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Iran, Australia, Singapore reimpose or tighten lockdown restrictions - because 'cases' - France "not ruling out" curfews


Yahoo News
Mon, 19 Jul 2021 20:12 UTC
mask australia
© DIEGO FEDELE/GETTY IMAGES
Iran on Monday imposed a week-long lockdown on the capital, Tehran, and the surrounding region as the country struggles with another surge in the coronavirus pandemic, state media reported.

The lockdown — the nation's fifth so far — will begin on Tuesday and last until next Monday. All bazars, market places and public offices will close, as well as movie theaters, gyms and restaurants in both Tehran province and the neighboring province of Alborz.

Iran reported 25,441 new cases on Monday and 213 deaths over the past day, bringing the overall death toll to 87,374 from among more than 3.5 million confirmed cases in the pandemic.

During an earlier surge in cases, in April, Iran reported the highest daily number of cases, 25,582. At the time, its daily death tolls surged to around 400, below the grim record of 486 reached last November.

Iranian authorities have lately been warning about a new surge, fueled by the fast-spreading delta variant. In sanctions-hit Iran, which has the highest COVID-19 death toll in the Middle East, less than 2% of the population of 84 million has received both doses, mainly of the imported Russian and Chinese vaccines.

Comment: Same goes for New South Wales and Victoria, Australia. Restrictions in Victoria were supposed to end on Tuesday, but have been extended. Quarantine-free travel to New Zealand is on hold (indefinitely for NSW). NSW has recorded 98 cases on Monday. Victoria recorded 12 cases. Yep. 12.

Singapore reimposed restrictions just a week after easing them after recording 163 new "cases".

And France, being France, isn't ruling out "localized curfews", "according to the gravity of the situation."

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Arrow Down

Republican senators abandon stronger IRS enforcement for funding $1.2T infrastructure plan

Kaelan Deese
Washington Examiner
Sun, 18 Jul 2021 12:54 UTC
Portman Biden
© AP
Senator Rob Portman and President Joe Biden
Republican senators working to negotiate a bipartisan $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill are ditching plans to strengthen enforcement at the Internal Revenue Service as a way to pay for the legislation, Sen. Rob Portman said Sunday.

The Ohio GOP lawmaker is one of 22 senators working to negotiate the lofty infrastructure bill. The proposal to amplify IRS enforcement as a means to raise new revenues was not supported by his fellow conservative colleagues, Portman told CNN, indicating that negotiators will have to find new ways to pay for the bill.
"Well, one reason it's not part of the proposal is that we did have pushback. Another reason is that we found out that the Democrats were going to put a proposal into the reconciliation package, which was not just similar to the one we had but with a lot more IRS enforcement."
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Star of David

Israel's foreign minister admits it's an apartheid state

Yossi Gurvitz
Mondoweiss
Mon, 12 Jul 2021 00:00 UTC
Lapid/Rivlin
© Twitter
Israeli FM Yair Lapid • Outgoing President Reuven Rivlin
By felicitous circumstances (for details, see here), the Israeli opposition brought down the Citizenship Law last week. The law prevents Palestinian citizens of Israel from granting resident status to their spouses who are non-Israeli Palestinians. The rules are different for Jews. A Jew who marries a Jewish woman from the United States will thereby grant her citizenship rights here; if he marries an American Christian, the Home Office will grit its teeth and grant her residency rights; but the law prevented Israeli Palestinians marrying other Palestinians from granting them any right here.

Basically, the law told Palestinian citizens of Israel that if they choose to share their lives with a non-Israeli Palestinian, they should live in exile.

Technically, the law, first passed in 2003, was a "temporary order": the Knesset knew the High Court wouldn't swallow such a law if it was permanent, since the violation of rights was too severe. But the HCJ is similar to the Jewish angel of death: Blind and rather stupid. So it could pretend a "temporary order" approved year after year is not a law. After all, it's not like the law would affect the children of the justices, is it?
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Cell Phone

Israeli spyware successfully broke into journalists' iPhones by sending iMessages that didn't even need to be read

Isobel Asher Hamilton
Business Insider
Mon, 19 Jul 2021 00:00 UTC
iPhone attacks
© Stanislav Kogiku/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
Amnesty International found evidence of iPhones being hacked with 'zero-click' attacks
A forensic analysis by Amnesty International found a type of military-grade spyware was used to successfully break into journalists' iPhones, apparently by sending iMessages that didn't even need to be clicked.

The spyware is made by Israeli company NSO Group, a private firm that sells advanced hacking tools to clients including governments.

A group of 17 media outlets and Amnesty International published a report Sunday claiming NSO Group's Pegasus software was used by its clients to hack the phones of at least 37 journalists, activists, politicians, and business executives around the world.

NSO Group strongly denied the report, claiming it contained factual inaccuracies and lacked evidence.

Amnesty International published a forensic methodology report of how it analyzed targets' phones to discover whether they had been compromised by Pegasus.

The organization found evidence of "zero-click" iMessage attacks being targeted at journalists going back to 2018, with alarming implications for iPhone security. Zero-click attacks don't require any interaction from the victim to break into a phone.

Comment: What were some of the targets for Pegasus?
A leaked list of over 50,000 phone numbers is believed to include targets marked by clients of Israeli surveillance firm NSO Group for hacking. Some of the phones were reportedly infected with its flagship malware, Pegasus.

Among the people presumed to be selected for digital surveillance are
"hundreds of business executives, religious figures, academics, NGO employees, union officials and government officials, including cabinet ministers, presidents and prime ministers."
It also includes "close family members of one country's ruler, suggesting the ruler may have instructed their intelligence agencies to explore the possibility of monitoring their own relatives."

The bombshell allegations came on Sunday from members of a collective of 17 media organizations, which includes the British newspaper, based on their investigation of a leak obtained by the French outlet Forbidden Stories and the human rights group Amnesty International.

The average number of targets per customer was 112 and that the company had 45 customers for its Pegasus spyware, corroborating the NSO Group's assessment of the 50,000 figure.

The suspected hacking 'wishlist' reportedly goes back to 2016 and consists of entries selected by NSO Group clients in 10 countries, including Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Morocco, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Hungary, India, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Clients in Mexico selected the most numbers - more than 15,000 - followed by Morocco and the UAE, each with more than 10,000 numbers.
See also:

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Footprints

Russian envoys in Afghanistan evacuated 'temporarily' as Taliban fighters gain ground in troubled nation after US forces withdraw


RT
Mon, 12 Jul 2021 15:58 UTC
Afghan militia
© AFP/Hoshang Hashimi
Afghan militia in support of Afghanistan security forces against the Taliban
Russian diplomats and consular staff stationed in the Afghan border city of Hairatan have now been relocated to neighboring Uzbekistan, as the country descends into fierce fighting between Taliban militants and government troops.

Zamir Kabulov, the Russian president's special representative for Afghanistan, told TASS on Monday that personnel located in the northern town had crossed the frontier amid a worsening security situation.

"In Hairatan, since it is in a state of limbo, in order not to jeopardize the safety of our employees, we temporarily moved them to the territory of Uzbekistan," he said. The diplomats had reportedly been providing support to citizens in the region in recent days, and have only crossed into the relative safety of the former Soviet republic until fighting has died down.

However, Kabulov emphasized that there is "no such threat" to Russian staff working in the embassy in the capital, Kabul. While the situation is deteriorating, he said that the state of affairs was "alarming, but predictable. What we predicted is happening."
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Star of David

Israel comes up with new plan 'for punishing violators of lockdowns'


Sputnik
Sun, 18 Jul 2021 23:41 UTC
Bennett
© Ronen Zvulun/Reuters
Israeli PM Naftali Bennett
Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett is boosting the enforcement of coronavirus regulations against violators, the prime minister's office announced.

Bennet held a Corona Cabinet discussion on Sunday, during which the Public Security Ministry presented the prime minister with a plan for a national effort to enforce COVID-19 pandemic regulations.
"Our goal is to determine logical directives, alongside aggressive and efficient enforcement against violators. Whoever violates the directives is endangering his health and the other citizens of Israel. We will not allow this. The Delta mutation is leaping forward around the world. Implementing the directives on the ground is a critical component in managing the pandemic in order to beat the mutation."
The plan, presented to the Israeli prime minister. combines technological means and enforcement actions to be carried out by police officers and municipal inspectors.

