Israel: Netanyahu’s wife convicted of fraud

Middle East Monitor 

 

An Israeli court on Sunday convicted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s wife, Sara, of fraudulently using public funds to pay for expensive restaurant meals, according to local media, Anadolu Agency reports.

 

Sarah Netanyahu was ordered to pay 55,000 shekels ($15,277), Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth reported.

The conviction came on the basis of a deal between the Israeli public prosecutor and Sara Netanyahu’s lawyer under which she pleaded guilty to the charges in return for payment of the amount mentioned.

On Sunday, Netanyahu arrived at the Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court and admitted to buying meals from luxury restaurants, despite the constant presence of a chef at the prime minister’s government residence.

Sara Netanyahu will pay a fine of 10,000 shekels (some $2,777), and reimbursement of 45,000 shekels (some $12,500) to the state coffers in exchange for a lesser charge of “deliberately exploiting the mistake of others"

Claims Of Insect Collapse Rubbished By New Study

Paul Homewood
Not A Lot Of People Know That

Readers will recall this story from January:

Insect collapse: ‘We are destroying our life support systems’

According to the Lister paper:

“Over the past 30 years, forest temperatures have risen 2.0 °C, and our study indicates that climate warming is the driving force behind the collapse of the forest’s food web”

As I reported at the time, the supposed temperature increase was fake, an artifact of merging two sets of incompatible data. The El Verde Field Station, responsible for the meteorological data, clearly warned against combining these two sets of temperature data, because the first one up to 1992 was artificially higher because of faulty equipment.

Any competent scientist should have double checked the source of the data, but for some reason Lister did not.

Now PNAS, who ran the original study, have published a new paper which rubbishes Lister’s findings.

Not only does this new study confirm the incompatibility of the temperature data, it also questions Lister’s claims that insect populations are even declining at all.

Read more

From Glyphosate to Front Groups: Fraud, Deception and Toxic Tactics

Colin Todhunter
Off Guardian

nvironmentalist Dr Rosemary Mason has just written to the Editor-in-Chief of the British Medical Journal and the British Medical Association Council Chairman, Chaand Nagpaul.

Her purpose is to not only draw attention to the impact of biocides, not least that of glyphosate, on health and the environment but also to bring attention to the corruption that allows this to continue.

Along with her letter, she enclosed a 13-page document. Readers can access the fully referenced document here: European Chemicals Agency classifies glyphosate as a substance that causes serious eye damage (or see the embedded version below).

It is worth reading in full to appreciate the conflicts of interest and the corruption that has led to the rise in certain illnesses and the destruction of the natural environment.

By way of a brief summary, the key points raised by Dr Mason and her claims include the following.

• The European Chemicals Agency classifies glyphosate as a substance that causes serious eye damage. There has been a massive increase in the use of glyphosate in recent years. An increase in cataracts has been verified by epidemiological studies in England and by a 2016 WHO report.
• There are shockingly high levels of weed killer in UK breakfast cereals. After testing these cereals at the Health Research Institute in Iowa, Dr Fagan, director of the centre, said: “These results are consistently concerning. The levels consumed in a single daily helping of any one of these cereals, even the one with the lowest level of contamination, is sufficient to put the person’s glyphosate levels above the levels that cause fatty liver disease in rats (and likely in people).”
• The amount of glyphosate in tap water in South Wales has increased tenfold in a very short period.
• Glyphosate is largely responsible for the destruction of biodiversity and an increase in the prevalence of many serious health conditions.
• There are massive conflicts of interest throughout various agencies in the EU that ensure harmful agrochemicals like glyphosate come to market and remain there.
• In fact, a global industry has emerged to give ‘advice’ on biocides regulation. This results in regulatory bodies effectively working to further the commercial interests of the pesticide industry.
• The European Food Safety Authority sanctioned increased maximum pesticide residue levels (MRL) at the request of industry (Monsanto in this case, to 100 times the previously authorised MRL).
• The Washington-based International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI) is used by corporate backers to counter public health policies. Its members have occupied key positions on EU and UN regulatory panels. It is, however, an industry lobby group that masquerades as a scientific health charity. The ILSI describes its mission as “pursuing objectivity, clarity and reproducibility” to “benefit the public good”. But researchers from the University of Cambridge, Bocconi University in Milan, and the US Right to Know campaign assessed over 17,000 pages of documents under US freedom of information laws to present evidence of influence peddling.
• ILSI Vice-President, Prof Alan Boobis, is currently the Chairman of the UK Committee on Toxicity of Chemicals in Food, Consumer Products and the Environment (CoT) (2015-2021). He was directly responsible for authorising chemicals such as glyphosate, chlorothalonil, clothianidin and chlorpyrifos that are destroying human health and creating a crisis in biodiversity. His group and others have authorised glyphosate repeatedly. He and David Coggon, the previous Chairman of CoT (2008-2015), were appointed as experts on Science Advice for Policy by European Academies (SAPEA), a group allied with the agrochemical industry and is fighting for higher pesticide exposure.
• Jean-Claude Juncker the President of the European Commission who, against a petition from more than 1.5 million European citizens, re-authorised glyphosate in December 2017 for a further five years. He set up the Science Advisory Mechanism, aiming to put industry-friendly personnel on various committees.

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The Normalization and Institutionalization of Fraud

Charles Hugh-Smith

Normalizing and institutionalizing fraud undermines the foundations of the economy and the financial system.

I am indebted to Manoj Samanta (twitter: @flation_debate) for the insightful concept the commoditization of fraud. The first step in the commoditization of fraud is to normalize fraud as Business as Usual (BAU) to the point that it's no longer viewed as "wrong," destructive or an aberration of evil-doers but as an accepted way to maximize gain and offload risk onto others.

The last step in the process is to institutionalize fraud within central banking and government policies.

How is selling shares in a money-losing corporation at outlandish valuations not the commoditization of fraud? The fraud has been normalized into a game of hoping that greater fools will be so enamored of the normalized fraud that they'll take the IPO shares off your hands at ever-higher valuations until the fraud breaks down.

But by then, the instigators of the fraud--the IPO--have escaped with billions in gains and zero liability.

How is private equity loading companies up with debt as a means of paying outlandish dividends to themselves not commoditized fraud? How is paying dividends with debt rather than earnings not fraud? The net result of this fraud is the debt-burdened company eventually defaults on its debt, defrauding the investors who were suckered into the scam.

But once again, the instigators of the fraud--private equity--have escaped with billions in gains and zero liability.

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“Saving Syria’s Children”: Response to the HuffPo - The BBC's history of faking news

Comment: Incontrovertible evidence that the BBC is a primary propganda outfit working for the British Deep State. (The Jimmy Savile cover up already proved that). 

So, please donate to Robert's crowdfunding campaign here.

---------------------  

Robert Stuart
Off Guardian

Corrections and clarifications to “Keith Allen Thinks The BBC May Have Faked ‘Apocalyptic’ Attack In Syria”

News and opinion website The Huffington Post has written about my campaign to crowdfund a documentary about the 2013 BBC Panorama programme Saving Syria’s Children.

Keith Allen Thinks The BBC May Have Faked ‘Apocalyptic’ Attack In Syria was published on May 4th 2019. Some notes in response follow.

Stuart says he has spent nearly six years compiling “a mountain of evidence” that shows the BBC’s footage was “faked”. He claims the national broadcaster worked “cheek by jowl with Isis” to produce the Panorama documentary, which was broadcast in September 2013.

Evidence that sequences in Saving Syria’s Children were fabricated is set out on my blog. Readers are free to make their own topographical analogies.

During the programme’s making BBC Panorama reporter Ian Pannell and cameraman Darren Conway were embedded with then ISIS partner group Ahrar al-Sham – a group described elsewhere by the BBC as “hard-line Islamist”. Less than three weeks earlier Ahrar al-Sham, ISIS and other groups together killed over 190 civilians, including women, children and elderly men, and kidnapped over 200 mostly women and children.

