The chancellor, Rishi Sunak, has warned that Britain is facing a "significant recession" after the government's latest growth figures showed that the first few days of the country's lockdown caused a record drop in economic activity.

Figures from the Office for National Statistics showed that just nine days of harsh restrictions on businesses caused output to fall by 5.8% in March, and by 2% in the first three months of the year.

The ONS said the hit to the economy in late March had affected almost every sector of the economy and meant that output had dropped by almost as much in a single month as in the 18-month decline during and after the financial crisis of 2008-09. With people ordered to stay at home from late March, all three main components of growth - services, production and construction - were affected.

Over the past three years, Facebook has been removing accounts for participating in what they call "coordinated inauthentic behavior" (CIB). According to Facebook's head of cybersecurity policy, the Orwellian term refers to when "groups of pages or people work together to mislead others about who they are or what they're doing." Facebook takes down accounts for CIB due to "deceptive behavior" not for sharing false information. In the latest purge, Facebook removed accounts from two news outlets, SouthFront and News Front.

The two outlets have no affiliation; the only thing they share besides the word "Front" in their names is content that does not toe the Western mainstream media line. In its effort to remove CIB and limit "disinformation," Facebook partners with the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensics Research Lab (DFRLab). The Atlantic Council is a Washington-based think-tank that receives funding from Western and Gulf State governments, defense contractors, and social media outlets. Some of its top contributors for the 2018 fiscal year include the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Embassy of the UAE to the US, the US State Department, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon.

Last week, the United States Department of Education issued new regulations under Title IX concerning how schools must respond to allegations of sexual assault and sexual harassment. Predictably, the regulations have been slammed by groups such as the National Women's Law Center, which has said that they will "make it harder for students who have experienced sexual harassment to come forward and to get the help that many need." Given President Trump's record of disturbing comments about women, including boasting of sexually aggressive behavior, it's easy to believe that this is an accurate description of regulations set forth by his administration. However, these regulations in fact require a reasonable and balanced approach to a serious problem. They are not about protecting rapists from the consequences of their actions. Rather, they are about protecting innocent men falsely accused of sexual offenses from having their lives destroyed for something that they did not do. The regulations balance this with the important need to prevent sexual assault and punish those who are in fact guilty of this heinous crime.

To understand why these regulations are necessary, we need to turn the clock back nearly a decade to April 4th, 2011. On that date, the Department of Education sent a letter to the president of every college and university in the nation. Known as the "Dear Colleague" letter for its opening line, it outlined new requirements on how schools must respond to allegations of sexual assault on campus in order to be in compliance with Title IX, a federal law requiring schools to extend equal opportunities to all students regardless of their sex. There was an implied threat that schools would lose their federal funding if they did not comply. The issuance of this letter was of questionable legality. A federal law known as the Administrative Procedures Act requires that the public be given notice before any new regulations go into effect with ample time for citizens to submit comments indicating why they support or oppose the proposed regulations and suggesting modifications. The required notice-and-comment process was bypassed for the "Dear Colleague" letter, depriving the public of the opportunity to weigh in.

The Obama national security team's outrageous abuse of power mirrors the underbelly of our prosecutorial system at large.

The Department of Justice's case against retired Army Lieutenant General and former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn has exposed an ugly reality involving the abuse of power at the highest levels of the Executive Office all the way down the justice system this country ostensibly holds so dear.

Plea bargains are an unfortunate reality of an American system of justice which finds merit in coercing people to admit guilt for crimes they didn't commit in order to avoid the expense of a trial and to prevent friends and family from potential legal liability. If the purpose behind such procedural abuse of power is to fight actual crime, the American people have grown accustomed to turning a blind eye. But if the purpose is to exact political revenge on someone who has incurred the disfavor of those in power, then the plea bargain system is a direct assault on the Constitution that should insult every American, regardless where they stand on the respective merits of the case. General Flynn's case falls firmly in the latter category.

Scottsdale Community College's mishandling of a professor's academic freedom drew an apology from the district's interim chancellor Monday, just days after the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education sent a letter defending the professor's rights. The college tried to force professor Nicholas Damask to apologize for three quiz questions about Islamic terrorism that a student said were "in distaste of Islam." Damask added that the college suggested he would be required to meet with an Islamic religious leader to review the content of his course.

"I'm happy that the Maricopa Community College governing board has acknowledged the importance of the First Amendment and academic freedom, even into subjects that may be controversial — without that freedom of thought and inquiry, America just isn't America anymore," said Damask, who has been teaching at SCC for 23 years. "And I'm grateful for groups like FIRE that are willing to stand by me in the fight to defend that freedom."

FIRE sent an urgent letter to SCC on Thursday, outlining the college's free speech and academic freedom missteps and demanding that it abandon any suggestion that it will investigate or suppress his teaching.

The president of a pro-migrant association that delivered assistance to the homeless was found murdered at his home in Bretteville-en-Saire, east of Cherbourg-en-Cotentin (Manche), according to Actu.

Retired teacher and former director of Gonneville School, Jean Dussine, 63, was president of Itinérance, a group that helped vulnerable migrants.

Dussine was found dead this morning at his home, believed to be beaten with an iron rod as he slept.

Migrants, who Dussine was hosting, sounded the alarm when they found the educator's dead body, according to Ouest France.

Since the brutal murder, a young twenty-year-old Afghan migrant, who Dussine had been housing, has been arrested and placed under local police custody.

Ever since the UK entered "lockdown", those pushing for it to end have been labelled "callous" or "selfish" or accused of putting profits before people. Meanwhile millions are unemployed and a global famine is on the horizon. The lockdown will kill more people than the virus, and needs to be ended.

The lockdown has been "eased". Apparently. Some people should go back to work, schools might be opening a bit. You can see one person at a time. You'd be forgiven for not noticing any tangible difference. You'd be more forgiven for thinking it's a contrived mess designed to confuse and distract people.

Essentially: We are very much still under lockdown, and likely to be so for the foreseeable future. And it is still, very much, a destructive policy which will ruin many more lives than the virus.

Nevertheless, the usual "liberal" media suspects are up in arms about Boris "putting profits before people". And, as per usual these days, even alt-media types (who should know better) are buying that line. So is Jeremy Corbyn.

In what is perhaps the greatest example of gaslighting in human history, we have "champions of the working class" arguing for mass unemployment, the shutting down of small businesses and the self-employed, and draconian police powers.

The US branch of Chinese tech giant Huawei has chosen a stunning and brave new public relations strategy to combat criticism, announcing web events with black journalists, environmentalists and women in technology.

Arguing that Covid-19 misinformation is "hitting African American, Asian, Hispanic, rural & low-income Americans hard," Huawei USA announced a May 13 event with musician will.i.am and CNN contributor and former Obama adviser Van Jones - among others - hosted by the National Association of Black Journalists.

#Misinformation on #COVID19 is hitting African American, Asian, Hispanic, rural & low-income Americans hard. On May 13 @NABJ, @IAMWILL, @VanJones68, @RolandSMartin & @EbonyJadeHilton discuss keeping Americans healthy + safe. https://t.co/iali0OFBrR#HuaweiNABJWebinarpic.twitter.com/XSs58j0Wdk

— HuaweiUSA (@HuaweiUSA) May 11, 2020

Something doesn't smell right. The number of newly confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the U.S. each day has been declining, as has the number of deaths. This is great news, and we should be hoping that the falling numbers are a sign that the pandemic is beginning to subside. But the mainstream media has been relentlessly pumping out stories that warn of "disaster" if the lockdowns are lifted "too soon". According to the mainstream media, by "ignoring science" we are inviting a "second wave" which will be even deadlier than the first one. And it is certainly true that as we end the lockdowns more people will get exposed to COVID-19, but right now I do not know of a single hospital in the entire country that is currently being overwhelmed by this pandemic. As long as our hospitals can handle it, there is no reason to continue the lockdowns.

But the mainstream media seems desperate to keep the lockdowns going, and so they keep telling us that we are "inviting disaster" by ending them. For example, the following comes from a New York Times article that was just published entitled "As States Rush to Reopen, Scientists Fear a Coronavirus Comeback"...

Millions of working people and small-business owners who cannot earn money while sheltering at home are facing economic ruin. So dozens of states, seeking to ease the pain, are coming out of lockdown.

Most have not met even minimal criteria for doing so safely, and some are reopening even as coronavirus cases rise, inviting disaster. The much-feared "second wave" of infection may not wait until fall, many scientists say, and instead may become a storm of wavelets breaking unpredictably across the country.

An American Jewish Committee official says that intermarriage is a "tragedy" for Israel because it presents a "crisis" to the core political support for Israel, organizations led by Conservative and Reform Jews.

Steven Bayme talked about the "danger" of intermarriage in remarks four years ago to a religious Jewish organization. (I noticed the speech this week because Bayme is a leading thinker, and yet the AJC chose not to publish his latest video webinar during the pandemic - maybe because I reported on the last one).

Bayme upholds a conservative view of intermarriage, that it's a "tragedy" that more than 70 percent of non-orthodox Jews are marrying non-Jews; "we've lost 2 million Jews over the last 25 years." Bayme wishes to restore traditional official disapproval of the practice so as to stem the tide.


Bayme repeatedly cites the threat to Israel support, because non-Jewish spouses foster Jewish alienation from Israel.

If you look at the barometer simply of commitment to Israel... in the current population of mixed married's there is enormous disinterest in matters relating to Israel. There's tremendous dispute among the social scientists over whether younger Jews are distancing themselves from Israel... Looking at inmarrieds, there may be more distancing, there may be less distancing, but the point of agreement is that, Once you factor in mixed-married's as a population, the distancing from Israel increases significantly.

The danger obviously is that if the cause of Israel becomes an orthodox cause alone, that will be a tragedy for the Jewish people, a tragedy for the state of Israel and frankly a tragedy for American Jewry.