Monthly Archives: November 2023

Spanish Government Threatens to Break Ranks With EU and Unilaterally Recognise Palestine. What Gives?

If Pedro Sánchez were to actually deliver on his word (which is a pretty big “IF”), Spain would become only the second country to recognise Palestinian statehood while being an EU Member State.

During a tour of Israel and Palestine last week, Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez did something that most EU leaders dare not: he criticised Israel for its indiscriminate bombing of Gaza. At a press conference on Gaza’s Rafah border crossing with Egypt, Sánchez described the mass killing of civilians, “including women and children,” as “unacceptable.” He also raised the possibility of Spain unilaterally recognising Palestine as a state if Spain’s EU partners do not commit to collective recognition.

“The time has come for the international community and especially the EU to make a decision on the recognition of the Palestinian State. It would be worth it and it would be important for us to do it together,” Sánchez said, adding that if that does not happen, Spain will make its own decision on the matter. As Euro News notes, while a number of EU Members do recognise Palestinean statehood, they do not include any of the larger states or economies, meaning that Spain could become a pioneer if Sánchez were to deliver on his word.

Of course, Sánchez’s talk of the need for the “international community” to recognise Palestine as a state is absurd given that 138 of the world’s 193 countries — representing over three-quarters of the global population — had already done so as of December 31, 2019. The map below illustrates just how out of sync the international community of which Sánchez speaks — i.e. NATO & friends — is with the rest of the world on this issue.

By the end of 2019, nine G20 countries had recognised Palestine : Brazil, China, India, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Argentina (all current or prospective BRICS members, though Argentina may leave before it joins), Turkey and Indonesia. Ten G20 countries hadn’t, six of them NATO members (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States) and three, major non-NATO allies (Australia, South Korea and Japan). The other, Mexico, this year reclassified the Palestinian Authority’s diplomatic mission in Mexico City from special delegation to embassy, despite huge pressure from the US State Department.

One more big caveat before we continue: a two-state solution may well be unworkable by this point anyway, as Yves argued in her preamble to yesterday’s cross-post, A Ceasefire Is Far from Lasting Peace – A National Security Expert on the Israel-Hamas Deal:

John Mearsheimer has stated a two-state solution is impossible and everyone advocating it ought to know that….which would seem to suggest their motives for touting  it are cynical. One insurmountable obstacle is that a Palestinian state would have its own military, something Israel would never tolerate. A second issue is the way  Israel has balkanize the area between Gaza and the West Bank, making any integration or even, say, land bridge very hard to implement. Third is what to do with the settlers They ought to be expelled, again something Israel would never accept.

Yet More “Terrorism Supporters”

Sánchez said in his speech that while the temporary ceasefire declared last Friday may be a step in the right direction, something more permanent is needed. He also called on Israel to comply with its obligations under international law.

These comments may seem like weak tea given the scale of destruction and death visited upon Gaza over the past seven weeks, but they still represent one of the strongest critiques of Israel’s actions by an EU leader to date.

What’s more, Sánchez currently holds the rotating six-month presidency of the European Council, which he will soon be handing over to Belgian Premier (and, incidentally, alum of the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders program) Alexander De Croo.

De Croo accompanied Sánchez on his tour of Israel, Palestine and Egypt. During his address at Rafah, De Croo called for an immediate end to civilian casualties in Gaza and described the ongoing destruction of the enclave as “unacceptable.”

The Israeli government responded in time-honoured fashion by accusing the two prime ministers of supporting terrorism. Tel Aviv’s rapidly growing list of “terrorist” national leaders includes the presidents of Colombia, Chile, Honduras, Bolivia, Turkey, Ireland and now Spain and Belgium…

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Quelle Surprise! UK Government Hands Management of NHS Patient Data to CIA-Linked US Spyware Firm, Palantir

The company that aspires to be inside “every missile,… every drone,” including, it seems, those belonging to the Israeli Defence Forces, is now running the patient data platform of the world’s second largest public health care system. 

The Rishi Sunak government this week finally announced its decision, presumably made long ago, to hand the management of all NHS England patient records to Palantir, a tech company whose client list includes the US military, intelligence agencies and ICE, as well as the armed forces of the UK, Israel and other western countries. The five-year contract between NHS England — the non-departmental government body that runs the National Health Service in England — and Palantir is worth £360 million ($450 million), but that figure could rise as high as £480 million ($600 million) if, as expected, it is extended by two further years.

