Ukraine adopts restrictive media law
RT | December 29, 2022
Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky signed into law a restrictive media bill on Thursday. The long-debated legislation introduces heavy state regulations, as well as officially forbids covering Russia in a positive way.
The legislation greatly empowers Ukraine’s media regulator, the National Council on Television and Radio Broadcasting. Half of the Council’s members are directly appointed by the Ukrainian president, with another half selected by the country’s parliament, Verkhovna Rada.
Under the new rules, the regulator is able to impose fines on all types of media, as well as hand them mandatory notices. The Council will be able to revoke licenses from printed media, as well as block online outlets for publishing restricted materials and refusing to take them down.
The new legislation also delves into the online media field, which has remained effectively unregulated in Ukraine. The final version of the bill has not imposed a mandatory registration for online media outlets, introducing a “voluntary” one instead. Those that opt to secure said registration will be shielded from extrajudicial blockage, while outlets without it can be subjected to 14-day bans after a number of “serious” violations.
Online media outlets with opaque structure, those not having easily distinguishable owners or reporters, can be easily banned by the regulator as well.
A sizable part of the legislation is devoted to tackling purported “Russian propaganda” and effectively outlaws any positive coverage of Moscow’s actions that challenge the official stance of Kiev. The bill also reinforces a ban on all Russian media outlets, which have been already de-facto outlawed in the country. Moreover, the legislation prohibits the media from publishing information somehow “discrediting” the Ukrainian language and denying or whitewashing the “criminal nature” of the Soviet-era “totalitarian regime.”
The media bill was first introduced back in 2020, but passing it was put into motion only after the ongoing conflict between Kiev and Moscow broke out in late February. The bill passed its first reading in late August, with the final version adopted early this month. The legislation has been repeatedly criticized by Ukrainian opposition figures, journalists, and international rights groups alike over the assertive role of the government and potential damage to freedom of speech in the country.
US government funds research on correcting “false beliefs”
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | December 29, 2022
The US government is funding research on how to fight online “misinformation” by correcting “false beliefs.” The funding is in partnership with fact-checkers.
On July 7, 2021, the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded a project titled, “How False Beliefs Form and How to Correct Them.”
The NSF allocated $444,345 to Lisa Fazio, an Associate Professor of Psychology and Human Development at Vanderbilt University. Since then, the total amount granted to the researcher has reached $506,478, as was first surfaced by a War Room report.
Published on NSF’s website is the grant’s purpose, which states:
“There is currently an urgent need to understand the real-world effects of misinformation on people’s beliefs and how to best correct false beliefs.
“Through a series of laboratory and naturalistic experiments, the project team is examining the effects of repetition on belief in real-world settings and how to more effectively counteract misinformation.
“By examining these basic psychological processes in the primary domain within which they affect daily life – misinformation on social media – this work will have implications for real-world practices aimed at reducing the impact of misinformation.”
The idea is for the research to “inform real-world practices aimed at reducing the impact of misinformation.” The NSF claims that “fact-checking practitioners are consulted to help guide the research, and results will be discussed with them.” However, it does not name the fact-checkers, many of which have already built up notoriety for the often biased way they apply fact-checks.
Hamas criticises ‘biased’, ‘contradictory’ EU resolution on two-state solution
MEMO | December 29, 2022
The Palestinian resistance movement Hamas issued a statement yesterday criticising the EU over Resolution no. 2949/2022 (RSP), on the prospects for a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine.
In a political memorandum, Hamas said the resolution “contained several inaccuracies and contradictions about the Palestinian issue”, noting that it “is heavily biased against the Palestinians’ inherent and legitimate rights to freedom, return and self-determination.”
Among the issues raised with the resolution, the movement said it has sided with the Israeli occupation’s narrative, while ignoring the Palestinian people’s legitimate right to resistance and self-defence.
“Voting against this right is considered a great sin that Europeans have committed, once again. This vote also reflects the double standards with which the European Union deals with issues of peoples and freedoms around the world.”
“In recent months, we have seen the European position on the crisis in Ukraine, and how the Ukrainian resistance was considered legitimate and supported with money and weapons,” the statement said. The resolution, Hamas insists, has disregarded terrorism practised by the Israeli occupation on a daily basis.
The EU resolution was called out over its double standards in regards to its advocating “customised” democracy for the Palestinians and the issue of the participation of resistance factions in free and fair elections, “despite the fact that most of the candidates for the Israeli Knesset have criminal records and terrorist practices and are labeled on terrorist lists in many countries, including Israel itself.”
