For large parts of the past two years, inflation has been a major concern for millions of Americans, as the significant increase in prices for many day-to-day purchases has eaten away at their buying power.
According to findings from a joint survey of Statista Q and We Are Social conducted in April 2023, 64 percent of U.S. adults said they spent less on non-essentials, while an equally high share of the 1,009 respondents said they paid more attention to bargains or deals. Only 11 percent of respondents said they didn’t change their behavior at all, showing how universal the impact of inflation has been.
The New York state authorities have rejected a request by Orsted, BP, and Equinor for raising the price of electricity in future power purchase contracts featuring offshore wind energy.
Offshore wind developers have been pressured by rising raw material and component costs, and higher borrowing costs, which has cast doubt over the viability of many projects. Indeed, Reuters reported that some projects planned for the waters off the coast of New York may need to be reconsidered in light of the authorities’ decision.
“Sunrise Wind’s viability and therefore ability to be constructed are extremely challenged without this adjustment,” Orsted told Reuters.
Sunrise Wind is an offshore project with a planned capacity of 924 MW that could supply electricity to 600,000 households. According to Orsted, it would also involve several hundred million dollars in investments in the state and 800 jobs.
“These projects must be financially sustainable to proceed,” the president of Equinor Renewables Americas told Reuters, referring to the offshore wind projects the Norwegian energy major is leading in the U.S.
Per Reuters, Equinor is involved in three projects with BP—the 816 MW Empire Wind 1 and the 1.26 GW Empire Wind 2, as well as the Beacon Wind farm, with a projected capacity of 1.23 GW.
Indeed, rising costs have compromised the financial sustainability of many wind power projects and earlier this year led to the cancellation of a large-scale one off the coast of the UK.
Swedish Vattenfall, which led the Norfolk Boreas project, said it would quit it after it saw costs rise by 40%, which made the project unviable.
To tackle the rising cost problem, wind developers have turned to governments, asking for additional tax incentives and higher electricity prices, busting the myth of cheap wind power.
The New York Public Service Commission said that if they had agreed to do what the wind developers wanted, that would have added 6.7% to New Yorkers’ electricity bills, which are already among the highest in the State.
Hamas Claims 26 Hostages Died From Israeli Airstrikes, Including Foreigners, After IDF Finds Several Bodies
Israeli media is reporting a “greenlight” has been given for the expected major Israeli offensive on the Gaza Strip as massive convoys of Palestinian civilians have been observed fleeing to the southern part of the densely populated strip. So far there has been limited ground incursions by the army into the strip, targeting Hamas operatives and reportedly to gain intelligence on the whereabouts of hostages.
The United Nations has issued a report saying at least 423,000 Palestinians have already been internally displaced within Gaza and this massive figure is expected to ratchet further. Likely it has surpassed a half-million as of Saturday, following the Israeli-issued evacuation order, which included dropping thousands of leaflets and warnings over Gaza City.
The UN said it “considers it impossible for such a movement to take place without devastating humanitarian consequences.” Middle East Eye and other regional sources have said over 700 Palestinian children were killed in one week of fighting. As of Friday Israel authorities tallied that over 1,300 Israelis were killed by the Hamas terror attacks on the southern settlements and the music festival, and rocket fire, with at least 3,200 wounded. 27 among the dead were Americans.
Middle East Eye on Saturday reports the following of the mounting Palestinian death toll in both Gaza and the West bank as follows:
Israel has killed at least 2,215 people in Gaza over the past week, according to the Palestinian health ministry. Of those killed, 724 are children and 458 are women. Some 8,714 people have been wounded in the besieged enclave in that time, it added.
Meanwhile, Israeli forces have killed 54 people and wounded 1,100 others in the occupied West Bank.
According to a review of the last hours of developments, the population is about to run out of water as the remaining supply dwindles after Israel cut off external supply sources:
UN agency for Palestinian refugees says its shelters in Gaza “are not safe anymore” as it warns water running our for besieged enclave’s residents.
