University COVID App Mandates Are The Wrong Call

As students, parents, and schools prepare the new school year, universities are considering ways to make returning to campus safer. Some are considering and even mandating that students install COVID-related technology on their personal devices, but this is the wrong call. Exposure notification appsquarantine enforcement programs, and similar new technologies are untested and unproven, and mandating them risks exacerbating existing inequalities in access to technology and education. Schools must remove any such mandates from student agreements or commitments, and further should pledge not to mandate installation of any technology.

Even worse, many schools—including Indiana University, UMass Amherst, and University of New Hampshire—are requiring students to make a general blanket commitment to installing an  unspecified tracking app of the university’s choosing in the future. This gives students no opportunity to assess or engage with the privacy practices or other characteristics of this technology. This is important because not all COVID exposure notification and contact tracing apps, for example, are the same. For instance, Utah’s Healthy Together app until recently collected not only Bluetooth proximity data but also GPS location data, an unnecessary privacy intrusion that was later rolled back. Google and Apple’s framework for exposure notification based on Bluetooth is more privacy-protective than a GPS-based solution, but the decision to install it or any other app must still be in the hands of the individuals affected.

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Police Confiscate Man’s Firearm After Anonymous “Antifa” Members Accuse Him of Being a “Racist”

A California man had his registered firearm seized by local police after “antifa” members on social media accused him of being racist on the internet — the first case of its kind.

On July 7th/8th, left-wing extremist twitter user @anonymouscommie doxed a Sacramento resident named Andrew Casarez. The anonymous account accused him of being a “neo-Nazi troll.”

On the very same day, the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office opened up an investigation into him. During a background check, they found that Casarez was a registered gun owner. On July 13th, 2020, Sergeant Nate Grgich executed a search warrant for his home and car.

Nothing illegal or of a criminal nature was found during the search, but Sgt. Grgich was able to get a judge’s permission to seize Casarez’s handgun, a pair of pants and a “racist” t-shirt using a new law enforcement tool called a “gun restraining order,” which was signed by Judge Jaime R. Roman.

The Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office is bragging about being the first in the country to seize a firearm using primarily the owner’s political ideology as the excuse.

On the case, spokesperson Lacey Nelson was quoted as saying “This search warrant it’s the first of its kind at least in the country. As far as how we obtained it and were able to serve it […] He was posting enough racist rhetoric and propaganda on Facebook that it was concerning that his behaviors could become violent in retaliation.”

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The Pentagon has made more UFO revelations, but Canada’s had a public UFO database for decades

Earlier this year, the Pentagon confirmed that Tom Delonge had actually leaked some legit UFO videos; and just last week, The New York Times buried even more UFO revelations on the 17th page of the print edition.

It’s definitely weird that the former lead singer of Blink-182 emerged from a paranoid painkiller addiction to become a legitimate UFOlogist, in communication with John Podesta and Hillary Clinton. It’s even weirder that his colleagues in the To The Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences include a former Defense Department employee who may be lying about his involvement with the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program; the former head of the CIA’s “men who stare at goats” program, who also claimed to scientifically “confirm” that Russian magician Uri Geller had actual psychokinetic abilities, even though Geller himself admitted it was a trick; and a scion of the Gulf Oil fortune who also worked for the DOD and involved in a UFO interest group with the co-author of the NYT articles about the Pentagon’s UFO program. Or that TTA purchased supposedly “alien” metals from the billionaire owner of Budget Suites for America.

But what’s even more ridiculous is that the Canadian government has had most of their UFO information easily available for decades. The info they have is no more damning or exciting than that blurry Pentagon footage of a pill-shaped aerial vehicle that’s probably just an unmanned drone or satellite. But the truth, as they say, is out there, nonetheless.

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Prince Andrew ‘put pressure on the US government to give Jeffrey Epstein a plea deal’ which saw the pedophile jailed for only 18 months in 2008, unsealed documents claim

Prince Andrew ‘lobbied the US government to help get a sweetheart plea-deal for pedophile friend Jeffrey Epstein‘ that saw him jailed for just 18 months in 2008, newly unsealed court documents claim.

The allegation is contained within a motion by lawyers for two anonymous Epstein accusers who were trying to get hold of documents which they claim showed Andrew’s lobbying efforts.

The motion forms part of a 2015 libel case against Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s alleged madam, which have been kept under lock and key until today – when they were released following her arrest on sex trafficking charges.

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Exposing the maskerade: The questions every American should be asking about indefinite mask mandates

The trope of “just shut up and wear a mask” is not science, ordered liberty, or constitutional governance. It’s what they do in North Korea. We need real debate on the effectiveness of masks, the type of masks, the situations in which they are worn, the duration of time, the benchmarks that need to be met to measure effectiveness, and the process for promulgating these rules. We are no longer 24 hours into an emergency. We are four months into this virus, and it’s time to function like the representative republic that we are.

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AstraZeneca to be exempt from coronavirus vaccine liability claims in most countries

AstraZeneca has been granted protection from future product liability claims related to its COVID-19 vaccine hopeful by most of the countries with which it has struck supply agreements, a senior executive told Reuters.

With 25 companies testing their vaccine candidates on humans and getting ready to immunise hundred millions of people once the products are shown to work, the question of who pays for any claims for damages in case of side effects has been a tricky point in supply negotiations.

“This is a unique situation where we as a company simply cannot take the risk if in … four years the vaccine is showing side effects,” Ruud Dobber, a member of Astra’s senior executive team, told Reuters.

“In the contracts we have in place, we are asking for indemnification. For most countries it is acceptable to take that risk on their shoulders because it is in their national interest,” he said, adding that Astra and regulators were making safety and tolerability a top priority.

Dobber would not name the countries.

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