Scotland to scan vehicle license plates to enforce “low emission” zones
By Ken Macon | Reclaim The Net | July 13, 2022
In the cities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee, and Aberdeen, in Scotland, Low Emission Zones (LEZs) have been launched – however enforcement will not begin until June 1, 2024 for Aberdeen and Edinburgh, June 1 2023 for Glasgow, and May 30 2024 for Dundee.
Transport Scotland said the grace period will allow ample time for compliance. Enforcement of the LEZs will be facilitated by automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) systems.
Vehicles entering the LEZs will be required to meet the Euro VI standards. Those that do not meet the standards are not allowed in the LEZs.
Penalties for non-compliance will be cumulative. The first incident of non-compliance would result in a £60 fine. Subsequent violations will result in a fine double the previous one up to a maximum of £960. The fine is reduced by half if paid within two weeks. The starting fine is reset if there are no subsequent violations within a 90-day period.
There has been a low emission zone in Glasgow that applies to buses since 2018.
Hate “expert” dismisses free speech as a “rallying call for the far-right”
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | July 12, 2022
Following the release of a study on Canadians’ beliefs about free speech, an “expert on hate crime and right-wing extremism” dismissed freedom of speech as a “rallying call for the far-right.”
The study, conducted by the University of Saskatchewan, alleged that there is a direct relationship between someone’s views on free speech and their political leaning. Right-leaning Canadians feel there should be no limit on speech, even when the speech could be considered offensive.
Jason Disano, the research director, told CTV News that the purpose of the survey, which involved just 1,000 respondents from all over the country, was to get an idea of where Canadians stood on the issue of free speech “given the prominent role that the phrase ‘freedom’ has been playing in the current Conservative Party of Canada leadership campaign.”
80% of all respondents said that there is, or somewhat is, freedom of speech in Canada. A large percentage of respondents also said that online platforms have a responsibility to censor hate speech and the spread of “misinformation.”
“But when you break that down into one’s political leanings, that’s when you really see differences in Canadian views and opinions in the extent to which that freedom of speech should be [limited],” said Disano.
About 25% of right-leaning respondents said that there is limited to no free speech in Canada. Only 3% of left-leaning respondents gave the same response.
Director of Center for Hate, Bias, and Extremism at Ontario Tech University Barbara Perry, who is an “expert on hate crime and right-wing extremism” chimed in and said that free speech is now “a rallying call for the far-right,” especially for the alt-right.
“If we look at the narrative over the past few years, there has been an emphasis on cancel culture. Free speech has become a rallying call for the far-right. It’s always been there, but I think it was really amplified by the emergence of the alt-right in particular,” she said.
UK Government considered tearing ‘Covid positive’ people from their homes
By Michael Curzon | Bournbrook | July 12, 2022
‘Boris’ Johnson loyalist Nadine Dorries appears to have admitted that the Government, which now prides itself on having imposed restrictions more lightly than others, considered tearing “mothers and fathers and families and children” from their homes if they ‘tested positive’ for Covid during lockdowns to be sent to isolation centres.
A health minister at the time, Ms Dorries was approached by former Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt and told to adopt this ‘zero Covid’ approach, she told GB News.
The now-Culture Secretary told Dan Wootton, who decided not to dig deeper into the claims:
“[Jeremy] said ‘you’ve got to speak to Matt [Hancock]’. It was at the time Nightingale hospitals were being built. ‘You’ve got to tell him that you don’t put sick people in the hospitals, you follow a “zero Covid” policy… When someone tests positive, you take them from their home and you take them to an isolation centre and you leave them there… That’s the only way you can beat Covid.’”
Ms Dorries said she responded:
“‘The British public will not stand for mothers and fathers and families and children being removed from their family and their home and put in isolation.’ He said: ‘Who said they won’t?’ I said: ‘The behaviour and insights team who I’ve discussed this with. They won’t wear it.’” (My emphasis – video below)
This is quite revealing. Anyone with an ounce of humanity would have rejected this outright, whether they thought the public would accept it or not.
Remember, also, that those officials in SAGE believed the British people wouldn’t accept being ‘locked down’ at all until Italy made it clear that they would.