Enforcing coronavirus regulations envisages the filing of criminal indictments against verified coronavirus patients who knowingly violate quarantine. Special emphasis will be put on weddings and other celebratory events as they carry greater potential for infection, according to the Israeli government.
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Quenelle

"Yankee, time to go home!": Iraqi PM says US combat troops have to leave

Ilya Tsukanov
Sputnik
Mon, 19 Jul 2021 19:16 UTC
US troops soldiers iraq
© AP Photo / Ali Abdul Hassan / File
In this March 27, 2020 file photo, U.S. soldiers stand guard during the hand over ceremony of Qayyarah Airfield, Iraqi Security Forces, in the south of Mosul, Iraq.
In January 2020, Iraq's parliament issued a resolution ordering the expulsion of all US and coalition forces from their country in response to the unprovoked assassination of a senior Iranian military commander in Baghdad. Washington has pared down its deployment and handed over some bases to Iraq, but refused to depart the country completely.

Iraq continues to depend on American security and training assistance, but doesn't want US combat troops to remain present in the country, Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi has said amid his preparations to visit Washington next week.

"We are visiting Washington to set out our relationship with America. The Iraqi army still needs their forces for training. We need their support to our air force, and we need their intelligence support in the fight against ISIS*," al-Kadhimi said, speaking to Saudi Arabia's al-Hadath TV on Sunday.
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Russian Flag

Moscow's media watchdog says YouTube leads in anti-Russian censorship and refusing to delete illegal content, after anti-trans video row


RT
Mon, 19 Jul 2021 18:57 UTC
youtube censor
© YouTube/KJN
Russia's state media regulator, Roskomnadzor, has pointed the finger at Google's video-streaming platform, YouTube, as the leading offender in both hosting illegal material and making unaccountable decisions to censor clips.

Officials made the comments on Sunday, after the American tech giant moved to block a video posted by Senator Alexey Pushkov, entitled 'Attack on the minds of babies: Children as victims of the transexual revolution'. Moscow's online watchdog is insisting that the post be restored.

"YouTube more often than other foreign services restricts access to materials from Russian media," Roskomnadzor said. "In total, about 30 cases of censorship of Russian publications and information resources have been identified."

Comment: And since YouTube is owned by Google:

Google to de-rank RT and Sputnik, makes millions in advertising revenue from videos that exploit children

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Bad Guys

Belarusan 'Guaido' begs help from Biden: Tikhanovskaya calls on Americans to oust Lukashenko


RT
Mon, 19 Jul 2021 18:39 UTC
Svetlana Tikhanovskaya belarus president
© Global Look Press / Darius Mataitis via www.imago-im
Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, failed Belarus presidential candidate
The self-described leader of Belarus' opposition movement, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, has called on US politicians to support her bid to remove her country's embattled leader, Alexander Lukashenko, as part of her visit to Washington.

In an interview with the National Interest magazine, published on Sunday, the 39-year-old activist, who has been living abroad since last summer's Belarusian presidential election, expressed hope that new US President Joe Biden would directly intervene in the Eastern European nation's domestic dispute. "With Biden's help we will prevail," she said.

Comment: If there's possibly a more pathetic political wannabe than Venezuela's Juan Guaido, Tikhanovskaya fills the bill. And it would do to be wary of any opinions or policies promoted by Chatham House. They are an old money, elitist think tank.

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Quenelle

French protesters draw anger at comparing vaccines to Nazi horrors - but the objectors are missing the point


The Independent
Mon, 19 Jul 2021 18:12 UTC
fire vaccine center france
© Associated Press
Vandals targeted the Urrugne vaccination in southwest France the weekend of July 19, 2021
A French Holocaust survivor has denounced anti-vaccination protesters comparing themselves to Jews who were persecuted by Nazi Germany during World War II. French officials and anti-racism groups joined the 94-year-old in expressing indignation.

As more than 100,000 people marched around France against government vaccine rules on Saturday, some demonstrators wore yellow stars recalling the ones the Nazis forced Jews to wear. Other demonstrators carried signs evoking the Auschwitz death camp or South Africa's apartheid regime, claiming the French government was unfairly mistreating them with its anti-pandemic measures.

"You can't imagine how much that upset me. This comparison is hateful. We must all rise up against this ignominy," Holocaust survivor Joseph Szwarc said Sunday during a ceremony commemorating victims of antisemitic and racist acts by the French state, which collaborated with Adolf Hitler's regime.

Comment: The gentleman interviewed is upset because he feels his history is being disrespected, but it also means he is blind to the blatant similarities of his experience, in the policies towards the current outgroup: those who refuse the vaccination. Ironically, ISRAEL is at the forefront of marking and tracking individuals to make sure they are vaccinated:

Freedom? Israel launches Covid-tracking 'FREEDOM BRACELET' as alternative to quarantine

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