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Utility Accused of Disproportionately Disconnecting Service in Low-Income Neighborhoods “to preserve the grid”

Columbus civic leaders continued to seek answers Thursday about how AEP decided which neighborhoods to cut power to this week and whether appropriate steps were taken to notify customers in advance of the outages.

The NAACP Columbus chapter again questioned AEP Thursday, calling for additional answers as to how the utility determines areas that will be without service, and whether AEP notified residents, governments and social service agencies prior to the shutdown. The questions followed statements from NAACP leaders Wednesday raising concerns that areas in Columbus affected by the outage included many low-income and minority neighborhoods.

“The NAACP’s concern is that these outages will add to the growing list of health, environmental and crime rates in these communities,” the NAACP said in a statement Thursday.  “We also need to know what this community can expect moving forward in these dog days of summer.”

City of Columbus officials also contacted AEP about the outages and the direct impact on those poorer neighborhoods, city spokeswoman Melanie Crabill said Thursday.

“We asked AEP the same question because we were being asked by residents,” Crabill said. “AEP assured us that they based load shedding on circuit locations, not neighborhoods.”

Ohio Democratic lawmakers from the Columbus area also sought answers from AEP Thursday, writing in a letter that the utility has an obligation to provide customers access to services and to communicate planned outages “to limit the human and financial costs shouldered by families, cities and people with medical needs.”

The letter included a list of questions for AEP and was signed by Democratic state representatives from Franklin County, including Kristin Boggs, Rich Brown, Latyna Humphrey, Dontavius Jarrells, David Leland, Mary Lightbody, Beth Liston, Adam Miller, and Allison Russo.

“We find it troubling that AEP has no issue with customer notifications when bills are due, but when customers are faced with historic heat, limited resources and great needs, there seems to be limited or no communication about planned outages that impact the health, safety and welfare of customers,” the lawmakers wrote.

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Japan passes bill making ‘online insults’ punishable by one year in jail

In an attempt to quell public concern about cyberbullying, Japan has passed legislation making “online insults” punishable by imprisonment.

The bill, passed by the Japanese government on Monday, has amended the country’s penal code and will take effect this summer.

According to the Japan Times, the amendment comes as a response to the death of professional wrestler and Netflix’s Terrance House reality star Hana Kimura.

Kimura, 22, died by suicide in 2020. News of her death was spread nationwide, with many Japanese citizens pointing to the ample online abuse and harassment Kimura received in the months before her death.

Offenders who post “online insults” can now be punished under the law with up to one year of jailtime, or fined ¥300,000 (approximately $2,870).

Prior to this legislation, insults were still illegal, though the punishment was lesser, with offenders earning fewer than 30 days detention and a fine of ¥10,000 (approximately $95).

According to CNN, under Japan’s penal code, insults “are defined as publicly demeaning someone’s social standing without referring to specific facts about them or a specific action.”

Insults differ from defamation in Japan, the distinguishing factor being that defamation must include specific facts when publicly demeaning another person. Defamation is also punishable under Japanese law.

The degree to which an insult will be punished under the new law has yet to be determined.

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MSN Quietly Deleted a Story Revealing That Severe COVID-19 is Rarely Found in the Unvaccinated.

A research paper found that people who did not receive a COVID-19 vaccine had a lower rate of suffering a severe case of the virus amidst the pandemic.

The article, which has been uploaded to the preprint server ResearchGate, relied on data from over 18,500 respondents across 175 countries. Analysis revealed that individuals unvaccinated against COVID-19 reported fewer instances of hospitalization in comparison to their vaccinated counterparts.

MSN – a news website launched by vaccine enthusiast Bill Gates’s Microsoft in 1995 –  covered the study, titling its article “Severe COVID-19 ‘Rare’ In Unvaccinated People,” but appears to have taken down the story since its publication. Archived versions of the article are still available, however.

The survey – “Self-reported outcomes, choices and discrimination among a global COVID-19 unvaccinated cohort“– was conducted from September 2021 through February 2022. Data collected for the survey was analyzed by an independent, international team of scientists led by Robert Verkerk, Ph.D., the founder and executive and scientific director of Alliance for Natural Health International.

“It is important to recognize that because the cohort represents a self-selected, as opposed to randomly selected, sample, the findings cannot be directly compared with other observational studies based on self-reported data based on randomly selected subjects,” emphasized the study.

Many of the unvaccinated individuals included in the analysis opted for natural treatments such as vitamin D, zinc, quercetin, and drugs such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.

The study also found that people unvaccinated against COVID-19 faced discrimination for their decisions, with between 20 to 60 percent of people per country reporting being personal targets of “hate or victimization.”

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Inmate “Offered Money” To Murder Ghislaine Maxwell: Court Filing

Lawyers for Ghislaine Maxwell claim that the former Jeffrey Epstein ‘madam’ should receive well below the recommended 20 year sentence because another inmate was allegedly offered money to strangle her in her sleep, according to the New York Times.

“One of the female inmates in Ms. Maxwell’s housing unit told at least three other inmates that she had been offered money to murder Ms. Maxwell and that she planned to strangle her in her sleep,” wrote Maxwell’s legal team, adding that the inmate wasn’t worried about legal repercussions since “an additional 20 years’ incarceration would be worth the money she’d receive for murdering Ms. Maxwell.”

The woman was moved to another housing unit in the prison, according to the lawyers, “presumably to protect Ms. Maxwell.”

“This incident reflects the brutal reality,” wrote the lawyers, adding “that there are numerous prison inmates who would not hesitate to kill Ms. Maxwell — whether for money, fame, or simple ‘street cred.’”

We have to wonder if the inmate was told to make it look like a suicide.