Professor Neil Ferguson told The Times in December 2020:
“[China] is a communist one party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought… and then Italy did it. And we realised we could.”
So has Ms Dorries revealed that the only reason we weren’t pulled away from our families after seeing two red lines was because other Europeans weren’t first?
Judge says it’s legally okay to deny unvaccinated an organ transplant
By Thomas Lambert | The Counter Signal | July 13, 2022
Justice Paul Belzil just decided that it was legally okay for doctors to remove Canadians from organ transplant waitlists if they’re unvaccinated.
As reported by the Westphalian Times’s Marie Oakes, Belzil filed his decision on Tuesday in a case concerning Annette Lewis, who was essentially given the choice of ‘comply or die’ after doctors changed the rules surrounding organ transplant waitlists to require being fully vaccinated.
According to Lewis, a doctor “told me if I did not take the COVID-19 vaccine, I would not get the transplant, and if I did not get the transplant, I would die.”
She added, “I ought to have the choice about what goes into my body, and a life-saving treatment cannot be denied to me because I chose not to take an experimental treatment for a condition — COVID-19 — which I do not have and which I may never have.”
But judge Belzil disagreed, arguing that “her beliefs and desire to protect her bodily integrity [do not] entitle her to impact the rights of other patients or the integrity of the [transplant program] generally.”
He ultimately ruled that the charter doesn’t apply to clinical treatment decisions and that Lewis’s rights, therefore, had not been violated.
Lewis isn’t alone in her struggle either. As previously reported by The Counter Signal, hospitals and health networks across the country have chosen to deny the unvaccinated organ transplants even when prospective patients are healthy and have found a donor.
In October 2021, Toronto’s University Health Network (UHN) (the largest health research organization in Canada and Canada’s largest transplant centre) adopted a policy requiring all organ transplant patients to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 before doctors operate on them.
The decision immediately affected roughly 4,300 Canadians awaiting life-saving care, some of whom have likely passed away by now.
Hong Kong unveils Covid quarantine bracelets
Samizdat | July 13, 2022
Hong Kong is set to introduce electronic tracking bracelets for citizens who decide to quarantine at home after testing positive for Covid-19, the health chief has announced. Violators of the isolation rules face hefty fines and possibly even jail time.
The territory’s secretary for health, Lo Chung-mau, announced the move during a Monday press briefing, saying the bracelets are meant to stop infected people from spreading the illness further and will operate on the ‘Leave Home Safe’ app rolled out last year.
“We have to make sure that home isolation is more precise while being humane,” Lo said, adding that the trackers will be introduced on Friday.
Breaching Hong Kong’s quarantine order could result in fines up to $3,200 and a maximum of six months behind bars. Individuals who are able to isolate at home must do so for two weeks, though will be allowed to leave if they test negative for two days in a row and have their first pair of vaccine doses.
While the territory previously required overseas arrivals to use bracelets with unique QR codes to check in and account for their movements, the gadgets were later replaced with genuine tracking tech. The system is set to be expanded, though the government has not said what type of bracelet it will use for the latest initiative.
The health secretary also noted that Hong Kong will implement a color-coded system similar to the one in place in mainland China, which labels different levels of infection risk as yellow or red. Those with the red designation will face heavy restrictions on their movement, including outright bans on entering public venues, while yellow entails lesser limits.
However, the city’s recently inaugurated chief executive, John Lee, has since stressed that the traffic light system would only apply to “a specific and small number of people,” but nonetheless argued that Hong Kong needs “some identification method” to distinguish citizens with active infections from those quarantining as a precaution.
Local officials continue to warn that Hong Kong’s Covid-19 outbreak remains “very serious,” urging residents to minimize travel and observe social distancing rules, which were just extended for another two weeks on Tuesday.
The Department of Health said it recorded 2,558 new local coronavirus cases on Tuesday, as well as another 211 infections among travelers from abroad. It did not offer a daily update for fatalities, but noted the territory had tallied 9,420 deaths in total throughout the pandemic, most of them occurring this year.