More than 320 Palestinians have been killed in the past 24 hours, including many women and children killed in Israeli air raids on convoys fleeing Gaza City, according to health officials.
The rising toll comes as Israel continues bombing Gaza a day after telling 1.1 million residents to head south ahead of a looming ground offensive following Hamas’s attack inside Israel last week.
At least 2,215 Palestinians have been killed and 8,714 wounded in Israeli air attacks on Gaza. The number of people killed in Israel has reached 1,300, with more than 3,400 wounded.
In the occupied West Bank, the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli fire in the past week has topped 50. More than 1,000 have been wounded and hundreds arrested.
🛑A matter of life and death: water runs out for 2 million people in Gaza
🛑 No humanitarian supplies have been allowed into Gaza for a week
The fate of the estimated 100 to 200 hostages in Hamas captivity still remains largely unknown, but Hamas in statements which have been underreported in Western press has claimed that over two dozen of the hostages have been killed by the IDF’s ongoing aerial bombardment of the Gaza Strip:
Hamas’ Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades said nine more captives were killed in indiscriminate Israeli shelling in the last 24 hours, including a number of foreigners.
Qassam has previously announced the death of 17 captives in Israeli air stikes in Gaza over the past week.
Sky News and others are also reporting, based on Israeli sources, that bodies of hostages have been recovered after some of the initial IDF infantry cross-border raids which began Friday into Saturday:
Raids carried out on the Gaza Strip by Israeli forces discovered human remains of those who had been missing since Hamas’s attack last weekend, local media is reporting.
According to Haaretz, armed forces entered an enclave where it is thought up to 200 people were being held hostage by Hamas, and retrieved the bodies of several people.
Items belonging to the missing people were also discovered.
The US said Friday it chartered its first successful evacuation flight, with talk of more to come.
There are Americans (many of them likely dual nationals) among the population of Gaza, which Washington says it is trying to facilitate safe exit for as Israeli airstrikes continue. Dangerously, the lone Raffah border crossing into Egypt has at this point been bombed several times.
But regional media is reporting there’s been a diplomatic breakthrough on this front, as Israel, Egypt, and the United States have forged an agreement to let foreigners residing in Gaza pass through the Rafah border crossing into Egypt.
Scene from the frontlines as the IDF build-up outside Gaza continues:
The Times of Israel cites a senior Egyptian official as follows:
The official says Israel has agreed to refrain from striking areas the foreigners would pass through on their way out of the besieged Palestinian territory. He adds that Qatar was involved in the negotiations and the participants received approval from the Palestinian terror groups, Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
The agreement does not deal with hostages being held by Hamas.
A second official at the Egyptian side of the Rafah crossing point says they received “instructions” to reopen it on Saturday afternoon for foreigners coming from Gaza.
But Egypt is by and large not letting Gazans exit, even erecting bigger concrete barriers of extra border protection, amid what’s setting up to be a catastrophic humanitarian crisis as the Israeli pressure ratchets.
The IDF says it is about to attack the northern half of the Gaza Strip with “great force” – while the US and other countries are urging for caution regarding Palestinian civilians. Below is rare footage of an elite Israeli rescue squad in action (intentionally blurred by IDF sources):
Israeli operators from the Special Tactics Rescue Unit 669 conduct a combat casevac near Zikim beach.
Washington has still all the while said it “stands with Israel” – and has not tried to actually halt the unrelenting IDF bombardment of civilian areas.
Meanwhile, things continue ratcheting in south Lebanon, with reports of new strikes being exchanged between Israel and Hezbollah, and other pro-Palestinian factions.
There are no plans for the creation of a natural gas cartel similar to the OPEC cartel in crude oil, Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak said on Friday.
“There are no discussions to set up a (gas) cartel,” Novak told RT Arabic TV as quoted by Reuters.