In the programme’s climactic scenes of the aftermath of an alleged incendiary attack the BBC crew filmed at close quarters an ambulance prominently bearing the ISIS emblem and its militarily attired occupants, at least one of whom was armed.

In an interview with TalkRadio on Friday, Stuart claimed “the only source of [this attack] is the BBC”. However, the strike was also reported by NBC News who interviewed doctors who described the “apocalyptic” attack in detail, documented in painstaking detail by the Violations Documentation Centre in Syria (VDCS), and confirmed by Human Rights Watch.

The NBC News article cited features an interview with a single volunteer doctor named “Roula”. This is clearly Dr Rola Hallam. Dr Hallam and Dr Saleyha Ahsan were being followed by the BBC Panorama team of reporter Ian Pannell and cameraman Darren Conway as they visited hospitals run by the UK charity Hand in Hand for Syria. As such Hallam was central to the BBC reports in question and cannot be considered an independent commentator. [1] [2] [3] [4]

The Violations Documentation Centre in Syria report cited gives the time of the alleged attack as follows:

On 26 Aug 2013, at 02:00 pm, the Syrian air forces shelled ‘Iqraa’ Institution in Orm Al Kubra in Aleppo, which had been under the Free Army’s control for several months then.

The VDCS report also quotes Mustapha Haid, “Head of ‘Doulati Organization/My State Organization’”:

At 3 in the afternoon, On 26 Aug 2013, I was in Al Atareb City and I heard rumours about a ‘chemical attack’ on Orm Al Kubra and that tens of casualties were brought to Al Atareb Hospital.

However the BBC has categorically stated in complaints correspondence that:

The attack happened on the 26th of August at around 5.30pm at the end of the school day.[5]

The VDCS report quotes a second witness, Issa Obeid, “Head of Nursing Department in Al Atareb Hospital”, who provides a first-hand account of his actions at Atareb Hospital:

We washed the casualties with water and serums after taking off their clothes. We used ‘Florasline’ liniment on the burnt areas and provided the casualties with fluids and some of them were given tranquilizers like Morphine.

However on 26 August 2013 Issa (or Iessa) Obied would appear not to have been present at Atareb but to have been attending a battle first aid training course in Antakia, Turkey. [6]
Iessa Obied has been photographed posing with an arsenal of weaponry including assault rifles, an anti-aircraft gun and a shoulder-launched surface-to-air missile. [7] [8] 

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Money laundering - Why the UK does not prosecute it

"Despite the UK’s rhetoric about wanting a “world-leading reputation for integrity” as a financial centre, it has never prosecuted a single company or bank for money laundering."

True Publica

A study by the CCP Research Foundation – which analyses banks’ so-called ‘conduct costs’ – revealed that the biggest 20 banks worldwide, including the biggest four in Britain, had paid or set aside £264 billion for fines in the five years to 2017. Britain’s biggest banks have paid out £71 billion for misconduct in the decade since the financial crisis. Much of these fines have related to money laundering but they were not prosecuted in the UK.

Lloyds is the bank that has suffered the heaviest penalties with at least £23.4 billion in conduct-related costs and write-offs since 2008.  RBS is second on the list. Its conduct and litigation costs since 2008, including amounts it has earmarked but not yet used, add up to £20.6 billion. The bailed-out bank also agreed to pay £3.6 billion to settle an investigation by the US Department of Justice (DoJ) for misselling mortgage-backed securities – the bonds at the heart of the 2008 crisis in America.

RBS and Lloyds were bailed out when the financial crisis broke out to the tune of £45.5 billion and £20.3 billion respectively.

Barclays avoided a UK state bailout – but only by taking £12 billion what looks like illegal emergency funding from the state of Qatar. The Serious Fraud Office is involved.

HSBC has forked out nearly £10 billion in fines and other costs for its conduct since 2008.
In the last few weeks – Standard Chartered, the British bank has been ordered to pay $1.1bn (£842m) by US and UK authorities to settle allegations for breaching sanctions against countries including Iran.

But it doesn’t end there does it – it just keeps on going.

