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Trevor Timm: Assange prosecution would put journalists around the world at risk

Bill Goodwin
Computer Weekly
Thu, 10 Sep 2020 18:06 UTC
julian assange protest trial September 2020
© Jekaterina Saveljeva
Supporters of Julian Assange protest outside the Old Bailey as the extradition hearing for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange resumes
Trevor Timm, co-founder of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, tells a court that if the US prosecutes WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, every reporter who receives a secret document will be criminalised

The prosecution of Julian Assange by the US government would set a legal precedent that puts journalists reporting on national security at risk worldwide, a court heard yesterday.

Trevor Timm, co-founder of the Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF), told a hearing at the Old Bailey that the case poses extreme danger to journalists if it is allowed to go ahead.

"This would criminalise every reporter who received a secret document whether they asked for it or not," he told the court.

Timm said this was almost a consensus opinion among first amendment experts, media law experts and lawyers, and was why "virtually every newspaper in the US has condemned proceedings before the court".

Comment:

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Alarm Clock

US Marshal service reveals majority of rescued sex-trafficked children came from foster care

Megan Fox
PJ Media
Fri, 11 Sep 2020 17:58 UTC
Sex trafficking protesters
© AP/Rachel La Corte/File
In this Oct. 21, 2014 file photo, people opposed to child sex trafficking rally outside of the Washington state Supreme Court in Olympia, Washington.
The U.S. Marshals Service recently launched a nationwide effort to recover missing and exploited children. Three major operations rescued over 100 children, many of them from sex traffickers. But a disturbing trend discovered during the operation should launch a nationwide investigation into the American child welfare system.

PJ Media reached out to USMS for details on the rescued children and was told that the majority of them came from foster care. This information was ignored in the initial media reports on the operation. Dave Oney, press contact at the USMS, responded via email to questions about the rescued children.
For the Northern Ohio Operation Safety Net: 25 of the 31 children recovered were in DCFS care in either a group homes or foster case. Additionally, seven children have been confirmed victims of sex trafficking.

For Operation Not Forgotten in Georgia: 28 of the 39 recovered were in the care of DFACS; 15 were victims of sex trafficking

For Operation Homecoming in Indianapolis: Of the eight children recovered, two were in foster homes or group homes. Five were runaways with risk factors. One was a noncustodial kidnapping. The bulk of the cases still being worked are foster/group home situations.
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Fire

California state officials, feds agree to thin millions of acres of forests in bid to manage future wildfires

Paul Rogers
The Mercury News
Sun, 23 Aug 2020 17:39 UTC
wildfire california firefighter
© Nhat V. Meyer/Bay Area News Group
BOULDER CREEK, CALIFORNIA – AUGUST 19: A CalFire Firefighter keeps an eye on the CZU August Lightning Complex fire in front of a home along Jamison Creek Road near Boulder Creek, Calif., on Wednesday, August 19, 2020
New plan would last 20 years, reshaping California's landscape

The two dozen major fires burning across Northern California were sparked by more than 12,000 lightning strikes, a freak weather occurrence that turned what had been a relatively mild fire season into a devastating catastrophe.

Yet what's driving these enormous fires is not sparks, but millions of acres of fuel: bone-dry trees and brush that haven't burned in many years.

Before the Gold Rush in 1849, large parts of California burned every few decades. Lightning fires burned for months, and native tribes burned the land, clearing out dead vegetation. But for much of the past century, as the state's population has built homes, towns and parks in rural areas, firefighters have extinguished the flames to save property and lives, allowing forests and other landscapes to become unnaturally dense.
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Alarm Clock

Ireland Health Service Executive rejects senior doctor's comments Covid-19 is 'less severe' than annual flu - UPDATE: Doc sacked

Ronan McGreevy
The Irish Times
Sat, 12 Sep 2020 17:26 UTC
Dr Martin Feeley Ireland covid hoax
© Nick Bradshaw
Dr Martin Feeley says any assessment of Ireland’s strategy should take into account the cost to people’s quality of life.
The Health Service Executive (HSE) has sought to distance itself from comments made in The Irish Times by one its senior executives that "draconian" Covid-19 restrictions were no longer justified.

Dr Martin Feeley, the clinical director of the Dublin Midlands Hospital Group, said Covid-19 is "much less severe" than the average annual flu.

He suggested people at low risk from the virus should be exposed to it so they can develop herd immunity and reduce the risk to vulnerable groups.

"That is what is happening and yet the policy seems to be to prevent it," he told The Irish Times.

"This should have been allowed to happen during the summer months before the annual flu season, to reduce the workload on the health service during winter months."

Comment:

UPDATE 16/09/2020: Dr. Feeley has "resigned" after his comments on 'draconian' Covid-19 curbs
Dr Martin Feeley's views that coronavirus is "much less severe" than the flu for most people and that restrictions were no longer justified caused a furore after they were reported in The Irish Times last weekend.

The HSE actively dissociated itself from his remarks and rejected his suggestion that young people should be allowed to get the virus to develop herd immunity.

Dr Feeley (70) stepped down from his post as clinical director of Dublin Midlands Hospital Group on Tuesday with immediate effect.

After his public comments, he came under heavy pressure from HSE management, who told him his position was untenable.

A doctor for more than 45 years and an employee of the health service for 30 years, Dr Feeley says he stands by his comments, but decided to resign so management in his hospital group would not be penalised.

He had argued that people at low risk from the virus should be exposed to it so they can develop herd immunity and reduce the risk to vulnerable groups.

"Experience has taught us that at-risk and vulnerable individuals are identifiable with remarkable accuracy; and protective measures, hygiene, masks, social distancing and cocooning are effective."


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Bizarro Earth

Rich kid 'rioters' are ignorant about the poor working class

Rob Henderson
New York Post
Sat, 12 Sep 2020 15:17 UTC
rich rioters
© Facebook
The tantrums of well-off alleged rioters like Clara Kraebber (above) and pals Frank Fuhrmeister (insets, from top), Claire Severine and Adi Sragovich impose costs on the poor they claim to be fighting for.
Across the country, pampered children of the overclass are taking part in the vandalization, looting and burning of businesses, many of which are owned by immigrants and members of minority groups, under the guise of championing the Black Lives Matter movement. In the 1960s, Malcolm X characterized white liberals as "the most dangerous thing in the entire Western Hemisphere," and now we are seeing why.

Consider the case of Clara Kraebber, who faces felony rioting charges after a recent alleged window-smashing spree that police say caused at least $100,000 in damage. The Postreported that Kraebber is a wealthy Upper East Sider whose mother is an architect and whose father is a psychiatrist. She was allegedly joined in the rioting by Frank Fuhrmeister of Stuyvesant Heights, a freelance art director who has designed ads for Joe Coffee and has also worked for Pepsi, Samsung and Glenlivet, among other high-profile brands. Another accused rioter is Adi Sragovich, an accomplished musician and student at $57,000-a-year Sarah Lawrence College who grew up in the super-tony enclave of Great Neck, NY. Claire Severine, a former jet-setting model, was also arrested.
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Fire

'Greece was sacrificed to migration': The people of Lesbos won't allow a new Moria, locals say

Dimitra Triantafillou
Sputnik
Tue, 15 Sep 2020 05:54 UTC
Refugees migrants Moria camp Lesbos
© AFP 2020 / ANGELOS TZORTZINIS
Refugees and migrants from the Moria camp protest near Mytilene on the Greek island of Lesbos, on September 12, 2020, a few days after a fire destroyed the Moria refugee camp.
"Let them leave!" "No new structures!" "Enough!" - these are just a few of the chants by the residents of the Greek island of Lesbos, where the largest migrant camp in Europe was destroyed by a massive fire earlier this month, leaving nearly 13,000 migrants without shelter. Now, a new facility is being built on the island.

A huge fire destroyed Greece's largest migrant and refugee reception and accommodation centre, Moria, on Lesbos earlier this month. A new situation is currently unfolding on the island, which has proportionally borne the brunt of a great deal of the migration crisis.

There's a feeling on the island that can be expressed by the saying "Now or never!" The island's residents want nothing else but the final act of the drama.
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Bullseye

'Maskless flash mob' marches through Target shouting 'Take off that mask'

Jackie Salo
New York Post
Wed, 16 Sep 2020 13:12 UTC
anti-maskers florida
A rowdy group of anti-maskers marched through a Target in Florida and shouted at other shoppers to "Take off that mask," viral video shows.

Footage on Twitter Tuesday showed the crowd parading around the aisles of the store — located in Ft. Lauderdale, according to HuffPost — and disregarding the store's face mask requirement as one of them exclaims, "We're not going to take it anymore!"

"Anti-maskers in Florida invade a Target," wrote a user who shared the video, which has received more than 6.6 million views as of Wednesday afternoon.

Comment: More of this, please!

See also:

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Microscope 2

'Non-scientific': Chinese 'whistleblower' claiming Beijing released 'man-made' Covid-19 roasted by virologists, blocked by Twitter


RT
Wed, 16 Sep 2020 15:45 UTC
lab samples scientist covid
© Reuters / Thomas Peter
American virologists ridiculed a bombshell claim by Chinese scientist-turned-'whistleblower' Li-Meng Yan that Covid-19 was produced in the Wuhan laboratory, as the news went viral across US media and social networks.

Yan certainly grabbed the headlines when she told Fox News host Tucker Carlson that she has "solid evidence" that the dreaded Covid-19, which infected almost 30 million people around the world and killed more than 935,000, was "deliberately" produced in the Wuhan laboratory. She did not stop at that and went on to claim that Beijing also released the deadly virus "intentionally" to inflict "damage" on the world.


Comment: Controlled opposition? It's certainly a rather convenient piece of fake news that manages to smear the idea that SARS-CoV2 is man-made by debunking a study that clearly had tarring China as its main objective.

See also:

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Eye 1

Steve Bannon is behind bogus study that China created COVID

Adam Rawnsley and Lachlan Markay
The Daily Beast
Tue, 15 Sep 2020 19:32 UTC
steve bannon
The study goes against basically all scientific evidence and expert opinion. But it fits with the former Trump adviser's anti-China posture.

A new study purporting to show that the novel coronavirus was manufactured in a Chinese lab was published by a pair of nonprofit groups linked to Steve Bannon, the former top Trump strategist now facing felony fraud charges.

The study, co-authored by a Chinese virologist who fled Hong Kong this year, claims that "laboratory manipulation is part of the history of SARS-CoV-2." Its findings were quickly picked up by a handful of prominent news organizations such as the New York Post, which hyped the "explosive" allegations that run counter to virtually all existing scientific literature on the source of the virus.

The study is the work of the Rule of Law Society and the Rule of Law Foundation, sister nonprofit organizations that Bannon was instrumental in creating. According to documents posted on the Society's website last year, he served as that group's chair. The Bannon connection was first spotted by Kevin Bird, a Ph.D. candidate at Michigan State University, and shared by Carl Bergstrom, a biology professor at the University of Washington, who called the study "bizarre and unfounded."

Comment: Regardless of whether or not it was intentional, it seems the current fraudulent study will be used to further discredit the actual evidence that SARS-CoV2 was man-made. Rather predictable.

See also: Chinese defector virologist Dr Li-Meng Yan publishes report claiming COVID-19 was made in a lab

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Eye 1

New virus facts ignored by politicians too stubborn to change

John Kehoe
Australian Financial Review
Fri, 11 Sep 2020 15:30 UTC
Melbourne business district
© Joe Armao
A deserted street in Melbourne's central business district. There must be more sustainable and humane alternatives than draconian shutdowns.
"When the facts change, I change my mind," John Maynard Keynes famously said.

The evidence on COVID-19 has changed since governments imposed hard lockdowns in late March when the virus was so uncertain.

The World Health Organisation now says that serological surveys show the infection fatality ratio has kept falling, so far to between 0.5 and 1 per cent, substantially below the 2-3 per cent originally feared.

The survival rate is above 99 per cent. People aged under 60 are far more likely to die in a road accident, but we don't ban them driving cars.

The second wave of the virus during the European summer is killing far, far fewer people. It is spreading mainly among the young and healthy, while older and vulnerable people are sensibly isolating and health systems are getting better at managing the virus.
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