UK Column News - 15th August 2025

Good afternoon. It's Friday the 15th of August 2025, just after 1:00 and welcome to UK Column News. I'm your host, Mike Robinson. Joining me by videolink today are journalists and peace campaigner Vanessa Bailey and journalist Mark Anderson. Today, I'm going to be covering more on the Online Safety Act in a moment. Will Coleshill. We'll have the latest from the

Pallona Shimrani inquest. Vanessa's going to be reporting on Iran and Syria and Lebanon. And Mark will be looking into, well, amongst other things, neuro warfare. But we're going to begin today with the Trump Putin meeting. Because today, today is the Today is the day Trump and Putin are to meet. Trump's just about to get on Air Force One, apparently to fly to Alaska. And while the hysteria only increases now, yesterday Zelensky came to London for hugs.

They're there, Vlad. It'll be OK, said Starmer. Apparently now at the time, Zelensky was doing at the at the same time, rather, he was doing all he could to make sure that

the war continues. And as Ashton Rutanzi here is reporting on X, Zelensky attacking Belgorod ahead of the Trump Putin summit to provoke Russia into massive retaliation and also making the point that they'd begun striking residential buildings inside Russia in an attempt to provoke a major retaliation before the Trump Putin summit.

So lots of that going on now. A couple of days ago, the Russian Embassy in London put out a statement and it said Russia has been and remains open to resolving the Ukrainian conflict through political and diplomatic means. At the same time, we must pursue A lasting and long term peace, which can only be achieved by eradicating the root causes of

the crisis. Against this background, we note the ongoing attempts by London and some of its partners to disrupt a peace resolution of the conflict by eliminating its root causes. And one of the root causes they identify. To finish that quote, one of the root causes they identify is Britain and rightly so.

And they're going to say in their statement, this is clearly demonstrated by the statements and activity developed by the British leadership in the run up to the Russian American summit in Alaska. This policy once again confirms the opportunistic approach of the European capitals which are hoping to further use Ukraine as an anti Russian battering ram. So, but let's come on to a comedy segment on today's news.

And because Britain has been pulling out all the stops to keep the war going, as the Russians hint at here, including sending the chief of the Defence staff, the vastly delusional Sir Tony Ratigan, to Washington to speak to the Centre for Strategic and International Studies. For those of you who haven't made it through one of my speeches before, he said, the gist is as follows.

We're in a more dangerous era, but Britain remains safe, NATO is stronger, Russia is weak, and the West has the military and economic and intellectual heft needed to buttress the global system. And, you know, the question is, what has he been smoking? Now I want to highlight four points he made in his speech and get Vanessa and Mark's thoughts on them. Maybe.

So. First, his claim that Britain has good reason to be confident in the quality of our own armed forces and intelligence services. He said in the strength of our defence construct and the path before us now is the right one. Second, he said NATO too should be confident in the enormous overmatch we enjoy in Russia's weakness and Putin, Putin's dilemma, and how that should embolden our strategy of deterrence.

Third, he said the return of statecraft, how our leaders prepared to use the military instrument alongside the other levers of national power to advance our collective interests. And the fourth point he made was a point on technology and the need to retain our advantage, especially with respect to artificial intelligence. So, Vanessa, maybe if I could invite a comment from you first, assuming you've stopped laughing at this point, what do you make of that? What's your nonsense?

It's utterly delusional. I don't really know what else to say. I mean, it's it's such hubris in the face of what has been happening since the start of a special military operation. I don't know. I don't know if they think they're going to defeat Russia with propaganda. That's about the best I can make of that. Yeah, I mean, it is. So it is so incredibly difficult now to comment on some of these things that these guys are saying because they're

completely off their heads. But you know, while Ratigan was deployed to wind up the US audience, former MI 6 head Sir Alex Younger was deployed to the Radio for Today programme yesterday to wind up the domestic audience. So let's just have a brief listen to what he had to say. I think we can isolate some facts nonetheless. The first is that Steve Witkoff, Trump's envoy, is out of his depth. He can talk, but he doesn't listen. He doesn't write stuff down.

He didn't take an interpreter. So this deal, this oven ready deal that he's presented, which apparently just requires Russian signature, is a total fantasy. And that relates to the second hard fact, which as I've seen absolutely nothing that indicates that Putin is in any way prepared to change course and resolve from his aim of total subjugation. So it's, it's hard to be optimistic, even though of course we desperately want a diplomatic solution.

The the risks are pretty high on the downside. And the key things we need from these talks are twofold, one, that Ukraine gets in the room, and two, that we double down on the pressure we're putting on Putin, which is working. We've been pretty hopeless our sort of vacillation and put solemnity actually in some ways encourage Putin. We've been living in La La land, but it's hard to overstate how different that feels now. And of course, we Europe has

been excluded. And that's a problem as as it is that Ukraine has been excluded. But I think they've organised to tremendous effect to add consequence to both Putin and Trump's actions. And I would go further. And this is a bold statement and and it's possibly overreaching, but I think we're getting to the point now where Europe can actually effectively substitute for the tremendous contribution

the US has made. And that, of course, assumes that Trump remains ready to sell weapons and to sustain the intelligence fee. So the question is, what's The upshot of all this nonsense rhetoric? Well, according to the Financial Times here The upshot is European Defence Union, Europe bills for war as arms factories expand at triple speed is their headline. Now Alex Younger may be saying that Europe needs United States to maintain arms supplies or or at least arms sales, but Europe

seems to be working. At least the FT is saying that work. Europe is working as hard as they can to minimise the reliance on the United States and to maximise the tax fair taxpayer funded profits which could be made from the war machine. To quote them a little bit here, Europe's weapons factories are expanding at three times the rate of peacetime, stretching over 7,000,000 square metres of new industrial development That represents rearmament on a historic scale.

