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From UK Column News Extra: A Ukrainian Dirty Bomb False Flag?
Published October 28, 2022 Find 25min Video Here:-
Mike Robinson, Alex Thomson, Vanessa Beeley and Patrick Henningsen discuss Russia’s claim that Ukraine intends to detonate a dirty bomb and blame Russia for it.
For regular access to News Extra join the UK Column community here:
JOHN O’LOONEY HAS A HUGE LIST OF DOCTORS AND NURSES THAT HAVE CONTACTED HIM -29 IN THE PAST 10 DAYS
Posted 30th October 2022. Find 3min Video Here:-
John asks that we pass this message along:
So far I’ve had 29 nurses and doctors call me in just ten days. I’ve been taking calls for 18 months now from them. Keep asking them to call me guys please the list is growing. My number is:
+44 1908 505570
If you can pass this video on I’d appreciate it – dozens of nurses are now reaching out and I want those ones too scared to do so to call me. I’m happy to lead us into battle from the front –
sent with ❤️
John O’looney – Funeral Director, Milton Keynes, UK.
Source: Philosophers-stone.info pureblood:
Lizz Truss phone hack when she was Foreign Secretary
Posted 31st October 2022.
Information commissioner warns firms over ‘emotional analysis’ technologies.
By Alex Hern 25th October 2022. Find Article Here:-
Companies ‘should not make meaningful decisions based on technology not backed by science’.
The regulator will be publishing guidance on how to use biometric technologies in spring 2023. Photograph: izusek/Getty Images/iStockphoto.
The information commissioner has warned companies to steer clear of “emotional analysis” technologies or face fines, because of the “pseudoscientific” nature of the field.
It’s the first time the regulator has issued a blanket warning on the ineffectiveness of a new technology, said Stephen Bonner, the deputy commissioner, but one that is justified by the harm that could be caused if companies made meaningful decisions based on meaningless data.
“There’s a lot of investment and engagement around biometric attempts to detect emotion,” he said. Such technologies attempt to infer information about mental states using data such as the shininess of someone’s skin, or fleeting “micro expressions” on their faces.
“Unfortunately, these technologies don’t seem to be backed by science,” Bonner said. “That’s quite concerning, because we’re aware of quite a few organisations looking into these technologies as possible ways to make pretty important decisions: to identify whether people might be fraudsters, or whether job applicants are worthy of getting that role. And there doesn’t seem to be any sense that these work.”
Simply using emotional analysis technology isn’t a problem per se, Bonner said – but treating it as anything more than entertainment is. “There are plenty of uses that are fine, mild edge cases … if you’ve got a Halloween party and you want to measure who’s the most scared at the party, this is a fun interesting technology. It’s an expensive random number generator, but that can still be fun.
“But if you’re using this to make important decisions about people – to decide whether they’re entitled to an opportunity, or some kind of benefit, or to select who gets a level of harm or investigation, any of those kinds of mechanisms … We’re going to be paying very close attention to organisations that do that. What we’re calling out here is much more fundamental than a data protection issue. The fact that they might also breach people’s rights and break our laws is certainly why we’re paying attention to them, but they just don’t work.
“There is quite a range of ways scientists close to this dismiss it. I think we’ve heard ‘hokum’, we’ve heard ‘half-baked’, we’ve heard ‘fake science’. It’s a tempting possibility: if we could see into the heads of others. But when people make extraordinary claims with little or no evidence, we can call attention to that.”
The attempted development of “emotional AI” is one of four issues that the ICO has identified in a study of the future of biometric technologies. Some are simple regulatory matters, with companies that develop similar technologies calling for further clarity on data protection rules.
But others are more fundamental: the regulator has warned that it is difficult to apply data protection law when technology such as gaze tracking or fingerprint recognition “could be deployed by a camera at a distance to gather verifiable data on a person without physical contact with any system being required”. Gathering consent from, say, every single passenger passing through a station, would be all but impossible.
In spring 2023, the regulator will be publishing guidance on how to use biometric technologies, including facial, fingerprint and voice recognition. The area is particularly sensitive, since “biometric data is unique to an individual and is difficult or impossible to change should it ever be lost, stolen or inappropriately used”.
Immune system-evading hybrid virus observed for first time.
By Linda Geddes 24th October 2022. Find Article Here:-
Researchers found the RSV and influenza viruses fused together to form a new type of virus pathogen.
As well as helping the viruses evade the immune system, joining forces may also enable them to access more lung cells. Photograph: David Davies/PA.
Two common respiratory viruses can fuse to form a hybrid virus capable of evading the human immune system, and infecting lung cells – the first time such viral cooperation has ever been observed.
Researchers believe the findings could help to explain why co-infections can lead to significantly worse disease for some patients, including hard-to-treat viral pneumonia.
Each year, about 5 million people around the world are hospitalised with influenza A, while respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is the leading cause of acute lower respiratory tract infections in children under five years old, and can cause severe illness in some children and older adults.
Although co-infections – where a person is infected with both viruses at the same time – are thought to be relatively common, it was unclear how these viruses would respond if they found themselves inside the same cell.
“Respiratory viruses exist as part of a community of many viruses that all target the same region of the body, like an ecological niche,” said Dr Joanne Haney from the MRC-University of Glasgow centre for virus research, who led the study.
“We need to understand how these infections occur within the context of one another to gain a fuller picture of the biology of each individual virus.”
To investigate, Haney and her colleagues deliberately infected human lung cells with both viruses and found that, rather than competing with one another as some other viruses are known to do, they fused together to form a palm tree-shaped hybrid virus – with RSV forming the trunk, and influenza the leaves.
“This kind of hybrid virus has never been described before,” said Prof Pablo Murcia, who supervised the research, published in Nature Microbiology. “We are talking about viruses from two completely different families combining together with the genomes and the external proteins of both viruses. It is a new type of virus pathogen.”
Once formed, the hybrid virus was also able to infect neighbouring cells – even in the presence of antibodies against influenza that would usually block infection. Although the antibodies still stuck to influenza proteins on the hybrid virus’s surface, the virus merely used neighbouring RSV proteins to infect lung cells instead. Murcia said: “Influenza is using hybrid viral particles as a Trojan horse.”
As well as helping the viruses evade the immune system, joining forces may also enable them to access a wider range of lung cells. Whereas influenza usually infects cells in the nose, throat and windpipe, RSV tends to prefer windpipe and lung cells – although there is some overlap.
Possibly, it could increase the chances of influenza triggering a severe, and sometimes fatal, lung infection called viral pneumonia, said Dr Stephen Griffin, a virologist at the University of Leeds. Although he cautioned that more research was needed to prove that hybrid viruses are implicated in human disease. “RSV tends to go lower down into the lung than the seasonal flu virus, and you’re more likely to get more severe disease the further down the infection goes,” he said.
“It is another reason to avoid getting infected with multiple viruses, because this [hybridisation] is likely to happen all the more if we don’t take precautions to protect our health.”
Significantly, the team showed that the hybrid viruses could infect cultured layers of cells, as well as individual respiratory cells. “This is important because the cells are stuck to one another in an authentic way, and the virus particles will have to go in and out in the right way,” said Griffin.
The next step is to confirm whether hybrid viruses can form in patients with co-infections, and if so, which ones. “We need to know if this happens only with influenza and RSV, or does it extend to other virus combinations as well,” said Murcia. “My guess is that it does. And, I would hypothesise that it extends to animal [viruses] as well. This is just the start of what I think will be a long journey, of hopefully very interesting discoveries.”
‘Brexit freedoms bill’ could abolish all pesticide protections, campaigners say.
By Damian Carrington 29th September 2022. Find Article Here:-
Bill would see 570 EU-derived environmental laws removed at end of 2023, with little time to replace them.
Scientists have warned that populations of many insect species, including hoverflies, are falling fast. Photograph: Dan Edwards/PA
The government’s “Brexit freedoms bill” could see all legal protections from pesticides abolished, wildlife campaigners have warned, putting insects, wildlife and human health in danger.
The bill, published a week ago by prime minister Liz Truss’s new administration, would result in all EU-derived laws being removed at the end of 2023, including 570 environmental regulations. The government could retain or amend some regulations, but has not set out plans to do so. Campaigners are worried there is insufficient time to put new regulations in place.
Green NGOs were already concerned by the lack of government action to reduce the harm pesticides cause to the environment, having failed so far to introduce a new national action plan on the sustainable use of pesticides, promised in 2018.
Ministers have also repeatedly overruled the government’s independent expert panel to allow the use of banned pesticides, such as bee-harming neonicotinoids, on an “emergency” basis. Scientists have warned many insect populations such as bees are falling at “frightening” rates that are “tearing apart the tapestry of life”.
Since the publication of the bill, environmental charities representing millions of people have been in revolt over the plan to slash nature protections and potentially remove environmental requirements from the billions of pounds of farming subsidies paid out each year.
“Pesticide use has caused localised extinctions of bee populations and has made our rivers toxic,” said Steve Backshall, president of invertebrate charity Buglife and wildlife TV presenter. “This is a time for our government to protect wildlife and people from pesticide harm. I urge our new government to reconsider removing pesticide regulation.”
Matt Shardlow, Buglife CEO, said: “There will be over 500 pieces of [environmental] legislation removed by the bill. It took three years for the department of environment to get the environment bill through parliament – the idea that we could have 500 new pieces of primary legislation in 15 months is crazy.”
A spokesperson for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said: “The UK upholds strict food safety, health and environmental standards, and our first priority regarding pesticides is to ensure that they will not harm people or pose unacceptable risks to the environment. The UK government has an excellent record on the environment enshrined in law in our landmark Environment Act.”
“Any decision on preserving, repealing or amending retained EU law will not come at the expense of these high standards and we are working to publish an updated UK national action plan for the sustainable use of pesticides.”
Since Brexit, the EU has strengthened its proposals to protect wildlife from pesticides, including reducing pesticide use by 50%. Buglife and dozens of other environmental NGOs resigned from the government’s pesticide forum in 2019, saying the area of land pesticides were used on had soared in the two decades since they joined the forum. The forum has not been replaced.
Jacob Rees-Mogg’s move to axe 2,400 UK laws is ‘anti-democratic’, say legal experts.
By Lisa O’Carroll 24th October 2022. Find Article Here:-
Laws that could disappear include ban on animal testing, workers’ rights and environmental protections.
Laws will be changed on 31st December 2023 ‘without any scrutiny at all’, says George Peretz KC. Photograph: James Hoathly/Alamy
Leading lawyers have sounded the alarm over Jacob Rees-Mogg’s proposals for post-Brexit legislation that could result in 2,400 laws disappearing overnight – including a ban on animal testing for cosmetics, workers’ rights and environmental protections.
Lawyers including one former UK government legal official who designed the concept of EU-retained law for Theresa May branded the move as “anti-democratic” and “completely barking”.
Swathes of laws including equal pay for men and women, pension rights for same-sex married couples, food standards and aviation safety rules could accidentally disappear or be redrafted poorly, they warn.
The retained EU law (revocation and reform) bill will get its second reading on Tuesday. It was designed in such a way that 47 years of laws devised during EU membership will be switched off on 31 December 2023 under a so-called sunset clause.
“A lot of laws are going to be changed without any scrutiny at all by a dying government that few people respect,” said George Peretz KC, a specialist in European law.
The Unison general secretary, Christina McAnea, said: “This is a countdown to disaster for all working people. It would mean turning the clock back to Dickensian times when workers had no rights.
“In a financial crisis with a headless government, people need stability and support, not a bonfire of numerous employment rights.
“Ministers must act now to reassure everyone that hard-won protection won’t be shredded. A free-for-all giving the green light to unscrupulous bosses is not the route to economic growth.
“All of this is deeply objectionable on two grounds – it is anti-democratic and it is anti-growth,” said Peretz, pointing out that employers need legal certainty on employment laws, technical standards and other matters before expanding or investing.
“We are a democracy and we have a process of making law in parliament. People can write to their MPs, industry gets consulted, we have debates in the House of Commons and in the Lords. This is a completely anti-democratic process,” he added.
Eleonor Duhs, a partner at the City law firm Bates Wells and a former government lawyer who helped design the concept of retained EU law, said the government’s plans were completely at odds with May’s vision to remove EU laws with “full scrutiny and proper debate”.
The concept of retained law was created for a smooth transition, not as a target practice for Brexiters, she argued.
“This bill gives ministers powers to repeal and replace a vast body of what is now domestic law at speed and without proper scrutiny. This is unprecedented, reckless and undemocratic,” said Duhs.
She also raised questions about the use of precious legal drafting resources within Whitehall.
“It took over two years and a vast amount of civil service resource to draft over 600 pieces of legislation to get the statute book ready for Brexit. Those changes were technical and straightforward compared with the complexity of what will be required under this bill,” she said.
“At a time when civil service resource is falling, the task of rewriting this vast body of law in a few short months appears impossible. Errors, omissions and gaps in the law are inevitable.”
The notion that 2,400 laws could be expunged in little over a year was “completely barking”, said Peretz, but possible because of the “extraordinary power” the government was giving itself to push laws over the December 2023 cliff.
“There is no requirement anywhere on ministers to consult anybody. Under this bill, ministers can just let vital rights and protections for consumers, workers, the environment and animal welfare fall without parliament having any chance to stop that happening,” he said.
“This is nothing to do with whether you support Brexit or not. You can be a fanatical supporter of Brexit and still think this is not the right thing to do.
“All of this is being done in the most immense rush, and when you do things in a rush there is a risk that mistakes are made.”
The bill also gives ministers the powers to rewrite or “update” the rules, with no requirement to consult and at most only a two-hour debate in parliament to say yes or no, but, despite promises from Rees-Mogg that Brexit could mean higher standards than the EU’s, it does not confer power to improve standards and protections, but only to reduce them.
Environmental campaigners including Chris Packham have already sounded the alarm on the threat to disapply environmental rules protecting rare flora and fauna in the 38 new investment zones in England to enable “accelerated development”.
The EU’s biometric power-grab is sinister and grotesque.
By SILKIE CARLO 16th October 2022. Find Article Here:-
Brussels is rolling out an invasive new border system that will cause massive delays, and further undermine our liberty.
If you’re planning to escape to a chateau next summer, brace yourself for pointless chaos and travel disruption, thanks to the EU’s latest Orwellian move to demand holiday-makers’ biometric data at its borders. Brits hopping across the Channel will first have their fingerprints and photos taken. The new mass data-gathering scheme, which will go live in May, is part of the evolution of a so-called “Smart Border”.
But there is nothing “smart” about the plans. The data grab has been justified by the aim of improving detection of dangerous travellers, finding vulnerable people, and reducing fraud, but it comes at an eye-watering cost to liberty and logistics. The border plans have been rightly described by civil society groups as “disproportionate and unnecessary”, while the Port of Dover’s boss has warned of “significant and continued disruption for a very long time”.
All travellers aged over 12 will need to be biometrically logged, creating an EU datastore loaded with hundreds of millions of people’s unique personal data. The EU is demanding not only a US-style set of four fingerprints, but facial images too. Holiday-makers’ personal information will be mixed in with eventually billions of pieces of data, spanning photographs, palm prints, DNA records and facial biometrics, to which controversial recognition algorithms can be applied. This may be the biggest biometric data collection operation in European history. What could possibly go wrong?
Too many of our European friends have an indifferent attitude to the emergence of a data-hungry superstate – over 1.7 billion EU Digital Covid Certificates were issued during the pandemic – but even those falling out of love with liberté must be concerned about the disastrous impact on tourism and transport. The Big Brother-style EU border checks are estimated to take seven times longer than checks today and the tailback at Dover could grow by 19 miles – roughly the distance of the Channel crossing itself.
It is ironic but not entirely surprising that the Schengen Area, supposedly defined by freedom of movement, is becoming a digital fortress. Authorities are adopting extreme technologies on the seemingly neutral premise of progress, but this is not simply a process of modernisation – it is a process of political metamorphosis.
It risks edging us towards a bleak future mirroring the kind of techno-totalitarianism modelled by China. And the biometric super-database is by no means the only disturbing technological development on European borders – in 2019, the EU trialled Minority Report-style AI “lie detectors” to scan passengers” faces in a highly controversial, poorly evidenced system called iBorderCtrl.
Meanwhile, police are using similar technologies in the UK, rolling out live facial recognition cameras, mobile fingerprinting devices, and according to a speech by the new Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley last week, finding “precriminal” online activity and using predictive analytics to target men who might become violent towards women in the future. Yet he said nothing about the thousands of reports every year of rape and domestic violence that are poorly investigated and rarely prosecuted.
Distinctly European values are falling between the cracks in the technological revolution – our cherished liberty, the presumption of innocence and the right to privacy. Last week, the head of GCHQ warned about China’s use of technology to exert control and of its “draconian” development of a “surveillance culture”. But if we are to criticise China with any authority, we must first show leadership in using technology to advance and protect liberty at home.
Silkie Carlo is director of Big Brother Watch
Distracted and Diverted by Political Pantomime, the UK is Rapidly Headed Toward Dictatorship.
Posted 22nd October 2022. Find Article and 7min Video Here:-
Mike Robinson (from UK Column) explains the enormous scope of the legislation which is oh so quietly moving forward and will have such an impact on the rights and freedoms we take for granted.
National Security Bill
Report on UK use of covert powers
Investigatory Powers Commissioner’s Office (IPCO) report
Sources:
UK Column News – 19th October 2022 ( extract)
https://www.ukcolumn.org/video/uk-column-news-19th-october-2022
Archive on demand, latest discussions, community groups and more: https://community.uk
Net Zero Bombshell: The World Does Not Have Enough Lithium and Cobalt to Replace All Batteries Every 10 Years – Finnish Government Report.
Posted 22nd October 2022
Influential elites are either in denial about the horrifying costs and consequences of Net Zero – witness last Wednesday’s substantial vote against fracking British gas in the House of Commons – or busy scooping up the almost unlimited amounts of money currently on offer for promoting pseudoscience climate scares and investing in impracticable green technologies. Until the lights start to go out and heating fails, they are unlikely to pay much attention to a recent 1,000 page alternative energy investigation undertaken for a Finnish Government agency by Associate Professor Simon Michaux. Referring to the U.K.’s 2050 Net Zero target, Michaux states there is “simply not enough time, nor resources to do this by the current target”.
To cite just one example of how un-costed Net Zero is, Michaux notes that “in theory” there are enough global reserves of nickel and lithium if they are exclusively used to produce batteries for electric vehicles. But there is not enough cobalt, and more will need to be discovered. It gets much worse. All the new batteries have a useful working life of only 8-10 years, so replacements will need to be regularly produced. “This is unlikely to be practical, which suggests the whole EV battery solution may need to be re-thought and a new solution is developed that is not so mineral intensive,” he says.
All of these problems occur in finding a mass of lithium for ion batteries weighting 286.6 million tonnes. But a “power buffer” of another 2.5 billion tonnes of batteries is also required to provide a four-week back-up for intermittent wind and solar electricity power. Of course, this is simply not available from global mineral reserves, but, states Michaux, it is not clear how the buffer could be delivered with an alternative system.
Michaux sounds a clear warning message. Current expectations are that global industrial businesses will replace a complex industrial energy ecosystem that took more than a century to build. It was built with the support of the highest calorifically dense source of energy the world has ever known (oil), in cheap abundant quantities, with easily available credit and seemingly unlimited mineral resources. The replacement, he notes, needs to be done when there is comparatively very expensive energy, a fragile finance system saturated in debt and not enough minerals. Most challenging of all, it has to be done within a few decades. Based on his copious calculations, the author is of the opinion that it will not go fully “as planned”.
Last Sunday, Sir David Attenborough concluded six episodes of pseudoscientific green agitprop Frozen Planet II by demanding that the world embrace Net Zero, “no matter how challenging it may be”. Net Zero is a political command-and-control project, the full horror of which is yet to be inflicted on the general population. Michaux is quite clear what it entails: “What may be required, therefore, is a significant reduction of societal demand for all resources, of all kinds. This implies a very different social contract and a radically different system of governance to what is in place today.”
Of course, a radically different system of government is available in the People’s Republic of China, but here the position on Net Zero is a tad more nuanced. Having lifted about a billion people out of starving poverty in the last 40 years and become the workshop for an increasingly complacent western world – all powered by fossil fuel – the cause does not seem so pressing. Speaking to the Communist Party Congress earlier this week, President Xi Jinping sounded a note of caution and said “prudence” would govern China’s efforts to peak and eventually zero-out carbon emissions. All of this would be in line with the principle of “getting the new before discarding the old”.
Meanwhile, China’s coal production is reported to have reached record levels, while the Congress was told that oil and gas exploration will be expanded as part of measures to ensure “energy security”.
Michaux points out that nearly 85% of world energy comes from fossil fuel. By his calculations, the annual global capacity of non-fossil electrical power will need to quadruple to 37,670.6 TWh. In a recent report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), Professor Michael Kelly estimates that the U.K. electricity grid would have to expand by 2.7 times. This will involve adding capacity at eight times the rate it has been added over the last 30 years. If calculations are made for the need to rewire homes, streets, local substations and powerlines to carry the new capacity, the extra cost will be nearly £1 trillion.
In another recent GWPF paper, the energy writer John Constable warned that the European Green Deal seems all but certain to break Europe’s economic and socio-political power, “rendering it a trivial and incapable backwater, reliant on – and subservient to – superior powers”.
History provides us with many examples of weak, or weakened, tribes being overrun by stronger tribes. In the animal kingdom it is known as natural evolution. A 96-year old ‘national treasure’ preaches we have to pay any price to satisfy the new cult of the green god. Better costed and more rational views are available.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
The Truth is Where? 