Politics
The Architecture of “False Flags” and Wartime Propaganda
On 7 May 1915, the pristine waters off the old head of Kinsale became a graveyard. Within just eighteen minutes of being struck by a single German torpedo, the RMS Lusitania – the world’s most celebrated luxury liner – vanished beneath the Atlantic, taking 1,198 lives with her. Historically, this tragedy is framed as a shocking turning point; a brutal act of piracy that shattered American isolationism and catalysed a moral crusade against imperial tyranny.
Yet, when we peel back the layers of standard textbook narratives, the fate of the Lusitania emerges as something far more calculated. Beneath the murky depths of this disaster lies a masterclass in crisis engineering – an intricate nexus of resource warfare, strategic maritime blockades, and the brutal leverage of financial markets.
It was an event transformed behind the scenes by architects of power, including the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, into a mass intelligence test. By deconstructing the chasm between the overt humanitarian narrative and covert geopolitical determinants, we can decode the hidden mechanics of more contemporary conflicts.<
War as an Engineered Industry
In classical political philosophy, war is often defined as an extension of politics by other means. However, a critical reading of political economy suggests a more chilling reality: modern total wars do not break out spontaneously; they are deliberately designed.
For any state to transition from peacetime into total war, it must first break the instinctive social contract of its citizenry. Democratic societies do not willingly sacrifice their youth, wealth, and liberties without an acute, existential provocation. This necessitates a “shock event” – or what strategic literature brands a “false flag” operation. By executing an attack or deliberately manufacturing a vulnerability, ruling elites can fabricate evidence to frame an adversary, thereby legitimising military aggression in the eyes of an outraged public.
The First World War (1914–1918) served as the premier laboratory for this brand of total mobilisation. It was not merely an escalation of armies, but a systemic restructuring. Entire civil institutions and societies were weaponised under totalitarian state control, all masked by the collective war effort. In this grand theatre, the entry of the United States in 1917 represented the ultimate geopolitical pivot.
The war dismantled three great empires – the Russian, German, and Ottoman – leaving millions dead and mutilated in its wake. Crucially, the Russian and German empires stood defiantly outside the orbit of western ‘Money Powers’ – non-elected, transnational network of central banks, Wall Street cartels, and mega asset management firms that controls the global reserve currency and uses sovereign debt to dictate international policies and conflicts to preserve its financial hegemony – whilst the Ottoman Empire occupied a Levant targeted for oil colonization and strategic British realignment.
Yet, this monumental American intervention would never have materialised without the psychological and political groundwork engineered through the wreckage of the Lusitania two years prior.
Geopolitical Background and the Ethnic Context
Prior to the disaster, President Woodrow Wilson’s administration faced a complex domestic quandary. London was desperate for American intervention; the British economy was utterly exhausted, and the Western Front was consuming human lives at an unsustainable rate. For decision-makers in Whitehall, dragging Washington into the trenches was a matter of sheer survival.
However, American public opinion leaned overwhelmingly towards isolationism, viewing the European conflagration as a distant imperialist squabble. Furthermore, Wilson faced a profound demographic dilemma: a relative majority of the American populace was of German descent, with the German language deeply embedded in local schools, press, and communities.
To shatter this domestic deadlock, British political planners recognized that they needed something louder than diplomacy. They required a direct assault on American sovereignty or dignity – an event so emotionally devastating that it would rewrite the collective consciousness and morph into an undeniable moral justification for total war.
Deconstructing the Incident: Myth versus Reality
When the German U-20 boat targeted the Lusitania, claiming 1,198 lives – including 128 American citizens – the Allied media machine instantly weaponised the tragedy. It was branded a savage German war crime against defenceless civilians. However, a century of maritime exploration and declassified documentation has exposed a truth entirely at odds with the official narrative.
1. The Auxiliary Cruiser
The Lusitania was never a purely civilian vessel. She was officially registered on the British Admiralty’s auxiliary warship rosters, designed from her very inception to specifications that allowed immediate conversion into an armed cruiser during wartime. In fact, her construction had been heavily subsidised by military loans from the British Government on the explicit condition that the Navy could claim her when required.
2. The Cargo
Despite vehement denials from British political circles, subsequent investigations and physical expeditions to the wreck proved that the ship’s holds were packed with massive shipments of military supplies destined for the British Army, including millions of rifle rounds, shrapnel shells, and fuses shipped out of New York.
Paradoxically, this lethal ammunition was loaded quite openly. This explains the mysterious, massive secondary explosion that ripped through the vessel immediately after the single German torpedo strike, causing her to sink in a mere 18 minutes. Under international maritime law at the time, the Lusitania was an entirely legitimate military target.
3. The Suppressed Warnings
Operating within strict maritime protocols, the German Chancellery saw through the British plot to use civilians as human shields for weapons transport. In an extraordinary move, the German Embassy in Washington purchased advertising space in major American newspapers – including prominent New York broadsheets – explicitly warning passengers that boarding the Lusitania was a high-risk venture, as she would pass through a designated war zone carrying military material.
Tragically, pro-British interest groups within the United States successfully suppressed the publication of these warning advertisements in several pivotal cities, leaving the civilian passengers entirely in the dark – disposable pawns in a high-stakes geopolitical chess game.
Winston Churchill and Engineered Risk Management
At the very centre of this web sits Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty.
Declassified records reveal that Britain’s legendary naval intelligence hub, Room 40, had successfully cracked the German military wireless codes. Consequently, the Admiralty possessed precise, real-time tracking of German U-boats patrolling the Irish coast.
The profound suspicion surrounding the incident lies not just in the sudden withdrawal of a military escort for the Lusitania, but in a sequence of direct, highly irregular directives emanating from Churchill’s personal office:
Step 1: A secret, direct order is issued from the personal office of the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill.
Step 2: The order is relayed past standard naval command straight to the Captain of the Lusitania as she approaches British waters.
Step 3: The luxury liner is commanded to reduce her speed off the Irish coast, placing her precisely within the active U-boat nexus.
This final directive flew in the face of all established naval protocols, which dictated that fast vessels must maintain maximum speed and zigzag to evade torpedoes. Internal Admiralty testimonies indicate that Churchill’s own aides confronted him, warning that slowing the ship would drastically increase the probability of an attack. His stern, unyielding reply was:
The order is mine; pass it on.
By confirming the military cargo, suppressing public warnings, intercepting the intelligence codes, and actively slowing the ship into the path of a known submarine, the incident shifts from the realm of tragic military negligence into the territory of deliberate facilitation – the engineering of a catastrophic trap.
Propaganda Mechanisms and the Dehumanisation of the Adversary
The moment the ship sank, the Allied media apparatus executed a meticulously prepared crisis management plan. Empirical military facts were instantly replaced with highly emotional, weaponised vocabulary. Overnight, headlines coalesced into a unified, thunderous battle cry: “The Barbarians Dare Again” and “The Hun Butchers Murder Mothers and Children”.
This wartime propaganda went far beyond mere reporting; it sought the total dehumanisation of the adversary – a psychological prerequisite required to prepare ordinary citizens to kill without guilt. The campaign succeeded brilliantly in shattering American isolationism. While Washington delayed its official declaration of war until 1917, the ghost of the Lusitania served as the emotional fuel and political legitimacy that President Wilson required to successfully market total war to Congress and an outraged American public.
From the Lusitania to the Twenty-First Century: Continuity of the Model
Deconstructing this history is not an exercise in mourning the ruins of the past, but an effort to extract the immutable structural rules of crisis engineering. It reveals that central planners and ruling elites treat mass casualties as mere cost variables in equations of global hegemony. This exact political blueprint has repeated itself across subsequent, well-documented historical milestones:
The Gulf of Tonkin Incident(1964): Washington claimed that an American destroyer fell victim to an unprovoked North Vietnamese assault. Declassified documents later exposed the attack as entirely fabricated and illusory, yet it served as the official pretext granted by Congress to launch full-scale military intervention in the Vietnam War.
The 9/11 Attacks (2001): Irrespective of the details heavily classified under absolute state secrecy, these attacks represented the ultimate modern “shock event.” It cleared the path for totalitarian domestic legislation like the Patriot Act and launched two decades of pre-emptive wars that redrew global energy maps and geopolitical borders at the cost of millions of lives.
