The Chinese Foreign Ministry has said the saboteurs of the Nord Stream pipelines must face consequences, as it condemned America’s failure to support a UN-led investigation into the incident. A Russian-sponsored resolution for an international probe did not pass a vote at the UN Security Council earlier this week.
Speaking at a media briefing on Tuesday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning claimed that Washington is “keen to carry out so-called ‘investigations’ of developing nations, yet is secretive on this incident.” The diplomat argued that the US attitude was an example of “obvious double standards,” and suggested that officials in Washington were “afraid of” something. Mao added that China hopes the perpetrators will be “brought to justice” as soon as possible.
China, Russia, and Brazil backed the draft resolution for an international Nord Stream investigation in a UN Security Council vote on Monday, although 12 other members abstained. If adopted, the resolution would have requested the secretary general to establish a commission to conduct a “comprehensive, transparent, and impartial international investigation” of the incident, which happened in September last year.
The US claimed the proposal was intended to undermine the national investigations being run by Germany, Denmark, and Sweden. Germany was the intended recipient of Russian natural gas pumped through the sabotaged pipelines. Denmark and Sweden are conducting probes as the explosions which ruptured the energy link occurred in their territorial waters.
China’s deputy representative to the UN, Geng Shuang, argued that there was no obstacle to holding an international investigation in parallel with national ones.
Geng also noted that the trio of European nations had already had six months to conduct their probes. Beijing expects them “to increase their sense of urgency, report the progress of the investigations to the Security Council in a timely and regular manner, and find out and announce the results of the investigations as soon as possible,” the Chinese delegation said in a statement.
Veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh claimed last month that the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines was ordered by US President Joe Biden and was conducted jointly by America and Norway. Both nations have denied those allegations. Russian President Vladimir Putin said last week that he “fully agreed” with Hersh’s conclusions.
The Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) should not be considered as a target during current hostilities, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Rafael Grossi said on Wednesday, commenting on Kiev’s statement about capturing the plant by force.
During his visit to the territory of the ZNPP, Grossi pointed to the need to agree on one important thing — the nuclear power plant should not be attacked and used for attacks in the other direction.
The idea is the basis of a new concept, currently being developed to protect the ZNPP, the IAEA chief said, adding that it envisages narrowing the safety zone around the plant. He insists that new measures have to be taken in order to protect the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant as situation here is not getting better. According to Grossi, hostilities around the area are intensifying so the agency is developing a new protection concept for the plant, and discusses this issue with Russia and Ukraine.
Rosenergoatom, a subsidiary of Russian state nuclear energy corporation Rosatom supports the stance of IAEA head Rafael Grossi that the ZNPP should not be used as a target or for blackmail, Rosenergoatom spokesman Renat Karchaa said on Wednesday.
“We fully support the position of the IAEA and Mr. Grossi on the inadmissibility of using the ZNPP as a target, but we are also categorically against the use of the plant as an instrument of blackmail and manipulation,” Karchaa told reporters after inspecting the plant’s territory with Grossi.
The Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant, under the control of Russian forces since March, is persitently shelled by Ukrainian militants. Moscow has repeatedly warned that such attacks should be considered as acts of nuclear terrorism.
The idea of forming a Serbia-Hungary Strategic Council was announced by Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić after his meeting with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in Belgrade on March 25. Specifically, Vučić announced that the strategic council between the two countries would be established in May. As Serbia is a non-EU/NATO member, unlike Hungary, it is guaranteed that Brussels and Washington are not happy about the strengthening ties between the two neighbouring countries.
Accordingly, the council would deal with the issue of security, the fight against terrorism, and opens the possibility of cooperation between their armies and police in the military-technical sense. It is for this reason, despite the benefits that this strategic cooperation brings for both countries, Brussels and Washington are not happy with this emergence.
The issue of security is very important and is back at the forefront due to the crisis in Ukraine. More than ever, the spotlight has not just been placed on security in the traditional sense, but also in regards to energy. Serbia and Hungary are connected not only by good mutual relations, but also by their tense relationship with the European Union. Although Hungary is an EU member, it has a number of open issues with the bloc, such as the handling of the war in Ukraine. Fundamentally, Serbia’s and Hungary’s current interests are opposed to that of the EU, and it is also this factor which unites them.
Serbia has excellent economic relations with Russia and China, and Orbán as a Hungarian nationalist, broke from EU consensus and concluded that his country should not have confrontational ties with Moscow. Serbia and Hungary are looking towards a Eurasian future rather than an Atlanticist one, something which binds their commonalities and necessitates the need for a common strategic council.
