Month: January 2023

The past few weeks have seen unusually cold weather sweep across northern India, with disastrous consequences for the millions of Indians who live there and are unaccustomed to the cold.

While climate doomsday preachers in the West talk about heat waves and extreme weather when there is mild or warm weather over a period of time, other parts of the world instead experience problems due to the reverse. In northern India, an unusual and prolonged cold wave has held large areas in its iron grip for almost two weeks.

Thick fog and temperatures around zero degrees in the multi-million city of New Delhi have already claimed many lives through accidents and cold – but another threat comes from the risk of poisoning as the freezing residents of the city set fire to everything they come across, including trash and waste.

Unusually cold

The coldest temperatures recorded so far were in the Kashmir province of northern India. There, the temperature in the lowlands has dropped to -7 degrees, which for Europeans may not be remarkable, but for Indians who rarely get weather colder than 6-7 plus degrees on any given day, it is a big difference from what they are used to.

If the temperature drops below 4 plus degrees, it is considered a cold wave. Last week, the coldest was 1,9 plus degrees in the capital, New Delhi. Meteorologists count this year’s January as the coldest ever in India.

“I have never in my entire career seen such low temperatures in a forecast. Freezing −4 to +2 on the plains. Wow!” meteorologist Nevdeep Dahiya wrote on Twitter.

According to Indian meteorologists, the cause of the unusually cold weather is changes in the jet streams that circulate around the Indian peninsula.

Thick fog and air pollution a dangerous combination

The thick and persistent fog leads daily to a large number of accidents in New Delhi, which with its 23 million inhabitants has now found itself in a difficult situation. Reports of a lack of food supply have been posted on social media, but so far dismissed by official sources who believe that there have indeed been some interruptions and delays due to traffic accidents around railway stations and roads in and out of the city, but that so far these have not leading to any shortage of food or fuel.

In the cold and the fog, however, there are two things that primarily give cause for concern for the rulers in the city. On the one hand, there is an unclear number of homeless people (according to many experts it is at least 150 000, possibly closer to 200 000) who lack shelter from the cold weather. The city’s approximately 250 ill-equipped homeless shelters have room for 19 000 people, but have long been filled beyond capacity. The number of dead people who are reported to have frozen to death during the nights and who are picked up during the day is claimed by various aid organizations to be between “dozens” to “hundreds” every day, but no official figure exists

.But another problem has arisen as tens of thousands of smaller bonfires are lit every day, often fueled by scavenged rubbish. The air pollution that usually plagues the city during the winter months is now considered even worse and the air is filled with toxic gases and pollutants that bind to the water droplets in the fog, weigh down and remain in the city like a toxic blanket. This leads to the very air that the residents are forced to breathe causing lung diseases and a greatly increased risk of cancer as a result.

The cost in human life of frostbite can thus rise over time, not only because people freeze to death, but because they become poisoned in their attempts to keep warm.

https://freewestmedia.com/2023/01/20/india-in-the-grip-of-icy-cold-weather/

Christians remain a highly persecuted religious minority in many countries around the world, the latest report by the Open Doors charitable organization has revealed.

The mission’s 2023 report showed Islamic regimes to be the most hostile to minority Christian groups, followed by communist countries. However, it is worth noting many European nations and U.S. states have placed barriers on the expression of Christian beliefs in the public domain.

In the 50 countries covered by the report in one year, a total of 5,621 Christians were killed just for practicing their faith. This relates to the period from Oct. 1, 2021, to Sep. 30, 2022.

Of the 760 million Christians residing in the same 50 countries, a total of 360 million are suffering serious and continuous persecution.

Open Doors defines persecution not only as physical violence and murder, but also as the destruction of property, discrimination in the workplace and in education, and being forced to leave their territories. 

At the top of the list of offenders is North Korea, with Somalia, Yemen, and Eritrea just a few points behind. North Korea is the most closed country on earth and one that oppresses all religions; however, Open Doors estimates there are still 300,000 Christians in the country practicing their faith in secret.

