A recent TrendCompass heading read, "Are new & improved lockdowns coming?" In that article, I referred to a few strange news items that seemed to point to the possible imposition of new lockdowns in the near future. First, there was the bizarre 1,531-page COVID-19 inquiry by Baroness Heather Hallett DBE. The Baroness wasn't concerned about accountability for one of the greatest trainwrecks in human history or who was behind it. Her main concern was about how to do it right the next time.

Then there was EU Commission president Ursula von der Lying who mentioned, in passing, during her State of the Union speech in September that "We are on the brink, if not even at the start of another global health crisis." Then we had warnings from the ECB that the financial system is becoming unstable. Six days after my report, on 27 November, Reuters - the ever truthful news service - announced that, "Bird flu virus could risk pandemic worse than COVID 19 if it mutates..."

According to Reuters, the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth of the matter is that the evil, invisible enemy, "could affect healthy individuals, including children, unlike COVID-19." Furthermore, some experts say that people lack antibodies against bird flu and respiratory infections. How do they know? They must have looked into people's antibody tanks and found them empty. Thankfully, "preventative measures exist, including vaccine candidates and antiviral stocks." Well, thank goodness for that - lucky us!

The Hoover Planning and Zoning Commission has voted to forward the request for the Islamic Academy of Alabama and Muslim prayer center, with a recommendation to deny it.

Approximately 175 people turned out for the meeting Monday night, most in opposition to the proposed zoning change that would allow the Islamic Academy of Alabama to move into Hoover's Meadowbrook Corporate Park. Public comments lasted 40 minutes before the vote to move the matter to the city council, with a recommendation to deny the project.

"At present, staff are unable to make a positive recommendation," Mac Martin, the city planner, told the commission during the work session portion of the meeting.

"We don't find it in alignment with the comprehensive plan," Martin explained as one of the main reasons before describing concerns with both the traffic study and occupancy projections.

The project scope seems to be "shifting and unclear," and "seems to change with each version of the traffic study," Martin said.

While Donald Trump's special envoy, Steve Witkoff, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, are in Moscow working to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine, a series of attacks on Russia-linked oil tankers unfolded both before and during their visit. Now, reports are also emerging of an explosion along the Druzhba oil pipeline.

On Wednesday morning, Kyiv Post cited sources in Ukraine's Military Intelligence (HUR) that reported an explosion struck the Druzhba ("Friendship") oil pipeline - one of Europe's most important energy arteries, which moves roughly 1.2 to 1.5 million barrels per day from Russia through Belarus and Ukraine into Central Europe.

Kyiv Post said an incendiary explosive device detonated on the pipeline near Kazynskiye Vyselki along the Taganrog-Lipetsk segment. The outlet cited residents who heard the powerful blast.

Wilmington Delaware -- A judge who sentenced a wealthy du Pont heir to probation for raping his 3-year-old daughter noted in her order that he "will not fare well" in prison and needed treatment instead of time behind bars, court records show.

Superior Court Judge Jan Jurden's sentencing order for Robert H. Richards IV suggested that she considered unique circumstances when deciding his punishment for fourth-degree rape. Her observation that prison life would adversely affect Richards was a rare and puzzling rationale, several criminal justice authorities in Delaware said. Some also said her view that treatment was a better idea than prison is a justification typically used when sentencing drug addicts, not child rapists.

Richards' 2009 rape case became public this month after attorneys for his ex-wife, Tracy, filed a lawsuit seeking compensatory and punitive damages for the abuse of his daughter.

The fact that Jurden expressed concern that prison wasn't right for Richards came as a surprise to defense lawyers and prosecutors who consider her a tough sentencing judge. Several noted that prison officials can put inmates in protective custody if they are worried about their safety, noting that child abusers are sometimes targeted by other inmates.

"It's an extremely rare circumstance that prison serves the inmate well," said Delaware Public Defender Brendan J. O'Neill, whose office represents defendants who cannot afford a lawyer. "Prison is to punish, to segregate the offender from society, and the notion that prison serves people well hasn't proven to be true in most circumstances."

O'Neill said he and his deputies have often argued that a defendant was too ill or frail for prison, but he has never seen a judge cite it as a "reason not to send someone to jail."

Richards was no frail defendant, court records show, listing him at 6-feet-4 and between 250 and 276 pounds. Nor do court records cite any physical illnesses.

Three children and a young adult were killed in a mass shooting at a little girl's birthday party in ​California on Saturday, with the gunman still on the loose, cops said.

The ​deadly chaos, which also left 11 people including more children wounded, ​occurred just before 6 p.m. at Monkey Space, a banquet hall ​near a Dairy Queen​ in Stockton, about 40 miles south of Sacramento, the Sacramento Bee reported.