They're going to say the data shows that Europe's long promised defence revival, driven by an injection of public subsidies is being is beginning to materialise not just in policy rhetoric or spending pledges, but also in concrete and steel. And Vanessa, the longer this progresses, the more I'm coming to the conclusion that this is simply a rerun of the COVID scam.

So you create an enemy that doesn't really exist, because make no mistake, at least in my opinion, Russia is not our enemy unless we unless we make it 1:00 and then use the fear generated to justify funnelling tax money into corporate interests, whether those are Big Pharma in one case or the big war machine in the other case. Do you think I'm wrong in that? No. Absolutely not.

I would actually say that COVID was a continuation of the previous war strategy because what has the West always done? It's created the the boogeyman, whether it's had Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gaddafi or President Assad of Syria, and then create the fear factor that somehow they're threatening national security in the EUUK or US since 911, of course. So I, I think really it's just a continuation of the same strategy that really took precedence after 911. OK. Well, thank you for that.

Now let's come to you and well, Patrick on Wednesday was talking

a little bit about the potential for the growing conflict in in Lebanon. But what's your thoughts on the

situation? Yeah, a lot of manoeuvring going on, of course, with Saudi Arabia and Israel partnering with Washington to try and disarm Hezbollah and other resistance factions, not only Shia Muslim but Christian Sunni Muslim resistance factions in Lebanon that have historically, of course, supported Palestine and opposed the expansionism of Israel. So first of all, let's have a look at what's been going on more recently. I know Pat alluded to this on Wednesday, a strategy of

surrender. Hezbollah condemns the Lebanese cabinet decision on disarmament, where basically they were saying that there should be a state monopoly on arms by the end of the year. But however, we're not putting any pressure on Israel to withdraw from the points that it continues to occupy in southern Lebanon. And of course, it continues, I think more than 4000 violations now of the alleged ceasefire that came into effect in November 2024. So this is quite interesting.

This was a poll that was carried out by the Lebanese Consultative Centre for Studies and Documentation carried out between the 27th of July and the 4th of August amongst 600 individuals from all different sects in Lebanon and it came up with the results that the majority of Lebanese oppose Hezbollah disarmament. This is in more depth. Majority of the citizens opposed to disarmament of Hezbollah

without guaranteed National Defence strategy. 71.7% believe that the Lebanese Armed Forces or the army is not capable of confronting Israeli attacks alone, which is absolutely correct. 76% believe that diplomatic relations will not deter Israel and 58% are against disarmament with no alternative

strategy. They then raise the question of the threat from the Takfiri forces of the so called new Syria President Abu Mohammad Al Jalani or Ahmed Al Shahra as he's known now in the West. So this was the result on the questions raised regarding the threat from Syria. 73% see events in Syria as an existential threat to Lebanon. 74% believe Syria threatens security and stability in Lebanon. 68% fear that they could pave the way for a war by armed groups against in Syria, against Lebanon.

And of course, this is very much in line with what I've been talking about the the invasion of the north or the infiltration of the north of Lebanon by the Takfiri elements from inside Syria. Now I just want to run this video. This was a video filmed on the 10th of August. So a few days ago now, there was a a tragedy that hit the Lebanese armed forces. Six soldiers died when Hezbollah had actually taken them to an A Hezbollah arms depot for them to dismantle it.

What is interesting is here you see the Lebanese flag and you see the Hezbollah resistance flag being flown alongside one another. What is very important for people to understand is that the Lebanese Armed Forces, for example, a family in the South, one of their sons might go into the army and the other might join Hezbollah, just to give you an indication of how intertwined the army, the people and the

resistance basically are. And what is interesting, sorry, just quickly about that story, no need to go back, is that Israel actually warned the UNIFEL, the UN forces or, or peacekeeping units not to go with the Lebanese army, which is very unusual. And there were Israeli drones overhead during the time that the army were investigating or dismantling the Hezbollah weapons.

So speculation here is that Israel had something to do with the attack in order to try and cause division between the army and Hezbollah. Now I think this is important. I want to look at the options for Lebanon. I know touched on them, but I think in a little bit more detail. So if we have a look at how I've divided it down. So first of all, there is potential of course for war in Lebanon against Israel that has really only similar to some kind of low intensity.

Then of course there's the potential for the civil war that is being created by particularly Saudi Arabia, but of course in partnership with Israel and Washington. But I think more importantly the intention is to actually destroy the Lebanese Armed Forces or their capability to be a serious Defence Force in the future to manufacture cetarian divide

within the army itself. Because fifty 5055% of the LAF are Shia Muslim and forcing really the Lebanese army to become nothing more than an internal security force very poorly weaponized by the US that sponsors them. And of course, then if that were to happen, the civil war scenario, Geelani would potentially exploit the vacuum created to, in inverted commas, protect the Sunni factions in Lebanon from any of the civil war fallout. And that, of course, would include invasion by his own

forces. Now for Hezbollah, the options are that they can negotiate that potentially they become a defensive force under the control of the government and the army, which is very similar to what happened in Iraq. And Barrack is basically saying, Tom Barrack, the the US envoy, what he's effectively saying to the Lebanese people, of course, is that we want you to die for Israel.

That is being very clearly understood by the majority of people in Lebanon. And again, the latest statement from Tom Barrack, the US will fully equip the Lebanese Armed Forces to help them implement the decision to withdraw weapons. I urge you to freeze that and read it again to understand how utterly ridiculous that is.

And finally we have a video from someone that I think everyone knows, journalist Madawa Osman, who's speaking from her perspective, giving a message to the Lebanese people. A great sin that serves Zionist Israel's interests. This is not an exaggeration. It is an accurate reading of the government acting under external DIC tats and at the expense of Lebanon's security. Listen closely.

A parliamentary paper or a cabinet mammal cannot dismantle A resistance that is woven into the fabric of our society. Nor can it erase the memory of daily raids and air strikes that have killed and displaced our people. Pro resistance voices across Lebanon from the South to the Bakar to Beirut have mobilised in the streets and ministers aligned with resistance factions walked out in a protest during the cabinet session. The ground reality is simple.

Legitimacy does not come from decrees, it comes from protecting the people. So what will the resistance do? Expect a sustained campaign of political delegitimization, mass protests, parliamentary pressure, diplomatic appeals to regional partners and a complete effort to obstruct any implementation that hands our weapons to foreign designs. This is a fight for Lebanon survival. I think she said it very clearly there. Yeah. Thank you, Vanessa.

Thank you very much for that. Now, let me welcome Mark to the programme. Mark, what is neuro warfare?

Let's ask that question to begin with. Well Mike, first of all, let me mention that I was listening to some of the Red Pill conference, the one that recently happened in Tulsa and there was 1 presentation that mentioned the Five Brains initiative. And what what happened was I started digging into the rabbit hole and I revived my thetruthhound.com blog which has been kind of dormant for a while and I came up with this article and this will help answer your

question. NATO linked fictional, so called fictional war strategy scenario. This is the headline. Sees the human mind, the human mind as the ultimate domain to conquer. I'm moving on from there. I'm just referencing the article here a little bit. An independent French institute, among others that have done these studies has produced a war game scenario that sees the human mind itself as the next and perhaps most important

domain to conquer and occupy. I might add a particular study put together by Herve Lee Gerdier, A researcher for the National Higher School of Cognitive Science in Bordeaux, France. He put his essay together initially issued about five years ago, but it describes what it calls a largely fictitious scenario and policy goals, envisioning a time frame from 2018 to 2040. So it's looking at all these extrapolations, and the disturbing theme is the weaponization of neurosciences.

And we'll continue here. This is a picture of the researcher, Mr. Lee Godier. I hope I'm saying his name, right? And that's of course, the title page to his study, Weaponization of Neurosciences. And again, this particular study, he puts it in a quasi fictional framework, saying some of this is real, but a lot of it is just, you know, hypothetical and things like that.

Anyway, as I note in this slide, they also envision a summit, 2026 NATO summit transcending to traditional realms of land, sea and air, cyberspace, outer space. We now have the human mind as that 6th domain. And all of this study and all of the think tank activity will culminate in a, for now, fictional NATO summit that may take place July 17th, 2020, sixth in Brussels, Belgium.

And the report suggest that is Mr Liguerdiere's report, or essay they call it. It suggests that the summit will be entitled The Human Mind, the 6th Domain of Operation. And just for clarity, we'll show this slide, if, if you will, what are those six domains, Air, land, sea, cyberspace, space, and finally the human Mind. And now to get into the mechanics of a little of this a little more or, or some of the

issues surrounding it as well. The Five Brains initiative, we've all heard of the Five Eyes Intel Alliance, that's Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US Well, now all this talk, some of it hypothetical, some of it not, is the Five Brains initiative. It kind of parallels the Five Eyes, although it's a little different in terms of its make up five brains would be France, Germany, Japan, Norway and the US. But apparently that initiative

is becoming a reality. And in the executive summary of that French report, it says while while it has been said that everything can be weaponized, neurosciences and more broadly speaking NBIC or nanotechnology, biotechnology, info technology and cognitive sciences are clearly providing state and non state actors with some true name changers. That's the executive summary of that French report and some other things. And this is where it gets really

interesting. On pages four and five of that report, one of the eight scientific objectives of neuroscience weaponization research is to recognise fake news or fake news recognition. That's on pages four and five. Page 5, it notes the risks that social media may pose to Liberal Democratic systems and that social media gives users the power to spread and receive what is called contaminated

information. And on page 9 of that report by the French researcher, it asked the question, what would trigger article five, among other things, adversaries such as fake news, factories prompting aid, anti NATO activities.

And what's really jumping out at me, Mike, on this before we look at a few more slides, is that as they move the chess pieces, as they move this stuff from hypothetical and futuristic research and scooted into the realm of reality, they get closer and closer to defining alternative news as a element of

enemy tactics. So it's not really all that far off if you extrapolate this a little bit, where alternative news that doesn't go along with the conventional narrative, especially if it were to affect something going on in a war significantly enough, then that news could be defined as an element of an enemy of enemy attack because you're cognitively changing the viewpoints of the population.

So in other words, the question becomes at what point do alternative news outlets become defined as enemy combatants? And that's a pretty chilling thing to consider. Now we'll we'll move forward here a little more. Is it really so fictional? This next slide asked that question, not so fictional question. Here's another study. Cognitive warfare.

In 2024, NATO's Allied Command Transformation, and This Is Real was tasked with developing A comprehensive cognitive war concept to be finalised in late 2024. So there's some reality to this and the next slide goes on to explain a little more and the the source of this is The Three Swords, a magazine by a specialised native warfare

centre in its infancy. This article claims to raise awareness of a new NATO concept that's supposedly in its infancy but will have a major impact on individuals, groups, societies and the way future wars are fought. So this is an interesting evolving thing to be sure. One of the main goals is to break social cohesion. This also comes from that report that I just showed that is showing this to be a more real, real concept.

