1572: Chop Shop

Hi Adam,

I got linked an article from earlier this year about the upcoming Dutch "begroting" and was shocked to read the last paragraph. I am not sure if you ever mentioned it on the show, but this is just plainly showing that governments and media do not give a crap about its population, and just laugh at you.

Thank you for the great show!

Erik Keimpema

"Tegenover alle uitgavenstijgingen staat een structurele uitgavenverlaging van opgeteld 2,1 miljard euro. Zeker een miljard euro daarvan is niet te danken aan bezuinigingen, maar aan geluk. Zo kan het ministerie van Onderwijs een meevaller van 490 miljoen euro inboeken, omdat de leerlingen- en studentenaantallen in de toekomst lager uitvallen dan geraamd. De mysterieuze oversterfte die ook na corona blijft aanhouden scheelt de overheid 270 miljoen euro per jaar aan AOW-uitkeringen."

Link

Hi Adam,

About the PFAS 'sales job' in Show 1572 @ 2:18

In NL there is also a big scandal about high levels of PFAS and its replacement chemicals PFOA (more from the EPA Link) in surface water (so also in crops, cows and our food) and recreational water at extreme high levels!

The culprit seems to be DuPont, a Belgium Trash disposal company, and 3M. They have been active since the 70s. More info in the 2019 documentary "Dark Waters" about the topic in the USA.

- 8 days ago: Zembla Dutch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVGk6bhAhNI

- 12 days ago: Zembla English: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3kzHc-eV88

- 4 months ago, Location: Dordrecht, Zembla English: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3kzHc-eV88

- 9 Months ago, Location: Wester Schelde, Dutch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcwHOn82nsM

EPA link about PFAS, PFOA, PFOS: https://www.epa.gov/assessing-and-managing-chemicals-under-tsca/new-chemicals-program-review-alternatives-pfoa-and

--

Sir Peet

Hi Adam,

I got linked an article from earlier this year about the upcoming Dutch "begroting" and was shocked to read the last paragraph. I am not sure if you ever mentioned it on the show, but this is just plainly showing that governments and media do not give a crap about its population, and just laugh at you.

Thank you for the great show!

Erik Keimpema

"Tegenover alle uitgavenstijgingen staat een structurele uitgavenverlaging van opgeteld 2,1 miljard euro. Zeker een miljard euro daarvan is niet te danken aan bezuinigingen, maar aan geluk. Zo kan het ministerie van Onderwijs een meevaller van 490 miljoen euro inboeken, omdat de leerlingen- en studentenaantallen in de toekomst lager uitvallen dan geraamd. De mysterieuze oversterfte die ook na corona blijft aanhouden scheelt de overheid 270 miljoen euro per jaar aan AOW-uitkeringen."

Link

I don't mind if you read this note on the show. Please keep me anonymous.

I strapped munitions on aircraft in the military. Here's what I've been told about American dud rates. Our rates of failure are much higher than other countries. The reason is all the safety mechanisms to prevent the ordinance from blowing up on the flight line. Our ordinance has many fail safes that prevent premature explosion. Some use radar or altimeters to determine if they are in free all. Others use mechanical devices to determine spin or acceleration. Most have more than one mechanism that must be triggered to go boom. In many cases ordinance does not go off because they are designed to fail safe.

Attached is a pic of a missile disarmed. Notice all the red "REMOVE BEFORE FLIGHT RIBBONS". Each one is a potential point of failure.

I talked to a Russian who did my job in the military. He said that they had a very low dud rate because they are more concerned that the munitions kill the enemy. Safety was a secondary concern for them. He said that premature explosions on the flight line were not uncommon.

Fun weapons safety fact: Pretty much every aircraft weapons system is setup to disarm once the weight on wheels sensor is activated. I'm sure at some point in early military history, a pilot accidentally "tickled the pickle", after he landed and send a rocket down the flight line or made a bomb go thud into the concrete.

Itm,

I’m sorry I can’t make this shorter.

Like many people I thought it was strange that

Prigozhin Would March on Moscow only to turn back. Especially when we’re told he’s going to be exiled to Belarus. If you were to betray Putin the last place you would go is into the arms of Lukashenko.

With the war dragging on and body count climbing, certain people within the Russian military leadership have been rumbling about the direction that Putin is taking things. He mentioned that there has also been some controversy in Russia over where the money for the Wagner group was coming from. This apparently was a power move by Putin and his loyal leadership to discern where the military leaders stand on Putin and the war. He said they staged the coup and monitored all the communications and actions of the leadership to see who announced they would join or try to flee. A stress test/loyalty test. As courage is contagious there had to be an actual march and not just talk. Apparently it involved some mayors and civic leaders as well. As a result, after the fact, there are many “missing” leaders. My friend explained that at exactly the same time, in Belarus, they were at their highest alert level for joining the military action in Ukraine which is not popular in Belarus. He said they literally had the soldiers (mostly recent conscripts forced to join) in vehicles, guns loaded, being told they’re going any minute. This was to stress test the soldiers to see which would protest. He said none did.

He also said that it’s ridiculous to believe that Putin would forgive people for joining in as he had just had people jailed for speaking out against the war weeks ago. Really obvious when Prigozhin is supposedly taking refuge in Belarus.

Also, I’m told the CIA has stated publicly that they’re having good results recruiting in Russia after that “coup”. I would think if you had an opponent trying to test the loyalty of his leadership you would want him questioning all of them.

I’m not explaining it as well as my friend but didn’t want to write too long of a note.

Thanks,

Rich

Greetings from the frontlines! Boots on the ground report here.

So, as JCD predicted, the pushback to generative AI is here. As previously discussed, Im with a Big Blue company. Theyve recently told us that we are not to use 3rd party generative AI tools for work, as they may infringe on IP. Just use OUR generative AI, it probably needs trained anyhow. I feel like anyone with a brain could have seen this coming, but that AI sure is bright and shiny.

You’ll find this note to be a little long but hopefully informative for the topic of the transgender social contagion sweeping the nation.

I am a CASA, court appointed special advocate, for foster children in a red state. There are a lot of Indiana listeners and people in other deep red states who may listen to your show and feel protected against transgender ideology impacting them, especially when we’ve been told it’s so political; after all, we live in red states with conservative politicians so this can only happen to parents in Canada or California.

In 2020, I had a court case involving the removal of a 13 year old girl and her sibling from their home. The crime? The father misgendered her. She told her school guidance counselor and the guidance counselor contacted the department of child services, DCS. They removed the children in the middle of a school day. These children were placed in foster care and their case was assigned to me. I attended supervised visitations. The counselor running the visitations would warn the father beforehand that if he misgendered his son, who was a 13 year old girl, she would end the visit early because it was an act of violence causing harm. I petitioned the judge and implored DCS multiple times to close this case and put the children back in their home where they belonged, warning that this was massive government overreach. It took three months for the judge to dismiss this case. Three months that a normal parent fought to get his kids back. Side note, while in foster care, the children got the COVID jab against the will of the father. It wasn’t until I demanded that the father had the final say over his childrens’ medical care that this went before the judge and he ordered the second dose not be administered without parental consent. I want to remind listeners, this is a deep red county in a deep red state and this was in 2020, over 3 years ago. For parents who think the public school system is broken and in need of repair, be advised, it’s working exactly how it was intended to work and things will only get worse. Compulsory education was designed to enslave and produce compliant consumers. Parents, stop blaming tik tok , social media, cell phones and public schools and start taking responsibility and ownership for what’s influencing your children. Here are some Good resources for educating yourself on the transgender movement:

The End of Gender, debunking the myths about sex and identity in our society by Debra Soh

Irreversible Damage, the transgender craze seducing our daughters by Abigail Shrier

Both of these authors are self-proclaimed liberal feminists disavowed by M5M and colleagues after they spoke out.

Respectfully,

Anonymous (wife of anonymous C)

ITM, I guess it's been a month now since our son has talked to us. I'm sure he experiences shame in going back to his sissy hypno porn life. I found this article interesting, I'm telling you TikTok is designed to pit children against parents. It doesn't work when the parents drink the kool-aid. Just like in the cultural revolution, the parents who denied the reality of the great leap forward maintained relationships with their kids. I'm glad you enlightened me to the maoist connection in all this. I did a deep dive on the great leap forward and cultural revolution. It's fascinating.

More Kids Are Going ‘No Contact’ And Cutting Off Their Parents

https://www.dailywire.com/news/more-kids-are-going-no-contact-and-cutting-off-their-parents

TYFYC

Erik

Link

Have you considered that maybe someone at HAARP listens to the show and points the machine at places after you use the rainsticks?

Todd Russell

So for weeks I jabbed my stomach, and for weeks it worked. Effortlessly, I pushed aside the puddings and the second helpings. Wasn’t it amazing, I said to myself, how little food you really need.

I must have been losing four or five pounds a week — maybe more — when all at once it started to go wrong. I don’t know why, exactly. Maybe it was something to do with constantly flying around the world, and changing time zones, but I started to dread the injections, because they were making me feel ill.

One minute I would be fine, and the next minute I would be talking to Ralph on the big white phone; and I am afraid that I decided that I couldn’t go on.

For now I am back to exercise and willpower, but I look at my colleagues — leaner but not hungrier — and I hope that if science can do it for them, maybe one day it can help me, and everyone else.

Link

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Archived Version

Thu, 13 Jul 2023 15:28

Image source, Getty ImagesBy Rachel Schraer, Clare Hix & Lindsey Harris

BBC Panorama

More than a quarter of patients on antidepressants in England - about two million people - have been taking them for five years, the BBC has found.

This is despite there being limited evidence of the benefits of taking the drugs for that length of time.

A doctor who runs an NHS clinic helping people off the pills says withdrawal symptoms can make it hard for some to stop taking their medication.

Withdrawal guidance was updated in 2019, but he says little has changed.

More than eight million people in England are on antidepressants - which are prescribed for depression, anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder and other conditions. That's one million more people than five years previously, NHS prescribing figures show.

The new figures on long-term use - for the period 2018-2022 - were provided to BBC Panorama by the NHS, following a Freedom of Information request. The data gives an overall picture but does not reflect the circumstances of individual patients, some of whom could be on antidepressants long-term for good reason.

The investigation also uncovered evidence that a leading drug company attempted 27 years ago to conceal possible withdrawal effects that one drug could cause.

Modern antidepressants - called SSRIs (Selective Serotonin Re-Uptake Inhibitors) - arrived from the late 1980s, including Prozac. They were quickly heralded as wonder drugs compared with earlier medications, some of which had serious side effects.

They were thought to treat depression by fixing an imbalance of the mood-regulating chemical serotonin in the brain. Researchers are now not clear how they work. One theory is that they simply change how you think or feel, rather than rectifying an underlying problem.

The NHS recommends antidepressants as a treatment for more severe depression. Talking therapy as well as exercise and lifestyle changes might be recommended instead of, or in combination with, the medication.

"Throughout my long and extensive career, I have seen people benefit from antidepressants," said Prof Wendy Burn, former president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists.

"I see them working in my clinical practice, I see lives being changed by them."

But she added: "People are staying on antidepressants longer, and we don't really have long-term studies that support that."

Image caption, Prof Wendy Burn helped change official guidance on antidepressants

There has long been a debate about how effective antidepressants are. The most comprehensive research, from the University of Oxford, suggests antidepressants do help some people, at least in the short-term.

But on average, their benefits are relatively modest, and the way people respond varies, with some not responding at all, according to the researcher who led the study.

And there is some evidence to suggest that long-term antidepressant use may be linked to some health risks, such as heart problems and diabetes. It is also thought that long-term use may lead to a higher risk of withdrawal symptoms in some people.

Withdrawal can happen when you stop a drug that your body has become used to.

Taking that drug away too quickly, before the brain has had time to adjust, can lead to symptoms - including low mood and feelings of anxiety. Some symptoms overlap with the original condition the drug was prescribed for, which means the withdrawal can sometimes be confused with relapse.

The symptoms depend on the individual, which drug they were taking, and for how long. Many patients can stop taking antidepressants without experiencing any problems.

If you are affected by any of the issues in this article you can find details of organisations that can help via the BBC Action Line

Panorama has uncovered evidence to suggest that one major drug company which manufactured SSRI antidepressants had become increasingly aware of a whole range of withdrawal symptoms from the mid-1990s, but was reluctant to share this information with the public and medicines regulators.

A copy of a confidential 1996 memo from firm Pfizer - which originally sold sertraline, now the UK's most common antidepressant - shows employees discussing what the drug company would tell regulators in Norway.

"We should not volunteer to describe the withdrawal symptoms, but have an agreed list prepared in case they insist," the memo says.

Some of the withdrawal reactions the memo refers to include sensory disturbances, sweating, nausea, insomnia, tremors, agitation and anxiety.

Pfizer no longer produces sertraline. Responding to Panorama's findings, a spokesperson said the company "monitored and reported all adverse event data" to licensing authorities, "in line with its legal and regulatory obligations and updated sertraline labelling as required."

It added: "Public health organisations and professional medical bodies throughout the world have recognised sertraline and other SSRIs as the treatment of choice for adult depression." The company said the drug's label warned about withdrawal and had been updated "as required".

The Royal College of Psychiatrists published updated information on withdrawal in 2019 - overseen by Prof Burn, who was its president at the time. It came after she heard testimony from patients who had experienced severe withdrawal effects.

Until then, guidance used by the NHS and the college maintained withdrawal was mostly mild and short-lived - lasting no more than about a week.

Now NHS guidance reflects that it can be severe and longer-lasting for some, and withdrawal can last many months.

Information on stopping antidepressants

Patients with concerns about their medication should discuss them with their doctor. Stopping an antidepressant suddenly can be dangerousDoctors say it is always important to seek advice and treatment for mental health problems and to try to have any medication regularly reviewedVisit the NHS, the Royal College of Psychiatrists and Leap For PDD websites for informationA Royal College of Psychiatrists spokesperson told the BBC: "Medicine continuously evolves, as does our knowledge of treating mental illness. As a result, the college updates its guidance when new evidence comes to light."

A lack of awareness about withdrawal difficulties has meant that even medical professionals who prescribe the drugs have struggled to stop taking antidepressants themselves.

Dr Mark Horowitz, who tried to stop the antidepressants he had taken for 15 years in 2015, said: "It led to complete havoc in my life," he says. "I would wake up in the morning in full panic, like I was being chased by an animal."

The panic he felt would last until late into the evenings and he took up running as a distraction.

"I ran until my feet bled, because it gave me a slight reprieve from that panic sensation."

He said it was worse than the symptoms that led him to take antidepressants in the first place.

Panorama examines whether the current generation of antidepressant drugs have lived up to their promises, following patients who have suffered serious side effects.

Watch The Antidepressant Story on BBC One at 20:00 on Monday 19 June (20:30 in Wales and Northern Ireland) and on BBC iPlayer afterwards (UK only)

He is concerned that far more work has been done on how to start patients on antidepressants - and much less on stopping.

"To me, it's the same as allowing cars to be sold without brakes," he said.

"We should know how to start the car and how to stop it."

Now Dr Horowitz runs England's only NHS antidepressant deprescribing clinic - a pilot scheme set up in London in 2021 to help people struggling to stop taking their medication.

At the moment he is seeing about 25 patients.

Despite withdrawal guidance having been updated, Dr Horowitz thinks patients are still struggling to get tailored advice. Guidance for doctors now recommends that people reduce the dose of their medication in stages, but it does not specify how long it should take. It's different for everyone.

Image caption, Dr Horowitz is still trying to reduce his antidepressant dose - and hopes to stop altogether this year

The Royal College of GPs told Panorama that family doctors were "highly-trained to have frank and sensitive conversations" with patients about the risks and benefits of antidepressants.

"Amid intense workload and workforce pressures," it said it was, "increasingly difficult to offer patients the time they need within the constraints of a standard 10-minute consultation."

The companies behind the most widely used antidepressants told Panorama that many clinical trials and studies, including ones conducted by independent researchers, had shown their drugs to be effective.

They said the drugs had been taken by many millions worldwide for potentially devastating and sometimes life-threatening conditions.

As with all medicines, they said, antidepressants have potential side effects which are clearly stated in the prescribing information. They added that their drugs are considered to be safe, with a positive benefit-risk ratio by doctors, patients and regulators around the world.

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Archived Version

Thu, 13 Jul 2023 14:26

On his way to catch a flight, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) was asked to have his photo taken by a facial recognition machine at airport security.

The Transportation Security Administration has been testing use of facial recognition software to verify travelers' identification at some airports. Use of the technology is voluntary, the TSA has told the public and Congress.

If you decline, a TSA agent is supposed to verify your identification, as we have done at airport security for years.

When Merkley said no to the face scan at Washington's Reagan National Airport, he was told it would cause a significant delay, a spokeswoman for the senator said.

There was no delay. The spokeswoman said the senator showed his photo ID to the TSA agent and cleared security.

Is facial recognition technology really voluntary if a United States senator has trouble saying no?

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Archived Version

Thu, 13 Jul 2023 14:26

The National Science Foundation's Division of Research on Learning in Formal and Informal Settings awarded $2,249,999 to Oakland, California-based nonprofit YR Media '-- a ''media, technology and music training center and platform for emerging BIPOC content creators who are using their voices to change the world'' '-- to teach ''underrepresented'' and ''underserved'' youth how to integrate critical theory with artificial intelligence technologies.

Starting in 2019, the grant titled ''Innovative approaches to Informal Education in Artificial Intelligence'' allocated millions of dollars to YR Media to ''research, design, and develop innovative approaches focusing on Artificial Intelligence (AI) for under-represented youth ages 14-24.''

The program, consisting of participants who ''are 90% youth of color and 80% low income,'' involved partnerships with the MIT Media Lab and Google staff and was ''grounded in sociocultural learning theory'' predicated on a ''theoretical framework'' of ''Computational Thinking plus Critical Pedagogy.''

Critical pedagogy is an educational framework and broader social cause that is derived from and applies methods emphasized in the broader social philosophy of critical theory stemming from the cultural Marxists of the Frankfurt School. Other derivatives of critical theory are the well-known concept of critical race theory and the myriad critical approaches to human sexuality stressing identitarian power struggles.

Emphasizing the sociocultural component of the program, the grant poses a series of questions like: ''What do underrepresented youth understand about AI and its role in society?'' and ''What are the features of an engaging ethics-centered pedagogy with AI?''

It further affirms the program's divisive attempt at stirring racial consciousness by indicating that ''[t]he research design will use ethnographic techniques and design research to study and analyze youth learning.'' Emphasizing the different experiences of various racial demographics, ''ethnographic techniques'' like those employed here are often just veiled attempts to make students think they're oppressed via the manipulation of statistics.

Young participants were encouraged to view ''AI through an ethics-and-equity lens,'' which the program suggests is ''desperately needed by the digital media and tech sectors as well as the general public.''

With the assistance of ''open-source tutorials'' from the MIT App Inventor, participants created ''their own AI tools'' to ''gain[] perspectives on the social impact of AI.'' This program fostered the release of ''products'' focusing on ''facial recognition, deepfakes, and virtual proctoring software.''

The program further explored ''the educational conditions that promote STEM engagement among BIPOC youth and others who have the most to offer and the most at stake in building ethical, equitable, and expressive AI.''

The grant indicates that ''[t]he model that has emerged from Understanding AI frames computer science as an expressive medium for storytelling, meaning-making, and social justice.'' Through this program and the fostering of ''Critical Computational Expression,'' the program's young participants ''combine the investigation of key social issues'' and ''creative expression to produce dynamic digital products '... that inform and shift national conversations about STEM and society.''

Artificial intelligence is a burgeoning field of key importance to the global economy and human civilization. All technology is integrated with the preferences of its creator; AI is no exception to this despite its alleged synthetic sentience.

The federal subsidization of programs facilitating the integration of divisive and hateful ideologies in both impressionable youth and technological development presents opportunities for the further erosion of national cohesion and a globally competitive tech sector.

YR Media and Google did not respond to The Federalist to comment on the program by the time of publication.

Samuel Mangold-Lenett is a staff editor at The Federalist. His writing has been featured in the Daily Wire, Townhall, The American Spectator, and other outlets. He is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. Follow him on Twitter @smlenett.

Samuel Mangold-Lenett

Visit on Twitter @smlenett

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Archived Version

Thu, 13 Jul 2023 14:25

In 2021, a California-based investor group purchased Golden Hill Mobile Home Park in Golden, Colorado, a small city just outside Denver in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Less than two years later, rents doubled for the nearly 40 households that called the community home, pushing residents'--some that had lived there for decades'--to seek cheaper alternatives in an area already feeling the pressure of an affordable housing crisis.

But this week, residents of the Golden Hills community got some good news: They are now the owners of the land their homes sit on, thanks in part to a 2020 state law that gave them the opportunity to purchase the property with financial assistance from the city and nonprofits.

Manufactured housing communities like the one in Golden are considered some of the most affordable unsubsidized housing in the country. But between rising rents and deep-pocketed investors scooping up these communities, residents are increasingly looking to purchase the land itself, and governments at all levels are mobilizing to help them do so.

More than 20 million Americans live in manufactured housing, according to the Manufactured Housing Institute, a trade association. With the average single-section manufactured home clocking in at just over $86,000, many residents cite affordability as the primary reason for purchasing the housing.

But while people may own these homes, they typically rent the land the buildings sit on. Just like any rental, those monthly payments are subject to rent increases as determined by the property owners. Last year, the average increase was just over 6%, according to the Manufactured Housing Institute, compared to 12% for new apartment tenants and 3.5% for apartment tenants who renewed their leases.

Large rent increases in manufactured housing communities often come after the property has been sold, according to Paul Bradley, president of ROC USA, a nonprofit that helps manufactured housing communities purchase properties. Over the last decade, private equity firms have increasingly invested in mobile home communities, much like they have in single-family homes. The Lincoln Institute estimates that about one-fifth of manufactured housing communities, or 800,000 home sites, have been purchased by investors in the previous eight years. (Manufactured housing is often called mobile home parks, though technically ''mobile homes'' are factory-built houses constructed before 1976.)

To ward off the trend, mobile park communities across the county have formed cooperatives in order to purchase the properties themselves. On Monday, Golden Hills Mobile Home Park became the 311th community to be purchased by its residents and the sixth in Colorado, according to ROC USA. These communities have a high success rate, Bradley said. So far, none have defaulted on their loan, declared bankruptcy or sold the property back to the private market. That may be, in part, because in the long run monthly payments are more stable compared to rents paid to private owners.

Governments at all levels have been mobilizing in recent years to better support residents of manufactured housing, especially low-income households.

Take, for instance, the Minnesota Legislature, which recently passed what Bradley described as ''unprecedented'' legislation. The law, among other things, preserves manufactured housing communities by creating a $10 million acquisition fund to help park residents purchase their communities, a $15 million fund for redevelopment and infrastructure improvement projects, and $10 million to help people purchase manufactured homes. It is, Bradley says, ''the most comprehensive set of investments in residential communities and manufactured housing communities anywhere in the country.''

Another power tool states are turning to is legislation that gives residents the first opportunity to buy the property their homes sit on. In recent weeks, Connecticut and Maine have enacted such bills. In 2020, Colorado approved a similar bill that has already helped preserve several mobile home parks in the state.

One such example is a manufactured housing community in Durango, Colorado, where the land was being sold as part of a 95-property portfolio deal to an investor group in Maryland. But the state's opportunity to purchase law gave residents the ability to put in an offer.

In total, 19 states have so-called right to first refusal laws, according to the Manufactured Housing Institute. These laws vary across states. For instance, in some cases they only apply when the land for sale would be converted to something other than a manufactured housing property. They also vary in how much they benefit tenants, Bradley said. In Washington state, the penalty for owners who don't give residents enough time to organize is almost negligible, and sellers can just increase the property price to cover those fees.

For manufactured housing, the concept of residents owning the land or cooperatives isn't new. Such communities have been around since the 1970s, according to Bradley, and first flourished in California, Florida and New Hampshire.

The Granite State's model, in particular, is uniquely poised to benefit low-income residents through a shared equity model. The movement gained more momentum in 1988, when the state approved a right of first refusal law. A few other states, including Massachusetts and Vermont, enacted similar legislation in the years following, but there has been very little action until recently.

Critics of right to first refusal laws often argue that the amount of time residents have to organize and purchase a property can deter other potential buyers and interfere with the seller's private property rights. Even if residents end up purchasing the land, running and investing in a community is a major undertaking.

''They have set up a business together, and it's run on a democratic basis,'' Bradley said, adding that it can be difficult for some communities to find volunteers who are willing to sit on a community leadership board.

In many cases, aged infrastructure presents the most pressing challenges to resident-owned communities. Many manufactured housing properties were established several decades ago and require significant infrastructure upgrades for services like water and sewage.

To help address these issues, Congress included a new Preservation and Reinvestment Initiative for Community Enhancement (PRICE) fund in the omnibus law Congress passed in December. The initiative includes $225 million in grants to support infrastructure and service projects, and will go to resident-owned communities, local governments, nonprofits and other entities committed to the long-term affordability of manufactured housing.

Finding property managers to help residents maintain their communities can also be a major challenge, as there are many more managers with the willingness and experience to take on multifamily housing, say, rather than manufactured housing.

But that's changing, Bradley said. ''The good news is as there are more co-ops there are more property managers coming along that are interested in co-ops.''

Editor's note: This story was changed July 11 to correct the number of manufactured housing sites purchased by investors over the last decade.

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Archived Version

Thu, 13 Jul 2023 14:23

Image source, Paolo Camilli/Instagram Image caption, White Lotus actor Paolo Camilli was among those expressing their anger that "a brief grope, if it's under 10 seconds, isn't considered a crime"

By Sofia Bettiza

BBC News, Rome

Does it count as sexual harassment if an assault lasts less than 10 seconds?

Many young people in Italy are expressing outrage on social media, after a judge cleared a school caretaker of groping a teenager, because it did not last long enough.

The case involves a 17-year-old student at a Rome high school.

She described walking up a staircase to class with a friend, when she felt her trousers fall down, a hand touching her buttocks and grabbing her underwear.

"Love, you know I was joking," the man told her when she turned around.

After the incident, which happened in April 2022, the student reported the caretaker, 66-year-old Antonio Avola, to police.

He admitted to groping the student without consent, but said it was a joke.

A Rome public prosecutor asked for a three-and-a-half year prison sentence but this week the caretaker was acquitted of sexual assault charges. According to the judges, what happened "does not constitute a crime" because it lasted less than 10 seconds.

Since the ruling, palpata breve - a brief groping - has become a trend on Instagram and TikTok in Italy, along with the #10secondi hashtag.

Italians have posted videos looking at the camera in silence and touching their intimate parts for 10 seconds straight.

Image source, Instagram

Image caption, Camilla posted this video referring to the caretaker's acquittal and the quote: "Groping lasted just 10 seconds"

The videos are often uncomfortable to watch but they have the aim of showing just how long 10 seconds can feel.

The first was posted by White Lotus actor Paolo Camilli, and since then thousands of people have followed suit.

Another video was reposted by Chiara Ferragni, Italy's most famous influencer who has 29.4 million followers on Instagram.

Another influencer, Francesco Cicconetti wrote on TikTok: "Who decides that 10 seconds is not a long time? Who times the seconds, while you're being harassed?"

"Men don't have the right to touch women's bodies, not even for a second - let alone 5 or 10."

He goes on to say that the judges' decision to acquit the caretaker shows just how normalised sexual harassment is in Italian society.

A post on the Freeda Instagram account says: "This sentence is absurd. The duration of the harassment should not diminish its severity."

But according to the judges, the caretaker did not linger. He groped the teenager only briefly, performing an "awkward manoeuvre without lust".

"The judges ruled that he was joking? Well, it was no joke to me," the student told Corriere della Sera newspaper.

"The caretaker came up from behind without saying anything. He put his hands down my trousers and inside my underwear.

"He groped my bottom. Then, he pulled me up - hurting my private parts. For me, this is not a joke. This is not how an old man should 'joke' with a teenager."

"That handful of seconds was more than enough for the caretaker to make me feel his hands on me."

She says she feels doubly betrayed - by her school and by the justice system.

"I'm starting to think I was wrong to trust the institutions. This is not justice."

The student fears the judges' ruling will deter girls and women from coming forward if they are subjected to such attacks.

Recent figures from the EU's Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA) suggested that 70% of Italian woman who had suffered harassment between 2016 and 2021 did not report the incident.

"They will feel that reporting abuse is just not worth it. But it is important, because silence protects the aggressors."

Link to Article

Archived Version

Thu, 13 Jul 2023 13:59

Watch the video (00:01:36)

with Hyun Song Shin, Economic Adviser and Head of Research

Key takeaways Tokenisation of money and assets has great potential, but initiatives to date have taken place in silos without access to central bank money and the foundation of trust it provides. A new type of financial market infrastructure '' a unified ledger '' could capture the full benefits of tokenisation by combining central bank money, tokenised deposits and tokenised assets on a programmable platform. As well as improving existing processes through the seamless integration of transactions, a unified ledger could harness programmability to enable arrangements that are currently not practicable, thereby expanding the universe of possible economic outcomes. Multiple ledgers '' each with a specific use case '' might coexist, interlinked by application programming interfaces to ensure interoperability as well as promote financial inclusion and a level playing field. IntroductionThroughout history, developments in the monetary system and society at large have been closely interwoven. This interplay has been a story of one side pulling the other, leading to dramatic leaps in economic activity over time. On the one hand, the evolving needs and demands of society have spurred the monetary system to adapt. On the other hand, key innovations in money and payments have unleashed latent demand for new types of economic activity that have led to dramatic spurts of economic growth and development.

The rapid expansion of trade and commerce over the past 500 years would be scarcely imaginable if buyers and sellers still had to cart around heavy chests full of metal coins to pay for goods and services. The advent of money in the form of book entries on ledgers overseen by trusted intermediaries opened the door to new financial instruments that bridged both geographical distance and the long lags between the delivery of goods and settlement of payments.1 With the advent of the electronic age, paper ledgers became digital, adding impetus to the "dematerialisation" of money as well as claims on financial and real assets. Electronic bookkeeping accelerated paper-based processes, allowing accounts to be updated at the speed of light. Through dematerialisation and digitalisation, the interplay between money and the economy has wrought profound changes on society at large.

Today, the monetary system stands at the cusp of another major leap. Following dematerialisation and digitalisation, the key development is tokenisation '' the process of representing claims digitally on a programmable platform. This can be seen as the next logical step in digital recordkeeping and asset transfer. Tokenisation could dramatically enhance the capabilities of the monetary and financial system by harnessing new ways for intermediaries to interact in serving end users, removing the traditional separation of messaging, reconciliation and settlement. Tokenisation could unlock new types of economic arrangement that the frictions inherent in the current monetary system have hitherto made impractical.

Crypto and decentralised finance (DeFi) have offered a glimpse of tokenisation's promise, but crypto is a flawed system that cannot take on the mantle of the future of money.2 Not only is crypto self-referential, with little contact with the real world, it also lacks the anchor of the trust in money provided by the central bank. While stablecoins have mushroomed to fill this vacuum by mimicking central bank money, the implosion of the crypto universe in the past year shows that there is no substitute for the real thing. Away from crypto, efforts by commercial banks and other private sector groups have explored the capabilities of tokenisation for real-world use cases. But these efforts have been hampered by the silos erected by each project and the resulting disconnect from other parts of the financial system. These projects also lack integration with a tokenised version of the settlement asset in the form of a central bank digital currency (CBDC).

The collapse of crypto and the faltering progress of other tokenisation projects underline a key lesson. The success of tokenisation rests on the foundation of trust provided by central bank money and its capacity to knit together key elements of the financial system. This capacity derives from the central bank's role at the core of the monetary system. Among its many functions, the central bank issues the economy's unit of account and ensures the finality of payments through settlement on its balance sheet. Building on the trust in central bank money, the private sector uses its creativity and ingenuity to serve customers.3 In particular, commercial banks issue deposits, the most common form of money held by the public. Supported by regulation and supervision, this two-tiered structure preserves the "singleness of money": the property that payments denominated in the sovereign unit of account will be settled at par, even if they use different forms of privately and publicly issued monies.

While the current monetary system has served society well, pinch points in the system that emerge from time to time highlight the frictions that users chafe against. These frictions result from the current design of the monetary system where digital money and other claims reside in siloed proprietary databases, located at the edges of communication networks. These databases must be connected through third-party messaging systems that send messages back and forth. As a result, transactions need to be reconciled separately before eventually being settled with finality. During this back-and-forth process, not only do participants have an incomplete view of actions and circumstances, but the uncertainties and misaligned incentives preclude some transactions that have clear economic rationale. While workarounds such as collateral or escrow can mitigate such frictions, these solutions have their limits and create their own inefficiencies. Tokenisation is a more fundamental route towards addressing the shortcomings of the current system.

New demands are also emerging from end users themselves as advances in digital services raise their expectations. Indeed, these emerging demands may be just the tip of the iceberg. As services delivered through smartphone apps make deep inroads into people's daily lives, users expect the same seamless operation of the monetary and financial system as the seamless interactions of apps on their smartphones. These demands are beginning to outgrow the siloed domains and their reliance on the to-and-fro processes at the edges of the network.

This chapter presents a blueprint for a future monetary system that harnesses the potential of tokenisation to improve the old and enable the new. The key elements of the blueprint are CBDCs, tokenised deposits and other tokenised claims on financial and real assets. The blueprint envisages these elements being brought together in a new type of financial market infrastructure (FMI) '' a "unified ledger".4 The full benefits of tokenisation could be harnessed in a unified ledger due to the settlement finality that comes from central bank money residing in the same venue as other claims. Leveraging trust in the central bank, a shared venue of this kind has great potential to enhance the monetary and financial system.

A unified ledger transforms the way that intermediaries interact to serve end users. Through programmability and the platform's ability to bundle transactions ("composability"), a unified ledger allows sequences of financial transactions to be automated and seamlessly integrated. This reduces the need for manual interventions and reconciliations that arise from the traditional separation of messaging, clearing and settlement, thereby eliminating delays and uncertainty. The ledger also supports simultaneous and instantaneous settlement, reducing settlement times and credit risks. Settlement in central bank money ensures the singleness of money and payment finality.

Moreover, by having "everything in one place", a unified ledger provides a setting in which a broader array of contingent actions can be automatically executed to overcome information and incentive problems. In this way, tokenisation could expand the universe of possible contracting outcomes. The unified ledger thus opens the way for entirely new types of economic arrangement that are impossible today due to incentive and informational frictions. The eventual transformation of the financial system will be limited only by the imagination and ingenuity of developers that build on the system, much as the ecosystem of smartphone apps has far exceeded the expectations of the platform builders themselves. Even in the near term, a unified ledger could unlock arrangements that have clear economic rationale. Possibilities include new types of deposit contract that bolster financial stability, improvements in supply chain finance and new ways to improve the financial system's resilience and integrity.

The unified ledger concept can be broad or narrow, with the first instances likely to be application-specific in scope. For example, one ledger could aim at improving securities settlement, while another could facilitate trade finance in supply chains. Tokenised forms of money would figure in each ledger to provide the transaction medium. Each unified ledger would bring together only the intermediaries and assets required for each application. The scope of a ledger will also determine the relevant players that must be involved in the governance arrangements. Separate ledgers could be connected through application programming interfaces (APIs), or, as their scope expands over time, they could incorporate additional assets and entities, or merge together.

Some of the benefits envisaged from the unified ledger could be reaped by interlinking existing systems through APIs into a "network of networks". While such a network of networks would still consist of separate systems and fall short of fully fledged programmability across systems, the worst drawbacks of siloed systems could be mitigated.

This next stage in the financial system's journey will be one that combines the best efforts of both the private and public sectors. Central banks could work with regulated private entities to develop technological solutions and standards to meet specific use cases. With their public interest mandate, central banks are best placed to establish a common venue for each use case by interlinking with the monetary system. Proper oversight and supervision will be a prerequisite for this endeavour.

In embracing evolution and change, central banks and the private sector should follow key guiding principles to ensure that the monetary system harnesses innovation for the public interest. First, the tried and tested division of roles between the public and private sector in the two-tiered system remains the cornerstone. The second principle is upholding a competitive level playing field that promotes innovation and financial inclusion. And third, the future monetary system needs to meet the highest standards of data security and privacy, while ensuring system integrity by guarding against illicit activity such as money laundering, financing of terrorism and fraud.

The rest of the chapter introduces the concept of tokenisation and how it could be mobilised in the design of key elements of the future monetary system: central bank digital currencies, tokenised deposits and tokenised claims on financial and real assets. The chapter then proposes unified ledgers to integrate these components seamlessly. Concrete examples show how this kind of integration could improve the old and enable the new. The final section discusses high-level guiding principles on scope, governance, incentives for participation, operational resilience and privacy.

Tokenising money and assetsThe blueprint for the future monetary system rests on several key concepts surrounding tokenisation.

Tokenisation basicsTraditional ledger systems and tokenised systems operate under fundamentally different rules. In traditional ledger systems, account managers are entrusted with maintaining and updating an accurate record of ownership. In contrast, in a tokenised setting, money or assets become "executable objects" that are maintained on programmable platforms. They could be transferred through the execution of programming instructions issued by system participants without the intervention of an account manager. While tokenisation does not eliminate the role of intermediaries, it changes the nature of that role. The role of the operator in a tokenised environment is as a trusted intermediary serving in a governance role as the rule book's curator, rather than as a bookkeeper who records individual transactions on behalf of account holders.

The claims traded on programmable platforms are called tokens. Tokens are not merely digital entries in a database. Rather, they integrate the records of the underlying asset normally found in a traditional database with the rules and logic governing the transfer process for that asset (Graph 1). Hence, whereas in traditional systems the rules that govern the updating of asset ownership are usually common to all assets, tokens can be customised to meet specific user or regulatory requirements that apply to individual assets. We discuss in a later section how this dual nature of tokens could be used to good effect in a supervisory and compliance setting by directly embedding supervisory features into the token itself, which can be tailored to specific rules.

Tokenisation '' the process of recording claims on financial or real assets that exist on a traditional ledger on a programmable platform '' introduces two important capabilities. First, by dispensing with messaging and the reliance on account managers to update records, it provides greater scope for composability, whereby several actions are bundled into one executable package. Second, it enables the contingent performance of actions through smart contracts, ie logical statements such as "if, then, or else". By combining composability and contingency, tokenisation makes the conditional performance of actions more readily attainable, even quite complex ones.5

This chapter examines several use cases of such contingent performance of actions. One is in the design of supply chains in which several participants interact under uncertainty and with incentives that may not be perfectly aligned. Another example is the design of banking deposit contracts where built-in contingencies that depend on the actions of other depositors alter the incentives of depositors to be a first mover in a bank run setting. Such contingent deposit contracts could nullify the so-called first-mover advantage.

Many interesting real-world applications require the tokenisation of assets that currently exist in traditional databases. These assets could range from financial securities whose ownership is recorded in securities depositories to real assets, such as commodities or real estate. The tokenisation process for such assets occurs through so-called ramps that define a mapping between assets in traditional databases and their counterparts in tokenised form (Graph 2). The assets in the traditional database are immobilised or "locked" to serve as collateral that backs the tokens issued on the programmable platform. The locking of assets ensures that the transfer of their tokenised counterparts guarantees the transfer of the underlying assets.

Central bank digital currency and private tokenised moniesThe full potential of tokenisation needs a monetary unit of account that denominates transactions, as well as the accompanying means of payment. In crypto, stablecoins that reside on the same platform as other crypto assets perform the role of the means of payment. However, for reasons highlighted already, central bank money and the settlement finality that it brings is a much firmer foundation for tokenisation.6 The full potential of tokenisation is therefore best harnessed by having central bank money reside on the same venue as other tokenised claims. This is because programmable transactions could incorporate settlement using the economy's unit of account as an essential part of the tokenised arrangement.

For this reason, the development of a wholesale CBDC is core to the functioning of a tokenised environment. As a tokenised means of settlement, wholesale CBDCs would serve a similar role as reserves in the current system, but with the added functionalities enabled by tokenisation. Transactions in wholesale CBDC could incorporate all the features such as the composability and contingent performance of the actions mentioned above. The BIS Innovation Hub, in partnership with central banks around the world, stands at the forefront of experimentation with CBDCs and tokenisation (Box A).

Enhanced digital representations of central bank money could include a retail variant open to use by ordinary users. A retail CBDC is a digital version of physical cash that can be used by households and firms for everyday transactions. By providing the public with a ready way to convert alternative private digital monies into digital cash, ie a direct link to the sovereign unit of account in digital form, the central bank would further support singleness.7

While the role of CBDCs in a tokenised environment is clear, there is greater room for debate concerning the appropriate form of private tokenised money that complements CBDCs. There are currently two main candidates for private tokenised monies: tokenised deposits and asset-backed stablecoins.8 Both represent liabilities of the issuer, who promises customers that they can redeem their claims at par value in the sovereign unit of account. However, tokenised deposits and asset-backed stablecoins differ in how they are transferred and in their role in the financial system. These differences have implications for their attributes as a tokenised form of money that complements CBDCs.

Tokenised deposits could be designed to resemble the workings of regular bank deposits in the current system; see McLaughlin (2021). They could be issued by commercial banks and represent a claim on the issuer. Like regular deposits, they would not be directly transferable. Central banks' liquidity provision for settlement would continue to ensure smooth functioning of payments.

To bring out the parallels between tokenised deposits and conventional deposits in the current system, consider how a payment is made currently, using deposit balances. When John makes a payment of GBP 100 to Paul, Paul does not receive a GBP 100 deposit at John's bank. Rather, John's account balance at his bank is reduced by GBP 100, while Paul's balance at his bank increases by the same amount. Meanwhile, the adjustments in the individual accounts at the two banks are matched by a transfer in central bank reserves between the two banks. The same payment outcome could be achieved in a tokenised world by reducing John's tokenised deposit holding at his bank and increasing Paul's tokenised deposit holding at his, while simultaneously settling the payment through a concurrent transfer of wholesale CBDC (Graph 3). Paul continues to have a claim only on his bank, where he is a verified customer, and has no claim on John's bank, nor on John.

Tokenised deposits would not only preserve but at times enhance some key advantages of the current two-tier monetary system.

First, tokenised deposits would help preserve the singleness of money. In the current system, singleness of money for payments involving commercial bank deposits is achieved because central banks operate settlement infrastructures that guarantee the ultimate transfer of payments at par value in terms of the sovereign unit of account. Tokenised deposits would preserve this arrangement. However, the fact that settlement in wholesale CBDC is automatically triggered through smart contracts would improve the immediacy of the current process, further narrowing time gaps to reduce risks.

The BIS Innovation Hub stands at the forefront of experimentation with central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and tokenised assets (Table A1). The work includes projects within and across jurisdictions and in multiple currencies, often in partnership with the private sector.

Experiments with CBDCs have shown that tokenisation can reduce the complexity of securities settlement by facilitating simpler and more direct holding systems, as shown in Project Helvetia. The findings from Helvetia also suggest that using wholesale CBDC, as opposed to linking real-time gross settlement systems to a financial infrastructure, could provide greater scope for future innovation and efficiency gains in the settlement process. In this context, tokenisation facilitates increased automation through the use of smart contracts. It can speed up settlement as tokenised assets typically settle automatically, ie both legs of a transaction settle simultaneously and instantly. Tokenisation also increases operational transparency, as shown in Projects Jura, Dunbar and mBridge. These three completed wholesale CBDC projects focus on use cases where CBDCs were transferred against either another CBDC (payment versus payment, PvP) or tokenised securities (delivery versus payment, DvP). While systems exist to cater to both cross-border PvP and DvP, coverage is not universal in terms of currencies and jurisdictions, and costs are often deemed too high for universal usage. These projects were able to offer new solutions to long-standing operational challenges and policy questions. For example, in Project Jura, subnetworks allow the platform to respect jurisdictional boundaries and data location requirements and notaries allow central banks to control and monitor transactions in their currencies both in terms of payments and PvP settlements. Moreover, programmability allows new types of contingent payment, while certain policy measures (eg capital controls) can be built in from the start.

Beyond CBDCs, other projects have explored the practical and technological complexities of tokenised assets in the context of green finance (Project Genesis) and trade finance (Project Dynamo).

Second, payments in tokenised deposits settled in wholesale CBDC would ensure finality. By using its own balance sheet as the ultimate means of settlement, the central bank provides the means for ensuring the finality of wholesale payments. As the trusted intermediary, it is the central bank that debits the account of the payer and credits the account of the payee, after which the payment is final and irrevocable. In the above example, finality ensures that Paul does not have a claim on John (or John's bank), but on his bank only.

Third, tokenised deposits would ensure that banks could continue to offer credit and liquidity in a flexible way. In the current two-tiered monetary system, banks provide individuals and firms with loans and on-demand access to liquidity through, for example, credit lines. Most of the money that circulates in the monetary system today is created in this way. This is in large part possible because the recipients of credit can simultaneously hold deposit accounts at banks, allowing banks to create deposits when making a loan.9 Unlike narrow banking models, this flexibility allows banks to adjust to the needs of firms and households in the light of changing economic or financial conditions. Of course, adequate regulation and supervision are required to prevent excessive credit growth and risk-taking.

Stablecoins are an alternative form of private tokenised money, but they have important shortcomings.10 In contrast to tokenised deposits, stablecoins represent a transferrable claim on the issuer, akin to a digital bearer instrument. A payment using stablecoins transfers the issuer's liability from one holder to another. Imagine that John holds 1 stablecoin unit (SCU) issued by a stablecoin issuer. When John pays Paul SCU 1, John's claim on the stablecoin issuer is transferred to Paul, who did not have a claim on that issuer before the transfer. There is no need to update the stablecoin issuer's balance sheet, and there is no settlement on the central bank's balance sheet. Whoever holds the instrument has a claim on the issuer and can transfer it without the need for consent or involvement of the issuer. In this case, Paul is left with a claim on an issuer he may not trust.

As stablecoins are tradable, their prices can deviate from par, thus undermining the singleness of money. Deviations from singleness can occur if there are differences in liquidity across stablecoins or if variations in the quality of the backing or characteristics of the issuer lead to differences in the perceived creditworthiness of different issuers. Even higher-order uncertainty can arise, such as that associated with doubts about whether others harbour doubts about the value of a stablecoin, which can lead to discounting and hence undermine singleness.11 For these reasons, as well as the absence of a clear regulatory and supervisory framework and the lack of a central bank as a lender of last resort, there have been multiple recent episodes where stablecoin prices have lost their pegs (Graph 4).

Asset-backed stablecoins also do not allow for the elastic provision of a general means of payment. Any dollar against which a stablecoin is issued should be, at least in principle, invested directly in safe and liquid assets. Stablecoins thus reduce the overall supply of liquid assets that are available for other purposes.12 Even if well regulated and supervised, stablecoin issuers would operate like narrow banks.

Finally, tokenised deposits have advantages over stablecoins in terms of compliance with know-your-customer (KYC), anti-money laundering (AML) and combating the financing of terrorism (CFT) rules. Going back to the example above, Paul holds the liability of the stablecoin issuer after the transfer from John. But the issuer did not perform any identity verification or compliance check on Paul, which creates a risk of fraud. To ensure compliance with KYC, AML and CFT regulation for stablecoins, a significant regulatory overhaul would be necessary.13 In contrast, tokenised deposits, by closely resembling the traditional deposit transfer process, could leverage the existing regulatory and supervisory frameworks for financial institutions.

Achieving seamless interoperability through unified ledgersThe potential of tokenisation lies in its ability to knit together transactions and operations that encompass money and a range of other assets that reside on the programmable platform. Money in tokenised form provides the essential means of payment that mirror the underlying economic transactions. At the heart of the system lies central bank money in tokenised form that facilitates settlement finality.

This section outlines the concept of a unified ledger where central bank digital currencies, private tokenised monies and other tokenised assets coexist on the same programmable platform. In simple terms, a unified ledger could be considered a "common venue" where money and other tokenised objects come together to enable seamless integration of transactions and to open the door to entirely new types of economic arrangement.

The concept of a unified ledger does not mean "one ledger to rule them all" '' a sole ledger that overshadows all other systems in the economy. Depending on the needs of each jurisdiction, multiple ledgers, each with a specific use case, could coexist. APIs could connect these ledgers to each other and existing systems (Box B). Over time, they could incorporate new functions or merge as overlaps in scope expand. The scope of a unified ledger would also determine the parties involved in each ledger's governance arrangements.

A unified ledger combines tokenised money and assets on a common platform. By doing so, it enables programmability, composability and multi-asset atomic settlement. On the road to a unified ledger, an intermediate solution would be to integrate legacy systems and existing infrastructures with new programmable platforms through application programming interfaces (APIs). APIs can interconnect systems and implement ramps that lock assets in traditional ledgers and unlock them in programmable platforms. If well designed, APIs may guarantee settlement finality as conventionally defined (CPSS-IOSCO (2012)). However, because APIs involve multiple systems with different operators and protocols, API implementations cannot achieve atomic settlement. Graph B1 shows three different models that range from the smallest incremental enhancement to a fully fledged unified ledger.

In the first model, an API connects the existing payment system to a programmable platform that contains only a limited number of asset classes (Graph B1.A). The programmable platform does not contain tokenised private monies or central bank digital currency (CBDC). Clearing and settlement of payments are achieved using traditional accounts at banks and via the conventional settlement system (eg a real time gross settlement system). A set of APIs coordinate workflows by sending and receiving messages across systems. The operators from both systems establish the standards for APIs. Settlement finality is achieved in the usual way. However, in this model, atomic settlement involving transactions with private monies, central bank money and other assets would not be feasible.

In the second model (Graph B1.B), the programmable platform contains tokenised private monies and tokenised assets, and APIs connect these to the central bank's settlement infrastructure. The platform contains no partition for the central bank. Tokenised private money partitions are connected to traditional systems through APIs and smart contracts. These contracts contain rules that ensure that the updating of accounts across participants is accompanied by settlement in central bank money in the traditional settlement system, which is triggered through APIs. This model guarantees atomic settlement for private monies and other assets, but not for transactions that involve CBDC.

In the third model (Graph B1.C), wholesale CBDC, tokenised private monies and tokenised assets coexist on a fully fledged unified ledger. Wholesale CBDCs could be provided in two ways. In the first, CBDCs may take the form of a central bank liability that is issued directly on to the unified ledger. Alternatively, the central bank could tokenise existing reserves using an API that connects the unified ledger to the current reserve system. This system supports settlement finality and atomic settlement for transactions involving wholesale CBDC, private tokenised monies and tokenised assets.

While the creation of a unified ledger would require the introduction of a new type of financial market infrastructure (FMI), some of the envisaged benefits could also be reaped through more incremental changes to existing systems and interlinking them through APIs into a network of networks. Weighing the pros and cons of a big leap against those of a series of incremental changes is important when considering innovation of any kind but it is especially important for the large discrete changes entailed by new infrastructures such as a unified ledger. Some automated processes for exchanging data that resemble operations in tokenised environments could be achieved by connecting existing systems through APIs. In the short term, modifying existing systems would require lower upfront costs and less coordination among stakeholders than creating a unified ledger.

Yet history shows that incremental fixes have their limits, especially when they accumulate on top of legacy systems. Each new layer would need to look forwards while being constrained by having to look backwards to ensure compatibility with legacy systems. These constraints will become more binding as more layers are added on top, eventually holding back innovative developments. The history of computing and software is replete with such examples.14

For these reasons, it is often the case that harnessing the benefits of technological advances necessitates a fundamental rethink of the financial infrastructure that supports new types of operation. Tokenisation presents another such opportunity, where the introduction of programmable platforms could bring long-term benefits that far outweigh the short-term costs arising from investment as well as the costs and coordination efforts in shifting to new standards and procedures. Of course, the relative balance between the benefits of a unified ledger and those from interlinking existing systems through APIs will depend on the state of technology and the specific needs of each jurisdiction. There is no one size fits all.

The building blocks of a unified ledgerA unified ledger leverages the benefits of tokenisation on a common platform. Based on a secure environment for storing and sharing data through encryption, it could enable new forms of transaction, thus expanding the universe of contracting outcomes.

There are two key aspects to the design of a unified ledger. The first is that it combines all the components needed to complete a transaction on one platform, ie it has everything in one place. The second is that it features money and assets as executable objects, which means they could be transferred safely and securely without going through external authentication and verification processes and without relying on external messaging systems.

The structure of a unified ledger can be described in terms of the following building blocks (Graph 5). The ledger comprises a data environment and an execution environment, which are subject to a common governance framework. The data environment contains the digital representations of money and assets in separate partitions that are owned and operated by the respective competent operating entities (dashed lines). The data environment also includes information necessary for the operation of the ledger, such as the data required for the secure and legal transfer of money and assets. The data environment also encompasses all information necessary to incorporate real-world events into any contingent performance of actions. Information can be a direct result of transactions on the ledger or may be obtained from the outside environment.15

Any operation involving one or more of these elements is carried out in the execution environment, either directly by users or through smart contracts. For each specific application, operations in the execution environment combine only the intermediaries and assets required for each application. For example, a payment between two individuals, executed via a smart contract, would bring together the users' banks (as providers of tokenised deposits) and the central bank (as provider of CBDC). Should the payment be conditional on some real-world contingency, that information would also be included.

The common governance framework specifies the rules and standards of how the different components interact in the execution environment, as well as which privacy rules apply. Preserving strict confidentiality is a prerequisite if a unified ledger is to be a practical proposition. Confidentiality and data control are achieved in two mutually reinforcing ways: data partitions and data encryption (denoted with a lock in the execution environment). Partitions guarantee that data and information are visible and accessible to only the respective authorised parties for each partitioned domain, ensuring strict confidentiality. At the same time, cryptographic techniques could ensure that data can be shared confidentially as inputs in the execution environment. The details are discussed in the following sections.

Use cases: improving the oldWhile the monetary system has served society well, its current design could lead to the emergence of pinch points. Digital money currently sits at the edges of communication networks, where it resides in siloed proprietary databases operated by banks and non-banks. External messaging systems are required to link these databases. The separation of messaging, reconciliation and settlement can lead to delays and means that participants often have an incomplete view of completed actions. Consequently, errors may go undetected for longer, leading to higher error resolution costs and increased operational risk. For these reasons, payment processes can be costly, cumbersome, slow and opaque. And they can fall short of meeting users' changing demands.

The complexity and lack of transparency in existing payment systems is evident even in a simple payment involving customers of two different banks (Box C). A transfer of funds from payer to payee involves a large number of messages, internal checks and adjustments. Participants generally cannot track the progress of their payments in real time. In particular, the payee does not see when the process is initiated, and the payer does not know when it is completed.16

The payment process is even more complex in cross-border transactions, further amplifying frictions. For one, these require international messaging systems on top of domestic ones. Differences in operating hours and/or holidays as well as inconsistencies across operating systems, for example in the form of different messaging standards, can lead to further delays, increasing settlement risk. In addition, the involvement of more intermediaries (eg correspondent banks) increases operational risk. For cross-border payments involving different currencies, there is also foreign exchange (FX) settlement risk, namely the risk that one party to a currency trade fails to deliver the currency owed.17

A unified ledger could improve the way payments are executed. Having private tokenised monies and CBDC on the same platform eliminates the need for the sequential messages across siloed databases. This enables so-called atomic settlement, in which two assets are exchanged simultaneously, such that the transfer of one occurs only upon transfer of the other.18 In the process, settlement, ie the wholesale leg of the payment from one intermediary to another, also occurs instantaneously in wholesale CBDC.19 At the same time, the use of a partitioned data environment with appropriate access controls allows full transparency for the transacting parties, while keeping the transaction private from those who are not involved. Finally, by combining messaging and payment rails on the same platform, the ledger eliminates delays in the payment process, thereby mitigating settlement risk.

Securities settlement could benefit greatly from execution on a unified ledger. The current process for securities settlement involves multiple parties, such as brokers, custodians, central securities depositories, clearing houses and registrars. Accordingly, there is a need for various messaging instructions, money flows and reconciliation procedures, all of which lengthen the process, increase the costs and expose parties to additional risks. By bringing tokenised money and securities together on a programmable platform, some of these risks could be mitigated by shortening settlement lags and obviating the need for messaging and reconciliation. Moreover, the simultaneous execution of the delivery and payment legs could expand the scope of securities covered in delivery-versus-payment (DvP) arrangements, further contributing to risk mitigation. Box D discusses this possibility in more detail.

Messaging that governs digital money is currently located at the edges of communication networks and money transfers involve multiple messages through third-party messaging systems. At each step of the process, participants often have only a limited view of the completed actions.

The complexity and lack of transparency in existing payment systems can be illustrated with a simple example of a wire transfer from Alice to Bob (Graph C1). The process begins with Alice sending a payment request to her bank using the bank's mobile app (step 1). Bank A responds by debiting Alice's account by the transfer amount together with any fees (step 2) and sending a payment order to the settlement system (step 3). The settlement system debits Bank A's settlement account and credits Bank B's account (step 4) and sends an advice of credit with a reference number to Bank B (step 5). There follows an acknowledgement with a reference number to Bank A (step 6). Bank B must ensure Bob has an account and perform any know-your-customer or anti-money laundering checks (step 7). If any of these checks fail, then Bank B will need to send a reversal request to the settlement institution (potential step 8a shown in light grey). Otherwise, Bank B credits Bob's account (step 8b) and sends a message to Bob notifying him of the adjustment to his account (step 9).

In some payment systems Bank B must accept the transfer by Bank A before it takes place. In this case, steps 5 and 7 come before step 4. It is also worth emphasising that in the description provided in Graph C1, Alice is not notified that Bob has received the transfer. This can be achieved through additional messages from Bank B to the settlement system (step 10), from the settlement system to Bank A (step 11), and then with a final confirmation message from Bank A to Alice (step 12). These steps appear in light grey in Graph C1 to show that they are not common to all systems.

Another important use case is the mitigation of settlement risk in the multi-trillion dollar FX market. Existing netting and payment-versus-payment (PvP) mechanisms help to mitigate settlement risk, but do not fully eliminate it, not least as existing PvP arrangements are at times unavailable, unsuitable for some trades or deemed too costly by market participants.20 Atomic settlement around the clock, instead, could eliminate settlement lags. Moreover, smart contracts that combine currencies with authorised FX providers could allow more currencies to be integrated on a common platform at a lower cost, expanding the scope of PvP arrangements.

Today, the process of trading securities and settling securities transactions involves multiple parties, with a myriad of messaging instructions, reconciliation efforts and money flows involved (Graph D1). Central securities depositories (CSDs) electronically manage securities either directly or indirectly (eg through a custodian) for the security's beneficial owner. A securities buyer or seller initiates the process by instructing her broker or custodian to initiate the trade. During the time between trading and final settlement (the "settlement cycle", which can take up to two days), parties are exposed to replacement cost risk (ie the risk of a trade failing to settle and having to be replaced at an unfavourable price). In addition, during the settlement process itself, counterparties are exposed to principal risk (ie the risk that one counterparty does not fulfil the agreement '' failing either to pay or to deliver the security). The CSD must verify the identity of account holders and ensures reconciliation and confirmation of what is being settled with the relevant third parties (eg clearing agents).

A unified ledger could reduce these risks by reducing the number of counterparties and shortening confirmation and reconciliation times. If both tokenised money and securities are hosted on a common platform, the risks and costs that arise from having them reside in separate ledgers can be reduced substantially. The simultaneous execution of the delivery and payment legs could also expand the scope of securities covered in delivery-versus-payment (DvP) arrangements, helping to mitigate principal risk between counterparties. Appropriate liquidity saving mechanisms would need to be instituted, as atomic settlement also puts higher liquidity demands on the system '' much like the move from deferred net settlement to real-time gross settlement.

Use cases: enabling the newBeyond improving existing processes, a unified ledger could open the door to entirely new types of "arrangements and transactions" that expand the universe of possible contracting outcomes. This is made possible through the combination of smart contracts, a secure and confidential environment for storing and sharing information and the execution of transactions enabled by tokenisation.

Smart contracts increase the scope for successful coordination. In many instances, mutually beneficial outcomes cannot be achieved when participants need to undertake costly joint efforts. The reason is that individual participants may have an incentive to free ride on the contribution of others. Contingent performance promises to overcome such coordination problems. For example, a smart contract could specify that each participant contributes only a certain amount to a joint venture if all other participants also contribute. This way, free-riding is eliminated.

Overcoming coordination problems may be particularly useful in the context of banking, where the use of contingency in term deposit contracts could contribute to the stability of bank funding and the banking sector more generally. Typically, term deposit contracts are bilateral arrangements between the bank and the depositor. Yet from time to time, the value of deposits can depend on the collective decisions of all depositors, especially during stress periods in the banking sector. In this context, strategic uncertainty arises as early withdrawals are met on a first-come, first-served basis, while the bank invests funds in illiquid assets. Depositors who withdraw first thus have an advantage and this can lead to bank runs. This problem could be mitigated by allowing explicit coordination through the design of new types of deposit contracts that impose contingent performance of actions on depositors. Such contracts could ensure that early withdrawers do no better than late withdrawers, thus eliminating the motivation to withdraw funds purely out of fear that others might do the same. This type of arrangement would not prevent all potential types of run from occurring, but it could mitigate the textbook case of first-mover advantage and coordination failures.

Supply chains are another possible use case that would make full use of a unified ledger's capabilities to incorporate real-time information into smart contracts. The problem of supply chain financing has been a notoriously difficult one to solve in real-world settings. Supply chain financing has attributes of a DvP problem as explained below, but one which also features uncertainty and information asymmetries about the underlying state of the world.

Graph 6 depicts a stylised supply chain. A buyer (usually a large firm) purchases goods from suppliers (often small and medium-sized enterprises, SMEs), which in turn require goods from other suppliers for production. A common problem is that the buyer would prefer to pay for the goods only once delivered. However, suppliers need to pay their workers and purchase materials to produce the goods beforehand. They thus require some form of financing until they receive payment from the buyer. For well known reasons, including the risk that the buyer will not pay upon delivery, obtaining trade credit usually requires firms to pledge collateral.21

For example, an SME in Italy might expect delivery of intermediate goods via ship from its Indian supplier in one month's time. To set up production now, it can pledge these goods as collateral to obtain a loan from a bank or its suppliers. Should the company default, the creditor can reclaim the collateral. However, creditors might be reluctant to provide sufficient credit or charge a prohibitively high interest rate, as the collateral might lose value due to pirate attacks or storm damage to the ship. The firm might also engage in fraudulent behaviour and try to pledge the collateral to different parties simultaneously, which is common in trade finance.22 These frictions to obtaining financing imply that suppliers often have to rely on their own funds to meet their working capital needs.

By combining the different components of the supply chain relationships and the steps of the financing process in one place, a unified ledger could mitigate the problems plaguing trade finance. Contracts that formalise the conditional performance of actions could eliminate incentive problems. Smart contracts could specify an automatic payment from the buyer to its suppliers upon delivery of goods, or partial early payment when intermediate steps are reached. This way, creditors would not need to worry about the risk that the buyer will not honour its obligations. Banks could extend loans featuring smart contracts that act upon real-time information on shipments provided by internet-of-things (IoT) devices, such as GPS data. In the above example, the interest rate could automatically fall, or additional credit be granted, once the ship passed the Horn of Africa, a notoriously high-risk area for piracy. This way, suppliers could finance part of their working capital needs as early as the production phase. Finally, because all trade finance contracts would be written on a shared ledger, it would be impossible to write duplicate loan contracts tied to the same collateral, which would further enhance lenders' willingness to extend credit to firms.

Supply chain financing (00:00:35)

20 Jun 2023

Tokenisation can help solve many of the issues plaguing international trade among small firms.

In addition, by providing a secure and confidential environment for storing and sharing information, the ledger could harness the benefits of data to lower the cost of and improve access to credit. The use of data can bring both benefits and costs. Data allow lenders to better assess the riskiness of borrowers, reducing both costs and the need for collateral. For example, lending by big techs, which use big data and machine learning to assess credit risk, is less sensitive to changes in real estate collateral values than bank credit (Graph 7.A).23 But network effects can lead to market concentration and ultimately higher costs for households and firms: the analysis of large troves of data enhances existing services and attracts further users, which in turn create new data, leading to a data-network-activities or "DNA" loop.24 Moreover, privacy concerns can make individuals reluctant to share their data. With data-sharing technologies (discussed below), mathematical computations can be performed directly on encrypted or anonymised data. Users hence retain control over their data when sharing them on the ledger. Through improved data-sharing arrangements, the unified ledger could enhance financial inclusion, in particular among disadvantaged segments of the population such as racial minorities and low-income households. These "thin credit file" applicants stand to benefit disproportionately from screening via non-traditional data: as banks' traditional credit scores are noisier indicators of their default risk than for other groups of the population, additional data yield a more precise signal of their credit quality (Graph 7.B).25 In turn, lenders can offer loans at lower rates.

Through encryption technology, a unified ledger could also enable new ways to enforce AML and CFT requirements. Financial institutions safeguard highly sensitive and proprietary data that often need to be kept confidential by law. However, the inability to share such sensitive data without exposing confidential information can hinder efforts to combat money laundering and other illicit activities. The use of a unified ledger could provide transparent and auditable records of transactions, transfers and ownership changes. Encryption methods allow financial institutions to share these data confidentially with each other and across borders to detect fraud and money laundering while remaining compliant with domestic data regulations.

These benefits could be further enhanced by leveraging tokenisation and the dual nature of tokens encompassing both identifying information and the rules governing transfer. In the case of payments, for example, supervisory compliance requirements that depend, among other things, on the transacting parties, their location and the type of transfer could be directly embedded into the token.26 While not undertaken in the context of a unified ledger, the BIS Innovation Hub's Project Aurora is exploring how privacy-enhancing technologies and advanced analytics might be leveraged to combat money laundering across financial institutions and borders.

The combination of smart contracts, information and tokenisation could also improve the issuance of and investment in securitised assets and bonds. One example is mortgage-backed securities (MBS), which pool mortgage loans into tranches of debt that are subsequently purchased by investors. Yet even in the deeply liquid $12 trillion US MBS market, the process of securitisation involves over a dozen intermediaries.27 Automation through smart contracts could eliminate time lags in information and payment flows, streamlining the securitisation process. A token could integrate real-time data on borrower repayments and how they are pooled and distributed to investors, further reducing the need for intermediaries.

Another use case is in green finance. The BIS Innovation Hub's Project Genesis illustrates some of the benefits of tokenisation and smart contracts. The project involves a platform from which an investor can download an app and invest any amount into tokenised government bonds that fund a green investment. Over the bond's life cycle, smart contracts allow the investor not only to see accrued interest, but also to track in real time how much clean energy is being generated and how far carbon emissions are being reduced as a result of the investment. Moreover, the investor can sell the bond in a transparent secondary market.

Taken together, these examples show how applications of the unified ledger have the potential to enhance the current monetary and financial system. For existing processes, a unified ledger could seamlessly automate and integrate transactions. And by leveraging the benefits of tokenisation and providing a secure environment for sharing data, a unified ledger could enable altogether new types of transaction.

Guiding principles for a unified ledgerAny application of the unified ledger concept should adhere to a number of high-level guiding principles. First and foremost, any application should be fully integrated with the two-tiered structure of the monetary system. In this way, the central bank could continue to support the singleness of money by providing settlement in wholesale CBDC, and the private sector could continue to innovate to the benefit of households and firms. In addition, there are important principles related to its scope and governance. These will specify how best to ensure a level playing field and foster competition, as well as how to ensure data privacy and operational resilience. The concrete implementation of these principles ultimately depends on the needs and preferences of each jurisdiction as well as the details of the specific application.

Scope, governance and competitionThe first important question regards the scope of the ledger. As discussed above, the concept of a unified ledger does not exclude a multiplicity of coexisting ledgers, each with a specific use case. In practice, the concept is likely to be applied first to specific applications where benefits are more immediate (Box E). For example, one ledger could aim at improving securities settlement, involving only the relevant parties, while another could pertain to trade finance in, say, the shipping industry. Starting from specific use cases, the ledger's scope could expand over time as it includes additional assets and entities. Ultimately, the scope of the ledger will depend on the specific needs and constraints of each jurisdiction.

Irrespective of its scope, a unified ledger would effectively be a new type of FMI or a combination of multiple FMIs. As such, a natural starting point for drawing up standards would be the Principles for financial market infrastructures28 which, in addition to setting out requirements for access, safety and operational resilience, state that FMIs should provide clear and certain final settlement (Principle 8) in central bank money where practical and available (Principle 9). These principles apply to a wide range of infrastructures such as payments systems, central securities depositories, securities settlement systems, central counterparties and trade repositories.

The scope of the ledger has direct implications for its governance arrangements, competitive design and the incentives to participate.

Governance of a unified ledger could follow existing arrangements, whereby central banks and regulated private participants take part in governance under established rules. For example, when money and payments are involved on a ledger, the central bank will necessarily play a role as the provider of the ultimate settlement asset. Its specific involvement in governance arrangements could take various forms, much as it does in the case of traditional payment systems, where public ownership, regulation and oversight, as well as private mutual ownership are all viable options.29 To ensure integrity, regulated and supervised private participants should remain in charge of customer-facing activities. They should also adhere to established KYC, AML and CFT regulations, as well as perform ongoing due diligence to ensure compliance with privacy regulations.

Tokenisation '' the process of recording claims on real or financial assets that exist on a traditional ledger on a programmable platform '' needs to overcome several economic, legal and technical challenges.

An intrinsic feature of many markets is economic friction generated by uncertainty and misaligned incentives, which can be mitigated by trusted intermediaries. For example, when a bank makes a loan to a non-financial firm, the borrower knows more about the quality of its project and the effort devoted to it. To ensure that funds are put to their intended use, lenders need to screen the quality of the borrower ex ante and monitor performance ex post. Technology alone is unlikely to overcome these market imperfections, leaving a role for intermediaries to screen borrowers.

Tokenisation efforts must also address legal issues. Rules and regulations governing tokenised assets must be aligned with those of their non-tokenised counterparts, which requires regulatory coordination to prevent unintended consequences such as shadow activities, theft and regulatory arbitrage. This task is easier for assets subject to legal frameworks and regulations that are standardised and can be easily translated into a computer algorithm. Broader issues include those pertaining to investor and consumer protection, cyber security and regulatory compliance across borders.

There are also technical challenges, especially in the design of ramps that map assets on traditional ledger systems to their tokenised counterparts. Ramps lock assets in their platform of origin as collateral for the tokens that are issued on the programmable platform. Locking and unlocking the original assets requires seamless interaction and coordination across systems. For example, to lock a property on a platform, the on-ramp would need to ensure that the property is no longer tradable outside the platform. As property titles are kept in disparate local registries, full automation could be difficult without the involvement of (offline) intermediaries. Generally, the feasibility of on-ramping and the associated benefits on the programmable platform will depend on the level of automation and harmonisation of the systems of origin.

As discussed in a recent BIS study, these aspects define a tokenisation continuum (Graph E1). It highlights a trade-off: for those applications where tokenisation is easiest, per-unit gains are likely to be modest; but the gains are likely to be largest for applications where tokenisation is most difficult. Therefore, in the short term, tokenisation could focus on identifying assets that are suitable for tokenisation and traded in large volumes.

The demands on governance arrangements increase with the scope of the ledger. For example, a unified ledger for cross-border payments would require seamless interoperability across private payment service providers (PSPs) and central banks located in various jurisdictions with different regulatory and supervisory frameworks. It would hence require significant harmonisation efforts across jurisdictions. A ledger that targets domestic securities settlement, on the other hand, would require less intensive coordination efforts.

An open and level playing field is important for competition and financial inclusion. From a public policy perspective, it is critical to consider how the introduction of a common platform may affect the industrial organisation of money and payments, and ultimately of the entire financial system. Promoting healthy competition between private actors through open platforms can foster innovation and lower costs for end users by reducing rents. By designing platforms and attendant regulations with these goals in mind, public authorities can help ensure that network effects work for the benefit of consumers. To this end, the use of encryption techniques such as homomorphic encryption could help prevent the concentration of data within centralised entities, and hence the emergence of dominant players.

An important challenge in promoting competition is providing the right economic incentives for potential participants. Without the right incentives, PSPs might decide not to join. Efforts to centralise over-the-counter (OTC) bond markets offer valuable lessons.30 Trading government bonds on an exchange, as opposed to over the counter, can lead to lower costs through improved matching and greater liquidity, especially during stress periods.31 However, high entry and operating costs or benefits from established investor-dealer relationships can deter some players from joining. As the main players in OTC markets, dealers also often enjoy market power and high profits, which can make them reluctant to join a common platform.32 But unless a sufficient number of players join, there may be insufficient liquidity and virtuous network effects cannot take hold. The experience from the introduction of fast payment systems suggests that mandating participation while simultaneously providing an infrastructure that allows for private sector innovation can be key to ensuring adoption.33 Once the benefits of network effects unfold, new players will join voluntarily.34

Data privacy and operational resilienceBy bringing together money, assets and information on a common platform, a unified ledger raises important issues about data privacy and operational resilience.

Adequate safeguards are necessary to protect users' privacy. The concentration of different types of data, possibly including transaction data in combination with information on geolocation and purchased products or services, raises concerns about data theft and abuse.35 As a fundamental right, privacy requires a conservative approach to data management on the unified ledger. Commercial secrecy is no less important. Businesses may be hesitant to participate in a unified ledger application unless they can protect confidential information such as smart contract code and transaction logs.

A key element to guaranteeing privacy is to create partitions in the ledger's data environment (Graph 5). Each entity, such as banks or the owners of tokenised assets, will see only transactions and associated data on their own partition. Updates to the data environment are initiated by the account owners through use of their private keys. These private keys are used to authenticate and authorise transactions, ensuring that only legitimate account owners can make changes to their own partition of the ledger's data environment.

In addition, encryption and other privacy-preserving technologies can ensure the safe sharing and use of data. When different entities interact in a transaction, information from different partitions needs to be shared and analysed in the execution environment. Secure data-sharing technologies enable mathematical computations to be performed directly on encrypted or anonymised data, without revealing sensitive information. Some intermediaries and users may be more willing to share data in encrypted form with other parties, which could foster competition and innovation rather than market concentration and captive behaviour. Commercial secrecy can be maintained by encrypting individual smart contracts. Only the code owner, or parties designated by the code owner, would have access to the contract details.

Various privacy-preserving technologies can protect confidential and personal data in a unified ledger, each with its own benefits and costs, depending on the specific application. Table 1 summarises the key characteristics of selected technologies and the trade-offs involved in their use. Homomorphic encryption and differential privacy allow users to share their data with other parties in encrypted form. Secure multi-party computation and federated learning, on the other hand, enable entities to use common machine learning algorithms while keeping their data in their local partitions. These methods differ in terms of their degree of privacy protection, computational burden and ease of implementation.36

A concrete example of how encryption technology might be used is a small bank that would like to apply a big tech's advanced machine learning model to assessing the credit risk of its loan applicants. Traditionally, the bank would have to grant the larger player access to its data for this task, which requires a great level of trust that the data will not be used to competitively undermine the small bank. With homomorphic encryption or similar methods, however, the bank can send encrypted data and take advantage of the big tech's analytic services without handing over the actual data. The big tech, in turn, could further improve its algorithms as they are trained on larger data sets.

As institutions that serve the public interest with no commercial interest in personal data, central banks could play a crucial role in designing ledger applications where privacy safeguards are implemented from the ground up. The ledger could be designed to embed privacy laws directly into the programming of tokens. In many cases, data privacy laws give consumers the opportunity to grant or deny third parties consent to use their data. For example, the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation gives its citizens the "right to be forgotten" by asking firms to delete their personal data. Likewise, the California Consumer Privacy Act endows Californians with the right to know what personal information is being collected and to prevent its sale or ask for its deletion. However, it is often difficult for users to exercise their options effectively, and to verify whether firms have actually deleted their data. By embedding the option to prevent the sale of data or to delete them directly into a smart contract specific to a certain token and transaction (eg payment data should only be accessible by certain institutions), data privacy laws could be made more effective.

Beyond privacy protection, rising costs from cyber attacks (Graph 8.A) highlight the need for strong institutional and legal safeguards for cyber resilience. Safeguarding the integrity and confidentiality of the ledger's data requires multiple layers of security such as encryption, authentication, access controls, monitoring and regular security audits. A cyber attack on a critical FMI or ledger could not only entail significant monetary and reputational damage, but also lead to widespread disruption in the financial system and ultimately inflict significant societal costs.37 The more comprehensive the ledger, the bigger the risks of a single point of failure and therefore the larger the potential associated costs. An appropriate level of investment in cyber resilience and security is therefore paramount.

A unified ledger could help ensure a sufficient level of investment in cyber security. Cyber security is a public good. If one institution spends more to protect its own infrastructure, it makes the system as a whole safer, thereby benefiting all other institutions. However, given such positive externalities, the classical problem of under-investment by private parties arises.38 Collectively, financial institutions will spend too little on cyber security (Graph 8.B). The unified ledger, sustained by a public-private partnership that internalises these externalities, could overcome this issue. It would lead to greater investment in cyber security, increasing overall system resiliency.

ConclusionTo realise the full benefits of innovation in money, payments and a broader range of financial services, it is crucial to have a vision for the future monetary system and for the role of central banks in driving innovation to meet evolving needs. Given the unpredictable nature of innovation, the focus should be on building a monetary system that is adaptable enough to support safe and sound innovation by the private sector, in any form that this may take.

This chapter has presented a blueprint for a future monetary system that harnesses the transformative potential of tokenisation to improve existing structures and open up new possibilities. This blueprint has sketched out a new financial market infrastructure '' a unified ledger '' that integrates CBDCs, tokenised deposits and other tokenised claims on financial and real assets in one place.

A unified ledger has two key advantages. First, it provides a venue where a broader array of contingent actions and financial transactions could be seamlessly integrated and automatically executed. In this way, it enables simultaneous and instantaneous settlement. In contrast to the crypto world, settlement in central bank money ensures the singleness of money and the finality of payments. Second, by having everything in one place, it allows new types of contingent contracts that serve the public interest by overcoming obstacles associated with information and incentive problems.

The ideas behind the unified ledger show how the future monetary system might evolve. In practice, the specific needs and constraints of each jurisdiction will dictate which applications of the concept will take root first, and on what scale. Along this journey, multiple ledgers, each catering to specific use cases, could coexist and interconnect through APIs to ensure interoperability.

Crucially, this journey requires a shift in emphasis from individual experimentation to joint innovation. Public-private collaboration is essential to develop technological solutions, establish common platforms and ensure proper oversight and supervision. Through cooperation, innovation and integration, it is possible to pave the way for a monetary system that builds on trust, enables new economic arrangements, enhances the efficiency and accessibility of financial transactions and responds to the evolving demands of households and firms.

Endnotes Technical annexGraph 7.A: Each bar reflects the coefficient estimate of the elasticity of credit to changes in firms' transaction volume or local house prices in firm-quarter regressions.

Graph 7.B: ROC curves plot the fraction of non-defaults admitted for a given score cutoff against the fraction of defaults admitted.

Graph 8.A: Based on cyber crimes reported to the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

Graph 8.B: Share of respondents who selected each respective answer to the question "Do you think that investment on cyber security has been too little/adequate/too much over the past year?".

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GlossaryAccounts: (digital) representation of an end user's set of claims, real or financial.

Application programming interface (API): a set of rules and specifications followed by software programmes to communicate with each other, and an interface between different software programmes that facilitates their interaction.

Atomic settlement: instant exchange of assets, such that the transfer of each occurs only upon transfer of the others.

Central bank public goods: goods and services provided by the central bank that serve the public interest, including payment infrastructures and trust in the currency.

Composability: the capacity to combine different components on a programmable platform.

Decentralised finance (DeFi): a set of activities across financial services built on permissionless DLT such as blockchains.

Digital wallet: an interface that allows users to make transfers or otherwise transact in digital money and assets. These interfaces are built on non-programmable platforms. Not to be confused with a token wallet.

Distributed ledger technology (DLT): a means of saving information through a distributed ledger, ie a repeated digital copy of data available at multiple locations.

Delivery versus payment (DvP): A settlement mechanism that links an asset transfer and a funds transfer in such a way as to ensure that delivery occurs if and only if the corresponding payment occurs.

End user: individuals, households and firms that are not participants in a platform

Homomorphic encryption (HE): a technique that allows data to be encrypted in such a way that they can be processed by third parties without being decrypted.

Internet of Things: software, sensors and network connectivity embedded in physical devices, buildings and other items that enable those objects to (i) collect and exchange data and (ii) send, receive and execute commands, including payments.

Market integrity: the prevention of illicit activities in the monetary system, such as money laundering and terrorism financing, as well as market manipulation.

Monetary system: the set of institutions and arrangements around monetary exchange. This consists of two components: money and payment systems.

Oracle: a service that provides outside ("off-chain") information for use by smart contracts in a DLT system.

Programmability: a feature of programmable platform and other technologies whereby actions can be programmed or automated.

Programmable platform: technology-agnostic platform that includes a Turing machine with an execution environment and a ledger and governance rules.

Payment versus payment (PvP): a settlement mechanism that ensures that the final transfer of a payment in one currency occurs if and only if the final transfer of a payment in another currency or currencies takes place.

Ramps: protocols that connect non-programmable platforms to programmable platforms. Ramps lock assets in their platform of origin as collateral for the tokens that are issued on the programmable platform.

Secure multi-party computation (SMPC): a cryptographic technique that allows multiple parties to jointly compute a function on their private data without revealing the data to each other.

Smart contract: self-executing applications of programmable platforms that can trigger an action if some pre-specified conditions are met.

Stablecoin: a cryptocurrency that aims to maintain a stable value relative to a specified asset, or a pool or basket of assets.

Token: a digital representation of value in a programmable platform. Tokens can be tokenised, ie derived from claims in traditional ledgers, or can be issued natively in the platform, ie "native" tokens.

Tokenisation: the process of recording claims on real or financial assets that exist on a traditional ledger onto a programmable platform.

Tokenised asset: a digital representation of a claim of an asset in a programmable platform.

Tokenised deposit: a digital representation of a bank deposit in a programmable platform. A tokenised deposit represents a claim on a commercial bank, just like a regular deposit.

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Archived Version

Thu, 13 Jul 2023 13:47

Today we announce the formation of xAI.

The goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe. You can meet the team and ask us questions during a Twitter Spaces chat on Friday, July 14th.

TeamOur team is led by Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX. We have previously worked at DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Tesla, and the University of Toronto. Collectively we contributed some of the most widely used methods in the field, in particular the Adam optimizer, Batch Normalization, Layer Normalization, and the discovery of adversarial examples. We further introduced innovative techniques and analyses such as Transformer-XL, Autoformalization, the Memorizing Transformer, Batch Size Scaling, and μTransfer. We have worked on and led the development of some of the largest breakthroughs in the field including AlphaStar, AlphaCode, Inception, Minerva, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4.

AdvisoryOur team is advised by Dan Hendrycks who currently serves as the director of the Center for AI Safety.

Relation to X CorpWe are a separate company from X Corp, but will work closely with X (Twitter), Tesla, and other companies to make progress towards our mission.

Join UsWe are actively recruiting experienced engineers and researchers to join our team as members of our technical staff in the Bay Area. Please fill out this form to apply.

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Thu, 13 Jul 2023 13:13

R

afael Rodr­guez Deustºa made his career by drawing on demand. An illustrator who advertises on the freelance artist platform 99designs, Deustºa's recent works are eclectic '-- they include a vintage-style logo for a champagne brand, a poster for an international fertilizer convention, a tango album cover, and a handful of custom tattoo designs. He sells his illustrations, which feature his signature cartoon style, under the pseudonym Fafarhd Deustºa.

Deustºa is based in Guadalajara, Mexico. Most of his clients are startups and small businesses in the U.S., with a few loyal customers in Europe and Australia. ''I earn more than I would with local clients,'' he told Rest of World. In exchange, his clients ''get some decent art at a fair price.''

But recently, Deustºa, like many creative workers globally, has encountered a new kind of competition: generative artificial intelligence.

He first noticed AI-powered submissions on 99designs' popular ''contest'' feature, which allows clients to post an open call for designs before selecting their favorite. In recent months, he has seen people submitting entries created using AI image generators such as Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and Dall-E.

''Someone who doesn't have that talent or [hasn't] invested years of practice in getting the skills to just 'win' a contest with an illustration he or she didn't really do '-- that bothers me,'' said Deustºa, who refuses to use AI tools in his work.

Since the blockbuster launch of ChatGPT at the end of 2022, future-of-work pontificators, AI ethicists, and Silicon Valley developers have been fiercely debating how generative AI will impact the way we work. Some six months later, one global labor force is at the frontline of the generative AI revolution: offshore outsourced workers.

These include workers hired per commission or on a contractual basis, such as freelance copywriters, artists, and software developers, as well as more formal offshore workforces like customer service agents. As generative AI tools present a new model for cost cutting, pressure is quickly mounting for these outsourced workers to adapt or risk losing work.

Rest of World spoke to outsourced workers across different industries and regions, including call center operators in Manila, programmers in Lahore, and designers in Cairo. Many said they are already seeing generative AI change the demand for their work and the stability of their income. But while some brace for layoffs or diminishing commissions, others have embraced generative AI tools in an effort to keep ahead of the curve. If generative AI represents a tectonic shift in the way we work, offshore outsourced workers are at the fault lines.

Rest of World reached out to four freelance workers around the world to learn how they use generative AI. We commissioned two pieces of work from each: one created with AI, and one without.

Abisoye Otusanya-AzzanA copywriter living in Lagos, NigeriaWhen ChatGPT launched last year, Abisoye Otusanya-Azzan, a copywriter based in Lagos, Nigeria, couldn't ignore the hype. ''The vibe around ChatGPT was crazy,'' she told Rest of World. ''I started using it as soon as it was made available.

Otusanya-Azzan, 29, started writing for a living during lockdown in 2020, after her income from fashion design dried up. She mostly writes marketing material for U.S. and U.K.-based clients in the personal development, fitness, and home improvement sectors.

She struggled with ChatGPT at first, but bought an e-book and joined a Facebook group for copywriters to pick up tips. ''I learned how to give better prompts and the results were a bit better,'' she said.

Otusanya-Azzan mainly uses ChatGPT to do research, overcome writer's block, and craft posts for her own blog. She makes sure to verify its output. ''It does make mistakes,'' she said. ''I don't completely trust it.''

While AI tools may ease the work of copywriters, they could also reduce demand for their skills. According to researchers at OpenAI, the organization behind ChatGPT, writing is among the occupations most exposed to text-based generative AI.

''I think that a lot of clients are already using AI tools instead of hiring copywriters,'' Otusanya-Azzan said. The technology may, however, bring different opportunities. ''I've also seen some companies looking to hire writers who are also prompt engineers, so that might be the next line of demand,'' she said. ''I'm curious to see how things turn out.''

Rest of World commissioned Otusanya-Azzan to write two blog posts on the topic ''5 living room storage ideas.''

Total minutes: 227 Total minutes: 20 AI tool used: ChatGPTNo AI: Otusanya-Azzan did research online, and then wrote and edited her blog post in Google Docs with the help of Grammarly.

With AI: Otusanya-Azzan prompted ChatGPT to first outline and then write a blog post, which she edited using Google Docs and Grammarly.

In search of lower wages, less oversight, and faster turnaround times, businesses in Western nations have long turned to workers in countries with cheaper labor. Freelancers on online gig work platforms like Fiverr, Upwork, and 99designs may not fit the conventional mold of outsourcing, but they largely map onto the same flows of work: clients in the Global North hiring workers in the Global South.

India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh were among the largest hubs for freelancers on online gig work platforms in 2020, according to a study of 11 such platforms by the Online Labour Observatory. Overwhelmingly, the clients on these sites were located in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and the U.K.

''This is very clearly a new way of offshoring services today,'' Uma Rani, senior economist at the International Labour Organization (ILO), a United Nations agency, told Rest of World. ''Employers want workers in these countries because they can pay less wages. But on the other hand, the amount of [platform] fees workers have to pay '-- it's almost double the exploitation that these workers face.''

The precarity built into the offshore model makes these workers particularly susceptible to AI-fuelled shifts in the labor market.

''This is very clearly a new way of offshoring services today.''

Rest of World conducted a survey of over 31,000 employees in tech, finance, and media via the platform Blind, an app that allows verified employees to post anonymously in industry forums. The largest share of respondents were employed by major Silicon Valley tech firms in the U.S., India, the EU, and Canada, including Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Meta.

Globally, 76% of respondents said they believed generative AI would allow their company to cut costs, and 63% predicted their company would hire fewer external contractors due to generative AI tools.

Despite predicting less work for contractors, most respondents did not fear changes in their own employment. While 56% said they currently use generative AI in their work, only 24% said they were either ''slightly concerned'' or ''very concerned'' that generative AI would render their own jobs redundant.

With the threat of less contract work to go around, many on online gig work platforms are trying to ride the wave of interest in generative AI by offering related services '-- and undercutting other contractors.

Need someone to churn out an illustration for your online retail store? Rather than hiring a traditional illustrator, you can use a dedicated ''AI artist'' portal where creators post their rates for custom images made using Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, or Dall-E. Prices regularly run from $15 to $60 apiece. Need someone to write blog posts that top Google search rankings? Instead of finding a copywriter, you can hire Fiverr workers selling bulk orders of AI-generated text. One worker in Bangladesh allows clients to buy as many as 1,000 articles on a given topic at a time. An order of 120 GPT-3-generated articles costs $90, and comes with claims of a plagiarism-free guarantee.

Santiago Bautista GonzlezAn illustrator living in Guadalajara, MexicoFor more than seven years, Santiago Bautista Gonzlez worked full time selling his cartoon-style illustrations, using the freelance gig marketplace Fiverr. His income, around $1,500 in a good month, dropped by a third this past January. February was equally disappointing.

In search of an explanation, Bautista, 31, read about the growing popularity of visual generative AI software. He found that Fiverr had added a section for AI artists. ''And I say, 'Well, maybe it's because of this,''' he told Rest of World.

Bautista decided to follow his customers, picking Midjourney as his tool of choice. He began offering AI commissions on Fiverr at the same base price as his usual hand-drawn illustrations. ''The first day I placed the new service, I got a sale,'' he said. ''It was just that hot.''

He figured he would draw less, give his hands a rest, and compensate his lost income with AI illustrations. But something curious happened. The AI service gave him so much exposure, said Bautista, that his hand-drawn orders also increased in popularity. ''Because of artificial intelligence, I started getting just too much work.''

He's not afraid that generative AI software will take his job. ''You still need some kind of creativity to create images [with AI],'' he said. ''And if the job gets to a point where the AI can do everything and can do it faster, that will only mean that I will work less, earn more, and have more time for my own projects.''

Rest of World commissioned Bautista to create two illustrations of a delivery driver on a motorcycle who loses a package while riding through a city.

Total minutes: 94 · Total cost: $70 Total minutes: 32 · Total cost: $50 AI tool used: MidjourneyNo AI: He searched Google for references, created a line drawing on paper, and took a photo of it. He traced his drawing and added color with Adobe Illustrator.

With AI: He prompted Midjourney to create a variety of images. He then used Photoshop to combine elements from several generated images.

In January 2023, Fiverr said it had seen a 1,400% increase in searches for AI-related job ads on its platform over the previous six months. The spike in demand pushed the company to create entirely new job categories, under an umbrella it calls ''AI services.'' For workers in this space, the popularity of generative AI has been a boon. Several of the creative workers Rest of World spoke to said it had helped them take on more clients and produce work faster, even if at lower price points.

Shweta Bose, based in Delhi, India, has long offered Adobe Photoshop services on Upwork. The release of ''generative fill,'' a new Photoshop feature launched in May, allows her to fill in, extend, and retouch images for her clients using simple text prompts. Real estate agents in the U.S. have hired her to retouch photos for listings, and families have hired her to convert multiple photographs of family members into a single digital portrait.

''I think [generative AI] will create more opportunities for freelancers, but drive the price of certain services down,'' Seif Percle, an Upwork contractor based in Cairo, told Rest of World. Percle's recent commissions include creating illustrations for children's books using Midjourney and Stable Diffusion.

In some sectors, such as programming and engineering, workers have found whole new services they can offer specifically around the rise of generative AI, as companies scramble to adopt the technology.

''I think [generative AI] will create more opportunities for freelancers, but drive the price of certain services down.''

''My Upwork has been going crazy with invites from different-sized businesses trying to improve or build out new stuff for their businesses with AI,'' Rehand Haider, a developer based in Lahore, Pakistan, told Rest of World.

Haider, who joined Upwork five years ago, estimates the demand for his AI implementation services has grown by two-thirds over the past six months. One of his recent commissions used ChatGPT's application programming interface (API) to create an app that automatically generates descriptions for Airbnb listings. Another used ChatGPT to make a Chrome browser extension that automatically fills in job applications.

Ali Zeeshan, a data scientist in Islamabad, Pakistan, told Rest of World the demand for generative AI on Upwork has been a major boost to his profile. ''I am getting more views, jobs, and top-notch clients,'' he said. His commissions grew threefold once he started offering AI services this year.

Mohammad Maruf Ahmed, based in Sylhet, Bangladesh, used to offer digital marketing services '-- helping brands in the U.S. grow their footprint on Instagram and YouTube. He switched gears when he received his first AI-related commission in December 2022. Now, he creates custom scripts for his clients to integrate ChatGPT into websites, Google Sheets, and Google Docs. Next, he sees himself using AI to help clients build brand-customized chatbots. ''The use case is changing on a daily basis,'' he told Rest of World.

It is not just programmers pivoting towards AI. Workers who, in the past, advertised copywriting skills are now offering to copy edit or fact-check articles written by ChatGPT, while others write prompts for AI tools.

But while some early adopters are able to take on more work thanks to AI assistance, there may be less to go around for others. ''There's a lot of competition that happens. Workers undercut one another from developing countries because it's the only way you can get any access to work,'' Rani, the ILO economist, said. She explained that even before AI tools were available, workers on these platforms would take on free assignments or accept pay cuts to stay ahead of other contractors.

There is particular pressure on outsourced workers to offer cheaper rates and shorter deadlines, she said, as they are often employed commission to commission, with little financial security or legal recourse when wages go unpaid.

''I feel a bit secured that I was able to grasp the technology faster and earlier than many,'' Faiz Ehsan, an AI artist in Patna, India, told Rest of World. In March, Ehsan switched from designing video game plots and writing quest narrations to creating book designs and illustrations, made largely using tools like Midjourney. The pivot is working '-- he wakes up to five to seven new messages from potential clients on Upwork every morning. But he knows it may not last. ''The challenges are always there. Since every day a new trend happens, I have to know, practice, and understand that trend to be able to sell it,'' he said.

Jessica TarrielaA virtual assistant living in Taguig, PhilippinesWhen ChatGPT launched in late 2022, Jessica Tarriela thought it could be a useful tool. A virtual assistant based in the Philippines, her work involves writing emails and conducting research for a content marketing client in the U.S. ''I can confidently say that I'm not a good writer,'' Tarriela told Rest of World. ''So I use ChatGPT to rephrase or write or summarize things.''

Tarriela, 26, works nights to compensate for the 12-hour difference between Georgia, where her client is located, and her home in Taguig. Her client knows that she uses generative AI in her work '-- in fact, he encouraged it. ''He asked me if I would be open to using AI, and I responded that I already am,'' she said.

Part of Tarriela's role is to create content such as blog posts and case studies for software businesses, and she uses generative AI to polish these texts. Her go-to tool is ChatGPT plugin AIPRM '-- it offers preset prompts for writing or editing texts, with names like ''Complete Proofreading in One Click'' or ''Human Written [100% Unique] SEO Optimized article.'' She said generative AI doesn't save her time, but it improves the quality of her work.

It's difficult to know how many Filipinos work as virtual assistants, but payment platforms estimate that at least 1.3 million people work in the country's business process outsourcing sector. Many are concerned AI tools will make their jobs redundant, Mylene Cabalona, president of the Business Process Outsourcing Industry Employees' Network, told Rest of World. This is partly because the sector is unregulated, with few protections for workers. ''There's no employer-employee relations; their clients are completely offshore,'' she said.

But Tarriela believes being an early adopter will protect her position. ''You shouldn't be afraid of AI, you should be afraid of people who use AI to make their work even better,'' she said.

Rest of World commissioned Tarriela to write a template for an invitation email.

Words written: 223 Words changed: 88 AI tool used: ChatGPTNo AI: Using Google Docs, Tarriela wrote an invitation for an event in New York.

With AI: She then prompted ChatGPT to polish her writing. It made several dozen edits, some of which she reversed.

Online gig workers may be at the forefront of generative AI adoption and displacement, but there are clear signs that AI is also quickly coming for the more traditional outsourcing industry.

Call centers have long been the face of offshore outsourcing, and waves of technological innovation have been key to their evolution. In the 1980s, automated phone trees with voice recognition sped up customer service call times. The first chatbots, which blended prewritten prompts with humans behind the curtain, began filtering out basic inquiries a decade ago. Now, conversational AI tools may upend the industry once again.

A recent study by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University, based on data from more than 5,000 customer support agents largely in the Philippines, found that using generative AI tools increased worker productivity by 14% '-- a number that rose to 35% for new hires and those who were previously least productive.

Mylene Cabalona is one of the roughly 1.6 million people in the Philippines who work in business processing outsourcing (BPO) '-- jargon for the umbrella industry that comprises offshore call centers, content moderation hubs, and IT support hotlines. Taken together, the BPO sector is one of the largest employers in the Philippines.

''We're not against AI, we're not against any software development,'' Cabalona told Rest of World. ''AI should be a mechanism to help the workers. But it should not be used against the workers. It should not be used to replace them.''

Cabalona serves as president of the BPO Industry Employees Network (BIEN), a nationwide association of BPO workers organizing in the notoriously anti-union sector. Cabalona said she and her colleagues are bracing for layoffs.

In a letter to shareholders and analysts in May, Daniel Julien, the chairman and CEO of BPO company Teleperformance, wrote that ''ChatGPT's launch has now made AI a boardroom and CEO agenda item, rather than just being an operational back-room topic.'' Teleperformance is a powerhouse in the BPO world, with a long roster of Silicon Valley clients including Amazon, Netflix, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft.

''Whether we look at cotton looms or the assembly belts or industrial robots or AI now, people are always worried.''

By plugging ChatGPT into its operator scripts, the company estimates it will reduce the length of each customer call by almost 40%, according to a slide deck shared with investors. Teleperformance has already planned or implemented 110 client projects using generative AI. Like other BPO companies, it maintains that ''human empathy'' will remain essential to its operations, especially in handling more complex customer calls. But the company estimates that by 2026, conversational AI could handle as much as 20% to 30% of its call volume.

That kind of shift would have an impact on BPO workers in the Philippines, who often handle the front-line customer service calls that Teleperformance has deemed ''easier to automate.'' BIEN estimates 54% of all BPO workers in the Philippines are front-line call center workers. ''We are anticipating AI and most of the affected would be the front lines '-- and most of these [workers] are women,'' said Cabalona. More than 50% of workers in the BPO sector in the Philippines are women, but they tend to be concentrated in lower-paying, ''lower-skilled'' roles, according to the ILO.

Teleperformance did not respond to Rest of World's requests for comment.

Skeptics remain, however, over the extent to which generative AI is actually being implemented in the BPO industry. ''There is a huge incentive for [BPO companies] to promote themselves as being ahead of the game,'' said Christy Hoffman, general secretary of UNI Global Union, which represents over 20 million service sector workers around the world. Hoffman suggested vendors have reason to sensationalize the potential benefits of AI, noting that Teleperformance's stock value had dropped in the months before the company released its letter to investors. ''This is PR, this is not at the level of the workplace and we expect that it will become so, but over time,'' she said.

Milagros Miceli, a sociologist and computer scientist researching labor conditions in outsourced data work, told Rest of World the threat of automation can also be used as a tool to get workers to do more for less. ''If there's always the threat of having machines replace you as a worker, that serves to discipline you, for you to be afraid to ask for a raise, for you to be afraid of even getting sick,'' she said. ''You've been warned.''

Labor researchers note that automation predictions are notoriously unreliable. ''Whether we look at cotton looms or the assembly belts or industrial robots or AI now, people are always worried '-- once machines do tasks that humans usually do '-- that machines might run the labor market one day,'' Fabian Stephany, a research lecturer in AI and work at the Oxford Internet Institute, told Rest of World.

In recent history, experts have failed to produce reliable studies on how much of the global labor force is at risk of technological unemployment '-- estimates in the past 10 years range wildly from 9% to 54%, even though these papers are based largely on the same data sets. Stephany shies away from predictions, instead positing AI will both end and create occupations. ''Economic theory and history tells us that AI is not going to automate human work away,'' he said.

Wu DayuA marketing designer living in Shenzhen, ChinaIt used to take at least a week for Wu Dayu's Shenzhen-based design studio to create promotional materials for online fashion stores. A photo-shoot required a model, makeup artist, photographer, and venue. Producing a catalog of images featuring six sets of clothes would cost around $3,500, he told Rest of World.

But since Wu, 35, switched to using generative AI in March, the same work can be completed in a day, by just two people, and for only $140.

Now, Wu uses a mannequin or asks an employee to model clothes so he can take some basic photos. He feeds the images into a Stable Diffusion-powered AI program that he has customized for this specific purpose. He adjusts the images of the model and background by using text prompts, such as ''a girl, wearing sneakers, street background, with green trees on the two sides of the street.''

This approach is becoming more widespread in China's sprawling e-commerce industry, even if some consumers have criticized the resulting images as fake and sexist. ''Some high-end brands might prefer human models,'' Wu said. ''For small and mid-sized sellers, AI models will save them a lot of money and time.'' In April, Wu laid off 60% of his staff.

Shaeman Liu, a 26-year-old fashion photographer in Hangzhou, said he doubts AI will replace all photography. He believes products advertised with real-life models are more appealing to shoppers.

Model Charline Xu, 24, told Rest of World she currently makes about 1,500 yuan ($210) an hour, and that she's worried clients using generative AI could cut into her income. She's prepared to compete. ''If [designers using AI] charge 800 yuan, I'll do 600. If they charge 600, I'll get down to 500,'' Xu joked. ''There's no other way out. I'll fight till the end.''

Rest of World commissioned Wu to design two promotional images for a made-up online store.

Total days: 7 · Total cost: $3,500 Total days: 1 · Total cost: $140 AI tool used: a Stable Diffusion LoRA model developed by Wu DayuNo AI: Rest of World commissioned Liu and Xu to do a photo-shoot with a particular dress. Wu used their photos to create a simple promotional design using CorelDraw, Xingtu, and Snapseed.

With AI: Rest of World sent Wu the same dress, which he photographed on an employee. He prompted a customized version of Stable Diffusion to generate photo-like images, which he edited.

The impact of generative AI on outsourced workers is likely to similarly be more nuanced than a sudden mass displacement.

For now at least, many labor researchers resist the idea that these tools bring ''full automation'' '-- often defined as the use of machines to complete tasks without human intervention. Rather, the current state of generative AI, by and large, falls under what experts call augmentation. Generative AI's first wave of adopters are mostly working alongside these technologies '-- treating them as tools, not substitutes.

Even the development of generative AI requires human intervention, a role that often also falls to offshore outsourced workers. Each training data set used to develop a tool like Dall-E began with a human data worker matching an image to an associated word. And content moderators help refine the model that powers ChatGPT '-- for example, by flagging hateful or toxic speech. ''[These workers] are fundamentally necessary to the developments that we see today,'' said Miceli. ''Large [AI] models '-- they wouldn't exist without this workforce.''

Many of these data workers congregate on sites like Microworkers, Remotasks, and Amazon Mechanical Turk, which provide a constant stream of low-paid tasks, sometimes referred to as ''click work.'' Others are employed through a web of BPO outsourcing subcontractors, including Teleperformance.

''Instead of workers displaced by AI, the future may look like more workers filing into micro work projects,'' Rafael Grohmann, principal investigator for Fairwork Brazil, a digital labor and AI research project, told Rest of World. ''In this stage now, we need many quality data workers, more people training and annotating data.''

While some offshore outsourced workers have already pivoted to AI-related work, others are committed to holding the line against the rising tide of automation. Deustºa, the illustrator from Guadalajara, said he's counting on clients who want stronger relationships and attention to detail to keep his business viable.

''A lot of clients have trouble explaining to us, humans, what they want and we help them to explain themselves,'' he said. One client recently admitted they hired Deustºa after trying and failing to use an AI image generator to create a workable design themselves. Ultimately, the client decided they still wanted a professional's human touch. ''It's the difference between buying a snack at a vending machine or eating it at your neighborhood cafe, chatting with the barista,'' Deustºa said. ''I still love technology, but I bet on humans.''

It is a position informed by life experience. Deustºa wasn't always an illustrator. For over two decades, he worked as a journalist in Mexico '-- first as an arts and culture reporter, then editing tech and science stories. Following the rise of digital news sites and social media in the 2010s, he found there were fewer jobs in print media and bet on freelance illustration as a new career. Now, seeing generative AI enter the market for illustrators is a ''bitter experience.''

''I was already displaced once because of technology,'' he said.

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Thu, 13 Jul 2023 13:09

Screenshot:Safestreetrebel on TikTokAn anti-car account on Tiktok has shared a novel way to immobilize self-driving cars. According to a new video from @safestreetrebel on Tiktok, placing a traffic cone on the hood of a Waymo or Cruise self-driving vehicle will disable it in its place.

This content is imported from twitter. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

A group of San Franciscans realized that they can disable Waymo and Cruise robotaxis by placing a traffic cone on the vehicle's hood.They're now encouraging others to do it: "Hell no, we do not consent to this." pic.twitter.com/ZrYhy4OATy

'-- David Zipper (@DavidZipper) July 6, 2023Naturally, Road & Track does not endorse disabling a self-driving car by putting something on its hood. And it should be noted that these driverless vehicle companies can take over their cars remotely'--as they do when a self-driving car is in a situation it doesn't understand'--or dispatch an employee to fix it. But the post shows a variety of clips of self-driving cars confused, blocking crosswalks, and stuck in weird situations across San Fransisco, and highlights how easy it is to disable them. A spokesperson for Waymo told Road & Track that "[n]ot only is this understanding of how AVs operate incorrect, but this is vandalism and encourages unsafe and disrespectful behavior on our roadways. We will notify law enforcement of any unwanted or unsafe interference of our vehicles on public roadways."

The TikTok account gives a motive beyond simple mischief, noting that the companies behind these driverless vehicles have provided videos from their multitude of cameras to police. Vice led the news that the SFPD was working with Waymo and Cruise in May of 2022, and it has been backed up with a report in Bloomberg in June of 2023. Both companies told Vice that they provide footage to law enforcement when subpoenaed or shown a valid warrant, as required by law, but Waymo notes its "policy is to challenge, limit or reject requests that do not have a valid legal basis or are overly broad.'' Police have broad power to secure footage from a variety of private camera sources, including CCTV cameras, when they believe a crime has been committed in the area.

This traffic cone prank is only possible because multiple companies are now testing self-driving vehicles without safety drivers on public streets. With no human in the car, even a vehicle with the remote safety driver can't deal with external factors like a cone on its hood. Regardless, it's probably a good thing that the cars in the video put on their flashers and sit still when something like this happens. While the idea of an autonomous car slamming its brakes to throw a cone off certainly sounds entertaining to watch, we're glad these things aren't programmed to experiment in strange circumstances.

Road & Track reached out to Cruise for its comment on this video. We'll update the story if we hear back.

Via Twitter.

Reviews Editor

Arguably the most fickle member of the Road & Track staff, Reviews Editor Mack Hogan is likely the only person to ever cross shop an ND Miata with an Isuzu Vehicross. He founded the automotive reviews section of CNBC during his sophomore year of college and has been writing about cars ever since.

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European Parliament political group

The European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR)[1] is a soft Eurosceptic,[13][14][15][16][17] anti-federalist[12][13][4] political group of the European Parliament. The ECR is the parliamentary group of the European Conservatives and Reformists Party (ECR Party) European political party (formerly known as the Alliance of Conservatives and Reformists in Europe (2016''2019) or Alliance of European Conservatives and Reformists (2009''2016), but also includes MEPs from four other European parties and thirteen MEPs without European party affiliation.

Ideologically, the group is broadly eurosceptic, anti-federalist and right-wing.[6] The main objective of the ECR is to oppose unchecked European integration, enlargement and potential evolution of the European Union (EU) into a Federal European Superstate on the basis of Eurorealism, and to ensure the EU does not heavily encroach on matters of state and domestic and regional decision making within EU member countries.[18] It also advocates for free market policies and stricter controls on immigration. The ECR contains factions of socially conservative, right-wing populist, liberal conservative, Christian democrat, and national conservative parties who all subscribe to an anti-federalist and eurorealist or euro-critical stance. Within the ECR, some parties and MEPs promote soft euroscepticism, (as opposed to a total rejection of the existence of the EU characterized by anti-EU-ism or hard euroscepticism), by calling for democratic reform of the EU, more transparency, changes to the Eurozone and EU migration/asylum policies, and the curbing some of the EU's powers and bureaucracy whilst maintaining unrestricted free trade and cooperation between nations.[19][20] Other parties and individual MEPs within the group support complete withdrawal from the block, referendums on EU membership and opposition to the Eurozone.[21][22]

The ECR was founded around the Movement for European Reform following the 2009 European elections at the behest of British Conservative Party leader David Cameron. Currently it is the fifth-largest group in the European Parliament with 66 MEPs from 16 countries.

Presently, the largest party in the group by number of MEPs is the Law and Justice (PiS) of Poland.

Founding principles and ideology [ edit ] The Prague Declaration was first proposed in 2003.The genesis of the ECR dates back to 2005, and possibly[when? ] earlier.[citation needed ] A political group in the European Parliament cannot be officially recognised if it contains MEPs from only a single member state. Instead, it must meet the minimum threshold required by the European Parliament's Rules of Procedure.[23][24] Any party seeking to create a group must therefore seek partners. The last mixed group in the European Parliament was forcibly dissolved. Since then, groups have been required to demonstrate ideological coherence. This is usually done by publishing a document (sometimes called a constituent declaration) stating the principles to which each group member is expected to adhere. The constituent declaration of the ECR has become known as the Prague Declaration. That document outlines the following principles:[25]

Free enterprise, free and fair trade and competition, minimal regulation, lower taxation, and small government as the ultimate catalysts for individual freedom and personal and national prosperity.Freedom of the individual, more personal responsibility and greater democratic accountability.Sustainable, clean energy supply with an emphasis on energy security.The importance of the family as the bedrock of society.The sovereign integrity of the nation state, opposition to EU federalism and a renewed respect for true subsidiarity.The over-riding value of the transatlantic security relationship in a revitalised NATO, and support for young democracies across Europe.Effectively controlled immigration and an end to abuse of asylum proceduresEfficient and modern public services and sensitivity to the needs of both rural and urban communities.An end to waste and excessive bureaucracy and a commitment to greater transparency and probity in the EU institutions and use of EU funds.Respect and equitable treatment for all EU countries, new and old, large and small.Ideologically, the founder members of the ECR traditionally sat on the centre-right[26] to right-wing[27] of the political spectrum with an economically liberal and anti-federalist outlook and an initial reluctance from the Conservative Party to include hardline anti-immigration and ultra-nationalist parties. Like the centre-right European People's Party (EPP), the founding members of the ECR mostly support pro-free market ideas with some of its MEPs maintaining ties to think-tanks such as The Cobden Centre and Open Europe,[28] as opposed to the more economic nationalist and anti-globalization approach of other euro-critical groups such as the EFDD and Identity and Democracy. However, the EPP generally favours EU integration and enlargement whereas the ECR opposes it.

In recent years the group has come to contain a growing faction of nationalist, anti-immigration and right-wing populist movements,[29] with some former ECR members arguing that the group has shifted considerably further to the right over time.[30]

The shift to the right was increased following the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union, since the Conservative Party lost its representation in the European Parliament.

In a statement issued on 11 November 2021, two core political documents were cited by the Group's Co-Chairmen, Ryszard Legutko and Raffaele Fitto, to define the ECR's ideological basis when they reaffirmed the Group's "commitment to the Prague Declaration and the ECR Statement on the Reform of the European Union".[31][32]

During the 2022 Ukraine invasion, the group has come to comprise generally pro-Ukrainian and anti-Russian parties, whereas Identity and Democracy mainly consists of pro-Russian parties. In February 2023, the group's chairman Legutko stated that the group shall stand by Ukraine until Russia is defeated and beyond.[33] Following the 2023 Finnish parliamentary election, the Finns Party, having previously moved to ID, rejoined ECR citing their change in policy to endorse Finnish NATO membership as the reason for the move.[34]

History [ edit ] Origins: 2005''06 [ edit ] In 2005, the British Conservative Party held a leadership contest. During the sixth term of the European Parliament, Conservative Party MEPs sat in the European Democrats (ED), a subgroup of the European People's Party''European Democrats (EPP-ED) group, which is dominated by the European People's Party (EPP). Leadership contender David Cameron argued for withdrawal of the Conservatives from EPP-ED and the formation of a new group. Upon taking office as Conservative leader in December 2005, Cameron indicated that the launch of a new group would be undertaken immediately.[35] The motives for forming this group was the EPP-ED was too federalist, while the Tories opposed stronger European integration.[36]

In June 2006, Cameron ordered Shadow Foreign Secretary William Hague to ensure the new group was created by 13 July 2006.[35] However, when that date arrived, it was announced that the launch of the new European Parliament group was delayed until after the 2009 elections.[37]

Movement for European Reform [ edit ] Mirek TopolnekIn the interim, a pan-European alliance, called the Movement for European Reform (MER), was founded and functioned outside of the European Parliament.[38] The same day, the Law and Justice and Civic Platform parties of Poland were identified as potential members of the new group: However, Civic Platform stated that it would not leave the EPP, and the Law and Justice stated that it planned to stay aligned to UEN.[39] The next day, Sir Reg Empey, the leader of the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), suggested that the UUP could join the new group after the 2009 election.[40] In the event of the election, the UUP ran under the banner of the Ulster Conservatives and Unionists, an electoral alliance between the Conservative Party and the Ulster Unionists.

The Czech Civic Democratic Party (ODS) was part of MER but its leader, Mirek Topolnek, did not rule out staying in EPP-ED.[41] Topolnek then attended the EPP Summit (a meeting of heads of state and government of the European People's Party) of 21 June 2007, adding speculation about the fragility of the new group.[42]

Later in 2007, the relations between the EPP and the Conservative Party further deteriorated when the EPP voiced its opposition to the UK holding a referendum of the Treaty of Lisbon, something the Tories had campaigned for.[36]

In July 2008, the European Parliament raised the 2009 threshold for forming a group to 25 members and representing 7 member states.[43] Topolnek, after being re-elected Leader of the ODS on 7 December 2008, attended yet another EPP Summit, on 11 December 2008.[44]

2009 European Parliament elections [ edit ] As the 2009 European elections approached, Cameron, Topolnek, and Conservative MEP Geoffrey Van Orden (a 'point-man' for the new group)[45] were looking for partners. The list of possible partners was kept secret.[46]

People or parties that were rumoured to be possible partners in the new group included Law and Justice;[47][48][49] Lega Nord;[47][50] the Danish People's Party;[47][50] For Fatherland and Freedom,[46][47] Order and Justice,[47] the Pensioners' Party;[51] Order, Law and Justice;[45][52][53] Libertas;[54] Civic Union;[55] Electoral Action of Poles in Lithuania,[55] ChristianUnion-SGP;[56] the independent Indrek Tarand;[55] and Lijst Dedecker's Derk Jan Eppink;[47][48] from member states such as the Czech Republic,[57][58] Poland,[57][58] Italy,[57] Sweden,[57] the Baltic and Balkan states,[57] Belgium,[58] and the Netherlands.[58] Speculation also considered the remnants of the Union for Europe of the Nations (UEN) group, which was thought to be on the verge of collapse[according to whom? ] after the decision of Fianna Fil to join the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE)[59] and the Italian National Alliance merging with EPP member party Forza Italia. Lajos Bokros, elected on the list of the Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF) joined the group as the EPP did not want to accept him on pressure of the rival Fidesz.

The new group was provisionally named the European Conservatives,[49] (echoing the 1970s group of the same name), which was then changed to European Conservatives and Reformists.[60] The original estimates were firmed up to 84 MEPs,[47] then to approximately 60.[58] Frictions surfaced, as the ODS wanted the new group to have as many MEPs as possible, whilst the Conservatives wanted to disbar anti-immigrant parties in the new group, including the Danish People's Party and Lega Nord.[50]

Formation [ edit ] Former ECR chairman, Michał KamiÅskiOn 22 June 2009, the first official list of the new group's members was released.[4] On 24 June, the group held its inaugural meeting, in which Conservative MEP Timothy Kirkhope was named interim leader.[61] Adam Bielan of PiS and Jan Zahradil of the ODS were named interim vice-chairmen.

At the first sitting of the Seventh European Parliament, on 14 July 2009, outgoing Parliament President Hans-Gert P¶ttering announced that applications from all new and returning groups had been received and approved, including ECR. The group then became eligible for EU funding, office space, and committee places.

The first election for the group leadership was also scheduled for 14 July 2009, pitting interim leader Kirkhope against fellow Briton Geoffrey Van Orden.[62] However, both Conservative leadership candidates were forced to forfeit the leadership to prevent it from falling apart, when Conservative MEP Edward McMillan-Scott defied his party whip and stood for one of the vice-presidency posts despite pledges the previous week that Polish MEP Michał KamiÅski would be backed for it. KamiÅski's bid for Vice-President of the European Parliament subsequently failed, and the Polish MEPs threatened to abandon the new caucus unless KamiÅski was made the group leader in the parliament.[63] Kirkhope went to an emergency meeting with Polish MEPs in Strasbourg and proposed sharing the group leadership with the KamiÅski; however, this was not accepted, and he had to step down as coalition leader, withdrawing in favour of KamiÅski. McMillan-Scott, who alleged that the Conservative's new allies in Poland are 'racist and homophobic', had the Conservative whip withdrawn in the European Parliament.[64][65] In March 2010, McMillan-Scott joined the British Liberal Democrats and the ALDE group.[66]

Leadership changes and upheavals in membership [ edit ] Group chairman KamiÅski left Law and Justice (PiS) in November 2010, saying that the party had been taken over by the far-right. KamiÅski and other Law and Justice MPs and MEPs formed a new Polish party, Poland Comes First, formed as a breakaway from Law and Justice following dissatisfaction with the direction and leadership of Jarosław KaczyÅski. KamiÅski initially remained chairman of the group, but other Law and Justice MEPs argued he should step down.[67] On 15 December, rumours emerged that the eleven remaining PiS MEPs might leave the ECR and join the right-wing Europe of Freedom and Democracy (EFD) group instead.[68]

In February 2011, KamiÅski announced he would resign his chairmanship, effective 8 March, when a replacement would be elected. Former interim leader Timothy Kirkhope was said to be the front runner,[69] but lost the election to Jan Zahradil of the Czech Republic's ODS.[70] Zahradil has been in talks with other parties about joining the ECR.[71] In late March, David Cameron invited the New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) to join the group.[72]

The May 2011 resignation of Silvana Koch-Mehrin, one of the fourteen Vice-Presidents of the European Parliament, led to the ECR considering putting another candidate forward to take the position they were denied through McMillan-Scott's defection.[73] Conservative Party MEP Giles Chichester was nominated on 31 May, and was elected unopposed by the Parliament on 5 July 2011,[74] after the ALDE group to which Koch-Mehrin belongs failed to find a willing and suitable candidate.[75]

On 14 December 2011, a new leadership was elected, with Martin Callanan as chairman and Jan Zahradil, Geoffrey Van Orden, Ryszard Legutko, and Derk Jan Eppink as Vice-Chairmen. On 26 December 2011, four members of United Poland '' who had split from Law and Justice in November '' left the ECR to join the Europe of Freedom and Democracy (EFD) group. On 17 January 2012, Czech OldÅich Vlask replaced Chichester as the ECR's Vice-President of the Parliament.

2014 European Parliament elections [ edit ] Bernd Lucke, former leader of Alternative for GermanyThe 2014 European elections were held on 22''25 May 2014. On 4 June 2014, the ECR accepted applications from the Danish People's Party (4 MEPs) and the Finns Party (2 MEPs), both formerly attached to the EFD group during the 7th term of the European Parliament, as well as the Family Party of Germany, both Ordinary People and Independent Personalities (OĽaNO) and New Majority (NOVA) from Slovakia, and the Independent Greeks.[76][77] Alternative for Germany and Bulgaria Without Censorship were admitted on 8 June, followed by the Dutch Reformed Political Party on 16 June.[78] On 18 June the New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) joined the group,[79] a party previously attached to the Greens/EFA group.[80] N-VA party members had voted by a wide margin to join the ECR group instead of ALDE; 70 voted to join the ECR, and just three to join ALDE.[81] The N-VA's decision allowed the ECR to overtake ALDE as the third biggest group in the European parliament,[81] assuming the role of "kingmakers" in the new parliament.[82] On 23 June, Irish Fianna Fil MEP Brian Crowley joined from the ALDE group, but without the permission of his party or its leader Michel Martin, who removed Crowley's party whip the following day.[83][84] On the same day, IMRO '' Bulgarian National Movement joined,[85][non-primary source needed ] taking the group to 70 MEPs.

The ECR's unanimous decision to admit the Danish People's Party and Finns Party as members was criticised because one MEP from each party has a criminal conviction.[86][87] Morten Messerschmidt, lead candidate for the Danish People's Party, was convicted in 2002 for publishing material that appeared to suggest that there is a link between a multiethnic society and rape, violence and forced marriages.[88] Jussi Halla-aho, a Finns Party MEP, was convicted in 2012 after writing a 2008 blog entry which claimed that Islam "reveres paedophilia".[88] However, Syed Kamall, the ECR's chairman, who is a practising Muslim, defended the new members.[88]

Following the election, British Conservative MEP Sajjad Karim was the group's candidate for President of the European Parliament.[89]

On 8 March 2016, the bureau of the ECR Group began motions to exclude the two remaining MEPs of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) from their group due to the AfD's links with the far-right Freedom Party of Austria (FP–) and controversial remarks about immigration, inviting the MEPs to voluntarily leave the group by 31 March, with a motion of exclusion to be tabled on 12 April otherwise.[90][91]

Changes in membership 2014''2019 [ edit ] On 2 October 2014, the leader of the Slovak party Freedom and Solidarity (SaS), Richard Sul­k, left the ALDE group to join the ECR,[92] and was formally accepted six days later.In November 2014, the sole Croatian member of the group, Ruža TomaÅić, left the party she founded, Croatian Party of Rights dr. Ante Starčević, to lead a new party, the Croatian Conservative Party.On 24 January 2015, Amjad Bashir, the UKIP MEP for Yorkshire and the Humber, changed affiliation to the Conservative Party and subsequently joined the ECR.[93]On 18 May 2015, Raffaele Fitto, formerly of Italian party Forza Italia and EPP group member, joined the ECR group: forming a party called the Conservatives and Reformists after the ECR.[94][95]On 7 July 2015, Remo Sernagiotto left the EPP to join the ECR.On 27 October 2015, Monica Macovei, from M10 political party left the EPP to join the ECR.[96]On 8 March 2016, Eleni Theocharous of the Cypriot Democratic Rally was admitted to the group from the EPP.[97]On 5 October 2016, Timothy Kirkhope was forced to quit after being created a life peer in the UK House of Lords, and thus becoming ineligible to continue serving in the European Parliament. His seat was succeeded by John Procter.On 3 July 2018, Peter Lundgren and Kristina Winberg, from Sweden Democrats left EFDD group to join ECR group.[98]On 17 December 2018, Stefano Maullu left the EPP group to join the ECR group after his defection from Forza Italia to the Brothers of Italy.[99]2019 European Parliament elections and shift to the right [ edit ] Prior to the 2019 elections, the Sweden Democrats (SD) and Brothers of Italy joined the ECR group,[100] while Forum for Democracy (FvD) and Debout la France pledged to do so after the elections should they win seats.[101]

Two ECR member parties, the Danish People's Party and the Finns Party, announced their intention to form a new group called the European Alliance for People and Nations with Alternative for Germany and Italy's League following the 2019 elections which was subsequently named Identity and Democracy.[102]

During the 2019 elections the British Conservative Party sustained losses, including that of former ECR chairman Syed Kamall. The ECR also saw its total number of MEPs reduced to 62 MEPs and was overtaken in number by Identity and Democracy, the other predominant eurosceptic grouping. However, the FvD and the new Spanish Vox party gained seats for the first time and were formally admitted into the group.

Following the election, the group named Raffaele Fitto and Ryszard Legutko as new joint chairmen.

Changes in membership 2019''present [ edit ] The Dutch Christian Union (CU) quit the group following the 2019 elections and switched to the European People's Party Group with the CU's sole MEP Peter van Dalen protesting that the ECR was moving too far to the right with the inclusion of parties like Forum for Democracy, Vox and the Sweden Democrats.[30] The fellow Dutch Reformed Political Party opted to remain the group, signalling the end of an alliance the CU and Reformed party had during European elections.

On 31 January 2020, the remaining British Conservative Party MEPs resigned from the group following the completion of the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union.

In May 2020, Cristian TerheÈ announced he was joining the ECR group as an MEP for the Romanian Christian Democratic National Peasants' Party (which had previously been expelled from the European People's Party Group) having initially been elected for the Social Democratic Party.[103]

In 2020, all MEPs of the Forum for Democracy party resigned to sit as independents before co-founding a new party, JA21. In 2022, Forum for Democracy switched its affiliation to the Identity and Democracy group.

In 2023, the Finns Party switched back its affiliation from the Identity and Democracy group to the ECR group.[104]

Conservatives and Reformists Summit [ edit ] ECR Group members participated in two summits organised by the ECR Party (then called the Alliance of Conservatives and Reformists in Europe):

2015 Conservatives and Reformists Summit: Tunis (Tunisia)[105]2016 Conservatives and Reformists Summit: Antalya (Turkey)[106]Membership [ edit ] Ninth European Parliament [ edit ] Following the 2019 election, the ECR won 61 seats. The Finns Party (Which would later rejoin the group in 2023) and the Danish People's Party agreed to leave the group and join the far-right Identity and Democracy after the election. After those losses, four parties joined the group: the Spanish Vox, the Family Party of Germany, Greek Solution and the Dutch Forum for Democracy.

ECR currently has 66 Members of the European Parliament from 16 countries.

Eighth European Parliament [ edit ] Following the 2014 election, members from twelve new parties joined. Additional parties were admitted during the course of the Eighth European Parliament, such as the Slovak Freedom and Solidarity party and the Italian Direzione Italia. Alternative for Germany was initially admitted, but expelled in April 2016.

In 2019 the ECR had 77 Members of the European Parliament,[107] from twenty-three parties across eighteen countries. The ECR drew the majority of its MEPs from northern and central Europe.

Seventh European Parliament [ edit ] Originally, it had been announced on 22 June 2009 that Hannu Takkula, MEP for the Finnish Centre Party (an Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe member party) would also be a member of ECR (with his two party colleagues remaining in ALDE), but he reversed this decision two days later.[108]

The group membership was reduced to 54 when Edward McMillan-Scott was expelled from the group in July 2009. It increased to 55 again when Anna Rosbach joined the group in March 2011.[109] UKIP MEP David Campbell Bannerman rejoined the Conservative Party in May 2011, taking the group's tally to 56:[110] one larger than The Greens''European Free Alliance '' an advantage that disappeared in June 2011. Anthea McIntyre was confirmed as the ECR's 57th MEP on 1 December 2011. United Poland, which had been founded by four defectors from Law and Justice '' Zbigniew Ziobro, Tadeusz CymaÅski, Jacek Kurski, and Jacek Włosowicz '' left the ECR for Europe of Freedom and Democracy (EFD) on 26 December 2011. In March 2012, Conservative Roger Helmer defected to the UK Independence Party (UKIP) and also joined EFD; Marta Andreasen moved in the opposite direction, joining the Conservatives and the ECR from UKIP and the EFD group, in February 2013.[citation needed ] In October 2012, Cristiana Muscardini joined the ECR, when she left Future and Freedom to found the Conservatives and Social Reformers. In April 2013, the ECR was joined by fellow Italian Susy De Martini, an independent who was formerly a member of The People of Freedom. The newly elected Croatian MEP Ruža TomaÅić of the Croatian Party of Rights joined the group when Croatia joined the EU in July 2013.[111] In November 2013, Poland Comes First dissolved itself, with three of its members joining the new Poland Together, which was also joined by Artur Zasada from the EPP: taking the group's number of MEPs to 57. In 2014, Mirosław Piotrowski rejoined Law and Justice, and sought re-election in 2014 under that party's banner.

MEPs [ edit ] 9th European Parliament [ edit ] European Conservatives and Reformists MEPs (2019''2024) has MEPs in 15 member states. Dark blue indicates member states sending multiple MEPs, light blue indicates member states sending a single MEP.8th European Parliament [ edit ] ^ Bernd Lucke left AfD with 4 more MEPs after losing leadership of his party in 2015. The remaining two AfD members, Beatrix von Storch and Marcus Pretzell were expelled from the ECR group in 2016. ^ Left LKR. ^ Notis Marias left ANEL. ^ Full name: Electoral Action of Poles in Lithuania '' Christian Families Alliance ^ They are: Jacek Saryusz-Wolski, Mirosław Piotrowski, Urszula Krupa, Zdzisław KrasnodÄbski Leadership [ edit ] Chairman [ edit ] Since 2019 The European Conservatives and Reformists group has had two co-chairpeople.Group Bureau [ edit ] As of 12 July 2019:

Cohesion [ edit ] According to calculations by Vote Watch Europe, the ECR group had a cohesion rate of 86.65% in parliamentary votes during the 7th session (2009''14). This is slightly lower than in the four pro-European groups, but higher than in the European United Left''Nordic Green Left (GUE/NGL) and far higher than in the Europe of Freedom and Democracy (EFD) groups. Internal cohesion was highest in votes on constitutional and inter-institutional affairs (94.79%), international trade, and industry, research & energy. The greatest divergence within the group was in decisions on regional development (70.53% cohesion), agriculture, and development (cooperation).[113] The parties that were most loyal to the group (meaning that they voted with the majority of ECR members the most often) were the UK Conservatives (97.51%), the Ulster Unionist Party and the Czech Civic Democratic Party. The members who deviated from the ECR majority the most often were the individual MEPs Andreasen from the UK (who had switched over from EFD group only in 2013; 61.20% loyalty), Muscardini from Italy, and Rosbach (who had crossed over from EFD in 2011).[114]