In 2019 alone, leaving aside Standard Chartered, the Financial Conduct Authority has dished out fines to the financial services sector at the rate of more than one a month. In total, to the 9th April, they have fined the industry or people in it collectively to the tune of £272,487,887.

What is interesting here is the missing link. British banks are world leaders in shovelling trillions into tax havens, most of it to evade taxation but a very good chunk of it is pure money laundering. 

Tyrants, despots, mass murderers, terrorists, traffickers – they are just as good a customer as any as far as the banks are concerned. Here, the British government and its toothless Financial Conduct Authority fail in every sense of the word. Money laundering through British tax haven islands and crown dependencies is something the state approves of – hence the lack of fines or punishment dished out for it.

Donald Toon, director at the National Crime Agency, admitted that money laundering in the UK was “a very big problem” and estimated that the amount of money laundered here each year has now risen to a staggering £150 billion. I would think that is on the light side.

Susan Hawley is Policy Director of Corruption Watch. She worked for six years at the Corner House on corruption issues, having previously worked in the policy team at Christian Aid on ethics and corruption issues. Here is her take, (originally published a year ago), on money laundering by British banks.

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Media Blackout as Israel’s Largest Banks Pay Over $1 Billion in Fines for US Tax Evasion Schemes

Mint Press News 

WASHINGTON — Israel’s three largest banks — Hapoalim Bank, Leumi Bank and Mizrahi Tefahot Bank — have all been ordered to pay record fines, which collectively are set to total over $1 billion, to the U.S. government after the banks were found to have actively colluded with thousands of wealthy Americans in massive tax-evasion schemes.

The scandal, though it has been reported on in Israeli media, has garnered little attention in the United States. The media black-out has been so surprising it was even directly mentioned by the Times of Israel, given that similar revelations about other banks and offshore tax-evasion schemes — such as those contained within the Panama Papers — led to global protests and even the resignations of some world leaders.

The settlements are the end result of a series of Department of Justice (DOJ) probes that were related to the DOJ’s 2007 investigation targeting UBS AG, Switzerland’s largest bank. The focus of the probe turned to Israel a few years later in 2011, when it was determined that the Swiss subsidiaries of several of Israel’s largest banks had actively aided Americans seeking to launder their money.

As the probes advanced, the DOJ found that the three banks — Israel’s largest when ranked by net income and total assets — had a history of collaborating with wealthy Americans in tax evasion schemes, not just in their Swiss subsidiaries but in Israel as well. Most of those wealthy Americans were Jewish Americans or dual U.S.-Israeli citizens who hid their U.S. citizenship from the Israeli banks.

A year after the probes into Leumi, Hapoalim and Mizrahi Tefahot were made public, the U.S. State Department notably listed Israel as a “major money laundering country… whose financial institutions engage in currency transactions involving significant amounts of proceeds from international narcotics trafficking … or other serious crime.”

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The Crisis of Science

corbettreport

TRANSCRIPT AND MP3: https://www.corbettreport.com/science... 

In recent years, the public has gradually discovered that there is a crisis in science. But what is the problem? And how bad is it, really? Today on The Corbett Report we shine a spotlight on the series of interrelated crises that are exposing the way institutional science is practiced today, and what it means for an increasingly science-dependent society.

The Coming Global Financial Crisis: Debt Exhaustion

Charles Hugh-Smith 

The global economy is way past the point of maximum debt saturation, and so the next stop is debt exhaustion.
 
Just as generals fight the last war, central banks always fight the last financial crisis. The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008-09 was primarily one of liquidity as markets froze up as a result of the collapse of the highly leveraged subprime mortgage sector that had commoditized fraud (hat tip to Manoj S.) via liar loans and designed-to-implode mortgage backed securities.

The central bank "solution" to institutionalized, commoditized fraud was to lower interest rates to zero and enable tens of trillions in new debt. As a result, total debt in the U.S. has soared to $70 trillion, roughly 3.5 times GDP, and global debt has skyrocketed from $84 trillion to $250 trillion. Debt in China has blasted from $7 trillion 2008 to $40 trillion in 2018.