Cognitive warfare, it says, is a structured approach to target the cognition of individuals, groups and societies to affect their decision making processes and ultimately their behaviour. It would mean propaganda. It would mean using AI more heavily, things like that. While cognitive effects are not typically measurable, they do affect how we think, feel and act. Using brain centred technologies that aim to destabilise structures, create distrust.

And I put emphasis on this and fracture and break social cohesion. And what's really interesting in my opinion before we look at this last slide is that if you think about television, if you think about even things in academia, especially television, elements of cognitive warfare have been going on for a very long time because the mass media cartel, the conventional news system, it does seek to break social cohesion. Look at BBC's field operations that you and Brian have talked about.

It undermines the culture, it undermines society. So NATO is talking about this through its allied command transformation. They're talking about it as if all of this might come from China or Russia, and the democratic societies that NATO seeks to protect would be on the receiving end of this. That's largely what the discussion is about. But we all know that the best offence is a good or the best defence is a good offence rather, and therefore NATO is going to practise the very

things that it condemns. They're going to use cognitive warfare. In fact, they already are against who they perceive to be the enemy, just as if they just as they say, China and Russia will use it against Western nations and NATO nations. Lastly, adding even more reality to this, let's show this last slide.

The National Library of Medicine under the US National Institutes of Health is talking about this as as it's becoming much more of a reality and its applicability to political science.

The headline of this study from the Frontiers and big data being Cognitive warfare, a conceptual analysis of the NATO Allied Command transformation cognitive warfare exploratory concept published just last November. And so it's fast becoming a reality, even though parts of it are hypothetical for now, but they're really trying to be omnipresent, you might say omniscient in terms of monitoring people, surveilling people and looking at undermining entire societies and

actually backing away from kinetic warfare. That's what I'm hearing. There'd be less bombs and missiles and more challenging the the the thinking and the societal structure of the so called enemy. So it's a it's a long term issue. I wanted to get it out today, Mike. Naturally, I'll return to this sometime at times and probably do an article on it as well. So back to you.

Thank you, Mark. And what I would say to this is we need to talk about this an extra, but I would just make the suggestion that in fact, this is this type of these types of reports suggesting that this type of warfare is somehow something theoretical are there and are promoted in order to pursue the idea in people's minds that they are still

theoretical. I think if we look at what happened during COVID, if we look at the deployment of the of the behavioural insights team and, and their types of operations, this is cognitive warfare that we are experiencing. We are experiencing that every day of our lives at the moment. And NATO can busy accuse, can be busy accusing Russia and China of this and of doing this on our population. NATO is doing this on its own population. And I think that is absolutely

demonstrable. We'll talk about more a little bit more about that in extra now.

Let's move on then, to Will Colesel and his latest report on the Paloma Shamrani inquest. Hello, this is Will Coles with Reporting for UK column on what I believe is now the 8th day of the Paloma Shamarani inquest. Here at Kent and Medway Coroner's Court today we've seen a huge amount of evidence with three days of testimony this week. This is a case still getting widespread mainstream media attention and I remain the only independent journalist down here

covering the case. In all, this case breaks down to three main questions, on most of which the coroner is likely to find A of course, the final calls of Paloma Shamarani's

death. B whether Paloma had competence to make her own decisions and choose alternative therapies, which has been centre of much of the mainstream media framing of the narrative, and the accusation of Paloma's brother that their mother killed Paloma. And finally, see what led Paloma to go down the route of alternative therapy and whether her treatment at the Mainstone Hospital under Doctor Mohan was what pushed her in that direction.

I've also spoken to Simone Platt, who despite being denied her testimony in court, has been down here observing every day and who Paloma called Auntie and saw at least every week roughly until her death. In terms of the final cause of Paloma's death, it's looking ever more likely that the coroner will rule in favour of the media Stein or Mass, leading to a blockage of the Airways. We've seen accusations that adrenaline help to spur on her death.

However, the paramedics and also the air ambulance doctor testifying today made very clear that they did not believe that adrenaline was the cause of death and seemed entirely united in their approach. Despite Katie Morani putting forth evidence of pink frothing at the mouth, which she says is in line with an overdose of adrenaline.

Much has also been made of the U12 plus dose of adrenaline given to Paloma despite a very slight weight and the fact that this dose is uniform for all ages and the body weights over 12 years old. In terms of competence, we had a shocking revelation yesterday from the coroner who said during a very fractious moment, I have no doubt for the evidence that I've heard the Paloma high capacity and I believe that I will be finding that in due course.

We've seen overwhelming evidence in favour of Paloma's competence, whether her written statements, whether the testimony of I believe 4 doctors now in the court and also the testimony of family members. I spoke to Simone Platt on this matter. Loma and I, during that period of her illness, became very, very close. She called me auntie and she confided in me and we became very, very close. And so was she competent to make her own decisions by your own estimation?

Absolutely. She would research, look into things, She would look at books, she would look in Internet, she'd look at research papers, she'd look at all sorts of things and did a great deal of research into her, her illness, her diagnosis, tests she was going to have what her blood tests and other tests meant. She was really on the ball. From this it seems almost certain that the narrative of the mainstream media has been debunked. The question at the centre of this mainstream media storm

seems to have been answered. In fact, it seems to have been answered so strongly that the coroner has pre announced her decision. Despite this, mainstream media interest is continuing and mainstream media organisations including the BBC, ITV and PA Media have pushed for different evidence in the case to be released to the public. Now the two pieces of evidence that were considered as a final

decision today. The final rulings were the 999 call where Paloma had collapsed and Keisha Morani was on the phone to the ambulance crew and a thoroughly, thoroughly distressing piece of evidence which I heard in court the other day. And also the voice note between Keisha Morani and the ex boyfriend or boyfriend at the time and a Harris when Paloma was first ill in December 2023.

