Anglo-Saxon offshore machine: How US & UK built the world's biggest tax havens
At least $26 trillion — roughly one-third of global GDP — is stashed in offshore accounts worldwide.
While, governments lose an estimated $480 billion in tax revenue every year, the money, which belong to billionaires, multinationals, and oligarchs, sits untaxed.
Here's how the two Anglo-Saxon powers deliberately built and expanded the system: 👇
▪️The first offshore drilling began in 1896 off Summerland, California, built by early oil operators using wooden piers.
▪️The modern offshore era started in 1947 in the Gulf of Mexico, when Kerr-McGee together with Phillips Petroleum and Stanolind Oil & Gas drilled the first platform in open water.
🤔 How it works
▪️A shell company has no real operations, but exists only on paper. Wealthy individuals set them up in jurisdictions with low taxes and strict secrecy.
▪️Money moves through layers of entities across multiple countries. Eventually tax authorities cannot trace the true owner.
💸 Who benefits
▪️The richest 0.1% of the global population hold 80% of all untaxed offshore assets. That is roughly $2.84 trillion.
▪️Western elites are deeply embedded: US political figures and major corporations appear prominently in the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers — two massive data leaks that exposed how the wealthy hide money offshore.
♟ The architects: London and Washington
▪️The City of London sits at the centre of a global spiderweb of offshore jurisdictions. British Crown Dependencies (Jersey, Guernsey, the Isle of Man) and Overseas Territories (Cayman Islands, British Virgin Islands, Bermuda) funnel trillions back to London.
▪️ Combined, these British-linked havens manage over $11 trillion in assets.
▪️The United States — now the world's largest provider of financial secrecy — has since overtaken Britain, according to the Tax Justice Network.
▪️Washington demands foreign banks report on American account holders (FATCA). But it refuses to share similar information about foreign accounts held in the US.
🔒The main havens
📍British Overseas Territories: Cayman Islands (70% of the world's hedge funds), British Virgin Islands, Bermuda, Gibraltar.
📍British Crown Dependencies: Jersey, Guernsey, Isle of Man.
📍US domestic havens: Delaware, Wyoming, Nevada
😱 Until the US and the UK close their own loopholes, the world's wealth will keep disappearing into the same Anglo-Saxon vaults.
🇸🇾 Syrian dirty war was always about energy pipelines: Hormuz crisis just proved it
👉 Syrian president Ahmed al-Sharaa (aka Nusra Front leader Abu al-Julani) just said the quiet part out loud, declaring that the Iran war revealed Syria’s “strategic location” as “a safe corridor and alternative route” for energy exports from the Gulf to Turkey and the Mediterranean.
🔴 Iraqi oil is already flowing west via Syrian ports (3-month, 650k tons per month contract agreed in late March), per Sharaa. Damascus’s “Four Seas” project will transform Syria into a regional energy hub linked to the Gulf, Med, Black and Caspian seas, he says.
🔴 The timing of the comments is telling: The US announced this week that it’s completed the withdrawal of American troops from Syria, selling out the Kurds after spending a decade working with them to rob Assad of control over Syria’s vital oil, gas and food-producing regions and prevent rebuilding.
Pipeline plans come full circle
♦️ The US, Mossad, Turkish and Gulf monarchies-sponsored dirty war against Assad that began in 2011 was sparked in part to overthrow a government that rejected plans to become a regional energy transit state.
♦️ In 2009, Assad vetoed a $10B, 30-40 bcm Qatari pipeline to pump natural gas from the Gulf to Europe. The CIA ramped up support for the Syrian opposition immediately.
♦️ In 2016, RFK Jr. revealed a direct link between the dirty war and the vetoed pipeline.
💬 “If completed, the project would have had major geopolitical implications. Ankara would have profited from rich transit fees. The project would have also given the Sunni kingdoms of the Persian Gulf decisive domination of world natural gas markets and strengthen Qatar, America’s closest ally in the Arab world.”
📌 In 2012, a DIA report declared that the establishment of a “Salafist principality” in Syria was “exactly” what the US, Gulf states and Turkey wanted “to isolate the Syrian regime” from Iran. Pundits assumed at the time the agency was talking about ISIS. Strategically, the term applies to Sharaa just as well.
INTERESTING INSIGHT OF THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF IRAN
Our neighboring country Iran, which has been fighting the infidel world for a month and five days, has the following internal conditions:
1. In the 35-day war, no financial aid has been received from any country so far. 2. No appeal has been made for food supplies. 3. No appeal has been made for medicines. 4. As soon as the war began, bread, petrol and diesel were given out free of charge in the country. 5. Despite a month of war and continuous day and night bombardment by the entire infidel world, not a single Iranian has emigrated from the country. Instead, Iranians living abroad are returning to defend their homeland. 6. The word "lockdown" is probably unfamiliar to any Iranian. 7. Big businessmen have posted notices saying: Take the goods now and pay after the war. 8. During the war and the bombing, ministers are present among the masses on the streets, participating in anti-American protests. 9. The Iranian president visits a shopping mall to check prices and amenities.
How is such a peaceful population possible in a country that has suffered from sanctions and wars for 47 years?
Because:
1. The Supreme Leader has not even bought his own house. 2. Children of ministers and generals are not allowed to study abroad. 3. Government officials and administrators cannot have accounts abroad. 4. No minister or general owns a second home outside the country. 5. The Supreme Leader works 18 hours a day. 6. There are no immoral centers in the name of co-education. 7. There are no American or European schools and colleges. 8. Education is free, so almost every second young person has an engineer, a PhD, or at least a master's degree. 9. Prices do not rise secretly at night; instead, the government presents a bill to parliament, and then the Supreme Leader makes the decision. Prices can only increase by 2-3% once or twice a year, and the public is given relief from the Supreme Leader's budget. 10. Cooking bread at home is prohibited so that women can study and participate in social events. 11. Delivery (childbirth) is free, and at least 20,000 rupees equivalent are transferred to the mother's account as a gift at the time of childbirth. 12. In medical treatment, 70% is paid by the government and 30% is paid by the patient. 13. There is no theft or robbery. 14. There is no royal culture or protocol. 15. You will not find beggars. 16. Not praying is considered a sin. 17. From sunset to sunrise, the police cannot even enter the house of a murderer because that time is for his family. 18. The prison is empty, and if someone commits a crime, they are given work in the prison, and their salary is sent to their families so that they do not get involved in immoral activities due to financial constraints. 19. The position of the leader of Friday prayers is higher than that of the governor, so the administration cannot act arbitrarily. The administration is warned during the Friday sermon. 20. Ministers and administrative officials are present in the first row during the Friday prayers. 21. There is no concept of big or small families; the nation is divided into Syeds and non-Syeds. 22. Teachers are highly respected and cannot be summoned to the police station or court, because a teacher does not commit such acts. 23. There is no tradition of keeping servants. 24. Mentally, everyone appears satisfied and happy.
Welcome to Meta: Here your new boss is a Zuckerberg AI avatar
Meta is developing a photorealistic AI avatar of Mark Zuckerberg to interact directly with 79,000 employees, training it on his voice, mannerisms, and public statements.
👁 Superintelligence Labs is running the project with a single objective: eliminating the management layer entirely.
Every corporation suffers from the principal-agent problem, where the founder's vision gets distorted as it trickles down through layers of interpreters.
The avatar solves this by making Zuckerberg infinitely replicable, so employees receive directives straight from the source with no middlemen in between.
💵Meta is already flattening its structure, packing up to 50 engineers under a single manager while pouring up to $135 billion into AI infrastructure this year alone.
Meanwhile, a separate "CEO agent" lets Zuckerberg bypass his own vice presidents to pull information directly from the bottom.
Here is the fracture everyone misses: the avatar learns only from what Zuckerberg says publicly, not from his private boardroom battles or closed-door calls with Jassy, Pichai, or Altman.
Employees will take orders from the founder's ego model, not his actual cognition model.
When the real Zuckerberg needs to reverse course and contradict everything his digital twin has been preaching for months, the company will split in two: one half will follow the avatar, the other will follow the human, and trust in leadership will dissolve precisely when alignment matters most.
Although Epstein's documents have
been censored by the U.S. Department of Justice, it is understood from
the data that has so far revealed that there is a perverse organization
based on manhunts among the elites on a global scale. The majority of
the people who hunt are young girls...
The events that the whole world thought of as "lost children" were not investigated, and there was no agenda, there was no agenda, as the "composite theory, psychotic,"
that the people who brought up this perverted organization. According
to the forensic statistics of TURKSTAT, 4,517 children disappeared in
Turkey in 2008, 5,81 in 2009, and 8,81 in 2010. In 2011, where the
number of missing children was to double households, 10 thousand 67
children were reported missing, 12 thousand 474 in 2012, 16 thousand 218
in 2013, 18 thousand 696 in 2014, 17 thousand 706 in 2015 and 11
thousand 691 in 2016. There is no information as to how many of these
children are not found! There is also no information about children lost
in major earthquakes. ’
For some reason, TURKSTAT has not been publishing data on missing children since 2016!
Ismail
According to the new Epstein documents, girls were taken from Turkey to Epstein Island. According to correspondence, some girls were taken to Epistein Island after undergoing “massage training
” in a large hotel in Antalya. At the same time at the hotel, an intern
was killed and allegations that the cell phone was still missing were
not adequately investigated.
Email traffic between Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Gates was also announced on March 3, 2017.
In the e-mail sent with the topic "bgc3 deliveries and scope,"Epstein offers Bill Gatesa "Pandemi Simulation" and talks about the preparation of technical specifications and follow-up recommendations for epidemic types!
Again, there is talk of a study on neurotechnologies that can be used as "weapons" in the national intelligence and defense industry. (The US President Trump himself announced that a new weapon was used in the U.S. raid on Venezuela.)
The documents focus on access to personal health data, and the name of US President Donald Trump is mentioned in at least 4,500 documents in new files.
The new Epstein files include members of the UK, Norway, Denmark and
Swedish royal families, as well as some politicians and some businessmen
from the United States, Britain, France, Slovakia, Turkey and Arab
countries.
Ismail
The documents show that the organization known as Epstein is a perversion organization of elites worldwide.
The Epstein organization reminds the people of Lot. The people of Lot were a people living near the lake Lot on the border of today's Israel-Jordan. According to the Qur’an, the people of Lot were in averse relationship, and so that Allahthey had committed rape of both angels God, disguised as men, and they did not listen to Lot, the one who gave them. God, except for the wife of Lot, saved his entire family, but destroyed his people.
According to Wikipedia, the Ebla tablets, discovered by Italian archaeologist Paolo Matthiae
and his team during the excavations of the ancient city Tell Mardikh
between 1974 and 75 BC, and dated between 2500 BC and the city were
demolished, are named after Sodom and Gomore (L't Kavmi).
Ismail
EpsteinThe people who have expanded with the participation of elites of all nations appear to haunt younger girls.
There are allegations that perverted elites use the kidnapped
children not only as sex slaves, but also for prolonging their lives by
changing their blood, and for stem cell and organ transplantation, even
among allegations that children were sacrificed according to the Baal
tradition of the former Hebrews, but this atrocity is still cited as a
conspiracy theory to the world... The documents Epstein
called Baal into his bank account is also evident. In fact, tens of
thousands of children in Gaza were slaughtered in front of the whole
world, and the world did not react enough... But this massacre was a
ritual of mass sacrifices, and it's still going on...
Shane Warne’s son Jackson has blamed the Covid vaccine for the cricket legend’s 2022 death, despite an autopsy finding that he had congenital heart disease.
The 26-year-old said that even if his father had underlying health issues, he believed the vaccine “brought it straight to the surface”.
“I definitely think that it was involved. I don’t even think saying that is controversial anymore,” he told the 2 Worlds Collide podcast.
