WHO Deletes Naturally Acquired Immunity from Its Website
By Jeffrey A. Tucker | American Institute for Economic Research | December 23, 2020
Maybe you have some sense that something fishy is going on? Same. If it’s not one thing, it’s another.
Coronavirus lived on surfaces until it didn’t. Masks didn’t work until they did, then they did not. There is asymptomatic transmission, except there isn’t. Lockdowns work to control the virus except they do not. All these people are sick without symptoms until, whoops, PCR tests are wildly inaccurate because they were never intended to be diagnostic tools. Everyone is in danger of the virus except they aren’t. It spreads in schools except it doesn’t.
On it goes. Daily. It’s no wonder that so many people have stopped believing anything that “public health authorities” say. In combination with governors and other autocrats doing their bidding, they set out to take away freedom and human rights and expected us to thank them for saving our lives. At some point this year (for me it was March 12) life began feeling like a dystopian novel of your choice.
Well, now I have another piece of evidence to add to the mile-high pile of fishy mess. The World Health Organization, for reasons unknown, has suddenly changed its definition of a core conception of immunology: herd immunity. Its discovery was one of the major achievements of 20th century science, gradually emerging in the 1920s and then becoming ever more refined throughout the 20th century.
Herd immunity is a fascinating observation that you can trace to biological reality or statistical probability theory, whichever you prefer. (It is certainly not a “strategy” so ignore any media source that describes it that way.) Herd immunity speaks directly, and with explanatory power, to the empirical observation that respiratory viruses are either widespread and mostly mild (common cold) or very severe and short-lived (Ebola).
Why is this? The reason is that when a virus kills its host, it cannot migrate. The more aggressively it does this, the less it spreads. If the virus doesn’t kill its host, it can hop to others through all the usual means. When you get a virus and fight it off, your immune system encodes that information in a way that builds immunity to it. When it happens to enough people (and each case is different so we can’t put a clear number on it) the virus loses its pandemic quality and becomes endemic, which is to say predictable and manageable. Each new generation incorporates that information through more exposure.
This is what one would call Virology/Immunology 101. It’s what you read in every textbook. It’s been taught in 9th grade cell biology for probably 80 years. Observing the operations of this evolutionary phenomenon is pretty wonderful because it increases one’s respect for the way in which human biology has adapted to the presence of pathogens without absolutely freaking out.
And the discovery of this fascinating dynamic in cell biology is a major reason why public health became so smart in the 20th century. We kept calm. We managed viruses with medical professionals: doctor/patient relationships. We avoided the Medieval tendency to run around with hair on fire but rather used rationality and intelligence. Even the New York Times recognizes that natural immunity is powerful with Covid-19, which is not in the least bit surprising.
Until one day, this strange institution called the World Health Organization – once glorious because it was mainly responsible for the eradication of smallpox – has suddenly decided to delete everything I just wrote from cell biology basics. It has literally changed the science in a Soviet-like way. It has removed with the delete key any mention of natural immunities from its website. It has taken the additional step of actually mischaracterizing the structure and functioning of vaccines.
So that you will believe me, I will try to be as precise as possible. Here is the website from June 9, 2020. You can see it here on Archive.org. You have to move down the page and click on the question about herd immunity. You see the following.
That’s pretty darn accurate overall. Even the statement that the threshold is “not yet clear” is correct. There are cross immunities to Covid from other coronaviruses and there is T cell memory that contributes to natural immunity.
Some estimates are as low as 10%, which is a far cry from the modelled 70% estimate of virus immunity that is standard within the pharmaceutical realm. Real life is vastly more complicated than models, in economics or epidemiology. The WHO’s past statement is a solid, if “pop,” description.
However, in a screenshot dated November 13, 2020, we read the following note that somehow pretends as if human beings do not have immune systems at all but rather rely entirely on big pharma to inject things into our blood.
What this note at the World Health Organization has done is deleted what amounts to the entire million-year history of humankind in its delicate dance with pathogens. You could only gather from this that all of us are nothing but blank and unimprovable slates on which the pharmaceutical industry writes its signature.
In effect, this change at WHO ignores and even wipes out 100 years of medical advances in virology, immunology, and epidemiology. It is thoroughly unscientific – shilling for the vaccine industry in exactly the way the conspiracy theorists say that WHO has been doing since the beginning of this pandemic.