In terms of the 999 call, the coroner ruled that due to the right to privacy and the distressing and intimate nature of the call that it should not be given out to the press and should not be given out to the public. I've heard this call myself and it is deeply, deeply disturbing. I saw at least one member in the of the court weeping. In terms of voice note from December 2023 with Kate Shimrani instructing the then boyfriend and the Harris to bring Paloma

to her house. I don't believe this is going to be of significant note, but I believe the mainstream media will still try and capitalise on this.

The final point on which we have not touched is how Paloma came to her decision despite her competence and whether Paloma was pushed into making a decision because of her treatment at the Maidstone Hospital where there seems to be significant evidence to show that she was given treatment without her consent, both from her testimonies and that of her mother and also other family members and friends.

Keisha Marani has also alleged that one of the drugs given rispirocates is not licenced to be used as a stand alone treatment, meaning Paloma should have consented to chemotherapy before this drug was given. In particular, we returned to Doctor Mohan, who I covered on the first day of the hearing and who left the country seemingly the next day. I think it made a massive difference.

She initially wanted to go home and think about it, but when she became incredibly ill literally within days of well, within hours of, of reaching home after her leaving hospital and then all sorts of things going wrong in terms of, you know, hair falling out, her feeling really unwell, vomiting, really, really unwell. Yet she'd been well enough to fly to Sweden and back from Sweden just days earlier, before she'd been to Maidstone Hospital.

She knew that drugs she'd been given had been misdescribed. I mean, there was a particular thing about a giving set. This is one of these bags with saline in, and there was a label on it and she'd been told it was saline flush. And it turned out it had a label on it, had a drug, a medicine in it that she hadn't been told about. So she became very, very suspicious and nervous of that hospital and didn't want to go back there.

There are questions to be asked about the conduct, informed consent and the NHS and it will be interesting to see whether the coroner eventually rules on those. We have one further date for court which is the 27th of August and we now have a provisional date for a ruling the 3rd of September. Remain peeled. We'll continue covering this is will Cultural reporting for UK column. So thanks very much to Will for that and we will keep you posted as things develop.

OK, now, if you like what the UK column does, if you'd like to support us, uh, please have a look at the front page of the website. There's tonnes of new content going on there every day. Uh, but if you look over here on the right hand side, it takes you to a page which shows you how you can support us. We do need your continued support. Thank you very much to everybody that is, please do that. But if you can't support us financially, then please do share our material as widely as

you possibly can. Now, as we've mentioned, UK column next on location event is Saturday, the 18th of October in New York. Andrew Wakefield is going to be one of the main speakers at that and we're going to be announcing more speakers next week. And of course, if you do pick up a ticket for this or for the live stream and live stream tickets are available now as well, That does give you access to Andrew Wakefield's film Protocol 7.

So please do pick up those tickets as soon as you can because there are not many left tonight at 7:00 PM. Charles and I are speaking to Germ as we usually do on a Friday. So that's at 7:00. Please have a look for that. We're looking at Empire in particular. And Sandy's interview with, with, with Peter Taylor has went out yesterday at 1:00 PM. That's on the UK column website. Now if you haven't seen that, Vanessa, very briefly, we're you've been writing extensively

over the last few weeks. We're creating a new section on the website called Syria Centric Regional Analysis. Just very briefly, any thoughts on that? Yeah, we're just going to bring together a number of regional analysts and myself included, and we'll be bringing analysis not only from Syria, but very much with Syria as the hub radiating out into the entire West Asia region. OK, super. Thank you for that. Now let's move on to online safety.

We've been talking about that extensively over the last few weeks, over the last few years, but particularly in the last few weeks as the regime begins to roll out.

And well, I just want to draw your attention to the Open Rights Group which has published a page entitled Blocked, which lists websites which have either shut down or have been Geo blocked or have imposed age restrictions as a result of the Online Safety Act. Now some of these sites won't be missed by some people because they're not that interesting, but that's neither here nor there. Many of the sites on here will be missed by people. It should be noted that these are all user reported.

And so there may be a few which you know where it says it's blocked, but which you may not find. You may not find a block in place because maybe your IP address isn't recognised as auk address for various reasons, but nonetheless they are sites that many have reported. And if we just run through this, little gives you an idea of how many sites that are being discussed here already and you

know lots of them. Now this is developing page and of course this is exactly the effect that the UK regime wants

to see. And what I would say is that following on from Wikipedia's attempt to deal with its own problems with the legislation that I was talking about on Wednesday's news programme, quite a number of people are calling on Wikipedia to effectively join the list of people that are Geo blocking Wikipedia and go dark in the United Kingdom. I think the problem is that I don't think Wikipedia is trying to take any action which would undermine the ACT in the way that it took its legal action.

It's not in any way against the Act in principle. I think it just wants to make sure that it is OK. So I think that sadly it's unlikely that they would take that action. But frankly, if they did take it, that would of course massively raise the general awareness of the situation in the population.

Now at at the back of this, of course, is at the back of this is the fact that this is just the first of the Online Safety Acts provisions to be implemented and that's age verification, otherwise known as digital ID. And Cory Doctorow here offers an excellent overview of the situation. Now the link, as with all the links will be in the show notes. He takes apart the Starmer regime's claim that it's possible to do age verification and at the same time to maintain individual privacy.