That’s a lot of money for a company that, like so many other Silicon Valley giants, is yet to post a single annual profit in its 20 years of operations. More valuable still is the NHS’ patient data system, which is the largest repository of health data in the world. As WIRED UK magazine reported in 2019, before Palantir had even signed its first contract with the NHS, Amazon, Google and the rest of Silicon Valley all wanted to get their hands on the data trove. Unsurprisingly, patients were less keen on the idea:

Careful use of health data could save lives, cut costs of delivering health care and even become a nice little earner for the NHS – indeed, an EY analysis that’s frequently touted by the government suggests opening up the vaults could earn the underfunded public health organisation as much as £9.6 billion annually. But the tradeoffs could be our privacy, letting big tech further monetise medicine, and locking hospitals and clinics into expensive tech systems that will cost us more in the long run.

“Ripping the Whole [of the NHS] from the Ground”

The £360 million deal grants Palantir and its four partners, Accenture, PwC, NECS and Carnall Farrar, responsibility for overhauling and managing that system. The government’s decision to pick Palantir may not have come as a surprise to close observers — more than a year ago we reported that NHS England had quietly instructed NHS Digital to gather patient data from NHS hospitals and extract it to its data platform, which is based on Palantir’s Foundry enterprise data management platform — but that doesn’t make it any less controversial.

This is a company whose co-founder and current chairman of the board, Peter Thiel, recently described the British public’s affection for the NHS as “Stockholm Syndrome.” Speaking in an Oxford Union debate, he said the country “could rip the whole thing from the ground and start over” (as opposed to the slow death that successive UK governments have been subjecting it to), and that British people needed to stop thinking of the NHS as “the most wonderful thing in the world.”

This comes from a man who makes much of his money from the national security state, pens homages to Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, and is a member of the Bilderberg Club’s steering committee. Palantir, the company he co-founded and whose board he still chairs, is one of the darkest companies in the tech sphere, which is saying a lot. From my previous post, NHS to Use US “Spy-Tech” Firm Palantir’s Platform to Extract Patient Data Without Patient Consent:

Named after the “seeing stones” used in The Lord of the Rings, Palantir was set up in 2003 with seed money from the CIA’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel (IQT). It is one of the darkest companies in the tech sphere. While it is making significant inroads in the corporate world, its main line of business is to provide data-mining technology to support US military operations, mass surveillance, and predictive policing. Its technology is also used by ICE to identify illegal migrants before detaining and deporting them.

When, in 2018, thousands of Google employees refused to participate in Project Maven, a secret Pentagon-funded AI pilot program aimed at the unmanned operation of aerial vehicles, the project was taken up by Palantir. Critics warn that the technology could pave the way to autonomous weapons that decide who to target without human input. In February 2021, Palantir’s chief operating officer boasted to investors that Palantir was driving towards being “inside of every missile, inside of every drone.”

Right now, the company is providing technical and moral support to Israel’s genocidal onslaught on Gaza, reports Middle East Eye:

In a social media post on 12 October, it said: “Certain kinds of evil can only be fought with force. Palantir stands with Israel.”

In a letter to shareholders issued on 2 November, the company said: “We are one of a few companies in the world to stand up and announce our support for Israel, which remains steadfast.”

Announcing the company’s third-quarter profits on the same day, Alex Karp, Palantir’s chief executive and a co-founder of the company, said: “I am proud that we are supporting Israel in every way we can”…

Speaking to Fox Business earlier this month, Joe Lonsdale, another of Palantir’s co-founders, said Israel was “doing what it has to do and eliminating the bad guys” and “we are trying to keep the good guys armed and ahead”.

Lonsdale said: “When we were building Palantir we actually learnt a lot from the Israelis. They’re quite good at what they do and one of my proudest moments was when Israel started working with Palantir. So Palantir helps Israel do a lot of things too.”

Middle East Eye asked Palantir what technology or support it was providing to Israel’s armed forces but had not received a response at the time of publication.

Patients’ Fears

Besides helping the “good guys” in Israel eliminate the “bad guys” in Gaza, Palantir will soon be using its Foundry operating system to help address the NHS’s existential crisis, or at least so we are lead to believe. That crisis includes a waiting list for elective treatment that has almost tripled over the past decade, to 7.7 million. According to NHS England’s National Director for Transformation Dr Vin Diwakar, the platform will help “tackle waiting times, join up patient care and make the health service sustainable for the future”.

