescribe to it being war crimes just because it’s on the news and you see someone beheading someone or somebody doing something grotesque. Those are certainly war crimes. But I call them war crimes based on what is prescribed and directed in the international humanitarian law, further codified therein by the protocols of the Geneva Convention, further codified in the laws of armed conflict. All of these are things that the United States is signatory to, along with Israel. I want to remind everybody that Israel is also a signatory to these things.
Within Gaza, is there a threat in Gaza? The threat of Hamas; the threat of an enemy? There absolutely is; I have never discredited or discounted that. However, there is also a very large, unarmed civilian population that is starving. They are on the brink of famine if they haven’t already crossed into what can be described as famine. That is a fact. And anybody who says that there isn’t mass starvation, or there aren’t starving people in Gaza, that is irresponsible rhetoric and that should be condemned. There is starvation. War crimes are being committed when you have Israel Defense Forces soldiers and UG Solutions American contractors—who, mind you, are in the country on a tourist visa—who are firing at the crowd to control their movements; or firing at the crowd to keep them back from a certain area. That’s just one example: Firing live ammunition, targeting at an unarmed population for the means of controlling them is a war crime.
A Campaign to Dehumanize the Population
So, what all this has shown me, having been there; having been on the ground in Gaza; is that it seems to me that there is an active effort, an active campaign if you will, to dehumanize the population. To label the entire population as the enemy, and then to further dehumanize the population through putting them in a position where they’re literally begging for food. We have set up these distribution sites in areas that, in order to reach them, the Palestinians have to travel many, many kilometers to get there. When they do get there, it is a mass free-for-all, fight for survival if you will, to get food at these locations. This further dehumanizes the population.
My fear is that, based on the current information that is available, the proposal that Netanyahu is putting forth to go and re-occupy or occupy the entirety of Gaza once again, is one, for the interests of the United States. We are complicit in that; they are using American weapons, they are using American bombs. Taxpayers’ dollars are going into an American contract entity, an American contract mechanism that is making money. U.S. tax dollars going into a company that is making money to be a part of this forced displacement if you will; putting Palestinians in danger. Regardless of the politics, beliefs and opinions aside, it is a fact that the distribution sites, the secured distribution sites where humanitarian aid is delivered and distributed in Gaza are built in the engagement areas of active combat zones. That’s a fact; I’ve been there and I’ve seen them. This, in and of itself, inherently puts a civilian population at great risk; just that piece alone should be condemned. The United States is absolutely complicit in that.
If Israel goes into a full occupation of Gaza, it will not be in Israel’s best interests, it will not be in the world’s best interests to occupy Gaza. To try to achieve a military defeat of Hamas is a fool’s errand. Hamas will not be militarily defeated. They have been militarily weakened, their leadership has been devastated. Now is the time for political and diplomatic actions, not military means. We have learned these lessons as a country in Afghanistan, Iraq, the southern Philippines. I’ve been deployed to the southern Philippines in the fight against the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. We’ve been there since the 1950s, since the days of General Pershing. We’ve learned that a military defeat of an organization of this nature is not going to achieve success. The full occupation of Gaza is only going to lead to much, much more death of a civilian population. It’s going to pull Israel into a quagmire of a conflict that will have no end. It is going to drag its allies into it with it—of which the United States is one.
I Am Committed to Spreading the Truth
So, I look at it through three different things, if you will. Humanitarian rights, humanitarian law; humanitarian law, Geneva Convention, international laws and treaties that the United States agrees to, that we hold as our values. We are violating those in Gaza every day. It’s like the tail wagging the dog, if you will, in terms of going along with whatever our ally says that we should do, rather than standing up to … Not standing up to our ally, but standing with our ally to hold them accountable for what is right. Because in the end, this is only going to severely damage Israel’s position and credibility on the world stage.
Two, the aspect of perception; that U.S. citizens are in Gaza, armed with fully automatic weapons, stun grenades, shotguns, machine guns, tear gas, used against an unarmed civilian population, mind you, that is starving. They come to these sites to get food. The unarmed population isn’t coming to these sites to protest or coming to these sites to try and incite an attack; they’re coming to these sites because we’re inviting them to come to these sites with food that they need to survive. And then, in return, they’re getting treated as if they were animals; as if they were sub-human. So, there is the aspect of the United States presence on the world stage and our American values. My message in spreading the truth of what I’ve seen in Gaza is not to shame or belittle or criticize or blame. That’s on the world community. My position in this is to bring forth the truth so that the American people and the world have an honest assessment of what’s going on.
I think anyone can agree that with the amount of secrecy in Gaza—no foreign press, no press can go in. No foreign entity or anybody who may speak out against the IDF or Israel. When I think about the secrecy and the hiding of the truth and the doublespeak and the language of “Oh, no one’s being shot, and no one’s starving.” Then when you show ample evidence to the contrary, then the narrative turns to “OK, well some people are starving, and some people are being shot, but Hamas is bad.” You create these red herring arguments. So when you think secrecy, red herring arguments deflecting blame, there are other countries in the world that do that. North Korea. Is that the line-up that we want to be with in terms of how we engage in the world and how we prosecute conflicts and wars? I don’t think so.
The third piece I look to is Israel, an ally, and their position in the world. If they continue down this path to where it is now evident to the world that there is starvation; it is evident to the world that it is seemingly systematic and that it’s done intentionally. If Israel does not change their approach of what they’re doing to include not going forth with a full-scale invasion of Gaza; if they continue on this path, this trajectory, they’re only going to harm their position on the world stage. They will lose allies and supporters, and they will make themselves more of a target and isolate themselves to the point where they will not have support in the future. Again, I always make an attempt to take in all perspectives, everyone’s view, why someone thinks the way they do. I did not lose a close family member or a fellow citizen on October 7th. So, it would be unfair of me to say, “This is how an Israeli or the IDF should feel.” That would be unfair of me to say that.
However, regardless of the justification of a war, regardless of the justification of the reasoning to take action against a perceived enemy, there are values and guidelines and rules and laws and treaties that dictate and establish how that should be done. These maintain responsibility and accountability in our world; that’s what we’ve been doing for hundreds of years. From what I have witnessed, just looking at the facts as they are, there are war crimes being committed in Gaza. There are crimes against humanity being committed in Gaza. If that’s being done intentionally, or just through the mission creep and the fog and friction of war, I don’t know. But I invite the world to investigate and to look at that.
A Day of Reckoning Is Coming
I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again in ending here: A day of atonement, a day of judgment, a day of reckoning is coming. More and more of the world are waking up to what’s going on in Gaza; it cannot be ignored. The months and months and months of “Oh, there’s no starvation. Oh, there’s no mass killing; women and children aren’t dying. That’s all made up.” That rhetoric has been exposed. And a day of reckoning is coming when the world is starting to take a hard, hard look. It’s like a box; and when that box is opened, and we look in there and see what’s truly going on, the world is going to demand accountability. Now is the time—not next week, not next year, not after; now is the time for the United States to stand and hold our ally accountable. Because if we do not, the world is going to hold us accountable right alongside of them; right alongside Israel. It will not be to the benefit of Israel, the United States, and quite frankly the world. The thing is, we know this; we can see it. There’s ample evidence; not just from me, not just from one American who was there. I share these stories with you not as someone who read the newspaper or read an article and applied some kind of opinion to it. I was there on the ground, seeing it with my own eyes, witnessing it firsthand.
But even beyond that, if you can’t take my word for it, the evidence includes Israeli Defense Force soldiers, IDF soldiers who in the last week have come forth to confirm many of the things that I have said. So, what I would ask is, let’s look at the truth and let’s take an honest assessment of our position in the world right now, and choose the right path. Because if we do not, we will be on the wrong side of history as a nation. That’s something that I don’t want, and I’m sure that’s something no one here wants….
The dehumanization aspect is something that I think is something I have seen time and time again. I remember as a young lieutenant, as we were going into Iraq, the post-invasion counterinsurgency world was new to America in terms of conventional war transitioning into a counterinsurgency type war with a long duration of staying in that nation. It’s something the United States as an Army was not prepared for; I’m not saying the United States hadn’t experienced it in other places before—Vietnam, Moro Philippines, other places, etc. But at this scale in terms of a conventional fight transitioning into a counterinsurgency fight to where the conventional army was a player in it. The dehumanization aspect [screen freeze] soldiers. The names and things we give to our enemy, or to just the population. We’ve all heard these horrible things. I’ll say them, not that they’re my beliefs, but they’re things that have been said. In Iraq, we called them ragheads, or in the Philippines just calling the Filipinos [screen blip] and things like that that you hear. This dehumanization not only comes through in how we act, but in our language and what we call people and how that conveys it. The same thing in Gaza; the UG Solutions personnel on the ground, who, by the way, the contract leader, the guy in charge of the contract, is a high-ranking officer in the Infidels Motorcycle Club that claimed to have the downfall of all Arabs and all Muslims. He’s the guy in charge of the security contracts; the guy who wears a tattoo that says “Infidel.” They call the Palestinians the “zombies”; they call them the “shit heads”; they call them just horrible names. All of that is part of the dehumanization. You don’t refer to them as human beings; you refer to them as some name that dehumanizes them. Then it’s easier to not see them as a human. Then when they’re crawling around on the ground, trying to pick up food to survive, they’re subservient to you, and you have all the power. That’s another step of dehumanization. When you lie about their plight, when you lie about their struggle—“Oh, they’re not starving. They’re fine.”—you dehumanize them further.
What’s really sad and striking to me is that dehumanization is not just coming from the uneducated and the ignorant. That dehumanization is coming from the likes of Ambassador Huckabee. “There’s no starvation.” Come on; the American people aren’t dumb; we can see it. Or, what was striking was that Ambassador Huckabee and Mr. Witkoff went to go visit one of the sites in Gaza recently. Parts that were cut out of the mainstream media that I saw, the video that was shot was that they’re saying, “Oh, the IDF aren’t shooting at the civilians.” During their visit, just outside the site, you can hear constant machine gun fire. OK, somebody is shooting somebody. It’s just the blatant lies in the face of the truth that to me is concerning. What changes that is the American people speaking up and saying, “We won’t tolerate that.” But the dehumanization aspect, yes, you and I sir [referring to peace activist and former CIA intelligence officer Ray MacGovern], we’ve seen that. We’ve seen that in conflict; we’ve seen that in places around the world. That is often an approach by one enemy to another to dehumanize the population, because then it makes it more palatable to oppress them.
Aug. 11—According to a New York Times report on Aug. 8, President Donald Trump has secretly signed a directive to the Pentagon authorizing the use of military force against certain Latin American drug cartels that his administration has deemed are terrorist organizations. The order provides an official basis for the possibility of direct military operations at sea and on foreign soil against drug cartels. U.S. military officials have started drawing up options for how the military could go after the groups, according to “people familiar with the conversations.”
But the bulk of the New York Times story focuses on the complex and apparently unresolved host of legal issues that could arise if the U.S. military is used to target drug traffickers in other countries, especially if operations are conducted without Congressional authorization or without the cooperation of the countries involved. It is unclear, the Times says, what White House, Pentagon and State Department lawyers have said about the new directive or whether the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel has produced an authoritative opinion assessing the legal issues.
Mexico has rejected the prospect of U.S. military operations on its territory. “There will be no invasion of Mexico,” Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said yesterday after the Times story appeared, reported AFP. “We were informed that this executive order was coming and that it had nothing to do with the participation of any military personnel or any institution in our territory,” Sheinbaum told her regular morning press conference. The Mexican Foreign Ministry said later that Mexico “would not accept the participation of U.S. military forces on our territory.”
