The two-metre rule has no basis in science, leading scientists have said as the Government comes under increasing pressure to drop the measure.

Writing for The Telegraph, Professors Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson, from the University of Oxford, said there is little evidence to support the restriction and called for an end to the "formalised rules".

The University of Dundee also said there was no indication that distancing at two metres is safer than one metre.

The intervention comes as two Government ministers suggested on Monday that the rule is likely to be relaxed following a review commissioned by Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister.

On Tuesday, shops experienced daily footfall drops of 41 percent compared to the same day last year, while enormous queues built up outside because of social distancing requirements.

We're told a second wave of coronavirus infections is coming. As businesses open back up and states relax lockdown orders, the number of new cases is ticking up in a handful of states. We've heard warnings in recent days from the Centers for Disease Control and various public health experts and elected officials that a new series of lockdowns might be necessary.

What these experts and officials don't seem to realize is that Americans will never comply with their lockdown orders again. They have burned their credibility to the ground, and they no longer have the moral authority to tell us what to do.

Simply put, the people in charge have shown themselves to be rank hypocrites who care more about politics than science. For months, we were told that large gatherings were deadly because of the coronavirus, but when protests broke out in late May, large gatherings were suddenly okay.

Many pundits and politicians seem to blame UK prime minister Boris Johnson for provoking the latest installment of the culture wars that now dominate Anglo-American public life. Sections of the media, from the New York Times to the Guardian, have claimed that Johnson wants to argue over statues to distract from his poor handling of the Covid pandemic. Others, such as Labour's David Lammy, reckon Johnson's defence of the statue of Winston Churchill, against those who would deface or dismantle it, was a deliberate attempt to stoke the culture wars, and deflect attention from the Tories lack of progress on 'racial injustice'.

These are massively disingenuous claims. After all, is it really surprising that a British prime minister would defend a memorial devoted to arguably the nation's greatest modern figure? Moreover, Johnson was not initiating anything. He was responding to a movement that has been directing its energy towards the destruction of the symbols of Britain's national history and culture. It takes tremendous bad faith to characterise Johnson's defensive response to an attack on British culture as an attempt to launch a culture war.

FRN brings the following major revelation:

Members of the Brazilian parliament decided to confirm suspicions and break into a hospital that claimed to have 5,000 infected & 200 deaths from COVID-19, and found that the hospital had grossly over-represented the cases and its claims. There was in fact not a single person, they report, and the hospital was entirely empty and was obviously still under construction.

Acting on a tip that something was going wrong at this hospital, five members of the Brazil parliament went to hospitals under encouragement by president Bolsonaro to break in & check to see the number of patients there.

The prevailing view among progressives today is that America hasn't made much progress on racism. While no one would argue that abolishing slavery and dissolving Jim Crow weren't good first steps, the progressive attitude toward such reforms is nicely summarized by Malcolm X's famous quip, "You don't stick a knife in a man's back nine inches and then pull it out six inches and say you're making progress." Aside from outlawing formalized bigotry, many progressives believe that things haven't improved all that much. Racist attitudes towards blacks, if only in the form of implicit bias, are thought to be widespread; black men are still liable to be arrested in a Starbucks for no good reason; plus we have a president who has found it difficult to denounce neo-Nazis. If racism still looms large in our social and political lives, then, as one left-wing commentator put it, "progress is debatable."

But the data take a clear side in that debate. In his controversial bestseller Enlightenment Now, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker notes a steep decline in racism. At the turn of the 20th century, lynchings occurred at a rate of three per week. Now, racially-motivated killings of blacks occur at a rate of zero to one per year.¹ What's more, racist attitudes that were once commonplace have now become fringe. A Gallup poll found that only 4 percent of Americans approved of marriages between blacks and whites in 1958. By 2013, that number had climbed to 87 percent, prompting pollsters to call it "one of the largest shifts of public opinion in Gallup history."

After President Donald Trump, the world's busiest leader must be President Recep Erdogan of Turkey. But despite his crammed schedule (threatening Europe, denouncing France, Greece, Cyprus, Egypt, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates; attacking Kurds in Turkey, Syria and Iraq, waging war in Libya and Syria, drawing plans for the invasion of Armenia and Greece, sending ships to the Eastern Mediterranean to steal undersea hydrocarbon from waters which do not belong to Turkey, sending troops to more than half-a-dozen Middle Eastern and African countries, bribing Lebanese fundamentalists to threaten the Armenians of that country with genocide, jailing Turkish journalists, shutting electronic communication, converting the Byzantine Hagia Sophia cathedral to a mosque...), Turkey's dictator found time recently to tweet that the U.S. social-political upheaval is a result of "racism and fascism."

Meanwhile, his slavish media extrapolated that the root of the U.S. crisis is slavery. Putting aside Turkish racism against the Alevis, Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks, Jews, Kurds, and Syrian Arab refugees, let's look at Turkey's slavery record.

