The Arizona Senate is set to pass a contempt resolution finding that the Maricopa County Board has failed to comply with a subpoena demanding access to elections equipment and ballots cast in the November election, with the potential threat of arrest alluded to in the sure-to-pass resolution.

The Associated Press reported Wednesday:

The Senate introduced the resolution Wednesday afternoon. Timing on a full Senate vote is unclear, but all 16 Republican senators are listed as sponsors, meaning it is virtually certain to pass.

Greta Thunberg accidentally shared a message showing she was getting told what to write on Twitter about the ongoing violent farmers' revolt in India — leading Thursday to her being probed for criminal conspiracy by police there, according to reports.

The 18-year-old left-wing eco-activist shared — and then quickly deleted — a message that detailed a list of "suggested posts" about the ongoing protests, according to the posts that were saved by Breaking 911.

The list gave a series of tips on what to post, asking her to also repost and tag other celebrities tweeting about it, including pop star Rihanna.

An extremist Israeli rabbi was convicted on Monday for inciting violence and hate crime against Palestinians. The maximum sentence for such an offence is five years in prison.

Yosef Elitzur, who lives in the illegal settlement of Yitzhar in the occupied West Bank, was indicted in 2013 for "incitement to violence" in publications condoning the killing of non-Jews. Elitzur was among the authors of a book called Torat HaMelekh, which is said to be a rabbinic instruction manual outlining acceptable scenarios for killing non-Jewish babies, children and adults.

A description of the book's hateful content published by Haaretz explained how, for example, "Thou Shalt Not Murder" applies only "to a Jew who kills a Jew". Non-Jews are considered "uncompassionate by nature" and attacks on them are believed to "curb their evil inclination". Babies and children of Israel's enemies may be killed, it said, since "it is clear that they will grow to harm us."

A recent surge in violence in the Tigray region has left 1,000 dead.

Up to 1,000 people — including priests and other church leaders — have been killed in a series of attacks in Ethiopia culminating in a massacre at a church where the Ark of the Covenant is believed to be kept.

Following reports that 750 people were killed in a raid on the Orthodox Maryam Tsiyon Church in Aksum, thought to contain the Ark of the Covenant, an anonymous source from inside the country spoke to Aid to the Church in Need (ACN).

The source told ACN the attack was the latest in a long line of fatal assaults against innocent people, as part of the ongoing conflict in the Tigray region of the country.

While the exact practical applications and repercussions of the digital documentation of one's COVID status are still under consideration, its primary purpose is to facilitate the revival of public and business life after a series of lockdowns. Still, many remain sceptical, fearing it will be seen as coercion and bolster vaccine reluctance.

The Danish government has announced it is to introduce so-called "digital corona passports" that will be used to document vaccination.

"In three to four months, the digital corona passport will be ready for use for things like business trips", Taxation Minister Morten Bødskov said, as quoted by Denmark's TV2.

The government and business representatives will decide on the exact consequences and opportunities of the vaccine passport once it has been fully introduced, depending on the situation with the coronavirus at that time, the minister said.

"It will be an extra pass you can have on your mobile phone, which documents your vaccination status", Bødskov said. "This is about us, as a country, making use of the technical advantages we have. We can be amongst the first in the world to have this and show it to the rest of the world", he said.

Jordan Peterson was a relatively unknown clinical psychologist and University of Toronto professor until his brave 2016 challenge to a draconian Canadian law on transgender pronouns drew widespread attention. Millions watched his brilliant, wide-ranging YouTube lectures about life, truth, feelings, personality, and values. For a while there he seemed ubiquitous, giving interviews and lectures around the world and, in the process, becoming the planet's most famous living public intellectual. He published a massive bestseller, 12 Rules for Life.

Then, suddenly, he disappeared. For the last two years he's been in medical hell, experiencing torturous pain and being brought to the brink of death by a puzzling malady that took him, in search of answers, to hospitals, clinics, and rehab centers in Canada, the U.S., Russia, and Serbia. Meanwhile his wife was diagnosed with a rare and deadly cancer from which she now seems, miraculously, to have recovered. On top of everything else, he, his wife, and his deeply devoted adult daughter all contracted the COVID virus.