Search of Sputnik Estonia Office Was Illegal, Local Court Rules
Samizdat – 13.07.2022
Sputnik International’s Estonia-based sister portal Sputnik Meedia was forced to shut down in March amid unprecedented pressure from Estonian authorities and banks, and a wave of personal threats against employees. But the outlet’s persecution by local authorities goes all the way back to 2019.
An Estonian court has ruled authorities’ April search of the former editorial office of Sputnik Meedia and former Sputnik Meedia editor-in-chief Elena Cherysheva’s home illegal, Cherysheva has informed Sputnik.
Cherysheva, who was detained on April 6 for alleged “crimes against peace” and purported “violations of international sanctions,” had her house searched. Her husband was taken to the former office of Sputnik Meedia, and it too was searched. After 16 hours of rummaging, authorities sent Cherysheva to a detention center, but was later released on bail. The ex-Sputnik Meedia employee said the searches were authorized by Estonian State Prosecutor’s Office lead prosecutor Taavi Pern.
“On April 8, the Prosecutor’s Office sent a search warrant and additional documents to the preliminary investigation judge in Harju County Court requesting that the search warrant be recognized as admissible and justified. The judge did not do so. As the court clarified, a person whose activities are related to the processing of information for journalistic purposes can be searched only on the basis of a ruling by a preliminary investigation judge or a court decision,” Cherysheva explained.
She added that the Prosecutor’s Office filed a complaint with the Tallinn District Court challenging the Harju County Court’s decision, but the higher court upheld the ruling.
Cherysheva further revealed the Harju County Court had also ruled in her favor to return her part of the personal property which authorities seized in April, after the State Prosecutor’s Office refused to do so.
“In its decision, the Harju County Court emphasized that given the decision of the Tallinn District Court of May 10 on the groundlessness and illegality of the search, it is not clear to the court on what basis the investigator continues to withhold funds found and seized during the search,” she said.
Sputnik’s Estonian sister agency has been hounded by the Baltic country’s authorities for years. Sputnik Meedia itself was created in early 2020 by former employees of Sputnik Estonia, which was forced to shutter its doors amid threats of criminal charges against its journalists by police, and after Estonian banks suspended Sputnik-related accounts in late 2019.
Sputnik Meedia was forced to terminate its operations in early March of this year, with banks freezing salaries and closing the media outlet’s accounts amid alleged suspicions of “money laundering, terrorist financing and the illegal sale of alcohol.” On top of that, the agency’s editor-in-chief and staff received regular threats against their life and safety.
After extending the vaccine passport program, Canada threatens fines for those that don’t use it
By Ken Macon | Reclaim The Net | July 12, 2022
After extending the use of the controversial vaccine passport program, the Canadian government has threatened those who do not have a vaccine passport, which reveals someone’s vaccination status for travel, with fines.
Though the government suspended a Covid travel vaccine mandate last month, it has insisted on keeping the more controversial ArriveCAN in use.
International travelers and returning Canadians have to use the ArriveCAN app to submit their contact and travel information and their COVID vaccination status.
The ArriveCAN website states that all travelers will still be “required to submit their mandatory information in ArriveCAN (free mobile app or website) before their arrival in Canada.”
“If you don’t submit your travel information and proof of vaccination using ArriveCAN you could be fined $5,000.”
“All travelers still need a valid #ArriveCAN receipt within 72 hours before their arrival to Canada and/or before boarding a plane or cruise ship destined for Canada, regardless of vaccination status,” tweeted the Public Health Agency of Canada in the last week.
“Failure to complete your ArriveCAN submission can impact your eligibility exemptions, may result in fines, and creates longer wait times for all arriving at the border.”
The Conservative Party has called for the removal of the app, which has been blamed for delays at Canadian airports and airlines.
“Canadians have dealt with enough chaos at the airports. The Liberals need to listen to the science and end the ArriveCan app,” CPC’s interim leader Candice Bergen wrote on Twitter on Monday.
Despite the complaints from users and the delays, the Canadian government extended the use of ArriveCAN until at least September 30.
The Administrative State Moves To Show Who’s Boss On Energy Policy
By Francis Menton | Manhattan Contrarian | July 08, 2022
Last Thursday, June 30, the Supreme Court issued its decision in West Virginia v. EPA, holding that, absent a further explicit statute from the Congress, the EPA did not have the authority to orchestrate its planned fundamental restructuring of the electric power generation sector of the economy. More generally, the Supreme Court stated that in cases involving “major questions,” including regulations that affect large portions of the economy, the government must demonstrate “clear congressional authorization” to support a sweeping effort to regulate.
Do you think that such a Supreme Court decision might cause the various regulatory bureaucracies to slow down and reconsider a little before plowing ahead with other dubious plans for fundamental economic restructurings? That’s not how these bureaucracies work. And such is most particularly the case with regard to regulators of the energy sector, sometimes known as “climate change” arena, where the bureaucrats are burning with a righteous religious fervor that they believe entitles them to cast the evil sinners into the fires of hell.
And thus, contemporaneous with the Supreme Court’s decision, several agencies promptly doubled down on efforts to strangle the oil and gas industries with regulatory restrictions, essentially daring the courts or anyone else to stop them. Thousands of pages of statutes give them thousands of arguments to claim they have the “clear congressional authorization,” any one of which arguments might stick. They are now out to show who’s boss.
EPA Administrator Michael Regan wasted no time in getting a statement out on the afternoon of June 30. Excerpt:
[W]e are committed to using the full scope of EPA’s authorities to protect communities and reduce the pollution that is driving climate change. . . . EPA will move forward with lawfully setting and implementing environmental standards that meet our obligation to protect all people and all communities from environmental harm.
In other words, we will just have to find other ways to implement the restrictions that we want to implement. The very next day, July 1, David Blackmon at Forbes reported that “EPA Targets Permian Basin, Widening Biden’s War On Oil And Gas.” The Permian Basin is currently the most productive oil and gas region in the United States, providing about 40% of the oil production and 15% of the gas of the entire country. The Permian Basin is also the site of about 40% of the nation’s active drilling rigs. And so it seems that EPA is gearing up to declare the Permian Basin a so-called “non-attainment area” with respect to ozone. Blackmon:
[T]he Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced [this week that] it may soon issue a ruling declaring that vast parts of the Permian Basin are in “non-attainment” status under the agency’s ozone regulations. If such a declaration is made, it will constitute a direct governmental assault on what is by far America’s most active and productive oil-producing region and its second most-productive natural gas area.
What would be the effect of such a declaration on current and future U.S. domestic oil and gas production? Blackmon again:
Placing the Permian Basin in non-attainment status would force a significant reduction in the region’s rig count, severely limiting the domestic industry’s efforts to increase U.S. oil production at a time when the global oil market is already severely under-supplied.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott promptly called on the Biden Administration to back off, saying that an EPA “non-attainment declaration “could interfere in the production of oil in Texas which could lead to skyrocketing prices at the pump by reducing production, increase the cost of that production, or do both.” But Blackmon notes that the plan comes from an office headed by a Biden-appointed anti-fossil-fuel activist, and thus is likely a core element of the administration’s program:
Mr. Biden appointed Joe Goffman, another of the many anti-fossil fuel activists that now hold senior posts at his various agencies, to head up EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation on an acting basis. That appointment might have been made with this specific policy action in mind.
Meanwhile, over at the Interior Department, July 1 was also the day for issuance of a statutorily-mandated five-year off-shore oil and gas leasing plan. Nicholas Groom at Reuters has a summary here. The bottom line is, we’re going to completely shut down leasing off both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, but maybe we’ll allow a little in the Gulf of Mexico or the Cook Inlet (Alaska). The number of auctions over the five-year period will be in the range of “zero to eleven,” and supposedly we’ll take public input as to which way to go. But Interior Secretary Deb Haaland in a statement left no doubt as to where she wants and expects this to come out:
“From Day One, President Biden and I have made clear our commitment to transition to a clean energy economy,” Haaland said in a statement. “Today, we put forward an opportunity for the American people to consider and provide input on the future of offshore oil and gas leasing. The time for the public to weigh in on our future is now.”
There is a 90 day period for public comment. You can be sure that environmental activist groups will flood the zone with thousands of comments to support the approach of the “zero” option of ceasing all further off-shore leases.
Other agencies were eerily silent in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s June 30 decision. Notable among those were the SEC and the Federal Reserve, both of which have recently ventured into adding “climate change” to their missions with only the most questionable of statutory support. Neither has given any indication of an intention to slow down.
And then on July 2, President Biden issued his now-famous tweet blaming the rising price of gas at the pump on gas station owners:
My message to the companies running gas stations and setting prices at the pump is simple: this is a time of war and global peril. Bring down the price you are charging at the pump to reflect the cost you’re paying for the product. And do it now.
A bureaucracy-wide campaign is ongoing under this guy’s direction to suppress oil and gas production in any way they can think of, and yet he has the gall to blame high prices on “companies running gas stations,” the majority of which are small independent businesses. At this point Biden has become malicious.
WHO Wants To Run the World?
By Paul Frijters, Gigi Foster, Michael Baker | Brownstone Institute | July 11, 2022
In Geneva in late May at the 75th meeting of the WHO’s decision-making body, the World Health Assembly (WHA), amendments to its International Health Regulations (IHRs) were debated and voted upon. If passed, they would grant the WHO the right to exert unconscionable pressure on countries to accept the WHO’s authority and health policy actions if the WHO decides that there is a public health threat that might spread beyond a country’s borders.
As Ramesh Thakur, the second man at the UN for years, noted, the amendments would mean “the rise of an international bureaucracy whose defining purpose, existence, powers and budgets will depend on outbreaks of pandemics, the more the better.”
This is the first clear instance of a globalist coup attempt. It would subvert national sovereignty worldwide by putting real power into the hands of an international group of bureaucrats. It has long been suspected that the authoritarian elites arisen during covid times would try to strengthen their positions by undermining nation states, and the this 75th jamboree is the first solid evidence of this being true.
What an opportunity then to see who is in the conspiring club. Who drafted the amendments? What was in them? Which individuals supported them or spoke out against them?
WHO were the conspirators?
The amendments on the table at the May WHA meeting had been transmitted to the WHO by the US Department of Health and Human Services on January 18, circulated by WHO to its member states (‘States Parties’) on January 20 and formally introduced to the WHA on April 12.
The proposals, according to an announcement on January 26, were co-sponsored by 19 countries plus the European Union. Even if some co-sponsors had little direct involvement in drafting them, they all would have approved in principle the overarching goal of tightening up the WHO’s authority over member states in the face of a public health event.
Loyce Pace, the HHS’s Assistant Secretary for Global Affairs – the leading US official nominally responsible for the proposed amendments – arrived at the Biden administration fresh from a stint as executive director of an advocacy organization called the Global Health Council.
That council receives funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and its members include Eli Lilly, Merck, Pfizer, Abbott Labs, and Johnson & Johnson. You get the idea. Via one of the foxes-turned-chicken-guard, it appears the HHS ‘worked closely’ on these amendments with large pharmaceutical companies, who will be chomping at the bit for a more proactive (read: profitable) response to any public health emergency, real or imagined.
So the conspiring club consists primarily of the US government and its Western allies in lockstep with Big Pharma, and they are looking to undermine both the sovereignty of their own governments and that of other countries, presumably with the idea that the Western elites would do the running.
What was in them? A blizzard of acronyms and euphemisms
To understand what the US proposed at the WHA, we need first to understand how things have worked in the WHO to this point.
The IHRs in their current form have been in force as international law since June 2007. Among other things, they impose requirements on countries to detect, report and respond to ‘public health events of international concern,’ or PHEICs. The WHO Director-General consults with the state where a possible public health event has occurred, and within 48 hours they are meant to come to a mutual agreement on whether or not it actually is a PHEIC, whether or not it needs to be announced to the world as such, and what counter-measures, if any, should be taken. It’s essentially an early-warning system on major health crises. This is a good thing if it’s run by people you can trust and if it has checks and balances to rein in expansionary tendencies.
The proposed amendments would greatly strengthen the power of the WHO relative to this baseline, in a number of ways.
First, they lower the threshold for the WHO to declare a public health emergency by empowering its Regional Directors to declare a ‘public health event of regional concern’ (PHERC, italics ours) and for the WHO to put out a new thing called an ‘intermediate public health alert.’
Second, they permit the WHO to consider allegations about a public health event from non-official sources, meaning sources other than the government of the state concerned, and allow that government only 24 hours to confirm the allegations and a further 24 hours to accept the WHO’s offer of ‘collaboration.’
Collaboration is essentially a euphemism for on-site assessment by teams of WHO investigators, and concomitant pressure at the whim of WHO personnel to enact potentially far-reaching measures such as lockdowns, movement restrictions, school closures, consumption of medicines, administration of vaccines and any or all of the other social, economic, and health paraphernalia that we have come to associate with the covid circus.
Should the state’s government acceptance of the WHO’s ‘offer’ not be forthcoming, the WHO is empowered to disclose the information it has to the other 194 WHO countries, while continuing to pressure the state to yield to the WHO’s invitation to ‘collaborate.’ A non-collaborating country would risk becoming a pariah.
Third, the proposal includes a new Chapter IV, which would establish a ‘Compliance Committee’ consisting of six government-appointed experts from each WHO region tasked with permanently nosing around to ensure the member states are complying with IHR regulations.
There are more crossings-out of the existing IHR language and new language added in, but the flavour of what the US-led alliance is shooting for is a WHO that can unilaterally decide whether there is a problem and what to do about it, and can isolate countries that disagree.
Compliant WHO member states could act as a supporting cast in the isolation effort, through the distribution of their own health budgets and their ‘health-related’ policies, which would include travel and trade restrictions. The WHO would become a kind of command-and-control center for globalist agendas, pushing the produce of (Western) Big Pharma.
Why and how would this work?
We learned during covid times why it would make sense that the US and its allies are insisting on these amendments.
Lowering the bar for declaring a global (or regional) public health threat triggers a huge opportunity for Western pharmaceutical companies. As legal experts have observed: “WHO emergency declarations can trigger the fast-track development and subsequent global distribution and administration of unlicensed investigational diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines.
This is done via the WHO’s Emergency Use Listing Procedure (EULP). The introduction of an ‘intermediate public health alert’ in particular will also further incentivise the pharmaceutical industry’s move to activate domestic fast-track emergency trial protocols as well as for advance purchase, production and stockpile agreements with governments before the existence of a concrete health threat to the world’s population has been detected, as is already the case under WHO’s EULP via the procedures developed for a ‘pre-public health emergency phase’.”
You can bet that the WHO ‘expert teams’ sent in to make on-the-ground assessments, under the banner of ‘collaboration’ with the host country experiencing the health event, will be chock-a-block with operatives from the CDC and who knows what other Western agencies, all poking around potentially sensitive facilities that a host government might justifiably claim a sovereign right to keep to itself. Likewise with the ‘Compliance Committee’ proposed by the US under the new Chapter IV of the IHRs: its government-appointed members have an open-ended brief, enshrined in international law, to be busybodies.
In layman’s terms, the WHO would be turned into an international thug, with its member states offered the role of backyard gang members.
As a bonus for Western elites, the proposals are a sneaky form of rewriting history. By cementing authority within an international organisation to determine the existence of public health crises and direct potentially draconian emergency responses, Western governments would get to enshrine and legitimise their own extreme responses to the covid outbreak, as we have pointed out previously. Their backsides would thereby be given some protection from legal challenges.
The refusniks: Developing countries
The proposals were pushed primarily by Western countries: the US was joined by Australia, the UK and the EU in arguing for passage. The resistance was led by developing countries who saw it as a colonialist ambush in which their ability to set policy and respond to health threats in a manner commensurate with their domestic situations would be overridden.
Brazil reportedly went so far as to threaten to withdraw from the WHO, and the African group of almost 50 countries, along with India, argued that the amendments were being rushed through without adequate consultation. Russia, China and Iran also objected.
Failure on the first try, but the US and its allies in the West will get more shots to push it through.
How do we expect them to do this? Well, when a proposal gets bogged down inside a giant bureaucratic machine like the WHO, the inevitable response is to set up committees to work in the background and circle back with a new set of proposals to be presented at a future meeting. True to form, a ‘working group’ and ‘expert committee’ are being assembled to accept member state proposals on IHR reform by the end of September this year. These will be ‘sifted through’ and reports will be prepared for review by the WHO’s executive board in January next year. The objective is to have a fresh set of proposals on the table when the WHA convenes for the 77th time in 2024.
