According to newly released emails, the United States Intelligence Community, led by the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, held regular meetings with Dr. Ralph Baric, one of America's leading coronavirus experts, since at least 2015.

Senator Rand Paul's office has worked for years to obtain the documents.

Baric has been accused of engineering the Covid-19 virus in his lab at the University of North Carolina, but he has never had to testify about his role in the pandemic despite his well-documented collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The newly released emails reveal that the CIA hoped to discuss "Coronavirus evolution and possible natural human adaptation with Baric" and that Baric held quarterly meetings with members of the Intelligence Community.

In early October, Israeli-Ukrainian Boris Wolfman was arrested in Russia. He is charged with masterminding a criminal organ trafficking scheme. His capture, wholly ignored by the Western media, raises the prospect that at long last, some justice will be served in a number of major organ trafficking scandals, dating back many years. Wolfman's apprehension also highlights Tel Aviv's little-scrutinised role as the world's centre of illegal organ harvesting and trafficking. Grimly, the Gaza genocide may have greatly facilitated this perverse commerce.

Ever since October 7th, credible allegations Zionist Occupation Forces are illegally harvesting the organs of slain Palestinians have widely circulated. In November 2023, Euro-Med Monitor published a report documenting how Israeli soldiers confiscated dozens of corpses from major hospitals in Gaza, to the extent of digging up and raiding mass graves built in their grounds to accommodate the neverending influx of slaughtered civilians. While some bodies were subsequently handed over to the Red Cross, many were and remain withheld.

Euro-Med Monitor records how many corpses exhibited clear indications of organ harvesting, including missing cochleas and corneas, as well as hearts, kidneys, and livers. Since then, the Zionist entity has released token numbers of murdered Palestinians at intermittent intervals to their surviving relatives. Frequently, the bodies are decomposed beyond recognition, making conducting professional autopsies - and identifying whether organs have been stolen - difficult if not impossible. Sometimes, the corpses are frozen solid, again greatly complicating medical examinations, and potentially obscuring organ theft.

The 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention mandates respect for the dignity of dead civilians, and explicitly prohibits the looting or mutilation of their bodies, during wartime. However, the Zionist entity has not only failed to ratify the treaty, but expressly rejects its applicability to Gaza and the illegally-occupied West Bank. Moreover, repulsive local laws and legal precedents unique to Tel Aviv grant authorities the power to refuse to release dead Palestinians to their families.

Their bodies can be used as grisly bargaining chips - or their organs looted with impunity. For decades, the Zionist entity has been the illicit organ trade's international nucleus. While Palestinians have long-raised alarm over Tel Aviv's theft of their fallen comrades' organs, it was not until the early 2000s the practice was officially admitted. Yehuda Hiss, head of Israel's Abu Kabir Institute, openly boasted of harvesting skin, bones, and other human materials during autopsies. He was never punished, suggesting his macabre activities were state-sanctioned.

This interpretation is amply reinforced by former Institute employee Meira Weiss' 2014 work Over Their Dead Bodies. She reveals how during the First Intifada 1987 - 1993, ZOF officials directed the centre "to harvest organs from Palestinians using a military regulation that an autopsy must be conducted on every killed Palestinian." This gave them free rein to seize whatever they wished from bodies in their care. Horrifyingly, Institute apparatchiks nostalgically referred to these years as the "good days", as they could pilfer organs "consistently and freely".

Disturbingly, the Gaza genocide's catastrophic death toll may represent the dawning of a new era of "good days" for the Zionist entity's organ trade. Wolfman's arrest, and the collapse of the conspiracies he oversaw, are unlikely to dent Tel Aviv's operations in the field. He was but one player in a world-spanning nexus of Israeli traffickers. In the manner of a hydra, Wolfman's removal will simply lead to others taking his place. After all, the returns are high, and risks mysteriously low.

Mohsen Abdelmoumen: You are a very courageous and committed journalist who has always supported the Palestinian cause. The world needs just voices like yours. What can you tell us about your long stays in Gaza and the occupied West Bank?

Eva Bartlett: I went to the West Bank in 2007 to witness with my own eyes how Palestinians the daily tragedies, injustices and realities of Palestinians' lives under occupation. Over the course of 8 months, I was witness to some of the ugliest aspects of life under Israeli rule: brutal attacks by armed illegal Jewish colonists and by Israeli soldiers on Palestinian children, women, elderly; the widespread humiliating military checkpoints cutting through Palestinian land and making movement nearly impossible; raids and weeks-long lock-downs on Palestinian towns and cities, in which the Israeli army ransacks and destroys homes and usually abducts one or more member of the family, including children. There are currently over 400 Palestinian children in Zionist prisons.

They say dead men tell no tales. Not true in this case. Epstein continues looming large over Trump's second term, with The Epstein Files™ - and specifically the demand to publish them, combined with the efforts to selectively 'massage' and 'tailor' them - practically dictating the schedule and tempo of US domestic politics. Left and Right have come together to force their release, squeezing Trump in the middle, who wants everyone to forget all about them.

Most assume that that's because Trump himself is personally implicated in them. More likely, Israel is, so Trump wants to placate Israeli paranoia in order to focus on making 'big beautiful peace deals' and avoiding another smear campaign like Russiagate, and thus the political chaos of his first term. He thinks he's 'doing MAGA' the only way it can be done, but in the meantime his base is 'noticing' an awful lot and wants the US to completely decouple from Israel.

The divergence is becoming extreme. Can the center hold?


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Timur Mindich slipped out of Ukraine hours before the raids. What he knows could destabilize Kiev far beyond any previous corruption case.

Golden toilet bowls. Stacks of dollars fresh from the US Federal Reserve. A courier complaining that hauling $1.6 million in cash "is no easy job." More than a thousand hours of wiretaps - filled with laughter, swearing, and the careless voices of men discussing how to split state contracts, who to bribe, and who should be placed in key government posts.

These are fragments of a vast corruption saga now unfolding in Ukraine - a scandal whose scale and brazenness have stunned even the country's Western sponsors.

The latest chapter began with raids on November 10, when officers from Ukraine's anti-corruption agencies searched the Kiev apartment of businessman and media producer Timur Mindich. A few hours earlier, he had quietly left the country - likely warned about the coming operation. That would not be surprising: Mindich is not just any fixer, but a close ally and longtime associate of Vladimir Zelensky.

What exactly lies at the heart of this sprawling corruption scandal? How far will its shockwaves travel - through Ukraine, through its Western backers, and through the war itself? And can a leader who has already outlived his legal mandate once again slip out of the crisis untouched?

The understanding reached at the Alaska summit is still in force, President Putin's aide Yury Ushakov has said.

Moscow and Washington are continuing their dialogue on resolving the Ukraine conflict in line with the understanding reached during the Alaska meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his US counterpart Donald Trump in August, Putin's aide Yury Ushakov has said.

Although the summit failed to yield a breakthrough, Moscow has praised what it called Washington's willingness to mediate and consider the conflict's underlying causes.

Russian officials also maintain that continued dialogue creates opportunities for trade and economic cooperation despite the US decision to sanction the oil companies Rosneft and Lukoil last month.

Russia is receiving "many signals" from the US, with the Anchorage meeting still acting as a basis for the talks, Ushakov told journalist Pavel Zarubin on Sunday. "We do believe it is a good way forward," he said. According to the official, the understandings are still relevant since Washington has never explicitly stated that they are no longer valid.

What began as an inquiry into kickbacks at the state's energy company has become a political firestorm circling the Kiev regime itself.

Ukraine's anti-corruption detectives have opened Pandora's Box. What started as a routine audit of the nuclear energy monopoly Energoatom has spiraled into a full-scale probe into embezzlement, implicating ministers, businessmen - and the man long known as Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky's personal "wallet." The affair now raises the question of how much longer the formally acting but no longer legitimate president can maintain control over his own system.

The case that shook Kiev's establishment

This week, Ukraine's National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) raided the homes of several senior officials and businessmen, including Timur Mindich - a longtime friend and financial backer of Zelensky, whom Ukrainian media openly call the president's "wallet." Mindich fled the country before investigators arrived, while several of his associates have been detained.

Kiev's drones have once again hit the Novovoronezh NPP in Western Russia.

Ukraine has intensified strikes on Russian nuclear power plants (NPPs) in response to its mounting battlefield losses, Rosatom head Aleksey Likhachev said on Friday.

Likhachev said that earlier this week, Ukrainian drones had once again targeted the Novovoronezh NPP in Western Russia's Voronezh Region. He relayed that eight of the unmanned aircraft were intercepted and destroyed, but falling debris damaged a power distribution unit, forcing three reactor blocks to temporarily reduce output to below half capacity.

"We are seeing growing aggressiveness from the Kiev regime, directed deliberately against facilities of Russia's nuclear energy sector. It is clear that this is a response to the successes and advances of our troops along almost the entire line of contact. Russia will provide an adequate response to such attacks."

Likhachev made the remarks after meeting with International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Rafael Grossi in Kaliningrad on Friday, where the two discussed the situation at the Zaporozhye NPP and Kiev's repeated attacks on other Russian nuclear sites.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) just came out with their latest survey of opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan, and you'll never guess what it says. . . .

. . . Oh wait, you totally will. It turns out the Taliban's ban on poppy cultivation has been remarkably successful!

Specifically, the UNODC is estimating the total area in Afghanistan under opium poppy cultivation to be 10,200 hectares, down 20% from last year's total of 12,800 hectares. While the new total may still sound like a lot, it's a mere fraction of the 232,000 hectares that were estimated to be cultivated in the year before the US military's spectacular pullout from the country in 2021.

In other words, the Taliban have somehow or other succeeded in doing what NATO was unable to do in two decades of de facto occupation: decimate Afghanistan's share of the global heroin trade.

So, what's happening here? What does this tell us about the true nature of the global drug trade? And what does all this have to do with the United States' coming (real) war on Venezuela's (fake) fentanyl trade? Let's find out.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's hardline coalition partner Itamar Ben-Gvir has claimed that the Levantine Arab ethnonational group was "artificially invented"

The Palestinian people do not exist, Israel's hardline security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has said ahead of the UN Security Council vote on implementing the next stage of the US-brokered peace plan for Gaza.

The Security Council will vote Monday on a resolution drafted by the US and backed by several Arab and Muslim countries, which they said "offers a pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood."

In a lengthy X post on Saturday, Ben-Gvir, who is also the leader of the ultranationalist Otzma Yehudit party, claimed that "there is no such thing as 'Palestinian people,'" arguing that the nation was "an invention without any historical, archaeological, or factual basis."

"The collection of immigrants from Arab countries to the Land of Israel does not constitute a nation, and they certainly do not deserve a reward for the terrorism, murder, and atrocities they have spread everywhere, especially in Gaza," he wrote, adding that the only "real" solution to the conflict was "encouraging voluntary emigration."