Tag: police state

Irish High Court Rejects X’s Challenge to Online Censorship Law

The Irish High Court has thrown out a legal challenge by X, dealing a blow to the company’s pushback against Ireland’s new censorship rules for online video-sharing services.

X had taken aim at Coimisiún na Meán, the country’s media watchdog, accusing it of stepping beyond legal limits with its Online Safety Code.

The rules demand that platforms hosting user-generated videos take active steps to shield users from “harmful” material. The company had described the regulator’s actions as “regulatory overreach.”

Mr Justice Conleth Bradley, delivering judgment on Wednesday, found no merit in X’s application for judicial review. The court concluded that the regulator’s code was lawful and that its provisions fell within the scope of both the EU’s Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD) and Ireland’s 2009 Broadcasting Act.

According to the ruling, the code does not clash with the Digital Services Act and can function in tandem with EU law.

Responding to the outcome, Coimisiún na Meán said it welcomed the decision and intended to examine the ruling closely before offering more detailed comment.

The case comes as X begins rolling out new age verification systems to meet obligations under the Irish code, alongside compliance efforts aimed at satisfying UK and wider EU digital censorship regulations.

The ruling marks a significant moment in the ongoing struggle over who decides the boundaries of online speech and content moderation.

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UK Government Emails Reveal Push to Pressure Tech Platforms to Remove Lawful Speech on Immigration and Policing

A series of internal emails from the UK government has revealed an aggressive push to monitor and suppress online posts deemed “concerning,” sparking alarm over creeping censorship under the banner of combating misinformation and community unrest.

The documents, shared by US Rep. Jim Jordan, paint a picture of state officials flagging lawful speech, pressuring tech companies to remove content, and targeting what they described as “concerning narratives about the police and a ‘two-tier’ system.”

One of the most widely circulated videos under scrutiny featured a street celebration in Manchester where participants waved Pakistani flags. Captioned “It looks like Islamabad but it’s Manchester,” the video, posted by Radio Genoa on X, amassed over 14 million views.

Government emails described this kind of footage as misleading or dangerous, with one note labeling it an example of content that is “shared out of context in order to incite fear of the Muslim community.”

Another email, dated August 3, 2024, acknowledged “significant volumes of anti-immigrant content” online and pointed to “concerning narratives about the police and a ‘two-tier’ system that we are seeing across the online environment.”

The correspondence shows government officials not only monitoring speech but actively collaborating with platforms to address posts, even ones not violating the law or even the platform’s terms of service.

Officials were asking for direct intervention. One message requested clarity from platforms about “what content you are seeing across your platform; and b) any measures you have taken in response.” A follow-up email urged platforms to act quickly, stating, “We’d be grateful if you could come back to us on those two points as soon as you are able to.”

In one particularly troubling exchange dated August 4, government officials flagged a video showing someone scrolling through a freedom of information request that referred to asylum seekers as “undocumented fighting age males.”

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Exonerated Missouri woman sues police for conspiracy and coverup that put her in prison for 43 years

Sandra Hemme’s federal lawsuit accuses St. Joseph Police of suppressing and destroying evidence that pointed to a fellow officer who was guilty of the 1980 murder. Before being freed last year, Hemme served the longest sentence of any wrongly convicted woman in American history.

Sandra Hemme, the Missouri woman who spent 43 years in prison for a murder she did not commit, has sued the city of St. Joseph and eight police officers in a 10-count federal lawsuit alleging malicious prosecution, a coerced confession and conspiracy.

“There was never any objective evidence tying Plaintiff (Hemme) to the crime,” the lawsuit alleges.

The lawsuit also points the finger at a former police officer, Michael Holman, as the killer of librarian Patricia Jeschke in 1980.

“To protect Holman, the Defendants concealed evidence of his guilt and chose not to follow the evidence leading to Holman,” according to the lawsuit. Holman died in 2015.

Hemme served the longest sentence of any wrongly convicted woman in American history, her lawyers have said. She was finally exonerated and freed last year after a lengthy legal battle that saw the Missouri Attorney General fighting to overturn her innocence ruling.

A year ago, in July 2024, Livingston County Circuit Court Judge Ryan Horsman overturned Hemme’s conviction — writing that she was “the victim of a manifest injustice.”

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey battled all the way to the state Supreme Court to keep Hemme in prison. She won her final freedom after the Missouri Court of Appeals rejected all of Bailey’s arguments, and in March the Buchanan County prosecutor declined to refile charges.

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Royal Bank of Canada closes Freedom Convoy lawyer’s accounts over ‘risk concerns’

The Royal Bank of Canada is shutting down a Freedom Convoy lawyer’s accounts over “risk concerns.”

In a July 23 post on X, Freedom Convoy layer Eva Chipiuk revealed that the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) terminated its banking relationship with her, citing “risk-related concerns” due to “recent activity” being outside their “client risk appetite.”

“As a federally regulated financial institution, RBC is required by law to comply with applicable legislation,” the letter, posted on X, read. “These laws require that we implement certain processes and procedures which directly support the formulation of RBC’s positions with respect to risk.”

“After careful consideration, we regretfully advise you that the recent activity in your accounts is outside of RBC’s client risk appetite, and consequently we are no longer in a position to continue our banking relationship with you,” it continued.

The decision followed a flagged Bitcoin transaction, after which RBC froze her account and asked her questions about her crypto activities, which she described to the Western Standard as “strange and demeaning.”

The bank gave her until August 18, 2025, to find a new financial institution, cryptically referencing compliance with federal regulations but providing no specific law or detailed explanation.

Chipiuk, who has been vocal about her criticism of Canadian institutions, suggested the debanking might be linked to her involvement in the Freedom Convoy or her public stance.

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Australia Bans YouTube for Children Under 16

The government of Australia has reversed its decision to grant YouTube an exemption from its sweeping ban on social media for children under 16. YouTube’s parent company, Google, is threatening legal action, but Australian officials vowed to push ahead with the ban.

“We can’t control the ocean, but we can police the sharks, and that is why we will not be intimidated by legal threats when this is a genuine fight for the wellbeing of Australian kids,” Communications Minister Anika Wells said when Google threatened to sue.

Australia announced its “world-leading” plan to bar children from using social media in November 2024. Despite resistance from Internet freedom advocates, and difficult questions about precisely how such a ban could be implemented, the relevant legislation was quickly passed, and the ban is set to take effect in December 2025.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese gave a press conference on Wednesday in which he pledged to promote Australia’s social media ban to other countries at the United Nations General Assembly in September.

“I know from the discussions I have had with other leaders that they are looking at this and they are considering what impact social media is having on young people in their respective nations, it is a common experience,” Albanese said, appearing with the parents of children who were bullied to death on social media.

“We don’t do this easily. What we do, though, is respond to something that is needed here,” he said.

YouTube was granted an exemption from the ban when it was passed by Parliament in November, for several reasons. One was that YouTube was viewed as an important source of information for teens, so even though it carried potentially harmful content, the good was thought to outweigh the bad.

LGBTQ groups insisted YouTube was an important resource for gay and lesbian children, while public health groups said they used the platform to distribute important information to young people. Australian parents found YouTube less alarming that competing platforms like TikTok. YouTube also featured less direct interaction between users than most of the social media platforms that troubled Australian regulators.

A final objection to banning YouTube was that logging into the service is not required – visitors can access the vast majority of the platform’s content as “guests.” This meant there was no practical way to hold YouTube accountable for policing the age of its users.

Naturally, many of the platforms that were targeted by Australia’s social media ban resented the exemption granted to YouTube. These complaints might have had some bearing on the government’s decision to cancel YouTube’s exemption.

According to Australia’s ABC News, YouTube was added to the social media ban at the request of eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, who wrote a letter to Wells asking for YouTube’s exemption to be rescinded. Inman Grant said her recommendation was based on a survey of 2,600 children that found nearly 40 percent of them had been exposed to “harmful content” while using YouTube.

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This Saturday Marks 88 Years of Federal Marijuana Prohibition — It’s Time To End It

Saturday, August 2nd, marks the 88th anniversary of the signing of the Marihuana Tax Act, the first federal marijuana prohibition law.

Since its inception, the criminalization of the marijuana plant and the stigmatization of those who consume it has been predicated almost entirely upon the promotion of gross exaggerations, racial stereotypes, and outright lies.

For instance, a July 6, 1927 story in the New York Times, headlined “Mexican Family Goes Insane,” farcically claimed: “A widow and her four children have been driven insane by eating the marihuana plant, according to doctors, who say there is no hope of saving the children’s lives and that the mother will be insane for the rest of her life.”

An academic paper titled “Marijuana,” published in 1933 in The Journal of Law and Criminology, similarly made over-the-top allegations about the plant’s supposed dangers. The authors wrote, “The inevitable result [of consuming cannabis] is insanity, which those familiar with it describe as absolutely incurable, and, without exception ending in death.”

In 1937, Harry J. Anslinger — America’s first ‘Drug Czar’ — lobbied Congress to ban cannabis nationwide. He did so over the staunch objections of the American Medical Association, which disputed the government’s false claims that cannabis use invariably induced violence, insanity, and death. Undeterred by the AMA’s opposition, Anslinger relied almost entirely upon racist rhetoric to persuade lawmakers. “There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the U.S., and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos, and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana use,” he asserted. “This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers, and any others.”

Fast-forward to 1971. That’s when the Nixon administration declared drug abuse to be “public enemy number one.” The lynchpin of this campaign was stamping out the use marijuana, which Congress had just classified as a Schedule I controlled substance — the strictest federal category available. Yet, privately, Nixon acknowledged that he did not think cannabis was “particularly dangerous,” and he lamented the “ridiculous” penalties faced by those arrested for possessing it.

Nonetheless, his administration publicly doubled down on the mythical marijuana threat for its own political gain. As his domestic policy chief, John Ehrlichman, later acknowledged, “We couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the (Vietnam) war or Black,” but we could get “the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin.”

By “criminalizing both heavily,” Ehrlichman explained, “we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.”

“Did we know we were lying about the drugs?” he asked. “Of course we did.”

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Why the UK’s age verification system (probably) won’t work

On Friday, the “Age Verification” clause of the UK’s Online Safety Act officially came into force. The result was a sudden surge in discussion, and a lot of people realising – finally – what the law really means.

People have been googling “VPN” a lot. That’s a good thing; we’ll get to why later.

Unfortunately, much of this is stable doors and bolted horses. We’ve been warning about the OSA since it was first mooted (by the Conservatives, just to remind you that “sides” are an illusion), and we’re rather past the point where awareness would have mattered.

The new law essentially forces companies to put any even potentially “adult content” behind an ID wall – meaning a user must prove their age before they access it. The ways of doing that vary; you can use a credit card or let an AI-powered system scan your face via webcam to guess your age.

Don’t worry, it won’t store the data, and it’s only guessing your age, not scanning your face and uploading it to some data storage centre. They promised they wouldn’t do that.

The really vital part here is what exactly “adult content” means. It evokes – and is indeed intended to evoke – pornography. The act was sold as a tool to prevent children from accessing the near-infinite amounts of porn scattered across the web, but pornography is the least of it.

“Adult content” can also mean violence, suicide, animal cruelty, war, drugs…or any news coverage and/or discussion of the same. It could also mean “conspiracy theories”, especially those which could “expose children to harm”, like anti-vaccine sentiment, or cause “radicalization”.

In fact, it can potentially mean anything it is required to mean, which is exactly the kind of thing they LOVE to put in new laws.

But I don’t want to rehash these points here. You can read our previous coverage of it HERE HERE HERE and HERE.

Today I want to talk about how the OSA is going to spread, and why it might not matter if it does.

Over the weekend, it was widely noted on Twitter/X that Elon Musk’s platform was putting EU-based users behind the age restriction, not just British ones. People made jokes that the US-based platform couldn’t differentiate between the UK and Europe.

Far more likely, they are preparing for when the EU launches its own age verification scheme in the near future.

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Israel ‘freezes’ plans for concentration camp in southern Gaza: Report

Israel’s so-called “Humanitarian City” project, which was planned to be established on the ruins of the city of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, has been frozen, Israeli media reported on 28 July.

“There is no decision to proceed with this, and there is no alternative plan. The political echelon was certain it was heading toward a hostage deal that included withdrawals in the southern Gaza Strip, so it seems they’ve abandoned this initiative – it’s on hold for now,” a senior security source told Yedioth Ahronoth.

The project, described as a concentration camp in Palestinian and Israeli media, was intended to forcibly displace hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to an isolated area near the Egyptian border. Gathering Palestinians there is seen as a first step to ethnically cleansing Gaza and forcing millions of Palestinians to flee to foreign countries as refugees.

Rather than fight Hamas, Israeli forces in Gaza are exerting most of their effort and resources to demolishing homes, residential buildings, and infrastructure to ensure displaced Palestinians have nowhere to return to.

The “Humanitarian City” project aimed to initially force some 600,000 Palestinians into an area between the Philadelphi and Morag axes on the ruins of Rafah.

Military reports estimated that its completion would take at least a year, which angered the Israeli cabinet.

The decision comes as Israel continues to severely restrict aid reaching Gaza, causing starvation and famine in the strip to worsen as a result.

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Lawyer Suing Gates & Bourla for Covid VAX Injuries Arrested and Imprisoned in Netherlands

In a stunning expression of the Globalist-Fascist takeover of the Netherlands, the Netherlands police have arrested Arno van Kessel, the lead attorney suing Bill Gates, Albert Bourla, Mark Rutte et al. for COVID-19 vaccine injuries.

The civil process was scheduled to begin on July 9; Mr. van Kessel was arrested in a Gestapo-reminiscent early morning raid by paramilitary police on June 11, where he was reportedly blindfolded, bound, and taken into detention, where he remains almost two months later.

Readers will note my tardiness in reporting this stunning story. The reason is because both the European and the American press have completely ignored both the civil trial against Gates, Bourla, Rutte et al. and van Kessel’s arrest.

I knew nothing about van Kessel’s arrest until last night, when my co-author, Dr. Peter McCullough, forwarded to me a report by INFOWARS journalist, Adan Salazar. Once again, the so-called “conspiracy theorist” Alex Jones has proven to be one of the first guys to report the shocking reality of what is going on.

Salazar’s report prompted me to do a Google Netherlands search with the key words Arno van Kessel gearresteerd — that is, “Arno van Kessel arrested”—and I got one search result for a June 27 report in an independent online journal called Der Andere Krant (The Other Newspaper). The following is an English translation.

Arno van Kessel will be held in custody for an additional ninety days because the Public Prosecution Service continues to designate him as a “suspect in an investigation into a criminal network,” yet without presenting any evidence. This means the Leeuwarden lawyer will definitely not be present at the public hearing on July 9th in the Leeuwarden District Court, where the first substantive hearing in the internationally high-profile case against, among others, the State of the Netherlands, Mark Rutte, and Bill Gates is scheduled. His partner, Peter Stassen, is on his own, but says he will “appear fully equipped.”

In early June, this newspaper reported that there was finally some progress in the internationally high-profile lawsuit by Leeuwarden lawyer Arno van Kessel https://deanderekrant.nl/nieuw-hoofdstuk-in-rechtszaak-tegen-bill-gates-en-mark-rutte/and his Eindhoven colleague Peter Stassen. In 2023, the legal duo announced they would file legal proceedings against Bill Gates, Mark Rutte, and the Dutch State, among others. On behalf of their clients, they want to force the judge to issue a clear ruling on the question: was the COVID-19 mRNA injection a vaccine for the benefit of the population’s health, or a bioweapon? Van Kessel said: “It’s one or the other, and there’s no in between.”

The Northern Netherlands District Court, Leeuwarden location, announced in early June 2025 – finally – that the first substantive hearing of the case is scheduled for July 9th. On Wednesday morning, June 11th, there was a completely unexpected turn of events. Arno van Kessel was dragged from his bed early in the morning by a special intervention team with a considerable display of force. The lawyer, his daughter, and his wife were even briefly held at gunpoint.

A day later, the police published a report on the website politie.nl linking Van Kessel to “a criminal network.” According to a press release issued by the Public Prosecution Service, eight people were arrested that morning for “adhering to anti-institutional ideology and possibly intending to use violence.” One of them was quickly released, while the other seven were held in restricted custody for two weeks, meaning the suspects were not allowed any contact with the outside world. Van Kessel – as was announced last week – was being held in a cell in Vught.

In recent weeks, several stories have appeared in the mainstream media about a network of so-called sovereigns. These “anti-institutionalists” may have been planning something related to the NATO summit. Weapons and explosives may have been found, but any hard evidence or substantiation remains lacking to this day. The suggestion that Van Kessel is also part of a dangerous criminal group has been raised. The charges have since been partially withdrawn. The AD newspaper reported last week that the Public Prosecution Service has been unable to substantiate a plan to disrupt the NATO summit. “We have investigated whether there is an imminent threat. This has not been proven.”

On Thursday, June 26, the Public Prosecution Service released more news after a long silence. One suspect has been released, but “six suspects in the investigation into a criminal network, in which a large proportion of the arrested suspects espouse anti-institutional ideology and may have the intention to use violence, will remain in custody for an additional 90 days,” the Public Prosecution Service announced. Van Kessel is one of those suspects who will remain in custody for another 90 days. The Public Prosecution Service states that it needs more time for the investigation and that “given the state of the investigation, it is not possible to respond substantively to questions about the progress, suspicions, and findings,” according to the Public Prosecution Service.

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Illegal immigrant caught working as police officer in Maine while attempting to buy firearm

Federal immigration agents collared a Jamaican national who managed to get himself hired as a cop in Maine — despite being in the country illegally, Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced Monday.

Jamaican migrant Jon Luke Evans, who was employed as a reserve police officer with the Old Orchard Beach Police Department, illegally attempted to buy a gun. He was arrested in Biddeford on Friday, according to ICE.

ICE said Evans was also issued a gun by the police department.

“The fact that a police department would hire an illegal alien and unlawfully issue him a firearm while on duty would be comical if it weren’t so tragic,” ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations Boston acting Field Office Director Patricia H. Hyde said.

“We have a police department that was knowingly breaking the very law they are charged with enforcing in order to employ an illegal alien. ICE Boston will continue to prioritize public safety by arresting and removing criminal alien threats from our New England communities,” Hyde added.

While Evans entered the US legally by flying into the Miami National Airport on Sept. 24, 2023, he overstayed his visa by nearly two years, ICE said. He was supposed to leave on October 1, 2023, but never did.

Evans joined the police force in May as a seasonal officer, the Old Orchard Beach Police Department told Fox News Digital. As part of his hiring process, Evans underwent a background check, physical and medical screenings and law enforcement training.

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