See also [ edit ] European Conservatives, an earlier political group of Conservatives in the European ParliamentEuropean Conservatives and Reformists Group ExecutiveMovement for European ReformReferences [ edit ] ^ a b "ECR formation '' Press release june 22 2009". 22 June 2009 . Retrieved 14 May 2015 '' via Scribd. ^ a b c d Nordsieck, Wolfram (2019). "European Union". Parties and Elections in Europe. Archived from the original on 8 June 2017 . Retrieved 30 May 2019 . ^ Alan Siaroff (2019). Comparative European Party Systems: An Analysis of Parliamentary Elections Since 1945. Taylor & Francis. p. 469. ISBN 978-1-317-49876-6. ^ a b c "Conservative MEPs form new group". BBC. 22 June 2009 . Retrieved 22 June 2009 . ^ Tim Bale; Sen Hanley; Aleks Szczerbiak (March 2010). " 'May Contain Nuts'? The Reality behind the Rhetoric Surrounding the British Conservatives' New Group in the European Parliament". The Political Quarterly. 81 (1): 85''98. doi:10.1111/j.1467-923X.2009.02067.x. when taken together they form not so much a coherent whole as a mix of liberal conservatives (the Conservatives, ODS, LDD and MDF) and conservative nationalists (PiS and TB-LNNK). ^ a b ^ "Ursula von der Leyen makes final pledges to secure EU's top job". The Guardian. 15 July 2019. Von der Leyen says in her letters that she hopes the "snapshot" on her positions, some of which are retreads of previous proposals from the commission, will reassure her critics, although there is a risk of putting off MEPs within the more Eurosceptic and rightwing European Conservatives and Reformists group, in which Poland's Law and Justice is the largest party. ^ "Explainer: Von der Leyen's rocky path to confirmation as EU Commission chief". Reuters. 12 July 2019. 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"Continuity and Change in Polish Party Politics Since 1989". In Ingo Peters; Elisabeth Bakke (eds.). 20 Years Since the Fall of the Berlin Wall: Transitions, State Break-Up and Democratic Politics in Central Europe and Germany. BWV Verlag. p. 277. ISBN 978-3-8305-1975-1 . Retrieved 6 February 2013 . ^ Senem Aydin-D¼zgit (2012). Constructions of European Identity: Debates and Discourses on Turkey and the EU. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 16. ISBN 978-1-137-28351-1. ^ Hans Slomp (2011). Europe, A Political Profile: An American Companion to European Politics [2 volumes]: An American Companion to European Politics. ABC-CLIO. p. 245. ISBN 978-0-313-39182-8. ^ Matt Cole; Helen Deighan (2012). Political Parties in Britain. Oxford University Press. p. 39. ISBN 978-0-7486-6903-5. ^ Reformists, European Conservatives and. "ECR Group '' European Conservatives and Reformists Group". ecrgroup.eu. Archived from the original on 19 February 2018 . Retrieved 15 December 2017 . ^ Erkanor Saka (2009). Mediating the EU: Deciphering the Transformation of Turkish Elites (PhD Thesis). p. 202. ISBN 978-1-109-21663-9 . Retrieved 9 March 2016 . ^ Matthew (26 October 2011). "Why anti-EUism is not left-wing". Workers' Liberty. Alliance for Workers Liberty . Retrieved 31 January 2016 . ^ "Senior Tory MEP urged to quit over Brexit support". Politico. 14 March 2016 . Retrieved 24 May 2020 . ^ "Europese Unie". Forum voor Democratie . Retrieved 7 April 2020 . ^ "Rules of Procedure of the European Parliament '' July 2009 '' Rule 30 '' Formation of political groups". European Parliament. ^ "Rules of Procedure of the European Parliament '' March 2009 '' Rule 29 '' Formation of political groups". European Parliament. ^ "The Prague Declaration : European Conservatives and Reformists Group". Ecrgroup.eu . Retrieved 7 September 2013 . ^ "Conservative MEPs form new 'anti-federalist' group in the European Parliament" . The Daily Telegraph. London. 22 June 2009. 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"Cameron gives Hague month to get MEPs out of Brussels group". The Daily Telegraph. London . Retrieved 28 September 2009 . ^ a b "Tories leaving Europe's EPP group". BBC News. 11 March 2009 . Retrieved 5 June 2018 . ^ Kubosova, Lucia (13 July 2006). "Plans to form new MEP group kicked into 2009". EUobserver . Retrieved 26 March 2009 . ^ "Cameron Euro declaration". BBC News. 13 July 2006 . Retrieved 27 May 2008 . ^ Mulvey, Steven (13 July 2006). "Q & A: The Tories and the EPP". BBC News . Retrieved 27 May 2008 . ^ "Could the UUP be ready to leave the European Democrats?". The Belfast News Letter. 14 July 2006. ^ "Will Mirek really leave the EPP-ED?". EUobserver. 2007 . Retrieved 28 May 2008 . ^ "16 Heads of State meet at an EPP summit". European People's Party. 2007. Archived from the original on 11 April 2008 . Retrieved 28 May 2008 . ^ "European Parliament increases threshold to form a political group". European Parliament. 2008 . 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"Tories look for new partners". BBC News . Retrieved 24 March 2009 . ^ "UK Conservative Party Leader Cameron Welcomes Bulgaria Opposition MP Yanev". Novinite. 27 March 2009 . Retrieved 24 April 2009 . ^ Hix, Simon, Michael Marsh and Nick Vivyan (23 April 2009). "Predict 09 '' Analysis by Member State '' Bulgaria". Burson-Marsteller. Archived from the original on 10 April 2009 . Retrieved 24 April 2009 . {{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) ^ "New conservative group to rock next Parliament". EurActiv.com. 3 June 2009 . Retrieved 3 June 2009 . ^ a b c Traynor, Ian (9 June 2009). "David Cameron on track to form alliance of Eurosceptics". The Guardian. London . Retrieved 9 June 2009 . ^ "EU vote: CU/SGP may link to Conservatives". DutchNews.nl. 8 June 2009 . Retrieved 10 June 2009 . ^ a b c d e Grossman, David (10 March 2009). "The Tories' European dilemma". BBC . Retrieved 11 March 2009 . ^ a b c d e Banks, Martin (25 March 2009). "UK Tories 'well on track' to forming new EU grouping". Theparliament.com . Retrieved 26 March 2009 . ^ Connolly, Niamh (15 March 2009). "FF to join liberal Euro group next month". The Sunday Business Post . Retrieved 26 March 2009 . ^ Charter, David (15 May 2009). "David Cameron's new European allies set to include odd bedfellows". The Times. London . Retrieved 15 May 2009 . ^ Banks, Martin (25 March 2009). "Tory MEP voices 'real concern' over new European grouping". The Daily Telegraph. London . Retrieved 22 July 2009 . ^ Banks, Martin (9 July 2009). "British Tories fight it out for leadership of new Eurosceptic group". Theparliament.com. Archived from the original on 24 July 2009 . Retrieved 10 July 2009 . ^ Ian Traynor in Strasbourg (15 July 2009). "Tories give up EU parliamentary leadership of Eurosceptic group | Politics". The Guardian. London . Retrieved 27 April 2010 . ^ "Conservatives expel MEP after row over right-wing bloc". New Statesman. 15 July 2009 . Retrieved 15 July 2009 . ^ "McMillan-Scott hits back at allegations of disloyalty". Theparliament.com. 15 July 2009. Archived from the original on 22 July 2009 . Retrieved 16 July 2009 . ^ "Ex-Tory MEP Edward McMillan-Scott joins Lib Dems". BBC News. 12 March 2010 . Retrieved 27 April 2010 . ^ Conservatives' EU alliance in turmoil as Michał KamiÅski leaves 'far right' party, The Guardian, 22 November 2010 ^ "Future of EU parliament group under renewed pressure". Theparliament.com. 15 December 2010 . Retrieved 7 September 2013 . ^ "Conservative confusion". European Voice. 3 February 2011 . Retrieved 10 February 2011 . ^ Taylor, Simon (8 March 2011). "Czech beats British Conservative to lead EP group". European Voice. ^ "ECR has moved from squabbling to stability". European Voice. 7 April 2011 . Retrieved 23 May 2011 . ^ "When Dave met Bart". European Voice. 24 March 2011 . Retrieved 23 May 2011 . ^ "Jostling for position". European Voice. 19 May 2011. ^ "Chichester and Podimata appointed vice-presidents". European Voice. 7 July 2011 . Retrieved 15 September 2011 . ^ "Just the job for a liberal?". European Voice. 9 June 2011 . Retrieved 15 September 2011 . ^ Barker, Alex (4 June 2014). "MEPs with criminal records join Tories' eurosceptic group". Financial Times . Retrieved 4 June 2014 . ^ Cerulus, Laurens (5 June 2014). "Cameron's group challenges liberals as kingmakers in new Parliament". EurActive . Retrieved 5 June 2014 . ^ "Belder in ECR". 16 June 2014 . Retrieved 16 June 2014 . ^ Van Overtveldt, Johan (18 June 2014). "N-VA kiest voor ECR-fractie in Europees Parlement" [N-VA chooses ECR Group in the European Parliament]. standaard.be (in Dutch) . Retrieved 18 June 2014 . ^ "Flemish MEP row reveals tensions in Greens/EFA group". EurActiv.com. 25 May 2014 . Retrieved 14 May 2015 . ^ a b "Liberals embarrassed as N-VA joins ECR, making it third largest Parliament group". EurActiv.com. 19 June 2014 . Retrieved 14 May 2015 . ^ "Cameron's group challenges liberals as kingmakers in new Parliament". EurActiv.com. 5 June 2014 . Retrieved 14 May 2015 . ^ Bardon, Sarah (24 June 2014). "Fianna Fail expel MEP Brian Crowley '' Irish Mirror Online". Irishmirror.ie . Retrieved 14 May 2015 . ^ "Brian Crowley loses Fianna Fil whip". RT‰ News. 24 June 2014. ^ "Europe Decides on Twitter: "ALDE and ECR both gained new members today: Angel Dzhambazki from BG joined @ecrgroup Mircea Diaconu from RO joined @ALDEgroup #EP2014" ". Twitter. 24 June 2014 . Retrieved 14 May 2015 . ^ Private Eye, Issue 1369, 27 June '' 10 July 2014, pg. 16. ^ Watt, Nicholas (June 2014) "David Cameron accused over 'dubious' European Union partners" The Guardian, Thursday 5 June 2014 Accessed 25 June 2014. ^ a b c Barker, Alex (June 2014). "MEPs with criminal records join Tories' eurosceptic group" Financial Times, 4 June 2014 Accessed 25 June 2014. ^ "Sajjad's European Parliament Presidential campaign heats up". Sajjadkarim.eu. 15 June 2014. Archived from the original on 17 June 2014 . Retrieved 14 May 2015 . ^ "AfD links to Austrian far-right 'final straw' for ECR MEPs". 9 March 2016. ^ "EU parliament group tells German AfD party to leave". EUobserver. 9 March 2016. ^ "SaS leader Richard Sul­k leaves ALDE and applies to join ECR | AECR". Aecr.eu. 2 October 2014. Archived from the original on 17 November 2015 . Retrieved 14 May 2015 . ^ "UKIP MEP Amjad Bashir defects to Conservative Party". BBC News. 24 January 2015 . Retrieved 10 February 2016 . ^ "Parlamento Ue, Fitto ¨ entrato nel gruppo Ecr (19 mag 2015) '' ilVelino/AGV NEWS". ilvelino.it . Retrieved 10 February 2016 . ^ "Movers and Shakers | The Parliament Magazine". theparliamentmagazine.eu . Retrieved 10 February 2016 . ^ "Comunicat de presă '' Europarlamentar Monica Macovei". agerpres.ro . Retrieved 10 February 2016 . ^ "ECR group welcomes Eleni Theocharous". European Conservatives and Reformists group. 9 March 2016 . Retrieved 9 March 2016 . ^ "ECR group approves two new members, Peter Lundgren and Kristina Winberg". European Conservatives and Reformists group. 3 July 2018 . Retrieved 8 July 2018 . ^ "Movers and Shakers '' 17 December 2018". theparliamentmagazine.eu. 29 June 2020. ^ "Tory Eurosceptic alliance looks to Salvini after Brexit". Financial Times. 28 November 2018. ^ "Party leaders to join ECR group after EU elections". theparliamentmagazine.eu. 29 June 2020. ^ "EU's nationalist parties announce plans to join forces after May vote". Saudi Gazette. 8 April 2019. ^ "PSD a pierdut un europarlamentar. Cristian TerheÈ a trecut la grupul extremiÈtilor din Parlamentul European". www.digi24.ro (in Romanian) . Retrieved 12 May 2020 . ^ "Perussuomalaiset vaihtaa EU-parlamenttiryhm¤¤". www.suomenuutiset.fi (in Finnish) . Retrieved 5 April 2023 . ^ AECR President Jan Zahradil opens Tunis Summit Archived 15 April 2016 at the Wayback Machine, AECR News, 13 November 2015 ^ Conservatives and Reformists Summit Antalya, AECR News, changeandwin.org, March 2016 ^ "2014''2019 Outgoing Parliament". European Parliament . Retrieved 20 July 2019 . ^ "NewsRoom Finland". Newsroom.finland.fi . Retrieved 27 April 2010 . [permanent dead link ] ^ Moss, Martha (9 March 2011). "Rosbach leaves Danish People's Party to become ECR MEP". The Parliament. Archived from the original on 13 March 2011 . Retrieved 10 March 2011 . ^ Crampton, Caroline (24 May 2011). "David Campbell Bannerman returns to the Tories". Total Politics . Retrieved 24 May 2011 . ^ "Ruza Tomasic joins the group of European Conservatives in EU parliament". Croatian Times. 10 June 2013 . Retrieved 14 June 2013 . ^ "MEPs by Member State and political group" . Retrieved 9 December 2022 . ^ Cohesion of (trans-national) political groups in the European Parliament, Vote Watch Europe, archived from the original on 13 July 2014 , retrieved 2 July 2014 ^ National party statistics '' Voting loyalty to political group: ECR '' European Conservatives and Reformists Group regarding All policy areas in the interval 2009-07-14 '' 2014-07-14, Vote Watch Europe, archived from the original on 9 July 2014 , retrieved 2 July 2014 External links [ edit ] European Conservatives and Reformists official websiteMembers of the groupConservativeHome (2009-06-22): The deal is done: Details of the new Conservative grouping in the European Parliament

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During the COVID-19 pandemic, many people proudly sported t-shirts, caps, stickers, and other accessories with the words ''I Will Not Comply,'' ''I Did Not Comply,'' ''He/She/It Did Not Comply,'' or ''Ze/Zim/Zhir Did Not Comply.'' Actually, if you use ze/zim/zhir, you probably did comply. And many people who lived in Massachusetts probably happily complied as well.

But if you lived in Massachusetts and had an Android phone, you didn't need a hat, shirt, or sticker. Whether you complied or not, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health may have been keeping an eye on you during the great period in American History known as ''5,000 Days to Slow the Spread'' or something. The health department may have done so by working with Google to install tracking technology on Android phones without the users' knowledge or, for that matter, their permission. The National Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) contends that the department teamed up with the tech giant to do just that and has filed a lawsuit.

The suit, Wright v. Massachusetts Department of Public Health, et al., alleges that the movements of one million Android users in the state were covertly tracked ostensibly to monitor COVID, starting June 15, 2021. The suit has nine counts on behalf of the plaintiffs, Robert Wright and Johnny Kula. Those counts include violations of the plaintiffs' Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights under the U.S. Constitution as well as violations of Articles X and XIV of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights. NCLA provides an outline of the suit in the video below.

In a press release, the NCLA states that the app did not appear on the user interface and could only be located by opening the settings and accessing the ''view all apps'' feature. So in just about every case, Android users had no idea that they were being tracked. But if a user did find and delete the app, the health department simply reinstalled it.

Sheng Li, serving as litigation counsel for NCLA, commented, ''Many states and foreign countries have successfully deployed contact tracing apps by obtaining the consent of their citizens before downloading software onto their smartphones. Persuading the public to voluntarily adopt such apps may be difficult, but it is also necessary in a free society. The government may not secretly install surveillance devices on your personal property without a warrant'--even for a laudable purpose. For the same reason, it may not install surveillance software on your smartphone without your awareness and permission.''

Senior counsel Peggy Little added:

The Massachusetts DPH, like any other government actor, is bound by state and federal constitutional and legal constraints on its conduct. This 'android attack,' deliberately designed to override the constitutional and legal rights of citizens to be free from government intrusions upon their privacy without their consent, reads like dystopian science fiction'--and must be swiftly invalidated by the court.''

Welcome to the soft tyranny of the 21st century. Perhaps an Android user in the Bay State decided to stand up to the demand that they get their shot and their boosters, and perhaps they were outspoken about that. But they were complying nonetheless, and they couldn't refuse. They didn't even know.

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I t was the dead cows on Wilbur Tennant's farm that shaped most of Rob Bilott's professional life. Tennant's farm was located in Parkersburg, W. Va.; Bilott was'--and remains'--an environmental lawyer at the firm of Taft Stettinius & Hollister in Cincinnati. All had been well for Tennant until 1998, when half of his herd of 300 cows began to languish and die. The farmer and the lawyer never would have come together, but Bilott's grandmother lived near Tennant, and a mutual friend suggested Tennant call her grandson for counsel.

Tennant had reason to suspect he needed the help of an environmental lawyer. His property was located up against a DuPont chemical plant, which was sending waste to an adjacent landfill; that, Tennant believed, was leaching contaminated water through a discharge pipe into the stream from which his cows drank. Bilott took the case, and in the summer of 1999, he filed the first ever lawsuit for damages resulting from the class of chemicals the plant was producing, known as PFAS (which DuPont was using to manufacture Teflon). Tennant and DuPont settled in 2001 for an undisclosed amount of money, but the case was just one in an avalanche of lawsuits that have come since.

''I've been practicing law since 1990,'' says Bilott. ''So I'm 33 years in and 25 of those 33 years have been focused on PFAS.''

He's hardly alone. Currently, there are more than 15,000 claims that have been filed nationwide against DuPont'--and its spinoffs Chemours and Corteva'--along with 3M, the major manufacturers of PFAS in the U.S., according to Michael London, partner in the New York-based Law firm Douglas & London, which is handling most of the cases. A handful of smaller PFAS companies are also facing suits. So far, DuPont, Chemours, Corteva, and 3M have paid a total of nearly $11.5 billion in damages for PFAS contamination. But that number could grow considerably, even exceeding the more than $200 billion paid by Big Tobacco in the 1990s. And well it should, environmental lawyers argue.

Short for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, PFAS are also known as ''forever chemicals'''--because that's pretty much how long they linger in the environment. PFAS exist in more than 12,000 forms, and are found in thousands of products, from food packaging, to clothing, shoes, cosmetics, contact lenses, wall paint, toilet paper, cookware, and even feminine hygiene products. That's decidedly bad news: the exposure to certain levels of the chemicals have been linked by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to a long list of health effects, including decreased fertility, high blood pressure in pregnant people, increased risk of certain cancers, developmental delays and low birthweight in children, hormonal disruption, high cholesterol, reduced effectiveness of the immune system, and more.

The ubiquity of PFAS affects us all. A study published in the International Journal of Environmental and Public Health, found PFAS in the blood of 97% of Americans tested. One 2022 study detected PFAS in raindrops'--after clouds picked up the chemical from evaporated, contaminated water in oceans, lakes, and streams.

''There's PFAS in the blood of penguins and polar bears,'' says Scott Faber, senior vice president of the Environmental Working Group, an advocacy organization. ''PFAS is so mobile. Once it gets into the air and the water, it goes everywhere.''

In early June, DuPont, Chemours, and Corteva got out from under a little bit of the civil litigation brought against them, reaching a $1.185 billion settlement with 300 local water systems that had sued the companies for the costs of cleaning and filtering their wells and aquifers. Three weeks later, 3M reached a much larger $10.3 billion settlement with 300 different water providers. Most, but not all, of the plaintiffs in both settlements are part of what is known as multidistrict litigation (MDL), in which suits alleging similar damages and identical defendants are consolidated for trial before a single judge in a single court. The 600 settled cases represent only a tiny share of the 15,000 claims in the MDL, being heard in the courtroom of Judge Richard Gergel, in the United States District Court for South Carolina.

Nobody pretends that even when the remaining cases in this MDL are settled, along with the hundreds more scattered around the country, the companies' problems will be solved. Only 18 state attorneys general have filed suit for PFAS damages so far, leaving plenty more to step up to the legal plate; and only a small fraction of the 148,000 public water systems around the country have sought their own day in court. Finally, if the International Journal of Environmental and Public Health study is correct, there is no telling how many of the 97% of Americans who may be contaminated with PFAS will develop illnesses from the chemicals. Those who do would have standing to sue.

For many court-watchers, so much potential legal action by so many people calls to mind a remedy like the 1998 Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement, in which 52 state and territorial attorneys general agreed with the four leading cigarette manufacturers that the companies would, among other things, raise the price of cigarettes; limit advertising and promotion'--especially to young people; ban payments for cigarette product placement in movies, TV, and theater; open previously secret industry documents; and dissolve industry trade groups. Worse, from the companies' point of view, they were also required to pay the states a total of $206 billion in damages and contribute an additional $1.5 billion to an anti-smoking campaign. For the PFAS makers, that's a scary precedent.

''Not 100% of Americans are walking around smoking tobacco,'' says Erik Olson, senior strategic director for the Natural Resources Defense Council. ''But basically 100% of Americans are walking around with PFAS in their bodies and none of them asked for that.''

Adds Bilott: ''None of us even knew we were being exposed to these chemicals. We were all being involuntarily contaminated, so it's potentially much larger in scope and scale [than the tobacco settlement.]''

A Long, Problematic PastIf the cases pending against the PFAS manufacturers are relatively new, the history of the chemical is not. PFAS was first developed in the 1940s, with the most common'--and most dangerous'--of its varieties known as PFOA and PFOS. As a study published in early June in the Annals of Global Health reports, internal documents from 3M and DuPont show that the companies knew as early as 1961 that the chemicals were harmful to human health. At the time, PFOA and PFOS were known as C8'--because of the eight carbon atoms that form their molecular spine'--but whatever name they went by, they were bad news. A 1961 DuPont study warned that Teflon, which used PFOA, should be handled ''with extreme care'' and that ''contact with the skin should be strictly avoided.'' A 1970 study by the company found that C8 could be ''highly toxic when inhaled and moderately toxic when ingested.''

Signage stands outside the 3M Co. Cottage Grove Center in Minnesota, U.S., on Oct. 18, 2018. 3M's Cottage Grove factory had been churning out some varieties of Per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) since the 1950s for the water- and stain-repellant Scotchgard.

Daniel Acker/Bloomberg'--Getty Images

The documents were obtained by Bilott in the process of discovery during three PFAS cases'--1998's Tennant vs. DuPont, 2001's Leach vs. Dupont, and 2006's Rowe vs. E.I. DuPont de Nemours Co. The documents were then donated to the library at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), where the authors of the June paper gained access to them for their research. It was the Leach case, in which 3,500 West Virginians sued, seeking recovery for one or more of six diseases that they believed they had contracted from exposure to PFOS or PFOA'--kidney cancer, testicular cancer, thyroid disease, high cholesterol, ulcerative colitis, and pre-eclampsia (or pregnancy-related hypertension)'--that had the biggest impact. The story was told in a New York Times Magazine article in 2016 and turned into the film Dark Waters in 2019. That introduced many Americans to the PFAS problem for the first time, and sparked similar lawsuits from individuals, communities, and water providers nationwide.

''The rest of the country really didn't know anything about PFAS until then,'' says Bilott. ''At that point, people started saying, 'Hey, these chemicals aren't just in the drinking water in West Virginia, they're being found in drinking water supplies around the country.' They started calling the EPA saying, 'What's the safe [drinking water] guideline [for PFAS?]'''

Four months after the Times piece was published, the EPA'--which had never set such a standard for PFAS before'--responded, and the conclusion they reached was alarming: Any concentration of PFOS or PFOA exceeding 70 parts per trillion (ppt) was dangerous. In 2022, the EPA lowered that number drastically, putting the safe PFOS and PFOA levels at just 0.02 ppt and 0.004 ppt respectively. One ppt is equivalent to one drop of water in 20 Olympic size swimming pools. ''They're just extremely toxic at extremely low doses,'' says Olson.

The Coming StormThe thousands of cases currently pending, to say nothing of the uncounted more that could be filed by individuals, will likely be broken down and consolidated into MDLs like the one being heard in South Carolina. ''Everybody likes MDLs,'' says London. ''The defendants don't have to have their CEOs and scientists and witnesses deposed scores of times by plaintiffs lawyers. And plaintiff's lawyers get some efficiencies because we get to finally move forward with one judge in one place.''

Under the MDL process, one plaintiff out of the designated group is selected as a bellwether case, and the settlement or ruling in that complaint applies to all of the other ones in the collective suit. In the June DuPont settlement, the bellwether was Stuart, Fla., a city of 17,500 people on the state's Atlantic coast.

''In the bellwether process, the judge asks the parties to nominate or designate cases that would be representative [of all of the others],'' says London. ''All of the parties agreed that the city of Stuart was most representative. It's like the John Doe of cities. You don't want an outlier. You don't want a town that serves four people and you probably don't want a New York City with 10 million people.''

Stuart had something else going for it too: it was alleging that most of its damages came from what's known as aqueous film forming foam (AFFF), otherwise known as fire-fighting foam. Heavy with PFAS'--originally the PFOA and PFOS varieties'--the foam leaches into the ground after it's been used, most frequently on military bases, at airports, and by firefighters either battling real blazes or in drills. Most of the other cities included in the settlement were also alleging contamination from AFFF'--which is one of the most common sources of PFAS in soil and water.

''The cities pretty rapidly figured out that it was their own fire and rescue departments using firefighting foam that was responsible,'' says Gary Douglas, London's partner in the firm. ''The vast majority, about 90-plus percent of PFAS contamination in the sewers, was the PFOS variety.''

Water sits at the Stoneridge Farm in Arundel, Maine, U.S., on Aug. 15, 2019. State and federal regulators and researchers have only recently begun to study PFAS chemicals in agriculture. The Stoneridge Farm is one of only three in the country known to have been shut down by the presence of PFAS.

Adam Glanzman/Bloomberg'--Getty Images

The ubiquity of the foam will likely place it at the center of other MDLs as well'--though consumers alleging injuries from the PFAS in thousands of commercial products could file suits too. And it won't help that the chemical companies, knowing of the dangers PFOS and PFOA present, have replaced these in AFFF and other products with a C6 (six carbon atoms) PFAS formulation dubbed Gen X. It's less toxic than PFOA and PFOS'--but only by a little. According to the EPA, the safe limit for consumption of Gen X chemicals in drinking water is just 10 ppt.

''Instead of C8, these companies started making C6, C4, C9, C10,'' says Bilott. ''But they're all part of the same PFAS family.''

All of this, plus existing C8 pollution, leaves the chemical companies with a long, litigious future ahead of them'--and it's a future they could have at least partly avoided if they'd just come clean about the dangers of PFAS early.

It was in 1980 that the EPA's superfund law was enacted, designating nearly 800 hazardous substances that would be subject to regulation. By then, the PFAS manufacturers already knew that the chemicals were dangerous, as the study conducted with the UCSF documents shows. Had the companies been more transparent with their research, revealing to the government what their studies had found, PFAS would have been included in the superfund list, allowing the chemicals to be manufactured, but under the government's eye, with limitations on how widely they were used and'--as in the case of Tennant's farm'--dumped. That would have made for much less of a mess today, and much less civil liability. What's more, under the superfund law, the cost of any clean-up may be borne partly by the manufacturers, but the states and the federal government can step in too, particularly if the contaminated area is a government-owned and -run facility like a military base.

''If the polluters had not hidden the truth from all of us, they would have been regulated in a way that might have insulated them from all the liability they're having to face,'' says Faber. ''It's one of those karmic kind of moments.''

Karma may have no legally recognized place in a court of law, but justice does, and public safety does, and compensating plaintiffs does. For the PFAS manufacturers, the best possible outcome might indeed be something like the tobacco master settlement, which would allow them to resolve at least some of their liability'--the suits brought by the state attorneys general in particular'--all at once.

''I've seen analogies [to the tobacco settlement],'' says Bilott. ''You're looking at something that's impacting millions of people worldwide. So this PFAS issue is probably even larger.''

That prospect is what likely keeps the corporate bosses up at night. The U.S. is a very big country with hundreds of millions of potentially injured plaintiffs. PFAS chemicals are forever; for the companies, the liability resulting from them could feel that way too.

Corrections: The original version of this story misstated the case that was the basis of the movie Dark Waters. It was Leach vs. DuPont, not Rowe vs. E.I. DuPont de Nemours Co. The story also misstated the year that the EPA set the safe drinking water levels for PFOS and PFOA at 0.02 ppt and 0.004 ppt respectively. It was 2022, not 2016.

Write to Jeffrey Kluger at jeffrey.kluger@time.com.

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The UK's bold attack on free speech, named the Online Safety Bill and ratified by a majority of 72 in the House of Lords, isn't getting any weaker. In fact, there are proposals to make it even worse.

The proposed changes demand accountability from tech companies for their use of algorithms that direct users towards certain content, not just for the content itself.

The most striking example cited in the debate was that of Andrew Tate, an influencer facing legal charges but also being the target of censorship across various social media platforms.

The bill is in the late stages of enactment and aims to regulate user-to-user service providers such as social media and search engines to protect users from ''harmful'' speech.

The proposed changes would make it illegal to ''deliberately push 13-year-old boys towards Andrew Tate '' not for any content reason, but simply on the basis that 13-year-old boys are like each other and one of them has already been on that site.''

Baroness Kidron, a crossbench peer and the architect of these changes, insisted on scrutinizing the ways companies design their services, often to push users towards specific types of content.

However, while aiming to protect young users from potential harm, this shift in focus will also stifle freedom of expression.

The amendments drew support from a number of political figures such as Baroness Harding, a conservative peer and former chief executive of TalkTalk, and Lib Dem peer Baroness Benjamin.

Nonetheless, some critics argue that the wide-ranging support may overlook the potential threat to the principle of free speech.

Culture Minister Lord Parkinson underlined the government's view that the bill already acknowledges the role of functions, features, and design in the risk of harm. He voiced concern that the amendments may dilute the bill or invite exploitation of legal uncertainties, potentially affecting the free flow of information and user experience on these platforms.

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The sanctions levied against Russia by the collective West have essentially failed. There is inconvenience within Russia amid ordinary citizens for global and economic transactions, but most of the govt transactions have continued.

On the opposite side of the consequence coin, absent the ability to purchase consumer goods on the global market, Russian domestic consumer independence has grown dramatically. There is more stuff being made and created inside Russia, for Russians to purchase, than ever before.

I cannot see how the Russian GDP doesn't benefit from this in the long-term.

Then again, I don't buy the official Western narrative about the ''horrible'' life inside Russia, because I talk to ordinary middle class Russians who seem to have found a way to organize life without too much disturbance.

Russia is actually a case study in the elimination of imports and the economic outcomes therein.

It doesn't suck to be a consumer; average Russians are doing fine, and it seems to get better over time. Ironically, give them a few more years of Western sanctions, and Russia could be a manufacturing powerhouse. Russia is a big country with a lot of raw material resources.

UNITED NATIONS, July 12 (Reuters) '' U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has proposed to Russian President Vladimir Putin that he extend a deal allowing the safe Black Sea export of grain from Ukraine in return for connecting a subsidiary of Russia's agricultural bank to the SWIFT international payment system, sources told Reuters.

Russia has threatened to ditch the grain deal, which expires on Monday, because several demands to dispatch its own grain and fertilizer abroad have not been met. The last two ships traveling under the Black Sea agreement are currently loading cargoes at the Ukrainian port of Odesa ahead of the deadline.

A key demand by Moscow is the reconnection of the Russian agricultural bank Rosselkhozbank to the SWIFT international payment network. It was cut off by the European Union in June 2022 over Russia's invasion of Ukraine. An EU spokesperson said in May the EU was not considering reinstating Russian banks.

However, the EU is considering connecting to SWIFT a subsidiary of Rosselkhozbank to allow specifically for grain and fertilizer transactions, three sources familiar with discussions told Reuters on Wednesday. The European Commission did not immediately respond to a request for comment. (read more)

Zelenskyy is the Bud Light of the NATO summit. ðŸ‚

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The largest banks in the US are reportedly taking big hits to their bottom line as borrowers default on billions of dollars worth of loans.

Citing data compiled by Bloomberg, the Financial Times says that JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America (BofA), Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley appear to have written off a combined $5 billion worth of loans in Q2 of this year as consumers feel the negative impacts of inflation and higher interest rates.

The write-offs essentially mean the banks have decided to officially recognize major losses in the value of assets on their balance sheets.

The banking giants point to credit card debt as the primary source of their multibillion-dollar write-offs.

JPMorgan Chase alone absorbed losses of $1.1 billion in bad credit card debt last quarter, an increase of over 66% on a year-over-year basis.

Meanwhile, BofA's credit card loans account for around 25% of the lender's unrecoverable debt.

Another pain point for the six banks is the struggling commercial real estate sector, which is witnessing a significant decline in demand as large swathes of the workforce telecommute for several days a week.

Wells Fargo, an institution that reportedly holds over $35 billion worth of office loans, is allocating $1 billion to cover possible losses in the embattled sector.

All in all, the six financial titans are expected to earmark an additional $7.6 billion to accommodate loans that could turn sour.

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June 16 (Reuters) - President Vladimir Putin said this month that Russia was considering withdrawing from the Black Sea grain deal as he accused the West of cheating Moscow because it still faced obstacles getting its own agricultural goods to world markets.

Putin said he would discuss the future of the grain deal with visiting African leaders on Saturday.

THE PACKAGE DEALThe United Nations and Turkey brokered the Black Sea Grain Initiative last July to help tackle a global food crisis worsened by Moscow's invasion of Ukraine and blockade of its Black Sea ports.

It allows food and fertilizer to be exported from three Ukrainian ports - Chornomorsk, Odesa and Pivdennyi (Yuzhny). The deal has been extended three times, most recently until July 17.

Nearly 32 million tonnes of mostly corn and wheat have so far been exported by Ukraine under the deal. The initiative also allows for the safe export of ammonia - a key ingredient in nitrate fertilizer - but none has been shipped.

To convince Russia to agree to the initiative, a three-year pact was also struck last July in which the United Nations agreed to help Moscow overcome any obstacles to its own food and fertilizer shipments.

While Russian exports of food and fertilizer are not subject to Western sanctions imposed after the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Moscow says restrictions on payments, logistics and insurance have amounted to a barrier to shipments.

U.N. spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said last week that "the past months have shown tangible progress" on improving Russian exports, but added: "Challenges remain but we will spare no effort to overcome all remaining obstacles."

WHY WERE THE DEALS NEEDED?The poorest in the world were hit worst by the rising global food prices. The U.N. World Food Programme (WFP) warned in March last year that its ability to feed some 125 million people was under threat because 50% of its grain came from Ukraine.

Between 2018''2020, Africa imported $3.7 billion in wheat (32% of total African wheat imports) from Russia and another $1.4 billion from Ukraine (12% of total African wheat imports), according to the United Nations.

The United Nations said last year that 36 countries count on Russia and Ukraine for more than half of their wheat imports, including some of the poorest and most vulnerable, including Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Somalia and Democratic Republic of Congo.

Under the Black Sea grain deal, more than 625,000 tonnes of grain has so far been shipped by the WFP for aid operations in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia and Yemen. In 2022, WFP procured more than half its global wheat grain from Ukraine.

RUSSIAN COMPLAINTSPutin complained that Russia has been cheated by the West because its own exports still faced problems.

The United States has dismissed Russia's grievances. U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Linda Thomas-Greenfield said last month: "It is exporting grain and fertilizer at the same levels, if not higher, than before the full scale invasion."

Putin said Russia only agreed to the deal for the sake of countries in Africa and Latin America but that only around 3.2-3.4% of the grain goes to the world's poorest countries while 40% went to prosperous countries.

According to U.N. data, around 3% of exports under the Black Sea deal has gone to low-income countries, while high income countries get around 44% and the rest to middle-income states.

The United Nations has always said the deal was a commercial enterprise and not intended to be entirely humanitarian, but that it benefited poorer countries by helping lower food prices globally.

RUSSIA'S DEMANDSIn a letter to U.N. officials in March, Russia spelled out the demands it wants met in exchange for its continued cooperation in the grain deal:

- Moscow wants the Russian Agricultural Bank (Rosselkhozbank) reconnected to the SWIFT payments system. The bank was cut off from SWIFT by the European Union in June last year over Russia's invasion. An EU spokesperson has said the bloc is not considering the reinstatement of Russian banks.

As a workaround, U.N. officials got U.S. bank JPMorgan Chase & Co JPM.N to start processing some Russian grain export payments with reassurances from the U.S. government.

The United Nations is also working with the African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) to create a platform to help process transactions for Russian exports of grain and fertilizer to Africa, the top U.N. trade official told Reuters last month.

Russia wants the resumption of its Black Sea ammonia exports via a pipeline from Russia's Togliatti to Ukraine's Pivdennyi port. The pipeline, which pumped up to 2.5 million tonnes of ammonia annually, was shut down by the war.

In September, Reuters reported that the U.N. proposed that Russian fertilizer producer Uralchem sell its ammonia to U.S.-headquartered commodities trader Trammo once it reaches the Russia-Ukraine border via the pipeline.

Until the ammonia pipeline is restarted, Moscow has said it will limit the number of vessels allowed to travel to Pivdennyi port under the Black Sea grain deal. U.N. data shows no ships have visited Pivdennyi port for more than a month.

Last week Russia accused Ukrainian forces of blowing up part of the pipeline, the world's longest carrying ammonia, in Ukraine's Kharkiv region. The regional Ukrainian governor said Russia had shelled the pipeline. Neither side provided evidence.

More than 400,000 tonnes of Russian fertilizer was also initially stranded in European Union ports after the war started, though U.N. officials have negotiated its release for export to Africa after Russia said it would be donated.

Russia also wants a resumption of supplies to Russia of agricultural machinery and spare parts; lifting restrictions on insurance and access to ports for Russian ships and cargo; and unblocking accounts and financial activities of Russian fertilizer companies.

RUSSIAN GRAIN, FERTILIZER EXPORTSWhile exports of Russian wheat and some fertilisers have risen since the war, exports of Russian ammonia and potassium-based fertilizers have plummeted.

In the 2021-22 season, Russia exported 38.1 million tonnes of grain, including 30.7 million tonnes of wheat, while in the 2022-23 season, Putin said Russia is expected to export around 55-60 million tonnes of grain - likely to be a record.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Russia's main wheat export markets are in the Middle East and Africa and exports to all regions have increased in the 2022-23 period.

While Russian exports of urea and potassium-based fertilisers diammonium and monammonium phosphate rose from Russia, exports of potassium-based fertiliser muriate of potash (MOP) fell 37% in 2022, according to trade data.

Reporting by Reuters staff; Editing by Daniel Wallis

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Thu, 13 Jul 2023 11:26

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Thu, 13 Jul 2023 11:21

Image source, PA MediaThe BBC is resuming its investigation into Huw Edwards, after a police inquiry found no evidence of criminal behaviour over claims that he paid a young person for explicit images.

He was named as the news presenter at the centre of the row by his wife, who said he was in hospital with "serious mental health issues."

The BBC said it would be "mindful" of its duty of care to those involved.

But it is facing new claims Edwards acted improperly towards some staff.

The corporation's internal fact-finding investigation was paused at the Metropolitan Police's request while it carried out its own enquiries.

On the resumption of the internal review, a spokesperson for the BBC said: "We will now move forward with that work, ensuring due process and a thorough assessment of the facts."

Director general Tim Davie also said he had asked for separate review into whether the BBC's complaints protocols and procedures were appropriate, after it was revealed the corporation contacted the family who made the allegations about Huw Edwards just twice - despite deeming them "very serious".

The initial allegations, first reported by the Sun online on Friday evening, were that the presenter paid a young person for sexually explicit photos, beginning when they were 17.

In later versions of the story, the Sun changed the wording of this allegation to "it is understood contact between the two started when the youngster was 17".

The paper had quoted a mother as saying her child, now 20, had used the money paid for the photos to fund a crack cocaine habit, and she was worried they could "wind up dead".

A lawyer for the young person has since said the accusations were "rubbish" but the family are standing by the account.

A statement issued by the Met, which has been assessing the allegations in recent days after discussions with BBC executives, said police "determined there is no information to indicate that a criminal offence has been committed."

But, as the BBC resumes its investigation, it faces fresh allegations of inappropriate behaviour by Edwards towards more junior staff.

Two current BBC workers and one former member of staff said they had been sent messages that made them feel uncomfortable.

An employee at the corporation told BBC News they received "suggestive" messages from Edwards. BBC News has seen the messages, which refer to the staff member's appearance and were sent this year.

One said they felt it was an abuse of power by someone very senior in the organisation.

Speaking to the BBC's Newsnight programme, the workers and former employee spoke of a reluctance among junior staff to complain to managers about the conduct of high-profile colleagues in case it adversely affected their careers.

The BBC said: "We always treat the concerns of staff with care, and would urge anyone to speak to us if they have any concerns. We have clear processes for making complaints."

In a separate BBC News investigation published on Tuesday, a young person who did not work at the BBC said they had felt "threatened" by messages sent by Huw Edwards.

"This remains a very complex set of circumstances," director general Tim Davie told BBC staff in an internal email sent on Wednesday evening, "Our aim must be to navigate through this with care and consideration."

Former controller of Radio 4, Mark Damazer highlighted the importance of the BBC exercising a proper duty of care.

Speaking to Radio 4's Today programme, he said "it is extremely important that Tim [Davie] and the BBC doesn't feel that it has to be rushed by other people's agendas to come to measured, appropriate and evidenced conclusions."

Edwards was identified by his wife on Wednesday as the BBC presenter at the centre of allegations, after media outlets - including BBC News - initially took the decision not to name the him due to privacy concerns.

Vicky Flind said she was issuing a statement on her husband's behalf after days of speculation, saying he was being treated in hospital for "serious mental health issues".

"I am doing this primarily out of concern for his mental well-being and to protect our children." her statement read.

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Thu, 13 Jul 2023 11:19

SummaryLevelling up and housing secretary Michael Gove is due to give evidence to the Covid inquiry this afternoonThe veteran Tory MP was Cabinet Office minister when the pandemic began, and held several ministerial posts in the decade before itBefore Gove, the inquiry will hear from others including Melanie Field of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, and Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet medical journalThe inquiry aims to look at lessons learned from the handling of the pandemic - this first phase is focused on planning and preparednessYou can watch the inquiry live at the top of this page by pressing the play button

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Wed, 12 Jul 2023 21:38

The box office surprise of the summer is a movie about child sex trafficking called Sound of Freedom whose release has been years in the making after filming wrapped in 2018.

The film tells the real-life story of the founder of the anti-sex trafficking charity Operation Underground Railroad, Tim Ballard, played by Passion of the Christ star, Jim Caviezel.

Directed and co-written by Alejandro Monteverde, Sound of Freedom shocked everyone when it beat Harrison Ford's last appearance in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. The fifth Indiana Jones movie made $11,698,989 on its opening weekend while the Sound of Freedom made almost its entire budget back, $14,242,063.

Jim Caviezel as Tim Ballard in the new film 'Sound of Freedom'. Disney allegedly owned the rights to the completed film but decided not to release it. Angel StudiosA viral tweet has alleged that the controversial film was originally set to be released by Disney but that the Mickey Mouse company never did.

The Claim

A tweet by a woman named Joy Reborn on Twitter, whose bio says she is a conservative and mom, has been viewed 193,000 times at the time of writing.

In the tweet, she claimed Disney owned the rights to the film after buying 20th Century Fox film studios in 2019, but did not release it.

"ðŸ--¥ Sound of Freedom was originally produced in 2018. DISNEY bought & SHELVED #SoundOfFreedom refusing to release it. 🧐Why wouldn't Disney want us to see human trafficked children saved? It took@AngelStudiosInc &@ElonMusk to get this movie to the public. GOD'S CHILDREN ARE NOT FOR SALE ðŸ--¥ BUY YOUR TICKETS NOW #GibsonChallenge TY Elon & Angel Studios.ðŸðŸ>>," the tweet read, alongside a poster for the film and screenshots of the film's Wikipedia page.

The Wikipedia page claimed Angel Studios successfully crowdfunded to market the film and get the rights to distribute it after Twitter owner Elon Musk suggested the company use the social media platform to promote its campaign.

The Facts

The Walt Disney Company announced its acquisition of 21st Century Fox in 2017 and that was completed in 2019. The acquisition meant Disney would automatically acquire the licensing to 20th Century Fox's film and television studios, cable entertainment networks and international TV businesses, and Hulu.

Both Sound of Freedom's director and the CEO of Angel Studios, Neal Harmon, claimed in media interviews that Disney shelved the movie after it bought 20th Century Fox.

"Initially made with [21st Century] Fox. After it was completed, Fox was acquired by Disney, who said, 'We can't release this film,'" Harmon told the Washington Examiner in May. "Eduardo [Verastegui, the film's producer] spent over a year before [Disney] released the rights to the film. At that time, he tried to take it to theaters, but just as they were, COVID hit, and another three years passed."

Director Monteverde claimed the delay in the film's release was a blessing in disguise.

"To me this is perfect timing. I do believe if this movie would come out earlier I don't think the audience was ready. Right now, there is unfortunately, there's advertisement for this film, but on the wrong side. Every day there is these atrocities happening on the news everywhere. Children trafficked. Sexually abused children all over the place," he told website Bounding Into Comics in June.

The Ruling

True.

Newsweek reached out to The Walt Disney Company by email to firstly confirm if it had acquired the rights to the film in 2019, and if it did in fact decide not to release the movie, what the reason was for shelving Sound of Freedom.

Movie studios often hold back the release of films for a number of reasons, including a perception a movie will not make enough profit, dissatisfaction with the final result, corporate restructuring, an executive decision by the top brass at a studio, licensing issues or timing issues, according to website TV Tropes.

A Disney spokesperson told Newsweek an international deal for the film's distribution had already been done prior to its acquisition of 21st Century Fox. The spokesperson said, "[Disney] studios had no knowledge of the film given the nature of the international acquisition pre-merger."

Harmon and Monteverde's accounts of wrestling the rights to the movie back off Disney are true, and Angel Studios crowdfunded for Sound of Freedom's distribution.

FACT CHECK BY NEWSWEEK by Newsweek's Fact Check team.

UPDATE: 7/12/2023, 5:24 A.M. This story was updated to include comment from Disney and to change the ruling.

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Wed, 12 Jul 2023 14:07

R alph Baric stepped onto the auditorium stage at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and looked out at the sparse audience that had come to hear him speak. On the large projector screen hanging behind him, the following words appeared: How Bad the Next Pandemic Could Be, What Might It Look Like, and Will We be Ready. The date was May 29, 2018.

''Well, I have to admit I'm a little worried about giving this talk,'' Baric said. ''The reason is being labelled a harbinger of doom.'' The screen shifted, and images of the four horsemen of the apocalypse'--Death, Famine, War, and Plague'--came into view, next to a headshot of a smiling Baric. ''This is not me,'' he continued, ''I'm not one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse.'' Light laughter bubbled through the audience; Baric smiled. For the next 35 minutes, he laid out his prediction, with uncanny precision, of what the next pandemic would bring: a rush for bogus antiviral treatments, vast profits for companies making personal protective equipment, a global economic crash, and a rise in conspiracy theories claiming that the pandemic pathogen was designed by scientists.

When SARS-CoV-2 emerged less than a year and a half later, Baric was among the first to raise the alarm. As early as January 2020, Baric felt certain that the new virus's spread was more akin to the flu than any of the human coronaviruses he had previously encountered. A timeline, he realized, had already been set: ''The U.S.,'' he says, ''had three months.'' By March 2020, right on the Baric schedule, the U.S. belatedly imposed wide-ranging shelter-in-place restrictions to prevent a domestic epidemic.

Baric, who has been researching coronaviruses since the 1980s, was a linchpin of the scientific response to COVID-19. He was tasked with moving potential cures'--some of which he had been developing for close to a decade'--out of the laboratory and onto the market. Sequestered in a state-of-the-art Biosafety Level 3 lab at the University of North Carolina, equipped with the multiple redundancies and safety features required by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Baric oversaw a staff of dozens, many of whom (like Baric) practically lived at the lab.

More from TIME He and his team were besieged by requests to support research groups across the globe who needed to run trials on SARS-CoV-2. That included developing animal models to establish the safety and efficacy of multiple COVID-19 vaccines in the early days of 2020. Baric and his long-time collaborator Mark Denison, a pediatric clinician at Vanderbilt University with a specialty in coronavirus-related diseases, also demonstrated that remdesivir and molnupiravir, two antiviral drugs originally designed for other uses, were highly effective in preventing illness; in May 2020, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) provided emergency use authorization for remdesivir, making it the first COVID-19 antiviral on the market.

In the roughly three and a half years since the pandemic began, Baric has published over 250 peer-reviewed studies'--a dizzying rate of productivity amounting to roughly half of his total output across a 40-year career. Between May 2020 and March 2023, I spoke frequently with him about his research, the successes and failures of the COVID-19 response, and his fears'--and dreams'--for the future.

While the COVID-19 pandemic global emergency officially ended on May 5, 2023, questions about its origins show no signs of abating. Last Friday (June 23), the Biden Administration declassified a report that revealed a split within the U.S. government on the question: five federal agencies have concluded that SARS-CoV-2 most likely spilled over into humans directly from an animal, while two others'--the Energy Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation'--assert that it likely spread indirectly through a laboratory accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), while there was near unanimity across agencies that the virus was not manmade. The report also notes that three Chinese researchers at the WIV'--including one whose work was funded by the U.S. government'--became ill with an unspecified illness early in the COVID-19 outbreak (according to Chinese authorities, none tested positive for SARS-CoV-2).

Baric, who signed onto an open letter published in Science in 2021 demanding a thorough investigation of the origins of SARS-CoV-2, is still frustrated by its slow pace. While he remains unsure on the question, Baric finds particular fault with a joint investigation by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Chinese government that was done in 2021, which dismissed the chance of a lab leak as ''extremely unlikely.'' That conclusion, Baric says, is premature, given the lack of conclusive data and China's more relaxed laboratory standards; he points out that while the U.S. restricts gain-of-function work with dangerous pathogens to labs rated at a minimum of BSL-3 (like Baric's), ''the regulations in China are such that you can work with SARS-like bat coronaviruses in BSL-2 [Biosafety level 2] labs,'' which require fewer safety features.

While none of the U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that the virus was genetically engineered, that is unlikely to stop a fringe theory that has increasingly taken over Baric's life. In February 2020, a month before the announcement of a global health emergency, there was a sudden surge of online interest about his work. That was followed by a series of attacks that began to emerge on the darker outskirts of social media. ''Twitter doesn't want you to know this'...but Dr. Ralph Baric is the one who created Covid 19 and gave it to the lab in Wuhan China,'' read a typical tweet, summing up the baseless theory that Baric was part of a secret Chinese plot to deploy a synthetically created viral bioweapon across the world.

Read more: Did COVID Originally Leak From a Chinese Lab? Politics May Prevent Us Ever Knowing for Sure

The theory plays on a collaboration dating back to the early 2010s between Baric and Shi Zhengli, the future director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the WIV. In the wake of the 2003 SARS epidemic, Shi had been spending years collecting hundreds of coronavirus strains from bat guano in caves and mineshafts across the vast Chinese mainland. Around 2013, Shi agreed to send some of the SARS-related coronavirus genomes that she had harvested to Baric's lab in North Carolina. Baric and his team then used the genomes for a variety of experiments, including gain-of-function studies, a broad class of biological research in which the genetic makeup of an organism is artificially mutated. For those seeking a scapegoat for the pandemic, Baric's experiments'--which used coronaviruses that would turn out to be closely related to (but not direct ancestors of) SARS-CoV-2'--proved that the virus was manmade, despite an absence of data.

Members of the World Health Organization team investigating the origins of COVID-19 arrive by car at the Wuhan Institute of Virology on February 3, 2021.

Hector Retamal'--AFP/Getty Images

A year into the pandemic, that fringe theory went public on one of the biggest stages in the world. Senator Rand Paul, in one of many U.S. congressional hearings that served as the backdrop for his bitter feud with Fauci, did not mince words. ''For years, Dr. Ralph Baric, a virologist in the U.S., has been collaborating with Dr. Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Virology Institute, sharing his discoveries about how to create super-viruses,'' Paul said on May 11, 2021. ''This gain-of-function research has been funded by the NIH [National Institutes of Health].'' The implication was clear: intentionally or unwittingly, Baric was complicit in the creation of SARS-CoV-2, notwithstanding the total lack of evidence. Paul's pronouncement put a glaring spotlight on Baric's decades-long career studying coronaviruses. In the ensuing days, online searches for ''Ralph Baric gain of function'' shot up, and with them a whole new round of online threats targeting the media-shy virologist.

Fear of the future is nothing new for Baric. In 1982, when he entered the field, coronaviruses were mostly used as laboratory tools to help us understand viral mechanics. Coronaviridae were thought to be benign, and quirky: somehow, they managed to have genomes much larger than any other RNA virus, a curious fact that, to hear Baric tell it, means that, ''they shouldn't exist on planet Earth.''

In the early 1980s, he was fully aware that coronavirology was a scientific backwater'--but that's exactly what he wanted. Far from the glare of public opinion, Baric could work at his own pace. One thing he discovered after a decade of study was that the Coronaviridae wasn't, as had been previously believed, a family of species-specific viruses, but a mess of generalist strains that were adept at jumping between hosts'--mouse, hamster, primate, beluga whale, to name a few'--when under pressure.

When the 2003 SARS epidemic emerged in the Chinese provinces of Guangzhou and Hong Kong, the apparently benign Coronaviridae family suddenly revealed itself capable of producing a highly efficient killer.

In light of what he had discovered in his lab, SARS was, for Baric, ''a shock but not a surprise.'' As it spread, sickening 10,000 people and killing roughly 800 before being fully eradicated through public health measures, Baric was forced to reckon with a new reality: coronaviruses, his benign laboratory tool, had the capacity to wreak havoc at a global scale. For a scientist that had long ago chosen to work on obscure virological problems, it was, he says, ''an exhilarating kind of feeling, with a sickness in the pit of your stomach.''

When the MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) coronavirus spilled over in 2012, less than a decade later and with a 35% mortality rate, Baric was faced with another stark realization: One deadly coronavirus epidemic is an aberration. Two within 10 years'--the blink of an eye in viral time'--spelled out a pattern.

In the mid-2010s, in the wake of MERS, Baric became convinced that the world needed a pan-coronavirus vaccine to protect humanity against whatever future pathogen the viral family next produced. The first step was to see how well an existing SARS-specific vaccine candidate his team had developed worked against other strains. Baric tested the vaccine against dozens of the coronavirus genomes that Shi Zhengli had harvested and sent to his lab. Against strains less than 8% genetically different from SARS, the vaccine worked. Against those that'--like MERS'--surpassed that threshold, it failed miserably.

Undeterred, Baric turned to synthetic virology, which is the science of stitching parts of different viruses together into artificial creations known as chimeras. Baric considered chimeras as the best way to study deadly pathogens while maintaining a safe lab with low risk of leaks. Submitting live SARS and MERS viruses to gain-of-function tests'--like pressuring pathogens to evolve new ways of infecting hosts'--was too edgy for him. But doing the same experiment with a chimera that combined a piece of a human coronavirus with one that could only infect a non-human animal allowed Baric to test how coronaviruses evolve while avoiding the inadvertent creation of a pathogen with the capacity to replicate in human cells.

Despite his caution, one experiment raised eyebrows. In 2014, Baric's team created a chimera that fused the spike protein of one of the SARS-related bat coronaviruses that Shi had harvested, known as SHC014, with the backbone of a mouse-adapted SARS virus; in principle, the chimera should only have been able to infect mice. Baric's team then introduced the chimera into human cell colonies and found that, under pressure, it was able to replicate in human respiratory cells while also evading antiviral drugs protective against SARS. It was proof of how close the coronavirus family was to producing a strain that could spill over into humans. From Baric's perspective, that made it a valuable piece of research, and hammered home the need for a pan-coronavirus vaccine. Others, though, were alarmed.

Marc Lipsitch, director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, is among the more strident voices calling for better regulation of research on ''enhanced pathogens of pandemic potential,'' or ePPP, a small subset of gain-of-function research carried out with human pathogens. When I spoke with him, Lipsitch readily acknowledged the value of Baric's work, but also said that he believes the decision to introduce the SHC014 chimera into human cells crossed a line. ''Ralph's done a lot of different kinds of experiments,'' says Lipsitch, ''some of which I've publicly said should get funding and be allowed to continue, and some of which I think he should not continue, at least not without careful review.'' For Lipsitch, the decision to run an ePPP experiment ultimately boils down to the urgency of the threat and whether alternative pathways exist. ''I'm open to learning more,'' he says, ''but I have not yet heard an argument for why taking some part of a bat virus and recombining it with some part of a human virus, and assessing its ability to infect human cells, is an important part of pandemic preparedness.''

A decade later, as the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded, the long-simmering debate around gain-of-function research spilled into public view, and Baric's work became an easy target. After Rand Paul's fiery congressional hearing speech opened the floodgates, the Chinese government'--increasingly under pressure about the origins of the pandemic and sensing an opportunity to deflect blame'--followed suit. In an open letter to the director of the World Health Organization released on Aug. 25, 2021, China's permanent representative to the United Nations demanded that Baric's lab be subject to a ''transparent investigation with full access'' to trace the origins of COVID-19. That placed Baric in rarefied air: a scapegoat for politicians in both the U.S. and China.

Four months later, the right-wing radio host Glenn Beck appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight, waving documents that he purported had been smuggled out of China and which supplied Baric's motive. ''I'll try not to sound crazy and tie this together,'' Beck said, before describing a get-rich-quick scheme involving vaccine patents, Baric, Anthony Fauci, Moderna, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and a cabal of other shadowy figures seeking to unleash a global pandemic for personal profit. When Beck finally shared them, the documents contained no evidence that Baric had delivered an engineered super-virus to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Rather, they included an email from Baric to Shi with travel logistics for a potential visit to Wuhan in 2018, along with messages from late 2019 between Baric and other virologists reacting with increasing alarm as the clusters of pneumonia in Wuhan metastasized into the global pandemic.

Sen. Rand Paul questions National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci during a hearing of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee about the ongoing response to the COVID-19 pandemic in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 4, 2021. Paul called on Fauci to resign and accused him of lying about the work done in a lab in Wuhan, China.

Chip Somodevilla'--Getty Images

Read more: What We Know About the U.S. Intelligence Community's Split on COVID-19 Origins

Regardless of its flimsiness, the narrative had its effects. Kizzmekia Corbett, a virologist who led testing of Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine at the NIH's Vaccine Research Center, had a front row seat to the rising stressors Baric faced. Like many at the tip of the spear of Operation Warp Speed, the U.S. government's COVID-19 vaccine and antiviral initiative, Corbett needed Baric and his team to run the safety and efficacy trial for Moderna's vaccine using their chimeric coronavirus strains, human respiratory cell cultures, and endless supply of lab mice. ''In the height of the pandemic,'' Corbett recalls, ''everybody needed those mouse models,'' along with the assays Baric had designed to test whether the vaccines could neutralize SARS-CoV-2.

Requests for support quickly piled up from across the world, keeping Baric and his team at their laboratory night and day. ''There's a point where you're doing your science for fun or to ask really cool questions,'' says Corbett, ''and then a pandemic happens and it becomes a service to the world, and that's so much pressure.''

Corbett first met Baric in 2009 when she was a junior doctoral trainee in his lab. Back then, he struck her as intellectually omnivorous, his lab made up of a sprawling set of tangentially connected virology projects overseen by about 30 researchers (''I felt like I might get lost in it,'' Corbett recalls), with Baric at the center, both good-natured and obsessive over minute details of the work.

The pandemic changed all that. With his staff buried inside layers of PPE and with stay-at-home restrictions in place, there was no more time for abstract research or Friday night beers; only the singular pressure of rapidly delivering cures. As the fringe theory about his purported role in the pandemic spread, Baric leaned ever more heavily into the work, trying to shut out the noise. He stopped responding to media requests; the price of being misunderstood was just too high. ''I've done long interviews and had my words twisted back at me,'' Baric says. ''Sometimes these people have very distinct agendas and are just interested in peddling their own brand of the truth.''

Corbett saw the effects firsthand. ''There were a couple of times when Ralph and I were doing talks in the same virtual conferences during the pandemic, and you could see the wear even on his face,'' she says. ''And I was thinking, is he going to retire? Is this going to be so much that he pulls out of the game?''

When Baric started studying coronaviruses in the 1980s, only two strains were known to infect humans, neither of which were deadly. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, reports of two other novel human coronaviruses emerged, including a pig-related alphacoronavirus among Haitian schoolchildren and a dog-related strain in a hospitalized infant in Malaysia (neither are closely related to SARS-CoV-2). That makes nine human pathogens and counting, with three capable of causing mass death. The rapid acceleration of coronavirus spillover events is why Baric remains so obsessed with a pan-coronavirus vaccine.

After over a decade of failure, the pandemic gave Baric a whole new path to creating one. While he rarely lets his emotions get the better of him, Baric trips over his words when he talks about mRNA vaccinology, which uses strands of synthetically programmed messenger RNA to generate an immune response. When he saw the results of the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines in his mouse models, and when they were later replicated in human trials, he was deeply moved. ''It was outstanding'--not outstanding, it was astonishing,'' he says. With earlier vaccine platforms, he continues, ''performance drops off five-, 10-fold,'' among older and immunocompromised people. ''With these mRNA vaccines, there was no loss of function,'' meaning they could effectively protect everyone, both young and old.

Baric is now advancing an mRNA vaccine that stitches together spike protein components plucked from different 12 coronaviruses, including SARS, SARS-2, and their closest relatives, which represent the strains most adept at infecting humans. It's a scientific bet that the next coronavirus to threaten us will resemble one we've encountered before.

Baric is careful to temper talk of a silver bullet. Because they prize breadth over specificity, pan-coronavirus vaccines won't be nearly as effective against a future pathogen compared to the COVID-19 vaccines, which only target one strain. What they will do is buy us valuable time. When a new coronavirus outbreak occurs, Baric explains, a pan-coronavirus vaccine could be rapidly deployed for a technique called ''ring vaccination.'' Used successfully to control Ebola outbreaks in Guinea and Sierra Leone, ring vaccination involves quickly inoculating close contacts of index patients, thereby shutting down a virus's path to the general population. The goal isn't total eradication, but slowing the new pathogen's advance through our species while strain-specific cures can be developed and deployed.

Baric plans to test his pan-coronavirus vaccine candidate on primates in the coming months, with human trials later in the year if results remain promising. Meanwhile, he continues to navigate increasing skepticism of'--and, sometimes, unbridled hostility to'--the brand of virology that has defined his long career.

The public debate around gain-of-function research has become polarized into two opposing camps, with scientists cast in leading roles as either pandemic-averting heroes or lab-leaking villains. Baric rejects that easy binary. Instead, he points out that gain-of-function experiments, even the most controversial ones, such as the experiment done in 2011 that transformed an avian flu strain into a deadly airborne pathogen (which precipitated a broad shutdown of gain-of-function research by the NIH) are funded by governments. That, Baric says, makes governments, rather than scientists, primarily responsible for choosing which experiments to run and how closely to monitor them. A draft report from January 2023 by the U.S. National Scientific Advisory Board for Biosecurity, a federally-appointed committee advising the U.S. government on gain-of-function research, backs up that view: among their recommendations are that government be more open about why certain gain-of-function experiments that might be risky to humans are funded.

Read more: Scientists Found New Chinese Data Hinting at the Origin of COVID-19. Then It Was Deleted

Lipsitch, for his part, sees greater transparency from everyone involved'--funders and scientists alike'--as the best way to move life-saving science forward and lower the temperature on the issue. ''There have been some very crazy things said, and some very offensive things,'' he says, ''but it's really in the scientific community's self-interest to explain what they think the value of these studies is, to engage with the idea that some of them may be dangerous, and to admit that lab accidents happen.''

Baric surrounded by lab equipment at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in April.

Jeremy M. Lange for TIME

As for the vitriol directed his way, Baric is navigating it as best he can. ''It's a bigger toll on family I would say,'' he says. ''A lot of anxiety.'' On Twitter, a small coterie of accounts posts gleeful messages about his impending arrest for a grab bag of purported misdeeds including state-sponsored terrorism, bioweapon creation, and mass murder (none of which, for the record, he has committed). He gets threatening emails, calls, and has even had strangers accost him at his home. Baric can only shrug. ''Most of the time, people are far away, and Facebook, Instagram are such impersonal mediums that they can bring out the worst nature in people.'' He stops himself reflexively. ''And sometimes the best!''

True to form, Baric has tried to understand the threats to his and his family's safety as just another inevitable symptom of epidemics. ''All the way back to polio virus,'' he says, ''you can find rumors and people saying that this was created by the U.S. military or that this was released on purpose to control African populations. All the way from flu to polio to hantavirus to bird flu to SARS to Zika to MERS.'' Though these tropes are false, they persist, to the point that the WHO has listed vaccine hesitancy as one of the top 10 threats to global health.

Baric believes disinformation risks wiping out the incredible scientific advances made during the pandemic. ''The public health community has not figured out how to deal with these echo chambers,'' he says, ''because false information traffics much faster on the internet and in social media than facts.'' Surveying the damage to the COVID-19 vaccines he helped bring to the world, Baric is pessimistic. ''It looks like American science is going to get shredded,'' he says, ''for a pandemic that started in China.''

Still, for all the gloom, Baric prefers to reflect on the absurdity of his situation rather than sink into despair. When I suggest to him that despite the conspiracy theories, there are many people happy that he became a scientist in the first place, he can't resist a final self-mocking dig: ''A fair number that probably wished I hadn't,'' he says, laughing. ''Let's be honest.''

Contact us at letters@time.com.

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Wed, 12 Jul 2023 14:06

90+ megacities 10,000 actions to reduce climate change 1.5C constraining global temperature rise With a majority of the world's population now living in cities, and a rapidly growing urban population in the developing world, cities are at the forefront of the issues caused by climate change. Arup has been a partner to C40 Cities for ten years, carrying out vital research to help cities measure, manage, and plan climate actions, empowering their leaders to make vital decisions. Designers and engineers can make an important contribution to the debate, developing new thinking around transport, energy and water infrastructure, to produce a more sustainable world.

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What does this mean for Cities?In our latest report with C40, Deadline 2020: How cities will get the job done we provide an analysis of the contribution that the 84 global C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group (C40) cities need to make to convert the agreement from aspiration into reality.

Meeting those challenging targets is now the C40's overriding aim. Doing so requires bespoke Climate Action Plans for every major city '' responding to specific local factors and building on global best practice. To support cities in achieving their goals, Arup and C4 co-created the Climate Action Planning Framework which sets the standard for city climate action plans that meet the objectives of the Paris Agreement. New York City (NYC) Mayor Bill de Blasio has committed the city to the Paris Agreement targets, the first city in the world to do so. As a C40 member city, NYC sought guidance on how to enhance their existing climate plan. We contributed to the draft plan and advised specifically on its zero carbon ambition.

'' I am proud that New York City will play its part and that we are joining in common cause with hundreds of local governments around this nation and the world. Together, we will show that the people will solve this problem at the grassroots. '' Bill de Blasio New York City Mayor

The future is urban, and brightC40's vision of a bright future is based on the will, ingenuity and commitment of city leaders to put the world on a low-carbon development path. By 2050, cities will be compact, connected and coordinated. They will have dense rather than sprawling urban forms, notable for their vibrant greenbelts and green roofs. Urban citizens will enjoy a high degree of mobility based primarily on walking, cycling, and public transport. Having achieved their long-term targets for carbon neutrality, cities will enjoy clean sources of energy, including local and district energy solutions. Devni Acharya, Senior Consultant has been on secondment with the C40 Cities Climate Leadership, developing climate action plans for five cities in the region which are especially susceptible to the impacts of climate change.

Watch: Devni's work with C40 involved developing climate action plans for five cities in the region which are especially susceptible to the impacts of climate change

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'' Limited power need not mean limited action for cities; there is enormous potential for partnerships with other cities, private businesses, investors and civil society to further climate action. '' Paula Kirk Director, Climate and sustainability

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Wed, 12 Jul 2023 14:02

Dario Amodei of Anthropic, right, arrives to the White House for a meeting with Vice President Kamala Harris on artificial intelligence, Thursday, May 4, 2023, in Washington.

Evan Vucci | AP

There's a new entrant in the budding AI arms race.

As Microsoft -backed OpenAI and Google race to develop the most advanced chatbots, powered by generative artificial intelligence, Anthropic is investing heavily to keep up. Just a few months after raising $750 million over two financing rounds, the startup is debuting a new AI chatbot: Claude 2.

Founded in 2021 by former OpenAI research executives and funded by companies including Google, Salesforce and Zoom , Anthropic is opening up its chatbot technology to consumers for the first time with Claude 2. For the past two months, the company's AI models have been tested by businesses such as Slack, Notion and Quora, and Anthropic has accumulated a waitlist of more than 350,000 people requesting access to Claude's application programming interface and its consumer offering.

"We have been focused on businesses, on making Claude as robustly safe as possible," said Daniela Amodei, who co-founded Anthropic with her brother, Dario. "We really feel that this is the safest version of Claude that we've developed so far, and so we've been very excited to get it into the hands of a wider range of both businesses and individual consumers."

Claude 2 will initially only be available to users in the U.S. and U.K., and Anthropic plans to expand availability in the coming months.

Since OpenAI introduced ChatGPT to the public late last year, the tech world has invested heavily in the potential of generative AI chatbots, which respond to text prompts with sophisticated and conversational replies. Academics and ethicists have voiced significant concerns about the technology's tendency to propagate bias, but even so, it's quickly made its way into schools, online travel, the medical industry, online advertising and more.

In March, OpenAI released GPT-4, its biggest update to the underlying tech behind ChatGPT. Two months later, it allowed ChatGPT to start browsing the internet so responses were no longer limited by its 2021 training data cutoff date, but it then disabled the chatbot's internet browsing ability after reports of problematic uses such as bypassing paywalls.

Google announced its Bard competitor in February, and has since updated the chatbot's math and coding skills and embedded the AI service in more products.

Anthropic's ambitions are no less grand.

The company says Claude 2 has the ability to summarize up to about 75,000 words, which could be the length of a book. Users can input large data sets, and ask for summaries in the form of a memo, letter or story. ChatGPT, by contrast, can handle about 3,000 words.

Picture Alliance | Picture Alliance | Getty Images

Daniela Amodei said Anthropic has invested at least two months in developing Claude 2, with a team of 30 to 35 people working directly on the AI model and a total of 150 people supporting it. She said the market is growing so rapidly that there's plenty of room for multiple players to succeed.

"It's a really unusual time from a business perspective because there's just so much demand for large language models and really more demand than the industry can currently provide," Amodei said. "The landscape is just very wide, and there's really quite a lot of room for many different users and types of users to make use of these systems."

In May, Anthropic was one of four companies invited to a meeting at the White House to discuss responsible AI development with Vice President Kamala Harris. Google parent Alphabet, Microsoft and OpenAI were the others.

That same month, the company raised $450 million, following a $300 million financing round in March at a $4.1 billion valuation.

Amodei provided some tangible examples of Claude 2's improvements over the prior version of the model. The new chatbot scored 76.5% on the Bar exam's multiple choice section, up from 73%. And in a Python coding test, Claude 2 scored 71%, up from 56% in its prior iteration.

When it comes to safety, the upgraded chatbot was twice as good at giving "harmless responses," according to a blog post, though it's worth noting that the red team safety evaluation was conducted internally.

Despite Claude 2's improvements in performance, Amodei acknowledged that there are plenty of hurdles ahead for Anthropic and the entire industry. For example, the tendency for AI chatbots to make up incorrect answers, called "hallucinations" by some tech companies, is a persisting problem.

"There are just so many remaining unknown unknowns but also known challenges with all language models in the world today," Amodei said. "No language model is 100% immune from hallucinations, and Claude 2 is the same."

WATCH: ChatGPT has boosted optimism about AI

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Archived Version

Wed, 12 Jul 2023 13:59

The case for separate bedrooms

The case for separate bedrooms 03:16 More than a third of Americans say they occasionally or consistently sleep in another room from their partner, according to a survey from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.

The practice of sleeping separately known as a "sleep divorce," and is meant to help you fall asleep and stay asleep without disruptions such as snoring, stolen covers or early alarms.

"We know that poor sleep can worsen your mood, and those who are sleep deprived are more likely to argue with their partners. There may be some resentment toward the person causing the sleep disruption which can negatively impact relationships," Dr. Seema Khosla, a pulmonologist and spokesperson for the AASM, said in a news release Monday. "Getting a good night's sleep is important for both health and happiness, so it's no surprise that some couples choose to sleep apart for their overall well-being."

The group's survey of 2,005 adults in the U.S. found that 43% of millennials engage in sleep divorce, followed by 33% of those in Generation X, 28% of those in Generation Z and 22% of baby boomers.

"Although the term 'sleep divorce' seems harsh, it really just means that people are prioritizing sleep and moving into a separate room at night when needed," Khosla added.

Should you try a sleep divorce?"There are benefits for some partners to sleep separately," Dr. Erin Flynn-Evans, a consultant to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, recently told CBS News . "Studies demonstrate that when one bed partner has a sleep disorder it can negatively affect the other sleeper. For example, bed partners tend to wake up at the same time when one has insomnia. Similarly, when bed partners differ in chronotype, like when one is a night owl the other is an early bird, these differing sleep preferences can negatively impact both partners' sleep."

On the other hand, sleeping with your partner can help in detecting conditions you may have been unaware of, Flynn-Evans said, as sleep clinicians use reports from bed partners to help identify patients with sleep disorders.

"For example, a person might report that their bed partner snores loudly, prompting them to seek treatment for sleep apnea ," she said.

3 things you can do to improve your sleep hygiene What to know about sleep apnea, the condition Biden uses a CPAP machine for Dr. Daniel Shade, a sleep specialist with Allegheny Health Network, previously told CBS Pittsburgh if couples are honest with themselves, they'll likely know whether there's a problem.

"You're snoring and you're thrashing about, (it) disturbs your partner, or you're getting up at 4 a.m. to go to work, or you have to use the bathroom many times in a night, and that can get disruptive," Shade said, noting other factors that may also affect sleep, like differing preferences in light, temperature or even TV usage at night.

But, if there are no sleep problems, Shade said, "by all means, sleeping in the same bed is better."

"We release oxytocin and some other chemicals that are called 'the cuddling hormones,' and things that give us a good feeling and bring us closer to that person we're imprinting upon that we're with," he said.

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Archived Version

Wed, 12 Jul 2023 13:57

MyPillow is auctioning off hundreds of pieces of equipment and subleasing some manufacturing spaces amid what founder and CEO Mike Lindell calls ''a massive, massive cancellation.''

Lindell, in an interview with the Star Tribune, said MyPillow lost $100 million from ''attacks by box stores, the shopping networks, the shopping channels, all of them did cancel culture on us.''

Several retailers, including Walmart, Bed Bath & Beyond and Kohl's, pulled MyPillow products from their shelves after Lindell continued to claim the 2020 presidential election was stolen from former President Trump.

The Minnesota-based manufacturing company appears to be using the website K-BID Online Auctions to sell items including forklifts, conveyors belts, printers, electronics and commercial supplies.

Lindell said he can replace any auctioned items if the retailers ''ever came back.''

He told the Star Tribune that the company is subleasing some of its manufacturing spaces in Shakopee, Minn., as its demands are different for direct sales than what was needed with retailers.

''If the box stores ever came back we could have it if we needed it, but we don't need that,'' Lindell told the Star Tribune. ''It affected a lot of things when you lose that big of a chunk [of revenue].''

Lindell is currently facing a $1.3 billion defamation suit from Dominion Voting Systems, which claims Lindell's accusations of fraud, election rigging and conspiracy have hurt the company's brand.

Lindell was ordered in April to pay $5 million to a software developer who debunked Lindell's data about the election after the MyPillow CEO vowed to pay that amount to anyone who could debunk his data allegedly proving election fraud. An arbitration panel ruled that software expert Robert Zeidman successfully disproved Lindell's claims and ordered the payment within 30 days.

Nassar stabbing not captured on prison cameras: reportFirst Bank of the US to be transformed into museumLindell refused to pay and filed a motion in May to have the ruling tossed out. Zeidman responded and filed a petition in a federal court in Minnesota to get Lindell to pay the $5 million plus 10 percent interest per year until it's paid.

According to reporting from The Washington Post, vacating the award would require the court to determine the panel committed misconduct, exceeded its powers or that the process was corrupt.

Copyright 2023 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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Archived Version

Wed, 12 Jul 2023 05:18

via the Bank of International SettlementsOn June 20th, the Bank of International Settlements released it's blueprint for the future monetary system. I read the 25-page breakdown so you don't have to. Though, you probably should read it so that you know your enemy and what they're planning.

Overall, the report isn't really that surprising. It's filled with all of the hubris, assumptions, and Orwellian overreach one would expect to come out of a report written by the BIS. With that said, it is funny to see how they're thinking and where they have blind spots. If I were to summarize the blueprint in a single sentence it would be, "The BIS seems to want an Ethereum-like 'platform' complete with interoperability and robust smart contracting capabilities that will allow them to granularly control the global monetary system."

Here are the sections that stood out to me accompanied with some commentary.

via the Bank of International SettlementsThe BIS is OBSESSED with the concept of tokenisation. They seem to think it is the Holy Grail of technological innovation that will enable the global monetary system to make the upgrade it needs as we transition further into the digital age. As I got further through the report it became clear to me that the BIS is completely missing the mark. Whether that's due to incompetence or misdirection is yet to be seen. I do think these people actually think they are productive members of society who provide value to the world in the form of acting as the Nanny of the global monetary system, so I would imagine their misunderstandings of tokenisation stem from pure incompetence.

In short, they believe that the blow ups in the crypto market over the last couple of years signal that it is doomed to fail because of a coordination problem that arises from the fractured nature of crypto networks, their liquidity profiles, and the fact that they're run by egregious scammers. While this is all true, they believe the solution to this problem is a CBDC because it can provide the network effect and liquidity profile they deem as necessary to have a successful digital currency. They completely miss that crypto doesn't work because of the fact that it is a cottage industry of affinity scams trying to replicate bitcoin's success.

via the Bank of International SettlementsHa! This snippet can be found on page two of the blueprint and it renders anything written after it completely irrelevant because it proves that the BIS is operating under the assumption that central banks are trustworthy institutions and that they alone can provide the market with a functioning monetary system. Again, this report is filled with the hubris one would expect from the BIS. They completely gloss over the fact that bitcoin was created in response to the inability of central banks to be trusted with the stewardship of monetary systems.

via the Nakamoto Institute, an email from Satoshi to the P2P Foundation mailing list in February, 2009"Crypto is obviously a shit show. We're here to clean it up and provide you with the solution that leverages the same faulty technological assumptions that industry is built on." Interestingly enough, the BIS doesn't mention bitcoin once in this blueprint. More on that later.

via the Bank of International SettlementsThe phrase "unit of account" came up a lot throughout this blueprint, and I believe we will start to hear those pushing the CBDCs using it a lot more moving forward as a form of propaganda to make people believe that a unit of account can only be issued by an interconnected central banking apparatus. Keep an ear out for this in the coming years as the push for CBDCs heats up.

via the Bank of International SettlementsUnsurprisingly, the CBDC will only work if it's via avenues that have "proper oversight and supervision" and operate within the "standards" set forth by the central banks. This is consultant speak for, "If we don't like what you try to do with our CBDC you will not be allowed to use it." This is where I remind you freaks that the criminals running the international central banking system should have no control over who can do what with their money. Money is a tool that should be agnostic to the user or use case. Any form of enforcement of crimes should be driven by processes that are external to the functions of money.

via the Bank of International SettlementsAgain with the unit of account appeal to authority. They're going to try to claim that a digital currency can only work if its tethered to a currency that is currently an accepted unit of account in the eyes of the BIS.

via the Bank of International SettlementsIt seems that the BIS has already been running trial projects of CBDC experiments in paralell with a number of central banks who are participating in the "BIS Innovation Hub" program. I found the list of central banks participating in these trials interesting because of who is not listed. It doesn't seem like the ECB or Federal Reserve have participated in any of these projects. At least not publicly.

via the Bank of International SettlementsHere they admit that crypto has been successful in allowing people to evade onerous and anti-human KYC/AML laws that put people in harms way. In the CBDC world they envision this won't be possible because the system will somehow be leveraging the existing regulatory and supervisory frameworks that financial institutions already have in place.

via the Bank of International SettlementsI found these two paragraphs particularly telling. If you squint hard enough and hold your breath you can hear the BIS make a soft admission that the incumbent system is doomed to fail and they need a complete overhaul the maintain control. They cleverly hide this admission behind the idea that anchoring their CBDC in the legacy system architecture is likely unfeasible. The short-term costs and disruptions caused by coordinating the transition will be worth it in the long run. They want to cut bait and start fresh.

via the Bank of International SettlementsThis is where they tell you that you will be locked into socialized losses if your bank mismanages its balance sheet and people decide they want to take their money elsewhere. "It's not even worth thinking about taking all of your money out of the bank because we'll retroactively claw back your money using state of the art smart contracts if others make the same decision and the bank goes under as a result."

via the Bank of International SettlementsAnother nod to their intent to ensure the CBDC is fully KYC'd and that every transaction comes accompanied with personally identifying information of the parties involved. Don't worry though, the Aurora project in the innovation hub is exploring how privacy-enhancing technologies and advanced analytics might be leveraged to combat money laundering across financial institutions. Are they also exploring how to prevent insiders from creating white-listed accounts that can "launder" money with impunity in the way Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan did for Jeffrey Epstein? Who watches the watchmen?

via the Bank of International SettlementsYou had to know a BIS blueprint for a CBDC would include environmental virtue singaling via "green investment". In the utopian CBDC future, when your government decides to throw hundreds of millions of dollars at the next Solyndra you'll be able to invest directly and watch as your investment evaporates from the comfort of your CBDC investment app!

via the Bank of International SettlementsDon't worry, pleb. The CBDC will be properly governed by central banks and private participants who will collaborate to ensure the integrity of the system. Don't worry about making a pull request with a suggested change to the system, this small group of kleptocrats is going to handle all of that for you. Just sit back and relax in your pod, throw on your VR goggles and dip that hand into your bucket of fried crickets.

via the Bank of International SettlementsThis is the section that includes the veiled threat to countries who aren't comfortable with all of this, yet want the ability to receive cross border payments. There will be "significant harmonisation efforts across jurisdictions". Put another way, "If you don't play ball, your economy will be cut off from this system. I hope you don't plan on sourcing raw materials from one of the member countries!"

via the Bank of International SettlementsTell me you don't understand how digital data storage works without telling me you don't understand how it works. Apparently the BIS is promising a CBDC that will have the ability to delete personally identifiable data within a smart contract. Someone always has access to the data at the end of the day. This line is very contradictory with the rest of the blueprint, which promises a hyper regulated platform wrought with KYC data that must be shared between participants to facilitate transactions.

via the Bank of International SettlementsSay it with me now freaks, "Cyber. Resilience." The money, banking and finance industry that has brought you data breech after data breech is finally going to make an "appropriate level of investment in cyber resilience and security" to ensure that those pesky hackers can't attack their CBDC platform.

via the Bank of International SettlementsHere's the final section I took a screenshot of and would like to end this note on while allowing myself to address the elephant in the room; there is not a single mention of bitcoin in this blueprint. The BIS has taken a look at the crypto "industry" at large, bucketed everything into the same broad brush category, and come to the conclusion that it is the only institution that can coordinate the technological and financial transition necessary to usher us into the era of digital currency. The era of the Central Bank Digital Currency. Even though I said earlier that the effort being put forth by the BIS to make CBDCs a thing is mainly driven by hubris and incompetence, it is very interesting that bitcoin wasn't mentioned by name and that it has seemingly been lumped in with the rest of crypto.

They either don't think it's a threat, don't understand the difference between bitcoin and crypto, or are intentionally not mentioning it because they recognize it is a massive threat to their existence. The only threat to their existence as it stands today because the bitcoin network achieves everything the BIS is claiming it can solely achieve in the highlighted sentence above.

Within the bitcoin network there is a singleness of money that attains payment finality roughly every ten minutes at the base layer. It is an open source software project that anyone can contribute to, plug into, build layers upon, and verify without asking for permission. It brings sound money back to a world that has gone mad with money printing. It ensures that the money of the world cannot be controlled by a select few men and women in positions of power who are prone to engage in corruption and criminality with impunity. It is an emergent system that anyone can opt into. It is the stick that is being thrust through the spokes of their wheel as they're going 100 miles per hour toward their dystopian destination.

Luckily for us, after reading the blueprint I do not think their CBDC will be successful in the long run. There is too much complexity and they are willingly walking into a prototypical second-system effect where they try to re-architect a whole new system from scratch. They may fool some people into using their system at first, but I do not believe they will be able to pull off what they have laid out in their blueprint. They will certainly try and they will certainly paper over defects in their system by conjuring new monetary units out of thin air, but at the end of the day bitcoin will only be getting stronger in parallel. And when you juxtapose bitcoin with the blueprint for the CBDC it is destined to win because the human spirit always prevails and there is nothing human about the system the BIS wants to erect.

Final thought...

Didn't plan on staying up late to write a 2,000 word synopsis of a BIS paper, but here we are.

You have your place to buy Bitcoin, but have you tried River? It's where all the Bitcoiners are now going. See why at River.com/TFTCSleep soundly at night knowing your bitcoin are secured by multisig.CrowdHealth BTC is now accepting memberships starting June 1st and later. Use code TFTC during sign-up and the first 1000 members will receive a discounted membership of $99/ month for the first 6 months.This rag was delivered to you via Ghost. If you are thinking about starting a newsletter or website and are looking for the most robust and sovereign option you should check out Ghost. For sovereign payments connect your Ghost site to Scrib. Donate to Marty's Ƀent ${donationMessage} Subscribe to TFTCGet the latest posts delivered right to your inbox

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Tue, 11 Jul 2023 22:42

Leadership from SAG-AFTRA held a conference call with top Hollywood publicity agencies on Monday, warning of ''powerful gatekeepers of A-list stars for a strike,'' via Variety.

The objective of the call, according to sources, was to brief the reps on protocols and how talent can best serve the union if and when a strike takes place.

''It would be a miracle at this point'' to reach a deal by this Wednesday, one producer told Variety.

The key issues around these conversations seem to be about minimum pay, residuals that consider the growth of streaming, healthcare, pensions, and regulation around how self-tapes are used in the casting process.

It's quite incredible how greedy studios are about to allow a double strike to happen, but that's where we're at now. This is turning into an existential battle about where Hollywood will be headed in the next decade.

Remember, tech companies like Amazon, Apple, Netflix, are now part of the studio system. Their moves during this strike have proven to be curiously unique, when compared to similar events of the past. If a strike does happen, this will get very ugly.

What you need to know: if SAG-AFTRA does decide to strike on Wednesday, actors will not be able to film any movie or TV production and cannot show up at any press junket or film premiere.

They now have just three days to agree on a deal, otherwise this will cause massive disruption in the industry, much more so than the current WGA strike. Expect a massive downturn in production. This strike will immediately halt all film productions.

It's a wonderful coincidence that these strikes and negotiations are occurring at the same time as AI has gone mainstream. This threat, and it is a threat, needs to be dealt with before it goes wildly out of control.

If SAG-AFTRA and/or DGA actually do go on strike, alongside WGA, they'll have the studios over a barrel.

Venice, Toronto and Telluride must also be relentlessly biting their nails as we speak. Imagine those film festivals without star attractions '-- gosh, the films would have to do the talking. The horror!

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Tue, 11 Jul 2023 21:25

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Tue, 11 Jul 2023 17:55

A new Bank of International Settlements (BIS) survey shows the increasing popularity of central bank digital currencies.

The survey, released Monday (July 10), found that the share of central banks involved in some sort of central bank digital currency (CBDC) project rose to 93%, while uncertainty about short-term CBDC issuance is waning.

''The survey suggests that there could be 15 retail and nine wholesale CBDCs publicly circulating in 2030,'' BIS said, noting that work on retail CBDCs is further along than on wholesale coins.

The BIS says wholesale CBDCs could let financial institutions access ''new functionalities enabled by tokenization, such as composability and programmability.''

And as PYMNTS wrote last week, tokenized deposits ''are being more widely considered and championed across far-flung corners of banking.''

For example, in a speech during the Innovate Finance Global Summit in April in the U.K, Bank of England Deputy Governor Sir Jon Cunliffe said tokenized deposits offer ''some or all of the functionality and efficiency claimed for stablecoins, allowing banks deposits to compete better with nonbank payment coins.''

And Rob Hunter, former deputy general counsel and director of regulatory and legislative affairs at The Clearing House (TCH), told Karen Webster in an interview late last year, ''There's no reason why banks shouldn't be allowed to use a new technology to perform functions that are clearly within the business of banking itself,'' including ''functions like deposit taking and transferring value that banks have been doing for hundreds of years.''

The BIS notes that four central banks have already issued a live retail CBDC: The Bahamas, the Eastern Caribbean, Jamaica and Nigeria.

And while no new retail CBDCs were launched last year, it's likely there are more to come, as 18% of the banks surveyed said they will probably put out a retail CBDC ''in the near term.''

Other banks are continuing studies about the feasibility of a CBDC, such as the Federal Reserve in the U.S., which last week released the results of its own study into the use of CBDCs in foreign and domestic payments.

The BIS survey also ties the rising interest in CBDCs to the recent cryptocurrency and banking crises, including last year's collapse of crypto exchange FTX and this year's failure of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, which served a number of crypto clients.

According to the BIS, ''60% of central banks said that the emergence of stablecoins and other cryptoassets has accelerated their work on CBDC.''

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Archived Version

Tue, 11 Jul 2023 17:53

Sound of Freedom has continued to defy expectations, raking in $40 million in less than a week at the box office.

The Angel Studios thriller was the surprise No. 1 box office hit on July 4 when it premiered, beating out Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. But its continued success earned the film a top-3 ranking at the box office this week, too.

''As with our July 4 numbers, today's figures have surpassed our expectations, and we are thrilled to continue this remarkable momentum,'' said Brandon Purdie, the head of theatrical distribution at Angel Studios. ''We are receiving messages from all corners of the country, describing packed theaters, sold-out screenings and spontaneous standing ovations for the film in numerous locations. It is undeniable that seeing this film has become an absolute must, thanks to the incredible word-of-mouth it has generated.''

Christians and conservative media have rallied behind the film, which received partial crowdfunding support. Angel Studios employed innovative promotional methods, such as an app that allows moviegoers to purchase tickets and then donate them to individuals who cannot afford the price of admission. The ''Pay It Forward'' app contributed $2.6 million to the film's opening day sales.

According to Comscore, Sound of Freedom marks one of the most successful openings ever for a faith-based film, placing it well ahead of this spring's Jesus Revolution ($15.8 million debut) starring Kelsey Grammar, 2019's Breakthrough ($11.2 million debut) featuring Chrissy Metz, and the Erwin brothers' 2018 musical drama I Can Only Imagine ($17.1 million debut).

Written and directed by Alejandro Monteverde, Sound of Freedom is based on the true story of Tim Ballard (portrayed by The Passion of the Christ star Jim Caviezel), a former government agent who embarks on a mission to rescue children from the clutches of sex traffickers in Colombia.

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Tue, 11 Jul 2023 17:52

Thames Water has secured £750m of emergency funding from its shareholders but the debt-ridden company warned it would need further funding in the years ahead.

The new funds come on top of the £500m investors pumped into Britain's biggest water company in March.

The company said on Monday it had secured £750m to run to March 2025. It indicated that a further £2.5bn would be needed to cover the five years to 2030 and said shareholders had ''acknowledged'' further equity support would be needed to turn around the ailing company.

Last year, Thames secured an agreement that its shareholders would put £1.5bn into the ailing water firm. The first cash injection, of £500m, came in March while a further £1bn had been expected this year.

It is understood the company believes that £750m is the maximum it can feasibly spend over the next two years with its current resources. Asked about the £250m shortfall on the expected £1bn, Alastair Cochran, the firm's interim co-chief executive, said it related to ''the phasing of when we need the money'' and said the figure represented less than two months' worth of capital expenditure.

Thames said the funding was contingent on a new business plan. ''It is entirely reasonable for them [the shareholders] to want to see that plan before committing, albeit they have always followed through in the past,'' Cochran said.

Thames Water debt chartDavid Black, the chief executive of the regulator, Ofwat, told a House of Lords committee last week that investors lacked ''appetite'' to put more money into the industry, and needed to have confidence in Thames's turnaround plan.

The regulator's chair, Iain Coucher, said there were ''ongoing conversations about the remaining £1bn and whether that is sufficient''.

Cochran and Cathryn Ross, the firm's other chief executive, said: ''This announcement is a major milestone for Thames and all our stakeholders. The substantial equity support package announced today will underpin the delivery of a more focused turnaround plan that builds on the foundations that have been put in place over the last two years and focuses expenditure on a smaller number of initiatives, which will deliver material and sustainable improvements in key performance metrics over the next three years.''

Ross and Cochran said it had been an ''extremely challenging'' year. They said record temperatures, a drought and freezing conditions had put ''unprecedented pressure'' on its network, while high energy and chemical prices had hit its profits. Only 55% of its annual performance commitments were met.

''In short, our performance was not as we '' or our customers '' wanted it to be,'' they said.

Thames needs the funding to upgrade its infrastructure after leakage rates hit five-year highs last year and it repeatedly released sewage into rivers. Thames was last week fined £3.34m for a ''reckless'' incident in 2017 in which millions of litres of undiluted sewage was pumped into rivers near Gatwick, killing 1,700 fish.

The Liberal Democrat environment spokesperson, Tim Farron MP, said: ''It's time to rip up Thames Water and reform it from top to bottom. This scandal-ridden firm has put profit first, leading to animals being killed while the Conservatives turn a blind eye.

''Ministers have been dismissing the sewage crisis for far too long, instead of taking meaningful action they sat on their hands.''

Thames Water gearing chartThames said its annual revenues rose by 4% to £2.3bn while underlying profits had fallen by 3% to £1.1bn because of ''higher operating costs''.

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Thames said its ratio debt to capital value, or gearing, had fallen to its lowest level in 10 years at 77.4% from 80.6%, although some companies in the debt-laden industry have ratios about 60%.

Thames Water dividends chartThe consortium that owns Thames took ownership in 2017 and has not taken a dividend since, but the company has paid internal dividends. It paid £45.2m in the year to the end of March 2023, up from £37m a year earlier.

The company announced the shock resignation of the former chief executive Sarah Bentley late last month, and hours later it emerged that officials were drawing up contingency plans to temporarily renationalise the company.

Thames, which serves 15 million customers, has been struggling under a £14bn debt pile as rapidly rising interest rates have pushed up the cost of borrowing. The company spent £476.5m servicing its debts during the year to 31 March.

Thames's largest investor is Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System (Omers), a Canadian pension fund, alongside the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS), China Investment Corporation and Abu Dhabi's Infinity Investments.

Ofwat has faced questions over its scrutiny of Thames, while former owner Macquarie, which sold its final stake in 2017, has been accused of loading the company with debts.

In May, England's water companies said they would invest £10bn to invest in tackling leaks and sewage pollution and upgrading networks. Customer bills are expected to rise as a result.

Bentley was criticised when the Guardian revealed she was due to receive long-term incentive payments worth nearly double her annual salary despite her forgoing her annual bonus. Details of her severance package are expected to be included in next year's annual report.

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Tue, 11 Jul 2023 17:52

The moment Paul Nuki knew something was wrong was when his teenage son walked over to the window and said, ''Dad, there's water gushing down the road.''

''I thought, yeah right, but within an hour, the whole house had filled up and the sofa was floating across the living room,'' says the 59-year-old, who lives in Stoke Newington. ''I'd heard about flooding in London before but when you start looking into it, you realise that Thames Water has been doing this all over the place.''

Indeed, it won't have come as a surprise to many Londoners when the company '-- which supplies 15'‰million people in the capital and South-East '-- entered crisis talks with the Government amid reports of a £14'‰billion black hole in the firm's finances and after its chief executive Sarah Bentley resigned. Today, in bid to stave off nationalisaiton, Thames Water have secured a further £750m from shareholders (this follows a £500m which investors stumped-up in March).

