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Mum jailed for ‘racist’ migrant hotel tweet ‘not allowed to visit ailing husband’

A woman who was jailed for over two years after tweeting about mass deportation and setting fire to migrant hotels has been refused temporary leave to visit her sick husband. Lucy Connolly, 42, was sentenced to 31 months behind bars after an inflammatory post on social media during the Southport riots last summer.

Demonstrations broke out across the country following the vicious killing of three children at a dance class on July 29, fuelled by false claims that the attacker was an illegal immigrant. Connolly’s post, which was later deleted, read: “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f***ing hotels full of the b******s for all I care … If that makes me racist, so be it.” The 42-year-old has reportedly been denied temporary leave to visit her husband Ray, who is suffering from bone marrow failure, and has also had her pleas to be with her 12-year-old daughter, whose behaviour at school has been “out of character”, rejected by authorities.

Documents suggest that Connolly has been denied leave for reasons linked to concerns over public and media interest in her case, rather than issues meeting the necessary criteria, The Telegraph reported.

Prison service sources denied her application for temporary release was blocked, insisting it was being considered by the governor at HMP Drake Hall in Staffordshire, to which she has recently been transferred

A spokesperson said: “Decisions on release on temporary licence and home detention curfew are made following uncompromising risk assessments to prioritise public safety.

“These are discretionary schemes, and each case is rigorously scrutinised, considering the severity of the offence, the prisoner’s conduct and the potential impact on victims and the community.”

However, internal notes at her previous prison, HMP Peterborough, suggested that the temporary release was “not necessarily going to happen due to the public interest” and that “the media interest has been raised as an issue in terms of any future Release on Temporary Licence (ROTL) applications”.

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The All-Devouring Machine: Pentagon Malfeasance and Insatiable Empire

The eyes of a new generation were opened in an episode that seemed like dark science fiction for those of a certain age, and an unyielding nightmare regardless: a genocide streaming into smartphones around the world in real time. Many American eyes were opened for the first time to the reality not only in Palestine, but in the places in the world that are meant to be forgotten, where the U.S. and its allies may tread at their will and pleasure. At the center of this system of license and aggression is the Department of Defense, as it is now euphemistically named. What we call “defense” spending in the United States is actually spending on weapons and war-making, and it has continued its unabated rise in both red and blue presidential administrations.

The U.S. spends far more on its military than any other country – it spends more than the next nine countries combined, and as a share of GDP, its military spending far outpaces that of other rich countries in the G7 group. The Department of Defense is massive, “with $4 trillion in assets dispersed across fifty states and over 4,500 locations worldwide,” and its sheer size is at the heart of pathological accounting failures in recent years. Last November, the Pentagon flunked its seventh audit in a row, again failing to properly account for its budget – over $800 billion. A Stimson Center policy brief published last July called the Pentagon’s wild spending “a budgetary time bomb set to explode in the next twenty years,” noting the explosion in Pentagon spending in the years since 9/11. “Adjusted for inflation, defense spending has increased more than 48% in just the first 24 years of this century.” The U.S. imperial military is a truly global enterprise. According to data compiled by political anthropologist David Vine at American University, there were about 750 bases outside of the United States as of 2021, scattered throughout the world in 80 countries and colonies. Vine points out that given the “sheer number of bases and the secrecy and lack of transparency” around the information, a complete list is impossible:

The Pentagon’s previously annual list of its bases, the “Base Structure Report,” is notoriously incomplete and, at times, inaccurate. The Pentagon has also failed to release the Congressionally-mandated annual report since the Fiscal Year 2018 version, making an accurate list even more difficult than in prior years. Most observers assume the U.S. military does not know the true number of bases occupied by U.S. forces. It is telling – but not a good sign – that when a recent U.S. Army-funded study evaluated the effects of U.S. bases on conflict globally, the study relied on my 2015 list of bases rather than the Pentagon’s list.

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Bill Gates Lobbying White House to Reverse USAID Cuts: Report

The cuts made to the so-called “foreign aid” agency USAID (which doesn’t actually have humanitarianism as its primary purpose) in the first days of the Trump 2.0 administration affected various global vaccine initiatives, many of which were pet projects of self-styled philanthropist Bill Gates.

Via Reuters (emphasis added):

Soon after his January 20 inauguration, President Donald Trump moved to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development, cutting more than 80% of contracts and freezing billions of dollars for everything from emergency food assistance to malaria prevention.

The Trump administration, led by the State Department, is reviewing what kinds of foreign aid will remain under its “America First” policy, with a list of around 30 global health projects for consideration, one of the sources said…

[The list includes] rganizations such as Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, as well as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, among others. They are on the shortlist for review by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Trump. The U.S. gives around $300 million annually to Gavi, and more than $1 billion to the Global Fund.

Several projects under the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) are also on the review shortlist, the source said.

In an attempt to ensure these projects remain federally funded, Gates has reportedly been quietly lobbying the administration behind the scenes to protect the billions that flow to his “non-profit” ventures.  

Putting aside the ultimate question of why Bill Gates isn’t under a federal prison, why do we allow creatures like this to slink around the White House trying to convince Trump, our duly elected president, and his lieutenants to reinstate his own personal scheme that for some reason require public subsidy even though Gates has a net worth of $108 billion?

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Israeli Troops Blow Whistle on War Crimes in Gaza ‘Kill Zone’

An Israeli human rights group on Monday published a report in which Israel Defense Forces officers and soldiers who took part in the creation of a buffer zone along Gaza’s border with Israel described alleged war crimes including indiscriminate killing, as well as the wholesale deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure in what multiple whistleblowers called a “kill zone.”

The new report from Breaking the Silence (BTS) details how Israel – which for decades has dubiously relied upon defensive buffer zones in territories it conquers or controls – decided on a policy of “widespread, deliberate destruction” in order to create a security perimeter ranging between roughly half a mile and a mile in width on the Gaza side of the Israeli-Palestinian border.

“To create this area, Israel launched a major miltary engineering operation that, by means of wholesale destruction, entirely reshaped about 16% of the Gaza Strip… an area previously home to some 35% of Gaza’s agricultural land,” the report states. “The perimeter extends from the coast in the north to the Egyptian border in the south, all within the territory of the Gaza Strip and outside of Israel’s internationally recognized borders.”

“The mission given to soldiers in the field, as revealed in their testimonies, was to create an empty, completely flat expanse about a kilometer wide along the Gaza side of the border fence,” the publication continues. “This space was to have no crops, structures, or people. Almost every object, infrastructure installation, and structure within the perimeter was demolished.”

“Palestinians were denied entry into the area altogether, a ban which was enforced using live fire, including machine gun fire and tank shells. In this way, the military created a death zone of enormous proportions,” the report adds. “Places where people had lived, farmed, and established industry were transformed into a vast wasteland, a strip of land eradicated in its entirety.”

“The testimonies demonstrate that soldiers were given orders to deliberately, methodically, and systematically annihilate whatever was within the designated perimeter, including entire residential neighborhoods, public buildings, educational institutions, mosques, and cemeteries, with very few exceptions,” the paper says. “Industrial zones and agricultural areas which served the entire population of Gaza were laid to waste, regardless of whether those areas had any connection whatsoever to the fighting.”

Palestinians who dared enter the perimeter, even accidentally were also targeted, including civilian men, women, children, and elders. The officers and soldiers interviewed by BTS struggled to explain whether noncombatants were informed of the no-go zone’s limits, with one saying civilians knew to stay away when they saw that “enough people died or got injured” crossing the unmarked boundary.

Some people who entered the perimeter out of sheer desperation were targeted. Israel’s blockade of Gaza has fueled widespread and sometimes deadly starvation, and Palestinians entered the “kill zone” to pick hubeiza, a nutritious wild plant, after the area’s farmland was razed.

“The IDF really is fulfilling the public’s wishes, which state: ‘There are no innocents in Gaza. We’ll show them,’” one reserve warrant officer explained. “People were incriminated for having bags in their hands. Guy showed up with a bag? Incriminated, terrorist. I believe they came to pick hubeiza, but… boom,” tank shells were fired at him from half a mile away.

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Member of ‘Zizian’ cult facing murder charges disrupts court with outbursts about transphobia

At a court hearing in Fairfield, Calif. on Tuesday meant to set a new trial date for two trans Zizian members accused of murder, attempted murder and escape, one of the defendants was ordered to be ejected again from the courtroom after screaming repeatedly about transphobia.

“The jail has been hormonally detransitioning me for a quarter of a decade,” Alexander “Somni” Leatham yelled behind a mask while reading from a statement held in his shackled hands, which rattled loudly. During the outburst, Leatham, who stands at six feet tall, resisted and tried to break out of the grasp of two sheriff’s deputies. Leatham, 29, is a male who identifies as a transgender woman. His co-defendant “Suri Dao,” 24, is a woman who identifies as trans nonbinary. They are both members of an extremist transgender leftist “rationalist” vegan cult linked to at least eight deaths. The members follow the teachings of a trans anarchist named Jack LaSota, who uses the alias “Ziz.” The group is informally referred to as “Zizians” by outsiders, though they did not use that name to refer to themselves.

Defendant “Suri Dao” is the alias of Colorado woman, Tessa Berns.

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100+ Meta employees, including Head of AI Policy, confirmed as ex-IDF

Meta’s recruitment of vast numbers of former Israeli soldiers raises serious questions about the tech giant’s commitment to free speech – and provides a peek into a biased content moderation process that’s been heavily censoring pro-Palestinian accounts amid the Israeli siege of Gaza.

This article was originally published by ¡Do Not Panic!

More than one hundred former Israeli spies and IDF soldiers work for tech giant Meta, including its head of AI policy, who served in the IDF under an Israeli government scheme that allows non-Israelis to volunteer for the Israeli army.

Shira Anderson, an American international rights lawyer, is Meta’s AI policy chief who voluntarily enlisted for the IDF in 2009 under a program which enables non-Israeli Jews who aren’t eligible for military conscription to join the Israeli army.

Through this program, known as Garin Tzabar, many non-Israelis who have fought for the IDF have been implicated in war crimes and crimes against humanity since Israel’s genocide of Gaza began in October 2023.

Anderson served as a non-commissioned officer in the IDF for over two years where she worked in the Military Strategic Information Section, writing dossiers and public relations propaganda for the IDF. She was also the liaison between the IDF and foreign military attaches stationed in Israel, and liaison to the Red Cross.

With AI a critical emerging technology for tech giants and militaries, Anderson’s role at Meta is an important one. She develops the legal guidance, policies and public relations talking points concerning AI issues and regulation for all of Meta’s key areas, including its product, public policy and government affairs teams.

At Meta, Anderson, who is based in Meta’s Washington DC office, is in familiar company. More than one hundred former Israeli spies and IDF soldiers are employed by the company, my new investigation shows, many of whom worked for Israel’s spy agency Unit 8200.

These ex-IDF members are based evenly across Meta’s US offices and in its Tel Aviv office, and a significant number of them, like Anderson, have a specialization in AI. Given that Israel has made extensive use of AI not just to conduct its genocide, but to establish its prior system of apartheid, surveillance and occupation, Meta’s recruiting of IDF AI specialists is particularly insidious. Did these former Israeli spies use their Unit 8200 connections to help the tech giant collaborate with the IDF to build kill lists? According to a report last year, Unit 8200 infiltrated WhatsApp groups and marked every name in a group for assassination if just one alleged Hamas member was also in the group, no matter the size or content of the group chat.

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UN Exposes Systematic Israeli Rape of Palestinians

On March 13th, the UN Human Rights High Commission published a horrifying report exposing in oft-emetic detail how the Zionist entity has employed “sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence against Palestinians” on an industrial scale since the Gaza genocide erupted in October 2023. The UN concludes these hideous acts are a central component of Israel’s “broader effort to undermine [Palestinians’] right to self-determination,” their systematic nature pointing unambiguously to endorsement by Tel Aviv’s military and political leaders.

The report records, “sexual and gender-based violence is by no means a new element of the Israeli occupation.” However, in the wake of October 7th, there has been a “sharp increase in sexual violence against Palestinian women and men”, both by Zionist Occupation Forces and settlers. The UN encountered no obstacles collecting voluminous highly incriminating evidence of this vile abuse. In addition to a welter of victim and witness testimony, perpetrators often voyeuristically captured themselves and their confederates openly committing these crimes on camera.

Frequently, these abhorrent images were pridefully posted on the culprits’ personal social media accounts. Such actions amply attest to the culture of total impunity in which ZOF soldiers literally rape and pillage. “Despite the abundance of witness and digital evidence of Israeli soldiers committing crimes in Gaza,” the UN found “there have been no meaningful efforts by Israel to hold the perpetrators accountable.” Requests submitted to Tel Aviv for clarity on investigations into sexual violence committed by Occupation Forces have been ignored:

“The Commission has not seen any evidence that Israeli authorities have taken any effective measures to prevent or stop acts of sexual violence or to identify and punish perpetrators.”

By contrast, the UN documented multiple statements by Zionist entity officials actively supporting ZOF militants accused of sex crimes, and “legitimizing rape and other forms of sexual violence” against Palestinians, particularly detainees. That Israel’s rulers advocate sexually-charged attacks on Palestinians is further reinforced by a deliberate ZOF strike on a women’s rights centre in Gaza, in mid-November 2023. The UN noted the broadside’s “clear gendered dimension,” with soldiers daubing deeply offensive, sexist insults directed at Palestinian women on the building’s inner walls in Hebrew.

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UK creating ‘murder prediction’ tool to identify people most likely to kill

The UK government is developing a “murder prediction” programme which it hopes can use personal data of those known to the authorities to identify the people most likely to become killers.

Researchers are alleged to be using algorithms to analyse the information of thousands of people, including victims of crime, as they try to identify those at greatest risk of committing serious violent offences.

The scheme was originally called the “homicide prediction project”, but its name has been changed to “sharing data to improve risk assessment”. The Ministry of Justice hopes the project will help boost public safety but campaigners have called it “chilling and dystopian”.

The existence of the project was discovered by the pressure group Statewatch, and some of its workings uncovered through documents obtained by Freedom of Information requests.

Statewatch says data from people not convicted of any criminal offence will be used as part of the project, including personal information about self-harm and details relating to domestic abuse. Officials strongly deny this, insisting only data about people with at least one criminal conviction has been used.

The government says the project is at this stage for research only, but campaigners claim the data used would build bias into the predictions against minority-ethnic and poor people.

The MoJ says the scheme will “review offender characteristics that increase the risk of committing homicide” and “explore alternative and innovative data science techniques to risk assessment of homicide”.

The project would “provide evidence towards improving risk assessment of serious crime, and ultimately contribute to protecting the public via better analysis”, a spokesperson added.

The project, which was commissioned by the prime minister’s office when Rishi Sunak was in power, is using data about crime from various official sources including the Probation Service and data from Greater Manchester police before 2015.

The types of information processed includes names, dates of birth, gender and ethnicity, and a number that identifies people on the police national computer.

Statewatch’s claim that data from innocent people and those who have gone to the police for help will be used is based on a part of the data-sharing agreement between the MoJ and GMP.

A section marked: “type of personal data to be shared” by police with the government includes various types of criminal convictions, but also listed is the age a person first appeared as a victim, including for domestic violence, and the age a person was when they first had contact with police.

Also to be shared – and listed under “special categories of personal data” – are “health markers which are expected to have significant predictive power”, such as data relating to mental health, addiction, suicide and vulnerability, and self-harm, as well as disability.

Sofia Lyall, a researcher for Statewatch, said: “The Ministry of Justice’s attempt to build this murder prediction system is the latest chilling and dystopian example of the government’s intent to develop so-called crime ‘prediction’ systems.

“Time and again, research shows that algorithmic systems for ‘predicting’ crime are inherently flawed.

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NEW STUDY – Flu Vaccination Linked to 27% Increased Risk of Flu

The Cleveland Clinic study titled, Effectiveness of the Influenza Vaccine During the 2024-2025 Respiratory Viral Season, was just uploaded to the MedRxiv preprint server:

Background The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of the influenza vaccine during the 2024-2025 respiratory viral season.

Methods Employees of Cleveland Clinic in employment in Ohio on October 1, 2024, were included. The cumulative incidence of influenza among those in the vaccinated and unvaccinated states was compared over the following 25 weeks. Protection provided by vaccination (analyzed as a time-dependent covariate) was evaluated using Cox proportional hazards regression.

Results Among 53402 employees, 43857 (82.1%) had received the influenza vaccine by the end of the study. Influenza occurred in 1079 (2.02%) during the study. The cumulative incidence of influenza was similar for the vaccinated and unvaccinated states early, but over the course of the study the cumulative incidence of influenza increased more rapidly among the vaccinated than the unvaccinated. In an analysis adjusted for age, sex, clinical nursing job, and employment location, the risk of influenza was significantly higher for the vaccinated compared to the unvaccinated state (HR, 1.27; 95% C.I., 1.07 – 1.51; P = 0.007), yielding a calculated vaccine effectiveness of −26.9% (95% C.I., −55.0 to −6.6%).

Conclusions This study found that influenza vaccination of working-aged adults was associated with a higher risk of influenza during the 2024-2025 respiratory viral season, suggesting that the vaccine has not been effective in preventing influenza this season.

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Hawaii Senate Passes Bill To Let Doctors Recommend Medical Marijuana For Any Condition They See Fit

Senators in Hawaii on Wednesday gave approval to a medical marijuana bill that would, among other changes, allow healthcare providers to recommend cannabis to treat any condition they believe it would benefit.

The full Senate chamber voted 24–1 to approve HB 302, from Rep. Gregg Takayama (D).

As introduced, the proposal would clarify that under state law, a medical marijuana recommendation would no longer need to be made by a doctor who had conducted “an initial in-person consultation” with a patient.

Last month, however, a pair of Senate committees amended the bill to effectively allow medical marijuana to be recommended for any condition that a doctor or advanced practice registered nurse (APRN) believes it would benefit. Currently providers can recommend marijuana to treat only those maladies on a specific state list.

The provision would redefine “debilitating medical condition” to mean “any condition determined by the certifying physician or advanced practice registered nurse to be appropriate for the medical use of cannabis.”

That would open the door to wider access for patients who might have conditions that stand to benefit from medical marijuana but whose ailments haven’t been specifically recognized by state officials.

Senate lawmakers did not discuss the bill ahead of Tuesday’s vote. The lone no vote came from Sen. Brenton Awa (R).

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