But it will also result in yet more private sector involvement in essential NHS processes — something successive British government have been encouraging since the 1990s. One of the people who began this long process of piecemeal privatisation is former Prime Minister Tony Blair, who in 2003 told a meeting of private healthcare executives that he wanted to open the whole of the NHS to outside competition. In July this year, he urged the government to further expand the role of the private sector in the NHS while encouraging patients to take up private healthcare offers.

The companies involved in this latest deal, particularly Palantir, Accenture, the disgraced accountancy firm formerly known as Arthur Andersen that is closely involved in the World Economic Forum’s Digital Transformation Initiative, and the scandal-tarnished big four auditor PwC, hardly inspire trust and confidence. Many NHS patients and staff members have serious reservations. A case in point: Dr Latifa Patel, chair of the British Medical Association (BMA), who wrote the following on BMA’s :

The decision to award Palantir, a large US-based multinational, the contract for the Federated Data Platform – software which is designed to bring together existing NHS patient data systems – is deeply worrying. Having made our concerns plain for several months on this, and having written to the secretary of state of health and social care and urged for a rethink, our fears about how patient information may be used and handled going forward have not diminished.

“This contract is valued at an eye-watering amount – money which is desperately needed for direct care to help patients right now, and other health and social care services which remain in such crisis, not to mention the ongoing workforce shortages. Going forward, we cannot and must not allow patient data to be exploited. We need to know just how confidential patient data will be used within this data platform and the extent of the role that Palantir, which has commercial interest in this decision, will play.

Patients are no less sceptical…

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The Far-Reaching Implications of Javier “the Wig” Milei’s Election Victory in Argentina

Clearly, a majority of voters have had enough of the status quo. What they want is a seismic shift in the underlying political and economic dynamics. And that is what they will get, for better or worse (my money is on the latter).

Sunday’s electoral victory of Javier Milei, an avowed libertarian with big sideburns, a fiery temper and far-right sympathies who claims to be on a mission to rid Argentina of its corrupt political caste (sound familiar?), was not much of a surprise. He had lead the polls leading up to the vote, had been endorsed by the country’s main right-wing party, and his opponent, Sergio Massa, is currently the economy minister in a country that is on the verge of hyperinflation (CPI: 148%) and where four in ten people live in poverty.

What was surprising is how emphatic the victory was. Milei, a political nobody just a few years ago, won 56% of the votes, compared to Massa’s 44% — one of the highest electoral margins of the country’s 40-year democratic era. Massa managed to win in only three of Argentina’s 23 provinces and federal district.

Clearly, a majority of voters have had enough of the status quo. According to a close friend living in Buenos Aries province, the word one keeps hearing is “change” (also sound familiar?), which is perhaps understandable given the dire state of the economy, the high levels of child poverty (67%) and the woeful performance of Alberto Fernández’s outgoing government. What people want is a seismic shift in the underlying political and economic dynamics. And that is what they will get, for better or worse (my money is on the latter). And the reverberations will reach far beyond Argentina’s borders.

The End of Argentina’s BRICS Membership (Before It Even Began)

On the campaign trail, Javier Milei said that as president he would cancel Argentina’s entry to the BRICS and align the country with the US and Israel — a move that will certainly be welcomed by Israel’s Netanyahu government, especially given that Buenos Aires is home to the largest Jewish population in Latin America, and one of the seven largest in the world. Until now, Latin American governments have lead the way in standing up to Israel during its “gazacide“, as Kurt Hackbarth recently reported for Jacobin. Bolivia has severed diplomatic relations with Tel Aviv while Colombia, Chile and Honduras have all recalled their ambassadors.

By contrast, Milei has stated that his first two trips before taking office on December 10 will be to the United States and Israel — the latter apparently for “spiritual reasons” (presumably a reference to Milei’s desire to convert to Judaism after his presidency is over).

Relations with China, meanwhile, are likely to be a lot more strained going forward. Milei has referred to the Asian nation as an “assassin,” telling a Bloomberg News in August:

“People are not free in China, they can’t do what they want and when they do it, they get killed. Would you trade with an assassin?”

Milei has since clarified that he wouldn’t stand in the way of private business deals between Argentine and Chinese companies. Diana Mondino, Milei’s pick for foreign minister, has also played down Milei’s statements, saying he never proposed formally breaking with China, which is probably a good thing given that China is Argentina’s second largest trading partner, providing much-needed foreign currency.

Now, China’s “comprehensive strategic partner[ship]” with Argentina (in the words of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Wang Wenbin) is probably over (or at least on hold). And that could be a problem given that China is heavily invested in many of Argentina’s strategic sectors, including lithium and gas — sectors that the US government and corporations also have their eyes on. Beijing is also a major creditor since signing a currency swap in 2009 with then-President Cristina Fernández de Kirchener, as Bloomberg recently reported:

Since then, China has invested billions in the country, in everything from lithium and solar power plants in the north, to a space station in the southern Patagonia region.

The ties have become even stronger in recent years, with Argentina joining Xi Jinping’s signature Belt and Road initiative in 2022. It announced plans to join the BRICS group of emerging markets, of which China is the largest, next year.

China’s investments in Argentina only reflect a fraction of its overall influence in Latin America, where it’s chipped away at the US’s dominance in recent decades. Through Belt and Road, China has poured billions into the construction of roads, bridges, trains, power grids and energy plants across the region. It’s also turned its attention toward governors instead of just national leaders, building relationships that have allowed it to invest in even the most remote areas, as it’s charged ahead to become South America’s No. 1 trading partner.

Special currency swap arrangements signed between Buenos Aires and Beijing in June and July this year have enabled the Argentine government to continue servicing its $44 billion loan package from the IMF, thus avoiding yet another default. That credit line could be at risk if Milei maintains his hard line toward Beijing. It is not hard to imagine, for example, his government blocking key Chinese investments in strategic sectors, including Vaca Muerta, an oil and shale gas reservoir in Patagonia that holds the world’s second-largest shale gas reserves and the fourth-largest shale oil deposits.

Milei has also said that his government would endorse and apply the Collective West’s sanctions against Russia, adding: “I would never support an autocratic government like Russia’s.”

In other words, on the off chance that Milei doesn’t cancel Argentina’s BRICS membership,  its is unlikely that the BRICS’ founding members will continue to endorse the membership of a country whose government supports US and/or EU sanctions against a fellow member. In such an event, it will be interesting to see whether or not the founding members opt to invite another Latin American country to replace Argentina, with the two most obvious candidates being Bolivia and Venezuela.

South American Trade bloc, Mercosur, Also on the Line

Milei has also launched scathing verbal attacks on the four-nation trade bloc Mercosur, comprising Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay, even going so far as to threaten to withdraw from the grouping, which will probably be harder than exiting the BRICS given the role it has played in promoting regional economic integration. If it were to happen, though, the result would almost certainly be the disintegration of Mercosur, which in turn will spell the end of multi-decade trade negotiations between the trade bloc and the EU.

The hopes in Brasilia and Brussels are that pragmatism will prevail and that Milei will temper his policies toward Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva once he is in office. Brazil is Argentina’s biggest trade partner but relations between the two countries already soured during Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency. They could be about to get even worse…

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Oh, the Irony: IMF Chief Touts Benefits of Cashless Future In Singapore, Just After a Major Bank Outage Shook the Island Nation

“This is not the time to turn back on central bank digital currencies,” Kirstalina Georgieva said. At the same time, Singapore’s central bank is advising the public to “carry some cash” as a contingency for further outages.

As regular readers know, the IMF has been playing a significant behind-the-scenes role advising governments and central banks on how to prepare for/usher in a cashless future. The Fund is deeply involved in the development of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), mainly by providing technical assistance to its members, much as its sister Bretton Woods institution, the World Bank, is deeply involved in the roll out across the Global South of digital identity systems, which are essentially a prerequisite for CBDCs.

At an event in Morocco in June, the IMF’s Managing Director Kirstalina Georgieva said the Fund is working on developing a global CBDC platform, to ensure interoperability between the different CBDC systems under development across dozens of jurisdictions:

If we are to be successful, CBDCs cannot be fragmented national propositions. To have transactions more efficient and fairer, we need systems that connect countries. In other words, we need interoperability. For this reason, at the IMF we are working hard on the concept of a global CBDC platform to trade and to manage risks.

The irony is that this is all happening at the same time that the global geopolitical order is rapidly fragmenting between US or NATO-aligned countries and much of the rest of the world, as we have already seen play out over the war in Ukraine and the US-EU’s ratcheting sanctions on Russia. That said, most of the BRICS economies, including Russia and China, are further along the path to developing and issuing a CBDC than their counterparts in the so-called collective West.

This Wednesday, Georgieva was in Singapore to deliver the keynote speech at the Singapore Fintech Festival. During that speech, she announced the launch of a CBDC Handbook as well as a soon-to-be-published joint plan with the World Bank to provide CBDC capacity development for national central banks and governments. She also warned public sector institutions that now “is not the time to turn back” on CBDCs. This, I believe, betrays a hint of anxiety about the current state of play with CBDCs, perhaps as a result of recent developments in the US and Nigeria (more on that shortly).

The future of digital cash, she said, depends on how many countries adopt the idea and how obsolete cash becomes as a result. This, she added, will take time, presumably (though she didn’t actually say this) because cash remains a popular means of payment in many countries around the world, including (to name a few) Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Japan, Mexico, Colombia, Slovakia and Spain, and is even staging a comeback in others (e.g. UK and Spain).

This will make cash difficult to fully displace, especially given the instinctive public distrust of central bank digital money. The few public surveys that have been conducted on CBDCs, including in the UK, the US and Spain, suggest the small minority of people who are actually aware of them harbour serious doubts and reservations.

As they well should: CBDCs, as envisaged, will replace money with something fundamentally different — a tokenised, programmable system of money over which government and central banks will have total, centralised control. In the words of the German economist Richard Werner, the CBDC revolution will turn your money into “conditional, potential money,” allowing the “disabling, freezing, cancellation or simple reduction” of your funds. This will all be happening at the same time as digital censorship laws are proliferating throughout the world.

Tellingly, Georgieva did not mention even the notion of CBDCs coexisting with cash, as some central bankers have done in recent months. The ECB, for example, recently announced that it is pushing for an explicit ban on unilateral cash exclusions by businesses in the Euro Area. This stands in stark contrast to the position of the European Commission, which is calling for governments to merely monitor cash exclusion and which, as the German financial journalist Norbert Häring has documented, wants to give decisive preference to the digital version of central bank money through its parallel guidelines on the digital euro and euro cash.

In the US, some central bankers, including Neel Kashkari, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, and Michelle Bowman, a Federal Reserve governor, have even questioned the need for a CBDC altogether. Fed supervision chief Randal Quarles went further, describing CBDCs as an embarrassing fad, comparable to the parachute pants made famous in the 1980s by rapper MC Hammer. US lawmakers, including the House of Representatives’ Majority Whip Tom Emmer, are also trying to preemptively prevent the Federal Reserve from issuing a CBDC that would enable the authorities to monitor and track the financial activities of Americans.

This may partly explain Georgieva’s exhortation to public institutions not to turn their back on CBDCs…

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Will the Next Geopolitical Flash Point Be a Centuries-Old Border Dispute in an Oil-Rich Corner of South America?

Ominously, both the US and the UK are deeply involved in Venezuela’s escalating face-off with neighbouring Guyana, one in the present, the other in the past.

Tensions are all of a sudden rising fast in one of Latin America’s longest-simmering border disputes. On Friday (Nov 10), the president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, accused Washington of “incubating a military conflict” in Essequibo, a vast 160,000 square-kilometre chunk of neighbouring Guyana that was a former Dutch and then British colony that has been claimed by Venezuela for the past 200 years, ever since it gained independence from Spain.

Maduro’s remarks came three days after the US’ newly appointed ambassador to Guyana, Nicole Theriot, stated that the US intends to strengthen its bilateral relationship in defence matters with Guyana, with a view to “improv[ing] mutual security objectives, address[ing] transversal threats and promot[ing] regional security.” This is all happening as tensions between Venezuela and Guyana escalate over Essequibo.

“We all have a lot of important work to do, and together I believe we can and will address the shared challenges in our collective neighbourhood, no matter how daunting they may seem,” Theriot said at a press conference with Guyana’s president, Irfaan Ali.

Plans for a New US Military Base?

Venezuela’s Foreign Minister Yván Gil took these comments as yet further proof that the US is seeking to increase its military presence in the region, “to protect American energy companies.” At the United Nations General Assembly in September Gil denounced the US military’s Southern Command for trying to create a military base in the disputed territory in order to create the spearhead of its aggression against Venezuela and seize our energy resources.” According to Maduro, Guyana’s government is “under the orders” of the US oil major, ExxonMobil, which discovered huge deposits of oil in Essequibo in 2015.

Guyana’s economy has grown significantly following the discovery, with GDP almost tripling in size between 2020 and 2022. This is despite the fact that the terms of the production Sharing Agreement signed with Georgetown were so egregious — with Exxon Mobil retaining 75% of the oil revenue as “cost recovery” and the remaining to be split 50-50 with Guyana — that a former presidential adviser feared that the country was being “recolonised.”