A funny thing happens when you depend on borrowing from the future (debt) to fund growth today: the new debt no longer boosts growth, as the returns on additional debt are increasingly marginal. This leads to what I term debt exhaustion: lenders can no longer find creditworthy borrowers, borrowers either don't want more debt or can't afford more debt, and the cost and risk of the additional debt far outweigh the meager gains. Whatever credit is issued is gambled in speculations that the current bubble du jour will continue indefinitely.

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How Do You Know Who Your Father Is? Because Your Mother Told You So?

Tough Love and Common Sense

According to the American Association of Blood Banks, 30% of DNA paternity tests nationwide turn out negative. “That’s out of about 300,000 tests per year nationwide,” said Angelucci. “In raw numbers that amounts to at least 100,000 negative results per year in the U.S., and that’s only the men who get tested. So this is a serious, under addressed problem.”
 
Paternity fraud occurs when a mother names a man to be the biological father of a child, when she knows or suspects that he is not the biological father.  

Most men and children who find out they are the victims of paternity fraud are devastated. Many times the children will become preoccupied with figuring/finding out who the biological father is. It's instinctual: We want to know where we come from. This is especially true when the child grew up believing someone else was the father, as they will often suddenly feel untethered to a parent they've always held so dearly.

...

Women who knowingly commit paternity fraud tend to specifically seek out "nice guys" who are family-oriented and trusting; The kind of men who are likely to still care for the child even after finding out the fraud that has taken place.

These women are often manipulative liars with no regard for those who will be hurt by such lies. Some of these women even swear to the alleged father and/or child that he is the real father, all the while knowing this to be false, yet hoping they are convincing enough to talk their way out of a DNA test, court proceedings and/or any other accountability or consequences for their choices. 

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Scientific Bullshit — How ‘Science’ Is Used To Deceive The Public

Humans Are Free

Did you know that there was a shocking study published in the Public Library of Science Journal, that found “up to 72%” of scientists admitted their colleagues were engaged in “questionable research practices,” and that just over 14% of them were engaged in outright “falsification”?[1]

If that’s not bad enough, between 1977 and 1990 the FDA found scientific flaws in 10–20% of all the studies they audited.[2]

But it gets even worse; scientists at the Thousand Oaks biotech firm Amgen, set out to double-check the results of 53 landmark published studies in their fields of cancer research and blood biology.

What they found was shocking; only 6 of the 53 studies could be proven valid. That means almost 90% were flawed, yet passed off to the public as fact. [3]

In other words, there’s a lot of scientific bullshit floating around my friends.

This becomes especially concerning when we consider how “science” seems to have replaced organized religion as the new authority that should blindly be obeyed in many ways.

People speak of it as if it is infallible, and anyone who questions the high priests of science are generally attacked, degraded, and dismissed as modern day heretics.

But science, just like any religion, is not a god that only speaks unadulterated Truth.
It is far from being infallible and is constantly in need of being updated, upgraded, challenged, revised, and changed, for the simple fact that science is subject to the narrow confines of mankind’s tiny flawed human perception; which is forever growing and expanding — and easily skewed by things like prejudice, pride, and corruption.

In and of itself, science is obviously inanimate and can do neither good nor bad because it has no mind of its own.

It is not a person, so we need to stop talking about science like it is a super hero. It is simply a vehicle that requires a driver, and the destination obviously differs from one driver to the next. 

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Global warming fraud: NOAA shows record warming where NO temperature stations exist

Adapt 2030
YouTube

NOAA shows record warm temperatures where there are no temperature monitoring stations or ocean buoys, that is straight up fraud. From Africa, Middle East and Antarctica, all made up data. All the while second most snow for Northern Hemisphere and RSS land stations show strong cooling and the sunspots are gone from our Sun three years early on the regular 11 year solar cycle.

