Escape from New York?
By Stephen Lendman | June 2, 2021
Is the Big Apple headed toward becoming something like what’s portrayed in the 1981 Hollywood Escape from New York science fiction film?
That plot involves a future crime-ridden USA that transformed New York City into a maximum security prison, trapping residents.
Empire State governance is becoming draconian on all things covid.
Passed by New York state senators in April, oppressive NY State Assembly Bill A416 states the following:
“Upon determining by clear and convincing evidence (sic) that the health of others is or may be endangered (sic), the governor may order the removal and/or detention of such…person(s) or group of such persons by issuing a single order (sic).”
“Identifying such persons either by name or by a reasonably specific description of the individuals or group being detained,” they shall be indefinitely be held “in a medical facility or other appropriate private facility.”
The measure targets individuals unwilling to self-inflict harm by getting jabbed for covid and risking irreversible harm.
Under federal law, experimental drugs cannot be mandated.
The Nuremberg Code requires voluntary consent on matters relating to health.
If the above measure is enacted into state or federal law, the health, well-being and safety of affected Americans will be jeopardized more greatly than ever before in US history.
Last March, New York Governor Cuomo announced the launch of Excelsior Pass — a digital health passport to push mass-jabbing with hazardous, experimental, unapproved covid drugs.
“Attend sporting events, arts performances and more,” according to promotional material for the scheme, adding:
“Excelsior Pass supports a safe reopening of New York (sic) by providing a free, fast and secure way to present digital proof of (covid jabs) or negative test results.”
“Think of it as a mobile airline boarding pass, but for proving you received a (covid jab) or negative test.”
Along with pushing hazardous covid mass-jabbing, the Excelsior Pass scheme may be step one toward requiring passport proof of the above for employment, education, air travel, other public transportation, hotel reservations, restaurant dining, in-store shopping, attending a sporting event, and other social interactions.
No proof, no access to the above, no normal daily routines, social isolation instead like lepers.
Is that where things are heading in New York and elsewhere in the US? Will federal legislation mandate it?
On Friday, GOP Senator Ted Cruz went the other way, announcing that he’ll introduce legislation to ban vaccine passports — called the No Vaccine Passports Act.
“(T)here’s a real potential for government overreach,” he warned, adding:
“I don’t believe anyone should be forced to” be jabbed for covid. “It should be your personal choice.”
“You should make the choice based on your health, based on the decisions you want.”
Promoting covid jabs as safe and effective is diabolical mass deception to harm maximum numbers of people.
Excelsior Pass was the first of its kind introduced in the US.
Developed in cahoots with IBM, the company said New York “is modeling for the rest of the country how new, technology-enabled approaches can help safely reinvigorate economies (sic) while also striving to protect public health (sic).”
Surveillance Technology Oversight Project executive director Albert Cahn expressed concern about the scheme, saying:
“I have more detailed technical documentation about the privacy impact of nearly every app on my phone than I do for this health pass,”adding:
“IBM and the governor are using lots of buzzwords, but they’re not explaining their cryptographic model.”
“They’re not explaining the security, implementation.”
“(T)he pass itself is incredibly revealing” by disclosing people’s health status and other personal data.
Among establishment media, the NYT is a leading source of Big Lies and mass deception on all things covid.
On June 1, the broadsheet promoted Excelsior passes, saying the following:
“This magic ticket (sic) is New York State’s first and only government-issued vaccine passport in the country, accessible, for now, only to people who have been (jabbed for covid) in the state,” adding:
“About 1.1 million Excelsior passes had been downloaded onto phones and computers as of last week, according to the state.”
Perhaps dark forces in New York and nationwide may mandate covid-jabbed passport proof ahead for access to most everything essential for normal social, business, and other interactions as things were pre-2020.
As of late May, numerous US states either partially or entirely banned issuance of vaccine passports, or rejected their mandatory use for normal access to facilities or events.
They include Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Wyoming.
Many states haven’t indicated support or opposition to use covid passports so far.
Most likely, they’ll all go one way or the other on this issue ahead.
So far in New York, most business establishments don’t require proof of being jabbed for covid to enter.
A number of sports, other entertainment and arts venues went the other way.
Fraud is another issue. Surveillance Technology Oversight Project executive Cahn quoted above said he downloaded someone else’s Excelsior Pass in 11 minutes from information posted on social media, adding:
“(A)s much as we want a magic piece of software to be able to tell us whether the person next to us is (jabbed for covid), these apps really can’t.”
“At the end of the day, it’s largely built on trust.”
The bottom line is that we’ve been lied to and mass-deceived on virtually all things covid since the designation came from renaming seasonal flu.
TRANSHUMANISM: THE WAR ON HUMAN NATURE
By Dave Cullen | June 1, 2021
Dave Cullen’s latest video throws further light on concerns about the Fourth Industrial Revolution – transhumanism. Smart cities and VR matrix style existence is likely not the plan set out for us by the globalist elite.
The vast majority of humanity is being rendered obsolete. The fourth industrial revolution is a further indicator of this. Humans are assets only as long as their labour has production value. As the fourth industrial revolution takes hold, the production value of humanity will reduce to zero, and therefore humanity will become a liability.
Cullen indicates that the globalist billionaire class are not going to build smart cities for us “liabilities”. They will not plug us into a wonderful new matrix. The media and government are engaged in mass deception of this agenda – it is all smoke and mirrors covering the most probable outcome, which is the mass culling of liabilities.
More at www.bitchute.com
Make Way for the Snitch State: The All-Seeing Fourth Branch of Government
By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead | The Rutherford Institute | June 1, 2021
We’re being spied on by a domestic army of government snitches, spies and techno-warriors.
This government of Peeping Toms is watching everything we do, reading everything we write, listening to everything we say, and monitoring everything we spend.
Beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it is all being recorded, stored, and catalogued, and will be used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government’s choosing.
This far-reaching surveillance has paved the way for an omnipresent, militarized fourth branch of government—the Surveillance State—that came into being without any electoral mandate or constitutional referendum.
Indeed, long before the National Security Agency (NSA) became the agency we loved to hate, the Justice Department, the FBI, and the Drug Enforcement Administration were carrying out their own secret mass surveillance on an unsuspecting populace.
Even agencies not traditionally associated with the intelligence community are part of the government’s growing network of snitches and spies.
Just about every branch of the government—from the Postal Service to the Treasury Department and every agency in between—now has its own surveillance sector, authorized to spy on the American people. For instance, the U.S. Postal Service, which has been photographing the exterior of every piece of paper mail for the past 20 years, is also spying on Americans’ texts, emails and social media posts. Headed up by the Postal Service’s law enforcement division, the Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP) is reportedly using facial recognition technology, combined with fake online identities, to ferret out potential troublemakers with “inflammatory” posts. The agency claims the online surveillance, which falls outside its conventional job scope of processing and delivering paper mail, is necessary to help postal workers avoid “potentially volatile situations.”
Then there are the fusion and counterterrorism centers that gather all of the data from the smaller government spies—the police, public health officials, transportation, etc.—and make it accessible for all those in power. And that doesn’t even begin to touch on the complicity of the corporate sector, which buys and sells us from cradle to grave, until we have no more data left to mine.
It’s not just what we say, where we go and what we buy that is being tracked.
We’re being surveilled right down to our genes, thanks to a potent combination of hardware, software and data collection that scans our biometrics—our faces, irises, voices, genetics, even our gait—runs them through computer programs that can break the data down into unique “identifiers,” and then offers them up to the government and its corporate allies for their respective uses.
In this way, we are now the unwitting victims of an interconnected, tightly woven, technologically evolving web of real-time, warrantless, wall-to-wall mass surveillance that makes the spy programs spawned by the USA Patriot Act look like child’s play.
Fusion centers. See Something, Say Something. Red flag laws. Behavioral threat assessments. Terror watch lists. Facial recognition. Snitch tip lines. Biometric scanners. Pre-crime. DNA databases. Data mining. Precognitive technology. Contact tracing apps.
These are all part and parcel of the widening surveillance dragnet that the government has used and abused in order to extend its reach and its power.
The COVID-19 pandemic has succeeded in acclimating us even further to being monitored, tracked and reported for so-called deviant or undesirable behavior.
Consequently, we now live in a society in which a person can be accused of any number of crimes without knowing what exactly he has done. He might be apprehended in the middle of the night by a roving band of SWAT police. He might find himself on a no-fly list, unable to travel for reasons undisclosed. He might have his phones or internet tapped based upon a secret order handed down by a secret court, with no recourse to discover why he was targeted.
This Kafkaesque nightmare has become America’s reality.
Despite the fact that its data snooping has been shown to be ineffective at detecting, let alone stopping, any actual terror attacks, the government continues to operate its domestic spying programs largely in secret, carrying out warrantless mass surveillance on hundreds of millions of Americans’ phone calls, emails, text messages and the like.
Yet the surveillance sector is merely one small part of a shadowy permanent government comprised of unelected bureaucrats who march in lockstep with profit-driven corporations that actually runs Washington, DC, and works to keep us under close watch and, thus, under control. For example, Google openly works with the NSA, Amazon has built a massive $600 million intelligence database for the CIA, and the telecommunications industry is making a fat profit by spying on us for the government.
Most recently, the Biden Administration indicated it may be open to working with non-governmental firms in order to warrantlessly monitor citizens online.
This would be nothing new, however. Vast quantities of the government’s digital surveillance is already being outsourced to private companies, who are far less restrained in how they harvest and share our personal data.
In this way, Corporate America is making a hefty profit by aiding and abetting the government in its militarized domestic surveillance efforts.
The snitch culture has further empowered the Surveillance State.
As Ezra Marcus writes for the New York Times, “Throughout the past year, American society responded to political upheaval and biological peril by turning to an age-old tactic for keeping rule breakers in check: tattling.”
This new era of snitch surveillance is the lovechild of the government’s post-9/11 “See Something, Say Something” programs combined with the self-righteousness of a politically correct, technologically-wired age.
Marcus continues:
“Technology, and our abiding love of it, is crucial to our current moment of social surveillance. Snitching isn’t just a byproduct of nosiness or fear; it’s a technological feature built into the digital architecture of the pandemic era …. the world’s most powerful technology companies, whose products you are likely using to read this story, already use a business model of mass surveillance, collecting and selling user information to advertisers at an unfathomable scale. Our cellphones track us everywhere, and our locations are bought and sold by data brokers at incredible, intimate detail. Facial recognition software used by law enforcement trawls Instagram selfies. Facebook harvests the biometric data of its users. The whole ecosystem, more or less, runs on snitching.”
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, what we are dealing with today is not just a beast that has outgrown its chains but a beast that will not be restrained.
Australia’s drug regulator considers referring vaccine hesitant Facebook posts to police
The regulator cited potential two-year jail terms in some instances
By Tom Parker | Reclaim the Net | June 1, 2021
Australia’s drug regulator, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), is considering referring Facebook posts containing claims about COVID vaccine deaths to the police after a post showing Labor backbencher Julian Hill getting his vaccine was met with mass pushback from vaccine skeptics.
The post was ratioed with almost twice the number of comments to engagements – a common sign that a post is unpopular.
Many of the comments noted that the vaccine is “experimental,” described Hill’s post as “propaganda,” and voiced their objections to the vaccine.
But The Guardian Australia focused on alleged posts from some Facebook users that purportedly contained an image that cited the TGA and claimed that COVID-19 vaccines have caused more than 200 deaths.
The figure is a reference to the TGA’s disclosure in its May 27 COVID-19 vaccine weekly safety report that it has received “210 reports of deaths following immunisation.” However, the TGA insists that only one of these deaths was caused by the vaccines.
After The Guardian Australia contacted the TGA, it said the alleged posting of claims that the vaccine had caused more than 200 deaths were “particularly concerning” and that it would consider referring these posts to the federal police.
Additionally, the TGA noted that it’s a criminal offense, punishable by two years in prison, to represent oneself as a commonwealth body or claim to act on behalf of one.
The Guardian Australia also contacted Facebook which swiftly removed the posts for violating its far-reaching “COVID-19 misinformation” rules.
Despite the threat of police referrals from the TGA and Facebook removing the posts, Hill demanded that Australia’s health minister, Greg Hunt, take further action to “combat vaccine hesitancy, and the bat shit crazy conspiracy theories circulating online.”
He also warned “Australians will continue to be exposed to restrictions and lockdowns… until enough of the population is vaccinated.”
These developments come months after Australian lawmaker Craig Kelly had one of his Facebook posts about masks removed after complaints from the opposition party. Days after this post removal, his account was temporarily suspended and he was then permanently banned a couple of months later.
