Society's ChildS


Light Saber

Not welcome: Syrian troops force another US convoy to turn around, go back where it came from

syria troops turn back US convoy
© YouTube/ SANASyrian servicemen observe US armoured vehicles as they drive away after failing to breach a local checkpoint in al-Hasakah province.
The incident is but the latest in a series of tense but mostly non-violent confrontations between Syrian civilians and troops and US occupation forces in oil-rich northeastern Syria.

Syrian Army troops manning a security checkpoint outside the town of Tell Tamer in western al-Hasakah province intercepted a convoy of US armoured vehicles on Wednesday and forced it to turn around and head back the way it came from, SANA has reported.

A short video clip of the incident shows an US Army Oshkosh M-ATV MRAP vehicle with an American Flag mounted on its rear turning around and driving away, while several Syrian servicemen armed with assault rifles slowly walk behind it. Other US vehicles are seen in the distance.

Comment:


Red Flag

Company behind UK's Covid-19 tracing app leaks 296 emails, killing trust in both the government & the scandal-riddled contractor

serco
© Getty Images / SOPA Images / LightRocket / Igor Goiovniov
Serco, the company behind the UK's upcoming Covid-19 tracing app, has admitted to a data breach that leaked details of nearly 300 people. But how did it get the government contract in the first place, given its track record?

The British government has been trying to mesmerise the public, like a snake charmer does a king cobra, with its contact tracing app.

Our supposed world-power nation, with a relatively small population, has performed dismally in this Covid-19 crisis so far, with the death toll now possibly topping 55,000. But the app was going to solve everything.

It had been trialed on the Isle of Wight and everything was set to go live imminently, even though it is already behind schedule.

The only bump in the road was the issue of privacy.

Arrow Down

Unemployment rate in India at 24% for week ended May 17

India protest
© APIndian students participate in a protest rally in New Delhi, India this week. The march called the Young India Adhikaar March, or Young India Rights March, was held to demand the government address the problem of unemployment.
Unemployment rate in India continued to be high at 24% for the week ended May 17, same as week before. However, with industries opening up gradually, there is an increase in labour participation rate which has bounced back from the 35.4% for week ended April 26 to 38.8% now, the Centre for Monitoring of Indian Economy said cautioning that uncertainty continues to prevail.

"Halfway into the month of May, it appears that the unemployment rate is around the same level as it was in April, mostly higher by a whisker," it said, adding that the small relaxations in the lockdown since April 20 have not had any positive impact on the unemployment rate yet.

"A persistently high unemployment rate indicates that a large proportion of labour that is willing to work is unable to find jobs," it said in its weekly report released on Tuesday. According to CMIE, urban India has a higher unemployment rate of 27% compared to rural India's 23% and a lower labour participation rate of 34% compared to 41% in rural India.

Attention

Facebook censorship rolls on: PragerU demoted from normal public visibility amid claims of 'repeated sharing of false news'

Mark Zuckerberg
© Reuters / Leah MillisFacebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg
Facebook has buried the page of Conservative non-profit group PragerU and "reduced distribution" of its posts claiming that PragerU has engaged in "repeated sharing of false news." The decision comes on the heels of a fact check of a PragerU video about polar bears by Facebook third-party fact-checker Climate Feedback.

Conservative non-profit group PragerU is once again facing censorship from tech giants. Facebook has reportedly reduced the reach of PragerU's page on its platform and implemented restriction for the "repeated sharing of false news," according to notifications that PragerU has received from Facebook following Mark Zuckerberg's third-party fact-checker Climate Feedback labeling a PragerU video on polar bears as fake news.

Comment: This is just the latest skirmish in PragerU's running battle with social media censorship:


Yellow Vest

Best of the Web: Food riots break out in Santiago, Chile, as government extends lockdown for third month and makes it even STRICTER


Comment: This kind of reaction is likely to spread globally over the next few months...


protest chile food covid lockdown
© AFP
Coronavirus cases soared in Chile Tuesday as soldiers were deployed to back up riot police in Santiago following clashes with demonstrators angry about food shortages and job losses.


Comment: Note how AFP opened this piece on mass protests against the totalitarian lockdown because people are hungry by first insinuating that lots more people died there... because of the protests!

So many people on this planet are in for a reckoning, and MSM journos are chief among them.


Soldiers in armored vehicles and wielding automatic weapons were deployed to the working class neighborhood of El Bosque, where on Monday residents armed with clubs and stones clashed with riot police.

Overnight Monday to Tuesday rioters looted a neighborhood gas station, while downtown a mob set a bus ablaze. Residents in both poor and middle-class neighborhoods banged pots and pans in protest.

The military deployment came as Chile recorded 3,520 new coronavirus cases, its biggest daily increase, for a total of almost 50,000 infections.


Comment: The timing of this 'factual increase' in Covid deaths is interesting, as it suggests that they expressly spiked the number in order to dampen support for the protesters and justify police/military repression against them.


Comment: The political class seems to be oblivious about what they are setting up to come next: major, bloody revolution.


Burka

Migrant crossings from France to UK spiked during lockdown


Comment: You won't hear a single word of complaint about this from the 'Karens' and authoritarians screaming bloody murder about 'maintaining social distancing'...


migrant crossings UK
The number of unaccompanied young migrants crossing the Channel from France to Britain has spiked during the coronavirus outbreak, as travel restrictions force them onto boats rather than trucks.