The Gas Exporting Countries Forum (GECF) is an organization of gas producers and exporters but it is not coordinating supply to the market the way OPEC does. Russia is a member of the GECF and its top energy official Novak said in the televised interview that the gas organization was “mostly about exchanging views.”
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the halt of most of Russian pipeline gas supplies to Europe, the EU has turned to LNG imports and increased deliveries via offshore pipelines from Norway and North Africa to replace the Russian supply, which accounted for around one-third of all European gas imports before the war in Ukraine.
The EU aims to ditch Russian gas by 2027.
Having lost the European market, Russia has raised pipeline exports to China and its global LNG exports, which are neither sanctioned nor too shunned in gas-starved Europe.
This year, the exports of Russian gas giant Gazprom to Europe have slumped and dragged its profits down. Gazprom has reported a massive drop in its first-half net profit as deliveries to Europe plunged compared to the same period in 2022 when Russia was still supplying pipeline gas to its European customers.
The major drop in Gazprom’s gas deliveries to key customers was due to the halt of Russian pipeline gas exports to nearly all European countries.
Gazprom started to reduce supply via the Nord Stream pipeline to Germany in June 2022, claiming an inability to service gas turbine maintenance outside Russia due to the Western sanctions against Moscow for the invasion of Ukraine. This was weeks before the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines at the end of September 2022, which definitively closed all pipeline gas routes of Russia’s gas to Germany.
In the series, “The HPV Vaccine: A Double-Edged Sword?” we will provide documented evidence of death and severe injuries linked with Gardasil, analyze the root cause of its harm, and offer solutions.
The Gardasil vaccine is linked to undeniable death and undeniable severe injuries as previously reported in this series of reports. An ingredient in Gardasil may contribute to these harms.
Let’s shift the lens to the beautiful Pyrenees in Europe where sheep were cherished for their wool, nourishment, and companionship. However, a mysterious sheep illness occurred around a decade ago.
Mysterious Post-Vaccine Sheep Illness
In August 2006, an outbreak of bluetongue disease quickly spread to European countries causing a state of emergency.
Bluetongue disease, caused by bluetongue virus (BTV), affects ruminants, mainly sheep, with symptoms of fever, hemorrhages, depression, edemas, and generalized cyanosis, easily observed on the tongue, which explains the disease name.
The totally unexpected outbreak caused by a newly emerged BTV serotype led to a massive compulsory European vaccination campaign implemented between 2007 and 2010. The administered vaccine contained a new ingredient not used in previous BTV vaccines—aluminum (Al)—with 2.08 milligrams per milliliter as the adjuvant, in addition to inactivated BTV.
The campaign seemed to effectively halt viral spreading, however, during the same vaccination period, a series of previously unreportedsevere diseases emerged in France, Germany, Switzerland, the UK, and Spain, featuring weakness and various neurological symptoms. Veterinarians were stumped, as no known disease explained the tragedy.
Sheep Study Identifies the Problem
Dr. Lluis Lujan, an associate professor of veterinary pathology at the University of Zaragoza in Spain, conducted a sheep study to determine the cause of the unusual diseases.
A total of 21 sheep were assigned into three groups (red, yellow, and green) with seven in each group as follows:
The red group received commercial sheep vaccines containing aluminum hydroxide.
The yellow group received the equivalent dose of aluminum dissolved in water (Alhydrogel®, an aluminum-based adjuvant).
The green group was administered a neutral saltwater solution.
Surprisingly, both the animals from the red and yellow groups became significantly more aggressive and showed more stereotypes and higher stress.
The detected level of aluminum found in the lymph nodes in the lumbar spinal cord was much higher in both the aluminum-only (yellow) and the vaccine group (red) compared with the control group, indicating that aluminum created an extra burden needing to be processed by the sheep.
This explained the phenomenon that the sheep illness occurred only after the aluminum was added to the vaccine as an adjuvant. “So for me, yes—the reason why the animals get sick after vaccination is how the body deals with aluminum,” Dr. Lujan stated in a documentary film “Under the Skin,” available on Epoch TV.
The idea is not only about sheep. We are looking for something that could be happening in humans.
‘Placebo’ Trial Participant Had 40+ Symptoms
The Phase 3 clinical trial for Gardasil (FUTURE II study) began in 2002. A particularly large number of participants were recruited in Denmark.
Gardasil clinical trial participant, Sesilje Petersen, developed severe fatigue and a total of 40 symptoms after the second and third shots.
“It was the biggest problem because I was a student at the university and it was very difficult for me to attend the classes as I fell asleep almost daily,” Sesilje said. “I wrote a list with all my symptoms—there were more than 40 symptoms, and some of them had been severe. I had a tumor on my pituitary gland.”
“I received a letter and was invited to this study and it sounded very interesting. So I decided to participate,” recalled Sesilje.
Sesilje kept the information brochure that the participants received at the beginning of the study. It said that the vaccination had already been carefully tested for safety and did not have any serious side effects.
The information about the placebo turned out to be a lie. “It says here that the placebo was saline—the Danish word for saltwater,” she said.
Aluminum: A Toxin in Vaccines for 90 Years
Sesilje’s “saline” placebo contained something highly unusual—aluminum (Al), an adjuvant commonly used in modern vaccines.
She was obviously misinformed about the study design and was unaware of what she was receiving. Prior to participating in the Gardasil study, Sesilje knew that she could not tolerate deodorants containing aluminum.
“We were not informed about the use of aluminum. The word aluminum was not given to us either in the procedure or in their phone consent form.” Sesilje said.
In fact, a study by Doshi et al. found that participants in the Gardasil trials were not adequately informed that the placebo was amorphous aluminum hydroxyphosphate sulfate (AAHS). The trial participants were told they could receive a “placebo” without being informed of noninert ingredients (AAHS). This raises serious ethical concerns about the trial conduct.
Aluminum was first used in human vaccines in 1932 and was the only adjuvant used in licensed vaccines for approximately 70 years. This controversial compound is still used as an adjuvant in vaccines, however, what is its actual role?
Aluminum is the third most abundant metal in the earth’s crust and is widely present in the environment—in plants, soil, water, air, food, and pharmaceuticals. It is present in an ionic form as Al3+.
The absorption of aluminum depends on several factors such as the pH level and the presence of organic acids (citrate, lactate). It is absorbed in a proportion of only 0.1 to 0.3 percent by the gastrointestinal tract in the upper intestine.
However, when aluminum is injected into our muscles in the formulation of a vaccine, it is nearly 100 percent absorbed. It then travels and crosses the blood-brain barrier and accumulates in our brain and other organs.
Aluminum is especially harmful to our brain and nerves, as it plays multiple roles in the clumping of harmful substances (β-amyloid, tau protein) in the brain, leads to the death of brain-protective cells called astrocytes, and disrupts the “protective wall” around the brain resulting in more vulnerability to harmful substances.
Christopher Exley, an English professor of bioinorganic chemistry, is one of the most knowledgeable and widely-cited aluminum researchers in the world, with over 200 peer-reviewed scientific papers published on aluminum and over 12,000 citations.
Renal failure patients dialyzed have developed encephalitis linked to excessive brain buildup of aluminum. Those who passed away had a tenfold higher level of aluminum in gray matter, leading to fatal brain diseases in 30 to 50 percent of cases. Their brain symptoms were correlated with their blood aluminum levels, including issues of speech, coordination, cognition, and fatal seizures.
As a potent toxin, aluminum can severely harm multiple human body systems. Aluminum’s toxic effects on our nerves, lungs, muscles, gut, kidneys, and liver have been well documented.
Dietary absorbed ionic aluminum can leave our body through the kidneys, however, most antigen-aluminum mixtures in vaccines are too large for the kidneys to expel out of our body. Accordingly, vaccine aluminum exposure poses a much higher safety risk than dietary aluminum.
According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), a placebo is defined as “an inactive pill, liquid, or powder that has no treatment value.” The well-established toxic properties of aluminum therefore suggest that aluminum cannot constitute a valid placebo.
Toxicity Makes Aluminum an Adjuvant
Almost all modern diseases have their origin in a disturbed immune system. No other drug intervenes in the immune system as intensively as vaccines. The role of vaccine components in human immunity is discussed without taboos in the scientific community.
The gold standard to evaluate the effectiveness of a vaccine is based on the antibody level generated. In the beginning, people were not satisfied with a pure inactivated virus to provoke an immune response and wanted to find a substance to help boost immunity and generate a more robust response with longer-sustained antibodies—that is the adjuvant.
Aluminum was found to be a strong adjuvant.
According to Mr. Exley, “The known toxicity of aluminum is almost certainly a contributor to the success of aluminum-based salts as adjuvants.”
A 2016 Nature study provided insight into the cellular toxicity induced by aluminum used as an adjuvant in clinically-approved human vaccinations.
When we inject a vaccine with aluminum into the muscle, we can only imagine what physical and chemical reactions will be triggered. At the very beginning, there may be little response at the injection site. The only reaction may be due to the damage caused by the needle.
“When the vaccine is injected deeply into the muscle tissue, aluminum ions begin to dissolve and start attacking the surrounding cells,” Mr. Exley stated in the documentary “Under the Skin.”
“So depending upon that rate of dissolution, you will get the degree of cytotoxicity—cell toxicity,” he said.
The aluminum ions kill our normal healthy cells and as those cells die, they release chemical messengers, which call for help from the other immune cells.
Immune cells react immediately and start to attack anything suspicious at the vaccination site. A fierce battle takes place.
It is only in the course of this inflammation triggered by aluminum that the silent antigens are now also taken seriously and are transported away by specialized immune cells. Those silent viral proteins are also identified by immune cells as enemies and specific antibodies are produced to bind them.
Volkswagen EV Sales In China Surge 90%, Despite Overall Sales Slumping
In the third quarter, Volkswagen AG saw a robust increase in sales in Europe and North America, which helped counterbalance a decline in the Chinese market.
The automaker saw its Chinese deliveries fall 5.8% during Q3, according to a Friday morning wrap-up by Bloomberg. But global deliveries rose by 7.4%, amounting to 2.34 million vehicles delivered for Volkswagen. Specifically, sales surged 9.9% worldwide in the month of September alone.
In China, the company faced a slump as third-quarter deliveries dipped to 837,200, and September sales experienced a slight decline of 0.9%.
Despite the decline in China, EV sales continue to be robust in the country. The delivery of all-electric vehicles in China surged by an impressive 90% to 21,662 vehicles in September, largely propelled by ID.3 sales, which outstripped overall market gains of 12%.
Meanwhile, Western Europe witnessed a significant 21% uptick in sales to 799,300 during the third quarter, and North American sales climbed 12% to 257,400.
We noted in late September that competition was so robust in China, some automakers like Mitsubishi were pulling out of the geography. Back in early summer, Volkswagen had slowed its production of EVs due to weakening sales.
“We are experiencing strong customer reluctance in the electric vehicle sector,” Manfred Wulff, head of the works council for Volkswagen’s Emden plant said in June. That appears to no longer be the case – at least in China.
We noted last week that the EV market in China is growing so quickly and prices are plunging at such a rapid rate, that the EU is investigating, claiming that emerging data indicates a probable surge in government-backed, low-cost imports, putting an already fragile EU sector at immediate risk.
The EU has launched an inquiry focused specifically on newly produced electric vehicles intended for carrying nine or fewer passengers; motorcycles, however, are not part of the current probe and the investigation is expected to wrap up within a year.
China’s Ministry of Commerce objected to the investigation, claiming it “is solely based on assumption and lacks sufficient evidence,” Bloomberg reported last week.
We noted weeks ago that Tesla’s EVs would be included in the investigation. EU executive vice-president Valdis Dombrovskis said in late September that there was “sufficient prima facie evidence” to support the probe. We had previously written about the EU’s investigation and Beijing’s response via The Global Times.
As we noted last month, China responded to the investigation via The Global Times, claiming that the EU’s probe would likely “backfire” and that the EU’s economy would suffer as a result. The publication said that “…as the EU wields trade protectionist measures to suppress China’s EV industry, the European economy may suffer.”
The article claimed that the EU isn’t bothered by the subsidies, but rather “the rapidly growing market influence of Chinese EV companies” and “the concern that homegrown European enterprises may be unable to compete.”
“Clearly, Europe is afraid,” The Global Times wrote. “They are afraid of competition from China, so they want to seek trade protectionism as a protective umbrella for European auto makers who are slowly transitioning toward electrification.” China added that the EU should “have enough courage to face competition from their Chinese counterparts directly.”
The authors of the papers are being attacked and say that “activist scientists” threatened by the new findings are “aggressively conducting an orchestrated disinformation campaign to discredit the papers and the scientific reputation of the authors.”
Indeed, from insults on social media and furious blog posts to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests demanding emails from a journal editor and federal scientist, the controversy is getting heated.
Several scientists who spoke with The Epoch Times expressed shock at the tactics used against those whose latest research is casting renewed doubts on the official climate narrative.
William Happer, Princeton professor emeritus of physics and former climate adviser to President Donald Trump, wasn’t surprised by the response to the new findings.
“Of course the climate cult will be dismissive of any information—no matter how scientifically correct—that is politically incorrect,” he told The Epoch Times, noting that the new findings made important and valid points.
The reason that climate activists are so upset is that the findings of the new papers—a trio of peer-reviewed studies by astrophysicist Willie Soon and dozens of other scientists from around the world—are casting further doubt on the narrative of man-made global warming.
The papers are also fueling even more public skepticism about the U.N Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which the authors say ignores the facts as well as climate science more generally.
The rhetoric employed by taxpayer-funded scientists with a vested interest in the climate change narrative to attack the new research was profoundly unscientific, multiple scientists told The Epoch Times.
Atmospheric science professor Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University, for instance, denounced the authors of one of the new papers as “a group of climate denier [clown emoji]” on X.
Mr. Mann, famous for the now-widely ridiculed “hockey stick” graph purporting to show massive man-made warming, also described the editor of the journal Climate as a “denier clown.”
Gareth S. Jones with the UK Met Office ridiculed the new studies as “nonsense,” while smearing the journal publisher for supposedly being “popular with the science denial community.”
Mr. Jones also denounced the guest editor of Climate’s special issue, Ned Nikolov, for having a “bit of a reputation, so much so that other climate contrarians distance themselves from him.”
Mr. Nikolov authored an earlier paper arguing that atmospheric pressure, not greenhouse gases, plays a primary role in temperatures on Earth and on other celestial bodies.
Also chiming in to attack the new papers and the scientists behind them was Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who’s using a FOIA request to demand all of Mr. Nikolov’s emails with relevant scientists.
Mr. Schmidt mocked Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore, one of the authors, saying on X that there was “mo[o]re [expletive] going around” before posting a highly edited version of Mr. Moore’s post on social media.
“The only point of this paper (which every climate denier and their dog has jumped onto), is to launder dirty ‘science’ into a clean made-for-Fox meme,” Mr. Schmidt wrote on X before publishing a more detailed rebuttal on his blog Real Climate.