What’s even more strange is the claim that a vaccine protects people from a virus rather than exposing them to it. What’s amazing about this claim is that a vaccine works precisely by firing up the immune system through exposure. Why I had to type those words is truly beyond me. This has been known for centuries. There is simply no way for medical science completely to replace the human immune system. It can only game it via what used to be called inoculation.
Take from this what you will. It is a sign of the times. For nearly a full year, the media has been telling us that “science” requires that we comply with their dictates that run contrary to every tenet of liberalism, every expectation we’ve developed in the modern world that we can live freely and with the certainty of rights. Then “science” took over and our human rights were slammed. And now the “science” is actually deleting its own history, airbrushing over what it used to know and replacing it with something misleading at best and patently false at worst.
I cannot say why, exactly, the WHO did this. Given the events of the past nine or ten months, however, it is reasonable to assume that politics are at play. Since the beginning of the pandemic, those who have been pushing lockdowns and hysteria over the coronavirus have resisted the idea of natural herd immunity, instead insisting that we must live in lockdown until a vaccine is developed.
That is why the Great Barrington Declaration, written by three of the world’s preeminent epidemiologists and which advocated embracing the phenomenon of herd immunity as a way of protecting the vulnerable and minimizing harms to society, was met with such venom. Now we see the WHO, too, succumbing to political pressure. This is the only rational explanation for changing the definition of herd immunity that has existed for the past century.
The science has not changed; only the politics have. And that is precisely why it is so dangerous and deadly to subject virus management to the forces of politics. Eventually the science too bends to the duplicitous character of the political industry.
When the existing textbooks that students use in college contradict the latest official pronouncements from the authorities during a crisis in which the ruling class is clearly attempting to seize permanent power, we’ve got a problem.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Editorial Director for the American Institute for Economic Research. He is the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and nine books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown.
France Forced To POSTPONE ‘Health Dictatorship’ Vaccine Legislation
Massive backlash against “vaccine blackmail” means delay in proposed legislation
By Steve Watson | Summit News | December 24, 2020
A radical bill proposed by the French Government that would see unvaccinated people refused basic services such as public transport has been put on ice after a massive backlash.
The proposed law mandates that citizens have proof of a negative COVID test or “preventative treatment, including the administration of a vaccine” in order to “access transport or to some locations, as well as certain activities.”
However, the government has been forced to delay the legislation after angry protests.
French Health Minister Olivier Véran publicly postponed the bill in an announcement Tuesday evening.
“Because there needs to be trust for the French people to go and get vaccinated of their own free will, because we’re still in a state of sanitary crisis … the government won’t present the text [to the National Assembly] for several months, before we’re out of the crisis,” Véran stated.
The bill was lambasted by political figures across the spectrum, with conservative MP Fabien Di Filippo labelling it “vaccine blackmail.”
RN leader Marine Le Pen branded the vaccine measure “essentially totalitarian.”
“In a backhanded way, this bill does not aim to make vaccinations mandatory, but will prevent anybody who doesn’t comply from having a social life,” she said.
RN party spokesman Sebastien Chenu called the plan a “health dictatorship,” while centrist senator Nathalie Goulet said the draft was “an attack on public freedoms.”
Guillaume Peltier, deputy leader of the center-right LR party, warned that the law would allow the government to “get all the power to suspend our freedoms without parliamentary control.”
France’s vaccination program, set to get underway on Sunday, will not be mandatory, but a majority of 55% of citizens say they will not get the shot.
As we previously highlighted, France has imposed some of the strictest lockdown measures in Europe, with citizens having to fill out a form every time they leave their home.
Meet ‘Dr’ Tony Blair, warmonger turned vaccination guru and health passport promoter
By Neil Clark | RT | December 23, 2020
Former British PM Tony Blair is calling for millions to be vaccinated with a single dose in a radical acceleration of the vax programme and also for the roll-out of health passports. But what, exactly, is his medical expertise?
‘Listen to the experts.’ ‘Follow the science.’ Two phrases we’ve heard ad nauseam in 2020.
But who qualifies as an ‘expert’ or ‘scientist’ is highly selective. A whole host of medical and scientific professionals who have argued against lockdowns as an anti-coronavirus strategy have been dismissed as ‘cranks’: we saw that quite clearly in the way the distinguished authors of the Great Barrington Declaration were treated.
By way of contrast, those with no qualifications in ‘the science’ have been elevated as public health gurus, simply because they are pro-lockdown and espouse the ‘official narrative’.
The most obvious example of these double standards is Bill Gates, a rather geekish multi-billionaire American computer software tycoon with a nice line in sweaters who is regarded as the ‘go-to’ man by leading news channels on what we should do next about Covid-19.
Gates’ funding of public health bodies and university departments – and media outlets too – is extraordinary. But that shouldn’t hide the fact that he is not a qualified doctor. Yet criticise Gates’ interventions and you’ll be screamed at by the very same people who say we shouldn’t be listening to experienced medical/scientific professionals who take a very different view. And so it is with Anthony Charles Lynton Blair.
‘The Blair Creature’ – to give him Peter Hitchens’ wonderful nickname – has emerged, on the day before Christmas Eve, to call for as many people as possible in Britain to get a special New Year present. “The aim should be to vaccinate as many people as possible in the coming months,” Blair writes in The Independent.
The target should be to cover a majority of the population by the end of February. “We should consider using all the available doses in January as first doses, that is, not keeping back half for second doses,” he continues. That’s despite the two vaccines in question only being licensed on the basis that people receive two doses.
Let’s remind ourselves of Tony Blair’s qualifications for giving advice on vaccination programmes. Er, he doesn’t have any. He studied law at Oxford where he played in a pop group called Ugly Rumours. He became a barrister, not a doctor or scientist. Then of course he went into politics, bombing various countries.
Yet here he is pontificating as if he’s some kind of world expert on vaccine programmes. But rather than focus on his lack of qualifications in immunology, the same ‘centrist’ crowd (many of whom hurled rather large stones at the genuine experts who did oppose lockdowns), laud the intervention of ‘The Blair Creature’. Tony is speaking, so we all must stop whatever we’re doing and listen.
Really? I’ll only start listening to Blair’s advice when those Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that he assured us could be assembled and launched within 45 minutes turn up. Why on earth should we trust someone who launched an illegal war based on false accusations?
This is not even about the vaccine. It’s about loud ‘this is what needs to be done’ statements on Covid-19 coming from people who have no medical education, while those who do are being sidelined for not toeing the ‘party line’.
It’s not just mass ‘single dose’ vaccinations by the end of February that Blair is keen to see rolled out. He wants health passports too. “Prepare for a form of health passport now,” he says. “I know all the objections, but it will happen. It’s the only way the world will function and for lockdowns to no longer be the sole course of action.”
This is another example of ‘it’s not what is said, but who says it’ in operation. For several months, a number of commentators (myself included) have warned about the roll-out of health passports and how our freedom to travel, attend sports and cultural events, or even go to the shops could be dependent on us possessing one.
But we were dismissed as ‘conspiracy theorists’ or worse, even though the World Economic Forum has been enthusiastically promoting such schemes.
Now Tony Blair, the great idol of those who spend their lives calling others ‘conspiracy theorists’, says that health passports “will happen”. Got that? “Will happen.” Not ‘might happen’, or ‘will happen if governments and the public decide they’re a good thing’, but “will happen”.
There is not meant to be any debate on the matter. The Davos elites have decided. We plebs are merely expected to wait in line for our jabs, and then gratefully receive our health passports without which we won’t be able to do things we took for granted just 12 months ago.
Following ‘doctor’s orders’? Or implementing a dystopian ‘Great Reset’ political agenda with terrible consequences for personal liberty? You decide.
Neil Clark is a journalist, writer, broadcaster and blogger. His award winning blog can be found at http://www.neilclark66.blogspot.com. He tweets on politics and world affairs @NeilClark66
What’s actually IN the US “Covid Stimulus Bill”?
The answer to that is nothing like as simple as you’d expect, given the name.
OffGuardian | December 22, 2020
The US congress just passed their Covid stimulus bill, or the “Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021” to give its official title. So what’s actually inside it? What has just been passed into law?
The answers to that is “nobody really knows”, least of all the members of congress, who passed the law without reading it, as they so often do. It’s the longest bill in US history, at over 5500 pages and it sailed through the voting mostly sight unseen.