In addition, Hungary is surrounded by countries with which it has a rather difficult historical (and sometimes current) relations, regardless of mutual NATO and EU membership, namely Romania and Slovakia. However, Hungary also never had great relations with Ukraine or Yugoslavia. With Serbia though, the successor of Yugoslavia, this has massively changed.
Both Belgrade and Budapest have invested a lot of energy into thawing relations in the last ten years. This developing relationship was epitomised with the Serbian Parliament in December ratifying the agreement on strategic cooperation between Serbia and Hungary.
Hungary is the only country neighbouring Serbia that Belgrade has concluded a strategic cooperation with, and it relates to more than twenty areas. This includes infrastructure and the economy, where Hungary is already among the first foreign trade partners of Serbia. This also extends to other sectors too, which is why Hungary is rapidly becoming one of Serbia’s closest partners.
When the future strategic council of Serbia and Hungary is viewed objectively, it is seen as purely political in nature and an effort to thrive under new global circumstances. That is why the council is essential. The current events in Ukraine, where there is a large Hungarian minority, and the remaining question over Kosovo, means that Serbia and Hungary will need to support each other more than ever as most of Europe is in favour of backing the Kiev regime and separatists in Kosovo.
Hungary has openly and repeatedly said that it does not want to be part of any adventure and war. Serbia also maintains a neutral position politically, although the majority of people are pro-Russian because of their own experience with NATO and the entire historical experience preceding and following it.
The fact that Budapest has good relations with not only Belgrade, but also the Republika Srpska (the Serbian entity of the Bosnia and Herzegovina Federation), is also important as it demonstrates again that Orbán’s Hungary is not only working based on values and principles, but also on the need for an ally in the region. Practically, with an interesting turn of historical circumstances, the Hungarians realised that their most reliable ally would be the Serbs, both in Serbia and Republika Srpska.
Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó commented on the meeting in a video on his Facebook page. He stressed that the strategic partnership and friendship between Belgrade and Budapest will greatly contribute to Hungary’s ability to better address the challenges it faces – primarily economic, security, and energy supply.
Szijjártó also recalled that under the long-term agreement with the Russian state-owned Gazprom, “natural gas for Hungary’s supply comes via Serbia, and Hungary stores hundreds of millions of cubic metres of gas for Serbia.”
European countries have destroyed their economies for sanctioning Russia and cutting gas supplies, something Budapest has done its best to avoid. For this reason, it is increasingly finding itself with more common interests with Belgrade and will not be hindered from jointly pursuing them just because Serbia is not an EU or NATO member.
Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.
This is the third in a series tracing the history of population control through to present day depopulation ‘aspirations’. You can read Part 1 here and Part 2 here. The question raised today is whether vaccines could have impacted on fertility and reproduction.
For the last 70 years, fertility rates have decreased worldwide, with a total 50 per cent decline, according to the World Economic Forum. The reasons given typically include women’s ’empowerment’ in education and the workforce, lower child mortality and the increased cost of bringing up children. What is not mentioned by this pro-vaccine body is the possible impact of vaccines.
This however has been brought into sharp focus by the now well documented adverse reactions to the Covid vaccines. A recent Project Veritas undercover report revealed Pfizer executive Jordon Trishton Walker confirming there were specific concerns about the Covid vaccines interference with women’s menstrual cycles: ‘There’s something irregular about their menstrual cycles. We will have to investigate that down the line, because that is a little concerning.’
His comment turned out to be an understatement. According to Pfizer’s own records, at least 82 per cent of pregnant women who were vaccinated lost their babies. Since this was known before the vaccines were given emergency approval by the US Food and Drug Administration, how it was that they recommended them to pregnant women is alarming.
Dr James Thorp, who has 44 years of obstetrics experience and served on the board of the Society for Maternal Foetal Medicine, has stated that vaccinating pregnant women with the covid jab is an ‘egregious violation of ethics’. He and other experts analysed the reports from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) in the US and found some alarming results. When they compared adverse reactions to the Covid jab with those of the flu jab they found there were 57 times more reports of miscarriages from the covid vaccination than the flu vaccination and 38 times more reports of foetal death and stillbirths.
An Australian fertility specialist has also reported an increase in miscarriages from 15 per cent to 74 per cent in women who received the Covid jab. Overall birth rates in Australia declined by 72 per cent approximately nine months after the vaccine roll-out compared with the same month in the previous year.
Dr Mike Yeadon, a former vice-president at Pfizer, believes the reason for increased infertility is due to antibodies being formed against synctin-1, a protein in the placenta, which is similar to the spike protein, and has noted that the lipid nanoparticles of the vaccine accumulate in the ovaries. After noting the high rate of pregnancy and menstrual abnormalities, one study concluded: ‘A worldwide moratorium on the use of Covid-19 vaccines in pregnancy is advised until randomised prospective trials document safety in pregnancy and long-term follow-up in offspring.’