"More whites were brought as slaves to North Africa than blacks brought as slaves to U.S or to the 13 colonies from which it was formed. White slaves were still bought and sold in the Ottoman Empire, decades after blacks were freed in the U.S."

¬ Thomas Sowell, black American economist and social theorist.

Who were the North African slave masters who plagued Western Europe from the 16^th century to the early 19^th century? They were the Barbary Coast pirates of Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya. Their sovereign was the Ottoman sultan whose navy protected them when the pirates were challenged by Western navies. Ottoman Turkey was also their main customer for slaves. For four centuries, the pirates raided Italy, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, England and Ireland kidnapping natives and selling them in the slave markets of North Africa. They even raided Iceland where the attacks were called Tyrkjaranio (Turkish raid).

The U.S. Navy was not immune to Barbary pirate attacks. The U.S. paid tribute to them to stave off attacks on its ships. According to historians, the Barbary Coast pirates enslaved 1,250,000 Europeans. The slave-hunting expeditions were year-round affairs to replenish slaves who had died or had converted to Islam.

Nine people were wounded by gunfire across Minneapolis Tuesday, including a two-hour span that saw eight shot, adding to a recent rash of violence since last month's unrest over the police killing of George Floyd.

Police Department statistics show that a record 149 people have been shot since the start of the year — nearly half were shot within the past three weeks.

The most recent violence started shortly after 10 p.m. Tuesday, when patrol officers responded to calls of gunfire in the 2900 block of Columbus Avenue, only to learn that a male victim had been dropped off at an area hospital.

A preliminary investigation showed that the shooting was preceded by an argument between a group of people, according to police, who offered few other details.

Nine shot in Minneapolis
Nine people were shot and one stabbed in separate incidents across Minneapolis Tuesday and early Wednesday.

The French city of Dijon was rocked by chaotic scenes reminiscent of a war zone as rival gangs clashed following an assault on a Chechen teen - but was it more a "battle of territories" in a drugs war than simple score-settling?

For several nights, the rule of law seemed suspended in parts of the historic French tourist town, as Chechen and Maghreb gangs openly brandished weapons and took over city streets, prompting surreal scenes and leaving residents in fear of venturing outside their homes.

Footage posted to Twitter showed a car speeding through a group of Chechens and flipping over, like a scene from a video game. The situation finally calmed on Monday, after the government deployed militarized police units to quell the unrest. Dijon Mayor François Rebsamen accused the Chechen community of attempting to "enforce its own right and law of retaliation."

On social media, some offered the knee-jerk explanation that the violence gripping the French city was simply the inevitable result of immigration - and, indeed, the non-integration of Muslim immigrants in France has led to plenty of cultural clashes. Yet, the reality of how Dijon became the center of all-out gangland warfare is more complicated.

Everyone is dealing with Corona-madness in their own way. In Russia, one priest has decided to take a serious stand over it. How serious this stand becomes remains to be seen, but it could yet provoke a 'schism' within the Orthodox Church - symbolically, if not literally.

Here's Russia Today's somewhat tepid report about the stand-off:

A Russian priest who believes Covid-19 is an invention by evil forces hellbent on "chipping the population" has apparently used Cossack fighters to seal off a women's convent after church authorities prohibited him from preaching.

According to local media sources, Shiigumen Sergius ousted the abbess of the convent, Varvara, along with several nuns, and took control of the building after his ban. Prior to the takeover, he was an informal leader of the community but was subservient to the regional diocese.

Since the incident, the cleric has not allowed local religious leaders to visit, and journalists from the area have claimed that the site is being guarded by Cossacks loyal to Sergius.

That claim is denied by the priest/'protestors'.

It's also interesting that RT opted to call him by his old name, whereas his new name is legally Romanov. Their report continues:

Sergius was forbidden from conducting religious duties at Ekaterinburg's Central Urals Monastery after criticizing the reaction of Russian authorities and Patriarch Kirill to the Covid-19 "pseudo-pandemic." Due to the precarious epidemiological situation, churches in Russia have been ordered to close for the safety of parishioners.

Sergius claimed on many occasions that the pandemic was an excuse to microchip the public, and complained that the closure of churches during the crisis was done under pressure from "the atheistic authorities."

'Chipping the population' was not the primary motive for declaring the pandemic, but the priest is essentially correct in that it in no way justified the lockdowns and mass suffering they caused. The media, as usual, caricatures the dissenting view in a manipulative effort to malign it in readers' eyes.

Facebook has flagged our article "It's all bullshit": 3 links sinking the Covid narrative" as 'false information', based on nothing but a single 'fact check' website, which does not even claim the information is 'false', but merely quibbles over terminologies to justify claiming the information is 'misleading.'

This is what you see today if you try to access that article on Facebook:

And if you click on the 'see why' button you get taken here, to the website of Health Feedback, an "independent fact-checker".

Of course, they're not independent - they're actually funded by Facebook. They are also funded by the "Credibility Coalition", an NGO focused on "common standards for information credibility".