We’ve downloaded a copy of the full document and will embed it for those of you patient or masochistic enough to tackle the whole thing. We’ve read some already, and will point out the highlights:
- “Foreign aid” is a big winner. Egypt is getting $1.3 billion, Sudan, Israel and Ukraine get over 500 million each, and many other countries around the world sizeable contributions, much of which will be spent on “defense”. Which is to say sent straight back to America via massive arms purchases.
- Not all the money being sent overseas is for buying weapons, some is for backing coups. Venezuela and Belarus get special mention here, each getting their own section of the bill detailing how terrible their “illegal regimes” are. There’s also a large section on “combating Chinese influence”.
- For some reason there’s another section on copyright law, which makes illegal streaming copyrighted content a federal crime, punishable by up to three years in prison.
- Nearly 300 million is put aside to develop influenza vaccines and prevent a future influenza pandemic.
- 4 BILLION dollars for the Gates-funded GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance.
- Vaccine “misinformation” is also a concern, and the bill provides for a pro-vaccine propaganda campaign – or rather a “PUBLIC AWARENESS CAMPAIGN ON THE IMPORTANCE OF VACCINATIONS”
So – huge amounts of foreign aid, support for various coups, totally irrelevant copyright laws, provisions for pro-vaccine propaganda campaigns… it’s not your typical “stimulus bill” so far, is it?
2020: The Year we Let Ourselves be Infantilised and Dehumanised
By Rob Slane | The Blog Mire | December 17, 2020
I recently wrote a satirical speech by our Prime Minister, in which I imagined him coming up with all sorts of absurd rules for the Christmas season. It was really hard. Not because I was unable to come up with hundreds of such rules, were I minded to do so, but because the whole point of satire is to raise the absurdities up a step or two, in order to highlight the ridiculousness of what is happening. But how do you do this when the real-life absurdities have already been turned up to 11 on the amplifier? I kid you not when I tell you that my original list included a rule against playing certain board games over Christmas — which I rejected — only to see a few days later SAGE coming out and advising against the playing of board games.
We have now had nearly nine months of being treated like utter imbeciles. A once great country with a once free people has been reduced to the level of being governed by pathetic, childish slogans. And for some reason we have allowed ourselves to be infantilised.
I am utterly baffled as to how people can have sat through some of these slogans being introduced without responding with howls of laughter.
“Stay Alert. Control the Virus. Save Lives.”
What on earth is this actually supposed to mean? Stay Alert? For what? Are we supposed to be on our guard for a virus that is approximately 120 nanometres, or around 1,000th the width of a human hair? Are we to carry an electron microscope around with us wherever we go, just in case? One of my favourite signs is an electronic one I sometimes see on my occasional drives into the office. On one day, it says, “Stay Alert. Control the Virus.” On another, it says, “Stay Alert. Watch out for Cyclists.” It should be noted that cyclists are considerably bigger than 120nm and even often wearing the kind of hi-vis jackets that coronaviruses refuse to wear.
Control the Virus? Say what? You mean they actually think we’re stupid enough to think they’re clever enough to devise schemes that can actually control those little invisible 120 nm virus particles that are in the air and on surfaces. Apparently so.
Save Lives? I am yet to hear a convincing argument as to how I and my family, not having any symptoms and thus not being infected by the virus, can possibly stop the spread of said virus that we don’t have by staying at home or wearing a piece of cloth over or respiratory passages, such that we save lives.
More recently, it has been decided that the slogans were maybe a bit too high-brow and needed to be simplified further, this time into monosyllables: “Hands. Face. Space.” Although I tend to avoid watching Comrade Johnson and Co as they spout this nonsense at their regular stand-ups, on the occasions when I have had that misfortune, it has felt eerily like suddenly being thrust into the world’s largest Kindergarten with teacher talking down to his little charges as if they were really, really stupid.
I won’t sport with your intelligence by mentioning all the other mind-numbing slogans we’ve been fed this year, suffice it to say that phrases such as “social bubble” and “Covid-secure” would be deeply funny were it not for the seriousness of the situation into which those coming up with such tripe have placed us (as an aside, are such buildings for which it is claimed that they are “Covid-secure” also “Flu-Secure” and “Cold-Secure”?)
But the infantilising of an entire population is by no means the worst thing they have done to us. Worse by far has been the dehumanising of millions of people, which has been done via a number of enormously destructive methods.
Chief of them is the idea that we must all avoid each other. I cannot even begin to think how destructive this has become. In a normal society, if you or I have symptoms of a particularly nasty seasonal respiratory illness, which is what Covid-19 is, we would avoid one another. Obviously. But the idea of perfectly healthy people avoiding other perfectly healthy people must qualify as one of the most absurd concepts ever dreamt up. Not only is it self-evidently unnecessary, it is bound to have long-term consequences for the way we view one another, the way we relate to one another, the way we behave around one another. It turns us from seeing one another as humans, made in the Image of God, to walking virus carriers and a potential risk. Some people now literally behave as if they are navigating their way through a crowd of potential terrorists, rather than simply walking through a group of fellow humans.
People avoidance is not just deeply destructive from a psychological and social perspective, it is also deeply cruel. The idea that a grandparent cannot have contact with their children or grandchildren is just obscene. And the very thought of the elderly being left to fester away in care homes, rather than being allowed contact with their families is sick. Yet that’s what we’ve done, or allowed to be done.
And of course, I cannot leave off talking about dehumanisation without mentioning masks. These wretched things were introduced in the Summer, long after the epidemic had waned, at a time when they could not possibly have done any good, even if they had been capable of doing any good. Why were they introduced? Partly to keep the fear-narrative going, even though there was extraordinarily little risk of dying of a seasonal respiratory virus at that time of the year. But even more important, they are a sign of submission. They are a, “we can do with you what we like moment.” They are nothing to do with health. They are a psychological mask, and even more than the social distancing, they have served to alter the way we see one another and are seen by others.
Millions of people humiliated by the Marketing Team of Covid-19 and their infantile slogans. Millions of people dehumanised by having their faces, their smiles, their laughter, their thoughtfulness etc covered to make them into expressionless drones. That was the year we just lived through. Will 2021 be the year a critical mass try to escape the Kindergarten and return to being human?
2020: The Year we Lost the Plot
By Rob Slane | The Blog Mire | December 14, 2020
“Our Government, along with Governments around the world will shortly announce the quarantining of whole populations for a seasonal respiratory virus which leaves 99.8-99.9% of those who get it in the land of the living. What is more, they will also announce a shutdown of the entire economy for months and then, when the epidemic has actually gone, will mandate that you cover the lower half of your face with a bit of cloth. They will do this by frightening people into compliance with a barrage of propaganda, slogans, data entirely taken out of context, and the threat of massive fines.”
Anyone making this claim at the beginning of the year would rightly have been thought to have mislaid the plot and their marbles, long ago. But here we are, at the end of that same year, and it is precisely what has happened.
Only it is much worse than that.
Had you somehow been persuaded to give credence to this insane prophecy, you would probably have been comforted by the following thought: “They’ll never get away with it. The people will never stand for it.”
Not a bit of it. Somehow, millions of people across the country, and in fact across the world, were persuaded to accept it. By far the majority somehow thought that quarantining whole nations of healthy people for a virus, for the first time in history, was a good idea. Well, actually the second time in history to be precise. It was tried in 2009 by the Mexican Government during the Swine Flu outbreak, but they had the good sense to end it after a couple of weeks after realising how much it would devastate the country.
Yet not only do we have our imaginary conspiracy loon’s mad ravings come true, but those same people who have accepted it look upon those of us who have been pointing out the madness of it all as if we were those who had taken leave of our senses. Oh irony, thou hast had a field day in 2020. As St. Antony the Great put it:
“A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, ‘You are mad; you are not like us.’”
To cut to the chase, we have gone and thrown out reason, rationality and proportionality this year. A coronavirus, which posed a danger to a very small proportion of our society, but which actually has an Infection Fatality Rate of around 0.2% – 0.26% (not too dissimilar to a bad seasonal flu), and which could thus have been dealt with proportionality, somehow became the catalyst for the biggest mass hysteria in the history of the human race. Indeed, many were so taken in by the great hypnotic spell set in motion by charlatans with their “hard-hitting emotional messaging,” that they adopted practices so irrational and disproportionate to the threat, one wonders how they managed to live before this year.
