Society's ChildS


Attention

Prison for anti-vaxxers? People who promote refusal of vaccines should be made criminally responsible, suggests Russian official

russia covid vaccine center
© SputnikLaw enforcement officers register to receive a dose of Russia's Gam-COVID-VAK (trademark "Sputnik V") coronavirus vaccine at the vaccination point in Gostiny Dvor, in Moscow, Russia.
With Russia's campaign to inoculate its citizens against Covid-19 being hampered by widespread anti-vaccination sentiment, a local official has proposed introducing penalties for those who call for others to refuse taking part.

In a letter seen by RT, the First Deputy Chairman of the Leningrad Region Civic Chamber asked federal Minister of Justice Konstantin Chuychenko to introduce criminal liability for spreading anti-vaxx propaganda, noting that some people promote fake information about the potential dangers of vaccines.

"I ask you to assess the idea of amending the Criminal Code to include responsibility for those calling for others to refuse vaccination on non-medical grounds," Vladimir Petrov wrote, also noting that there should be an extra penalty for medical professionals who disseminate false and harmful information about vaccination.

Comment: The key here is spreading knowingly false information. From the wording here, it would seem that if someone was spreading information they believed to be true, the penalties wouldn't apply.

See also:


Treasure Chest

Photos of Senior Russian traffic policeman's mansion go viral after arrest over bribery charges

golden toilet bowl
© Alexander Khinshtein / TelegramOne photo — that of the residence's golden toilet bowl — quickly spread across Russian social media.
Photos of a high-ranking Russian traffic cop's gaudy mansion, including a golden toilet seat and painted ceilings, have gone viral after he was arrested for bribery and abuse of power, along with other police officers.

Alexey Safonov, the head of the southern Stavropol region's traffic police, was detained on Tuesday. The authorities believe he was the head of a criminal organization.

The news was announced by State Duma MP Alexander Khinshtein, who revealed on Telegram that the police and national guard conducted a huge operation on Tuesday morning.

Water

Iran's oil-rich Khuzestan hit by fifth night of protests over water shortage

Protest Iran water
© TwitterIranians protest water shortages in Susangerd, Iran
Protests in Iran's oil-rich Khuzestan province continued for a fifth-straight night over a severe water shortage.

Video posted on social media on July 19 showed protesters chanting and blocking roads as security forces try to disperse crowds with tear gas. In some videos, what appears to be the sound of gunfire can be heard.

Protests have been held in a number of cities across the southwestern province, including in Ahvaz, Ramhormoz, and Susangerd.

At least two people have been killed since the protests erupted on July 15. Unconfirmed reports put the death toll at four. Human rights groups say the protesters were killed by security forces, but the local government blames "rioters" for the deaths. Iran's government has long blamed protesters for deaths during unrest, despite its history of bloody crackdowns.

Iran is facing its worst drought in at least 50 years, a natural event exacerbated by poor water management. The drought has hit agriculture and left dams with little water supply. Parts of the country have experienced weeks of blackouts.

Comment: Low rainfall is to blame along with accusations of mismanagement:
In the western province of Lorestan, the Head of the Water and Sewage Company, Hamidreza Kermond, said there are 120 villages that depend on tankers for their daily water. 1.2 million people from the 1.8 million population are facing water problems.

"There is no more water left that we can distribute through the water network and pump to the storage tanks," Kermond said.

According to a report by the Human Rights News Agency, a citizen in Isfahan central Iran said they did not have water for long periods of time.
"The authorities sent 40 tankers into the city, instead of presenting an effective solution. The sanitation of the distributed water was unclear to us, since we want our women and children to drink from it."
An official in nomadic issues in the northeastern province of North Khorasan said over 3,000 nomadic families have a serious need of water.
Iranians well
© Iran News Wire
"We need at least 30 billion rials ($122,100) to provide a mobile water supply, which was not given to us yet," the official said. He added that many of the natural water supplies such as water springs in the region have dried up.

In Varzaqan, northwestern Iran, the Governor said that 65 villages have problems with their water supply. He added many areas do not have drinking water.

In Semnan, northern Iran, Iraj Heydarian, the Head of the Water Company of the district said there has been a 34% decrease in water in the province since last year. Heydarian also said there was a 46% decrease in rainfall since last year.

According to official statistics, there have only been 112 millimeters of rainfall this year, whereas the average rainfall in Iran is usually 192 millimeters. In addition to Iran's water crisis, the constant blackouts across Iran have only intensified problems for farmers and livestock owners.

In Ahvaz, southwestern Iran, hundreds of Iranian Arabs took to the streets on July 11 to protest the water shortages. Locals demanded their water rights and the blockage of dams. They gathered peacefully outside the Governor's building, demanding authorities to respond to the water problems. Security forces surrounded the locals and detained many of the participants in the water protests. Ahvaz temperatures yesterday had a high of 49°C/120°F.



Padlock

Florida man receives 8-month prison term in first felony sentence from January 6 Capitol breach

Paul Allard Hodgkins
© Screenshot1 Paul Allard Hodgkins in the U.S. Senate on January 6, 2021
A Florida man, who breached the U.S. Capitol on January 6, was sentenced to eight months in prison on Monday. Paul Allard Hodgkins pleaded guilty last month to one count of obstructing an official proceeding - Congress' certification of the 2020 presidential election results.

Prosecutors, who asked for an 18-month sentence, argued that Hodgkins, "like each rioter, contributed to the collective threat to democracy."

U.S. District Court Judge Randolph Moss of Washington, DC. said:
"Although you were only one member of a larger mob, you actively participated in a larger event that threatened the Capitol and democracy itself. The damage that was caused that way was way beyond a several-hour delay of the vote certification. It is a damage that will persist in this country for several decades."
According to video footage, Hodgkins breached the Senate chamber and took a selfie with the infamous "Shaman," who donned a horned helmet.

Hodgkins' sentencing could set a standard for hundreds of other defendants now facing prosecution for their actions on January 6. The judge's ruling will likely help other defendants decide whether to accept plea deals or go to trial.

Comment: One down. The standard is set and the rest, like dominoes, will follow. So, whose 'collective threat' is it really?


Headphones

NPR's brilliant self-own

npr logo
© NPR
National Public Radio complains about a media figure who tells people "what their opinions should be" and uses political "buzzwords".

Yesterday's NPR article, "Outrage As A Business Model: How Ben Shapiro Is Using Facebook To Build An Empire," is among the more unintentionally funny efforts at media criticism in recent times.

The piece is about Ben Shapiro, but one doesn't have to have ever followed Shapiro, or even once read the Daily Wire, to get the joke. The essence of NPR's complaint is that a conservative media figure not only "has more followers than The Washington Post" but outperforms mainstream outlets in the digital arena, a fact that, "experts worry," may be "furthering polarization" in America. NPR refers to polarizing media as if they're making an anthropological discovery of a new and alien phenomenon.

The piece goes on to note that "other conservative outlets such as The Blaze, Breitbart News and The Western Journal that publish aggregated and opinion content have also "generally been more successful...than legacy news outlets over the past year, according to NPR's analysis." In other words, they're doing better than us.

Pills

Real-world patients are up to 400% more likely to suffer adverse events than drug trials show - Lancet study

vaccine side effects lottery gambling profit
© The Daily Sceptic
Dr Sebastian Rushworth has written today about the serious problem of the underestimation of side-effects in drug trials, which he says should "shake the very foundations of evidence based medicine".

His article reports on the results of a study recently published in the Lancet Healthy Longevity, funded by the UK Medical Research Council and the Wellcome Trust, which seeks to establish the extent to which drug trials underestimate side-effects by comparing trial data to real world data. The study focuses in particular on blood pressure drugs known as RAAS blockers, which Dr Rushworth explains were chosen because of the number of trials that have been done by different companies. There is no reason the results should not apply equally to other drugs, he says, including Covid vaccines (for which there have been an unprecedented number of adverse event reports despite the trials showing them to be safe).

Comment: Given the insane profits pulled in by Big Pharma, the idea that drugs trials would be fudged makes complete sense. What good corporate entity would want to sink a pile of cash into a multi-year R&D program and then have to report to its shareholders that it was a bust? Better yet, move the trials overseas, where those pesky regulators can't reach:


Light Saber

JK Rowling blasts Trans Activists after death threat: 'This movement poses no risk to Women whatsoever'

J.K. Rowling
© Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images
On Sunday, famed "Harry Potter" author JK Rowling, who has endured vitriol and abuse from transgender activists, fired back at someone who sent her a death threat over Twitter, wishing her to receive a pipe bomb in her mailbox. Rowling blasted, "To be fair, when you can't get a woman sacked, arrested or dropped by her publisher, and cancelling her only made her book sales go up, there's really only one place to go."

The exchange had been triggered when Rowling replied to a critic who quoted her saying, "I've ignored porn tweeted at children." Rowling fired back, "Juan, I'll give you a moment to think hard about leaving that up. I reported every bit of porn so-called trans allies tweeted into Twitter threads where children were sending me artwork for the Ickabog. I didn't respond or retweet it because I didn't want more kids to see it."

Comment: See also:


Handcuffs

South African ex-president Jacob Zuma's corruption trial resumes online

  • Zuma, 79, faces 16 charges of fraud, corruption and racketeering
  • The ex-leader has retained a fervent support base within the ruling African National Congress party and among the general public
Jacob Zuma
© South Africa Judiciary via APSouth African ex-president Jacob Zuma’s supporters portray him as a defender of the poor.
Jacob Zuma returned to court on Monday for the resumption of a long-running corruption trial, testifying from jail as proceedings unfolded online in a bid to avert more of the deadly unrest that swept South Africa after the former president was sentenced in a separate case.

Security forces threw a cordon around the High Court in the southeastern city of Pietermaritzburg, capital of Zuma's home region of KwaZulu-Natal, where loyalists have previously gathered in rowdy shows of support.

The measures were later eased to allow street access after the area was deserted.

Handcuffs

Protesters brutally beaten and arrested by police on UK "Freedom Day"

freedom day arrests
© Vuk Valcic/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
Doesn't look much like freedom.

People in London protesting the fact that so called "freedom day" is anything but that, were met with even harsher police responses than during lockdown Monday, with chaotic footage emerging of beatings and arrests.

The action predominantly took place in Parliament Square, with protesters chanting "arrest Boris Johnson" and "shame on police."

Comment: See also:


Syringe

Fauci: Smallpox, polio would still be in U.S. if "false information" spread like it has with COVID

Fauci
© Jim Lo Scalzo/Pool via APDr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases
Anthony Fauci said on Saturday that he thinks smallpox and polio would still be spreading in the U.S. if today's "false information" were present then.

"If you look at the extraordinary historic success in eradicating smallpox and eliminating polio from most of the world, and we're on the brink of eradicating polio, if we had the pushback for vaccines the way we're seeing on certain media, I don't think it would have been possible at all to not only eradicate smallpox; we probably would still have smallpox, and we probably would still have polio in this country," Fauci, President Biden's chief medical adviser, said in response to a question from "CNN Newsroom" host Jim Acosta.

"If we had the kind of false information that's being spread now, if we had that back decades ago, I would be certain that we'd still have polio in this country," he added.

Comment: If there had been social media when the first polio vaccines were given, the public would've had the opportunity to avoid the horrific maiming of thousands of children otherwise known as the Cutter Incident:
The Cutter vaccine had been used in vaccinating 200,000 children in the western and midwestern United States.[76] Later investigations showed that the Cutter vaccine had caused 40,000 cases of polio, killing 10.[76] In response the Surgeon General pulled all polio vaccines made by Cutter Laboratories from the market, but not before 250 cases of paralytic illness had occurred. Wyeth polio vaccine was also reported to have paralyzed and killed several children. It was soon discovered that some lots of Salk polio vaccine made by Cutter and Wyeth had not been properly inactivated, allowing live poliovirus into more than 100,000 doses of vaccine.
Global Research reports:
This scenario of fast tracking unsafe and poorly researched vaccines was certainly the case for one of the first polio vaccines in 1955. In fact the polio vaccine received FDA approval and licensure after two hours of review - the fastest approved drug in the FDA's history. Known as the Cutter Incident, because the vaccine was manufactured by Cutter Laboratories, within days of vaccination, 40,000 children were left with polio, 200 with severe paralysis and ten deaths. Shortly thereafter the vaccine was quickly withdrawn from circulation and abandoned.

The CDC's website still promulgates a blatant untruth that the Salk vaccine was a modern medical success. To the contrary, officials at the National Institutes of Health were convinced that the vaccine was contributing to a rise in polio and paralysis cases in the 1950s. In 1957 Edward McBean documented in his book The Poisoned Needle that government officials stated the vaccine was "worthless as a preventive and dangerous to take." Some states such as Idaho where several people died after receiving the Salk vaccine, wanted to hold the vaccine makers legally liable. Dr. Salk himself testified in 1976 that his live virus vaccine, which continued to be distributed in the US until 2000, was the "principal if not sole cause" of all polio cases in the US since 1961. However, after much lobbying and political leveraging, private industry seduced the US Public Health Service to proclaim the vaccine safe.[2] Although this occurred in the 1950s, this same private industry game plan to coerce and buy off government health agencies has become epidemic with practically every vaccine brought to market during the past 50 years.
See also: