A Washington state inmate was sentenced to another 25 years in prison for murdering his cellmate — a convicted child sex offender who raped his sister.

Shane Goldsby, 26, was sentenced this week after he beat to death his 70-year-old cellmate Robert Munger in June 2020.

Munger was reportedly serving a 43-year prison sentence for his child sex crimes.

Three new conditions reported by a small number of people after vaccination with COVID-19 shots from Pfizer and Moderna are being studied to assess if they may be possible side-effects, Europe's drugs regulator said on Wednesday.

Erythema multiforme, a form of allergic skin reaction; glomerulonephritis or kidney inflammation; and nephrotic syndrome, a renal disorder characterised by heavy urinary protein losses, are being studied here by the safety committee of the European Medicines Agency (EMA), according to the regulator here.

Pfizer, by far the biggest supplier of COVID-19 vaccines to the European Union, and Moderna did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment.

Just over 43.5 million doses of Moderna's vaccine, Spikevax, have been administered in the European Economic Area as of July 29, the EMA said, compared to more than 330 million doses of the Pfizer shot, Comirnaty, developed with Germany's BioNTech.

The advent of fact-checker journalism may be wearing out its welcome. Perhaps the increasing politicization of American life is a contributor to the downward spiral of the fact-checking profession that is primarily run by politically engaged reporters, not expert specialists in the subjects they assess by any sense of the imagination. Not that any one group of experts should have the authority over the truth either. Self-appointed media gatekeepers are a ticking time bomb of political censorship, waiting to be unleashed when the temptations are too great and the necessity for impartiality is even greater. With White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki calling for collusion between social media companies and the government to censor "misinformation", this threat seems to be as close as ever.

Although fact checkers purport to be independent guardians of accountability, recent events have exposed them as mere enforcers of fashionable political positions. This brings us to a relatively new, but powerful company known as NewsGuard, which claims a partnership with Microsoft and gleaming spotlights in major outlets. Its staff and board boast powerful connections to the government, finance, and the media. According to an Op-ed in Politico written by NewsGuards' CEO, rather than simply being a fact-checking company that can only debunk stories after they go viral, NewsGuard rates entire websites' trustworthiness. This new strategy is aimed at discrediting the very source that alleged misinformation or disinformation may come from. NewsGuard publishes lengthy "nutritional labels," rating websites on various criteria of journalistic importance and outlining its reasons for giving certain ratings. Perhaps one day, these ratings may be used to filter out certain websites, which is what NewsGuard's CEO alludes to by citing the great political scientist Francis Fukuyama's article in Foreign Affairs.

In fact, the company made the following tweet on July 17, 2021, essentially siding with Psaki's call for a government-media partnership to censor internet content.

Pfizer's Covid vaccine may pose more of a risk to boys, a study claimed today amid growing calls for No10 to rethink plans to dish out jabs to children.

New research has suggested boys are 14 times more likely to be struck down with a rare heart complication called myocarditis.

The data, from the US, will likely fuel an already fierce debate over Britain's decision to press ahead with inoculating all 16 and 17-year-olds.

Last week, the Government's advisory panel ruled older teenagers should be given their first dose. Ministers plan to invite them before they head back to schools and colleges in September.

But health officials have yet to make concrete plans for children to get top-ups. They want to wait for more safety data about myocarditis before pressing ahead.

Real-world data from the US, which has been vaccinating children for months, have shown teenage boys to be at a higher risk.

Australian authorities have announced Melbourne's lockdown will be extended by another week, with its 5 million people subject to the longer restrictions after 20 new Covid-19 cases were recorded.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews confirmed the week-long extension of Melbourne's lockdown on Wednesday, just a day before restrictions were due to be lifted in Australia's second-most populous city.


Andrews instead announced that "we cannot afford to open up and let this variant run free - we need to get in front of this, just like we have done before," referring to the presence of the Delta strain of coronavirus responsible for the recent spike in infections.

China will establish a blacklist of karaoke songs to ban those containing "illegal content" from karaoke venues across the country starting from 1 October, according to the Ministry of Culture and Tourism.

The ministry said banned content would include that which endangers national unity, sovereignty or territorial integrity, violates state religious policies by propagating cults or superstitions, or which encourages illegal activities such as gambling and drugs.

A Chinese court has upheld a death sentence against Canadian citizen Robert Schellenberg.

Schellenberg has been detained in China since 2014, when he was accused of attempting to smuggle 225kg of methamphetamine to Australia. He has maintained his innocence. In December 2018 he was sentenced to 15 years but after he appealed a retrial was ordered and the Dalian intermediate people's court instead ordered his execution.

His case is one of at least two involving Canadian detainees expected to hear a result as early as Tuesday, in what observers and foreign governments have labeled "hostage diplomacy" by Chinese authorities over an ongoing extradition hearing in Canada for a Huawei executive wanted in the US.

Hours after both San Francisco and Oakland officials announced mandatory vaccinations or weekly testing for teachers, Gov. Gavin Newsom was traveling to the East Bay to expand the mandate to all school employees within California, according to published reports.

Politico and the Los Angeles Times both reported that the announcement would be coming on Wednesday while Newsom pays a visit to the Oakland Unified School District which began 2021-2022 classes on Monday.

California would be the first state in the country to issue a such a mandate amid a surge in delta variant COVID cases and schools reopening to wide scale in-class instruction for the first time since March 2020. At the nearby Pleasanton Unified School District, officials said they were prepared for such an announcement. Patrick Gannon, spokesperson for the district, said:

"It's not something that is entirely unexpected to us. We have spent the last year and a half providing opportunities for both our staff and our students to get vaccinated if they were able to."

School employees will join state workers and healthcare workers who had previously been required for vaccinations or weekly testing.

It is an objective, indisputable fact: never in the history of the world has there been a global push to administer an experimental medicine to all of humanity, billions of us, at the same time.

I want you to stop and reflect on that. Imagine the hubris it required both to carry out this plan and to propagandize the world to carry it out.

"Hubris?" you ask. "What do you mean?"

The Covid vaccines are experimental. The FDA has not approved them. Most vaccines require years to test and approve, in no small part because we want to make sure they don't have dangerous long-term side effects, which they can have; the CDC has published a list of problems with selected approved vaccines. Many experimental vaccines never make it out of the experimental phase. CNN made similar points back when Trump was, wrongheadedly (I thought so at the time) pushing for rapid approval of the Covid vaccines. Of course, the mercurial news organization hastened to forget all that when the Biden administration decided rapid vaccine deployment was a good idea. They shouldn't have: for all the good they certainly have done, physicians warn us that vaccines can be dangerous for some, and experimental vaccines are, naturally, even more so.

This is not just scientific madness, it appears to be very intentional and purposeful.

The Moderna and Pfizer vaccine tests were conducted, as customary, with a control group; a group within the trial who were given a placebo and not the test vaccine. However, during the trial -and after the untested vaccines were given emergency use authorization- the vaccine companies conducting the trial decided to break protocol and notify the control group they were not vaccinated. Almost all the control group were then given the vaccine.

Purposefully dissolving the placebo group violates the scientific purpose to test whether the vaccine has any efficacy; any actual benefit and/or safety issues. Without a control group there is nothing to compare the vaccinated group against. According to NPR, the doctors lost the control group in the Johnson County Clinicial Trial (Lexena, Kansas) on purpose: