Palestinian student Ameer Hazboun sentenced by Israeli military court for campus activism
Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network | November 10, 2020
Palestinian student prisoner Ameer Hazboun was sentenced by an illegitimate Israeli military court on Monday, 9 October to 16 months in Israeli prison and a fine of 3000 NIS ($890 USD/$750 EUR). He has been detained since 11 September 2019 and his military court hearings have been repeatedly delayed and postponed.
He was subjected to severe torture under interrogation at al-Moskobiyeh interrogation center before being charged with, essentially, being a Palestinian student activist: he was accused of membership in the Progressive Democratic Student Pole, a leftist student bloc at Bir Zeit University recently labeled a “prohibited organization” by the Israeli military occupation command, attending student events and organizing student activities on campus. In fact, distributing flyers for a student election campaign was labeled “aiding an illegal organization.”
A fourth-year engineering student at Bir Zeit University, Ameer was seized by soldiers in his dormitory on 10 September 2019 as they invaded his room at 1:00 a.m. He was brutally kicked beaten by the soldiers with their guns while being transported to the Moskobiyeh interrogation center. He arrived at the center with bruises all over his body and informed the prison doctor that he has a platinum plate in his left hand for a previous injury. He was interrogated for weeks on end for 22 hours a day. Due to severe sleep deprivation, he would sometimes fall asleep during interrogation and was shaken awake by the interrogators. He was forced into multiple stress positions, including being forced to stand on his toes with his hands cuffed overhead to the wall, placing severe stress on his feet, arms and injured hand.
UK Intelligence to Fight Anti-Vaccine Propaganda Spread by State Actors, British Media Reports
Anti-vaccine demonstrators in Edinburgh © Sputnik / Jason Dunn
By Tim Korso – Sputnik – 09.11.2020
A UK intelligence unit, known as the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), has been authorised to conduct cyber operations to tackle the spread of anti-vaccine propaganda online, The Times reported citing an anonymous government source. According to the newspaper, the government increasingly views anti-vaxxers as a new priority because of the upcoming registration of domestically-developed vaccines against the coronavirus.
Apart from GCHQ, a secretive UK Army unit within the 77th Brigade specialising in information warfare will be taking part in the efforts “to quash rumours about misinformation” related to the COVID-19 vaccines, General Sir Nick Carter confirmed to The Times.
The newspaper’s source claims that GCHQ will be using the same toolkit it utilised to combat Daesh and its propaganda and recruitment efforts. The toolkit includes ways of taking down undesired content and conducting cyber attacks against the cyberactors behind it, for example by encrypting the perpetrators’ computer data, The Times added.
“GCHQ has been told to take out anti-vaxxers online and on social media. There are ways they have used to monitor and disrupt terrorist propaganda”, the anonymous source claimed.
However, GCHQ will not be able to use its tools against everyone online because its authority only extends to dealing with [alleged] state cyber actors and the content created by them, the newspaper reported citing another anonymous government source.
Russia as Main target for UK Intelligence Cyber Operations?
The British newspaper claims Russia will be the GCHQ’s prime target, citing its own investigation into the country’s alleged ties to the surge of internet memes questioning the safety of the vaccine developed by Oxford University in concert with AstraZeneca. The said investigation was based on a trove of documents and images provided by an anonymous source, who claimed to be part of an alleged propaganda effort purportedly seeking to hurt the image of the British vaccine. The Times, however, admitted in its article that it could not directly link the alleged social media campaign, targeting only the UK vaccine, with the Kremlin.
According to the newspaper, the alleged campaign against the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine started after the head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) that developed Sputnik V, Kirill Dmitriev, called the UK-developed medicine a “monkey vaccine” on several occasions. Dmitriev referred to the vaccine’s usage of a monkey virus as a vector to deliver the COVID-19 material needed to form immunity. He did not directly call the drug dangerous or ineffective, but noted that the use of human adenoviruses was more reliable, as their influence on the human body is better understood.
Dmitriev’s use of the term “monkey vaccine” prompted the emergence of numerous internet memes, baselessly alleging that the British drug would be turning recipients into monkey-like creatures or otherwise negatively affecting patients’ health. The head of RDIF later denounced the use of his words to besmirch the UK-developed vaccine, but defended his concerns over the possibility of its long-term side effects.