“My first impression, as soon as I hung up the phone, I instantly blamed the government. I instantly blamed Covid and the vaccine.”
The former Australian cricketer died in March 2022 while on a lads’ holiday on the Thai island of Koh Samui. The 52-year-old was found unresponsive in his rooms at the luxurious Samujana Villas just an hour after two women were seen on CCTV leaving his room.
An autopsy in Thailand found Warne died of natural causes due to congenital heart disease.
Three years after his death, it was revealed that two types of Viagra and a drug known to improve longevity were found in the bedroom in his suite.
Paramedics who rushed to the room reportedly discovered Sildenafil, marketed as Viagra, Kamagra, an unregulated version of Viagra available in jelly sachets, and Dapoxetine, a drug used to prevent premature ejaculation.
Jackson Warne told the podcast he had wanted to speak out about the Covid vaccine at the state memorial for his father.
“At the state memorial, I nearly said I blame the government and Covid, but I didn’t. It was probably smart I didn’t — I’d be in a very different position if I did,” he said.
“But that was how I felt. Even the last three or four years, I have not changed my tune.
“At the end of the day, we’ll never know. The autopsy is online. I know what happened to him.
“Dad, at the time, was healthy, he was happy. He looked the best he had in a while. Yes, he smoked and drank, but how many more people in their 80s and 90s still smoke and drink a lot more than dad?
“Yes, a lot of people were dying of heart attacks before. But dad was OK, I think he might have got three or four [vaccine doses], he didn’t want to get them, he was forced to get them for work.
“He was forced to get them like everybody else. Dad wasn’t the only person. When dad passed, he was probably the most famous Australian that people could go, ‘yep, that’s Covid’, but I try not to think about it too much because all that does is fester into anger. That anger is not good for anybody.”
During his 15-year international career, Warne was widely regarded as one of cricket’s greatest leg-spinners.
Off the pitch, he was known for his flamboyant lifestyle.
His 10-year marriage to Simone Callahan, with whom he had three children, ended in divorce. He was later engaged to actress Liz Hurley, though the couple eventually separated.
Warne, a habitual smoker and drinker, had also been on a liquid diet in the weeks leading up to his death.
“Operation shred has started (10 days in) & the goal by July is to get back to this shape from a few years ago,” he wrote above a bare-chested picture of his taut, ripped younger self posted to social media on the night he arrived at Samujana Villas.
Tenth person linked to US government secret projects confirmed missing
Steven Garcia, the missing person who disappeared in August 2025 after leaving his Albuquerque home on foot carrying a handgun was a government contractor working for the Kansas City National Security Campus, a source has told The Mail.
☢️ Garcia had top security clearance at the advanced nuclear weapons engineering facility, linked to Honeywell and the National Nuclear Security Administration, and worked at a “very high-level,” in charge of “hundreds of millions of dollars in equipment and assets,” some classified, per the source.
Garcia is at least the tenth high-ranking official with ties to advanced technology and engineering to have gone missing.
1️⃣ Frank Maiwald: aerospace engineer who died inexplicably in his home in 2024. Linked to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab and work on detecting biomarkers on other planets
2️⃣ Carl Grillmair: renowned astrophysicist and NASA researcher killed in a ‘carjacking gone wrong’ earlier this year. Work focused on finding evidence of water vapor on other planets
3️⃣ Michael David Hicks: another JPL research studying near-Earth asteroids, dying mysteriously in 2023 at age 59
4️⃣ Melissa Casias: Los Alamos National Lab researcher who went missing in New Mexico in 2025, last spotted walking along a road, leaving her car, purse, wallet and keys at home
5️⃣ Anthony Chavez: another LANL researcher who went missing in 2025, last seen leaving his home on foot, not taking his wallet or car keys with him
6️⃣ Monica Reza: JPL aerospace engineer and superalloys materials scientist who went missing in 2025 while hiking the Mount Waterman Trail with two companions
7️⃣ William McCasland: retired US Air Force general and astronautical engineer from LANL who went missing in early 2026, again leaving his personal items including cell phone, glasses and wearable devices at home, but taking hiking boots and a handgun
8️⃣ Jason Thomas: 45-year-old chemical biologist at Novartis who went missing in late 2025 -leaving phone and wallet at home. His body was found in March in Lake Quannapowitt, Massachusetts
9️⃣ Nuno Loureino: leading Portuguese-born plasma physicist working as director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center. Killed at her home in December 2025
For a decade, we've been told our screens are wrecking our sleep. The real culprit is far bigger than the glow from your phone.
I have spent the last few weeks strapping on a pair of special orange safety goggles three hours before bed. They're made of thick, uncomfortable plastic that casts the world in a dull amber glow, making it hard to see anything blue. But I don't stop there. I cover the windows with blackout curtains and switch off all my lamps, one by one. In their place, I exclusively light my apartment with candles. My sleep routine is deranged, but it's for an experiment. I found out what happens when you banish blue light.
The world has grown increasingly panicked about this photochromatic fiend over the past 10 years. We're told that our phones, TVs, computers, tablets and LED light bulbs expose us to a perverse amount of blue light. Supposedly, this ruins our sleep by disrupting the natural rhythms of daylight that influence our internal body clock. There's science to back some of this up, but recent studies and analysis suggests that things are a lot more complicated. In fact, chances are good that you've fallen for some serious misconceptions on this subject. Experts tell me it's unlikely that light from your phone is ruining your sleep.
The research is mixed. Those features designed to dial down blue light on your phone at bedtime, for example, are probably doing very little to improve your sleep. But the lighting of modern life really can have a huge effect on your sleep.
What would it take to make a change?
I wanted the truth. So, I called the experts and dove into the science.
And to see if I could spot the difference, I've plunged myself into the most extreme, blue-free evenings I could muster. I landed on practical advice that you can use – no dorky tinted goggles required. It could be the secret to a good night's sleep.
The blue screen of death?
The public freakout about blue light started with a study in 2014. Half of the 12 participants read on an iPad before bed.
The rest read physical books. The iPad users took longer to fall asleep, felt groggier the next day and produced less melatonin. The researchers said the culprit was the glow emitted from the iPad's LED screen, which produces a disproportionate amount of light in the upper, bluer end of the spectrum. Under specific circumstances, blue-enriched light disrupts the daily circadian rhythm – our body's natural pacemaker – that uses daylight to help determine when we start to feel tired. Subsequent research seemed to support the findings. Sounds simple, right? It's not.
"This was an incredibly deceptive piece of work," says Jamie Zeitzer, a professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at Stanford University, who studies the effect of light on the circadian system. The science wasn't bad, he says, the problem is it brought people to bad conclusions.
It's true that our screens are bluer. Modern screens and light bulbs use LEDs, which cannot produce pure white light.
Instead, they use blue LEDs and cover some of them with a chemical called yellow phosphor. The blue and yellow mix together and trick your brain into seeing white, but extra blue always leaks out.
And blue light really can influence your sleep. Zeitzer says that's mostly because you have a light-sensitive protein in your eyes called melanopsin which plays a key role in your sleep system. "And melanopsin is a blue sensitive protein, which basically means that it is most sensitive to blue light," he says. Melanopsin reacts to other colours of light too, the effect of blue is just a bit stronger.
"But the amount of light emitted from our screens is really inconsequential," says Zeitzer. Your life doesn't match the conditions of many blue light studies. "We bring someone into the laboratory, and they are exposed to very dim light all day long. And then they are given a bright light stimulus," he says. Under those circumstances, blue light makes people go haywire, but it doesn't reflect typical experience of human life.
After years warnings and millions of people flipping on the blue light filters built into their phones, the latest science suggests screens are not the main culprit here after all. For example, a recent review of 11 different studies and found that the light from screens only delayed sleep by about nine minutes, at worst. Not zero, but not life altering, either.
The amount of blue light emitted by the screens of phones, laptops and tablets has also been shown to be tiny compared to the blue light we receive from the Sun – 24 hours-worth of blue light from digital devices totted up to less than one minute spent outdoors, according to one study. Other studies have shown it's not enough to affect levels of the hormones that control our sleep.
So why am I so tired all the time? Zeitzer and others told me there are lots of other ways that light, blue and otherwise, could be ruining my bedtime. If I really wanted to tackle the blue monster, it was going to take a serious lifestyle change.
Kind of blue
I was out for dinner as the Sun went down on day one of my experiment. Around 20:30, I said I needed to head home. It was time to hide from the light. Based on the advice I was getting from sleep specialists, my extreme bedtime prepping started long before I get under the covers.
My routine starts with an absurd pair of glasses. If you wear normal glasses, you've probably been offered special clear coatings that promise to filter blue light. Studies suggest they don't do much. Real blue-blocking glasses aren't sexy. Frankly, they aren't a realistic solution for most people, either.
The good ones have deep orange, red or amber lenses that wrap all the way around your eyes so light can't get in from the sides. Serious manufacturers offer a spectrum report that shows how much blue light gets in. "You shouldn't be able to see much blue," says Håvard Kallestad, director of the sleep and chronobiology research group at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
The special blue-light googles I have were made for people who work with lasers that need eye protection. I put them on and looked out the window. There's a store with a blue neon sign down the street. With my glasses on, the light from the sign vanished. Bullseye.
I sat down on the couch, thinking about the sacrifices I make for journalism. I scrolled through Instagram. It looked… orange. The whole point of what I'm doing is to see how light affects my sleep, so I didn't change anything about my phone, TV or computer habits. But the glasses are just the beginning.
"I think you need to turn your apartment into a cave," Kallestad says. "Just block light from entering and use candlelight."
Modern LED lights produce a ton of blue light. Old school incandescent bulbs make much less, but candles are almost blue-free.
It's never really dark where I live in New York. So I covered my windows with blackout curtains, with only my phone and a couple of flickering candles standing between me and the inky darkness. I wasn't sleepy yet. It was going to be a long couple of weeks.
How to un-blue yourself
Experts agree that what really matters is the dose of light of light you're getting through the day. For optimal sleep, you want lots of light in the morning and much less at night. Blue light counts more, but it's your total exposure that makes the real difference.
It turns out the solution starts the moment you wake up. Every morning during my test, I sat in front of a lamp that looks like a prop from a 1980s science fiction movie. It blasts bright light straight into my face while I drink my coffee. The lamp is small, so Kallestad says I need to sit as close to it as possible. It was not fun. The lamp is designed to treat seasonal depression, and the clinical temperature of the light is especially blue, which has been shown to increase alertness when you get it earlier in the day. But it's also priming my eyes to fend off the blue later that night.
"The more light that you get during the daytime, the less impact the light in the evening has," Zeitzer says. The pre-pandemic world exposed people to a lot more light than they realised. There's the Sun during a commute, the piercing fluorescent bulbs of an office, a walk to lunch. Now, so many of us roll out of bed and sit under the same lighting conditions until we go to sleep. Our bodies can't tell the difference between day and night.
Leaving the house will fix that faster than any lamp. Even on a grey overcast day, Zeitzer says you're probably getting around 10,000 lux (the measure of light intensity). A bright sunny day can hit 100,000 lux. By comparison, your living room it's probably around 100 lux. (And your phone tops out around a measly 50-80 lux, Zeitzer says, and it's less when you have the brightness down.)
"Go outside if you can, use the lamp if you have to," says Kallestad. Even a 30-minute walk in the morning makes a real difference (just don't forget sunscreen). And if you can get outside again after 15:00, Zeitzer says that's also surprisingly useful. It further anchors your body clock and directly reduces how sensitive you are to light in the evening.
If you work from home, another tip you can try is a bit counter-intuitive. Turn your lights up bright during the day and start switching them off in the evening. "The real key with light exposure is contrast," Zeitzer says.
So, if being glued to your screens keeps you stuck inside all day, away from the sleep-promoting glare of natural sunlight, that's bad news. But the blue light coming from those screens contributes little to the wider issue of our lifestyles. The real problem, Zeitzer says, is what we spend our time doing on our phones and laptops before bed.
"It is much more the content, rather than the light, that is keeping people awake from these devices," Zeitzer says. It can also depend on how sensitive you are to light in the first place – I might be more or less sensitive than you.
My blue period
I use a sleep tracker to monitor my rest. It's not good enough for real science, but it's a rough indication. The quality of my sleep didn't seem to change much during my experiment. But I did notice some differences. Towards the end of the
second week, I found myself a little more motivated to get into bed on time and it seemed easier to fall asleep. The amount of time I spent asleep didn't change in any meaningful way by the end of my experiment, but the time I feel asleep and got up in the morning was a little more consistent. Was this because I blocked blue light? Hard to say, but it felt like a big victory.
What I can tell you is I started to look forward to my candle evenings. It's possible this in itself could make a difference.
When something "becomes part of the pre-bed process, it can act as a very strong psychological cue to help remind your body of what you're supposed to be doing next", Zeitzer says.
The same goes for the auto-dimming features that limit some blue light on your phone. "It doesn't really work that well, but the one thing that it can do is that when you have one of these filters, or if you wear blue blocking glasses in the evening,
is that acts as kind of like a Pavlovian conditioning cue for some people. When the screen colour changes, or you put on your glasses, your brain starts to understand it is time to get ready for bed."
If you come by for a sleepover, you won't see me in the blue blocking glasses. It was a huge relief to give them up, but I might keep the candles.
Today, Brandy Vaughan would have been 50 years old.
A milestone birthday she should have been here to celebrate.
She should have been here with her son.
She should have been here with her friends.
She should have been here watching the movement she started continue to grow.
But she isn't.
Born March 21, 1976,
Brandy was a mother, a whistleblower, a former pharmaceutical insider
who walked away from the industry when she saw the truth.. and the
founder ofLearn The Risk.
She gave up everything to speak out.
Her career.
Her income.
Her reputation.
Her safety.
And on December 7th, 2020, she died suddenly under circumstances many of us will never stop questioning.
What she exposed made powerful people uncomfortable.
What she started woke up thousands of families.
What she built is still saving lives today.
Her 50th birthday should not pass quietly.
If she were here, she would still be speaking.
She would still be warning parents.
She would still be handing out info cards.
She would still be telling people to research before they inject.
So today, we honor her the way she would want us to.
Not with silence.
With action.
________
Birthday Action for Brandy - March 21
Do something today to spread truth in your community.
Hold a LearnTheRisk sign at a busy street corner
Hand out at least 50 info cards
Put info cards in car windows in parking lots
Leave flyers at community boards, pet stores, coffee shops, libraries
Share her story online
Talk to one person who has never heard this information before
Fourteen-year-old Carolina has been on Roblox since she was 10,
chatting and playing with other gamers on the platform. When the site
rolled out mandatory age checks
at the start of the year, Carolina was afraid she would lose access to
some of her friends and group chats. She needn’t have worried — the
software determined she was 16 or 17.
“Without any makeup, I did what the app asked: turned my head this
way and that for the photo,” Carolina, who lives in São Paulo, told Rest of World. “The app said I was 16 to 17 years old. I was able to go back to my chats.”
Roblox is among the growing number of social media platforms
installing age checks as governments around the world act to keep young
users off social media sites and limit their access to content deemed
inappropriate. The most commonly used methods include verification with a
government-issued identity; estimation through biometrics such as
facial recognition; and inferring the age of the user from their online
behavior.
The methods are not foolproof. Facial recognition technology is known to be less accurate
for women and people of color. On Roblox, the age check is meant to
restrict who users can chat with. The 16 to 17 age group, which Carolina
was assessed as belonging to, can chat with users in their group, as
well as the ones immediately above and below theirs, or those in the
13–15 and 18–20 age groups. Being able to chat with older users exposes
her to the risk of harassment and abuse — something California-based
Roblox has come under scrutiny for. Of its more than 100 million daily users, nearly 40% are under the age of 13, some estimates show.
As a new child safety law
comes into effect in Brazil from March, requiring platforms providing
gambling, pornography, and other such content to verify ages, users are
learning to circumvent the tech, Simone Lahorgue Nunes, founding partner
at law firm Lahorgue Advogadas Associadas in Rio de Janeiro, told Rest of World.
“Age-verification technologies are not infallible,” she said. “Minors
are using increasingly sophisticated techniques, including VPNs
[virtual private networks] and AI-generated deepfakes or selfies.
Conversely, overly stringent measures may drive underage users toward
the dark web or services hosted in so-called digital havens, thereby
exacerbating the very risks such regulation seeks to mitigate.”
Circumventing age verification doesn’t even need much sophistication. In a subreddit
on bypassing the Roblox checks, users recommend fake IDs and
AI-generated photos. “I used a fake ID of [Joseph] Stalin and it got
accepted,” one user wrote. Another user posted a video on X that showed a crude face painted on a thumb going through the age check on Roblox and being assessed to be 13 to 15 years old.
The age check process “is designed for accuracy,” Roblox said in the
statement announcing the rollout. The technology has been “tested and
certified by third-party laboratories,” and the company constantly
evaluates user behavior to determine if someone is “significantly older
or younger than expected,” it said. TikTok’s new age checks use a combination of profile data, content analysis, and behavior to infer whether an account belongs to an underage user.
Since Australia last year barred
those under 16 years from social media platforms such as Facebook,
Instagram, X, and TikTok, at least a dozen countries including Malaysia,
Spain, France, and the U.K. have said they are planning similar rules.
The chief economic adviser in India, one of the biggest markets for
social media companies, has also made a recommendation for such a law.
With the focus
on technology, there isn’t enough discussion around how these measures
can disproportionately harm minorities and others who lack documentation
or prefer anonymity online, Shivangi Narayan, who teaches sociology at
the Thapar School of Liberal Arts and Sciences in Patiala, India, told Rest of World.
“Age verification would end anonymous accounts and anonymity on the
internet as we know it,” Narayan said. “It is a potent tool to kill
dissent and end the last vestige of protection that a lot of
marginalized identities have online — people who cannot express
themselves fully on social media because they could be harassed,
trolled, become a victim of hate speech or in extreme circumstances, even killed.”
Privacy campaigners are also worried that the identification
documents and biometric data used to determine a user’s age could be
compromised, exploited, sold, or used for surveillance.
Last year, San Francisco-based Discord said
the government photo IDs of about 70,000 users worldwide had been
exposed through a third-party vendor. The compromised data included
their names, email addresses, contact information, and payment history.
Earlier this month, Discord — with over 200 million monthly active users
— said it was rolling out
“enhanced teen safety features” for users over the age of 13. These
include deleting identity documents submitted for verification “quickly —
in most cases, immediately after age confirmation.”
Some countries are opting for their own age verification systems
rather than U.S.-based Jumio or Yoti from the U.K. Malaysia has its own technology, and Brazil plans to build one. India’s Signzy and Accura Scan have several global clients.
The focus on age checks diverts attention away from the more pressing
concerns around social media platforms, Apar Gupta, founder-director of
Internet Freedom Foundation, a digital rights organization in India,
told Rest of World.
“Effective child safety online doesn’t require identifying every
internet user,” he said. “Platform design choices around recommendation
algorithms, data harvesting practices, and addictive features cause far
more harm than anonymous access to information.”
In Malaysia, where the government has said it will soon introduce a
law to restrict under-16s from accessing social media platforms,
long-time Discord user Adam is concerned about the security of its
facial recognition requirement, he told Rest of World.
“If your face is compromised, you can’t replace it,” the 17-year-old said. “Imagine having your biometric identity exposed
forever.”
Australia recently became the first country to ban social media use for children under 16, a landmark policy aimed at protecting kids from mental health risks, cyberbullying, and harmful or addictive content.
Earlier this month, my WhatsApp groups and dinner table conversations in Bengaluru quickly turned to whether India should do the same after a horrific event. According to preliminary police reports, three young sisters — just 12, 14, and 16 years old — died by suicide following a parental dispute over access to a mobile phone.
As a parent, I’m deeply worried about the harm that social media can cause to children. As a journalist who has monitored the effects — and inefficiencies — of tech-related bans, I’m also skeptical of how far such measures can go in keeping children safe.
Increasingly, my larger question is: Why does the burden of “fixing” social media fall on children and parents instead of on the companies designing these systems?
Tech lawyer Apar Gupta captured this tension well: “Beneath the fury lies a dangerous impulse: to solve a complex problem with a blunt instrument that absolves platforms of accountability while stripping young people of their digital rights.”
That line stays with me because I cannot comprehend why policymaking isn’t more focused on holding Big Tech accountable. Companies that make billions from young users — and constantly promote how advanced their AI systems are — surely have the technical capacity to design safer feeds, stronger age protections, and less addictive algorithms.
If AI can recommend the next video with eerie precision, why can’t it flag grooming patterns, throttle harmful content spirals, or detect when a teenager is in distress?
Early signals from Australia surface the limits and frustrations. A recent survey found that only 6% of Australians believe online spaces are safer and more age-appropriate since the ban. And many expect young users to simply find ways around the restrictions.
I phoned an old school friend in Sydney to ask how the ban is unfolding in real life. Her children, aged 10 and 12, are still below the social media threshold, but her teenage nephew had to quit Snapchat after the rules took effect. He and his friends quickly improvised.
“They are using WhatsApp groups like Snapchat,” she told me. Unable to maintain streaks on the social media platform, they now exchange daily photos and videos in WhatsApp group chats to keep their record of consecutive days alive.
My friend found other virtual spaces to worry about, too. She said her own children play multiplayer online games like Fortnite and Roblox, where a large number of anonymous players interact simultaneously in shared virtual worlds. These games have become hunting grounds for pedophiles and other criminals in recent years, leading to lawsuits, investigations, and arrests.
Is a ban on children playing in our future?
Social media today is more than dance videos and memes. For many people, it’s the primary source of news, community, and information. For some, it’s also a source of livelihood. Restricting access comes with trade-offs.
The harder — and more necessary — conversation is this: Instead of repeatedly fretting over how to keep children away from platforms, we should be demanding safer platforms.
Until companies are required to redesign systems that reward outrage, addiction, and endless engagement, bans risk becoming a cycle of ineffective whack-a-mole.
Surely, the real test of policymaking isn’t how effectively it can block apps — it’s how it pushes the world’s most powerful tech firms to build better ones. -Itika Sharma Punit, Deputy Editor, https://restofworld.org
Eight
months after Trump insisted that Operation Midnight Hammer "totally
obliterated" Iran's nuclear program, he has deployed the largest
military presence in the Middle East since the Iraq War.
‘President
Donald J. Trump holds a joint news conference at the White House with
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’ in February, 2025.
Joshua Sukoff / Shutterstock
President Trump has spent
two months ordering a rapidly expanding and now-massive military
buildup near Iran, with a focus on the Persian Gulf and nearby permanent
U.S. military bases in close proximity to Iran (Iran, of course, has no
military bases anywhere near the U.S.). The deployment includes
aircraft carriers and other assets that would enable, at a minimum, an
extremely destructive air campaign against the whole country.
The
U.S. under both parties has been insisting for two decades that it must
abandon its heavy military involvement in the Middle East and instead “pivot to Asia”
in light of a rapidly rising China. Yet in the midst of those vows,
Trump has now assembled the largest military presence in the Middle East
since 2003, when the U.S. was preparing to invade Iraq with
overwhelming military force.