The East African nation of Somalia has been in disarray for the last 30 years, and Islam is the only religion allowed to exist in the country. Fundamentalist Islamists are also in control of Yemen. Eritrea, however, is not an Islamic state, and yet, Protestant Christians and opponents of the government are persecuted there. Muslim states such as Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, and Sudan are also in the top 10, with the predominantly Hindu country of India close behind.

Outside of the top offenders, there are communist states such as China, Vietnam, Cuba, and Laos.

Even in the traditionally Catholic Nicaragua, Colombia, and Mexico, there are numerous reports of persecution.

The Open Doors organization itself has been around since 1955 and has a backstory involving Poland.

A Dutch missionary began to help Christians behind the Iron Curtain by smuggling in bibles to Poland. He had visited the country in the 1950s and learned of the persecution suffered by Catholics. He later also smuggled bibles into the USSR. In 1981, Open Doors smuggled a million bibles into China as part of the “Project Pearl” mission. A few years later, the organization delivered a million bibles to the Russian Orthodox Church.

The organization is present in 30 countries around the world, and the Polish chapter of the organization was established in 2010.

https://rmx.news/poland/360-million-christians-are-being-persecuted-around-the-world-report-says/

British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), the national broadcaster of the United Kingdom, aired a two-part series documentary attacking PM Narendra Modi’s tenure as Gujarat Chief Minister during the Gujarat riots of 2002.

India on Thursday denounced the controversial BBC documentary series on Prime Minister Narendra Modi and described it as a “propaganda piece” that is designed to push a discredited narrative.

One of the nefarious objectives behind the documentary was to cast aspersions on the role of Islamists in the Godhra train carnage, which claimed a total of 59 Hindu lives.

At about 9:12 minutes into the programme, it claimed, “The final death toll was 59 and the cause of the fire was disputed. But at the time, Muslims were blamed.”

Former BBC reporter Jill McGivering was then brought in to further lend credence to the insinuation. “This is in a State that has a particular history of tensions between the Hindu majority and the Muslim minority. There is a history of communal violence, nasty violence,” she was heard saying.

“And the concern was something like this happens, the Hindu community will feel angered that their community has been targeted,” McGivering further added while she tried to portray Narendra Modi as a Hindu hardliner who avenged the riots.

But by doing so, the BBC nullified the role of the extremists who set the Sabarmati express on fire, which is not disputed in any sense.

The truth about the 2002 Godhra train carnage

On 27th February 2002, the Sabarmati express was scheduled to reach Godhra station at about 3:30 am. On that day, the train was running four hours late. As such, it arrived at Godhra by 7:40 am.

8 minutes later, a mob of 2000 Islamists set 59 Hindus, including 25 women and 15 children, in the coach S6 of the train on fire in Godhra’s predominantly Muslim area – Signal Falia.

31 Islamists were found guilty of the Godhra massacre on February 22, 2011, by the trial court (with only 11 receiving the death penalty and 20 receiving life in prison), and all 31 convictions were affirmed by the Gujarat High Court in October 2017, resulting in everyone receiving a life sentence. Prior to that, based on the testimony of witnesses and survivors, it was obvious to anybody with even a modicum of intellectual integrity that Muslims had set the train on fire.

In February 2003, an accused person made a judicial confession in which he acknowledged that Godhra was a well-planned attack and that he had personally participated in it. A judicial confession is conclusive evidence. This proves that the Godhra carnage was a preplanned attack on the innocent Karsevaks.

In the March 2006 issue of Outlook, a report was published. This report includes the following two paragraphs:

Gayatri Panchal, a resident of Ahmedabad, who survived the incident on February 27, 2002, but lost both her parents in her reaction to the report has said, “The report of the Banerjee Commission is absolutely wrong. I have seen everything with my own eyes and barely escaped myself but lost both my parents.”

