Source: SFGate
“The pharma giant AstraZeneca has requested that the European authorization for its COVID-19 vaccine be pulled, according to the EU medicines regulator. In an update on the European Medicines Agency’s website Wednesday, the regulator said that the approval for AstraZeneca’s Vaxzevria had been withdrawn ‘at the request of the marketing authorization holder.’ AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine was first given the nod by the EMA in January 2021. Within weeks, however, concerns grew about the vaccine’s safety, when dozens of countries suspended the vaccine’s use after unusual but rare blood clots were detected in a small number of immunized people. The EU regulator concluded AstraZeneca’s shot didn’t raise the overall risk of clots, but doubts remained. Partial results from its first major trial — which Britain used to authorize the vaccine — were clouded by a manufacturing mistake that researchers didn’t immediately acknowledge.” (05/08/24)
https://www.sfgate.com/news/world/article/european-medicines-agency-pulls-authorization-for-19445906.php
Source: spiked
by Molly Kingsley
“The World Health Organisation’s proposal for a global ‘pandemic treaty’ has been a political and public-relations disaster. Talks between WHO member states began in late 2021 and resumed last month, with final negotiation sessions taking place this week. WHO officials aim to settle on a new pandemic agreement and amendments to existing International Health Regulations (IHR). The initial pandemic agreement plan (or ‘zero draft’) was so controversial when it was published in 2023 that much of the negotiation process has since been conducted in secret. This draft agreement would have granted the WHO the power to issue legally binding mandates to member states and their citizens during pandemics. This would include imposing lockdowns, quarantines and mandatory vaccinations. This threatened to fundamentally redefine the relationship between nation states and the WHO. As resistance to these changes mounted internationally, the WHO has responded by smearing those critical of its ambitions.” (05/07/24)
https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/05/08/the-whos-plan-for-public-health-tyranny/
Source: In These Times
by Nashwa Bawab
“Students and faculty on campuses across the country are facing repression and violent attacks from police and racist mobs for establishing ‘Popular University for Gaza’ encampments that have become some of the latest sites and frontlines in the U.S. and international resistance to the genocide in Gaza. More than 2,000 students and others have reportedly been arrested since the encampments began. … The New York Police Department has repeatedly shown up in full riot gear at Columbia University and arrested a large number of students last week. At the University of California, Los Angeles students faced off with a violent Zionist mob for hours with seemingly no protection from campus police or otherwise. Several student journalists were also attacked and injured.” (05/07/24)
https://inthesetimes.com/article/palestine-israel-student-movement-sjp-gups-gaza-encampments-popular-university-gaza
Source: Al Jazeera [Qatari state media]
“An appeals court in Hong Kong has banned a popular song that was penned during the Chinese territory’s pro-democracy protests of 2019. The ban on Glory to Hong Kong, issued on Wednesday, came as the territory’s authorities sought to remove the song from internet search results and content-sharing platforms. The popular song incorporates defiant lyrics, including the key protest slogan ‘Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times.’ It was later mistakenly played as Hong Kong’s anthem at international sporting events, instead of China’s ‘March of the Volunteers,’ in mix-ups that upset city officials.” ()5/08/24)
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/5/8/hong-kong-court-bans-protest-song-glory-to-hong-kong
Source: Bloggingheads.tv
“Antisemitism and Free Speech | Robert Wright & Paul Bloom.” (05/07/24)
https://bloggingheads.tv/videos/67597
Source: Brownstone Institute
by Jeffrey A Tucker
“It’s not been a good week for the Censorship Industrial Complex. The machine has been built and put into action over nearly a decade but largely in secret. Its way of doing business has been via surreptitious contacts with media and tech companies, intelligence carve-outs in ‘fact-checking’ organizations, payoffs, and various other clever strategies, all directed toward boosting some sources of information and suppressing others. The goal has always been to advance regime narratives and curate the public mind. And yet, based on its operations and insofar as we can tell, it had every intention of remaining secret. This is for a reason.” (05/07/24)
https://brownstone.org/articles/the-proof-of-censorship-is-censored/
Source: New York Times
“President Biden paused an arms shipment to Israel last week to prevent the U.S.-made weapons from being used in a long-threatened assault on the city of Rafah, administration officials said on Tuesday night, a sign of the growing rift between the United States and Israel over the conduct of the war. The president withheld 1,800 2,000-pound bombs and 1,700 500-pound bombs that he feared could be dropped on Rafah, where more than one million Gazans have taken refuge, the officials said. The administration is reviewing whether to hold back future transfers, including guidance kits that convert so-called dumb bombs into precision-guided munitions. The decision to delay the delivery of the 3,500 bombs was the first time since the Oct. 7 Hamas-led terrorist attack that Mr. Biden has used his power to curtail arms as an instrument to influence Israel’s approach to the war that followed.” (05/08/24)
https://archive.is/v0MQa
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Patrick Carroll
“Walsh’s concern about jobs being lost due to technological development is nothing new. Ever since the Industrial Revolution, people have been raising concerns that technology would ‘take jobs’ and leave many out of work. One of the earliest groups to raise these concerns was the Luddites, a 19th-century group of English textile workers who opposed the use of machinery in their trade because it was being used to replace workers. The term ‘Luddite’ has since become a pejorative for someone who opposes labor-saving technological advances — one that Walsh has clearly earned with this take. The issue with Luddism is that it gets in the way of economic progress. Technology is an immensely powerful tool for improving our standard of living, and much of the prosperity we enjoy today is a result of technological advances that replaced human labor with machine labor.” (05/07/24)
https://fee.org/articles/what-matt-walsh-gets-wrong-about-ai-and-work/
Source: Hoover Institution
“The 1st Amendment on Campus with Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.” (05/07/24)
https://free-speech-unmuted.podbean.com/e/the-1st-amendment-on-campus-with-berkeley-law-dean-erwin-chemerinsky-eugene-volokh-and-jane-bambauer-hoover-institution/
Source: Semafor
“TikTok has filed a lawsuit challenging a law that seeks to force its Chinese parent company ByteDance to sell the app to a US entity or be banned. The complaint was filed on Tuesday in Washington DC’s federal appeals court. TikTok argues that the new law is unconstitutional and violates American’s First Amendment right to free speech, according to the suit. TikTok also alleges it has been denied equal protection under the law, which, it alleges, is akin to unlawful seizure of property, according to the documents.” (05/07/24)
https://www.semafor.com/article/05/07/2024/tiktok-sues-us-over-ban