The history books tell of one of our great Kings, Canute, demonstrating to his courtiers that contrary to their supposition, he could not in fact control the waves. In our day, it’s like King Canute has gone rogue, telling his subjects that he can control the waves and viruses, and his subjects have responded by not only believing him, but by taking any action he tells them they must do to stop the waves or the virus, including confining themselves to their homes, closing their businesses, wearing cloths on their faces, along with umpteen other truly bizarre and wholly useless diktats. Then, when the waves or the virus continue doing what waves and viruses do, a wave of Covidian Logic bursts over us and we find it is our fault that they have not been controlled. We didn’t shut down hard enough or long enough, or we played board games at Christmas.
In the real world, the only thing that got controlled this year was not a virus, but people. That all went off spiffingly, or spaffingly as Comrade Johnson might put it. People were suppressed, people were controlled, people were — you might say — owned. And by and large they acquiesced in putting their hand to this National Suicide Plan.
Of course, the reply that comes the way of anyone who points this out is, “Ah, but if we hadn’t locked down and masked up, the deaths would have been in the hundreds of thousands.” To which the answer is simply, “Nope. Lockdown cannot be shown to have saved a single life.” Sweden, by not turning itself into a basketcase, failed to have anything like wave of mass deaths predicted by the Enthusiasts for Lockdown. Nor did other nations that took a similar approach. A recent peer-reviewed study from France, looking at 188 countries, has confirmed what should have been obvious all along:
“Stringency of the measures settled to fight pandemia, including lockdown, did not appear to be linked with death rate.”
Then of course there was the Danish RCT study, which showed no significant statistical difference between infection rates of those wearing surgical masks, and those with no masks.
Imagine that!
Imagine that we were put under house arrest for months, made to cover our respiratory passages with bits of cloth, forced to alter our lives, and threatened with fines for non-compliance — and none of it made any difference to mortality.
Imagine that this Government and Parliament caused the complete shutdown of the economy for months, putting millions on the dole, wrecking 1,000s of businesses, causing the worst recession in 300 years, and piling up a future of debt, poverty, mental health issues and reduced life expectancy — and none of it saved any lives.
Imagine that we are still in this situation, with people still acquiescing in the destruction of their own country, the Government and media still feeding us lies, and with no real plausible end to this madness.
Actually, you have no need to imagine it. Even though it is so outlandish that even the most unhinged, basement-dwelling “conspiracy nut” on the planet could not have come up with this, it is indeed the year you just lived through. We lost the plot in 2020, and the most pressing question is: will we get it back in 2021?
This piece is the first in a series of five articles I will be publishing over the next couple of weeks looking at various aspects of our new Covidian State in 2020. These pieces are also due to be published on The Conservative Woman website from 27-31 December.
Spain officially ends FORCED sterilization of people with mental disabilities – a practice still LEGAL in many US states
RT | December 18, 2020
The Spanish government will no longer sterilize disabled people against their will. Despite the fact that eugenics is generally considered a thing of the past, forced sterilization is still permitted in multiple US states.
The Spanish government officially ended the forced sterilization of disabled people on Thursday, publishing new legislation in an official newsletter. According to the newsletter, “In the last decade, more than a thousand forced sterilizations have been practiced in Spain, most of them on women.”
“The end to this practice…brings an end to one of the most detrimental human rights violations allowed under Spanish law,” the Spanish Committee of Representatives of Persons with Disabilities (CERMI) in a statement on Thursday.
But while the Spanish government’s newsletter described the now-illegal practice as a “serious anomaly in human rights terms,” one might be disturbed to find out that involuntary sterilization is still permitted in some US states.
At the turn of the 20th century, eugenics was a popular idea in the US among the progressives of the time. Corporate foundations like the Carnegie Institution and the Rockefeller Foundation funded the growing eugenics movement, and in 1906, breakfast cereal baron John Harvey Kellogg co-founded the Race Betterment Foundation in Michigan to take the movement’s ideas mainstream.
A year later, Indiana passed the world’s first sterilization law, with 31 states following suit. A controversial Supreme Court ruling in the case of Buck v. Bell in 1927 upheld a Virginia statute allowing the forced sterilization of those considered “unfit” to reproduce, and from then until the mid-1970s, more than 60,000 people in the US were involuntarily sterilized.
The practice is still legal in many states. The 1927 decision has never been overturned, and at least eight states still have involuntary sterilization laws on their books. These include California, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Vermont, and Washington. In the District of Columbia, a 2007 appeals court decision held that a doctor may sterilize a patient if he or she deems it in the “best interest of the patient.”
More than a century after the passage of the first sterilization law in Indiana, the legality of the practice has led to some shocking cases of abuse. In just one women’s prison in central California, 1,400 inmates were sterilized between 1997 and 2013. Where prison sterilization is not mandatory, it is often presented to inmates under duress. In Tennessee in 2017, a judge offered inmates 30 days off their jail sentences if they consented to free vasectomies or long-acting birth-control implants. A bipartisan bill outlawed the practice a year later.
US designates anti-govt. Bahraini group as ‘terrorist’ after Manama inks peace deal with Israel
Press TV | December 16, 2020
The administration of outgoing US President Donald Trump has designated Bahraini opposition group Saraya al-Mukhtar as a “terrorist” organization, months after the Manama regime agreed to a Washington-brokered normalization with Israel.
In a statement released on Tuesday, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said his office had blacklisted the group as “a Specially Designated Global Terrorist,” claiming that it was “posing a significant risk of committing acts of terrorism that threaten the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”
He alleged that Saraya al-Mukhtar receives “financial and logistic support” from Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) and seeks to depose the Bahraini government.
“The group has plotted attacks against US personnel in Bahrain and has offered cash rewards for the assassination of Bahraini officials,” Pompeo further claimed.
The designation freezes any of the group’s US assets and generally bars Americans from dealing with it.
Iran has not commented on the claims so far.
The Bahraini government welcomed the US blacklisting of Saraya al-Mukhtar.
The Bahraini Foreign Ministry said in a statement that it “commends” what it called “the relentless efforts undertaken by the United States of America in combatting all extremist terrorist organizations.”
Bahraini courts have already sentenced suspects allegedly linked to Saraya al-Mukhtar to years in prison and revoked their citizenship.
Several Bahraini groups have faced accusations of ties to Iran since 2011, when an uprising began in the kingdom against the ruling Al Khalifah regime. Tehran has, however, dismissed such allegations as false.
Analysts see the blacklisting as an American reward to Manama, months after it reached a US-brokered normalization deal with the Israeli regime.
The agreement sparked several angry street protests in Bahrain, with the participants slamming the regime in Manama for turning a deaf ear to the nation’s calls against making peace with the occupiers of Palestine.
In addition to Bahrain, the UAE, Sudan and Morocco have also reached similar agreements with Israel.
Joe Macaron, a fellow at the Arab Center Washington DC, told the Middle East Eye (MEE) news portal that “the activities of Saraya al-Mukhtar have significantly diminished since 2018 but the Trump administration is standing by those Arab allies who normalized with Israel.”
“While Morocco got US recognition of its sovereignty over Western Sahara and Sudan was delisted as a state sponsor of terrorism, the Trump administration is showing support for Bahrain in a designation that has no real impact whatsoever,” he added.
Bahrain — home to the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet — has seen anti-regime protest rallies since the onset of the uprising. The major demand has been the ouster of the Al Khalifah dynasty and the establishment of a just and conclusive system representing all Bahraini nationals.
In an attempt to stifle those calls, the Manama regime has been pressing ahead with a heavy-handed crackdown against the protesters and persecution of human rights campaigners and political dissidents.
Pakistan returns $1 bln of Saudi Arabia’s loan over Kashmir dispute
MEMO | December 16, 2020
Pakistan has returned $1 billion to Saudi Arabia as a second installment of a $3 billion soft loan, as Islamabad reaches out to Beijing for a commercial loan to help it offset pressure to repay another $1 billion to Riyadh next month, officials said on Wednesday according to a report by Reuters.
Analysts say it is unusual for Riyadh to press for the return of money. But relations have been strained lately between Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, historically close friends.
Saudi Arabia gave Pakistan a $3 billion loan and a $3.2 billion oil credit facility in late 2018. After Islamabad sought Riyadh’s support over alleged human rights violations by India in the disputed territory of Kashmir, Saudi Arabia has pushed Pakistan to repay the loan.
With the $1 billion flowing out, Pakistan – which has $13.3 billion in central bank foreign reserves – could face a balance of payments issue after clearing the next Saudi installment.
