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Experimental COVID Lockdowns Lacked Scientific Basis, CIA's Media Manipulation in Ukraine, Community Gift Circles
Revealing News Articles
March 12, 2024

Dear friends,

This week we've summarized key news articles on more evidence that the experimental COVID lockdowns were a giant failure, statements by a Rutgers University molecular biologist suggesting that the COVID virus was intentionally created in a lab, how the US made more than 100 weapons sales to Israel since the start of the war in Gaza, and more.

In our independent media section, don't miss articles on an ex-CIA's agent take on why secret CIA bases in Ukraine are now being disclosed to the public, a Yale University research scientist who says that COVID vaccines were pushed on populations to "protect the integrity of the bioweapons industry," and indications that some natural disasters may have been caused by exotic military technologies.

In our news from year's past, we summarize articles on how the Pentagon runs a secret army of 60,000 around the world, which operates without the awareness of the majority within Congress.

Our inspiring stories this week include building community with gift circle events, Jane Goodall's effective activism based on open communication, nature trails that improve access to public lands and revitalize small towns, and more. You can also skip to this section now.

Each excerpt is taken verbatim from the news source listed at the link provided. If any link fails, see this page. The most important sentences are highlighted. By educating ourselves and spreading the word, we can work together to create a more free and informed society.

With faith in a transforming world,
Mark Bailey and Amber Yang for PEERS and WantToKnow.info

Special note: We are launching a new video series called Mindful News Briefs TOMORROW where we discuss highlights of our weekly newsletter summaries with nuance, uncensored investigation, and compassion for all sides. And no matter the topic, we always end our news briefs on an inspiring, constructive note. Look out for the video tomorrow morning!!

Quote of the week: Our enthusiasm for digital technology about which we have little understanding and over which we have little control leads us not toward greater agency, but toward less...We have surrendered the unfolding of a new technological age to a small elite who have seized the capability on offer. But while Renaissance kings maintained their monopoly over the printing press by force, today's elite is depending on little more than our own disinterest. — Douglas Rushkoff


COVID Lockdowns Were a Giant Experiment. It Was a Failure.
October 30, 2023, New York Magazine
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/covid-lockdowns-big-fail...

In the U.S. and the U.K. especially, lockdowns went from being regarded as something that only an authoritarian government would attempt to an example of “following the science.” But there was never any science behind lockdowns — not a single study had ever been undertaken to measure their efficacy in stopping a pandemic. One New York emergency-room doctor recalls that after the steady stream of COVID patients during March and April of 2020, “our ER was basically empty.” During the first two years of the pandemic — 2020 and 2021 — the U.S. had 19 percent more deaths than it normally saw in two years’ time. For Sweden — one of the few countries that had refused to lock down its society — it was just 4 percent. An analysis by Bloomberg found broadly similar results. In other words, for all the criticism Sweden shouldered from the world’s public health officials for refusing to institute lockdowns, it wound up seeing a lower overall death rate during the pandemic than most peer nations that shut down schools and public gatherings. The downsides of lockdowns and school closings were not being openly discussed in the mainstream media. Emily Oster, a Brown University economist … set up what she called the National COVID-19 School Response Dashboard, which eventually tracked 12 million kids in both public and private schools and continued to collect infection-rate data over the next nine months. Not once did the student rate hit one percent during any two-week span. Three CDC scientists acknowledged in the Journal of the American Medical Association: “As many schools have reopened for in-person instruction in some parts of the U.S. … there has been little evidence that schools have contributed meaningfully to increased community transmission.”

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on COVID and government corruption from reliable major media sources.


Scientist claims ‘smoking gun’ evidence COVID-19 intentionally created by researchers in Chinese lab
February 29, 2024, New York Post
https://nypost.com/2024/02/29/world-news/scientists-may-have...

COVID-19 may have been created in a Chinese lab, a British professor told the UN Wednesday. Richard H. Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, was quoted saying in a new Wall Street Journal article that the virus that killed millions around the world may actually have been manmade in China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology. He cited evidence found in a 2018 document from the lab that talked of making such a virus. “[The document] elevates the evidence provided by the genome sequence from the level of noteworthy to the level of a smoking gun,” Ebright said. The papers from the lab cited by Ebright contained drafts and notes regarding a grant proposal called Project DEFUSE, which sought to test engineering bat coronaviruses in a way that would make them more easily transmissible to humans. The proposal was ultimately rejected and denied funding by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, but Wade suggested that their work could have been carried out by researchers in Wuhan who had secured Chinese government funding. “Viruses made according to the DEFUSE protocol could have been available by the time Covid-19 broke out,” wrote [Nicholas] Wade, a former science editor of the New York Times. Along with the research notes, Wade claimed the specific genetic structure of the coronavirus that allowed it to infect humans served as another strong indication of “the virus’s laboratory birth.”

Note: Explore a list of news article summaries on the significant likelihood that COVID was engineered in the context of bioweapons research with US funding and Chinese military involvement at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.


US uses loophole to keep 100 arms sales to Israel under the radar amid Gaza war – report
March 6, 2024, The Guardian (One of the UK's Leading Newspapers)
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/06/israel-weapons...

The US is reported to have made more than 100 weapons sales to Israel, including thousands of bombs, since the start of the war in Gaza, but the deliveries escaped congressional oversight because each transaction was under the dollar amount requiring approval. The Biden administration ... has kept up a quiet but substantial flow of munitions to help replace the tens of thousands of bombs Israel has dropped on the tiny coastal strip, making it one of the most intense bombing campaigns in military history. Administration officials informed Congress of the 100 foreign military sales to Israel in a classified briefing. The sales ... are reported to have included precision-guided munitions, small diameter bombs, bunker busters, small arms and other lethal aid. The under-the-radar deliveries made by the Biden administration to Israel were additional to the three major military sales that were made public since the start of the war: $320m in precision bomb kits in November and 14,000 tank shells costing $106m and $147.5m of fuses and other components needed to make 155mm artillery shells in December. “Whether it is arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the UAE under the Trump administration, or sales to Israel under the Biden administration, Congress – and the American public – deserve full transparency about who is buying US weapons and how many weapons we are selling them,” said Democratic congressman Joaquin Castro.

Note: Learn more about arms industry corruption in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on war from reliable major media sources.


Biden administration admits flying 320,000 migrants secretly into the U.S. to reduce the number of crossings at the border has national security 'vulnerabilities'
March 4, 2024, Daily Mail (One of the UK's Popular Newspapers)
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13155765/biden-illegal...

Joe Biden's administration has admitted transporting migrants on secret flights into the U.S. and lawyers for its immigration agencies claim revealing the locations could create national security 'vulnerabilities'. Customs and Border Protection has refused to disclose crucial information about a program last year arranging flights for thousands of undocumented immigrants from foreign airports directly to U.S. cities. While record numbers of migrants were flowing over the southern border last year, the Biden White House was also directly transporting them into the country. Use of a cell phone app has allowed for the near undetected arrival by air of 320,000 [migrants] with no legal rights to enter the United States. Included in details of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit first reported by Todd Bensman, the Center for Immigration Studies found Biden's CBP approved the latest secretive flights that transported hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants from foreign countries into at least 43 different American airports from January through December 2023. The program was part of Biden's expansion of the CBP One app, which kicked off at the start of last year. [Migrants] who cannot legally enter the U.S. use CBP One to apply for travel authorization. Migrants are able to remain in the U.S. for two years without obtaining legal status and meanwhile are eligible for work authorization.

Note: Read the full in-depth report by the Center for Immigration studies here. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption from reliable major media sources.


The Government Really Is Spying On You — And It’s Legal
February 28, 2024, Politico
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/02/28/government-buying...

In 2018 ... the government was buying up reams of consumer data — information scraped from cellphones, social media profiles, internet ad exchanges and other open sources — and deploying it for often-clandestine purposes like law enforcement and national security in the U.S. and abroad. The places you go, the websites you visit, the opinions you post — all collected and legally sold to federal agencies. The data is used in a wide variety of law enforcement, public safety, military and intelligence missions, depending on which agency is doing the acquiring. We’ve seen it used for everything from rounding up undocumented immigrants or detecting border tunnels. We’ve also seen data used for man hunting or identifying specific people in the vicinity of crimes or known criminal activity. And generally speaking, it’s often used to identify patterns. It’s often used to look for outliers or things that don’t belong. So say you have a military facility, you could look for devices that appear suspicious that are lingering near that facility. Did you know that your car tires actually broadcast a wireless signal to the central computer of your car, telling it what the tire pressure is? It’s there for perfectly legitimate safety reasons. Governments have ... figured out that the car tire is a proxy for the car. And if you just put little sensors somewhere or you run the right code on devices that you scatter around the world, then you can kind of track people with car tires.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.


Key Articles From Independent Media


CIA in Ukraine — An Ex-CIA Agent’s View
March 3, 2024, ScheerPost
https://scheerpost.com/2024/03/03/cia-in-ukraine/

The New York Times on February 25 published an explosive story of what purports to be the history of the CIA in Ukraine from the Maidan coup of 2014 to the present. The story, “The Spy War: How the CIA Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin” ... relied on more than 200 interviews in Ukraine, the US, and “several European countries.” There is a CIA listening post in the forest along the Russian border, one of 12 “secret” bases the US maintains there. Beginning in 2016, the CIA trained an “elite Ukrainian commando force known as Unit 2245, which captured Russian drones and communications gear so that CIA technicians could reverse-engineer them.” One of the reasons that I believe the Times article was “authorized” by the intelligence community is because of what isn’t in it. There’s no mention, for example, that the United Nations has deemed Ukraine to be one of the most corrupt countries in the world, where money just seems to disappear into foreign accounts and the pockets of Ukrainian government officials. There’s no mention that Ukraine has become a “supermarket” for black market weapons and that western weapons meant for the war effort have popped up all over the world. And there is no mention at all that it was the CIA and the State Department that were responsible for the 2014 overthrow of the Ukrainian government in the first place, an action that resulted in Russia’s decision to invade eight years later.

Note: John Kiriakou is a whistleblower, former CIA counter-terrorism officer, and former senior investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In our War Failures and Lies section in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center, we discuss how the CIA has supported Neo-Nazis in Ukraine since at least 2014, the year of the far-right coup that incorporated the Nazi group Azov Battalion into the country’s National Guard. Since then, declassified government documents show that Ukraine was systematically developed as a proxy for US war against Russia. In 2016, Congress removed a ban on funding Ukrainian neo-fascist groups, effectively paving the way for American arms and weapons to fall in the hands of Ukraine’s Nazi organizations.


COVID Cover-Up: Government ‘Forced’ COVID Vaccines to Protect Bioweapons Industry
February 27, 2024, The Defender
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/government-forced-covid...

Government officials covered up the origins of COVID-19 and “forced” the vaccination of millions of people worldwide to “protect the integrity of the bioweapons industry,” according to a senior research scientist [at] Yale University. Harvey Risch, M.D., Ph.D. ... provided compelling testimony on what he believes accounts for the “crushingly obsessive push to COVID-vaccinate every living person on the planet.” Risch was among the medical experts ... who participated in Monday’s Senate roundtable discussion on “Federal Health Agencies and the COVID Cartel: What Are They Hiding?” Risch highlighted circumstantial evidence that COVID-19 “leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology” (WIV) in China in fall 2019. There is evidence the virus contains a unique genetic sequence “that also exists in Moderna patents from 2017,” while intelligence has “overwhelmingly” indicated the WIV as the source of the virus. According to Risch, “This work and the WIV leak was what I consider to be the fruit of our bioweapons industry that has been performing secretive and nefarious biological weapons development for the last 70 years.” Risch said that much of this research was banned in 1975, with the enactment of the United Nations Biological Weapons Convention, which prohibited the development of offensive bioweapons. However, a carve-out in the treaty allows “small quantities of offensive bioweapons ... to be developed in order to do research on vaccine countermeasures.”

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on COVID and government corruption from reliable major media sources.


Natural Disasters are Not All Natural
November 10, 2023, Journal of Geography, Environment and Earth Science International
https://journaljgeesi.com/index.php/JGEESI/article/view/727

For a half century, the military has been developing technologies to turn climate and extreme environmental phenomena into weapons. This study is a literature review. Results of the literature review reveal that HAARP (High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program), the most powerful ionospheric heater in operation, is able to influence climate. High-power electromagnetic pulses in the earth's crust, produced by a mobile magneto-hydrodynamic generator, is a technique developed since the 1970s to trigger earthquakes. Directed energy weapons, a real technology, can ignite destructive fires at range. For several years, official documents report effects on health and the environment similar in all aspects to those that would be detected if solar geoengineering by stratospheric aerosol injection, a climate-altering technique, was used. Due to numerous biases and a lack of objectivity, the IPCC's arguments on the causes of the growth in extreme environmental phenomena (heat and cold waves, storms, hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, floods, wildfires, air pollution, etc.) are flawed. The solar hypothesis isn't appropriate either, given its low activity for several years. In conclusion, the use of military climatic and environmental modification technologies appears to be the most relevant explanation to understand the increase in natural disasters over the last 20 years.

Note: In 2015, a senior climate scientist spoke out about being approached by an intelligence agency seeking to use weather as a weapon with geoengineering technologies. Read about the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP), which some beleve was a weather control weapon. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on military corruption from reliable major media sources.


Key Articles From Years Past


Inside the Military's Secret Undercover Army
July 5, 2021, Newsweek
https://www.newsweek.com/exclusive-inside-militarys-secret...

The largest undercover force the world has ever known is the one created by the Pentagon over the past decade. Some 60,000 people now belong to this secret army, many working under masked identities and in low profile, all part of a broad program called "signature reduction." The force, more than ten times the size of the clandestine elements of the CIA, carries out domestic and foreign assignments ... sometimes hiding in private businesses and consultancies. The newest and fastest growing group is the clandestine army that never leaves their keyboards. These are the cutting-edge cyber fighters and intelligence collectors who assume false personas online ... or even engage in campaigns to influence and manipulate social media. Hundreds work in and for the NSA, but over the past five years, every military intelligence and special operations unit has developed some kind of "web" operations cell that both collects intelligence and tends to the operational security of its very activities. No one knows the program's total size, and the explosion of signature reduction has never been examined for its impact on military policies and culture. Congress has never held a hearing on the subject. And yet the military developing this gigantic clandestine force challenges U.S. laws, the Geneva Conventions, the code of military conduct and basic accountability. A major task of signature reduction is keeping all of the organizations and people, even the automobiles and aircraft involved in the clandestine operations, masked. The signature reduction industry also works to figure out ways of spoofing and defeating everything from fingerprinting and facial recognition at border crossings, to ensuring that undercover operatives can enter and operate in the United States, manipulating official records to ensure that false identities match up.

Note: Learn more about mission creep in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in the military and in the intelligence community from reliable major media sources.


Pentagon reportedly running secret army of 60,000 around the world
May 19, 2021, New York Post
https://nypost.com/2021/05/18/pentagon-reportedly-running-secret...

The Pentagon is running a 60,000-strong secret army made up of soldiers, civilians and contractors, who travel the world under false identities embedded in consultancies and name-brand companies — without the knowledge of the American people or most of Congress. The top-secret army was created by the Pentagon over the past 10 years as part of a program called “signature reduction,” and operates both domestically and internationally using a low-profile force of clandestine warriors who sometimes wear civilian clothes as they carry out their assignments, Newsweek reported. The force is 10 times the size of the covert elements of the CIA, comes with a cost of more than $900 million, and engages about 130 private companies in operations in locales like the Middle East and Africa. About half of the “signature reduction” force is made up of special forces. Military intelligence specialists comprise the second-largest element inside the force. But the ... fastest-growing group in the unit is made up of cyber-warriors who use false personas and “nonattribution” or “misattribution” techniques online to disguise themselves so they can track high-value targets, collect “publicly accessible information” and engage in influence campaigns to manipulate social media. One recently retired senior officer who oversaw one of the programs said no one is fully aware of their extent or the implications they have for military warfare.

Note: Learn more about mission creep in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in the military and in the intelligence community from reliable major media sources.


Inspiring Articles


How to Integrate Gift Circles into Any Community
February 26, 2014, Shareable
https://www.shareable.net/how-to-integrate-gift-circles-into-any-community/

What if there was a way to create more community, instill a deeper sense of belonging, and begin bringing healing to the vast sense of isolation experienced in modern Western culture? The Gift Circle, as founded by Alpha Lo and spread by Charles Eisenstein, is a group facilitation format that holds great possibility as a way to match resources with needs, create community and inspire gratitude and generosity. The goals of a Gift Circle are simply to provide a warm, free, and welcoming space for community to gather and share Gifts and Needs, most often while literally sitting in a circle. The Gift Circle format [provides] a sense of psycho-spiritual belonging and connection to ameliorate the vast sense of alienation and scarcity experienced by so many. We would eat and socialize a bit, then gather sitting in a circle, and go around the circle with each person speaking what gift they’d enjoy sharing with the community. For instance someone might offer giving a massage, making a custom mix CD, giving a life coaching session, dance class, or a home-cooked meal – the gifts were generally more service-oriented, though there was an occasional item gifted as well, like a futon or pair of headphones. Most importantly, there would be a time at the end where we’d leave 20-30 min for givers and receivers to connect with one another directly and coordinate a time to meet up later to give or receive whatever it was. It was highly encouraged to schedule the gift or need session during that meeting, while the energy was still fresh.

Note: Read the full article to see how you can start a gift circle in your community! Explore more positive stories like this in our comprehensive inspiring news articles archive focused on solutions and bridging divides.


Jane Goodall Champions Pragmatism For Progress In National Geographic Documentary ‘Jane Goodall: The Hope’
April 30, 2020, Forbes
https://www.forbes.com/sites/francesbridges/2020/04/30/jane-goodall...

In 1986, [Dr. Jane Goodall] attended a conference in Chicago with researchers studying chimps in six areas of Africa, and the reports of environmental devastation shocked Goodall. After listening to the reports at the conference, Goodall felt obligated to speak. Her activism evolved quickly, from chimps, to their habitat to human welfare, and how animal rights and the future of the planet are inherently interconnected. Some of her decisions have been deemed controversial: her friendship with for US Secretary of State James Baker, her work with Conoco ... oil company to build a chimpanzee sanctuary, hard conversations with the National Institutes of Health regarding their medical research and testing practices on chimpanzees and visiting their labs. "I lost a lot of friends because of going into the labs, sitting down and talking to the people, organizing a conference to bring in the lab people, the scientists and also the animal welfare people ..."There were a lot of animal rights people who refused to speak to me — they said, 'Wow can you sit down with these evil people and have a cup of tea with them?' I was totally and completely flabbergasted. If you don’t talk to people, how can expect them to change?” When speaking to the NIH, “I didn’t stand there and accuse them of being cruel monsters. I showed slides and some film of the Gombe chimpanzees and talked about their lives, and then showed some slides of the chimps in the small cages and said, ‘You know, it’s like putting a person in a prison like that,’” said Goodall. “Many of the scientists said, ‘We really have never thought about this in this way’ a lot of them were actually crying." She stands by all of it because it produces results. It took decades, but the NIH phased out medical testing and research on chimpanzees. Conoco built the chimpanzee sanctuary, the Tchimpounga Chimpanzee Rehabilitation Center, saving all of the starving chimpanzees in the Brazzaville Zoo in the Republic of Congo.

Note: Explore more positive stories like this in our comprehensive inspiring news articles archive focused on solutions and bridging divides.


Calling In: Loretta J. Ross's Antidote to Cancel Culture
October 24, 2022, Atmos
https://atmos.earth/calling-in-macarthur-fellow-loretta-j-ross-cancel-culture/

What does it take to have a challenging conversation in the era of cancel culture? For MacArthur Fellow Loretta J. Ross, the answer lies in calling in: a communicative strategy rooted in compassion, accountability, and restorative justice. Cancel culture [is] a phenomenon whereby people deemed to be moral transgressors are publicly discredited on social media platforms, and in some instances, punished through cultural, social, and professional ostracism. Professor Ross thinks this readiness to cancel a person on the basis of their beliefs is toxic. Instead, she espouses empathy and stresses the importance of context in challenging conversations. Calling in is not what you do for other people–it's what you do for yourself. It gives you a chance to offer love, grace, and respect, and to showcase one's own integrity and one's own ability to hold nuance and depth. People mistakenly think that you're doing it because you're trying to change somebody else. That's not possible. And since we don't have the power to control and change others, the only power we're left with is self-empowerment. In this sense, calling in is a conscious decision to not make the world crueler than it needs to be. We're all capable of using a technique I call "the mental parking lot" where you temporarily put aside any visceral reactions you have to what others are saying. It's a technique that requires you not to pay attention to your reaction but rather to devote your focus and respect to the person you're talking to.

Note: Smith College Professor and civil rights activist Loretta Ross worked with Ku Klux Klan members and practiced restorative justice with incarcerated men convicted or raping and murdering women. Watch Loretta Ross's powerful Ted Talk on simple tools to help shift our culture from fighting each other to working together in the face of polarizing social issues.


Building More Than Trails
February 1, 2024, Reasons to be Cheerful
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/lost-sierra-trail-rural-communities...

There is some debate as to where the name “The Lost Sierra” comes from. More than a dozen communities are tucked away across this area, which is fragmented by the mountainous terrain of the surrounding national forests. Trinity Stirling, who lives in Quincy and grew up in the Lost Sierra, has made it her mission to help connect these scattered communities with the hopes of giving their economies a boost by creating more recreation opportunities. And that mission starts with trails. Stirling worked on a long-term project to connect more than a dozen rural towns with a long-distance trail stretching about 600 miles. Stitched across federal public land, the trail network is coming together in stages, building off existing trails. So far, about 74 miles are under construction and 30 miles have been finished. The goal of the Lost Sierra Route, as the long-distance trail will be known, is to improve access to public land at a time when more and more people want to get outside, while at the same time connecting isolated communities and working to diversify the regional economy, which grew around the booms and busts of natural resource industries like mining, logging and ranching. Trails can serve multiple purposes for communities, Lawson says, and the economic impact is not only about attracting tourists. Having opportunities to explore trails, fly fish in scenic rivers or take a peaceful walk after work can make places more attractive to live or start a business in.

Note: Explore more positive stories like this in our comprehensive inspiring news articles archive focused on solutions and bridging divides.


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