“The latest contrarian crowd pleaser from Soon et al (2023) is just the latest repetition of the old ‘it was the sun wot done it’ trope[1] that Willie Soon and his colleagues have been pushing for decades,” argued Mr. Schmidt, whose federal salary is almost $200,000 per year. “There is literally nothing new under the sun.”
Scientists Respond
The blog post by Mr. Schmidt “is dismissive in an insubstantive way,” said climatologist Judith Curry, who wasn’t involved in the new papers but previously served as chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
“The response by Schmidt, Mann, and others, particularly with regard to the FOIA request regarding editorial discussions on this paper, reflects their ongoing attempts to control the scientific as well as public dialogue on climate change,” she told The Epoch Times. “In my opinion, their behavior not only reflects poorly on them but is damaging to climate science.”
Ms. Curry, author of “Climate Uncertainty and Risk,” who has a post by the lead authors on her blog Climate Etc. to provide a forum for discussion, said the new paper raises “an important issue that is swept under the rug by the IPCC and many climate scientists.”
In particular, it has major implications for how 20th-century climate records are interpreted, she said.
“Further, the issue of the urban heat island effect on global land temperatures remains unresolved, which is also highlighted in the Soon et al. paper,” she said, calling it “a useful contribution to the climate science literature.”
Mr. Soon, the main author of the paper and a principal with the Center for Environmental Research and Earth Sciences (CERES), explained that the three new papers by CERES scientists are a major threat to powerful vested interests.
“For over three decades, the claims and conclusions by U.N. IPCC reports reigned supreme, unquestioned and unchallenged,” Mr. Soon, who was previously with the solar and stellar physics division of the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told The Epoch Times. “Our latest series of three published papers show that those claims are scientifically empty.
“Our results appear to rock the weak foundation of IPCC, and this must be the reason why you are seeing such instantaneous rejection and outright complaining by activists like Schmidt and Mann.”
Mr. Soon and some of the other scientists involved in the new papers published another groundbreaking study in 2021 showing that solar activity could explain all observed warming.
In a highly unusual development for complex scientific studies, that paper has been downloaded more than 55,000 times since it was published.
“The high level of attention to this paper by people hungry for truth might be the real threats that Schmidt and Mann are worrying about,” Mr. Soon said, pointing to a detailed response to the attacks from critics published on CERES-Science.com, titled “The orchestrated disinformation campaign by RealClimate.org to falsely discredit and censor our work.”
Mr. Happer noted that the new paper by Mr. Soon and the other authors, headlined “The Detection and Attribution of Northern Hemisphere Land Surface Warming,” is indeed significant.
The two important and valid points are that there are “huge uncertainties” surrounding how much warming there has been since 1850 and how much of that might be due to human activities, he said.
“The paper presents very strong evidence that a warming bias is built into the records from urban areas,” Mr. Happer told The Epoch Times after reviewing the paper, which he wasn’t involved with.
“This extra warming of urban versus rural areas is not caused by increasing concentrations of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. It is caused by humans, but it cannot be reversed by ruinous net-zero policies.”
Mr. Happer, who believes that human CO2 emissions are responsible for “a relatively small contribution” to the “modest warming” that has been observed, agreed with the paper’s conclusion that available data isn’t good enough to determine how significant the various factors, such as volcanoes, solar irradiance, and greenhouse gas emissions, are to the warming.
Marc Morano, editor of the popular website Climate Depot, told The Epoch Times that the aggressive reaction to the new papers was an effort to silence dissent from the U.N.-backed narrative.
“The climate establishment is mimicking the same coercive tactics that we saw in COVID,” he said. “If you present any scientific challenge to the official narrative, you are the deplatformed, canceled, censored, and silenced.”
Indeed, the United Nations and other powerful groups are actively working to silence other views on the issue. U.N. Undersecretary-General for Global Communications Melissa Fleming is waging war on what she calls climate “disinformation.”
While insurgents were flying across the Israeli border on paragliders, a series of coordinated attacks left more than 1200 Israelis dead, many at a music festival on the Gaza border.
A day later, in response to the tragedy, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir announced that the country would be taking a series of actions to loosen its strict gun control laws.
Of course, with videos of Hamas gunmen kicking in doors in an Israeli village near the border, it’s not hard to understand why the government of Israel is starting to second-guess its strict gun control laws.
The truth is the individual right of the people to keep and bear arms is “necessary to the security of a free state.”
That’s something that Americans understand. There’s no need to fear an invading force of paragliders, (or any force at all, really) coming over the US border. Even if the military didn’t immediately take care of the threat, American citizens would convert their F-150s into makeshift technicals and squash the invaders with overwhelming firepower.
Israel is currently passing out thousands of “weapons of war” to civilian security teams.
This is a complete 180 from when the Israeli Defense Forces were DISARMING people & leaving them with only a pistol and 50 rounds of ammunition.
Israel’s gun culture is fraught with civilian firearm restrictions. And to make matters worse, the Israel Defense Forces have spent the last few years confiscating guns from local civilian security forces.
This confiscation has led to Israeli civilians being outgunned as they defend their homes. While Hamas terrorists invaded with machine guns, grenades, and missiles, these Israeli gun owners were forced to fight back with only a single handgun and 50 rounds of ammunition each, the maximum allowed by law.
But while the changes in Israel’s Firearms Licensing Division will no doubt benefit self-defenders held up by bureaucracy and paperwork, those who are eligible to carry firearms under the new rules will still have “to undergo a telephone interview” and may have to wait up to “a week” for approval.
Even then, Israeli gun owners can only purchase a meager 100 rounds of ammunition. That’s not even enough ammo for a good range day.
As of the writing of this article, the license application portal is down, likely due to overwhelming demand.
That means even citizens who qualify under this may-issue permitting system can’t apply for that “speedy” telephone interview.
Instead of ammunition restrictions, waiting periods, and bureaucratic firearm licensing, Israel needs a Second Amendment protecting individuals’ right to keep and bear arms for self-defense.
🚨BREAKING: Residents of a small settlement of roughly 30,000 are now eligible for their may-issue firearms license in Israel. This is a good but very small step. How were these people ineligible before?
American politicians who sit horrified by the scenes unfolding in Israel should stop attempting to strip law-abiding citizens of their Second Amendment rights and consider the unknown number of terrorists who may have crossed the southern US border undetected.
Our 2nd amendment is the BEST protection from every threat.
If you are armed, you can protect yourself from criminals or terrorists who want to hurt you and your family.
And the 2A gives us all the right to protect ourselves from a tyrannical government.
Over the past decades, progress towards gender parity in varying societal and economic contexts has advanced, albeit slowly in some places.
While, for example, literacy in females has caught up to that of their male counterparts since the 1970s, Statista’s Florian Zandt notes that many scientific fields are still heavily male-dominated. This is especially true for STEM jobs.
Statista’s chart, based on data from the National Center for Education Statistics, shows that progress towards a more equal distribution of conferred degrees in science, technology, engineering and mathematics was barely achieved over the past ten years.
In the academic year ending in 2021, more than 60 percent of all bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees in United States postsecondary education institutions were awarded to men. The share distribution is even more tilted towards males for tertiary education below or at associate’s degrees. The former are comprised of certificates not necessarily leading to an undergraduate degree, while the latter are typically awarded after completing community college or similar institutions. Here, 71 percent of degree holders in the academic year of 2020-21 were male. Still, associate degrees saw the most substantial shift towards a more equitable distribution over the past ten years, while the share of doctorate degrees awarded to females in STEM studies remained virtually the same.
Overall, around 800,000 STEM degrees were conferred in the academic year of 2020-21, an increase of 42 percent compared to ten years prior.
In terms of total associate’s, bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees awarded in the United States in 2021, STEM degrees account for around 20 percent.
