Republican lawmakers in South Carolina introduced legislation to make it illegal for employers to ask about coronavirus vaccination status, saying it's private medical information.

The bill's author said the legislation is needed because unvaccinated individuals are suffering real-world consequences.

"We have people in South Carolina that are losing their jobs because they have to report to their employer that they're unvaccinated," bill sponsor Rep. Mike Burns told Fox News Digital. "We also have people who are having their insurance rates put in a different category. They're charging up to an extra $100 a week more than the vaccinated people. It is absolutely insane to do this kind of thing."

The legislation, H. 4848, was introduced on Jan. 20. The bill would make it a criminal offense for any employer, business, nonprofit or public entity to ask about someone's COVID-19 vaccination status.

Coming up on three decades ago, in the early years of writing my weekly column for the Irish Times, I fell into writing on a theme that might have been described as a critique of contemporary economics. I was not an 'expert': my sole formal qualification in economics was a pass in a Leaving Cert paper that, being doubtful if I had enough subjects to scrape through, I took at the last minute on the basis that, having plumped for Latin rather than Economics, I had sat with one ear cocked through numerous 'free' classes sleepily listening to half my class being rather reluctantly schooled in concepts like supply and demand, inflation and recession. I found it more interesting than Latin but did not like the teacher. A 'C' allowed me to pass my Leaving Cert and escape from the horror of education.

I was probably not the only person in the world in the early 1990s who was beginning to think there was something wrong about the way we had slipped into thinking about economics, but I was certainly the only one writing about it in the Ireland of the time. The conventional economics-related arguments occurred between those calling for more 'rationalisation' — by which they meant greater profits — and those who saw public spending as an instrument of 'redistribution,' a kind of necessary governmental 'humanitarianism' to counteract the laws of markets. I thought both positions missed the obvious: the primary purpose of economics was to construct a model of human transactions that served the human need to live and coexist in functional and comfortable material interrelationships.

This intention had seemed to become lost in a discussion in which there prevailed a notion that economics was about defending a 'realistic' view of work and production in which human beings had become a problem rather than the central beneficiaries. For a couple of years, but especially through 1993, I wrote persistently about this, regularly incurring the condescension of the economic establishment of the time. I wrote about the 'downsizings' and closures of industries, the starving out of essential and previously valued public services, the escalating obsession with increasing profit at all costs, the true meanings of wealth and poverty, the skewed conventional concepts of transaction costs, the persistent valourisation of global 'values' (what I called 'the struggle against placelessness'), and the recurrent question: 'Where's the money going to come from?'

Newly released emails seemingly contradict Boris Johnson's claim that he did not intervene in the evacuation of animals from Kabul.

Emails released Wednesday by the UK Parliament's Foreign Affairs Select Committee, which is investigating the hurried British evacuation from Kabul, Afghanistan in August 2021, suggest Prime Minister Boris Johnson did authorize the evacuation of staff and animals. He has previously denied involvement in the matter.

In one communication dating from August 2021, a UK Foreign Office official discussing an evacuation request from an animal charity wrote that Johnson had approved the evacuation of an "equivalent charity" called Nowzad.

Canadian reporter Josh Freed "fled" Quebec's lockdowns for a voluntary vacation in Florida but then blasted the Sunshine State for wearing pandemic "blinders" in an article published in the Montreal Gazette.

Freed contrasted Canada's handling of COVID-19, where people live "in full confinement mode," with the freedoms of Florida, noting the difference in people's mental health.

"In ever-friendly America, some customers even shake hands with their waiters before leaving, to say, 'Thanks, I'll have some germs for dessert,'" Freed wrote. "It's health madness, but there's a psychological upside, since COVID doesn't dominate all life like [in Canada]. We, Montrealers, live in a tense, depressing pandemic bubble — all-COVID, all the time — which is why many people avoid following the news."

Recent research from Gallup documents changes in America's political ideology over the last year. A previous preference for the Democratic Party shifted to a preference for the GOP.

On average, 25% described their views as liberal, 37% as moderate, and 36% as conservative. Compared with Republicans and independents, greater ideological diversity was evident within the Democratic Party, with half identifying as liberal and the other half identifying as moderate (37%) or conservative (12%).

