Israel’s Central Bank Pushes Digital Shekel
To accelerate its central bank digital currency (CBDC) development, Israel is pushing forward with the digital shekel initiative. The Bank of Israel (BoI) is set to collaborate with a range of service providers to create a sophisticated digital payment system based on this new currency.
Central Bank Digital Currencies have sparked significant controversy, particularly concerning privacy and civil liberties. One of the primary concerns is the potential for increased surveillance. Unlike cash transactions, which offer a high degree of anonymity, CBDC transactions could be meticulously tracked and monitored by central banks. This capability to log and trace every transaction made with CBDCs could severely undermine financial privacy, allowing governments to gather extensive data on individuals’ spending habits and personal financial activities.
Related: Fed Governor Admits CBDCs Pose “Significant” Privacy Risks
Moreover, the enhanced government control over the money supply that CBDCs could provide raises further issues. With CBDCs, authorities might more easily freeze or seize assets without due process, potentially misusing this power to target political opponents or suppress dissent. The concept of programmable money, where the government could dictate how, where, and when money can be spent, also poses a risk. While this could be utilized for beneficial purposes such as directing stimulus funds, it also opens the door to excessive control over individual financial behavior.
Israel’s central bank outlined its plans in an announcement, revealing the launch of the “Digital Shekel Challenge.” This initiative, inspired by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Innovation Hub’s “Project Rosalind,” aims to explore advanced API prototypes. The BIS project, conducted in partnership with the Bank of England, serves as a model for this Israeli endeavor.
Within the framework of the challenge, the BoI will offer a sandbox environment equipped with an API layer. Participants will compete to develop real-time CBDC payment solutions designed for widespread public use.
Related: Biden Signals Plan To Destroy Financial Anonymity With CBDCs
Shauli Rejwan, managing partner at Masterkey Venture Capital in Tel Aviv, shed light on the program’s structure in an interview. He described the challenge as a three-phase process: initial applications and presentations, subsequent access to the new network for selected projects, and a final presentation to a panel of judges, many of whom are prominent figures in the crypto community.
“This initiative is a significant step for the Israeli ecosystem, potentially bridging the gap between the web3 industry and government, even though DeFi, ZK, and permissionless solutions are not yet being considered,” said Rejwan.
Invitations for participation have been extended to entities from the private sector, public institutions, and academic circles. The central bank emphasized a preference for innovative and original uses within the payments domain, whether these are enhancements to existing systems or entirely new applications.
The initiative also allows participants to tailor their solutions to specific niches and unique scenarios, despite the universal applicability of CBDCs.
Critics also worry about the implications of CBDCs on financial inclusion and freedom. While proponents argue that CBDCs could help provide banking access to the unbanked, the same technology could be exploited to exclude or discriminate against certain groups. This could lead to situations where access to financial services is restricted based on compliance with government policies, thus eroding personal freedoms and potentially integrating into social credit systems where financial privileges are tied to behavior.
BREAKING: Infowars Archive In Danger
Former US SSPX District Superior Sentenced to 1-Year in Prison for Molesting Multiple Underage Boys
(LifeSiteNews) — The former U.S. district superior for the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) was sentenced to one year in a French jail after admitting in April to having molested seven underage boys between 2002 and 2018 in France, Spain and Switzerland.
French outlets reported that a criminal court in Gap sentenced Father Arnaud Rostand, 58, to 12 months in prison with deferred incarceration. He is also required to undergo four years of “socio-juridical” monitoring and psychiatric treatment, as well as provide compensation for his victims.
Rostand served as the SSPX’s U.S. District Superior from August 2008 through August 2014 per the request of then-SSPX Superior General Bishop Bernard Fellay. Father Davide Pagliarani of Italy succeeded Fellay for a 12-year term in 2018.
Ordained in 1993, Rostand led a school in Paris between August 1998 and August 2006. He was named District Superior of Canada between August 2006 and August 2008 before serving the U.S. District.
In court, Rostand said that he informed the SSPX via letter in 1998 that he had an “attraction” to children. He stated that he informed the SSPX about this again in 2000, then in 2006 and 2013.
LifeSite reporter Michael Haynes previously attempted to contact SSPX headquarters in Menzingen, Switzerland for clarity on the matter but did not receive a response.
On April 5, the SSPX published an initial statement, though it did not name Rostand. The statement, which was reissued on April 15 for the U.S. and Canada, claimed that “at no time and in no way were the actions of this priest covered up by his Superiors.”
It also noted that “in 2014, after ambiguous and inappropriate attitudes were brought to their attention, the Society’s Superiors withdrew the incriminated priest from the apostolate, entrusting him with administrative tasks without any responsibility, and under appropriate disciplinary supervision, firstly in Switzerland and then in Canada from 2019.”
Rostand’s own public details record that he worked as SSPX communications director in the Society’s headquarters in Switzerland between 2014 and April 2019. The role entailed having to “coordinate the collaboration between the various institutions of the priestly society and oversee public relations matters.”
After this, he was named district secretary of Canada from April 2019 through June 2022, according to public details.
The Society’s deleted statement maintained that “after his arrival in Canada (2019), the Society’s superiors became aware of the existence of offenses, under the jurisdiction of the courts, and they immediately reported them to the judicial authorities in accordance with the norms in force in our society and strengthened his disciplinary framework. Following this report, the necessary investigations were launched, culminating in the recent trial.”
Various Traditional Catholic influencers have debated whether the SSPX has adequately addressed the Rostand affair or if it is trying to brush it under the rug to avoid responsibility.
Catholic Family News editor-in-chief Brian McCall said on a podcast in April that he “hopes” the SSPX will respond to Rostand’s claim that he informed his superiors about his attraction toward minor boys previously. “It is not clear from public information what the superiors knew or understood about Fr. Rostand between 1998 and 2014,” McCall wrote in a May op-ed. “It would certainly be helpful if this could be clarified.”
Other unverified reports allege that R9stand was not entirely restricted in his ministry while in Canada. Rather, he performed baptisms and said public Masses on occasion.
Rostand was arrested in December 2023, having been based in the Monastery of Our Lady of Montgardin in the Western Alps since 2021, apparently on orders of Pagliarani. The monastery has been used as a place of seclusion for priests (including disgraced SSPX clergy) to dedicate themselves to a contemplative life.
As reported by LifeSite’s Haynes, abuse group Collectif des Victimes FSSPX has statedthat the “measures” the SSPX took against Rostand “were ineffective, contrary to what is claimed, as the touching continued until 2018. This was the year in which Superior General Davide Pagliarani put him back in contact with the faithful in Menzingen, after four years on communications assignments. We had to wait until 2019 for psychiatric follow-up, 21 years after the first warnings!”
Rostand’s sentencing comes on the heels of the May 28 arrest of another French SSPX priest, Fr. Jean-Luc Radier, who is alleged to have abused a pre-teenage boy in the 1990s.
This journalist previously reported on allegations and actual instances of abuse by priests within the SSPX in the United States several years ago. Click here to access those stories.
BREAKING: Infowars Archive In Danger
Germany Could Soon be Screening 18-Year-Olds to Boost Military Recruits
The war in Ukraine has Europe on edge, and German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius is proposing a new model of military service. He wants compulsory screening of potential recruits to strengthen the army in a context of heightened risk.
Under the draft, presented by Boris Pistorius to the defense committee of the Bundestag, the lower house of Germany’s parliament, young people who have reached the age of 18 will be required to answer a questionnaire on their willingness and ability to serve in the army. Young women will also receive it, but without the obligation to complete it, sources said.
The idea of this screening is both to increase the possible interest of young people and, for the army, to select the most suitable or motivated ones for an interview. According to AFP information, the decision whether or not to perform military service will remain voluntary.
The model will involve basic training for six months, with the option of extending it to 17 months. The minister will present the new formula to the public on Wednesday afternoon on June 12. Young people who have completed their military service will join the reserves.
This plan is “exclusively about the ability to accelerate and strengthen the reserves for global defense,” said one participant at the parliamentary meeting. The long-term goal is to bring the Bundeswehr’s strength to 460,000 soldiers: about 200,000 permanently active in the army, the rest in reserve.
Despite a recruitment drive, the number of active military personnel in Germany fell to 181,500 last year. Boris Pistorius, now Germany’s most popular political figure, has for months been insisting on the need to make the army “war worthy” in order to defend the country and fulfill its role in NATO
After cutting its funding at the end of the Cold War, Germany has been investing heavily for two years to bring it back up to par, but the minister is calling for more resources. Chancellor Olaf Scholz, along with the Social Democrats (SPD) and Green majority allies in the governing coalition, are advocating for an all-volunteer army.
BREAKING: Infowars Archive In Danger
Surge of Right-Wing and Anti-Establishment Parties in Czech EU Elections
Enough!—the name of a Czech party and a word that sums up the mood not only in the Czech Republic but all around Europe as right-wing and anti-establishment parties made substantial gains at this year’s European elections.
In the Czech Republic, voters punished the five-party coalition which has been perceived as being soft on issues that concern the country’s citizens, such as migration and the European Green Deal. The centrist government did not follow in the footsteps of its Central European partners (Hungary, Slovakia and Poland) to reject the EU’s recently adopted Migration Pact—which makes it compulsory for member states to either accept migrants or pay a fine—but merely abstained.
The Czech economy has also been in a dire state for the past few years, with high inflation reducing consumer purchasing power. As with their European counterparts, Czech farmers have been protesting against the Green Deal and high energy costs which threaten their livelihood. The government’s cause was not helped when Prime Minister Petr Fiala—though himself a critic of the Green Deal—accused protest organisers of being “pro-Russian” or having other political goals. A survey published last October revealed that almost 80% of the population does not trust the prime minister, who has been in power since November 2021.
Voters vented their frustration at the government whose parties jointly received only about a third of all votes: the Fiala-led centre-right Spolu got 22.3%, pro-EU liberal Mayors and Independents finished on 8.7%, and the leftist Pirate Party 6.2%. The three alliances and parties got 9 seats out of the 21 allocated to the Czech Republic in the European Parliament (EP), a drop of three seats compared to the EP elections five years ago. Petr Fiala admitted defeat, saying “the results reflect the mood of society.”
Roman Joch, Executive Director of the Czech conservative think tank the Civic Institute, told The European Conservative:
The elections resulted in the complete defeat of the strongest pro-European parties, the left-liberal parties. There are two reasons for that: the Migration Pact and the Green Deal. By 2035 the sale of all petrol and diesel cars will be banned, and only electric vehicles will be sold. Czechs have realised that those cars will be more expensive and their living standards will decrease. Our Škoda cars are the flagship of Czech industry. The voters’ message to the government was that they must be tougher on these issues.
Meanwhile, anti-establishment and populist parties made big gains, raking in the remaining twelve seats in the European Parliament.
Previous Prime Minister Andrej Babiš’s ANO movement, a centrist, but in many aspects conservative party, and described by many as a populist political force, finished the elections in first place with 26.1% of the votes and seven seats (one more than five years ago). The movement campaigned under the headline “No to immigration and the green madness.” Babiš said he would overturn the EU’s ban on petrol and diesel cars and would get rid of tax burdens on energy consumption if he were reelected in national elections next autumn.
As Roman Joch explains:
The ANO movement has moved more to the Right, they are more conservative on immigration, and are opposed to the Green Deal and the holy jihad against diesel and petrol cars. But in economic terms, the party leans more to the left compared to the current government.
Babiš is a close ally of both the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, and his Slovakian counterpart Robert Fico, both of whom have drawn the ire of the EU elites for their anti-war, anti-immigration and anti-gender ideology rhetoric. Babiš himself has gone against the mainstream thinking on Ukraine, and has called for peace negotiations to end the war. He has also blamed the current Czech government for “dismantling” the V4 cooperation of Central European nations.
ANO has been the single strongest party in the Czech Republic for the past nine to ten years, regularly polling between 25% and 35%. Analysts believe the party’s handling of the economy and its ability to attract voters from different social classes has contributed to its success.
Děkujeme moc všem! Jste úžasní ❤️
— Andrej Babiš (@AndrejBabis) June 9, 2024
Third and fourth place went to a right-wing and a left-wing alliance who were united over the condemnation of the EU’s policies on migration and climate change, as well as their strong opposition to military support for Ukraine. The right-wing Přísaha a Motoristé received 10.3% of the votes and two seats in the European Parliament, with party leader, former racing driver Filip Turek saying he will arrive at the first plenary session of the Parliament by a car with a “large carbon footprint.”
❤️Pravda a láska zvítězila nad lží a nenávistí.??? pic.twitter.com/w4f54h9xG1
— Filip Turek (@DolphSegal) June 12, 2024
Stačilo! (Enough!)—a grouping formed by the Communist Party—got 9.6% and two seats. “The vote was a referendum on this government and a referendum on peace—and we won both,” said Communist Party leader Kateřina Konečná.
The Přísaha a Motoristé alliance unexpectedly weakened another eurosceptic party, the right-wing anti-immigration Freedom and Direct Democracy (SPD) which got 5.7% percent of the vote and will be sending just one MEP to Brussels. “We don’t want African and Arab immigrants or the spread of Islam and mosques!” warned SPD leader Tomio Okamura, himself of mixed Japanese and Czech heritage. “It’s very Kafkaesque that the person who holds the banner of Czech nationalism is a Japanese,” remarked Roman Joch.
The next chapter in Czech politics will be to see what kind of alliances the parties will try to forge inside the European Parliament. Filip Turek said he would like his newly formed party to join the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), a group to which Petr Fiala’s Civic Democratic Party belongs. Meanwhile, Andrej Babiš has hinted at the possibility of leaving the liberal Renew group—headed by French President Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party—saying he no longer considers his party a good fit with the rest of the group given how the majority of EU liberals voted on the Migration Pact and the Green Deal. “Ideologically he belongs to the ECR but Fiala, who hates Babiš, will try to block that. Babiš’s political positions are now closer to Viktor Orbán than to Emmanuel Macron,” Roman Joch added.
BREAKING: Infowars Archive In Danger
Survivor of CIA MK-Ultra Program Launches New Initiative to Fight Child Sex Trafficking
(LifeSiteNews) — A physician and survivor of sex abuse inflicted through the CIA program MK-Ultra has launched an initiative to fight sex trafficking by equipping communities to recognize where it occurs and providing the legal tools to combat it.
Dr. Juliette Engel, a former assistant professor of radiology who specialized in prenatal ultrasound, has told how she was born into a family of U.S. intelligence operatives who were “instrumental” in the transfer of hundreds of Nazi scientists to the U.S. under Project Paperclip. In 1955, at age six, she was sold by her parents to a fledgling MK-Ultra project, “an illegal program of mind control and experimentation signed into existence by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles in 1953,” as Dr. Engel explained. The project built upon the experiments from the Nazis imported to the U.S. in Project Paperclip.
Colonel Douglas Macgregor, who is involved in Dr. Engel’s anti-child trafficking initiative, has pointed out that a congressional investigation in 1975 “led to revelations that at least 80 American universities, colleges, hospitals,” along with private contractors engaged in MK-Ultra “subprojects involving mind control experimentation including forced administration of mind-altering drugs (particularly LSD), hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, sexual abuse, and torture.”
It was in this horrific program, in which trauma and drugs are used to induce dissociation and amnesia, that Dr. Engel was subjected to government-sponsored child abuse, including sex abuse. It would come to inform her understanding of the government’s involvement in child sex trafficking as a whole.
Learn the signs of child trafficking
Later in life, after having escaped the program and establishing her own medical practice, Dr. Engel founded the non-profit MiraMed Institute, which recruited doctors and nurses to work on maternal and infant health care reform with Russian mothers.
“That was how I learned that children from the birth houses and orphanages were being sold and sent overseas for prostitution and organ trafficking,” Dr. Engel explained on her project website. Over the next decade, she developed a coalition that rescued tens of thousands of sex trafficking survivors, but returned to the U.S. when, in her words, her “protégé was murdered and Russian Military Intelligence warned that I would be next.”
It was thanks to child sex abuse demand in other countries, including the U.S., that Russian child trafficking operations could thrive. As Dr. Engel investigated further, she found that pedophilia was a major — even “defining” — issue in America and that “Pedophiles had infiltrated government, academia, entertainment and law enforcement.” She found, moreover, that its cover-up required “collusion between intelligence agencies, government officials and a complicit media.”
Her work and experience have also helped clarify the dangers of even broader, related problems for children in America: Young students being “sexualized and indoctrinated with radical communist ideologies;” rising abortion rates; “transgenderism and pedophilia” being “forced on students in kindergarten.”
Dr. Engel’s new initiative, an Our Country Our Children Action response team called “Protect Our Children,” has collected resources detailing red flags to watch for that indicate a child may be a victim of trafficking, as well as ways parents can deter predators. The team is currently building a step-by-step guide on how to help fight child trafficking through government involvement.
“Protect Our Children” encourages all who want to help combat child trafficking to “join all the local government and governmental associated organizations” possible, including school boards and Town Hall, and to “pay attention to the transparency of election process at all levels of government and question anything you think appears irregular.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has recently enacted a legislative package that serves as a partial model for combating child grooming and sex trafficking at the state level, including:
- HB 305, which permits hearsay statements made by minors of any age to be accepted as evidence and mandates that a first conviction of human trafficking minors suffices to be placed on the sex offender registry.
- HB 1131, which creates an Online Sting Operations Grant Program within the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) that provides for annual funding of sting operations and the necessary equipment to track and capture child predators over the internet.
- HB 1235, which tightens standards for the state sex offender registry, including preventing offenders from evading registration via temporary residences, requiring them to register any vehicles they may possess as living quarters and to give advance notice of any international travel, and strengthens the conditions necessary to be removed from the registry.
- HB 1545, which bars adults from “pattern(s) of communication” with minors involving “explicit and detailed verbal descriptions of sexual activity,” strengthens penalties for child porn possession, promoting underage sexual performances, and similar crimes, and making both categories of offenses third-degree felonies.
- SB 1224, which enhances the Statewide Guardian ad Litem Office with a new position and grant program tasked with assisting children aging out of foster care and mandates lethality assessments for any law enforcement responses to domestic violence reports.
In a 2022 interview recounting part of her experience in Project MK-Ultra, which she has described in her memoir “Sparky: Surviving Sex Magick,” Dr. Engel told how she believes learning to connect with God through prayer helped sustain her throughout her life. Her grandmother taught her the Lord’s Prayer (the “Our Father”) as a girl, and throughout her childhood, she would “say a version of the Lord’s Prayer every night and feel a connection to God.”
Dr. Engel has explained in her memoir that satanic ritual abuse, which involves “ancient rites,” was used in her MK-Ultra “programming,” and pointed out during her 2022 interview that what brought an end to these rites in times past was Christianity.
“Nothing else is going to stop it,” she added.
Dr. Engel’s project website links to a documentary, “Eyes of the Devil,” (Warning: Disturbing Content) that exposes the horrors of child sex trafficking, including through interviews with a mother who wanted to sell her child without regard for whether he or she would be killed for organs or sold into sex slavery.
BREAKING: Infowars Archive In Danger
Germany: CDU & SPD Politicians Implicated by Human Trafficking Gang Leader
A four-year investigation by the Düsseldorf public prosecutor’s office (PO) into an extensive human trafficking ring in western Germany took a wild turn after the alleged gang leader testified for the first time, implicating several Christian Democrat (CDU) and Social Democrat (SPD) politicians, Junge Freiheit reported on Tuesday, June 11th.
According to the German daily, local politicians near Cologne had allegedly accepted large-scale bribes from the gang in exchange for giving out illegal residence permits. The full extent of these bribes is yet to be discovered, but “we’re talking about dubious donations in the six-digit range,” the website writes.
The Düsseldorf PO accuses the gang leader, Claus B., of helping wealthy clients, primarily from China, obtain German residence permits and register bogus companies in Germany without ever living or working there. The smuggling chief identified politicians who had been aiding him from both sides of the mainstream political divide, all of whom are denying the charges at this point.
Among others, the gang leader identified Dirk Hürtgen (CDU), the former head of the foreigners’ registration department of the town of Düren, 35 km southwest of Cologne; as well as his successor, the Greens’ Sybille Haussmann. The trafficking chief says that residence permits went for a fixed rate of €20,000 apiece.
However, Claus B’s disclosures suggest their bribes might pale in comparison to what the SPD managing director of the Heinsberg and Euskirchen sub-districts, Jens Bröker, had taken— totaling at least €300,000.
Hürtgen and Haussmann are denying the allegations, saying that the Federal Immigration Office had checked each case and found no irregularities in the documents submitted. Nonetheless, the PO continues to investigate the politicians involved.
The Düren District Administrator Wolfgang Spelthahn (CDU)— perhaps best known as the owner of football club FC Düren— is also among those identified by the gang leader, although Spelthahn is said to have solicited donations to his club rather than direct payments. He also denies all wrongdoing.
The prosecutors are investigating several shady donations and contracts related to the football club and its stadium. Suspicions have been raised about one company that generously sponsored the players’ jerseys and another one that rented the stadium’s advertising spots. On top of those, the club received €600,000 as a deposit for the construction of a new football field.
Spelthahn claims that both sponsorship contracts had been properly taxed, documented, and approved by the entire board. When asked, the official simply said he had no idea “some of the Chinese entering the country only met the necessary requirements on paper.”
BREAKING: Infowars Archive In Danger