Not all was lost
Salvaging something from the fact that the WHA failed to get a consensus around its biggest agenda item, the US and its allies got a small victory on the point of when they can try again – though in their desperation they needed to violate the IHRs’ own rules to accomplish it. Article 55 of the IHRs states unambiguously that a four-month notice period is required for any amendments.
In this instance, revised amendments were presented on May 24, the same day that the first lot were rejected. These were discussed, further amended on May 27 and then adopted on the same day. The approved amendments halve the two-year period for any (further) approved amendments to the IHRs to take effect. (The IHRs that came into force in 2007 were agreed to in 2005 – but under the new resolution, anything agreed to in 2024 would come into effect in 2025 rather than 2026.)
Yet, what was achieved in terms of fast-tracking the force of new amendments was lost in slow-tracking their implementation. Nations would have up to 12 months – double the previous suggestion of six months – to implement any IHR amendments that newly enter into force of law.
State of play
Where is all this going?
If the WHO takes the reins on decisions about what constitutes a health crisis, and can pressure every country into a one-size-fits-all set of responses that it, the WHO, also determines, that’s bad enough. But what about if its invitation to ‘collaborate’ with countries is backed up with teeth, such as sanctions against those who demur? And what about if it then broadens the definition of ‘public health’ by, for example, declaring that climate change falls under that definition? Or racism? Or discrimination against LBTQIA+ people? The possibilities thereby opened up for running the world are endless.
A global ‘health’ empire would bring huge harms to humanity, but a lot of power and money is pushing for it. Don’t think it can’t happen.
Paul Frijters is a Professor of Wellbeing Economics at the London School of Economics: from 2016 through November 2019 at the Center for Economic Performance, thereafter at the Department of Social Policy
Canada’s Heritage Minister panel: unregulated speech “erodes the foundations of democracy”
By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | July 11, 2022
According to the Expert Advisory Group on Online Safety appointed by Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez, “misleading political communications” should be regulated because unregulated political disinformation and discussion “erodes the foundations of democracy.”
Rodriguez has insisted multiple times that censorship bill, Bill C-11, also known as the Online Streaming Act, would not regulate user-generated content.
“We made it very clear in the Online Streaming Act that this does not apply to what individual Canadians and creators post online,” said Rodriguez. “No users, no online creators will be regulated. Only the companies themselves will have new responsibilities.”
However, that claim has been contradicted by the Canada Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) and the Expert Advisory Group on Online Safety that he appointed. Online platforms would have to regulate based on the speech of its users.
“[Section] 4.2 allows the CRTC to prescribe by regulation user uploaded content subject to very explicit criteria. That is also in the Act,” said chair of CRTC Ian Scott in June 2022.
The same comments have been previously repeated severally by the Expert Advisory Group on Online Safety, whose role is to propose measures of regulating online content that it considers harmful, including, but not limited to “propaganda, false advertising and misleading political communications.”
Content that would be regulated includes Facebook posts, private Twitter DMs, Amazon listings, video games, and even listings on Airbnb.
“Many experts mentioned there is justification to look more widely at some interactive services like Airbnb and gaming platforms,” members of the group proposed in one meeting.
“Many experts supported the notion that private communications should be included under the scope of the legislative framework. Private messaging services should also be regulated.”
The advisory group also proposed the regulation of legal content, noting that legal but harmful content “poses unique challenges” and “it is difficult to reconcile the issue of disinformation with the freedom of expression.”
The Online Streaming Act passed in the House last month and is currently in the Senate.
U.S. Drug-War Hypocrisy in Russia
By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | July 11, 2022
The drug-war hypocrisy of President Biden and the mainstream press are on full display in Russia, specifically in the case of Brittney Griner, the renowned W.N.B.A. basketball star. Griner was caught with a small amount of hashish oil in her luggage upon arriving in Russia to play for a Russian basketball team during the offseason. She has been detained by Russian authorities for drug-war violations since February 17 of this year. She faces a possible 10-year jail sentence.
Imbued with their extreme anti-Russia animus, Biden and the mainstream press have gone ballistic, accusing Russian authorities of illegitimately detaining Griner. They have been maintaining that Russian authorities should release her immediately and permit her to return to the United States without any further delay.
For example, here is an editorial from the Los Angeles Times entitled “Free Brittney Griner,” in which the Times writes, “We don’t know if Griner brought contraband into Russia or if she’s being framed by an adversarial government with an unjust legal system. At this point, it really doesn’t matter. This punishment does not fit the alleged crime, and it’s clear that Griner is essentially a political hostage. She must be freed.”
Consider this op-ed in the New York Times in which a Times sports columnist named Kurt Streeter repeatedly repeats the phrase “141 days,” to depict what he considers to be an excessively long period of time for Griner to be held on drug charges.
Meanwhile, after these pieces were written, Griner decided to plead guilty to the charges. So far, there is no allegation by either newspaper that the Russians forced her to plead guilty.
For his part, Biden is steadfastly maintaining that despite Griner’s guilty plea, the Russians are still holding Griner illegitimately. Unfortunately, he failed to provide any explanation for his reasoning, most likely because he doesn’t have one. White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre confirmed this when she stated, “We believe that the Russian Federation has wrongfully detained Brittney Griner, and she is in intolerable circumstances right now. We are going to do everything that we can — the president has this top of mind — to make sure that we get Brittney home safely.”
Of course, there is one great big elephant in the room that none of these people dares to confront and address: drug laws. Russia has drug laws, just like the United States does.
Now, think about that: Russia is an authoritarian state, one that has drug laws as part of its legal structure. In fact, think about China, a totalitarian communist state, one that also has drug laws as part of its system.
Given such, what does that say about the United States, given that it too has drug laws as part of its system. In fact, both the federal government and the state governments have brutally enforced drug laws for decades, as thousands of people who have been prosecuted and incarcerated can attest.
Streeter laments, repeatedly, that Griner has been in jail for “141 days.” Sure, three months is a long time, given that no one should should ever be detained at all for possessing drugs. But what Streeter omits from his lamentations is that 141 days is nothing compared to the years-long and decades-long jail sentences that American citizens have received at the hands of not the Russians but rather at the hands of their very own government officials — just for possessing or distributing drugs.
Just a few weeks ago, a festival organized by a group called the Rainbow Family was held in a national forest in Colorado. A U.S. magistrate popped in and opened up a makeshift courtroom in the middle of the forest. And guess why he did that. So that he could arraign people who were charged with possession of marijuana and other minor offenses. You can catch a photograph of this guy in this Washington Post article. He is quoted as saying, “Have you ever been in a more beautiful courtroom?”
It’s worth noting that Griner is black. Why is that important? Because it helps to remind us of the racist nature of America’s drug laws. The people who are serving the longest jail sentences here in the United States for drug-war violations are black. In fact, America’s drug war is without a doubt the most racist government program since segregation.
The Wall Street Journal, citing NORML, states that Griner’s possession of a small quantity of hashish oil would have been legal in Arizona and 18 other states. That’s only partially true. It’s legal under state law, but not federal law. The federal government continues to make possession of illicit drugs, including marijuana and hashish oil, illegal in every state, just as Russia does.
There is, of course, another lesson to be learned here. The more that the Pentagon, by itself or through NATO, incites foreign crises or creates official enemies in order to justify the continuation of its massive and ever-increasing taxpayer-funded largess, it makes it much more unsafe for Americans to travel overseas.
Brittney Griner’s arrest and detention for drug-war violations in Russia puts a needed mirror on America’s war on drugs. The best thing U.S. officials could do to help others around the world who are victimized for drug-war violations is by ending its own drug-war tyranny here at home. That means legalization of all drugs, both at the federal and state levels. It also means immediately releasing every person from every state and federal prison who has been incarcerated for a non-violent drug offense. It’s always best to lead by example, as compared to engaging in hypocritical tirades against foreign regimes that are enforcing the same drug-war tyranny that U.S. officials are enforcing here at home.
