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UK Ofcom Pushes Rules Targeting “Misogynistic” Content, Prompting (Even More) Free Speech Concerns

Britain’s communications regulator, Ofcom, has unveiled a new framework urging social media and technology companies to censor so-called “misogynistic” content as part of its A Safer Life Online for Women and Girls campaign.

The initiative, framed as an effort to protect women from online abuse, further weakens the distinction between “harmful” conduct and lawful expression, a tension Ofcom itself acknowledges in its own documentation.

The regulator’s new guidance encourages platforms to adopt a wide range of “safety” measures, many of which would directly influence what users can post, see, and share.

These include inserting prompts that nudge users to “reconsider” certain comments, suppressing “misogynistic” material in recommendation feeds and search results, temporarily suspending users who post repeated “abuse,” and de-monetizing content flagged under this category.

Moderators would also receive special training on “gender-based harms,” while posting rates could be throttled to slow the spread of unwanted speech.

Ofcom’s document also endorses the use of automated scanning systems like “hash-matching” to locate and delete non-consensual intimate imagery.

While intended to prevent the circulation of explicit photos, such systems typically involve the mass analysis of user uploads and can wrongly flag legitimate material.

Additional proposals include “trusted flagger” partnerships with NGOs, identity verification options, and algorithmic “friction” mechanisms, small design barriers meant to deter impulsive posting.

Some of the ideas, such as warning prompts and educational links, are voluntary.

Yet several major advocacy groups, including Refuge and Internet Matters, are pressing for the government to make them binding on all platforms.

If adopted wholesale, these measures would effectively place Ofcom in a position to oversee the policing of legal speech, with tech firms acting as its enforcement arm.

In a letter announcing the guidance, Ofcom’s Chief Executive Melanie Dawes declared that “the digital world is not serving women and girls the way it should,” describing online misogyny and non-consensual deepfakes as pervasive problems that justify immediate “industry-wide action.”

She stated that Ofcom would “follow up to understand how you are applying this Guidance” and publish a progress report in 2027.

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Were The Brits Behind Bloomberg’s Russian-US Leaks?

Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service warned earlier the same day as Bloomberg’s report that the Brits are hellbent on discrediting Trump in order to undermine his latest peace efforts for resolving the conflict from which they profit.

Bloomberg shared what it claimed to be the transcripts of calls between Trump’s Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and Putin’s top foreign policy aide Yury Ushakov as well as between Ushakov and Putin’s other advisor Kirill Dmitriev about the Ukrainian peace process. The gist of the Witkoff-Ushakov call was Witkoff’s proposal to have Putin suggest a Gaza-like 20-point peace deal for Ukraine during an upcoming call with Trump while the Ushakov-Dmitriev one implied that the leaked draft was Russian-influenced.

Ushakov declined to comment on his talks with Witkoff but said that “Somebody tapped, somebody leaked, but not us” whereas Dmitriev flat-out described his purported call with Ushakov as “fake”. For his part, Trump defended Witkoff’s alleged “coaching” of Ushakov on how Putin should deal with him by reminding everyone “That’s what a dealmaker does. You got to say, ‘Look, they want this – you got to convince them with this.’ That’s a very standard form of negotiations.”

As regards the possibility that the draft framework was Russian-influenced, the notion of which has been pushed by the legacy media to discredit the proposed mutual compromises therein, that was already debunked. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who also serves as National Security Advisor, said that “The peace proposal was authored by the U.S. It is offered as a strong framework for ongoing negotiations It is based on input from the Russian side. But it is also based on previous and ongoing input from Ukraine.”

Therefore, neither transcript is scandalous even if their contents were accurately reported, yet the question arises of who might have tapped and leaked these calls. Intriguingly, earlier the same day that Bloomberg later published their report, Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service warned that the UK “aims to undermine Trump’s efforts to resolve the conflict by discrediting him.” Readers will recall the UK’s role in Russiagate, which they conspired with the CIA, FBI, and the Clinton camp to cook up to against him.

Seeing as how they can no longer collude in this way with their three prior conspirators, the UK might therefore have resorted to leaking those two calls with Ushakov that they might have tapped (possibly among many others) as a last-ditch attempt to discredit the latest unprecedented progress towards peace. This provocation might also have been meant to make Trump panic and fire Witkoff out of fear of another Russiagate 2.0 investigation if this scandal helps the Democrats flip Congress next year.

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28 Points of NONSENSE: Russia Unbothered, Ukraine RUNNING OUT of Men

The more revisions the EU and Kiev make to Trump’s 28-point plan for Ukraine, the more ridiculous it is to assume that Russia would accept the document. Especially, as Russia is the side winning this war of attrition with advantages in manpower and weaponry that are leading to signifiant advances on the battlefield, as Kiev’s defensive lines start to fall apart.

Stanislav Krapivnik, a former U.S. Army officer, supply chain exec and military and geopolitical expert, noted that while the West is branding Trump’s offer as a type of surrender for Kiev, it’s actually asking Russia to capitulate to the West’s demand for a ceasefire with a “letter of intent” to try to make it look like NATO wants an end to the war.

As for the question of what Moscow is willing to accept, he pointed out that it seems the Russian government is finally coming to the conclusion that this conflict will have to be settled on the battlefield.

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‘Stunning’: Only 1 In 7 Germans With Positive PCR Test Had COVID Infection

Only about 1 in 7 positive PCR tests in Germany during the COVID-19 pandemic indicated an actual coronavirus infection that triggered an antibody response, according to a new peer-reviewed study.

Brian Hooker, Ph.D., chief scientific officer for Children’s Health Defense (CHD), called the study’s findings of an 86% false positive rate “stunning.”

The study also found that by late December 2020, when COVID-19 vaccines rolled out, about 25% of Germans had already acquired a natural infection. By the end of 2021, the figure rose to 92%, indicating near-universal immunity in the population.

PCR tests led to ‘significant overcounting’ of COVID infections

The study by three German researchers, published last month in Frontiers in Epidemiology, used two mathematical models to analyze how well PCR test results aligned with the results of blood tests for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies.

The findings were based on data obtained from accredited labs in Germany that handled about 90% of PCR tests in the country from March 2020 to early 2023, and also performed antibody (IgG) blood tests until May 2021.

The researchers — Michael Günther, Ph.D., Robert Rockenfeller, Ph.D., and Harald Walach, Ph.D. — said their models aligned data from PCR tests that detect “small bits of viral genetic material in the nose or throat,” and antibody tests that show if a person’s immune system “responded to an actual infection weeks or months earlier.”

They told The Defender:

“When we compared the number of PCR positives with later antibody results, only about 1 out of 7 PCR-positive people showed the kind of immune response that indicates a true infection. Under conservative assumptions, it could be closer to 1 out of 10.”

Their analysis also showed that by the end of 2021, “nearly everyone” in Germany had been “infected, vaccinated, or both.”

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“It’s Utilities Versus Rent” – Data Centers Send Energy Prices Soaring

The surge in data center construction to power today’s AI and cloud computing demands has sent electricity prices skyrocketing over the last few years. And, as Bloomberg reports, it is only getting worse.

With electricity costs now as much as 267% higher compared to five years ago in some parts of the US, fingers are being pointed directly at data center activity for blame. And while some – especially generously funded lobbies – are eager to dissemble and distort, claiming that on the contrary, electricity prices are barely keeping up with inflation and that data centers have little to no impact on electrical bills, the map below shows that more than 70% of the nodes that recorded pricing increases are located within 50 miles of significant data center activity.

Take Nicole Pasture: the Baltimore resident said her utility bills are up 50% over the past year. She is also a judge who rules on rental disputes in the city’s district court and sees people struggling with their power bills.

“It’s utilities versus rent,” she said. “They want to stay in their home, but they also want to keep their lights on.”

New data center construction projects are announced weekly, sometimes every day. Some of the construction timelines have upwards of 100 MW of new data center demand being built only two years from groundbreaking. This has to be contrasted against the rate of new energy generation construction, with the recent vite among PJM Interconnection stakeholders resulting in a failure to even select a plan for how to add data centers to the grid. 

“The voting reflects the nearly impossible challenge of trying to ensure resource adequacy and control ratepayer costs, while also allowing data center development in a market that is already short on generation supply and faces a 5-to-7 year timeline to bring on new large-scale generating resources,” Jon Gordon, a director at Advanced Energy United, a clean energy trade group, said in a bulletin on the meeting.

While some utilities have been able to pass the burden of higher electricity costs onto the owners of the large loads, most of the costs of expanding grid capacity inevitably find their way to consumers.

According to Bloomberg, in northern Virginia, Dominion Energy cited data center demand, inflation and higher fuel costs when asking regulators to raise its customer bills by about $20 a month for the average residential user over the next two years. Dominion also forecasts peak demand would rise by more than 75% by 2039 with data centers. It would be just 10% without.

And it’s only getting worse: with hundreds of gigawatts of future power demand from data centers built by companies like Oracle and Microsoft, Goldman writes that “eight out of the 13 US regional power markets are already at or below critical spare capacity levels.”

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Federal Judges Allow North Carolina to Use New GOP-Drawn Congressional Map

Federal judges in North Carolina allowed the state to use the newly drawn congressional map, which gives Republicans one extra seat in the House.

Two lawsuits were filed to block the North Carolina legislature from enacting the newly drawn map.

A three-judge panel of the US District Court of the Middle District of North Carolina denied requests for a preliminary injunction.

NBC News reported:

A federal court in North Carolina is allowing the state to use a new Republican-drawn congressional map that would help the GOP pick up another seat in the House during next year’s midterm elections.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina unanimously denied preliminary injunction requests brought by a pair of lawsuits that said in part that the new map was aimed at diluting the voting strength of Black voters, in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The judges found that the challengers “presented no direct evidence” that the North Carola Legislature enacted the map for racially discriminatory purposes.

“Instead, the direct evidence shows that the 2025 redistricting was motivated by partisan purposes,” the panel wrote Wednesday in a 57-page opinion.

Wednesday’s ruling comes after the Republican-controlled North Carolina Legislature last month approved a map aimed at expanding the number of Republican seats in the House. North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein, a Democrat, does not have the power to veto the map.

The challengers, in a pair of consolidated lawsuits, asked the court to block the state from using the new borders of two congressional districts for next year’s midterms.

Texas is also battling its newly redrawn congressional map in court and has asked the Supreme Court to halt the lower court’s ruling that blocked the new redraw.

Last Friday, Justice Alito paused the lower court’s ruling and temporarily restored Texas’s new congressional map.

In response to Texas’s redraw, California eliminated 5 House GOP seats.

The Justice Department filed a lawsuit against California and argued that its new congressional map is a result of unconstitutional race-based gerrymandering.

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Trump State Dept. declares abortions, euthanasia, transgender surgeries ‘human rights violations’

Federal officials will recognize the intentional destruction of innocent preborn babies as well as the surgical and chemical mutilation of children as human rights violations, according to the State Department.

Spokesperson Tommy Pigott told The Daily Signal that countries receiving foreign aid will be required to include “the mutilation of children” in their annual reporting to the United States.

“In recent years, new destructive ideologies have given safe harbor to human rights violations,” Pigott said. “The Trump administration will not allow these human rights violations, such as the mutilation of children, laws that infringe on free speech, and racially discriminatory employment practices, to go unchecked. We are saying enough is enough.”

“Racially discriminatory” practices include favoring non-white applicants for jobs or other benefits, a practice sometimes called “affirmative action.”

The human rights reports are a standard requirement for countries receiving taxpayer dollars.

“The State Department submits Human Rights Reports on all countries receiving assistance and all United Nations member states to Congress in accordance with the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 and the Trade Act of 1974,” The Daily Signal explained.

Other human rights violations that must be tracked include sanctions for so-called “hate speech,” supporting mass migration into other countries, “attempts to coerce individuals into engaging in euthanasia,” “violations of religious freedom, including antisemitic violence and harassment,” and support for “forced testing, forced organ harvesting, and eugenic gene-editing practices on human embryos.”

A medical reform group that opposes transgender drugs and surgeries for minors thanked the Trump administration for “setting a clear moral standard” on this issue, as well as others, such as DEI.

“Do No Harm commends the Trump administration for highlighting toxic ideologies around the globe as the first step to eliminating them,” Executive Director Kristina Rasmussen told LifeSiteNews via a media statement.

“Engaging in racial discrimination or pushing irreversible gender medicalization on children is unacceptable – whether here at home or abroad,” Rasmussen said. “The State Department is leading the way in protecting the vulnerable and setting a clear moral standard for the world.”

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EU Parliament Votes for Mandatory Digital ID and Age Verification, Threatening Online Privacy

The European Parliament has voted to push the European Union closer to a mandatory digital identification system for online activity, approving a non-binding resolution that endorses EU-wide age verification rules for social media, video platforms, and AI chatbots.

Though presented as a child protection measure, the text strongly promotes the infrastructure for universal digital ID, including the planned EU Digital Identity Wallet and an age verification app being developed by the European Commission.

Under the proposal, every user would have to re-identify themselves at least once every three months to continue using major platforms. Children under 13 would be banned entirely, and teenagers between 13 and 16 would require parental approval to participate online.

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Economic Doom Loop: Leftist UK Gov’t to Raise Taxes to All Time High, While Increasing Welfare and Migration Handouts

The leftist Labour Party government in Britain announced £26 billion in tax hikes as a part of its autumn budget, which will take the tax burden to an all time high over the next five years.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves, the Labour government’s top cabinet minister on the economy, unveiled Wednesday her long-anticipated budget, which will see millions of Britons see their taxes increased despite the leftist party’s promise to focus on growth and to protect workers from paying more in tax.

While Reeves did not technically raise income taxes — as it would have been a direct contradiction of the party’s 2024 election manifesto — her budget extends the income tax threshold freeze, resulting in what is known as fiscal drag, a process by which workers are brought into higher tax bands as a result of inflation or pay growth.

According to the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), which controversially leaked the details of Reeves’ plan prior to the announcement, the extension of the freeze announced on Wednesday will see an estimated 920,000 more workers paying the 40 per cent income tax rate by 2029-30 compared to projections in March. Similarly, some 780,000 more people will be forced into paying income tax for the first time at the lowest 20 per cent rate, The Times reported.

As a result, income tax will increase from 10.5 per cent of GDP to 11.8 per cent by 2030-31. In total, the overall tax burden will climb from 34.7 per cent to an all time high of 38 per cent of GDP by 2031 after the £26 billion in tax hikes are factored in.

The government attempted to ameliorate anger over the cost of living by announcing q £150 reduction in energy payments, and an increase to the national minimum wage, which critics warn may hurt employment numbers. In a further populist measure, the government will introduce a so-called “mansion tax” on properties worth over £2 million. However, some have warned that this will further exacerbate the exodus of millionaires from the country.

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Why the Meandering Borders of Ukraine Are No Hill For America First To Die On

Here we go again. The Donald had no more than offered a constructive 28-point plan that correctly identified America’s Homeland Security interest in Ukraine as nichts, nada, nugatory and nyet – when the Washington neocon brigade that he foolishly invited back into his government to sabotage it for the second time, did exactly that. This time it pulled the guts right out of his Ukraine peace plan and did so in plain sight.

To wit, the only thing that mattered in the original gussied-up word salad of 28-points was that –

  • Ukraine would be partitioned roughly along the lines of the pre-1918 Novorussiya province of the Russian Empire, meaning that mainly Russian-speaking Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk and the major parts of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia would be allowed to secede from the tyrannical, corruption-ridden, Nazi-tainted, anti-Russian Kiev regime.
  • the rump of Ukraine would forswear now and forevermore any interest in joining NATO. That is, functioning as a Cuba on Moscow’s borders just like Khrushchev foolishly attempted with JFK way back in October 1962.

Neither of these so-called “concessions” to Putin would harm America’s true homeland security by a whit because Russia with a $2 trillion GDP based on oil, grains and metals is no threat whatsoever to America’s $30 trillion high-tech economy. Nor would they have adversely impacted the so-called “rules-based international order” because the latter is but a beard for the Washington-based Warfare State and global empire, which is already bankrupting America and which remains utterly unnecessary for the maintenance of what’s left of its liberty, democracy and capitalist prosperity.

In short, the Donald was – knowingly or otherwise – fixing to make like the long-ago Senator from Vermont, George Aiken. The latter correctly and famously told LBJ the way to get out of the Vietnam morass was to “declare victory and go home”.

That’s essentially what Trump’s 28-point plan did – just like in the case of that comparable 60-years ago folly that had no bearing on America’s security, either.

But apparently to quell the uproar over its correct answer to the $300 billion financial and human catastrophe that the Washington War Party and its NATO footmen have visited upon the ashes of the Ukrainian steppes, the Donald unaccountably sent Little Marco Rubio to Geneva last weekend. His remit was to negotiate an acceptance of his 28-point plan by the crooks, sadists and war criminals who conduct the Ukrainian version of Mafia rule in their woebegone nation. But what he actually did was agree with them to essentially disembowel Trump’s plan by dropping the aforementioned provisions, which were the only thing that really mattered to the Russians.

Still, Rubio’s treachery in plain sight should not have been a surprise to anyone who has actually paid attention (not the Donald) to Washington’s machination during recent decades. After all, sending the fox into the hen house to gather the eggs is a hardly an adequate metaphor for what happened in Geneva.

To wit, Rubio was, is and always will be the enemy of America First because he is an inveterate neocon interventionist. After having hung around the Deep Swamp most of his adult life, he has no clue that the entire machinery of the Washington-based Warfare State is about selling arms and conducting live-action military exercises abroad against anyone who fails to cow-tow to the dictates of the war-makers on the Potomac and their auxiliaries and proconsuls scattered around the planet.

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