The Economic Reality of Systematic Warfare
The ultimate umbilical cord linking engineered conflicts to the global order is forged in finance and credit. During the First World War, Great Britain funded its astronomical war effort by borrowing heavily from Wall Street, specifically the J.P. Morgan banking group. By 1916, British military debts to American banks had ballooned to exceed 10% of the entire United States Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
This massive financial exposure created an unyielding economic chain of events. The accumulation of military debts to the point of exceeding the 10% threshold automatically rendered an Allied victory an absolute matter of domestic national security for the United States. This was essential to protect the banking and financial system from total systemic collapse.
Consequently, America’s entry into the trenches was not a spontaneous, idealistic crusade to protect global democracy. It was an intervention emotionally brokered by the tragedy of the Lusitania to safeguard the investments of the financial elite on Wall Street and secure the ultimate repayment of British sovereign bonds.
Wars as Mass Intelligence Tests
Parroting official political narratives without subjecting them to rigorous geopolitical and critical analysis constitutes a failure of a collective intelligence test. The global financial and monetary elites who steer the international order do not view the world through the lens of sentimentality, national borders, or human cost; they view it through the prism of centralised control and the restructuring of financial systems via the controlled shocks of total war.
Reading the Lusitania incident provides the necessary lens to decipher our current global landscape. The very same archetypes that deployed print propaganda in 1915 are utilizing digital simulation models, viral pandemic narratives, climate emergency rhetoric, and modern energy blockades today to usher in a highly centralized financial and social order. As history repeatedly warns us, the capitulation of the masses to emotional propaganda is a blank cheque signed by the victims for their executioners, ensuring the repetition of the catastrophe in every age.
Featured image via Three Lions/Getty Images
FIFA President Gianni Infantino is working on his third World Cup, which spreads across North America this weekend. His first tournaments were held in autocratic countries with governments willing to splash cash and use the games to sportswash their tarnished image on the global stage.
In America, where 78 of the 104 matches will be played, he’s dealing with something dramatically different — democratically elected leaders spread across 11 host communities.
Infantino at first seemed to approach North America largely the same way he did Russia and Qatar: Win over the head of state and go from there. He went so far as to court President Donald Trump by giving him a peace prize before he started a war with Iran.
State and local politicians, however, had their own priorities.
In America, Infantino has found himself foiled not only by democracy but the country’s federalism — the separation of national and state power that gives local officials unique power. He can blame Thomas Jefferson for that.
“I think that’s just a big difference, even compared to other western democracies, our federalism is a huge difference,” said Alex Lasry, the CEO of the New York New Jersey Host Committee.
As a result, FIFA’s national partners in Mexico and Canada have more say over how the World Cup is playing out in their countries than the White House does in America, a country that does not even have a sports minister.
In practice, this has meant that even as FIFA presented itself as the world government of the globe’s most beloved sport, local officials in America started standing in its way.
A senior FIFA official earlier this year said it was exaggerated to say one person in Qatar or Russia snapped their fingers and things got done, but the official did describe America as more decentralized.
Back in 2023, one of Infantino’s longtime advisers spoke at length about the FIFA president’s public image. “This whole idea of shoulder-rubbing with dictators? It’s not real. Sometimes the U.S. president is Joe Biden, sometimes it’s Donald Trump. Gianni can’t change that,” the adviser told Tim Röhn of the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network, which includes POLITICO. “He’s not interested in politics — only in football.”
But those politics have been creating roadblocks for months, leading up to the first American game on Friday in Los Angeles.
There was a five-member special board in Massachusetts that had to sign off on a license to allow FIFA to play seven matches there, a power it used to extract concessions from the local host committee.
New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill — one of the newly elected politicians who didn’t bid for the World Cup but now has to pay to put it on, despite having other priorities — got in a public scrape with FIFA over transportation costs. FIFA didn’t budge, but the fight was ugly.
When it tried to ban water bottles from stadiums, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani attacked and FIFA backed down.
On the legal front, a quartet of attorneys general — three from blue states and one from red Texas — are now investigating the soccer body’s ticketing practices.
Alas, there isn’t one person Infantino can call to smooth things over. He isn’t the first European to puzzle over America’s decentralized governance, but this 21st-century Alexis de Tocqueville seems to be learning the hard way.
President Donald Trump’s name was removed from the facade of the Kennedy Center on Saturday, capping off the president’s longtime effort to assert control over the institution, one of Washington’s most iconic cultural landmarks.
In a Saturday court filing to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Matthew Floca, the Kennedy Center’s chief operating officer and executive director, confirmed work crews had removed “all physical signage” from the building and grounds “that purports to rename the Kennedy Center after President Trump or any individual besides President Kennedy.”
Workers, hidden behind a large white tarp, removed Trump’s name from the building’s white exterior early Saturday morning, after blowing past a Friday deadline due to what Floca cited as “weather-related delays.” The tarp remained in place on Saturday afternoon.
The removal comes after U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper ruled in late May that Trump’s rebranding of the performing arts center in his own name was illegal, contravening federal law that the center could only honor Kennedy and usurping authority from Congress.
In the weeks since, officials have removed references to Trump on the Kennedy Center’s website, issued new identification cards, edited employee email signatures and rescinded any trademark applications adding Trump to the institution’s name, Floca wrote in his filing. The restoration of the building’s original name followed denials Friday by both Cooper and an appeals court of last-ditch attempts by the administration and Department of Justice to stay Cooper’s May ruling.
It’s a stinging blow to the president, whose ambitious plans for the Kennedy Center included packing its board with loyalists and shutting it down for two years to conduct major renovations.
Cooper, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, also nixed the Kennedy Center’s closure in his May ruling, prompting Trump to angrily announce plans to transfer the institution back to Congress in a Truth Social post shortly after.
“Judge Cooper should be ashamed of himself!” he wrote. “Unless I am free to do what I do better than anyone else, bring this Institution back, physically, financially, and artistically, I have no interest in continuing what could only be a hopeless journey into “NEVER NEVER LAND.”
The England national team suffered an unexpected setback before the start of their 2026 World Cup campaign after a portion of their training equipment was stolen following the squad’s arrival in Kansas City, USA.
According to a report by The Guardian, special boots belonging to several players, along with official balls and other training equipment, were lost during the transport of the team’s gear to their designated headquarters in the city.
Kansas City police have launched an investigation into the incident, while the authorities supervising England’s national team have initiated urgent measures to provide replacements for the missing equipment and ensure the team’s preparatory schedule is not affected before the start of the tournament.
Kansas City police opened an investigation into the incident, and the newspaper reported that authorities detained two individuals suspected of involvement in the event, with investigations continuing to determine the full circumstances of the case and the extent of the losses.
The incident occurs at a time when the area surrounding the team’s training camp is experiencing heightened security attention, following a shooting incident near the team’s residence a few days prior. Authorities confirmed at the time that the shooting did not target the England delegation and did not result in injuries among its members, as reported by Reuters.
Although there are no indications linking the two incidents, the repetition of security events during the first few days of the team’s stay in Kansas City highlights the challenges faced by participating teams off the field, coinciding with the kick-off of the 2026 World Cup.
Featured image via Richard Pelham/Getty Images
By Alaa Shamali
Ghana have suffered a major setback ahead of their 2026 World Cup campaign after it was confirmed that midfielder Thomas Partey will miss their opening match against Panama in Toronto following a decision by Canadian authorities to deny him entry to the country.
According to Reuters, the ruling will deprive Ghana of one of their most influential players for their first fixture of the tournament.
FIFA confirmed that Partey, who is currently with the Ghana squad in the United States, will not be permitted to travel to Canada for the match against Panama. The governing body stressed that visa decisions fall solely within the jurisdiction of the Canadian government and that FIFA has no authority to intervene or overturn the decision.
The organisation added that Partey will remain available for Ghana’s other group-stage matches taking place in the United States, including upcoming fixtures against England and Croatia.
The issue comes at a crucial moment for Ghana, who were expected to rely heavily on Partey’s experience during the tournament. The decision has also renewed questions about the impact of immigration and visa policies on a World Cup being jointly hosted by the United States, Canada and Mexico.
Reuters reported that the visa refusal is linked to legal proceedings involving the player in the United Kingdom, where he is awaiting trial over criminal allegations that he has categorically denied.
Featured image via Ryan Hiscott/Getty Images
By Alaa Shamali
BRUSSELS — A growing number of soccer supporters say chaotic visa procedures are keeping them from attending World Cup matches in the United States.