This shift likely reflected a variety of factors, including the change in presidents, the response to COVID-19, and the rise in inflation. When polling numbers were broken down by race, an additional theme emerged: Only 26% of blacks and 28% of Hispanics identified as liberal. A similar trend has been documented among Asian Americans, with 44% disapproving of President Joe Biden's performance, demonstrating the greatest disapproval rating among racial minority groups.

The mobile phones of a senior Human Rights Watch staff member are alleged to have been repeatedly hacked by a client of NSO Group at a time when she was investigating the catastrophic August 2020 explosion that killed more than 200 people in Beirut.

The alleged hacking of Lama Fakih, a US-Lebanese citizen and director of crisis and conflict at HRW, marks the latest example of how NSO's powerful surveillance tool, Pegasus, has been used by the company's clients to target campaigners and journalists.

HRW said that Fakih had been alerted by Apple on 24 November 2021 that her personal iPhone could be under state-sponsored attack. An investigation by HRW's security team, which was reviewed by Amnesty International's Security Lab, found that Fakih's iPhones had apparently been infected with Pegasus through a so-called "zero-click" exploit that allows operators of the spyware to infect a phone without the mobile user doing anything, such as clicking on a link.




The news comes as NSO has faced a raft of bad news at home and abroad. In November, the company was placed on a US blacklist by the Biden administration, which said it had evidence that the Israeli company was enabling foreign governments to conduct "transnational repression".

Spotify has sided with its podcast superstar over Neil Young.

The legendary folk singer gave the streaming behemoth an ultimatum earlier this week, saying he refused to allow his music on the same platform as Joe Rogan. The "Heart of Gold" singer accused Rogan and his podcast of spreading false information about COVID-19 vaccines.

Spotify reportedly paid more than $100 million deal to be the exclusive home of Rogan's show. Young, meanwhile, stands to lose 60% of his streaming income from his defiant stance, he said in a statement on his website.

"We want all the world's music and audio content to be available to Spotify users," a spokesperson for the company told the Wall Street Journal. "With that comes great responsibility in balancing both safety for listeners and freedom for creators."

The sum of all fears for the average Russian has just been averted. The large packet of totalitarian answers to a problem of questionable magnitude has been booted from the State Duma. There has been an air of dread amongst the populace who were waiting to see if nationwide QR-code legislation would make it into law destroying their lives and businesses to separate those vaccinated from plague-ridden riff-raff. There was an expectation that some sort of Hegelian Dialectic gamesmanship would get a watered-down, but still crushing version of this system passed. Thankfully for the sake of the Russian economy and sanity itself this is now not to be. This decision to completely bail on a QR Code apartheid not only comes at an interesting moment in history but has great relevance for Russia itself and issues related to Covid-19 on a global scale.

At least one person was injured from a powerful explosion in central Athens early Wednesday which damaged an office block and smashed nearby storefronts.

The pre-dawn blast occurred 200 meters from the ancient Temple of Olympian Zeus on the busy Syngrou Avenue.

The blast caused a fire on the mezzanine floor, which spread to the first floor, while extensive damage has been done to other buildings in the area due to the shock wave. The wreckage caused damage to many vehicles.

Extremist groups in the United States appear to increasingly view attacking the power grid as a means of disrupting the country, according to a government report aimed at law enforcement agencies and utility operators.

Domestic extremists "have developed credible, specific plans to attack electricity infrastructure since at least 2020," according to the report from the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Intelligence and Analysis. The document, dated Monday, was obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press.

The report warns that extremists "adhering to a range of ideologies will likely continue to plot and encourage physical attacks against electrical infrastructure," which includes more than 6,400 power plants and 450,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines that span the country.

Experts on the U.S. power grid have pointed out that it would be difficult to knock out power to the nation given the size and decentralized nature of the grid. The DHS report also notes that attackers, without inside help at least, would be unlikely to produce widespread, multistate outages, though they could still do damage and cause injuries.

It comes as both the FBI and DHS have repeatedly warned in recent months that the U.S. faces a heightened threat from domestic extremists.