The Million Mask March takes place on November 5 when Guy Fawkes Night is celebrated in the UK. The rally is aimed at decrying global corporations, government corruption, police brutality and systemic racism, but this year it was also joined by those protesting the Covid-19 lockdown.

Liverpool protesters clash with police and Manchester students tear down 'prison-like' fencing

Liverpool was awash with protesters on Thursday night as local residents came together to protest against the government's Covid-19 restrictions.

The police responded to reports of huge crowds gathering at St George's Hall in the city center at around 6.30pm. The demonstrators were dispersed but gathered again later in the evening at the Pier Head.

Three arrests were made and 13 people were fined for their part in the disturbance. Videos also show pepper spray being deployed to neutralizetroublemakers at the demonstration.

One protestor compared the lockdown to the panic created by the millennium bug, which turned out to be unjustified.

"I'm worried about my kids. But what it is, is right, is I got onto this sort of thing, remember the year 2000, 'millennium bug,' when they scared the life out of the world for six months? This [is] the same thing. Fear is a great controller. So basically, we're being controlled using fear," he told Ruptly, RT's video agency.

Former Supreme Court judge Lord Jonathan Sumption is in agreement.

Liverpool was the first city in England to be hit with the highest regional coronavirus restrictions on October 14 but is now subjected to the even stricter measures of the national lockdown until December 2.

Meanwhile, university students in Manchester marched around their Fallowfield campus in protest against the restrictions placed upon their lives, including the erection of a perimeter fence around their halls as a "security measure" to "help avoid the mixing of households."

In other footage published by Ruptly, students can be seen cheering as the fencing was torn down.

"There is fencing around the whole outside, we feel like it's completely unnecessary. It makes it feel like we're in a prison," one of the students told the BBC. The university subsequently apologized for putting up the fence and said it would be removed on Friday.

Many students in Manchester and across the country have been isolating for weeks and have not received face-to-face tutoring, despite paying £9,000 a year for their university education.

Both cities, Liverpool and Manchester, have been deemed epicenters of the second wave of the coronavirus in the UK and faced local restrictions before the national lockdown commenced on Thursday.

On Friday, Liverpool will become the first city in the country to take part in a mass Covid-19 testing trial. Around 2,000 British military personnel are being drafted in to increase capacity at test sites.

This appears to a worrying precedent and there are clues as to what the army could be used for next: UK's NHS to enlist ARMY to vaccinate ENTIRE population with coronavirus vaccine, will do a 'dry run' with flu vaccine

The pilot scheme will offer everyone living and working in Liverpool the opportunity to have repeat coronavirus tests over the two-week trial period. It comes amid fears that the new technology, which provides rapid results within 20 minutes, was missing up to half of Covid-19 infections.

"You can expect to see an increase in armed police patrols across London over the next few days," the police said on Twitter. It's a "precautionary measure" due to the raised terrorist threat level, they added, while urging the public to "stay alert and report anything suspicious to police."

British authorities raised the terrorist threat level from 'substantial' to 'severe' on Tuesday. It's the second highest level, meaning that an attack is believed to be highly likely. The move was made after Austria and France witnessed deadly attacks in recent weeks.

Armed officers will be patrolling mostly empty streets in London as England went into lockdown on Thursday in an attempt to stem the sharp rise in coronavirus cases. Until December 2, residents are forbidden to leave their homes except for essential reasons like work, education, or receiving medical assistance.

This Monday, a man who previously tried to join Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS), went on a rampage in Vienna, killing four people with an automatic rifle before being shot dead by police. The shocking events in the Austrian capital followed an attack on a church in Nice, France in which three people were killed, and the beheading of school teacher Samuel Paty near Paris in mid-October.

The attack on Paty is believed to be an act of revenge, as he showed his students cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed during a class on freedom of speech. President Emmanuel Macron enraged Muslims around the world with his endorsement of caricatures of Mohammed, while the country's security forces have cracked down on organizations suspected of promoting radical Islam.

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[...]

In news that will likely cast further doubt on the election results, tens of thousands of absentee ballots arrived in large U.S. Postal Service boxes at the TCF Center in Detroit, Mich. on Wednesday morning at 3:30 am. The TCF Center, formerly Cobo Hall, is ere the absentee ballots are counted for Wayne County, which is the home of Detroit.

Former Michigan state senator Patrick Colbeck wrote that the total number of ballots dumped on the counting board totaled 38,000:

Before the ballots showed up mysteriously at 3:30 am, no ballots had arrived at the TCF Center for over six hours, and many poll workers in the facility sat around with no work to do while getting paid hundreds of dollars by the state of Michigan.

According to Michigan election law, all of these mail-in and absentee ballots had to be submitted before 8pm on Tuesday night in order to be lawfully accepted and counted for the election. This means the city of Detroit potentially sat on these ballots for hours. The white van that arrived had the name of Detroit city clerk Janice Winfrey emblazoned upon it as well as a logo and a phone number. Last month, Winfrey set the stage to drag out the process in an interview with ABC 7 News.

"We're back in control, and we know that we will have nearly 10,000 poll workers that will be working with us to process ballots on election day, or election week is what we're calling it now, because we know we're going to be slow," she said, adding that she was not going to let "outside influencers" get in the way of her election day schemes.

That entire interview with Winfrey can be seen in its full context here:

The ballots were kept away when they could have otherwise been taken to the TCF Center in smaller, more manageable batches. Countless taxpayer dollars were wasted and many poll challengers were disenfranchised because delivery took so long. The ballots being in limbo for such a lengthy period of time also increases the potentiality for fraud as well.

[...]

[...]

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden says "it's clear that we're winning enough states to reach 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency."

Biden stopped short of claiming victory outright, but pointed out his margins in Wisconsin, Arizona, Michigan, the popular vote lead, and confidence about winning Pennsylvania based on the rate of mail-in ballots he's been winning.

Standing alongside his running mate Kamala Harris, who did not speak, Biden urged Americans to "unite, to heal, to come together as a nation" and not treat opponents as enemies.

Biden promised he would govern as a president for all Americans, not as a Democrat. However, his speech also contained a warning, presumably aimed at the Trump campaign's challenge to some of the voting results, that "No one's going to take our democracy away from us - not now, not ever."

[...]

[...]

Claiming Pennsylvania, Georgia and North Carolina, Trump said his campaign had a "big" lead in all three. "Additionally, we hereby claim the State of Michigan if, in fact, there was a large number of secretly dumped ballots as has been widely reported!" he tweeted.

Twitter immediately slapped a warning label on the president's post, noting that "Official sources may not have called the race when this was tweeted."

The second tweet, about the "large number of secretly dumped ballots" also got flagged as "disputed and might be misleading."

Media outlets entrusted by social networks to make election calls have not yet called any of those states for either candidate, aside from Michigan which was declared for Biden moments prior to Trump's announcement.

In a press conference in Philadelphia, the president's campaign claimed to have evidence of widespread irregularities concerning the counting of mail-in ballots, millions of which have been cast in this election.

Republican observers said they were not allowed to attend the counting in several Democrat urban strongholds, thanks to whose votes Biden claimed lead in Michigan and Wisconsin.

"We're going to win this election! We've actually won it, it's just a matter of counting the votes fairly," said Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, speaking on behalf of the president's campaign in Philadelphia.

[...]

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