Emerging from this nightmare and prepared to step back onto the public stage, Peterson agreed to a major interview with Decca Aitkenhead for the Sunday Times of London. The story appeared on January 31; on the same day, Peterson posted on YouTube a recording of the nearly three-hour Zoom conversations that he and his daughter, Mikhaila, had with Aitkenhead. In the recording (which as of Wednesday had accumulated half a million hits), Peterson is friendly and forthcoming, but emotionally fragile as a consequence of his long torment; at one point he breaks into tears and has to step away from the microphone. Mikhaila, for her part, spends an hour and a half telling Aitkenhead the full story of Peterson's illness, complete with vivid particulars. And Aitkenhead poses throughout as entirely sympathetic, sounding more like a compassionate social worker than a journalist.

Irritated by the sweeping use of executive orders during the COVID-19 crisis, state lawmakers around the U.S. are moving to curb the authority of governors and top health officials to impose emergency restrictions such as mask rules and business shutdowns.

The push is underway in such states as Arizona, Michigan, Ohio, Maryland, Kentucky, Indiana and Pennsylvania, where legislators are seeking a constitutional amendment to strip the governor of many of his emergency powers.

Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Wayne Langerholc said the amendment would "make it unequivocally clear that our General Assembly is a co-equal branch ... that we are not a monarchy and that our voices matter."

Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf and some of his counterparts around the country have argued that they need authority to act quickly and decisively against the fast-changing threat.

The coronavirus has killed an estimated 430,000 Americans and is going through its most lethal phase yet, despite the rollout of vaccines, with new and more contagious variants from abroad turning up in the U.S.

All primary and secondary school students in China will, in principle, be barred from bringing mobile phones to school, the Ministry of Education announced on Monday.

The new measure, aimed at protecting students' eyesight, making sure they focus on study and preventing them from becoming addicted to the internet and online games, has sparked heated debate among parents over the practicality of implementation and the need to keep their children up to pace with phone-centered technological advances in everyday life.

When Dai Hanyang was in middle school, his head teacher brought a hammer to school to enforce a cellphone ban.

There were 11 states in the US which refused to lock down this autumn and winter. The doomsday models churned out by SAGE, Imperial College and others predicted that any country, region or state that declined to lockdown would face overrun hospitals and massive death tolls compared to those that did lock down, as the virus, no longer controlled by the restrictions, "ripped" through the population.

Perhaps the authors of such models would care to explain this then. The chart above shows the Covid death toll per million people up to February 1st of the no-lockdown American states in red. If the doomsday models are correct, why don't the bars for those states clearly stand out from the bars of the lockdown states in blue? Furthermore, why are the top five states for Covid deaths lockdown states?

In fact, the lockdown states on average had 5.6% more deaths than the no-lockdown states (the orange bars). If anything this suggests lockdown made things worse. At any rate there's no sign it helped.

Positive cases are now sharply in decline in the US, and no less sharply in no-lockdown states than in lockdown states. This means there is no reason to think the gap between lockdown and no-lockdown states will be closed this winter.

Isn't it time the lockdown proponents put their models to the test in the real world? Time to put up or shut up. Either their models can reproduce the outcomes of real states which don't lock down, or they can't and need to be fundamentally revised. No more hiding behind counterfactuals of "it would have happened but for lockdown". The facts are here and waiting to be explained.

Stop Press: Alexander Fiske-Harrison in the Telegraph points out that "the European countries with the strictest lockdowns have come out no better".

While 2020 may be remembered as the year Orwell turned over in his grave - and also the year deemed the perfect "match" for Satan - 2021 might well be remembered for the year Alfred Nobel did back flips in his.

The Nobel Peace Prize has often generated controversy over many of its dubious nominees and recipients. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger shared the prize with his counterpart, Le Duc Tho, "for jointly having negotiated a cease fire in Vietnam in 1973." Kissinger won despite his role in the bombings in Cambodia and in the killings in 'Operation Candor'. President Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, inspiring him to bomb seven countries as he managed to out-Bush G.W. Bush. The former Nobel secretary told the AP news agency in 2015 that in awarding the prize to Obama, "the committee didn't achieve what it had hoped for." You don't say?

Yet, one of the biggest jaw-droppers may be a current contender, the corporate-funded Marxist front group, Black Lives Matter. The nomination must make BLM's sponsors proud. And how much do corporate socialists like Black Lives Matter? As of June 2020, corporate America had pledged BLM over $1.678 billion, led by Bank of America and cheap-labor lover Nike.

BLM was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by a Norwegian lawmaker. NBC News reported: "In his nomination letter, Petter Eide, a Socialist Left member of the Storting, Norway's parliament, wrote that he had nominated Black Lives Matter 'for their struggle against racism and racially motivated violence.'"