Sheinbaum’s remarks followed a statement released by the U.S. Embassy in Mexico, which said both countries would use “every tool at our disposal to protect our peoples” from drug-trafficking groups. U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Ronald Johnson said on X that the countries “face a common enemy: the violent criminal cartels.”
Sources close to the White House report that Trump is struggling with finding a way to take on the cartels, and that he is being pushed by some advisors "to bring in the Marines," said one source. "Direct military action is not necessarily the most effective way to fight these people. Some advisors, close to Director of National Intelligence (DNI) say the best way to fight is to bust up the protection racket that the international banking system runs for the cartel, which pass trillions of dollars through banks, and provide them with both liquidity and profits. If you can block these cash flows, both the cartels and the corrupt banks that service and use them would be put out of business. Then, it is not a very complex law enforcement operation to mop them up, in which the government of Mexico, with some logistical and other support provided by the U.S., can handle the job."
But the banks are going to fight to keep control of the massive money flows of "Dope, Inc.", which they launder on a daily basis for the cartels. "Maybe we should do as FDR and his friend and ally, former Marine commandant Gen. Smedley Darlington Butler proposed—send the Marines into Wall Street to take on the real enemy of our republic."
This and other sources also reported that there are people in the Southern Command who would like to have a military base in Mexico. Trump is reportedly opposed to this, which would make Mexico feel like a colony, and which they would strenuously resist. The idea of the base or bases was being pushed as part of the plans to control the border, which has proven to be unnecessary, in part, thanks to cooperation from the Mexican government.
Aug. 11—Chinese rail engineers have given thought since at least 2014 to the construction requirements for the Bering Strait tunnel required to build a “China-Russia-Alaska-Canada-U.S. high-speed railroad.” In May of that year, one of China’s most famous tunnel and rail engineers, Wang Mengshu, outlined China’s overall ambitious plans for building transcontinental high-speed railroads globally in an interview with Beijing Times.
The fourth of the transcontinental trunklines he identified caught international attention: the idea of linking Eurasia to Canada and the United States. Wang reported that planning was beginning on an estimated 13,000 km route, “starting from the northeast and heading north, through Siberia to the Bering Strait, crossing the Pacific Ocean by building a tunnel to Alaska, then going from Alaska to Canada, and finally to the United States.” He estimated that crossing the Bering Strait would require approximately 200 km of tunnels, “a technology used in the high-speed rail tunnel from Fujian to Taiwan, and the necessary technology is already in place.”
“If it is completed, people from China to the United States will no longer need to take a plane. They can take the high-speed rail to see the scenery of many countries along the way. According to the design speed of 350 km per hour, passengers can reach the United States in less than two days by high-speed rail,” he told Beijing Times.
Hearing of Wang’s interview, U.S. rail expert Hal Cooper, a champion for the Bering Strait tunnel for decades together with the Schiller Institute, told Russia’s RIA Novosti that while the political obstacles to Chinese, Russian, American cooperation may remain, “after this announcement by the Chinese, [the project] will never be suppressed. It’s never going to be swept back under the rug again.”
Seven months later, Wang told the New York Times in a December 18 interview, that the Bering Strait crossing "is a wish and a dream of not only China’s railway experts but also railway engineers in Russia, Canada and the U.S. whom I have spoken to. The technology developments in recent years in high-speed railway and underwater tunnels make it possible. It is a dream, but one that is within reach.
“The Chinese central government is not seriously considering it, not yet,” he reported. “But why not? We have the technology, and it is a good thing to do. It would benefit generations to come, and the environment. As railway engineers, we think it would be a great legacy to leave for future generations. It would connect continents. It would be a grand structure of human engineering.”
The New York Times wanted to know what the chances are that this grand idea would ever be built. Wang answered:
“That depends entirely on politics, because we have the technology. It depends on whether governments of the four countries can work together, make this dream come true and leave this amazing legacy for our children…. Some governments like to spend their resources on fighting wars. I think building a railway is far more meaningful than fighting wars.”
Aug. 11—Writing on his X page Aug. 9, Russian Direct Investment Fund CEO and special presidential envoy for investment and economic cooperation Kirill Dmitriev said that Russian President Vladimir Putin and American President Donald Trump, who will be meeting in Alaska on Aug. 15, should commit their countries to developing cooperation in the Arctic and beyond.
“Born as Russian America—Orthodox roots, forts, fur trade—Alaska echoes those ties and makes the U.S. an Arctic nation. Let’s partner on the environment, infrastructure, and energy in the Arctic and beyond,” Dmitriev wrote. Dmitriev included with his post a picture of railroad tracks extending in the direction of Alaska’s high mountains.
Also posted in the comments section of Dmitriev’s X account is a simple post by the Schiller Institute’s Daniel Burke, “Time for the Bering Strait Tunnel,” to which Dmitriev responded: “Possibly yes.”
On his Telegram channel, Dmitriev warned that there would be efforts to derail the Trump-Putin summit. “A number of countries that are interested in continuing the conflict, will make enormous efforts (involving provocations and disinformation) to disrupt the upcoming meeting between President Putin and President Trump,” he wrote, according to TASS.
It was Dmitriev who greeted Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff, when his plane landed in Moscow earlier this week for his meeting with President Putin. At that time Witkoff commented: “We see vast potential for mutually beneficial collaboration, including with U.S. investors in Arctic projects, rare earth metals and infrastructure development,” he said.
Aug. 11—There is no starvation in Gaza, repeated Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu, the Butcher of Gaza, at an Aug. 10 news conference. When asked about the matter, he lied that, while there was “deprivation” in Gaza, “no one in Gaza would have survived after two years of war” if Israel was implementing a “starvation policy.” He sidestepped the question about people starving to death, to passively deny there was a “starvation policy” being implemented to effectively kill everyone that won’t “leave voluntarily.” He was also never asked whether there is a “starvation policy” whose primary aim might be, not to directly kill everyone, but to drive everyone out of Gaza. There are historical examples in 1940s Poland and in Nazi Germany, where similar policies were carried out. In World War II’s concentration camps, the mission was to work the inmates (including the Reich’s political enemies) to death and to gas the ones that were deemed no longer worthy to be worked to death.
Netanyahu lied, as he has been doing repeatedly, since being warned by President Donald Trump last week to stop claiming that people are not starving, when everyone can see that they are. "If his mouth is moving, then he is lying<' said one source close to the White House. "President Trump, for one, does not believe his lies, believing hsi own eyes instead." This and other sources say that Trump will be announcing a comprehensive U.S. to halt the starvation and ease the humanitarian crisis in Gaza last this week, perhaps before his Aug. 15 summit in Alaska with President Vladimir Putin of Russia.
What follows is a brief summary overview of the policy of the Netanyahu government using food in Gaza as a weapon:
The UN and related agencies had no logistical blockages to getting 600 trucks/day into Gaza during the February ceasefire. That was completely stopped in March and April. From May through July, a total of 5,100 trucks have gotten in, not quite 57/day—or 8 days worth of aid over 91 days. And that figure included the late July “upsurge” response by Israel. Yet July averaged only 72/day. As of Aug. 10, the daily figure for people starved to death and for people shot dead trying to get aid was at 11 apiece. There are still more people in the latter category (around 900 at or around the GHF sites) than the former (around 150 known cases).
The so-called Gaza Humanitarian Fund claimed that they distributed 7.6 million “meals” last week. While that is certainly a record high for them, they don’t actually distribute meals. (The World Food Program, e.g., used to distribute meals.) The GHF figure has devised the amount of 40-lb boxes employed as the prize in a bizarre pre-dawn, 8-minute scramble—what have been called by its critics “hunger games.” The figure of 7.6 million “meals” translates into 19,000 boxes/day for the more than 1 million Gazans in southern Gaza.
What happens in this real-life “hunger game” is that about 8,000-10,000 people walk some 5 miles in the dark to line up, under gunfire, at each of four sites. Some 4,000-5,000 boxes are distributed at each site. Those lucky ones who get a 40-lb box try to walk the 5 miles back, and the other 4-5,000 are supposed to take it in stride and leave the winners alone. And to get the boxes back to their families, they have to avoid criminal gangs—some armed and financed by the Israelis—who can avoid the 10-mile trek.
Do those boxes translate into 57 meals per box? That would require access to water and cooking fuel. Normal aid, last February and pre-October 7, included water and cooking fuel. However, since February, no water has been delivered, and two (that is, 2) trucks of cooking gas have been delivered. Normal deliveries of cooking gas were 8 truckloads/day, so Gaza has received in the last 5 months one quarter of one day’s cooking gas. Brackish water, with salt and waste, has been used, creating widespread diseases.
No nation that imposes this mass death on others can remain fit to survive for long, nor can nations who choose to look the other way at what is going on.
Aug. 11—The prominent Ukrainian journalist Diana Panchenko, a critic of both the 2014 coup in Kiev, and the war policy of NATO dictator Volodymyr Zelenskyy, had, as of July 2025, over 2 million subscribers to her YouTube account. However, as of Aug. 8, YouTube has now shut it down.
A former Journalist of the Year, Panchenko was a presenter on a Kiyv TV channel beginning in 2010 and on “NewsOne” TV in 2015. The latter was associated with Victor Medvedchuk, head of the “For Life” party. She’s hosted several shows since then, and was very well-known in Ukraine. Zelenskyy then imposed sanctions on Taras Kozak, the owner of NewsOne, and other media outlets. Panchenko then co-founded the Journalists’ Protection Club movement. In 2022, she interviewed people in Mariupol and a captured Azov defender Mykhailo Shvets, for her video “From Kyiv to Donbass.” In late 2022, she left Kiev for Donetsk.
She is listed on the infamous Myrotvorets list as an “Anti-Ukrainian propagandist.” They note that: “Comprehensive measures are underway to bring the defendant to justice for crimes against Ukraine” and that her “Liquidation date” has not been filled in. Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council placed her under sanctions in January 2023. The NSDC’s “Center for Countering Disinformation” listed her on its March 2024 report for the crime of “spreading hostile disinformation on TikTok.”
YouTube’s action, shutting out her 2 million subscribers, can only raise concerns regarding Panchenko’s security.
Aug. 11—Following up on criminal referrals that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard submitted to Attorney General Pam Bondi, on the manufacture of the “Russiagate” narrative, Vice President J.D. Vance told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo Aug. 10 that indictments were coming for “defrauding the American people, defrauding the intelligence agencies, lying about what the intel said…. That’s a violation of the people’s trust, that’s a violation of what our intelligence services should be doing, and I absolutely think they broke the law. You’re going to see a lot of people get indicted for that.”
Aug. 11-- Schiller Institute Founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche released today the following open letter to President Donald Trump and President Vladimir Putin. The letter is copied to Chinese President Xi Jinping.
The letter is accompanied by three articles from EIR magazine on May 4, 2007, on constructing a Bering Strait tunnel, through which would pass a rail line that unites the rail systems of Eurasia with those of the Americas. The addresses for three of the EIR articles that would accompany Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche’s letter are presented immediately below: “Russian-American Team: World Needs Bering Strait Tunnel!”; “Mendeleyev Would Have Agreed;” “Origins of the Bering Strait Project.”
To President Donald Trump and President Vladimir Putin:
When you are meeting in Alaska on August 15, the fate of humanity lies in your hands. Against all the attempts by the opponents of peace, you can not only bring the war in Ukraine to an end, and with it eliminate the Sword of Damocles of the nuclear extinction of the human species at least over this conflict, but you can also reintroduce diplomacy into the relation of the two most powerful nuclear nations on the planet.
But there is something even more elevated you can do, by not only fighting off the threats facing mankind, but by giving the whole world a beautiful vision for the future. You could agree to build a corridor across the Bering Strait, and with that rail and tunnel project unite the rail systems of Eurasia with those of the Americas. This project would open up for development the vast untapped resources of Siberia, as well as the U.S. Arctic resources of oil, gas, precious metals of all kinds, as well as fresh water. Siberia and the Russian Far East hold the largest deposits of raw materials of all the elements which one can find in Mendeleyev’s Periodic Table, and the joint development of these resources, to which many other resource-poor countries could be invited, could become the perfect war-avoidance program and greatly enhance the prosperity of the world.
In the not so distant future, one could then travel by high-speed railroad around the world, from the most southern tips of Argentina and Chile in Ushuaia and Puerto Williams, all way through the Americas, then through the Bering Strait, across Eurasia, then with a tunnel under the Strait of Gibraltar, travel all the way through the African continent to the Cape of Good Hope.
The Bering Strait Tunnel project has been studied and promoted over decades by leading scientific and political figures in the United States, Russia and China, as is documented in the attached set of articles from EIR magazine, dating back to 2007, as well as an 8-minute video prepared by Dr. Victor Razbegin, deputy chairman of the SOPS, Russia’s Council for the Study of Productive Forces, which won the Grand Prize for Innovation at the Shanghai World Expo 2010.
The Bering Strait Tunnel and related great infrastructure projects could also serve as the basis for further in-depth discussions among Presidents Trump, Putin and China’s Xi Jinping, should President Trump be invited and agree to attend the 80th anniversary celebration of the end of World War II, to be held in China on Sept. 3—as I have earlier proposed.
This project for integrated infrastructure of the whole world as the basis for development will lay the basis for ending war as a means of conflict resolution forever. The hope of humanity rests on you!
Respectfully Yours,
Helga Zepp-LaRouche
Founder, Schiller Institute
Aug. 11, 2025
cc.: President Xi Jinping
Aug. 11—Israel’s escalated attack on Gaza City Aug. 10 targeted and hit a tent housing journalists, outside the main gate of the Al-Shifa Hospital, killing five journalists and two others. Al Jazeera reported that their well-known journalist Anas al-Sharif was among the dead. The other four deceased are Al Jazeera correspondent Mohammed Qreiqeh, and its camera operators Ibrahim Zaher, Mohammed Noufal, and Moamen Aliwa.
The Al Jazeera Media Network condemned the killings as “yet another blatant and premeditated attack on press freedom…. This attack comes amid the catastrophic consequences of the ongoing Israeli assault on Gaza, which has seen the relentless slaughter of civilians, forced starvation, and the obliteration of entire communities. The order to assassinate Anas al-Sharif, one of Gaza’s bravest journalists, and his colleagues, is a desperate attempt to silence the voices exposing the impending seizure and occupation of Gaza.”
Shortly before his death, al-Sharif posted on X that Israel had launched intense, concentrated bombardment—also known as “fire belts”—on the eastern and southern parts of Gaza City. His last video showed flashes of orange light with loud bombs of missile bombing. He commented, translated to English: “Nonstop bombing…. For the past two hours, the Israeli aggression on Gaza City has intensified.”
An Isreal Defense Force (IDF) statement claimed that al-Sharif headed a Hamas cell and “advancing rocket attacks against Israeli civilians and troops.” It claimed documents, not revealed, proved his involvement with Hamas. Muhammed Shehada, an analyst at the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, said there was “zero evidence” that al-Sharif took part in any hostilities. “His entire daily routine was standing in front of a camera from morning to evening.”
Lethal targeting of the journalist was in evidence last month, when IDF spokesman Avichai Adraee shared a video on social media that accused al-Sharif of being a member of Hamas’s military wing. Irene Khan, the United Nations special rapporteur on freedom of expression, said that she was “deeply alarmed by repeated threats and accusations of the Israeli army” against al-Sharif. “Fears for al-Sharif’s safety are well-founded as there is growing evidence that journalists in Gaza have been targeted and killed by the Israeli army on the basis of unsubstantiated claims that they were Hamas terrorists.” The IDF has killed more than 200 reporters and media workers since Oct. 7, 2023.
Al Jazeera released a statement from al-Sharif, written on April 6, in the event of his death. He said that he “lived the pain in all its details” and “tasted grief and loss repeatedly. Despite that, I never hesitated to convey the truth as it is, without distortion or misrepresentation, hoping that God would witness those who remained silent, those who accepted our killing, and those who suffocated our very breaths. Not even the mangled bodies of our children and women moved their hearts or stopped the massacre that our people have been subjected to for over a year and a half.”
He also expressed sorrow for having to leave behind his wife, Bayan, and for not seeing his son, Salah, and daughter, Sham, grow up.
Aug. 11—Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, reflecting on the combined but uneven evolving state of U.S.-Russian relations, said in an interview with Rossiya-1 Aug. 10, “some sprouts of common sense are appearing in the dialogue with the U.S., which have been sorely lacking in recent months and years.”
He, at the same time, discussed Russia’s recent decision to lift its self-imposed ban on deploying intermediate range missiles, ascribing the Russian change in policy to the need to respond to what “the Americans and their allies, especially the European warmongers, are undertaking.” In his interview with Rossiya-1, Ryabkov made it clear that besides the now-famous Oreshnik missile, Russia has developed other advanced missile technologies.
“Oreshnik—yes, but we have other [weapons]. We did not waste time…. I cannot dwell on what I am not supposed to, but, we have such weapons.” TASS news agency reported: “Commenting on the potential deployment of Russian weapons to new regions, Ryabkov noted, ‘It would be absolutely wrong, irresponsible of me to disclose concrete geographical locations.’ ‘We always have a lot of options on the table and we never exclude anything for us,’ he added.”
TASS then reminded some, and recounted for the first time for others, the wildly dangerous days of the Biden Administration and NATO’s deployment, via Ukraine, of long-range missile attacks on Russia last fall. “Russian President Vladimir Putin said on November 21 [2024] that the United States and its NATO allies had announced their approval of the use of long-range precision weapons. Following this announcement, Russian military sites in the Kursk and Bryansk regions were attacked with American and British missiles. In response, Russia used its newest intermediate-range ballistic missile, the Oreshnik, in a non-nuclear strike targeting Ukraine’s Yuzhmash defense plant in Dnepr (formerly known as Dnepropetrovsk). The Russian President warned that the West could bring upon itself heavy consequences, should its inflammatory policies prompt further escalation of the conflict.”
This—both the potential for sanity, and the present reality of a reckless escalation that could prove unstoppable past a certain point—is the true, “nuanced” circumstance of the Friday Aug. 15 Trump-Putin summit in Alaska.
by Mr. X
Aug. 11—Near where the future Bering Strait Tunnel finally connecting Russia and the United States will soon be located, there is a town in Russia named Kotzebue. It is named after the Russian explorer Otto von Kotzebue (1787-1846,) who was the son of the playwright August von Kotzebue (1761-1819.) On behalf of the Russian Imperial Navy—the same navy that Catherine the Great earlier deployed as part of her 1780 League of Armed Neutrality, which indirectly supported the American Revolution by protecting “neutral” shipping to the new United States from interference by the British Navy—Otto von Kotzebue explored the Bering Strait in pursuit of a passage to the Arctic Ocean.
As a result of Russia’s sale of Alaska to the United States in 1867, five years after Russia had also supported the Union cause by sending its navy to the ports of New York and San Francisco to prevent Britain and France from breaking Lincoln’s blockade of the Confederacy, Russia’s mainland coast is 55 miles from the Seward Peninsula of the United States. (Technically, the two countries, each of which owns one of the Diomede Islands, are actually geographically much closer—only 2.4 miles apart.) Could the eight decades of hostility between Russia and the United States, two nations which, prior to 1945, had not only not fought each other, but had been allied in opposition to the British Empire, now be finally overcome? Was that hostility instigated by Britian's Winston Churchill’s “Operation Unthinkable” proposal to go to war with the Soviet Union by no later than July 1945, well before the end of the War in the Pacific? Is that empire, and its lackeys, right now attempting to foment war with Russia, involving the United States, up to this very moment?
Readers of Executive Intelligence Review’s Daily Alert are aware that since July 30, documents released by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard have provided clues that may yet figure in answering that question. In his August 5 article, “Whistleblower Exposes Real 2016 U.S. Election Meddling,” journalist Kit Klarenberg, reporting on those documents, tells the story of “a U.S. intelligence veteran who from 2015 to 2020 served as Deputy National Intelligence Officer, at the ODNI-overseen National Intelligence Council. They specialized in ‘cyber issues,’ including ‘cyber-enabled information operations.’ Prior to the 2016 vote, they led the production of an ICA [Intelligence Community Assessment] on ‘cyber threats’ to U.S. elections, at the order of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, for which they were ‘commended.’” Klarenberg then quotes that source from one of the documents Gabbard released. “For the new 2017 ICA, I was directed by (REDATED) to focus on Russian attempts to access U.S. election-related infrastructure. IC [Intelligence Community] reporting suggested many Russia-attributed what did the initials IP stand for? IP addresses were making connection attempts that the IC could not explain the purpose of. Later, when presenting (REDACTED) with our findings, (REDACTED) directed us to abandon any further study of the subject, saying ‘it’s something else.’ In light of later development in open source reporting, I came to have concerns about this Russia-attributed cyber activity and the abrupt dismissal of the study effort.”
Note the following important passage: "In addition, I noted other nations’ efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election, but this critical context was omitted from the 2017 ICA. During conversion of the 2017 ICA to… Unclassified versions, key context was not included, and I was pressured to alter my views on the 2017 ICA’s [Intelligence Community Assessment’s] key judgments, with the expressed intent by (REDACTED) that my concurrence was sought to enable (REDACTED) to sway the views of the Defense Intelligence Agency, DIA."
Will Great Britain’s intelligence operatives, former head of GCHQ Robert Hannigan and former MI6 Chief Sir Richard Dearlove be among those foreign nationals accused, instead of “the Russians,” of co-managing the attempt, before and after the 2016 election, to alter the Presidency of the United States? As Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, both of whom survived assassination attempts in the past 18 months, prepare to meet this Friday, note Vice-President J.D. Vance’s comments on a Fox News interview regarding the criminal referrals DNI Gabbard has made to Attorney General Pam Bondi regarding Russiagate: “that’s a violation of what our intelligence services should be doing, and I absolutely think they broke the law.” Vance indicated he supports and expects indictments.
A new security and development architecture needs to be the focus of not only the August 15 meeting, but also a subsequent “Big 3” meeting, preferably in early September, among Presidents Trump, Putin, and President Xi Jinping of China. President Xi, who spent months in the state of Iowa as a student, and has an appreciation of American history, might be intrigued to know, if he is not already aware of it, that Abraham Lincoln’s Ambassador to Russia Cassius Marcellus Clay, who played a secondary but essential role in Secretary of State William Seward’s purchase of Alaska from Russia, “was among the first United States diplomats to urge Russo-American identity of interests in Eastern Asia,” according to author Albert Parry. During the Second World War, in the spring of 1943, Parry wrote this in an article cited here, titled “Cassius Clay’s Glimpse into the Future: Lincoln’s Envoy to Saint Petersburg Bade the Two Nations Meet in Asia.”
At this September 2-3, eightieth anniversary of the victory over fascism, in which the United States, China and Russia were all allied, the dream to connect East and West through the Bering Strait, equally a dream of Chinese, Russian and American thinkers and engineers, such as the Schiller Institute’s late Hal Cooper, who designed the World Land-Bridge map of international “development corridors,” could be discussed. Helga Zepp-LaRouche has released a petition that urges this. We, who are both patriots of our nations, and world-citizens in search of a more perfect union of humanity without war, should encourage this next step. That is the mountain-top standpoint from which to view the true potential, despite the dangers, of the upcoming summit-process.
Aug. 6--The ingenious American intelligence officer Edgar Poe (1809-1849) in 1842 solved the murder of a New York City woman by the name of Mary Rogers. He presented his conclusions in a story, called “The Mystery of Marie Roget.” Poe reports that “‘The Mystery of Marie Roget’ was composed at a distance from the scene of the atrocity, and with no other means of investigation than the newspapers afforded.… It may not be improper to record, nevertheless, that the confessions of two persons, made, at different periods, long subsequent to the publication, confirmed in full, not only the general conclusion, but absolutely all the chief hypothetical details by which that conclusion was attained. “ Had Poe been alive in the present era, he would have ignored the “too much information” plague of the internet-dominated present, and ridiculed the methods of inquiry, if they can be called that, that have been used to in effect hide the truth, both in the “RussiaGate” matter, and in “the Epstein case.” In our world and time, awash in the massive electronic trash dump of “too much information,” the “tales of ratiocination” of Edgar Poe, which reveal the true method by which crimes like Russia-Gate and “the mystery of Jeffrey Epstein” might be readily solved, are ignored, just as the great intellectual and political achievement known as the American Revolution, which produced Edgar Poe, is intentionally misunderstood.
The important revelations coming from DNI Tulsi Gabbard on the Russiagate hoax represent much more than a break from “business-as-usual” in Washington. She should be supported, in order not only to bring long-denied justice to the treasonous actors within the Obama (and Bush!) administrations, but to reveal the true enemy of the United States, and humanity as a whole—the British Empire, in May of 1945, in a document titled “Operation Unthinkable,” Britain drew up plans for an immediate preemptive war against the Soviet Union, to begin in July of 1945–two months after the end of the war in Europe, and a month before nuclear weapons would be dropped on Japan! In the words of that report, “The overall or political object is to impose upon Russia the will of the United States and British Empire.” This meant that nuclear weapons would be used against the Soviet Union, either in 1945, or as soon as possible thereafter. As reported elsewhere in this White Paper, that is the intent, now, in 2025, of British financial and intelligence forces—which are the same thing—toward both Russia and China, in pursuit of ”final victory“ in what the British have for centuries called “the Great Game.”
In October, 2008, the American ambassador to Kyrgyzstan, Tatiana Gfoeller, found herself in Bishkek in a testy confrontation with Prince Andrew of Great Britain, now infamous and shunned because of “the mystery of Jeffrey Epstein.” When Ambassador Gfoeller protested against the idea that “Great Game” politics should be the template for policy in Central Asia, “Prince Andrew….stated baldly that ‘the United Kingdom, Western Europe (and by extension you Americans, too) were now back in the thick of playing the Great Game. More animated than ever, he stated cockily: ‘And this time we aim to win!’” Andrew is known to have been, until his disgrace, integral to the Empire’s international weapons trade.
One of Jeffrey Epstein’s earliest sponsors, in the mid-1980s was the late British “defense contractor,” Douglas Leese, a key architect of Al-Yamamah, one of the largest weapons deals in history. Leese is reported to have introduced Epstein to Robert Maxwell, and described Epstein to convicted swindler Steven Hoffenberg, once-owner of the New York Post, thus: “The guy’s a genius, he’s great at selling securities. And he has no moral compass.”
This is the face, and the soul, of the leaders and lackeys of the War Party. Both “The Mystery of Jeffrey Epstein” and “The Mystery of Russia-Gate,” in the way they have been reported, have, so far, been diversions from the truth. The truth is that the old colonial-imperial order has died, and can never be revived. The War Party does not accept that, however, and intends to impose its will upon humanity, either by subjugating it, or by destroying it in thermonuclear war. “Epstein” and “Russia-Gate” are one. Several of the actors in both are the same, in fact. “Imposing our will” upon humanity, whether that be the impassioned destruction of nations, or the remorseless destruction of innocent children, originate in the same Nietzschean view of humanity. If the two can be combined, as in Gaza, causing the victims of the Holocaust to commit that same ultimate crime upon Palestinians,“ that is the most delicious corruption. Of the War Party, Edgar Poe said it best: “They are neither man nor woman, they are neither brute nor human; they are pestilential carcasses, disparted from their souls.”
Aug. 6--The ingenious American intelligence officer Edgar Poe (1809-1849) in 1842 solved the murder of a New York City woman by the name of Mary Rogers. He presented his conclusions in a story, called “The Mystery of Marie Roget.” Poe reports that “‘The Mystery of Marie Roget’ was composed at a distance from the scene of the atrocity, and with no other means of investigation than the newspapers afforded.… It may not be improper to record, nevertheless, that the confessions of two persons, made, at different periods, long subsequent to the publication, confirmed in full, not only the general conclusion, but absolutely all the chief hypothetical details by which that conclusion was attained. “ Had Poe been alive in the present era, he would have ignored the “too much information” plague of the internet-dominated present, and ridiculed the methods of inquiry, if they can be called that, that have been used to in effect hide the truth, both in the “RussiaGate” matter, and in “the Epstein case.” In our world and time, awash in the massive electronic trash dump of “too much information,” the “tales of ratiocination” of Edgar Poe, which reveal the true method by which crimes like Russia-Gate and “the mystery of Jeffrey Epstein” might be readily solved, are ignored, just as the great intellectual and political achievement known as the American Revolution, which produced Edgar Poe, is intentionally misunderstood.
The important revelations coming from DNI Tulsi Gabbard on the Russiagate hoax represent much more than a break from “business-as-usual” in Washington. She should be supported, in order not only to bring long-denied justice to the treasonous actors within the Obama (and Bush!) administrations, but to reveal the true enemy of the United States, and humanity as a whole—the British Empire, in May of 1945, in a document titled “Operation Unthinkable,” Britain drew up plans for an immediate preemptive war against the Soviet Union, to begin in July of 1945–two months after the end of the war in Europe, and a month before nuclear weapons would be dropped on Japan! In the words of that report, “The overall or political object is to impose upon Russia the will of the United States and British Empire.” This meant that nuclear weapons would be used against the Soviet Union, either in 1945, or as soon as possible thereafter. As reported elsewhere in this White Paper, that is the intent, now, in 2025, of British financial and intelligence forces—which are the same thing—toward both Russia and China, in pursuit of ”final victory“ in what the British have for centuries called “the Great Game.”
In October, 2008, the American ambassador to Kyrgyzstan, Tatiana Gfoeller, found herself in Bishkek in a testy confrontation with Prince Andrew of Great Britain, now infamous and shunned because of “the mystery of Jeffrey Epstein.” When Ambassador Gfoeller protested against the idea that “Great Game” politics should be the template for policy in Central Asia, “Prince Andrew….stated baldly that ‘the United Kingdom, Western Europe (and by extension you Americans, too) were now back in the thick of playing the Great Game. More animated than ever, he stated cockily: ‘And this time we aim to win!’” Andrew is known to have been, until his disgrace, integral to the Empire’s international weapons trade.
One of Jeffrey Epstein’s earliest sponsors, in the mid-1980s was the late British “defense contractor,” Douglas Leese, a key architect of Al-Yamamah, one of the largest weapons deals in history. Leese is reported to have introduced Epstein to Robert Maxwell, and described Epstein to convicted swindler Steven Hoffenberg, once-owner of the New York Post, thus: “The guy’s a genius, he’s great at selling securities. And he has no moral compass.”
This is the face, and the soul, of the leaders and lackeys of the War Party. Both “The Mystery of Jeffrey Epstein” and “The Mystery of Russia-Gate,” in the way they have been reported, have, so far, been diversions from the truth. The truth is that the old colonial-imperial order has died, and can never be revived. The War Party does not accept that, however, and intends to impose its will upon humanity, either by subjugating it, or by destroying it in thermonuclear war. “Epstein” and “Russia-Gate” are one. Several of the actors in both are the same, in fact. “Imposing our will” upon humanity, whether that be the impassioned destruction of nations, or the remorseless destruction of innocent children, originate in the same Nietzschean view of humanity. If the two can be combined, as in Gaza, causing the victims of the Holocaust to commit that same ultimate crime upon Palestinians,“ that is the most delicious corruption. Of the War Party, Edgar Poe said it best: “They are neither man nor woman, they are neither brute nor human; they are pestilential carcasses, disparted from their souls.”
July 31—Executive Intelligence Review, acting in the tradition of responsibility toward the Presidency of the United States undertaken by its founder, economist Lyndon LaRouche, publishes as its lead today the Introduction to the forthcoming White Paper issued by The LaRouche Organization: “Worse Than Treason—The Actual Motive Behind ‘Russiagate.’” There are three crucial conceptions that appear in this document, to which we call attention.
Conception Number One: “What DNI Gabbard has released thus far, shows that in August, September, and early December of 2016, the intelligence community had determined that Russia was neither capable of, nor interested in hacking U.S. election infrastructure to affect the outcome of the presidential election.” Instead of this new emphasis, which definitively removes Russia from any espionage role like that claimed for the past nine years—and vindicates former National Security Agency whistleblower Bill Binney and his associates, including former CIA operatives Larry Johnson and Ray McGovern, as well as many other members of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity who challenged this false claim from the time it was made nine years ago—everyone is still being encouraged to only focus upon the important, but secondary angle that “the Obama Administration did it”—thus letting off the “originating agent” behind Russiagate, which was not the Obama Administration.
Conception Number Two: “What has not yet been mentioned by Gabbard, other than limited reference to the ‘Steele Dossier,’ is the role of British intelligence in manufacturing the Russiagate story, and the role played by key individuals such as GCHQ Director Robert Hannigan, MI6 Chief Richard Dearlove, former Prime Minister Tony Blair, and others.” This is crucial, both because this, not Russia, was the foreign threat against the United States which illegally sought to determine the outcome of the 2016 American Presidential election, by America’s historical enemy, and because both Dearlove and Blair are all over the disastrous Trump Administration policy in the Middle East right now.
Conception Number Three: “The reason for the British-orchestrated confrontation between the United States and Russia was so that the British could consolidate a global financial empire based on depopulation and looting raw materials and labor.” China’s Belt and Road Initiative and the BRICS New Development Bank, launched in 2013 and 2014, respectively, posed a great threat to what King Charles has called “Global Britain.” This, and nothing else, is the actual motivation behind the disastrous “American realist” policies toward China, and the supremely stupid economic policies of self-destruction being pursued by the United States.
In fact, the United States’ primary allies, were it to re-adopt its once-traditional policy of investment in mining, manufacturing, agriculture, advanced nuclear fission and thermonuclear fusion research and development, and the correlated advanced machine-tool design, would in fact be the very Russia and China that are today said to be its enemies! The Lincoln Administration understood the role of Great Britain. The Franklin Roosevelt Administration understood the role of Great Britain. And 200 years ago, the Presidency of American Revolution veteran John Quincy Adams (1825-29) exemplified an independent American foreign and domestic policy, which he had eloquently expressed in his 1821 Fourth of July speech to the Congress, delivered in his capacity as Secretary of State.
Only if the Presidency has the courage to name the names of the real “perfidious Albion” perpetrators of Russiagate, the real foreign enemy of America, and the real War Party will the drive toward thermonuclear war with Russia possibly be contained. The world security and development architecture proposed and detailed by participants in the two Schiller Institute conferences held in the past three months is the clear pathway forward. This can work, but only if the American Presidency leaves the obsolete, hostile fantasy world of “unipolarity” and its NATO bastard child behind. By recommitting to its original anti-colonialist purpose, America can yet liberate the trans-Atlantic world from the radioactive fate to which it seeks to condemn mankind. All that is needed is to summon what the assassinated Yitzhak Rabin called “the courage to change axioms.”
by Mr. X
July 23—It is true that Director of National Security Tulsi Gabbard has just called attention, through a series of now-declassified documents, to a 9-year-old story, that she has referred to as “a treasonous conspiracy,” on the part of the 2016 American intelligence establishment, including the then-President Barack Obama. But on behalf of whom is this treason being committed? The Russiagate caper, for example, was instigated by British intelligence, in the form of then-GCHQ Chief Robert Hannigan. That is, a foreign government, the British Empire, interfered to defraud the 2016 American Presidential election, by claiming that Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee.
As journalist Aaron Maté wrote on July 22: “According to newly declassified documents, U.S. intelligence leaders concealed high-level doubts about one of Russiagate’s foundational allegations: that Russia stole and leaked Democratic Party material to help Trump defeat Hillary Clinton. In a September 2016 report that was never made public until now, the NSA and the FBI broke with their intelligence counterparts and expressed ‘low confidence’ in the attribution to Russia. The previously undisclosed dissent about Russia’s alleged hacking activities in the 2016 election is among several revelations released last week by Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s Director of National Intelligence.” But it was British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) Chief Robert Hannigan and Christopher Steele’s controller, “former” MI6 head Sir Richard Dearlove, that were the instigators and the brains behind it all.
Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter responded to these revelations on July 21 on George Galloway’s show: “[W]e’re at a point right now in American British relations where we need to be calling a spade a spade. You are not our friend. In fact, you are our enemy. You facilitated active treason against the sitting President of the United States. Under some circumstances, that would be a casus belli (cause for war)…. And you’re lucky I’m not the president, because I’ll tell you what, you interfere with American democracy to that degree, you will pay a heavy price, as you should. Not you, George. You’re my friend and not the British people. And that’s why we’ll never do this. But your government is the absolute enemy of not just the United States, but all of humanity.”
When looking at “Russiagate,” it is important to see the nature of the treason under consideration; thermonuclear war, after all, is treason against the human race. The present war of NATO against Russia is a war that London’s The Economist had written a script for, in 2007, before Barack Obama was elected to the Presidency. “In the dangerous second decade of the (21st) century, when Vladimir Putin returned for a third term as Russian president and stood poised to invade Ukraine, it was the EU that pushed the Obama administration to threaten massive nuclear retaliation.”
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zhakarova July 21 expressed, in her unique way, what this British-instigated march toward folly has actually meant. "Historically, we have done everything possible to build relations with a peaceful and prosperous Germany based on mutual respect. We forgave what no person, no nation, should be expected to forgive. We forgave the deaths of tens of millions of our people. And what did we get in return? What everyone is seeing today….
“To me, the most alarming thing happening in Germany is the complete amnesia regarding its own past. The country has forgotten its recent history, including its reunification. The fact that the country was divided did not happen by some global accident, but as a consequence of the crimes it committed. Germany has forgotten who played the decisive role in making its reunification possible. It was our country, our people, those who had every right not to forgive, but did, who also helped bring the German people back together. Even that has now been betrayed. They have betrayed themselves.”
Is America about to betray itself as well? Will that self-betrayal, given America’s importance, cause a global thermonuclear war? Perhaps the way to look at what Gabbard is calling attention to is, in the context of a larger, chronic problem of “Tory” treasonous behavior in the American Presidency, citing a series of years: 1989, with the Bush 41 presidency and the fall of the Berlin Wall; 1963’s Kennedy assassination; 1945’s April death, in office, of President Franklin Roosevelt and the subsequent unjustified dropping of the atomic bomb in August.
For a moment, then, reverse this perspective. See the American Revolution as the first successful anti-colonial revolution in history, 250 years ago. Then, consider the nearly 600 years of colonialism that is now coming to an end, and the role that the international collaboration known as the American Revolution played in causing that transition to come about. Then, realize that the promise contained in the American 1776 Declaration of Independence is best expressed in the present-day economic aspirations of the true heirs of that experiment—the vast majority of the human race, as assembled in over 100 nations, now called the “Global Majority.”
Yet, the United States has been caused to regard that very grouping of nations, grouped at the moment around the formation called the BRICS, as its enemy. In upholding this wrong idea, the United States commits treason against itself. It is of this that President John Quincy Adams, who occupied that office exactly 200 years ago, warned the Congress four years earlier in his Fourth of July speech in 1821: America “well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign Independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.”
Fifty years ago, the economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche, in what is today referred to as his “Oasis Plan,” outlined how to extend justice, not “IMF/World Bank loans,” to Palestine and Southwest Asia, and more generally to the nations of Africa, Asia and Ibero-America, in the form of “advanced technology transfer.” In this way, not only would the crimes of colonialism be addressed, but a new, self-sufficient economic platform would be created, based on technology transfer as expressed in advanced machine tool production and high energy-density physical production in the fields of mining, manufacturing, agriculture, and essential infrastructure, including in the fields of health and education. That would provide the economic foundation for a real new security and development architecture. That is the fight that must be waged in the United Nations now, for the people of Gaza, and for our own souls’ sake.
Don’t be distracted by the indigestible news-feeds and blog posts coming your way on every variety of topic today. Of course, there are events that “everyone is talking about,” such as the announcement of more weapons to be sent to Ukraine by the Trump Administration and NATO. These, however, no matter how important they may momentarily be, operate within the realm of entropic, predictable tragedy. Such, however, is not, and will hopefully never be, our focus.
We must be clear-eyed about unfolding tragedy, in order to avoid it. The tragi-comedy in Ukraine, with its Wal-Mart Pagliacci, is now coming to a close, no matter what the headlines say, and the weapons shipments, real and merely promised, are. Yesterday, a new deadline, 50 days, by which time the war in Ukraine must conclude, was decreed by President Trump. As with the famous story, “The Monkey’s Paw,” however, we should not only wish for the Ukraine war to end in 50 days, because that wish might be granted in ways that neither the United States, nor Russia, nor anyone else in the world, except for haters of the human race, would intend.
Annie Jacobsen, author of Nuclear War: A Scenario, in an interview, July 10, which also included as a guest former CIA intelligence officer Andrew Bustamente, told the following story. "So, this goes back to your terrifying point about miscalculation or mistake. I think that the mistake is where the real threat lies. People at this table may remember, in November, the U.K. gave—and I’m talking about the Ukraine-Russia conflict right now—the U.K. gave the Storm Shadow to Ukraine…. Ukraine we gave the ATACAMS. These are systems, missiles systems essentially, to be able to go further into Russia, to allow Ukraine to fire further into Russia. And Russia was pissed off.
“And in response, they fired an intermediate range ballistic missile, capable of carrying a nuclear warhead, OK? This is the first time in history that a ballistic missile was used, in this kind of a kinetic war, a hot war. And I was on an airplane, leaving London, and I went, ‘Oh my God, is this that situation, where I’m not going to land because there’s a nuclear war?’ Because that is precisely the kind of thing I write in Nuclear War: A Scenario, where something’s launched, and the United States, because we have a ‘Launch On Warning’ policy, launches before it lands, because we’re not willing to wait to see what was in that warhead.
“Now, what was in the warhead, was nothing! The Russians launched an inter-range ballistic missile into Ukraine, with nothing in the warhead. Why? I mean, this is so terrifying. Well, we learned later, when Lavrov went on television, he said that he had notified his American counterparts in advance. I was taken to the State Department to see where that advanced notice came into. And it’s called the NNRRC—the”national nuclear security center" in the State Department—I’m messing up the name, but it’s known as the NNRRC. (This may refer to the National and Nuclear Risk Reduction Center of the State Department.) It’s inside the State Department.
“And it’s basically, the ‘Hello, We’re Not At War’ room. Meaning every 90 seconds you hear, ‘bing, bing, bing,’ and that’s all you hear. And I was with the Assistant Secretary of State, who said ‘Annie, that’s the Russians telling us we’re not at war.’ And she explained to me that Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister, when he said on TV, which went over everybody’s head, including mine, ‘oh, we notified our American counterparts,’ what did that mean? Well, what Mallory Stewart, the Assistant Secretary of State told me, was what it meant was that Lavrov rang up the NNRRC, and said, ‘you know, we’re launching, and it doesn’t have a nuclear warhead.’”
Andrew Bustamente: “That was such a big deal. And I don’t think the average person understands how big a deal that was. I think it was called the Oreshnik.”
Jacobsen: “It was called the Oreshnik.”
Bustamente: “The Oreshnik was the newest, most modern version of an ICBM, intermediate ballistic missile, that the Russian inventory had. We had never seen it deployed. It’s never been seen before. And it reminded the whole fucking world, you do not want to go down this road.”
The interview has 2.9 million views as of this writing.
Meanwhile, regarding Ukraine, an intriguing, if unconfirmed report from Alexander Mercouris of The Duran was filed yesterday: “This (involves) a Ukrainian commentator who published, apparently, a plan, details of a plan, which he says he was given by Ukrainian officials, in which there are now apparently serious preparations planning for a relocation of the Ukrainian government to the West. In other words, away from Kyiv. Now, the Ukrainians immediately said, ‘This is fake. This is not an original document.’ But the Ukrainian commentator who is apparently a well-regarded one, stood his ground, and he said that that simply isn’t true. It is an absolutely real document. And he has absolute confidence in its authenticity, especially given the people who gave it to him.”
As in Shakespeare’s Anthony And Cleopatra, the veracity of the rumor is less important than what the very existence of the rumor itself expresses. Nothing done by anyone in NATO, including the United States Presidency, can reverse defeat on the battlefield there, which was inevitable. This includes escalation with more weapons being sent to Ukraine, or with sanctions, for reasons contained in Annie Jacobsen’s story. Loss of the fragile trust that now exists between Russia and the United States can mean that the slightest miscalculation, or careless dismissal of an evaluation provided by officers that go against prevailing opinion, including that of the leader of a nation, can cost humanity everything.
Instead, we invite you to challenge the hidden axioms that underpin tragedy. We investigate reality, not “virtual reality.” We rely on our real ideas, and not others’ “artificial intelligence.” We stand for the sovereignty of principle, not “the rule of law.” Our forces have just addressed, over July 12-13, the international community, particularly the BRICS nations, with the Schiller Institute’s Ten Principles for a New International Security and Development Architecture, placed at the center of the world dialogue.
This dialogue and call to action consists of our organizing a series of presentations, now in the ascendancy, including conferences, seminars, classes. The purpose is to fashion a new system of international and intercontinental congresses, in person and online, focused on the method of discovery and re-discovery of new ideas, and old ideas that have been lost. In doing this work, we are walking in the footsteps of thinker Lyndon LaRouche, and the mission expressed in the life’s work of the late economist and statesman.
A clean break with our recent past, particularly the past 55 years since August 15, 1971, must be made by a United States that has not only de-industrialized itself, de-populated itself, and pauperized itself, but is now tearing itself down. Technological progress through mass employment in mining, manufacturing and agriculture, has to be returned to the United States. The promise of a future must be given to the nation’s (and the world’s) youth. And a new security and development architecture must be composed by Russia, the United States, China and other nations, with which this Presidency must engage.
by Mr. X
July 11—“Man Is Not a Wolf to Man! For a New Paradigm in International Relations!” is more than the title of the Schiller Institute’s International Conference this Saturday and Sunday, July 12-13. The intention, as well as the resolve, embedded in the title-statement, is to fight for the hegemony of a higher vision of humanity than that of today’s bestial “geopolitics.” Creative non-violent direct action, through fighting for world physical-economic solutions, is a winning method by which we rise above the self-containing, self-enveloping, self-destructive tragedy of violence, war and moral indifference that is the sum total of trans-Atlantic policy toward some 8 billion people on the planet right now.
As The LaRouche Organization pamphlet, “Economic Recovery Plan 2025 in the Spirit of 1776” puts it, “We can absolutely reverse this collapse, and revive our productive economy, but it will take a cultural shift, away from the worship of Mammon toward a better understanding of mankind’s relationship to the development of our species’ future, and the development of our universe as a whole.” For example, America’s descent into an imperial outlook, burdened by a “zombie dollar” created through the destruction of American industry, agriculture and advanced science, could only be reversed by a return to productive physical economy. Monetary manipulations, whether through tariffs, through zombie “crypt currencies,” or through the other zany pseudo-ideas of the artificially intelligent trans-human moral morons of Silicon Valley, are actually accelerating America’s loss of world influence and world power in the short term, no matter how loudly the opposite is bellowed to be the case.
A falling-down drunk worth a trillion dollars is a trillion-dollar drunk. The trans-Atlantic system, including the United States, is way worse. The war-intoxicated, post-Bretton Woods “funny-monetary” system owes an unpayable two-plus quadrillion dollars! The “golden billion” persons in the trans-Atlantic sector are part of this bankrupt system, which pretends to be not only solvent, but vibrant and even lucrative. Meanwhile, “outside,” at least 6 of the other 8 billion people on the planet, particularly in Africa, South America and Asia, are making a different choice than to play along with that financial video game.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, speaking on July 7 at a post-BRICS press conference in Brazil, said: “Addressing the BRICS summit via videoconference, President of Russia Vladimir Putin said that the old-time system primarily catered to the interests of the Golden Billion. This era is receding into the past. Everyone prioritizes principles being promoted by BRICS as a foundation of a truly multilateral, equitable and mutually beneficial cooperation between all countries.”
On BRICS, U.S. President Trump on July 8 said, “BRICS was set up to degenerate our dollar, to take our dollar—take it off the standard,” and said that result would be as bad “as losing a war, as losing a world war.” BRICS was not, however, in fact, set up for the purpose of creating an alternative currency to the dollar. BRICS exists so that those nations that have been thought of as “unequal” to Europe, those nations that Josep Borrell and others have referred to, and think of, as “the jungle,” will economically work together for their own benefit, in their own way, and with nations that do not view them as inferior.
The Global Majority, particularly those of the Global South, have been through the rodeo of physically paying, with their raw materials, precious metals, food, and their blood, for debts they did not actually incur in the first place. Through “bankers’ arithmetic,” for decades they have, like sharecroppers in the American South, paid back far more than they have incurred. The United States, because its leaders do not study the idea of economics and statesman Lyndon LaRouche, does not even realize that the idea of the World Land-Bridge, developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s by Lyndon LaRouche from a prison cell, was largely intended to involve precisely Africa, Asia, and South and Central America. This, in collaboration with, not in opposition to, China and other BRICS members, will be the key to an American Economic Recovery Plan for 2025-2026. It could occur just in time for the 250th birthday of the anti-colonial American Revolution, actually begun in the 1760s, which culminated in the Declaration of Independence and later, the Constitution of the United States.
Our present, tragic path has been fully outlined for us, as American “junior partners” by British intelligence and the Royal Institute for International Affairs’ Chatham House, which attacked the BRICS meeting. Chatham House was particularly disappointed that neither Xi Jinping nor Vladimir Putin were at the just-concluded BRICS Summit. It was hoped that by inducing President Donald Trump to attack the BRICS by name—which he has now done—British “intelligence” could thereby up the ante of division, especially between Trump and China. Chatham House asserted that BRICS itself was “divided” between the “anti-Western” Russia/China on the one side, and the “non-anti-Western” India and Brazil on the other. (South Africa is usually dismissed by the British for racialist reasons.)
This weekend’s Berlin Conference will demonstrate the opposite of Chatham House—instead, “A New Paradigm in International Relations!” Its nature will be very familiar to those that know about United States President (1825-1829) John Quincy Adams, previously the American Secretary of State. It will be even clearer to those who know the 1644-48 process that created the Treaty of Westphalia. Quincy Adams’ words, “Always stand on principle … even if you stand alone,” should be kept in mind in this turbulent situation, when reading Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s Tenth Principle:
“The basic assumption for the new paradigm is, that man is fundamentally good and capable to infinitely perfect the creativity of his mind and the beauty of his soul, and being the most advanced geological force in the universe, which proves that the lawfulness of the mind and that of the physical universe are in correspondence and cohesion, and that all evil is the result of a lack of development, and therefore can be overcome.” We must strive that all policy in international relations, and in this crisis, must start with that principle.
by Mr. X
July 2—This Friday, July 4, will mark the opening of a one-year commemoration and recollection of the 250th birthday of the United States of America. Former Ohio Congressman and Presidential candidate (2004, 2008) Dennis Kucinich released, on July 1, a statement, “July 4, 2025: The Desecration of the Declaration of Independence and a Call for Renewal.” The document begins with its own resolution: “If America is to remain what the Revolution envisioned in 1776, a nation governed by laws, then we the people must speak out, we must act and defend that vision.”
When the Schiller Institute was founded, it issued a “Declaration of the Inalienable Rights of Man”, which is almost identical to the Declaration of Independence. Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s proposal then, as now, was that the nations of the Global South, the now-expanded group of nations that had originally assembled 70 years ago in Bandung, Indonesia, then declaring themselves the Non-Aligned Movement, should co-opt the Declaration of Independence, temporarily abandoned by the United States itself, but still, as it will always be, universally valid. The principle, “that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness—” is not a decree but a law of human nature. There are unalienable rights that cannot be taken from any human being, because they are universal, and come from no state. These are the aspirations being spoken of in the policies associated with the BRICS nations, policies which have been given concrete physical-economic expression in works such as the 2014 EIR Special Report, “The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge”.
In her “Ten Principles for a New International Security and Development Architecture”, Zepp-LaRouche’s Tenth Principle reads: “The basic assumption for the new paradigm is, that man is fundamentally good and capable to infinitely perfect the creativity of his mind and the beauty of his soul, and being the most advanced geological force in the universe, which proves that the lawfulness of the mind and that of the physical universe are in correspondence and cohesion, and that all evil is the result of a lack of development, and therefore can be overcome.”
There are those, in Silicon Valley and in the City of London, who vehemently disagree. These are the “new eugenicists,” who believe they can remake a “trans-humanist” race in their image. The “unfit,” particularly the poor, will simply be deleted from the human race. “Once rejected largely due to Nazi atrocities, eugenics is being embraced by both the Left and Right. Yet its beating heart lies not in politics, but in tech-driven approaches,” writes author Joel Kotkin. “One big difference from 20th-century eugenics is that today’s effort is a largely private matter, at least until now, shaped not by the state, but the technocratic elite. What’s emerging is a modern version of John Calvin’s Protestant ‘Elect.’” Are these, the creatures from INCUTEL, Palantir, etc., a “new breed” of Anti-Christian soldiers, marching the human race off to war?
Who, for example, has decided on the “governance” of the United States by “the War Party”? Not the people of the United States. They are opposed to the present war policy and voted for a President who was opposed to “forever wars"—yet the war has happened, nonetheless. Why does the United States fight continuous wars, against the people’s will, no matter whom they elect, even as its physical economy and the livelihood of its people decline at an accelerating rate?
It isn’t just war, however. Three weeks ago, on June 19, “A Chinese magnetic levitation train, using a 1.1 ton test sled, and employing an electromagnetic propulsion system, accelerated to a speed of 650 kilometers per hour (404 mph) after travelling just 600 meters—the fastest speed ever achieved by a maglev—and then braked to a crawl within 220 meters.” But American physicists James Powell and Gordon Danby of Brookhaven National Laboratories in Long Island, New York got the first patent for the design of the maglev almost 60 years ago! Did the Communist Party of China stop the United States from building its magnetically levitated trains, or high-speed rail, for the past 60 years—or was it the War Party? Why has NASA, the core of the United States space program, in the “Big Ugly Bill” just passed in the United States Senate, been cut back to pre-Kennedy Moon-shot levels of funding, including the entire Artemis Moon Program being essentially killed?
Are the people that decided these things, the same people who decided that the United States would be plunged into another no-win-war on Iran, a war planned since 2001? Several commentators, from Scott Ritter to Jeffrey Sachs, have found themselves, in the last 48 hours, discussing the possibility that Israel’s Netanyahu would use thermonuclear weapons, or even, under certain circumstances, used by the United States, since Iran has, at the moment, officially decided not to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to re-enter their country.
And with good reason. Journalist Kit Klarenberg has just called attention in “Spying on Iran: How MI6 Infiltrated the IAEA,” in The Grayzone, to the case of British MI6 operative Nicholas Langman, whose name and self-description was discovered in “a trove of leaked papers detailing the activities of Torchlight, a prolific British intelligence cutout.” Langman says that he “worked to prevent WMD proliferation through … support for the [IAEA] and Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons [OPCW] and through high level international partnerships.” He also says that he “enabled [the] major diplomatic success of [the] Iranian nuclear and sanctions agreement.”
Klarenberg writes: “The influence Langman claimed to have exerted on the IAEA adds weight to Iranian allegations that the international nuclear regulation body colluded with the West and Israel to undermine its sovereignty. The Iranian government has alleged that the IAEA supplied the identities of its top nuclear scientists to Israeli intelligence, enabling their assassinations, and provided critical intelligence to the U.S. and Israel on the nuclear facilities they bombed during their military assault this June.”
Is this what the United States, on the eve of its 250th birthday, has come to? Worse than acting as “a cockboat in the wake of the British man-of-war,” are the United States’ massive military forces being deployed, not on behalf of the General Welfare of the American people, but on behalf of what is, both in Ukraine and Southwest Asia, British imperial policy for total war with Russia? When Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump meet next week in Washington, with what British operatives will they have each met beforehand? How actually independent, 250 years after its inception, is the U.S. government, or the people of the United States?
Kucinich concludes his July 4, 2025 declaration: “If America is to remain what the Revolution envisioned in 1776, a nation governed by laws, then we the people must speak out, we must act and defend that vision. Our freedom ultimately depends upon an enlightened, active citizenry. Otherwise we betray the past and surrender the future, and the nation fails.” By that citizenry, however, we must now mean a worldwide citizenry, not organized primarily by party, or nationality, but by intent."
If the world is not only to survive, but also to grow and develop, citizens, particularly young citizens from around the world, should first read the Schiller Institute’s “Declaration of the Inalienable Rights of Man” and the “Ten Principles for a New International Security and Development Architecture,” and then convene, in person or online, for its July 12-13 Conference “Man Is Not a Wolf to Man: For a New Paradigm in International Relations!” in Berlin, Germany. Also, particularly through this upcoming July 4 weekend, wherever you are, help circulate and distribute, in the streets and online, the statement “Will There Be Thermonuclear Fireworks By the Fourth of July?”
by Mr. X
June 27—It should not have come as a surprise. “Trump Warns U.S. Will Strike Again If Iran Resumes High-Level Uranium Enrichment” read the headline in the afternoon online issue of the New York Times. The Jewish Insider carried the following additional headline: “Trump Suspends Negotiations with Iran after Defiant Speech from Ayatollah—The President also said that he would require Iran to allow entry for international inspectors to ensure the regime doesn’t rebuild its nuclear program.” This particularly does not come as a surprise to those who have already been circulating the statement, issued June 23 by The LaRouche Organization, “Will There Be Thermonuclear Fireworks by the Fourth of July?” If you have not done so yet, start circulating it now!