Th​ose slain were ages 8, 9, 14 and 21, police said. The injured included a 9-, 12- and 15-year-old and went up to age 22, the Bee and a local pol said.

"Unfortunately tonight, heaven is a little bigger with the individuals, children and adults that unfortunately did not make it," Mayor Christina Fugazi said late Saturday.

• A hedge-fund-backed plan to pump 15 billion gallons a year from an East Texas aquifer has sparked intense local opposition and legal challenges.
• Growing Texas cities are increasingly tapping distant rural water supplies, accelerating depletion of shared aquifers like the Carrizo-Wilcox.
• Without major conservation efforts, rural communities risk losing water essential for farming and ranching as urban demand continues to climb.

One of the ways you can claim rights to water sources is to own land next to them or over them. It seems intuitive that you should be able to dip into a river running along your property to get a drink for yourself and possibly your livestock, or water for your plants and possibly your farm fields. That works so long as you don't hog too much of the river flow and your downstream neighbors can do the same as you are doing. In practice, there are so many humans today demanding so much water that the amounts each person or enterprise can withdraw are usually regulated by agreement or law.

The same goes for groundwater since aquifers rarely span just one person's property and can be very large, for example, the Ogallala aquifer, which lies below 122 million acres of the U.S. Great Plains.

The Yorkshire Post can now report on the case after a charge against IT contractor Jon Richelieu-Booth relating to a different social media post was dropped a week before it was due to go to court.

He said he has been stunned by the 'very Orwellian' conduct of West Yorkshire Police throughout the matter and now intends to make a complaint against the force.

"I thought 1984 was a book, not an instruction manual," he said.

West Yorkshire Police initially said it "wouldn't be appropriate to comment" given there may be a formal complaint but have subsequently provided a statement confirming it had investigated the matter after the publication of The Yorkshire Post's story was followed up by the Daily Telegraph .

Recent figures have revealed that police nationally are making 30 arrests a day over 'offensive' posts on social media - with West Yorkshire Police second only to the Metropolitan Police for making such arrests.

Americans feel like they're living under a government run by an elite class that behaves more like royalty than public servants. It isn't one president, one party, or one administration. It's the permanent US government that consists of elected and unelected insiders... all the bureaucrats, consultants, lobbyists, and corporate middlemen who are perched high above everyone else while regular Americans are treated like peasants expected to stay quiet and keep the machine running. And when that elite class builds a system with loopholes big enough to swallow us whole, it's no wonder foreigners slither over and start pillaging.

The H1-B scam is a perfect example of that screwed-up system.

Sure, you can get angry at the foreigners who waltz through the open door, but the real blame sits with the people who built the door in the first place. They decorated it, propped it open, and then ignored it when everyone flooded in. That's exactly what you're looking at in this latest situation at Kentucky University of the Cumberlands and a crafty Indian businessman, Anil Palla, who figured out how to turn a rural American university into a Day-1 CPT pipeline... or, to put it simpler, a backdoor into the H-1B system that our own government has been too corrupt or too comfortable to fix.

The world really is waking up to the terrible truth about the forced "green transition". The Wall Street Journal (finally) speaks the blasphemy out loud — countries with a lot of renewables are "hemorrhaging industry", they face right-wing revolts in elections, they can't keep up in the AI race, and the system wide costs of renewable electricity are crippling.

The pagan quest to do rain-dances with electrical generators has become an existential threat. If AI is the next revolution, then the lands of green fantasia have already lost the race. There's a global contest to create the first world dominating AI before anyone else does. This is not an exponential curve we can afford to lose. The first nation to crack adversaries encryption codes, hack their defenses, design the killer bioweapon, or build a self replicating drone army — potentially takes it all.

The contest is, above all, an energy competition. Ponder that gram for gram, each day the human brain uses ten times the energy than muscle does, yet despite that stupendous cost, it conquered the world.

For twenty years some rich countries became mired in corruption and virtuous beauty contests. They toyed with fripperies like imaginary weather-control a century hence, while their adversaries built the engines of real power.

I am confident that over 2 million people in the UK have shared thoughts on the Genocide in Gaza that are stronger than anything Natalie Strecker has expressed.

I am quite certain that I am one of those 2 million.

Yet Natalie Strecker, an avowed pacifist and mother of young children, today faces up to ten years in prison under the Terrorism Act when the verdict in her case comes in.

Strecker is charged with eliciting support for Hamas and Hezbollah, based on 8 tweets, cherry picked by police and prosecutors from an astounding 51,000 tweets she sent, mainly from the Jersey Palestine Solidarity Committee account.