Israel Arrests Journalist, Raids West Bank Library
Palestine Information Center – November 9, 2020
OCCUPIED JERUSALEM – Israeli occupation forces (IOF) launched a raid and arrest campaign on Sunday night and at dawn Monday in various areas of the West Bank and Jerusalem. Several Palestinians were arrested including a journalist.
In Nablus, IOF arrested the journalist and former prisoner Bushra Jamal Al-Tawil at Tiar checkpoint on the Yitzhar road on Sunday night. Tawil was taken to the Hawara camp, south of Nablus.
IOF released Tawil at the end of July 2020 after spending 8 months in the occupation prisons.
Tawil was arrested for the first time in 2011, and she was sentenced to 16 months. She spent six months because she was released in the Wafa Al-Ahrar prisoner exchange agreement in December 2011. Then, she was re-arrested again in July 2014, and she was sentenced to ten months in prison, which is the continuation of her previous detention before the prisoner exchange agreement.
The third arrest was in November 2017, and the Israeli authorities ordered her administrative detention for eight months. The last arrest was on December 10, 2019.
Tawil’s family suffered from the occupation’s targeting of them through successive arrests. Her parents were arrested several times in the past, and her father spent a total of 14 years in the occupation’s prisons. Her mother was also arrested on 08/02/2010, and was released on 01/02/2011.
In another development, IOF patrols stormed Jaffa street and the area surrounding Al-Ain refugee camp, west of Nablus.
Eyewitnesses reported that Israeli soldiers stormed a store and confiscated items from inside the store in the presence of the owner and he was detained.
In Qalqilya, the IOF soldiers fired stun grenades and teargas canisters in the area near the separation wall in Jayyus, northeast of Qalqilya.
In Tulkarem, IOF arrested Imad Fahmi Ammar, 38 years, after raiding his house in Qaffin town, north of Tulkarem, and seized his personal phone and amount of money.
IOF broke into a library in the Al-Ashqar complex in the middle of the Martyr Thabet Thabet Square in Tulkarem and searched it. Confrontations erupted between the Palestinian youths and the IOF soldiers who fired tear gas canisters, without any injuries reported.
The areas of Jalazun refugee camp and Dura al-Qara town, north of Ramallah, witnessed an incursion by IOF, which coincided with the launch of a drone over the camp and the town.
In al-Khalil, the IOF soldiers arrested the two brothers Musab and Salah Al-Zughayer after they raided their houses.
IOF arrested the ex-prisoner Muhammad Shaheen and Muayad Walid Amr from Dura, southwest of al-Khalil, after they raided and searched their homes.
Local sources stated that IOF arrested two Palestinians from Beit Ta’amer, east of Bethlehem, and seized a vehicle of one of them.
Three brothers were also arrested after IOF raided their relatives’ house in the village and searched it.
The sources pointed out that IOF arrested a young man after storming his relatives’ house in Aida camp, north of Bethlehem.
In Jerusalem, the Israeli occupation intelligence stormed the house of Silwan Club’s president, Marwan Al-Ghoul, and served him a summons for investigation on Tuesday, in Room 4 in the Al-Maskobiya center, west of the occupied city.
Why it is right to question the orthodox Covid-19 narrative
The authors of ‘Welcome to Covidworld’ defend their stance
By Matthew Ratcliffe and Ian James Kidd | The Critic | November 6, 2020
In a reply to our piece “Welcome to Covidworld”, Ben Bramble engages in precisely the sort of thinking that we raised concerns about. He suggests that we are mistaken in comparing harms done by lockdowns and other measures to harms caused by the virus. Instead, we ought to have weighed up the costs of lockdowns against what would have happened without them.
Bramble’s case hinges on a counterfactual claim: in the absence of lockdowns, the virus would have inflicted much more harm than it has done. The cost of not locking down would, he says, have been “mind-bogglingly great”.
What could be wrong with Bramble’s claim? First of all, his use of the term “lockdown” is insufficiently discerning. Lockdown is not a simple, straightforward policy measure that took the same form in every country. There are, for instance, important differences between early and late lockdowns. Australia and New Zealand both locked down early and suppressed the virus.
Setting aside the issue of whether or not the actions taken by these countries are morally justifiable, it remains to be seen whether or not this is a success story. If a highly effective vaccine is not forthcoming, both countries will face the painful options of cutting themselves off from the rest of the world indefinitely, having strict lockdowns whenever the virus reappears, or eventually succumbing to the virus, none of which amount to success.
However, the current UK situation is very different. Given where we are now, nobody is claiming that this second lockdown or any future UK lockdowns will be able to suppress the virus here. It is too well established for that. Rather, the stated aims have been to buy us some time until a vaccine arrives and, most recently, to ensure that the NHS is not overwhelmed. In evaluating the effectiveness and appropriateness of such policy measures, it will not do to make sweeping claims about the effectiveness of lockdowns in general. When considering interventions so extreme and destructive, we need to proceed more carefully.
Bramble simply accepts that lockdowns in general work. He does not specify exactly what it would be for a late lockdown to work, when the goal is no longer complete suppression. Presumably, the relevant criteria will include reducing hospitalizations and deaths due to Covid-19, during the lockdown and in the longer term as well. But where is the evidence that lockdowns generally have this effect? Bramble doesn’t provide any. Maybe he thinks it’s just obvious that they achieve this, but it really isn’t.
A strict lockdown in Peru is associated with one of the highest Covid-19 death tolls in the world (currently recorded as 1,047 people per 1 million of the population). Other countries that have resorted to exceptionally long and strict lockdowns, such as Argentina, have also fared badly. One could, of course, run Bramble’s counterfactual here: it would have been even worse for these countries had they not locked down. But where is the evidence for that? Indeed, what would even count as evidence?
It would be intellectually and morally unacceptable to make the pro-lockdown position unfalsifiable by always insisting on the following: (1) where cases drop after a lockdown was introduced, it must be the lockdown that achieved this; (2) where cases rise after a lockdown was introduced, it would certainly have been even worse without the lockdown; (3) if other countries, such as Sweden, adopt less extreme approaches than us and fare better or at least no worse, this must be due to other differences between the two countries – the Swedish strategy would never have worked here.
So, how do we go about evaluating the effectiveness of lockdowns? Where is the evidence that the virus ultimately causes far more deaths in the absence of extreme social restrictions? Where are those countries that followed a different course from countries like the UK (which locked down, but did not suppress the virus) and now have higher death tolls than us? By simply assuming that his counterfactual claim is true, Bramble illustrates our worry that lockdowns risk becoming an unfalsifiable article of faith. In fact, he even asserts that “the science on this is beyond question”. Is it really? If so, all the disease modelers who have made dire predictions concerning the current UK situation will be delighted to hear that their work will be forever immune from critique, even if it turns out that their models have little bearing on reality. And, in any case, none of them would endorse Bramble’s exaggerated claim that, without a lockdown, there would have been “many millions of deaths” in countries such as the UK.
In fact, much about the behaviour of this virus remains unclear, including how the infection rate is influenced by growing immunity within a population. There is no single, homogeneous entity called “the science”. Rather, there are many different and often conflicting perspectives, theories, and claims. Furthermore, this is a complicated, fast-changing situation that impacts on all aspects of human society. Relevant expertise thus encompasses a wide range of academic disciplines and areas of practice. Philosophers should not simply defer to “the experts”; they also have plenty of relevant expertise themselves.
What we do know is that lockdowns are immensely damaging in so many ways. This second UK lockdown will further disrupt the social and emotional development of our children, cause a substantial rise in severe mental health problems, force many elderly people to live out the final weeks and perhaps months of their lives in loneliness and misery, exacerbate and prolong the pain of bereavement by depriving people of interpersonal and social interactions that shape and regulate grief, destroy livelihoods and risk mass unemployment, increase regional social and economic inequalities, reduce the life-opportunities of young people while saddling them with an ever-growing mountain of debt to pay off, suspend much of what gives our lives meaning, deprive people of countless precious, irreplaceable life-moments, and cause deaths due to the numerous resulting impacts on people’s health.
However, the true extent of certain harms, such as the long-term effects of sustained lockdown measures on children’s development, may not become fully clear for some time.
Others have similarly warned that policy makers are paying insufficient attention to these growing costs. For instance, an open letter by psychologists, which appeared on 1 November, spells out the widespread and damaging psychological effects of continuing restrictions, including the harms done to children. Similarly, an article published in the British Medical Journal on 2 November raises the concern that the “collateral damage” caused by public health interventions has “yet to be considered systematically”. Others have drawn attention to the global costs of national lockdowns. For instance, the charity Oxfam has stated that, by the end of this year, over 12,000 people could be starving to death every day due the global impact of national-level responses to Covid-19.
Bramble observes that the orthodox view has in fact been subjected to critical scrutiny. But the problem is that – in the UK, at least – alternative perspectives have had little influence on the processes of recommending, making, and implementing policy decisions. And we worry that this may be partly because of blinkered and inflexible attitudes that are widely held. People are often very quick to dismiss or express moral disapproval of dissenting voices. However, those who confidently endorse lockdowns with an air of moral authority also need to acknowledge the full extent of the harms these measures have caused, are causing, and are likely to cause. Furthermore, explicit and sufficiently specific criteria should be supplied for determining the effectiveness of any proposed lockdown, accompanied by convincing evidence to show that it is very likely to achieve its intended effects.
Instead of pursuing such a path, Bramble speculates that our own concerns originate in cognitive impairments caused by our distressing experiences of lockdown. This is the kind of response that motivated our earlier account of “Covidworld”, a simplified, virus-centric reality where various norms of reason, scientific enquiry, and moral conduct have ceased to apply.
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Angelina Jolie’s MI6 Interview Shows Just How Connected Hollywood Is To the Deep State
By Alan Macleod | MintPress News | November 4, 2020
With election fever still gripping the U.S., talk of rigging or interference in the democratic process is reaching new levels, high enough that even Hollywood legend Angelina Jolie is talking about it. In an extraordinary interview in Time magazine, the star of “Wanted, Maleficent, and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider,” sat down with the former head of the UK’s MI6 spy network, Sir Alex Younger, to ask how worrying the threat from Russia or China really is.
“Russia feels threatened by the quality of our alliances and, even in the current environment, the quality of our democratic institutions. It sets out to denigrate them, and it uses intelligence services to that end. It is a serious problem, and we should organize to prevent it,” the British spook told the actress.
Younger also went on to discuss the rise of China, and how the West must act to challenge the supposed threat Beijing poses. “We are going to have two sharply different value systems in operation on the same planet for the foreseeable future. We mustn’t be naïve. We need to retain the capacity to defend ourselves,” he told Jolie.
Never challenging him, Jolie even asked the head of perhaps the world’s most notorious spying agency how we can protect ourselves from fake information.
To some, the pairing of a Hollywood star and a veteran spymaster might seem strange. But, in reality, the silver screen and the national security state have always been intimately intertwined. And as much as Jolie presents herself as a leading humanitarian, even being appointed as a Special Envoy for the UN Commission for Refugees, she has spent an inordinate amount of her free time rubbing shoulders with some of the world’s worst human rights abusers.
At World Refugee Day in 2005, Jolie shared a stage with then-U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Rice was a key player in the Bush administration, responsible for the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions, two of the world’s worst humanitarian and refugee crises that continue to plague the planet to this day.
Jolie herself has slowly become a leading member of the U.S. national security apparatus, joining the influential and well-endowed Council on Foreign Relations think tank in 2007, and penning a joint op-ed in The New York Times with John McCain two years ago calling for U.S. intervention in Syria and Myanmar. “Around the world, there is profound concern that America is giving up the mantle of global leadership,” they questionably asserted, decrying America’s “steady retreat over the past decade” that has, “dangerously eroded the rule of law,” and condemned the Trump administration’s inaction in Syria that could have “deterred mass atrocities,” and reduced the refugee crisis.
Salt
Jolie’s collaboration with high-level government officials is not limited to her personal life, however. The 45-year-old Californian has also worked closely, and openly, with CIA officials as part of her movies. A case in point is the 2010 blockbuster Salt, where Jolie plays a CIA agent accused of being a Russian spy. The movie was released at the same time as the real-life Anna Chapman scandal, where the Russian national was caught spying for her country inside the U.S., and marked the beginning of hardening American relations with Moscow, ending up at the point where some have declared the beginning of a new Cold War.
“Salt was the first big cultural product reflecting this geopolitical change, for most of the 2000s Hollywood had no interest in evil Russians,” Tom Secker, an investigative journalist with SpyCulture.com told MintPress. “If you watch the film the Russian politicians are clearly based on Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev.”
Jolie, playing an evil Russian spy in Salt, chokes out an NYPD officer
“We talked to a lot of the women in the CIA,” said Jolie of her experiences preparing for her role. She appeared to have nothing but admiration for the organization; “One after the other, they are just these lovely, sweet women that you can’t imagine being put in a dangerous situation, but they really are,” she added. Salt even hired a former CIA officer to be an on-set technical advisor.
A CIA document Secker shared with MintPress highlights the extent of CIA involvement in Hollywood and their reasons for doing so. “In an effort to ensure an accurate portrayal of the men and women of the CIA,” it reads. “For years the Agency has worked with creative artists from across the entertainment industry. [The CIA Office of Public Affairs] interacts with directors, producers, screenwriters, authors, documentarians, actors and others to help debunk myths and provide authenticity, and of course to protect Agency equities,” it adds. But perhaps the most important reason stated is, “to help prevent inappropriate negative depictions of the Agency,” in mass media.
Propaganda on an enormous scale
The level of state involvement in Salt is far from abnormal. In fact, Alford and Secker’s book “National Security Cinema” details how, since 2005, documents they obtained showed that the Department of Defense alone had closely collaborated in the production of over 1,000 movies or TV shows. This includes many of the largest film franchises, such as “Iron Man,” “Transformers,” “James Bond,” and “Mission: Impossible,” and hit TV shows like “The Biggest Loser,” “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Master Chef” and “The Price is Right.”
In general, the military or the CIA will offer free services to productions, such as the use of prohibitively expensive military equipment, or technical direction, in exchange for editorial control over scripts. This allows the agencies to make sure the power, prestige, and integrity of these organizations are not challenged. Sometimes entire movies are radically rewritten.
“The Department of Defense actually apologized in their covering letter to the producers of “Hulk” (2003), since the changes they required were so extensive,” Dr. Matthew Alford of the University of Bath told MintPress.
“But really the disturbing thing here is the pattern and the scale… What I suggest is that we focus on the deliberate, major, secretive pressures that rewrite scripts — and we find they’re all on the side of the national security state. Systematically scrubbed from the screen is an unsavoury century of military history including war crimes, illegal arms sales, racism and sexual assault, torture, coups, assassinations, and weapons of mass destruction. It amounts to the airbrushing of an entire mediated culture.”
Thus, the large majority of big-budget productions featuring military or intelligence services have been greenlighted by the national security state, who have negotiated for control over the message in order to better propagandize both Americans and the global public. However, serious antiwar content rarely makes it to network TV or Hollywood drawing boards, so wholescale interference is usually unnecessary.
In 2014, former Deputy Counsel or Acting General Counsel of the CIA, John Rizzo, wrote that his organization “has long had a special relationship with the entertainment industry, devoting considerable attention to fostering relationships with Hollywood movers and shakers—studio executives, producers, directors, big-name actors.” Many of America’s most familiar faces have visited the organization’s headquarters in Langley, VA, including Will Smith, Robert De Niro, Mike Myers, Bryan Cranston, and Tom Cruise.
In recent years, collaboration has become even more overt. The Department of Defense even tweeted out during the Oscars how proud it is to work so closely with Hollywood to further its own image.
Meanwhile, the latest series of the hit spy show “Jack Ryan,” for instance, has the eponymous CIA hero travel to Venezuela to help overthrow tyrannical dictator Nicolas Reyes (a clear allusion to current president Nicolas Maduro). John Krasinski, who plays Ryan, said that he worked closely with the Agency in order to make the show more realistic. Krasinski also described the CIA as amazingly “apolitical.” “They’re always trying to do the right thing,” he said of them, claiming they “care about the country in a bigger, more idealistic way.”
Last month, a real CIA agent, Matthew John Heath, was arrested outside Venezuela’s largest oil refinery carrying explosives, a grenade launcher, a submachine gun, and stacks of U.S. dollars.
“Probably Hollywood is full of CIA agents and we just don’t know it. And I wouldn’t be surprised at all to discover that this was extremely common,” said “Batman” star Ben Affleck in 2012, before going to describe himself, perhaps jokingly, as a CIA agent himself.
Propaganda works
The effect of years of propaganda has been to improve the standing of the deep state and make the American public more conducive to supporting the tactics of the CIA and the military. One academic study found that showing torture scenes from the hit spy series “24” to liberal college students made them far more likely to support the use of it against anyone deemed an enemy of the state.