And remember that this current regime sees platforms using quite a number of different, so called age assurance providers, meaning that individuals wanting to use platforms are going to have to send their personal data to an ever widening range of companies. We're sharing that with, well, with whom? Because we don't actually know.

And Doctor O concludes that to quote them a little bit here, age verification is an impossibility and an impossibly terrible idea with an impossibly vast array of consequences for privacy and the open web. Now as the. Electronic Frontier Foundation, or EFF, wrote in June following a court hearing in the United States or a court ruling that no person, adult or child, has a First Amendment right to access speech that is obscene to minors without first submitting proof

of age. They went on to say that a person who submits identifying information online can never be sure if websites will keep that information or how that information will be used or disclosed. This leaves users highly vulnerable to data breaches and other security harms. So the question is what's going on here? And state this once again, this has got nothing to do with protecting children. It's about two things, censorship and intelligence

gathering. The censorship aspect we're all familiar with and we should be familiar with the use of social media for intelligence gathering as well. But of course that's hard if people are able to use social media relatively anonymously. It's hard to to use social media as as an intelligence gathering operation while we're able to use it anonymously. That is.

So nonetheless, we should be fully aware by now of the scale of the state spying operation here in the UK, but for anybody in the in other countries in the EU or the US, they're not too far behind. So this is just one aspect of the digital prison we're now accepting as a matter of

convenience. Now, let's just mention Karen Bradley here and this letter to her from Diane Johnson, who's the Minister of State for Policing and Crime Prevention, who said in here that and that Karen Bradley had asked about current plans to build police capability for using social media intelligence at force and national levels.

And the fact that they were carefully considering recommendations made and that they were talking about as they're in fact building a national Internet intelligence investigations team as part of the National Police Coordination Centre. So this is just another example of the type of infrastructure that's been built to spy on us. But of course, the key thing here is they want to be able to identify individuals that they're spying on.

Now, in related news, we we're all pleased, we're pleased to let you know that I'm sure you're excited about it, that AI is going to be used to help catch, help the police catch criminals. So the British regime is rolling out this next stage of its pre crime infrastructure because criminals hell bent on making others lives a misery they say face being stopped before they can strike through the cutting edge mapping technology supported by a that AI.

That's according to Peter Kyle. The press release says that innovators have been tasked with developing A detailed, real time and interactive crime map that spans England and Wales and can detect, tract and depict and predict where a devastating knife crime is likely to occur or spot early warning signs of antisocial behaviour before it spirals out of control, giving police the Intel they need to step in and keep the public

safe. They say that it will be rooted in advanced AI that will examine how to bring together data shared between police, councils and social services, including criminal records, previous incident locations and behavioural patterns of known offenders.

And they're, they've announced they're going to set up something called the Concentrations of Crime Data Challenge, which will set a quotes clear and measurable target corporate, corporate and university teams as part of this regime's £500 million research and development missions accelerator programme. So they're going to, so the question is, how are they going to do this? Well, they're going to build more data centres, of course.

And but don't worry because as Charles reported on Wednesday, we can offset the water wasted cooling these data centres and our data prison by deleting a few emails. So there we go. If you remember what it said here, delete all the emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems.

And then finally, on this topic then there's been much fanfare across mainstream media that sorry that pornography websites have been seeing viewing figures fall significantly since the age verification regime came into force. Now of course, that fact itself is unverified. The data seems to be coming from a third party and doesn't seem to take into account the massive growth in VPN usage which has happened in parallel since this regime has been rolled out.

So traffic appearing to come from the UK may appear to have fallen, it undoubtedly has. But traffic to these sites, The question is, has it fallen across the board? I think probably not. The people who use websites such as this will not stop using them. They're going to find another way. And VPNs, of course, is the most obvious choice. So anyway, we'll leave that topic there for now and go back to international news. And Vanessa, what's been going

on with Iran? Yeah, interesting developments. Of course. We saw at the end of Marwa's video that she said that one of the tactics of the resistance factions in Lebanon would be to reach out to their allies in the

region. And I just wanted to include this article written by a new writer for UK column very much from the region, Ibrahim Majid, who's writing about on on a bi weekly basis on the situation in the region, talking about the regional disarmament of any forces, whether resistance or actual military that may present a threat to Israel now or in the

next century basically. So there is a concerted effort by Israel to wipe out any potential threat to the security of Israel during its expansionist programme. So basically what we've seen is the Iran security chief has been visiting both Iraq and Lebanon. He was in Baghdad for talks on the next phase of the resistance axis. And this is because there are moves by Washington and Israel also to disarm what is perceived to be the resistance factions in

Iraq itself. Nor Al Maliki, the former Prime Minister of Iraq, put out a very strong statement saying that we agreed in the meeting with Lajarani that Iran and Iraq would refuse to disarm Hezbollah, all the Popular Mobilisation forces in Iraq. Of course the PMF does come under the governance of the Iraqi military. He also said had it not been for the PMF, of course, the Americans would would have swallowed Iraq.

And the same could be sad if Hezbollah is eradicated in Lebanon. Now in Lebanon as a result of some of the statements from the Iranian foreign minister and other diplomats, members of the opposition to the resistance.