Hamas acknowledged the resolution’s demand to end the Israeli blockade, imposed on the people of Gaza since 2006 but concluded that the resolution is further proof of “the European bias towards the Israeli occupation and its racist policies” and the EU’s lack of seriousness in pursuing a just and fair solution to the Palestinian cause.
The movement urged the European Parliament to reconsider Resolution 2949 and to correct its position in order to achieve a just solution for the Palestinian people.
Earlier this month, a senior member of Hamas denounced the EU over its silence concerning the complicity of over 700 European financial institutions in supporting illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian lands.
Yemen: Despite truce, Saudi-led coalition killed, injured 900 civilians since April
MEMO | December 29, 2022
More than 900 civilians have been killed and injured by the Saudi-led coalition’s missile strikes in Yemen’s border district of Shada, west of Saada governorate, since the signing of the UN armistice agreement in early April, Abdullah Musraa, the director of the hospital in Razih Al-Rifi said.
Musraa added that since the beginning of the truce Razih Hospital has received 111 dead civilians and 796 wounded, including African immigrants, Al-Mayadeen reported, citing the Houthi-controlled official news agency SABA.
He noted that nothing has changed in the behaviour of the Saudi regime since the signing of the UN humanitarian and military truce.
Musraa stressed that the border areas in Saada governorate are witnessing a continuous escalation by the Saudi-led coalition with the bombing of homes, farms and public and private property, according to Al-Mayadeen.
He added that many cases were transferred to other hospitals across the governorate and the capital, Sanaa, as Razih Hospital could not keep up with the demand or provide the necessary services for critical cases.
A truce was agreed on 2 April between the Saudi-led alliance and the Houthis. It was extended twice for two months, however, the second extension ended on 2 October.
Since then, fighting has resumed. The UN has failed to reach an agreement to reinstate the ceasefire.
NYC electric garbage truck plans hit wall after trucks “conked out” plowing snow for just four hours
By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | December 28, 2022
In a move that absolutely nobody could have seen coming, New York City is scrapping its brilliant idea for electric garbage trucks after finding out the truck simply “aren’t powerful enough to plow snow”.
The pipe dream of converting the city’s 6,000 garbage trucks from gas to electric in order to try and limit carbon emissions (because there’s no other problems that need to be dealt with in New York City right now) is “clashing with the limits of electric-powered vehicles,” Gothamist wrote this week.
The city’s current trucks run on diesel and can be fitted with plows in the winter.
Despite the shortcomings, the city Department of Sanitation’ has already ordered seven electric rear loader garbage trucks, custom-made by Mack, the report says. Those trucks cost an astonishing $523,000 each and are to be delivered this spring.
Sanitation Commissioner Jessica Tisch told the NYC city council earlier this month: “We found that they could not plow the snow effectively – they basically conked out after four hours. We need them to go 12 hours. Given the current state of the technology, I don’t see today a path forward to fully electrifying the rear loader portion of the fleet by 2040.”
“We can’t really make significant progress in converting our rear loader fleet until the snow challenges are addressed,” she continued.
Many other cities don’t use their garbage trucks to plow snow, the report notes. Places that get a lot of snow, like Denver, have their own committed light duty trucks outfitted with plows, which operate more efficiently.
New York City, however, has committed to plowing each street and doing so by putting the city’s 2,100 trucks to work to clear the “equivalent of 19,000 miles of street lanes”.
In addition to… well, not being able to get the job done, charging has also been a holdup with electric trucks, Tisch said: “..this charging infrastructure requires additional space and often new electrical utility connections that can require substantial capital investments.”
Harry Nespoli, the president of Teamsters Local 831 union representing sanitation workers also isn’t sold on the idea: “How much power do they have? Can they run 12-hour shifts without a charge? I don’t know.”
Sanitation spokesperson Vincent Gragnani concluded: “With current technology, full electrification isn’t possible now for some parts of our fleet, but we are monitoring closely and really hope it will be.”
Let us know how that turns out, Vinny.
Moscow ‘outraged’ by crackdown on Russian media abroad
Foreign Ministry’s spokeswoman Maria Zakharova. © Sputnik
RT | December 29, 2022
France’s push to ban Russian news outlets both on the nation’s territory and in the EU is unacceptable, Moscow’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Thursday. Earlier this month, the nation’s TV regulator Arcom ordered satellite operator Eutelsat to stop broadcasting Channel One Russia, Rossiya 1, and NTV channels.
In a statement, Zakharova said the French watchdog had imposed those restrictions “under apparent pressure from the authorities,” adding that the move preceded relevant sanctions on the EU level. “Moscow is outraged by the new steps taken by Paris aimed at introducing more and more broadcasting bans on Russian media, both on its territory and in the EU as a whole,” she stated.
Such actions suggest that France, given its political clout in the bloc, “is the main lobbyist” supporting the ban on Russian TV channels in Europe, Zakharova claimed. “Such a display of Russophobia, which, unfortunately, has already become mundane, [points to] the aspiration to silence any voices that provide an alternative to the EU propaganda at all cost.”
According to Zakharova, Europeans “are being deprived of the right to free access to information.” She suggested that Paris and Brussels might be “afraid that the audience, after seeing a different point of view and picture of the world that does not correspond to that shown by the mainstream of the Western media, will draw their own conclusions” about global politics and the Ukraine conflict.
The spokeswoman described the crackdown on Russian media as “a flagrant violation” of freedom of speech, which is “discriminatory in nature.” The ban is “another testament that the Western ideal democratization model is in fact no more than a tool for achieving foreign policy goals,” Zakharova claimed.
In recent years, Western countries unleashed a massive campaign against Russian media, which only intensified after Moscow started its military operation against Ukraine. In March, the EU suspended the broadcasting activities of Sputnik and RT, with the number of blacklisted channels only growing as the bloc introduced new sanctions packages.
Zelensky to meet Klaus Schwab at the WEF in Davos
Free West Media | December 29, 2022
When the World Economic Forum (WEF) starts again in Davos next January, Vladimir Zelensky will be present too. He hopes to secure funding for the reconstruction of Ukraine.
Zelensky has already confirmed his participation. His government is currently preparing for the illustrious meeting in Davos, the President reported.
Among other things, another meeting is planned with the CEO of BlackRock, Larry Fink, with whom Zelensky has already exchanged views on post-war reconstruction in Ukraine.
“Specialists of this company are already helping Ukraine to structure the fund for the reconstruction of our country,” said Zelensky, who had a video call with Fink in September.
Zelensky did not reveal whether he would take part in person or virtually at the WEF from January 16 to 20.
Since May 2022, the forum has been all about the Ukraine war. In his welcome speech at the time, WEF founder and chairman Klaus Schwab described it as a “turning point in history” that “will reshape our political and economic landscape in the years to come”.
Demographic expert warns Ukraine will experience “catastrophic drop” in birth rate
By Ahmed Adel | December 29, 2022
The birth rate of Ukraine is expected to drop to catastrophic levels in 2023 and lead to the country’s population dropping to 35 million in the coming years. This is a demographic crisis that Ukraine will find extremely difficult to escape from, even if the war was to end tomorrow.
“Next year will see a catastrophic drop in the birth rate, and there is a risk that by 2030 the population of Ukraine will drop to 35 million,” said Professor Ella Libanova, Academician-Secretary at The National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and Director of M.V. Ptukha (Institute for Demography and Social Studies).
She added that the main factor is the war as it contributes to a high mortality rate, stress, overload, poor nutrition, and a lack of medical care, all of which has an effect on reproduction and birth rates.
The expert noted that a Ukrainian woman would need to give birth to 2.13 – 2.15 children in her lifetime to maintain Ukraine’s current population of approximately 43.1 million. According to her, in 2021, the average birth rate in Ukraine was 1.1, and in 2022 it will be “even less”.
Libanova said that many of the people that have left Ukraine are “young women of active reproductive and working age, which means that they are not working in Ukraine today and not giving birth to children here.”
“It is clear that the purely quantitative effect is negative. But given the catastrophic decline of the economy due to the war, most likely these women would not have found work in Ukraine, and their presence would have increased pressure on the labor market,” the professor explained.
According to M.V. Ptukha, the population of Ukraine has decreased every year since 1994. The current population is estimated at 43.1 million, but it is recalled that in the 2001 All-Ukrainian Census, nearly 48 million people lived in Ukraine.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), as of August 9, found that more than 10.5 million people fled Ukraine to go into neighbouring countries. Since then, more than 4.4 million people have returned to their homes.
Although many people have returned to their homes, Libanova stressed that Ukrainian women still abroad will be less incentivised to return “because each new month of their stay […] deepens their adaptation – their knowledge of the language improves, their children go to schools and universities, and mothers take on work.”
At the same time, according Oleg Soskin, a former adviser to the President of Ukraine, Kiev is becoming a ghost city due to the massive exodus of people leaving.
“Rent in Kiev is falling and there is no longer demand. This means that migrants in Kiev are starting to leave, and there are 400,000 of them. Kiev is slowly becoming a ghost city thanks to Klitschko and all the people like Zelensky, Yermak and Shmyhal,” he said on his YouTube channel.
Soskin urged Ukrainians to leave towns and villages where production has stopped working and where there is no water, electricity, and heating systems.
“Manufacturing is going down, the economy is going down, banks are almost unable to hold out. Therefore, devaluation, inflation. Don’t linger in ghost towns,” he advised.
Following the Kiev regime’s terrorist attack on the Crimean bridge, Russia began launching missile attacks against Ukrainian infrastructure. The targets of the retaliatory strikes were energy facilities, defence industry, military command, and communications. The knock-on effects of such strikes mean electricity cuts and other inconveniences to citizens.
Soskin also highlighted that Ukrainians are being taken off city streets and forced to the front lines, which points out that Zelensky is becoming an “undisguised dictator in the eyes of the people.”
“Zelensky says what is democracy, what is freedom, and that we do not have a dictatorship, but in fact we are a dictatorship,” he said, before revealing that he receives videos of Ukrainians being forced off the streets of Dnieper, Chernivtsi, Krivoy Rog and other cities so that they can fight on the front lines.
Along with Kiev becoming a “ghost city”, people being forced off the streets to fight on the front lines, and Ukrainian women in Europe unlikely to return to their country, Ukraine faces a significant demographic crisis that will only worsen with its deepening economic crisis.
According to the Washington Post, at a closed-door meeting at the National Bank of Ukraine in December, central bank officials warned that if Russia’s attacks intensified, “people could flee Ukraine in droves, taking their money with them and crash the national currency as they seek to exchange their Ukrainian hryvnia for euros or dollars.”
“The Ukrainian government could be left without international reserves to pay for critical imports and unable to meet its foreign debt obligations — a doomsday scenario known as a balance-of-payments crisis,” the report added.
With such a dire economic situation, it is only inevitable that Ukrainian couples will have fewer children, and much later in life, even if wartime factors are suddenly excluded. This is a crisis that Ukraine cannot avoid now, even if the war is to end tomorrow.
Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.
Belarus shoots down Ukrainian missile – MOD
RT | December 29, 2022
Belarusian forces intercepted and destroyed a Ukrainian S-300 anti-air missile on Thursday, the Defense Ministry said.
According to the MOD, parts of the missile fell on agricultural land near the village of Gorbakha in the country’s southwestern Brest Region, which shares a border with Ukraine. There were no casualties.
Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has been briefed about the incident, state news agency Belta said.
Photos posted on social media show missile parts lying in the middle of a field.
The incident comes as officials in Minsk accuse Kiev of amassing troops and setting up firing positions across the border. The Belarusian government restricted movement in several border areas last week, citing tensions with Ukraine.
On November 15, a falling missile killed two people in eastern Poland, not far from the border with Ukraine. Warsaw said that the projectile was probably an S-300 fired by Ukrainian forces as they were trying to fend off a Russian attack, and that there was no evidence that the fallen missile was launched by Russian troops.
Kiev initially accused Moscow of attacking Polish territory, but later said that further investigation was needed to determine what happened. Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky described the incident at the time as an attack on NATO. Russia denied that the missile that hit Poland was fired by its forces.
Eighteen UK doctors speak out about covid vaccine concerns
Doctors for Patients UK | December 21, 2022
Doctors for Patients UK (DFPUK) was launched in September 2022 and has become a fast-growing group of UK doctors who are dedicated to practising ethical, evidence-based, patient-centred medicine. Our group was borne out of increasing concerns that core principles of medical ethics are being disregarded, such as the oath to “First do no harm”, respect for individual bodily autonomy and the need to obtain full and informed consent for all medical interventions.
Many doctors, in the UK and internationally, have become increasingly concerned about the safety profile of Covid-19 vaccines and the continued rollout of these products to the public, including pregnant women and children. Several doctors in DFPUK have submitted multiple Yellow Card reports of adverse events to the MHRA, and have signed letters to the JCVI, MHRA, the RCOG, Prime Minister and others to express their concerns, but have seen little or no response or action taken.
They have, therefore, now compiled the video above in which they share their individual perspectives, clinical experiences and serious ethical concerns, in the hope that urgent action will finally be taken by the authorities.
This fulfils their duty, as outlined by the General Medical Council, for doctors to take prompt action when they see that patient safety is being compromised.
For any enquiries about DFPUK or the video please contact doctorsforpatientsuk@proton.me Please review the information under our resources page for further information and presentations on this issue.
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