For years, there have been signs that all is not well. Type ''Thames Water'' into social media and dozens of tales of woe emerge, from Belsize Park residents who were without water for weeks to south Londoners with brown liquid coming out of their taps. In Hampstead last summer, water was gushing from broken pipes for three days at the same time that the company was threatening residents with £1,000 fines for using hosepipes (they did later apologise). Then there's the environmental impact: Thames Water was recently fined £3.3'‰million for releasing undiluted sewage into two rivers, killing 1,400 fish. The judge said the firm had made a ''deliberate attempt'' to mislead the Environment Agency about the scale of the problem.

Getty ImagesIt wasn't supposed to be this way. When Thames Water was privatised in 1989, it was with the promise of money for investment in infrastructure. What actually happened was neglect. Experts point the finger at Australian bank Macquarie, which owned it between 2006 and 2017 and have been called ''vultures'' who ''piled on debt, sucked out profits and paid virtually no tax''. Its model was to borrow against its assets to increase dividend payments to its shareholders '-- at least £1.6'‰billion between 2006 and 2016 '-- while Thames Water's debt rose from £3.4'‰billion to £10.8'‰billion. Macquarie says it invested more than £11 billion in the network which it says ''exceed annual investment levels both before and after our ownnership.''

Environmental campaigner Feargal Sharkey argues that ''they got rich, we didn't.'' The former pop star turned eco crusader puts the chaos down to ''a catastrophic failure of regulation'' by Ofwat, which he says has failed to demand rigour from water companies and imposes fines so insignificant that Thames Water sees them as a ''cost against business'' not a deterrent.

On Wednesday, Ofwat boss David Black defended its role in the crisis, saying that using debt financing to fund infrastructure investment wasn't a problem, but that Thames Water had gone too far. ''Their performance needs dramatic improvement and we do think they need to sort out their finances. It is their responsibility to do that. That's what we'll be holding them account to do. We are here to protect customers and we will continue to do that,'' he said.

''They are utterly dependent on bill payers picking up the tab for the foreseeable,'' snorts Sharkey. ''And they clearly haven't spent our money on the infrastructure.''

Thames Water aren't replacing failing pipes, it's just patch and repair; that's why it's all failing at once

Ah, the infrastructure. Theo Thomas, CEO of environmental organisation London Waterkeeper, tells me that it's crumbling: 630'‰million litres of water a day is lost through leaks, while the sewage system is unable to cope with modern quantities of wastewater from our sinks, loos, washing machines, roads and restaurants which no longer drains away, thanks to our heavily paved city. It means that London's 100-plus storm overflows '-- safety valves that stop raw sewage sloshing into our homes during heavy rain '-- regularly dump foul water into the Thames.

In new plans submitted to Ofwat to tackle sewage pollution, Thames Water proposed a 20 per cent rise in customer bills to help pay for the clean up. Little wonder that a YouGov poll found that 69 per cent of Britons are in favour of renationalising the industry.

It's something a group of Labour backbenchers has called on leader Keir Starmer to reinstate as a policy, arguing that it would end the monopoly and remove the profit motive.

The Liberal Democrats have a plan to turn water firms into ''public benefits companies'' that would remain private but be forced to put the good of the planet on a level-footing with profit.

Musician and rivers campaigner Feargal Sharkey said he laughed when he read the Government's press release for its new water plan (Peter Byrne/PA)

/ PA ArchiveMeanwhile, the Government is drawing up contingency plans for Thames Water's collapse and working overtime to convince us that everything is fine. Customers ''should rest assured'' that their water supplies will be protected and that the industry is ''financially resilient'', said environment minister Rececca Pow at PMQs this week. ''There's a lot of MPs coming out of the woodwork, who haven't said anything on this before,'' observes aquatic ecologist and campaigner Vaughan Lewis. ''If MPs are genuinely concerned and not just posturing, then great. At the next election there will likely be a change of government and they're going to have a big challenge. I think the only way they can go forward is with cross-party support.''

Sharkey, however, believes that nationalisation is not the immediate next step. ''The secretary of state could resolve an awful lot of this today, with nothing more than the stroke of the pen,'' he says. ''The Government could issue an enforcement order and tell water companies: this is how much you will pay your investors, this is how much you will spend. If you fail to comply, then it has the power to fine them 10 per cent of their annual turnover. ''I think the ownership argument is a red herring right now. We need to concentrate on finding the £20'‰billion that the National Infrastructure commission estimated is needed to keep London's taps running.''

Replacing the capital's archaic water system would be a gargantuan effort and one that would cause untold disruption to Londoners' lives. The first significant step towards such modernisation is the 25km-long Thames Tideway ''super sewer'' '-- designed to cut sewage spills in the river by 95 per cent and due to open next year after a decade of construction. Its overall cost has spiralled to £4.5'‰billion, a billion more than the original budget, paid for by Thames Water customers.

David Black, chief executive of Ofwat (House of Commons/PA)

/ PA MediaIt's being trailed as the successor to Joseph Bazalgette's original Victorian sewer system which we're often told desperately needs updating. Lewis, however, alleges that this is just an excuse for Thames Water to hide behind. ''They're using it as a cheap cover. We don't blame the Romans for potholes in the road and neither should we blame the Victorians for the pipes that are failing,'' he says.

The water industry, in three years' time, will look very different from the way it did last week. They are finished

In fact, a lot of the water pipes that are failing now are from the Forties and Fifties and not that old. But Thames Water are not replacing them, they just patch and repair. That's why all this infrastructure is failing at once. I guess they have got a big task '-- but we pay them big money.''

Theo Thomas says that if Londoners are to be spared decades of pain, we need to come up with a ''comprehensive approach to these problems now. Currently there is a failure of co-ordination across the city. Cities in other countries, such as Copenhagen, have been working effectively on this for many years. Why can't London?'' Nor, it seems, can Londoners take it for granted that the water will keep flowing from our taps. ''London is now number nine on the list of global cities most likely to run out of water,'' says Sharkey. ''It's not too dramatic to say that the capital is only ever 24 hours from having the water turned off. Last month, there were tens of thousands of homes without water in Kent and Sussex because of shortages with South East Water. According to Ofwat, other companies are in a similar situation to the one facing Thames Water.''

''The entire water industry is on the brink of insolvency and on the brink of physical collapse,'' adds Lewis. ''It's reached a point where nothing the water companies do would shock anybody.'' Paul Nuki, his wife Helen and their four children know that all too well. They were forced to move out of their home in 2019, and couldn't return for a year due to water damage. And they were lucky enough to have good home insurance '-- some elderly neighbours and renters on their street lost everything.

Thames Water is facing financial difficulties (Martin Keene/PA)

/ PA Archive''It had a massive impact. Most people had to leave for a year, some longer and were housed as far away as Croydon,'' says Nuki. ''Several businesses never recovered and had to close.'' They got a ''couple of grand'' from Thames Water, worked out as an amount per person living in the house ''and they were careful not to call it 'compensation','' he adds.

When asked for a comment on its commitment to Londoners, the company directed the Evening Standard to a recent statement that says: ''Thames Water remains focused on delivering for its customers, the environment and stakeholders.''

Sharkey urges people to write to their MPs ahead of the general election and make their voices heard, but cautions against withholding bill payments, calling it a ''distraction'' that could lead to individuals being prosecuted.

''The only thing that we can, with complete certainty, say is that Londoners are absolutely incensed over this,'' he says. ''But what I can guarantee you is that the water industry, in three years' time, will look very different from the way it did last week. They're finished.''

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Tue, 11 Jul 2023 17:51

The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work.

The big ideaPeople in the U.S. are dying at higher rates than in other similar high-income countries, and that difference is only growing. That's the key finding of a new study that I published in the journal PLOS One.

In 2021, more than 892,000 of the 3,456,000 deaths the U.S. experienced, or about 1 in 4, were ''excess deaths.'' In 2019, that number was 483,000 deaths, or nearly 1 in 6. That represents an 84.9% increase in excess deaths in the U.S. between 2019 and 2021.

Excess deaths refer to the actual number of deaths that occur in a given year compared with expected deaths over that same time period based on prior years or, as in this study, in other countries.

In my study, I compared the number of U.S. deaths with those in the five largest countries in Western Europe: England and Wales, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. Those five countries make for a good comparison because they are nearly, if not quite, as wealthy as the U.S. and their combined population is similar in size and diversity to the U.S. population.

I also chose those countries because they were used in an earlier study from another research team that documented a 34.5% increase in excess deaths in the U.S. between 2000 and 2017.

The acceleration of this already alarming long-term trend in excess deaths in the U.S. was exacerbated by the fact that the U.S. experienced higher death rates from COVID-19 compared with similar countries. However, COVID-19 alone does not account for the recent increase in the number of excess deaths in the U.S. relative to comparison countries.

Why it mattersRising living standards and medical advances through the 20th century have made it possible for people in wealthy countries to live longer and with a better quality of life. Given that the U.S. is the largest economic power in the world, with cutting-edge medical technology, Americans should have an advantage over other countries in terms of life span and death rates.

But in the last 50 years, many countries around the world have outpaced the U.S. in how fast death rates are declining, as revealed by trends in life expectancy.

Life expectancy is an average age at death, and it represents how long an average person is expected to live if current death rates remain unchanged throughout that person's lifetime. Life expectancy is based on a complex combination of death rates at different ages, but in short, when death rates decline, life expectancy increases.

Compared to about 20 other high-income countries, since around the mid-1970s the U.S. life expectancy has been slipping from about the middle, or median, to the lowest rungs of life expectancy. So the relative stagnation in life expectancy in the U.S. compared with other countries is directly related to the fact that death rates have also declined more slowly in the U.S.

The U.S. has higher death rates than its peer countries due to a variety of causes. Cardiovascular disease prevalence has been an important driver of life expectancy changes across the globe in recent decades. But while death rates from cardiovascular disease have continued to decline in other parts of the world, those rates have stagnated in the U.S..

A key reason for this trend is the rise in obesity, as research shows that obesity increases the risk of death from cardiovascular disease. High prevalence of obesity in the U.S. also likely contributed to the relatively high death rates from COVID-19.

Another cause is that the U.S. has disproportionately high death rates from intentional injuries in the form of homicides, in particular those caused by firearms. Moreover, it also has high death rates from unintentional injuries, in particular drug overdoses.

People are being exposed to fentanyl without knowing it, and because the synthetic opioid is so highly potent, people are dying in unprecedented numbers. What other research is being doneWhile these specific causes of deaths should clearly be health policy priorities today, there might be more fundamental causes to the elevated U.S. death rates.

In the early 1990s, young people in the U.S. between the ages of 15 and 34 were already dying at higher rates than their peers in other countries from a combination of homicides, unintentional injuries '' in large part from motor vehicle accidents '' and deaths from HIV/AIDS.

Research is underway to understand the more fundamental societal causes that may explain the vulnerability of the U.S. population to successive epidemics, from HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 to gun violence and opioid overdoses.

These include racial and economic inequalities, which combined with a weaker social security net and lack of health care access for all may help explain larger health and death disparities compared to European countries.

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Tue, 11 Jul 2023 17:51

The rate of death in Australia remains well above the norm, with a rise in killer diseases other than Covid leaving doctors baffled.

In March there were 14,578 deaths registered in Australia, which is around 1,647 more than would be expected for that month according to the historical average.

This means the number of 'excess deaths' was 11.3 per cent above the norm, which also takes into account factors such as an ageing population, according to figures released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics on Wednesday.

Of the those 1,647 excess deaths, only 247 were certified as directly due to Covid.

A further 117 died 'with' the disease, meaning they had other serious conditions besides the virus that may have caused their death.

Deaths otherwise surged due to cardiac conditions (up by nearly 20 per cent on the historical average), influenza and pneumonia (up by 17 per cent), dementia including Alzheimer's disease (up by 12.5 per cent) and cancer (8.3 per cent).

Excess deaths, which is the mortality rate above the historical norm, continues to run at alarmingly high figures in Australia

The main demographics dying in greater numbers were males over 85 years of age and females aged over 75.

For the year to March, Australia's mortality rate has been running at 11.8 per cent over the historical norm, with 4,451 more deaths than normal.

This is an improvement on the 2022 calendar year when the mortality rate ran at 15 per cent above average, with 25,235 excess deaths.

That alarming jump led to a Senate motion in April, sponsored by Victorian UAP Senator Ralph Babet, to hold an inquiry into why Australians are dying in such high numbers.

The move was voted down by the government and crossbench Senators including the Greens.

Senator Gerard Rennick has called for a parliamentary inquiry into the continuing excess deaths

Queensland LNP Senator Gerard Rennick, who voted for the inquiry, told Daily Mail Australia on Thursday it was still very much needed.

'We need an inquiry because we have a significant number of excess deaths and we need to know why these deaths occurred.'

Last September the head of Australia's peak doctor body, the Australian Medical Association (AMA), admitted doctors were baffled by the surge in deaths.

'There needs to be some research into why this is happening,' AMA President Professor Steve Robson told Daily Mail Australia.

He pointed to some 'likely factors' that could be a hangover from the Covid period of isolation and restrictions where people either couldn't or were scared of seeing a doctor because of infection risk.

'People have avoided going to see the doctor for regular checks or to talk about a problem with their health or delayed a trip to the doctor and consequently seen their condition become more serious,' Prof Robson said.

'We need to do more to prepare the health system, both to address the impact of Covid on things like waiting lists but also to deal with those patients who have delayed accessing care and now require more serious intervention.'

Among the killer conditions claiming more Australians are cancer, diabetes, dementia and heart conditions

In Australia's most locked-down state Victoria, more than 6,000 cancer cases were estimated to have been missed during the lockdown periods between April 2020 and April 2022, according to Cancer Council Victoria.

Prof Robson noted that excess deaths in Britain have been running about 10 per cent higher since the Covid pandemic, which has become a major political issue.

Senator Rennick called for an inquiry to also look into whether the Covid vaccines has contributed to the excess deaths.

The Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) says while the life-saving jabs are safe, around 1-2 in every 100,000 people who receive vaccine have developed the heart conditions myocarditis and pericarditis.

A landmark Covid vaccine injury class-action lawsuit was filed in April against the Australian government, the TGA and the Department of Health.

The nationwide suit, which reportedly has 500 members, seeks redress for those allegedly left injured or bereaved by the Covid vaccines.

'The TGA and regulators around the world continue to monitor and analyse Covid-19 vaccine safety data covering hundreds of millions of people, and the latest evidence from clinical trials and peer-reviewed medical literature,' a TGA spokesperson previously told Daily Mail Australia.

'This information continues to overwhelmingly support the safe and effective use of Covid-19 vaccines.'

WHY VACCINES ARE IMPORTANTImmunisation is a simple, safe and effective way of protecting people against harmful diseases before they come into contact with them.

Immunisation not only protects individuals, but also others in the community, by reducing the spread of preventable diseases.

Research and testing is an essential part of developing safe and effective vaccines.

In Australia, vaccines must pass strict safety testing before the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) will register them for use. Approval of vaccines can take up to 10 years.

Before vaccines become available to the public, large clinical trials test them on thousands of people.

High-quality studies over many years have compared the health of large numbers of vaccinated and unvaccinated children. Medical information from nearly 1.5 million children around the world have confirmed that vaccination does not cause autism.

People first became concerned about autism and immunisation after the medical journal The Lancet published a paper in 1998. This paper claimed there was a link between the measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism.

Since then, scientists have completely discredited this paper. The Lancet withdrew it in 2010 and printed an apology. The UK's General Medical Council struck the author off the medical register for misconduct and dishonesty.

Source: Australian Department of Health

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Tue, 11 Jul 2023 17:50

Some pro-trans activists have branded the national broadcaster 'Nazis' after its flagship current affairs show ran a story about a teenager who took his own life after being denied gender-affirming care.

Taking to Twitter, transgender advocates lashed out at the ABC and its Four Corners program for telling the tragic story of Noah O'Brien, who was born as a girl called Lily, and died in January this year.

One viewer took objection to the program, which highlighted the complexities of transgender healthcare for minors, for including both sides of the issue and vowing 'not to stand in judgement of either side of this debate'.

'Well, maybe you f**king should stand in judgement of the side that's affiliated with Nazis,' they tweeted.

Another Twitter user wrote: 'Let's be crystal clear: There is no debate about trans people's right to survive. We will not debate our existence with neo-Nazis and their allies.'

Noah O'Brien, 14, (pictured) died in January this year. He had written his parents a letter six months before telling them he identified as a boy but was worried about returning to school

The ABC has been bombarded with criticism over its Four Corners story, which highlighted both sides of the transgender debate

In recent years, so-called 'gender-critical feminists' - who typically oppose medical interventions for children who say they are trans - have found themselves on the same side of the debate as some far-right anti-LGBT activists, including neo-Nazis.

But despite this unwanted association with extremists, these women's rights activists maintain their criticisms of trans healthcare are legitimate, and deny they are 'Nazis' simply for saying medical intervention shouldn't happen before the age of 18.

After Four Corners went to air on Monday, dozens of angry viewers flocked to Twitter to declare all critics of transgender healthcare 'Nazis', adding that any 'debate' about trans people is a disgrace.

They also accused the ABC of false equivalency by giving airtime to pro- and anti-trans voices, claiming there is medical consensus that gender-affirming care is the best course of action for youths experiencing gender dysphoria.

'According to the science, it's not a debate. Trans people are correct, it's that simple,' one person tweeted.

'To call it a debate is to legitimise lunacy as equal to scientific fact. Something every journalist should already know.'

The ABC program had revealed the 14-year-old had written his parents a letter six months before telling them he identified as a boy.

Noah's mum Lauren told Four Corners of the devastating loss of her son after he was worried about returning to school in his new gender identity following the holidays.

'My husband gave him CPR and the ambulance, and the police arrived about four minutes after we called them and they took him to Westmead Hospital, where he stayed alive until six in the morning,' she said.

'That was from about 11 o'clock. So, we got seven hours to actually say goodbye.'

Noah had been admitted to Westmead children's hospital in Sydney's west where he was discharged after a day, with a recommendation to seek support for gender issues.

Noah's mother, Lauren (pictured), said her son was not given access to any gender-affirming care

An article explaining why the ABC ran the Four Corners story was further slammed

Ms O'Brien went to his GP to get a referral but did not realise that he would be pushed down the waiting list because he had started puberty.

Four Corners reported that Noah 'was effectively denied any specialist gender support by the hospital'.

The ABC's efforts to thwart controversy with an article explaining how and why it aired the story on Noah's plight also backfired.

'We interviewed the doctors running Australia's two biggest gender clinics in Melbourne and Brisbane to explain and defend the gender-affirming model of care,' the ABC stated.

'We interviewed experts independent of the gender clinics, including the eminent psychiatrist Professor Ian Hickie. We also spoke to two of the most high-profile and qualified critics of the existing model and defenders of the research, Dr Dianna Kenny and Dr Jillian Spencer.'

Noah O'Brien tragically died in January

The ABC has come under fire for running a Four Corners story on a 14-year old who took his life

'Considering they claim they checked for accuracy the article is full of inaccuracies,' an angry person tweeted in response to the article.

'Their (sic) is no scaling back of gender care in the UK quite the opposite... Just utter rubbish from start to finish.'

The ABC refused to back down from its report, stating Four Corners staffers had a 'rigorous process of checking and refining the final product'.

'We were determined not to stand in judgement of either side of this debate. We wanted the story to reflect the weight of evidence, but we were acutely aware that the science is new and evolving in this area. We believe we got the balance right,' it stated.

The Four Corners controversy comes after another ABC program, Media Watch, faced similar backlash for acknowledging both sides of the public debate surrounding gender-affirming care.

For confidential support call the Lifeline 24-hour crisis support on: 13 11 14

Kids Helpline: 1800 55 1800 (for people aged 5 to 25)

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Tue, 11 Jul 2023 17:49

A proposed amendment to a bill in California would classify parents who refuse to affirm their child's gender as abusive and could result in revoked custody.

AB957, proposed by Democratic Assemblymember Lori Wilson and state Senator Scott Wiener, amends the state Family Code which addresses the 'health, safety, and welfare of the child' in every household.

If passed, the law could see children pulled from their parents' home if their family members have what the state deems anti-LGBTQ+ ideals.

Rep. Wilson - who has a transgender son - said during a recent meeting that she believes parents supporting their child's gender is in the 'best interests' of the kid.

'We should be affirming our children in every possible way,' she said of the proposed last-minute addition to the Family Code bill.

A proposed amendment to a bill in California would classify parents who refuse to affirm their child's gender as abusive and could result in revoked custody

AB957 was proposed by Democratic Assembly member Lori Wilson (left) and state Senator Scott Wiener (right) and amends the state Family Code

The bill originally passed in the California Assembly on May 3 but was amended on June 6 by state Sen. Wiener. It will need to pass again with the revisions.

Under the revision to the Family Code, courts would be given complete authority to remove children from their homes if their parents do not affirm their gender.

The change would also make it so that schools, churches, and other organizations would need to affirm the gender identity of a child or face repercussions.

This is because the revisions would change the definition of what is considered to impact the 'health, safety, and welfare of [a] child.'

Individuals and organizations who refuse or do not acknowledge a child's gender identity could potentially face abuse charges, however, a spokesperson for Rep. Wilson's office said the bill only applies to family law and not criminal law.

The revisions have already been slammed by those who say the state should not step into private residences to monitor each child's gender and their parents' response.

Nicole Peterson, founder of Facts Law Truth Justice, told the Daily Signal that the law is 'horrifying' and troublesome for parents everywhere.

'If a parent or guardian is unwilling or simply not ready to affirm their 7-year-old's new identity '-- as they transition from Spongebob to Batman to Dora the Explorer '-- they can be found guilty of child abuse under AB-957 if it passes into law,' she said.

Rep. Wilson - who has a transgender son - said during a recent meeting that she believes parents supporting their child's gender is in the 'best interests' of the kid

Here, California state assembly member Wilson explains her reasoning behind considering in a state bill that a parent's lack of affirmation of a child's gender identity could factor into losing a custody battle. pic.twitter.com/RZjH7SRuHv

'-- Benjamin Ryan (@benryanwriter) June 10, 2023'This is a horrifying bill for children, and for parents and guardians not just in California, but across the country,' Peterson continued.

She went on to mention that should California Governor Gavin Newsom run in the 2028 presidential election, she believes he would bring this law to every state.

San Francisco lawyer Erin Friday told the Washington Free Beacon said she believes AB957's revisions could escalate to more boundary pushing laws.

'It's not a giant leap''it's a tiny step to get there,' said Friday.

'We know exactly where they are going with it. I didn't think the bill could get worse, but it got worse,' she continued, saying she worries

The language of the revisions is ambiguous and does not go into the specifics of how the law would be enforced and in what situations.

It also does not mention the age range for children that this could fall upon or make a distinction between 'affirming' and 'sex-change.'

The law would ask judges to consider parents' rejection or non-affirmation of their child's gender paramount to physical abuse or neglect.

The revised AB957 comes as Wiener is also advancing a bill that would require foster parents to 'affirm' the identity of children who identify as transgender.

Wiener previously made headlines for sponsoring a bill that would allow children to come from out of state to obtain sex change procedures in California.

The revised AB957 comes as Wiener (pictured center) is also advancing a bill that would require foster parents to 'affirm' the identity of children who identify as transgender

'We believe that no one should be prosecuted or persecuted for getting the care they need '-- including gender-affirming care,' Governor Gavin Newsom said in 2022

The 2022 bill received support from Gov. Newsom who applauded California's devotion to 'equality and acceptance.'

'We believe that no one should be prosecuted or persecuted for getting the care they need '-- including gender-affirming care,' Newsom said in 2022.

'Parents know what's best for their kids, and they should be able to make decisions around the health of their children without fear. We must take a stand for parental choice,' he continued in a statement.

Newsom has not commented on the new revisions to the Family Code.

AB957 will have a hearing in the State Senate on June 13.

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Archived Version

Tue, 11 Jul 2023 17:49

A Tennessee law prohibiting doctors from providing medical care such as puberty-blockers and gender-affirming surgery for transgender minors can go into effect immediately, a US appeals court ruled on Saturday.

The US court of appeals for the sixth circuit said advocacy groups that had challenged Tennessee's law could not show they were likely to prevail on their claims it violated the US constitution.

The panel of three judges voted 2-1 to reverse a lower court's decision that had blocked Tennessee from enforcing the law while it was being challenged.

''Life-tenured federal judges should be wary of removing a vexing and novel topic of medical debate from the ebbs and flows of democracy by construing a largely unamendable federal constitution to occupy the field,'' Judge Jeffrey Sutton wrote for the appeals court.

Neither of the advocacy groups that challenged the law nor the state's attorney general could be reached on Saturday morning.

Tennessee's law is part of growing efforts by Republican lawmakers to impose restrictions on medical care for transgender youths. Lawmakers said the measure was necessary to protect minors from being permanently harmed. Medical associations argue gender-affirming care can be life-saving.

It bans any medical procedure aimed at enabling a minor to identify with a gender other than that assigned at birth.

Federal judges have blocked five laws similar to Tennessee's from taking effect. Those judges found the laws violated the constitution's guarantee of equal protection.

The appeals court's decision on Saturday said that absent a clear showing that Tennessee's law violated the constitution, choices about medical care and protecting minors are best settled by state legislatures.

Judge Helene White said she believed Tennessee's law ''is likely unconstitutional'' as a type of sex discrimination.

Sutton wrote that the appeals court will try to reach a final decision about Tennessee's law by 30 September.

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Archived Version

Tue, 11 Jul 2023 17:48

3D-printed vegan meat alternative Redefine Meat is ramping up its UK distribution after teaming up with eight new wholesale partners.

The Israeli business uses plant-based ingredients that are then combined and 3D-printed into a range of alt meat products, from premium whole cuts to mince-based products and pulled meat alternatives.

It has partnered with Brakes, Braehead Foods, Albion Fine Foods, Classic Fine Foods, Elite Fine Foods, Food Republic, Forest Produce and Zebra Plant Based in a bid to widen its availability to foodservice operators and restaurants across the country.

The business said the versatility of the portfolio '' which includes a new-meat flank steak, a lamb kofta alternative, plus a slow-cooked pulled pork alternative, a burger and an ''authentic'' minced product '' offered an ''ideal solution'' for premium dining outlets looking to offer more varied sustainable options, and more casual dining restaurants seeking minced products with the taste and texture of traditional meat.

Feedback from chefs and customers had been ''overwhelmingly positive with the quality and product texture achieved providing something genuinely different in a crowded sector'', said Michael Nelson, senior category manager at Brakes.

How Israel became foodtech's Silicon Valley''We can see real potential for the range, particularly among our hospitality customers looking for a menu hero item that both vegans and meat lovers can enjoy.''

Following its expansion into the UK market in 2021, the business was now ''working with some of the most iconic brands across all dining occasions to help expand their plant-based menus to meet the growing appetite for meat alternatives'', said Simon Owen, head of UK at Redefine Meat.

''This requires a range of efficient and effective wholesaler partners able to fulfil our growing demand and who share our vision for offering a wider range of delicious and sustainable plant-based options that satisfy all five senses.''

The Redefine Meat brand is now available via foodservice in countries including the UK, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Italy. It is also available in both retail and foodservice in home country Israel and has plans to enter into retail in the UK in the future.

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Archived Version

Tue, 11 Jul 2023 17:47

U. S. Senator Charles Schumer speaks while holding photo of bottle with drug Xylazine and mentions letter issued by Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) alerting of threat as fentanyl is mixed with Xylazine during the briefing at 875 3rd Avenue lobby in Manhattan on drug Xylazine linked to overdose deaths.

Lev Radin | Lightrocket | Getty Images

The Biden administration unveiled a plan Tuesday to eliminate the growing threat of fentanyl laced with xylazine, an illegal street drug cocktail that is fueling a wave of overdose deaths.

The plan directs several federal agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as well as the Food and Drug Administration, to expand access to testing, prevention and overdose recovery resources. It also aims to disrupt the illegal xylazine supply chain, among other efforts.

Those agencies must develop and submit an implementation report to the White House in 60 days.

>>Fentanyl is an extremely potent synthetic opioid with its own soaring death toll. Xylazine, also known as "tranq," is a cheap animal sedative not meant for human consumption.

The plan is the administration's first concrete action to address the dangerous combination since declaring it an "emerging threat" in April.

It also builds on President Joe Biden's national drug control strategy '-- which aims to tackle the country's addiction and overdose epidemic '-- and his administration's other efforts to crack down on illegal fentanyl.

"Even as we work to save lives from illicit fentanyl, this administration is hyper-vigilant in reacting to changes in the drug supply, like xylazine," Dr. Rahul Gupta, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, said during a call with reporters Monday.

The White House plan's long-term goal is a 15% reduction in xylazine-positive drug overdoses in at least three of four U.S. Census regions by 2025.

Xylazine was detected in nearly 11% of fentanyl overdose deaths through June 2022, according to a report from the CDC released last week, up dramatically from about 3% of cases in January 2019.

"The proportion of xylazine-involved deaths is continuously growing and is a great concern. Every one of these numbers is tragic," White House domestic policy advisor Neera Tanden said during a call with reporters. "They represent individuals, families and communities torn apart."

The U.S. has been grappling with an opioid epidemic for years, and xylazine only adds to it.

Drug dealers often mix the tranquilizer with fentanyl to extend the duration of the opioid's effects, which can include relaxation and euphoria. But dealers may also use xylazine as a cheap bulking agent to boost their supply of fentanyl.

Xylazine can do major damage to the human body, including leaving drug users with severe skin ulcers, soft-tissue wounds and necrosis '-- sometimes described as rotting skin '-- that can lead to amputation.

Treatment, testing and supply reductionFentanyl laced with xylazine poses several health threats, including severe hypoventilation, the development of serious wounds and extreme withdrawal symptoms.

Bags of heroin, some laced with fentanyl, are displayed before a press conference at the office of the New York Attorney General regarding a major drug bust, Sept. 23, 2016.

Drew Angerer | Getty Images

To address those health challenges, the administration's plan will develop and deploy a treatment framework for patients exposed to xylazine. That involves identifying the most effective practices for withdrawal management and clinical stabilization, or returning a patient to constant and steady function.

The plan will also evaluate and deploy overdose reversal strategies that health-care providers, first responders, harm reduction staff, drug users and community bystanders can use.

Those strategies will focus on the use of assisted breathing, hands-only CPR and naloxone, the first medicine approved in the U.S. to reverse opioid overdoses.

Naloxone, marketed as Narcan, is effective against fentanyl but may have an insufficient response against xylazine since the tranquilizer is not an opioid.

Even then, Gupta said, "I want to stress that these medications should still be used regardless."

The plan also aims to ramp up testing for xylazine in other drugs.

That involves developing and authorizing rapid test strips for clinical settings and deploying tests "at all levels of the supply chain, from wholesale seizure quantities to retail levels within communities," according to the plan.

It also includes standardizing testing practices across medical examiners, coroners, public health laboratories and drug analysis laboratories.

"Testing is currently ongoing in community and law enforcement settings, but not enough," Gupta said on the call. "We need more testing." Gupta said xylazine can be purchased from online vendors in China and Puerto Rico. "To a lesser extent," some drug traffickers are mixing xylazine with fentanyl in Mexico, according to Gupta.

Another major component of the plan will identify the specific sources of xylazine and determine whether the tranquilizer was diverted from legitimate supplies or synthesized for illegal use. The plan will also enhance the Biden administration's ability to regulate the xylazine supply chain while maintaining the tranquilizer's availability for legitimate uses in animals in research.

The administration will also explore potential regulatory options for disrupting the production, distribution and sale of illegal xylazine, according to the plan.

That could potentially include scheduling xylazine under the Controlled Substances Act, which would designate a rating for the tranquilizer according to its abuse risk.

The administration will also consider potential avenues for prosecuting those who manufacture, import, export, sell or distribute xylazine to support fentanyl trafficking.

The last two components of the plan are scaling up research efforts on xylazine-laced fentanyl and developing an epidemiological data system to track the spread and effects of the drug combination.

The "good news," is many actions outlined in the plan are "already underway," Gupta said.

For example, the Drug Enforcement Administration in March warned the American public of a sharp increase in the trafficking of fentanyl mixed with xylazine. A month earlier, the FDA restricted the unlawful entry of xylazine in the U.S.

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Archived Version

Tue, 11 Jul 2023 17:46

Image source, Getty ImagesBy Rachel Schraer, Clare Hix & Lindsey Harris

BBC Panorama

More than a quarter of patients on antidepressants in England - about two million people - have been taking them for five years, the BBC has found.

This is despite there being limited evidence of the benefits of taking the drugs for that length of time.

A doctor who runs an NHS clinic helping people off the pills says withdrawal symptoms can make it hard for some to stop taking their medication.

Withdrawal guidance was updated in 2019, but he says little has changed.

More than eight million people in England are on antidepressants - which are prescribed for depression, anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder and other conditions. That's one million more people than five years previously, NHS prescribing figures show.

The new figures on long-term use - for the period 2018-2022 - were provided to BBC Panorama by the NHS, following a Freedom of Information request. The data gives an overall picture but does not reflect the circumstances of individual patients, some of whom could be on antidepressants long-term for good reason.

The investigation also uncovered evidence that a leading drug company attempted 27 years ago to conceal possible withdrawal effects that one drug could cause.

Modern antidepressants - called SSRIs (Selective Serotonin Re-Uptake Inhibitors) - arrived from the late 1980s, including Prozac. They were quickly heralded as wonder drugs compared with earlier medications, some of which had serious side effects.

They were thought to treat depression by fixing an imbalance of the mood-regulating chemical serotonin in the brain. Researchers are now not clear how they work. One theory is that they simply change how you think or feel, rather than rectifying an underlying problem.

The NHS recommends antidepressants as a treatment for more severe depression. Talking therapy as well as exercise and lifestyle changes might be recommended instead of, or in combination with, the medication.

"Throughout my long and extensive career, I have seen people benefit from antidepressants," said Prof Wendy Burn, former president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists.

"I see them working in my clinical practice, I see lives being changed by them."

But she added: "People are staying on antidepressants longer, and we don't really have long-term studies that support that."

Image caption, Prof Wendy Burn helped change official guidance on antidepressants

There has long been a debate about how effective antidepressants are. The most comprehensive research, from the University of Oxford, suggests antidepressants do help some people, at least in the short-term.

But on average, their benefits are relatively modest, and the way people respond varies, with some not responding at all, according to the researcher who led the study.

And there is some evidence to suggest that long-term antidepressant use may be linked to some health risks, such as heart problems and diabetes. It is also thought that long-term use may lead to a higher risk of withdrawal symptoms in some people.

Withdrawal can happen when you stop a drug that your body has become used to.

Taking that drug away too quickly, before the brain has had time to adjust, can lead to symptoms - including low mood and feelings of anxiety. Some symptoms overlap with the original condition the drug was prescribed for, which means the withdrawal can sometimes be confused with relapse.

The symptoms depend on the individual, which drug they were taking, and for how long. Many patients can stop taking antidepressants without experiencing any problems.

If you are affected by any of the issues in this article you can find details of organisations that can help via the BBC Action Line

Panorama has uncovered evidence to suggest that one major drug company which manufactured SSRI antidepressants had become increasingly aware of a whole range of withdrawal symptoms from the mid-1990s, but was reluctant to share this information with the public and medicines regulators.

A copy of a confidential 1996 memo from firm Pfizer - which originally sold sertraline, now the UK's most common antidepressant - shows employees discussing what the drug company would tell regulators in Norway.

"We should not volunteer to describe the withdrawal symptoms, but have an agreed list prepared in case they insist," the memo says.

Some of the withdrawal reactions the memo refers to include sensory disturbances, sweating, nausea, insomnia, tremors, agitation and anxiety.

Pfizer no longer produces sertraline. Responding to Panorama's findings, a spokesperson said the company "monitored and reported all adverse event data" to licensing authorities, "in line with its legal and regulatory obligations and updated sertraline labelling as required."

It added: "Public health organisations and professional medical bodies throughout the world have recognised sertraline and other SSRIs as the treatment of choice for adult depression." The company said the drug's label warned about withdrawal and had been updated "as required".

The Royal College of Psychiatrists published updated information on withdrawal in 2019 - overseen by Prof Burn, who was its president at the time. It came after she heard testimony from patients who had experienced severe withdrawal effects.

Until then, guidance used by the NHS and the college maintained withdrawal was mostly mild and short-lived - lasting no more than about a week.

Now NHS guidance reflects that it can be severe and longer-lasting for some, and withdrawal can last many months.

Information on stopping antidepressants

Patients with concerns about their medication should discuss them with their doctor. Stopping an antidepressant suddenly can be dangerousDoctors say it is always important to seek advice and treatment for mental health problems and to try to have any medication regularly reviewedVisit the NHS, the Royal College of Psychiatrists and Leap For PDD websites for informationA Royal College of Psychiatrists spokesperson told the BBC: "Medicine continuously evolves, as does our knowledge of treating mental illness. As a result, the college updates its guidance when new evidence comes to light."

A lack of awareness about withdrawal difficulties has meant that even medical professionals who prescribe the drugs have struggled to stop taking antidepressants themselves.

Dr Mark Horowitz, who tried to stop the antidepressants he had taken for 15 years in 2015, said: "It led to complete havoc in my life," he says. "I would wake up in the morning in full panic, like I was being chased by an animal."

The panic he felt would last until late into the evenings and he took up running as a distraction.

"I ran until my feet bled, because it gave me a slight reprieve from that panic sensation."

He said it was worse than the symptoms that led him to take antidepressants in the first place.

Panorama examines whether the current generation of antidepressant drugs have lived up to their promises, following patients who have suffered serious side effects.

Watch The Antidepressant Story on BBC One at 20:00 on Monday 19 June (20:30 in Wales and Northern Ireland) and on BBC iPlayer afterwards (UK only)

He is concerned that far more work has been done on how to start patients on antidepressants - and much less on stopping.

"To me, it's the same as allowing cars to be sold without brakes," he said.

"We should know how to start the car and how to stop it."

Now Dr Horowitz runs England's only NHS antidepressant deprescribing clinic - a pilot scheme set up in London in 2021 to help people struggling to stop taking their medication.

At the moment he is seeing about 25 patients.

Despite withdrawal guidance having been updated, Dr Horowitz thinks patients are still struggling to get tailored advice. Guidance for doctors now recommends that people reduce the dose of their medication in stages, but it does not specify how long it should take. It's different for everyone.

Image caption, Dr Horowitz is still trying to reduce his antidepressant dose - and hopes to stop altogether this year

The Royal College of GPs told Panorama that family doctors were "highly-trained to have frank and sensitive conversations" with patients about the risks and benefits of antidepressants.

"Amid intense workload and workforce pressures," it said it was, "increasingly difficult to offer patients the time they need within the constraints of a standard 10-minute consultation."

The companies behind the most widely used antidepressants told Panorama that many clinical trials and studies, including ones conducted by independent researchers, had shown their drugs to be effective.

They said the drugs had been taken by many millions worldwide for potentially devastating and sometimes life-threatening conditions.

As with all medicines, they said, antidepressants have potential side effects which are clearly stated in the prescribing information. They added that their drugs are considered to be safe, with a positive benefit-risk ratio by doctors, patients and regulators around the world.

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Archived Version

Tue, 11 Jul 2023 17:32

I first thought that something was up when I saw that a certain member of the Cabinet had miraculously changed his appearance. He had acquired a new jawline. His neck emerged without effort from his collar. When he rose from his chair at the Cabinet table, that chair no longer tried to cling longingly about his hips.

I got it! He had lost weight, stones and stones of belly and dewlap; and I immediately thought of Julius Caesar, and his preference for well-fed colleagues.

'Let me have men about me that are fat,' said the Roman dictator, shortly before his assassination. 'Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look.'

As it turned out, Caesar was right to be worried about Cassius. Then I noticed another colleague whose silhouette was shrinking visibly; and another. By this time my spider senses were jangling.

If an otherwise healthy middle-aged man displays sudden weight loss, I reasoned, there are only two possible explanations. Either he has fallen hopelessly in love, or else he is about to mount a Tory leadership bid.

I was going to search for the hero inside myself '-- the one that was three stone lighter

I consulted the doctor, and he told me that I was an ideal candidate for these drugs

Then one of those colleagues came up and whispered the truth '-- that there was an entirely separate explanation. He had access, he said, to a wonder drug. 'It stops you wanting to eat,' he said. Really? I boggled.

'Look at me,' he said, and twanged his braces in triumph. He was right: there was a whole lot less of him than I remembered '-- so much less, in fact, that he looked almost gaunt by comparison. Suddenly I was interested.

I was going to search for the hero inside myself '-- the one that was three stone lighter. I was going to locate that svelte and dynamic version of Johnson, imprisoned for decades in pointless extra body weight, and I was going to set him free.

Tell me how, I said; and so my friend shared the number of a brilliant physician who had prescribed this magic potion. 'Are you sure it works?' I said. He twanged his braces again. There was no argument. It was a miracle.

I consulted the doctor, and he told me that I was an ideal candidate for these appetite-suppressing drugs. It works like this, he said: when you have had a meal, your body produces a hormone that tells your hypothalamus (at the base of the brain) that you are full; so you stop eating.

The trouble is this natural hormone only circulates for a couple of minutes, and before you know it you are chowing down again. So for decades scientists have been looking for the exact molecule that will tell you to stop being so damn hungry: the satiety molecule.

Back in the 1990s they thought they had cracked it when they extracted a hormone from the digestive system of the Gila monster '-- a giant black and orange lizard from Mexico.

They took this hormone, gave it to human beings, and somehow fooled the human alimentary system into slowing its metabolic rate.

Their stomachs started to think they belonged to Gila monsters, and began digesting things with reptilian slowness. People no longer felt quite so hungry, and for all I know they just sat there motionless, occasionally blinking and darting their tongues out at flies. It was an amazing breakthrough '-- and there is a campaign to get the scientists concerned the Nobel Prize.

But the Gila monster hormone was still too short-lived; it didn't last long enough in the system to defeat human greed. So scientists in Denmark (with some help from Oxford) started searching ever harder for the knock-out satiety hormone, one that will suppress your appetite for a whole week.

I must have been losing four or five pounds a week - maybe more - when it started to go wrong

It was a huge effort that lasted six or seven years '-- until bingo, they got it. The hormone is called semaglutide, and the proprietary name of the drug is Ozempic.

It's a cinch, said the doctor. All you need to do is inject a tiny dose of clear Ozempic fluid into your abdomen, once a week, and hey presto '-- no more raiding the fridge at 11.30pm for the cheddar and chorizo washed down with half a bottle of wine.

Say goodbye to that unconquerable mid-morning lust for a bacon sandwich. No longer will you stand over the children waiting for them to push aside their bowls of pasta '-- and then ruthlessly scoff whatever they have left.

After 40 years of moral failure, 40 years of weakness in the face of temptation '-- of akrasia '-- I was going to acquire a new and invincible chemical willpower. I was going to become an ex-glutton, a person of moderation and grace and restraint, and like my Cabinet colleagues I was going to start to resemble a chiselled whippet.

He wrote out the prescription, I zoomed to the chemist's; and though I was frankly a bit taken aback by the cost, what the hell, I said to myself, think of the benefits to health.

So for weeks I jabbed my stomach, and for weeks it worked. Effortlessly, I pushed aside the puddings and the second helpings. Wasn't it amazing, I said to myself, how little food you really need.

I must have been losing four or five pounds a week '-- maybe more '-- when all at once it started to go wrong. I don't know why, exactly. Maybe it was something to do with constantly flying around the world, and changing time zones, but I started to dread the injections, because they were making me feel ill.

One minute I would be fine, and the next minute I would be talking to Ralph on the big white phone; and I am afraid that I decided that I couldn't go on.

For now I am back to exercise and willpower, but I look at my colleagues '-- leaner but not hungrier '-- and I hope that if science can do it for them, maybe one day it can help me, and everyone else.

I believe we are still in the foothills of what these drugs can do. They could be transformative. I talked to Mads Thomsen, the brilliant Dane who led the search for semaglutide, and he described how these drugs will eventually become much cheaper, and orally ingested. He described how people could use them daily, like statins, and radically improve their health '-- and I think he is right.

The obesity crisis in this country is appalling: more than three-quarters of older people are overweight or obese '-- and the numbers are terrible among the kids.

Yes, the drugs will cost a bit to begin with, but those who can afford it should pay; and think of the savings for the NHS in diabetes, cancer and cardiovascular disease. We are performing terrible invasive and destructive surgeries and treatments '-- all because people could not restrain their appetites. Why not help them?

I agree with the fundamental conservative instinct '-- that we should be relying on good old-fashioned human determination to keep that fridge door shut. We should all be taking more exercise. But in the end it may not be enough.

I see nothing morally wrong in using these drugs to help you lose weight, any more than it is wrong to use an electrically assisted bicycle to get up the hill. Even for us fatties, it turns out, there is such a thing as satiety '-- and science has found it.

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Archived Version

Tue, 11 Jul 2023 17:28

The first time Marion Carrett tested positive for COVID, she didn't think much of it. It was at the height of Australia's Omicron wave, and the virus was striking all around her.

The second time, she figured she was just unlucky.

Then came a third positive test.

And a fourth.

It wasn't until she caught it a fifth time that she began to suspect she was dealing with something more than bad luck. After travelling from her Gold Coast home to Melbourne, Marion was forced to turn right around when the by-then familiar symptoms started. "That's when I went, 'Okay, well, this is out of control. I can't go on holidays, I can't go anywhere'," she says.

Over the following five months, she would test positive for COVID another five times '-- returning a negative result between each one.