One Belgian-Moroccan soccer fan, who was granted anonymity to discuss the issue without fear of repercussions, told POLITICO he thought he had secured tickets to Saturday’s Morocco vs. Brazil match through FIFA’s lottery system, booked flights to New York and applied for entry to the U.S.
That’s when things began to go wrong.
The fan, who had previously traveled with an Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) — the online authorization system used by travelers from countries that don’t need visas for short visits to the U.S. — said his application was approved on May 27, but abruptly revoked one week later.
“There was nothing mentioned except for travel not authorized,” he said. “That’s the whole frustrating situation — the opacity of the whole thing.”
His attempts to apply for a non-immigrant visa were fruitless. Ahead of the World Cup, the State Department launched an expedited process for some fans seeking visas to attend matches in the U.S., but the Belgian-Moroccan national said he was never able to access it because an initial appointment platform failed to register his payments.
That, in turn, made it impossible to book the mandatory interview at the U.S. Embassy in Brussels required before requesting an expedited appointment. He added that calls to the embassy went unanswered because they were automatically forwarded to an inactive Belgian number.
Other World Cup attendees have reported similar problems. Scottish musician Kenny Smith said his ESTA was revoked despite recent travel to the United States. Meanwhile, Somali referee Omar Abdulkadir Artan was recently denied entry to the country despite being selected to officiate at the tournament.
FIFA President Gianni Infantino on Wednesday acknowledged that the special World Cup visa system was “not working always, and with everyone.” Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin defended visa denials Thursday, citing security concerns.
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security declined to say if dual nationals were more likely to have their applications revoked, but said ESTA applications are continuously vetted and approval “does not guarantee admission” to the U.S.
For the Belgian-Moroccan fan missing Saturday’s match, the visa ordeal undermined the point of the tournament. “The whole experience of a World Cup is intended to bring people together,” he said. “Now actually being rejected for no reason, it actually has the opposite effect.”
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By now, there has been extensive coverage of the fact that the Belfast pogroms took place almost entirely in loyalist areas. This should surprise no one. Loyalism has always been an exclusivist ideology, predicated on the notion that one population deserves to dominate another that is dismissed as less deserving. Historically of course, this viewpoint dictated that Protestants must be allowed to lord it over Catholics.
However, violent sectarianism has largely faded in the north of Ireland, following 1998’s Good Friday Agreement. Instead, loyalism has now applied to immigrants, people of colour and Muslims the bigoted mindset it incubated over centuries.
It’s hard to dominate another group of people without justifying it in some way. Humans, like many other mammals, have an in-built notion of fairness. Seeing others get less without good cause cannot be easily sustained psychologically. Hence many Protestants developed prejudices giving grounds for their superior position. Catholics were said to be lazy, feckless and practicing a heretical religious doctrine.
Belfast loyalists pivot from sectarianism to racism
Years of indulging in this act of self-deceit have easily enabled the switch to applying new fictions to new target populations. Muslims are heathens, satanic even. Immigrants have sparked an unprecedented crime wave, never mind evidence to the contrary. Even children aren’t safe in playgrounds from sinister foreign men.
Combined with this capacity for a supremacist mentality has been the means for exercising the violence necessary to make dominance concrete. In prior decades, it has meant loyalists carrying out ethnic cleansing of Catholics. This was most notable in the 1920s, during the birth pangs of what became known as ‘Northern Ireland’. Loyalist mobs burned Catholics out of their homes, murdered others, and caused an estimated 23,000 to flee. So-called ‘Rotten Prods’ — Protestant trade unionists who stood alongside Catholics in workplaces — were also killed.
Another outbreak of barbarism occurred in 1969, when again loyalist thugs chased large numbers of Catholic families out of their homes, deploying widespread arson again. Belfast politicians have described how the loyalist pogroms of this week mirror those previous horrors. During the ‘Troubles’, loyalist paramilitaries carried out 713 sectarian murders of Catholics.
In its capacity to inspire reactionaries, loyalism is similar to its bedfellow, Zionism. The latter is a racist doctrine of Jewish supremacy that has always permitted extreme violence against the indigenous Palestinian population that stands in the way of their ethnostate.
As it has now reached the inevitable exterminationist phase of its trajectory, it has been celebrated by chauvinists the world over looking to subjugate their own troublesome populations. ‘Israeli’ and Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) flags can be found in loyalist areas across the north of Ireland. Loyalist politicians wined and dined by the terror regime of Tel Aviv came back singing its praises.
The longstanding links between loyalism and the British far-right
The twin primary sicknesses of these ideologies — a deeply inculcated supremacist mentality, and the willingness to use violence to suppress those deemed inferior — have obvious appeal to far-right actors everywhere. There have long been links between loyalist thugs and like-minded British neo-Nazis.
The Ulster Defence Association was known to have links to the vile racists of Combat 18. One of the latter’s founders, Eddie Whicker, helped arm the murderous loyalist terror gang. Combat 18 members were present at the notorious loyalist disorder at Drumcree.
Daniel Grundle (also known as Daniel Douglas) is the leader of current racist group Our Northern Ireland Voice. He described his founding of the group as a “calling”. Grundle reminisced about how in the 1980s his uncle Jimmy Grundle helped set up a version of Britain’s National Front in the north of Ireland.
The links extend to this day. Before Ben Habib’s recent decision to dissolve it, far-right agitator Richard Inman operated as a link between the racist Advance UK and the north of Ireland. Inman obviously thought so highly of the embedded bigotry within loyalism, that he made the Six Counties his permanent base. From there, he has lauded the Islamophobic hate displays of Concerned Parents Newtownabbey and spoken at far-right rallies.
Others, such as former Ulster Volunteer Force member Mark Sinclair and ex-Democratic Unionist Party councillor William Walker have linked up with their ideological peers at far-right rallies. Areas of Scotland still have strong loyalist elements, and they have clearly been inspired by the ethnic cleansing in Belfast. Racists there engaged in copycat crimes against people of colour.
Racist politicians embrace street violence
It isn’t just street thugs who seem enthused by loyalist violence. Those looking to take over the British state have been content to carry on stirring up emotions, even as houses burn. Reform’s Zia Yusuf screeched that:
Some cultures are MUCH better than others.
Restore Britain’s official account vomited out:
Restore Britain will reverse the third-worldification of our country.
Farage obviously delights in the prospect of reactionary rioting. In the wake of the Henry Novak murder, Farage exacerbated an already febrile atmosphere by calling for “pure cold rage“. Neither Nigel Farage nor Yusuf of Reform have used their X accounts to offer any condemnation of the Belfast violence. Likewise the even more vile Rupert Lowe of Restore Britain.
Reform have made no secret of their intent to hurtle towards authoritarianism if they occupy 10 Downing Street. Owen Jones recently enumerated their plans in this regard. As he points out, Farage has spoken of his intent to bring in a:
…British version of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the US deportation force that seizes migrants from homes, workplaces and the streets.
Under Reform:
The government would be granted direct powers over the police and would attack the independence of the judiciary, dressed up as a war on “activist judges”.
The parallels with the fascists of the 1930s are clear. The likes of Mussolini and Hitler used street thugs to help them seize power, then implemented an authoritarian state.
Street violence has many useful traits for budding despots. It makes the state look weak, as it struggles to handle the chaos. Far-right parties project an image of strength, and proclaim they will restore order.
It can be a tool for intimidating left-wing activists. Additionally, rioting thugs can be integrated into the state’s own security forces once power has been seized.
Belfast — A return to the fascism of the 1930s
The left’s best analysts, like Yanis Varoufakis, have long been warning that we are heading for a repeat of that uniquely dark era. Racist riots and mass mobilisations are becoming increasingly common in Britain, and authoritarian policies are already being implemented by British prime minister Keir Starmer.
Reform are happy to let other street thugs pick up the baton handed to them by loyalists. Once in power, they’ll gleefully receive another gift from Labour. By that point, it’ll be too late, and Britain will pay devastating consequences for inviting its own particular variant of loyalism into government.
Featured image via Charles McQuillan/Getty Images
The disastrous Iran war may be ending. But a humiliated US may look to Cuba as the next victim with Trump’s crony Marco Rubio applying heavier sanctions. The Americans have been making their aggressive intentions clear for months.
US outlet The Hill reported on 11 June that the US State Department:
announced that it will sanction Cuba’s state-owned oil and gas company Unión Cuba-Petróleo (CUPET) amid escalating tensions between the U.S. and the island country.