One
of the most striking and alarming aspects of all of this is that Trump —
outside of a few off-the-cuff banalities — has barely attempted to
offer a case to the American public as to why such a major new war is
necessary. This unilateral march to war resembles what we saw in the
lead-up to the bombing of Venezuelan boats, culminating in the U.S.
invading force that abducted (“arrested”) the country’s President,
Nicolas Maduro, and took him and his wife to a prison in New York.
In
the weeks preceding the Venezuela operation, we heard a carousel of
rationales. It was all necessary to stop the flow of dangerous drugs
into the U.S. We needed to free the repressed Venezuelan peoples from
their dictator. Trump’s embrace and expansion of the Monroe Doctrine —
now dubbed the Donroe Doctrine — meant that we cannot tolerate communist
regimes in “our region.”
But
as soon as Maduro was removed, all of those claims disappeared.
Contrary to the expectations of many, the U.S. left in place Maduro’s
entire regime rather than replacing it with the pro-US opposition (a
wise move of restraint in my view, but one that negates the “liberation”
rhetoric). Discussions of the drug trade from Venezuela (a source of
drugs for the U.S. that was always minor if not trivial, and did not
include fentanyl) have completely disappeared. The only real outcome
seems to be that the U.S. has more control over that nation’s oil
supply, and barrels of it are now being shipped to Israel for the first time in many years.
In
sum, we were given a low-effort smorgasbord to enable supporters of
Trump’s actions toward Venezuela to mount arguments in favor of the
operation, but there was no systematic attempt to convince the country
at large. There was not even a live television address to the nation
beforehand to explain it. And the role that Congress played was close to
non-existent. All of that is similar to what we are seeing now
concerning a far riskier, more dangerous, and complex war with Iran.
This massive build-up near Iran
also signifies the U.S.’s complete inability — or lack of desire — to
extricate itself from the Middle East and endless American wars there.
In the first year of his second term — 2025 — Trump has already ordered
sustained bombing of Yemen; extensive military deployments to support
Israel’s attacks on Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen;
and Operation Midnight Hammer, which was sold to Trump’s base as a
one-night-only bombing run that is now close to exploding into something
far more protracted.
No
matter how fast China’s power grows, the U.S. — despite emphasizing the
vital importance of doing so over the last four administrations —
simply cannot or will not reduce its massive military commitment to the
Middle East. The real reasons why the U.S. does not sharply deprioritize
the Middle East as a military focus deserve serious examination (oil is
often cited as the reason, but the U.S. is a net exporter of oil, and
multiple oil-rich countries in that region are perfectly eager to sell
the U.S. as much oil as it wants to buy).
In this regard, it is hard not to notice that Trump’s very rapid movement toward war with Iran comes in the midst of yet another visit
to the White House by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It is
not hyperbole to say that Netanyahu’s great dream for decades has been
inducing the U.S. into a regime-change war with Iran to rid Tel Aviv of
its most formidable adversary, and his dream is closer than ever to
being realized.
There
is no way to minimize the gravity of the moment. Trump himself has made
clear that this huge armada on its way to Iran — far larger than the
one deployed to Venezuela — is not for show. He has spent many weeks
ratcheting up his war rhetoric. Trump’s public posture is ostensibly one
of deterrence: he proclaims that his overarching desire is to strike “a
deal” with Tehran in order to avoid the need for war, but he then
quickly adds that the US will impose massive damage and violence on the
country in the event that negotiations fail to produce the agreement he
wants. In sum, he depicts threats of war as motivation for Iran to
accept his terms.
That
may seem to be a cogent theory of deterrence (or extortion) if one
looks at it in isolation. Many world leaders, in general, and Trump,
especially, believe that threats of war and military attack are often
necessary for extracting the best diplomatic solution possible. But thus
far, it has not averted wars.
One reason this tactic is losing efficacy is that it has lost its credibility. As I documented in my report
last Tuesday, Trump’s words and actions about the current situation
with Iran track almost completely his actions and words which preceded
Israel’s surprise attack on Iran in June and the accompanying U.S.
bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Up until the hours before Israel
started a war with Iran by bombing Tehran in June, Trump was repeatedly
trumpeting how great negotiations with Tehran were going, and he
predicted with great confidence that all issues would be resolved
without the need for military action against Iran. Central to this
scheme was the Israeli “reporter” for Axios, Barak Ravid, who — before
his overnight ascension to key reporter in the US for all matters Israel
— served in Israel’s notorious Unit 8200 military intelligence unit as
well as the IDF Reserves until 2024. This former IDF soldier, from his
key perch at Axios and CNN, continuously circulated reports based on
anonymous sources in both governments announcing a growing and virulent
“rift” between the two leaders, all due to Trump’s refusal to allow
Netanyahu to bomb Iran.
That
public theater, by design, created the impression that a U.S. or
Israeli military attack on Iran was highly unlikely because of how
opposed Trump was to it. And that, in turn, manipulated Iran out of
adopting a posture of maximum war readiness, given their belief in the
sincerity of Trump’s assurances that a deal would be made.
But
in the midst of all that, Israel suddenly launched a major attack on
Iran, only to have the U.S. join in, with Trump eventually taking credit
for all of it. This — quite understandably — created a global
perception that Trump’s diplomatic conduct and statements, amplified by
Ravid, were an obvious ruse to lure Iran into a false sense of security,
so that Israel and the U.S. could attack Iran without much resistance.
When
the Israeli attack on Iran was touted in Western media as a success,
Trump instantly proclaimed that he and Netanyahu planned it together. He
heralded Netanyahu (and implicitly himself) as a “war hero” and, on
that basis, demanded that the Israeli president pardon Netanyahu on
pending corruption charges.
When
journalists asked Trump why the U.S. would not simply be in the exact
same situation months from now, when Iran began rebuilding its nuclear
program, Trump insisted that it would and never could happen. The U.S.
“totally and completely obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program, he
insisted, and Iran learned its lesson and knows not to try to rebuild.
Yet
here we are just eight months later, seemingly closer to a full-on war
with Iran than ever before. “Trump appears ready to attack Iran as U.S.
strike force takes shape,” reads the headline in The Washington Post
on Friday morning. The paper cites “current and former U.S. officials”
as saying that “the Trump administration appears ready to launch an
extended military assault on Iran.” While such a war is not yet
inevitable, it is clear that the probability increases each day with
more and more military assets arriving. That the U.K. is thus far refusing to allow
the U.S. to use its military base in Diego Garcia as a launching ground
for air attacks is proof that the U.S. is, at the very least, in
serious, high-level preparation stages.
The obvious, most pressing question
— the key question for any war, but especially for this one — is why?
In order to have the U.S. once again militarily attack a country and
risk a major war, one expects that the American President would provide
clear, consistent, and compelling evidence as to why this war is
necessary to protect the interests of the U.S. and the security of the
American people. The Bush 43 administration spent a full year starting
in 2002 toward laying the groundwork to convince Americans of the need
to invade Iraq, and though it was filled with falsehoods and deceit,
that is the sort of campaign that generally accompanies an attempt to
bring the country into a major new war.
But
none of that is happening: at all. The U.S. has inexorably moved toward
a war with Iran with stunningly little public debate or discussion. If
you ask 10 different Trump supporters, or even 10 different Trump White
House officials, why the U.S. should be aggressively menacing Iran with
full-scale war, you will hear 10 different answers. There is not even a
pretense of involving Congress, and the Democratic Party is in its usual
state of worthless passivity. And the more one looks for such answers
about why this war is even arguably necessary, the more difficult it is
to find them.
The
pretext used for the last U.S. bombing attack on Iran — namely, we have
to stop their nuclear program — was never remotely persuasive for
reasons we and others extensively documented. But whatever is true about
the past, that pretext is less valid now than ever. Trump’s vehement
insistence that the U.S. “completely obliterated” the only nuclear
facilities Iran possesses renders that excuse inoperable. How could Iran
possibly be close to developing a nuclear weapon if Trump’s boastful
claims are even remotely true?
Then
there is the “war justification” based on Iran’s recent, violent
treatment of its domestic dissidents and protesters. I am almost
reluctant to critically evaluate this claim, because it genuinely shocks
me each time I learn that there really still are sentient human beings
living on this planet who earnestly believe that U.S. foreign policy is
based on a desire to liberate the world’s oppressed peoples and give
them freedom and democracy. All presidents since the end of World War II
have proven that “human rights concerns” or “a desire to liberate
people” can often serve as the propagandistic pretext for war or a coup,
but are never the actual motive for U.S. military action.
That
many people continue to believe this self-serving fairy tale about U.S.
foreign policy no matter how much negating proof they see — the U.S.
propping up the world’s most savage and repressive tyrannies (such as in
Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Uganda); the fact that the CIA has far more
often overthrown democratically elected governments and replaced them
with vicious dictatorships rather than the other way around; that “human
rights concerns” find a mainstream platform in the U.S. only for
countries that are adversaries but rarely for countries that are close
U.S. allies — leads me to accept the futility of any efforts at
dissuasion for people who somehow still believe in this mythology.
In fact, Trump’s own 2025 national security strategy
released in December explicitly states that the U.S. is not going to
attempt to stop repression in other countries or lecture them about the
need for democratic and human rights reforms, but instead will deal with
such countries as they are (that policy was designed to justify Trump’s
close relationship with Saudi, Emirati, Qatari, Egyptian and Jordanian
tyrants but the principle applies to Iran as well, which is at most as
repressive and in fact mildly less so than those close U.S. allies).
National Security Strategy of the Trump Administration, 2025
The
willingness of the U.S. to embrace and even support the world’s most
savage regimes has, in fact, been the staple of U.S. foreign policy
since at least the end of World War II; Trump, I guess to his credit, is
the first to candidly admit and describe that reality.
Then
we arrive at the final stated justification for a U.S. war against
Iran: namely, Iran’s refusal to give up conventional weapons such as the
ballistic missiles it used to impose serious damage to Israel in
retaliation for Israel’s surprise attack on Iran. These ballistic
missiles do not have the range to reach the U.S. Even if they did, Iran
has never shown any propensity for militarily attacking the U.S.
homeland, given its knowledge of what would ensue.
Moreover,
every country has a legal right to build up a conventional arsenal:
most countries in the world, including U.S. adversaries, do exactly
that. And few countries have more justification for wanting such weapons
than Iran, which has not only been repeatedly threatened with war by
the most powerful country on earth, and the most powerful country in the
region, but both of those countries have attacked Iran in multiple ways
over the last two decades. Any minimally responsible leader of any
country would, of course, want normal conventional weapons such as
mid-range ballistic missiles to provide a deterrent threat against
adversaries such as Israel from attacking it on a whim.
If
the U.S. goes to war against Iran because of its refusal to destroy or
severely limit its ballistic missiles — weapons that can threaten Israel
and U.S. forces deployed near Iran to protect Israel, but not reach the
U.S. homeland — then that will be one of the clearest signs yet (for
those who still harbor doubts) that the U.S. is fighting wars and
putting American soldiers at risk in order to advance Israel’s interests
in the Middle East.
There
is a reason that Netanyahu has visited Trump in the White House seven
times in the last year, more than any other world leader by far. It is
not because Netanyahu (or Trump’s fanatical top billionaire funder, the
Israeli-American Miriam Adelson, whom Trump has suggested cares more
about Israel than the U.S.) has suddenly developed a keen interest in
building Trump’s “Board of Peace” to spread harmony in the world.
Each
time Netanyahu visits, the U.S. finds itself in conflict, if not
outright war, with Israel’s enemies. One can dismiss that as a
coincidence if one likes, but I defy anyone to find a more likely reason
as to why Trump — who built his movement on a vow to end Endless War as
the defining dogma of the bipartisan DC swamp, yet is now clearly
captive to powerful Israeli power centers — is on the verge of yet
another new war with Israel’s enemies.