In other words, those that are aligned with Israel, like Jamail demands the expulsion of the Iranian ambassador, says Tehran's guardianship is over, which is kind of extraordinary as they're accepting diktats from Israel, Washington and Saudi Arabia. So there's a little bit of hypocrisy, to put it mildly there. And then let's say what Ali Lejrani said, the new security chief from Iran, when he was in Lebanon, he was diplomatically

very blunt. So he said Lebanon should be strong and independent, not take orders from across the oceans. Those who interfere in Lebanon's affairs are imposing plans and deadlines. And he's absolutely correct on this because the deadlines for the resistance disarmament is, of course, coming from Israel and Washington, not necessarily

from the Lebanese government. He also went on to say in coordination with President Allen of Lebanon, Iran wishes to strengthen its relations with the Lebanese state and people at all levels. So he's making a very clear point here. I commend President Allen. Sorry, I misspelt that or it was spell checked wrongly for reinforcing national unity and unifying ranks within all Lebanese sects. So while this is a very diplomatic message, I think it's it's palpably clear.

And the head of Hezbollah has also made a very clear statement yesterday on the fact that Hezbollah will resist disarmament with with everything they possibly can.

Sorry, just another mention of Syria centric regional analysis, which is going to be a new section on UK column covering analysis on the region and focusing very much on on the whole of West Asia. But I wanted to today look at what's been going on in Syria. There's a recent article that was published yesterday at UK column by myself. Syria prey to the globalist Kabal and crony capitalist Al

Qaeda regime. Effectively what we're seeing now in Syria is very much what happened in Iraq and of course elsewhere. It's standard procedure after USUK LED disintegration of a country and and destruction of its sovereignty. We're seeing crony capitalism come to the fore. They supply or or what we've been seeing since May through July and August are the creations of memorandums of understandings with companies that I demonstrate in the article to be very shady.

Many of them front companies or shell companies without the financial wherewithal to actually follow through on the

pledges. So of course, what we're actually seeing is the attempt to bring money in through corruption and crony capitalism in Syria, which is going to line the pockets of Washington, their elected regime, which at the moment is the Al Qaeda corrupt regime that has for years been syphoning off both gold and finances and wealth from inside Syria, even when it only contained or or controlled Idlib. Now, of course, it's being done on a much larger scale. So I just want to go into some

depth. It's all in the article. People can go and read that. But just some examples from what has been going on, the companies involved. So if I could just have the slide after this one, if possible. These are a couple of the companies. So the memorandums of understandings and some of the dodgier companies that were involved. So from the UAE, 2 billion apparently has been invested in the Damascus metro 26.5

kilometres 17 stations. One wonders why right now that people have no electricity, no water, Are they being expected to celebrate the the creation of an underground metro? Jordan 17,000,000 for a luxury hotel complex in Deir Ezzor. Aleppo 25,000,000 for a commercial complex. Ubarco, a company from Italy that has pledged 2.5 billion for Damascus Towers project and Polydeath recycling and

sustainability project. Now just leave that on the screen for a second, if you can, Mike, because I particularly wanted to point out, so the Damascus Towers project, which is the 2.5 billion. So that's 20,000 apartments, 25 floors each, 60 towers. Now the company Ubacco, which is based in Italy, was founded in April 2022 with a capital of €16,000 and an annual revenue of 209,000. So clearly not capable of fulfilling that pledge.

And then if we look at Polydeath 2021, it was a hardware company which was dissolved 2 years ago in on the 25th of July re established itself claiming to be specialised in aviation.

Now all of these companies are of course going to need external financing, which is where this familiar money laundering is going to come in. And I wanted to mention at the same time that while all of this is going on, this grotesque spectacle that Jolani and Tom Barrack are providing for the Syrian people, of course, yesterday I met with refugees from Sweda. Again. I've written extensively about that for UK column and reported on it, The massacre led by Jolani's HTS forces and his

tribal faction proxies. I met with a number of refugees, Venezuelan Druze that have been effectively evacuated by the Venezuela embassy here, brought to Lebanon. And so while Jolani, Tombaric, Washington, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey are providing this absolutely fraudulent spectacle of some kind of investment into a a dying sovereign Syria that is going to be debt enslaved, the stories I heard of Jolani's forces were horrific and reminiscent, of course, those

that I heard back in 20/12/2013. For example, children were seen to be carried out of their houses, including babies. They prepared boiling water. The children were murdered by putting them into boiling water. Children were slaughtered in front of their parents if the parents didn't have the money to pay HTS. Women were abducted or raped on the spot and then murdered. The desecration of properties, of tombs, of shrines, of entire villages that were razed to the

ground. So while all of this is ongoing, this this unbelievable theatre of bloodshed is being conducted by by Washington and the UK. We can't forget that the MI 6 linked operatives are in the presidential palace grooming Jolani's administration to to change their image for for the public. Meanwhile, the bloodshed continues in Syria. People have no money. They're living through the most desperate poverty that they've ever seen, and corruption now is within a shadow state.

There is no accountability whatsoever for Jolani's regime. And of course they're syphoning out the wealth because they know that they're not going to be permanent. So Syria is effectively being raped and pillaged on every single level. Vanessa, I can't say thank you for that report because that was quite harrowing in in many ways. But you know that I just want to, I just like to address something that was being said in the chat box there while you

were speaking. And that was that somebody was saying, well, this is international news. This is not British. It's the UK column. Why aren't you covering more British stuff? And, and my point, Vanessa, is I'd be interested in your thoughts on this. This is British news because these are puppets of the British regime and therefore this is our responsibility in my opinion, and I just wanted to get your

thoughts on that. I find it rather just depressing that someone from Britain is saying, well, this isn't British news when the British regime is responsible for what is now happening in the region and has been responsible for more than a

century. So I think we need to wake up to the fact that our regime in Britain is utterly responsible for the bloodshed that is now happening and that bloodshed is not going to be contained in Syria because the British are sponsoring the Tak fairy elements that are conducting these atrocious These are trustees against the Syrian people. And where are these Tak fairies going to go in the end? Where are they going to go? They're going to come back to the UK, to the EU, to the US and

you'll be facing them. So it is a British problem. Yes, yes, I mean, I don't think it was a suggestion that that it wasn't. Well, anyway, we'll talk about more in extra because because that that is a really it is a really interesting and important point to make. So, you know, thanks to thanks for the comment because it's going to start an interesting conversation. Let me let's let's finish off today. Coming back to Mark then and Mark some health related news.

Absolutely. Mike, if I may make a suggestion, we can show one of the two videos now and the other one an extra, unless you want to do differently. But this first slide that I got here is from a kind of centrist political organisation called Veer in We're in Switzerland. The headline is from their website interview unnoticed by the public, but it's getting more protest. Switzerland is operating the only who WHO bio laboratory.

And I think from there we can go with the first primary video that explains the basis of this and what people are protesting. It has to do with the space laboratory and people's perceptions of what they're doing there. So let's show that first video if we can do that. A lab leak in Switzerland will be a major problem not just here in Switzerland but around the world.

The Biohub PSL lab for earring Spiets Canton Byrne is being facilitated as a dual used gain of function facility for the World Health Organisation and there is no oversight by the Swiss government. Who has the oversight? Who knows what's going on up there? They don't have any transparency, so people are awakening and they want to know what's going on in their lab. My name is Christian Osh. I'm the president of the Swiss association Veer. I grow up here in the hills and

the Bernie's overland. We're not out of touch. We're really connected to nature and that makes us realise how much freedom really means to us. And we do everything possible to maintain our freedom, our sovereignty and especially our neutrality of Switzerland. The Swiss government is now allowing bio weapons on Swiss soil.

And when more people find out the beautiful Swiss country, the Swiss flag, the Swiss chocolate, the Swiss cheese, it's extremely naive because Switzerland has been occupied. It acts like the operation centre for a lot of their wrongdoings worldwide. And it is the Swiss Federal Council that is responsible for what's happening here in Switzerland, with obviously the diplomatic immunity for all these organisations that are causing a lot of havoc right now. I would say it's evil.

And the Swiss government needs to stop the allowance for this to continue on here in Switzerland. I believe that we need to revoke diplomatic immunity for the World Health Organisation and we need to invoke the spirit of the Swiss people for sovereignty, neutrality and freedom. Very interesting. Of course, it's worth noting, Mike, that there are different schools of thought and gain of function. Some consider viruses to be inert, just chaff, biological chaff, you might say.

Others question the very existence of viruses. And say bacterial agents are more of a threat. At any rate, there's considerable concern among the Swiss people. The other video has to do with what Telsey Gabbard has to say about the broader health situation with regards to some of this.

And I think I can basically conclude today and we can carry on into extra a little if we can, but let's remind ourselves too that and we can show the slide if you'd like, Mike, that exercise Pegasus is getting pretty imminent here, a tier one exercise to take place between September and November this year. One thing that's mentioned in this slide that I didn't mention three weeks ago when I first reported on Exercise Pegasus and will it mirror exercise

sickness? I believe that was before for the COVID pandemic. There's a local resilience forum, several local resilience forums, and I believe the next slide after this mentions that and the resilience forums, the listing, and we can put this in the show notes. The listing provides lots of email addresses and the resilience forums are made up of local authorities, emergency services, local public services, the Environment Agency.

So it provides a lot of contacts and email addresses at this website, auk government website that would enable concerned citizens who watch UK column to contact these people and get involved and ask lots of questions. That's the most important thing at this point. And we can talk later about a special designation that the UK got from The Who that facilitates exercise Pegasus in

my opinion and related matters. But at any rate, Mike, Mark maybe go. Ahead, go ahead and mention this because I think this is important. So go ahead and tell us a little bit more about this. Yeah, this just came up. On August 7th, The Who officially designated not only Health Canada and not only a ministry in Japan Health, Labour and Welfare, but also the UK's Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory agency, or

MHRA, as WHO listed authorities. WL as World Health Organisation listed Authorities, a status granted to national authorities that meet the highest international regulatory standards for medical products. With these latest designations, The Who expands the growing list of these WL as now involving 39 agencies across the world supporting faster and broader access to quality assured medical products, particularly in low and middle income countries.

What that really means is they want to make sure that any country, rich or poor, especially poorer ones, are markets for vaccines and mRNA technology, mRNA injections, which goes along with what James Roguski has been saying, you know, to, to get access worldwide and establish regional centres worldwide to make sure that no, no arm is left unjabbed. You might say, if possible, when they possibly declare the next pandemic.

And when you look at Exercise Pegasus and precedence to that and the President in the US to the COVID pandemic, which is event two O 1, will these drills become real? And then what would another crackdown ensue? And what those crack, would those crackdowns be even worse than before? So this is a time to be super vigilant in the UK and beyond. So that should do it for now. Yeah, thank you very much for that, Mark. Thank you and thank you to Vanessa.

We got to leave the news programme there for today. Join us if you're UK column member for some UK called News Extra in a couple of minutes. But I keep totally confused by the fact that Vanessa's on today because Patrick and Vanessa swapped where Patrick goes to the Beautiful Days festival this week. So it is Friday and hope everyone has a great weekend. Join us for extra if you can, but otherwise we'll see you at 1:00 PM as usual on Monday. See you then.