Facebook also expanded its crackdown on vaccine skeptic content last month by starting to “fact-check” and suppress individual users that repeatedly share misinformation. This followed whistleblowers exposing the tech giant’s secret algorithm that suppresses negative vaccine experiences.
Do SAGE Members Calling for Lockdown to be Extended Beyond June 21st Not Believe the Vaccines Work?
By Will Jones • Lockdown Sceptics • June 1, 2021
So do the vaccines not work then? That’s certainly the impression you’d get from the way various members of SAGE are carrying on, warning of new waves and new variants and the need to delay the end of lockdown even further (completely ignoring the fact that half of America is now open without any problems so far).
As Sherelle Jacobs asks in the Telegraph, why is the debate continuing as though nothing has changed despite half the country – the most vulnerable half – being vaccinated?
Instead of discussing how quickly vaccines could spell the end of restrictions, the commentariat fixates on the risk of another wave as if absolutely nothing has changed. Somehow, despite low deaths, the Indian variant rather than the vaccine has become the game changer.
We have become wearily used to these media interventions from SAGE members in the build-up to key decisions around lockdowns, usually pushing some skewed version of the scientific evidence to frighten the public and pile pressure on the Government to tighten or maintain restrictions. This was bad enough in the autumn before the vaccines were on the scene, but now it leaves you wondering if they know something we don’t about how well the vaccines prevent death and serious disease.
The Government has been continually putting out new research showing how effective the vaccines are, including against the Indian variant, and while I have written on a number of occasions about the shortcomings of these studies, I had been assuming that the vaccines do work, or at least that the Government and its scientists believe they work. With all this talk of third waves and extending lockdown, you have to wonder.
The latest line to justify extending the lockdown is from NERVTAG member Professor Ravi Gupta, who argues for just a few more weeks to let more people get vaccinated, saying there are signs an “explosive” third wave is on the horizon.
Yet according to the latest figures, 51.3% of the adult population has now had one vaccine dose and 31.4% has had two. Over 90% of the over-70s are now fully vaccinated.
The vaccines are supposed to be up to 90% effective at preventing symptomatic infection, including in the over-65s. They are also claimed to be a 90% effective at preventing hospitalisation or death (though presumably their efficacy is reduced somewhat in the frail elderly). This means any new “surge” will have something like one tenth of the infections of earlier waves, while hospitalisations and deaths should be up to a hundred times less – a non-event in infectious disease terms. While these are likely overestimates of vaccine effectiveness, especially among those most susceptible to the disease, there is also naturally acquired immunity and prior immunity that will help to bring the disease burden down.
However you look at it, if the vaccines are going to do their thing then they are already doing it and there’s no point postponing the unlocking. If they’re not working then there’s nothing we can do about it now anyway so we might as well get back to living fully. Either way, the SAGE prophets of doom should be roundly ignored.
Washington court rules YouTubers aren’t members of the news media
By Christina Maas | Reclaim the Net | June 1, 2021
The Washington State Supreme Court rules that YouTubers are not a member of the “News Media,” and therefore do not qualify for press privileges. The ruling shows how existing legislation works against individual and independent journalists whose medium is online platforms.
In the Green vs. Pierce County case, the Washington Supreme Court ruled that the YouTuber is not a member of the “News Media.” Green runs a news YouTube channel called “Liberty’s Champion,” which has more than 18k subscribers. He submitted a public records request to Pierce County after he had a disagreement with a security guard employed by the county. The purpose of the request was to get more information about the county’s security force.
We obtained a copy of the case documents for you here.
The county obliged to the request, but did not submit all the records Green requested. He requested all the records, arguing that as a member of the news media, he was entitled to the information. The county still refused his request.
So he sued the county at the district court, which ruled in his favor. The county appealed at the supreme court, which ruled against Green.
The states laws define “news media” as:
“Any newspaper, magazine or other periodical, book publisher, news agency, wire service, radio or television station or network, cable or satellite station or network, or audio or audiovisual production company, or any entity that is in the regular business of news gathering and disseminating news or information to the public by any means, including, but not limited to, print, broadcast, photographic, mechanical, internet, or electronic distribution.”
From the definition, it is clear the statute has not been updated to keep up with the current times. While Green’s channel fits the definition of news media, it is disqualified by the phrase “entity,” whose legal definition, according to the court, should be interpreted to fit the traditional news outlets included in the statutes. Unfortunately, the list only includes organizations, not individuals.
Therefore, an online channel run by an individual does not satisfy the legal definition of “news media.” In the ruling, the court stated “Liberty’s Champion is not ‘news media’ simply because it has a YouTube channel and regularly posts content.”
It added that “there are no freedom of the press implications if there is no news media.”
According to Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University’s Law School, the court’s perception of news media is “corporatist” and “takes an unduly narrow view of the press.” In a post on his website, he continues to argue that “in the modern era the “press” should include unaffiliated individual journalists.”
One of the dissenting judges in the bench argued that “distinguishing different news media based on size or organizational structure or status as legal entity is disfavored, if not outright impermissible.”
Even the majority did acknowledge that the statutory definition might be archaic:
“The evermore constant use of social media to access news demonstrates our increased reliance on and trust in social media, and it requires careful vetting to ensure that the news and stories we find are accurate. The manner in which we access news today is vastly different from how we did it in 2007, and this statutory definition may not comport with the current intersection of social media and the news.”
Goldman also points out that the courts, and even Green, failed to bring up the argument that Green is a “sole proprietor” of his channel, which earns money. In most cases, sole proprietorships do qualify as legal entities, in which case the majority’s ruling should have favored Green.
Additionally, the statute’s definition of “news media” does include “an employee, agent, or independent contractor” of its definition of an “entity.” So, one could argue that YouTube is the “entity” and Green is an independent contractor of YouTube.
The bottom line is, existing legislatures have ambiguous definitions that end up creating unnecessary statutory interpretation problems, especially due to the constant evolution of technology. As Goldman puts it: “the entire architecture of the news industry and journalism has changed radically, [and] we don’t have good principled ways of defining media enterprises sufficient to ensure the privileges won’t be misused.”
Canada: Conservatives’ attempts to protect platform users’ speech online is blocked
By Dan Frieth May | Reclaim the Net | May 31, 2021
Members of the Liberal Party, New Democratic Party (NDP), and Bloc Quebecois rejected a Bill C-10 amendment proposed by the Conservative Party of Canada that would have exempted user-generated content from the bill’s online speech suppression powers. The vote was cast during Monday’s Heritage Committee meeting.
Bloc and NDP legislators have expressed support for the bill, meaning the controversial internet censorship bill is highly likely to pass. Still, Conservative legislators are keen on ensuring the bill does not become law without an exception being created for user-generated content.
Legislators appear to be ignoring all the complaints and criticism of the bill from the public.
Former chairman of the CTRC, the regulator that will oversee online platforms once the bill passes, Peter Menzies has condemned the bill, warning it is “an assault on Canadian’s freedoms.”
Last week, a group of experts in the tech industry, wrote an open letter to Trudeau, urging him to “stop harming the Internet, and the freedoms and aspirations of every individual in this country, and our knowledge economy through overreaching regulatory policies that will have significant, yet unintended consequences for the free and open internet in Canada.”
Illegitimate rules remove parental consent for Covid vaccines
The Rule of Law is being dismantled and our children are the prey
By Meryl Nass, MD | May 31, 2021
Continuing from the last post: the US had very high rates of Covid compared to many countries, and right now that seems to have been a good thing… since places like Australia and New Zealand seem to want to be able to impose lockdowns for the forseeable future as they pursue the impossible goal of zero Covid. Impossible because you are not going to get everyone on the planet to accept a shot, and then vaccinate the wild animals and pets who are also susceptible. We have basically reached herd immunity with a combination of vaccine and natural immunity. Since only 40% of the US population is fully vaccinated, according to the NYT, there has undoubtedly been a considerable amount of natural immunity that has accrued.
Why aren’t the media celebrating? Apparently the powers that be who have made so many disastrous decisions regarding pandemic management don’t want us to know this. Yet. Thus their huge hurry to vaccinate despite the law, despite the still experimental nature of the vaccine products:
* The colleges demanding vaccinations
* The employers firing the unvaccinated
* The authorization for 12-15 year olds
* The million dollar lotteries for vaccinees, and other excesses to coerce vaccinations
But now the ante has been upped even higher. While many laws have been disregarded during the pandemic emergency, under the rubric of an emergency, two things I learned today are the worst.