Democrat-aligned voters’ opinion of the FBI has been steadily rising over the last decade, to the point that 77% hold a favorable view of the institution (and almost two-thirds of the country supports the CIA).
Thus, while the entertainment industry might be liberal in that it largely opposes Trump and donates to the Democratic Party, it works closely to support and uphold the national security state, promotes ultra-patriotism and American aggression throughout the world. While Jolie might present herself as a champion of human rights, working with the very institutions responsible for destroying those rights around the globe undermines this assertion.
Alan MacLeod is a Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent.
Twitter Doubles Down On Censorship With Renewed Warnings On Trump Tweets
By JonathanTurley | November 4, 2020
We have been discussing the rising private censorship on the Internet demanded by Democratic leaders and meted out by companies like Twitter and Facebook. The original purpose of the Internet as a free and robust space for political and social expression is under attack as politicians demand greater levels of control to combat “disinformation.”
Indeed, Biden adviser Pete Buttigieg on Election Day demanded more penalties for companies not stopping “inciting material,” a subjective term left intentionally undefined. This drumbeat for censorship was amplified on Election Day when Twitter again hit tweets from President Donald Trump with warnings of disinformation. The tweets were pure political speech and Twitter again showed that it is now fully committed to biased regulation of speech between users of its service.
I have criticized President Trump’s rhetoric in the election about “stealing” the election. However, that is hyperbolic political speech. Biden supporters, including leaders like House Whip James Clyburn, have been saying that Trump was stealing the election through voter suppression. They have not been hit with Twitter warnings. Yet, Trump was immediately hit when he sent a Twitter post that Democrats were trying to “steal” the election: “We are up BIG, but they are trying to STEAL the Election. We will never let them do it. Votes cannot be cast after the Polls are closed!”
I have previously objected to such regulation of speech. What is most disturbing is how liberals have embraced censorship and even declared that “China was right” on Internet controls. Many Democrats have fallen back on the false narrative that the First Amendment does not regulated private companies so this is not an attack on free speech. Free speech is a human right that is not solely based or exclusively defined by the First Amendment. Censorship by Internet companies is a “Little Brother” threat long discussed by free speech advocates. Some may willingly embrace corporate speech controls but it is still a denial of free speech.
This is why I recently described myself as an Internet Originalist:
The alternative is “internet originalism” — no censorship. If social media companies returned to their original roles, there would be no slippery slope of political bias or opportunism; they would assume the same status as telephone companies. We do not need companies to protect us from harmful or “misleading” thoughts. The solution to bad speech is more speech, not approved speech.
If Pelosi demanded that Verizon or Sprint interrupt calls to stop people saying false or misleading things, the public would be outraged. Twitter serves the same communicative function between consenting parties; it simply allows thousands of people to participate in such digital exchanges. Those people do not sign up to exchange thoughts only to have Dorsey or some other internet overlord monitor their conversations and “protect” them from errant or harmful thoughts.
The actions by Twitter and Facebook on Election Day were reprehensible and wrong. What is so disturbing is that so many Democrats have become enablers of such corporate speech controls by the giant tech companies.
Voters in New Jersey and Arizona Say ‘Yes’ to Legalising Recreational Marijuana
Sputnik – 04.11.2020
While Americans went to the polling stations to cast a vote and decide if the near future of the United States will be “red” or “blue”, New Jersians turned “green” on Election Day.
Voters in New Jersey have approved a ballot measure to legalise the use of marijuana for recreational purposes.
According to preliminary data, more than 60 percent of New Jersians who voted said “yes” to the measure.
Democratic Governor Phil Murphy took to Twitter on Tuesday night to congratulate his fellow residents on the happy news, calling it a “huge step for racial and social justice” and for the state’s economy. Murphy had earlier failed to gain enough votes in the state legislature to legalise recreational marijuana use, and put the issue to a statewide referendum vote. The legalisation of recreational or medical use of marijuana, or both, were on the ballot on Tuesday in Arizona, Mississippi, Montana, New Jersey, and South Dakota.
More than 70 percent of Democrats in the state reportedly spoke in support of the measure.
New Jersey has become the twelfth US state to legalise recreational marijuana; at the federal level, however, it remains illegal. Prior to New Jersey, Illinois was the latest state to allow the recreational use of cannabis. Arizona also voted to legalise recreational marijuana on 3 November.
The use of cannabis for medical purposes is legal in 33 states and the District of Columbia. In comparison, US’ neighbour Canada legalised cannabis throughout the country in 2018.
Protests of more than two people will be ILLEGAL under updated rules for UK national lockdown
RT | November 3, 2020
Protests are no longer exempt under the UK-wide coronavirus lockdown that begins Thursday, and police plan to enforce that rule, unlike during the previous lockdown, according to UK media.
Demonstrations consisting of more than two people will be made expressly illegal under the second national lockdown, which is expected to take effect Thursday. Police allowed large protests, in particular for the Black Lives Matter movement, during the first lockdown even as individual British families were barred from getting together – a situation many found unfair.
A Home Office spokeswoman avoided ruling protests out completely, telling Yahoo News UK that “the right to peaceful protest is one of the cornerstones of our democracy,” but added that “any gathering risks spreading the disease, leading to more deaths, so it is vital we all play our part in controlling the virus.”
Police have reportedly received instruction from Home Secretary Priti Patel to break up any protest involving more than two people from Thursday on. However, a government source told The Times that protests would not explicitly be prohibited in the lockdown legislation which is scheduled to be voted on Wednesday and take effect the following day. Instead, the loophole that allowed protests while families were prevented from gathering will be closed.
Nevertheless, some officers fear that people will be more inclined to take to the streets because of the restrictions, as one police source told The Times, adding that “this is going to cause a lot of trouble.”
“People are going to be extremely angry and there are concerns they’ll protest the fact they can’t protest.”
News of a second lockdown has already triggered protests in the suburbs of London, where hundreds of people took to the streets over the weekend to denounce the proposed national shutdown. The demonstration was organized by the group StandUpX, which warns that the pandemic is being weaponized to permanently deprive UK residents of their freedoms. PM Boris Johnson has insisted this second national lockdown will end in December, though that is likely cold comfort to those who remember the original “two weeks to flatten the curve” that instead stretched on for months.
New Lockdowns Announced in UK
By Samuel May | OffGuardian | November 1, 2020
So, during ‘Prime Minister’s statement on coronavirus, 31 October 2020’, the usual trio of Johnson, Whitty and Vallance ‘did their thing’ once again, and sold us a lie.
We were shown some graph projections, made by the same people who were wrong in all their previous graph projections and which lacked any context whatsoever (like, for instance, what did last autumn’s hospital admissions look like by comparison?).
Yet these graphs were nevertheless unanimously and alarmingly clear, apparently: We’re all terribly, terribly at risk from the RONA, don’t you know, and we need a further 4 weeks of lockdown.
Johnson said:
From Thursday until the start of December, you must stay at home.
Although initially sold as ‘time-limited’, Michael Gove has already announced this will be extended if their computer models happen to show the mythical ‘R’ rating hasn’t gone down far enough.
So, consider yourselves primed.
Johnson described this latest lockdown as “less prohibitive and less restrictive” than April/March, although even the most lay of laymen will be acutely aware by now of what the true repercussions of this lockdown will be.
This lockdown will further widen the rich/poor divide, further depress the UK economy by shutting down ‘non-essential’ businesses etc., further isolate the young, needy and vulnerable and further cheapen the lives of the very elderly people whose wellbeing has endlessly and hypocritically been used to justify this evil charade.
Johnson said:
And even if I could now double [hospital] capacity overnight – and obviously I am proud that we have massively increased capacity, we do have the Nightingales, we’ve got 13,000 more nurses now than last year, we have many more doctors – but it still would not be enough, because the virus is doubling faster than we could conceivably add capacity.
So you see, anything that could possibly have been done would never have been enough. They know this. That’s probably the only reason they didn’t massively boost the NHS during the quiet summer months, despite the fact they’ve been warning of a possible resurgence for ages. You aren’t being conned here. We need to be very clear on that point. Move along now.
Oh…. and the army will be on our streets this time, testing lots and lots of people. Won’t that be nice. Johnson stated (our emphasis):
“… over the next few days and weeks, we plan a steady but massive expansion in the deployment of these quick turnaround tests.
Applying them in an ever-growing number of situations
From helping women to have their partners with them in labour wards when they’re giving birth to testing whole towns and even whole cities
The army has been brought in to work on the logistics and the programme will begin in a matter of days.
Working with local communities, local government, public health directors and organisations of all kinds to help people discover whether or not they are infectious, and then immediately to get them to self-isolate and to stop the spread”
You may remember we warned this was looming back in early October, when MP and 77th Brigade reserve officer Tobias Ellwood stood up in Parliament to request greater military involvement. It seems he was listened to. Or, at least, he popped up to ask a convenient question and plug a narrative hole at an opportune time.
Throughout this Number Ten briefing, Johnson/Vallance/Whitty seemed a bit nonchalant this time around, as they condescended to inform the unwashed masses of their fate. Or perhaps they were overcompensating, for there was a certain tenseness about their eyes, as of someone placing a powerful mousetrap behind a wardrobe…
Green Party, Libertarian presidential candidates on Israel-Palestine
By Alison Weir | If Americans Knew | October 29, 2020
Howie Hawkins and Jo Jorgensen are also on the ballot – and unlike Trump and Biden, they and their running mates appear to be remarkably independent of the Israel lobby…
Libertarian Party
Presidential candidate Dr. Jo Jorgensen
Jorgensen is on the ballot in all 50 states.
In a Q&A on her website she stated:
Q: Should the U.S. continue to support Israel?
A: No, we should not give aid to any foreign nationsQ: Should it be illegal to join a boycott of Israel?
A: NoQ: Should Jerusalem be recognized as the capital of Israel?
A: It’s none of our business
Related statements:
Q: Should the U.S. go to war with Iran?
A: NoQ: Do you support the killing of Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani?
A: NoQ: Should the military be allowed to use enhanced interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding, to gain information from suspected terrorists?
A: NoQ: Should the U.S. provide military aid to Saudi Arabia during its conflict with Yemen?
A: NoQ: Should the government increase or decrease military spending?
A: DecreaseQ: Should the U.S. accept refugees from Syria?
A: YesQ: Should the U.S. send ground troops into Syria to fight ISIS?
A: NoQ: Should the military fly drones over foreign countries to gain intelligence and kill suspected terrorists?
A: NoQ: Should foreign terrorism suspects be given constitutional rights?
A: Yes, give them a fair trial and shut down Guantanamo BayQ: Should the United States pull all military troops out of Afghanistan?
A: YesQ: Should the U.S. formally declare war on ISIS?
A: NO
Some questions about “the new normal”
By Richard Hugus | October 24, 2020
Dear Editor, Cape Cod Times :
According to the Massachusetts Department of Public Health*, on October 22, 2020 only 1 person diagnosed with Covid 19 was counted as “hospitalized” and 0 were counted in the ICU at Falmouth Hospital. The count at Cape Cod Hospital in these categories was 0 and 0. Falmouth has a population of about 30,000 people. The population of Cape Cod is about 212,000.
Some questions:
Should 212,000 people be required to wear face masks and maintain a distance of six feet from everyone else when just one person is in the hospital?
Should small businesses Capewide be forced into onerous restrictions and widespread closings?
Should students be kept out of school and forced into “virtual” education via computer screen? For that matter, should students be denied an education altogether, or workers be denied employment, if they refuse to get the flu shot that has been mandated in Massachusetts in order to keep the case load (of 1, in this case) in hospitals down?
Should the healthy be required to quarantine when such measures have never been taken before?
Should our right to assemble be curtailed?
Do public health officials, or does anyone, have a right to limit our right of assembly? Or our right to travel?
Should children in day care centers be required to wear masks, and learn at the beginning of their lives that not being able to see other kids’ faces is normal?
Does oxygen deprivation from wearing masks make sense?
Is it right to make people so afraid of the virus that they fear getting medical attention for other illnesses?
Is it acceptable to see young people committing suicide in greater numbers because of the dark world the virus scare has ushered in?
If there was a raging virus, would masks make even a bit of difference?
Are masks a preparation for vaccines which we will also have no choice about?
Does the pharmaceutical industry perhaps have a profit motive in seeing vaccines mandated? Does that industry perhaps have undue influence at WHO and the CDC?
Whatever Covid may once have been, it now looks a lot like a political agenda masquerading as a health crisis. Too many things just don’t make sense. It’s time to say no to whatever and whoever is driving this agenda.
—————
* See 10:50 mark of video presentation
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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
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