Gov. Ron DeSantis said Monday he was issuing an executive order suspending any local pandemic-related restrictions.

During a bill signing at The Big Catch at Salt Creek, a restaurant near downtown St. Petersburg, DeSantis said ending local restrictions was the "evidence-based thing to do" considering the availability of vaccines.

"I think folks that are saying that they need to be policing people at this point, if you're saying that, you really are saying you don't believe in the vaccines, you don't believe in the data."

DeSantis on Monday signed Senate Bill 2006, passed by lawmakers last week that gives the governor the ability to override local emergency orders. That bill does not take effect until July 1, but DeSantis said he would issue an executive order suspending any local restrictions.

"The fact is, we're no longer in a state of emergency," he said.

Attorney Alan Dershowitz on Sunday explained why he agreed to help Rudy Giuliani as the former mayor is investigated over his Ukraine dealings — slamming the US as a "banana republic" after the FBI raided Giuliani's Manhattan home.

Dershowitz, a Harvard law professor who served on President Donald Trump's impeachment legal team, said it was "inappropriate" for the federal agents to execute a search warrant at Giuliani's Upper East Side apartment last week.

Dershowitz told host John Catsimatidis on the Cats Roundtable podcast Sunday:

"In banana republics, in Castro's Cuba, in many parts of the world when a candidate loses for president, they go after the candidate, they go after his lawyers, they go after his friends. That's happening in America now. They're going after Rudy Giuliani."

He noted that Giuliani was the US attorney for the Southern District of New York in the 1980s.

Over the past months, many lawmakers and media personalities in the US have called for a legislative review to limit what they call "Big Tech sovereignty," implying that social media have unlimited powers to determine what violates their guidelines and what does not.

Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri is warning that Big Tech firms are attempting to "transform America," claiming in a new book that mega-corporations are the "gravest threat" to liberty in decades.

In an interview with Fox News published on Sunday, Hawley characterized his book, "The Tyranny of Big Tech," as one that "corporate press, corporate media, and corporate monopolies" wanted to be "canceled."

"This is a book that corporate leftists don't want anybody to read, and for good reason," Hawley is quoted in the report as saying. "This is all about how big tech and mega corporations are working hand-in-hand with big government to try to run our country, silence our speech, and take over our government."

"And we have to stop them," the senator emphasized.

Simon & Schuster had been scheduled to publish the book, which is ultimately expected to appear in stores on May 4, but after Hawley and other Republicans objected to certifying the Electoral College votes in some swing states in the 2020 presidential election, the company dropped him as a client following the notorious Capitol riot on January 6.

The Philippines has taken the gloves off in its dispute with Beijing over the South China Sea, with its top diplomat dropping the F-bomb as he demanded the withdrawal of Chinese vessels near the Scarborough Shoal.

Foreign Secretary Teodoro Locsin Jnr dispensed with diplomatic niceties as he took to Twitter on Monday, calling China an "ugly oaf" and demanding it "get the f*** out" of Philippine maritime waters. His colourful language followed reports that Chinese coastguard ships had harassed their Philippine counterparts in the vicinity of the shoal, which is claimed by both countries.

One of President Joe Biden's top White House advisers suggested Sunday that he's still wearing a mask outdoors out of habit although the latest public health guidance says he doesn't need it.

Questioned about Biden's practice, senior adviser Anita Dunn told CNN's "State of the Union" that she realized that she was also still wearing her mask outdoors even after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said fully vaccinated people like her and Biden can stop wearing masks outside when they're alone or not among strangers.

"I myself found that I was still wearing my mask outdoors this week, because it has become such a matter of habit," Dunn said. "I think the president takes the CDC guidelines very seriously. And he's always taken his role as sending a signal to follow the science very seriously, as well."

A CIA recruitment ad featuring a "cisgender woman of color" who rails against the "patriarchy" and announces she has been diagnosed with "generalized anxiety disorder" has been ridiculed for its woke pandering.

The promo went viral on Twitter, racking up almost a million views, prompting 'The CIA' to start trending.

In the video, a Hispanic woman regurgitates glib social justice mantras, explaining how she is a "daughter of immigrants" while bragging about being "perfectly made."

"I am a cisgender millennial who has been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder," she states.


"I am intersectional, but my existence is not a box checking exercise," she adds, after having ticked a whole raft of 'diversity' boxes and showing off her 'Donald R. Cryer award for diversity and inclusion.'