NOAA September Temperature Fraud
"The Abnormal Warmth That Prevailed In The First Half Of The 20th Century" deleted 1970's cooling
October Global Temperature Down a Little from September
www.drroyspencer.com/
International Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set (ICOADS)
Record Global Cooling Over The Last Eight Months
Global 2 meter anomalies
Sun spotless again 11/20
Northern hemisphere historical snow cover

Politics is Fake and Staged

corbettreport

Computer Crash Wipes Out Years of Air Force Investigation Records

Comment: Really? I mean, come on...Back ups and safeguard protocols weren't in operation from one of the biggest defence contractors on the planet? I don't think so. That level and amount of information doesn't just disappear, it needs a helping hand. I think someone didn't want someone else to discover a few salient facts...Lockheed Martin is the "Monsanto" of the weapons industry after all.

------------------------------- 

Government Executive

The U.S. Air Force has lost records concerning 100,000 investigations into everything from workplace disputes to fraud.

A database that hosts files from the Air Force’s inspector general and legislative liaison divisions became corrupted last month, destroying data created between 2004 and now, service officials said. Neither the Air Force nor Lockheed Martin, the defense firm that runs the database, could say why it became corrupted or whether they’ll be able to recover the information.

Lockheed tried to recover the information for two weeks before notifying the Air Force, according to a service statement.

The Air Force has begun asking for assistance from cybersecurity professionals at the Pentagon as well as from private contractors.

“We’ve kind of exhausted everything we can to recover within [the Air Force] and now we’re going to outside experts to see if they can help,” said Ann Stefanek, an Air Force spokeswoman at the Pentagon.

For now, Air Force officials don’t believe the crash was caused intentionally.

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40 percent of scientists admit that fraud is always or often a factor that contributes to irreproducible research

Nature 

 

Survey sheds light on the ‘crisis’ rocking research.

More than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments, and more than half have failed to reproduce their own experiments. Those are some of the telling figures that emerged from Nature's survey of 1,576 researchers who took a brief online questionnaire on reproducibility in research.

The data reveal sometimes-contradictory attitudes towards reproducibility. Although 52% of those surveyed agree that there is a significant 'crisis' of reproducibility, less than 31% think that failure to reproduce published results means that the result is probably wrong, and most say that they still trust the published literature.

Data on how much of the scientific literature is reproducible are rare and generally bleak. The best-known analyses, from psychology¹ and cancer biology², found rates of around 40% and 10%, respectively. Our survey respondents were more optimistic: 73% said that they think that at least half of the papers in their field can be trusted, with physicists and chemists generally showing the most confidence.

The results capture a confusing snapshot of attitudes around these issues, says Arturo Casadevall, a microbiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland. “At the current time there is no consensus on what reproducibility is or should be.” But just recognizing that is a step forward, he says. “The next step may be identifying what is the problem and to get a consensus.”

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Market Analyst: “Nothing Is Real… All Of This is Being Played To Keep People Believing The System Is Working”

Mac Slavo
SHTFplan.com

The stock market may be hovering near all-time highs, but according to Greg Mannarino of Traders Choice that doesn’t mean the valuations are actually real:

We exist, beyond any shadow of any doubt, in an environment of absolute fakery where nothing is real… from the prices of assets to what’s occurring here with regard to the big Wall Street banks, the Federal Reserve, interest rates and everything in between.

…All of this is being played in a way to keep people believing, once again, that the system is working and will continue to work.

Full Interview with USA Watchdog:

 

President Obama has suggested that people like Greg Mannarino who are exposing the fraud for what it is are just peddling fiction. And just this week the President argued that he saved the world from a great depression and that the closing credits of the 2008 crash movie “The Big Short” were inaccurate when they claimed that nothing has been done to fundamentally curb the fraud and fix the system under his administration. But as Mannarino notes, the President and his central bank cohorts are making these statements because the system is so fragile that if the public senses even the smallest problem it could derail the entire thing:

Let’s just look at the stock market… there’s no possible way at this time that these multiples can be justified with regard to what’s occurring here with the price action of the overall market… meanwhile, the market continues to rise.
…
Nothing is real. I can’t stress this enough… and we’re going to continue to see more fakery… and manipulation and twisting of this entire system…  We now exist in an environment where the financial system as a whole has been flipped upside down just to make it function… and that’s very scary.
…
We’ve never seen anything like this in the history of the world… The Federal Reserve has never been in a situation like this… we are completely in uncharted territory where the world’s central banks have gone negative interest rates… it’s all an illusion to keep the stock market booming.
…
Every single asset now… I don’t care what asset… you want to look at currency, debt, housing, metals, the stock market… pick an asset… there’s no price discovery mechanism behind it whatsoever… it’s all fake… it’s all being distorted.
…
The system is built upon on one premise and that is confidence that it will work… if that confidence is rattled the whole thing will implode… our policy makers are well aware of this… there is collusion between central banks and their respective governments… and it will not stop until it implodes… and what I mean by implode is, correct to fair value.

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What Whistleblowers Tell Us About Vaccine Safety and Effectiveness

mercola.com

In 2010, two Merck virologists filed a federal lawsuit under the False Claims Act against their former employer, alleging the vaccine maker lied about the effectiveness of their mumps vaccine (which is part of the trivalent measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine).

The whistleblowers, Stephen Krahling and Joan Wlochowski, claimed they witnessed "firsthand the improper testing and data falsification in which Merck engaged to artificially inflate the vaccine's efficacy findings."

They charged that Merck used improper testing techniques; manipulated testing methodology; abandoned undesirable test results; falsified test data; and failed to adequately investigate and report the diminished efficacy of its mumps vaccine.

They also claim Merck falsely verified that each manufacturing lot of mumps vaccine would be as effective as identified in the labeling; falsely certified the accuracy of applications filed with the FDA; falsely certified compliance with the terms of the CDC purchase contract; and mislabeled, misbranded and falsely certified its mumps vaccine, among other violations.

Merck allegedly falsified the data to hide the fact that the mumps vaccine in the MMR shot has significantly declined in effectiveness.¹ 

By artificially inflating the mumps vaccine efficacy, Merck was able to continue selling MMR vaccine in the US and maintain its monopoly over the mumps vaccine market in the US and other nations that purchase Merck's MMR vaccine.

This is the main point of contention of a second class-action lawsuit, filed by Chatom Primary Care² in 2012.

US District Court Judge C. Darnell Jones has now given both of these lawsuits the green light to proceed.^{3, 4} 

Also noteworthy is the fact that the Department of Justice (DOJ) has gone on record disputing Merck's apparently false assertions that DOJ previously investigated the issue and declined to join in the lawsuit because it found no wrongdoing by Merck. 

Court Documents by Department of Justice Contradict Merck Statements

The Wall Street Journal⁵ initially published the following statement received from a Merck spokeswoman:

"This lawsuit is completely without merit. Merck has presented information that demonstrated to the US Department of Justice that these allegations are factually false, and after the department conducted its own two-year investigation, it decided not to pursue this lawsuit.
In addition, the FDA previously examined the issues raised in the lawsuit, and they were resolved to the agency's satisfaction. Merck intends to vigorously defend against the litigation filed by the plaintiff."

However, court documents filed by DOJ appear to refute Merck's insinuations that DOJ has already made a final determination in this case and sided with Merck. Kellie Lerner, a representative for vaccine purchasers, sent the Wall Street Journal the following statement:

"Contrary to Merck's assertions, the Department of Justice has submitted documents to the court affirming its 'strong interest in the outcome' of the case, and clarifying that its decision not to intervene 'should not be interpreted as a comment on the merits.'
More importantly, the government has preserved its right to intervene later in the proceedings. Based on the government's submissions to the court, we take issue with any assertion that the government has definitively concluded to not pursue this case." [Emphasis mine]

Does Faked Vaccine Efficacy Nullify Indemnification?

In order for a drug company producing and selling a in the U.S. to be indemnified from civil liability for vaccine damage, the vaccine must be licensed by the FDA as "pure" (safe) and "potent" (effective) and the CDC must have recommended the vaccine for universal use by children.

If in fact a drug company fakes or withholds information from the government about a vaccine's safety or effectiveness, does indemnification still apply? Likely not. And that could spell trouble for Merck.

This certainly isn't the first time vaccine effectiveness has been questioned. Even for vaccines that adhere to government standards for demonstrating effectiveness, while vaccine acquired "herd immunity" is thrown around like gospel, much of the protection vaccines offer has actually been shown to wane rather quickly. The fact is, vaccine-acquired immunity does NOT work the same way as the naturally-acquired immunity you get after recovering from the disease.

Besides that, a majority of the adult population never receives boosters, so most of the adult population is in effect "unvaccinated." This too puts a serious hole in the 85-95 percent requirement to achieve vaccine-acquired "herd immunity."

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CDC whistleblower confesses to MMR vaccine research fraud in historic public statement

RINF

CDC whistleblower William Thompson has now gone public with a statement posted on the website of the law firm representing him, Morgan Verkamp LLC. (See the full statement reprinted below.)

The statement opens with a blatant admission of scientific fraud at the CDC:

My name is William Thompson. I am a Senior Scientist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where I have worked since 1998. I regret that my coauthors and I omitted statistically significant information in our 2004 article published in the journal Pediatrics. The omitted data suggested that African American males who received the MMR vaccine before age 36 months were at increased risk for autism. Decisions were made regarding which findings to report after the data were collected, and I believe that the final study protocol was not followed.

The full letter is available at this link. In the letter, Dr. Thompson confirms the fact that he had multiple phone conversations with Brian Hooker and that the CDC has not been honest about the risks associated with MMR vaccines.

The letter then goes on to repeat the typical vaccine propaganda of our time: all vaccines are miracle medicine, the CDC is highly professional, there has been no retaliation against him and so on. Intelligent readers will of course take all these statements with a grain of salt, understanding just how much political and legal pressure has no doubt been exerted onto Dr. Thompson up to this point. 

The relevant portion of Dr. Thompson’s statement is contained in the first paragraph. It is an open admission of scientific fraud at the CDC, and the admission of this by William Thompson is an historic moment for our world.

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RBS fined £14.5m over mortgage selling

The Telegraph

Royal Bank of Scotland has been fined £14.5m by the City regulator for failing to ensure that advice given to mortgage customers was suitable.

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) said the £14,474,600 fine for RBS and the NatWest reflected "serious failings" in their advised mortgage sales business.

The firms failed to ensure that advice given to customers was suitable, according to the FCA. Two reviews of sales from 2012 found that in over half the cases the suitability of the advice was not clear from the file or call recording.

Customers were not advised properly over the affordability for them of mortgages or the appropriate term of products being offered. Others were given poor advice when looking to consolidate their debts.

Some bank advisers even offered their personal views on the possible future movement of interest rates. "This was highly inappropriate and may have resulted in the borrower being sold the wrong type of mortgage for them", said the FCA. 

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Bank of America agrees to $17bn fine over mortgage fraud - report

RT

America’s second largest lender has reached a $17 billion settlement with US federal authorities over selling bad mortgages, according to sources close to the negotiations.

The bank will pay out $10 billion in cash and $7 billion for consumer relief – such as modified home loans and refinanced mortgages, AP reports, citing officials close to the negotiations. The final verdict is due on Thursday.

The fine will be the largest single compensation settlement, beating out JPMorgan Chase & Co’s $13 billion penalty paid in November 2013. Citigroup, another major US bank, had to pay $7 billion in July.

In March, the bank was ordered to pay $9.5 billion to the Federal Housing Finance Agency to resolve similar associations. Since the financial crisis, the bank has been ordered to pay over $60 billion in fines, claims, and buying out mortgage bonds.

The deal requires the bank to admit it misled investors about the quality of mortgage loan sale prior to the housing crash, when banks lent out too much money to homeowners who eventually could not pay off their loans.

This eventually resulted in the collapse of the housing bubble and the beginning of the recession in late 2007. The banks defrauded investors about the condition of the loans, which led to billions in losses while millions of Americans lost their homes to foreclosure.

Three quarters of the loans in question came from Countrywide Financial, which Bank of America acquired in 2009, along with Merrill Lynch. In total, between 2004 and 2008, the groups sold more than $965 billion in bad loans.