Panchal, who has three sisters, said the Banerjee Commission report was not correct as the fire could not have been accidental as no one was cooking in the S-6 coach and it was packed with passengers. “Mobs pelted stones at the coach for a long and then threw in burning rags and also poured some inflammable material so that the coach was on fire. I will maintain the same wherever I am called to depose on the matter,” Panchal said.

So, it is clear that, according to the eyewitness account, coach S-6 caught fire when Muslims drenched it in gasoline, set it ablaze, and circled the railway from all sides to prevent the Ramsewaks from leaving, according to the police’s obviously plausible statement. 

It becomes necessary to refer to the Nanavati-Mehta commission’s comments which cite the forensic science laboratory’s reports. The report denies all the possibilities and conspiracies raised by Muslims and liberal activists inventing multiple reasons for the coach being set ablaze.

These theories included ideas of an imaginary scuffle between Karsevaks and the local Muslim vendors, and an equally untrue incident of Hindus molesting a Muslim girl. Here is what the commission has concluded:

“From the evidence of all these witnesses and other material on record it becomes clear that except overcrowding in the train and occasional raising of slogans inside the train and on platforms of the intervening stations, the Ramsevaks had not done anything and no incident had happened earlier which could have led to the incident which later on happened at Godhra. In absence of any evidence whatsoever indicating any incident on the way, the Commission has no hesitation in coming to the conclusion that the suggestion made by JamiateUlma-E-Hind that a quarrel had taken place between Ramsevaks and vendors at Ujjain railway station is without any basis. Its journey from Ayodhya to Godhra was trouble-free.”

Regarding the fire and its origin, D V Talati had told the Nanavati-Mehta Commission:

“About 60 litres of inflammable liquid must have been used in burning that coach. The floor of the coach in some places was totally burnt. After explaining the difference between a fire in an open space and a fire in a confined place, he stated that the phenomenon of flashover can happen in a place that is small and completely closed. The size of S/6 was quite big. Its total area of it was 5000 sq. ft. Therefore, there was no possibility of a flashover in that coach unless the fire was big. The fire had not started from below the coach. The total quantity of liquid that was required for burning the coach could not have been thrown from outside, nor the fire which took place in S/6 could have been caused only by the burning rags thrown in it. As there was more damage in the eastern part of the coach, he had come to the conclusion that the fire had originated in the eastern part of that coach.”

Conclusion

The Godhra massacre is the clearest illustration of the ruthless inhumanity of Islamists, as seen by their sympathy for vile criminals, their blame of innocent victims—including infants and toddlers—and their use of absurd falsehoods and mental tricks to justify the inexcusable.

The documentary by the BBC is its latest attempt to create an atmosphere of communal unrest in the country by disputing well-established facts.

https://www.opindia.com/2023/01/bbc-documentary-on-gujarat-riots-whitewash-islamists-who-set-the-godhra-train-on-fire/

By Silvio Canto, Jr.

According to news reports, New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced her resignation effective February 7th.  This is a portion of her speech:   

The PM spoke directly to members of her family during the speech, telling her four-year-old daughter Neve: “Mum is looking forward to being there when you start school this year,”

She also asked her fiancé Clarke Gayford if they could “finally get married” after the coronavirus pandemic thwarted their earlier plans.

She also said something about not having anything left in the tank.  Is she talking about energy or public support?

It looks like New Zealand just got fed up with her ways, i.e. an authoritarian tyrant dressed up in the finest woke attire.   Like some of our Democrats, she became a control freak during the pandemic.  At one point, she locked down New Zealand because of one case of COVID-19.  Furthermore, she told her fellow citizens to turn in their neighbors for talking to people outside.  That reminds me of Cuba and the regime’s neighborhood committees to defend the revolution.  As expected, she went into gun grabbing mode after the mass shooting at a mosque in 2019.

She reminded me of Senator Elizabeth Warren without claiming that she was part Māori, the people living there before the English landed their ships.  

We wish her well now that she can “finally get married” and turn her partner into a husband and father of their daughter.  Maybe she can start a New Zealand reality TV version of “The Donna Reed Show” and kiss her husband off to work every day. Maybe they can have a couple of more kids and remind the country that New Zealand needs more babies to pay for all those generous social programs.  It’s hard to keep your welfare state clicking with a birth rate of 1.6 children per woman.

In the end, it was political reality that drove her out.  People just got tired of her act.  My bet is that her liberal soulmate, PM Justin Trudeau of Canada, is next.  He may be telling us soon that his tank is a bit dry too.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/01/the_lefts_golden_girl_wants_to_finally_get_married.html

A Norwegian shipping company has banned electric cars on its ferries because according to a risk analysis, the risk of fire from such vehicles is too great. An ocean liner had recently sunk because of it.

The listed Norwegian shipping company Havila has banned electric, hybrid and hydrogen cars from its ferries. After a risk analysis, it was concluded that the risk to the safety of the shipping fleet was too great. If a car catches fire, the fire can no longer be extinguished.

The shipping company travels the so-called mail ship route along the coast of northern Norway. The tours are important for Scandinavian passenger and cargo traffic and are also very popular with holidaymakers.

The risks for ships from the transport of electric cars have been discussed since the Felicity Ace sank off the Azores last February. E-vehicles on board had caught fire and the blaze could not be extinguished. Finally, the huge ship sank with thousands of electric cars and vehicles from Porsches and Bentleys.

According to a report by the TradeWinds shipping news service, Havilashipping company boss Bent Martini said the risk analysis showed that the fire in an electric car required a particularly complex rescue operation. The crew on board could not afford this. Passengers would also be at risk. This is different for vehicles with combustion engines. A possible fire is usually easy to fight by the crew.

After the sinking of the Felicity Ace, Greenpeace also warned against e-cars on ships: “In general, electronic components and especially electric vehicles pose a risk for every transport,” it said at the time.

https://freewestmedia.com/2023/01/20/fire-hazard-ferry-company-bans-electric-cars/

On January 17, Conservative Party London Assembly Member Nick Rogers lodged a formal complaint with the Greater London Authority Monitoring Officer against London Mayor Sadiq Khan after internal communication seemed to contradict remarks made by Khan on the issue of Khan’s involvement in expanding Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) across all of Greater London.

The mayor has decided to expand London’s Ultra-low emission zone, which will impose a daily charge of £12.50 on vehicles that do not comply with the emission norms and enter the outer limits of the city. It has been alleged that Sadiq Khan manipulated public consultation on ULEZ by deliberately excluding thousands of votes opposing the move.

Khan and his deputy Seb Dance, a former Member of the European Parliament, when pressed repeatedly by Tory assembly members at public sessions, informed the London Assembly that they had not been informed in advance about the ULEZ consultation findings.

An internal email, however, demonstrates that the Mayor was privately consulted on the ULEZ survey findings on September 29th, before to their formal publication. More than 200 pages of confidential correspondence and documentation from the Mayor’s top advisers and TfL (Transport for London) directors during the last weeks of the ULEZ consultation process were recently released. 

The Conservatives believe that the Mayor’s administration intervened in the consultation process, skewing the findings and decreasing the percentage of those opposed to Sadiq Khan’s ULEZ extension. According to the reports, given the decision to extend the ULEZ to outside London, vehicles will have to pay £12.50 a day to drive in the city if their vehicle is older than 2015 for diesel and 2005 for petrol.

The records also indicate that thousands of replies were omitted from the final ULEZ consultation findings after an intervention by the Mayor’s senior advisers. The intervention reduced total opposition in the final vote by three percentage points, from 62 per cent to 59 per cent.

Around 5,200 votes from motoring groups were discounted by officials, which allowed mayor Sadiq Khan to declare that there was no overwhelming dissent to the proposal to expand the ULEZ.

Rogers accused Khan of “falsely and dishonestly” tampering with the findings and accused him of “severe misconduct” for violating the integrity of the consultation and unfairly rejecting thousands of valid comments. “The Mayor must now explain himself to Londoners, who participated in this consultation in good faith. This behaviour cannot stand and must be addressed by the appropriate authorities,” he said.

London minister Paul Scully also commented on the issue saying, “These findings are very concerning. If the Mayor is going to push through such a punitive and unpopular policy, he has to have a grip on the detail. The London Assembly is responsible for the oversight of the Mayor of London. It can and should investigate this further.”

However, spokesperson of Khan maintained that Khan was not informed on its progress and only made decisions after the final report. “The real scandal is that toxic air leads to the death of thousands of Londoners every year, which is why the Mayor took the difficult decision to expand the ULEZ London-wide. The Mayor made the decision after considering TfL’s full final report on the consultation responses,” he said.

“The consultation was not a referendum, however, TfL made a number of modifications to the scheme following feedback received in the consultation. This included addressing cost of living concerns with a £110m scrappage scheme for low-income Londoners and extending the exemptions for disabled Londoners,” he added.

According to him, TfL takes its responsibilities to hold thorough and legally compliant consultations very seriously, with an independent consultant putting together the final analysis and report, and any claim that TfL or the Mayor tried to influence the ULEZ consultation findings is just false. “As part of a rigorous consultation process, it was right for TfL to seek responses from as wide a range of Londoners as possible, including young Londoners, whose lives will be affected by air pollution for years to come,” the spokesperson of Khan was quoted as saying.

Reportedly, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak also criticised Sadiq Khan for imposing a tax on a public which does not want it. “Expanding this zone is not something that communities want and I look forward to working with him to urge the Mayor to properly consider and respond to all these views and stop this unfair tax,” he said at Prime Minister’s Question Hour on Wednesday.

Reports mention that at least two London councils are presently opposing to Transport for London deploying the cameras required to police the ultra-low emission zone on their roadways. Politicians on all sides agree that the issue will play a significant role in the next mayoral election, when Khan seeks a record third term.

https://www.opindia.com/2023/01/london-mayor-sadiq-khan-excluded-negative-votes-to-expand-ultra-low-emission-zone/

French inmates who have been sentenced to less than two years in prison will be released three months early in order to ease concerns of prison overcrowding, French newspaper Le Figaro reported on Tuesday.

The move by the French Ministry of Justice means that, since Jan. 1 of this year, criminals are free to leave prison three months earlier than their sentence ordered, provided they have been sentenced to less than two years in prison and have appropriate accommodation.

The early release will not apply to those convicted of domestic violence, sexual offenses such as rape and sexual assault, or offenses against minors under the age of 15. It will mean, however, that convicted drug traffickers, robbers and thieves, and violent criminals will be free to roam French streets earlier.

The new policy has enraged magistrates concerned about repeat offenders; they insist the lengths of sentences they hand down to criminals are for a good reason.

“We did not become judges to be robots who sign papers without appreciation. If the legislator wants to empty the prisons, he does not need us to do it,” said one magistrate cited by Le Figaro. The judge warned it was only a matter of time before the policy is shown to fail by an inmate who re-offends when they should still be behind bars.

Another judge from the Paris region questioned how the policy will look to criminals from a deterrent perspective.

“You see how we are going to be considered by our drug traffickers who repeat offenses with a vengeance,” he told the French newspaper. He suggested the policy was doomed to fail and magistrates may feel inclined to “increase the penalties” they hand down to criminals so as to render the reduction obsolete.

The policy comes after French Ministry of Justice statistics published late last year revealed French prisons have reached record levels of inmates with more than 72,000 convicts behind bars.

The issue facing the French government is that the country’s official prison capacity is 60,700 places, meaning an overcrowding issue of 20 percent.

