Today - Friday 15th January - over 50,000 restaurants are planning to open, an act of mass civil disobedience against "anti-Covid" lockdown measures which have massively hurt the restaurant business, especially small family-owned businesses.

Spreading through social media under the hashtag #IoOpro ("I am opening"), the movement is largest country-wide act of civil disobedience since lockdowns began.

Italain opposition MP Vittorio Sgarbi has backed the movement, saying in an interview:

Open up, & don't worry, in the end we will make them eat their fines".

Italy's government is already facing internal conflict and crisis, an early election is a possibility.

A new study published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that in-person classes at K-12 schools do not appear to lead to increases in COVID-19 when compared with areas that have online-only learning.

The CDC study noted that in the week beginning Dec. 6, coronavirus cases among the general population in counties where K-12 schools opened for in-person learning were similar to rates in counties that were online only.

"CDC recommends that K-12 schools be the last settings to close after all other mitigation measures have been employed and the first to reopen when they can do so safely," the authors of the report wrote.

As of Dec. 7, about 62 percent of K-12 school districts were offering either full or partial in person-learning, but reports of outbreaks at schools have been limited, according to the CDC.

A coalition of big tech companies, including Microsoft is developing a COVID passport, with the expectation that a digital document linked to vaccination status will be required to travel and get access to basic services.

The group is calling itself the Vaccination Credential Initiative (VCI), and includes Microsoft, Salesforce and Oracle.


The US health provider Mayo Clinic is also involved in the project, which is being described as "the most significant vaccination effort in the history of the United States."

The idea is now a familiar one. Anyone who has been vaccinated will receive a QR code that can be stored on their mobile phone in the wallet app. Those without phones will have access to a printed version.

We have previously reported on the development of this so called 'CommonPass', which also has backing from the World Economic Forum, and now more details have emerged.

The prosecution of journalists, who worked with Russian news outlets in Latvia is nothing but outright "repression" aimed at gagging alternative news sources, particularly those linked to Moscow, one of them told RT.

Andrey Yakovlev is a veteran Latvian journalist who founded Baltnews, a local news agency. His problems with authorities began when he handed control of the agency to the Russian Rossiya Segodnya media group.

The move "really did not sit well" with Latvian authorities and he was accused of violating the EU's and Latvia's sanctions against Russia.

"The media outlet [Baltnews] was working legally here", Yakovlev said, adding that the ownership transfer was done in accordance with local laws and duly registered. Still, this did not stop a court case being opened against him.

An admitted Antifa member and independent journalist was arrested over the stabbing of two Trump supporters outside the state Capitol in Albany, N.Y. on Wednesday. One of the victims had an eviscerated bowel and required emergency surgery.

Alexander Stokes Contompasis, 37, of Rensselaer, N.Y., has been charged with felony first-degree assault, second-degree assault, two counts of criminal possession of a weapon and second-degree menacing over the stabbings of two men that occurred during a brawl in East Capitol Park between Antifa and pro-Trump "Stop the Steal" protesters.
The right-wing crowd consisted of around 35 Trump supporters and at least three individuals whom police say are associated with the Proud Boys group. The rally was organized as part of coordinated pro-Trump rallies across the nation, including one that devolved into a riot at Capitol Hill in Washington D.C.

New York State Police recovered the knife that they suspect was used in the stabbing from Contompasis's vehicle, which was parked near the Capitol building. The Daily Gazette reported that he fled the scene by car and was quickly stopped and taken into custody. Several other suspects were charged with minor offenses and given appearance tickets, including two counter-protesters who were reportedly armed with expandable batons.

French police have launched an investigation after an alleged "black supremacist" blew up an apartment while making homemade explosives, injuring himself and another person in a Parisian suburb.

The 37-year-old man was arrested on Wednesday after an explosion and fire at an address in the Saint-Leu-la-Foret area northwest of the French capital, which injured the two occupants, a man and a woman.

"An investigation has been underway since Wednesday morning into the heads of criminal associations and the unauthorized manufacture of explosive devices," a spokesperson for the Pontoise prosecutor's office said on Thursday.

Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn have hit MS-13's "board of directors" with terror charges — accusing the leaders of the notorious gang of ordering up scores of murders.

The US Attorney's Office in the Eastern District of New York on Thursday indicted the gang's leaders for conspiracy to provide and conceal material support to terrorists and conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism transcending national boundaries.

Prosecutors say they're charging the 14 highest-ranking members of the transnational gang — 11 of whom are already behind bars, mostly in El Salvador.

Federal authorities are seeking to extradite the jailed suspects to the US, sources said.

Three others — Hugo Armando Quinteros-Mineros, Cesar Humberto Lopez-Larios and Fredy Ivan Jandres-Parada — are the subject of a federal manhunt by the FBI.

Among the jailed suspects is Borromeo Enrique Henriquez, who is known as "Diablito de Hollywood" and is considered one of the gang's most powerful members, prosecutors said.

The suspects make up the "Ranfla Nacional" — or the gang's ruling body.

President Donald Trump's Department of Labor has released an updated set of rules to protect the wages of American graduates from the damage done by CEOs' use of H-1B visa workers.

U.S. Secretary of Labor Eugene Scalia said in a January 12 statement:

"The U.S. Department of Labor is taking these steps to strengthen wage protections, address abuses in visa programs, and protect American workers from being undercut by cheaper foreign labor. These changes help ensure that these important foreign worker programs function as Congress intended, while securing American workers' opportunities for stable, good-paying jobs."

The wage rules cover the H-1B program, which allows CEOs to keep roughly 900,000 foreign, mid-skilled, contract workers in the United States. The H-1B program also keeps roughly 150,000 spouses in white-collar jobs, and it helps attract roughly 300,000 foreign workers into white-collar jobs via the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program.

The labor department rules set the wage floors for the imported H-1B workers, and so hinder companies from hiring cheaper foreign workers instead of American graduates. The rule says:

A primary purpose of the restrictions on immigration created by the INA, both numerical and otherwise, is "to preserve jobs for American workers." Safeguards for American labor, and the Department's role in administering them, have been a foundational element of the statutory scheme since the INA was enacted in 1952.

Lawsuits from business groups blocked a prior version of the rule.

French data privacy watchdog CNIL condemned the Interior Ministry for the unlawful use of drones to oversee demonstrations and make sure people were respecting the COVID-19 lockdown.

In a decision made public on Thursday, the authority stressed that the use of such tools by the police nationwide broke the law in the absence of any regulatory framework. In a statement, the interior ministry said it acknowledged the CNIL's decision, and would respect its terms.

The CNIL started investigating the use of camera drones by law enforcement last May. It found the ministry had not used mechanisms to blur the faces of people filmed by the drones in demonstrations or walking in the streets during lockdown. This was a breach of French data privacy rules, the CNIL said, as such individuals could be easily identified in the filmed images, which were then stored by the police.

The interior ministry has since told the CNIL that blurring systems were put in place, but the authority said they could be turned off. "This mechanism does not necessarily prevent the identification of individuals as long as the services of the ministry of the interior are able to deactivate blurring," the authority said.

At no point has the public been properly informed about the use of camera drones by the police, the CNIL said, adding it had reminded the interior ministry it should obey the law.

Fifteen years ago the world was introduced to the research of Polish psychologist Andrzej Łobaczewski in his seminal work Political Ponerology. In it, he outlined the danger of pathological revolutionary movements, the poisonous influence of psychopaths in positions of power, and the real origins of totalitarianism - as well as why relatively normal people are left woefully vulnerable to pathological thinking and psychological 'infection'. When the book was first published the "forever war on terror" Neocons were at the forefront in the United States, and the world is still reeling from their atrocious foreign policy, not to mention the Patriot Act. But times sure have changed since then, and with them, the rise of far-left pathologies whose scope and influence is nearly universal in Western society.

On Christmas Day of 2020, James Lindsay of "the grievance studies affair" fame published an important article on his website New Discourses: 'Psychopathy and the Origins of Totalitarianism.' Lindsay, a mathematician by training, is also an expert on the nonsense that is Critical Social Justice Theory (i.e. Wokeness). There's no one better to expose Woke ideology for what it actually is: psychopathic. So this week on MindMatters we discuss a range of topics stemming from Lindsay's article: Critical Race Theory, cancel culture, and the pipe dreams of revolution-induced utopia we're witnessing now in the West. Meet the new psychopathic fervors - same as the old ones. Using concepts from Ponerology like paralogic and paramorality, and Pieper's idea of pseudo-realities, Lindsay provides an indispensable account of what's really going on, peeling back the mask of the in-your-face thought virus threatening to sicken and destroy everything it touches.


Running Time: 01:24:51

Download: MP3 — 77.7 MB