Among the conditions identified as abusive in the 2016 Stabroek offshore license were the Guyanese government’s measly 2% royalty payment, which many argue does not remotely compensate Guyana for exploitation of a non-renewable resource; the absence of ring-fencing provisions which allows the consortium led by Exxon Mobile to deduct costs from one oil field against the revenues of another; and a permanent stability clause which prohibits Guyana from introducing new laws adverse to the oil companies until 2056, barring any extensions.

In 2020, Global Witness published a report claiming that Guyana could lose billions of US dollars as a result of the deal. From Village Voice:

Global Witness said its investigation showed that Guyana’s lead negotiator-former-Natural Resources Minister Raphael Trotman – rushed to sign Exxon’s deal despite knowing the company would soon announce new oil find results and while experts were telling him to seek more information.

During negotiations, Trotman also suffered an apparent conflict of interest as he was close political allies with one of Exxon’s Guyanese lawyers. The lawyer- Nigel Hughes – has denied he represented Exxon on the deal, but admitted that his firm had represented Exxon since 2009 and that he has worked for the company on other matters.

Exxon’s license is the subject of ongoing litigation in Guyana, with civil society groups arguing it is illegal.

Essequibo is not only rich in oil and gas; it boasts other mineral deposits, huge fish stocks and fresh water supplies, which a government minister even recently talked about exporting to other countries. As the Commander of US Southern Command (USSOUTHCOM), General Laura Richardson, said in January, Latin America is home to 31% of the world’s fresh water.

But for the moment, it is Guyana’s vast untapped energy supplies that are of prime interest to US corporations. According to U.S. Geological Survey estimates, Guyana’s coastal area has roughly 13.6 billion barrels of oil reserves and 32 trillion cubic feet of gas reserves waiting to be drilled. For a country with one of the lowest population densities on the planet and a GDP of slightly less than $10 billion, a huge bonanza awaits. But Caracas says the untapped energy supplies belong to Venezuela and that the arbitration panel that granted Guyana jurisdiction over Essequibo was rigged.

Complex and Messy

Like most centuries-old border disputes, the Essequibo question is both complex and messy. The area in dispute accounts for roughly two-thirds of Guyana’s entire territory. Not only that but Guyana is also locked in a dispute with another neighbour, Suriname, over Tigri, a wooded area that is controlled by Guyana but claimed by Suriname. As with Essequibo, the roots of the dispute, which briefly exploded into violence in 1969, date back to the colonial period when the UK and the Netherlands ruled Guyana and Suriname, respectively.

Essequibo has been under the jurisdiction of Guyana for over a century. Ironically, at the Paris Tribunal of Arbitration, convened in 1899 to settle the dispute, Venezuela’s claims were supported by Washington. Sitting on the five-member court were two Americans, representing Caracas, two Britons, representing, of course, the interests of Her Majesty’s Empire, and a Russian. The latter, Friedrich Martens, was instrumental in tilting the ruling in the British colony’s favour. But the outcome of the arbitration had apparently been rigged from day one, according to a document by one of the US judges released decades later.

Generations of Venezuelan leaders have refused to accept the ruling, on the grounds that the country was not “directly represented” among the judges of the Paris Tribunal of Arbitration. Instead, Caracas has given priority to a treaty that was signed in 1966 between Venezuela and the UK (Guyana was still a British colony at the time), called the Geneva Agreement, under which the parties agreed to reach a mediated solution to the Essequibo dispute, recognising Venezuela’s nullification of the 1899 decision.

But Guyana refused to engage in direct negotiations, preferring instead to pursue UN-based mechanisms including through the General Assembly and the Security Council. In 1987, both countries agreed to thrash out their differences through a UN-mediated “Good Offices” process. During the Hugo Chávez era, integration with the neighbour was prioritised over territorial differences.

To begin with, Maduro continued along the same path. In September, 2013, months after Chávez’s death, he made an official visit to Georgetown and declared that the dispute was a legacy of colonialism.

Even Washington kept uncharacteristically quiet on the issue. For decades, it had more or less stood on the sidelines, calling for a “timely resolution” of the Essequibo dispute. But that all changed in 2018, when it began calling for the hugely controversial 1899 arbitration decision to be upheld. In the same year, Guyana filed an application before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) asking the Court to reaffirm the 1899 arbitration award that established the boundary between Guyana and Venezuela. In 2020, the ICJ ruled against Venezuela, whose government refuses to acknowledge ICJ jurisdiction on the matter.

Juan Guaidó Joins the Picture

All of this has happened for one simple reason: Exxon Mobil discovered vast reserves of crude oil in disputed waters off the Essequibo coast…

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Brazil’s Lula Government Just Mandated COVID-19 Vaccines For All Children Over 6 Months of Age

The Minister of Health, Nísia Trindade, claims that all COVID-19 vaccines have proven to be both effective and safe, and that COVID-19 is a vaccine-preventable disease.

On October 31, Brazil’s Ministry of Health announced that as of next year COVID-19 vaccines will be included in the national vaccine schedule for young children. According to a press release from the Ministry, the vaccination of children aged 6 months to  5 years will be “prioritised” alongside “groups at high risk of developing severe forms of the disease,” including the elderly, immunocompromised, pregnant and postpartum women, people with permanent disabilities and indigenous people.

Three doses of the vaccine will be administered to millions of Brazilian babies, toddlers and young children, with an interval of 8 weeks between the 1st and 2nd dose, and one of 4 months between the 2nd and 3rd. There will be just options on offer. After scrapping its recommendations for viral vector vaccines (AstraZeneca and Janssen) in April, the Health Ministry currently approves (as far as I can tell) Pfizer-BioNtech’s Comirnaty and Comirnaty bivalent, Moderna’s Spikevax bivalent, and the Chinese-produced Coronavac.

“It is an important change, in line with the World Health Organization [WHO], in which the vaccine against COVID-19 now joins our National Immunisation Program,” said the Ministry’s Health and Environment Surveillance Secretary, Ethel Maciel. “The vaccine is now recommended in the children’s calendar. For all children… in Brazil, aged between 6 months and 5 years, the vaccine becomes mandatory in the vaccination calendar.”

In taking this measure, the government is not merely approving the use of COVID-19 vaccines for children as young as six months old (that was already done some time ago); it is, as Maciel says, effectively mandating it. And those at the sharpest end of the mandate will be the children of Brazil’s poorest families, since one of the main requirements for families to qualify for Brazil’s recently reintroduced  “Bolsa Familia” welfare program is that all children must be up to date with all immunisations provided for in the National Immunisation Program of the Ministry of Health. That now includes the COVID-19 vaccine.

Brazil is already one of the most vaccinated countries in Latin America, with almost 90% of the  population receiving at least one dose and 82%, two by January 2023. But relatively few young children are getting the jab. In August, a study showed that only 11% of children aged 6 months to 5 years had received at least two doses of the Covid-19 vaccine. Speaking to Merco Press, researcher Cristiano Boccolini lamented that only 3% of babies aged 6 months to 2 years had been treated with the drugs, layingthe blame on delays in vaccine purchases, “fake news” that children do not suffer severe consequences from contracting COVID-19, and widespread public fears about the vaccine’s lack of safety and effectiveness.

According to Brazil’s Minister of Health, Nísia Trindade, who seemingly inhabits an entirely different universe to the rest of us, all of the vaccines have proven to be not only safe but effective by Brazil’s health regulatory agency, Anvisa. Not only that, she says, but COVID-19 is a vaccine-preventable disease.

This is a staggering claim to make, particularly for a national health minister, at this stage in the pandemic. The vaccines have been in widespread use for almost three years now, with 70% of the world population receiving at least one dose, according to Our World in Data. Yet the virus continues to circulate, spread and evolve. Moreover, a number of recent high-quality studies, including one from the Cleveland clinic, suggest that repeated boosting with these vaccines leads to negative efficacy, meaning that the protection provided quickly wanes after a brief surge, leaving patients net more vulnerable to the virus.

This correlates with the IM Doc’s meticulously and extensively maintained records of patient outcomes, which suggest that recent vaccination by the new vaccines is correlated with a new infection not long after. In recent correspondence with Yves, IM Doc said this outcome had “become so frequent that it is leading to outrage among patients who got a booster and then in fairly short order got Covid, and to patient rejection of advertising and MD pressure to get a Covid booster (although per below, the latter is waning).”

The problem is not just that the vaccines are not very effective at preventing transmission or infection; it is that they are not nearly as safe as they have been advertised.

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The World’s Largest Biometric Digital ID System, India’s Aadhaar, Just Suffered Its Biggest Ever Data Breach

In one fell swoop, roughly 10% of the global population appears to have had some of their most valuable personal identifiable information (PII) compromised. Yet Aadhaar continues to receive plaudits from Silicon Valley.

An anonymous hacker claims to have breached the digital ID numbers, as well as other sensitive personal data, of around 815 million Indian citizens. To put that number in perspective, it is more than 60% of the 1.3 billion Indian people enrolled in the government’s Aadhaar biometric digital identity program, and roughly 10% of the entire global population. Thanks to the breach — the largest single one in the country’s history, according to the Hindustan Times — the personal data of hundreds of millions of Indians are now up for grabs on the dark web, for as little as $80,000.

To register for an Aadhaar card, Indian residents have to provide basic demographic information, including name, date of birth, age, address and gender, as well as biometric information, including ten fingerprints, two eyeball scans and a facial photograph. Much of that data has apparently been compromised.

Media reports suggest that the source of the leak was the Covid-19 test data of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), which is linked to each individual’s Aadhaar number. The alarm was first raised by Resecurity, a Los Angeles-based cyber security company, which on Oct 15 included the following in a blogpost on its corporate website:

On October 9th, a threat actor going by the alias ‘pwn0001’ posted a thread on Breach Forums brokering access to 815 million “Indian Citizen Aadhaar & Passport” records. To put this victim group in perspective, India’s entire population is just over 1.486 billion people.

HUNTER investigators established contact with the threat actor and learned they were willing to sell the entire Aadhaar and Indian passport dataset for $80,000.

The data set offered by pwn0001 contains multiple fields related to the PII of Indian citizens, including but not limited to:

– name
– father’s Name
– phone Number
– other Number
– passport Number
– aadhar Number
– age
– gender
– address
– district
– pincode
– state…

One of the leaked samples contains 100,000 records of personal identifiable information (PII) related to Indian residents. In this sample leak, HUNTER analysts identified valid Aadhaar Card IDs, which were corroborated via a government portal that provides a “Verify Aadhaar” feature. This feature allows people to validate the authenticity of Aadhaar credentials,” Resecurity said…

Resecurity acquired… 400,000 records and contacted multiple victims to validate the information, as well as used the “Verify Aadhaar” feature available via official government WEB-resource in India.

The contacted victims from the acquired data set confirmed the validity of their data, and stated they have never been notified about [the breach] before.

Digital Identity Theft

A leak of such highly sensitive personal identifiable information (PII) creates a significant risk of digital identity theft, warns Security Affairs:

Threat actors leverage stolen identity information to commit online banking theft, tax refund fraud, and other cyber-enabled financial crimes. Nation-state actors are also hunting for Aadhaar data with the goal of espionage and influence campaigns that leverage detailed insights on the Indian population. Resecurity observed a spike in incidents involving Aadhaar IDs and their leakage on underground cybercriminal forums by threat actors who look to harm Indian nationals and residents.

Aadhaar (Hindi for “foundation”) is a 12-digit unique identity (UID) number issued by the government after confirming a person’s biometric and demographic information. Launched in 2016 following the passage of the Narenda Modi government’s Aadhaar Act, it is the largest digital identity system on the planet, with 1.3 billion UIDs issued by 2021, covering a staggering 92% of India’s population.

It was ostensibly created to provide people without identification a formal government ID as well as crack down on duplicate, fake or stolen IDs used to benefit from government programs and welfare schemes. And it quickly drew interest and praise from elite quarters around the world, including Silicon Valley.

In a 2019 entry of his “Gates Notes” blog, Bill Gates lauded Aadhaar for making “India’s invisible people visible.” Three years earlier, in a lecture on Technology for Transformation, Gates had said that Aadhaar is something that had never been done before by any government, not even in a rich country. He also claimed it does not pose any privacy risks; try telling that to the 815 million people whose personal data is now up for grabs on the Dark Web!

Together with Nandan Nilekani, one of the co-founders of Indian tech giant Infosys who is widely recognised as Aadhaar’s chief architect, Gates went on to play a key role in exporting Aadhaar to other parts of the so-called Global South, much of it financed by the World Bank. The two tech billionaires also reportedly helped persuade the Modi government to embark on the disastrous path of demonetisation in order to expand cashless payment alternatives. Demonetisation is believed to have caused a 2% drop in India’s GDP growth in 2016/17 alone — the equivalent of $52 billion, according to the Sunday Guardian.

Even today, Aadhaar continues to receive plaudits from Silicon Valley, despite all of its security flaws, privacy concerns and other issues. Worldcoin, the controversial cryptocurrency project set up by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman that uses an eye-scanning “orb” to give users a unique digital identity to verify whether they are human, recently said it seeks to emulate India’s Aadhaar system in its own creation of a global identity and financial network.

Ironically, both Aadhaar and World Coin were featured in a recent report by Moody’s Investor Services as examples of how not to develop a digital identity system…

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