Yet the Covid jab has been consistently pushed on pregnant women by governments worldwide, not least in the UK.
But what of ‘traditional’ vaccines? There are reasons to question them too, particularly those added ingredients reported elsewhere to be associated with fertility issues. What then are the sources of evidence that indicate this could be a problem, and that raise questions about vaccines’ possible injurious effect on reproduction?
For people who want access to this evidence what follows is a review of research on the impact of ‘adjuvants’ added to vaccines for the purpose of increasing the immune response (the scientific justification for which is given here).
One of these is aluminium, which is added despite the separate evidence that exposure to it impacts on male fertility: this study for example finds a statistically significant inverse relationship between the aluminium content of semen and the sperm count. The fact that it is used in the form of aluminium chloride to induce infertility in laboratory animals, begs the question of why it is permitted in vaccines?
Another is polysorbate 80, also known as Tween 80, used as an emulsifier in vaccines, has been shown to inhibit the production of testosterone, causing damage to the uterus and ovaries in rats. A patent for a vaccine exists that deliberately causes infertility in animals and Tween 80 is specifically mentioned as a preferred ingredient.
How did such ingredients ever come to be added to vaccines? The scientific justification is that they improve vaccine efficacy and that whatever the side effects found, these are offset by the view that ‘the huge worth of vaccines remains unquestionable’.
Formaldehyde is another adjuvant, used to inactivate live viruses and bacteria in vaccines. Apart from being a carcinogen, there is also evidence of its potential deleterious effect on fertility. A paper published in the Mutation Research journal found a positive association between formaldehyde and reproductive toxicity and concluded: ‘Human reproductive and developmental toxicities resulting from formaldehyde exposure could potentially be a threat to human health.’
A Chinese study concluded that exposure to formaldehyde increased the risk of miscarriage. Even the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) accept that working with formaldehyde could increase fertility problems or the chances of having a miscarriage. However, the same CDC remain uncritical supporters of vaccines, promoting them as safe and recommending some even to pregnant women, like the flu vaccine, which contain formaldehyde.
The antibiotic drugs streptomycin and neomycin are ‘suspected to have caused or may be expected to cause, an increased incidence of human fetal malformations or irreversible damage’.
Another antibiotic, gentamicin, has been shown to have various adverse effects on male fertility, including reduced weight of reproductive organs and a negative effect on sperm. The medicines.org website states that gentamicin should be given to pregnant women only in life-threatening situations because it can cause nerve and renal damage to the foetus. Yet it is found in flu vaccines which are routinely given to expectant mothers.
This article purporting to bust the myths and misinformation surrounding the side effect impacts of adjuvants in vaccines does not mention fertility.
Yet there are causes for concern that the authorities, in their adherence to vaccines, seem insufficiently interested in. Take the HPV vaccine: in addition to the serious health issues associated with it detailed in TCWhere, it reportedly can adversely affect fertility, cause ovarian failure and, according to a study in Nature, menstrual irregularities and early menopause. The flu vaccine too has been associated with spontaneous abortions.
Worryingly, a scientific paper published in 2017 claimed that a widespread tetanus vaccine programme in Kenya in 2014 was a cover for trying to sterilise the female population of the country. It said that the tetanus toxoid (TT) vaccine used by the World Health Organisation in Kenya also contained human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG); together these can cause spontaneous abortions and infertility. This had been known for years as a TT and hCG vaccine had already been proposed for birth control. Was this a deliberate attempt at forced birth control or just an appalling and casual medical mistake?
The infamous and hard to explain 2010 speech by Bill Gates, one of the world’s foremost pro-vaccine zealots, in which he lists vaccines as one of the measures used to reduce the population, raised more questions than it answered. Was it a Freudian slip? Vaccinating malnourished children can have fatal results.
The sum total of this evidence suggests there may be cause for concern. Platitudes stating that ‘the huge worth of vaccines is unquestionable’ is no answer to the quite specific question raised by the routine addition to vaccines of apparently dangerous adjuvants – that of their possible impact on fertility.
Part 4 will examine how our food, water and air are also laden, intentionally, carelessly or for profit motive, with anti-fertility substances.
16-year-old Anas Al-Khalili was used as a human shield by Israeli forces in the northern occupied West Bank town of Nablus earlier this year. In this video, he describes his terrifying experience.
13-year-old Abdul-Rahman was shot in the head by Israeli forces while collecting grapes near his home in the village of Kafr Qaddoum in the occupied West Bank. An expanding bullet struck him in the forehead and doctors were unable to remove all the bullet shards, leaving Abdul-Rahman with lifelong injuries.
These bullets used by Israeli forces are designed to expand inside the body upon impact, causing massive internal injuries. Customary international law prohibits the use of expanding bullets, or any bullets that expand or flatten easily in the human body, though DCIP regularly documents fatalities and injuries seemingly as a result of expanding bullets, also known as dumdum bullets.
From the original Baric study demonstrating beta-coronavirus loading in laboratory models can cause myocarditis to the first year of the COVID-19 crisis there has been a concern that SARS-CoV-2 infection in humans could cause heart inflammation. Epidemiologic studies relying on ICD codes triggered by routine cardiac troponin testing and or results implied that hospitalized patients were developing myocarditis with the respiratory illness. None of these studies were confirmed with clinical adjudication or autopsy. In 2020 the NCAA Big Ten athletic conference, US Military, and many other organizations screened for myocarditis on clinical grounds—handful of cases were found without any reported hospitalizations or deaths. Tuvali, et al from Israel, demonstrated that myocarditis in 2020 was not any more common that the low levels of baseline myocarditis from parvovirus, giant cell, and other conditions.
Almamlouk et al performed a systematic review of 50 autopsy studies and 548 hearts of patients who died of or with COVID-19. Usual post-mortem findings of tissue edema and necrosis were reported commonly. About two thirds of hearts had SARS-CoV-2 found in the tissue. However, none of the hearts had extensive myocarditis as the cause of death.
Almamlouk R, Kashour T, Obeidat S, Bois MC, Maleszewski JJ, Omrani OA, Tleyjeh R, Berbari E, Chakhachiro Z, Zein-Sabatto B, Gerberi D, Tleyjeh IM; Cardiac Autopsy in COVID-19 Study Group; Paniz Mondolfi AE, Finn AV, Duarte-Neto AN, Rapkiewicz AV, Frustaci A, Keresztesi AA, Hanley B, Märkl B, Lardi C, Bryce C, Lindner D, Aguiar D, Westermann D, Stroberg E, Duval EJ, Youd E, Bulfamante GP, Salmon I, Auer J, Maleszewski JJ, Hirschbühl K, Absil L, Barton LM, Ferraz da Silva LF, Moore L, Dolhnikoff M, Lammens M, Bois MC, Osborn M, Remmelink M, Nascimento Saldiva PH, Jorens PG, Craver R, Aparecida de Almeida Monteiro R, Scendoni R, Mukhopadhyay S, Suzuki T, Mauad T, Fracasso T, Grimes Z. COVID-19-Associated cardiac pathology at the postmortem evaluation: a collaborative systematic review. Clin Microbiol Infect. 2022 Aug;28(8):1066-1075. doi: 10.1016/j.cmi.2022.03.021. Epub 2022 Mar 23. PMID: 35339672; PMCID: PMC8941843.
In summary, this review should be the nail in the coffin in ruling out COVID-19 illness as a cause of fatal myocarditis. Despite the virus being found in heart tissue, it was not causing significant inflammation. The explosion of fatal myocarditis by report of unexplained cardiac arrest, adjudication, and at necropsy must have another explanation than SARS-CoV-2 infection. The only new proven cause of heart damage in human populations is COVID-19 vaccination. Vaccines used in America (Pfizer, Moderna, Janssen, Novavax) have been demonstrated to cause myocarditis as published in the peer-reviewed literature.
These observations call for immediate access to the CDC COVID-19 vaccine administration database for physicians and other providers who are managing the burgeoning caseload of myocarditis. This will be the only way the epidemiology of COVID-19 vaccine induced myocarditis can be studied and patient outcomes can be improved.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Children’s Health Defense (CHD) on Friday filed a class action lawsuit against President Biden, Dr. Anthony Fauci and other top administration officials and federal agencies, alleging they “waged a systematic, concerted campaign” to compel the nation’s three largest social media companies to censor constitutionally protected speech.
Kennedy, CHD and Connie Sampognaro filed the complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, Monroe Division, on behalf of all the more than 80% of Americans who access news from online news aggregators and social media companies, principally Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.
The plaintiffs allege top-ranking government officials, along with an “ever-growing army of federal officers, at every level of the government” from the White House to the FBI, the CIA and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to lesser-well-known federal agencies of inducing those companies:
“to stifle viewpoints that the government disfavors, to suppress facts that the government does not want the public to hear, and to silence specific speakers — in every case critics of federal policy — whom the government has targeted by name.”