Marion Carrett has tested positive for COVID 10 times. ( Supplied: Marion Carrett )After what she believes were 10 separate infections, including nine in the past 10 months, Marion's life is a shadow of what it once was. Interstate and overseas trips have been cancelled because the risk of falling ill is too great. Theatre tickets have been given away time and time again. Weeks have been spent in bed, isolated away from her mother and niece, who she shares a house with.

Recently Marion has resorted to giving up going into the office, resolving to spend three months working from home in a desperate attempt to out-manoeuvre the virus at least long enough to get a fifth vaccine dose. Right now, she says, a six-month break between illnesses is little more than a pipe dream.

"I'm really fortunate that I have a job that can be done at home," the 51-year-old Gold Coast resident says. "But I don't really want to be locked in there forever."

Almost as soon as SARS-CoV-2 '-- the virus that causes COVID '-- made the jump to humans, frantic work began to understand the biological lottery that dictates who gets it and how serious the infection is. More than three years later, scientists have some answers, but the exact biological conditions that create a NOVID (people who have never caught the virus), someone extremely susceptible like Marion, or most people in between, remain a mystery.

"It's the million-dollar question," says Dr Megan Steain, a virologist at the University of Sydney currently working to develop a variant-proof COVID vaccine. "There's been a handful of genes that have been associated with it, but making these absolute connections is really difficult."

It's left people like Marion in a sort of limbo, desperate for guidance as the world around them embraces life after lockdowns. She says seeing an immunologist has left her with more questions than answers.

At the appointment, Marion says was told that she wasn't the only one suffering from repeat infections and it was likely due to a minor defect in her immune system.

But to find out what that defect is would require a long, and expensive, process of genetic testing and even if they solved the mystery, there was no guarantee that anything could be done to change it.

"I was kind of hoping he would have something that would boost my immunity or something," she says. "It was a pretty disappointing experience."

The possible suspectsWhile we don't yet have the full picture, scientists do have some theories about what makes someone more susceptible to COVID reinfection.

The first, and most obvious, possibility to rule out is environmental causes. The more COVID you're exposed to, the more likely you are to catch it. For example, if you spend a lot of time mingling with large groups in enclosed spaces, you probably have a higher risk of getting COVID repeatedly than someone who rarely leaves their home and wears a mask when they do.

The next thing to look at is someone's acquired immune response, which Dr Steain says can be "highly variable" and influenced by things like age, diet, lifestyle or gender.

"We know that we have people who are quite high responders, who generate robust, quite long-lasting immune responses and other people who for some reason just don't seem to respond as well to vaccination," Dr Steain says.

Stuart Turville and his team at the Kirby Institute are working to track new COVID variants, looking at how well they navigate pre-existing antibodies.( Supplied: Stuart Turville )Professor Stuart Turville and his team at the Kirby Institute are working to track new COVID variants, looking at how well they navigate pre-existing antibodies. He describes B-cells '-- a key player in our acquired immune response '-- as individual Lego blocks.

As time goes on, through exposure the body becomes better at understanding how the virus works and these cells are able to come together and build increasingly effective barriers. "Our biggest ally in the pandemic is that our B-cells have been given enough time and experience to mature '... so the right combination can come about," he says. "Our antibodies aren't static '-- they're getting better and better over time."

For some people, however, this doesn't seem to be happening, leading to prolonged COVID infections and higher chances of repeat infections. People who are immunocompromised or immunosuppressed, say from cancer treatment, are at particularly high risk.

Does DNA play a role?While some parts of our immune system are malleable and able to strengthen over time, there's another layer that's more ingrained. This is often called "innate immunity" and it's the first line of defence responsible for holding viruses and pathogens at bay while the rest of the immune system kicks into gear.

"With hardwired immunity, we have a selection of receptors that don't change," Dr Turvill says. "They're really great in the short-term of hampering the progression of a virus '-- and in some cases, they do such a good job that the virus doesn't go any further."

Research is currently underway to understand whether genetic differences in how these receptors operate influence how susceptible we are to COVID infections and how serious the illness is.

One hormone that has been of considerable interest is Type-1 Interferon, one of the key players in our innate immune system. "It's basically molecules produced by cells to try and stop viral infection from occurring," Dr Steain says. "Some people seem to produce these very rapidly in large amounts, and we think that can help control or really stop a viral infection in its tracks."

If overproduction of Type-1 Interferon can make people more resistant to COVID, then the opposite might also be true '-- that people who aren't able to mount a strong interferon response may be more at risk of repeat infections, particularly if they've also got a poor acquired immune response.

It's a theory that Professor Stuart Tangye, an immunologist at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research, has been monitoring closely.

Professor Tangye specialises in researching rare immune diseases and says even a single gene mutation can be enough for "the wheels to fall off your immune system".

"It does all seem to point Type-1 Interferon, but it's a bit like a daisy chain," he says.

"There are many points within the way the immune system responds to SARS-CoV-2 which results in the production of Interferon '-- if there's a break at any one of those daisy chain points, there can be a problem."

Loading... Professor Tangye is also a member of the COVID Human Genetic Effort, an international consortium of experts seeking to understand the genetic and immunological factors that influence SARS-CoV-2 infections.

He says one of the group's early findings concerned people with severe, life-threatening COVID symptoms; they discovered about 15 per cent of study participants were making auto-antibodies that attacked interferon production, crippling the immune system.

They also found a small cohort of people with severe symptoms had previously unknown single gene defects.

"There's a number of viral infections now where there's pretty good evidence that if you can't make Type-1 Interferon or your production of Interferon is blocked by these auto-antibodies, you are really susceptible," Professor Tangye says.

Genetic influence on resistance or susceptibility to viruses is not without precedent. For example, there's a small cohort of people who are naturally resistant to HIV infection because of a genetic variant.

"We've seen it with other viruses, there are some people who are more resistant than others," Dr Turville says. "There's still a lot of things we are still learning about COVID."

Just last month, research was published confirming earlier theories that people with blood type A were at greater risk of COVID infection than those with type O, due to SARS-CoV-2's spike protein's preference for certain blood cells.

Where to from here?While many of the theories about increased susceptibility go hand in hand with severe symptoms, Marion says each time she tests positive the experience is pretty much the same.

For three or four days she feels really unwell: "Not unwell enough to go to hospital, but unwell enough that getting out of bed is a real effort." The symptoms include fatigue, a sore throat, cough, headache temperatures, and chills.

"It's actually been very similar every time," she says. "I've bounced back better the last couple of times, and I think that's because I'm now getting antivirals and I think that's helped."

Antivirals, like Paxlovid, are now available to Australians who are at risk of developing serious COVID symptoms and have been shown to reduce the length and severity of infection.

For now, Marion says she's going to try to improve her health in other ways and limit unnecessary trips outside the house.

"I'm sort of a bit anxious about the thought of being in this position forever," she says.

"Is COVID going to go away ever? I hope so, but if it doesn't, I don't really know how I'm going to manage it."

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Tue, 11 Jul 2023 17:09

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

As the debate rages in the United States over parental notification and authority in cases involving transgender children, the United Kingdom is embroiled in a controversy over a law that would not only limit parental authority in such cases but affirmatively require parents to pay for such transitioning.

Under the interpretation put forward by police, parents who refuse to use the alternative pronouns for their children or refuse to pay for their transitioning could be criminally prosecuted.

According to the UK's Code for the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), abusive conduct now includes ''withholding money for transitioning [and] refusing to use their preferred name or pronoun.''

So a parent with familial or religious objections to the transitioning of a child would be required under the law to fund operations or treatments.

According to the guidance material, this is not even ''an exhausted list,'' but some of the first ''examples'' of potentially criminal conduct that comes to mind.

The guideline would suggest that parents with deep-seated religious convictions against transgender status would either have to fund an operation that they consider immoral or face arrest for failing to do so.

To potentially prosecute a parent for refusing to use an adopted pronoun of their child is chilling and wrong. Nevertheless, a CPS spokesperson doubled down with a comment to Fox News that ''domestic abuse is a severe crime and leaves victims with a lasting impact . . . This assists prosecutors to ensure that any victim, regardless of who they are, can get justice for the abuse they have faced.''

This follows the erosion of free speech and religious rights in Britain, including English courts upholding the criminalization ''toxic ideologies.''

It was Sir Edward Coke in The Institutes of the Laws of England, 1628 who declared ''For a man's house is his castle, et domus sua cuique est tutissimum refugium [and each man's home is his safest refuge].'' William Pitt, the first Earl of Chatham later added:

''The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the crown. It may be frail '' its roof may shake '' the wind may blow through it '' the storm may enter '' the rain may enter '' but the King of England cannot enter.''

That no longer appears the case when misusing pronouns or failing to write a check for a child's transitioning, which will now be treated as the same as physical child abuse.

As the definition of abuse is broadened, the state derives greater control and direction over family affairs and relations. Moreover, leaving enforcement to the discretion of police in this ''nonexhaustive'' list only further undermines this long-standing protection over internal family matters. The question is what the limiting principle will be as the state defines a wider array of conduct to be child abuse. The default assumption of Pitt appears to have flipped in the United Kingdom.

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Tue, 11 Jul 2023 16:31

An Israeli professor who claims to have given evidence to the FBI about Biden family corruption has been charged with arms trafficking and violating US sanctions on Iran by the DOJ.

Gal Luft, 57, was arrested in February on eight counts of working secretly for China, attempting to broker the sale of arms to Libya, Kenya and the UAE without the necessary US permits, and selling Iranian oil to China in violation of sanctions.

He was detained in Cyprus but fled while free on bail. His whereabouts are unknown, but on Monday the indictment against him was unsealed.

Luft claims he has information about the Biden family's business with people linked to Chinese military intelligence. He was a potential witness for the US House committee investigating wrongdoings by Hunter Biden and his father, President Joe Biden.

The status of his potential testimony is not known now that Biden's DOJ has announced charges against the think-tank leader.

Gal Luft, an Israeli-American professor, claims he has information about members of the Biden family doing business with people linked to Chinese military intelligence

Luft said last week he was being hunted by the Justice Department because he had information about the Bidens.

Luft is charged with willfully failing to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, arms trafficking, Iranian sanctions violations and making false statements to federal agents.

Luft last week told The New York Post, in a video filmed from an undisclosed location, he was being hunted by the Justice Department because he had information about the Bidens.

'I, who volunteered to inform the US government about a potential security breach and about compromising information about a man vying to be the next president, am now being hunted by the very same people who I informed '-- and may have to live on the run for the rest of my life,' he said.

The House Oversight Committee was preparing to interview Luft as part of their investigation into the Biden family before he fled his extradition from Greece.

Luft claims he met with FBI agents in Brussels in 2019 and told them relatives of President Joe Biden were receiving vast sums of money from Chinese officials.

Luft said the China state-controlled energy company CEFC was paying $100,000 a month to Hunter Biden, and $65,000 to his uncle, Joe's brother, Jim Biden.

Hunter and Jim Biden took the money in exchange for their FBI connections and use of the Biden name to promote China's Belt and Road Initiative around the world, Luft claimed.

On Monday, prosecutors in Manhattan detailed the charges against Luft, which were filed earlier this year.

Damian Williams, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said Luft worked illegally to advance Chinese interests in the United States and worldwide.

'As alleged, Gal Luft, a dual U.S.-Israeli citizen and co-head of a Maryland think tank, engaged in multiple, serious criminal schemes,' said Williams.

'He subverted foreign agent registration laws in the United States to seek to promote Chinese policies by acting through a former high-ranking U.S. Government official; he acted as a broker in deals for dangerous weapons and Iranian oil; and he told multiple lies about his crimes to law enforcement.

'As the charges unsealed today reflect, our Office will continue to work vigorously with our law enforcement partners to detect and hold accountable those who surreptitiously attempt to perpetrate malign foreign influence campaigns here in the United States.'

Hunter Biden pictured with his dad Joe in June. Luft said the China state-controlled energy company CEFC was paying $100,000 a month to Hunter Biden, and $65,000 to his uncle, Joe's brother, Jim Biden

Joe Biden and brother Jim Biden (right) choose their flavor at Ellen's Homemade Ice Cream in Charleston, West Virginia, October 24, 2008

Luft now faces several charges including arms trafficking and is accused of attempting to broker the sale of Chinese weapons to Libya, Kenya and the UAE, without the necessary permits.

Luft is accused of attempting to broker the sale of Chinese weapons to Libya, Kenya and the UAE, without the necessary permits.

Prosecutors claim he communicated in code, referring to weapons as 'toys' and the United States as 'uncle'.

He also referred to the Iranian oil as being Brazilian, in an alleged attempt to hide the true origin of the fuel.

The indictment stated Luft voluntarily spoke to investigators, and lied to them repeatedly - insisting that he was not involved in trafficking arms or brokering trade of Iranian oil.

'For years, Luft, a dual U.S.-Israeli citizen who serves as the co-director of a Maryland-based think tank, engaged, along with others, in multiple international criminal schemes,' the indictment states.

Luft claims the charges against him are politically-motivated, and designed to stop him sharing what he knows about Hunter, Jim Biden and their businesses.

'The chances of me getting a fair trial in Washington are virtually zero,' he said.

Explaining why he skipped bail, he added: 'I had to do what I had to do. I don't want to get people in trouble.'

Greek authorities realized he had skipped bail after finding Luft's car abandoned near the airport. He told the publication he was in a different country now.

The former Israeli Defense Force colonel claims he was 'charged for a thought crime' amid his weapons trafficking allegations.

The accusations date from an email with an associate five years ago.

Luft told The New York Post: 'I was asked by a bona fide arms dealer, an Israeli friend, to inquire with a company I knew if they had an item and what would be the price of an item.

'This is where the conspiracy ended. No follow-up, no money, no brokering activity,' he claimed.

Luft also said there was sinister intent behind his extraction order which was issued on November 1, 2020 - seven days before the midterms.

He claims it was processed shortly before Democrats were expected to lose control of the House to Republicans who wanted to investigate the Biden family over alleged corruption and abuse of foreign influence.

Luft is claiming that he was left with no option but to flee his bail as he believes his chances of getting a fair trial are 'virtually zero'

'When it was clear the Republicans are going to win the House or the Senate, all of a sudden comes [Republican Rep. James] Comer and [Republican Rep. Jim] Jordan and the game is changing,' he said.

'There will be questions and subpoenas and investigations [so] they [the administration] have to discredit me. I never thought of coming forward. Through 2020 I sat quiet like a fish.'

He added: I didn't want to get caught up in this game, but when they arrested me I had no choice but to blow it up.'

Luft made his claim earlier this year after he was detained at the Cyprus airport.

'I've been arrested in Cyprus on a politically motivated extradition request by the US,' he tweeted on February 19.

'The US, claiming I'm an arms dealer. It would be funny if it weren't tragic. I've never been an arms dealer.

'DOJ [Department Of Justice] is trying to bury me to protect Joe, Jim & Hunter Biden. Shall I name names?,' he wrote.

The tweet was brought to the attention of House investigators.

Then-Vice President Joe Biden, left, with his son Hunter, right, at the Duke Georgetown NCAA college basketball game in Washington, January 30, 2010

Republican Jim Jordan from Ohio is one of the US House members who has been investigating the Bidens

It comes after emails revealed earlier this year that Hunter had been asked to use contacts in the FBI to help his Chinese business partner, who was arrested for bribery and money laundering.

It was also claimed that Hunter Biden used a top FBI official code-named 'One Eye' to funnel secret bureau information to his Chinese business partners.

Patrick Ho '' convicted of bribery and money laundering in 2018 '' was secretary general of CEFC, the Chinese oil giant Hunter partnered with, and which sent the Biden family more than $5 million.

Hunter Biden described Ho as the 'f***ing spy chief of China' in a May 2018 recorded conversation on his abandoned laptop, and court documents show Ho was under surveillance by federal law enforcement in an espionage-related investigation.

Hunter took a $1 million wire payment to represent Ho as his attorney before he was arrested in November 2017. He also agreed to speak to FBI agents to glean information on the case against his Chinese Communist Party-connected client.

On September 18, 2017, Ho retained Hunter with a $1million contract.

The agreement, obtained by DailyMail.com earlier this year in March from Hunter's abandoned laptop, describes Ho as 'Deputy Chairman and Secretary General of China Energy Fund Committee' (CEFC) and says Hunter would provide 'Counsel to matters related to US law and advice pertaining to the hiring and legal analysis of any US Law Firm or Lawyer'.

Two months later, Ho was cuffed by FBI agents who intercepted him at JFK Airport in New York on November 18, 2017 on charges of bribing African government officials for CEFC.

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Reverend Al Sharpton's pastor brother has been jailed for 30 months for a slew of crimes including drug trafficking, income tax evasion and lying to obtain Social Security disability benefits.

Pastor Kenneth Sharpton Glasgow, 58, the half-brother of the civil rights leader, was sentenced to more than two years behind bars on Thursday for his illegal acts. His prison stint begins on August 17.

Glasgow pleaded guilty to embezzling $407,000 from two non-profit organizations he founded including, The Ordinary People Society (TOPS) located in Dothana, Alabama a felon voting rights advocacy organization, and the Prodigal Child Project.

Though the prosecutors allege he may have taken nearly $1 million from the nonprofits without reporting the income, US District Judge R. Austin Huffaker rejected that claim, The Christian Post reported.

After the sentencing hearing Jim Parkman, one of Glasgow's defense attorneys, told the news outlet it was 'a fair sentence.'

Pastor Kenneth Sharpton Glasgow, 58, with his half-brother Rev. Al Sharpton

Glasgow is the son of Sharpton's father, Al Sharpton Sr., and Sharpton's older half-sister, Tina Glasgow, ProPublica reported. Tina Glasgow is one of two children Sharpton's mother, Ada, had during her first marriage in Alabama. Pictured: Al Sharpton speaks onstage during the 2023 ESSENCE Festival Of Culture on June 30, 2023 in New Orleans, Louisiana

Glasgow also tried to deceive the Social Security administration in order to collect disability benefits, but was ordered to repay the $376,000 he collected .

Pastor Kenneth Sharpton Glasgow was sentenced to more than two years behind bars on Thursday for his illegal acts. His prison stint begins on August 17

The con-artist pastor, who also runs Kenny Sharpton-Glasgow Ministries International, also pled guilty to conspiring with another man, Willie Frank Peterson, to distribute cocaine. That case is still pending, as per the news outlet.

Previous crimes include an alleged assault on a police officer who reportedly tried to remove the illegal drugs Glasgow had been hiding in his mouth during a traffic stop.

He is scheduled to appear in court later this month regarding the assault charge, but his camp believes that the other charges he is facing will be dropped, News 4 reported.

In March 2018, Glasgow was taken into custody with 26-year-old Jaime Townes after the body of 23-year-old Breunia Jennings was found in a wrecked car in Alabama.

Jennings had been shot in the head and pronounced dead at the scene. Police said they believe Townes was angry at Jennings because he believed she had stolen his car.

Dothan police said several people, including Townes and Glasgow, were arrested at the scene and transported to the department for interviews.

Police then charged Townes and Glasgow with capital murder. According to police, Jennings was shot during a dispute over a car.

The authorities said that 'instead of him (Townes) notifying law enforcement, he took matters in his own hands and jumped in Mr. Glasgow's vehicle to find Breunia Jennings.'

Authorities said numerous shots were fired at the vehicle Jennings was driving and police believe Townes fired those shots.

Glasgow later appeared in court and questioned the murder charge against him.

'I don't know why I am facing capital murder charges,' Glasgow stated, as per The Dothan Eagle.

'I'm not responsible for what someone else does. He just asked me for a ride to take him to look for his car.'

Rev. Al Sharpton's pastor brother Kenneth Glasgow Sharpton (pictured) was jailed for 30 months for drug trafficking, income tax evasion and lying to obtain Social Security benefits

The 23-year-old victim Breunia Jennings was shot in the head and pronounced dead at the scene. Her body was found in a wrecked car in Alabama

According to Alabama law, murder committed by or through the use of a deadly weapon while the victim is in a vehicle is considered a capital crime, the Eagle reported.

Glasgow was charged with murder because it's believed he aided or abetted Townes by letting him use his car.

In this case, aiding or abetting is equally liable for the underlying crime, according to the state's complicity statue.

He was eventually cleared of the capital murder charge.

Kenneth and Al Sharpton share the same father, Al Sharpton, Sr. Glasgow served a 14-year-sentence on robbery and drug convictions more than two decades ago. The experience inspired him to launch the nonprofit The Ordinary People's Society, whose mission is to promote a number of social justice initiatives, including felon voting rights

Glasgow, who was born in Brooklyn but raised in Alabama led a different life than his half-brother Al Sharpton. The brothers - Kenneth and Al - share the same father.

Glasgow was born after Al Sharpton Sr., and Sharpton's older half-sister, Tina Glasgow, began a sexual relationship, ProPublica reported.

During an interview with the publication he said: 'I was born messed up. My fingers messed up. It's meant for me to be messed up.'

Glasgow served a 14-year-sentence on robbery and drug convictions more than two decades ago. The experience inspired him to launch the nonprofit The Ordinary People's Society, who mission is to promote a number of social justice initiatives including, felon voting rights.

His community outreach over the years had helped those afflicted with drug addiction, mass incarceration, homelessness, poverty, unemployment and hunger.

Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, testified on Glasgow's behalf and described him as having ' no boundaries of who he will help,' the news outlet reported.

Glasgow's defense team said that the judge took into account Glasgow's community work when deciding on his 30-month prison sentence.

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Tue, 11 Jul 2023 16:01

Quebec has shot straight to the top of the league table for euthanasia. According to projections published in the Daily Mail, more than 7% of all deaths in the province were medically assisted.

Journalist James Reinl reported: ''nearly 5,000 people opted for assisted suicides last year even as the Canadian province's officials make it easier for the terminally ill to end their lives. Nearly 8 percent of all deaths in Quebec are assisted suicides '-- far higher than Canada's other provinces and even such countries as Belgium and the Netherlands, which have much older euthanasia laws.''

According to an article in AFP, ''Since introducing the option in 2015, the number of assisted deaths in the province has outpaced the rest of Canada (3.3 percent), as well as the Netherlands (4.8 percent) and Belgium (2.3 percent) which have older euthanasia laws.''

And Quebec politicians are determined to make it even easier to access euthanasia. Earlier this month legislation was passed to allow people suffering from neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's, to make advance directives before their mental competence degrades and they become unable to make a formal request euthanasia.

The new law also allows Quebecers to receive a doctor-assisted death in places other than hospitals, such as funeral homes and long-term care facilities. Nurses will be able to administer the lethal injection, too. However, MAID must not be promoted for profit and no fees can be charged.

Some critics of the new law remarked upon how easily it passed through the Quebec legislature. The vote for 103 in favour, 2 opposed and one abstention.

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Tue, 11 Jul 2023 15:52

Someone (who needs to remain anonymous) was able to obtain the death certificates from Minnesota for all deaths that occurred from 2015 to the present, which presented the opportunity to see if the CDC is being entirely honest about the US death data. Unsurprisingly, the CDC is not.

As we shall document, the CDC is concealing references to a covid vaccine on Minnesota death certificates (that are exceedingly rare to begin with because of widespread medical establishment denialism of vaccine adverse side effects). In almost every death certificate that identifies a covid vaccine as a cause of death, the CDC committed data fraud by not assigning the ICD 10 code for vaccine side effects to the causes of death listed on the death certificate.

BackgroundWhen someone dies, there is a death certificate that is filled out for official/legal purposes. Death certificates contain a lot of information (some states include more than others), including the causes of death (CoD).

Causes of death refer to the medical conditions that ultimately played some role in the demise of the decedent. To qualify as a CoD, a condition only needs to contribute to the medical decline of the decedent in some way, but doesn't have to be directly responsible for whatever ultimately killed the person. If someone had high blood pressure, and subsequently suffered a heart attack that led to cardiac arrest which killed them, all three conditions qualify as CoD. On the other hand, this unfortunate fellow's ingrown toenail is not a cause of death, because it in no way contributed to their demise.

This is from the CDC's own guidance explaining how to properly fill out CoD's on a death certificate (you don't need to understand the difference between Cause A, B, etc for this article):

The critical thing to keep in mind is that the person filling out the death certificate writes a text description of the CoD's, but doesn't assign the ICD 10 codes for the CoD's.

That's the CDC's job.

ICD 10 Coding System for CoD'sThere is a fancy coding system that is used to classify the many thousands of medical conditions that can play a role in death known as the International Classification of Diseases. Every few years, it is updated/revised to keep up with new medical (or bureaucratic) developments, as new conditions are discovered and old conditions are reorganized or reclassified.

The current iteration of the ICD that was used for the deaths we're looking at is the ICD 10 (that's the 10th version). It is basically a hierarchical classification system:

There are codes for practically every random weird thing you can think of:

These are categories themselves '' a code can go as 7 characters long:

SourceICD 10 Codes for Covid Vaccine Side EffectsThere are two ICD 10 codes for vaccine side effects that can be broadly used for the covid vaccines '' T88.1 and Y59.0:

T88.1 '' Other complications following immunization, not elsewhere classified.

Y59.0 '' Viral vaccines

(There are other ICD 10 codes for various specific complications or side effects of vaccines, but the point remains that an ICD 10 code for vaccine side effects exists.)

CDC '' Centers for Data ConcealmentThe CDC receives the death certificates from the various states and applies ICD 10 codes. This is primarily done with a secret algorithm, with a tiny percentage of cases adjudicated by CDC staff when the algorithm is unable to confidently assign an ICD code to the text description written on the actual death certificate (such as confounding spelling or a text description that does not make much sense). I confirmed this with a biostatistician who works for a DoH in a US state (I'm leaving out which one because I want to preserve my persona grata status). The individual who obtained the MN death certificates likewise confirmed with state officials that the ICD codes in their data were assigned by the CDC.

What a death certificate identifying a covid vaccine as a CoD *should* look like

There are three death certificates in the MN tranche that contain either T88.1 or Y59.0. One is for a flu vaccine reaction, and '' surprisingly '' the other two are for a covid vaccine.

Note '' when used below:

UCoD (Underlying Cause of Death) refers to ''the disease or injury that initiated the train of events leading directly to death, or the circumstances of the accident or violence which produced the fatal injury.''

MCoD (Multiple Causes of Death) refers to ''the immediate cause of death and all other intermediate and contributory conditions listed on the death certificate.'' (everything else)

The first death certificate contains a covid vaccine ICD (below), and it looks like the CDC was trapped and could not avoid putting it on without fundamentally rewriting the death certificate, because the vaccine complication is unambiguously listed as the UCoD (this death certificate is saying the person was killed by a heart attack caused by the covid vaccine within minutes of injection):

The second death certificate the CDC deigned to assign a vaccine ICD (and not only one but *BOTH* vaccine ICD codes(!!)) feels like perhaps a rogue CDC employee was working that day and snuck it in:

In any event, as we can clearly see, both T88.1 and Y59.0 are indeed appropriate for when a covid vaccine is listed as a CoD. Thus the CDC cannot claim that there was no official ICD 10 code that could be used to designate covid vaccines (or any other excuse).

The FRAUD:

With that introduction, below are 7 death certificates from Minnesota that identify a covid vaccine as a cause of death where the CDC omitted the corresponding ICD 10 code identifying a vaccine side effect when the CDC assigned ICD codes to the death certificates.

The first fraudulently filled out death certificate offers a crucial detail highlighting not only the fraud but the naked double standards for assigning CoD's.

This death certificate identifies both a covid vaccine and covid itself as contributory CoD's (in the last row highlighted in yellow, vaccine underlined in green, covid in blue):

''covid vaccine second dose 10 hrs prior to death''''history of covid infection in May 2020'' (about 7-8 months prior to death)Any remotely objective person would presume that if a condition that occurred 7 months prior without any clear link to the actual death still nevertheless meets the standard for being identified as a CoD, then surely a condition or event that occurred a mere TEN HOURS before death identified by the doctor filling out the death certificate merits inclusion as a CoD.

Yet, the CDC assigned U70.1 '' ''COVID-19, virus identified'' '' for covid, but neglected to assign T88.1 or Y59.0 for the covid vaccine.

A second point to highlight is that we see that anything mentioned as a CoD, even in the context of ''history of'' that had (presumably) been long resolved, is a legitimate CoD insofar as assigning an ICD 10 code and epidemiological data are concerned.

This decedent suffered a cardiac arrest that ultimately led to her death *ONE DAY* after being vaccinated.

(For the record, I am not bothered by the ''though it's not clear as to any mechanism for how the vaccine could have led to the cardiac arrest'' line. This death occurred February 24, 2021 '' well before there was any sort of public awareness about the multiple plausible mechanisms by which the vaccine could cause heart damage. So to me, whoever filled out the death certificate was a gutsy fellow willing to identify a covid vaccine on a death certificate that had his name on it.)

Fraudulent Death Certificate #3

This death certificate doesn't merely identify a covid vaccine, it explains that the decedent ''felt sick after the vaccine'' and died 4 days later from a heart attack. Yet, no T88.1 or Y59.0.

This death certificate provides that the decedent received her second dose of Pfizer 18 days prior to her death.

Here we have a 65-year-old male who was killed by a heart attack 12 days after getting vaccinated.

This case is especially noteworthy. Someone involved with this death informed me that the family had to pressure the coroner to put the recent covid booster on the death certificate. A family member also filed a VAERS report themselves, after the patient's doctors declined to do so.

Furthermore, the CDC applied W34 as the UCoD. What is W34 for?

'accidental discharge and malfunction from other and unspecified firearms and guns.'

There is no mention of any firearms mishaps on the death certificate.

One would have to wonder how such an errant code came to be, especially on a death certificate that contains other ICD 10 shenanigans. It is unlikely that 'Y590' or 'T881' would be 'misspelled' or algorithmically mixed up with 'W34.'

Perhaps if there were no other instances of fraudulent omittance of vaccine ICD codes on other death certificates, and the CDC wasn't in the habit of routinely assigning U07.1 for a covid infection that resolved a year ago, the failure to include T88.1 or Y59.0 here could be excused.

At minimum, this death certificate should contain T88.0 '' 'Infection following immunization' '' to document the breakthrough infection (which is a subject for a separate article as this seems to be fairly widespread).

Additional Observations

The following table shows the date of death and age for all 9 death certificates shown above that identified a covid vaccine as a CoD:

It is striking that 7/9 died before May 2021. This is odd '' if anything, the deaths should skew later, not earlier. Vaccine adverse events were denied '' with maximum prejudice and then some '' for many months before the medical mainstream has finally (begrudgingly) started to acknowledge that the covid vaccines can trigger potentially lethal pathologies (in exceedingly rare instances to be sure).

The clustering of death certificates mentioning a covid vaccine at the beginning of the rollout suggests that 'administrative' interference likely played a role in discouraging coroners from mentioning a covid vaccine on death certificates.

Another noteworthy tidbit here is the age of the decedents: every single one is a senior citizen, and the average age of the decedents is 80. This is important to highlight because whereas young people ''dying suddenly'' stands out, there has been much less attention or acknowledgement of the covid vaccine's devastating toll upon the old and frail, where deaths '' even those that occur in close proximity to vaccination '' are readily attributed to prior health conditions.

Finally, the actions of the CDC call into question whether the CDC is altogether qualified or trustworthy enough to be the steward of the nation's epidemiological data. The CDC manages many of the datasets that underpin whole fields of study. If the CDC is willing to fraudulently alter data (or even if the CDC is just too incompetent to avoid corrupting data), all data under the aegis of the CDC is potentially suspect, especially if it relates to a controversial political or social issue. The implications of this are disturbing, to say the least.

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Scientists have uncovered startling evidence that a substantial portion of the batches of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine deployed in the European Union may in fact have consisted of placebos '' and that the German regulator knew this and did not subject them to quality-control testing.

The scientists, Dr. Gerald Dyker, Professor of Organic Chemistry at the Ruhr University Bochum, and Dr. J¶rg Matysik, Professor of Analytical Chemistry at the University of Leipzig, are part of a group of five German-speaking scientists who have been publicly raising questions about the quality and safety of the BioNTech vaccine (as it is known in Germany) for the last year and a half.

They recently appeared on the Punkt.Preradovic online programme of the German journalist Milena Preradovic to discuss batch variability. Their starting point was the recent Danish study showing enormous variation in the adverse events associated with different batches of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, or BNT162b2 per its scientific codename. The below figure from the Danish study illustrates this variation.

It shows that the batches used in Denmark, which are represented by the points in the graph, essentially break down into three groups.

The 'green batches' clustered around the green line have a moderate or moderately-high level of adverse events associated with them. In the discussion with Preradovic, Gerald Dyker takes the example of the green point furthest to the right.

As he explains, it represents the batch that was the used the most in Denmark, with somewhat over 800,000 doses having been administered. These 800,000 doses are associated with around 2,000 suspected adverse events, which gives a reporting rate of one suspected adverse event per approximately 400 doses. As Dyker puts it, ''That's not a small amount if we compare to what we know otherwise from influenza vaccines.'' According to Dyker's calculation, the green batches account for more than 60% of the Danish sample.

There are then the 'blue batches' clustered around the blue line, which are obviously associated with an extraordinarily high level of adverse events. As Dyker notes, no more than 80,000 doses of any of the blue batches were administered in Denmark '' suggesting that these especially bad batches may perhaps have been quietly pulled from the market by public health authorities.

Nonetheless, these batches had as many as 8,000 suspected adverse events associated with them. Eight thousand out of 80,000 doses would give a reporting rate of one suspected adverse event for every 10 doses '' and Dyker notes that some of the blue batches are indeed associated with a reporting rate of as high as one suspected adverse event for every six doses!

On Dyker's calculation, the blue batches represent less than 5% of the total number of doses included in the Danish study. Nonetheless, they are associated with nearly 50% of the 579 deaths recorded in the sample.

Finally, we have the 'yellow batches' clustered around the yellow line, which, as can be seen above, barely gets off the x-axis. On Dyker's calculation, the yellow batches represent around 30% of the total. Dyker notes that they include batches comprising some 200,000 administered doses which are associated with literally zero suspected adverse events.

As Dyker puts it, ''malicious'' observers might note that ''this is how placebos would look''.

And malicious observers might be right. For Dyker and Matysik compared the batch numbers contained in the Danish study with publicly available information on the batches approved for release, and they made the startling discovery that almost none of the harmless batches, unlike the very-bad and not-so-bad batches, appear to have been subject to any quality-control testing at all.

Unbeknownst to most observers, it is precisely the German regulatory agency, the Paul Ehrlich Institute (PEI), which is, in principle, responsible for quality control of all the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine supply in the EU. (The institute is named after the German immunologist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Ehrlich, not, of course, the Stanford biology professor of the same name.)

This reflects the fact that the actual legal manufacturer of the vaccine, as well as the marketing authorisation holder in the EU, is the German company BioNTech, not its more well-known American partner Pfizer.

Dyker and Matysik found that the PEI had tested and approved for release all the very bad 'blue' batches, the overwhelming majority of the not-so-bad 'green' batches, but almost none of the harmless 'yellow' batches '' as if the PEI knew in advance that these batches were unproblematic.

This is shown in the below slide from Dyker's presentation during the Punkt.Preradovic interview. The title reads: 'Which batches from the Danish study did the Paul Ehrlich Institute test and approve for release?'

In the PEI column of each of the tables, ''ja'' means, of course, that the batch was tested, ''nein'' means that it was not. Note that only the first batch in the 'yellow' table was tested.

The caption under that table reads: ''The PEI did not generally regard testing of the harmless 'yellow batches' as necessary.''

As Dyker put it, with notable restraint, ''this would support the initial suspicion that they are maybe in fact something like placebos''.

Or, in short, to paraphrase the German scientists' findings on the variability of the Pfizer-BioNTech batches, it would appear that the good was bad, the bad was very bad, and the very good was saline solution.

(The full Punkt.Preradovic interview with Gerald Dyker and J¶rg Matysik is available here in German. The above translations are by your writer. A full, presumably machine-translated, English version of the interview is also available on the Punkt.Preradovic webpage.)

Robert Kogon is a pen name for a widely-published financial journalist, translator and researcher working in Europe. Subscribe to his Substack and follow him on Twitter.

Stop Press: Watch the researchers discuss their findings, with English subtitles.

Stop Press 2: Geoff Pain on Substack has suggested there may be an innocent explanation for these strange data linked to the fact that the adverse event reports the scientists looked at were only from Denmark but the batches were distributed across the world, where some adverse events (including deaths) were reported. It's still not clear though why the zero-adverse-event lots would line up nearly perfectly with the ones not tested by the German regulator. If there are any updates on this we'll post them here.

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Tue, 11 Jul 2023 15:01

The number of Brown University students identifying as LGBTQ+ has doubled since 2010, according to a new poll from the university's student paper.

About 38% of students at the Ivy League school identified as either homosexual, bisexual, queer, asexual, pansexual, questioning, or other '-- more than five times the national rate for adults not identifying as straight.

A similar poll conducted at the school just over 10 years ago found that 14% of the student body identified as being part of the LGBTQ+ community.

The poll was conducted by the Brown Daily Herald, an independent student newspaper at the Rhode Island school, and released in June as a part of a Pride Month special issue.

It is unclear how many students were polled in the survey.

As of fall 2022, Brown had an undergraduate enrollment of 7,222 students and another 3,515 in its graduate and medical programs.

The number of heterosexual students went down by 25.2% and homosexual students went up by 26% from fall 2010 to spring 2023. The poll was conducted by Brown University's independent student paper, the Brown Daily Herald, as part of a special Pride Month edition. Boston Globe via Getty ImagesThe Herald could not be reached for comment, and the university declined to comment, citing the paper's independence from the school.

About 7.2% of American adults identified as being non-heterosexual, according to a 2022 Gallup poll, up from 3.5% in 2012.

Since the Herald first conducted a survey of sexual orientation on campus in 2010, Brown students identifying as lesbian and gay dropped by more than half from 46 to 22%.

About 19% of that group were college-age members of Generation Z.

The number of students identifying with other groups, however, soared: Bisexual students increased by 232%, and other LGBTQ+ groups rose by a collective 793%, the Herald found.

Of the LGBTQ+ respondents, the most common orientation was bisexual at 53.7%.

Josephine Kovecses, a member of the class of '25, told the Herald she thought those numbers were driven by broadening social norms in recent years.

''Queer people haven't been able to be open in their identifications for that long. So it's exciting that the numbers are growing and that queer people are able to be open in particular at Brown,'' Kovecses said.

The Herald's own poll question options over the years mirrored that viewpoint.

From fall 2010 to spring 2023, the number of heterosexual students at Brown fell and the number of bisexual students rose.In 2010, students were given only heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, and other orientations to choose from.

It wasn't until spring 2022 that queer, pansexual, asexual, and questioning were added to the survey.

Some have argued that the soaring number of LGBTQ+ students at Brown is an example of a ''social contagion'' at a famously left-leaning school.

The survey found that students identifying as LGBTQ+ were more than five times the national average for adults in the United States, which a 2022 Gallup poll found was 7.2%. Boston Globe via Getty Images''There are two theories, that greater tolerance is allowing more to come out of the closet, or Bill Maher's assertion that LGBT is trendy among some youth,'' professor of political science at the University of London Eric Kauffman told the Fix in June.

''I think the second theory better fits the data and explains more of why the rise occurred.''

Citing data from the right-leaning Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, Kauffman said LGBTQ+ identification has increased much more than sexual activity in those groups.

One current Brown student felt the rising numbers were driven by increased social awareness about LGBTQ+ identity. Boston Globe via Getty Images''If this was about people feeling able to come out, then we should have seen these two trends rise together,'' he said.

''What we find instead is that identity is rising much faster than behavior, indicating that people with occasional rather than sustained feelings of attraction to the opposite sex are increasingly identifying as LGBT.''

Others, including Sharita Gruberg of the LGBTQI+ Research and Communications Project with the Center for American Progress, agree with Kovecses that the environment of greater awareness that Gen Z was raised in has driven the numbers.

''Gen Z has grown up at a time when stigma around LGBTQ identities is on the decline and rights are expanding,'' Grunberg said in 2022 after Gallup released its findings, according to CNN.

''As greater awareness about the diversity of sexual orientations and gender identities grows, and as the stigma surrounding LGBTQ identity lessens, we're likely to see more people self-identify as LGBTQ.''

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Archived Version

Tue, 11 Jul 2023 14:52

Talks between shipping giant United Parcel Service (UPS) and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters fell apart last week, upping the possibility that the union could strike in a massive walkout when their current contract expires at the end of this month.

The union, which represents roughly 340,000 members working for UPS, voted last month to authorize a strike if a deal isn't reached before July 31. The strike would be one of the largest in U.S. history.

Here's what to know about the looming possible strike:

What will happen to my packages?A strike by the tens of thousands of UPS workers represented by Teamsters could significantly disrupt deliveries, potentially delaying packages or prompting higher shipping costs from other companies.

The shipping company has said it transports roughly 6 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) for the US alone. But it has said it has ''contingency plans'' in place for both the products it is shipping and its members who may strike, UPS told The Hill last week.

Jonathan Gold, vice president of supply chain and customs policy at the National Retail Federation, said a strike would likely prompt a supply chain disruption like that which occurred during the pandemic, stalling deliveries.

FedEx, another shipping giant, said in a statement that ''shippers who are considering shifting volume to FedEx'' should start working with the company now.

A major UPS strike is looming '-- here's what that means for your packages

''In the event of an industry disruption, FedEx Corporation's priority is protecting capacity and service for existing customers,'' the company said.

The United States Postal Service (USPS) Monday launched a new ''coast-to-coast 2-5-day shipping offering'' and said it's ''ready to compete for an increased share of the growing package business.''

A United Parcel Service delivery driver steers his truck, Friday, June 30, 2023, in the East Boston neighborhood of Boston. Frustrated by what he called an ''appalling counterproposal'' earlier this week, Teamsters General President Sean O'Brien, the head of the union representing 340,000 UPS workers, said a strike remains on the table. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer)What are they fighting over?The shipping company and the union are divided over wages, benefits and compensation for workers as they negotiate a new contract before their current agreement expires at the end of this month.

Teamsters are also pushing for an end to a dual-wage system for delivery drivers and to ''forced overtime on drivers' days off,'' as well as for better workplace protections and a holiday on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

UPS drivers make $18.05 an hour in Arkansas, $17.63 in Oklahoma and $21.02 in Connecticut, according to Indeed.

UPS made $11.5 billion in net income in 2022, as profits exceeded fourth-quarter expectations. The company's 2022 operating profits hit more than $13 billion, for an operating margin of 13 percent.

UPS and the union reached a tentative agreement on the two-tier wages, overtime and holiday at the start of this month, which was seen by many as a move that would lessen the likelihood of a strike, but tensions continue on other economic parts of the negotiations.

What will the strike affect?''@UPS seems to think it has the luxury of time on its side '' enough to ignore the needs of the #Teamsters who make its profits possible, including more than 150,000 part-timers who are the backbone of the company's operations,'' the union wrote on Twitter, noting that ''340,000 Teamsters on strike can't be ignored.''

''As it turns out, the company does not have the luxury of being able to ignore us. Because in just a few short weeks, UPS will have to reckon with fierce Teamster power in the streets if their disrespect continues,'' the Teamsters union said.

Not only could the possible strike impact deliveries, a mass work stoppage of thousands of warehousing, transportation and delivery workers under the union could also effect commerce.

The last time UPS Teamsters walked out was more than 25 years ago in 1997, launching a 15-day strike that impacted the package supply chain worldwide.

When will we know if UPS Teamsters are striking?Workers are set to strike if the union and UPS don't reach a deal by the contract expiration date on July 31.

The union had pushed for a deal to be made by July 5, which didn't materialize because of time needed to ratify a new contract.

On the July 5 deadline, Teamsters said UPS ''walked away from the bargaining table after presenting an unacceptable offer to the Teamsters that did not address members' needs.''

UPS last week urged the Teamsters to return to the table for negotiations and said that they ''have not walked away.''

It's not clear if we'll know before July 31 if the union will definitely strike, but without a deal, union representatives have said workers will walk away from their posts as soon as the existing contract ends.

''We all have a contract till July 31st '-- we will work under that contract,'' Teamsters Local 171 Vice President Scott Barry told outlet WDBJ7.

''Our administration has made it clear. We will not be working beyond the expiration date without the contract our members have demanded, and more importantly without the contract our members deserve,'' Teamsters president Sean O'Brien said earlier this month.

United Parcel Service deliveryman walks through a neighborhood while carrying packages to a home, Friday, June 30, 2023, in Haverhill, Mass. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)What areas will the strike affect?If the current contract expires, workers are set to strike nationwide.

Bottom Line: Beer Institute tops up lobbying operationMcCarthy seeks to ward off GOP uproar on spending stopgapOver the past few weeks, Teamsters workers have held ''practice pickets'' around UPS hubs across the country, according to the union.

Teamsters said new ''practice picket'' actions occurred in Mississippi, Alabama, Maryland, New York, Minnesota and California Saturday.

''As rank-and-file solidarity deepens, the eyes of the nation are on all @UPS#Teamsters, and public support for our historic contract fight is overwhelming,'' the Teamsters union said. ''Our members are ready to walk on August 1 if UPS doesn't deliver what #Teamsters have rightfully earned.''

Copyright 2023 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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Archived Version

Tue, 11 Jul 2023 14:52

Popular weight-loss drugs Ozempic and Saxenda are under review

Ozempic is under review by European drug-safety regulators after they received reports of suicidal thoughts linked to the popular weight-loss drug and another medicine in the class.

The European Medicines Agency said Monday it is evaluating the safety risk for patients who take the drugs, manufactured by Novo Nordisk, after learning that...

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Ozempic is under review by European drug-safety regulators after they received reports of suicidal thoughts linked to the popular weight-loss drug and another medicine in the class.

The European Medicines Agency said Monday it is evaluating the safety risk for patients who take the drugs, manufactured by Novo Nordisk , after learning that three people who took the medicines reported thoughts of self harm or suicide.

Suicidal behavior isn't listed as a side effect for Ozempic'--and a related drug called Saxenda that is also subject to the review'--in the European Union, the EMA said.

Novo Nordisk said the company's studies of Ozempic and Saxenda, as well as its continuing monitoring of their use, haven't shown a link to suicidal thinking or thoughts of self harm.

''Novo Nordisk remains confident in the benefit risk profile of the products and remains committed to ensuring patient safety,'' a Novo Nordisk spokeswoman said.

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American depositary shares in Denmark-based Novo Nordisk were flat in trading on the New York Stock Exchange midday Monday.

Ozempic, Saxenda and other drugs targeting a gut and brain hormone called glucagon-like peptide-1, or GLP-1, have exploded in popularity after studies found they can help people lose significant weight.

Companies initially developed the class to treat people with diabetes. Ozempic, which is approved for diabetes treatment, has a sister drug named Wegovy that is cleared for chronic weight management in people who are obese.

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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said it doesn't comment on external research or individual reports, but may evaluate them. It said clinical trials for Wegovy didn't support an increased risk of suicidal thoughts or behavior.

Prescribing information for Wegovy, however, includes a warning and precaution for these risks because it has been reported in clinical trials for other weight-management drugs, the FDA said.

The EMA said it would consider whether to expand its inquiry to other GLP-1 drugs.

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The agency said it began its review after the Icelandic Medicines Agency reported suicidal thoughts by one user of Ozempic and similar thoughts by a user of an older drug in the class called Saxenda.

A third case reported by the Icelandic agency involved thoughts of self-injury by a user of Saxenda.

Write to Melanie Evans at melanie.evans@wsj.com

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Archived Version

Tue, 11 Jul 2023 14:51

Nearly a dozen current and former officials serving in the White House and Biden administration, including the president's national security adviser and the secretary of state, have extensive ties to Hunter Biden, who is accused by Republicans of selling access to his father, dating back over a decade.

A Fox News Digital analysis reveals the extent of Hunter's potential reach in the White House, while the embattled first son is expected to make his first court appearance on July 26 for two alleged misdemeanor tax violations and a felony gun charge.

The Justice Department announced last month that Hunter had entered a plea agreement in the case that will likely keep him out of jail. U.S. Attorney for the District of Delaware David Weiss, who led the investigation, is facing demands from Republicans probing alleged improper retaliation against whistleblowers who claimed the probe was "influenced by politics" and that Weiss was "hamstrung" when making prosecutorial decisions.

The analysis includes two members of Biden's Cabinet and one former Cabinet member, a top aide to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, a national security adviser, five top Biden White House aides, and a top Biden campaign aide who is currently on leave from her role as a communications director for first lady Jill Biden.

Jake SullivanHunter Biden and President Biden's national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, served together on the board of the Truman National Security Project, a liberal foreign policy think tank, for roughly two years before Sullivan joined the president's campaign in 2020.

President Biden's national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, left, Hunter Biden, President Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken (Getty Image)

BIDEN'S CLAIM TO HAVE NO KNOWLEDGE OF HUNTER'S BUSINESS DEALINGS IS BECOMING HARDER TO MAINTAIN

Hunter, who started serving on the board in 2012, and Sullivan both served on the Washington-based nonprofit's board between 2017 and early 2019, according to internet archives captured by the Wayback Machine.

During that time, Hunter was also serving on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings and the Chinese private equity fund BHR Partners. The federal investigation into Hunter's foreign business dealings, which is still ongoing, also launched during the same time frame in 2018.

Sullivan was recently accused by former White House official Mike McCormick of being a "conspirator" in the Biden family's "kickback scheme" in Ukraine when Biden was vice president.

Sullivan denied the allegations, telling reporters that he had nothing to do with such an operation.

Jake Sullivan, left, and Hunter Biden (Getty Images)

Antony BlinkenSecretary of State Antony Blinken held a meeting with Hunter Biden at the State Department in July 2015 when he was serving as the deputy secretary of state in the Obama-Biden administration and Hunter was on Burisma's board, according to emails previously reviewed and verified by Fox News Digital.

The meeting was two months in the making after Hunter emailed Blinken in late May 2015, asking, "Have a few minutes next week to grab a cup of coffee? I know you are impossibly busy, but would like to get your advice on a couple of things."

Blinken said "absolutely" and Hunter forwarded Blinken's full email response to Devon Archer, who was also serving on the Burisma board with him. However, the initial meeting appeared to have been canceled due to the admission of Hunter's older brother, Beau Biden, to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Maryland because of a recurrence of brain cancer. Beau passed away on May 30, 2015.

Antony Blinken emails with Hunter Biden on May 22, 2015. (Fox News)

BLINKEN AND WIFE EMAILED FREQUENTLY WITH HUNTER BIDEN, RAISING QUESTIONS ABOUT ROLE IN LAPTOP COVER STORY

Less than two months later, Blinken and Hunter met, prompting Blinken to send a follow-up email saying it was "great to see" Hunter and "catch up."

"You will love this," Antony Blinken wrote to Hunter Biden on July 22, 2015, "after you left, Marjorie, the wonderful african american woman who sits in my outer office (and used to be Colin Powell's assistant) said to me: 'He sure is pleasant on the eyes.' Tell you wife. Tony." (Fox News)

In April of this year, former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell testified to the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees that Blinken, as President Biden's then-campaign senior adviser, "played a role in the inception" of the public statement signed by intelligence officials claiming Hunter's abandoned laptop was part of a Russian disinformation campaign just weeks before the 2020 presidential election.

Blinken denied having any role in getting the letter signed by members of the intelligence community and claimed, "One of the great benefits of this job is that I don't do politics and don't engage in it. But with regard to that letter, I didn't '' it wasn't my idea, didn't ask for it, didn't solicit it."

Emails from Hunter's infamous laptop that Blinken allegedly sought to discredit show that Hunter has ties to Blinken and his wife, Evan Ryan, dating back over a decade. Those emails also show that Hunter scheduled meetings with Blinken while he was on the board of Burisma and Blinken was deputy secretary of state.

Multiple profiles pieces over the years said Blinken has advised Biden on more than just foreign policy in his decades-long friendship with the president and serving as a confidant. Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., President Biden's re-election campaign co-chair, told CNN in 2021, "President Biden is personally close to both Tony Blinken and Evan Ryan and Tony has been an incredibly loyal, capable and effective adviser, staffer and personal friend of the sort that is rare in Washington."

Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Hunter Biden (Getty Images)

Evan RyanEvan Ryan, Blinken's wife who is currently serving as White House cabinet secretary, communicated frequently with Hunter and his longtime business partner, Eric Schwerin, when she was working at the White House during the Obama-Biden administration.

Hunter tried to connect with Blinken on June 16, 2010, when he asked Ryan for his non-government email address, according to emails. Ryan, who also worked on Biden's unsuccessful 2008 presidential campaign, then provided Blinken's personal email address to Hunter.

It appears that Hunter Biden tried to connect with Antony Blinken on June 16, 2010, when he asked Blinken's wife, Evan Ryan, for his non-government email address. (Fox News)

White House visitor logs also show that Schwerin, who was the president of Hunter Biden's investment firm Rosemont Seneca Partners for several years, met with Ryan at the White House's Old Executive Office Building (OEOB) in October 2010.

She was also in communication with Hunter and Schwerin about a couple of White House events that year, including the Mexico State Dinner and the annual "Easter Egg Roll."

"OVP has 250 tix to the Easter Egg Roll and your Mom has an additional 200. Family, etc is coming out of your Mom's allotment," Schwerin said in the email to Hunter, referring to Blinken's wife. "Evan is handling your Dad's and we can pass on names to her for outreach purposes. Let's discuss. I don't think we have 50 spots, but if we had 20 or so names we'd probably be fine."

Eric Schwerin sent Hunter Biden an email about two upcoming White House events and mentioned that he talked with Evan Ryan, Blinken's wife, about tickets to the events. (Fox News)

JAKE SULLIVAN SERVED ON A NATIONAL SECURITY BOARD WITH HUNTER BIDEN FOR 2 YEARS, RAISING QUESTIONS FROM GOP

"More importantly, OVP has 12 spots to fill for the Mexico State Dinner in May and needs to send in their names by Monday," he continued. "Evan is looking for any suggestions. Hispanic Americans or just any outreach related suggestions. Obviously they won't have trouble filling this number but is still looking for suggestions."

A couple of months later, Hunter and Ryan exchanged emails about the Mexico State dinner guest list, and she sent him the seating chart for his table.

Evan Ryan and Antony Blinken have ties to Hunter Biden dating back over a decade. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

Fox News Digital previously reported several other ties between Hunter and Ryan.

Jeff ZientsWhite House chief of staff Jeff Zients, who led the federal COVID-19 pandemic response between early 2021 and April 2022, met Hunter multiple times in 2016, according to emails and White House visitor logs.

Zients met with Hunter Biden twice in February 2016 and on another occasion in May 2016, just months before Biden, the vice president at the time, was set to leave the White House.

Former Joe Biden aide Anne Marie Muldoon invites Hunter Biden to a meeting with Zients and his father in July 2016. (Fox News)

Hunter Biden's former business partner Joan Mayer sends him his schedule on Feb. 12. It includes a meeting with his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, Jeff Zients and David Rubenstein. (Fox News)

Biden attended the first two meetings, which both took place at the U.S. Naval Observatory, where the vice presidential residence is located.

Hunter Biden's business partner Joan Meyer sends him his schedule on Feb. 23. (Fox News)

Additionally, Anne Marie Muldoon, who was an assistant for then-Vice President Biden between 2014-2017, sent Hunter Biden an invitation to attend a potential fourth meeting with his father, Zients, David Bradley, a Washington, D.C.-based political consultant and chairman of media group Atlantic Media, and Eric Lander at the Naval Observatory on July 12, 2016. While it is unclear whether Hunter Biden joined the meeting, Muldoon sent him a copy of the meeting agenda after it took place.

Kathy ChungKathy Chung, who is currently serving as the Pentagon's deputy director of protocol, communicated frequently with Hunter when she was serving as Biden's executive assistant during the Obama administration.

Throughout much of her five-year tenure working for Biden, Chung regularly shared information with Hunter about his father's schedule and passed messages directly from the then-vice president, according to emails.

Chung's relationship with Hunter also appears to date back to before she worked for his father. The emails showed that Hunter recommended Chung for the executive assistant role when the previous holder of the job, Michele Smith, departed the White House in the spring of 2012.

HUNTER BIDEN'S BUSINESS PARTNERS, ASSISTANTS VISITED WHITE HOUSE OVER 80 TIMES WHEN BIDEN WAS VP

A month after Chung thanked Hunter for "thinking" of her and getting her to apply for a job in the vice president's office, Chung emailed Hunter Biden informing him that she had been offered the job.

Kathy Chung informs Hunter Biden that Vice President Biden had selected her to be his executive assistant. (Fox News)

"I cannot thank you enough for thinking about me and walking me thru this," she said. "What an incredible opportunity! Thanks, Hunter!!"

In another email exchange shortly after the Obama-Biden administration concluded, Hunter suggested that Chung come work at his company. It does not appear that she ever joined Hunter's company.

Hunter Biden tells Kathy Chung she should work for him in February 2017, adding that he can "make everyone money." (Fox News)

Chung made headlines in January after she was reportedly questioned by federal investigators as part of the probe into the president's handling of classified documents.

Ron KlainBiden's former White House chief of staff, Ron Klain, who stepped down in February, previously served as the chief of staff for Vice President Biden until the end of January 2011. In September 2012, Klain reached out to Hunter for help in raising $20,000 for the Vice President's Residence Foundation (VPRF), telling him to "keep this low low key" to prevent "bad PR," according to emails Fox News Digital previously reported on.

"The tax lawyers for the VP Residence Foundation have concluded that since the Cheney folks last raised money in 2007 and not 2008, we actually have to have some incoming funds before the end of this fiscal year (i.e., before 9/30/12 '' next week) to remain eligible to be a 'public charity,'" Klain, who had left his chief of staff position in Vice President Biden's office a year earlier but was the foundation's chairman at the time, said in an email to Hunter.

"It's not much '' we need to raise a total of $20,000 '' so I'm hitting up a few very close friends on a very confidential basis to write checks of $2,000 each," Klain continued. "We need to keep this low low key, because raising money for the Residence now is bad PR '' but it has to be done, so I'm trying to just collect the 10 checks of $2,000, get it done in a week, and then, we can do an event for the Residence Foundation after the election."

Hunter then forwarded the email to Schwerin, who helped manage a majority of Hunter's finances, and the two discussed donating to the foundation, though it's not clear what was ultimately decided.

Klain's career with Biden dates back to his failed presidential campaign in 1988 and serving as counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Former White House chief of staff Ron Klain (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

Elizabeth AlexanderElizabeth Alexander, the communications director for first lady Jill Biden who went on temporary leave in May to help lead the messaging arm of Biden's re-election campaign, also has ties to Hunter.

In 2014, Alexander, who served as Biden's spokesperson when he was a senator and the vice president, reached out to praise Hunter for his statement after he was kicked out of Navy Reserve for testing positive for cocaine.

"Hey Hunter '' just wanted to write you a quick note to say David and I are thinking of you," she wrote in an email. "Your statement was perfect and gracious. Sending you a virtual hug from both of us and hoping you can get some peace this weekend."

Alexander is married to David Wade, a former State Department staffer who helped advise Hunter with rapid response as he was receiving increased public scrutiny regarding his lucrative position with Burisma.

Emails uncovered by Fox News Digital last month showed Hunter's firm, Rosemont Seneca Partners, was paying Wade for communications consulting, and he strategized with Hunter and his partners on how to respond to inquiries by the Wall Street Journal and New York Times.

Wade has visited the White House at least five times during Biden's presidency, according to visitor logs.

Annie TomasiniAnnie Tomasini, an assistant to the president and the current director of Oval Office operations, was in frequent communication with Hunter, referred to him as her "brother" and often ended her emails with "LY" for "love you," according to emails dating from 2010 to 2016.

Biden publicly announced on Dec. 20, 2010, that Tomasini was stepping down to take a position with Harvard University, and Tomasini kept Hunter clued in on the details of that position before she took it, according to emails. The month prior, on Nov. 19, 2010, she forwarded information to Hunter about Harvard's employee benefits and added, "Thanks."

Annie Tomasini, director of Oval Office operations, left, follows President Biden on the South Lawn of the White House before boarding Marine One on May 17, 2023. (Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

"Hey '' I looked at benefits And they look pretty amazing. Any word on comp?" Hunter responded on Nov. 23, 2010.

"I'll keep you posted. Thanks for looking at all the background Hunt," Tomasini replied.

Tomasini was offered the job on Nov. 30, 2010, writing to Hunter, "Director of intergovernmental relations. > 120k ish '' may be a little higher."

She later thanked him and said she was going to tell his father the news. Months later, Hunter gave a speech at Harvard, but not before running the draft by Tomasini first.

Tomasini has accompanied Biden and Hunter to Camp David twice in the past few weeks.

HUNTER BIDEN'S CLOSE RELATIONSHIP WITH HIS DAD'S NEW CAMPAIGN CO-CHAIR REVEALED IN LAPTOP EMAILS

Michael Donilon Michael Donilon, a current senior adviser to Biden who served as his chief campaign strategist in 2020, was on dozens of emails with Hunter and other members of Biden's inner circle coordinating strategy meetings throughout the 2012 campaign, mulling over a 2016 presidential bid, and later plotting Biden's endeavors post-vice presidency.

In August 2015, Schwerin shared a Politico article with Hunter that says Donilon and a few other advisers from Biden's inner circle, including Hunter, are the only ones "involved in the real decision-making."

An email from February 2016 showed that Hunter, Donilon and a few others were also involved in the planning stages for the Biden Foundation. And shortly after Biden left office in 2017, Hunter, Donilon and others in his inner circle were invited to a meeting at Biden's residence in McLean, Virginia, according to emails.

Days later Hunter, Donilon and several others were invited to a meeting at Biden's Wilmington, Delaware, home where classified documents were recently discovered. The meeting took place on Feb. 7, 2017, the same day it was announced that the former vice president would be leading the Penn Biden Center at the University of Pennsylvania, where classified documents were also found, and the Biden Institute at the University of Delaware.

Donilon accompanied Biden a few months ago on the trip to Ireland, which included Hunter and Biden's sister, Valerie Biden Owens.

Steve Ricchetti Steve Ricchetti, who currently serves as Biden's White House counselor, was also on dozens of emails with Hunter dealing with strategy meetings and helping Biden with post-VP life.

Fox News Digital reported last year that Schwerin visited the White House at least eight times in 2016, meeting with Ricchetti at least twice when he was serving as Biden's chief of staff.

Morell, the former CIA deputy director who testified in April, said he received a call in October 2020 from Ricchetti, who was serving as the chairman of Biden's campaign at the time, following the final debate against then-President Donald Trump, when Biden said the Hunter laptop was a "Russian plant" and a "bunch of garbage."

Morell said the call from Ricchetti was to thank him for spearheading the letter signed by intelligence officials that tried to debunk the laptop.

Steve Ricchetti, counselor to the president, gestures after playing a round of golf with President Biden at Wilmington Country Club in Delaware on April 17, 2021. (Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images)

Louisa Terrell Louisa Terrell, who is serving as assistant to the president and the director of the Office of Legislative Affairs, communicated with Hunter dozens of times during the Obama-Biden administration, with some of the correspondence including Schwerin on the emails.

In February 2014, Terrell emailed Hunter and Schwerin, saying, "So nice to catch up over lunch '' thank you. Enjoy the snow day and talk soon."

Louisa Terrell, White House legislative affairs director, walks with Steve Ricchetti to a House Democrat caucus meeting at the U.S. Capitol on May 31, 2023. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

Another email chain from late 2014 through early 2015 shows that she reached out to Hunter for help in getting her daughter into Sidwell Friends School, one of the most expensive and elite PK-12 schools in the country, which includes both of former President Obama's daughters and some of Biden's grandchildren as alumni.

"Thank you for agreeing to speak with Sidwell about Olivia's application to next year's 7th grade class. I recognize how busy you are and appreciate you making the time to chime in with Bryan," Terrell said in February 2015. "Below is some logistical information and some background on why Olivia is a good fit for Sidwell. Let me know if this is helpful and/or you need some additional information."

"[Bryan] was very cordial/ nice '' sent me two emails '' one saying he received my message and email and a second that was more personal acknowledging that he also spoke to Chris and others who had weighed in on behalf of Olivia and he hopes it all works out etc..." Hunter said. "Very nice '' looking forward to having dinner sometime soon '' but didn't give any thing up in the way of real information."

Less than two weeks later, Terrell emailed Hunter saying her daughter got into Sidwell and added, "Thank you so so much for your help. I hope you know how much I appreciate it. Thank you, thank you!"

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

Terrell has worked for Biden going back as early as 2001 and served a two-year stint as executive director at the Biden Foundation, according to her LinkedIn profile.

The White House, Biden's campaign and Hunter Biden's lawyer did not respond to Fox News Digital's requests for comment.

Fox News' Joe Schoffstall and Thomas Catenacci contributed to this report.

Jessica Chasmar is a digital writer on the politics team for Fox News and Fox Business. Story tips can be sent to Jessica.Chasmar@fox.com.

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Mon, 10 Jul 2023 21:55

In this photo illustration, the Threads logo by META is displayed on a smartphone with Twitter logo in the background. Threads is the new social network from Meta Platforms which was launched on the 5th of July 2023.

Omar Marques | Lightrocket | Getty Images

User traffic on Twitter has slowed since the launch of Meta 's text-based platform Threads, which has already surpassed 100 million sign-ups since its debut last week.

Threads launched in the U.S. on Wednesday and is being touted by Meta executives like Instagram chief Adam Mosseri as a more positive "public square" for communities "that never really embraced Twitter." So far, users seem to be on board.

"Threads reached 100 million sign ups over the weekend. That's mostly organic demand and we haven't even turned on many promotions yet. Can't believe it's only been 5 days!" Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post Monday.

Twitter appears to have taken a hit. Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, shared a screenshot to Twitter Sunday showing that traffic on the platform was "tanking."

According to Similarweb, a data company that specializes in web analytics, web traffic to Twitter was down 5% for the first two full days Threads was generally available compared with the previous week. The company said Twitter's web traffic is down 11% compared with the same days in 2022.

Twitter responded to CNBC's request for comment with an automated response. Meta didn't offer additional comment beyond Zuckerberg's post.

The booming growth on Threads is helped by the fact that it is tied to an existing social network, Meta's Instagram. Users can sign up with their existing handles on Instagram and are able to retain some of their following as others sign up for the app.

Threads reached the 100 million milestone even faster than OpenAI's generative chatbot ChatGPT, which surpassed 100 million monthly users in two months.

The app still has lots of room to grow, having not yet launched in Europe, where Mosseri said there is still some regulatory complexity to navigate. If Threads is able to retain its userbase, it could solidify its position as a real competitor for Twitter, which reported nearly 238 million monetizable daily active users in its last quarterly earnings report as public company last summer.

Twitter owner Elon Musk appears to have already shown some concern about Threads, as his longtime lawyer Alex Spiro wrote a letter to Meta accusing the company of "unlawful misappropriation" of trade secrets.

Musk and Zuckerberg were also taking shots at one another over the weekend, as Zuckerberg mocked Musk's tweet style and Musk called Zuckerberg a derogatory name.

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Thu, 13 Jul 2023 14:17

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Thu, 13 Jul 2023 13:49

Mutinous Wagner mercenary group boss Yevgeny Prigozhin is likely either dead or jailed, and his much-publicized meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin after his botched rebellion was probably faked, according to a former senior US military leader.

Retired Gen. Robert Abrams, an ABC News contributor who previously served as the commander of US Forces Korea, shared his thoughts on Prigozhin's uncertain fate in the aftermath of the Wagner Group's short-lived armed insurrection last month.

''My personal assessment is that I doubt we'll see Prigozhin ever again publicly,'' Abramstold ABC News. ''I think he'll either be put in hiding, or sent to prison, or dealt with some other way, but I doubt we'll ever see him again.''

Asked if he thought the billionaire businessman was alive after posing the most significant challenge to Putin's regime since he came to power in 1999, Abrams said: ''I personally don't think he is, and if he is, he's in a prison somewhere.''

The retired four-star general also raised doubts about a meeting that, according to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, Putin held with Prigozhin and all his senior Wagner commanders on June 29, five days after the aborted mutiny.

Retired US Gen. Robert Abrams (center) said he believes Yevgeny Prigozhin was likely either killed or imprisoned for trying to overthrow Russia's military leadership. REUTERS''I'd be surprised if we actually see proof of life that Putin met with Prigozhin, and I think it's highly staged,'' Abrams said.

Peskov told reporters Monday that Putin had invited 35 people to the meeting, among them Prigozhin, and that it had lasted three hours.

Other senior members of Putin's administration, including the head of the national guard, Viktor Zolotov, and SVR Foreign Intelligence boss Sergei Naryshkin were also said to be present, reported the French newspaper Liberation.

Peskov said Putin gave his ''assessment'' of the Wagner Group's actions during the war in Ukraine, in which they led the bloody fight to capture the city of Bakhmut, and also ''of the events of June 24'' '-- referring to the day of the mutiny.

Yevgeny Prigozhin posed the most significant challenge to Putin's regime since he came to power in 1999. ZUMAPRESS.comPutin also ''listened to the explanations of the commanders and offered them options for further employment and further use in combat,'' according to the Kremlin spokesman.

''The commanders themselves presented their version of what happened. They stressed that they are staunch supporters and soldiers of the head of state and the commander-in-chief, and also said that they are ready to continue to fight for their homeland,'' Peskov said. ''That is all we can say about this meeting.''

Prigozhin, 62, who had been publicly feuding with Russia's top military brass, including Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, over their handling of the war in Ukraine, led his fighters in a rebellion that saw them seize control of the city of Rostov-on-Don.

Prigozhin then ordered his forces to march toward Moscow, but he abruptly changed his mind after Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko hastily brokered a truce between the mercenary chief and the Kremlin.

Abrams raised doubts that Prigozhin, 62, actually met with President Vladimir Putin in the days after his botched mutiny. via REUTERSUnder the agreement, Prigozhin would be spared charges of treason if he agreed to go into exile in Belarus, but Lukashenko said last week that Prigozhin was back in Russia.

One of Prigozhin's private jets has made multiple trips between Belarus and Russia in the days since the uprising, according to flight tracking data.

He was reportedly seen in the Saint Petersburg office of the FSB last week, where he arrived to collect his arsenal of weapons that had been confiscated during a raid on his mansion.

Around the same time, Prigozhin also released an audio message, thanking those who supported the Wagner Group's failed mutiny, which he said was ''aimed at fighting traitors and mobilizing our society.''

Prigozhin's current whereabouts and future plans remain unknown.

Former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently said Prigozhin's failed coup attempt put a target on the Russian's back.

''I wouldn't insure his life '... Prigozhin clearly took a chance. If you're going to take on the king, don't do it with a Nerf bat. He did. It failed,'' Pompeo said on WABC 770 AM radio's ''Cats Roundtable'' show with host John Catsimatidis.

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The notorious Russian prankster duo Vovan and Lexus have duped veteran US statesman Henry Kissinger in their latest stunt. In a phone call, the now 100-year old former Secretary of State believed he was speaking directly to Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky.

The fake "Zelensky" at one point in the call began saying revealing things about the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage, which initially was widely blamed on Russia, but increasingly evidence points to either Kiev or Western intelligence being behind the Sept. 26, 2022 explosion. And then Kissinger revealed his views on who was behind the Nord Stream blasts...

Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger admits during a Vovan and Lexus prank call that he thought "Zelensky" was responsible for destroying Nord Stream 2. pic.twitter.com/5eIHDfWwtI

'-- Blackrussian (@Blackrussiantv) July 11, 2023Vovan and Lexus later revealed the key clip on their show. They press Kissinger on whether he believes Moscow really did blow up their own pipelines. After he hesitates, they then press him on who really did it.

That's when Kissinger finally said, "I, frankly, have thought it was you," based on the dubbed over translation of the exchange.

The fake Zelensky then insisted it wasn't Ukraine behind the sabotage. Kissinger then sought to assure that he "didn't blame" Kiev even if it was the case that the Ukrainians did it.

Pranksters Vovan and Lexus got through to former US Secretary of State Kissinger, introduced themselves as Zelensky and asked, ''Who blew up Nord Stream?''''I thought it was you,'' Kissinger replied. pic.twitter.com/kbrWib8l6k

'-- Spriter Team (@SpriterTeam) July 11, 2023One obvious conclusion is that Washington insiders have understood all along that it wasn't the Russians that took out their own vital Russia-to-Germany pipelines which are to supply Europe.

And legendary journalist Seymour Hersh has stood by his bombshell investigative report saying based on high-level sources that the CIA conducted the sabotage in a major covert operation: How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline. But it seems Kissinger has understood and held to the 'alternative' views himself: i.e.: Ukraine or the West did it.

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Jul 3, 2023

Inside With Jen Psaki (clip)

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Tue, 11 Jul 2023 17:38

The Metropolitan Police has confirmed it has spoken to the BBC about the suspended presenter accused of paying a teenager more than £35,000 for sexually explicit images.

Director-general Tim Davie said today that the corporation was investigating 'swiftly and sensitively' into the 'deeply concerning' claims following urgent talks with government.

However the Met said the broadcaster has not yet made a 'formal referral or allegation'.

In a statement a spokesperson for the force said: 'The Met has received initial contact from the BBC in relation to this matter but no formal referral or allegation has been made.

'We will require additional information before determining what further action should follow.'

The broadcaster confirmed in a public statement this afternoon that it had suspended a male member of staff, but did not reveal the identity of the employee.

In a follow-up email sent to BBC staff, director-general Tim Davie (pictured) reiterated that the BBC is taking the allegations 'incredibly seriously'. He added: 'By law, individuals are entitled to a reasonable expectation of privacy, which is making this situation more complex'

BBC has suspended the presenter accused of paying a teenager more than £35,000 for sexually explicit images, the broadcaster has confirmed (stock photo)

The Metropolitan Police has confirmed it has spoken to the BBC about the suspended presenter. Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley is pictured in February

In a follow-up email sent to staff, Mr Davie reiterated that the BBC is taking the allegations 'incredibly seriously'.

Later in the internal email, he adds: 'By law, individuals are entitled to a reasonable expectation of privacy, which is making this situation more complex. I also want to be very clear that I am wholly condemning the unsubstantiated rumours being made on the internet about some of our presenting talent.

'We are in contact with the family referenced in the media reports. I want to assure you that we are working rapidly to establish the facts and to ensure that these matters are handled fairly and with care, including by external authorities where appropriate.'

Mr Davie today held urgent talks with the government over the 'deeply concerning' sex pictures scandal surrounding one of its top stars.

Shortly after his phone call with culture secretary Lucy Frazer today, the broadcaster released a statement confirming it had suspended the presenter.

'The BBC takes any allegations seriously and we have robust internal processes in place to proactively deal with such allegations,' the statement said.

'This is a complex and fast moving set of circumstances and the BBC is working as quickly as possible to establish the facts in order to properly inform appropriate next steps.

'It is important that these matters are handled fairly and with care.

'We have been clear that if - at any point - new information comes to light or is provided to us, this will be acted upon appropriately and actively followed up.

'The BBC first became aware of a complaint in May. New allegations were put to us on Thursday of a different nature and in addition to our own enquiries we have also been in touch with external authorities, in line with our protocols.

'We can also confirm a male member of staff has been suspended.

'We expect to be in a position to provide a further update in the coming days as the process continues. The BBC Board will continue to be kept up to date.'

Culture secretary Lucy Frazer (pictured) held urgent talks with BBC boss Time Davie today over the allegations that one of its presenters paid a teenager more than £35,000 for sexually explicit images

During his call with the culture secretary, Mr Davie said the corporation was investigating the claims 'swiftly and sensitively'.

Ms Frazer described the allegations reported by The Sun newspaper as 'deeply concerning' and said the broadcaster now needs to be given space to probe the matter and take appropriate action.

Following a phone call with Mr Davie, she tweeted: 'I have spoken to BBC director-general Tim Davie about the deeply concerning allegations involving one of its presenters.

'He has assured me the BBC are investigating swiftly and sensitively.'

She added: 'Given the nature of the allegations it is important that the BBC is now given the space to conduct its investigation, establish the facts and take appropriate action. I will be kept updated.'

Senior officials have told the broadcaster the allegations must be investigated 'urgently and sensitively', with the Department of Culture Media and Sport (DCMS) kept updated.

A DCMS spokeswoman previously said: 'These allegations are deeply concerning.

'As a public service broadcaster in receipt of public funding, senior officials have stressed to the BBC that the allegations must be investigated urgently and sensitively, with the department kept informed.'

The presenter, who has not been named but is described as being well-known, allegedly began paying the teenager when they were 17, and sent them the money which they used to fund an addiction to crack cocaine.

The lurid speculation was sparked by a newspaper report that the youngster's family had complained about the behaviour of the 'household name' seven weeks ago, but had been unhappy with the BBC response.

The presenter had reportedly been taken off air on Friday, pending an investigation, but has now been suspended.

He is said to be known to millions of people and could face a police probe over potential crimes which carry a maximum 14-year prison sentence.

The alleged victim's mother says that the family complained to the BBC on May 19, asking for the presenter to be told to stop sending their child money.

It is claimed that even after the family complained, the star continued to send money and remained on air - before he allegedly attended an awards ceremony and was even partying with BBC bosses.

The suspension comes after a slew of lawmakers criticised the Corporation's handling of the allegations and demanded full transparency about the probe.

It is the latest crisis for Mr Davie to respond to after he survived calls to resign over his handling of Gary Lineker being briefly taken off air in March after the football pundit criticised Home Secretary Suella Braverman's 'cruel' asylum policy.

F ormer Home Secretary Priti Patel called the broadcaster's treatment of the complaint 'derisory' and insisted the BBC 'must provide the victim and his family a full and transparent investigation'.

HOW BBC PRESENTER 'SEX PICS' SCANDAL CAME TO LIGHT 2020: The BBC presenter allegedly began requesting sexually explicit photographs from the teenager.

May 19: Alleged victim's family complained to the BBC, asking for the presenter to be told to stop sending their child money.

June: The accused host allegedly attended a party alongside BBC senior executives.

July 7: The BBC star was said to have been taken off air - but has not been suspended.

The alleged victim's family details the accusations in a newspaper interview, claiming the presenter paid for the explicit photographs for three years.

The alleged victim's mother also claimed the teenager used the cash to fund their spiralling drug habit.

July 8: It is revealed the presenter could face a police probe over potential crimes which carry a maximum 14-year prison sentence

Several major BBC stars - including Rylan Clark, Jeremy Vine and Gary Lineker - confirm they are not the man behind the scandal .

July 9: Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer holds 'urgent talks' with BBC boss Tim Davie.

BBC suspends the male staff member whom allegations were made against.

Director-general Tim Davie sends an internal email to staff reiterating that the BBC is taking the allegations 'incredibly seriously'.

It is understood that the BBC has been in contact with police.

July 10: Representatives from the BBC meet with the Metropolitan Police.

In a letter reported by BBC News At Six, the young person said via a lawyer: 'For the avoidance of doubt, nothing inappropriate or unlawful has taken place between our client and the BBC personality and the allegations reported in The Sun newspaper are 'rubbish'.'

The legal representative also said the young person told The Sun on Friday evening before the newspaper published the story that there was 'no truth to it', the BBC reported.

The mother and stepfather of the young person stood by their allegation, and questioned how their child could afford the lawyer, The Sun reported.

The newspaper alleged that the mother said: 'It is sad but we stand by our account and we hope they get the help they need.

'We did this to help - and the presenter has got into their head. How did they afford a lawyer?'

She added: 'The BBC, which is funded by licence fee payers, has become a faceless and unaccountable organisation.'

Fellow Conservative MP Paul Bristow said: 'What is being suggested is incredibly serious. The BBC must be completely transparent on how it is dealing with this complaint. No ifs, no buts. They need to let the licence fee paying public know what they are doing and what they propose to do.'

Labour shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves said the reports were 'deeply concerning'.

She told Sky News' Sophy Ridge on Sunday show: 'The idea that some presenters act with impunity and can get away with these sort of things, it does call into question the ethics, the investigations, how long these things take,

'The BBC and other broadcasters do need to get a grip because we seem to lurch from one scandal to another and more needs to be done.'

Ms Reeves added there should be a 'full investigation' into the matter.

'That's the concerning thing, someone makes a complaint - a very serious complaint - and then they're put on the TV the next night and they're still there,' she said.

'That's not good enough, that's not treating people, victims, with respect and that's why there needs to be a full investigation.'

Government minister Victoria Atkins, the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, told Sky News: 'These are very, very serious allegations and the BBC have said they have processes in places.

'But I think as public attention and concern grows, the BBC is going to have to act very swiftly to deal with these allegations and set out what they are going to investigate them.'

Ms Atkins said she could 'quite understand the public concern' about the allegations.

'It may well be that happens in due course,' she added.

'With allegations of this kind, we as a Government have worked very hard over the years to try to help complainants of very serious allegations both in the criminal courts and with the police.

'And I would expect other institutions that have responsibilities with the public to have similar high standards.'

The alleged victim's family claims the explicit messages started in 2020 and that the star did not hide his identity and even sent photographs to the teen while he was at work.

He would allegedly request 'performances' from the teenager, who told their mother they would then 'get their bits out'. On one occasion, he sent the teenager a lump sum of £5,000.

The mother told the Sun their child went from a 'happy-go-lucky youngster to a ghost-like crack addict' in just three years.

The teenager's mother said she once heard the BBC star telling them: 'I told you not to f***ing ring me'.

She said her relationship with her child has always been close, and that they have previously confided when the man has sent them money.

The mother also told the Sun last night she used to 'love' watching the presenter, and was left 'shocked' to see a photograph of him in his underwear on the sofa of his house while looking at her child's phone.

'I immediately recognised him. He was leaning forward getting ready for my child to perform for him. My child told me, 'I have shown things' and this was a picture from some kind of video call.'

But now the stricken mother says: 'Whenever I see him on telly, I feel sick.

She believes nothing was done and said the man continued to send her child cash as he remained on air.

It has also been alleged that the presenter partied with BBC bosses at an awards ceremony after the allegations were made against him.

Insiders claim the host enjoyed a champagne reception and a three-course meal alongside senior executives weeks after the alleged victim's mother complained to the network.

A fellow party guest told the Mirror that it was 'astonishing' that someone facing 'such serious allegations' could attend the event, adding: 'If this man was aware of what was hanging over him, he certainly didn't show it.'

The source added: 'The BBC had been made aware in the strongest possible terms of what this person is supposed to have done '' and still they were able to go along, with colleagues in tow. It is very odd, to say the least.'

Jeremy Vine (pictured) also distanced himself from the allegations on Saturday

Rylan Clark was one of three high-profile names to deny his involvement on Saturday

Match of the Day presenter Gary Lineker, became the third prominent BBC presenter to distance himself from reports that a top BBC star paid a vulnerable teenager £35,000 for sexual pictures that the youngster used to buy crack cocaine

BBC ANNOUNCES SUSPENSION OF STAFFER 'ACCUSED IN SEX PICTURES SCANDAL''The BBC takes any allegations seriously and we have robust internal processes in place to proactively deal with such allegations.

'This is a complex and fast moving set of circumstances and the BBC is working as quickly as possible to establish the facts in order to properly inform appropriate next steps.

'It is important that these matters are handled fairly and with care.

'We have been clear that if - at any point - new information comes to light or is provided to us, this will be acted upon appropriately and actively followed up.

'The BBC first became aware of a complaint in May. New allegations were put to us on Thursday of a different nature and in addition to our own enquiries we have also been in touch with external authorities, in line with our protocols.

'We can also confirm a male member of staff has been suspended.

'We expect to be in a position to provide a further update in the coming days as the process continues. The BBC Board will continue to be kept up to date.'

The BBC has appeared to suggest the family did not respond to them when they tried to pursue an investigation. But one of the country's top lawyers has questioned why they did not act sooner.

Nazir Afzal, who prosecuted the Rochdale grooming gang, told the Times last night he was 'surprised that this person was not suspended once [the BBC] became aware of the gravity of the allegation.'

He continued: 'The police should have been engaged as soon as they worked out whether the complaint was genuine.

'Where are we now - the middle of July? Six, seven weeks on. They should have advised the police that this is a matter that they should be investigating, and that should have been done weeks ago.

'There's no justification for the police not having become involved as early as possible.'

A BBC spokesperson told MailOnline on Friday: 'We treat any allegations very seriously and we have processes in place to proactively deal with them.

'As part of that, if we receive information that requires further investigation or examination, we will take steps to do this.

'That includes actively attempting to speak to those who have contacted us in order to seek further detail and understanding of the situation.

'If we get no reply to our attempts or receive no further contact that can limit our ability to progress things but it does not mean our enquiries stop.

'If, at any point, new information comes to light or is provided '-- including via newspapers '-- this will be acted upon appropriately, in line with internal processes.'

Meanwhile, s everal major BBC celebrities have stated publicly they are not the presenter being investigated.

This evening, Match of the Day presenter Gary Lineker, became the third prominent BBC presenter to say they were not the BBC star facing the serious accusations.

At just after 7pm, the football pundit tweeted: 'Hate to disappoint the haters but it's not me.'

Earlier on Saturday, Rylan, who has presented on BBC Radio Two among a string of other work, was the first to declare he was not the host in question.

He wrote: 'Not sure why my names floating about but re that story in The Sun - that ain't me babe.

'I'm currently filming a show in Italy for the BBC, so take my name out ya mouths.'

Vine then also distanced himself from the claims, adding: Just to say I'm very much looking forward to hosting my radio show on Monday '-- whoever the 'BBC Presenter' in the news is, I have the same message for you as Rylan did earlier: it certainly ain't me.'

Nicky Campbell appeared to suggest he had contacted police about being mentioned in connection with the story.

He tweeted a screenshot which featured the Metropolitan Police logo and the words: 'Thank you for contacting the Metropolitan Police Service to report your crime.'

In his tweet, he wrote: 'I think it's important to take a stand. There's just too many of these people on social media. Thanks for your support friends.'

The BBC's culture editor Katie Razzall said the presenter's continued presence on its content after a serious allegation was made 'leads to questions about what steps the Corporation took after the complaint.'

She said many questions were still unanswered, including how the investigation was undertaken and if it was appropriate for the unnamed presenter to remain on air following the allegation.

BBC News entertainment correspondent Lizo Mzimba yesterday said that the unnamed presenter will not appear on air in the near future.

He told the BBC News channel: 'We understand that the presenter is currently not scheduled to be on air in the near future.'

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Tue, 11 Jul 2023 17:37

Riley Gaines, the outspoken swimmer who competed against the biological male swimmer pretending to be female, Lia Thomas, is now calling out the attempted normalization of pedophilia.

"In America we are normalizing Pedophilia. Let me repeat that, we are normalizing Pedophilia."

You are 100 percent correct @Riley_Gaines_ But not just normalizing Pedophilia in America, but all around the world.https://t.co/zoJahmglMn

'-- Truth Justice ' (@SpartaJustice) July 6, 2023

Go Ad-Free, Get Exclusive Shows and Content, Go Premium Today - $1 Trial

Dr. Sherri Tenpenny points out the CDC's stance on biological men giving birth and breastfeeding'...

In the CDC website's section on ''Health Equity Considerations'' '' found under its ''Infant and Young Child Feeding Toolkit,'' the CDC declared that ''Transgender & nonbinary-gendered individuals may give birth & breastfeed or feed at the chest. https://t.co/pWfXX60pIH pic.twitter.com/cNeuUvjnBA

'-- Dr Sherri Tenpenny (@BusyDrT) July 6, 2023

MORE NEWS: Georgia State House Representative From Atlanta Flips To Republican Party

Straight from the CDC's website'...

Follow Us On Rumble

Having a baby suck on a man's nipples'... is there any other sane way to describe that as something other than pedophilia?

This next video ties it all together as far as pushing the 'normalization of pedophilia' agenda together'...

This is insanity pic.twitter.com/g1CMVYeZoa

'-- Karli Bonne' (@KarliBonnita) July 6, 2023

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Wife of Azovstal soldier describes fears after his surrender

CNN '--

Ukrainian commanders who were captured by Russia after leading the defense of Mariupol from the Azovstal steel plant last year have vowed to return to the battlefield following their return home Saturday evening.

The men are among the highest profile fighters to have fallen into Russian hands since the start of the war. They announced their intentions at a news conference held shortly after their arrival in Ukraine's western city of Lviv, accompanied by President Volodymyr Zelensky.

They had been flown back from Turkey '' where they had been held since September under an agreement reached with Russia '' in the same plane that carried Zelensky back from his meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Under the terms of their transfer 10 months ago, Turkey had agreed the men would not be handed over to Ukraine until the war's end. It was not immediately clear why Erdogan had apparently violated that agreement with Moscow.

For Zelensky, it appeared to mark another significant achievement from his Istanbul trip, after he had earlier secured strong support from his Turkish host for Ukraine's eventual membership of NATO.

The Azovstal siege lasted weeks and made heroes in Ukraine of the men and women who held out for months from February until the end of May 2022. The Russian military has claimed that over 2,000 Ukrainian service members surrendered there.

At the press briefing in Lviv Saturday night, some of the fighters spoke about their experiences in Turkey and shared their expectations of the future.

Denys Prokopenko, a commander of Azov regiment, said: ''The most important thing for today is that the Ukrainian army has seized the strategic initiative on the front line and is moving forward every day.''

Prokopenko said returning to the front line was the reason he and others had returned to Ukraine.

Video footage showed large crowds that gathered in Lviv to greet the leaders.

Azov deputy commander Svyatoslav Palamar described his experience in Turkey using a poem by famed Ukrainian writer Lesya Ukrainka.

''We are paraplegics with sparkling eyes, with a strong soul and a weak will. Eagle wings are growing behind our backs but we were shackled to the Turkish soil,'' he said, adding that Zelensky and his team found the key ''to take their shackles off.''

''We will continue to do our job. We are military men. We took an oath,'' Palamar added.

Zelensky thanked his team and Erdogan in particular for helping to bring the Azovstal leaders home.

The Ukrainian president also announced his appointment of Oleksandr Pivnenko as new commander of the National Guard.

Zelensky described him as ''a powerful soldier'... and combat officer who distinguished himself in the battles against Russian invaders, in particular, in the battles for Bakhmut'' in his address to the Ukraine's National Guard later on Saturday.

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https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/rfk-jr-blows-the-lid-off-operation-mockingbird-and-how-the-cia-manipulates-american-news-media/

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. talks about Operation Mockingbird, the CIA's covert propaganda program to manipulate the mainstream media and the American people through the use of numerous assets. RFK Jr. brought it up during an interview with Lex Fridman who was completely clueless. Media analyst Mark Dice has the story.

Operation Mockingbird

THE CIA AND THE MEDIA, by Carl BernsteinHow Americas Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up

Part 1: CIA's Extraordinary Role Influencing Liberal Media Outlets Daily Kos, The Daily Beast, Rolling Stone, by Dick Russell

Part 2: The Belly of The Daily Beast and Its Perceptible Ties to the CIA, by Dick Russell

12:42 pm on July 9, 2023

The Best of Charles Burris

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