Children aged 12-15 are being invited to vaccine clinics without parental permission, in the cities of San Francisco and Philadelphia, and others, based on emergency edicts in local jurisdictions, coupled with a Declaration by Alex Azar in March 2020 broadening the liability waiver umbrella for “covered countermeasures” during a pandemic to virtually anyone who has anything to do with a vaccine program. This could be interpreted as covering anyone who chooses to mandate the vaccine, even while experimental. In other words, even though you are not permitted to mandate an experimental product, Alex Azar said he would not allow you to be punished if you did so.
There do exist real laws, which preceded the pandemic, that protect children as a special class from both being used as experimental subjects (which legally under EUA this is) and protect them by requiring parental consent for procedures, unless they are emancipated minors.
Unless these laws were revoked while I blinked, they still exist and as federal laws should supercede anything imposed by a lesser jurisdiction.
Let’s see what happens. This is “hot” news and I don’t have time to put in the links, but this is true.
Finally, the FDA has announced its vaccine advisory committee will meet on June 10 to advise (aka bless) FDA on authorization and/or licensure for pediatric Covid vaccines. Not to put too fine a point on it, it is possible the FDA will authorize Covid vaccines for younger children, or even license them, starting June 11.
Meanwhile, Israeli media have claimed that one in 3 to 6 thousand vaccinees (I think in the 15-30 age group) develops myocarditis. I am trying to get the official report on this.
It is likely the FDA is trying to forestall any more bad news, which is why it is moving so rapidly. Furthermore, the FDA has warned us that it may not be able to provide any background documents prior to the June 10 meeting. That means the public and the advisors may be entirely in the dark as the advisors vote to provide their approval for whatever the FDA has up its sleeve.
Meanwhile, the Indian Bar Association has served legal notice for suppression of ivermectin against the WHO Chief Scientist, who is a famous Indian who headed up the Indian Council of Medical Research before transferring to the WHO.
Statement from the International Delegation to the 2021 Syrian Presidential Election
Syria Solidarity Movement | May 29, 2021
This independent delegation was assembled to witness the May 26, 2021 presidential election in Syria and to investigate on-the-ground conditions of Syrian life in the current period. Activists and journalists from Palestine, Syria, South Africa, France, Canada, and the United States joined this delegation on the invitation of the Syria Solidarity Movement and Arab Americans 4 Syria. This joint statement summarizes our findings on the election and what it means for Syrians.
On election day, our delegation traveled to neighborhoods that had been outside of government control when the last presidential elections took place in 2014. Notably, we visited polling places in the towns of Arbeen and Douma, in the hard-hit Eastern Ghouta region southeast of Damascus where residents are returning and beginning to rebuild their homes, some after years of seeking refuge elsewhere. We witnessed Syrians cast secret ballots in polling places where monitors from opposition parties were present alongside election officials, in accordance with the Constitution of the Syrian Arab Republic. We saw nothing to indicate unfairness or coercion in the casting of ballots.
We also conducted extensive interviews with members of the Syrian general public. We were not inhibited in any way from conducting these interviews, and could freely do so outside the presence of government officials.
We overwhelmingly found that Syrian people place tremendous significance on this election. During and after the election we observed huge enthusiasm. It appeared genuine and widespread. For many Syrians, the election represents the imminent ending of the war, the defeat of foreign plots, and hope for the future. For young people, it encapsulates the first period of relative stability they have experienced in their living memory. Many expressed that they were not simply casting votes for their preferred candidate, but for a sovereign, unified Syria, free from imperialist interference. For them, the presidential election was a referendum on the right of the Syrian people to determine their own future.
It is the unanimous conclusion of the undersigned representatives of the International Delegation to the 2021 Syrian Presidential Election that the re-election of President Bashar al-Assad, of the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party and the National Progressive Front, is the legitimate, democratic expression of the Syrian people.
Ted Kelly
International Action Center
Co-Editor, Tear Down the Walls!
Wyatt Miller
MN Anti-War Committee, USA
Kobi Guillory
Co-chair, Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression
Amal Wahdan
Coordinator, One Democratic State Assembly
Steering Committee, Syria Solidarity Movement
Ramallah, Palestine
Mpho Masemola
Secretary General, Ex Political Prisoner’s Veterans Association of South Africa (EPPA)
Member, Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), African National Congress military wing
Johnny Achi, E.E.