“China has come to our rescue,” a foreign ministry official told Reuters. A finance ministry official said Pakistan’s central bank was already in talks with Chinese commercial banks.
“We’ve sent $1 billion to Saudi Arabia,” he said. Another $1 billion will be repaid to Riyadh next month, he said. Islamabad had returned $1 billion in July.
Although a $1.2 billion surplus in its current account balance and a record $11.77 billion in remittances in the past five months have helped support the Pakistani economy, having to return the Saudi money is still a setback.
Pakistani army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa, who visited Riyadh in August to ease the tensions, met the Saudi ambassador in Islamabad on Tuesday.
Featured Video
Trita Parsi: Iran War Ends Today? Threats of Deporting Trita Parsi
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
The Crusades – colliding narratives
Ashes of Pompeii | June 13, 2026
They say history is written by the victors, but the Crusades offer an interesting historical contrast: a two-century collision that produced not one history, but two parallel, irreconcilable realities. The dates and the battles are identical in both accounts, but the moral axis is entirely flipped.
In the traditional Western narrative, the Crusades are framed as a heroic, if tragic, epic. The First Crusade is a pious pilgrimage; the knights are romanticized figures of chivalry in shining armor, bravely holding the line in a hostile, exotic land. The eventual loss of the Holy Land is mourned as the “fall of Outremer,” a tragic retreat of European civilization. In this telling, the East is often reduced to a passive backdrop, its inhabitants viewed through a lens of mystique or backwardness, mere obstacles to a divine mandate.
But cross the Mediterranean, and the exact same timeline reads like a chronicle of foreign invasion and eventual, hard-won restoration against the barbarous northerners. The dates do not change, but the adjectives do. Here is the history as it is remembered in the Levant… continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Iran warns ‘no point’ in deal with US if Israel remains unrestrained
- Ukraine as a laboratory of ‘techno-fascism’
- Desperate Starmer choosing piracy as distraction over UK crime crisis – Putin envoy
- The Crusades – colliding narratives
- Trita Parsi: Iran War Ends Today? Threats of Deporting Trita Parsi
- What Is SIDS?
- DHS docs: Govt bracing for nationwide anti-AI riots, preparing to crack down on dissent
- India signals rethink over West Asia
- Israeli Ex-Navy Chief admits massive damage from Iran missiles
- The strategic arsenal US lost in war against Iran – and why replenishment will take years
- If Americans Knew
- Did Trump just threaten a nuclear attack on Iran? Another merger for Israel-Firster David Ellison –Daily Update
- Israeli Firm Accused of Launching Smear Campaigns During US, European Elections
- As World Cup kicks off, Gaza amputee girls chase football dreams
- Oxfam: More Palestinians killed by Israel across West Bank in last 3 years than previous 17 years combined
- US-Iran ceasefire may be imminent, but will Israel blow it up? – Daily Update
- The Issue of Israel Is Ending Democracy In Michigan
- Israel is stealing homes, livelihoods, and lives in West Bank
- Gaza is not an aberration – Israel planned this genocide decades ago
- Israel is changing the face of Lebanon, mainstream media is normalizing it – 3 articles
- Genocide lobby benefits from EU anti-racist fund
- No Tricks Zone
- Climate Alarmists Now Using Natural Phenomena To Support Their Claims
- New Study: Significant CO2 Fluxes From Non-Volcanic Sources Are Largely Neglected In Carbon Budgets
- Women Climate Scientists Being Harassed, Insulted By Skeptics, Claims Berkeley Earth Researcher
- Germany’s Longterm Spring Climate Data Show “No Climate Trend”
- New Study: Solar Photovoltaic, Wind Power Fail To Meet Annual Energy Demands 62% Of The Time
- Germany’s Die Welt: “Too Much Is Too Much” … Green Energies Are Cannabalizing Each Other!
- Germany’s Ecological Holocaust… Once Fairy Tale Forests Getting Cleared For Wind Turbines
- A Grand Solar Minimum Has Arrived…Global Cooling Of At Least 1°C Is Expected By The 2030s, 2040s
- European “Expert Commission” Urges COVID-19-Like Global Climate State Of Energency!
- Real-World Observations Do Not Support The Position That Climate Change Is Human-Caused
Aletho News 