Maxwell was convicted on Dec. 29 of charges including sex trafficking of minors and a conspiracy to recruit women and girls – some just 14-years-old into a lifestyle of sexual abuse at the hands of Epstein and his associates – whose names have remained suspiciously secret.

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Congress Finds Even More Reasons To Disregard The Bill of Rights

With news that Congress is on its way to passing new gun control laws that will make it easier for bureaucrats to disarm law-abiding Americans, the United States is once again repeating the egregious mistake of responding to a perceived “emergency” by crippling constitutional protections for Americans’ unalienable rights.

First we had the post-9/11 passage of the Patriot Act and its creation of a national security surveillance state that tracks and records Americans’ digital communications despite the absence of probable cause, legal warrants, or explicit consent. Then we had the Department of Homeland Security’s recent flirtation with a “disinformation board” meant to regulate speech and censor points of view at odds with the government’s officially sanctioned “narratives.”

Now we have a renewed push for “red flag” laws intended to deprive Americans of their weapons without proper due process or criminal conviction. Over the last 20 years, America’s First, Second, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments have been under sustained attack, and, amazingly, it has been elected officials sworn by oath to “support and defend” those same amendments who have led much of the charge.

There’s nothing so dangerous as a politician who undermines the Bill of Rights during a moment of tragedy or crisis. Those rights, set forth as the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution as a redundancy to make explicitly clear what is beyond the scope of the federal government’s enumerated powers, are not wishy-washy suggestions meant to be ignored during times of “emergency.” On the contrary, it is during such times when their safeguards become most critical.

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The UK’s Decision to Extradite Assange Shows Why The US/UK’s Freedom Lectures Are a Farce

The eleven-year persecution of Julian Assange was extended and escalated on Friday morning. The British Home Secretary, Priti Patel, approved the U.S.’s extradition request to send Julian Assange to Virginia to stand trial on eighteen felony charges under the 1917 Espionage Act and other statutes in connection with the 2010 publication by WikiLeaks of thousands of documents showing widespread corruption, deceit, and war crimes by American and British authorities along with their close dictatorial allies in the Middle East.

This decision is unsurprising — it has been obvious for years that the U.S. and UK are determined to destroy Assange as punishment for his journalism exposing their crimes — yet it nonetheless further highlights the utter sham of American and British sermons about freedom, democracy and a free press. Those performative self-glorifying spectacles are constantly deployed to justify these two countries’ interference in and attacks on other nations, and to allow their citizens to feel a sense of superiority about the nature of their governments. After all, if the U.S. and UK stand for freedom and against tyranny, who could possibly oppose their wars and interventions in the name of advancing such lofty goals and noble values?

Having reported on the Assange case for years, on countless occasions I’ve laid out the detailed background that led Assange and the U.S. to this point. There is thus no need to recount all of that again; those interested can read the granular trajectory of this persecution here or here. Suffice to say, Assange — without having been convicted of any crime other than bail jumping, for which he long ago served out his fifty-week sentence — has been in effective imprisonment for more than a decade.

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Top ‘Fact Checker’ USA Today Forced to Delete Articles Over Fabricated Sources

Well, this is awkward.

The news outlet has an entire section of its website dedicated to ‘fact checking’ and is used by Facebook to ‘fact check’ stories published by other outlets, downranking them in algorithms in a form of soft censorship.

However, it appears as though USA Today should have devoted more resources to fact checking itself before publishing articles by its own staff.

“USA Today’s breaking news reporter Gabriela Miranda fabricated sources and misappropriated quotes for stories, the news outlet confirmed on Thursday. The outlet conducted an internal audit after receiving an “external correction request” on one of its published stories,” reports Breitbart.

The 23 articles which were removed for not meeting the paper’s “editorial standards” included pieces on the Texas abortion ban, anti-vaxxer content and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Miranda, who has now resigned from her position, “took steps to deceive investigators by producing false evidence of her news gathering, including recordings of interviews,” according to the New York Times.

“After receiving an external correction request, USA TODAY audited the reporting work of Gabriela Miranda. The audit revealed that some individuals quoted were not affiliated with the organizations claimed and appeared to be fabricated. The existence of other individuals quoted could not be independently verified. In addition, some stories included quotes that should have been credited to others.”

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Google Accused of Manipulating UK News Results With ‘Anti-Conservative Bias’: Whistleblower

A Google whistleblower told The Epoch Times that the Internet giant has an “anti-conservative bias” and search results are “reconfigured to what the establishment thinks.”

He added that “we have to use whatever democracy we have left to stop this.”

It follows allegations from a Daily Mail study that articles from mostly left-wing outlets were returned among the most searched terms on Google about UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, prompting the country’s culture secretary to say that it “tells us what many have suspected all along.”

On June 10, the Daily Mail showed that searching for Johnson on Google presented far more results from news sites hostile to him. The Guardian came up 38 times, The Independent was cited 14 times, and BBC News came up 24 times. More conservative-leaning outlets such as The Daily Telegraph came up four times, the Daily Express three times, and MailOnline twice.

The response was noted by UK Culture Secretary Nadine Dorres, who is setting up the Digital Markets Unit (DMU) that will oversee a new regulatory regime, and who is currently looking at various platforms to understand how algorithms can impact users’ online experiences.

“I have raised the issue of bias and algorithms distorting democratic content and opinion with Google,” Dorres told the Daily Mail. “They have promised to revert to me with evidence that this is not the case which I have yet to receive.”

“This evidence published by the Mail is fairly conclusive and tells us what many have suspected all along. We are looking at how we can address unfair bias and distortion in the forthcoming Digital Competition Bill,” she told the publication.

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