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West African heads of state on Sunday chose Nigeria’s new President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to lead their regional bloc for the next year, replacing Guinea-Bissau’s leader Umaro Sissoco Embalo, AFP journalists reported.

Six people were killed and one wounded in an attack at a kindergarten in southern China’s Guangdong province on Monday, a spokeswoman for the city government said.

Oil might be a source of power, but trying to control its price is a  politically hazardous business. Led by the odd pairing of the Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammad Bin Salman (MBS), and Vladimir Putin, the Opec Plus oil producers’ cartel exists to maintain a price floor for its fractious members in an energy environment where oil prices have crashed three times over the past two decades. But its importance in a geopolitical world defined by Sino-American competition is beginning to extend well beyond the gyrations of oil markets. Opec Plus has remained resilient even as the Beijing-Moscow-Tehran axis has hardened since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as well as the recent Chinese-brokered rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran. This raises questions about whether Saudi Arabia is now defecting into the anti-Washington camp.

Opec Plus was formed in rather different geopolitical circumstances. In late 2016, the cartel constituted a rapprochement between the two large, and hitherto generally antagonistic, Eurasian oil producers as they were adjusting to the shock of the United States’ re-emergence as a top-tier oil producer. Forging an association between Opec and Moscow was an act of Saudi desperation. For the previous two years, Riyadh had sought to bankrupt the American shale sector by allowing prices to slump, but largely succeeded only in emptying its own foreign exchange reserves. When they finally reversed course in September 2016, the Saudis found that, having alienated most other Opec members with their recklessness, they could no longer control prices. Two months later, Russia and 10 other states agreed to support a second Opec oil output cut, and Opec Plus was born.

Read more: Has the West lost control of oil?

essica Rose is obviously more pleasant and less censorious than some of the other commentators who have been trying to ‘debunk’ the suggestion by a group of German scientists that the ‘yellow’ batches in the recent Danish Pfizer-BioNTech batch-variability study could be placebos.

But her own ‘debunking‘ has one obvious problem. Her criticism focuses on the claim that the ‘placebo’ batches actually have many adverse events associated with them, just not in Denmark, where the study was focused. However, the denominators she uses in order to compare the rates of adverse event reports per batch that turn up in VAERS have been chosen arbitrarily.

She says so herself. Thus she writes:

It is important to note that I do not have the ‘doses’ (dose number) for the relevant yellow vax lots as per the VAERS data. It is a pity. If I had these data, I could provide a much better analysis. For the purposes of this analysis, I assume that the batch sizes per lot are equal [to those in the Danish study]. This might be a very bad assumption, but what can I do? I’m still better than the CDC staff, combined.

But if we do not have the number of doses, what is the point of the comparison? Nobody has ever claimed that there were no adverse event reports associated with these batches. In the Danish study, there were in fact four ‘yellow’ batches that had literally zero adverse events associated with them. But the other 14 merely had relatively few. The issue is the reporting rate.

Moreover, the problem is even more serious. As seen in the above quote, Jessica Rose simply assumes that the appropriate denominators for the VAERS reports are equal to the denominators in the Danish study, i.e., the number of doses of each batch deployed in Denmark. But we do in fact know the total number of doses included in the batches in question, and, unsurprisingly, it is far higher. Why unsurprisingly? Well, because the whole is greater than the part.

As discussed in my previous article, these are EU batch releases falling under the authority of Germany’s Paul Ehrlich Institute (PEI) as the responsible regulator. Needless to say, the number of doses deployed in just one – moreover, small – EU country is usually going to be less than the total.

Read more: Why the ‘Yellow’ Fake Vaccine Batches Really Do Appear to Be Placebos

The pedo-loving propagandists at the once-great Rolling Stone are at it again, this time seemingly defending child traffickers with a scathing review of Jim Caviezel’s anti-child-trafficking film, Sound of Freedom – which they described as a “QAnon-tinged thriller about child-trafficking” which is “designed to appeal to the conscience of a conspiracy-addled boomer.”

REVIEW: ‘Sound of Freedom,’ the QAnon-tinged thriller about child-trafficking, is designed to appeal to the conscience of a conspiracy-addled boomer. https://t.co/XSFFsWV6Me

— Rolling Stone (@RollingStone) July 7, 2023

Read more: “Why Do You Support Child Trafficking?” Rolling Stone Slammed Over Negative ‘Sound Of Freedom’ Review

Numerous mainstream media outlets disparaged the anti-child trafficking thriller Sound of Freedom as being based on nothing but a “conspiracy theory” linked to “Q Anon.”

Rolling Stone, the Washington Post, CNN and The Guardian all condemned the box office hit, which is based on true events, as a baseless conspiracy born out of the Q Anon movement.

Rolling Stone claimed the film was “designed to appeal to the conscience of a conspiracy-addled boomer.”

WaPo accused the “low-budget” film’s star, Jim Caveizel, who plays former DHS agent and child rescuer Tim Ballard, of “embracing Q Anon,” while the Guardian called it a “paranoid Q-adjacent thriller.”

CNN claimed the drama injected “Q Anon concepts” like child trafficking to induce a “moral panic.”

On The Sound of Freedom, CNN says child sex trafficking is real, but “these films are created out of moral panics… it specifically is looking at QAnon concepts of these child trafficking rings.” Do you want more QAnon because this is how you get more QAnon. pic.twitter.com/IsIRWVp1X3

— Alex Christy (@alexchristy17) July 8, 2023

People love their smartphones, but did you know they could be spying on you? A recent study by computer scientists from New York University and UC San Diego uncovered the hidden dangers of spyware apps. These apps are not only difficult to detect, but they can also leak your sensitive information without your knowledge. The team warns that it’s important to be aware of this issue and take steps to protect yourself and your privacy.

“This is a real-life problem and we want to raise awareness for everyone, from victims to the research community,” says Enze Alex Liu, the first author of the paper, in a university release.

Spyware apps are often marketed as tools to monitor children or employees, but they can also be used by abusers to secretly spy on their partners. These apps are designed to record everything that happens on a victim’s device, including text messages, emails, photos, and even phone calls. The abusers can then access this information remotely through a web portal. The use of spyware apps has been on the rise, with a significant increase in their usage in recent years.

To find out if your device has been infected with a spyware app, you can check your privacy dashboard and the list of all apps in your device’s settings. However, these apps are specifically designed to remain hidden, making them difficult to detect.

The study focused on analyzing 14 leading spyware apps for Android phones. While Google does not allow the sale of these apps on its official app store, they can still be downloaded separately from the web. This is in contrast to iPhones, which do not allow such “side-loading” of apps, making spyware apps less prevalent on this platform.

Read more: Is Your Phone Spying on You? Computer Scientists Reveal What’s Hiding in Your Apps

The European Union’s new law on exchanging data between national law enforcement authorities is set to increase the amount of data being shared with Europol, including biometric data, according to UK monitoring group Statewatch.

The new law, called Directive (EU) 2023/977 entered force in June and is meant to eliminate inconsistencies and harmonize existing regulations. This includes the Prüm regulation that allows police forces to share records, including face biometrics, to enable cross-country searches of criminals and suspects.

The Directive also replaces provisions on cross-border data exchange of two legal frameworks, the Schengen Implementation Agreement (SIA) and the Swedish Framework Decision. The two frameworks were used by law enforcement agencies to cross-check their data with DNA or fingerprint biometric databases of another member state.

As a result of the new changes, “Europol’s data warehouse will grow significantly” says Statewatch:

Europol will be able to receive a copy of all information exchanged when it concerns crimes in its area of responsibility.

Member states can still assess whether to share data with the agency on a case-by-case basis. EU member states have until 12 December 2024 to incorporate the Directive into national law.

Read more: EU Police Biometric Databases Will Grow With New Data Exchange Policy, Says Rights Group

Army veteran Kelsi Sheren was a fresh-faced 19-year-old when she first set foot on the combat field in Afghanistan. It proved to be a life-altering experience.

Six months later the Canadian artillery gunner was ‘still shaking’ on a military helicopter heading home after witnessing one of her comrades being blown to pieces after he set off an IED in the field as their battalion moved from compound to compound.

‘That was my first exposure to watching someone die. And that was my first exposure to having to clean up what was left of someone,’ Sheren told DailyMail.com.

The experience, she says, ‘broke part of my brain’. It took witnessing that horrific death ‘for the reality of what we were doing to hit’. She was plagued by the memory of scrubbing her comrade’s remains off her hands – all the while ducking heavy fire.

Once home, she turned to therapy – and realized she was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.

Sheren made it her mission to help other veterans and has been an outspoken critic of the Canadian government’s relaxed attitude to euthanasia – including its push to make it available to veterans plagued by PTSD.

‘It’s disgusting and it’s unacceptable,’ she said, arguing that authorities would rather euthanize a soldier than foot the bill for their recovery.

Read more: Canada’s push to euthanize veterans with PTSD is ‘disgusting, unacceptable and infuriating’, says female artillery gunner who spent six months on the front line in Afghanistan