Kent County Council in southeast England, which includes the major port of Dover, was dealing with "230 to 250" young migrants a year ago, its chief executive, Roger Gough, said.

"But that number has pretty much doubled. It's now nearly 470 and new arrivals are coming in all the time," he told AFP.

Channel crossing attempts have increased since the end of 2018, despite the danger of heavy maritime traffic, strong currents and low water temperatures.

In 2019, 2,758 migrants were rescued by the French and British authorities while trying to cross the strait -- four times more than in 2018, according to French officials.

The coronavirus pandemic has reinforced the trend, with the reduced number of trucks going through the Channel Tunnel leading migrants to make the crossing in small boats instead.

Comment: So much for Brexit ending illegal mass migration to the UK. Why, it's as if the UK govt continues to tacitly encourage it in order to drive down wages and maintain a social 'strategy of tension'...


Arrow Up

China offers farmers cash to stop breeding exotic animals, Wuhan declared a "wildlife sanctuary"

civet
© APA civet cat stall is closed at a wildlife market in Guangzhou, capital of south China's Guangdong Province, January 5, 2004.
The city at the center of the coronavirus crisis has banned the eating of wild animals and Chinese farmers are being offered cash to quit breeding exotic animals. Both moves come amid mounting pressure for China to crack down on the illegal wildlife trade blamed by many for the pandemic that has killed more than 320,000 people.

The local administration in Wuhan, the city of about 11 million people in China's central Hubei province where cases of the new coronavirus were first recorded late last year, announced Wednesday that the eating of all wild animals was officially banned.


Comment: Multiple cases of coronaviruses in numerous other countries have been uncovered that occurred before the outbreaks in Wuhan: Coronavirus may have been in Ireland last year - Taoiseach


The city also banned virtually all hunting of wild animals within its limits, declaring Wuhan "a wildlife sanctuary," with the exception of government sanctioned hunting for "scientific research, population regulation, monitoring of epidemic diseases and other special circumstances."

Comment: While it is pretty clear by now that the coronavirus was not transmitted through the wildlife trade, it seems that countries are using the contrived crisis as an opportunity to implement, what may normally be, difficult to push through policy:


Padlock

The lockdown left is no friend of the working class

the tube
If you want to know how messed-up politics has become in the Covid era, consider this: a Tory government is agitating for working people to have the right to return to work, while the TUC and the rest of the left are howling for working people to be kept at home. Evil Tories want to get the working classes working, while hip Corbynistas cry: 'No! It's too dangerous. Leave them in their flats.'

It's an about-face of epic proportions. How far we've come since the Battle of Orgreave. It is now the left that wants working people to be decommissioned, put out to pasture, languishing on state-paid wages or Universal Credit and uncertain of whether their job will even exist once the lockdown is finally lifted. And it's the Tories saying: 'Erm, don't you think it would be better if working people worked?'

Of course, the left's justification for its new policy of preventing the working classes from working is that they might catch Covid-19 and die. They're ramping up the culture of fear in a desperate effort to present their bizarre, historically unprecedented anti-work outlook as a good, noble thing. Actual facts - like the fact that under-40s have made up just 0.75 per cent of deaths from Covid - don't get so much as a look-in. No, keep all workers at home, even the fit, healthy young ones.

Comment: See also:


Play

YouTube defends removing epidemiologist Knut Wittkowski's video on coronavirus herd immunity

youtube HQ headquarters
© AFP PHOTO / JOSH EDELSON/AFP via Getty Images
YouTube defended its removal of a video of a prominent epidemiologist explaining his view on coronavirus and "herd immunity."

The video featured Dr. Knut Wittkowski, the former head of biostatistics, epidemiology and research design at Rockefeller University. In it, he was critical of lockdown and social distancing measures, arguing they are counterproductive to achieving "herd immunity" from the virus. The video was removed for purported "misinformation" after reaching over 1.3 million views.

"With all respiratory diseases, the only thing that stops the disease is herd immunity," Wittkowski said in the video, according to the New York Post, which first reported the story on Saturday. "About 80% of the people need to have had contact with the virus, and the majority of them won't even have recognized that they were infected."

Comment: While YouTube's strategy of licking the boots of the authorities may keep them out of trouble (to a certain extent) with those same authorities, users are not happy about the platform's recent uptick in censorship. With the announcement that mega YouTube star Joe Rogan is leaving the platform for greener pastures, it seems like YouTube's days may be numbered if they continue to oust content that doesn't fall inline with official narratives.

See also:


Syringe

Doubts raised over Oxford coronavirus vaccine after ALL of the monkeys that took part in the trial are found to have contracted the disease

coronavirus vaccine
The coronavirus vaccine being developed by scientists at Oxford University may not prevent people from becoming infected with the disease after all, experts have warned.

In the latest animal trials of the vaccine carried out on rhesus macaques, all six of the participating monkeys went on to catch the coronavirus.

Dr William Haseltine, a former Harvard Medical School professor, revealed the monkeys who received the vaccine had the same amount of virus in their noses as the three non-vaccinated monkeys in the trial.

This suggests the treatment, which has already received in the region of £90million in government investment, may not halt the spread of the deadly disease.

The bombshell comes after initial reports last week suggested the vaccine offered 'some' immunity against the virus, and stopped it getting deep into the lungs, where it becomes deadly.

The vaccine, known as ChAdOx1 nCov-19, is currently undergoing its first human clinical trial, as nations accelerate their efforts to tackle the deadly virus.

Comment: See also: