Tag: police state

California Man First to be Charged With Smuggling Greenhouse Gases Into US

A San Diego man was arrested Monday for smuggling greenhouse gasses into the United States from Mexico.

Federal prosecutors say this is the first criminal case of its kind in the country.

The indictment alleges Michael Hart, 58, imported hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) – a chemical compound commonly used for refrigeration, air-conditioning and aerosols – from Mexico and then sold them for a profit, which violates regulations created in 2020 ostensibly intended to “slow climate change.”

“This is the first prosecution in the United States to include charges related to the American Innovation and Manufacturing Act of 2020 (AIM Act),” said a press release from the Southern District of California. “The AIM Act prohibits the importation of HFCs, commonly used as refrigerants, without allowances issued by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).”

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Outrage as thousands of breast cancer-stricken women in England are denied life-extending drug available in Scotland

Thousands of women with incurable breast cancer say they are being ‘robbed of precious time with their loved ones’ after being denied life-extending drugs available in Scotland.

In what has been hailed a ‘dark day’ for patients, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence watchdog said Enhertu is not cost-effective.

Trials of the drug found it boosted the time the cancer was held at bay from seven months to over two years – results that were called ‘mind-blowing’ by experts.

Charities and patients said they were in ‘absolute shock’ at the decision, which comes months after it was approved north of the border.

Labelled a ‘wonder drug’ by oncologists, it is also available in 13 other European countries, as well as the US and Canada.

Last night, health officials were accused of creating a ‘cruel post code lottery’ in which ‘women’s lives in England, Wales and Northern Ireland are somehow worth less’.

In a sign of growing anger, a Breast Cancer Now petition rallying against the decision had reached more than 6,000 signatures in just a few hours.

Baroness Delyth Morgan, the charity’s chief executive, blamed a ‘broken system’, adding new methods for evaluating health technologies at Nice for ‘denying secondary breast cancer patients access to potentially life-extending medicines that may have previously been approved on the NHS.’

She said: ‘This is a dark day. This means that thousands of mums, daughters, sisters and wives face knowing a treatment that could have been a lifeline for them exists, but remains out of reach.

‘Meanwhile women in Scotland have been granted access to it.’

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Republicans Probe GoFundMe and Eventbrite Over Government Transaction Surveillance

The US House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government appears to be trying to dig deeper into the meaning of the subject matter it has been convened to explore.

Specifically – how some private financial entities, egged on by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) – a federal, US Department of Treasury agency – allegedly went on to essentially surveil clearly political terms like “Trump” and “MAGA” on platforms such as Eventbrite and GoFundMe.

The latter company’s purpose is self-evident – it’s a crowdsourcer – whereas Eventbrite is in a similar business, with a stress on event management and ticketing.

And that’s apparently how deep – and wide – government influence on digital platforms/companies went in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021 events in Washington DC.

Now the House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan wants to know what exactly was happening in these “spaces” at that time.

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British man sentenced to 2 years in jail over anti-immigration stickers

A British man has been sentenced to two years in prison on charges of inciting racial hatred for creating an online library of downloadable anti-immigration stickers. One of the stickers read “We will be a minority in our homeland by 2066.” Others say “It’s okay to be white.” 

Samuel Melia, 34, of Pudsey in West Yorkshire, has been found guilty of encouraging racially aggravated criminal damage. He was sentenced to two years in prison on Friday at the Leeds Crown Court, according to BBC News.

Melia, who is the Yorkshire organizer for the British Nationalist Group Patriotic Alternative, has been accused of being the head of the Telegram Messenger group Hundred Handers, which generated printable anti-immigration stickers that were then displayed in public places, court documents show. Some of the stickers are labeled with the logo of the leftwing Extinction Rebellion group, and read “Sink the boats, save the world,” “Save the environment, end mass immigration,” “Only white people care about the environment,” and “House the world, destroy the environment.”

Judge Tom Bayliss KC said the stickers contained “ethnic slurs” which were “corrosive to our society” and he branded Melia in court as an “anti-semite” who has “Nazi sympathies.”

Court documents state that Melia had an “obsessive interest” in Sir Oswald Mosley and was attempting to “peddle the same antisemitism.” Mosley was the founder of the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s. Melia also reportedly had a poster of Hitler in his garage.

The majority of the material that Hundred Handers published was “xenophobic, nationalistic and vitriolic,” according to the court.

Melia claimed to the court that the stickers were intended to “start a conversation.”

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Botched execution of serial killer in Idaho puts focus on capital punishment secrecy laws

In 2012, two Idaho prison officials chartered a private plane and flew to Washington state with thousands of dollars in cash.

They met with a pharmacist behind closed doors and bought the drug for a convicted murderer’s lethal injection.

Only a years-long public records lawsuit revealed the pharmacist’s name, the pharmacy and other details of the exchange. After prison officials said the pharmacist’s exposure had scared away other lethal drug suppliers, Idaho lawmakers barred such information from getting out again.

Idaho tried and failed Wednesday to execute Thomas Eugene Creech, a 73-year-old serial killer who had been in prison for 50 years. Neither his attorneys nor the public knew where the state obtained the drug or the exact qualifications of his executioners.

Opponents say secrecy laws are are a significant hurdle to accountability and make it hard to ensure that the procedures aren’t unconstitutionally painful, whether the deaths are carried out successfully — as Texas did Wednesday in the case of Ivan Cantu — or botched like Creech’s.

Idaho long kept the identities of execution team members and drug suppliers secret but judges were still able to force disclosure of the information if it was relevant to lawsuits or appeals. The new law prohibits state officials from disclosing the information, even if under court order.

The law also prevents professional licensing boards from taking disciplinary action against people for participating in executions.

Such secrecy is typical among states that impose capital punishment, including Texas, where lawmakers passed a similar measure in 2015 to ensure drug suppliers did not face retaliation or harassment for cooperating with executions.

“States are saying, ‘We don’t need to show you the information about … how we find or drugs or the training of the prison staff,’” said Robin Maher, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit that tracks executions. “And then, when things go wrong, they can’t be held accountable.”

Creech was convicted of five murders in three states and suspected of several more. He has been in custody since 1974 and was already serving a life term when he beat a fellow inmate, 22-year-old David Dale Jensen, to death in 1981 — the crime for which he was to be executed.

When his appointed hour came at 10 a.m. Wednesday, Creech was wheeled into the execution chamber and strapped to a table. Medical personnel poked and prodded at his arms, legs, hands and feet for nearly an hour, making eight attempts, but they couldn’t find a vein they thought would hold up long enough to deliver the fatal dose. He was returned to his cell.

It is unclear whether or when the state might try again, or how. Like other states concerned about the availability of lethal injection, Idaho recently passed a law allowing for firing squads as a backup, but the state has yet to write protocols for using that method or build a facility where it could shoot people to death. It has not approved the use of nitrogen gas, a method used for the first time early this year in Alabama.

Creech’s execution team comprised volunteers who, according to Idaho execution protocols, were required to have at least three years of medical experience, such as having been a paramedic, and to have “current venous access proficiency.” They were not necessarily doctors, who famously take an oath to “do no harm” — though Idaho Department of Correction Director Josh Tewalt later told lawmakers that the executioners regularly use their IV skills to save lives in their day jobs. They wore white balaclava-style coverings to conceal their faces.

Tewalt defended the state’s approach, saying the department ensures execution drugs are acquired lawfully, provides test results showing their authenticity, and ensures medical members of the execution team meet or exceed required qualifications.

“I would argue we are very transparent about any information that speaks to the integrity of the process,” said Tewalt. “What we won’t do is tell you their names.”

Tewalt also disagreed with characterizing the attempt as “botched” — stopping the execution after the failed IVs prevented the process from truly going awry, he said.

Creech, according to his attorneys, suffers from several conditions that could have made vein accessibility challenging: Type 2 diabetes, hypertension and edema. It can also be more difficult for older people to have IVs inserted, as their veins can be less stable.

“This is precisely the kind of mishap we warned the State and the Courts could happen when attempting to execute one of the country’s oldest death-row inmates in circumstances completely shielded in secrecy,” Creech’s attorneys, with the nonprofit Federal Defender Services of Idaho, said in a written statement.

Among the arguments they made in their unsuccessful last-minute petitions to the U.S. Supreme Court was that the secrecy violated Creech’s due-process rights and could constitute cruel and unusual punishment if the lethal drug, the sedative pentobarbital, was of poor quality and caused unnecessary pain or complications.

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Ear-Piercing Noise Blares Through DC Gulag Torturing Sleep Deprived J6 Political Prisoners For Weeks

An ear-shattering, harrowing sharp noise has been blaring throughout the Washington DC  Correctional Treatment Facility for weeks where January 6 political prisoners are detained.

J6 defendants housed in C3A, the cell block known as the Patriot Pod in the DC gulag where J6ers are segregated from the general population, called The Gateway Pundit urging the American people to demand oversight of the jail from US Marshals and members of Congress.

As TGP has reported, J6ers have been brutalized and tortured for exposing the corruption within the Bureau of Prisons System and the Department of Justice to the media. In February, two political prisoners were ripped from their cells, abducted and transferred to the country’s most hostile anti-Trump correctional facilities and barred from communication for regularly speaking out.

J6 political prisoner Matthew Krol has been living on a pacemaker for nearly two years in the DC jail and has described dying from a heart attack while incarcerated and “coming back” while waiting years for heart surgery. Krol is one of several J6 defendants in the correctional facility in a legal battle with DC jail for medical deprivation.

After enduring more than two weeks of unbearable loud noise, Krol is calling on everyone on the outside for help.

“We have another situation here in C3A. For weeks, now throughout the day and many nights, there [are] sounds of construction going on,” the political prisoner, who is living on a pacemaker, told TGP after 14 days of the madness. “The supervisors say there is no construction at night, yet the noise continues.

“And there have been C/Os that have said there [is] no construction going on in the pod above us. It is 10:23 PM and our current C/O has been in my cell listening twice tonight to the noise. Inmates in the USA are supposed to get 8 1/2 hours of interrupted sleep a day, that does not happen here.”

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The Witch Hunt Begins In Pennsylvania – The Thought Police Are Coming For You

You probably know that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has the charge to protect America’s “critical infrastructure”. You probably also understand that to mean they should be stopping terrorists from blowing up things like nuclear power plants, bridges and dams. You are unlikely to understand that DHS believes it is supposed to “protect” America’s “cognitive infrastructure” and that this means censoring your free speech and preventing you from disseminating ideas or opinions with which DHS disagrees.

DHS believes it has the power to silence you, and it has been doing so for some time now.

Within DHS is an entity called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). CISA has for some time now been working with private entities to silence anyone who strays from the official government-approved narrative. The Attorney General of Louisiana described it this way in testimony before Congress.

“The First Amendment clearly states that “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech.” This means that the government has no power to restrict expression because of its message, ideas, subject matter, or content. The U.S. Supreme Court also firmly established that “the Constitution ‘demands that content-based restrictions on speech be presumed invalid … and that the Government bear the burden of showing their constitutionality.” United States v. Alvarez, 567 U.S. 709, 716-717 (2012) (plurality op.). Yet in our lawsuit we have uncovered a censorship enterprise so vast that it spans over a dozen significant government institutions, including the White House, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Department of State’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Publicly, these federal actors have justified their deeds in the name of protecting the public against “misinformation” and “disinformation,” when in fact it is done to suppress disfavored views…”

“To understand the framework of these activities, we must first look at the way censorship has been approached by those actively engaged in it. For example, CISA — an agency within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) — has classified the thoughts, ideas, and beliefs of the American public as “critical infrastructure.” In an effort to control, manage, and maintain these cognitive assets, CISA serves as a “switchboard” for sending disfavored information from state and local officials to the necessary social media company to ensure content-moderation policies are applied. As a result, America’s “cognitive infrastructure” can be maintained in the same way that the DHS might protect the nation’s physical infrastructure from outside threats; but in this case, CISA aims to protect our collective consciousness from independent thought and inquiry at the individual level…”

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Net Zero is a war on the working class

It’s official. Net Zero will make us poorer. A new report finds that the British government’s climate-change policies are likely to ‘make the poor poorer, and push struggling communities further into deprivation and exclusion’.

Our Journey to Net Zero, by the Institute for Community Studies (ICS), shows that the transition to Net Zero will cause a rise in unemployment, as carbon-intensive industries are forcibly restructured. Food will become more expensive. And the eco-friendly changes we’ll all be forced to make, such as insulating our homes or switching to electric cars, will be extremely difficult ’for low-income households’. The ICS concludes that the poorest 40 per cent of households are at risk of falling into ‘transition poverty’.

As shocking as this statistic is, the report is no rant. A team of researchers from ICS, Trinity College Dublin, and the universities of Leeds and York have thoroughly reviewed the policy changes and instruments – subsidies, taxation and so on – most likely to prove effective in reducing emissions of CO2. And they have concluded that these Net Zero measures will push down living standards for a lot of people in the UK.

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US govt. claims immunity from dozens of PFAS lawsuits, citing Federal Tort Claims Act

The United States government has asked a federal judge to dismiss more than two dozen lawsuits filed against it for allegedly contaminating water and soil at hundreds of sites near military bases and facilities across the country with toxic “forever chemicals.”

The U.S. told a federal judge in Charleston, South Carolina, late Monday that it is immune to the lawsuits filed by state and local governments, businesses and property owners who say the U.S. military is liable for property and environmental damage caused by its use of firefighting foams containing per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS.

PFAS are used in hundreds of consumer and commercial products including the firefighting foams, non-stick pans, stain-resistant clothing and cosmetics, and have been linked to cancer and hormonal dysfunction. The military has used PFAS-containing firefighting foams since the 1970s for things like firefighting training.

The chemicals are often referred to as forever chemicals because they do not easily break down in nature or in the human body.

The 27 lawsuits were filed in the past six years against the U.S. government by states including New Mexico, New York and Washington, cities, private property owners and local businesses near military facilities where firefighting foams were used.

The plaintiffs say they are seeking potentially hundreds of billions of dollars in damages to pay for groundwater and soil remediation near military sites across the country. Some businesses among the plaintiffs, including a dairy that claims PFAS-contaminated water caused its cattle to die and a property owner whose blueberry cropland was allegedly damaged by the chemicals, are also seeking punitive damages.

The government said it was immune to the lawsuits under a provision of the Federal Tort Claims Act that protects it from tort liability for the discretionary acts of government employees. That law allows plaintiffs to sue the U.S. government for damages only if the government violates specific, mandatory policies.

How the Government Used ‘Track F’ to Fund Censorship Tools

Officials from the National Science Foundation tried to conceal the spending of millions of taxpayer dollars on research and development for artificial intelligence tools used to censor political speech and influence the outcome of elections, according to a new congressional report.

The report looking into the National Science Foundation (NSF) is the latest addition to a growing body of evidence that critics claim shows federal officials—especially at the FBI and the CIA—are creating a “censorship-industrial complex” to monitor American public expression and suppress speech disfavored by the government.

“In the name of combatting alleged misinformation regarding COVID-19 and the 2020 election, NSF has been issuing multimillion-dollar grants to university and nonprofit research teams,” states the report by the House Judiciary Committee and its Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.

“The purpose of these taxpayer-funded projects is to develop AI-powered censorship and propaganda tools that can be used by governments and Big Tech to shape public opinion by restricting certain viewpoints or promoting others.”

The report also described, based on previously unknown documents, elaborate efforts by NSF officials to cover up the true purposes of the research.

The efforts included tracking public criticism of the foundation’s work by conservative journalists and legal scholars.

The NSF also developed a media strategy “that considered blacklisting certain American media outlets because they were scrutinizing NSF’s funding of censorship and propaganda tools,” the report said.

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