Co-founder, Arab Americans for Syria
Daniel Kovalik
Adjunct Professor of International Human Rights, University of Pittsburgh School Of Law
Alain Corvez
Adviser in international strategy, France
Rick Sterling
Journalist, USA
Paul Larudee
Retired Academic and Unretired NGO Administrator & Piano Technician
Ten Killed During Protests in Cali, Colombia Over Past Day
Sputnik – 29.05.2021
At least 10 people were killed and 23 others were hospitalised during a day of protests in the city of Cali in southwestern Colombia, Security Minister Carlos Alberto Rojas Cruz said on Saturday.
“Yesterday, 10 people were killed in Cali, and in some areas in the south of the city, confrontations turned into a real urban war”, Rojas said live on the Caracol radio station.
According to him, many demonstrators sustained injuries during the rallies, with at least 23 of them admitted to the city’s hospitals.
“However, we know that there are many more of them”, the minister noted.
Local media and social networks voiced dismay over the recent series of videos showing people wearing civilian clothes shooting at protesters, and moving together with police officers. Activists demanded that the authorities explain these incidents.
“The presence of armed civilians on the streets of the city is unacceptable, it turns it into a field of military operations… The revealed facts require a quick and thorough investigation involving all law enforcement agencies”, Rojas said.
The city of Cali has been the epicentre of protests against tax hikes, rocking Colombia since late April even after the authorities discarded the initiative. Labour and student organisations demand social and health care reforms, demilitarisation of cities, and dissolution of Mobile Anti-Disturbance Squadron forces.
Rallies in Cali involve violent clashes between protesters and law enforcement troops. In the wake of the poor security situation, local authorities announced a night curfew. In addition, on Friday Colombian President Ivan Duque arrived in the province of Valle del Cauca, of which Cali is the capital, to hold a security council session and discuss the unrest with the regional government. He pledged to deploy more military personnel to the area.
Protest leaders publicly reject all forms of violence and declare them as peaceful marches, but numerous radical activists join the marches, vandalise properties and attack the police.
The Ministry of Defence of Colombia blames armed rebel groups, such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and the Army of National Liberation, for the violence during the demonstrations, claiming they seek to destabilise certain regions of the country for their purposes.
New Paper: Masks Achieve Nothing In Terms Of Spread
By Damian D. Guerra and Daniel J. Guerra | medrxiv.org | May 29, 2021
Latest analysis shows yet again – yet again – what we already knew from 40 years of published research. And also empirically from simply glancing over the past year’s real-world data. Masks don’t work!
Our main finding is that mask mandates and use are not associated with lower SARS-CoV-2 spread among US states. 80% of US states mandated masks during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Mandates induced greater mask compliance but did not predict lower growth rates when community spread was low (minima) or high (maxima). We infer that mandates likely did not affect COVID-19 case growth [15], as growth rates were similar on all days between actual or modeled issuance dates and 6 March 2021. Higher mask use (rather than mandates per se) has been argued to decrease COVID-19 growth rates [11].
While compliance varies by location and time, IHME estimates are robust (derived from multiple sources [17]) and densely sampled (day-level precision). Higher mask use did not predict lower maximum growth rates, smaller surges, or less Fall-Winter growth among continental states.
Mask-growth rate correlation was only evident at minima. This may be an artifact of faster growth at fewer normalized cases, as well as regional differences in case prevalence early in the pandemic. States in the high mask quintile grew at similar rates as states in the low mask quintile after maxima (when interstate total case differences were smaller than before minima).
In addition, mask use did not predict normalized cases at minima, and low mask growth curves trailed those of high mask (particularly Northeast) states before minima. Growth maxima and Fall-Winter surges did not differ between Northeast and other states. Northeast states exhibited the highest seroprevalence up to at least July 2020 [24] and constituted 80% of the top quintile of mask use, which may explain their comparatively lower Summer growth.
Overall, mask use appears to be an intra-state lagging indicator of case growth. There is inferential but not demonstrable evidence that masks reduce SARS-CoV-2 transmission. Animal models [25], small case studies [6], and growth curves for mandate-only states [16] suggest that mask efficacy increases with mask use [11]. However, we did not observe lower growth rates over a range of compliance at maximum Fall-Winter growth (45-83% between South Dakota and Massachusetts during maxima) [17] when growth rates were high.
This complements a Danish RCT from 3 April to 2 June 2020, when growth rates were low, which found no association between mask use and lower COVID-19 rates either for all participants in the masked arm (47% strong compliance) or for strongly compliant participants only [8].
Masks have generally not protected against other respiratory viruses. Higher self-reported mask use protected against SARS-CoV-1 in Beijing residents [26], but RCTs found no differences in PCR confirmed influenza among Hong Kong households assigned to hand hygiene with or without masks (mask use 31% and 49%, respectively) [27].
Medical and cloth masks did not reduce viral respiratory infections among clinicians in Vietnam [9] or China [10], and rhinovirus transmission increased among universally masked Hong Kong students and teachers in 2020 compared with prior years [28].
These findings are consistent with a 2020 CDC meta-analysis [29] and a 2020 Cochrane review update [30].
Our study has implications for respiratory virus mitigation. Public health measures should ethically promote behaviors that prevent communicable diseases. The sudden onset of COVID-19 compelled adoption of mask mandates before efficacy could be evaluated.
Our findings do not support the hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 transmission rates decrease with greater public mask use.
As masks are required in public in many US states, it is prudent to weigh potential benefits with harms. Masks may promote social cohesion as rallying symbols during a pandemic [31], but risk compensation can also occur [32]. Prolonged mask use (>4 hours per day) promotes facial alkalinization and inadvertently encourages dehydration, which in turn can enhance barrier breakdown and bacterial infection risk [33].
British clinicians have reported masks to increase headaches and sweating and decrease cognitive precision [34]. Survey bias notwithstanding, these sequelae are associated with medical errors [35]. By obscuring nonverbal communication, masks interfere with social learning in children [36]. Likewise, masks can distort verbal speech and remove visual cues to the detriment of individuals with hearing loss; clear face-shields improve visual integration, but there is a corresponding loss of sound quality [37, 38].
Future research is necessary to better understand the risks of long-term daily mask use [30]. Conversely, it is appropriate to emphasize interventions with demonstrated or probable efficacy against COVID-19 such as vaccination [39] and Vitamin D repletion [40]. In summary, mask mandates and use were poor predictors of COVID-19 spread in US states. Case growth was independent of mandates at low and high rates of community spread, and mask use did not predict case growth during the Summer or Fall-Winter waves.
Strengths of our study include using two mask metrics to evaluate association with COVID-19 growth rates; measuring normalized case growth in mandate and non-mandate states at comparable times to quantify the likely effect of mandates; and deconvolving the effect of mask use by examining case growth in states with variable mask use. Our study also has key limitations. We did not assess counties or localities, which may trend independently of state averages.
While dense sampling promotes convergence, IHME masking estimates are subject to survey bias. We only assessed one biological quantity (confirmed and probable COVID-19 infections), but the ongoing pandemic warrants assessment of other factors such as hospitalizations and mortality. Future work is necessary to elucidate better predictors of COVID-19 spread. A recent study found that at typical respiratory fluence rates, medical masks decrease airway deposition of 10-20μm SARS-CoV-2 particles but not 1-5μm SARS-CoV-2 aerosols [41].
Aerosol expulsion increases with COVID-19 disease severity in non-human primates, as well as with age and BMI in humans without COVID-19 [42]. Aerosol treatment by enhanced ventilation and air purification could help reduce the size of COVID-19 outbreaks.
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Are There 50,000 ‘Israeli-born’ Individuals Living in the UK?
By Professor David Miller | August 18, 2026
Recent disclosures by the Zionist regime show that some 2,069 British nationals were serving in the IDF as of March 2025, according to Freedom of Information (FoI) requests submitted to the occupation forces (1,686 dual British-Israeli, plus 383 multinational). We cannot tell from the figures how many of these were already settler colonists and intend to stay in the colony, and how many will return or have returned to the UK. Presumably, those returning to the UK will number far fewer than 2,000, since many are known to have become permanently residents of the colony.
Additionally, the IDF figures only provide a snapshot, and do not tell us how many have served in the Jewish supremacist military either before or after March 2025. One way into the question of how many genocidaires are living in Britain is to ask how many current British residents were born in the Zionist colony. There is data on that, as we shall see. … continue
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