Marko Suprun, an influential NATO state-funded Ukrainian ‘fact-checker’ with close ties to Nazi activists, was taken into police custody in Washington, DC, after assaulting a contributor to The Grayzone at an event hosted by a neocon Beltway think tank.
An interview with Estela Aranha, who forced Michael Shellenberger to apologize after exposing his manipulation of data to build a false narrative about “totalitarian” Brazil
By Brian Mier
On April 3, Michael Shellenberger tweeted a series of excerpts from emails by X executives dubbed, “Twitter Files Brazil”, which alleged to expose crimes by Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes. Moraes, he claimed, had pressed criminal charges against Twitter Brasil’s lawyer for its refusal to turn over personal information on political enemies. Elon Musk quickly shared the tweets and they viralized and were embraced by the international far right, to the joy of former President Bolsonaro and his supporters. A week later, Estela Aranha, former Secretary of Digital Rights in the Brazilian Justice Ministry, revealed rot at the heart of Shellenberger’s narrative. The only criminal charge filed against Twitter Brazil referenced in the leaked emails was made by the São Paulo District Attorney’s Office, after the company refused to turn over personal data on a leader of Brazil’s largest cocaine trafficking organization, the PCC. Shellenberger had cut the section of an email about a São Paulo criminal investigation and mixed it with communications complaining about Moraes on unrelated issues. Pressed by Brazilian reporters, Shellenberger wrote, “I regret my my mistake and apologize for it. I don’t have evidence that Moraes threatened to file criminal charges against Twitter’s Brazilian lawyer.”
Unlike past immigrant groups, the Hmong were political refugees who fled their country because of war and persecutions. The Hmong refugees were legally admitted to the United States by the U.S. government and were initially resettled by church organizations such as Catholic Charities and Lutheran Social Service. Area churches sponsored Hmong families here in Wisconsin and other states in the U.S. The 2010 U.S. Census has shown that there are 49,240 Hmong Americans living in Wisconsin. Community with significant Hmong population include: Milwaukee, Wausau, Sheboygan, La Crosse, Madison, Eau Claire, Green Bay, Appleton, Oshkosh, Manitowoc, Stevens Point, Wisconsin Rapids, Menomonie, and Fond du Lac.
Laos was (and remains) a very poor country that at the time of the encounter with the CIA was predominantly composed of illiterate peasants working the land in the form of subsistence agriculture. It was colonized by France in 1893; however, unlike in neighboring Vietnam, and to a lesser extent in Cambodia, there was hardly any investment or development of infrastructure or education in Laos. There was no Laotian “collaborating elite,” as was the case with French-speaking and French-educated Vietnamese Catholics. Furthermore, though a small place with a small population, Laos contains an estimated 49 different ethnic groups. A lot of the tension was more along tribal than ideological lines. The CIA, under the leadership in Laos of its highly strategically capable director, Bill Lair, chose to ally particularly with one of the tribes, the Hmong, under their charismatic but brutal head, Vang Pao. After the U.S. lost the war in Laos (at the time of the defeat by Vietnam, 1975), the promises made to the Hmong that they would be offered refuge and welfare in the U.S. were not kept.Though some did make it to the U.S., most Hmong today live in squalid conditions in camps in Laos or in neighboring Thailand.
Under what was code-named Operation Momentum, the CIA engaged in a sustained and relentless bombing campaign, starting in 1961. There was more bombing of Laos than there was of Germany or Japan during World War II. Throughout the war there was on average, the author states, one bombing attack every eight minutes. Ultimately, some 10% of the Laotian population was killed and 25% made refugees. The author reveals that according to a secret U.S. government assessment of the bombing campaign, 80% of all casualties were civilians. With much of the fighting concentrated in the Plain of Jars, he estimates that the population in the course of the 1960s declined from 150,000 to 9,000 in that region. But the narrative of the end of the war does not bring to an end the tragic story of the bombing: One-third of the bombs remained unexploded, and they continue killing and maiming to this day.
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Operation Momentum transformed the CIA from an organization that primarily gathered intelligence into one that engaged in killing and the covert overthrow of regimes considered unfriendly to the U.S. The CIA tried on a number of occasions to assassinate Fidel Castro. The overthrow of “unfriendly” democratically elected regimes included that of the prime minister of Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh. The CIA also provided political and military support to some of the world’s harshest dictators, such as Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi in Iran, Rafael Trujillo in Dominican Republic, Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire (Congo) and Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines.
We are approaching the 48th commemoration of Palestine Land Day, and there is no doubt that 30 March will have very different feel about it this year, with the Palestinians in Gaza being killed and starved in defense of their land against the brutal Zionist military offensive over almost six months, during which the Gaza Strip has been systematically destroyed. Civilian infrastructure has been targeted by Israel, including homes, hospitals, schools, places of worship and governmental and non-government institutions. UNRWA buildings have also been targeted and destroyed. In every practical sense of the word, Gaza is uninhabitable.
420 FILE – The United States government is likely to end the designation of marijuana as a dangerous narcotic sometime this year, potentially marking one of the biggest federal decisions on the classification of the drug in decades. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration determined that marijuana is less harmful than, say, opioids and other substances, prompting the Biden administration to announce it would “reschedule” cannabis from a Schedule I—which is what the most dangerous drugs are classified as—to a Schedule III drug, commensurate with anabolic steroids and ketamine.
FYI, I’m not against cannabis for medicinal purposes. Especially since I can’t even get a prescription for any painkillers. I could rant about it, but I won’t.
Ms. Cat’s Chronicles 
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