In October last year, French President Emmanuel Macron admitted half of the crimes in Paris are committed by “foreigners in an irregular situation or awaiting asylum approval.” He, however, refused to make an “existential link between immigration and insecurity.”

https://rmx.news/crime/france-to-solve-prison-overcrowding-by-releasing-inmates-3-months-early/

By Jack Gleason

The majority of the American public has been brainwashed, and (by definition) they don’t know it. This has been a systematic process, carried out over many decades, first on college campuses, then in our public schools, and now in the news media and corporate world. 

Hanan Parvez (MBA, MA Psychology, founder of PsychMechanics) says “Brainwashing is essentially acquiring beliefs without critical thought.” Children naturally learn from our parents about the world, how it works, and what part we play in it. 

After they’ve grown up, circumstances can manipulate people into rejecting their previous beliefs. This may be caused by PTSD from military experience, a narcissistic or abusive spouse who damages their self-esteem, cults, or radical religious leaders who consciously or unconsciously appeal to weaknesses in order to break people down and rebuild them with a new set of thoughts and behaviors that serve their own purposes. 

For governments with no conscience, knowing how to reprogram a person is very appealing. Ordinarily peaceful citizens can be turned into effective soldiers, willing to kill on orders from superiors. Spies can be trained to be undetectable. Extensive research has been conducted into controlling human behavior, including the Central Intelligence Agency’s MKUltra project in 1953.  

If you can control an individual, can those same techniques be used to control entire societies. Parvez lists the steps needed…  

Isolating them physically and cutting contact with their previous group. 

Breaking them down by mocking their previous ways of thinking and past group affiliations, along with humiliation, and embarrassment. 

Promising a new identity and inviting them into the new group with other transformed members.

Rewarding them for joining, by making them feel important, worthwhile, and better than others.

The 2020 COVID crisis fits the bill nicely. People were told to stay in their homes, avoid friends and family; going to church was treated as a crime. Anyone who disagreed with the lockdowns was labeled as “selfish” and guilty of endangering their grandparents. People who wanted more information about the vaccines were called “deniers” and doctors who sounded the alarm were fired and their websites were deplatformed.

At this point the target will take any action or follow any command in order to preserve their new sense of worth and remain a member in good standing of their new group.

Successfully brainwashed people are often “obsessed with their new beliefs, group, and the group leader… They’ll constantly tell you how you’re wrong about everything… But they can’t see that they’re being harmed.”

Before Big Tech shut down free speech on the Internet, any negative discussion about vaccines was met with vitriolic resistance from their friends online. Relationships were broken, even among family members. 

Parvez suggests ways to bring people back from their delusions… 

First, isolate them from their cult. This may be difficult since social media, mainstream news, and corporate interests continue to perpetuate the myth that COVID is deadly and the vaccines are safe. 

Second, “present yourself as an ingroup.” Confronting your brainwashed friends and calling them stupid for believing lies only sets up a closed door to new thinking. When you share that you initially thought that the vaccines were a good idea until a close family friend had serious complications, that opens their minds. When you say you did some research on the Internet and found credible evidence that the vaccines were harming people across the world, you open the door further. 

Parvez continues, “You can show them you’re on their side by being non-judgmental, non-defensive, compassionate, and respectful.” Making someone feel embarrassed for being wrong is not helpful. 

The next step is to poke holes in their beliefs, simply by asking genuinely curious questions. Remember, people who are brainwashed want to recruit you to their cause, which makes their own doubts fade.  

Instead of trying to confront them on every issue, focus on a couple areas where you are well-versed. Do some studying and pick examples that are crystal clear. A good example is the VAERS database that reports adverse reactions to new vaccines. The government says the vaccines are safe, but the number of reported deaths is 22,065 in 2021 and 12,420 in 2022 compared to 166 in 1991 trending up to 420 in 2020. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/01/dealing_with_your_brainwashed_friends_and_family_.html