The second paragraph of that statement, an immediate response to the bombing of Iran by the United States, asked: “Here is a question: if the sites were not destroyed, or if Iran announces it is able to rebuild, what will happen then? Will the use of tactical nuclear weapons be the next step?” In the last days, as distributors passed out the statement on street corners and at subway and bus stops, the credulous, the wishful thinkers insisted that “it’s all over. We did the job. It’s a one-off. There won’t be any war, especially nuclear war. The war is over.” The fearful avoidance of reality—that some fool, or group of fools, could propose, or simply move to use, for example, one or more of the undeclared but very real nuclear weapons in the possession of Israel, for example—was evident, and palpable.
Seasoned organizers, however, are coming up with creative and humorous ways to “kick people in their axioms” and disturb the waters between their ears, without terrifying them. One activist in Boston “was dressed in an approximation of colonial garb with a tricorner hat, etc., and a sign, ‘Nuclear Fireworks for July 4?’ with mushroom clouds drawn on it…. He got hundreds of leaflets out in downtown Boston. The costume and sign appeared to amuse some people. He called out. ‘Don’t let nuclear war ruin your vacation,’ ‘A nuclear war will ruin summer’ and joked ‘It will be the bigliest fireworks in history. It’s going to be YUUUGE!’”
Former Ohio Congressman and United States Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich spoke to several hundred people assembled for the June 27 meeting of the International Peace Coalition, following opening remarks by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, transcribed in this Daily Alert. Here is an approximate transcript of portions of his comments: "I just want to say, just listening to Helga’s remarks, how important, concise, how literate her recitation of the moment is…. I want to make some observations, based on what Helga has said, and based on my own experience.
“When Lavrov called for a new security architecture, we have to recognize that the security architecture which is in place right now, has been shredded. The UN Charter—shredded. The Non-Proliferation Treaty—torn up. And the context of Lavrov’s remarks is a challenge for us to demand, even as a rearguard action, to say, ‘Look, we have to enforce these existing structures—but as we move toward trying to find structures that can ensure the survivability of the planet.’
“Now, given the pratfalls which pass for policy in Washington, the bombing—which was against our Constitution, totally; the President doesn’t have the authority, unless there is an imminent threat to the United States; I’ve sued several Presidents over this—doesn’t have the authority to go ahead and conduct this action. So, they did it! Then, they claimed obliteration. Well, if what they claimed was successful, there would be radiation traveling right now, in clouds going around the world!
“So, there’s this—we must keep in mind that there are elements, particularly connected to Israel, who keep pushing, pushing, pushing, for this fantasy of regime change in Iran. And what that would ultimately mean, in the States, is a full-scale invasion. Just running some off-the-cuff numbers the other day, we would need about 2 million troops. We would need a draft, and we would need to be prepared for World War Three….
“I think this meeting is really important, when you look at the condition that Trump is in right now….The narrative that’s going out right now is, ‘well you didn’t really destroy anything there, maybe a couple of buildings on the surface.’ That causes others to say, ‘well, let’s have another strike. Let’s do it again! Let’s get ’em!!’ … The unbridled use of the military is a challenge for the United States right now. And it’s something that we have to deal with.
“The callous discussion of the nuclear question—having a President yesterday, or the day before, compare his illegal action against Iran as a thing on the same level as Hiroshima. What that says is that he doesn’t understand Hiroshima! And that whatever Truman does—which I’ve spoken against, in my assessment, I wasn’t around at that time—but whatever Truman does, or did, is now being twisted to legitimate further bombing. And it’s really dangerous.
“We’re in a very difficult time in world history, with what Helga said. The West is still up to their old colonial tricks. Still lusting for empire. At a time when the world has changed, we have a multipolar world, and there are people that refuse to accept it, and for those of us who believe in human unity, this is our task, this is our challenge, to weigh in, and to say: Stop what you’re doing, and let’s recall how we must move forward in a world which could be dangerous, but in a world which also could be a world of tremendous potential and blessings.”
The second of two Schiller Institute conferences will take place in Berlin, Germany on July 12-13. The first conference, held in the United States in Newark, New Jersey, was titled “A Beautiful Vision for Humanity in Times of Great Turbulence!” The Berlin Conference title is: “Man Is Not a Wolf to Man: For a New Paradigm in International Relations!”
The organizing for that conference has featured the work of a group, “The John Quincy Adams Brigade” of organizers from America—North and South America—who are working in Europe, as a living expression of that intention. Graham Fuller, 25-year veteran of the CIA, former U.S. diplomat, and Islamic scholar, who also addressed the meeting, said: “I just want to say I’m very hearted by hearing all these reports of various activities around the world … this is very heartening. At the popular level, we’ve got to get through, to break through the New York Times, Washington Post, and everything else, that simply either print a lot of nonsense, or simply, more to the point, ignore these very, very important developments.”
What you choose to do, in your way, to mobilize others, in these next days, is equally or more important than anything being done by most elected officials. When individual patriots and citizens around the world, combined in solidarity, choose to, they can represent a far stronger force for good than the evil that the well-heeled few—even with their guns and computers—can commit. The world must be our responsibility to change, such that A New International Security and Development Architecture can arise. Our chosen role in changing history must be, through our conferences and actions, the subject of these next days before us.
May 12—At 2 a.m. Sunday morning, May 11, Russian President Vladimir Putin, after three days of non-stop meetings and ceremonies commemorating the Victory against Fascism in Europe, held a press conference and proposed resuming full negotiations with Ukraine to end what is effectively a NATO-imposed war on the country. Putin suggested that talks restart in Istanbul, Türkiye, on Thursday, May 15.
Putin’s Proposal Catches European Leaders Off Guard
Just hours before Putin’s statement, European leaders meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv had demanded a 30-day ceasefire beginning Monday morning. These same leaders, gathered in direct opposition to the 30 heads of state assembled in Moscow for the Great Victory celebrations, were caught off guard—both literally and figuratively—by Putin’s early-morning announcement.
"Russia is ready for talks without any preliminary conditions," Putin stated. "There are combat actions and war going on now, and we propose to resume negotiations that were not interrupted by us. Well, what’s wrong about it?"
As Putin and others know, Ukraine itself halted the negotiations that had taken place in Istanbul in April 2022. Then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson traveled to Kyiv on April 9 that year, demanding that Ukraine abandon the peace treaty already agreed upon with Russia—and Ukraine complied. To this day, a decree passed in Ukraine’s parliament in late 2022 forbids any Ukrainian president from negotiating with Russia while Putin remains in power.
"Ukraine is still legally prohibited from negotiating with the Russian side," Russian Presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov stated in March.
Zelenskyy’s Challenge and Trump’s Reaction
Despite this legal barrier, Zelenskyy responded to Putin’s proposal later on Sunday, dramatically challenging him to a Western-style "High Noon" showdown, daring him to "meet him in Istanbul" this Thursday.
U.S. President Donald Trump, unconcerned with formalities, had clear advice for Ukraine:
"President Putin of Russia doesn’t want to have a Cease Fire Agreement with Ukraine, but rather wants to meet on Thursday, in Turkey, to negotiate a possible end to the BLOODBATH. Ukraine should agree to this, IMMEDIATELY. At least they will be able to determine whether or not a deal is possible, and if it is not, European leaders, and the U.S., will know where everything stands, and can proceed accordingly!"
While many had speculated about Trump’s position on the war, this statement leaves little doubt: "Ukraine should agree to this, IMMEDIATELY."
Pope Leo XIV’s Surprise Appearance and Historical Connections
The second significant event on Sunday was the appearance of newly elected Pope Leo XIV in St. Peter’s Square before more than 100,000 people, where he unexpectedly led the open-air assembly in singing the Easter antiphon "Regina Caeli."
Leo XIV—the first member of the Augustinian order elected to the papacy, the first English-speaking pope since Pope Adrian IV in the 12th century, and the first pope from the United States—also clarified his choice of name.
"In his first meeting with Cardinals on Saturday, the new Pontiff said that he chose his papal name to continue down the path of Pope Leo XIII, who addressed ‘the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution,’" CNN reported.
In 1888, Pope Leo XIII met with Archbishop Patrick John Ryan of Philadelphia, who presented him with a copy of the United States Constitution, personally gifted by President Grover Cleveland. At the time, Philadelphia remained a stronghold of the American System of Physical Economy, represented in the works of Lincoln advisor Henry Charles Carey and his father, Revolutionary War-era thinker Mathew Carey, an opponent of British East India Company economist Adam Smith.
"The harmony of interest" between capital, labor, and agriculture is said to have been central to their discussions, reportedly leading to the drafting of Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum.
"One hundred years ago, Rerum Novarum treated the remedying of the evil, then being run by a 'devouring usury,' which, ‘although often condemned by the church, but practiced, nevertheless, under another form by avaricious and grasping men, has increased the evil’ effected by the handing over of workers, ‘each alone and defenseless, to the inhumanity of employers, and the unbridled greed of competitors,’" wrote Lyndon LaRouche, quoting Leo XIII in the preface of his book The Science of Christian Economy.
Pope Leo XIV also addressed ongoing conflicts in Southwest Asia, India-Pakistan, and Ukraine.
A Higher Strategy for Peace
These two events—Putin’s unexpected challenge to Western narratives and Pope Leo XIV’s revival of economic justice—can be seen as two "flanks" working toward a higher strategy of victory for humanity.
War must become obsolete, but that cannot happen unless its root causes are eliminated. For that to occur, the world requires "A Beautiful Vision for Humanity in Times of Great Turbulence!" Such is the purpose and mission of the upcoming May 24-25 conference of the Schiller Institute.
April 30—The proposal by Russian President Vladimir Putin for a three-day truce, commencing May 8-10—“the Russian side reiterates its willingness to enter peace talks without preconditions, with a view to eliminating the root causes behind the Ukraine crisis and establishing constructive interaction with international partners”—has been met with panic and derision. This reaction, and rejection, comes from representatives—though not necessarily from the population—of Ukraine, as well as from the “Russiagate media circus,” i.e., the usual suspects from the Anglo-American intelligence agencies, sometimes euphemistically called the “legacy media.”
The reason for the rebuke is not, as claimed, the short length of the proposed truce—three days. It is well known that there was a previous 30-day truce in March, initiated by Donald Trump, to which both Russia and Ukraine agreed, yet it did not hold. The concern over the new Putin proposal lies in its timing and how it aligns with current history.
There is an “isochronic” character to this proposal. That is, an action occurring on May 8-9 not only implicitly re-celebrates the triumph of what President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called the “Four Freedoms” over the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, but by commencing a truce on that day, it recommits humanity—not merely Ukraine, Russia, or the United States—to a knowable, successful pathway out of Hell.
The truce is set to begin on May 8, known as “Victory in Europe Day,” marking the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War in Europe. It is celebrated in Russia on May 9, because the official time of the war’s ending was 11:01 Central European Time (CET) on May 8, 1945, making it 12:01 a.m. and later, on May 9, 1945, across Russia and the Soviet Union’s 11 time zones. Notably, May 8-9 was a celebration of victory over fascism before victory was falsely claimed to be contingent upon, and tied to, the deployment and detonation of the atomic bomb—something President Roosevelt would not have done.
The year 2025 will mark the last major anniversary in which any of the surviving veterans of the Second World War will be alive to participate. In 2024, there were still, remarkably, 75,000 veterans of World War II alive in Russia and 66,000 American veterans at the beginning of this year. Many of these individuals—particularly in the case of Russia—would have been no older than 12 or 13, some even younger, when they fought and perhaps killed to defend their nations.
There is also the “Immortal Regiment” assembly, largely identified with Russia, in which the photographs of those who died in the war are worn and carried by their descendants, so that they, through posterity, march, fight, and triumph again. This is not merely symbolic, but isochronic—the embodiment of the commitment for which not only 27 million Russians, but tens of millions of others worldwide, soldiers and civilians alike, gave their lives—their “last full measure of devotion”—so that we, their descendants, might live. (It is rarely mentioned, but 100 million Chinese were refugees in their own country during that war, and Chinese civilian and military deaths likely exceeded 20 million.) The celebration of that victory—not only over fascism, but also in favor of “the better angels of human nature” over evil—is worthy of recognition, including through a truce dedicated in the image of that commitment made 80 years ago.
In this context, discussions about a “peace without preconditions” are elevated beyond mere geopolitics—they take on a deeper meaning. That is necessary. There has to be a “higher hypothesis” for peace. As former Austrian Foreign Minister Karin Kneissl stated in an interview: “It’s not just about bilateral or trilateral relations—between Moscow, Kiev, and Washington—but about an in-depth transformation of the entire security system in Europe. The issue is on the agenda, and Moscow has long been demanding that it be addressed. Simply negotiating a ceasefire around Ukraine won’t solve the issue, because its roots run much deeper.”
The thermonuclear threat remains barely contained. Former Russian Security Council head Nikolay Patrushev, in a TASS interview yesterday, accused Western powers of “deploying their military machine against Russia and becoming delirious with nuclear apocalypse scenarios.” He pointed to destabilization originating from Brussels, Berlin, Paris, and London. American Vice President J.D. Vance has remarked, “There’s this weird idea among the mainstream media that if this thing goes on for just another few years, the Russians will collapse, the Ukrainians will take their territory back, and everything will go back to the way that it was before the war. That is not the reality that we live in…”
Vance would do well to read the April 24, 2019 RAND report, Extending Russia: Competing From Advantageous Ground, to better understand how the “media” arm of Anglo-American intelligence—the same forces that attempted to prevent Trump from becoming president—have been briefed on their assignment to prevent the resumption of U.S.-Russia relations. That report, which outlined methods for baiting Russia into what Pope Francis once characterized as “World War Three in pieces,” recommended, well before 2022, the provision of lethal aid to Ukraine, increased U.S. support for Syrian rebels, promoting “regime change in Belarus,” exploiting tensions in the Caucasus, and other strategies to neutralize Russia. Reviewing the trajectory of events since that report was written provides valuable insight.
This also explains why, when the Iranian foreign minister proposed last week that the United States should rejuvenate its flagging nuclear power industry by assisting Iran in building 19 civilian nuclear power plants—referencing Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace initiative of the 1950s—the “mainstream media” would never report it to the American people. Re-conceptualized, could this proposal actually be seen as an invitation for Russia, the world’s leading nuclear power plant producer, to collaborate with the United States on global stability through economic development? Could a pilot project in Iran serve as a means of de-nuclear-weaponizing the region? “Our longstanding game plan is to build at least 19 more reactors, meaning that tens of billions of dollars in potential contracts are up for grabs. The Iranian market alone is big enough to revitalize the struggling nuclear industry in the United States,” said Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi in an April 21 speech at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
The United States—and the world—stands at a crossroads. Will it follow the neo-imperialist policy path of the disastrous Vietnam War, which ended ignominiously on April 30, 1975—exactly 50 years ago—or embrace FDR’s vision of ending imperialism, including in its fascist forms, creating prosperity in the wake of war, particularly in what is now called the Global South? Though the proposal for a May 8-10 truce is only a first step, the spirit in which it is advanced—the spirit of the Immortal Regiment of World War II veterans—offers a foundation for embracing the Principles for a New International Security and Development Architecture, the focus of the Schiller Institute conference, A Beautiful Vision for Humanity in Times of Great Turbulence!, scheduled for May 24-25, 2025.
March 21—As the great strategist, revolutionary, and supporter of President Abraham Lincoln, Dr. Sun Yat-Sen once said, “Acting is easy; thinking is hard.” Dr. Sun, the creator of modern China, wished to shock his Chinese contemporaries into the realization that we must also elicit from our contemporaries—that their fundamental weakness is not that they fail to act, or to react, to world crises, but rather, that they fail to think of themselves as acting on the world as a whole, through particular and even individual actions based on a shared idea of humanity. The Ten Principles for a New Security and Development Architecture that inform the May 24-25 conference of the Schiller Institute, demand the kind of “hard thinking” which, if embraced, places each thinker in immediate dialogue with the changing landscape of world history expressed in the emerging communities of discourse that have emerged in the Global South, and are emerging in pockets of the Anglosphere itself.
There is a greater power now available to the citizens of the Anglosphere than at any time before, but the mind must be alive in order to wield it. That assertion runs counter to the everyday “narrative” that is accepted and repeated, especially by those who claim to be “politicized,” that “the deep state is everywhere” and is omnipotent. For any citizen in today’s trans-Atlantic sphere, successfully proposing and enacting lawful and productive change in foreign and domestic policy requires that one first recognize that you can’t ignore the fact that “there’s a war going on.” The Anglosphere, terrified by Tuesday’s two-and-a-half-hour Trump-Putin dialogue on March 18, and the already-discussed possibility of a meeting between the two leaders in Saudi Arabia “in the near future,” is increasingly attacking its own population. This can most readily be seen in Europe, with the at first gradual and now headlong dismantling of parliamentary democracy, under the Orwellian banner of “rearmament for peace.”
On the Trump-Putin exchange, Russian strategic analyst Fyodor Lukyanov remarked that “real diplomacy has returned.” He cautioned, however, against two impending illusions. “One is the illusion that everything will be resolved quickly and painlessly, and the other is the cynical belief that any agreement is fundamentally unattainable.” The “mainstream media” of the multiple intelligence agencies are finding it increasingly difficult to maintain the charade of the “War Party,” even when the previously “sure bet” of “helping our friends in the Mideast by starting wars” is invoked. In America, there is little enthusiasm for the bombing of Yemen, and far less enthusiasm for a war with Iran, including, and perhaps especially from much of the Trump support base.
Don’t let your mind be disassembled by the dissemblers. Don’t be bamboozled, bum-rushed, or bushwhacked by media misdirection, as is, for example, being done around the release of the 80,000 pages of the Kennedy files. No one has had time to read or digest them, but “responsible media” assure us that there’s nothing there, even though they weren’t released for six decades.
The Los Angeles Times “reported” on March 18, “A cursory review of the release did not immediately yield any major revelations or challenge the well-established facts that Kennedy was fatally shot by Lee Harvey Oswald while traveling in an open-topped convertible through Dallas. However, the vast drove of documents will take significant time for historians and The Times to comb through.” In other words, “we haven’t read them, and we know you won’t, so stick to your knitting until further notice from the authorities as to what you are instructed to think.”
But it’s not necessarily what’s in the files that holds the most interest. It may very well be what the files don’t show, and the way they don’t show it, that may be more intriguing, as well as useful. For example: Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA from 1953 to 1961 whom President Kennedy fired for actions undertaken (not only with respect to Cuba, but possibly Congo as well), was appointed to the Warren Commission investigating the President’s assassination. "Since its founding, to date, the chief defect of the Central Intelligence Agency is typified by Allen Dulles’s tenure as its Director of Intelligence…. To a large degree, the case of Dulles and of the FBI’s intrusion into foreign intelligence functions are key to everything fundamentally wrong with the post-1939 functioning of the U.S. intelligence services. … Although there is no doubt that Allen Dulles was committed to the U.S.A.’s winning the war against Nazi Germany, he and his brother John had previously been admirers of Adolf Hitler since the late 1920s…. During the 1930s, Allen Dulles was a member of the Board of Directors of Schroeder’s Bank, the ‘piggy bank’ used by Hjalmar Schacht to conduit funds raised to bring Hitler to power in Germany. During and after the war, the Dulles brothers played the leading part in sponsoring the establishment of the post-war Nazi international. Insofar as Nazi Germany became the military adversary of the Anglo-American forces, Allen Dulles worked without doubt for Hitler’s defeat; however, in political philosophy of practice, the Dulleses were Nazi, before and after the war…. If one were obliged to select a single postwar occurrence which locates Dulles’s influence on the failures of the U.S. intelligence community, it is the coverup of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy: the failure to detect and disrupt the operations before the fact, and the massive, arbitrary coverup after the fact." Lyndon LaRouche, founder of Executive Intelligence Review*, and his associates, who were in working contact with attorney Jim Garrison in the late 1970s and early ’80s, made that statement in 1984. LaRouche then added, “The evidence developed by New Orleans District Attorney, Jim Garrison, was massive. This evidence is variously corroborated by and significantly supplemented by evidence assembled by other investigators, including the internal private news agency headed by candidate LaRouche.”
Senator Frank Church’s Select Committee To Study Governmental Operations with respect to Intelligence Activities issued a November 1975 document, “Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders” which cites a cable personally sent by Allen Dulles to the CIA Station Officer in Leopoldville on August 26, 1960, concerning the first leader of the newly independent Democratic Republic of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, who was assassinated on January 17, 1961 (capitals all in the original) REMOVAL MUST BE AN URGENT AND PRIME OBJECTIVE…….(Name indicated by •••••) A HIGH PRIORITY OF OUR COVERT ACTION. YOU CAN ACT ON YOUR OWN AUTHORITY WHERE TIME DOES NOT PERMIT REFERRAL HERE."
It is not necessary to find in the 80,000-plus pages of the Kennedy files a smoking gun, whose smoke may have dissipated decades ago. It will be a revelation for the people of the Anglosphere, especially as the Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. files are also released, that their thinking about everything was changed by the assassinations. They were the major engine of a cultural paradigm shift from which the trans-Atlantic world will never recover, until not only those files are released, but also until people reject the very idea that the files should have ever been kept from the American people in the first place.
The Church Committee’s “Alleged Assassination Plots Against Foreign Leaders” study prompts several questions; for example, “Who Killed Israel’s Yitzhak Rabin, really?”in 1995. When we look at post-Rabin Israel, and post-Arafat Palestine—another death that should be more carefully scrutinized—not only with respect to the present actions in Gaza and West Bank, but the possibility of war with Iran, and perhaps others, what must we learn about the longer-term cultural effects of silence in the face of criminal execution of leaders?
Every action, no matter how small, or even small-minded, which seeks to impact “the course of contemporary policies and events,” is embedded, now, in an epochal change, being shaped by conversations involving the nations of Russia, China, the United States, the BRICS nations and others. Thermonuclear weapons, and the danger of thermonuclear war, have in part determined that. We, the people, must find a way, not only to impact the present world-discussion, and its immediate future pursuit of the path to either war or peace, but also to determine an outcome for the human race other than extinction. What gives us not only the right, but the responsibility to do that, is a shared vision, “A Beautiful Vision for Humanity in Times of Great Turbulence!” That is the title for the May 24-25 conference, and it is the mission to which those who would make the world better, joyfully aspire.