She then begins rambling on about not allowing her inflection to rise at the end of her sentences and having "earned her way in" (but not by checking diversity boxes, surely?).

Boris Johnson has said there is a "good chance" the one-metre plus social distancing rule can be scrapped from 21 June.

During a campaign visit in Hartlepool, the prime minister told reporters: "I think we've got a good chance, a good chance, of being able to dispense with one-metre plus."

He stressed the move would be "dependent on the data" and "we can't say it categorically yet", but added: "That's what it feels like to me right now."


Under the government's roadmap for easing COVID-19 restrictions, 21 June is the date on which all legal limits on social contact are set to be removed.

But there have been suggestions that some separate measures - like mask wearing - could continue beyond that point.


The government's roadmap for relaxing coronavirus rules acknowledges that social distancing is "difficult and damaging for businesses and, as a result, it is important to return to as near to normal as quickly as possible".

In this new video, I tell the story of how a hostile foreign government helped stop a socialist becoming Britain's prime minister.

I've covered the story of the "anti-Semitism" witch hunt in the Labour Party since 2015. In that time, I've written an estimated 150 articles on the topic.

We've reported on the propaganda war against Jeremy Corbyn for years, and in detail.

But it can be a lot to take in. And for those who haven't followed the story all along, it may be hard to know where to start.

So The Electronic Intifada is proud to present this mini-documentary, giving an overview of how Israel and its lobby helped bring down Jeremy Corbyn.

It uses archive video clips and primary documents to bust the media smears about "Labour anti-Semitism."

Facing harsh economic measures imposed by Washington and its allies in Europe, Russia is working to cut Western influence out of its economy, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in an exclusive interview with RT.

In April, US President Joe Biden unveiled a new package of sanctions against Russian businesses and officials, while, at the same time, effectively banning American financial institutions from buying shares in Russian sovereign debt. Officials in Washington described the restrictions as a "proportional" response to alleged meddling by Moscow in the 2020 US presidential election, and assertions Russia was behind the colossal SolarWinds cyber-espionage breach detected last year. The Kremlin has strongly denied both sets of claims.

The UK and the EU have both since rolled out their own sanctions, and there is talk in European capitals of more measures to come. Few moves have been as extreme, though, as the decision to target national debt bonds, which the White House says was designed to hit the country's economy while minimizing the impact on world markets. However, some economists claimed the package of measures was mostly "symbolic," and the new rules could simply be "circumvented" if buyers still wanted to pick up shares in Russian debt.

"They were monsters with human faces, in crisp uniforms, marching in lockstep, so banal you don't recognize them for what they are until it's too late." — Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

The U.S. government, in its pursuit of so-called monsters, has itself become a monster.

This is not a new development, nor is it a revelation.

This is a government that has in recent decades unleashed untold horrors upon the world — including its own citizenry — in the name of global conquest, the acquisition of greater wealth, scientific experimentation, and technological advances, all packaged in the guise of the greater good.

Mind you, there is no greater good when the government is involved. There is only greater greed for money and power.

Unfortunately, the public has become so easily distracted by the political spectacle out of Washington, DC, that they are altogether oblivious to the grisly experiments, barbaric behavior and inhumane conditions that have become synonymous with the U.S. government.

These horrors have been meted out against humans and animals alike. For all intents and purposes, "we the people" have become lab rats in the government's secret experiments.

Fifty years from now, we may well find out the whole sordid truth behind this COVID-19 pandemic. However, this isn't intended to be a debate over whether COVID-19 is a legitimate health crisis or a manufactured threat. It is merely to acknowledge that such crises can — and are — manipulated by governments in order to expand their powers.

As we have learned, it is entirely possible for something to be both a genuine menace to the nation's health and security and a menace to freedom.

This is a road the United States has been traveling for many years now. Indeed, grisly experiments, barbaric behavior and inhumane conditions have become synonymous with the U.S. government, which has meted out untold horrors against humans and animals alike.

For instance, did you know that the U.S. government has been buying hundreds of dogs and cats from "Asian meat markets" as part of a gruesome experiment into food-borne illnesses? The cannibalistic experiments involve killing cats and dogs purchased from Colombia, Brazil, Vietnam, China and Ethiopia, and then feeding the dead remains to laboratory kittens, bred in government laboratories for the express purpose of being infected with a disease and then killed.

It gets more gruesome.