Kennedy, chairman and chief litigation counsel of CHD, said American Democracy itself is at stake in this case:
“U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said, ‘Censorship reflects a society’s lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime.’ It also violates the Constitution.
“The collaboration between the White House and health and intelligence agency bureaucrats to silence criticism of presidential policies is an assault on the most fundamental foundation stone of American Democracy.”
The lawsuit’s argument rests on the Norwood Principle, an “axiomatic,” or self-evident, principle of constitutional law that says the government “may not induce, encourage, or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.”
According to the plaintiffs, the U.S. government used the social media companies as a proxy to illegally censor free speech.
The complaint cites the now-weekly, ongoing disclosures of secret communications between social media companies and federal officials — in the “Twitter files,” other lawsuits and news reports — which revealed threats by Biden and other top officials against social media companies if they failed to aggressively censor.
The suit points to examples where the censorship campaign allegedly trampled First Amendment freedoms, such as the Hunter Biden laptop story, the COVID-19 Wuhan lab-leak theory and the suppression of facts and opinions about the COVID-19 vaccines.
The plaintiffs do not seek financial damages. Instead, they seek a declaration that these practices by federal agents violate the First Amendment and a nationwide injunction against the federal government’s effort to censor constitutionally protected online speech.
The complaint points to a Supreme Court decision that said social media platforms are “the modern public square” and argues that all Americans who access news online have a First Amendment right against censorship of protected speech in that public square.
Jed Rubenfeld, one of the attorneys arguing the case filed Friday, explained why the lawsuit was filed as a class action:
“Social media platforms are the modern public square. For years, the government has been pressuring, promoting, and inducing the companies that control that square to impose the same kind of censorship that the First Amendment prohibits.
“This lawsuit challenges that censorship campaign, and we hope to bring it to an end. The real victim is the public, which is why we’ve brought this suit as a class action on behalf of everyone who accesses news from social media.”
According to the complaint, when the administration violates the First Amendment of an entire class of people, the judiciary must step in to protect American’s constitutional rights:
“Apart from the Judiciary, no branch of our Government, and no other institution, can stop the current Administration’s systematic efforts to suppress speech through the conduit of social-media companies.
“Congress can’t, the Executive won’t, and States lack the power to do so. The fate of American free speech, as it has so often before, lies once again in the hands of the courts.”
The lawsuit also names Surgeon General Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. Department of Commerce, DHS, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and other individuals and agencies — 106 defendants in total.
‘The largest federally sanctioned censorship operation’ ever seen
According to the lawsuit, efforts by federal officials to induce social media platforms to censor speech began in 2020 with the suppression of the COVID-19 lab leak theory and reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Once President Biden took office in January 2021, senior White House officials reported the Biden team began “direct engagement” with social media companies to “clamp down” on speech the White House disfavored, which officials called “misinformation.”
Revelations would later prove the administration was asking social media companies to suppress not only putatively false speech but also speech it knew to be “wholly accurate” along with expressions of opinion.
This practice, it alleges, spread from the administration and through the entire government, becoming “a government-wide campaign to achieve through the intermediation of social media companies exactly the kind of content-based and viewpoint-based censorship of dissident political speech that the First Amendment prohibits.”
Similar allegations about this massive federal censorship campaign also so were alleged by the plaintiffs in the Missouri. v. Biden case, but this case introduces many new allegations.
Some, but not all, examples of government-coordinated suppression of free speech on social media cited in the complaint include the following:
Substantial evidence of coordinated efforts by Fauci and others to suppress the lab-leak theory, which remains plausible and supported by evidence.
Extensive email communication between Fauci and Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, demonstrating Facebook and other social media companies adopted policies that identified any claims about the lab-leak hypothesis to be “false” and “debunked.”
Facebook’s admission that its censorship of COVID-19-related speech, on supposed grounds of falsity, is based on what “public health experts have advised us.”
Public statements by Zuckerberg on Joe Rogan’s podcast that Facebook suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story as a result of communications from the FBI.
“Twitter files” documents demonstrating weekly meetings between agents from the FBI’s 80-agent social media task force and Twitter to discuss content suppression along with direct payments from the FBI to Twitter for compliance with requests.
CISA’s work with the Center for Internet Security, a third-party group, to flag content, including particular individuals, for censorship on social media.
“Twitter files” evidence about the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), a vast network of high-level interactions with the federal government and social media platforms — which included proposals, ultimately adopted, for the U.S. government to establish its own “disinformation” board. One free-speech advocate described the EIP as “the largest federally-sanctioned censorship operation” he had ever seen.
Documents demonstrating after the election, the EIP was transformed into the “Virality Project,” which was dedicated to “take action even against ‘stories of true vaccine side effects’ and ‘true posts which could fuel hesitancy.’”
Census Bureau documents describing work by its “Trust & Safety” team with social media platforms to “counter false information.”
“Twitter files” documents, news reports, and documents received through Freedom of Information Act requests that demonstrated myriad, consistent communications with Facebook, Twitter and Google (YouTube) and numerous Biden administration officials named as defendants in the lawsuit including Murthy, former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, officials from the CDC, DHS, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, CISA, the U.S. State Department, the White House — including White House Counsel — and other agencies about how to take action against “misinformation” related to COVID-19.
This last set of communications included action against the so-called “Disinformation Dozen,” which includes Kennedy. According to the complaint, “Facebook itself has stated that the infamous ‘disinformation dozen’ claim has no factual support.”
The complaint alleges that the collusion between the administration, federal agencies and social media companies to suppress constitutionally protected free speech now also extends beyond the election and COVID-19-related commentary to include suppression of speech on topics such as climate change, “clean energy,” “gendered disinformation,” pro-life pregnancy resource centers and other topics.
It also alleges, based on research from the Media Research Center that identified hundreds of instances of censored critiques of Biden, that social media companies “have achieved astonishing success in muzzling public criticism of Joe Biden.”
It argues that the defendants’ power over social media gives them a “historically unprecedented power over public discourse in America — a power to control what hundreds of millions of people in this county can say, see, and hear.”
CHD President Mary Holland, who also serves as CHD general counsel, told The Defender :
“If Government can censor its critics, there is no atrocity it cannot commit. The public has been deprived of truthful, life-and-death information over the last three years. This lawsuit aims to have government censorship end, as it must, because it is unlawful under our constitution.”
The lawsuit asks the court to permanently enjoin them from, “taking any steps to demand, urge, pressure, or otherwise induce any social-media platform to censor, suppress, de-platform, suspend, shadow-ban, de-boost, restrict access to constitutionally protected speech, or take any other adverse action against any speaker, protected content or viewpoint expressed on social media.”
Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.
Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked “flat-earthers” and “anti-vaxxers” to call for a crackdown on “disinformation” online. He made the comments during a town hall event in Ottawa last week.
Trudeau began by saying the government should find a balance between censorship and free speech to protect people from disinformation.
“Governments have very limited tools to protect people in an online world, which is a good thing. It allows for a tremendous amount of freedom – freedom of expression, freedom of discovery – no oppressive governments controlling what you see, what you want, but it also opens us up to a tremendous amount of crap, of hate speech, of things that are illegal, but also things that are just going to bring us down roads where we’re going to get lost,” he said.
He then talked about misinformation in terms of anti-vaxxers and flat-earthers.
“I remember a few years ago before the pandemic, getting really fascinated by flat-earthers, and trying to understand – sort of – the thinking behind them, of people who decided actively to create an identity for themselves that was to just clearly reject what science settled thousands of years ago with the ancient Greeks and that there’s no real contrast to,” he explained.
“It’s more of an identity thing rather than a reasoning thing, and to have people sucked into that, it was fascinating to try and see what it was all about.
“And of course, we went on to understand the phenomenon of anti-vaxxers and anti-science, anti-skeptics, and this rise in these echo chambers that are validating this kind of thinking in ways that have real consequences.
“There are people in Canada who died surrounded by their families because they truly and genuinely believed that the vaccine was more dangerous than the virus, and it killed them.”
The PM then argued that online platforms should be held responsible for the content they host.
“My responsibility as Prime Minister is to try and keep everyone in this country as safe as I possibly can, but I can’t protect everyone from every bit of disinformation on the Internet. So we have to have reflections of how we move forward, how we responsibilize the companies that are controlling so much, the private companies that are controlling so much of the public square you now live in that doesn’t have police paid by your taxes to keep you safe.”
“It doesn’t have rules around businesses to regulate so you don’t get scammed by the corner store. This is the new world we’re in that we’re going to have to try and adjust to, and I can tell you, I’m worried about the direction we’re going.”
A Baltimore contractor has agreed to relocate the processing of hundreds of thousands of gallons of toxic wastewater from the site of last month’s Norfolk Southern train derailment after local officials mounted strong opposition to the disposal plan. Clean Harbors of Baltimore Environmental Services announced on Tuesday morning that approximately 600,000 to 800,000 gallons of water from East Palestine, Ohio would be processed elsewhere.
Local officials had only learned on Friday that Norfolk Southern had contracted with Clean Harbors to ship enormous amounts of contaminated water from the derailment site to Baltimore. From there, the water would have been piped into Baltimore’s aging, leaky sewer system, and from there it would travel to the city’s troubled Back River Wastewater Treatment Plant. Just last year, the state declared the plant to be on the brink of “catastrophic failure,” and less than a month ago one of the plant’s buildings dedicated to processing sewage sludge suffered a massive explosion requiring its closure.
While the Baltimore city council voted on Monday to implore the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to reconsider allowing the wastewater to be sent there, the agency has refused to hear any objections, having warned state environmental agencies in a letter earlier this month that blocking Norfolk Southern’s hazardous materials from their jurisdictions would be “impermissible” as a violation of the Interstate Commerce Clause of the Constitution.
However, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott concluded that the city did not have to accept the wastewater from Clean Harbor into the local sewer system once it was inside Maryland state lines. On Monday, he announced the city could “shield its sewer system from the Ohio wastewater by modifying the discharge permit issued to Clean Harbors to ‘safeguard Publicly Owned Treatment Works’.”
Last month’s Norfolk Southern train derailment in East Palestine spawned an environmental disaster of rare proportions after local authorities permitted the burning of highly toxic vinyl chloride that spilled from five of the cars, releasing numerous toxic substances including dioxins into the surrounding air, water, and soil. While the EPA attempted to reassure residents the pollution did not pose a health risk, numerous scientists have argued otherwise, pointing out that even small amounts of chemicals like dioxins can accumulate over years with deadly results.
While stressing that the so-called treated water from the destroyed Fukushima nuclear plant still contains radionuclides that are not able to be removed, a renowned Japanese environment economist said in an exclusive interview with the Global Times recently that we must persistently demand that the Japanese government and the Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) stop dumping the nuclear-contaminated wastewater into the ocean.
Kenichi Oshima, professor at Ryukoku University, told the Global Times that the Japanese government and TEPCO should not release the nuclear-contaminated wastewater.
The Japanese government and TEPCO plan to use ALPS – Advanced Liquid Processing System – to treat the nuclear-contaminated wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear accident and then release the treated water into the ocean. The treated water contains radionuclides including ruthenium, strontium-90 and iodine-129, in addition to tritium, Oshima noted.
Before the release, TEPCO developed a “Radiation and Environmental Impact Assessment Report on Ocean Discharge of ALPS Processed Water” to assess the impact of ocean discharge.
“Nevertheless, we believe it is impossible to accurately predict the ecological effects of ocean discharges over the next several decades,” the Japanese environment economist said.
Commenting on the so-called treated Fukushima water, Mao Ning, spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, said on Monday that Japan has been claiming that ALPS-treated nuclear-contaminated water is safe and harmless and that it opposes calling the water “nuclear-contaminated”. The fact, however, is that the water contains over 60 radionuclides, many of which cannot be treated effectively with existing technologies.
Some long-lived radionuclides may spread with ocean currents and form a bioconcentration effect, which will multiply the total amount of radionuclides in the environment, causing unpredictable hazards to the marine environment and human health, Mao pointed out, noting that the discharge will last as long as 30 years or even longer.
Mao’s remarks are made in response to Japanese Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry Yasutoshi Nishimura, who claimed on Friday that the use of “nuclear-contaminated water” is a “misunderstanding of facts” after the heads of state of China and Russia expressed serious concern about Japan’s plan to dump the nuclear-contaminated water in a joint statement released on March 21.
The maturity and effectiveness of the ALPS technology has not been evaluated or certified by a third party, and the treatment of such large quantities and complex components of nuclear-contaminated wastewater is unprecedented, and its long-term effectiveness is in doubt, Mao said.
Oshima noted that in 2015, the Japanese government and TEPCO pledged in writing that they would never discharge the nuclear-contaminated water into the ocean without the understanding of fishermen and the public. The Japanese government and TEPCO have been explaining the situation to fishermen and local residents but have not obtained their consent.
However, the Japanese government and TEPCO are not listening to the voices of the people, including those involved in the fishing industry, Oshima revealed.
“We must persistently demand that the [Japanese] government and TEPCO stop discharging ALPS-treated water,” he stressed.
The Japanese professor raised two alternatives in dealing with the radioactive wastewater.
The first is to store the water in large tanks. The half-life of tritium is 12.3 years, so after 123 years of storage, the radioactivity will have decayed to 1/1,000 of its original level. Japan has experience in oil stockpiling, so this is feasible, said Oshima.
The second is mortar solidification. Mortar solidification can prevent leakage. Mortar solidification has been used in the US, Oshima noted.
What Japan needs to do now is to take seriously the legitimate concerns of the international community, faithfully perform its international obligations, handle the nuclear-contaminated water in the safest and most prudent way, including fully studying alternatives to ocean discharge, Mao urged.
Also, rather than whitewash its ocean discharge decision, Japan needs to fully subject itself to international oversight, and avoid, to the maximum extent possible, imposing unpredictable risks on the international community, Mao said.
Why does the Telegraph give publicity to nutters like this?
To claim that the impact of climate change meant that the construction and use of buildings are now a “bigger existential threat than nuclear war” is something that nobody in their right mind would say, and is an insult to those who lost their lives in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And he is not even right about “buildings accounting for 15% of emissions”. It is the people who live in them who need energy to live their lives.
And it is irrelevant how “green” you make buildings – their construction will still require concrete, metals and equipment, all of which involve large amounts of fossil fuels in their production, transportation and use. And I doubt whether his preference for refurbishing rather than new build will have much effect either, since new builds can be designed to be much more energy efficient.
The end logic of Mr Sturgis is that we should all go back to living in mud huts.
Unfortunately Sturgis is just another of those attention seekers, who want to push their extreme agendas onto the rest of us. Shame on the Telegraph for giving him the opportunity.
Western sanctions on Russia over its de-Nazification operation in Ukraine have ricocheted with disastrous results for European economies. Dr Linwood Tauheed, associate professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, linked them to civil unrest now wracking the continent.
The wave of strikes and protests sweeping Europe are in response to austerity policies prompted by sanctions on Russia, an academic has said.
Linwood Tauheed told Sputnik that Europeans are “not willing to be stoic about this any longer.”
The unrest was “an indication that some of the issues caused out there directly by the sanctions, which, of course, was caused by the war, are affecting them greatly,” he said.
The sanctions have been centrally co-ordinated by the European Commission, the unelected executive of the European Union (EU), which has also diverted billions of euros from the ironically-named European Peace Facility fund to buy arms for the Kiev regime.
“All of the EU countries are subject to round and round, and have been, of austerity that is a particular element of having this European Economic Union,” where countries have “given up their own sovereign currency and therefore their ability to solve their individual problems,” Tauheed noted.
EU nations must ask economic giant Germany’s approval before taking any measures to support their own people — as Greece and Italy have discovered. That has formed “a particular view of Germany and Brussels in terms of how those entities affect their individual economies,” Tauheed argued.
He said sanctions on Russia, reduced energy imports, de-industrialisation and falling living standards were “unifying” the public against austerity.
“Their leaders are willing to take limited euro resources and put them into a war machine and send them to Ukraine,” Tauheed stressed. “Austerity is looming and citizens are wondering ‘how we have money to send to Ukraine when we don’t have money to extend our pensions in France?’ Austerity is at the core of this. And it is European-wide, it’s not just country to country.”
The crisis is not limited to public spending and strikes over wages. German financial giant Deutsche Bank is now facing collapse after losing 11 per cent of its share value on Friday, and 29 per cent since the start of the month.
“Large banks in large countries in Europe” are facing “some crisis or another” but the US option of a central bank bail-out was not available to them, the academic said.
“So they’re going to be less able to quell bankruptcies and solvency among European banks than the US has been,” Tauheed said. “More dominoes” will likely fall in Europe, “but that’s also going to be contagious back to the US.”
Recycling was introduced, worldwide, as a tool to teach citizens to become compliant.
Forcing citizens to sort their rubbish into up to nine separate bags or boxes every week had absolutely nothing to do with ‘saving the planet’ and everything to do with teaching citizens (through a mixture of fines and shame) to behave ‘responsibly’ i.e. to do as they were told without looking too closely at the rationale of what they were being told to do.
The recycling never had anything to do with protecting the planet, of course. Most of the rubbish sorted, washed and collected in the UK was taken abroad, by lorry or ship or train, and burnt or dumped. It was, quite simply, impractical and not cost effective to recycle the material that had been collected. And, of course, collecting the sorted rubbish involved massive costs in terms of cash and pollution.
Today, the recycling business has reached an apogee of lunacy. Councils introduce ever more complex rules and fees. They refuse to take away much of the waste that is collected. And those wanting to take their rubbish to a ‘recycling’ centre will probably have to make an appointment and answer a host of questions.
It is no surprise that fly-tipping has become a major problem. The biggest causes of plastic in the sea are dumped fishing gear and plastic waste (much of it officially designated as recycled) which has been dumped by ships.
The good news, however, is that in Britain, recycling rates are falling. More and more people have become aware that the whole recycling movement was just another piece of manipulative trickery.
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The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
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