At the centre of the move was Trump’s Cuban-American henchman and secretary of state Marco Rubio. Rubio said:
the latest sanctions are pursuant of President Trump’s May 1 executive order expanding sanctions on government officials, agents “or material supporters of the Cuban government,”.
The sanctions concern Cuba’s oil and gas company Unión Cuba-Petróleo (CUPET).
Defence secretary Pete Hegseth was at the US military colony Guantanamo Bay on 10 June. As the Canary reported, Hegseth:
told a captive audience of American soldiers that Cuba had better not try and get long-range weapons. The US has been ramping up threats against the island state.
Rubio accused the Cuban government of:
diverting its energy resources “to line their own pockets: reselling countless barrels of scarce energy on the secondary market, hoarding energy supplies for its military, intelligence and repressive forces, and rationing energy as a tool of social control.”
Which is a bit rich coming from an openly far-right government committed to denying its citizens even basic healthcare while spending billions on a failed war in Iran.
An Iran deal could mean US move on Cuba
Meanwhile, a Pakistan-brokered deal to end the US attack on Iran looks close. Al Jazeera reported on 12 June that Pakistan’s PM Shehbaz Sharif had said:
Pakistan is now working closely with both sides to finalize the next steps. Peace has never been this close as it is now.
As the Canary has reported, the US was looking to bring the Americas to heel before it blundered into the Iran war.
Trump’s 2025 national security strategy said as much. The US wants to ensure:
the Western Hemisphere remains reasonably stable and well-governed enough to prevent and discourage mass migration to the United States.
And that those pliable governments:
cooperate with us against narco-terrorists, cartels, and other transnational criminal organizations.
Trump and his cronies want:
a Hemisphere that remains free of hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets, and that supports critical supply chains.
Cuba is the closest dissenting nation to the US in the Americas. And for Trump’s generation it is an unresolved problem. He would return to it to the status of a mafia-run US vassal state. It will be a happy day when the war against Iran ends. But a humiliated US empire is still a dangerous beast. And the people of Cuba may be the first to feel Trump’s post-Iran wrath.
Featured image via Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
By Joe Glenton
High-stakes geopolitics aren’t the only external factor threatening to hijack the tournament.
Perhaps ironically for a competition hosted by a U.S. president who is highly skeptical about climate change and says assertions about rising temperatures have been made “by stupid people,” the heat is very likely to be a problem.
Heat waves have become a persistent part of Northern Hemisphere summers — each one made hotter, longer and more likely to occur as a result of man-made global warming. The locations of several stadiums across the U.S. and Mexico, as well as the peak-summer timing of the World Cup, are expected to put players and fans at risk of overheating.
The problem isn’t just heat, but also humidity. The combination of the two feels far hotter and is measured with wet-bulb temperature, which mimics how the human body cools off through sweating. A wet-bulb temperature of 95 degrees Fahrenheit can be fatal even to healthy people; the football players’ union FIFPRO says wet-bulb temperatures above 79 degrees — which can be reached through a combination of 86-degree heat and 50 percent humidity, for example — will affect performance and health, and 82-degree heat should prompt the postponement of a match.
When scientists last month ran the numbers, they found that 26 of 104 matches are expected to take place in conditions of at least 79-degree wet-bulb temperature. Five matches are estimated to breach the 82-degree wet-bulb barrier. And a peer-reviewed study found that during last year’s FIFA Club World Cup in the U.S., average wet-bulb temperature exceeded 82 degrees in 31 of 57 matches analyzed by scientists.
That study also found that high temperatures were associated with players covering less ground, forcing a change of tactics. Exhaustion sets in faster under high temperatures — at the Club World Cup, 10 players asked to be substituted in a single match. But heat doesn’t just affect gameplay. At the 2024 Copa America, an assistant referee collapsed in the heat and, last month, two people died during sports events held amid a heat wave in France.
As climate change continues to heat the planet, FIFA will have to grapple with the growing threat at every subsequent tournament. The 2030 men’s World Cup in Spain, Portugal and Morocco takes place in a global warming hotspot. The women’s World Cup next year will be in Brazil during a warming El Niño event, expected to supercharge the heating effect of climate change.
And that’s not even counting the other growing climate risks — from wildfire smoke to extreme rain — that threaten to disrupt future events.
An Israeli influence operation named BlackCore allegedly sought to undermine left-wing politicians and shape elections in the UK and US. The Canary previously reported on a joint French/Israeli media investigation into the shadowy outfit. BlackCore is also accused of setting up a bogus Palestine charity.
Now a French domestic security agency is investigating too. Israeli newspaper Haaretz and French outlet Libération reported on 11 June:
Israeli firm BlackCore, suspected of interfering in France’s local elections in March, is also suspected of meddling in elections in New York City and Scotland, and operating in Angola and Togo, the head of France’s disinformation detection service Viginum said on Thursday.
In a second article covering another aspect of BlackCore’s operations, also published on 11 June, claimed:
A network of fake fitness coaches, Vietnamese bots, Facebook ads aimed at Brits – and a bogus ‘humanitarian fund’ for Gaza. A Haaretz and Libération investigation exposes a digital operation whose infrastructure leads back to BlackCore, the Israeli influence firm under investigation in France.
Various Israeli influence operations have come to light in recent months. One looks at how the Israeli military shapes media reporting of the Gaza genocide. Another examines leaked documents about a military-run course for English and Hebrew speaking influencers.
The fact Israel runs complex influence operations is well-known. Press reporting on the granular details is less common.
Election interference by Israel
Russia and China are often charged with election interference in the west. There’s no doubt both countries run influence operations just like the UK and US. But the new Haaretz report sheds light on how Israel runs its own.
analyzed BlackCore’s digital footprint, uncovered a toolkit of influence-operation systems routed through servers in Britain, Germany, Finland and Lithuania.
Closest to home is the allegation that Israel tried to shape Scottish elections. French security agency Viginum claims:
France’s cybersecurity agency has accused the Israeli tech company BlackCore of interfering in the Scottish elections earlier this year by targeting the first minister, John Swinney.
The disinformation detection agency Viginum said BlackCore had this year used proxy social media accounts to target Swinney, the Scottish National Party, and the Scottish government on four occasions.
Viginum’s head of ‘digital interference’ Sébastien Lecornu said:
This modus operandi was not limited to municipal elections in France. It also appears to have been used to carry out foreign digital interference operations in other countries or regions, such as Angola, Togo, the elections in Scotland, and the 2025 municipal election in New York.
It was previously reported that BlackCore targeted left-wing candidates in Marseille and Toulouse elections.
Brillant added:
Our investigations did not make it possible to identify the sponsor or sponsors, if indeed they exist, behind this foreign digital interference.
BlackCore — Fake Palestinian charity?!
The other part of the Haaretz report verges on the bizarre. It centres on an allegedly fake charity named Sadaqah Palestine, which:
presented itself as a non-governmental, non-political nonprofit helping Palestinian families, children and refugees affected by displacement, poverty and war.
The ‘charity’ had:
a website with a credit card donation form and maintained social media accounts on X, Instagram and Facebook, and even had a paid advertising budget on Meta’s platforms.
it did not have… any verifiable existence. No organization by that name appears in the U.K. charity register, nor in similar U.S., EU and Israeli records offline. Its social media following, our analysis found, was largely manufactured, including seemingly fake accounts.
The charity’s digital footprint leads back to BlackCore, which has been described as:
[an] Israeli “elite influence, cyber and technology” firm.
Researchers described the site as:
a honeypot: a decoy built to attract people who wanted to help – in this case, by aiding Palestinians – and to take donors’ money, their personal data or both.
The cynicism involved is hard to fathom:
The page pitched the fund against the backdrop of the collapse of official humanitarian aid in Gaza, noting that as USAID and UNRWA halted most of their operations, ordinary donors had to step in.
And:
It declares its location as Palestine; X’s own metadata places it in the United Kingdom. In its 13 years of existence, the account has never once “liked” anything.
Followers were also fake: a mix of US-based ‘fitness’ accounts and Vietnamese bots. Researchers traced the page to BlackCore via:
Digital certificates – the public, immutable record created every time a website obtains an encryption authorization.
You can read the full reports on the charity and the election interference here and here. They offer a rare glimpse inside an alleged Israeli influence operation. This is notable of itself. The fact one aspect of this operation was to exploit public goodwill over Palestine is especially grotesque.
Featured image via the Canary
By Joe Glenton
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